The Cataract
The companionship of Maycock was so happy, and our odd jobs on horseback or by foot so pleasantly scattered about the countryside, now among the ruins, now among the farms and villages, by windmill and by busy railhead, by hop-garden and by white house, that I soon accepted the situation and wished for no other. Eight or ten days after my first arrival in the camp, suddenly a call came from the battalion, and we rode up in haste to find them once more about to move from a halting-place in a field into a new attack. This time I was wanted; my horse was sent back, and the adjutant, Lewis, told me to go up immediately to the new front with him. No one knew, except in the vaguest form, what the situation was, or where it was.
Suddenly, therefore, I was plucked forth from my comparative satisfaction into a wild adventure. Lewis, a reticent man, hurried along, for the afternoon sun already gave warning, and to attempt to find our position after nightfall would have been madness. First of all he led his little party to our old familiar place, Observatory Ridge, and Sanctuary Wood, across which we looked for those once solid trenches, Hedge Street and Canada Street; but never was a transformation more surprising. The shapeless Ridge had lost every tree; the brown hummock, flayed and clawed up, was traversed by no likeness of trenches. Only a short length of shallow half-choked ditch stood for Hedge Street or Canada Street, with the entrance to the dugouts there in danger of being buried altogether. I asked a bystander where we were, and gasped at his answer. Waiting there in the gashed hillside for Lewis, who had gone below for instructions, we looked over the befouled fragments of Ypres, the solitary sheet of water, Zillebeke Lake, the completed hopelessness. The denuded scene had acquired a strange abruptness of outline; the lake and the ashy city lay unprotected, isolated, dominated finally. But farther off against the sunset one saw the hills beyond Mount Kemmel, and the simple message of nature’s health and human worthiness again beckoned in the windmills resting there. There – and here!
‘God knows!’ was all the answer our adjutant gave us as he emerged into the air again, fixing the strap of his shrapnel helmet, and clambering out of the holes. He went ahead, and before the glow of the splendid evening had paled he had cleverly led us to the new headquarters, a set of huge square pillboxes (forts, in fact) on a bluff, which the low-shot light caused to appear steep and big. Here he again entered for a conference, and his party had time and inclination to linger behind one of the pillboxes, and to observe that the next one had been uprooted and smashed into massy boulders. We did not misinterpret that; but, as luck would have it, there was no bombardment proceeding just then. At length our battalion was guided through the starlight into the sector, its business being to attack some buildings on the road to Gheluvelt, in conjunction with an attack on a wider front; but the orders were never clear and during the next three days confusion reached its maximum. The companies held a site called Tower Hamlets, known to me in the early spring through a telescope as a pretty little nook among hazy trees, with the best part of a mill and a serviceable barn still standing.
What the companies in the forward craters experienced now I never heard in detail. Their narrative would make mine seem petty and ridiculous. The hero was Lindsey Clarke, already mentioned; nowadays known for his imaginative sculptures, then for his hoarse voice, modesty and inexhaustible courage. He took charge of all fighting, apparently, and despite being blown off his feet by shells, and struck about the helmet with shrapnel, and otherwise physically harassed, he was ubiquitous and invincible. While Clarke was stalking round the line like a local Cromwell in his great boots, poor Burgess in a pillbox just behind was wringing his hands in excess of pity, and his headquarters was full of wounded men. With him sat one Andrews, a brilliant young officer, not of our battalion, on some duty of liaison with Brigade headquarters. But as even we hardly ever had certain contact with him, his lot was not a happy one.
At our headquarters, two pillboxes were used, one by the adjutant and his clerks and messengers, with the doctor (Gatchell, already named); one by my signallers, men of all work, and myself. The entrances of these places, of course, faced the German guns, but my doorway was shielded by a concrete portico. About forty men of various vocations used the place, and I sat in a corner near the door, directing the work of the signallers, and waiting for orders. By night it was cold, by day roasting hot. Water was desperately scarce here and everywhere. There was little to do but to see that all means of communication were open and ready. The carrier pigeons which we had brought up suffered from the bad air of the place. The men drowsed and yawned. Time went by, but no one felt the passage of it, for the shadow of death lay over the dial.
Never (to our judgment) had such shelling fallen upon us. For what reason? The Germans had clearly no idea of letting the British advance any further along the Menin Road. Their guns of all calibres poured their fury into our small area. It was one continuous din and impact. Reports of casualties were the principal messages from the front line, and we had no reason to think them exaggerated, with such a perpetual rain of shells. The trenches immediately about our pillboxes were already full of bodies. One man in my headquarters died of shock from a heavy shell striking just outside. We endeavoured to send off a pigeon, but the pigeon, scared by the gunfire, found his way into the dugout again, and presently a fluttering sound under the floorboards led to his discovery. The men thought that many shells struck the pillbox. The only question seemed to be when one would pierce it, and make an end.
Next door, so to speak, the adjutant, doctor and their helpers had a slightly worse position, more exposed to enemy observation. The Aid-Post was hit, and the doctor continued to dress the wounded at incredible speed, though with only an appearance of protection overhead; the wounded came in great number. I went over to ask for orders and information; Lewis, as though defying this extreme fury of warfare, was in an almost smiling mood, and quizzed me about ‘coming to dinner.’ Old Auger, the mess corporal, winked at me over the adjutant’s shoulder, and raised a tempting bottle from his stores. Even here he had managed to bring a full box of supplies. I returned, and presently the firing decreased. Lewis called on us to see how we were, and told me that he really meant some sort of dinner would be going soon, and I was to be there. Colonel Millward had just rejoined, from leave, and I had seen him in the headquarters just now; surely, I thought, the news he brings is promising. A runner visited me, and went back over the thirty yards to the other pillbox – his last journey. He had arrived in the doorway there, and joined the five or six men sheltering there, including the doctor consulting about something, when the lull in the shelling was interrupted. I was called upon the telephone (we had some inexhaustible linesmen out in the open incessantly repairing the wire) by Andrews at the forward station. ‘I say, hasn’t something happened at your headquarters?’ ‘Not that I know of – all right, I believe.’ (The sound of shelling had long ceased to impinge.) ‘Yes, I’m afraid something’s wrong; will you find out?’ My servant, Shearing, hurried across, and hurried back, wild-eyed, straining: ‘Don’t go over, sir; it’s awful. A shell came into the door.’ He added more details after a moment or two. The doctor and those with him had been killed.
The rate of shelling even seemed to increase after this, and yet outside the late September sun shone ‘as on a bridal.’ That ‘serene, exasperating sunlight!’ But already the thought was in our minds: What will happen to this front when it rains? Behind our pillboxes the low ground had formerly been ornamental lakes in château grounds. Besides, there would assuredly be no pillboxes in a couple of days. Meanwhile bullets began to strike round the entrance of my pillbox, as if the Germans had advanced their machine-guns. We were supposed to have been making advances on this front, too.
During this period my indebtedness to an eighteenth-century poet became enormous. At every spare moment I read in Young’s Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality, and I felt the benefit of this grave and intellectual voice, speaking out of a profound eighteenth-century calm, often in metaphor which came home to one even in a pillbox. The mere amusement of discovering lines applicable to our crisis kept me from despair.
We were relieved in broad daylight, under every sort of observation, but nobody refused to move. The estimate of our casualties was 400, and although the real number was 280 or so, the battalion had had enough. When all my men had gone, including Sergeant Worley, who had been my fearless, tireless ‘second’ all the time, I found Sergeant Craddock, of the Orderly Room, also ready to depart. We stared over the ‘ornamental lakes,’ now a swamp with a dry crust of a surface, and tree-stubs here and there offering substantial foothold. Already there was a marked track across, and shells were thundering and smoking along it. Craddock seized his portfolios (the paper war always accompanied its rival) and I my belongings; we looked silently at one another, and went. We immediately passed the bodies of two men just killed, the sweat on their faces, and with shouts of uncontrol we ran for life through the shelling and the swamps. These were called Dombarton Lakes. The screech and smashing filled a square of the old pleasure-garden; you could almost feel the German gunners loading for you; we emerged short of breath. Beyond, one of my signallers whom I had not seen lately approached us, and showed the inimitable superiority of man to fate by speaking, even then and there, in appreciation of the German artillery’s brilliance. ‘Never did see such shelling,’ he said. It was exactly as if he had been talking of a break by Willie Smith, or art for art’s sake. A machine-gun at long range interrupted this moment of conversation, and moved us on.
Then I met Sergeant Worley again, just as the shelling was waking up afresh. He caught my arm, and pointed out a spire far off, but glittering clearly in the westering light, beyond the battle line. ‘It’s that bloody old church spire,’ he said, ‘that’s the cause of all this big stuff: enfilades the lot: why don’t the ’eavies get on to it?’ That spire, so cool, so calm, so bright, looked as though it deserved to escape, but it would hardly do so: even as we gazed, volumes of smoke began to burst out in the air around it.
The battalion united in the neighbourhood of a small and wiry wood called Bodmin Copse, with tumult and bullets and sometimes shells in the air around; then D Company, led by Burgess, had the bad luck to be ordered back into support positions. I see the handsome cynicism of Ellis, their second officer, as he waved his walking-stick to us on the way back. The other companies and headquarters took shelter in a sandy trench, and we waited. The enemy wondered what we were waiting for. A steady bombardment with big shells began, and luckily most of them fell a few yards short, but the mental torture, especially when, after one had been carefully listened to in flight and explosion, another and another instantly followed as though from nowhere, was severe. The trench around me was slowly choked and caved in by hits just outside. Our regimental sergeant-major, who used to swing his arm up and down at emotional moments like a flail, lifted it with such judgment that he was wounded in the hand. We were not too much destroyed to enjoy this jest of chance. Maycock came up in the early dusk with a train of mules carrying Royal Engineers’ material and tins of water to a point near Bodmin Copse, a star turn for which he earned the General’s stern reproof on account of his not obtaining a receipt for the deliveries. He had his revenge. He went back, obtained a receipt, insisted on having the General roused, and with deliberate silence, delivered the paper.
The eastern sky that evening was all too brilliant with British rockets, appealing for artillery assistance. Westward, over blue hills, the sunset was all seraphim and cherubim.