Books: Now It Can Be Told

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

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41

They were a new plague of war, and did for a time gain a complete
mastery of the air. But later the Germans learned the lesson of low
flying and night bombing, and in 1917 and 1918 came back in greater
strength and made the nights horrible in camps behind the lines and in
villages, where they killed many soldiers and more civilians.

The infantry did not believe much in our air supremacy at any time,
not knowing what work was done beyond their range of vision, and
seeing our machines crashed in No Man's Land, and hearing the rattle
of machine-guns from hostile aircraft above their own trenches.

"Those aviators of ours," a general said to me, "are the biggest liars
in the world. Cocky fellows claiming impossible achievements. What
proof can they give of their preposterous tales? They only go into the
air service because they haven't the pluck to serve in the infantry."

That was prejudice. The German losses were proof enough of our men's
fighting skill and strength, and German prisoners and German letters
confirmed all their claims. But we were dishonest in our reckoning
from first to last, and the British public was hoodwinked about our
losses. "Three of our machines are missing." "Six of our machines are
missing." Yes, but what about the machines which crashed in No Man's
Land and behind our lines? They were not missing, but destroyed, and
the boys who had flown in them were dead or broken.

To the end of the war those aviators of ours searched the air for
their adventures, fought often against overwhelming numbers, killed
the German champions in single combat or in tourneys in the sky, and
let down tons of high explosives which caused great death and
widespread destruction; and in this work they died like flies, and one
boy's life--one of those laughing, fatalistic, intensely living boys--
was of no more account in the general sum of slaughter than a summer
midge, except as one little unit in the Armies of the Air.

XIII

I am not strong enough in the science of psychology to understand the
origin of laughter and to get into touch with the mainsprings of
gaiety. The sharp contrast between normal ethics and an abnormality of
action provides a grotesque point of view arousing ironical mirth. It
is probable also that surroundings of enormous tragedy stimulate the
sense of humor of the individual, so that any small, ridiculous thing
assumes the proportion of monstrous absurdity. It is also likely--
certain, I think--that laughter is an escape from terror, a liberation
of the soul by mental explosion, from the prison walls of despair and
brooding. In the Decameron of Boccaccio a group of men and women
encompassed by plague retired into seclusion to tell one another
mirthful immoralities which stirred their laughter. They laughed while
the plague destroyed society around them and when they knew that its
foul germs were on the prowl for their own bodies . . . So it was in
this war, where in many strange places and in many dreadful days there
was great laughter. I think sometimes of a night I spent with the
medical officers of a tent hospital in the fields of the Somme during
those battles. With me as a guest went a modern Falstaff, a "ton of
flesh," who "sweats to death and lards the lean earth as he walks
along."

He was a man of many anecdotes, drawn from the sinks and stews of
life, yet with a sense of beauty lurking under his coarseness, and a
voice of fine, sonorous tone, which he managed with art and a melting
grace.

On the way to the field hospital he had taken more than one nip of
whisky. His voice was well oiled when he sang a greeting to a medical
major in a florid burst of melody from Italian opera. The major was a
little Irish medico who had been through the South African War and in
tropical places, where he had drunk fire-water to kill all manner of
microbes. He suffered abominably from asthma and had had a heart-
seizure the day before our dinner at his mess, and told us that he
would drop down dead as sure as fate between one operation and another
on "the poor, bloody wounded" who never ceased to flow into his tent.
But he was in a laughing mood, and thirsty for laughter-making liquid.
He had two whiskies before the dinner began to wet his whistle. His
fellow-officers were out for an evening's joy, but nervous of the
colonel, an austere soul who sat at the head of the mess with the look
of a man afraid that merriment might reach outrageous heights beyond
his control. A courteous man he was, and rather sad. His presence for
a time acted as a restraint upon the company, until all restraint was
broken by the Falstaff with me, who told soul-crashing stories to the
little Irish major across the table and sang love lyrics to the
orderly who brought round the cottage pie and pickles. There was a
tall, thin young surgeon who had been carving up living bodies all day
and many days, and now listened to that fat rogue with an intensity of
delight that lit up his melancholy eyes, watching him gravely between
gusts of deep laughter, which seemed to come from his boots. There was
another young surgeon, once of Barts', who made himself the cup-server
of the fat knight and kept his wine at the brim, and encouraged him to
fresh audacities of anecdotry, with a humorous glance at the colonel's
troubled face . . . The colonel was forgotten after dinner. The little
Irish major took the lid off the boiling pot of mirth. He was entirely
mad, as he assured us, between dances of a wild and primitive type,
stories of adventure in far lands, and spasms of asthmatic coughing,
when he beat his breast and said, "A pox in my bleeding heart!"

Falstaff was playing Juliet to the Romeo of the tall young surgeon,
singing falsetto like a fat German angel dressed in loose-fitting
khaki, with his belt undone. There were charades in the tent. The boy
from Barts' did remarkable imitations of a gamecock challenging a
rival bird, of a cow coming through a gate, of a general addressing
his troops (most comical of all). Several glasses were broken. The
corkscrew was disregarded as a useless implement, and whisky-bottles
were decapitated against the tent poles. I remember vaguely the
crowning episode of the evening when the little major was dancing the
Irish jig with a kitchen chair; when Falstaff was singing the Prologue
of Pagliacci to the stupefied colonel; when the boy, once of Barts',
was roaring like a lion under the mess table, and when the tall,
melancholy surgeon was at the top of the tent pole, scratching himself
like a gorilla in his native haunts. . . Outside, the field hospital
was quiet, under a fleecy sky with a crescent moon. Through the
painted canvas of the tent city candle-light glowed with a faint rose-
colored light, and the Red Cross hung limp above the camp where many
wounded lay, waking or sleeping, tossing in agony, dying in
unconsciousness. Far away over the fields, rockets were rising above
the battle-lines. The sky was flickering with the flush of gun-fire. A
red glare rose and spread below the clouds where some ammunition-dump
had been exploded . . . Old Falstaff fell asleep in the car on the way
back to our quarters, and I smiled at the memory of great laughter in
the midst of tragedy.

XIV

The struggle of men from one low ridge to another low ridge in a
territory forty miles wide by more than twenty miles deep, during five
months of fighting, was enormous in its intensity and prolongation of
slaughter, wounding, and endurance of all hardships and terrors of
war. As an eye-witness I saw the full scope of the bloody drama. I saw
day by day the tidal waves of wounded limping back, until two hundred
and fifty thousand men had passed through our casualty clearing
stations, and then were not finished. I went among these men when the
blood was wet on them, and talked with hundreds of them, and heard
their individual narratives of escapes from death until my imagination
was saturated with the spirit of their conflict of body and soul. I
saw a green, downy countryside, beautiful in its summer life, ravaged
by gun-fire so that the white chalk of its subsoil was flung above the
earth and grass in a wide, sterile stretch of desolation pitted with
shell-craters, ditched by deep trenches, whose walls were hideously
upheaved by explosive fire, and littered yard after yard, mile after
mile, with broken wire, rifles, bombs, unexploded shells, rags of
uniform, dead bodies, or bits of bodies, and all the filth of battle.
I saw many villages flung into ruin or blown clean off the map. I
walked into such villages as Contalmaison, Martinpuich, Le Sars,
Thilloy, and at last Bapaume, when a smell of burning and the fumes of
explosives and the stench of dead flesh rose up to one's nostrils and
one's very soul, when our dead and German dead lay about, and newly
wounded came walking through the ruins or were carried shoulder high
on stretchers, and consciously and subconsciously the living,
unwounded men who went through these places knew that death lurked
about them and around them and above them, and at any second might
make its pounce upon their own flesh. I saw our men going into battle
with strong battalions and coming out of it with weak battalions. I
saw them in the midst of battle at Thiepval, at Contalmaison, at
Guillemont, by Loupart Wood, when they trudged toward lines of German
trenches, bunching a little in groups, dodging shell-bursts, falling
in single figures or in batches, and fighting over the enemy's
parapets. I sat with them in their dugouts before battle and after
battle, saw their bodies gathered up for burial, heard their snuffle
of death in hospital, sat by their bedside when they were sorely
wounded. So the full tragic drama of that long conflict on the Somme
was burned into my brain and I was, as it were, a part of it, and I am
still seared with its remembrance, and shall always be.

But however deep the knowledge of tragedy, a man would be a liar if he
refused to admit the heroism, the gallantry of youth, even the gaiety
of men in these infernal months. Psychology on the Somme was not
simple and straightforward. Men were afraid, but fear was not their
dominating emotion, except in the worst hours. Men hated this
fighting, but found excitement in it, often exultation, sometimes an
intense stimulus of all their senses and passions before reaction and
exhaustion. Men became jibbering idiots with shell-shock, as I saw
some of them, but others rejoiced when they saw our shells plowing
into the enemy's earthworks, laughed at their own narrow escapes and
at grotesque comicalities of this monstrous deviltry. The officers
were proud of their men, eager for their honor and achievement. The
men themselves were in rivalry with other bodies of troops, and proud
of their own prowess. They were scornful of all that the enemy might
do to them, yet acknowledged his courage and power. They were quick to
kill him, yet quick also to give him a chance of life by surrender,
and after that were--nine times out of ten--chivalrous and kindly, but
incredibly brutal on the rare occasions when passion overcame them at
some tale of treachery. They had the pride of the skilled laborer in
his own craft, as machine-gunners, bombers, raiders, trench-mortar--
men, and were keen to show their skill, whatever the risks. They were
healthy animals, with animal courage as well as animal fear, and they
had, some of them, a spiritual and moral fervor which bade them risk
death to save a comrade, or to save a position, or to kill the fear
that tried to fetter them, or to lead men with greater fear than
theirs. They lived from hour to hour and forgot the peril or the
misery that had passed, and did not forestall the future by
apprehension unless they were of sensitive mind, with the worst
quality men might have in modern warfare--imagination.

They trained themselves to an intense egotism within narrow
boundaries. Fifty yards to the left, or five hundred, men were being
pounded to death by shell-fire. Fifty yards to the right, or five
hundred, men were being mowed down by machine-gun fire. For the time
being their particular patch was quiet. It was their luck. Why worry
about the other fellow? The length of a traverse in a ditch called a
trench might make all the difference between heaven and hell. Dead
bodies were being piled up on one side of the traverse. A shell had
smashed into the platoon next door. There was a nasty mess. Men sat
under their own mud-bank and scooped out a tin of bully beef and hoped
nothing would scoop them out of their bit of earth. This protective
egotism seemed to me the instinctive soul-armor of men in dangerous
places when I saw them in the line. In a little way, not as a soldier,
but as a correspondent, taking only a thousandth part of the risks of
fighting-men, I found myself using this self-complacency. They were
strafing on the left. Shells were pitching on the right. Very nasty
for the men in either of those places. Poor devils! But meanwhile I
was on a safe patch, it seemed. Thank Heaven for that!

"Here," said an elderly officer--one of those rare exalted souls who
thought that death was a little thing to give for one's country's
sake--"here we may be killed at any moment!"

He spoke the words in Contalmaison with a glow in his voice, as though
announcing glad tidings to a friend who was a war artist camouflaged
as a lieutenant and new to the scene of battle.

"But," said the soldier-artist, adjusting his steel hat nervously, "I
don't want to be killed! I hate the idea of it!"

He was the normal man. The elderly officer was abnormal. The normal
man, soldier without camouflage, had no use for death at all, unless
it was in connection with the fellow on the opposite side of the way.
He hated the notion of it applied to himself. He fought ferociously,
desperately, heroically, to escape it. Yet there were times, many
times, when he paid not the slightest attention to the near
neighborhood of that grisly specter, because in immediate, temporary
tranquillity he thrust the thought from his mind, and smoked a
cigarette, and exchanged a joke with the fellow at his elbow. There
were other times when, in a state of mental exaltation, or spiritual
self-sacrifice, or physical excitement, he acted regardless of all
risks and did mad, marvelous, almost miraculous things, hardly
conscious of his own acts, but impelled to do as he did by the passion
within him--passion of love, passion of hate, passion of fear, or
passion of pride. Those men, moved like that, were the leaders, the
heroes, and groups followed them sometimes because of their intensity
of purpose and the infection of their emotion, and the comfort that
came from their real or apparent self-confidence in frightful
situations. Those who got through were astonished at their own
courage. Many of them became convinced consciously or subconsciously
that they were immune from shells and bullets. They walked through
harassing fire with a queer sense of carelessness. They had escaped so
often that some of them had a kind of disdain of shell-bursts, until,
perhaps, one day something snapped in their nervous system, as often
it did, and the bang of a door in a billet behind the lines, or a
wreath of smoke from some domestic chimney, gave them a sudden shock
of fear. Men differed wonderfully in their nerve-resistance, and it
was no question of difference in courage.

In the mass all our soldiers seemed equally brave. In the mass they
seemed astoundingly cheerful. In spite of all the abomination of that
Somme fighting our troops before battle and after battle--a few days
after--looked bright-eyed, free from haunting anxieties, and were easy
in their way of laughter. It was optimism in the mass, heroism in the
mass. It was only when one spoke to the individual, some friend who
bared his soul a second, or some soldier-ant in the multitude, with
whom one talked with truth, that one saw the hatred of a man for his
job, the sense of doom upon him, the weakness that was in his
strength, the bitterness of his grudge against a fate that forced him
to go on in this way of life, the remembrance of a life more beautiful
which he had abandoned--all mingled with those other qualities of
pride and comradeship, and that illogical sense of humor which made up
the strange complexity of his psychology.

XV

It was a colonel of the North Staffordshires who revealed to me the
astounding belief that he was "immune" from shell-fire, and I met
other men afterward with the same conviction. He had just come out of
desperate fighting in the neighborhood of Thiepval, where his
battalion had suffered heavily, and at first he was rude and sullen in
the hut. I gaged him as a hard Northerner, without a shred of
sentiment or the flicker of any imaginative light; a stern, ruthless
man. He was bitter in his speech to me because the North Staffords
were never mentioned in my despatches. He believed that this was due
to some personal spite--not knowing the injustice of our military
censorship under the orders of G.H.Q.

"Why the hell don't we get a word?" he asked. "Haven't we done as well
as anybody, died as much?"

I promised to do what I could--which was nothing--to put the matter
right, and presently he softened, and, later was amazingly candid in
self-revelation.

"I have a mystical power," he said. "Nothing will ever hit me as long
as I keep that power which comes from faith. It is a question of
absolute belief in the domination of mind over matter. I go through
any barrage unscathed because my will is strong enough to turn aside
explosive shells and machine-gun bullets. As matter they must obey my
intelligence. They are powerless to resist the mind of a man in touch
with the Universal Spirit, as I am."

He spoke quietly and soberly, in a matter-of-fact way. I decided that
he was mad. That was not surprising. We were all mad, in one way or
another or at one time or another. It was the unusual form of madness
that astonished me. I envied him his particular "kink." I wished I
could cultivate it, as an aid to courage. He claimed another peculiar
form of knowledge. He knew before each action, he told me, what
officers and men of his would be killed in battle. He looked at a
man's eyes and knew, and he claimed that he never made a mistake . . .
He was sorry to possess that second sight, and it worried him.

There were many men who had a conviction that they would not be
killed, although they did not state it in the terms expressed by the
colonel of the North Staffordshires, and it is curious that in some
cases I know they were not mistaken and are still alive. It was indeed
a general belief that if a man funked being hit he was sure to fall,
that being the reverse side of the argument.

I saw the serene cheerfulness of men in the places of death at many
times and in many places, and I remember one group of friends on the
Somme who revealed that quality to a high degree. It was when our
front-line ran just outside the village of Martinpuich to Courcelette,
on the other side of the Bapaume road, and when the 8th-l0th Gordons
were there, after their fight through Longueval and over the ridge. It
was the little crowd I have mentioned before in the battle of Loos,
and it was Lieut. John Wood who took me to the battalion headquarters
located under some sand-bags in a German dug--out. All the way up to
Contalmaison and beyond there were the signs of recent bloodshed and
of present peril. Dead horses lay about, disemboweled by shell-fire.
Legs and arms protruded from shell-craters where bodies lay half
buried. Heavy crumps came howling through the sky and bursting with
enormous noise here, there, and everywhere over that vast, desolate
battlefield, with its clumps of ruin and rows of dead trees. It was
the devil's hunting-ground and I hated every yard of it. But John
Wood, who lived in it, was astoundingly cheerful, and a fine, sturdy,
gallant figure, in his kilted dress, as he climbed over sand-bags,
walked on the top of communication trenches (not bothering to take
cover) and skirting round hedges of barbed wire, apparently
unconscious of the "crumps" that were bursting around. I found
laughter and friendly greeting in a hole in the earth where the
battalion staff was crowded. The colonel was courteous, but busy. He
rather deprecated the notion that I should go up farther, to the
ultimate limit of our line. It was no use putting one's head into
trouble without reasonable purpose, and the German guns had been
blowing in sections of his new-made trenches. But John Wood was
insistent that I should meet "old Thom," afterward in command of the
battalion. He had just been buried and dug out again. He would like to
see me. So we left the cover of the dugout and took to the open again.
Long lines of Jocks were digging a support trench--digging with a kind
of rhythmic movement as they threw up the earth with their shovels.
Behind them was another line of Jocks, not working. They lay as though
asleep, out in the open. They were the dead of the last advance.
Captain Thom was leaning up against the wall of the front-line trench,
smoking a cigarette, with his steel hat on the back of his head--a
handsome, laughing figure. He did not look like a man who had just
been buried and dug out again.

"It was a narrow shave," he said. "A beastly shell covered me with a
ton of earth . . . Have a cigarette, won't you?"

We gossiped as though in St. James's Street. Other young Scottish
officers came up and shook hands, and said: "Jolly weather, isn't it?
What do you think of our little show?" Not one of them gave a glance
at the line of dead men over there, behind their parados. They told me
some of the funny things that had happened lately in the battalion,
some grim jokes by tough Jocks. They had a fine crowd of men. You
couldn't beat them. "Well, good morning! Must get on with the job."
There was no anguish there, no sense of despair, no sullen hatred of
this life, so near to death. They seemed to like it. . . They did not
really like it. They only made the best of it, without gloom. I saw
they did not like this job of battle, one evening in their mess behind
the line. The colonel who commanded them at the time, Celt of the
Celts, was in a queer mood. He was a queer man, aloof in his manner, a
little "fey." He was annoyed with three of his officers who had come
back late from three days' Paris leave. They were giants, but stood
like schoolboys before their master while he spoke ironical, bitter
words. Later in the evening he mentioned casually that they must
prepare to go into the line again under special orders. What about the
store of bombs, small-arms ammunition, machine-guns?

The officers were stricken into silence. They stared at one another as
though to say: "What does the old man mean? Is this true?" One of them
became rather pale, and there was a look of tragic resignation in his
eyes. Another said, "Hell!" in a whisper. The adjutant answered the
colonel's questions in a formal way, but thinking hard and studying
the colonel's face anxiously.

"Do you mean to say we are going into the line again, sir? At once?"

The colonel laughed.

"Don't look so scared, all of you! It's only a field-day for
training."

The officers of the Gordons breathed more freely. Poof! They had been
fairly taken in by the "old man's" leg-pulling . . . No, it was clear
they did not find any real joy in the line. They would not choose a
front-line trench as the most desirable place of residence.

XVI

In queer psychology there was a strange mingling of the pitiful and
comic--among a division (the 35th) known as the Bantams. They were all
volunteers, having been rejected by the ordinary recruiting-officer on
account of their diminutive stature, which was on an average five feet
high, descending to four feet six. Most of them came from Lancashire,
Cheshire, Durham, and Glasgow, being the dwarfed children of
industrial England and its mid-Victorian cruelties. Others were from
London, banded together in a battalion of the Middlesex Regiment. They
gave a shock to our French friends when they arrived as a division at
the port of Boulogne.

"Name of a dog!" said the quayside loungers. "England is truly in a
bad way. She is sending out her last reserves!"

"But they are the soldiers of Lilliput!" exclaimed others.

"It is terrible that they should send these little ones," said kind-
hearted fishwives.

Under the training of General Pi, who commanded them, they became
smart and brisk in the ranks. They saluted like miniature Guardsmen,
marched with quick little steps like clockwork soldiers. It was
comical to see them strutting up and down as sentries outside
divisional headquarters, with their bayonets high above their wee
bodies. In trench warfare they did well--though the fire-step had to
be raised to let them see over the top--and in one raid captured a
German machine-gun which I saw in their hands, and hauled it back (a
heavier weight than ours) like ants struggling with a stick of straw.
In actual battle they were hardly strong enough and could not carry
all that burden of fighting-kit--steel helmet, rifle, hand-grenades,
shovels, empty sand-bags--with which other troops went into action. So
they were used as support troops mostly, behind the Black Watch and
other battalions near Bazentin and Longueval, and there these poor
little men dug and dug like beavers and crouched in the cover they
made under damnable fire, until many of them were blown to bits. There
was no "glory" in their job, only filth and blood, but they held the
ground and suffered it all, not gladly. They had a chance of taking
prisoners at Longueval, where they rummaged in German dugouts after
the line had been taken by the 15th Scottish Division and the 3d, and
they brought back a number of enormous Bavarians who were like the
Brobdingnagians to these little men of Lilliput and disgusted with
that humiliation. I met the whole crowd of them after that adventure,
as they sat, half naked, picking the lice out of their shirts, and the
conversation I had with them remains in my memory because of its
grotesque humor and tragic comicality. They were excited and
emotional, these stunted men. They cursed the war with the foulest
curses of Scottish and Northern dialects. There was one fellow--the
jester of them all--whose language would have made the poppies blush.
With ironical laughter, outrageous blasphemy, grotesque imagery, he
described the suffering of himself and his mates under barrage fire,
which smashed many of them into bleeding pulp. He had no use for this
war. He cursed the name of "glory." He advocated a trade--unionism
among soldiers to down tools whenever there was a threat of war. He
was a Bolshevist before Bolshevism. Yet he had no liking for Germans
and desired to cut them into small bits, to slit their throats, to
disembowel them. He looked homeward to a Yorkshire town and wondered
what his missus would say if she saw him scratching himself like an
ape, or lying with his head in the earth with shells bursting around
him, or prodding Germans with a bayonet. "Oh," said that five-foot
hero, "there will be a lot of murder after this bloody war. What's
human life? What's the value of one man's throat? We're trained up as
murderers--I don't dislike it, mind you--and after the war we sha'n't
get out of the habit of it. It'll come nat'ral like!"