Death of a Hero (38 page)

He experienced a rapid fall of spirits to a depth of depression he had never before experienced. Hitherto, mere young vitality had buoyed him up, the
élan
of his former life had carried him along through the days. In spite of his rages and his worryings and the complications and boredoms, he had really remained hopeful. He had wanted to go on living, because he had always unconsciously believed that life was good. Now something within him was just beginning to give way, now for the first time the last faint hues of the lovely iris of youth faded, and in horror he faced the grey realities. He was surprised and a little alarmed at his own listlessness and despair. He felt like a sheet of paper dropping in jerks and waverings through grey air into an abyss.

The dinner bugle-call sounded. He turned mechanically and joined the men thronging towards the eating-huts. The snow was falling faster, and the men stamped their feet as they waited for the doors to open, cursing the cook's delay. There was the usual animal stampede for the best platefuls when the door opened. Winterbourne stood aside and let
them struggle. The expressions on their faces were not pretty. He was practically the last in, and did not fare well. He ate the stewed bully, hunk of bread, and soap-like cheese with a sort of dog gratitude for the warmth, which was humiliating. He scarcely even resented the humiliation.

The train taking them to rail-head crawled interminably through a frozen landscape thinly sprinkled with snow. The light was beginning to wane. The skeleton outlines of dwarf trees, twisted by the wind, loomed faintly past the window. It was bitterly cold in the unwarmed third-class French carriage; one of the windows was smashed, and the bitter air and snow swept in. The men sat in silence, wrapped in their greatcoats and stamping their feet rhythmically on the floor in vain efforts to keep warm. Winterbourne was cold to the knees, and yet felt feverish. His cough had grown worse, and he realized he had a temperature. He felt dirtily uncomfortable, because he had not taken his clothes off for days. The water at the camp had all frozen, and it had been impossible to get a bath.

Darkness slowly intensified. Slowly, more slowly, the train crawled along. Winterbourne was in that section of the draft going to the Pioneer Battalion. He had asked the Sergeant what that meant:

“Oh, it's cushy, much better than the ordinary infantry.”

“Why, what do they do?”

“Workin' parties in No Man's Land,” said the Sergeant with a grin, “an' go over the top when there's a show.”

The train slightly increased its speed as they passed through a large junction. Somebody said it was St. Omer, somebody else said St. Pol, someone else suggested Béthune. They did not know where they were, or where they were going. About two miles outside the junction the train came to a stop. Winterbourne peered into the thick darkness. Nothing. He leaned out the glassless window and heard only the hissing steam from the stationary train, saw only the faint glow of the furnace. Suddenly, far away in front and to the left, a quick flash of light pierced the blackness and Winterbourne heard a faint boom. The guns! He waited, straining eyes and ears, in the freezing darkness. Silence. Then again – flash. Boom. Flash. Boom. Very distant, very faint, but unmistakable. The guns. They must be getting near the line.

Once again the train started and crawled interminably once more. For about half an hour they passed through a series of deep cuttings.
Then, from the right this time, came a much nearer and brighter flash, followed almost at once by a deep boom audible above the noise of the train. The other men heard it this time:

“The guns!”

The train crept on stealthily for another couple of minutes through the gloom. The men were all crowded round the window. Flash. Boom. Another two minutes. Flash. Boom.

Three-quarters of an hour later, they detrained at rail-head in complete darkness.

5

W
INTERBOURNE had an easy initiation into trench warfare. The cold was so intense that the troops on both sides were chiefly occupied in having pneumonia and trying to keep warm. He found himself in a quiet sector which had been fought over by the French in 1914 and had been the scene of a fierce and prolonged battle in 1915 after the British took over the sector. During 1916, when the main fighting shifted to the Somme, the sector had settled down to ordinary trench warfare. Trench raids had not then been much developed, but constant local attacks were made on battalion or brigade fronts. A little later the sector atoned for this calm.

To Winterbourne, as to so many others, the time element was of extreme importance during the war years. The hour-goddesses who had danced along so gaily before, and have fled from us since with such mocking swiftness, then paced by in a slow, monotonous file as if intolerably burdened. People at a distance thought of the fighting as heroic and exciting, in terms of cheering bayonet charges or little knots of determined men holding out to the last Lewis gun. That is rather like counting life by its champagne suppers and forgetting all the rest. The qualities needed were determination and endurance, inhuman endurance. It would be much more practical to fight modern wars with mechanical robots than with men. But then, men are cheaper, although in a long war the initial outlay on the robots might be compensated by
the fact that the quality of the men deteriorates, while they cost more in upkeep. But that is a question for the War Departments. From the point of view of efficiency in war, the trouble is that men have feelings; to attain the perfect soldier, we must eliminate feelings. To the human robots of the last war, time seemed indefinitely and most unpleasantly prolonged. The dimension then measured as a “day” in its apparent duration approached what we now call a “month”. And the long series of violent stalemates on the Western front made any decision seem impossible. In 1916 it looked as if no line could be broken, because so long as enough new troops were hurried to threatened points the attacker was bound to be held up; and the supplies of new troops seemed endless. It became a matter of which side could wear down the other's man-power and moral endurance. So there also was the interminable. The only alternative seemed an indefinite prolongation of misery, or death or mutilation, or collapse of some sort. Even a wound was a doubtful blessing, a mere holiday, for wounded men had to be returned again and again to the line.

For the first six or eight “weeks” Winterbourne like all his companions, was occupied in fighting the cold. The Pioneer Company to which he was attached were digging a sap out into No Man's Land and making trench mortar emplacements just behind the front line. They worked on these most of the night, and slept during the day. But the ground was frozen so hard that progress was tediously slow.

The company were billeted in the ruins of a village behind the reserve trenches, over a mile from the front line. The landscape was flat, almost treeless except for a few shellblasted stumps, and covered with snow frozen hard. Every building in sight had been smashed, in many cases almost level with the ground. It was a mining country with great queer hills of slag and strange pit-head machinery in steel, reduced by shell-fire to huge masses of twisted sting metal. They were in a salient, with the half-destroyed, evacuated town of M— in the elbow-crook on the extreme right. The village churchyard was filled with graves of French soldiers; there were graves inside any of the houses which had no cellars, and graves flourished over the bare landscape. In all directions were crosses, little wooden crosses, in ones and twos and threes, emerging blackly from the frozen snow. Some were already askew; one just outside the ruined village had been snapped short by a shell-burst. The dead men's caps, mouldering and falling to
pieces, were hooked on to the tops of the crosses – the grey German round cap, the French blue-and-red kepi, the English khaki. There were also two large British cemeteries in sight – rectangular plantations of wooden crosses, it was like living in the graveyard of the world – dead trees, dead houses, dead mines, dead villages, dead men. Only the long steel guns and the transport waggons seemed alive. There were no civilians, but one of the mines was still worked about a mile and a half further from the line.

Behind Winterbourne's billet were hidden two large howitzers. They fired with a reverberating crash which shook the ruined houses, and the diminishing scream of the departing shells was strangely melancholy in the frost-silent air. The Germans rarely returned the fire – they were saving their ammunition. Occasionally a shell screamed over and crashed sharply against the ruins the huge detonation spouted up black earth or rattling bricks and tiles. Fragments of the burst shell-case hummed through the air.

But it was the cold that mattered. In his efforts to defend himself against it, Winterbourne like the other men, was strangely and wonderfully garbed. Round his belly, next the skin, he wore a flannel belt. Over that a woollen vest, grey flannel shirt, knitted cardigan jacket, long woollen under-pants and thick socks. Over that, service jacket, trousers, puttees, and boots; then a sheepskin coat, two mufflers round his neck, two pairs of woollen gloves and over them trench gloves. In addition came equipment – box respirator on the chest, steel helmet, rifle and bayonet. The only clothes he took off at night were his boots. With his legs wrapped in a greatcoat, his body in a grey blanket, a ground-sheet underneath, pack for pillow, and a dixie of hot tea-and-rum inside him, he just got warm enough to fall asleep when very tired.

Through the broken roof of his billet Winterbourne could see the frosty glitter of the stars and the white rime. In the morning when he awoke, he found his breath frozen on the blanket. In the line his short moustache formed icicles. The boots beside him froze hard, and it was agony to struggle into them. The bread in his haversack froze greyly; and the taste of frozen bread is horrid. Little spikes of ice formed in the cheese. The tins of jam froze and had to be thawed before they could be eaten. The bully beef froze in the tins and came out like chunks of reddish ice. Washing was a torment. They had three tubs of water between about forty of them each day. With this they shaved and washed – about ten or fifteen to a tub. Since Winterbourne was a latecomer to the
battalion, he had to wait until the others had finished. The water was cold and utterly filthy. He plunged his dirty hands into it with disgust, and shut his eyes when he washed his face. This humiliation, too, he accepted.

He always remembered his first night in the line. They paraded in the ruined village street about four o'clock. The air seemed crackling with frost, and the now familiar bloody smear of red sunset was dying away in the southwest. The men were muffled up to the ears, and looked grotesquely bulky in their sheep-or goat-skin coats, with the hump of box respirators on their chests. Most of them had sacking covers on their steel helmets to prevent reflection, and sacks tied round their legs for warmth. The muffled officer came shivering from his billet, as the men stamped their feet on the hard, frost-bound road. They drew picks and shovels from a dump, and filed silently through the ruined streets behind the officer. Their bayonets were silhouetted against the cold sky. The man in front of Winterbourne turned abruptly left into a ruined house. Winterbourne followed, descended four rough steps, and found himself in a trench. A notice said:

HINTON ALLEY
To the Front Line.

To be out of the piercing cold wind in the shelter of walls of earth was an immediate relief. Overhead shone the beautiful ironic stars.

A field-gun behind them started to crash out shells. Winterbourne listened to the long-drawn wail as they sped away and finally crashed faintly in the distance. He followed the man ahead of him blindly. Word kept coming down: “Hole here, look out.” “Wire overhead.” “Mind your head – bridge.” He passed the messages on, after tripping in the holes, catching his bayonet in the field telephone wires, and knocking his helmet on the low bridge. They passed the Reserve line, then the Support, with the motionless sentries on the fire-step, and the peculiar smell of burnt wood and foul air coming from the dug-outs. A minute later came the sharp message: “Stop talking – don't clink your shovels.” They were now only a few hundred yards from the German front line. A few guns were firing in a desultory way. A shell crashed outside the parapet about five yards from Winterbourne's head. It was only a whizz-bang, but to his unpractised ears it sounded like a heavy. The shells came in fours – crump, Crump,
CRUMP, CRRUMP – the Boche was bracketing. Every minute or so came a sharp “ping!” – fixed rifles firing at a latrine or an unprotected piece of trench. The duck-boards were more broken. Winterbourtle stumbled over an unexploded shell, then had to clamber over a heap of earth where the side of the trench had been smashed in, a few minutes earlier. The trench made another sharp turn, and he saw the bayonet and helmet of a sentry silhouetted against the sky. They were in the front line.

They turned sharp left. To their right were the fire-steps, with a sentry about every fifty yards. In between came traverses and dug-out entrances, with their rolled-up blanket gas-curtains. Winterbourne peered down them – there was a faint glow of light, a distant mutter of talk, and a heavy stench of wood smoke and foul air. The man in front stopped and turned to Winterbourne: