20
The village of Chuignolles, ice-bound, desolate, wood-patched was our destination. The battles of the Somme had passed that way, wiping everything out. Old shell holes were softened with growing vegetation. Farm cottages were held together by bits of corrugated iron. The wind whistled through them, playing ghostly tunes on splintered trunks that once had been a wood.
Two prison camps full of Germans, who in some mysterious way knew that we had been in the Cambrai push and commented about it as we marched in, were the only human beings, save the village schoolmaster and his wife and child, in whose cottage we shared a billet with a Canadian forester. The schoolmaster was minus one arm, the wife had survived the German occupation, and the child was a golden-haired boy full of laughter, with tiny teeth, blue eyes and chubby fingers that curled round his mother’s heart. The men were lodged under bits of brick wall and felting that constituted at least shelter, and warmed themselves with the timber that the Canadian let them remove from his Deccaville train which screamed past the horse lines about four or five times a day. They had stood the march in some marvellous way that filled me with speechless admiration. Never a grouse about the lack of rations, or the awful cold and wet, always with a song on their lips they had paraded to time daily, looked after the horses with a care that was almost brotherly, put up with filthy billets and the extremes of discomfort with a readiness that made me proud. What kept them going? Was it that vague thing patriotism, the more vague because the war wasn’t in their own country? Was it the ultimate hope of getting back to their Flos and Lucys, although leave, for them, was practically non-existent? What had they to look forward to but endless work in filth and danger, heaving guns, grooming horses, cleaning harness eternally? And yet their obedience and readiness and courage were limitless, wonderful.
We settled down to training and football and did our best to acquire the methods of the new army. My Major, who had been in command of the brigade, had fallen ill on the march and had been sent to England. The doctor was of opinion that he wouldn’t be coming out again. He was worn out. How characteristic of the wilfully blind system which insists that square pegs shall be made to fit round holes! There was a man who should have been commanding an army, wasted in the command of a battery, while old men without a millionth part of his personality, magnetism or knowledge recklessly flung away lives in the endeavour to justify their positions. In the Boer War if a General lost three hundred men there was an inquiry into the circumstances. Now if he didn’t lose three hundred thousand he was a bad General. There were very few bad ones apparently!
At least one could thank God that the Major was out of it with a whole skin, although physically a wreck.
The guns we drew from Ordnance at Poix and Chuignolles were not calibrated, but there was a range half a day’s march distant and we were ordered to fire there in readiness for going back into the line. So one morning before dawn we set out to find the pin-point given us on the map. Dawn found us on a road which led through a worse hell than even Dante visited. Endless desolation spread away on every side, empty, flat, filled with an infinite melancholy. No part of the earth’s surface remained intact. One shell hole merged into another in an endless pattern of pockmarks, unexploded duds lying in hundreds in every direction. Bits of wreckage lay scattered, shell baskets, vague shapes of iron and metal which bespoke the one-time presence of man. Here and there steam rollers, broken and riddled, stuck up like the bones of camels in the desert. A few wooden crosses marked the wayside graves, very few. For the most part the dead had lain where they fell, trodden into the earth. Everywhere one almost saw a hand sticking up, a foot that had worked up to the surface again. A few bricks half overgrown marked where once maidens had been courted by their lovers. The quiet lane ringing with the songs of birds where they had met in the summer evenings at the stroke of the Angelus was now one jagged stump, knee-high, from which the birds had long since fled. The spirits of a million dead wailed over that ghastly graveyard, unconsecrated by the priests of God. In the grey light one could nearly see the corpses sit up in their countless hundreds at the noise of the horses’ feet, and point with long fingers, screaming bitter ridicule through their shapeless gaping jaws. And when at last we found the range and the guns broke the eerie stillness the echo in the hills was like bursts of horrible laughter.
And on the edge of all this death was that little sturdy boy with the golden hair, bubbling with life, who played with the empty sleeve of his young father spewed out of the carnage, mutilated, broken in this game of fools.
21
February found us far from Chuignolles. Our road south had taken us through a country of optimism where filled-in trenches were being cultivated once more by old women and boys, barbed wire had been gathered in like an iron harvest and life was trying to creep back again like sap up the stem of a bruised flower. Their homes were made of empty petrol tins, bits of corrugated iron, the wreckage of the battlefield,—these strange persistent old people, clinging desperately to their clod of earth, bent by the storm but far from being broken, ploughing round the lonely graves of the unknown dead, sparing a moment to drop a bunch of green stuff on them. Perhaps some one was doing the same to their son’s grave.