Books: Now It Can Be Told

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

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"This war has produced two great dugouts," said Lord Kitchener on a
visit to the convent. "Me and Baker-Carr."

It was the boys who interested me more than the machines. (I was never
much interested in the machinery of war.) They came down from the
trenches to this school with a sense of escape from prison, and for
the ten days of their course they were like "freshers" at Oxford and
made the most of their minutes, organizing concerts and other
entertainments in the evenings after their initiation into the
mysteries of Vickers and Lewis. I was invited to dinner there one
night, and sat between two young cavalry officers on long benches
crowded with subalterns of many regiments. It was a merry meal and a
good one--to this day I remember a potato pie, gloriously baked, and
afterward, as it was the last night of the course, all the officers
went wild and indulged in a "rag" of the public-school kind. They
straddled across the benches and barged at each other in single
tourneys and jousts, riding their hobby-horses with violent rearings
and plungings and bruising one another without grievous hurt and with
yells of laughter. Glasses broke, crockery crashed upon the polished
boards. One boy danced the Highland fling on the tables, others were
waltzing down the corridors. There was a Rugby scrum in the refectory,
and hunting-men cried the "View halloo!" and shouted "Yoicks! yoicks!"
. . . General Baker-Carr was a human soul, and kept to his own room
that night and let discipline go hang. . . .

When the battles of the Somme began it was those young officers who
led their machine-gun sections into the woods of death--Belville Wood,
Mametz Wood, High Wood, and the others. It was they who afterward held
the outpost lines in Flanders. Some of them were still alive on March
21, 1918, when they were surrounded by a sea of Germans and fought
until the last, in isolated redoubts north and south of St.-Quentin.
Two of them are still alive, those between whom I sat at dinner that
night, and who escaped many close calls of death before the armistice.
Of the others who charged one another with wooden benches, their
laughter ringing out, some were blown to bits, and some were buried
alive, and some were blinded and gassed, and some went "missing" for
evermore.

XVIII

In those long days of trench warfare and stationary lines it was
boredom that was the worst malady of the mind; a large, overwhelming
boredom to thousands of men who were in exile from the normal
interests of life and from the activities of brain-work; an
intolerable, abominable boredom, sapping the will-power, the moral
code, the intellect; a boredom from which there seemed no escape
except by death, no relief except by vice, no probable or possible
change in its dreary routine. It was bad enough in the trenches, where
men looked across the parapet to the same corner of hell day by day,
to the same dead bodies rotting by the edge of the same mine-crater,
to the same old sand-bags in the enemy's line, to the blasted tree
sliced by shell-fire, the upturned railway--truck of which only the
metal remained, the distant fringe of trees like gallows on the sky-
line, the broken spire of a church which could be seen in the round O
of the telescope when the weather was not too misty. In "quiet"
sections of the line the only variation to the routine was the number
of casualties day by day, by casual shell-fire or snipers' bullets,
and that became part of the boredom. "What casualties?" asked the
adjutant in his dugout.

"Two killed, three wounded, sir."

"Very well. . . You can go."

A salute in the doorway of the dugout, a groan from the adjutant
lighting another cigarette, leaning with his elbow on the deal table,
staring at the guttering of the candle by his side, at the pile of
forms in front of him, at the glint of light on the steel helmet
hanging by its strap on a nail near the shelf where he kept his
safety-razor, flash--lamp, love-letters (in an old cigar-box), soap,
whisky--bottle (almost empty now), and an unread novel.

"Hell! . . . What a life!"

But there was always work to do, and odd incidents, and frights, and
responsibilities.

It was worse--this boredom--for men behind the lines; in lorry columns
which went from rail-head to dump every damned morning, and back again
by the middle of the morning, and then nothing else to do for all the
day, in a cramped little billet with a sulky woman in the kitchen, and
squealing children in the yard, and a stench of manure through the
small window. A dull life for an actor who had toured in England and
America (like one I met dazed and stupefied by years of boredom--
paying too much for safety), or for a barrister who had many briefs
before the war and now found his memory going, though a young man,
because of the narrow limits of his life between one Flemish village
and another, which was the length of his lorry column and of his
adventure of war. Nothing ever happened to break the monotony--not
even shell-fire. So it was also in small towns like Hesdin, St.-Pol,
Bruay, Lillers--a hundred others where officers stayed for years in
charge of motor-repair shops, ordnance-stores, labor battalions,
administration offices, claim commissions, graves' registration,
agriculture for soldiers, all kinds of jobs connected with that life
of war, but not exciting.

Not exciting. So frightful in boredom that men were tempted to take to
drink, to look around for unattached women, to gamble at cards with
any poor devil like themselves. Those were most bored who were most
virtuous. For them, with an ideal in their souls, there was no
possibility of relief (for virtue is not its own reward), unless they
were mystics, as some became, who found God good company and needed no
other help. They had rare luck, those fellows with an astounding faith
which rose above the irony and the brutality of that business being
done in the trenches, but there were few of them.

Even with hours of leisure, men who had been "bookish" could not read.
That was a common phenomenon. I could read hardly at all, for years,
and thousands were like me. The most "exciting" novel was dull stuff
up against that world convulsion. What did the romance of love mean,
the little tortures of one man's heart, or one woman's, troubled in
their mating, when thousands of men were being killed and vast
populations were in agony? History--Greek or Roman or medieval--what
was the use of reading that old stuff, now that world history was
being made with a rush? Poetry--poor poets with their love of beauty!
What did beauty matter, now that it lay dead in the soul of the world,
under the filth of battlefields, and the dirt of hate and cruelty, and
the law of the apelike man? No--we could not read; but talked and
talked about the old philosophy of life, and the structure of society,
and Democracy and Liberty and Patriotism and Internationalism, and
Brotherhood of Men, and God, and Christian ethics; and then talked no
more, because all words were futile, and just brooded and brooded,
after searching the daily paper (two days old) for any kind of hope
and light, not finding either.

XIX

At first, in the beginning of the war, our officers and men believed
that it would have a quick ending. Our first Expeditionary Force came
out to France with the cheerful shout of "Now we sha'n't be long!"
before they fell back from an advancing tide of Germans from Mons to
the Marne, and fell in their youth like autumn leaves. The New Army
boys who followed them were desperate to get out to "the great
adventure." They cursed the length of their training in English camps.
"We sha'n't get out till it's too late!" they said. Too late, O God!
Even when they had had their first spell in the trenches and came up
against German strength they kept a queer faith, for a time, that
"something" would happen to bring peace as quickly as war had come.
Peace was always coming three months ahead. Generals and staff-
officers, as well as sergeants and privates, had that strong optimism,
not based on any kind of reason; but gradually it died out, and in its
place came the awful conviction which settled upon the hearts of the
fighting-men, that this war would go on forever, that it was their
doom always to live in ditches and dugouts, and that their only way of
escape was by a "Blighty" wound or by death.

A chaplain I knew used to try to cheer up despondent boys by
pretending to have special knowledge of inside politics.

"I have it on good authority," he said, "that peace is near at hand.
There have been negotiations in Paris--"

Or:

"I don't mind telling you lads that if you get through the next scrap
you will have peace before you know where you are."

They were not believing, now. He had played that game too often.

"Old stuff, padre!" they said.

That particular crowd did not get through the next scrap. But the
padre's authority was good. They had peace long before the armistice.

It was worst of all for boys of sensitive minds who were lucky enough
to get a "cushie" wound, and so went on and on, or who were patched up
again quickly after one, two, or three wounds, and came back again. It
was a boy like that who revealed his bitterness to me one day as we
stood together in the salient.

"It's the length of the war," he said, "which does one down. At first
it seemed like a big adventure, and the excitement of it, horrible
though it was, kept one going. Even the first time I went over the top
wasn't so bad as I thought it would be. I was dazed and drunk with all
sorts of emotions, including fear, that were worse before going over.
I had what we call `the needle.' They all have it. Afterward one
didn't know what one was doing--even the killing part of the business-
-until one reached the objective and lay down and had time to think
and to count the dead about. . . Now the excitement has gone out of
it, and the war looks as though it would go on forever. At first we
all searched the papers for some hope that the end was near. We don't
do that now. We know that whenever the war ends, this year or next,
this little crowd will be mostly wiped out. Bound to be. And why are
we going to die? That's what all of us want to know. What's it all
about? Oh yes, I know the usual answers: 'In defense of liberty,' 'To
save the Empire.' But we've all lost our liberty. We're slaves under
shell-fire. And as for the Empire--I don't give a curse for it. I'm
thinking only of my little home at Streatham Hill. The horrible Hun?
I've no quarrel with the poor blighters over there by Hooge. They are
in the same bloody mess as we are. They hate it just as much. We're
all under a spell together, which some devils have put on us. I wonder
if there's a God anywhere."

This sense of being under a black spell I found expressed by other
men, and by German prisoners who used the same phrase. I remember one
of them in the battles of the Somme, who said, in good English: "This
war was not made in any sense by mankind. We are under a spell." This
belief was due, I think, to the impersonal character of modern
warfare, in which gun-fire is at so long a range that shell-fire has
the quality of natural and elemental powers of death--like
thunderbolts--and men killed twenty miles behind the lines while
walking over sunny fields or in busy villages had no thought of a
human enemy desiring their individual death.

God and Christianity raised perplexities in the minds of simple lads
desiring life and not death. They could not reconcile the Christian
precepts of the chaplain with the bayoneting of Germans and the
shambles of the battlefields. All this blood and mangled flesh in the
fields of France and Flanders seemed to them--to many of them, I know-
-a certain proof that God did not exist, or if He did exist was not,
as they were told, a God of Love, but a monster glad of the agonies of
men. That at least was the thought expressed to me by some London lads
who argued the matter with me one day, and that was the thought which
our army chaplains had to meet from men who would not be put off by
conventional words. It was not good enough to tell them that the
Germans were guilty of all this crime and that unless the Germans were
beaten the world would lose its liberty and life. "Yes, we know all
that," they said, "but why did God allow the Germans, or the statesmen
who arranged the world by force, or the clergy who christened British
warships? And how is it that both sides pray to the same God for
victory? There must be something wrong somewhere."

It was not often men talked like that, except to some chaplain who was
a human, comradely soul, some Catholic "padre" who devoted himself
fearlessly to their bodily and spiritual needs, risking his life with
them, or to some Presbyterian minister who brought them hot cocoa
under shell-fire, with a cheery word or two, as I once heard, of "Keep
your hearts up, my lads, and your heads down."

Most of the men became fatalists, with odd superstitions in the place
of faith. "It's no good worrying," they said.

"If your name is written on a German shell you can't escape it, and if
it isn't written, nothing can touch you."

Officers as well as men had this fatalistic belief and superstitions
which amused them and helped them. "Have the Huns found you out yet?"
I asked some gunner officers in a ruined farmhouse near Kemmel Hill.
"Not yet," said one of them, and then they all left the table at which
we were at lunch and, making a rush for some oak beams, embraced them
ardently. They were touching wood.

"Take this with you," said an Irish officer on a night I went to
Ypres. "It will help you as it has helped me. It's my lucky charm." He
gave me a little bit of coal which he carried in his tunic, and he was
so earnest about it that I took it without a smile and felt the safer
for it.

Once in a while the men went home on seven days' leave, or four, and
then came back again, gloomily, with a curious kind of hatred of
England because the people there seemed so callous to their suffering,
so utterly without understanding, so "damned cheerful." They hated the
smiling women in the streets. They loathed the old men who said, "If I
had six sons I would sacrifice them all in the Sacred Cause." They
desired that profiteers should die by poison-gas. They prayed God to
get the Germans to send Zeppelins to England--to make the people know
what war meant. Their leave had done them no good at all.

From a week-end at home I stood among a number of soldiers who were
going back to the front, after one of those leaves. The boat warped
away from the pier, the M. T. O. and a small group of officers,
detectives, and Red Cross men disappeared behind an empty train, and
the "revenants" on deck stared back at the cliffs of England across a
widening strip of sea.

"Back to the bloody old trenches," said a voice, and the words ended
with a hard laugh. They were spoken by a young officer of the Guards,
whom I had seen on the platform of Victoria saying good-by to a pretty
woman, who had put her hand on his shoulder for a moment, and said,
"Do be careful, Desmond, for my sake!" Afterward he had sat in the
corner of his carriage, staring with a fixed gaze at the rushing
countryside, but seeing nothing of it, perhaps, as his thoughts
traveled backward. (A few days later he was blown to bits by a bomb--
an accident of war.)

A little man on deck came up to me and said, in a melancholy way, "You
know who I am, don't you, sir?"

I hadn't the least idea who he was--this little ginger--haired soldier
with a wizened and wistful face. But I saw that he wore the claret-
colored ribbon of the V. C. on his khaki tunic. He gave me his name,
and said the papers had "done him proud," and that they had made a lot
of him at home--presentations, receptions, speeches, Lord Mayor's
addresses, cheering crowds, and all that. He was one of our Heroes,
though one couldn't tell it by the look of him.

"Now I'm going back to the trenches," he said, gloomily. "Same old
business and one of the crowd again." He was suffering from the
reaction of popular idolatry. He felt hipped because no one made a
fuss of him now or bothered about his claret-colored ribbon. The
staff-officers, chaplains, brigade majors, regimental officers, and
army nurses were more interested in an airship, a silver fish with
shining gills and a humming song in its stomach.

France . . . and the beginning of what the little V. C. had called
"the same old business." There was the long fleet of motor-ambulances
as a reminder of the ultimate business of all those young men in khaki
whom I had seen drilling in the Embankment gardens and shouldering
their way down the Strand.

Some stretchers were being carried to the lift which goes down to the
deck of the hospital-ship, on which an officer was ticking off each
wounded body after a glance at the label tied to the man's tunic.
Several young officers lay under the blankets on those stretchers and
one of them caught my eye and smiled as I looked down upon him. The
same old business and the same old pluck.

I motored down the long, straight roads of France eastward, toward
that network of lines which are the end of all journeys after a few
days' leave, home and back again. The same old sights and sounds and
smells which, as long as memory lasts, to men who had the luck to live
through the war, will haunt them for the rest of life, and speak of
Flanders.

The harvest was nearly gathered in, and where, a week or two before,
there had been fields of high, bronzed corn there were now long
stretches of stubbled ground waiting for the plow. The wheat-sheaves
had been piled into stacks or, from many great fields, carted away to
the red-roofed barns below the black old windmills whose sails were
motionless because no breath of air stirred on this September
afternoon. The smell of Flemish villages--a mingled odor of sun-baked
thatch and bakeries and manure heaps and cows and ancient vapors
stored up through the centuries--was overborne by a new and more
pungent aroma which crept over the fields with the evening haze.

It was a sad, melancholy smell, telling of corruption and death. It
was the first breath of autumn, and I shivered a little. Must there be
another winter of war? The old misery of darkness and dampness was
creeping up through the splendor of September sunshine.

Those soldiers did not seem to smell it, or, if their nostrils were
keen, to mind its menace--those soldiers who came marching down the
road, with tanned faces. How fine they looked, and how hard, and how
cheerful, with their lot! Speak to them separately and every man would
"grouse" at the duration of the war and swear that he was "fed up"
with it. Homesickness assailed them at times with a deadly nostalgia.
The hammering of shell-fire, which takes its daily toll, spoiled their
temper and shook their nerves, as far as a British soldier had any
nerves, which I used to sometimes doubt, until I saw again the shell-
shock cases.

But again I heard their laughter and an old song whistled vilely out
of tune, but cheerful to the tramp of their feet. They were going back
to the trenches after a spell in a rest-camp, to the same old business
of whizz-bangs and pip-squeaks, and dugouts, and the smell of wet clay
and chloride of lime, and the life of earth-men who once belonged to a
civilization which had passed. And they went whistling on their way,
because it was the very best thing to do.

One picked up the old landmarks again, and got back into the "feel" of
the war zone. There were the five old windmills of Cassel that wave
their arms up the hill road, and the estaminets by which one found
one's way down country lanes--"The Veritable Cuckoo" and "The Lost
Corner" and "The Flower of the Fields"--and the first smashed roofs
and broken barns which led to the area of constant shell-fire. Ugh!

So it was still going on, this bloody murder! There were some more
cottages down in the village, where we had tea a month before. And in
the market-place of a sleepy old town the windows were mostly broken
and some shops had gone into dust and ashes. That was new since we
last passed this way.

London was only seven hours away, but the hours on leave there seemed
a year ago already. The men who had come back, after sleeping in
civilization with a blessed sense of safety, had a few minutes of
queer surprise that, after all, this business of war was something
more real than a fantastic nightmare, and then put on their moral
cloaks against the chill and grim reality, for another long spell of
it. Very quickly the familiarity of it all came back to them and
became the normal instead of the abnormal. They were back again to the
settled state of war, as boys go back to public schools after the
wrench from home, and find that the holiday is only the incident and
school the more enduring experience.

There were no new impressions, only the repetition of old impressions.
So I found when I heard the guns again and watched the shells bursting
about Ypres and over Kemmel Ridge and Messines church tower.

Two German airplanes passed overhead, and the hum of their engines was
loud in my ears as I lay in the grass. Our shrapnel burst about them,
but did not touch their wings. All around there was the slamming of
great guns, and I sat chewing a bit of straw by the side of a shell-
hole, thinking in the same old way of the utter senselessness of all
this noise and hate and sudden death which encircled me for miles. No
amount of meditation would screw a new meaning out of it all. It was
just the commonplace of life out here.

The routine of it went on. The officer who came back from home stepped
into his old place, and after the first greeting of, "Hullo, old man!
Had a good time?" found his old job waiting for him. So there was a
new brigadier-general? Quick promotion, by Jove!

Four men had got knocked out that morning at D4, and it was rotten bad
luck that the sergeant-major should have been among them. A real good
fellow. However, there's that court martial for this afternoon, and,
by the by, when is that timber coming up? Can't build the new dugout
if there's no decent wood to be got by stealing or otherwise. You
heard how the men got strafed in their billets the other day? Dirty
work!

The man who had come back went into the trenches and had a word or two
with the N.C.O.'s. Then he went into his own dugout. The mice had been
getting at his papers. Oh yes, that's where he left his pipe! It was
lying under the trestle-table, just where he dropped it before going
on leave. The clay walls were a bit wet after the rains. He stood with
a chilled feeling in this little hole of his, staring at every
familiar thing in it.

Tacked to the wall was the portrait of a woman. He said good-by to her
at Victoria Station. How long ago? Surely more than seven hours, or
seven years. . . Outside there were the old noises. The guns were at
it again. That was a trench-mortar. The enemy's eight-inch howitzers
were plugging away. What a beastly row that machine-gun was making!
Playing on the same old spot. Why couldn't they leave it alone, the
asses? . . . Anyhow, there was no doubt about it--he had come back
again. Back to the trenches and the same old business.

There was a mine to be blown up that night and it would make a pretty
mess in the enemy's lines. The colonel was very cheerful about it, and
explained that a good deal of sapping had been done. "We've got the
bulge on 'em," he said, referring to the enemy's failures in this
class of work. In the mess all the officers were carrying on as usual,
making the same old jokes.

The man who had come back got back also the spirit of the thing with
astonishing rapidity. That other life of his, away there in old
London, was shut up in the cupboard of his heart.

So it went on and on until the torture of its boredom was broken by
the crash of big battles, and the New Armies, which had been learning
lessons in the School of Courage, went forward to the great test, and
passed, with honor.

Part Three

THE NATURE OF A BATTLE

I

In September of 1915 the Commander-in-Chief and his staff were busy
with preparations for a battle, in conjunction with the French, which
had ambitious objects. These have never been stated because they were
not gained (and it was the habit of our High Command to conceal its
objectives and minimize their importance if their hopes were
unfulfilled), but beyond doubt the purpose of the battle was to gain
possession of Lens and its coal-fields, and by striking through
Hulluch and Haisnes to menace the German occupation of Lille. On the
British front the key of the enemy's position was Hill 70, to the
north of Lens, beyond the village of Loos, and the capture of that
village and that hill was the first essential of success.

The assault on these positions was to be made by two New Army
divisions of the 4th Corps: the 47th (London) Division, and the 15th
(Scottish) Division. They were to be supported by the 11th Corps,
consisting of the Guards and two new and untried divisions, the 21st
and the 24th. The Cavalry Corps (less the 3d Cavalry Division under
General Fanshawe) was in reserve far back at St.-Pol and Pernes; and
the Indian Cavalry Corps under General Remington was at Doullens; "to
be in readiness," wrote Sir John French, "to co-operate with the
French cavalry in exploiting any success which might be attained by
the French and British forces." . . . Oh, wonderful optimism! In that
Black Country of France, scattered with mining villages in which every
house was a machine-gun fort, with slag heaps and pit-heads which were
formidable redoubts, with trenches and barbed wire and brick-stacks,
and quarries, organized for defense in siege-warfare, cavalry might as
well have ridden through hell with hope of "exploiting" success. . .
"Plans for effective co-operation were fully arranged between the
cavalry commanders of both armies," wrote our Commander-in-Chief in
his despatch. I can imagine those gallant old gentlemen devising their
plans, with grave courtesy, over large maps, and A. D. C.'s clicking
heels in attendance, and an air of immense wisdom and most cheerful
assurance governing the proceedings in the salon of a French chateau.
. . The 3d Cavalry Division, less one brigade, was assigned to the
First Army as a reserve, and moved into the area of the 4th Corps on
the 2lst and 22d of September.