The greatest comfort I knew was to lie on my valise in the wet straw with closed eyes and listen to “Caprice Viennois” on the gramophone. It lifted one’s soul with gentle hands and bore it away into infinite space where all was quiet and full of eternal rest and beauty. It summed up the youth of the world, the springtime of love in all its fresh cleanness, like the sun after an April shower transforms the universe into magic colours.
I think the subalterns guessed something of my trouble for they went out of their way to help me in little things.
We marched north and went into the line again behind Albert, a murdered city whose skeleton melted before one’s eyes under the ceaseless rain of shells from our heavy artillery.
During and since the retreat the cry on all sides was “Where the devil are the Americans?”—those mysterious Americans who were reported to be landing at the rate of seven a minute. What became of them after landing? They seemed to disappear. Some had seen them buying up Marseilles, and then painting Paris all colours of the rainbow, but no one had yet heard of them doing any fighting. The attitude was not very bright, until Pershing’s offer to Foch. Then everybody said, “Ah! Now we shall see something.” Our own recruits seemed to be the dregs of England, untrained, weedy specimens who had never seen a gun and were incapable of learning. Yet we held the Hun all right. One looked for the huskies from U.S.A., however, with some anxiety.
At Albert we found them, specimens of them, wedged in the line with our infantry, learning the game. Their one desire was to go out into No Man’s Land and get to close quarters. They brought Brother Boche or bits of him every time. One overheard talk on one’s way along the trenches to the O.P. “Danger?” queried one sarcastically, “Say, I ain’t bin shot at yet.” And another time when two officers and I had been shelled out of the O.P. by a pip-squeak battery to our extreme discomfort and danger, we came upon a great beefy American standing on the fire step watching the shells burst on the place we had just succeeded in leaving. “If that guy don’t quit foolin’ around with that gun,” he said thoughtfully, “some one’ll likely get hurt in a minute.”
Which was all to the good. They shaped well. The trouble apparently was that they had no guns and no rifles.
Our own positions were another instance of the criminal folly of ignorance,—great obvious white gashes in a green field, badly camouflaged, photographed and registered by the Hun, so placed that the lowest range to clear the crest was 3,500 and the S.O.S. was 3,550. It meant that if the Germans advanced only fifty yards we could not bring fire to bear on them.
The dawn of our getting in was enlivened by an hour’s bombardment with gas and four-twos. Every succeeding dawn was the same.
Fortunately it proved to be a peace sector, comparatively speaking, and I moved out of that unsavoury spot with no more delay than was required in getting the Colonel’s consent. It only took the death of one man to prove my point. He was a mere gunner, not even on proficiency pay, so presumably it was cheap knowledge. We buried him at midnight in pouring rain, the padre reading the service by the light of my electric torch. But the Colonel wasn’t there.
From the new position so reluctantly agreed to, we fired many hundreds of rounds, as did our successors, and not a single man became a casualty.