B00D2VJZ4G EBOK (19 page)

We hurled ourselves back to the trench. And then there was a tremendous roar and a tearing across the skies above us, as the barrage commenced with unerring accuracy. It was as though a door had been suddenly flung open. The skies behind our lines were lit by the flashes of many thousand guns, and above the booming din of the artillery came the rasping rattle of the Vickers guns pouring a continuous stream of lead over into the enemy’s lines. Never before, surely, had there been such a bombardment, and I shuddered for those unfortunates caught in that storm of death.

Yet the German gunners were not slow to answer their S.O.S. call, for before I had crossed the few yards back to the trench their shells were already bursting around. I saw the trench before me and in my excitement I slipped upon the edge and fell headforemost amidst a rain of loose earth. My helmet slipped off and I was just able to drag out my Lewis gun buckets before a stream of humanity striving to reach the deeper parts of the trench carried me before it. I had lost my steel helmet and could think of little else during the whole bombardment. The shells lashed the ground with fury. Each piece of flying shrapnel seemed to be searching for my unprotected head and as I pushed it into the parapet the loose grains of earth matted my hair and trickled into the collar of my tunic. The rest of the section crouched near.

Our corporal, Regular soldier and veteran of the First Battle of Ypres, sat crouched in the corner, his knees almost to his chin, and, except for an occasional blasphemy or laconic: ‘The next one’ll get us,’ he remained motionless. My pal leaned against the parapet, his eyes closed as though death had already come to him, and a little further along another youngster cried audibly. From right and left came cries of pain and the stretcher bearers, risking all in their devotion, pushed backwards and forwards to dress the wounded. Our casualties were heavy, but fortunately the enemy batteries were disorganized and the shooting somewhat haphazard, otherwise few of us would have escaped that morning.

News came back of the success of the first advance with comparatively light casualties, and, after a lull, our guns increased again to tremendous fury while the attack was further developed. The crack of rifles and rattle of machine guns came through the din. Casualties this time were much heavier, as was to be expected. Then the bombardment slowly died away and it was obvious that the time for consolidation had arrived. Orders came for us to lead along the trench, and I soon found a helmet for which the owner no longer had any use. I appropriated it thankfully.

We got mixed up with a carrying party coming from the opposite direction, and the enemy, who could see into the lower parts of the trench, began sniping with ‘whizz-bangs.’ Those small, swiftly travelling shells came without warning and spread a greater feeling of ‘wind-up’ than did the larger varieties. Something had gone wrong and we were turned about. A shell hit the parapet near by and a second burst on the inside of the parados, but 2 or 3 yards away. The man in front was killed, while I, who was lifted from my feet by the explosion and enveloped in a thick suffocating cloud of yellow fumes, remained unscratched. Such were the fortunes of war.

For the next hour or so I was suffering from shell-shock and only half-conscious of the withering fire that the enemy directed against us from the left sector of the old line behind us. The shelling was measured and nerve-racking. Each shell was intended for the trench and did not fall far away. The casualty list lengthened, and it seemed that endurance could stand little more. Our inactivity was deadly. At last the enemy got tired, and towards the late afternoon all became quiet.

Then came the order for us to reinforce the troops in Battle Wood. We left the trench and crossed the shell-torn hill by the railway cutting. The crater, which I expected to see as an immense jagged hole in the ground, was actually a large flat-bottomed depression like a frying-pan, clear and clean from debris except at the further edge, where vestiges of one of the enemy’s trenches showed through its side. The poor devils caught in that terrible cataclysm had no chance. Yet what chance was there for anyone in that war of guns and mathematics?

On the nearer lip of the crater lay the body of a German still clutching his rifle. He was a tremendous fellow well over 6 feet in height, I should think, and seems to have made a single-handed effort to hold up the advancing British line. How he got there is difficult to imagine. He was probably out on advance post between the mine and our lines and had retreated to the crater to make his last brave stand. A murmur of admiration passed down the file at the recognition of such courage. Here and there black fountains of earth were thrown up as heavy enemy shells burst in the wilderness and put a finishing touch to that scene of desolation. I could survey the whole of the famous hill and, away in front, the tree stumps of Battle Wood; and it occurred to me that until that day no man had, during those many months since the first battles, stood on that same ground in daylight and lived.

Private E
. N.
Gladden, at the end of
1915,
when eighteen years of age, attested under the Derby Scheme. Called up in the following May. Passed for home service and posted to the 2nd/1st Hertfordshires. Left England on August 30th, 1916, and joined the 7th Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers on the Somme. Badly handled both by the enemy and the weather in the October-November battles about Le Sars and Warlencourt. Contracted trench feet and crossed to Blighty in the ill-fated ‘Glenart Castle’ at the end of December. Early March back at the Depot at Catterick and to France May 2nd
, 1917,
and posted to the 11th Battalion in the Salient. Then followed Messines, the Third Battle, and Passchendaele. Italy (23rd Division) in November. Xmas in the trenches on the Piave-Montello front. Transferred to the mountains in March 1918. The battalion took a leading part in both the Austrian offensive on the Asiago Plateau on June 15th, and the final crossing of the Piave on October 27th
, 1918.

We had waited a long time for nine o’clock on that July night of 1917, and now that we were nearing the hour to be off we wanted sleep. Yet, through the nervous excitement which weeks of preparation had engendered we could doze but fitfully. On the rat-eaten boards of a dug-out on the canal bank we sprawled, pinned down by our battle clobber. A curtain hung at the door to keep out gas. It also kept out the twilight.

‘Can’t someone get a blasted light?’ Private Smith suddenly exclaimed, and as an answer a match was struck, applied to a piece of four-by-two, which in turn was stuck in the middle of a tin of dubbin. This acted as a candle, and threw a strange eerie light that turned the faces of the twenty of us who were huddled there a pale green, with dark shadows that made holes for eyes.

Smith, who stared vacantly across to my side, broke the silence again.

‘God, this makes you think,’ he said, in a voice which wasn’t quite like his own.

‘Put a sock in it, Smith,’ was the solitary answer he received to his philosophy, and once more silence descended upon the dug-out, and shadows jumped over the domed roof as the green light bobbed up and down.

I reflected idly on the happenings of the past month. Right back, where we could sleep in tolerably clean straw and pinch the eggs and cherries of an old French farmer, we had also crushed down his growing wheat and had cut trenches across his fields.

We were told that these trenches followed the line of those we were to attack later, and, having cut them out, we rushed over them every day for a fortnight, always, at the end, capturing the little village of St. Jullen at the bayonet. Only it was rather different there. You see we had a breathing space half-way across the fields, and from nowhere French girls came with baskets of oranges and chocolates for heroes – only the heroes had to pay through the nose for the dry or gritty delicacies.

It was a great holiday, that – when we put one foot in paradise, experienced the unregretted loss of lousy shirts, stole eggs for breakfast, got fruit for tea and generally were fattened up. For what end?

Then we marched back again. But we were still fairly well behind the line. There the sergeant, whom we hated because he snarled every time he spoke, was unlucky, for a flying piece of iron caught him in the liver. Somehow we found we were sorry when he died because when he had gone we discovered there were a lot of things he had done for his platoon that weren’t done for anyone else.

Then there was the working party that went out to carry ‘footballs’ up to the front line and, cutting across the field between the two lines of trenches by way of the light railway, was suddenly swept by German guns, and turned back, with gas-masks fixed, into a dug-out to lay panting. But eleven of the twenty-four were left huddled up by the railway line. And the colonel had told Brigade Headquarters, so the rumour ran, that he wasn’t going to have his bloody battalion cut up before they began. (At any rate, there were no more working parties.) And as the movements in the back area increased, the padre rigged up a cross on a sugar box one morning, and we had communion, though the beer parade collided with this. What memories! It seemed so long ago: we were much nearer to death now…

There was a tap on the curtain which was lifted as the colonel came in. I don’t know where we had picked up the old man, but he was a decent old buck.

‘Now, my boys,’ – something like that he began – ’you’ve been practising and waiting for this moment for a long time. Try to remember what you have learnt, and keep up the name of the regiment. I’ve just come to wish you all the best of luck. There’ll be some porridge up soon. Fill your bellies. And God bless you.’

I hadn’t the heart to eat much of the porridge. I stuffed down two or three spoonfuls and dozed off again…

I awoke with a start. The light had burnt out. My mate, George, gave me a kick because I wasn’t moving.

‘Come on,’ he said; ‘they’re falling in.’

‘Here, give me a hand. This blasted clobber’s weighing me down.’

He pulled me up, and with a good deal of clatter we struggled through the little door. There was still a bit of light in the sky, which was reflected in the muddy water of the canal. There was also a suggestion of rain in the wind.

We fell in. The roll was called: we were all there.

Then, in single file, we turned left to the communication trench and the enemy’s lines. We reached our positions and waited, sprawling in the Flanders mud on a summer’s night. George and I sprawled together to keep warm; for even a summer’s night, with the rain in the wind which comes across the plain, Flanders can be chilly.

George, always a voluble member of the platoon, had still a little to say, though now in whispers. He could see no outcome of the War in its present form. In the evening platoon discussions he had been in favour of a general armistice. But he pronounced it ‘ar-mis-tik,’ with the accent on the second syllable.

‘If only we could have an armistik,’ he began, as Fritz started a devil’s tattoo on his machine guns. Ta-t-t t-ta! How well he played it. Then from our own lines came the finishing notes, Tata. We laughed at this exchange of courtesies, in spite of our discomfort. They kept it up till the thing got on my nerves. Then the guns which had been growling in the background suddenly burst out in a screaming tornado of lead, and heavy stuff dropped just behind us. There was some suppressed commotion.

‘Stretcher bearers,’ came a voice.

‘Coming up,’ was the reply.

‘Someone hit,’ muttered George.

‘Ay.’

‘Lucky sod. He’s saved a lot of trouble.’

I never knew who it was. The poor devil called out for his mother.

‘Oh, put a sock in his blasted mouth,’ came another nerve-racked voice.

The stretcher bearers got the chap away and there was quiet again. Every few minutes the officers came round to see if we were all right. I was more thankful to see the cooks. They had struggled up with hot tea, strengthened with rum. It was the most liberal treatment we had had during the War. By the way the liquor burned, I should say it was fifty-fifty. The youngest lad in the platoon – he must have lied to get into the Army, poor fool – crawled on his belly and would insist on shaking hands with every one of us. He was thoroughly drunk.

It was still dark, and my illuminated watch said 3.30. That meant half an hour more. Then we became very silent, and even the guns seemed to be still. It seemed like the calm that comes before the thunderstorm…

An officer came round once more.

‘Five minutes more, boys,’ he said; ‘get ready.’

We fixed our bayonets. We gripped each other’s hands. And waited. My heart seemed to take up that devil’s tattoo and thumped against my ribs…

Suddenly it came. I can still hear those three sharp staccato cannon shots which seemed to split the darkness, for there followed a tremendous roar and crash which sent the first light of dawn trembling along the distant horizon above the mist, suddenly to burst into miles of flames. And from No Man’s Land shot up a myriad of distress lights, trembling. And ‘express trains’ roared overhead.

It was a wonderful moment. Some magic force drew us up from our crouching positions, and in the blue mist which still clung to the hollows in the battlefield we looked like ghosts wreathed by smoke. Eighty thousand of us. Then we swept forward as if caught by the wind. The spreading light of dawn caught the glint of bayonets as they moved on and on…

I met Ira by the side of a shell hole. He had pulled out his leg from the squelchy mud which had dragged him down to the knee. Months we had campaigned together. The happiness which we had managed to squeeze out of those dreary months we shared; the sorrows we shared; the parcels from home we shared. On those blessed days of rest we had flung bits of poetry to each other and had teased to say what we had quoted. We thought that after the War we would quit the monotonous life at home and would go adventuring. We had mapped out what we would do, where we would go – this country and that. They knew us as the twins. Before we went over we had been told to press on: if a man dropped down he must be left – others would follow to patch him up.