Letters from France Part 13

The Tenth Legion did get its rest. Caius lay beneath a moss-covered, tilted gravestone--long, long forgotten--not so far from the great road.

One of a much later generation of orderly officers, who had sc.r.a.ped part of the inscription clean with his penknife, went back and told the mess at dinner that he had come across the grave of an officer of their own unit, who had died thereabouts in some camp a hundred and fifty years before. He did not mention that, on his stroll, he had scrambled down a steep gra.s.s bank which ran curiously across the hill-side. There was green gra.s.s above it, and green gra.s.s below it; and green gra.s.s and patches of ploughland all over the downs. The white frost still hung to the blades, though it was midday. The remnant of a small wood stood from the hill-side. "I must get a fatigue party on to that timber to-morrow,"

had said the orderly officer to himself.

And so it was that the forest pa.s.sed away--the general service wagons from the neighbouring Roman camp called there daily for sixty years for fuel cut by generations of fatigue parties. The only trees left, over miles of sloping downs, were the thickets around the villages and one row of walnut trees growing along the top of that steep gra.s.s embankment--the one remnant of Hammerhead's old orchard. Years later the tow-haired Franks swept through the country. The walnut trees were cut by a farmer for the uprights in his long barn. His children rolled down the old bank in their games, and in bad baby Latin invited the youngsters of the farm next door to charge up "the Gra.s.s Bank" while they defended it. The generations, whose bad Latin gradually became French, still spoke of Hammerhead's old landmark--now situated in a large gra.s.s field--as "The Gra.s.s Bank."

On the military maps some way behind the arterial system of red lines which stood for the German trenches--exactly as on a German map it stands for ours--was a shaded mark shaped like an elongated pea pod.

There was no name to it--but a note in some pigeonhole of the local Intelligence Officer stated that the inhabitants called the place "The Gra.s.s Bank." Through it the map showed a lonely little red capillary, wandering by itself for a quarter of an inch, and fading off into nothing again. The stout German colonel of the local artillery group--big guns which barked mostly of nights--having found his forward observation post knocked in by a small field-gun sh.e.l.l, had come back and growled like a bear all dinner-time, most inconsequentially, about the lack of cover from heavy sh.e.l.ls in the back areas. His real object was to abuse the men at the table with him; but one junior Staff Officer, hankering after promotion, looked round for the best dug-out site; and caused to be burrowed downwards, from the bottom of a steep gra.s.sy bank which ran half-way across a neighbouring field, four narrow dark tunnels leading into low square rooms, held up with stout beams, and all connected with each other. Two were lined with rough bunks on wooden frames folding against the wall. Another held a table covered with papers, a telephone switchboard, and four busy clerks. The fourth was panelled carefully with deal, the ceiling neatly gridironed with dark stained wood, a cupboard let into a recess with a looking-gla.s.s panel above it, a comfortable bunk with an electric bulb above the pillow and a telephone by the bedside. The group commander slept there undisturbed, even when the British suddenly pushed their front forward, and the Gra.s.s Bank began to shake with the thump of 9-inch sh.e.l.ls. The junior Staff Officer wonders why he is a junior Staff Officer still.

The great battle climbed like some slow, devouring monster up one green slope, down the next, and up the green slopes beyond, clawing on to green fields, and leaving them behind it a wilderness of pock-marked slime. One of the many small obstacles, which held up its local progress for a while, was some sort of nest of Germans behind a certain bank.

Several attacks had been made on it. The Intelligence Officer of an Australian Brigade followed the Intelligence Officer of an Australian Battalion on his stomach, for one night, up to the barbed wire; and gave it as his opinion that the enemy kept his machine-guns in dug-outs at the bottom of the bank. Later, a wild night of driving rain, and flashes, and crashes, and black forms struggling in the mud against the glint of flares on slimy white crater edges, left things still uncertain.

It was there that Tim Gibbs came in--and Booligal. Tradition in New South Wales puts the climate of Hay, h.e.l.l, and Booligal in that order.

Tim had driven starving, rickety sheep across his native plains when the earth's surface had been powdered to red sand and driven by shrivelling westerlies in travelling sandhills from mirage to summer mirage. Tim was used to hot places. That is why he became a stretcher-bearer for his company in Gallipoli, and transferred to the regimental bombers when they reached France. When they came to a sea of brown mud waves, which some cynic had misnamed the "Gra.s.s Bank," it was not Tim who volunteered to take it. He had been in far too many hot corners to retain any of his old hankering after them, and the Gra.s.s Bank was hotter than Booligal.

He went for the place because his colonel told him to--went cheerfully to do a thing he horribly disliked, without letting anyone guess by word or deed or the least little sign that he disliked it--which, if you think of it, is more heroic by a long chalk.

It was after dark on a winter's night that he and his men--about sixteen of them--crept out up a slimy trench deep to the knees in sloppy mud; peered at the enemy's wire against the skyline; half crawled, half slid through a gap in it, and disappeared, Tim leading. A white flash--a shower of bombs--red and orange flares breaking like Roman candles in the sky--the chatter of a machine-gun--the enemy's barrage presently shrieking down the vault of heaven. A dozen wounded men came back before dawn. And Tim--Tim lay with his face to the stars, dreaming for ever and ever of red plains and travelling sheep, on the edge of Tamar the Hammerhead's Gra.s.s Bank.

Slime Trench--Gra.s.s Bank--Gibbs' Corner--you will read of them all in their chapter in the War's History. They were in every map for a month--the newspapers made headings of them--they were household words in London suburbs and Melbourne teashops. A month later the flood of battle swept past them all in a great general attack without so much as pausing to look. Two months--and a string of lorries pushed up a newly made road until a policeman held them up, just as he would in London, to let some cross stream of traffic through. One of the crossing lorries b.u.mped into a hole and impaled itself on a beam that had fallen off the lorry ahead. The two drivers of a lorry far behind climbed up a steep, sh.e.l.l-shattered neighbouring bank, and munched bread and bully beef while the afternoon grew to dusk and gun flashes showed like lightning on the angry low winter clouds ahead.

"What they want to get us stuck in this flaming mud-hole for?" said the driver to the second driver. "The Huns must have had a dug-out down there, Bill," he added, pointing to certain splintered, buried timber at the foot of the bank.

Now there may be no such place as the Gra.s.s Bank; and there may have been no Hammerhead nor Tim Gibbs; and he did not come from Booligal. But the story is true to this extent--that it happens all the time upon this battlefield.

CHAPTER x.x.xI

IN THE MUD OF LE BARQUE

_France, December 20th._

By the muddy, sh.e.l.l-pitted roadside of the sunken road in Le Barque, behind the German lines, were found three shapeless forms. The mud dripped from them as they lay, but they were the forms of men. And the German soldiers who saw them, and who buried them, took it that they were men who had not lost their lives from any sh.e.l.l wound; that they had not been killed by the fire of our machine-guns, or by stray bullets. They put down the death of those men to the mud and the mud alone. The sunken road at Le Barque had been mashed with sh.e.l.ls and trampled to slime with traffic; some runner from battalion headquarters at night, slipping through the sleet, some couple of men straggling after the tail of an incoming platoon on a wild night when the English barrage suddenly startled them and caused them to miss the path by a few yards in the blackness, had stumbled unnoticed into a sh.e.l.l-hole. All their company officer knew was that they were missing--and no trace of them was found until three bodies were dragged from a sh.e.l.l crater, when men told stories of men missed there before.

Now, I do not know if it really was the mud which engulfed alive the three Germans who lay beside the sunken road of Le Barque; but I know that their comrades thought it was. And that is a simple proof that the mud, of which the Germans talk so much, is not all on the British side of the trenches.

Looking from our lines yesterday across a valley one noticed a German trench running up the farther side, the grey mud parapet heaped out, like the earth of one long, continuous grave, on both sides of the trench. Behind that trench, along its whole length, as far as we could see, ran a sinuous thread of light-coloured soil. It was the beaten track by which the Germans had moved up and down their trench. They could not move _in_ the trench, so when they wanted to move they had to hop up and move outside of it. If we were sniping by day they could not move at all; and the track had probably been made by Germans moving at night. It hugged the trench in case we started shooting or sh.e.l.ling--when the Germans could at once jump back into the mud again.

The Germans in some parts of the Somme battlefield have been going down with frostbite in great numbers, so great as to put at least one battalion out of action. This is through getting feet wet and frozen in muddy trenches. To reach their front line, last month, in these valleys in front of Bapaume and Le Transloy, has been quite impossible to the Germans unless they went up over the open, or used such trenches as a self-respecting man could scarcely enter. They came up, as would any other soldiers under the same circ.u.mstances, across the open land. Even then there were places which a man could scarcely pa.s.s. I know a man who, in that same sunken road at Le Barque, pulled two of his comrades by force out of the mud--an everyday matter. They left their boots and socks in the mud behind them.

If a man is wounded in some of those German trenches it takes eight men to get him to the dressing station and five hours to arrive there, and very much longer if there is any fighting in progress. One would not say that any of these difficulties have been more acute amongst the Germans than with the British and Australians--in some ways our men have faced and overcome greater hards.h.i.+ps than the Germans. But there is this chief difference--the German is now getting back the sh.e.l.ls which for two years he rained upon the British. And he is talking--like a German--about the unfairness of it.

The German Staff claims that German infantry is the best in the world.

Certainly it is tough, and thoroughly convinced that it is better than any of its friends. "The Turk is a pretty good fighter," said a German to me a few days ago, "and the Bulgars fight well. The Austrians are worth little. Every time the Russians drive the Austrians back they have to call us in to repulse the Russians again for them."

The German infantryman is tough, but not tougher than ours, and without the dash; his outstanding virtue is his great power of work. But I do not believe from what I have seen that he works one sc.r.a.p harder than the Australian. He might be supposed to have his heart more in the war than the soldier of any other nation, but he certainly has not. Many German soldiers have told me that there was a universal longing for the war to end--but they seem to wonder at your asking them what they think, or what their people in Germany think--as though it mattered one straw. They tell you, in a detached sort of way, that a great many of their people in Germany are tired of the war. "But they have no influence on these matters," they say, "nor have the soldiers. We do not meet together--we have nothing to say with it. They would go on with the war all next year even if a million more men are killed--they will bring back all the wounded, and the sick, if necessary."

The German who used those words seemed to have no quarrel with those who were driving his country, and no pride in them--he did not approve and he did not disapprove. He seemed to accept them as part of the unquestioned, unchangeable laws of his existence; they were there--and what business was it of his to interfere with them?

One can scarcely see a gleam of hope for them in the att.i.tude of their prisoners--a people that cannot rebel. But perhaps it is unfair to judge.

For these men, whom we now see, have been at long, long last through the fire of guns heavier than their own; and through the mud of Le Barque.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

THE NEW DRAFT

_France, December 11th._

A fair-sized sh.e.l.l recently arrived in a certain front trench held by Australians in France. It exploded, and an Australian found himself struggling amongst some debris in No Man's Land. He tried to haul himself clear, but the tumbled rubbish kept him down; and, as often as he was seen to move, bullets whizzed past him from a green slope near by. The green slope ran like a low railway embankment along the other side of the unkempt paddock between the trenches. It was the German front line.

Finally one of his mates, I am told, jumped over to his help and dragged him clear. When he got in he asked to be put into the very next party that should visit the German trenches. He wanted his own back.

He was one of the newest Australians. That is exactly the sort of request that would have been made by the oldest ones.

We have seen the newest Australian draft in France, and the verdict from first to last amongst those who know them is, "They will do." There is always a certain amount of chaff thrown out by the oldest Australians at the latest arrivals. The sort of Australian who used to talk about our "tinpot navy" labelled the Australians who rushed at the chance of adventure the moment the recruiting lists were opened "the six bob a day tourists." Well--the "Tourists" made a name for Australia such as no other Australians can ever have the privilege to make. The next s.h.i.+pment were the "d.i.n.k.u.ms"--the men who came over on principle to fight for Australia--the real, fair d.i.n.k.u.m[3] Australians. After them came the "Super-d.i.n.k.u.ms"--and the next the "War Babies," and after them the "Chocolate Soldiers," then the "Hard Thinkers," who were pictured as thinking very hard before they came. And then the "Neutrals." "We know they are not against the Allies," the others said, when came news of the latest drafts still training steadily under peace conditions, "we know they are not against us--we suppose they are just neutral."

[3] "d.i.n.k.u.m"--Australian for "true."

There has always been some chaff thrown at the latest arrival--and it is a mistake to think that there was never any feeling behind the chaff.

I remember long ago at Anzac when a new draft was moving up past some of the older troops--past men who were thin with disease and overworn with heavy work--there was a cry of "You have come at last, have you?" flung in a tone of which the bitterness was unmistakable. There has always been a feeling, amongst the older troops here, that they have been holding the fort--hanging on for Australia's name until the others have time to come along and give them a hand. There is a tendency to feel that soldiers who are still at home are getting all the limelight--the parading of streets and praises of the newspapers--and will probably live to reap most of the glory at the end of it all.

If so, there was never a feeling that melted more quickly the moment each new draft arrives and is really tested. The moment it goes into the whirl of a modern battle, and acquits itself through some wild night as every Australian draft always has done in its first fight and always will do, every sign of that old feeling melts as if it had never existed; and the new draft finds itself taken into the heart of the old force on the same terms as the oldest and proudest regiment there. I make no apology for talking of them as "old" regiments. There are regiments in this war, not three years old, which have seen as much terrible fighting as others whose record goes back over hundreds of years. Ages ago, prehistoric ages, the "d.i.n.k.u.ms" became a t.i.tle for men to be intensely proud of. Men who were through the first fortnight at Pozieres need never be ashamed to compare their experiences with those of any soldiers in the world, for it is the literal truth that there has never in history been a harder battle fought. The "Chocolate Soldiers"

became veterans in one terrible struggle. The "War Babies" were old soldiers almost before they had cut their teeth. It is one of the pities of the censors.h.i.+p, but a necessary one, that the Australian public cannot know, until the story of this war is fully told at the end of it, the famous Australian battalions which will most a.s.suredly go down to history as household names.

And if there are not battalions, amongst the newest troops, which will go down to history with some of the very best Australia possesses--then I am a German. They have had a wonderful training of late--a training which can only be compared in thoroughness with that of Mena Camp in Egypt where our first troops trained, and with the full experience of this war to back it. The British authorities are equipping the new Australian drafts generously. The discipline of Australians, once they come to understand their work, has never given the slightest real anxiety to those responsible for them. The newest men have exactly the same straight frank look and speech as has every other batch that I have seen. If there is any difference between them first and last I will be bound that it is beyond the keenest eye to detect it.

Indeed, if there is a difference between one Australian infantry battalion and another, it is, and has always been, a matter of officers.

A commander who can make all his subordinates feel that they are pulling in the same boat's crew--that they are all swinging together, not only with their own but with every other battalion and brigade; who can make them look upon themselves as all helping in the one big cause; who can make them regard the difficulty of another battalion merely as a chance for freely and fully a.s.sisting it--a commander who can do these things with his officers can make a wonderful force of his Australians. This may sound abstract and vague, but it is real to such an extent that it is the main reason of all differences that exist between Australian units.

Australian units have, like the Scots, a wonderful confidence in each other. They have been proud to fight by the side of grand regiments and divisions; but I fancy they would rather fight beside other Australians or New Zealanders than beside the most famous units in the world.

Chaffing apart, that is the feeling of the oldest unit towards the newest.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

WHY HE IS NOT "THE ANZAC"

_France, November 28th._

"You don't call us the Anzacs, do you?" asked the man with the elbow sling appealingly. "You call us just Australians and New Zealanders, don't you?"