Letters from France Part 12

That march at both ends of the motor trip was the adjutant's salvation.

When the battalion splashed up to its appointed billets, and found them calculated for receiving only half of its number of soldiers awake, he s.h.i.+fted two-thirds of them in; and, as they promptly fell to sleep the moment the column ceased to move, he s.h.i.+fted in the remainder when they were asleep.

When the battalion drew its breath next morning, it was inclined to think that it was enduring the full horror of war; and was preparing to summarise the situation. But before it could draw a second breath it was marched off to--to what I will call a reserve camp. It was not technically a reserve camp, which was farther on; but they knew it was a camp for battalions to rest in--when they have been very good, and it is desired to give them time to recover their wind. They were rather "bucked" with the idea of this resting-place.

At midday they arrived there. That is to say, they waded up to a collection of little tents, not unlike bushmen's tents in Australia, and stood knee deep at the entrances, looking into them--speechless. They were not much by way of tents at the best of times. There was nearly as much mud inside as there was outside. But on top of the normal conditions came the fact that the last battalion to occupy those tents must have camped there in dry weather. Since there was not enough headroom upwards it had dug downwards. And, as it had not put a drain round them, the water had come in, and the interior of a fair proportion of these residences consisted of a circular lake, varying in depth from a few inches to a foot and a half.

The battalion could only find one word, when its breath came--and, as the regiment which had made those holes, and the town major to whom they now belonged, were probably of unimpeachable ancestry, I do not think the accusation was justified. But when it realised that, good or bad, this was the place where it was to pa.s.s the night, it split itself up, as good Australian battalions have a way of doing.

"Which is the way to our tents, Bill?" asked the rear platoon of one of the band, which had arrived half an hour before.

"I don't know--I'm not the blanky harbour-master," was the reply. The battalion set to work, like a tribe of beavers, to make a home. It banked up little parapets of mud to prevent water coming in. It dug capacious drains to let the water which was in run out. It sc.r.a.ped the mud out of the interior of its lake dwellings, until it reached more or less dry earth. A fair proportion of the regiment melted out into the landscape, and returned during the rest of the day by ones and twos, carrying odd bits of timber, broken wood, bricks, f.a.g ends of rusty sheet iron, old posts, wire and straw. By nightfall those Australians were, I will not say in comfort, but moderately and pa.s.sably warm and dry.

It so happened that they stayed in that camp four days. By the time they left it they were looking upon themselves as almost fortunate. There was only one break in its improvement--and that was when a dug-out was discovered. It was a charming underground home, dug by some French battery before the British came--with bunks and a table and stove. The privates who discovered it made a most comfortable home until its fame got abroad, and the regimental headquarters were moved in there.

Dug-outs became all the fas.h.i.+on for the moment--everyone set about searching for them. But the supply in any works on the Allied side is, unfortunately, limited--and after half a day's enthusiasm the battalion fell back resignedly on its canvas home.

When it came back some time later to these familiar dwellings, heavy-eyed and heavy-footed, there was no insincerity in the relief with which it regarded them. They were a resting-place then. Another battalion had kept them decently clean, and handed them over drained and dry; for which thoughtfulness, not always met with, they were more grateful than those tired men could have explained.

For they had been up into the line, and the places behind the line, and out again.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE WINTER OF 1916

_France, December 20th._

A friend has shown me a letter from Melbourne. Its writer had asked a man--an educated man--if he would give a subscription for the Australian Comforts Fund. "Certainly not," was the reply. "The men have every comfort in the trenches."

That is the sort of dense-skinned ignorance which makes one unspeakably angry--the ignorance which, because it has heard of or read a letter from some brave-hearted youngster, making light of hards.h.i.+ps for his mother's sake, therefore flies to the conclusion that everything written and spoken about the horrors of this war is humbug, and what the Army calls "eyewash"--a big conspiracy to deceive the people who are not there.

As a matter of fact, the early winter of 1916 which these men have just been going through will have a chapter to itself in history as long as history lasts. It is to some extent past history now--to what extent I do not suppose anyone on the German side or ours can tell.

I, personally, do not know how the men and their officers can live through that sort of time. Remember that a fair proportion of them were a few months ago adding up figures in the office of an insurance company or a s.h.i.+pping firm--gulping down their midday coffee and roll in a teashop in King or Collins Streets. But take even a Central District farmer or a Newcastle miner--yes, or a Scottish shepherd or an English poacher--take the hardest man you know, and put him to the same test, and it is a question whether the ordeal would not break even his spirit.

Put him out of doors into the thick of a dirty European winter; march him ten miles through a bitter cold wind and driving rain, with--on his back--all the clothing, household furniture, utensils and even the only cover which he is allowed to take with him; dribble him in through mud up to his knees--sometimes up to his waist--along miles and miles of country that is nothing but broken tree stumps and endless sh.e.l.l holes--holes into which, if a man were to fall, he might lie for days before he were found, or even might never be found at all. After many hours, trickle him, half dead with dragging his feet at every step out of the putty-like mud, into a shallow, straggling, open ditch not in any way different from a watery drain between two sodden country paddocks, except that there is no gra.s.s about it--nothing but brown, slippery mud on floor and trench sides and over the country in all directions as far as eye can see. At the end of it all put him to live there, with what baggage he carried on his back and nothing more; put him in various depths of mud, to stay there all day in rain, wind, fog, hail, snowstorm--whatever weather comes--and to watch there during the endless winter nights, when the longed-for dawn only means another day and another night out there in the mud ditch, without a shred of cover. And this is what our men have had to go through.

The longed-for relief comes at last--a change to other sh.e.l.l-battered areas in support or reserve--and the battalion comes back down the long road to the rear, white-faced and dreary-eyed, dragging slowly through the mud without a word. For they have been through a life of which you, or any people past and present who have not been to this war, have not the first beginnings of a conception; something beside which a South Polar expedition is a dance and a picnic. And that is without taking into account the additional fact that night and day, on the Somme where these conditions existed, men live under the unceasing sound of guns. I can hear them as I write--it is the first longed-for gloriously bright day, and therefore there is not an interval of a second in that continuous roar, hour after hour. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world--there has never yet been anything to approach it except at Verdun.

Life is hard enough in winter in the old-established trenches along more settled parts of the front--there is plenty for the Comforts Fund to do there. Dropping into the best of quiet front trenches straight from his home life the ordinary man would consider himself as undergoing hards.h.i.+ps undreamt of. Visiting those trenches straight from the Somme the other day, with their duck-boards and sandbags, and the occasional ping of a sniper's bullet, and the momentary spasm of field guns and trench mortars which appeared in the official summary next day as "artillery and trench mortar activity"--after the Somme, I say, one found oneself looking on it, in the terms of the friend who went with me, as "war de luxe."

It is unwise to take what one man writes of one place as true of all places or all times, or indeed of anything except what he personally sees and knows at the moment. These conditions which I have described are what I have seen, and are fortunately past history, or I should not be describing them. I personally know that English troops, Scottish troops and Australian troops went through them, and have, in some cases, issued from such trenches and taken similar German trenches in front of them. Our troops are more comfortable than they were, but it is in the nature of war to find yourself plunged into extremes of exertion and hards.h.i.+p without warning; and no man knows when he writes to-day--and I doubt whether anyone of his superiors could tell him--whether he will, at any given date, be in a worse condition or a better one.

What the German is going through on his side of the muddy landscape is described in another chapter. For our grand men--and though to be called a hero is the last thing most Australians desire, the men are never grander than at these times--the Australian Comforts Fund, the Y.M.C.A.

and the canteen groceries provide almost all the comfort that ever enters that grim region. In the areas to which those tired men come for a spell, the Comforts Fund is beginning to give them theatres for concert troupes and cinemas. It provides some hundreds of pounds to be spent locally on the most obtainable small luxuries at Christmas, besides such gifts in kind as Christmas brings.

But, for those who are actually in the front or just behind it, one cup of warm coffee in a jam-tin from a roadside stall has been, in certain times and places, all that can be given; the Fund has given that, and it has been the landmark in the day for many men. In those conditions there was but one occasional solace. A friend of mine found an Australian in the trenches in those days, standing in mud nearly to his waist, s.h.i.+vering in his arms and every body muscle, leaning back against the trench side, fast asleep.

CHAPTER XXIX

AS IN THE WORLD'S DAWN

_France, December 20th._

Yesterday morning we were looking across a bare, shallow valley at the opposite knuckle of hill-side, around the foot of which the valley doubled back out of sight. A solitary grey line of broken earth ran like a mole burrow up the bare knuckle and vanished over the top. A line of bare, dead willow stumps marked a few yards of the hollow below. On the skyline, beyond the valley's end, stood out a distant line of ghostly trees--so faint and blue as to be scarcely distinguishable from the sky.

There was nothing else in the landscape--absolutely nothing but the bare, blank shape of the land; save for those old ghosts of departed willows--no trees--no gra.s.s--no colour--no living or moving or singing or sounding thing.

Only--that morning at dawn had found a number of men tumbling, jumping, running, dodging in and out of the sh.e.l.l-holes across that slope, making towards our lines. The peck of occasional rifles came from some farther part of the grey, featureless hill-side--the report was the only trace of the rifles or of the men firing them. But as the men who were dodging back were Australians the rifles must have been the rifles of Germans, in trenches or sh.e.l.l-holes, somewhere on the face of that waste. Who these Australians were, the men who watched from where we stood did not know. Apparently they were men who had lost their way in the dark and wandered beyond our trenches; as the light grew they had suddenly realised that they were in front of our front line, and not behind it, as they thought, and had come tumbling back over the craters.

They all reached the trench safely.

For this battle has now reached such a formless, featureless landscape, that it is a hard thing to tell whether you are looking at your own country or the German country, or the country between the lines. The stretch between the two sides has for the moment widened, the Germans abandoning many of their waterlogged, sodden ditches close in front of our lines, and contenting themselves with fighting a sort of rearguard action there, while they tunnel, bore, dig, burrow like moles into the farther heights where their reserve line runs near Bapaume. The battle has widened out generally over the landscape.

It is a very great difference from that boiling, bursting nightmare of Pozieres, where the whole struggle tightened down to little more than one narrow hill-top. This battle is now being fought in a sort of dreamland of brown mudholes, which the blue northern mist turns to a dull purple grey. The shape of the land is there, the hills, valleys, lines of willow stumps, ends of broken telegraph poles. But the colour is all gone. It is as though the bed of the ocean had suddenly risen, as though the ocean depths had become valleys and the ocean mudbanks hills, and the whole earth were a creation of slime. It is as though you suddenly looked out upon the birth of the world, before the gra.s.s had yet begun to spring and when the germs of primitive life still lay in the slime which covered it; an old, old age before anything moved on the earth or sang in the air, and when the naked bones of the earth lay bare under the naked sky century after century, with no change or movement save when the cloud shadows chased across it, or the storms lashed it, or the evening sunlight glinted from the water trapped in its meaningless hollows. It is to that unremembered chaos that German ideas of life have reduced the world.

Up the hill-side opposite there is running a strange purple-grey streak between two purple-grey banks. There is something mysterious in this flat ribbon, ruled, as if by the hand of man, across that primeval colourless slope. The line of it can be traced distinctly over the hill and out of sight. It takes a moment's thinking to realise that the grey streak was once a road. It is a road which one has read of as the centre of some desultory fighting. I dare say it will appear in its own small way in history. "The battalion next attacked along the Bapaume-Cambrai road"--to give it a name it does not own; and readers will picture the troops in khaki dodging along a hedge, beneath green, leafy elm trees....

Something moved. Yes, as I live, something is moving up that old purple-grey scar across the hill-side. Two figures in pink, untanned leather waistcoats are strolling up the old road, side by side. Their hands are in their trousers pockets, and the only sign of war visible about them is their copper-green hats. A sniper's rifle pecks somewhere in the landscape thereabout, but the two figures do not even turn a head. They are Bill and Jim from South Melbourne let loose upon the antediluvian landscape, strolling up it, yawning. And they gave me much the same shock as if some green and pink animal had suddenly issued from its unsuspected burrow in a field of primeval grey slime and begun crawling over its face to some haunt in the slime elsewhere. Two other distant figures were moving on the far hill-side too. Perhaps it was at them the rifle was pecking; for to our certain knowledge the crest of that hill was German territory.

Men lose their bearings in that sort of country every day. Germans find themselves behind our lines without knowing that they have even pa.s.sed over their own; and an Australian carrying party has been known to deposit its hot food, in the warm food containers, all ready steaming to be eaten, in German territory. To their great credit be it said that the party got back safely to the Australian trenches--save for one who is missing and three who lie out there, face upwards.... Brave men.

There is only one time when that unearthly landscape returns to itself again. I suppose men and women lived in those valleys once; French farmers' girls tugged home at dusk up that ghostly roadway slow-footed, reluctant cows; I dare say they even made love--French lads and sweethearts--down some long obliterated path beside those willow stumps where the German patrol sneaks nightly from sh.e.l.l-hole to sh.e.l.l-hole.

There comes an afternoon when the sky turns dull yellow-white like an old smoker's beard, and before dusk the snowflakes begin to fall. Far back the cursing drivers are dragging their jibbing horses past half-frozen sh.e.l.l-holes, which they can scarcely see. And out there, where the freezing sentries keep watch over the fringe where civilisation grinds against the German--out there under the tender white mantle, flickering pink and orange under the gun flashes--out there for a few short hours the land which Kultur has defaced comes by its own.

CHAPTER x.x.x

THE GRa.s.s BANK

_France, December 10th._

The connection of Tamar the Hammerhead, who cut the Gra.s.s Bank out of the forest, with Timothy Gibbs, of Booligal, in New South Wales, may not be clear at first sight. Tam's beech forest covered two or three green hills in Gaul at the time when Caius Sulpicius, and his working party of the Tenth Legion, were laying down new paving stones on the big road from Amiens over the hill-tops. The wagon carrying the military secretary to the Governor had b.u.mped uncomfortably down that long slope the week before; and as the Tenth Legion was resting, its commanding officer received, two days later, an order to detail another fatigue party. The big trees looked down on a string of private soldiers shouldering big square paving stones from a neighbouring dump, where the wagons stood, and fitting them carefully into the pavement, and--and otherwise enjoying their rest. Caius Sulpicius and his orderly officer stood watching them. The orderly officer leant on his stick. Caius had a piece of bread in one hand and a wedge of cheese in the other. His forearm was black with grubbing amongst the paving stones.

"When the Tenth Legion gets a rest without some old bra.s.s helmet helping us to spend it," he said with his mouth full, "I'll begin to think the end of the war is coming."

"Why didn't it strike old Bra.s.sribs to make the inhabitants do a job of work occasionally?" he added presently. "Now, in the old general's time--"

Far down on the edge of the forest, across two or three miles of rolling hills, a patch of orange earth, newly turned, caught the orderly officer's eye. One of the inhabitants was doing a job of work there, anyway. Two days ago he had pa.s.sed that way in a stroll after parade. A mallet-headed man, his bare arm-muscles orange with mud, was piling up an earthen embankment on the hill-side. A patch of the forest had been allowed to him. In two years he had cut out the trees and undergrowth.

He was now trying to make his patch of hill-side level. The orange mud bank of his terrace had been the labour of twelve months, and there was a year's work in it yet. He had scarcely hoped to possess even a rood of land, and now he had two acres. He was going to use every inch of it.

That was Tamar the Hammerhead's life's work.