Backwaters
In a day or two I was sent on leave. After an unpleasant delay at Poperinghe station, about which now hung an atmosphere of anticipated terror thick as mist, the train went its way through Hazebrouck and St Omer, formerly a secure region; but now an enemy aeroplane flew part of the way with us, and bomb after bomb burst flaming in the fields alongside, until ‘wished morn’ whitely appeared. During my leave, I remember principally observing the large decay of lively bright love of country, the crystallization of dull civilian hatred on the basis of ‘the last drop of blood’; the fact that the German air raids had almost persuaded my London friends that London was the sole battle front; the illusion that the British Army beyond Ypres was going from success to success; the ration system. Perhaps the ration system weighed most upon us. This was not the ancient reward of the warrior! He had never had a sugar-card in Marlborough’s wars, or even 1916. Meanwhile Hampton Court, and even the Palladium, seemed to be standing where they did.
The return from leave was none the better because I heard that the battalion had made a big move, but after all they had not gone far. I got off the train at Bailleul, which recalled Béthune to my mind, and, although it stood as near the line as Poperinghe, had as yet escaped the look of raggedness and weariness and punishment. The shops were coloured, artistic, and many amusing trade placards and concert announcements seemed to show prosperity and vivacity. The battalion was not in this graceful old town, but in the outskirts of Meteren, a village on the highroad westward, whose church tower serenely faced, along the straight stone road, the beautiful Moorish turrets of Bailleul church. In this village I found some of the officers (Amon, of course, among them) hobnobbing with a French gentleman whose pretty house was a cabinet of water-colours chiefly of racehorses. I fear those cannot have survived the subsequent surge of war over Meteren. Here I would have gladly stayed, but I had hardly found the farm at the end of a sandy lane, in which our billets were taken, when I was ordered to be ready for attending a Signalling School in the real ‘back area.’ This development, promising in itself a period of rest and safety, was bad news; for experience proved that to be with one’s battalion, or part of it, alone nourished the infantryman’s spirit. Now amid a thousand tables I should pine and want food.
Next morning, therefore, while the young sunlight freshened the darkened greenery of the year, I was sitting among a load of equipment, officers, NCO’s and men in a lorry, hurtling along the causeway towards Cassel, through villages where one imagined one would like to come from a normal trench tour, past cottages at whose doors women sat on chairs to pick the hopbines heaped about them. A lorry is not the vehicle for enjoying the Barbizon aspect; the travellers grew comatose long before the end of the journey, which was at a dull little village called Zuytpeene. The Signalling School was a series of huts in a long meadow, with an ugly house posing as a ‘château’ at the far end. Here days went by without incident; above, the sky was usually clear and calm; around, the spirit of apathy and unconcern with the war was languidly puffing at its cigarette or warbling revue melody. Yet only a few miles off was that commanding hill Cassel, whence radiated constantly the challenge and dynasty of battle at Ypres. The road thither was secluded, and hardly anyone noticed the fantastic fruitage of blackberries in the low hedges; one climbed until presently at a bold curve the track joined the stone road, with its rattling railway. At the top, the cool streets of Cassel led between ancient shop-fronts and courtyards, maintaining in their dignity that war was nothing to do with Cassel. There was one memorable inn in whose shadowy dining-room officers from highest to lowest congregated. Far below its balcony the plain stretched in all the semblance of untroubled harvest, golden, tranquil and lucent as ever painter’s eye rested upon. Some confused noise of guns contested one’s happy acquiescence. But what one saw and what one felt at Cassel’s watchtower that September is taken from time by the poet-historian, C. E. Montague.
As I dreamed over this landscape of richness and repose I was tapped on the shoulder. It was our old fellow-sufferer Kapp, who recognized the battalion colours on my shoulders; he was still wearing his on his back, having heard nothing of our modifications. He had been away from us, with the Press Bureau, since June 1916, and he could not withhold his questions about the battalion. But they were few; he had now become a temporary proprietor of motor-cars and châteaux, and our news sounded very silly and coarse as I tried to give it. He, however, was not listening much; he asked after names and passed quickly to others. It was too late! the war had changed as well as the battalion. Why change your profession in middle age? Kapp’s momentary flicker of romance soon died down, and he went out, promising to call on me in his car one day soon.
The course of signalling imposed no burden, beyond that of estrangement from one’s battalion, upon the officers attending. Many of them, to my joy, were Australians, at whose resourceful wit and confidence one refreshed the parched mind. I hear still the gay and easy Captain Bath, reciting the ‘Nancy Brig,’ or offering sermons on the Uncertainty of Life. I see his towzled hair, bright eyes, and vinous flush such as jolly Bacchus must have had. I hear also his laments for Adelaide, while we were wandering through benighted farm buildings in performance of ‘a scheme.’ His companions were worthy of him, and they revealed every day that it is possible for an army to be highly efficient without a sign of pedantry.
This period ended, I returned to the battalion, not without difficulty, for they had been on the move. The first news I had of them, on arriving at a field where they had been, towards the south of the Ypres Salient, was from a transport driver, who said they ‘were going over the top in the morning.’ The suggestion was unpleasing, for my servant and myself had already been carrying our burdens for miles, and it was still many kilometres to the battlefield. At the end of another dusty trudge we met the transport officer, Maycock, friendliest and most impulsive of our officers, who told me I should ride up to the battalion with him, and we set off at once. The battalion was drawn up in a field by the scanty ruins of Vierstraat, nearly ready to move; the sun shone with autumn light on the kind round faces, and dun uniforms, and sack-clothed helmets, and broken trees with yellowing leaves, and trodden strings of grass under foot. Dixies of tea were passing round among the companies. To my surprise Colonel Millward, though hailing me affectionately, did not want me for the coming tour in the line, and I found myself riding away with Maycock, while the battalion marched into the ruins of Hollebeke and Battle Wood. It was that evening that a shell fell among the headquarters staff on the way up, and killed Naylor, the philosophic and artistic lieutenant who had served in the battalion almost all my time, whose quiet presence was a safeguard against the insolence of fortune. I do not see many allusions to him in these memoirs, but he was one of those silent, modest, and ubiquitous men whose quality is consistent and therefore taken for granted. Another shell, bursting on a small party of non-commissioned officers as they were about to leave the trenches after relief, robbed us instantly of Sergeant Clifford, a man of similar sweetness of character and for months past invaluable in all necessities. These losses I felt, but with a sensibility blurred by the general grossness of the war. The uselessness of the offensive, the contrast in the quality of ourselves with the quality of the year before, the conviction that the civilian population realized nothing of our state, the rarity of thought, the growing intensity and sweep of destructive forces – these views brought on a mood of selfishness. We should all die, presumably, round Ypres.
The transport camp was at Rozenhil, near Reninghelst, a small hill among small farms, now five or six miles from the battlefield; and here I acted as assistant to Maycock, though I hardly knew a horse from a dromedary, and as Anglican opponent at table to two Roman Catholic chaplains who lived in the camp. Their rest, like ours, was broken by bombing raids, which night and day came near enough. It was a bad season for mules and horses, which, as they stood in regular lines, could not be protected, and made a simple target. The camps of the men were only tents and shanties, round which low walls of earth were cast up to catch flying splinters from the explosions near by. If the bomb fell on top, clearly there was no more to be said about it. Night was streaked and dissected with searchlight beams, but the raiding went on thoroughly, turning the area in which troops rest into a floor of Hades. As for the forward area, from the glimpses which I had of it, no unstable invention of dreams could be more dizzily dreadful. Taking up the rations used to be almost a laughing matter – not so now. Merely to find the way through the multiplying tracks and desperate obliteration of local identity would have been a problem; to get horses and vehicles through, in the foundering night of dazzling wildfire and sweltering darkness, with shells coming and going in enormous shocks and gnashing ferocity, to the ration or working party crouching by some old shelters, was the problem. Maycock could do it. While I was admiring him, I found my horse suddenly going his own wild way because an anti-aircraft battery opened up furiously beside our heads, or because he smelt danger. A view of the then notorious Spoil Bank under these conditions is in my mind’s eye – a hump of slimy soil, with low lurching frames of dugout entrances seen in some too gaudy glare; a swilling pool of dirty water beside it, among many pools not so big (the record shell-hole?); tree-spikes, shells of waggons, bony spokes forking upwards; lightnings east and west of it, dingy splashes of searchlights in the clouds above; drivers on their seats, looking straight onwards; gunners with electric torches finding their way; infantry silhouettes and shadows bowed and laden, and the plank road, tilted, breached, blocked, upheaved, still stretching ahead. The plank road was at once the salvation and the slaughter-house of the forward area in this battle. To leave it was to plunge into a swamp, to remain on it was to pass through accurate and ruthless shell-fire.
These wooden roads began at some distance from the line, for now all this countryside was more than defaced, and drainage was unthinkable. As I entered the destroyed plain and passed along the loathed planks, one day, I saw a little knot of Chinese labourers, carrying shells from a lorry to a dump, hopping, grinning, singing. It was near Voormezeele, where the wreckage of a convent could be seen in a thinned grove of trees. Looking through a bookseller’s list lately, I found a devotional book there entered with the place of publication ‘Voormezeele.’ The printing office was not open when the Chinese and I were there, and the convent bell was mute. Still, there were spots of greenery in the dried moats and the gardens, and the general desolation with which they must be compared was worse. The battalion, having undergone its torture at Hollebeke, was withdrawn into dreary, flimsy dugouts, an old British support position, beneath the Wytschate Ridge; no relief for the mind other than physical rest could be found there, and rain set in cold and dark to depress them, when I made my way to them. Behind, along the road to Kemmel, still stood the column of tree-stumps among which our sniping authorities had formerly smuggled in one or two steel trees, now lagging superfluous on the stage, their green paint and tubular trunks being out of season.