Books: Now It Can Be Told

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

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"I's best be going," said the village boy.

"'Dulce et decorum est -'" said the undergraduate.

"I hate the idea, but it's got to be done," said the city--bred man.

So they disappeared from their familiar haunts--more and more of them
as the months passed. They were put into training-camps, "pigged" it
on dirty straw in dirty barns, were ill-fed and ill-equipped, and
trained by hard--mouthed sergeants--tyrants and bullies in a good
cause--until they became automata at the word of command, lost their
souls, as it seemed, in that grinding-machine of military training,
and cursed their fate. Only comradeship helped them--not always jolly,
if they happened to be a class above their fellows, a moral peg above
foul-mouthed slum-dwellers and men of filthy habits, but splendid if
they were in their own crowd of decent, laughter-loving, companionable
lads. Eleven months' training! Were they ever going to the front? The
war would be over before they landed in France. . . Then, at last,
they came.

III

It was not until July of 1915 that the Commander-in-Chief announced
that a part of the New Army was in France, and lifted the veil from
the secret which had mystified people at home whose boys had gone from
them, but who could not get a word of their doings in France.

I saw the first of the "Kitchener men," as we called them then. The
tramp of their feet in a steady scrunch, scrunch, along a gritty road
of France, passed the window of my billet very early in the mornings,
and I poked my head out to get another glimpse of those lads marching
forward to the firing-line. For as long as history lasts the
imagination of our people will strive to conjure up the vision of
those boys who, in the year of 1915, went out to Flanders, not as
conscript soldiers, but as volunteers, for the old country's sake, to
take their risks and "do their bit" in the world's bloodiest war. I
saw those fellows day by day, touched hands with them, went into the
trenches with them, heard their first tales, and strolled into their
billets when they had shaken down for a night or two within sound of
the guns. History will envy me that, this living touch with the men
who, beyond any doubt, did in their simple way act and suffer things
before the war ended which revealed new wonders of human courage and
endurance. Some people envied me then--those people at home to whom
those boys belonged, and who in country towns and villages and
suburban houses would have given their hearts to get one look at them
there in Flanders and to see the way of their life. . . How were they
living? How did they like it? How were they sleeping? What did the
Regulars think of the New Army?

"Oh, a very cheerful lot," said a sergeant-major of the old Regular
type, who was having a quiet pipe over a half-penny paper in a shed at
the back of some farm buildings in the neighborhood of Armentieres,
which had been plugged by two hundred German shells that time the day
before. (One never knew when the fellows on the other side would take
it into their heads to empty their guns that way. They had already
killed a lot of civilians thereabouts, but the others stayed on.)

"Not a bit of trouble with them," said the sergeant-major, "and all as
keen as when they grinned into a recruiting office and said, `I'm
going.' They're glad to be out. Over-trained, some of 'em. For ten
months we've been working 'em pretty hard. Had to, but they were
willing enough. Now you couldn't find a better battalion, though some
more famous. . . Till we get our chance, you know."

He pointed with the stem of his pipe to the open door of an old barn,
where a party of his men were resting.

"You'll find plenty of hot heads among them, but no cold feet. I'll
bet on that."

The men were lying on a stone floor with haversacks for pillows, or
squatting tailor-wise, writing letters home. From a far corner came a
whistling trio, harmonized in a tune which for some reason made me
think of hayfields in southern England.

They belonged to a Sussex battalion, and I said, "Any one here from
Burpham?"

One of the boys sat up, stared, flushed to the roots of his yellow
hair, and said, "Yes."

I spoke to him of people I knew there, and he was astonished that I
should know them. Distressed also in a queer way. Those memories of a
Sussex village seemed to break down some of the hardness in which he
had cased himself. I could see a frightful homesickness in his blue
eyes.

"P'raps I've seed the last o' Burpham," he said in a kind of whisper,
so that the other men should not hear.

The other men were from Arundel, Littlehampton, and Sussex villages.
They were of Saxon breed. There was hardly a difference between them
and some German prisoners I saw, yellow-haired as they were, with
fair, freckled, sun-baked skins. They told me they were glad to be out
in France. Anything was better than training at home.

"I like Germans more'n sergeant-majors," said one young yokel, and the
others shouted with laughter at his jest.

"Perhaps you haven't met the German sergeants," I said.

"I've met our'n," said the Sussex boy. "A man's a fool to be a
soldier. Eh, lads?"

They agreed heartily, though they were all volunteers.

"Not that we're skeered," said one of them. "We'll be glad when the
fighting begins."

"Speak for yourself, Dick Meekcombe, and don't forget the shells last
night."

There was another roar of laughter. Those boys of the South Saxons
were full of spirit. In their yokel way they were disguising their
real thoughts--their fear of being afraid, their hatred of the thought
of death--very close to them now--and their sense of strangeness in
this scene on the edge of Armentieres, a world away from their old
life.

The colonel sat in a little room at headquarters, a bronzed man with a
grizzled mustache and light-blue eyes, with a fine tenderness in his
smile.

"These boys of mine are all right," he said. "They're dear fellows,
and ready for anything. Of course, it was anxious work at first, but
my N. C. O.'s are a first-class lot, and we're ready for business."

He spoke of the recruiting task which had begun the business eleven
months ago. It had not been easy, among all those scattered villages
of the southern county. He had gone hunting among the farms and
cottages for likely young fellows. They were of good class, and he had
picked the lads of intelligence, and weeded out the others. They came
from a good stock--the yeoman breed. One could not ask for better
stuff. The officers were men of old county families, and they knew
their men. That was a great thing. So far they had been very lucky
with regard to casualties, though it was unfortunate that a company
commander, a fine fellow who had been a schoolmaster and a parson,
should have been picked off by a sniper on his first day out.

The New Army had received its baptism of fire, though nothing very
fierce as yet. They were led on in easy stages to the danger-zone. It
was not fair to plunge them straight away into the bad places. But the
test of steadiness was good enough on a dark night behind the reserve
trenches, when the reliefs had gone up, and there was a bit of digging
to do in the open.

"Quiet there, boys," said the sergeant-major. "And no larks."

It was not a larky kind of place or time. There was no moon, and a
light drizzle of rain fell. The enemy's trenches were about a thousand
yards away, and their guns were busy in the night, so that the shells
came overhead, and lads who had heard the owls hoot in English woods
now heard stranger night-birds crying through the air, with the noise
of rushing wings, ending in a thunderclap.

"And my old mother thinks I'm enjoying myself!" said the heir to a
seaside lodging-house.

"Thirsty work, this grave-digging job," said a lad who used to skate
on rollers between the bath-chairs of Brighton promenade.

"Can't see much in those shells," said a young man who once sold
ladies' blouses in an emporium of a south coast village. "How those
newspaper chaps do try to frighten us!"

He put his head on one side with a sudden jerk.

"What's that? Wasps?"

A number of insects were flying overhead with a queer, sibilant noise.
Somewhere in the darkness there was a steady rattle in the throat of a
beast.

"What's that, Sergeant?"

"Machine-gums, my child. Keep your head down, or you'll lose hold of
it. . . Steady, there. Don't get jumpy, now!"

The machine-gun was firing too high to do any serious damage. It was
probably a ricochet from a broken tree which made one of the boys
suddenly drop his spade and fall over it in a crumpled way.

"Get up, Charlie," said the comrade next to him; and then, in a scared
voice, "Oh, Sergeant!"

"That's all right," said the sergeant-major. "We're getting off very
lightly. New remember what I've been telling you. . . Stretcher this
way."

They were very steady through the night, this first company of the New
Army.

"Like old soldiers, sir," said the sergeant-major, when he stood
chatting with the colonel after breakfast.

It was a bit of bad luck, though not very bad, after all--which made
the Germans shell a hamlet into which I went just as some of the New
Army were marching through to their quarters. These men had already
seen what shellfire could do to knock the beauty out of old houses and
quiet streets. They had gone tramping through one or two villages to
which the enemy's guns had turned their attention, and had received
that unforgetable sensation of one's first sight of roofless cottages,
and great gaps in garden walls, and tall houses which have tumbled
inside themselves. But now they saw this destruction in the process,
and stood very still, listening to the infernal clatter as shells
burst at the other end of the street, tumbling down huge masses of
masonry and plugging holes into neat cottages, and tearing great
gashes out of red-brick walls.

"Funny business!" said one of the boys.

"Regular Drury Lane melodrama," said another.

"Looks as if some of us wouldn't be home in time for lunch," was
another comment, greeted by a guffaw along the line.

They tried to see the humor of it, though there was a false note in
some of the jokes. But it was the heroic falsity of boys whose pride
is stronger than their fear, that inevitable fear which chills one
when this beastliness is being done.

"Not a single casualty," said one of the officers when the storm of
shells ended with a few last concussions and a rumble of falling
bricks. "Anything wrong with our luck?"

Everything was all right with the luck of this battalion of the New
Army in its first experience of war on the first night in the danger-
zone. No damage was done even when two shells came into one of their
billets, where a number of men were sleeping after a hard day and a
long march.

"I woke up pretty quick," said one of them, "and thought the house had
fallen in. I was out of it before the second came. Then I laughed. I'm
a heavy sleeper, you know. [He spoke as if I knew his weakness.] My
mother bought me an alarm-clock last birthday. 'Perhaps you'll be down
for breakfast now,' she said. But a shell is better--as a knocker-up.
I didn't stop to dress."

Death had missed him by a foot or two, but he laughed at the fluke of
his escape.

"K.'s men" had not forgotten how to laugh after those eleven months of
hard training, and they found a joke in grisly things which do not
appeal humorously to sensitive men.

"Any room for us there?" asked one of these bronzed fellows as he
marched with his battalion past a cemetery where the fantastic devices
of French graves rose above the churchyard wall.

"Oh, we'll do all right in the open air, all along of the German
trenches," was the answer he had from the lad at his side. They
grinned at their own wit.

IV

I did not find any self-conscious patriotism among the rank and file
of the New Army. The word itself meant nothing to them. Unlike the
French soldier, to whom patriotism is a religion and who has the name
of France on his lips at the moment of peril, our men were silent
about the reasons for their coming out and the cause for which they
risked their lives. It was not for imperial power. Any illusion to
"The Empire" left them stone--cold unless they confused it with the
Empire Music Hall, when their hearts warmed to the name. It was not
because they hated Germans, because after a few turns in the trenches
many of them had a fellow-feeling for the poor devils over the way,
and to the end of the war treated any prisoners they took (after the
killing in hot blood) like pet monkeys or tame bears. But for
stringent regulations they would have fraternized with the enemy at
the slightest excuse, and did so in the winter of 1914, to the great
scandal of G. H. Q. "What's patriotism?" asked a boy of me, in Ypres,
and there was hard scorn in his voice. Yet the love of the old country
was deep down in the roots of their hearts, and, as with a boy who
came from the village where I lived for a time, the name of some such
place held all the meaning of life to many of them. The simple minds
of country boys clung fast to that, went back in waking dreams to
dwell in a cottage parlor where their parents sat, and an old clock
ticked, and a dog slept with its head on its paws. The smell of the
fields and the barns, the friendship of familiar trees, the heritage
that was in their blood from old yeoman ancestry, touched them with
the spirit of England, and it was because of that they fought.

The London lad was more self-conscious, had a more glib way of
expressing his convictions, but even he hid his purpose in the war
under a covering of irony and cynical jests. It was the spirit of the
old city and the pride of it which helped him to suffer, and in his
daydreams was the clanging of 'buses from Charing Cross to the Bank,
the lights of the embankment reflected in the dark river, the back
yard where he had kept his bicycle, or the suburban garden where he
had watered his mother's plants . . . London! Good old London! . . .
His heart ached for it sometimes when, as sentry, he stared across the
parapet to the barbed wire in No Man's Land.

One night, strolling outside my own billet and wandering down the lane
a way, I heard the sound of singing coming from a big brick barn on
the roadside. I stood close under the blank wall at the back of the
building, and listened. The men were singing "Auld Lang Syne" to the
accompaniment of a concertina and a mouth-organ. They were taking
parts, and the old tune--so strange to hear out in a village of
France, in the war zone--sounded very well, with deep-throated
harmonies. Presently the concertina changed its tune, and the men of
the New Army sang "God Save the King." I heard it sung a thousand
times or more on royal festivals and tours, but listening to it then
from that dark old barn in Flanders, where a number of "K.'s men" lay
on the straw a night or two away from the ordeal of advanced trenches,
in which they had to take their turn, I heard it with more emotion
than ever before. In that anthem, chanted by these boys in the
darkness, was the spirit of England. If I had been king, like that
Harry who wandered round the camp of Agincourt, where his men lay
sleeping, I should have been glad to stand and listen outside that
barn and hear those words:

Send him victorious, Happy and glorious.

As the chief of the British tribes, the fifth George received his
tribute from those warrior boys who had come out to fight for the flag
that meant to them some old village on the Sussex Downs, where a
mother and a sweetheart waited, or some town in the Midlands where the
walls were placarded with posters which made the Germans gibe, or old
London, where the 'buses went clanging down the Strand.

As I went back up the lane a dark figure loomed out, and I heard the
click of a rifle-bolt. It was one of K.'s men, standing sentry outside
the camp.

"Who goes there?"

It was a cockney voice.

"Friends."

"Pass, friends. All's well."

Yes, all was well then, as far as human courage and the spirit of a
splendid youthfulness counted in that war of high explosives and
destructive chemistry. The fighting in front of these lads of the New
Army decided the fate of the world, and it was the valor of those
young soldiers who, in a little while, were flung into hell-fires and
killed in great numbers, which made all things different in the
philosophy of modern life. That concertina in the barn was playing the
music of an epic which will make those who sang it seem like heroes of
mythology to the future race which will read of this death-struggle in
Europe. Yet it was a cockney, perhaps from Clapham junction or Peckham
Rye, who said, like a voice of Fate, "All's well."

V

When the New Army first came out to learn their lessons in the
trenches in the long days before open warfare, the enemy had the best
of it in every way. In gunpowder and in supplies of ammunition he was
our master all along the line, and made use of his mastery by flinging
over large numbers of shells, of all sizes and types, which caused a
heavy toll in casualties to us; while our gunners were strictly
limited to a few rounds a day, and cursed bitterly because they could
not "answer back." In March of 1915 I saw the first fifteen-inch
howitzer open fire. We called this monster "grandma," and there was a
little group of generals on the Scherpenberg, near Kemmel, to see the
effect of the first shell. Its target was on the lower slope of the
Wytschaete Ridge, where some trenches were to be attacked for reasons
only known by our generals and by God. Preliminary to the attack our
field-guns opened fire with shrapnel, which scattered over the German
trenches--their formidable earthworks with deep, shell-proof dugouts--
like the glitter of confetti, and had no more effect than that before
the infantry made a rush for the enemy's line and were mown down by
machine-gun fire--the Germans were very strong in machine-guns, and we
were very weak--in the usual way of those early days. The first shell
fired by our monster howitzer was heralded by a low reverberation, as
of thunder, from the field below us. Then, several seconds later,
there rose from the Wytschaete Ridge a tall, black column of smoke
which stood steady until the breeze clawed at it and tore it to
tatters.

"Some shell!" said an officer. "Now we ought to win the war--I don't
think!"

Later there arrived the first 9.2 (nine-point-two)--"aunty," as we
called it.

Well, that was something in the way of heavy artillery, and gradually
our gun-power grew and grew, until we could "answer back," and give
more than came to us; but meanwhile the New Army had to stand the
racket, as the Old Army had done, being strafed by harassing fire,
having their trenches blown in, and their billets smashed, and their
bodies broken, at all times and in all places within range of German
guns.

Everywhere the enemy was on high ground and had observation of our
position. From the Westhook Ridge and the Pilkem Ridge his observers
watched every movement of our men round Ypres, and along the main road
to Hooge, signaling back to their guns if anybody of them were
visible. From the Wytschaete Ridge (White-sheet, as we called it) and
Messines they could see for miles across our territory, not only the
trenches, but the ways up to the trenches, and the villages behind
them and the roads through the villages. They looked straight into
Kemmel village and turned their guns on to it when our men crouched
among its ruins and opened the graves in the cemetery and lay old
bones bare. Clear and vivid to them were the red roofs of Dickebusch
village and the gaunt ribs of its broken houses. (I knew a boy from
Fleet Street who was cobbler there in a room between the ruins.) Those
Germans gazed down the roads to Vierstraat and Vormizeele, and watched
for the rising of white dust which would tell them when men were
marching by--more cannon fodder. Southward they saw Neuve Eglise, with
its rag of a tower, and Plug Street wood. In cheerful mood, on sunny
days, German gunners with shells to spare ranged upon separate farm-
houses and isolated barns until they became bits of oddly standing
brick about great holes. They shelled the roads down which our
transport wagons went at night, and the communication trenches to
which our men moved up to the front lines, and gun-positions revealed
by every flash, and dugouts foolishly frail against their 5.9's, which
in those early days we could only answer by a few pip-squeaks. They
made fixed targets of crossroads and points our men were bound to
pass, so that to our men those places became sinister with remembered
horror and present fear: Dead Horse Corner and Dead Cow Farm, and the
farm beyond Plug Street; Dead Dog Farm and the Moated Grange on the
way to St.-Eloi; Stinking Farm and Suicide Corner and Shell-trap Barn,
out by Ypres.

All the fighting youth of our race took their turn in those places,
searched along those roads, lived in ditches and dugouts there, under
constant fire. In wet holes along the Yser Canal by Ypres, young
officers who had known the decencies of home life tried to camouflage
their beastliness by giving a touch of decoration to the clammy walls.
They bought Kirchner prints of little ladies too lightly clad for the
climate of Flanders, and pinned them up as a reminder of the dainty
feminine side of life which here was banished. They brought broken
chairs and mirrors from the ruins of Ypres, and said, "It's quite
cozy, after all!"

And they sat there chatting, as in St. James's Street clubs, in the
same tone of voice, with the same courtesy and sense of humor--while
they listened to noises without, and wondered whether it would be to-
day or to-morrow, or in the middle of the sentence they were speaking,
that bits of steel would smash through that mud above their heads and
tear them to bits and make a mess of things.

There was an officer of the Coldstream Guards who sat in one of these
holes, like many others. A nice, gentle fellow, fond of music, a fine
judge of wine, a connoisseur of old furniture and good food. It was
cruelty to put such a man into a hole in the earth, like the ape-
houses of Hagenbeck's Zoo. He had been used to comfort, the little
luxuries of court life. There, on the canal-bank, he refused to sink
into the squalor. He put on pajamas at night before sleeping in his
bunk--silk pajamas--and while waiting for his breakfast smoked his own
brand of gold-tipped cigarettes, until one morning a big shell blew
out the back of his dugout and hurled him under a heap of earth and
timber. He crawled out, cursing loudly with a nice choice of language,
and then lit another gold--tipped cigarette, and called to his servant
for breakfast. His batman was a fine lad, brought up in the old
traditions of service to an officer of the Guards, and he provided
excellent little meals, done to a turn, until something else happened,
and he was buried alive within a few yards of his master. . . Whenever
I went to the canal-bank, and I went there many times (when still and
always hungry high velocities came searching for a chance meal), I
thought of my friend in the Guards, and of other men I knew who had
lived there in the worst days, and some of whom had died there. They
hated that canal-bank and dreaded it, but they jested in their
dugouts, and there was the laughter of men who hid the fear in their
hearts and were "game" until some bit of steel plugged them with a
gaping wound or tore their flesh to tatters.

VI

Because the enemy was on the high ground and our men were in the low
ground, many of our trenches were wet and waterlogged, even in summer,
after heavy rain. In winter they were in bogs and swamps, up by St.-
Eloi and southward this side of Gommecourt, and in many other evil
places. The enemy drained his water into our ditches when he could,
with the cunning and the science of his way of war, and that made our
men savage.

I remember going to the line this side of Fricourt on an August day in
'15. It was the seventeenth of August, as I have it in my diary, and
the episode is vivid in my mind because I saw then the New Army lads
learning one of the lessons of war in one of the foulest places. I
also learned the sense of humor of a British general, and afterward,
not enjoying the joke, the fatalistic valor of officers and men (in
civil life a year before) who lived with the knowledge that the ground
beneath them was mined and charged with high explosives, and might
hurl them to eternity between the whiffs of a cigarette.

We were sitting in the garden of the general's headquarters, having a
picnic meal before going into the trenches. In spite of the wasps,
which attacked the sandwiches, it was a nice, quiet place in time of
war. No shell same crashing in our neighborhood (though we were well
within range of the enemy's guns), and the loudest noise was the drop
of an over-ripe apple in the orchard. Later on a shrill whistle
signaled a hostile airplane overhead, but it passed without throwing a
bomb.