Was it just a Boche measure to prevent us from using the town as billets any more? Or was it a retaliation for the taking of the Messines Ridge which we had watched from our chimney not many weeks before, watched in awe and wonder, thanking God we were not taking part in that carnage? The unhealthy life and the unceasing strain told even on the Major. We were forced to live by the light of candles in a filthy cellar beneath the château, snatching uneasy periods of rest when one lay on a bunk with goggles on one’s smarting eyes, breathing with labour, listening to the heavy thud of shells up above and the wheezing and sneezing of the unfortunate signallers, getting up and going about one’s work in a sort of stupor, dodging shells rather by instinct than reason and tying up wounded with a dull sickness at the pit of one’s stomach.
But through it all one’s thoughts of home intertwined with the reek of death like honeysuckle with deadly nightshade, as though one’s body were imprisoned in that foul underground hole while one’s mind soared away and refused to come back. It was all a strange dream, a clammy nightmare. Letters came, filled with all the delicious everyday doings of another world, filling one’s brain with a scent of verbena and briar rose, like the cool touch of a woman’s hands on the forehead of a man in delirium.
8
On the morning of the fifth day the gas shelling ceased and the big stuff became spasmodic,—concentrations of twenty minutes’ duration.
One emerged into the sun, sniffing carefully. The place was even more unrecognizable than one had imagined possible. The château still stood but many direct hits had filled the garden with blocks of stone. The Asylum was a mass of ruins, the grounds pitted with shell holes. The town itself was no longer a place to dine and shop. A few draggled inhabitants slunk timidly about like rats, probing the debris of what had once been their homes. The cobbled streets were great pits where seventeen-inch shells had landed, half filled again with the houses which had toppled over on either side. The hotels, church and shops in the big square were gutted by fire, great beams and house fronts blocking the roadway. Cellars were blown in and every house yawned open to the sky. In place of the infantry units and transports clattering about the streets was a desolate silent emptiness punctuated by further bombardments and the echoing crash of falling walls. And, over all, that sickly smell of mustard.
It was then that the Left Group Commander had a brain wave and ordered a trial barrage on the river Lys in front of Frelinghein. It was about as mad a thing as making rude noises at a wounded rhinoceros, given that every time a battery fired the Boche opened a concentration.
Pip Don had had three seventeen-inch in the middle of his position. Nothing much was found of one gun and its detachment except a head and a boot containing a human foot.
The Group Commander had given the order, however, and there was nothing to do but to get on with it.—