Between the Lines

by Boyd Cable

The engagement was not over yet. It had been raging with varying intensity for almost a week, had resulted in a considerable advance of the British line, and had now resolved itself into a spasmodic series of struggles on the one side to 'make good' the captured ground and steal a few more yards, if possible; on the other, to strengthen the defence against further attacks and to make the captured trenches untenable.

But the struggle now was to the Regiment coming out a matter of almost outside interest, an interest reduced nearly to the level of the newspaper readers' at home, something to read or hear and talk about in the intervals of eating and drinking, of work and amusement and sleep and the ordinary incidents of daily life. Except, of course, that the Regiment always had at the back of this casual interest the more personal one that if affairs went badly their routine existence 'in reserve' might be rudely interrupted and they might be hurried back and flung again into the fight.

But that was unlikely, and meantime there were still stray shells and bullets to be dodged, the rifles and kits were blasphemously heavy, and it was most blasphemously hot. The men were occupied enough in picking their steps in the broken ground, in their plodding, laborious progress, above all in paying heed to the order constantly passing back to 'keep low,' but they were still able to note with a sort of professional interest the damage done to the countryside. A 'small-holding' cottage between the trenches had been shelled and set on fire, and was gutted to the four bare, blackened walls. The ground about it still showed in the little squares and oblongs that had divided the different cultivations, but the difference now was merely of various weeds and rank growths, and the ground was thickly pitted with shell-holes. A length of road was gridironed with deep and laboriously dug trenches, and of the poplars that ran along its edge some were broken off in jagged stumps, some stood with stems as straight and bare as telegraph poles, or half cut through and collapsed like a half-shut knife or an inverted V, with their heads in the dust; others were left with heads snapped off and dangling in grey withered leaves, or with branches glinting white splinters and stripped naked, as in the dead of winter. In an orchard the fruit trees were smashed, uprooted, heaped pell-mell in a tangle of broken branches, bare twisted trunks, fragments of stump a foot or a yard high, here a tree slashed off short, lifted, and flung a dozen yards, and left head down and trunk in air; there a row of currant bushes with a yawning shell-crater in the middle, a ragged remnant of bush at one end and the rest vanished utterly, leaving only a line of torn stems from an inch to a foot long to mark their place.

A farm of some size had been at one time a point in the advanced trenches, and had been converted into a 'keep.' Its late owner would never have recognised it in its new part. Such walls as were left had been buttressed out of sight by sandbags; trenches twisted about the outbuildings, burrowed under and into them, and wriggled out again through holes in the walls; a market cart, turned upside down, and earthed over to form a bomb-store, occupied a corner of the farmyard; cover for snipers' loopholes had been constructed from ploughshares; a remaining fragment of a grain loft had become an 'observing station'; the farm kitchen a doctor's dressing station; the cow-house a machine-gun place; the cellar, with the stove transplanted from the kitchen, a cooking, eating, and sleeping room. All the roofs had been shelled out of existence. All the walls were notched by shells and peppered thick with bullet marks. A support trench about shoulder deep with a low parapet along its front was so damaged by shell fire that the men for the most part had to move along it bent almost double to keep out of sight and bullet reach. Every here and there—where a shell had lobbed fairly in—there was a huge crater, its sides sealing up the trench with a mass of tumbled earth over which the men scrambled crouching. Behind the trench a stretch of open field was pitted and pock-marked with shell-holes of all sizes from the shallow scoop a yard across to the yawning crater, big and deep enough to bury the whole field-gun that had made the smaller hole. The field looked exactly like those pictures one sees in the magazines of a lunar landscape or the extinct volcanoes of the moon.

The line of men turned at last into a long deep-cut communication trench leading out into a village. The air in the trench was heavy and close and stagnant, and the men toiled wearily up it, sweating and breathing hard. At a branching fork one path was labelled with a neatly printed board 'To Battn. H.Q. and the Mole Heap,' and the other path 'To the Duck Pond'—this last, the name of a trench, being a reminder of the winter and the wet. The officer leading the party turned into the trench for 'The Mole Heap,' walked up it, and emerged into the sunlight of the grass-grown village street, skirted a house, crossed the street by a trench, and passed through a hole chipped out of the brick wall into a house, the men tramping at his heels. The whole village was seamed with a maze of trenches, but these were only for use when the shelling had been particularly heavy. At other times people moved about the place by paths sufficiently well protected by houses and walls against the rifle bullets that had practically never ceased to smack into the village for many months past. These paths wandered behind buildings, across gardens, into and out of houses either by doors or by holes in the wall, over or round piles of rubble or tumbled brick-work, burrowed at times below ground-level on patches exposed to fire, ran frequently through a dozen cottages on end, passage having been effected simply by hacking holes through the connecting brick walls, in one place dived underground down some short stairs and took its way through several cellars by the same simple method of walking through the walls from one cellar to another. The houses were littered with empty and rusty tins, torn and dirty clothing, ash-choked stoves, trampled straw, and broken furniture. The back-yards and gardens were piled with heaps of bricks and tiles, biscuit and jam tins; broken fences and rotted rags were overrun with a rank growth of grass and weeds and flowers, pitted with shell-holes and strewn with graves.

The whole village was wrecked from end to end, was no more than a charnel house, a smashed and battered sepulchre. There was not one building that was whole, not one roof that had more than a few tiles clinging to shattered rafters, hardly a wall that was not cracked and bulged and broken.

In the houses they passed through the men could still find sufficient traces of the former occupants to indicate their class and station. One might have been a labourer's cottage, with a rough deal table, a red-rusted stove-fireplace, an oleograph in flaming crude colours of the 'Virgin and Child' hanging on the plaster wall, the fragments of a rough cradle overturned in a corner, a few coarse china crocks and ornaments and figures chipped and broken and scattered about the mantel, and the bare board floor. Another house had plainly been a home of some refinement. The rooms were large, with lofty ceilings; there were carpets on the floors, although so covered with dirt and dried mud and the dust of fallen plaster that they were hardly discernible as carpets. In one room a large polished table had a broken leg replaced by an up-ended barrel, one big arm-chair had its springs and padding showing through the burst upholstering. Another was minus all its legs, and had the back wrenched off and laid flat with the seat on the floor, evidently to make a bed. There were several good engravings hanging askew on the walls or lying about the floor, all soiled with rain and cut and torn by their splintered glass. The large open-grate fireplace had an artistically carved overmantel sadly chipped and smoke-blackened, a tiled hearth in fragments; the wall-paper in a tasteful design of dark-green and gold was blotched and discoloured, and hung in peeling strips and gigantic 'dog's-ears'; from the poles and rings over the windows the tattered fragments of a lace curtain dangled. There was plenty of evidence that the room had been occupied by others since its lawful tenants had fled. It was strewn with broken or cast-off military equipments, worn-out boots, frayed and mud-caked putties, a burst haversack and pack-valise, a holed water-bottle, broken webbing straps and belts, a bayonet with a snapped blade, a torn grey shirt, and a goatskin coat. The windows had the shutters closed, and were sandbagged up three parts their height, the need for this being evident from the clean, round bullet-holes in the shutters above the sandbags, and the ragged tears and holes in the upper part of the opposite wall. In an upper corner a gaping shell-hole had linen table-cloths five or six fold thick hung over to screen the light from showing through at night. In a corner lay a heap of mouldy straw and a bed-mattress; the table and fireplace were littered with dirty pots and dishes, the floor with empty jam and biscuit tins, opened and unopened bully-beef tins, more being full than empty because the British soldier must be very near starving point before he is driven to eat 'bully.' Over everything lay, like a white winding-sheet, the cover of thick plaster-dust shaken down from the ceiling by the hammer-blows of the shells. The room door opened into a passage. At its end a wide staircase curved up into empty space, the top banisters standing out against the open blue sky. The whole upper storey had been blown off by shell fire and lay in the garden behind the house, a jumble of brickwork, window-frames, tiles, beams, beds and bedroom furniture, linen, and clothes.

These houses were inexpressibly sad and forlorn-looking, with all their privacy and inner homeliness naked and exposed to the passer-by and the staring sunlight. Some were no more than heaps of brick and stone and mortar; but these gave not nearly such a sense of desolation and desertion as those less damaged, as one, for instance, with its front blown completely out, so that one could look into all its rooms, upper and lower and the stairs between, exactly as one looks into those dolls' houses where the front is hinged to swing open.

The village had been on the edge of the fighting zone for months, had been casually shelled each day in normal times, bombarded furiously during every attack or counter-attack. The church, with its spire or tower, had probably been suspected as an artillery observing station by the Germans, and so had drawn a full share of the fire. All that was left of the church itself was one corner of shell-holed walls, and a few roof-beams torn and splintered and stripped of cover. The tower was a broken, jagged, stump—an empty shell, with one side blown almost completely out; the others, or what remained of them, cracked and tottering. The churchyard was a wild chaos of tumbled masonry, broken slates, uprooted and overturned tombstones, jumbled wooden crosses, crucifixes, black wooden cases with fronts of splintered glass, torn wreaths, and crosses of imitation flowers. Amongst the graves yawned huge shell craters; tossed hither and thither amongst the graves and broken monuments and bricks and rubbish were bones and fragments of coffins.

But all the graves were not in the churchyard. The whole village was dotted from end to end with them, some alone in secluded corners, others in rows in the backyards and vegetable gardens. Most of them were marked with crosses, each made of two pieces of packing-case or biscuit-box, with a number, rank, name, and regiment printed in indelible pencil. On some of the graves were bead-work flowers, on others a jam-pot or crock holding a handful of withered sun-dried flower-stalks. Nearly all were huddled in close to house or garden walls, one even in the narrow passage between two houses. There were, in many cases, other and less ugly open spaces and gardens offering a score of paces from these forlorn last resting-places apparently so oddly selected and sadly misplaced; but a second look showed that in each case the grave was dug where some wall or house afforded cover to the burying-party from bullets. In the bright sunlight, half-hidden under or behind heaps of debris, with crosses leaning drunkenly aslant, these graves looked woefully dreary and depressing. But the files of men moving round and between them, or stepping carefully over them, hardly gave them a glance, except where one in passing caught at a leaning cross and thrust it deeper and straighter into the earth. But the men's indifference meant no lack of feeling or respect for the dead. The respect was there, subtle but unmistakable, instanced slightly by the care every man took not to set foot on a grave, by the straightening of that cross, by those withered flowers and dirty wreaths, even as it has been shown scores of times by the men who crawl at risk of their lives into the open between the forward trenches at night to bring in their dead for decent burial.