There were twelve hundred yards of a straight sunken road for us to ride through before we reached Bony. That road was a veritable gallery of German dead. They lay in twos and threes, in queer horrible postures, along its whole unkempt length, some of them with blackened decomposed faces and hands, most of them newly killed, for this was a road that connected the outer defences of the Hindenburg Line with the network of wire and trenches that formed the Hindenburg Line itself.
"Best sight I"ve seen since the war," said Wilde with satisfaction. And if the colonel and myself made no remark we showed no disagreement.
Pity for dead Boche finds no place in the average decent-minded man"s composition. Half a dozen of our armoured cars, wheels off, half-burned, or their steering apparatus smashed, lay on the entrenched and wired outskirts of Bony, part of the Hindenburg Line proper. In the village itself we found Red Cross cars filling up with wounded; Boche prisoners were being used as stretcher-bearers; groups of waiting infantry stood in the main street; runners flitted to and fro.
"We"ll leave our horses here," said the colonel; and the grooms guided them to the shelter of a high solid wall. The colonel, Wilde, and I ascended the main street, making eastward. A couple of 59"s dropped close to the northern edge of the village as we came out of it. We met a party of prisoners headed by two officers--one short, fat, nervous, dark, bespectacled; the other bearded, lanky, nonchalant, and of good carriage. He carried a gold-n.o.bbed Malacca cane. Neither officer looked at us as we pa.s.sed. The tall one reminded me of an officer among the first party of Boche prisoners I saw in France in August 1916. His arrogant, disdainful air had roused in me a gust of anger that made me glad I was in the war.
We went through a garden transformed into a dust-bin, and dipped down a hummocky slope that rose again to a chalky ridge. Sh.e.l.ls were screaming overhead in quick succession now, and we walked fast, making for a white boulder that looked as if it would offer shielded observation and protection. We found ourselves near the top of one of the giant air-shafts that connected with the ca.n.a.l tunnel. Tufts of smoke spouted up at regular intervals on the steep slope behind the village below us.
"We"re in time to see a barrage," remarked the colonel, pulling out his binoculars. "Our people are trying to secure the heights. I didn"t know that Gouy was quite clear of Boche. There was fighting there yesterday."
"There are some Boche in a trench near that farm on the left," he added a minute later, after sweeping the hills opposite with his gla.s.ses.
"Can you see them?"
I made out what did appear to be three grey tin-helmeted figures, but I could see nothing of our infantry. The sh.e.l.ling went on, but time pressed, and the colonel, packing up his gla.s.ses, led us eastwards again, down to a light-railway junction, and through a quaint little ravine lined with willow-trees. Many German dead lay here. One young soldier, who had died with his head thrown back resting against a green bank, his blue eyes open to the sky, wore a strangely perfect expression of peace and rest. Up another ascending sunken road. The Boche guns seemed to have switched, and half a dozen sh.e.l.ls skimmed the top of the road, causing us to wait. We looked again at the fight being waged on the slopes behind the village. Our barrage had lifted, but we saw no sign of advancing infantry.
The colonel turned to me suddenly and said, "I"m going to select positions about a thousand yards south of where we are at this moment--along the valley. Wilde will come with me. You go back and pick up the horses, and meet us at Quennemont Farm. I expect we shall be there almost as soon as you."
I followed the direct road to return to Bony. A few sh.e.l.ls dropped on either side of the road, which was obviously a hunting-ground for the Boche gunners. At least a dozen British dead lay at intervals huddled against the sides of the road. One of them looked to be an artillery officer, judged by his field-boots and spurs. But the top part of him was covered by a rain-proof coat, and I saw no cap.
Quennemont Farm was a farm only in name. There was no wall more than three feet high left standing; the whole place was shapeless, stark, blasted into nothingness. In the very centre of the mournful chaos lay three disembowelled horses and an overturned Boche ammunition waggon.
The sh.e.l.ls were still on the shelves. They were Yellow Cross, the deadliest of the Boche mustard-gas sh.e.l.l.
I went on leave next morning, and got a motor-car lift from Peronne as far as Amiens. Before reaching Villers-Bretonneux, of glorious, fearful memories, we pa.s.sed through Warfusee-Abancourt, a sh.e.l.l of its former self, a brick heap, a monument of devastation. An aged man and a slim white-faced girl were standing by the farm cart that had brought them there, the first civilians I had seen since August. The place was deserted save for them. In sad bereavement they looked at the cruel desolation around them.
"My G.o.d," said my companion, interpreting my inmost thought, "what a home-coming!"
XVIII. A LAST DAY AT THE O.P.
When, on October 21, I returned to France, the war had made a very big stride towards its end. Cambrai had been regained, and Le Cateau--"Lee Katoo," the men insisted on calling it--taken. Ostend was ours, Lille was ours; over Palestine we had cast our mantle. Our own Division, still hard at it, had gone forward twenty-four miles during my fortnight"s leave in England. Stories of their doings trickled towards me when I broke the journey at Amiens on my way back to the lines. I met an Infantry captain bound for England.
"It"s been all open fighting this last fortnight--cavalry, and forced marches, and all that--and I don"t want to hear any more talk of the new Armies not being able to carry out a war of movement," he said chirpily. "The men have been magnificent. The old Boche is done now; but we"re making no mistakes--we"re after him all the while.
"Dam funny, you know, some of the things that are happening up there.
The Boche has left a lot of coal dumps behind, and every one"s after it. There"s a 2000-ton pile at Le Cateau, and it was disappearing so rapidly that they put a guard on it. I was walking with my colonel the other day, and we came across an Australian shovelling coal from this dump into a G.S. waggon. A sentry, with fixed bayonet, was marching up an" down.
"The colonel stopped when we came to the sentry, and asked him what he was supposed to be doing.
""Guarding the coal dump, sir."
""But what is this Australian doing? Has he any authority to draw coal?
Did he show you a chit?"
""No, sir," replied the sentry. "I thought, as he had a Government waggon, it would be all right."
""Upon my Sam!" said the colonel, astonished. Then he tackled the Australian.
""What authority have you for taking away this coal?" he asked.
"The Australian stood up and said, "I don"t want any authority--I bally well fought for it," and went on with his shovelling.
"Frankly, the colonel didn"t know what to say; but he has a sense of humour. "Extraordinary fellows!" he said to me as we walked off.
"Then we came across an American who was "scrounging" or something in an empty house. He jumped to attention when he saw the colonel, and saluted very smartly. But what do you think? He saluted with a bowler hat on,--found it in the house, I expect.... I tell you, it was an eye-opening day for the colonel."
I lorry-hopped to the village that I had been told was Divisional Headquarters; but they had moved the day before, seven miles farther forward. There were nearly 200 civilians here. I saw a few faded, ancient men in worn corduroys and blue-peaked caps; a bent old crone, in a blue ap.r.o.n, hobbled with a water-bucket past a corner shop--a grocer"s--shuttered, s.l.u.ttish from want of paint; three tiny children, standing in doorways, wore a strangely old expression. There was a pathetically furtive air about all these people. For four years they had been under the Boche. Of actual, death-bringing, frightening war they had seen not more than five days. The battle had swept over and beyond them, carrying with it the feared and hated German, and the main fighting force of the pursuing British as well. But it was too soon yet for them to forget, or to throw off a sort of lurking dread that even now the Boche might return.
I got a lift in another lorry along a road crumbling under the unusual amount of traffic that weighed upon it. Our advance had been so swift that the war scars on the countryside had not entirely blighted its normal characteristics. Here were sh.e.l.l-holes, but no long succession of abandoned gun-positions, few horse-tracks, fewer trenches, and no barbed wire. The villages we went through had escaped obliterating sh.e.l.l fire. I learned that our attacks had been planned thus-wise. Near a bleak cross-roads I saw Collinge of B Battery, and got off the lorry to talk to him.
"Brigade Headquarters are at Bousies, about six miles from here," he said. "I"m going that way. The batteries are all in Bousies."
"What sort of a time have you had?" I inquired.
"Oh, most exciting! Shan"t forget the day we crossed the Le Cateau river. We were the advance Brigade. The Engineers were supposed to put bridges across for us; the material came up all right, but the pioneers who were to do the work missed the way. The sapper officer who had brought the material wanted to wait till the proper people arrived, but the Boche was sh.e.l.ling and machine-gunning like mad, and the colonel said that bridge-building must be got on with at once. The colonel was great that day. Old Johns of D Battery kept buzzing along with suggestions, but the colonel put his foot down, and said, "It"s the sapper officer"s work; let him do it." And the bridges were really well put up. All the guns got across safely, although C Battery had a team knocked out."
I walked by Collinge"s side through a village of sloping roofs, single-storied red-brick houses, and mud-clogged streets. It was the village which our two brigades of artillery occupied when the Armistice was signed, where the King came to see us, and M. le Maire, in his excitement, gave His Majesty that typically French, shall I say? clasp of intimacy and brotherliness, a left-handed handshake.
"Curious thing happened on that rise," remarked Collinge when we were in open country again. "The colonel and the adjutant were with an infantry General and his Staff officers, reconnoitring. The General had a little b.i.t.c.h something like a whippet. She downed a hare, and though it brought them into view of the Boche, the General, the colonel, and the others chased after them like mad. I believe the colonel won the race--but the adjutant will tell you all about it."
Away on the left a lone tree acted as a landmark for a sunken road.
"Brigade tried to make a headquarters there," went on Collinge, "but a signaller got knocked out, and the Boche began using the tree as a datum point; so the colonel ordered a shift." Twenty rough wooden crosses rose mournful and remote in a wide, moist mangel-field. "The cavalry got it badly there," said Collinge. "A 42 gun turned on them from close range, and did frightful execution." We were near to a cross-road, marked balefully by a two-storied house, cut in half so that the interior was opened to view like a doll"s house, and by other sh.e.l.l-mauled buildings. "The batteries came into action under that bank," he continued, pointing his cane towards a valley riddled with sh.e.l.l-holes. "That"s where Dumble did so well. Came along with the cavalry an hour and a half before any Horse Artillery battery, and brought his guns up in line, like F.A.T.... See that cemetery on the top of the hill?... the Boche made it in August 1914; lot of the old Army buried there, and it"s been jolly well looked after. The colonel walked round and looked at every grave one day; he said he"d never seen a better cared-for cemetery.... We had an "O.P." there for the Richemont River fight. The Boche sh.e.l.led it like blazes some days....
And we saw great sights up that _pave_ road there, over the dip. They held a big conference there; all sorts of Generals turned up.... Staff cars that looked like offices, with the maps and operation orders pinned up inside; and when our battery went by, the road was so packed with traffic that infantry were marching along in fours on either side of the road."
We reached the outskirts of Le Cateau, descending a steep _pave_ road.
"They sh.e.l.led this place like stink yesterday," Collinge told me.
"Headquarters were in one of those little houses on the left for one night, and their waggon line is there now, so you"ll be able to get a horse.... I heard that Major Bartlett had both his chargers killed yesterday when C Battery came through.... Isn"t that one of them, that black horse lying under the trees?"
I looked and saw many horses lying dead on both sides of the road, and thought little of it. That was war. Then all my senses were strung up to attention: a small bay horse lay stretched out on the pathway, his head near the kerb. There was a shapeliness of the legs and a fineness of the mud-checkered coat that seemed familiar. I stepped over to look.
Yes, it was my own horse "Tommy," that old Castle, our ex-adjutant, had given me--old Castle"s "handy little horse." A gaping hole in the head told all that needed to be told. I found "Swiffy" and the doctor in the workman"s cottage that had become Brigade waggon-line headquarters.
Yes, "Tommy" had been killed the day before. My groom, Morgan, was riding him. The Boche were sending over shrapnel, high in the air, and one bullet had found its billet. Poor little horse! Spirited, but easy to handle, always in condition, always well-mannered. Ah, well! we had had many good days together. Poor little horse!
I want always to remember Bousies, the village of gardens and hedgerows and autumn tints where we saw the war out, and lay under sh.e.l.l fire for the last time; whence we fought our final battle on November 4th, when young Hearn of A Battery was killed by machine-gun bullets at 70 yards"
range, and Major Bullivant, with a smashed arm and a crippled thigh, huddled under a wall until Dumble found him--the concluding fight that brought me a strange war trophy in a golfing-iron found in a hamlet that the Boche had sprawled upon for four full years.... And the name punched on the iron was that of an Oxford Street firm.
Collinge and I rode into Bousies in the wan light of an October afternoon. At a cross-roads that the Boche had blown up--"They didn"t do it well enough; the guns got round by that side track, and we were only held up ten minutes," said Collinge--Brigade Headquarters"
sign-board had been planted in a hedge. My way lay up a slushy tree-bordered lane; Collinge bade me good-bye, and rode on down the winding street.
There were the usual welcoming smiles. Manning gave me a "Had a good leave, sir?" in his deep-sea voice, and Wilde came out to show where my horse could be stabled. "It"s a top-hole farm, and after the next move we"ll bring Headquarters waggon line up here.... The colonel says you can have his second charger now that you"ve lost "Tommy." He"s taking on Major Veasey"s mare, the one with the cold back that bucks a bit.
She"s a nice creature if she"s given plenty of work."
"How is the colonel?" I asked.
"Oh, he"s in great form; says the war may end any minute. Major Simpson and Major Drysdale are both away on leave, and the colonel"s been up a good deal seeing the batteries register.... We got a shock when we came into this place yesterday. A 42 hit the men"s cook-house, that small building near the gate.... But they haven"t been troublesome since."
The end wall of the long-fronted narrow farmhouse loomed up gauntly beside the pillared entrance to the rectangular courtyard. A weather-vane in the form of a tin trotting horse flaunted itself on the topmost point. This end wall rose to such height because, though the farmhouse was one-storied, its steep-sloping roof enclosed an attic big enough to give sixty men sleeping room. Just below the weather-vane was a hole poked out by the Boche for observation purposes. Our adjutant used to climb up to it twice daily as a sort of const.i.tutional. Some one had left in this perch a bound volume of a Romanist weekly, with highly dramatic, fearfully coloured ill.u.s.trations. As the house contained some twenty of these volumes, I presumed that they betrayed the religious leanings of the farm"s absent owner. A row of decently ventilated stables faced the farmhouse, while at the end of the courtyard, opposite to the entrance gates, stood an enormous high-doored barn. The entrance-hall of the house gave, on the left, to two connecting stone-flagged rooms, one of which Manning used as a kitchen--Meddings, our regular cook, was on leave. The other room, with its couple of s.p.a.cious civilian beds, we used as a mess, and the colonel and the adjutant slept there. The only wall decorations were two "samplers" executed by a small daughter of the house, a school certificate in a plain frame, and a couple of gaudy-tinselled religious pictures. A pair of pot dogs on the mantelpiece were as stupidly ugly as some of our own mid-Victorian cottage treasures. And there were the usual gla.s.s-covered orange blossoms mounted on red plush and gilt leaves--the wedding custom traditional to the country districts of Northern France. The inner door of this room opened directly into the stable where our horses were stalled. An infantry colonel and his staff occupied the one large and the two small rooms to the right of the entrance-hall; but after dinner they left us to go forward, and my servant put down a mattress on the stone floor of one of the smaller rooms for me to sleep upon. Wilde took possession of the other little chamber. The large room, which contained a colossal oak wardrobe, became our mess after breakfast next day. The signallers had fixed their telephone exchange in the vaulted cellar beneath the house, and the servants and grooms crowded there as well when the Boche"s night-sh.e.l.ling grew threatening.