II
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 some one 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 whizz-bang type. This was our first experience of the weapon, and the first experience of a whizz-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 whizz-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 of 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 marvellously escaped. The first whizz-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 14th 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 that 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 labour 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's 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 be endured like a dung-hill. 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 Trower, 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 whizz-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, too, 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.
V
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 north-east 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 dug-out, 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, too frequent farce; it worked under his breeches, and gathered at the back of his knees, chafing and torturing him; and if he lay 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 walls of the dug-out, on the waterproof 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 bawled 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 babel 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 quarrelling 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 shell-fire, 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 tsetse 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 resist it. 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 disgust. 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 bacon 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, for ever sick, yet for ever 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 existence 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 paralysing 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, hot 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 foot-hills 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.