The Somme (10 page)

The berth was a broad canvas hammock slung on frames, but, after the sharp discomfort of a succession of stretchers, it seemed a couch for a prince. There was a pillow, and four thick blankets, two above and two below, and the folds of these last successfully smothered the angularities of the frames. From this high perch Everitt could see that the other berths, to judge from groans and restless tossings, were occupied by serious cases: naturally the lighter casualties were stowed near the roof. Behind him a door gave admittance to some kind of store-room for dressings and utensils, and in front was the narrow pass by which he had entered. He lay so close to the roof that the windows were beneath him, but across the corridor he could glance downwards to the busy tramway.

He did not know how long it would take to load the train, and no one seemed able to enlighten him. By this time it was four o'clock, and the hot afternoon sun made the carriage intolerably stuffy. Everitt began to believe the journey might prove less amusing than he had been given to understand. There was nothing whatever to do, and he could only watch the movements outside at the expense of a crick in the neck. The man on the top berth opposite was too badly hurt to give any answer to his attempt at conversation, and Everitt in his loneliness discovered that he was incredibly tired and sleepy. An orderly approaching, he learned that the train was now fully loaded. ‘But she never starts before midnight – else the Jerries 'ud see us, and there'd be dirty work.' Whether from guns or bombs he did not say, but the prospect of eight hours' delay was sufficiently depressing. Something of this must have appeared in his face, for the other was impelled to cheer him. ‘Tea's at five and you'll be at Rouen to-morrow morning.'

This was news indeed. Rouen he had seen several times – a wide-spreading town standing finely in the broad Seine valley, noteworthy in passing for the steep wooded hills over the river, the grey Cathedral with its curiously truncated tower, and the iron suspension-bridge that carries the railway. He would rather it had been Abbeville or Boulogne, whence Blighty was obviously more accessible, but were there not ambulance-ships sailing direct from Rouen riverwards to Southampton? The orderly confirmed this, and, learning the extent of Everitt's hurts, told him he was ‘a dead cert for Blighty.' ‘They're bunged up with bad cases at all the Bases – too bad to move – and they daren't keep any others there long.'

This was better still and a third meal went far to bind the spell – hot tea in enamelled bowls (blue outside and white within), bread and butter spread with liberal jam, and actually a hunk of cheese to follow. The friendly orderly – a pale, weedy, spectacled youth in baggy trousers – brought him another pillow to ease his injured leg, and in something very like contentment Everitt pulled the blankets over his head to chew the cud of comfort.

For to be in repose of mind and body after long weeks of suffering is perhaps the greatest blessing the weary world can show. He must have seemed an object pitiable enough, soiled with dirt and sweat, ragged and unshaven, but to lie there in comfort, free for the time from pain, secure from danger, exulting in the knowledge that in a few hours he would be carried away from all the complicated horrors of war, was a very fair substitute for Heaven.

In a few minutes he must have been asleep, for, opening his eyes again, he found that night had fallen. The train was motionless, but he had no notion if it were still in the clearing-station. The compartment, dimly lit by a shaded lamp round which moths were dancing feverishly, was eerie enough in the gloom. Occasionally a groan or a curse came from a man suffering beyond endurance. The air was rank with exhalations, hot, stuffy, and intolerably offensive. Dirt, stale sweat, dried blood, varnish and a smell of drugs and food contended together in a sickening medley. Outside the guns still boomed in harsh chorus, softened by distance from a bark to a roar, but tireless as ever. Someone said it was ten o'clock and consigned the Red Cross to Hell for the delay.

A little later came the Doctor and Sister on their rounds. In that crowded box there was little they could do – largely their duty was to change essential dressings, make minor adjustments for comfort's sake, and, principally and above all, to speak a cheering word to souls sorely in need of it. Always the men tried to catch the Sister's eye, eager for a word, and grinning with gratification when they received it. Once again they were all ‘sonny,' and it was not only the five ‘Woodbines' that made them glad to see her. With their departure Everitt dozed and waked and dozed again. At last a jerk told him that the train had started, and that Jerry had once again been cheated.

The night's journey was a nightmare. At the time Everitt was perhaps too tired to think about what he saw, just as, in the line, the need for violent action between bouts of bemused exhaustion had drugged his brain to numbness. But afterwards every detail grew vivid to memory. At home in England he would go over the whole journey again from Les Bœufs to Rouen, visualizing every detail, trembling and growing sick with horror at these vivid night-thoughts, shaking with panic to think of dangers that were passed.

The train took thirty hours to reach Rouen – from midnight on Tuesday to the early hours of Thursday morning, and they had been eight hours in their cots before it started. Everitt passed the time in broken dozes, which at first seemed to refresh him, but afterwards served only to exasperate him by their brevity. Several times during the night a doctor or a Sister visited them, asked in a whisper if all were well, and passed on noiselessly. Some of the men near him were desperately injured. The tattered thing in the cot opposite on the lowest tier was bandaged from neck to waist, and lay there hour after hour groaning through set teeth, too ill to move so much as a finger. Only the most desperately urgent operations could be attempted in a moving train, and all they could do for him was to inject morphia and sponge his face and lips. Another man was mangled so ruthlessly with shrapnel in the back and buttocks that he could find no position of comfort. Howsoever he tossed and shifted, he could not relieve the pressure on the wounds – great raw surfaces as though he had been flayed.

All the night long the orderlies were busy bringing draughts of water to burning throats, changing bandages when necessary, talking to those whom pain made garrulous. The grotesque horrors of the night made Everitt sick to see; the Sisters and orderlies performed for helpless men the vilest offices. And always the train was rumbling through the darkness, while the cots swayed and rocked, and men grew light-headed with pain and fever.

As far as Amiens the line was blocked with every kind of traffic – fodder for the Push in the shape of men, horses, guns and stores. On their journey southwards Everitt had been astonished by the volume of the traffic behind the rail-heads, and had counted the ambulance-trains with something like personal dismay. Thus the present delay was readily explicable.

The grey morning found them still jogging towards the north-west. The day was passed principally in waiting for meals. The kitchen, for convenience's sake in respect of water, lay immediately behind the engine, and the orderlies must utilize the frequent halts for the carrying of the pails of tea and porridge and trays of bread and bacon along the track from coach to coach. Thus much of the food was cold by the time it reached its destination.

There were no platforms between the coaches, and doctors and Sisters alike swung themselves from one to another by means of the stanchions beside the doors. Only thus had they been able to follow their night-rounds. Everitt, of course, had seen nothing of this, and now only learned it from the friendly orderly together with other vivid details of what he called a dog's life. The gymnastics involved in rushing up and down the track beside the slowly moving train and in swinging the heavy pails to and from the coaches were alone almost enough to tire a man at the end of a day. Add to this the vile duties of the sick bays, and it was clear that even the Red Cross behind the line had its strenuous moments. Their rest, it seemed, came on the return journey to the clearing-station, but before they could ‘get down to it,' it was necessary to scrub and scour every corner of the train and every article in it.

Dinner was an affair of stew and potatoes, bread and rice; tea copied yesterday. Between these sole breaks in the monotony Everitt dozed and exchanged jerky conversation with the man opposite. Also he hoarded scanty cigarette-ends, and once nearly fell headlong in trying to reach across the gangway for a match. Someone loaned him a magazine, bursting with War jokes, and crammed with optimism and robust cheer. But he found reading difficult, and dozed the more as the day grew warmer.

As the chill morning brightened towards noon he was perplexed to notice the air more and more strongly infected with a hideous carrion reek, such as was already only too familiar. The stench seemed more offensive whenever in his twistings and turnings he raised the folds of the blanket on his cot. The sickening sweetish odour filled him with a shuddering disgust, and appetite fled. The strangeness of the thing puzzled him, but it was only in Hospital at Rouen that he learned its meaning. Apologizing shamefacedly to an orderly there, the latter replied cheerfully: ‘Not a bit of it. Of course she's hound to hum after all those hours in the train with never a dressing. They'll clean it out for you to-morrow in the butcher's shop, and you'll be as sweet as a bloody rose.' He realized that he had no cause to feel shamed like a detected leper. His wound had turned septic and that vile odour of decay was part of the day's work.

All that day the train jolted through the hot plain of Normandy, and the men grew languorous in the heat. In that polluted air the coolness of evening was doubly welcome, but it was not until ten o'clock on Wednesday night that they reached the sidings and ghastly flickering arc-lamps of Rouen. The delay there was exasperating. Six times they passed the illuminated face of a clock below a signal-cabin, each time on a different pair of rails. Complicated manœuvres of shunting followed, and the train entered the station three times before reaching its destination.

Excitement now kept every one awake, and rumour declared that a boat was waiting at the quay to ship the whole trainload to England. Jerked downwards and outwards on the stretcher, Everitt found himself on a long platform paved with wounded. The arc lamps showed the dimly lighted train disgorging streams of helpless and grotesquely bandaged men, the platform crowded with strange-looking figures arrayed in rags and tatters of muddy khaki and white linen, and a long line of Red Cross Ambulances filling rapidly and driving away into the darkness. It was early morning before Everitt found a place in one of them, and by then nothing seemed to matter but a bed. There were stories of spring-mattresses, sheets and feather pillows, and filthy as any tramp though he knew himself to be, he felt perfectly willing to crawl contentedly into such a nest of bliss and sleep indefinitely.

At this hour of the morning the town was dark and silent, and their destination uncertain: England was obviously as remote as ever. The night air was cool and refreshing; the flash and roar of the guns were quenched at last. In half an hour they saw lights beside the road and on a board the legend ‘No. 1 General Hospital'; and there followed a long succession of similar boards numbered consecutively. The Hospital area covered many acres, but in the gloom it was impossible to see anything save the grey shapes of buildings.

At No. 5 board they swung away from the road and halted before a brightly lit double doorway. Here they were carried into a long bare waiting-room already occupied by fifty stretchers. Following the inevitable Inquisition came the night-Sister in the silent ward, clean, sweet-smelling sheets, the discarding of the grimed rags of the journey, and billow upon billow of slumber and sweet forgetfulness.

Here was the Base at last, after a journey of thirty hours from the rail-head, and sixty hours form no-man's-land. For Everitt at least ‘The Somme' was a memory.

But not far away the fires of hate burned red as ever, and the long agony quickened with the days.

‘He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,

Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,

And rouse him at the name of Crispian.'

—
KING HENRY V

We two were alone in the carriage and entire strangers. The War-to-end-War was already a memory, and we were travelling together from London towards the West. Falling easily into talk after the garrulous manner of holiday-makers, we drifted from the time-honoured conventions of the weather gradually but surely towards the Great Tragedy. There followed the inevitable question – ‘What were you in?' and we fell to discussing War in the abstract, the ethics of it, and the alternatives promised by the League of Nations.

My companion professed himself so rabid a Pacifist that I could not help asking him how it was he had ever worn khaki. He replied with unexpected fierceness that he had been bullied into soldiering, and had only joined the Army to avoid ridicule. He had always hated War, and realized the horror and folly of it; but better these things than the degradation of white feathers. For the same reason he had joined an Infantry battalion – ‘so that they shouldn't mock me any longer.' It seemed that his subsequent adventures had served merely to confirm his prejudices.

The talk turned to cowardice, and to what extent it is a crime in War. I noticed that my companion was growing strangely excited, and, on my remarking that a deserter could expect no mercy, he cried out at me that it was a pity that those who framed such harsh judgments could not themselves be put to the test. Experience would probably broaden their charity.

Seeing myself to be treading on dangerous ground I hastened to admit with due humility that I had spoken without knowledge. A civilian had obviously no experience of these things. He seemed mollified by my apology, and asked me if I cared to hear a story. Scenting a yarn of the War, I laid aside my newspapers, and he needed no further encouragement.