Chapter XVI

“The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”

--OMAR KHAYYÁM.

The morrow of battle is worse than battle itself, worse even than the eve. For, when the weary body has been rested, the dazed brain begins to reassert itself, and the flood of realisation pains like the rush of blood to a numbed limb. The empty messes, the missing faces, the shrunken appearance of the battalion when the roll is called, the pile of kits lying ownerless outside the Quartermaster’s store ... each of these visible signs of the battalion having passed through the fire the mind takes in, reluctantly and recoiling from each fresh shock. In sleep it revives shudderingly every phase of the fight, and, liberated from the shackles of the will, lying powerless in the ban of slumber, suffers unresisting, a thousand times intensified, every torment of fear and horror which the waking mind has suppressed. For dreams--so the psychologists tell us--are but the expression of emotions consciously or subconsciously held in restraint in the waking hours.

Tents, as far as the eye could see, pitched in a sea of mud, ruffled by chill gusts of rain and wind sweeping across the slopes; a mammoth gun belching forth green fire and yellow smoke a few hundred yards away, the thunder of distant cannon, blending with the stir of the camp; drums beating, pipes skirling from the lines of the Scots Guards, the solemn harmony of men’s voices singing hymns (only the Welsh Guards possessed a choir like that!) ... these were the sights and sounds to which our Ensign awoke from his first troubled sleep after getting back to camp.

He came to his senses with a start of terror that sent him flying to the tent door. Hideous nightmare shapes were haunting the tents and huts where officers and men of the Guards slept the sleep of utter exhaustion, physical and mental, the terrifying spectres that drift through the battle--dreams of men who have been in action. Until our Ensign had gazed long upon the lines of tents swaying in the wind, and had seen the familiar khaki figures, wrapped in their waterproof capes, passing to and fro in the mud, his mind remained in the grip of a nameless terror: he did not know who or where he was, whether he were alive or dead, on earth or in space. Thus do men awake from their first sleep after coming out of battle.

For a few instants he felt like one raised from the dead. Slowly and painfully his mind picked up, one by one, the threads of his life where it seemed to have left off on that sunny morning--surely it was years ago?--when the whistles had sounded, the hurricane din had broken loose, and the Guards had moved forward into battle.

But there across the tent lay Peter’s sleeping valise and things: there, on the tent pole, hung the little mirror they shared in common. The tent was dry and clean: the yellow light diffused through its canvas sides was bright and comforting. And here was the faithful Johnson, getting ready his bath and a complete change of clothing, and collecting his torn and blood-stained uniform for the battalion tailor to mend and scour.

Lazily our Ensign fished a box of cigarettes from his kit spread out beside him, lit one, and lying back in his warm sleeping-bag, watched the smoke curl upwards towards the peaked dome of the tent. He was stiff all over, every bone in his body was aching, but he was conscious of a deep sense of thanksgiving; he was overpoweringly glad to be back in the world again.

They had to carry on. He had a pang when he found all those joyous company Messes he had known shrunk to a group of officers small enough to take their meals together at one short table. He would not let himself think of the old double-company Mess, for only he and two others survived--all the rest were casualties. “_Der Mann stirbt_,” says the old German maxim, “_das Regiment bleibt_,” and the old Battalion routine continued unbroken. The Battalion had to be remade, companies re-shuffled, new non-commissioned officers appointed, casualty lists made up, names sent in for decorations, and with it all the old duties to be done--rifle inspections and rum issues and all the rest. The very matter-of-factness of this resumption of the old life hurt a little sometimes, but the work of the Army, like the Government of the realm, brooks no interruption.

Drafts arrived to fill up the gaps in the ranks of the Battalion. They saw the first batch of these parading one angry and lowering autumn evening as they trooped back through the mud and rain from the little cemetery in the centre of the camp, where they had laid to rest a brother officer ... a plain rite with no other ceremonial than that with which the simple majesty of the Burial Service invests the humblest obsequies, with the rain blowing damp upon their bare heads, and the guns of the Somme growling in the distance.

Truly the Regiment is a thing immortal.

* * * * *

But even in the midst of the work of reorganising the Battalion, rumours began to circulate that the Guards, like other Divisions, were going to have “a second helping” of the great offensive. There was a plain hint of this intention in the very stirring message of congratulation which the Brigadier sent to the Battalion for their achievements on September 15: “You may be called upon in the near future,” the passage ran, “to carry out similar work, and I know that you will not fail.”

Of course they would not, but the news created something akin to dismay amid the little band of survivors of the great advance--not from any reluctance to play a man’s part again, but from apprehension as to how the strong leaven of untried recruits in their ranks would withstand the fury of a modern battle as their first taste of active service. Events were to prove how utterly groundless these apprehensions were, but there was a pretty general feeling at the time that it was hard luck for the Battalion’s fine fighting reputation to be thus staked on the untested quality of new drafts.

Moreover, this time it was the turn of our Ensign’s Battalion to lead the attack. Everybody was going in: and our Ensign found himself back with his company, as second in command to Peter and the only other officer in the company. Nos. 1 and 2 companies were to furnish the first “waves” of the assault.

One afternoon the Corps Commander rode over to the camp, and from his horse told the officers of our Ensign’s Battalion, assembled in a semicircle, what was expected of the Battalion, and why. In a few very brief but very lucid words he explained the higher strategy of the Somme offensive, which the general public was to learn three months’ later from Sir Douglas Haig’s memorable despatch, and assured them that what the great British artillery superiority on the Somme could do to lighten their task would be done in a measure that should surpass anything the Germans had yet experienced in the way of bombardments. Then, wishing them all good luck, he rode away, and in simple language, such as soldiers understand, addressed the non-commissioned officers to the same effect. And that simple, straightforward talk was like a searchlight that picked out and held in its bright beam the word “Duty,” which is engraved in every soldier’s mind.

* * * * *

So, on a wet, dark evening, the Battalion marched back again to that little copse where in the dug-out “The Last Supper of the Girondins” had taken place. The roads had suffered terribly from the combined effects of the rain and the heavy traffic of the recent advance. They had been churned into deep quagmires of glutinous mud, where guns and limbers and G.S. waggons kept on getting bogged, where the men sank in above the middle of their puttees at every step.

What with the darkness and the mud and the frequent blocks owing to vehicles sticking fast in the slime, the traffic was in a state of chaos. The rain pelted down unmercifully, and it was so dark that a man could not distinguish the features of his neighbour in the ranks. Reliefs and fatigue parties, passing to and from the front line, got inextricably mixed up. Men lost touch, and amid the curses of the drivers as they urged their exhausted horses or mules through the deep bog of the road, echoed cries such as: “Fatigue party this way!” “All Welsh Guards to move forward”; “Make way there! Stretcher-bearers!” while the rain splashed sorrowfully down and the air trembled to the thundering crash of the guns all around.

The Battalion took about four hours to march the few miles separating their last camp from the copse, and when they finally got in they were all drenched and liberally besmeared with mud. A rum issue warmed them a little, and then once more the men set about scraping themselves dry spots in the crumbling shell-holes and building shelters out of the litter of branches and shell-baskets and corrugated iron sheeting scattered about the copse.

Their labours proved to be in vain, for at luncheon the next day a baby-faced infantry subaltern walked up to the officers’ mess and very diffidently suggested that the Battalion was occupying his battalion’s billet. The Brigade was consulted and gave the verdict in favour of the Line, so that afternoon the Battalion moved to another portion of the wood, where, in a number of German dug-outs, all more or less battered, and in shell-holes, they managed to make themselves fairly comfortable. With the aid of the mess-servants, the officers managed to put a fairly large dug-out into a state of repair, thatching the holes in the roof with sandbags filled with earth, laid across iron girders, and building up the gaps in the back of the shelter with sheets of corrugated iron which one of the orderlies found lying in the wood. The floor was carpeted with clean sandbags, a table was knocked together and a line of seats constructed out of filled sandbags. A brazier of glowing coals was placed in the doorway, for the nights were very cold, and thus they managed to install themselves with some measure of comfort.

The men displayed extraordinary ingenuity in the little bivouacs and earths they constructed out of their waterproof sheets and all kinds of odd material. Fortunately the weather improved, and the sun came out hot in the daytime, though the air got very cold after nightfall.

Early each morning the companies were taken out by an officer and given half an hour’s physical drill in the bright sunshine--either a little doubling (which was a matter of some difficulty, as the slopes on which they exercised were pitted with shell-holes) or leap-frog or follow-my-leader. In the afternoons there were fatigues to be done, mostly salvage fatigues, to clear that littered brown slope over which the Guards had advanced.

Until he had superintended one of these salvage parties, our Ensign had had no idea of the extraordinary quantity and variety of articles with which a battlefield is strewn. The men of the party--generally 100 strong--were spread out over the area designated by the Brigade to be cleared, and ordered to bring in every single article they found, no matter what it was, and deposit their burdens at a salvage-dump which had been formed by the roadside. At the dump lay in huge piles rusty rifles, both British and German, bayonets and equipment and greatcoats the same, khaki caps and German helmets, boxes of ammunition and bombs, thousands of rounds of ammunition, parts of machine- and Lewis guns and trench mortars, field-dressings in their neat brown cases, and all kinds of unused rations. All the dead that had strewn the slope had, by this time, been covered in, and the articles which the salvage parties brought by the hundred to the dump were merely the superficial litter of the battlefield.

Altogether the Battalion spent four days in the wood. For the greater part of the time they were shelled--an utterly haphazard, sporadic bombardment, with large black 5·9 shells. In comparison with their noise and number, the projectiles did very little damage, but they gave the survivors of the 15th of September an insight into the quality of the new drafts. One of these shells exploded in the middle of the night, with a crash that shook the wood, within a score of yards of a leafy shelter beneath which three of the recruits were sleeping. But, as the Company Sergeant-Major informed our Ensign in accents of admiration afterwards, the three recruits merely turned over on their sides and went to sleep again.

It was 9 o’clock in the evening of September 24 when the Battalion started out for the trenches from which the attack was to be delivered the next day, at 12.35 P.M. instead of the more customary early hour. Our Ensign’s company led off, and as both officers had been over the route they found their way safely to the rendezvous, a Tank stranded on the plain, where the guides sent by the battalion they were relieving met them. The night was as dark as pitch and the German guns most unpleasantly active; in fact, as soon as they had topped the ridge--a long winding caterpillar of silent marching figures--high-explosive shrapnel began to burst about them with unpleasant force and in dangerous proximity.

Our Ensign marked down their experiences of that night in his diary as “the most beastly night I ever remember.” Men marching at night are always inclined to hurry the pace when they come under shell fire, and as the going was very bad over the loose and crumbling shell-holes, the rear of the company, where our Ensign was, had considerable difficulty in keeping touch with the head. Night after night parties of Germans walked into the British lines, for in the devastated country where most trenches were merely lines of shell-holes connected up, there were no landmarks to guide one. Once touch were lost with the head of the column and the guide, our Ensign knew that he and his men stood a very good chance of landing themselves in the German lines.

There was a communication trench, but it was full of water, so the companies went up over the open. Several times they had to cross the trench in its windings, and each time our Ensign had to help his heavily-laden men to leap the yawning gulf, and then urge them forward at the double to catch up with the rest of the party disappearing into the gloom.

At length they reached their destination--a very narrow, shallow trench dug in the soft brown earth on the grassy downward slope of a low ridge, the German star-shells spouting from the flat ground below them. The trench was so narrow that the reliefs had to stand on the edge until the battalion occupying it had scrambled out. There were no dug-outs or shelters of any kind--save that, here and there, men had scraped long shelves in the back wall. The only fire-step was a series of rough embrasures scooped at intervals in the forward wall; parapet there was none, for the edge of the trench was practically flush with the ground.

The relief was accomplished with remarkable alacrity, as reliefs in such circumstances generally are, and the outgoing battalion hurried helter-skelter away into the darkness amid a rain of shells. The only means of communication between one end of that crowded trench and the other was by walking along the top. Luckily, as the night advanced, the Hun became quieter, so Peter and our Ensign made their way to the end of their section of the trench and verified their connection with the other Guards battalion which was to attack the next day on their right, and got back unscathed to the officers’ corner of the trench.

There they found El Capitan and his ensign who were to take No. 1 Company “over the top” in the morning. The only accommodation was a long shelf cut in the wall of the trench which would shelter two sitting or one lying, and a niche, scooped out of the back wall about level with their waists, which they used as a table.

Throughout the long cold hours until daylight the officers took it turn and turn about to watch, whilst the remaining three sought slumber in the sand-hole or on the floor of the trench. But sleep was out of the question, for once below the level of the ground, by some trick of acoustics, the air trembled so violently with the crash of the guns that the ear-drums positively ached. All night the Germans shelled them in desultory fashion, the shells ploughing up and down the trench but never in it, and the only casualties they sustained were in a luckless water fatigue party. All night the British artillery pounded away at the German lines, cleaving a passage by which the Guards would advance in the noonday hours.

Morning broke--the morning of September 25--pearly and fresh and delightful, and from the shallow trench the officers surveyed the objectives of the coming attack set in a landscape whose perfect serenity was marred only by the gleaming shell-bursts that dotted it everywhere. They saw the long gash in the brown shell-ploughed soil which marked the trench, their first objective; beyond it the village, embowered in foliage, swathed in coral-pink and saffron smoke ... a yellow, jagged fragment of church tower, a glimpse of long skeleton roofs and of gaping white walls ... with the capture of which their day’s work would be done.

By some miracle of organisation servants turned up with breakfast, and the four officers munched cold bacon and bread-and-butter and hard-boiled eggs, and drank scalding-hot tea whilst they studied the scene before them. Aeroplanes--British, of course: the Hun variety was a rarity on the Somme in those days--soared out into the cloudless sky, and fussed about over the German lines amid woolly-white shell-bursts, whilst the German trenches broke their silence with the vicious stutter of machine-guns.

All the time the British shells screamed overhead and burst with vast brown earth-spouts and creamy belches of smoke about the trench and the village. Up and down that first objective they went, now flinging high into the air great beams of wood and other dark objects that might have been human limbs, now sending up merely a low billow of dust and smoke, showing that the projectile had fallen plumb into the trench. In the village the shells crashed and thundered and sent great masses of masonry and woodwork flying, and once, after a burst of pink smoke had cleared away, our Ensign saw that the jagged finger of church tower had vanished.