Love and the Loveless (41 page)

They were exhausted at the hour before dawn, following upon the difficult walk-up from the Pilckem ridge, but they recovered after a meal of salt beef, hard biscuit, and chlorinated water.

At 5.25 a.m. Phillip, lying awake between strange white sheets, heard distant reverberation; covering his head with a blanket, he abandoned himself to thinking about Lily, and Westy, almost twin souls.

*

The New Zealand division, on the right of Second Army, was at that time floundering to the attack opposite the wired pillboxes between the Wallemolen and the Bellevue spurs. Between them and the Germans were the swamps of the Ravebeek.

The 3rd Australian Division was on their right, in the positions recently held by the Second West Pennine. It was almost the same plan of attack for the fifth step as that which had failed three mornings before. On the left of Second Army New Zealand engineers had laid, during the darkness, five coconut-matting tracks across the morass of the Ravebeek, hidden by the drizzle which turned to luminous fog the light-balls of the Germans, fired from their mebus. About zero hour, 5.25 a.m., the wind became stormy and brought drenching rain, through which the infantry struggled up the slope to the line of pill-boxes, which they had
known since the night before to be protected by deep wire entanglements. There they tried to cut paths through the wire with hand clippers, under heavy enfilade fire from pill-boxes. The second and third waves joined them. Within a few hours 100 officers and 2,635 other ranks had fallen, among them soldiers who had got through the 30-yard-thick wire-belt, only to be shot against the apron tangle surrounding the 5-foot-thick concrete pill-boxes.

*

After breakfast, Phillip said good-bye, and wearing a greatcoat lent to him by one of his hosts, seated himself beside the driver of a staff Vauxhall. The hood was up, rain drove across the green meadows and ploughed fields, shutting out the view, which anyway would not be very interesting, he felt, as they drove along the road to St. Omer. The destination was Arras, by way of Hazebrouck and so to the mining area around Bethune, with its desolate memories of Loos, when ‘Spectre’ West had been wounded.

*

It was later he learned that the 9th Australian Brigade on the right had got up the slopes of sandy ground, and, having suppressed machine-gun nests in shell-holes, had gone on astride the Passchendaele road almost to the ruins of the village, where they found some survivors of the Second West Pennine Division, under a wounded staff officer with a black patch over one eye, who had formed some sort of strong-point there. They were firing at Germans retreating from the Wallemolen spur across the highway, beyond the ruins of Passchendaele.

When a runner brought back a message, at 10.50 a.m., that the 9th Australian Brigade was holding the high ground above the line of pill-boxes where the checked New Zealand troops were lying, the Major-General commanding the 3rd Australian Division at once decided to make an enveloping attack—a right hook, as he put it—with a reserve battalion of one of his brigades, in order to pass Passchendaele village. He was stopped by order of the British Lieutenant-General commanding the 2nd Anzac Corps, who had made plans for another attack to take place at 3 p.m. that afternoon, in the manner of the frontal assault which had failed three days before, and again that morning.

During the lapse of the four hours to 3 p.m. the Australian troops on the crest holding the Flandern II position were being
pasted by German field-guns firing over open sights and by machine guns and snipers. Left in the air, and facing annihilation, the Australians withdrew, taking what wounded they could across rain-swept wastes almost to their starting tapes: whereupon the Corps plans for a frontal assault were cancelled.

*

By that time Phillip had arrived at Arras. 286 M was at Wailly, at a training camp about three miles beyond the town. Deciding to find his own way there, and look around, he ended up at the Officers’ Club. Suddenly life seemed blank, the war no longer interesting. Mooching about the town, he heard semi-musical noises. In one of the patched-up buildings a band was practising. GRAND RAGTIME HOP TONIGHT ALL WELCOME. After a drink with some gunners in the Club he decided to take a room for the night, and accept their invitation to dine. Afterwards they went to the dance hall. The only “women” present were dolled-up female impersonators from one of the local concert parties. The dance was not a scrum, as he had imagined it would be, but taken seriously, with a Master of Ceremonies blowing a whistle for each dance to start off, and commands to “take your partners, gentlemen!” The female impersonators were almost frighteningly real, with yellow curls, stuffed bosoms, rouge, and scent. They were sometimes coy, at other times leering. He had a half-turned-inside-out feeling, dimly like the rough-and-smooth nightmare feelings of childhood. Or was it the stuffy atmosphere, the brassy noise, the smell of sweat and greasy bully beef. Making his excuses to the gunners, he walked back through a ghost town to the Officers’ Club, and went to bed, feeling lost that he was not going up the timber tracks, into the glittering wastes of the night.

*

In the darkness, a little more than forty miles to the north of where he lay between rough brown blankets, twelve hundred more stretcher bearers were arriving on the Anzac front to help bring in the wounded to the bloody dressing stations known as Kronprinz, Waterloo, and Spree. With sandbags tied round knees, waists, and forearms, these men went out at first light to the wire-belts which could be seen so clearly from the Gravenstafel ridge. No shots tore across the ragged brown slopes, white-pocked with water, bestrewn with bodies drowned and drowning, some broken and bled out, others still crying for help.

A wound is not always felt when it is received; but in the hours which follow pain can so consume the spirit that a man’s life becomes elemental longing to be safe; while pictures in the mind assume such anguished need for mother, wife, friend, little children, or even to be allowed to die in the country of his birth, that his piteous cries sometimes dissolve even the iron constriction of war. Thus it was some of the Germans arose from their shell-holes, and having carried back their own wounded, moved down to their wire, and even came through it in places to help tend their enemies lying there.

“Where did you get to, you old devil?”

Having heard, Pinnegar went on, “I had the wind up, I can tell you! I knew of course you’d gone with West, but wondered if I’d be strafed by the Colonel for giving you permission. I bet he’s curious to know all about it, since the telegram came from G.H.Q.! Probably thinks you’re a spy! I’d give a month’s pay to have seen Brendon’s face when you pinched his horse! Who did you see at G.H.Q.? Anyone in particular?”

“No. I just gave in the report, they sent me back, and here I am. What’s happening?”

“Oh some bloody training for a raid the infantry’s going to do. To keep them keen, said the Brigadier. Keen! They’ll never be keen again. What we need is a couple of month’s rest, down in the South of France. What a hope! Only senior officers get there, and then only if they have the right connexions. It’s just the same as in peace time, it’s all a matter of privilege.”

He thought that if Darky Fenwick had said that, Teddy would have called it socialistic tripe. But Teddy had been through a lot since those days in the Angel hotel at Grantham.

“What do I do, Teddy?”

“There’s nothing particular, Phil. The usual routine fatigues. Nolan has carried on quite well in your absence.”

“Do you mind if I go for a ride? I feel a bit stale.”

“I don’t care what you do. More Cook’s tours? Only don’t be away too long. I mean, I think you ought to come back at
night. I’m hoping leave will start again soon; it might do when we’ve done the raid.”

*

On Black Prince, but without his groom, Phillip spent the days in riding about the old battlefield areas. He followed the road through Mercatel, which had been behind the German lines until the retreat to the Siegfried Stellung in March, and so to the Bapaume road. Along it to Ervillers, where Sergeant Rivett had written his graphic description of the three balloons being shot down; and so to Bapaume, now a shack town, with a double-gauge railway and great dumps. He had lunch at the Officers’ Club, where he heard that a great tank and infantry school was to be set up at Albert. Most of the shot-up tanks had been salvaged from the swamps of Third Ypres and sent for repair, and then for use at the school. New tactics would be practised, for the final Great Push in the spring.

There were stories, also, of camouflaged watering-points being laid to within a few hundred yards of the front line.

He returned by way of the road to Cambrai, riding down as far as Beaumetz, then turning left-handed, crossed downland country grooved with valleys between Mory and St. Leger, and so to the site of the camp where Jack Hobart and the others of the original company had trekked, coming into green country after the winter ruination of the valley of the Ancre. There he dismounted, and stood still, pierced by memories of All Weather Jack, now lost for ever with other scenes of that happy springtime in Clover Valley. No, not lost: it lived on in his own memory, at least. It added to his life.

“The Brigade is now training with tanks,” said Pinnegar, a few days later. “It’s going to be some raid, in my opinion. The Brigadier’s going home. Wonder who we’ll have. I saw Byng today; he came to look on. You know we’re in Third Army now, don’t you? Have you seen the paper? There’s been a hell of a drive through the Italians, at Caporetto. According to the German wireless, they’ve taken over a hundred thousand prisoners and three hundred guns, and have the whole bloody lot on the run. I suppose we’re to do a show here, to give the Germans the idea that it’s a proper push! A fat lot of reserves it’ll draw from Italy!”

Orders came to move. In column of route, the company marched away at dusk, taking the Bapaume road. They bivouacked that night in Clover Valley, near the source of the
Sensee river. There they were ordered to remain during daylight, under cover of the camouflage concealing limbers and tents, the horses and mules already being scattered, each tied to its picket peg, near what cover was available. At dusk another move south, passing through Bapaume shortly after 9 p.m. and then following a track over an open rolling plateau for some miles. The night was quiet and slightly misty, with only occasional gun-fire. They crossed over the broad-gauge railway line beyond Bertincourt, and at last, weary and hungry, halted to bivouac among gloomy trees, from which, throughout the night, large drops fell upon the taut canvas tents.

The shut-in feeling of the night vanished with the sun shining down the rides and groves of a forest which covered several miles of open chalk country not unlike Cambridgeshire. Jays cried among the great oaks; holly and hornbeam, with coppery leaves still unshed, grew among the undergrowth. The screeching of jays was heard, and Pinnegar declared he had seen a squirrel.

“Cunning little beggar,” he smiled. “It dodged me round a tree playing hide-and-seek for some minutes. The Flying Corps used to call this wood Mossy Face,” he went on, as they lunched off glassed tongue, French bread, tinned butter, and mango chutney. “It’s the shape of the ace of spades from the air. The Germans had an aerodrome in the clearing over there.”

They made friends with an American doctor attached to the brigade holding the outpost line, which faced the Siegfried Stellung. The doctor asked them into his dugout to have a highball. Along one wall two rows of partridges were hanging by their necks from nails driven into the chalk. Each bird had a label on it, with a date.

“I guess I like my birds to hang for ten days, no more, no less,” said the doctor. “I have respect for the life I have taken, sir, and consider it a dooty to treat what these birds have to give me, first as objects of sport, and then as objects of the culinary art, in an ethical manner. Does that seem strange to you, sir?”

“Not in the least, sir,” replied Phillip, thinking that the doctor was ragging him. “I’m a bit of a taxidermist myself, when I’m at home.”

“Is that so? Have you read Thoreau, young man?”

“No, sir, but I have read Frezenberg.”

“And who is he, may I inquire?”

“Frezenberg Ridge, sir—a philosopher of nature. He wrote a book called
The
Pond,
and lived mainly on boiled sea-weed.”

“Wale, what d’yer know! Frezenberg. I will read his book. Meanwhile, I must express my regrets that your highball has no cracked ice, sir. Let me fill your glass.”

“By all means. I like this kind of whiskey, sir. Is it American?”

“It sure is, sir. Old Crow Bourbon! Shipped under order by General Pershing himself, I guess.”

Phillip brought Pinnegar with him the next time he visited the doctor’s dug-out. Having been shown the partridges, Pinnegar winked at Phillip, to prepare him to observe the cunning way by which he intended to wangle some of the partridges for the mess.

“We’ve got a French chef from the Carlton in our company. Will you honour us at dinner tonight, captain? The chef is an expert on hashing up bully beef, if you don’t mind such ordinary fare.”

“Now, don’t you want me to let you have some of these birds? I would be honoured if you would accept what you require, plenty more where these came from. How many boys to share the feast? Seven? That’s swell! I will instruct my man to take your French chef seven of these birds shot by me on these French fields. I am honoured to know that a French chef will treat them with the respect doo to them.”

“I’m afraid,” said Pinnegar, “that I can only offer you Scotch with them.”

“Now see here,” replied the doctor, “I have some genuine chateau-bottled claret, Chateau Lafitte, ’08. We will drink the wine that your Gilbert Keith Chesterton was anxious should not be diluted by water. You know the poem, I guess—in the Flood, Noah said, ‘I don’t care where the water goes, so long as it don’t get into the wine’. I heard your Chesterton give a talk at Princeton, in ’09. He was a great chuckling man. Sure, that’s fixed! I will be honoured if you guys will drink Chateau Lafitte with me. Wale, I’ll be seeing you boys tonight. I’ll have the birds sent round by my orderly right now.”

When they had left the dug-out, Pinnegar said, “A damned nice fellow, don’t you agree? No bloody swank about him, like most Yanks. You know that story about the doughboy walking into a pub in Piccadilly and asking for a beer, then complaining it was flat. The barmaid said, ‘I’m not surprised, we’ve kept it three years for you.’ What’s the matter, old man?”

“I think I had too much of that whiskey.”

“You’ll be all right. Don’t forget to tell the doc. tonight how you pinched the A.P.M.’s horse!”

“Oh, damn that for a tale!”

*

Orders were issued that no working parties, or groups of men more than two in number, were to be seen within the Daylight Line. This was an area roughly two miles behind the British outpost line, much of it under observation from the Siegfried Stellung.

This great German fortress consisted of three lines of trench-systems, each with its front, support, and reserve trenches, all heavily wired. It was about 5,000 yards deep, and between the trench-systems were zones of battle. The main resistance trenches were sited on reverse slopes, out of sight of attacking troops, who would thus appear, to the Germans, on the sky-line. Acres of wire, making salients, some hundreds of yards deep, lay before the main system, with batteries of machine-guns sited beneath ferro-concrete cover, to fire down the sides of the wire-salients.

The trenches were 12-ft wide, and 18-ft. deep, with sloping sides to stop tanks. Deep underground shelters ran for miles beneath the trenches.

Phillip was sent for by the Brigade-major. A young officer was in the dug-out, looking to be about his own age. He had a round face, almost chubby, a small dark moustache, and wore a Burberry. Phillip got a shock when the Brigade-major introduced him to the newcomer. “This is the Brigadier.”

The Brigadier was most friendly; then he sat back and let his Brigade-major talk.

“You have been on an infantry course at Etaples, haven’t you? How would you like to be an instructor at the new Infantry-cum-tank Training School at Albert?” When Phillip did not reply, the Brigade-major said, “Well, think it over. Discuss it with your C.O. Or anyone else you like. No hurry. I hear, quite unofficially, of course, that you did a Dick Turpin ride on one of the Provost Marshal’s staff horses to Westcappelle. How did you get on?”

“Very well, sir. I had to borrow a horse, as the motorcar was otherwise engaged.”

“But you managed to get to Westcappelle?”

“Yes, sir. I spent the night with ‘OA’, and the next morning was brought here by motorcar.”

“All very hush-hush, I suppose?”

“Well, sir, I was only a messenger boy, really.”

“Is ‘Spectre’ West all right, d’you know?” asked the Brigadier. Another shock: on the left breast of his tunic was the maroon riband of the Victoria Cross, beside the white-purple-white of the Military Cross.

“I haven’t heard yet, sir.”

The Brigade-major said, dismissing him, “Well, think about that instructor’s job at Albert. No need to make up your mind for a week or so. Ask your pals’ opinions, if you like.”

“Very good, sir.”

He asked Pinnegar about it. Did they want to get rid of him? He felt he did not care much, if they did. But what was the idea?

“Give you a rest, I expect, Phil. After all, you’ve been out here, off and on, since ’fourteen.”

He felt depressed. Perhaps they had heard about his drinking. They might even send him home, to help train a Young Soldiers’ battalion. Eighteen-year-old boys, like himself in 1914. There was no life at home.

It was now dull and misty weather, between autumn and winter. All was quiet on the Western front. Third Ypres had ended, with the capture of Passchendaele by the Canadians.

*

Well within the Daylight Line dumps of baled hay and 4-bushel sacks of oats were being made at night, all of them carefully camouflaged. Also, mysterious shallow pits were dug in darkness, and concealed by day. If these were for batteries, where were the guns?

“It’s all a huge bluff, in my opinion,” said Pinnegar, “to make the Germans think we’re going to attack. How the hell can we, with damn-all troops,
and
against the Hindenburg Line?”

One day Phillip went round the trenches with him. They were built up with sandbags, carefully and strongly wired; sumps under the duck-boards; deep shelters, all kept tidy. From one fire-bay he saw Germans walking about behind their trenches, easily within rifle range.

“Isn’t there any sniping, Teddy?”

“Not so far as I know. Suits me.”

They walked above and beside the communication trench. The grasses were wan and grey, with thin docks and starved-looking
burrs; but here and there beside the trench grew tussocks of cock’s-foot, blue-green, where passers-by during the early spring had urinated. That showed what a Garden of Eden it was, he thought.

Covey after covey of partridges flew up, with whirring wings.

At night, noises of the German light railway engine drawing trucks from Ribecourt to
Havrincourt, behind their front line, could be heard distinctly. Occasionally a flare arose, and made a cocoon-like haze in the distance. Wood owls were now calling among the bare trees, softly, with bubbling cries, as though the young birds of that year were finding their mates, with whom they would remain until mustard gas or shell-fire did them part. But it was not England, he thought, dreaming of springtime days with Desmond over the Seven Fields, the woods around Fox Grove golf course, and farther into Kent, on bicycles. It would never again be the same England.

*

The days were misty, leaves fell laden with moisture, there was no wind. Still no official news of an attack. The gun sections were in their emplacements, life was the same from day to day. Except that, according to Pinnegar, lots of badgeless officers were constantly going round the trenches, wearing tin-hats covered with brand-new sandbag material, and brand-new tommy’s tunics.

“Obviously staff wallahs! Their moustaches alone, and those ill-fitting tunic collars, would give them away, even if they’d left their walking sticks and Thermos flasks behind!”