The Secret Battle - A. P. Herbert

I have never understood omens; I suppose they are good or bad according to the mind of the man who sees them: and I was glad that Harry thought it was good.

VI

It was one of the Great Dates: one of those red dates which build up the calendar of a soldier's past, and dwell in his memory when the date of his own birth is almost forgotten. It is strange what definite sign-posts these dates of a man's battle—days become in his calculation of time—like the foundation of Rome. An old soldier will sigh and say, 'Yes, I know that was when Jim died—it was ten days after the Fourth of June,' or, 'I was promoted the day before the Twelfth of July.'

The years pile up, and zero after zero day is added for ever to his primitive calendar, and not one of them is thrust from his reverent memory; but at each anniversary he wakes and says, 'This is the 3rd of February, or the 1st of July,' and thinks of old companions who went down on that day; and though he has seen glorious successes since, he will ever think with a special tenderness of the black early failures when he first saw battle and his friends going under. And if in any place where soldiers gather and tell old tales, there are two men who can say to each other, 'I, too, was at Helles on such a date,' there is a great bond between them.

On one of these days we sat under the olive-tree and waited. Up the hill one of that long series of heroic, costly semi-successes was going through. We were in reserve. We had done six turns in the trenches without doing an attack. When we came out we were very ready to attack, very sure of ourselves. Now we were not so sure of ourselves; we were waiting, and there was a terrible noise. Very early the guns had begun, and everywhere, from the Straits to the sea, were the loud barkings of the French 'seventy-fives,' thinly assisted by the British artillery, which was scanty, and had almost no ammunition. But the big ships came out from Imbros and stood off and swelled the chorus, dropping their huge shells on the very peak of the little sugar-loaf that tops Achi Baba, and covering his western slopes with monstrous eruptions of black and yellow.

Down in the thirsty wilderness of the rest-camps the few troops in reserve lay restless under occasional olive-trees, or huddled under the exiguous shelter of ground-sheets stretched over their scratchings in the earth. They looked up and saw the whole of the great hill swathed in smoke and dust and filthy fumes, and heard the ruthless crackle of the Turks' rifles, incredibly rapid and sustained; and they thought of their friends scrambling over in the bright sun, trying to get to those rifles. They themselves were thin and wasted with disease, and this uncertainty of waiting in readiness for they knew not what plucked at their nerves. They could not rest or sleep, for the flies crawled over their mouths and eyes and tormented them ceaselessly, and great storms of dust swept upon them as they lay. They were parched with thirst, but they must not drink, for their water-bottles were filled with the day's allowance, and none knew when they would be filled again. If a man took out of his haversack a chunk of bread, it was immediately black with flies, and he could not eat. Sometimes a shell came over the Straits from Asia with a quick, shrill shriek, and burst at the top of the cliffs near the staff officers who stood there and gazed up the hill with glasses. All morning the noise increased, and the shells streamed up the hill with a sound like a hundred expresses vanishing into a hundred tunnels: and there was no news. But soon the wounded began to trickle down, and there were rumours of a great success with terrible losses. In the afternoon the news became uncertain and disturbing. Most of the morning's fruits had been lost. And by evening they knew that indeed it had been a terrible day.

Under our olive-tree we were very fidgety. There had been no mail for many days, and we had only month-old copies of the Mail and the Weekly Times, which we pretended listlessly to read. Eustace had an ancient Nation, and Hewett a shilling edition of Vanity Fair. Harry in the morning kept climbing excitedly up the trees to gaze at the obscure haze of smoke on the hill, and trying vainly to divine what was going on; but after a little he too sat silent and brooding. We were no longer irritable with each other, but studiously considerate, as if each felt that to-morrow he might want to take back a spiteful word and the other be dead. All our valises and our sparse mess-furniture had long been packed away, for we had now been standing by for twenty-four hours, and we lay uneasily on the hard ground, shifting continually from posture to posture to escape the unfriendly protuberances of the soil. In the tree the crickets chirped on always, in strange indifference to the storm of noise about them. They were hateful, those crickets.... Now and then Egerton was summoned to Headquarters; and when he came back each man said to himself, 'He has got our orders.' And some would not look at him, but talked suddenly of something else. And some said to him with a painful cheeriness, 'Any orders?' and when he shook his head, cursed a little, but in their hearts wondered if they were glad. For the waiting was bad indeed, but who knew what tasks they would have when the orders came.... Often the Reserves had the worst of it in these affairs ... a forlorn hope of an attack without artillery ... digging a new line under fire ... beating off the counterattack....

But the waiting became intolerable, and all were glad, an hour before sunset, when we filed off slowly by half-platoons. Every gun was busy again, and all along the path to the hill batteries of 'seventy-fives' barked suddenly from unsuspected holes, so close that a man's heart seemed to halt at the shock. The gully was full of confusion and wounded, and tired officers and odd groups of men bandying rumours and arguing in the sun. Half-way up the tale came mysteriously down the line that we were to attack a trench by ourselves; a whole brigade had tried and failed—there was a redoubt—there were endless machine-guns.... Some laughed—'a rumour'; but most men felt in their heart that there was something in it, and inwardly 'pulled themselves together.' At last they were to be in a real battle, and walk naked in the open through the rapid fire. And as they moved on, there came over them an overpowering sense of the irrevocable. They thought of that summer day in 1914 when they walked light-hearted into the recruiting office. It had seemed a small thing then, but that was what had done it; had brought them into this blazing gully, with the frogs croaking, and the men moaning in corners with their legs messed up.... If they had known about this gully then and these flies, and this battle they were going to, then, perhaps, they would have done something else in that August ... gone into a dockyard ... joined the A.S.C. like Jim Roberts.... Well, they hadn't, and they were not really sorry ... only let there be no more waiting ... and let it be quick and merciful, no stomach wounds and nastiness ... no lying out in the scrub for a day with the sun, and the flies, and no water.

Look at that officer on the stretcher ... he won't last long ... remember his face ... his platoon relieved us somewhere ... where was it?... Hope I don't get one like him ... nasty mess ... would like one in the shoulder if it's got to be ... hospital ship ... get home, perhaps ... no, they send you to Egypt ... officer said so.... Hallo, halting here ... Merton trench ... old Reserve Line.... Getting dark ... night-attack?... not wait till dawn, I hope ... can't stand much more waiting.... Pass the word, Company Commanders to see the Colonel ... that's done it, there goes Egerton ... good man, thinks a lot of me ... try not to let him down....