How Dear Is Life (38 page)

But it was not all over. They had surrendered, and they were being killed. They were rolling on the ground, bloody heads and faces, bodies hunching up, faces in hands, kicking, clinging; bayonet stabs, shots, butts bashing heads, screams, shouts, thuds.

More Germans, big men, were coming up. The Prussian Guards! “A-a-ah!” he shouted, and raised his rifle to fire at them again and again, cursing the harshness of the steel-harsh hot bolt. Then something went off right in his face, brassy bright speckles. His knees gave way; he banged his lip on the backsight of his rifle as he sat down. The rain leapt everywhere in a drenching downpour. The noise receded.

When he felt steadier, he got up and walked among the men on the ground, Germans and British, some doubled up and crying out, clutching their stomachs, some moaning, beating their arms, kicking with their feet.
Water!
Wasser!
Water!
Wasser!
Why were they so thirsty? Some stared at him, with eyes bulged like those of rabbits caught by ferrets, bulging from straining. He saw them rising up with the ground, very slowly. He clutched at the ground, to stop it going away; but it went away.

The night came on; the rain fell.

*

He felt very sick when he opened his eyes, feeling instant terror.
Mother
,
mother!

Gradually he remembered where he was. He was very cold. His head ached. His eye was speckly with the electric snake, his mouth had the sour, yellow taste of bully beef. He managed to sit up, to look about him. Stretcher-bearers were carrying back wounded men. Had he been hit? He could move his arms and legs. He felt his face. There was a bump on his forehead, but no hole there. He rolled over, got on his knees, managed to push himself to his feet. His shoes and hose and slipped-down spats were sodden weights. He wanted to lie down, to go to sleep again; but it was too cold, too wet.

He picked up his rifle. A burst brass case was in the breach. It must have exploded there. It had gone off in his face. The
breach was marked by the explosion. Twice like that, what an escape. Then there was the bullet that had cut his coat. Ah, the crucifix! He felt it safe under his shirt.

He threw down the rifle, then, seeing Tommy Atkins and another man with a stretcher, picked it up again and went to speak to them. Tommy Atkins, red-cheeked and determined as ever, but face thinner and more serious, said, “We looked at you, just now, Maddison, and thought you had concussion.”

“Christ, what a life!” he sobbed.

“Talking like that won’t help matters, Maddison.”

Carrying his damaged rifle, tears smudging his dirty face, Phillip went back to find the Colour-sergeant. On the way he stopped to look at a party of men beside two stretcher bearers. They were carrying the body of the grey-moustached General, who had blown the horn, on a stretcher. He had been shot through the neck during the night. Later, Phillip heard that he was General Fitzclarence, who had rallied the troops at Gheluvelt a fortnight before, and led a counter-attack that had prevented the break-through. Everyone said he was a wonderful officer. He had won the Victoria Cross three times during the South African war.

*

For the next four nights and days the London Highlanders remained in the woods, in support: making bunkers, wiring the reserve line of watery shallow trenches, working as carrying parties, while by day and by night rain fell intermittently through the pine and beech trees.

It was the end of the autumn fighting weather. Winter was now settling upon the brown landscape, with its soil sandy-yellow in places. Soon the springs would break, the water-table rise to within eighteen inches of the surface. Wet and cold were now the things to be dreaded, to be endured.

Among trees splintered and gashed, where still an occasional cock pheasant was heard to crow, and an odd hare seen to race upon the fallen leaves, the shell-holes began to fill with misty grey water, which rose to within a foot of their crumbling craters. Water seeped up into new reserve trenches as they were being dug, being trodden into marn. Yellow clay clung to the blades of shovels with greater tenacity than the force of the diggers. Digging went on slowly, at least it gave temporary warmth to bodies in sodden uniforms. Phillip dreamed as he shivered, when
digging was done, of glaring August roads, of the great heats of the march from London when the dust floated over those happy days gone now for ever.

Sandbags, laid header-stretcher on tarred felt covering the rough timbered frames of bunker roofs, had broken the tarred felt in places. Here water dripped, on greatcoats and kilts already saturated with the rains outside.

There was little time for sleep. Long hours were spent winding off barbed wire, from heavy rolls on to sticks; each to be borne, at night, upon the shoulders of two men, to the line. Out in front, under the hiss and pop and quiver of flares, both German and British wiring parties were working. Such work was justly called a fatigue. There were fatigues for carrying steel-loophole plates, bundles of sand-bags, and spades; ammunition fatigues; rations fatigues; fatigue parties under the Royal Engineers, starting from battalion dumps near the front line. Wooden crates filled with cigarettes and air-tight tins of tobacco began to arrive—cursed by the fatigue parties. Worst of all was a new sort of entanglement made under surveillance of the Royal Engineers at their dump beside the Menin Road—loops of wire, like concertinas pressed flat, fixed between two sets of wooden trestles. These had to be hauled and handled right into no-man’s-land, slip, slosh, gash; out among the dead swelling under upheaved and broken trees, while traversing machine-guns sent chips and flakes of wood flying.

If a machine-gun started to traverse when a flare was falling you must stand still, in a glaring shade of luminous dust that seemed to take away all shape and cover all with an intangible cement powder of light. Gone was romantic feeling about the lily-white wavering flares, whose going out meant utter darkness without sense of uprightness so that often you found yourself flat in sudden mud on your face, or the back of your head. Life had the actuality of nightmare, thick with tiredness in a slow, dragging world; a deadness of living only just endurable from moment to moment by the thought of relief. The news that the aged Field-Marshal Lord Roberts had died of a chill at St. Omer, after inspecting troops, came like a whisper across the mud and desolation, through the weight and inertia of the night.

A
T THE
beginning of the third week of November the Guards Brigade was relieved.

Despite exhaustion, hope upheld the territorials, and discipline the regulars, on the march down the Menin Road, to the Grande Place of Ypres, where the Cloth Hall, the Cathedral of St. Martin, and many of the other buildings were as yet unshelled.

But there was to be no rest there. They went on through the wide and cobbled square, leaving the town by the Rue du Beurre. The column crossed railway line and canal, and continued along a tree-lined road. The men did not know their destination. Not to know was part of the mental torture, though none thought of mental torture, for so long had it been accepted as life itself. No whistling or singing; each man trudged, among others near yet remote, in desperate aloneness.

Several of the Highlanders, including Phillip, had lost shoes in the mud of the woods. They made the march unshod.

After nine days of fighting the London Highlanders numbered less than three hundred all told; even so, the battalion was almost as long, in columns of fours, as the rest of the brigade. The Coldstream had lost all their officers, and had a hundred and fifty other ranks. The Scots Guard had one captain and sixty-nine other ranks. The Black Watch mustered one lieutenant and a hundred and nine other ranks. The Cameron Highlanders had three officers and a hundred and forty other ranks.

Despite constant grinding nervous thought that with his lacerated bare feet he could never continue after each ten-minute halt at every hour, Phillip did not fall out. Towards the end of the march, when all except the Guards had lost step and line, he was light-headed, feeling that he could keep on quite a bit yet He carried Lance-Corporal Blunden’s rifle for the last two hours, or nine kilometres. Blunden, kind little modest Blunden, small dark Suffolk man, was also bare-foot.

The march lasted, with halts, over eight hours.

It was only at night that he learned of the London Rifles’ arrival from St. Omer that afternoon on their way up the line; and he realised that he had missed his cousin Willie. The next morning, when he hobbled to the centre of the town, wearing a pair of wooden
sabots
borrowed from the old man of his billet, he heard that the Rifles had already marched out. He sat in the Rossignol estaminet, but it was lonely there, among unknown faces, so he went back to his billet, as snow began to fall.

When the draft from the 2nd Battalion arrived, there were many new faces in No. 1 Company; but he made no new friend. Instead, he became the centre of four or five of the newcomers in his billet, all ready to defer to one of the original battalion, the man with the greatcoat ripped horizontally across the breast by a Spandau bullet. They sat together in the Rossignol at night. Almost an evening fixture there was an old soldier of the A.S.C., who owned a crown-and-anchor board, and took their money. “Come on, my lucky lads, try your fancy! Here we are again, Box and Cox, the Army bankers! The Old Sweaty Sox! Often bent, but never broke! Back your fancy, my lucky lads! You comes here in rags and you rides away in moticars! If you don’t speculate you can’t accumulate!” Rattle of dice, the throwdown. “Up she comes, the old mood-’ook!” as the anchor turned up among the Major (crown), the Curse (diamond), Shovel (spade), Shamrock (club), and Heart.

The immediate past receded into the dark region of the inner mind: shut away in moments of the day—parades, drills, route marches, football: hidden in the bright lights of smoky estaminet when songs were sung, and there was always the patter of the ‘rough and tough, the old and bold’ soldier of Ally Sloper’s Cavalry, said to be worth fifty thousand francs, sitting at his board
on the table by the wall, the bloody old skrimshanking thief. This was the life!

“Where you lay, I pay! I touch the money, but I never touch the dice! Any more for the lucky old mud-’ook? Are you all done, gentlemen? Are you all done? You lay, I pay! Copper to copper, silver to silver,
and
gold
to
gold.
Here she goes” (rattle of dice)—“and out she comes—the lucky heart, the Curse, and the Major.” He took in more francs than he paid out; for the odds were 6 to 1 against. But the patter went on and on, with the rattle, the throw, the chink of silver francs.

One of the main subjects of talk in the estaminets at that time was commissions. Almost daily men were leaving the battalion for England, to assume the coveted star and braid upon the tunic cuff. There was a look in their eyes as they came out of the orderly room, already temporary second-lieutenants of the New Armies, ordered to report the next morning for their passes HOME. The estaminets frequented by the Bleak Hill Boys became very noisy at night, as old friends had their final ‘wets’ together, before going back to billets in the frosty nights hung with glittering stars that remained, despite the flashing of the guns. 

“Where you lay, I pay! I touch the money, but I never touch the dice!”

This was the life!

Among the remaining survivors of the company, Phillip heard rumours that the battalion was to become an Officers Training Corps. There was not much doubt about what was the best service to be commissioned in. Quite a number of fellows had already applied for the Army Service Corps, Mechanical Transport section, for not only were A.S.C. officers paid more than any other branches—even a lorry-driver private, enlisted since the war, got six shillings a day, more than a junior officer of infantry—but the A.S.C. lived in comfort in rear areas, they could sleep once every twenty-four hours, and
in
a
bed.
For that reason alone there were no more vacancies in the A.S.C.

One of the fortunate ones going home had been gazetted to the Royal Garrison Artillery, whose heavy howitzers were normally miles behind the front line. The Royal Engineers came next for comfort; they worked up the line, but they went back to permanent billets where they could sleep dry.

Next in order of desirability was the Royal Field Artillery, the 18-pounders. They were about a mile back; they ate at a table under cover; above all, they could sleep out of the rain. All second-lieutenants of the branches behind the actual trenches were paid more than infantry second-lieutenants, who got five shillings and sixpence a day.

This seemed riches to Phillip; but he knew he would not stand the ghost of a chance if he applied for a commission. Nor would he ever dare to approach Douglas to ask the new Company Sergeant-Major to take him before Captain Ogilby. In any case, the new Colonel was not forwarding any more applications, as so many men had already left the battalion: and if all who were eligible were recommended, the battalion would scarcely muster more than a platoon. And in that platoon, of course, would be himself, the original Elastic Highlander. Still, what did it matter—this was the life!

He had gone to the estaminet in the first place for its name,
Au
Rossignol
,
which brought back the bluebell woods of Kent. One night while he was sitting there with the usual four of the new draft someone sang a Kipling song,
Gentlemen
Rankers,
that made him feel he was glad to be staying on, a
café-rhum
drinking lad, one of the old Bleak Hill b’hoys, don’t you know, who had fought in shoes and spats—Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree, Damned from here to Eternity, God ha’ mercy on such as we—Bah! Yah!! BAA-AA-AH!!!

In shouted chorus, in the warmth and smoke of the Nightingale with its grey marble counter, rows of bottles on shelf of mirror’d wall, Marie leaning over the counter and smiling, madame’s china coffee pots with big ornamentated curved spouts and handles on the stove behind. This was the life!

“Have a drink, you chaps? Cinq café-rhums, Marie!”

“Oui, m’sieu.”

“Cheer-ho, you chaps!”

Downham in the office used to say Cheer-ho, and Phillip had said Cheer-ho ever since. People like the Leytonstone men said Cheer-o.

Phillip the veteran with the gaping tear across his greatcoat went back with the four new chaps to the billet at nine o’clock, when the estaminets were out of bounds to soldiers, telling himself that it was the only life. His letters home were cheery, dashed off usually in the early afternoon, after the route march of the morning and with dinner inside him. This was the life!

*

And this the death—broken sleep upon billet floor; phantoms in the silence of the night, the snorings of Church, mutterings and teeth-grindings of Collins which went on and on until the sudden shout broke from him, the cry of exploding nerves. Silence again, but not for long; movements in the straw; the shut dark hung with snore and mutter, scenes, faces, flinchings, terrors—the childhood “battle of the brain” come again, to be thrust away, pressed back, hands clenched, knees drawn up against cries ever imminent, groans to be blanket-muffled lest the new chaps in the straw discover his real self, his donkey-boy cowardice, as Peter Wallace had done, and Father, Magister, Martin, Furrow, and others whose faces swirled about him, distorting past his mental sight, passing through his eyes with faces of wax melting in flames of blazing stack and windmill, dripping upon shadows of broken trees in the death-pallor of lilies under which thousands of more or less donkey-boys in khaki lay dead, with tens of thousands of donkey-boys in
feldgrau
, while the moon looked down in frozen grief.

Mutter
—
mutter
—
mother
—
mother
—the rain was beating on the window pane.