Post of Honour (23 page)

Chapter Six

I

W
inter in the Valley had been mild but generally wet, cheerless and without much promise. There had been no heavy snowfalls but ever since November the sun had been hiding behind seeping skies and by January the flurries of hail that came in horizontally, like a shower of assegais, had given way to a steady downpour that beat the dead bracken flat and changed the meandering Sorrel into a brown, froth-flecked torrent twenty yards wide carrying floating islands of driftwood imprisoned in briars that snagged in the shallows, causing floodwater to lap half-a-mile across the flat fields of the west bank. The woods, were thinned, strewn with the victims of the autumn gales blocking the rides or leaning drunkenly against hard-pressed neighbours and the river road below Hermitage Farm, robbed by Lord Kitchener of Henry Pitts’ watchful eye, soon became pitted with potholes and obstructed by bank-slides. As winter groped its way towards spring the landscape withered under ceaseless rain and its inhabitants withdrew into themselves, almost forgetting to keep Christmas and New Year. The only really cheerful face to be met within the Valley that season was that of Horace Handcock, for he alone, it seemed, held the secret of the year’s promise in his heart and was willing enough to share it with anyone with patience to listen.

For Horace this was the year of decision; the year when Kitchener’s trained hosts, instead of being fed piecemeal into the line, would charge forward
en masse
,
an irresistible force that would scatter the cowardly German hordes like stubble wisps and surge over the Rhine to Potsdam, carrying ropes for the Kaiser, Little Willie and the Junkers who had planned to enslave the world but had forgotten that the British Lion had strong teeth. They would be dealt with, Horace assured everyone, as the Lion had dealt with everyone in the past who made the fatal error of twisting the tail of the passive but indomitable islanders and disposed of, once and for all, as had Napoleon, the Mahdi, and Kruger but with a slight difference. This time there would be no honourable banishment for the defeated but an eighty-foot gallows for the leaders and years of hard labour for the misled. Neither were Horace’s hopes pinned entirely upon the British field army. Poised to issue from Scapa and Rosyth were the ironclads that would steam down the east coast, corner the craven German Navy in or around the Helgoland Bight and blow it out of the water so that never again would the Hohenzollerns, or anyone else, presume to seek parity with the super-national dispenser of justice which was how Horace regarded the British Grand Fleet.

There were men of the Valley, however, who did not share Horace’s optimism in the early spring of 1916, men who would have liked very much to look forward to a midsummer victory-march down the Unter den Linden to the music of ‘The British Grenadiers’ but who were prevented, by evidence that they found difficult to discount, from believing in the likelihood of gaps being torn in the German line for the exploitation of Haig’s cavalry.

Several of these dismal Jimmies lived within rifle range of Horace’s cowardly grey hordes whom they sometimes met face to face in trench raids or on patrol in no-man’s-land and who saw no shame in flattening themselves in deep slush when they heard the oncoming shriek of a five-nine, or watched the deceivingly slow roll of the dreaded Minnenwerfer coming out of the sky like a great wounded bird. Henry Pitts could be numbered among the doubters for in one way active service had disappointed him. He had arrived in France shortly after the lost Battle of Loos but so far no one had ever asked him to perform any of the evolutions he had perfected on the home drill-grounds during the previous summer. Instead they shuttled him to and fro along the greasy pavé, humping a Christmas tree of equipment that taxed even his patience and stamina when they left the road and entered narrow communication trenches where, every few yards, there was a shell-hole, a hangman’s noose of barbed wire, telephone cables, a cave-in or a stretcher-party battling along from the opposite direction. He remained cheerful because, in place of precise, heel-clicking drill movements, they offered him comradeship. He had always preferred the company of men and here was good company in abundance, its society and steadfastness releasing the full force of his jovial, tolerant disposition, so that like Smut Potter and Jem Pollock before him, he soon became a great favourite in his company and could be relied upon to squeeze laughter from the most melancholy incidents, like the upsetting of the rum ration jar or a mortar explosion that smeared the section’s breakfast rashers against the parapet. He had never had an eye for natural beauty so that the hideous disfigurement of the landscape did not distress him in the least and there was another aspect of active service that commended itself to him. When in the line nobody nagged him about his personal appearance, which was almost worth the sacrifice of home and family, for first Martha, his mother, and then Gloria, his wife, had never ceased to berate him for failing to care for his clothes or scrape the stubble from his chin. Over here, as long as he was out of range of the martinets, he could go days without removing mud that adhered to him and as to shaving regularly he often grew a tramp’s stubble half-an-inch long. There was, in fact, a freedom that a man could not fail to appreciate after years of nagging at the Hermitage. For all this, however, he had no great hopes of seeing Germany’s defeat by midsummer for what had impressed him most out here had been the apparent permanence of the war, with its miles and miles of deep ditches, its unending forests of wire, its deep, roomy dugouts (especially in captured sections of the German line) and the multiplicity of expensive-looking mechanical transport that swarmed everywhere between support lines and rest billets. To Henry’s simple mind it seemed ridiculous to suppose that so much effort, and so much money, should have been poured into an enterprise due to end in a month or so. Frugal use of stock and plant had been practised by generations of Pitts at Hermitage, where a five-barred gate was expected to do service for twenty-five years, and sometimes the evidence of waste that he witnessed in France depressed him. He could not help thinking how useful some of these things would prove if he could have transported them to the farm.

A dozen or so sectors north of Henry’s was another Valley man who would have challenged Horace had he heard him prophesying victory by June. This was Smut Potter, whose estimate of the duration of the war was based upon the strength of German counter-attacks during the Loos fighting last September. Smut had never shone at arithmetic. One of his drawbacks throughout life had been his inability to count beyond ten. At Mary. Willoughby’s little school he had used his fingers for counting but a fog descended on his brain when he had used up all his fingers and thumbs and was obliged to start again. Yet numbers impressed him and he made a point of counting the German dead when the company occupied one of the enemy’s trenches. Until Loos this had been an easy thing to accomplish, for he was engaged in nothing but local sorties where the dead and prisoners seldom exceeded a dozen, but in the big push that autumn Smut’s counting system broke down the first day, for he was in the second wave to cross no-man’s-land and jump into a deep trench previously held by the Brandenburgers and here he found acres of Germans killed in the preliminary bombardment. It had seemed to him then, that the German Army must have been eliminated, that only a few dazed survivors would be left to scramble out of range of the British guns but he very soon discovered that this was not so for, by midday, he and his friends were counter-attacked, bundled out of the captured trench and were soon back at starting-point, where they were pinned down by fresh hordes appearing as from nowhere.

The seesaw went on for four days. Every time a few yards of rubble was won it was carpeted with German dead but the enemy soon reappeared with any number of fresh men until the offensive ground to a halt and the survivors of Smuts company were withdrawn for rest and refit.

During a spell in billets behind the line he pondered his experiences so deeply that he missed several chances of relieving his quartermaster’s worries in respect of various shortages. At last, finding no answer to the mystery, he turned for enlightenment to his particular chum, a Stepney coster, called Harry.’ ‘Airy boy,’ he said, ‘where do ’ee reckon they all come from?’ and Harryboy, whose familiarity for humanity
en masse
was the natural product of an East End upbringing, replied, unhelpfully, ‘All them mucking Fritzes? Blimey, doncher know? They collects all the dead uns after every show an’ puts ’em through a bloody mincer in the Kaiser’s palace! Then they cart all the sausage meat to a bloody great bakery where they bake it, an’ out they come good as noo ready for the next show!’ Smut, of course, did not accept this as a satisfactory explanation of the inexhaustibility of the Kaiser’s manpower but secretly he felt that the real explanation came as close to necromancy.

Young Harold Eveleigh, seventeen-year-old brother of Gilbert, who had profited by Gilbert’s false start and enlisted in a town a hundred miles from the Valley, would have taken issue with Horace on yet another account—that of the popular belief that all Germans were cowards, who ran away once they were bombed out of their deep shelters and called upon to ‘face cold steel’. Harold had been in France since early September, despite his mother’s frantic efforts to trace him and haul him out of the Army as she had once succeeded in doing as regards Gilbert. Harold looked at least twenty, having inherited his father’s height and had joined up for devilment but whilst he was still in training, and serving under a false name, he learned that his elder brother had been killed in a bombing accident at a neighbouring camp. He and Gilbert, as the two elder boys in a long family of girls, had been very close and Harold had to take it out on somebody, so he managed to wangle his way into a draft on the point of leaving for France and soon became as enthusiastic a slayer of Germans as Smut Potter, although he never approached the latter’s efficiency. There was already a belief among veterans that a newcomer was at his best during his first few weeks in the line and that thereafter he deteriorated as a fighting machine. Harold Eveleigh’s recklessness during the Loos push justified this theory. He arrived in France only a fortnight before the battle opened and when his shattered unit was withdrawn he had accounted for at least five Germans and probably one or two more. He came through unwounded, one of four in his platoon, and the experience taught him, among other things, that war correspondents who described the Germans as a nation of cowards were either deliberate liars or very badly informed for he witnessed acts of heroism on the part of enemy personnel that would have surprised him had they been performed by some of the elite British regiments, like the Coldstreamers, or the Royal Welch. He saw three Germans killed in quick succession trying to rescue a wounded comrade from the wire and the next day came across a dead machine-gunner, lying beside his weapon with seventeen wounds in his body and a deep trench down which he could have withdrawn within yards of his emplacement. He saw German stretcher-parties walk through a box barrage carrying British wounded and he studied the impassive faces of some of the dead Saxons who had refused to surrender a surrounded sap when their nearest reinforcements were pinned down by an incessant rain of shells. After Loos, Harold was in and out of the line for another six months and was sent back with a slight wound, in February 1916. During this period he learned many basic facts about the war but perhaps the most important of them was that a man’s courage under fire did not depend upon his nationality but upon such factors as how much sleep he had had in the last seventy-two hours, what kind of training he had received, how much rum had been available before an attack and even on the arrival or non-arrival of his mail. It also depended, just as the veterans argued, upon how long a man had been out and what kind of sectors he had served in, so that when, to his amazement, he was included in a group of survivors and sent home to train for a commission he would have admitted to anyone, Horace Handcock included, that the respite he had gained represented the difference between Harold Eveleigh the Hero, and Harold Eveleigh the Coward.