The Somme (6 page)

Everitt's effort to stand upright showed that his leg, if unbroken, yet thrilled with pain when weight was placed upon it. It seemed that it must snap at the least pressure, and he noticed that the contracting muscles had drawn the heel upwards until only the toes could touch the ground. Evidently he could not walk unaided.

Help was imperative, and instinctively he thought of Myers. He had forgotten his existence for half a dozen hours, but weakness quickened his affection. In dread of the enemy he dared not raise his voice above a whisper, but almost immediately one of the motionless figures rose to its feet and blundered clumsily towards him. (But in no-man's-land at night every man has the gait of a drunkard.) A flare, however, revealed the cause of the figure's staggering, and at the same time showed that it was Myers.

But a Myers strangely altered! Round his head was a field-bandage, black with congealed blood, and an ominous wine-coloured crust concealed his face. From the edge of the roughly tied bandage the blood had dripped and hardened into grotesque black stalactites. Beneath its stains his face showed white and ghastly. ‘Caught a whack from shrapnel,' he whispered. ‘Knocked me silly for some time, and at first I thought I was done for. Just as though my head had been split. It's throbbing like the devil and I'm as giddy as a goose. What's yours?'

Everitt explained, and together they tied a field-dressing to his leg. The muddy puttee was tightly glued to the flesh beneath, but persistent effort removed it to reveal a neat plum-coloured patch on either side of the calf. His arm was stiffening and they despaired of releasing it from the sleeves of great-coat and tunic.

All at once they discovered that they were parched with thirst, and in a minute their two water-bottles were empty. Immediately there arose from every side that terrible litany of the wounded: ‘A drink, for Christ's sake.' Myers seemed to be the only man capable of walking, and he did the only thing possible – took their bottles from the dead and gave them to the living. He also produced a flat circular tin of malted milk lozenges (‘Meat and drink together,' said the advertisement) and these the scare-crows munched together with huge satisfaction. After a time they saw not far away the dim shapes of men digging, and heard the sound of smothered English curses. In a little while someone came over to them – a man of the Loamshires – to be instantly assailed with two demands – ‘Stretcher-bearers' and ‘the time.' But of neither could he tell anything very definite. ‘It might be about ten o'clock, and no doubt there are stretcher-parties at work. You'll be all right soon, but we can't leave off our job to help you chaps just now. Anyhow, we've got no stretchers.' Thus the visitor – a melancholy man with a disillusioned air, for which perhaps he had ample reason.

It seemed that the remnants of the battalion were ‘digging-in' not two hundred yards from the front enemy trench. The attack had reached the Germans ‘in places,' but the isolated fragments of trench so captured were untenable and had been abandoned in the darkness. No one knew exactly either where he was or where was the enemy. To-morrow they expected counter-attacks. ‘God knows what will happen, and He won't split.' More than half the battalion were casualties, and they looked like receiving neither water nor rations. There were rumours of relief to-morrow night, but in the meantime every one was ‘fed up and beat to the wide.' With this benediction the visitor left them, vaguely promising to ‘hurry up the stretcher-bearers.'

This dispiriting news made Everitt more anxious than ever to make an effort to regain the trench. In the darkness the place now seemed swarming with troops, and it was extraordinary that an enemy, who could not be more than a quarter of a mile away, made no attempt to disturb them. Yet the murmuring and thudding and clinking of the working parties met with no interruption, and mutual suspicion and uncertainty produced a truce. It was more than ever imperative, however, to gain some kind of shelter, and the muddy ditch they had left so unwillingly eight hours earlier now seemed to Everitt and Myers a kind of City of Refuge.

They reckoned that they had not more than three hundred yards to cover, and it was to be expected that some kind of organized help would be available in the trench. ‘What about these others?' said Myers, voicing both their thoughts. ‘We can't do anything for them, and the stretcher-bearers will be along soon,' answered Everitt, who, truth to tell, cared for one thing only – to leave that patch of ground which he already realized he should see in his mind's eye to his dying day. But the others heard their talk, and with the wounded man's pathetic anxiety for company, begged and beseeched them not to leave them. ‘Don't go away, chum, don't leave us here. Can't you help any way at all? I'm sure I could get along if you'd only help,' – when some of them could not even sit upright. ‘Poor old Jimmy's hit through the lungs,' said Myers; ‘he won't last long.' Jimmy lay only a little way off, choking and coughing, and choking again. ‘How goes it, chum?' ‘Pretty bad, mate,' and further words were drowned in a mouthful of blood. As well as they could they propped his head against a haversack and wrapped round him his great-coat and waterproof sheet. Myers had bandaged the wound (‘both lungs, poor devil – not an earthly'), and a drink of water was all they could do for him in parting. ‘Good luck, Jimmy – they'll soon pick you up.' ‘Good luck, Tom, you'll be in Blighty in a week,' and a choking cough followed them into the darkness. Jim Frampton, a gentle, peace-loving countryman, they had both known from the day they had enlisted together, and, as they stumbled away, they felt like traitors, and almost murderers. Yet, to stay there was merely uselessly to imperil their own chances. Cruel as it seemed to leave the others behind them, there was nothing they could do for them. ‘Perhaps they'll be carried off to-night by the stretcher-bearers,' said Everitt, but he knew the folly of any such delusion. For a battalion has only sixteen stretchers at best, adequate perhaps to holding the line, but absurdly insufficient in present circumstances. It would take two men at least three hours to carry a loaded stretcher to the road and an hour to return; there were perhaps four hundred casualties in the battalion; the survivors were working on the new trench-line throughout the night; what were Frampton's chances? Everitt never saw him again, and later counted his name among the killed.

At first Everitt tried to crawl, but the uneven ground twisted his injured leg unbearably. Then he attempted a kind of grotesque shuffle in a sitting position, stretching his left leg stiffly ahead and working himself forward by his hands. But by this means progress was painfully slow and infinitely exhausting, and it proved impossible to preserve under such circumstances the least sense of direction. Myers could obviously have found his way easily enough, but it seemed never to occur to him to do so. At last they pooled their resources. Using his rifle, barrel downwards, as a kind of crutch, Everitt threw his uninjured arm round Myers' neck and, thus locked together in a drunkard's embrace, they steered a twisted course west-wards. It was a partnership in infirmities. Everitt, helplessly lame, found a clear head and a keen pair of eyes; Myers, dizzy and partially blinded, supplied the motive power. Every hole and ridge was a trap, and a dozen times in five minutes they fell headlong. Again and again they must pause and rest, and in one such respite Everitt in vain attempted to propound an epigram that might be worthy of the occasion. But he tried in vain. It was no time for wit, and sarcasm must wait for safety.

Despite their snail's progress all sound of the working party died behind them. Snipers' rifles cracked like whips through the silence, and always the cold white flares were rising and falling. Overhead stray shells moaned and rumbled continually, but the zone of their danger lay far to the rear. They steered entirely by the Verey lights, aiming always to leave them behind, but finding, after the manner of traffickers in no-man's-land, that the flares rose obstinately on three sides of them. Now and again they passed dead men, men of the Loamshires side by side with Fusiliers, and once clay upon clay beside a riven thorn-bush. This bush Everitt thought he remembered, and they were encouraged to greater efforts.

But the intense exertion of their journey sent the sweat from them in salt streams, and soon their throats were dry as kilns. Once more they must rob the dead. Twice they drew blank, but the third attempt yielded a bottle nearly full of lemonade, made that morning with powder sent from home. ‘He likes lemonade so much.' And now strangers were drinking it, and they knew nothing, and he lay staring at the stars. The tang of the drink restored them and again they struggled onwards.

After a time Everitt felt himself so ill that he begged Myers to go ahead while he rested. In ten minutes the latter returned triumphantly. He had discovered a trench, not a hundred yards distant, occupied by men of a Rifle battalion, who, with the characteristic haziness of the ‘forward area,' had told him they ‘rather thought they were holding the front line.' At all events they knew nothing of any occupied trench to their front. It seemed that the Loamshire's original position lay farther to the left in this same trench, and that the Riflemen formed a flanking battalion to the attack. The whole position was incredibly hazy. For all they knew the Germans might be sharing the trench with them, and the revealing dawn might involve an instant struggle. But such a state of things was inherent to the forward fringe of the Push, and in the meantime the Riflemen were anxious chiefly for rum.

Thus advised, Myers had walked along the trench leftwards until he found a dump of wounded in charge of two stretcher-bearers. These were all Loamshire men, who told him that the casualties were being collected there until some arrangement could be made for their removal by carrying-parties. This news brought him back hot foot to Everitt, whom, since all sense of direction was lost in an instant in so trackless a wilderness, he only found after five minutes' hoarse shouting and stumbling into holes. A last effort carried them to the lip of the trench, to which arose mysterious whispers from utter darkness. Letting himself slide as gently as might be over the parapet, Everitt found himself caught safely in the arms of invisible strangers and stowed forthwith recumbent on a muddy fire-step. There were several wounded men lying on the floor of the trench, but the gloom gave no idea of their number. Wrapped in great-coat and ground-sheet, Everitt was exhausted enough to be careless even whether there was any chance of further progress. He fell asleep instantly, and it was bright daylight when he awoke.

At once his thoughts turned to breakfast. Once again Myers' famous lozenges were alone available, and their ravenous neighbours shared in the feast. (Here was material for a notable advertisement, entirely wasted in the absence of a camera.) The stretcher-bearers had disappeared in the darkness, and the talk turned solely on what was next to do. All save Myers were so badly hurt that walking was out of the question, and the Guillemont road seemed infinitely remote. As the sun climbed higher, thirst grew upon them, and the flies, banished by yesterday's wet weather, resumed their loathsome visitations. Evidently nothing could be done until dusk; and they must resign themselves to a further twelve hours' meditation. As far as Everitt was concerned, so long as he lay motionless, his leg gave him no pain, but he avoided instinctively the smallest movement. Words were few in the hot stuffiness of the trench, and hunger and thirst made it easy to quarrel. At last someone found a muddy
Royal Magazine
, and the treasure was divided into eight fragments. But reading made the men sleepy, and their thoughts flew continually towards possibilities of escape. Also the haphazard rationing of the book had been effected regardless of literary continuity. The crux of a story was invariably in a neighbour's hands.

For four hours no one came near them, but about eleven o'clock the two stretcher-bearers returned with heaven-sent rations of bread, jam, cheese, and bully-beef, together with full water-bottles. Jack-knives and fingers made short work of the food, which was wolfed by ravenous men as though it were the choicest meal in the world. Everitt's arm was now so stiff that he was unable to bend the elbow, and his one-handed manœuvres left him hideously bedaubed with jam and grease.

Hunger satisfied, they besieged their benefactors with questions. ‘How did we get on yesterday?' ‘Where's the batt.?' and above all ‘How are we going to get away?' But the good samaritans had no definite news. (They seemed doomed to a limbo of Rumour.) The rations they had obtained from a Company of the Rifles near by. Evidently units were hopelessly mixed, and all they could learn of the Loamshires was that they were ‘out in front somewhere.' Every one asked in chorus whether the Rifles would carry them out, but the stretcher-bearers could tell them nothing. It was indeed all too probable that other battalions would be fully occupied with their own affairs.

At length the bearers disappeared again, ostensibly to ‘have a look round,' perhaps to make arrangements for the evening. With their going Everitt fell helplessly into black depression. It seemed to him that they were marooned in that narrow trench indefinitely – isolated, forgotten, cut off alike from friend and foe. Among that helpless knot of strangers, gathered haphazard from the storm outside, it was easy to believe that the ordered machine of the army had no longer any concern with them. Why hadn't they been carried away last night? Why should it be any more feasible to-night – or any other night? Suppose the Germans came over. They were utterly helpless and hopelessly exposed. Who knew what would happen before nightfall, or for the matter of that, after it? What were stretchers and stretcher-bearers for?

All this, in place of thankfulness for so many dangers cheated, and the miracle of their survival inducing no optimism for the future! Yet, to their jangled nerves, this ebb of courage seemed perfectly natural, and shame came only long afterwards. Everitt remained obstinately pessimistic, and refused to be comforted by any argument. To all and sundry he replied that they were ‘in the cart.'