As I write these words I know that I have not forgotten what happened that night at English Farm, what was going to happen on the St Jean-Wieltje Road at Cambrai, at Amiens, in the ‘train bleu’ after years in the black areas of a second world war; I see them still in the watch fires of a thousand sleepless nights, for the soul goes marching on.
“If the Boche start shelling we shall be for it.” It was Quainton, whose tank was some thirty yards behind mine, who had come up to see what was the matter. He had always had that kind of initiative and I envied him his easy, uninhibited way.” I think I’ll go forward and see what’s up. After all, they told us this road would be kept clear for tanks.”
“Don’t be a fool”, I whispered back, “If anything happens you may not be able to find your tank again.”
Bagshaw came up. “What’s up? We ought to get on.” I told him I had no idea. Infantry, gunners, ammunition limbers were all stuck in a solid mass in the silence and darkness. Every so often a red spurt of sparks and an explosion marked the fall of an enemy shell. It was a quiet night, but for how much longer? I had visions of a chaos of plunging mules, overturned ammunition limbers, and above all, tanks with their ninety gallons of petrol aflame.
There was a sudden disturbance; a young staff officer had appeared. “You!”—he was speaking to me—”What the hell—is this your tank? What the devil do you think you’re doing? Get on man I You should be at your starting points by now!”
“I can’t sir…”, I started to explain.
“Good God man!” he cut me short, “Drive through them! Push them off the road!” I realized I had fallen into some peace-time form of manners. “This is a war—get on!”
With sinking heart I told Allen to start the engine. We edged and pushed. A gun limber went over amid the curses of the team. “You fucking bastards!” they swore at us. I felt they were right. I tried to get off the track but the tank began a fearful slither into the mud. Allen stopped the skid with difficulty—only the fact that he was a fine driver made him able to do it—and we pushed, surrounded by curses and hate every foot of the way.
At any moment, I thought, the star-shell which must have discovered us at English Farm would flame out in a barrage to blow us all to hell. And then suddenly our guns opened up their preliminary barrage. All around us the mud became alive with the white flashes of our artillery. These were not field artillery—they were 6-inch howitzers in position fifty yards behind our front line. In a moment or two the enemy counter-barrage started. Our ‘road’, inevitably, was the target of their fixed lines, calibrated over the weeks, automatically registered. The nightmare was now fact. I signalled Allen to turn at right angles off the road. The shelling was now uniform, as heavy off the road as on it. Yet it was a comfort to feel we were not now a pre-determined target. At least I did know what was happening on that road.
I judged we had reached our starting point, signalled again to Allen and pointed our tank towards the ‘hill’ which somewhere in shell-illuminated night was our objective. The tank commander’s private fear now possessed me—that I would fall wounded, unobserved by the crew and so be driven over by the tank. Just as I reached our side door a shell-burst blew me over. The door opened and my crew pulled me in and slammed the door to. “I thought you was a gonner sir”, said Richardson. I worked my way to my seat in front next to the driver Allen. We shut off the engine; we had another forty minutes to go before zero.
With the engine’s roar silenced we could appreciate the racket outside, like an inferno of slamming doors. And now I was aware of a novel sensation; the tank with which I was familiar as a solid mass of steel was shaking continuously like a wobbling jelly. No protection more solid than a figment of the imagination.
I was not aware of being afraid, which, from the point of view of comfort, is as good as not being afraid. The tank continued to wobble and the doors to slam; sometimes the slam and the wobble were instantaneous. When I realized that both violent slam and wobble occurred at intervals which were rhythmically connected, I knew we were very near the bursting point of a heavy shell. I felt we should move; there was nowhere to go.
Since it was dark the enemy were firing blind on their established barrage lines and, so far, we had not been hit. Could a shell fall short or over? It could—so I gave up thinking about it, thus taking shelter instinctively in mindlessness. Allen had nothing to do, but I could order Hayler and gunner Allen, a youngster whose face I could see by the dim interior light of the tank to be glistening with sweat, to get out with me and release the pigeon reporting our arrival at our starting point. I recorded the time and Hayler stolidly fixed the message to the container on the carrier’s leg. With only five minutes to zero Hayler tossed it into the air. It promptly settled on the edge of a shell-hole and began to walk about. Exasperated, frustrated, we watched its deliberation. “If it’s going to walk to HQ it will bring very stale news.” “It’s not daylight yet sir”, Hayler reminded me. We started to throw clods of earth at the bird as if that would disturb a composure which could not be shaken by the now intense shell-fire. “I wish I had its bloody wings…”, shouted Allen. “You want the best wings: we have them”, it seemed to say.
It was nearly time. “Get in and start up”, I ordered. The crew began to swing the starting handle. Nothing happened. Then, just as despair began to settle on us, the engine sprang to life with a roar.
Dawn; and we were moving into battle. Through the front flap I could see the contours of the ‘hills’ and that was all. We were in low gear; even at full power we could only lurch at a mile an hour from shell-hole to shell-hole. The tank began a list to the right. We could not correct it and the six-pounder gun filled with mud as it ploughed through, not over, the ground. The flying earth made it impossible for Allen or me to open the front observation flaps more than a thin slit. When I tried to use the periscope it was shot off.
Once, to our front and right, I saw the stumps of trees. It was a great relief as a wood was marked just to the right side of Hill 40. So far so good—if only the tank would right itself, but it would not. We were on rising ground, but with drainage gone the higher ground was a morass worse than the Steenbeck.
Should the staff have known? Of course; but nobody had told the Etonians, the Harrovians, the Public School Elite, that rain on a summit emerged at the surface just below the summit. Or had they—when I was not attending? In Geography class perhaps. No, that was only ‘jute and flax’ growing somewhere or other. Not on Hill 40. Where the hell was Hill 407
It was time to try to check our direction. Opening my flap wider I was relieved to find the shattered trees more or less where, according to my guesses, they should have been. Bothered by chunks of earth each time I opened the flap at all widely I found it difficult to make my fleeting glances cohere. “Shells seem very close sir”, screamed Allen in my ear. He was right. With the increasing daylight the rhythm of shells I had noted before we started had given way first to the drum-fire of zero hour, and then to something more discriminated. The enemy could see us and his artillery were aiming concentrated fire at us. He could not miss. Yet miss he did, and this contributed to the delusion of safety. And then I realized, in one of my repeated glances in the direction of the trees, that they were not trees but our infantry advancing in line with their rifles slung on their shoulders. I had imagined that infantry used their rifles for shooting; not so—not in Ypres Salient. Imaginary security; imaginary aggression? Yet men died.
8
WITH sinking heart I pulled out my map and looked at it. It was the same map so it was hardly surprising that it looked the same. But what the devil had it to do with the mud bath in which we wallowed? My hands were not now trembling although I was certain of death, probably of the whole crew, but certainly for Allen and myself. What happened in the back of the tank I left to Sergeant O’Toole, that brave, ugly man with red face and protruding eyes and the biggest protruding ears I had ever seen issue from the sides of a man’s head. The first time he introd
uced himself to me as assigned as second-in-command to my crew he had stood as rigidly to attention as a knock-kneed man could and announced defiantly, his habitual expression, that he was an orphan.
Something heaved up in the middle of the tank with a grinding noise. I signalled to O’Toole. “Get out with Colombe and fix the unditching beam.” The two clambered out—to certain death I thought. The huge balk of timber, iron shod, had to be belted to the tracks so that they were locked to revolve together carrying the beam round under the belly of the tank and giving the track additional purchase.
They did revolve but the tank did not budge an inch. The beam scooped the mud out from under the tank; we were digging ourselves deeper into the mud. A louder, more raucous grinding than before—”Transmission has gone”, shouted Allen. The engine was racing, free-wheeling. He shut off the power. “Get out!” I ordered, and the whole crew tumbled into the mud. O’Toole yelled and pushed me away from the door. A bullet had spattered, missing my head. I had not heard it or been aware. The near miss they said, unlike the whining more distant bullet, made a loud crack—or killed you.
As I looked at my map and hands in the tank I felt I was floating about four feet above my self, Allen an interested and unfrightened spectator. This dis-association, de-personalization was a way of achieving security—spontaneous, automatic, but potentially costly as it involved not knowing of the imminence of death.
We formed, according to our training, a ‘strong point’. We scattered in a rough line between the tank and the position in which we thought the enemy lay. We had our Lewis guns and ammunition. If rifles were not used by the infantry, what could we do with our guns? If I knew where the enemy, or even Germany, was we could have fired in that direction. I got out my compass. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw we were facing in the wrong direction. Luckily for us I retrieved some capacity for scepticism; it delayed me enough for suspicion to ripen into certainty that the compass was disturbed by the mass of steel of the tank. We crouched in our shell-holes, fiddled with our guns to see the mud had not clogged them. Morning passed to golden afternoon; the sun came out, the gunfire seemed less and our tank, now sinking out of sight without help from the unditching beam, no longer attracted gunfire.
“Triplanes!” They were said to be Royal Navy reconnaissance machines. We showed our identity by putting our three discs on the ground. The planes, we had been told, would thus learn of our position. It seemed a miracle that they were not hit by the shells which, though fewer, were hailing down on us and must be weaving, with those of our guns, an invisible pattern in the air. “Shouldn’t think they will see these things or our tank”, said Colombe. “I would have other things to think about if I were up there.” Indeed, their loops, dives, steep climbs into the sky looked more like an exercise in evasion of an unseen enemy than a part of our life.
It was now 12.30; I could have believed we had been there timelessly. There was nothing to see but the unchanging mud, the faces of my crew, the spotless sheen of the guns contrasting incongruously with our caked uniforms and filth. There was no doubt of it now—the gunfire was less. Richardson produced some photos of his wife and children for me to look at. He was the grandfather of the crew—thirty-eight, twice my age, and much older than the rest of us. His wife, motherly looking woman, and the two rather lumpish children were displayed with pride, discoursed upon in detail and in confidence of a sympathetic hearing—I did not know why. Now I suspect it was more out of a feeling of compassion for my youth and inexperience than belief in me. Could anyone, outside a public-school culture, believe in the fitness of a boy of nineteen to officer troops in battle?
I had no idea what was to happen next. No one said anything about tanks sinking in the mud or men like trees walking—except in religion. Battle orders I wanted—not Bible stories. There came a time when I began to feel that religion could likewise do with battle orders and fewer fairy stories: God is too much of a devil to be dealt with by the fairy stories of Birmingham business men. Krishna made Arjuna see that long ago. Would nobody tell me what to do?
Richardson fell silent. We watched the wastes of mud. Nothing, nothing, nothing. ‘We are Fred Karno’s Army, What bloody use are we?’—the words of one of our marching ditties seemed to fit our situation. “And, boys and girls”, said the parson, fresh from a conducted tour of the front at government expense, as he warmed to the peroration of his children’s sermon, “what do you think they were singing? All those brave marching men” (not sentimental Sunday school softies as you might think, but soldiers) “were singing, ‘The Church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ our Lord’.”
“Sir!” It was Sergeant OToole, asking permission to speak; battle or no battle, the conventions, the rules must be observed. “Yes sergeant?” “I think things are livening up over there.” His voice was urgent.
They were indeed; a flurry of figures, the first I had seen since the early morning ‘wood’ had appeared; some seemed to stumble. “I think they are our chaps retiring sir!” They were about a hundred yards in front and slightly to the left. Had I managed to direct the tank to the wrong side of the hill? German machine-guns were now joined by the rapid high-pitched note of ours. Down came our barrage and the whole inferno broke. Cursing our luck we ‘stood to’ our guns.
An officer appeared and ducked down by my side. “B Company? Your orders are to withdraw to forward Company HQ”, he shouted.
“Oughtn’t we to stay—Lewis guns, plenty of ammunition.”
“Do what you bloody well like—I’ve told you the orders.” He was cross. So was I. Why the devil start arguing? I wanted to be cleared out; the Angel of Mons itself could not have been more welcome than this apparition. In 1940 it would have been said he was a German spy dressed as an officer, causing the gallant armies to fall back.
The officer had gone. I knew—I still know—I should have stayed, orders or no orders. Even junior officers are supposed to show initiative. “Come on chaps!” I yelled, waving them back. Breathless, hot, worn out, we got back to the Advanced HQ in a German pill-box. Victories, said Churchill after the terrible defeat in Malaya, are not won by retreats however glorious.
Despard, a tank commander rather older than the rest of us, was waiting to go in. A bullet, God knows from where, hit him in the belly. He sank down.
“What’s up?” I asked. I was surprised; more surprised still when he said he was “finished”. The pallor of his face increased.
“I knew it. When that bloody… magpie… came this… morning”, he gasped, “I knew my number was up.”
I felt stunned. I could not think what to say to this queer fatalistic Irishman. How could he possibly be convinced, as he was, that a magpie was more obviously the cause of death than a bullet? He died some two hours later.
I was called in to the Company Commander and saluted. “Despard has just been shot sir.”
De Falbe looked pained. “Nothing serious I hope.”
“He thinks he’s dying sir.”
“Dear me, dear me. Poor fellow.”
The pill-box was relatively quiet though the door-slamming went on and the rat-tat-tat of machine-guns reminded one that the front must be near—if a bullet could kill a man it must have been fired from nearby.
“Sit down my dear chap.” The major’s voice was soothing. “What a pity; such a nice chap too. You did say Despard, didn’t you?”
“Despard sir.”
“Yes, yes of course. That’s what I thought you said. I’m not deaf you know. Have some port my dear fellow.”
On the table shone half a dozen beautiful port glasses of a size unknown to me. He was—had he been an ordinary officer—what I would have called ‘drunk’. But the fruity voice, the gentle, melancholy tones, were no different from what they ever were. How like the White Knight in Alice he was.
“Thank you sir.”
“What? What did you say?”
“I said ‘Thank you sir’.”
“Don’t mention it my dear fellow
. Now, we must get on. Where was I? Oh yes. But do have some port first won’t you? Sergeant, just pop out and see what it’s like will you?” He leant confidentially towards me. The blast as the door opened and shut again prompted his next remark. “Very rough night. Doesn’t do to have these chaps hanging around when we have secret stuff to discuss. Now, tell me, what was it like?”
I told him, and explained that I had lost my tank. He nodded sympathetically.
“I knew it was rough. I was afraid it would be.”
I said I regretted having had to withdraw during the counterattack and after we had formed a strong-point. He was getting bored. So was I. I felt I was beginning to believe we really had formed a strong-point.
“It was really very good.”
“What was sir?”
“The strong-point.”
“Not really sir.” I was trying to struggle back to the world of fact.
Was my Company Commander drunk? These ‘old seasoned casks’, as Mrs Jorrocks said, are not easily made drunk. I had not—then or since—known what it is to be seized by the joy of battle; taken ‘by the throat’ as Julian Grenfell described it. My sense of reality made me too leaden-footed even to run away.
Mercifully the Major’s boredom and my fatigue asserted themselves. “My dear boy, you must be tired out. Get back to camp now. Carter, get these chaps to camp.”
Carter drew me aside. “Tomorrow the brigade intelligence officer will be interviewing you. Your chaps are in the trench outside. Get them together back to the Canal. There should be a lorry there—if it hasn’t been blown up.”
Outside I thought the shelling, though heavy, was less than it had been. Our bedraggled and exhausted band stumbled together and shuffled off towards the track leading to the Canal rendezvous. It had become lighter. Just time, I thought, to get to the track before dark—maybe even to the Canal.
Harrison, Quainton’s driver, had attached himself because Quainton and his crew, also without their tank but otherwise intact, had gone off in front of us without him. About ten minutes later we saw them a hundred yards or so in front. We could not catch up. In fact, as we stumbled and floundered with our heavy loads of guns, ammunition and equipment from one water-logged shell-hole to the next, I felt increasingly afraid that we could not get to the track. Dread of spending the night in that bog made me drive myself and the crew desperately to reach the track, now an incredibly long fifty yards in front. I relieved Allen of his load which was now beyond his strength.
The Long Week-End 1897-1919 Page 15
