by Hilary Green
They were not to stay for long. Belgrade had already fallen to the Austrians. Soon they heard that the Serbian forces, hastily withdrawn from the Austrian front, had been unable to hold back the Bulgarians, who had been equipped with heavy weapons by Germany. Initially Stobart and the staff of the field hospital were ordered to retreat towards Nis, but then word came that help was desperately needed further south. After a hasty conference, it was agreed that Leo should lead a small detachment to Leskovac, on the road towards Kumanovo. She would be accompanied by one of the women doctors, Stella Patterson, five nurses, and two ox-carts and a wagon with their Serbian drivers, who would also act as orderlies.
The weather was appalling. Autumn had brought strong winds and endless rain but that could not mask the thunder of the guns to the east. On reaching Leskovac they were directed to a field outside the town, where they struggled against the elements to set up the tents. Before they had even unloaded the wagons, wounded began to arrive, transported as they had been from Chataldzha in jolting ox-carts, with only the primary emergency dressings to cover their wounds. Looking at the faces of her five helpers Leo realized that her previous experience was going to be invaluable.
At dawn next morning, just as they were about to start the daily routine of feeding and bathing, an officer galloped into the camp on a lathered horse.
‘You must move at once! Pack up and move! The enemy will be here within hours!’
There followed a period of chaos where one day seemed to blend into the next so that Leo lost track of time. Again and again they set up camp, offloaded the wounded and began the work of caring for them, only to be told within hours that the Bulgarians were close at hand and they must move on again, through Lebane and Medveda to Pristina, along roads clogged with refugees, with their own retreating army at their heels.
Tom swore as the endless rain smudged the line he had just drawn. He rubbed it out and got up from the stool where he was crouching to squint through the periscope that gave him a view of the area beyond the trench. It was an unsatisfactory way of seeing the landscape he was trying to draw, but to raise his head above the parapet was to invite a bullet from a sniper in the enemy lines. He regarded it despondently. It reminded him of Mons: another vista of slag heaps and pithead cranes, with at its centre the huge structure that the troops had nicknamed London Bridge, looming out of the mist. The difference was that now, after a year of the war, most of the buildings were ruins and the ground was pitted with water-filled shell-holes, each one a glimmering reflection of the grey sky. Loos, that was the name of the place. The battalion had been redeployed there at the beginning of autumn. The French pronounced it ‘Loss’. It struck him as gloomily appropriate.
Tom finished his sketch and turned back through the pages of the pad. They were not all filled with the horror of war. The summer months had passed with a minimum of action on both sides. There had been time to enjoy the sunshine, to listen to the birds, write letters, draw – almost to relax. His pad was full of pictures of men laughing together over a shared joke, playing cards, smoking, mending socks. Their faces were worn and filthy but there was something in their eyes that he had struggled to catch; a look of optimism and hope and the warmth of shared comradeship. He had been touched, over and over again, by the evidence of the close bonds that had grown up, the sense of brotherhood engendered by life in the trenches. But now, the rumour was, that time of relative peace was almost over. There was to be one more big push, one decisive action before the winter set in.
Tom collected his pencils and his stool, said goodbye to the men around him and headed back to the dugout he shared with Ralph. As soon as he entered, he knew that something had happened. Ralph was on his feet, pacing the two or three steps in either direction that the confined space allowed, his face taut.
‘What’s going on?’ Tom asked.
‘It’s come. We attack tomorrow. The plan is to break through the Boche lines and then circle round to outflank him. Joffre and the French are attacking simultaneously in the Champagne area and along the Vimy ridge. If we can do it, it could end the war.’
‘If!’ Tom repeated sceptically. ‘But it would be marvellous if it works.’ He scanned Ralph’s face. ‘There’s something else. What is it?’
Ralph sat down abruptly and let his hands hang idly between his knees. ‘We’re going to use gas, Tom.’
Tom sat opposite him. ‘Oh, God! I thought we were above that.’
They had both seen the effects of chlorine gas when the Germans had employed it at Ypres and the horror of seeing men choking and gasping while others stood by unable to help had made an indelible impression.
‘Apparently the thinking is that as the Germans used it first it’s all right for us to retaliate in kind,’ Ralph said bitterly. He looked up and Tom’s heart was wrenched by the despair in his eyes. ‘This isn’t the sort of fighting I thought I’d signed up for, Tom. I thought there could still be some chivalry, some honour in fighting for your country. But look at us! We sit here, hurling shells at each other, never even seeing each other’s faces, and the generals are so far behind the lines they don’t even know what’s going on. It’s a war of machines, not men; and even there we’re completely outclassed. Not enough guns, not enough ammunition. Do you know, for a lot of the time our gunners are rationed to one shell every half hour? The men have been making their own grenades out of jam tins filled with gun cotton. And now this. We can’t fight them man to man so we’re going to try to poison them. How much lower can we sink?’
The stretcher jolted and tilted to one side as one of the bearers stumbled and Luke cried out in spite of himself. The morphia was wearing off and the pain of his shattered leg was like a fire consuming his body. Fire within and fire without, as the sun beat down. At least it was not the merciless sun of midsummer any longer, but even now in October the sky was cloudless and the heat striking up from the rocky earth gave the impression of living in an oven. In his delirium Luke imagined himself spitted like a hog and turning slowly over a fire.
‘Water!’ he begged, from a throat almost too parched to croak.
‘Sorry, mate! There’s none left,’ was the reply. ‘You’ll get some when we get you down.’
Luke felt his bowels churn and fought for control, in vain. He whimpered with disgust and humiliation as he realized that he had soiled himself. Dysentery had become a fact of life during the months crouched in shallow trenches on the slopes of Chunuk Bair. They had attacked in August, heading at night up the valley called Chailak Dere to take the height they had called Destroyer Hill. They had cut steps up the sheer cliff with their entrenching tools to reach Table Top, hearing the hakas of the Maori contingent from the adjoining hill. Then, five hundred yards from the summit, the assault had been called off until daylight. By then, the opposing Turks had been reinforced and they had come under fire from a battery on top of the hill. The Auckland brigade had been mown down in their hundreds when they tried to advance and when the orders had been given for the Wellingtons to follow Malone had refused. Luke had heard the row between him and Brigadier General Johnston. ‘My men are not going to commit suicide!’ Malone had said.
They had made it to the top the following night and found no opposition except a solitary Turkish machine gun crew, who had surrendered. At dawn, they had been able to look across to the glittering waters of the Narrows, between Gallipoli and Asia. But it was impossible to hold the position. The ground was too hard to dig deep trenches and the Turks could creep up on them to within twenty yards without being seen. Luke had fired till his gun was too hot to hold and the front trench was clogged with the dead and dying. There was no water and they had had nothing to eat but salty bully beef, but they fought on. Malone led bayonet charge after bayonet charge until he was killed by shrapnel from one of their own batteries. By the time they retired, after dusk, only two officers and forty-seven men were left.
Luke had been one of the ‘lucky’ ones that time. For weeks since then he had squatted in a du
gout on the slopes below the hilltop, while somewhere, a long way away, faceless men tried to decide what to do next. The hillside was strewn with bodies and the stench as they decomposed was unbearable. In the end a truce was agreed so that men from each side could meet together in no-man’s-land to dig pits into which they rolled and dumped the bodies of friend and foe alike. Even after that, the place was still swarming with flies. The only food was bully beef and tins of apricot jam, with hard-tack biscuits, but as soon as anyone opened a tin it was immediately black with flies. It was not long before dysentery struck and none of them were spared. As the weeks passed, the effort of carrying water or moving equipment became almost too much for their weakened bodies.
From time to time the Turks attacked, pouring down the hill yelling ‘Allah! Allah!’ and screaming and whistling, and the weary Aussies and Kiwis raised their weapons and yelled back ‘Come on, you bastards!’ and somehow they beat them back. But it was one of those attacks that had finally done for Luke. A grenade had landed in the trench and Luke had tried to kick it away. The explosion had torn the muscles of his leg. Now, he was on a stretcher, heading down the narrow, winding path, where stretcher-bearers sometimes had to drop their burden and take cover from Turkish snipers; where the ground was so treacherous, and the men so weakened, that it could take three days to reach the beach.
Four days after the attack on Loos Tom and Ralph were back in the same dugout. Ralph was slumped, exhausted, on the edge of his bed with his head in his hands. His uniform was torn and filthy and there was a bloodstained bandage round his left forearm.
‘We were there, Tom! In the Jerries’ second line! And there was no opposition. It was defended by old men and officers’ orderlies. We broke through the first line, even though the bombardment hadn’t cut the wire as it was supposed to. We cleared out the opposition there and charged on and found ourselves in total possession of the second line trenches. But by that time our men were exhausted. They’d fought all day and we’d taken a lot of casualties. If the reserves had been on hand they could have passed through us and attacked the Germans from the rear. It could have been the decisive blow. Once the German line was broken they would either have had to pull back or sue for peace.’
‘But the reserves weren’t there?’ Tom queried.
‘That bloody fool of a general, Sir John French, had kept them sixteen kilometres behind the lines. Then, when they were told to come forward, they were loaded down with extra rations, extra ammunition, God knows what else, and they marched all night in the pouring rain. They were only boys, Tom, most of them; volunteers – what people are calling ‘Kitchener’s Army’. They’d never seen action before and by the time they reached us they were as exhausted as we were. They didn’t even know for certain where the front line was. Some of them just marched straight into the enemy machine guns.’
‘I thought you had cleared the Germans out of that sector.’
‘So we had, if the French had kept their part of the bargain. We didn’t know it then, but Joffre had called off his attack because his troops weren’t getting anywhere, so the Boche were able to rush reinforcements over to our section. By the time the new lads arrived it was too late.’ He ran his hands through his hair. ‘That’s the whole story of this shambles we are calling a war, Tom. Too little, too late! Not enough guns, not enough shells, men in the wrong place without the supplies they need to keep going. And bloody incompetent generals! We’ve been betrayed, Tom. That’s the long and the short of it.’
Tom looked at him with compassion. He had had no illusions about war, after his experiences in the Balkans, but Ralph had cherished such shining ideals of patriotism and gallantry and it wrung his heart to see him so brought down. He wanted to say, ‘But you have survived, that’s all that really matters’ but he knew it would be the wrong thing for Ralph to hear at that moment. Besides, there was something else that weighed heavily on his mind. He had spent the last days in the forward observation post and had taken no part in the attack. He hated himself for not sharing Ralph’s danger. He turned away, folding his arms, and swore to himself that next time they would go into battle side by side.
The following morning he presented himself at battalion headquarters and asked to see the colonel. He had to wait for some time before he was admitted and then the colonel raised his eyes from the maps he was studying and gazed at him abstractedly.
‘Well, what is it?’
‘I have a request, sir. I want to be transferred to active duties.’
His commanding officer blinked at him as if he was having difficulty focusing and Tom saw that he was on the verge of exhaustion. Then his eyes cleared.
‘You’re the artist. What do you mean, active duties?’
‘I know I have only been given an honorary commission, sir, so that I can document the action in pictures; but I can’t stand by and see other men die without sharing the danger. I want to be regarded as a regular officer.’
The colonel sighed. ‘You have no training, Devenish. How do you imagine you can function as an officer without training?’
‘Then I should like to be trained, if that’s possible,’ Tom said.
‘You want me to send you back to England to undergo officer training, is that it?’
Tom hesitated. ‘I can’t get the same training here? On the job, as it were?’
‘No, you can’t! This is a crack regiment. It isn’t run by amateurs – though God knows, the way we are losing officers at the moment it may come to that.’
‘All the more reason for me to play my full part,’ Tom said. ‘If I have to go back, then that is what I should like to do. If you agree, of course.’
The CO looked at him for a moment, then he returned to his maps. ‘Yes, very well. I’ll make the necessary arrangements.’
Thirteen
Leo hoped that when she and her little group reached Pristina they might find Mabel Stobart waiting for them with the rest of the convoy, but there was no sign of them. She asked everyone she could think of, from the mayor to the crowds of refugees flooding into the city, but no one had any news. With the Austrians pressing in from the north and the Bulgarians from the east, it was obvious that her colleagues would have been forced to join the general retreat, so Leo decided to wait as long as possible in the hopes that they would appear; but when three days passed without news she had to conclude that they had either gone on ahead or were taking a different route.
The city was in the grip of panic, besieged from all directions by refugees, and food was getting difficult to find. Leo became familiar with the word nema – there is none – as she combed the shops looking for bread and sugar. She became uncomfortably familiar, too, with a question. ‘Where are the English and the French? They are supposed to be our allies. When are they coming to help us?’ There was a temporary flare of hope when the news arrived that allied contingents had landed at Salonika but it was short-lived. The Bulgarians were surrounding the city and the small allied force did not have the strength to break through. As the first remnants of the defeated Serb army started to appear in the city Leo decided that it would be irresponsible to wait longer. She stopped a cavalry officer and explained her dilemma.
‘If I were you, I should move out at once,’ he said. ‘If the Bulgarians don’t take the town in a day or two, the Austrians will.’
‘There’s no chance of a rally, a fight back?’ Leo said.
He shook his head. ‘There was talk of a last stand, at Kosovo Polje, but the generals decided against it.’
Leo was touched by the dejection on his face. She knew the significance of that place to the Serbs. It was the locus of every legend and every folk song; the place where in 1389 the Serbs had fought their decisive and ultimately doomed battle against the Turkish army. She knew how many of them would have preferred a gallant last stand on that historic spot to this abject retreat.
‘It is better that you should save yourselves and live to fight another day,’ she said. ‘But where are you heading?
’
‘Through the mountains. It’s the only route left open to us. If we can reach the Adriatic at Durazzo perhaps the allies will send ships to take us off. But it will be a hard journey and the Albanians are not our friends. There will be many who do not survive.’
Leo watched him ride away with a growing sense of despair. It was December now, the worst time of the year to be heading into the mountains. She knew very little about Albania except that it was a poor country and the officer’s comment that the Albanians were not their friends sent a chill through her heart. Even if they were disposed to help, how could they be expected to feed the multitude that was about to descend on them? What conditions would be like, up there, she could only guess. But there was nothing for it, they must join the exodus.
The rain was unrelenting and the roads were a sea of mud. Leo grew tired of pinning up the long strands of wet hair that fell around her shoulders, so she resorted to the expedient she had adopted at Chataldzha and hacked it off with a pair of surgical scissors. It occurred to her, in one of her quieter moments, that in her boots and breeches she must look very much as she had done when Sasha first mistook her for a boy. The thought sent a shaft of anguish through her. Where was Sasha now? He would have fought to the last, she was sure of that. Was he now part of this dejected rabble, heading for exile; or was he lying dead somewhere on the borders of the country he loved so much?
At a village outside Prizren, almost on the border of Albania, where they encamped one night, Stella Patterson came to Leo’s tent.
