So we dressed and talked to Brigade, who had no information. At six o’clock Brigade issued an order, “Man O.P.’s at once.” The fog still hung like a blanket, and no news had come through from the front line. The barrage was reported thick in front of and in Essigny with gas.
The signallers were ready, three of them. The subaltern detailed had only to fill his pockets with food.
The subaltern detailed! It sounds easy, doesn’t it? But it isn’t any fun detailing a man to go out into a gas barrage in any sort of a show, and this was bigger than the wildest imagination could conceive. I wondered, while giving him instructions, whether I should ever see him again. I never did. He was taken prisoner, and the signallers too.
They went out into the fog while the servants lit the fire and bustled about, getting us an early breakfast. The Anti-Aircraft discussed the advisability of withdrawing immediately or waiting to see what the barrage would do. They waited till about 9 a.m. and then got out. The Scots Captain and I wished them luck and looked at each other silently and refilled pipes.
There was a hint of sun behind the fog now, but visibility only carried about two hundred yards. The Guns reported that the barrage was coming towards them. The Orderly Officer had been down and found all things in readiness for any emergency. None of the O.P.’s answered. Somewhere in that mist they were dodging the barrage while we sat and waited, an eye on the weather, an eye on the time, an ear always for the buzz of the telephone; box respirators in the alert position, the guns laid on the S.O.S. loaded with H.E.
Does one think in times like that? I don’t know. Only little details stand out in the brain like odd features revealed in a flash of lightning during a storm. I remember putting a drawing-pin into the corner of a Kirchner picture and seeing the headlines of the next day’s paper at home; I saw the faces of my people as they read them. I saw them just coming down to breakfast at the precise moment that I was sticking in the drawing-pin, the door open on to the lawn—in America, still asleep, as they were six hours behind, or possibly only just turning in after a dance—in Etaples, where perhaps the noise had already reached one of them. When would they hear from me again? They would be worrying horribly.
The ’phone buzzed. “Brigade, sir!”
“Right. Yes?—S.O.S. 3000! Three thousand?—Right! Battery! Drop to three thousand, S.O.S.—Three rounds per gun per minute till I come down.”
It was 10 a.m. and that was the range, when according to plan it shouldn’t have come till 10 p.m. at double the range.