The Somme

by Gristwood, A. D. ; Wells, H. G. ;

  In this welter of confusion and contradiction no one knew what to believe, and nerves and tempers alike were chafed to desperation. Anxiety played strange tricks with us. One man muttered to himself continually, gazing at the ground with strained, bloodshot eyes and answering not a word to question or entreaty. After a time his mutterings grew louder. ‘Here’s a bloody mess. Here’s a bloody mess.’ Again and again he repeated these words, and neither threats nor laughter could rouse him. So obstinate an introspection could have but one end, and at roll-call on the third day he did not answer his name. Fear had unhinged his mind. What became of him I never discovered.

  Our days we spent in the trenches, sometimes asleep, but for the most part keeping our cover. The news gradually confirmed our fears. It became more and more certain that we were outflanked on our left, and to guard against this new danger we began digging trenches and Strong Points at right angles to the existing line. Wire we had none, but we hid the newly turned earth under swathes of weeds and grasses and took advantage of hedges and trees for cover. The night we parcelled out between us so that two men shared guard for a couple of hours at each post. By the time ten men had completed their turns dusk had changed to dawn, and once again we stood-to in expectation of the crisis.

  The barrage seemed to slacken slightly after the first twelve hours, but it may have been merely that we were growing accustomed to it. Communication with Headquarters was often interrupted, and the telephone more often than not useless. The signallers were thus constantly at work upon the ground-wires in search of a breakage, and no considerations of danger were allowed to hinder their almost continuous labours. Somehow the wires were repaired; somehow the ration-parties struggled through the barrage. These journeys were deservedly unpopular, but they were an essential service, and few escaped their varied excitements.

  I was twice detailed for a fatigue-party to carry rations from ‘B’ Company in support to Platoon Headquarters. The whole length of tottering, battered Amigny lay between us and our objective, and it was out of the question to reach it by way of the main road. Accordingly our circuitous route took us through the scattered copses in front of our trench, and thence by a maze of lanes and footpaths round the right flank of the village. By this means we avoided the worst of the barrage, and, stumbling through the barriers of invisible barbed-wire that blocked the roads at every turning, ran, and walked, and ran again, to tumble breathlessly into shelter at the end of the journey.

  Returning heavily-laden – for no one wished to make a double journey – we must needs walk slowly beneath our burdens. (I remember there fell to my share a sinister box of chloride of lime.) The weight of equipment and a slung rifle gnawed savagely at our shoulders. By journey’s end we were dripping with sweat and panting like overdriven horses. Thirst sent caution to the winds, and, reckless of dysentery, we filled our bottles at the crazy well beside the cross-roads.

  It was on the second night that we first heard the distinctive whistling and popping of gas-shells. These symbols of civilization, however, burst with but a feeble explosion (that the vapour might not be unduly dissipated), and accordingly lacked the moral effect of high explosives. On our ration-journeys they sung through the long-suffering trees to burst all round us. Of necessity we must wear our masks, but every one wore them with a difference. Beleaguered at night in a properly adjusted gas-mask, a man is at once dumb, and blind, and predisposed to infectious and baseless panics. It is better to face the risk of a definite and appreciated danger, and accordingly we adjusted only nose-clip and mouthpiece. There were rumours of mustard-gas, but for the moment we preferred sight to safety.

  By this time the village was pandemonium, the abode of devils. The streets were blocked with fallen masonry, and everywhere the shattered houses were crumbling into rubble. The tireless thundering barrage lit the night with a flicker of yellow lightning. Like evil spirits of infinite power and malice, the shells swept headlong through the tortured air and fanned our faces with the warm blast of their passing. A dank white fog hid the moon and held captive the stench and smoke of the bombardment. Lonely sentries cowered helplessly in holes and corners among the ruins; wounded men, pale and haggard and blood-stained, staggered dizzily towards the aid-post; breathless messengers hurried by on urgent unknown errands.

  About noon on the third day of our captivity the enemy opened a desultory fire on our front line. Some eight hundred yards ahead we could see the smoke of this new bombardment, and it was easy to forecast its sequel. Deterred hitherto from a frontal attack by the obstacle of the wired forest, his advance towards Chauny now allowed him to outflank us towards the north. At dawn we might expect the long delayed climax.

  VI

  I can hardly tell at what precise moment desperation had its way with me. Gradually and almost unconsciously, however, my thoughts hardened towards a resolution at all costs to escape from the Inferno.

  Over yonder, under so constant an apprehension of death and danger, one learned to analyse motives and call things by their proper names. Again and again I had pondered the matter and argued it with others, vainly trying to find solid ground beneath shifting quicksands. Those men are greatly to be envied who can settle once and for all the rights and wrongs of a case, settle them and fling themselves whole-heartedly into the battle. The doubter, the Agnostic, the sitter on the fence, is doubly damned in the hurly-burly. The enthusiasts on either side despise him, and he finds himself committed to an endless balancing of arguments. For fairness’ sake, as he thinks, he plays the part of Devil’s Advocate to every successful cause, and obstinately champions a censured creed.

  What were we all doing out there? That was the question that hammered always in my mind. The rhetoric of a thousand journalists will never bring home to the civilian a tithe of what War is. The ghastly futility of the thing; its blasphemy of God and human nature; its contemptuous denial of Christianity; its mechanical, cold-blooded cruelty – only those who saw these things face to face can mensure their horror. And those who know cannot share their knowledge, and a new generation grows up in ignorance.

  What were we doing out there? Daily denying human nature in a vast complex of futile cruelty; plotting the destruction of strangers who, like ourselves, had not to avenge the shadow of a personal quarrel; practising the art of slaughter, and learning to smash and batter the Temple of the Holy Ghost. The wonder of modern war is, not that men are so savage, but that they are so little cruel. On the battlefield the carefully instilled lesson of ruthlessness is sometimes forgotten in remembrance of a common humanity. Instead of cracking the skull of a wounded man, Tommy and Jerry alike share with him their cigarettes and rations.

  I have even heard short-sighted Atkins give way to an unmanly pacifism. ‘It ought to stop. This lunacy could be ended to-day, and would be if the decision rested with us. This very day an Armistice and a Conference, and then surely the shred of sanity yet remaining in the world will secure a settlement of the quarrel. Better any settlement than this Golgotha.’

  But the stern patriots at home took a wider view and insisted on fighting it out. ‘Never will we sheathe the sword till Belgium is avenged’ – as though to kill Germans miraculously revived the martyrs of Louvain. The mingled stream of prayer ascended from London and Berlin alike. Latter-day apostles were proud to baptize battleships, and in their war sermons confounded the New Testament with the Gospel of Hate. As though God would ‘take sides,’ as in Israel of old! Could the howling chauvinist newspapers have realized a tithe of the disgust aroused out yonder by their blood thirsty ravings, I believe even they might have learned a little wisdom. To the man in the trench the War was little more than a personal tragedy, and often he confounded friend and foe in a common humanity. Beneath the roughest rind of frightfulness lurked a shamefaced shred of pity.

  It is true that the people actually doing the fighting were necessarily deprived of that high moral purpose and philosophic clarity of judgment that flower to perfection only in ease and safety. The far
ther you travelled from the line, the greater grew the hate, until it found a glorious culmination in fire-eating old gentlemen who nightly created heta-combs of enemies over their port wine and cigars in the Club-rooms of London and Berlin. They frothed at the mouth with warlike zeal and grew purple in the face with a noble rage. ‘Would that the enemy had but one head!’ And indeed the common soldier has no right to doubt the divinity of War. ‘His not to reason why; his not to make reply; his but to do or die’ – while the arm-chair men did the thinking for him.

  Doubtless the man behind the gun did wrong to doubt that all things were working together for good. Nominally he should be too busy to think, and a rum-ration is a better investment than a conscience. But he did object to the brainless ineptitudes put into his mouth by cheerful Special Correspondents, and hated above all the arm-chair critic, immune from error and the shadow of turning, wading daily through vicarious slaughter to the Kaiser’s gallows-tree.

  Yet I at least should have been the last to jeer at him. I had entered the Army merely because this was the line of least resistance. Towards the end of 1915 the way of the shirker was hard, and the utmost rigours of training seemed preferable to the sneers of over-righteous civilians, immune by reason of age, sex, or infirmity from what they described as ‘the privilege of serving their country.’ At that time I dreaded merely the discomforts of camps and billets. France and danger seemed infinitely remote.

  Physical qualifications are, I suppose, justly held to be the sole test of fitness for such service. For myself, I felt as little like a soldier as any man. I hated the rough living, the exposure, the fatigue, the loss of freedom. The stifling of initiative and responsibility, the change from a name to a number, the blind, unintelligent acceptance of contradictory orders, the sinking to the level of a reliable machine that eats and drinks and sleeps, and does what it is told – I loathed them all and saw no silver lining. With only the poor consolation of knowing that I desired the pain and danger of War as little for other as for myself, I already had good reason to write myself down an arrant coward.

  In the artificial surroundings of our towns there are to be found nowadays many people entirely destitute of the brave old virtue of pugnacity. On the rare occasions in their lives when force is the only remedy, they shut their eyes and telephone for the police. And now, the whole world prostrate before the God of Force, these feeble folk were expected to take a lion’s share in the literal battle of life; to compete with ploughmen, coal-heavers and prizefighters in the glorious trade of War. Small wonder they dreaded the ordeal and doubted their fitness for so terrible an emergency!

  Thus numbered among the weaklings, and timidly shrinking from the bickerings of the world, I had not to cheer me even the consolation of a just quarrel. My mind was dark with doubts and questionings, and for all my muddled thinking I could not reconcile the conflicting claims of individual conscience and public interest. What had the plain citizen to do with the quarrels of diplomatists? What voice had the people in the Declaration of Wars so ably engineered by vested interests and bankrupt statesmen? Has not the individual the absolute right to steer his course independently of any guide save his own sense of right and wrong?

  The Conscientious Objectors solved the problem to their own satisfaction, and for their pains went straightway to prison; true blue patriots and hot gospellers bravely tested their principles in khaki; and the doubter, shrinking alike from the finger of scorn and the growl of the guns, balanced reasons no longer and bartered future pain for present praises. He too joined the Army. And after that, the deluge!

  Do you wonder that the experience of two year’ service confirmed my doubts? I remembered that those at home were waiting for me, and I rated their claim higher than the Army’s. It is hard to say to what extent this last argument was mere hypocrisy and the bolstering of a weak case. The drowning man clutched at every straw.

  But that evening I had received a letter from home, full of hopeful looking forward and eager prayers for present safety. Enclosed were some of the first flowers of spring – primroses, early violas and a sprig of rosemary. ‘There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.’ Such a message brought with it far more exasperation than comfort. The scent of the flowers recalled vividly the sights and sounds of home. In the intensity of my longing for the peace of the English countryside I lost all shame at leaving my companions.

  VII

  By midnight on the 23rd March all save the sentries had returned to the dug-outs, and, but for an unexpected alarm, I had a couple of hours to my own devices. It was an elaborate scheme that I had planned, and I must needs carry it out with the greatest caution. A self-inflicted wound on Active Service is equivalent to desertion in the face of the enemy, and the Army has little mercy on deserters. For discipline’s sake the practice must be strongly checked, and the punishment is death. More than once I had seen advertised in Routine Orders the fate of a poor wretch shot for this very crime.

  Thus I was gambling for dangerously high stakes, and looking back at those things from my present sheltered harbour, I am inclined to believe that at that time I cannot have been entirely responsible for my actions. This however is doubtless a biased verdict. The court-martial would have looked at the matter very differently.

  At all events the turned worm was desperate. I felt myself to be playing a lone hand – an insignificant clod of a private defying the whole organized might of the Army – but I obstinately determined to carry the thing through to the end. All that day, behind the cover of last month’s Punch, I had pondered and weighed my chances. The scorching from a point-blank shot had proved the undoing of many, and it was necessary to find some sort of protection from the flash of the rifle. Some authorities recommended a damp sand-bag for this purpose; but such were scarce thereabouts, and a tin of bully-beef made an excellent substitute. I had discovered in the dug-out an old rusty rifle, and at first I had preferred this to my own. In my excitement I might well forget to eject the empty cartridge, and it would be a bad thing to be found with such evidence in the breach: the old rifle I could easily fling away afterwards. But later, bethinking me that so crazy a tool might well play its part too realistically by bursting in my face, I dared not run the added risk, and regretfully left it behind me.

  Ostensibly I was going to fill my water-bottle at the well, where I hoped the heavy shelling would keep possible witnesses at a distance. Twice before, at a time of crisis, I had lost all my personal belongings, and I accordingly transferred from my knapsack to my pockets such necessities as a razor, two or three handkerchiefs, and the day’s rations. It says much for the uncanny spell of calmness that possessed me that I was able to look so far ahead, but now that the time had come I lost my fears in a resigned and sullen self-possession.

  Soon I was stumbling among the ruins of fallen houses in search of some hole or corner that would serve my purpose. I had almost decided upon a gloomy, mouldy-smelling cellar, reached with difficulty by a dozen crumbling wooden steps, when a match showed me that it was an officer’s dug-out. Fortunately it was empty, and, despite so inauspicious a beginning, it did not cross my mind to accept the warning and abandon the venture. Some hundred yards away I found a cul-de-sac in a ruined house, the battered stone walls of which promised to smother the noise of the rifle.

  Now that the time had come my heart was thumping uncomfortably, and I needed all my determination to persevere. Crouching in a corner of the yard, I held the rifle in my right hand, with the forefinger crooked round the trigger and my left hand a foot or so from the muzzle. Scorching at this distance would, I thought, be negligible, and the beef-tin was forgotten. Listening intently for intruders, I several times set my teeth for action, but each time hesitated and dared not take the second pressure on the trigger. All the time the shells were mocking at my delay: it would be a grim irony should they do my business for me.

  At last I shut my eyes and fired almost at random. A keen burning pain shot through m
y left hand, and the explosion echoed deafeningly in the close-cabined space of my hiding-place. But my cowardice had brought its own punishment. A bad aim had left only a clean-cut groove in the side of the hand, palpably a bullet wound, and all was to do again. Action had given me courage, however, and, first slashing the wound with a jack-knife to hide the track of the bullet, a second shot passed plumb through the centre of the palm. A bone snapped with a jerk and a sickening stab of pain, and I rolled on the ground involuntarily, and gritted my teeth to keep back the cry that might have betrayed me.

  But already I was hiding the rifle beneath a pile of timber and listening for any sign of interruption. I need not have feared. Who would take notice of two rifle-shots, or who indeed would hear them among the noises of the night? Reassured, I uncovered my rifle and came out into the moonlight. Almost at once I realized that I was in a tight corner. Bad judgment had increased my danger a hundredfold, and my hand was scorched and black from wrist to finger-tips. It was impossible to conceal such suspicious evidence; somehow I must contrive to turn it to my advantage. It seemed probable that the next act of the comedy might well be a tragedy.