How Dear Is Life (37 page)

D
URING
the misty Flemish night a deserter came across, crying out, “Do not shoot, Mister Herr Englander, do not shoot!” Rumour said that when he was taken to battalion headquarters in the wood, he told there was to be a great attack the next morning led by the Garde du Corps Prusse, the dreaded Prussian Guard, who never surrendered, and never took prisoners. The deserter said he had seen them in billets at Werwick and Komines. They had been brought from the French front at Arras.

The rumour came from the signallers' bunker. Corporal Douglas said it was true.

The night, the chloral darkness tainted with the sweetness of decaying flesh, nauseating and thick as licorice-powder, the timeless blackness sprouting white lilies of corruption, was passed by Phillip in intermittent control of his death-fear. The Prussian Guard! It was a relief when, shortly after five o'clock, in the stand-to before dawn, the flares from the German trenches stopped rising, and a hurricane shrapnel shelling whistled and rattled down upon the wood.

Nothing fell near the Brown Wood Line at first. He knew that the shelling was to prevent supports coming up: his thoughts made him shake. Why had the Grenadiers gone away?
Cranmer
, he cried in his mind, as he fought annihilating truth.

Limp and palpitating, he pressed himself into the damp straw, hands over face to stop the red-gold-black steel-fragmentation roars of five-nines now falling upon the Line, crashes breaking apart his head, to scatter brains through eyes and ears and mouth. He held the crucifix, next to the brown
papier-
mâché
identity disc: but no words of prayer would form in his mind. Every time a word-thought came it was broken in rending flame-crash, golloped with saliva of black electric
zig-zagging snakes scintillating out of retching saccharine brown stench of decaying flesh falling into the trench with lumps of clay and jagged ends of wood. He was sick, and became feeble.

Men were shouting. He was pulled violently by the collar. The black beard and black bitter eyes of Corporal Douglas stared at him. He got up and heard screaming; swaying he saw a man lying face up, his fixed eyes in green face bulging, his kilt in tatters by the stumps of blown-off legs.

He fumbled at the toeless sock covering rifle bolt against mud, and stared, mouth and head greasy-rotten, yellow with undigested bully beef in sour stomach, into dim dirty dark beyond cratered parapet and heard rapid short cheers,
Hoch-hoch-hoch
!
in the distance. A calm-seeming figure appeared. Captain Ogilby, brass pistol in hand, stood ready to fire into the air.

Two Very pistols had been issued to the battalion the previous day. The light-balls were poor, half as bright as the Germans': when they burned,
if
they burned, they soon dropped sizzling upon the ground. They had no parachutes, they were useless.

Why weren't the Vickers guns firing? Two, purchased privately before the war, had at last come up with the transport. They were supposed to be sited on either flank of the battalion front, to give protecting cross fire. Why weren't they firing?

With reports of his rifle ringing in ears, he fired into the gloom. Then, in the ghastly clear of dawn, he saw them, line behind line, moving slowly in regular order. Bloody thousands of them! Now it was started, he found himself aiming and firing steadily: squeeze trigger, reload, aim sights in line, squeeze again, conscious of other reddish-black gashes thumping on either side of him. Why weren't the Vickers guns firing? Surely tripods had been set-up in sand-bag emplacements in the parapet the previous night; they had not fired, of course, to conceal their whereabouts until the attack. The only Vickers guns in the entire British Expeditionary Force! Yet they were not firing.

What was so terrifying, what the Magister would call awe-full, was the way the Prussians seemed to be coming forward at a jog trot, rifles at the porte. They were all big men, made taller by the brass spikes on their helmets. There was none of the running and jumping sideways of the Bavarians coming up to the road
at Messines, after the singing. These came on in line, shoulder to shoulder, as though it were the battle of Waterloo. When they came nearer, he could see that they were in full marching order, with overcoats rolled around their packs. This made them look very big, massive. Nothing could stop them.
Peter
Wallace
bayonetted,
with
Captain
Mc Taggart.
O Christ!

Panic gave way to a swearing rage, to hot anger of firing, reloading, shaking thumb pressing in clips, hair on back of head twitching. Other men were swearing, too; but he did not know this. The Prussians advanced on the right, though many tumbled in front. He could see the brown bullock hair on the outside of a square leather pack when one stumbled, shot.

There were shouts on the right.

“Back into the wood! Withdraw! Withdraw!”

They had over-run No. 3 Company, on the right. Sergeant Furrow was shouting to get out, over the open ground at the double, lie down inside the wood, give covering fire while the other half-section withdrew.

“Steady now, boys!”

Gibbering, wetting himself with fear, he scrambled out. Filled with leaden aching, he ran for the trees. He got there somehow, found himself behind a thick trunk, firing across the front, while the half-section ran hare-eyed, open-mouthed.

Calmer, still trembling, he went with them to the support position, a shallow trench hardly more than an outline. They lay down, facing the flank, until snouts and shots told them of the counter-attack. His shirt was cold with sweat. What a game it was, what a game. He slept.

In the afternoon they were relieved by French troops, whose blue overcoats and red trousers were covered with mud. The French had been fighting by the canal to the south. Meanwhile rumours had told how Fiery Forbes had led the counter-attack, with the acting-Adjutant and Headquarters staff, and stragglers of No. 2 Company which had been over-run on the right. They had cleared the Germans out of the wood with the bayonet, and taken some prisoners.

These came past the company sitting by the reserve line. Unarmed, the prisoners were marched back by their
feld-webel
who, seeing the Adjutant, halted his men and gave him a terrific salute. The Adjutant told one of the Orderly Room clerks, little Kirk of the tent party at Bleak Hill, to take them away to the
M.P. post where the railway line crossed the Menin Road. So Kirk set off, walking beside the
feld-webel
, looking as though he had not the least idea where he was going. However, he said later, on his return, the German sergeant-major had been very helpful, handing him a nominal roll of his men to give the Military Police at Hell Fire Corner.

*

The French soldiers looked ill, with sunken eyes, and yellow hollow cheeks. Phillip felt dull, too. They were leaving the Bill Brown Line. Cranmer's lucky fire-bucket was lost, left in the trench. The thought of Cranmer gone brought tears. Others were crying—overcome by the unendurable power of high explosive, the cold emptiness of life, the negation of the broken tangled wood, the thought of being lost for ever, belonging to death, life but heavy movement without purpose and death the end.

He slouched away with the remnants of No. 1 Company, hose over spats mud-balled, one among others straggling in loose order, slowly following the shambler in front, just able to keep himself from staggering wide, his eyes on the back of the shambler in front, vaguely aware that they were returning to the Menin Road, with its
pavé
hurtful to the feet; and rest.

But why had they turned not towards Ypres, but back to the line again? Not again, O Christ, not
again
? There was nothing to do but follow the shambler in front, one step forward after another since there was nothing to do about it.

The Menin road was crowded with traffic, going both ways. Red-cross motor ambulances, horse-drawn waggons, limbers, shell-caissons, walking wounded, some with
pickelhauben
slung on shoulders, arms and shoulders red-white bandages, convict-hair-cropped German prisoners in muddy leather boots, tunics cut away and hanging loose with blood-dripping arms, jaws bullet-skewed, dead mules and horses lying legs-up all along the roadside, limbers, waggons, field-guns, all broken by shell-fire. And ominous sight, most disheartening—heavy howitzers were trundling down towards Ypres.

Nobody spoke. They stopped, moved on, halted again. Marching was shuffling and loose: automatic movements of men with wills no longer active. The remaining coherencies of their minds were fixed upon the next step onwards; men moving from a moment of chaos into a moment of chaos.

D
URING
the past few days and nights the London Highlanders had been lent to the Brigade holding what officially was known as the Brown Wood Line, but, among the troops, the Bill Brown Line. Now they were returning to their own Brigade, in the woods north-west of Gheluvelt. Here the fighting had been the most severe. At half-past nine in the morning, after four hours intensive shelling, fresh battalions of the Garde du Corps had made their first tremendous onslaught through the fog, piercing the line north and south of Gheluvelt in their original rush, and penetrating the Nonne Bosschen, the Nuns’ Wood.

Vorwärts
Preussen
,
immer
vorwärts!
The Kaiser had addressed the
senior officers of twenty-three Deutschland divisions—nearly a quarter of a million men—the day before: the war would be won if they took Ypres, which was the way to the sea, to the Pax Germanica, to a place in the sun I There were only nine
Entente
divisions between them and victory! Vorwärts!

*

The Kaiser made no reference then, or later—nor had he ever done so before—to ‘walking over the contemptible little British Army.’ That supposed Order of the Day, alleged to have come from the All Highest’s General Headquarters at Aix-la-Chapelle during the previous August, had been faked in its entirety by a General officer at the London War Office named Frederick Maurice—later made a Knight of the Cross of St. Michael and St. George. The idea of the faking had been to give heart to tired British troops in retreat from Mons and Le Cateau.

Richard Maddison, when he read of the protest made by the young and pacifist-socialist Marquess of Husborne, heir to the dukedom of Gaultshire, of his public protest that the Kaiser never uttered such a remark, almost shouted to Hetty, at the breakfast table with his silent daughters, that the fellow was a traitor, and should go to the Tower!

The Old Contemptibles, as
The
Daily
Trident
and other newspapers were calling the defenders of Ypres, had been continuously in the line for nearly twelve weeks. On the front of Sir Douglas Haig’s 1st Corps the Prussians, by midday of November
11, had broken through to a depth of two and a half miles. In one place they had arrived within a hundred yards of a battery of howitzers, and a battery of field-guns. Rifle fire of mixed cooks, headquarter clerks and others, stopped them.

At half-past three in the afternoon of that dull and misty day the Garde du Corps came on again, marching between two enfilade fires, from north-east and south-west. So accurate was the rapid fire of the peace-time trained British soldiers that the attack wilted. The Oxfordshire Light Infantry and the Northamptons charged the survivors with the bayonet.

Farman biplanes, the ‘Longhorns’ of the Royal Flying Corps, Union Jack painted large under each lower wing, reported more German troops coming up the long straight poplar’d road from Menin, through Gheluwe, and lesser lanes and tracks to Terhand, Kruiseecke, Zuidhoek, Malenhoek, all leading from the plain of Flanders to the great woods dark upon the least of slopes above Ypres, the holding of which town meant eventual victory to one side, as its loss meant eventual defeat.

So the attacks continued, until many of the battalions of the British Expeditionary Force, the red little, dying little Army, were decimated. Scottish Borderers and Irish Rifles, Gordons and Cheshires, men of the level lands of Gaultshire and Lincolnshire, the Northumberland Fusiliers and the Duke of Wellington’s —the bullets flailed, the shells spouted; while Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, and the Duke of Würtemberg—the one in command south-east of Ypres, the other commanding the armies of the north-east—were ordered again, and again, and yet again, to break the thin British line. The 1st Guards Brigade, originally mustering four thousand men, now had four officers and about three hundred men. The situation, in the reserved language of Corps and Army commanders, was critical.

Reserves had already been brought up from the 4th Guards Brigade, from the Brown Wood Line, and were being expended. The last reserve battalion, the London Highlanders, was now on its way. Cranmer had arrived before Phillip.

When the London Highlanders arrived, in the sombre light of that wet November afternoon, fighting was still going on in the woods. Remnants of British and German battalions were mixed up, firing in little groups among the trees. On the ground lay many more dead and dying, in
feldgrau
and khaki, than moved on feet behind trees and crouched, rifles supported on elbows, in the clearings or rides.

To the last arrivals, some of the walking wounded by a first-aid post were full of tales of disaster. Others were optimistic, that they would soon be out of it, safe with Blighty ones. Many stories came from the men in charge of the Brigade ammunition dump where No. 1 Company under Captain Ogilby halted to draw extra linen bandoliers.

The Royal Fusiliers had been cut-up to a man, Phillip heard the Regimental Sergeant-Major, in charge of ammunition, tell Captain Ogilby. Their Commanding Officer had been killed. The Worcesters had been cut to pieces, so had the South Lanes, and the Wilts, and the Irish Rifles.

“A trying day for British Arms, sir!” remarked that peacetime mass of beer, beef and duty, the R.S.M., now reduced to duty, duty, duty.

The 15th Infantry Brigade had caught it too. “Still, when it’s all over, it will be pleasant to get back to real soldiering, sir!” was the remark by which the R.S.M. was remembered after he was killed.

The cockney slinging out bandoliers had a different attitude to that of the old Coldstreamer.

“I never sin anyfink like it, in all Christ’s creation, straight I never! Them pushin’ squar’eads come on agin an’ agin, like they was square-bashin’! The whole pushin’ woods was lousy wiv’m, straight they was!” He had a bandage round his left hand. “Cut me ‘and to the bone when I took ’old er th’ bynit er one pushin’ great sod of a Prewshun what wor goin’ ter stick me. Me! Ju Jitsu champion of the rig’m’nt what took five pun off’r ’Ackenschmidt when ’e couldn’t lay me aht in five pushin’ minutes at the ’Olborn Empire when ’e challenged all comers! Me, the pushin’ Prewshun makes for to stick
me
!

“What ’appened? I dunno, arst me! Shall I tell you? Right mate! Look, I’m dahn, see, on me knees like, and the great
soddin’ bastard’s runnin’ at me. So I seize ’is bynit wiv me ’and, see, stick it in ver grarnd, gives a jerk wiv me uvver ’and at the butt, pulls ’im forrard, tips ’im arse over tip flat on ’is back and me pal what played for the ’Spurs kicks ’is brains aht. That’s what ’appened, since you arst me. Thought at first I got a Blighty one, but not this trip.”

“How did you get this job?” asked someone.

“I found it, mate! Life’s what you make it, in this world, an’ the next! You swing the drippin’, or you get it swung on you, see? Anymore for anymore? The Old Firm, the old sweaty sox, water-proof all through, what is butter only grease?”

His eyes were dark and hard all the time he spoke; he never smiled; he was greasy in face and neck and hands, and greasy all over chest, ribs and thighs, too; his quiff was plastered down on his forehead in a curl, looking as though he had just combed and pressed it there; as he had; with butter, from a tin he had taken from the ration dump. Grease kept out the cold from Jabez Wolfe when he swam the Channel; and as the storeman said, what was butter only grease?

*

The rain, which had been intermittent since mid-day, began to fall steadily. From in front and from all sides of the wood came the continuous rattle and crackle of rifle fire, crossing and re-crossing, and now, ominously near, the hammering of machine-guns. Phillip knew by the almost deliberate slowness that they were German. He had heard them before; he had seen a captured Spandau brought back by the Grenadiers from the counterattack. It fired, not on a tripod like the Maxim, but on sleds. It was slower, as it was heavier.

While they rested there, he got up and wandered off. There was a sense of freedom in being alone. He went among the trees, with his last folded sheet of precious newspaper.

The brief meditation over, he strolled among the dead, peering at their faces, wondering how they had felt at the moment of death, and trying to think what had happened to the thoughts in their heads. Did thoughts leave the brain at the moment of death, as separate things, or did they cease with life? How could thoughts, which were mostly eye-pictures, each one taken at a certain moment in living, and stored in grey matter like soft herring roe, but looser and greyer, which was the brain, how could thoughts exist outside their cells? Could a camera, broken,
influence the negatives it had once taken? The positives existed apart from the camera. But it was too difficult to puzzle out. If there was a God, however, why did He permit such terrible things to happen?

He filled his water-bottle with clay-stained water at the bottom of a new shell-hole, and drank his fill behind a tree. Then stooping down, he watched the water running into the blue enamelled neck again, while a paralysing cold thought came that he would perhaps never drink from it again. But if he did come out all right, the water might give him typhoid. If so, he would get to hospital, and out of this hell. Even if he was a wreck after the fever, it would be better than being killed.

He returned to his company. Many of the fellows were crouching or sitting back to back on the ground, holding to their upright rifle barrels, heads bowed in sleep. He sat beside them.

*

How long he was asleep he did not know; but when he looked up again, conscious of the stale, thick, fatty taste of bully beef on tongue and in throat, he saw multitudes of heavy drops of rain jumping with little splashes on the brown and black fallen leaves, and on the sodden coats and caps and muddy hose around him. But how, he wondered, were they shouting, when they were asleep.

“They’re coming! Thousands of ’em! They’ve broken through!”

He tried to get to his feet without falling over, so heavy was equipment, rifle, overcoat. Corporal Douglas was kicking the others, to waken them. As they extended among the trees, he saw the lashing cold drops of the storm bouncing, spray-shattered, off sprawled grey and khaki lying fixed upon the ground in terribly untidy groups. He could hardly see, but did not care, it did not matter that water was running down his cap-comforter into his eyes, dripping down his neck, trickling cold on his stomach. Nothing mattered. Nothing had ever mattered. God, what a world! Nothing was fair. Let the bullets hit him, he did not care. Punishment, punishment, punishment! Cry, cry, cry, cry! Let his tears stream into the earth with the rain, and wash all life away. Hey, Baldwin?

Men were pointing, shouting, crouching down to fix bayonets. His bayonet would not lock; it was muddy. He began to gibber to himself. The Prussian Guards were coming through the trees.
He shouted to himself, “Shut your bloody mouth!” He screamed at himself, scratching his face. “Liar! Liar! I did not tell Milton the Arithmetic answers!” Then, “Oh! Oh!” as he tried again to lock the bayonet on the locking clip. He managed to click it on, despite the mud in the ring. Other soldiers passed by, in little groups, their eyes staring. Among them was a wild, mad-looking grey-moustached officer, with red tabs and gold braid on his tunic collar buttoned to his neck. He put a copper hunting horn at the side of his mouth, and blew it, then taking off his cap with his other hand scooped the air with it like the huntsmen did to otter hounds at Lynmouth, to urge them on.
Yaa-oi!
Yaa-oi!
C’arn’yer!
Then going forward again he blew more notes on the horn and gave another wild screaming cheer.

“Up Guards, and at ’em!” cried Phillip, stumbling forward. Men were shouting hoarsely all along the line. One passed close by Phillip, swearing continuously in teeth-snarling voice, all the gutter-words, filth and muck of the gutters rushing with dirty rain-water to a drain. He began to swear like the regulars. He heard his own voice, very thin, coming out of a little thrill. He was one of them, he was not afraid, he was going forward! They were all like Cranmer, with their hard set faces, their glaring eyes, their bared teeth. Some were hatless; others wore balaclavas over chins, only eyes and noses and open mouths showing. The clean looking things about them were the new light-brown cloth bandoliers of ammunition across their chests.

Phillip went forward through the trees, light head on automatic body. It was wonderful not to care any more. All fear had gone with the upsurging heat of his body. The dull ache of his limbs was gone. He went forward among British Grenadiers, Irish Guardsmen, Coalies, Jocks, Odds and Sods, passing from tree to tree, only partly conscious of the great slant of rain. He thought he saw Cranmer yelling among the others, and wondered if the rest of the Brigade had come up. There were shrieks and cries and roared out oaths in the rain, men were falling, writhing, sudden loud shots ringing in his ears; with detached amazement he saw Germans running about much like themselves among the trees just in front, others in spiked helmets on heads standing, showing teeth open-mouthed above many-button’d grey tunics, yelling amidst the thin plate-breaking clash of bayonets. A khaki sergeant, whooping and yaaring, pushed past him. The Germans were going down. They were screaming. They were holding up
their hands. They were surrendering! He felt a savage delight, a thrilling terror, a magnification of the feeling he had had when he set fire to the long dry grass of the Backfield in summer, as he saw them trying to push away the bayonets with their hands. “A-a-ah!” It was all over!