Blasting and Bomardiering Page 15

  The big Australian drivers, on their high seats, idly cracking their whips, moved up it at a leisurely pace, like characters of Callots—again incredibly romantic, grandiose and scarecrow figures from another age: or out of a contempoary print, depicting the prairie-wagons of indolent pioneers, pushing on lackadaisically into the Never-never, or the Back-of-Beyond. They displayed a superb indifference from the rushing deliveries of the mechanical war-god. For shell after shell pounded down without intermission upon this central artery of the battlefront. But these great sunburnt plainsmen refused to recognize the machine-age as in being—as any more than a thunderstorm, if as bad as that, for at least it was not wet. Its crashing shells were just particularly troublesome thunderbolts. They were in greater number, certainly, than were usually seen. That was all.—But for them the power involved was nature. These children of nature imparted an air of natural happening, of an elemental disturbance, to all the mechanical 'planning' of our latterday Clausewitzes upon the other side of the Line, and their understudies on our side of it.

  But the Anzacs turned the field of battle itself into a less sinister locality, with their open-air habits and free and easy ways. I have seen them walking about after an attack in the empty space behind the Front Line, as unconcernedly as if they had been out duckshooting—potting the German airmen as they came over, contemptuous of the retaliatory barrage, while we, with more discretion, remained down in the captured trenches. They could not be prevented from doing that, although the relations between the officers and men was such that there was no question of interfering with this sport.

  These colonial habits, however, invaded our dull battery, in the person of a spirited overseas officer. We had attached to us a lot of West Indian negroes, principally for purposes of shell-humping. In command of them came to us one Kamper, if I remember, from Jamaica. If Kamper was asleep in his dugout, his black servant had the strictest orders to wake him, at the first sign of a German plane. Out he would rush, revolver in hand, spring on top of his dugout and empty his weapon into the air, waggling it about in the hope that one bullet, at least would find its mark.

  The great open spaces of Jamaica seemed to make him feel about these bogus birds much as it made his rugged colleagues from the Australian steppe. Fond as he was of his siesta— however much he might be lapped in a Caribbean calm within his fleabag, he would not miss Richtofen for anything. For he was persuaded it was Richtofen he was settling accounts with when he came flying out of his musty, rat-infested lair, his red hair tumbling over his face.

  Nestling at the side of Ypres itself was our place of rest and relaxation, for we had one here at last. It was then that I made my only attempt to live undangerously and to furnish a little.

  I was alotted a sandbag dugout (6 feet by 4) by the side of a battered rivulet. My clay-room was upon its bank. My batman installed a shelf upon which I stood my dozen volumes in an orderly rank. All was set for a little picnic of the mind in this cell of a booted anchorite. 'The wilderness were paradise enow,' though I had no book of verses with me, but Das Kapital which was probably more suitable under the circumstances.

  It was a smiling day when I moved in. But that night when I went to it I was promptly apprised as to what was to be the fly in this ointment. For making ready to follow Proudhon over into the pages of Karl Marx, his great opponent (and later, I found, mine) it became painfully apparent that the brook at night was stiff with pertinacious mosquitoes. My light had to be put out immediately; my sleep was intermittent and my disappointment knew no bounds.

  With a few quiet bombs dropping in the ruins of Ypres, and an occasional shell in the dump at our back, I should have made a pretty picture, burning the midnight oil, above my battered rivulet. As it was I was bitten to pieces and Karl Marx had to wait. I preferred sleeping at the battery-position, though that was nightly plastered with high-explosive. I would infinitely rather have had my garden-coalcellar, allotted me in my first battery, where I got my trench-fever, but had no malarial insects.

  The climax of the war was approaching. Or rather our high command were meditating the conversion of the Salient into something still more magnificent—a real bulge, namely, indefinitely elastic. The Germans of course could read their

  thoughts like a book. And the Germans were explaining to them, as best they could, that this was quite out of the question They did their best to show them that it was quite difficult enough to stop where they were, and that it was wholely unfeasible to wade forward through the bog that lay between us and our enemies, and so on to Berlin.

  The Front Line and a half-mile behind had become a first class quagmire. The irrigation which normally, in these Low Countries, drains off the water, had for a long time not been practised; and meanwhile every few yards shells had splashed down into the water, and mixed it and the earth into a sea of mud.

  This great bog was traversed everywhere with duckboard-tracks—otherwise gangways of wood, for people to walk in Indian file. Off the duckboard-track, more often than not, conditions were frankly aquatic.

  The preparations for Passchendaele were a poem in mud cum blood-and-thunder. The appetite of the Teuton for this odd game called war—in which a dum-dum bullet is a foul, but a gas-bomb is O.K.—and British 'doggedness' in the gentle art of 'muddling through', when other nations misunderstand British kindliness and get tough, made a perfect combination. If the Germans and the English had not been there, all the others would long before that have run away and the war been over.

  These two contrasted but as it were complementary types of idie fixe found their most perfect expression on the battlefield, or battle-bog, of Passchendaele. The very name, with its suggestion of splashiness and of passion at once, was subtly appropriate. This nonsense could not have come to its full flower at any other place but at Passchendaele. It was pre-ordained. The moment I saw the name on the trench-map, intuitively I knew what was going to happen.

  On the coast we had no O. Pip work, but now all the time one or other of us were going up to the front line with our parties of signallers. As I have said, I had not the slightest idea what was occurring, and since that time I have never cared to go back and investigate according to what logical system I was moved about upon this muddy board. There were 'zero hours', for which we waited with our eyes on our wristwatches, there were days of attack, or rehearsals for attack, practice barrages, sudden alarms and excursions, which died down ten minutes after the first flare up. I cannot tell you what any of these things were.

  All that I know is that I moved hither and thither over this sea of mud and have since been told that it was a fool who was moving me. However, had it been the greatest Captain in the world it would have been all one to me. I am not interested in Great Captains. 'Everything bores me except the philosophic man.' There is for me no good war (la bonne guerre) and bad war. There is only bad war.

  Ours, then, was an epic of mud. Mud was even one of our weapons—an alternative weapon. Once when two of the negroes had started a razor-fight it devolved upon me to stop it. So to start with I seized them respectively by the shirt-collar and opening my arms abruptly, as you open a pair of scissors, I flung them apart. One drooped to the right of me, one to the left of me: but only for a moment. I supposed I had ended hostilities: but then simultaneously each of them scooped up a handful of mud and discharged it across my face at his antagonist. And soon we were all three covered in liquid clay. Kamper appeared—revolver in hand—however, and as if by magic the two Blacks vanished and I found myself alone, straddling like a statue of clay, with only a razor at my feet to testify to the fact that I had not been dreaming!

  I never got the right touch with the West Indian negro. At our Nieuport position one dark night the negroes were rolling shells up to the guns—very large ones, since the guns were outsize. This operation had to be effected without so much as a match struck, lest the German air-patrols should spot us. A negro sergeant I noticed was not only stationary, and peculiarly idle, but actually obstructing the
work of the dusky rollers. I spoke to him. He neither looked at me nor answered. I could scarcely see him—it was very dark, and he was very dark. I ordered him to do a little rolling. This was a word of command. It elicited no response from the dark shape. Whereupon I gave him a violent push. This propelled him through space for a short distance, but he immediately returned to where he had stood before. I gave him a second push. As if made of india-rubber, he once more reintegrated the spot he had just left. After this I accepted him as part of the landscape, and the shells had to be rolled round, him, since they could not be rolled through him.

  CHAPTER VIII

  The 'O.Pip' on the Ridge

  I have often referred to O.Pips, or observation posts. Here are a few typical experiences of that type of amusement.—When I had to go up to the observation post I had to be woken—no easy matter: that was the first step. Upon this occasion, as usual the signaller N.C.O. woke me. It was the early hours of the morning and I cursed him. I had been sleeping in a stretcher upon the ground; the stretcher was two inches under water, so I had been slumbering in a bath. My under side was submerged. I flung off the heaviest sleep I have ever been stupefied with, which is saying a lot, for I sleep like a log. It must have been the effort required to sleep half under water.—I rose dripping to my feet and put on my tin-hat. Then I drank a cup of tea and ate a biscuit.

  It was an attack of sorts, infantry were moving up in the night, and it was important to do as much of the journey as possible before daybreak. We were late in starting. The O.Pip was a mile or two along the Line to our left. We crossed the Menin Road, and shortly afterwards, as the day was breaking, we found numbers of infantry held up beside the road we were to follow. A barrage had suddenly came down a short way ahead.

  A couple of dozen yards from the road there were some empty dugouts, on a slight elevation, and I took my party there to wait. As I stood in the opening of a derelict Mess, my men inside, expecting nothing untoward, and still half-asleep, a shell whooped down at me. It was at me it undoubtedly had been aimed. It exploded two feet from my head, the top of the dugout wall was between my head and the burst. Without its crashing into your head, you could not be nearer to a shell than that, and I banged against the side of the open-

 

  ing and was then carried forward in a stampede of my trusty followers from within. We hastened away from this unfortunately chosen shelter, but the German battery meant business. We had to crouch as we ran, to allow the passage over our backs of the buzzing shell-splinters from the series of five-nines.

  Having rejoined the infantry, more time went by, people coming back reporting the continuance of the barrage. Therefore we set out to see if we could not walk round it, or find a way through it farther down.

  Upon a duckboard track as we tramped forward, we came upon two Scottish privates; one was beheaded, and the leg of another lay near him, and this one's arm was gone as well. They had been killed that morning—a direct hit I suppose: the Scottish battalion to which they belonged having lost a number of men, I later heard, on the way up.

  As we approached them my party left the duckboards and passed round the flank of this almost sardonically complete tableau of violent death. Averting their heads, the men circled round. Their attitude was that of dogs when they are offered some food which they don't much like the look of. But a moment later when a shell passed over us, to burst a fairish distance away, my party bowed itself, as it advanced, as if to avoid a blow, though ordinarily such shelling would have been disregarded.

  We encountered the barrage, but negotiated it without mishap. Everywhere the enemy was bustling and aggressive however, and the entire front was in an uproar. At length we came out upon the last stretch, the empty approaches to the Front Line, and there to our great indignation were machine-gunned by a low-flying plane.

  It was the first time any of us had met with this particular type of aeronautical caddishness. I even didn't know they could do it. I was intensely surprised. Now, of course, airmen think nothing of picking off shoppers in the streets of a city, or whisking past a window and spraying a woman with bullets in her bath. It is recognized as one of the most triumphant assertions of man's mastery over his biped handicap. And we're all very proud to think that our airmen can retaliate and pick off bipeds of discordant nationality. But at the time we all felt it was an uncalled-for interloping to say the least of it, on the part of a particularly vindictive type of flying Bosche.

  In spite of the unexpectedness of this occurrence, we saw at once that this low-flying plane was upon some ungentlemanly errand. Of course it was a Bosche—no English plane was ever so near the Line as this. We sank into a shell-hole with the rapidity of a well-drilled Music-hall troupe (dresses by Bairns-father). 'Don't show your faces!' said the corporal. I watched from under the peak of my cap the two men who were staring down at us as they approached, but we were not hit, only scandalized. With their staccato snapping superimposed on the roar of their engine, they went over our heads. But an infantry party going up the Line, the only other thing in sight, they successfully attacked, accounting for three of them, it seemed.

  I forget the order of these events, but I believe this was the Broudsind Ridge period, preparatory to Passchendaele. Everything was perfectly vacant and quiet just here: it was the vacuum immediately behind the Line—a No Man's Land that had been left behind, and so was more No Man's Land than ever.

  Upon the crest of the ridge ahead was our observation-post. We had no difficulty whatever in locating it. No one, in fact, could miss it. For it had a cluster of shell-bursts around it, rather as a mountain-peak is crowned or ringed with cloud.

  We were not far off the ridge when I was considerably startled by the sudden emergence from a trench of a dramatically perspiring Brigadier. He advanced toward me in somewhat minatory fashion. Generals in such places as that were unusual. I saluted and he thrust out his finger, pointing at the crest of the ridge.

  'You know the enemy is over there?' he asked me sternly.

  'Yes sir,' I answered humbly.

  'You know you are under machine-gun fire as soon as you get to the top?'

  I answered that I did—that I had been here before.

  To satisfy this general officer I got my party into a trench, and we circuitously approached the tumultuous spot which it would be our task for the rest of the day to occupy. It was one thing to get to it, another matter to enter it. We were not a suicide club, I and my signallers (at least that was my attitude). And having got within hailing distance of it, we halted. When we got into it we should merely be wasting our time. So we might as well humour the Brigadier, and watch our step. I lighted my pipe, and discussed the incidence of the bursts with the corporal.

  The danger from the machine-gun fire the Brigadier exaggerated. But that factor had to be taken into account in this last stage of the proceedings. The main thing, however, was to judge one's moment properly, with regard to the shell-fire. Most of the shells went slightly beyond, sometimes they would lengthen, and there were periods when they eased off, though they never stopped entirely.

  We waited about ten minutes in a trench, then I gave the signal and we rushed at it heads down. I was last in and just yanked my tail into the funk-hole as a shell came down in the trench behind.

  This observation-post was the regulation German 'pill-box'. There was room inside it for all of us. You may represent it to yourself as a monstrous Easter-egg, its shell of four foot thick concrete, sunk in the earth. Its domed top protruded slightly above the level of the parapet, covered with a thick coat of caked soil. It was entered from a trench; and as it had been a German pill box in the first instance, its entrance faced the enemy. It was from this trench at its mouth that the 'observing' had to be done, either by periscope or otherwise.

  There were five of us, myself, the signaller corporal, and three signallers. We crowded down into it puffing and laughing. There was no floor, this was its only drawback; a miniature sheet of water was where that should ha
ve been. But this dark expanse of water—perhaps four feet across—had as it were a bank. It was on this shelf of clay that we sat or stood.

  When we were not there our O.Pip was the home of a family of rats. They did not, however, leave it when we entered, but sensibly accepted our intrusion. They frequently were to be seen swimming in the water, and we would throw them pieces of cheese, when these rodents would indulge in a litde fierce polo. The shells thudded upon the roof of this excellent concrete egg, and we, in our moments of relaxation, or when the shelling was so severe that it had driven us inside, fed the rats and smoked.

  The German front-line trench was almost immediately beneath us—the two front lines were so close together here that we could almost look into it. It was very thinly held at this time. I sometimes thought there were no Germans there at all.

  On another occasion I was in this observation-post when a great barrage was laid upon the German trenches. A Field Artillery officer was up there with me and we waited down in the trench for the barrage zero hour. We got up just before the storm broke. Then, to the second, there was the muffled crash of massed artillery, and over came the barrage—every type of projectile, groaning, panting, bumbling, whistling and wheezing overhead. Down they plunged upon the German trench, a chain of every type of burst, and a screen of smoke and earth defined, as far as one could see on either hand, the German Line.

  As we stood watching—there was no occasion to consider exposing ourselves to enemy fire, with such a tornado as this absorbing all his attention—the other officer clutched my arm and pointed his finger. 'See that!' he said. I looked where he pointed, and saw something dark fly into the air, in the midst of the smoke. My companion said it was the leg of a Bosche, but I thought, though it looked rather like a boot and half a thigh, that it was in fact some less sensational object. It may all the same have been a German limb: and if so it was probably my strong feeling that there were no Germans there that made me incredulous.—Also I did not care whether it was a leg or not, there is always that.