Books: Now It Can Be Told

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

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II

The movements of troops and the preparations for big events revealed
to every British soldier in France the "secret" of the coming battle.
Casualty clearing-stations were ordered to make ready for big numbers
of wounded. That was always one of the first signs of approaching
massacre. Vast quantities of shells were being brought up to the rail-
heads and stacked in the "dumps." They were the first-fruit of the
speeding up of munition-factories at home after the public outcry
against shell shortage and the lack of high explosives. Well, at last
the guns would not be starved. There was enough high-explosive force
available to blast the German trenches off the map. So it seemed to
our innocence--though years afterward we knew that no bombardment
would destroy all earthworks such as Germans made, and that always
machine-guns would slash our infantry advancing over the chaos of
mangled ground.

Behind our lines in France, in scores of villages where our men were
quartered, there was a sense of impending fate. Soldiers of the New
Army knew that in a little while the lessons they had learned in the
School of Courage would be put to a more frightful test than that of
holding trenches in stationary warfare. Their boredom, the intolerable
monotony of that routine life, would be broken by more sensational
drama, and some of them were glad of that, and said: "Let's get on
with it. Anything rather than that deadly stagnation." And others, who
guessed they were chosen for the coming battle, and had a clear vision
of what kind of things would happen (they knew something about the
losses at Neuve Chapelle and Festubert), became more thoughtful than
usual, deeply introspective, wondering how many days of life they had
left to them.

Life was good out of the line in that September of '15. The land of
France was full of beauty, with bronzed corn-stooks in the fields, and
scarlet poppies in the grass, and a golden sunlight on old barns and
on little white churches and in orchards heavy with fruit. It was good
to go into the garden of a French chateau and pluck a rose and smell
its sweetness, and think back to England, where other roses were
blooming. England!. . . And in a few days--who could say?--perhaps
eternal sleep somewhere near Lens.

Some officers of the Guards came into the garden of the little house
where I lived at that time with other onlookers. It was an untidy
garden, with a stretch of grass-plot too rough to be called a lawn,
but with pleasant shade under the trees, and a potager with
raspberries and currants on the bushes, and flower-beds where red and
white roses dropped their petals.

Two officers of the Scots Guards, inseparable friends, came to gossip
with us, and read the papers, and drink a little whisky in the
evenings, and pick the raspberries. They were not professional
soldiers. One of them had been a stock-broker, the other "something in
the city." They disliked the army system with an undisguised hatred
and contempt. They hated war with a ferocity which was only a little
"camouflaged" by the irony and the brutality of their anecdotes of
war's little comedies. They took a grim delight in the humor of
corpses, lice, bayonet--work, and the sniping of fair-haired German
boys. They laughed, almost excessively, at these attributes of
warfare, and one of them used to remark, after some such anecdote,
"And once I was a little gentleman!"

He was a gentleman still, with a love of nature in his heart--I saw
him touch the petals of living roses with a caress in his finger-tips-
-and with a spiritual revolt against the beastliness of this new job
of his, although he was a strong, hard fellow, without weakness of
sentiment. His close comrade was of more delicate fiber, a gentle
soul, not made for soldiering at all, but rather for domestic life,
with children about him, and books. As the evenings passed in this
French village, drawing him closer to Loos by the flight of time, I
saw the trouble in his eyes which he tried to hide by smiling and by
courteous conversation. He was being drawn closer to Loos and farther
away from the wife who knew nothing of what that name meant to her and
to him.

Other officers of the Guards came into the garden--Grenadiers. There
were two young brothers of an old family who had always sent their
sons to war. They looked absurdly young when they took off their
tunics and played a game of cricket, with a club for a bat, and a
tennis-ball. They were just schoolboys, but with the gravity of men
who knew that life is short. I watched their young athletic figures,
so clean-limbed, so full of grace, as they threw the ball, and had a
vision of them lying mangled.

An Indian prince came into the garden. It was "Ranjitsinji," who had
carried his bat to many a pavilion where English men and women had
clapped their hands to him, on glorious days when there was sunlight
on English lawns. He took the club and stood at the wicket and was
bowled third ball by a man who had only played cricket after ye manner
of Stratford-atte-Bow. But then he found himself, handled the club
like a sword, watched the ball with a falcon's eye, played with it. He
was on the staff of the Indian Cavalry Corps, which was "to co-operate
in exploiting any success."

"To-morrow we move," said one of the Scots Guards officers. The
colonel of the battalion came to dinner at our mess, sitting down to a
white tablecloth for the last time in his life. They played a game of
cards, and went away earlier than usual.

Two of them lingered after the colonel had gone. They drank more
whisky.

"We must be going," they said, but did not go.

The delicate-looking man could not hide the trouble in his eyes.

"I sha'n't be killed this time," he said to a friend of mine. "I shall
be badly wounded."

The hard man, who loved flowers, drank his fourth glass of whisky.

"It's going to be damned uncomfortable," he said. "I wish the filthy
thing were over. Our generals will probably arrange some glorious
little massacres. I know 'em! . . . Well, good night, all."

They went out into the darkness of the village lane. Battalions were
already on the move, in the night. Their steady tramp of feet beat on
the hard road. Their dark figures looked like an army of ghosts.
Sparks were spluttering out of the funnels of army cookers. A British
soldier in full field kit was kissing a woman in the shadow-world of
an estaminet. I passed close to them, almost touching them before I
was aware of their presence.

"Bonne chance!" said the woman. "Quand to reviens--"

"One more kiss, lassie," said the man.

"Mans comme to es gourmand, toi!"

He kissed her savagely, hungrily. Then he lurched off the sidewalk and
formed up with other men in the darkness.

The Scots Guards moved next morning. I stood by the side of the
colonel, who was in a gruff mood.

"It looks like rain," he said, sniffing the air. "It will probably
rain like hell when the battle begins."

I think he was killed somewhere by Fosse 8. The two comrades in the
Scots Guards were badly wounded. One of the young brothers was killed
and the other maimed. I found their names in the casualty lists which
filled columns of The Times for a long time after Loos.

III

The town of Bethune was the capital of our army in the Black Country
of the French coal-fields. It was not much shelled in those days,
though afterward--years afterward--it was badly damaged by long-range
guns, so that its people fled, at last, after living so long on the
edge of war.

Its people were friendly to our men, and did not raise their prices
exorbitantly. There were good shops in the town--"as good as Paris,"
said soldiers who had never been to Paris, but found these plate-glass
windows dazzling, after trench life, and loved to see the "mamzelles"
behind the counters and walking out smartly, with little high-heeled
shoes. There were tea-shops, crowded always with officers on their way
to the line or just out of it, and they liked to speak French with the
girls who served them. Those girls saw the hunger in those men's eyes,
who watched every movement they made, who tried to touch their hands
and their frocks in passing. They knew they were desired, as daughters
of Eve, by boys who were starved of love. They took that as part of
their business, distributing cakes and buns without favor, with
laughter in their eyes, and a merry word or two. Now and then, when
they had leisure, they retired to inner rooms, divided by curtains
from the shop, and sat on the knees of young British officers, while
others played ragtime or sentimental ballads on untuned pianos. There
was champagne as well as tea to be had in these bun--shops, but the A.
P. M. was down on disorder or riotous gaiety, and there were no
orgies. "Pas d'orgies," said the young ladies severely when things
were getting a little too lively. They had to think of their business.

Down side-streets here and there were houses where other women lived,
not so severe in their point of view. Their business, indeed, did not
permit of severity, and they catered for the hunger of men exiled year
after year from their own home-life and from decent womanhood. They
gave the base counterfeit of love in return for a few francs, and
there were long lines of men--English, Irish, and Scottish soldiers--
who waited their turn to get that vile imitation of life's romance
from women who were bought and paid for. Our men paid a higher price
than a few francs for the Circe's cup of pleasure, which changed them
into swine for a while, until the spell passed, and would have blasted
their souls if God were not understanding of human weakness and of
war. They paid in their bodies, if not in their souls, those boys of
ours who loved life and beauty and gentle things, and lived in filth
and shell-fire, and were trained to kill, and knew that death was
hunting for them and had all the odds of luck. Their children and
their children's children will pay also for the sins of their fathers,
by rickety limbs and water--on-the-brain, and madness, and
tuberculosis, and other evils which are the wages of sin, which
flourished most rankly behind the fields of war.

The inhabitants of Bethune--the shopkeepers, and brave little families
of France, and bright-eyed girls, and frowzy women, and heroines, and
harlots--came out into the streets before the battle of Loos, and
watched the British army pouring through--battalions of Londoners and
Scots, in full fighting-kit, with hot sweat on their faces, and grim
eyes, and endless columns of field-guns and limbers, drawn by hard-
mouthed mules cursed and thrashed by their drivers, and ambulances,
empty now, and wagons, and motor-lorries, hour after hour, day after
day.

"Bonne chance!" cried the women, waving hands and handkerchiefs.

"Les pauvres enfants!" said the old women, wiping their eyes on dirty
aprons. "We know how it is. They will be shot to pieces. It is always
like that, in this sacred war. Oh, those sacred pigs of Germans! Those
dirty Boches! Those sacred bandits!"

"They are going to give the Boches a hard knock," said grizzled men,
who remembered in their boyhood another war. "The English army is
ready. How splendid they are, those boys! And ours are on the right of
them. This time--!"

"Mother of God, hark at the guns!"

At night, as dark fell, the people of Bethune gathered in the great
square by the Hotel de Ville, which afterward was smashed, and
listened to the laboring of the guns over there by Vermelles and
Noeux-les-Mines, and Grenay, and beyond Notre Dame de Lorette, where
the French guns were at work. There were loud, earth--shaking
rumblings, and now and then enormous concussions. In the night sky
lights rose in long, spreading bars of ruddy luminance, in single
flashes, in sudden torches of scarlet flame rising to the clouds and
touching them with rosy feathers.

"'Cre nom de Dieu!" said French peasants, on the edge of all that, in
villages like Gouy, Servins, Heuchin, Houdain, Grenay, Bruay, and
Pernes. "The caldron is boiling up. . . There will be a fine pot-au-
feu."

They wondered if their own sons would be in the broth. Some of them
knew, and crossed themselves by wayside shrines for the sake of their
sons' souls, or in their estaminets cursed the Germans with the same
old curses for having brought all this woe into the world.

IV

In those villages--Heuchin, Houdain, Lillers, and others--on the edge
of the Black Country the Scottish troops of the 15th Division were in
training for the arena, practising attacks on trenches and villages,
getting a fine edge of efficiency on to bayonet-work and bombing, and
having their morale heightened by addresses from brigadiers and
divisional commanders on the glorious privilege which was about to be
theirs of leading the assault, and on the joys as well as the duty of
killing Germans.

In one battalion of Scots--the 10th Gordons, who were afterward the
8/10th--there were conferences of company commanders and whispered
consultations of subalterns. They were "Kitchener" men, from Edinburgh
and Aberdeen and other towns in the North. I came to know them all
after this battle, and gave them fancy names in my despatches: the
Georgian gentleman, as handsome as Beau Brummell, and a gallant
soldier, who was several times wounded, but came back to command his
old battalion, and then was wounded again nigh unto death, but came
back again; and Honest John, slow of speech, with a twinkle in his
eyes, careless of shell splinters flying around his bullet head, hard
and tough and cunning in war; and little Ginger, with his whimsical
face and freckles, and love of pretty girls and all children, until he
was killed in Flanders; and the Permanent Temporary Lieutenant who
fell on the Somme; and the Giant who had a splinter through his brain
beyond Arras; and many other Highland gentlemen, and one English padre
who went with them always to the trenches, until a shell took his head
off at the crossroads.

It was the first big attack of the 15th Division. They were determined
to go fast and go far. Their pride of race was stronger than the
strain on their nerves. Many of them, I am certain, had no sense of
fear, no apprehension of death or wounds. Excitement, the comradeship
of courage, the rivalry of battalions, lifted them above anxiety
before the battle began, though here and there men like Ginger, of
more delicate fiber, of imagination as well as courage, must have
stared in great moments at the grisly specter toward whom they would
soon be walking.

In other villages were battalions of the 47th London Division. They,
too, were to be in the first line of attack, on the right of the
Scots. They, too, had to win honor for the New Army and old London.
They were a different crowd from the Scots, not so hard, not so steel-
-nerved, with more sensibility to suffering, more imagination, more
instinctive revolt against the butchery that was to come. But they,
too, had been "doped" for morale, their nervous tension had been
tightened up by speeches addressed to their spirit and tradition. It
was to be London's day out. They were to fight for the glory of the
old town . . . the old town where they had lived in little suburban
houses with flower-gardens, where they had gone up by the early
morning trains to city offices and government offices and warehouses
and shops, in days before they ever guessed they would go a-
soldiering, and crouch in shell-holes under high explosives, and
thrust sharp steel into German bowels. But they would do their best.
They would go through with it. They would keep their sense of humor
and make cockney jokes at death. They would show the stuff of London
pride.

"Domine, dirige nos!"

I knew many of those young Londoners. I had sat in tea-shops with them
when they were playing dominoes, before the war, as though that were
the most important game in life. I had met one of them at a fancy-
dress ball in the Albert Hall, when he was Sir Walter Raleigh and I
was Richard Sheridan. Then we were both onlookers of life--chroniclers
of passing history. I remained the onlooker, even in war, but my
friend went into the arena. He was a Royal Fusilier, and the old way
of life became a dream to him when he walked toward Loos, and
afterward sat in shell-craters in the Somme fields, and knew that
death would find him, as it did, in Flanders. I had played chess with
one man whom afterward I met as a gunner officer at Heninel, near
Arras, on an afternoon when a shell had killed three of his men
bathing in a tank, and other shells made a mess of blood and flesh in
his wagon-lines. We both wore steel hats, and he was the first to
recognize a face from the world of peace. After his greeting he swore
frightful oaths, cursing the war and the Staff. His nerves were all
jangled. There was another officer in the 47th London Division whom I
had known as a boy. He was only nineteen when he enlisted, not twenty
when he had fought through several battles. He and hundreds like him
had been playing at red Indians in Kensington Gardens a few years
before an August in 1914. . . The 47th London Division, going forward
to the battle of Loos, was made up of men whose souls had been shaped
by all the influences of environment, habit, and tradition in which I
had been born and bred. Their cradle had been rocked to the murmurous
roar of London traffic. Their first adventures had been on London
Commons. The lights along the Embankment, the excitement of the
streets, the faces of London crowds, royal pageantry--marriages,
crownings, burials--on the way to Westminster, the little dramas of
London life, had been woven into the fiber of their thoughts, and it
was the spirit of London which went with them wherever they walked in
France or Flanders, more sensitive than country men to the things they
saw. Some of them had to fight against their nerves on the way to
Loos. But their spirit was exalted by a nervous stimulus before that
battle, so that they did freakish and fantastic things of courage.

V

I watched the preliminary bombardment of the Loos battlefields from a
black slag heap beyond Noeux-les-Mines, and afterward went on the
battleground up to the Loos redoubt, when our guns and the enemy's
were hard at work; and later still, in years that followed, when there
was never a silence of guns in those fields, came to know the ground
from many points of view. It was a hideous territory, this Black
Country between Lens and Hulluch. From the flat country below the
distant ridges of Notre Dame de Lorette and Vimy there rose a number
of high black cones made by the refuse of the coal-mines, which were
called Fosses. Around those black mounds there was great slaughter, as
at Fosse 8 and Fosse 10 and Puits 14bis, and the Double Crassier near
Loos, because they gave observation and were important to capture or
hold. Near them were the pit-heads, with winding-gear in elevated
towers of steel which were smashed and twisted by gun-fire; and in
Loos itself were two of those towers joined by steel girders and
gantries, called the "Tower Bridge" by men of London. Rows of red
cottages where the French miners had lived were called corons, and
where they were grouped into large units they were called cites, like
the Cite St.-Auguste, the Cite St.-Pierre, and the Cite St.-Laurent,
beyond Hill 70, on the outskirts of Lens. All those places were
abandoned now by black-grimed men who had fled down mine-shafts and
galleries with their women and children, and had come up on our side
of the lines at Noeux-les-Mines or Bruay or Bully-Grenay, where they
still lived close to the war. Shells pierced the roof of the church in
that squalid village of Noeux--les-Mines and smashed some of the
cottages and killed some of the people now and then. Later in the war,
when aircraft dropped bombs at night, a new peril over--shadowed them
with terror, and they lived in their cellars after dusk, and sometimes
were buried there. But they would not retreat farther back--not many
of them--and on days of battle I saw groups of French miners and
dirty-bloused girls excited by the passage of our troops and by the
walking wounded who came stumbling back, and by stretcher cases
unloaded from ambulances to the floors of their dirty cottages. High
velocities fell in some of the streets, shrapnel-shells whined
overhead and burst like thunderclaps. Young hooligans of France
slouched around with their hands in their pockets, talking to our men
in a queer lingua franca, grimacing at those noises if they did not
come too near. I saw lightly wounded girls among them, with bandaged
heads and hands, but they did not think that a reason for escape. With
smoothly braided hair they gathered round British soldiers in steel
hats and clasped their arms or leaned against their shoulders. They
had known many of those men before. They were their sweethearts. In
those foul little mining towns the British troops had liked their
billets, because of the girls there. London boys and Scots "kept
company" with pretty slatterns, who stole their badges for keepsakes,
and taught them a base patois of French, and had a smudge of tears on
their cheeks when the boys went away for a spell in the ditches of
death. They were kind-hearted little sluts with astounding courage.

"Aren't you afraid of this place?" I asked one of them in Bully-Grenay
when it was "unhealthy" there. "You might be killed here any minute."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"Je m'en fiche de la mort!" ("I don't care a damn about death.")

I had the same answer from other girls in other places.

That was the mise-en-scene of the battle of Loos--those mining towns
behind the lines, then a maze of communication trenches entered from a
place called Philosophe, leading up to the trench-lines beyond
Vermelles, and running northward to Cambrin and Givenchy, opposite
Hulluch, Haisnes, and La Bassee, where the enemy had his trenches and
earthworks among the slag heaps, the pit-heads, the corons and the
cites, all broken by gun-fire, and nowhere a sign of human life
aboveground, in which many men were hidden.

Storms of gun-fire broke loose from our batteries a week before the
battle. It was our first demonstration of those stores of high-
explosive shells which had been made by the speeding up of munition-
work in England, and of a gun-power which had been growing steadily
since the coming out of the New Army. The weather was heavy with mist
and a drizzle of rain. Banks of smoke made a pall over all the arena
of war, and it was stabbed and torn by the incessant flash of bursting
shells. I stood on the slag heap, staring at this curtain of smoke,
hour after hour, dazed by the tumult of noise and by that impenetrable
veil which hid all human drama. There was no movement of men to be
seen, no slaughter, no heroic episode--only through rifts in the smoke
the blurred edges of slag heaps and pit-heads, and smoking ruins.
German trenches were being battered in, German dugouts made into the
tombs of living men, German bodies tossed up with earth and stones--
all that was certain but invisible.

"Very boring," said an officer by my side. "Not a damn thing to be
seen."

"Our men ought to have a walk-over," said an optimist. "Any living
German must be a gibbering idiot with shell-shock."

"I expect they're playing cards in their dugouts," said the officer
who was bored. "Even high explosives don't go down very deep."

"It's stupendous, all the same. By God! hark at that! It seems more
than human. It's like some convulsion of nature."

"There's no adventure in modern war," said the bored man. "It's a
dirty scientific business. I'd kill all chemists and explosive
experts."

"Our men will have adventure enough when they go over the top at dawn.
Hell must be a game compared with that."

The guns went on pounding away, day after day, laboring, pummeling,
hammering, like Thor with his thunderbolts. It was the preparation for
battle. No men were out of the trenches yet, though some were being
killed there and elsewhere, at the crossroads by Philosophe, and
outside the village of Masingarbe, and in the ruins of Vermelles, and
away up at Cambrin and Givenchy. The German guns were answering back
intermittentlv, but holding most of their fire until human flesh came
out into the open. The battle began at dawn on Septembet 25th.

VI

In order to distract the enemy's attention and hold his troops away
from the main battle-front, "subsidiary attacks" were made upon the
German lines as far north as Bellewarde Farm, to the east of Ypres,
and southward to La Bassee Canal at Givenchy, by the troops of the
Second and Third Armies. This object, wrote Sir John French, in his
despatch, "was most effectively achieved." It was achieved by the
bloody sacrifice of many brave battalions in the 3d and 14th Divisions
(Yorkshire, Royal Scots, King's Royal Rifles, and others), and by the
Meerut Division of the Indian Corps, who set out to attack terrible
lines without sufficient artillery support, and without reserves
behind them, and without any chance of holding the ground they might
capture. It was part of the system of war. They were the pawns of
"strategy," serving a high purpose in a way that seemed to them
without reason. Not for them was the glory of a victorious assault.
Their job was to "demonstrate" by exposing their bodies to devouring
fire, and by attacking earthworks which they were not expected to
hold. Here and there men of ours, after their rush over No Man's Land
under a deadly sweep of machine-gun fire, flung themselves into the
enemy's trenches, bayoneting the Germans and capturing the greater
part of their first line. There they lay panting among wounded and
dead, and after that shoveled up earth and burrowed to get cover from
the shelling which was soon to fall on them. Quickly the enemy
discovered their whereabouts and laid down a barrage fire which, with
deadly accuracy, plowed up their old front line and tossed it about on
the pitchforks of bursting shells. Our men's bodies were mangled in
that earth. High explosives plunged into the midst of little groups
crouching in holes and caverns of the ground, and scattered their
limbs. Living, unwounded men lay under those screaming shells with the
panting hearts of toads under the beat of flails. Wounded men crawled
back over No Man's Land, and some were blown to bits as they crawled,
and others got back. Before nightfall, in the dark, a general
retirement was ordered to our original line in that northern sector,
owing to the increasing casualties under the relentless work of the
German guns. Like ants on the move, thousands of men rose from the
upheaved earth, and with their stomachs close to it, crouching, came
back, dragging their wounded. The dead were left.