Pass Guard at Ypres Read online

  “Have another drink.”

  “Not now. It is understood, of course, that the Brigade and you yourself were placed in a difficult situation: full allowances have been made for the unexpectedness of the attack, the rawness of the troops, the strangeness of the ground. But the Corps Commander—we at Proven were not quite sure if you personally fully appreciated the situation. Your reports are non-committal and appear to show no realisation of failure. While although this is perhaps in itself a minor matter, the marching back of the troops to the accompaniment of a band—you know, Colonel”—with a sudden access of humanity—“I hate all this.”

  “That’s all right. Help yourself.”

  “I’m damned sorry in myself for you.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Bad luck—we all know it’s damned bad luck. It’s only what the Corps Commander feels. He’s fed up. That’s why he’s putting in the other crowd to get the trenches back. It’s only that I had to tell you.”

  “That’s all right. Don’t worry.” The Colonel sat immovable and imperturbable as ever.

  “I hope it won’t have harmed your fellows, don’t you know.”

  “It’s difficult to harm the dead.”

  CHAPTER XIV

  He was one of the best of the War Correspondents upon the Western Front. Nine months of war experience, combined with his professional knowledge and training, enabled him to separate the essential from the unessential and to give to the British public just that information which it required upon the things that mattered, such as the nature of the struggle, the magnitude of the issues involved, and the morale of the troops. He did not believe in writing up from theory or hearsay, but preferred to portray events and characters as he saw them with his own eyes in the course of his regulated wanderings. It was at places like this that he would, he had discovered, obtain the material that he wanted. At G.H.Q. and behind the Corps area the war tended to become rather remote, but here at St. Janter-Biezen, in Corps reserve, he could find those who practically until yesterday had been engaged in hand-to-hand conflict, and who now had leisure to recount something of their experiences in that forbidden land which even he was not allowed to enter. He would see for himself of what manner of stuff the battalion of “K.1” was made. He had heard stories on the way up, some not altogether favourable. Never mind stories. He was not Bowles of the Daily Thunderer, who spent his time in the messes and the hospitals at the Base: he would get among them, and form judgment for himself.

  The day at St. Jan-ter-Biezen proved to be a day well spent. He was glad to see at the outset that the appalling losses which they had suffered had not quelled the military instincts of the battalion. They paraded as usual for battalion drill, and he noticed that the peculiar variations of detail in arms drill and formal manœuvre upon which the Southshires had prided themselves from time immemorial were observed as punctiliously by these soldiers of less than a year’s standing as they could possibly have been by the 1st Battalion itself at Aldershot. He availed himself of the ample opportunities which Chip Viner, the Adjutant, afforded him of inspecting the huts and mess-rooms, and found, as he expected to find, that they were scrupulously orderly and clean. At B.H.Q. itself everybody, from the Colonel downwards, was busily occupied, and he noticed that both here and in the Quartermaster’s department much time was being spent upon the composition of casualty lists and the sorting of effects. It was a sad business, but it was being executed in a thorough unemotional manner which spoke volumes for the spirit of those remaining.

  In the afternoon, after a lunch at Headquarters mess, at which conversation seemed hardly less free than usual, and in which the Colonel seemed to have been in particularly good form, he walked across to the adjacent field to watch the games which Harry, the old Carlisle three-quarter, and Robbie had organised. They were playing both Soccer and Rugger with a will, officers and men together, keen as mustard for “C” Company to beat the rest. Best of good signs, this, and the note-book was plied that afternoon. Nothing much the matter with the spirit of an Army in which men could come straight from Ypres to a game of football. That was the sort of thing that people at home might take a lesson from: no grousing or repining here, but on with the game with a swing, and jolly good luck to the next attack. Then, after tea, when the parades and inspections of the day were over, what of those little groups jesting round by their tents, ambling about or playing the eternal House—“Click, click,” “Top of the ’ouse”—happy to all appearance, happy and carefree, forgetting already their grim experiences. What men they were! And how the heart of the British public should swell with pride when it read any portrayal, however inadequate, of their daily life.

  And if this could be said of the men, what could be said to do justice to the officers? If they had had to combine four messes into one, if out of the full complement but the C.O., acting Adjutant, two company commanders and five subalterns were remaining, then those remaining would see to it that in that one joint mess the old traditions should be maintained, and that the spirit of the British officer and gentleman should prevail over all adversity. They’d been through it all right; he could see that with half an eye. He wasn’t like that fool Derry, of the Wire, who always pretended that the British soldier was insensible to suffering. He saw the marks of strain. Toler, heavy-eyed and chalky in appearance, looked as if he hadn’t slept for days. Bill’s hands were trembling, and he guessed that that was not from excessive smoking. That Devonian’s tunic seemed a bit too loose round the neck, and that little curly-haired, quiet-voiced chap in the corner, whom they called Cherub and Ganymede when the port came round—his eyes were skeery, and he was pretty well all in: he couldn’t speak without a slight stammer, and his head kept twitching. Yes, by God, they were men to bite on the bullet and keep it up like this. He could picture those others, to whom they would refer from time to time as the talk went eternally from the latest show in Town or the chances of conscription coming to Hooge and Sanctuary Wood. He could picture Roffey standing on top of his parapet at Hooge, to fall with a dozen dead Germans round him headlong on his wire; Wray walking out towards the advancing enemy to pick up a soldier whom he had noticed lying wounded in a shell-hole as they were falling back; B.G. the tough tea-planter, standing at a sap-head, still firing steadily with his clothes on fire. Lies, lies all the way, had been told of this division. Those at the Corps who’d downed them so were liars, and he’d see they knew it. He’d got the story clear enough, and they’d hung on where it was hardly possible for men to remain and live: and it was through these men, and those they led, that Sanctuary Wood and Ypres were ours. Their comrades had died at their posts, or had their lives sacrificed uselessly in that counter-attack, supreme act of a general’s folly. But these remained, and with them lived something more—the spirit of a regiment that death itself could not overcome.

  It was a fruitful visit. He was thanked by many for his article “The Spirit that Prevails,” an article which went far to steady public opinion at a critical time. He narrated nothing that he did not see, he exaggerated nothing, he put nothing into the mouth of officer or man that had not actually been said in his presence. He paid no more than the tribute that was due. He did not tell, because he did not know, of the company commander who, with ten men left of those 200 whom he had tried to guard and train, fingered his revolver late that night, put it apparently idly to his temple, then suddenly flung it with a curse out into the darkness, or of that other, the Colonel, who wrote in his war diary “Ichabod,” and walked the lanes all night alone.

  CHAPTER XV

  Freddy Mann put back his final stake into his pocket, gathered up the kitty and a 50-franc note from the grunting and admiring Harry, helped himself to a final not illiberal whisky and soda, and with a cheery “Evening all. Three o’clock—must be pushing along. Thanks for a damned good evening,” swung out of the farm-house to his billet. He whistled as he made his way across the field, lit his candle and slowly undressed in front of his shack, then lit a c
igarette and took a final stroll, clad in pyjamas and British warm, to the corner of the enclosure before turning in. A very reasonable ending to a very reasonable sort of day. Nothing like doing Harry down at poker to finish with, especially when Harry threw in a full house and he held a pair of nines. There wasn’t much in doing down those two kids who’d joined “C” Company since he left: they were sitting birds, those kids Ball and Trench, who’d just come from England with the latest draft, jumped whenever they heard a shell, and couldn’t tell a joker from an ace of spades.

  But Harry was a different matter. He’d given him his first lessons in poker a bare six months ago; he wondered how much he imagined he could teach him now? Yes, and what applied to poker applied to dozens of other things as well in this ruddy war. Damned fine soldier, Harry, one of the best he’d ever seen, and he would make something of the new “C” Company now that the Skipper had gone to Intelligence, if anybody could. He’d taught him more by example than by talk, most of the tricks of the trade. But was there now much more that he had to learn? He didn’t want to buck, but there it was. Townroe had thought him good enough to give him the Battalion bombers, and from what he’d heard so far he hadn’t exactly cramped their style. There might be something in that hint Chips had dropped of a “mention” for that July business for all he knew, and, anyway, there was no getting round the fact that the second pip had come through that morning. He’d had four months of it, and seen a bit, but no, he cheerfully reassured himself as he plunged into the darkness of his little triangular abode, the Huns had done their damnedest with him and he was still top-dog. That little singing in his head was nothing. They’d find before they finished that he was by no means done for yet; as Robbie would say, so far he’d played the bowling. And yes, by God, he’d learnt a bit since April.

  He had. Take a boy of nineteen from school, put him into uniform, send him abroad, and give him within the space of nine months fifty-six days in the trenches by the Menin Road, and thirty days and nights in Ypres, and he will tend to grow in what passes in a war for wisdom. There wasn’t much that Freddy Mann hadn’t sampled, from the digging of a cable trench and the martialling of a ration party at Birr Cross Roads to putting a revolver bullet through the head of a German who was coming at him round a traverse with a bayonet. That first night and first stand-to had been predecessor to many nights of ghostly mystery. There had been other raids since that fearsome expedition led by Toler during the storm in June, when they had spent three hours hung up by machine guns inside the German wire, and Brains had been brought back with a leg he would never use again. He had met others since of the breed of Corporal Sugger, and ex-Regular soldiers, lead-swingers, quartermaster-sergeants and the like held no terrors now for him. He had learnt on the whole to appraise a man’s value in the line in inverse proportion to the volume of his talk. Others beside poor Baggallay had gone from a cheery hour in his company, in billet or dug-out, to sudden death. He had seen others besides Sugger suddenly fall shrieking to the bottom of the trench or cower at the corner of a traverse crouching on the fire-step with their backs to the parapet.

  There wasn’t much in the way of trench warfare, or of the reactions of human beings to twentieth-century armaments, that anybody could tell him. He knew the anxiety which comes with the midnight hours of a moonless night, when one can see but ten yards ahead and some cheerful R.E. officer on his way back to Brigade has remarked that they are certain to attack. He knew that strange sympathy with the German infantry 200 yards away which one instinctively feels when the artillery of each side is registering upon front-line trenches. He knew what it means to stand in a fire-bay and curse the Staff, the artillery, the A.S.C., the trench-mortar merchants, the next battalion, even the next company, everything, everybody but one’s own forsaken little crowd. He knew, with Grenfell, those moments of exaltation which come, even if rarely, when the thundering line of battle stands. All this he knew, and one thing more, what it means to belong to a division and a battalion which is under a cloud, but which knows perfectly well that when the crisis came it did all that any division, Kitchener or Regular, could do. And this knowledge, and the knowledge of what terror means, the loss of comrades and disgrace to accompanying torturing death, had not broken him, but had left him pretty hardened and, as it appeared at the present moment, very much with his monkey up. They’d had their gruel, had they? Good enough! The best in their crowd had been wiped out, only 200 of the originals were remaining. Right. The Boche was still round Wipers, still looking at them from the hills to north and east and south. Just wait a bit, with the Mills bombs coming out, the new drafts being broken in, the battalion reshaped, shrapnel now unlimited and our artillery strengthening day by day. South Africa had started something like this, and—yes—he’d learnt a good deal from good old Bamford; let them wait.

  Topping, these September nights, with the harvest moon. He pulled the flap of his doorway to one side, stepped out for a moment and looked around. Gad, it was good to be alive on a night like this. There were our star shells far away, now pretty well as good as theirs; those flashes were the flashes of our guns; and somewhere there, down at the end of a white road that faded into the moonlit distance, lay a town which stood for the frustration of many German hopes. Be damned to them all—the croakers at home, and the Staff, and the Boche, those swine at Corps H.Q. and all who’d tried to crab them and do them down: hadn’t they helped to save their Wipers? And did the Boche imagine that there was nothing more to come, that his bombers and the whole battalion were being fattened for a Laffan’s Plain review? There’s Loos to come, he muttered with a smile: hope you enjoy it. Good-night, blasted Huns and other pretty darlings. Good-night, Ypres, old girl: sleep safe!

  The iron had entered deep: it had not yet pierced to his inmost soul.

  CHAPTER XVI

  To say that Private Bamford was in any real sense elated would be an overstatement. The experiences of the past few months had only served to deepen his philosophy in regard to war, and he took the daily events of trenches or reserve billets without emotion as they came. Yet, on this occasion, one who could have read in secret places might have perceived a certain vague fluttering round Private Bamford’s heart, not entirely dissimilar to if fainter than that rush of feeling that had come to him fifteen years before, when he stood at the foot of Glencoe to face his first engagement. Rumours he knew all about, and no rumour save of disaster lived long in Bamford’s presence. But rumours and definite statements from G.H.Q. are different matters, and this was clear enough. They were going over the top that night, over and on and through. That meant, say, by November, the end of the war, which meant in its turn that he would qualify for his sixteen years’ pension, and be nicely home for Christmas. Just see his officer through this last little bit, and that would be the end of that, if only he didn’t do anything extra foolish and the bullet with his number didn’t come. Wasn’t any thanks to him, he must say, that it hadn’t come already. Look at him now, talking to that Staff fellow, head and shoulders over parapet, as if they were looking over the Thames Embankment. He’d better go and drop him a hint: no—as Private Bamford lumbered a few steps forward and then drew quickly back—no, in the circumstances, not. He always believed in lying low while G.O.C.s were about, and here was the G.O.C. He’d been just like that at Kimberley, he remembered; all this damned keenness, that was what it was, and it didn’t seem as if he’d grown out of it since then. There they were now, both of ’em at it; Freddy Mann leaning over and pointing towards the lake, and the G.O.C. eagerly following his finger. Ought to be at Division, as a matter of fact, the G.O.C. They were going over three hours from now: he supposed, though, he wanted to be in at the death. So would he, if he were G.O.C. Bit of all right, to be a G.O.C., and know your whole blooming Division was going through. None of that Redvers business this time. Lucky swine, the G.O.C., to have a job like his, and know he was top-dog over the Boche. Hullo, he was off now, with Harry. Funny, that way he fell behind for a moment, and looked
back and tugged at his moustache as if he were worried about something. Just a trick, that was all that was; nothing much to worry about for him or anybody else. The Boche was done: French had said so himself in so many words in this special order that had just come round. No earthly doubt about it, reflected Private Bamford, as he contentedly spat pieces of plug into the corner of the traverse: it can only mean one thing when a General visits a front line trench twice in twenty-four hours, and an officer gives his batman ten francs to buy chocolate at the first shop they come to, and tells him to keep the change. He’d just shove along now, and begin to get ready for it by scrounging the Q.M.S.’s rum.

  The worst that could be said against General Vicke as a soldier and a Divisional Commander was that he was too attached to his men. This fault had been the subject of comment at Aldershot and was increasingly in evidence during the operations in Belgium in 1915. Care for one’s men is, of course, inculcated as one of his first duties into the mind of every junior officer, and previously in South Africa and India General Vicke had shown that he had learnt his lesson to the full. When, however, one arrives at the rank of Major-General, and finds oneself in command of 12,000 infantrymen and gunners, to say nothing of mounted troops and details, care for the individual must to a certain extent be merged in considerations of strategy and of the unit as a whole. It was by this time sufficiently established that a division in such a sector as Ypres loses 60 per cent. of its strength every three months, and entirely changes its personnel, sometimes more than once, in a year.

  The wise commander, in view of this, will therefore steel himself against undue interest in the subaltern or private soldier. His men cannot in the nature of things be to him as were Methuen’s to their commander in South Africa, or Roberts’ at Kandahar. It was a pity that with all his excellent qualities General Vicke never quite appreciated this point. To have done so would have in no way conflicted with his well-established habit of slipping off whenever possible to the front-line trenches, and dropping into dug-outs to share a drink from flask or canteen with subalterns or men. He could have done this, and still known every officer and many N.C.O.’s by their names, while recognising without mental disturbance the fact that within a few weeks or at most months they were almost bound to part. As it was, as Corps Commanders and high Staff officers would remark, this damned paternal interest was all very well, but there was a war on, and you can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs, and all this worrying about casualties upset corps commanders’ equanimity and the peace of Army Conferences.