B00D2VJZ4G EBOK (20 page)

‘If you fall I shall stop,’ said Ira to me a day before. ‘Hell to them all! I shall stop.’ But we were separated before we began. He was attached to another platoon. I saw him as I went over. He was well.

He laughed as he swore, ‘What a bloody mess!’ We said good-bye – ’God be with you.’ I never saw him again. Later I wrote to him. The letter was returned – undelivered. The mark of a rubber stamp was on the envelope, ‘Killed in action.’ Just that. A country’s regrets to me that my friend was dead…

Most of the firing had been on our side. We did not know it at the time. There was such a screaming in the air that lead seemed to be flying everywhere. Something whipped by and one swore that his ear had been missed by a hair’s breadth. In front our barrage fell like a curtain and the earth vomited up mud and dirt. Then the fun began.

A rattle, with that well-known crescendo and diminuendo as the machine gun swept from east to west, cracked out. In front of me I saw a pair of arms go up and a rifle drop and six feet of khaki crumple up. I saw George hurrying to get behind a scrap of a hedge. He never got there. But he got his ‘armistik’ all right; he got it in the guts. I dropped on my knees and crawled to that little bit of shelter. I saw stretched at full length, with his face towards heaven, a boy in grey with the down of youth upon his chin.

We were off our track. We turned left and reached a road. It was strange to see abandoned guns and parapets turned the wrong way. Down the road came two other figures in grey. One was leaning heavily upon the other. His shirt was tom off his back and there was a great gash in his flesh. We looked at each other in passing. We spoke to each other only with our eyes and went our ways.

Then a frightened group with hands in the air came towards us. Old Tom placed his bayonet on the grey tunic of one and sent the fear of God through his body. Tom laughed at the young boy’s squeal, then quickly went through his pockets, jerked his thumb towards our lines, kicked his backside and went on.

The devil had a busy morning raking out his furnaces, but left us quiet for an hour in the churchyard of St. Julien in the afternoon. I tried to make some tea in a shell hole with the remains of my water, some old tea leaves and solidified methylated spirit. There were too many snipers about to be very comfortable, but those of us who kept our heads low survived the hour. Our platoon was like a spearhead in the line. In the early evening the enemy opened out on us; in mistake our own guns opened, too.

‘Better fall back a few yards,’ said the officer, and even as we were doing so something jabbed my hand. It dropped down and blood spurted out.

The others had gone. I was alone. The fire was not continuous. It came in fits and starts. In an interval my good hand helped me out. I dashed out and dropped in the shadow of a grave. I was seen. From the pillbox, hidden somewhere about, which had given us trouble all the day, a couple of bits of lead whistled. I crawled into an enormous shell hole and began to sink into mud. With the slime clinging to me I got away, through the bottom of a hedge which, by the grace of God, had remained there.

No one to be seen now and my head facing I knew not where. A great, livid waste, the light of day going, and the way might be to the north or the south. I had lost my bearings. Not far away a tank, half embedded, was getting it full tilt. The sweat stood on my dirty face. And then in that great expanse of mud and wire I spotted a little red cross on a little flag, sticking eighteen inches out of the ground. I felt safe again.

It was at the entrance to a cellar. The cellar was filled to overflowing. Men and bits of men were huddled there or stretched at full length.

‘Better get on,’ said the doctor, noticing that my legs were whole. So, duly labelled, I turned to home again. I passed my mates with waterproofs on their shoulders, standing to. I tried to run, but felt weak. Suddenly a barrage fell in front of me. I turned into the remains of a cottage by the side of the road, found a seat on an empty petrol tin in the corner, pulled down my tin hat to cover my face. But, like some venomous beast, the barrage crept nearer and soon bits of the brick wall began to fall. I was shaking with fright. I decided to bolt the moment the barrage lifted. My arm was throbbing with pain. My leg had gone to sleep. I thumped it with my other hand – and life came back again and with it hope. There came a flash. I shut my eyes. A deafening crash and tumble of mortar. The firing stopped. I bolted. Down the road zigzag, zigzag, to dodge the snipers, on and on nearer home. Soon I saw the white tapes. I followed. My throat was burning with thirst. I saw a watercart in a ditch and soon water was running down a long throat that asked for more and more.

In the early hours of the morning I tumbled into an electrically lighted dug-out dressing station two miles from the front line where there were clean bandages and steaming tea. I fell at full length, motionless. Someone pressed drink to my lips.

The journey was not ended. Soon they came to carry me on again.

‘Got a couple of Jerries here. Do you mind if they go with you?’

Mind? Not if it was the whole German Army. They bundled us in together and we were off. The rain was falling piteously. At the field ambulance we were taken out. The place was full. Hope and despair lived there side by side. There were screams as the broken bodies were lifted on to the tables for the surgeons’ knives. There was a great light on dirty faces of men as they sat on wooden forms, their arms bared to the doctor who pricked the flesh with his inoculating needle to carry its serum to attack the tetanus germ.

They took us to a tent on which the rain beat down ceaselessly and mercilessly. I fell on a stretcher and pulled the damp blanket on top of me. What did it matter? Rain – rain – rain. Far away the guns growled. Rain – rain – rain. It splashed on to the canvas and dripped into the tent. Drip – drip – drip. Each drip seemed to fashion itself into a word – sleep. Sleep – sleep – sleep. Nearly twenty-four hours after the attack. Tomorrow the hospital train – and Blighty. But now sleep. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep. S–l–e–e–p. Oh, thank God! Thank God, s–l–e–e–p.

Alfred Willcox, a private in the Royal Sussex Regiment (various battalions), always on the Western Front, chiefly in the Salient. For a very brief period was a cook, but poisoned himself with coke fumes, to the relief of his comrades. In the 13th Sussex (Lowther’s Lambs) when they took the village of St. Julien in the Third Battle of Ypres. The incidents in the narrative took place that day, when he was wounded
.

The delusion existed, and probably still exists, that no labour companies were ever nearer the line than twenty miles. But when I tell you that the company to which I belonged originally half of a Scottish labour battalion – was for the last seventeen months of the War never at any moment out of range of Jerry’s guns, and that when he did get us he got us with his biggest guns and with his high-velocities, from which there was no dodging, and that during the struggle for Passchendaele in the autumn of 1917 our company were awarded a Military Cross, a D.C.M., and eight M.M.’s – well, we must have been within
hearing
distance, anyway.

The word ‘labour’ also gave people the impression that we were an uneducated, uncivilized, unwashed lot of beings, whereas we were composed of exactly the same sort of men as every other branch of the service, except that most of us were short-sighted, and some of us wanted a finger, or possessed varicose veins, or suffered from some other stroke of luck. In my own section alone (I was a corporal), I had all types of men, from Bill Barnes, whose ideas of conjugal felicity had caused his wife to throw herself from a high tenement window in Edinburgh, with the result that Bill served his country for seven arduous years in a northern institution, to the man (I forget his name, but I honour his memory) who, wounded on the roads at Ypres, went to hospital, and in whose kit, to make an inventory of which was part of my duties, I found a volume of the
Golden Treasury
, a copy of
As You Like It
, and Hume’s
Treatise on Human Nature
.

I confine my narrative to these few months in the fall of 1917. We had been billeted at Dickebusch, a ruined village south of Ypres, and at that time about five miles behind the line. On July 30th, the day before the Third Battle of Ypres began, we moved up to a spot about a couple of miles behind Hill 60, and just in front of Scottish Wood. Here we dumped our kit-bags, immediately in front of an East of Scotland battery of 6-inch guns, placed just within the edge of the wood, and there we remained for three solid weeks with no other protection than canvas bivouacs in a region where everybody else lived underground. These ‘bivvies’ were merely canvas sheets hung over poles and stretched out at each side and pegged down. To get inside one had to crawl on all fours, and into each of them crawled every night to sleep eight weary and generally wet men and a large and varied assortment of other creatures which, though they crawled, did
not
sleep.

I can feel the guns of that battery in my ears yet. Every time a gun went off it felt like hitting your head against a stone wall. I am reminded here of our sergeant-major. While the rank and file slept in ‘bivvies,’ the officers and the sergeant-major were allowed to put up tents, both bivvies and tents being camouflaged with leafy branches. Being at that time company clerk, I had the privilege of sleeping in the sergeant-major’s tent. Nobby was an old Regular, a bluff Yorkshireman of the ‘Ole Bill’ breed.

Although not a thing of beauty, he was to me a joy for ever. He wore a body-belt. I think he had to, he was so stout. And a flannel body-belt on a fat man acts exactly like the small flowerpot a gardener inverts on top of a dahlia stake to trap earwigs. They crawl up the stake into the flower-pot at night, and are caught there in the morning. Nobby didn’t wait till morning. He lit his candle, took off his body-belt, and set to work. He got on famously for a minute or two, then when on the point of making a particularly valuable capture, one of the guns went off, out went the candle and Nobby lost his prey. He found his tongue, however, and his matches, relit his candle, and proceeded on his quest.

How we weren’t all splashed out over and over again while in that camp, I do not know. Between us and the battery a railway ran straight up towards Messines Ridge. It was used by one of those big railway guns, which used to slip quietly up during the night, fire a few rounds and slip down again. On our other side was a light railway on which ran small cars conveying men or ammunition. In front and crossed by both railways ran the main road from Ypres to Lille. Just behind us was one of our captive observation balloons; and Jerry was always having tries for one or other of these. He smashed up a battery of guns on the other side of the main road; he cleared out another labour company on the other side of the light railway; he blew holes in the road and blew up the railway; and one day he came across in one of our own planes, fired explosive bullets into the balloon, setting it ablaze, and calmly flew back again to his own lines.

During those five months of fighting for Passchendaele our company worked on the forward roads in front of Ypres, advancing as our line advanced, working parties being sometimes in front of the field guns. On one occasion a party were working exceptionally far forward, and from a recently captured pillbox in the vicinity of Westhoek Ridge were watching our shells bursting over the German trenches. Some line men came down past, clearing out as far as they could. ‘Come on, Jock,’ they shouted to one of our men. ‘What the ’ell are you hanging about here for? If Jerry spots you, he won’t half give you gippo.’ ‘Och, its a’ richt, chum – sanriy-fairy-an. We’re workin’ here.’ ‘Working! My Gawd!’ and they stayed not upon the order of their going.

It was certainly no joke working on these roads when there was a stunt on. Jerry had them taped off to an inch and was shelling them unmercifully.

The traffic on such a road was a wonderful sight. It is a steady, continuous stream, a stream often temporarily checked when a block occurs perhaps miles further up. A shell has landed in the road and knocked a hole in it and, as likely as not, put out of action a lorry or a man or two. The traffic stops dead, perhaps both ways, and the danger of destruction is greatly intensified. Forward the ‘Labour Corps!’ A squad of men is quickly on the spot with pick and shovel, and the hole is filled up with any mortal thing that can be found – stones, beams, bricks, railway lines, sleepers, bits of cars or lorries, wheels, cases of bully, tombstones, dead horses – anything that will occupy space, and in a few minutes the traffic moves on once more, and the War goes on!

After it had become evident that our hopes of an immediate advance were doomed to disappointment, our company was taken back to Dickebusch. There we built a camp for ourselves, where we spent the winter before moving up to Shrapnel Corner near Ypres in the spring-time. The C.Q.M.S. and myself built a little hut of corrugated iron with a good sound 3-foot-high parapet all round. Our Quarter-bloke at that time was a big, black-moustached, clear-to-hell-out-of-it, sort of chap, just the very man for a company of 500 skrimshankers like ours. While he was a Q.M.S. and I only a lance-jack, in civil life I was a schoolmaster and he a school janitor. However, we worked and lived together in great harmony and friendship for a year. I did the work and he took the responsibility. He was a beadle (church officer) in the Auld Kirk, and a teetotaller. I was a deacon in the, Free Kirk, and drank his nightly tot of rum at bedtime as well as my own.

Our hut was about 8 feet by 6 feet, and just so high that if the Q.M.S. wanted to stretch himself he had either to lie down or go outside. He slept under the duckboard table-shelf-desk on which the rations were kept during the day, and I on a stretcher, with a little ‘Queen’ stove between us. In the morning at Reveillé – perhaps – I rose, lit a fire in the stove, on the top of which I put a petrol tin full of water for shaving and washing purposes. If the chimney smoked, as it usually did, I. went outside, mounted the parapet and cleaned it out with drain-rods.