Passchendale
We went to the trenches in front of Mericourt and there “A” Company captured two German patrols in a few hours. The battalion put out a party in front to cover the relief of posts. It was in charge of Izzy, and his Lewis gunner was one of our old draft, Leslie, a big six-footer, whose helper was Jackson, another of our men and just as big. They saw the Germans coming toward them, a small patrol, and lay low until they were close, when Leslie rose with his gun ready. There was no fighting, the Huns surrendered. When they got the prisoners to the trench they questioned them and found that a second patrol was expected. Izzy took his men out again and bagged the second lot, led by a lance-corporal. For such good work Izzy received the Military Cross and Leslie and Jackson got the Military Medal.
Mcintyre told me that I was to go with him on a patrol and we went far over toward the German lines, remaining out three hours. I think he wanted to get a little glory for himself, and we certainly tried to find a few goose-steppers. Melville was always with me. He was a splendid scout, cool as ice, ready for anything, and could move like a great cat. War was a game wherein those trained were often the most like novices. We had a newcomer who had specialized on scouting and could read a compass like a sailor, yet he was useless, bewildered in no man’s land, while Melville could go anywhere with an uncanny sense of direction.
We went out a second night and I got acquainted with “the Professor.” He was a quiet-voiced man, sandy-haired, unnoticed in the platoon, but had held an important position in a college. We crawled out slowly, then separated in three parties of four each. There had been a magnificent sunset, a flood of exquisite colouring, opals, pinks and crimsons, and I had remarked about it in the Professor’s hearing. He crawled beside me as we took up a position where we were to remain for an hour, hoping to trap a patrol, and shivered each time the flares went up. The Hun was having a little fun all by himself, sending up red and green lights as a change from the regular white ones. The red glows made some small pools of water look like big blots of blood, and the green lights gave everything a ghastly, corpse-like sheen. At one spot we disturbed a bunch of rats, and they rustled through the grass and over old rubbish, their snaky tails dragging after them. Their little eyes were malevolent as they watched us and one shuddered when he remembered what they were seeking.
“Are you nervous?” I whispered to the Professor, and as we lay in our position he seemed glad to talk.
“I’m really so frightened that I could jump up and bolt like a wild thing,” he said. “How on earth do you chaps stand it?” Melville and Tommy were on the other side of him.
I tried to convince him that it was only the nervousness of the first night that gripped him, but he argued against me, and, to my surprise, Tommy agreed with him. For the first time I heard my closest friend admit that his heart was in his mouth as he crawled into the region between the wires. “Bird’s like a bloody machine,” he said. “I’ve been beside him for ten months out here and when there’s been chaps killed near him, and I’ve never seen him act shaky. He hasn’t got nerves like the rest of us.”
I changed the subject then and talked of other things in order to soothe the new man, and was surprised to find him so well-educated; he should never have been a private in the ranks. He, in turn, told me that he had been surprised. He had been in a rather rough Ontario battalion, and its members had made a specialty of carousals while they were in England, the canteens being their main entertainment. He had expected things as bad or worse in France, and had found our company as fine a group of men as he had ever met. During all that summer I had not seen a dozen drunks in our billets, but the fact had not impressed me before. The Professor then talked about the sunset and asked, rather curiously, how I could be interested in such things, and at the same time intent on killing my fellow men. He spoke of the beauty that belongs to sunsets and dawns and high mountains and still waters and moonlight, and pointed out the incongruity of a star gleam in a stagnant pool beside us. Everything about us, he said, should be horrible distorted repulsive.
No Germans were abroad in our territory and after a long time Melville and I wormed ahead through the grass, on and on, until we were so close to the enemy trench that we could see its wire barriers and the cruel length of the barbs. Then we went back, and long after I was in my bivvy listening to the heavy hammer strokes of a battery back of Canada Trench, I thought of the Professor’s words. It was easy to misjudge character. Men whom no one credited with heroic qualities, revealed them. Others failed pitiably to live up to expectations. There was, I was sure, a strength or weakness in men apart from their real selves, for which they were in no way responsible. And who could know the Professor’s calibre? Snobbishness died miserably in the trenches. No artificial imposition could survive in the ranks where inherent value automatically found its level; all shams of superiority fled before such an existence of essentials; but a man’s endurance under that which he most dreads was something we could not gauge.
The Professor was a dreamer, which made it harder for him. His imagination led him twice through every danger, tried him cruelly. For every medal earned by the martinet type of soldier, a dozen were deserved by the dreamers. But when I tried to measure myself I failed. It was not physical courage that carried me, far from it, but a state of mind that words will never describe. Each night when I slept I dreamt of Steve, saw him clearly, and when awake, in the trenches at night, out on listening posts, FELT him near. In some indefinable way I depended on him. Ever since he had guided me in from that foggy unknown stretch at the back of Vimy I would go anywhere in no man’s land. I knew, with a – fanatical, if you like – faith, that a similar touch would lead me straight where I should go. In the trenches, on posts, in any place, I was always watching for him, waiting for him, trying to sense him near me, and in the doing I missed the tensity of dragging hours, and easy fears that seized the unoccupied mind.
I liked the keen damp air of the mornings of September. At stand-to each man would have a glowing cigarette, each have his collar turned to his chin, his shoulders hunched, and would be pacing the hard-packed trench floor. When he stopped and gazed over the bags he would doze a second – start guiltily, and doze again. The east would shoot with crimson. Birds would twitter. Then like magic the sun would glitter on the dew-covered weeds and wet wire. There would be mists in the hollows, often extensive, so that the distant slag heaps would appear dark islands in a woolly sea. Gradually the sun would gain strength, and the vapors would dissolve. Then we went back to our shelters and odours of tea and bacon made each man happy.
On the third night our patrol was divided into two parties. Mcintyre was not with us, and the officer we had was “windy.” We did not go out nearly as far as usual, and when I took him to a spot near three trees where there was a short sap with German greatcoat in it, he was alarmed. He led us over to the right and left Melville and I to “guard” his flank. There was a length of low ground, almost ravine-like, through which an enemy patrol might pass and he told us to stay on its banks. We lay there in the grass. It was quiet and we were tired. It was our third successive night of crawling, and so Melville took a length of fine wire he always carried and made a neat trip string at the head of the long pocket. Then we relaxed, relaxed thoroughly and slept.
Fortunately I woke just before the officer and his men reached us. They were hurrying and the lieutenant was panting with excitement. “Where was the German patrol?” We sat up and grinned at them. There had been no patrol. “Yes, there was,” hissed the officer, “and it came right into this hollow. Where is it?” We argued earnestly then and had a difficult time. They assured us that six Germans had filed by them and that only a lucky move had kept them hidden. At last the controversy ceased, with honours even, and we went in, but not before Melville slyly inspected his trip-wire – and found it broken. We talked afterward about that Heinie patrol. How could they pass us without seeing us?
We made a second trip into the same front and I got to know no man’s land like a back yard. Mcintyre was more nervous as the lines were much closer than where we had held before. He had several listening posts out and constant patrols. The only change in work I had was a covering party to protect engineers who examined a road that crossed our trenches. Word came that we were to be relieved by the 22nd Battalion and I was sent out as guide. With me were Hickey and Egglestone, two men of the 73rd, both good soldiers. They were to take in the other platoons. We had a long wait for the “Van Doos” and there at the top of the Ridge talked and smoked, and as we watched the ten mile arc of Very Lights glimmer and sink before us, we saw a German attack on the battalion to our left. The flashing of bursting shells along our lines was a winking chaos of crimson, and then we saw our flares looping, our S.O.S. soaring aloft. Within a minute red flashes marked the German front, a fury of explosions that lasted twenty minutes. Meanwhile the din of bursting shells and machine guns came clearly to us and we could even see the bursting of Mills bombs. At last everything regained its normal appearance, and our men arrived. The attempted German raid, we heard afterwards, did not reach our trench.
The French-Canadians would not be hurried and their officers humoured them like children. They were a great battalion, carried a fine reputation, and seemed conscious of it, which was natural. Slowly, and with long halts every half mile, we wended our way down the Ridge and out on the plain. The “Van Doos” smoked in spite of all cautions about being spotted and I was very thankful when at last we arrived at our trench. Our lads moved away with amusing alacrity – the veterans had recalled another time at the crater line – and soon the trench was handed over. No patrols covered the relief and to Mcintyre’s amazement all his listening posts were ignored. No more sentries were posted than we used in daytime, and the only remark the officer made was, “If he wants to come over – let heem come.”
It was now October and we moved away to Magnicourt. Rumours had come that we were going to the Salient, that graveyard swamp of mud and slime, to the long agony of Passchendale, and the men were restless. For the first time some of them began to look on the “vin” when it was “rouge” and one man, Giger, had to be carried to his billet. His like was not elsewhere in the Corps. His appearance was a reminder of what Mother Nature could do when she was in an angry mood; he had scarcely any forehead and could neither read nor write. He had come in a late draft and had been sick for several days, giving up everything but his oath of allegiance. We laughed to weakness the night when at a barn billet a calf got its head through an opening and licked his face. Poor Giger howled with fright.
Our billet was a coal shed. Around the wall ran a brick ledge and around the ledge ran mice and rats, three generations of them, so that we moved our quarters to the loft of a barn and slept on the straw. In the night I heard men marching and went down. Many times when out at billet I had risen quietly and slipped outside, drinking in the moist air, looking at the moon-bathed fields and hedges, picturing the same night across the water. It was dark and uncanny when I left the barn. One heard nothing but the steady tramp, tramp, tramp on the road as the shadowy files marched past in a cloud of dust like river mist, silent and half asleep. They were, like us, headed Ypres-way. Bulky ghosts loomed alongside the column, the non-coms, watching for stragglers, but there were no shouted orders. The only sounds were the thudding shuffle of feet, the dull creak of equipment, a muttered curse as someone trod on another’s heels. All at once the men halted, and slumped down on the roadside without waiting for the “fall out” order. Mostly the men sprawled, motionless, on their packs, but here and there a match flared as a cigarette was lighted and there were glimpses of tired, sharp-lined faces.
After the battalion had gone I wandered along the road. It was warm but a shower threatened. A dozing sentry of the guard leaned on his rifle. Back from him, under two big trees, several soldiers were sleeping on the ground. I walked away down the road and to my surprise met Mcintyre. He had probably been visiting officers in another battalion – there were many moving our way – and he was feeling talkative. He asked me sharply what I was doing, and then gave definite hours that I should rest. I mentioned the Salient and he swore and cursed it, and then broke forth about his gallant boys, his splendid men. He knew every man, his faults and weaknesses, and was kind to them all. At times he seemed strict, but never without reason and there that night he almost broke down as he talked about us, and I sensed that he that afternoon had had to censor the company letters, perhaps more poignantly inarticulate than usual. It began to rain as I left him and I went back in the mysterious silence, listening to the steady beating on the cobbles. The bent still figure of the sentry had not moved, but under the trees the sleepers were stirring and muttering as drops from the branches fell on their unprotected faces.
The next day we moved on and seemed to leave the main route for we stopped at a little village prettier than any I had seen. Trees shaded all the little homes and a brook flashed and gurgled its way among them, crossing under a quaint old stone bridge that must have been hundreds of years old. The company seemed changed, the men more restless. At the estaminet they found one of those crazy penny-in-the-slot pianos and there made merry, singing too boisterously for harmony. Giger got drunk again and semaphored to a mademoiselle until he became incapable of motion. I watched the men as they got their evening meal, and they were all flushed, unnatural. Even little Mickey was shrill, and I looked at the boy. He had changed, was different, and I feared for him. His nerve was leaving him. On our last trip in a whizz bang had made bloody work of two gunners and an arm had been left lying in the trench. His post was nearby and I saw him walk by the place hurriedly and then, with a sudden cry, seize the arm and hurl it over the parapet. Afterward he had given me a glance of dog-like entreaty and I had stayed and talked with him for more than an hour. He smoked continually, those army gaspers, Red Hussars and Bees-wings, and his hands were not steady.
That night was the wildest of any I had seen in billets. Half the men had had more liquor than they could carry and all were shouting ribald songs and indulging in horse play. It was all fun, and their delight seemed in making the Professor cringe. They had got to know him and it was rumoured that he was such a granny that he even considered a knowledge of French immoral. They shouted about the three kinds of “cases” there were, walking, “sandbag,” and “stretcher,” and asked each other grisly questions concerning “religion” and “next-of-kin.” There were pledges about “V.C.’s” or “wooden ones,” and more of like kind. All of it was but a reflex of their own inner thoughts.
The Professor and Tommy and I helped many of them make their beds that night, and then I went out in the village to the old bridge and sat there listening to the water. The moonlight fell flat on things and gilded them, and there was the night’s faint moist smell of trees and grass and brookside. I thought of that long ago when we had come to France, those first nights filling sandbags with Vimy slime, Freddy’s white set look, his premonitions; Arthur sitting in the mud, dazed, stricken, five minutes before the bullet was to hit him; Charley at my water-logged bivvy in Dumbell Camp, pleading for something to change his convictions; poor ape-like Slim and his pal, Joe, always together, in trench or billet, and together in death. What waited us up in the Salient?
A man came down the street, walking slowly, quietly, and sat beside me on the old stone wall. It was Stewart, the stretcher bearer, and he spoke softly as a woman as he talked about the beauty of the night. Then he rambled on, telling me of his boyhood in old Scotland, of his going to Canada, of all he had done, and intended to do, intimate things which only old friends mention. I listened sympathetically and over an hour we sat together, then he walked on up the road. I looked at my watch. It was one o’clock in the morning.
Before I could leave another came, the Professor. He had been lying down and could not sleep, and now he unloaded his mind. He thought that some one should shriek from the high places about this awful, stupendous folly in which we were engaged, that the few sane men left on earth should combine their efforts to stop the carnage. He hated war, loathed it, feared it, hated everything connected with it, even to those gaily-woven silk souvenirs and postcards that played havoc with our five-franc notes. Our existence was, he said, an ugly nightmare, and Heaven must shudder in protest. We walked back slowly, and in the garden by our billet found Mickey lying on the brook bank. One roll would have dropped him in a deep pool, and there he lay on his back in a drunken stupor. We carried him in and I could have hugged him; sharp lines were cutting into his boyish features, altering him, aging him.
We moved to Hazebrouck. Sitting in the “40 Hommes” coach I watched the boys. They were normal again, but different. They sang a long time, old songs, in harmony, and then were silent; there was none of the usual jesting. I had looked at each in turn, “Old Bill” with tissue paper on a comb, one of the orchestra; Sambro beside him talking to Barron; Big Glenn, reading a letter; Melville, Ira, Jennings, and Hughes singing lustily; Stewart, smiling at them; old Sam, as sour as usual; Hickey and Egglestone with a lance jack named Always, a nice fellow; Kennedy, Bunty, Johnson, Luggar, Dykes, Flynn, and Eddie, all singing. I sat with Mickey and Tommy by the door, and Tommy talked of the marching battalions he had glimpsed on the road. The Professor came from a corner and joined us. He was talking again about the war, calling it a ghastly paroxysm of civilization.
Mickey stared at him, wide-eyed, and I tried to ease the condemnation, pointing out that war was not new, had always been. I got out my little guide book and tried to divert Mickey’s thoughts as I read about the history of the country. Arras, Boulogne, Cambrai, Verdun, had all been towns under the reign of Julius Caesar, and a German invasion was nothing new. Attila and his heathen Huns had poured into France when it was Gaul, burning and plundering and had lost 160,000 men before they were driven away. I read about King Edward at Crecy with his expeditionary force of thirty-two thousand, facing three times his strength of the finest French chivalry. The English held strategic position on a slope, with the sun at their backs, and their bowmen shot down the mounted Frenchmen who attacked with their lances. Thirty thousand men of France fell in that battle, twelve hundred knights and eight princes, so why should we consider we were entangled in an original catastrophe.
“How many knights and princes are going to be killed up in Passchendale?” asked Tommy, cynically. Then he raved about the officers, the gilded staff in fine chateaus and billets, waited on hand and foot, living like lords, travelling in cushioned cars, stroking away – with careless pens – thousands of lives. The Professor and Mickey did not speak.
I turned the pages and read to them that when Louis XIV was waging wars, taking four fortresses on the Rhine in four days, the pomp and splendour of his equipage rivalled that of fairy princes. Every campaign ended in a sort of royal pageant. There were coaches of crystal and gold, horses draped in cloth of gold, courtiers and conquerors dazzling with diamonds, ladies in silks and plumes and laces. Old King Solomon himself was outshone. “So you see, Tommy,” I said, “there’s really nothing new. The old boys had their big parades and banquets and probably their W.A.A.C.’s to wait on them.”
“That’s all right,” said Tommy, doggedly, “them old chaps were bred for wars, it was all they knew. They didn’t think about anything else.”
The Professor had been looking at my little book and now he snatched it from me. “Listen,” he said tensely, and read, “… the code of chivalry was completed by an education that began at the early age of seven years. Boys were sent to the castle of their father’s overlord, where, in return for their breeding, they rendered domestic service, no matter how lofty their birth. At twelve they learned to ride and use arms. Then they went on adventure, on horse, carrying shield and lance for their leader. Between sixteen and twenty they were made knights and put on, for the sacred fast and vigil of arms, the white tunic, a sign of purity; the red robe, which symbolized the blood he must shed; the black jerkin, betokening death, a close companion of all knight-at-arms.” “They were soldiers,” he cried, “we’re not. They wanted war, we don’t.”
“It’s all the same through history,” I said weakly.
“There has always been war and will be. We can’t change things, we just go on.”
The Professor argued firmly that such reasoning was piffle, stank of the fatalistic. Chivalry, he said, had long been buried, purity had become a strange word.
I tried to stop him, but it was no use and Tommy took up the argument, declaring that we were really worse than they were in the Dark Ages, and that anyone who had been drilled to fight and kill from the time he was seven was different. We were simply civilians in soldier’s clothing, and war was a mess of grotesque murder. He stopped, finally, when I could give him a nod that Mickey could not see, but the lad had absorbed every word. He sat staring at us and through us, seeing things, fearful things. The Professor stilled as soon as he noticed him.
At Hazebrouck, Melville and Ira and I went to have a feed of eggs and chips, but discovered that we did not have enough money amongst us. As we looked in the windows of the shop we saw big, good-natured Gordon sitting alone at a table, and at once went in. He could not speak French and we were able to make madame understand that he would pay the bill. As we ate I talked with Ira, and found him changed. He was quiet, thoughtful, kind in manner, and never raised his voice as he calmly told me that everything was all right with him, he had got hold of himself. I dared not ask him what he meant, and he told me without asking. He was going to his death, he said, and would meet it like a soldier, and there was that in his voice that told me any argument of mine would be futile. My skin was pricked with goose flesh as he talked.
Melville heard all he said and was impressed. We all forgot about our empty pockets until Gordon had risen to go, and we were in a predicament. He looked at us, then grinned in his usual manner. “I’ll bet you guys were planning to stick me,” he said. “Just to let you have your joke, I’ll go ahead and pay.” And he did. He was a big-boned man, sometimes a little awkward in his work, but no bigger heart than his beat under khaki.
It began to rain that night and continued all the next day. We went to Ypres and waited there four hours. Tommy and I went exploring and found our way to a lane that led to an old ruin half-hidden by piled wreckage. We scrambled over debris and got into a long, shadowy passage with a film of moisture on its walls, ending at a door as cold and stiff as a thing dead and rigid. I pushed it in, wondering what we might discover, but it was only a large inner room, the windows completely blocked so that little light crept in. It was a place of dull mystery, shadows and watching darkness, and the stillness of desolation brooded over it. Tommy shivered, and so did I, and we hurried out into the drizzle and stared around.
I told him how in 1382 the Bishop of Norwich had landed at Calais with sixty thousand men and marched to take Ypres – and failed. In my little guide book I read descriptions of that part of Belgium. “White villages glistening in warm sunshine, orchards teeming with golden fruit, here and there a gleam of water. The land is highly cultivated. Waving cornfields overshadow the soil, the homes are ornamented with ivy, the honeysuckle, rose and vine peep from groves of poplar or willow; and placid waters – the slow streams and still canals, which intersect that land in all directions – sparkle and glimmer. Yet this landscape of mild earth, so lovely in an aspect of repose, has been the theatre of almost all the sanguinary wars which from time to time have desolated Europe; that luxuriated crop has been manured with the best blood of the brave, the gay, the virtuous; those sleeping groves have responded to the storm of slaughter – and may yet again.”
“Cut out that stuff.” Tommy spoke sharply and I put the book away. I could understand his irritableness; it was on all of us. The atmosphere of the Salient had gripped us. Before us, all around us, in the fan of a great wheel, it lay, Pilckem, Wieltje, Railway Wood, Hooge, Sanctuary Wood, Mont Sorrell, Hill 60, Hollebeke. Among the veterans I had visited in other battalions I had heard of numerous Farms, Lancashire, Turco, Argyle, Hussar, and Essex. And there were Cottages and the Willows, and Admiral’s Road, and Hellfire Corner, and Crab Crawl, the Spoil Bank, the Bluff, Maple Copse and Zillibeke Lake. We peered around us as we marched out into that flat world of mud and water, a desolation racked by explosions, fetid with slime of rotting things, gray and gruesome beyond description. We went to California Trench, relieving the 4th C.M.R.s, and found it a dreadful ditch with make shift shelters. The rain continued and we stood about like wooden Indians or arranged some sort of roof to shed the drizzle. There was considerable shelling from all angles and at dusk the Salient seemed a mighty ghoul, something invisible and vengeful, blood-seeking, watching. All that night we sat in such shelter as we had and were soaked by constant dripping, chilled to the bone. Dawn came slowly and with a clinging penetrating mist that made even the rifles clammy to the touch. We got out and moved off in small parties and an officer came to INSPECT that swamp hole in which we had cowered, to see if any cigarette butt or rubbish had not sunk in the mire. Wheeeee–ump! A shell, probably a stray, came with a heart-stopping suddenness and exploded in the very niche Melville and I had excavated, leaving the lieutenant a bloody pulp.
We moved to tents in St. Jean and left our equipment there. It was still raining and we were taken through the mud to battery positions. Horses and mules had drowned there as they tried to move the guns and so ropes were used, and thirty men tugged on each one. We could not pull the guns in the usual fashion as the mud gripped the wheels, so we turned them over and over until they were in new emplacements. It was tremendous labour. We wallowed often to our armpits in mud and water mixed to porridge thickness and the only thing solid underfoot was a dead man or his equipment. As we got the guns in their new places big black-winged Gothas came overhead and dropped bombs on us, or the track that was some hundred yards away. There ammunition-laden mules were packed in line and I saw direct hits made on broad rumps or on the shaky planks of the “board road.” More carcasses were piled beside the way, more legs to stiffen toward the skies, more bodies to distend and afford footholds for rats. Shambles of heads and heels and entrails were shovelled into the mire and the procession kept on. None of our airmen were in sight.
Then the Hun shelled us. The battery had not loosed a round before one gun was wrecked by a direct hit and two gunners killed. We went away, back to our tents, sodden, shaking with cold and exhaustion, and were cheered by steaming hot tea and mulligan. But we sat at night in the rain-soaked tents, huddled in sitting positions on floors that were pooled with icy water and the shelling kept on. We sat there in the dark, unmoving, without speaking, our brains numbed by the awfulness of everything, trying to reach a comatose state that answered for sleep. Again we moved on, this time to an area dotted with derelict rusting tanks, and on the way met remnants of relieved battalions, men who looked like grisly discards of the battlefield, long unburied, who had risen and were in search of graves in which to rest. A German airman came over, flying deliberately, one of those hawks of the Black Cross, swooped down and sprayed bullets at one of the sausage balloons above Ypres. There were forked flames, billowing smoke, a meteor of fiery fabric, charred fragments, and two swaying figures attached to parachutes. They dangled a moment and then sank from sight.
Some of the men slept in tanks. We went to one, Melville, Tommy and I, and could tip it with our weight. Water was underneath and as we rocked the monster, a head squeezed out in the muck, a face without eyes, the skin peeled as though from lard, a corpse long dead and frightful. We left the place and found a mound of solid earth, enough to make our bed, and there we stayed, between sandbagged walls, with a roof of salvaged corrugated iron. Not far from us was an old trench revetted with German stick work, blocked at one part with broken wire and the black dead of forgotten fights. At night we were called forth and led to a dump and there laden with sections of new-made “bath mats.” All around the giant horseshoe of the Salient there were red flashes and winking glows and the misty light of flares.
We went toward the front line, past water-logged trenches, a nightmare of scummy holes, an indescribable desolation, on and on. The sky was illumined by strange flickering lights, the reflection of a thousand gun flashes, and quivered with the passage of shells. As we neared the end of our duckwalk a few flares soared up ahead of us, alarmingly near, and their fitful gleams cast strange moving shadows over the swamp. A machine gun fired nervously and bullets buried themselves with vicious thuds in jagged, fang-like stubs nearby. We hurried, then met the foremost carriers without their loads. Each man, as he came to the end of the narrow “bath mats,” threw down the one he carried, butting it to that one on which he stood. Thus the path went on with amazing speed. But the boards were new and their whiteness was detected. Suddenly a hurricane of shell-fire was all about us. Fortunately I was just at the end and I threw my load down, jumped around and ran. Others heaved their sections wildly and all was confusion. High explosive rained all around us – stunning, stifling, ear splitting; everywhere there was a dead smell of gas and mud and blood.
One man went down as I pushed by him and then we were all away. It was a miraculous escape, but the shelling followed the walk. I left it and plunged through mud a distance and gained another pathway. Someone seized my tunic, someone who wheezed dreadfully. It was “Old Bill,” night blind, up there with his load, and he had finished putting it in proper place before he ran. I walked with him, helped him back to solid footing, and back to our shelters.
We went on to Abraham Heights and relieved the the R.C.R.’s. It was soft ground and we easily dug a trench and took shelter in it. Sambro was on one side and Melville on the other. As we worked together our rations came, very slim, and dry socks, and – wonders of wonders – mail. Melville had not talked since we moved and I watched him closely. He took his pair of socks and placed them in a corner of the bivvy he had made. “Bill,” he said quietly, “remember this pair and get them when you come back.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
He tried to grin, big red-faced Melville, who had been with me through a hundred ticklish corners, and then he said simply, “I’m not coming back.”
I tried to argue with him, asked him questions, but he never told me whether he had had a dream or what had given him his premonition, and he was not afraid. He had received a parcel containing some of his favourite chewing tobacco, “Napoleon,” and he gave it all away to the other men of the platoon, saying that he had more than he needed.
Sambro and I looked at each other and talked together. There was nothing we could do. Melville had joked many times about Freddy’s “fool ideas,” and now he … As we stood gazing over the morbid ground there was a distant report, distinguishable above the others, and a shell came over us with a rush that made me perspire. It was a high velocity gun that was strafing us and that first hit was not fifty yards from where we had dug. Whii-iip! Another. Across from us Hickey and Alway had dug a short bed-length shelter and that shell caused them to duck low. Before they rose the third one came – and burst just beside them, burying them deep. We rushed to the place, choked with fumes, and dug with all our strength. It was of no use. We found Hickey first, and he had been killed by the blow of the explosion. Alway was doubled beneath him.
Once more we moved, in the darkness, up Grafenstrafel Road and halted by shell holes occupied by the 49th. As they left we dug in, connecting holes, then cut places in the trench side and hung ground sheets over them, and there boiled mess-tins of tea. One lot and our water was gone, and we were almost famished for hot drink. I crawled a distance in the muck and found a hole deep enough to dip from and filled my mess-tin. Twice more I went and we all had plenty of reviving tea. Then a low moaning sound in front caused us all to stand steady. It was repeated at intervals, sometimes faintly, and sounded like a man in agony. Once at Vimy, while over on the left of our company talking to members of the adjoining battalion, I had heard a man moaning in no man’s land, and had seen a sentry go out to help him. There had been a shot, and the sentry managed to crawl in, badly wounded by a German sniper, who had simulated suffering in order to lure a victim over the parapet. I thought it another trap and said so, but Sergeant Oron and Clark went out. They found a German in the swamp. He was badly wounded, had lain in the muck for three days and gangrene had set in. He hated us, bared his teeth, snarled like an animal. A stretcher party took him to the nearest dressing station, struggling for hours in the mud, and left him to await his turn in the line. Before it came, a shell dropped between him and a wounded officer and blew them to atoms.
Clark told me I was wanted at the end of the trench. An officer was there and told me I was to go on patrol with him. His men were all of another platoon and I did not know where we were, but I went gladly. Action helped me in the Salient. It was the deadly waiting, helpless waiting, that was unnerving, for always it seemed as if swooping Death were just above us, hovering, or reaching tentacles from dark corners. There was much whispering among the men and mention of a pillbox at Furst Farm. We moved out slowly, cautiously, through a farmyard, slimy, nauseating with putrid filth and stench, and crept along a hedge toward a road. All at once I froze. Directly in front of me I could see the outline of pot helmets. German heads, close together. A patrol seemed bunched there, waiting for us. The officer did not know what move to make and as we peered I saw that the helmets had never tilted a fraction. They seemed fixed, immovable, and two of us crept forward. Every German was dead.
They were in rifle pits and there were many more we had not seen at first. They had been killed by overhead shrapnel and were so wedged in the mud that few had fallen over. We floundered all around them and did not find a live German, though we fancied we saw a working party in the gloom, and then made our way back to the trench. I was covered with foul mud, sickened with smells and my kilt had worn my legs raw. Melville had tea ready for me but he was strangely quiet. Ira was with him, and beyond them, seated on the firestep, was Mickey.
Gradually it grew light. Rumour had come that we would be relieved at night and many of the men were glad. “Old Bill” and Bunty had had a fearful time in the mud, up that horrible road where one tracked the highway by dead men strewed like spilled bundles. Sambro wanted some tea. He had been on a message to company headquarters in a pillbox, and he was wet and cold. I crawled out to the water hole again, and as I dipped it was light enough to see. Just below my mess-tin, in the water, was a huge dead rat. Every other pool near it was discoloured with worse than rats, so I said nothing but boiled the tea an extra time.
All day we huddled, dozing, waiting for relief, and then came word than an attack was to be made that night. We were to try to capture a strong point, a Farm ruin, called “Graf House.” Mcintyre came when it was dark and gave orders. There were to be seven parties used and he was taking twenty-five men with him. We were to work up a road as quietly as possible as it was to be a stealth attack at two pip emma, without a barrage. The Stokes gunners would lend assistance once we were started. Melville shook hands with me as soon as Mcintyre finished talking, but he did not say a word. Then Ira came and whispered that he was glad we were on our way.
The men chosen went to the pillbox headquarters and there we were given a rum ration, those who wished it. There seemed to be plenty of the liquor and breaths were reeking as we crept out and into the beginning of the road. I followed Mcintyre and was to take back messages as soon as our objective was reached. Behind me was Luggar and next him was Hale. As we crawled I took particular notice of each object in the gloom, and as I peered over the bank on our left I saw a German raise his head, not twenty yards from us. I seized Mcintyre’s foot to signal him, and he yanked it from me and spoke out loud. The German fired instantly and the bullet grooved the top of Luggar’s head slicing the scalp, and causing him to be temporarily insane. He threshed about and Hale and I held him down as a perfect stream of bullets was passing over us from the left. Other hands helped us and we passed him back to the rear to be bandaged there. I tossed a Mills bomb in the direction of the Hun and after it had exploded I crept ahead a few feet and raised carefully to look over the bank. Crack! A rifle was thrust up and fired only inches from Hale’s head. The bullet split his scalp and the concussion broke his ear drums. Blood streamed over his face, blinding him, and I helped him get started back to Stewart. Then I pitched a second bomb, close in. Meanwhile Mcintyre had not halted. He had rushed on and Sambro and I half-raised as we hurried after him. A machine gun blazed at us from a spot on the right and we dove into the mud. Crash – slam. The Stokes gun was at work but its shells dropped short, falling almost in our path. We rose again as the Maxim stopped firing, then – a flaming white-hot instant – oblivion.
When I recovered consciousness my head was splitting with pain and a terrible nausea had seized my stomach. The Stokes shell had dropped beside me, throwing me bodily into the mud, and Sambro was stunned as well. He was lying in the slime, and feeling his limbs, certain that he was wounded. All around us was frightful clamour of guns and bombs and rifle shots. I heard Mcintyre’s voice shouting “Five rounds rapid,” then it stopped, but my nose was bleeding and I was too dizzy to stand. We crawled towards the sound, then halted. There was a great plunging in the murk, and two dim figures came towards us, puffing and blowing, tugging at something. They were Germans, big men, and had a machine gun and tripod. They placed it just in front of us and one man yanked at a long cartridge belt. I pulled the pin from my last bomb and heaved the missile at a count of two. It burst just beneath the tripod. One man went down like a huge tree, the other struggled a moment before he stilled.
We went by them, making sure the gun was ruined, and in a new-made crater found a man of “A” Company with his wrist almost severed. We bandaged him hurriedly and sent him back, and were rising to go on when Clark came stumbling through the mud, and yelled at us. “Come on, give them …” His shout was cut off. He pitched, dead, in front of us.
A man scurried by with a stretcher as we went over to the bank where we could see men moving. It was a Lewis gunner, and he said Mcintyre had been shot through the stomach and was dying. They got him on the stretcher, but we went on to the short bank in front and found “Old Bill,” Mickey, and Johnson crouched there, shooting at a German gun that streaked sparks not more than thirty yards away. Sambro had bombs with him and he and I hurled them. The bursts seemed right on the gun and it was silenced. I stared at the other men on the bank. They were all dead. Melville and Ira and Jennings, lying there together, rifle in hand, all shot through the head by one sweep of the German gun. “Old Bill” had seen it, and stayed there after, trying to pot the gunner himself. The fourth dead man was poor old sour Sam, at rest at last.
We looked around and found that all the rest of the party had gone, but another fit of sickness seized me and I could not move for a time. Sambro stayed with me. When we did go back we had to crawl a distance to avoid machine gun fire, but the main fighting had shifted over on the left. A light vapour was stealing over the ground making it harder to see and I stumbled over a body as we found the road bank. It was the Professor, riddled with bullets, dead. He was covered with mud, had lost his steel helmet, had evidently got lost in the darkness, and there he lay, after years of study and culture, with glassy eyes and face upturned to the sky, a smashed cog of the war machine, with not a hope of burial excepting by a chance shell, and the mist thickened and rolled sullenly over him. A few paces beyond we saw some person on the bank itself, stooping over something. It was Stewart, the stretcher bearer, and we called to him softly, telling him to get down into the ditch. He was in plain view of any Huns left along the low ground. He did not answer but went on bandaging a wounded man, and not a second later came a sharp, heavy report. Stewart pitched across the man he was binding, headfirst, so that his kilt fell over his back and there he lay, dead, while the Germans shot again and again, a fusilade of bullets, as if venting their hate, and the man beneath Stewart stilled. We had not a bomb left but we wormed to the bank at a spot farther along and fired at the rifle flashes until the shooting stopped. Then we crawled on until at last we came to old trenches near company headquarters and there I suddenly lost consciousness.
When I woke it was late in the morning. I was lying in the corner of a remnant of trench and Mickey and Sambro were with me. I had been sick again and then had lain as if in a stupor. There had been a terrific shelling all about us and the acrid reek of explosives stung my nostrils. None of the other survivors were near us, not a runner had come into view. We huddled there together and listened to the thunder of the guns until it was noon. Then I roused and peered from our refuge. A few yards away were three green-scummed pools. White, chalky hands reached out of one – hands that were spattered with lumps of clay, and from the farther one a knee stuck up above the filthy water. In another bit of trench, where the parados had disappeared, a soldier stood rigidly, feet braced apart. He was dead, had been killed by concussion, and his body was split as if sliced by a great knife. Looking back I could make out the bank of the road and there distinguished Stewart’s body still humped over the man he was trying to assist. Some dead Germans were over on the flank and one, bareheaded, was lying as if reclining on his elbow. A shell came as I looked up and erupted almost under the body, and the dead man stood straight up a moment, as if saluting, then tumbled down on the other side. I lay down again and saw that neither Sambro nor Mickey had moved. They were asleep as they hunched there side by side, mud-splattered, wan as ghosts.
Night found us still crouched in our cover and I got up and went around the shell holes until I found “Old Bill” and Johnson. They told me that a relief was due and that there had been no orders. Sergeant Oron had been wounded and Hughes was not with us, having gone on leave from St. Jean. We did not know who would have the platoon. As we talked there was suddenly a small barrage of fish tails. They whirred from the sky and several fell near the standing dead man and toppled him over. Then a corporal from another platoon came and called to us to follow him. We were to go back to Ypres, the 16th Battalion was relieving us. We went and met the incoming men by our old trench, were joined by the remainder of the company and heard that big Glenn had been killed, that Izzy had died gloriously in the fighting at the “Graf House.”
All that long drag back was a hideous nightmare. The track was worse than when we had come in and the shelling was incessant. We moved with infinite slowness, every step a struggle, a tearing physical effort, and a vast noise was over all, a thundering, rolling clamour that dulled our thinking, mercifully smothering some of our agonized impressions of the night before.
We went back to the Watou area and there lay about and were given trousers to replace our soaked and muddied kilts. A big draft came and refilled our ranks and then came the dread word that we were to go back to Passchendale again. The November rains were chilling us, freezing us, our feet were always soggy and we were almost despondent. All that time we had been out we had talked but little. Each man seemed busy with his own thoughts, disinclined to speak to another. There had been too many of our friends killed, the men we had been with for months. I found that McLeod and Farmer had died in the mud, that Egglestone had been wounded and placed on a stretcher and then he and his bearers were all blown to fragments by a big shell. And poor old Flynn had been killed. We seemed to move in a daze, to do things as if we were automatoms. One of the draft, Upham, a lad who had been out before, made friends with me and stayed by me. Sambro was with Barron, and Mickey and Tommy were together. Jerry was missing.
Once more we went to California Trench and hated it intensely as we all remembered the gory death of the inspecting officer. We went on the next night through a fearful shelling up to an abomination of desolation, finding curled tangles of wire in absurd places, men squatted in the muck, silent, staring, stiff-moving men, who muttered as they got up and vanished in the gloom like mud-swathed phantoms. It was daylight before we could find where we were to dig in and Captain Grafftey came among us, the first officer we had seen up there with the exception of Mcintyre. He told us to dig for shelter, but no more, as we might move at any time. Orr and Hayward had been wounded on the way up and one man killed.
As we worked the Hun began to shell our position with whizz bangs and some of the men grew panicky. The captain climbed through the mud, from shelter to shelter, speaking to the fellows. Tommy and I watched him come near us. Just a few feet from us, in the next shelter, Dykes was working. He straightened to speak and at the next instant a shell cut the top of his head away, leaving but the jaw and neck. The body rocked a moment as if in a wind and then toppled backward. The captain saluted as he passed.
When it grew dark we moved again and formed a new line. The Hun spotted us and started shelling while machine gun fire raked the ground. Upham and I were together and as we started digging I saw a body just in front of us, a big man with his equipment over his greatcoat. “Catch hold of that stiff,” I said to Upham. “Pull him back here and we’ll use him for part of our parapet.”
He stared at me. “Don’t,” he yelled. “Don’t touch him.”
I seized the corpse myself, rolling it over and into place, and Upham sprang from where he had been spading and commenced a new hole over to the right. A salvo of shells came and exploded. Whizzing fragments were all around me but I was not touched. Upham fell and was dead when I reached him. There was a strange cry further on. It was the sergeant-major who should have gone to the Depot, the old original. He had insisted in coming for one more trip and his jaw had been carried away by shrapnel. He died before morning. Two other men were down, Johnson and Barron, both wounded. The shelling continued all that night and the next day. We had dug deep V-shaped pits, connecting some of them, and there we crouched, gray faces under muddy helmets, red-rimmed eyes, staring, dazed, wondering, our brains numbed beyond thinking by the incessant explosions. One of the new men pitched down between our shelter and the next one. He was pierced in a dozen places and one arm had been sheared from his body by shrapnel. Mickey sat beside me shuddering, half-stunned, staring unseeing, his limbs twitching convulsively at each concussion.
A shell flung equipment in the air. A steel helmet struck into the parados. Then a haversack came hurtling into our trench and fell apart. We gazed stupidly at the contents, a pair of sox, a towel, a toothbrush, a razor and a tin of bully. Another new man came sprawling into our shelter. His helmet was gone and he had lost his rifle. He shook as with ague and crouched in the mud, grovelling and making almost animal noises. He had been literally blown out of his pit and his chum was killed. Then Davies came from the other direction, stepping on the armless body in his path. I shouted at him, asking some questions about the battalion, but he never answered. He sat down close beside me and I was wedged there between him and Mickey. There were continuous explosions just behind us. Mud showered down on our legs, buried our Lee-Enfields, but we stayed in our huddle. Then came a tremendous shock and the narrow through which Davies had come was blocked by an upheaval and the dead man slid toward us, slithered down until his one arm was out-stretched beside our boots. There was a watch on his hairy wrist and, strangely, it was going. I looked at the time. One o’clock. Each hour had grown to be a grim possession, something held precariously.
The new man recovered enough to huddle on the other side of Mickey. Fear had relaxed the muscles of his face and it had become like dough; his mouth dribbled; I could not look at him. All that afternoon we sat there and, oddly, it seemed but a short time. Nothing was clear to me. Explosion succeeded explosion, a concentrated clamour, slamming and pounding, until the noise beat on the brain itself, and when the firing lulled to solitary shells it became the torture of dripping water. I stirred, and found that my arm had been around Mickey all the while and that Davies and I had gripped hands. We got up, freed our rifles from the mud, shook ourselves and Davies went to find Grafftey. We hoped that we would soon be relieved. A message came for me. The Hun had been driven back on the left and we were to move our line forward as soon as it was dark. I was to go with an officer in advance and help stretch a tape where the company was to dig in.