Behind the Lines (15 page)

Along the ridge beyond the village ran a
route nationale
. Its bordering trees had always been a ranging mark for the enemy's guns. One of the tall poplars lay across its intersection with the narrower road to the front, and the stream of traffic had perforce piled up behind the obstacle. A gang of sweating, swearing men were labouring desperately to remove it. Their figures could be seen hacking and hauling darkly against the glow of a distant burning dump, overhung by an immense black pall of smoke. Shells that approached with a vicious shriek and detonated with a reverberating “cr-rump” ranged at minute intervals up and down the crowded road, and from a copse to the right a heavy howitzer fired periodically, its blast almost unseating the horsemen on the road.

The tree was dragged away and the traffic streamed on, only to halt again a short distance farther on where a ditched six-inch howitzer partly blocked the road. Baulks
of timber were taken from a sapper bridging wagon, and dragged to the side of the road; the traffic bumped over them and round the obstacle.

The traffic thinned as it neared the front, and B Battery was able to make better progress. But the hostile shells became more numerous. Close ahead the ruins of a village was lit by their bursts. One landed on the maltese cart ahead of Rawley, and it disappeared.

Rumbald, his steel helmet askew, clattered up beside him. “We can't get through this,” he panted. “I will go back and see if I can find a way round.”

Rawley jerked out sharply, “We've got to get through.” And when Rumbald persisted, he shouted, “Good God, Rumbald, don't you realize this is a battle, and the infantry up there are relying on us for artillery support!”

A shrill, rising scream was cut short by a crash and a spurt of flame on the roadside. His mare reared straight up and came down trembling. In the brief, bright glow Rawley saw Rumbald's big face glistening and streaked with perspiration. “Go back—hell!” he shouted.

He heard the hurtling shriek of a large calibre shell; the darkness lifted about a vivid flash surmounted by a great black canopy of rising earth. He turned in the saddle and yelled through his cupped hands—“Tr-rot!”

The battered gable end of a barn to the left glistened fitfully in the flash of bursting shells. The air sang and hummed with flying fragments of metal. He signalled “gallop” to the gun behind him. The six horses threw their weight upon the traces and stretched their necks. The
drivers crouched low in the saddles, the men clutched desperately to the swaying caissons; and the gun behind rocked and bounced and struck sparks beneath its flying wheels.

Again he heard the hurtling shriek of a large calibre shell. The hot blast scorched his face, and the uprearing canopy of earth spread out above him like a pall. With his head bent sideways as to a gale he saw driver Tench slowly bow his head and then slide slowly from the saddle down among the galloping hoofs. By the light of the next flash he saw the huddled body, white face and shock of dark hair strike the road and remain motionless; and then the following gun wheels leapt upon it.

A fire burning in the shattered village spilled a ruddy pool of light upon the shell-pocked road and bordering hummocks of masonry. A driverless limber flashed out from the darkness beyond. Rawley saw the ruddy glow of the fire reflected in the glistening eyes of the terrified horses as they stampeded by with the leaping limber behind. They missed the gun by inches, but thirty yards further on they collided with a hummock of brickwork with a crash that splintered the limber to matchwood, and could be heard above the roar of the barrage.

Beyond the rubble heap of the village in the comparative peace of an occasional whiz-bang Rawley turned his mare and waited. One by one the wagons and guns appeared as long, dark, swiftly moving objects against the red glow of the fire. Piddock, a dark silhouette with tilted shrapnel helmet and bulging respirator, clattered up.

“Dirty night at sea,” he growled.

“Any damage?” asked Rawley.

“One wagon scuppered and a team knocked out, and Rumbald is back t'other side of the village with number two gun that's ditched in a shell-hole big enough to sink a battleship.”

Major Cane appeared out of the darkness ahead and led them to the new position, a chawed-up depression in the old support line, where rusty wire and shell holes impeded the task of getting in the guns; but an old trench with infantry dug-outs gave accommodation for the men.

II

Soon after dawn Cane and Rawley, accompanied by linesmen, set off to observe and to try to get some idea of the new line held by the enemy. It was Rawley's first view of a battlefield. They came down a gentle slope covered with rank grass and pitted with shell holes, and crossed the old fire trench by one of the wooden bridges prepared by the sappers. In the now deserted trench the rough ladders, made to assist the infantry in going over the top, still leaned against the parapet, and in the bay beneath the bridge one of the early casualties lay on the fire-step, with his muddy boots protruding from the great coat which covered him.

They passed through the rusty wire and knife rests into the low ground which two days previously had been no-man's-land. Here and there a figure sprawled stiffly among the coarse grass and rusty tins, the face already
blue-grey and the lips black, between which the teeth glimmered like those of a dead horse. Nearer the old German Line was evidence of the bombardment—countless shell holes, twisted scraps of barbed wire, the iron cases of trench mortar shells, ripped and spread fanwise by the explosion of the charge within, and more gruesome relics: a black German field boot, with an inch or two of shining white shin bone protruding from it.

The German fire trench was too broad to jump. Cut in the hillslope, it was backed by a tortured glacis of chalk. The duckboards were littered with broken revetment and chalk debris. Water bottles, gas masks, rifles, coal-scuttle helmets, and scraps of clothing and equipment littered the fire-step, and its defenders lay in grotesque attitudes among the ruins. One knelt as in prayer, with his head bowed on the fire-step. Another sprawled face downwards on the duckboards. Another sat drunkenly in the angle of a traverse with his cropped head thrown back as though singing a ribald chorus. A thin, red-headed corpse gazed at the sun with one rigid eye; the other side of his face was gone. And the occupants of one dug-out had been literally plastered round the doorway by the explosions of the attackers' bombs. It was all clear and vivid in the bright morning light, and nothing moved.

Farther on, in a saphead, they came upon an overturned machine-gun with a half-fired belt still through the breech. Behind it sat a huge dead German, his black-booted legs spread out on either side in the firing position, his back against an ammunition box. He was tunicless, and his great
hands and knotted forearms rested on the faded grey cloth of his breeches, where they had dropped from the firing knob. His grimy open shirt displayed a hairy chest matted with a purple crust from three or four bayonet jabs.

“Stout fellow!” said Cane, as they picked their way past him and up the sap. “But, damn him, he must have done a hell of a lot of damage before they got him.”

Through a wood they went by a trench only breast high, where branches, splintered wood, and fallen trunks littered the ground on either side. Above them towered the trees, gaunt and ragged, with limbs hanging lamely or stumps ending in white-splintered manes. And the work of destruction continued. A runaway express train, it seemed, was tearing across the sky, to end in mid-career in a stunning thunder clap; and in the clear sky overhead appeared miraculously a thick woolly black cloud. The sky was soon stained with wispy smears, the drifting ghosts of former heavy shrapnel bursts.

They found themselves at last in the new front Line, which at this point was an old German reserve trench with new fire-steps cut to face the enemy, and were able to shoot the battery from a position in a barricaded communicating trench running out towards the enemy.

III

On their return to the battery they found that it had received some attention from the enemy's gunners. Number two pit had received a direct hit, and the fire which had
been started thereby had only just been prevented from exploding the ammunition stacked at the back. Piddock and Sergeant Jameson had spent an anxious ten minutes removing from the danger zone some hundreds of shells that were already almost too hot to touch. And a little later Piddock had been blown down the steps of the mess dug-out by a shell which landed on the parados of the trench. His only injury, a glorious black eye, was the subject of much chaff.

“What with one thing and another we've had quite a chatty afternoon,” he told them with a grin; but Rawley noticed that the usual clog dance accompaniment to the gramophone was missing that evening.

Day succeeded day and the battle continued. To Rawley they were days of recurring pictures, like figures on a revolving frieze, a kaleidoscope of sound, movement, and colour. The gun-pits with the sunlight streaming through the camouflage netting and mottling the backs and helmets of the sweating gunners; the gun-pits at night, leaping in the vivid flashes of the guns from shadowy mystery to the cardboard detail of theatrical scenery; the gun-pits in the rain, with water sluicing the bleached sandbags and trickling from the drenched netting overhead. The rutted road by day and night, in sunshine and in rain, with wounded in twos and threes trickling down it and little files of steel-hatted men passing up it. The mess dug-out with Cane, pipe in mouth, working out barrage tables by the light of a guttering candle. The tortured lunar-like landscape, hot and reeking beneath a brazen sun, boggy and shining and
diluvian beneath a slanting rain, or ghostly and Dantesque in the greenish glow of Verey lights. The skyline familiar in every detail from the clustered bare poles of the wood to the ragged hummocks of the
briqueterie
, smeared by day with the dirty smudges of shell-bursts and illuminated at night by the soaring Verey lights, winking shrapnel bursts, and coloured S.O.S. rockets.

The throbbing roar of the guns was ever present, the crashing concussion of detonating shells, the nauseating stench of foul earth, chloride of lime, wet clothing, and sweating humanity.

No one knew what was happening. The newspapers spoke glibly of victories and substantial gains. B Battery fired countless attack bombardments and put down countless protective barrages in answer to supplicating S.O.S. rockets, but no orders came to move forward.

Typical British battle weather had set in, and after floundering through the water-logged trenches and mud from the O.P. to the battery, one arrived in a state of semi-exhaustion. Rawley, however, was consistently cheerful and even happy. The happiest moment of the day was when, after the exhausting trudge back from the O.P., he stumbled, tired and muddy, down the steps of his dug-out. Presently, as he sipped a mug of hot tea, his servant would pull off his muddy field boots. Afterwards he would strip and towel himself vigorously all over; and the evening ration cart would bring him a letter from Berney. His inward happiness was proof against the outward attacks of cold, fatigue and monotony.

The new wagon lines had become a quagmire, and Rumbald had got his way at last and had gone back to construct new horse-standings. No doubt he was more concerned about the exhausting and dangerous journey to and from the O.P. than with the comfort and health of the horses; but Rawley was glad to be rid of him, for in the confined space of the little mess his presence and personality were rather overpowering.

Rawley himself did not mind the extra duty which one officer the less at the guns entailed, but he was resentful on Piddock's account. Piddock had been shaken by being blown down the dug-out steps, and three days later he had again been blown over by a crump when on his way up to the O.P. Physically he had suffered no injury on either occasion, and he was not the man to talk about his mental reactions. Outwardly he was as cheerful as ever, but on one occasion, during a heavy strafe, his lighting of a cigarette was performed a shade too nonchalantly to deceive the keen eye of a friend like Rawley. If anyone needed and deserved a quiet spell at the wagon lines it was Piddock, not Rumbald.

For days the rain continued, and it became the chief source of discomfort. The old German trench behind the guns was a foot deep in liquid mud. It was impossible to keep the water out of the dug-outs. Clothing became sodden, and clean underclothing freshly put on felt damp and sticky. The guns on their platforms of timber baulks sank deeper and deeper in the ooze, and threatened to disappear altogether as more than one horse and wagon had done.
The ammunition wagons needed two and even three teams to drag them over roads that were like ploughed fields, and the journey from the wagon lines and back occupied from sunset till sunrise. Shells, with delay action fuses, that buried themselves deeply in the earth before detonating, left pits a dozen feet deep into which the unwary fell to be drowned in the foul water that filled them.

The enemy were using a large number of gas shells, particularly at night. When the ghostly Verey lights were rising and falling on the front, they came whimpering and sighing through the darkness like lost souls, the liquid gas within the shell swilling like water in the belly of a trotting horse. The men in rain-washed steel helmets and respirators floundering in the quagmire resembled reptiles emerging from the primeval ooze. The mud itself was impregnated with gas, and few men in the battery escaped scot free in that polluted air. Rawley could speak hardly above a whisper, and for a day Cane lost his voice entirely.

Late one afternoon, after a spell at the guns, Rawley squelched along the trench and down the steep steps to the mess dug-out. A battered acetylene lamp flared on a bracket that had been driven into the glistening damp earth wall of the dug-out. Piddock, who had been on duty at the O.Pip, sat dejectedly on a box. He wore his muddy trench coat, and his dented steel helmet lay on the rough table before him.