FOOTNOTES
[1] All who are interested in the personalities of the Seven Years’ War, as far as North America was concerned, owe a deep debt of gratitude to Dr. Doughty, the Government Archivist of the Dominion of Canada, for the immense amount of material which he has collected and made accessible in ‘The Siege of Quebec’ (Doughty and Parmelee), and in his edition, for the Champlain Society, of Knox’s Historical Journal.
THE OLD CONTEMPTIBLES: THE FIRST CHRISTMAS.
BY BOYD CABLE.
The Divisional Ammunition and Supply Column had done a long march on the Christmas Eve. It was not so much that the distance was long in measured kilometres, but from a point of time, of dragging weariness, of bad roads, of cold and wet and discomfort it was prolonged to a heart-breaking length.
The column had taken the road at daybreak, and this meant that the men had to be on parade a full quarter-hour before, had to turn out of their uncomfortable billets and sleeping-places an hour and a half before the time to parade. In that time they had to pack their kits (a quick enough and simple job, to be sure), put on their wet boots, water and feed their horses, eat a biscuit-and-cheese breakfast, scramble for a ‘lick and a promise’ sort of wash, harness up their teams, pack picketing gear and odd stores on the wagons and sheet them over, have themselves and everything belonging to them packed and harnessed and standing ready to turn out promptly to the shout of ‘Hook in.’ They were all ready, and with a nicely-timed handful of seconds to spare, when the word came, because the practice that makes perfect had been their regular routine for a good many months past, and there had been plenty of times when they had been obliged to do the same routine in very much less than this present leisured hour and a half.
It was raining when the wagons turned out, formed up on the road, and, dropping into place unit by unit, rolled steadily off on the march. The rain was taken quite philosophically and as a matter of course, as indeed it had come to be by now and any time for a month past. There were a good many even by then who had wondered where all the rain could come from, and held a firm opinion that it must cease very soon, on the reasonable assumption that no rain supply is inexhaustible and that the past month must have ‘pretty well emptied the watering-pot.’ They were to learn for another solid three months almost without a break what the Flanders watering-pot can supply when it really sets about the job in earnest, and it was to come to be a standing joke and boast of the first Expeditionaries that you could always tell one of the men who went through that first winter in France because an examination of his toes would show him to be web-footed.
But at the end of December the wet had not been accepted as such a permanent feature of life as it was to become, and there were plenty of men in the column who, as they marched out that Christmas Eve, looked up at the sky and round the grey horizon and tried to find, or persuade themselves and each other they could see, a spot where it was ‘lifting.’ But it did not lift, and before long the men’s damp clothes, half dried by body heat in sleeping in them, had become soaked and saturated through again. It was cold too, and fingers gripped about the wet reins of their pairs of horses grew numbed and stiff, were periodically revived with much blowing of warm breath—the only item of warmth left about a man—into cupped hands, and arm beating and flapping. The roads were heavy, rutted and inches deep in stiff mud, flooded in parts by the overflow from brimming-over ditches.
The march was bad enough in its early stages; it became acute in its discomfort as the day wore on, and men and horses grew tired and more tired. By far the worst feature was the constant series of halts. The road taken by the column was filled for miles with a slow-crawling and packed procession of horses and wagons. The slightest check at the head of the procession meant a stop to all the rest, and because each wagon took a fraction of time longer than the one ahead to see its predecessor started and to get under way itself, what to a wagon in the front ranks was no more than a slowing to avoid running into the wagon ahead was easily translated a few teams back into a pull-up and immediate move on, and further back the line to a longer and longer interval of halt. So that in the middle and rear of the line there were frequent halts of a minute, two, three, and up to ten minutes. And if a wagon driving through an extra soft portion of road was caught and held beyond the immediate strength of the tired team to pull out, the halt might spin out into anything up to fifteen minutes. Several times during the day there were hour-long halts at cross- or fork-roads, while cross streams of traffic passed clear or entering streams were shuffled in. Towards mid-day exasperated officers strove to avail themselves of the frequent halts to water and feed. Buckets would be unhooked from their places under the wagons, and the drivers, leaning out and scooping the water up from the ditches, would perhaps get so far in the watering performance when there would be a hurried order to ‘Get mounted,’ the buckets would be emptied, the drivers hurriedly remount and move on again—to halt again perhaps within a hundred yards. No officer dare halt or hold his section of the column to complete his watering and feeding because the orders were imperative to press on and avoid halting the whole. A halt to feed was actually made about 2 P.M. when it was plain that there was no hope of getting the column in, as had been intended, by the early afternoon; but the halt was so short that there could be no attempt to cook food or make a hot drink for the men. They ate cold bully beef and biscuit while the horses fed, and finished their meal in the saddle when the horses moved again.
During the afternoon it grew steadily colder, and the rain drizzled on without ceasing. The road ran parallel now with the firing line, and as the darkness fell the horizon was lit continually with rising and falling belts of light from the trench flares, while the guns flashed quick leaping and vanishing gusts of vivid light, rolled and grumbled and roared incessantly. The rattle and splutter of rifle fire swelled to what one might have thought an alarming nearness when the road twisted in towards the firing line, or a falling away of the ground or change in the wind allowed the sound to carry better, dropped away again to no more than a distant crackle as a belt of wood shut it off or the road ran wide out from the battle line.
But of all these things the men on the road were heedless. They were concerned only with the slowness of the journey, the wish for it to end, the approach of dark long before it could be completed. The column carried no lights, and as the night shut down the road under the horses’ feet became almost invisible to the eyes of the drivers sitting on their horses or box seats. Each lead driver had to be content to follow close on the tracks of the wagon in front of him, to hold his tired horses up when they stumbled, to halt them quickly when the wagon ahead halted, to move them on again instantly on the other vehicle starting. Every man kept his eyes carefully away from the dancing lights on the horizon, because watching them for a few seconds meant a temporary total blindness and the vanishing of the road beneath them when they came to look down, and this driving in the dark was quite bad enough without that.
The inevitable happened at last. A team driven too close to the road-side brought its wagon wheels within a foot of the ditch, just at a part, unfortunately, where the road-edge sloped sharply to the steep side of the ditch. The ‘long-rein driver’ perched on the box called a sharp word of warning and swung his wheelers to the left, felt the wagon beneath him skid sideways, lurch suddenly, sink sharply ‘by the stern’ and halt abruptly. The driver of the next team saw what had happened, shouted to the other drivers behind him, wrenched his horses’ heads clear of the bogged wagon and tried to pull up. But the horses, jerked from their sleepy plodding, swerved, plunged, slithered wildly on the wet road; the wagon wheels, gripped fast by the sharp thrust of the brake, failed to bite on the slippery surface, skidded forward, butted the wheelers heavily, slewed, slithered again and brought up with a splintering jar and a rear wheel fast locked in the wheel of the bogged wagon. The near wheeler of the second team, floundering and splashing and scrambling wildly for foothold, caught the bump of the wagon, fell, and slid wholesale into the ditch. The road was completely and effectually blocked.
Now the ditches in this part of Flanders are anything from about three to six feet deep, and their sides are cut down as straight and smooth as a wall; in winter they are full to the brim with ice-cold water, and their bottom is an unplumbed depth of mud of the consistency of molasses and the tenacity of fish glue. From all of which you will understand and appreciate the difficulty of rescuing the trapped wagon and horse, although you will never, unless you have experienced it, understand the wetness, the cold, the exasperating stupidity of the horse, the monumental bulk and weight and the passive resistance of a wet and mud-plastered wagon, the bitter unpleasantness of the whole job.
Actually, although this may appear surprising, the salving of the horse was a greater difficulty than the restoration of the wagon to the road. The wagon had to be unloaded, it is true, but after that a plank pushed sloping down under the wheel, a swarm of men clustering and clutching on the wheels and tailing on a couple of drag-ropes, brought the concern out with a rush. Then the team was hooked in again and the wagon rolled off, and with a chorus of cries, of scuffling hoofs, of grinding wheels, the column halted behind the stalled wagons came to life and rumbled on their way. The horse made a longer and more temper-raising job. Driver Jim Ruff, of the A.S.C., had always had an inordinate pride in his wheelers, a liking for them that in connection with a human would have been called love, a belief in their intelligence that was beyond doubt. But that night his pride had a muddy fall, his love a cooling off into annoyance, his belief a staggering blow. ‘Golly,’ the ditched near-wheeler, displayed a stupidity that, as Driver Ruff assured her, would have disgraced ‘a mongrel mule,’ an indifference to helping herself, and a calm resignation and acceptance of her fate that respectively, and again in the words of Driver Ruff, ‘was more like a oyster than a ’orse’ and ‘might do for a bloomin’ padre, but wasn’t no use in the A.S.C.’ Driver Ruff, at the first crash of catastrophe, had flung down off his perch and was round at his wheelers’ heads in a flash, unhooking ‘Wog,’ lying quietly on his side in the road and waiting for assistance and instructions, and adjuring the struggling ‘Golly’ to keep quiet an’ not make a fool of herself. ‘Golly’ took the advice so completely that, having quietened, she refused—although the mud clamped about her legs may have had something to do with it—to move a limb thereafter. At first Ruff and the other drivers called to assist tried to persuade her to get her fore-feet on the bank, then by passing a drag-rope round her fore-legs tried to pull them from under her and up on to firm ground. The only result was to upset her balance and set her slowly sinking sideways until her body was completely covered and only her neck and head were above water. It began to look as if the horse must drown in a four- or five-foot ditch.
Meantime the wagon was man-handled along and into the side of the road and the stream of vehicles resumed their interrupted march, rumbling past a busy rescue party grouped at the ditch-side, working in the light of a couple of lanterns with picks and spades and drag-ropes, to extricate the sunken ‘Golly.’ At last a shelving cut was made in the bank of the ditch, and Driver Ruff, already three parts soaked with splashings and fumblings to fix a rope correctly about his horse, completed the job and the soaking by plunging boldly into the ditch and passing a couple of ropes under the mare’s body. A string of men tailed on to the ropes, and at the word from an A.S.C. officer who had taken charge of the proceedings threw their weight into a regular tug-of-war heave, and hauled the animal out bodily on to the shelving bank, up it, and on to the road.
It was after ten o’clock before the wheelers were hooked in and the wagon swung into the traffic procession, with Driver Ruff soaked and shivering on the box. In ten minutes he had to pull up again for another block somewhere in the darkness ahead. He climbed down and stamped to and fro for full thirty minutes. Then he went and rummaged out a couple of box-lids he had been saving in his wagon for firewood, and, always keeping a wary ear turned to the road for the sound of callings and crunching wheels that would tell him the transport was on the move again, jumped the ditch, hunted in the darkness of a patch of wood, and managed to collect a small armful of twigs and branches. He split his dry wood, built it up and lit it, his fingers so numbed and shaking that he could scarcely fumble out a match. Under the shelter of his cap—it was still drizzling fine rain—he managed to get a brisk flame going, and when he had it burning strong and bright piled his twigs and branches on it. The wood hissed and sputtered, but caught at last, and tongues of flame began to crackle up, throwing a cheerful radiance on the wet faces and forms of the men who quickly crowded round and a most grateful glow of life-giving warmth on Driver Ruff, crouched with chattering teeth and blue lips close over the blaze. But before the fire had even completely caught there came a distant shout, repeated along and down the line, ‘Get mounted—get mounted,’ and the sound, far off at first but rapidly coming nearer and nearer, of tramping hoof-beats, scrunching wheels, and the rumble of moving wagons. The men about the fire scattered and ran to their horses, and Ruff had no choice but to leave his precious fire and run with them. The procession started, wagon after wagon—and within two hundred yards halted again. The disgusted Ruff had the mortification of seeing his fire blazing up strongly and cheerfully and immediately surrounded by a fresh crowd of the nearest men. It was too far to go back, since the move might come again any minute, and anyhow Ruff guessed the difficulty he would have in forcing a way to the front of the dense ring about his own fire. He tried to wrap his wet coat closer about him, and sat huddled and shivering on his seat for another half-hour before the way was clear and the wagons crawled on again.
It was nearly midnight when he dragged wearily into camp. He took his horses’ bits out, slacked their girths, gave them generous feeds, and when their nosebags were empty hung a net full of hay to the point of the wagon-pole, and then went to the cook-house, where he was given a mess-tin of soup and meat and a mug of hot tea. These things finished to the last bite and drop, he, by special and gracious favour of the cook, took off his soaking boots and hung his wet jacket before the embers of the fire, sat himself beside it, and dropped instantly into deep sleep. This, be it noted, was the only sleep he had been able to have for some thirty-six hours. The night before the column marched he had been out with his wagon drawing rations from ‘Refilling Point,’ had been from 6 P.M. on the road, waiting his turn for loading, moving up a wagon’s length at a time to the loading-place, where, under the light of a couple of lanterns, men were hacking up cheeses, dismembering sides of bacon, trundling out boxes of bully and biscuits and tins of tea and sugar. Driver Ruff had pulled out as soon as his wagon was loaded, waited for the others to complete their loading, moved on to rejoin his unit with them. Delays and checks on a road already, even at that early hour, astir with traffic, had prevented their reaching the camping-ground until about a couple of hours before the hour fixed to turn out on the march, and that brief time had been fully occupied by Ruff, first in watering and feeding and rubbing down his horses, and then in getting his own breakfast, packing his kit for the road, and harnessing up again.
Now, as may be imagined, he slept heavily, sitting huddled over the half-dead fire, on this his second night out of bed, after a day of wearying and strenuous work—and in case that be not properly understood it may be remarked that sitting on the hard wooden seat of a jolting wagon, bumping and jarring over a rough road, holding a pair of ‘heavy draught’ horses and steering them with a constantly needed care, hauling them up every few minutes, all these things are actually tiring hard physical work.
But he only slept for half an hour. At the end of that time he was shaken roughly awake and told to get a move on, and to fall in outside the lines before hooking in his horses. He rose stiffly, sore in every joint and aching in every limb as if he had been beaten and bruised with a club. The fire was dead and he was chilled to the marrow with the cold that had struck in from his wet clothes, with the more miserable cold that comes out of late and insufficient sleep. He shook like a man in the ague, and his teeth chattered as he thrust his arms into the clammy dampness and coldness of his jacket’s clinging sleeves. Putting on his boots was sheer torture. They were icy cold, and the wet leather was stiff and hard as a board. Altogether he was just about as miserable, cold, and uncomfortable as a man can be, as he hobbled stiffly from the cook-house into the bitter rawness of the winter morning. As he went out one of the cooks came in and commenced to make up the fire, and it suddenly struck Driver Ruff what a magnificent and enviable job a cook had, always messing about with a warm fire and hot water and other of the pleasantest things in life. The cook, roused from a warm straw bed in the cold of one o’clock to light a fire with damp wood, probably held a different opinion of the pleasures of his office. Ruff had three minutes with his horses before the ‘Fall in’ was called. They whickered and nuzzled at him, each jealously pushing the other’s head aside as he spoke to them and rubbed their noses and pulled their ears. ‘After all, Golly,’ he said, ‘a cook don’t have horses; eh, Wog?’ and at that thought the cook’s job lost its savour and a gleam of content warmed the driver’s soul.
A figure suddenly appeared in the shape of lamp-illumined breeches and boots and a blot of shadow above them, and his sergeant spoke briskly: ‘Hullo, Ruff. Merry Christmas.’
‘Lumme!’ said Driver Ruff. ‘If I hadn’t clean forgot—same to you, sergeant.’
‘An’ may we see the next at ’ome,’ said the sergeant. ‘Now what about this pair o’ yours? Had a stiffish day yesterday, didn’t they?’
Ruff told him briefly but pungently the sort of day they had had and the work they had done. He was so eloquent on their behalf—quite omitting any mention of his own sorrows—that the sergeant promised to manage it somehow that they’d get a light wagon-load that day and the other wagons share the balance.
Driver Ruff began to feel the world not so bad a place after all, and even the briefly outlined programme of the day’s work to begin at once and keep on till evening did not cast him down. ‘They’ll do it easy with a light load,’ he said cheerfully.
The ‘Fall in’ was called, and wondering rather at this unusual item of the morning’s work, the men fell in at the end of the horse lines, standing in an ankle-deep porridge of mud.
Their officer addressed them shortly, an N.C.O. beside him with a lantern, and another with a handful of envelopes and a bundle of cardboard boxes. The wagons, said the officer, would go to Refilling Point, load, march together from there and rejoin the Division at their new camp, separate there, and each take their rations to their own units. And because he might not see them together again that day he had paraded them then to wish them a happy Christmas and good luck, and to give them a little present that had been sent out to every man in the Expeditionary Force.
One by one the men received a photograph of the King and Queen with a message written on the back, and a brass tobacco-box containing tobacco and cigarettes and the Christmas wishes of Princess Mary.
‘Bloomin’ ’andsome,’ said one driver admiringly. ‘I’m goin’ to send mine ’ome to be kep’ for me. There’ll be bags o’ new troops out ’ere in the spring, but we’ll allus ’ave these to show we was out wi’ the first crush.’
‘My dad’s got ’is Queen’s chocolate box yet that she gave the first lot out in S’th Africa,’ said Driver Ruff. ‘I’ll be upsides with ’im now.’
‘I been thinkin’ this week past,’ said a third, ‘that I never knew anythin’ less like Christmas comin’. It seems more like it now somehow.’
And so ‘somehow’ it did. One might hardly expect a handful of men, turned out in the raw cold small hours of a winter morning, standing in mud over their boots, with a long weary day’s work and a bare half night’s uncomfortable sleep behind them, and another wet and weary day ahead, to rise with any enthusiasm to a call for ‘three cheers for the King and Queen.’ But they did it, the ‘H’ray’ leaping eagerly and cheerfully close on the last sound of the word, of the officer’s ‘Hip-hip-hip⸺.’
And Driver Ruff’s was the first and loudest and gayest voice of the lot.