It is afternoon now, and the regiment is drawing near to the trenches. The slanting sun begins to throw long shadows from the poplars. The open fields are covered with tall grass and hay that moves in long, slow, undulating waves under the gentle breeze that is rising. The sloping light falling on them gives the waves an extraordinary resemblance to the lazy swell on a summer sea. Here and there the fields are splashed with broad bands of vivid colour—the blazing scarlet of poppies, the glowing cloth-of-gold of yellow mustard, the rich, deep, splendid blue of corn-flowers.
For one or two miles past the track has been plainly marked by sign-posts bearing directions to the various trenches and their entrances. Now, at a parting of the main track, a group of 'guides'—men from the regiment being relieved from the trenches—wait the incoming regiment. Company by company, platoon by platoon, the regiment moves off to the appointed places, and by company and platoon the outcoming regiment gathers up its belongings and moves out. In most parts of the firing line these changes would only be made after dark. But this section bears the reputation of being a 'peaceful' one, the Germans opposite of being 'tame,' so the reliefs are made in daytime, more or less in safety. There has been no serious fighting here for months. Constant sniping and bickering between the forward firing trenches has, of course, always gone on, but there has been no attack one way or the other, little shell-fire, and few aeroplanes over.
The companies that 'take over' the support trenches get varied instructions and advice about tending the plants and flowers round the dugouts, and watering the mustard-and-cress box. They absorb the advice, strip their accoutrements and tunics, roll up their shirt-sleeves, and open the throats, fish out soap and towels from their packs, and proceed to the pump to lather and wash copiously. The companies for the forward trench march down interminable communication trenches, distribute themselves along the parapet, and also absorb advice from the outgoing tenants—advice of the positions of enemy snipers, the hours when activity and when peace may be expected, the specially 'unhealthy' spots where a sniper's bullet or a bomb must be watched for, the angles and loopholes that give the best look-out. The trenches are deep and well-made, the parapets solidly constructed. For four days or six, or as many as the regiment remains 'in,' the range of the men's vision will be the walls of the trench, the piled sandbags, the inside of their dug-outs, and a view (taken in peeps through a loophole or reflected in a periscope mirror) of about fifty to a hundred yards of 'neutral ground' and the German parapet beyond. The neutral ground is covered with a jungle of coarse grass, edged on both sides with a tangle of barbed wire.
Close to the German parapet are a few black, huddled heaps—dead Germans, shot down while out in a working party on the wire at night, and left there to rot, and some killed in their own trench, and tumbled out over the parapet by their own comrades. The drowsy silence is broken at long intervals by a rifle shot; a lark pours out a stream of joyful thrilling song.
* * * * *
A mile or two back from the firing line a couple of big motor-cars swing over the crest of a gentle rise, swoop down into the dip, and halt suddenly. A little group of men with scarlet staff-bands on their caps and tabs on their collars climb out of the cars and move off the track into the grass of the hollow. They prod sticks at the ground, stamp on it, dig a heel in, to test its hardness and dryness.
The General looks round. 'This is about as low-lying a spot as we have on this part of front,' he says to his Chief of Staff. 'If it is dry enough here it must be dry enough everywhere else.'
The Chief assents, and for a space the group stands looking round the sunlit fields and up at the clear sky. But their thoughts are not of the beauties of the peaceful landscape. The words of the General are the key to all their thoughts. For them the promise of spring is a grim and a sinister thing; to them the springy green turf carpet on the fields means ground fit to bear the weight of teams and guns, dry enough to give firm foothold to the ranks of infantry charging across the death-trap of the neutral ground, where clogging, wet, slippery mud adds to the minutes under the hail of fire and every minute there in the open means hundreds of lives lost. The hard, dry road underfoot means merely that roads are passable for heavy guns and transport. The thick green foliage of the trees is so much cover for guns and the moving of troops and transport under concealment from air observation; the clear, blue sky promises the continuance of fine weather, the final release from the inactivity of the trenches. To these men the 'Promise of Spring' is the promise of the crescendo of battle and slaughter.
The General and his Staff are standing in the middle of a wide patch of poppies, spread out in a bright scarlet that matches exactly the red splashes on the brows and throats of the group. They move slowly back towards the cars, and as they walk the red ripples and swirls against their boots and about their knees.
One might imagine them wading knee-deep in a river of blood.
'The attack has resulted in our line being advanced from one to two hundred yards along a front of over one thousand yards.'—OFFICIAL DESPATCH.
Down to the rawest hand in the latest-joined drafts, everyone knew for a week before the attack commenced that 'something was on,' and for twenty-four hours before that the 'something' was a move of some importance, no mere affair of a battalion or two, or even of brigades, but of divisions and corps and armies. There had been vague stirrings in the regiments far behind the firing line 'in rest,' refittings and completings of kits, reissuing of worn equipments, and a most ominous anxiety that each man was duly equipped with an 'identity disc,' the tell-tale little badge that hangs always round the neck of a man on active service and that bears the word of who he is when he is brought in wounded—who he was when brought in dead. The old hands judged all the signs correctly and summed them up in a sentence, 'Being fattened for the slaughter,' and were in no degree surprised when the sudden order came to move. Those farthest back moved up the first stages by daylight, but when they came within reach of the rumbling guns they were halted and bivouacked to wait for night to cloak their movements from the prying eyes of the enemy 'planes. The enemy might have—probably had—an inkling of the coming attack; but they might not know exactly the portion of front selected for the heaviest pressure, and this must be kept secret till the last possible moment. So the final filing up into the forward and support trenches was done by night, and was so complete by daylight that no sign of unwonted movement could be discerned from the enemy trenches and observing stations when day broke.
It was a beautiful morning—soft and mildly warm and sunny, with just a slight haze hanging low to tone the growing light, and, incidentally, to delay the opening of fire from the guns. Anyone standing midway between the forward firing trenches might have looked in vain for living sign of the massed hordes waiting the word to be at each other's throats. Looking forward from behind the British lines, it could be seen that the trenches and parapets were packed with men; but no man showed head over parapet, and, seen from the enemy's side, the parapets presented blank, lifeless walls, the trenches gave no glimpse of life. All the bustle and movement of the night before was finished. At midnight every road and track leading to the forward trenches had been brimming with men, with regiments tramping slowly or squatting stolidly by the roadside, smoking much and talking little, had been crawling with transport, with ammunition carts, and ambulances and stretcher-parties, and sappers heavily laden with sandbags and rolls of barbed wire. The trenches—support, communication, and firing—had trickled with creeping rivulets of khaki caps and been a-bristle with bobbing rifle-barrels. Further back amongst the lines of guns the last loads of ammunition were rumbling up to the batteries, the last shells required to 'complete establishment'—and over-complete it—were being stowed in safe proximity to the guns. At midnight there were scores of thousands of men and animals busily at work with preparations for the slaughter-pen of the morrow. Before midnight came again the bustle would be renewed, and the circling ripples of activity would be spreading and widening from the central splash of the battle front till the last waves washed back to Berlin and London, brimming the hospitals and swirling through the munition factories. But now at daybreak the battle-field was steeped in brooding calm. Across the open space of the neutral ground a few trench periscopes peered anxiously for any sign of movement, and saw none; the batteries' 'forward observing officers,' tucked away in carefully chosen and hidden look-outs, fidgeted with wrist-watches and field-glasses, and passed back by telephone continual messages about the strength of the growing light and the lifting haze. An aeroplane droned high overhead, and an 'Archibald' (anti-aircraft gun) or two began to pattern the sky about it with a trail of fleecy white smoke-puffs. The 'plane sailed on and out of sight, the smoke-puffs and the wheezy barks of 'Archibald' receding after it. Another period of silence followed. It was broken by a faint report like the sound of a far-off door being slammed, and almost at the same instant there came to the ear the faint thin whistle of an approaching shell. The whistle rose to a rush and a roar that cut off abruptly in a thunderous bang. The shell pitched harmlessly on the open ground between the forward and support trenches. Again came that faint 'slam,' this time repeated by four, and the 'bouquet' of four shells crumped down almost on top of the support line. The four crashes might have been a signal to the British guns. About a dozen reports thudded out quickly and separately, and then in one terrific blast of sound the whole line broke out in heavy fire. The infantry in the trenches could distinguish the quick-following bangs of the guns directly in line behind them, could separate the vicious swish and rush of the shells passing immediately over their heads. Apart from these, the reports blent in one long throbbing pulse of noise, an indescribable medley of moanings, shrieks, and whistling in the air rent by the passing shells. So ear-filling and confused was the clamour that the first sharp, sudden bursts of the enemy shells over our trenches were taken by the infantry for their own artillery's shells falling short; but a very few moments proved plainly enough that the enemy were replying vigorously to our fire. They had the ranges well marked, too, and huge rents began to show in our parapets, strings of casualties began to trickle back to the dressing stations in a stream that was to flow steady and unbroken for many days and nights. But the enemy defences showed more and quicker signs of damage, especially at the main points, where the massed guns were busy breaching the selected spots. Here the lighter guns were pouring a hurricane of shrapnel on the dense thickets of barbed-wire entanglements piled in loose loops and coils, strung in a criss-cross network between pegs and stakes along the edge of the neutral ground; the howitzers and heavies were pounding and hammering at the parapets and the communication trenches beyond.
For half an hour the appalling uproar continued, the solid earth shook to the roar of the guns and the crashing of the shells. By the end of that time both fronts to a depth of hundreds of yards were shrouded in a slow-drifting haze of smoke and dust, through which the flashes of the bursting shell blazed in quick glares of vivid light, and the spots of their falling were marked by gushes of smoke and upflung billowing clouds of thick dust. So far the noise was only and all of guns and shell fire, but now from far out on one of the flanks a new note began to weave itself into the uproar—the sharper crackle and clatter of rifle and machine-gun fire.
Along the line of front marked for the main assault the guns suddenly lifted their fire and commenced to pour it down further back, although a number of the lighter guns continued to sweep the front parapet with gusts of shrapnel. And then suddenly it could be seen that the front British trench was alive and astir. The infantry, who had been crouched and prone in the shelter of their trenches, rose suddenly and began to clamber over the parapets into the open and make their way out through the maze of their own entanglements. Instantly the parapet opposite began to crackle with rifle fire and to beat out a steady tattoo from the hammering machine-guns. The bullets hissed and spat across the open and hailed upon the opposite parapet. Scores, hundreds of men fell before they could clear the entanglements to form up in the open, dropped as they climbed the parapet, or even as they stood up and raised a head above it. But the mass poured out, shook itself roughly into line, and began to run across the open. They ran for the most part with shoulders hunched and heads stooped, as men would run through a heavy rainstorm to a near shelter And as they ran they stumbled and fell and picked themselves up and ran again—or crumpled up and lay still or squirming feebly. As the line swept on doggedly it thinned and shredded into broken groups. The men dropped under the rifle bullets, singly or in twos and threes; the bursting shells tore great gaps in the line, snatching a dozen men at a mouthful; here and there, where it ran into the effective sweep of a maxim, the line simply withered and dropped and stayed still in a string of huddled heaps amongst and on which the bullets continued to drum and thud. The open ground was a full hundred yards across at the widest point where the main attack was delivering. Fifty yards across, the battalion assaulting was no longer a line, but a scattered series of groups like beads on a broken string; sixty yards across and the groups had dwindled to single men and couples with desperately long intervals between; seventy yards, and there were no more than odd occasional men, with one little bunch near the centre that had by some extraordinary chance escaped the sleet of bullets; at eighty yards a sudden swirl of lead caught this last group—and the line at last was gone, wiped out, the open was swept clear of those dogged runners. The open ground was dotted thick with men, men lying prone and still, men crawling on hands and knees, men dragging themselves slowly and painfully with trailing, useless legs, men limping, hobbling, staggering, in a desperate endeavour to get back to their parapet and escape the bullets and shrapnel that still stormed down upon them. The British gunners dropped their ranges again, and a deluge of shells and shrapnel burst crashing and whistling upon the enemy's front parapet. The rifle fire slackened and almost died, and the last survivors of the charge had such chance as was left by the enemy's shells to reach the shelter of their trench. Groups of stretcher-bearers leaped out over the parapet and ran to pick up the wounded, and hard on their heels another line of infantry swarmed out and formed up for another attack. As they went forward at a run the roar of rifles and machine-guns swelled again, and the hail of bullets began to sweep across to meet them. Into the forward trench they had vacated, the stream of another battalion poured, and had commenced to climb out in their turn before the advancing line was much more than half-way across. This time the casualties, although appallingly heavy, were not so hopelessly severe as in the first charge, probably because a salient of the enemy trench to a flank had been reached by a battalion farther along, and the devastating enfilading fire of rifles and machine-guns cut off. This time the broken remnants of the line reached the barbed wires, gathered in little knots as the individual men ran up and down along the face of the entanglements looking for the lanes cut clearest by the sweeping shrapnel, streamed through with men still falling at every step, reached the parapet and leaped over and down. The guns had held their fire on the trench till the last possible moment, and now they lifted again and sought to drop across the further lines and the communication trenches a shrapnel 'curtain' through which no reinforcements could pass and live. The following battalion came surging across, losing heavily, but still bearing weight enough to tell when at last they poured in over the parapet.
The neutral ground, the deadly open and exposed space, was won. It had been crossed at other points, and now it only remained to see if the hold could be maintained and strengthened and extended.
The fighting fell to a new phase—the work of the short-arm bayonet thrust and the bomb-throwers. In the gaps between the points where the trench was taken the enemy fought with the desperation of trapped rats. The trench had to be taken traverse by traverse. The bombers lobbed their missiles over into the traverse ahead of them in showers, and immediately the explosions crashed out, swung round the corner with a rush to be met in turn with bullets or bursting bombs. Sometimes a space of two or three traverses was blasted bare of life and rendered untenable for long minutes on end by a constant succession of grenades and bombs. In places, the men of one side or the other leaped up out of the trench, risking the bullets that sleeted across the level ground, and emptied a clip of cartridges or hurled half a dozen grenades down into the trench further along. But for the most part the fight raged below ground-level, at times even below the level of the trench floor, where a handful of men held out in a deep dug-out. If the entrance could be reached, a few bombs speedily settled the affair; but where the defenders had hastily blocked themselves in with a barricade of sandbags or planks, so that grenades could not be pitched in, there was nothing left to do but crowd in against the rifle muzzles that poked out and spurted bullets from the openings, tear down the defences, and so come at the defenders. And all the time the captured trench was pelted by shells—high-explosive and shrapnel. At the entrances of the communication trenches that led back to the support trenches the fiercest fighting raged continually, with men struggling to block the path with sandbags and others striving to tear them down, while on both sides their fellows fought over them with bayonet and butt. In more than one such place the barricade was at last built by the heap of the dead who had fought for possession; in others, crude barriers of earth and sandbags were piled up and fought across and pulled down and built up again a dozen times.
In the middle of the ferocious individual hand-to-hand fighting a counter-attack was launched against the captured trench. A swarm of the enemy leaped from the next trench and rushed across the twenty or thirty yards of open to the captured front line. But the counterattack had been expected. The guns caught the attackers as they left their trench and beat them down in scores. A line of riflemen had been installed under cover of what had been the parapet of the enemy front trench, and this line broke out in 'the mad minute' of rifle fire. The shrapnel and the rifles between them smashed the counter-attack before it had well formed. It was cut down in swathes and had totally collapsed before it reached half-way to the captured trench. But another was hurled forward instantly, was up out of the trench and streaming across the open before the infantry had finished re-charging their magazines. Then the rifles spoke again in rolling crashes, the screaming shrapnel pounced again on the trench that still erupted hurrying men, while from the captured trench itself came hurtling bombs and grenades. Smoke and dust leaped and swirled in dense clouds about the trenches and the open between them, but through the haze the ragged front fringe of the attack loomed suddenly and pressed on to the very lip of the trench. Beyond that point it appeared it could not pass. The British infantry, cramming full cartridge-clips into their magazines, poured a fresh cataract of lead across the broken parapet into the charging ranks, and the ranks shivered and stopped and melted away beneath the fire, while the remnants broke and fled back to cover. With a yell the defenders of a moment before became the attackers. They leaped the trench and fell with the bayonet on the flying survivors of the counter-attack. For the most part these were killed as they fled; but here and there groups of them turned at bay, and in a dozen places as many fights raged bitterly for a few minutes, while the fresh attack pushed on to the next trench. A withering fire poured from it but could not stop the rush that fought its way on and into the second-line trench. From now the front lost connection or cohesion. Here and there the attackers broke in on the second line, exterminated that portion of the defence in its path or was itself exterminated there. Where it won footing it spread raging to either side along the trench, shooting, stabbing, flinging hand grenades and bearing down the defenders by the sheer fury of the attack. The movement spread along the line, and with a sudden leap and rush the second line was gained along a front of nearly a mile. In parts this attack overshot its mark, broke through and over the second line and, tearing and hacking through a network of wire, into the third trench. In part the second line still held out; and even after it was all completely taken, the communication trenches between the first and second line were filled with combatants who fought on furiously, heedless of whether friend or foe held trench to front or rear, intent only on the business at their own bayonet points, to kill the enemy facing them and push in and kill the ones behind. Fresh supports pressed into the captured positions, and, backed by their weight, the attack surged on again in a fresh spasm of fury. It secured foothold in great sections of the third line, and even, without waiting to see the whole of it made good, attempted to rush the fourth line. At one or two points the gallant attempt succeeded, and a handful of men hung on desperately for some hours, their further advance impossible, their retreat, had they attempted it, almost equally so, cut off from reinforcements, short of ammunition, and entirely without bombs or grenades. When their ammunition was expended they used rifles and cartridges taken from the enemy dead in the trench; having no grenades they snatched and hurled back on the instant any that fell with fuses still burning. They waged their unequal fight to the last minute and were killed out to the last man.
The third line was not completely held or even taken. One or two loopholed and machine-gunned dug-out redoubts, or 'keeps,' held out strenuously, and before they could be reduced—entrance being gained at last literally by tearing the place down sandbag by sandbag till a hole was made and grenade after grenade flung in—other parts of the trench had been recaptured. The weak point that so often hampers attack was making itself felt. The bombers and 'grenadiers' had exhausted the stock they carried; fresh supplies were scanty, were brought up with difficulty, and distributed to the most urgently required places with still greater difficulty. The ammunition carriers had to cross the open of the old neutral ground, the battered first trench, pass along communication trenches choked with dead and wounded, or again cross the open to the second and third line. All the time they were under the fire of high-explosive shells and had to pass through a zone or 'barrage' of shrapnel built across their path for just this special purpose of destroying supports and supplies. Our own artillery were playing exactly the same game behind the enemy lines, but in these lines were ample stores of cartridges and grenades, bombs, and trench-mortars. The third and fourth lines were within easy bomb- and grenade-throwing distance, and were connected by numerous passage-ways. On this front the contest became a bombing duel, and because the British were woefully short of bombs and the enemy could throw five to their one, they were once again 'bombed out' and forced to retire. But by now the second trench had been put in some state of defence towards its new front, and here the British line stayed fast and set its teeth and doggedly endured the torment of the bombs and the destruction of the pounding shells. Without rest or respite they endured till night, and on through the night, under the glare of flares and the long-drawn punishment of the shell fire, until the following day brought with the dawn fresh supports for a renewal of the struggle. The battered fragments of the first attacking battalions were withdrawn, often with corporals for company leaders, and lieutenants or captains commanding battalions whose full remaining strength would hardly make a company. The battle might only have been well begun, but at least, thanks to them and to those scattered heaps lying among the grass, spread in clumps and circles about the yawning shell-holes, buried beneath the broken parapets and in the smashed trenches—to them, and those, and these others passing out with haggard, pain-lined faces, shattered limbs, and torn bodies on the red, wet stretchers to the dressing stations, at least, the battle was well begun. The sappers were hard at work in the darkness consolidating the captured positions, and these would surely now be held firm. Whatever was to follow, these first regiments had done their share.
Two lines of trenches were taken; the line was advanced—advanced, it is true, a bare one or two hundred yards, but with lives poured out like water over each foot of the advance, with every inch of the ground gained marking a well-spring and fountain-head of a river of pain, of a suffering beyond all words, of a glory above and beyond all suffering.
'. . . have maintained and consolidated our position in the captured trench.'—EXTRACT FROM OFFICIAL DESPATCH.
Number nine-two-ought-three-six, Sapper Duffy, J., 'A' Section, Southland Company, Royal Engineers, had been before the War plain Jem Duffy, labourer, and as such had been an ardent anti-militarist, anti-conscriptionist, and anti-everything else his labour leaders and agitators told him. His anti-militarist beliefs were sunk soon after the beginning of the War, and there is almost a complete story itself in the tale of their sinking, weighted first by a girl, who looked ahead no further than the pleasure of walking out with a khaki uniform, and finally plunged into the deeps of the Army by the gibe of a stauncher anti-militarist during a heated argument that, 'if he believed now in fighting, why didn't he go'n fight himself?' But even after his enlistment he remained true to his beliefs in voluntary service, and the account of his conversion to the principles of Conscription—no half-and-half measures of 'military training' or rifle clubs or hybrid arrangements of that sort, but out-and-out Conscription—may be more interesting, as it certainly is more typical, of the conversion of more thousands of members of the Serving Forces than will ever be known—until those same thousands return to their civilian lives and the holding of their civilian votes.
* * * * *
By nightfall the captured trench—well, it was only a courtesy title to call it a trench. Previous to the assault, the British guns had knocked it about a good deal, bombs and grenades had helped further to disrupt it in the attacks and counter-attacks during the day, and finally, after it was captured and held, the enemy had shelled and high-explosived it out of any likeness to a real trench. But the infantry had clung throughout the day to the ruins, had beaten off several strong counter-attacks, and in the intervals had done what they could to dig themselves more securely in and re-pile some heaps of sandbags from the shattered parapet on the trench's new front. The casualties had been heavy, and since there was no passage from the front British trench to the captured portion of the German except across the open of the 'neutral' ground, most of the wounded and all the killed had had to remain under such cover as could be found in the wrecked trench. The position of the unwounded was bad enough and unpleasant enough, but it was a great deal worse for the wounded. A bad wound damages mentally as well as physically. The 'casualty' is out of the fight, has had a first field dressing placed on his wound, has been set on one side to be removed at the first opportunity to the dressing station and the rear. He can do nothing more to protect himself or take such cover as offers. He is in the hands of the stretcher-bearers and must submit to be moved when and where they think fit. And in this case the casualties did not even have the satisfaction of knowing that every minute that passed meant a minute farther from the danger zone, a minute nearer to safety and to the doctors, and the hospitals' hope of healing. Here they had to be throughout the long day, hearing the shriek of each approaching shell, waiting for the crash of its fall, wondering each time ifthisone, the rush of its approach rising louder and louder to an appalling screech, was going to be the finish—a 'direct hit.' Many of the wounded were wounded again, or killed as they lay; and from others the strength and the life had drained slowly out before nightfall. But now that darkness had come the casualties moved out and the supports moved in. From what had been the German second trench, and on this portion of front was now their forward one, lights were continually going up and bursts of rifle and machine-gun fire were coming; and an occasional shell still whooped up and burst over or behind the captured trench. This meant that the men—supports, and food and water carriers, and stretcher-bearers—were under a dangerous fire even at night in crossing the old 'neutral' ground, and it meant that one of the first jobs absolutely necessary to the holding of the captured trench was the making of a connecting path more or less safe for moving men, ammunition, and food by night or day.
This, then, was the position of affairs when 'A' section of the Southland Company of Engineers came up to take a hand, and this communication trench was the task that Sapper Duffy, J., found himself set to work on. Personally Sapper Duffy knew nothing of, and cared less for, the tactical situation. All he knew or cared about was that he had done a longish march up from the rear the night before, that he had put in a hard day's work carrying up bales of sandbags and rolls of barbed wire from the carts to the trenches, and that here before him was another night's hard labour, to say nothing of the prospect of being drilled by a rifle bullet or mangled by a shell. All the information given him and his section by their section officer was that they were to dig a communication trench, that it must be completed before morning, that as long as they were above-ground they would probably be under a nasty fire, and that therefore the sooner they dug themselves down under cover the better it would be for the job and for all concerned. 'A' section removed its equipment and tunics and moved out on to the 'neutral' ground in its shirt-sleeves, shivering at first in the raw cold and at the touch of the drizzling rain, but knowing that the work would very soon warm them beyond need of hampering clothes. In the ordinary course, digging a trench under fire is done more or less under cover by sapping—digging the first part in a covered spot, standing in the deep hole, cutting down the 'face' and gradually burrowing a way across the danger zone. The advantage of this method is that the workers keep digging their way forward while all the time they are below ground and in the safety of the sap they dig. The disadvantage is that the narrow trench only allows one or two men to get at its end or 'face' to dig, and the work consequently takes time. Here it was urgent that the work be completed that night, because it was very certain that as soon as its whereabouts was disclosed by daylight it would be subjected to a fire too severe to allow any party to work, even if the necessary passage of men to and fro would leave any room for a working party. The digging therefore had to be done down from the surface, and the diggers, until they had sunk themselves into safety, had to stand and work fully exposed to the bullets that whined and hissed across from the enemy trenches.
A zigzag line had been laid down to mark the track of the trench, and Sapper Duffy was placed by his sergeant on this line and told briefly to 'get on with it.' Sapper Duffy spat on his hands, placed his spade on the exact spot indicated, drove it down, and began to dig at a rate that was apparently leisurely but actually was methodical and nicely calculated to a speed that could be long and unbrokenly sustained. During the first minute many bullets whistled and sang past, and Sapper Duffy took no notice. A couple went 'whutt' past his ear, and he swore and slightly increased his working speed. When a bullet whistles or sings past, it is a comfortable distance clear; when it goes 'hiss' or 'swish,' it is too close for safety; and when it says 'whutt' very sharply and viciously, it is merely a matter of being a few inches out either way. Sapper Duffy had learned all this by full experience, and now the number of 'whutts' he heard gave him a very clear understanding of the dangers of this particular job. He was the farthest out man of the line. On his left hand he could just distinguish the dim figure of another digger, stooping and straightening, stooping and straightening, with the rhythm and regularity of a machine. On his right hand was empty darkness, lit up every now and then by the glow of a flare-light showing indistinctly through the drizzling rain. Out of the darkness, or looming big against the misty light, figures came and went stumbling and slipping in the mud—stretcher-bearers carrying or supporting the wounded, a ration party staggering under boxes balanced on shoulders, a strung-out line of supports stooped and trying to move quietly, men in double files linked together by swinging ammunition boxes. All these things Sapper Duffy saw out of the tail of his eye, and without stopping or slacking the pace of his digging. He fell unconsciously to timing his movements to those of the other man, and for a time the machine became a twin-engine working beat for beat—thrust, stoop, straighten, heave; thrust, stoop, straighten, heave. Then a bullet said the indescribable word that means 'hit' and Duffy found that the other half of the machine had stopped suddenly and collapsed in a little heap. Somewhere along the line a voice called softly 'Stretcher-bearers,' and almost on the word two men and a stretcher materialised out of the darkness and a third was stooping over the broken machine. 'He's gone,' said the third man after a pause. 'Lift him clear.' The two men dropped the stretcher, stooped and fumbled, lifted the limp figure, laid it down a few yards away from the line, and vanished in the direction of another call. Sapper Duffy was alone with his spade and a foot-deep square hole—and the hissing bullets. The thoughts of the dead man so close beside him disturbed him vaguely, although he had never given a thought to the scores of dead he had seen behind the trench and that he knew were scattered thick over the 'neutral' ground where they had fallen in the first charge. But this man had been one of his own company and his own section—it was different about him somehow. Yet of course Sapper Duffy knew that the dead must at times lie where they fall, because the living must always come before the dead, especially while there are many more wounded than there are stretchers or stretcher-bearers. But all the same he didn't like poor old 'Jigger' Adams being left there—didn't see how he could go home and face old 'Jigger's' missus and tell her he'd come away and left 'Jigger' lying in the mud of a mangel-wurzel field. Blest if he wouldn't have a try when they were going to give Jigger a lift back. A line of men, shirt-sleeved like himself and carrying spades in their hands, moved out past him. An officer led them, and another with Sapper Duffy's section officer brought up the rear, and passed along the word to halt when he reached Daffy. 'Here's the outside man of my lot,' he said, 'so you'll join on beyond him. You've just come in, I hear, so I suppose your men are fresh?'
'Fresh!' said the other disgustedly. 'Not much. They've been digging trenches all day about four miles back. It's too sickening. Pity we don't do like the Boches—conscript all the able-bodied civilians and make 'em do all this trench-digging in rear. Then we might be fresh for the firing line.'
'Tut, tut—mustn't talk about conscripting 'em,' said Duffy's officer reprovingly. 'One volunteer, y'know—worth ten pressed men.'
'Yes,' said the other, 'but when there isn't enough of the "one volunteer" it's about time to collar the ten pressed.'
Two or three flares went up almost simultaneously from the enemy's line, the crackle of fire rose to a brisk fusillade, and through it ran the sharp 'rat-at-at-at' of a machine-gun. The rising sound of the reports told plainly of the swinging muzzle, and officers and men dropped flat in the mud and waited till the sweeping bullets had passed over their heads. Men may work on and 'chance it' against rifle fire alone, but the sweep of a machine-gun is beyond chance, and very near to the certainty of sudden death to all in the circle of its swing.
The officers passed on and the new men began to dig. Sapper Duffy also resumed work, and as he did so he noticed there was something familiar about the bulky shape of the new digger next to him.
'What lot are you?' asked the new man, heaving out the first spadeful rapidly and dexterously.
'We're 'A' Section, Southland Company,' said Duffy, 'an' I say—ain't you Beefy Wilson?'
'That's me,' said the other without checking his spade. 'And blow me! you must be Duffy—Jem Duffy.'
'That's right,' said Duffy. 'But I didn't know you'd joined, Beefy.'
'Just a week or two after you,' said Beefy.
'Didjer know boss's two sons had got commissions? Joined the Sappers an' tried to raise a company out o' the works to join. Couldn't though. I was the only one.'
'Look out—'ere's that blanky maxim again,' said Duffy, and they dropped flat very hurriedly.
There was no more conversation at the moment. There were too many bullets about to encourage any lingering there, and both men wanted all their breath for their work. It was hard work too. Duffy's back and shoulder and arm muscles began to ache dully, but he stuck doggedly to it. He even made an attempt to speed up to Beefy's rate of shovelling, although he knew by old experience alongside Beefy that he could never keep up with him, the unchallenged champion of the old gang.
Whether it was that the lifting rain had made them more visible or that the sound of their digging had been heard they never knew, but the rifle fire for some reason became faster and closer, and again and again the call passed for stretcher-bearers, and a constant stream of wounded began to trickle back from the trench-diggers. Duffy's section was not so badly off now because they had sunk themselves hip deep, and the earth they threw out in a parapet gave extra protection. But it was harder work for them now because they stood in soft mud and water well above the ankles. The new company, being the more exposed, suffered more from the fire; but each man of them had a smaller portion of trench to dig, so they were catching up on the first workers. But all spaded furiously and in haste to be done with the job, while the officers and sergeants moved up and down the line and watched the progress made.
More cold-bloodedly unpleasant work it would be hard to imagine. The men had none of the thrill and heat of combat to help them; they had not the hope that a man has in a charge across the open—that a minute or two gets the worst of it over; they had not even the chance the fighting man has where at least his hand may save his head. Their business was to stand in the one spot, open and unprotected, and without hope of cover or protection for a good hour or more on end. They must pay no heed to the singing bullets, to the crash of a bursting shell, to the rising and falling glow of the flares. Simply they must give body and mind to the job in hand, and dig and dig and keep on digging. There had been many brave deeds done by the fighting men on that day: there had been bold leading and bold following in the first rush across the open against a tornado of fire; there had been forlorn-hope dashes for ammunition or to pick up wounded; there had been dogged and desperate courage in clinging all day to the battered trench under an earth-shaking tempest of high-explosive shells, bombs, and bullets. But it is doubtful if the day or the night had seen more nerve-trying, courage-testing work, more deliberate and long-drawn bravery than was shown, as a matter of course and as a part of the job, in the digging of that communication trench.
It was done at last, and although it might not be a Class One Exhibition bit of work, it was, as Beefy Wilson remarked, 'a deal better'n none.' And although the trench was already a foot deep in water, Beefy stated no more than bald truth in saying, 'Come to-morrow there's plenty will put up glad wi' their knees bein' below high-water mark for the sake o' havin' their heads below low bullet-mark.'
But, if the trench was finished, the night's work for the Engineers was not. They were moved up into the captured trench, and told that they had to repair it and wire out in front of it before they were done.
They had half an hour's rest before recommencing work, and Beefy Wilson and Jem Duffy hugged the shelter of some tumbled sandbags, lit their pipes and turned the bowls down, and exchanged reminiscences.
'Let's see,' said Beefy. 'Isn't Jigger Adams in your lot?'
'Was,' corrected Jem, 'till an hour ago. 'E's out yon wi' a bullet in 'im—stiff by now.'
Beefy breathed blasphemous regrets. 'Rough on 'is missus an' the kids.Six of 'em, weren't it?'
'Aw,' assented Jem. 'But she'll get suthin' from the Society funds.'
'Not a ha'porth,' said Beefy. 'You'll remem—no, it was just arter you left. The trades unions decided no benefits would be paid out for them as 'listed. It was Ben Shrillett engineered that. 'E was Secretary an' Treasurer an' things o' other societies as well as ours. 'E fought the War right along, an' 'e's still fightin' it. 'E's a anti-militant, 'e ses.'
'Anti-militarist,' Jem corrected. He had taken some pains himself in the old days to get the word itself and some of its meaning right.
'Anti-military-ist then,' said Beefy. 'Any'ow, 'e stuck out agin all sorts o' soldierin'. This stoppin' the Society benefits was a trump card too. It blocked a whole crowd from listin' that I know myself would ha' joined. Queered the boss's sons raisin' that Company too. They 'ad Frickers an' the B.S.L. Co. an' the works to draw from. Could ha' raised a couple hundred easy if Ben Shrillett 'adn't got at 'em. You know 'ow 'e talks the fellers round.'
'I know,' agreed Jem, sucking hard at his pipe.
The Sergeant broke in on their talk. 'Now then,' he said briskly.'Sooner we start, sooner we're done an' off 'ome to our downy couch.'Ere, Duffy'—and he pointed out the work Duffy was to start.
For a good two hours the Engineers laboured like slaves again. The trench was so badly wrecked that it practically had to be reconstructed. It was dangerous work because it meant moving freely up and down, both where cover was and was not. It was physically heavy work because spade work in wet ground must always be that; and when the spade constantly encounters a debris of broken beams, sandbags, rifles, and other impediments, and the work has to be performed in eye-confusing alternations of black darkness and dazzling flares, it makes the whole thing doubly hard. When you add in the constant whisk of passing bullets and the smack of their striking, the shriek and shattering burst of high-explosive shells, and the drone and whirr of flying splinters, you get labour conditions removed to the utmost limit from ideal, and, to any but the men of the Sappers, well over the edge of the impossible. The work at any other time would have been gruesome and unnerving, because the gasping and groaning of the wounded hardly ceased from end to end of the captured trench, and in digging out the collapsed sections many dead Germans and some British were found blocking the vigorous thrust of the spades.
Duffy was getting 'fair fed up,' although he still worked on mechanically. He wondered vaguely what Ben Shrillett would have said to any member of the trade union that had worked a night, a day, and a night on end. He wondered, too, how Ben Shrillett would have shaped in the Royal Engineers, and, for all his cracking muscles and the back-breaking weight and unwieldiness of the wet sandbags, he had to grin at the thought of Ben, with his podgy fat fingers and his visible rotundity of waistcoat, sweating and straining there in the wetness and darkness with Death whistling past his ear and crashing in shrapnel bursts about him. The joke was too good to keep to himself, and he passed it to Beefy next time he came near. Beefy saw the jest clearly and guffawed aloud, to the amazement of a clay-daubed infantryman who had had nothing in his mind but thoughts of death and loading and firing his rifle for hours past.
'Don't wonder Ben's agin conscription,' said Beefy; 'they might conscription 'im,' and passed on grinning.
Duffy had never looked at it in that light. He'd been anti-conscription himself, though now—mebbe—he didn't know—he wasn't so sure.
And after the trench was more or less repaired came the last and the most desperate business of all—the 'wiring' out there in the open under the eye of the soaring lights. In ones and twos during the intervals of darkness the men tumbled over the parapet, dragging stakes and coils of wire behind them. They managed to drive short stakes and run trip-wires between them without the enemy suspecting them. When a light flamed, every man dropped flat in the mud and lay still as the dead beside them till the light died. In the brief intervals of darkness they drove the stakes with muffled hammers, and ran the lengths of barbed wire between them. Heart in mouth they worked, one eye on the dimly seen hammer and stake-head, the other on the German trench, watching for the first upward trailing sparks of the flare. Plenty of men were hit of course, because, light or dark, the bullets were kept flying, but there was no pause in the work, not even to help the wounded in. If they were able to crawl they crawled, dropping flat and still while the lights burned, hitching themselves painfully towards the parapet under cover of the darkness. If they could not crawl they lay still, dragging themselves perhaps behind the cover of a dead body or lying quiet in the open till the time would come when helpers would seek them. Their turn came when the low wires were complete. The wounded were brought in cautiously to the trench then, and hoisted over the parapet; the working party was carefully detailed and each man's duty marked out before they crawled again into the open with long stakes and strands of barbed wire. The party lay there minute after minute, through periods of light and darkness, until the officer in charge thought a favourable chance had come and gave the arranged signal. Every man leaped to his feet, the stakes were planted, and quick blow after blow drove them home. Another light soared up and flared out, and every man dropped and held his breath, waiting for the crash of fire that would tell they were discovered. But the flare died out without a sign, and the working party hurriedly renewed their task. This time the darkness held for an unusual length of time, and the stakes were planted, the wires fastened, and cross-pieces of wood with interlacings of barbed wire all ready were rolled out and pegged down without another light showing. The word passed down and the men scrambled back into safety.
'Better shoot a light up quick,' said the Engineer officer to the infantry commander. 'They have a working party out now. I heard 'em hammering. That's why they went so long without a light.'
A pistol light was fired and the two stared out into the open ground it lit. 'Thought so,' said the Engineer, pointing. 'New stakes—see? And those fellows lying beside 'em.'
'Get your tools together, sergeant,' he said, as several more lights flamed and a burst of rapid fire rose from the British rifles, 'and collect your party. Our job's done, and I'm not sorry for it.'
It was just breaking daylight when the remains of the Engineers' party emerged from the communication trench and already the guns on both sides were beginning to talk. Beefy Wilson and Jem Duffy between them found Jigger's body and brought it as far as the dressing station. Behind the trenches Beefy's company and Jem's section took different roads, and the two old friends parted with a casual 'S' long' and 'See you again sometime.'
Duffy had two hours' sleep in a sopping wet roofless house, about three miles behind the firing line. Then the section was roused and marched back to their billets in a shell-wrecked village, a good ten miles farther back. They found what was left of the other three sections of the Southland Company there, heard the tale of how the Company had been cut up in advancing with the charging infantry, ate a meal, scraped some of the mud off themselves, and sought their blankets and wet straw beds.
Jem Duffy could not get the thought of Ben Shrillett, labour leader and agitator, out of his mind, and mixed with his thoughts as he went to sleep were that officer's remarks about pressed men. That perhaps accounts for his waking thoughts running on the same groove when his sergeant roused him at black midnight and informed him the section was being turned out—to dig trenches.
'Trenches,' spluttered Sapper Duffy, '. . . us? How is it our turn again?'
'Becos, my son,' said the Sergeant, 'there's nobody else about 'ere to take a turn. Come on! Roll out! Show a leg!'
It was then that Sapper Duffy was finally converted, and renounced for ever and ever his anti-conscription principles.
'Nobody else,' he said slowly, 'an' England fair stiff wi' men. . . . The sooner we get Conscription, the better I'll like it. Conscription solid for every bloomin' able-bodied man an' boy. An' I 'ope Ben Shrillett an' 'is likes is the first to be took. Conscription,' he said with the emphasis of finality as he fumbled in wet straw for a wetter boot, 'out-an'-out, lock, stock, 'n barrel Conscription.'
* * * * *
That same night Ben Shrillett was presiding at a meeting of the Strike Committee. He had read on the way to the meeting the communiqué that told briefly of Sapper Duffy and his fellow Engineers' work of the night before, and the descriptive phrase struck him as sounding neat and effective. He worked it now into his speech to the Committee, explaining how and where they and he benefited by this strike, unpopular as it had proved.
'We've vindicated the rights of the workers,' he said. 'We've shown that, war or no war, Labour means to be more than mere wage-slaves. War can't last for ever, and we here, this Committee, proved ourselves by this strike the true leaders and the Champions of Labour, the Guardians of the Rights of Trade Unionism. We, gentlemen, have always been that, and by the strike'—and he concluded with the phrase from the despatch—'we have maintained and consolidated our position.'
The Committee said, 'Hear, hear.' It is a pity they could not have heard what Sapper Duffy was saying as he sat up in his dirty wet straw, listening to the rustle and patter of rain on the barn's leaky roof and tugging on an icy-cold board-stiff boot.
The remains of the Regiment were slowly working their way back out of action. They had been in it for three days—three strenuous nights and days of marching, of fighting, of suffering under heavy shell-fire, of insufficient and broken sleep, of irregular and unpalatable rations, of short commons of water, of nerve-stretching excitement and suspense, all the inevitable discomforts and hardships that in the best organised of armies must be the part of any hard-fought action. The Regiment had suffered cruelly, and their casualties had totalled some sixty per cent. of the strength. And now they were coming back, jaded and worn, filthily grimed and dirty, unshaven, unwashed, footsore, and limping, but still in good heart and able to see a subject for jests and laughter in the sprawling fall of one of their number plunging hastily to shelter from the unexpected rush and crash of a shell, in the sultry stream of remarks from an exasperated private when he discovered a bullet-pierced water-bottle and the loss of his last precious drops of water.
The men were trickling out in slow, thin streams along communication and support trenches, behind broken buildings and walls and barricades, under any cover that screened them from the watchful eyes of the enemy observers perched high in trees and buildings and everywhere they could obtain a good look-out over our lines.
In the minds of the men the thoughts of almost all ran in the same grooves—first and most strongly, because perhaps the oftenest framed in speech, that it was hot—this hot and that hot, hot as so-and-so or such-and-such, according to the annoyance or wit of the speaker; second, and much less clearly defined, a dull satisfaction that they had done their share, and done it well, and that now they were on their way out to all the luxury of plenty of food and sleep, water to drink, water and soap to wash with; third, and increasing in proportion as they got farther from the forward line and the chance of being hit, a great anxiety to reach the rear in safety. The fear of being hit by shell or bullet was a hundred-fold greater than it had been during their part in the action, when the risk was easily a hundred times greater, and more sympathy was expended over one man 'casualtied' coming out than over a score of those killed in the actual fight. It seemed such hard lines, after going through all they had gone through and escaping it scot free, that a man should be caught just when it was all over and he was on the verge of a more or less prolonged spell outside the urgent danger zone.
The engagement was not over yet. It had been raging with varying intensity for almost a week, had resulted in a considerable advance of the British line, and had now resolved itself into a spasmodic series of struggles on the one side to 'make good' the captured ground and steal a few more yards, if possible; on the other, to strengthen the defence against further attacks and to make the captured trenches untenable.
But the struggle now was to the Regiment coming out a matter of almost outside interest, an interest reduced nearly to the level of the newspaper readers' at home, something to read or hear and talk about in the intervals of eating and drinking, of work and amusement and sleep and the ordinary incidents of daily life. Except, of course, that the Regiment always had at the back of this casual interest the more personal one that if affairs went badly their routine existence 'in reserve' might be rudely interrupted and they might be hurried back and flung again into the fight.
But that was unlikely, and meantime there were still stray shells and bullets to be dodged, the rifles and kits were blasphemously heavy, and it was most blasphemously hot. The men were occupied enough in picking their steps in the broken ground, in their plodding, laborious progress, above all in paying heed to the order constantly passing back to 'keep low,' but they were still able to note with a sort of professional interest the damage done to the countryside. A 'small-holding' cottage between the trenches had been shelled and set on fire, and was gutted to the four bare, blackened walls. The ground about it still showed in the little squares and oblongs that had divided the different cultivations, but the difference now was merely of various weeds and rank growths, and the ground was thickly pitted with shell-holes. A length of road was gridironed with deep and laboriously dug trenches, and of the poplars that ran along its edge some were broken off in jagged stumps, some stood with stems as straight and bare as telegraph poles, or half cut through and collapsed like a half-shut knife or an inverted V, with their heads in the dust; others were left with heads snapped off and dangling in grey withered leaves, or with branches glinting white splinters and stripped naked, as in the dead of winter. In an orchard the fruit trees were smashed, uprooted, heaped pell-mell in a tangle of broken branches, bare twisted trunks, fragments of stump a foot or a yard high, here a tree slashed off short, lifted, and flung a dozen yards, and left head down and trunk in air; there a row of currant bushes with a yawning shell-crater in the middle, a ragged remnant of bush at one end and the rest vanished utterly, leaving only a line of torn stems from an inch to a foot long to mark their place.
A farm of some size had been at one time a point in the advanced trenches, and had been converted into a 'keep.' Its late owner would never have recognised it in its new part. Such walls as were left had been buttressed out of sight by sandbags; trenches twisted about the outbuildings, burrowed under and into them, and wriggled out again through holes in the walls; a market cart, turned upside down, and earthed over to form a bomb-store, occupied a corner of the farmyard; cover for snipers' loopholes had been constructed from ploughshares; a remaining fragment of a grain loft had become an 'observing station'; the farm kitchen a doctor's dressing station; the cow-house a machine-gun place; the cellar, with the stove transplanted from the kitchen, a cooking, eating, and sleeping room. All the roofs had been shelled out of existence. All the walls were notched by shells and peppered thick with bullet marks. A support trench about shoulder deep with a low parapet along its front was so damaged by shell fire that the men for the most part had to move along it bent almost double to keep out of sight and bullet reach. Every here and there—where a shell had lobbed fairly in—there was a huge crater, its sides sealing up the trench with a mass of tumbled earth over which the men scrambled crouching. Behind the trench a stretch of open field was pitted and pock-marked with shell-holes of all sizes from the shallow scoop a yard across to the yawning crater, big and deep enough to bury the whole field-gun that had made the smaller hole. The field looked exactly like those pictures one sees in the magazines of a lunar landscape or the extinct volcanoes of the moon.
The line of men turned at last into a long deep-cut communication trench leading out into a village. The air in the trench was heavy and close and stagnant, and the men toiled wearily up it, sweating and breathing hard. At a branching fork one path was labelled with a neatly printed board 'To Battn. H.Q. and the Mole Heap,' and the other path 'To the Duck Pond'—this last, the name of a trench, being a reminder of the winter and the wet. The officer leading the party turned into the trench for 'The Mole Heap,' walked up it, and emerged into the sunlight of the grass-grown village street, skirted a house, crossed the street by a trench, and passed through a hole chipped out of the brick wall into a house, the men tramping at his heels. The whole village was seamed with a maze of trenches, but these were only for use when the shelling had been particularly heavy. At other times people moved about the place by paths sufficiently well protected by houses and walls against the rifle bullets that had practically never ceased to smack into the village for many months past. These paths wandered behind buildings, across gardens, into and out of houses either by doors or by holes in the wall, over or round piles of rubble or tumbled brick-work, burrowed at times below ground-level on patches exposed to fire, ran frequently through a dozen cottages on end, passage having been effected simply by hacking holes through the connecting brick walls, in one place dived underground down some short stairs and took its way through several cellars by the same simple method of walking through the walls from one cellar to another. The houses were littered with empty and rusty tins, torn and dirty clothing, ash-choked stoves, trampled straw, and broken furniture. The back-yards and gardens were piled with heaps of bricks and tiles, biscuit and jam tins; broken fences and rotted rags were overrun with a rank growth of grass and weeds and flowers, pitted with shell-holes and strewn with graves.
The whole village was wrecked from end to end, was no more than a charnel house, a smashed and battered sepulchre. There was not one building that was whole, not one roof that had more than a few tiles clinging to shattered rafters, hardly a wall that was not cracked and bulged and broken.
In the houses they passed through the men could still find sufficient traces of the former occupants to indicate their class and station. One might have been a labourer's cottage, with a rough deal table, a red-rusted stove-fireplace, an oleograph in flaming crude colours of the 'Virgin and Child' hanging on the plaster wall, the fragments of a rough cradle overturned in a corner, a few coarse china crocks and ornaments and figures chipped and broken and scattered about the mantel, and the bare board floor. Another house had plainly been a home of some refinement. The rooms were large, with lofty ceilings; there were carpets on the floors, although so covered with dirt and dried mud and the dust of fallen plaster that they were hardly discernible as carpets. In one room a large polished table had a broken leg replaced by an up-ended barrel, one big arm-chair had its springs and padding showing through the burst upholstering. Another was minus all its legs, and had the back wrenched off and laid flat with the seat on the floor, evidently to make a bed. There were several good engravings hanging askew on the walls or lying about the floor, all soiled with rain and cut and torn by their splintered glass. The large open-grate fireplace had an artistically carved overmantel sadly chipped and smoke-blackened, a tiled hearth in fragments; the wall-paper in a tasteful design of dark-green and gold was blotched and discoloured, and hung in peeling strips and gigantic 'dog's-ears'; from the poles and rings over the windows the tattered fragments of a lace curtain dangled. There was plenty of evidence that the room had been occupied by others since its lawful tenants had fled. It was strewn with broken or cast-off military equipments, worn-out boots, frayed and mud-caked putties, a burst haversack and pack-valise, a holed water-bottle, broken webbing straps and belts, a bayonet with a snapped blade, a torn grey shirt, and a goatskin coat. The windows had the shutters closed, and were sandbagged up three parts their height, the need for this being evident from the clean, round bullet-holes in the shutters above the sandbags, and the ragged tears and holes in the upper part of the opposite wall. In an upper corner a gaping shell-hole had linen table-cloths five or six fold thick hung over to screen the light from showing through at night. In a corner lay a heap of mouldy straw and a bed-mattress; the table and fireplace were littered with dirty pots and dishes, the floor with empty jam and biscuit tins, opened and unopened bully-beef tins, more being full than empty because the British soldier must be very near starving point before he is driven to eat 'bully.' Over everything lay, like a white winding-sheet, the cover of thick plaster-dust shaken down from the ceiling by the hammer-blows of the shells. The room door opened into a passage. At its end a wide staircase curved up into empty space, the top banisters standing out against the open blue sky. The whole upper storey had been blown off by shell fire and lay in the garden behind the house, a jumble of brickwork, window-frames, tiles, beams, beds and bedroom furniture, linen, and clothes.
These houses were inexpressibly sad and forlorn-looking, with all their privacy and inner homeliness naked and exposed to the passer-by and the staring sunlight. Some were no more than heaps of brick and stone and mortar; but these gave not nearly such a sense of desolation and desertion as those less damaged, as one, for instance, with its front blown completely out, so that one could look into all its rooms, upper and lower and the stairs between, exactly as one looks into those dolls' houses where the front is hinged to swing open.
The village had been on the edge of the fighting zone for months, had been casually shelled each day in normal times, bombarded furiously during every attack or counter-attack. The church, with its spire or tower, had probably been suspected as an artillery observing station by the Germans, and so had drawn a full share of the fire. All that was left of the church itself was one corner of shell-holed walls, and a few roof-beams torn and splintered and stripped of cover. The tower was a broken, jagged, stump—an empty shell, with one side blown almost completely out; the others, or what remained of them, cracked and tottering. The churchyard was a wild chaos of tumbled masonry, broken slates, uprooted and overturned tombstones, jumbled wooden crosses, crucifixes, black wooden cases with fronts of splintered glass, torn wreaths, and crosses of imitation flowers. Amongst the graves yawned huge shell craters; tossed hither and thither amongst the graves and broken monuments and bricks and rubbish were bones and fragments of coffins.
But all the graves were not in the churchyard. The whole village was dotted from end to end with them, some alone in secluded corners, others in rows in the backyards and vegetable gardens. Most of them were marked with crosses, each made of two pieces of packing-case or biscuit-box, with a number, rank, name, and regiment printed in indelible pencil. On some of the graves were bead-work flowers, on others a jam-pot or crock holding a handful of withered sun-dried flower-stalks. Nearly all were huddled in close to house or garden walls, one even in the narrow passage between two houses. There were, in many cases, other and less ugly open spaces and gardens offering a score of paces from these forlorn last resting-places apparently so oddly selected and sadly misplaced; but a second look showed that in each case the grave was dug where some wall or house afforded cover to the burying-party from bullets. In the bright sunlight, half-hidden under or behind heaps of debris, with crosses leaning drunkenly aslant, these graves looked woefully dreary and depressing. But the files of men moving round and between them, or stepping carefully over them, hardly gave them a glance, except where one in passing caught at a leaning cross and thrust it deeper and straighter into the earth. But the men's indifference meant no lack of feeling or respect for the dead. The respect was there, subtle but unmistakable, instanced slightly by the care every man took not to set foot on a grave, by the straightening of that cross, by those withered flowers and dirty wreaths, even as it has been shown scores of times by the men who crawl at risk of their lives into the open between the forward trenches at night to bring in their dead for decent burial.
Outside the shattered village stood the remains of a large factory, and on this the outcoming files of the Regiment converged, and the first arrivals halted to await the rest. What industry the factory had been concerned with it was impossible to tell. It was full of machinery, smashed, bent, twisted, and overturned, all red with rust, mixed up with and in parts covered by stone and brickwork, beams and iron girders, the whole sprinkled over with gleaming fragments of window-glass The outside walls were almost completely knocked flat, tossed helter-skelter outwards or on top of the machinery. The tall chimney—another suspected 'observing post' probably—lay in a heap of broken brickwork with the last yard or two of the base standing up out of the heap, and even in its remaining stump were other ragged shell-holes. A couple of huge boilers had been torn off their brick furnaces by the force of some monster shell and tossed clear yards away. One was poised across the broken outer wall, with one end in the road. The thick rounded plates were bent and dented in like a kicked biscuit-tin, were riddled and pierced through and through as if they had been paper. The whole factory and its machinery must once have represented a value of many thousands of francs. Now it was worth just the value of its site—less the cost of clearing it of debris—and the price of some tons of old iron.
Some of the men wandered about amongst the ruins, examining them curiously, tracing the work of individual shells, speculating on the number of hands the place had once employed, and where those hands were now.
'Man, man,' said a Scottish private, 'sic an awfu' waste. Think o' the siller it must ha' cost.'
''Ow would you like to be a shareholder in the company, Jock?' said his companion. 'Ain't many divvydends due to 'em this Christmas.'
The Scot shook his head sadly. 'This place an' the hale toon laid waste,' he said. 'It's awfu' tae think o' it.'
'An' this is one bloomin' pebble in a whole bloomin' beach,' said the other. 'D'you remember Wipers an' all them other towns? An' that old chap we saw sittin' on the roadside weepin' 'is eyes out 'cos the farm an' the fruit-trees 'e'd spent 'is life fixin' up was blowed to glory b' Jack Johnsons. We 'ave seed some rummy shows 'ere, 'aven't we? Not but what this ain't a pretty fair sample o' wreck,' he continued critically. 'There's plenty 'ud think they'd got their two-pennorth to see this on the screen o' a picture-show at 'ome, Jock.'
'Huh! Picturs!' sniffed Jock. 'Picturs, and the-ayters, and racin', and fitba'. Ah wanner folks hasna better use for their time and money, at sic a time 's this.'
'Aw,' said the other, 'But y' forget, Jock. Out 'ere they 'ave their 'ouses blown up an' their business blown in. A thousan' a day o' the like o' you an' me may be gettin' killed off for six months on end. But at 'ome, Jock—aw!'
He stooped and picked up a lump of white, chalky earth from the roadside, scrawled with it on the huge boiler-end that rested on the broken wall, and left the written words to finish the spoken sentence.
Jock read, and later the remains of the Regiment read as they moved off past the aching desolation of the silent factory, down the shell-torn road, across the war-swept ruins of a whole country-side. A few scowled at the thoughts the words raised, the most grinned and passed rough jests; but to all those men in the thinned ranks, their dead behind them, the scenes of ruin before them, the words bit, and bit deep. They ran:
But it'sBisness As Usual—AT HOME.