Books: Now It Can Be Told

P >> Philip Gibbs >> Now It Can Be Told

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The place in Nieppe had been a jute-factory, and there were big tubs
in the sheds, and nearby was the water of the Lys. Boilers were set
going to heat the water. A battalion's shirts were put into an oven
and the lice were baked and killed. It was a splendid thing to see
scores of boys wallowing in those big tubs, six in a tub, with a bit
of soap for each. They gave little grunts and shouts of joyous
satisfaction. The cleansing water, the liquid heat, made their flesh
tingle with exquisite delight, sensuous and spiritual. They were like
children. They splashed one another, with gurgles of laughter. They
put their heads under water and came up puffing and blowing like
grampuses. Something broke in one's heart to see them, those splendid
boys whose bodies might soon be torn to tatters by chunks of steel.
One of them remembered a bit of Latin he had sung at Stonyhurst:
"Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor; lavabis me, et super nivem
dealbabor." ("Thou shalt sprinkle me with hyssop, O Lord, and I shall
be cleansed; thou shalt wash me, and I shall be made whiter than
snow.")

On the other side of the lines the Germans were suffering in the same
way, lousy also, and they, too, were organizing bath-houses. After
their first retreat I saw a queer name on a wooden shed:
Entlausunganstalt. I puzzled over it a moment, and then understood. It
was a new word created out of the dirt of modern war--"Delousing
station."

XIV

It was harvest-time in the summer of '15, and Death was not the only
reaper who went about the fields, although he was busy and did not
rest even when the sun had flamed down below the belt of trees on the
far ridge, and left the world in darkness.

On a night in August two of us stood in a cornfield, silent, under the
great dome, staring up at the startling splendor of it. The red ball
just showed above the far line of single trees which were black as
charcoal on the edge of a long, straight road two miles away, and from
its furnace there were flung a million feathers of flame against the
silk-blue canopy of the evening sky. The burning colors died out in a
few minutes, and the fields darkened, and all the corn-shocks paled
until they became quite white, like rows of tents, under the harvest
moon. Another night had come in this year of war.

Up Ypres way the guns were busy, and at regular intervals the earth
trembled, and the air vibrated with dull, thunderous shocks.

"The moon's face looks full of irony to-night," said the man by my
side. "It seems to say, `What fools those creatures are down there,
spoiling their harvest-time with such a mess of blood!'"

The stars were very bright in some of those Flemish nights. I saw the
Milky Way clearly tracked across the dark desert. The Pleiades and
Orion's belt were like diamonds on black velvet. But among all these
worlds of light other stars, unknown to astronomers, appeared and
disappeared. On the road back from a French town one night I looked
Arras way, and saw what seemed a bursting planet. It fell with a
scatter of burning pieces. Then suddenly the thick cloth of the night
was rent with stabs of light, as though flashing swords were hacking
it, and a moment later a finger of white fire was traced along the
black edge of the far-off woods, so that the whole sky was brightened
for a moment and then was blotted out by a deeper darkness . . . Arras
was being shelled again, as I saw it many times in those long years of
war.

The darkness of all the towns in the war zone was rather horrible.
Their strange, intense quietude, when the guns were not at work, made
them dead, as the very spirit of a town dies on the edge of war. One
night, as on many others, I walked through one of them with a friend.
Every house was shuttered, and hardly a gleam came through any crack.
No footstep, save our own, told of life. The darkness was almost
palpable. It seemed to press against one's eyeballs like a velvet
mask. My nerves were so on edge with a sense of the uncanny silence
and invisibility that I started violently at the sound of a quiet
voice speaking three inches from my ear.

"Halte! Qui va la?"

It was a French sentry, who stood with his back to the wall of a house
in such a gulf of blackness that not even his bayonet was revealed by
a glint.

Another day of war came. The old beauty of the world was there, close
to the lines of the bronzed cornfields splashed with the scarlet of
poppies, and the pale yellow of the newly cut sheaves, stretching away
and away, without the break of a hedge, to the last slopes which met
the sky.

I stood in some of those harvest-fields, staring across to a slope of
rising ground where there was no ripening wheat, and where the grass
itself came to a sudden halt, as though afraid of something. I knew
the reason of this, and of the long white lines of earth thrown up for
miles each way. Those were the parapets of German trenches, and in the
ditches below them were earth-men, armed with deadly weapons, staring
out across the beauty of France and wondering, perhaps, why they
should be there to mar it, and watching me, a little black dot in
their range of vision, with an idle thought as to whether it were
worth their while to let a bullet loose and end my walk. They could
have done so easily, but did not bother. No shot or shell came to
break through the hum of bees or to crash through the sigh of the
wind, which was bending all the ears of corn to listen to the
murmurous insect-life in these fields of France.

Close to me was a group of peasants--a study for a painter like
Millet. One of them shouted out to me, "Voilà les Boches!" waving his
arm to left and right, and then shaking a clenched fist at them.

A sturdy girl with a brown throat showing through an open bodice
munched an apple, like Audrey in "As You Like It," and between her
bites told me that she had had a brother killed in the war, and that
she had been nearly killed herself, a week ago, by shells that came
bursting all round her as she was tying up her sheaves (she pointed to
great holes in the field), and described the coming of the Germans
into her village over there, when she had lied to some Uhlans about
the whereabouts of French soldiers and had given one of those fat
Germans a blow on the face when he had tried to make love to her in
her father's barn. Her mother had been raped.

In further fields out of view of the German trenches, but well within
shell-range, the harvesting was being done by French soldiers. One of
them was driving the reaping--machine and looked like a gunner on his
limber, with his kepi thrust to the back of his head. The trousers of
his comrades were as red as the poppies that grew on the edge of the
wheat, and three of these poilus had ceased their work to drink out of
a leather wine-bottle which had been replenished from a hand-cart. It
was a pretty scene if one could forget the grim purpose which had put
those harvesters in uniform.

The same thought was in the mind of a British officer.

"A beautiful country, this," he said. "It's a pity to cut it up with
trenches and barbed wire."

Battalions of New Army men were being reviewed but a furlong or two
away from that Invisible Man who was wielding a scythe which had no
mercy for unripe wheat. Out of those lines of eyes stared the courage
of men's souls, not shirking the next ordeal.

It was through red ears of corn, in that summer of '15, that one found
one's way to many of the trenches that marked the boundary-lines of
the year's harvesting, and in Belgium (by Kemmel Hill) the shells of
our batteries, answered by German guns, came with their long-drawn
howls of murder across the heads of peasant women who were gleaning,
with bent backs.

In Plug Street Wood the trees had worn thin under showers of shrapnel,
but the long avenues between the trenches were cool and pleasant in
the heat of the day. It was one of the elementary schools where many
of our soldiers learned the A B C of actual warfare after their
training in camps behind the lines. Here one might sport with
Amaryllis in the shade, but for the fact that country wenches were not
allowed in the dugouts and trenches, where I found our soldiers
killing flies in the intervals between pot-shots at German periscopes.

The enemy was engaged, presumably, in the same pursuit of killing time
and life (with luck), and sniping was hot on both sides, so that the
wood resounded with sharp reports as though hard filbert nuts were
being cracked by giant teeth. Each time I went there one of our men
was hit by a sniper, and his body was carried off for burial as I went
toward the first line of trenches, hoping that my shadow would not
fall across a German periscope. The sight of that dead body passing
chilled one a little. There were many graves in the bosky arbors--
eighteen under one mound--but some of those who had fallen six months
before still lay where the gleaners could not reach them.

I used to peer through the leaves of Plug Street Wood at No Man's Land
between the lines, where every creature had been killed by the
sweeping flail of machine-guns and shrapnel. Along the harvest-fields
there were many barren territories like that, and up by Hooge, along
the edge of the fatal crater, and behind the stripped trees of Zouave
Wood there was no other gleaning to be had but that of broken shells
and shrapnel bullets and a litter of limbs.

XV

For some time the War Office would not allow military bands at the
front, not understanding that music was like water to parched souls.
By degrees divisional generals realized the utter need of
entertainment among men dulled and dazed by the routine of war, and
encouraged "variety" shows, organized by young officers who had been
amateur actors before the war, who searched around for likely talent.
There was plenty of it in the New Army, including professional "funny
men," trick cyclists, conjurers, and singers of all kinds. So by the
summer of '15 most of the divisions had their dramatic entertainments:
"The Follies," "The Bow Bells," "The Jocks," "The Pip-Squeaks," "The
Whizz-Bangs," "The Diamonds," "The Brass Hats," "The Verey Lights,"
and many others with fancy names.

I remember going to one of the first of them in the village of Acheux,
a few miles from the German lines. It was held in an old sugar-
factory, and I shall long remember the impressions of the place, with
seven or eight hundred men sitting in the gloom of that big, broken,
barn-like building, where strange bits of machinery looked through the
darkness, and where through gashes in the walls stars twinkled.

There was a smell of clay and moist sugar and tarpaulins and damp
khaki, and chloride of lime, very pungent in one's nostrils, and when
the curtain went up on a well--fitted stage and "The Follies" began
their performance, the squalor of the place did not matter. What
mattered was the enormous whimsicality of the Bombardier at the piano,
and the outrageous comicality of a tousle-haired soldier with a red
nose, who described how he had run away from Mons "with the rest of
you," and the light--heartedness of a performance which could have
gone straight to a London music-hall and brought down the house with
jokes and songs made up in dugouts and front--line trenches.

At first the audience sat silent, with glazed eyes. It was difficult
to get a laugh out of them. The mud of the trenches was still on them.
They stank of the trenches, and the stench was in their souls.
Presently they began to brighten up. Life came back into their eyes.
They laughed! . . . Later, from this audience of soldiers there were
yells of laughter, though the effect of shells arriving at unexpected
moments, in untoward circumstances, was a favorite theme of the
jesters. Many of the men were going into the trenches that night
again, and there would be no fun in the noise of the shells, but they
went more gaily and with stronger hearts, I am sure, because of the
laughter which had roared through the old sugar--factory.

A night or two later I went to another concert and heard the same
gaiety of men who had been through a year of war. It was in an open
field, under a velvety sky studded with innumerable stars. Nearly a
thousand soldiers trooped through the gates and massed before the
little canvas theater. In front a small crowd of Flemish children
squatted on the grass, not understanding a word of the jokes, but
laughing in shrill delight at the antics of soldier-Pierrots. The
corner-man was a funny fellow, and his by-play with a stout Flemish
woman round the flap of the canvas screen, to whom he made amorous
advances while his comrades were singing sentimental ballads, was
truly comic. The hit of the evening was when an Australian behind the
stage gave an unexpected imitation of a laughing-jackass.

There was something indescribably weird and wild and grotesque in that
prolonged cry of cackling, unnatural mirth. An Australian by my side
said: "Well done! Exactly right!" and the Flemish children shrieked
with joy, without understanding the meaning of the noise. Old, old
songs belonging to the early Victorian age were given by the soldiers,
who had great emotion and broke down sometimes in the middle of a
verse. There were funny men dressed in the Widow Twankey style, or in
burlesque uniforms, who were greeted with yells of laughter by their
comrades. An Australian giant played some clever card tricks, and
another Australian recited Kipling's "Gunga Din" with splendid fire.
And between every "turn" the soldiers in the field roared out a
chorus:

"Jolly good song, Jolly well sung. If you can think of a better you're
welcome to try. But don't forget the singer is dry; Give the poor
beggar some beer!"

A touring company of mouth-organ musicians was having a great success
in the war zone. But, apart from all those organized methods of mirth,
there was a funny man in every billet who played the part of court
jester, and clowned it whatever the state of the weather or the risks
of war. The British soldier would have his game of "house" or "crown
and anchor" even on the edge of the shell-storm, and his little bit of
sport wherever there was room to stretch his legs. It was a jesting
army (though some of its jokes were very grim), and those who saw, as
I did, the daily tragedy of war, never ceasing, always adding to the
sum of human suffering, were not likely to discourage that sense of
humor.

A successful concert with mouth-organs, combs, and tissue-paper and
penny whistles was given by the Guards in the front-line trenches near
Loos. They played old English melodies, harmonized with great emotion
and technical skill. It attracted an unexpected audience. The Germans
crowded into their front line--not far away--and applauded each
number. Presently, in good English, a German voice shouted across:

"Play 'Annie Laurie' and I will sing it."

The Guards played "Annie Laurie," and a German officer stood up on the
parapet--the evening sun was red behind him--and sang the old song
admirably, with great tenderness. There was applause on both sides.

"Let's have another concert to-morrow!" shouted the Germans.

But there was a different kind of concert next day, and the music was
played by trench-mortars, Mills bombs, rifle-grenades, and other
instruments of death in possession of the Guards. There were cries of
agony and terror from the German trenches, and young officers of the
Guards told the story as an amusing anecdote, with loud laughter.

XVI

It was astonishing how loudly one laughed at tales of gruesome things,
of war's brutality-I with the rest of them. I think at the bottom of
it was a sense of the ironical contrast between the normal ways of
civilian life and this hark-back to the caveman code. It made all our
old philosophy of life monstrously ridiculous. It played the "hat
trick" with the gentility of modern manners. Men who had been brought
up to Christian virtues, who had prattled their little prayers at
mothers' knees, who had grown up to a love of poetry, painting, music,
the gentle arts, over-sensitized to the subtleties of half-tones,
delicate scales of emotion, fastidious in their choice of words, in
their sense of beauty, found themselves compelled to live and act like
ape-men; and it was abominably funny. They laughed at the most
frightful episodes, which revealed this contrast between civilized
ethics and the old beast law. The more revolting it was the more,
sometimes, they shouted with laughter, especially in reminiscence,
when the tale was told in the gilded salon of a French chateau, or at
a mess-table.

It was, I think, the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been
played on them by an ironical fate. They had been taught to believe
that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and
that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast
instinct, cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival
by tooth and claw and club and ax. All poetry, all art, all religion
had preached this gospel and this promise.

Now that ideal had broken like a china vase dashed to hard ground. The
contrast between That and This was devastating. It was, in an enormous
world-shaking way, like a highly dignified man in a silk hat, morning
coat, creased trousers, spats, and patent boots suddenly slipping on a
piece of orange-peel and sitting, all of a heap, with silk hat flying,
in a filthy gutter. The war-time humor of the soul roared with mirth
at the sight of all that dignity and elegance despoiled.

So we laughed merrily, I remember, when a military chaplain (Eton,
Christ Church, and Christian service) described how an English
sergeant stood round the traverse of a German trench, in a night raid,
and as the Germans came his way, thinking to escape, he cleft one
skull after another with a steel-studded bludgeon--a weapon which he
had made with loving craftsmanship on the model of Blunderbore's club
in the pictures of a fairy-tale.

So we laughed at the adventures of a young barrister (a brilliant
fellow in the Oxford "Union") whose pleasure it was to creep out o'
nights into No Man's Land and lie doggo in a shell-hole close to the
enemy's barbed wire, until presently, after an hour's waiting or two,
a German soldier would crawl out to fetch in a corpse. The English
barrister lay with his rifle ready. Where there had been one corpse
there were two. Each night he made a notch on his rifle--three notches
one night--to check the number of his victims. Then he came back to
breakfast in his dugout with a hearty appetite.

In one section of trenches the men made a habit of betting upon those
who would be wounded first. It had all the uncertainty of the
roulette-table. . . One day, when the German gunners were putting over
a special dose of hate, a sergeant kept coming to one dugout to
inquire about a "new chum," who had come up with the drafts.

"Is Private Smith all right?" he asked.

"Yes, Sergeant, he's all right," answered the men crouching in the
dark hole.

"Private Smith isn't wounded yet?" asked the, sergeant again, five
minutes later.

"No, Sergeant."

Private Smith was touched by this interest in his well-being.

"That sergeant seems a very kind man," said the boy. "Seems to love me
like a father!"

A yell of laughter answered him.

"You poor, bleeding fool!" said one of his comrades. "He's drawn you
in a lottery! Stood to win if you'd been hit."

In digging new trenches and new dugouts, bodies and bits of bodies
were unearthed, and put into sand-bags with the soil that was sent
back down a line of men concealing their work from German eyes waiting
for any new activity in our ditches.

"Bit of Bill," said the leading man, putting in a leg.

"Another bit of Bill," he said, unearthing a hand.

"Bill's ugly mug," he said at a later stage in the operations, when a
head was found.

As told afterward, that little episode in the trenches seemed
immensely comic. Generals chuckled over it. Chaplains treasured it.

How we used to guffaw at the answer of the cockney soldier who met a
German soldier with his hands up, crying: "Kamerad! Kamerad! Mercy!"

"Not so much of your 'Mercy, Kamerad,'" said the cockney. "'And us
over your bloody ticker!"

It was the man's watch he wanted, without sentiment.

One tale was most popular, most mirth-arousing in the early days of
the war.

"Where's your prisoner?" asked an Intelligence officer waiting to
receive a German sent down from the trenches under escort of an honest
corporal.

"I lost him on the way, sir," said the corporal.

"Lost him?"

The corporal was embarrassed.

"Very sorry, sir. My feelings overcame me, sir. It was like this, sir.
The man started talking on the way down. Said he was thinking of his
poor wife. I'd been thinking of mine, and I felt sorry for him. Then
he mentioned as how he had two kiddies at home. I 'ave two kiddies at
'ome, sir, and I couldn't 'elp feeling sorry for him. Then he said as
how his old mother had died awhile ago and he'd never see her again.
When he started cryin' I was so sorry for him I couldn't stand it any
longer, sir. So I killed the poor blighter."

Our men in the trenches, and out of them, up to the waist in water
sometimes, lying in slimy dugouts, lice--eaten, rat-haunted, on the
edge of mine-craters, under harassing fire, with just the fluke of
luck between life and death, seized upon any kind of joke as an excuse
for laughter, and many a time in ruins and in trenches and in dugouts
I have heard great laughter. It was the protective armor of men's
souls. They knew that if they did not laugh their courage would go and
nothing would stand between them and fear.

"You know, sir," said a sergeant-major, one day, when I walked with
him down a communication trench so waterlogged that my top-boots were
full of slime, "it doesn't do to take this war seriously."

And, as though in answer to him, a soldier without breeches and with
his shirt tied between his legs looked at me and remarked, in a
philosophical way, with just a glint of comedy in his eyes:

"That there Grand Fleet of ours don't seem to be very active, sir.
It's a pity it don't come down these blinkin' trenches and do a bit of
work!"

"Having a clean-up, my man?" said a brigadier to a soldier trying to
wash in a basin about the size of a kitchen mug.

"Yes, sir," said the man, "and I wish I was a blasted canary."

One of the most remarkable battles on the front was fought by a
battalion of Worcesters for the benefit of two English members of
Parliament. It was not a very big battle, but most dramatic while it
lasted. The colonel (who had a sense of humor) arranged it after a
telephone message to his dugout telling him that two politicians were
about to visit his battalion in the line, and asking him to show them
something interesting.

"Interesting?" said the colonel. "Do they think this war is a peep-
show for politicians? Do they want me to arrange a massacre to make a
London holiday?" Then his voice changed and he laughed. "Show them
something interesting? Oh, all right; I dare say I can do that."

He did. When the two M. P.'s arrived, apparently at the front-line
trenches, they were informed by the colonel that, much to his regret,
for their sake, the enemy was just attacking, and that his men were
defending their position desperately.

"We hope for the best," he said, "and I think there is just a chance
that you will escape with your lives if you stay here quite quietly."

"Great God!" said one of the M. P.'s, and the other was silent, but
pale.

Certainly there was all the noise of a big attack. The Worcesters were
standing-to on the fire-step, firing rifle--grenades and throwing
bombs with terrific energy. Every now and then a man fell, and the
stretcher-bearers pounced on him, tied him up in bandages, and carried
him away to the field dressing-station, whistling as they went, "We
won't go home till morning," in a most heroic way. . . The battle
lasted twenty minutes, at the end of which time the colonel announced
to his visitors:

"The attack is repulsed, and you, gentlemen, have nothing more to
fear."

One of the M. P.'s was thrilled with excitement. "The valor of your
men was marvelous," he said. "What impressed me most was the
cheerfulness of the wounded. They were actually grinning as they came
down on the stretchers."

The colonel grinned, too. In fact, he stifled a fit of coughing.
"Funny devils!" he said. "They are so glad to be going home."

The members of Parliament went away enormously impressed, but they had
not enjoyed themselves nearly as well as the Worcesters, who had
fought a sham battle--not in the front-line trenches, but in the
support trenches two miles back! They laughed for a week afterward.

XVII

On the hill at Wizerne, not far from the stately old town of St.-Omer
(visited from time to time by monstrous nightbirds who dropped high-
explosive eggs), was a large convent. There were no nuns there, but
generally some hundreds of young officers and men from many different
battalions, attending a machine-gun course under the direction of
General Baker-Carr, who was the master machine-gunner of the British
army (at a time when we were very weak in those weapons compared with
the enemy's strength) and a cheery, vital man.