Letters from France

by C. E. W. Bean

They were the stretcher-bearers bringing in from out there some of the wreckage of the night before. We went along the trench farther, and at a later stage we could see men in the mist in ones and twos out in front of the line. A rifle or two from somewhere behind the mist were pecking regularly—sniping from some German outpost; and it seemed not wise to show yourself too freely—the mist was lifting, and you never knew whether the Germans were this side of it or not. But though those bullets pecked constantly at the small parties or at stragglers of the night's attack hopping back from advanced shell-holes, the little procession with the flag passed through unharmed. If the sniper saw it he must have turned his rifle for the moment somewhere else.

We made our way back, when we went, across a hill-side literally flayed of all its covering. The barrage of the night before, and of other days, had fallen there, and the slope was simply a ploughed field. I could not get rid of that impression at the time, and it is the only one that I have of it still—that we were hurrying up a ploughed countryside along a little, irregular, newly-made footpath. We had come out upon a road and crossed it at one point. After a second or two's thought one recognised that it was a road, because the banks of it ran straight. It had been like coming on the body of a man without his skin—it took you some time to realise that this flayed thing was a road at all.

There was a shrapnel shell regularly spitting across that country. We knew we should have to pass it, and one was naturally anxious to be under cover at the moment. At this time I noticed on our left a little group of figures, faintly seen in the mist, attending to some job in the open. We came in sight of the trench we were making for, and they hailed us asking the way. We told them, and they came slowly across the open towards us. They were standing above the trench intent on some business which needed care when the expected shell whizzed over the hill and burst. I ducked.

The men, standing on the brink above the trench there, did not even turn a head to look at it. Five or six angry pieces hissed by, but they no more heeded them than if it were a schoolboy pelting mud. They were intent on their business and nothing else. They did not ask for a trench to get into, but only to be shown the way. Their burden was carried easier over the open. They were stretcher-bearers.

We started home a good deal later from another part of the line by a short cut. Five minutes after we had set out, the Germans happened to turn their barrage across a patch whither our aged trench seemed certain to lead. There may not have been more than fifteen shells in the minute, but it seemed, looking along that path, more like thirty. They were of all sorts mixed—ugly, black, high-explosive shrapnel bursting with the crash of a big shell; little, spiteful whizzbang field gun tearing into the brown earth; 5.9 shells flinging up fountains of it. We pushed on until the shelter petered out and the shorter shells were already bursting behind us, and the trench was little more than a crater to nip into when you heard them singing towards you—and then we decided to give it up. At one time, as we dodged back, a visitor came singing so straight that we dived headlong into a crater just as you would dive into the sea.

A few minutes later we were back in the comfort of a fair trench, perfectly snug, watching the storm. As we reached that trench and turned into it, two men were clambering up on to the bank to join a party of five others who were standing up there already, in the open. They were stooping down to arrange with others the lifting of something up to them.

They were stretcher-bearers—Australian stretcher-bearers. The two pair on the bank already had their load, and the others were lifting theirs up thither. They were just setting out to carry their burden overland on a track which led straight to the barrage which had turned us back.

I learned more about Australian stretcher-bearers that morning than I had known since the first week in Gallipoli. I cursed my fate that I was not permitted to have a camera there, to prove to Australians that these things are true. As luck would have it, the next time I saw that same scene the British official photographer was beside me. We saw the smoke of a barrage on the skyline. And coming straight from it were two little parties each headed by a flag.

We hurried to the place—and there it is on record, in the photograph for every man to see some day just as we saw it, the little party coming down the open with the angry shells behind them.

I asked those stretcher-bearers as I looked up at the shell-bursts how the Germans treated them.