Love and the Loveless

by Henry Williamson

  After an early breakfast Phillip led his pack mules down through the wood. Sergeant Nolan was to lead them, to his disappointment. But Pinnegar had been firm. No more Cook’s tours. The donks were loaded with ammunition, water, oil, rations; unladen donks were to carry the guns and tripods. The Brigade was timed to leave the wood at 9 a.m. The young Brigadier had been given a distant objective, beyond Graincourt, a village about 8,000 yards behind the German front line. The Brigade was to advance beyond the village, take the wooded crest of Bourlon Wood, and hold the approaches into Cambrai until the cavalry arrived.

  There was half an hour to go. News came in that the Germans themselves had been preparing to make an attack from Havrincourt the following morning. Villages behind the first line had been full of storm troops. Now they were either dead, prisoners, or had run away. While the company stood by, field batteries passed at the gallop, one following another, to take up positions beyond the German front line.

  A message came through that the Brown Line—the second Siegfried position—had been taken.

  “I can’t believe it, Phil! There’s a catch in it, somewhere. You’d better get back, and get ready to follow on. Our brigade’s going through now. Cheerio! See you later.”

  “Good luck, mein prächtig kerl!”

  On the way back, he saw from higher ground an entire division on the move, three brigades in line, each battalion in column of route. It was a tremendous sight. He felt really keen about the war for the first time. It was the strangest feeling: he really had passed the shadow line.

  “It only wants the bandsmen in front of each battalion,” said Morris. The drivers cheered when Phillip told them the news. “We’ll soon be back in Blighty now, sir!”

  As the day grew brighter, he could see tanks crawling up and down the chalky lines of trenches, dragging wire behind them, and rolling it up. Long strings of pack mules passed, dozens of them. Shortly after 10.30 a.m. he could see, through his field-glasses, tanks and infantry about Marcoing. Then, farther on, as weak sunlight spread over the grey-green landscape, he could see tanks moving up to the crest of the Flesquières ridge, the equivalent of the Passchendaele-Broodseinde ridge in Flanders. Four hours to take—not fourteen weeks!

  It meant the attack had got through the whole of the Siegfried Stellung, into open country beyond. The Intelligence Officer said, “I doubt if Division and Corps will believe it!”

  Apparently confirmation of this staggering fact was required; for no cavalry appeared.

  In the meantime, something had happened on the Flesquières ridge. Shells spouted like waves breaking on a distant coral reef; thin black columns of smoke drifted from burning tanks. Three—four—five on fire were counted. Obviously a German battery had been missed, and was firing over open sights as the tanks appeared on the sky-line.

  In the foreground, clusters of men could be seen at work making roads. Other groups were laying a light railway; and carrying forward armoured cables to advanced brigade-headquarters—all as planned.

  *

  In the early afternoon the cavalry appeared, squadron after squadron trotting over the grass to the south. They went down out of sight, then reappeared moving in files over the cleared German trenches. Soon they dismounted, and the horses were led back, under cover. Was it as at Monchy-le-Preux, in the April attack, he wondered.

  After them came cyclists and motorcycles with sidecars in each one of which sat a gunner facing to the rear with a Vickers gun—the first troops of the Motor Machine Gun Corps he had seen. They bumped away down into the lower valley.

  When would the order to advance come? Drivers were sitting on horse-rugs on the ground, happily playing nap and solo whist for sous and centimes. French civilians, driving cows and pigs, and carrying bundles of clothing, appeared stoically in the British lines. A message arrived from Pinnegar, saying he was going forward to his new battle H.Q., and would send a message later where to take further ammunition, water, and oil, which were to be brought up by limber.

  “Where are our donks?” he asked the senior driver, a lance-corporal.

  “They should be back by now.”

  It was 3 p.m. Not much light remained.

  “I don’t like the look of all this,” he said to Morris. “It’s been too cushy. What’s behind us, to carry on? They called it a raid, didn’t they? That’s what it’ll turn out to be, in my opinion.”

  At 3.30 p.m. he left L/Cpl. O’Flynn in charge, and rode forward with Morris to the company headquarters which had been marked on his map the day before. It was in the second German line.

  Remembering the congestion and muddle of the transport during the first night of Loos, he must reconnoitre the way before darkness fell. Followed by Morris, he cantered through the wood and down the clearing to the old front line.

  It was a strange feeling to be riding upon a new battlefield, hardly damaged by shell-fire, passing German dead strewn everywhere, the wounded still among them, some sitting up, others lying back, in patient silence awaiting their turns for stretchers. Everywhere rusty tangles of wire had been lugged about, and left in untidy heaps. The firing trench was hardly blown in anywhere. Hares ran about, stopping to peer with ears taller than the grasses. A few shells droned down and spouted blackly, “just to show there’s a war on, sir”, said Morris.

  They crossed the deep and wide main trench of the first line, upon a wooden bridge just completed. Ahead lay the ruinous red village of Havrincourt. The pre-war road to it, crossed by the lines, had been cleared of fallen trees by hundreds of pioneer troops and was now being filled in and levelled. A concrete shelter sunken into the road, with splays a foot above ground level, was about to be blown up.

  An extension of the Canal du Nord, with tunnels running under hills, was being built at the outbreak of war. Part of the works, abandoned in August 1914, was the Grand Ravin. This was marked on the maps as possibly a formidable obstacle. Running from south to north, it crossed the Havrincourt road. The tanks had feared it, as the unknown. But all had gone well: six fascines, enough to fill the Grand Ravin, and covered by chalk, gave enough stability for a staff motorcar to wobble its way over, pushed by half-a-dozen cheerful pioneers.

  Phillip dismounted, and leaving Black Prince on the road with Morris, went to look for Pinnegar. A Vickers mounted forward of the trench parados drew him: yes, it was 286 M. The new H.Q. were in a deep dug-out, which had flowers painted on the wooden walls below. By candle-light and flash-lamp book-cases and pictures were visible on the panelling. The officers’ rooms leading off from the corridor connecting the main assembly rooms—lined with tier upon tier of bunks—were furnished with carpets, tables, brass-and-iron bedsteads with sheets, pillows, and woollen rugs. No wonder the Alleyman called it a Sanatorium!

  A gunner led him along a corridor, past a canteen. Broken bottles lay on the floor, and spilled liquids. There was a bar, with looking-glasses behind shelves on which bottles and cigar boxes still stood. A battle-policeman was on guard, beside a row of candles. It looked as though some of the moppers-up had mopped up more than prisoners. No doubt there would be a celebration party, too, among the red caps later on.

  “In there, sir!”

  “Thank God!” said Pinnegar. “I thought you were never coming! Have you got the limbers?”

  “Not with me, Teddy. I came to——”

  “Why the hell not? We’re waiting to go up to Bourlon Wood, and we can’t very well carry our bloody guns and belt boxes, can we? Didn’t you get my order?”

  “Only to stand by with limbers, skipper.”

  “That was Z 9. Didn’t you get Z 12?”

  “No, sir.”

  “But I sent it half an hour after Z 9, telling you to come at once, with all transport! Didn’t you get it?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “But you’ve come here!”

  “I came because I’d had no orders, and it will soon be dark. What’s happened?”

  “The usual balls-up. Division ordered the Boy General to
stop getting forward from Graincourt, until our flanks were secured, but the Boy was right up with the foremost infantry, and went on with some tanks he’d got hold of, and bloody well took Bourlon Wood! Now he wants all our guns at once. My God, I thought you’d have the sense to know something like that would happen!”

  “I wanted to do it, but thought for once I’d obey orders! However, I’ll go back at once, and bring up the pack mules, and the limbers! It will take—let me see—I can get back in half an hour. Then the return—nearly five miles—if there isn’t any hold-up, it will take us at least another hour to get here. I’ll be on the Havrincourt road between half-past five and six pip emma.”

  Why hadn’t he followed his hunch? Orders anyway took hours to arrive during a schemozzle. It was Loos all over again. The German line open, the wave spent.

  *

  Timeless rainy darkness upon congested track lit by gun flash and glare of bursting shell. Wire tripping and entangling, tearing at hand, puttee, and tunic, mules in chalky mud fetlock deep often kicking against barbing pain. Had the guide lost direction? Questions about the way to Havrincourt caused one explosion, a screaming flow of curses out of the darkness in front when a driver replied to “Who the hell are you?” with an innocent, “94673 Driver Gordon, sir.”

  Apparently some harassed colonel was under the delusion that the transport belonged to the Gordon Highlanders of the 51st division, “who hadn’t the guts to attack the Hun holding out all day at Flesquières, although there was no bloody wire and no f—— trenches or supports behind them! And for f—— miles on either flank and f—— miles behind Flesquières there was not a f—— Hun to be seen!! Call yourselves soldiers, and Highlanders at that? You’re the scum of Glasgow, you haven’t the guts to attack even from the rear, and now you have the bloody impertinence to tread my men into the mud with your b—— f—— mules, God damn you to hell!!!”

  Phillip had listened to this exhausted-man tirade while pushing Black Prince forward. He said, “I am sorry to disappoint you, sir, but this is the Two Eight Six Machine Gun Company of the East Pennine division.”

  “Then why the hell didn’t you say so at first? This driver said he was the Gordons!”

  “His surname is Gordon, sir. I wonder if you could tell me if this is the way to Havrincourt?”

  “It was when I was there half an hour ago, but whether or not it’s there now don’t ask me! Where d’you come from?”

  “Where you’re obviously going, sir.”

  “Where the hell’s that?”

  “Stellenbosch, mein prächtig kerl!”

  He moved away into safe darkness, laughing with an imaginary Mrs. Neville as words floated after him, “You’re a bloody fool, whoever you are!” Another of the many chance acquaintanceships of the Great War was ended.

  *

  The infantry was exhausted. The cavalry had come up late. The headquarters of the Cavalry Corps were still thirty-six miles away. The initiative was lost. So were many of the communications. Tanks had crushed the main cables; iron hoops of wheels of field-guns and limbers, entangled mules and horses, had broken the slighter wires of buzzer and telephone. Mounted orderlies and runners had been too slow. Carrier pigeons were half-trained, bemused by noise, subdued by the cold weather; wireless was not used properly because it was not understood. A steel spring had been transmuted to lead.

  All day the German garrison at Flesquières, near the five tanks knocked out by a wounded German gunner officer serving the gun himself when all his crew were killed, had held to their re-entrant while knowing that British troops had gone miles past them on both flanks. They were in the air; they stayed because it would be useless loss of life to go back over open ground, enfiladed from two sides.

  Because of the gap in the British advance, older Generals advised caution. The G.O.C. the Highland Division did not comply with a suggestion from the G.O.C. East Pennines that he should attack across the East Pennine front, but behind the Germans at Flesquières. He required the help of tanks, he said. So the lead weight dropped. The East Pennine General ordered his foremost Brigadier to remain where he was, at Graincourt on the left flank, far ahead and almost to the Cambrai road. This Brigadier, who was the Boy General, “saw no reason why the order should deflect him from the attack of his immediate objectives”. Two dismounted squadrons of King Edward’s Horse, inspired by the V.C. commander who had gone up to be with his foremost troops, joined the advance, and reached the long straight cobbled road which led to Cambrai.

  Darkness had fallen when reinforcements were heard coming up. A platoon of the Duke of Wellington’s was resting beside the road. The step was crisp and uniform; could these be the Guards? But as the column came near, coal-scuttle helmets were seen against the stars, instead of the more usual pudding basins. Some of the patients of the Sanatorium, from Flesquières, were escaping.

  The new patients lay still, fags concealed in practised palms; the company passed; then a party of toughs joined the rear of the column and jumped on the backs of a feldwebel, a hauptmann, and one other. Cries, shouts, screams as Lewis guns rattled. Fifty Germans were killed, and thrice that number taken prisoner.

  *

  At 10 p.m., when 286 M arrived, fighting by bomb and bayonet was going on in the trenches west of the beet-sugar factory beside the Cambrai road. By midnight all sixteen of the company’s guns were emplaced: seven around Graincourt, nine covering the gap to the sugar factory a thousand yards away.

  It had been raining for seven hours.

  The company headquarters were under the church. Going down to see Pinnegar, Phillip came to a sort of crypt. Brick pillars supported a vaulted roof. On the floor hundreds of men were lying asleep.

  Below the crypt several stairways led down into the chalk. They were steep, and timbered as usual, but had about double the usual number of steps. At the bottom was a gallery, lit along its length by electric bulbs diminishing in the distance.

  It was a maze of turnings and doors, and almost asphyxiatingly hot, with fug of tobacco smoke, sweat, paraffin vapour of Primus stoves, and burnt cooking fat: an atmosphere horridly quivering with the pulses of the diesel engine driving the dynamo in one of the rooms. The vibration seemed to be pumping the stomach, by way of the ear-drums.

  Going up and down corridors, trying to find Pinnegar, he came upon the engine room, getting a sickening shock when a door opened and two Germans came out, carrying red-banded boxes. A momentary shock: this was no subterranean invasion, but a clearing of charges of ammonal, many boxes of it, that had been hidden behind the boards of one wall of the little room adjoining the engine-house. The two German engineers had been running the plant for some months, it being divisional headquarters. The R.E. officer superintending the removal of high explosives told Phillip that the old Hun had apparently not overlooked the chance of the place being captured some day, for there were two hundred kilograms of ammonal hidden under the catacombs.

  “Was there a time fuse?”

  “No. The detonator was connected direct to the main switch, or what anyone would reasonably take to be the main starting switch, wired to the batteries. It was damned fortunate that the Boy General got here first, and ordered the two Huns to carry on with the lighting arrangements, for one of them said, in effect, that if that was so, he might as well point out that what looked like the main switch was a starting switch, at least not for the engine alone, but for the end of the war as far as everyone around was concerned. They added that if their services were going to be retained by the new board of directors, they thought it their duty to show the Herr foreman where to dig for the explosives. They were able to show the precise spots, under floors and timber casings of walls, since they had buried the stuff there in the first place!”

  Phillip felt sick. It was like being in the boat to Ostend, Pieter der Konig, going to see Mavis at the convent at Wespaelar. There was the same steady shiver of the engine through the walls, and the thud of shells or guns coming down from above was like the bow
s lifting up and plunging down into big waves. He looked for a lavatory, there must be one somewhere, but how would they get the stuff away. Pumping perhaps—pumping: his damned heart was pumping in his ears and pumping water into his mouth.

  Round one corner he heard horrible singing, as two soldier servants washed plates and cups in a bucket of steaming water, while smoking cigars. He opened a door, and saw a Madame Tussaud’s scene—one that would have made Teddy livid—an elderly Brigadier sitting in a crimson plush armchair, a round pedestal library table upon which his booted legs rested, a fire burning in a white tiled stove on which flowers were painted, a shelf above it with looking glass, before which stood a French carriage clock, its pendulum visible behind the glass case. On the walls were oleographs of the Kaiser, the Crown Prince, and Field-Marshal von Hindenburg; while spread upon the table was a large-scale map of Bourlon Wood printed in German.

  “What the devil do you want?” cried the Brigadier-General.

  “Sorry, sir, I thought this was the lavatory.”

  He returned to the little room adjoining the engine, and in the chalk cavity behind the ripped panelling found a convenient place. After all, exchange was no robbery!

  “Where shall I place my picket line, Teddy?”

  “Christ knows. I don’t. It’s up to you.”

  “I think the best place is in Havrincourt. There’s probably water there. Well, cheerio. I’ll be up in the morning, to see you.”

  The drivers had three days emergency rations: one tin each of bully beef, Maconochie stew, and pork-and-beans; a pound and a half of biscuits in a linen bag, and shares in tins of butter and plum-and-apple jam. Someone got a fire going behind a wall standing amidst the ruins of Havrincourt, facing away from the enemy—although flares were going up on either side as well as in front. Phillip uncovered the rum jar, and poured about a quart and a half into the steaming dixie of tea boiled with sugar. A cheerful timeless binge followed. The convoy had got through. Soon drivers were creeping on hands and knees to sleep beside bales of hay and oat sacks overlaid by tarpaulins.