Books: Now It Can Be Told

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

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On Monday night the colonel was told that his battalion would be
relieved, and managed to send this order to a part of it. It was sent
through by various routes, but some men who carried it came back with
the news that it was still impossible to get into touch with the
companies holding the advanced positions above the Menin road.

In trying to do so they had had astounding escapes. Several of them
had been blown as far as ten yards by the air-pressure of exploding
shells and had been buried in the scatter of earth.

"When at last my men came back--those of them who had received the
order," said the colonel, "I knew the price of their achievement--its
cost in officers and men." He spoke as a man resentful of that bloody
sacrifice.

There were other men still alive and still holding on. With some of
them were four young officers, who clung to their ground all through
the next night, before being relieved. They were without a drop of
water and suffered the extreme miseries of the battlefield.

There was no distinction in courage between those four men, but the
greater share of suffering was borne by one. Early in the day he had
had his jaw broken by a piece of shell, but still led his men. Later
in the day he was wounded in the shoulder and leg, but kept his
command, and he was still leading the survivors of his company when he
came back on the morning of Tuesday, August 10th.

Another party of men had even a longer time of trial. They were under
the command of a lance-corporal, who had gained possession of the
stables above the Menin road and now defended their ruins. During the
previous twenty-four hours he had managed to send through several
messages, but they were not to report his exposed position nor to ask
for supports nor to request relief. What he said each time was, "Send
us more bombs." It was only at seven-thirty in the morning of Tuesday,
after thirty hours under shell-fire, that the survivors came away from
their rubbish heap in the lines of death.

So it was at Hooge on that day of August. I talked with these men,
touched hands with them while the mud and blood of the business still
fouled them. Even now, in remembrance, I wonder how men could go
through such hours without having on their faces more traces of their
hell, though some of them were still shaking with a kind of ague.

X

Here and there on the roadsides behind the lines queer sacks hung from
wooden poles. They had round, red disks painted on them, and looked
like the trunks of human bodies after Red Indians had been doing
decorative work with their enemy's slain. At Flixecourt, near Amiens,
I passed one on a Sunday when bells were ringing for high mass and a
crowd of young soldiers were trooping into the field with fixed
bayonets.

A friend of mine--an ironical fellow--nudged me, and said, "Sunday-
school for young Christians!" and made a hideous face, very comical.

It was a bayonet-school of instruction, and "O. C. Bayonets"--Col.
Ronald Campbell--was giving a little demonstration. It was a curiously
interesting form of exercise. It was as though the primitive nature in
man, which had been sleeping through the centuries, was suddenly
awakened in the souls of these cockney soldier--boys. They made sudden
jabs at one another fiercely and with savage grimaces, leaped at men
standing with their backs turned, who wheeled round sharply, and
crossed bayonets, and taunted the attackers. Then they lunged at the
hanging sacks, stabbing them where the red circles were painted. These
inanimate things became revoltingly lifelike as they jerked to and
fro, and the bayonet men seemed enraged with them. One fell from the
rope, and a boy sprang at it, dug his bayonet in, put his foot on the
prostrate thing to get a purchase for the bayonet, which he lugged out
again, and then kicked the sack.

"That's what I like to see," said an officer. "There's a fine
fighting-spirit in that lad. He'll kill plenty of Germans before he's
done."

Col. Ronald Campbell was a great lecturer on bayonet exercise. He
curdled the blood of boys with his eloquence on the method of attack
to pierce liver and lights and kidneys of the enemy. He made their
eyes bulge out of their heads, fired them with blood-lust, stoked up
hatred of Germans--all in a quiet, earnest, persuasive voice, and a
sense of latent power and passion in him. He told funny stories--one,
famous in the army, called "Where's 'Arry?"

It was the story of an attack on German trenches in which a crowd of
Germans were captured in a dugout. The sergeant had been told to blood
his men, and during the killing he turned round and asked, "Where's
'Arry? . . . 'Arry 'asn't 'ad a go yet."

'Arry was a timid boy, who shrank from butcher's work, but he was
called up and given his man to kill. And after that 'Arry was like a
man-eating tiger in his desire for German blood.

He used another illustration in his bayonet lectures. "You may meet a
German who says, 'Mercy! I have ten children.' . . . Kill him! He
might have ten more."

At those training-schools of British youth (when nature was averse to
human slaughter until very scientifically trained) one might see every
form of instruction in every kind of weapon and instrument of death--
machine-guns, trench-mortars, bombs, torpedoes, gas, and, later on,
tanks; and as the months passed, and the years, the youth of the
British Empire graduated in these schools of war, and those who lived
longest were experts in divers branches of technical education.

Col. Ronald Campbell retired from bayonet instruction and devoted his
genius and his heart (which was bigger than the point of a bayonet) to
the physical instruction of the army and the recuperation of battle-
worn men. I liked him better in that job, and saw the real imagination
of the man at work, and his amazing, self-taught knowledge of
psychology. When men came down from the trenches, dazed, sullen,
stupid, dismal, broken, he set to work to build up their vitality
again, to get them interested in life again, and to make them keen and
alert. As they had been dehumanized by war, so he rehumanized them by
natural means. He had a farm, with flowers and vegetables, pigs,
poultry, and queer beasts. A tame bear named Flanagan was the comic
character of the camp. Colonel Campbell found a thousand qualities of
character in this animal, and brought laughter back to gloomy boys by
his description of them. He had names for many of his pets--the game-
cocks and the mother-hens; and he taught the men to know each one, and
to rear chicks, and tend flowers, and grow vegetables. Love, and not
hate, was now his gospel. All his training was done by games, simple
games arousing intelligence, leading up to elaborate games demanding
skill of hand and eye. He challenged the whole army system of
discipline imposed by authority by a new system of self-discipline
based upon interest and instinct. His results were startling, and men
who had been dumb, blear-eyed, dejected, shell-shocked wrecks of life
were changed quite quickly into bright, cheery fellows, with laughter
in their eyes.

"It's a pity," he said, "they have to go off again and be shot to
pieces. I cure them only to be killed--but that's not my fault. It's
the fault of war."

It was Colonel Campbell who discovered "Willie Woodbine," the fighting
parson and soldier's poet, who was the leading member of a traveling
troupe of thick-eared thugs. They gave pugilistic entertainments to
tired men. Each of them had one thick ear. Willie Woodbine had two.
They fought one another with science (as old professionals) and
challenged any man in the crowd. Then one of them played the violin
and drew the soul out of soldiers who seemed mere animals, and after
another fight Willie Woodbine stepped up and talked of God, and war,
and the weakness of men, and the meaning of courage. He held all those
fellows in his hand, put a spell on them, kept them excited by a new
revelation, gave them, poor devils, an extra touch of courage to face
the menace that was ahead of them when they went to the trenches
again.

XI

Our men were not always in the trenches. As the New Army grew in
numbers reliefs were more frequent than in the old days, when
battalions held the line for long spells, until their souls as well as
their bodies were sunk in squalor. Now in the summer of 1915 it was
not usual for men to stay in the line for more than three weeks at a
stretch, and they came back to camps and billets, where there was more
sense of life, though still the chance of death from long-range guns.
Farther back still, as far back as the coast, and all the way between
the sea and the edge of war, there were new battalions quartered in
French and Flemish villages, so that every cottage and farmstead,
villa, and chateau was inhabited by men in khaki, who made themselves
at home and established friendly relations with civilians there unless
they were too flagrant in their robbery, or too sour in their temper,
or too filthy in their habits. Generally the British troops were
popular in Picardy and Artois, and when they left women kissed and
cried, in spite of laughter, and joked in a queer jargon of English-
French. In the estaminets of France and Flanders they danced with
frowzy peasant girls to the tune of a penny-in-the-slot piano, or,
failing the girls, danced with one another.

For many years to come, perhaps for centuries, those cottages and
barns into which our men crowded will retain signs and memories of
that British occupation in the great war. Boys who afterward went
forward to the fighting-fields and stepped across the line to the
world of ghosts carved their names on wooden beams, and on the
whitewashed walls scribbled legends proclaiming that Private John
Johnson was a bastard; or that a certain battalion was a rabble of
ruffians; or that Kaiser Bill would die on the gallows, illustrating
those remarks with portraits and allegorical devices, sketchily drawn,
but vivid and significant.

The soldier in the house learned quite a lot of French, with which he
made his needs understood by the elderly woman who cooked for his
officers' mess. He could say, with a fine fluency, "Ou est le blooming
couteau?" or "Donnez-moi le bally fourchette, s'il vous plait,
madame." It was not beyond his vocabulary to explain that "Les pommes
de terre frites are absolument all right if only madame will tenir ses
cheveux on." In the courtyards of ancient farmhouses, so old in their
timbers and gables that the Scottish bodyguard of Louis XI may have
passed them on their way to Paris, modern Scots with khaki-covered
kilts pumped up the water from old wells, and whistled "I Know a
Lassie" to the girl who brought the cattle home, and munched their
evening rations while Sandy played a "wee bit" on the pipes to the
peasant--folk who gathered at the gate. Such good relations existed
between the cottagers and their temporary guests that one day, for
instance, when a young friend of mine came back from a long spell in
the trenches (his conversation was of dead men, flies, bombs, lice,
and hell), the old lady who had given him her best bedroom at the
beginning of the war flung her arms about him and greeted him like a
long-lost son. To a young Guardsman, with his undeveloped mustache on
his upper lip, her demonstrations were embarrassing.

It was one of the paradoxes of the war that beauty lived but a mile or
two away from hideous squalor. While men in the lines lived in dugouts
and marched down communicating trenches thigh-high, after rainy
weather, in mud and water, and suffered the beastliness of the
primitive earth-men, those who were out of the trenches, turn and turn
about, came back to leafy villages and drilled in fields all golden
with buttercups, and were not too uncomfortable in spite of
overcrowding in dirty barns.

There was more than comfort in some of the headquarters where our
officers were billeted in French chateaux. There was a splendor of
surroundings which gave a graciousness and elegance to the daily life
of that extraordinary war in which men fought as brutally as in
prehistoric times. I knew scores of such places, and went through
gilded gates emblazoned with noble coats of arms belonging to the days
of the Sun King, or farther back to the Valois, and on my visits to
generals and their staffs stood on long flights of steps which led up
to old mansions, with many towers and turrets, surrounded by noble
parks and ornamental waters and deep barns in which five centuries of
harvests had been stored. From one of the archways here one might see
in the mind's eye Mme. de Pompadour come out with a hawk on her wrist,
or even Henri de Navarre with his gentlemen-at-arms, all their plumes
alight in the sun as they mounted their horses for a morning's boar-
hunt.

It was surprising at first when a young British officer came out and
said, "Toppin' morning," or, "Any news from the Dardanelles?" There
was something incongruous about this habitation of French chiteaux by
British officers with their war-kit. The strangeness of it made me
laugh in early days of first impressions, when I went through the
rooms of one of those old historic houses, well within range of the
German guns with a brigade major. It was the Chateau de Henencourt,
near Albert.

"This is the general's bedroom," said the brigade major, opening a
door which led off a gallery, in which many beautiful women of France
and many great nobles of the old regime looked down from their gilt
frames.

The general had a nice bed to sleep in. In such a bed Mme. du Barry
might have stretched her arms and yawned, or the beautiful Duchesse de
Mazarin might have held her morning levee. A British general, with his
bronzed face and bristly mustache, would look a little strange under
that blue-silk canopy, with rosy cherubs dancing overhead on the
flowered ceiling. His top-boots and spurs stood next to a Louis Quinze
toilet-table. His leather belts and field-glasses lay on the polished
boards beneath the tapestry on which Venus wooed Adonis and Diana went
a-hunting. In other rooms no less elegantly rose-tinted or darkly
paneled other officers had made a litter of their bags, haversacks,
rubber baths, trench--boots, and puttees. At night the staff sat down
to dinner in a salon where the portraits of a great family of France,
in silks and satins and Pompadour wigs, looked down upon their khaki.
The owner of the chateau, in whose veins flowed the blood of those old
aristocrats, was away with his regiment, in which he held the rank of
corporal. His wife, the Comtesse de Henencourt, managed the estate,
from which all the men-servants except the veterans had been
mobilized. In her own chateau she kept one room for herself, and every
morning came in from the dairies, where she had been working with her
maids, to say, with her very gracious smile, to the invaders of her
house: "Bon jour, messieurs! Ca va bien?"

She hid any fear she had under the courage of her smile. Poor chateaux
of France! German shells came to knock down their painted turrets, to
smash through the ceilings where the rosy Cupids played, and in one
hour or two to ruin the beauty that had lived through centuries of
pride.

Scores of them along the line of battle were but heaps of brick-dust
and twisted iron.

I saw the ruins of the Chateau de Henencourt two years after my first
visit there. The enemy's line had come closer to it and it was a
target for their guns. Our guns--heavy and light--were firing from the
back yard and neighboring fields, with deafening tumult. Shells had
already broken the roofs and turrets of the chateau and torn away
great chunks of wall. A colonel of artillery had his headquarters in
the petit salon. His hand trembled as he greeted me.

"I'm not fond of this place," he said. "The whole damn thing will come
down on my head at any time. I think I shall take to the cellars."

We walked out to the courtyard and he showed me the way down to the
vault. A shell came over the chateau and burst in the outhouses.

"They knocked out a 9.2 a little while ago," said the colonel. "Made a
mess of some heavy gunners."

There was a sense of imminent death about us, but it was not so
sinister a place as farther on, where a brother of mine sat in a hole
directing his battery. . . The Countess of Henencourt had gone. She
went away with her dairymaids, driving her cattle down the roads.

XII

One of the most curious little schools of courage inhabited by British
soldiers in early days was the village of Vaux-sur-Somme, which we
took over from the French, who were our next-door neighbors at the
village of Frise in the summer of '15. After the foul conditions of
the salient it seemed unreal and fantastic, with a touch of romance
not found in other places. Strange as it seemed, the village
garrisoned by our men was in advance of our trench lines, with nothing
dividing them from the enemy but a little undergrowth--and the
queerest part of it all was the sense of safety, the ridiculously
false security with which one could wander about the village and up
the footpath beyond, with the knowledge that one's movements were
being watched by German eyes and that the whole place could be blown
off the face of the earth . . . but for the convenient fact that the
Germans, who were living in the village of Curlu, beyond the footpath,
were under our own observation and at the mercy of our own guns.

That sounded like a fairy-tale to men who, in other places, could not
go over the parapet of the first-line trenches, or even put their
heads up for a single second, without risking instant death.

I stood on a hill here, with a French interpreter and one of his men.
A battalion of loyal North Lancashires was some distance away, but
after an exchange of compliments in an idyllic glade, where a party of
French soldiers lived in the friendliest juxtaposition with the
British infantry surrounding them--it was a cheery bivouac among the
trees, with the fragrance of a stew-pot mingling with the odor of
burning wood--the lieutenant insisted upon leading the way to the top
of the hill.

He made a slight detour to point out a German shell which had fallen
there without exploding, and made laughing comments upon the harmless,
futile character of those poor Germans in front of us. They did their
best to kill us, but oh, so feebly!

Yet when I took a pace toward the shell he called out, sharply, "Ne
touchez pas!" I would rather have touched a sleeping tiger than that
conical piece of metal with its unexploded possibilities, but bent low
to see the inscriptions on it, scratched by French gunners with wore
recklessness of death. Mort aux Boches was scrawled upon it between
the men's initials.

Then we came to the hill-crest and to the last of our trenches, and,
standing there, looked down upon the villages of Vaux and Curlu,
separated by a piece of marshy water. In the farthest village were the
Germans, and in the nearest, just below us down the steep cliff, our
own men. Between the two there was a narrow causeway across the marsh
and a strip of woods half a rifle-shot in length.

Behind, in a sweeping semicircle round their village and ours, were
the German trenches and the German guns. I looked into the streets of
both villages as clearly as one may see into Clovelly village from the
crest of the hill. In Vaux-sur-Somme a few British soldiers were
strolling about. One was sitting on the window-sill of a cottage,
kicking up his heels.

In the German village of Curlu the roadways were concealed by the
perspective of the houses, with their gables and chimney-stacks, so
that I could not see any passers--by. But at the top of the road,
going out of the village and standing outside the last house on the
road, was a solitary figure--a German sentry.

The French lieutenant pointed to a thin mast away from the village on
the hillside.

"Do you see that? That is their flagstaff. They hoist their flag for
victories. It wagged a good deal during the recent Russian fighting.
But lately they have not had the cheek to put it up."

This interpreter--the Baron de Rosen--laughed very heartily at that
naked pole on the hill.

Then I left him and joined our own men, and went down a steep hill
into Vaux, well outside our line of trenches, and thrust forward as an
outpost in the marsh. German eyes could see me as I walked. At any
moment those little houses about me might have been smashed into
rubbish heaps. But no shells came to disturb the waterfowl among the
reeds around.

And so it was that the life in this place was utterly abnormal, and
while the guns were silent except for long--range fire, an old-
fashioned mode of war--what the adjutant of this little outpost called
a "gentlemanly warfare," prevailed. Officers and men slept within a
few hundred yards of the enemy, and the officers wore their pajamas at
night. When a fight took place it was a chivalrous excursion, such as
Sir Walter Manny would have liked, between thirty or forty men on one
side against somewhat the same number on the other.

Our men used to steal out along the causeway which crossed the marsh--
a pathway about four feet wide, broadening out in the middle, so that
a little redoubt or blockhouse was established there, then across a
narrow drawbridge, then along the path again until they came to the
thicket which screened the German village of Curlu.

It sometimes happened that a party of Germans were creeping forward
from the other direction, in just the same way, disguised in party-
colored clothes splashed with greens and reds and browns to make them
invisible between the trees, with brown masks over their faces. Then
suddenly contact was made.

Into the silence of the wood came the sharp crack of rifles, the zip-
zip of bullets, the shouts of men who had given up the game of
invisibility. It was a sharp encounter one night when the Loyal North
Lancashires held the village of Vaux, and our men brought back many
German helmets and other trophies as proofs of victory. Then to bed in
the village, and a good night's rest, as when English knights fought
the French, not far from these fields, as chronicled in the pages of
that early war correspondent, Sir John Froissart.

All was quiet when I went along the causeway and out into the wood,
where the outposts stood listening for any crack of a twig which might
betray a German footstep. I was startled when I came suddenly upon two
men, almost invisible, against the tree-trunks. There they stood,
motionless, with their rifles ready, peering through the brushwood. If
I had followed the path on which they stood for just a little way I
should have walked into the German village. But, on the other hand, I
should not have walked back again. . . .

When I left the village, and climbed up the hill to our own trenches
again, I laughed aloud at the fantastic visit to that grim little
outpost in the marsh. If all the war had been like this it would have
been more endurable for men who had no need to hide in holes in the
earth, nor crouch for three months below ground, until an hour or two
of massacre below a storm of high explosives. In the village on the
marsh men fought at least against other men, and not against invisible
powers which belched forth death.

It was part of the French system of "keeping quiet" until the turn of
big offensives; a good system, to my mind, if not carried too far. At
Frise, next door to Vaux, in a loop of the Somme, it was carried a
little too far, with relaxed vigilance.

It was a joke of our soldiers to crawl on and through the reeds and
enter the French line and exchange souvenirs with the sentries.

"Souvenir!" said one of them one day. "Bullet--you know--cartouche.
Comprenny?"

A French poilu of Territorials, who had been dozing, sat up with a
grin and said, "Mais oui, mon vieux," and felt in his pouch for a
cartridge, and then in his pockets, and then in the magazine of the
rifle between his knees.

"Fini!" he said. "Tout fini, mon p'tit camarade."

The Germans one day made a pounce on Frise, that little village in the
loop of the Somme, and "pinched" every man of the French garrison.
There was the devil to pay, and I heard it being played to the tune of
the French soixante-quinzes, slashing over the trees.

Vaux and Curlu went the way of all French villages in the zone of war,
when the battles of the Somme began, and were blown off the map.

XIII

At a place called the Pont de Nieppe, beyond Armentieres--a most
"unhealthy" place in later years of war--a bathing establishment was
organized by officers who were as proud of their work as though they
had brought a piece of paradise to Flanders. To be fair to them, they
had done that. To any interested visitor, understanding the nobility
of their work, they exhibited a curious relic. It was the Holy Shirt
of Nieppe, which should be treasured as a memorial in our War Museum--
an object-lesson of what the great war meant to clean-living men. It
was not a saint's shirt, but had been worn by a British officer in the
trenches, and was like tens of thousands of other shirts worn by our
officers and men in the first winters of the war, neither better nor
worse, but a fair average specimen. It had been framed in a glass
case, and revealed, on its linen, the corpses of thousands of lice.
That vermin swarmed upon the bodies of all our boys who went into the
trenches and tortured them. After three days they were lousy from head
to foot. After three weeks they were walking menageries. To English
boys from clean homes, to young officers who had been brought up in
the religion of the morning tub, this was one of the worst horrors of
war. They were disgusted with themselves. Their own bodies were
revolting to them. Scores of times I have seen battalions of men just
out of battle stripping themselves and hunting in their shirts for the
foul beast. They had a technical name for this hunter's job. They
called it "chatting." They desired a bath as the hart panteth for the
water--brooks, and baths were but a mirage of the brain to men in
Flanders fields and beyond the Somme, until here and there, as at
Nieppe, officers with human sympathy organized a system by which
battalions of men could wash their bodies.