Bretherton

by Morris, W. F. ;

“Yes,” I replied. “I wanted one when you were on leave, and I looked to see if you had any.”

  He made no comment, and continued his checking of returns by the light of a candle stuck in a cigarette-tin.

  “Why did you lie about it, G. B.?” I asked at last.

  He went on with his work for a moment or two and then looked up. “Well,” he said, “if I had admitted it, there would have been a row and it might have got to Headquarters; an that would have been very unhealthy for me after that photograph business.”

  “Might have lost you your M.C.,” I suggested cuttingly, for I was angry with him.

  He looked up sharply at that and seemed about to make some quick retort, but the look of annoyance passed, and he laughed and shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, I’m not worrying about that,” he said.

  III

  The Somme battle dragged on, but the hoped-for breakthrough and return to open warfare did not come. We had one or two false alarms, and the battalion created some records in rapid concentration; but the gap through which we were to have pushed did not appear, and as the possibility of its appearance grew more and more remote, Corps Headquarters became less insistent on keeping us together. At first companies only had been detached, but now platoons and even sections were sent off on various duties. B Company was scattered over the whole Corps area on various jobs for the A.P.M., whose hand Hubbard licked with dog-like fidelity; and A Company also was split up. Gurney’s platoon was away east of Montauban, Dodd and his platoon had taken over Pagan’s job of manning the Corps observation posts, and my own platoon alone was with Company Headquarters doing odd jobs, chiefly burial fatigues.

  Before long, however, orders of a different sort came from Crops. A biggish attack was coming off, and Corps wanted a platoon for a job of observation from a point in the first day’s objective. G. B. was away when the orders arrived, and my own platoon being the only one available, I made the necessary preparations at once. But to my surprise, when he returned he said that he himself would take up my platoon and that I was to remain behind with the C.Q.M.S., sanitary men, and other odds and ends.

  I was much annoyed at this order. Not that I was a fire-eater: Heaven forbid! The job was likely to prove as unpleasant as the last, and, like most men who have wandered about in a modern battle, I was not pining for repetition. But it was my own platoon that was going up, and it was my job to lead it. It would be employed on a job calling for special knowledge such as we were supposed to possess and which I believed I possessed, and my professional pride was hurt by this possible imputation that I was not up to the job.

  G. B. reassured me on this point, but he would give no satisfactory reason for his action; and I was driven to the conclusion, rightly or wrongly, that in this stunt, which if successful would earn for us the praise of Corps Headquarters, he intended to take all the kudos for himself.

  The platoon marched out at dusk, and when it had disappeared in the gathering gloom, I returned to my tent in a very touchy mood.

  It returned next evening, or rather what was left of it returned, in charge of my sergeant; and it was from him that I learned what had happened. They had reached their objective—an exposed position—to be pounded heavily and counter-attacked. During the afternoon, when things were a little quieter, G. B. had taken two men and crawled out to a broken building that lay in front of their position. He returned after an absence of about half an hour to report some movement of the enemy, and then crawled back again with his servant to the two men he had left on watch. One of these came in with further information about twenty minutes later, and then an hour went by without any communication or sign from them.

  At the end of an hour and a half the sergeant became anxious, and taking a man with him, crawled out to reconnoitre. On reaching the stunted, jagged walls of the broken building the first object that met their eyes was G. B.’s servant dead with a bullet through his forehead. Farther on they came upon the body of one of the other two men with one side of his face blown away. Cautiously continuing their exploration, they came upon the second man lying upon his back on a heap of brick rubble with a bayonet wound in his throat, but there was no sign of G. B. At considerable risk to themselves they crawled right round the building without finding any trace of him, and only when a minen-werfer began pitching flying pigs into the ruins and a bullet through his water-bottle warned the sergeant that a sniper had spotted them did he abandon the search.

  They were rather heavily attacked soon after he rejoined the platoon, and I gathered that there was an unpleasant mix-up of bomb and bayonet; but he managed to hold his ground, though when things had quietened down again my poor old platoon had been reduced to something less than half its strength, Eventually a unit came up to relieve them, and he had thereupon got his men out safely and come straight back to me to report. That was his story.

  I questioned him very closely about G. B., but both he and the man who had been with him were positive that G. B. could not have been in the ruined building or its immediate neighbourhood. They declared that had he been lying wounded they could not have failed to have found him. They had found his servant and the other two men at once and had spent nearly twenty minutes searching for G. B. The three men were dead, and the sergeant was positive that the third man had been killed by a bayonet jab.

  “Jerry must have crept up and rushed ’em, sir,” said my sergeant. “There was a lot of heavy stuff coming over all the afternoon, and we wouldn’t have heard a little row like that. I told the Captain that it was very risky, but he would go; and now Jerry has got ’im, sir.”

  We still half hoped that G. B. might yet turn up, but the days went by, and it became evident that my sergeant’s view of the situation was the true one.

  G. B. was posted as missing.

  IV

  The Battle of the Somme dragged on into the Battle of the Ancre, and it was not till December that the Corps came out for a rest and we found ourselves in billets in a little village not far from Doullens. Hubbard’s tireless cultivation of the Provost-Marshal bore fruit, for he left us to become an A.P.M. himself, and Pagan was given the command of B Company, an event of which he informed me in his usual fashion by an apt quotation from Henry V. Harding, our American M.O., also left us to become one of the big guns, I believe, in a base hospital. I went on my long overdue leave and found that Helen, though as comradely as ever, could not be induced to become Mrs. Baron even by the glamour of my three pips and the mention in dispatches which I had collected. Indeed the prospect of that event now seemed remote. I was rather badly hipped and in consequence, childishly perhaps, refused to write to her. But I will pass over these purely personal matters.

  In the early spring the Canadians began that offensive which resulted in the capture of Vimy Ridge, and when they came out for a well-earned rest, our corps took over from them, and we moved up to the bleak hillsides just north of Arras. The ensuing attacks took us well over the ridge and on to the plain beyond, and there we stuck. The battle had reached that stage which we had now learned to regard as inevitable, the stage in which the enemy, having been driven back out of reach of our concentration of guns, had had time to mass his own guns and bring up reserves—the stage at which fresh operations on a large scale are necessary for any further advance. But G.H.Q. had learnt by experience the costly futility of hammering away at an enemy well prepared and forewarned; and they transferred the attack to another sector, leaving our line very thinly held.

  Meanwhile the battalion had been equipped with Lewis guns, and we had one to each platoon. Six of our guns were always in the line, which, to tell the truth, was shockingly undermanned. One night the enemy put down a box barrage on us. In a box barrage, it must be explained, the shells pitch not only on the fire trench but on a line some distance behind it and to the right and left as well, thus cutting one off on all sides from reinforcements and placing one in a “box.” The object of this device is to allow a raiding party to come over and to ensure that they will not be distu
rbed whilst dealing with the unfortunate troops in the box.

  It was unpleasant while it lasted. Our parapet was blown up in several places, and one of my two guns was put out of action in the first few minutes. I spent an anxious time dodging along the empty fire-bays between the two guns. My one remaining gun was twice blown off the parapet, but my stout Number One got it back again into position and fired drum after drum into no-man’s-land as fast as Number Two could ram them on the magazine post. He must have done a lot of execution, for when the raiding party loomed up on the heels of the barrage, there were very few of them.

  The other gun team were working the bolts of their rifles like fields, and I believe that only two of the enemy got into the trench. One of them jumped on top of one of my men and then went down under a smashing blow from a steel helmet, delivered sideways. The other, an officer, with an automatic pistol in his hand, shot two of my men as he stood on the parapet. Then he jumped, and I let drive at him with my service revolver. He came down sideways and lay motionless in the bottom of the trench.

  My other team got their gun firing again, but no more Germans appeared. One of the two men shot by the Bosche officer was dead with a bullet through the eye; the other had a flesh wound in the neck. I put a field-dressing on him and turned to have a look at the officer. I pulled the cumbersome German-pattern steel helmet off his head and switched on my torch.

  It was then that for the first time in my life I doubted my sanity. My shaking thumb caused the torch-light to flicker, and in the wavering light the pale face appeared to be grimacing at me. Was this a preliminary sympton of a faint? I asked myself. I leaned back against the solid wall of the trench and was grateful for the support. The strain of those last few minutes must have been too much for me, I suppose, and I was “seeing things”; for the bloodless face of the German officer with closed eyes and head resting on a couple of empty Lewis-gun magazines seemed to me to be the face of G. B. I could even see the scar across his cheek that he had carried ever since that desperate stand of his on the Somme.

  I knelt there staring at the man and trying to pull myself together, telling myself that this was not G. B. With my own eyes I had seen this German officer shoot two of my men, one of whom was an old A Company man and had served under G. B. in the old days. And then I remember a sudden dazzling light, a feeling of warmth, and a sensation of falling, falling… and no more.

  V

  When I opened my eyes I perceived a long brown level plain stretching from me and a broad low black arch silhouetted against the distant sky. Gradually my muddled brain began to function, and on reopening my eyes I slowly realized that the brown plain was an army blanket and the black arch the iron foot of a bed. I perceived with vague surprise that I was in a long hut and that there were other beds placed against the opposite wall with military regularity; and an army nursing sister was bending over one of them.

  I closed my eyes and wandered again: I saw the German officer lying in the bottom of the trench and the face that was the face of G. B. A cold sweat broke out upon my forehead. I must pull myself together, I thought: I was losing grip—seeing things. A sign of nerves at the breaking-point. I must stick it; if the Bosche came over again… And then I opened my eyes and remembered where I was. I had done with all that for a time. A hospital now… Blighty perhaps…

  But I was too tired to feel thrilled, and I dozed off into oblivion again.

  PART III

  “G. B.”

  CHAPTER XI

  I

  FRANCE, September 1916. The hot sun beat down on a shallow valley north of Bray-sur-Somme. A few months ago it had been a pleasant green, secluded valley, but now it was a dusty, noisy town. The level stretch of parched earth between the slopes was bare of grass and scored with wheel-ruts; and where it broadened out into an amphitheatre, rows of posts and been driven into the earth, and, tethered to the ropes between them, two hundred horses shook their heads and twitched their glossy hides in ceaseless efforts to dislodge the persecuting flies.

  In one of the flanking slopes a line of dug-outs had been constructed, and their tunnelled entrances, flanked with flattened sandbags of the shape and colour of stone blocks, resembled the mortarless passages of an Aztec temple. On the slopes themselves a motley town had sprung up. Bell-tents, Stevenson huts, canvas-screened latrines, shacks of empty ammunition boxes, bivouacs and tarpaulins spilled from the crests to the dry, rutted track between. A thick barbed-wire fence ten feet high enclosed a large rectangle on a roughly level platform half-way up the southern slope. A similar but smaller enclosure stood near by. A hundred or more prisoners, all with the same close-cropped pale hair, faded grey uniforms, and dirty, calf-high boots, slept, sat, smoked, or stood sullenly within the larger enclosure; some half-dozen officers wearing rakish caps and long grey tight-waisted overcoats with gay-coloured facings occupied the smaller. A couple of bored British Tommies in steel helmets and with bayoneted rifles slung over one shoulder were on guard, and a number of loiterers in shirt-sleeves were watching through the wire a newly arrived prisoner with arms raised above his head being searched by a sergeant.

  Men came and went in the mushroom town. A man in shirtsleeves sitting on an upturned bucket peeled potatoes into a large iron dixie and whistled a slow, lugubrious tune. Two men in shirt-sleeves and steel helmets were fusing a box of Mills grenades. A kilted piper marched to and fro like an automaton playing some skirling pibroch of the Highlands; and near his beat sat a sunburnt man, naked to the waist, plying needle and thread on a grey army shirt and proclaiming in song that the lady of his affection had an eye of glass but a heart of gold.

  High overhead flew a German plane, a white fleecy-looking object against the hazy blue sky, and an invisible anti-aircraft battery behind the hill was “archying” it. Bang-bang, bangbang went the guns; and then pop-pop, pop-pop sounded far overhead. The tiny plane glided out from four white puffs of cotton-wool, banked steeply, and shot swiftly back eastwards.

  Outside a long brown tarpaulin shack an officer in shirt-sleeves and light khaki drill shorts lounged in a canvas chair. A copy of La Vie Parisienne rested upon his bare sunburnt knees. Another officer, clothed also in shorts but with the three stars of a captain upon his tunic-cuff, came from under the tarpaulin and halted by the chair.

  “My leave has come through, Baron,” he said, stroking his close-clipped moustache with the stem of his pipe.

  The officer in the chair looked up and tilted forward his cap to shade his eyes from the sun.

  “Good for you, G. B.,” he said. “But I thought there was no leave going.”

  Bang-bang, bang-bang went the guns again, and pop-pop, pop-pop came the answering shell bursts high up in the sky.

  The other took off his khaki cap and stroked his short crisp hair. “Well, there isn’t really,” he answered. “Except for the gilded staff. Corps H.Q. got a twinge of conscience apparently and bunged along this vacancy to us; and the C.O. sent it to me. But for some damn silly reason or another I have to report at Domart before six pip emma, and some antediluvian vehicle takes us to Abbeville. It means lorry-jumping from here to Domart, I suppose.”

  “Domart! That’s t’other side of Amiens, isn’t it? A bit north though. There’s a lorry route from Albert to Acheux, I know,” said Baron. “And there’s another from there to Candas. I believe. That’s not far from Domart.”

  “Anyway, I shan’t have too much time,” answered Bretherton. “Brewster! Brewster!”

  A private soldier in grey shirt-sleeves came running at the call.

  “Brewster, I’m off on leave toute suite. Clean the buttons on my best tunic and give my belt a rub, will you?”

  The man took the belt and disappeared beneath the tarpaulin.

  “You are in charge of the shop, Baron. All the bumph is in the company office, but you have seen most of it; there’s nothing needs explaining.”

  Bretherton strode off and entered his tent a few yards away. He washed in a canvas bucket and changed his short
s for riding-breeches and field-boots. Then he packed into a leather-seamed haversack pyjamas, khaki collars and socks, shaving and washing kit, a pair of khaki slacks, and a pair of brown shoes. Before the packing was finished, Brewster, the soldier-servant, came in with the belt and tunic over his arm. Bretherton put on the tunic with its glittering buttons and buckled the glossy belt round his waist. He slung the haversack over his shoulder, put the yellow leave warrant into a breast pocket, and picked up a trench-coat.

  “Cheerio, Brewster,” he said. “Mr. Baron will let you know when I’m coming back. If we move meantime, hand my kit in to the Q.M.S.”

  Outside the tent an officer with a very fresh boyish face was talking to Baron.

  “Hear you are off to Blighty, G. B.,” he said as Bretherton emerged. “Lucky dog! I have a little souvenir for the mater. I wonder if you would deliver it for me—or post it if it’s too much of a bore. But my people would be jolly glad to see you—and put you up if you care to. Half an hour or thereabouts from Piccadilly. I have put the address on it.”

  Bretherton put the parcel into the pocket of his trench-coat.

  “Right-oh, Gurney,” he said. “Be very glad to look them up—and tell them all about their little David—what! Cheerio, you fellows. Don’t finish the war before I get back.”

  “Give my love to dear old Piccadilly,” said Baron.

  “Marble Arch, Bond Street, Oxford Circus—change for Piccadilly,” chanted Gurney, and added wistfully: “Lucky devil!”

  Bretherton hurried off between the motley collection of huts down to the dusty valley-track and climbed the opposite slope. A short distance farther on, he reached the Albert road; and presently saw the town itself below him, a medley of roofs and chimneys buttressing the devastated square where broken houses gaped roofless to the sky and the Hanging Virgin of Albert upon the lofty battered brick church tower hung golden in the sunlight. He passed through the narrow streets of the town and crossed the shell-pocked, brick-littered square to the Doullens road.