Domesticities
The advancing spring of 1917, with its ever brightening green even round Rudkin House and its prismatic play of sunbeams on that gurgling, persistent brook in Zillebeke, yet meant advancing war, and our sector began to warm up. Our own flying corps were brilliantly active, but there were on occasion four or five German airplanes in the early day over our forward positions. Great shells were sent into our area in the endeavour to destroy the deep dugouts, shells which from a flank could be plainly seen in the final seconds of their descent. I was fascinated by that violent spectacle. A long-range trench mortar one afternoon fired with weary iteration and accurate inaccuracy, its visible missiles plunging into the muck and tinware just over the trench in which I talked with the inimitable Vidler, who felt friendly towards this region from its connection with the Canadians, his brothers by adoption. He took me on little explorations in the wood, and we found old German uniforms, bones and shovels, and British graves. (They are still finding them, in 1930.) Vancouver Street was anti-German at this time. It was, however, not a good platform, as its mud-filled entrance to the front trench suddenly exposed one’s head and shoulders to the snipers opposite. But being on this ridge at all was rather like being in a deadly pillory.
My observers’ reports grew extensive and sometimes valuable; the more valuable they were, the worse for me, for an officer at Divisional headquarters could never be satisfied with what I transmitted. He came along himself to Ypres at a gentlemanly hour to press for more facts, and this usually meant my going up to the front trenches and round the positions for the second time that day. This steely youth had the bad habit of crossing the infantryman’s country between trenches where that was not the convention, on the principle of ‘après moi les 5.9.’ One day a footsore Blunden was just back in the Ramparts, perhaps noting down a poetical hint on the swans in the moat or more probably wondering if the mess corporal had got back from Poperinghe and forgotten the Beaune, certainly feeling he had earned an interval, when his tormentor called, requiring instant conduct to a point in the front line where the authentic eye could examine a mass of new earth reported by Sergeant Clifford in the German support line. Good, in a military sense. Shell-holes, duckboards, trenches, again drearily footed, we chose a point looking towards Stirling Castle. When the Divisional eye had rested on this phenomenon, but not with such insight that any brilliant interpretation followed, we turned, and my friend strode over the open, stepping westward, and singing some rhymes by Mr Belloc. This excursion proved a little too bold, and suddenly a shell or two fell behind; then with the familiar breath-stopping suddenness a large one rushed into the mould beside us, kicking up some lumps of it, and then another, quite as large. We removed from this disturbance in different directions, and my high-booted inspector made his own way to Ypres, thenceforward leaving me to myself for some time.
Long tramps day and night ruined my feet, but I had to walk to Poperinghe in great misery to have a tooth put to rest or die in the attempt. In daylight one might be unlucky over getting a lift on that hazardous road, which could be seen between its trees from the German and from our front line. I was. The tooth was pulled, back I went, and saw again the tipsy water-tower and the sole surviving pinnacle along the road through Ypres with illogical happiness. By the station I noticed some newly installed howitzers, and there was a suspicious quickness among those now passing out of the Lille Gate, but even so, the dentist had been settled with. In the very prime of my content, seeking the home from home across the rubble, and instinctively avoiding the pits leading swiftly into the Ypres sewers, I was chilled by the recollection that as ‘mess president’ I was due to receive the evening admonition from the General, as he sat down and scanned the seats to note the absentees. He was quite right; I had no faculty for turning the young mess corporal, though he looked rather like a Frenchman, into a Soyer. The satisfaction with which poor Hornby could say to his visitor, ‘Do try this cream cheese, made at Mont-des-Cats, quite a local product,’ or ‘These cauliflowers are uncommonly good, Clark,’ was sure to be knocked of a heap by some horrid hiatus or ruination; by charred sardines or marine coffee.
One evening his thoughts were distracted from these unhappy imperfections by the unprecedented characteristics of the visitor. This was a Major, attached to the tunnelling company and living, apparently for ever and from the beginning, along by the Lille Gate; a Canadian, a big, slow-paced but unescapable being; and he had ‘dropped in’ to inform Brigade of emergency exits from the Krab Krawl tunnels, requiring our considered defence in case of a German raid. There was to my sense indication that this evangelist had drunk our health occasionally before calling, and at dinner his gold-digger’s fraternity of style appealed to all except the General, who at every vivid question and proposition and even critical shaking of head went redder, but could not impress his guest with the due gravity. At last, he seized an opportunity. ‘You wish an officer to inspect the tunnel exits; very well; Mr Blunden will go with you immediately,’ with a look towards me in which a rudimentary wink strove for dignified expression. I went many times round the Observatory Ridge trenches, but this was the most picturesque of my tours. The Major seemed to have an enormous physique, eyes independent of light, and a preternatural affinity with this trench area. Everywhere we passed, he murmured over past and present stages of sandbags, junctions, revetments, drains, even patting the side of Vince Street like a horse as he said, ‘It’s a good trench, Vince Street, and it always was, young man. What’s that? The man who made it? Yes, knew Vince well. Now just here we’ll turn off (see the steps?) and look at Yeomanry post,’ a formless site, shelled an hour earlier. On Observatory Ridge it was blackness profound, and not only did the veteran pry about all the emergency exits with dangling barbed wire to them, but also he felt very much attracted to various derelict sapheads and cuttings, thick to the knees with cold mud. ‘This was a very promising communication,’ ‘I myself preferred this to Living Trench,’ ‘Well, d’ye know, your General ought to be up here – see, there’s nothing to stop ’em.’ At last he went downstairs into the tunnels, and in a sort of wooden sepulchre found two mining officers and one bottle of whisky. They were in a grave mood, and as he went in dismissed a non-commissioned officer from the doorway. ‘Fresh, fresh, fresh,’ one commented in deep bass on the departing soldier, and the other nodded assent, though in that cave of spoiled air and fuscous lamplight the word ‘fresh’ was misleading; then they welcomed the Major as he seated himself on the wood bench, and (to use a contemporary elliptical expression) I had one, too. They talked of drives and parallels and countermines, spreading out a magical but terrible map of the underworld, and all with a stolid permanency resembling the Major’s, who finally hauled his bulk up again into the moist darkness and we arrived in Ypres (one of us having grown a little stupid) in the moody hush of the darkest hour.
It was at that stern time when the Brigade-Major, Clark, would often take a walk round the line, and his route was likewise an individual choice, though he avoided half-choked derelicts. ‘I like,’ he said, ‘to see something of the country we are fighting for,’ and so he moved mazily in the mist from point to point inaccessible by day, often with some recollection of local history, tantalizing me in my sympathy with these overwhelmed barns and hovels and beetfields; but he was not really occupied in antiquarian studies. He was under orders to gather ideas for bloodthirsty battle, but he kept that secret. The first notion I had of it was when, on the extreme right of our territory, close to a hopeless drowned support-trench, we came on a rough trench tramway, which made me say, ‘This must have been put down in 1914 by the Spanish Onions’ (he belonged to the regiment so nicknamed); whereon he replied, ‘I’ll bet you it wasn’t there three weeks ago.’ It was in fact part of the preparation for the Messines attack, which was shortly afterwards rumoured, with expansive stories of our mines ready to be sent up under German Brigade headquarters, a modern miracle if it was so, and the even colder announcement that the British staff were allowing for I forget how many thousand casualties on the first day.
Do I loiter too long among little things? It may be so, but those whom I foresee as my readers will pardon the propensity. Each circumstance of the British experience that is still with me has ceased for me to be big or little, and now appeals to me more even than the highest exaltation of pain or scene in the ‘Dynasts,’ and thank the heaven of adoration incarnadined with Desdemona’s handkerchief. Was it nearer the soul of war to adjust armies in coloured inks on vast maps at Montreuil or Whitehall, to hear of or to project colossal shocks in a sort of mathematical symbol, than to rub knees with some poor jaw-dropping resting sentry, under the dripping rubber sheet, balanced on the greasy fire-step, a fragment of some rural newspaper or Mr Bottomley’s oracle beside him? That thrusting past men achingly asleep in narrow chilly firetrenches, their mechanical shifting of their sodden legs to let you go on your way, pierces deep enough. That watching the sparks of trench mortar bombs converge on some shell-hole a few hundred yards towards the still dawnless east, with their fiendish play on Aristophanes’ comic syllables ‘tophlattothratt, tophlattothratt,’ the lunge and whirr of such malignity against a few simple lives, pierces deep enough. Towards Hooge one brazen morning, running in a shower of shells along ‘The Great Wall of China’ (one dull shell struck within a rifle’s length of us, and exploded something else), Kenward the corporal and I saw a sentry crouching and peering one way and another like a birdboy in an October storm. He spoke, grinned and shivered; we passed; and duly the sentry was hit by a shell. So that in this vicinity a peculiar difficulty would exist for the artist to select the sights, faces, words, incidents, which characterized the time. The art is rather to collect them, in their original form of incoherence. I have not noticed any compelling similarity between a bomb used as an inkpot and a bomb in the hand of a corpse, or even between the look of a footballer after a goal all the way and that of a sergeant inspecting whale-oiled feet. There was a difference prevailing in all things. Let the smoke of the German breakfast fires, yes, and the savour of their coffee, rise in these pages, and be kindly mused upon in our neighbouring saps of retrogression. Let my own curiosity have its little day, among the men of action and war-imagination.
The Brigade was withdrawn to Poperinghe for rest. We had our meals where we wished, and I chose a little table in the ‘British Hostel,’ where the gramophone was chiefly employed on a minuet by Boccherini and something ‘Hawaiian’ – not bad accompaniments (for the uncritical young) to Madame’s chickens and wines. The Officers’ Club was usually overcrowded, but none the worse for that; one could exercise oneself in the delicate operation of identifying badges and divisional symbols, thus always gaining power of conjecture about possible reliefs for our own division. Even the General took some wine one evening at the invitation of Clark, and I reflected that he might even have gone to see Charlie Chaplin if we had pressed the point. However, he was called off on momentous affairs. Chaplin was showing, but in a microscopic size; better things were given us at the great hop-warehouse by the station, by our own divisional party, ‘The Tivolies.’ These oscillated round that well-known entertainer Du Calion, who perched on a ladder in the middle of the stage, wearing a pseudo-naval uniform and let fall on the lordly brass-hats below his licensed satire beginning, ‘I should like to inform you young fellows of the junior service.’ O, then there was clowning, then there was antic; Robinson, the tall immaculate in evening dress, danced with the tubby little ‘wench,’ who snivelled to perfection, in lovely incongruity – what a roar went up when the ‘wench’ appeared again as a Lancashire lad of rather limited sense and confronted some tremendous stage colleague, with
‘Get out of ’ere.’
‘I’ll knock yer ’ead off.’
‘You won’t.’
‘I will.’
‘You’d never do it’ (advancing firmly).
‘I will.’
(Recoiling, and very rationally) ‘Ah, and I believe he would.’
Or that other commonplace, fortune-telling.
The ‘wench’ was listening earnestly. The wizard read ‘her’ hand, scratching it. ‘Ah, there’s a bit of luck for you. I can see it. There’s the firing line. We don’t ’ave no breastworks in this part. Ah, there’s that bit of luck again. You’re going to ’ave a letter. Your sweetheart’s on the road to Poperinghe. He’s been awarded the YMCA with Triangles. He’s got off at the station. He’s been told off by the RTO. He’s gone in for a glass of stoot. He’s come out again – they don’t give credit. He’s in the street outside. He’s coming in to this ’all. He’s—’ (commotion at the back, shouting and blundering over forms; a red-nosed gruesome figure, the like of which never rewarded Shakespeare’s fancy, comes hurrying up the middle passage. Applause crescendo, all heads turned to the new Adonis) ‘he’s coming on to this platform!!’ (He does, and with one final tremendous gesture, glaring horribly at the gasping ‘wench,’ flings out his scraggy arms in awful invitation. ‘Alarums. Chambers go off.’)
This elementary but then glorious comedy was the last that some of the audience were ever to enjoy. But they had not expected even that much. One sees why they roared with laughter. Shakespeare died too soon.