The Somme

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

  Making my way back to the dug-out, and hiding my injured hand beneath my jacket, I grumbled to the sentry that I had left my water-bottle at the well and must now risk the barrage again to recover it. Also I leaned my rifle against a tree and asked him to look after it until my return. Then away towards the village again, and then back to the sentry, stumbling this time and crying aloud that I was wounded! Thus I had created a most excellent alibi: the sentry could be sure that it was not my own rifle that had inflicted the wound. By this time, moreover, shock had made me feel realistically faint, and it was not deception that sent me staggering dizzily towards the aid-post. I was still deaf from the concentrated explosion. Obviously my story must be that I had been hit by shrapnel from a whizz-bang.

  All went well. The sentry bandaged me with a field-dressing and showed not a shred of suspicion. In the stretcher-bearers’ dug-out explanation was unnecessary. No doubt I looked haggard and shaken enough, and down there in the stifling heat of the braziers I grew so sick and giddy that men’s words came to me only as a dull and meaningless murmur. The dressing was already soaked with blood, and expert hands now rebandaged the wound and supported my wrist in a canvas sling. Of my equipment, I need retain nothing save gas-mask and steel helmet. Everybody congratulated me and envied my good fortune. I wondered what they would have said to the truth.

  Moreover I did not look forward with pleasure to the journey to the ambulance. I had still to pass through the barrage, and it was in vain that I protested I could find my way alone. At no time, save during an attack, must a wounded man leave the line unattended, and I realized with shame that my scheming must risk the life of a stranger. It seemed, however, that we must first report ourselves at the Regimental Aid-post. My heart sank dejectedly. What would the M.O. say to the blackening of my hand?

  We started our journey amid a chorus of bad language and good wishes, and stumbled along the trench line to a sand-bagged cellar beneath what had once been an estaminet. There an officious sergeant insisted upon dressing my hand for the third time (and heartily I cursed his kindness), and pinned to my tunic a scrap of paper authorizing my departure from the line. I strained eyes and ears to catch the beginnings of suspicion, and even dared to ask why it was my hand had blackened. My genuine deafness, and my tale that the shell had burst beside me, carried me harmlessly through the ordeal, however, and the sergeant’s sympathy extended even to cigarettes and a tot of rum.

  We had next to make our way to the ‘B’ Company dug-outs so justly hated by the ration-parties, and again we took a roundabout course through the safer ground on the flank of the village. For a time we found little to hinder us, but the danger grew greater as we drew nearer to the houses. The flash and clamour of the barrage bewildered us; exploding shells sprinkled us with dust and chips of pavé; flying fragments sent us cowering into a ditch by the wayside. We reached shelter scared and breathless, and our proposed five minutes’ breathing-space seemed likely to swell to the best part of an hour.

  For my companion was enjoying our expedition as little as I was. The route lay directly through the death-trap of the village, and we had good reason to believe that the path must be blocked with débris. The men in the dug-out did their best to make the way plain to us, but at night-time, and on such a night, I could see that they did not envy us our journey.

  At last, however, we took our courage in both hands and started off at a run down the high street. Three days and nights of bombardment had changed utterly even ruined Amigny. Fallen masonry and heaps of broken bricks lay scattered over the roadway; the pavé was torn and pitted into treacherous holes and furrows. In this tumbled chaos, seen by fits and starts through the intermittent flash of the barrage, we could not distinguish the main road from side-tracks and courtyards, and we had only covered perhaps a quarter of a mile in twenty minutes when we realized that we were hopelessly astray from the proper path. For some time we groped blindly in a maze of narrow lanes and shattered mews and stables, and at last, when we emerged again in the high street not far from our starting-place, I could endure the hurly-burly no longer, and cried out desperately that ‘for God’s sake’ we should return to shelter. There seemed nothing else to be done, and a few minutes later we were back again in the dug-out.

  Restored once more by rest and a mug of tea, I was at first eager to make another attempt that night. I was convinced that the Germans would attack at dawn, and imagined myself cooped helplessly below ground while the enemy swarmed round the dug-outs. What hope then for an injured man? But the others would not hear of our going until daylight should make the path plainer. The members of a carrying-party just returned from Headquarters declared that our only hope of reaching the Buttes de Rouy lay in a masterly inactivity, and events showed that they were right.

  The dug-out was occupied by the Company signallers, and ever and again messages and inquiries came to them over the wires. The man on duty was continually speaking to other little groups of men buried like ourselves in a precarious shelter from the storm. ‘How are things going?’ ‘Heavy shelling with gas and H.E., but no signs of an attack.’ ‘Heard anything from “D” Company?’ ‘Not a word, and the wire’s just gone for the third time to-night. Three men outed on repairs.’ And then the voice stopped abruptly and we were left to guess what had happened.

  A little group of palsied, white-faced watchers, grimy, unshaven, hollow-eyed from four days and nights that had yielded sleep only in broken snatches, gnawed by anxiety and tortured by uncertainty, what wonder if they were silent and sullen? The consciousness of disaster sapped their courage – the certainty that this present horror was merely a necessary preliminary to the real business of battle. Men returning from duty outside (and some did not return) lay down silently wherever they could find a resting-place – on the floor, on the stairs, in the first cot that came to hand – and fell straightway into the sleep of exhaustion. Twitching fingers and gusty irritability discounted the feigned nonchalance of the officers. To add to their troubles, they must needs pretend that all was well.

  Throughout the night I rested in a berth out of harm’s way beneath the roof. Not one of the men would hear of my giving up my place, and the rations they had they shared with me. Seven o’clock brought breakfast and a loosening of tongues. The attack was still postponed and the shelling seemed set to last for ever. Refreshed by the meal, we were again ready to tempt Fortune, and climbed once more into the daylight. Warned by last night’s misadventure, it was our intention to strike southwards into the Coucy Woods, where, so we were told, the shelling was far less troublesome. Tumbling breathlessly into the narrow winding trench that led thither, and passing half a dozen scattered posts of Lewis gunners, in less than ten minutes we came out upon a paved highway lined with poplars. The road ran almost exactly parallel with the line, and we only turned away from it towards the rear when well within the shelter of the forest.

  And there, as by enchantment, we escaped from the dust and roar of the bombardment into another world – the old familiar world of trees and fields and sunshine. Behind us lay the Abomination of Desolation – a land of scorched and cratered meadows, of shattered riven hedgerows, and homes abandoned and made desolate. The smoke and reek of War hung over it; the fair face of the earth was warped and cankered in a long-drawn agony. Here the sun shone blithely from a sky of forget-me-not blue, the trees and fields were whole and fair, the noise of the guns lay behind us like a dying storm. For the first time for four long days and nights we could rest, and linger by the way, and watch the shadow of the clouds upon the meadows.

  Our way wound through woods full of the fragrance of damp leaves by narrow paths of mingled shade and sunshine. Fragile nodding anemones and the yellow stars of Wordsworth’s celandines smiled bravely at the sun. The ‘lambs’ tails’ hung in clusters from the hazel-bushes, and the honey-scented flowers of the palm were packed in mustard-yellow clusters upon tough leafless branches. Larks sang high above the tree-tops. ‘The lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf ro
und the elm-tree bole were in tiny leaf.’ But this gentle joy of Nature at Spring’s birth-time men were too busy to see. Other and more important duties distracted their attention.

  Beyond the forest our path lay over meadows among the tangled wire of the Battle Area. But the trenches were tenantless and the gun emplacements empty save for shining stacks of abandoned shells. High overhead beyond the river floated a German observation-balloon in ominous security.

  We met not a soul between the Coucy Woods and the twin hummocks of the Buttes de Rouy, where Headquarters had long been raked by an obstinate bombardment. For there all manner of work and traffic had once found shelter, and in the lea of the hills, beneath an elaborate camouflage of painted canvas and green netting, had gathered a busy camp of field-kitchens, ammunition dumps, horse-lines, howitzer batteries, and all the ragtag and bobtail of the sector. But now the market-place was empty, and the booths and huts lay scattered in ruins. The guns and the transport-limbers had withdrawn towards the river. The canteen beside the road had been wrecked by a shell. The long narrow tunnels that honeycombed the hills were empty save for a group of signallers and the staff of the Regimental Aid-post.

  But I had now to face perhaps the greatest risk of the journey. In broad daylight, and among men no longer distracted by the urgency of danger, deception would be far more difficult. Another examination might well prove my undoing, but the stretcher-bearer had heard my story, and I dared not abandon the myth of the whizz-bang. An unexpected piece of good fortune solved the problem, however. The M.O. was most fortunately asleep, and our explanation that the wound had already been dressed and ticketed was an excuse for the tired orderly to pass me without further formality into a kind of waiting-room, where I had only to rest and smoke and hope for an early ambulance.

  Here I saw the last of my companion, who waited only for a drink of tea before beginning his long trudge back to Amigny. I heard later that he was killed that same day by shrapnel.

  VIII

  As I lay smoking peacefully in the straw-lined bunk, I remember saying to myself that at all events I had won the first round. My chief feeling for the moment was one of pride that I had been able so far to evade the strong hand of the law, and I redoubled my determination to cheat it to the end.

  The ambulance was long delayed, and I passed the time plotting and planning my future movements. Suddenly I remembered a capital error. It was an absurdly trivial matter, but much might turn upon it. Had I got rid of my empty cartridge? For the life of me I could not remember ejecting it. I foresaw the examination of my rifle – almost certainly blood-stained. How did the marks come there if I had left it behind me before I was wounded? And what was the explanation of the empty case? For the moment I could think of no better answer to the first question than blank ignorance. Perhaps I had leaned against the rifle on my return to the dug-out. As for the empty cartridge, most opportunely I remembered the rumour of attack two hours before midnight. The battalion in the front line had opened rifle-fire on what proved afterwards to have been merely a German patrol. Stray shots fired in retaliation had whizzed past our ears in the second line, and, carried away by excitement, I had (obviously) fired in return and forgotten to eject the cartridge.

  This was a weak enough defence, but I could think of nothing better. Above all I must keep to my tale of shrapnel so long as I remained in the company of those who knew that no hand-to-hand fighting had yet taken place on the sector; but at the first opportunity I was determined to substitute the far more plausible story of a wound received point-blank.

  Already I was beginning to pay the price of my treachery. The shame of this petty scheming and a growing fear of discovery were an unforeseen punishment. Free from the distractions of action and danger, I grew fearful and despondent. I had bartered self-respect for safety.

  At ten o’clock the ambulance was still to seek, and my impatience grew rapidly towards panic. At all costs I must escape from the neighbourhood of my own battalion. At any moment I might be face to face with discovery.

  Thus goaded, I asked leave to join some men of the R.A.M.C. who were on the point of returning from the aid-post to the advanced dressing-station at Sinceny. Permission was readily given, but an unexpected difficulty delayed us.

  The only other casualty in the dug-out was a shell-shocked artilleryman – a timid, shrinking little man with wandering, lack-lustre eyes and a livid yellow face above a limp black moustache. For some time it was impossible to rouse him. To all questions he gave but one answer: ‘Anything so long as I get away from those guns!’ He repeated these words continually in an expressionless, whispering monotone, and, when at last with shuffling, dragging footsteps the poor fellow made shift to accompany us, we had not covered fifty yards before he collapsed in a ditch by the wayside. A drink of water revived him, but it was clear that he must return to the aid-post. We tried in vain to make him understand that an ambulance would soon be carrying him to safety. Our words meant nothing to him, and, gazing at vacancy with clouded eyes that still saw horrors to us invisible, he fell once more to the recital of his litany, and did not even know that we were leaving him.

  ‘Coal-boxes’ were bursting behind us over the Buttes, and to escape them we steered a zigzag course over the meadows. These were the last fringe of danger, however, and presently we returned to the road for the sake of better going. Out here on the grassy slopes that skirted the forest we could see neither man nor horse nor gun. The wide misty landscape was empty; a darting biplane (whether friend or foe we knew not) was the only thing that seemed alive. But away across the valley the rattle of machine-guns waxed and waned capriciously, and tall columns of dun-coloured smoke marked the sites of burning villages.

  At a bend in the road, where all traffic by day must make a detour into the fields to avoid hostile observation, we came suddenly upon a French mitrailleuse mounted upon a lorry, its outlines hidden by a tangle of fir-branches. The gunners in their smart blue uniforms grinned cheerfully at us as we passed, but a British military policeman at the cross-roads was less amiable. Had he but known it, he had good reason for his suspicions; but my ticket was not to be denied, and he opened for us the last barrier to safety. Outwardly I was forlorn enough, but I laughed in my sleeve.

  Sinceny village was strongly garrisoned by the French. Officers were staring through field-glasses towards the enigma beyond the river; the smoke of field-kitchens curled lazily among the ruined houses; men were digging trenches behind the shelter of a line of hedges.

  In a house less shattered than most we found the Advanced Dressing-station, already three parts empty, and the officer in charge fussing desperately. He had, perhaps, reason for his impatience. The Y.M.C.A. hut over the way was forlorn and deserted; Brigade Headquarters had vanished; canteen and post office alike had folded their tents. But the major did not sufficiently conceal his anxiety, and fumed and shouted until even his own men laughed at him. He was one of those large pink men, clean-shaven and immaculate, who do themselves well under all circumstances, and he seemed by no means to appreciate so sudden and urgent a catastrophe.

  In this excitement of departure I once again avoided examination, but secured in exchange for my roughly scribbled ticket an official Field Casualty Card. Medical stores, furniture and kit were dumped into waiting lorries, and two motor-ambulances just sufficed to contain the staff and perhaps a score of casualties. In less than half an hour the dressing-station was empty.

  We had only travelled as far as the Chauny high road, however, when we were stopped by a man badly wounded in arm and shoulder. Where he came from no one knew, but his plight was obviously desperate. Unfortunately there was not an inch of room in any of the ambulances, and no one seemed anxious to leave their shelter. Not a man of the Royal Army Medical Corps could be spared from duty, and there was therefore only one way out of the difficulty. Were any of the patients able to walk?

  This was an invidious and doubtful question. Two of the men were bad cases of shell-shock. Pale beneath a m
ask of grime, and with eyes that blinked and wandered, not a muscle in their bodies but quivered and trembled convulsively. Head and limbs were racked by a merciless palsy, and one of them who was trying to smoke a cigarette could hold it neither in his mouth nor his fingers. The elder of the two, stuttering and stammering horribly, told me how he had been sitting on the ground with his back against the trunk of an apple tree. A shell hit the base of the tree, and the explosion flung him ten yards across the orchard. He recovered consciousness as we saw him – deaf and dazed and twitching.

  The other men were variously afflicted. Two had lost an arm and one a leg. Another, his jaw smashed by shrapnel into a pulp of flesh and bone, groaned and grunted like a wild beast in a hopeless effort to speak. Blood and saliva oozed in a red foam from the mouth of a man shot through the lung. On one of the cots lay a poor fellow whose left leg, snapped at the ankle, projected from a swathe of bandages as a splinter of bone stained black with iodine.

  All were manifestly worse off than I – all, that is, save a smiling poilu who discreetly knew no English – and, to the delight of the palpitating major, I volunteered to leave the convoy and make my own way to the field-ambulance at Quirczy. If this should seem inconsistent with my late conduct, I can only suggest that I had no quarrel with fellow-victims.

  From Sinceny to Quirczy is about six kilometres, and it took me three hours to cover them. My gas-mask I had left behind at the dressing-station, but I retained my shrapnel helmet as a sunshade. It was a wretched enough journey, and by three o’clock, when I reached the field-ambulance, I was ready to drink from a puddle and sleep in a ditch.

  Mounted military police were warning every one to get away to the rear, and spread panic by insisting that certain dull and loaded detonations near at hand marked the demolition of the Chauny bridges. Once a captain of machine-gunners emerged from the shelter of a hedge and questioned me eagerly. Where was the line, and where were the Huns? Naturally I could tell him nothing save that the Germans had so far delivered no attack on this side of the river.