Now, God be Thanked

by John Masters

  Frank lay below the lip of a shell hole at the edge of a quarry in front of Hulluch. A sandy stubble covered his chin and cheeks, and he was coated from cap to boots in mud, some white and chalky in texture, some black from the coal-bearing seams they had fought over and in. It was near noon, September 27th, and the 1st Wealds had not been rested since leaving Noeuxles-Mines near 9 p.m on the 25th. They had marched for six hours – to cover four miles; and fought for thirty-four hours, the men now and then dozing where they were, whether in a captured German frontline trench, or in the open, in one of the pockmarked shell holes, or against the brick rubble of miners’ crushed cottages. It was still raining, though not hard, and the morning ground mist was dispersing. Tower Bridge peered down on them like monstrous Siamese-twin storks made of black metal. Shells burst continuously all around, but it was not a planned barrage, such as they had experienced twice, once when they passed through the leading brigade of the 1st Division yesterday afternoon, thrusting further into Hulluch; once early this morning when a powerful German counterattack had pushed them out of Hulluch again. Over the whole battlefield aircraft of both warring nations flew in lazy arcs, or swooped and circled round each other – always in silence, everything but an occasional thin rattle from their machine-guns drowned in the enormous din of the artillery.

  The ground all around was covered with corpses. Peering out from the rim of the quarry, Frank thought that over half of them were Jocks – their kilts spread over them like shrouds, their bare wet backsides turned up in obscene taunting gestures at the clouds. Fifteen dead Germans lay in the quarry itself, most apparently blasted by a single shell, two bayoneted in the face and stomach by the Wealds’ C Company and Pioneers when they stormed the quarry yesterday … to be driven out later … to retake it an hour ago …

  Communication seemed to have broken down. Frank had not seen any officer since dawn. He didn’t know whether anyone in the battalion knew the Pioneers were here, with about ten men of C Company. For the moment the shelling was too heavy to send someone to find out. They’d suffered heavily – five men gone from the Pioneers alone, out of the dozen who’d left Noeux-les-Mines … Shells, shells, shells! This was becoming an artillery war. Back at Ypres, there’d been shelling all right, and plenty of it, but there’d been some movement, a lot of rifle and machine-gun fire aimed at people – something personal. Here, it was the guns, the everlasting bloody guns, that had been pounding at his eardrums for two days now, and mangling flesh and blood from ten miles away … And he’d been thinking, a while back, that he didn’t like the rifle! The truth was …

  ‘Someone coming, sergeant,’ a soldier called from the rear of the quarry, ‘it’s the adjutant.’

  ‘Captain Burke-Greve?’ the sergeant shouted.

  ‘No, the new one – Mr Rowland.’

  Frank turned in time to see Boy Rowland tumble into the quarry, followed by a burst of machine-gun fire that clattered and splattered on the rock wall of the quarry and knocked more bricks out of a ruined store shed twenty yards away.

  ‘Keep a sharp watch forward, Jones,’ he said to the private beside him, and slid down the slope to join the sergeant and Boy Rowland.

  Boy said, ‘Hullo, Stratton, glad to see you here … Sergeant, we’re going to attack at … in ten minutes. A Company’s on your right and the rest of C on your left. You’ll command what you’ve got here … The CO’s coming up through this quarry as soon as the attack begins, with battalion headquarters. Don’t move till he gets here, then advance with us. I’ll wait here till he comes.’

  ‘Very good, sir … Do we get any artillery support?’

  ‘Yes, HE and gas … Everyone got his mask? The wind’s right.’

  ‘What’s our objective, sir?’

  ‘The road running north-east to south-west through the centre of Hulluch … the Seaforths are on the battalion’s right, objective the crossroads between Hulluch and Chalk Pit Wood – you can’t see it from here … We’re all supporting an attack by the Guards Division on the line Lens to Chalk Pit Wood, including Hill 70.’

  He sat down, breathing wearily. Frank and the sergeant waited, thinking their own thoughts. ‘Have a little rum, sir,’ the sergeant said after a time – ‘I always keep some in my flask – the other flask.’

  Boy shook his head. ‘Thanks … my throat’s dry enough already. What I’d like is a hot bath. I feel filthy.’

  There’s an officer for you, Frank thought: worrying about being dirty when he looked starving, and dog tired, and must be a little scared, too, though he wasn’t showing it. Folks like the Rowlands lived different before the war, so they thought different. As for himself, he’d like a good cup of tea, with Agnes and Lily at his knees, little John on his lap, and Anne standing beside the chair ready to pour him another cup, her soft breast pressing into his shoulder. Pity Fred didn’t get married. There was nothing like it.

  He shook his head, wiping out the vision. ‘I’ll go round the men, sergeant. Better check all gas masks … Gas masks on! Block the tube. Hand up anyone who can breathe … Bartlett, what’s the matter?’

  ‘I can breathe easy, corporal. Must be a hole in the mask.’

  ‘Let’s have a look.’

  Frank examined the hood-like mask and quickly found a small hole in the material, at the back. ‘Lucky to be alive, you are,’ he said to Private Bartlett.

  He opened his pack, which was lying on the slope beside his previous position, found his housewife and with a few deft strokes sewed up the tear. ‘That was a shell splinter did that,’ he said. ‘An inch forward and you’d have had no head. Put it on and test it again … All right? Everyone else all right? Gas masks tested, sergeant – all correct.’

  They waited. The number of shells passing overhead increased. Peering forward, Frank saw gas shells bursting in white clouds along the road on the near side of Hulluch. The wind bore the gas gliding eastward. German whizzbangs began to burst all along the tenuous and scattered British lines. Lieutenant-Colonel Quentin Rowland ran down into the quarry through the shell fire, followed by the dozen men of his headquarters, running widely separated. Boy Rowland saluted his CO and shouted something through his gas mask, which Frank could not hear. To right and left men rose from the earth and moved forward, their heads coming to black-masked snouts. Machine-guns increased their infernal chatter, men fell, tumbled, crawled.

  The CO was signalling to the Pioneer sergeant with his hand – ‘Advance!’

  The sergeant rose, sweeping his right hand forward. Frank jumped to his feet, carried his rifle to the high port, and walked steadily forward. Hill 70 loomed larger than it really was out of the gloom to the right. The miserable houses of Hulluch stretched across the line straight ahead, the ground between a mass of humps and lumps, and everywhere the sodden kilts.

  The air chattered and sighed and moaned against the cloth sides of Frank’s mask. Clods of earth rose and dashed by the eye pieces. The earth heaved. He stepped over bodies – more Scots, more bottoms and balls and hair bared to the rain – Germans, helmets smashed, brains seeping into the mud – a girl, caught trying to fly by a stray shell, face down, skirt rumpled and wet – more Germans … a British officer, revolver drawn, face up, dead – a leg, by itself … A scream to his right, loud enough to be heard above the din … he turned his head and saw the sergeant go down, his whole stomach ripped out by a shell splinter … Behind him, the colonel and the rest of headquarters were coming on … but to the left, they were stopped. German machine-guns kept up a steady giant tattoo, and more of them were in action. German soldiers appeared out of the brick rubble, charging. Frank dropped, shouting ‘Sights down! Half left, enemy, rapid fire!’ and began to fire, the rifle propped on a dead Highlander’s back. A British machine-gun joined in from behind and to his left.

  After five minutes the German counter-attack had withered, but so had the British attack. The Germans, from reserve trenches and strongposts in houses and ruins, poured fire across the open ground. Mortars whizzed and cl
acked, their bombs arching down out of the sky to burst on Germans and British. Flashes of exploding shells stippled the slope of Hill 70 with momentary colour.

  They were at grips, locked, neither side able to move. The light slowly faded from the sky as British and Germans wrestled, immobile, among the cottages, streets, quarries, pits, mine shafts, slag heaps, and towering machinery between Lens, Hulluch, Loos, and La Bassée.

  The battalion was in brigade reserve between Hulluch and Vermelles. It was October 2nd, and the trenches, though not as formalized as they had become round Ypres since the second battle and the first gas attacks there, were at least deep and well revetted, and becoming more so every day. Boy Rowland sat in the Pioneer Store dugout with the new Pioneer Sergeant, Frank Stratton, and 2nd Lieutenant Fred Stratton, all drinking cocoa. Boy had come to arrange for expert work on the communication trenches, and found Fred chatting with his brother. Business done, Boy had accepted Frank’s offer of cocoa. The dugout was a model of what one should be: it had started with the advantage of being an underground store room for blasting explosives for a mine. In two days Frank Stratton and his men had converted it into a subterranean ironmonger’s store, gleaming with picks, shovels, entrenching tools, angle irons, crowbars; in one corner, dynamite, and in another, Frank Stratton’s bed … three planks stretched across some ammunition boxes, full of grenades.

  ‘I wouldn’t share that bed with you, sergeant,’ Boy said, smiling – ‘even if I were your wife.’

  ‘The way I see it, sir,’ Frank said, ‘is if we’re going to get a direct hit from a Jack Johnson down here, it won’t make any difference if a few grenades go up, too … How’s your new batman coming along, sir? I hear he’s a wad pusher.’

  ‘Absolutely TT,’ Boy said, ‘but all that means is that I’ll get his rum ration as well as my own … though I’m beginning to wonder whether I should have a batman at all. After you left I had Johnson, who was wounded at Plugstreet, then O’Hara, who was killed the other day.’

  Frank said, ‘Wish I could come back, sir, in a way. You begin to feel as though you’re not with the battalion, even as far back as this.’

  ‘You were far enough forward at Hulluch.’

  ‘Yes, sir … We need six men to get up to strength, sir.’

  ‘I’ll get the CO’s permission to have two posted from each company.’

  Fred cut in. ‘It would be better if the CO would let Sergeant Stratton speak privately to the sergeant-majors, Boy. He has to have men who can use their hands. Otherwise, the company commanders send men they want to get rid of, and everyone suffers when the Pioneers come to do a job for a company. I’ve seen that, already.’

  ‘That’s a good Idea, sir,’ Frank said, thinking, Fred’s growing a little toothbrush moustache, and his accent is changing. He doesn’t talk just like Mr Charles, and never will, but he doesn’t talk just like me, either. He’s betwixt and between … and that was never too comfortable a place in this world.

  He sipped the cocoa, very sweet and strong. In the communication trench a few yards away some soldiers were cleaning rifles and singing to a mournful tune:

  If you want to find the sergeant-major

  I know where he is, I know where he is,

  If you want to find the sergeant-major,

  I know where he is –

  He’s boozing up the privates’ rum,

  I’ve seen him, I’ve seen him,

  Boozing up the privates’ rum,

  I’ve seen him,

  Boozing up the privates’ rum.

  Fred said, ‘What do you make of Gallipoli, Boy?’

  Boy said, ‘I don’t know … I sometimes wonder if we’re being told everything. It doesn’t sound very good to me, reading between the lines. We should have been in Constantinople long ago, if we’ve really been succeeding. Once you’re held up, in this war, it seems you can’t get going again.’

  ‘That’s what happened to the Germans in 1914,’ Fred said, ‘and now to us, at Ypres and here.’

  Boy nodded. ‘It’s a rum war all right … We’d be better off in the navy. A lot more comfortable, anyway.’

  ‘Until you find yourself going in for the long distance swimming championship of the world, sir,’ Frank said. ‘And I wouldn’t win that – can’t swim … We lost a lot of officers the other day, didn’t we, sir?’

  ‘Five killed, five wounded.’ Boy said. ‘Nearly two hundred men, and we went in only five hundred and twenty strong.’

  He felt vaguely uneasy, talking so freely in front of an Other Rank. Frank Stratton was an older man, and exceptionally level headed; and he was a sergeant now … but all the same, perhaps he shouldn’t be discussing the obvious stalemate in Gallipoli, or the heavy casualties. ‘Thanks for the cocoa,’ he said, rising.

  Frank leaped to his feet, his hand at a rigid salute. ‘Thank you, sir. Everything will be ready at six pip emma.’

  Boy nodded, walking out. Frank sat down again beside his brother. Fred said, ‘As I was telling you when Boy came in, Fagioletti got his decree nisi from Ethel last week, and now he’s applying to the judge to make it final right away, so’s he can marry again before he joins up and fights for his adopted country.’

  ‘Fagioletti, join up?’ Frank said incredulously, a part of him wishing that Fred would not refer to Mr Charles as ‘Boy’ in front of him. He knew it was his nickname, of course; everyone did, but that did not mean that an officer should so speak of him to a sergeant.

  Fred said, ‘Of course not! He’s got another woman in London he wants to fuck. But if he does that before the divorce is final, and the King’s Proctor finds out, then the whole divorce would be off.’

  ‘Ethel was a ninny to sign that paper he wanted, about her going with other men,’ Frank said.

  ‘Of course she was, but Mum and Dad couldn’t stop her. She’s been at home since mid June … sort of walking out with a bloke at the plant – Rowland’s – who wants to marry her, Mum says … but she keeps praying Fagioletti will change his mind. Not a bloody hope in hell!’

  Frank wished Fred would not use foul language in front of him. Officers did not do that, except under great stress, as in battle.

  ‘I went over and talked to the Irish Guards CO,’ Quentin said. ‘Arthur’s definitely gone – killed by machine-gun fire on the 27th, when he was acting as Staff Captain to the brigade. So we’ve lost one of the most brilliant young men of your generation, slaughtered by some sausage-guzzling Bavarian swine … John Kipling’s missing in action near Chalk Pit Wood. He was with the 2nd Irish Guards.’

  ‘He can’t have been eighteen,’ Boy exclaimed. ‘He came to Wellington my last term, and I’m …’

  ‘He was a few weeks past his eighteenth birthday. You know he was a close friend of Guy’s … in fact Guy spent ten days of this last summer holidays at Bateman’s.’

  ‘Is he believed killed?’

  Quentin nodded. ‘A sergeant said he thought he’d seen him hit by a shell.’

  ‘Mr Kipling will take it hard, I suppose.’

  ‘He’ll take it like the rest of us. Like Lord and Lady Swanwick,’ Quentin said. ‘This has been a hard battle, Boy, and the men aren’t happy. I can feel it. Of course, we’ve had very heavy casualties. Over 60,000, I hear rumoured – but don’t spread that.’

  ‘The men did their best. They were wonderful,’ Boy said, ‘but – we didn’t succeed. I think they want to know why. I do, myself.’

  They were sitting in the CO’s dugout, a candle glittering on the table between them, dark outside, occasional star shells bursting over the front lines, occasional distant bursts of machine-gun fire, occasional shell bursts, murmuring of soldiers in the trench and along the line of dugouts, someone playing a mouth organ.

  Quentin said, ‘There are rumours that the reserves were too far back. The Commander-in-Chief was holding them in his own hands and when General Haig wanted them, it took too long for them to come up … There was confusion on the roads – troops going up tangling with troops
moving back.

  ‘I know that’s true’ Boy said. ‘It was a disgrace. The staff make a mess and the soldiers suffer. I’d like to have seen some of those brass hats with us in front of Hulluch … Is it true that two New Army divisions ran away, en masse?’

  ‘I believe so,’ Quentin said, dropping his voice, ‘but we daren’t admit it, or others will think they can run away, too. We’ve got to say that everyone behaved well – then the new men, the New Armies, will think there’s no alternative. We must mass more men when we attack, and mass them further forward, so there’s no delay after the enemy’s first and second lines have been taken … Longer artillery preparation, more guns per yard of front, more shells per gun.’

  Boy said nothing. The panic and exhilaration, the disgust and fear and determination of the time of battle were welling up in him again, and he had a hard time preventing himself from trembling. The bombardment for Loos had been as strong as it could be; yet they had not broken through. They had broken in, but not through – and later, counterattacking, the Germans had done the same – broken in and then been held. What could break that pattern? It seemed certain that men’s flesh and blood could not, nor machine-guns.

  Quentin said, ‘We have to keep a close watch on morale, Boy. No talk of failure is to be tolerated.’

  ‘Could we try to get some more decorations for the men, sir?’ Boy asked. We haven’t put in for many, and we won’t get all of those. We never do.

  ‘I haven’t put in for more because I don’t believe in giving men decorations for doing what is only their duty. We don’t believe in putty decoration in the Wealds, Boy.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘We’ll see that the company and platoon commanders organize games as soon as we get out of the line. Meanwhile, offensive patrolling. We’ve got to show the Boches that No Man’s Land belongs to us, not to them.’