Chapter XIII: Part THREE: Adagio (3)

“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 and_petits 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.

The best nights were those when Evans was on duty, but often the urgency was so great that the officers’ runners and the officers themselves worked and carried burdens. The most awkward burdens were the long sheets of corrugated iron used for revetting. They had to carry these along the road, since they were too large to get round the traverses. It was impossible to keep the metal sheets from clanking against rifles or the sheet of the man in front in the darkness. The machine guns from the slag-hill opened out, and they could see the spurts of gold sparks on the road come towards them. Winterbourne felt his piece of corrugated iron violently hit and half wrenched from his hand; the man in front went down with a clatter. Somebody yelled “Stretcher-bearer!” The men dumped their burdens and cowered on the ground. It was an awful confusion. Only Evans and Winterbourne were left standing on the road. Evans cursed the N.C.O.’s, and made the men form up again behind Winterbourne. It took a long time to find all the sheets of metal in the darkness, and the machine-guns went on rattling pitilessly. They were hours late in getting back to billets.

* * * * *

As March dragged on, more and more heavy guns arrived, clattering up behind their tractors in the darkness. A Tank and its crew were hidden not far from the Pioneers’ billets, and there were others farther from the line. A new infantry Division was pushed in to the line on their right. Other Divisions were said to be in readiness close behind. The sector became more and more lively, but no big attack was made. Winterbourne questioned Evans, who said it had been postponed to give the mud a chance to dry. What hopes!

The Germans had excellent observation posts on Hill 91, and their aircraft were constantly over the British lines and back areas. They were perfectly aware that an attack was being prepared. Every night they shelled M——, shelled the cross-roads leading to M——, shelled any artillery positions they had spotted, shelled the wrecked village where the Pioneers were billeted. The cellars were good enough protection against shell splinters, but far too flimsy to resist a direct hit. Every day or night huge crumps were flung at them, exploding with concussions which shook the ground and made sleep impossible. In the day-time, Winterbourne sometimes crouched at his cellar-entrance and watched the explosions within his view. If one of these big shells hit a half-ruined house, almost every vestige disappeared in a cloud of black smoke and rosy brick dust.

And there was gas, a good deal of gas. It was the beginning of the intensive use of gas projectiles, which later became so greatly perfected. Their experience of it began one March night on Hill 91. A smart local attack had driven the Germans out of their advance positions and carried the British line forward—at a cost—about two hundred and fifty yards on a front of eight hundred. Evans explained to Winterbourne that these local attacks were being made all along the line to deceive the Germans as to the exact position of the coming offensive. Since the Germans would have needed to be blind or lunatic not to see where the guns and troops were being massed, Winterbourne thought this an over-subtle and over-costly bit of policy. However, his not to reason why.

The Pioneers—three platoons of them—under Evans, Pemberton and Hume, were to dig a new communication trench from the former British front line to their present Outpost line of hastily interlinked shell-holes. Evans told Winterbourne not to carry any tools:

“I expect it’ll be rather a sticky do. The old Boche is pooping off whizz-bangs all day and night up there. And I’m hanged if I can find out exactly where our new front line is supposed to be. It’s a network of Boche trenches up there, and we don’t want to go barging into their line.”

They struggled up Southampton Row and skirted M——, which was being shelled heavily and reverberantly. They got into another trench on the fringe of Hill 91. Whizz-bangs kept cracking all round them, in little masses of about a dozen—several batteries firing together. Evans and Winterbourne were leading. Winterbourne paused:

“There’s a curious smell about here, Sir” (sniff, sniff) “like pineapple or pear-drops.”

Evans sniffed the air.

“So there is.”

The smell rapidly became stronger after another salvo of whizz-bangs.

“By Jove, it’s tear-gas!” said Evans. “Pass the word along to put on gas goggles.”

The line halted, while the men fumbled in the darkness for their goggles; and then slowly stumbled on. Winterbourne found he was practically blinded by his goggles in the darkness; they kept going dim with perspiration. He took them off.

“We shall be here all night at this rate, Sir. May as well be blinded with tear-gas as goggles. I’ll keep mine off and reconnoitre.”

Evans pulled off his goggles, and the two went on ahead, telling the Sergeant to follow straight on until he came up with them. Tears poured from the two men’s eyes as they toiled up the muddy trench. They kept dabbing their eyes with pocket handkerchiefs, like a couple of mutes at their own funerals.

Crash, crash-crash, crash, crash-crash-crash-crash, came the whizz-bangs; and the pineapple smell became stronger than ever.

“It’ll be a jolly look-out for us,” said Evans, “if they poop over poison-gas too. We shan’t be able to smell it with all this stink of pear-drops. Peuh! It’s like being in a sweet factory.”

They laughed. And then dabbed their streaming eyes again.

In ten minutes they came up to the largest of the mine craters. The wind was fresh on the hill-crest and there was no gas. Their smarting eyes began to recover.

“Here we are,” said Evans, “and there’s the old No Man’s Land, but where in hell our Front line is, I don’t know. You stay here, Winterbourne, and tell Sergeant Perkins to halt until I come back. I’ll go and reconnoitre.”

“I’ll go back and fetch them, Sir, and bring them up.”

“All right,” and Evans vanished in the darkness. Winterbourne returned to the line of men, dismally groping their way through the gassy trench. They waited for Evans, who led them over the old No Man’s Land to a very deep trench. They turned to the left. Evans whispered to Winterbourne:

“There’s nothing here but a net-work of Boche trenches; look how deep they are. I couldn’t see a soul, and there are still Boche trench-notices up. I’m hanged if I know where we are. For all I know we’re in the Boche lines.”

Winterbourne unslung his rifle and bayonet, and walked in front of Evans. Verey lights went up occasionally, but most mysteriously seemed to come from all sides, behind them as well as in front and to the flanks. The trenches were immensely deep and dark, except when lit dimly by the glow of Verey lights, or the abrupt flashes of whizz-bangs. They went on and on, constantly passing cross-trenches, completely lost, probably returning on their footsteps. They could hear the men muttering and cursing behind them. At another cross-trench they halted in despair. Winterbourne stood on a large hummock in the middle of the wide trench, peering ahead through the gloom. Evans looked at his luminous wrist-watch.

“Good Lord! We’ve been wandering in these blasted trenches for nearly three hours. It’ll be too late to do any work unless we get there at once.”

Winterbourne grabbed his arm:

“Look!”

Several shadowy figures were silhouetted against the skyline, coming along the trench towards them. Too dark to distinguish the helmets. English or German?

“Challenge them,” whispered Evans. Winterbourne threw his rifle forward:

“Halt! Who are you!”

“Frontshires,” said a weary voice.

“Ask which company.”

“Which company?”

“A, B, C, D,—what’s left of ’em.”

They were now close enough for Evans and Winterbourne to see they were in British uniform. Evans passed down word to his men to stand to the left and let the out-going party pass. The Frontshires staggered rather than walked down the bumpy trench.

“We ’ung on until nearly all of us was killed, Sir,” said one man huskily to Evans, as if apologizing.

“When the Springshires was wiped out, we got enfiladed, Sir,” said another, “there’s on’y one of our officers left.”

About fifty men, the flotsam of the wrecked battalion, stumbled past them. Then came the Sergeant-Major and a young subaltern. Evans stopped him, and asked the way to the front line, explaining briefly their job. The subaltern seemed dazed with weariness. He kept swaying in the darkness.

“It’s up there... up there... somewhere....”

“But how far?”

“I don’t know... not far... I can’t stop... mustn’t leave the men.”

And he stumbled on again. Evans turned to Winterbourne.

“Well, Winterbourne, you might as well get off the body of that dead Boche you’re standing on, and we’ll push along.”

Winterbourne sprang away with a sensation of horror, and saw that he had indeed unconsciously been standing on a dead German.

They wandered about until nearly dawn, without finding the Front line. They came on a couple of wounded Germans, whom Evans put into stretchers. Just about dawn they found themselves back at the point where they had entered the old German trenches, and recrossed to familiar ground. The wounded Germans groaned as the stretcher-bearers stumbled and bumped them on the ground.

* * * * *

The remnant of the battalion of the Frontshires very slowly made their way into M——. Zwiing, CRASH! CLAANG! went the great crumps, but they hardly heard them. They were too tired. They went through the town in single file. On the straight road, the subaltern halted them, formed them roughly into fours, and took his place at their head. They shambled heavily along, not keeping step or attempting to, bent wearily forward under the weight of their equipment, their unseeing eyes turned to the muddy ground. They stumbled over inequalities; several times one or other of them fell, and had to be dragged laboriously to his feet. Others lagged hopelessly behind. Time and again the young subaltern and the R.S.M. paused to allow the little group to re-form. Hardly a word was spoken. They went very slowly, past the slag-hill, past the ruined village, past the Pioneers’ billets, past the soldiers’ cemetery, past the ruined château, past the closed Y.M.C.A. canteen; and just as the fresh clear Spring dawn lightened the sky, they came to the village where they had their rest billets. The firing had quieted down, and the larks were singing overhead in the pure exquisite sky. In the pale light the men’s unshaven faces looked grim and strangely old, grey-green, haggard, inexpressibly weary. They shambled on.

Outside of Divisional Headquarters a smart sentry was on duty. He saw the little party wearily stumbling down the village street, and thought they were walking wounded. The young subaltern stopped about thirty yards from the sentry, and once more re-formed his men. The sentry heard him say “Stick it, Frontshires.”

Already the news had reached the back areas that the Frontshires had been nearly wiped out in a desperate defence—fifty of them and one officer left, out of twenty officers and seven hundred and fifty men.

The sentry sprang to attention and took one pace forward. Sloped arms—one, two, three, as if on parade—and remained rigid. As the little group drew level, he sharply brought his rifle and fixed bayonet to the “Present Arms.”

The young officer wearily touched the brim of his steel helmet. The men scarcely saw, and did not comprehend, the gesture. The sentry watched them pass, with a lump in his throat.

There was still nothing to report on the western front.

[ VIII ]

After a few hours sleep and a hasty meal, Evans and Winterbourne started for the Front line again. Evans was very much ashamed at having lost his way the night before, and the Major had strafed him for incompetence. Evans had not replied, as he might have done, that since the Major knew so well where they ought to have gone, he might have taken the trouble to lead them there.

It was about two on a sunny cold afternoon. They skirted M—— with its everlasting, maddening Zwiiing, CRASH! CLAAAANG! In the trenches on the edge of Hill 91, they met two walking wounded, unshaved, muddy to the waist. One had his head bandaged and was carrying his steel helmet, the other had his tunic half off, and his left hand and arm were bandaged in several places. They were talking with great gravity and earnestness, and hardly saw Evans and his runner. Winterbourne heard one of them say:

“I told that muckin new orfficer twice that some mucker’d get hit if he muckin well took us up that muckin trench.”

“Ah,” said the other, “moock ’im.”

Evans and Winterbourne paused at the old Front line on the crest of the hill to take breath, and looked back. The blue sky was speckled all over with the little fleecy shrapnel bursts from Archies, pursuing three different enemy planes. The heavy shells fell reverberantly into M—— at their feet. They looked over a broad flat, grey-green plain, dotted with ruined villages, seamed with the long irregular lines of trenches. The wavering broad ribbon of No Man’s Land was clearly visible, blasted to the white chalk. They could see the flash of the heavies, and enemy shells bursting on cross-roads and round artillery emplacements. A Red Cross car of wounded bumping its way from the Advanced Dressing Station in M—— was shelled all down the road by field artillery. They watched it eagerly, hoping it would escape. Once or twice it disappeared in the smoke of the shell-burst and they felt certain it was done for; but the car bumpingly reappeared and finally vanished from sight in the direction of Rail Head.

“God! What a dirty trick! I’m glad they didn’t get it,” said Winterbourne, as they scrambled out of the trench.

“Ah, well,” said Evans, “Red Cross cars have been used as camouflage before now.”

* * * * *

They easily found the new Front Line in the daylight. Directions in English had been hastily scrawled on the old German trench notices, and they wondered how on earth they could have missed the way the night before. The Front line was full of infantry, some on sentry-duty, some sitting hunched up on the fire-steps, many lying in long narrow holes like graves, scooped in the side of the trench. They found an officer, who took them along to show them where the new communication trench was wanted. Winterbourne, turning to answer a question from Evans, struck the butt of his rifle sharply against a sleeping man in one of the holes. The man did not stir.

“Your fellows are sleeping soundly,” said Evans.

“Yes,” said the officer tonelessly, “but he may be dead for all I know. Stretcher-bearers too tired to take down all the bodies. Some of ’em are dead, and some asleep. We have to go round and kick ’em to find which is which.”

The new trench they were to dig had been roughly marked out, and ran from the old German Front line to the lip of Congreve’s Mine Crater, now used as an ammunition dump. A salvo of whizz-bangs greeted them as they went out to look at it.

“I don’t altogether envy you this job,” said the Infantry officer; “this is about the most unhealthy spot on Hill 91. The Boche shells it day and night. Your Colonel had a hell of a row about it with the Brigadier, but our fellows are too whacked to do any more digging.”

Over came another little bunch of whizz-bangs, in corroboration—crash, crash-crash, crash. The grey-green acrid smoke smelt foul.

“They’re going to call it Nero Trench,” he added, as they left him, “because the ground’s so black with coal dust and slag. Well, good-bye, best of luck. And, by the bye, look out for gas.”

* * * * *

The Nero Trench job was an intensified nightmare. The Germans had it “taped” with exactitude, and shelled it ruthlessly. Five minutes was the longest period that ever passed without salvos of whizz-bangs. Evans and Winterbourne, Hume and his runner, walked continually up and down the line of men, who toiled hastily and nervously in the darkness to make themselves a little cover. When the shells came crashing near them, they crouched down on the ground. It was found after the first night that each man had simply dug a hole for himself instead of regularly excavating his three yards of trench. On some nights the shelling was so intense that Evans withdrew the men for a time to the shelter of a trench. They had several casualties.

And then the Germans began a steady, systematic gas bombardment of all the ruined villages in the advanced area. It began on the second night of the Nero Trench job. They had noticed on Hill 91 that a pretty heavy bombardment was proceeding from the German lines, and all the way down from M——, they heard the shells continuously shrilling overhead. It puzzled them that they could not hear them exploding.

“Must be bombarding the back areas,” said Evans. “Let’s hope it gives ’em something to think about besides sending us up tons of silly papers.”

But as they came nearer their village they could tell by the sound in the air that the shells must be falling close ahead of them. Soon they heard them falling with the customary zwiiING, followed by a very unaccustomed soft PHUT.

“They can’t all be duds,” said Winterbourne.

A shell dropped short, just outside the parapet, with the same curious PHUT. Immediately a strange smell, rather like new-mown hay gone acrid, filled the air. They sniffed, and both men exclaimed simultaneously:

“Phosgene! Gas!”

They all fumblingly and hastily put on their gas masks, and stumbled on blindly down the trench. Winterbourne and Evans scrambled out on to the road, and got into the edge of the village. A rain of gas shells was falling on it and all around their billets—zwiing, zwiing, zwiing, zwiing, PHUT PHUT PHUT PHUT. Each took off his mask a second and gave one sniff—the air reeked with phosgene.

Evans and Winterbourne stood at the end of the trench to help out the groping half-blinded men. As they filed by, grotesques with india-rubber faces, great dead-looking goggles, and long tubes from their mouths to the box respirators, Winterbourne thought they looked like lost souls, expiating some horrible sin in a new Inferno. The rolled gas blankets were pulled down tightly over the cellar entrances, but the gas leaked through. Two men were gassed and taken off in stretchers, foaming rather horribly at the mouth.

* * * * *

The gas bombardment went on until dawn, and then ceased. Winterbourne fell asleep, with his gas mask just off his face. Hitherto they had slept with the box respirator slung on a nail or piled with the other equipment; after the experience of this and the subsequent nights they always slept with the respirator on their chests and the mask ready to slip on immediately.

The heavies began again soon after it was light. Winterbourne was awakened by one which crashed just outside his cellar. He lay on the floor for a long time listening to the zwiiiING, CRASH, of the shells. He heard two ruined houses clatter to the ground under direct hits, and wondered if the cellars had held firm. They hadn’t. But fortunately, they happened to be unoccupied. Presently, the German batteries switched off and began bombarding some artillery about five hundred yards to the left. Winterbourne profited by the lull to wash. He ran out of the cellar in his shirtsleeves and gas mask, with the canvas bucket in which he washed; and found that a shell had smashed the pump outside his billet. He knew there was another about three hundred yards to the right, although he had never been there.

It was another cold but sunny morning, with the inevitable white shrapnel bursts all over the sky. He was now so accustomed to them that he scarcely noticed their existence. Occasionally a very faint rattle of machine-gun fire came from the war in the air, of which he was nearly as ignorant as people in England of the war on land.

He took off his mask and sniffed. A fresh wind was blowing, and although there was plenty of phosgene in the air, it was not in any deadly concentration. He decided to risk leaving the mask off. The ground was deeply delved with the conical holes made by the big shells thrown over, and pitted everywhere by the smaller holes of the gas shells. He found a dud, and examined it with interest. A brownish-looking shell, about the size of a five-nine.

The cottages were rather scattered, and unused as cellar-billets in this direction. The top storeys had gone from nearly all, but in several the ground floor was fairly intact. He looked into each as he passed. The wall-paper had long ago fallen and lay in mouldering heaps. The floors were covered with broken bricks, tiles, smashed beams, laths and disintegrating plaster. Odd pieces of broken furniture, twisted iron beds, large rags which had once been clothes and sheets, protruded from the mass. He poked about and found photographs, letters in faded ink on damp paper, broken toys, bits of smashed vases, a soiled satin wedding-gown with its veil and wreath of artificial orange blossom. He stood, with his head bent, looking at this pathetic débris of ruined lives, and absent-mindedly lit a cigarette which he immediately threw away—it tasted of phosgene. “La Gloire,” he murmured, “Deutschland über alles, God save the King.”

The next cottage was less damaged than the others, and its rough wooden shutters were still on their hinges. Winterbourne peered through and saw that the whole of the inside had been cleared of débris, and was stacked with quantities of wooden objects. He shaded his eyes more carefully, and saw they were ranks and ranks of wooden crosses. Those he could see had painted on them R.I.P.; then underneath was a blank space for the name; then came the name of one or other of the battalions in his Division, and then the present month and year, with a blank space for the day. Excellent forethought, he reflected as he filled his bucket and water-bottle; how well this War is organized!

* * * * *

About nine, Evans’s servant told him to report immediately in fighting order. Wearily and sleepily he threw on his equipment, re-tied the string of his box respirator, and slung his rifle and bayonet over his left shoulder. He waited with the officers’ servants, who gave him a piece of bread dipped in bacon grease to eat. Presently Evans came out and they started off.

“I’ve got to see an R.E. officer,” said Evans, “about a new job on Hill 91. It’s a bit farther to the left of where we’ve been working, and it’ll take us half an hour longer to get there.”