Love and the Loveless (27 page)

“You’re smoking my fusee, Teddy!”

“What did I tell you! Damp as a bloody midden!”

Phillip flicked the wheel once more, blowing on the spark which instantly changed the black fusee head to crimson. Vigorous puffs transferred the rose to the cigar end. “How’s that, Teddy?”

Pinnegar let out rasping coughs. “Tastes of phosgene, if you ask me!” He tore it open. “If that isn’t a cabbage leaf, I’m a Dutchman!” he cried, sticking the fuming end into his coffee. “What bloody awful coffee,” he went on. “It’s chicory ground up with dandelion roots, you know. Waitress! Ma’ms’el, l’addition, siwouplay!”

“I’m sorry, Teddy, we ought to have stopped at the Eagle, as you said. Let me pay.”

“Not on your life. I asked you to have lunch with me.”

“Well, thanks very much. I’ll do the same for you next time.”

“Not here!” exclaimed Pinnegar, swallowing several soda-mints. “Not in this bloody awful Poopy!”

Outside in the cobbled street they parted, and Phillip made his way to the convent school. Several hundred officers were already assembled in the main room. Those behind followed the example of their seniors in the front rows and stood up as the lecturer walked on from the side of the platform. There was a scraping of chairs as three hundred sat down again, trying to fit themselves into the least uncomfortable positions, to relax as far as possible amidst other legs, arms, elbows, and knees. Those in the rear half of the hall were already smoking when Major West, standing
white-faced
and still, said quietly, “Do smoke if you want to, gentlemen,” whereupon, Phillip noticed, the front row began to fill their pipes. He wondered if Westy felt nervous. It must be awful to face hundreds of ordinary officers, when you were on the Staff.

“I am asked to speak about the past, present, and future of Ypres. It is first heard of in history as a small fortress originally built on an island in the tenth century. The monastery of St. Martin was already there, apparently. The town grew fast, it had a charter in 1073, with two parishes, St. Martin and St. Peter.

“Sheep, otherwise wool, made the wealth of England, and it made Ypres rich, too. Cloth-weaving was patronised by the Counts of Flanders. After the first two decades of the twelfth century, Ypres market was known throughout Europe, being a centre of much trade. During the fourteenth century the human population was nearly a quarter of a million. One can imagine the fields around the town, grazed by flocks, the pastures drained and irrigated by water taken off and leading back into the brooks, or beeks, whose names are familiar to many of you today—the Belleward, Reutel, Zonne, Steen, Stroom, Loo, Haan, Groot
Kemmel, and so on. Sinister or apocryphal places today, but once of pastoral quietude. And will be so again, sooner than perhaps many of us can grasp at the moment.

“But to our brief history of Ypres. Trade enriches a country, which means usually one particular class. There followed civil strife, a revolt of the traders against those who had been enriched by them. Ypres burgesses, with those of the sister-towns of Ghent and Bruges, took up arms against the Counts of Flanders, who tried to restrict their privileges. They had to fight, too, against the Kings of France, always enemies of the Flemish. Wars benefit only mushroom growths, profiteers and opportunists. True industry is paralysed, foreign merchants depart. The celebrated cloth trade of Ypres declined, city life with it. The weavers left. Some went to England, and established their craft there. By this time the Burgundians had taken the city, and destroyed its charters. By the sixteenth century, the Spanish were overlords. Under the despotic rule of the Dukes of Alba, the population was less than five thousand, and most of the city in ruins.

“During the seventeenth century the French occupied the town and surrounding country. Louis XIV fortified it, making it one of the strongest towns in the conquered territory. In 1715 the Dutch garrisoned it, making the Belgians pay for their upkeep. A usual procedure in war, gentlemen, though it has been known to be worked the other way round.”

This dry remark caused laughter: it was generally said throughout the British Expeditionary Force that the British paid both French and Belgian governments rent for the land they occupied, including the trenches.

“During two hundred years the city had suffered siege, bombardment, plunder, fire, hangings, and heavy taxation to enable its Spanish and Austrian masters to fight against France. Flanders, you will recall from the classroom, is the Cockpit of Europe. Human nature does not change, nor does the nature of the wolf and the sheep. The moral seems to be that of Cromwell, ‘Trust in God and keep your powder dry’.

“By a decree of 1792, the French Revolutionary Convention made new laws for Belgium. Ypres was powerless against the Jacobins, and lost under their rule what the town had managed to keep under all previous rulers, its municipal autonomy. The Concordat of 1801 removed the power of the bishops. The Dutch returned, to fortify the ramparts once more. Fifty years
later, in 1855, under Leopold the First, the fortifications were once again torn down.

“In October 1914, when the finest small army the continent has ever seen entered Ypres, the population was seventeen and a half thousand. The people were chiefly tradesmen and artisans, with what we would call a comfortable middle class of old burgher families and property owners. There was also a limited society of the old nobility living in hereditary mansions in the town, and old châteaux in the surrounding country of farms. A sleepy town, ‘a rose-red city, half as old as time’, with little ambition, small culture, her artistic minority living in the past, and caring for the town’s historical relics, mainly architectural. A town like any old English market town, its economy maintained by farming, which had taken on new cultivations of hops, tobacco, beet sugar, corn, and fruit, in addition to the classic products of beef, mutton, and butter. The butter market was indeed, until the summer of 1914, one of the most important in Belgium. I myself have an affection for the town—”

Laughter and cries interrupted the speaker. He stood motionless, the laughter ceased. “I am perfectly serious, gentlemen. I came here with some friends in a reading party between Trinity and Michaelmas terms in 1906. Among other pleasures, we were offered some duck-shooting by the Baron of a very finely ordered château in a quiet pastoral hamlet. The Baron’s keeper fed grain to flighting mallard in the little brook which ran out of Bellewaarde Lake. Afterwards, we had an excellent game of billiards, I remember.”

This information created a stir, followed by odd noises of laughter beyond derision. The contrast was too great—the familiar rubble and earth heap of Hooge Château beside the Menin road, scene of innumerable flammenwerfer, bayonet, and bombing attacks over a totally upheaved and detonated soil saturated with gas, odours of the dead, and chloride of lime, on the one hand; and someone shooting duck and then playing billiards with a Baron, on the other. Everybody seemed to be laughing: why, Phillip wondered. Hadn’t Cranmer shot a pheasant in the woods, and cooked it for both of them, in November 1914? Of course: that was in the time of the “red little, dead little army”.

“Yes, gentlemen, I am indebted to the Baron de Vinck for some very good sport. So ends a brief outline of the past. Now we come to the present, and to the not so far distant future.
The Salient, and the country extending to the gentle rises—one can hardly call them ridges, in the sense of our downs at home, and particularly what we know as the chalk ridges of Sussex, Surrey, Kent and Buckinghamshire—the almost imperceptibly rising ground to the east, from the Gheluvelt plateau on the south to the Passchendaele-Broodseinde-Westroosebeek-Stadenberg hillock on the north—the Salient is like the palm of one’s hand, when held out stiff and flat before one, thus——”

‘Spectre’ West extended his right hand, horizontal to the ground. “The ball of the thumb and the thumb are the Monts de Flandres, lying west of the Salient. The palm of the hand is the lower ground of the Salient. The lines crossing the palm are the Steenbeek and its tributary watercourses, Haanebeek, Stroombeek, Lekkerboterbeek, and other threads. They rise about the watershed of the Gravenstafel ridge, flowing south and west, and then north. Other streamlets flow east, having their sources in the same sort of sandy, gravelly soils which overlay yellow and blue clays of the subsoil. This gault clay resists the percolation of water. So that’s our country, from which it is intended to dispossess the present squatters, on our way to the Flanders plain lying below the sky-line to the east.

“Before I pass on to a description of the Flanders plain, I will speak briefly of the terrain of the battle to be fought before the breaking out of the forces of pursuit. The battlefield of the first phase is the palm of the hand. There are valleys, or more correctly depressions, between the fingers, whose tips end the rising ground. These depressions, to us, are dead ground, providing hidden routes for the enemy counter-attack divisions, and cover for their field-gun and howitzer batteries. Both the counterattacking divisions and the batteries are therefore mobile. The reserve divisions will lie out of range of our barrage, awaiting the moment to advance; the batteries each have several alternative emplacements, to which they can move at night. Now for the
Eingreif
Divisionen.
The German word
eingreif
is more than our word
grappling.
Rather is it
interlocking,
or as they say in East Anglia,
cogging-in,
fitting-in-with. The
eingreif
divisions, one behind every division in the line, function by hastening forward, under cover of dead ground, at the psychological moment when the attackers, having arrived at their limited objectives, after an expense of courage, have not yet got into shape for defence.

“Each
eingreif
division, arriving behind the enemy division
already in line, comes at once under command of the general officer of the fighting division, regardless of seniority. The man on the spot knows the form, as it were, and so the fresh troops are placed at his disposal.

“That, broadly speaking, is the tactical form for the enemy. We shall deal with it as it deserves, before the break-out. Our job is to bring these
eingreif
divisionen
forward into our cockpit, and break them there, by the combined fire-power of our infantry, gunners, and machine gunners, while our fresh divisions prepare for the next detonating bite into the palm of the unclenched mailed fist.”

The lecturer drank from a glass of chlorinated water, and shuddered.

“After the lecture, we shall be going to a model of the battlefield. It covers two acres. There we shall be able to see, to scale, the lie of the land. I am indebted to a French colleague, Capitaine Delvert, for this description of the country lying south of the Moeres, reclaimed fen land, which lies east and northeast of the Fôret d’Houthulst, in the French sector. This is a rough translation,

The notes were put in a tunic pocket, almost leisurely. Every eye watched the marmoreal face, with its high forehead covered by short, unbrushed hair. Phillip, elbows on knees, felt inspired to some wild and unformulated heroic action. Even so, he could not think, even, of himself wearing above his heart one of the ribands worn by his hero.

“Now with your permission I shall deal shortly with the second phase of the battle, the break-out. So far in this war neither side has been able to make a wide enough breach in what in former times was the square of resistance, and in mediaeval history the
armour, to enable its own armour to pass through, with supplies and all subsidiary services. Supplies and services need railways and main roads, so the breach must be wide. Since the war became static, every battle undertaken and prepared to make a breach in the opponent’s armour has failed—the Germans at First and Second Ypres, the British at Loos, the Somme, and Arras; the French in Champagne. Now, at what is likely to be known as Third Ypres the question may well be asked: Will our men be able to push through five fortified lines of enemy wire and concrete, having neutralised the enemy artillery, and reach that distant skyline overlooking the Plain of Flanders to Bruges and Ghent, and beyond the mist, Antwerp and the Dutch frontier?”

There was complete silence in the audience.
Five
fortified
lines
of
enemy
wire
and
concrete
… shades of Loos, Hindenburg Line, and the Somme!

“We know our enemy. We have no illusions about his ability and courage. But we do know that he is nearing the point of exhaustion, after the wastage of his ‘blood bath’ of the Somme, which caused his Higher Command to ask for peace terms six months ago. What will be his position when we have blasted him off the last point of observation upon the Salient, whence, for nearly three years now, he has looked down on our every movement of horse and waggon, every puff of steam at railhead, every shovelful of earth thrown up below him? So confident has he sat in his security, that he has used the Salient as a training school for his gunner cadets, using not targets of canvas as our cadets have on Salisbury Plain at home, but living soldiers who never wanted to be where they were, but who through sheer guts and if you like stupidity, never knowing when they were beaten, have remained in the Salient during more than a thousand days and nights of hell, showing such metal that in the end they cannot but win the war.”

There were murmurs of approval in the front rows; but impassivity among the regimental officers behind. They’d had some, thought Phillip, looking at ‘Spectre’ standing straight and still and impassive.

“The Flanders plain behind and below the Passchendaele-Staden rise is only a little more than thirty-three miles in width, from the sea-coast to the Dutch frontier. There are only two main-line railway systems crossing the plain laterally. When we have broken out of the Salient, gentlemen, a day’s march will
bring the Ypres-Roulers-Thourout railway under howitzer fire, leaving the enemy only the lines through Ghent and Bruges. Once the railway junction at Bruges is dominated by our guns, Zeebrugge with the rest of the Belgian coast will be untenable, and the end of the war will be in sight.”

The lecturer clicked his heels, bowed to the senior officers in the front row, and walked off the platform.