The Golden Virgin

by Henry Williamson

  “We’ve got a listening set continuously manned, we’ll be passing it soon.”

  Padding on the sand-bags, on which his big toes sometimes fluffed, and sweating in the close air, they came to a bay lit by a candle stuck in an alcove in the wall, where a man in shirt-sleeves was sitting, back to bag-upholstered wall, reading a book, headphones over ears with wires leading into a box beside him.

  “That’s the C.R.E.’s new pet gadget—he calls it a ‘geophone’,” whispered the subaltern.

  The listening man lifted his eyes from the book, made a washout movement with one hand, then went on reading. When Phillip bent to find out what the book was, the listener held it up, open at the title page for him to see; he nodded as though with anticipatory appreciation. It was The Egoist, by George Meredith, an author Phillip knew only from a poem in one of his younger sister Doris’ school-books, Love in the Valley, which was pretty good, with true descriptions of a barn owl flying, and a nightjar reeling above the bracken on Reynard’s Common, sitting along a branch of a silver birch. But he could not read such things, or think of them, out of England.

  After a long time, it seemed, the tunnel became slightly wider, and they came upon men sitting on the floor, silently passing back a solitary sand-bag as carefully as if they were middle-aged devotees of some secret baby-cult. The sand-bag was laid, with extreme care, on another bag stacked with others beside one wall. The sapper officer put finger to lip before creeping forward, very slowly, to the end of the gallery.

  Two men only were standing at the face of the chalk. One held a carpenter’s wooden auger. He turned it with extreme caution several times, before pulling out the bit slowly, for the chalky droppings to be caught by his mate, in cupped hands, beside him. The droppings were put into a sand-bag held open by a third man sitting on the floor. A fourth man then gave the second man a bottle, which was tilted into the auger hole. When the liquid had been in about a minute—while everyone waited in complete silence—it was then scraped out in the form of chalky paste, with the aid of a long thin wooden scoop. Then the boring began again, as slowly and silently.

  *

  When they were up in the trench again, in dazzling light, the sapper subaltern explained that the gallery was one thousand and thirty feet in length, which brought it directly under the German fort at Y Sap. The extreme caution was necessary, he said, because of what had happened recently when the 183rd Tunnelling Company had been mining Russian saps, to provide covered communications across no-man’s-land into the German front trench—“The idea of these is to blow the ends in by small charges, for the infantry to debouch through at Zero hour. This particular sap was considerably deeper than the others, and the chap pushing the auger at the chalk face suddenly staggered forward, the point of the bit having unexpectedly penetrated a Hun officer’s dug-out.”

  “Good God!”

  “Fortunately our men are Tynesiders, miners in peace-time, and were on their toes. They saw what had happened, and stood absolutely still. The bit had come through the last of the chalk, and was up against the upright deal planks lining the dug-out, with a couple of inches of air-space in between wood and chalk, to act as a buffer I suppose. The old Hun didn’t suspect anything, and there’s a hundred pounds of ammonal tamped in at the end of that particular Russian sap at this moment, ready for Zero hour.”

  “How deep was the dug-out?”

  “Well, our sap was thirty feet down, deep enough to prevent it being blown in by all but the heaviest howitzer shells.”

  “Has that been reported? I mean, that the Hun dug-out roofs are thirty feet down?”

  “I don’t think a point was specially made about it in the report.”

  Thanking his host, and inviting him to call and have a mug of whiskey and a slice of plum cake in the company dug-out when he passed that way, Phillip hurried back to Captain Bason, who was seated at a table signing returns with the company clerk, a lance-corporal.

  “I say, I think I ought to see the C.O. at once, skipper.”

  Captain Bason went on writing. Then, after some time he said, “What about, old sport?”

  “I think I have something he will want to know, rather urgently. It’s really a sort of private matter between us.”

  Ray, who was in the shelter, said, “Don’t tell me you’ve got the job of private bum-boy already?”

  Ignoring this remark, Phillip said, when Captain Bason continued to write upon the paper before him, “Well, I didn’t mean exactly private, but I think I’ve found out something the C.O. wants to know.”

  “You don’t say!” replied Bason, good-naturedly. “What do you know that only a colonel should know? By the way, he was round here while you were on your Cook’s tour, with Kingsman and Milman, and asked where you were.”

  Before Ray could say anything further, Captain Bason went on, “Ray, go round to the C.S.M. and check up the trench stores that we’ll have to hand over when we go back to Querrieu. Come along in, corporal. See that these returns go down to Ovillers Post with the ration party this evening.”

  When the corporal had followed Ray out of the shelter, Bason said, “Now then, what’s the trouble, young Phil?”

  “I think I may be on to something the C.O. wants to know rather urgently.”

  “Then it’s personal? Nothing about the battalion?”

  “In a way, it concerns the battalion. But he told me in confidence.”

  Looking at him sideways, with narrowed eyes, Bason said, “Can’t I, as your company commander, know about something that concerns the battalion?”

  “Well, skipper, I think Col. West ought to know it first.”

  “If that doesn’t take the biscuit! Who the bloody hell d’you think you are?”

  Phillip had not seen Bason looking before as he was looking now. The amiable, easy face, with the long thin brown moustache, untrained and untrimmed, had a look of a stubborn pink pig standing motionless, its eyes fixed sideways and upward. “If you can’t tell me, as your company commander, then I’m b—d if I’ll let you go sucking up to the Colonel, just because you knew him socially before you joined this regiment! Who the hell d’you think you are? What’s the idea? Want to push out Milman as adjutant? Why, you’re only a wart, and under my orders, and don’t you forget it! You’ll bloody well stop with your platoon until I bloody well tell you to go, and anything you have to report, you’ll report to me! Now clear off back to your post, and let’s have no more bloody nonsense from you!”

  Standing to attention, Phillip said, “Sir! I request permission to see the Commanding Officer.”

  “I’ll bloody well put you under arrest if you don’t bloody well obey my orders!” shouted Captain Bason, rising from the table. “Push off!”

  “Very good, sir!”

  He went back to his platoon.

  Two hours later a company runner came and said he was wanted at Coy. Headquarters. There Captain Bason told him he was to report at Battn. H.Q. The skipper eyed him keenly, saying, “Now look out what you’re about! No talking out of school, mind!”

  “Of course not, sir.”

  “G’r’rt yer!” said Bason, imitating George Robey’s famous remark in The Bing Boys at the Alhambra. “G’r’rt yer! Come back later and tell us all about it.”

  Phillip was glad that the Bason was his old self again.

  *

  Boon brought in burnt corks and ‘Spectre’ West praised Phillip for his information, but said more definite evidence was required, and that the Brigadier had already approved his plan of trying to get into the Boche trench opposite. A box barrage was to be put round the sector at seven minutes past midnight for four minutes. Shrapnel and high-explosive from field guns would plaster the front line, leaving the section to be entered unshelled until the last two minutes. Then all batteries would put down a barrage from 12.9 a.m. until 12.11 a.m. That would get the Hun garrison down into the dug-outs. Meanwhile flanking parties would occupy shell-holes and sweep the rear lines while a party of picked men, cri
cketers all, would get into the front line. They would be armed with Mills bombs, daggers, and knobkerries. They would have blacked faces, and wear wash-leather bags over their boots.

  Two parties, each under a sergeant, would get along the trench, from both sides of the centre of the chosen sector, and form bombing blocks. “Your centre party will carry these experimental grenades of yellow phosphorus. You will detail men to stand by three dugout entrances. The grenades will be thrown down the two outside shafts, leaving the middle shaft un-bombed. The phosphorus will release dense white smoke, and choke any Hun below. They might still be able to fight, but there is no question of a fight. The sole purpose of your entry into the Boche line is to find out how deep the dug-outs are. You yourself will descend the middle shaft, wearing a P.H.G. helmet. This has special eye-pieces set in rubber sponge. It will have been soaked in a concentrated solution of sodium bicarbonate, to counter the fumes of diphosphorus pentoxide.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  “I repeat:—The sole purpose of the raid is to enable a descent to be made down the steps of one dug-out. You are to count each step going down, and again on coming up. Visibility for your descent will be provided by strontium flares. These flares on being tossed down the central shaft will burn red and give the effect of the dug-out being on fire. Any Boche below will, at first, keep clear of that entrance. When you have come up, a sergeant will go down, to check your count. Meanwhile the space between the top ledges will be measured, to get an average measurement of the drop between each ledge. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Phillip left a letter, to be posted to his mother, if he did not come back. In it he put some pimpernels and speedwells picked from around Ovillers Post.

  *

  It took two hours to get into position, crawling and resting, by the gap through the German wire. Singing in chorus came from the trenches in front. It was drowned when the barrage opened up with its intensive summer lightning over the valley behind, followed by the shriek and score of air. Red stars burst in the sky, arcs of fire opened in the German lines, while Lt.-Col. West crawled from one black face to another, pressing the hand of each man.

  Three streaks of fire arose from the German lines. Two broke into red balls, the third became a silver pheasant’s tail. Down fell the German barrage on their own parapet.

  Phillip pushed himself flat, next to “Spectre” West. His eye was near a wan green dotted circle on the ground: the luminous wristlet watch strapped to the black wrist of the wooden hand.

  He felt a strange exaltation. The light and clangour took away all feelings, so that he was a small centre of calmness.

  They lay there for what seemed a very long time, until the British barrage stopped. The German barrage was still dropping. When it stopped, suddenly, they heard shouting coming from the dim white German parapet.

  With hot-bowelling suddenness machine-gun bullets were cracking from groups of sparkles to left and right, all cutting across the German parapet, sweeping just in front of it from the left and from the right, so that some bullets seemed to be striking each other with extra large flashes. Then stabs of red came from the trench itself. The front line was held in strength.

  They lay there until the firing died down, and singing once more arose up from the dug-outs.

  *

  “The Brocken,” said Lt.-Col. West at midnight, when they arrived at Battalion H.Q. “Or some other midsummer-eve festival. I don’t know much about German mythology, but I fancy they celebrate in the Hartz mountains with song and dance about this time. Well, I’ve been able to get on the right side of the Brigadier, but Division is strafing him. Corps wants to know why they weren’t told in advance. I suppose I’ll be returned to the Commanding Officers’ Pool.”

  He pushed over mug, bottle, and siphon of chlorinated water. Phillip saw that his hand was shaky.

  “But surely, sir, with your record——’

  “My dear Phil, colonels are as common as peas in a bushel measure. One or another is degommé every day. One third of us get bad reports from our brigadiers.”

  “Good lord!”

  “Oh, stop being jejeune, for Christ’s sake! Everyone wants a scapegoat, and Corps is in very hot water already. Haig, I hear from the Brigadier, has complained that not one of the trench raids on its front has come off. Why? Because they’re held in strength. Why? Because the Boche knows our plans and realises they are based on illusion. If that illusion persists, the greatest slaughter in the history of the British Empire will occur on Z day!”

  “Spectre” West emptied his mug of whiskey, and cried, “Were you bloody well telling lies again? Did you pick up that prisoner in no-man’s-land? Was he in their front line, as you said at the time? By all the angels of God, if you let me down, Phillip, I’ll have you shot!”

  “I am sure the dug-out was very deep. It took me quite a time to go down, and then up again.”

  “Then why didn’t you report its depth to Milman?”

  “It didn’t seem important, then. I thought it must already be known. It was only when you made a special point of it, sir, that it occurred to me.”

  A salvo of 5.9’s swooped over, making for the valley beyond.

  “Spectre” West called to his servant to bring another bottle of whiskey. He poured himself a terrible lot, thought Phillip.

  “You know, the entire future of Britain and the Empire depends on the success or failure of the coming battle. The flower of the British nation, all the ardour, guts, and intelligence of a generation which has volunteered to do its damndest for what it believes in—Great Britain, and all that the Pax Brittanica stands for throughout the world—under the proud words Ich Dien—is gathered here in Picardy. I must empty my bladder. Don’t go away.”

  When he came back to the shelter he said, “How old are you, Phillip? Twenty-one? God, to be twenty-one again! The world in 1906, when I was up at Wadham, was from everlasting to everlasting, as Traherne wrote in his ‘Immortal Wheat’ passage. Now at twenty-nine I am a wreck, mental and physical. Do you know why? Shall I tell you?” He poured himself more whiskey.

  “Steady on,” said Phillip, putting out a hand to take the bottle. “Please don’t have too much. I give you my word that I know that dug-out was very deep, if that’s any help.”

  “Oh, I’m not thinking of that. Why didn’t you go and see my people at their pub in Lime Street, as you promised me when I was hit in front of Le Rutoire Farm last September? Does not your word mean anything to you? Or haven’t you got a word?”

  “I saw your letter from the Duchess of Westminster’s hospital on the ante-room board, in which you wrote that you were hoping soon to rejoin the battalion, so I thought it wasn’t necessary.”

  “You didn’t forget?”

  “No, of course not!”

  “Well, well, well,” muttered “Spectre”, staring at nothing. Phillip thought that he looked dreadfully ill. “I suppose Frances told you? No need to pretend, my lad. You don’t know? Well, here it is. I’ve been in love with her, my cousin once removed, since I came down from Oxford in ’09. Nothing doing.”

  He looked at his mug of whiskey. On impulse Phillip took it, and put it at the other end of the table.

  “You know,” went on the other, apparently not noticing, “I had a hell of a job to get back here again. I wouldn’t have had the hope of a snowflake in hell if ‘Nosey’ Orlebar hadn’t been at the War House. He got me posted to the seventh battalion, as second-in-command. Then I was offered a battalion.”

  “May I be excused, Colonel? I must empty my bladder.”

  He took the mug with him and swished the whiskey away. When he returned, “Spectre” West with elbows on table was saying to himself, “Bompity-bompity-bompity-bompity! A cricket ball would have done the trick. How many steps leading down? Bompity-bompity-bompity! How many bompity-bomps?”

  “I can only repeat that the Mills’ reports were muffled and soft, but then I was standing six or seven yards away from the
shaft. I could feel them, remote and dull, to be far under my feet, allowing for the fact that they were only Mills bombs.”

  “That’s the kind of objectivity I want! Chalk is soft stuff, of course, and absorbs an explosion. If those dug-outs are more than seven to eight yards below the surface, then only a 12-inch or 15-inch howitzer shell can blow them in. And in confidence, mind!—as is everything I’m saying to you—there are only sixteen really heavy guns on the Corps front. One 15-inch and three 12-inch on railway mountings, and twelve 9.2’s. Sixteen heavies to poop off at dug-outs possibly eight metres deep underground, in soft, shock-absorbent chalk, honey-combing half a dozen lines of trenches along three thousand five hundred yards of Corps front. Divide three thousand five hundred by sixteen, and you have one dug-out-busting howitzer or gun to every two hundred and twenty yards of front. Multiply that a mile for depth, for raking back, that’s one heavy shell for one-eighth of a square mile. In that area will be scores of machine-gun teams down in those deep dug-outs, each team of which has practised bringing up its guns and mountings in pieces, to fit together as soon as the bombardment has lifted. Where will their targets be then? Six hundred yards distant from the muzzles of their Spandau guns! I tell you Fourth Army is MAD!” he shouted, banging the table with his fist. Then he uttered a long sigh and lay down on his bunk, face to the wall.

  Phillip took the bottle from the table, and going outside, hurled it into the air. Then climbing out of the communication trench he walked beside it on his way to the line. Hearing the voice of the Brigadier coming down the trench, and since it was against orders to walk over the top, he cleared off before questions could be asked. Thank God he’d chucked away the bottle in time.

  Chapter 16

  THE YELLOWHAMMER

  There were four sections of eight men under a corporal in his platoon. Each section had rehearsed its particular and detailed function, for almost every moment of the assault, during the many practice advances, before he had joined Captain Bason’s company. Every man knew what to do, how to do it, and the precise time it should be done; but now, for the final exercise before the Generals, the time-table had been changed.