The Somme (16 page)

For we were strained to the last pitch of endurance: nerves were on edge and tempers raw to distraction. All that evening I heard sounding in my ears the hiss and roar of the barrage. We were light-headed with anxiety and the fever of wounds, and the sleep that alone could cure us seemed banished from the world.

Several times we wandered aimlessly to the railway station, where a scared crowd of civilians clamoured impotently for trains and stared at us wide-eyed as at wild beasts from a menagerie. (And they had cause.) At the Y.M.C.A. hut, still bravely open, and at several estaminets we sought in vain for food and drink. Stocks were everywhere exhausted, and all men concerned chiefly with dread of to-morrow. Their fears were well-founded, for next morning the Germans captured the town and seized the clearing-station for billets.

It was long after midnight when our train at last arrived. For more than an hour there had been a noise of shunting in the distance, and we were not surprised to find that the journey was to be made in cattle-trucks. The last Red Cross train, crowded with stretcher-cases, had left soon after nine o'clock, and no other transport was available. Already many of the seriously wounded had been evacuated in wagons and lorries. To enjoin haste a few shells fell haphazard on the town.

Yet even now we must resign ourselves to further waiting. We were marshalled in a long line by the rail-side, and made our way slowly down the length of the train, thirty men clambering into each truck. And then there followed an intolerable and inexplicable delay. For two more hours we were kept in gusty impatience outside the station, and then, in the small hours of the morning, at last began our journey to the sea. The moon had vanished and the closed trucks were as black as a cave at midnight, but we were leaving behind us the welter of the line, and looked eagerly forward to to-morrow.

Thirty men in a French cattle-truck without their equipment can rest in comparative comfort. Forms or seats there were none, but we sorted ourselves as best we could in the darkness into two long lines on either side of the wagon, our feet meeting in the middle. Few had overcoats or ground-sheets, and in our anxiety we had left the blankets behind us. By hugging together in pairs we made shift to keep almost warm, however, and a philanthropist even sought to cheer us with a mouth-organ. There were no rations and, above all, no cigarettes, so that his cheerfulness was the more praiseworthy.

The journey to the Base took fourteen hours. Most of the men in my truck were only slightly injured, and the jolting of the train was thus to them no more than annoying: those with body-wounds were, I imagine, less happy. Sleeping in broken snatches, we somehow tossed and turned and swore our way through the five hours of darkness, and, when day broke, pulled back the sliding doors to find the train grinding slowly through an unfamiliar landscape of wide flat cornlands. The sunlight did not flatter us. The sorry-looking crew of scarecrows in the wagon were dirty and ragged and unshaven, with dark rings under their eyes and the wolfish ill-temper of men tried wellnigh past endurance. The truck stank horribly of blood and dirt and the air was rank with fetid exhalations.

Early in the morning we halted at a small country town, where ladies of the French Red Cross Service brought out to us mugs of steaming café-cognac. The warm drink cheered us mightily, but beyond a shamefaced ‘Merci' and ‘Très bien' we could do little to show our gratitude. The Sisters, I thought, showed their courage in approaching the menagerie thus fearlessly.

While we waited there passed us a French Division ‘going up the line,' and with them also our conversation was sadly limited. Loudly proclaiming the obvious, we shouted to them that we were ‘blessé à la ligne,' and they replied with the familiar shibboleths of ‘Sale boche' and ‘C'est la guerre.' We understood one another well enough, however, and seemed to find an irrational pleasure in the meeting. This must have been one of the Divisions that filled the gap between Amiens and Soissons, and a few hours later they were doubtless in desperate action.

Soon after noon we drew up at a siding beside a Y.M.C.A. hut and a dressing-station. Mugs of hot tea hunks of bread, jam, bully-beef, cigarettes, field-cards – I cannot hope to convey to you the dizzy joy we found in them. We wolfed the food unashamed like starving animals, and lit our Woodbines with a fearful joy. The orderlies bandaged afresh those men whose wounds were bleeding from the jolting of the train, and cheered us with tales of the flesh-pots of hospital. As we left behind us the stark horrors of the line, we insensibly invested ourselves with something of the traditional gaiety of the wounded Tommy. We could hardly do otherwise: we only now began to realize the extent of our good fortune.

We reached Rouen about five o'clock, but waiting ambulances shattered our hope of Blighty. Ten minutes later we were in hospital, but not the calm haven of our dreams. At this time the Base hospitals were hopelessly congested by the sudden pressure of casualties. An ever-rising tide submerged them, and train succeeded train by day and night. The huts and tents were full to overflowing, and convoys leaving daily for England did little to relieve them. Each empty bed had three men to fill it, and the routine of the place had gone all to pieces. The orderlies told me that since the beginning of the German offensive they had been working for twenty hours a day. Baths and meals and dressings were dispensed haphazard: there was no one to give orders, and for the most part we were left to our own devices.

The throng in the steaming bath-house was so great that it was hard to find even standing-room. My left hand was of course useless, and thus disabled I tangled myself hoplessly in towels and clothing. Seen through the drifting clouds of steam, the crowded naked bodies of the men, and their halting, clumsy, fettered movements, made an excellent illustration for a canto of the
Inferno
. But an hour later we forgot all our troubles in the breathless luxuries of clean sheets, fresh linen and a soft mattress. Our shelter was a draughty and ill-lit marquee, but it seemed to us a palace. We were asleep almost before we were in bed.

But that evening I had been warned for an operation, and about midnight my sleep was roughly broken: ‘Come along, chum, get a move on. You're for the butcher's shop.' They do not believe in euphemism in a military hospital. Huddling on trousers and tunic, I groped my way down dark passages to the theatre and resigned myself to an hour's meditation in the lobby. The floor was paved with stretchers, and those of us who could walk stepped gingerly over them to a bench in the corner. It was a dreary ordeal. Some of the men on the stretchers were in such agony that they could not keep still or silent for a single moment. The big swing-doors leading to the theatre opened and shut continually, and within we caught sight of red-stained horrors lying side by side upon the tables. The reek of ether and chloroform clogged the air, and through the doors came the sound of hoarse, stertorous breathing, broken sometimes by sudden strident shrieks that set us asking anxious questions. ‘Do they always give chloroform?' ‘Oh yes; the chap that's making that row doesn't know what's happening to him.' But we would have been glad of stronger confirmation.

There were six tables in the theatre, and the less serious cases were dealt with on stretchers on the floor. From an unconscious man on one of the nearer tables came a shrill, tireless, monotonous yelling, and not far away four orderlies were holding down another who was fighting desperately against the anæsthetic. Pale, tired-looking doctors examined me; the sweetish scent of ether filled my nostrils; somewhere inside my head a wheel began to spin dizzily; the wheel became confused with the beating of a drum; the drum beat more and more softly, and I floated away into a sea of darkness and silence, to awake, sick and giddy, in the familiar gloom of the marquee. To the doctors I had repeated my story that the wound was from a bullet fired point-blank, but my dread was that I should blab my secret under the anæsthetic. My fears were once more groundless, however. The orderlies assured me that I had opened my mouth only in harmless and normal blasphemy.

In the morning the Sister recommended me to get my papers from the theatre and to see the officer in charge of the ward with a view to getting ‘marked for Blighty.' Such freedom of action was unprecedented in my experience, but this was no time for diffidence. I interviewed a truculent major in the receiving-room, satisfied him that I was fit to travel, and emerged triumphantly bearing papers marked in red ink with the magic ‘E.' Fortune favours the coward.

Two days later I was officially warned for England. (In the Army you are ‘warned' for everything – coal-fatigues, bombing raids, England, France, and your ‘ticket.') In a delicious flutter of excitement, I changed once again from hospital-blue to khaki, claimed my papers in the popular waterproof envelope, and travelled by ambulance with an exulting multitude to Rouen station. There we found a string of cattle-trucks luxuriously fitted with benches (obviously a leave train), received rations of bread, butter, beef and biscuits, and were told that our destination was Le Havre.

This was sufficient to convert even the most obstinate pessimists, and our failure to recognize the familiar route through Barentin and Yvetot worried us not at all. But our high hopes were premature. In the midst of an animated discussion of the relative merits of Leeds and London we fell to earth abruptly in the unexpected terminus of Trouville-sur-Mer, a dozen miles from Havre on the other side of the Seine estuary. Obviously this was no port for Blighty, and we besieged the staff of the train for explanations. The latter at first professed complete ignorance, and then told us that our present position was due to a misunderstanding; in half an hour we should be returning to Le Havre by way of Rouen. This sounded too fantastic even for Army transport; but we clutched eagerly at any straw, and did our best to believe them. In the light of after-events, I believe they were merely afraid to tell us the unwelcome truth.

But this meagre thread of hope soon snapped. On a range of hills towards the west was a long line of buildings, crowned by a Red Cross flag. We could not help realizing that this was a large Base hospital, and after two hours' further delay the train backed out of the station and took a branch line towards the foot of the hills. In a few minutes it turned remorselessly into a siding, and we received orders to detrain.

There were waiting for us some dozens of open trucks fitted with seats in the manner of a switchback at a fair. A narrow-gauge railway climbed the hill-side in a series of zigzags, and carried us rapidly through fields of young corn and budding woodland. Wide views opened inland towards the south, but we were in no mood to appreciate them. We felt that we had been ‘sold,' and it exasperated us to be treated like children who must do as they are told without the saving grace of reasons.

The engineers on the light railway confirmed our fears. There were no less than four hospitals at Trouville, and they laughed at our hopes of Blighty. Thousands had passed that way with a similar story. A few of the men swore whole-heartedly, but most were sullenly silent: the high hopes of the morning had turned to dust and ashes.

And that was the end of our dreams. Instead of an English hospital, a noisy Convalescent Camp in France, with trestle-beds, rough food, and all the fatigues and discomforts that went with them! The rush of reinforcements from England had cut down the available transport, and we were marooned at Trouville that we might not clog the lines of communication. But we found it difficult to look at the matter thus dispassionately, and after a scrambling half-hearted meal in the crowded mess-room, crept sullenly to our allotted huts and made shift to forget our troubles in sleep. For myself, I was not far from tears.

But worse was to follow. After twenty-four hours in Camp a great number of the more obviously ill and helpless were transferred to hospital, myself among them. A week later the walking wounded were removed to a new and partially completed colony that resembled nothing so much as a builder's yard. There was little to see but mud and cement, timber and ironwork; and everywhere stood the gaunt skeletons of huts and bungalows. An army of German prisoners was at work there, but for many weeks we lived in a limbo of muddle and makeshift. The ward at first contained only beds, bedding, and empty lockers, with a defective anthracite stove and three hurricane lamps. Outside, a sea of mud ended only at the doorway.

These discouraging surroundings underlined our original disappointment and sunk us in an apathy of pessimism. I in particular had creeping fears to keep me company. We had chummed together on the journey in the usual Army way, but birds of passage like ourselves could never stay long together. In each hospital we found new neighbours. The man who shared your rations to-day, to-morrow you lost for ever.

Those long lonely weeks at Trouville were a penance to me. I was haunted by the fear of discovery, and suffered almost the remorse of a murderer. Terrified by my dread of the death-penalty, night after night I dreamed that the worst had befallen me. I pictured to myself the firing-party and the word of command; the crash of the volley and ‘the nothing all things end in.' Again and again I recalled the details of that eventful evening, and shrank again from the shock of the bullet. The rifle, the scorching of the wound, the sound of the shots, the chance of an eavesdropper – I brooded miserably over the most sinister possibilities and tried to fashion a line of defence against every shred of evidence. Or should I admit the fact, but insist on an accident? Or would it be best to confess and ask for mercy? Wrapped all day in this obstinate cloak of introspection, I feared above all to betray myself by words shouted in the morbid dreams from which I awoke trembling and dreading the beginnings of madness. I remembered that the others were still there in the line, doing their duty that I might live in safety. Thus despising myself, I almost grew to envy what I now called their happiness. The healthy thoughts of the past seemed banished for ever.