24
Headquarters gave me another subaltern during the day. He had been with the battery in the early days at Armentières but for various reasons had drifted to another unit.
He joined us just before the order was received to take up another position farther back and lay out a line on the Riez de Cugny. The enemy was apparently coming on. So we hooked in once more about 4.30 in the afternoon and trekked up the road on to a ridge behind which was the village of Villeselve. The Hun seemed to have taken a dislike to it. Five-nines went winging over our heads as we came into action and bumped into the village about two hundred yards behind. The Babe rode back to Brigade to report and ask for orders. There were no means of knowing where our infantry were except through Brigade who were at infantry headquarters, and obviously one couldn’t shoot blind.
Meanwhile the Dago servant collected bread and bully and a Tommy’s water bottle, which stank of rum but contained only water, and the Stand-by, the new lad and myself sat under a tree watching the Hun barrage splash in all directions and made a meal.
The Babe didn’t return as soon as he ought to have done. With all that shooting going on I was a little uneasy. So the new lad was told to go to Brigade and collect both the orders and the Babe.
It was getting dark when the Scot brought up his battery and wheeled them to drop into action beside us. As he was doing so the Babe and the new lad returned together. Their news was uncomforting. Brigade Headquarters had retired into the blue, and the other two batteries which had been on the road had also gone. There was no one there at all.
So the Scotsman and I held a council of war, while the Stand-by went off on a horse to reconnoitre a passable way round the shelled village. The light had gone and the sky behind us was a red glare. The village was ablaze and at the back of it on the next ridge some aeroplane hangars were like a beacon to guide storm-tossed mariners. The crackling could be heard for miles.
There was no one to give us the line or a target, no means of finding where the headquarters were or any likelihood of their finding us as we hadn’t been able to report our position. We were useless.
At the back of my brain was the word Guivry. I had heard the Adjutant mention it as a rendezvous. On the map it seemed miles away, but there was always the chance of meeting some one on the way who would know. So while the other people snatched a mouthful of ration biscuit we brought the teams up and hooked in.
The Scotsman led as his battery was nearest the track that the Stand-by reported passable. The only light was from the burning hangars and we ran into mud that was axle deep. Incidentally we ran into the barrage. A subaltern of the other battery was blown off his feet and deposited in a sitting position in a mud hole. He was fished out, spluttering oaths, and both batteries went off at a trot that would have made an inspecting General scream unintelligible things in Hindustani. Mercifully they don’t inspect when one is trying to hurry out of a barrage, so we let it rip up the slope until we had got past the hangars in whose glow we showed up most uncomfortably on the top of the ridge. As soon as we had got into darkness again we halted and took stock of ourselves. No one was hurt or missing, but all the dismounted men were puffing and using their sleeves to wipe the sweat off their faces. I was one.
It was from this point that the second phase of the retreat began. It was like nothing so much as being in that half dead condition on the operating table when the fumes of ether fill one’s brain with phantasies and flapping birds and wild flights of imagination just before one loses consciousness, knowing at the time that one hasn’t quite “gone.” Overfatigue, strain, lack of food and above all was a craving to stop everything, lie down, and sleep and sleep and sleep. One’s eyes were glued open and burnt in the back of one’s head, the skin of one’s face and hands tightened and stretched, one’s feet were long since past shape and feeling; wherever the clothes touched one’s body they irritated—not that one could realize each individual ache then. The effect was one ceaseless dolour from which the brain flung out and away into the no man’s land of semi-consciousness, full of thunder and vast fires, only to swing back at intervals to find the body marching, marching, endlessly, staggering almost drunkenly, along the interminable roads of France in the rain and cold. Hour after hour one rode side by side with the Scot, silent, swaying in the saddle, staring hollow-eyed into the dark ahead, or sliding with a stiff crash to the ground and blundering blindly from rut to rut, every muscle bruised and torn. Unconsciously every hour one gave a ten-minute halt. The horses stood drooping, the men lay down on the side of the road, motionless bundles like the dead, or sprawled over the vehicles, limp and exhausted, not smoking, not talking, content to remain inert until the next word of command should set them in motion again; wonderful in their recognition of authority, their instant unquestioning obedience, their power of summoning back all their faculties for just one more effort, and then another after that.
The country was unknown. Torches had given out their last flicker. Road junctions were unmarked. We struck matches and wrestled with maps that refused to fold in the right place, and every time Guivry seemed a million miles away. The noise of shelling dropped gradually behind until it became a mere soothing lullaby like the breaking of waves upon a pebble beach while we rolled with crunching wheels down the long incline into Buchoire, a village of the dead, without lights, doors creaking open at the touch of the wind.
We halted there to water the horses and give them what forage could be scraped together. The Scot and I rode on alone to Guivry, another seven kilometres. As we neared it so the sound of guns increased again as though a military band had died away round one corner and came presently marching back round another, playing the same air, getting louder as it came.
In a small room lit by oil lamps, Generals and Staffs were bending over huge maps scored heavily with red and blue pencils. Telephones buzzed and half conversations with tiny voices coming from back there kept all the others silent. Orderlies came in motor overalls with all the dust of France over them.
They gave us food,—whisky, bully and bread, apples with which we filled our pockets. Of our Corps they knew nothing, but after much telephoning they “thought” we should find them at Château Beines.
The Scot and I looked at one another. Château Beines was ten minutes from the burning hangars. We had passed it on our way down empty, silent, hours ago, in another life. Would the horses get us back up that interminable climb? Who should we find when we got there—our people or Germans? We rode back to Buchoire and distributed apples to the Babe, the Stand-by and the others and broke it to them that we had to go back on the chance of finding our brigade. The horses had been watered but not fed.
We turned about and caught up French transport which had blocked the road in both directions. We straightened them out, a wagon at a time, after endless wagging of hands and tongues and finally got to Château Beines to find a French Headquarters installed there who knew nothing about our brigade. There were English artillery in the farm a mile farther.
We went there. The farm was a ruin wreathed in fog, but from beneath the now smoking hangars a battery of ours was spitting shells into the night. Headquarters was somewhere in the farm cellar. We followed up a chink of light to its source and found a row of officers lying on wooden beds of rabbit netting, a signaller squatting on a reel of wire in the corner over a guttering candle, the concrete roof dripping moisture upon them. It was 3 a.m.
Orders were to come into action at once and open fire on a certain main-road junction.
The Scot and I went out and scoured ploughed fields waist-deep in drifting mist, looking for a position, found a belt of turf on the edge of a road and fetched the guns up. Locating the position on the map, working out the angle of the line of fire and the range with protractors took us back to the cellar where those lucky devils who were not commanding batteries were lying stertorous. Horses and men sweated their heart’s blood in getting the guns into position on the spongy ground and within an hour the first ear-splitting cracks joined in the chorus of screaming resistance put up by the other two batteries, with gunners who lost their balance at the weight of a shell and fell upon their faces, picking themselves up without even an oath and loading up again in a stupor by a process of sub-conscious reflex energy.
What are the limits of human endurance? Are there any? We had three more days and nights of it and still those men went on.