At last; we threw ourselves onto the duck boards while it was still light. I decided to check our direction by compass; to my amazement the compass showed I was about to lead the crew back to the enemy lines. Unable to think and with no one to ask I followed the compass instead of my sense; it was an age before I was assured that I had been right to do so.
We were joined by a couple of tommies escorting some half dozen prisoners who were carrying two stretchers with wounded. Harrison, without any warning, broke under the strain; he had seen the Germans. “You bloody bastards”, he screamed. “You bastards, you killed my brother.” He had drawn his revolver and was blazing away at the stretcher party. Luckily OToole and I managed to disarm him, still fighting violently. We got him down and two others pinioned his arms with webbing belts from our equipment. He was frothing at the mouth. No one had been hit and his ammunition was exhausted. I stuffed his revolver, empty, into my pocket.
After some minutes he stopped struggling; the fit seemed to have passed. I told OToole to keep by him and not let him out of his sight. When we had re-loaded ourselves we all stumbled on, Harrison morose and sullen with his hands tied. Somehow we found the lorry and scrambled in. I managed to count our party, found the numbers correct, gave the all-clear and off we went with the usual jolt which threw us into a jumbled heap on the floor. I suppose we slept, but beyond the jolting and rattling I knew little more till the driver said we were at the camp.
9
THE Intelligence Officer sat on one side of the table and I sat facing him. “Can you show me whereabouts your tank got stuck?” It sounded simple, but though it was early afternoon I seemed incapable of thought. I said it was a bit to the right of Hill 40, that is, east of it—or was it west? It could be…
He waited patiently, “Here, show me on the map.”
Obviously it could not be west—it would be in the German lines. Nor east, because we would not have got into action. But, come to think of it, I was not sure we had got into action. I kept thinking of my shell-hole which I shared with a corpse from a previous engagement.
“Here”, I said with a wobbly finger.
“Or”, he said with scarcely concealed sarcasm, “possibly here… perhaps?”
I agreed that it was very likely. The corpse was lying andrews-cross-wise. It was thin, dessicated, not blown-up, and the green skin was stretched tight like parchment over the bones of the face.
“Sir?” He was asking me something.
“I said, did you notice when the alluvial changed to the cretaceous?”
I could hardly believe my ears. “I didn’t notice any change”, I said truthfully.
“There seems to be general agreement about that.” I was unable to interpret his intonation. Anyhow I was not alone; the fellow in the shell-hole had his mouth wide open, the skin stretched— by the mouth? Or did the tight skin pull it open? It—or was it ‘he’?—didn’t stink, for which I was thankful.
“You say the tank sank out of sight?”
I considered this. “No, it sank level with the ground. You could probably see it if you stood up.”
“But… didn’t you look at it before you went?”
“Not standing sir. I had nearly been shot through the head just before.”
“Well, yes, I suppose there is always the risk of that… in battle I mean.”
I was getting cross. “This was supposed to be a battle… sir”, I added.
He looked at my face for a moment and then studied his map. At last he said, indicating that the interview was over, “Well, thank you very much. I think that will do… Oh, by the way, did you see any infantry?”
I said they had been falling back when we left—a small bunch of them under counter-attack. “Here, pretty well on the top of the hill, a bit to the left I should say.”
“Ah! That’s very interesting”. It must have been my only intelligible remark. I saluted and left.
The Intelligence Officer was Clough Williams Ellis whom I was to meet after the war when he designed the War Memorial to our school dead. At this meeting in 1916 he could hardly have failed to realize that I was typical of the damned fools that were made combatant officers. We were not impressed by our highly intelligent staff, or I might have congratulated him on the arrangements for the blockage on the St Jean-Wieltje Road. No fool could have arranged the battle I had just seen for myself.
Cohen met me outside. As always he was pallid, skin drawn tight—oh God, not that again—sweating and tense. Seeing my face he laughed.
“What did he say? I liked the bit about the alluvial didn’t you? Or didn’t he ask you?”
We joined a small group. Despard was the only casualty. Cohen and Stokes, both twenty-two and so much more experienced than the rest of us, were exchanging notes on the ‘show’, ‘stunt’ or, as I hoped, 1^31116’. Broome, pink, baby-faced and foul-mouthed, joined us. His eyes wide open and innocent, he described how he had tripped over a bit of barbed wire.
“Before I knew what had happened I began to slither into this ruddy shell-hole. Must have been a 9.2—huge, filled with water. I didn’t stop till I was up to my waist. It stank—full of arms and legs and blown-up bellies. I tell you, it was a kind of human soup.”
“Liar”, said Stokes.
“It’s gospel truth I tell you; if you don’t believe me ask my batman—he’s just had to throw my uniform away—the whole lot—it stinks so awful. Kind of horrible sweet…”
“Oh shut up for Christ sake. We don’t want to hear about your swimming gala.”
“I tell you, it’s absolutely true.” He was getting annoyed. “The belly was ripped open and the guts…”
“Stank—they usually do”, said Cohen crisply.
“But—” expostulated Broome.
“Oh, put a sock in it. Shut up—we don’t want to hear about your battle. What did you do with your tank?” Stokes tried to stop the flow.
“It blew up. Direct hit.”
“A direct hit?,” said Stokes incredulously. “What happened to the crew?”
“Dead”, Broome simpered. He began to snuffle and wiped away a tear.
“What’s the joke?” asked Carter joining in.
“There’s no joke. These silly bastards don’t believe…”
“How did you get out if the whole crew was killed?”
“I don’t know.”
“You were having your soup—swim I mean—I suppose.”
“Well, that was afterwards… I think… I caught my foot in the barbed wire and before I could stop I was slithering waist deep into this sort of human…”
“Oh God! You’ve started him off again.” Cohen, Quainton and I had had enough and drifted away. “Do you know”, said Cohen, “I really believe that little bastard is speaking the truth.”
“He’s got the story pretty pat. We can find out—I’ll ask in the orderly room about his crew.”
It was true; they were dead—’missing’, they called it, ‘believed killed’.
One day, years after the war, I was swimming at a popular road house and was accosted by another swimmer. He had recognized me, but it took me a moment or two before there emerged from out of the matrix of the firm businessman’s face the pink baby-face of Broome.
“Those days of the war—when I look back at them”, he said, “were the happiest days of my life.”
“Impossible!” I replied.
“They were. I enjoyed every moment of it.”
Every moment; fancy that. I really believe that prosperous businessman was speaking the truth.
“How’s Harrison?” I asked Quainton.
“Oh, he’s all right. He’s simmered down again. Sorry you had all that fuss. I don’t know how he didn’t see us going off. I should have noticed that he wasn’t in the party. Talking of parties, here’s the Daily Mail. Do you think the papers will mention the show?”
“How about ‘We carried out some adjustment of our line’, or ‘We took X-thousand prisoners and reached all our objectives’? I
haven’t a clue what happened but I did see about half a dozen prisoners.”
“And we seem to have captured a lot of mud”, Quainton replied, “even if it’s only what I’ve got on my uniform. I think I’d better see what Perkins has done about it.” He went off to find his batman.
Cohen came up; he and I started to walk off down the road outside the camp when an orderly said the Major wanted to see me.
“Oh Bion, sorry, but I’ve got bad news for you I’m afraid. Will you take your crew up the line this evening and see if you can bring your tank back? It wasn’t knocked out when you left was it? We are supposed to salvage any tank we sent into action.”
“Sir, I don’t think we can do it without special equipment—it’s buried in mud, up to the roof before we left.” I was going on to tell him that the transmission had gone too and even if we could dig it out something would have to tow it back, when my eye caught the expression on the face from which the soothing tones and quiet voice proceeded. His moustache drooped, his face was flabby, but his green eyes were hard. This unmilitary figure had always frightened me.
“I know my dear boy”—he still frightened me—”Silly isn’t it?” As he spoke he reminded me of the soothing, almost oleaginous tones of the parson—he of the ‘and-what-do-you-think-they-were-singing?’ infamy—when he pronounced the words, ‘Hear what comfortable words Our Lord saith’. (“I know dear boy, something humorous I think—with boiling oil in it.”) I thought it best to hold my tongue.
“Don’t risk the lives of your men”, he added, “If the fire is too heavy come back.”
I saluted and went out. The aristocratic—and he was aristocratic —alcoholic—and he was alcoholic—is not to be treated with the sort of familiarity which one might dare to assume with a man-eating tiger.
“What luck?”, asked Cohen who had waited for me.
“Going to fetch the tank back.”
“Mind you don’t get your feet wet—I should take an umbrella if I were you.”
I went to rout out Sergeant O’Toole.
10
THE lorry was waiting, so was the Canal, so was Number 5 Infantry Track. I was disappointed to see it was an unmistakably quiet night. If we found the tank again… what? We could beat it with shovels so the enemy would open fire. “We got there sir, but the enemy fire was so heavy they beat us off it every time…” But in fact I was too green to think of it. Later one became more of a veteran liar.
This time our journey was easier. We had only revolvers, the heavy service Colts, and little ammunition instead of those Lewis guns which seemed both flimsy and made of lead. At one point the ground became dark and lumpy; there were men resting or sleeping—a relief party.
A lump detached itself and came up to me. “Who are you?” it said. I told him. “And you?” “Number 17XY battery—gunners.” “What’s it like forward—do you know? He told me it was very quiet. Of course I could see that for myself. In any case we were on one of the well-worn infantry tracks so clearly marked by the duck boards that the enemy gunners had registered it weeks ago. If it were not ‘very quiet’ the track would be spouting with high explosive and the air above whining.
The clouds parted and a shaft of moonlight revealed us momentarily to each other. “Good God! It’s you Bion isn’t it?” “Bonsey! E. K. Bonsey!” I remembered him at school, a couple of years older than I, studious, wearing spectacles; I neither liked nor disliked him.
Now, sixty years later, that momentary moonlight contact is etched on my mind. We walked a few yards. In the quiet a groan came from the mud in the distance, followed by a cry further off. I was listening—but not to Bonsey. How queer! Like marsh birds, innumerable bitterns mating. Or perhaps, a more comfortable vision, the moonlit plain near Avignon bathed in light, alive with the cheerful songs of nightingales spreading a web of sound.
“What’s that?” I said—as if I didn’t know!
“I was just telling you”, he said, exasperated. “Don’t go off this track. You may get wounded, or just sprain an ankle and you will sink into the mud and drown. No one will ever find you. Listen!”
We did. Sometimes it stopped for a minute or so and then the chorus broke out again, not raucous or crude—gentle. Dante’s Inferno—but how much better we do these things now.
“Do you mean no stretcher bearer gets them?”
“No stretcher bearer would be such a fool. Your unit might save you, the regimental stretcher bearers. Haven’t you heard of the RAMC? The Rob All My Comrades boys?”
Of course I had—and have many times since, particularly from the RAMC itself which is determined that the particular stain should not be forgotten by its members, though it cannot turn it into an honour like the spats of the Royal Highlanders, or the muzzle on the Bear of the Warwick family.
“Shut up! Shut up! you noisy sods, you bleeding pieces of Earth.”
But they didn’t; and they don’t. And still the warning voices sound in answer to the sufferers of bereavement, depression, anxiety. “Don’t go off the beaten track. Don’t do as the psych-o-analysts do. Haven’t you heard? Pay Stills Your Conscience Here. Don’t go off the beaten Church. Remember Simon Magnus. Leave your mind alone. Don’t go down the Unconscious Daddy: Let the Gold Mine come up to you.” How wise! How very wise!
Those guns would not fire. “Good-bye old man”, we said to each other. “Good-bye! See you in Peace-time!” What morale! What poppycock!
We trudged on. Now, not for the first time, I wonder why. It was most unlikely we could find the tank; if we could there was nothing to do. Eight men cannot lift forty tons of steel out of the mud. You can’t win a war by retreating, said Churchill. But you can’t win a war with a bullet through your head. And yet I knew a very cheerful man who had a bullet just there—through his brain. It must have been the only place where it cannot have done any harm.
Some shells fell; it shut out that damned groaning. I called to O’Toole, “What the hell are we doing here sergeant? You saw that bloody tank!”
He gave the matter some thought. “No idea sir.” At least he remembered to say “sir”.
“Sergeant, that is the fourth shell I’ve heard fall in the last five minutes. It is too much. We must not risk the lives of our men. At any moment the place will be aflame. My orders to you are to fall in the crew and march back.”
“Very good sir.”
It seemed like bravado: it seemed like common sense; a combination which was a luxury indeed.
I thought I would have a last word with Bonsey on the way back, but he had been killed. Requiescat in Pace—”See you in Peace-time old man”. I was shocked; I was shocked to find I did not care. I was to become more familiar with the intense comradeship of war, every scrap of gesture, intonation, etched apparently indelibly. A week later it was over and yet not so. One still seemed to know the stout heart, but the name, the history, the parts that lay outside the limits of time and space where he entered into the sphere of one’s own life, they did not exist. Married? Single? How many children? Military Cross I see; university graduate. Father as rich as Croesus since he is head of that firm. Accounts for his uniform. Nice chap.
Married? Not yet. Related to that Celebrated Swindler. His father? Really! What does it feel like to have a Dad who’s in gaol? Shut up—or you’ll say it aloud. Doesn’t even wonder if I’ve heard of his Dad the notorious swindler. But—savoir faire. Fine presence. Hello, hullo, hulLO! What are those nobs under his tunic? Well, I’m damned! A steel waistcoat! Of course, if your father is a notorious swindler he can afford to buy toys like that. I didn’t know they made them now. Perhaps he had it made specially—by another swindler of course, because it would not keep out any ordinary bullet. No more use than the ordinary prayer books and Bibles which are always keeping bullets out according to the press. I’d rather wear my Bible over my shins or my balls. Obviously officer material—and anyhow, think of the row the press baron would make if he didn’t get a commission. Promoted at once— tank commander! Such an
outstanding fellow. Promoted again—company commander! Such an outstanding officer—must send him home to organize a new brigade. We want men of experience. England, Flu and Dooty. Dead in a week—the ‘flu got through the waistcoat. Nice chap. Shifty as hell.
I did not see the Major when I got back; he had had to go to HQ. He saw me the next day and was kindness itself. When I told him of how we had been unable to get through the barrage he said, without a trace of sarcasm, “Ah yes, I was afraid you would.” Where did he think the barrage was? “No good risking the lives of highly trained men. I am glad you used your judgement.” He looked at some papers—some officers thought he kept these papers especially for looking at. I saluted. “Goodbye dear boy—crew in good heart?” “Yes sir.”
For my part I had learned to keep a crew who wore their good hearts on their sleeves—for inspection, part of their kit like boots or blankets. I went out wondering why that man made me sweat with fear; perhaps he could see the ‘very heavy barrage’ far better than I could.
11
ON an exercise march a few days later we came under shell-fire. A lorry in front of us was picked up and thrown into the ditch; one man was killed, but the driver escaped. After the march was over I saw Harrison had been on the parade.
“How did he get on?” I asked Quainton.
“Oh he’s all right. When we were passing the lorry he shouted at the driver leaning against the upturned engine, ‘What’s up chum? Won’t it go?’ He’s back to his usual.”
The Long Week-End 1897-1919 Page 16
