"Where"s your prisoner?" asked an Intelligence officer waiting to receive a German sent down from the trenches under escort of an honest corporal.
"I lost him on the way, sir," said the corporal.
"Lost him?"
The corporal was embarra.s.sed.
"Very sorry, sir. My feelings overcame me, sir. It was like this, sir. The man started talking on the way down. Said he was thinking of his poor wife. I"d been thinking of mine, and I felt sorry for him. Then he mentioned as how he had two kiddies at home. I "ave two kiddies at "ome, sir, and I couldn"t "elp feeling sorry for him. Then he said as how his old mother had died awhile ago and he"d never see her again. When he started cryin" I was so sorry for him I couldn"t stand it any longer, sir. So I killed the poor blighter."
Our men in the trenches, and out of them, up to the waist in water sometimes, lying in slimy dugouts, lice-eaten, rat-haunted, on the edge of mine-craters, under hara.s.sing fire, with just the fluke of luck between life and death, seized upon any kind of joke as an excuse for laughter, and many a time in ruins and in trenches and in dugouts I have heard great laughter. It was the protective armor of men"s souls. They knew that if they did not laugh their courage would go and nothing would stand between them and fear.
"You know, sir," said a sergeant-major, one day, when I walked with him down a communication trench so waterlogged that my top-boots were full of slime, "it doesn"t do to take this war seriously."
And, as though in answer to him, a soldier without breeches and with his shirt tied between his legs looked at me and remarked, in a philosophical way, with just a glint of comedy in his eyes:
"That there Grand Fleet of ours don"t seem to be very active, sir. It"s a pity it don"t come down these blinkin" trenches and do a bit of work!"
"Having a clean-up, my man?" said a brigadier to a soldier trying to wash in a basin about the size of a kitchen mug.
"Yes, sir," said the man, "and I wish I was a blasted canary."
One of the most remarkable battles on the front was fought by a battalion of Worcesters for the benefit of two English members of Parliament. It was not a very big battle, but most dramatic while it lasted. The colonel (who had a sense of humor) arranged it after a telephone message to his dugout telling him that two politicians were about to visit his battalion in the line, and asking him to show them something interesting.
"Interesting?" said the colonel. "Do they think this war is a peep-show for politicians? Do they want me to arrange a ma.s.sacre to make a London holiday?" Then his voice changed and he laughed. "Show them something interesting? Oh, all right; I dare say I can do that."
He did. When the two M. P."s arrived, apparently at the front-line trenches, they were informed by the colonel that, much to his regret, for their sake, the enemy was just attacking, and that his men were defending their position desperately.
"We hope for the best," he said, "and I think there is just a chance that you will escape with your lives if you stay here quite quietly."
"Great G.o.d!" said one of the M. P."s, and the other was silent, but pale.
Certainly there was all the noise of a big attack. The Worcesters were standing-to on the fire-step, firing rifle-grenades and throwing bombs with terrific energy. Every now and then a man fell, and the stretcher-bearers pounced on him, tied him up in bandages, and carried him away to the field dressing-station, whistling as they went, "We won"t go home till morning," in a most heroic way... The battle lasted twenty minutes, at the end of which time the colonel announced to his visitors:
"The attack is repulsed, and you, gentlemen, have nothing more to fear."
One of the M. P."s was thrilled with excitement. "The valor of your men was marvelous," he said. "What impressed me most was the cheerfulness of the wounded. They were actually grinning as they came down on the stretchers."
The colonel grinned, too. In fact, he stifled a fit of coughing. "Funny devils!" he said. "They are so glad to be going home."
The members of Parliament went away enormously impressed, but they had not enjoyed themselves nearly as well as the Worcesters, who had fought a sham battle-not in the front-line trenches, but in the support trenches two miles back! They laughed for a week afterward.
XVII
On the hill at Wizerne, not far from the stately old town of St.-Omer (visited from time to time by monstrous nightbirds who dropped high-explosive eggs), was a large convent. There were no nuns there, but generally some hundreds of young officers and men from many different battalions, attending a machine-gun course under the direction of General Baker-Carr, who was the master machine-gunner of the British army (at a time when we were very weak in those weapons compared with the enemy"s strength) and a cheery, vital man.
"This war has produced two great dugouts," said Lord Kitchener on a visit to the convent. "Me and Baker-Carr."
It was the boys who interested me more than the machines. (I was never much interested in the machinery of war.) They came down from the trenches to this school with a sense of escape from prison, and for the ten days of their course they were like "freshers" at Oxford and made the most of their minutes, organizing concerts and other entertainments in the evenings after their initiation into the mysteries of Vickers and Lewis. I was invited to dinner there one night, and sat between two young cavalry officers on long benches crowded with subalterns of many regiments. It was a merry meal and a good one-to this day I remember a potato pie, gloriously baked, and afterward, as it was the last night of the course, all the officers went wild and indulged in a "rag" of the public-school kind. They straddled across the benches and barged at each other in single tourneys and jousts, riding their hobby-horses with violent rearings and plungings and bruising one another without grievous hurt and with yells of laughter. Gla.s.ses broke, crockery crashed upon the polished boards. One boy danced the Highland fling on the tables, others were waltzing down the corridors. There was a Rugby scrum in the refectory, and hunting-men cried the "View halloo!" and shouted "Yoicks! yoicks!" ... General Baker-Carr was a human soul, and kept to his own room that night and let discipline go hang....
When the battles of the Somme began it was those young officers who led their machine-gun sections into the woods of death-Belville Wood, Mametz Wood, High Wood, and the others. It was they who afterward held the outpost lines in Flanders. Some of them were still alive on March 21, 1918, when they were surrounded by a sea of Germans and fought until the last, in isolated redoubts north and south of St.-Quentin. Two of them are still alive, those between whom I sat at dinner that night, and who escaped many close calls of death before the armistice. Of the others who charged one another with wooden benches, their laughter ringing out, some were blown to bits, and some were buried alive, and some were blinded and ga.s.sed, and some went "missing" for evermore.
XVIII
In those long days of trench warfare and stationary lines it was boredom that was the worst malady of the mind; a large, overwhelming boredom to thousands of men who were in exile from the normal interests of life and from the activities of brain-work; an intolerable, abominable boredom, sapping the will-power, the moral code, the intellect; a boredom from which there seemed no escape except by death, no relief except by vice, no probable or possible change in its dreary routine. It was bad enough in the trenches, where men looked across the parapet to the same corner of h.e.l.l day by day, to the same dead bodies rotting by the edge of the same mine-crater, to the same old sand-bags in the enemy"s line, to the blasted tree sliced by sh.e.l.l-fire, the upturned railway-truck of which only the metal remained, the distant fringe of trees like gallows on the sky-line, the broken spire of a church which could be seen in the round O of the telescope when the weather was not too misty. In "quiet" sections of the line the only variation to the routine was the number of casualties day by day, by casual sh.e.l.l-fire or snipers" bullets, and that became part of the boredom. "What casualties?" asked the adjutant in his dugout.
"Two killed, three wounded, sir."
"Very well... You can go."
A salute in the doorway of the dugout, a groan from the adjutant lighting another cigarette, leaning with his elbow on the deal table, staring at the guttering of the candle by his side, at the pile of forms in front of him, at the glint of light on the steel helmet hanging by its strap on a nail near the shelf where he kept his safety-razor, flash-lamp, love-letters (in an old cigar-box), soap, whisky-bottle (almost empty now), and an unread novel.
"h.e.l.l!... What a life!"
But there was always work to do, and odd incidents, and frights, and responsibilities.
It was worse-this boredom-for men behind the lines; in lorry columns which went from rail-head to dump every d.a.m.ned morning, and back again by the middle of the morning, and then nothing else to do for all the day, in a cramped little billet with a sulky woman in the kitchen, and squealing children in the yard, and a stench of manure through the small window. A dull life for an actor who had toured in England and America (like one I met dazed and stupefied by years of boredom-paying too much for safety), or for a barrister who had many briefs before the war and now found his memory going, though a young man, because of the narrow limits of his life between one Flemish village and another, which was the length of his lorry column and of his adventure of war. Nothing ever happened to break the monotony-not even sh.e.l.l-fire. So it was also in small towns like Hesdin, St.-Pol, Bruay, Lillers-a hundred others where officers stayed for years in charge of motor-repair shops, ordnance-stores, labor battalions, administration offices, claim commissions, graves" registration, agriculture for soldiers, all kinds of jobs connected with that life of war, but not exciting.
Not exciting. So frightful in boredom that men were tempted to take to drink, to look around for unattached women, to gamble at cards with any poor devil like themselves. Those were most bored who were most virtuous. For them, with an ideal in their souls, there was no possibility of relief (for virtue is not its own reward), unless they were mystics, as some became, who found G.o.d good company and needed no other help. They had rare luck, those fellows with an astounding faith which rose above the irony and the brutality of that business being done in the trenches, but there were few of them.
Even with hours of leisure, men who had been "bookish" could not read. That was a common phenomenon. I could read hardly at all, for years, and thousands were like me. The most "exciting" novel was dull stuff up against that world convulsion. What did the romance of love mean, the little tortures of one man"s heart, or one woman"s, troubled in their mating, when thousands of men were being killed and vast populations were in agony? History-Greek or Roman or medieval-what was the use of reading that old stuff, now that world history was being made with a rush? Poetry-poor poets with their love of beauty! What did beauty matter, now that it lay dead in the soul of the world, under the filth of battlefields, and the dirt of hate and cruelty, and the law of the apelike man? No-we could not read; but talked and talked about the old philosophy of life, and the structure of society, and Democracy and Liberty and Patriotism and Internationalism, and Brotherhood of Men, and G.o.d, and Christian ethics; and then talked no more, because all words were futile, and just brooded and brooded, after searching the daily paper (two days old) for any kind of hope and light, not finding either.
XIX
At first, in the beginning of the war, our officers and men believed that it would have a quick ending. Our first Expeditionary Force came out to France with the cheerful shout of "Now we sha"n"t be long!" before they fell back from an advancing tide of Germans from Mons to the Marne, and fell in their youth like autumn leaves. The New Army boys who followed them were desperate to get out to "the great adventure." They cursed the length of their training in English camps. "We sha"n"t get out till it"s too late!" they said. Too late, O G.o.d! Even when they had had their first spell in the trenches and came up against German strength they kept a queer faith, for a time, that "something" would happen to bring peace as quickly as war had come. Peace was always coming three months ahead. Generals and staff-officers, as well as sergeants and privates, had that strong optimism, not based on any kind of reason; but gradually it died out, and in its place came the awful conviction which settled upon the hearts of the fighting-men, that this war would go on forever, that it was their doom always to live in ditches and dugouts, and that their only way of escape was by a "Blighty" wound or by death.
A chaplain I knew used to try to cheer up despondent boys by pretending to have special knowledge of inside politics.
"I have it on good authority," he said, "that peace is near at hand. There have been negotiations in Paris-"
Or:
"I don"t mind telling you lads that if you get through the next sc.r.a.p you will have peace before you know where you are."
They were not believing, now. He had played that game too often.
"Old stuff, padre!" they said.