How Dear Is Life

by Henry Williamson

  So the attacks continued, until many of the battalions of the British Expeditionary Force, the red little, dying little Army, were decimated. Scottish Borderers and Irish Rifles, Gordons and Cheshires, men of the level lands of Gaultshire and Lincolnshire, the Northumberland Fusiliers and the Duke of Wellington’s —the bullets flailed, the shells spouted; while Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, and the Duke of Würtemberg—the one in command south-east of Ypres, the other commanding the armies of the north-east—were ordered again, and again, and yet again, to break the thin British line. The 1st Guards Brigade, originally mustering four thousand men, now had four officers and about three hundred men. The situation, in the reserved language of Corps and Army commanders, was critical.

  Reserves had already been brought up from the 4th Guards Brigade, from the Brown Wood Line, and were being expended. The last reserve battalion, the London Highlanders, was now on its way. Cranmer had arrived before Phillip.

  Do vibrations, thoughts, acts of hate (or lost love) exist or continue together with gestures of love, of goodwill, in the ethereal or spiritual life of the world? The bullet breaks the body, and falls spent; does thought continue? In the multitude of the cries of the Battle of Ypres, let one little fragmentary hope of London be remembered—Up the ole Blood’ounds!

  When the London Highlanders arrived, in the sombre light of that wet November afternoon, fighting was still going on in the woods. Remnants of British and German battalions were mixed up, firing in little groups among the trees. On the ground lay many more dead and dying, in feldgrau and khaki, than moved on feet behind trees and crouched, rifles supported on elbows, in the clearings or rides.

  To the last arrivals, some of the walking wounded by a first-aid post were full of tales of disaster. Others were optimistic, that they would soon be out of it, safe with Blighty ones. Many stories came from the men in charge of the Brigade ammunition dump where No. 1 Company under Captain Ogilby halted to draw extra linen bandoliers.

  The Royal Fusiliers had been cut-up to a man, Phillip heard the Regimental Sergeant-Major, in charge of ammunition, tell Captain Ogilby. Their Commanding Officer had been killed. The Worcesters had been cut to pieces, so had the South Lanes, and the Wilts, and the Irish Rifles.

  “A trying day for British Arms, sir!” remarked that peacetime mass of beer, beef and duty, the R.S.M., now reduced to duty, duty, duty.

  The 15th Infantry Brigade had caught it too. “Still, when it’s all over, it will be pleasant to get back to real soldiering, sir!” was the remark by which the R.S.M. was remembered after he was killed.

  The cockney slinging out bandoliers had a different attitude to that of the old Coldstreamer.

  “I never sin anyfink like it, in all Christ’s creation, straight I never! Them pushin’ squar’eads come on agin an’ agin, like they was square-bashin’! The whole pushin’ woods was lousy wiv’m, straight they was!” He had a bandage round his left hand. “Cut me ‘and to the bone when I took ’old er th’ bynit er one pushin’ great sod of a Prewshun what wor goin’ ter stick me. Me! Ju Jitsu champion of the rig’m’nt what took five pun off’r ’Ackenschmidt when ’e couldn’t lay me aht in five pushin’ minutes at the ’Olborn Empire when ’e challenged all comers! Me, the pushin’ Prewshun makes for to stick me!

  “What ’appened? I dunno, arst me! Shall I tell you? Right mate! Look, I’m dahn, see, on me knees like, and the great soddin’ bastard’s runnin’ at me. So I seize ’is bynit wiv me ’and, see, stick it in ver grarnd, gives a jerk wiv me uvver ’and at the butt, pulls ’im forrard, tips ’im arse over tip flat on ’is back and me pal what played for the ’Spurs kicks ’is brains aht. That’s what ’appened, since you arst me. Thought at first I got a Blighty one, but not this trip.”

  “How did you get this job?” asked someone.

  “I found it, mate! Life’s what you make it, in this world, an’ the next! You swing the drippin’, or you get it swung on you, see? Anymore for anymore? The Old Firm, the old sweaty sox, water-proof all through, what is butter only grease?”

  His eyes were dark and hard all the time he spoke; he never smiled; he was greasy in face and neck and hands, and greasy all over chest, ribs and thighs, too; his quiff was plastered down on his forehead in a curl, looking as though he had just combed and pressed it there; as he had; with butter, from a tin he had taken from the ration dump. Grease kept out the cold from Jabez Wolfe when he swam the Channel; and as the storeman said, what was butter only grease?

  *

  The rain, which had been intermittent since mid-day, began to fall steadily. From in front and from all sides of the wood came the continuous rattle and crackle of rifle fire, crossing and re-crossing, and now, ominously near, the hammering of machine-guns. Phillip knew by the almost deliberate slowness that they were German. He had heard them before; he had seen a captured Spandau brought back by the Grenadiers from the counterattack. It fired, not on a tripod like the Maxim, but on sleds. It was slower, as it was heavier.

  While they rested there, he got up and wandered off. There was a sense of freedom in being alone. He went among the trees, with his last folded sheet of precious newspaper.

  The brief meditation over, he strolled among the dead, peering at their faces, wondering how they had felt at the moment of death, and trying to think what had happened to the thoughts in their heads. Did thoughts leave the brain at the moment of death, as separate things, or did they cease with life? How could thoughts, which were mostly eye-pictures, each one taken at a certain moment in living, and stored in grey matter like soft herring roe, but looser and greyer, which was the brain, how could thoughts exist outside their cells? Could a camera, broken, influence the negatives it had once taken? The positives existed apart from the camera. But it was too difficult to puzzle out. If there was a God, however, why did He permit such terrible things to happen?

  He filled his water-bottle with clay-stained water at the bottom of a new shell-hole, and drank his fill behind a tree. Then stooping down, he watched the water running into the blue enamelled neck again, while a paralysing cold thought came that he would perhaps never drink from it again. But if he did come out all right, the water might give him typhoid. If so, he would get to hospital, and out of this hell. Even if he was a wreck after the fever, it would be better than being killed.

  He returned to his company. Many of the fellows were crouching or sitting back to back on the ground, holding to their upright rifle barrels, heads bowed in sleep. He sat beside them.

  *

  How long he was asleep he did not know; but when he looked up again, conscious of the stale, thick, fatty taste of bully beef on tongue and in throat, he saw multitudes of heavy drops of rain jumping with little splashes on the brown and black fallen leaves, and on the sodden coats and caps and muddy hose around him. But how, he wondered, were they shouting, when they were asleep.

  “They’re coming! Thousands of ’em! They’ve broken through!”

  He tried to get to his feet without falling over, so heavy was equipment, rifle, overcoat. Corporal Douglas was kicking the others, to waken them. As they extended among the trees, he saw the lashing cold drops of the storm bouncing, spray-shattered, off sprawled grey and khaki lying fixed upon the ground in terribly untidy groups. He could hardly see, but did not care, it did not matter that water was running down his cap-comforter into his eyes, dripping down his neck, trickling cold on his stomach. Nothing mattered. Nothing had ever mattered. God, what a world! Nothing was fair. Let the bullets hit him, he did not care. Punishment, punishment, punishment! Cry, cry, cry, cry! Let his tears stream into the earth with the rain, and wash all life away. Hey, Baldwin?

  Men were pointing, shouting, crouching down to fix bayonets. His bayonet would not lock; it was muddy. He began to gibber to himself. The Prussian Guards were coming through the trees. He shouted to himself, “Shut your bloody mouth!” He screamed at himself, scratching his face. “Liar! Liar! I did not tell Milton the Arithmetic answers!” Then, “Oh! Oh!�
�� as he tried again to lock the bayonet on the locking clip. He managed to click it on, despite the mud in the ring. Other soldiers passed by, in little groups, their eyes staring. Among them was a wild, mad-looking grey-moustached officer, with red tabs and gold braid on his tunic collar buttoned to his neck. He put a copper hunting horn at the side of his mouth, and blew it, then taking off his cap with his other hand scooped the air with it like the huntsmen did to otter hounds at Lynmouth, to urge them on. Yaa-oi! Yaa-oi! C’arn’yer! Then going forward again he blew more notes on the horn and gave another wild screaming cheer.

  “Up Guards, and at ’em!” cried Phillip, stumbling forward. Men were shouting hoarsely all along the line. One passed close by Phillip, swearing continuously in teeth-snarling voice, all the gutter-words, filth and muck of the gutters rushing with dirty rain-water to a drain. He began to swear like the regulars. He heard his own voice, very thin, coming out of a little thrill. He was one of them, he was not afraid, he was going forward! They were all like Cranmer, with their hard set faces, their glaring eyes, their bared teeth. Some were hatless; others wore balaclavas over chins, only eyes and noses and open mouths showing. The clean looking things about them were the new light-brown cloth bandoliers of ammunition across their chests.

  Phillip went forward through the trees, light head on automatic body. It was wonderful not to care any more. All fear had gone with the upsurging heat of his body. The dull ache of his limbs was gone. He went forward among British Grenadiers, Irish Guardsmen, Coalies, Jocks, Odds and Sods, passing from tree to tree, only partly conscious of the great slant of rain. He thought he saw Cranmer yelling among the others, and wondered if the rest of the Brigade had come up. There were shrieks and cries and roared out oaths in the rain, men were falling, writhing, sudden loud shots ringing in his ears; with detached amazement he saw Germans running about much like themselves among the trees just in front, others in spiked helmets on heads standing, showing teeth open-mouthed above many-button’d grey tunics, yelling amidst the thin plate-breaking clash of bayonets. A khaki sergeant, whooping and yaaring, pushed past him. The Germans were going down. They were screaming. They were holding up their hands. They were surrendering! He felt a savage delight, a thrilling terror, a magnification of the feeling he had had when he set fire to the long dry grass of the Backfield in summer, as he saw them trying to push away the bayonets with their hands. “A-a-ah!” It was all over!

  But it was not all over. They had surrendered, and they were being killed. They were rolling on the ground, bloody heads and faces, bodies hunching up, faces in hands, kicking, clinging; bayonet stabs, shots, butts bashing heads, screams, shouts, thuds.

  More Germans, big men, were coming up. The Prussian Guards! “A-a-ah!” he shouted, and raised his rifle to fire at them again and again, cursing the harshness of the steel-harsh hot bolt. Then something went off right in his face, brassy bright speckles. His knees gave way; he banged his lip on the backsight of his rifle as he sat down. The rain leapt everywhere in a drenching downpour. The noise receded.

  When he felt steadier, he got up and walked among the men on the ground, Germans and British, some doubled up and crying out, clutching their stomachs, some moaning, beating their arms, kicking with their feet. Water! Wasser! Water! Wasser! Why were they so thirsty? Some stared at him, with eyes bulged like those of rabbits caught by ferrets, bulging from straining. He saw them rising up with the ground, very slowly. He clutched at the ground, to stop it going away; but it went away.

  The night came on; the rain fell.

  *

  He felt very sick when he opened his eyes, feeling instant terror. Mother, mother!

  Gradually he remembered where he was. He was very cold. His head ached. His eye was speckly with the electric snake, his mouth had the sour, yellow taste of bully beef. He managed to sit up, to look about him. Stretcher-bearers were carrying back wounded men. Had he been hit? He could move his arms and legs. He felt his face. There was a bump on his forehead, but no hole there. He rolled over, got on his knees, managed to push himself to his feet. His shoes and hose and slipped-down spats were sodden weights. He wanted to lie down, to go to sleep again; but it was too cold, too wet.

  He picked up his rifle. A burst brass case was in the breach. It must have exploded there. It had gone off in his face. The breach was marked by the explosion. Twice like that, what an escape. Then there was the bullet that had cut his coat. Ah, the crucifix! He felt it safe under his shirt.

  He threw down the rifle, then, seeing Tommy Atkins and another man with a stretcher, picked it up again and went to speak to them. Tommy Atkins, red-cheeked and determined as ever, but face thinner and more serious, said, “We looked at you, just now, Maddison, and thought you had concussion.”

  “Christ, what a life!” he sobbed.

  “Talking like that won’t help matters, Maddison.”

  Carrying his damaged rifle, tears smudging his dirty face, Phillip went back to find the Colour-sergeant. On the way he stopped to look at a party of men beside two stretcher bearers. They were carrying the body of the grey-moustached General, who had blown the horn, on a stretcher. He had been shot through the neck during the night. Later, Phillip heard that he was General Fitzclarence, who had rallied the troops at Gheluvelt a fortnight before, and led a counter-attack that had prevented the break-through. Everyone said he was a wonderful officer. He had won the Victoria Cross three times during the South African war.

  *

  For the next four nights and days the London Highlanders remained in the woods, in support: making bunkers, wiring the reserve line of watery shallow trenches, working as carrying parties, while by day and by night rain fell intermittently through the pine and beech trees.

  It was the end of the autumn fighting weather. Winter was now settling upon the brown landscape, with its soil sandy-yellow in places. Soon the springs would break, the water-table rise to within eighteen inches of the surface. Wet and cold were now the things to be dreaded, to be endured.

  Among trees splintered and gashed, where still an occasional cock pheasant was heard to crow, and an odd hare seen to race upon the fallen leaves, the shell-holes began to fill with misty grey water, which rose to within a foot of their crumbling craters. Water seeped up into new reserve trenches as they were being dug, being trodden into marn. Yellow clay clung to the blades of shovels with greater tenacity than the force of the diggers. Digging went on slowly, at least it gave temporary warmth to bodies in sodden uniforms. Phillip dreamed as he shivered, when digging was done, of glaring August roads, of the great heats of the march from London when the dust floated over those happy days gone now for ever.

  Sandbags, laid header-stretcher on tarred felt covering the rough timbered frames of bunker roofs, had broken the tarred felt in places. Here water dripped, on greatcoats and kilts already saturated with the rains outside.

  There was little time for sleep. Long hours were spent winding off barbed wire, from heavy rolls on to sticks; each to be borne, at night, upon the shoulders of two men, to the line. Out in front, under the hiss and pop and quiver of flares, both German and British wiring parties were working. Such work was justly called a fatigue. There were fatigues for carrying steel-loophole plates, bundles of sand-bags, and spades; ammunition fatigues; rations fatigues; fatigue parties under the Royal Engineers, starting from battalion dumps near the front line. Wooden crates filled with cigarettes and air-tight tins of tobacco began to arrive—cursed by the fatigue parties. Worst of all was a new sort of entanglement made under surveillance of the Royal Engineers at their dump beside the Menin Road—loops of wire, like concertinas pressed flat, fixed between two sets of wooden trestles. These had to be hauled and handled right into no-man’s-land, slip, slosh, gash; out among the dead swelling under upheaved and broken trees, while traversing machine-guns sent chips and flakes of wood flying.

  If a machine-gun started to traverse when a flare was falling you must stand still, in a glaring shade of luminous dust that seeme
d to take away all shape and cover all with an intangible cement powder of light. Gone was romantic feeling about the lily-white wavering flares, whose going out meant utter darkness without sense of uprightness so that often you found yourself flat in sudden mud on your face, or the back of your head. Life had the actuality of nightmare, thick with tiredness in a slow, dragging world; a deadness of living only just endurable from moment to moment by the thought of relief. The news that the aged Field-Marshal Lord Roberts had died of a chill at St. Omer, after inspecting troops, came like a whisper across the mud and desolation, through the weight and inertia of the night.

  Chapter 30

  REST

  AT THE beginning of the third week of November the Guards Brigade was relieved.

  Despite exhaustion, hope upheld the territorials, and discipline the regulars, on the march down the Menin Road, to the Grande Place of Ypres, where the Cloth Hall, the Cathedral of St. Martin, and many of the other buildings were as yet unshelled.

  But there was to be no rest there. They went on through the wide and cobbled square, leaving the town by the Rue du Beurre. The column crossed railway line and canal, and continued along a tree-lined road. The men did not know their destination. Not to know was part of the mental torture, though none thought of mental torture, for so long had it been accepted as life itself. No whistling or singing; each man trudged, among others near yet remote, in desperate aloneness.

  Several of the Highlanders, including Phillip, had lost shoes in the mud of the woods. They made the march unshod.

  After nine days of fighting the London Highlanders numbered less than three hundred all told; even so, the battalion was almost as long, in columns of fours, as the rest of the brigade. The Coldstream had lost all their officers, and had a hundred and fifty other ranks. The Scots Guard had one captain and sixty-nine other ranks. The Black Watch mustered one lieutenant and a hundred and nine other ranks. The Cameron Highlanders had three officers and a hundred and forty other ranks.