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

No wonder a sentry was startled when he saw our two figures
approaching him through a clump of trees. His words rang out like
pistol-shots.

"Halt! Who goes there?"

"Friends!" we shouted, seeing the gleam of light on a shaking bayonet.

"Come close to be recognized!" he said, and his voice was harsh.

We went close, and I for one was afraid. Young sentries sometimes shot
too soon.

"Who are you?" he asked, in a more natural voice, and when we
explained he laughed gruffly. "I never saw two strangers pass this way
before!"

He was an old soldier, "back to the army again," with Kitchener's men.
He had been in the Chitral campaign and South Africa--"Little wars
compared to this," as he said. A fine, simple man, and although a
bricklayer's laborer in private life, with a knowledge of the right
word. I was struck when he said that the German flares were more
"luminous" than ours. I could hardly see his face in the darkness,
except when he struck a match once, but his figure was black against
the illumined sky, and I watched the motion of his arm as he pointed
to the roads up which his comrades had gone to the support of another
battalion at Hooge, who were hard pressed. "They went along under a
lot of shrapnel and had many casualties."

He told the story of that night in a quiet, thoughtful way, with
phrases of almost biblical beauty in their simple truth, and the soul
of the man, the spirit of the whole army in which he was a private
soldier, was revealed when he flashed out a sentence with his one note
of fire, "But the enemy lost more than we did, sir, that night!"

We wandered away again into the darkness, with the din of the
bombardment all about us. There was not a square yard of ground
unplowed by shells and we did not nourish any false illusions as to
finding a safe spot for a bivouac.

There was no spot within the ramparts of Ypres where a man might say
"No shells will fall here." But one place we found where there seemed
some reasonable odds of safety. There also, if sleep assailed us, we
might curl up in an abandoned dugout and hope that it would not be
"crumped" before the dawn. There were several of these shelters there,
but, peering into them by the light of a match, I shuddered at the
idea of lying in one of them. They had been long out of use and there
was a foul look about the damp bedding and rugs which had been left to
rot there. They were inhabited already by half-wild cats--the
abandoned cats of Ypres, which hunted mice through the ruins of their
old houses--and they spat at me and glared with green-eyed fear as I
thrust a match into their lairs.

There were two kitchen chairs, with a deal table on which we put our
cake and Cointreau, and here, through half a night, my friend and I
sat watching and listening to that weird scene upon which the old moon
looked down; and, as two men will at such a time, we talked over all
the problems of life and death and the meaning of man's heritage.

Another sentry challenged us--all his nerves jangled at our
apparition. He was a young fellow, one of "Kitchener's crowd," and
told us frankly that he had the "jimjams" in this solitude of Ypres
and "saw Germans" every time a rat jumped. He lingered near us--"for
company.

It was becoming chilly. The dew made our clothes damp. Cake and sweet
liquor were poor provisions for the night, and the thought of hot tea
was infinitely seductive. Perhaps somewhere one might find a few
soldiers round a kettle in some friendly dugout. We groped our way
along, holding our breath at times as a shell came sweeping overhead
or burst with a sputter of steel against the ramparts. It was
profoundly dark, so that only the glowworms glittered like jewels on
black velvet. The moon had gone down, and inside Ypres the light of
the distant flares only glimmered faintly above the broken walls. In a
tunnel of darkness voices were speaking and some one was whistling
softly, and a gleam of red light made a bar across the grass. We
walked toward a group of black figures, suddenly silent at our
approach--obviously startled.

"Who's there?" said a voice.

We were just in time for tea--a stroke of luck--with a company of boys
(all Kitchener lads from the Civil Service) who were spending the
night here. They had made a fire behind a screen to give them a little
comfort and frighten off the ghosts, and gossiped with a queer sense
of humor, cynical and blasphemous, but even through their jokes there
was a yearning for the end of a business which was too close to death.

I remember the gist of their conversation, which was partly devised
for my benefit. One boy declared that he was sick of the whole
business.

"I should like to cancel my contract," he remarked.

"Yes, send in your resignation, old lad," said another, with ironical
laughter.

"They'd consider it, wouldn't they? P'raps offer a rise in wages--I
don't think!"

Another boy said, "I am a citizen of no mean Empire, but what the hell
is the Empire going to do for me when the next shell blows off both my
bleeding legs?"

This remark was also received by a gust of subdued laughter, silenced
for a moment by a roar and upheaval of masonry somewhere by the ruins
of the Cloth Hall.

"Soldiers are prisoners," said a boy without any trace of humor.
"You're lagged, and you can't escape. A 'blighty' is the best luck you
can hope for."

"I don't want to kill Germans," said a fellow with a superior accent.
"I've no personal quarrel against them; and, anyhow, I don't like
butcher's work."

"Christian service, that's what the padre calls it. I wonder if Christ
would have stuck a bayonet into a German stomach--a German with his
hands up. That's what we're asked to do."

"Oh, Christianity is out of business, my child. Why mention it? This
is war, and we're back to the primitive state--B.C. All the same, I
say my little prayers when I'm in a blue funk.

"Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, Look upon a little child."

This last remark was the prize joke of the evening, received with much
hilarity, not too loud, for fear of drawing fire--though really no
Germans could have heard any laughter in Ypres.

Nearby, their officer was spending the night. We called on him, and
found him sitting alone in a dugout furnished by odd bits from the
wrecked houses, with waxen flowers in a glass case on the shelf, and
an old cottage clock which ticked out the night, and a velvet armchair
which had been the pride of a Flemish home. He was a Devonshire lad,
with a pale, thoughtful face, and I was sorry for him in his
loneliness, with a roof over his head which would be no proof against
a fair-sized shell.

He expressed no surprise at seeing us. I think he would not have been
surprised if the ghost of Edward the Black Prince had called on him.
He would have greeted him with the same politeness and offered him his
green armchair.

The night passed. The guns slackened down before the dawn. For a
little while there was almost silence, even over the trenches. But as
the first faint glow of dawn crept through the darkness the rifle-fire
burst out again feverishly, and the machine-guns clucked with new
spasms of ferocity. The boys of the New Army, and the Germans facing
them, had an attack of the nerves, as always at that hour.

The flares were still rising, but had the debauched look of belated
fireworks after a night of orgy.

In a distant field a cock crew.

The dawn lightened all the sky, and the shadows crept away from the
ruins of Ypres, and all the ghastly wreckage of the city was revealed
again nakedly. Then the guns ceased for a while, and there was
quietude in the trenches, and out of Ypres, sneaking by side ways,
went two tired figures, padding the hoof with a slouching swiftness to
escape the early morning "hate" which was sure to come as soon as a
clock in Vlamertinghe still working in a ruined tower chimed the hour
of six.

I went through Ypres scores of times afterward, and during the battles
of Flanders saw it day by day as columns of men and guns and pack-
mules and transports went up toward the ridge which led at last to
Passchendaele. We had big guns in the ruins of Ypres, and round about,
and they fired with violent concussions which shook loose stones, and
their flashes were red through the Flanders mist. Always this capital
of the battlefields was sinister, with the sense of menace about.

"Steel helmets to be worn. Gas-masks at the alert."

So said the traffic man at the crossroads.

As one strapped on one's steel helmet and shortened the strap of one's
gas-mask, the spirit of Ypres touched one's soul icily.

IX

The worst school of war for the sons of gentlemen was, in those early
days, and for long afterward, Hooge. That was the devil's playground
and his chamber of horrors, wherein he devised merry tortures for
young Christian men. It was not far out of Ypres, to the left of the
Menin road, and to the north of Zouave Wood and Sanctuary Wood. For a
time there was a chateau there called the White Chateau, with
excellent stables and good accommodation for one of our brigade
staffs, until one of our generals was killed and others wounded by a
shell, which broke up their conference. Afterward there was no
chateau, but only a rubble of bricks banked up with sandbags and deep
mine-craters filled with stinking water slopping over from the
Bellewarde Lake and low-lying pools. Bodies, and bits of bodies, and
clots of blood, and green metallic-looking slime, made by explosive
gases, were floating on the surface of that water below the crater
banks when I first passed that way, and so it was always. Our men
lived there and died there within a few yards of the enemy, crouched
below the sand-bags and burrowed in the sides of the crater. Lice
crawled over them in legions. Human flesh, rotting and stinking, mere
pulp, was pasted into the mud-banks. If they dug to get deeper cover
their shovels went into the softness of dead bodies who had been their
comrades. Scraps of flesh, booted legs, blackened hands, eyeless
heads, came falling over them when the enemy trench-mortared their
position or blew up a new mine-shaft.

I remember one young Irish officer who came down to bur quarters on a
brief respite from commanding the garrison at Hooge. He was a handsome
fellow, like young Philip of Spain by Velasquez, and he had a profound
melancholy in his eyes in spite of a charming smile.

"Do you mind if I have a bath before I join you?" he asked.

He walked about in the open air until the bath was ready. Even there a
strong, fetid smell came from him.

"Hooge," he said, in a thoughtful way, "is not a health resort."

He was more cheerful after his bath and did not feel quite such a
leper. He told one or two stories about the things that happened at
Hooge, and I wondered if hell could be so bad. After a short stay he
went back again, and I could see that he expected to be killed. Before
saying good-by he touched some flowers on the mess-table, and for a
moment or two listened to birds twittering in the trees.

"Thanks very much," he said. "I've enjoyed this visit a good deal . .
. Good-by."

He went back through Ypres on the way to Hooge, and the mine-crater
where his Irish soldiers were lying in slime, in which vermin crawled.

Sometimes it was the enemy who mined under our position, blowing a few
men to bits and scattering the sand-bags. Sometimes it was our men who
upheaved the earth beyond them by mine charges and rushed the new
crater.

It was in July of '15 that the devils of Hooge became merry and bright
with increased activity. The Germans had taken possession of one of
the mine-craters which formed the apex of a triangle across the Menin
road, with trenches running down to it on either side, so that it was
like the spear-head of their position. They had fortified it with
sand-bags and crammed it with machine--guns which could sweep the
ground on three sides, so making a direct attack by infantry a
suicidal enterprise. Our trenches immediately faced this stronghold
from the other side of a road at right angles with the Menin road, and
our men--the New Army boys--were shelled day and night, so that many
of them were torn to pieces, and others buried alive, and others sent
mad by shell-shock. (They were learning their lessons in the school of
courage.) It was decided by a conference of generals, not at Hooge, to
clear out this hornets' nest, and the job was given to the sappers,
who mined under the roadway toward the redoubt, while our heavy
artillery shelled the enemy's position all around the neighborhood.

On July 22d the mine was exploded, while our men crouched low,
horribly afraid after hours of suspense. The earth was rent asunder by
a gust of flame, and vomited up a tumult of soil and stones and human
limbs and bodies. Our men still crouched while these things fell upon
them.

"I thought I had been blown to bits," one of them told me. "I was a
quaking fear, with my head in the earth. I kept saying, 'Christ! . . .
Christ!'"

When the earth and smoke had settled again it was seen that the
enemy's redoubt had ceased to exist. In its place, where there had
been a crisscross of trenches and sand-bag shelters for their machine-
guns and a network of barbed wire, there was now an enormous crater,
hollowed deep with shelving sides surrounded by tumbled earth heaps
which had blocked up the enemy's trenches on either side of the
position, so that they could not rush into the cavern and take
possession. It was our men who "rushed" the crater and lay there
panting in its smoking soil.

Our generals had asked for trouble when they destroyed that redoubt,
and our men had it. Infuriated by a massacre of their garrison in the
mine-explosion and by the loss of their spear-head, the Germans kept
up a furious bombardment on our trenches in that neighborhood in
bursts of gun-fire which tossed our earthworks about and killed and
wounded many men. Our line at Hooge at that time was held by the
King's Royal Rifles of the 14th Division, young fellows, not far
advanced in the training-school of war. They held on under the gunning
of their positions, and each man among them wondered whether it was
the shell screeching overhead or the next which would smash him into
pulp like those bodies lying nearby in dugouts and upheaved
earthworks.

On the morning of July 30th there was a strange lull of silence after
a heavy bout of shells and mortars. Men of the K. R. R. raised their
heads above broken parapets and crawled out of shell-holes and looked
about. There were many dead bodies lying around, and wounded men were
wailing. The unwounded, startled by the silence, became aware of some
moisture falling on them; thick, oily drops of liquid.

"What in hell's name--?" said a subaltern.

One man smelled his clothes, which reeked of something like paraffin.

Coming across from the German trenches were men hunched up under some
heavy weights. They were carrying cylinders with nozles like hose-
pipes. Suddenly there was a rushing noise like an escape of air from
some blast-furnace. Long tongues of flame licked across to the broken
ground where the King's Royal Rifles lay.

Some of them were set on fire, their clothes burning on them, making
them living torches, and in a second or two cinders.

It was a new horror of war--the Flammenwerfer.

Some of the men leaped to their feet, cursing, and fired repeatedly at
the Germans carrying the flaming jets. Here and there the shots were
true. A man hunched under a cylinder exploded like a fat moth caught
in a candle-flame. But that advancing line of fire after the long
bombardment was too much for the rank and file, whose clothes were
smoking and whose bodies were scorched. In something like a panic they
fell back, abandoning the cratered ground in which their dead lay.

The news of this disaster and of the new horror reached the troops in
reserve, who had been resting in the rear after a long spell. They
moved up at once to support their comrades and make a counter-attack.
The ground they had to cover was swept by machine-guns, and many fell,
but the others attacked again and again, regardless of their losses,
and won back part of the lost ground, leaving only a depth of five
hundred yards in the enemy's hands.

So the position remained until the morning of August 9th, when a new
attack was begun by the Durham, Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Midland
troops of the 6th Division, who had been long in the salient and had
proved the quality of northern "grit" in the foul places and the foul
weather of that region.

It was late on the night of August 8th that these battalions took up
their position, ready for the assault. These men, who came mostly from
mines and workshops, were hard and steady and did not show any outward
sign of nervousness, though they knew well enough that before the
light of another day came their numbers would have passed through the
lottery of this game of death. Each man's life depended on no more
than a fluke of luck by the throw of those dice which explode as they
fall. They knew what their job was. It was to cross five hundred yards
of open ground to capture and to hold a certain part of the German
position near the Chateau of Hooge.

They were at the apex of the triangle which made a German salient
after the ground was lost, on July 30th. On the left side of the
triangle was Zouave Wood, and Sanctuary Wood ran up the right side to
a strong fort held by the enemy and crammed with machine-guns and
every kind of bomb. The base of the upturned triangle was made by the
Menin road, to the north, beyond which lay the crater, the chateau,
and the stables.

The way that lay between the regiment and their goal was not an easy
one to pass. It was cut and crosscut by our old trenches, now held by
the enemy, who had made tangles of barbed wire in front of their
parapets, and had placed machine-guns at various points. The ground
was littered with dead bodies belonging to the battle of July 30th,
and pock-marked by deep shell-holes. To cross five hundred yards of
such ground in the storm of the enemy's fire would be an ordeal
greater than that of rushing from one trench to another. It would have
to be done in regular attack formation, and with the best of luck
would be a grim and costly progress.

The night was pitch dark. The men drawn up could only see one another
as shadows blacker than the night. They were very quiet; each man was
fighting down his fear in his soul, trying to get a grip on nerves
hideously strained by the rack of this suspense. The words, "Steady,
lads." were spoken down the ranks by young lieutenants and sergeants.
The sounds of men whispering, a cough here and there, a word of
command, the clink of bayonets, the cracking of twigs under heavy
boots, the shuffle of troops getting into line, would not carry with
any loudness to German ears.

The men deployed before dawn broke, waiting for the preliminary
bombardment which would smash a way for them. The officers struck
matches now and then to glance at their wrist-watches, set very
carefully to those of the gunners. Then our artillery burst forth with
an enormous violence of shell-fire, so that the night was shattered
with the tumult of it. Guns of every caliber mingled their explosions,
and the long screech of the shells rushed through the air as though
thousands of engines were chasing one another madly through a vast
junction in that black vault.

The men listened and waited. As soon as the guns lengthened their
fuses the infantry advance would begin. Their nerves were getting
jangled. It was just the torture of human animals. There was an
indrawing of breath when suddenly the enemy began to fire rockets,
sending up flares which made white waves of light. If they were seen!
There would be a shambles.

But the smoke of all the bursting shells rolled up in a thick veil,
hiding those mining lads who stared toward the illuminations above the
black vapors and at the flashes which seemed to stab great rents in
the pall of smoke. "It was a jumpy moment," said the colonel of the
Durhams, and the moment lengthened into minutes.

Then the time came. The watch hands pointed to the second which had
been given for the assault to begin, and instantly, to the tick, the
guns lifted and made a curtain of fire round the Chateau of Hooge,
beyond the Menin road, six hundred yards away.

"Time!"

The company officers blew their whistles, and there was a sudden
clatter from trench-spades slung to rifle-barrels, and from men
girdled with hand-grenades, as the advancing companies deployed and
made their first rush forward. The ground had been churned up by our
shells, and the trenches had been battered into shapelessness, strewn
with broken wire and heaps of loose stones and fragments of steel.

It seemed impossible that any German should be left alive in this
quagmire, but there was still a rattle of machine-guns from holes and
hillocks. Not for long. The bombing-parties searched and found them,
and silenced them. From the heaps of earth which had once been
trenches German soldiers rose and staggered in a dazed, drunken way,
stupefied by the bombardment beneath which they had crouched.

Our men spitted them on their bayonets or hurled hand-grenades, and
swept the ground before them. Some Germans screeched like pigs in a
slaughter-house.

The men went on in short rushes. They were across the Menin road now,
and were first to the crater, though other troops were advancing
quickly from the left. They went down into the crater, shouting
hoarsely, and hurling bombs at Germans, who were caught like rats in a
trap, and scurried up the steep sides beyond, firing before rolling
down again, until at least two hundred bodies lay dead at the bottom
of this pit of hell.

While some of the men dug themselves into the crater or held the
dugouts already made by the enemy, others climbed up to the ridge
beyond and with a final rush, almost winded and spent, reached the
extreme limit of their line of assault and achieved the task which had
been set them. They were mad now, not human in their senses. They saw
red through bloodshot eyes. They were beasts of prey--these decent
Yorkshire lads.

Round the stables themselves three hundred Germans were bayoneted,
until not a single enemy lived on this ground, and the light of day on
that 9th of August revealed a bloody and terrible scene, not decent
for words to tell. Not decent, but a shambles of human flesh which had
been a panic-stricken crowd of living men crying for mercy, with that
dreadful screech of terror from German boys who saw the white gleam of
steel at their stomachs before they were spitted. Not many of those
Durham and Yorkshire lads remain alive now with that memory. The few
who do must have thrust it out of their vision, unless at night it
haunts them.

The assaulting battalion had lost many men during the assault, but
their main ordeal came after the first advance, when the German guns
belched out a large quantity of heavy shells from the direction of
Hill 60. They raked the ground, and tried to make our men yield the
position they had gained. But they would not go back or crawl away
from their dead.

All through the day the bombardment continued, answered from our side
by fourteen hours of concentrated fire, which I watched from our
battery positions. In spite of the difficulties of getting up supplies
through the "crumped" trenches, the men held on and consolidated their
positions. One of the most astounding feats was done by the sappers,
who put up barbed wire beyond the line under a devilish cannonade.

A telephone operator had had his apparatus smashed by a shell early in
the action, and worked his way back to get another. He succeeded in
reaching the advanced line again, but another shell knocked out his
second instrument. It was then only possible to keep in touch with the
battalion headquarters by means of messengers, and again and again
officers and men made their way across the zone of fire or died in the
attempt. Messages reached the colonel of the regiment that part of his
front trenches had been blown away.

From other parts of the line reports came in that the enemy was
preparing a counter-attack. For several hours now the colonel of the
Durhams could not get into touch with his companies, isolated and
hidden beneath the smoke of the shell-bursts. Flag-wagging and
heliographing were out of the question. He could not tell even if a
single man remained alive out there beneath all those shells. No word
came from them now to let him know if the enemy were counter-
attacking.

Early in the afternoon he decided to go out and make his own
reconnaissance. The bombardment was still relentless, and it was only
possible to go part of the way in an old communication trench. The
ground about was littered with the dead, still being blown about by
high explosives.

The soul of the colonel was heavy then with doubt and with the
knowledge that most of the dead here were his own. When he told me
this adventure his only comment was the soldier's phrase, "It was not
what might be called a 'healthy' place." He could see no sign of a
counter-attack, but, straining through the smoke-clouds, his eyes
could detect no sign of life where his men had been holding the
captured lines. Were they all dead out there?