A Test to Destruction

The author wishes to express his gratitude to General Sir Hubert Gough, G.C.B., G.C.M.G., K.C.V.O., etc., for permission to quote from a letter describing his meeting with General Humbert of the French Army at Villers Bretonneux during the MICHAEL attack in March 1918; and to Captain the Earl Haig, M.C., for his permission to include in the narrative several extracts from
The
Private
Papers
of
Douglas
Haig,
published by Messrs. Eyre & Spottiswoode (to whom also the author’s thanks).

The letter written by the late General Sir Charles Harington, reproduced in part in chapters 10 and 11, was originally published in Volume Two, Number 2 of
The Ypres
Times,
the Journal of the Ypres League, in April 1924.

A popular song at the time of the story, “Over There” by George M. Cohan, some of the words of which were ‘roared out around the piano’ is used by permission of the holders of the ‘© Copyright 1917/Copyright Renewal 1945 Leo Feist Inc., New York, N.Y. Rights for British Empire and Commonwealth, except Canada, controlled by Chappell & Co., Ltd., London, England’.

In the winter of 1917–18 the Great War for Civilization—as it was generally accepted among the elderly and non-combatant of the Christian nations still engaged: Great Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Austria, and the United States of America—was about to enter its penultimate phase on the Western Front.

This battlefield, upon which there had been continuous fighting for three and a half years, could be seen at night from aircraft as a great livid wound stretching from the North Sea, or German Ocean, to the Alps: a wound never ceasing to weep from wan dusk to gangrenous dawn, from sunrise to sunset of Europe in division.

During this war there were the terrors of action at the front, as well as mortifying fears arising from comparative inaction at home. Movement is often release from fear; while sedentary suspense can reduce the spirit more than the physical exhaustions of action.

This is a story of the last year of the Great War, and of the year following the first silence upon the battlefield. It has a small beginning, set in a time when all combatants, except perhaps those of the United States—who had yet to share in the general sufferings of the Old World—were coming to the end of their endurance upon both the Home Front, and the Western Front—that deadly area where millions of husbands and sons had fallen, in the coastal sandhills beside the Channel; in the brown, the treeless, the grave-set plain of Flanders; among the slag-heaps and derelict pithead-gear of Artois; upon the chalk uplands of Picardy and Champagne; in the forests of Argonne and Alsace extending to the neutral country of Switzerland—where below mountain peaks, under the snow, wild flowers lay resting as still within their corms and bulbs as the human dead upon the battlefield.

As the great battles of the Spring of 1918 broke upon France and Flanders, so the flowers of the upland valleys arose with blooms as fugacious as human hopes for the outcome of the war, which, it was said everywhere, would decide the fate of the world.

*

It had been a hard winter, and food was scarce in London, particularly among the poorer or working, and the middle, or clerical and professional classes.

South of the Thames, working-class houses were of yellow brick, built generally in terraced streets for cheapness; while those occupied by the middle classes were usually semi-detached, built of red brick in the nineteenth century, or merely faced with red, for economy, if erected in late Victorian or early Edwardian days; with side and rear walls of the cheaper yellow brick occasionally fused with glass fragments, for greater tenacity. Roads of such houses, built two by two and known as semi-detached, had gardens both at the front and back, the former often protected from immediate view by hedges of privet and occasionally of holly, both shrubs which endured the acid fogs of winter’s smoke and mist. Here and there stood lilac and laburnum, bringing colour to limited living.

From such a road, built up the side of a hill just before the turn of the century, a middle-aged housewife, whose life was centred irrevocably around her husband and children, set forth on a cold February morning of 1918 in an attempt to get some eatable food for her family. Rationing had not by then been organized, and life had become more difficult than ever before.

When she reached the hamlet of Randiswell—still so called by older people, who knew the place when it was in Kent, before appropriation by the London County Council—the first thing she noticed was that the tattered poster of Field-Marshal Lord Kitchener on the hoardings before the shops was lying in strips upon the pavement. She saw its disappearance with a slight pang. It had remained there during the years, a figure of assurance that all would come right in the end. Could it have been nearly three and a half years since the stern face, heavy black moustache, extended arm and pointing finger, YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU!, had first appeared when her son was walking beside her in his kilt and glengarry, just before he had gone to France in September 1914? She felt
momentarily gay at the thought of Phillip, now safe at home, in category B2. Surely, after four spells at the front, he would not be sent out again?

The billposter, an old man, was slowly moving his long-handled paste brush up and down as he stuck on a fresh roll of paper. She had no curiosity about what the new poster might be, for by now she accepted all things in life: to submit was the only way. One must hope for the best, and be as cheerful as possible, for the sake of others. All was in God’s hands; and in the end, she believed, all things would come right.

There was much to be thankful for. Her son, now twenty-two, no longer drank to excess; he had given up that terrible habit, and seemed to have turned over a new leaf. His last letter said that he was learning to box at his camp on the East Coast, and he swam every morning in the sea. So he must be entirely free from the effects of trench fever, if he could safely bathe all through such bitter weather! He was working in the Orderly Room, as an assistant adjutant. It was wonderful news. Papa, too, had got through his bad attack of bronchitis, and was down again in his sitting room before the fire. Yet he was still very weak, and the doctor had said that he must not think of venturing out of doors for a long time.

Now she really must think of food. Things were no longer delivered, one had to fetch everything, and take what was given. Her efforts during the past two weeks had not been very successful. This time she
must
succeed in getting something really nourishing for Dickie and the two girls. Dickie was looking so fagged and pale, after long hours at the office, followed by his patrols as a special. (She must remember never to say ‘special’ in his hearing: he liked to be called a Special Constable, or rather Sergeant.
I
am
a
sergeant
of
Special
Constabulary,
she could hear him saying.
Otherwise
I
am
certainly
nothing
special,
and
never
was.
Unlike
your
best
boy,
Phillip.)

Poor Dickie, he was so hurt that Phillip never wrote to him nowadays. She had asked him to write sometimes to his father; but after such a request Phillip’s next letter usually arrived only after a long interval.

*

In the Maddison home during the first two weeks of February all that Hetty had managed to get from Chamberlain the butcher and Soal the greengrocer in Randiswell was frozen mutton scrag
and some old bones, a few blackened potatoes and one small swede turnip—which meant that on two successive Sundays Richard, the master of the house, had looked with dismay, not far from despair, at what his wife had put before him for his one good meal of the week; and then he had worked himself up and finally shouted that it was her duty to do better; that she had comparatively nothing to do in the house all day, why could she not show some care for those entirely dependent on her? Then throwing down his worn table napkin, he had left the room.

Richard had come back to the table to find another fault: the mutton was old crone! Again he had got up, in impotent protest from a deceived and empty stomach. “Very well, if you cannot do your duty, I must do it for you! I will go without my usual bowl of soup and bread on Friday next, and buy something in Leadenhall Market!”

Poor Dickie! She had tried not to laugh when he had come home on Friday night with a sheep’s heart and a wood-pigeon, result of forty minutes’ standing in line before one of the shops in the covered market.

“All the same, Hetty, I still think you could do better down here, if you really acted with determination! You are too haphazard, you know, you tamely accept what you are given, instead of demanding the best! After all, if a shopkeeper finds that his customer is taking an interest, he will respond—that is but human nature.”

So Hetty had set forth that morning with thoughts of a saddle of mutton, Dickie’s favourite dish, to be served with onion sauce, brussels sprouts, and baked floury potatoes. That would, she hoped, make up for the steak-and-kidney pie she had tried, at her younger daughter’s suggestion, to make with the sheep’s heart and pigeon. Oh dear, that pie.

“Why did you not
stew
my ring-dove in a casserole, pray? And a sheep’s heart should be stuffed, with savoury herbs and onions, and then gently baked!” Once again Richard had pushed back his chair and gone out of the room, saying, “I’ve a good mind to join the Army, ’pon my soul! Oh, I am not joking! I am still not too old, you know, to enlist in the Labour Corps!”

He had not meant seriously what he had said: the remark had arisen from idle fancy after reading an announcement in the paper; but it recurred again and again to his mind in
the days that followed. “I’m at the end of my tether,” he told himself in the looking glass as he tried to imagine his face without beard and moustache. Could he dye his hair dark-brown, as it had been before his wretched marriage? At least he could shoot with a rifle. And in the middle of the week he announced quietly that he had given in his name at the Recruiting Office in the Strand for the Pioneer Section of the Labour Corps.

“You will soon be rid of me, and what Mr. Turney next door no doubt considers to be my bullying ways! I have made my Will, and left everything to you, Hetty.” He had never spoken of his father-in-law other than as ‘Mr. Turney.’

*

Phillip’s room in No. 9 Manor Terrace, Landguard Fort, Suffolk, had one window facing west. The glass of this window had not been cleaned for over a year and a half, since the opening of the battle of the Somme, when had begun an unceasing flow of drafts to the Western Front. The frame rattled when the wind blew; the putty holding the glass panes was hard and cracked, fallen in places; the pre-war paint was flaking off. The wooden floor was rough with scratches of hob-nailed boots, and marks of burning coals fallen beyond the flower-pattern’d tiles of the hearth.

Every night since he had lain in his bare room Phillip had hugged himself with the thought that he was warm and dry. When snow had clotted the panes he had drawn up his knees and thought that he was safe from frozen trenches, where hands and feet were pierced as with nails in the added cold of sleeplessness: that he was back in England, and with the Mediators, that he was among friends, that he belonged to the Gaultshire Regiment, that he was now with the finest crush in the Army. Gone was ‘the battle of the brain’ at night, gone the hopeless weights upon the mind when awakening. To be fit was now the ideal,
mens
sana
in
corpore
sano.

The long wet nights in the Salient during the battles of Third Ypres no longer broke into his sleep: sudden
phew-crash
of 4.2 shell giving time to throw yourself flat on the timber tracks; unlike the 8-pounder, the pip-squeak which arrived in a shower of dust or mud, a mere smokeless amazement unless you were hit and you found yourself without body in a sky-world without dimension; brutal downward droning 5.9s; coarser slower 8-inch
stuff; high-velocity railway-guns firing from Wervicq and Menin, sending shells like earthquakes without warning on the cobbles and ruins of the Cloth Hall and Grand’ Place of Ypres—rearing mule and crumpling driver, ringing ear-drums and sightless flaming eyes, scorching blast-smell of red-hot iron and high explosive … no more sweating entanglements of the mind. Life really was ‘Colour and Warmth and Light’ come again. Friendship was the sun of living. And the little dog that slept in his bed was part of the new world of zestful fun.

Manor Terrace was a brick and slated row of workmen’s cottages built on the edge of the shingle bank near the mouth of the river Orwell. Landguard Camp extended south almost to the estuary, where from the slips and hangars of the Royal Naval Air Service arose the great flying boats which patrolled that area of the North Sea under Harwich Command. To the hutments of the 3rd (Special Reserve) Battalion the Gaultshire Regiment at Landguard came all those men and officers, after convalescence from wounds and sickness, from the various fronts in France and Flanders, Italy, Salonika, and Mesopotamia. Phillip had acquaintance with most of them, since, being assistant adjutant, it was his job to receive each new arrival.

A regulated life had given regulated thoughts. He was in the habit of awakening just before dawn, to lie in quiet happiness with the dog he had bought in Felixstowe. It was the smallest of a litter of fox-terrier pups, the only one with shaggy hair. The owner had let it go for five shillings, saying that it was the ‘cad,’ or smallest pup of the litter, the last but one to be born. It had been as thin as it was friendly when he had brought it to his billet; but now it was fat—the servants in the end room had seen to that.

Phillip had made up some doggerel verses about it, two lines of which ran

Soon the buglers would be sounding reveillé. The Colonel had ordered it half an hour later than usual, now that the battalion was composed almost entirely of drafts from hospital: the walking wounded, and the sick, from Third Ypres were now coming in almost every day.

Lord Satchville, the C.O., welcomed all arrivals, speaking to each man by name as he went down the files standing at ease, Phillip beside him reading names from the orderly room roll. The Colonel recognized many of the old soldiers, recalling their circumstances from former talks. What a C.O. to have! Easy in manner, amiable, quiet of voice, always friendly but at the same time impersonal.

The reading of names, and the greeting of returned soldiers, was one of Phillip’s many duties as assistant adjutant. He had learned much about the organization of a battalion during his weeks at Landguard Camp; the variety of his duties had given him a personal interest combined with a modest air of authority. And after the day’s work there was tea in the mess to look forward to, with plenty of amusing talk; then more work until the bugle sounded for dinner, when in one’s best tunic, slacks, and polished brown shoes, the day was delightfully rounded off. After dinner there was auction bridge, sometimes in the Colonel’s house, with other invited officers, one of them a newcomer like himself, but who wore the coveted D.S.O. riband, to whom the Colonel had said, “Let me present you to my wife.” Phillip had thought for the moment that the ‘present’ was because he was a Companion of the Order, but Lord Satchville then said the same thing of himself. “May I present Mr. Maddison——”