The Crash of Pillars
The hour of attack had been fixed by the staff much earlier than the infantry wanted or thought suitable. The night had passed as such nights often do, shelling being less than was anticipated, silent altogether at times. I suppose it was about three when I shook hands with Colonel Millward, mounted the black-oozing steps of battle headquarters in the burrows below Bilge Street, and got into the assembly ditch (‘Hornby Trench’) with my signallers. It was thick darkness and slippery going, but we used an old road part of the way. Where we lay, there were in the darkness several tall tree-stumps above, and it felt like a friendly ghost that watched the proceedings. A runner came round distributing our watches, which had been synchronized at Bilge Street. At 3.50, if I am right, shortly after Vidler had passed me growling epigrams at some recent shell-burst which had covered him with mud, the British guns spoke; a flooded Amazon of steel flowed roaring, immensely fast, over our heads, and the machine-gun bullets made a pattern of sharper purpose and maniac language against that diluvian rush. Flaring lights, small ones, great ones, flew up and went spinning sideways in the cloud of night; one’s eyes seemed not quick enough; one heard nothing from one’s shouting neighbour, and only by the quality of the noise and flame did I know that the German shells crashing among the tree-stumps were big ones and practically on top of us. We rose, scrambled ahead, found No Man’s Land a comparatively good surface, were amazed at the puny tags and rags of once multiplicative German wire, and blundered over the once feared trench behind them without seeing that it was a trench. Good men as they were, my party were almost all half-stunned by the unearthliness of our own barrage, and when two were wounded it was left to me to bandage them in my ineffective way. (I have been reminded that two of our party were killed, but at the time the fact was lost in the insane unrealities all round.) The dark began to dilute itself into daylight, and as we went on we saw concrete emplacements, apparently unattended to as yet, which had to be treated with care and suspicion; walking to the slanted low entrances with my revolver, I was well satisfied to prove them empty. And indeed the whole area seemed to be deserted! German dead, so obvious at every yard of a 1916 battlefield, were hardly to be seen. We still went ahead, and the mist whitened into dawn; through it came running a number of Germans – a momentary doubt; we prepared for a fight; no – ‘Prisoners!’ shouted my batman. Where they went I don’t know; we took no more notice. A minute more, and my advanced guard of signallers had come into touch with our companies, digging in by fours and fives along their captured objective. Meanwhile, I went ahead to see all that the mist allowed; there were troops of our Brigade advancing through the lines of men consolidating shell-holes, and with map before me I could recognize some of the places which we had certainly captured. It seemed marvellous, for the moment. All ours – all these German trenches. Caliban Support, Calf Avenue, Calf Reserve. But, stay – even now a pity looks one in the face, for these trenches are mostly mere hedges of brushwood, hurdles, work for a sheepfold, with a shallow ditch behind; and they have been taking our weeks of gunfire in these!
The reflection and the sympathy actually occurred to me, but were soon obliterated by the day’s work, and an increase in the German gunfire upon us. The slow twisting passage of the tanks through our position was thought to be the reason, for as these machines wheeled aside from the pits where our men were digging, heavy shells came down in plenty with formidable accuracy. Besides, the enemy must have captured a set of operation maps with all the stages of advance displayed. I remember that I was talking with somebody about one ‘Charlie’ Aston, an officer’s servant, who had been running here and there to collect watches from German dead. He had just returned to his chosen shell-hole with several specimens, when a huge shell burst in the very place. But not much notice was taken, or elegy uttered, for everywhere the same instant destruction threatened. And Tice and Collyer were already killed – news as yet failing to have its full painfulness in the thick of things.
The battalion headquarters soon advanced from the old British front line, still conspicuous with the tall tree-stumps, and crushed itself into a little concrete dugout with a cupola over it, formerly used for a perfect survey of the British defences. I tried to throw up enough earth to protect an annexe next door, but was driven from the work by a machine-gun, hanging on no great way off. Road-making parties behind us had lost no time and, strung out among the shell-bursts, were shovelling and pummelling tracks across old No Man’s Land. And then the Brigade headquarters came, beautiful to look upon, and their red tabs glowed out of several shell-holes. This was more than the German observers could endure, and in a short time there was such a storm of high explosive on that small space that the brains of the Brigade withdrew, a trifle disillusioned, to the old British trenches. Another storm, and a more serious and incontestable one, was now creeping on miserably with grey vapour of rain over the whole field. It was one of the many which caused the legend, not altogether dismissed even by junior officers, that the Germans could make it rain when they wanted to. Now, too, we were half certain that the attack had failed farther on, and one more brilliant hope, expressed a few hours before in shouts of joy, sank into the mud.
It was wet and it was cold. The marvel was that the day wore on, so heavy it was, and yet the day wore on, and I found by my watch that it was afternoon. At battalion headquarters in the concrete look-out there were long faces, not in expression of despair but what is almost as bad – indefiniteness. In the doorway, where the wounds of several men were dressed, a man with a mortal wound in the back was propped up. This poor wretch again and again moaned, ‘I’m cold, cold,’ but seemed to have no other awareness of life. The doctor looked at him, and shook his head at me. A medical orderly looked at him, and answered me he could do no good. I went out to visit company headquarters, which were now (with bombs and notebooks) under waterproof sheets stretched over shell-holes, swiftly becoming swimming-baths. As the unprepossessing evening came, N. C. Olive and myself were sharing a tin of ‘Sunshine’ sausages in one of these pools.
The position grew no better during the night, and the succeeding day was dismal, noisy and horrid with sudden death. Tempers were not good, and I found myself suddenly threatening a sergeant-major with arrest for some unfriendly view which he was urging on the headquarters in general. Then, there were such incidents as the death of a runner called Rackley, a sensitive and willing youth, just as he set out for the companies; intercepted by a shrapnel bullet he fell on one knee, and his stretched-out hand still clutched his message. Vidler, that invincible soldier, came in a little afterwards through explosions, observing, ‘That was a quick one, ’Erb. I was feeling round my backside for a few lumps of shrapnel – didn’t find any though.’ This second day was on the whole drab in the extreme, and at the end of it we were ordered to relieve the 14th Hampshires in their position ahead, justly termed the Black Line, along the Steenbeck. The order presented no great intellectual difficulty, for our reduced battalion merely had to rise from its water-holes, plod through the mud of an already beaten track and crouch on the watch in other holes. Darkness clammy and complete, save for the flames of shells, masked that movement, but one stunted willow tree at which the track changed direction must haunt the memories of some of us. Trees in the battlefield are already described by Dante.
Headquarters – officers, signallers, servants, runners and specialists – arrived in the blind gloom at the trench occupied by the Hampshire headquarters, and it is sufficient to indicate the insensate condition of the relief when I say that we did not notice any unusually close arrival of shells as we drew near to the trench, but as we entered it we found that there had just been one. It had blown in some concrete shelters, and killed and wounded several of our predecessors; I was aware of mummy-like half-bodies, and struggling figures, crying and cursing. Passing along towards the officers’ dugout, we found the Hampshire colonel, sardonic and unshaken, who waited with us long hours while the relief, so simple in the mention, so perplexing in the midnight morass, was being completed. He told us that in daylight one only reached the front companies through a machine-gun barrage. He intended to have taken out with him a German soft cap, but eventually he forgot it; and perhaps I ought to be ashamed of saying that I have it to this day. It was the chief museum-piece in the dugout, except for a stack of German ration tobacco, which made a pretty comfortable seat. The smell of this little concrete hutch, like all other German dugouts, was peculiar and heavy; I do not know how they found the British lines, but probably their experience would be parallel. It is a matter which W. H. Hudson should have heard of, when he was writing A Hind in Richmond Park.
The night spent itself somehow. Already it seemed ages since I had last seen poor Tice, and looked at this very patch of ground with him (‘To give five ducats, five, I would not farm it’), but the gulf between this and three days before was indeed a black and lethal abyss, which had swallowed up the hopes of the Allies for this summer. I do not remember what was said. Day brought a little promise of better weather, and the guns were for a time quiet enough; I explored here and there, and my signallers got their wires to ‘all stations’ into working order. A tank officer looked in, asking help to salve some equipment from his wrecked machine, lying just behind our pill-box. Presently the drizzle was thronging down mistily again, and shelling grew more regular and searching. There were a number of concrete shelters along the trench, and it was not hard to see that their dispossessed makers were determined to do them in. Our doctor, an Irishman named Gatchell, who seemed utterly to scorn such annoyances of Krupp, went out to find a much discussed bottle of whisky which he had left in his medical post. He returned, the bottle in his hand; ‘Now, you toping rascals’ – a thump like a thunderbolt stopped him. He fell mute, white, face down, the bottle still in his hand; ‘Ginger’ Lewis, the unshakable Adjutant, whose face I chanced to see particularly, went as chalky-white, and collapsed; the Colonel, shaking and staring, passed me as I stopped to pull the doctor out, and tottered, not knowing where he was going, along the trench. This was not surprising. Over my seat, at the entrance the direct hit had made a gash in the concrete, and the place was full of fragments and dust. The shell struck just over my head, and I suppose it was a 5.9. But we had escaped, and outside, scared from some shattered nook a number of field mice were peeping and turning as though as puzzled as ourselves. A German listening-set with its delicate valves stood in the rain there, too, unfractured. But these details were perceived in a flash, and meanwhile shells were coming down remorselessly all along our alley. Other direct hits occurred, the Aid Post and the signallers’ dugout were shattered. Men stood in the trench under their steel hats and capes, resigned to their fate. I said to Sergeant Seall, ‘This is thick’; he tried to smile. A veterinary surgeon, Gatfield, with his droll, sleepy, profoundly kind manner, filled the doctor’s place, and attended as best he could to the doctor and the other wounded. The continuous and ponderous blasts of shells seemed to me to imply that an attack was to be made on us, and being now more or less the only headquarters officer operating, after an inconclusive conference with the Colonel, I sent the SOS to the artillery; the telephone wire went almost immediately afterwards. Our wonderful artillery answered, and at length the pulverization of our place slackened, to the relief of the starting nerves; whereon, Sergeant Ashford came to tell me that our linesmen had put us in touch with the 13th Royal Sussex on our right, and that the Adjutant of that battalion wanted me at the ’phone. Bartlett, a genial and gallant man, bright-haired Bartlett called me by name – I hear his self-control still in those telephoned words – and told me what made our own ‘direct hit’ not worth mentioning. His headquarters had been pierced by a great shell, and over thirty killed or wounded. ‘A gunpit – Van Heule Farm’; I knew it by the map. What could we do to help? It was little enough; we called the RAMC to send rescuers to that gunpit, and I heard later that a driver actually succeeded in getting an ambulance to it, up the gouged and eruptioned St Julien Road.
The tragedy of the 13th came home to me more than all the rest, and from the moment of that telephone call my power of endurance lay gasping. Two chaplains visited us, to their glory and our pleasure, but not to our final comfort, for they brought no guess nor hint of our relief. One’s range of effect, and of conception, seemed to close in, and the hole overhead in the resumed ill-smelling pillbox was ever catching the eye. I managed to fill in my diary for the day, and could not keep out some thoughts of better days. That night about twelve o’clock we were relieved (‘all in billets by 3.30 a.m.’), and even those who like myself had been for the last twenty-four hours in a gully or pit were scarcely able to credit it. Hobbling down the muddy mule-track, one found that the soles of one’s feet had become corrugated, and the journey was desperately slow. No ordinary burst of shells could make us hurry now, but as we approached the dark earth wall of the Yser Canal, the notion of having a chance of escape quickened our dragging steps; and my own little group, passing a familiar spot called Irish Farm, went still quicker because of the most appalling missile we had ever heard. It was a high-velocity shell, and a big one; it came suddenly with a shriek beyond expression, entered the mud a few yards away, and rocked the earth and air. Perhaps the gunners were accustomed to this sort of nightmare, which in its solitary horror impressed me more even than the rolling storms of shell of the last few days.
The second-in-command, Frank Cassells, met us on the canal bank, and by his excellent household arrangements we got under cover there, and warmed ourselves with unforgettable, though very simple stew. Officers were herded together in a grimy dugout, with bunk beds; the men were in the long tunnels; and after a few hours of impervious sleep all woke to a sense of renewed misery. For one thing, we were expecting to be sent up again almost at once (the following night) into the battle. For another, a heavy battery in the field behind, next my old Red Hart Estaminet, was firing straight over our quarters, and at every discharge the roof of the dugout and our scalps seemed to be lifted and jarred with acute pain. Then, the desolate sky was still dropping rain, and the stricken landscape offered no relief. It would have been a poor day even by the Arun. Two dumps of timber and ammunition flared and snapped along the transport track. In the tunnels the men were humbly dozing or cleaning up, one degree farther from the pale happiness of knowing ‘what it was all about’ than we were. But that evening the Brigade-Major, Clark, who saw me going by his temporary ‘office,’ called me in for a word or two, in his usual tranquil tones disclosed some of the mistakes of the attack (our 15-inch artillery had fired for two hours on one of the positions already overrun by us, for example!) and told me the strange news that we were going out, the whole Division. I was sent ahead to seize enough tents for the battalion’s accommodation.
Poperinghe again! even more divisional emblems, more badges and uniforms; more mud on the white house-fronts, more shutters up, fewer tiles on the roofs; the smell of petrol, veritably as sweet as life – we ask no violets yet. Through Poperinghe, among the wooden shops and taverns, to St Jans ter Biezen; a hop-garden or two, a shrine or two, peasants, dog-carts, poplars waving in the watery breeze. It is a real relief, but the battle has already become a vile and inglorious waste of our spirit; indeed to most of us it had from the first appeared a deal too ambitious, to vaunt it at Ypres. And even our pastoral retreat is now being visited at night by aircraft well accustomed to the art of murdering sleep if not life. Out of the line was out of the line in 1916, but we are older now.