Love and the Loveless (32 page)

“Now you know why I told you that you did not need whiskey.”

“I’m sorry to be obdurate, Westy, but we don’t get the kind of food we had for lunch today, in the line.”

“I know, I know,” whispered ‘Spectre’ West. “You don’t have to explain to me. Obdurate means hard of heart; you will never be that. Obstinate, yes indeed! I’m sorry ‘Tubby’ Clayton is not here, you would like him.”

“Who’s he?”

“Gilbert Talbot’s great friend. Gilbert was a Green Jacket, killed in the flame attack at Hooge. He was a son of the Bishop of Winchester, and a fellow of the quality of Julian Grenfell. The altar over there is his memorial. It’s a carpenter’s bench. This was a hop loft originally. Take care how you go down the steps. They’re built close and steep for better foothold, while carrying up bags of hops. Now I’m going to take you to have a hot bath. Only mind you don’t catch cold afterwards.”

In the night of 15/16 August, through a terrain of yellow clay underlying sand and patches of gravel—a hungry soil, its fertility maintained in peacetime by ewe flocks wintering on turnips in the rotation of corn, hay, roots—a terrain now liquefied, without drainage and become morass again, nine British divisions
struggled forward to the tape lines laid from Langemarck in the north to St. Julien and onwards to Frezenberg, thence across the Ypres–Roulers railway embankment to Westhoek and the Nuns’ Wood to Stirling Castle south of the Menin road: a distance, as the tapes were laid, of ten thousand yards.

Before the march-up, there had been protests at Corps level that the attack would suffer because “the concentration of German batteries at the back of the Gheluvelt plateau had not been mastered”. Also it had been stated that many of the tracks and duck-walks, by which alone the infantry dumps were to be replenished, were destroyed. Moreover, the assault divisions were far under strength, despite drafts of conscripts and men who had recovered from wounds. And all the divisions in reserve to the four attacking corps were now immediately behind the line, in addition to the last two divisions in Army reserve. The jar of hundreds and thousands was almost empty.

To the young Fox, with eyes fixed on the distant sky-line, came three of the best divisions of Old Plum. They were “to be held back for subsequent developments”, which meant the break-out and pursuit into the Plain of Flanders. The Fox was still on the Black Line, with the Green Line, otherwise Flandern I, before him; and beyond Flandern I were Flandern II and Flandern III.

*

On the morning of 16 August, after a rainy night to St. Julien and back, Phillip heard the barrage breaking beyond the muddy tapes which almost were trodden out of sight by 4.45 a.m. He had then been back at the picket line about five minutes. At the end of ten hours with the mule convoy he was almost beyond speaking power; but compared with the infantry, he knew, the transport section had a cushy life. He could sleep, sleep, sleep; and out of the rain.

Behind the Salient many stories began to pass among the soldiers who, after relief, slouched in utter exhaustion through the Grand’ Place. Phillip, ever curious to know more of the war, ever a little apart from his fellows, because he was always remote from himself, made many notes of what he heard. How the South Irish division had advanced beside the Ulster division—Shamrock with Bloody Hand—both so thinly shaken out into line as to look like raiding parties. The South Irish, let down by their own artillery, fought until all were killed or over-run by the
Eingreif
division
which appeared out of nowhere: for a man was less then two metres high, often no more than a metre indeed, as he went forward upright, striving to carry high above the mud his bayonet and rifle. And how the South Irish had not enough men to act as moppers-up, so that the Spandau machine guns in Potsdam, Vampir, and Borry Farms—almost solidified by concrete—turned round, after waiting to surrender, and shot them in the back, before the sparse survivors, clogged and staggering, returned after almost reaching the Green Line. Others, together with isolated Ulstermen, hung on in shell craters while the main counter-attacks passed beyond them. The British defensive barrage dropped where they lay, so that they had it both ways. And how the 56th Londoners were caught by a curtain of high-explosive shell from behind the Gheluvelt plateau as soon as they advanced among the unburied dead of many similar assaults. They got into the splinter and root heaps of Polygon Wood and Nonne Bosschen, but were surrounded, while the Germans set up machine guns in the northern edge of the Nuns’ Wood and enfiladed a brigade of the 8th Division, which was shot to pieces on the very ground on which it had been shot to pieces on July 31, and from the same woods. The Divisional General before the attack had protested that the woods on the south-west of the Gheluvelt plateau must be cleared and held before the second northern assault could advance, but his protest was over-ruled, though endorsed and forwarded by the Corps Commander to Army; and so 8th Division history was repeated in the same place.

*

A strange remark was made to Phillip about this time. There was a sort of soldier tramp who lived in a cellar under the ruins of the Prison at Ypres. He was a cook, attached to the gunners. He had a grey beard, and wore a Belgian peaked black cap with sabots, ragged khaki tunic and trousers, and a greatcoat lined
with sandbags. He muttered to himself and seemed to be mad, and what he said was, “We’ll never get back to the bright side of the moon; no, never again, never again.” Yes, Phillip thought, we are on the dark side of the moon, our living is utterly unknown to the people at home.

The news from St. Julien,
via
Teddy Pinnegar, about the attack on 16 August wasn’t too bad. The Au Bon Gîte, an estaminet made almost solid with concrete, which had held up the advance on July 31, at last had been captured by a really clever idea. An aeroplane had been sent to fly over it and machine-gun it exactly one minute before zero hour, while two specially trained companies of Green Jackets got close up to it and isolated it with smoke bombs. The garrison of one officer and fifty men surrendered to the next wave, said Pinnegar, without having fired, otherwise not a man jack of them would have got away alive.

“You know, Phil, I never thought much of Guardees”—(what does he know about them, thought Phillip)—“but I must hand it to Cavan, who although he’s a lord seems to have some brains. He had the bright idea to establish armourers’ shops just behind the tapes, all ready to clean rifles and Lewis guns, and then pass them on to the front lines, in exchange for clogged ones. Have you seen the latest type of prisoner? Most of them are mere kids, it’s like robbing an incubator. They either surrender, or clear off as soon as they’re fired at.”

*

Orders were given, after the almost total failure of the attack of 16 August (except at Langemarck) for certain positions, at least, to be captured, with a view to a further general advance at the earliest possible moment by the Shamrock and Bloody Hand divisions. The brigadiers protested that their brigades, reduced to hardly more than a battalion in numbers, were exhausted; the Divisional Generals agreed; the Corps General told the Fox that he was unable to carry out the attacks ordered.

These brief entries gave hardly more than a hint of the nightly transport hell, in rain and mud, mules scrambling for duck-walks, breaking the wooden treads, kicking and floundering amidst uptilted sections, cursed and screamed at by the infantry, whose walks they were. The teak and beech-wood roads were afloat in some places, crashed by shells in others, while cries of wounded in the liquid morass under the Brock’s Benefit (as it was called ironically) of SOS coloured rockets came with whimpering shell fragments. In his diary were no references to the wincing, sweating pulses of fear, the electric adder running down the side of his head, to the bottle of whiskey by day, the
rum shared with the muleteers at night, the pictures in the brain of himself regrowing the woods, of levelling the banks of the brooks and in clear water seeing roach moving in droves over waving water-weeds, white flowers of crow’s-foot on long bines, the green tresses of Sabrina fair: the black rotting pictures of himself fitting arms and legs to dismembered trunks, broken-pink-vested: or raising the dead among the larks and the peewits, or to the fancy that the ghost of Cranmer was helping him, of Percy Pickering and Peter and Nimmo and David Wallace, all differences forgotten, come together again; of Albert Hawkins in new butterfly tie smiling at him behind the garden fence, all the misunderstanding of blood and weeping resolved in sunshine … black sunshine, rotting away the world.