Departures
The battalion, being relieved from Potijze breastworks, occupied various cavities of less or more insecurity in Ypres. Though many cellars existed in the town, most of them were battered in and waterlogged, and the Ramparts were overcrowded. Our principal shelter was the Convent, then the husk of a building, but concealing a many-chambered underground lodging for a considerable number of men, who could parade for working or carrying parties in its courtyard; that cobbled yard will ever be to me the stage on which Maycock stands glaring at the round white moon, and shaking his fist at her, and crying, ‘It’s that bloody old witch – until she changes we’ll keep being frozen.’ At one corner was the entrance to a garden, the paths of which had been adorned by some patient enthusiasts of the autumn before with their regimental badges done in coloured glass; and, passing that way, one had the choice of admiring their workmanship, or the sweet simplicity of the pigeons curving and glinting round the Cathedral’s tattered tower, or the fact that the German gunners were shooting high explosives to burst in the air innocuously round that aiming-mark of theirs.
Over the sepulchral, catacombed city, aeroplanes flew and fought in the cold winter sun. Sentries blew their whistles from broken archways; the brass shell-cases used for gas-gongs gleamed with a meaning beside them; and all of a sudden flights of shells came sliding into the town. Few people were seen on the streets, and it is difficult to recall in realistic sensation one’s compulsory walks in Ypres. The flimsy red post-office, a blue poster for Sunlight Zeep, a similar advertisement for Singer’s Naaimaschinen, the noble fragment of a gateway to Saint Martin’s Cathedral, interior walls with paintings of swans on green ponds, the rusty mass of ironware belonging to some small factory with an undestroyed chimney, ancient church music nobly inscribed on noble parchment, scattered among legless wicker chairs, in the roadway outside St Jacques, a scaffolded white building in the Place (the relic of a soon disillusioned optimist), a pinnacle, a railing, a gilded ceiling – those details one received, but without vivacity. One set out to arrive at a destination in Ypres, and even in quiet times one was not quiet. As if by some fantastic dream, the flush and abundance of antique life and memorial and achievement, such as blend into the great spirit-harmony of the cities in that part of Europe, stole suddenly and faintly over the mind; then departed. This city had been like St Omer, like Amiens. How obvious, and how impossible!
Man, ruddy-cheeked under your squat chin-strapped iron helmet, sturdy under your leather jerkin, clapping your hands together as you dropped your burden of burning-cold steel, grinning and flinging old-home repartee at your pal passing by, you endured that winter of winters, as it seems to me, in the best way of manliness. I forgot your name. I remember your superscriptions, ‘OAS’ and ‘BEF,’ your perpetual copying-ink pencil’s ‘in the pink,’ ‘as it leaves me’; you played House, read Mr Bottomley, sang ‘If I wore a tulip,’ and your rifle was as clean as new from an armoury. It is time to hint to a new age what your value, what your love was; your Ypres is gone, and you are gone; we were lucky to see you ‘in the pink’ against white-ribbed and socket-eyed despair.
We suffered much from death and wounds, but still there existed a warm fraternity, a family understanding, for a large proportion of those who saw the Somme battle together still formed the cordial opinion of the battalion. Harrison, with his gift of being friend and commander alike to all his legion, was at our head; everyone was outwardly censorious and inwardly happy when he paraded the battalion by the bleak hop-garden at Vlamertinghe for arms drill. It was cold, but he put life into us, and there is a religious or poetic element in perfecting even one’s dressing by the right. We still had our Colonel when we were sent back amid hootings, and swervings, and bangings on a quaint railway (with the usual desperate palaverings over entraining, at the Cheesemarket Station, Poperinghe) to an untouched and sociable village called Bollezeele (tins of Oxblood Polish and salmon in every window!). It was near St Omer. There we ate and slept excellently, and for myself, I was in the house of the local doctor, whose talk was in the best style of wisdom and tolerance. We endlessly played the gramophone, and we had concerts at which the metre and tune of
‘England was England when Germany was a pup,’
served for numerous additional verses of personalities. ‘Harrison’ was rhymed thus: ‘The listening posts they think it hot, the noisy way he carries on,’ and ‘Allen’: ‘who issued the troops with a small tot of rum and reserved for himself One Gallon.’
Innocent activities like the famous Sergeant-Major’s drainage improvements at Roussel Farm, needed but to be mentioned – a magnificent and general laugh at once burst forth, echoing through the rafters. The Medical Officer’s simple remedies were sufficiently ridiculed, and he himself, battering away at the piano and roaring out in a most parching voice ‘The Battle Cry of Freedom,’ was declared on all sides to be ‘a cure.’
A thaw came on, and dirty rainstorms swept the open fields. I felt how lucky I was to have received almost at that moment a pair of new and ponderous Wellingtons, though my size in boots was different; and in these I worked with Worley on a new plan for putting up barbed wire in a hurry, which we had ourselves pencilled out. The Divisional General rode by one morning as we were beginning, with our squad of learners, and when he returned we had put up quite a maze of rusty inconvenience. The good old Duke – no, the General, called me all trepidant to him, smiled, asked my age and service, liked the wire, and passed into the village. At lunch Harrison also smiled upon me. ‘Rabbit, I hear you were wiring this morning … The General said you surprised him. He asked me, ‘‘Who was that subaltern in the extraordinary boots, Harrison? Well, he got that wire up very quick. We went down the street, and there wasn’t a yard of it: we came back and there was a real belt.’’ You’ve found another friend.’ He began to laugh very heartily as he added, ‘Those boots, Rabbit!’ This painful memory must be exorcized by being noted here. I presented my batman shortly afterwards with a pair of new jack-boots.
With a sudden surprise order to return to the trenches, these affectionate times came to an end. We marched that great march of the British from Poperinghe, past hop-gardens and estaminets, past shattered estaminets and withered fields and battery shelters and naked hearths dripping with rain – perhaps the most significant and sad of all domestic ruin – to the screened corner by Ypres Asylum, thence turning along Posthoornstraat into Kruisstraat, a suburb of Ypres, where, we heard, the inhabitants had longest lingered on and sold wines against the fates. A reconnaissance of the trenches which we were to hold came next. They were those on a rising ground in Sanctuary Wood, near Hill 60, and were indifferently known as Tor Tops, Mount Sorrel and Observatory Ridge. On arriving in the wood, we found it an unprepossessing one. ‘What about Thiepval?’ said Sergeant Ashford to me as we moved taciturnly up the duckboards, not the imagined communication trench. ‘Looks exactly the same.’ The scene was deathly, and if we had known then the German points of vantage we should have disliked it still more.
Meeting me outside a high red house in Kruisstraat, Harrison walked along the road to tell me some news, and his face was overcast. He was ordered to return to England, and at once. But more followed. He had arranged that I was to go to Brigade as Intelligence Officer; the General had previously desired him to let me go, and now he thought it would do me good. These facts caused the Ypres-Comines Canal, over which our short walk led us, to look particularly desolate and grey. That night Harrison went his way, and I reported anxiously at the seat of terror in the Ramparts; the battalion relieved in wild blackness on Observatory Ridge. They had hardly taken over the trenches when a fierce brief bout of shelling fell upon Valley Cottages, the foolish wreckage used as battalion headquarters, and among the victims was our kind, witty and fearless Sergeant-Major Daniels. He was struck in the head, and being carried away to the casualty clearing station in Vlamertinghe white mill, lived a day or two and said good-bye to Harrison, who heard of the bad business in time to see him once more.
These men being lost to me, Cassells having transferred to the Flying Corps, and Lintott having collapsed and disappeared in a deathly state from among us, I felt myself in the void. I made an attempt to master the position at Brigade headquarters, and there was certainly work to do. It was my business to compile all the information that our front yielded, and to write daily reports which were signed by the General before being sent to higher quarters and circulated in the Brigade. The battalions manned various observation posts and snipers’ lairs, and, while their work came under my control, we had a section of specialists attached to the Brigade headquarters. Moreover, I could now claim to be a bureaucrat, for there were two clerks to draw maps and produce manifold copies of reports and programmes. I received several ancient and some modern maps and archives as my weapons of war.
Such was the subject of my interest; and now for the surroundings. Brigade headquarters was compendiously concealed in an ancient bricked vault under the Ramparts, not far from the Lille Gate – not far enough.
This cavern was reputed to have stored barrels of beer in recent, and Marlborough’s horses in remote, antiquity. It produced in the mind of the visitor a confidence in its prodigious strength, but some absurd stickler for accuracy presently proved that a very few feet of earth protected it above. At least, it was roomy, and contained a suite of cubicles (divided with best mailbags), a dining-room at the moat end, and an office at the Ypres end. There next the exit I had my table and my mysterious heap of pamphlets, codes (one never spoke nowadays of the 11th R. Sussex, but of ‘Arthur’ or similar pseudonym) and papers. Outside, men were killed from time to time, but there were generally a good many, cleaning up, delivering messages, awaiting inspection or instructions, acting as if it was a normal rendezvous.
From the time of my arrival here and the severance from the companionship and duty which had grown preternaturally mine, I find that my memory relaxes and chronology withers away. But much topographical and personal impression persists, and I can still pick up my tin hat and the General’s periscope (‘Albert’) and get out to my daily round. The moat was often as placid as John Crome as one crossed it into the exposed flats beyond. There I soon left behind the often remarked gunner’s grave, honoured with the small statue of a child bearing a basket of flowers, borrowed with a genuine poetical pathos ‘for the duration.’ Thence the way over the watery grass did not detain anyone. As time went on, the Germans practised more and more the ingenious but dangerous by-play of ‘sniping’ even at a single passenger here with shells, and one’s more fantastic thoughts ran upon the rumour that there existed below a conduit from the Ramparts to the dam of Zillebeke Lake ahead – a very nice conduit, but closed to the public. Half-way across to the dam, a precarious battery position lined the Ypres-Roulers railway, in the middle of a morass; and it was here, at an unpleasant moment for the gunners, that I actually saw the dark body of a huge shell in the air as it swooped into the muck just ahead. Our gunners in the Salient were at the mercy of their opponents, and their gunpits hardly looked strong enough to store potatoes. Not much better were the numerous shanties and holes, all in a row, along the Zillebeke Lake dam, called The Bund. Here I would call for my observer-corporal, Kenward, who daily bumped his head over the entrance as he came out with telescope and logbook, after which we tramped under the rags of camouflage round the corner of the lake into the handsome communication trench to Zillebeke village. Daily that corner grew more of a slough. A line of slender trees, and a strip of grass, gave us a hint of pastoral as we looked out, but what one was most aware of was the interminable clump, clump of boots on trench boards.
This route was known to so many uncomplaining tourists that I may be forgiven a quantity of detail. Presently one turned from the lake at Hallebast Corner, easily redesignated Hellblast, where usually one might see not far off what enthusiasts called ‘splendid bursts’ of five-nines, occasionally with water-music. A short ditch led to Zillebeke Church by a little stream which murmured over pots and pans, as having no reason to change its habits because of a dull war; ruined brickwork hugged the ground, and among it some headquarters officers were answering questions and finding a little whisky left, unseen but not unsuspected. A cat or two, or their ghosts, glossily crossed the linenless backyards. Zillebeke tileyard had ceased work and a little smoke there was naturally a dangerous thing. The church tower was not yet altogether down, but one lost its architectural distinctions in one’s quick movement over the road, under German observation; one’s eye managed to register nevertheless a number of wooden crosses.
From that point, two trenches went on to the firing line, and it depended on incident or instinct which we took. Vince Street, the north one, was solidly made, and commanded a pretty view of a farm called Dormy House, in the court of which a cart stood with a load of musty straw, scarcely to be considered extant. So Oberon might have deceived. The trench led into the brutalized little wood known to mournful history as Maple Copse; and so did the other trench from the south, Zillebeke Street, which had shallowly twisted along past a battalion headquarters, Valley Cottages. The only way to get to Valley Cottages was to hoist oneself out of Zillebeke Street into the full gaze of competent German observers and walk ‘over the top,’ into the back door. There were many wooden crosses here. It was best to have no business in daylight at those cottages; but even so one went into Maple Copse, the pretended shield of some field-guns with the additional harmless fraud of brown-leafed camouflage, and one left Maple Copse with a serious mind to walk on in the open to support trench, Stafford Trench. The greensward, suited by nature for the raising of sheep, was all holes, and new ones appeared with great uproar as one crossed. A German battery at close range made beautiful groups round Kenward and myself one day, and the interested faces looking on from Stafford Trench had the pleasure of seeing us refuse to quicken our pace. As we expected to receive the next salvo on our persons, we felt that running would be a little tedious. I looked down and saw a shrapnel helmet, with blood and hair in it.
The land rose to the south and east, and formed positions of decided strength in spite of the wretched approach. East, ahead, we climbed up Observatory Ridge, scantily covered with the verges of Sanctuary Wood, and still we were under the telescopes of the enemy, who had Hill 60 and other observation posts. By a peculiarity of remembrance I see there a dugout like a cairn in the open, at first a cookhouse, but shelled out of that use; then the terrible little trees of the brown ridge posture on the sky, with the terraced 1914 shelters, useless and bulged, below them. Trenches began among these. It was a deep front line, but to the south there was an end to it – ‘The Gap.’ The sandy soil otherwise was carefully dug and sapped, with tremendous dugouts beneath, entered from the malodorous cutting Krab Krawl. In that trench there was a surprising little nook for two, one the observer, and the other his mate with the logbook. My old friend Sergeant Clifford would always be fondly lingering at this point for me, with marvellous exposition of German subtlety more or less based on what he had seen. This man loved his work, and wrestled with its problems as nowadays people struggle to prepare huge strikes. I am meeting him again one posthumous morning, and shall expect him to have news of Satan tunnelling under Zion Hill, with exact map references. From his post in the Low Countries, strange contrasts of happenings were to be seen. Here, a little iron pipe, puffing out vapour in moment-jets. There, a party of bluish Germans, apparently all sage elders with swarthy beards, gingerly filing through a copse – past old British crosses and new German monuments. Shrapnel sends them scampering off the track. There, a white-headed boy carrying a mess-tin. Dogs, with the usual habits. Beyond, a pushing-party bringing up trolleys bristling with the iron rods used for reinforced concrete. The same party scuttling away from sudden white cloudlets – our shrapnel again. Curious that one did not notice it going over. Farther, a street emerging from a clean village, white linen on the lines, civilians, horsemen and dogcarts spanking along; resting troops out in a field at physical exercises, even women in dark blue skirts pushing trucks. One day, the grand spectacle of a church steeple in flames, finally toppling to earth. With such varieties our observers were in clover, even if they usually recorded about four in the afternoon, with a flourish, that the ‘light prevented further observations.’
Not nearly so good was the look-out at Rudkin House, the little hillock facing towards Hill 60, although the cardboard chart of landmarks there claimed a spacious survey. It was an odd place, being actually in the mouth of an old well, the bottom of which was in a tunnelled dugout; and, as a cookhouse was installed there for battalion headquarters, the observers had domestic difficulties. Wood-smoke in dugouts already short of air was one of the war’s little miseries; and I never visited this dungeon without repeating from Young’s Night Thoughts, often in my pocket, the just words,
‘Dreadful post
Of observation! darker every hour.’
From Rudkin House a subway provided safe but awkward communication with the front line, and one morning early, calling there with the Brigade-Major, I was thunderstruck to see troops coming up from the emergency exits between the front and support systems and smoke rising also. The German gunners, whose opportunity filled one with horrid apprehension, stood by and no doubt preferred the information they got by watching to other action. Men crowded out and doubled and ducked back into Stafford Trench, while the Brigade-Major rapidly organized a working-party to block up the fire below with sandbags. This was the result of some machine-gunner’s mistaking a can of petrol for his washing water. Such fires happening in tunnelled dugouts ended a number of lives. On this occasion I believe one man was suffocated.