And We Go On (37 page)

Conscripts had reached the front and we heard that the First Division stragglers were such material and that the old men of the battalion had been heartbroken. A few came to us. We did not abuse them or use them differently than other new men. They were of average build and intelligence and should make soldiers. We moved to Queant finally and there we heard that Russell was to receive a second decoration for bravery. Tommy cursed for an hour and almost went to the captain in protest but I quieted him. Men like Earle and Barron and Murray and Lockerbie, and Tommy himself, had never received any consideration. It was a tragic farce sometimes, the awarding of medal ribbons.

We were shocked one morning to hear that General Lipsett had been killed. We had often seen him; he seemed nearer to us than other brass hat, was often in the trenches, and I had never heard a man speak against him. His funeral was most impressive, a special firing party from his old battalion, the celebrated Little Black Devils, attending. We saw the Prince of Wales for the first time, a clean-looking, boyish sort of fellow.

All through the Cambrai fighting the Student had held his place in the platoon. He was not a blood-thirsty fighter, but he kept pace with those next him and never flinched or took cover before they did. When he helped bandage a boy who was bleeding to death and when he had to help drag dead Germans from a post we wanted to use, I saw him go white and tremble, but he never shirked in either case. He had grit that spells control.

The battalion joined in the general pursuit of the fleeing “goose steppers” and we marched through villages with inhabitants almost delirious. They shouted at us and the children ran alongside yelling “Bon Canadaw.” Here and there we saw things that whitened the faces of the new men and made Tommy's jaws set grimmer. At one place an old peasant beckoned to us to watch him. He hurried to an outbuilding and worked with a long-handled rake until he pulled from under the floor the badly-hacked body of a German officer. The Frenchman stamped on the battered face with his boots until we spoke sharply to him and walked away. Again we saw a more pitiful sight, escaped prisoners, who had lain hidden for two days in a Wood. It was hard to recognize them as British soldiers. They were walking skeletons, with matted hair and beards, rags on their feet in lieu of boots, their tattered clothing crawling with vermin. Haggard, weak-voiced, piteous, it made one see red as he thought of those well-fed, well-housed, comfortable German prisoners seen about the farms in northern parts of England.

We saw refugees with great, sweat-dried Percherons drawing farm carts heaped with mattresses and furniture, with lean cows tethered to the rear, and old men following with barrows and push carts piled with other possessions, nearly everyone dressed in his or her Sunday best, usually black, and very tired, foot sore and pathetic. Some hissed their hatred in vitriolic language, some were dull and would not talk, poor creatures too beaten by life's ironies for even the joy of deliverance. At one place a pig was eating a dead horse by the roadside and was driven away with shrill cries as women attacked the carcass with knives and stripped every shred of meat for their own consumption. We gave most of our rations to children, and to mothers in whose eyes one read the story of the long paralysis of the Hun. One night as we were going past the outskirts of a village a Red Cross sergeant called me to a building, a door-less stable that had sheltered a few of the fugitives. Shells were dropping near, the village had been strafed all the afternoon, and all the rest had fled and left him with a woman who lay on blankets in one corner.

“Help me, corporal,” he said. “I'm alone for the time but my men will soon be here with an ambulance. This woman has been deserted by everybody and is going to have a child.”

He had only a lantern he had salvaged and a pair of sheets taken from a farmhouse. The house was a wreck as a shell had hit it but the stove was still in order and I made a fire in it to heat water. I worked there with the sergeant, a man with three years at a medical college, until the ambulance came and took away the mother and baby, both, the sergeant said, doing far better than he had expected.

The company was at the other end of the village when I reached them and I found Tommy and Sambra and Kennedy and the Student in a house with a fire going. “There's all kinds of stuff in the garden,” said Sambro, “if only we don't have to do picket or anything we'll have a feed.”

We filled a big black kettle with vegetables and water and set it on the stove. Overhead, beans were tied in bunches, drying. We shelled them and put them in the pot, then clamped on the cover. A bed was in the second room and after hanging blankets over the windows and barring the doors we all lay crossways the mattress and went to sleep. I was wakened by the Student. The room was filled with steam and smells. We lighted a candle and found that the beans had swelled and overflowed on the hot stove. We got the covers cleared by sweeping all to the floor and found that our dinner was soft enough to eat. A half-tin of margarine was dumped into the boiled peas and carrots and potatoes and all was jammed into a batter. We served it on mess-tin tops and plates and enjoyed the meal as much as a hotel dinner. Then came a report that set all the company swearing. A Dane who came with the MacLean men had been given the Victoria Cross for work at Parvillers!

We knew he was a “Blue-blood,” that his letters bore a family crest, that he was wealthy, and in France solely on adventure, but we did not think he would have his aims so gratified. He was a good soldier, courageous and willing, but had not the experience nor half the ability of men like Waterbottle, Earle or Williams. The men of his own platoon seemed most surprised. Tommy grinned at everyone and said the war was keeping its reputation.

The next day we reached the fringe of the Raismes Forest and entered it in close pursuit of Huns we had twice sighted. It was cold and damp, a late October night, and the Student and I talked a long time in a brush shelter.

CHAPTER XI

Raismes Forest

The Student talked about an officer. “He's a decent chap,” he said. “He's clean and intelligent, and probably has applied himself conscientiously to his business of killing the Hun, but I felt sorry for him when we were lined up out at billets and he was examining our iron rations and field dressings. Gregory, that tall, blonde, easy-moving fellow smiled at him when he came along. He was inches taller than the officer, so much more man beside him, and when the officer tried to make some pleasantry Gregory made such a swift rejoinder that he was nonplussed. He flushed and stammered and took refuge behind sharp orders. Every man in the platoon could see that Gregory should have been wearing the Sam Browne. I believe he could handle a company without effort.”

The Student had made correct observation. Gregory was a graduate of Edinburgh University, and of good birth, yet he stayed in the ranks, easy-going, quizzical, observing, as if he really enjoyed seeing the futility of assumed rank. He had a splendid carriage, the confidence of the men, and would have made an ideal leader, yet I never heard him speak either scathingly or pityingly of those who ordered his existence and were, usually, much his inferior.

“What does it matter anyway?” said the Student, as we huddled together. “This whole ghastly business is futile in the extreme, and that's what makes it so illimitably cruel. It doesn't matter who wins, the underdogs will remain in their places, the top ones will be at the top, and after a few years there'll be more wars, just as senseless. Our leaders know it, all history is full of lessons on its futility, yet we go on.”

“… and – we – go – on.”

I remembered poor little Mickey gasping, with his last breath, his protest of such a rule. So I told the Student about him, of the white tunic that had meant purity, the red one as a token of the spilling of blood, and how Mickey cried out that he had never worn them, never wanted to, so why should he be drawn in the maw of the insatiable, monstrous machine of war.

Two figures came out of the dripping darkness and crouched beside us, Tommy, shivering, bitter-voiced, and Giger, who was again with the company.

“Not a drop of rum for us on a night like this,” said Tommy, “and yesterday a bunch of transport drivers were so drunk they couldn't keep on the road. They have all they want all the time, and so much bread that they peddle it to the estaminets for beer.” He was in his usual mood and the Student seemed to sympathize with him. They talked of the cycles in history that seemed to chain mankind. Every period had its wars, now one nation, now another, getting its life blood drained without hope of betterment. Why did our statesmen, other statesmen, allow such things? Why was there war?

“If they'd only take them that made it, and wanted it, and give them bayonets and put them in trenches, in mud and rain, and say, ‘There you are, have your fill. Kill the other chap, and we'll get rations to you day after to-morrow,' how much war would there be?” rasped Tommy. “It's not them that fight, the ones who start it, they're always safe and have plenty, it's the poor devils who never know what it's all about and can't see for flags waving or hear anything but drums and patriotic speeches. They join up, or the big boys in the safe places make laws and force them out in front of the guns and see them blown to shambles. I wish that every person responsible, on both sides, could be dragged by the heels around Passchendale and then shelled by high velocity guns till they died of sheer fright.”

Giger got so excited that he could not stay quiet. He had filled out, grown stout, and was a walking testimony to the nutritive value of bully, bacon and army biscuits. “I'd like to smash the Kaiser,” he grunted. “I'd like to stick him with my bayonet, and listen, I'm not going to take no prisoners. Every Fritz I get near is going to get his.”

No one checked him and he grew more confident. “I got back to the platoon,” he boasted. “Binks, him that went down sick, give me a charm.
He took it off a Heinie, it's a wrist ring of hair, and Binks said it was sure good luck. The Heinie was killed by a shell after Binks took it from him, but Binks put it on and went all through the scrap at Parvillers and at Jigsaw Wood and was never touched. We got the Germans runnin' now and I got this charm, so I come back to get a crack at some of them. I ain't never killed one yet and I'd hate to go back to Canada and have to say that.”

There was a sincerity in his speech that made me shiver. It was Tommy who stopped his tongue. “Shut up,” he ordered. “You're no better than the Heinies yourself. Who wants to kill people?”

Then he turned to us and raved about the unfairness of the way the army was handled. “They sent two more guys to the rest camp,” he grated. “Both of them come to us last spring, after we'd been with the battalion more than a year. Yet we stayed in for everything and that pair goes to the seashore.”

“But they're no good in the line, Tommy,” I said, “and you know it.”

“Which doesn't alter things one iota. It's the rotten injustice that gets me.” Tommy was wound up. “They can send a certain number of men out on rest, so they pick out chaps that need officers over them all the time, and they keep the men who've been two years in this mess, never mind how much they need to relax. They know that when a bunch of us old fellows are in front it doesn't make any odds where the officers are. And look at the whole blasted game – about five men back of every one that's up front, five men who don't know what it is to face machine guns, getting the same pay as us and ten times the privileges, and all the glory. Hell …”

“It used to be,” said the Student, “that the fighters did the fighting and the rest stayed on the land. Now it‘s the amateurs that fight, and the professional soldiers are in the rear at headquarters or Base jobs.”

“I'd like a job tendin' them squareheads in the cages,” said Giger. “I'd make them step. They wouldn't go round with their heads up if I was over them.”

“Will you shut up,” snapped Tommy. “You make me sick.”

“Where's the padre?” asked the Student. “Before I came over I fancied that they were always with the soldiers, helping the wounded ones and having little services every chance they got.”

“Don't,” said Tommy, “start that argument. I was a member of the Methodist Church when I enlisted. Now I don't know or care about anything
connected with it. Preachers and padres are not any better than brass hats. They're out of touch with the men, and they've lost their hold.”

“Don't you believe in God?” asked the Student.

“I do” said Tommy gravely and reverently. “If I didn't I'd quit everything. But I'm going to have my own belief in my own way. It's all going to be between Him and me, and no preacher is going to have anything to do with it. They tell you it's wrong to hate another man, wrong to kill a man, and that's a commandment, and yet they get up in pulpits and out on church parades and tell you that we're fighting for the Lord and talk as if the Germans were devils and that it's all right to kill them. Bah – padres, I'm sick of them. They say just what the brass hats want them to say, there's not a sincere man among them. If there was he'd be out between the lines trying to stop both sides from killing each other.”

“He'd get killed himself,” said Giger. “Them Heinies'd shoot anybody.”

We pushed Giger outside and he went, muttering to himself, to shiver elsewhere.

“I don't believe,” said Tommy, “that God is on either side of this war, but I believe that He's with the poor chaps like little Mickey – on both sides. If there's a hell the big bugs will surely get there.”

I got tired of hearing his bitterness and gradually he quieted. At dawn we were stiff with cold and ate cold rations, then started down a road in the forest. It had once been a grand old Wood where French nobles had great bear hunts, but now it was a place where sudden death lurked among the bushes. We saw Germans about ten o'clock, two of them near the road. The captain had just come up to speak to us when they rose and fired down the clearing. He moved as rapidly as we did. For the next hour we tried our best stalking methods but did not glimpse our quarry.