A Test to Destruction (23 page)
Read A Test to Destruction Online
Authors: Henry Williamson
*
From the C.C.S. at Kemmelâ“Nobody sit down on the grass, it's contaminated with gas!”âlorries for the lightly wounded and minor mustard-gas cases went to one of the three hospitals outside Poperinghe adjoining railway sidings and named Dosinghem, Bandaghem, and Mendinghem.
“This way the mustard-gas cases. Line up here.”
“Do you think I could be taken to my General. I amââ”
“This way, sir. Into line. Now left turn. Hands on shoulders of the man in front of you. Lead on in front, follow the orderlyââ”
The orderly was a German walking wounded, black-bearded and with a Red Cross arm-band. As the line shuffled away Phillip
was just aware of a voice saying, “We've had bloody thousands in, and no sleep for two days and he wants his General!”
Nearly an hour's wait. Screams and cries. Men writhing on the ground, clothes torn off, almost naked men with blisters like half-deflated children's pink balloons. “Water! Give me water, someone! For Christ's sake, give me water!” Noises of retchingâstrainings in convulsive gasps as though life were serpentine trying to crawl out of bodies in froth.
“Are you there, O'Gorman?”
“Yes, sorr.”
“Try again to locate General West, will you?”
“I will, sorr. Do you stand here, I will be back, sorr.”
With anguish he had to move on, his turn to see the M.O. Where was O'Gorman?
First the anti-tetanus injection; then examination of eyes. Painful light. Shrinking back. “Stand still, I won't hurt you.” Soothing lanoline; cool bandage.
“I must be with my General, doctor. Would it be possibleââ”
“I'm afraid you'll have to wait until you get to the base, Colonel.”
“But it is most important, doctor.”
The doctor respired violently. He too had had no sleep for two days. “Perhaps you don't know that the Germans have reached Merville, and are only a couple of miles from Bailleul? Do you want to get away or don't you?”
“I'm sorry, doctor.”
“All right, all right, don't apologise. And for God's sake don't argue, man!”
Waiting. Obedience. Swimming, weeping pain. Slow shuffle to railway siding. Then a miracle, O'Gorman's voice saying, “Follow me, sir, I've got it taped.”
Leading Phillip by the hand the batman took him through several lines of tents to an area where the sickly smells of blood and iodoform, ether and carbolic struggled with the nidors of pus, urine, and excreta; where surgeons were stripped to their breeches' tops, with sweating torsos and set faces working away amidst the cries of the demented as fresh ambulances arrived with their formless loads, splashing mud from wheels over close rows of stretchers, their occupants with tunics and trousers stained dark in patches, occupying the only clear spaces. O'Gorman led him towards circular-saw-like screams of broken
men being lifted up to operating tables only just cleared of other bodies, but not of mud and blood, white tables in line whence came the steady frettings of hand-saws cutting across fractured bones. “Mother! Mother!” came the wild cry of a boy without feet, as he saw a silver saw in a doctor's hand.
“Here, you!” said a voice of authority, beckoning to a man in the line of anxious blood-volunteers. Phillip imagined, within the red nightmare of his mind, the tunic being peeled off; arm bared; cut made above elbow; stifled cry; tube thrust into vein. Blood gushing, volunteer (hoping to escape battle) staggering, whimpering. “Lie still!” Drip of blood into container. Spider with fly in web, horror of boyhood âsport'. It was too much. Had he not been upheld by the need to find âSpectre', he would have sunk down and given up. The presence of the faithful O'Gorman (equally faithful to his own idea of getting back to Blighty with the âKarnel') held him to the idea beyond the fireballs of his eyes, the Vesuvius of his chest.
“The Gineral can't do much talkin', sorr, he's after being given the morphia. Here he is, the Gineral, sorr, at your feet.” He recognised the voice of Boon, âSpectre's' soldier servant. “Will you bend down, sir, he cannot move, sir.”
A hand came out from under the blanket, Boon took Phillip's hand, and guided it to his master's hand, feeling emotional that âSpectre' and âLampo' were together once more.
“Westy, I must tell youââ” He choked, the fire-balls of his eyes broke.
*
As the long, slow Red Cross train was crawling south-west towards the railway junction at Hazebrouck, through which all trains to and from the bases had to pass, the German guns bombarding Bailleul five miles away seemed to be shaking the coach. Bailleul was directly east. Five miles to the west rose the
mont
of Cassel; the railway lay between the two towns. The wind being slight, when the train passed through an area of wood smoke, fumes entered the white dormitory reawakening fear and pain that it had been set on fire. There was the sound of sobbing. A grey-headed orderly said again and again, as he stepped over stretchers, “Don't take it to heart, laddie, don't take it to heart. It's worse for the boys in the line.” He was speaking to a youth of 18, who was overcome temporarily by the never-ending work and, above all, by the moans and smells.
Long wait at a junction. Where were they? He did not like to ask, the orderlies were so busy. Voices heard in the White City passing by open doorâAfrican, Chinese, Italian. Were they being shipped home, to dig trenches along the East Coast? O'Gorman told him: they were going to work on âLa Belle Hotesse', a redoubt being prepared from behind Hazebrouck to St. Omer, through the âforest of Nipper'. He meant Nieppe. “They say there's going to be a fourth line, called the Beebee line, sorr.”
The foreign jabber receded. Another train came in. He heard neighing, clop of hooves, unharrassed cries of command. Cavalry. Going or coming? O'Gorman did not know.
The hospital train crept forward again, to the shake of greased couplings. It was being shunted. Another long wait. Anti-aircraft guns popped, there was the crump of bombs. “What time is it?”
“Eleven o'clock, sorr.”
Drubbling quiver and head-buffeting of guns increasing.
“'Tes like to be on the Ridge, sorr.”
He listened, relieved to be by the open door. Cool air. Wounded being brought to the siding. No room. The young voice crying again, old voice repeating, “Don't take it to heart, laddie, it's worse for the boys in the line.” Why couldn't he vary it? Words grated like a blunt saw across his head.
In the grey light of dawn the train stopped finally at a siding along the coast. Blessed warm sugary tea, cup after cup of it made him feel wildly cheerful and safe as the liquid relieved the salinity of the weeping raw patches of flesh, while he lay temporarily at peace, awaiting turn to be put with other stretchers into the Ford ambulances.
Boon came to find himâto say goodbye. No more personal servants, except those specially enlisted valets of peace-time, were being allowed to go home with their officers.
“Good luck, sir. You'll keep an eye on the General for me, won't you, sir? Thank you, sir. God bless you, if you'll excuse me saying of it, sir.”
“God bless you, Boon.”
“Very good, sir.”
It was a sad moment. “Well, cheerio, Boon. It's been a long way since Loos. No, not goodbye, au revoir!”
“Au revoir, sir.”
“We'll have a pint together when we meet next.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Flames roared again in Phillip's head, this side of darkness.
*
With his mouth-organ Major Kidd was entertaining a group of captured British soldiers behind barbed wire. The cage was beside the railway at Kortrai, whither they had been marched, during unknown days, on their way to Germany.
The spirit shown by one of the temporary officers of the
passé
Army of the drowned Lord Kitchener was not uncommon in the British Expeditionary Force at that time, when action had brought relief from cowering thoughts of trench warfare.
In some ways it was easier for those upheld by the vanity, courage, or prominence of an idea beyond themselves, expressed in the freedom of bodily action, than for the military business mind confined more or less to rooms, tables, paper, telephones and other details of a life of comparative inaction. But any life of service for others generates its own courage, or sense of responsibility.
Major-General Harington, M.G.G.S. to General Plumer at Cassel, has broadly described the April crisis of the Second Army; so while âLampo' and âSpectre' are lying at a base hospital, and the 2nd Gaultshires, commanded now by the senior acting-captain, Tabor, are fighting in the re-upheaved ruins south of Wytschaete, let the spirit revisit the Flanders plain to the hill of Cassel, with its yellow gravelly slopes topped by the village through which ran seven roads.
Here in the last Spring of the Great War were brick buildings with faded paint and broken-tiled roofs, and cracked
pisé
barn walls, grouped together a hundred and fifty metres above the Flemish lowlands. From Cassel could be seen lesser hills of the
Monts
de
Flandres
âKemmel, Rouge, Noir, Scherpenberg, and Catsâsoon to be the scene of attack and counter-attack seeming without end to those in, and beyond, the fighting.
Twenty miles east from the big telescope on Cassel Hill lay Passchendaele, a village site little more than fifty metres above sea-level.
If we could only hold in the North (wrote Major-General Harington) the tide was bound to turn in our favour, but could we? Our resources were indeed slender. There were no fresh troops to come. Units
were formed of men who had been through the terrible experience of retreat and drafts of inexperienced men from home. All had suffered severe casualties. Units had never had a chance to reform.
We were discussing the situation at a Staff Conference when an A.D.C. came in with a message to say that the Germans had re-occupied the Messines-Wytschaete Ridge;
our
Ridge, which ten months before we had captured with such pride. Here we were, the same Commander and Staff, sitting in the same room and places in which we had planned that successful operation, being told that it had all gone.
I watched the Army Commander's face. I wondered what the effect on him would be. I knew what it meant to him. I saw him in a real crisis. He never said a word, but told me to continue with what I was saying on something quite different when the A.D.C. interrupted.
The Wytschaete-Messines ridge was a loss, but more was to follow. Where was it going to stop? The enemy got into the village of Locre, at the foot of the Scherpenberg. Still we held the Passchendaele Salient at Ypres. After all those years of security (in Flanders) it seemed incredible that places like Armentières, Nieppe, Ploegsteert Wood, Bailleul, Bac St. Maur, Fleurbaix etc. could ever fall into enemy hands. Yet that was happening, hourly and daily.
As we knew later, the German Commander-in-Chief had scored a bigger success than he expected and had persuaded the German High Command to give him more and more troops. The goal of the Channel Ports was all he saw. He influenced the High Command. The latter succumbed to a strategy which has led many a campaign to disaster. The troops employed were drawn off their main objective. The pressure about Amiens lessenedâthe wedge between the British and French Armies got more blunt.
Our Second Army line was a very curious and dangerous one at this time. Still we kept our fist out in the Passchendaele Salient with the enemy almost astride our communications. Every time I told the Army Commander that our line was broken in two or three places his grand courage made him reply that it was better than being broken in four or five.
I think now of a conference in my room. The Army Commander was with me standing at my desk examining the map. I knew what he was feeling about Passchendaele. We both knew that the limit had been reached. We should have to come out. The risk was too great. No more help could come from anywhere. Meteren was in flames. Hazebrouck was threatened. At last I summoned up courage to say what I had feared for days.
“I think, sir, you will have to come out of Passchendaele.”
“I won't!”
The next moment I felt his hand on my shoulder. “You are right, issue the orders.”
He knew it all the time. We both did. We did not speak about it. He went off to his room. We were both much relieved.
The spirit of surrender, however, to the enemy did not last long: as far as I remember something under five minutes.
The old bulldog spirit then came back. He wanted to make quite sure that, in our orders to be issued for the evacuation of the Salient, we were going to hang on to Ypres. As a matter of fact our plans for evacuating were all complete in every detail and had been for some time. He never left anything to chance in that respect and saw that we, who were privileged to be on his staff, did not either.
He then went off in his customary way to see the subordinate Commanders who were going to carry out the difficult task of evacuation. Such an operation is always nasty and liable to be upset. However, we slipped away without the enemy being aware of it. Our line was then close round Ypresâin truth with our backs to the wall.
A rusty rotten train, on its way into Germany, squeaked and clanked into a siding at Kortrai, to similar but diminished music from Bill Kidd's âmarf-orgin'.
“Don't worry, lads, Bill Kidd's boys will come and fetch us! Come on you crab-wallahs, do an allez!”
*
An American hospital at Ãtretât, 14th April, towards evening. The day spiker, going round the George Washington ward, stops as from a swathed face and chest comes a dry croak. “Bottleâpleaseââ”
“Sure, buddy, I'll bring you one right now.”
Fiery, scalding urine, only a few drops, yet once again. Shame for an empty bottle. More stinging. Try again. Nothing. “So sorry.”