Post of Honour (40 page)

‘Only the essentials,’ Claire told him, ‘although I daresay it would cheer him up to learn we had our own kind of troubles over here.’

‘Well, you tell him all you’ve a mind to, Mrs Craddock and send Marian over soon as you like.’ He looked round the disordered kitchen with impatience. ‘This place needs a doin’ over, don’t it? I reckon Marian’ll make the dust fly! Funny thing about most women—present company excepted o’ course—either they can’t have enough of a man one way, or they can’t do enough for him another! Now Marian, backalong, she was different. She kept the place fresh but didden seem to mind how many kids come along!’ He smiled to himself and Claire thought his ability to do that again was the most encouraging thing to emerge from the interview.

III

O
n the night of March 20th, 1918, Paul took a convoy of lorries carrying ammunition up to a battery about two miles behind the Green Defence Zone, in front of St Quentin. The night was dry, muggy and unusually quiet. Not a single shell whined overhead and only very occasionally did a flare of one sort or another light up the blackness for a few moments. It was difficult to believe that somewhere up ahead were hundreds of thousands of men slopping about in trenches that were only just beginning to dry out after the thaw.

After arranging for the shells to be off-loaded, the major commanding the battery invited Paul into his spacious dug-out for a drink.

He was hardly more than a boy, with a boy’s exuberance and lack of ceremony, and speculated gaily on the date of the long-awaited German offensive, saying that Jerry would probably wait for things to dry out a little more before trying his luck in the quagmire over which the British had tried to advance in the autumn, and when Paul asked if he thought the initial attack would be successful, he said, off-handedly, ‘Oh, they expect Old Fritz to gain some ground but our defences are fluid enough to cope with it. We shall just bring up reserves and counter-attack and in the end everything will be as-you-were I imagine. Well, here’s to a safe trip back and I wish to God I was going with you! Things are devilish dull here lately and I’m overdue for leave.’

Things remained dull until Paul’s lorries were about halfway back to the dump. Then, about 3 a.m., all hell broke loose, first in the areas nearer the base, then in the artillery zone behind him and finally right where the convoy was travelling, a mixture of high-velocity and gas shells straddling the road with terrifying accuracy. It was suicide to push on so Paul ordered the men out of the vehicles and let them disperse in the fields and they were pinned here for more than half-an-hour as the shifting barrage grew more and more intense and the landscape erupted under a continuous rain of shells. Paul was not long in doubt that this was it, the big push they had been promised as soon as Jerry had transferred a sufficient number of troops from the Russian front but what appalled him was the terrible intensity and accuracy of the barrage, as though thousands of guns of all calibres were concentrating on a relatively small area, switching back and forth with a horrid rhythm that prevented anyone making a dash for it. With the first lightening in the eastern sky came fog and Paul spared a thought for the poor devils trapped in the underground front line, saturated with gas, crouching in crumbling trenches and awaiting the first waves of the German infantry to appear through the mist that now lay heavily over the countryside.

About six o’clock, when the barrage seemed to be re-concentrating on the forward areas, he started the convoy moving again but before they had gone far a howitzer shell landed smack on the head of the column and the road was impassable. The pattern of the drumfire now resolved itself into a steady pounding of extreme back and front areas and only occasional shells, mostly gas, fell in the intermediate zone so that there was no alternative but to return to the battery site and await the arrival of trouble-spot engineers to clear the road. The men in the leading lorries had been killed outright so, unencumbered with wounded, they were able to turn and head back the way they had come, driving directly into the sheet of flame on the horizon.

Moving fast they covered the distance in just over twenty minutes but there was no sanctuary at the battery, nor was there much shelter in the gunners’ dug-outs. A direct hit, possibly two or three, had registered on the site and the place was a shambles. Every gun but one had been destroyed and the only living member of the crews seemed to be a bombardier nursing an injured hand. He was able to tell him that, apart from a team over on the right, he was the sole survivor.

‘We’d only fired a few rounds,’ he said, ‘they had us taped to an inch! I was over by the dump which didn’t go up, thank Christ. I bin out two years but never seen anything like this, not even on the Somme. It’s a different
kind
of straffing, sir, a proper your-turn-next carpet pattern. Jerry ’as all the bloody luck, don’t ’ee? Look at the fog out there!’

Paul’s sergeant put a field-dressing on the man and sent him over to the remains of the officers’ dug-out. It was useless to send him back to the dressing station for the fog belt in the west was masking a leaping sheet of orange indicating the barrage had switched yet again and was now firing at extreme range.

The gun on the right was still in action but its detonations sounded like apologetic coughs against the roar of the overall barrage. The ground quivered and heaved and the din penetrated the deepest recesses of the brain, slamming the door on every impulse not directly concerned with self-preservation. Paul staggered across to the battery HQ post and on his way recognised the remains of the boyish major who had entertained him three hours before, identifying him from among several blood-stained bundles by his military moustache and the crown on the lapel of his tunic. There was nothing he could do but get his surviving fourteen men under what cover was still available and there they remained until, through the tormented fog-belt, came the first of the beaten infantry.

They arrived in twos and threes, stumbling, blear-eyed men, some without rifles and about half of them walking wounded trying forlornly to find their way to a dressing station. Only one, a hard-bitten sergeant of a Midland regiment, was coherent and told Paul of chaos and carnage up the line where break-throughs had occurred right and left of the sectors his company had been holding.

‘Couldn’t do a damned thing to stop ’em!’ the man said, with a curse. ‘The saturation strafe they sent over at first light wiped out two-thirds of us. All the trenches up there are shallow and under-manned and then down comes this bloody fog to cap all! We held ’em off for a time with two machine-guns but they by-passed us and went round the flanks. It’s a real bloody cave-in if you ask me and it’ll take days to harden up, even if we’ve got plenty o’ reserves back there!’ He glanced bitterly at the fog which lay low on the ground all about them. ‘By God!’ he muttered, ‘if we’d had fog like this at Third Wipers we could have gone all the way to Berlin!’

Then a wounded captain arrived and with him an astonishingly composed Engineer, a tall, angular Scotsman with iron-grey hair who had been in the support line all night installing a pump. Paul never forgot him, a polite, methodical man of well over forty who took command of the half-demoralised mob of wounded and stragglers now milling about the littered gun-site. The Scotsman said they would have to organise a road-block and rallying point until reserves came up and a counter-attack could be mounted and his quiet confidence spread to Paul and some of the unwounded NCOs, who at once set to work, driving the three remaining lorries broadside on across the road, digging in each side and hauling timber and wire from the shattered gunpits and dug-outs to make some kind of entanglement to protect front and flanks. Men and more men trickled in until there were about two or three hundred to man the strongpoint, and as soon as the barrage lifted Paul sent off two despatch-riders to the rear with scribbled messages reporting their strength and position. The Scotsman told him that they were on the furthest edge of the Green Zone that had been designed for defence in depth but that the German attack had been launched before the new trenches were much more than surface scratches. There were plenty of tools available, and the men dug furiously after they realised they were out of range of all but long-range artillery and that the very speed of the German advance would mean a long interval must elapse before field batteries could be moved forward to give their infantry support. The bombardment had slackened appreciably and what there was of it seemed to be concentrated on areas further back, probably in the hope of checking the flow of reserves in the Green Zone. They had dug and wired a semi-circular strongpoint by nine o’clock and sited their three light machine-guns and two Lewis-guns by the time the first parties of German infantry appeared through the thinning fog at a range of perhaps four hundred yards. By then the gun on the right, that had been firing over open sites, was silent, having run out of ammunition and the Scotsman, walking along the curving trench, did not give the order to fire until the scattered groups on the edge of the mist were within close range. They went to ground at once and during the lull that followed some of Paul’s men brought up rations and a small jar of rum salvaged from the battery command post. Paul tried to contact the rear by telephone but the wire must have been cut to pieces by the bombardment, so the Scotsman despatched several of the walking wounded with orders to fan out both sides of the road and take their chance getting through with first-hand reports on the situation.

About midday the Germans attacked again, this time in greater strength and with at least two heavy machine-guns, but they were again beaten off and the Midland sergeant, who seemed to Paul the kind of man badly needed at Supreme Headquarters, forty miles back, said that in his view the enemy was employing completely revolutionary tactics in this offensive, pushing on wherever the resistance was weak and leaving the strongpoints to be mopped up by reserve divisions armed with mortars and supported by light artillery.

They were there in the improvised defence-hedgehog until dusk but had nothing worse than light machine-gun fire and sniping to contend with. The Germans out ahead had a flame-thrower but were never able to get close enough to use it. About six. to everyone’s relief, a despatch-rider arrived on a Douglas motor-cycle, with orders to retreat to a map reference three miles in the rear and they pulled out, taking the less badly wounded along with them and probed their way over the shattered plain for hours, occasionally being fired on by other groups of stragglers from sectors south and north of the St Quentin trenches. In one of these blind encounters the Scots captain was shot through the head; Paul never knew his name.

In the early hours of the morning they came unexpectedly upon a new line of strongpoints where reserves, rushed up earlier in the day, were furiously digging in. Paul and the survivors of his group were sorted out and directed to a scratch MT centre, established in front of Rouy le Grand. It was, they told him, thirteen miles from the previous front line. At Third Ypres, Paul reflected, it had taken the British four months and something like half-a-million casualties to capture a couple of miles of liquid mud.

IV

H
e remembered that first day clearly enough. The intensity of the switched barrages, the bloody shambles of the battery site, the cool, angular Engineer who had organised the defence, and even irrelevant details, like the dead gunner’s pathetic moustache and the bombardier’s shattered hand, but he could never recall the day-to-day life of the next few weeks, remembering the period only as a grey, misted-over interval, shot through with stress, fear and constant movement that resulted in a terrible physical exhaustion. More often than not throughout April and early May he seemed to be asleep on his feet or driving a Leyland lorry over the remains of roads and tracks, weaving between an eternal patchwork of shell-holes and breathing stale air through his respirator. His senses were numbed by shock, noise and lack of sleep so that there was no rhythm to his existence, as during his previous fifteen months in the field. His unit, merged into other decimated units, was flung here and there, north, south and back again, wherever it was needed to bring up rations and wire and ammunition and sometimes the lorries seemed to be moving to no purpose for days on end. All the men whose names he remembered disappeared into the chaos of the shifting front but others replaced them, half-trained boys of eighteen and wary, workshy men of nearly fifty, who waddled about much like Old Honeyman tending sheep in the big paddock at home. No mail came through, or if it did he was never there to receive it and everywhere the front seemed to be crumbling and the war as good as lost. As soon as the St Quentin break-through was plugged outside Albert went north into the dismal basin of the Lys, again fighting as an infantryman during the break-through at Bailleul. Then, when the northern offensive was held, he was sent south again to lovely, unspoiled country around Vailly, north of the River Vesle, where the exhausted survivors of St Quentin and the Lys were just in time for the May offensive on Chemin des Dames, and Ludendorff’s stormtroops smashed through on a broad front, penetrating to the Marne.

It was here, just before the supreme German effort, that he had a few days’ respite, drifting up and down quiet country roads through villages still inhabited by civilians and during this blessed period he sometimes let his mind drift back to the Valley, to the view of the meandering Sorrel seen from the south-west corner of Hermitage Wood but before he had made contact with home, or even caught up on his arrears of sleep, the third hammer blow fell on the exhausted divisions manning the Vauxaillon-Craonne Line and suddenly he was a rifleman again, holding out in forlorn little centres of resistance and washed back by the indefatigable grey tide from the east, escaping death sometimes by inches and going back and back with the wreck of British and French units blasted from their positions by mathematically plotted barrages, like the one that had shattered the old front line opposite St Quentin. On the morning of the 29th of May the tide finally engulfed him, blotting out past and present for a period of fifty-nine days.