War Classics (20 page)

In a minute the man sitting next to me began to talk; he was an Australian, going to Villers Bretonneux to search for the graves of some of his comrades who had been killed there on 8 August.
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In my ignorance I had never heard of that special push, when the Boche got his nearest to Amiens. But now – thanks to the slowness of the French train – the details of the battle were pointed out to me at first hand by one who had taken part in it.

At first the land was not so much scarred – this house had been So-and-so’s headquarters; here had been a CCS – these trenches were where the Americans, who had been holding part of the line, had let the Australians down and the Boche through.

‘The Americans?’ I queried with interest. I had met none of them yet. ‘Weren’t they any good?’

‘No damn good at all,’ came the answer, curt and deep. ‘No discipline and all talk. After they broke here, they had to ask us to lend our officers to stiffen their men. Now they say they’ve won the war,’ he added bitterly. I made a mental note to watch any Americans I might come across to see if this were true. He seemed a fair-minded man, and the man who was talking to the Hut Lady corroborated his statement. By now the houses had begun to get fewer; there was no longer any building that could have served – even temporarily – as a Headquarters. The land was cut across with trenches and strewn with debris of a massive kind, derelict tanks and wagons. There was no smaller debris – at any rate to be seen from the railway carriage – as a Chinese Labour Corps had just passed over this part and tidied it up.
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I strained my eyes and memory to just where the Australian lines had been, just where the Americans had let them down, just how far the Boche had got – so that on our way back I might readily recognise them.

Far as the eye could see, the land was desolate – no smoke from any house, no house itself – but so far it did not look unnatural. I was used to barren, bleak spaces bereft of human habitation, and this looked only as if it had been recently used and then suddenly abandoned.
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Even the French trains must arrive some time, and this one at last drew up at Villers Bretonneux and the Australian got out. He purposed marching over the battlefield with his map and compass and returning by the evening train. As soon as he was gone, the officer next to me moved up in friendly conversation. I was now seated by the window and he, as it were, sat all round me – completely screening me from the languid officers who conversed in a low tone at the other end of the carriage. I was not embarrassed. Whatever one did seemed natural nowadays in France.

But the landscape was changing now – we were moving slowly towards Péronne. The railway cutting itself had been used as a means of defence or offence – I did not know which. Its cream, chalky sides were honeycombed with dugouts, and with dugouts that seemed to have been abandoned in headlong flight. The first blue-grey overcoat that I saw lying carelessly at the mouth of a dugout, made me start. But it was only one of a series. Overcoats, crumpled dust-grey caps with their red edges, empty shell cases, rifles – all these lined our path. The Boche had left in a hurry and the Chinese Labour Corps had not yet reached so far to tidy up the battlefield. We had passed the Chinese, indeed, soon after Villers Bret, placidly and matter-of-factly clearing up the mess. Their faces were as expressionless as if they were scavenging a High Street.

Now, beyond the railway cutting, there were masses of barbed wire, heaps of ragged green stuff that we were told was ‘camouflage’ for the artillery, now and then the muzzle of a gun sticking out of the battered grey ground. An occasional heap of stones marked where I suppose a house had once stood, an occasional stump recalled a tree. Sometimes, in the middle distance, often nearer at hand, the eye lighted gratefully on a few irregular crosses in little groups together. Now and then a solitary one – simple or Maltese – stood by the cutting itself.

It was with a shock of surprise that I came gradually to recognise how the eye did lighten with relief as it fell upon these crosses. At the Base, where they stood in rows and looked across the sea to England, nothing had seemed sadder, nothing more poignant. And here they were up the Line itself, coming to the eye like something normal, the one normal thing in this strange world. It was as if weary with looking on earth that was no earth, on grass that was blasted beyond recognition, on ruins that were uncanny in their desolation, on trees that were stark, on silence that was like the depths of a pit, weary of all this, one turned with thankfulness to the only thing that one could recognise, the only thing that was normal or peaceful here. For it was both, in a supreme degree. Never again will I think of Death as frightening or terrific. The panoply he wears in England, the ghastly hearse, the solemn black, the slow music, the portentous train of mourners – these would menace and cow the lightest heart. But Death is not like that. Down ‘where the boys are’ at Le Tréport, I guessed it was not so: up the line I knew it. Where everything was unnatural and abnormal, the sign of Death alone was simple and kindly. Not even the youngest child would have been afraid of these crosses. It was a strange effect; and yet, when one has lost one’s bearings in an uncharted world, it was possibly an effect to be expected.

The officer chattered on by my side – this had happened here, that there. Did I notice the shell holes? That smudge over there had been a hamlet. I listened and I looked – I looked and I listened, but there was nothing here in focus. The Hut Lady on the other side was hearing much the same from her officer. ‘Look, Tiny,’ she said to me suddenly, ‘isn’t the sky nice and blue?’ It was an odd remark to come from such a prosaic person, but she had obviously been feeling the same oppressiveness as myself. The sky and the crosses were relieving points.

I do not believe the officers beside us felt anything of the sort. They were used to this country. ‘Horrible, isn’t it?’ said one of them indifferently; but long months – perhaps years – of it had made their minds blank to it. Yet even on them it produced a certain effect. It had softened them curiously to even the humblest forms of ordinary life. There were no flowers anywhere, of course, at the moment, and no birds at all, but they spoke without repulsion and even with fondness of rats and cats, while their anxiety to meet us, to do us any service in their power was only, on a higher plane, an instance of the same feeling. I recognised even then dimly that it was not the same as the eagerness of the men at the Base to flirt with us. Later I was to see it still more clearly.

They were talking at the moment of how far we should go in this train. ‘If you get out at Roisel with us,’ said one, ‘and there’s a car handy, we could take you right down the Hindenburg Line. You could see the
Kadaverfabrik
where the old Boche burnt down his dead for fat, you know. It’s just thereabouts. Of course, if you did the thing properly, you’d have to stay all night.’
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‘Sleep in the Hindenburg Line?’ queried the Hut Lady excitedly.

‘There’s a hut we’re just putting up, that you could have,’ he went on musingly. ‘But you’d have to sleep on the floor.’

Now after the prospect of the station floor at Amiens and the extreme delight of actually getting a bed instead, I was all for bed, so I’m afraid I did not look encouraging. But the Hut Lady was enraptured. ‘Oh, Tiny, shall we not stay?’ she turned to me. ‘I should so love to write home that I’d slept in the Hindenburg Line. Think how romantic it would be – alone on the Battlefield all night.’

I shuddered. ‘I should not like it at all,’ I said firmly. ‘Just think of the morning; no place to wash, no mirror to do your hair and everybody staring at you when you knew you looked a fright. Besides,’ I pointed out, ‘if you can’t sleep without sheets, you certainly couldn’t sleep on the floor.’

‘I shouldn’t mind for one night,’ she retorted valiantly, and I don’t believe she would have. She has much more spirit and courage in adventure than I have. There were other difficulties also that I foresaw if we remained all night at Roisel – not difficulties of propriety, I hasten to say, for those never worried me in France, but difficulties of personal comfort, which, I felt sure, would worry our hosts as much as ourselves. But we must get back to Amiens by night.

And now very slowly the train crept into Péronne. It was a military train, but it carried a few refugees with their pitiful bundles making their way home. It appeared that already at Péronne some families had come back and were living in the dugouts by the station. On the platform, indeed, there was one child. My eyes travelled past it idly – quite an ordinary French child of about seven or so – when I was roused by a succession of cries from the train itself. ‘Oh, I say!’ remarked the man beside me excitedly, ‘Look! There’s a kid. A kid at Péronne.’

The whole train was saying it too. I put my head out of the window. At every carriage my compatriots were doing the same, welcoming, beckoning, shouting – joy and surprise depicted on their usually unemotional features. The refugees embraced one another, chattered and cried and laughed. The child laughed too, in quite a friendly fashion, and waved his hand to the officers.

‘Hullo,’ said a voice suddenly at my elbow. It was the officer who had breakfasted with us at Amiens. ‘D’you see there’s a child, there – a child - in Péronne?’

As if I could have helped noticing with all this fuss! ‘Yes, I have seen it,’ I remarked meekly, but the intended sarcasm passed over his head.

‘Looks like old times – war over and all that,’ he went on vaguely, ‘with a child at Péronne.’

I said nothing. Things were indeed out of focus in this world if the sight of one small French child could bring a whole trainload of war-hardened English soldiers into a state of wild excitement. And yet not one of them seemed to find it in the least extraordinary that this should be so.

‘Where are you going to?’ the officer went on abruptly.

‘We thought of Roisel,’ I replied, ‘and if there’s a car, to go to the Hindenburg Line.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘if there’s not a car, you won’t see anything. You had much better go to Cambrai. If you want devastation,’ he continued, ‘and I take it you do, you’ll get it full blast between Roisel and Cambrai. Nobody’s been there yet at all to clear up – not even a Boche prisoner. I’d go to Cambrai if I were you,’ and he vanished back to his carriage.

‘Tiny, what is happening out there?’ queried the Hut Lady petulantly. ‘Why don’t we get on?’

‘We will, in a minute,’ I replied soothingly, ‘when the Army has got over seeing this child. There are several women and even one child now in Péronne.’

She accepted the explanation in silence and resumed her discussion about Roisel and its possibilities. ‘Of course if the car is not at Roisel,’ my officer agreed, ‘there’s nothing much that you can see just there, especially if you want to go back that night.’

‘I think we’d better,’ I said anxiously looking at the Hut Lady. ‘It’s awfully good of you to ask us to stay, but we’ve only got two or three days.’

‘All right.’ The Hut Lady gave in reluctantly. ‘I’d love to say I’d slept on a battlefield, with the soldiers there too, and I’ll never have such a chance again. Still, you’re running this show and if you say Cambrai, Cambrai it is.’ Nobody ever looked less like one who aspired to sleep with soldiers on a battlefield than our immaculate Hut Lady, but human nature, I had learned, is an incongruous thing.

The train drew near to Roisel and the two officers got out. They said ‘Goodbye’ as warmly and reluctantly as if we had known them a lifetime. Our train moved on, and only the two languid officers, just back from home leave, were left with us. They looked at us rather suspiciously and talked – as they had done all along – in low voices to one another. But the Hut Lady and I were quite relieved to have each other to talk to at last. I pulled out my notebook and jotted down a few things I had seen, and began a letter home, heading it, ‘After Roisel’. Yet I wrote but a few words, as every now and then we jumped up to look at something on one or other side of the train.

The desolation here was complete and the destruction absolute. Through the open window not a sound broke the silence; there was not a sign of any kind of life anywhere. ‘Hell must be like this,’ I thought to myself. ‘I am sure it must be like this.’ And still I had not seen the worst yet.

‘I suppose we ought to go as far as Cambrai,’ ventured the Hut Lady doubtfully. ‘This looks as good desolation as we’ll get anywhere.’

It did indeed. ‘I’ll ask the officer from Amiens,’ I replied, ‘the next time he comes up.’

‘Oh, so you
are
going on to Cambrai,’ he remarked, in tones of pleasure as he greeted us at the next stop. ‘I’m going there too. I’ll see you at the station.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed hesitatingly, looking round at what I suppose must be called the surrounding country, though it bore not the faintest resemblance to any country I had ever known. ‘D’you think,’ I began diplomatically after a silence, ‘that perhaps we could get out and walk a bit?’

He stared at me. ‘Here do you mean?’

I nodded.

‘Good Lord, no!’ came the swift reply. ‘I do
not
think so.’

I retired, rebuffed, and he went back to his carriage.

But our languid friends were waking up. One of them summoned up courage to address me. ‘Are you travelling all by yourselves?’ he enquired.

It was my turn to be amazed. ‘Why, yes,’ I answered, blankly enough.

‘Oh, we thought you were with those people who got out at Roisel,’ he explained, as an explanation seemed expected.

‘Oh, d’you mean because they sat with their arms all round us?’ I asked amiably. ‘Because I don’t even know their names.’

He flushed a little – perhaps not unwarrantably – and the Hut Lady hastily broke in. Her unassailable propriety must have reassured him; and presently they were talking to us in quite friendly fashion, pointing out this landmark and that in the wilderness outside the window. As we drew nearer Cambrai, leaving Gouzeaucourt behind us, every inch almost seemed to have its story to tell. But it was the constant sight of gaping shell holes choked with filthy water, of abandoned tanks, of wrecked lorries and of pitted ground that remained most clearly with me. After the moment, it mattered little to me that this or that had happened at a particular spot. Yet one thing stands out in my memory. Just before we came to Cambrai, one of the officers pointed out what seemed like a deep smudge on the horizon. ‘That is Bourlon Wood,’ he said briefly. ‘You have probably heard of that.’ Even now I can see its grim blackness flickering in the distance. Will the day ever come, I wonder, when I shall walk in Bourlon Wood?
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