Love and the Loveless

by Henry Williamson

  “General Ludlow is the Area Commandant.”

  Brig.-General W. R. Ludlow was out when they got to his headquarters. “You’ll have to wait until he returns.”

  “But I have urgent information, sir. Why can’t I be allowed to telephone?”

  “I might have believed you, if you hadn’t gone too far, and put in that bit about getting into Passchendaele village,” said Brendon. “You see, I happen to have read the latest situation report! No! You’ll stay here, with me, until the General returns. I’m putting you in charge of an officer, who will be responsible for your carcase. Tell my groom,” he said to the sergeant, “to bring round my charger now.” He went to the lavatory.

  When the horse arrived, Phillip said to the groom, “I’ll just try this for the major a moment,” and vaulting into the saddle, kicked in his heels, and galloped away.

  While he was cantering along the grassy verge of the road to Dunkerque, the Commander-in-Chief, at his H.Q. in Montreuil, told a meeting of war correspondents that the failure of the battle of Poelcappelle two days before had been due solely to mud. “We are now practically through the enemy’s defences,” he said. “The enemy has only flesh and blood against us, not ‘blockhouses’; they take a month to make.”

  *

  His first feeling was of dream-like strangeness that he was where he was, his voice was hardly of himself, with the thought that they must see through him as nothing. His former belief in himself as someone above the ordinary ruck left him. He was quivering with the long ride, following the exhaustions of the previous night. He answered the Brigadier-General’s questions, wondering if some were traps, because the Colonel had asked almost the same questions already. They must be testing his truthfulness.

  “A yard in ten minutes, did you say?”

  “Yes, sir, that is what the Brigadier in the Green House said to Major West. ‘Some of my men in the Ravebeek below Bellevue took ten minutes to advance a yard, and were sitting ducks’.”

  “And Bellevue is now wired, you say?”

  “Yes, sir, belts of wire twenty-five to thirty yards deep.”

  “In front of the mebus line?”

  “Yes, sir. Well in front of the pill-boxes. And the pill-boxes themselves are wired.”

  “In addition to the twenty-five–thirty-yard belt?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Show me on this map.”

  Again the points were gone over. Then, “Have you had any sleep since yesterday morning?”

  “No, sir.”

  “When did you last have some food?”

  “I think it was the day before yesterday, sir.”

  “I’ll have some sandwiches sent in at once. And some coffee? I think I must ask you to dictate immediately a report of what you’ve told us. Colonel Firling will take you to the next coach, where you will be undisturbed.”

  The idea of dictating harassed him. He felt he would have nothing to say. He was taken into an office, everything like new, polished, neat, exact. A table with pens, roll-blotter, new nibs, pencils, erasers. Blue pencil, red pencil. Thick foolscap paper embossed with the Royal Arms, and in small black raised letters, G.H.Q. France.

  “I’ll send in a stenographer. Is there anything else you want? That’s the door, should you want to wash.”

  “Sir, would it be possible for me to write my report? It won’t take me long.”

  “By all means! I’ll leave you to it. Ring this bell if you want anything. I’ll be in the next coach. Come in when you’ve done, will you.”

  Sandwiches came in, with a bottle of beer, corkscrew with stag’s-horn handle, polished tumbler, and table napkin. Chicken sandwiches! He wolfed them, swallowed Bass’ Pale Ale.

  What he wrote he did not know: his pen moved fast over paper. At last the account was written, signed, and taken to the next coach, to be typed. Colonel Firling invited him to sit down. He spoke about Westy, calling him Harold. He was surprised to know that the Colonel knew about the Lone Tree business at Loos. Then a half-bald major with large grey eyes and prominent teeth came in, wearing an R.F.C. tunic without wings, and Phillip was introduced to him. His mind did not take in the name, but the Colonel called the newcomer Maurice. He had some aeroplane photographs. The Colonel looked at them through a magnifying glass. Then he passed one to Phillip, and stood over him in a brotherly way while he looked at it. The chief points were marked by arrows in Chinese white, with names. He saw Passchendaele, Flandern II, Keerselaarhoek, Augustus Wood, Tiber Copse, and others.

  “Can you indicate just where you were when Harold was hit? This was taken while you were writing your report. The glass makes the detail plainer, I think.”

  He peered through the lens.

  “You said about twenty men made up the patrol of the Lancashire Fusiliers of the 197th Brigade. As you will see, there is no appearance of any casualties. Of course they may have been taken prisoner. On the other hand, they may have got back to our lines. If so, we should be hearing before very long.”

  “But the congestion, sir! The wounded are lying literally wound to wound, and hundreds more outside trying to drag themselves under cover!”

  “If Harold hasn’t lost too much blood, he might have walked in, don’t you think?”

  The Brigadier-General returned. “Do sit down,” he said genially. “I was most interested to read your report. You must look at it, Maurice,” to the R.F.C. major. He went on to ask Phillip about his service; and on hearing that he had fought with the London Highlanders at Messines in ’14, said that the regiment had done as well as any troops in France.

  After his report had been typed, he read it through and signed the top copy with a signature that didn’t look like his own. What he had said was pretty awful. Rifles useless; Lewis guns useless; wire-belts too broad to bomb across; wounded left out to die; hundreds brought in to Kronprinz and Waterloo regimental aid posts when barrage opened on morning of 9th; four hundred men wanted for stretchers on 146 Inf. Bde. front alone; weak, erratic barrage-fire; effect of counter-battery work nil; bayoneted rifles stuck in ground to mark wounded quivering in the gusts. Cries for help coming from all over the watery wastes below Wallemolen, Bellevue and the knuckles of the Passchendaele ridge. While half a mile above, on comparatively dry ground, on either side of the crest lay the equivalent of a private road, a deserted road, a road lying unclaimed by both sides, who were stuck either in concrete or in black mud, intent on old tactics which had confirmed the battle almost as an immovable object struck by an irresistible force. The way on the afternoon of 10 October to the Ridge had been open, behind the deadlocked lines, the one in concrete within barbed wire, the other rooted in swilling mud.

  What had he said?

  “Perhaps you’d like to lie down and sleep before dinner? I’ll show you your quarters. Your division is now on the way to join Third Army. We’ll send you down tomorrow, to Arras, by motor.”

  *

  Towels, shaving kit, two hair-brushes; somebody else’s pyjamas laid out on the bed. Stove glowing. Wash-hand basin; shelf of books. What did the Staff read? Kipling, Scott, “Old Luk-oie”, Sommerville and Ross, Nat Gould, and The New Pepys Diary. He fell asleep with The First Hundred Thousand, by Ian Hay, which was about the battle of Loos but nothing like it.

  *

  The kindness of the easy-going, beltless senior officers in slacks, who called one another either by pet or Christian names. Their simpleness. They seemed to have no feeling as they discussed, almost casually, subjects other than that of the war. Of course, no “shop”. But the odd thing was that when he had spoken they had listened to him, despite the return of his stammer, voice thin, hollow, hesitant, no good. The R.F.C. major had a stammer, too, and seemed almost a little foolish, in a clown-like, gentle way: large ostrich-egg-shaped face, almost protruding eyes and teeth while he balanced a glass of port wine on his bald patch and talked about Russia and Russian writers, only two of which Phillip had heard about—Tolstoi and Tourgenieff.

  They all listened
when he gave them his account of the Etaples mutiny, but his stutter returned with the dread twisty feeling, as he sat on his hands, as he began to feel hollow again; and his words petered out. One part of him was not in the least surprised when the R.F.C. major turned to him as their coffee cups were being filled and said, “You must write a book about what you have seen one day, when all this is over”; but another part was amazed that anyone on the Staff could say such a thing. No wonder Westy was happy among such men.

  A sergeant-orderly came in. He felt a shock when he said to the Brigadier-General beside him, “The Commander-in-Chief has arrived, sir.”

  *

  A quarter of an hour later, as he was smoking the second half of his cigar, he had another shock when the sergeant-orderly returned, to say, “Sir Launcelot’s compliments, sir, and he would like to see Mr. Maddison now.” For he realised that this was the Chief of the General Staff, referred to by the others as “the Professor”.

  He felt he could not get up. If he tried, he would fall. He put down the cigar, and waited for giddiness to pass.

  The Brigadier-General said, “I expect you still feel rather tired after your night out, but you will find the Chief sympathetic, although he does not speak very much. He will in all probability ask you to elaborate your report, and you will find him a good listener. Shall we go?”

  “To Sir Launcelot, sir?”

  “Yes, he will take you to the Chief.”

  The Chief! The Commander-in-Chief! Sir Douglas Haig himself!

  The feeling was almost that of going over the top in daylight, as he followed the Brigadier-General to another coach, before which sentries were marching up and down in light cast by arc-lamps. They were challenged; a pass-word was given and accepted. They entered a coach.

  The C.G.S. had a long oval face and a moustache, seen in the light of a green-shaded lamp. He got up and said, “Hullo, Jack.” Phillip was introduced, then left with the General with the star and crossed swords on his shoulder straps. The General had his typed report, on which, in blue pencil, were the initials D.H.

  “The Commander-in-Chief wants to see you.”

  Phillip followed him through a door straight into a room where stood the figure known from a thousand thoughts and a hundred newspaper photographs, astonishingly not so tall as he had imagined, but looking at him without a smile, grey moustache brushed down and away below a straight nose dividing a face that, he thought, was very clear and straight of look on the right side, and kindly, even gentle, on the left side.

  “Mr. Maddison, sir.”

  “Good evening, Mr. Maddison. Will you come here.” Phillip came to attention, bowed slightly without realising it, and walked across a carpet with a shield woven into it to a map occupying a large part of one wall of the coach.

  “Now will you show me where you went with Major West.”

  He did so, while a feeling of calm came over him. Dissolved was the figment of the great Field-Marshal. This man beside him was safe. It might almost have been Father, without the life-narrowing that Father had suffered. This father-like man was simple, and good like Father. Calm and at ease, he traced the route up the railway cutting, through the cemetery, and across no-man’s-land and the road running through fallen trees to the square tower of Passchendaele church.

  “It seemed to end the road, being bang in the middle of a straight perspective, sir. We got there without a shot being fired, and found the village unoccupied. The time was almost five o’clock. Major West said that with two battalions and machine guns we could have cut off the garrison of the mebus line from here”—pointing at Wallemolen—“to here”—east of Hamburg.

  While the journey had been gone over in words the Field-Marshal had remained attentive and silent.

  “Now will you tell me what you overheard when with Major West.” When this was recounted, the Field-Marshal said,

  “Now will you tell me what you yourself saw.”

  A feeling obstructed him: that this fatherly man, so strangely unlike the Famous Figure he had known, was more like Father than ever. Under the calm quiet scrutiny upon himself he sensed a feeling that made him doubtful, a little afraid of what he had written in his report.

  “Sir—if you please, sir—I——”

  “You may speak freely.”

  “Well, sir, I saw something of the effect of our machine-gun barrage about a hundred yards south of Passchendaele village. There was a German cemetery there, with wooden crosses, all of them ‘Here rests in God an unknown German soldier.’ The cross pieces were nearly all broken off about two feet from the ground, where bullets had clipped them almost in a straight row.” He went on hurriedly, “Well, sir, about the terrain. The going is not so bad on the ridge, on the sandy ground, but down below it is, well, dreadful. This is not a personal complaint, sir. In fact, sir—you see, sir, it has been all right for the transport and carrying parties, because we’ve had something definite to look forward to every night, that is, sir, getting back to some sort of home. We knew that after a few hours we would, with luck, get back to where we could sleep. But the men going up, in slow single file, holding to one another in the darkness on the duck-boards, or across where they have been destroyed by shell-fire, take as much as fourteen hours to get from the Pilckem ridge to the Gravenstafel. I—I think they feel that they have no hope now, sir. No hope before, during, or after an attack. The mud around the old beds of the beeks is nearly up to a man’s waist. And if he can get forward, his rifle or Lewis gun is useless. No hope if wounded, because he cannot crawl even into a shell-hole. In any case, sir, the shell-holes are now filled to within twelve inches of the broken rims. In fact, they connect, sir.”

  The Field-Marshal was silent, his gaze resting upon Phillip’s face.

  “All to whom I spoke, sir, said ‘It’s murder’. These were the rank and file, and the junior officers. I think some thought I had some sort of say in the matter of stopping the attacks, sir,” he said, trying not to give way. “My ob-observations, sir, are that I heard that phrase again and again, but not as a complaint, sir. It was accepted. It was different at Etaples, when I was there for an Infantry course, last month. I must apologise, sir, if I give offence.”

  “I asked you to speak freely.”

  “Well, sir, I think that’s just about all.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Maddison.” The Field-Marshal opened the door for him. “Good night.”

  “Good night, sir!”

  He felt exhilarated, he was free, he had crossed over the shadow line, left forever the old life. For him, Phillip Maddison, a Field-Marshal had opened a door. He thought of Father, who had always tapped on his bedroom door before entering, out of politeness, even when he had come up to cane him. But why was he crying?

  *

  While Phillip had been eating his dinner in “OA” mess, New Zealanders and Australians were taking over the sector between Bellevue and the Staden railway cutting. These troops cursed the departing “eh bah goom bastards” for leaving their own wounded lying out where they had fallen. The hardy Cornstalks, unsoftened by a lifetime in bad air of factory, shop, and counting house, set themselves to bring in as many as they could. Four hundred bearers from one brigade of the New Zealand division were put in to clear the Second West Pennine wounded.

  They were exhausted at the hour before dawn, following upon the difficult walk-up from the Pilckem ridge, but they recovered after a meal of salt beef, hard biscuit, and chlorinated water.

  At 5.25 a.m. Phillip, lying awake between strange white sheets, heard distant reverberation; covering his head with a blanket, he abandoned himself to thinking about Lily, and Westy, almost twin souls.

  *

  The New Zealand division, on the right of Second Army, was at that time floundering to the attack opposite the wired pillboxes between the Wallemolen and the Bellevue spurs. Between them and the Germans were the swamps of the Ravebeek.

  The 3rd Australian Division was on their right, in the positions recently held by the Second Wes
t Pennine. It was almost the same plan of attack for the fifth step as that which had failed three mornings before. On the left of Second Army New Zealand engineers had laid, during the darkness, five coconut-matting tracks across the morass of the Ravebeek, hidden by the drizzle which turned to luminous fog the light-balls of the Germans, fired from their mebus. About zero hour, 5.25 a.m., the wind became stormy and brought drenching rain, through which the infantry struggled up the slope to the line of pill-boxes, which they had known since the night before to be protected by deep wire entanglements. There they tried to cut paths through the wire with hand clippers, under heavy enfilade fire from pill-boxes. The second and third waves joined them. Within a few hours 100 officers and 2,635 other ranks had fallen, among them soldiers who had got through the 30-yard-thick wire-belt, only to be shot against the apron tangle surrounding the 5-foot-thick concrete pill-boxes.

  *

  After breakfast, Phillip said good-bye, and wearing a greatcoat lent to him by one of his hosts, seated himself beside the driver of a staff Vauxhall. The hood was up, rain drove across the green meadows and ploughed fields, shutting out the view, which anyway would not be very interesting, he felt, as they drove along the road to St. Omer. The destination was Arras, by way of Hazebrouck and so to the mining area around Bethune, with its desolate memories of Loos, when ‘Spectre’ West had been wounded.

  *

  It was later he learned that the 9th Australian Brigade on the right had got up the slopes of sandy ground, and, having suppressed machine-gun nests in shell-holes, had gone on astride the Passchendaele road almost to the ruins of the village, where they found some survivors of the Second West Pennine Division, under a wounded staff officer with a black patch over one eye, who had formed some sort of strong-point there. They were firing at Germans retreating from the Wallemolen spur across the highway, beyond the ruins of Passchendaele.

  When a runner brought back a message, at 10.50 a.m., that the 9th Australian Brigade was holding the high ground above the line of pill-boxes where the checked New Zealand troops were lying, the Major-General commanding the 3rd Australian Division at once decided to make an enveloping attack—a right hook, as he put it—with a reserve battalion of one of his brigades, in order to pass Passchendaele village. He was stopped by order of the British Lieutenant-General commanding the 2nd Anzac Corps, who had made plans for another attack to take place at 3 p.m. that afternoon, in the manner of the frontal assault which had failed three days before, and again that morning.