by Philip Child
Coming back to the battery from the trenches late one night, Dan found that the guns had mysteriously disappeared. Lorries were being loaded, batmen appeared from huts and dugouts carrying Wolseley valises, torches flashed and lit up the figures of men in marching equipment. The battery was being torn from the little patch of ground that had grown familiar and was now landless and rootless as any gipsy caravan.
He asked Lynch whom he found, flashlight in hand, checking stores: “Where are we off to?”
Lynch flashed the torch onto Dan’s face, thereby obscuring his own; from obscurity his disembodied voice uttered a single word with prophetic distinctness. “The salient.…” There were many bulges in the thin red line, but only one that all men called the salient.
A whole army corps on the march and in a hurry cluttered every highway and byway, a caterpillar with seventy thousand legs slowly creeping toward Ypres. The plans had been made, the fates of the marching myriad signed and sealed: a slow journey of days to end at a given moment of time in a single sharp leap of thousands, all at once, into the unknown. And during that slow progress, minds and spirits gathered and tensed themselves for that leap.
Officers and men of the battery travelled in lorries except for a handful who marched with the guns. They were a mighty caravan: caterpillar tractors and guns, Commer lorries, battery light cars, motorcycles and sidecars. The lorries kept together like a mechanical dragon with each of its vertebrae clanking and weaving in a separate, yet connected, curve. The tractors and guns followed in a column of their own at about three miles an hour.
The uncertainty and mystery of the nocturnal rendezvous had a charm for Dan which he never forgot. You were homeless wanderers travelling from infinity to infinity. Sent on an errand, you left your brother subalterns at daybreak and met them again at night at some crossroad that had reality only because it was marked on the map. You slept in haylofts or on the muddy floors of barns which rose like magic out of the darkness, never again to be seen and recognized afterwards.
They passed famous British regiments coming out of the line. Major D’Arcy knew all about them. He knew why one regiment was called the Pompadours and another the Moonrakers and another the Bloody Eleventh. Why one wore the Tudor dragon on their caps and another the paschal lamb of Charles II’s Portuguese wife and another the castle and keys of Gibraltar. He knew their battle honours, their nicknames, their marching tunes, the peculiarities of their uniforms, and why those peculiarities existed in honour of some forgotten heroism. “There go the ‘Dirty Half-Hundred .’ The Duke of Wellington said to them after Vimeiro, ‘Not a good looking regiment, but devilish steady.’ They had black facings then, cheap dyed, and when they dragged the cuffs across their sweating faces, the dye came off.… Those are the Greys — they’ve worn the eagle of France on their caps since Waterloo.” They passed the Sherwood Foresters marching to “The Young May Moon,” the tune they marched to when they arrived at the breach at Badajoz after a long, forced march.… It was not the first time most of these regiments had fought in Flanders.
Who could have said that they were marching to a battle that might break the heart of England? The thousands went into battle not ignobly, not as driven sheep or hired murderers — in many moods, doubtless — but as free men with a corporate, if vague, feeling of brotherhood because of a tradition they shared and an honest belief that they were doing their duty in a necessary task. He who says otherwise lies or has forgotten.
Ypres still had a skyline. You could not altogether wipe out seven hundred years of history with three years of even the modern spirit. Approaching the town, talk ceased and there was a kind of mental girding of the loins, for all ranks felt, each in its way, that this was the valley of the shadow of death. Not that there was quiet over Ypres. For a month and more the guns had been in full cry without once being called home, and since the Battle of Messines, men had swarmed and slithered and crawled and struggled in the quivering mud like maggots in a neglected wound.
In the city, the streets had lost sharpness of contour and had become passages cleared through heaps of fallen brick. In the place d’armes , where the Cloth Hall lay like a beheaded torso, a river of traffic streamed toward the Menin Gate and the one “road” to the front. For it was night, the time when the army came out of its many graves and walked. High velocity shells of large calibre fell at steady intervals onto the road as they had fallen for months and months. Men scattered, other men picked up the wounded, if they were to be found; only the military police, forbidden to leave their posts, hunched their shoulders momentarily and continued to direct the traffic. The human stream flowed together again and flowed on.
They passed the moat where swans still swam hard by a sixty pounder battery in the ramparts near the Menin Gate, and followed the caterpillars and guns down the Zonnebeke Road toward Hellfire Corner. Mist and drizzle, salient weather, soaked them to the skin, getting beneath the neck and armholes of leather jerkins, compressing the night into a drumming opaqueness that enclosed and isolated their little section of the artery that carried life blood to the front. The pavement petered out and was replaced by a plank road of beechwood laid over the liquid mud; the planks squelched and tip-tilted under them. The debris of caissons, of horses, of GS wagons, of rusted tanks with their treads twisted up and out like a wounded man flinging up his arms, of what had once been men, lined the road like sea wrack. Several times they had to halt when, up ahead, some shell of the ever-searching stream had found the exact line of the road, flinging upward men, planks, guns, or transport wagons indiscriminately.
At last they reached the battery position and laid a ribbon of planks on brushwood and chicken netting to get to it from the road, with a tank to pull them close to the emplacements. The tank officer said: “You’re lucky. You’ve got a bit of dry ground here.” Dry ground it may have been, but the term seemed merely relative to the festering slough that surrounded them. Exhausted and wet to the skin, they laboured all night, laying platforms and manhandling the guns. A squall of shells swept over them: seventy-sevens and four-point-twos searching and sweeping, certain of hitting something in an area where three thousand guns and more were sitting in mud without cover. They picked up the wounded and went on with the work, and the squall passed on to other areas of decompression. The guns went in and sat like awkward boys at a tea party, and before daybreak, they fired their first shells. “That’s the stuff to give ’em!”
But with the grey daylight they found themselves in a morass utterly devoid of any homely landmarks. The shell-pocked terrain had been chewed and spat forth by a cyclops. The landscape lacked relevance to humanity or to anything growing. It was simply empty. True, a captured pillbox and a few rotting tanks were visible; on the crest of the ridge ahead, paleolithic rubble marked what had been a village, and here and there splintered tree trunks cut off short, bristled like the beard on a corpse. But all these things had long since died; men had gone to earth there, earth to mud, and trees to splintered stumps. The only living things visible were the guns scattered everywhere, barely discernible in the conquering monotony, and inhabiting the waste like lost spirits in hell. The landscape was significant of nothing, and the significance of mere emptiness was appalling. To see so vast a tract of fruitful earth pulped into a cancerous girdle made one feel uneasy in that part of one deep down that never feels secure because it belongs to the earth and fears to be reduced to the primitive element of mud into which human clay and man’s machines have been absorbed. It was a landscape. It was a raped landscape, naked, raw, and expiring.… A cockney dispatch rider came chugging up the road (almost deserted in daytime) whistling cheerfully. His appearance in that place and in that mood was ridiculous and inappropriate — and reassuringly human.
On the 7th of June, 1917, the British Army took Messines and began the Third Battle of Ypres; on November 6th they took Passchendaele, and looking down for the first time since 1914 on the plain of Flanders, ended the
battle having advanced through 14,300 yards of hell at a cost of 300,000 casualties. Pilckem Ridge, Langemarck, Menin Road, Polygon Wood, Brookseinde, Poelcappelle, Passchendaele, and again Passchendaele — these are the battles of 1917 fought in the salient, and in these battles, at some time or another, the majority of the divisions of the British Army in France went through the bloodbath — often twice or thrice; grim names for Britain to remember and sacred.
Men advanced through porridge-like mud in which they sometimes sank to their waists, wearing sandbags about their boots to keep them from sinking deeper, using a sandbag filled with mud for a pillow when they infrequently slept; slipping, stumbling, gliddering, struggling, pulling one another out of that slough. In broad daylight flights of wasps with black crosses on their wings flew low and stung them with machine guns as if they were crawling grubs. At night the roads and duckboards were continuously swinged with steel, yet over them men, mules, and ammunition had to go. Blazing shell dumps lit their purgatorial passage. They fought incessantly, gaining a rod here, often pushed back in a counterattack there, struggling in gas masks, holding rifles in numbed hands. Frequently, they suffered many barrages in a single day. The stretcher bearers — eight men to a stretcher in that mud — wandered in no man’s land; sometimes their bullets found them and they fell and, sinking into the mud, were not. Often men sat down and cursed and sobbed and then got up and stumbled on. Rarely, they hummed a song or whistled, Instead of hugging a saucy wench, I cuddle a sandbag in a trench — only there were few sandbags and fewer trenches. Somehow many of them existed and survived; but they were not the same men afterwards, for they had seen more than death, they had faced corruption of the soul and despair.
There was a saying about Ypres which, for a time, was proverbial and which, repeated now out of its time, seems feverish and unreticent: “Men saw one another’s souls at Ypres.” Perhaps they did, but if so, the seeing was a matter of reading hints, for Anglo-Saxon reserve, which foreigners sometimes mistake for stolidity, never had a more severe test and never emerged more triumphantly. At Ypres each member of the mess still seemed to be himself, only more essentially so. Lynch, the Irishman, was more excitable, alternately gay and savage. Dolughoff, who shared a waterlogged bivvy with Dan, became more and more quarrelsome; he did his job as an officer well, but he asked for no man’s friendship. Alastair, that exasperating brother of Dan’s, remained unruffled, and contrived somehow, even in that muck, always to have his boots polished. Charles Burnet was as erratic and gay in talk as ever (the men wrote home: “We’ve got a skipper that’s one of the best”), but drank more than usual. Major D’Arcy was his cool and ironic self, faintly amused at the crude efforts of shells to disturb his aplomb — quare fremuerunt gentes ! Tripp came into the mess grinning, always grinning, and rubbing his hands, ready for dinner; his favourite saying was “Cheer up, cully, you’ll soon be dead. A short life and a gay one!” Brains Kinney was wounded and sent to England, which on the whole pleased him since Ypres had begun to interfere with his historical perspective. But Curry, stolid Curry, did not change because he was dead. He was mortally wounded and died without making a fuss on the duckboards outside the battery.
II
Dan lay asleep on two boards raised a few inches above the water which covered the muddy floor of his foxhole. Opposite him, similarly raised above the water, lay Dolughoff. The smell of fecal decomposition and the fact that the entrance faced the wrong way meant that, a few weeks ago, it had been lived in by Germans. An hour or two earlier when they had been lying waiting for sleep, gas shells, the most civilized of all the sounds of war, had been sighing through the night and announcing their arrival with a subdued plop that was almost apologetic. It was difficult to sleep in a gas helmet, though when you were very tired you could sometimes manage it.
A sharp cry cut into the troubled texture of Dan’s dreams: Oh God! Oh God! followed by a gabbled recitative in some foreign language, rhythmical even though hurried by panic; it might have been a prayer.
He sat bolt upright on the side of the planks, his booted feet dipping into foul water. He put out his hand to find a wall and touched wet mud. Then he knew where he was. The cry? Dolughoff, of course … or was it simply his own dream? He was shivering, and the wet drizzle, sifting into their home, had misted the eye pieces of his gas helmet and made his blankets dripping wet. He fumbled in the pocket of his trench coat for a flashlight, turned it on, and swept the beam in a circle about the mud sides of the bivvy. The beam came to rest on the figure of Dolughoff sitting hunched on his plank bed. His shoulders heaved as if he were panting for breath, and in his gas mask, with his hands gripping the edge of the planks, he made Dan think of an evil spirit suddenly rising from his coffin.
Dan scrambled down from his bed and splashed over to Dolughoff. “Are you gassed, man?”
The Russian shook his head and waved his hand in wordless denial. For several instants the goggled eyes stared at Dan, then Dolughoff relaxed and swung his legs over the edge of the planks.
“God! What a dream.” The clip of the gas mask, sitting over his nose, made the words come with a nasal boom. He tossed his head to rid his mind of the fumes of sleep. “Is there still gas, Thatcher?”
Dan climbed out of the bivvy and tested for gas. The shelling had stopped during their sleep and the air was clean and rain washed. He called back to Dolughoff. “No gas.… I’ll nip into the BC post and get us a tot of rum.”
The guns were at work on a routine harassing program, and the momentary gun flashes lit the familiar plank road crossing a sea of mud, on which flowed the stream of men, mules, and guns going up the line. Dan lifted the gas curtains and went into the concrete pillbox, the battery commander’s post, which was the brain and nerve centre of the battery. Lynch, who was orderly officer, silently handed him a message from group headquarters. Dan stretched it out close to the candle and read:
The Wellington Battery will provide a working party of two officers, two full ranks, and twelve other ranks, to go to (see appended sketch map and note co-ordinates of route and destination). On arrival at the destination, the officer in charge of the party will report to the RE officer in charge of —
“Who is to go, Imbrie?”
“Alastair and Dolughoff tomorrow. You relieve them the day after. You are supposed to put up an OP. Crazy idea! You’ll have to take iron rations and live on ’em for God knows how long. Going up you’ll have to rope the men together. I’ve told the BSM to tick off a party from the roster.”
Dan studied the sketch map. “That’s in the front line.”
“It was today. It may not be tomorrow.”
Dan went back to the bivvy and found that Dolughoff had lit a candle and was sitting up in his bunk with his blankets drawn tight about his shoulders. He paid no attention to Dan.
“You and Alastair are taking a working party up the line tomorrow.”
“All right,” said Dolughoff in a flat tone.
Dan saw that he was shivering. “Got the wind up, Dolly? Here, drink some of this.”
“Wind up, you bloody fool?” exclaimed Dolughoff vehemently. “No! I’ve never been afraid of a shell in my life. No bullet, bomb, or shell has got my name on it. They won’t touch me till I’ve delivered my message. I’ve been put into this blasted war to do a special job. And I’ll do it. You’ll see.”
“A message? What is this message you are always talking about, Dolly?”
“Why should I tell you? You don’t like me and I am indifferent to you. As a matter of fact, I heartily dislike practically all human beings. ’Specially women.”
“And yet if a quarter of what you tell me is true, there isn’t a more lecherous, prancing old goat than you in this world, Dolly.”
Dolughoff was not in the least offended. “All right, granted. That doesn’t keep me from despising the darlings. I’ve never surrendered my integrity by loving a woman and I never shall. T
hey want only to turn a man from himself and make him weak.”
“You certainly are a work of art, Dolly! Can’t you see that a woman is a person — not just a woman.”
“Not to me,” said Dolughoff succinctly.
Dolughoff got a tin mug and poured a tot of rum into it; the rim of the mug clattered against the neck of the rum jar. “I am a deeply unhappy man, Thatcher. Do you suppose I enjoy despising people and loathing them? Do you think I like being what I am? I tell you, I have been made that way for a purpose. I cannot like people.”
Completely nonplussed and in his heart ashamed for Dolughoff, Dan mumbled: “I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything! Do you think you can help me? Just listen to me, that’s all I want of you.… I want to tell you about the dream I had.… You know the plank road out there?” Dolughoff gestured with outstretched finger.
“Of course.”
“I thought I was standing in the mud near that road. Beside me was a shadowy figure, very tall, very imposing, though I couldn’t see his face. In front of him was a machine gun. The gun’s muzzle was pointed toward the road and over it was stretched a black cloth. Up the planks marched the usual column of men, mules, then more men, just as they are marching at this minute. The odd thing was they didn’t make a sound, no footfalls or clank of accoutrement. Then I heard myself saying to him — to it (and my voice sounded like some other person’s): ‘It is strange, sir, that they don’t make any sound. You’d think they were going to heaven.’
“The figure laughed. The laugh made me jump, it was so unexpected and I give you my word, Thatcher, it was an ugly sound! Then he said:
“‘To heaven! That is an odd idea. Do they think so?’
“I said: ‘I don’t believe so, sir. They’ve given up thinking much about it. They just go on, I suppose.’ He was silent for a minute, then he said:
