The Test of Scarlet: A Romance of Reality

by Coningsby Dawson

Heming was attached to a battery whose Major was noted for his “guts". He either made or broke his officers in the first week that they were with him. He didn’t have to wait long to be put to the test. The whole of our brigade was crowded into the narrow valley, know as Mash Valley, which parallels the road which runs along the ridge from Albert to Pozihres. It was a direct enfilade for the Hun. The batteries were strung throughout the length of the valley at about two-hundred—yard intervals, so that when we weren’t being pounded by the enemy, we were being wounded by prematures from the friendly guns behind us. When a strafe was on, it was as though two contending gales had met above our heads and were pushing against each other breast to breast. In those days we made landscapes at a tremendous rate. There met at the Somme the most ingenious artists in the science of destruction which the world had seen till that date. They found a pleasant country of windmills, snuggling woods, villages with tall, clear spires, nests of embowered greenness upheld by hills against the sky, and they trampled it with shells into dust and mixed the dust with tire blood of men, till as far as eye could stretch it was a putrescent sea of mud.

In the first week of September 1916, when we crept into our positions under the heavy morning mist, the clay was baked to the brittle hardness of pottery; two months earlier the rains and carnage had washed away all signs of friendliness and greenness. Hands, heads and stockinged feet of the dead stuck out where the mud had dried up; one tripped over them and, at touching them, shrank back with a thrill of horror. It was a good place from many points of view to test a man’s capacity for “guts". It was especially good at night, for directly darkness had fallen the Hun drenched the length and breadth of the valley with gas-shells You could hear them coming over with a whistling sound, like an army of wild geese. You waited for the explosions and, when you heard nothing but stealthy thuds, you knew that it was time to run along the gun-pits and give the alarm for the wearing of gas-helmets. The helmets with which we were issued in those days were rather horrid affairs. They were like gray flannel shirts drenched in treacle and sewn up at the top so that you could not push your head through. You pulled them on and tucked the shirts in under the collar of your tunic. Then you shoved a rubber mouth-piece between your teeth, peered out through the goggles in the side of the gray flannel and slowly suffocated. Seeing that we were in a valley, all the gas from the shells drifted down to the low ground where the gun-pits had been dug and hung there ready to stifle your men directly the suffocation of their helmets became too much to bear. Mash Valley was most excellently chosen as a place in which to test one’s guts.

Heming had been with us two days when the Major took him up with him to make a reconnaissance of the front. At that time I was corporal of the B. C. party, so I went ahead to lay in wire in order that we might keep in touch with the battery should the Major wish to register the guns. At the head of Mash Valley there was an engineers’ dump, known as Kay, and it was at this point that the main trench-system began. We ran our wire in as far as Kay and were met there by the Major and Heming at three in the morning.

A Scotch mist was drifting across the desolation. The air was piercingly cold and a watery moon looked down, I think the first thing that impressed one about the trenches of the Somme was their desertion. The dead far outnumbered the living, and the dead were for the most part unburied. One wondered from where the men would spring up to fight should a Hun attack commence. The walls of the trenches were honey-combed with little scooped out holes. In those holes, with their knees drawn up to their chins and the mist soaking down on them, unshaven haggard men slept. They were polluted to the eyes and wearied to extinction. Sometimes their feet stuck out across the duck-board. You stumbled across them, but they did not waken; they only moaned. When they did not moan, you were puzzled; until a man made some motion or spoke, you were never certain whether he was living or dead. The slain defenders and those who had taken over from them huddled side by side, keeping guard together.

Here and there one of the kennels had been crushed in by a shell and the inmate had been killed while he slept. His putteed legs and heavy army boots were still thrust out across the duck-board; they were the only reminders of his sojourn there.

As one drew nearer to the front-line through the winding labyrinth of trenches, he noticed that the sides were walled up with the dead. Men’s bodies had proved cheaper than sandbags; moreover, they had saved labour in spots where no unnecessary men ought to be asked to jeopardize their lives. The bodies, where they showed through the mud, had flaked off white like plaster exposed to the wind and sun. Flies rose up in clouds as one passed; their wings filled the air with an incessant buzzing.

Horrors multiplied as the world grew grayer and the dawn began to break. We came to a ditch levelled nearly flat by the Hun barrage, in which Jocks and coloured troops had fought side by side. They were buried to the waist; in the process of decay the black men had turned white and the white black.

I watched the effect of all this on Heming. The Major watched hun. Perhaps most closely of all the signallers watched him. When a new officer joins any unit, the men are overwhelmingly eager to find out whether he has guts. They know that the day is always coming when their chance of life may depend on his judgment and courage.

Heming’s face was the face of a dreamer. He never was nor could have been a man of action. He imagined too far ahead. He visualized and fought the horror which lurked behind each traverse before he came to it. A thousand times that morning he must have seen himself mutilated and dead. His expression was tense and excited, but an amused smile played about the edges of his mouth. His eyes beneath his steel-helmet were brilliant and forward-looking. He seemed to contemplate his inward struggle against terror with the unimpassioned aloofness of a spectator.

Trenches were becoming shallower. It was some time since we had passed any sentries or working-parties. A horrible, brooding silence was over everything, broken only by the secret dripping of rain and the scuttling of rats among corpses. The Major became more frequent in the examining of his map. At last he ordered us to crouch down while he stealthily peered over the lip of the trench in an effort to get his bearings. It began to dawn on us that we had come too far and were lost in No Man’s Land.