A Fox Under My Cloak (34 page)

*

When the time was come to go into the trenches again, he felt curious, excited, and pleased; for it was to be a visit only, to observe the lie of the land, and to see, in particular, the emplacements in the new forward assault trenches that had been built for the cylinders.

What surprised him was the length and order of the
communication
trenches, the only danger being from shelling so occasional that it was said the old Hun had pulled out most of his heavy artillery to face the major attack that was coming down south by the French, in Champagne.

All across the gently sloping downland burdened with huge sombre pyramids and dumps of slag and stones, arising above the fringe of tall yellow grasses and weeds beyond parapet and parados, line upon line of chalk could be seen—the assault trenches. He was told by an infantry captain who invited him into a shelter dug under the parapet that the attack had been planned for two days previously, the 15th September, but it had been postponed. The day before, said the captain, who was in the first battalion of the Gaultshires, the old Hun hoisted a board before the wire in front of his trench just below the Lone Tree ridge—he had carried it and fixed it during the night, so that it could be read through field-glasses—

The infantry captain, mug of whiskey in hand, looked at Phillip across the dugout table in his company headquarters, and spoke in a voice of deadly fury under his restraint.

“They’ve removed all ranging marks for our artillery, and their rifle fire is conspicuous by its absence. Why, do you ask? Because they are saving ammunition. And why, you wonder? Because for weeks past bumff has been going around with full details of the push. Our staff has done everything except send a complete copy of the plan of attack to the Hun opposite, who
has watched us digging jumping-off ditches, putting up wooden bridges over the trenches for the eighteen-pounders, and
scaling-ladders
for the infantry, from his comfortable quarters in the Tower Bridge; and so interested is he in it all, that he has not sent over so much as a whizz-bang. Why?”

“Perhaps they’re waiting for the actual moment of attack, to break it, sir. Once I saw——”

“Allow me to speak,” said the captain, his eyes fixed upon Phillip’s. “I will do the talking here! Why, you ask, is the Hun waiting until he has got us jam-packed before him, every trench and assembly point bung-full, and then, when he can’t miss, CRASH——!”

The pale captain smashed his fist upon the table, starting up a score of flies, some to settle upon his sweating brow.

Alarmed, and a little shaken by the outburst, Phillip replied, “Exactly, sir! That’s what our Guards did at Klein Zillebeke, during First Ypres. They let the Alleyman cut their wire, in order to catch all of them coming through the gap.”

“Were you there?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Who were you with?”

“The London Highlanders.”

“Then shake hands!” The other leaned over to give him a hurtful clasp. “Help yourself to a spot of old man whiskey!”

“Thank you, sir. By the way, I’m also in the Gaultshires. I removed my badges in case the sniping was hot. My name’s Maddison. I haven’t served with the regiment yet, sir.”

“Mine’s West. I hope you’re posted to us, one day. I’d like you in my company. I take off my hat to any man who went through First Ypres!”

Phillip felt important with the new brassard on his right sleeve, of red, white, and green vertical stripes. In a way, he was a staff officer, he considered. The R.E. colonel at the gas school had said that the duty of a squad officer was to stay with his cylinders until they were emptied, lest their presence endanger his own men: therefore no officer, wearing the brassard, could be ordered to join in the assault. What, Phillip had said to an imagined Desmond, could be more cushy? He would see all that happened, and be under cover when the machine-guns started. He had his spare P.H. helmet, in case of accidents, such as a shell breaking a cylinder.

There were fourteen emplacements in his sector, each having been made by digging away the fire-step, and replacing it by a wooden platform resting on stakes driven into the chalk. Under each platform fifteen cylinders were to be laid. Turned on full bore, the gas from each would escape in under three minutes.

The captain showed him a trench map. The German lines lay just over the crest of the slope rising imperceptibly across the wide and grassy wilderness of No Man’s Land. “The Hun can see us against the skyline, when we go out on patrol,
particularly
when the moon is going down. We can’t see him, because the ground rises again out of the Loos valley behind his front line.” To the south, the British lines lay up another slope, with No Man’s Land an imperceptible hollow in front. Behind the enemy front line was Hill 69, rising to the skyline, and the much-wired Loos Road Redoubt. Farther on, to the south, and in the direction of Loos with its upstanding colliery gear, the German lines lay on and behind more rising ground.

Phillip looked cautiously over the chalk-bagged parapet. Dark-brown docks in seed were visible in the thin yellow grasses; thistle floss floated into the haze of the eastern horizon from which arose the chimneys and machinery of pitheads, and dark sullen heaps of stony slag faintly green with grass. Out of the hazy, almost level scene arose the bursts of shells, like waves breaking upon an invisible reef.

Dominating the view was a tall structure in lace-work iron, of twin pylons surmounted by a flat top, called by the men the Tower Bridge. It arose high above a red-brick village with a church. That was Loos, one of the main objectives of the attack, which had to be captured, said Captain West, in the first rush. Beyond it was the large town of Lens, which was never shelled, since the civilian population was still there, working for the old Hun.

“Yes, they’re still mining coal to make the shells which will be blowing us all to hell next week. And we not only pay rent for our trenches in this blasted country, but have to pay for the blankets we’re buried in. Still, what the hell? A soldier’s life is short and merry. Come into my shelter and have a spot of old man whiskey.”

Enamel mugs jinked; down went a generous slop of whiskey and chlorinated water.

“Thank God we’re being relieved tonight,” said Captain West. “But we’ll be back in time for the alleged Big Push. When are you going to bring up your beastly gas bottles? God’s teeth, if the old Hun gets a direct hit on one of your emplacements——”

Phillip saw that Captain West’s hand was shaky. He had a very white face, with a high forehead that seemed to think for itself above the clouded blue-grey eyes when he was silent; but when he spoke, it was usually through his teeth, and he had a grim look when he clenched his bony jaws. He was a
strong-looking
man, he thought; though his strength was more in his will than in his physique. Phillip had learned that his nickname among the other officers was “Spectre”. It suited him, he thought.

“What provision have you made for leaking gas?”

“Two extra Vermorel sprayers will remain in the sector, with two of my corporals, when we bring the cylinders up, sir, to neutralise any gas.”

“We had to piss on our handkerchiefs during Second Ypres. I’ve got the blasted gas in me still.” Captain West thumped his chest, and cleared his throat. Phillip noticed how dirty his nails were. He was not like any regular officer he had met before.

*

On the 18th of September the cylinders arrived in the special tram, which was shunted into a siding. Each cylinder was in a wooden box. Phillip was ordered to remove them by unscrewing the tops of the boxes, then to loosen all the dome covers of the cylinders before replacing them in the boxes and refixing the wooden lid with one screw only.

Remembering that chlorine was corrosive, and that his father had always put screws into wood with Vaseline, against rust, he got hold of a tin, and returned with his squad to the siding.

While they were unscrewing the boxes, and were about to loosen the dome-cover of the first cylinder, a general arrived on the scene and asked what they were doing. Phillip called his men to attention; then repeated his instructions.

“Put all the boxes back in the train at once,” ordered the general. “Those safety domes are not to be touched.”

“Sir!” replied Phillip at attention. He saw, with some alarm, from the gold crossed-swords and crown on the officer’s
shoulder-straps 
that he was a major-general. So the screws only were removed from the box lids; and one screw replaced in each, after being smeared with Vaseline.

*

Violent blows were splitting the sky, singly and in multiples of four; rarely was there silence; but in a rare interval when no guns were firing, he was aware of a quivering of the air, of a ground-bass seeming to shake the very earth and all upon it. At night the tremulous flickers of the French bombardment were to be seen in the sky, far away down south, where the chalk escarpments of the Champagne Pouilleuse were set sparsely with fir-plantations, now a wreckage of poles. When would the Big Push start? No-one knew; rumours were almost as numerous as the flies. His servant, an old soldier nicknamed “Twinkle”, told him all the rumours, obviously to get him to talk; Phillip listened, but made no reply; he knew that the gas cylinders were not all in place.

On the night of 19th of September, while a slight breeze was blowing from the German lines, the boxes of cylinders were loaded on to G.S. wagons, and taken to the forward dump. The feet of the horses had been enwound with sacking, and then put inside treble sand-bags, and tied; the wheels were muffled, too. Extra care for silence was taken lest enemy shelling destroy the loads. The British shelling had slowed down, as though in sudden anxiety about retaliation.

Without incident the wagons unloaded, and went back quicker than they came, the horses needing no encouragement to return to the picket line, where a string-bag of hay and fifteen pounds of oats was their daily ration. The box-lids were
unscrewed
, the cylinders removed, and slung on poles, each to be carried up to the front line, via communication trenches, by two fatigue men from the infantry. As they were heavy, and movement would be slow, there was a relief of two extra men for each load.

Progress was tedious up the communication trenches, as many other fatigue parties were passing up and down upon the
duck-boards
. At last the front assembly trench was reached, and the sergeants in command of the various carrying-parties led their men to the emplacements. The cylinders were laid on the chalk, and sandbag revetments built around them. It was nearly dawn when, having visited his emplacements and seen that all
was in order, including the two men left with Vermorel sprayers, with rations, and water in a petrol can, Phillip led his squad back to the cross-roads at Philosophe, where the disused railway passed through the Lens–Béthune road. About half a mile down the road they turned left at the next cross-roads and about a mile farther on arrived at their billets in the village of Mazingarbe, which they entered as the flares were shrinking in the first pallor of dawn.

*

The billet was in a terrace of brick-built and tiled cottages, or
corons
,
leading off from the square. He had a bed in an
upstairs
room, chosen for its airiness, while the widow and her children slept in the cellar, on top of half a dozen layers of bully beef in tins.

It was a bare room, with one small cracked window facing east, and a floor of broad poplar boards. The bed was a rusty frame on which was some straw under an army blanket. Thereon his valise was spread open, the flap turned back, for the
toothless
old soldier acting as his batman fancied himself as a valet. Phillip supposed that “Twinkle”, as the batman had said he was called by everyone, was a sapper, although he wore no shoulder letters. He had appeared one evening in the billet, and offered himself as Phillip’s batman, telling him that he was the only man in the British Army to have earned two Rooti, or bread-eating, medals. He explained this curious position by declaring that he had first joined the Army in India as a cook; and when after twenty years he had got the Good Conduct Medal, and his regiment was on the point of returning home, he was left behind accidentally, and had carried on, maintaining the cookhouse on his own, “up-’olding of the British Raj, sir, wiv various punkah and other wallahs, sir”, until the next regiment arrived, when he re-enlisted and after another twenty years had qualified for another Rooti medal. That, said “
Twinkle
”, brought him up to the little old Boer War.

To substantiate his various experiences, across the old soldier’s left breast there stretched a band of ribands from which the colours had faded and been replaced by grease and smoke. When Phillip asked what they were, the old soldier replied with an uninterrupted flow of sounds and spittle-sprays from toothless gums in which the originals of Good Conduct, Coronation, Durbar, Chitral, Egypt, North West Frontier, Afghanistan,
Omdurman, Fuzzy Wuzzies, Boer War Queen’s and King’s, might, with a little knowledge of British military history, be made out.

After his second time-expired discharge, according to a “Twinkle” garrulous with rum or whatever it was he got hold of at night, he had worked in the kitchen of a sandwich shop in Covent Garden, where after boiling the haunches of old boars, sows, and horses, he sliced them cold to make “thicks” or
sandwiches
for the porters and carters in the vegetable market. If he was to be believed, most of the great names in opera and ballet had dropped in at his “Ham and Beef” at one time or another, including Caruso, Melba, Scotti, Chaliapin, Destinn, Pavlova, and Nijinsky. Phillip was never tired of hearing the old man’s stories, which usually were told while he waited at table during his solitary dinner in the cottage kitchen at night.

The experience in the Ham and Beef shop in London now seemed to serve the old fellow well, for in the Demi Lune in Mazingarbe, “Twinkle” did a roaring trade in beef sandwiches, which he cut up in vast quantities in the billet, after boiling great chunks of meat in saucepans over a fire in an outhouse. Where the meat came from, Phillip did not know. “Twinkle” probably scrounged it, he thought.