The cars of these naval brasshats all had names—like 'Bellerephon', or 'Hood'. And when, say, the senior wardroom panjandrum would drive off in his state-motor, for a spot of play, say, at the Dunkerque Casino, the boatswain, piping with great vigour, would cry 'Away Bellerephon!' as it drew out— or whatever happened to be the name of the superb machine.
Every sector on the Western Front had its 'Hellfire Corner'. Our sub-Nieuport one was as good as most. A hundred yards beyond it lay our battery position. All day this road was bombarded without intermission, or rather with lifts of ten minutes or so at stated intervals. We found a considerable amount of traffic waiting for the 'lift'. At last the 'lift' or pause seemed to have come. Hellfire Corner had been at peace for over a minute. We all rushed forward in a sauve qui pent before the next shell should come down.
The motor-cycle stopped at the side of the road, and its driver indicated the remains of a small whitewashed cottage. It stood back about fifteen feet from the road. A familiar face appeared at a crack in the wall. It was the battery cook. The crack in the wall was the back entrance. The faithful cook gave me a discreet Irish welcome from inside the crack. As I approached a shell came down on the road at my back with a wallop, and the splinters smacked the cottage and flew on beyond it: which of course explained the unostentatious nature of my welcome. The cook felt it would have been illogical to welcome me with too promising an effusiveness.
'You've come to a nice place, sir!' he said, as I entered the fissure. 'It's like this all day. They never stop shelling that road. You've come to a hot place. It's a little hell away from hell.'
'Have you had a bad time?'
'We've had six direct hits on this.'
He indicated our humble headquarters.
'Pretty good,' I said.
However, inside, the cottage was a three-room residence— mess, dormitory, and kitchen. And it was not so undesirable as some. The poilu had lived there before us. Unlike the English the French were concrete addicts. They mortared themselves in—they built for safety first. They had not altered this cottage outwardly, but had given it eight foot thick concrete walls to its one big room, and at least a ten foot thick roof. This room was a shell that would take some cracking. I was in it when it was hit. It was as firm as a rock. It was a pleasure to be shelled in it.
This was to be my home for some time—two months, I should think. Apart from the fact of its proximity to the road, it was a splendid place.
CHAPTER VI
Our Home in a Pillbox
Whenever we had been shelled, especially if there had been casualities, the Navy would arrive on horseback. This may seem strange to you, and it seemed strange to me. But there would be a clatter of hoofs, and his brasshat at a rakish angle, up would canter the naval pasha. As often as not a salvo of splinters would be whizzing round the stern-sheets of his mount —a naturally rather jumpy steed, for to its surprise at finding itself bestrode by so paradoxical a horseman, was added an aversion to the buzzing of fragments of metal.
I never got used to the sight of a high naval dignitary on horseback. He would sit, his arm akimbo, and look down into my gunpit at my piece of naval ordnance, which no doubt made him feel at home. I always supposed that it was the expression 'Hellfire Corner' which acted as a magnet to this mettlesome personage. It was a standing challenge to the Nelson Touch, that must have been it.
To come back to our shelter from the wintry blast. Our main room was a pillbox, really, built inside a cottage. And when I said it was a big, I meant relatively, compared with dugouts. It was in fact small, and its dimensions had been still further reduced by the trebling of its walls. Our six campbeds exactly fitted into it, except for a foot or so at the door.
When we turned in at night, we walked or crawled over the intervening campbeds, unless ours was next the door. In that circumscribed area strange scenes were witnessed. That was before we lay down. The second-in-command was responsible for these. He went Peter-Pan when he got his clothes off. Uniformed and in his right mind, with his little calves bulging to the rear, and a huge bloated cap crowning his unusually large head, he was a different man. He was quite an able officer and I had a fondness for him.
He was a small man, who was the living image of Lawrence of Arabia (as I have since discovered, for of course at that time the Arab lands had not yet met their deliverer). This battery 'Lawrence' was not quite so goodlooking, and he sported a Hapsburg lip. But otherwise he could have accompanied Alien-by into Damascus (if he had kept his under lip in) and no one would have detected the difference.
This whimsical officer used to stand upon his bed in his underpants, a cane representing a rifle held in to his side, and drill us. It must have astonished the cook, when first this shouting voice came out of our nocturnal pillbox. He got used to it doubdess; but the first time he must have leapt to attention, for this little artillery captain had an excellent word-of-com-mand.
Often there was a smell of gas, if the night shelling had already started. We had nothing but gas there. Then, taking this night-parade, our driller would break down in a fit of coughing, as the gas got into his throat.
'Jump to it, Boorfelt!' he clamoured, protruding his under-lip, at attention upon his bed. 'Free-sent. Umms!' He held his cane at the present, to the rather sourly-smiling Boorfelt— who felt the three pips ought to be on his shoulder, rather than on the little captain's. In the light of our small oil lamp he looked like a dishevelled schoolboy, he was so small and his eyes were so dreamy and twinkling, though he made them stare and frown to issue his commands.
Except for the O.C. we were like a small class of children, the shelled road outside of the importance of a noisy disregarded torrent. This bombproof, airless, sleeping cubicle was our nursery. We had to put up with a lot of grown-up nonsense from our nannie. Our seniors are such incorrigible children!
The second room was the officers' mess. The French had not taken so much trouble over that. But even so it had enough logs on top of it to build a tolerably large log-cabin.
The officers' 'toilet' was not far off; we had a lavatory, which was at a distance of about ten yards from the door of the mess.
Shelling of the battery—as distinct from the shelling of the road —began every evening about nine. As soon as we began to finish our tinned salmon and glass of Scotch, we kept our wristwatches under observation. Then began the visits to the lavatory, which we took in turn. The last one back was always apt to be caught, and would come jumping in out of the way of a gas-shell.
The gas-shells were small, came down with a soft sickly whistle, and struck the ground with a gentle plock. Their very sound was suggestive of gas. There was nothing to be afraid of unless they got a direct hit on your chest—except their gas. But in going to the lavatory they were liable to hit you. For some reason they fell, to start with, all round this place and on the pathway we had to take from the Mess.
In the morning the battery usually stank of sweet gas. Men were always going sick. A gunner who got down into a shell hole, where the gas clung for hours, was laid out. We kept them out of the holes if we could.
For weeks on end every man in the battery slept in his gasmask. In lying down we fixed our gas-masks, with the tin teat just up against our lips. Before we were all asleep one of us —usually Boorfelt—would sit up, sniff, and say 'gas!' We would all sniff, and then said 'gas!' Then we stuck our tin teats in our mouths, and clipped the pincers upon our noses. So we would sleep for the rest of the night.
On rejoining my old battery friends, in this semi-coastal position (and I was glad to see them once more, for in the other battery I was an interloper) I found them finishing the concrete emplacements for the big naval guns. These concrete emplacements were in pits, below ground level. And the greatest care had been taken to conceal their presence from German airmen. This we successfully did, for it was only once in a way that we got any shelling and that not of a very determined sort.
We never fired these guns. We were waiting for the Att
ack which never came. Which illustrates my remarks regarding the gunner's life. Here we did not even retaliate. We were shelled but we did not shell in return. Yet, at the time, we were doubtless described as 'fighting' in France. Of course I do not mean to say we were not all very brave. It is merely that we were so very inactive.
Meanwhile the men did do a bit of superfluous concreting from time to time, picked the leaves off the gun barrel, and anything else they could find to do.—I could never find anything to do. I read Proudhon (cla propriety c'est un vol') my favourite political philosopher, and attempted to compute the cost of shells discharged daily on either side. I was not enough of an economist to fathom the depth of ruin this spelled for European society. But I did see that the merely military outcome was by this time meaningless. It was perfectly clear that we should all be ruined, and that some people meant us to be.
My gun, No. 4, was nearest the road. Every twenty seconds a shell fell on the road, with the regularity of clockwork. If I was near the gun—and I had to hang about in sight of it—I would stoop: the splinters from the shell usually passing at a height of about five feet from the ground. Or I propped up our sandbag-parapet with my shoulder, crossing my legs.
As on one occasion I stood chatting with the double of Colonel Lawrence I found that he was not bowing so politely as I was as the splinters came over. He was remaining officiously upright.
In my own territory, this would scarcely do. So the next time I refrained from making my bow. But a few minutes later a large viciously-hissing splinter passed at headlong speed immediately between our noses, which were about a foot apart.
I raised my eyebrows in discreet mockery, but my superior officer had raised his still more—his Hapsburg lip was within a quarter of an inch of this unceremonious missile, and his staring eyes observed it with amazement down the flanks of his nose, as it flew past—not as good a nose as that of Lawrence, but reminiscent, all the same.
I am reminded by this of another occasion when I happened to observe the expression on a man's face at a rather critical moment. This was later on. I was accompanying an officer whose business it was to select a battery-position. We had just settled upon one, which seemed in not too busy a spot, and otherwise desirable, when a shrapnel discharged itself immediately over our heads. As the shell was coming straight for us, we leapt as one man into a small shell hole, on either side of which we had been standing: our tin hats met with a crash, just as the shell exploded. The shrapnel rained about us, in a spray of bullets. I was looking up into his face, and as the shrapnel pelted down he screwed his face up in the grimace of the sufferer from constipation.—This was not the double of Colonel Lawrence, who was not a particularly nervous man. He was an educated man, which was unusual, among these officers, and capable of philosophic perception, which was even more so. He was even a prophet. He foretold my future—for a year or two, anyway.
Sixty per cent of the casualties on the Western Front were caused by shell-fire, forty per cent by bullets. (Bayonet wounds were so rare that they do not enter into the statistics.) Shell fire is an interesting subject, therefore, for the soldier. And there is nothing I do not know about shell-fire. As a matter of fact our position by the side of an important road was peculiarly adapted to making one an expert in that subject.
Each 'burst' produces its spawn of 'splinters', which proceed to whizz in all directions till they lose momentum, and drop, or flop, on the ground. They were flopping the whole time round us, as well as buzzing past our shoulders. The force with which they arrived depended, naturally, upon the nearness of the burst. I was often spanked with a spent one—like being hit with a stone not thrown very hard.
My sergeant was killed a few weeks after my arrival. One afternoon a staff officer came to the battery to recover a screwdriver (I think it was that, but it may have been a corkscrew or shoehorn). The bogus Colonel Lawrence suggested I should return with this officer to Group Headquarters, officially to liquidate this episode, and perhaps linger over a glass of navy rum. I thought I would do this, and we were almost out of sight of the battery when there was an unusually loud noise. Looking back we saw a black fountain of earth. It rose, and fell, out of the heart of the battery.
'Eleven inch,' said I.
'That's it,' said he. 'It looks as if it were your gun.'
I didn't think it was my gun. It looked as if it was back of the guns. All that would be happening at the battery position would be the usual exodus. The men would have had orders to leave it as rapidly as possible, and this they would carry out to the letter. They would be rushing out in the opposite direction to the road. This occasional shelling, with us, was always shortlived. Then everybody went back again. The holes were examined. That was the ordinary procedure.
I decided to deal with the screwdriver first. When over an hour later I got back to the battery position my gunpit (that of No. 4 gun) was like a small quarry. The sergeant and a half dozen men had been in it: it had been a direct hit, a few feet at the side of the gun. He and the six men were all killed or wounded. I wrote to the widow of my sergeant, saying what a popular man he was, and got a new N.C.O. for my gun and the necessary reinforcements. As this is written, so it happened. But that is obviously not how men's lives should be taken away from them, for nothing at all. ^
Had it not been for the screwdriver (or the shoehorn) I should probably at present be in a war-grave too. In our next battery position (in the Salient) the same thing, more or less, occurred. While I was off duty, back at our rest billets, there was an air attack. A bomb got a direct hit upon my gun. All my gun detachment were casualties. When I left France my subsection were all unfamiliar faces. Also 'Birdie', my colleague of No. 3 gun—my other section officer—was wounded in both lungs a few days before I left.
The hundred yards from Hellfire Corner to us was all Hell-fire. And the other side of the road there was a battery that, unlike us, had a good deal of lateral Hellfire, as well.
Our side of the road would normally have been a meadow. On the other side the coastal sand-dunes began. They were most substantial sand-hills, twenty or thirty feet high. A very high one rose just across the way from our concreted cottage. And it must have been composed by this time as much of lead and iron as of sand.
It was the dwelling place of a Field Artillery battery. They were mercilessly shelled, and they had brought to a fine art
the technique of vanishing into their sand hill. At the first sign of danger the whole battery went into the sandhill.
Considering the length of our stay in this position, we were a rather sedentary lot. Except for occasional visits to Group Headquarters, immediately to the rear, we moved about little. None of our neighbours lived attractive lives. Though doubtless attractive people, they were not the sort of people you dropped in to visit. A 'Hellfire' tea-party presented little attraction to any of us. It was no great temptation to rush across the road, pursued by five-nines, and be immediately engulfed in the sandhill, in flight from guns of every calibre—with an excellent chance of being buried alive, for it seemed more than probable that one fine day the sandhill would cave in.
As to our neighbours upon our right, they were very much farther away. We could only see them as big specks, across intervening fields. They, too, were no doubt charming fellows; but we had formed the habit of watching them being shelled, by naval guns from somewhere near Ostend, and of dodging the debris flung far and wide by these huge projectiles. All their energy, however, was not taken up with darting in and out of a sandhill. Had they been a bit nearer we might have hailed them : but it seems that the life of war is conducive to a certain clannishness, if not exclusiveness, especially among the English.
For my part, I should not have stepped over in any case, in that direction, for the excellent reason that T. E. Hulme, I discovered, was there. And somehow reconciliations under these conditions did not appeal.
At the Naval Group Headquarters one day, hearing that some R.M.A. Batte
ries were in the neighbourhood, I asked the adjutant if he had ever come across a certain T. E. Hulme. Pointing out of the window, he said :
'He's over there. He's in the battery next to yours.' And he proceeded to express his lack of appreciation of the socratic method, when imported into the Mess. 'What a man!' he exclaimed. 'He'd argue a dog's hind leg off.' And I agreed that he was disputatious. I was sorry when I heard he'd been killed that I had not made my peace with him.
CHAPTER VII
Passchendaele
The centre of 'the Salient' was where my battery next found itself. The Salient was the bulge, of course, round the romantic ruin of the town of Ypres. No Norman Keep in ivy-clad decay was ever so romantic as Ypres, literally swarming with ghosts even at high noon (in the moonlight you could not tell which were the quick and which the dead) and looking as if Time, that does not hurry when making a ruin as a rule, had telescoped itself to make this one, Death having lent it a hand.
The famous Salient was a stupid bulge, but one of which the high command were inordinately proud; not because it was of any strategic importance, but because a great many men had been killed in its creation. It is obvious why a 'salient' is an unsatisfactory place for the men who are in it. They can be shelled from three sides, more or less, instead of one. But this Salient was sacrosanct. It was the Salient. It was as great as it was costly as a feat of arms, to hold it. So it was kept intact, as a monument of 'doggedness'. At the time I thought it was stupid to have a salient. Since I have found it was even more stupid than I had suspected.
Our forward position was up the Menin Road, to the east of it. It was not far from yet another 'Hellfire Corner', but we could not see this one as there was a rise in the ground that interrupted the view. All day long, however, we could observe the shambles on the Menin Road itself (the shouting for stretchers just reached us at our guns) which was chockablock at all times with A.S.C. and Anzac transport, ambulances and the rest of it.
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