The Somme (8 page)

It seemed these men of the Oakshires were relieving Everitt's battalion, and the stretcher-party was at last confirmed in the vague report it had brought from headquarters. The new-comers were good fellows and shared with the party the contents of a whole precious water-bottle. Someone produced a cigarette – just one ‘Woodbine' – which Everitt received as by divine right. He felt himself a cur to accept such a treasure – a greater sacrifice to the donor than anyone could realize who had never shared the occasion – and for the first time had an inkling of the privileges of a ‘casualty.' Words are feeble tools to describe the joy of that three minutes' smoke. At such times at these frayed nerves shriek for tobacco. Ever afterwards he could relish the taste of that cigarette, the puff and pause and exhalation, the scent of the smoke, the glow of the red ash before it fell. It was good to know they were far enough back for smoking to be permissible. The others, poor fellows, had no cigarettes, and doubtless cursed their luck, if silently, no less fervently. Remember they were carrying the smoker ‘out,' perhaps to Blighty, while they would remain indefinitely. Yet all they said was, ‘Lucky devil!'

Continuing their journey, they crossed a deep trench that Everitt remembered by reason of a peculiarly aggravating fall he had made there into slimy darkness. But the mud had dried after a hot day, and in the moonlight it was far easier to negotiate. This marked another stage in the journey. They were going down-hill now, and the Verey lights rose but a little way above the ridge behind them. Also they rejoiced in the consciousness of men and guns between them and the enemy. Certainly the worst was passed.

Another hour's journey brought them to a group of dug-outs, where they found scattered fragments of the Loamshires. One and all were disciples of Mr. Micawber. This was ‘support,' and here was battalion headquarters and the regimental aid-post. Under normal circumstances it is the duty of the Medical Officer of a battalion in the line to examine all casualties in his unit, administering first-aid and dispatching them rearwards with some kind of passport tied to their clothing. (Naturally these ‘chits' are prized above rubies.) But that night the majority of the Loamshires were casualties, and there was no attempt to meddle with the wounded. The party halted for some time on the strength of a rumour that the field-ambulance men were carrying from the aid-post to the advanced dressing-station on the road. The M.O. confined himself to wandering half heartedly from stretcher to stretcher (and there were many), asking men if they were ‘all right,' and passing on before they had had time to answer. And, indeed, in the darkness, and with practically no shelter, he could do no more.

After half an hour two R.A.M.C. men appeared. They had a party working on the road to the dressing-station, but the battalion bearers must carry on for another half-mile. This was a bombshell to tired men who were expecting relief from a burden they must have hated. A sergeant asked Everitt if he could manage to walk to the road, and two of the men offered to help him. With his fit arm round the neck of one and supported by both, he attempted some kind of shuffling progress, but, the wounded leg proved useless and exquisitely painful. Everitt, in disgust at the infinity of trouble he was causing, offered to stay where he was until daylight, when ‘someone will pick me up,' but the four men, hiding their disappointment under cheerful curses at the expense of the R.A.M.C., shouldered their burden once again, and carried it over the remainder of the wilderness between headquarters and the road.

It was an enormous relief to reach even so battered a relic of civilization. How long ago was it that he had left it behind him as the boundary of a habitable world he might never see again? A stretcher-dump by the wayside gave promise of an organized system of evacuation, and the very presence of a road suggested welcome company and traffic after the emptiness of the dreary desolated fields. The bearers laid the stretcher in the mud beside the roadside ditch, and wishing him ‘Good luck' shambled away towards Guillemont. If ever men had earned gratitude it was they, yet Everitt could only mumble the heartlessly inadequate: ‘Thanks awfully' of his nation, received as inevitably with: ‘Not a bit of it.'

Every such journey is one long series of risks to all concerned. The slow progress and the impossibility of taking quick cover add immeasurably to its dangers, and the temptation to abandon the helpless cause of the trouble is often wellnigh irresistible. That night they had been unusually lucky, for the spasmodic shelling had never been within twenty yards of them, and the rifle-fire had been negligible. More often to the physical exertion of the journey is added the imminent fear of death. Yet, in any event, stretcher-bearing is the most exhausting task on active service. At the end of a spell a man is commonly dripping with sweat without, bone-dry within, and so exhausted that he can sleep in his equipment in the adjacent mud. It is all a commonplace of the line. Everybody does it, everybody curses it, and everybody, despite the most desperate extremes of toil and danger, carries the job through to the end, knowing that he too may one day lie helpless and in need of the same succour.

Lying prone in the road, Everitt's chief fear was that a careless wanderer would tread upon him in the darkness. Several times the catastrophe nearly occurred, but he at length grew so sleepy that he could no longer concern himself with trifles. Six-inch howitzers were stationed beside the road – the mud preventing their ponderous weight leaving it – and almost overhead their deafening uproar split the night continually. The remorseless flash and din of their firing was maddening enough to a man wellnigh hopeless of peace: it seemed to Everitt he would never again be out of their hearing. Nevertheless, he must have slept in spite of them, for a familiar voice roused him.

The Loamshires had been relieved and the survivors were moving back to ‘reserve.' In the gloom he could see nothing plainly, but there was evidently no attempt at any sort of order and discipline. They were merely a forlorn mob of weary men dragging themselves doggedly through the mud, half asleep, silent for the most part, continually stumbling against each other, forming and reforming into fortuitous groups of friends and strangers. The voice was Mason's, a man of Everitt's platoon. He had no definite news of anyone, and all he could say of Sunday afternoon was that ‘the whole thing was a bloody wash-out.' They were out now, anyway, and had been promised a rest. In any case there were so few of them that a further stay in the line was impossible. The relief, too, was of another Division, which spelled a week or two of peace. ‘But you could never tell what might happen.' Attracted by their voices, a third man joined them. This was Tubby Staunton, platoon runner and famous for plum-cake from home. He thought he had seen several of their mutual friends go over, but he too had no certain news. In the morning they would be able to count their losses, but by then Everitt hoped to be far away. Mason gave him a cigarette (the way to Heaven must be paved with the Ashes of Woodbines), wished him good luck, and became another ship that had passed in the night. Everitt never saw him again, and for the worst of reasons.

Several times parties of men approached from the rear, and each time toiled slowly back beneath laden stretchers. The place seemed to be the Ultima Thule of the Red Cross: towards the line a deserted road led through darkness and hidden horrors towards Bapaume. It was strange to imagine it crossing the last British outpost line, threading no-man's-land, passing the successive lines of enemy trenches, and then growing stable and civilized again beneath an alien traffic. Everitt tried not to be impatient, but he could not help asking how long he must await his turn. ‘Not long, chum – only a few minutes, now,' was the answer, and unreasonably he cursed the R.A.M.C. as sluggards. At the back of his mind perhaps were memories of interminable marches, where men fainted in the dust, and rest-billets were always ‘only another kilo.'

These men had been carrying for three days and nights with the briefest intervals for sleep and food; yet, such is human vanity on the unlikeliest occasions that he forthwith called to mind almost with self-congratulation that it was the ‘foot sloggers' alone who knew the ultimate horror of war. Here shells were rare and the chances incalculably against misfortune, while ‘up there' the reaper never tired. It was his experience that the Medical Corps rarely came within rifle-range, and kept usually behind the field-artillery and battalion-headquarters. Always he had seen the battalion stretcher-bearers taking all the hardest kicks and receiving none of the ha'pence.

This was the more ungrateful from a man awaiting aid from the very men he was disparaging, but he was far too tired to be just. At last they were carrying him slowly down the road, stumbling often in the torn pavé, and continually dazed and dazzled by the thud and flash of the guns. Everitt saw that the eastern sky was flushing from grey to lilac and rose-red in the dawn. The new day revealed in an uncanny twilight the wreckage of a shattered country-side.

After half an hour's journey along the road, they turned aside into a muddy track cut through the wayside bank. This sloped downwards into a kind of cave between walls lined with muddy sandbags. The roof was made of an arched sheet of corrugated iron covered with more sandbags, and the whole daubed with mud as a screen from aeroplanes. The passage was exactly wide enough to admit a stretcher, but within it widened to a chamber perhaps twelve feet square. Soiled blankets formed the door, and light came from the white glare of an acetylene lamp hanging from a rafter. This was an advanced dressing-station – the first-aid house on the road to hospital. Round the walls stretchers were ranged on brackets, like berths in a cabin, and more stretchers covered every foot of the floor. Each carried its burden, muddy, bloody, hacked and mutilated sometimes almost beyond human resemblance. The place reeked of blood and mud and sweat and iodine: the air was foul with the stench of wounds. Some of the men were dead, some were dying, some were groaning, some were grinning, some wére silent between clenched teeth. Beneath the lamps was a large trestle-table, and one by one the men were lifted upon it for examination by the doctors. As soon as this was completed, the stretcher was removed and carried out by a door opposite, and another entered to take its vacant place on the shelves: thus there was an unending stream of patients, in at one door and out at the other. It was salutary to remember that this stream had been flowing without respite now for days and weeks, and that it would continue to flow until the coming of the winter's lull. Everitt's turn came in half an hour, and he found himself recumbent beneath the glare of the lamp. Someone held to his lips an invalid's feeding-cup containing tea, hot, strong and sweet, and, rising upon the support of one arm, he drank noisily and greedily through the spout of the cup.

There were two doctors and perhaps half a dozen orderlies. One of them told Everitt they had been working there for twenty hours and must carry on until relief came. In that dazzling light their faces were white and ghastly, their eyes puffy for want of sleep, and all their movements languid with fatigue. (Everitt suddenly wondered what sort of scarecrow
he
must appear.) That unending stream of men had to be attended to somehow, patched up and forwarded to the clearing-station. And this was one dressing-station among hundreds – a drop in the ocean of suffering!

To Everitt's relief his leg was dismissed without examination. Evidently the field-dressing was adequate. His arm, however, they washed and dressed, slitting the sleeve of his tunic the better to reach the wound, and hurting him hideously where the linen beneath had stuck to the raw flesh. But the ordeal was soon over, and he found himself outside again and carried some fifty yards farther down the road. Near by dead men were being lifted from stretchers required urgently for more profitable burdens.

For a time he was left with some dozen others in the shelter of a stack of ammunition-cases. It was now broad day, and with the light came cheerfulness. The little group fell to an interminable discussion of the chances of Blighty, and swapped yarns blended of horror and humour. A stray shell, pitching perhaps twenty yards away, sobered them considerably, but in less than an hour appeared the eagerly expected ambulance. This, since the road was too rough for motors, was a clumsy, high-built wagon, canvas covered and daubed conspicuously with a soiled red cross. Two horses seemed fully as nervous as the driver.

The stretchers were run into their places, three ranged one above another on either side of a central gangway, and the straps tied to prevent their jerking from the grooves on the brackets. Everitt noticed one man particularly. He was swathed from head to middle in fold upon fold of bandages, already flushing to ominous red. With face dead-white, eyes tightly closed, and lips writhed apart to show clenched teeth, he had the appearance of a hideous Egyptian mummy, brutally ravished from a sepulchre.

The journey was an affair of half an hour only. Thanks to the torn roadway, the wagon rolled and jolted continually, and the wonder was that no one was thrown out. Everitt found it best to grip a stanchion with his sound arm and to project his injured leg over the corridor to prevent its injury. The men with body wounds suffered terribly from the shaking. Their groans were pitiable, but there was only the driver to hear them, and his attention was completely devoted to saving the horses from falling. A flapping canvas curtain hid the road, but an occasional glimpse showed that they were following the old route through Guillemont. No doubt they passed the Loamshires, but of them Everitt saw nothing.

Gradually they left the roar of guns behind them, and at last the ambulance stopped at a cross-road, where the passengers were unloaded into a field largely devoted to picketed mules. It seemed that the motor-ambulances ran from here rearwards, and already there was some fifty stretchers awaiting removal. They were back in the old ‘line behind the line,' an ugly region of dumps and stores, horse-lines and light-railways, huts and tents and tangled telegraph wires. Traffic of lorries and ambulances covered the road, muddy indeed, but at least unbroken. The country crawled with troops coming and going. Everitt noticed that shrapnel helmets were no longer in use and cast away his own as a contribution to the local salvage-dump. Another link broken!