XXIV
WINNING AND LOSING
The Western front: a pulsating, changing line—Offensive with the British—The buoyant youth of England—Not a “good show”—English sportsmanship—A successful battalion—Psychology of the charge—“Here we are again!”—Stories of the capture—The “Keetcheenaires”—An army in the making.
Seeming an immovable black line set as a frontier in peace, that Western front on your map which you bought early in the war in anticipation of rearranging the flags in keeping with each day’s news was, in reality, a pulsating, changing line.
At times one thought of it as an enormous rope under the constant pressure of soldiers on either side, who now and then, with an “all together” of a tug of war at a given point, straightened or made a bend, with the result imperceptible except as you measured it by a tree or a house. Battles as severe as the most important in South Africa, battles severe enough to have decided famous campaigns in Europe in older days, when one king rode forth against another, became the landmark incidents of the give and take, the wrangling and the wrestling of siege operations.
The sensation of victory or defeat for those engaged became none the less vivid because victory meant the gain of so little ground and defeat the loss of so little; perhaps the more vivid in want of the movement of pursuing or of being pursued in the shock of arms in past times when an army front hardly covered that of one brigade in the trenches. For winners and losers returning to their billets in French villages, as other battalions took their places, had time to think over the action.
The offensive was mostly with the British through the summer of 1915; any thrust by the Germans was usually to retake a section of trenches which they had lost. But our attacks did not all succeed, of course. Battalions knew success and failure; and their narratives were mine to share, just as one would share the good luck or the bad luck of his neighbours.
You may have a story of heartbreak or triumph an hour after you have been chatting with playing children in a village street, as the car speeds toward the zone where the reserves are billeted and the occasional shell is warning that peace is behind you. First, one alights near the headquarters of two battalions which have been in an attack that failed. The colonel of the one to the left of the road was killed. We go across the fields to the right. Among the surviving officers resting in their shelter tents, where there is plenty of room now, is the adjutant, tall, boyish, looking tired, but still with no outward display of what he has gone through and what it has meant to him. I have seen him by the hundreds, this buoyant type of English youth. The colonel comes out of the farmhouse and he sends for some other officers.
In army language, theirs had not been a “good show.” We had heard the account of it with that matter-of-fact prefix from G. H. Q., where they took results with the necessarily cold eye of logic. The two battalions were set to take a trench; that was all. In the midst of merciless shell-fire they had waited for their own guns to draw all the teeth out of the trench. When the given moment came they swept forward. But our artillery had not “connected up” properly.