The Bluff
What had happened was this. Soon after our division had been moved back to the rest area, part of the line which it had been holding was strongly attacked and lost to the enemy. Several counter-attacks failed, and finally our own Division was brought back from rest to recapture the lost trenches. One brigade attacked with great dash and success. The lost trenches were re-occupied, and our own brigade, which had been lying in support, was ordered to take over and hold them against the expected counter-attacks. The Bluff, which was the main feature of the position and the worst part of which The Royals, as the senior battalion, were given to hold, was a low hill jutting out at the re-entrant to the Salient, south-east of Ypres. It was a strong tactical position commanding the approaches to our trenches, as the enemy well knew. Seen from our front line farther south it had the dead, bleak appearance of all ground that is much shelled. Pitted by high explosive, burned yellow by fumes of gas and shells, and stripped of every living thing,with blackened stumps of trees sparsely scattered on its summit, this muddy hillock dominated the flat lands, and, on the sunny morning when I first saw it, seemed indescribably sinister and menacing. It said to me, 'I am war, the antagonist of everything clean and comely, of everything fresh and young: misery of mind and body, torment of kindly earth and all its little growing things, lover of all that is foul and dead.'
'We've keepit up the reputation o' the auld mob, onyway'
That night the weather suddenly changed. There had been a hint of spring in the air, but in an hour that was wiped out by a bitter north windsweeping the bare fields with icy rain and snow. The transport, pitched in the filthy morass known as 'Scottish Lines,' saw its labour of three weeks thrown away in a couple of nights. For the human beings there were a few tents and huts, but in face of the searching wind canvas seemed quite porous, and the huts were badly built and had a hundred openings to the bitter air. But up at the Bluff conditions were terrible. The trenches had disappeared under repeated bombardments, and had become mere chains of shell holes in which the men stood up to their thighs in liquid mud. When the C.O. arrived to take over the headquarters' dug-out he found it blown to pieces. Within lay the bodies of the previous occupants—four officers. Another dug-out was finally found. It was deep in a bank at the end of anarrow passage twenty feet long. Within was a chamber six feet long, four broad and four high, and in this place, so horribly like a grave, the C.O., second-in-command, and adjutant lived for three days and four nights. A candle gave light, and whenever a shell burst above the flame jerked out. The sergeant-major and the orderlies and servants lived in the tunnel, squatting on their haunches in the mud. Outside there were no other dug-outs at all. The shelling was continuous, but the cold was far worse. Men sank in the mud and remained motionless for hours. Many fell into shell holes and had to be hauled out with twisted telephone wires. The wounded suffered horribly. Owing to the mud and the German barrage no supplies could be brought up, and it was impossible to light braziers. On thefourth night relief came, but it was daylight before the last company sucked itself out of its mudholes and waded back in full view of the enemy. Fortunately a blinding snowstorm swept down from the north and hid all movement just when it seemed certain that disaster would occur. Every available vehicle was sent up to meet the battalion, but there was a long walk before these could be reached. The men crept along on sodden, swollen feet—no gumboots had been obtainable. They came along in groups, now of two or three, now of six or seven, or one by one. They were bent like old men, and staggered as they walked, their faces set and grey. The most terrible thing of all was the utter silence. Snow muffled the fall of the dragging feet; it lay thick on the masses of ruins in the shattered empty villages;and when the brigade major's greeting rang out men shrank and looked fearful at the sudden sound. Yet when I spoke to any, as they staggered through the snow past the point whither I had gone to meet them, life flickered up for a moment from the depths of that final exhaustion. 'What price Charlie Chaplin now, sir!' said one man whose wavering footsteps led him hither and thither. And another in simple words summed up the heroic simple spirit of them all: 'Well, we've keepit up the reputation o' the auld mob, onyway.' Indomitable men! Who could ever vanquish you?
Rest meant tent boards under frozen canvas, but it was rest. On that weary morning even the uninviting outline of Reninghelst village seemed like home.
Surely so long as great deeds appeal to the British race those weary miles will be always sacred. Within them lie the unnumbered British dead, 'the dear, pitiful, august dead.' Comrades of the dauntless warriors of Gallipoli, comrades of the sailors who have gone down fighting in the cold waters of the North Sea, brothers of all brave men suffering for a clean cause, they leave the issue with us. As longas the British Empire endures, and it will endure so long as it works for God and no longer, the memory of the heroes of the Ypres salient will live and glow.
'I hate war: that is why I am fighting,' said one of them. They fought not merely for their country, but because they believed they were fighting war itself. We shall not be true to their memory unless we remember that. 'Slavery will always be,' said the defenders of slavery. 'It is impossible to prevent those things, human nature being what it is,' said others of schools like Dotheboys Hall. A little time ago England and Scotland were at one another's throats; a little before that clan fell upon clan with vindictive fury. When we have beaten Germany, who stands for the old, rotten, pagan beliefin old, rotten, pagan things we must see that we do not betray the men who died fighting because they hated war.
But war has good in it too, they say. Yes, and amid its hideous wrong no doubt there was good in slavery, as there is in cancer or blindness. Almost any evil or agony may be the root of noble qualities, and war is no exception.
These men died in the hope that it might be impossible for a civilised nation again to thrust this evil on the human race. They died trusting us to see that Europe would not again have to choose the alternative of entering upon such an agony or of forgetting its honour towards God. Force, it would seem, must long remain the last remedy, but might it not beforce resting on a pivot and striking with effect wherever international crime seeks to disturb the peace of the nations? The mere knowledge of such a united determination would at least be a powerful persuasive. That may be only a dream. The immediate fact is that the doctrine of Will to Power must first be crushed, represented as it is to-day by Germany and her dupes. But men who have been through the furnace will not rest content with less than the solemn attempt, in the name of the dead, to put the nations of the world in a worthier relationship to one another than has so far prevailed. Our brothers who have fallen died in the hope that for succeeding generations life would be different. They died believing that because of their sacrifice it might be possible to substitute for the German (or any other) Will to Power the Christian Will to Righteous Peace. This effort alone can be their fitting monument.
Printed in Great Britain byT. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty at the Edinburgh University Press
Transcriber's note:The table of contents states that section III of Chapter VII starts on page 128. It actually starts on page 127. The link to this section has been adjusted accordingly.