xv

Theatre of War

And soon afterwards we began to discover the War again. In gusty rain we relieved the Welsh on the extreme left of the British Line, where it adjoined the Belgian trenches. The village of Boesinghe, which named this part, lay on the edge of the Yser Canal, and was now no ornament to it; but in the light of earlier troubles and later ones we were not so badly off.

Our way up was through Elverdinghe with its tower mill and its miraculously preserved château (‘von Kluck’s country seat’), past its little gasworks, and along shallow trenches pontifically screened, hitherto left alone by our German cousins. Houses in quite good shape appeased the anxious eye as one advanced, fine stone roads plotted out the country, and there was a general simplicity and complaisance in the martial arrangements which pleased one’s civilian self. But there are certain possibilities and indeed occurrences in war which a soldier cannot entirely dismiss, and by the time that one had looked into Boesinghe and its system of defences, one was not amused. The burnt château was only a useless case; the battalion headquarters was an iron vault in an outbuilding, with fragile huts and coop-like sandbag annexes obviously clustered round. Boesinghe village street, though approached over a rustic bridge past an Arcadian lake, was a litter of jutting roof-timbers, roomless doorways, and plaster and brick rubbish. The tawny and white tumulus of stones that represented the church was very avoidable. No protection against anything more violent than a tennis-ball was easily discernible along that village street. Uncommon feebleness of design and performance was plain in the communication trenches, Hunter Street and Bridge Street; the wicker-work support line was scarcely strong enough to keep white mice in, but muddy enough to destroy tempers; the gabioned front line was in the massive canal bank, than which a finer parapet could not be demanded, but just behind it and parallel with it ran the awkward stream Yperlee. Our future, in short, depended on the observance of the ‘Live and Let Live’ principle, one of the soundest elements in trench war.

Unfortunately it was not invariably observed. The Germans possessed a magnificent minenwerfer, well masked under the wreckage of a place known as Steam Mill. With this weapon they celebrated the new year and demonstrated that enormous explosions could be induced at any moment on Boesinghe Church and the parts adjacent. The crash of their presents was not in keeping with the evergreens that led along to the pretty bridge and winding water. Once or twice the operators amused themselves by lobbing their trench mortar bombs into the area of the Belgians, accurately leaving ours (from the extremest of our posts) unassailed; and the action of our neighbours, who made the best of their way out through our lines, was no doubt watched with interest by the German observers. The situation was such that at any moment, and especially in the intense frost, we feared that the Germans might cross the canal and drive in our left flank. Alarmed, with redder cheeks and sharper tone than usual, the General urged on our wirers and insisted that they should not do their work under cover, but emerge down the canal bank and drive in their stakes and criss-cross their entanglements there. Barbed wire is noisy gear to handle, and the bobbins on which it is supplied and from which it is uncoiled have tin protections which clank and twang at most unsuitable moments. The German parapet on the other side of the canal was perhaps fifty yards away. Worley managed to set some wire out, without casualties, but he was lucky. I watched him scrambling about the steep bank in some pain, and afterwards heard his opinions with equal pleasure.

Another feature of this ‘bit’ was the broken railway bridge across the canal, which promised two hateful excitements – the order to raid the enemy thereabouts, the receipt of a raiding party from him. Both events happened, but to our successors. Life for us was daily less delightful, despite that; shells fell much too frequently about the silly allotment-sheds of battalion headquarters, where I lived and made my nightly tea in a bomb-store, and snipers and machine-guns performed artistically on the front and village lines. A domestic impediment still remained with us; and, being visited while I was in charge of a digging party by this lisping emperor, I was enabled to observe for myself the speed with which he denied himself the pleasure of walking about on top when flares and maxims were hunting us. This excessive caution of his at last became discernible to Harrison, and somehow the Colonel’s discovery disappeared into the unbeloved mysterious country behind. ‘I was never so taken in in my life,’ Harrison would sometimes say, later on; but he felt too keen a remorse to discuss the case at length.

The stand-to billets in this sector were at a quiet camp called Roussel Farm, a place with hutments of Belgian make, like barns; where perhaps no one was more conspicuous than a sergeant-major, who in the temporary absence of Daniels acted as ‘Regimental.’ The substitute, a tall, baggy-trousered and agreeably boastful man, was one who spluttered and swung his arm up and down like a pump-handle whenever a chance of important conversation arose. At Roussel Farm he planned and with the labour of defaulters completed a slight drainage scheme, which was afterwards associated more or less mischievously with his name. Imitations of his bellowing, stammering, good-hearted style were highly popular: ‘I’ve done it, Sir. [The arm sawing the air.] I’ve laid the duckboard just where you said. – ’Ere, you, catch ’old o’ that angle iron and carry it to my place. – I told that damn fool of a batman to fill my case with Gold Flake and ’e’s gone and crammed it with Red ’Ussars. – Speakin’ of ’Amel, I wasn’t ’arf glad when I see you at that water store,’ and so forth. His drains and duckboards served us well at Roussel Farm; if you missed the duckboard in the dark you were at least sure to find the drain, and that led ultimately in the required direction.

One morning, dark and liquid and wild, Colonel Harrison and a number of us went off in a lorry to reconnoitre in Ypres proper, and to visit the trenches we were to hold. The sad Salient lay under a heavy silence, broken here and there by the ponderous muffled thump of trench mortar shells round the line. We passed big houses, one or two glimmering whitely, life in death; we found light come by the time that we passed the famous Asylum, a red ruin with some gildings and ornaments still surviving over its doorway, and an ambulance pulling up outside. There was in the town itself the same strange silence, and the staring pallor of the streets in that daybreak was unlike anything that I had known. The Middle Ages had here contrived to lurk, and this was their torture at last. We all felt this, as the tattered picture swung by like accidents of vision; and when we got out of the lorry by the Menin Gate (that unlovely hiatus) we scarcely seemed awake and aware. The Ramparts defended the town on the east and seemed to concentrate whatever of life and actuality dared to be in it. After the distant and alien secrecy of the Grande Place, the sound of dripping water-taps put in here by British soldiers, and the sight of dispatch-riders going in and out, had an effect of reanimation. Here we entered headquarters, or waited at the entrances among the tins of soapy water and the wet rubber boots. We went into the naked eastward area, studied the trenches and their bleak-faced sentries, shivered in the wind. Then, later in the day, we heard for the first time the bursting of shells in Ypres. Their shattering impact sent out a different noise to any before heard by me – a flat and battering, locked-in concussion. Then silence and solitude recaptured the wilderness of looped and windowed walls, unless the wind roused old voices in flues and wrenched vanes. More and more shells leapt down with the same dull and weary smashing. Our motor moved out without further delay.

I had longed to see Ypres, under the old faith that things are always described in blacker colours than they deserve; but this first view was a tribute to the soldier’s philosophy. The bleakness of events had found its proper theatre. The sun could surely never shine on such a simulacrum of divine aberration.

The new year was yet very young when the battalion filed through Ypres to take over trenches at Potijze, which we came to know very well. It was not the worst place in the Salient. I had seen it already, and its arrangement was simple – a breastwork front line, running across the Zonnebeke road to a railway bank on the south; a support line; two good (or not too bad) communication trenches – Haymarket and Piccadilly. Battalion headquarters dugout was near Potijze Château, beside the road. It boasted a handsome cheval-glass and a harmonium, but not a satisfactory roof.

This headquarters also enjoyed a kind of Arcadian environment, for the late owner had constructed two or three ponds in the grounds with white airy bridges spanning them, sweeping willows at their marges, and there were even statues of Venus and other handsome deities on little eminences, although I did not examine them closely. The château itself, much injured as it was, was not destroyed, and in the upper storey my observers gazed through a telescope on a dubious landscape; lucky these, whose day could not begin before eight, and ended at four with the thickening of what little light there had been. Littered on the damp floor beside them were maps of parts of the estate, some of great age, and log-books of the number of woodcock, hares, rabbits and I forget what, formerly laid low by shooting parties of this fine house. At least we had not done that! The antiquarian instinct was not assisted by the exposed situation of that garret, though Chatterton might have refused to leave the muniment room of St Mary Redcliff whether five-nines were occasionally whooping past or not.

In the ground floor of this white château, which still had a conservatory door, and a painted metal chair and table near that, was a dressing-station; outside lay a dump of steel rails, concertina wire, planks and pit-props, now mostly frozen into the ground; opposite was a low farm building, Lancer Farm, in which was the bomb store. The stream Bellewaardebeek flowing by (under its ice) supplied the ponds. Presently its depth was daily measured, in case the enemy (who owned the upper stretches of the stream) was preparing any new deluge like that which drove Noah to sea. If one lived much in the district, one evolved a sense when to use the Haymarket communication trench, when Piccadilly. The men, unable to keep their footing on the glazed boards, bound sandbags round their boots; but the ‘practice’ had to be ‘discontinued forthwith.’ Going forward, one finds St James’ Street, the support trench, none too comfortable: it is narrow, its sandbags are worn out (and the thaw will come presently), its dugouts are only dugouts by name, for they are small hutches of galvanized iron and revetting materials, blackened with wood-smoke, and inside dusky and suffocating. Sit down, and cower, for the ‘air’ is best near the floor. At the extreme left one may find Amon and Vidler playing cards in the worst canopy of all these flim-flam constructions, and one shudders in the evil, iced draught that darts through, and marvels at this tenacity.

The front line was crude and inhuman. Our new doctor, Moore, with lean cheek and red nose, went round with his flask in the foul cold, and was admired for his courage and charity at once. (He had won his DSO near here in 1914.) The parapet was low, and such a man had to stoop all the way along. On the right, a telegraph pole leaning over at 45 degrees or so was our landmark and boundary; there a great mine-crater interrupted our prettily alternating bays and traverses, which on the map look like a wainscot design. There were no dugouts in the front line, and even recesses for bombs and ammunition were scarce. Still farther ahead was the British wire, a thin brambly pretence, nor was the German wire at this point the usual series of iron thickets. Their front trench was much higher than our own, and behind it the ground made a gradual ascent, whereon one identified such bony remains as Oskar Copse and Wilde Wood.

Deathly blue, sable, hung the pall of the great cold over this battlefield. It was bad enough to be standing or moving there at all, but our business was more than that. From an ‘absolutely reliable Belgian source, which had never hitherto failed,’ it was reported that a German offensive was maturing here, and our alertness had to be impeccable. Ignorant of the secret news, I went round with Harrison, and was startled by his merciless arrest of a sentry, who, contrary to orders, was wearing a knitted comforter to keep his ears from freezing as he stood on duty in a saphead. Our patrols were frequent and even foolhardy. Vidler and Amon excelled in them. They lay in that arctic fierceness and listened to the conversation of sentries, and the common night routine of the Germans, which Vidler readily completed with his amusing imagination.

As intelligence officer, I, too, was many times out in No Man’s Land here. It may be well to say more, since those times and tortures are now almost forgotten. The wirers were out already, clanking and whispering with what seemed a desperate energy, straining to screw their pickets into the granite. The men lying at each listening-post were freezing stiff, and would take half an hour’s buffeting and rubbing on return to avoid becoming casualties. Moonlight, steely and steady, flooded the flat space between us and the Germans. I sent my name along, ‘Patrol going out,’ and, followed by my batman, blundered over the parapet, down the borrow-pit, and through our meagre but mazy wire. Come, once again.

The snow is hardened and crunches with a sort of music. Only me, Worley. He lays a gloved hand on my sleeve, puts his head close, and says, ‘God bless you, sir – don’t stay out too long.’ Then, we stoop along his wire to a row of willows, crop-headed, nine in a row, pointing to the German line. We go along these. At the third we stop. This may have been a farm track – a waggon way. But, the question for us is, what about that German ambush, or waiting patrol? Somewhere, just about here, officers were taken prisoner, or killed, a fortnight ago. There is no sound as we kneel. A German flare rises, but the moonlight will not be much enkindled. I have counted our steps from the first pollard. We come to the last. There are black, crouching forms, if our eyes do not lie, not far ahead; but, patience at last exhausted, we move on again. The forms are harmless shapes of earth or timber, though we still think someone besides ourselves has moved. I am looking for two saps, which the aeroplane photographs disclose boldly enough, and one of which is held at times. And here is one. Hold hard.

This one is vague and shallow. We enter, and creep along, but it does not promise well; then we step up, and cross over to the other. At the extremity is a small brushwood shelter, and this may mean – it does, but not now: yet this mess-tin and this unfrosty overcoat are not so derelict. We cannot avoid the feeling that we are being stalked, and we are equally amazed that in this moonlight we are not riddled with bullets. The enemy’s parapet is scarcely out of bombing range. Far off we hear German wheels; but the trenches are silent. Probably we are being studied as a typical patrol. I do not like this telegraph wire here, which is not so continuously buried in snow as it ought to be. I have put my foot on it gently, and it is a wire. It leads to a stick bomb ready to be exploded. We move again, with our trophies. I still keep count of our paces.

Spike-like tree-trunks here stand surrounding an oval moat, which in turn encloses a curious mound. We must carry in some idea of this, and we coast it, but nothing happens, and so far as the difficult moonlight shows it is desolate and harmless as its two lean elm-trees. And now turning home, we see that our wirers have packed up, and we are amazed that we have been out over two hours. It is not so easy (once we have slipped over our parapet again) to leave the front line for battalion headquarters; it has magnetized the mind; and for a moment one leans, delaying, looking out over the scene of war, and feeling that to ‘break the horrid silence’ would be an act of creation.

Things did not always end so. One night, when I was far out, our artillery suddenly and for no obvious reason began to shrapnel the German front line at savage speed, and north and south a hideous noise began. The Germans flung up volleys of flares and alarm lights, and my small party sunk to the ground in terrible anticipation. The British guns raked the German line, the shells only just missing us. We presently ran and stumbled into the miserable British breastwork, and asked why all the banging; the reply was that someone along the line had given the gas alarm. With us there was no gas, and we shook in the prospect of a retaliation. Strange acquiescence! the enemy made no immediate sign; and after a time the patrollers went down by way of Haymarket. Suddenly a stupefying fury of shells lashed that black-shadowed alley, and we ran (myself asthmatical, but swifter than a hare); shells burst slap in the trench, and we half choked in the reek and fume. Then the sharp and well-calculated German answer to British offensiveness stopped, and we panted and pitied ourselves in the candle-light of company headquarters in St James’.

It was thought by the staff that we should do well to patrol the snowy ground in white suits. One day a large package of what we expected to be snow-suits came up, by the hand of Q. M. Swain. On being opened, it was found to contain a number of ladies’ becoming night-gowns.