And We Go On (16 page)

Fortunately I woke just before the officer and his men reached us. They were hurrying and the lieutenant was panting with excitement. “Where was the German patrol?” We sat up and grinned at them. There had been no patrol. “Yes, there was,” hissed the officer, “and it came right into this hollow. Where is it?” We argued earnestly then and had a difficult time. They assured us that six Germans had filed by them and that only a lucky move had kept them hidden. At last the controversy ceased, with honours even, and we went in, but not before Melville slyly inspected his trip-wire – and found it broken. We talked afterward about that Heinie patrol. How could they pass us without seeing us?

We made a second trip into the same front and I got to know no man's land like a back yard. Mcintyre was more nervous as the lines were much closer than where we had held before. He had several listening posts out and constant patrols. The only change in work I had was a covering party to protect engineers who examined a road that crossed our trenches. Word came that we were to be relieved by the 22nd Battalion and I was sent out as guide. With me were Hickey and Egglestone, two men of the 73rd, both good soldiers. They were to take in the other platoons. We had a long wait for the “Van Doos” and there at the top of the Ridge talked and smoked, and as we watched the ten mile arc of Very Lights glimmer and sink before
us, we saw a German attack on the battalion to our left. The flashing of bursting shells along our lines was a winking chaos of crimson, and then we saw our flares looping, our S.O.S. soaring aloft. Within a minute red flashes marked the German front, a fury of explosions that lasted twenty minutes. Meanwhile the din of bursting shells and machine guns came clearly to us and we could even see the bursting of Mills bombs. At last everything regained its normal appearance, and our men arrived. The attempted German raid, we heard afterwards, did not reach our trench.

The French-Canadians would not be hurried and their officers humoured them like children. They were a great battalion, carried a fine reputation, and seemed conscious of it, which was natural. Slowly, and with long halts every half mile, we wended our way down the Ridge and out on the plain. The “Van Doos” smoked in spite of all cautions about being spotted and I was very thankful when at last we arrived at our trench. Our lads moved away with amusing alacrity – the veterans had recalled another time at the crater line – and soon the trench was handed over. No patrols covered the relief and to Mcintyre's amazement all his listening posts were ignored. No more sentries were posted than we used in daytime, and the only remark the officer made was, “If he wants to come over – let heem come.”

It was now October and we moved away to Magnicourt. Rumours had come that we were going to the Salient, that graveyard swamp of mud and slime, to the long agony of Passchendale, and the men were restless. For the first time some of them began to look on the “vin” when it was “rouge” and one man, Giger, had to be carried to his billet. His like was not elsewhere in the Corps. His appearance was a reminder of what Mother Nature could do when she was in an angry mood; he had scarcely any forehead and could neither read nor write. He had come in a late draft and had been sick for several days, giving up everything but his oath of allegiance. We laughed to weakness the night when at a barn billet a calf got its head through an opening and licked his face. Poor Giger howled with fright.

Our billet was a coal shed. Around the wall ran a brick ledge and around the ledge ran mice and rats, three generations of them, so that we moved our quarters to the loft of a barn and slept on the straw. In the night I heard men marching and went down. Many times when out at billet I had risen quietly and slipped outside, drinking in the moist air, looking
at the moon-bathed fields and hedges, picturing the same night across the water. It was dark and uncanny when I left the barn. One heard nothing but the steady tramp, tramp, tramp on the road as the shadowy files marched past in a cloud of dust like river mist, silent and half asleep. They were, like us, headed Ypres-way. Bulky ghosts loomed alongside the column, the non-coms, watching for stragglers, but there were no shouted orders. The only sounds were the thudding shuffle of feet, the dull creak of equipment, a muttered curse as someone trod on another's heels. All at once the men halted, and slumped down on the roadside without waiting for the “fall out” order. Mostly the men sprawled, motionless, on their packs, but here and there a match flared as a cigarette was lighted and there were glimpses of tired, sharp-lined faces.

After the battalion had gone I wandered along the road. It was warm but a shower threatened. A dozing sentry of the guard leaned on his rifle. Back from him, under two big trees, several soldiers were sleeping on the ground. I walked away down the road and to my surprise met Mcintyre. He had probably been visiting officers in another battalion – there were many moving our way – and he was feeling talkative. He asked me sharply what I was doing, and then gave definite hours that I should rest. I mentioned the Salient and he swore and cursed it, and then broke forth about his gallant boys, his splendid men. He knew every man, his faults and weaknesses, and was kind to them all. At times he seemed strict, but never without reason and there that night he almost broke down as he talked about us, and I sensed that he that afternoon had had to censor the company letters, perhaps more poignantly inarticulate than usual. It began to rain as I left him and I went back in the mysterious silence, listening to the steady beating on the cobbles. The bent still figure of the sentry had not moved, but under the trees the sleepers were stirring and muttering as drops from the branches fell on their unprotected faces.

The next day we moved on and seemed to leave the main route for we stopped at a little village prettier than any I had seen. Trees shaded all the little homes and a brook flashed and gurgled its way among them, crossing under a quaint old stone bridge that must have been hundreds of years old. The company seemed changed, the men more restless. At the estaminet they found one of those crazy penny-in-the-slot pianos and there made merry, singing too boisterously for harmony. Giger got drunk again and semaphored to a mademoiselle until he became incapable of motion.
I watched the men as they got their evening meal, and they were all flushed, unnatural. Even little Mickey was shrill, and I looked at the boy. He had changed, was different, and I feared for him. His nerve was leaving him. On our last trip in a whizz bang had made bloody work of two gunners and an arm had been left lying in the trench. His post was nearby and I saw him walk by the place hurriedly and then, with a sudden cry, seize the arm and hurl it over the parapet. Afterward he had given me a glance of dog-like entreaty and I had stayed and talked with him for more than an hour. He smoked continually, those army gaspers, Red Hussars and Bees-wings, and his hands were not steady.

That night was the wildest of any I had seen in billets. Half the men had had more liquor than they could carry and all were shouting ribald songs and indulging in horse play. It was all fun, and their delight seemed in making the Professor cringe. They had got to know him and it was rumoured that he was such a granny that he even considered a knowledge of French immoral. They shouted about the three kinds of “cases” there were, walking, “sandbag,” and “stretcher,” and asked each other grisly questions concerning “religion” and “next-of-kin.” There were pledges about “V.C.'s” or “wooden ones,” and more of like kind. All of it was but a reflex of their own inner thoughts.

The Professor and Tommy and I helped many of them make their beds that night, and then I went out in the village to the old bridge and sat there listening to the water. The moonlight fell flat on things and gilded them, and there was the night's faint moist smell of trees and grass and brookside. I thought of that long ago when we had come to France, those first nights filling sandbags with Vimy slime, Freddy's white set look, his premonitions; Arthur sitting in the mud, dazed, stricken, five minutes before the bullet was to hit him; Charley at my water-logged bivvy in Dumbell Camp, pleading for something to change his convictions; poor ape-like Slim and his pal, Joe, always together, in trench or billet, and together in death. What waited us up in the Salient?

A man came down the street, walking slowly, quietly, and sat beside me on the old stone wall. It was Stewart, the stretcher bearer, and he spoke softly as a woman as he talked about the beauty of the night. Then he rambled on, telling me of his boyhood in old Scotland, of his going to Canada, of all he had done, and intended to do, intimate things which only old friends mention. I listened sympathetically and over an hour we sat
together, then he walked on up the road. I looked at my watch. It was one o'clock in the morning.

Before I could leave another came, the Professor. He had been lying down and could not sleep, and now he unloaded his mind. He thought that some one should shriek from the high places about this awful, stupendous folly in which we were engaged, that the few sane men left on earth should combine their efforts to stop the carnage. He hated war, loathed it, feared it, hated everything connected with it, even to those gaily-woven silk souvenirs and postcards that played havoc with our five-franc notes. Our existence was, he said, an ugly nightmare, and Heaven must shudder in protest. We walked back slowly, and in the garden by our billet found Mickey lying on the brook bank. One roll would have dropped him in a deep pool, and there he lay on his back in a drunken stupor. We carried him in and I could have hugged him; sharp lines were cutting into his boyish features, altering him, aging him.

We moved to Hazebrouck. Sitting in the “40 Hommes” coach I watched the boys. They were normal again, but different. They sang a long time, old songs, in harmony, and then were silent; there was none of the usual jesting. I had looked at each in turn, “Old Bill” with tissue paper on a comb, one of the orchestra; Sambro beside him talking to Barron; Big Glenn, reading a letter; Melville, Ira, Jennings, and Hughes singing lustily; Stewart, smiling at them; old Sam, as sour as usual; Hickey and Egglestone with a lance jack named Always, a nice fellow; Kennedy, Bunty, Johnson, Luggar, Dykes, Flynn, and Eddie, all singing. I sat with Mickey and Tommy by the door, and Tommy talked of the marching battalions he had glimpsed on the road. The Professor came from a corner and joined us. He was talking again about the war, calling it a ghastly paroxysm of civilization.

Mickey stared at him, wide-eyed, and I tried to ease the condemnation, pointing out that war was not new, had always been. I got out my little guide book and tried to divert Mickey's thoughts as I read about the history of the country. Arras, Boulogne, Cambrai, Verdun, had all been towns under the reign of Julius Caesar, and a German invasion was nothing new. Attila and his heathen Huns had poured into France when it was Gaul, burning and plundering and had lost 160,000 men before they were driven away. I read about King Edward at Crecy with his expeditionary force of thirty-two thousand, facing three times his strength of the finest French
chivalry. The English held strategic position on a slope, with the sun at their backs, and their bowmen shot down the mounted Frenchmen who attacked with their lances. Thirty thousand men of France fell in that battle, twelve hundred knights and eight princes, so why should we consider we were entangled in an original catastrophe.

“How many knights and princes are going to be killed up in Passchendale?” asked Tommy, cynically. Then he raved about the officers, the gilded staff in fine chateaus and billets, waited on hand and foot, living like lords, travelling in cushioned cars, stroking away – with careless pens – thousands of lives. The Professor and Mickey did not speak.

I turned the pages and read to them that when Louis XIV was waging wars, taking four fortresses on the Rhine in four days, the pomp and splendour of his equipage rivalled that of fairy princes. Every campaign ended in a sort of royal pageant. There were coaches of crystal and gold, horses draped in cloth of gold, courtiers and conquerors dazzling with diamonds, ladies in silks and plumes and laces. Old King Solomon himself was outshone. “So you see, Tommy,” I said, “there's really nothing new. The old boys had their big parades and banquets and probably their W.A.A.C.'s to wait on them.”

“That's all right,” said Tommy, doggedly, “them old chaps were bred for wars, it was all they knew. They didn't think about anything else.”

The Professor had been looking at my little book and now he snatched it from me. “Listen,” he said tensely, and read, “… the code of chivalry was completed by an education that began at the early age of seven years. Boys were sent to the castle of their father's overlord, where, in return for their breeding, they rendered domestic service, no matter how lofty their birth. At twelve they learned to ride and use arms. Then they went on adventure, on horse, carrying shield and lance for their leader. Between sixteen and twenty they were made knights and put on, for the sacred fast and vigil of arms, the white tunic, a sign of purity; the red robe, which symbolized the blood he must shed; the black jerkin, betokening death, a close companion of all knight-at-arms.” “They were soldiers,” he cried, “we're not. They wanted war, we don't.”

“It's all the same through history,” I said weakly.

“There has always been war and will be. We can't change things, we just go on.”

The Professor argued firmly that such reasoning was piffle, stank of the fatalistic. Chivalry, he said, had long been buried, purity had become a strange word.

I tried to stop him, but it was no use and Tommy took up the argument, declaring that we were really worse than they were in the Dark Ages, and that anyone who had been drilled to fight and kill from the time he was seven was different. We were simply civilians in soldier's clothing, and war was a mess of grotesque murder. He stopped, finally, when I could give him a nod that Mickey could not see, but the lad had absorbed every word. He sat staring at us and through us, seeing things, fearful things. The Professor stilled as soon as he noticed him.