The Passing Bells (27 page)

Cooks were opening five-pound tins of stew and heating the contents over a kerosene fire. Foxe's Fancy Old Irish Stew, Fenton noted wryly. He wondered what Archie would be dining on at his London club. Not his own stew, surely, although it was certainly tasty enough. He ate two helpings and washed it down with a large whiskey and soda. One of the other officers who sat squeezed at the long table which had been designed for children's legs eyed him sourly.

“Where the hell is the First Corps? Should be in position on our right flank by now, shouldn't it?”

“Should be. But it's not . . . and it won't. There's nothing on
their
right flank. The French are falling back all along the line.”

The glum officer toyed with his stew. “Could have told 'em that. Knew it would happen. We should have landed at Antwerp and let the bloody Frogs fight their own war.”

So much for allied cooperation and friendship, Fenton thought as he sipped his whiskey. But why should officers of the II Corps of the British Expeditionary Force have a feeling of comradeship for the French Army when they didn't have it for their own I Corps? A major in the Manchester Regiment was glaring at his Coldstream Guards badges with open hostility. Fenton downed his whiskey and left the room without bothering to thank anyone for the hospitality of the mess.

The HQ was cleared by 2:00
A.M.
as battalion commanders and their aides returned to their units. General Wood-Lacy, slurping away at a mug of steaming tea, continued to pace slowly back and forth in front of a wall map—a pathetically inadequate map but the best one available. Fenton sat behind a child's desk in the schoolroom and watched his uncle in silence. After ten minutes, the general turned away from the map and sat on the edge of a desk, tapping a wooden pointer idly against his booted leg.

“Well, Fenton, tomorrow will be all battle, and Second Corps will go it alone. No matter. We can cut it. We're blessed with Smith-Dorrien as corps commander. A good infantryman. Knew him well in Africa. Zulus almost scuppered him when he was a subaltern as they almost scuppered me. By God, this division won't let him down.”

“What do I do, sir? Seems to me I'm a bit of a fifth wheel around here now.”

“Oh, I dare say I shall keep you busy scurrying about. I can't send you back, can I? Lord knows where your brigade is right now . . . stuck along the road someplace well out of it. No, no, you'll stay attached to my staff for a few more days and earn your keep. You may also learn something about soldiering—that it isn't all walking Buck guard, seducing women, and playing cards.”

Church bells tolled for early mass, but that was the last peaceful sound to be heard that Sunday morning. Fenton slept fitfully in the schoolroom, hunkered down at a desk. He woke to the sound of the bells and the distant clatter of rifle fire. Mess orderlies brought dixies of tea into the rooms for the sleepy-eyed staff officers. The field telephones began to ring.

“The Fourth Middlesex reports contact with the enemy at Obourg bridge.”

A map pin was placed on the spot. Other reports came in, and the sound of distant small-arms fire became more rapid and intense.

“The West Kents and the Royal Fusiliers are heavily engaged. . . . Two Fritz battalions attacking Le Bois Haut . . .”

By ten in the morning German artillery began to open up, and the telephone network to the line battalions started to break down as shellfire cut the wires. Messengers and battalion runners came and went. More dixies of hot tea were brought in along with bully beef and bread. Fenton sat in a corner of the operations room, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes. He felt out of things, a useless mouth to feed. He walked out onto the school play yard in the afternoon and watched the pall of smoke which lay heavily along the northern skyline. The towering slag heaps of the area chopped off visibility to a few hundred yards in any direction. A drab and miserable landscape, but people lived there, built homes, married, raised children, and sent them off each morning to this little dark brick school. Now shells were screaming out of the hot sky and thundering into the earth a mile from the village. The little houses stood waiting for the storm to reach them. Their occupants were gone or leaving; bundles of belongings were piled onto carts, into ancient, wheezing motorcars, in perambulators and two-wheeled dog carts. The shells inched closer to the village, and a haze of red dust from blasted houses obscured the sun. Chunks of debris splattered the yard, and the schoolhouse windows were starting to shatter under the heavy concussions.

It seemed foolish to stand in the open with a good part of Frameries falling about him, so Fenton walked casually back toward the school, aware that a platoon of Highlanders at the far end of the play yard, and prudently under cover, were watching him. It would not do, he thought grimly, for a captain in the Coldstream Guards to run. A piper with a sense of humor blew a few notes of “Johnnie Cope”: “Hey, Johnnie Cope, are ye wauking yet?” The platoon laughed in appreciation, and Fenton doffed his cap to the piper when he reached the school building, a gesture that brought a burst of cheers—followed by a German howitzer shell which turned the center of the play yard into a volcano. The platoon of Royal Scots ducked, a swing and a teeter-totter were blown into lethal fragments, and Fenton dove headfirst through a door.

The headquarters staff was still working efficiently despite the broken glass and fallen plaster that littered the rooms. A medical orderly wrapped a bandage around Fenton's cut head, handed him a tot of rum, and then hurried off to aid the more desperately wounded, who were being brought into the schoolhouse in increasing numbers. Colonel Blythe, hollow eyed and grim faced, spotted Fenton nursing his head in a corner and came quickly over to him.

“Are you all right, lad?”

“Fine,” he said thickly. “Just a knock on the head.”

“Because we've got a job for you. We've received orders to disengage and pull back five miles . . . set up a new line by nightfall. This bloody artillery is getting to be too bloody accurate.”

“What does the general feel about that?”

“Woody wants to stay and fight. He sent a message to GHQ asking for ten machine-gun teams. They won't send them, of course. I doubt if there are ten Vickers guns to spare in the entire army. Anyway, machine guns won't stop cannon, and the Huns are moving batteries of 'em onto our flank. We've got to pull back, but Woody's afraid that once we start retreating there'll be no end to it. He's sure we'll just keep sliding back to the coast.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“We've lost all contact with Fifth Division HQ at Elouges. Get in your car and hurry over there, make certain they know we're pulling back to Sars-la-Bruyère. I'll give you the timetables for the withdrawal. We must coordinate our movements or there'll be frightful gaps in the line.” He shoved a packet of papers into Fenton's hand. “Hurry along. That's the good chap.”

Fenton gave Webber the choice of staying or going along with him. Like any devoted batman, Webber elected to stay “with my officer.” He sat in the front with Lance Corporal Ackroyd, a loaded Lee-Enfield between his knees, convinced by rumors he had heard that hordes of Germans were on the roads disguised as Belgian nuns.

The pattern of the roads forced them due south for a mile before they could hope to turn west toward Elouges. It was a slow mile. The road was choked with artillery and transport turning to go back. Some artillery officers were refusing to turn their teams around, cursing the fact that they had yet to fire their pieces at the enemy. Squads of Tommies from the Wiltshire Regiment were acting as military police, and soon the jam of horses, wagons, and guns was broken and the retreat became an orderly and steady flow to the south.

The road to the west was narrow and twisting, meandering through fields, woods, nameless little villages, and past slag heaps and coal dumps. Streams of infantry crossed the road at a dozen places, moving away from the battle, which still cracked and thundered along the horizon. They were tired men, their uniforms torn and filthy, their faces black with coal dust, but they all appeared cheerful and full of optimism. A lieutenant in the Royal Irish, who flagged the car down to ask directions, told Fenton that they had stopped the Germans in their tracks at the canal.

“Shot them down in droves . . . five rounds rapid all along the line. . . . Didn't have to aim. . . . Came on in masses, shoulder to shoulder. I hear the Kaiser called our army contemptible. Wonder what he thinks now?” The lieutenant felt they were on the verge of a major victory even though they were, in his words, giving up a bit of ground. It seemed to Fenton that more than just a “bit of ground” was being given up. The army was turning its back on an advancing enemy, and it would be a logistic nightmare to get it turned around again. The lieutenant had assumed that the hundred yards or so of his platoon's front was the entire conflict, and he had seen the German attacks on that front wither away under the murderous rifle fire of his marksmen. He had not seen the big map at HQ that revealed the action at Mons as being only a tiny part of a huge battle raging from the Swiss border to Brussels. A battle is more than the sum of its parts. Even a stupendous victory at Mons would mean little or nothing if the French armies were falling back from the frontier, which they seemed to be doing. The tiny British Expeditionary Force was way out on a limb, and if it didn't pull back in a hurry, that limb was going to be chopped off. There was no point in trying to explain any of that to a euphoric young Irishman who felt he had just won the war. Fenton gave him some cigarettes, the directions to Sars-la-Bruyère, and told Lance Corporal Ackroyd to drive on.

No one at 5th Division HQ gave a damn about the withdrawal timetable of the 3rd Division. The pressure on 5th Division's front—and that pressure was severe—made it necessary for the officers to devise their own timetable for retreat. Shells were thudding closer and closer to Elouges and turning the roads into interlocking craters. German troops were across the canal in force and the rear-guard action was becoming desperate. Most of the bridges across the canal had been blown, but large formations of German cavalry supported by infantry were sweeping around the canal east of Conde and taking the division in flank. Coordinated withdrawal was impossible. Each battalion had to pull back when it could.

“Tell Sir Julian that we'll try not to leave any gaps, but we can't possibly guarantee it,” the division commander's ADC said a bit testily. “After all, this isn't Salisbury maneuvers.”

Lance Corporal Ackroyd was pacing restlessly beside the car as Fenton left the HQ building in the town square. A battery of eighteen-pounders in a seedy little park was firing shrapnel at a not-too-distant hill, and firing as rapidly as the crews could load the shells. Webber sat rigidly in the front seat clutching his rifle, head turned, watching the shells splatter the skyline with bursts of black smoke.

“Where to now, sir?” Ackroyd said as he opened the car's rear door. He had to shout to be heard.

Fenton looked at his watch. Four twenty-five. It would be dark by the time they got back to Frameries, and the chances were that the division would have pulled out by then. They would have to catch up with it on the road to Sars-la-Bruyère. He sat on the running board with Ackroyd and went over the map with him. The main road south was starting to clog up badly; transport wagons, gun teams, and troops were already backing up into the town square. To drive into that crush would be folly.

“We can easily go around, sir,” the corporal said. “This is a big, powerful car and the fields are dry as stone. We could cut across country and be at this Sarlabrewer in two hours.”

It sounded reasonable to Fenton, and he made a mental note to recommend Ackroyd for another chevron.

The car plowed through fields of oat and barley, leaving a wake of bent grain, but after a few miles the landscape changed from flat fields to a thickly wooded country interspersed with slate quarries and coal works. A labyrinth of narrow dirt roads, none of which could be found on the map, headed in all directions. They took one that looked promising, but, after two miles of steady travel to the south, the road ended abruptly at a coal mine and they had to turn back and try another. The new road wandered haphazardly south, then west, then south again, going through dense woods, the branches of trees forming a gloomy canopy. At one point Ackroyd had to brake in a hurry to keep from slamming into a troop of French dragoons who suddenly emerged from the shadowed woods at a trot, the horses lathered, the riders gaunt-faced with fatigue, moving across the road in a flood of foam-flecked horsehide and glittering accouterments. They were part of General Sordet's corps screening the BEF's left flank, clattering past in the fading sunlight like ghost cavalry on the way to Waterloo. The woods on the other side of the road swallowed them up.

“Blimey,” an awed Ackroyd murmured. “They don't 'arf look a sight.”

There were more cavalry further down the road—British hussars, a hundred or more walking their tired horses. The khaki-clad troopers looked less splendid than their French counterparts, but more warlike with their Lee-Enfield rifles jutting up from the saddle sheaths. Fenton recognized the major in command, one of the better whist players at the Marlborough Club, and called out to him. The man walked slowly up to the car, leading his horse.

“Hello, Fenton,” he said. “What are you doing out here all on your lonesome?”

“Trying to reach Sars-la-Bruyère.”

“Well, this road will take you there—eventually. But the place is an unholy mess . . . jam-packed with transport, and all of it moving back into France. What's happening up north?”

“Damned if I know exactly. Big fight this morning all along the canal from Mons to Conde. We did well, I think, but the corps's in full retirement nonetheless.”