UNDERTONES OF WAR

By Edmund Blunden.

(London : R. Cobden-Sanderson; 1928.)

---

IX

THE STORM

Marching west from Béthune, we had nothing to trouble us except our packs and the General, who never exhibited his talent for being in all places at once more terrifically. My own place was alongside my friends C. and R. [on charges of fraternizing with the enemy], who, with the prospect of a court-martial, were at first rather quiet, but presently began to be themselves. The rejoiced at least that their equipment was carried on the transport. Mine was not, and every halt was welcome. Our road showed us noble woods, and gentle streams turning water-wheels, and cleanly green and white villages, The battalion was billeted at Auchel, a considerable mining town, for one night; I remember that well because, when we got in at eleven or so, the advance party had not made all their arrangements, and I set out to find shelter for my servant and myself. Seeing a young woman at an upper window, looking out in some wonder at the sudden incursion in the streets, I addressed her with the most persuasive French I could find, and she (note it, recording Angel, or spirit of Sterne, if you did not then) hastened down to give us food and lodging, and next day piano practice and L'Illustration. Emerging from the slag-heaps of Auchel, the battalion moved deviously, but now definitely southward, and came without unusual even to the flimsy outlandish village of Monchy-Breton (known, of course as Monkey Britain), near St. Pol. The weather was heavy and musty, the usual weather of British operations.

Near this place was an extent of open country (chiefly under wheat) which in its ups and downs and occasional thick woodlands resembled the Somme battlefield; Colonel told us that the ground was held to be an excellent facsimile of the scene of our "show". Hardly a man knew so much as the name of the southern village from which we were to attack; but we saw with mixed feelings from our practice that the jumping-off position was one side of a valley, the position to be captured the other side, and all began to be proficient in moving to the particular "strong point" or other objective plotted out for them. Gas was loosed over us; we crouched down in trenches while the roaring heat of the flammenwerfer curled up in black smoke above; a Scottish expert, accompanied by well-fed, wool-clad gymnastic demonstrators, preached to us the beauty of the bayonet, though I fear he seemed to most of us more disgusting than inspiring in that peacefully ripening farmland. In the intervals we bought chocolate from the village women who had tramped out far enough to reach us; and so we passed the time. Our maneuvers and marches were quite hard work, and in the evenings the calm of Monchy-Breton and its mud huts under their heavy verdure was not much insulted.

At battalion headquarters conferences were held over the arrangements for our attack. "Jake" Lintott, the clever assistant-adjutant who had been with the Canadians at Ypres, had drawn a fine bold map of the destined ground and trenches on the reverse of our waterproof table-cloth. When conference began, the table-cloth was turned over, and the map used. One sunny evening after we had been talking out the problems and proceedings of the coming battle, and making all clear with the map, it was felt that something was wrong, and some one turning noted a face at a window. We hurried out to catch a spy, but missed him, if he was one; certainly he was a stranger.

Nothing else distinguished our Monchy-Breton period; after a fine night or two sleeping under the stars, we left its chicken-runs and muddy little cart-tracts about the middle of August, and were entrained at Ligny St. Flochel, between Arras and St. Pol. A German aeroplane hovered above the act, and we sat waiting for the train to start, in a familiar attitude, with trying apprehensions. We traveled with the gravity due to hot summer weather, and found the process better than marching. But the Somme was growing nearer! Leaving the railway, we were billeted one night in a village called Le Souich. The occasion was marked at battalion headquarters by a roast goose, which the old farmer whose house we had invaded had shot at shortest range with the air of a mighty hunter ("Je le tire à l'oeil!" [I shot it by eye!]); and I joyfully remember how Millward, that famed cricketer, gave us an hour's catching practice in the orchard with apples instead of cricket-balls or bombs.

Thence the battalion took the road, in great glare and heat and dust, kilometer after kilometer. The changeful scenery of hills and woods was indeed dramatic and captivating after our long session in the flat country, but as the march wore on most of us were too used up to comment on it. Many men fell out, and officers and non-commissioned officers for the most part were carrying two or three rifles to keep others in their place. At Thievres there was a long halt, and a demand for water; some thrifty inhabitants produced it at so much a bucket, thus giving occasion for a critical pun on the name of the place. The villagers' device for dismantling wells and pumps, and their inquisitive probing for information, disturbed out men's philosophy a little. Eventually the battalion encamped in a solemnly glorious evening at the edge of a great wood called Bois du Warnimont, with the divisional artillery alongside; the stragglers came in, and were sternly told their fault at "orderly room" next day -- we blush to think how many there were, but our experience of marching had recently been meager.

Warnimont Wood, verdant and unmolested, was six or seven miles west of the terrible Beaumont Hamel, but we hardly realized that yet. A reconnoitering party was soon sent up to the line, and I remember thinking (according to previous experience) that I should be able to buy a pencil in the village of Englebelmer, on the way; but when we got there its civilians had all been withdrawn. Therein lay the most conspicuous difference between this district and our old one with the cottagers and débitants continuing their affairs almost in view of the front trench. The majority of the reconnoitering party went on horseback, I on a bicycle; and the weather had turned rainy, and the quality of Somme mud began to assert itself. My heavy machine went slower and slower, and stopped dead; I was thrown off. The brake was clogged with most tenacious mud, typifying future miseries. Presently we reached an empty village called Mesnil, which, although it stood yet in the plausible shape of farmhouses and outbuildings, not shattered into heaps, instantly aroused unpleasant suspicions. Those suspicions were quickly embodied in the savage rush of heavy shrapnel shells, uncoiling their dingy green masses of smoke downwards while their white-hot darts scoured the acre below. On the west side, a muddy sunken lane with thickets of nettles on one bank and some precarious dugouts in the other led past the small brick station, and we turned out of it by two steps up into a communication trench chopped in discolored chalk. It smelt ominous, and there was a gray powder here and there thrown by shell-bursts, with some of those horrible conical holes in the trench sides, blackened and fused, which meant "direct hits" and by big stuff. If ever there was a vile, unnerving, and desperate place in the battle zone, it was the Mesnil end of Jacob's Ladder, among the heavy battery positions, and under enemy observation.

Jacob's Ladder was a long trench, good in parts, stretching from Mesnil with many angles down to Hamel on the River Ancre, requiring flights of stairs at one or two steep places. Leafy bushes and great green and yellow weeds looked into it as it dipped sharply into the green valley by Hamel, and hereabouts the aspect of peace and innocence was as yet prevailing. A cow with a crumpled horn, a harvest cart should have been visible here and there. The trenches ahead were curious, and not so pastoral. Ruined houses with rafters sticking out, with half-sloughed plaster and crazy window-frames, perched on a hillside, bleak and piteous that cloudy morning; derelict trenches crept along below them by upheaved gardens, telling the story of savage bombardment. Further on was a small chalk cliff, facing the river, with a rambling but remarkable dugout in it called Kentish Caves. The front line lay over this brow, and descended to the wooded marshes of the Ancre in winding and gluey irregularity. Running through it towards the German line went the narrow Beaucourt road, and the railway to Miraumont and Bapaume; in the railway bank was a look-out post called the Crow's Nest, with a large periscope. South of the Ancre was massive high ground, and on that a black vapor of smoke and naked tree trunks or charcoal, which I found was called Thièpval Wood. The Somme indeed!

The foolish persistence of ruins that ought to have fallen but stood grimacing, and the dark day, chilled my spirit. Let us stop this war, and walk along to Beaucourt before the leaves fall. I smell autumn again. The Colonel who was showing [Blunden's own Colonel] Harrison the lie of the land betrayed no such apprehension. He walked about, with indicatory stick, speaking calmly of the night's shelling, the hard work necessary to keep the trenches open, and the enemy's advantage of observation, much as if he was showing off his rockery at home; and this confidence fortunately began to grow in me, so that I afterwards regarded the sector as nothing too bad. As we went along the slippery chalk cuttings and past large but thin-roofed and moldy dugouts, it was my duty to choose positions for forward dumps of bombs, ammunitions, water and many other needs, against the approaching battle. When we had made our round, we went back across the village to the colonel's exemplary underground headquarters in Pottage Trench, a clean and quiet little alley under the whispering shadow of aspen trees in a row; and thence, not unwillingly, back further, up Jacob's Ladder to Mesnil, which now smelt stronger still of high explosive, and away.

The battalion moved up to a straggling wood called from its map reference P. 18, near the little town of Mailly-Maillet. Here, three miles from the enemy's guns, it was thought sufficient to billet up in tents (and those, to round off my posthumous discontent, used specimens). Mailly-Maillet was reported to have been until recently a delightful and flourishing little place, but it was in the sere and yellow; its long chateau wall was broken by the fall of shell-struck trees; its church, piously protected against shrapnel by straw mats, had been hit. On the road to the town, we had remarked on almost every cornfield gate the advertisement of "Druon-Lagniez, Quincaillier à Mailly-Maillet"; but, seeking out his celebrated shop, one found it already strangely ventilated, and its dingy remnants of cheap watches or brass fittings on the floor somehow disappointing to the expectation. In a garden solitude of this little town there rose a small domed building, as yet but a trifle disfigured, with plaster and glass shaken down to the mosaic floor, in the middle of which stood the marble tomb of a great lady, a princess, if I do not forget, of a better century. There the pigeons fluttered and alighted; and the light through the high pale-tinted panes seemed to rest with inviolable grace on holy ground.

Work at Hamel immediately called for me, with a party of good warriors, duly paraded and commanded by my invincible friend Sergeant Worley. The first night that we reached the village, wild with warfare, rain was rushing down, and we willingly waited for dawn in a musty cellar, wet through, yet not anxious on that account. I had already chosen the nooks and corners in the front line where I would make up in readiness for our battle small reserves of rations, rifle ammunition, grenades, reels of barbed wire, planks, screw pickets, wire netting, sandbags; my party therefore took up their burdens from the central stores in Hamel, and followed me to different points. The chief dump in Hamel lay between a new but not water-proof residence (its back door opening on Thiepval), and a tall hedge with brambles straying over our stacks of planks and boxes, making a scene passably like the country builder's yard. A soldiers' cemetery was open at all hours just behind this kind illusion. I may say that we worked hard, up and down, and even felt a little proud as the forward stores grew to useful size. When the Brigade bombing officer, suddenly pouncing upon me in a lonely trench, told me that my boxed of bombs at one place would all by ruined by exposure to the weather, and that he should report me to the General, I damned him and wept. My critic (an old adversary) had just arrived from England. But I was afraid of the General. Apart form that, there was no great trouble; once, carelessly stacking some bombs above the parados in sight of some enemy post, we returned with the next consignment to find nothing but new shell holes there. All day long that valley was echoing with bombardment, but for the most part it was on Thièpval Wood that the fury thundered; and we, at meal-times, sat freely like navvies in some ruin and put away considerable quantities of bread, bully, and cheese. And how well we knew our Hamel! The "Café du Centre" was as real to us as the Ritz, though now it was only some leaning walls and a silly signboard. The insurance agent's house, with its gold bee sign still inviting custom (not in our line!); the stuffed pheasant by his glass dome, drooping a melancholy beak and dishonored plumage, opposite our duckboard and wire repository; the superior hip bath lying on the roadside towards the line; the spring of beautiful clear drink there; the level-crossing keeper's red house, with its cellars full of petrol-tins of water, in the direction of Thiepval -- these and every other lineament of poor Hamel photographed themselves in us. The ridiculously fat tom-cat which had refused to run wild knew us well. We humped our boxes of deadly metal past the agricultural exhibition of innocent metal on the wayside; what were plows and drags and harrows to Hamel now? What rural economist had collected them there?

The date of the attack was suddenly postponed. A runner discovered me, with this news. We went back to the wood in which the battalion, not too well pleased with its surroundings, had dug short protective lengths of trench. These, however, could not protect us from a plague of wasps, and the engineers had to add to their varied service that of clearing some monstrous nests with gun-cotton. After an agreeable evening passed in exploring the rambling streets of Mailly, and in watching a huge howitzer in action, few with shells by means of a pulley, and those shells large enough to be seen plainly mounting up to the sky before they disappeared in annihilating descent upon "Thiepval Crucifix", we turned in. I was as bold as Harrison and others, and put on my pajamas; but at midnight the shriek of shells began, meant for our camp, and we slipped shivering into the nearest slit of trench. There were gas shells, and high explosive, and samples of both missed our trench by yards; the doctor, who was huddling next to me with his monkey in his arms, was suddenly affected by the gas, and his pet also swallowed some. They were both "sent down the line"; but I was unharmed. When the hate was over, it seemed perhaps difficult to sleep again, warm as the blankets might be, and it was one more case of waiting for daylight.

Expecting that I should not again see that wood, I went up next night with some heavy materials for the dump in Hamel, carried on the limbers. The transport officer, Maycock, was with us, which is saying we talked all the way. At Mesnil church, a cracked and toppling obelisk, there were great craters in the road, and when one of the limbers fell in, it was necessary to unload it before it could be got out. While this delay lasted, in such a deadly place, my flesh crept, but luck was ours, and no fresh shells came over to that church before we were away. The journal into Hamel that evening was unforgettable. One still sees in rapid gun-lights the surviving fingerpost at the fork in the unknown road. It helped us. As we plodded down the dark hill, the blackness over by Thiepval Wood leapt alive with tossing flares, which made it seem a monstrous height, and with echo after echo in stammering mad pursuit the guns threshed that area; uncounted shells passed with savage whip cracks, and traveled meteor-like with lines of flame through the brooding sultry air. One scarcely seemed to be alive and touching earth, but soon the voices of other beings sounded, at Hamel Dump, like business -- "Back in 'ere, lad." "Any more? The following day I had an opportunity to improve my small forward dumps, and to choose with Sergeant Rhodes, the master-cook, a "retired spot" where he might prepare the rum and coffee, to be served to the attacking troops. This matter introduced an incident. All day, on and off, our guns were battering the German trenches, and one saw almost without a thought our salvoes bursting every few minutes on such tender points as trench junctions, clearly marked in that sector of chalk parapets and downland. The German guns answered this brilliant provocation unexpectedly. Thus, as the thin and long cook-sergeant and I were walking comfortably in Roberts Trench, the air about us suddenly became ferocious with whiz-bangs, the parapets before and behind sprang up in clods and roarings; there seemed no way out. They were hitting the trench. Rhodes stared at me, I at him for a suggestion; his lean face presented the wildest despair, and no doubt mine was the same; we ran, we slipped and crouched one way and the other, but it was like a cataract both ways. And then, sudden quite; more to come? Nothing; a reprieve.

Another postponement took me dustily back to the battalion in the wood watched by so many German observation balloons in the morning sun. The wood, shelled deliberately because of its camps and accidentally because of some conspicuous horse-lines and silhouetted movements on the hill to the west, had frayed the men's keenness; there had been casualties; and then the anticlimax twice repeated had spoiled their first energetic eagerness for a battle. Yet, still, there were a sound and capable battalion, deserving far better treatment than there were now getting, and a battle, not a massacre, when they left their wretched encampment. On the evening of September 2, the battalion moved cautiously from Mailly-Maillet by cross-country tracks, through pretty Englebelmer, with ghostly Angelus on the green and dewy light, over the downs to Mesnil, and assembled in the Hamel trenches to attack the Beaucourt ridge next morning. The night all round was drowsily quiet. I stood at the junction of four forward trenches, directing the several companies into them as had been planned. Not one man in thirty had seen the line by daylight -- and it was a maze even when seen so, map in hand. Even getting out of the narrow steep trenches with weighty equipment, and crossing others, threatened to disorder the assault. Every man remembered the practice attacks at Monchy-Breton, and was ready, if conditions were equal, to act his part; among other things, the "waves" had to form up and carry out a "right incline" in No Man's Land -- a change of direction almost impossible in the dark, in broken and entangled ground, and under concentrated gunfire. When the rum and coffee was duly on the way to these men, I went off to my other duty. A carrying-party from another battalion was to meet me in Hamel, and for a time the officer and I, having nothing to do but wait, sat in a trench along the village street considering the stars in their courses. An unusual yet known voice jubilantly interrupted this unnaturally calm conversation; it was a sergeant-major, a fine soldier who had lost his rank for drunkenness, won it again, and was now going over in charge of a party carrying trench mortar ammunition. A merry man, a strong man; when we had met before, he had gained my friendliest feelings by his freedom from any feeling against a schoolboy officer. Some N.C.O.'s took care to let their superior training and general wisdom weigh on my shyness : not so C. He referred to the attack as one might speak of catching a train, and in it a few hours later he showed such wonderful Saint Christopher spirit that he was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. Meanwhile, all waited.

The cold disturbing air and the scent of the river mist marked the approach of the morning. I got my fellow-officer to move his men nearer to my main supply of bombs, which were ready in canvas buckets; and time slipped by, until scarcely five preliminary minutes remained. My friend then took his men into cellars not far away, there to shelter while the bombardment opened; for their orders were to carry bombs to our bombing officer, young French, who was ordered to clear the suspected German dugouts under the railway bank, a short time after the attacking waves had crossed. As for me, I took off my equipment and began to set out the bomb buckets in a side trench so that the carriers could at the right moment pick them up two at a time; and while I was doing this, and the east began to unveil, a stranger in a soft cap and a trench coat approached, and asked me the way to the German lines. This visitor was white-faced as a ghost, and I liked neither his soft cap nor the mackintosh nor the right hand concealed under his coat. I, too, felt myself grow pale, and I thought it as well to show him the communication trench, Devial Alley, then deserted; he scanned me, and quickly went on. Who he was, I have never explained to myself; but in two minutes the barrage opened, and his chances of doing us harm (I thought he must be a spy) were all gone.

The British barrage opened. The air gushed in hot surges along that river valley, and uproar never imagined by me swung from ridge to ridge. The east was scarlet with dawn and the flickering gun-flashers; I thanked God I was not in the assault, and joined the subdued carriers nervously lighting cigarettes in one of the cellars, sitting there on the steps, studying my watch. The ruins of Hamel were crashing chaotically with German shells, and jags of iron and broken wood and brick whizzed past the cellar mouth. Which I gave the word to move, it was obeyed with no pretense of enthusiasm. I was forced to shout and swear, and the carrying party, some with shoulders hunched as if in a snowstorm, dully picked up their bomb buckets and went ahead. The wreckage around seemed leaping with flame. Never had we smelt high explosive so thick and foul, and there was no distinguishing one shell-burst from another, save by the black or tawny smoke that suddenly appeared in the general miasma. We walked along the river road, passed the sandbag dressing-station that had been built only a night or two earlier where the front line crossed the road, and had already been battered in; we entered No Man's Land, but we could make very little sense of ourselves or the battle. There were wounded Highlanders trailing down the road. They had been in the marshes of the Ancre, trying to take a machine-gun post called Summer House. Ahead, the German front line could not be clearly seen, the water-mist and the smoke veiling it; and this was lucky for the carrying party. Halfway between the trenches, I wished them good luck, and point out the place where they should, according to plan, hand over the bombs, I left them in charge of their own officer, returning myself, as my orders were, to my colonel. I passed good men of ours, in our front line, staring like men in a trance across No Man's Land, their powers of action apparently suspended.

"What's happening over there," asked Harrison, with a face all doubt and stress, which I crawled into the candled, overcrowded frowziness of Kentish Caves. I could not say. "What's happening the other side of the river?" All was in ominous discommunication. A runner called Gosden presently came in, with bleeding breast, bearing a message written an hour or more earlier. It did not promise well, and, as the hours passed, all that could be made out was that our attacking companies were "hanging on", some of them in the German third trench, where they could not at all be reached by the others, dug in between the first and the second. Lintott wrote message after message, trying to share information north, east and west. Harrison, the seat standing on his forehead, thought out what to do in this deadlock, and repeatedly telephoned to the guns and the general. Wounded men and messengers began to crowd the scanty passages of the Caves, and curt roars of explosion just outside announced that these dugouts, shared by ourselves and the Black Watch, were now to be dealt with. Death soon arrived there, among the group at the clumsy entrance. Harrison meanwhile called for his runner, fastened the chin-strap of his steel helmet, and pushed his way out into the top trenches to see what he could; returned presently, with that kind of sever laugh which tells the tale of a man who has incredibly escaped from the barrage. The day was hot outside, glaring mercilessly upon the burned, choked chalk trenches. I came in again to the squeaking field telephones and obscure candlelight. Presently Harrison, a message in his hand, said: "Rabbit, they're short of ammunition. Get round and collect all the fellows you can and tame them over -- and stay over there and do what you can." I felt my heard thud at this; went out, naming my men among headquarters "odds and ends" wherever I could find them squatted under the chalk banks, noting with pleasure that my nearest dump had not been blown up and would answer our requirements; I served our bombs and ammunition, then thrust my head in again to report that I was starting, when he delayed, and presently cancelled, the enterprise. The shells on our breathless neighborhood seemed to fall more thickly, and the dreadful spirit of waste and impotence sank into us, when a sudden report from an artillery observer warned us that that were Germans in our front trench. In that case Kentish Caves was a death-trap, a hole in which bombs would be bursting within a moment; yet here at last was something definite, and we all seemed to come to life and prepared with our revolvers to try our luck.

The artillery observer must have made some mistake. Time passed without bombs among us or other surprise, and the collapse of the attack was wearily obvious. The bronze noon was more quite but not less deadly than the morning. I went round the scarcely passable hillside trenches, but they were amazingly lonely; suddenly a sergeant-major and half a dozen men bounded superhumanly, gasping and excited, over the parapets. They had been lying in No Man's Land, and at last had decided to "chance their arm" and dodge the machine-guns which had been perseveringly trying to get them. They drank pints of water, of which I had luckily a little store in a dugout there, now wrecked and gaping. I left them sitting wordless in that store. The singular part of the battle was that no one, not even these, could say what had happened, or what was happening. One vaguely understood that the waves had found their maneuver in No Man's Land too complicated; that the Germans' supposed derelict forward trench near the railway was joined by tunnels to their main defense, and enabled them to come up behind our men's backs; that they had used the bayonet where challenged, with the boldest readiness; "used the whole dam lot, minnies, snipers, rifle-grenades, artillery"; that machine-guns from the Thiepval ridge south of the river were flaying all the crossings of No Man's Land. "Don't seem as if the 49th Div. got any further." But the general effect was the disappearance of the attack into mystery.

Orders for withdrawal were sent out to our little groups in the German lines towards the end of the afternoon. How the runners got there, they alone could explain, if any survived. The remaining few of the battalion in our own positions were collected in the trench along Hamel village street, and a sad gathering it was. Some who had been in the waves contrived to rejoin us now. How much more fortunate we seemed than those who were still in the German labyrinth awaiting the cover of darkness for their small chance of life! And yet, as we filed out, up Jacob's Ladder, we were warned by low-bursting shrapnel not to anticipate. Mesnil was its vile self, but we passed at length. Not much was said, then or afterwards, about those who would never again pass that hated target; among the killed were my old company commanders Penruddock and Northcote (after a great display of coolness and endurance) -- laughing French, quiet Hood, and many more. The Cheshires took over the front line, which the enemy might at one moment have occupied without difficulty; but neither they nor our own patrols succeeded in bringing in more than two or three of the wounded; and, the weather turning damp, the Germans increased their difficulty in the darkness and distorted battlefield with a rain of gas shells.

 

X

A HOME FROM HOME

For the moment, our much impaired battalion was billeted in Englebelmer, a sweet village scarcely yet spoiled. James Cassells (who had spent the day in the shell-holes between the German trenches) and myself were ordered to look after one of the two makeshift companies. Cassells had spoken of the prospect of "sitting in the barrage with the wind whistling through his hair," but now he said nothing of the full experience. He was wondering how he was alive. Our billet was a chemist's house, well furnished, with ledgers and letters strewn about from open bureaux, chiefly from poor people in Thiepval and other places of the past who bemoaned the bad crops, and their consequent inability to pay up. Again autumn had come! Crops were still bad.

We were an affectionate pair, and poetically minded. With a little rum and much rhyme, taking a quiet side room as our own, we gave each other a sturdy goodnight. Hoarse and ponderous roars of high explosive in the orchard outside interrupted that night, which we unwillingly finished in the cellar. Englebelmer, indeed, was now entering upon a dark period. Its green turf under trees loaded with apples was daily gouged out by heavy shells; its comfortable houses were struck and shattered, and the paths and entrances gagged with rubble, plaster and woodwork. Still, we explored the church, into which opened a mysterious tunnel; as if on holiday, we examined the brightly painted saints and the other sacred objects from gallery to vault; and, hard by, found a large collection of the Englebelmer parish magazine, which was and was not interesting.

Reorganized, the battalion was quickly sent back to the more obvious kind of war. My batman and a large number of his cronies used to spell the name of our new locality "Ocean Villas", but it appears on the map as Auchonvillers. In retrospect, I confess that we were lucky to take over trenches there, even though they faced some bases of red walls and decapitated trees, the outward signs of Beaumont Hamel. Auchonvillers at that time was a good example of the miscellaneous, picturesque, pitiable, pleasing, appalling, intensely intimate village ruin close to the line. As we go up to the new sector, we must pass through, and we will look about us.

The direct road from Engelbelmer over the downs is too generally exposed for a battalion relief. The battalion moves round through Mailly-Maillet, in whose purlieus, where the apples are falling and the leaves beginning to change their tint, the huge throat of the howitzer is still being elevated to hurl horror at Thiepval Crucifix. For Thiepval is not yet captured; and we have heard that on September the Third the 49th Division could not get twenty years forward from Thiepval Wood -- oh, forget September the Third. We are still in the Somme battle, and probably only just beginning. Meanwhile, between the curious concrete obelisks which here are used for telegraph posts, we enter Mailly, and turn at the church, still neatly jacketed with straw, but with a new hole or two in it, along a leafy side-road; another turn, and are between excellent meadow-grounds, which lack only a few fat sheep, an old molecatcher, and some crows. Groups of shell-holes, however, restrain the fancy from useless excursions, and, sitting under some tall slender elms on a convenient bank for a few moments' rest, we keep our ears eastwardly attentive. Crossing a light railway, we are in Auchonvillers. The large logs by the roadside speak of former French activity here; our own engineers do not make their dugouts with such timber. The mildew-ridden bomb store also has a French style, and is full of antiquated cricket-ball grenades and others with tennis-bat handles, which we had best leave alone. Outside, on a kind of gallows, hangs a church bell, beautifully dark green, the gift of some fantastic ancient "seigneur de Mailly", as its fair engraved inscriptions boasts. Perhaps the giver would not be wholly indignant if he knew that his bell was being used (as another chalk inscription on its advises) as a gas alarm; doubtless he intended it for the good of humanity.

The heart of the village is masked with its hedges and orchards from almost all ground observation. That heart nevertheless bleeds. The old homes are razed to the ground ; all but one or two, which play involuntary tricks upon probability, balancing themselves like mad acrobats. One has been knocked out in such a way that its thatched roof, almost uninjured, has dropped over its broken body like a tea-cozy. The church maintains a kind of conception shape, and has a cliff-like beauty in the sunlight; but at this ecclesiastical corner visitors are sometimes killed we may, in general, allow distance to lend enchantment. Up that naked road is the stern eye of Beaumont Hamel -- turn, Amaryllis, turn -- this way the tourist's privacy is preserved by ruins and fruitful branches.

Someone was telling us lately he had often taken coffee in the Auchonvillers estaminets. Doubtless he could explain that roomy building with the red cross painted on it; it seems irrelevant now. Here is a walnut tree, under it a rubble-heap, and on the other side of the road another rubble-heap. Reserve company headquarters : but who's to know that? The enemy apparently knows it. Here is a sandbag sentry-box, with the inscription, "Sam's Abode". The roadway close to it has a distressed look. Poor Sam. But now we come to some very respectable and sizable farm buildings, with conspicuous holes in the bottom of the walls, admitting to desired cellars, and nettles flocking rankly about the gaping windows, and even green doors hanging a little recklessly on their hinges. Odd sensation, we feel that it is good for us to be here. We look back at the church's white and gray hulk, not three hundred yards away, and do not like that look. A mound of those trench mortar bombs called footballs, shot out on the roadside like potatoes -- more where these come from! -- marks the garden of the last house-block in Auchonvillers; then we walk under the lee of a damp-smelling bank of chalk, along a chalky track, pick a blackberry from the bramble which takes a fancy to our khaki, and enter that long and noted trench, Second Avenue.

The French had modeled Auchonvillers comprehensively as a large redoubt, complete with a searchlight, but now it all seemed out of use and in need of an antiquary. There were many dugouts under houses and in the gardens, but of a flimsy, rotted, and stagnant kind; the Somme battle had evidently swamped all old defense schemes, and destroyed the continuity of "taking over". Forward, the trenches were numerous and reliable, although they, too, had got out of hand, thanks to the confusion consequent upon the disaster of July 1. It was remarkable that they remained as serviceable as they were. But there was much to do for them, and Colonel Harrison soon re-elected me Field Works Officer. Meanwhile, I had spent a day or two in Auchonvillers with the reserve company, exploring everywhere for trustworthy dugouts, and finding many uncharted but uninviting ones. The post which had to be maintained near the church had scarcely been manned, and I had just visited the section there, when a shell tore a road into their cellar and killed and wounded almost all. At night, too, that company headquarters under the walnut tree was again and again treated to salvoes of shells. The servants, bringing over our dinner in the dark, judging the time -- a plate of soup in each hand, for instance -- felt a comical but also real terror, and when we found that our dugout roof of brickbats and earth, instead of being yards thick, was scarcely more than a decent veil against publicity, we also acknowledged the disturbance. Nor, though great energy with spade and "air spaces" and steel girders succeeded, did I object to leaving this den for battalion headquarters alongside Second Avenue.

It was the weather when leave begin to turn, and sing a little dryly in the wind; when spiders apparently spend the night in making webs on fences; and when the distances dare assume the purple as the sunset dislimns. As far as battalion headquarters, one might notice these nocturnal effects. Beyond that point, the facts and probabilities of war obscured them. One's fine fancy was smothered with the succession of typewritten decrees, SECRET or CONFIDENTIAL one and all, the collection of maps and diagrams with their gaudy green and yellow and matter-of-fact symbols; my artistic appetite accepted as it chief nourishment the eternal design -- TO DUMP >>-->. I enjoyed my work, which took me up and down from the dreary and mutilated front line opposite Beaumont Hamel to where the lithe young poplars stood lightly sighing at the extremity of Auchonvillers' orchards. The long communication trenches were daily repaired and even beautified by "maintenance parties", seven or eight men in each, of which I had charge; and in addition I had to keep a critical eye on all the system of trenches, and to urge the company commanders to "do something about" this collapsing firestep and that overwhelmed bomb-store. The sector began to look extremely neat -- except the front line, which remained impressionist, and bulged and silted at its own sweet will. Our handling of duckboards, and digging of drainage pits, called "sumps", earned us applause; nay envy; even Harrison joined one afternoon in digging out a sump par excellence, six feet below the trench bottom -- and it would have been deeper, but in the obsession of rapture we flung up a shovelful or two of earth over the parapet, and the observant Germans gave us notice with several large and well-placed shells.

Recollection paints these autumn weeks in the Beaumont Hamel sector as a tranquil time. Naturally, there on the edge of the Thiepval inferno, there were ungentle interludes. One night in particular the front line was stubbornly bombarded with minenwerfers (it was a minenwerfer sector, and one often turned cold in the fire trench as one heard the approaching swish of these monsters). As we had little or no wire in front, and as the line now lay exposed and helpless, Harrison anticipated a German raid, and C. and I lay most of the night waiting for it in the new shell-holes, with a set of the trustiest soldiers, fingering bombs in a contemplative fashion. There was no raid; but a shock awaited me. When next morning's sun gilded even the barbed wire, I looked in early at my store dugout to decide how many duckboards were needed to make up the proper reserve. I looked in. The sun gleamed through the crannies there on the unutterably mangled heads and half-naked bodies of the poor fellows, victims of the minenwerfer bombardment, who had been carried there to await burial.

Other lacerations fell on the battalion in connection with the attacks on Thiepval south of the river. This name Thiepval began to have as familiar and ugly a ring as any place ever mentioned by man; and as yet we knew it by report only. Our present business was to divert some of the enemy's heavy artillery from it when another forlorn hope was clutching the air before it; we made ostentatious "smoke attacks", which gave me a change of employment. These attacks deluded some German machine-gunners, and drew some shell-fire perhaps intended rather as a snub to impudence than as a genuine display of anxiety. The regimental sergeant-major, talented and gentlemanly Daniels, was ordered, about four one afternoon, to provide several hundred men of straw, which were to be raised above the parapet amid a heavy smoke cloud next morning. There was no straw. But with sandbags and grass and whatever trench theatricalities we could gather, by the aid of the regimental police, the ingenious man produced some 190 dummies before midnight. And, I think, scarcely a dummy was lifted next morning without becoming a casualty to the machine-guns. A good joke : but with this sub-audible meaning, that the operators might have been playing the part of these marionettes, and no doubt would be yet.

Poor Daniels, my good old friend! Your Auchonvillers dugout was better than nothing, but . . . He shared a dark and wandering hole, an underground workshop, with the Aid Post, and the stores taken over by the Aid Post included a number of ancient blankets. The blankets were probably the lousiest in all Christendom. Nevertheless, we others over the way had skill to sympathize. The doctor and myself slept in a long, deep, French dugout, with a heavy timbered roof, quite warm, and scarcely less insectiferous. At night, when the read burst of shrapnel clanged over the support trench there, one was glad to go down; but a scratchiness was always mingled with one's satisfactions in such a menagerie.

Days passed, weeks passed, and it began to appear that we were growing like hermit crabs into the sector. Artillery liaison officers came, went, returned, and renovated the wit the musical education of battalion headquarters at dinner. The apartments of those headquarters were improved within and without. Beside the old Beaumont Hamel road, in a dangerous and unvisited place, lay a large and forgotten mass of carpentering stores, ranging from thick timber to beautiful axes; on my drawing attention to these, Jake Lintott led a number of hands, glad to be busy, to the place in the evenings. Plans and elevations of dugouts for the winder were pouring in from experts behind the line, and for once we produced something more or less corresponding to the scientific schedule. Honest labor. I began the private enterprise of building a new wash-house, but my excavations disturbed something, and I retired. My own job allowed me a free-lance variety which others wanted. Now I could be whiling away a foolhardy hour with a trench catapult ("Gamage's"), which, Cassells and I discovered, would readily toss a Mills bomb far enough to burst as shrapnel over the huge crater in front of the German line; now I was surveying the whole line with reference to its being prepared for winter tenancy, or listening at the foot of the mineshaft in hateful Hunter Street for the subterraneous sounds there spelling danger. Once I caught a stray mongrel, cleaned him and dried him in gentlemanly sort with a sandbag, kept him with me on my round, dug him a small recess, put in a couch of new bags, attached him to an old bayonet driven into the chalk. But what are human hopes? He went. I think I gave him W.H. Davies' Corned Beef by mistake, an unpopular brand, so he may have thought me a danger. Once I walked back to Mailly, to gather from the Engineers' yard a consignment of duckboards and frames, and next to the dump I picked my way into the outraged house of a notary -- a man after my own heart! There were books everywhere, on the floor, in cases, on chairs, and even on the window-sills. On them the plaster and window-glass had been powdered, the rain had dripped and spouted; yet still they stood, a luxuriant legion of general literature in bright blue or red morocco, and ivory-smooth vellum, awaiting death. When I saw scattered about the porch and the door-steps, unreverenced by the sappers in charge, a number of volumes less splendidly arrayed, and reflected that at battalion headquarters the charms of our library -- O. Henry, the "Field Service Pocket Book" and "Spoon River -- were now rather withered, I could not but snatch up four or five, and bear them trench-wards in a sandbag. The heavyweight was a seventeenth-century treatise on Country Houses, which gave us no practicable ideas for the embellishment of our dugout, but would be a suitable kind of heirloom, if we stayed much longer before Beaumont. Another passing contribution of mine to the gaieties of our home was made during a visitation of German gas shells, when it was alleged that I went to sleep in my flannel mask. (At present only the Colonel had a box respirator.) I did not recollect it, yet this was urged as a confirmation of the feat.

But I recall the singular, phantasmal appearance of another wealthy house in Mailly. The Engineers used it as a headquarters. Its large drawing-room was furnished in delicate Arcadian style, the suite and the curtains being of a silver-gray silk, the piano of a light volatile design and clear tinge answering it; the tall windows wee blocked with sandbags thoughtfully painted white, as though they, too, would harmonize! Perhaps the hues of dust and dimness helped them somewhat in this impossibility. The room was unreal and supernatural, nor did I feel easy about the spirit's attitude towards my drinking my whisky by that incredible piano. Surely strange music would begin in tones of protest and prophecy. How long, I wonder, was it before the spell was snapped and the day gaped impudently through irreparable shell-holes on these exorcised haunters?

Looking back towards safety from the Auchonvillers trenches, one daily saw a high crucifix at the end of the town, silvered and silhouetted in the sunset. Before we came away, this sad sculpture had fallen, and it was penitential weather. News had indeed been solemnly circulated that the battles in the south were expected to be decisive; even the phrase occurred, "no winder campaign might be necessary". The first tall stories concerning the almightiness of the tank (which though so near us was as yet an unknown thing to us) had come. Something as big as a house was adumbrated, and the Germans wee described as feeling completely overwhelmed. As usual, they were not overwhelmed where we happened to be facing them. However, perhaps the overcast sky denied us a continual freshness, and it was not much of an event after all when under that colorless cloud-veil one afternoon we were taken out of the trenches held so long -- over three weeks. The General had communicated the move at short notice to Harrison by telephone, using some cryptographic transparency of his own invention -- "You will have your tea this evening, Harrison, where I told you", or something like that. The relief was accordingly confirmed by the German gunners, and the dirty brown smoke of their parting presents could be seen sprouting on the parapets and communications at a score of points at once while our companies handed over.

 

XI

VERY SECRET

We marched to Martinsart Wood, with its huge howitzers, its mud, its confusion of hutments and tents and bivouacs, and yet its sylvan genius lingering in one or two steep thorny thickets. There, the exceedingly scanty list of honors won on September 3, and consolatory remembrances from the Divisional General, were published to us. Harrison was not excited by this diluted elixir. Meanwhile the men spent hours in contemplating those big guns and their shells chalked with monotonous jokes about the Kaiser and Crown Prince. Some, unluckier, were detailed to join some unlucky officers in a reconnaissance party to Thiepval Wood.

Thiepval, key of that region where the Ancre curves southward, had at length fallen to the British; and yet the Germans might recapture it, if they could make its north flank, Thiepval Wood, still more of an inferno than ever. This they were efficiently doing. But I anticipate -- I would have you see that little reconnaissance in its natural, or unnatural evolution. Date yourself 1916, and come; the autumn day is moody, the ground churned and greasy; leave Martinsart Wood, the poor dear platoon scrubbing equipment, coaxing stray dogs, looking for canteens, and scrawling letters. We cross the Nab, that sandy sunk road, and, if we are not mad, the ancient sequestered beauty of an autumn forest haunts there, just over the far ridge. Aveluy Wood, in thy orisons be all our sins remembered. Within, it is strangely uninhabited; the moss is rimy, its red leaves make a carpet not a thread less fine than those in kings' houses. But enough of this minor poetry; here the wood-path comes out on a lonely and solemn highway. There are signposts pointing between the trees beyond, "Ride to Black Horse Bridge", and others, French and English; but we turn along the road, unmolested, unimagining. It leads to a chasm of light between the trees, and then we have on our left hand a downland cliff or quarry, on our right hand a valley rich in trees. One tall red house stands up among them. Why? Why not? There is no roaring in the air. But here we leave the road, and file along the railway track, which, despite all the incurable entanglements of its telegraph wires, might yet be doing its duty; surely the 2:30 for Albert will come round the bend puffing and clanking in a moment?

Below, among mighty trees of golden leaf, and some that lie prone in black channels as primeval saurians, there is a track across the lagooned Ancre. A trolley-line crosses, too, but disjointedly; disjointedness now dominated the picture. When we have passed the last muddy pool and derailed truck, we come into a maze of trenches, disjointed indeed; once, plainly, of nice architecture and decoration, now a muddle of torn wire netting and twisted rails, of useless signboards, of foul soaked holes and huge humps -- the old British system looking up toward lofty Thiepval. And Thiepval Wood is two hundred yards on, scowling, but at the moment dumb; disjointed, burnt, unchartable. Let us find, for we must, Gordon House, a company headquarters; and we scuttle in the poisoned presence of what was once fresh and green around unknown windings of trenches. "Over the top" would be simpler and less exhausting; it is the far edge of the wood now; we must have come too far forward. Gordon House, someone finds out from his map, is behind us. We crawl or scamper along the wood edge as the plainest route, and are at once made the target for a devil's present of shells; they must get us; they do not. Shell after shell hisses past our heads into the inundations of the Ancre, below this shoulder of brown earth, lifting as high as the hill wild sputtering founts of foam and mud. God! Golly! The next salvo -- and here's that dugout. A stained face stared out. "I shouldn't stand there, if I were you : come in." "No, I'm all right : don't want to be in the way." "Come in, blast you; just had two men killed where you are."

Time-values have changed for the moment from furious haste to geological calm when one enters that earthy cave with its bunk beds, squatting figures under their round helmets, candles stuck long-ways on the woodwork, and officers at their table shared by the black-boxed field telephone, soda-bottles and mugs, revolvers and strewn papers. One of these officers, a boy who is addressed as "Cupid", is provoked by our naïve surprise at the highly dangerous condition of Thiepval Wood Left. "Barrage? We relieved through a barrage." (How mildly sweet might it now have appeared to be able to take over trenches at Cuinchy!) "You can rely on a barrage here pretty well the whole time." At last we have learned something of the defense scheme of this sector, and by way of friendly general information the present inmates of Gordon House admit that its roof, though in appearance quite generously thick, is not thick enough : not nearly! But appearance has it virtues.

Escaping as hastily and inconspicuously as our slight local knowledge allows, we wind through the morass, while the scattered roaring lessens in our ears, and the voices of waterfowl just reach our numbed attention. Harrison, whom we have met at an appointed corner, bustles along on the tramline sleepers, full of combat with the immediate future: "That spot will just suit you, Rabbit. Colonel Rayley tells me that the Germans send up bombing parties of fifty every day about noon, along the C.T. from St. Pierre Divion. There's a bombing-block for you and Cassells to keep going." The daylight is fading now, and the red of autumn grows dusky all about us; mist, thick in the throat, comes out of the wild valley. A "hate" begins. Flames and flashes kindle the vague wood. What a night we leave behind us!

It turned out when we reached our camp that we were after all to be spared the threatened ordeal in Thiepval Wood. New orders had come, and we were to go in again at Hamel. Immediately Harrison rode off to consult authorities (the Black Watch headquarters) about the place, of which he had already had a life's experience in one inexpressible day. Gratefully now we took over the Hamel positions, the stairs and cuts in the hillside so sublimely exposed, the maze of disprivileged trenches principally useless. All eyes were drawn to the storm center, the savage scenery of the ridge south of the river, whence our coming and goings were so unpleasantly eyed and menaced.

Fine days succeeded, and moonlit nights, temperate nights with their irresistible poetry creating a silver lake in the borders of Thiepval's lunatical wood, a yellow harvest on the downs towards Mesnil the mortuary. It was possible for me with my odd jobs "to go for walks" in these hours of illusion, and seldom were they spoiled by direct opposition. We had our troubles. Among these was the enormous British trench motor, then called the Flying Pig, which hurled its shells as much into our area as the opposite trenches. There were several capricious enemy bombardments by the heaviest guns, and machine-guns were ever snarling at us : moreover, in the curiously unchartable complication of our long-stretched sub-sector, it seemed that we had in the phrase of the time "a pet sniper", for occasionally in daylight and in places of unquestioned security, a bullet would crack past or thump into the parapet. In these days indiscriminate rifle fire, once so familiar, was practically extinct. Our Lewis-gunners found themselves one or two coigns of vantage, form which the enemy's rash movements in St. Pierre Divion on the other side of the Ancre were seen and challenged. A horse and cart even came to a dugout entrance there one day; our artillery were also looking; the horse and cart never went back.

My trench maintenance parties with hammers and choppers, saws and nails were lodged in Hamel village; they made themselves comfortable in cellars, and went to and fro in the exact and ordinary manner of the British working man. One, by turns, stayed at home to cook; the others kept the line tidy, and left no staircase, recess nor buttress unbeautified. They enjoyed this form of active service with pathetic delight -- and what men were they? willing, shy, mostly rather like invalids, thinking of their families. Barbusse would have "got them wrong", save in this : there were all doomed. Almost all finished their peaceful lives a few days afterwards in the fury at Stuff Trench. Leaving them at their suburban carpentering in the sunlight, I could go for an hour's exploring. Old curiosities, here a lousy mattress on ancient boxes of bombs, there a bureau or a bookcase, kept one's mind in a strange emotion. A farmer's pea-jacket hung in a shed beside the cook's wet socks; a great fuse (Dopp. KZ) and blood-stained equipment lay in the roadway beside a crimson-velvet chair lacking the hind legs. I heard and evening robin in the hawthorn, and in trampled gardens among the refuse of war there was the fairy, affectionate immortality of the yellow rose and blue-gray crocus. Hamel Church attracted me, and though stripped and tottering still had that spirit clinging to it which would have been the richest poetry to George Herbet. Stooping along there, always instinctively listening for the field-guns opposite, and feeling the tingling physical heat due to being under observation, I found my way into a white arched cellar, half collapsed, and with some astonishment discerned that it was crammed with cases of rations. This discovery quickly became the news of the day. The same night, the battalion policemen went up with me to collect the first-fruits, and were able to distribute among the companies a lavish allowance of marmalade, soup squares, and other things. This home charity safely accomplished, "the Brigade was informed"; next day the Staff Captain arrived in person, and, little relishing the hilly openness of the locality, crept along with me among the ruins to the fabulous dump. He saw, went (nimbly), and soon afterwards our men had sent down thousands of tines of salvaged stores to the Brigade headquarters. I think I deserved any medal that may have been awarded on this proud occasion.

Our tour lasted ten days, and occasionally the remainder would come that the powerful-looking German trenches opposite us were still those which were to have "captured and consolidated" on September 3. One would catch sight, beyond the enemy parapets, of several coils of British barbed wire lying where the Beaumont road ran over a rise; and those coils had been there when one glanced over form Picturedrome before September 3. They were the simple evidence of a still greater and more melancholy date, July 1. And now it was nearly winter. The situation southward in the wide battlefield "remained obscure". One afternoon, when some tremendous attempt was being made to clear it up, smiling Geoffrey Salter and myself sat on the chalk-heaps in the most easterly sap of our incomprehensible line -- was it Pêche Street, or Louvercy? -- with orders to record what could be seen of the battle. A moorland overwhelmed in a volume of tawny and blue smoke, thunderously murmuring, in which innumerable little lights in ones, twos, threes, white, green, red, purple, were thrown up like colored water drops, was not easy to tabulate. Salter's pencil traveled at speed, but in vain. The battle died away into ordinary bad temper. The situation remained obscure. Our south-most post shared in it as much as its tenants wanted and more. It was the burnt mill midway between our front line and the Thiepval Wood positions, standing desperately alone among the waterlogged woods. One went to it and from it by grace of night. My voluntary night in it, though just the expected example, was uncomfortable; the enemy exercised his field-guns regularly on the group of ruins, and with lucky monotony hit a plantation of red willows just behind it. The millhouse contained a small cupboard-dugout, stinking with old sandbags and dampness -- no other protection, except a fence of barbed wire round the bare yard. Whish-whang! sh-wang! sh-wang! That a mill, with some steady old miller, some aproned blue-eyed daughter, with pigs in the sty and perch in the pool, should come to be so ugly even in the moon! It had been in my mind that the stream might be used for a water-expedition against the German post in the swamp; I studied the locality carefully; but the mill killed all such mock-heroic fancies, and I never thought again of its possibilities. A sordid cripple, it hated us all. Meanwhile the Adjutant and the Doctor, in better surroundings, beguiled what leisure the busy telephone left, and the labor of supplying reports to an anxious Brigade staff, with mouth-organs and whistle-pipes. We are well and could keep ourselves in trim. At length the Royal Naval Division relieved us in Hamel, and we accepted with joy a story that one battalion had marched in solid column of fours to Mesnil Church, and was not barraged : this incident, which we refused to consider a fiction, was to us the sublimation of the impossible which happens. We smiled at this, we smiled at the blessing of stepping westward once more, and some one whom we knew well enough but could never catch at the essential moment was smiling at us.

The next thing that befell us was sudden, and our smile would not obey orders. It came in an envelope "Very Secret", and stated that we should in two days, and with the collaboration of other arms and troops, capture and consolidate a place called Stuff Trench. The failing ancient sun shone on the wide and shallow Ancre by Aveluy, and the green fancy-woodwork of the mill belonged to another century, as we crossed the long causeway leading from the pleasures of rest, and turned along the opposite hillside, with its chalky excavations, old trenches and spaces of surviving meadow-like green, towards the new arena. Then we found ourselves filing up a valley under the noses of howitzers standing black and burnished in the open, and loosing off with deadly clamor while the bare-chested gunners bawled and blasphemed -- Happy Valley or Blighty Valley, which was it? Farther along stood Authuille Wood, and we went in along a tram-line and a board walk, whereon with sweating foreheads and sharp voices some Highland officers were numbering off some of the most exhausted men (just relieved) I had seen. Near here was the captured German work called Leipzig Redoubt, with its underworld comforts, from bakehouse to boudoir; the companies were accommodated there, while the battalion headquarters entered the greasy, damaged shanties of typical British sandbags and tinware in the Wood, at a spot called Tithe Barn, and the night came on.

James Cassells and myself, when it began to rain, made ourselves a mackintosh bivouac within our dugout, and yet we rested ill, for the water ran in through many openings, and rats had here an independence and frivolity beyond any previously observed; it was with great pleasure that we got into the serene yet cannonaded morning. It fell to me then to take up a party of men to the battalion's assembly position and make up a dump of tolls, ammunition and other requirements for the attack. The walk to the front line lay over the most bewildering battlefield, so gouged and hummocked, so denatured and dun, so crowded with brown shrapnel-cases and German long-handled grenades, shell-holes, rifles, water-bottles; a billowing desert; and yet there was not much opportunity or reason for contemplating this satire in iron brown and field gray, for the staff-supplied motive of "offensive operations" was not yet weakening, and a rough road was being made here, and limbers were tipping and clattering ahead there, and guns being hauled forward, and signallers running out their lines and burying their cables, and little stings of burdened soldiers like mine trickling onward until they passed tragicomically among those black accidents and emanations on the skyline.

The front trench, shallow and narrow, clean-cut by good craftsmen, soft and heavy with the night's downpour, was on the hither side of a ridge, nor could the enemy's present position be seen from it. The brown plain all round lay without landmark or distinction. Thiepval was vaguely gestured at on our left. Pozières had once been a village on our right. We got our on top, and dug a square recess to receive the picks and shovels, the small arms ammunition, the bombs, the water-cans and flares and what else we had carried up; and then the loud whirring of an aeroplane sounder just over our heads. British! -- not so : flying perhaps thirty yards above the trench was a plane with the formidable Prussian cross as bold as the observer looking down; the machine-gun bullets thumped the soft soil, and missed us. The sarcastic visitors flew on at their ease along the trench, but our hears sank at the knowledge that they knew about tomorrow.

That night, our attacking companies went forward and lay in a ditch with a few "baby elephant" shelters in it, and much water, a little way behind their assembly positions. There was a white front. Behind them, a few field-guns, covered only with netting dressed up as withered foliage, were waiting too. I went to see them on the morning of the attack, and I remember chiefly the voice of F. Salter, as he emerged from a rough shelter, stretching his stiff arms and trying to move his eyebrows like a man awake, cursing the frost; I remember the familiar song of my old companion Doogan, now for the last time, "Everybody's doing the Charlie Chaplin walk." He broke off, and without self-pity and almost casually he said, "it's the third time. They've sent me over, this is the third time. They'll get me this time." Nor would it have availed to use in reply one's familiar trench tags, nor to speak out the admiring friendship which never fully found words; Doogan seemed to know; and he was tired.

The clear autumn day was a mixed blessing for Harrison, who, in his determination to send over the companies to take Stuff Trench after as much "rest" as could be found in that Golgotha, had arranged that they should advance from the reserve trench direct to the assault. And by way of novelty the assault was ordered to be made a few minutes after noon; the men would therefore have to move forward in broad day and over a sufficiently long approach -- liable to the air's jealous eyes. Watches were synchronized and reconsigned to the officers, the watch hands slipped round as they do at a dance or a prize distribution; then all the anxiety came to a height and piercing extreme, and the companies moving in "artillery formation" -- groups presenting a kind of diamond diagram -- passed by Harrison's headquarters in foul Zollern Trench. I watched him as he stood on the mound roof of his dugout, that simple and martial figure, calling out to those as they went in terms of faith and love. Lapworth, who had just joined us, went by at the head of his platoon, a youth with curling golden hair and drawing-room manners, sweetly swinging his most subalternish cane from its leather thong; and he was the last officer to go by.

Orders had been admirable obeyed; the waves extended, the artillery gave tongue at the exact moment. The barrage was heavy, but its uproar was diffused in this open region. Harrison had nothing to do but wait, and I with him, for I was acting as his right-hand man in this operation. News of the attack always seems to take years in reaching headquarters, and it almost always gets worse as it is supplemented. At last some messages, wildly scribbled, as may be imagined, but with a clearness or expression that may not be so readily imagined, came to Zollern Trench. One was from Doogan : Stuff Trench was taken, there were few men left, and he had "established bombing blocks". G. Salter had sent back some forty prisoners. A message was brought with some profanity by my old friend C.S.M Lee, who ripped shirt was bloody, and who could not frankly recommend Stuff Trench. The concrete emplacement halfway thither, looking so dangerous on the maps, had not bee found dangerous, and the gunners' preparation there had been adequate; but, he said, we were being blown out of Stuff Trench. Should we be able to hold it? We--ll, we was 'olding it what I got THIS; and so departed Lee, tall blasphemous, and brave.

Looking about in the now hazier October light, I saw some German prisoners drifting along, and I stopped them. One elderly gentleman had a jaw which seemed insecurely suspended; which I bound up with more will than skill, and obtained the deep reward of a look so fatherly and hopeful as seldom comes again; others, not wounded, sourly observed my directions down the communication trench. As they went, heavy German shells were searching thoroughly there, and I do not think they ever got through. Their countrymen lay thick in these parts. Even the great shell-hole which we hazardously used as a latrine was overlooked by the sprawling corpses of two of them, and others lay about it.

Our regimental sergeant-major was by this time in disgrace. This fine man, so swift in spirit and in intelligence, had lifed his water-bottle too often in the back-breaking business of getting the battalion into action; and he had not unreasonably filled the bottle with rum. In the horrid candle-light of the deep dugout he had endeavored to keep going and with piteous resolution answered what he thought the substance of his Colonel's questions; but it would not do, and Sergeant Ashford, the bright and clever signaler, took his place. Again the night came on; and in the captured trench the remnant who had primed themselves with the spirituous hope of being relieved had to hear that no relief was yet forthcoming. The sharpness of their experience was to be gauged from the fact that even the company held in support in our original front line, employed on incidental tasks, was reported to be exhausted, and its commander appealed to Harrison for relief in ultimatory terms.

Another day arrived, and the men in Stuff Trench had to eat their "iron rations", for we could not supply them. We had also lost touch with our battalion doctor, who was somewhere towards Thiepval, that slight protuberance on rising ground westward; the bearers of the wounded had to find another way out; yet we were in possession of Stuff Trench, and the Australians southward held its continuation, Regina. That evening, gloomy and vast, lit up with savage glares all round, a relieving battalion arrived, one disposed to quarrel with us as readily as with the Germans. "Take the companies over to Stuff Trench," said Harrison to me, "and see them settled in there." Cassells came with me. We were lucky, the night being black, to find our way through that unholy Schwaben Redoubt, but by this stage our polarity-sense was awakened and we knew how little to expect of local identifications. At last, after many doubts, we had passed (in the darkness) a fragment of road metalling which assured me that all was right; the grumbling relief followed our slow steps, which we could not hasten, even though one of many shells crashing into our neighborhood caught a section of the incomers and the moaning cries might have distracted more seasoned tacticians.

It was Geoffrey Salter speaking out firmly in the darkness. Stuff Trench -- this was Stuff Trench; three feet deep, corpses under foot, corpses on the parapet. He told us, while still shell after shell slipped in crescendo wailing into the vibrating ground, that his brother had been killed, and he had buried him; Doogan had been wounded, gone downstairs into one of the dugout shafts after hours of sweat, and a shell had come downstairs to finish him; "and," says he, "you can get a marvelous view of Grandcourt from this trench. We've been looking at it all day. Where's these men? Let me put 'em into the posts. No, you wait a bit, I'll see to it. That the sergeant-major?"

Moving along as he spoke with quick emotion and a new power (for hitherto his force of character had not appeared in the less exacting sort of war), he began to order the newcomers into sentry-groups; and stooping down to find what it was snuffing at my boots I found it was a dog. He was seemingly trying to keep me from treading on a body. I caught sight of him by someone's torch or flare; he was black and white; and I spoke to him, and at the end of a few moments he allowed me to carry him off. Cassells and myself had finished, and returned by ourselves by the shortest way; now the strain told, our feet weighed like lead, and our hope was out of action. I put down the dog, who came limpingly round the shadowy shell-holes, stopped, whined, came on again; what was the use? he perhaps thought; that way, too, there is this maniacal sport of high explosive, and the mud is evidently the same all over the world; I shall stay here. Warmly I wished to adopt this dog, but now I could scarcely stoop, and I reflected that the mud and shell zone extended a long way on; so there he stayed; feebly I passed along.

If I was weary, what of Salter and his men? Still I hear their slouching feet at last on the footbridge over Ancre by Aveluy, where a sad guard of trees dripping with the dankness of autumn had nothing to say but sempiternal syllables, of which we had our own interpretation. The shadows on the water were so profound and unnavigable that one felt them as the environment of a grief of gods, silent and bowed, unvisitable by breeze or star; and then we were past, and soon asleep in the tents near Aveluy Wood.

The action at Stuff Trench on October 21 and 22 had been the first in which our battalion had seized and held any of the German area, and the cost had been enormous; not intemperate pride glowed among the survivors, but that natural vanity was held in check by the fact that we were not yet off the battlefield. The evenings were shutting in early, the roads were greasy and clogging, and along the wooded river valley the leaves had turned red and now had a frost-bitten chillier tinge; the ridges looked lonelier under the sallow clouds; but in mud and gloom the guns went on, and by our camp of tents at evening we saw the tanks crawl round and round in preparation for something new, and not even rumors of our being sent to Lens or Egypt were heard. Winter clothing was served out, shirts, vests, white leather gloves with fleece lining and a tape to keep them together.

 

XII

CAESAR WENT INTO WINTER QUARTERS

Then we went into the trenches round about Thiepval Wood, which not long before had been so horrible and mad; but now they had assumed a tenderer aspect, were voted "a rest-cure sector", and we were envied for them. The land in front was full of the dead of July 1 and other days of destruction, but our own casualties were happily few, and there was cover for all. Occasionally heavy shells blocked up parts of Inniskilling Avenue, or the waterside path to Mill Post (opposite our old mill at Hamel) which Lapworth, the mild-looking boy who had so stalwartly endured the pandemonium of Stuff Trench, now commanded. At battalion headquarters it was like old times, everyone having time and means to appear with shining face and even shining buttons, and arguments about ghosts, the German Emperor and the French artillery rising into sonorous eloquence until some near explosion put out the acetylene lamp, or "paper warfare" warmed up with the receipt of large envelopes from Brigade. Those not in the front trench were sheltered in medieval-looking passages hewn through the chalk and the roots of the trees; the forward posts were chiefly manned from tunnels called Koyli West and East; and in truth everyone seemed disposed to be satisfied. In Paisley Valley, alongside the wood, some tanks were lying veiled with brown nets, and one might have translated the fact; but a week or so passed, and nothing had happened. Had it not? With the aid of the sergeant cook I had built four ovens in the wood, which Wren himself would have eaten his dinner out of -- or gone without.

In spite of the sylvan intricacies (a trifle damaged) of Thiepval Wood, and a bedroom in the corridored chalk bank, and the tunes of the "Bing Boys" endlessly revolved, one was not yet quite clear of Stuff Trench; my own unwelcome but persistent retrospect was the shell hole there used by us as a latrine, with those two flattened German bodies in it, tallow-faced and dirty-stubbled, one spectacled, with fingers hooking the handle of a bomb; and others had much worse to remember. We were merry when at length the relief was sent in and we went along the road in pale daylight to Senlis, a village six or seven miles behind the line. The road wound and twisted, but we liked it well, and at one point the still lofty stump of Mesnil Church tower showed above the dingy trampled fields it was hard not to shout aloud. "Not gone yet", signaled the tower. We heard the church bell ring in Senlis, we bought beer and chocolate, and we admired with determination the girls who sold them; so great was the hour of relaxation, so kindly was the stone of the road and the straw of the barn. We envied the troops employed as road-sweepers and ditchers in their drains and puddles. But, prime gift of eccentric heaven, there was the evening when Harrison took all the battalion to the divisional concert-party performing in the town. The roof ought indeed to have floated away in the paeans and warblings that rose from us, as the pierrots chirruped and gambolled there. In sweet music is such art -- and never was music sweeter than the ragtime then obtaining, if appreciation indexes merit. "Take me back to dear old Blighty" was too much for us -- we roared inanely, and when a creditable cardboard train was pulled across the stage and the performers looking out of the windows sang their chorus, "Birmingham, Leeds or Manchester," the force of illusion could no further go. "Mr. Bottomley -- Good old Horatio" was a song scarcely less successful; "On the day on which Peace is declared," a neat little skit, and "When you're a long, long way from home" will never cease to ring pathetically through the years between. All the performers had been over the top. Glum and droll clown, where can I now find your equal? Will time yield you such a "house" again? and you, graceful tenor, with what glorious air can you now awaken such a sigh as when in that farmstead you sang the "cheap sentiment" of those newly from the outer darkness? "When you're a long, long way from home" -- we seemed to be so.

Soon enough, from the huts in the orchard, from the mud-walled barns by the church, from the blankets in the straw or the mahogany beds with the mountainous straw mattresses, we were marching eastward again, with little to recommend our future to us. It was now approaching the beginning of November, and the days were melancholy, and the color of clay. We took over that deathtrap known as the Schwaben Redoubt, the way to which lay through the fallen fortress of Thiepval. One had heard the worst accounts of the place, and they were true. Crossing the Ancre again at Black Horse Bridge, one went up through the scanty skeleton houses of Authuille, and climbing the dirty little road over the steep bank, one immediately entered the land of despair. Bodies, bodies, and their useless gear heaped the gross waste ground; the slimy road was soon only a mud track with passed a whitish tumulus of ruin with lurking entrances, some spikes that had been pine trees, a bricked cellar or two, and died out. The village pond, so blue on the map, had completely disappeared. The Ligne de Pommiers had been grubbed up. The shell-holes were mostly small lakes of what was no doubt merely rusty water, but had a red and foul semblance of blood. Paths glistened weakly from tenable point to point. Of the dead, one was conspicuous. He was a Scottish soldier, and was kneeling, facing east, so that one could scarcely credit death in him; he was seen at some little distance from the usual tracks, and no one had much time in Thiepval just then for sight-seeing, or burying. Death could not kneel so, I thought, and approaching I ascertained with a sudden shriveling of spirit that Death could and did.

Beyond the area called Thiepval on the map a trench called St. Martin's Lane led forward; unhappy he who got into it! It was blasted out into a broad shapeless gully by intense bombardment, and pools of mortar-like much filled most of it. A few duckboards lay half submerged along the parapet, and these were perforce used by our companies, and ferociously shelled at moments by the enemy. The wooden track ended, and then the men fought their way on through the gluey morass, until not one nor two were reduced to tears and impotent wild cries to God. They were not yet at the worst of their duty, for the Schwaben Redoubt was an almost obliterated cocoon of trenches in which mud, and death, and life were much the same thing -- and there the deep dugouts, which faced the German guns, were cancerous with torn bodies, and to pass an entrance was to gulp poison; in one place a corpse had apparently been thrust in to stop up a doorway's dangerous displacement, and an arm swung stupidly. Men of the next battalion were found in much up to the armpits, and their fate was not spoken of; those who found them could not get them out.

Harrison had his headquarters at the Thiepval end of St. Martin's Lane, and while the place was deep down and even decorated with German drawings, its use was suspected by the enemy, whose shells fell nightly with sudden terrifying smash on the roof and in the trench at the exits. Nevertheless, he had a lantern put out in the night, to guide those who made the awful journey from the line; it took an experienced messenger four or five hours to come and return. The nights were long, but he could not sleep; ordering me to watch, he might lie down for a time, but, if a messenger came and spoke with me, he at once called out the instruction wanted. His face was red and pallid with the strain; he struggled round the line in the early morning, and on return would find the General paying a call, with "Well, Harrison, the air of Thiepval is most bracing."

In saying this, the General was perfectly serious, and he was not less so in many other remarks of a more military and not less tangential kind, which caused Harrison to carry with him habitually a letter of resignation. One day some unexpected and desperate order led to the display of this letter. "No, Harrison," piped the now amazed General, "no, I shall not look at it. I shall put it in my breeches pocket"; and the event ended in Harrison's gaining his point and a personal anecdote of the General which never failed to charm. But the background of such things was a filthy, mortifying, and most lonely acre, where a village had been, and where still a foundation of bricks, or the stump of an apple-tree, or even a leaf or two of ivy might be found -- at your own risk.

Of all the strange artifices of war, Thiepval was then a huge and bewildering repository. The old German front line west of it still retained its outline, after the torrents of explosive which it had swallowed month after month. Steel rails and concrete had there been used with the remorseless logic which might be called real imagination, had been combined and fixed, reduplicated and thickened until the trench was as solid as a pyramid. In front of it here and there were concealed concrete emplacements, formerly lurking in the weeks and flowers of No Man's Land; beneath it, where now our reserve company lived, were prodigious dugouts, arranged even in two storeys, and in the lower storey of one of these was a little door in the wall. Opening, one went steadily descending along dark galleries, soon discovering that the stacks of boxes which seemed to go on forever were boxes of explosive; then one arrived at two deep well-shafts, with wind-lasses and buckets ready for further descent, but at that point it seemed as if one's duty lay rather upstairs. This mine would have in due course hurled the British line over the Ancre. In another great dugout were elaborate surgical appliances and medical supplies; another again, was a kind of quartermaster's store, in which, although in one of the crushed staircases were some corpses not to be meddled with, one stood and turned over great heaps of new, smart, but now inapplicable German greatcoats, or tins of preserved meat with Russian labels (I tried it, but made no converts), or heavy packages of ration tobacco which extemest want would not force us to approve -- and egg bombs japanned black, and "windy bombs" with their bat-handles and porcelain buttons, and maps in violet and green and scarlet, and letters in slant hand with many an exclamation mark, and black and gold helmets, and steel ones with cubist camouflaging, and horse-hide packs, and leather-faced respirators, all in one plethora and miscellany, bloodstained here and there. The smell of the German dugouts was peculiar to them, heavy and clothy.

There was, moreover, one vault here which was arrayed with mirrors, no doubt collected from the chateau whose white ruin still revealed the interior of a cellar, and on which an image of the Virgin was dreaming in the sullen daylight. One could find books in Thiepval; I am guilty of taking my copy of Ferdinand von Freiligrath's bombastic poems from that uncataloged library. But it is time to return from these abysmal peregrinations to the world up aloft, where still here and there in outlying pits a minewerfer (without its team) thrusts up its steel mouth towards the old British line; where the ration party uses the "dry places" in the mud -- those bemired carcasses which have not yet ceased to serve "the great adventure" -- and the passer-by hates the plosh of the whizzing fuse-top into the muck worse than the fierce darts of the shrapnel itself; where men howl out angry imprecation at officers whom they love; where our poor half-wit and battalion joke, whom red tape will not let us sent away, is running out above the Schwaben half-naked, slobbering and yet at times aware that he is not in his perfect mind.

We came away for a couple of nights, and were billeted in dugouts by Authuille, built against the high sheltering bank called "The Bluff", and there we passed pleasant hours. The blue Ancre swirled along as though it could not be beaten from its brookish gayness and motion, right against our feet; songs sounded sweetly there, and the simple tune "We were sailing along on a moonlight bay" held me enchanted; I can never escape from that voice in that place. The cold and clear stream was a blessing, and many a soldier dipped his hands in it spontaneously and in happiness, or crossed to the islands midstream to wash out a haversack or a shirt. Poetry with her euphrasy had her triumph, no matter how brief, with many of those pale weary men, nor could she find it strange when they were hurrying up to the canteen kept open there by the South African heavy artillery, or when their song changed to "When the beer is on the table, I'll be there."

Now November's advancing date seemed to warrant us in believing that actual battle was over for the present, and when we took over the Schwaben again we did not think of anything worse than a trench tour -- ordeal enough in that den of misery. Sluggish, soaking mists, or cold stinging wind, loaded the air and the spirits; the ruins of the world looked black and unalterable; Thiepval Wood's ghostly gallows-trees made no sound nor movement. Thus, then, beyond doubt, the gigantic clangor of the Somme offensive had ceased, and once or twice one heard it urged that Caesar went into winter quarters. The fog, dewing one's khaki, scarcely let the sun rise, and the gray chalky mud, as though to claim the only victory, crawled down the dugout entrances, whether those still had stairs, or were mere gullets, their woodwork burnt out by phosphorus bombs or shells. We fell into a routine, relieving companies at short intervals, clearing our wounded, and concealing our dead; to indicate how steady the look of things was, let me mention that one day some one had to report at the advanced Army headquarters and view a new patent oven (constructed of five old drums) in operation. The victim, myself, left Thiepval and arrived duly by a course of lorry-jumping at Toutencourt, at least a dozen miles back; the miraculous over was displayed to a selection of ordinary officers by a selection of staff officers, and an aroma of roasting sirloin (or it may not have been sirloin) was detected; it should have been served to the audience. Thence "home" from aristocratic Toutencourt through the best villages imagination could paint to democratic Thiepval, and a night of the usual blended notes -- chiefly the double bass of high explosive on the dugout exit.

"And this," said Lupton, the adjutant, pulling his moustache one gaunt morning, "is Z day minus two." My eye must have looked like a pickled onion. "Really," he continued, "The biggest attack of the lot." That had been the case before. But -- anyway, the news was right, and whatever Z day might do, there was a little affair for the battalion to administer at once. A German strong-point thirty or forty yards ahead of the Schwaben was awkwardly situated in regard to the proposed "doings", and would be cleaned up by us. I received this information with distaste, and Harrison seemed at first to think it applied specially to me, as odd-job man; then he changed his mind, and sent James Cassells out with a fighting patrol that night; if this failed, it seemed I was to try my hand the night after. As soon as Cassells and his men moved, there were bombed and fusilladed, whereon they lay down in confusion round the inconvenient sap head, and, by the grace of Good, suddenly two of the enemy from another direction wandered among them and surrendered. These prisoners duly arrived at battalion headquarters, seemingly half expecting to be eaten alive -- most welcome guests. They blinked, gestured, became natural. The back areas were so well pleased with these samples that they accepted the perfectly sound report of Cassells, finding the enemy's post too strongly wired and resolutely held for any but a carefully studied assault.

By a foolish error in taste, I, who was then "mess president", had brought up to Thiepval an ample bottle of Benedictine, but little whisky; and on the eve of attack that little had disappeared. Poor Harrison gazed as one in a trance at the deplorable bottle of Benedictine, and more in sorrow than in anger at me. I felt that I had to recover my position, but whisky does not appear at a wish. In double gloom the short day decayed, and the noise of shelling swelled until my colonel sent me up above to listen occasionally if there was any sound of rifle fire. For during this battle of the Somme, there must have been a hundred shells for one rifle-shot; and the cracking of bullets from the front trench in the general storm song would have been a danger signal. But the night dragged its muddy length without German interference, and the attacking troops assembled in the ravenous holes more or less as was planned on paper. Our own part was subsidiary, and the main blow was to be struck northward towards Grandcourt and Beaumont Hamel. Struck it was in the shabby clammy morning of November 13.

That was a feat of arms vying with any recorded. The enemy was surprised and beaten. From Thiepval Wood battalions of our own division sprang out, passed our old dead, mud-craters and wire and took the tiny village of St. Pierre Divion with its enormous labyrinth, and almost 2,000 Germans in the galleries there. Beyond the curving Ancre, the Highlanders and the Royal Naval Division overran Beaucourt and Beaumont, stronghold of the finest; and as this news came in fragments and rumors to us in Thiepval, we felt as if we were being left behind. Towards four o'clock orders came that we were to supply 300 men that night, to carry up wiring materials to positions in advance of those newly captured, those positions to be reconnoitered immediately. This meant me.

A runner called Johnson, a red-cheeked silent youth, was the only man available, and we set off at once, seeing that there was a heavy barrage eastward, but knowing that it was best not to think about it. What light the grudging day had permitted was now almost extinct, and the mist had changed into a drizzle; we passed the site of Thiepval Crucifix, and the junction of Fiennes Trench and St. Martin's Lane (a wide pond of grayness), then the scrawled Schwaben -- few people about, white lights whirling up north of the Ancre, and the shouldering hills north and east gathering inimical mass in their wan illusion. Crossing scarcely discernible remains of redoubts and communications, I saw an officer peering from a little length of trench ahead, and went to him. "Is this our front line?" "Dunno : you get down off there, you'll be hit." He shivered in his mackintosh sheet. His chin quivered; this night's echoing blackness was coming down cruelly fast. "Get down." He spoke with a sort of anger. By some curious inward concentration on the matter of finding the way, I had not much notices the furious dance of high explosive now almost around us. At this minute, a man, or a ghost, went by, and I tried to follow his course down the next slope and along a desperate valley; then I said to Johnson, "The front like must be ahead here still; come on." We were now in the dark and, before we realized it, inside a barrage; never had shells seemed so torrentially swift, so murderous; they seemed to swoop over one's shoulder. We ran, we tore ourselves out of the clay to run, and lived. The shells at last skidded and spattered behind us, and now where were we? We went on.

Monstrously black a hill rose up before us; we crossed; then I thought I knew where we were. These heavy timber shelters with the great openings were evidently German howitzer positions, and they had not been long evacuated, I thought, stooping hurriedly over those dead men in field gray overcoats at the entrances, and others flung down by their last "foxholes" near by. The lights flying up northward, where most deafening noise was roaring along the river valley, showed these things in their unnatural glimmer; and the men's coats were yet comparatively clean, and their attitudes most like life. Again we went on, and climbed the false immensity of another ridge, when several rifles and a maxim opened upon us, and very close they were. We retreated aslant down the slope and as we did so I saw the wide lagoons of the Ancre silvering in the Beaucourt lights, and decided our course. Now running, crouching, we worked along the valley, then sharply turning, through crumbled pits and over mounds and heaps, came along high ground above what had been St. Pierre Divion, expecting to be caught at every second; then we plunged through that waterfall of shells, the British and German barrages alike, now slackening; and were challenged at last, in English. We had come back from an accidental tour into enemy country, and blessed with silent gladness the shell-hole in which, blowing their own trumpets in the spirit of their morning's success, were members of four or five different units of our division. We lay down in the mud a moment or two, and recovered our senses.

The way to Thiepval was simpler. At the edge of the wood a couple of great shells burst almost on top of us; thence we had no opposition, and, finding a duckboard track, returned to battalion headquarters. Johnson slipped down the greasy stairway, and turned very white down below. We were received as Lazarus was. The shelling of the Schwaben had been a "blaze of light", and our deaths had been taken for granted. Harrison was speaking over the telephone to Hornby, and I just had vitality enough to hear him say, "They have come back, and report an extraordinary barrage; say it would be disaster to attempt to send up that party. Certain disaster. Yes, they say so, and from their appearance one can see that they have been through terrific shelling. . . . Yes, I'll bring him along." "That's all right," he turned to his second in command. "No wiring party. I said it would all come out in the wash. Seven o'clock -- take it easy, Rabbit, we'll go and see the General when you feel a bit better."

 

XIII
THE IMPOSSIBLE HAPPENS

It seemed far away from war's unruly ravings, that lamp-lit but damp dugout at Passerelle de Magenta in which the General was resting on his bed, his arms folded on his breast, but the occasion made me bold. Closely following the map, with my narrative, then I hope much plainer than now, Harrison decided that I had nearly been into Grandcourt (still a name of distance and wild desire) and that I had come up against the real line which the Germans were holding. But, however these things might be, one immense fact came out like the sun at midnight : our division had almost done with the Somme. The misty trees might have been Hyde Park, and my feet moved with a rhythm, as I kept pace with the Colonel's always vigorous but not champion pace.

A Highland unit was filing into the line. At the ration-party's rendezvous below Thiepval, our hearty Quartermaster Swain was with his transport, and in particular he was guarding, with all the skill of years of suspicion and incident, our issue of rum. When he called at headquarters presently, he was distressed, and his "eyes were wild". Two jars of the rum had been "lifted" under his very nose by the infallible Jocks. It was a feat of arms indeed, but poor Swain felt his occupation was gone. A few hours later we took our belongings from Thiepval, and went down the track and surviving country road, still being shelled in a casual way, and busy with men and transport, to the Bluff dugouts. These were gradually deteriorating, and Harrison sent in an ironical report on their condition, in case they were being relied upon for "the coming winder". A pleasing incident of the course of inspections which occupied that day of rest was the quenching of a pushful officer who was ever to the fore with accounts of his unrewarded perspicuity and daring, by the Doctor, who, seizing as his pretext a more insolent phrase than the other usually snapped out, put down a scintillating barrage of army satire and even sanctimonious benedictions, to the joy of all who were present. Warmed by his success, Doc. Ford proceeded the same evening to serve the general good again, entering the dugout of the Lewis-gun officer, who was not thought the most energetic altruist among us, and disturbing his rest in an ingenious and friendly manner. I loved this Doctor, athletic, bright and young -- I particularly remember his beautiful opposition to our conventional explanations of Patriotism, his "No, that's Jingoism" -- but already he was sickening for trench fever, and after a short time he had to give way to its heavy siege.

The first kit inspection proved that we were short of all sorts of things, rifles, leather equipment, gas masks, and all the rest, and the next morning early I took a party of men and a couple of limbers up towards Thiepval and set about salvaging what was wanted. The inward upheaval of our promised exodus made this seem one adventure too many, and we observed the grouping of the customary big shells snouting up the gray mud and derelict timber with great care; but we needed not range far, for the graying haversacked British dead were all round -- not many of the Germans thereabouts, but what should one want with their red-hide hairy knapsacks, their leather respirators, curious but somehow inhuman? My explorers did their work with vigor, there limbers were soon more than brimful, and we hustled down through Authuille and over Black Horse Bridge, "forever and forever". The battalion was on the roadside ready to march, and amid humorous and artful smiles and glances we fell in. Lancashire Dump in the very of Aveluy Wood, and the old French finger-posts and notices, and the mossy clear places between the trees, and the straight, damp, firm highway, good-bye to you all ; there in the marsh the wild duck and moorcock noise, and farther behind one hears the stinging lash of shells in the swamp, but we are marching. Not the same "we" who in the golden dusty summer tramped down into the verdant valley, even then a haunt of every leafy spirit and the blue-eyed ephydriads, now Nature's slimy wound with spikes of blackened bone; not that "we", but yet here and there was the same face that had accompanied them, and above all Harrison with his merry eye and life-giving soldierly gesture was riding up and down the column.

After a night's respite in huts in the Nab Valley, nor far from our old cover, Martisart Wood, we were able to add a few more kilometers to our distance from the line, and, passing Albert with songs and with amazement, left the pools of the Ancre behind, and came to the substantial village of Warloy. There, too, we stayed one luxurious night. The house in which some of us were lodged was the quietest conceivable, the most puritan, with little square plots of grass and tiled paths between it and the road; our beds were in the attics, and during the night we had scarcely thrown down the French novels which we picked up there and put out our candles when, it seemed, an aeroplane was buzzing overhead and something hit the tiles. This dream was confirmed next morning, for the reader had killed some soldiers in the village with machine-gun fire.

We now marched in earnest. Of all the treasured romances of the world, is there anything to make the blood sing itself along, to brighten the eye, to fill the ear with unheard melodies, like a marching battalion in which one's own body is going? From the pit, arise and shine, let the drum and trumpet mark the pride of your measure; you have now learned that the light is sweet, that a day in peace is a jewel whose radiances vary and frolic innumerably as memory turns it in her hand, infinitude of mercy. Here is this jewel; kind Nature will shield it from the corrosions of yesterday; yield yourself to this magical hour, a starling curving among tens of thousands above the blue mere, a star spinning in the bright magnetic pilgrimage of old God; follow that God, and look you mock him not.

So inexpressible was the exaltation of that day, and the solid ground was ethereal, not much being uttered from man to man for many miles. An old friend of ours, however, did not feel this. In his grimmer mood and best red tabs he rode up, shrilly calling me out of my planetary dream to him, and ordered me to arrest the transport sergeant for the offence of allowing what he called "super-structures" on his vehicles. Poor Sergeant Luck on his black horse came up in confusion, accepted his fate and observations on his gross unmilitary character, and the General reluctantly went devouring elsewhere. The super-structures ("surely you can see them, Blunden? Why did you not immediately place this non-commissioned officer under arrest?") consisted chiefly of the illegal extra blankets which the batmen had contrived to collect for their winder campaign; and once again one innocent suffered while many guilty went free. I condoled with Luck, and he with tears in his eyes thought of his hitherto spotless name in the world of limbers and Maltese carts and horse-lines.

Hardly believing what was happening, we came through places which had been so remote from possibility that their names were unmeaning to us. Greenness, even if it was only November greenness, was our dream scenery. We passed Beauquesne, where, somebody said, was Advanced General Headquarters. Well, you say so. We ended our resurrection road in Doullens, a placid town, with cobbled complicated streets, withdrawing courtyards under archways, and curtains, and clocks, and mantel piece ornaments, and roast fowl, and white and red wine. One longed to take one's ease in that miniature triumph of domesticity, but it was no more than a stage. I was soon reporting at the station yard, trying to obtain all the information about the battalion's train journey northward, and the sunset flared the brazen news that it would be a cold one, while the shifting wind whistled through the black chains and ponderous wheels of the waiting cattle-trucks. But it was a beautiful world even then.