My tie alone proclaimed me as an officer. I had left my tunic and all my impedimenta, with—fortunately—my notebooks and important papers, in the pill-box on the ridge.
The orderly in his rough way was comforting. I felt sorry for the boy. It wasn’t his fault anyway.
One had an early insight into the German character. This lot were Mecklenburgers and good stuff by the look of them, but desperately dull and earnest. All day long they sat in that pill-box—three officers and about twenty men—and jabbered. There wasn’t a laugh, there wasn’t even the semblance of a smile. They smoked cigars most of the time; when food was brought, they gobbled it down like famished wolves and then turned to jabbering and smoking once more. Occasionally a British plane caused a diversion; they rushed to the verandah and craned their necks at it amidst a babel of maledictions, it would have been funny—if one had been in the heart for it—to see the way these fellows took their war. They were perfectly safe, and knew it, until such time as we should attack again. The pill-box must have been sunk a yard or more beneath the ground, and had five feet or more of concrete on every side. Only the back-blast from a shell pitching in their back verandah—short of a direct hit from a heavy gun—could have done much harm. They were wonderfully well camouflaged.
They gave me something to drink but could not spare any food, and I smoked a cigar or two. When it got dark they sent us down under an escort. We had hardly started when a “strafe” began, so we sat in another pill-box and listened to our own shells falling all round and hitting the place more than once.
Then the bombardment died away and we went on our way—across the swampy Hanebeek, past batteries and groups of infantry in open trenches or yet other pill-boxes; into Company Headquarters, a crowded cellar in a farm, where a brief examination of our guides by a pot-bellied, earnest Hun officer took place; and then away again, on over more open, firmer country, up a long slope by a narrow bridle-path, with our shells still falling at intervals round about and fresh corpses of men and horses showing where our guns had found occasional value from searching tracks whose use had been established. The warning Draht, Draht (“ware wire”) of our surly N.C.O. guide became rarer, we emerged at length on to a regular road, and after an hour or so’s walking we were taken into the roomy and laboriously built and fortified quarters of the Regimental Staff. There more depositions were taken by the bullet-headed Brigade Major, a forbidding-looking, efficient little blackguard, I thought, and a good specimen of their military machine. Cigars were provided for our guides and we were marched out again once more, items of passing interest, no doubt, but as human beings inconsiderable. We would be going towards Moorslede. I was dead tired and faint with hunger, but the cool night air blew fresh upon my forehead. We passed ammunition limbers by the score—great, clumsy things they seemed after our neat Q.F. variety—and now and again a company of infantry coming up to the line at the rapid, business-like half run, half walk, which struck one so strangely after our own infantry’s measured pace. They seemed to be in high spirits, and had a cheery word for our guides. From what I saw, the German Flanders army went up cheerfully enough in those days to take its hammering.
And then at last, in the grey dawn and after many questionings of passers-by by our somewhat uncertain guides, Moorslede, and a brief halt in a Headquarters of sorts; then on again on the last stage, beyond shell-fire now and knowing—as every German had enviously said to us who could speak English at all—that “the war was over for us.” It was their stock phrase, and I believed them with a deep-down feeling somewhere—in spite of all the bitterness—that it was so, and that I should at least, given reasonable luck, see home and friends once more.
Into Roulers we fare in a grinding, shaking motor-bus and take our first impression of black rye bread and ersatz coffee.
And here we may be left—in a Belgian occupied town, in a stifling, ill-ventilated room, amidst a motley crew of unwashed, sleepy, but not unfriendly Germans; worn with the fatigue and strain of the last long fifteen hours, and at first—for my part—probing vainly for an explanation of it all; and then, as the tyranny of the stomach grows more ensconced, settling down to the long, absorbing vigil of waiting on the next full meal.