And We Go On (41 page)

The German's eyes lightened. He understood, and slipped the coat over his tunic. It fitted well and he put on the cloth cap. The change was effective. He appeared a young Belgian and would never draw a second glance. It was only a short distance to the open and beyond that the outposts would be relaxed, scattered, easy to avoid.

I opened the door of my room and saw that the old man and his wife had retired. Outside, the way seemed clear. The German stepped out hastily, then hesitated, turned and held out his hand. I gripped it with a warm pressure.

“Kamerad,” he said with a soft accent.

“Good luck to you,” I answered, and he was gone.

When I fell asleep it was to dream so wildly that I woke a dozen times, sweating, starting up, talking with Jones. In the morning the old lady came with hot coffee. I got up and went to the barracks where the sergeant-major met me. “You,” he said, “are orderly sergeant. Get busy and round up the men. A lot of them are absent.”

Many of the fellows had had too much liquor, but some of the officers were no better, and it was night before all was in order. We were in good quarters with plenty of room. The big soup boilers in the kitchen were still filled with the dinner the Germans had forsaken. Tommy came and said there were enough brass hats to load a box car coming to the funeral the next day, and that there had been grand speeches in the Square and grand posings of the beribboned staff heroes. Mills, he said, had regained control of himself.

The Belgians made a fine service for the dead, a room in the City Hall being decorated for them. The divisional padre conducted the funeral. I did not go near it, and I felt sure that Jones would understand my feelings. One striking feature I did witness. A group of the veterans of 1870 attended the service, old men in faded uniforms, with decorations on their breasts. And we go on – how such things made one remember!

The R.S.M. was very strict. As I watched a band of officers wend their way into the gayly-lighted city places for a night of hilarity he came and gave me gruff orders that all the “other ranks” were to be tucked in their beds by nine-thirty. I said nothing to him, but back in the barracks I helped the boys arrange a plank out one window to the top of the wall surrounding the big building. They could go out on it and down to the ground by means of a short ladder, and could come in by the same means. We hid both plank and ladder in the daytime. Each night I reported my company “all present and correct sir,” and heard the other orderly sergeants telling of eight, ten, even more, “absent, sir.” They would be crimed for having a good time, for daring to wish for pleasures that were arrayed for men no better than they who happened to be wearing a Sam Browne.

Each evening, when I had finished reporting, I went out myself. I had my room with the old couple and I slept there every night, in a clean, sweet bed, and each morning had hot coffee and fried eggs and chips.
Always the old lady got me out in time to reach the gate before reveille, and no sentry ever reported my going in.

Tommy was silent, brooding, sombre; he did not even quell the newcomers who shouted around his bunk at night. As for myself, I was no better. A seething unrest swelled and burned within me so that I could scarcely bend myself to discipline or give civil answers to those in authority. The Belgians wanted to talk to me, to point out houses where the Kaiser and Hindenburg and Ludendorff had lodged, to tell me of the time in '14 when the boche had come, Von Kluck's army, and how our Dragoon Guards had routed the Uhlans. I listened at times, but mostly I could not. I tramped the streets, going all around the city and far out on the roads into the country. War – war – war. My head was filled with memories, with all the poignant scenes I had witnessed. I was soured, morose, cynical, and could not rest. Gradually Tommy and I found solace in each other's company. He seemed dreadfully changed. “Bill,” he said, “While it lasted I didn't want to get mine. I sweat buckets when I was in it those last few weeks, but now I wish – oh how I wish – that I was under one of them white crosses. I don't want to go back and leave the boys.”

He was sincere. All the oldtimers were talking morosely. They were sardonic, bitter, caustic, needed careful handling. And the brass hats rose to the occasion. Drill and shino stuff was pushed to the fore. We must jump to it, snap into it, be “smart” soldiers. Now was the time to show our stuff. I heard terrible suggestions, bloody ones, cruel ones, and was thankful that my leave came through – at last. Leave! It seemed an irony now. I tried to locate my pack, all our things that we had left in billet as we went to attack Mons. Only the pack remained. All my treasured war souvenirs were gone. Those camp followers, the transport men, and batmen, and cooks, had stolen everything. Tommy's was the same, emptied of everything. Probably there is to-day in some part of Canada a home decorated by a Luger, an Iron Cross, a German officer's cap and gloves, all taken by the gallant fighter who brushed mules in French stables and shivered when the bombing planes were over.

Leave! Bitterness welled within me and was increased by all the petty final delays of getting my warrant. I could not go to see the old man by the waterfall, I was not fit to meet him. Nottinghamshire looked changed and peaceful, but I could not rest. I left abruptly when I saw fat, contented German prisoners loafing about farm stables. On the boat from Boulogne
there had been some of our lads who had escaped from the Hun lines, gaunt skeletons, with sores that made one's flesh creep, living dead men who would never again know the blessing of good health. Up in Glasgow the crowds were after Ramsay MacDonald, and machine guns and barbed wire barricades were about, so I went back to London. There I seemed to be always meeting officers and I tried to forget myself in the extremes of “Zigzag,” “The Better 'Ole,” “Seven Days Leave,” “Going up,” “Yes, Uncle,” and kindred plays. When it was time to go back to France I thought I was glad.

On the boat an officer spoke to me. It was the lad we had found under the tank at Cambrai – already on leave. I had been once since the fall of '16!

He was eager to talk and asked questions that would have enraged Tommy, but I really liked the man. He was his natural self and had simply followed the flow of circumstances, as he always would. Then a gunner chap came and spoke to me, a clean-looking, wistful-eyed fellow.

“Do you know, Jock,” he said, “that I'm going back with three hundred dollars in my pocket, simply because I couldn't spend it.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“I don't drink,” he said, “and I don't gamble, and my chum was killed at Cambrai. I'd like to see this country but I'm one of those queer ducks who won't travel alone.”

A few hours later he and I were on our way to explore France. We went away down south, through sunny little towns and lovely sea shore places, where the war had not reached. We visited American encampments, and were treated royally, being fed real steak and onions and potatoes, dinners we never saw in our battalion. The Yanks we were with were fine fellows, and denounced their army bitterly, saying that the “dagoes” and “bohunks” were in the majority, and ruined it. When we left them we were convinced that the real American of British descent is as good a man as any on earth.

On and on, back to the war zone, on trains, lorries and barges, in barracks, hotels and theatres, with French and Welsh and New Zealanders. Back on the Somme for a last look on those terrible fields. It filled me with a chill I did not lose for days, for it was evening when we reached that desolate part where not even a blade of grass was growing. It was motionless,
a stark sea of tragedy, where not even a bird sang or a hearth smoke broke the sky line.

Lille, Tournai, Namur, and Charleroi, and then we went to Ypres, out again over that awful, death-ridden ground where shaky duckboards still survived among obscene slimy places more horrible than words could paint. The fearful stench of death was there, hovering, clinging, and along the old used ways there were stiff legs sticking from the mire, and bloated bodies of mules not entirely sunken in the muck. Old stubs like jagged spikes still toothed the skyline. It was a cesspool of human desolation, shaking into abominable rottenness, a succession of stagnant, discoloured, water-logged shell holes, cankering the dead crust of a vast unhallowed graveyard. Standing there in the twilight one could feel the damp odours, and with them a mysterious eddying clamminess. Relax the will ever so little and one heard long-drawn, shuddering sighs, saw broken forms twisting in agony, visioned once more hell's hurricane over that most-tortured scene that man has trod.

I reached the battalion at Genval, fourteen days over my leave, and reported. The sergeant-major looked at the captain, then back at me, and gave me the orders for next day. I was to carry on as orderly sergeant. That reception broke my defiant bitterness, and I found billet in a lovely home that had been refused the officers. In that town we had our Christmas dinner, my third in France, and then we moved back across the border.

All the fool drilling had been discarded and we just did enough to keep in good physical shape. There had been a rebellion at Mons that made the brass hats realize they were facing serious problems, and orders had changed overnight. I was asked to take a third stripe, and refused, then bitter again, I paraded and asked to be allowed to revert to the ranks.

The captain granted it, but I wondered just how he judged my peculiar attitude. He had always treated me fairly though I know my conduct was trying at times. I felt, however, that he did not know anything about myself or Tommy, that he had never been aware of our work on patrols or in the trenches, knew that he did not have opportunity. We did not mix freely with the men and I had little in common with sergeants, and so it was a shock when I was given the ribbon for the Military Medal. More surprising was the award:

Operations at Mons, 10/11th November, 1918.
For courage and devotion to duty.

This N.C.O. was in command of a section during the attack on Mons on the night of November 10/11th. When the advance was held up by two enemy machine gun posts he worked his way forward, and by bringing heavy rifle grenade fire on the posts forced them to withdraw. He showed great gallantry and initiative through out.

I had not seen the captain until I joined his party just before we crossed over to the station, and yet there was proof that he had seen and known what others did not, and it made me wonder just how many other things there were of which he had not made mention.

Another leave was offered, the final battalion leave, and I was given a chance to go again. I went to see the old man by the crooning water. It was evening when I got there, and the little cottage was closed. I went to the “Black Boar” and was welcomed with a sincerity that warmed me. The old man? Did I not know? He had died in November, yes, the day before the Armistice was signed.

It was a chilly night in February but I went to the place by the waterfall where I had first met Phyllis, and stood there a long time, how long I do not know, and all at once I saw her, and Steve with her, close together. They were indistinct save for their faces, and it was as if they were lighted by a glow. I was startled, voiceless, and their eyes held me. They were full of pity.

“Why?” I tried to shout my question, but choked – and they were gone. And then the night was cold and very dark.

We were billeted at Bramshott Camp. I was more bitter than before, and would not attend parades or stay with the company. Tommy and I roamed around like strangers in a wild country. One day he took a little Testament from his pocket.

“My mother gave me this when I left home,” he said, “and told me to read something in it every time I went into the fighting. I did, and after a while I got to thinking that it was a charm that kept me safe, and I always read in it before every trip outside the bags. Now it's all over and I read it just the same, but it's got me thinking that there's nothing right. Back home they'll be waiting with all that hero stuff, and we-won-the-war stuff, and telling you that right was bound to win. I don't want to hear it. The first Germans in the war were brutes, I think, but the last crowd were just
like we are, and their papers and preachers told them the same twaddle ours told us. Which one was right? Was either of them right? I've got so that I don't believe anything, and I'll have to go back and pretend I do because I could never make my mother understand that the Germans aren't horned devils, and that the British weren't haloed champions of Christianity. I wish I was with Mickey.”

He was terribly in earnest. Tommy was utterly weary of everything, and I could understand him. There always had seemed to me a peace deeper than sunsets in that world of little white crosses, a peace that couldn't be taken away. When the gunner and I left the Salient we stood near Sanctuary wood and I was impressed by the very atmosphere of that region. It seemed as if something tremendous, solemn, inviolable, was over all, an invisible and yet an invulnerable keeper. Even the wind seemed comforting those sleeping amid that stiff, stark horror, and chilling us outsiders. Down near one of the make-shift shelters to which the Belgian fugitives were returning I saw an old woman gathering wood for her fire. She stopped in her prowl and gazed over the gray sweep of the Salient – then hastily made the sign of the cross.

We went to one of the big entertainment huts and after the regular concert was over they prepared to hold some sort of religious service. Tommy promptly rose to leave and a padre tried to stop him.

“No,” said Tommy, “I don't want to hear any more twaddle. I've had to go on church parades, but this isn't compulsory, and once I'm out of this rig no man will ever make me listen to your stuff.”

The padre tried to argue. “We're going to teach a real gospel now,” he said. “The war's over and we're going to, first of all, prove to the people what a horrible crime it is.”