The Spring Passes
Returning to the line, the Brigade took over the rather uninteresting positions north of Ypres, spread out under the superior enemy strongholds called High Command. The weather grew quite warm, and answerable to May; there seemed no special operation in the air, although at night one might pass the time by taking compass bearings on the most usual gunflashes. That notwithstanding, a change for the worse in the treatment of the support and reserve area was now clear enough, and the German counter-battery firing had to be watched by us passers-by. The most terrific punishment fell in the golden evening upon one or two battery positions recently perfected, such violence on such points exceeding our previous experience, and attracting numerous spectators out of the dugouts along the Yser Canal. One strange fact in the area often provided discussion. A little way behind the canal, beside the high road, stood a pretty ornamented house, among trees, called Reigersburg Château. It was unmolested by the German gunners, or practically so. Similar non-combatant’s privilege was allowed to another château a short distance westward, the Trois Tours, although the village of Brielen which it overtopped had become the usual three-verse fandango of brick mounds and water-holes. Of the White Mill, which artillery had been occupying, nothing but the crushed base was left, but the winged structure was easily fancied in that spring sun and wakened zephyr, a fair and blessed ghost. Even the Yser Canal, in whose high bank we lived, was fresh and twinkling, crossed with bridges of light timber almost like a Chinese lake. In the dugout of Vidler, when the 11th were relieved, there was particular joy, for his old schoolfellow Tice had now joined the battalion, and in conclave threatened solemn war against any German who crossed his track. With his stiff, cropped hair he looked an unmistakable German himself. Vidler now had a fresh audience for his school recollections and mimicry; he almost gave his orders on parade in the nasal tones of our famous writing-master, and filled the desert air with imitations which a starling would have been proud of. Amon and Collyer, his old school-fellows, bore the burden, Tice with his sweet mournfulness listened and gave suggestions and approval, while I made up the party of five and the colloquy of Sussex in her days of peace with all my heart.
The Brigade took its full turn of sixteen days, and at headquarters, in the absence of the General, the temporary command of kindly Colonel Draffen well suited the mild season. Draffen ‘never tried to be his own lance-corporal,’ and sympathetically regarded us as trying hard to perfect ourselves in our special jobs. At table, in his office, he was fatherly. I knew about Jeshurun, and how when he waxed fat he kicked, yet I am sorry to recall that my confidence ran a little too high in these easier conditions. First I began to air my convictions that the war was useless and inhuman, even inflicting these on a highly conservative General (an unnaturally fearless man) who dined with us one evening, and who asked me, ‘why I wasn’t fighting for the Germans?’ to which I answered with all too triumphant a simplicity that it was only due to my having been born in England, not Germany. Probably I was growing reckless after a year of war. And then our old commander came back, on the eve of our relief, with the result that he quickly sent for me and ordered me to keep my observers manning their present posts during the tour of the incoming Brigade. At this I dared to complain that the men had already worked day and night for sixteen days, under dangerous – ‘Good God, man,’ the General broke in with just indignation, ‘don’t talk to me about the men being in danger; don’t we all’ – and I forgot what more, for I took an early opportunity to go. I went to the Brigade Major, and, mentioning my escapade, petitioned for my return to the 11th Royal Sussex, where indeed I still felt my companionship was. Clark gently but firmly supported this idea. The next time that the General saw me was on a country road; he told me he was returning to me a manuscript of poems on Ypres which he had done me the honour to read, and observed that he had perused them with interest. This he reinforced later in his own handwriting, ‘I have read these with great pleasure.’ I do not aspire to any more unexpected critical commendation.
The relief was completed, and we migrated into the world of ivied dovecotes and orchards, where a battalion sees itself as a united family, horses and all within the same hedgerow; but those who heard Olympian voices on the wind were a little depressed to think that we were due back after our week or so in the country, to attack Pilkem Ridge, of which High Command was one bastion.
Training in a new mode of offensive approach now occupied the Foot. I was once more a genuine infantryman, and with less enthusiasm than was apparent I controlled my platoon as they plodded through the ploughed ups and downs beyond St Omer to outflank a prearranged and harmless enemy. Several mild and lengthening days went by as we yawned over this exercise; it was the season of Love. Accordingly the old farmer in the yard of his, and our, headquarters protested that we had stolen his new irreplaceable bucket worth several hundred francs, and was hardly convinced that his claim was too bold even when the bucket was produced from beneath some trusses of straw in his loft. The cars of authority came and went; the mossy banks of the country roads smiled more sweetly every morning with celandine and violet, with primrose and starflower. One day when I was ordered to serve at a court-martial a few miles off, I was rewarded as I went for my trouble; after a walk across a moor with ancient quarryings all solitary and primeval, the village of Acquin to which I was sent was shown suddenly like a jewel in the valley below, through a sparkling wave of sun and dewy haze. The roofs were rosy bright, and the lusty speech of the farmyards resounded.
The only consolation that one could find in being warned that an attack was coming was the frequent unfulfilment of such warnings; and this time the proposed capture of Pilken Ridge was postponed after all. I personally profited by the changed intention, for I was sent to the seaside for a rest. At Ambleteuse there was little to do but to idle among the tents or downs, as was prescribed, and now a somnolent, apathetic mood had come over me, so that I kept little reckoning of events. By luck or judgment in lorry-hopping (the snarls of the Portuguese drivers were amusing, seeing that the lorries they drove were British), one reached Boulogne and looked at the shops. A French poet (there are as many in France as this side), Albert Sautteau, who always added to his name the dignity ‘des Gens de Lettres,’ used to receive me kindly at ‘Le Home’ near our rest camp, and we read together his clockwork rhymes from the local papers. Like the curious Eclympastere in Chaucer’s poem, nearly, ‘he slept and did none other work,’ still dreaming on and refusing to believe in the war save in verses ‘pour les blessés’ and ‘à mes amis à Verdun.’ Madame was his very opposite, elegant and energetic; mademoiselle was only able to speak in blushes and smiles; and the small boy Gustave, dressed up like a young Highlander, haunted the camp and seemed to hold a better command than the Major in charge there. These were my friends, and I contrived to return to ‘Le Home’ once or twice more during the war. But now, I think, that home would be found in some leisurely by-street of Valenciennes, agreeable to the patient Muse of my good old friend.
And now away again to the outer world, where the tide of British power is gathering imperiously and insolently already for the onrush of 1917. I was now eager once more to share the regular life of my battalion, whose friendship outweighed all sorrows, but to my disgust I was once more detached from it to suffer a course of musketry. The countryside round St Omer and the dusty highway were nothing to me without my old familiar faces, and the terms and technicalities of the rifle and its use were like grains of sand working into my skull. There were accordingly some petulant remarks over the telephone at the rifle-range when I was in charge of practice; and I was at least more skilful with the shots of epigram than with the three-o-three of the small-arms factory. The village where we lived was marvellously cloaked and embosomed in huge old trees, the grass and herbs ran high above its churchyard wall, there were oak benches and books and beer; but I was in my glory the day we ended the course and marched away through the burning glare of dusty summer. I had been longing for the fragrance of ancient peace:
‘Now to attune my dull soul if I can
To the contentment of this countryside,
Where man is not for ever killing man
But quiet days and quiet waters glide.’
That was the note which my verses struck (memory retains these things capriciously), but officialdom and military manuals struck a louder and a harsher one. The heartiness of tried companions was the only real refuge; and so I went to find it with a lightened step. At Watten station something happened which you may laugh at, but I shall not. The train was not due to leave till the evening; after a visit to an estaminet, listening to a hero who was not ashamed of it, I sauntered by the canal, and then settled myself with my book in an empty cattle-truck. There came along a girl of fourteen or so, with a small brother, and looked in. We talked, and – we fell in love. That ‘I’ may be still in love with her, Marie-Louise of course, so black-eyed, and serious, and early-old with the inheritance of peasant experience – I have seen her alone since in many a moment of escape and fantasy. Still she looks in on this life’s sultry cattle-truck, halted awhile in some drab siding, and once again we kiss, innocent as petals in the breeze. With what sad resignation to the tyrannical moment, which she hardly credits to be true, lifting her slow hand doubtfully to wave farewell, does that child-love of only one day’s courting watch me pass into the voluminous, angry, darkening distance: ah, Marie-Louise!
Canal bank: Coney Street: and almost the first face I saw in the communication trench beyond battalion headquarters was Sergeant Davey’s, covered with sweat and mud. He was emerging from the explosion of a couple of shells in the trench, which had killed two of the runners before and behind him. It had required many frightful shocks to impress on Davey’s noble looks this appealing misery. ‘Is this the promised End, or image of that horror?’ However, Davey went on, one of the essential men of all our changing battalion; and soon a healing liberty from the gridiron of new labours and new lightnings was afforded. Out we went to a merry round of work and pleasure at Houlle in the marsh of St Omer, one of the battalion’s best times. In 1917 old expressions such as ‘a bon time’ and ‘trays beans’ were not much heard; another had arisen, ‘The BEF will all go home – in one boat’: but at least we now had a week or two of camp life, some in tents, some in brewery warehouses, some in fine bedrooms, all in high summer. The lonely ponds and canals were a delight after the day’s strenuous business, which began often before dawn. Having attacked and trenched and reinforced and counter-attacked through the yellowing corn, and discussed this manœuvre, that quarry, that cross-road until the afternoon, we came into the splendid silences of evening with intense joy. It was during this rest that Vidler, Amon, Collyer, Tice and myself, all of Christ’s Hospital, went together into St Omer, and roamed the streets, the cathedral, the cafés and the shops with such exhilarations of wit and irony that we felt no other feast like this could ever come again; nor was the feeling wrong.
The picture taken that day is by me now; the vine winds over the white wall, a happy emblem of our occasion; and the five of us, all young and with an expression of subdued resoluteness and direct action, are looking on the world together. What do we care for your Three Musketeers? And after all, we know their very roads better than they did.
I recollect the battalion on the march through grey and pink boulevards and faubourgs, in misty morning dripping dew; and there was a night when we slept on doorsteps by the road; I recollect the enormous sidings at Hazebrouck station, and one more languid, unconversational, clumsy journey in the open trucks to Poperinghe, Olive and myself sitting swinging our legs over the track, noting ominous new shell-holes in the fields alongside; but most of all, out of a deranged chronology and dimmed picture, I recollect the strange sight of red rose-like fires on the eastward horizon at dusk, the conflagrations of incendiary shells tumbling into that ghat called Ypres with which we must now renew acquaintance.