VII
WE march, and sleep, and work as in a dream. Nothing that we do or see seems any longer real to us. This inverted way of living by night and drowsing by day, blunts one’s sense of actuality as with a drug. The only fact which remains constant is our ceaseless struggle against weariness.
There’s no longer the faintest doubt as to where we are going; we’re marching into the great shove, to which all the previous four years of war have been a preface. We’re marching, if human endurance can carry us, straight into the heart of Germany. Among ourselves we make no more attempts to disguise what is intended; as though the doors of a furnace had been suddenly flung wide, we feel the heat of the trial which will consume us. To-day is the fourth of August; we hope to be in Berlin by Christmas—some, but not all of us.
One looks curiously into the faces of his companions, half expecting to find their fates written on their foreheads. In so doing, he is not morbid: he simply braces himself to meet the facts of things which must surely happen. He knows that many of those who jest with him to-day, will lie endlessly asleep to-morrow. He wonders vaguely to which company he himself will belong—whether to the company of those who sleep or the company of those who go toiling forward. It seems as though those who are to fall in the battle must have been already selected; they must have been assigned some mark by which they may be detected. So one watches his comrades stealthily to discover the invisible tag which records their lot.
I find myself speaking to my men more as a friend and less as an officer; the thought of that last night-march, which all men must make solitarily, is drawing us together in a closer bond. A voice is continually whispering, “It may be the last time you can be decent to that chap—the last time.”
I notice the counterpart of my own feeling in the attitude of the drivers towards their horses. They, too, realise that for many of us, whether human or four-footed, the hour of parting is approaching fast When stables are ended and the hungry crowd is dashing for the cook-house in a greedy endeavour to collar the biggest portions, the drivers turn back to their teams to give Chum and Blighty an extra pat and to shake the hay a little loose for them. The horses sniff against the men’s shoulders and arch their necks to gaze after them with a mild wonder in their eyes.
In what part of the line lies the furnace into which they mean to hurl us? Some say that we are going to join up with the French—others that the Americans will be behind us and will leap-frog us when we have crumpled up the Hun Front by our attack. There are many wild rumours, the most likely of which is that the neighbourhood of Rheims will be our jumping-off point. But to get us there they will have to entrain us; there are no signs of entraining at present. Nothing is certain, except that every night we are crawling southwards.
Are we brave or merely indifferent? The Army crushes imagination and sentiment. To attain a certain object lives have to be expended—the mere lives in proportion to the worth of the object. For those who plan the game at General Headquarters death and courage are an impersonal sum in mathematics: so many men and horses in the held, of whom so many can be spared for corpses, But the sum is not impersonal for us. It consists of an infinite number of intimate computations: the little sums of what life means to us and of what our lives mean to the old men, mothers, wives, sweethearts who scan the casualty lists feverishly, hoping not to read our names among the fallen. General Headquarters cannot be expected to complicate their book-keeping by taking these bijou exercises in addition and subtraction into their immenser calculations.