And We Go On (25 page)

Cockburn, who had been wounded at the same time as Laurie, returned to the battalion, and I got to know Haldane and Peeples, two big tall men who had come with the MacLean kilties. Then I got leave for a day and went over the country with a brigade signaller, a lad from my home town. Chinese labour battalions were everywhere, digging trenches, and we watched their curious way of shovelling. They used round shovels with very long handles and always had earth in the air, keeping the shovel going all the time and only taking a third as much gravel as we would lift. They carried their dixies of rice and tea level full, having them suspended from poles that sagged and allowed the dixie to swing, but they never spilled a drop, the carriers walking in a spring-kneed fashion. Some of them were enormous brutes, working in baggy trousers, naked from the waist. They had their own clothing and customs and were “bossed” by their own foremen, all being under British sergeants. We saw two of them scrapping, clawing and pulling at each other like school girls, and judged that one good white man could handle two or three of them. At night they had a band, each instrument having one string, and each drummer but one drumstick, and they played a weird music that was monotonous and doleful. They slept in ditches, lining the road for half a mile, or under bridges and would not lie in the open, fearing the German bombing planes.

Several times we heard the dread humming of the big Gothas and one night they came very near, dropping their loads between St. Hilaire and Bourecq, the next village. The Chinese ran all over the fields, jabbering and chattering, and were straggled for miles around before morning. Our lads found that they would buy bully and the cooks had a hard time keeping
a supply on hand. Poker was the chief recreation after payday while crown-and-anchor men were always to be found. There was very little drinking, and not over three drunks came in all the time we were out on rest. Giger had had severe warnings. His latest “spill” had been the statement that he knew an archduke had started the war and that he had been killed for it.

On Sundays Earle and I walked to Lozingham, where we had billeted the previous summer. The 85th were there. I visited my brother and many other boys I knew, and always had our supper there. At night we walked back, nine kilometers, and did not mind the distance at all. The brigade signaller managed to arrange a day with one of the cars and we went away down south, passing a field where an inspection was in progress, men standing rigidly to attention before the scrutiny of an impressive group of brass hats, immaculate in ribbons and spurs and monocles. We saw more droves of Chinks, and Sengalese, strange, soft-eyed fellows with their hair done up in black buns, and there were Frenchman wearing red trousers and gay braid. At noon we got dinner with a Yank, a corporal, who had a brother in the fourth division. He was eager to talk about the war and luridly condemned his own people for not entering it sooner and for being so long in getting into action. He himself had been five months in camp and was fed-up with drilling.

There were rumours of field manoeuvres and trucks came and took us over the country. We were marched into long lines and imaginary positions, and had day-long picnics. Some of the officers took it seriously and bawled us out in harsh language, but the older ones were very calm and it did not break their hearts to see us lying on the soft gray banks and contemplating skylarks. Messages would be sent, and mixed into a mystery; we would go where we were not supposed to go; smoke bombs would be used at the wrong time.

Some of the manoeuvres were huge affairs, and one nice morning we were disturbed by furious voices and rose hastily to see the Corps commander and some of his staff. They did not seem pleased with the way we continually took cover and our officers covertly implored more action. At one point a village crossed our “battle ground” and we charged it heartily – at the wrong time – and rushed a Y.M.C.A. tent that was serving cocoa and biscuits to hungry soldiers. An enraged officer followed us in and wholesale murder was in his eye. He sent men out in various directions
and followed some of them – while the first out returned by another way. At night we lay around the billets and related the incidents of the day and planned fresh frolic for the morrow. It was a wonderful vacation.

One afternoon Sparky and Tommy and I were “casualties” near a French house. After the company had gone we went in and talked with madame in the kitchen. She could speak English as well as we could her language and we got on famously together. She made coffee for us and fried eggs and was very kind. We wondered what made her so eager to help us and she said it was because she had “a Tommy.”

We looked at Tommy and laughed as he blushed, but our grins faded when she went to the door of an inner room and led an apparently old man into view. The fellow's hair was white-streaked and he tottered as he walked. His eyes once seen could never be entirely forgotten. They were dreadful, blue orbs, distended, unwinking, and staring with a horror that startled us. “He is twenty-three,” said madame, “and my only living son. There were two more but they are dead. This boy, Henri, was at Verdun. His mind is what you call at the halt – it cannot get past Verdun. He was wounded there, with dead men on him, and could not move. A day and a night he was like that and now, in his mind, he is still there.”

We expected to hear her breathe maledictions on the boche, as some of the French did, but she did not utter a word of hate. The poor creature she led would not remain where we were but slunk back into the darkened room. He would never, his mother said, go out into the fields or gardens, and his face was the waxen colour of death. For days after I could visualize his ghastly features and those awful staring eyes. We could see that he had been Tommy's twin in physique but it was difficult to believe that he had once the same red cheeks and impetuous, high-held chin.

The next few days brought rumours of big battles to be fought, and the company seemed to steady overnight.

CHAPTER VII

In a German Trench

We found a little estaminet between our village and Bourecq, a small house managed by a gaunt, bony-faced woman with eye sockets like a skull. A varied company used to gather there each night and spend money freely, but, like the widow's cruse, it never seemed to run dry of wine or coffee. It was there we met old “Peter.” We never knew him by any other name. He belonged to the R.C.R.'s and was a hard-bitten, fantastic old soldier used for odd duties. Tommy sympathized with him regarding his regiment's well-known liking for brasso and blanco, and was soon in his confidence. Peter wanted to win a medal. He had had nineteen months in the line without receiving the slightest recognition of his worth, and it grieved him.

“Some bleedin' pup comes over wot has money and goes in the line five minutes and has a Military Cross stuck on his chest,” he wheezed. “Wot for, I awsks yer? Nobody knows. Some chap'll come fresh and dandy from Blighty and be feelin' good as he gits in a big scrap. He pulls some blinkin' stunt and up goes a V.C. 'Course he's likely won the trinket, but I awsks yer, wot would he be like if he'd had a year first in the muck. Jist like any of us, I tells yer, with his tail draggin' and only watchin' his own hide.”

He had been crimed once for striking a sergeant. Up in the crater line at Vimy one night when it was raining in French style a messenger had said that the non-com wanted to see him. Peter asked if morning would not do, as he would be obliged to go overland to get to the sergeant's dugout, the sap having been blown in by Minnenwefers. No, it was urgent, so after Peter got through his turn on post he wallowed through the mire – and got caught by machine gun fire. For over half an hour he was forced
to stay back of the trench, soaked, chilled, cramped, trying to lie flatter each time the gun fired. Then at last, after twice falling into water-filled craters, mud from hoofs to horns, dead beat, wet to the skin, fed up to the back teeth, he reached the sergeant's shelter where that three-striped authority had remained in dry comfort-and the non-com wished to know the number of his rifle.

“I soaked him a good one,” said Peter. “Number of me blinkin' rifle! I hit him hard, I did.”

He told us of another place they had been, some area on the Somme. They were hurried up after dark, before they had rations drawn, to repulse an expected German attack. It had rained a steady drizzle, and when they got to their place there was not a flare going up. They lay in a ditch, without definite orders, without food, without wire in front of them, waiting for an attack that never came, and just before daylight discovered that they were in the rear of the second defense line. “It were a terrible night,” he said. “We couldn't move then, it were too late and we were perished with cold. When it's light we sees a trench we could have used, and up it comes a brigadier, with blood in his eye – the only time I seen one in the line – and a carload of brass hats in tow, and we gets it proper. It's a gime, a bleedin' gime, strite it is.”

He was a find for us. We went there for several nights until we had heard all his tales, and his wish for a decoration was pathetic. “Barin' a bit of ribbon to wear for the old girl's sake,” he said, “there's the ornament itself to have in yer parlour. If I don't get it mytes, I hopes I gits mine in no man's land, that's all.”

And then we drew from him another queer idea. He considered that to be killed out in front, between the lines, the most fitting death a soldier could die. “Let the shells bury me,” he grunted. “It's the plice for Peter, if I has to get me ticket.”

I often thought of Peter afterwards. There was something that stirred one in his intensity of speech. That old derelict really had more of “the spirit of the trenches” than those specialists in safe places could possibly ferment, than any of the red tabs who ordered life and death as fancy moved them. There was something he could not express otherwise in his wish to fall, if he must, out in that Garden of Sleep between the wires, that Valhalla of the bravest of the brave, Nature's cemetery of the vanguard. And there was more than complaining in what he said about the winning
of medals. Was it not true that many decorations were won by conspicuous lads fresh from training camps, without a year of hard days of trench routine, and shell fire and Death's flutter about them? Who knows how strong their courage would have been then? And every man who fought at the front knew that for every high honour awarded, hundreds were deserved, that those given were the lucky ones seen by authority. Valiant men in desperate battles performed prodigious feats of valour and endurance, were killed and forgotten; others survived, with only a few comrades knowing just what they had accomplished. Few men gained Victoria Crosses without exhibiting extraordinary courage,
but
their equals fought, unadorned, in every company on the western front.

A group of entertainers came to Bourecq and nearly everyone went to see the show. It was some offering that included a cave scene, wherein an imp gambolled about. We were to go to see it but Tommy's leave came through and he was excited. “Me for a Piccadilly fairy instead of your show,” he chortled. “A nymph of ‘de pave' is better than an imp in a cave. Away with him.”

Giger's leave came at the same time, and at a fitting time. It relieved considerable anxiety on “Old Bill's” part. He had discovered Giger roaming around an isolated farm of the poorer type. A melancholy female had apparently attracted him. She was the attendant of two bony porkers and a consumptive-looking cow, wore her frowsy hair in a loose knot, had sores on her skin and was dressed mostly in soldiers' discards. Giger tried to talk to her by sign language.

We told Tommy that he was responsible for his comrade and advised Giger to stay by him. Giger grinned. Leave was going to be a red-letter event in his life. “I kin talk German,” he boasted. “One of them Yankees learnt me.”

We had seen him often in conversation with one of the MacLean Kilties, Coleman, a fair-haired boy from Montreal. “Let's hear you,” we chorused, and Giger gave us his complete repertoire. “Donnerwetter,” he growled. “Herr O burst, Gutten tag. How's that?” We applauded.

The battalion moved to Bellacourt. It gave me queer feelings to be moving back to the front again. All of us had realized that we had not been taken back and fed so well and trained for manoeuvres if there were not some big attack in prospect. The company was in fine fettle, every man bronzed and in perfect health – at least looking that way. But I knew that
there were many in the platoons who carried war-shattered nerves, nerve disabilities that were not suspected.

The weather had continued fine and the boys made fun and sang in their billets. One of the “originals,” however, pulled a poor joke. He was in the pioneer section and he exhibited a wooden cross and said that orders had come to have the top bar lengthened, as the “umpty-umps” were coming now with box-car numbers. They had dubbed the MacLeans as “millionaires” because their battalion number had been “1030.”

In the morning as we ate breakfast we had difficulty in getting our food without swallowing wasps. At any time in the summer that one opened a tin of jam or marmalade those black and yellow pests came circling around, but at Bellacourt they came in swarms. Russell fought them till he got stung. He and little Ted were enemies quite often, as they were jealous of each other. Rees, though not much bigger, would not have anything to do with them. He was a good-mannered lad and slightly reticent. Honor had entertained us in the night. He had been visiting friends and when he reached our billet it was midnight. He made his bed and lay down and there in the dark sang in the finest voice a hymn that brought thoughts that kept us all quiet. Not a man spoke or disturbed him, and when he had finished he slept.

O Love that will not let me go
I rest my weary soul on Thee,

Often afterward did I think of that strong tenor in the night in a French barn, swinging, swaying us, holding back every interruption.