The Secret Battle

by A. P. Herbert

Yet in France, at the worst, given proper rest and variety, with a chance to nurse his courage and soothe his nerves, a resolute man could struggle on a long time after he began to crack. But Harry had no rest, no chance. The affaire Philpott was having a rich harvest. For about three weeks in the February of that awful winter the battalion was employed solely on working-parties, all sorts of them, digging, carrying, behind the line, in the line, soft jobs, terrible jobs. Now as adjutant I used to take particular care that the safe jobs in the rear should be fairly shared among the companies in a rough rotation, and that no officers or men should have too many of the bad ones—the night carrying-parties to the front line. But about now Colonel Philpott began to exert himself about these parties; he actually issued orders about the arrangements, and whether by accident or design, his orders had this particular effect, that Harry took about three times as many of the dangerous parties as anybody else. We were in a country of rolling down with long trough-like valleys or ravines between. To get to the front line you had to cross two of these valleys, and in each of them the Boche put a terrific barrage all night, and every night. The second one—the Valley of Death—was about as near to Inferno as I wish to see, for it was enfiladed from both ends, and you had shell-fire from three directions. Well, for three weeks Harry took a party through this valley four or five nights a week.... Each party meant a double passage through two corners of hell, with a string of weary men to keep together, and encourage and command, with all that maddening accumulation of difficulties I have tried already to describe ... and at the end of that winter, after all he had done, it was too much. I protested to the Colonel, but it was no good. 'Master Penrose can go on with these parties,' he said, 'till he learns how to do them properly.'

After ten days of this Harry began to be afraid of himself; or, as he put it, 'I don't know if I can stand much more of this.' All his old distrust of himself, which lately I think he had very successfully kept away, came creeping back. But he made no complaint; he did not ask me to intercede with Philpott. The more he hated and feared these parties, the worse he felt, the keener became his determination to stick it out, to beat Philpott at his own game. Or so I imagine. For by the third week there was no doubt; what is called his 'nerve' was clean gone; or, as he put it to me in the soldier's tongue, 'I've got complete wind-up.' He would have given anything—except his pride—to have escaped one of those parties; he thought about them all day. I did manage, in sheer defiance of Philpott, to take him off one of them; but it was only sheer dogged will-power, and perhaps the knowledge that we were to be relieved the following week, which carried him through to the end of it....

If we had not gone out I don't know what would have happened. But I can guess.

II

And so Philpott finally broke his nerve. But he was still keen and resolute to go on, in spite of the bitterness in his heart. Philpott—and other things—had still to break his spirit. And the 'other things' were many that winter. It was a long, cold, comfortless winter. Billets became more and more broken and windowless and lousy; firewood vanished, and there was little coal. On the high slopes there was a bitter wind, and men went sick in hundreds—pneumonia, fever, frost-bite. All dug-outs were damp and chilling and greasy with mud, or full of the acrid wood-smoke that tortured the eyes. There were night advances in the snow, where lightly wounded men perished of exposure before dawn. For a fortnight we lived in tents on a hill-top covered with snow.

And one day Harry discovered he was lousy....

Then, socially, though it seems a strange thing to say, these were dull days for Harry. Few people realize how much an infantryman's life is lightened if he has companions of his own kind—not necessarily of the same class, though it usually comes to that—but of the same tastes and education and experience—men who make the same kind of jokes. In the line it matters little, a man is a man, as the Press will tell you. But in the evenings, out at rest, it was good and cheering to sit with the Old Crowd and exchange old stories of Gallipoli and Oxford and London; even to argue with Eustace about the Public Schools; to be with men who liked the same songs, the same tunes on the gramophone, who did not always ask for 'My Dixie Bird' or 'The Green Woman' waltz.... And now there was none of the Old Crowd left, only Harry and myself, Harry with a company now, and myself very busy at Headquarters. And Harry's company were very dull men, promoted N.C.O.'s mostly, good fellows all—very good in the line—but they were not the Old Crowd. Now, instead of those great evenings we used to have, with the white wine, and the music, and old George dancing, evenings that have come down in the history of the battalion as our battles have done, evenings that kept the spirit strong in the blackest times—there were morose men with wooden faces sitting silently over some whisky and Battalion Orders....

And Hewett was dead, the laughing, lovable Hewett. That was the black heart of it. When a man becomes part of the great machine, he is generally supposed—I know not why—to surrender with his body his soul and his affections and all his human tendernesses. But it is not so.

We never talked of Hewett very much. Only there was for ever a great gap. And sometimes, when we tried to be cheerful in the evenings, as in the old times, and were not, we said to each other—Harry and I—'I wish to God that he was here.' Yet for long periods I forgot Hewett. Harry never forgot him.

Then there was something about which I may be wrong, for Harry never mentioned it, and I am only guessing from my own opinion. In two years of war he had won no kind of medal or distinction—except a 'mention' in despatches, which is about as satisfying as a caraway-seed to a starving man. In Gallipoli he had done things which in France in modern times would have earned an easy decoration. But they were scarce in those days; and in France he had done much dogged and difficult work, and a few very courageous, but in a military sense perfectly useless things, nothing dramatic, nothing to catch the eye of the Brigade. I don't know whether he minded much, but I felt it myself very keenly; for I knew that he had started with ambitions; and here were fellows with not half his service, or courage, or capacity, just ordinary men with luck, ablaze with ribbon.... Any one who says he cares nothing about medals is a hypocrite, though most of us care very little. But if you believe you have done well, and not only is there nothing to show for it, but nothing to show that other people believe it ... you can't help caring.