“My dear Billie, what a priceless type! He talked exactly like a recruiting poster! Did you see him wag his finger at me? ‘Are you doing your bit?’ Oh dear, I do so enjoy the army!”
“Lucius,” I said, “I’ve always defended you when you’ve put people’s backs up by the way you buck about your soft job. But I’m hanged if I’ll stand for you doing it in my own mess.”
“Damn it, old boy, I was only ragging….”
“I don’t know so much about that,” I replied—I was pretty annoyed with him for drawing old Blinkers like that: Blinkers, for all his old-womanish ways, was a devilish good officer and as brave as a lion. “If you’ve got a cushy billet, that’s your affair. But if you really are a funk you might keep your opinions to yourself instead of airing them in front of fellows who’ve just come out of the line. I can tell you this: next time they start crabbing you I’m damned if I stick up for you any more!”
It was pretty straight talk, wasn’t it? And I meant it to wither him. But he never turned a hair.
“Poor old Billie,” he said, smiling at me. “You know you’d always stick up for Mary’s brother.”
“The fact that I’m engaged to your sister has nothing to do with it. It certainly won’t prevent me from going straight off to Blinkers and apologizing for having brought you in….”
“Dear old chap!” He patted me on the back. “So you think I’m a funk, too, do you?”
“Didn’t you say yourself you were afraid of shells?”
“Well, aren’t you?”
“Yes. But, dash it all, one doesn’t glory in it!”
“Why pretend to be something you’re not?”
He was exasperatingly calm, and I felt a wave of anger surge over me again.
“It’s all very well to pretend to misunderstand me. I know, we all know, there are lots of fellows in jobs behind the line because they have special qualifications. But what special qualifications have you got, apart from the fact that you’re good at languages, to spend the whole of your time mucking about at the back in a car, a job that any old buffer like a modern languages master or a college don could do every bit as well? Listen, Lucius, you needn’t worry to come and see me any more. I’m fed up!”
He grinned quite cheerfully. “All right, old boy. Sorry I made things awkward for you with the Major, but I simply can’t resist pulling people’s legs. As for my job…”
“Suppose you tell me just what your job is?”
He laughed. “Mucking about in a car at the back. But we all have our uses, old son. Ta-ta, William, try and cultivate a sense of humour—it’s no end of a help in life!”
Then he got into his Vauxhall. But I turned my back on him and walked into the mess.
II
Now that the War is history, we fellows who were in it are a lot of blinking heroes. We bore the young generation a good deal, I always suspect, with our reminiscences of the battles we took part in. But to us at the time those battles, whose names are now gloriously inscribed on regimental colours and war memorials throughout the Empire, were just shows, as we used to call them, and we went into them and out the other side—some of us—without ever realizing that we were making history. The weather, the weight of one’s equipment, the difficulty of keeping direction in the waste of shell-holes, the heavy going—in a word, the petty discomforts of the business, not heroics, were what engrossed us. That’s war.
And so the first time I went over the bags in the Battle of the Somme my principal concern was a really agonizing corn. It was in an interval between pushes, and our battalion was in the front line. Opposite us the German front bulged in a small salient protected by a strong point known as the Rhomboid on the right. Before the advance was resumed, it was considered necessary to pinch out the salient and mop up the strong point. The first of these tasks was entrusted to our Division, while the Division on our right was to deal with the Rhomboid. Our battalion and the battalion on our left were to send over a company apiece after a short preliminary bombardment. In our case the job was entrusted to “D” company, of which I was second-in-command.
The staff had the bright idea of arranging for this jolly picnic to take place in broad daylight. We went over at four o’clock of a summer afternoon. My corn was hurting me so much that actually the physical pain of walking rendered me almost oblivious of the mixed lot of stuff that promptly came down on us. I know we caught it pretty hot in the open, and I was not surprised to find myself in command of the company as the only surviving officer by the time we reached our objective. Jerry hadn’t stopped to argue, and the trench was empty.
Our orders were to consolidate and hold on until night, when we were to be relieved. Accordingly I lost no time in setting the men to dig themselves in. A lot of machine-gun stuff kept coming over from the Rhomboid, suggesting to me that the attack on the right had been held up. We had a good many casualties. I sent out patrols to link up with our left and right. Then the German barrage started.
Those gunners had the range to a T. Up and down in salvoes whizzbangs and five-nines came plumping, while a screen of shells shut us off from the trench from which we had started out. My corn was giving me gyp, and I had sat down on the fire-step to nurse my aching foot when the company sergeant-major, usually the most imperturbable of men, breezed up quivering with excitement.
“Our people on the left have fallen back, sir,” he reported. “I’ve just been that far along the trench, and barrin’ a lot of dead and two or three wounded there’s nobody left.”
“What about the right?” I asked. “The Rhomboid seems to be popping off as merrily as before.”
“Don’t know, sir, but I’ll soon find out.”
“I’ll come with you, Sergeant-Major,” I said. Fifty yards along the trench the sergeant of No. 16 platoon met us.
“They’re away on the right, sir,” he said. “Every man jack of them has hooked it.”
“Best retire to conform, sir,” suggested the sergeant-major.
“Ay, that we had,” murmured the platoon sergeant.
“We can’t without orders,” I objected, feeling very wavy about the stomach.
Then a man appeared struggling along the press of men in the trench. It was a runner from Battalion Headquarters. He had come through the barrage and was badly scared. I had just taken the message from his hand when, without warning, two men loomed up on what had been the parados of the German trench. They wore hideous coal-scuttle helmets and leather equipment over grey uniform.
One of them was a big, fat man with a purple face running with moisture. He was wheezing like a grampus. The instant he saw me he yelled with a strong German accent: “Ach, bloddy Englishman!”
I cried out a warning, and snatching up my revolver, which dangled from a lanyard about my neck, fired point-blank at him. He threw up his hands and crashed backwards with a curiously shrill exclamation of surprise. Then everybody seemed to shout together, there were two or three loud detonations, a louder explosion, and something hit me hard on the back of the head. I saw a shower of stars, then the ground slipped away….
III
Of all the sensations of war, I herewith coldly and with deliberation proclaim, that of being made a prisoner is infinitely the worst. A German had got round behind me, and, using a stick-bomb like a club, had put me down for the count. When I came to, the trench was full of grey-green uniforms, and a party of us was being rounded up to go down to the rear.
What with my aching head and raging corn and the utter sense of humiliation that overcame me, I have very little recollection of our march. I know that we traversed a perfectly diabolical barrage of British shells, and I am still amazed to think that we all, prisoners and escort, came through alive.
They ran us into a barbed-wire compound, putting me in a corner wired off from the men. There were no other British officers there. A Ge
rman captain, who was pretty civil, asked me my name and regiment, and started to cross-examine me in very fair English about our next attack. When he found that I would not talk he left me to my own devices.
A little later all my fellow-prisoners were marched away. The sergeant-major, who had got a flesh wound in the thigh from a German bayonet, waved his hand as he hobbled by and cried: “Good luck, sir!” I felt pretty forlorn as I saw them go.
Gosh, I shall never forget that afternoon. The sun blazed down hotly, and there was no cover. My head was splitting from the clout I had received; I was faint with hunger, for I had had nothing since a very early lunch; and my corn was throbbing abominably. But the thirst was the worst. Some kind of a main road ran close to the edge of the compound. All through the late afternoon the road was choked with traffic going in a dense stream towards the firing-line, sending up choking clouds of red dust that were simply stifling. And all the time the very air seemed to quiver to the throb of the guns.
I felt broken in spirit, absolutely abased to the ground. The hopelessness of the position was the awful thing—to count for nothing any more, to be just a captured piece tossed to the side of the chessboard until the game was done! It was not until a deep-throated hum in the sky and the angry barking of the archies made me look aloft that I got the whiphand of myself again. For there, very high in the bright blue sky and all ringed round with shrapnel bursts, was a covey of British planes, swift and proud and indomitable, soaring over the enemy lines. I could have stood up and cheered at the sight. It was the stimulus I required, of all others, in my sorry pass.
After that, nothing more happened. It was almost dark when an N.C.O. brought me a couple of pieces of rather nasty-looking black bread and a mess-tin of weak coffee. I ate and drank and then laid me down to sleep on the grass of the compound.
I awoke to the freshness of a pellucid, dewy morning. The officer I had seen before was standing at the gate of the cage talking to a slim young German officer with a white-and-black sash slung across his tunic. When they saw me on my feet they pushed open the gate and came in.
The young officer bowed stiffly. “Von Scheidemann of the Staff of the 161st Infantry Regiment,” he introduced himself. “My Colonel has seen the bravery of your attack and invites you to breakfast with him. I have an automobile here.” His English was stiff but reasonably fluent.
“So I am to be pumped,” was my first thought. But I accepted the invitation. The prospect of a hot meal attracted me; besides, I reflected, a peep at a German Headquarters would be distinctly interesting. “If I might have a wash?” I suggested.
“You shall have that at Headquarters,” von Scheidemann answered, and led the way to where, on the road outside the compound, a grey motor-car was throbbing gently. An orderly with a rifle, standing by the door, stiffened to attention as we approached.
My escort held the door open for me.
“You forgive that I mention it,” he said pleasantly enough, “but both of us are armed,” and he jerked his head towards the orderly, “just to prevent misunderstandings, yes?” The next minute we were off along that road at a good forty miles an hour.
In truth, we wanted all the speed the very skilful driver could whack out of that car. The first thing I had heard on waking had been the whirl and crash of bursting shells. As soon as we had turned off the main road—in a north-westerly direction, as far as I could make out by the position of the sun, for I had entirely lost my bearings—we seemed to come now into a zone swept by the British artillery. We had a hundred hairbreadth escapes. Again and again coal-boxes pitched with vast spouts of brown earth in the fields alongside us as we sped along, and twice crashed on to the road itself behind us. The road was all torn and pocketed by shell-craters, and the going was terribly rough.
We had travelled for barely ten minutes when the car slowed down and stopped at the entrance to a village. Here the road was screened with sacking against observation from the higher ground to the west where I knew the British trenches lay. Von Scheidemann jumped out and beckoned me to follow him. Hardly had my foot touched the ground than the car was in motion again, backing to turn, and in a second it was off once more, speeding back the way it had come. A great pall of smoke and dust hung over the village and from the tangle of red roofs and white walls in the centre where the houses clustered thick about a wrecked fragment of church tower, the iron slamming of bursting shells re-echoed deafeningly.
“Your compatriots are hard at it again!” said my companion; “this is a bad spot. Quick!” He gripped my arm and ran me to where, above the entrance of a dug-out, a black-and-white flag flapped from a blasted tree-trunk. He raised a blanket curtain, and there I saw a very steep flight of stairs lit by electric light, leading as it seemed into the very bowels of the earth. We went down together.
The entrance led into a very maze of subterranean chambers cut in past centuries out of the solid chalk and extended and modernized by the invader. The place was a veritable underground fortress, nay, a camp. Here were barrack-rooms and dormitories and baths and stores, a guard-room, offices…accommodation, apparently, for a whole Brigade.
Von Scheidemann led me swiftly along a main corridor, down one side-turning after another, until we came to a corridor bearing a notice-board inscribed: STAB 161 INF. REG. Here we ran into a burly Prussian officer who had a pair of tortoise-shell spectacles on his nose. He seemed irritable and rather excited. Von Scheidemann said to him in German:
“Things look lively again this morning!”
“Herr Gott!” replied the other, “it’ll be bad for us again to-day!”
“I’ve got the Englishman along!” said my escort.
“Good!” answered the other, and continued on his way.
My companion entered the corridor and pushed open a wooden door with his name painted on it. He bowed me into a small, rather stuffy room, plainly furnished, where an orderly was making the bed.
Von Scheidemann sent the man for hot water.
“Perhaps you’d like a shave too?” he asked.
I nodded gratefully, rubbing my chin.
“Franz is the man for you, then,” he said. “He used to work at a barber’s in Portsmouth. Franz, you rascal,” he went on, addressing the orderly who had come in with a big can of hot water, “tell the gentleman about the time you used to shave the naval officers at Portsmouth!”
The orderly grinned sheepishly as he tucked a towel about my neck.
“T’ree year haf I vork at Portsmouse,” he chuckled. “Dere ain’t many Bridish admirals wot ain’t got shafed by Vranz som taime or anoder. Gut monney I haf made there, jawohl…a naice down, Portsmouse, and loafly girls!”
Von Scheidemann roared with laughter.
But I sat in silence and let Franz shave me: I was thinking how far away it seemed to the Hard.
IV
War is a series of surprises, but I never anticipated sitting down to breakfast with a German Colonel and his regimental staff. Yet here I was, in a long, low-roofed room, lit with electric light, ventilated by long, slanting air-shafts driven up through the tons of chalk and earth above us, eating cold tongue and drinking coffee cheek by jowl with the O.C. 161st Prussian Infantry. The Colonel was a small, thick-set man with beady eyes, a red neck, and a grizzled moustache. Beside him was the bespectacled officer I had already seen, who turned out to be the First Adjutant: there was also a black-bearded Stabsarzt, wearing the velvet collar and badges of the German Army Medical Corps, and a young Captain whom I took to be the Signalling Officer.
They were all excessively polite. The Colonel, addressing me in very bad French, expressed his regret at having no English, but I told him I could manage to get along with French. I saw no necessity for telling him that, while I was no German scholar, I could understand the general drift of a conversation in German.
I could not help noticing the general
air of restlessness hanging over the company. All the officers at that breakfast-table looked absolutely worn out, oppressed by the shadow of some threatening danger. Messages kept on coming in by orderly to the Adjutant, and with each fresh arrival the Colonel cocked his eye in that officer’s direction, while not interrupting his conversation with me.
The Colonel congratulated me on coming through the previous day’s fighting alive.
“It was a good attack,” he said. “I watched it from my observation station. The creeping barrage was excellently handled: a remarkable man, your General Horne…I should like to meet him!”
I bowed, but said nothing.
“But you hadn’t a chance once you came up against our incomparable infantry,” the Colonel went on. “Your troops are brave…they sacrifice themselves willingly…but they avail nothing against our years of training!”
Still I remained silent. This “artillery preparation” for a direct pumping attack was too childish for words.
And how they did try to pump me! The Colonel, the Adjutant, von Scheidemann, even the Doctor, they all took a hand and started discussions about infantry tactics, artillery preparation, Stokes mortars, Lewis guns, and heaven knows what else, flattering me, contradicting me, agreeing with me, praising and condemning British generalship, British initiative, even British pluck. I dodged and slithered and scraped through it all, never committing myself to a direct answer if possible, and keeping a tight hand on my temper lest I should be tempted to say a word more than I intended. For I realized that at the bottom of all this desultory discussion lay the desire to obtain from me some light on the big push which I knew to be impending in this sector of the Somme front.
All the time I kept my ears open for any asides I might be able to pick up. Once the Adjutant silently laid a message brought in by an orderly beside the Colonel’s plate. The Colonel read it, then crashed his fist down on the table.
The Big Book of Espionage Page 37
