by John Masters
Quentin said, ‘Put him on a charge, being improperly dressed.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Quentin moved on, followed by Archie Campbell, his adjutant, and Captain ‘Stork’ Kellaway, B Company commander. Every man of the battalion was wearing a rose, mostly red but some white or yellow, stuck through the top buttonhole of his tunic. Quentin didn’t like to see them there: they were supposed to be worn on the right side of the headdress, stuck through the chinstrap of the Broderick cap or the chin chain of the full-dress helmet. But the only headdress the men could wear in the line was the steel helmet, and unless they were also wearing camouflage netting covers there was no place to stick a rose. Campbell had suggested, when the problem first arose, that the men might wear the rose behind their ear, or between their teeth. Damned tommyrot! Quentin had wondered for a moment whether his adjutant was pulling his leg … civilians didn’t understand the importance of tradition, of doing the same things year after year, century after century, and doing them right.
He stopped in front of the portly Sergeant Fagioletti and said, ‘Sergeant, why are you wearing a rose in your tunic?’
Like the young private, Fagioletti looked alarmed and astonished. His eyes wandered about, searching for help. The CO barked, ‘Answer me, damn it!’
Fagioletti stammered, his Italian accent very strong – ‘Because-a we was-a ordered to, sir.’
Quentin’s face and neck grew red. ‘Why were you ordered to, man? Do you wear roses every day? What would happen to you if you wore a rose in your tunic any other day?’
Fagioletti knew the answer to that and snapped happily, ‘On a charge of improperly dressed, sir!’
‘Then why is it all right … why is it compulsory … today?’
Fagioletti remembered what the captain had told them – ‘Minden,’ he said. ‘There was a battle, and the men marched through an orchard and picked roses and stuck them in their hats. It was before I joined the regiment, sir.’
Campbell could not restrain an explosive chuckle, quickly stifled. The CO said icily, ‘It was. It was in 1759 … we smashed seventy squadrons of French cavalry, and four brigades of infantry, under the crossfire of sixty guns, then reformed and marched back through the remnants – we and five other regiments – the six Minden regiments, which all wear roses on this day … the one hundred and fifty-ninth anniversary.’
He moved on, asking a question here, giving a sharp reprimand there. At the end of B Company’s trenches Captain Tanner, commanding A Company, was waiting. Kellaway saluted and stepped back, but Quentin said, ‘Wait a minute, Kellaway. You, too, Tanner. Listen … since March 21st we’ve been fighting for our lives, trying to hold the Germans. A month ago we knew we’d done it. Any day now we’ll start advancing … and this time we won’t stop till we cross the German frontier. They’ve all but shot their bolt … But when we advance, we have got to fight with the same sort of determination that we did when we had our backs to the wall. Make sure the men understand that. It’s easy to fight desperately when you’re cornered – you have no alternative. It’s not so easy when you’re attacking … why not take it easy, you think, we’re tired, we’ll push tomorrow, not today … I won’t have it! Attacks will be pressed to the hilt, regardless of fatigue, casualties, darkness, anything. You understand?’
‘Yes, sir,’ the two company commanders said together.
‘Good. One more thing. The Germans know we are getting ready to attack. They may try one last thrust to put us off balance. We don’t know where it will come, but knowing the Germans, we can be pretty sure it will come. Be ready, mentally as well as practically.’
‘Yes, sir.’
John Merritt urged the chestnut into a trot. Beside him Chee Shush Benally, riding bareback, kicked his heels into the flanks of the powerful bay draught horse, close-coupled, heavy-hocked, broad-chested, and the horse followed suit. The fields, barely a mile behind the battery position, were fallow; there were not enough men left to work them; also, they were in range of German heavy artillery. The 137th Regiment was supporting infantry in the line near Le Fère, but there had been no heavy fighting for a month and the colonel was pulling the batteries out of their support role in succession for seventy-two hours of intensive work to bring all men, animals, and equipment up to proper condition and scale. Battery D alone had lost four horses, one gun, two caissons, fourteen men, and a considerable amount of baggage and other equipment to enemy shelling and the general wear and tear of the battlefield. John had worked all morning, with Captain Hodder, on the men’s pay rolls and family allotment rolls. Now, since chow, he had been exercising horses, assisted by Private Benally.
The two young men rode side by side, John posting to the chestnut’s rhythm, Chee sitting loose on the bay’s broad back. John’s skin was pale, his eyes grey, his hair dark brown under the steel helmet, its chinstrap tight on the point of his chin. Chee was dark-skinned, square and squat with powerful arms and more than a hint of a beer belly hanging out over the belt of his khaki breeches. He said now, ‘You had news, John.’
‘How do you know?’ John asked. The Navajo always seemed to know what was happening to him, without having to be told.
‘In your face … eyes,’ Chee said.
After a while John said, ‘Yes. She’s back on heroin, a very small dose. But her father is afraid it soon won’t be enough, as she builds up tolerance. He’s afraid she’ll run away again.’
The Indian said nothing. The sweat ran down his face in the August afternoon, the high sun blazing down on the parched fields.
John burst out, ‘And if she does that, she might kill the baby. It’s due in October … She’s got to have something to live for … but what can it be? How can I help her, save her?’
He dug his spurs into the chestnut’s side and leaned forward, getting a firm control of the reins. The hedge ahead was thin, about four feet high. He didn’t know whether the chestnut had ever jumped before, and didn’t care. He was at full gallop now; he gathered the horse under him, then spurred powerfully. The chestnut leaped like a buck and cleared the hedge by a good foot. John looked round. Chee was coming … that old bay had certainly never jumped before. But it was going to now. Up … over. The chestnut was feeling its oats, tittuping sideways and bucking mildly. He headed it across the field, for the next hedge … up, over, the bay following. Dust rose, clods of hard earth flew, the chestnut whinnied loud in excitement … back over the two hedges, round the big field at a gallop …
John eased back. ‘Whoa … whoooa,’ he cried, patting the chestnut’s neck. ‘Easy now … Easy!’
Chee drew up beside him, reining in – ‘Christ, John … Top will have my blood … horses sweating …’
Now it was John’s turn to say nothing. Chee knew perfectly well why he had broken out just now: if he didn’t he would have burst. The horses hadn’t been harmed. They’d dry off in the ten-minute walk back to the battery, and then …
‘You ask for leave,’ Chee said. ‘Nothing happening here. You ought to be there, with her.’
After a time John said, ‘I’ll see the captain tonight. I’ll just say …’
Chee said, ‘Don’t want tell captain everything? You must, John. Hodder OK man. Won’t talk.’
John said at last, ‘I suppose I’ll have to.’
Then they walked the horses into the lane and headed east for the battery’s position. As they turned into the battered village where men and horses were billeted, the 1st Sergeant came out of a house at the side of the road, saluted, and said, ‘Preparing them for the Kentucky Derby, were you, lieutenant?’ His eyes wandered expertly over the horses, from nose to croup. ‘No harm done, as far as I can see … I was watching from an upper window, with my binoculars. Better not do that again, sir, or the captain might be watching, instead of me.’ He saluted again and bustled off.
John and Chee dismounted. John looked up at his friend’s dark, impassive face – ‘I forgot to ask you, thinking of my own troubles … what do you hear fr
om home?’
Benally said, ‘Mother sick, sir … the sore that will not heal. Inside. My eldest brother dead …’
John felt the same angry helplessness that often overcame him when talking with Chee, from the first days of their friendship at Fort Bliss, Texas, fifteen months ago – ‘What happened to him?’
‘Coming back from Gallup in the wagon. Drunk. Fell out of wagon. Wagon wheels rolled over his chest, belly. He knew he’d die, but might live hours, days.’
‘God! Did he last long?’
‘No. He had a bottle of Everclear in his pocket … He drank it all. People came in five, ten minutes. He was near a hogan and they’d seen … But he was dead. Drunk dead.’
They were singing in the horse lines, lugubriously but with a stern emphasis, to the tune of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’:
Fifteen dollars for allotment,
Fifteen dollars for allotment,
And we’ve only got fifteen dollars left.
Seven dollars for allotment,
Seven dollars for allotment,
And we’ve only got eight dollars left.
Five dollars for a Liberty Bond,
Five dollars for a Liberty Bond,
And we’ve only got three dollars left.
Two dollars for a Liberty Bond,
Two dollars for a Liberty Bond,
And we’ve only got a dollar left.
John eyed his canvas valise. It was packed and ready, for the captain had given him his leave – ninety-six hours. In two hours the ration truck would take him back to Noyon and then … Le Havre – Southampton – London.
All we do is sign the pay roll,
All we do is sign the pay roll,
But we never see a god-damned cent!
Victoria Station … that little old railway through the green fields and hop poles to Hedlington. There he’d take a taxi, if he couldn’t get Betty to lend him her car for the trip to Walstone. His heart was beating fast and he thought, I must control myself. Sure, he was going to see his wife, for the first time in – how long? God, sixteen months: but it was not the flushed, lovely bride of those days. He was going to meet a drug addict, a woman seven months pregnant with an unknown man’s child; and he was going to rescue her, by his love. But how …?
A bugle blew sharply, insistently from the captain’s post of command, the half-ruined village schoolhouse. John listened: Officers! On the double! He picked up his steel helmet, jammed it on his head, and ran.
The other battery officers were already there when he arrived, panting. Captain Hodder said, ‘Your leave’s cancelled, Merritt … The Germans are attacking in strength against our forward divisions, and against the British on their left. Our division’s moving up, including all the artillery. I’ll have orders from battalion in an hour. Get the battery ready to move within ten minutes after that. That’s all. Dismissed!’
The two lieutenants and two 2nd lieutenants who completed the battery’s complement of officers saluted and hurried out, as the 1st Sergeant and Supply Sergeant went in. It began to rain, a long awaited, heavy, summer rain.
An hour and a half later Captain Hodder shouted, ‘Drivers mount!… cannoneers in rear of your pieces … Post! Forward – Ho!’ Battery D plodded across the slippery field and on to the pavé. John rode at the head of the second section which contained the 3rd and 4th pieces of the battery. Behind the 3rd piece, he knew, was marching Chee Shush Benally; and behind the 4th, at the rear of the battery, Lieutenant Walden, the 2nd-in-command. The rain slashed down, drumming on his steel helmet, and running down the back of his trench coat, its skirts spread out to keep the saddle as dry as possible. At first he had to force himself not to think of Stella and the cancelled leave. As the hours wore on the here-and-now forced themselves into his consciousness, pushing everything else out. There’d been a failure in the ration supply and both men and horses were hungry. Horses threw shoes and went lame. The marching cannoneers grew tired, developed blisters, and fell by the roadside, to be dragged to their feet and shoved forward by Lieutenant Walden and the sergeant at the rear. In places, without warning, the pavé dissolved into glue, the guns got stuck, and the section chief would yell, ‘Cannoneers on the wheels!’; and the cannoneers, marching behind the pieces they would serve in action, struggled forward and put their shoulders to the wheels of gun and caisson to help the horses drag them clear. On again … men falling, staggering to and fro, the rain still warm, but driving intensely into their faces, the rumble of artillery fire growing closer ahead … Captain Hodder was standing beside the road in the midnight darkness, his bugler beside him. As each section chief passed the captain called, ‘Cannoneers, mount caissons!’ The cannoneers cheered raggedly as they stumbled forward and took the metal seats on the limbers and the fronts of the gun shields. There had been room for them from the beginning, but cannoneers never rode except in such an emergency as this, to save the horseflesh; in the field artillery, the horses were at least as important as the men.
On into the darkness … hour after hour, by farms untouched, through silent, shattered villages, across empty fields … The light of dawn spread and the column stopped. John dismounted, to rest his horse, and waited. American infantry were trudging past, going forward. The guns were very loud now, some shells bursting in the fields to the right. A galloping messenger reached Captain Hodder and shouted a few words, and handed over a small piece of paper. The captain nodded, glanced at the paper, then turned in his saddle, and shouted, ‘Hip shoot! Action right! Line of metal, azimuth one eight zero! Centre sector, azimuth nine zero!’
Quentin Rowland, standing in the front-line trench with Archie Campbell beside him, muttered, ‘I can’t believe it … I can’t believe it … It’s uncanny.’
It was, Archie thought; it was too like March 21st to be credible. Then, as now, the trench was full of men, waiting. There was Kellaway, down the trench. There was Sergeant Fagioletti. There was Private Whitman. Again, his bowels quaked with the expectation of imminent battle. Above all, there was the fog, creeping over them since midnight, gradually thickening, until now, at four-fifteen in the morning, it was a dense pale curtain in the night, its greyness replacing night’s darkness with an equal but more valuable cloak of invisibility, for this would last well into the day. But, instead of the storm of the German bombardment of that spring day, now there was no gun fire, but, from close behind, the rumble of tank engines. And now it was not the Germans who were going to attack, but the British. And poor Laurence Cate was gone, with thousands of others, in the nearly five months since the German storm had broken.
‘Four-nineteen,’ Quentin muttered. ‘Good luck, Kellaway. You’ll make it. Nothing can stop us now.’
4.20. From far to the rear the British artillery, 2000 guns, opened fire in a rolling barrage, starting fifty yards in front of the front-line trench and moving slowly across No Man’s Land towards the Germans. The assaulting infantry climbed up the trench ladders and out into the open, officers using their compasses to keep direction in the fog. The tanks crashed over the trenches and the infantry took their places between and behind them … For miles to right and left the Fourth Army, the same Army (though renumbered from Fifth to Fourth) which had been so rudely hurled into confusion in March, now advanced, Canadians, Australians, British, with 500 tanks.
The German wire loomed out of the fog, the tanks crawled into it, on to it, crushed it. Kellaway, in the centre of his company’s front line, shouted ‘Charge’ in a cracked voice. His men swept forward. Good God, Kellaway thought, there are no Germans on the firestep … only one machine-gun firing … there, a sentry throwing up his hands in surrender … there two officers trying to rally their men, firing their Mausers at an advancing tank, the tank rolling over them, crushing them into the earth … The Germans had been taken by surprise, even more so than the British on March 21st …
He jumped down into the trench … his men were mopping up, throwing grenades into dugouts, sending Germans streaming back across
No Man’s Land, hands up. The CO arrived, panting, his face scarlet, his blue eyes bulging. ‘We’ve got the first objective,’ he shouted. ‘On, on, men … The barrage is still moving! Keep close to it … keep the tanks moving!’ He scrambled up the back wall into the open, waving his revolver in the air, and yelling, ‘On, Wealds, on!’ The tanks rumbled on, in clouds of blue exhaust smoke, their guns banging, machine-guns crackling. The wild excitement of the morning caught Kellaway by the throat. It was broad daylight, and they were already on top of the German second line. He jumped up beside the Colonel, and ran forward, screaming, ‘On, Wealds … on, on!’
In Battery D Walden was dead, hit by a shell burst half an hour ago, at eleven o’clock. The Top Sergeant was badly wounded, propped up against a caisson, only half-conscious. Hodder was forward with the infantry commander, designating targets by telephone to John at the battery position; and, when the telephone lines were cut, by flag semaphore from a point on the slope about a mile ahead. The barrels of the 75s were red hot from continuous firing, the crews dead weary. No one knew what outfit of doughboys they were fighting with, for the German attack of early morning seemed to have cut across two divisions moving up. From their accents, some seemed to come from the Deep South, some from New York, and some from the Middle West. Whoever they were, they were fighting well, and hard, as the Germans came on, not in lines or masses … how the gunners and machine-gunners prayed they would do just that, for a change! … but in blobs and trickles, grey-clad figures slipping down a hedge line here, along the edge of a wood there, vanishing; but where they had vanished, soon came the hammer of their machine-guns, enfilading some doughboy position, killing or wounding the defenders … a few minutes’ calm, half an hour, then more grey figures slipping down the field, machine-gun fire clacking low overhead to keep your own heads down.
The German artillery had been very accurate whenever it had chosen to pick on Battery D as its target, raining shells on the guns, the caissons, and the horse lines in rear with deadly effect. There’d be no more six-horse teams when the battery moved again; they’d be lucky to have four to each gun, then … But for hours on end the German guns had not engaged Battery D. Perhaps their ammunition train had not been able to keep up with the rapid advance, John thought. Or perhaps they were engaging other batteries of the 137th … with which no one had had any contact since dawn. This was a soldiers’ battle, a lieutenants’ and sergeants’ battle, fought out at close range, in confusion, each man almost alone to do his best, to seize what opportunities were offered, to work together without orders or plan … an American battle.
