The Flavour of Victory
The jolliest man in the field is the man who, so to say, has been safely wounded, that is, whose wound is serious enough to take him right down the line, with a good prospect of crossing to Blighty, but not so serious as to cause anxiety. I never met so hilarious a crowd as the first batch of wounded from the fighting of 25th September 1915. We had been prepared for a 'rush.' The growling of the guns had for days past been growing deeper and more extended. It is, as a matter of fact, impossible to keep afuture offensive concealed. The precise time and place may be unknown, but the gathering together of men, the piling up of ammunition, and the necessary preparations for great numbers of wounded, advertise inevitably that something is afoot. The ranks are not slow to read the signs of the times: they say, for example, that an inspection by the divisional-general can only mean one thing. How much crosses to the other side it is hard to say, but the local inhabitants know all that is common talk, and sometimes a great deal more. They have eyes in their heads; they can see practice charges being carried through, and note which regiments carry battle-marks on their uniforms; and the little shops and estaminets are just soldiers' clubs where gossip is 'swapped' as freely as in the London west-end clubs, andunfortunately, is much better informed. A woman working on a farm once told me to what part of the line a certain division was going on returning from rest, and she gave a date. The commanding officers of the battalions concerned knew nothing of it, and indeed a quite contrary rumour was in circulation, but time proved the old woman to be right.
The Loos offensive was no exception, and for many days anxious thoughts and prayers had filled our hearts. We went from hope to despondency, and back to hope again. I dare say the talk round the mess table was very foolish. Compared with the earlier days of the war the country seemed full of men, and we heard stories of great accumulation of ammunition. Anything seemed possible.
By nine o'clock on the morning of the 25th the convoys were coming in, and the wounded streamed into the reception room. They were 'walking cases,' men who had been wounded in the early part of the attack and, able to walk, had made their way on foot to the regimental aid-post. All had been going well when they left. They were bubbling over with good spirits and excitement. Three—four—no, five lines of trenches had been taken and 'the Boche was on the run.' They joked and laughed and slapped one another on the back, and indeed this jovial crowd presented an extraordinary appearance, caked and plastered with mud, with tunics ripped and blood-stained, with German helmets, black or grey, stuck on the back of their heads, and amazing souvenirs 'for the wife.' One man with a rather guilty glanceround produced for my private inspection from under his coat an enormous silver crucifix about a foot long. He found it in a German officer's dug-out, but probably it came originally from some ruined French chapel. All souvenirs taken from dead enemies are loathsome to me. It is merciful that so many people have no imagination. I have never been able to understand, either, the carrying home of bits of shell and mementoes of that kind. Any memento of these unspeakable scenes of bloodshed is repulsive. Yet the British soldier is as chivalrous as he is brave. He speaks terrible words about what he will do to his foes, but when they are beaten and in his power he can never carry it through. This was very striking when you consider that until quite recently the German was 'top-dog' and howmuch our men had suffered at his hands. But once the fight is over he is ready to regard their individual account as settled. I remember so well one fire-eating officer who was going to teach any prisoners that came into his hands what British sternness meant. In due course twenty wounded Prussians came in. He was discovered next day actually distributing cigarettes to them. Now we must recollect that the British Tommy is not a class apart; he is simply the 'man in the street,' the people. Sometimes there is savage bitterness, not without good reason, and frequently the sullen or frightened temper of the prisoners made friendliness difficult, but Tommy—and by that name I mean the British citizen under arms—does not long nourish grudges when the price has been paid. He is essentially chivalrous, and even tohis enemy, when the passion of fighting or the strain of watchfulness is past, he is incurably kind.
An atmosphere of hope and cheerfulness pervaded the clearing station this first morning of the 'great offensive.' Passing through a ward I said to the nurse, 'Well, sister, everything seems to be going splendidly.' She looked up sombrely from the wound she was dressing and replied, 'So they said in the first hours of Neuve Chapelle.' I was chilled by what she said and felt angry with her.
Doubts and Fears
As the day wore on the news was not so good. The Meerut Division, which had delivered the containing attack in front of us on the Moulin du Pietre, waswhere it had been before it attacked, so the wounded said, with the exception of some units, notably Leicesters and Black Watch, who had apparently disappeared. Perhaps all that had been intended had been achieved. After all, the real battle—none could be more real and more costly to those taking part in it than a containing attack, forlorn hope as it often is—thedecisivebattle was further south at Loos. But the changed mood of the wounded now coming in was noticeable. Our fighting men hate to be beaten, and the story was of confusion and lack of support. Our own gas, too, had lingered on the ground and then drifted back on our own trenches. A young German student who was brought in wounded admitted the gallantry of the first rush, but he said, 'We always understood those trenches could be rushed,but we also know that they cannot be held on so small a front. They are commanded on either side.' In all seven hundred wounded and gassed were brought in from the British regiments of this division, and there was much work to be done.
Sunday was a bright, warm day, and in the afternoon we gathered all who could walk to a service in the green meadow behind the operating theatre. (There, too, they were busy enough, God knows.) The men came very willingly. I spoke a few words from the text 'Blessed are the peacemakers,' for that benediction was meant also for those lads who had just struck so brave a blow for a decent world. A gunner said afterwards, 'Do you know, I have only heard two sermons since I came out ten months ago. The other was by the Bishop of London, andhe took the same text!' It is, as a matter of fact, very difficult to serve the gunners properly; they were so scattered in little groups. It was very peaceful that Sunday afternoon—no sign of war anywhere, except the maimed results of it—as those men remembered with tears those whom it had 'pleased Almighty God to take out of this transitory world into His mercy.'
Every wounded man has a letter to write or to have written for him, and it was essential that since the people at home knew there was heavy fighting going on all messages should be sent off at once. This is one of the chaplain's voluntary tasks, and we were kept close to it every afternoon for some weeks after the offensive began. For some time the number of letters was about four hundred every day. A number of men hadwritten farewell letters—very moving they seemed, but I did not think it part of my duty to look too closely at these. They had addressed them and then put them in their pockets, hoping that if they were killed they might be discovered. Some had been finished just before the order to go over the parapet. But the curious thing was that these were sent home, with a few words in a covering note saying they were alive and well, as a sort of keepsake. In those written after arrival in hospital a sense of gratitude to God was very frequent, and a great longing for home and the children. Some strange phrases were used: a mother would be addressed as 'Dear old face,' or simply 'Old face.' But poets used to write verses to their mistresses' eyebrows, and why not a letter to a mother's face?
The German prisoners sent a message asking if they might speak with theHauptmann-Pfarrer. They besought me to send word to their relatives that they were safe. I took the full particulars and promised to ask the Foreign Office to forward, but could not guarantee the messages getting through, as their government was behaving very badly over the matter. They were all very anxious that I should be sure and say their wounds were slight (leicht).
Next day came urgent orders that all wounded were to be evacuated who could possibly be moved. So far as we had heard events seemed to be moving fairly well at Loos, but there were some ugly rumours and the atmosphere was one of great uneasiness. After dinner that evening the commanding officer, Major Frankau, took me aside, and askedme not to go to bed as they would need every available pair of hands throughout the night.
Our Share of the Fifty Thousand
It was ten o'clock when the first cars came crunching into the station yard, and the convoys arrived one after another until five in the morning. Then, as we could take in no more, the stream was diverted to the other clearing station up the road. Before the war the deep hoot of a car always seemed to say: 'Here am I, rich and rotund, rolling comfortably on my way; I have laid up much goods and can take mine ease'; but after that night it had another meaning: 'Slowly, tenderly, oh! be pitiful. I am broken and in pain,' as the carscrept along over the uneven roads. These were our share of the wounded from Loos, the overflow of serious 'stretcher cases' who could not be taken in at the already overworked stations immediately behind their own front. Many had been lying on the battlefield many hours. They were for the most part from the 15th (Scottish) Division and the 47th (London) Division. Both had made a deathless name. The former got further forward than any other, and paid the penalty with over six thousand casualties. All this night the rain fell in torrents. It streamed from the tops and sides of the ambulances, it lashed the yard till it rose in a fine spray; the lamps shone on wetness everywhere—the dripping, anxious faces of the drivers, the pallid faces of the wounded, eyes staring over their drenched brownblankets, eyes puzzled in their pain and distress, like those of hunted animals; and the reception room was filled with the choking odours of steaming dirty blankets and uniforms, of drying human bodies and of wounds and mortality. As each ambulance arrived the stretchers, their occupants for the most part silent, were drawn gently out and carried into the reception hall and laid upon the floor. At once each man—the nature of whose wounds permitted it—was given a cup of hot tea or of cold water, and a cigarette. Two by two they were lifted on to the trestles, and examined and dressed by the surgeons. Their fortitude was, as one of the surgeons said to me, uncanny. It was supernatural. I could not have believed what could be endured without complaint, often without even a word to express the horrid pain, unlessI had seen it. Amid all that battered, bleeding, shattered flesh and bone, the human spirit showed itself a very splendid thing that night. The reception room at last filled to overflowing and could not be emptied. All the wards and lofts and tents were crammed. By the time the other station was filled the two had taken in three thousand men. They remained with us for a week, because the hospital trains were too busy behind Loos to come our way. Every day every man had to have his wounds dressed. Some were covered with wounds; many of the wounds were dangerous, all were painful; and gas gangrene, which the surgeon so hates to see, had to be fought again and again. The medical staff, seven in number, worked on day after day, and night after night, skilfully, tenderly, ruthlessly.There were also a great many operations, and scores of difficult critical decisions.
As we stepped out from among the blanketed forms I thought bitterly of the 'glory' of war. Yet if there was any glory in war this was it. It was here, in this patient suffering and obedience. These men might well glory in their infirmities. This was heroism, the real thing, the spirit rising to incredible heights of patient endurance in the foreseen possible result of positive action for an ideal. The reaction from battle is overwhelming. Passions that the civilised man simply does not know, so colourless is his experience of them in ordinary days, are let loose, anger and terror and horror and lust to kill. So for a while, as nearly always happens, even wounds lost their power to pain in thesleep of bottomless exhaustion. Those who could not sleep were drugged with morphine. The moaning never stopped, but rose and fell and rose again. It shook my heart. We turned from the ashen faces and went out into the grey morning light. Everything seemed very grey. A mist was drawing up slowly from the sluggish Lys, and we wondered as we went shivering through it across the soaked grass what was happening beyond it over there at Loos.
Next afternoon at tea we were all cheered by the news that a man who had had his leg taken off three hours before was asking for a penny whistle. At last it was discovered that one of the cooks had one. (Cooks in the army are a race apart, possessors of all kinds of strange accomplishments.) It was willingly handed over, and soon the strains of 'Annie Laurie' were rising softly from a cot in Ward VIII.
A month later the Principal Chaplain asked me to go to a battalion. Chaplains who had been through the previous winter with battalions were not anxious for another winter of it, if fresh men could be found. I was thankful to go, in spite of all the kindness there had been on every hand and the friendships made. The devilish ingenuity of wounds was getting the better of me.
My charge was a brigade, containing a battalion of the Gordon Highlanders, with which I was directed to mess. But the day I joined, this battalion was taken out of the brigade, and as soon as the rearrangement was completed I was transferred to one of the battalions of TheRoyal Scots. While I was with this unit both its commanding officer and its adjutant were changed. In both cases the cause was the promotion of the officer in question.
Back Again!
The landing of the British Expeditionary Force in the far-away days of August 1914 was one of the great moments of history. And Scotland has a special share in the pride and sorrow that surround that great day, for in her premier regiment centred memories of warfare and endurance, of ancient alliances and ancient enmities, without a parallel in the story of any other regular regiment. The oldest regiment in Europe was on the battlefield once again. The First, or Royal Regiment of Foot, now known asThe Royal Scots, when it climbed the steep streets of Boulogne, marched on a soil sacred to it by the memories of heroic campaigns. Names that were as yet unfamiliar to the world at large were dear to it as the last resting-places of its comrades of long ago—names such as Dunkirk and Dixmude, Furnes and Ypres, Saberne and Bar-le-Duc. Hepburn's Regiment had fought over every foot of the ground on which it was now to share the waging of the greatest of all campaigns. Dumbarton's Drums were once more beating their way through Europe to the making of history. The trust of Gustavus Adolphus and Turenne, of Marlborough and Wellington, marched with them as the promise of victory; and from the old Royals, dustily climbing the cobbled street, spoke all the glamour of 'age-kept victories.'
France was a smiling land in those days, for the sun shone in the hearts of Frenchwomen as the rumour of war rose from the anxiously expected British columns and drifted across the shining August fields. The 2nd battalion—the 1st was still in India—tramped cheerily on its way. To no one then was there revealed that dreary vista of trenches that was to be war to the mind of the modern soldier.
The First Shock of War
Mons and the 23rd of August saw The Royals in action. With other battalions they occupied the Mons salient, actually the point on which the torrent of war first broke and for a brief moment spent itself. On that still night it seemed tohang suspended as a great wave does before falling. As the battalion lay in the shallow trench the pregnant silence was at last broken by the high, clear call of a bugle, one single long note, indescribably eerie and menacing, and then the listening men heard the rustling tread of feet moving through the grass with a steady, regular, ominous advance. The might of Germany was on the move, and still the thin brown line lay tense and silent, until only forty paces separated the two. Then, at a word, The Royals' line broke into a storm of flame which swept the line of the advancing men as a scythe sweeps through the corn; and for the British infantry the great war had begun.
Mons was a victory; the German advance was held up temporarily. But all night the British troops were beingwithdrawn. It was after five in the morning before The Royals got their orders to move, and 'A' Company claims to be the last of the British army to leave Mons. But Le Cateau was another story. Here our men learned what the concentrated fire of artillery could be. The shallow trenches were obliterated; our gunners, hopelessly outclassed in weight and number of pieces, could do little, in spite of the greatest gallantry, to protect the infantry; and that the army was able to withdraw at all was a striking proof of its stern discipline. Audencourt was a shambles. Colonel McMicking, wounded near this village and left behind, as all the wounded who were unable to walk had to be, was hit again while being carried out of the blazing church. The command devolved onMajor, now Brigadier-General, Duncan. From this time onwards the German guns had the range of the roads, and such a superiority of fire that they could do almost as they pleased. The infantry, at first furious at the necessity of retreat, turned again and again—as did the guns—on their pursuers, but even so the pressure was perilously near breaking point. The enemy had every means of mechanical transport, and was able to find time for rest. Our men had to press on to the last point of human endurance. There was no respite. The French Foreign Legion have a grim saying, 'March or die.' Here the word was 'March or be captured,' and even when every other conscious feeling but that of utter exhaustion seemed dead, somewhere deep down in their hearts the will to endure urged them on.
Is there no painter, no poet, who can enshrine for future generations the memory of this historic scene? We have here a sudden glimpse of Britain at her best. Hot sun, torment of burning feet on the cruel, white, and endless roads, the odour and sight and sound of death and wounds, pressure of pressing men, and love of life and the horrid loneliness of fear—all that was Giant Circumstance; but he could not extinguish the souls of men made in the image of God for suffering and endurance and triumph. English and Irish and Scottish—but brothers in hatred of retreat and in their determination to push on until they could turn and strike—the glamour of great names hung round all those tattered battalions; and the very essence of it was in the oldest of them all, in history and in campaigns, this famousLowland regiment. Of that at such a time they thought little, if at all; sheer physical facts pressed too hard, yet in their desperate victory over circumstance they wrote the most golden page of their story, and enriched the blood of all who follow them.
You can find a certain humour in war if you look for it, though war is not amusing, and life at home has many more entertaining incidents in it than life at the front. One officer of The Royals fell sound asleep in a trench during the climax of a terrific bombardment, and awoke to find himself alone among the dead. (He makes us laugh when he tells the story, but at the time it cannot have been just very humorous.) He pushed on after the retreating army, and though—owing to the mistake of an officer at a cross-roads who stood saying,'Third division to the right, So-and-so division to the left,' when it should have been the other way about—he lost his way, he found the battalion a fortnight later. Two others came in sight of the last bridge standing on one river just as the explosive was about to be detonated, and maintain that, running furiously toward the bridge, they persuaded the engineer in charge to postpone the fatal moment by brandishing a large loaf, rarest of all articles on the heels of a retreating army. Another who had been sent on ahead to find a billet in a château saw a beautiful bathroom, and was preparing to make use of a priceless opportunity when he found that the enemy was upon him, and fled in haste. The transport officer, peering round the corner of a house, saw his beloved transport which he had gathered and cherisheduntil it was reputed the best in the army, go up in matchwood and iron splinters. One subaltern, finding himself on the ground, discovered to his horror that he had a hole in his chest, but struggled gamely on, now walking, now stealing a ride on a limber—just catching the last train of all—and finally arriving in England with no other articles of kit or clothing but a suit of pink pyjamas and a single eyeglass.
At Meaux the steeples of Paris were in sight; but the hour had struck, and The Royals at last wheeled to pursue.
At the Nose of the Salient
The battalion had come through much since then, on the Marne and the Aisne and the Lys, and in trench warfare fromHooge to Neuve Chapelle. Here is a picture of a day's fighting from the diary of an eyewitness—a bald note of facts. It refers to 25th September 1915:—
'The brigade formed up in the trench in the following order from left to right, 1st Gordons, 4th Gordons, 2nd Royals, one company Royal Scots Fusiliers. Each battalion received separate point of attack, namely, Bellevarde Farm, Hooge Château, Redoubt, Sandbag Castle. Artillery bombardment 3.50-4.20a.m.General attack then launched. "B" Company was at the nose of the salient; "C" Company on right of "B"; "A" Company on left; "D" Company in dug-outs in reserve. At 4.20a.m.the battalion advanced to the attack. Complete silence was observed and bayonets were dulled. The front line was captured with few casualties on our side, andshortly after the final objective was successfully attained. Our line was consolidated. One hundred and sixteen prisoners belonging to the 172nd Regiment of XV. Prussian Corps were taken and three lines of trenches. All four officers of "B" Company were hit before German front line was reached. Touch was established with R.S.F. on right and 4th G.H. on left. There was heavy German shell-fire on the captured trenches. A party from "D" Company tried to make communication trench back to our old front line, 1st Gordons unfortunately were not able to reach the German front line owing to wire being undestroyed and too thick to cut. A gap was thus made between 1st and 4th Gordons. The enemy pushed bombers through, thus getting behind 4th Gordons. Desperate hand-to-hand fighting ensued.O.C. "A" Company was forced to defend his left flank. A German counter-attack moving N. to S. by C.T. across the Menin Road, The Royals' machine-gun did great execution. Terrific bombardment by German heavies (H.E.). "A" Company was ordered to retire on our old front line to get in touch with 4th G.H. on left. "B" Company to keep in touch ordered to do the same. "C" Company rinding enemy on left rear, position became critical. No battalion at all now on left, 1st Gordons having failed in their objective, and 4th having been withdrawn owing to flank attack in front of 1st. No battalion now on right either. "C" Company in danger of being surrounded. Captain N.S. Stewart personally reported the danger of his position. A company of 4th Middlesex were rushed up—all our men by thistime having been used up—to the nose of the salient, but could not man it owing to terrific barrage of fire. "C" Company, completely cut off, fought its way with the bayonet back to its former front line. Colonel Duncan reorganised the firing line. Both sides spent the night in gathering in the wounded.'
So ended the containing attack from the Ypres salient. But is not every sentence a spur to the imagination?
Two days later, the Corps commander, in personally thanking the battalion, complimented it on 'the smart appearance of the men whoshowed no signs of what they had gone through.'
It was to this famous battalion of a great Regiment that I was now attached as one of the four Presbyterian chaplains to the 'fighting Third' Division.
The Shell Area
The shell area is all the land behind the trenches which is under fire from the enemy's guns as a matter of course. It is not a pleasant place, for that reason, to walk about in, and our own artillery, cleverly concealed, is apt to open fire unexpectedly within a few yards of the passer-by in a way that is very disturbing. It is a dreary land; a dank air broods over it, an atmosphere of destruction and death, of humanity gone awry and desolate. I remember the almost ecstasy with which one April afternoon some ofus found ourselves among the purple hyacinths on Kemmel hill. Poor Kemmel, once a pleasure resort whither happy Belgians went for the benefit of their health, now far from that—and not particularly healthy! These battered villages are now merely sordid; only Ypres maintains a personality, an air of undefeat all its own. It too is a ruin, but unlike the others it is a splendid ruin. At every cross-roads the brooding crucifixes hang. The British mind does not like this constant reiteration of mishandling and defeat in the death of Christ. It does not seem to it to be the final message of the Cross. Indeed, it is the product of the mediaeval, monkish mind. It was not until the tenth century that the representations of the Crucifixion showed Our Lord as dead; it was much later before the emphasiswas laid on agony and despair. Once from among the debris of the convent in Voormezeele I rescued such a representation of the Body of Christ, limbs gone, broken arms outstretched, and it seemed a symbol. But that is not the final truth, defeat and despair. The cross-road shrines would not look down on those groups of tramping Islanders if it were so. And as you look back over the parados of the firing trench, across the bleached and scarred countryside, you remember thatthat, like the scenes of agony in the clearing station after Loos, is the plain, visible proof that His Spirit lives in the world of men. But what a Via Dolorosa it is, that grim ditch dug across Europe, with its crouching men behind the snipers' plates. Strange path for the twentieth century to have to walk in, to provethat compassion and righteousness still live.
In all this area the British soldier walks with a singularinsouciance. It is not simply that he is brave. He is that, supremely so, and not least when he is very much afraid and will not show it and carries on with his job. But there is more in it than that. There is a kind of warlike genius in him which makes him do the right thing in the right way, so that he appeals to humour and comradeship as well as to gallantry. It was one of our sergeant-majors who before a battalion attack offered £5 to the man of his company who was first in the enemy's trench. Think of it for a moment. He appealed to their sporting instinct; he turned their thoughts from death and wounds and introduced a jest into every dug-out that night; and he indicated, withoutboasting, that he was going to be first over the parapet. He made it certain that every sportsman in the company—and what British regular is not—would strain every nerve to be first across. And the cream of the jest was that, stalwart athlete that he was, he was first across himself! The same may be said of the officer; he wins more than obedience from his men. I have seen senior N.C.O.'s crying like children because their young officer was dead.
Along with this courage and comradeship and humour there is often a great deal of fatalism. It expresses itself in many ways, in the reading of Omar Khayyam—'The Ball no Question makes of Ayes and Noes'—for example, in the indifference so often shown by men if they lose through their own fault some 'cushy job' and have to go back to theline, or in the doing of really foolish things, foolish because dangerous, but useless. I remember sitting outside the dug-out of Captain Chree (who afterwards laid down his life on the Somme) at battalion headquarters, and watching the shelling of one of our batteries of 18-pounders some five hundred yards back. The Germans had searched for it repeatedly with lavish expenditure of ammunition, and that afternoon they got it repeatedly, with very unpleasant results. But of course there were many misses. Whenever the German shells fell short they burst in the field, in front of the battery, which was bounded on two sides by a road. In the midst of the bombardment a soldier came down the road facing us and, instead of walking round by the cross-roads, cut across the field in which shells were bursting.He deliberately left comparative safety for real danger simply in order to save himself five minutes' walk. On another occasion, when I was at dusk one evening in Vierstraat, a Tommy came along carrying some burden. At this point he got tired and planted it down right in the middle of the cross-roads. Another man told him he could not have chosen a worse place for a rest, that the Boche was always firing rifles and machine-guns up the road, but he was prevailed upon to move only with the greatest difficulty. Perhaps in another class was the soldier the doctor and I came upon suddenly in a ruined house in Ypres kicking with all the strength of an iron-shod boot at the fuse of an unexploded German shell. A friend with his hands in his pockets was watching the proceedings with much interest.He said he was only wanting the fuse as a souvenir, but he would soon have got that to keep and a good deal more. The doctor was quite peevish about it, as the saying is!
When an attack is being made or repelled, the concentration of batteries in action turns the country in front of them into a nightmare of noise—'a terrific and intolerable noise' in Froissart's phrase. The incessant slamming of the guns makes it impossible to hear enemy shells coming. The first intimation is their arrival. But the orderlies go backwards and forwards through it all with superb courage. Wounded trickle down the trolley line to the dressing station, and an occasional group of prisoners come through. It was on a day like this that I saw Davidson and Rainie for the last time. When The Royals were movedup from the support trenches to take over from the battalion which had delivered the attack at St. Eloi, some one said to Captain Davidson, who was going up at the head of his company through a terrible barrage, 'This is going to be a risky affair.' 'Yes,' he replied, 'but it's not our business whether it's risky or not. My orders are to go through.' Soon after he fell. He was barely twenty years of age.
'I hate war: that is why I am fighting'
There is a garden in Vlamertynghe with a marble seat overturned beside a smashed tree, a corner just made for lovers, once. An enormous crump hole fills the greater part of the garden, and the wall has fallen outwards in one massleaving the fruit trees standing in a line, their arms outstretched. Across on the other side of the road Captain Norman Stewart lies buried. But his memory lives in the hearts of men, and wherever the 2nd battalion gathers round its braziers and in the glow of them the stories of the heroes of the regiment are passed on from the veterans to the younger men, Stewart will be remembered with reverence as one who not only upheld but created regimental tradition.
It was a bombing affair in which he died, detachments of Suffolks, Middlesex, and Royal Scots, under his leadership, being ordered to drive the enemy out of the tip of the salient. Barricades made progress almost impossible in face of a murderous machine-gun fire. Owing to the confused nature of the fighting noquarter could be given, and desperate fighting ensued with bombs, bayonets and hand to hand. Finally ten yards were gained and the ground consolidated.
At one point of the fight, finding progress otherwise impossible, Captain Stewart mounted to the top of the barricade in full view of the enemy, with shells and bombs bursting all round and under machine-gun and rifle fire. Though wounded he remained there in face of certain death for over ten minutes. From bucket after bucket handed up to him he still hurled bombs at the thronging enemy beneath, until a sniper crept round to his flank, and this heroic Scotsman fell.
'They pass, they pass, but cannot pass away,ForScotlandfeels them in her blood like wine.'
The night before he died Stewart said to a friend, 'I hate war: that is why I am fighting.'
Billets and Camps
The camps to which the battalion returned after each tour of the trenches were for the most part out of danger except for an occasional shell, but it was only when we were withdrawn to the 'rest area' that we felt any sense of freedom to settle down and take stock of ourselves. Both Colonel Duncan and Colonel Dyson, to whom I owe countless kindnesses, were keen disciplinarians, and Major Everingham, the Quartermaster, imperturbable, efficient, could really perform almost superhuman feats.A man can only know his own department, and in mine the standard of a battalion is shown by its attitude to religious observances. A bad battalion finds too many engagements to turn out in any strength on Sunday. I used to feel so proud as the old Royals, every available man on parade, would march up behind their pipes and drums, alert, well-groomed, punctilious in all the minor forms that are so important an evidence of a battalion's condition. In rest billets we all got to work; there were marches and manœuvres, cinematographs and cross-country runs, football matches and boxing competitions. These men when stripped were so much more beautiful than in their clothes. Of how many in civilian occupations could that be said? The battalion would be refitted; a brewer's great vatwas commandeered for a bathing-place; the village school was turned, every evening, into a recreation room; and a communicants' class was started. Not for the first time I longed for a brief, clear statement of our Church's faith. The cumbrous complicated Catechisms and Confessions are magnificent monuments, but they are worse than useless under such conditions. ACredowhich could be written on a blackboard and pointed to as the Church member's essential Confession of Faith, to be developed and expanded according to the need and circumstances, would be a real power in a chaplain's hands. The men's behaviour in billets—ramshackle barns for the most part—was almost exemplary. Only once or twice small episodes occurred in connection with hen-roosts, and on one occasion a sucking-pig wasslaughtered amid its brethren at the dead of night. It must have been a temporary madness that possessed the author of this escapade, for he had no possible chance of escape. It was pleaded on his behalf, on his appearance before the Colonel, that he had recently done a gallant deed, but as some one said, 'If every man who did a gallant deed was allowed to kill a pig there would not be a pig left in Flanders.'
It was the cleanness of the air and of the soil that made a rest back among the far-stretching forests of the Pas de Calais so different from one nearer the line. To get on bridle-paths and roads free from lorry traffic and let your horse out at full stretch over the fallen leaves down some long grey-purple vista of bare trees, and feel the clean wind whistling past your ears and smell the fresh odoursof the great woods, to see the blue smoke drifting up from some forester's cottage, or for a moment in passing catch a glimpse of a fairy-story scene of charcoal burners grouped together in a glade, was to ride into another world of thought and feeling. My little horse John, one of the five horses left of those who crossed with the battalion, felt it too—thought perhaps he was in old England again. But the British soldier hates manœuvres and marches and drills and inspections. He would rather be left in peace in his trenches, in a 'quiet' part of the line at least, than bothered about those things. Movement, too, has an exhilarating effect on him, and so when orders come to go back into action he tramps off with remarkable goodwill. I remember one battalion of Royal Welsh Fusiliers, suddenly rushed up from rest,pulled out of the station singing a song of which the refrain is something like 'Ai, ai! Vot a game it is!' at the top of their voices. And it really is by no means a game. As the Colonel used to say (very moderately), 'Life out here is not all joy!'
One November evening I was picking my way cautiously through the mud camp near Reninghelst, and hearing the tune of a famous hymn, drew near to listen, for Jock sometimes sings to hymn tunes words that certainly never appeared in any hymn-book, and I wanted to make sure that itwasthe greatest hymn in the English language which was being sung. It was a quiet night. Now and again a heavy gun fired a round, and infrequently, on a gentle wind blowing from the trenches, was borne the rattle of a machine-gun. From all thecamp arose the subdued confused noise of an army settling to rest for the night. Some tents were in darkness, in others a candle burned, and here and there braziers still glowed redly. It was from one of the lighted tents that the singing came, each part being taken, and a sweet clear tenor voice leading. The tune was old 'Communion,' and they had just come to this verse:
'Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,Save in the death of Christ, my God:All the vain things that charm me most,I sacrifice them to His blood.'
How often have we sung that, perhaps thoughtlessly, in comfort at home, but these lads had in truth sacrificed the 'vain things.' With a lump in my throat I waited for the last verse:
'Were the whole realm of nature mine,That were an offering far too small;Love so amazing, so divine,Demands my life, my soul, my all.'
Waiting
The beginning of March found me with a battalion of The Royals in a rather battered Belgian town. Its centre received a good deal of attention from enemy artillery, but it offered two attractions which brought in officers from divisions all around. After all, to men accustomed to living in the trenches, the atmosphere was one of almost Sabbath peace. The hall where 'The Fancies' made much of the humours of trench life to uproariously delighted audienceswas crowded out night after night. You could not find anywhere greater zest and enjoyment. The striking comradeship of soldiering, the common experience of audience and actors, and the abandonment of all thought for the morrow, gave that impression of cheerful carelessness the root of which is not happiness but the conviction that the future is so uncertain and the possibilities so dreadful that he is wise who lives for the hour only, even as the hour may snatch life from him. I thought I knew the head in front of me, and, leaning forward, saw it was my brother-in-law. It has always struck me as quaint that he, who had been with his battery for a year and a half, and I, who had been out for nine months, should have met again under such circumstances. I had pictured a stricken field and much coolness exhibited inan admittedly dramatic moment—something in line with Stanley's 'Dr. Livingstone, I presume.' It was comforting to find it otherwise, but, as Smee says inPeter Pan, it was 'galling too.' First when looking into a shop window, and now in a concert hall, in all these months of war! We said, 'Not a bad show, is it?' 'Not half bad.' But there have been some strange meetings in this war. A private in our battalion discovered his son, a boy of seventeen, in a new draft which had just come up to the line. He had run away from home and been lost to sight. The father set matters on a proper footing by thrashing his son there and then in the front trench!
War was not very far off after all. Two days later we were having lunch in the comfortable warm restaurant which is this tedious town's other attraction.We drank our coffee to the accompaniment of the nasty sound of arriving shells. Every time a shell screamed towards us the stout lady behind the counter dropped on hands and knees, emerging flushed and trembling after each had burst. We were rather amused; but when we went out and round the corner of the street, the body of a man was being swiftly carried away wrapped in a brown blanket. Forty soldiers, it was said, had been killed and wounded. Distracted women stood in little groups in the passages of the houses, and there was much blood in the gutters.
Only a country invaded by the enemy drinks to its dregs the cup of war, but the narrow belt a few miles behind the friendly army's trenches enjoys great prosperity. The love of home or the love of money keeps the population inmany places where it would be better away. One beautiful spring day I took shelter behind a farmhouse in the Hallebast-Vierstraat area until some shelling on the path ahead had died down. The farmer's wife came out and we got into conversation. A rise in the ground gave some shelter from the German lines, but she told me that any movement on horseback was immediately sniped with whizbangs. The day before all her cows had been killed by shell-fire in the paddock behind the farmhouse, but if she and her elderly husband let their land go out of cultivation, how were they to live, and if they left, where could they go? When high-explosives blew great holes in their sown land they just filled in the holes and ploughed and sowed the place over again. The settled sadness of her face and voice haunts me still. Others, however, stay in danger because they are making so much money. Several shopkeepers in this town admitted they had never known such prosperity. The estaminets make enormous profits from the sale of very weak beer. A friend of mine, having drawn battalion pay in notes of too large amounts, was told to return to the paymaster and draw it in smaller sums. He found the office closed, and turned into a little village shop to see if they could change a part of it. To his amazement they changed the whole of it from the till. The total amount was ten thousand francs. But how many Belgians have lost their all?
Our billets were clean and very airy. For some reason, though all furniture had been removed, the presses, which were all open, were full of beautiful bed and table linen. It was very tempting,but fortunately we resisted the temptation. The morning after we arrived, about seven o'clock, a disturbance arose below. Angry women's voices were heard in altercation with the servants, there were hurried footsteps on the stair, and a moment later our door was thrust violently open. Two strapping Belgian women strode in and demanded answers to many questions. We adopted our friend the Major's plan, and feigned to know even less French than we did. We were anxious to be very inoffensive as we lay on the floor and watched these determined individuals throwing open the presses and wardrobes. Inside the linen lay untouched, folded neatly; we felt thankful we had left it so. They stamped out again, and we heard the Colonel's voice raised in protest next door. The doctor and I looked at oneanother. He seemed rather pale, and I noticed for the first time that his head rested on an enormous soft pillow covered with a spotless linen pillow-slip edged with beautiful lace.
But next morning we had a different awakening. Dawn was rising wanly from the east to another day on the Salient. The broken windows were rattling and the floor trembling under the dull continuous thudding of a concentrated bombardment. We lay and listened, and for the thousandth time hated war. We knew that men, some of whom we knew and loved, were going over the parapet, many never to return.
That night, as dusk fell, the old steeple with its rent side looked down on cobbled streets thronging with ordered ranks of men standing ready to move. Here andthere a few officers spoke together, or a man gave his chum a light from his fag, or straps were tightened. A rifle butt rang on the pavement, and the adjutant's horse moved his feet restlessly. These men had no illusions as to what they would probably have to face; but none guessed that there lay ahead the most dreadful test of physical endurance which the old battalion, since the great retreat, had ever known.