Love and the Loveless

by Henry Williamson

  That afternoon Barrow, his batman, helped by Nolan, built a sand-bagged shelter against a few square yards of standing wall. It was roofed with corrugated iron and covered with sandbags, and was finished by the time Phillip returned from exploring the British old front line and Noman’s-land across to the German front line. He brought back a very small, beautifully made German portable stove. It was simplicity itself: a cylinder of sheet iron welded eight inches in diameter and eighteen inches high. There were fire-bars below and a door, a lid on top, and six feet of flexible piping. It was light to carry, weighing about ten pounds. With the pipe passing through a hole made in the sandbag wall, it was soon pouring out smoke, and radiating heat in the shelter, which was just long enough to take the stretcher-bed, which rested on old bomb boxes. There, until the company was relieved six days later, he lived warmly, enjoying the thought of being on active service, while his bank-balance was mounting up at home.

  They went back to huts in Colincamps, where the rest was spent in gun drill by the sections, and by the transport in carting cases of bombs and trench-mortar shells to forward dumps. After three days they returned to the line. Serious fighting was over; the weather was now the enemy. It was December, and the dark of the year. Snow fell on the 19th. A gale followed, with chilling rain. The company came out of the line on Christmas Eve, reaching Colincamps in the small hours of Christmas Day. There had been talk of an extra special Christmas dinner for the men; really good rations were to be issued this year, said the A.S.C., with a surprise for each man. The good ration turned out to be frozen pork and dried vegetables. These, boiled up together, were followed by a small slice of gritty Christmas pudding, and then the surprise—a ration cracker bonbon for each man, containing a paper cap.

  In the afternoon Phillip rode down to Albert. The leaning Virgin upon the campanile of the ruined red-brick basilica brought many memories, among them one of Father Aloysius, who had explained so much to him, and helped him to see life clearly against a background of death. But O, how lonely was life, after all.

  Through the cleared streets of the town’s square he passed, coming to the Bapaume road, a rising riband of grey mud red in patches from shell-holes filled by bricks, and ground by wheels and feet of men and beasts into liquid. Mules and horses were moving where once it would have been death to be seen in daylight. The transport animals had come across the battlefield tracks, their bellies looked as though swallows had been building nests under them, their ears were dejected, as slowly they walked back home to picket line and stable. He came to the old front line, now flattened and dragged about; littered, like the verges of the road, with rusty rifles, Lewis guns, helmets, shells, and other débris. Dismounting, and giving the reins to his groom, he walked, with clogs of loam clinging to his feet, about the old Noman’s-land of Mash Valley, where he and his platoon had gone over in July. Little was recognisable. Lips of the mine craters were trodden down, paths wandered among thin stems of weeds which had sprung up during the past summer. Many of the dead still lay where they had fallen, each an almost level suggestion of something wasted into the soil, with relict bone and fragment of uniform covered with little heapings of earth thrown out by tunnelling rats. A few runs were still in use, judging by the smoothness of entry and exit.

  A brass buckle; fragment of leather; skull with curls matted upon it; puttee coiled about leg bone; broken helmet from which sandbag covering had fretted away, leaving only the faded paint of divisional colours—everywhere the dead had merged with the ground. Where was Rose Avenue? He was lost, helplessly, in chalky waste. Ovillers was a disturbed whiteness, a frozen sea with thin, black masts. He moved on, searching. Pimm—Howells—Sergeant Jones—Marsh—Clodd—Hammond—Smith—Rybell—Johnson—the summer print of faces and places faded in the cold ruin of winter. Was this litter of burst and broken sandbags, collapsed and spilled, the trench where he had clambered out on that summer morning? This the wicker pigeon cage carried by Pimm, lying near a scatter of ribs, and, immediately by the handle, a cluster of tiny white finger and knuckle bones? Was that the torn-open petrol tin of water Pimm had been carrying when it seemed that a shell had burst near and thrown scalding water upon his own thigh? Was that his pelvis bone, in which three small coins, a franc and two 10-centime pieces, had been embedded by the shell explosion? He felt the scar in his buttock tingling as he stood beside what was left of Pimm; and closing his eyes, gave the emptiness of himself to prayer. Poor little terrified Howells, would he be identifiable by his bullet-proof vest, or had the phosphorus bombs which had caught fire while he carried them consumed bones and all to ash?

  Thousands upon thousands of helmets lay among the grass bents and thistle stalks. Anguish rose in him; wherever he looked, to whatever horizon—eastwards, to north and south from where he stood, the grey wilderness extended an arc of sky-line fretted by stumps of trees, soil and subsoil burst up, to fall and be tossed up and down again, abandoned, fossilised under the cold shearing of wind, and the helpless pity of the rain. His mother’s face came to him, while he thought that the spirit of a million unhappy homes had found its final devastation in this land of the loveless. He went back the way he had come, riding into a low purple sunset down to the valley of the Ancre, and up the track again to Colincamps.

  *

  It was freezing hard two days after Christmas, with ice an inch thick in shell-holes. Sergeant Rivett was reported by a military policeman when he was seen with his drivers trying to break the ice in order to water the mules. A chit from Division followed: This practice is contrary to General Routine Orders and must cease forthwith. The nearest drinking point, by canvas trough, was at Albert. It took some time to go there and return, thrice daily, on hard corrugated roads; while half the drivers faced an average of eight hours daily on fatigues. Then there were the nightly journeys with rations and S.A.A. which Phillip led, leaving the routine work of stables, forage-fetching, detailing of drivers, etc., to Rivett.

  Two men were admitted to hospital during this period, one driver with pneumonia, the other with a ruptured appendix. One replacement driver came, a loose, uneasy fellow of about twenty-four, named Cutts. He had a bad history, according to Teddy Pinnegar. Cutts had run away in the division’s first attack, and been sentenced to death by a General Court Martial. The sentence had been commuted to penal servitude for life, with suspension for the duration of the war. Good conduct might, it was understood, mitigate part of the sentence, perhaps reducing it to twelve years. Cutts had served in one of the territorial battalions, before being sent to a new unit.

  The word flabbergasted came into Phillip’s mind as he spoke to Cutts, with his staring brown eyes, curly forelock over forehead, large nose and loose mouth. He had about him the instinctive fear of a bullock entering the shambles. He spoke in jerks. Presumably he had no people: letters never came for him, and he wrote none.

  Sergeant Rivett, at the other extreme, seemed to spend his time writing letters, apparently to everyone he had ever known. Phillip, censoring letters, came to know more about the men’s backgrounds than about the men themselves. Rivett appeared to have imagination; he was, according to what he wrote, having a desperate war. Every “screed” was “penned” to the roar of guns (one, referring to a French attack “down south”, spoke of the “sullen mutter of Creusot’s seventy-fives”). Apparently Rivett saw daily what others missed: thrilling dog-fighting overhead. “Knights of the air” spun down in flames, far above the terrible conditions of trench warfare. One letter began, Dear Sir, and looking at the envelope, Phillip was startled to see that it was addressed to Major Anthony Downham, “A” Mess, Machine Gun Training Centre, Grantham. It gave a description of the burden of his work, then stated, somewhat mysteriously, “things out here have to be seen to be believed”, before concluding with respectful good wishes for the New Year.

  Most of the drivers’ letters were simple, laconic, uninformative. The war and wintry conditions were accepted mentally; no writer expressed his inner thoughts. Like himself
in 1914, they did not dare to form their real thoughts into coherency, any more than they dared to think of death. Their letters home were almost bare, ending with the phrase, in the pink. “Here’s hoping you’re in the pink, as I am.” How did it originate, in the pink? Of course, the pink of condition.

  Even when the hard weather had turned drivers’ faces and hands blue, they were still in the pink.

  Frost, turning mud to stone, brought different anxieties. Apart from the extreme slowness of the mules picking their way upon miniature Alpine ranges and frozen lakes, and despite the strenuous work by Lewis, the company shoer, in roughing the shoes of the animals, there was always the chance of one slipping and breaking a leg. Also, howitzer shells would burst on impact instead of boring deep into mud.

  The strange thing was that, with the coming of frost, no heavy stuff fell in the valley. Except for whizzbangs, all that came over was an occasional armour-piercing naval shell, searching for the British 15-inch naval gun on its multiple-bogey carriage. About the course of this shell there was some speculation. The scoring sound of its passage high overhead arrived simultaneously with a brown and yellow fountain in Albert; immediately afterwards there was a little pop, followed later by the crash of the shell exploding. There were several theories about the little pop which came down from the sky, followed by the scoring sound heard at the very moment the shell exploded a mile away. One was that the air above opened before the shell, and then clapped back, as when a bullet, passing by one’s head, cracked in the air. Others said that the report of the gun firing in Bapaume station arrived behind the shell, carried by suction. Or, the shell travelled faster than sound, it arrived before it was heard passing over. Phillip wondered if the report of the gun firing was dragged in the swirling air behind the shell; but no-one seemed to know the answer.

  What was certain was that Fritz was pulling out his heavies and going north to Arras, where Third Army was said to be preparing a push against the Vimy Ridge.

  A thaw set in at the end of the month. A full moon shone over the marshes, where the cries of wildfowl came eerily, in that it seemed strange that any life could remain among the charred poplar stumps. Rain fell heavily, prisoners with blue circles of cloth let into their feld grau uniforms daily scraped tons of mud off Station Road. They saluted smartly all British officers. Soon the mud was embanked six feet high beside the road, embedding dead mules and horses, shattered limbers, rifles, the rubbish of uniform and equipment. Snow fell out of the north-east, whirling over the wastes of the Somme battlefield, covering all with its white shroud, endusked in places by the black bursts of German shells searching for batteries. After the snow it was a world of clear sky, white earth, and austere sunshine. For a while desolation was shrouded. Up-ended mules were white mounds marked by four posts with tiny frost-glitters. Black was white—burnt poplar stumps, charred aeroplane frames, old corpses with faces like pickled walnuts were clowns, with caps of snow covering frozen hair. White was also black, where shells had burst and left small craters bordered with stains of smoke.

  *

  The snow had melted when frost struck hard, solidifying earth and water. Drivers crouched over their mules, beating icy mitten’d hands, with fingers annealed blue to crystallised reins. Phillip scrounged a roll of new cocoanut netting, one of a pile on a dump in Englebelmer, wondering what it was for. Back at the picket line, they cut it up to provide extra bedding for the drivers. Then, noticing that some donks had lowered an ear, sign of exhaustion, he scrounged another roll, making of it extra blankets for them; only to find that most of the mules had spent the small hours in eating one another’s coverings. Some already had the habit of gnawing the rugs of their neighbours, in the nervous misery of the nights.

  Sergeant Rivett told him that the cocoanut screens were for concealment from view. They were to be strung on posts, to hide traffic movement on roads under observation.

  “The French have been doing it, I hear. They call it camouflage, sir. I did hear that enquiries have been made about the two missing rolls from the dump.”

  Without warning, as before, the Assistant Director of Veterinary Services appeared. Phillip saw him, from his tent, looking at the ragged remains of what Nolan had called the Donks Spring Suitings.

  “What are your mules doing?” asked Major Pickles.

  “Resting, at the moment, sir.”

  “Where did that camouflage screening come from?”

  “It’s in case of aircraft spotting them, sir.”

  “I said, where did it come from?”

  “I found it on Station Road, sir.”

  At that moment Jimmy let out a bray, and began to eat its neighbour’s tattered shawl. “I think they like the oil in the cocoanut fibre, sir.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “Sir, about the rations. We can draw only six pounds of oats per day for our mules and horses. We’re down on hay, too. I can’t guarantee to keep them in condition——”

  “Who asked you to guarantee anything? In any case, the rations are short because a ship hit a mine and blocked Boulogne harbour. You’ll have to do the best you can with what you’ve got. No, that screening won’t hurt them. As you say, there’s oil in it. But that’s no authority for stealing from dumps, mind!”

  “Sir, nothing was further from my mind!”

  “Eh? Well, watch your step, young man!”

  *

  When a mule lowered both ears, it had given up. It stood awhile in dejection, nosebag and net of hay unwanted. In the black night it sank down, its eyes in the morning were glazed. He shot three prone mules above the eyes with his revolver, while the drivers stood by, mute with their own dejected life.

  Later he wondered how this had got to the ears of the A.D.V.S., who appeared in the afternoon and demanded to know why the sick animals had not been sent to the Mobile Veterinary Station at Albert. Phillip said he had not heard of the Mobile Station. The A.D.V.S. then rated him for allowing his mules to develop mud rash. When he had gone, Phillip looked up the causes of mud-rash in his book: “Debility following on overwork and generally poor conditions, such as prolonged exposure to inclement weather.” The cure—rest, warmth, bran mashes, linseed in feeds, dry covered standings. Where could he buy linseed? Dare he try a lorry-hop to Amiens? And incidentally get a decent dinner at the Godbert?

  When a temporary thaw came a loaded limber stuck fast. Several dismounted drivers failed to shift it, heaving at wheel-spokes, with two pairs of mules tugging. Pushing behind, Phillip added a hundredweight or so of mud to his person. Extra pairs were hooked in: eventually ten pairs failed to move it, now sunk to the axles, as a concerted pull by the weak animals was impossible. The limber had to be abandoned.

  The next day, a company runner came down with a written message from Captain Hobart, telling Phillip to go up and see him. He took his groom with him. Morris was an undersized Cockney youth who looked as he did because he had been starved in childhood—projecting teeth, prematurely set bones, slight curvature of spine and bandiness from rickets—large head on narrow shoulders, permanently reflective eyes. He had been a carter’s lad before the war, sleeping with the horses for warmth and love of them. In spite of his nut-like brittleness, Morris was strong, his spirit urging him on where others might hang back.

  With Morris following on Jimmy the mule, Phillip trotted up Railway Road, passing its junction with Station Road from Beaumont Hamel. From here the road rose to higher ground which had been the second line of German resistance in the recent battle. It led through the ruins of Beaucourt, and past the track, once a country lane, leading through a valley to Pusieux-au-Mont. The way, now open to observing eyes in the east, led to the Baillescourt Farm line. Here Phillip handed over his horse to Morris, telling him to return and wait for him in the Pusieux Road valley. Alone, he walked up a narrow sunken track which he imagined had formerly been used by farm implements and waggons coming out of Baillescourt Farm, the ruins of which lay on the edge of the slope leading, on the other side of
Railway Road, down to the former water-meadows of the Ancre.

  The track climbed away at right angles to Station Road, its western bank showing, every ten yards or so, the rectangular entrances of dug-outs, each about three feet wide by five high. As he came to the skyline, Phillip saw a group of figures wearing cap comforters and woollen scarves above greatcoats standing hands in pockets in a sand-bagged emplacement dug out from the gulley. “Darky” Fenwick greeted him, his dark eyes lighting up with pleasure.

  “The skipper’s gone to see the brigade major, and Teddy’s visiting the sections. He’ll be back about three. Come and see my Love Nest.”

  Down into clumsy narrow darkness, where a struck match and a candle flame seemed to make the close stale atmosphere a thicker fluid black. “I thought mebbe thee’d like a wee drap, Sticks.” They drank whiskey and chlorinated soda-water. Tiers of beds, wooden-posted and with mattresses of wire-netting, took dim shape around him. Outlines of galleries were seen but to dissolve at once in solid blackness, which seemed to give off a smell of rancid fat and something else he could not determine.

  “Aye, ’tis in all the German dug-outs,” explained Fenwick. “All Weather Jack says ’tis from Jerry eating sausages and smoking too many damp Dutch cigars.”

  “Well, thanks for the drink, Darky. While I’m waiting for the skipper, I think I’ll do a bit of exploring.”