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 great-coats 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.”
“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, some one 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.
[ V ]
Winterbourne 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 afterwards 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 stale-mates 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 hew 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 alternatives 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 was 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 shell-blasted 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 of steel, reduced by shell-fire to huge masses of twisted rusting 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 wagons 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 among 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 thick 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 great-coat, his body in a grey blanket, a groundsheet 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 pillow. 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 late-comer 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 street 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:
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. Winterbourne 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:
“Halt—password to-night’s ‘Lantern.’” Winterbourne halted, and passed the message on. They waited. He was standing almost immediately behind a sentry, and got on the fire-step beside the man to take his first look at No Man’s Land.
“’Oo are you?” asked the sentry in low tones.
“Pioneers.”
“Got a bit o’ candle to give us, chum?”
“Awfully, sorry, chum, I haven’t.”
“Them muckin R.E.’s gets ’em all.”
“I’ve got a packet of chocolate, if you’d like it.”
“Ah. Thanks, chum.”
The sentry broke a bit of chocolate and began to munch.
“Muckin cold up here, it is. Me feet’s fair froze. Muckin dreary, too. I can ’ear ole Fritz coughin’ over there in ’is listenin’ post—don’t ’arf sound ’ollow. Listen.”
Winterbourne listened, and heard a dull hollow sound of coughing.
“Fritz’s sentry,” whispered the men. “Pore ole bugger—needs some liquorice.”
“Move on,” came the word from the man in front. Winterbourne jumped down from the fire-step and passed on the word.
“Good-night, chum,” said the sentry.
“Good-night, chum.”
Winterbourne was put on the party digging the sap out into No Man’s Land. The officer stopped him as he was entering the sap.
“You’re one of the new draft, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Wait a minute.”
“Very good, Sir.”
The other men filed into the sap. The officer spoke in low tones:
“You can take sentry for the first hour. Come along, and don’t stand up.”
The young crescent moon had risen and poured down cold faint light. Every now and then a Verey light was fired from the German or English lines, brilliantly illuminating the desolate landscape of torn irregular wire and jagged shell-holes. They climbed over the parapet and crawled over the broken ground past the end of the sap. The officer made for a shell-hole just inside the English wire, and Winterbourne followed him.
“Lie here,” whispered the officer, “and keep a sharp lookout for German patrols. Fire if you see them and give the alarm. There’s a patrol of our own out on the right, so make sure before you fire. There’s a couple of bombs somewhere in the shell-hole. You’ll be relieved in an hour.”
“Very good, Sir.”
The officer crawled away, and Winterbourne remained alone in No Man’s Land, about twenty-five yards in front of the British line. He could hear the soft dull thuds of picks and shovels from the men working the sap and a very faint murmur as they talked in whispers. A Verey light hissed up from the English lines, and he strained his eyes for the possible enemy patrol. In the brief light he saw nothing but the irregular masses of German wire, the broken line of their parapet, shell-holes and débris, and the large stump of a dead tree. Just as the bright magnesium turned in its luminous parabola, a hidden machine-gun, not thirty yards from Winterbourne, went off with a loud crackle of bullets like the engine of a motor-bicycle. He started, and nearly pulled the trigger of his rifle. Then silence. A British sentry coughed with a deep hacking sound; then from the distance came the hollow coughing of a German sentry. Eerie sounds in the pallid moonlight. “Ping” went a sniper’s rifle. It was horribly cold. Winterbourne was shivering, partly from cold, partly from excitement.
Interminable minutes passed. He grew colder and colder. Occasionally a few shells from one side or the other went wailing overhead and crashed somewhere in the back areas. About four hundred yards away to his left began a series of loud shattering detonations. He strained his eyes, and could just see the flash of the explosion and the dark column of smoke and débris. These were German trench mortars, the dreaded “minnies,” although he did not know it.
Nothing different happened until about three-quarters of an hour had passed. Winterbourne got colder and colder, felt he had been out there at least three hours, and thought he must have been forgotten. He shivered with cold. Suddenly, he thought he saw something move to his right, just outside the wire. He gazed intently, all tense and alert. Yes, a dark something was moving. It stopped, and seemed to vanish. Then near it another dark figure moved and then a third. It was a patrol, making for the gap in the wire in front of Winterbourne. Were they Germans or British? He pointed his rifle towards them, got the bombs ready, and waited. They came nearer and nearer. Just before they got to the wire, Winterbourne challenged in a loud whisper:
“Halt, who are you?”
All three figures instantly disappeared.
“Halt, who are you?”
“Friend,” came a low answer.
“Give the word or I fire.”
“Lantern.”
“All right.”
One of the men crawled through the wire to Winterbourne, followed by the other two. They wore balaclava helmets, and carried revolvers.
“Are you the patrol?” whispered Winterbourne.
“Who the muckin hell d’you think we are? Father Christmas? What are you doin’ out here?”
“Pioneers digging a sap about fifteen yards behind.”
“Are you Pioneers?”
“Yes.”
“Got a bit o’ candle, chum?”
“Sorry, I haven’t, we don’t get them issued.”
The patrol crawled off, and Winterbourne heard an alarmed challenge from the men working in the sap, and the word “Lantern.” A Verey light went up from the German lines just as the patrol were crawling over the parapet. A German sentry fired his rifle and a machine-gun started up. The patrol dropped hastily into the trench. The machine-gun bullets whistled cruelly past Winterbourne’s head—Zwiss, zwiss, zwiss. He crouched down in the hole. Zwiss, zwiss, zwiss. Then silence. He lifted his head, and continued to watch. For two or three minutes there was complete silence. The men in the sap seemed to have knocked off work, and made no sound. Winterbourne listened intently. No sound. It was the most ghostly, desolate, deathly silence he had ever experienced. He had never imagined that death could be so deathly. The feeling of annihilation, of the end of existence, of a dead planet of the dead arrested in a dead time and space, penetrated his flesh along with the cold. He shuddered. So frozen, so desolate, so dead a world—everything smashed and lying inertly broken. Then “crack-ping” went a sniper’s rifle, and a battery of field-guns opened out with salvos about half a mile to his right. The machine-guns began again. The noise was a relief after that ghastly dead silence.
At last the N.C.O. came crawling out from the sap with another man to relieve him. A Verey light shot up from the German line in their direction, just as the two men reached him. All three crouched motionless, as the accurate German machine-gun fire swept the British trench parapet—zwiss, zwiss, zwiss, the flights of bullets went over them. Winterbourne saw a strand of wire just in front of him suddenly flip up in the air where a low bullet had struck it. Quite near enough—not six inches above his head.
They crawled back to the sap, and Winterbourne tumbled in. He found himself face to face with the platoon officer, Lieutenant Evans. Winterbourne was shivering uncontrollably; he felt utterly chilled. His whole body was numb, his hands stiff, his legs one ache of cold from the knees down. He realized the cogency of the Adjutant’s farewell hint about looking after feet, and decided to drop his indifference to goose grease and neat’s-foot oil.
“Cold?” asked the officer.
“It’s bitterly cold out there, Sir,” said Winterbourne through chattering teeth.
“Here, take a drink of this,” and Evans held out a small flask.
Winterbourne took the flask in his cold-shaken hand. It chinked roughly against his teeth as he took a gulp of the terrifically potent Army rum. The strong liquor half choked him, burned his throat, and made his eyes water. Almost immediately, he felt the deadly chill beginning to lessen. But he still shivered.
“Good Lord, man, you’re frozen,” said Evans. “I thought it was colder than ever to-night. It’s no weather for lying in No Man’s Land. Corporal, you’ll have to change that sentry every half hour—an hour’s too long in this frost.”
“Very good, Sir.”
“Have some more rum?” asked Evans.
“No, thanks, Sir,” replied Winterbourne, “I’m quite all right now. I can warm up with some digging.”
“No, get your rifle and come with me.”
Evans started off briskly down the trench to visit the other working parties. About a hundred yards from the sap he climbed out of the trench over the parados; Winterbourne scrambled after, more impeded by his chilled limbs, his rifle and heavier equipment. Evans gave him a hand up. They walked about another hundred yards over the top, and then reached the place where several parties were digging trench mortar emplacements. The N.C.O. saw them coming and climbed out of one of the holes to meet them.
“Getting on all right, Sergeant?”
“Ground’s very hard, Sir.”
“I know, but—”
Zwiss, zwiss, zwiss, zwiss came a rush of bullets, following the rapid tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat of a machine-gun. The Sergeant ducked double. Evans remained calmly standing. Seeing his unconcern, Winterbourne also remained upright.
“I know the ground’s hard,” said Evans, “but those emplacements are urgently needed. Headquarters were at us again to-day about them. I’ll see how you’re getting on.”
The Sergeant hastily scuttled into one of the deep emplacements, followed in a more leisurely way by the officer. Winterbourne remained standing on top, and listened to Evans as he urged the men to get a move on. Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. Zwiss, zwiss, zwiss, very close this time. Winterbourne felt a slight creep in his spine, but since Evans had not moved before, he decided that the right thing was to stand still. Evans visited each of the four emplacements, and then made straight for the front line. He paused at the parados.
“We’re pretty close to the Boche front line here. He’s got a machine-gun post about a hundred and fifty yards over there.”
Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. Zwiss, zwiss, zwiss.
“Look! Over there.”
Winterbourne just caught a glimpse of the quick flashes.
“Damn!” said Evans, “I forgot to bring my prismatic compass to-night. We might have taken a bearing on them, and got the artillery to turf them out.”
He jumped carelessly into the trench, and Winterbourne dutifully followed. About fifty yards farther on, he stopped.
“I see from your pay-book that you’re an artist in civil life.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Paint pictures, and draw?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Why don’t you apply for a draughtsman’s job at Division? They need them.”
“Well, Sir, I don’t particularly covet a hero’s grave, but I feel very strongly I ought to take my chance in the line along with the rest.”
“Ah. Of course. Are you a pretty good walker?”
“I used to go on walking tours in peace time, Sir.”
“Well, there’s an order that every officer is to have a runner. Would you like the job of Platoon Runner? You’d have to accompany me, and you’re supposed to take my last dying orders! You’d have to learn the lie of the trenches, so as to act as guide; take my orders to N.C.O.’s; know enough about what’s going on to help them if I’m knocked out, and carry messages. It’s perhaps a bit more dangerous than the ordinary work, and you may have to turn out at odd hours, but it’ll get you off a certain amount of digging.”
“I’d like it very much, Sir.”
“All right, I’ll speak to the Major about it.”
“It’s very good of you, Sir.”
“Can you find your way back to the sap? It’s about two hundred yards along this trench.”
“I’m sure I can, Sir.”
“All right. Go back and report to the Corporal, and carry on.”
“Very good, Sir.”
“You haven’t forgotten the pass-word?”
“No, Sir, ‘Lantern.’”
About thirty yards along the trench, there was a rattle of equipment, and Winterbourne found a bayonet about two feet from his chest. It was a gas-sentry outside Company H.Q. Dugout.
“Halt! Who are yer?”
“Lantern.”
The sentry languidly lowered his rifle.
“Muckin cold to-night, mate.”
“Bloody cold.”
“What are you, Bedfords or Essex?”
“No, Pioneers.”
“Got a bit of candle to give us, mate, it’s muckin dark in them dugouts.”
“Very sorry, chum, I haven’t.”
Rather trying this constant demand for candle-ends from the Pioneers, who were popularly supposed by the infantry to receive immense “issues” of candles. But without candles the dugouts were merely black holes, even in the daytime, if they were any depth. They were deep on this front, since the line was a captured German trench reorganized. Hence the dugouts faced the enemy, instead of being turned away from them.
“Oh, all right, good-night.”
“Good-night.”
Winterbourne returned to the sap, and did two more half-hour turns as sentry, and for the rest of the time picked, or shovelled the hard clods of earth into sandbags. The sandbags were then carried back to the front line and piled there to raise the parapet. It was a slow business. The sap itself was camouflaged to avoid observation. Winterbourne hadn’t the slightest idea what its object was. He was very weary and sleepy when they finally knocked off work about one in the morning. An eight-hour shift, exclusive of time taken in getting to and from the work. The men filed wearily along the trench, rifles slung on the left shoulder, picks and shovels carried on the right. Winterbourne stumbled along half-asleep with the cold and the fatigue of unaccustomed labour. He felt he didn’t mind how dangerous it was—if it was dangerous—to be a runner, provided he got some change from the dreariness of digging, and filling and carrying sandbags.
After they passed the Support Line, the hitherto silent men began to talk occasionally. At Reserve they got permission to smoke. Each grabbed in his pockets for a fag, and lighted it as he stumbled along the uneven duckboards. After what seemed an endless journey to Winterbourne they reached the four steps, climbed up, and emerged into the now familiar ruined street. It was silent and rather ghostly in the very pale light of the new moon. They dumped their picks and shovels, went to the cook to draw their ration of hot tea, which was served from a large black dixie and tasted unpleasantly of stew. They filed past the officer who gave each of them a rum ration.
Winterbourne drank some of the tea in his billet, then took off his boots, wrapped himself up, and drank the rest. Some real warmth flushed into his chilled body. He was angry with himself for being so tired, after a cushy night on a cushy front. He wondered what Elizabeth and Fanny would say if they saw his animal gratitude for tea and rum. Fanny? Elizabeth? They had receded far from him, not so far as all the other people he knew, who had receded to several light years, but very far. “Elizabeth” and “Fanny” were now memories and names at the foot of sympathetic but rather remote letters. Drowsiness came rapidly upon him, and he fell asleep as he was thinking of the curious “zwiss, zwiss,” made by machine-gun bullets passing overhead. He did not hear the two howitzers when they fired a dozen rounds before dawn.
[ VI ]
Except for the episode with the officer, this specimen night may stand as a type of Winterbourne’s life in the next eight or ten days. They went up the line at dusk; they were shot at, worked, and shivered with cold: went down the line, slept, tried to clean themselves, and paraded again. Four or five times they passed corpses being carried down the trenches as they went up. There was, of course, nothing to report on the western front.
Then, just as the monotony was becoming almost as intolerable as drilling to the home-service R.S.M.’s “Stand still there, stand steady!” they had a night off, and were transferred to the day shift. But this was even more tedious. They paraded soon after dawn, and worked in Hinton Alley, about two hundred yards from the Front Line. Their job was to hack up the frozen mud—which was about as malleable as marble—extricate the worn duck-boards, dig “sump-holes,” and relay new duck boards. A job which in moist weather might have occupied two men for half an hour, in that frost occupied four men all day.
A Lieutenant-General came along while Winterbourne was laboriously jarring his wrists, trying to hack up the marble-like mud.
“Well, and what are you doing, my man?”
“Replacing duck-boards, Sir,” said Winterbourne, bringing his pick smartly to his side, and standing to attention, toes at an angle of forty-five degrees.
“Well, get on with it, my man, get on with it.”
Vive L’Empereur.
Diversions were few, but existed. There were, for instance, the rats. Winterbourne had been too much absorbed by other new experiences to pay much attention to them at first. And during the day they kept rather out of sight. One evening, just about sunset, as they were returning down Hinton Alley, there was a block in the trench. Winterbourne happened to be just at the corner of the Support line, with its damaged, revetted traverses, and piles of sandbags on the parapet. The Germans were sending up some rather fancy signal rockets from their Front line, and he was vaguely wondering what they meant, when a huge rat darted or rather scrambled impudently just past his head. Then he noticed that a legion of the fattest and longest rats he had ever seen were popping in and out the crevices between the sand-bags. As far as he could see down the trench in the dusk they were swarming over parapet and parados. Such well-fed rats! He shuddered, thinking of what they had probably fed upon.
In a very short time he had become perfectly accustomed to the very mild artillery fire, sniping and machine-gunning. No casualties had occurred in his own company, and he began to think that the dangers of the war had been exaggerated, while its physical discomforts and tedium had been greatly underestimated. The intense frost prevented his shaking off the heavy cold he had caught at Calais, and at the same time had given him a chill on the liver. The same thing had happened to half the men in the company, whether new-comers or old stagers; and all suffered from diarrhœa due to the cold. There was thus the added diversion of frequent visits to the latrine. Those in the line were primitive affairs of a couple of biscuit boxes and buckets, interesting from the fact that the Germans had fixed rifles trained on most of them and might get you if you happened to stand up inopportunely. If you had any sense you waited until the bullet ping-ed over, and then calmly walked out: for lack of which elementary precaution somebody occasionally was popped off. The Pioneers’ latrine, just behind their billet, was a more elaborate six-seater (without separate compartments) built over a deep trench and surrounded with sacking on posts. One of the posts had been damaged by a shell, and there were numerous rents in the sacking from shell splinters. Here Winterbourne was forced to spend a larger portion of his spare time than was pleasant in cold weather. One day when he entered he found another occupant, an artilleryman. This person was carefully examining his grey flannel shirt: and such portions of his body as were exposed to view were covered with small bloody blotches. Some horrid skin disease, Winterbourne surmised. He attended to his own urgent private affairs.
“Still terribly cold,” he ventured.
“Muckin cold,” said the artilleryman, continuing absorbedly the mysterious search in his shirt.
“Those are nasty skin eruptions you have.”
“It’s them muckin chats. Billet’s fair lousy with ’em.”
Chats? Lousy? Ah, of course, the artilleryman was lousy. So lousy that he had been bitten all over, and had scratched himself raw. Winterbourne felt uncomfortable. He detested the idea of vermin.
“How d’you get them? Can’t you get rid of them?”
“Get ’em? Everybody gets ’em. Ain’t you chatty? And there ain’t no gettin’ rid of ’em. The clothes they gives you at the baths is as chatty as those you ’ands in. Where there’s dug-outs and billets there’s chats, and where there’s chats, they cops yer.”
Winterbourne departed from the lousy artilleryman with a new pre-occupation in life—to remain one of the chatless as long as possible. It was not many weeks, however, before he too became resigned to the louse as an inevitable war comrade.
Like a good many recruits when first in the line he was rather inclined to be foolhardy than timorous. When a shell exploded near the trench, he popped his head up to have a look at it; and listened to the machine-gun bullets swishing past with great interest. The older hands reproved him:
“Don’t be so muckin anxious to look at whizz-bangs. You’ll get a damn sight too many pretty soon. And don’t keep shovin’ yer ’ead over the top. We don’t care a muck if ole Fritz gets yer, but if he sees yer he might put his artillery on us.”
Winterbourne rather haughtily decided they were timorous, an impression confirmed by the manner in which they instantly ducked and crouched when a shell came whistling towards them. So many shells exploded harmlessly that he wondered at their inefficiency. Late one afternoon the Germans began firing on Hinton Alley—little salvos of four whizz-bangs at a time. The men went on with their work, but a little apprehensively. Winterbourne clambered partly up the side of the trench and watched the shells bursting—crump, Crump, Crump, CRRUMP. The splinters hummed harmoniously through the air. Suddenly he heard a loud whizz, and zip-phut, a large piece of metal hurtled just past his head and half-buried itself in the hard chalk of the trench. More surprised than scared he jumped down and levered the metal up with his pick. It was a brass nose-cap, still warm from the heat of the explosion. He held it in his hand, gazing with curiosity at the German lettering. The other men jeered and scolded him in a friendly way. He felt they exaggerated—his nerves were still so much fresher than theirs.
That night, just after he had got down into kip, the night silence was abruptly broken by a discharge of artillery. Gun after gun, whose existence he had never suspected, opened out all round, and in half a minute fifty or sixty were in action. From the line came the long rattle of a dozen or more machine-guns, with the funny little pops of distant hand grenades. He got up and went to the door. Ruins interrupted a direct view, but he saw the flashes of the guns, a sort of glow over a short part of the front line, and Verey lights and rockets flying up continually. A Corporal came unconcernedly into the billet.
“What is it?” asked Winterbourne, “an attack?”
“Attack be jiggered. Identification raid, I reckon.”
The German artillery had now opened up, and a shell dropped in the village street. Winterbourne retired to his earth-floor. In about three-quarters of an hour the firing quieted down; only one German battery of five-nines kept dropping shells in and about the village. Winterbourne began to reflect that shell-fire in gross might be more deadly than the few odd retail discharges he had hitherto experienced.
Next morning, the Corporal’s diagnosis proved correct. As they went up Hinton Alley soon after dawn, they met a British Tommy escorting six lugubrious personages in field grey, whose faces were almost concealed in large white bandages swathed all round their heads.
“Who are they?” he asked.
“Fritzes. Prisoners.”
“I wonder why they are all wounded in the head.”
“Koshed on the napper with trench clubs. I reckon they’ve got narsty ’eadaches, pore old barstards.”
About a week after that, they had a day off, and were warned to parade at five P.M. to begin another night shift. (Each platoon in turn did a week’s day shift and three weeks’ night-work.) The Sergeant turned to Winterbourne:
“And you’re to report at the Officer’s Mess fifteen minutes before p’rade.”
Winterbourne duly reported, wondering uneasily what breach of military discipline he had committed. He was met on the door-step by Evans, who was just coming out, all muffled up.
“Ah, there you are, Winterbourne. Major Thorpe says you may act as my runner, so hereafter you’ll parade here fifteen minutes earlier than the rest each night.”
“Very good, Sir.”
All this time Winterbourne was rather wretchedly ill, and remained so for weeks. He had a permanent cough and cold, and was weakened by the prolonged diarrhœa. Every night he felt feverish, passing rapidly from a cold shivering to a high temperature. On the day after his arrival in the line, he had “gone sick” to get something to relieve his hard cough. Major Thorpe had chosen to consider this as an attempt to evade duty, and had promptly insulted him. Whereupon Winterbourne had decided that so long as he could stand he would never “go sick” again. So he carried on. The stretcher-bearer in his platoon had a clinical thermometer. One night just before going up the line Winterbourne got the man to take his temperature. It was 102.
“You didn’t ought to go up the line like that, mate,” said the man, with a sort of coarse kindness Winterbourne liked, “I’ll tell the orfficer you ain’t fit for service, an’ make it all right with the M.O. to-morrer.”
Winterbourne laughed:
“That’s decent of you, but I shan’t go sick. I only wanted to see if I were imagining things.”
“You’re a bloody fool. You c’d get a cushy night in kip.”
It was a relief therefore to act as Evans’s runner. On the nights when Evans was on duty Winterbourne did not carry a pick and shovel, and did no manual labour. He simply followed Evans about on his rounds, and carried messages to the N.C.O.’s for him. It was undoubtedly cushy. Almost an officer’s job.
Winterbourne was brought into much closer intimacy with Evans, and had some opportunity to observe him. The officer was distinctly friendly, and they talked a good deal in the long hours of hanging about in the Front line. Evans brought sandwiches and a flask of rum with him, and invariably shared them with his runner; a kindness which touched Winterbourne profoundly. Usually about ten o’clock they sat on a fire-step under the frosty stars, and ate and talked. Occasionally a few shells would go whining overhead, or a burst of machine-gun fire would interrupt them. Their low voices sounded strangely muffled in the cold dead silence.
Evans was the usual English public school boy, amazingly ignorant, amazingly inhibited, and yet “decent” and good-humoured. He had a strength of character which enabled him to carry out what he had been taught was his duty to do. He accepted and obeyed every English middle-class prejudice and taboo. What the English middle classes thought and did was right, and what anybody else thought and did was wrong. He was contemptuous of all foreigners. He appeared to have read nothing but Kipling, Geoffrey Farnol, Elinor Glynn, and the daily newspapers. He disapproved of Elinor Glynn, as too “advanced.” He didn’t care about Shakespeare, had never heard of the Russian Ballets, but liked to “see a good show.” He thought “Chu Chin Chow” was the greatest play ever produced, and the Indian Love Lyrics the most beautiful songs in the world. He thought that Parisians lived by keeping brothels and spent most of their time in them. He thought that all Chinamen took opium, then got drunk, and ravished white slaves abducted from England. He thought Americans were a sort of inferior Colonials, regrettably divorced from that finest of all institutions, the British Empire. He rather disapproved of “Society,” which he considered “fast,” but he held that Englishmen should never mention the fastness of Society, since it might “lower our prestige” in the eyes of “all these messy foreigners.” He was ineradicably convinced of his superiority to the “lower classes,” but where that superiority lay, Winterbourne failed to discover. Evans was an “educated” pre-war Public Schoolboy, which means that he remembered half a dozen Latin tags, could mumble a few ungrammatical phrases in French, knew a little of the history of England, and had a “correct” accent. He had been taught to respect all women as if they were his mother, would therefore have fallen an easy prey to the first tart who came along and probably have married her. He was a good runner, had played at stand-off half for his school and won his colours at cricket. He could play fives, squash rackets, golf, tennis, water-polo, bridge, and vingt-et-un, which he called “pontoon.” He disapproved of baccarat, roulette andpetits chevaux, but always went in for the Derby sweepstake. He could ride a horse, drive a motor-car, and regretted that he had been rejected by the Flying Corps.
He had no doubts whatever about the War. What England did must be right, and England had declared war on Germany. Therefore, Germany must be wrong. Evans propounded this somewhat primitive argument to Winterbourne with a condescending air, as if he were imparting some irrefutable piece of knowledge to a regrettably ignorant inferior. Of course, after ten minutes’ conversation with Evans, Winterbourne saw the kind of man he was and realized that he must continue to dissimulate with him as with every one else in the Army. However, he could not resist the temptation to bewilder him a little sometimes. It was quite impossible to do anything more. Evans possessed that British rhinoceros equipment of mingled ignorance, self-confidence and complacency which is triple-armed against all the shafts of the mind. And yet Winterbourne could not help liking the man. He was exasperatingly stupid, but he was honest, he was kindly, he was conscientious, he could obey orders and command obedience in others, he took pains to look after his men. He could be implicitly relied upon to lead a hopeless attack and to maintain a desperate defence to the very end. There were thousands and tens of thousands like him.
Winterbourne noticed that when they were in the line at night, Evans made a point of walking over the top, instead of in the trenches, even when it was plainly far more inconvenient and slower to do so, on account of the wire and shell-holes and other obstacles. At the time, he paid little attention to this, thinking either that it was expected of an officer, or that Evans did it to encourage the men. Evans rather deliberately exposed himself, and always maintained complete calm. If the two men were exposed to shells or machine-gun fire, Evans walked more slowly, spoke more deliberately, seemed intentionally to linger. It was not until months afterward that Winterbourne suddenly realized from his own experience that Evans had been reassuring, not his men, but himself. He had been deliberately trying to prove to himself that he did not mind being under fire.
Any man who spent six months in the line (which almost inevitably meant taking part in a big battle) and then claimed that he had never felt fear, never received any shock to his nerves, never had his heart thumping and his throat dry with apprehension, was either super-human, subnormal or a liar. The newest troops were nearly always the least affected. They were not braver, they were merely fresher. There were very few—were there any?—who could resist week after week, month after month of the physical and mental strain. It is absurd to talk about men being brave or cowards. There were greater or less degrees of sensibility, more or less self-control. The longer the strain on the finer sensibility the greater the self-control needed. But this continual neurosis steadily became worse and required a greater effort of repression.
Winterbourne at this time was in the state when danger—and that was slight in these first weeks—was almost entirely a matter of curiosity, rather stimulating than otherwise. Evans, on the other hand, had been in two big battles, had spent eleven months in the line, and had reached the stage when conscious self-control was needed. When a shell exploded near them, both men appeared equally unmoved. Winterbourne was really so, because he was fresh, and had no months of war neurosis to control. Evans only appeared so, because he was awkwardly and with shame struggling to control a completely subconscious reflex action of terror. He thought it was his “fault,” that he was “getting windy,” and was desperately ashamed in consequence. And that, of course, made him worse. Winterbourne, on the other hand, was obviously a man who would develop the neurosis rapidly. He had a far more delicate sensibility. He had already reached a state of acute “worry” over Fanny and Elizabeth and the War and his own relation to it. And yet his pride would compel him to urge himself far beyond the point where another man would merely have collapsed. He endured a triple strain—that of his personal life, that of exasperation with Army routine, and that of battle.
Perhaps it was through the implicit if unexpressed attitude of the women that Winterbourne also endured the strain of feeling a degradation to mind and body in the hardships he endured in common, after all, with millions of other men. It was a fact that his mind degenerated; slowly at first, then more and more rapidly. This could scarcely have been otherwise. Long hours of manual labour under strict discipline must inevitably degrade a man’s intelligence. Winterbourne found that he was less and less able to enjoy subtleties of beauty and anything intellectually abstruse. He came to want common amusements in place of the intense joy he had felt in beauty and thought. He watched his mind degenerating with horror, wondering if one day it would suddenly crumble away like the body of Mr. Valdemar. He was bitterly humiliated to find that he could neither concentrate nor achieve as he had done in the past. The élan of his former life had carried him through a good many months of the Army, but after about two months in the line, he saw that intellectually he was slowly slipping backwards. Slipping backwards, too, in the years which should have been the most energetic and formative and creative of his whole life. He saw that even if he escaped the War he would be hopelessly handicapped in comparison with those who had not served and the new generation which would be on his heels. It was rather bitter. He had been forced to smash through obstacles and to triumph over handicaps enough already. These lost War months, now mounting to years, were a knock-out blow from which he could not possibly recover.
And he felt a degradation, a humiliation, in the dirt, the lice, the communal life in holes and ruins, the innumerable deprivations and hardships. He suffered at feeling that his body had become worthless, condemned to a sort of kept tramp’s standard of living, and ruthlessly treated as cannon-fodder. He suffered for other men too, that they should be condemned to this; but since it was the common fate of the men of his generation he determined he must endure it. His face lost its fineness and took on the mask of “a red-faced Tommy,” as he was politely told later by a genial American friend. His hands seemed permanently coarsened, his feet deformed by heavy army boots. His body, which had been unblemished when he joined, was already infested with lice, and his back began to break out in little boils—a thing which had never happened to him—either from impure drinking water or because the clothes issued from the baths were infected.
No doubt, it was the painter’s sense of plastic beauty which made him feel this as something so humiliating and degrading. How else account for the feelings of shame and horror he felt at an occurrence which most men would have promptly forgotten? He had been in the line about a month, and his diarrhœa had got steadily worse. One night, when accompanying Evans on his rounds, Winterbourne felt a physical necessity, and asked permission to go to a latrine. They were about two hundred yards away, and before Winterbourne got there the contents of his bowels were irresistibly evacuated in spite of his desperate efforts to control them. It was one of the coldest nights of that long bitter winter—the thermometer was below zero Fahrenheit. Winterbourne halted in horror and disgust with himself. What on earth was he to do? How return to Evans? He listened. It was one of the quietest nights he ever experienced in the line, hardly a shot fired. Nobody was coming along the trench. He rapidly undressed, shivering with cold, stripped off his under-pants, cleaned himself as well as he could, and hurled the soiled clothes into No Man’s Land. He dressed again, and rushed back to meet Evans, who asked him a little sharply why he had been so long about it. The discomfort passed; but the humiliation remained.
January slowly disappeared; they were halfway through February, and still the frost held. It was a dreary experience. Each day was practically the replica of that before and after—up the line, down the line, sleep, attempt to get a little clean in the morning, inspection parade, dinner, an hour or two to write letters, then parade again for the line. Towards the end of February, the welcome news came that they were going out of the line for four days’ rest. On the last night before they went out, Evans and Winterbourne were watching the men working when they heard a series of rapid sharp explosions. They looked over and could see the dull red flashes of bombs or small trench mortars bursting about three hundred yards away. Simultaneously they exclaimed:
“It’s on our sap!”
Evans jumped into the trench and rushed towards the sap, followed by Winterbourne, who tore the bolt-cover from his rifle and stuffed it in his pocket as he ran. They could hear the crash, crash, crash-crash, crash of the small mortars, which abruptly ceased when they were about forty yards short. Verey lights were shooting up in all directions, and the British machine-guns were rattling away. Evans dashed round a traverse and went plump into two of his own men who were staggering away from the sap, half-dazed and silly with the shock of explosions.
“What’s happened?”
They were incoherent, and Evans and Winterbourne rushed on to the sap. Dimming down his torch with his left hand, Evans peered in; and Winterbourne behind him saw two bodies splashed with blood. The head of one man was smashed into his steel helmet and lay a sticky mess of blood and hair half-severed from his body. The other man, the Corporal, was badly wounded but still groaning. Obviously, one of the mortars had dropped plump in the sap. Another discharge came crashing on either side. Evans shoved his haversack under the Corporal’s head, and shouted to make himself heard over the explosions:
“Get the stretcher-bearer, and send those windy buggers back here.”
“What about the sentry?” bawled Winterbourne.
“I’ll get him in. Off with you.”
Evans began to unbutton the Corporal’s tunic, to bind his wounds, as Winterbourne left. The man was bleeding badly. Three hundred yards to the stretcher-bearer and three hundred yards back. Winterbourne raced, knowing that a matter of seconds may save the life of a man with a severed artery. He was too late, however. The Corporal was dead when he and the stretcher-bearer rushed panting into the sap.
They got the sentry’s body later.
[ VII ]
Next day they marched back about four miles to another village, half-destroyed but still partly inhabited. For the first time in two months Winterbourne sheathed his bayonet. It seemed symbolical of the four days’ rest they were promised. Four days! An immense respite. The men were cheery, and sang all the war songs as they marched off in platoons—“Where are the boys of the village to-night?” “It’s a long, long trail a-winding,” “I’m so happy, oh, so happy, don’t you envy me?” “Pack all your troubles in your old kit-bag,” “If you’re going back to Blighty,” “I want to go home,” “Rolling home.” But not “Tipperary.” So far as Winterbourne knew, none of the troops in France ever sang “Tipperary.”
He had not slept well, haunted by the vision of the dead man’s smashed, bloody head, and the groaning Corporal. Evans looked a little pale. But they said nothing to each other. And after all, they were going on rest, four days’ rest. Winterbourne tried to join in the singing. Major Thorpe trotted past them on his horse. They marched to attention, and ceremonially saluted. That also seemed peaceful.
In the village they were billeted in large barns. A thaw had set in, so rapid that they started out on frozen ground and arrived in a village street deep in slushy mud. The nights were still cold, and old broken-down barns and earthen floors made chilly bedrooms. There seemed to be no water supply in the village, and they had to wash in thawing flood-pools, breaking the new thin ice with tingling fingers. But they went to the baths and changed their underclothes. The baths were in a shell-smashed brewery. Thirty or forty men stripped in one room and then went into another which had rows of iron pipes running across it, about eight feet from the ground. Small holes were punched in the pipes at intervals of about six feet. A man stood under each hole, and then a little trickle of warm water began to fall on his head and body. They had about five minutes to soap themselves and get clean. Winterbourne went back there alone the next day. By judicious bribing he managed to get an officer’s bath and a new set of underclothes. It was delicious to be clean and deloused again.
The four days passed very quickly. They paraded in the morning, did a little drill, played football or ran in the afternoons, and went to the estaminets in the evening. Winterbourne treated his section to beer, and drank half a bottle of Barsac himself. The men, all beer and spirit drinkers, despised the finer flavour of French wines and called them “vinegar.” After dark, they sneaked out and stole sandbags of “boulets”—coal-dust made into large pellets with tar—and burned them in a brazier to warm the chilly barn. Winterbourne protested against this thievery. But since the others went anyhow and he benefited by the theft, he thought he might as well share the crime too. True, it was French government property; and nobody minds stealing from governments. But still, he hated to be a thief. The men called it “scrounging.” Under pressure of necessity, every man in the line became a more or less unscrupulous scrounger.
On the third night Winterbourne “clicked unlucky.” He was on Gas and Fire Picket. They sat all night round the Company Field Kitchen and drank tea, while one man was always on guard. The tin hat and the fixed bayonet were unwelcome reminders that they were soon returning to the line. The men talked of their homes in England, wished the war would end, hoped anyway they’d get leave or a blighty soon, and envied the officers sleeping in beds. One man grumbled because there was no “red lamp” in the village. Winterbourne felt glad there wasn’t. Not that he would have been tempted, for he was quite fiercely chaste unless in love, but he hated the thought of these men giving their lean, sinewy bodies to the miserable French whores in the war-area bawdy houses.
“It’s all right in Béthune,” said the grumbler. “You can see ’em lining up outside the red lamps after dark under a Sergeant. Soon’s the old woman gives the signal, the Ser’ant says: ‘Next two files, right turn, quick march,’ and in yer go. The ole woman ’as a short-arm inspection and gives yer Condy’s Fluid, and the tart ’as Condy’s Fluid too. She was a nice tart, she was, but she was in a ’ell of a ’urry. She kep’ sayin’ ‘’Urry, daypaychez.’ I ’adn’t got meself buttoned up afore I ’eard the Ser’ant shoutin’: ‘Next two files, right turn, quick march.’ But she was a nice tart, she was.”
Winterbourne got up and walked out to the muddy road. The stars were faint and dim and lovely in the soft misty night sky; there seemed to be a first quiver of Spring in the scentless pure air. O Andromeda, O Paphian!
At dawn the birds twittered and sang, a little hesitantly in the cold morning mist. The sun rose in a golden haze, behind rows of poplars, over the flat dark earth.
They went into the line again, three miles to the right of their former positions. Their billets were about a mile and a quarter behind the town of M——, right in the crook of the salient. They lived in cellars in a small mining village, badly smashed, and entirely evacuated of civilians. A long treeless road led straight up to M—— and Hill 91, one of the most fought-over places in the line, seamed with trenches, pitted with shell-holes, honeycombed with galleries, eviscerated with huge mine craters, blasted bare of all vegetation. At Hill 91, the German line turned sharply left and linked up with a long slag-hill, about five hundred yards from the Pioneers’ billets. Consequently, although they were a long way from Hill 91, their billets were under observation and within machine-gun range, while the road to M—— was constantly shelled, and enfiladed by machine-guns. It was a rotten position, and would have been evacuated but for the “prestige” of keeping M——. A costly bit of prestige. It was estimated that venereal disease held continually a division of troops immobilized at Base Hospitals, to keep up the prestige of British purity; and another Division must have been obliterated to retain that barren prestige of holding M——.
They arrived about eleven, and almost immediately Evans’s servant came and told Winterbourne to report at the Officers’ Mess cellar, in fighting order. Evans was waiting for him.
Hitherto the Company had been under strength, and officered by Major Thorpe and the two subalterns, Evans and Pemberton, who took duty alternately. While on rest, they had been made up to full strength, and were joined by three other subalterns, Franklin, Hume and Thompson. They thus went up the line one hundred and twenty strong, with six officers, one of whom was supernumerary. Evans had been made a sort of unofficial second-in-command, while continuing to act as Platoon officer. Since he was the most experienced of the subalterns, he was to overlook the new officers until they knew their jobs. He explained all this to Winterbourne as they went along.
“You must give me your word not to mention it to the other men, but there is almost certainly a show coming off on this front. Probably in about four weeks. You mustn’t let the men know.”
“Of course not, Sir.”
“We shall have twelve-hour shifts up here, I’m afraid. I’ve got to take three platoons up to Hill 91, over there, at five to-night; and I want to reconnoitre. We’ve got to repair and revet the front communication trenches, clear away some of our wire, and fill the gaps with knife-rests. We’ve also got to repair Southampton Row, the main communication trench to your left. Every time we go up, we’ve got to take Mills bombs or trench mortars or S.A.A. I think we’re going to have a lively time. I rode out about ten miles yesterday, and saw fifteen batteries of heavies and a lot of tanks camouflaged by the road. The officers said they were booked for this sector or a little south.”
They were walking up the narrow straight road to M——. About every minute a heavy shell—or a salvo of heavy shells—plonked into M——. There was a sudden spout of black smoke and débris, a heavy sullen reverberating CLAANG as the loud detonation shook the twisted steel mining machinery, and re-echoed from the chalky slopes of Hill 91. To their right was a long slag-hill, mangled with shell-holes. Evans pointed to it.
“The Boche Front line runs just in front of that, about four hundred yards away. At some points our own Front line is only twenty yards from theirs. It’s a rummy and awkward position. Most of the transport for M—— has to come up this road, and the poor devils are shelled and machine-gunned wickedly every night. All troops on foot have to use Southampton Row, the communication trench to your left. You see it’s got fire-steps and a parapet—it’s also a Reserve line which we have to man in case of necessity.”
They got into the ruined streets of M——, and were promptly lost. The town was blasted to about three feet of indistinguishable ruins. A wooden notice-board over a mass of broken stones, said: “CHURCH.” Another further on said: “POST OFFICE.” Evans got out his map, and they stood together trying to make out the direct way to the section of trench they wanted. ZwiiiNG, CRASH, CLAANG!—four heavy shells screamed towards them and detonated with awful force within a hundred yards. The nearest swished over their heads and exploded twenty yards away. Four great columns of black smoke leaped up like miniature volcanoes; broken bricks and fragments of shell case clattered in the empty street. The reverberating echoes seemed like a groan from the agonizing town. The explosions seemed to hit Winterbourne in the chest.
“Heavies,” said Evans very calmly, “eight inch, probably.”
ZwiiiNG, Crash, CRASH! CLAANG! Four more.
“Seems a bit unhealthy here. We’d better push on.”
Winterbourne was silent. For the first time he began to realize the terrific inhuman strength of heavy artillery. Whizz-bangs and even five-nines were one thing, but these eight or ten inch high explosive monsters were a very different matter.
ZwiiiNG, CRASH! CLAANG!
Minute after minute, hour after hour, day and night, week after week, those merciless heavies pounded the groaning town.
Zwiiing, Crash! Craaash! Claaang!
It was too violent a thing to get accustomed to. The mere physical shock, the slap in the chest, of the great shells exploding close at hand, forbade that. They became a torment, an obsession, an exasperation, a nervous nightmare. Unintentionally, as a man walked through M——, he found himself tense and strained, waiting for that warning “zwiing” of the approaching shell, trying to determine by the sound whether it was coming straight at him or not. Winterbourne’s duties during the next two and a half months necessitated his walking through M——, often alone, twice or four times every twenty-four hours.
The real nightmare was only just beginning. There had been the torment of frost and cold; now came the torments of mud, of gas, of incessant artillery, of fatigue and lack of sleep.
Under the swift thaw the whole battered countryside seemed to turn from ice to mud. It was deep on the pavé roads, deeper round the billets, deeper still on the unpaved tracks, and deepest of all in the trenches. In Winterbourne’s hallucinated memories, where images and episodes met and collided like superimposed films, that Spring was mud. He seemed to spend his time pledging through interminable muddy trenches, up to the ankles, up to the calves, up to the knees; shovelling mud frantically out of trenches on to the berm, and then by night from the berm over the parapets, while the shells crashed and the machine-gun bullets struck gold sparks from the road stones. When he was not doing that, he was scraping mud with a knife from his boots and clothes, trying to dry socks and puttees and to rub some warmth into his livid aching feet. He had not known that wet cold could keep one’s legs so achingly dead for so long. He had not known how wearisome it could be to drag tired legs and carry burdens through deep sticky chalk mud, where each step was an effort, where each leg stuck deep as the other was laboriously pulled from the sucking mud. He had not known that one could hate an inert thing so much. Overhead it might be sunny, with innumerable little fleecy puffs of exploded shrapnel pursuing a darting white airplane high in the misty blue March sky. Underfoot, it was mud. They had no time to look at the sky, as they dragged along, toiling their bent way along those muddy ditches.
He remembered a week of blessed respite which he spent in an underground gallery, squatting twelve hours a day by a winch and interminably winding sandbags of chalk to men in the trench. These galleries—which were never used—were being dug to conceal two or three divisions before a surprise attack. They seemed to extend for miles. The cutting and picking at the advancing end was done by R.E.’s, skilled miners who cut with astonishing rapidity and accuracy. The Pioneers filled the chalk into sacks, and dragged them along the galleries, where Winterbourne incessantly wound them to the top. The Engineers had better rations than the infantry and the Pioneers, whose lunch was bread and cheese. They had huge cold beefsteaks and bottles of strong tea and rum for their lunch. Winterbourne during his half hour’s midday rest one day wandered up to their end of the gallery, just as they were eating. He could not help glancing rather wolfishly at their meal. One of them noticed it, and pointing to his steak, said with his mouth full:
“Ah reckon tha doesn’t get groob the likes o’ this in thy lot, lad.”
“No, but the stew’s very good—only you get a bit tired of it every day.”
“Aye, that tha does. But we’re skilled men, we are, traade union. They’re got to feed oos well, they ’ave.”
Half kindly, half contemptuously, the miner cut off a hunk of his steak and held it out to Winterbourne in his large dirty hand.
“Here tha art, lad, take a bite at that.”
“Oh no, thanks, it’s very kind of you, but...”
“Nay lad, tha’s welcome; tak it, tak it. Tha looks fair famelled and wore out. Tha’s na workin’ chap, ah knows.”
Torn between his feeling of humiliation, his desire not to reject the man’s kindly-meant offer and his hungry belly, Winterbourne hesitated. He finally took it, with a rather ghastly feeling of animal humiliation. The cold tender meat tasted delicious. It was the first unsodden meat he had eaten for weeks. He gave them his last cigarettes, and returned to his winch.
Winterbourne detested “berming.” Hour after hour standing in wet chilly mud, shovelling the stuff away to prevent its sliding back into the trench from which it had been laboriously thrown, and widening the space between the top of the trench and the parapet. The machine-guns from the slag-hill constantly rattled away at them. One night Winterbourne and the man next him dug up the bones, tunic, equipment and rifle of a French soldier, who had been hastily buried in the parapet many months before. His cartridges fell from the mouldering pouches and still looked bright in the dim star-dusk. Winterbourne dug up the skull; it was large and dome-shaped, a typical Frenchman’s head. They tried to find his identity disc, but failed. Pemberton, who was on duty that night, made them rebury what was left in a shell-hole. They stuck a cross over it next day, marked UNKNOWN FRENCH SOLDIER.