A Fox Under My Cloak (47 page)

To which a critic had replied,
Take
more
water
with
it,
matey
!
There was a new inscription on one wall, he noticed. Was this an addition by “Twinkle”? The words read,

A
FTER
a good breakfast of fried bacon and eggs, he decided to take sandwiches and full water-bottle, and watch the new attack from high ground. The Guards were going over sometime
that day. Part of the battlefield could be overlooked from Maroc, a mining village just inside the old front line, “Twinkle” told him.

Immediately in front of Maroc the right flank of the attack rested on two long, grass-grown spoil-heaps, the best part of a mile in length and forty feet high, extending into the German lines like two slugs side by side. This was the Double Crassier.

“Now don’t be late tonight, and fret an old man’s heart, will you, sir? And pardon the liberty, sir, but you won’t forget to git me taken on the strenghth of your lot, will you, sir?”

This unexpected tenderness delighted Phillip for a moment; then he felt that “Twinkle” was playing, with his pink and
toothless
gums (the gold riveted teeth had vanished) the part of a harmless old granddad: and as he looked at him again he thought that he detected hard cunning under the grinning.

*

Maroc was no good, too near the front line. There was the hole-in-the-wall “Twinkle” had spoken of, at the end of the village, but streams of machine-gun bullets and balls of black smoke dotting the roof-lines showed that it was under observation. So he returned to the Harrow road, now white with chalky mud, and thought to cross below the crest of the spur on which the old front line continued north until it descended slowly into the fold of ground in which lay Le Rutoire farm.

He went on up the straight road, leaving it when whizz-bangs spirted a hundred yards in front, and threaded a way around shell-holes and over communication trenches, full of German dead, thinking that a solitary figure would not be fired at when there was so much fighting going on in front, on the rising ground beyond Loos and the tall Tower Bridge.

He peered into a steel telephone-box in the German trench that had a bomb-buckled door, and a sniper lying dead inside it—he must have been a sniper, because his rifle was fitted with a telescopic sight. Phillip thought to take it as a souvenir; but the butt, on which half-a-dozen notches had been cut neatly, was split, so he left it, and went on his way—whither?—striding fast, clasping his thumb-stick, walking from nowhere to nowhere, urgently, his face strained, his blue eyes with their characteristic speculative look intensified: a man beginning to think for himself, maybe on the wrong lines—for what so far in his life, and the war that was an intensification of that life, could he have
recognised as the right lines? Phillip was thinking of “Spectre” West: thought took the form of imitation. He could be as Westy!

Bullets whistling overhead and falling with tired little buzzes in the grass all around were spent bullets, coming from all directions. A passing despatch-rider told him that the Germans were back in the Hohenzollern Redoubt, their old front line a mile or two north of Lone Tree. No wonder, the reserves being so late! The blasted, inefficient staff!

*

The day was misty, with low clouds and scatters of rain. When he reached the outskirts of the village, walking round
shell-holes
half-filled with yellow lyddite water, his boots and puttees were clotted with grey-white mud. He plodded on past a
cemetery
with trenches around and through broken crosses and bits of artificial marble-chip flowers, and making for the church, found the empty square, or
place.
This looked to be sinister, open to a thousand unseen eyes, so he kept to the protecting houses, picking his way over splintered rafters and heaps of bricks below gaping roofs and standing walls. He went carefully, lying down when shells swooped to throw up red brick dust amidst dark fragments. He wanted to get to the Tower Bridge, which now seemed, with its criss-cross iron-work, and flat roof, as high as the water-towers that flanked the Crystal Palace seen from the entrance gates at the top of Sydenham Hill, when he had marched there six years before with a thousand other Boy Scouts, for the Grand Review. Even then, in the mock battle, Mr. Purley-Prout had tried to get round the flanks of the defenders, instead of being like the other scoutmasters, content to charge direct, and cross broomsticks with their rivals. God’s teeth, he heard Westy’s voice saying, the Germans knew how to protect their flanks. He could hear their stick-bombs going off, gruff noises like old men clearing their throats in the shelters on the Hill, as the Germans worked down the chalk trenches on Hill 70; while their machine-guns were chattering, rigid as German discipline.

He sat down, and let his thoughts rest, when he came to the troops in the cellars beyond the church. Smoke of wood fires arose, with a smell of frying bacon. So some rations had been got up. After ten minutes he went on, around fallen walls and window-frames towards the Tower Bridge. Where was the front line? he asked a soldier, obviously cavalry, in breeches,
puttees reversed, and leather bandolier. He turned out to be the North Somerset Yeomanry, and told Phillip that the Germans were half a mile away, in trenches from Chalk Pit Copse to Hill 70, up behind the Tower Bridge.

“Plaize to kape your ’ade down, zurr, there be znipers auver thurr”—pointing to Cité St. Pierre—“over thurr”—the
greygreen
mass of the Double Crassier—“and in they brick ’ousen of yon mine-shaft. It ban’t exactly a ’ealthy place, midear.”

“Any up the Tower Bridge, do you know, by any chance?”

“Not now, zurr, but they cleared out one on’m yesterday, ’twas a telephone chap, so I did hear. ’Twas a Jerry all right.”

“Can one get up the pylons?”

“Aye, aye! There be a round ladder, like up a church tower. But ’tis risky, zurr, what wi’ they znipers about!”

That was enough for Phillip. He crept round shallow places in the rubble, bending low until his neck ached; he went on upright—until a bullet spat on a brick wall, and pinged away like a metal wasp. Cautiously he reached the base of one pylon, around which the usual rubble of brick and wood was piled, with a scattering of glass, amidst rifles, water-bottles, tins of beef, biscuits, and half-buried dead.

What was unusual was the sight of two light-draught horses, their harness hanging awry, waiting side by side near an
upturned
G.S. wagon, the lower part of the driver’s body lying beside it. Obviously the old cushy days of the transport were over, he was thinking, when with howls ending in clanging cracks four woolly bears broke to hang yellow above the Tower, and their splinters swooshed down upon tile and brick. The shells had obviously come east, from Lens.

He ran to cover, through a tangle of ironwork and brick which must have been the engine house; a huge fly-wheel lay in pieces near a riveted and rusty boiler full of holes and tears, and girders split and wrenched about; while above, seen through a tattered iron roof, the steel platform where the trucks had been loaded to be run off on rails along the crassier or dump were visible. He thought that the twelve-inch naval gun on the
railway
at Béthune must have hit it, to have caused such upheaval. And yet, despite the destruction below, the steelwork of the towers seemed to be untouched, except for gashes in the metal. They looked immensely strong.

Had the search party which had found the German telephoning
climbed up the framework? It looked impossible. His thought was broken by the fat buzz of howitzer shells, coming from the opposite direction, from the north, probably in Hulluch. So guns were placed for cross-fire, the same as machine-guns! He wondered if the staff knew this: it might be a discovery.

Yes, it was definitely a cross-fire! Four more yellow bears appeared in the sky, coming direct from behind Hill 70, from Lens. The gunners had shifted range and direction, to burst over the square. He stood up, and saw an open iron door half hidden by scrap metal in between the feet of the towers. Insinuating himself there, he saw an iron stairway leading upwards, spiral and very narrow, enclosed by sheet iron. It was like the iron staircase up to the mezzanine room between the Town
Department
at Head Office and the directors’ floor. Up the old
Bloodhounds
!

It was with thoughts of past days with Cranmer as corporal of the patrol that Phillip started to climb the iron stairs. Round and round he went, his feet sometimes fumbling at a tread, not daring to look down, or to think of what would happen if a shell made a direct hit on it. Shrapnel had struck it many times; hundreds of jagged holes were in the boiler-plate walls. He paused for breath, to ease the ache in his legs, while the dim tube whispered hugely of the noises of battle, then
whang
! the blow went right through him, as a splinter of woolly bear opened an eyelid-shaped space six feet above his eyes.

After hesitation, he decided that the law of averages—no shell ever fell exactly in the same shell-hole as another—would protect him; so he climbed on, to rest again a dozen yards higher up, and to see large gaps in the boiler plate above him. Would that bare space be watched by a sniper? Why were there no British observers up the tower? Perhaps because they could see all they needed for the moment from their old O.P.s in Maroc, and the huge crassier near Vermelles, with telescopes?

He came to the top of the staircase, and found himself on an iron floor strewn with shell-splinters and broken glass. He was in a circular room, like a turret, with breast-high windows all round it. Cold wind moved past him from the empty spaces, with their serrated glass edges.

He began to tiptoe around the platform, under the steel roof. At the far end was a table, with one leg fractured, leaning
sideways
. Below it was a small pile of newspapers, apparently
slidden off, with an empty wine bottle and a piece of dry black bread; and in one corner, a single grey Zeiss glass. He picked it up, screwed the adjustment, and saw that it was unbroken. What luck! He put it on the table, and took up a newspaper, making out the thickly carved German letters,
Berliner
Tageblatt.
Then there was a little book of cartoons, with a picture of Big Bertha, a fat smiling woman bending down, face turned back to look at her posterior, which was a gun pooping off a shell with the motto
Gott
Strafe
England!
He examined other pictures of smiling, moustached soldiers, wearing the round nob of
gunners
on their
pickelhauben
,
in scenes of snow. There was a Russian bear, with the Czar’s face under its peaked cap, ambling big and stupid right into the muzzles of a German battery. On another page was a long lean lanky Highlander, with bony knees and a narrow face and brow with glengarry slipping off, and buck teeth holding a huge curved pipe, and a marmalade pot in one hand, running away from a laughing German soldier labelled
Michael
with rifle and bayonet.

Phillip sat down and studied the book, while he ate his lunch. He was keeping the best things of his adventure for after his meal—the view over the battlefield from the window. “Twinkle’s’ sandwiches had never tasted so good, with their French mustard. They were horse all right, browner and more tender than beef, with a wider grain that made the slices easier to bite with the bread, and softer to chew. Then, having folded his sandwich paper, and put it back in his haversack, he opened his map, and going to the window with the grey Zeiss monocular, looked out.

The morning mist had cleared up, and the country lay spread out below him, with its faintly blue pyramids, tall brick chimneys, —some of them white—and thickly congested pithead villages or
corons
of brick, lying as though pressed upon the wide spaces of rolled-out downland. The downland itself looked flattened, as though it had sunk down with all the stone and coal lifted out from under the coverlet of chalk. On the map-like scene little men in groups and files were moving, all one way, amidst the booming of cannon and the burst of shell. He focussed the glass on one group, but they were without interest: mere
slow-moving
figures. It was better to look with his eyes only, at black spouts of shell-bursts amidst the thin and wandering lines of white in the brown-green grassy flattened downland. He saw
the flashes of guns, tiny winks of light, and imagined the air torn in strip upon strip above the tiny men moving so slowly, so far away—always so slowly, so far away.

He went to the dangerous side of the tower, towards the Germans, after covering his face with his khaki handkerchief, to blend with the rusty iron. North lay the shallow valley between Lone Tree ridge and the crest of the Lens-Béthune road, with its lengths of coppice concealing the machine-guns which had cut up the Cantuvellaunian attack of the day before; and farther down the valley, into which the straight road dipped, lay the brown cluster of Hulluch, and beyond it a stream in a green valley, with trees in full foliage just beginning to turn to the colours of autumn. Farther away and beyond, five miles or so, lay La Bassée and the canal. West of La Bassée lay smaller Auchy, and this side of it miners’ cottages,
corons,
near the big sullen Dump, and a tall chimney by the pit-head; and in front of it, semi-circular in a dressing of sulky chalk, wreathed in the smoke of many shells, lay the Hohenzollern Redoubt, which had been taken and lost, and was now being attacked again, judging by the white British shrapnel smoke over it.

He saw Vermelles, comparatively untouched by shell-fire; and the big grey pyramid that was the crassier at Philosophe,
tunnelled
along its peak for shrapnel-proof observation posts. Back behind the British lines lay the tall slag-heaps of Noeux-les-Mines, the square tower of Béthune, and the dark mass of a wood. How small and remote everything seemed!

He saw the trenches of the lost and dying soldiers’ world like lines of waves white-crested: low waves frozen white on the green and dun underswell of a frozen sea—frozen with pain and despair—waves of burst chalk-bags strewn with punctured men. Through the glass he could make out the criss-cross of larch poles, the knife-rest obstacles with their coils of wire; and the dead men caught in the tangles.