“Retire immediately!” repeated the Colonel.
I came to earth with a bang and began to apologize. Somehow it doesn’t do to talk like that to one’s Colonel even in moments of spiritual exaltation.
We ceased fire and packed up and got mounted and hooked in like six bits of black ginger, but the trouble was that we had to leave the comparative safety of our orchard and go out into the barrage which was churning up the fields the other side of the hedge. I collected the Stand-by and gave him the plan of campaign. They were to follow me in column of route at a trot, with twenty yards between guns,—that is, at right angles to the barrage, so as to form a smaller target. No man can have failed to hear his voice but for some unknown reason they failed to carry out the order. The leading gun followed me over the ditch on to the field, shells bursting on every side. About sixty yards across the field I looked over my shoulder and saw that they were all out of the orchard but wheeling to form line, broadside on to the barrage.
The leading gun, which the Stand-by took on, was the only one that got safely away. The five others all stuck with horses dead and men wounded, and still that barrage dropped like hail.
We cut out the dead horses and shot the badly wounded ones and somehow managed a four-horse team for each gun. The wounded who couldn’t walk were lifted on to limbers and held there by the others, and the four-horse teams nearly broke their hearts before we got the guns off that devilish bit of ploughed land on to a road, and after another twenty minutes had got out of the shell fire. Three sergeants were wounded, a couple of drivers and a gunner. The road was one solid mass of moving troops, French and English, infantry, gunners and transport. There was no means of going cross-country with four-horse teams. One had to follow the stream. Fortunately there were some R.A.M.C. people with stretchers and there was a motor ambulance. Between the two we got all our casualties bandaged and away. The other batteries had been gone already three quarters of an hour. There was no sign of them anywhere.
My own battery was scattered along a mile of traffic; one gun here, another there, divided by field kitchens and French mitrailleuse carts, marching infantry and limbered G.S. wagons. Where the sergeant-major was with the wagon line was beyond the bounds of conjecture. One hoped to find him at the rendezvous at Buchoire. There was nothing with us in the way of rations or forage and we only had the limbers full of ammunition. Fortunately the men had had a midday ration issued in the orchard, and the horses had been watered and fed during the morning. In the way of personnel I had the Quartermaster-sergeant, and two sergeants. The rest were bombardiers, gunners, and drivers,—about three men per gun all told. The outlook was not very optimistic.
The view itself did not tend to lighten one’s depression. We climbed a fairly steep slope which gave a view of the country for miles on either side. The main roads and every little crossroad as far as the eye could carry were all massed with moving troops going back. It looked like the Allied armies in full retreat, quite orderly but none the less routed. Where would it end? From rumours which ran about we were almost surrounded. The only way out was south. We were inside a bottle which we could not break, all aiming for the neck.
And yet everywhere on that slope French infantry had dug themselves in, each man in a little hole about knee-deep with a tiny bank of mud in front of him, separated from the next man by a few yards. They sat and smoked in their holes, so like half-dug graves, waiting for the enemy, watching us go back with a look in their eyes that seemed to be of scorn. Now and again they laughed. It was difficult to meet those quiet eyes without a surge of rage and shame. How much longer were we going to retreat? Where were our reinforcements? Why had our infantry been “relieved” that morning? Why weren’t we standing shoulder to shoulder with those blue-clad poilus? What was the brain at the back of it all? Who was giving the orders? Was this the end of the war? Were we really beaten? Could it be possible that somewhere there was not a line of defence which we could take up and hold, hold for ever? Surely with magnificent men like ours who fought till they dropped and then picked themselves up and fought again, surely something could be done to stop this appalling débâcle!
26
The tide of traffic took us into Guiscard where we were able to pull out of the stream one by one and collect as a battery,—or at least the gun part of it. While studying the map a mounted orderly came up and saluted.