Post of Honour

by R. F Delderfield

  A dozen or so sectors north of Henry’s was another Valley man who would have challenged Horace had he heard him prophesying victory by June. This was Smut Potter, whose estimate of the duration of the war was based upon the strength of German counter-­attacks during the Loos fighting last September. Smut had never shone at arithmetic. One of his drawbacks throughout life had been his inability to count beyond ten. At Mary. Willoughby’s little school he had used his fingers for counting but a fog descended on his brain when he had used up all his fingers and thumbs and was obliged to start again. Yet numbers impressed him and he made a point of counting the German dead when the company occupied one of the enemy’s trenches. Until Loos this had been an easy thing to accomplish, for he was engaged in nothing but local sorties where the dead and prisoners seldom exceeded a dozen, but in the big push that autumn Smut’s counting system broke down the first day, for he was in the second wave to cross no-man’s-land and jump into a deep trench previously held by the Brandenburgers and here he found acres of Germans killed in the preliminary bombardment. It had seemed to him then, that the German Army must have been eliminated, that only a few dazed survivors would be left to scramble out of range of the British guns but he very soon discovered that this was not so for, by midday, he and his friends were counter-attacked, bundled out of the captured trench and were soon back at starting-point, where they were pinned down by fresh hordes appearing as from nowhere.

  The seesaw went on for four days. Every time a few yards of rubble was won it was carpeted with German dead but the enemy soon reappeared with any number of fresh men until the offensive ground to a halt and the survivors of Smuts company were withdrawn for rest and refit.

  During a spell in billets behind the line he pondered his experiences so deeply that he missed several chances of relieving his quartermaster’s worries in respect of various shortages. At last, finding no answer to the mystery, he turned for enlightenment to his particular chum, a Stepney coster, called Harry.’ ‘Airy boy,’ he said, ‘where do ’ee reckon they all come from?’ and Harryboy, whose familiarity for humanity en masse was the natural product of an East End upbringing, replied, unhelpfully, ‘All them mucking Fritzes? Blimey, doncher know? They collects all the dead uns after every show an’ puts ’em through a bloody mincer in the Kaiser’s palace! Then they cart all the sausage meat to a bloody great bakery where they bake it, an’ out they come good as noo ready for the next show!’ Smut, of course, did not accept this as a satisfactory explanation of the inexhaustibility of the Kaiser’s manpower but secretly he felt that the real explanation came as close to necromancy.

  Young Harold Eveleigh, seventeen-year-old brother of Gilbert, who had profited by Gilbert’s false start and enlisted in a town a hundred miles from the Valley, would have taken issue with Horace on yet another account—that of the popular belief that all Germans were cowards, who ran away once they were bombed out of their deep shelters and called upon to ‘face cold steel’. Harold had been in France since early September, despite his mother’s frantic efforts to trace him and haul him out of the Army as she had once succeeded in doing as regards Gilbert. Harold looked at least twenty, having inherited his father’s height and had joined up for devilment but whilst he was still in training, and serving under a false name, he learned that his elder brother had been killed in a bombing accident at a neighbouring camp. He and Gilbert, as the two elder boys in a long family of girls, had been very close and Harold had to take it out on somebody, so he managed to wangle his way into a draft on the point of leaving for France and soon became as enthusiastic a slayer of Germans as Smut Potter, although he never approached the latter’s efficiency. There was already a belief among veterans that a newcomer was at his best during his first few weeks in the line and that thereafter he deteriorated as a fighting machine. Harold Eveleigh’s recklessness during the Loos push justified this theory. He arrived in France only a fortnight before the battle opened and when his shattered unit was withdrawn he had accounted for at least five Germans and probably one or two more. He came through unwounded, one of four in his platoon, and the experience taught him, among other things, that war correspondents who described the Germans as a nation of cowards were either deliberate liars or very badly informed for he witnessed acts of heroism on the part of enemy personnel that would have surprised him had they been performed by some of the elite British regiments, like the Coldstreamers, or the Royal Welch. He saw three Germans killed in quick succession trying to rescue a wounded comrade from the wire and the next day came across a dead machine-gunner, lying beside his weapon with seventeen wounds in his body and a deep trench down which he could have withdrawn within yards of his emplacement. He saw German stretcher-parties walk through a box barrage carrying British wounded and he studied the impassive faces of some of the dead Saxons who had refused to surrender a surrounded sap when their nearest reinforcements were pinned down by an incessant rain of shells. After Loos, Harold was in and out of the line for another six months and was sent back with a slight wound, in February 1916. During this period he learned many basic facts about the war but perhaps the most important of them was that a man’s courage under fire did not depend upon his nationality but upon such factors as how much sleep he had had in the last seventy-two hours, what kind of training he had received, how much rum had been available before an attack and even on the arrival or non-arrival of his mail. It also depended, just as the veterans argued, upon how long a man had been out and what kind of sectors he had served in, so that when, to his amazement, he was included in a group of survivors and sent home to train for a commission he would have admitted to anyone, Horace Handcock included, that the respite he had gained represented the difference between Harold Eveleigh the Hero, and Harold Eveleigh the Coward.

  It is doubtful whether Ikey Palfrey, still serving with the artillery in or around the Cuinchy brickstacks, would have bothered to argue with Horace Handcock upon the subject of how long the war would last but if, for some reason, he had been drawn into a discussion at The Raven his rebuttal of Horace’s prophecies might have led to him being branded as a defeatist. After nearly eighteen months at the front, broken by a single spell of leave in June, 1915, Ikey had formed certain theories about modern warfare and they were not of the kind likely to win preferment for a professional. He had artillery-spotted for several small-scale offensives and two major pushes, including the Loos debacle and had come to the conclusion that at least two drastic changes would have to be made on the Western Front before the Allies could advance as far as Roulers and Lille, much less Cologne and Berlin. In the first place all British ex-cavalry generals bent over maps at HQ would have to be put out of harm’s way, preferably by a bullet through the head, although, in this case, shots would have to be fired point-blank for it was a well-known fact that all cavalry generals had bullet-proof skulls. This having been done, and a new General Staff having been recruited from men who had ceased to think of war in terms of Balaclava, some new tactical method would have to be devised as a means of penetrating the German trench system and covering the advance of infantrymen across open ground traversed by enemy machine-guns. Ikey had watched, through powerful binoculars, the advance of successive waves at Loos and for four days had seen the clusters climb out of their assembly points, plod a few yards over churned-up ground and wither away before they had travelled half the distance to their first objective. They looked, he thought, like a swarm of clockwork dolls moving across a brown tablecloth and when, during the first two days, attack after attack failed, he was at first surprised, then furiously angry and finally filled with hatred for men who ordered their advance without regard for the vulnerability of flesh and bone to bullets and shrapnel. Then, as his duties required him to keep the surging attacks and counter-attacks under constant observation, he was able to eliminate the human element altogether and study the battle in a tactical sense, reasoning that before the fortified ground on either side could be taken and held something far more ima
ginative than a preliminary bombardment was needed to fortify the attacker during the initial stage of a breakthrough. His mind began to toy with smokescreens, low-level aerial machine-gunning and even bullet-proof vests but he rejected all three as too clumsy, too revolutionary and too ineffectual. Then, on the third day, he had the germ of an idea and it excited him; what was surely needed out here, what would have to be found before substantial progress could be made, was some kind of war chariot mounted with quick-firing guns, something impervious to all but a direct hit from a mortar or long-range shell, a machine, moreover, that could crush wire and circumnavigate all but the smallest shell-holes, a moving fort behind which the hardy infantry could advance without being scythed down by traversing machine-guns and rifle fire. That night, back in his dug-out, he took pencil and paper and began to sketch but he was less than half-satisfied with the drawing he produced, thinking that it resembled a memory copy of one of the sketches of military engines made by Leonardo da Vinci that he remembered seeing in a magazine in the mess at Quetta. He persisted, however and at last evolved something that seemed to him to be at least partially practical, a kind of squat armoured car, with broad, steel-plated wheels looking a little like an armadillo. He was so absorbed that he got behind with his real work and it was not until the candle burned low that he put the sketch-pad in his valise, marked his maps and finally rolled on to his wire-netting bed to sleep. Outside the guns went on grumbling, not violently but persistently, somewhere to the south and before he slept Ikey thought the distant cannonade sounded exactly like autumn thunder in the Sorrel Valley.

  There was a woman, formerly of the Valley, abroad that same night not forty miles from the sector where Ikey sat sketching war-chariots and although she had always prided herself on being a realist, she would have done her utmost to extract a crumb of comfort from Horace Handcock’s optimistic prophecies. Having come to regard the war as the most hideous tragedy that had ever beset the world she would have welcomed any terms, including unconditional surrender, that brought the suffering she witnessed each night to an abrupt end.

  As an ambulance driver shunting regularly between casualty-clearing station and hospital, Grace Lovell was more familiar with the extremes of pain and human desolation than even a front-line infantry man. A fighting man was primarily concerned with his own plight, and either stuck it out, like a terrified mole, or was caught up in a struggle for survival demanding a quality of exclusive concentration. Grace Lovell did most of her work outside the range of all but the howitzers and therefore found it very difficult to isolate herself from the load of misery in her vehicle and devote her entire attention to the task of driving over shell-pocked roads with quarter-power headlamps.

  She had been in France for close on a year now, having volunteered for ambulance driving after a brief, unhappy spell in a London hospital when the 1914 amnesty freed all imprisoned suffragettes. She emerged from Holloway half-way through her sixth sentence and her experiences during the previous decade had not been such as to encourage her to embrace a patriotic crusade. Ever since 1904 she had been hounded, hunted, man-handled, forcibly fed, and hectored by men and to the hard core of the Movement, some of whom, like Grace, were reduced to skin and bone by hunger-strikes and nervous strain, the war was regarded as a fitting punishment for a world of men who had been callous, sadistic and mulish in responding to a demand for basic human rights.

  This savage mood endured through the autumn and into the spring of 1915, while she was recuperating at a holiday home in Scotland run by a wealthy sympathiser but she began to relent a little as the casualties of the first winter’s fighting appeared on public platforms at meetings loosely associated with women’s suffrage, men who, for the most part, were no longer men at all but patched-up parodies of men lacking arms, legs or even half a face. As news of the death or mutilation of some of her personal friends reached her, the shift of sympathies kept pace with her improvement in health and although she still regarded the war as the climax of years of blundering inefficiency on the part of the male cabals of Europe, she could find it in her heart to feel desperately sorry for the millions of young men urged to lay down their lives at the toot of a bugle and the flutter of a Union Jack. Veterans of the movement, women like Annie Kenney and Christobel Pankhurst, assured her that this was the opportunity for which they had been working since 1904 and that after the war every woman in Britain would have the franchise. She did not know whether she believed them but after a spell as a VAD in a London hospital it did not seem to matter much for the keen edge of her fanaticism was blunted by a factor removed from the purely physical suffering she witnessed in the wards. This was a creeping doubt as to whether women in authority were any more reasonable, or even as efficient as men. She had the bad luck to come within the orbit of a fat-rumped martinet whose only qualification for her position as Commandant was newly-acquired wealth and Grace soon had good reason to despise this type of woman as wholeheartedly as she despised Cabinet Ministers. The titled Commandant administered the hospital like an eighteenth-century school, treating her volunteer nurses much as the more ignorant of the wardresses had treated prisoners in Holloway. Grace came to suspect that, again like some of the wardresses, the Commandant was not only a bully and a snob but also a Lesbian for she made favourites of all the doll-faced little nurses from aristocratic houses and was hostile to any member of her staff who had been a suffragette. After two or three months of back-breaking toil and humiliation Grace knew that she would have to choose between resigning or changing her hospital, and since almost every reception-centre for the wounded was in charge of middled-aged women enjoying the exercise of despotism she managed, by pulling various strings, to transfer to the transport section of the Department and was sent to France in time to evacuate some of the casualties of the battle of Veuve Chapelle, in April.

  It was here, driving between clearing-station and base, that her re-orientation really began, for during her ten years in and out of gaol she had forgotten that men also possess the capacity to suffer. Back in the hospital wards at home, freshly washed, rid of their filthy uniforms and with their wounds covered by clean bandages, wounded men could be regarded with a certain amount of detachment but out here, where they were lifted into ambulances much as they had quitted the battlefield, compassion came near to prostrating her until she was able to convince herself that every stretcher case needed instant, practical help far more than tears. By the time the Loos fighting began she had become an extremely efficient driver and assistant orderly so that she was put on a regular run through devastated territory wrecked during the previous autumn’s fighting.

  Although the oldest woman in her section she withstood the demands of active service better than most. Her experiences had bred in her an iron self-discipline and once she was rested, and had recovered from successive hunger-strikes, she put on weight and regained her taut, resilient physique. She had need of strength. In addition to the strain of night-driving over bad roads, where every jolt produced screams of agony, and the sickening morning routine of scrubbing out the ambulance, her seniority made her a target for all the younger women seeking a confidante. There were those whose health proved unequal to the demands of the work but who wanted most desperately to acquit themselves well, and, there were those who had rushed starry-eyed into the Service at the beginning of the war and were now driven to distraction by nagging superiors. There were others, perhaps the most pitiable, whose greatest fear was to succumb to fear, and there was, of course, a steady stream of pregnancies among girls from good-class homes in city suburbs, girls whose staggering ignorance of the basic facts of hygiene caused Grace to rage against the social taboos of the last few generations.