John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works

by Philip Errington

  In the silence, the drivers get down to stretch their legs; some near-by soldier accepts a cigarette and lights it with his briquet, or flint and steel, and says something about the chance of the division moving, or the duration of the war, or tells how in the earlier fighting he found three dead men without visible wounds in some dugout in a far-away part of the line. Another soldier, drawn by the talk, says that they are going to attack down there, and that it will be hot, and that his brother is there. The moon rises during the talk; the men look at the moon for some hint of the coming weather.

  The block, whatever it was, breaks up or is removed, and the column moves forward again in a strangeness of moonlight. It moves through the street of a village where there was fighting in the early part of the war. It is now a village of the dead; half of the houses are roofless, others lie in heaps of stone, the rest are barred and dark. On one side of the street some of the wreckage of the war lies – a broken cannon, part of a cart with the wheels gone, and a child’s wooden horse. Near it is a drinking-fountain with running water in it, making a gurgle to the night. The street is as silent as the grave, but for the noise of the column on the road and the lead and chuckle of the water. In one part of the street some light glimmers up from a cellar; a man emerges, drops a curtain behind him, and the light disappears. Sometimes these villages seem to be lying sick of the plague and the column, the people fleeing. At other times the shut houses seem to be full of life, brooding and about to burst out upon the column as it goes.

  All the way, at odd times, far off, with neither sense nor sequence, the guns have sounded almost like the noises of peace – blasting or pile-driving. Now, outside the village, as the ambulance comes out upon the hill, they sound for the first time like the noise of battle, much nearer and much more terrible. Now, too, far off, as the car runs in the open, the drivers see the star-shells going up and up, and bursting into white stars, and pausing and drifting slowly down, very, very slowly, pausing as they come, far apart, yet so many that there are always more than one aloft. They are the most beautiful things in modern war and almost the most terrible. Often they pause so long before dying that they look like the lights of peace in lighthouse and city beacon, or like planets in the sky.

  In this open space the drivers can see for some miles over the battlefield. Over it all, as far as the eye can see, the lights are rising and falling. There is not much noise, almost no continual noise, but a sort of mutter of battle with explosions now and then. Very far away, perhaps ten miles away, there is fighting, for in that quarter the sky glimmers as though with summer lightning; the winks and flashes of the guns shake and die across heaven.

  One side of the road here is screened with burlap stretched upon posts for half a mile together; otherwise daytime traffic on it would be seen by the enemy. Some of the burlap is in rags and some of the posts are broken; the wreck of a cart lies beside the road, and in the road itself are roundish patches of new stones where shell-holes have been mended, perhaps a few minutes before. This part of the road jingles like the rest with traffic, though here, for some reason, there are fewer motor-lorries and more horse-wagons. Here and there are working parties filling up shell-holes with stones. That piece of the road is always much shelled in the daytime.

  By this time the moon is riding the night in beauty. The ambulance passes from the danger patch into a desert with neither hedge nor tree upon it. In the moonlight one can see the fields on each side of the road for perhaps a quarter of a mile, as in a summer dusk. One glance at the fields is enough to show that they have been bedevilled by the hand of war. All the countryside shows like a warren, with holes and tossed-up earth, as though rabbits as big as horses had been burrowing there for years. The earth lies scooped up in lines and heaps and hillocks, paler than the grass in this light, but all irregular and meaningless and useless. Near the road the pits and tossings of the earth run into one another at every yard, and out of them project the bones of their victims – carts with their wheels in air, the skulls of horses, the bonnets of ambulances, and splinters that might have been anything. Once, for three weeks on end, day and night, all that road and the land beside it was rained upon by shells of every kind till it became as it is now, blasted from all likeness to land. There are not five consecutive unscarred yards upon any part of it. It is torn and burrowed in and pitted with the pox of war; the flesh of the earth is eaten and blown away and the bones of the solid world laid bare. At seeing this for the first time in its fullness a man has just that sense of infamous desecration which comes to him when he first sees wounded men brought in from the battlefield. During the weeks of that fury the men and horses that were killed upon that land were buried and unburied daily many times, and torn at last to dust and laid with the dust. That fury has long since ceased. It was the effort of a nation and it failed. It gives a man a sense of his littleness in this world to see that the effort of a nation made so small a wreck upon the world it outraged.

  Passing this desolation the ambulances come to another, perhaps sadder. Here the road runs through woodland, but such woodland; it is like that wood in hell where the trees are the souls of suicides. No single tree stands. All are torn off short and burned black. It is a wood of rampikes about five feet high, each tree ending in a bunch of splinters, or rayed down, or split. Some are uprooted, some tossed up and flung across their fellows, but all are shorn and pollarded by hours and weeks of shellfire. All the ground of the wood is dug into shell-holes and some rats are scuttling and squeaking among the wreck and running across the road. Some men are in the wood, probably they have their dugouts there; one man, perhaps a curé, cries goodnight as the cars pass. He is half seen among the stumps as the cars turn a corner. Lovers must have gone to that place in peacetime, when the primroses were out and the blackbird built and sang there; now . . .

  Just overhead as the car passes comes a blasting, shattering crash which is like sudden death. Then another and another follow, one on the other, right overhead. On the ground above, the slope of the little hill, a battery of soixante-quinze guns has just opened fire. On the tail of each crash comes the crying of the shell, passing overhead like a screech-owl, till it is far away in the enemy lines, where it bursts. Another round follows, but by this time the ambulance is a hundred yards away, and now, on the heels of the affront, comes the answer. Rather to the right and very near in the stillness of the moonlight an enemy battery replies, one, two, three guns in as many seconds, a fourth gun a little late, and the shells come with a scream across and burst behind the ambulances, somewhere near the battery. Then a starlight goes up near enough to dazzle the eyes, and near enough, one would think, to show the ambulance to the world; and as the starlight goes down a second round comes from the battery, aimed God knows at what, but so as to arroser the district. The noise of the engine stifles the noise of the shells, but above the engines one shell’s noise is heard; the screech of its rush comes very near, there is a flash ahead, a burst, and the patter of falling fragments. Long afterward, perhaps six seconds afterward, a tiny piece of shell drops upon the ambulance. Another shell bursts behind the car, and another on the road in front; the car goes round the new shell-hole and passes on. The firing ceases for the moment. The land ahead is quiet, moonlit country, seemingly at peace, however much shell-torn, though the starlights still rise and burst and pause, white and beautiful, over the valley beyond.

  The cars come to a crossroads where a train of fifty pack-mules has halted. They are all laden with ammunition, and war has made them quiet (for mules), though many of them show the yellows of their eyes as the cars pass. Beyond them is a wayside cross, with a cluster of soldiers’ graves about it. Shells have dug up the graves and broken the memorials on them; they lie scattered here and there, little wooden crosses and wreaths of coloured wire, under the Christ upon the cross. All the neighbourhood of the crossways is blasted with shells. Some shell-holes lie in regular lines along the roads there, perhaps twenty feet apart, just as they were sown in methodical
bombardment; others are scattered broadcast; some, old ones partly filled, little more than a foot deep; others big enough to hold half a dozen men and deep enough to hide them. This crossways is, in its way, a famous place. It is called Golgotha in that part of the front. Four hundred yards from it some of the bloodiest fighting in all this war took place. The cross is the Calvary of Golgotha, past which thousands of brave men marched to their deaths.

  The cars are now close to the enemy and very close to the Poste de Secours. The noise of the war runs up and down the front, but not at all like war as it is imagined in peacetime. It is a popping and banging, more like fireworks on the Fourth than something ordered and deadly. Then with their shattering bang the guns of a battery begin, and the shells rush screaming overhead and pass away and burst, and the enemy replies with heavier shells, so loud and so near that men expect to see them against the sky. With the bursts of these enemy shells comes a noise of collapse; a few ruined houses behind there have fallen to them.

  The cars go slowly now, for the road is full of shell-holes. All the trees in the hedgerows have been shot to rampikes. Two lonely walls of houses stand up white in the moonlight over the ruins of their roofs. What were once gardens show up whitish as heaps of rubble. The cars jolt over a dead horse from which the rats scatter; beyond it is another dead horse with part of his cart still harnessed to him; beyond that lie two dead mules and about half of a Red Cross ambulance. This is a bad part of the road, not three hundred yards from the enemy. Very many men have been killed at just this point.

  At the moment it is more beautiful than words can say. With the light of the moon upon them the walls of the ruins are like obelisks in some garden of the gods. Bats are flitting up and down above the road, and the shadows of the trees make patterns and an owl is calling. Then from in front comes a pattering of little feet, and a drove of donkeys comes along, tiny donkeys hardly bigger than sheep, and pattering with their little hooves like sheep. A man is in charge of them. They come here night after night; they are safer than these wagons and cars which make a noise. For tonight they have done their task; they have brought up their loads and now are going back to safety. They patter by with that air of patience and wisdom which the donkey has. The man in charge calls to them and they shift to their side of the road, stumbling, slackening, and quickening, with their little feet beating out of time.

  The ambulances have to go very slowly here, for the road is so full of shell-holes. Some of the worst of these have been roughly filled with ruin, but even so they are still nearly a foot deep. A brook runs across the road in one place. It once ran under the road through a culvert, but the culvert has been blown to pieces and the masonry merged with the road, and now the water flows across and runs into the shell-holes. The taint of corruption hangs about this place and the rats are busy there, for dead horses lie in the water, just as they were killed a few days since when they stooped there to drink after the dusty journey. The ambulances splash across the swamp and turn a bend into the Place of what was once a big village.

  All the Place shows up brightly in the moonlight. It was once the Place, the central square, the heart and market-place of a community. Now it is like a cemetery or place of death. All the houses surrounding it are ruins, all are roofless, most of the walls are down, the few walls still standing are pierced with holes, or toppling, or half-razed, or propped by the wreck of their floors which have fallen sideways and now support them. The trees are wrenched off six feet from the ground and end in bunches of twisted splinters. A bed or two, the sticks of chairs, some broken carts, some garden gates, a mess of straw and a travelling soup-kitchen are littered up and down in the road. Disemboweled houses, with their fronts gone, pour out their treasures of broken plaster. A pile of coils of barbed wire lies on one side, and two stretcher-bearers are seated beside it, talking in low tones. In the centre of the Place is the village Calvary, famous in its way among the Calvarys of France. Shells have fallen round it and burst against it and pitted it with marks, but have not destroyed it. One shell (said now to have been the last of the great attack) tore an arm from it and slued the whole cross round, so that now the figure of Christ leans toward the enemy and points with his one arm forward, as though showing France the way.

  This is “the front.” Two hundred and fifty yards away, a seventh part of a mile, two minutes’ walk, are the enemy lines. Dead ahead, in what looks like a big rubbish-heap, such as one may see in suburbs where builders have been putting up a row of villas, is the Poste de Secours. The rubbish-heap was once a farm, though no man, not even the farmer, could now say where his buildings lay. The cellars, where once the farmer matured his vintage, make the Poste; the rising ground beyond, once the vineyard, is dug across by “our” support trenches, “our” outermost line is somewhere beyond the ridge, under a star which does not float down, but is steady, being Vega. Someone has fixed a Red Cross mark on the rubbish-heap as a guide to the ambulance, and a pile of bloody old stretchers lies beside it. The cellar entrance has been adapted. The approach is down a gentle slope, barred across with battens to keep the feet of the stretcher-bearers from slipping. The entrance is hung across with canvas so that no gleam of light may pass.

  The drivers leave their cars and go toward the entrance, where a stretcher-bearer stands. He welcomes them, and the usual talk begins of how long the war will last, and how it will end. There are several cases inside, he says, and more are coming, for the enemy has been firing trench torpedoes. He says that the cases will not be ready for an hour, and then at one in the morning some sick are coming; the cars will have to wait for instructions. The drivers go down the sloping path into the cellars. The cellar roof has been propped and heaped with layers of timber balks interspersed with sandbags, and the cellar itself, shored up, is like a mine. It is a vast place with several rooms in it, from one of which, strongly lighted, comes the sound of voices and of people moving. Looking round near at hand, as the eye becomes accustomed to the darkness, one sees some loaded stretchers on the floor near the doorway. Three dead men, who were alive an hour ago, lie there awaiting burial. They were all hit by one torpedo, says the stretcher-bearer, these and five others, but these three died on their way to the Poste. Some say that the dead look as though they were asleep, but no sleep ever looked like death. These men are not asleep; they are dead, whatever that may mean. Their uniforms are clean; there is no mud on their boots. By their clean equipment it is easy to see that they were men of this night’s relief; probably they were only an hour in the trenches, and now they are relieved forever.

  Farther from the door, in a darkness like that of an old ship’s forecastle, are stands of bunks for the stretcher-bearers. Those who are off duty lie asleep there, “like a trooper’s horse, all standing”; that is, with their clothes on. Beyond them is a kind of office where two men are playing draughts, one man is writing a letter, and a fourth is reading a newspaper.

  Away to the right, where the voices and the movement are, is a larger room. Men move about in it, softly, and one man with his side to the door is bending over something. He is the Médecin Chef of the Poste watching a dying soldier in the very article of death. He and his assistant are dressed in white sterilized operating robes. The orderlies stand about the table, intent upon their tasks. A saline injection is at work. There is a smell of ether and a blinding presence of iodine. One man has his hand on the patient’s wrist, and all eyes are turned upon the poor fellow’s face, as his breath fails. “Both his legs were broken by the torpedo,” says the doctor, “and we have done all we could, but he had lost too much blood.” The man dies, even as he speaks; tender hands very gently order his body and lay it on its stretcher with the three others near the door. Another wounded man, lying on a stretcher, is lifted onto the operating-table. One of his legs is shattered; but this man is a grizzled country labourer, much stronger than the man who has just gone. He looks round on the people with a look of terror, like an animal’s terror. Someone says, “N’ayez pas peur.” The a
naesthetist lowers a mask upon his face, pours ether, and murmers, “Respirez.” The man breathes hard for two minutes, and then in the drunkenness of the fumes struggles up, claws at the orderlies, and swears and calls upon the Holy Ghost. The orderlies grin and glance at each other; the man falls into unconsciousness, and his wound is laid bare and searched. The doctors shake their heads and cut off the leg below the knee, and an orderly plobs it into a tin bucket, foot uppermost. Before the man has completely recovered consciousness he is off the table, wrapped up upon his stretcher, and another wounded man takes his place. This man has a piece of the torpedo in his ankle, but with help he is able to hobble to the table and to swing himself onto it. He casts a frightened grin at the men about him, but tries to see the operation, such as it is. The other wounded men have been treated. They are sitting silent and motionless, absorbed in their own pain, in semi-darkness on a bench at the back. One can see their three white faces, much swathed in bandages, and the droop of their three bodies. They do not want to talk. It is labour enough to them to keep from crying out. They do not move, they regard nothing; they sit as though dazed, and as though they belonged to a different species, as though they were in a different world. The world of pain is a different world.