My Year of the War Part 17

They thought of nothing except soap and water. For a week they need not fight mud or Germans or parasites, which, like General Mud, waged war against both British and Germans. Standing on the slats of the concrete floor of a factory, they peeled off the filthy, saturated outer skin of clothing with its hideous, crawling inhabitants and, naked, leapt into great steaming vats, where they scrubbed and gurgled and gurgled and scrubbed. When they sprang out to apply the towels, they were men with the feel of new bodies in another world.

Waiting for them were clean clothes, which had been boiled and disinfected; and waiting, too, was the shelter of their billets in the houses of French towns and villages, and rest and food and food and rest, and newspapers and tobacco and gossip--but chiefly rest and the joy of lethargy as tissue was rebuilt after the first long sleep, often twelve hours at a stretch. They knew all the sensations of physical man, man battling with nature, in contrasts of exhaustion and danger and recuperation and security, as the pendulum swung slowly back from fatigue to the glow of strength.

Those who came out of the trenches quite "done up," Colonel Bate, Irish and genial, fatherly and not lean, claimed for his own. After the was.h.i.+ng they lay on cots under a gla.s.s roof, and they might play dominoes and read the papers when they were well enough to sit up.

They had the food which Colonel Bate knew was good for them, just as he knew what was deadly for the inhabitants whom they brought into that isolated room which every man must pa.s.s through before he was admitted to the full radiance of the colonel's curative smile. When they were able to return to the trenches, each was written down as one unit more in the colonel's weekly statistical reports. In summer he entertained al fresco in an open-air camp.

XV In Neuve Chapelle

Typical of many others, this quiet village in a flat country of rich farming land, with a church, a school, a post-office, and stores where the farmer could buy a pound of sugar or a spool of thread, employ a notary, or get a pair of shoes cobbled or a horse shod, without having to go to the neighbouring town of Bethune, Neuve Chapelle became famous only after it had ceased to exist--unless a village remains a village after it has been reduced to its original elements by sh.e.l.l-fire.

It was the scene of one of those actions in the long siege line which have the dignity of a battle; the losses on either side, about sixteen thousand, were two-thirds of those at Waterloo or Gettysburg. Here the British after the long winter's stalemate in the mud, where they stuck when the exhausted Germans could press no farther, took the offensive, with the sap of spring rising in their veins.

The guns blazed the way and the infantry charged in the path of the guns' destruction; and they kept on while the s.h.i.+eld of sh.e.l.l-fire held.

When it left an opening for the German machine-guns through its curtain and the German guns visited on the British what their guns had been visiting on the Germans, the British stopped. A lesson was learned; a principle established. A gain was made, if no goal were reached.

The human stone wall had moved. It had broken some barriers and come to rest before others, again to become a stone wall. But it knew that the thing could be done with guns and sh.e.l.ls enough--and only with enough. This means a good deal when you have been under dog for a long time. Months were to pa.s.s waiting for enough sh.e.l.ls and guns, with many little actions and their steady drain of life, while everyone looked back to Neuve Chapelle as a landmark. It was something definite for a man to say that he had been wounded at Neuve Chapelle and quite indefinite to say that he had been wounded in the course of the day's work in the trenches.

No one might see the battle in that sea of mud. He might as well have looked at the smoke of Vesuvius with an idea of learning what was going on inside of the crater. I make no further attempt at describing it. My view came after the battle was over and the cauldron was still steaming.

Though in March, 1914, one would hardly have given Neuve Chapelle, intact and peaceful, a pa.s.sing glance from a motor-car, in March, 1915, Neuve Chapelle in ruins was the one town in Europe which I most wanted to see. Correspondents had not then established themselves. The staff officer whom I asked if I might spend a night in the new British line was a cautious man. He bade me sign a paper freeing the British army from any responsibility. Judging by the general att.i.tude of the Staff, one could hardly take the request seriously. One correspondent less ought to please any Staff; but he said that he had an affection for the regulars and knew that there were always plenty of recruits to take their places without resorting to conscription. The real responsibility was with the Germans. He suggested that I might go out to the German trenches and see if I could obtain a paper from them. He thought if I were quick about it I might get at least a yard in front of the British parapet in daylight. His sense of humour I had recognized when we had met in Bulgaria.

Any traveller is bound to meet men whom he has met before in the travelled British army. At the brigade headquarters town, which, as one of the officers said, proved that bricks and mortar can float in mud, the face of the brigadier seemed familiar to me. I found that I had met him in Shanghai in the Boxer campaign, when he had come across a riotous China from India on one of those journeys in remote Asia which British officers are fond of making. He was "all there,"

whether dealing with a mob of Orientals or with Germans in the trenches. I made myself at home in the parlour of the private house occupied by himself and staff, while he went on with his work. No flag outside the house; no sign that it was headquarters. Motor-cars stopped only long enough for an officer to enter or alight. Brigade headquarters is precisely the target that German aeroplanes or spies like to locate for their guns.

"Are you ready? Have you your rubber boots?" the brigadier asked a few minutes later, as he put his head in at the parlour door. It would not do to approach the trenches until after dark. Of course, I had rubber boots. One might as well try to go to sea without a boat as to trenches without rubber boots in winter. "I'll take my const.i.tutional," he added; "the trouble with this kind of war is that you get no exercise."

He was a small man, but how he could walk! I began to understand why the Boxers could not catch him. He turned back after we had gone a mile or more and one of his staff went on with me to a point where, just at dusk, I was turned over to another pilot, an aide from battalion headquarters, and we set out across sodden fields that had yielded beetroot in the last harvest, taking care not to step in sh.e.l.l- holes. Dusk settled into darkness. No human being was in sight except ourselves.

"There's the first line of German trenches before the attack," said my companion. "Our guns got fairly on them." Dimly I saw what seemed like a huge, long, irregular furrow of earth which had been torn almost out of the shape of a trench by British sh.e.l.ls. "There was no living in it when the guns began all together. The only thing to do was to get out."

Around us was utter silence, where the h.e.l.l of thunders and destruction by the artillery had raged during the battle. Then a spent or ricochet bullet swept overhead, with the whistle of complaint of spent bullets at having travelled far without hitting any object. It had gone high over the British trenches; it had carried the full range, and the chance of its. .h.i.tting anyone was ridiculously small. But the nearer you get to the trenches, the more likely these strays are to find a victim. "Hit by a stray bullet!" is a very common saying at the front.

At last we felt the solidity of a paved road under our feet, and following this we came to a peasant's cottage. Inside, two soldiers were sitting beside telephone and telegraph instruments, behind a window stuffed with sandbags. On our way across the fields we had stepped on wires laid on the ground; we had stooped to avoid wires stretched on poles--the wires that form the web of the army's intelligence.

Of course, no two units of communication are dependent on one wire.

There is always a duplicate. If one is broken it is immediately repaired. The factories spin out wire to talk over and barbed wire for entanglements in front of trenches and weave millions of bags to be filled with sand for breastworks to protect men from bullets. If Sir John French wished, he could talk with Lord Kitchener in London and this battalion headquarters at Neuve Chapelle within the same s.p.a.ce of time that a railroad president may speak over the Long Distance from Chicago to New York and order dinner out in the suburbs.

These two men at the table, their faces tanned by exposure, men in the thirties, had the British regular of long service stamped all over them. War was an old story to them; and an old story, too, laying signal wires under fire.

"We're very comfortable," said one. "No danger from stray bullets or from shrapnel; but if one of the Jack Johnsons come in, why, there's no more cottage and no more argument between you and me. We're dead and maybe buried, or maybe scattered over the landscape, along with the broken pieces of the roof."

A soldier was on guard with bayonet fixed inside that little room, which had pa.s.sageway to the cellar past the table, among straw beds. This seemed rather peculiar. The reason lay on one of the beds in a private's khaki. He had come into the battalion's trenches from our front and said that he belonged to the D------regiment and had been out on patrol and lost his way.

It was two miles to that regiment and two miles is a long distance to stray between two lines of trenches so close together, when at any point in your own line you will find friends. It was possible that this fellow's real name was Hans Schmidt, who had learned c.o.c.kney English in childhood in London, and in a dead British private's uniform had come into the British trenches to get information to which he was anything but welcome.

He was to be sent under guard to the D------regiment for identification; and if he were found to be a Hans and not a Tommy--well, though he had tried a very stupid dodge he must have known what to expect when he was found out, if his officers had properly trained him in German rules of war.

I had a glimpse of him in the candlelight before stooping to feel my way down three or four narrow steps to the cellar, where the farmer ordinarily kept potatoes and vegetables. There were straw beds around the walls here, too. The major commanding the battalion rose from his seat at a table on which were some cutlery, a jam pot, tobacco, pipes, a newspaper or two, and army telegraph forms and maps.

If the hosts of mansions could only make their hospitality as simple as the major's, there would be less affectation in the world. He introduced me to an officer sitting on the other side of the table and to one lying in his blankets against the wall, who lifted his head and blinked and said that he was very glad to see me.

It is a small world, for China cropped up here, as it had at brigade headquarters. The major had been in garrison at Peking when the war began. If my s.h.i.+pmate on a long battles.h.i.+p cruise, Lt.-Col. Dion Williams, U.S.M.C, reads this out in Peking let it tell him that the major is just as urbane in the cellar of a second-rate farmhouse on the outskirts of Neuve Chapelle as he would be in a corner of the Peking Club.

"How is it? Painful now?" asked the major of Captain P-----, on the other side of the table.

"Oh, no! It's quite all right," said the captain.

"Using the sling?"

"Part of the time. Hardly need it, though."

Captain P-----was one of those men whose eyes are always smiling; who seems, wherever he is, to be glad that he is not in a worse place; who goes right on smiling at the mud in the trenches and bullets and sh.e.l.ls and death. They are not emotional, the British, perhaps, but they are given to cheeriness, if not to laughter, and they have a way of smiling at times when smiles are much needed. The smile is more often found at the front than back at headquarters; or perhaps it is more noticeable there.

"You see, he got a bullet through the arm yesterday," the major explained. "He was reported wounded, but remained on duty in the trench." I saw that the captain would rather not have publicity given to such an ordinary incident. He did not see why people should talk about his arm. "You are to go with him into the trench for the night,"

the major added; and I thought myself very lucky in my companion.

"Aren't you going to have dinner with us?" the major asked him.

"Why, I had something to eat not very long ago," said Captain P-----.

One was not sure whether he had or not.

"There's plenty," said the major.

"In that event, I don't see why I shouldn't eat when I have a chance,"

the captain returned; which I found was a characteristic trench habit, particularly in winter when exposure to the raw, cold air calls for plenty of body-furnace heat.

We had a ration soup and ration ham and ration prunes and cheese; what Tommy Atkins gets. When we were outside the house and starting for the trench this captain, with his wounded arm, wanted to carry my knapsack. He seemed to think that refusal was breaking the Hague conventions.

Where we turned off the road, broken finger-points of brick walls in the faint moonlight indicated the site of Neuve Chapelle; other fragments of walls in front of us were the remains of a house; and that broken tree-trunk showed what a big sh.e.l.l can do. The trunk, a good eighteen inches in diameter, had not only been cut in two by one of the monsters of the new British artillery, but had been carried on for ten feet and left lying solidly in the bed of splinters of the top of the stump. All this had been in the field of that battle of a day, which was as fierce as the fiercest day at Gettysburg, and fought within about the same s.p.a.ce. Every tree, every square rod of ground, had been paid for by sh.e.l.ls, bullets, and human life.

But now we were near the trenches; or, rather, the breastworks. We are always speaking of the trenches, while not all parts of the line are held by trenches. A trench is dug in the ground; a breastwork is raised from the level of the ground. At some points a trench becomes practically a breastwork, as its wall is raised to get free of the mud and water.

We came into the open and heard the sound of voices and saw a spotty white wall; for some of the sandbags of the new British breastworks still retained their original colour. On the reverse side of this wall lines were leaning in readiness, their fixed bayonets faintly gleaming in the moonlight. I felt of the edge of one and it was sharp, quite prepared for business. In the surroundings of damp earth and mud-bespattered men, this rifle seemed the cleanest thing of all, meticulously clean, that ready weapon whose well-aimed and telling fire, in obedient and cool hands, was the object of all the drill of the new infantry in England; of all the drill of all infantry. Where pickets watched in the open in the old days before armies met in pitched battle, an occasional soldier now stands with rifle laid on the parapet, watching.

Across a reach of field faintly were made out the white spots of another wall of breastworks, the German, at the edge of a stretch of woods, the Bois du Bies. The British reached these woods in their advance; but, their aeroplanes being unable to spot the fall of sh.e.l.ls in the mist, they had to fall back for want of artillery support. Along this line where we stood outside the village they stopped; and to stop is to set the spades going to begin the defences which, later, had risen to a man's height, and with rifles and machine-guns had riddled the German counter-attack.

And the Germans had to go back to the edge of the woods, where they, too, began digging and building their new line. So the enemies were fixed again behind their walls of earth, facing each other across the open, where it was death for any man to expose himself by day.

"Will you have a shot, sir?" one of the sentries asked me.

"At what?"

"Why, at the top of the trench over there, or at anything you see moving," he said.