Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1215 page)

A lecture on the 1st March by the Major-General cheered the new hands. He told them that “there was a great deal of work to be done in the line we were going into. Communication-trenches were practically non-existent and the front parapet was not continuous.
All
this work would have to be done by the infantry, as the Divisional R.E. would be required for a very important line along the Canal and in front of the town of Ypres.” One of the peculiarities of all new lines and most R.E. corps is that the former is always out of condition and the latter generally occupied elsewhere.

Their bombing practice led to the usual amount of accidents, and on the 2nd March Lieutenant Keenan was wounded in the hand by a premature burst; four men were also wounded and one of them died.

Next day, when their Quartermaster’s party went to Calais to take over the 1st Battalion’s camp there, they heard of the fatal accident at bomb-practice to Lord Desmond FitzGerald and the wounding of Lieutenant Nugent and Father Lane-Fox. They sent Captains J. S. N. FitzGerald and Witts, and their Sergeant-Major and Drum-Major to FitzGerald’s funeral.

On the 6th March they entrained at Poperinghe for Calais, where the whole Brigade lay under canvas three miles out from the town beside the Calais–Dunkirk road. “The place would have been very nice, as the Belgian aviation ground, in the intervals of dodging the Belgian aviators, made a fine parade and recreation ground, but life in tents was necessarily marred by continued frost and snow.” More intimately: “The, bell-tents are all right, but the marquees leak in the most beastly manner. There are only a few places where we can escape the drips.”

Here they diverted themselves, and here Sir Douglas Haig reviewed them and some Belgian artillery, which, as it meant standing about in freezing weather, was no diversion at all. But their “Great Calais First Spring Meeting” held on Calais Sands, in some doubt as to whether the tide would not wipe out the steeple-chase course, was an immense and unqualified success. Every soul in the Brigade who owned a horse, and several who had procured one, turned out and rode, including Father Knapp, aged fifty-eight. There were five races, and a roaring multitude who wanted to bet on anything in or out of sight. The Battalion bookmaker was a second lieutenant — at home a barrister of some distinction — who, in fur coat, brown bowler of the accepted pattern, and with a nosegay of artificial flowers in his buttonhole, stood up to the flood of bets till they overwhelmed him; and he and his clerk “simply had to trust to people for the amounts we owed them after the races.” Even so, the financial results were splendid. The mess had sent them into the fray with a capital of 1800 francs, and when evening fell on Calais Sands they showed a profit of 800 francs. The star performance of the day was that of the C.O.’s old charger “The Crump,” who won the steeple-chase held an hour after winning the mile, where he had given away three stones. His detractors insinuated that he was the only animal who kept within the limits of the very generous and ample course laid out by Captain Charles Moore. There followed a small orgy of Battalion and inter-Battalion sports and amusements-football competitions for men and officers, with a “singing competition” for “sentimental, comic, and original turns.” Oddly enough, in this last the Battalion merely managed to win a consolation prize, for a private who beat a drum, whistled, and told comic tales in brogue. It may have been he was the great and only “Cock” Burne or Byrne of whom unpublishable Battalion-history relates strange things in the early days. He was eminent, even among many originals — an elderly “old soldier,” solitary by temperament, unpredictable in action, given to wandering off and boiling tea, which he drank perpetually in remote and unwholesome corners of the trenches. But he had the gift, with many others, of crowing like a cock (hence his
nom-de-guerre
), and vastly annoyed the unhumorous Hun, whom he would thus salute regardless of time, place, or safety. To this trick he added a certain infinitely monotonous tomtomming on any tin or box that came handy, so that it was easy to locate him even when exasperated enemy snipers were silent. He came from Kilkenny, and when on leave wore such medal-ribbons as he thought should have been issued to him — from the V.C. down; so that when he died, and his relatives asked why those medals had not been sent them, there was a great deal of trouble. Professionally, he was a “dirty” soldier, but this was understood and allowed for. He regarded authority rather as an impertinence to be blandly set aside than to be argued or brawled with; and he revolved in his remote and unquestioned orbits, brooding, crowing, drumming, and morosely sipping his tea, something between a poacher, a horse-coper, a gipsy, and a bird-catcher, but always the philosopher and man of many queer worlds. His one defect was that, though difficult to coax on to the stage, once there and well set before an appreciative audience, little less than military force could haul “Cock” Byrne off it.

They celebrated St. Patrick’s Day on the 14th March instead of the 17th, which was fixed as their date for removal; and they wound up the big St. Patrick dinners, and the Gaelic Football Inter-company Competition (a fearsome game), with a sing-song round a bonfire in the open. Not one man in six of that merry assembly is now alive.

THE SALIENT FOR THE FIRST TIME

They marched out of Calais early on the 17th March, through Cassel, and Major the Hon. A. C. S. Chichester joined on transfer from the 1st Battalion as Second-in Command. Poperinghe was reached on the afternoon of the 18th, a sixteen-mile march in suddenly warm weather, but nobody fell out. The town, crowded with troops, transport, and traffic of every conceivable sort, both smelt and looked unpleasant. It was bombed fairly regularly by enemy planes, so windows had long since ceased to be glazed; and at uncertain intervals a specially noxious gun, known as “Silent Susy,” sent into its populated streets slim shells that arrived unfairly before the noise of their passage. But neither bombs nor shells interfered with the cinemas, the “music hall,” the Y.M.C.A. or other diversions, for every one in “Pop” was
ipso facto
either going into the Salient or coming out, and in both cases needed the distraction of the words and pictures of civilised life. They lay there for a few days, and on the 26th March about midnight, in a great quiet, they entered Ypres, having entrained, also with no noise whatever, from Poperinghe. The Diary, rarely moved to eloquence, sets down: “It was an impressive sight not to be forgotten by those who were present, as we threaded our way through the wrecked and shattered houses. Those of the Battalion who knew it before had not seen it since the dark days of November ‘14, when with the 1st Battalion they played their part in the glorious First Battle of Ypres, a fight never to be forgotten in the annals of the Irish Guards.”

The impression on the new hands, that is, the majority of men and officers, struck in and stayed for years after. Some compared their stealthy entry to tip-toeing into the very Cathedral of Death itself; and declared that heads bowed a little and shoulders hunched, as in expectation of some stroke upon the instant. Also that, mingled with this emotion, was intense curiosity to know what the place might look like by day. (“And God knows Ypres was no treat to behold, then or after — day or night. The way most of us took it, was we felt ‘twas The Fear itself — the same as meeting up with the Devil. I do not remember if ‘twas moonlight or dark when we came in that first time. Dark it must have been though, or we felt it was, and there was a lot of doings going on in that darkness, such as Military Police, and men whispering where we was to go, and stretchers, and parties carrying things in the dark, in and out where the houses had fallen by lumps. And there was little blue lights showing here and there and around, and the whole stink of the Salient, blowing back and forth upon us, the way we’d get it up our noses for ever. Yes — and there was transport on the pavé, wheels going dam’ quick and trying, at the same time, not to make a noise, if ye understand.

“And I remember, too, voices out of holes low down betwixt the rubbish-heaps. They would be the troops in cellars over against the Cloth Hall, I expect. And ye could hear our men breathing at the halts, and the kit squeaking on their backs, and we marching the way we was striving not to break eggs. I know
I
was.”)

At the time no one seemed to have noticed the peculiarity of the Salient, which, like Verdun, appears at night surrounded by a ring of searchlights and artillery; so that on going forward one feels as though one were altogether cut off from the rest of the front, a target open to every fire.

They were welcomed on the morning of the 27th March by three shells well and truly placed, one after the other, in the courtyard of the Convent where Battalion H.Q. stood. Six N.C.O.’s and men were wounded, of whom Sergeant McGuinn died a few hours later. This was the prelude to a night-long bombardment from a battery evidently told off for the job, which opening at eleven kept it up till ten of the morning of the 28th, when it ceased, and the remainder of the day was quiet. One must remember that the enemy used Ypres through the years as their gunnery school officers’ training-ground.

The 29th March was also a quiet day for the Battalion. There was, naturally, no walking about, or any distraction from the wonder where the next blast of fire would choose to fall, a sensation of helplessness which is not good for the nerves. They were the right Reserve Battalion of the Right Brigade, which, elsewhere, would have been equivalent to being in the front line, but Ypres had its own scale of sufferings. They worked quietly on repairs from dusk till the first light of dawn in their trenches beyond the Canal. From daylight to dusk again they lay up in dug-outs for the most part, and all fires that showed smoke were forbidden. But a race accustomed to peat can miraculously make hot tea over a few fragments of ammunition-boxes or a fistful of stolen coke, even in the inner bowels of a sealed dugout. Any signs of life were punished by visits from observation-planes or a shelling from one flank or the other; for the enemy commanded practically all their trenches, and this implied a constant building and repair of traverses and blindages. It took them three hours to relieve the 1st Coldstream in the front line on the night of the 30th March, and during relief the reserve trench which was being taken over by No. 4 Company under Captain Eric Greer (he had reverted to Company Officer on Major Chichester’s arrival as Second-in-Command) was shelled and badly knocked about. There were only eight men wounded, however, and the company was “perfectly cool throughout.” (“When you know ye may be for it every minute, you can
not
be more frightened than frightened. The same as getting drunk,
I
think. After a while-dead-drunk ye get, and dead-drunk ye stay. Ah, but they was genteel trenches and pleasant-spoken Jerries down at Laventie where we’d come from, in front of Red House and all!”)

The last day of March brought them for one breathless half-hour the heaviest shelling they had yet undergone; but it ended, as so many such outbursts did, in nothing but a few slight wounds, and a searching of the Menin road by night with big stuff that roared and rattled on what remained of the tortured stones. One could always know when Ypres city had been shelled afresh, by the pools of blood on the pavé in the raw morning or some yet undisposed-of horse which told that the night-hawking processions of the transport had caught it once again. Their daily lives in the front and reserve line were dark, confined, and unsavoury. One officer was ill-advised enough to pry into the vitals of his dug-out. (“When I arrived, it did not look so bad, as the floor was covered with sand-bags as usual.”) A strong-stomached orderly turned in to remove a few. He found no less than six layers of them, progressively decaying; then floor-boards of a fabulous antiquity, and last the original slime of ‘14’s corruption. It was neglectful, but men who may be blown out of this life any hour of the twenty-four do not devote themselves to the continuities of house-cleaning.

In Ypres city that spring not one single building was habitable, though many of them still retained the shapes of human dwellings. The Battalion messes were all underground in cellars, a couple of which, with a hole knocked through the dividing walls, make a good anteroom; but their sole light came from a small window which also gave passage to the stove-pipe. A tired man could doze down there, in gross fuggy warmth and a brooding stillness broken only by the footsteps of small parties moving without ostentation till the triple whistle of the aeroplane-watchers sent feet scurrying loudly to cover.

Those who have known of both terrains say Verdun Salient, by reason of its size, contours, and elevation was less of a permanent tax on the morale than the flatness and confinement of Ypres. One could breathe in certain spots round Verdun; look out over large horizons from others; and solid, bold features of landscape interposed between oneself and the enemy. The thickness and depth, too, of all France lay behind for support. In the Salient it was so short a distance from Calais or Boulogne that one could almost hear the Channel threatening at one’s back, and wherever wearied eyes turned, forwards or flankwise, the view was closed by low, sullen rises or swells of ground, held and used in comfort and at leisure by an established enemy.

They reckoned time in the trenches by the amount of shelling that fell to their share. A mere passage of big stuff overhead seeking its butts in the town did not count any more than excited local attacks to left or right of the immediate sector; and two or three men wounded by splinters and odds-and-ends would not spoil the record of “a quiet day.” Occasionally, as the tides and local currents of attack shifted, our guns behind them would wake up to retaliation or direct punishment. Sometimes the enemy’s answer would be immediate; sometimes he accepted the lashing in silence till nightfall, and then the shapeless town would cower and slide still lower into its mounds and rubbish-heaps. Most usually a blow on one side or the other would be countered, it seemed to the listeners in the trenches between, exactly as in the prize-ring. But the combatants were heavy-, middle-, and light-weight guns, and in place of the thump of body blows, the jar and snap of jabs and half-hooks, or the patter of foot-work on the boards, one heard the ponderous Jack Johnsons arrive, followed by the crump of the howitzers, and then the in-and-out work of field artillery quickening to a clinch, till one side or the other broke away and the silence returned full of menaces of what would happen next time “if you hit my little brother again.” A local and concentrated shelling of the Battalion’s second line one day, which might have developed bloodily, was damped down in three minutes, thanks to a telephone and guns that worked almost simultaneously. Nobody but themselves noticed it in the big arena.