Death of a Hero (51 page)

The Division was to take over part of the M – sector from the Canadian Army Corps. Winterbourne had to occupy part of the Reserve line just to the left of M—. The four company commanders with their runners were sent on ahead in a lorry to reconnoitre the positions and arrange details of “taking over”. The Colonel particularly impressed upon Winterbourne the necessity for obtaining and carefully reading the written instructions for defence which would be with the officer he was relieving.

They were to have met Canadian guides at a given rendezvous, but the guides were not there. Winterbourne, who could have found his way to M – in the blackest darkness, and who had twenty times passed up and down the trench he was to occupy, decided to push on. The other three, mistrusting him, stayed. He set out with Baker, his servant and runner. Owing to the shortage of men, the officers' servants had to act as runners, with the result that they performed both jobs abominably. Baker had been allotted to Winterbourne by the despotic Colonel, who interfered in the minutest details and then held the company commander responsible for everything which went wrong. Thus he was in a position to take credit for every success and push off the responsibility for failure on some one else.

Winterbourne would certainly not have chosen Baker for himself, and wondered what possible caprice of the Colonel had forced the boy
on him. He was a decent enough lad – a milliner's delivery boy – but timid, unintelligent, and lazy. Baker seemed to think that he had performed all his duties as a runner if he followed Winterbourne so closely that he continually trod on his officer's heels.

They passed many places familiar to Winterbourne – the cemetery (now much enlarged), the ruined village (now still more ruined), the long slag-hill, Southampton Row. Nothing had changed, except to become a little more desolate and smashed. He noticed that several large shells had fallen in the cemetery that morning or the night before, digging up the graves violently, scattering bones and torn blankets and broken crosses over the other graves. He turned in for five minutes, and walked down the long row containing the graves of his Pioneer companions. He stood a couple of minutes at Thompson's grave. A shell splinter had knocked the cross crooked. He set it straight.

Winterbourne found the trench easily enough, and asked the first Canadian sentry for Company Headquarters. The man was leaning very negligently on the parapet, chewing gum. Winterbourne, accustomed to perpetual “sir-ing” and heel-clicking and general servility, was almost shocked when the man very casually jerked his thumb over his left shoulder without saying a word, and returned thoughtfully to his gum-chewing. He found the company commander, a Major, democratically sitting in the trench on a double-seated latrine, talking humorously to one of his men. The British always had separate latrines for officers.

Winterbourne enjoyed this hugely, and liked the Canadians. They at once invited him to whisky highballs and bridge. He managed to evade this, and then explained his own situation; asked for the written orders of defence and to see all the positions. The Canadian officer stared and said they had no written instructions.

“Well, what do you do if you're attacked?”

“I guess you'd form a defensive flank – if they ever got past the machine-gunners in M—.”

The Canadian officer walked Winterbourne round the positions. He was bareheaded – strictly against orders – and his men greeted him as he passed with friendly nods and an occasional brief remark. Winterbourne noticed that they did not wait for him to speak first, and did not call him “sir”. He reflected with amusement that the Canadians were easily the crack troops of the British armies, and were sent into all the hardest fighting. And yet they didn't even say “sir” to an officer!

This meeting with the Canadians was probably the last piece of enjoyment or tranquillity that Winterbourne ever had. From the moment he went back to his own battalion his life became one long harassed nightmare. He was deluged with all sorts of documents requiring information and statistics he was totally unable to furnish. The blunders, the mistakes, the negligences of his inexperienced men were legion, and all were visited upon him by the martinet Colonel. For days and weeks he got scarcely any sleep, and never once even took his boots off. He had continually to be up and down the trench, especially during the periodic six days in the Front line, and even in Support. He spent hours a day answering idiotic written questions brought by weary runners, and trying to puzzle out minute and unnecessary orders. He was always being told to report to Battalion Headquarters, where he was savagely attacked and reprimanded for the most puffing and unimportant errors. He went on patrol himself, contrary to orders, to make sure that at least one patrol a night was properly done – and was severely reprimanded for that. The boys, suddenly released from button-polishing and saluting and drill (which they had been taught to consider all important), became deplorably slack in important matters. They lost portions of their equipment, dropped their ammunition, never knew their orders as sentries, went to sleep on sentry duty, shivered when ordered to go on patrol, cried when put in listening-posts in No Man's Land, littered up the trench with paper, bully-beef tins, and fragments of food, urinated in the trenches, and “forgot” perpetually everything they were told. While Winterbourne was at one end of his section of trench, desperately and sweatingly trying to get some sort of order and sense into them, others were committing all sorts of military abominations at the other end. It was useless to “take their names” for punishment, especially as there aren't many punishments as bad as being in the line. One day he did exasperatedly make the Sergeant-major “take their names”, and by night-fall found he had collected forty-two. Ludicrous. The N.C.O.'s gave the job up in despair and let things drift.

He found most of the recruits were hopelessly slow in getting on their gas-masks, and appeared to be in such a state of hebetude that they did not realize that gas was dangerous. They did preposterous things. They would, for instance, entirely abandon a Lewis-gun post to get their dinners. It was ten days before Winterbourne discovered this. The subalterns had seen it, of course, but had not known that
they ought to report it. Winterbourne “ran” the responsible N.C.O. as an example. He “ran” a boy for sleeping on sentry duty, and then washed out the charge when he reflected that the poor wretch might be shot for so serious a military crime. His Front line positions were an exhausting nightmare, too. His front was over five hundred yards. He had an outpost line of four listening and observation posts with a section in each. Three hundred yards further back he had his main defence line and his own headquarters. Behind that he had various isolated Lewis-gun positions. All these were imposed upon him in spite of his protests. The defence scheme might be all very well on paper, and might have worked out with experienced troops, but it was hopeless under these peculiar circumstances. He realized after a couple of nights in the Front line that under any determined attack it would be impossible for him to hold his positions for ten minutes. He urged this on the Colonel, begging that the dispositions might be temporarily revised and the men brought more closely together under his own eyes. He was told that he was incompetent and not fit to be a lance-corporal. Winterbourne sarcastically replied that some people are born corporals and some are not. He offered to resign his command, and was ordered to continue it under threat of immediate arrest and court-martial for negligence and disobeying orders in the face of the enemy. Knowing how easily a court-martial can be “cooked”, Winterbourne unwillingly carried on.

Most fortunately, he was not at first attacked, but he lost several men. Two were wounded on a ration party, having lost contact and wandered about half the night. One was shot through the neck by a fixed rifle, although Winterbourne had thrice ordered every N.C.O. to warn the men about it. At stand-to one morning the Germans bombarded them with mustard-gas shells. Winterbourne had warned them of the gas until he was sick of doing so. Two mustard shells fell just outside the parapet of a firestep with six men on it. They ducked down when the shells burst, and then stood stupidly looking at the bright yellow shell-hole, wondering what the funny smell was. Three of them were gassed, and two died.

Winterbourne spent most of each night plodding up and down his immense area of trenches to see that every one was at his post. After dawn one morning, instead of trying to snatch an hour's sleep, he went up to inspect his listening-posts, feeling an uneasy intuition about them. There were four, about a hundred yards apart, isolated in what had once been the Front line. At the third listening-post he found six
rifles leaning against the trench and no men. They had been captured by a silent raiding party in broad daylight! Probably all asleep. Winterbourne was furious, sent his runner back for another section, and remained on guard himself. The runner came back timidly after an interminable time, and said the Sergeant wouldn't come. Winterbourne didn't want the other posts to know that one had been captured, fearing a panic. It was useless to leave the runner on guard; he would simply have waited until Winterbourne's back was turned and have run to the other posts and spread an alarmist report. Winterbourne hurried back, and found that the runner had delivered such a garbled and incoherent message that the Sergeant had been utterly unable to understand, and had sent him back for precise orders. Of course, the Colonel put all the responsibility upon Winterbourne, and threatened him again with a court-martial. Winterbourne protested and they had a furious row; after which the Colonel re-doubled his persecutions. When they went out for four days' “rest” after their first three weeks in the line, Winterbourne felt more exhausted and depressed than he would have believed possible. He saw that the men got into their billets, after infinite tramplings and shoutings in the darkness, and fell on to a sacking bed. He slept for fourteen hours.

Of course, Winterbourne had taken all this far too tragically and responsibly. The situation happened to be one which most disastrously fed his “worry” neurosis. A bitterly humorous destiny seemed intentionally to involve him in circumstances which rent his mind to pieces and exhausted his body – unnecessarily. It was a misfortune, due possibly to the fact that the initial of his name made him come towards the end of a list, that he was sent to a battalion so raggedly composed and so naggingly commanded. We passed out almost together at the Cadet School; but where everything ran comparatively easily and smoothly for me, all went wrong with him. He brooded incessantly and saw all things in terms of the bleakest despair – the collapse of his own life, his present situation, the continued retirement of the Allied Armies which seemed to promise an indefinite continuation of the War, his feeling that even if he came out alive he would never be able to rebuild his life. It was unlucky to go straight back to M –, which had such tragic associations for him and made it doubly hard to repress shell-shocked nerves. His state of mind, what with sleeplessness and worry and shock and ague – which
came back as soon as he was in the line again – and physical exhaustion and inhibited fear, almost fringed dementia, and he would have collapsed but for his strength of will and pride. He was a wrecked man, swept along in the swirling cataracts of the War.

The days passed into weeks, the weeks into months. He moved through impressions like a man hallucinated. And every incident seemed to beat on his brain Death, Death, Death. All the decay and death of battlefields entered his blood and seemed to poison him. He lived among smashed bodies and human remains in an infernal cemetery. If he scratched his stick idly and nervously in the side of a trench, he pulled out human ribs. He ordered a new latrine to be dug out from the trench, and thrice the digging had to be abandoned because they came upon terrible black masses of decomposing bodies. At dawn one morning when it was misty he walked over the top of Hill 91, where probably nobody had been by day since its capture. The heavy mist brooded about him in a strange stillness. Scarcely a sound on their immediate front, though from north and south came the vibration of furious drum-fire. The ground was a desert of shell-boles and torn rusty wire, and everywhere lay skeletons in steel helmets, still clothed in the rags of sodden khaki or field grey. Here a fleshless hand still clutched a broken rusty rifle; there a gaping, decaying boot showed the thin, knotty foot-bones. He came on a skeleton violently dismembered by a shell explosion; the skull was split open and the teeth lay scattered on the bare chalk; the force of the explosion had driven coins and a metal pencil right into the hip-bones and femurs. In a concrete pill-box three German skeletons lay across their machine-gun with its silent nozzle still pointing at the loop-hole. They had been attacked from the rear with phosphorous grenades, which burn their way into the flesh, and for which there is no possible remedy. A shrunken leather strap still held a battered wrist-watch on a fleshless wrist-bone. Alone in the white curling mist, drifting slowly past like wraiths of the slain, with the far-off thunder of drum-fire beating the air, Winterbourne stood in frozen silence and contemplated the last achievements of civilized men.

A raiding party was sent out from his front. He watched the box barrage from the Front line. The Germans filled the night with Verey lights and coloured rockets. Their artillery and trench-mortars and machine-guns retaliated fiercely. Smoke and gas drifted across. After
interminable waiting the officer and three of the men staggered back, bleeding, blackened with smoke, their clothes torn to pieces on the wire. The raid had failed.

A company of gas experts came up from the Base, and sent over some thousands of Stokes mortars loaded with a heavy concentration of poison gas. As soon as the last mortar was fired they were in a fearful hurry to get away. The German artillery retaliation smashed their trenches. Next morning, Winterbourne watched through glasses the Germans carrying out their dead on stretchers.