From the start of the war there have been girls who have made a trade of preying on the consciences of men who are risking their all in the trenches. Half the time their trump-card, that there is a child, is no more than a mean lie by means of which to extract money. In the light of this little glimpse of pitiful biography, the world to which we had said good-bye seemed full of treacherous traps to betray our manhood; this thing which we were now doing, despite its terrible cruelty, was clean and straight and redemptive. You rode into action with the sun shining to do one strong thing and, if need be, to die when your courage was at its highest. There wasn’t much to regret about that. It was easy to be good when to be brave was all that was required.
We had come down to Demart, the little village on the edge of No-Man’s Land, from which the offensive had started. The houses were bent and twisted. Their roofs were gone and their walls gaped with ugly holes where shells had torn through them. Of those which still stood, there was scarcely one which had not had a side taken out. Some of them were in flames; others had caved in and sprawled black and smouldering.. The ruins were filled with poisonous odours, gas, blood, decay, the fumes of explosives. Yet one noted the heroism of the little gardens which had somehow contrived to outlive this hell. Trees were dead and stood limply with their arms blown off or hanging laboriously at their sides by a shred; but flowers still smiled and lifted up their faces. All along the streets, outside improvised dressing-stations, our wounded lay on stretchers. There was no moaning—no giving way to pity. However terrible their wounds, they rested there in the sun with the blood drying on their cheeks, perfectly motionless and apparently happy that for a time their fighting days were ended. They were mostly blue and gray-eyed men, simple and childish looking in their helplessness. The stretcher-bearers were Hun prisoners, depressed fellows, who perspired freely beneath their enormous steel helmets and the bulky haversacks which they carried on their shoulders. They plodded to and fro like dumb animals, docile, obedient and eager to ingratiate themselves. One wondered why at dawn we should have attempted to kill each other, when a few hours later we could get along so comfortably.
On the far side of the village we began to climb the heavily entrenched slope, which the enemy had held that morning. Nothing of his trench-system was left. The shell-holes were nearly all fresh and stretched lip to lip as far as Dodo Wood, proving the accuracy and intensity of our barrage. However many men had perished, hardly a trace of them was left; they had been buried by the unseen thing that had murdered them.
At the edge of Dodo Wood a mounted man met us, bringing a message that the battalion we were supporting would probably attack at noon, and appointing as our place of rendezvous a deep ravine several miles ahead. We had lost so much time through halts in the traffic that it was already very nearly eleven. If we were to keep our appointment, our only chance was to strike off to the left across country and risk being still further delayed by wire entanglements and shell-holes. We picked up the track of one of our tanks and followed it round the edge of a high plateau.
It was curious to note how very slightly the plateau was fortified. The enemy must have been hugely confident of his ability to hold that ground. Here and there he had established strong-points, which our tanks had discovered and stamped fiat; but of trenches there were hardly any. One saw extraordinarily few dead and none at all of our own fellows. It was obvious that the enemy had not tried to make a stand; the moment his Front-line had been overwhelmed all the forces which were behind him had broken and fled, allowing our chaps to romp home. It was as unlike a modern battlefield as you could well imagine. The sun shone and larks sang overhead. Through the trampled wheat every now and then a hare scampered; save ourselves nothing human was in sight, living or dead. The armies of pursuers and pursued had slogged their way forward and vanished into the blue distance that lay ahead.
We came down by a gradual decline to the ravine which had been named as our rendezvous. It was an angry looking place, with steep grassy slopes rising up precipitously on either side and no possible means of escape, when once it had been entered, except by the exits at either end. The ravine, like the plateau, was empty and silent—nothing spoke, nothing stirred Unlike the plateau it was not merry with wind and sunshine; it was sinister, shadowy, and held a hint of menace. No one was there to meet us; so while Tubby rode on to find the infantry headquarters, I left the section to rest, while I reconnoitred a village about a quarter of a mile distant for a place at which to water the horses. One had to go cautiously in investigating country so recently captured, as there were quite likely to be pockets of Huns left behind, who had been overlooked in the rapidity of the advance. There was also this additional reason for caution, that in a moving battle it was impossible to tell where our Front-line was at any particular moment. It would be quite easy to go too far and find oneself in the hands of the enemy.
When I entered the village I found that it was as dead as Sodom. It stank like an open sewer. Into its streets mattresses, broken furniture, every kind of refuse, had been cast. It had evidently only recently been vacated by the enemy, for the signs of his going were everywhere. He must have surrendered it without firing a shot, for the only dead were his own soldiers, who had been killed by our bombardment, and one civilian woman with a little fair-haired child in her arms. I tied up my horse and with my groom entered several of the houses, thinking that we might find food to help us eke out our rations. The Hun, with a methodical orderliness which almost called for admiration, had anticipated our necessity and, even in the panic of his departure, had not left so much as a loaf of bread. Whatever he could not carry off he had polluted and rendered useless. The only food we found was in a Quartermaster’s store, where the Quartermaster, a man of immense proportions, sat huddled in a chair with a huge skull-wound in his forehead, contemplating a meal which he would never finish, over which the flies hummed a requiem.
We examined the wells behind the houses; all except three of them had been filled with rubbish. We rode down to the river; here the stench we had noticed on entering grew nauseating. Everything that could render the water undrinkable had been flung into it; dead men, dead horses and indescribable offal. It was horrible, this irreverent use they had made of men who had been their comrades. While we watched the little river which yesterday had been so clean and happy, strangling between its grassy banks, we heard the jingling of swords and the sharp trit-trotting of horsemen approaching. Round a bend in the empty street came the first of our cavalry, their chargers side-stepping and prancing, and their men bending forward with an expression of smiling expectancy. They were the most gallant sight of a gallant, morning, these magnificent animals, dumb and human, who had waited throughout the war for their chance and now, like unleashed hounds, came running hot upon the scent, eager to prove their mettle. The sight of them was inspiring and instinct with intelligence; it lifted the mere toil of killing out of its monotony and into the rarer atmosphere of valour.
They drew up by the river, but only for a moment. The dainty creatures lowered their muzzles to the water, screamed and jumped back, shaking their heads. They looked like high-born ladies, fresh from the toilet, scented and washed and contemptuous of anything that would soil their perfection. There was a look of inexhaustible youth about them, as though they had been pampered with the promise of unescapable immortality.
With a hunting cry and a touch of the spur, they went bounding off through the shining weather, leaving behind a memory which set a standard.