The Golden Virgin (38 page)

Faulty annealing of copper driving bands on shells—so that the copper was hard, and not pliable—caused the rifling of bores to be torn, and worn erratically. H.E. shell fired in the 18-pounders sometimes burst or bulged the barrels. Weak buffer springs, which did not hold and contain what recoil was not absorbed by the piston of the oil buffer, sometimes broke, and the gun had to be run up to fire again by hand.

Again, hot summer weather caused the high explosive in a heavy shell sometimes to exude and form a film which was tricky to scrape off.

All these, and many other defects, were due to haste in an improvised and expanding munitions industry, where often amateur workmanship was employed upon second-rate material; but when after the beginning of the Battle of the Somme, the wholesale and terrible defects of guns, ammunition and fuses were reported, Mr. Lloyd George, Minister of Munitions, said, “The Garrison Artillery in France is entirely untrained, it cannot shoot, and is quite unfitted to work the perfect weapons which I have provided’.

*

Meanwhile in the front assembly trenches before Ovillers on that summer morning which was to become a day of great heat the first wild hopes of the one-way bombardment had subsided: trundling quarry-heavy noises filled the brain as with stone. Men sat or lay down, apathetic, apart, each one with his thoughts.

Sitting on the came, Phillip could feel the water vibrating under him, as he strove to overcome the knotted feeling in his stomach, to prevent the saliva in his mouth from making him sick. He clung to himself in the rushing weight of noise, which made his head
ache without his realising it. He tried to fix his mind on the starling on Grandpa’s red chimney-pot. Now it would be singing into the freshness of the morning air, just as he had seen it a hundred times on awakening. There it was, turning its head first one way, then the other, like a speaker by the Socialist Oak on the Hill; and as it turned it squeezed out a sort of one-bird-band music—concertina, mouth organ, Jew’s harp, and penny whistle—head thrown one way, then another. From its quivering throat, surrounded by its own feather boa, the starling uttered every kind of noise and call to be heard in the streets and gardens; errand-boy’s whistle;
milko
of milkman with clank of milk-cans; cat’s wail, dog’s bark, blackbird, thrush, tomtit, even Grandpa clearing his throat in the bathroom, and gargling. Think of the starling, of the sky above the red chimney pot, which was red because Grandpa used a gas-fire in his bedroom, think of the silky blue sky of early summer morning at home. Would they be getting up yet? Father sometimes went on the Hill, to walk alone in the fresh air of morning, Think! Think! But his mind seemed to break like glass, his being to leap out of his body, as he saw the chalk lip of the trench jumping in spits and splatters. There was a machine-gun playing on it, and thirty more minutes to go to Zero hour!

He felt himself to be all water from mouth to stomach. With a fearful start he felt someone touch him. Jones was mouthing something but all sound was ground away by the glacier of shells. Jones cupped his hands and bawled so that the extra noise was hurtful, unendurable, and he pushed at the shoulder below the face, crying soundlessly, “I know! I know!” as Jones pointed to the edge of the chalk, where the long grasses fringing the shine of the unseen sun were being flicked off like little pieces of straw.

It was five minutes past seven. Phillip hurried to get the rum jar, pushing past faces looking at the breaking parapet. When he returned, followed by Pimm with pigeon basket and water-can, Sergeant Jones took the earthenware gallon jar, and held it while Phillip ripped his mess-tin out of its cover. Out went cake, chocolate, cheese, tomatoes; in slopped rum, dark brown and oily, while the tin rattled. Thrusting the cork back in the jar, and stamping it in with his heel, he left it in the charge of Pimm crouching beside the pigeon basket, and went with Sergeant Jones down the trench, squeezing past men waiting there, some pale and shaking, others composed, all quiet. To each a double spoonful, fed baby-fashion by the sergeant. They were for it: bompity—bompity, all the way down to a soldier’s grave.

He looked at his watch. It was 7.10 a.m. Howells was lying still and void of face on the floor of the trench. His head was bent on his neck as though it were broken. In five minutes’ time the Stokes mortars out in front in their pits would open up, and the first waves would climb up into the deadly vacancy above. The Spandaus were being aimed low. If he could get clear of the parapet, there was an even chance of a leg wound. Yet, lying upon the ground, his head might be hit. The enemy gunners’ sights would not be lowered while wave after wave passed through the same area. But he must think of the men.

“Come on, drink!” he yelled, inaudibly. Howells’ mouth opened and worked, as though he were drowning. Sergeant Jones knelt and put his arm behind his shoulders. He dipped the spoon, and pushed it between chattering teeth. It ran down Howells’ chin.

“Come on, pour it into him!”

Sergeant Jones tried again. Howells choked. “Stand up! Get up! Or I’ll shoot you for cowardice!”

Phillip hardly knew what he was saying. In his own deadly fear, holding him in a vice, that “Spectre” West was right, that the plan was wrong, that the most terrible disaster for them all was imminent, his attitude towards the younger, weaker Howells was that of his father to himself in the past. He saw the nervous lovelessness of a past self confronting him in the deadly white-faced fear of the broken Howells. He knelt and levered open the jaws with finger and thumb, thrusting in the spoon, holding the nose while Jones held the feebly fluttering hands. Another, another. Then he pointed at Jones’ mouth; down went the rum; now me! me! pouring red-searing liquid past his own teeth. Howells was raising himself on an elbow, life returning to his eyes; Phillip, inflamed, thinking of Albert Hawkins as Howells got on his feet, put an arm round his shoulders and pressed him to him. “I’m with you! I’ll look after you!”

When the canteen was empty he went back for the jar, and spoonfuls were given to all and every open mouth, including Pimm, the Oliver Twist of the trenches, as the men called him.

Oliver Twist had a pigeon in his hands. “Kiss the tippler for luck,” he said, offering the bird to Phillip, who touched its feathers with his cheek. Pimm went on to other men. “Kiss Jimmy for luck, cully!” Laughing, they kissed the pigeon. Phillip passed down the trench, shaking hands with his men, under the glissade of shells swooshing through smoke and air-buffets crushing ear-drums
to talking voiceless shaking-hands-mouthing-nothingness thrust out from sleeves white with chalk. Ho wells, seen to be lifting up the bag of Mills bombs, was given the bag of lighter special phosphorus grenades instead, Phillip slinging the bag of Mills bombs over his own shoulder. He shouted unheard orders—“Jones, we go right through! Bring the Lewis gun! We’ll go right on! Forward! Forward! Chuck off your equipment all of you, come on, chuck it off!” He undid his leather belt, threw off the shoulder straps, unbuckled haversack and water bottle.

“Rifles, pouches, bombs and bandoliers only! Fix bayonets! We’re going over now! They can’t see us in the dust and smoke, we’ll get right up to their wire, all the way! Pimm, bring the pigeons and one water can, leave the rum jar. We’ll show them!” he shouted unheard even by himself, obsessed by the idea of getting across no-man’s-land before the bombardment lifted. The wild boy had taken over.

But now not so wild externally. At 7.20 a.m., two minutes before the practised time of advance of the first waves, he got up a ladder and immediately found himself alone with the unhelping indifference of wild flowers and grass in a glassy-gold world of dust and chemical air. He ran forward until he was breathless, then stopped, curiously observing little tufts of grass being spat out of the ground all around him. Life was automatic movement beyond reality. He beckoned with his free arm to bring on the running figures faster in the noiseless bone-thundering air, figures in the sun-smoke seen to be throwing up arms and sinking slowly on their knees, to lie still as though tired or to twist about with open mouths and hair untidy without helmet covering in front of more upright figures advancing at the double. Men caught up with him as he ran on. His legs moved without conscious motion except their dragging heaviness. To left and right the line, bunched here and gapped there, was going forward with him. He felt an incoherence of joy that he was not afraid and that Westy would approve. He was detached from what was going on, he felt that nothing really mattered, barely aware of Time that raced yet was fixed. Now Sergeant Jones was running towards him with the black Lewis gun, and on the other side of him was Pimm, running with eyes staring and mouth open. The pigeon basket on his back was jumping up and down and the sandbag holding the water-can was swinging in one hand, his rifle at the trail in the other. A line of OPERATION ORDER NO. 1 ran zigzagging through Phillip’s head.
Strict
silence
will
be
maintained
during
the
advance
through
the
smoke
and
no
whistles
will
be
blown.
He began to laugh.

“Two-fifty paces, sir!” the sergeant yelled in his ear, as he pointed to the ground, meaning that they were to lie down, as practised.

“Forward! Forward!”

They must get over the bare and open ground. They must get as far as the German trenches, where at least would be cover in shell-holes. There they would have a chance to find where the Spandaus were firing from and to put a burst into at least one of them; but even as he flailed his arm to bring the first and second waves on, he saw that the whole line was staggering and falling, four and five men together at a time. Then he was tilting up against the sky in a moment of suspended amazement before the rim of his helmet wrenched his neck against grass. His legs had given way under him, how queer. In the same moment he saw a great ugly grey bulb arising out of the earth, with a cracked dome. It became a huge cauliflower turning into black smoke. It was some time—about two seconds in reality—before he realised that the mine under Y Sap had gone up, without the other mine farther south, the Lochnager. The shock had flung them all to the ground.

He began to think coolly. Now the lip of the mine crater would be in the way of the machine guns firing at them. They were lying down, according to orders. The mines were to be fired two minutes before Zero hour. The barrage had two minutes to go. The first German line was still out of sight, about a quarter of a mile away. They were wasting valuable time. Westy was right; a line of skirmishers, lightly equipped, but all with bombs, to stop the Germans getting up from the deep dug-outs.

Forward! Forward!

A thousand wires hummed high and shrill in his ears as he hurried on. He saw Sergeant Jones shouting; helmets were rising up, falling, rifles dropping. A steam-harsh noise filled the air. He knew what that was: machine-gun bullets, each faster than sound, with its hiss and its air-crack arriving almost simultaneously, many scores of thousands of bullets in the air together at the same time and coming from all directions.

Brilliant spots of light broke above the rolling smoke, far away. Each coloured spot hung there, burning, before dropping down into the dusty storm below. Rockets calling for help: the German barrage fell on no-man’s-land.

The guns that morning were heard in south-east England, through, some said, reflection of sound-rays from the layer of heated ozone far above the earth’s atmosphere, to the ground below. Others declared that the vibrations travelled through the continental chalk ridge of north-west Europe, the base of which extended under the Channel. Whatever the means of travel, the bourdon of gunfire was not heard on the south coast of England; but it was heard most clearly by Richard Maddison, who had gone up early, drawn by the beauty of the morning, upon the pleasaunce of the Hill.

He wore his old striped flannel trousers and white shoes with brown leather borders, pleased that the clothes he had first worn for tennis in the ’eighties were still comfortable. He felt the warmth of the sun upon his face and bare head; his old tennis “togs” gave him a feeling of youth. He was now in his fifty-third year, and was good, he told himself, for another twenty years. Nothing like digging to keep a man fit!

He had the Hill to himself, except for the rooks busy in the grass where the sheep had been grazed until a fortnight before, when the fly, of both the green and the blue bottle variety, had begun to be active, from so many dust-bins in the streets which had arisen out of the burnt subsoil of clay like continuous reefs or cliffs around the Hill. There was danger of spotted fever, the dreaded cerebro-spino-meningitis from such flies. He must get some chloride of lime for Hetty’s dustbin.

However, London River was to be seen as of yore, the woods on Shooter’s Hill, and the North Downs; while the Crystal Palace, glittering grey, was a mark that he saw, in such free moments, with romance, for the old days a-wheel into Surrey and Kent.

He had a new romantic feeling that morning; for as he walked upon the crest of the Hill, before going down the gully, he heard all about him, in the air of the splendid summer day arising, a continuous heavy undertone, almost from the ground under his feet; or was it from the air above?—a heavy undertone, with dull faraway boomings, which remotely seemed to thud upon the ear. The guns in France! The Great Offensive, of which so much had been spoken and speculated upon in the City, had started that morning!

He kept the news to himself when he arrived home; and having had his cold tub, and put on his City clothes, he went down to breakfast with a feeling almost of freedom.

“Well, Hetty old girl, I’ve some news for you. The guns in France were going well, great guns, as I came down from the Hill just now! Something is in the wind, you mark my words!”

“Oh dear, I do hope—yes I expect it will be all right,” answered Hetty, not wanting to upset his happy mood. “Your bacon is almost ready, Dickie. It won’t be a moment.”