Books: Now It Can Be Told

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

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This curtain was rent with flashes of light and little glinting stars
burst continually over one spot, where the Bluff was hidden beyond
Zillebeke Lake. When daybreak came, with the rim of a red sun over a
clump of trees in the east, the noise of guns increased in spasms of
intensity like a rising storm. Many batteries of heavy artillery were
firing salvos. Field-guns, widely scattered, concentrated their fire
upon one area, where their shells were bursting with a twinkle of
light. Somewhere a machine-gun was at work with sharp, staccato
strokes, like an urgent knocking at the door. High overhead was the
song of an airplane coming nearer, with a high, vibrant humming. It
was an enemy searching through the mist down below him for any
movement of troops or trains.

It was the 76th Brigade of the 3d Division which attacked at four
thirty-two that morning, and they were the Suffolks, Gordons, and
King's Own Liverpools who led the assault, commanded by General Pratt.
They flung themselves into the German lines in the wake of a heavy
barrage fire, smashing through broken belts of wire and stumbling in
and out of shell-craters. The Germans, in their front-lines, had gone
to cover in deep dugouts which they had built with feverish haste on
the Bluff and its neighborhood during the previous ten days and
nights. At first only a few men, not more than a hundred or so, could
be discovered alive. The dead were thick in the maze of trenches, and
our men stumbled across them.

The living were in a worse state than the dead, dazed by the shell-
fire, and cold with terror when our men sprang upon them in the
darkness before dawn. Small parties were collected and passed back as
prisoners--marvelously lucky men if they kept their sanity as well as
their lives after all that hell about them. Hours later, when our
battalions had stormed their way up other trenches into a salient
jutting out of the German line and beyond the boundary of the
objective that had been given to them, other living men were found to
be still hiding in the depths of other dugouts and could not be
induced to come out. Terror kept them in those holes, and they were
like wild beasts at bay, still dangerous because they had their bombs
and rifles. An ultimatum was shouted down to them by men too busy for
persuasive talk. "If you don't come out you'll be blown in." Some of
them came out and others were blown to bits. After that the usual
thing happened, the thing that inevitably happened in all these little
murderous attacks and counter-attacks. The enemy concentrated all its
power of artillery on that position captured by our men, and day after
day hurled over storms of shrapnel and high explosives, under which
our men cowered until many were killed and more wounded. The first
attack on the Bluff and its recapture cost us three thousand
casualties, and that was only the beginning of a daily toll of life
and limbs in that neighborhood of hell. Through driving snowstorms
shells went rushing across that battleground, ceaselessly in those
first weeks of March, but the 3d Division repulsed the enemy's
repeated attacks in bombing fights which were very fierce on both
sides.

I went to General Pilcher's headquarters at Reninghelst on March 4th,
and found the staff of the 17th Division frosty in their greeting,
while General Pratt, the brigadier of the 3d Division, was conducting
the attack in their new territory. General Pilcher himself was much
shaken. The old gentleman had been at St.-Eloi when the bombardment
had begun on his men. With Captain Rattnag his A. D. C. he lay for an
hour in a ditch with shells screaming overhead and bursting close.
More than once when I talked with him he raised his head and listened
nervously and said: "Do you hear the guns? . . . They are terrible."

I was sorry for him, this general who had many theories on war and
experimented in light-signals, as when one night I stood by his side
in a dark field, and had a courteous old-fashioned dignity and
gentleness of manner. He was a fine old English gentleman and a
gallant soldier, but modern warfare was too brutal for him. Too brutal
for all those who hated its slaughter.

Those men of the 3d Division--the "Iron Division," as it was called
later in the war--remained in a hideous turmoil of wet earth up by the
Bluff until other men came to relieve them and take over this corner
of hell.

What remained of the trenches was deep in water and filthy mud, where
the bodies of many dead Germans lay under a litter of broken sand-bags
and in the holes of half-destroyed dugouts. Nothing could be done to
make it less horrible. Then the weather changed and became icily cold,
with snow and rain.

One dugout which had been taken for battalion headquarters was six
feet long by four wide, and here in this waterlogged hole lived three
officers of the Royal Scots to whom a day or two before I had wished
"good luck."

The servants lived in the shaft alongside which was a place measuring
four feet by four feet. There were no other dugouts where men could
get any shelter from shells or storms, and the enemy's guns were never
silent.

But the men held on, as most of our men held on, with a resignation to
fate and a stoic endurance beyond that ordinary human courage which we
seemed to know before the war.

The chaplain of this battalion had spent all the long night behind the
lines, stoking fires and going round the cook-houses and looking at
his wrist-watch to see how the minutes were crawling past. He had tea,
rum, socks, oil, and food all ready for those who were coming back,
and the lighted braziers were glowing red.

At the appointed time the padre went out to meet his friends, pressing
forward through the snow and listening for any sound of footsteps
through the great hush.

But there was no sound except the soft flutter of snowflakes. He
strained his eyes for any moving shadows of men. But there was only
darkness and the falling snow.

Two hours passed, and they seemed endless to that young chaplain whose
brain was full of frightful apprehensions, so that they were hours of
anguish to him.

Then at last the first men appeared. "I've never seen anything so
splendid and so pitiful," said the man who had been waiting for them.

They came along at about a mile an hour, sometimes in groups,
sometimes by twos or threes, holding on to each other, often one by
one. In this order they crept through the ruined villages in the
falling snow, which lay thick upon the masses of fallen masonry. There
was a profound silence about them, and these snow-covered men were
like ghosts walking through cities of death.

No man spoke, for the sound of a human voice would have seemed a
danger in this great white quietude. They were walking like old men,
weak-kneed, and bent under the weight of their packs and rifles.

Yet when the young padre greeted them with a cheery voice that hid the
water in his heart every one had a word and a smile in reply, and made
little jests about their drunken footsteps, for they were like drunken
men with utter weariness.

"What price Charlie Chaplin now, sir?" was one man's joke.

The last of those who came back--and there were many who never came
back--were some hours later than the first company, having found it
hard to crawl along that Via Dolorosa which led to the good place
where the braziers were glowing.

It was a heroic episode, for each one of these men was a hero, though
his name will never be known in the history of that silent and hidden
war. And yet it was an ordinary episode, no degree worse in its
hardship than what happened all along the line when there was an
attack or counter-attack in foul weather.

The marvel of it was that our men, who were very simple men, should
have "stuck it out" with that grandeur of courage which endured all
things without self-interest and without emotion. They were
unconscious of the virtue that was in them.

XVII

Going up to the line by Ypres, or Armentieres, or Loos, I noticed in
those early months of 1916 an increasing power of artillery on our
side of the lines and a growing intensity of gun-fire on both sides.

Time was, a year before, when our batteries were scattered thinly
behind the lines and when our gunners had to be thrifty of shells,
saving them up anxiously for hours of great need, when the S O S
rocket shot up a green light from some battered trench upon which the
enemy was concentrating "hate."

Those were ghastly days for gunner officers, who had to answer
telephone messages calling for help from battalions whose billets were
being shelled to pieces by long--range howitzers, or from engineers
whose working-parties were being sniped to death by German field-guns,
or from a brigadier who wanted to know, plaintively, whether the
artillery could not deal with a certain gun which was enfilading a
certain trench and piling up the casualties. It was hard to say:
"Sorry! . . . We've got to go slow with ammunition."

That, now, was ancient history. For some time the fields had grown a
new crop of British batteries. Month after month our weight of metal
increased, and while the field-guns had been multiplying at a great
rate the "heavies" had been coming out, too, and giving a deeper and
more sonorous tone to that swelling chorus which rolled over the
battlefields by day and night.

There was a larger supply of shells for all those pieces, and no
longer the same need for thrift when there was urgent need for
artillery support. Retaliation was the order of the day, and if the
enemy asked for trouble by any special show of "hate" he got it
quickly and with a double dose.

Compared with the infantry, the gunners had a chance of life, except
in places where, as in the salient, the German observers stared down
at them from high ground and saw every gun flash and registered every
battery. Going round the salient one day with General Burstall--and a
very good name, too!--who was then the Canadian gunner-general, I was
horrified at the way in which the enemy had the accurate range of our
guns and gun-pits and knocked them out with deadly shooting.

Here and there our amateur gunners--quick to learn their job--found a
good place, and were able to camouflage their position for a time, and
give praise to the little god of Luck, until one day sooner or later
they were discovered and a quick move was necessary if they were not
caught too soon.

So it was with a battery in the open fields beyond Kemmel village,
where I went to see a boy who had once been a rising hope of Fleet
Street.

He was new to his work and liked the adventure of it--that was before
his men were blown to bits around him and he was sent down as a tragic
case of shell-shock--and as we walked through the village of Kemmel he
chatted cheerfully about his work and life and found it topping. His
bright, luminous eyes were undimmed by the scene around him. He walked
in a jaunty, boyish way through that ruined place. It was not a
pleasant place. Kemmel village, even in those days, had been blown to
bits, except where, on the outskirts, the chateau with its racing-
stables remained untouched--"German spies!" said the boy--and where a
little grotto to Our Lady of Lourdes was also unscathed. The church
was battered and broken, and there were enormous shell-pits in the
churchyard and open vaults where old dead had been tumbled out of
their tombs. We walked along a sunken road and then to a barn in open
fields. The roof was pierced by shrapnel bullets, which let in the
rain on wet days and nights, but it was cozy otherwise in the room
above the ladder where the officers had their mess. There were some
home-made chairs up there, and Kirchner prints of naked little ladies
were tacked up to the beams, among the trench maps, and round the
fireplace where logs were burning was a canvas screen to let down at
night. A gramophone played merry music and gave a homelike touch to
this parlor in war.

"A good spot!" I said. "Is it well hidden?"

"As safe as houses," said the captain of the battery. "Touching wood,
I mean."

There were six of us sitting at a wooden plank on trestles, and at
those words five young men rose with a look of fright on their faces
and embraced the beam supporting the roof of the barn.

"What's happened?" I asked, not having heard the howl of a shell.

"Nothing," said the boy, "except touching wood. The captain spoke too
loudly."

We went out to the guns which were to do a little shooting, and found
them camouflaged from aerial eyes in the grim desolation of the
battlefield, all white after a morning's snowstorm, except where the
broken walls of distant farmhouses and the windmills on Kemmel Hill
showed black as ink.

The gunners could not see their target, which had been given to them
through the telephone, but they knew it by the figures giving the
angle of fire.

"It's a pumping-party in a waterlogged trench," said a bright-eyed boy
by my side (he was one of the rising hopes of Fleet Street before he
became a gunner officer in Flanders). "With any luck we shall get 'em
in the neck, and I like to hear the Germans squeal. . . And my gun's
ready first, as usual."

The officer commanding shouted through a tin megaphone, and the
battery fired, each gun following its brother at a second interval,
with the staccato shock of a field-piece, which is more painful than
the dull roar of a "heavy."

A word came along the wire from the officer in the observation post a
mile away.

Another order was called through the tin mouthpiece.

"Repeat!"

"We've got'em," said the young gentleman by my side, in a cheerful
way.

The officer with the megaphone looked across and smiled.

"We may as well give them a salvo. They won't like it a bit."

A second or two later there was a tremendous crash as the four guns
fired together. "Repeat!" came the high voice through the megaphone.

The still air was rent again. . . In a waterlogged trench, which we
could not see, a German pumping-party had been blown to bits.

The artillery officers took turns in the observation posts, sleeping
for the night in one of the dugouts behind the front trench instead of
in the billet below.

The way to the observation post was sometimes a little vague,
especially in frost-and-thaw weather, when parts of the communication
trenches slithered down under the weight of sand-bags.

The young officer who walked with luminous eyes and eager step found
it necessary to crawl on his stomach before he reached his lookout
station from which he looked straight across the enemy's trenches.
But, once there, it was pretty comfortable and safe, barring a direct
hit from above or a little mining operation underneath.

He made a seat of a well-filled sand-bag (it was rather a shock when
he turned it over one day to get dry side up and found a dead
Frenchman there), and smoked Belgian cigars for the sake of their
aroma, and sat there very solitary and watchful.

The rats worried him a little--they were bold enough to bare their
teeth when they met him down a trench, and there was one big fellow
called Cuthbert, who romped round his dugout and actually bit his ear
one night. But these inconveniences did not seem to give any real
distress to the soul of youth, out there alone and searching for human
targets to kill . . . until one day, as I have said, everything
snapped in him and the boy was broken.

It was on the way back from Kemmel village one day that I met a queer
apparition through a heavy snowstorm. It was a French civilian in
evening dress--boiled shirt, white tie, and all--with a bowler hat
bent to the storm.

Tomlinson, the great Tomlinson, was with me, and shook his head.

"It isn't true," he said. "I don't believe it. . . We're mad, that's
all! . . . The whole world is mad, so why should we be sane?"

We stared after the man who went into the ruin of Kemmel, to the noise
of gun-fire, in evening dress, without an overcoat, through a blizzard
of snow.

A little farther down the road we passed a signboard on the edge of a
cratered field. New words had been painted on it in good Roman
letters.

Cimetiere reserve

Tomlinson, the only Tomlinson, regarded it gravely and turned to me
with a world of meaning in his eyes. Then he tapped his forehead and
laughed.

"Mad!" he said. "We're all mad!"

XVIII

In that winter of discontent there was one great body of splendid men
whose spirits had sunk to zero, seeing no hope ahead of them in that
warfare of trenches and barbed wire. The cavalry believed they were
"bunkered" forever, and that all their training and tradition were
made futile by the digging in of armies. Now and again, when the
infantry was hard pressed, as in the second battle of Ypres and the
battle of Loos, they were called on to leave their horses behind and
take a turn in the trenches, and then they came back again, less some
of their comrades, into dirty billets remote from the fighting-lines,
to exercise their horses and curse the war.

Before they went into the line in February of '16 I went to see some
of those cavalry officers to wish them good luck, and saw them in the
trenches and afterward when they came out. In the headquarters of a
squadron of "Royals"--the way in was by a ladder through the window--
billeted in a village, which on a day of frost looked as quaint and
pretty as a Christmas card, was a party of officers typical of the
British cavalry as a whole.

A few pictures cut out of La Vie Parisienne were tacked on to the
walls to remind them of the arts and graces of an older mode of life,
and to keep them human by the sight of a pretty face (oh, to see a
pretty girl again!).

Now they were going to change this cottage for the trenches, this
quiet village with a church-bell chiming every hour, for the tumult in
the battle-front--this absolute safety for the immediate menace of
death. They knew already the beastliness of life in trenches. They had
no illusions about "glory." But they were glad to go, because activity
was better than inactivity, and because the risk would give them back
their pride, and because the cavalry should fight anyhow and somehow,
even if a charge or a pursuit were denied them.

They had a hot time in the trenches. The enemy's artillery was active,
and the list of casualties began to tot up. A good officer and a fine
fellow was killed almost at the outset, and men were horribly wounded.
But all those troopers showed a cool courage.

Things looked bad for a few minutes when a section of trenches was
blown in, isolating one platoon from another. A sergeant-major made
his way back from the damaged section, and a young officer who was
going forward to find out the extent of damage met him on the way.

"Can I get through?" asked the officer.

"I've got through," was the answer, "but it's chancing one's luck."

The officer "chanced his luck," but did not expect to come back alive.
Afterward he tried to analyze his feelings for my benefit.

"I had no sense of fear," he said, "but a sort of subconscious
knowledge that the odds were against me if I went on, and yet a
conscious determination to go on at all costs and find out what had
happened."

He came back, covered with blood, but unwounded. In spite of all the
unpleasant sights in a crumpled trench, he had the heart to smile when
in the middle of the night one of the sergeants approached him with an
amiable suggestion.

"Don't you think it would be a good time, sir, to make a slight attack
upon the enemy?"

There was something in those words, "a slight attack," which is
irresistibly comic to any of us who know the conditions of modern
trench war. But they were not spoken in jest.

So the cavalry did its "bit" again, though not as cavalry, and I saw
some of them when they came back, and they were glad to have gone
through that bloody business so that no man might fling a scornful
word as they passed with their horses.

"It is queer," said my friend, "how we go from this place of peace to
the battlefield, and then come back for a spell before going up again.
It is like passing from one life to another."

In that cavalry mess I heard queer conversations. Those officers
belonged to the old families of England, the old caste of aristocracy,
but the foul outrage of the war--the outrage against all ideals of
civilization--had made them think, some of them for the first time,
about the structure of social life and of the human family.

They hated Germany as the direct cause of war, but they looked deeper
than that and saw how the leaders of all great nations in Europe had
maintained the philosophy of forms and had built up hatreds and fears
and alliances over the heads of the peoples whom they inflamed with
passion or duped with lies.

"The politicians are the guilty ones," said one cavalry officer. "I am
all for revolution after this bloody massacre. I would hang all
politicians, diplomats, and so-called statesmen with strict
impartiality."

"I'm for the people," said another. "The poor, bloody people, who are
kept in ignorance and then driven into the shambles when their rulers
desire to grab some new part of the earth's surface or to get their
armies going because they are bored with peace."

"What price Christianity?" asked another, inevitably. "What have the
churches done to stop war or preach the gospel of Christ? The Bishop
of London, the Archbishop of Canterbury, all those conventional,
patriotic, cannon--blessing, banner-baptizing humbugs. God! They make
me tired!"

Strange words to hear in a cavalry mess! Strange turmoil in the souls
of men! They were the same words I had heard from London boys in
Ypres, spoken just as crudely. But many young gentlemen who spoke
those words have already forgotten them or would deny them.

XIX

The winter of 1915-16 passed with its misery, and spring came again to
France and Flanders with its promise of life, fulfilled in the beauty
of wild flowers and the green of leaves where the earth was not made
barren by the fire of war and all trees killed.

For men there was no promise of life, but only new preparations for
death, and continued killing.

The battle of Verdun was still going on, and France had saved herself
from a mortal blow at the heart by a desperate, heroic resistance
which cost her five hundred and fifty thousand in dead and wounded. On
the British front there were still no great battles, but those trench
raids, artillery duels, mine fighting, and small massacres which
filled the casualty clearing stations with the average amount of human
wreckage. The British armies were

being held in leash for a great offensive in the summer. New divisions
were learning the lessons of the old divisions, and here and there
generals were doing a little fancy work to keep things merry and
bright.

So it was when some mines were exploded under the German earthworks on
the lower slopes of the Vimy Ridge, where the enemy had already blown
several mines and taken possession of their craters. It was to gain
those craters, and new ones to be made by our mine charges, that the
74th Brigade of the 25th Division, a body of Lancashire men, the 9th
Loyal North Lancashires and the 11th Royal Fusiliers, with a company
of Royal Engineers and some Welsh pioneers, were detailed for the
perilous adventure of driving in the mine shafts, putting tremendous
charges of high explosives in the sapheads, and rushing the German
positions.

It was on the evening of May 15th, after two days of wet and cloudy
weather preventing the enemy's observation, that our heavy artillery
fired a short number of rounds to send the Germans into their dugouts.
A few minutes later the right group of mines exploded with a terrific
roar and blew in two of the five old German craters. After the long
rumble of heaving earth had been stilled there was just time enough to
hear the staccato of a German machine-gun. Then there was a second
roar and a wild upheaval of soil when the left group of mines
destroyed two more of the German craters and knocked out the machine-
gun.

The moment for the infantry attack had come, and the men were ready.
The first to get away were two lieutenants of the 9th Loyal North
Lancashires, who rushed forward with their assaulting-parties to the
remaining crater on the extreme left, which had not been blown up.

With little opposition from dazed and terror-stricken Germans,
bayoneted as they scrambled out of the chaotic earth, our men flung
themselves into those smoking pits and were followed immediately by
working-parties, who built up bombing posts with earth and sand-bags
on the crater lip and began to dig out communication trenches leading
to them. The assaulting-parties of the Lancashire Fusiliers were away
at the first signal, and were attacking the other groups of craters
under heavy fire.

The Germans were shaken with terror because the explosion of the mines
had killed and wounded a large number of them, and through the
darkness there rang out the cheers of masses of men who were out for
blood. Through the darkness there now glowed a scarlet light, flooding
all that turmoil of earth and men with a vivid, red illumination, as
flare after flare rose high into the sky from several points of the
German line. Later the red lights died down, and then other rockets
were fired, giving a green light to this scene of war.