Chapter XV

On returning to the trench, our Ensign found that, during his absence, the men had dug a foot or so down and had fashioned a rude kind of fire-step. Their numbers had been increased by the arrival of two more officers of our Ensign’s Battalion with mixed parties of Guards. These two officers had been having an exhilarating time bombing the enemy out of the right of the third German line. Our Ensign found all the surviving officers of his Battalion--with the Commanding Officer, the Doctor, and the Padre, seven in all--installed in a sort of small observation trench (probably dug originally for the officers of the German battery installed there). Several of the party were busy deepening the trench with pick and entrenching tool, but others were looking through their glasses at the slopes to the right of the yellow church tower where strange doings were toward.

Word had been brought in from the small party of Guards and other units holding the most advanced line that the Germans were massing for a counter-attack. Through his glasses our Ensign could clearly descry dense parties of men advancing in artillery formation on the distant slopes bathed in the mellow evening sunshine, while on the roads transport waggons, artillery limbers, and even motor-buses were to be seen rolling up. The situation was desperate enough. The Guards were still without word from the rear, without any known support, without any definite connection either right or left, without machine-guns, for the last team had been knocked out that afternoon, without Verey lights for the approach of darkness, or any material to put the trench in a proper state of defence. If the Germans attacked it would have to be a fight to a finish, for, of course, there was no idea of falling back. Our Ensign noticed the Commanding Officer, who was perfectly cheerful and entirely confident, examining the chamber of his revolver.

Then, over to the right, a sudden German barrage with nasty, black 5·9 shells, began with unexpected violence. Through the high-spouting shell-bursts a steady line plodded forward and the word flashed along the line--

“The Scots Guards are attacking!”

Onward they went in the failing light, tall figures swallowed up in black masses of smoke, men flung this way and that, ducking, stumbling, falling. Suddenly our Ensign, watching through his glasses, saw an officer he knew well topping the skyline,--a shell burst quite close to the familiar figure--he shot up an arm to protect his face, then plunged forward again and was lost to view in the eddying smoke and the gathering dusk. Then the line was slowly swallowed up, and only the shells remained to bar the advance of supports.

The day died reluctantly, sullenly, and the temperature began to sink. Our Ensign, who had been doing his share of the digging, suddenly remembered that he had had no lunch. He looked for his orderly, a man he had got in the last line to take the place of the wounded MacFinnigan, but he was nowhere to be seen, vanished in the smoke of battle together with our Ensign’s haversack containing his sandwiches. However, El Capitan came to the rescue with a hunk of bread and tongue and a bar of chocolate, which, together with a draught of the famous tea-and-brandy mixture, gave our young man a satisfying meal. As he was eating he saw the stretcher-bearers arriving with Duke, with whom the Doctor immediately busied himself.

It was almost dark when an Irish Guards sergeant arrived with the news that the Germans were still massing to attack. Our Ensign never forgot the sight of that man, a big Celtic type with fine eyes, a blood-stained bandage round his head, very white against his black hair. He had come from the mixed party still holding out in the most advanced line. Having delivered his message, he went forth once more into the dusk ... and was never seen again. Thus do men vanish in battle.

The counter-attack never came. Long after the German star-shells had begun spouting, long after the survivors of the party in the most advanced line and of the detachment which had gone forward in the afternoon had been withdrawn, the Guards remained on the _qui vive_. Our Ensign and his brother ensigns divided the night into watches, and took turns to spend three hours in the raw air with the line of outposts which the Guards threw out in front of their trench. That night, at last, they got touch with a line battalion on the left, and on the right with another battalion of Guards.

When our Ensign returned to the trench on being relieved on outpost duty ... it was about midnight ... feeling very cold and utterly weary, he found an unwonted stir there. Rations and water had come up and were being distributed among the men. Nor had the officers been forgotten. Three servants had accompanied the ration party and brought food and drink for the officers, also the letters. Loud were the praises of the Quartermaster sung that night, for it was a great feat. All day the Battalion had been marooned, yet, with the coming of night, the rations arrived in spite of Heaven knows what difficulties to be surmounted on the way up. There were three letters for our Ensign, and the first he opened was a bill from a London florist! That thin sheet of paper, with its elaborately engraved heading, brought home vividly to him the extraordinary contrasts in which war abounds,--at one moment cowering in a shell-hole, with death busy all about; the next moment back again in the old routine of life, with letters and newspapers ... and bills! Thus our Ensign pondered as he devoured cold tongue and bread and biscuits, and sipped some excellent claret out of an enamel mug, at his feet El Capitan and the Padre snoring peaceably.

When the first streaks of another dawn appeared in the sky, the outpost line was withdrawn and the men came trudging back to the trench, muddy, red-eyed with want of sleep, transpierced with cold. Our Ensign watched the morning creeping rosy-fingered into the sky, and idly wondered what the day would bring forth. During the night, apparently, the British artillery had profited by the deep stretch of ground won from the enemy, for, as soon as it was light, some vicious little field-pounders began barking very close up behind the Guardsmen’s position. Then a few British aeroplanes hummed out into the clear morning sky and flew away. Not long after a regular covey of German machines sallied out and hovered above the Guards, cramped up in their shallow and altogether unprotected trench.

“Now we shall catch it,” thought our Ensign, and catch it they did. It was mostly shrapnel, H.E. shrapnel, black and vile-smelling, with a deafening detonation, that the Hun sent over, reserving his heavier stuff for the little battery behind, which barked incessantly notwithstanding. The German shooting was bad, and the shells fell short of or over the trench. Several shrapnel bursts clanged and whizzed and pattered round the heads of the officers as they sat in the bottom of their corner of the trench, but they had no casualties. In fact, although the shelling went on at intervals all through the day, the casualties were few.

But it was an arduous time. There was no means of proceeding along the trench, for it was far too crowded, and, indeed, there was no object in doing so. One could only sit there and attempt the impossible--namely, to pay no heed to the shells. The little group of officers was strangely isolated, for there was no movement to be observed, either before or behind them. The ground in the rear was in full view of the enemy, so communication with the troops in the line behind was cut off during the daylight hours. It all gave our young man a queer sort of “desert island” sensation, and he kept on thinking of the shipwrecked pleasure party in “The Admirable Crichton.”

Some of the officers slept, others ate, others took turns at assisting the orderlies to deepen still further the trench, the bottom of which was found to consist of live German shells in their wicker cases. One of the orderlies, stoutly wielding a pick, made this interesting discovery, upon which the pick was unanimously disqualified, and only very gentle scraping with the entrenching tool allowed. Our Ensign slept a little and ate a little and drank a little, and then did a thing he had never done before, being a strict Tory, ... he read ‘The Daily News’ from cover to cover--leading articles, Women’s Page, advertisements, and all, and then passed it on to somebody else, who did the same. It was the only newspaper in the trench.

But the green panorama stretched out before them was not without its compensations either. Ever since the previous afternoon the British Heavies had played a wonderful game with the pretty little hamlet with the yellow church tower peering forth from among the trees. Huge projectiles whooshed noisily through the air, and hurled destruction among the red roofs and the verdant foliage. A great pall of smoke, flanked by spouts of black and brown earth, and topped with eddies of coral-pink haze, was the last that our Ensign had seen of the little village by daylight. At night, as he went round the outposts, however, he had still heard the great shells crashing into the village, and watched a house blaze heavenwards with a glare that lit up the surrounding spouts of smoke. In the first light of morning he had seen the yellow church tower but a single ragged stick of broken masonry amid a tangle of broken trees and gaping roofs. And still the shells went pounding in. Ah, the guns of the Somme--they do their work thoroughly!

It is not often in this war of trenches that a man can get a comprehensive view of an attack. To the little group of officers, cooped up in their narrow trench, was vouchsafed that morning as grandiose a spectacle as (our Ensign believes) any man has witnessed in this war. Somewhere about the hour of half-past nine a light infantry brigade over on the left attacked, and from their “grand stand,” as the men, delighted, called it, the Guards could see every detail of the advance. It was a sight, too, to gladden brave men’s eyes! For though the little lines of brown dots that went creeping forward up the distant green slopes were swept away again and again, while across the valley echoed the loud stutter of the German machine-guns, yet the succeeding lines went on. The tiny brown figures seemed literally to be blown down, yet others struggled forward, wave upon wave, until they were lost to view. Through the glasses one could see the wake they had left--little figures crawling about, hobbling, with the stretcher-bearers darting and ducking and dodging to and fro. Once a figure detached itself from the advancing line, right in the teeth of that whirlwind of death, bent over a prostrate figure, picked it up, and started to struggle along ... probably towards the shelter of a shell-hole. But, even as our Ensign watched, with bated breath, the little brown figure and his burden rolled over and lay still.

All the valley now re-echoed to the roar of artillery, and the Germans left the Guards alone while they concentrated on the attacking forces. The British supports were seen coming up through a heavy barrage, then men began to trickle back down the slope strewn with brown figures left in the trail of the advance. What had happened? No one knew. Had the attack failed? None could say. Little by little the artillery fire slackened, some inquisitive aeroplanes came out and hovered over the scene, and, by-and-by, the noise and the smoke subsided. Then, after a pause, the enemy turned his attention to the Guards, and started his intermittent bombardment again.

In the course of the day word at last came up from the rear. The Guards were to maintain their position, and might be called upon to support an attack. In the afternoon the troops on the left went forward again to the attack, but the wind blew the smoke across the field of vision, and the Guards could not exactly see what was going forward. Germans, however, could still be discerned in and about the ruined village.

Towards dusk that evening our Ensign and a Grenadier officer took a party of men and raided some _chevaux de frise_--trestles garnished with barbed wire--which the lynx eye of our Ensign’s Commanding Officer had noticed in front of a German trench in their rear. This was lifted bodily in sections, and put out in front of the trench to furnish some slight measure of protection in the event of a German attack.

Night fell again, dank and cold, with a menace of rain. Still there was no word of relief. How distant seemed that fresh dawn when, under the paling stars, the Guards had gone forward to the attack! Everybody was worn out. Excitement, fatigue, want of sleep, had done their work. But no respite could be granted. Again, at nightfall, the line of outposts was posted; and again the ensigns, haggard and scrubby, did a shift each in turn. The men were so utterly exhausted that they literally could not keep their eyes open as they lay crouching in their shell-holes in pairs, their faces towards the spouting German lights, their backs towards the blackness of their trench. Our Ensign, moving continually during his turn of duty to keep himself awake, had to go from shell-hole to shell-hole and assure himself that the sentries were watchful by kicking the soles of their boots.

While our Ensign was out during the hours before midnight, in company with one of his sergeants, he managed to get in touch with the troops who had made the gallant attacks that morning and afternoon. In a sunken road which had been wrested from the enemy, and was strewn with German and British dead, he found the wounded laid out in long lines of stretchers, moaning, shivering with cold, pathetically asking for cigarettes--a thing he could not give them. They were waiting their turn to be carried down over the broken and shell-swept ground to the rendezvous of the field ambulances, a mile or so back.

In a German dug-out our Ensign found two battalion commanders supping off bread and chocolate and a drain of whisky in a bottle, with them two or three young officers. They were all mud-stained and worn, but they made our Ensign welcome and offered him a share in their drain of whisky. They told our Ensign they were momentarily expecting to be relieved, and promised to inform their successors of the Guards’ line of outposts, so that they could join up with the Guards.

When our Ensign got back to the trench, he heard glad tidings: the Guards were to be relieved that night. It was half-past one in the morning, but there were no signs of the relief as yet; and presently our Ensign was sent out again with another party of men to strengthen the outpost line, for there were rumours of a German attack to be delivered at two o’clock.

Once more the weary men, many of whom had already been three hours on outpost duty that night, fared forth into the blackness in a smother of rain. The night was very dark, and it was hard work getting the men out of the trench and lined up, for they were heavy with sleep. Perhaps this operation created an undue amount of noise; but the fact remains that hardly had our Ensign led them into the open than a perfect storm of German bullets came over--machine-guns stuttered loudly, and a great shower of German lights soared up into the sky.

Everybody flung himself flat on his face, our Ensign reflecting that the enemy seemed to anticipate a further British attack rather than to contemplate launching one himself. Presently the storm abated, and our Ensign rose to his feet. But the man at his side did not stir. Bending down, our Ensign shaded his lamp with his hand and flashed the light for an instant on to the prostrate figure. It was our Ensign’s orderly--his third since the attack started--lying dead on his back with a bullet through the head. He was the only casualty.

* * * * *

The cold night was all but spent, and the sky was slowly changing to the play of the approaching day, when, from out of a scene of some bustle about the trench, word came to our Ensign to bring the outposts in ... the reliefs had arrived. Never was relief effected more swiftly. It went at a whirlwind pace. Stiff and aching, the outposts stumbled in and were pushed by their comrades into their places in the sadly shrunk companies of the Battalion; a blur of figures groped their way into the trench, a couple of infantry subalterns emerged and reported to the Commanding Officer, ... how fresh they looked, thought our Ensign....

Then a German shell screamed over and burst noisily, scattering a pailful of shrapnel about: another followed, and another. The sky is flushing with the coming of the sun: every moment the light grows brighter. Hurry, hurry, or the Huns will finish off even that wasted shadow of a battalion before it clears the ridge. What are they waiting for in front? Clang ... whee ... ee ... oo ... oo! goes the shrapnel. Why the devil don’t they move on? Crash! there falls another shell....

But the leading company is off at a good steady amble, the rest of the Battalion at its heels, each company commander taking the shortest way that will bring his men out of the zone of visibility behind the shelter of the ridge. Away they go, across the German third line, where the only Guards left now are the dead, and muffled figures are frying bacon over little wood fires,--past shell-holes tenanted by stiff forms, over roads strewn with field-grey corpses and littered with the jumble of the battlefield, down the slope back to life and air and safety, where the larks are singing in the pellucid sky, where the gunners are clinking dixies as they come and go about their breakfast--past a smashed gun here and a wrecked horse ambulance there, and so on to a road where signallers and sappers and R.A.M.C. orderlies, washing and shaving and breakfasting in the bright sunshine, wave an encouraging hand as the Guards go by.

There, in an open space by a wood, spruce figures--the officers and non-commissioned officers who had been left behind--are moving in and out of the muddy, dishevelled Guardsmen grouped about the smoking cookers. Peter is there, and all the others; and there, too, is the faithful Johnson, waiting with our Ensign’s cap and a discreetly murmured “Glad to see you all right, sir!” There also the Mess Sergeant, pink and perspiring, darting to and fro among a cloud of servants busy over a white cloth spread on the ground ready for breakfast. The grateful smell of breakfast is in the air and the buzz of many voices--but all the movement stops, all the voices are hushed, as the Battalion, much reduced in strength, marches in, forms up, and is dismissed by the Commanding Officer. Then the buzz of voices breaks forth again, hearty greetings are exchanged, there is much hand-shaking, while the company officers, their company sergeant-majors by their sides, run about and see that the men get their breakfast.

Half an hour later our Ensign sank down beside the white table-cloth. The craving for warm food was uppermost, stronger even than the desire to sleep, ... it was a Gargantuan meal in the sunshine. Whilst he ate, he heard of the fortunes of the fight, the fine advance made, the numbers of prisoners captured, the success of the French, the losses, the death of this friend and of that, the condition of the wounded, ... but it made no impression on his mind at the time. He was too tired, his mind was too benumbed by the sensations he had experienced, to grasp or to realise anything.

Then, finally, came the march back to camp, the drums of the Battalion at the head. They followed that self-same road by which our Ensign had seen the remnants of the Irish Division coming out of action a week or so before. The men held themselves erect, and stepped out well to the roll of the drums and the squeal of the fifes, which brought out on to the roadside banks men from batteries, bivouacs, and horse-lines all around. Near the camp the Brigadier met them and walked a part of the way beside the Commanding Officer, sitting his horse at the head of the column.

And so, to the lilt of the regimental quickstep, they came to a great city of canvas spread out upon a breezy hillside, and marched in to rest through lines of other Guardsmen, like them, just out of action, who smiled them a welcome through the grime on their faces.