The Somme (2 page)

The ‘Cookers' lay in a deep hollow a mile to the rear of the line. The place was known as ‘Death Valley,' by no means without reason. There were the foremost batteries, and the fatigue party waited until dusk in a whirlpool of hurry. The ‘Big Push,' to use the euphemistic cant of the day, was in full cry. Always new guns were arriving, and ammunition-limbers, ration-wagons, water-carts, field-kitchens, mules, stores of the Royal Engineers, camouflage materials, corrugated iron, timber, barbed wire, sandbags in thousands. No lorries or ambulances could reach Death Valley, however, which lay far from paved roads among the uplands of the Somme. The hill-side tracks had been utterly obliterated by the weeks of shell-fire since the bloodstained 1st July, and all the countryside was a wilderness. To write ‘a wilderness' is easy, but to realize the appearance of the landscape you must have seen it. Thereabouts the country is open downland, after the manner of Sussex, largely grass-covered, and sprinkled capriciously with rare patches of woodland. From the crests of the ridges mile upon mile of country was visible, and everywhere the land lay utterly waste and desolate. Not a green thing survived the harrowing of the shells. Constant barrages had churned the land into a vast desert of shell-craters, one intersecting another like the foul pock-markings of disease. To look over these miles of blasted country, thus scarified to utter nakedness, was to see a lunar landscape, lifeless, arid and accursed.

At night this sense of other-worldliness was stronger than ever. In the dense darkness, where to show a light was probably suicide, the dismal sea of craters was lit only by the flash of guns and the noiseless ghastly glare of Verey lights. In the white radiance of the magnesium flares all things seemed to await judgment, and the ensuing utter darkness came with the suddenness of doom. From dusk to dawn they traced in the sky their graceful parabolas, hanging long in the air as though unwilling to cease their brooding over it. Always they seemed cold, revealing, pitiless, illuminating with passionless completeness this foul chaos of man's making, unutterably sad and desolate beneath the stars. From far behind the line you could trace the course of the trenches by their waxing and waning, and the veriest child at home knew the danger of their all-revealing splendour.

By day the hills were deserted, and only in the valleys and hollows was movement visible. In daylight those open ridges might only be crossed in safety by small parties of perhaps twenty men – lost in the vastness of the landscape. Larger parties drew gun-fire, and road traffic could by no means face the wilderness. It was in such small parties that the Loamshires had first found their way to Combles from the flesh-pots of Amiens: their first sight of the Somme battlefield was gained from the Crucifix above Death Valley. This ancient iron cross, rusty, bent, and ominous, yet remained as a notorious landmark on the hill-side, and from the shattered trenches near by they looked forward across the valley to a hideous welter of dust and smoke and intolerable noise. A heavy bombardment was in progress, and great spouts of flying earth sprang skywards unceasingly. Not a yard of the tortured earth appeared immune from these volcanoes, and it seemed impossible that a man could live five minutes within the zone of their tumult. And yet they knew that men were facing their utmost shock and horror not a mile from where they were standing, and it was all too obvious that their turn awaited them Tiny dust-coloured figures could be seen moving amid the welter, surviving by a miracle. The continuous hullabaloo of guns smote their ears with a vicious perseverance of shock. There, across the valley, lay the reeking core of this desolation, smoking, flaming, forcing itself with hideous toil and confusion towards an unknown decision. For miles to north and south stretched this artificial Hell, and the reek of it darkened the autumn sky.

Within the region of desolation the rare woods were matchwood only, shattered stumps of trees, bristles of timber splintered and torn to fantastic shreds and Patches. Each wood was a maze of ruined trenches, obstructed by the fallen riven trunks of trees, dotted with half-obliterated dugouts, littered with torn fragments of barbed wire. This, indeed, was largely twisted and broken by shell-fire, but in rusted malignancy it yet remained fiercely hindering. Immediately after their final capture (for commonly they changed hands half a dozen times in a week) these woodlands of the Somme represented the apotheosis of Mars. There lay the miscellaneous débris of war – men living, dying and dead, friend and foe broken and shattered beyond imagination, rifles, clothing, cartridges, fragments of men, photographs of Amy and Gretchen, letters, rations, and the last parcel from home. Shells hurling more trees upon the general ruin, the dazing concussion of their explosion, the sickly sweet smell of ‘gas,' the acrid fumes of ‘H.E.,' hot sunshine mingling with spouts of flying earth and smoke, the grim portent of bodies buried a week ago and now suffering untimely resurrection, the chatter of machine-guns, and the shouts and groans of men – such were the woods of the Somme, where once primroses bloomed and wild rabbits scampered through the bushes.

Rarely are there many men visible, and the few are hot, grimy and exhausted beneath their ludicrous shrapnel helmets shaped like pie-dishes. They move slowly because they can by no means move otherwise. The mud from recent rains has caked on the skirts of their great-coats, and their boots and puttees are coated white and yellow with soil. Probably they last shaved a week ago, and have since washed in shell-holes. They are irritable, quarrelsome, restless even in their fatigue, with dark shadows beneath their eyes and drawn, set faces. That little group carrying a stretcher, plodding slowly, with eyes fixed on the ground and faces of a strange dead, yellowish hue, is leaving the front line. For perhaps forty-eight hours the men have been lying in holes and ditches, ‘being shelled to hell.' They passed the time as best they might – smoking, dozing, eating, quarrelling, drinking, cleaning rifles that were instantly fouled again by the drifting dust. They dared not leave their holes even to relieve the demands of nature. Vermin maddened them and only ceased their ravages in the cool of the night. Occasionally a shell struck home and they saw their friends mangled to red tatters. Sometimes men were numbed to idiocy by concussion; sometimes they were buried alive in the earthquake of a collapsing trench; sometimes a lucky man secured an arm wound and ‘packed up' for hospital before their envying eyes. Perhaps an exposed position involved digging. Chalk is tough to handle, and the spur of shell-fire, if it goads to exertion, does little to invigorate. And this is why they seem dazed, with the haggard beaten air of suffering children. But at least their faces are set towards the old familiar world of trees and fields and farm-yards; of women and children; of red-roofed estaminets where vin rouge restores the hearts of men, of straw barns where lives oblivion.

It will be said that here is no trace of the ‘jovial Tommy' of legend, gay, careless, facetious, facing all his troubles with a grin and daunting the enemy by his light-heartedness. We all know the typical Tommy of the War Correspondents – those ineffable exponents of cheap optimism and bad jokes. ‘'Alf a mo', Kaiser,' is the type in a nutshell. A favourite gambit is the tale of the wounded man who was smoking a Woodbine. Invariably he professes regret at ‘missing the fun,' and seeks to convey the impression that bayonet fighting is much like a football match, and even more gloriously exciting. It was such trash that drugged men's minds to the reality of war. Every one actively concerned in it hated it, and the actual business of fighting can never be made anything but devilish. It is even divested of the old hypocritical glories of music and gay colours (and so far, indeed, the change is for the better). The patriots at home urged that ‘it was necessary to keep up the nation's spirit; nothing would have been gained by unnecessary gloom,' but a people that must be doped to perseverance with lies is in an evil case, and the event of these Bairnsfather romances was a gigantic scheme of falsehood. How bitterly it was resented the nation never knew.

From Death Valley the Loamshires marched over the hills to Meaulte. At the tail-end of the march they were dog-weary, but twelve hours' sleep on straw went far to restore them. For twenty-four hours the joy of release was undimmed. With clean, vermin-free underclothing, and after a long night's rest and a hot shower-bath, once more it was possible to think sanely; the lowering cloud of urgent danger was lifted for a season. Perhaps it was a cynical enjoyment, but the bands that played in the square, the cosy, crazy little shops where wrinkled old women sold delicious coffee, the roaring tide of khaki, drunk and sober, in the streets, made them forget altogether those thousands suffering and dying in the furnace not half a dozen miles away. Meaulte lies on the edge of the ‘old front line' and, to normal eyes, was hideous enough. The houses had been shelled to greater or less dilapidation, and dust lay thick on every road and yard. The shops, even when intact, were blighted with a hopeless dirt and squalor. Hardly a house remained in occupation, and the few inhabitants, lost in the crowd of troops, sold coffee, vin rouge, biscuits, chocolate, tinned fruits and cigarettes as the last resource against ruin. Every garden had run wild, and the autumn flowers were dusty and stunted among the weeds. It was a foul-mouthed, jostling throng that filled the streets, their pockets temporarily full and hearts light by reason of a week's respite. Small wonder drunkenness and debauchery ran riot in the place. They were the only means of forgetting.

From this grey pandemonium the men of the Loamshires hoped to march westwards again to the real France beyond the battle zone. ‘Divisional Rest' was due, and already that month the brigade had lost more than half its strength at Leuze Wood. New drafts had restored their numbers, but some weeks of work together would be required to restore the battalions to efficiency. But, quenching the sergeant's pious hope, came on the second morning the order to ‘parade for pay and stand by ready to move off in an hour's time.' The news came like a blow, and the delayed pay an hour before departure seemed a refinement of exasperation. Of what use was money if the creditors were to be moved away from all chance of spending it? During pay-parade the company commanders, haranguing their men, told them that they were to return to the ‘forward area' (blessed euphemism) for ten days, and that the battalion's sole duty lay in the construction of a forward-trench as close as might be to the German lines. They were assured, with a particularity that seemed almost suspicious, that during this ‘tour in the line' they were to be used only as pioneers. Certainly they had done Yeomen's service on the Somme, both on the 1st July at Gommecourt and on the 9th September at Leuze Wood, and undoubtedly the new drafts were inexperienced and unassimilated. But already the rumoured Divisional Rest had been cut down from a month to a day, and dark suspicions grew like the rank weeds of Meaulte.

Trones Wood of ill memory was their destination, and the march there filled the greater part of two days. After a night in old German dugouts, the official Reserve position were found to be nothing more than a series of shelter trenches midway between Trones Wood and Guillemont. These were the merest slots in the ground, none more than five feet deep. Wrapping themselves in blankets and ground-sheets, and covering the tops of the trenches with pilfered timber and sheets of corrugated iron, they made themselves as comfortable as might be. These narrow ditches resembled the drainage-trenches of a London suburb in the heyday of its development towards villadom, but the grimly humorous found a resemblance to graves. By good management it was just possible to curl up head to head in the slots, and the impedimenta of equipment were jammed haphazard into holes and corners. After dark no lights were allowed above ground, but, by shutting in a section of trench with ground-sheets, the feeble illumination of candles was available to those who had the good fortune to possess any. Crawling along these narrow alley-ways at night, dodging beneath ingenious erections of blankets, stumbling over a long litter of men and equipment, you would imagine yourself in an overcrowded coal-mine, where fools performed the simplest tasks with incredible toil. To turn, you must stand up, and to venture out of the trench was to invite the immediate disaster of falling headlong into a shell-hole. Once you had lost your bivouac it might take you half an hour to recover it.

Fortunately, the rain held off until the evening of the Loamshires' departure. Even two hours had sufficed to transform the trenches into slimy morasses, with equipment and personal belongings fast sinking into the mud. Utterly forlorn these ‘homes' seemed in their inundation, and, with nowhere to sit in comfort, men were the less sorry to leave them. Two days and nights saw them back again, so exhausted after their march that it was easy enough to fall asleep in the rain, often with nothing but a wet ground-sheet between the sleeper and a puddle. This time they occupied other trenches behind the wood, wider and less exasperatingly crowded. Here it was necessary to carve shelters in the sides of the trenches, using rubber sheets and blankets as the outer trenchward wall. Coiled up in these lairs, you could at least avoid the rain, and by sharing your bivouac it was even possible to lie warm. (To neutralize this luxury, the lice were the more active in snugger quarters.)

For several days their time was passed chiefly in salvage-fatigues. These involved the tiresome quartering of long acres of ground, and the collection and sorting into a variegated dump of all the litter of the battlefield. Not far from Trones Wood a blown-in trench held thousands of Mills bombs. These ingenious weapons are rendered harmless by a steel safety-pin, which rusts with damp. So long as they are undisturbed they are innocuous, but they have been known to lie forgotten and unheeded for weeks only to explode with fatal results at an inadvertent kick. Thus it was delicate work disinterring them from the earth and débris in which they were nearly buried; but by a fluke of good fortune none had rusted sufficiently to fracture the pins, and there were no casualties.