Chapter one of The Secret Battle by A. P. Herbert. This is
a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
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The Secret Battle by A. P. Herbert, Chapter one. I am
going to write down some of the history of Harry Penrose, because I do
not think full justice has been done to him, and because there must be
many other young men of his kind who flung themselves into this war at the
beginning of it, and have gone out of it after many sufferings, with
the unjust and ignorant condemnation of their fellows. At times, it may be
I shall seem to digress into the dreary commonplaces of all war chronicles, but
you will never understand the ruthless progression of Penrose's tragedy without some acquaintance with each
chapter of his life in the army. He joined the battalion only a few
days before we left Plymouth for Gallipoli, a shy, intelligent looking person with
smooth, freckled skin and quick nervous movements. And although he was at once
posted to my company, we had not become at all intimate when we steamed
at last into Mudros Bay. But he had interested me from the first and
at intervals in the busy routine of a troop ship passing without escort through submarine
waters, I had been watching him and delighting in his keenness and happy disposition.
It was not my first voyage through the Mediterranean, though it was the
first I had made in a transport, and I liked to see my own
earlier enthusiasm vividly reproduced in him. Cape spart Tell, and the first glimpse
of Africa, Tangiers and Tarifa, and all that magical hours steaming through the
narrow waters, with the pink and white houses hiding under the hills, Gibraltar
town shimmering and asleep in the noonday sun, Malta and the bumboat women,
carozzes swaying through the narrow, chattering streets, cool drinks at cafes in a
babble of strange tongues. All these were to Penrose, part of the authentic
glamor of the East. And he said so. I might have told him,
with the fatuous pomp of wider experience, that they were, in truth,
but a very distant reflection of the genuine East. But I did not,
for it was refreshing to see anyone so frankly confessing to the sensations of
adventure and romance. To other members of the officer's mess, the spectacle of
Gibraltar from the sea may have been more stimulating than the spectacle of South End,
though this is doubtful, but it is certain that few of them would
have admitted the grave impeachment. At Malta, some of us spent an evening
ashore and sat for a little in a tawdry, riotous little cafe, where
two poor singing women strove vainly to make themselves heard above the pandemonium of clinked
glasses and bald orders. There we met many officers newly returned from the landing
at Cape Helly's, some of them with slightly bodily wounds, but all of
them with grievous injuries staring out of their eyes. Those of them who would
speak at all were voluble with anecdotes of horror and blood. Most of our
own party had not yet lost the light hearted mood in which men went to
the war. In those days. The picnic illusion of war was not yet
dispelled also individually. No doubt we had that curious confidence of the unblooded soldier,
that none of these strange, terrible things could ever actually happen to us.
We should forever hang upon the pleasant fringes of war, sailing in strange
seas and drinking in strange towns, but never definitely entangled in the more crude
and distasteful circumstances of battle. And if there were any of us with a
secret consciousness that we deceived ourselves to night was no time to tear away the
veil. Let there be lights and laughter and wine tomorrow, if need be,
let us be told how the wounded had drowned in the wired shallows,
and reckon the toll of that unforgettable exploit, and the terrors that were still
at work. And so we would not be dragooned into seriousness by these messengers
from the Peninsula, but rather, with no injury to their feelings, laughed
at their croakings and continued to drink. But Harry Penrose was different. He
was all eagerness to hear every detail hideous and heroic. There was one officer
present from the twenty ninth Division, a man about thirty with a tanned,
melancholy face and great solemn eyes, which, for all the horrors he related,
seemed to have something yet more horrible hidden in their depths. Him Harry
plied with questions, his reveler's mood flung impatiently aside, and the man seemed
ready to tell him things, though from his occasional reservations and sorrowful smile I
knew that he was pitying Harry for his youth, his eagerness, and his
ignorance. Around us were the curses of overworked waiters, and the babble of
loud conversations and the smell of spilt beer. There were two officers uproariously drunk,
and in the distance, pathetic snatches of songs were heard from the struggling
singer on the dais. We were in one of the first outposts of the
Empire and half way to one of her greatest adventures, and this excited youth
at my side was the only one of all that throng who was ready to
hear the truth of it and to speak of death. I lay emphasis on
this incident because it well illustrates his attitude towards the war at that time,
which too many have now forgotten. And because I then first found the image,
which alone reflects the many curiosities of his personality. He was like an
imaginative, inquisitive child, a child that cherishes a secret gallery of pictures in
its mind, and must continually be feeding the storehouse with new pictures of the
unknown, that is not content with a vague outline of something that is to
come, a dentist, or a visit, or a doll, but will
not rest till the experience is safely put away. In its place a clear,
uncompromising picture, to be taken down and played with at will. Moreover,
he had the fearlessness of a child. But I shall come to that
later. And so we came to Mudros, threading a placid way between the
deceitful Aegean islands. Harry loved them because they wore so green and inviting an
aspect. And again I did not undeceive him and tell him how parched and
austere, how barren of comfortable grass and shade he would find them on closer
acquaintance. We steamed into Mudros Bay at the end of an unbelievable sunset.
In the great harbor, were gathered regiments of ships battleship, cruiser, tramp,
transport and trawler, And as the sun sank into the western hills,
the masts and the rigging of all of them were radiant with its last rays,
while all their decks and hulls lay already in the soft blue dusk.
There is something extraordinarily soothing in the almost imperceptible motion of a big steamer gliding
at slow speed to her anchorage. As I leaned over the rail of the
boat deck and heard the tiny bugle calls float across from the French or English
warships, and watched the miniature crews at work upon their decks, I became
aware that Penrose was similarly engaged close at hand, and it seemed to me
an opportunity to learn something of the history of this strange young man. Beginning
with his delight in the voyage and all the marvelous romance of our surroundings,
I led him on to speak of himself. Both his parents had died when
he was a buoy AT's Cool. They had left him enough to go to
Oxford upon without the help of the exhibition he had won, and he had
but just completed his second year there when the war broke out. For some
mysterious reason, he had immediately enlisted instead of applying for a commission like his
friends. I gathered, though not from anything, he directly said that he
had had a hard time in the ranks. The majority of his companions in
training had come down from the North with the first draft of Timesiders, and
though God knows, the Timesider as a fighting man has been unsurpassed in this
war. They were a wild, rough crowd before they became soldiers, and
I can understand that for a high strung, sensitive boy of his type,
the intimate daily round of eating, talking, and sleeping with them must have
made large demands in his patriotism and grit. But he said it did him
good, and it was only the pestering of his guardian and relations that after
six months forced him to take a commission. He had a curious lack of
confidence in his fitness to be an officer, a feeling which is deplorably absent
in hundreds not half as fit as he was. But from what I had
seen of his handling of his platoon on the voyage, and the men are
difficult. After a week or two at sea, I was able to assure
him that he need have no qualms. He was, I discovered, pathetically
full of military ambitions. He dreamed already, he confessed, of decorations and
promotions and glorious charges. In short, he was like many other undergraduate officer
of those days in his eagerness and readiness for sacrifice, but far removed from
the common type in his romantic, too imaginative outlook towards the war. Romantic
is the only word I think, and it is melancholy for me to remember
that. Even then I said to myself, I wonder how long the romance
will last, my son, But I could not guess just how terrible was
to be its decay. We were not to be long at Moodro's. For
three days we lay in the sweltering heat of the great hill circled bay,
watching the warships come and go, and buying fruit from the little Greek sailing
boats which flooded around the harbor. These were days of hot anxiety about one's
kit. Hourly each officer reorganized and redisposed his asiduous belongings, and re weighed
his valise, and jettisoned yet more precious articles of comfort lest the weight regulations
be violated, and for the sake of an extra shirt, the whole of
one equipment be cast into the sea by the mysterious figure we believed to watch
over these things. Afterwards, we found that all our care was in vain,
and in the comfortless camps of the peninsula bitterly bewailed the little luxuries we
had needlessly left behind, now so unattainable. Down in the odorous troop decks,
the men wrote long letters describing the battles in which they were already engaged,
and the sound of quite mythical guns. But on the third day came
our sailing orders. In the evening, a little trawler promoted to the dignity
of a fleet sweeper, came alongside, and all the regiment of gross overloaded
figures, festooned with armament and bags of food and strange knobby parcels, tumbled
heavily over the side. Many men have written of the sailing of the first
argassy of troopships from that bay, and by this time the spectacle of departing
troops was an old one to the vessels there. But this did not diminish
the quality of their farewells. All the King's ships manned ship as we passed,
and sent us a great wave of cheering that filled the heart with sadness
and resolution. In one of the French ships was a party of her crew
high up somewhere above the deck, and they sang for us with astonishing accuracy
and feeling, the Chans du des pars. So moving was this that even
the stolid northerners in our sweeper were stirred to make some more articulate acknowledgment than
the official British cheer. And one old pitman, searching among his memories of
some Lancashire music hall, dug out a rough version of the Marseillaise by degrees.
All our men took up the tune and sang it mightily, with no
suspicion of words, and the officers not less timidly joined in and were proud
of the men for what they had done. For many were moved in that
moment who were never moved before. But while we were yet warm with cheering
and the sense of knighthood, we cleared the boom and shivered a little in
the breeze of the open sea. The sun went down, and soon it
was very cold in the sweeper, and in each man's heart, I think
there was a certain chill. There were no more songs, but the men
whispered in small groups or stood silent, shifting uneasily their wearisome packs. For
now we were indeed cut on from civilization and committed to the unknown. The
transport we had left seemed a very haven of comfort and security. One thought
longingly of white tables in the saloon, and the unfriendly linen and bags of
bully beef and biscuits we carried were concrete evidence of a new life. The
war seemed no longer remote, and each of us realized indignantly that we were
personally involved in it. So for a little all these soldiers had a period
of serious thought, unusual in the soldier's life. But as we neared the
peninsula, the excitement and novelty, and the prospect of exercising cramped limbs brought
back valor and cheerfulness. At Malta, we had heard many tales of the
still terrifying ordeal of landing under fire, but such terrors were not for us.
There was a bright moon, and as we saw the pale cliffs of
Cape Helly's all I think expected each moment a torrent of shells from some obscure
quarter. But instead, an unearthly stillness brooded over the two bays, and
only a morse lamp blinking at the sweeper suggested that any living thing was there.
And there came over the water a strange, musty smell. Some said
it was the smell of the dead, and some the smell of an incinerator.
Myself, I do not know, but it was the smell of the
peninsula forever, which no man can forget. We disembarked at a pier of
rafts by the River Clyde, and stumbled eagerly ashore, and now we were
in the very heart of heroic things. Nowhere, I think, was the
new soldier plunged so suddenly into the genuine scenes of war as he was at
Gallipoli. In France. There was a long transition of training camps and railway
trains and billets, and he moved by easy gradations to the firing line.
But here, a few hours after a night in linen sheets, stood suddenly
on the very sand where, but three weeks before, those hideous machine guns
in the cliffs had mowned down that astonishing party of April twenty fifth, and
in that silver stillness it was difficult to believe. We shambled off up the
steady slope between two cliffs, marveling that any men could have prevailed against so
perfect a field of fire. By now we were very tired, and it
was heavy work laboring through the soft sand. Queer Moorish looking figures in white
robes peered at us from dark corners, and here and there a man poked
a tousled head from a hole in the ground and blinked upon our progress.
Someone remarked that it reminded him of nothing so much as the native camp at
Earl's Court on a fine August evening, and that indeed was the effect.
After a little the stillness was broken by a sound which we could not conceal
from ourselves. Was the distant rattle of musketry. Somewhere a gun fired startlingly.
And now as we went, each man felt vaguely that at any minute
we might be plunged into the thick of a battle, laden as we were,
and I think each man braced himself for a desperate struggle, such as
the effect of marching in the dark to an unknown destination. Soon we were
halted in a piece of apparently waste land, circled by trees, and ordered
to dig ourselves a habitation at once, for in the morning, it was
whispered, the Turks search all this ground. Everything was said in a kind
of hoarse, mysterious whisper, presumably to conceal our observations from the ears of
the Turks five miles away. But then we did not know they were five
miles away. We had no idea where they were or where we were ourselves.
Men glanced furtively at the North Star for guidance, and were pained to
find that, contrary to their military teaching, it told them nothing. Even
the digging was carried on a little stealthily till it was discovered that the Turks
were not behind those trees. The digging was a comfort to the men,
who, being pitmen, were now in their element, and the officers found
solace in whispering to each other that magical communication about the prospective searching. It
was the first technical word they had used in the field, and they were
secretly proud to know what it meant. In a little the dawn began,
and the gray trees took shape, and the sun came up out of Asia,
and we saw at last the little sugar loaf peak of as Shibaba,
absurdly pink and diminutive in the distance. A man's first frontal impression of that
great rampart, with the outlying slopes masking the summit, was that it was
disappointingly small. But when he had lived under and upon it for a while,
day by day it seemed to grow in menace and in bulk, and
ultimately became a hideous, overpowering monster, pervading all his life, so that
it worked upon men's nerves, and almost everywhere in the peninsula. They were
painfully conscious that every movement they made could be watched from somewhere on that massive
hill. But now the kitchens had come, and there was breakfast and vicious
milkless tea. We discovered that all around our seeming solitude the earth had been
peopled with sleepers, who now emerged from their holes. There was a stir
of washing and cooking and singing, and the smoke went up from the wood
fires in the clear cool air. D Company officers made their camp under an
olive tree with a view over the blue water to Samothrace and Imbros, and
now in the early cool, before the sun had gathered his noonday malignity,
it was very pleasant. At seven o'clock the searching began a mile away on
the northern cliffs. The first shell burst, stampeding a number of horses,
The long drawn warning scream, and the final crash gave all the expectant battalion
a faintly pleasurable thrill, And as each shell came a little nearer, the
sensation remained. No one was afraid. Without the knowledge of experience, no
one could be seriously afraid on this cool sunny morning in the grove of olive
trees. Those chill hours in the sweeper had been much more alarming. The
common sensation was, at last, I am really under fire today. I
shall write home and tell them about it. And then, when it seemed
that the line on which the shells were falling must, if continued, passed
through the middle of our camp, the firing mysteriously ceased. Harry, I
know, was disappointed. Personally I was pleased. I learned more about Harry
that afternoon. He had been much exhausted by the long night, but was
now refreshed and filled with an almost childish enthusiasm by the pictorial attractions of the
place. For this enthusiastic soul, one thing only was lacking in the sight
of the camp. The rise of the hill which here runs down the center
of the insula, hid from us the dardnells. These, he said,
must immediately be viewed. It was a bright afternoon of blue skies and gentle
air. Not yet had the dry northeast wind come to plague us with dust
clouds, and all the vivid colors of the scene were unspoiled. We walked
over the hill, through the parched scrub, where lizards darted out from under
our feet, and tortoises lay comatose in the scanty shade, and came to
a kind of inland cliff where the Turks had had many riflemen at the landing.
For all the ground was littered with empty cartridges, and there was unfolded
surely the most gorgeous panorama this war has provided for prosaic Englishmen to see.
Below was a cool, inviting grove of imperial cypresses. All along the narrow
strip between us and the shore lay the rest lines of the French, where
moved lazy figures in blue and red and blasts Senegalese in many colors. To
the left was the wide sweep of Morto Bay, and beyond the first section
of Ashibaba, rising to Detot's battery in terraces of olives and divines. But
what caught the immediate eye, what we had come to see and had sailed
hither to fight for, was that strip of unbelievably blue water before us,
deep generous blue, like a Chinese bowl. On the farther shore, towards
the entrance to the Straits, we could see a wide green plain, and
beyond and to the left, peak after peak of the mountains of Asia,
and far away in the middle distance there was a glint of snow from some
regal summit of the Anatolian mountains. That wide green plain was the plane of
Troy. The scarcity of classical scholars in expeditionary forces and the wearisome observations of
pressmen on the subject of Troy have combined to belittle the significance of the classical
surroundings of the Gallipoli campaign. I myself am a stolid, ill read person,
but I confess that the spectacle of those historic flats was not one in
diplomatic phrase, which I could view with indifference. On Harry ridiculously excited already
the effect was almost alarming. He became quite lyrical over two little sweepers,
apparently anchored near the mouth of the Straits, that he said must have been
where the Greek fleet lay. God, It's wonderful. Up on the slope
towards Dett's battery, the gun were busy, and now and then asiatic Anne
sent over a large shell from the region of achilles Tomb, which burst ponderously
in the sea off Cape Helly's. And there we sat on the rough edge
of the cliff and talked of Achilles and Hector and Diomede and Patroclis, and
the far sounding bolts of Jove. I do not defend or exalt this action,
but this is a truthful record of a man's personality. And I simply
state what occurred. And I confess that with the best wish in the world,
I was myself becoming a little bored with Troy, when in the middle
of a sentence he suddenly became silent and gazed across the straits with a fixed,
pinched look in his face, like a man who was reminded of some
far off calamity he had forgotten. For perhaps a minute he maintained this rigid
aspect, and then as suddenly relaxed, murmuring in a tone of relentless determination,
I will it was not in me not to inquire into the nature of
this passionate intention, And somehow I induced him to explain. It seemed that,
in spite of his genuine academic successes and a moderate popularity at school and
at Oxford, he had suffered from early boyhood from a curious distrust of his
own capacity in the face of anything he had to do. In a measure.
No doubt this had even contributed to his success, For his nervousness took
the form of an intimate, silent brooding over any ordeal that lay before him,
whether it was a visit to his uncle or schools or a dance.
He would lie awake for hours, imagining all conceivable forms of error and failure
and humiliation that might befall him in his endeavor. And though he was to
this extent forewarned and forearmed, it must have been a painful process. And
it explained to me the puzzling intervals of seeming melancholy which I had seen,
varying his usually cheerful demeanor. You remember last night he said I had been
detailed to look after the baggage when we disembarked and take charge of the unloading
party. As far as I know, I did the job all right,
except for losing old Tompkins valise. But you can't think how much worry and
anxiety it gave me beforehand. All the time on the sweeper, I was
imagining the hundreds of possible disasters, the working party not turning up and me
left alone on the boat with the baggage, the Colonel's things being dropped overboard
a row, with the MLO getting the baggage ashore, and then losing the
battalion or the working party or the baggage. It all worked out quite simply,
but I tell you, Benson, it gave me hell. And it's
always the same. That's really why I didn't take a commission, because I
couldn't imagine myself drilling men once without becoming a permanent laughing stock. I know
now that I was a fool about that. I usually do find that out,
but I can't escape the feeling next time. And now it's not only
little things like that, But that's what I feel about the whole war.
I've a terror of being a failure in it, a failure out here,
you know, a sort of regimental dud. I've heard of lots of them,
the kind of man that nobody gives an important job because he sure to
muck it up. Though I do believe Eccleston's more likely to be that than
me. But that's what I was thinking just now, somehow, looking at
this view Troy and all that, and thinking how those Greeks sweated blood for
ten years on afternoons like this, doing their duty for the damned old kings,
and how we've come out here to fight in the same place thousands of
years afterwards, and we still know about them and remember their names. Well,
it gave me a kind of inspiration. I don't know why. I've
got a bit of confidence. God knows how long it will last, but
I swear I won't be a failure. I won't be the battalion dud,
and I'll have a damned good try to get a medal of some sort and
be like like Achilles or somebody. Sheer breathlessness put us an end to this
outburst, and since it was followed by a certain shyness at his own revelations,
I did not probe deeper. But I thought to myself that this young
man's spirit of romance would die hard. I did not know whether it would
ever die, For certainly I had never seen that spirit working so powerfully in
any man as a positive incentive to achievement. And I tell you all this
because I want you to understand how it was with him in the beginning.
But now the bay was in shadow below us on the hill, the solemn
stillness that comes over all trenches in the hour before dusk had already descended,
and away towards the cape the Indians were coming out to kneel in prayer.
Beside the Alien sea. The romance of war was in full song, and
scrambling down the cliff we bathed almost reverently in the Hellespont end of chapter one
recording by Rogermaline. Chapter two of the Secret Battle by A. P.
Herbert. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Rogermaline.
Those first three days were, for many of us who did not know the
mild autumn months, the most pleasant we spent on the peninsula. The last
weeks of May had something of the quality of an old English summer, and
the seven plagues of the Peninsula had not yet attained the intolerable violence of June
and July. True, the inhabited portion of the narrow land we won had
already become in great part a wilderness. The myrtle and rock rose and tangled
cistus, and all that wealth of spring flowers in which the landing parties had
fallen and died in April had long been trodden to death. And there were
wide stretches of yellow desert where not even the parched scrub survived. But in
the two and a half miles of bare country which lay between the capes and
the foothills of Achibaba was one considerable oasis of olives and stunted oaks. And
therein on the slopes of the bridge was our camp, fortunately set. The
word camp contains an unmerited compliment to the place. The manner of its birth
was characteristic of military arrangements in those days. When we were told on that
first mysterious midnight to dig ourselves a shelter against the morning searching, we were
far from imagining that what we dug would be our peninsular home and haven of
rest from the firing line for many months to come. And so we made
what we conceived to be the quickest and simplest form of shelter against a quite
temporary emergency. Long, straight, untraversed ditches running parallel to and with but
a few yards between each other. No worse form of permanent dwelling place could
conceivably have been constructed, for the men were cramped in these places, with
a minimum of comfort and a maximum of danger. No man could climb out
of his narrow drain without casting a shower of dust from the crumbling parapet onto
his sleeping neighbor in the next ditch, and three large German shells could have
destroyed half the regiment. Yet there were many such camps, most of them
lacking the graceful concealment of our trees, such targets, even the Turkish artillery
he must sometimes hit. There were no dugouts in the accepted sense of the
Western Front, no deep, elaborate staircase chambers hollowed out by miners with miners
material. Our dugouts were dugouts in truth, shallow excavations scooped in the surface
of the earth. The only roof for a man against sun and shells was
a waterproof sheet stretched precariously over his hole. It is sufficient testimony to the
indifference of the Turkish artillery that, with such naked concentrations of men scattered about
the peninsula, casualties in the rest camps were so few. Each officer had
his own private hole set democratically among the men's, and an officer's mess was
simply made by digging a larger hole and roofing it with two waterproof sheets instead
of one. There was no luxury among the infantry there, and the gulf
which yawns between the lives of officer and man. In France, as regards
material comfort was barely discernible. In Gallipoli, food was dull and monotonous.
For weeks we had only bully beef and biscuits, and a little coarse bacon
and tea. But it was the same for all, one honorable equality of
discomfort. At first there were no canteen facilities, and when some newcomer came
from one of the islands with a bottle of champagne and another of chartrusse,
we drank it with bully and cast iron biscuit. Drinking water was as precious
as the elixir of life, and almost as unobtainable. But officer and man
had the same ration to eke out through the thirsty day. Wells were sunk
and sometimes immediately condemned. And when we knew the water was clear and sweet
to taste, it was hard to have it corrupted with the metallic flavor of
chemicals by the medical staff. Then, indeed did a man learn to love
water? Then did he learn discipline when he filled his water bottle in the
morning with the aciduous ration of the day, and fought with the intolerable craving
to put it to his lips, and there and then gurgled down his fill.
In the spring nights, it was very cold, and men shivered in
their single blanket under the unimaginable stars. But very early the sun came up,
and by five o'clock all the camp were singing, and there were three
hours of fresh coolness, when it was very good to wash in a canvas
bucket and smoke in the sun before the torrid time came on. And again
at seven, when the sun sat perched on the great rock of Samothrace,
and Imbrose was in a fleecy marvel of pink and saffron clouds. There were
two hours of pure physical content, but these I think were more nearly perfect
than the morning, because they succeeded the irritable fevers of the day. Then
the crickets and the branches sang less tediously, and the flies melted away,
and all over the peninsula the wood fires began to twinkle in the dusk,
as the men cooked over a few sticks, the little delicacies which were preserved
for this hour of respite. When we had done, we sat under our
olive tree in the clear twilight and watched the last aeroplane sail home to Rabbit
Islands, and talked and argued till the glow worms glimmering in the scrub.
And up the hill, the long roll of the Turk's rapid fire told us
that darkness was at hand, and the chill dew sent us into our crannies
to sleep, So we were not sorry for three days of quiet in the
camp. Before we went up the hill, Harry alone was all eagerness to
reach the firing line with the least possible delay. But then Harry was like
none of us. Indeed, none of us were like each other. It
would have been strange if we had been. War chroniclers have noted, with
an accent of astonishment, the strange diversity of persons to be found in units
of the New Army, and the essential sameness of their attitude to the war,
as though a man were to go into the haymarket and be surprised if
the first twelve pedestrians there were not of the same profession, were then to
summon them to the assistance of a woman in the hands of a rough,
and be still surprised at the similarity of their methods. We were, in
truth a motley crowd gathered from everywhere, but when we sat under that olive
tree, we were very much alike, with the single exception of Harry Egerton.
Our company commander, a man of about thirty with a round face and
a large head, was a stockbroker by profession and rather improbably an old territorial
by pastime. He was an excellent company commander, but would have made a
still more admirable second in command for his training in figures and his meticulous habits,
and such things as the keeping of accounts were just what is required of
a second in command, and were lamentably deficient in myself. The intricacies of
acquaintance rolls and impressed accounts and page three of the soldier's pay book were meat
and drink to him, and in general I must confess that I shamefully surrendered
such delicacies to him. Harry Penrose had the fourteenth platoon. Of the other
three subalterns, perhaps the most interesting was Hewett. He, like Harry,
had been at Oxford before the war, though they had never come together there.
He was a fair, dreamy person of remarkably good looks. Alone,
of all the young apollos I have known, did he at all deserve that
title. Most of these have been men of surpassing stupidity and material tastes.
But Hewett added to his physical qualifications something of the mental refinement which presumably one
should expect of even a modern apollo. Intensely fastidious, he frankly detested the
war and all the dirt and disgust he must personally encounter. Like Harry,
he was an idealist, but more so for he could not idealize the war.
But the shrinking of his spirit had no effect on his conduct. He
was no less courageous than Harry or anyone else, and no less keen to
see the thing through. Only at that time he was a little less blind.
A year senior to Harry, he had taken grate in nineteen fourteen,
and though his degree had been disappointingly low, he had not yet lost the
passionate attachment of the greats man to philosophy and thoughts of the ultimate truths.
Sometimes he would try to induce one of us to talk with him of his
religious and philosophical doubts, but in that feverish place it was too difficult for
us, and usually he brooded over his problems alone. Eustace of the sixteenth
Platoon was a journalist by repute, though it was never discovered to what journal,
if any, he was specially attached. His character was more active than
his appearance, which was long, awkward and angular, and if he had
ever been to school he would have been quite undeservedly unpopular for not playing games,
undeservedly because one could not conceive of him as playing any game physically.
Indeed, he was one of nature's gacks. Intellectually he was nimble, not
to say athletic with an acute and deeply logical mind. As a companion,
more especially a companion in war, he was made tedious by a habit of
cynicism and a passion for argument. The cynicism, I think, had developed
originally from some early grievance against society, had been adopted as an effective pose,
and had now become a part of his nature. Whatever its origin,
it was wearing to us, for in the actual scenes of war, one
likes to cling to one's illusions while any shred of them remains, and would
rather they faded honorably under the general influence of time, than be torn to
fragments in a moment by reasoned mockery. But Eustace was never tired of exhibiting
the frailty and subterfuge of all men, particularly in their relations to the war.
The nation arrived for him as regularly as the German submarines would allow,
and all his views were, in that sense distinctly national. If any of
us were rash enough to read that paper ourselves, we were inevitably provoked to
some comment which led to a hut wrangle on the public schools, or kitchener
or the rights of the war, and the pleasant calm of the dusk was
marred. For Eustace could always meet us with a powerfully logical case, and
while in spirit we revolted against him his heresies, we were distressed by the
appeal they made to our reluctant reasons. Harry, the most ingenuous of us
all, and the most devoted to his illusions, was particularly worried by this
conflict. It seemed very wrong to him that a man so loyal and gallant
in his personal relations with others should trample so ruthlessly on their dearest opinions.
Burnett was of a very different type. Tall and muscular, with reddish hair
and vivid blue eyes, he looked as he wanted to look, a man
of action by nature and practice. He had knocked about for some years in
Africa and Australia, a process which had failed equally to establish his fortunes or
soften his rough edges, and from the first he affected the patronizing attitude of
the experienced campaigner. The little discomforts of camp fire were nothing to him,
for were they not part of his normal life. And when I emerged from
my dugout, pursued by a centipede of incredible ferocity. He held forth for
a long time on the best method of dispatching rattlesnakes in the umgoga or some
set for locality by degrees. However, as life became more unbearable, the
conviction dawned upon us that he was no less sensible to heat and hunger and
thirst than mere temporary campaigners, and rather more ready to utter his complaints.
Finally, the weight of evidence became overwhelming, and it was whispered at the
end of our first week at Gallipoli that Burnett was bogus. The quality of
being bogus was, in those days the last word in military condemnation, and
in Burnett's case, event showed the verdict to be lamentably correct. So we
were a strangely assorted crowd only alike as I have said in that we were
keen on the winning of this war, and resolved to do our personal best
towards that end. Of the five of us, Hewett and Eustace had the
most influence on Harry Me. He regarded as a solid kind of wall that
would never let him down or be guilty of any startling deviations from the normal.
By Hewett, he was personally and spiritually attracted by Eustace, alternately fascinated
and disturbed, and it was a very bad day for Harry. When Hewett's
death removed that gentle, comfortable influence. We were ordered to relieve the blanks
at midnight on the fourth day, and once again we braced ourselves for the
last desperate battle of our lives. All soldiers go through this process during their
first weeks of active service. Every time they move anywhere, immense expectations,
vows, fears, prayers fill their minds, and nothing particular happens. Only
the really experienced soldier knows that it is the exception and not the rule,
for anything particular to happen. And the heroes of Romance and history who do
not move a muscle when told that they are to attack at dawn are generally
quite undeserving of praise, since long experience has taught them that the attack is
many times more likely to be canceled than to occur. Until it actually does
happen, they will not believe in it. They will make all proper preparations,
but quite rightly do not move a muscle. We, however, were
now to have our first illustration of this great military truth, For indeed we
were to have no battle. Yet that night's march to the trenches was an
experience that made full compensation. It was already dusk when we moved out of
the rest camp, and the moon was not up. As usual in new
units, the leading platoons went off at a reckless canter, and stumbling after
them in the gathering shadows, over rocky, precipitous slopes, and in and
out of the clumps of bush, falling into dark holes onto indignant sleepers,
or maddeningly entangled in hidden strands of wire. The rear companies were speedily out
of touch. To a heavily laden infantryman, there are few things more exasperating
than a night march into the line, conducted too fast. If the country
be broken and strewn with obstacles, at which each man must wait while another
climbs or drops, or wrestles or wades in front of him, and must
laboriously scamper after him in the shadows, lest he and thereby all those behind
him, be lost. If the country be unknown to him, so that,
apart from purely military considerations, the fear of being lost is no small
thing for a man knows that he may wander all night alone in the dark,
surrounded by unknown dangers, cut off from sleep and rations, and the
friendly voices of companions, a jest among them when he discovers them, then
such a march becomes a nightmare. On this night, it dawned gradually on
those in front that they were unaccompanied save by the first platoon, And a
long halt and much shouting and searching gathered most of the regiment together, hot,
cursing and already exhausted. And now we passed the five white water towers
standing mysteriously in a swamp, and came out of the open country into the
beginning of a gully. These gullies were deep, steep sided ravines, driven
through all the lower slopes of Achi Baba, and carrying in the spring a
thin stream of water peopled by many frogs, down to the straits or the
sea. It was easier going here, for there was a rough track beside
the stream to follow. Yet, though those in front were marching as they
thought with inconceivable deliberation, the rear men of each platoon were doubling round the
corners among the trees and cursing as they ran. There was then a wild
hail of bullets in all those gullies, since for many hours of each night
the Turk kept up a sustained and terrible rapid fire from his trenches far up
the hill, And whether by design or bad shooting, the majority of these
bullets passed high over our trenches and fell hissing in the gully bed. So
now all the air seemed full of humming whistling things, and all around in
the gully banks and the bushes by the stream there were vicious spurts as they
fell. It was always a marvel how few casualties were caused by this stray
fire. And to night we were chiefly impressed with this wonder. In the
stream, the frogs croaked incessantly, with a note of weary indifference to the
medley of competing noises. At one point there was a kind of pot hole
in the stream, where the water squeezing through made a kind of high toned
whale, delivered with stabbing emphasis at regular intervals. So weird was this sound,
which could be heard many hundred yards away, and gradually asserted itself above
all other contributions to that terrible din that many of The men, already mystified
and excited, said to themselves that this was the noise of the hideous explosive
bullets of which they had heard. Soon we were compelled to climb out of
the gully path to make way for some descending troops, and stumbled forward with
a curious feeling of nakedness. High up in open ground. Here the bullets
were many times multiplied, and many of us said that we could feel them
passing between us. Indeed, one or two men were hit, but though
we did not know it, most of these near sounding bullets flew high above
us. After a little we were halted and lay down, wondering in the
sibilant dark. Then we moved down and halted again, and realized suddenly that
we were very tired. At the head of the column, the guide had
lost his way and could not find the entrance to the communication trench, and
here, in the most exposed area of all that peninsula, we must wait
until he did. The march was an avoidable piece of mismanagement. The whole
regiment was being unnecessarily endangered, but none of this we knew, so very
few men were afraid, for we were still in the bliss of ignorance.
It seemed to us that these strange proceedings must be a part of the everyday
life of the soldier. If they were not, we raw creatures should not
have been asked to endure them. We had no standard of safety or danger
by which to estimate our position, and so the miraculous immunity we were enjoying
was taken as a matter of course, and we were blissfully unafraid. At
the same time, we were extremely bored and tired, and the sweat cooled
on us in the chill night air. And when at last we came into
the deep Communication trench, we felt that the end of this weariness must surely
be near. But the worst exasperations of relieving an unknown line were still before
us. It was a two mile trudge in the narrow ditches to the front
line. No war correspondent has ever described such a march. It has not
included in the official horrors of war. But this is the kind of thing
which, more than battle and blood, harasses the spirit of the infantryman and
composes his life. The Communication trenches that night were good and deep, and
dry and free from the awfulness of mud. But they were very few and
unintelligently used. There had been an attack that day, and coming by the
same trench was a long stream of stretchers and wounded men, and odd parties
coming to fetch water from the well, and whole battalions relieved from other parts
of the line. Our men had been sent up insanely with full packs.
For a man so equipped to pass another naked in the narrow ditch would have
been difficult, when all those that he meets have also straps and hooks and
excrescences about them. Each separate encounter means heart breaking entanglements and squeezes and sudden
paroxysms of rage. That night we stood a total of hours hopelessly jammed in
the suffocating trench, with other troops trying to get down. A man stood
in those crushes, unable to sit down, unable to lean comfortably against the
wall because of his pack, unable even to get his hand to his water
bottle and quench his intolerable thirst, unable almost to breathe for the hot smell
of herded humanity. Only a thin ribbon of stars overhead, remotely roofing his
prison, reminded him that indeed he was still in the living world and not
pursuing some hideous nightmare. At long last some one would take charge of the
situation, and by sheer muscular fighting for space, the two masses would be
extricated. Then one moved on again, And now each man has become a
mere, lifeless automaton. Every few yards there is a wire hanging across the
trench at the height of a man's eyes, and he runs blindly into it,
or it catches in the piling swivel of his rifle. Painfully he removes
it, or in a fit of fury, tears the wire away from him.
Or there is a man lying in a corner with a wounded leg,
crying out to each passer by not to tread on him, or a stretcher
party slowly struggling against the tide. Mechanically, each man grapples with these obstacles,
mechanically repeats the ceaseless messages that are passed up and down, and the
warning wire stretcher party step up to those behind and stumbles on. He is
only conscious of the dead weight of his load, and the braces of his
pack biting into his shoulders, of his thirst, and the sweat of his
body. And the longing to lie down and sleep. When we halt,
men fall into a doze as they stand, and curse pitifully when they are
urged on from behind. We reach the inhabited part of the line, and
the obstacles become more frequent, for there are traverses every ten yards, and
men sleeping on the floor, and a litter of rifles, water cans,
and scattered equipment. Forever we wind round the endless traverses and squeeze past the
endless host we are relieving, and sometimes the parapet is low or broken or
thin, or there is a dangerous gap, and we are told to keep
our heads down and dully pass back the message so that it reaches men meaninglessly
when they have passed the danger point or are still far from it. All
the time there is a wild rattle of rapid fire from the turks, and
bullets hammer irritably on the parapet, or fly singing overhead. When a man
reached his destined par to the trench that night, there were still long minutes
of exasperation before him, for we were inexperienced troops, and first of all
the men crowded in too far together and must turn about and press back so
as to cover the whole ground to be garrisoned. Then they would flock like
sad sheep too far in the opposite direction. This was the subaltern's bad time,
for the officer must squeeze backwards and forwards, struggling to dispose properly his
own sullen platoon. And it was hard for him to be patient with their
stupidity, for like them, he only longed to fling off his cursed equipment
and lie down and sleep forever. He like them, had but one thought
that if there were to be no release from the hateful burden that clung to
his back and cut into his shoulders and ceaseless impeded him, if there were
to be no relief or his thirst and the urgent aching of all his body,
he must soon sink down and scream. Harry's platoon was settled in when
I found him, hidden away somewhere in the third reserve line. He had
conscientiously posted a few centuries and done all those things which a good platoon commander
should do, and was lying himself in a sort of stupor of fatigue.
Physically, he was not strong, rather frail, in fact, For the
infantry. He had a narrow chest and slightly round shoulders, and his heart
would not have passed any civilian doctor. And from my own experience I knew
that the march must have tried him terribly. But a little rest had soothed
the intense nervous irritation whose origins I have tried to describe, and his spirit
it was as sturdy as ever. He struggled to his feet and leaned over
the parados with me. The moon was now high up in the northeast.
The Turks had ceased their rapid fire at moonrise, and now an immense piece
wrapped the peninsula. We were high up on the center slopes of Ashibaba,
and all the six miles which other men had conquered lay bathed in the moonlight
below us. Far away at the cape, we could see the long green
lights of the hospital ships, and all about us were glow worms in the
scrub. Left and right, the pale parapets of trenches crept like dim seen
snakes into the little valleys and vanished over the opposite slopes. Only a cruiser
offshore, firing lazily at long intervals, disturbed the slumbrous stillness. No better
sedative could have been desired. How did you like the march, I said,
oh, I'll write one of my men was wounded, I believe,
But I didn't see him, all right, I said, personally, I
thought it was damned awful. It's a marvel that any of us are here
at all. I hear a company still adrift as it is. Well,
anyhow we got here, said Harry, What a wonderful spot this is,
And look at those damned glow worms. I was anxious to know what impression
the night had made on Harry, but these and other answers gave me no
real clue. I had a suspicion that it had, in truth considerably distressed
him, But any such effect had clearly given way to the romantic appeal of
the quiet moon. I too was enjoying the sense of peace. But I
was still acutely conscious of the unpleasantness of the night's proceedings, and a certain
envy took hold of me at this youth's capacity to concentrate on the attractive shadow
of distasteful things. There was a heavy, musty smell over all part of
the trench, the smell of a dead turk lying just over the parapet,
and it occurred to me maliciously to wake Harry from his dreams and bring home
to him the reality of things. Funny smell you've got here, Harry,
I said, Know what it is? Yes, it's cactus or amaryllus,
or one of those funny plants they have here, isn't it? I read
about it in the papers. This was too much. It's a dead turk,
I told him, with a wicked anticipation of the effect I should produce.
The effect, however, was not what I expected. No, said
Harry, with obvious elation. Let's find the devil. Forthwith, he swarmed
over the parapet, full of life again, nosed about till he found the
reeking thing, and gazed on it with undisguised interest. No sign of horror
or disgust could I detect in him. Yet it was not pure ghoulishness.
It was simply the boy's greed for experience and the savor of adventure. Anyhow,
my experiment had failed, and I found that I was glad. But
when I was leaving him for the next platoon, he was lying down for
a little sleep on the dirty floor of the trench, And as he flashed
his electric torch over the ground. I saw several small white objects writhing in
the dust. The company commander, whom we had relieved, had told me
how under all these trenches the Turks and the French had buried many of their
dead, And in a moment of nauseating insight, I knew that these things
were the maggots which fed upon their bodies. Harry, I said, you
can't sleep there, look at those things. And I told him what they
were, rubbish. He said, their glow worms. Gone to sleep well.
Then I left him, But that's how he was in those days.
End of chapter two recording by Roger Maline. Chapter three of the Secret Battle
by A. P. Herbert. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.
Recording by Roger Maline. So many men have written descriptions of trench life
in France, there have been so many poems, plays and speeches about it,
that the majority of our nation must have a much clearer mental picture of
life on the Western Front than they have of life at the Savoy or life
in East Ham. But the Gallipoli Peninsula was never part of the Western Front,
and no man came back from that place on leave lucky. Indeed,
if he came at all, the campaign was never, for obvious reasons,
an important item in official propaganda, and the various non official agencies which now
bring home the war to Streatham had not begun to articulate when the campaign came
to an end, and so neither Streatham nor anyone else knew anything about it.
And though for a soldier to speak, however distantly of the details of
trench life in France, is now in some circles considered a solecism, equivalent
to the talking of shop. I hope I may still, without offense,
make some brief reference to the trenches of the Peninsula, for in truth it
was all very different. Above all, from dawn to dawn it was genuine
infantry warfare in France, Apart from full dress attacks. An infantryman may live
for many months without once firing his rifle or running the remotest risk of death
by a rifle bullet. Patiently heat tramps and watches and digs and is shelled,
clinging fondly to his rifle night and day, but seldom or never in
a position to use it, so that in the stagnant days of the past
he came to look upon it as a mere part of his equipment, like
his water bottle, only heavier and less comforting, and in real emergencies fumbled
stupidly with the unfamiliar mechanism. This was true for a long time of the
normal or peacetime sectors of France. But in those hill trenches of Gallipoli,
the Turk and the Gentile fought with each other all day with rifle and bomb,
and in the evening crept out and stabbed each other in the dark.
There was no release from the strain of watching and listening and taking thought.
The Turk was always on higher ground. He knew every inch of all those
valleys and vineyards and scrub strewn slopes, and he had an uncanny accuracy of
aim. Moreover, many of his men had the devotion of fanatics, which
inspired them to lie out behind our lines, with stores of food enough to
last out their ammunition, certain only of their own ultimate destruction, but content
to lie there and pick off the infidels till they too died. They were
very brave men. But the Turkish snipers were not confined to the madmen,
who were caught disguised as trees in the broad daylight and found their way into
the picture papers. Every trench was full of snipers, less theatrical but no
less effective. And in the night they crept out with unbelievable stealth and lay
close into our lines, killing our sentries and chipping away our crumbling parapets.
So the sniping was terrible. In that first week we lost twelve men each
day. They fell without a sound. In the early morning, as they
stood up from their cooking at the brazier, fell shot through the head and
lay snoring horribly in the dust. They were sniped as they came up the
communication trench with water, or carelessly raised their heads to look back at the
ships in the bay. And in the night there were sudden screams where a
sentry had moved his head too often against the moon. If a periscope were
raised, however furtively, it was shivered in an instant. If a man
peered over himself, he was dead. Far back in the reserve lines,
or at the wells, where a man thought himself hidden from view, the
snipers saw and killed him. All along the line were danger posts where many
had been hit. These places became invested with a peculiar awe and as you
came to them, the men said, keep low, here, sir,
in a mysterious whisper, as though the Turk could hear them. Indeed,
so uncanny were many of the deaths that some men said the Turk could see
impossibly through the walls of the trench and crouched nervously in the bottom. All
the long communication trenches were watched, and wherever a head or a moving rifle
showed at a gap, a bullet came with automatic regularity. Going down a
communication trench alone, a man would hear the tap of these bullets on the
parapet following him along, and break into a half hysterical run in the bright
sunlight to get away from this unnatural pursuit. For such it seemed to him
to be. The fire seemed to come from all angles, and units bitterly
accused their neighbors of killing their men, when it seemed impossible that any Turk
could have fired the shot. For a little then, this sniping was thoroughly
on the men's nerves. Nothing in their training had prepared them for it.
They hated the blinded feeling it produced. It was demoralizing, always to be
wondering if one's head was low enough always to walk with a stoop. It
was tiring to be always taking care, and it was very dangerous to relax
that care for a moment. Something had to be done. And the heavy,
methodical way in which these tinesiders of ours learned to counter and finally overcome
the sniper is characteristic of the nation's effort throughout this war. The Turks were
natural soldiers fighting in their own country. More they were natural scouts. Our
men were ponderous, uncouth pitmen from Timeside and the Clyde. But we chose
out a small body of them who could shoot better than their fellows and called
them snipers. And behold they were snipers. We gave them telescopes and periscopes
and observers, and set them in odd corners and told them to snipe,
And by slow degrees they became interested and active and expert, and killed many
Turks. The third time we came to those trenches, we could move about
with comparative freedom. In all this, Harry took a leading part for the
battalion scout officer was one of the first casualties, and Harry, who had
had some training as a out in the Ranks was appointed in his place.
In this capacity, he was in charge of the improvised snipers, and all
day moved about the line from post to post, encouraging and correcting. All
this he did with characteristic energy and enthusiasm, and tired himself out with long
wanderings in the scorching sun. In those trenches, all movement was an intense
labor. The sun blazed always into the suffocating ditch, where no breath of
air came. The men not on duty lay huddled wherever they could steal an
inch of shade, with the flies crawling about their eyes and open mouths.
Progress was a weary routine of squeezing past men, or stepping over men,
or running into men round corners as one stood to escape death. In little
niches in the wall were mess tins boiling over boxwood fires, so that the
eyes smarted from their smoke, and the air was full of hot fumes,
and everywhere was the stuffy smell of human flesh in the heat of the day.
These things produced in the healthiest man an intolerable irritation and fatigue. To
a frail, sensitive youth like Harry, his day long rambles must have been
torture. But though he too became touchy, he pursued his task with determination
and would not be tempted away. The rest of us, when not on
watch, lay torpid all the hot hours in the shallow holes we had scratched
behind the trench and called company headquarters. These places were roofed only with the
inevitable waterproof sheet, and had there been any serious shelling, would have been
death traps. Into these dwellings came many strange animals, driven from their nests
among the roots of the scrub. Snakes, lizards, and hideous centipedes.
Large clumsy winged things, which some said were locusts, fell into the trench,
and for a few hours strove vainly to leap out again, till they
were trampled to death. They had the color of ivory, and shone with
bright tints in the sun, like shot silk. The men found tortoises derelict
in near shell holes, and set them to walk in the trench, and
they too, wandered sadly about till they disappeared. No man knew where.
The flies were not yet at full strength, but they were very bad,
and all day we wrestled with thirst. He was a lucky man who could
sleep in the daylight hours. And when the cool evening came beckoning him to
sleep, he must rise and bestir himself for the work of the night.
Then all the line stirred with life again, with the cleaning of rifles thick
with heavy dust, and the bustle of men making ready to stand to arms.
Now, indeed, could a man have slept when all the pests of
the day had been exercised by the cool dusk, and the bitter cold of
the midnight was not yet come. But there was no sleep for any man,
only watching and digging, and carrying, and working and listening. And
so soon as Ashibaba was swathed in shadow and the sun well down behind the
westward islands, the Turk again his evening fusillade of rapid fire. This was
an astonishing performance, night after night at this hour, every man in his
trench must have blazed away till his rifle would do its work no more.
Rapid fire has been a specialty of the Turkish infantryman since the days of Plevna,
and indeed he excels in it. Few English units could equal his performance
for ten minutes, But the Turk kept up the same sustained, deafening volume
of fire for hours at a stretch, till the moon came up and allayed
his fears, For it was an exhibition of nervousness as well as musketry.
Fearful of a stealthy assault in the dark, he would not desist till he
could see well across his own wire captured. Orders by the Turkish high command
repeatedly forbade this reckless expenditure of ammunition, and sometimes for two nights he would
restrain himself, but in the early days never for more. Our policy was
to lie down in the trench and think sardonically of the ammunition he was wasting.
But even this was not good for men's minds. Most of the fire
was high and whizzed over into the gullies, but many hundreds of all those
thousands of bullets hit the parapet. There was a steady, reiterant rap of
them on the sand bags, very irritating to the nerves, and bits of
the parapet splashed viciously into the trench over the crouching men. In that tornado
of sound, a man must shout to make himself heard by his friends,
and this produced in his mind an uncomfortable sense of isolation. He seemed cut
off from humanity, and brooded secretly to himself. Safe he might be in
that trench, but he could not long sit alone in that tempestuous security without
imagining himself in other circumstances, climbing up the parapet, leaving the trench,
walking into that So on the few murky nights when the moon would not show
herself but peeped temptingly from behind large bolsters of cloud, so that even the
Turks diminished their fire, and then with a petulant crescendo continued, men lay
in the dust and prayed for the moon to come. So demoralizing was this
fire that it was not easy to induce even sentries to keep an effective watch.
Not unnaturally, they did not like lifting their heads to look over,
even for the periodical peeps which were insisted upon. An officer on his rounds
would find them standing on the firestep with their heads well below the parapet,
but gazing intently into the heart of a sandbag, with the air of a
man whom no movement of the enemy can escape. The officer must then perform
the melancholy rite of showing the man how safe it is. This consisted in
climbing up to the firestep and exposing an immoderate amount of his head, gazing
deliberately at the turks, and striving to create an impression of indifference and calm.
He then jumped down, shouting cheerily that's the way Thompson, and walked
off, thanking God. Personally, I did not like this duty at the
best. It was an hypocrisy. For the reluctance of the officer to look
over was no less acute than the man's, and it was one thing to
look for a moment or two and pass on, and another to stand there
and repeat the process at brief intervals. Officers performed this rite according to their
several characters. Eustace, for example, with a cynical grin which derided with
equal injustice both himself and his action. He was notably courageous, and his
nonchalance on the parapet would have been definitely reassuring to the nervous sentry, But
his expression and attitude said clearly, this is all damned nonsense, my good
man. You don't like standing up here, Neither do I, and neither
of us is deceiving the other at all. Burnett did it with genuine and
ill concealed distaste, too hasty to be convincing. Harry alone did it with
a gallant abandon like a night throwing down his challenge to the enemy, and
he alone can have been really inspiring to the reluctant Sentry. He had a
keen dramatic instinct, and in these little scenes rather enjoyed the part of the
unperturbed hero calming the timorous herd. Watching him once or twice, I wondered
how much was acting and how much real fearlessness. If it was acting,
he was braver than than most of us, But I think it was the
other. Just then, there were five or six hours between the end of
the rapid fire and the stand, two before dawn. During these hours,
three of the company officers were always on duty. We split the time in
two, and it was a weary three hours, patrolling the still trench,
stumbling over sleeping men sprawled out like dead in the moonlight, and goading the
tired sentries to watchfulness. Terrible was the want of sleep. The men fell
asleep with their heads against the iron loopholes, and starting up as the officer
shook them, swore that they had never nodded. Only by constant movement could
the officer be sure even of himself. He dared not sit for a moment,
or lean in the corner of the traverse, though all his limbs ached
for rest, lest he too be found snoring at his post, and he
and all his men be butchered in their guilty sleep. And so he drags
his sore feet ceaselessly backwards and forwards, marvel at the stillness and the stars
and the strange musky night smell which has crept out of the earth. Far
away, he can see the green lights of a hospital ship, and as
he looks, they begin to move and dwindle slowly into the distance. For
she is going home, and he thinks of the warmth and light and comfort
in that ship, and follows her wistfully with his eyes till she is gone.
Turning back, he sees a sentry silent above him. He too is
watching the ship, and each man knows the other's thoughts, but they do
not speak. At last comes the officer, relieving him cold and irritable from
his brief sleep. He is a little late, and they compare watches resentfully,
and unless they be firm friends, at that moment they hate each other.
But the one who is relieved goes down to the dugout in the support
line a little jauntily, now though his feet are painful, feeling already that
he could watch many hours more. And suddenly the moon is beautiful and the
stars are friendly. For he is going to sleep. But when he comes
to the little narrow hole which is the dugout, there are two officers already
filling most of the floor, noisily asleep. One of them is lying on
his waterproof sheet. He tugs angrily at it, but it is caught in
something and will not come away. He shakes the man, but he does
not wake. Too tired to continue, he lies down awkwardly in the crooked
space which is left between the legs and arms and equipment of the others.
He draws his meager trench coat over his body and pulls his knees up that
they too may be covered. There is nothing over his feet, and already
they are cold. His head he rests on a rough army haversack. In
the middle of it there is a hard knob, a soap tin, or
a book or a tin of beef for a little. He lies uncomfortably like
this, hoping for sleep. His ear is crushed on the hard pillow.
There is something knobbly under his hip. He knows that he ought to get
up and rearrange himself, but he lacks the necessary energy. Finally, he
raises himself on his elbow and tugs at the towel in his haversack to make
him a pillow. The strap of the haversack is fastened and the towel will
not emerge. He unfastens the haversack and in desperation, pulls out the whole
of its contents with the towel. His toothbrush and his sponge and his diary
are scattered in the dust. Some of the pages of the diary are loose,
and if he leaves it, they will be lost. He feels in
the darkness for his electric torch and curses because he cannot find it. He
has lent it to the damned fool who relieved him. Why can't people have
things of their own? Painfully groping, he gathers his belongings and puts them
one by one in the haversack, arranging his towel on the top. His
elbow is sore with leaning on it, but the pillow is ready lying down
again. He falls quickly to sleep. Almost at once there is a wild
din in his dreams, rapid fire again springing up. He rushes into the
trench with the others. It is an attack. Who is attacking? The
men in the trench know nothing. It started on the right, they say,
And now the whole line is ablaze again with this maddening rifle fire.
Running back to the dugout, he gropes in the wreckage of coats and equipment
for his belt and revolver. He must hurry to the front line to take
charge of his platoon. There are no telephones to the firing line. What
the hell is happening. When he is halfway up the communication trench, cannoning
into the walls in his haste and weariness, the firing suddenly stops. It
was a wild panic started by the Senegalese holding the line on our right.
Damned them black idiots. He goes back, swearing with the other officers,
and they lie down. Anyhow, it is too late now to waste time
on fussy arrangements. When he wakes up again, there is already a hint
of light in the east. It is the stand to arms before dawn.
His feet are numb and painful with cold. His limbs are cramped and aching,
and his right forearm has gone to sleep. The flesh of his legs
is clammy and sticks to the breeches. He has lived and slept in for
five days. He longs for a bath. Slowly with the others, he
raises himself and gropes weakly in the muddle of garments on the floor for his
equipment. He cannot find his revolver. Burnett has lost his belt and mutters
angrily to himself. All their belongings are entangled together in the narrow space.
They disengage them without speaking to each other. Each one is in a dull
coma of endurance. For the moment. Their spirit is at its lowest ebb.
It is the most awful moment of warfare. In a little they will
revive, But just now they cannot pretend to bravery or cheerfulness, only curse
feebly and fumble in the darkness. They go out into the trench and join
their platoons. The NCOs are still shaking and bullying, the men still asleep
Some of these are almost senseless and can only be roused by prolonged physical violence.
The officer braces himself for his duties, and by and by all the
men are more or less awake and equipped, though their heads droop as they
sit, and their neighbors nudge them into wakefulness. As the officer approaches mechanically,
he fills and lights a pipe and takes a cautious sip at his water
bottle. The pipe turns his empty stomach, and an intolerable emptiness assails him.
He knocks out the pipe and peers over the parapet. It is almost
light now, but a thin mist hides the Turkish trench. His face is
greasy and taut with dirt, and the corners of his eyes are full of
dust. His throat is dry, and there is a loathsome stubble on his
chin, which he fingers absently, pulling at the long hairs steadily. The
light grows and grows, and the men begin to chatter, and suddenly the
sun emerges over the corner of Chi Baba, and life and warmth come back
to the numb souls of all these men stand. Two is over, But
as the men tear off their hateful equipment and lean their rifles against the wall
of the trench. There is a sudden burst of shelling. On the right,
figures appear running on the sky line. They are against the light and
the shapes are dark, but there seems to be a dirty blue in their
uniforms. No one quite knows how the line runs up there. It is
a salient. The figures must be Turks attacking the French. The men gape
over the parapet. The officer gapes it has nothing to do with them.
Then he remembers what he is for and tells his men excitedly to fire on
the figures. Some of the men have begun cooking their breakfast and are with
difficulty seduced from their task. A spasmodic fire opens on the running figures.
It is hard to say where they are running or what they are doing.
The officer is puzzled. It is his first glimpse of battle, and he
feels that a battle should be simple and easy to understand. The officer of
the next platoon comes along. He is equally ignorant of affairs, but he
thinks the figures are French attacking the Turks. They too wear blue the first
officer rushes down the line, telling the men to seize fire. The men
growl and go back to their cooking. It is fairly certain that none of
them hit any of the distant figures. But the officer is worried. Why
was nobody told what was to happen? What is it all about? He
has been put in a false position. Presently, a belated chit arrives to
say that the French were to attack at sunrise. But the attack was a
fiasco and is postponed. And now all the air is sickly with the smell
of cooking, and the dry wood crackles in every corner. Little wisps of
smoke goes straight up in the still air. All the peninsula is beautiful in
the sunlight, and wonderful to look upon against the dark blue of the sea.
The dew sparkles on the scrub over the cypress grove. Comes the first
aeroplane, humming contentedly. Another day has begun. The officer goes down,
whistling to wash in a bucket. End of chapter three recording by Roger Maaleine.
Chapter four of the Secret Battle by A. P. Herbert. This
LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Roger Maline. Such was life
in the line at that time. But I should make the soldiers almost automatic
reservation that it might have been worse. There might have been heavy shelling,
but the shelling on the trenches was negligible. Then there might have been mud,
but there was not. And eight such days might have left Harry Penrose
quite unaffected in spirit, in spite of his physical handicaps, by reason of
his extraordinary vitality and zest. But there were two incidents before we went down
which did affect him, and it is necessary that they should be told.
On the fifth day in the line, he did a very brave thing,
brave at least in the popular sense, which means that many another man would
not have done that thing. To my mind, a man is brave only
in proportion to his knowledge and his susceptibility to fear. The standard of the
mob, the standard of the official military mind, is absolute. There are
no fine shades, No account of circumstance and temperament is allowed, and perhaps
this is inevitable. Most men would say that Harry's deed was a brave one.
I have said so myself, but I am not sure eighty to a
hundred yards from one section of our line was a small stretch of Turkish trench,
considerably in advance of their main line. From this trench, a particularly
harassing fire was kept up night and day, and the brigade staff considered that
it should be captured. High officers in shirt sleeves and red hats looked long
and wisely at it through periscopes. Colonels and adjutants, and subalterns and sergeants
stood silent and respectful while the great men pondered. The great men then turned
round with the air of those who make profound decisions, and announced that you
ought to be able to enfilade it from over there, or I suppose they
enfilade you from there. The term enfilade invariably occurred somewhere in these dicta and
in the listeners' minds. There stirred the suspicion that the great ones had not
been loo at the right trench, if indeed they had focused the unfamiliar instrument
so as to see anything at all. But the decision was made, and
for the purposes of a night attack, it was important to know whether the
trench was held strongly at night or occupied only by a few busy snipers.
Harry was ordered to reconnoiter the trench with two scouts. The night was pitch
black, with an unusual absence of stars. The worst of the rapid fire
was over, but there was a steady spit and crackle of bullets from the
Turks, and especially from the little trench opposite. Long afterwards, in France,
he told me that he would never again dream of going out on patrol
in the face of such a fire. But tonight it did not occur to
him to delay his expedition. The profession of scouting made a special appeal to
the romantic side of him. The prospect of some real practical scouting was exciting.
According to the books, much scouting was done under heavy fire. But
according to the books, and in the absence of any experience to the contrary,
it was probable that the careful scout would not be killed. Then why
waste time? All this I gathered indirectly from his account of the affair.
Two bullets smacked into the parapet by his head as he climbed out of the
dark sap and wriggled forward into the scrub. But even these did not give
him pause. Only while he lay and waited for the two men to follow
did he begin to realize how many bullets were flying about. The fire was
now really heavy. And when I heard that Harry had gone out, I
was afraid, But he, as yet was only faintly surprised the colonel had
sent him out. The colonel had said, the Turks fired high, and
if you kept low, you were quite safe. And he ought to know.
This was a regular thing in warfare, and must be done so.
Unlike reptiles into the darkness, dragging with hands and pushing with knees, progress
in the orthodox Scout fashion was surprisingly slow and exhausting. The scrub tickled and
scratched your face, The revolver in your hands caught in the roots. The
barrel must be choked with dust. Moreover, it was impossible to see anything
at all, and the object of a reconnaissance being to see something. This
was perplexing. Even when the frequent flares went up, and one lay pressed
to the earth, one's horizon was the edge of a tuft of scrub five
yards away. This always looked like the summit of some commanding height. But
laboring thither one saw by the next flare only another exactly similar horizon beyond.
So must the worm feel wandering in the rugged spaces of a well kept lawn.
It was long before Harry properly understood this phenomenon, and by then his
neck was stiff and aching from lying flat and craning his neck back to sea
in front. But after many hours of crawling, the ground sloped down a
little, and now they could see the sharp stabbing flashes from the rifles of
the snipers in the little trench ahead of them. Clearly they were only snipers,
for the flashes came from only eight or nine particular spots, spaced out
at intervals. Now the scouts glowed with a sense of achievement as they watched.
They had found out. Never again could Harry have lain like that,
naked in the face of those near rifles, coldly calculating and watching, without
an effort of real heroism. On this night he did it easily, confident,
unafraid. Elated with his little success, something prompted him to go farther
and confirm his deductions. He whispered to his men to lie down in a
fold of the ground, and crept forward to the very trench itself. Aiming
at a point midway between two flashes. There was no wire in front of
the trench, but as he saw the parapet looming like a mountain close ahead,
he began to realize what a mad fool he was, alone and helpless
within a yard of the Turks, an easy mark in the light of the
next flare, But he would not go back, and, squirming on,
worked his head into a gap in the parapet and gazed into a vast blackness.
This he did with a wild incautiousness, the patience of a true scout,
overcome by his anxiety to do what he intended as soon as possible.
The Turks' own rifles had drowned the noise of his movements, and providentially no
flare went up till his body was against the parapet. When at length the
faint, wavering light began and swelled into sudden brilliance. He could see right
into the trench, and when the shadows chased each other back into its depths.
As the light fell, he lay marveling at his own audacity. So
impressed was he by the wonder of his exploit that he was incapable of making
any intelligent observations other than the bald fact that there were no men in that
part of the trench. He was still waiting for another flare when there was
a burst of rapid fire from our own line a little to the right.
Suddenly he realized that Bee Company did not know he was out. C Company
knew, but in his haste he had forgotten to see that the others were
informed before he left, as he had arranged to do with the Colonel,
he and his scouts would be shot by b Company. Obsessed with this thought,
he turned and scrambled breathlessly back to the two waiting men. God knows
why he wasn't seen and sniped, and his retirement must have been very noisy,
for as he reached the others, all the snipers in the trench opened
fire feverishly. Together, Harry and his men, who were cold with waiting,
wriggled blindly back. They no longer pretended to any deliberation or cunning,
but having come to no harm so far, were not seriously anxious about themselves.
Only it seemed good to go back now. But after a few yards
one of the men, Trouer, gave a scream of agony and cried out,
I'm hit, I'm hit. In that moment, Harry told me all
the elation and pride of his exploit ebbed out of him, a sick disgust
with himself, and everything came over him. Williams, the other scout,
lay between him and Trouer, who was now moaning horribly in the darkness.
For a moment, Harry was paralyzed. He lay there saying feebly, where
are you hit? Where is he hit? Williams? Where are you hit?
When at last he got to his side, the man was almost unconscious
with pain, but he had managed to screech out both legs. In fact,
he had been shot through the femoral artery and one leg was broken.
In that blackness, skilled hands would have had difficulty in bandaging any wound.
Harry and Williams could not even tell where his wound was, for all his
legs were wet and sticky with blood. But both of them were fumbling and
scratching at their field dressings for some moments before they realized this. Then they
started to take the man in half, dragging half, carrying him at every
movement. The man shrieked in agony when they stood up to carry him bodily.
He screamed so piercingly that the storm of bullets was immediately doubled about them.
When they laid down and dragged him, he screamed less, but progress
was impossibly slow. And now it seemed that there were turks in the open
scrub about them, for there were flashes and a loud reports at strangely close
quarters. The turks could not see the miserable little party, but Trouer's screams
were an easy guide. Then Harry bethought him of the little medical case in
his breast pocket, where with needles and aspirin and plaster and pills, was
a small file of morphine tablets. For Trauer's sake and their own. His
screaming must be stilled. Tearing open his pocket, he fumbled at the elastic
band around the case. The little file was smaller than the rest. He
knew where it lay, but the case was upside down. All the files
seemed the same size. Trembling, he pulled out the cork and shook out
one of the tablets into his hand. A bullet cracked like a whip over
his head. The tablet fell in the scrub. He got another out and
passed it over to Williams. Williams's hand was shaking, and he dropped it.
Harry groaned. The next two were safely transferred and pressed into Trower's mouth.
He did not know how strong they were, but he remembered vaguely seeing
one or two on the label, and at that black moment, the phrase
came curiously into his head, as ordered by the doctor. Trower was quieter
now, and this made the other two a little calmer. Harry told me
he was now so cool that he could put the file back carefully in the
case and turned them to his pocket. Even from sheer force of habit,
he buttoned up the pocket. But when they moved off, they realized with
a new horror that they were lost. They had come out originally from the
head of a long sap. In the darkness and the excitement, they had
lost all sense of direction and had missed the sap. Probably they were not
more than fifty yards from friends, but they might be moving parallel to the
sap, or parallel to the front line, and that way they might go
on indefinitely. They could not drag their wretched burden with them indefinitely, so
Harry sent Williams to find the trench and lay throbbing by the wounded man.
No one who has not been lost in the pitchy dark and no man's land
can understand how easy it is to arrive at that condition, and the intense
feeling of helplessness it produces. That solitary weight of Harry's must have been terrible,
for he had time now to ponder his position. Perhaps Williams would not
find the trench, Perhaps he too would be hit. Perhaps he would not
be able to find the scouts again. What should they do? Then?
Anything was possible in this awful darkness, with these bullets cracking and tearing about
him, Perhaps he would be killed himself. Straining his ears, he fancied
he could hear the rustle of creeping men any moment. He expected a rending
blow on his own tender body. But his revolver had been dropped, and
the dragging of trour he could do nothing, only try to bind up the
poor legs. Again, poor Harry. As he lay there bandaging his scout,
he noticed that the lad had stopped moaning, and said to himself that
his morphine tablets had done their work. That was something, anyhow, But
the man was already dead. He could not have lived for ten minutes,
the doctor told me. And when Williams at last returned, trailing a long
string from the sap, it was a dead man. They brought painfully into
the trench and handed over gently to the stretcher bearers. I was in the
sap when they came and dragged Harry away from it, and when they told
him he nearly cried. The other incident is briefly told. On our last
day in the line, Harry's platoon were working stealthily in the hot sun at
a new section of trench connecting two SAPs, and someone incautiously threw a little
new turned earth over the parapet. The Turks, who seldom molested any of
the regular established trenches with shell fire, but hotly resented the making of new
ones, opened fire with a light, high velocity gun of the whiz bang
type. This was our first experience of the weapon, and the first experience
of a whiz bang is very disturbing. The long shriek of the ordinary shell
encourages the usually futile hope that by ducking one may avoid destruction. With the
whiz bang, there is no hope for there is no warning. The sound
and the shell arrive almost simultaneously. Harry's platoon did not like these things.
The first three burst near but short of the trench, filling the air with
fumes. The fourth hit and removed most of the parapet one bay. Harry,
hurrying along to the place, found the four men there considerably surprised,
crouching in the corners and gazing stupidly at the yawning gap. It was undesirable,
if not impossible, to rebuild the parapet during daylight, so he moved
them into the next bay. He then went along the trench to see that
all the men had ceased work. He heard two more shells burst behind him.
As he went on his way back, two men rushing round a corner,
two men with white faces smeared with black and a little blood, almost
knocked him down. They were speechless. He went through the bay which had
been blown in. It was silent empty. The bay beyond was silent,
too, save for the buzzing of a thousand flies in it. He had
left eight men, Six of them were lying dead, two had marvelously escaped.
The first whiz bang had blown away the parapet. The second following immediately
after, had passed miraculously through the hole straight into the trench. A piece
of astounding bad luck or good gunnery. The men could not be buried till
dusk, and we left them there. Two hours later, as we sat
under a waterproof sheet and talked quietly of this thing, there came an engineer
officer wandering along the trench. He had come crouching through those two shattered and
yawning bays. He was hot and very angry. Why the hell don't you
bury those turks? He said, They must have been there for weeks.
This is the kind of charge which infuriates the soldier at any time. And
we did not like the added suggestion that those six good men of the fourteenth
Platoon were dead Turks. We told him they were Englishmen, dead two hours.
But my god, man, he said, they're black. We led
him back, incredulous to the place. When we got there, we understood,
whether from the explosion or the scorching sun in that airless place, I
know not, but those six men were, as he said, literally black,
black and reeking and hideous, and the flies. Harry and I crouched
at the end of the bay truly unable to believe our eyes. I hope
I may never again see such horror as was in Harry's face. They were
his platoon, and he knew them as an officer should. After the explosion,
there had been only four whom he could definitely identify. Now there was
not one in two hours. I do not wish to labor this or any
similar episode. I have seen many worse things every soldier has in a man's
history. They are important only in their effect upon him, and the effect
they have is determined by many things, by his experience, and his health
and his state of mind. But if you are to understand what I may
call the battle psychology of a man, as I want you to understand Harry's,
you must not ignore particular incidents. For in this respect, the lives
of soldiers are not uniform. Though many may live in the same regiment and
fight in the same battles, the experiences which matter come to them diversely,
to some crowded and overwhelming, to some by kind and delicate degrees, and
so do their spirits develop. These two incidents, following so closely upon each
other, had a most unhappy cumulative effect on Harry. His night scouting,
in spite of its miserable end, had not perceptibly dimmed his romantic outlook.
It had been an adventure, and from a military point of view, a
successful adventure. The colonel had been pleased with the reconnaissance as such, but
the sight of his six poor men lying black and beastly in that sunlit hole
had killed the romance of war for him. Henceforth it must be a necessary
but disgusting business to he endured like a dunghill. But this, in the
end, was inevitable with all soldiers. It is only a matter of time,
though for a boy of Harry's temperament it was an ill chance that it
should come so soon. What was more serious was this, the two incidents
had revived, in a most malignant form, his old distrust of his own
competence. I found that he was brooding over this, accusing himself quite wrongly,
I think of being responsible for the death of seven men. He had
bungled the scouting. He had recklessly attracted attention to the party and trour not
he had paid for it. He had moved four men into a bay where
four others already were, and six of them had been killed. I tried
hard to persuade him, not quite honestly, that he had done absolutely the
right thing in scouting, of all things. I told him a man must
take chances. And the matter of the two whiz bangs was sheer bad luck.
It was no good. He was a fool, a failure. Unconsciously,
the Colonel encouraged this attitude, for, thinking that Harry's nerve might well
have been shaken by his first experience, he would not let him go out
on patrol again on our next tour in the line. I think he was
quite mistaken in this view, for the boy did not even seem to realize
how narrow his own escapes had been, so concerned was he about his lost
men. Nor did this explanation of the Colonel's veto even occur to him.
Rather, it confirmed him in his distrust of himself, for it seemed to
him that the Colonel two must look upon him as a bungler, a waster
of men's lives. All this was very bad, and I was much afraid
of what the reaction might be. But there was one bright spot. So
far, he only distrusted his military capacity. There was no sign of his
distrusting his own courage. I prayed that that might not follow. End of
Chapter four recording by Roger Maline. Chapter five of the Secret Battle by A.
P. Herbert. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording
by Roger Maline. Mid June came, with all its plagues and fevers and
irritable distresses. Life in the rest camp became daily more intolerable. There set
in a steady wind from the northeast, which blew all day down the flayed
rest areas of the peninsula, raising great columns of blinding, maddening dust.
It was a hot, parching wind which in no way mitigated the scorch of
the sun, and the dust it brought became a definite enemy to human peace.
It pervaded everything, It poured into every hole and dugout, and filtered
into every man's belongings. It formed a gritty sediment in water and tea.
It passed into a man with every morsel of food he ate and scraped and
tore at his inside. It covered his pipe so that he could not even
smoke with pleasure. It lay in a thick coating on his face, so
that he looked like a wan ghost, paler than disease had made him.
It made the cleaning of his rifle a too frequent farce. It worked under
his breeches and gathered at the back of his knees, chafing and torturing him.
And if he laid down to sleep in his hole, it swept in
billows over his face, or men passing clumsily above kicked great showers upon him.
Sleep was not possible in the rest camps while that wind blew. But
indeed there were many things which made rest in the rest camps impossible. Few
more terrible plagues can have afflicted British troops than the flies of Gallipoli in May.
By comparison, there were none. In June. They became unbearable.
In July they were literally inconceivable. Most Englishmen have lain down some gentle summer
day to doze on a shaded lawn, and found that one or two persistent
flies have destroyed the repose of the afternoon. Many women have turned sick at
the sight of a blowfly in their butcher's shop. Let them imagine a semi
tropical sun in a place where there is little or no shade, where sanitary
arrangements are less than primitive. Where in spite of all precautions, there are
scraps of bacon and sugar and tea leaves lying everywhere in the dust, and
every man has his little daily store of food somewhere near him. Where there
are dead bodies and the carcasses of mules easily accessible to the least venturesome fly.
Let them read for one fly a hundred, a thousand, a million,
and even then they will not exaggerate the horror of that plague. Under
it, the disadvantages of a sensitive nature and a delicate upbringing were easy to
see. An officer lies down in the afternoon to sleep in his hole.
The flies cluster on his face. Patiently. At first, he brushes them
away with a drill like mechanical movement of his hand. By and by he
does it angrily. His temper is going. He covers his face with a
handkerchief. It is distressingly hot, but at least he may have some rest.
The flies settle on his hand, on his neck, on the bare
part of his leg. Even there, the feel of them is becoming a
genuine torment. They creep under the handkerchief. There is one on his lip,
another buzzing about his eye. Madly. He tears off the handkerchief and
lashes out, waving it furiously till the air is free. The flies gather
on the wall of the dugout, on the to proof sheet and watch.
They are waiting, motionless till he lies down again. He throws his coat
over his bare knees and lies back. The torment begins again. It is
unendurable. He gets up, cursing, and goes out. Better to walk
in the hot sun, or sit under the olive tree in the windy dust.
But look into the crowded ditches of the men. Some of them are
fighting the same fight, hands moving and faces twitching like the flesh of horses
automatically. But most of them lie still, not asleep, but in a
kind of dogged artificial insensibility. The flies crowd on their faces, they swarm
about their eyes, and crawl unmolested about their open mouths. It is a
horrible sight, but those men are lucky. Then there was always a great
noise in the camp, for men would be called for from headquarters at the
end of it, or orders passed down. And so great was the wind,
and the noise of the French guns and the Turkish shells that these messages
had to be baled from man to man. The men grew lazy from sheer
weariness of these messages, so that they were mutilated as they came and had
to be repeated, and there was this babble always. The men, too,
like the officers, became irritable with each other and wrangled incessantly over little
things. Only the officers argued quietly and bitterly, and the men shouted oaths
at each other and filthy epithets. There was only a yard between the holes
of the officers and the holes of the men, and their raucous quarreling grated
on nerves already sensitive from the trials of the day, and the officer came
near to cursing his own men, and that is bad. So there was
no rest to be had in the camp during the day, and at night
we marched out in long columns to dig in the whispering gullies or unload ships
on the beach. There were many of these parties, and we were much
overworked, as all infantry units invariably are. And only at long intervals there
came an evening when a man might lie down under the perfect stars and sleep
all night. Undisturbed. Then indeed he had rest, and when he woke
to a sudden burst of shelfire, lay quiet in his hole, too tired
and dreamy to be afraid. Dust and flies, and the food and the
water, and our weakness joined forces against us, and dysentery raged among us.
There were many who had never heard of the disease, and thought vaguely
of the distemper of dogs. Those who had heard of it thought of it
as something rather romantically Eastern, like the seats he fly. And the first
cases were invested with a certain mysterious distinction, especially as most of them were
sent away. But it became universal. Everybody had it, and everybody could
not be sent away. One man in a thousand went through that time untouched,
one in ten escaped with a slight attack. But the remainder lived permanently
or intermittently, in a condition which in any normal campaign would have long since
sent them on stretchers to the base. The men could not be spared.
They stayed and endured and tottered at their work. Thus there was every circumstance
to encourage infection, and little to resisted. One by one, the officers
of d Company were stricken. The first stages were mildly unpleasant, encouraging that
comfortable sense of martyrdom which belongs to a recognized but endurable complaint. As it
grew worse, men became querulous, but were still interested in themselves, and
those not in the final stages discussed their symptoms emulously, disgustingly, still a
little anxious to be worse than their fellows. In the worst stage, there
was no emulation, only a dull misery of recurrent pain and lassitude, and
discussed. A man could not touch the coarse food, which was all we
had, or if from sheer emptiness he did, his sufferings were immediately magnified.
Yet always he had a wild craving for delicate food, and as he
turned from the sickening bacons in the gritty lid of his mess tin conjured bright
visions of lovely dainties which might satisfy his longing and give him back his strength.
So men prayed for parcels, But when they came, or when some
wanderer came back from the islands with a basket of Grecian eggs, too often
it was too late for the sickest men, and their agonies were only increased.
Scientific dieting was impossible. They could only struggle on, forever sick,
yet forever on duty. This was the awful thing. When a man reached
this stage. The army was lucky. Indeed, if it did not lose
him, he was lucky himself if he did not die. But so strong
is the human spirit, and so patient the human body that most won through
this phase to a spasmodic exist distance of alternate sickness and precarious health. And
when they said to themselves, I am well and ate heartily, and said
to their companions this and that is what you should do, the disease gripped
them again, each time more violently. All this sapped the strength of a
man, and finally there came a terrible debility, a kind of paralyzing lassitude,
when it needed a genuine flogging of the will for him to lift himself
and walk across the camp, and his knees seemed permanently feeble, as if
a fever had just left him. Yet many endured this condition for weeks and
months till the fever definitely took them. Some became so weak that, while
they still tottered up to the line and about their duties. They could not
gratuitously drag themselves to the beach to bathe, then, indeed, were they
far gone, for the evening swims were the few paradisial moments of that time.
When the sun had but an hour to live, and the wind and
the dust and the flies were already dwindling, we climbed down a cliff path
where the Indians kept their sacred but odorous goats. There was a fringe of
rocks under the cliffs where we could dive. There we undressed, hut and
grimy, lousy, thirsty and tired along the rocks. Solitary Indians were kneeling
towards Mecca. Some of the old battered boats of the first landing were still
nosing the shore, and at a safe distance was a dead mule. The
troops did not come here, but waded noisily in the shallow water. So
all was quiet, save for an occasional lazy shell from Asia and the chunk
chunk of a patrol boat. The sea at this hour put on its most
perfect blue, and the foothills across the straits were all warm and twinkling in
the late sun. So we sat and drank in the strengthening breeze, and
felt the clean air on our contaminated flesh, and plunging luxuriously into the lovely
water, forgot for a magical moment all our weariness and disgust. When a
man could not do this, he was ill indeed, And by this time
we had found each other out. We had discovered a true standard of right
and wrong. We knew quite clearly now, some of us for the first
time, what sort of action was dirty, and we were fairly clear how
likely each of us was to do such an action. We knew all our
little weaknesses and most of our serious flaws under that olive tree that could not
long be hid in the pleasant life of London or Oxford. We had had
no occasion to do anything dishonorable or underhand in our relations with other men.
We had not even wished to be guilty of anything worse than mild unkindness or
consistent unpunctuality. But behind the footlights of Gallipoli we had found real burning temptations,
and we had found our characters. D company on the whole was lucky
and had stood the test well. We knew that Burnett was bogus but we
knew that Williams of a company was incalculably more bogus. We had stood in
the dark sap at night and reluctantly overheard the men of his company speak of
him and his officers. But little weaknesses beget great irritations in that life,
and the intimate problems of communal feeding were enough to search out all our weaknesses.
We knew that some of us, though courageous, were greedy, that
others, though not greedy, were querulous about their food and had a nasty
habit of sticking out for their rights. Indeed, I think I developed this
habit myself. We had had trouble about parcels. Parcels, in theory were
thrown into the common stock of the mess, but Egerton and Burnett never had
parcels, and were by no means the most delicate eaters of other people's dainties.
Harry and Hewitt reserved some portion of each parcel a cake or a slab
of chocolate, which they ate furtively in their dugouts, or shared with each
other in the dusk. Burnett ostentatiously endowed the mess with his entire stock,
but afterwards, at every meal hinted somberly at the rapacity of those who had
devoured it. Harry and Hewitt each made contributions to the mess, but Harry
objected to the excessive consumption of this food by Burnett, and Hewitt, who
gave ungrudgingly to the rest of us, had a similar reservation, never expressed
as against Egerton. So all this matter of food set in motion a number
of antagonisms, seldom or never articulate, but painfully perceptible at every meal.
The parcel question, I think, was one of the things which embittered the
quarrel between Harry and Burnett. A parcel from home to schoolboys and soldiers and
prisoners and sailors and all homesick exiles is the most powerful emblem of sentiment and
affection. A man would willingly preserve its treasures for himself to gloat over alone,
in no mere fleshly indulgence, but as a concrete expression of affection from
the home for which he longs. This is not nonsense. He likes to
undo the strings in the grubby hole which is his present home, and secretly
become sentimental over the little, fond packages and queer loving thoughts which have composed
it. And though in a generous impulse he may say to his companions,
come and eat this cake, and see it in a moment disappear, it
is hard for him not to think, my sister or a wife or mother
made this for me. They thought it would give me pleasure for many days.
Already it is gone. Would they not be hurt if they knew?
He feels that he has betrayed the tenderness of his home. And though the
giving of pleasure to companions he likes may overcome this feeling, the compulsory squandering
of such precious pleasure on a man he despises calls up the worst bitterness of
his heart. So was it between Harry and Burnett? If, by the
way it be suggested that Burnett was entitled to feel the same sentimental jealousy about
his parcels, I answer that Burnett's parcels came on his own order, from
the soulless hand of Fortnum and Mason. All of us were very touchy,
very raw, and irritable in that fevered atmosphere. Men who were always late
in relieving another on watch, or unreasonably resented a minute's postponement of their relief,
or never had any article of their own, but forever borrowed mess tins
and electric torches and notebooks from more methodical people, or were overbearing to batmen,
or shifted jobs on to other officers, or slunk off to baye loan
when they should have taken their sultry platoon. Such men made enemies quickly.
Between Eustace and Hewitt, who had been good friends before and were to be
good friends again, there grew up a slow animosity. Hewitt was one of
the methodical class of officer. Eustace was one of the persistent borrowers. Moreover,
as I have said, he was a cynic, and he would argue.
He had a contentious remark for every moment of the day. And though
this tormented us all beyond bearing, Hewett was the only one with both the
energy and the intellectual equipment to accept his challenges. So these two argued quietly
and fiercely in the hot noon or the blue dusk, till the rest of
us were weary of them both, and the sound of Eustace's harsh tones was
an agony to the nerves. They were both too consciously refined to lose their
tempers healthily, and when they reached danger point, Hewett would slink away,
like an injured animal to his burrow. In this conflict, Harry took no
speaking part, for while in spirit and affection he was on Hewett's side,
he paid intellectual tribute to Eustace's conduct of the argument and listened as a rule
in puzzled silence. Eustace again was his cordial ally against Burnett, while Hewett
had merely the indifference of contempt for that officer. So it was all a
strange tangle of friendship and animosity and goodness, nature and bitterness. Yet on
the surface you understand we lived on terms of toleration and vague geniality. Except
for the disputations of Hewitt and Eustace, there was little open disagreement. In
the confined space of a company mess permanent hostilities would make life impossible. It
is only generals who are allowed to find that they can no longer act with
each other and resign. Platoon commanders may come to the same conclusion, but
they have to go on acting. And so openly we laughed and endured and
bore with each other. Only there was always this undertone of irritations and animosities
which in the maddening conditions of our life, could never be altogether silenced,
and might at any moment rise to a strangled scream. Harry's appointment a Scout
officer was the first thing to set Burnett against Harry, though already many things
had set Harry against Burnett. It had been commonly assumed, in view of
Burnett's backwood's reputation, that he would succeed Martin as Scout officer. The Colonel's
selection of Harry took us a little by surprise, though it only showed that
the Colonel was a keener judge of character and ability than the rest of us.
No one, I think was more genuinely pleased that Burnett was not to
be Scout officer than Burnett himself, But in the interests of his daredevil pretensions,
he had to effect an air of disappointment and let it be known by
grunts and shrugs and sour looks that he considered the choice of Harry to be
an injury to himself and the regiment. As far as Harry was concerned,
this resentment of Burnett's was more or less genuine, for his reluctance to take
on the job did not prevent him being jealous of the man who did.
Then, Burnett was one of the people who had nothing of his own,
and seemed to regard Harry as the youngest of us all, as the proper
person to provide him with all the necessaries of life. In those days,
we had no plates or crockery, but ate and drank out of our scratched
and greasy mess tins. Harry's mess tin disappeared, and for three days he
was compelled to borrow from Hewett or myself, a tedious and to him hateful
business. One day, Burnett had finished his meal, a long way ahead
of any of us, and Harry, in the desperation of hungry waiting,
asked him for the loan of his mess tin. Automatically, he looked at
the bottom of the tin, and there found his initials inscribed. It was
his own tin. Further, some one had tried to scratch the initials out.
Harry kept his temper with obvious difficulty. Burnett knew well that he had
lost his mess tin. We were all sick of hearing it, but he
said he was quite ignorant of having it in his possession. When Harry argued
with him, Burnett sent for his batman and cursed him for taking another officer's
property. The wretched man mumbled that he had found it and withdrew, and
we all sat in silence, teeming with distrustful thoughts. We were sorry for
the batman. We were sorry for Harry. Burnett may not have taken the
mess tin with his own hands, but morally he stood convicted of an action
which was dirty. Then Burnett and Harry took a working party together to dig
in the gully. Burnett was the senior officer, but left Harry to work
all night in the whispering rain of stray bullets while he sat in an engineer's
dugout and drank whiskey. Harry did not object to this, the absence of
Burnette, being always congenial to him. But next day there came a complimentary
message from the Brigadier about the work of that working party. Burnett was sent
for and warmly praised by the Colonel. Burnett stood smugly and said nothing.
Harry, when he heard of it, was furious and wanted He said to
have a row with him. What he expected Burnett to say, I don't
know. The man could hardly stand before his colonel, and say, Sir
Penrose did all the work. I was in the engineer's dugout nearly all the
time with my friends, and had several drinks a row in any case would
be in tall hole in that cramped intimate existence. And I dissuaded Harry,
though I made Egerton have a few words with Burnett on the subject. Harry
contented himself with ironic comments on Burnett's gallantry and industry, asking him blandly at
meals if he expected to get his promotion over that working party, and suggesting
to Egerton that Burnett should take Harry's next turn of duty because he is so
good at it. This made Burnett beautifully angry, but it was bitter badnage,
and did not improve the social atmosphere. There were a number of such
incidents between the two. They were very pretty in themselves, some of them
like a fly, but in their cumulative effect very large and distressing. In
many cases there was no verbal engagement, or only an angry inarticulate mutter.
Public unfair angers were necessarily avoided. But this pent up, suppressed condition of
the quarrel made it more malignant, like a disease, and it got on
Harry's nerves. Indeed, it got on mine. It became an active element
in that vast complex of irritation and decay which was eating into his young system.
It was leagued with the flies and the dust, and the smells,
and the bad food, and the wind, and the harassing shells of the
Turks, and the disgustful torment of disease. For Harry was a very sick
man. He had endured through all the stages of dysentery, and now lived
with that awful legacy of weakness of which I have spoken. And the disease
had not wholly left him, But some days he lay faint, with excruciating
spasms of pain. Slightly built and constitutionally fragile at the beginning, he was
now a mere, wasted wisp of a man. The flesh seemed to have
melted from his face, and when he stood naked on the beach, it
seemed that the moving of his bones must soon tear holes in the unsubstantial skin.
Standing in the trench, with the two points of his collar bone jetting
out like promontories above his shirt, and a pale film of dust over his
face, he looked like the wan ghost of some forgotten soldier on the Western
Front, where one case of dysentery created a panic among the authorities, and
in the most urgent days they have never had to rely on skeletons to fight.
He would long since have been bundled off. But in this orgy of
disease, no officer could be sent away who was willing to stay and who
could still totter up the gully, And Harry would not go. When he
went to the battalion doctor, it was with an airy request for the impotent
palliatives when provided for early dysentery, and with no suggestion of the soul destroying
sickness that was upon him. One day, he would not come down to
the rocks and bathe so feeble he was. I know now, he said,
the meaning of that bit in the psalms. My knees are like water,
and all my bones are out of joint. Harry, I said,
you're not fit to stay here? Why not go sick, at which he
smiled weakly and said that he might be better in a day or two.
Pathetic hope all men had it, And so Hewitt and I walked down a
little sadly alone marveling at the boy's courage, for it seemed to us that
he wanted to stay and see it through, and if indeed he might recover,
we could not afford to lose him, so we said no more.
But by degrees I gained a different impression. Harry still opened his mind to
Hewitt and myself more than to anyone else. But it was by no direct
speech, rather by the things he did not say, the sentences half finished,
the look in his eyes, that the knowledge came that Harry did want
to go away. The romantic impulse had perished long since in that ruined trench,
but now even the more mundane zest of doing his duty had lost its
savor in the long ordeal of sickness and physical distress. He did want to
go sick, he had only to speak a word, and still he would
not go. When I knew this, I marveled at his courage yet more.
For many days I watched him fighting this lonely conflict with himself, a
conflict more terrible and exacting than any battle. Sometimes the doctor came and sat
under our olive tree, and some of us spoke jestingly of the universal sickness
and asked him how ill we must be before he would send us home.
Harry alone sat silent. It was no joke to him. And how do
you feel now, Penrose, said the doctor. Are you getting your arrow
root? All right? Harry opened his mouth, but for a moment said
nothing. I think it had been in his mind to say what he did
feel, but he only murmured, all right, thank you doctor. The
doctor looked at him queerly. He knew well enough, but it was his
task to keep men on the peninsula, not to send them away. Once
I spent an afternoon in one of the hospital ships in the bay. When
I came back and told them of the cool wards and pleasant nurses, and
all the peace and cleanliness and comfort that was there, I caught Harry's wistful
gaze upon me, and I stopped. It was well enough for the rest
of us in comparative health to imagine luxuriously those unattainable amenities. None of us
were ill enough then to go sick if we wished it. Harry was,
and I knew that such talk must be an intolerable temptation. Then one day,
on his way up to the line with a working party, he nearly
fainted. I felt it coming on, he told me. In a block.
I thought to myself, this is the end of it all for me.
Anyhow, I actually did go off for a moment, I think,
and then someone pushed me from behind, and as we moved on, it
wore off again. I did swear Harry stopped, realizing the confession he had
made. I tried to feel for myself the awful bitterness of that awakening in
the stifling trench, shuffling uphill with the flies. But he had told me
now everything I had only guessed before, and once more, I urged him
to go sick and have done with it. I would, he said,
only I'm not sure. I know I'm jolly ill and not fit for a
thing, but I'm not sure if it's only that I was pretty brave when
I got here. I think I nodded, and I think I am still.
But last time we were in the line, I found I didn't like
looking over the top nearly so much. So I want to be sure that
I'm quite all right in that way before I go sick. Besides, you
know what everybody says. Nobody could say anything about you, I told him,
one's only got to look at you to see you've got one foot in
the grave. Well we go up again tomorrow, he said, And if
I'm not better after that, I'll think about it again. I had to
be content with that, though I was not content, for my fears were
fulfilled, since in the grip of this sickness he had begun at last to
be doubtful of his own courage. But that night Burnett went to the doctor
and said that he was too ill to go on. So far as the
rest of us knew, he had never had anything but the inevitable preliminary attack
of dysentery. Though it is only fair to say that most of us were
so wrapped up in the exquisite contemplation of our own sufferings that we had little
time to study the condition of others. The doctor, however, had no
doubts about Burnett. He sent him back to us with a flea in his
ear and a dose of chlorodyne. The story leaked out quickly, and there
was much comment adverse to Burnett. When Harry heard it, he led me
away to his dugout. It was an evening of heavy calm, like the
inside of a cathedral. Only a few mules circling dustily at exercise in the
velvet gloom, and the distant glimmer of the Scotsman's fires made any stir of
movement. The men had gone early to their blankets and now sang softly their
most sentimental songs, reserved always for the night before another journey to the line.
They sang them in a low croon of ecstatic melancholy, marvelously in tune
with the purple hush of the evening. For all its aching regret, it
was a sound full of hope and gentle resolution. Harry whispered to me,
you heard about Burnett. Thank God, nobody can say those things about me.
I'm not going off this peninsula till I'm pushed off. I said nothing.
It was a heroic sentiment, and this was the heroic hour. It
is what men say in the morning that matters in the morning. We moved
off as the sun came up. There had been heavy firing nearly all night,
and over Ashibaba, in the cloudless sky there hung a portent. It
was as though some giant had been blowing smoke rings, and with inhuman dexterity
had twined and laced these rings together without any of them, losing their perfection
of form. As the sun came up, these cloud rings stood out a
rosy pink against the blue distance. And while we marched through the sleeping camps,
turned gently through dull gold to pale pearl. I have never known what
made this marvel, a few clouds forgotten by the wind or the smoke of
the knight's battle. But I marched with my eyes upon it all the stumbling
way to Ashibaba. And when I found Harry at a halt, he too
was gazing at the wonder with all his men. It's an omen, he
said, good or bad? Good? He said, I have never understood
omens. I suppose they are good or bad according to the mind of the
man who seized them. And I was glad that Harry thought it was good.
End of Chapter five, recording by Rogermaline. Chapter six of the Secret
Battle by A. P. Herbert. This LibriVox recording is in the public
domain. Recording by Rogermaline. It was one of the great dates, one
of those red dates which build up the calendar of a soldier's past and dwell
in his memory when the date of his own birth is almost forgotten. It
is strange what definite signposts. These dates of a man's battle days become in
his calculation of time, like the foundation of Rome. An old soldier will
sigh and say, yes, I know that was when Jim died. It
was ten days after the fourth of June, or I was promoted the day
before the twelfth of July. The years pile up, and zero after zero
day is added forever in his primitive calendar, and not one of them is
thrust from his reverent memory. But at each anniversary he wakes and says,
this is the third of February or the first of July, and thinks of
old companions who went down on that day. And though he has seen glorious
successes since, he will ever think with a special tenderness of the black early
failures when he first saw battle and his friends going under. And if in
any place where soldiers gather and tell old tales, there are two men who
can say to each other, I too, was at Helle's on such a
date, there is a great bond between them. On one of these days
we sat under the olive tree and waited up the hill. One of that
long series of heroic, costly semi successes was going through we were in reserve.
We had done six turns in the trenches without doing an attack. When
we came out, we were very ready to attack, very sure of ourselves.
Now we were not so sure of ourselves. We were waiting, and
there was a terrible noise. Very early the guns had begun, and everywhere
from the straits to the sea were the loud barkings of the French seventy fives,
thinly assisted by the British artillery, which was scanty and had almost no
ammunition. But the big ships came out from Imbros and stood off and swelled
the chorus, dropping their huge shells on every peak of the little sugar loaf
that tops Ashibaba, and covering his western slopes with monstrous eruptions of black and
yellow. Down in the thirsty wilderness of the rest camps, the few troops
in reserve lay restless under occasional olive trees, or huddled under the aciduous shelter
of ground sheets stretched over their scratchings in the earth. They looked up and
saw the whole of the great hill swathed in smoke and dust and filthy fumes,
and heard the ruthless crackle of the Turk's rifles incredibly rapid and sustained,
and they thought of their friends scrambling over in the bright sun trying to get
to those rifles. They themselves were thin and wasted with disease and this uncertainty
of waiting in readiness, for they knew not what plucked at their nerves.
They could not rest or sleep, for the flies crawled over their mouths and
eyes and torment them ceaselessly, and great storms of dust swept upon them as
they lay. They were parched with thirst, but they must not drink,
for their water bottles were filled with the day's allowance, and none knew when
they would be filled again. If a man took out of his haversack a
chunk of bread, it was immediately black with flies, and he could not
eat. Sometimes a shell came over the straits from Asia with a quick shrill
shriek, and burst at the top of the cliffs near the staff officers,
who stood there and gazed up at the hill with glasses all morning. The
noise increased, and the shells streamed up the hill with a sound like a
hundred expresses vanishing into a hundred tunnels. And there was no news. But
soon the wounded began to trickle down, and there were rumors of a great
success with terrible losses. In the afternoon, the news became uncertain and disturbing.
Most of the morning's fruits had been lost, and by evening they knew
that, indeed, it had been a terrible day. Under our olive tree,
we were very fidgety. There had been no mail for many days,
and we had only month old copies of the mail and the weekly Times,
which we pretended listlessly to read. Eustace had an ancient nation, and Hewett
a shilling edition of Vanity Fair. Harry in the morning kept climbing excitedly up
the trees to gaze at the obscure haze of smoke on the hill, and
trying vainly to divine what was going on. But after a little he too
sat silent and brooding. We were no longer irritable with each other, but
studiously considerate, as if each felt that tomorrow he might want to take back
a spiteful word and the other be dead. All our valises and our sparse
mess furniture had long been packed away, for we had now been standing by
for twenty four hours, and we lay uneasily on the hard ground, shifting
continually from posture to posture to escape the unfriendly protuberances of the soil. In
the tree the crickets chirped on, always in strange indifference to the storm of
noise about them. They were hateful, those crickets. Now and then Egerton
was summoned to headquarters. And when he came back, each man said to
himself, he has got our orders. And some would not look at him,
but talked suddenly of something else, And some said to him, with
a painful cheeriness, any orders. And when he shook his head, cursed
a little. But in their hearts wondered if they were glad for the waiting
was bad indeed, but who knew what tasks they would have when the orders
came. Often the reserves had the worst of it in these affairs, a
forlorn hope of an attack without artillery, digging a new line under fire,
beating off the counter attack. But the waiting became intolerable, and all were
glad. An hour before sunset, when we filed off slowly by half platoons,
every gun was busy again, and all along the path to the hill,
batteries of seventy fives barked suddenly from unsuspected holes, so close that a
man's heart seemed to halt at the shock. The gully was full of confusion
and wounded and tired officers and odd groups of men, bandying rumors and arguing
in the sun. Halfway up the tail came mysteriously down the line that we
were to attack a trench by ourselves. A whole brigade had tried and failed.
There was a redoubt, There were endless machine guns. Some laughed a
rumor, but most men felt in their heart that there was something in it,
and inwardly pulled themselves together. At last they were to be in a
real battle, and walk naked in the open through the rapid fire. And
as they moved on, there came over them an overpowering sense of the irrevocable.
They thought of that summer day in nineteen fourteen, when they walked lighthearted
into the recruiting office. It had seemed a small thing then, but that
was what had done it. It had brought them into this blazing gully,
with the frogs croaking and the men moaning in corners, with their legs messed
up. If they had known about this gully then, and these flies,
and this battle they were going to. Then perhaps they would have done something
else in that august, gone into a dockyard, joined the a sc like
Jim Roberts. Well they hadn't, and they were not really sorry. Only
let there be no more waiting, and let it be quick and merciful,
No stomach wounds and nastiness, No lying out in the scrub for a day
with the sun and the flies and no water. Look at that officer on
the stretcher. He won't last long. Remember his face. His platoon relieved
us somewhere. Where was it? Hope I don't get one like him,
nasty mess, would like one on the shoulder. If it's got to be
hospital ship, get home. Perhaps No, they send you to Egypt.
Officer said, So Hallo halting here Merton trench, old reserve line getting dark
night attack, Not wait till dawn. I hope can't stand much more waiting.
Pass the word company commanders to see the colonel that's done it. There
goes Egerton. Good Man thinks a lot of me. Try not to let
him down. But what Egerton and the others heard from the colonel made a
vain thing. Of all this bracing of men's spirits, there was a muddle.
The attack was canceled. No one knew where the Turks were, where
anybody was. We were to stay the night in this old reserve trench and
relieve the front line in the morning. When Egerton told his officers, only
Burnett spoke. He said, damn, as usual, I wanted to go
at the old Turks, and we knew that it was not true. The
rest of us said nothing, for we were wondering if it were true of
ourselves. I went with Harry to his platoon. They too said nothing,
and their faces were expressionless. But they were cold now and hungry, and
suddenly very tired, and they had no real fire of battle in them.
They had waited too long for this crowning experience of an attack, braced themselves
for it too often to be disappointed. And I knew that they were glad,
But they did not mind being glad. They pondered no doubts about themselves,
only curled up like animals in corners to sleep. Harry, too,
no doubt, had braced himself like the rest of us, and he too
must have been glad, glad to lie down and look forward, after all
to seeing another sunrise. But I thought of his doubts about himself, and
I felt that this business was far from easing his burden. For me and
for the men, it was a simple thing, the postponement of a battle
with the Turks. For Harry, it was the postponement of a personal test.
The battle inside him still went on, only it went on more bitterly.
There was a great muddle in front. Troops of two different brigades were
hopelessly entangled in the shallow trenches they had taken from the Turks. They had
few officers left, and their staffs had the most imperfect impressions of the whereabouts
of their mangled commands. So the sun was well up when we finally took
over the line. This was in defiance of all tradition. But the Turk
was shaken and did not molest us. The men who passed us on their
way down grimly wished us joy of what they had left. Their faces were
pale and drawn, full of loathing and weariness. But they said little,
and the impression grew that there was something up there which they could not even
begin to describe. It was a still scorching morning, and as we moved
on, the air became heavy with a sickening stench, the most awful of
all smells that man can be called to endure, because it preyed on the
imagination as well as the senses, for we knew now what it was.
We came into a Turkish trench, broad and shallow. In the first bay
lay two bodies, a Lowlander and a Turk. They lay where they had
killed each other, and they were very foul and loathe him. In the
sun, a man looked up at them and passed on, thinking glad,
I haven't got to stay here. In the next bay there were three dead,
all Englishmen, and in the next there were more, and he thought
it was a hot fight just here. But as he moved on, and
in each succeeding bay beheld the same corrupt aftermath of yesterday's battle, the suspicion
came to him that this was no local horror. Over the whole front of
the attack, along two lines of trenches, these regiments of dead were everywhere
found strung in unnatural heaps along the parapets, or sprawling horribly into half the
trench, so that he touched them as he passed. Yet Still he could
not believe, and at each corner thought, surely there will be none in
this bay, But always there were more, until if he were not careful
or very callous, it began to get in his nerves, so that at
the traverses he almost prayed that there might be no more beyond. Yet many
did not realize what was before them till they were finally posted in the bays.
They were to garrison three or four in a bay. Then they looked
up at the sprawling horrors on the parapet and behind them, just above their
heads, and knew that these were to be their close companions all that sweltering
day, and perhaps beyond. The regiment we had relieved had been too exhausted
by the attack or too short handed to bury more than a few, and
the Turkish snipers made it impossible to do anything during the day, and so
we sat all the scorching hours of the sun, or moved listlessly up and
down, trying not to look upwards. But there was a hideous fascination about
the things, so that after a few hours a man came to know the
bodies in his bay with a sickening intimacy, and could have told you many
details about each of them, their regiment, and how they lay, and
how they had died, and little things about their uniforms, a missing button,
or some papers, or an old photograph sticking out of a pocket.
All of them were alive with flies, and at noon, when we took
out our bread and began to eat, the flies rose in a great black
swarm and fell upon the food in our hands. After that no one could
eat. All day. Men were being sent away by the doctor, stricken
with sheer nausea by the flies and the stench and the things they saw,
and went wretching down the trench to keep away the reek. We went about
for a little in the old gas helmets, but the heat and burden of
them in the hot, airless trench was intolerable. The officers had no dugouts,
but sat under the parapets like the men. No officer went sick,
no officer could be spared, And indeed we seemed to have a greater power
of resistance to this ordeal of disgust than the men. But I don't know
how Harry survived it, being already in a very bad way physically. It
affected him more than the rest of us, and It was the first day
I had seen his cheerfulness defeated. At the worst. He had always been
ready to laugh a little at our misfortunes, the great safety valve of a
soldier, and make ironical remarks about Burnett or the staff. This day he
had no laugh left in him, And I thought sadly of that first morning
when we jumped over the parapet to look at a dead turk. He had
seen enough. Now in the evening the turk was still a little chastened,
and all night we labored at the burying of the bodies. It was bad
work, but so strong was the horror upon us that every man who could
be spared took his part, careless of sleep or rest, so long as
he should not sit for another day with those things. But we could only
bury half of them that night, and all the next day we went again
through that lingering torment, and in the afternoon, when we had orders to
go up to the front line after dusk for an attack, we were glad.
It was one of the very few moments in my experience when the work
correspondent's legend of a regiment's pleasure at the prospect of battle came true. For
anything was welcome, if only we could get out of that trench, away
from the smell and the flies, away from those bodies. I am not
going to tell you about that attack, only so much of it as affects
this history, which is the history of a man and not of the war.
It was a one battalion affair, and eventually a failure. D Company
was in reserve, and our only immediate task was to provide a small digging
party forty men under an officer, to dig some sort of communication ditch to
the new line. When taken. Burnett was told off for this job.
We did these things more or less in turn, and it was his turn,
and Burnett did not like it. We sat round a single candle under
a waterproof sheet in a sort of open recess at the back of the front
line, while Egerton gave him his orders, and there ran in my head
the old bit about they all began with one accord to make excuse. Burnett
made no actual excuse. He could not, but he asked aggressive questions about
the arrangements, which plainly said that he considered this task too dangerous and too
difficult for Burnett. He wanted more men, he wanted another officer, but
no more could be spared from an already small reserve. He was full of
the high ground on the right, from which his party would obviously be enfilated
and shot down to a man. However, he went and we sat listening
to the rapid fire or the dull thud of bombs, until in front a
strange quiet fell. But to right and left were the sounds of many machine
guns as usual. No one knew what had happened, but we expected a
summons at any moment. We were all restless and jumpy, particularly Harry.
For a man who has doubts of himself or too much imagination, to be
in reserve is the worst thing possible. Harry was talkative again and held forth
about the absurdity of the whole attack, as to which he was perfectly right.
But I felt that all the time he was thinking, shall I do
the right thing? Shall I do the right thing? Shall I make a
mess of it? I went out and looked over the parapet, but could
make nothing out. Then I saw two figures loom through the dark and scramble
into the trench, and after them came others, all along the line,
coming in anyhow in disorder. Then Burnett came along the trench and crawled in
under the waterproof sheet. I followed. It's no good, he was saying.
The men won't stick it. It's just what I told you. Enfilated
from that high ground over there, two machine guns. How many casualties have
you had, said Egerton, one killed and two wounded. There was silence,
but it was charged with eloquent thoughts. It was clear what had happened.
The machine guns were firing blindly from the right, probably over the heads
of the party. The small casualties showed that casualties are the test. No
doubt, the men had not liked the stream of bullets overhead. At any
moment the gun might lower, but there was nothing to prevent the digging being
done. Given an officer who would assert himself and keep the men together,
that was what an officer was for, and Burnett had failed. He had
let the company down. Egerton, I knew, was considering what to do.
The job had to be done. But should he send Burnett again with
orders not to return until he had finished as he deserved, or should he
send a more reliable officer and to make sure. Then Harry burst in let
me take my platoon. He said, they'll stick it, all right,
and his tone was full of contempt. For Burnett, full of determination,
no doubts about him. Now. Well, we sent him out with his
platoon, and all night they dug and sweated in the dark. The machine
gun did lower at times, and there were many casualties, but Harry moved
up and down in the open, cheerful and encouraging, getting away the wounded,
and there were no signs of the men not sticking it. I went
out and stayed with him for an hour or so and thought him wonderful,
Curious from what strange springs inspiration comes. For Harry, for the second time,
had been genuinely inspired by the evil example of his enemy. Probably in
the first place, he had welcomed the chance of doing something at last,
of putting his doubts to the test. But I am sure that what chiefly
carried him through that night, weak and exhausted as he was, was the
thought Burnett let them down. Burnett let them down. I'm not going to
let them down. Anyway. He did very well, But in the morning
he was carried down to the beach in a high fever. And perhaps it
was just as well, for I think Burnett would have done him a mischief.
End of Chapter six recording by Roger Maline. Chapter seven of the Secret
Battle by A. P. Herbert. This LibriVox recording is in the public
domain. Recording by Roger Maline. So Harry stayed till he was pushed off,
as he had promised, and I was glad he had gone like that.
I had long wanted him to leave the peninsula somehow, for I felt
he should be spared for greater things. But knowing something of his peculiar temperament,
I did not want his career there to end on a note of simple
failure, a dull surrender to sickness in the rest camp. As it turned
out, the accident of the digging party and the way in which Harry had
seized his chance, sent him off with a renewed confidence in himself, and
with regard to Burnett, even a sense of triumph. So I was not
surprised when his letters began to reveal something of the old enthusiastic Harry, chafing
at the dreary routine of the depot and looking for adventure again. But I
am anticipating they sent him home. Of course, it was no good keeping
anyone in his condition at Egypt or Malta, for the prolonged dysentery had produced
the usual complications. I had a letter from Malta and won from the Mediterranean
Club at Gibraltar, where he had a sultry week looking over the bay,
seeing the ship's steam out for England, he told, and longing to be
in one, for it took many months to wash away the taste of the
peninsula, and much more than the austere comforts of the hospital at Gibraltar.
Even the hot August sun in the Alameda was hatefully reminiscent. Then six weeks
milk diet at a hospital in Devonshire, convalescence and a month's leave. Then
Harry married a wife. I did not know the lady, a Miss Thickness,
and she does not come into the story very much, though she probably
affected it a good deal. Wives usually do affect a soldier's story, though
they are one of the many things which, by the absolute official standard of
military duty, are necessarily not reckoned with at all. Not being the president
of a court martial, I did reckon with it, and when I had
read Harry's letter about his wedding, said, we shan't see him again.
For in those early years it was generally assumed that a man returned from service
at the front need not go out again unless he wished for a period almost
incalculably remote, And being a newly married man myself, I had no reason
to suppose that Harry would want to rush into the breach just yet. But
about May. That would be nineteen sixteen. We had done with Gallipoli and
come to France after four months idling in the Aegean Islands. I had another
letter, much delayed, from which I will give you an extract. I
never thought I should want to go out again. You remember, we all
swore we never should, but I do. I'm fed to the teeth with
this place, the depot in Dorsetshire, nothing but company drill and lectures on
March discipline and all the old stuff. We still attack Hill two nineteen twice
weekly in exactly the same way, and still no one but a few of
the officers knows exactly which hill it is, since we always stop halfway for
lunch time, or because there's hopeless confusion. There's nobody amusing here. Williams
has got a company and swanks like blazes about the front, but I think
most people see through him. My wife's got rooms in a cottage near here,
but they won't let me sleep out, and I don't get there till
pretty late most days. Can't you get the colonel to apply for me?
I don't believe it's allowed, but he's sure to be able to wrangle it.
Otherwise I shall be here for the rest of the war, because the
more you've been out, the less likely you are to get out again if
you want to. There are lots who don't want to go, and wouldn't
be any earthly good and stand in hourly danger of being sent I want to
see France, I answered, on a single sheet. All very well,
but what about missus p Does she concur I told you I was a married
man. His answer was equally brief. She doesn't know, but she would.
Well, it wasn't my business, so we wangled it. I was
adjutant then, and Harry came out to France. But I was sorry for
missus Penrose. I do not know if all this seems tedious and unnecessary,
I hope not, for it is very relevant to the end of the story,
and if this record had been in the hands of certain persons. The
end of the story might have been different. I do not know. Certainly
it ought to have been different. Anyhow, Harry came to France and found
us in the line at Suchet. The recuperative power of the young soldier is
very marvelous. No one but myself would have said that this was not the
same Harry of a year ago, for he was fit and fresh and bubbling
over with keenness. Only myself, who had sat over the dard knells with
him and talked about Troy, knew what was missing. There were no more
romantic illusions about war, and I think no more military ambitions. Only he
was sufficiently rested to be very keen again, and had not yet seen enough
of it to be ordinarily bored. And in that summer of nineteen sixteen,
there was much to be said for life in the Suchet sector. It was
a peace time sector, where divisions stayed for months at a time, and
one went in and out like clockwork, at ritual intervals, each time into
the same trenches, the same deep dugouts, each time back to the same
billets or the same huts in the same wood, all the deserted fields.
About the line were a mass of poppies and corn flowers, and they hung
over one in extravagant masses as one walked up the communication trench. In the
thick woods round Bouvigny and Nullette there were clusters of huts where the resting time
was very warm and lazy and companionable, with much white wine and singing in
the evenings. Or one took a horse and rode into Kupinay or Barlin,
where there had not been too much war, but one could dine happily at
the best estiminae, and then ride back contentedly under the stars. In the
line, also there was not too much war. Few of the infantry on
either side ever fired their rifles, and only a few bombers with rifle grenades
tried to injure the enemy. There were short sectors of the line on either
side which became spasmodically dangerous because of these things. And at a fixed hour
each day, the Germans blew the same portions of the line to dust,
with mynan morphers, our men having departed elsewhere half an hour previously, according
to the established routine, from which neither side ever diverged. Our guns were
very busy by spasms, and every day destroyed small sections of the thick red
masses of the German wire, which were every night religiously repaired. The German
guns were very few, for the psalm battle was raging, but at times
they flung whiz bangs vaguely about the line, or dropped big shells on the
great brows of the Lorette Heights behind us. From the high ground we held
there was a good view with woods and red and white villages on the far
hills beyond the Germans, and away to the left one looked over the battered
pit country toward Lantz, with everywhere the tall pit towers all crumpled and bent
into uncouth shapes and gray slag heaps rising like the pyramids out of a wilderness
of broken red cottages. To the southeast began the Vimy Ridge, where the
red pimple frowned over the lines at the Lorette Heights, and all day there
was the foam and blackness of bursting shells. In the night there was much
patrol rolling and bursts of machine gun fire, and a few snipers and enormous
labors at the improvement of the line, wiring and raveting, and exquisite work
with sand bags. It was all very gentle and friendly and artificial, and
we were happy together. Burnett had left us on some detached duty or other,
and in that gentler atmosphere, Eustace was a good companion. Again,
men grew lusty and well, and one could have continued there indefinitely without much
injury to body or mind. But sometimes on a clear night we saw all
the southern sky a fire, with some new madness on the sum, and
knew that somewhere in France there was real war. The correspondence wrote home that
the regiments condemned so long to the deadening inactivity of trench warfare were longing only
for their turn at the Great Battle. No doubt they had authority, though
I never met one of those regiments. For our part, we were happy
where we were. We had had enough for the present. But I digress,
and yet no, for I want you to keep this idea of the
diversity of war conditions before you, and how a man may be in a
fighting unit for many months and yet go unscathed, even in spirit, or
in the most arcadian parts of the battle area. He may come alone against
some peculiar shock from which he never recovers. It is all chance. We
made Harry scout officer again, and he was very keen. Between us and
the German lines was a honeycomb of old, disused trenches where French and Germans
had fought for many months before they sat down to watch each other Across this
maze. They were all overgrown now with flowers and thick grasses, but for
the purposes of future operations it was important to know all about them. And
every night Harry wriggled out and dropped into one of these to creep and explore,
and afterwards put them on the map. Sometimes I went a little way
with him, and I did not like it. It was very creepy in
those forgotten alleys, worse than crawling outside in the open, I think,
because of the intense blackness and the infinite possibilities of ambush. The Bosches,
we knew, were playing the same game as ourselves, and might always be
round the next traverse, so that every ten yards one went through a new
ordeal of expectancy and stealthy, strained investigation. One stood breath us at the
corner, listening, peering, quivering with the strain of it. And then
a rat dropped into the next bay, or behind us, one of our
Lewis guns blazed off a few bursts, shattering the silence. Surely there was
some one near, moving hurriedly under cover of the noise. Then you stood
again, stiff and cramped with the stillness, and you wanted insanely to cough
or shift your weight onto the other foot, or your nose itched, and
the grass has tickled your ear, but you must not stir, must hardly
breathe. For now all the lines have become mysteriously hushed, and no man
fires. Far away, one can hear the rumble of the German limbers coming
up with rations to the dump, and the quiet becomes unbearable, so that
you long for some titanic explode illusion to break it and set you free from
waiting. Then a machine gun opens again, and you slip round the corner
to find nothing at all, only more blackness and the rats scuttling away into
the grass, and perhaps the bones of a Frenchman. And then you begin
all over again. When he has done this sort of thing many times without
any happening, an imperfect scout becomes careless through sheer weariness, and begins to
blunder noisily ahead, and sooner or later he goes under. But Harry was
a natural scout, well trained, and from first to last kept the same
care, the same admirable patience. And this means a great strain on body
and mind. In those old trenches, you could go right up to the
German line two hundred yards away, and this Harry often did. The Germans
had small posts at these points waiting, and were very ready with bombs and
rifle grenades. It was a poor lookout if you were heard about there,
and perhaps badly wounded, so that you could not move two hundred yards away
from friends and all those happy soldiers who spent their nights comfortably in trenches.
When you were out there in your stomach, perhaps your companion would get away
and bring help, or he too might be hit or killed, and then
you would lie there for days and nights alone in a dark hole, with
the rats scampering and smelling about you, till you died of starvation or loss
of blood. You would lie there listening to your own men chattering in the
distance at their wiring, and neither nor anyone would find you or know where
you were till months. Hence some other venturesome scout stumbled on your revolver in
the dark, or maybe the line would advance at last, and some salvage
party come upon your uniform rotting in the ditch, and they would take off
your identity disk and send it into headquarters and shovel a little earth above your
bones. It might be many years. I am not an imaginative man,
but that was the kind of thought I had while I prowled round with Harry,
and I never went so far as he. He even had an occasional
jest at the Germans, and once planted an old dummy close up to their
lines. There was stony ground there, and as they took it there,
he told me it clattered. The next night he went there again in case
the Germans came out to capture Reggie. They did not, but every evening
for many months they put a barrage of rifle grenades all about that dummy.
Then there was much talk of raids, and all the opposite wire had to
be patrolled and examined for gaps and weak places. This meant crawling in the
open close up to the enemy, naked under the white flares, and sometimes
they fell to earth within a few feet of a scout and sizzled brilliantly for
interminable seconds. There was a sniper somewhere near, and perhaps a machine gun
section, and surely they could see him, so large, so illuminated,
so monstrously visible. He felt. It was easy when there was not too
much quiet, but many echoes of scattered shots, and the noise of bullets
rocketing into space, or long bursts of machine gun fire to cover your movements.
But when that terrible silence fell, it was very difficult. For then,
how loud was the rustle of your stealthiest wriggle, How sinister the tiny
sounds of insects in the grass. Everywhere there were stray strands of old barbed
wire, which caught in your clothes and needed infinite patients to disentangle. When
you got rid of one barb another clung to you as the wire sprang back,
or if you were not skillful, it clashed on a post or a
rifle or a tin can with a noise like cymbals. You came across strange
things as you crawled out there, dead bodies and bits of equipment and huge
unexploded shells, or you touched a rat or a grass snake that made you
shiver as it moved. The rats and the field mice ran over you if
you lay still for long, And once Harry saw a German patrol dog sniffing
busily in front of him. Sometimes as you went up wind, you put
your hands suddenly on a dead man and had to lie close beside him for
cover. Or you scented him far off, like a dog nosing through the
grass, and made him a landmark. Whispering to your companion, keep fifty
yards from the deaden, or make for the dead bosh. When the lights
went up, you lay very close, peering ahead under your cap, and
as they fell away to the ground, all your vision became full of moving
things and fugitive shadows. The thick rows of wiring posts looked like men working,
and that cluster of stones like the head of a man in a shell
hole watching, watching you gone in an instant. Then you waited tensely for
the next light. There is the murmur of voices somewhere very difficult to locate.
For a long while, you stalk it, ready to attack some patrol,
some working party. Then you hear a familiar time side curse. It
is a company wiring with much noise. All this, as I have said,
is a heavy strain on mind and body and nerve. It requires a
peculiar kind of courage, a lonely, cold blooded kind of courage. Many
men who would do well in a slap dash fight in the light of day
are useless as scouts. Not only are they noisy and impatient, but they
cannot stand it. And yet it is no job for a very imagine of
man. There are too many things you can imagine if you once begin.
The more you know about it, the more there is to imagine, and
the greater the strain becomes. Now Harry had a very vivid imagination, and
he knew all about it, and yet he played this game nearly every night.
We were in the line for three months. Nothing theatrical, you understand,
nor even heroic by popular standards, no stabbing, a phrase, no
medals. But by my standards it was very nearly heroic. And I don't
know how he did it, but this was forgotten later on. Then Harry
had a shock. There was a large sap running out from our line along
the crown of a steep ridge. This sap was not held during the day.
At night was peopled with bombers and snipers, and it was a great
starting place for the patrols. One night, Harry went out from this sap
and crawled down the face of the ridge. It was a dark night and
the bosches were throwing up many flares. One of these came to earth ten
yards from Harry. At that moment, he was halfway down the slope,
crouched on one knee. However, when flares are about, to keep still
in any posture is better than to move. So Harry remained rigid. But
one of the new scouts behind was just leaving the sap and hovered uncertainly on
the skyline as the light flared and sizzled below. Possibly he was seen.
Possibly what followed was a chance freak of the Germans. Anyhow, a moment
later they opened with every machine gun in the line, with rifles, rifle
grenades and high velocity shells. So venomous was the fire that every man in
the line believed, and afterwards hotly asserted that the whole fury of it was
concentrated on his particular yard of trench. Few of us thought of the unhappy
scouts lying naked outside. Harry, of course, flattened himself to the ground
and tried to wriggle into a hollow on level ground. You may, with
luck be safe under wild fire of this kind. For a long time.
Being on a slope, Harry was hopelessly exposed. I lay there, he
told me, and simply sweated with funk. You won't believe me, but
at one time I could literally feel a stream of machine gun bullets fuffling my
hair and thudding into the bank just above my back, and they dropped half
a dozen whiz bangs just in front of me. While it was going on,
I couldn't have moved for a thousand pounds. I felt pinned to the
ground. Then there was a lull and I leaped up, so did Old
Smith. Bolted for the sap and simply dived in head first. They were
still blazing off sixteen to the dozen, and it was the mercy of God
we weren't hit. Talk about wind up, and when we got in two
bombers thought it was an attack and took us for boshes. Rather funny.
While the strafe was going on, I kept thinking, poor Old Smith,
he's a married man. He was just a few yards from me, and
Smith tells me he was thinking, mister Penrose, a married and married man,
what about some more whiskey. Well, he made a joke of it,
as one tries to do as long as possible, and that night was
almost happily exhilarated, as a man sometimes is after escaping narrowly from an adventure.
But I could see that it had been a severe shock. The next
night he had a cold and a bad cough, and said he would not
go out for fear of making a noise and giving the show away. The
following night he went out, but came in very soon and sat rather glum
in the dugout, thinking of something. I always waited up till he came
into report, and we used to discuss the situation over some whiskey or a
little white wine. The following day, the colonel gave him a special job
to do. There was the usual talk of a raid on a certain section
of the enemy lines, but there was a theory that this particular section had
been evacuated. Flares were sent up from all parts of it, but this
was supposed to be the work of one man, a hard worker who walked
steadily up and down, pretending to be a company. Harry was told off
to test the truth of this myth, to get right up to that trench,
to look in and see what was in it. It was a thing
he had done twice before, at least, though myself I should not have
cared to do it at all. It meant the usual breathless, toilsome wriggle
across no man's land, avoiding the flares, and the two snipers who covered
that bit of ground, finding a gap in the wire, getting through without
being seen, without noise, without catching his clothes on a wandering barb,
or banging his revolver against a multio of tin cans. Then you had to
listen and wait, and if possible, get a look into the trench.
When and if you had done that, you had to get back, turn
around in a tiny space, past the same obstacles, the same snipers.
If at any stage you were spotted, the odds against your getting back at
all were extremely large. However, Harry was a scout and it was his
job. In the afternoon of that day I met him somewhere in the line
and made some would be jocular remark about his night's work. He seemed to
me a little worried, preoccupied, and answered shortly. Hewett was sitting near
shaving in the sun, and said to him, you're a nasty, cold
blooded fellow, Harry, crawling about like a young snake every night. But
I suppose you like it, Harry said, slowly, with a casual air.
Well, so I did, but I must say that Strafe the other
night put the wind up me properly. And when I went out last night,
I found I was thinking all the time, suppose they did that again.
And when I got to the top of a ridge or anywhere a bit
exposed, I kept imagining what it would be like if all those machine guns
started just then simply dashed into a shell hole. And I found myself working
for safe spots where one would be all right in case of accidents, sort
of lost confidence, you know. It was all said in a matter of
fact manner, as if he was saying, I don't like marmalade so much
as I used to do. And there was no suggestion that he was not
ready to go and look in the Bosche front line or the unter de in
Lunden if necessary. But I was sorry about this. I told him that
he must not imagine that that strafe was a unique affair, never likely to
be repeated. But when I went back to the dugout, I spoke to
the Colonel. That night, I went up with Harry to Foster Alley and
watched him writhing away into the gray gloom. There were many stars, and
you could follow him for thirty yards. And as I watched, I wondered,
is he thinking, suppose they do that again? And when he gets
over near the wire, will he be thinking what would happen if they saw
me? Now? If so, I said, God help him and went
back to headquarters. Three hours later he came into the dugout, where I
sat with the Colonel making out an intelligence report. He was very white and
tired, and while he spoke to the Colonel, he stood at the bottom
of the muddy steps with his head just out of the candle light. All
the front of his tunic was muddy, and there were two rents in his
breeches. He said, very sorry, sir, but I couldn't get through.
I got pretty close to the wire but couldn't find a gap. Was
there much firing, said the Colonel, The usual two snipers and a machine
gun. On the left. From what I heard, I should say there
were a good many men in that part of the trench, but I couldn't
swear. Now. What the Colonel had wanted was somebody who could swear that
was what the brigade wanted. So he was not pleased, but he was
a kind, understanding fellow, and all he said was well, I'm sorry
too, Penrose, but no doubt you did your best. And he went
to bed. Then I opened some peria we still had peria then, and
gave Harry a strong whiskey and waited for I knew that there was more.
He talked for a little, as usual, about the Mud and the Bosch
line and so on, and then he said what I told the Colonel was
perfectly true. I did get pretty close to the wire, and there wasn't
a gap to be seen, But that wasn't the whole of it. I
couldn't face it. The truth is that show the other night was too much
for me. I found myself lying in a shell hole, pretending to myself
that I was listening and watching and so on, but really absolutely struck,
trying to make myself go on, and I couldn't. I'm finished as a
scout. That's all well, it was all for the present. No thinking
human CEO is going to run a man in for being beaten by a job
like that. It is a specialist's affair, like firing a gun. It
is his business to put the right man on the job, and if he
doesn't, he can't complain. So we made Harry Lewis gun officer. And
that was the first stage. End of chapter seven. Recording by Roger Malin
Chapter eight of The Secret Battle by A. P. Herbert. This LibriVox
recording is in the public domain. Recording by Roger Maline. Soon after that
we went down to the Palm. It was autumn then, and all that
desolate area of stark brown earth was wet and heavy and stinking. Down the
Ancre valley. There were still some leaves in teppe filled wood, and the
tall trees along the river were green and beautiful in the thin October sun.
But the center of battle was coming up to that valley. In a month,
the green was all gone, and there was nothing to see but the
endless, uniform landscape of tumbled earth and splintered trunks, and only the big
shells raising vain water spouts in the wide pools of the ancre gave any brightness
to the tired eye. But you know about all this. Every Englishman has
a picture of the sum in his mind, and I will not try to
enlarge it. We were glad in a way to go there, not in
the expectation of liking it, but on the principle of Henry the fifth speech.
On the eve of Saint Crispin, we saw ourselves in hospitals or drawing
rooms or bars, saying, yes, we were six months on the Somme
as indeed we were, We were going to be in the swing. But
it was very vile. After Suchet it was real war again, and many
Suchet reputations wilted there and died. Yet, with all its horror and discomfort
and fear, that winter was more bearable than the Gallipoli summer, For at
the worst there was a little respite, spasms of repose. You came back
sometimes to billets, cold, bare, broken houses, but still houses,
where you might make a brave blaze of a wood fire and huddled round it
in a cheery circle, with warm drinks and a song or two. And
sometimes there were estimonies and kind French women. Or you went far back to
an old chateau perched over the village, and there was a bridge and a
piano and guests at headquarters. Civilization was within reach, and sometimes you had
a glimpse of it and made the most of it. But we had a
bad time, as everyone did. After a stiff three weeks of holding a
nasty bit of the line, much digging of assembly trenches and carrying in the
mud, we took our part in a great battle. I shall not tell
you about it. It is in the histories, but it was a black
day for the battalion. We lost four hundred men and twenty officers, more
than twice the total British casualties at Amdormen. Hewett was killed and six other
officers, the colonel and twelve more were wounded. Eustace showed superb courage with
a hideous wound. Harry and myself survived. Now I had made a mistake
about Harry after that scouting episode at Suchet. I told myself that his nerve
was gone, that for a little anyhow, he would be no good in
action. But soon after we got to the Psalm he had surprised me by
doing a very good piece of work under fire. We were digging a new
jumping off line in no man's land, two hundred men at work at once.
They were spotted, the boshes dropped some minies about, and there was
the beginning of a slight stampede, you know, the sort of thing.
Mythical orders to retire came along. All Harry did was to get the men
back and keep them together and keep them digging. The officer's job. But
he did very well, and to me, as I say, surprisingly well.
The truth was as I afterwards perceived that only what I may call his
scouting nerve was gone. It is a peculiar kind of super nerve, as
I have tried to show, and losing it he had lost a very valuable
quality. But that was all at present. Or I may put it another
way, there is a theory held among soldiers which I will call the theory
of the favorite fear. Every civilian has his favorite fear, death by burning
or by drowning, the fear of falling from a great height or being mangled
in a machine, something which it makes us shiver to think about. Among
soldiers, such special fears are even more acute, though less openly confessed.
But in the evenings, men will sometime times lie on the straw in the
smoky barns and whisper the things of which they are most afraid. It is
largely a matter of locality and circumstance. In Gallipoli, where the Turk's rapid
musketry fire was almost incredibly intense and their snipers uncannily accurate, men would say
that they hated bullets, but shell fire left them unmoved. The same men
travel to France and found rifle fire practically extinct, but gunpower increasingly terrible and
rapidly reversed their opinions. More often, however, there has been some particular
experience which, out of a multitude of shocks, has been able to make
a lasting impression and leave behind it the favorite fear. One man remembers the
death of a friend caught by the gas without his gas mask, and is
possessed with the fear that he may one day forget his own and perish in
the same agony. And such is the effect of conduct on these obsessions,
that this man will neglect the most ordinary precautions against other dangers, will be
reckless under heavy shell fire, but will not move an inch without his respirator.
With others. It is the fear of being left to die between the
lines, caught on the wire and riddled by both sides, the fear of
snipers, of five nines, even of whiz bangs. One man feels safe
in the open, but in the strongest dugout has a horror that it may
be blown in upon him. There is the fear of the empty trench,
where like a child on the dark staircase, another man is convinced that there
are enemies lying behind the parapet ready to leap upon him. And there is
the horror of being killed on the way down from the line after a relief.
But most to be pitied of all the men I have known, was
one who had served at Gallipoli in the early days. Few men then could
have an orderly burial in a recognized ground, but often the stretcher bearers buried
them hastily where they could, in and about the lines. This man's fear
was that one day a sniper would get him in the head, that unskilled
companions would pronounce his death sentence, and that he would wake up, perhaps
within a few yards of his own trench, and know that he was buried
but not dead. That was how it was with Harry. The one thing
he could not face at present was crawling lonely in the dark with the thought
of that tornado of bullets in his head. Nothing else frightened him now more
than it frightened the rest of us, though God knows. That was enough
so that he did quite well in this battle in a sound, undistinguished way.
He commanded a platoon for the occasion and took them through the worst part
of the show without exceptional losses, and he got as far as any of
the regiment got. He held out there for two days under very heavy shell
fire, with a mixed lot of men from several battalions and a couple of
strange officers. In the evening of the second day, we were to be
relieved, and being now in command, I sent him down with a runner
to brigade headquarters to fix up a few points about our position and the relief.
There was a terrific barrage to pass, but both of them got through.
When his business was done, he started back to rejoin the battalion.
By that time it was about eleven o'clock at night and the relief was just
beginning. There was no reason why he should have come back at all.
Indeed, the brigade major told him he had better not had better wait there
in the warm dugout and join us as we passed down. Now, when
a man has been through a two days battle of this kind, has had
no sleep and hardly any food for two days, and finished up with a
two mile trudge over a stony wilderness of shell holes, through a vicious barrage
of heavy shells. When after all this he finds himself worn and exhausted,
so that he can hardly stand, but safe and comfortable in a deep dugout
where there are friendly lights and the soothing voices of calm men. And when
he has the choice of staying there the right side of the barrage till it
is time to go out to rest, or of going back through that same
barrage staggering into the same shell hole with the immediate prospect of doing it all
over again with men to look after as well as himself. Well, the
temptation is almost irresistible. But Harry did resist it, I can't tell you
how. And he started back. The barrage was worse than ever all down
the valley road and Apparently when they came near the most dangerous part, Harry's
runner was hit by a big splinter and blown twenty yards. There were no
stretchers unoccupied for five miles, and it was evident that the boy, he
was only a kid, would die in a little time. He knew it
himself, but he was very frightened in that hideous valley where the shells still
fell, and he begged Harry not to leave him. And so we came
upon them. As we stumbled down thanking, our stars were through the worst
of it. Harry and the runner crouched together in a shell hole, with
the heart of the barrage blazing and roaring sixty yards off, and stray shells
all around. From a military, or indeed a common sense point of view,
it was a feudal performance, the needless risk of a valuable officer's life.
They do not give decorations for that kind of thing. But I was
glad he had stayed with that young runner. And I only tell you this
to show you how wrong I was, and how much stuff he had in
him still. And now Colonel Philpot comes into the story. I wish to
god he had kept out of it altogether. He was one of a class
of officer with which our division was specially afflicted. At least we believed so,
if only for the credit of the British Army. For if they were
typical of the old Army, I do not know how we came out of
nineteen fourteen with as much honor as we did, but I am happy to
think they were not. We called them the old duds, and we believed
that for some forgotten sin of ours, or because of a certain strong temporary
spirit we had, they were dumped upon us by way of penalty. We
had peculiarly few regular officers, and so perhaps were inclined to be extra critical
of these gentlemen. Anyhow, at one time they came in swarms, lazy,
stupid, ignorant men, with many years of service, retired, reserve
or what not, but no discoverable distinction, either in intellect or character or
action. And when they had told us about Simla and all the injustices they
had suffered in the matter of promotion or pay, they ousted some young and
vigorous temporary fellow who at least knew something of fighting. If there were stray
passages in the King's regulations, which he did not know by heart. And
in about a week their commands were discontented and slack. In about two months
they were evacuated sick, for they had no guts, most of them.
And that was the finest moment of their careers for them and for US.
Lieutenant Colonel W. K. Philpot, substantive captain, after god knows how
many years, outdutted them all, though to give him his due, he
had more staying power than most of them. He took over the battalion when
Colonel Roberts was wounded, and the contrast was painfully acute. I was his
adjutant for twelve months in all, and an adjutant knows more most things about
his co O. He was a short, stoutish fellow with beady eyes and
an unsuccessful mustache, slightly gray like a stubble field at dawn. He had
all the exaggerated respect for authority and his superiors of the old school regular,
with none of its sincerity. For while he said things about the brigadier which
no colonel should say before a junior officer, he positively cringed when they met,
And though he bullied defaulters and blustered about his independence before juniors. There
was no superior military goose to whom he would have said the most different bow.
He was lazy beyond words, physically and mentally. But to see him
double out of the mess when a general visited the village was an education.
It made one want to vomit. Then, of course, he believed very
strongly in the book, not wholly writ but all that mass of small red
publications, which expound the whole art of being a soldier in a style calculated
to invest with mystery the most obvious truths. It says it in the book
was his greatest gambit, and a good one too. Yet he betrayed the
most astonishing ignorance of the book. Any second lieutenant could have turned him inside
out in two minutes on field service regulations, and just where you expected him
to be really efficient and knowledgeable, the conduct of trials and military law and
so on, he made the most hideous elementary howlers. But ignorance is easily
forgivable if a man will work, if a man will learn. But he
would do neither. He left everything to somebody else, the second in command,
the adjutant, the orderly room. He would not say what he wanted,
he very seldom knew, and when in despair you made out his orders
for him, he invariably disagreed. When he disagreed, he was as obstinate
as a mule, without being so clever. When he did agree, it
took half an hour to explain the simplest arrangement. If you asked him to
sign some correspondence for the brigade, he was too lazy and told you to
sign it yourself. And when you did that, he apologized to the brigade
for the irregularities of his adjutant, a temporary fellow, you know, for
he had an ill concealed contempt for all temporaries, and that was perhaps one
reason why we disliked him so much. He would not believe that a young
officer who had not spent twenty years drinking in mess rooms could have any military
value whatever. Moreover, it annoyed him intensely, And here he had my
sympathy to see such men enjoying the same pay or rank as he had enjoyed
during the almost apocryphal period of his captaincy, and having himself learned practically nothing
during that long lotus time, it was inconceivable to him that any man,
however vigorous or intelligent, could have learned anything in two years of war.
Now let me repeat that I do not believe him to be typical of the
old Army. I know he was not, thank God. But this is
a history of what happened to Harry, and Colonel Philpit was one of the
things which happened very forcibly. So I give him to you as we found
him. And since he may be alive, I may say that his name
is fictitious, though there are unhappily so many of him alive that I have
no fears that he will recognize himself. He would not be the same man
if he did. We went out for a fortnight's rest after that battle,
and Harry had trouble with him almost at once. He had amused and irritated
Harry from the first the old duds always did. For his respect for authority
was very civilian and youthful in character. He took a man for what he
was, and if he decided, he was good stood by him loyally forever
after. If he did not, he was severe, not to say intolerant,
and regrettably lacking in that veneration. For the old and incapable, which
is the soul of military discipline. Philpit's arrogance on the subject of temporaries annoyed
him intensely. It annoyed us all. And this I think it was that
made him say a very unfortunate thing. He was up before the CEO with
some trifling request or other. I forget what, and somehow the question of
his seniority and service came up. Incidentally, Harry remarked quite mildly that he
believed he was nearly due for promotion. Colonel Philpit gave as close an imitation
of a lively man as I ever saw him achieve. He nearly had a
fit. I forget all, he said. He thundered for a long time,
banging his fist on the King's regulations and knocking everything off the rickety table.
But this was the climax promotion by God. And how old are you,
young man, and how much service have you seen? Let me tell
you this, Master Penrose, When I was your age, I hadn't begun
to think about promotion. And I did fifteen years as a captain, fifteen
solid years, And I don't wonder, said Harry. It was very unfortunate
when we went back to the line, Harry was detailed for many working parties,
and some of them, particularly the first, were very nasty. The
days of comfortable walking in communication trenches were over. We were in captured ground,
churned up by our own fire, and all communication with the front was
over the open over the shell holes. Harry was told off to take a
ration party carrying rations up to the battalion in the line one hundred men.
These were bad jobs to do. It meant three quarters of a mile along
an uphill road heavily shelled. Then there was a mile over the shell hole
country where there were no landmarks or duckboards or anything to guide you. For
a single man in daylight with a map. Navigation was difficult enough in this
uniform wilderness until you had been over it a time or two. To go
over it for the first time in the dark with a hundred men carrying heavy
loads was the kind of thing that makes men transfer to the flying core.
Harry got past the road with the loss of three men only there at any
rate. He went straight ahead, however slowly, But when he left the
road his real troubles began. It was pitched, dark and drizzling, and
the way was still uphill with those unhappy carrying parties, where three fourths of
the men carried two heavy sacks of bread and tinned meat and other food,
and the rest two petrol tins of water or a jar of rum, or
rifle oil or whale oil, besides a rifle and a bandolier, and two
respirators and a greatcoat. You must move with exquisite slowness, or you will
lose your whole party in a hundred yards. And even when you are just
putting one foot in front of another, moving so slowly that it maddens you,
there are halts and hitches every few yards. A man misses his footing
and slides down into a crater with his awful load. The hole is full
of foul green water, and he must be hauled out quickly lest he drown.
Halfway down the line man halts to ease his load, or shift his
rifle, or scratch his nose. When he goes on, he can see
no one ahead of him, and the cry not in touch comes sullenly up
to the front. Or you cross the path of another party burdened as yours
in the dark, or against the flaring skyline. They look like yours,
bent murky shapes with bumps upon them, And some of your men trail off
with the other party. And though you pity your men more than yourself,
it is difficult sometimes to be gentle with them, difficult not to yield to
the intense exasperation of it all, and curse foolishly. But Harry was good
with his men, and they stumbled on, slipping, muttering, with a
dull ache at the shoulders and a dogged rage in their hearts. He was
trying to steer by the compass, and he was aiming for a point given
him on the map. The rendezvous for the party he was to meet.
This point was the junction of three trenches, But as all trenches thereabouts had
been so blotted out as to be almost indistinguishable from casual shell holes, it
was not so good a rendezvous as it had seemed to the brigade. However,
Harry managed to find it, or believed that he had found it,
for in that murk and blackness, nothing was certain. If he had found
it, the other party had not, for there was no one there.
They might be late, they might be lost, they might be waiting elsewhere.
So Harry sent out a scout or two and waited while the men laid
down in the muddy ruins of the trench and dozed unhappily. And while they
waited, the bosch, who had been flinging big shell about at random since
dusk, took it into his head to plaster these old trenches with five nines.
Harry ran or floundered along the line, telling the men to lie close
where they were. There was indeed nothing else to do, but it gave
the men confidence, and none of them melted away as he ran. A
big one burst very near and knocked him flat, but he was untouched.
It is marvelous how local the effect of he can be. For about ten
minutes they had a bad time, and then it ceased suddenly, And now
was one of those crucial moments which distinguish a good officer from a bad or
even an ordinary officer. It was easy to say, here I am at
the rendezvous. By this time Harry had got his bearings a little by the
lights and knew he was in the right spot with these something rations. The
men are done and a bit shaken, so am I. The other people
haven't turned up if they want their rations. They can damned well come here
and get them. I've done my part, and I'm going home. But
a real good officer with a conscience and an imagination would say, yes,
but I've been sent up here to get these rations to the men in the
line. My men will have a rest tomorrow and some sleep and some good
food. The men in the line now will still be in the line with
no sleep and little rest. And if these rations are left here in the
mud and not found before dawn, they'll have no food either. And whatever
other people may do or not do, it's up to me to get these
rashings up there somehow. If we have to walk all night and carry them
right up to the front line ourselves, and I'm not going home till I've
done it, I don't know, but I think that that's the sort of
thing Harry said to himself. And anyhow, after the row with Philpit,
he was particularly anxious to make good. So he got his men out and
told them about it all, and they floundered on. It was raining hard
now with a bitter wind. When they passed the crest of the hill.
Harry had a vague idea of the direction of the line, so long as
they were on the slope, but on the flat, when they had dodged
round a few hundred shell holes, halting and going on and halting again,
all sense of direction departed, and very soon they were hopelessly lost. The
flares were no good, for the line curved, and there seemed to be
lights all around, going up mistily through the rain in a wide circle.
Once you were properly lost, the compass was useless, for you might be
in the bosch lines, you might be anywhere. At such moments, a
kind of mad, desperate self pity, born of misery and weariness and rage,
takes hold of the infantryman, And if he carries a load, he
is truly ready to fall down and sleep where he is, or die.
And in the wretched youth and charge there is a sense of impotence and responsibility
that makes his stomach sink within him. Some of the men began to growl
a little, but Harry held on despairingly, And then by God's grace,
they ran into another party, an nco and a few men. These were
the party, or some of them, that should have met them at the
rendezvous. They too had been lost, and were now wandering back to the
line. Well, Harry handed over the rations and turned home well pleased with
himself. He was too sick of the whole affair, and it was too
dark and beastly to think of getting a receipt. It was a pity,
for while he trudged home, the NCO, as we afterwards heard, was
making a mess of the whole business. Whether he had not enough men,
or perhaps lost them, or miscalculated the amount of rations, or what is
not clear. But half of all that precious food was found lying in the
mud at noon the next day, when it was too late, and half
the battalion in the line went very short. Then the colonel rang up philpit
and complained bitterly about the conduct of the officer in charge of our ration party.
Philpott sent for Harry and accused him hotly of dumping the rations carelessly anywhere,
of not finishing his job. Harry gave his account of the affair quite
simply, without enlarging on the bad time he had had, though that was
clear enough to a man with any knowledge. But he could not show a
receipt. Philpot was the kind of man who valued receipts more than righteousness.
He refused to believe Harry straightforward tail cursed him for a lazy swine, and
sent him to apologize to the Colonel of the Blanks. That officer did listen
to Harry's story, believed it, and apologized to him. Harry was a
little soothed, but from that day I know there was a great bitterness in
his heart, for he had done a difficult job very well, and had
come back justly proud of himself and his men. And to have the work
wasted by a bungling nco and his word doubted by a filpit, and that
I may call the beginning of the second stage. End of chapter eight recording
by Roger Maline. Chapter nine of the Secret Battle by A. P.
Herbert. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Roger Maline.
For after that Harry began to be in a bad way again. That
shelling in the n and the nearer concussion of the shell that knocked him over
had been one of those capital shocks of which I have spoken. From that
time on, shell fire in the open became a special terror, a new
favorite fear. Afterwards he told me so, and all that winter we had
shell fire in the open. Even the lines were not trenches, only a
string of scattered shell holes garrisoned by a few men. Everywhere, night and
day. You had that naked feeling. Yet in France, at the worst,
given proper rest and variety, with a chance to nurse his courage and
soothe his nerves, a resolute man could struggle on a long time after he
began to crack. But Harry had no rest, no chance. The affair
Filpit was having a rich harvest. For about three weeks in the February of
that awful winter, the battalion was employed solely unworking parties, all sorts of
them digging, carrying behind the line in the line, soft jobs, terrible
jobs. Now, as adjutant, I used to take particular care that the
safe jobs in the rear should be fairly shared among the companies in a rough
rotation, and that no officers or men should have too many of the bad
ones the night carrying parties to the front line. But about now Colonel Philpit
began to exert himself about these parties. He actually issued orders about the arrangements,
and whether by accident or design, his orders had this particular effect that
Harry took about three times as many of the dangerous parties as anyone else.
We were in a country of rolling down down, with long trough like valleys
of ravines between. To get to the front line, you had to cross
two of these valleys, and in each of them the Bosh put a terrific
barrage all night and every night. The second one, the Valley of Death,
was about as near to inferno as I wished to see, for it
was enfilated from both ends, and you had shellfire from three directions. Well,
for three weeks Harry took a party through this valley four or five nights
a week. Each party meant a double passage through two corners of hell,
with a string of weary men to keep together and encourage and command with all
that maddening accumulation of difficulties I have tried already to describe. And at the
end of that winter, after all he had done, it was too much,
I protested to the But it was no good. Master Penrose can go
on with these parties, he said, till he learns how to do them
properly. After ten days of this, Harry began to be afraid of himself,
or as he put it, I don't know if I can stand much
more of this. All his old distrust of himself, which lately I think
he had very successfully kept away, came creeping back. But he made no
complaint. He did not ask me to intercede with Philpit. The more he
hated and feared these parties, the worse he felt. The keener became his
determination to stick it out, to beat Philpit at his own game, or
so I imagine, for by the third week there was no doubt what is
called his nerve was clean gone, or as he put it to me in
the soul's tongue, I've got complete wind up. He would have given anything
except his pride, to have escaped one of those parties. He thought about
them all day. I did manage, in sheer defiance of Philpot, to
take him off one of them. But it was only sheer, dogged willpower
and perhaps the knowledge that we were to be relieved the following week, which
carried him through to the end of it. If we had not gone out,
I don't know what would have happened, but I can guess. And
so Philpot finally broke his nerve, but he was still keen and resolute to
go on. In spite of the bitterness in his heart, Philpot and other
things had still to break his spirit, and the other things were many that
winter. It was a long, cold, comfortless winter. Billets became more
and more broken and windowless and lousy. Firewood vanished, and there was little
coal on the high slopes. There was a bitter wind, and men went
sick in hundreds pneumonia, fever, frostbite. All dugouts were damp and chilling
and greasy with mud, or full of the acrid wood smoke that tortured the
eyes. There were night advances in the snow, where lightly wounded men perished
of exposure before dawn. For a fortnight we lived in tents on a hilltop
covered with snow, and one day Harry discovered he was lousy then socially,
though it seems a strange thing to say, these were dull days for Harry.
Few people realize how much an infantryman's life is lightened if he has opinions
of his own kind. Not necessarily of the same class, though it usually
comes to that, but of the same tastes and education and experience. Men
who make the same kind of jokes in the line it matters little a man
as a man, as the press will tell you. But in the evenings
out at rest, it was good and cheering to sit with the old crowd
and exchange old stories of Gallipoli and Oxford and London, even to argue with
Eustace about the public schools, to be with men who like the same songs,
the same tunes on the gramophone, who did not always ask for my
Dixie Bird or the Green Woman waltz. And now there was none of the
old crowd left, only Harry and myself. Harry with a company now,
and myself very busy at headquarters. And Harry's company were very dull, men
promoted MCO's mostly good fellows, all very good in the line, but they
were not the old crowd. Now. Instead of those great evenings we used
to have with the white wine and the music and old George dancing, evenings
that have come down in the history of the Battalion, as our battles have
done, evenings that kept the spirits strong. In the blackest times, there
were morose men with wooden faces, sitting silently over some whiskey and battalion orders.
And Hewett was dead, the laughing, lovable Hewett. That was the
black heart of it. When a man becomes part of the great machine,
he is generally supposed, I don't know why, to surrender with his body,
his soul, and his affections and all his human tenderness. But it
is not so. We never talked of Hewett very much. Only there was
forever a great gap. And sometimes when we tried to be cheerful in the
evenings as in the old times, and were not, we said to each
other, Harry and I I wish to God that he was here. Yet
for long periods I forgot Hewett. Harry never forgot him. Then there was
something about which I may be wrong, for Harry never mentioned it, and
I am only guessing from my own opinion. In two years of war he
had won no kind of metal or distinction except a mention in dispatches, which
is about as satisfying as a carraway seed to a starving man. In Gallipoli,
he had done things which in France in modern times would have earned an
easy decoration, but they were scarce in those days. And in France he
had done much dogged and difficult work, and a few very courageous, but
in a military sense, perfectly useless things, nothing dramatic, nothing to catch
the eye of the brigade. I don't know whether he minded much, but
I felt it myself very keenly, for I knew that he had started with
ambitions, and here were fellows with not half his service or courage or capacity,
just ordinary men with luck ablaze with ribbon. Anyone who says he cares
nothing about metals is a hypocrite, though most of us care very little.
But if you believe you have done well, and not only is there nothing
to show for it, but nothing to show that other people believe it,
you can't help caring. And then, on top of it, when of
a genuine sense of bitter injustice, when you know that your own most modest
estimate of yourself is exalted compared with the estimate of the man who commands you,
you begin to have black moods. Harry had black moods. All these
torments accumulated and broke his spirit. He lost his keenness, his cheerfulness,
and his health. Once a man starts on that path, his past history
finds him out like an old wound. Some men take to drink and are
disgraced. In Harry's case it was Gallipoli. No man who had a bad
time in that place ever got over it in body or soul. And when
France or some other campaign began to work upon them, it was seen that
there was something missing in their resisting power. They broke out with old diseases
and old fears, the legacies of Gallipoli. Harry grew pale and nervous,
and hunted to look at, and he had a touch of dysenterry. But
the worst of the poison was in his mind and heart for a long time,
as I have said, since he felt the beginning of those old doubts
and saw himself starting downhill. He had striven anxiously to keep his name high
in men's opinion, for all liked him and believed in him. He had
been ready for anything, and done his work with a conscientious pride. But
now this bitterness was on him. He seemed to have ceased to care what
happened or what men thought of him. He had unreasonable fits of temper.
He became distrustful and cynical. I thought then sometimes of the day when he
had looked at Troy and wanted to be like Achilles. It was painful to
me to hear him talking as Eustace used to talk, suspicious, intolerant,
incredulous. I thought how Harry had once hated that kind of talk, and
it was most significant of the change that had come over the good companion I
had known. Yet sometimes when the sun shone, and once when we rode
back into Albert and dined quietly alone, that mask of bitterness fell away.
There were flashes of the old, cheerful Harry, and I had hopes.
I hoped Philpit would be killed, but he survived, for he was very
careful, and though as I have said, he stuck it for a long
time, he was by no means the gallant fire eater you would have imagined
from his treatment of defaulters round the line. Just before dawn was enough for
him. In that sort of country, things are quiet then and you can
see what's going on. He liked it best when things were quiet, so
did all of us, and I don't blame him for that. But that
winter there was a thick crop of siw's. Siw is the short title for
a man who has been evacuated with self inflicted wounds, shot himself in the
foot or held a finger over the muzzle of his rifle, or dropped a
great boulder on his foot, done himself any reckless injury to escape from the
misery of it all. It was always a marvel to me that any man
who could find courage to do such things could not find courage to go on.
I suppose they felt it would bring them the certainty of a little respite,
and beyond that they did not care for it was the uncertainty of their
life that had broken them. You could not help being sorry for these men,
even though you despised them. It made you sick to think that any
man who had come voluntarily to fight for his country could be brought so low,
that humanity could be so degraded exactly where it was being so ennobled.
But Philpot had no such qualms. He was ruthless, and necessarily so.
But beyond that he was brutal. He bullied when they came before him,
healed of their wounds, haggard, miserable wisps of men. He kept them
standing there while he told them at length exactly how low they had sunk.
They knew that well enough, poor devils, and flung at them a rich
vocabulary of abuse, words of cowardice and dishonor, which are strictly accurate but
highly unnecessary. For these men were going back to duty. Now they had
done their punishment, though the worst of it was still to come. All
they needed was a few quiet words of encouragement from a strong man to a
weaker, a little human sympathy, and that appeal to a man's honor which
so seldom fails if it is rightly made well. This did not surprise me.
In Philpit, he had no surprises for me. By now. What
did surprise me was Harry's intolerant, even cruel comments on the cases of the
SIWs. He had always had a real sympathy with the men. He knew
the strange workings of their minds and all the wretchedness of their lives. He
understood them, and yet here he was as scornful as Prussian on the subject
of use, as even Philpit. It was long before I understood this.
I don't know that I ever did, but I thought it was this,
that in these wrecks of men he recognized something of his own sufferings, and
recognizing the disease, he was the more appalled by the remedy they took.
The kind of thing that had led them to it was the kind of thing
he had been through was going through there the connection ceased, there was no
such way out for him. But though it ceased, the connection was so
close that it was degrading. And this scorn and anger was a kind of
instinctive self defense put on to assure himself, to assure the world that there
was no connection, none at all. But I don't know. At the
end of February, I was wounded and went home without any conceit, without
exaggerating our friendship. I may say that this was the final blow for Harry.
I was the last of the old crowd. I was the one man
who knew the truth of things as between him and Philpit and I went.
I was hit by a big shell at Wisbang Corner, and Harry saw me
on the stretcher as we came past d Company on the Bapalm road. He
walked with me as far as the cookers and was full of concern for my
wound, which was pretty painful just then. But he bucked me up and
talked gaily of the good things I was going to, And he said nothing
of himself. But when he left me there was a look about him.
What is the word wistful? It is the only one, like a dog
left behind. While I was still in hospital I had two letters from the
battalion. The first was from Harry, a long wail about Philpit and the
dullness of everybody, now that the old crowd were extinct, though he seemed
to have made good friends of some of the dull ones. At the end
of that endless winter, when it seemed as if the spring would never come,
they had pulled out of the line and trekked up north, so that
there had been little fighting. They were now in shell holes across the high
ridge in front of Aras, preparing for an advance. The other letter was
from Old Night, the Quartermaster, dated two months after I left. I
will give you an extract. Probably by now you will have seen or heard
from young Penrose. He was hit on the sixteenth, a nasty wound in
the chest from a splinter. It was rather they're funny, not funny,
but you know what I mean. How he got it. I was there
myself, though I didn't see it. I had been up to HQ to
see about the rations, and there were a lot of us. Johnson,
he is now adjutant in your place and fellows and so on. Standing outside
h Q, which is on a hill what you people call a forward slope,
I believe, and watching our guns bombarding the village. It was a
remarkable sight, etc. Etc. A long digression. Then the Bosch started
shelling our hill. He dropped them in pairs, first of all at the
other end of the hill, about five hundred yards off, and then nearer
and nearer, about twenty yards at a time. The line they were on
was pretty near to us, so we thought that dugout would be a good
place to go to. Penrose was just starting to go back to his company
when this began, and as we went down, somebody told him he'd better
wait a bit, but he said no, he wanted to get back.
I was the last down, and as I disappeared pretty hurriedly, I told
him not to be a fool, But all he said was this is nothing,
old bird, you wait till you live up here. I'm going on.
The next thing we heard was the hell of an explosion on top.
We ran up afterwards and there he was, about thirty yards off. The
funny thing is that I understood he rather had the wind up just now and
was anything but reckless. In fact, someone said he had the dugout disease.
Otherwise you'd have said he wanted to be killed. I don't know why
he wasn't asking for it like that. Well, thank god, I'm a
q M, etc. Etc. I read it all very carefully and wondered
you'd have said he wanted to be killed. I wondered about that very much.
And there was a PostScript which interested me. By the way I hear
Burnett's got the m C for salvage I believe, end of chapter nine recording
by Roger Maline. Chapter ten of the Secret Battle by A. P.
Herbert. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Roger Maline.
I was six months in that hospital, and I did not see Harry
for seven for I was at Blackpool and he at Lady Radmore's in Kensington.
His was a quicker business than mine. And when I had finished with the
hospitals and the homes and came to London for a three weeks lays, he
was back at the depot. Then he got seven days leave for some mysterious
reason. I think there was a draft leaving shortly and everybody had some leave,
and I dined twice with him at home. They had a little house
in Chelsea, very tastefully furnished by missus Penrose, whom I now saw for
the first time. But I saw more of her that evening than I did
of Harry, who was hopelessly entangled with two or three in laws. She
was a dark, gentle little person, with brown and rather sorrowful eyes.
When I first saw her, I thought she was never meant to be a
soldier's wife, But after we had talked a little, I added, but
she is a good one. She was clearly very much in love with Harry
and delighted to meet someone who had been with him in France and was fond
of him. For like all wives, she soon discovered that. But all
the time I felt that there were questions she wanted to ask me and could
not. I will not pretend to tell you how she was dressed, because
I don't know. I seldom notice, and then I never remember. But
she appealed to me very much, and I made up my mind to look
after her interests if I ever had the chance, if there was ever a
question between Harry and a single man. I had no chance of a talk
with Harry, and noticed only that he seemed pretty fit again, but sleepless
looking. The second night I went there was the last night of Harry's leave.
If I had known that when I was asked, I think I should
not have gone, For while it showed I was a privileged person, it
is a painful privilege to break in on the last evening of husband and wife.
I know those last evenings. And though Harry was only going back to
the depot in the morning, it was known there had been heavy losses in
the regiment, there was talk of a draft, it might well be the
last evening of all. I got there early, at Harry's request, about
half past five on a miserable, gusty evening in early November. Harry was
sitting in a kind of study library or den writing. He looked less well
and very sleepless about the eyes. It was the anniversary of one of the
great battles of the regiment, and we talked a little of that day soldiers
will with a sort of gloomy satisfaction. Then Harry said slowly, I've been
offered a job at the War Office by Major Mackenzie. Intelligence. Oh,
I said, that's very good, But I was thinking more of missus Harry
than Harry. Harry went on as if he had not heard I was writing
to him when you came in, and I don't know what to say.
Why not? Well, he said, you know as well as anyone what
sort of time I've had and how I've been treated by Philpit and others.
And I've had about enough of it. I remember telling you once on the
peninsula that I thought myself fairly brave when I first went out, and my
god, so I was compared with what I am now. I suppose everyone
as his breaking point, and I've certainly had mine. I simply feel I
can't face it again. Very well, I said, take the job and
have done with it. You've done as much as you can, and you
can't do more. What's the trouble? But he went on, seemingly to
convince himself rather than me. I've never got over those awful working parties in
that valley. I had two or three five nines burst right on top of
me. You know, the Lord knows how I escaped. And now I
simply dream of them. I dream of them every night. Usually it's an
enormous, endless plane full of shell holes, of course, and raining like
hell. And I walk for miles, usually with you looking over my shoulder,
waiting for the shells to come. And then I hear that savage,
kind of high velocity shriek, and I run like hell, only I can't
run, of course, that's the worst part. And I get into a
ditch and lie there, and then one comes that I know by the sound
is going to burst on top of me, and I wake up simply sweating
with funk. I've never told anybody but you about this, not even Peggy,
but she says, I wake her up sometimes making an awful noise.
He was silent for a little and I had nothing to say. And then
it's all so different now, so damnably dull. I wouldn't mind if we
could all go out together again, just the old crowd, so that we
could have good evenings and not care what happened. But now there's nobody left.
I don't expect they'll let you go out again. Only poor old Egerton.
He's back again. And I can't stand all those boot faced NCO officers
and people like Philpit and all the old duds. You can't get away from
it. The boot faces aren't officers, and nothing will make them so.
Even the men can't stand them, and they get on my nerves. It
all gets on my nerves, the mud and the cold, and the feudal
brigadiers and all the damned eyewah we have nowadays, never having a decent wash
and being cramped up in a dug out the size of a chest of drawers
with four boot faces where you can't move without upsetting the candle and the food,
or banging your head and getting lousy, and all those endless ridiculous details
you have to look after day after day working parties, haversack rations. Has
every man got his box respirator? Why haven't you cleaned your rifle as if
I cared a damn No, I won't say that, but there you are.
You see, it's on my nerves. But sometimes, and though I
sympathized, I was glad there was a butt, When I think of some
of the bogus people who've been out perhaps once, and come home after three
months with a nice blighty in the shoulder and get a job and stayed in
it ever since, I feel I can't do that either, and run the
risk of being taken for one of them. I don't think there's any danger
of that, I remarked, I don't know. One officeer is the same
as another to most people. And then you know, although you hate it,
it does get hold of you somehow out there, and after a bit,
when you've got used to being at home, you get restless. I
know I did last time, and sometimes I do now. I don't say
I hunger for the battle. I never want to be in a stunt again,
but you feel kind of out of it when you read the papers or
meet somebody on leave. You think of the amusing evenings we used to have,
and I rather enjoyed trekking about in the back areas, especially when I
had a horse wandering along on a good frosty day and never sure what village
you were going to sleep in, marching through Dulons with the band Estiminaise and
talking French and all the rest of it. And then I think of a
five nine and I know I'm done for I've got too much imagination. That's
the trouble. I hope you're not fed up with all this, but I
want your advice. It's funny one never used to think about getting killed,
even in the war, it seemed impossible somehow that you you're s elf could
be killed. Did you ever have that feeling? Though one was ready enough
in those days? But now, even in the train the other day,
going down to Bristol by the Express, I found I was imagining what would
happen if there was a smash. Things one reads of, you know,
carriage is catching fire and so on, just wind up and the question is
is it any good going out if you've got into that state? And if
one says no, is one just making it an excuse? It's no good
telling a military doctor all this. They'd just say, hah, scrimshanker.
What you want is some fresh air and to exercise my son. And for
all I know, they may be right. As a matter of fact,
I don't think I'm physically fit. Really, my own doctor says not.
But you're never examined properly before you go out, as you know, you
all troop in by the dozen at the last moment, and the fellow says,
feeling quite fit, And if you've just had a good breakfast and feel
buckish, you say yes, thank you, and there you are. Unless
you ask them to examine you, you might have galloping consumption for all they
know, and I'm damned if I'd asked them. After all, I suppose
the system's right. If a man can stick it for a month or two
in the line, he's worth sending there if he's an officer, and it
doesn't matter to the country if he dies of consumption afterwards. But my trouble
is, can I stick it for a month or two? Or shall I
go and do some awful thing and let a lot of fellows down. Putting
aside my own inclinations, which are probably pretty selfish, what is it my
duty to do? After friend Philpit, I don't know that I'm so keen
on duty as I was, but I do want to stick this damn war
out on the right line if I can. What do you think? Before
I answer that, I said, there's one consideration you seem to have overlooked,
and that is missus Penrose. After all, you're a married man,
and that makes a difference, doesn't it? Well? Does it? I
don't really see why it should make any difference about going out or not going
out. Otherwise every shirker could run off and marry a wife and live happily
ever after. But it certainly makes it a damned sight harder to decide,
and it makes the hell of a difference when you're out there. You can
make up your mind not to think of it when you're at home like this,
but out there, when you're cold and fed up and just starting up
the line with a working party, you can't help thinking of it. And
it makes things about ten times more difficult. And as you know, it's
jolly hard not to let it make a difference to what you do. But
damn it, why did you remind me of that? I didn't want to
think about it. And then missus Penrose came in and we went down to
dinner. I did not enjoy that dinner to begin with. I felt like
a vulgar intruder on something that was almost sacred and certainly very precious, For
all the signs of the last evening were there. The dishes we had were
Harry's favorites, procured at I know what trouble and expense by missus Harry,
and she watched tremulously to see that he liked them. She had gone out
and bought him a bottle of well loved Moselle for especial surprise, and some
port, which was a huge extravagance, but that was nothing, if these
things could only give a special something to this meal which would make him remember
it. For the flowers he never saw, and the new dress went unnoticed
for a long time. But I felt that it would all have gone much
better, perhaps if I had not been there. And I hoped she did
not hate me, and Harry was not at his best. The question he
asked me I had had no time to answer, and he had not answered
it himself. Through most of that dinner, which by all the rules should
have been superficially at least cheerful and careless, as if there were no such
thing as separation ahead, Harry was thoughtful and preoccupied, and I knew that
he was still arguing with himself, what shall I say to Mackenzie, Yes
or no? Wandering up and down among the old doubts and resolutions and fears.
Missus Harry saw this as well as I, and no doubt she cursed
me for being there, because in my presence she could not ask him what
worried him. But the moselle began to do its work. Harry talked a
little and noticed the new dress, and we all laughed a lot at the
pudding, which came up in such a curious shape. We were very glad
to laugh at something. Then Missus Harry spoke of some people in the regiment
of whom she had heard a good deal, George Dawson and Egerton and old
Colonel Roberts. I knew that in a minute we should stumble into talking about
the trenches or shells or some such folly, and have Harry gloomy and brooding
again. I could not stand that, and I did not think Missus Harry
could. I plunged recklessly into the smoother waters of life in France. I
told them the old story about General Jackson and the Billet Guard, and then
we came on to the famous night at Forceville and other historic battalion orgies,
the dinner at Mosche Breton, when we put a row of candles on the
floor of the tent for footlights, and George and a few subs made a
perfect beauty chorus. Those are things one likes to remember about active service,
and I was very glad to remember them. Then the special port came in
and was a great success. Harry warmed up and laughed over those old gaieties,
and was in great form at that moment. I think his answer to
Major Mackenzie would have been definitely no. Missus Harry laughed very much too,
and said she envied us the amusing times we had together out there. You
men have all the fun. And that made ME feel a heartless ass for
having started on that topic, For I knew that when Harry was away there
was little fun for her, and whether he was lying on his stomach in
a shell hole or singing songs in an estimateae, not thinking much of his
wife, perhaps except when they drank Sweethearts and Wives, it was all one
uniform, hideous weight for her. So I think it was hollow laughter for
missus p Moreover, though I did not know how much she knew about Harry's
difficulties the job and so on, I felt sure that, with the extraordinary
instinct of a wife, she scented something of the conflict that was going on,
and she knew vaguely that this exaggerated laudation of the amenities of France meant
somehow danger to her. So that just as I was beginning to congratulate myself
on the bucking up of Harry, I tartily perceived that between us we were
wounding the wife, and I more than ever wished myself anywhere than sitting at
that pretty table with the shaded lights. Well, we nearly finished the port,
Harry still in excellent form, and went upstairs. Harry went off to
look for smokes or something, and I knew at once that missus Harry was
going to ask me questions about him. You know how a woman stands in
front of the fire and looks down and kind of paws the fender with one
foot when she is going to say something confidential. Then she looks up suddenly
and you're done. Missus Harry did that, and I was done. At
any other time, I should have loved to talk to her about Harry,
but that night I felt it was dangerous ground. How do you think Harry
is looking, she said, You probably know better than I do nowadays.
I said, I thought he seemed pretty fit, considering all things. Do
you think he'll have to go out again? She asked, I don't think
he ought to, but they seem so short of men. Still, he's
not really strong, you know. So she knew nothing about the job,
and this put me in a hole. For if I told her about it,
and he did not take it, but went out again. The knowledge
would be a standing torture to her. On the other hand, I wanted
him to take it. I thought he ought to, and if she knew
about it, she might be able to make him. Wives can do a
great deal in that way. But that would be disloyal to Harry. Well,
I temporized with vague answers while I wrestled with this problem, and she
told me more about Harry. You know, he has the most terrible dreams,
wakes up screaming at night and quite frightens me. And I don't think
they ought to be allowed to go out again when they're like that. I
don't want him to go out again, at least, she added, halfheartedly,
as a kind of concession to convention. If it's his duty, of
course, then defiantly, no, I don't want him to go anyhow.
I think he's done his bit, hasn't he, mister Benson. He has,
indeed, I said, with sincerity at last, Well, you have
some influence with him, can't you. But then Harry came in and I
had lost my chance. I have noticed that while on the stage, conversations
which must necessarily be private are invariably concluded without interruption. In private life,
and especially private houses, are always interrupted. Long before the end, Missus
Harry went to the piano, and Harry and I sat down to smoke,
And since it was the last night, Harry was allowed to smoke his pipe
the way Missus Harry said that nearly made me weep. So I sat there
and watched Harry and his wife played and played soft, melancholy, homesick things
chopin. I think that leagued with the wine and the warm fire and the
deep chairs, in an exquisite conspiracy of repose. She played for a long
time, but I saw that she too was watching, and the fancy came
to me that she was fighting for Harry, fighting, perhaps unconsciously, that
vague danger she had seen at dinner when it had beaten her, fighting it
with this music that made war seem so distant and home so lovable, And
soon I began to see that she was winning. For when she began playing,
Harry had sat down a little restless again, and fidgeted, as if
the music reminded him of good things too much, And his eyes wandered round
the room and took in all the familiar things like a man saying goodbye,
the old chair with the new chintz, and the yellow curtains, and the
bookcase his father left him, and the little bookcase where his history books were.
He looked a long time at them, and the firelight shining on the
piano, and his wife playing and playing, And when he had looked at
her, quickly he sat up and poked the fire fiercely, and sat back,
frowning. He was wondering again this music was being too much for him.
Then she stopped and looked across at Harry and smiled. When she played
again, it was I think a nocturne of Chopin's. God knows which,
but it was very peaceful and homesick. And as I watched, I made
sure that she had won, for there came over Harry a wonderful repose.
He no longer frowned or fidgeted or raised his eyebrows in the nervous way he
had, but lay back in a kind of abandonment of content. And I
said to myself, he has decided he will say yes to Mackenzie missus.
Harry perhaps also perceived it, for after a little she stopped and came over
to us, and then I did a fateful thing. There was a copy
of the Times lying by my chair, and because the silence that was on
us, I picked it up and looked aimlessly at it. The first thing
I saw was the casualty list, buried in small type among some vast advertisements
of patent foods. I glanced down the list in that casual manner which came
to us when we knew that all our best friends were already dead or disposed
of. Then my eye caught the name of the regiment, and the name
of a man I knew, Captain Egerton VR killed. There was another near
it, and another, and many more. The list was thick with them,
and the other battalions in the brigade had many names. There fellows one
had relieved in the line, or seen in billets, or talked with in
the cocktail cafe at neu Lemis. There must have been a massacre in the
brigade, ten officers killed and ten wounded in our life alone. I suppose
I made that vague murmur of rage and regret which slips out of you when
you read these things. For Harry looked up and asked, what's that?
I gave him the paper, and he too looked down that list. Only
two of those names were names of the old crowd, and many of them
were the dull men, but we knew them very well for all that,
and we knew they were good men. Egerton, Gordon, Young Matthews,
Spencer, Smith, the bombing fellow Tompkinson, all gone. So we were
silent for a long minute remembering those men, and Missus Harry stared into the
fire. I wondered what she was thinking of, and I was sorry for
her, for when Harry got up there was a look about him which I
had seen before, though not for many months, not since the first days
on the sum While I was groping after my coat in the hall, Harry
came out of his den with a letter which he asked me to drop in
the box. I looked at it without shame. It was addressed to Major
Mackenzie, D. S O et cetera. And what have you said,
I asked, No, said Harry, with a kind of challenging look.
Well I think you're wrong, I told him, though I knew then that
I was too late. Missus Harry was beaten, now, finally beaten,
poor thing. And what are you too talking about? Said missus Harry about
a dinner, My dear, I went out and posted that a cursed letter,
thanking God that I was not a wife. End of Chapter ten.
Recording by Rogermaline. Chapter eleven of the Secret Battle by A. P.
Herbert. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Rogermaline.
Harry went to France again a month later, after the feudal kind of medical
examination he had foretold. I had a letter from him from the base,
and after that there was silence. I even began to hunt about in the
casualty lists, but he was never there, And seven weeks later they let
me go out again myself, to the astonishment of all but the military doctors
at the base. I heard of Harry. Some one had been wanted for
some kind of job down there, an officer to instruct the details of the
mysteries of iron rations, or something of the sort. Harry, happening to
be there at the time and pleasing the eye of the Aldermanic officer in command
of our base depot, had been graciously appointed to the post. But he
had caused a considerable flutter in the tents of the Mighty by flatly declining it
and stating insanely that he preferred to go up to the line. This being
still the one topic of conversation in the camp, I did not linger there
longer than was absolutely necessary. Infantry based depots are bad places, and that
one was very bad. You had worse food, worse treatment, and worse
company than you ever had in the line, much discomfort and no dignity.
I never understood why officers should be treated with such contempt whenever there were a
number of them together. If you went about by yourself or with another officer
or two, you had a certain amount of politeness and consideration from military officials.
But as soon as you got with a herd of officers you were doomed.
You were dirt. If the intention at the base was to make the
line seem a haven of refuge and civility, it was highly successful as far
as I was concerned. I got back to the battalion under the usual conditions,
A long jog in the mess cart under the interminable dripping poplars, with
a vile wind lashing the usual rain, over the usual flat fields, where
the old women labored and stooped as usual, and took no notice of anything.
The heart sinks a little as you look at the shivering, dreariness of
it all, and if it is near the line, you hope secretly that
the battalion is out for at least a few days more, that you may
have just two days to get used to this beastliness again, and not be
met by some cheery, acclimatized ass with a glad to see you, old
son, just in time, going up tonight doing a stunt on Tuesday.
Yet as you come to the village there is a strange sense of homecoming that
comes with the recognition of familiar things, limbers clattering and splashing along, and
the Regimental postman trudging back with the Mail and Sea Company cooker steaming pleasantly under
an outhouse, and odd men with waterproof sheets draped over the shoulders, wet
and glistening. Today I was lucky for the battalion was a long way back,
resting, so that this homecoming sense was strong upon me, and I
wanted to see Harry. When I came near to the usual main street,
I saw the battalion marching in by a side road, coming back from a
route march I sent my gear ahead and got down to see them pass.
It was strangely pleasant. The drums of the little band were covered because of
the wet, and only the bugles brayed harshly, but very cheerfully. Old
Philpit was ahead of them, riding fatly on his mild black mare, and
returned my salute quite pleasantly. You could see a lot of young recruits among
the men, and there were many officers I had never seen, but the
welcoming signs of the old men we had had from the beginning, mostly NCOs,
now made up for that young smith. I saw in command of C
Company now and Tarrant, our late transport officer, was squelching at the head
of a platoon, obviously not liking it much. Then came D Company,
and I looked relief for Harry Stevenson. I knew in command how young the
company commanders were, but there were only two other officers, and they both
strange. The last of them tramped past, and I was left silent in
the rain, foolishly disturbed. Where was Harry As no doubt he is an
orderly officer or away on a course. But I was disturbed, and the
thought came to me that if anything had happened to him, I too should
be lonely here with none of the old crowd left. I walked on then
and came to the little flag of D Company headquarters, flapping damply outside an
estiminee in the mess. They greeted me very kindly and gave me tea,
but there was still no Harry. But they all talked very fast, and
the tea was good. And where's Penrose, I asked at last, I
haven't seen him yet. I had spoken to Stephenson. He did not answer
immediately, but he picked up his cup and drank assiduously. Then he kind
of mumbled, very low and apologetic, he's in his billet, under close
arrest, under arrest, My god, what for? Stephenson began to drink
again. He was a good fellow who knew that Harry and I were friends.
Also, he had known Harry in the Suchet days, and he did
not like having to tell me this. But one of his subalterns, a
young pup just out, was less sensitive and told me brutally, running away
cowardice in the face of et cetera, have some more tea. Bit by
bit I heard the whole miserable story, or rather that naked kernel of it
which passed publicly. For the whole story, I had to make my own
footnotes, my own queries. The first night Harry was with the battalion,
Philpit had sent him up with a carrying party to the front line or thereabouts,
fifty men and some engineering stuff of sorts, wiring trestles, barbed wire
or something. It was shellhole country, no communication trenches or anything. And
since there had been an attack recently, the Bosche artillery was very active on
the roads and back areas. Also, there was the usual rotten valley to
cross, with the hell of a barrage in it. So much these young
braves conceded. Harry had started off with his party, had called at the
brigade dump and picked up the stuff. Later on someone rang up brigade from
the line and said no party had arrived. Brigade rang up Philpit, and
he sent up the assistant adjutant to investigate. Somewhere in the arius road he
had come upon Harry with most of the party running down the road towards the
dump, away from the line. The stores were urgently needed at the front.
They never got there. That was all the court martial was tomorrow.
Well it was a black story, but I made one or two footnotes at
once. The very first night he was back, the awful luck, the
cruelty of it, just back in the condition of nerves I knew him to
be in, with that first miserable feeling upon him, wondering probably why the
hell he had driven himself out there, and praying to be let down easy
for one night at least, and then to be sent straight up on a
job like that, the job that had broken him before, and by Philpit.
I seem to see Philpit arranging that with a kind of savage glee.
Oh here's master Penrose again. Well he'd better take that party tonight instead of
mister Gibson. And who was the assistant adjutant? God knows. If every
working party that went wrong meant a court martial, there would be no officers
left in the army. And if some busybody had been at work, who's
the assistant adjutant? I asked, fellow who was attached to division, used
to be in this battalion in your time? I believe what's his name?
Burnett? Burnett? He rang up the colonel and told him about it Burnette,
I groaned, The gods were against Harry. Indeed, Burnett had been
away from the battalion for eighteen months, drifting about from odd job to odd
job, town major here, dump officer there, never in the line.
Why the devil had he come back now to put his foot in it?
And perhaps, but I could not believe that Stevenson's two young officers, Wallace
and Brown, made no footnote. Naturally, they had come out by the
same draft as Harry, one from Sandhurst, the other from a cadet school.
They were fresh as Harry had been, and they had no mercy.
And while I resented their tone, I tried to remember that they knew not
Harry and said nothing. But when young Wallace summed up the subject with well,
all I can say is he's a cold footed swine and deserves all he
gets, I exploded, You damn young pup, I said, just out
and hardly seen a shot fired. You dare to say anything about Penrose?
I tell you you're not fit to lick his boots. Do you know that
he joined up in the ranks in August fourteen and went through Gallipoli and had
done two years active service before you even had a uniform. Do you know
he's just refused a job at home in order to come out here and another
job at the base. Does that look like cold feet? You wait till
you've been out a year, my son, before you talk about cold feet
you. But I couldn't control myself any I went out cursing. Then I
got leave to go and see Harry. He was in his billet, in
a small bedroom on the ground floor. There was a sentry standing at the
window, fixed bayonet and all so that he should neither escape nor make away
with himself. He was surprised, and I think really pleased to see me.
For before me, as he said, or anyone who knew his history,
he was not ashamed. It was only when the ignorant the wallaces were
near that he was filled with humiliation because of the things he knew they were
thinking. That sentry out there, he told me, was in my platoon
at Gallipoli, one of my old men. Just before you came in.
He tapped on the window and wished me luck. He said that all the
old lads did the same. Bucked me up no end, not that he
needed much bucking up, for he was strangely quiet and resigned, more nearly
at peace with everything than I had seen him for many months. Only he
said, I wish to God that I was a single man, and I
wish to God they would get on with it. He had been under arrest
for six weeks, six solid weeks, carted about from place to place like
some animal waiting for slaughter, while the summaries of evidence and the memos and
the secret envelopes went backwards and forwards through units and through formations, from mandarin
to mandarin, from bigwig to bigwig, while generals and legal advisers and judge
advocates and twopenny halfpenny clerks wrote their miserable initials in the dirty forms and wondered
what the devil they should decide, and decided nothing at all. All this
terrible time, Harry had been writing to his wife, pretending that all was
well with him, describing route marches and scenery and all the usual stuff about
weather and clothes and food. Now at least somebody had decided, and Harry
was almost happy, for it was the end of suspense. Once they settled
on a court martial, he said, I knew I was done, and
except for Peggy, I don't care. I don't know what they've told you,
but I'd like you to know what really happened. I found the battalion
at Monval the same old part and got their feeling pretty rotten. Old Philpit,
of course, sent me off with a working party, like a shot
out of a gun. Before I'd been there an hour. I picked up
some wiring stuff at the brigade dump. It was a long way up the
road then, not far from hell Fire Corner. Fritz was shelling the road
like hell, going up and down, dropping them in pairs fifty yards further
every time. You know the game. I had the wind up pretty badly,
and so had the men, poor devils. But what was worse they
seemed to know that I had. We had a lot of shells very close
to us, and some of the men kept rushing towards the bank when they
heard one coming. Well, you don't get on very fast at that rate,
and it's damned hard to keep hold of them when they're like that.
And knowing they were like that made me even worse. When we got to
Dead Mule Tree, about ten of them were missing, just stayed under the
bank, in the holes. I don't say this to excuse myself. I'd
just tell you what happened. Then we got to that high bit where the
bank stops and the valley goes up on the left, you know, the
awful exposed feeling one has there, And they had a regular barrage just at
the corner. I got the men under the bank and waited till a shell
burst, and then tried to dash them past before the next. But the
next one came too fast and fell plunk into the middle of the column behind
me. Three men were killed outright, and those of us who hadn't flung
themselves down were knocked over. I fell in a kind of narrow ditch by
the road. When I put my head up and looked back, I saw
some of the men vanishing back under the bank. Then another one came eight
inch I should think they were, and I groveled in the ditch again.
It was just like my awful dreams. I must have been there about ten
minutes after every one. I started to get up and go back to the
men under the bank, meaning to get them together again. Every time,
the next one came too quick, and I was pinned, simply pinned in
that ditch. Then Fritz stopped for a minute or two, altering the program,
I suppose, and I got up and ran like hell for the bank.
The four or five men lying near me got up and ran too.
When we got under the bank, we lay down and I looked around.
There was not a man to be seen. I shouted, but at first
nothing happened, and I tell you I was glad. Some of the men
who had gone back, not seeing me anywhere, had melted away home.
I don't blame them. Then a few drifted along from further down the bank.
By degrees. Most of the party turned up. There must have been
between thirty and forty of them in the end. And then you see,
I knew I should have to go on again, get past the corner somehow,
and and I couldn't. I simply couldn't face it. Peters, the
NCO said something about going to have another shot. Sir. He was pretty
shaken himself, they all were, but he'd have gone We ought to have
gone on, I know that, But anyhow, I told him I didn't
think we should ever get by at present, and said we'd better go back
a bit and wait under cover some yarn or other. So we started back
down the road. The Bosh was still doing the up and down game on
the road, only about twice as much. By this time. I can
tell you there was no shame between those men and me. We understood each
other. Every time we heard that damned shriek, we fell into shell holes
and prayed they were following us down the road, getting nearer and nearer.
You know that dugout in the bank where headquarters used to be. Well,
just when it looked as if the next lot must come right on top of
us, I saw a light coming from the dugout, and most of us
ran hell for leather for the door. Some one was standing at the entrance.
As we dashed in just in time. We nearly knocked him over.
And guess who it was, said Harry, with a horrible kind of hysterical
laugh. Guess who it was? It was Burnett. Burnett, of all
people. He had been sent up to find out what had happened. Well,
he asked what the hell I was doing, and said I was to
go on at once. I said I was going to wait a bit,
there was too much of a barrage. Then he said, very offensively,
he couldn't help that. My orders were to go on at once, that
annoyed me, and I said I'd see him damned first, and told him
if it was so urgent, he could take the party of himself if he
liked, but he didn't, naturally no reason why he should. Then he
rang up philpit and told him that he had seen the officer in charge and
some of the party running down the road demoralized, so he had, of
course he saw me running for the dugout, though the joke of it is,
the joke of it is he was sheltering there himself. And at the
enormity of that joke, Harry went off into that hideous laughter again. He
said, I refused to obey orders and asked for instructions. Phil Pitts said
it was too late now the stuff had been wanted by midnight. He told
Burnett to put me under arrest and come back. That's what happened, he
went on. And I don't care. Only I wish it had been anybody
but Burnett, though I suppose he was quite right, But it makes no
odds. I had got the wind up, and I had filled with a
party, and I don't deny it, even if I wasn't really running when
he saw me. One thing I can say if I did have the wind
up, I've never had cold feet till that night. I'm glad I came
out this time. If I did fail at the pinch Burnett wouldn't have I
knew I was when I came, and I know I'm done now, but
I wish you'd just explain it all to Peggy and the people who don't know.
And that is what I am trying to do. End of Chapter eleven.
Recording by Roger Maline. Chapter twelve of the Secret Battle by A.
P. Herbert. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by
Roger Maline. The court martial was held in an old farm lying just outside
the village. There was a large courtyard where the chickens clucked all day,
and children and cattle roamed unchecked in the spacious midden. The courtroom was unusually
suitable to its purpose, being paneled all round in some dark wood, with
great black beams, under a whitewashed ceiling, high and vaulted, and an
open hearth where the dry wood crackled heartlessly all day. Usually these trials are
conducted in the best bedroom of some estiminee, and the court sits defensively,
with a vast white bed at their backs. But this room was strangely dignified
and legal. Only at first Madame persisted in marching through it with saucepans to
the kitchen. All these curious English functions were the same to her a Christmas
dinner, or a mess meeting, or the trial of a soldier for his
life. The court impressed me rather favorably. A major general and four others.
The major General, who was president of the court was a square,
fatherly looking person, with a good mustache and rather hard blue eyes. He
had many rows of ribbons, so many that as I looked at them from
a dark corner at the back, they seemed like some regiment of colored beetles
paraded in close column of companies. All these men were very excellently groomed.
Groomed is the right word, for indeed they suggested a number of well fed
horses. All their skins were bright and shiny and well kept, and the
leather of their sam browns, and their field boots and jingling spurs, and
all their harness were beautiful and glistening in the firelight. I once went over
the royal stables at Madrid. And when all these glossy creatures jingled heavily up
to their table, I was reminded of that they sat down and pawed the
floor restively with their well polished hoofs, cursing in their hearts because they had
been brought so far to do some damned court martial. But all their faces
said, thank God, at least I have had my oats to day.
And there was an atmosphere of grayness about them. The hair of some of
them was splashed with gray. The faces of most of them were weathered and
gray, and one felt that the opinions of all of them were gray,
but not weathered, for they were just men. According to their views,
they would do the thing conscientiously, and I could not have hoped for a
better court. But as judges they held the fatal military heresy that the forms
and procedure of military law are the best conceivable machinery for the discovery of truth.
It was not their fault. They had lived with it from their youth,
and since it is really a form of conceit, the heresy had this
extension that they themselves and men like them, blunt on, straightforward men,
were the best conceivable ministers for the discovery of truth, and they needed no
assistance. Any of them would have told you, damn it, sir,
there's nothing fairer to the prisoner than a field general court martial. And if
you read the books or witness the trial of a soldier for some simple crime,
you will agree. But given a complex case where testimony is at all
doubtful, where there are cross currents and hidden animosities, the blunt, honest
men are lost. To begin with, being in their own view, all
seeing and all just, they consider the prisoner's friend to be superfluous, and
if he attempts any genuine advocacy, they cannot stomach the sight of him.
Prisoner's friend be damned, they will tell you. The prosecutor does all that,
and any thing he doesn't find out the court will. Now the prosecutor
is indeed charged with the duty of bringing out anything in the favor of the
accused. That is to say, if private smith, after looting his neighbor,
becomes afterwards remorseful and returns his loot to its owner, the prosecutor will
ask questions to establish the fact. In a case like Harry's, it means
practically nothing. The prosecutor will not cross examine a shifty or suspicious witness,
dive into his motives, get at the secret history of the business, first
because it is not his job, and secondly because, being as a rule
only the adjutant of his battalion, he does not know how. The court
will not do this because they do not know anything about the secret history,
and they are incapable of imagining any because they believe, pplicitly that any witness,
officer or man, except perhaps the accused, is a blunt, honest,
straightforward man like themselves, and incapable of deception or concealment. This is
the job of the prisoner's friend. Now. The book lays down very fairly
that if he be an officer or otherwise qualified, prisoner's friend shall have all
the rights of defending counsel in a civil court. In practice, the blunt
men often make nothing of this safeguard. Many courts I have been before had
never heard of the provision. Many, having heard of it, refused flatly
to recognize it, or insisted that all questions should be put through them.
When they do recognize the right, they are immediately prejudiced against the prisoner.
If that right is exercised. Any attempt to credit or genuinely cross examine a
witness is regarded as a rather sinister piece of cleverness. And if the prisoner's
friend ventures to sum up the evidence in the accused favor at the end,
it is too often that damned lawyer stuff. Usually it is safer for a
prisoner to abandon his rights altogether in that respect, but that should not be
in a case like Harry's. The question of counsel was vital in his case.
I make no definite charges against Philpit and Burnett. All I say is
that it was unfortunate that the two men most instrumental in bringing Harry to trial
should have been the only two men with whom he had ever had any bitterness
during his whole military career. It was specially unfortunate that Burnett should be the
first and principal accuser when you remembered that almost the last time Harry had seen
Burnett, he had shown courage, where Burnett had shown cowardice and thus humiliated
him. This case could have been passed over. Hundreds such have been passed
over, and on their merits from any human standpoint, rightly, why was
this one dragged up and sent stinking to the mandarins. Well, one possible
answer was, look at the history of these three men, And in the
light of that history, I say that Philpitt and Burnett should have been ruthlessly
cross examined by a really able man till the very heart of them both lay
bare. Whether the issue would have been different, I don't know, but
at least there would have been some justice on both sides. And it may
even be that a trained lawyer could not have got at the heart of the
matter, but also prevailed upon the court not to be prejudiced against him by
his getting at it. For that brings you back to the real trouble.
I could have done it myself, and gladly. If anyone knew anything about
these men, I did. But if I, acting for Harry, had
really cross examined Burnett, asked him suddenly what he was doing in that dugout,
and when he hesitated, suggested that he too was sheltering, and quite
rightly because the fire was so heavy. Or if I brought out the history
of that night at Gallipoli and suggested that the animosity between the two men might
both explain Harry's conduct in the dugout and account for Burnett having made the charge
in the first place, thus throwing some doubt on the value of his evidence.
All that would have been cleverness. And if I had suggested that Philpit
himself my co O might have some slight spite against the accused, or asked
him why he had applied for a court martial on this case after hushing up
so many worse ones, I think the court would have become apoplectic with horror
at the sacrilege. Then again, it had been fixed that Travers should be
prisoner's friend. He knew more about the papers and the summary of evidence and
so on than anyone, though as the papers had only been sent down the
morning before, he did not know a great deal. So we left it
at that. Travers was a young law student in private life, but constitutionally
timid of authority, and he made no great show in spite of the efforts
of the Deputy judge advocate, a person supposed to assist everybody. But as
I have said, perhaps it was as well for what they thought of as
the hard facts of the case were all that mattered to the court. And
as related by Philpot and Burnett and Peters. They were pretty damning. That
bit about the running was fatal. It made a great impression. Both the
prosecutor and two of the court asked Burnett, are you sure he was running?
If he had only been walking away from the enemy, it would have
made so much difference. Travers did ask Burnett why he was in the dugout
entrance, and it showed you what a mockery any kind of cross examination would
have been. In the absence of shorthand writers. Every question, in almost
every answer was written down word for word by the deputy judge advocate. After
a question was put there was a lengthy pause while the officer wrote. Then
there was some uncertainty and some questions about the exact form of the question.
Had Travers said, why were you in the dugout? Or why did you
go to the dugout? Finally, all being satisfactorily settled and written down,
the witness was allowed to answer. But by then the shiftiest witness had had
time to invent a dozen suitable answers. No liar could possibly be caught out,
no deceiver ever be detected under this system. That was being fair to
the witness. Burnett answered, of course that he had gone there to inquire
if the working party had been seen to do Burnett justice. He did not
seem at all happy at having to tell his tale again. If his original
report had really been made under a sudden impulse of spite and revenge, and
however that may be, he could certainly have made a very different report.
I think perhaps he had not realized how far the matter would go, had
not imagined that it would come to a court martial, and now regretted it.
But it was too late. He could not eat his words, and
that was the devil of it. Burnett might have made a different report.
Philpott could have arranged things with the brigade, could have had Harry sent to
the base on the ground of his record and medical condition, and not have
applied for a court martial. But once those hard facts came before the court
to be examined under that procedure simply as hard facts, an officer ordered up
with a party in important stores, some of the party scattered, Officers seen
running running mind you, in the wrong direction, Officers shaken on the evidence
of his men, and refusing to obey an order. It was too late
to wonder whether the case should ever have come there. That was Philpit's business.
He did not seem disturbed. He even mentioned casually that there had been
a similar incident with this officer once before, when his conduct with a working
party by no means satisfied me quite apart from the monstrous misrepresentation of the thing.
The statement was wholly inadmissible at that stage, and the President stopped him.
But that also was too late. It had sunk in, and so
the evidence went slowly on unshaken. Not that it was all unshakable. No
one tried to shake it. After Philpit came Peter's the NCO. A good
fellow, he told the court what Harry had said about going back to wait
a bit instead of going straight on. When the party collected again, they
asked him, was there any reason why the party should not have gone on?
Then? Well, sir, he said, the shelling was bad,
and we should have had some casualties. But I dare say we should have
gone through. I've seen as bad before. Then there was one of the
men who had been with Harry, a good fellow who hated being there.
He told the story of the movements of the party with the usual broken irrelevances,
but by his too obvious wish to help Harry did him no good.
When asked in what condition the officer was, he said, well, Sir,
he seemed to have lost his nerve, like we all of us had
as far as that goes. The shelling was that heavy. But that was
no defense for Harry. Harry could either make a statement not on oath,
or give evidence on oath and be cross examined. He chose the latter,
related simply the movements of the party and himself, and did not deny any
of the facts of which evidence had already been given. When you had collected
the party under the bank by this corner you speak of, said the President,
why did you not then proceed with the party? I thought the shelling
was too heavy, sir. Just then I thought it would be better to
go back and wait a bit where there was more cover, till the shelling
got less. But Sergeant Peter says the party would probably have got through.
Yes, sir, in view of the orders you had received, wouldn't it
have been better to go straight on? I don't know, sir, Perhaps
it would. Then. Why didn't you do that at the time, sir?
I thought it best to go back and wait and that was what you
were doing when you were seen a running to the dugout. Yes, sir,
well, the court did not believe it, and I cannot blame them,
for I knew that Harry was not being perfectly ingenuous. I knew that
he could not have gone on. Yet it was a reasonable story. And
if the court had been able to imagine themselves in Harry's condition of mind and
body, crouching in the wet dark under that bank, faint with weariness and
fear shaken, with those blinding tearing concussions, not knowing what they should do
or what they could do, perhaps they would have said in their hearts,
I will believe that story. But they could not imagine it, for they
were naturally stouthearted men, and they had not seen too much war, they
were not young enough, and indeed it was not their business to imagine that.
Another of the court asked, is it true to say, as Private
Mallin said that you had lost your nerve? Well, sir, I had
the wind up pretty badly one usually does at that corner. And I've had
too much of it, I see, I wondered if he did see if
he had ever had too much of it? Harry said nothing about Burnett,
nothing about Philpit. Probably it would have done no good. And as he
told me afterwards, the real charge was that I'd lost my nerve, and
so I had, and I don't want to wangle out of it like that.
That was the end of it. They were kind enough, those gray
men. They did not like the job, and they wanted only to do
their duty. But they conceived that their duty was laid down in the book
to look at the hard facts and no further. And the hard facts were
very hard. The court was closed while they considered their verdict. It was
closed for forty minutes, and when it reopened they asked for evidence of character,
and that meant that the verdict was guilty on the only facts they had
succeeded in discovering. It could hardly have been anything else. The adjutant put
in formal evidence of Harry's service, age record and so on, and I
was allowed to give evidence of character. I told them simply the sort of
fighting record he had about Gallipoli and the scouting and the job he had refused
in England. I am glad to believe that I did him a little good
for that evening. It got about somehow that he was recommended to mercy,
and perhaps they remembered that he was twenty three end of Chapter twelve, recording
by Roger Maline, Chapter thirteen of the Secret Battle by A. P.
Herbert. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Roger Maline.
That evening I sat in Sea Company mess for an hour and talked with
him about the trial. They were very sad and upset at this thing happening
in the regiment. But they were reasonable and generous, not like those d
company pups Wallace and the other for they were older men and had nearly all
been out a long time. Only one of them annoyed me, a fellow
in the thirties, making a good income in the city, who had only
joined up just before he had to under the Derby scheme, and had been
out a month. This fellow was very strong in the honor of the regiment,
and seemed to think it desirable for that honor that Harry should be shot.
Though how the honor of the regiment would be thereby advanced, or what
right he had to speak for it, I could not discover. But the
others were sensible, balanced men, and as perplexed and troubled, as I
I had been thinking over a thing that Harry had said in his talk with
me. If I did have the wind up, I've never had cold feet.
It is a pity one cannot avoid these horror terms, but one cannot.
I take it that wind up, whatever the origin of that extraordinary expression
may be, signifies simply fear. Cold feet also signifies fear, but as
I understand, it has an added implication in it of base yielding to that
fear. I told them about this distinction of Harry's and ask them what they
thought. That's it, said Smith, That's just the damned shame of the
whole thing. There are lots of men who are simply terrified the whole time
they're out, but just go on sticking it by sheer, guts, will
power, or whatever you like. That's having the wind up, and you
can't prevent it. It just depends how you're made. I suppose there really
are some people who don't feel fear at all, that fellow Drake, for
example, though I'm not sure that there are many. Anyhow, If there
are any, they don't deserve much credit, though they do get the VCS.
Then there are the people who feel fear like the rest of us,
and don't make any effort to resist it, don't join up or come out.
And when they have to go back after three months with a blighty one
and get a job and stay there, and when they are here wangle out
of all the dirty jobs put in Foster. Well, they're the people with
cold feet, if you like. Smith went on, And as you say,
Penrose has never been like that. Fellows like him keep on coming out
time after time, getting worse wind up every time, but simply kicking themselves
out until they come out once too often and stop one or break up suddenly
like Penrose. And and the question is ought any man like that to be
shot? Asked Foster. Ought anyone who volunteers to fight for his country be
shot? Said another damn it, Yes, said Constable. He was a
square, hard looking old boy, a promoted NCO and a very useful officer.
You must have some sort of standard, or where would the army be.
I don't know, said Foster. Look at the Australians. They don't
have a death penalty, and I reckon they're as good as us. Yes,
my son, Perhaps that's the reason this was old constable. Again,
the average Australian is naturally a sight stouter hearted than the average Englishman. They
don't need it, then, why the hell do they punish Englishman worse than
Australians if they can't even be expected to do so well? Well, retorted
Foster, But this piece of dialectics was lost unconstable Anyhow, I don't see
that it need be such an absolute standard, Smith began again, thoughtfully,
he was a thoughtful young fellow. They don't expect everybody to have equally strong
arms or equally good brains. And if a chap's legs or arms aren't strong
enough for him to go on living in the trenches, they take him out
of it if he's lucky. But every man's expected to have equally strong nerves
in all circumstances, and to go on having them till he goes under.
And when he goes under, they don't consider how far his nerves or guts,
or whatever you call it, were as good as the other people's.
Even if he had nerves like a chicken to begin with, he's expected to
behave as a man with nerves like a lie or a drake would do.
A man with nerves like a chicken. Is a damned fool to go into
the infantry at all? Put in Williams the honor of the regiment person.
Yes, but he may have had a willpower like a lion and simply made
himself do it. You'd be all right, Smith. Somebody said, if
you didn't use such long words, what the hell do you mean by an
absolute standard? Sorry, George, I forgot you were so ignorant. What
I mean is this take a case like Penroses. All they ask is was
he seen running the wrong way or not going the right way. If the
answer is yes, the punishment is death, etc. Etc. To begin
with, as I said, they don't consider whether he was capable physically or
mentally. I don't know which it is of doing the right thing. And
then there are lots of other things which we know make one man more windy
than another, or windier today than he was yesterday, things like being a
married man, or having boils or a bad cold, or being just physically
weak so that you get so exhausted you haven't got any strength left to resist
your fears. I've had that feeling myself. None of those things are considered
at all at a court martial, and I think they ought to be No,
said Foster, they ought to be considered before they decide to have a
court marshal at all. A case like Penrose's never ought to have got so
far. You're right, I don't know why the devil it did, after
all, said Williams. You've got to consider the name of the regiment.
What would happen? But I could not stand any more of that. I
think Smith's on the right line, I said, though I don't know if
it would ever be workable. There are, of course lots of fellows who
feel things far more than most of us, sensitive imaginative fellows like poor Penrose,
and it must be hell for them. Of course, there are some
men like that, with enormously strong wills, who manage to stick it out
as well as anybody and do awfully well. I should think Young Aston,
for instance, and those I call the really brave men. Anyhow, if
a man like that really does stick it as long as he can, I
think something ought to be done for him, though I'm damned if I know
what he oughtn't He oughtn't be allowed to go on too long, That's what
it comes to, said Smith. Well, what do you want, Foster
asked, A kind of periodical wind up examination. That's the kind of thing.
I suppose it is a medical question, really, only the doctors don't
seem to recognize, or else they aren't allowed to any stage between absolute shell
shock with your legs flying in all directions, and just ordinary scrimshanking. But
damn it, man Constable exploded, look at the scrimshanking you'll get. If
you have that sort of thing, you'd have all the mother's darlings in the
kingdom saying they'd had enough when they got to the base. Perhaps no,
I think that's silly. I don't know what it is that gives you bad
wind up after a long time out here, nerves or imagination or emotion or
what. But it seems to me the doctors ought to be able to test
when a man's really had enough, just as they tell whether a man's knee
or a man's heart are really bad or not. You'd have to take his
record into account, of course, and you'd have to make it a compulsory
test, said Smith, because nowadays no one's going to get into a board
and say, look here, doctor, i've been out so long and I
can't stand anymore, they'd send you out in the next draft, compulsory both
ways, added Foster. When they've decided he'd done enough and wasn't safe any
longer, he oughtn't to be allowed to do any more, because he's dangerous
to himself and everybody else. It is only fair to say that long after
the supposed date of this conversation, a system of sending war weary soldiers home
for six months at a time was instituted, though I doubt if Foster would
have been satisfied with that. As a matter of fact, said Williams.
That's what usually does happen, doesn't it. When a chap gets down and
out like that, after a decent spell of it, he usually gets a
job at home, instructor at the depot or something. Yes, And then
you get a fellow with the devil of a conscience like Penrose, and you
have a nasty mess like this. And what about the men, asked Constable,
Are you going to have the same thing for them? Certainly? Only
thank god there are not so many of them who need it. All that
chat you read about the wonderful fatalism of the British soldier is so much bunkum
it simply means that most of them are not cursed with an imagination, and
so don't worry about what's coming. That's true. You don't see many fatalists
in the middle of a big strafe. Of course, there are lots of
them who are made like Penrose and with a record like his something, and
as dan lucky for the British Army. There are not more of them put
in constable, certainly, but as damned unlucky for them to be in the
British Army, in the infantry anyhow. And what does that matter? Oh
well, you can take that line if you like. But it's a bit
Prussian, isn't it. Prussia is winning this dirty war anyhow at present.
So the talk rambled on and we got no further. Only most of us
were in troubled agreement that something, perhaps many things, were wrong about the
system. If this young volunteer, after long fighting and suffering, was indeed
to be shot like a traitor in the cold dawn nine times out of ten,
as Williams had said, we knew that it would not have happened,
simply because nine men out of ten surrender in time. But at the tenth
case, be even remotely possible. That was our doubt. What exactly was
wrong. We could not pretend to say it was not our business. But
if this was the best the old men could do, we felt that we
could help them a little. I give you this scrap of conversation only to
show the kind of feeling there was in the regiment, because that is the
surest test of the rightness of these things. They were still at it when
I left, And as I went out wearily into the cold drizzle, I
heard Foster summing up his views with well, the whole things damned awful.
They've recommended him to mercy, haven't they? And I hope to god he
gets it. But he got no mercy. The sentence was confirmed by the
higher authorities. I cannot pretend to know what happened, but from some experience
of the military hierarchy, I can imagine I can see those papers wrapped up
in the blue form with all the right information, beautifully inscribed in the right
spaces, very neat and precise, carefully sealed in the long envelopes, and
sent wandering up through the rarefied atmosphere of the higher formations. Very early they
halt at the brigadier, or perhaps the divisional general, someone who thinks of
himself as a man of blood and iron. He looks upon the papers,
he reads the evidence very carefully. At the end he sees recommended to Mercy.
All very well, but we must make an example. Sometimes. Where's
that confidential memo we had the other day? That's it. Yes, officer
who fails in his duty must be treated with the same severity as would be
awarded to private in the same circumstances. Quite right too, shan't approve recommendation
to Mercy, Just right on it. See no reason why sentence should not
be carried out, and I'll sign it. Or more simply, perhaps Mercy,
Mercy be damned, must make an example. I won't have any cold
feet in my command. And so the blue form goes climbing on burdened now
with that fatal endorsement, boring over ridge after ridge, and on each successive
height. The atmosphere becomes more rarefied, though the population is more numerous,
And at long last it comes to some Olympian peak. I know not where
beyond which it may not go, where the air is so chill and the
population so dense that it is almost impossible to breathe. Yet here I make
no doubt they look at the blue form very carefully and gravely, as becomes
the high gods. But in the end they shake their heads a little sadly
maybe, and say, ah, General B does not approve recommendation to mercy.
He's the man on the spot he ought to know, must support him.
Sentence confirmed. Then the blue form climbs sadly down to the depths,
again, to the low regions where men feel fear. The thing was done.
Seven mornings later, in a little orchard behind the casket's farm. The
padre told me he stood up to them, very bravely and quietly. Only
he whispered to him, for God's sake, make them be quick. That
is the worst torment of the soldier, from beginning to end the waiting.
After three months I had some leave and visited missus Harry. I had to,
But I shall not distress you with an account of that interview. I
will not even pretend that she was brave. How could she be? Only
when I had explained things to her as Harry had asked, she said,
somehow that does make it easier for me, And I only wish I wish
you could tell everybody what you have told me, And again I say that
it's all I have tried to do. This book is not an attack on
any person, on the death penalty or on anything else, though if it
makes people think about these things so much the better. I think. I
believe in the death penalty. I don't know, but I did not believe
in Harry being shot. That is the gist of it. That my friend
Harry was shot for cowardice, and he was one of the bravest men I
ever knew. End of Chapter thirteen recording by Rogermaline. End of the Secret
Battle by A. P. Herbert