And We Go On (12 page)

At midnight the ambulance brought in a soldier whose face was so swollen that he could not speak. He had crawled in mud from a listening post, unable to walk, and his hands were raw discoloured hooks. Spike put the man to bed and he lay very quiet after getting a hot drink. In the morning he was dead. He had died without making a sound, absolutely worn out with crawling in the mud, back and forth from post to trench, without enough to eat, and suffering all kinds of exposure. He seemed to be quietly resting when we looked at him, and one felt rather glad that the poor chap was through with all the mud, and rain, and snow, and
rats, and lice, and discipline, and discomfort; he could rest a long, long time.

Towards morning I lay awake and listened for the barrage. I could picture the boys in the trench, tense waiting, staring over the parapet. Mud would be everywhere, plastering their clothing, gripping their feet. Our last trip in had been a nightmare journey and the deep trench in the dusk looked like the bed of some dirty river, suddenly gone dry. The barrage was like rolling thunder. Even where we were we could hear it so plainly that it awed us, kept us quiet. As it grew light I saw men go by the tent carrying something wrapped in a ground sheet, with muddy boots sticking stiffly out, eloquent of an ended journey. Spike came in and said the man had been brought down in the night, a scurvy case, and that they had not tried to put him in a bed.

No one brought us any breakfast and so I got up and dressed – I had managed to keep my khaki with me – and went among the tents until I found the kitchen. I gave the number of our ward. “How many?” barked the cook. “Twelve,” I said, and was given hot cocoa and bread and jam and margarine. scant enough rations for our eight, but the best meal we had had. Then I got in bed again and talked with the 7th battalion man, while out on the roads motor lorries droned and rattled without ceasing.

We talked of patriotism. He said it was not a password in his company, that loyalty was a word they sneered at; discipline, with the death penalty behind it, a canker we could not cure. Then he derided the caste of the nation and cursed the propaganda passed out by preachers, editors, staff officers and platform patriots of both sexes. He seemed emotional and told me that he was an original member of his battalion, and so I humoured him, though not condoning all his violence. We agreed that the war was, in some indefinable way, our duty, but that those “patriots” were to be detested as our handicaps. We were sure that had they been as sacrificial and sincere as the soldier the war would have been over, or would never have been begun.

I thought of the way some of those platform shouters had ranted about the Germans, and their “hate,” and how different it was in the battalion. All uttered hate was at the “higher-ups,” and outside of a certain derisive jesting at old “Heinie” the German was seldom mentioned in billets. Given a dirty night at the crossroads or an undue strafing in the trenches and there would be bitter vows of vengeance and Fritz and his methods
would be luridly described. Twenty-four hours later the orator would give a prisoner a cigarette and grin at him.

We talked about discipline, the cruelty of cartwheel crucifixion, which I had seen on the parade grounds of the R.C.R.'s below Mount St. Eloi. Men, volunteers, spread-eagled to cart-wheels, tied there for hours in a biting, bone-chilling wind, all because the fellow had not shined a button or given some snobby officer a proper deference. I had seen men laden with their packs and rifles, overcoats and all, marched back and forth, twenty feet each way, to the barking of a bristled non-com, a sheer process of fatiguing the man until he was almost a wreck; and these men who had left good jobs and homes and had come, as the orators said, to fight for right and loved ones.

We were all, the 7th man said, at the mercy of authority-crazed, overfed, routine-bound staffs, old fogies with a tragic lack of imagination and a criminal ignorance of actual warfare. Spike came in and sat a long time on our beds, talking about religion. He was a thinker, and it was his theory that we took from this world our memories and affections, and he wondered what visions of the war we would carry. His ideas held me. If, I thought, the cosmic law is based on logical principle, then memory and affection ARE indestructible and personality persists beyond that which we call death.

The 7th battalion man proved even more of a thinker than Spike. Life, he said, was an uncreated thing, co-existent with Him who is life, and Time is not, never was and never will be. Memory and affection might be indestructible, and we are much greater than we know, component parts of that Spirit that is undying. He looked at me and said solemnly, “You'll find, Jock, that the greatest moment here on earth is when you leave it.”

Privates in a dirty, wind-blown, rain-soaked tent, unshaven, strangers to each other, with sick men on either side, discussing topics that cause any man to sober. I think of Spike and that 7th man every time I read of the “sodden cattle” of the dugouts.

All that day I wondered about Steve and what it had been like at Hill 60. It must have been another region where mine craters grew and multiplied and sprouted machine gun posts and saps, but what had those first fighters thought of the war? Had there been rats up there, those obscene creatures with their glittering eyes, had they to endure the same post duties, six hours on, six off, in all weather, under all fires, all dangers, and with the
wraiths of no man's land peeping over the parapets in the lonely hours before dawn? And the more I thought of these first comers the more I wished I had been with them.

I woke next morning and heard strange guttural voices. Dressing hurriedly, I went into the next tent and found it filled with wounded Germans. They stared at me, some of them friendly, some indifferent. One chap with a turban-sized bandage on his head was sitting up, stolidly eating bully as though it were an occupation instead of a meal. A man beside me said something, repeated it, and I gathered that he wanted a drink. I got my mug and water bottle and he drank thirstily, then thanked me. Spike came in and asked me to give him a hand in feeding them, and I enjoyed it. The stolid man with the bully was the exact replica of a New Brunswicker with us, who only asked for plenty of hard tack and his rum ration. Given those, he was content, and a double issue seemed to make a feather bed of his chicken-wire bunk.

An officer came that night to see the Germans. He was one of those eyeglass youngsters, full of “pip-pip” and “tootle-oo” stuff, which fizzed from him as he talked to the nurse accompanying him. I did not know whether she was there out of curiosity or as his bodyguard, but they went away again without doing anything to help a sufferer, leaving only a trail of “right-os” and “cheerios.” Spike came afterwards and ground his teeth. So far as we knew he was the only person to attend those wounded Germans all that night.

I was just sixteen days at St. Pol, then coolly walked away from the place and got on board a train.

No one halted me or questioned me. I never had seen a doctor again, and for five days I drew rations for our ward, washed sick men's faces, and fed many. I had a bath at the bath house and even drew a new tunic from the quartermaster I unearthed, and a badge. As I left, a Scot – a bandy-legged chap – who had been hanging around one ward six weeks, dodging doctors, looked at my balmoral and said seriously, anxiously, “Ye'll no disgrace the tartan wull ye lad?” I looked him up and down and walked away.

By devious ways I reached Mount St. Eloi and there to my astonishment found Melville. He had been down the line with mumps the same as I, had taken French leave from his ward and was very anxious to get back to the boys. We went over the Ridge just at dusk and found it a jungle of old wire
and powdered brick and muddy burrows and remnants of trenches. We went off the main track that was being used and sat in a big crater to rest. Melville spoke sharply and I looked. Three dead men were reclining in the place, lolled back to the muddy wall, gazing incuriously before them, their faces turned black. We rose and climbed away from the place and almost stumbled over another dead man crouched in a shell hole, his rifle in his hands, squatted as if he were ready to spring.

In the twilight, just before darkness, we stood and looked down over the Ridge on the enemy side. The first flares rose, in scattered places, and we could not distinguish the lines. The air was damp and chilling, an unearthly feeling predominated. The dead man, the solitary flares, the captured ground, gave me a sense of ghosts about, and one realized the tragedy of the stricken hill. Many, many men had died on that tortured, cratered slope.

We found the platoon, and hardly recognized it. The sergeant was there, and MacDonald, but the rest were strangers. They told me that the 73rd, of the Fourth Division, had been so cut up that they had been withdrawn and the 85th Nova Scotia Highlanders had taken their place. The remnant of the 73rd had been divided between us and the 13th. I got MacDonald to one side and asked questions. It was far worse than I thought. The 42nd had gone straight through to their objective despite the sleety snow and mud and confusion, had driven back all opposition and seized their objective. But on their left the Fourth Division had been held up, and a flanking fire had taken heavy toll.

Freddy was gone, he had predicted truly. A big shell had landed beside him, killing him and burying him. Charley had fallen in the first rush, riddled with bullets. Joe, the ex-policeman, had fought through to the objective, and had been killed by a sniper on the flank. One shell had wiped out Stevenson, Theriault and Roy, as they grouped by a captured gun. MacMillan had been shot in the stomach, and had died after waiting hours in a trench. Billy, the complainer, had fallen as he charged a machine gun, keeping on until he was almost within reach of the gunners. Little Gilroy had been killed, and Westcott, and Smaillie had been wounded. Hughie, and the sergeant he had defied, had been wounded at the same time, and had been taken away together. Big Herman was missing. They located his body a month later. That morning he had shaken hands with Freddy, said goodbye to him, and then when he had got going had run
amuck. He was found almost at the bottom of the Ridge, near a battery position, with eight dead Germans about him, four of them killed by bayonet.

In the other platoons, besides Tommy, Slim and Joe had survived, and Ira and Sam, and big Glenn and Eddie, and Mickey and Jerry. They sat in the dugout that night, after a hard day of re-building roads, each man suffering from bodily fatigue, and crawling vermin, and the clammy chill of mud-caked clothing, their faces brooding, enigmatic, even Mickey's curiously odd, only their eyes moving. They would not talk about the fighting and seemed utterly worn. Six months ago we had marched to Mount St. Eloi, eagerly, bravely, our tin hats askew and with a cheeky retort for every comment, hiding whatever secret apprehensions we had, not knowing the heavy ominous silence that follows the burst of big shells – and the cries of the wounded; not knowing what it is to scrape a hasty grave at night and there bury a man who has worked with you and slept with you since you enlisted.

CHAPTER III

The German Officer

We left the top of the Ridge and went to Vimy village, relieving the C.M.R.'s there, and doing working parties, digging trenches near the front line. I came back alone the first night and two of the new men asked me to go with them to a shelter that they had made in the railway embankment. It was a snug bivvy and there was plenty of room for the three of us. We were soon asleep, but about midnight I was wakened by a tug at my arm. I looked up quickly, throwing back my ground sheet, and there stood Steve!

I could see him plainly, see the mud on his puttees and knees. He jerked a thumb towards the ruined houses and motioned for me to go to them. I did not speak. I thought that if I could do exactly as he said, and not wake the others, perhaps he would actually speak to me. He started to walk away as I gathered up my equipment and rifle and greatcoat, and when I hurried he simply faded from view. I was disappointed. For at least ten minutes I stood by a path, waiting, watching, listening, hoping he might speak or whisper. Nothing happened, and I grew cold, so I kept on to the nearest ruin and there lay on a rough earth floor and went to sleep.

In the morning I heard fellows talking about a big shell that had killed two men. I jumped up and looked. They were digging from the shelter I had left the mangled bodies of the two lads who had invited me to join them. The shell had exploded just above their heads. All that day I thought of how I had been saved, and I resolved that if ever again I saw Steve I would do exactly as he motioned; he had saved my life.

Earle had transferred to the Brigade Trench Mortars, and so I did not see him, but McDonald and I slept together. After two more days we were
warned to fall in at dark to march back over the Ridge. The officer in charge was the supernumerary who had been with us at Divion, and he seemed very unused to his work. When the time came to fall in, the Germans began shelling, using gas shells. We put on our respirators and waited in the ruins until there was a lull, as the gas shells could penetrate the walls. Finally the officer called us out, and at that moment the shelling increased. I had been told to act as guide and was with the officer, and I shouted that everyone was to follow me.

The platoon started after me on the road that led over the Ridge, but the officer called us back, reprimanded me, and made us fall in in two ranks. Shells were dropping everywhere and we had to put on our masks again. Yet he yelled for us to NUMBER, and to FORM FOURS. It was a ghastly business but we made a semblance of obeying. He would not hurry and turned to see if we were properly in line, then gave the order to move in single file. McDonald was next to him. I had slipped in third and Melville behind me. A shell came over the officer's shoulder and struck McDonald full on the chest, breaking in pieces as it did so. The impact killed him instantly and drove him back with such force that Melville and I were knocked off our feet and sprawled into the ditch. The liquid in the shell splashed over the legs of the officer, burning him badly. He lay on the road and called for assistance.