28
The Hun was indeed at Crissolles, for the brigade had fought there the previous evening. So much for Army advice.
The day was marked by two outstanding events; one, the return of the Major of the Scots Captain’s battery, his wound healed, full of bloodthirst and cheeriness; the other, that I got a shave and wash. We advanced during the morning to cover a village called Bussy. We covered it,—with gun fire and salvos, the signal for each salvo being a wave from my shaving brush. There was a hell of a battle in Bussy, street fighting with bayonets and bombs. The brigade dropped a curtain of fire on the outer fringe of the village and caught the enemy in full tide. Four batteries sending over between them a hundred rounds a minute of high explosive and shrapnel can make a nasty mess of a pin-point. The infantry gloated,—our infantry.
On our right Noyon was the centre of a whirlwind of Hun shells. We were not out any too soon. The thought added zest to our gun fire. Considering the amount of work those guns had done in the last five days and nights it was amazing how they remained in action without even breaking down. The fitter worked like a nigger and nursed them like infants. Later the Army took him from me to go and drive rivets in ships!
We pulled out of action again as dusk was falling, and the word was passed that we had been relieved and were going out of the line. The brigade rendezvoused at Cuy in a field off the road while the traffic crept forward a yard and halted, waited an hour and advanced another yard, every sort of gun, wagon, lorry, ambulance and car, crawling back, blocked at every crossroads, stuck in ditches, sometimes abandoned.
All round the sky glared redly. Hour after hour we sat in that cup of ground waiting for orders, shivering with cold, sleeping in uneasy snatches, smoking tobacco that ceased to taste, nibbling ration biscuits until the night became filled with an eerie strained silence. Jerky sentences stopped. Faint in the distance came the crunch of wheels, a vague undercurrent of sound. The guns had stopped. Now and again the chink of a horse mumbling his bit. The tail end of the traffic on the road below us was silent, waiting, the men huddled, asleep. And through it all one’s ear listened for a new sound, the sound of marching feet, or trotting horses which might mean an Uhlan patrol. Bussy was not far.
Suddenly one voice, far away, distinct, pierced the darkness like a thin but blinding ray. “Les Boches!—Les Boches!”
A sort of shivering rustle ran over the whole brigade. Men stirred, sat up, muttered. Horses raised their heads with a rattle of harness. Hands crept to revolvers. Every breath was held and every head stared in the direction of the voice.
For a moment the silence was spellbound.
Then the voice came again, “A gauche! A gauche! Nom de Dieu!” and the crunch of wheels came again.
The brigade relaxed. There came a laugh or two, a mumbled remark, a settling down, a muttered curse and then silence once more.
Eventually came a stir, an order. Voices were raised. Sleeping figures rolled over stiffly, staggered up. Officers came forward. The order “Get mounted!” galvanized everybody.
Wagon by wagon we pulled out of the field. My battery was the last. No sooner on the road, with our noses against the tailboard of the last vehicle of the battery in front, than we had to halt again and wait endlessly, the drivers sleeping in their saddles until pulled out by the N.C.O.’s, the gunners flinging themselves into the ditch. At last on again, kicking the sleepers awake,—the only method of rousing them. It was very cold. To halt was as great an agony as to march, whether mounted or on foot. For five days and nights one had had one’s boots on. The condition of feet was indescribable. In places the road was blocked by abandoned motor lorries. We had to extemporize bridges over the ditch with rocks and tins and whatever was in the lorries with a tailboard placed on top, to unhook lead horses from a four-horse gun team and hook them into a loaded wagon to make a six-horse team, to rouse the drivers sufficiently to make them drive properly and get the full team to work together, and at last, having reached a good metalled road, to follow the battery in front, limping and blind, hour after hour. From time to time the gunners and drivers changed places. For the most part no word was spoken. We halted when the teams bumped their noses on the wagon in front, went on again when those in front did. At one halt I sat on a gun seat, the unforgivable sin for a gunner on the line of march,—and I was the Battery Commander. Sprawled over the breech of the gun in a stupor I knew no more for an indefinite period when I woke again to find us still marching. The sergeant-major confided to me afterwards that he was so far my accomplice in that lack of discipline that he posted a gunner on either side to see that I didn’t fall off. We had started the march about five o’clock in the afternoon.
We didn’t reach our destination till nine o’clock next morning. The destination consisted of halting in the road outside a village already full of troops, Chevrincourt. The horses were unhooked and taken off the road, watered, and tied to lines run up between the trees. Breakfast was cooked, and having ascertained that we were not going to move for the rest of the day we spread our valises, and got into pyjamas, not caring if it snowed ink.