Now It Can Be Told Part 17

Two officers of the Scots Guards, inseparable friends, came to gossip with us, and read the papers, and drink a little whisky in the evenings, and pick the raspberries. They were not professional soldiers. One of them had been a stock-broker, the other "something in the city." They disliked the army system with an undisguised hatred and contempt. They hated war with a ferocity which was only a little "camouflaged" by the irony and the brutality of their anecdotes of war's little comedies. They took a grim delight in the humor of corpses, lice, bayonet-work, and the sniping of fair-haired German boys. They laughed, almost excessively, at these attributes of warfare, and one of them used to remark, after some such anecdote, "And once I was a little gentleman!"

He was a gentleman still, with a love of nature in his heart-I saw him touch the petals of living roses with a caress in his finger-tips-and with a spiritual revolt against the beastliness of this new job of his, although he was a strong, hard fellow, without weakness of sentiment. His close comrade was of more delicate fiber, a gentle soul, not made for soldiering at all, but rather for domestic life, with children about him, and books. As the evenings pa.s.sed in this French village, drawing him closer to Loos by the flight of time, I saw the trouble in his eyes which he tried to hide by smiling and by courteous conversation. He was being drawn closer to Loos and farther away from the wife who knew nothing of what that name meant to her and to him.

Other officers of the Guards came into the garden-Grenadiers. There were two young brothers of an old family who had always sent their sons to war. They looked absurdly young when they took off their tunics and played a game of cricket, with a club for a bat, and a tennis-ball. They were just schoolboys, but with the gravity of men who knew that life is short. I watched their young athletic figures, so clean-limbed, so full of grace, as they threw the ball, and had a vision of them lying mangled.

An Indian prince came into the garden. It was "Ranjitsinji," who had carried his bat to many a pavilion where English men and women had clapped their hands to him, on glorious days when there was sunlight on English lawns. He took the club and stood at the wicket and was bowled third ball by a man who had only played cricket after ye manner of Stratford-atte-Bow. But then he found himself, handled the club like a sword, watched the ball with a falcon's eye, played with it. He was on the staff of the Indian Cavalry Corps, which was "to co-operate in exploiting any success."

"To-morrow we move," said one of the Scots Guards officers. The colonel of the battalion came to dinner at our mess, sitting down to a white tablecloth for the last time in his life. They played a game of cards, and went away earlier than usual.

Two of them lingered after the colonel had gone. They drank more whisky.

"We must be going," they said, but did not go.

The delicate-looking man could not hide the trouble in his eyes.

"I sha'n't be killed this time," he said to a friend of mine. "I shall be badly wounded."

The hard man, who loved flowers, drank his fourth gla.s.s of whisky.

"It's going to be d.a.m.ned uncomfortable," he said. "I wish the filthy thing were over. Our generals will probably arrange some glorious little ma.s.sacres. I know 'em!... Well, good night, all."

They went out into the darkness of the village lane. Battalions were already on the move, in the night. Their steady tramp of feet beat on the hard road. Their dark figures looked like an army of ghosts. Sparks were spluttering out of the funnels of army cookers. A British soldier in full field kit was kissing a woman in the shadow-world of an estaminet. I pa.s.sed close to them, almost touching them before I was aware of their presence.

"Bonne chance!" said the woman. "Quand to reviens-"

"One more kiss, la.s.sie," said the man.

"Mans comme to es gourmand, toi!"

He kissed her savagely, hungrily. Then he lurched off the sidewalk and formed up with other men in the darkness.

The Scots Guards moved next morning. I stood by the side of the colonel, who was in a gruff mood.

"It looks like rain," he said, sniffing the air. "It will probably rain like h.e.l.l when the battle begins."

I think he was killed somewhere by Fosse 8. The two comrades in the Scots Guards were badly wounded. One of the young brothers was killed and the other maimed. I found their names in the casualty lists which filled columns of The Times for a long time after Loos.

III

The town of Bethune was the capital of our army in the Black Country of the French coal-fields. It was not much sh.e.l.led in those days, though afterward-years afterward-it was badly damaged by long-range guns, so that its people fled, at last, after living so long on the edge of war.

Its people were friendly to our men, and did not raise their prices exorbitantly. There were good shops in the town-"as good as Paris," said soldiers who had never been to Paris, but found these plate-gla.s.s windows dazzling, after trench life, and loved to see the "mamzelles" behind the counters and walking out smartly, with little high-heeled shoes. There were tea-shops, crowded always with officers on their way to the line or just out of it, and they liked to speak French with the girls who served them. Those girls saw the hunger in those men's eyes, who watched every movement they made, who tried to touch their hands and their frocks in pa.s.sing. They knew they were desired, as daughters of Eve, by boys who were starved of love. They took that as part of their business, distributing cakes and buns without favor, with laughter in their eyes, and a merry word or two. Now and then, when they had leisure, they retired to inner rooms, divided by curtains from the shop, and sat on the knees of young British officers, while others played ragtime or sentimental ballads on untuned pianos. There was champagne as well as tea to be had in these bun-shops, but the A. P. M. was down on disorder or riotous gaiety, and there were no orgies. "Pas d'orgies," said the young ladies severely when things were getting a little too lively. They had to think of their business.

Down side-streets here and there were houses where other women lived, not so severe in their point of view. Their business, indeed, did not permit of severity, and they catered for the hunger of men exiled year after year from their own home-life and from decent womanhood. They gave the base counterfeit of love in return for a few francs, and there were long lines of men-English, Irish, and Scottish soldiers-who waited their turn to get that vile imitation of life's romance from women who were bought and paid for. Our men paid a higher price than a few francs for the Circe's cup of pleasure, which changed them into swine for a while, until the spell pa.s.sed, and would have blasted their souls if G.o.d were not understanding of human weakness and of war. They paid in their bodies, if not in their souls, those boys of ours who loved life and beauty and gentle things, and lived in filth and sh.e.l.l-fire, and were trained to kill, and knew that death was hunting for them and had all the odds of luck. Their children and their children's children will pay also for the sins of their fathers, by rickety limbs and water-on-the-brain, and madness, and tuberculosis, and other evils which are the wages of sin, which flourished most rankly behind the fields of war.

The inhabitants of Bethune-the shopkeepers, and brave little families of France, and bright-eyed girls, and frowzy women, and heroines, and harlots-came out into the streets before the battle of Loos, and watched the British army pouring through-battalions of Londoners and Scots, in full fighting-kit, with hot sweat on their faces, and grim eyes, and endless columns of field-guns and limbers, drawn by hard-mouthed mules cursed and thrashed by their drivers, and ambulances, empty now, and wagons, and motor-lorries, hour after hour, day after day.

"Bonne chance!" cried the women, waving hands and handkerchiefs.

"Les pauvres enfants!" said the old women, wiping their eyes on dirty ap.r.o.ns. "We know how it is. They will be shot to pieces. It is always like that, in this sacred war. Oh, those sacred pigs of Germans! Those dirty Boches! Those sacred bandits!"

"They are going to give the Boches a hard knock," said grizzled men, who remembered in their boyhood another war. "The English army is ready. How splendid they are, those boys! And ours are on the right of them. This time-!"

"Mother of G.o.d, hark at the guns!"

At night, as dark fell, the people of Bethune gathered in the great square by the Hotel de Ville, which afterward was smashed, and listened to the laboring of the guns over there by Vermelles and Noeux-les-Mines, and Grenay, and beyond Notre Dame de Lorette, where the French guns were at work. There were loud, earth-shaking rumblings, and now and then enormous concussions. In the night sky lights rose in long, spreading bars of ruddy luminance, in single flashes, in sudden torches of scarlet flame rising to the clouds and touching them with rosy feathers.

"'Cre nom de Dieu!" said French peasants, on the edge of all that, in villages like Gouy, Servins, Heuchin, Houdain, Grenay, Bruay, and Pernes. "The caldron is boiling up... There will be a fine pot-au-feu."

They wondered if their own sons would be in the broth. Some of them knew, and crossed themselves by wayside shrines for the sake of their sons' souls, or in their estaminets cursed the Germans with the same old curses for having brought all this woe into the world.

IV

In those villages-Heuchin, Houdain, Lillers, and others-on the edge of the Black Country the Scottish troops of the 15th Division were in training for the arena, practising attacks on trenches and villages, getting a fine edge of efficiency on to bayonet-work and bombing, and having their morale heightened by addresses from brigadiers and divisional commanders on the glorious privilege which was about to be theirs of leading the a.s.sault, and on the joys as well as the duty of killing Germans.

In one battalion of Scots-the 10th Gordons, who were afterward the 8/10th-there were conferences of company commanders and whispered consultations of subalterns. They were "Kitchener" men, from Edinburgh and Aberdeen and other towns in the North. I came to know them all after this battle, and gave them fancy names in my despatches: the Georgian gentleman, as handsome as Beau Brummell, and a gallant soldier, who was several times wounded, but came back to command his old battalion, and then was wounded again nigh unto death, but came back again; and Honest John, slow of speech, with a twinkle in his eyes, careless of sh.e.l.l splinters flying around his bullet head, hard and tough and cunning in war; and little Ginger, with his whimsical face and freckles, and love of pretty girls and all children, until he was killed in Flanders; and the Permanent Temporary Lieutenant who fell on the Somme; and the Giant who had a splinter through his brain beyond Arras; and many other Highland gentlemen, and one English padre who went with them always to the trenches, until a sh.e.l.l took his head off at the crossroads.

It was the first big attack of the 15th Division. They were determined to go fast and go far. Their pride of race was stronger than the strain on their nerves. Many of them, I am certain, had no sense of fear, no apprehension of death or wounds. Excitement, the comrades.h.i.+p of courage, the rivalry of battalions, lifted them above anxiety before the battle began, though here and there men like Ginger, of more delicate fiber, of imagination as well as courage, must have stared in great moments at the grisly specter toward whom they would soon be walking.

In other villages were battalions of the 47th London Division. They, too, were to be in the first line of attack, on the right of the Scots. They, too, had to win honor for the New Army and old London. They were a different crowd from the Scots, not so hard, not so steel-nerved, with more sensibility to suffering, more imagination, more instinctive revolt against the butchery that was to come. But they, too, had been "doped" for morale, their nervous tension had been tightened up by speeches addressed to their spirit and tradition. It was to be London's day out. They were to fight for the glory of the old town... the old town where they had lived in little suburban houses with flower-gardens, where they had gone up by the early morning trains to city offices and government offices and warehouses and shops, in days before they ever guessed they would go a-soldiering, and crouch in sh.e.l.l-holes under high explosives, and thrust sharp steel into German bowels. But they would do their best. They would go through with it. They would keep their sense of humor and make c.o.c.kney jokes at death. They would show the stuff of London pride.

"Domine, dirige nos!"

I knew many of those young Londoners. I had sat in tea-shops with them when they were playing dominoes, before the war, as though that were the most important game in life. I had met one of them at a fancy-dress ball in the Albert Hall, when he was Sir Walter Raleigh and I was Richard Sheridan. Then we were both onlookers of life-chroniclers of pa.s.sing history. I remained the onlooker, even in war, but my friend went into the arena. He was a Royal Fusilier, and the old way of life became a dream to him when he walked toward Loos, and afterward sat in sh.e.l.l-craters in the Somme fields, and knew that death would find him, as it did, in Flanders. I had played chess with one man whom afterward I met as a gunner officer at Heninel, near Arras, on an afternoon when a sh.e.l.l had killed three of his men bathing in a tank, and other sh.e.l.ls made a mess of blood and flesh in his wagon-lines. We both wore steel hats, and he was the first to recognize a face from the world of peace. After his greeting he swore frightful oaths, cursing the war and the Staff. His nerves were all jangled. There was another officer in the 47th London Division whom I had known as a boy. He was only nineteen when he enlisted, not twenty when he had fought through several battles. He and hundreds like him had been playing at red Indians in Kensington Gardens a few years before an August in 1914... The 47th London Division, going forward to the battle of Loos, was made up of men whose souls had been shaped by all the influences of environment, habit, and tradition in which I had been born and bred. Their cradle had been rocked to the murmurous roar of London traffic. Their first adventures had been on London Commons. The lights along the Embankment, the excitement of the streets, the faces of London crowds, royal pageantry-marriages, crownings, burials-on the way to Westminster, the little dramas of London life, had been woven into the fiber of their thoughts, and it was the spirit of London which went with them wherever they walked in France or Flanders, more sensitive than country men to the things they saw. Some of them had to fight against their nerves on the way to Loos. But their spirit was exalted by a nervous stimulus before that battle, so that they did freakish and fantastic things of courage.

V

I watched the preliminary bombardment of the Loos battlefields from a black slag heap beyond Noeux-les-Mines, and afterward went on the battleground up to the Loos redoubt, when our guns and the enemy's were hard at work; and later still, in years that followed, when there was never a silence of guns in those fields, came to know the ground from many points of view. It was a hideous territory, this Black Country between Lens and Hulluch. From the flat country below the distant ridges of Notre Dame de Lorette and Vimy there rose a number of high black cones made by the refuse of the coal-mines, which were called Fosses. Around those black mounds there was great slaughter, as at Fosse 8 and Fosse 10 and Puits 14bis, and the Double Cra.s.sier near Loos, because they gave observation and were important to capture or hold. Near them were the pit-heads, with winding-gear in elevated towers of steel which were smashed and twisted by gun-fire; and in Loos itself were two of those towers joined by steel girders and gantries, called the "Tower Bridge" by men of London. Rows of red cottages where the French miners had lived were called corons, and where they were grouped into large units they were called cites, like the Cite St.-Auguste, the Cite St.-Pierre, and the Cite St.-Laurent, beyond Hill 70, on the outskirts of Lens. All those places were abandoned now by black-grimed men who had fled down mine-shafts and galleries with their women and children, and had come up on our side of the lines at Noeux-les-Mines or Bruay or Bully-Grenay, where they still lived close to the war. Sh.e.l.ls pierced the roof of the church in that squalid village of Noeux-les-Mines and smashed some of the cottages and killed some of the people now and then. Later in the war, when aircraft dropped bombs at night, a new peril over-shadowed them with terror, and they lived in their cellars after dusk, and sometimes were buried there. But they would not retreat farther back-not many of them-and on days of battle I saw groups of French miners and dirty-bloused girls excited by the pa.s.sage of our troops and by the walking wounded who came stumbling back, and by stretcher cases unloaded from ambulances to the floors of their dirty cottages. High velocities fell in some of the streets, shrapnel-sh.e.l.ls whined overhead and burst like thunderclaps. Young hooligans of France slouched around with their hands in their pockets, talking to our men in a queer lingua franca, grimacing at those noises if they did not come too near. I saw lightly wounded girls among them, with bandaged heads and hands, but they did not think that a reason for escape. With smoothly braided hair they gathered round British soldiers in steel hats and clasped their arms or leaned against their shoulders. They had known many of those men before. They were their sweethearts. In those foul little mining towns the British troops had liked their billets, because of the girls there. London boys and Scots "kept company" with pretty slatterns, who stole their badges for keepsakes, and taught them a base patois of French, and had a smudge of tears on their cheeks when the boys went away for a spell in the ditches of death. They were kind-hearted little s.l.u.ts with astounding courage.

"Aren't you afraid of this place?" I asked one of them in Bully-Grenay when it was "unhealthy" there. "You might be killed here any minute."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"Je m'en fiche de la mort!" ("I don't care a d.a.m.n about death.")

I had the same answer from other girls in other places.