Coming of Age
A day or so later (my company being handed over to its ordinary commander), the battalion marched back several miles to another camp. The route lay through Kemmel, where we made a halt, wondering to see the comparatively sound state of the houses and particularly the château’s ridiculous mediæval turrets in red brick. Its noble trees were a romance and poetry understood by all. The day was gloomy, but to be ‘stepping westward’ among common things of life made it light enough. Gently the chestnut and aspen leaves were drifting down with the weight of the day’s dampness. We passed over hills still green, and by mossy cottages, with onions drying under the eaves. It was as though war forgot some corners of Flanders. (Next year, war remembered that corner with a vengeance.) Our camp by Westoutre at length appeared, through a drifting rain, in the bottom of a valley, undisguised slabby clay; the houses hereabouts were mean, and no entertainment for the troops could be anticipated, except a hot bath in an enormous brewery. Indeed, the merest physical needs were unanswered by the tattered canvas of this wretched open field, formerly horse-lines. Protests were ‘forwarded,’ and we were moved to a hutment camp in a wood, called Chippewa, as fine as the other was miserable. Here ‘training’ was immediately threatened, but a large allowance of leave began.
From this refuge I was soon called away to the line, in order to make preparations for a piece of trench digging to be done by the battalion. Worley went with me – it would have taken considerable force to keep him away. Lately he had begun to – I would say ‘amuse’ himself by drawing pictures, but the word does not comprehend his intense patience and effort. In his Army notebook with its squared leaves his slow pencil (trained chiefly in a butcher’s round) worked out the reminiscence of places at which the old battalion had been, and he was evidently determined that no single brick, no wheelbarrow, no sandbag should be omitted. He showed these drawings to very few persons, to me most, for he believed I knew about such matters. I loved him for this new expression of a simple but profound trust. The bond between us had been swiftly struck at Cambrin a year and a half before. It holds, it holds to-day; though at the moment of writing I have no news of Worley, and once I heard a rumour that he was lost to the world. I thought his sudden series of drawings showed a queerness. But I wander from the track, which is taking us up to Larch Wood near Hill 60, through a sunny, but cold-fingered autumn day. The arrival is a little untimely, for we must pass vile Verbrandenmolen, a prominence crossed by wooden roads and littered with slimed breakages; and just now the Germans are annoyed with two heavy guns of ours, tilted under their paltry camouflage on this knoll. An engineer was walking just ahead of me. He had scarcely lifted his feet from a duckboard between us when a great shell plunged through the board – and did not burst. I found myself staring at the hole and the torn-up woodwork in dull astonishment. Then explosions and whizzings all round urged me to be going, with ‘stopped ears.’
Larch Wood Tunnels were a magnificent work. The passages excelled in height and width and air supply. At this time they were principally in use as a medical headquarters, and once inside them it certainly seemed that safety and calm were assured. But outside, people were being killed from time to time. A strange scene was to be viewed from the southward outlets of this tunnel – the deep old railway cutting, passing Hill 60. It was a dark canal now, the banks of which were shattered and the timbers tossed aside by cataclysm. Hill 60 was not noticeable, having been transformed into a mine-crater, but a bridge beside it still spanned the railway cutting with a rough red-patched arch. Water dripped and slipped down the chaotic banks into the greasy flood beneath. The market train from Comines looked like being delayed for all eternity. Philip de Comines would not have known the place.
An engineer officer pointed out to us the position of the proposed trench; we walked up to it, through trees like black tusks, and brown clods of hillocks, blue shadows, weak sunlight, a naked poverty. John Nash has drawn this bad dream with exactitude. Just behind the tape already laid for the trench, a British aeroplane had fallen, its nose downward in the mud. We were about to examine it more closely, but the gunners opposite, who all this while had us under observation, resented this, and sent over some shrapnel and high explosive. This high explosive was fitted with the instantaneous fuse, and the speed and range of its jabbing fragments were formidable. Having outlived this little disturbance, we surveyed our business, and decided how best to bring up and distribute the battalion, when darkness fell. As we walked back to Larch Wood, a fragment from a shell bursting on my side happened to ricochet and freakishly wounded Worley in the leg. He regarded this as insult rather than injury, and hobbled on.
That night the battalion dug for hours and made the best part of a valuable trench; for once all were satisfied, and there were scarcely any casualties. Larch Wood Tunnels served as headquarters. Towards daybreak the companies left the line, and passing Zillebeke found the lorries awaiting them (like angels of mercy) near Shrapnel Corner. Our new doctor, Crassweller of Detroit, was on his way down with me, and we had at one time lost direction, when an intense though local shelling broke upon us. It was a mixture of gas and high explosive, and we thought our time had come; scurrying through the tumult we saw a dugout entrance, rushed for it, slithered into it, just as a couple of gas-shells burst in the opening. Below, miners were at work, and in spite of words about gas they would not put on their masks. Before we went, two or three of these obstinate men were gassed, and fell exhausted. I suddenly remembered, here, that midnight had passed, and this was my twenty-first birthday. At last the noise on top ceased, and with clipped noses we hurried through the vaporous darkness, down by Manor Farm’s meaningless location, on to Shrapnel Corner and seats in a lorry, a vehicle than which at the right hour and in the right road the chariots of Israel are not more glorious.
As we went the misty daylight came, the wayside trunks of trees and rags of roofs glimmered, the old threadbare, galvanized-iron and tin-can area of batteries and battalions in support exposed itself like the ashes of a tramp’s fire to the tired eye. I may have remarked as we passed on the dragging length of war, for Crassweller in the kindness of his heart told me that he thought I was going to be free of it for several weeks. A signalling course. I hoped that this might be wrong, but he was strong on it, and sure enough that day at Chippewa Camp, while I was hurrying round with pencil and book enlisting performers for a concert in the large hut there, orders came for my departure. It was wonderful to be promised an exeat from war for weeks, but I saw once again the distasteful process of separation from the battalion, and felt as usual the injustice of my own temporary escape while others who had seen and suffered more went on in the mud and muck.