THE BOOK OF THE WORDS
We were due back in the line that night, and I was struggling, in company with one humid orderly-room sergeant and several hundred houseflies, to clean up the usual orderly-room mess—indents, returns, and other nuisances which, in the absence of the adjutant, usually fall upon the patient shoulders of that regimental tweeny, the second-in-command.
I was seated at the kitchen table of a farm-house in Picardy. The weather had been wet and misty for weeks—the weather at critical moments in this war was invariably pro-Boche—but this afternoon the sun had reappeared and summer had come back with a rush. Still, on the overworked highway outside mud still lay deep. At the farm-gate two transport men were admonishing two mules, in the only way they knew, for indicating reluctance (in the only way they knew) to hauling the headquarters company's field-kitchen out of the oozy ruts where it had reposed for ten days. Through the open door, looking east, I could descry the wrecked spire of Albert Church, with its golden Virgin and Child projecting horizontally from the summit, like the flame of a candle in a steady draught.
To my ears all the time, through the heavy summer air, came the incessant muffled thunder of guns, and guns, and more guns—British guns, new British guns; hundreds of them—informing Brother Boche that he, the originator of massed artillery tactics, was "for it" himself at last. The bombardment had begun systematically about the middle of the month, all up and down the Western Front. Last Saturday it had intensified in the neighbourhood of the Somme and Ancre Valleys; I had lain awake in my billet, listening, and recalling that summer afternoon, less than two years ago, when Lord Eskerley had gloomily explained to me that it took at least three years to make a British gunner. This afternoon the whole earth trembled; the final eruption could not be much longer delayed.
For Britain was ready to strike at last. True, she had struck before, both recently and frequently; but that had been mainly in self-defence, or for experiment, or to create a diversion. Now she was in a position to strike home. For nearly two years the Willing Horse had stood up indomitably under the strain, while a nation, mainly willing, but shamefully unready, was getting into condition. To-day that nation was ready; every man worth his salt was at last a trained soldier. Never before in our history had such an army been gathered, and never again would such an army be seen, as strained at the leash behind that twenty-five mile front on the thirtieth of June, nineteen sixteen. True, we launched greater armies, and won greater victories in the two years that followed; but—the very flower of a race can bloom but once in a generation. The flower of our generation bloomed and perished during the four months of the First Battle of the Somme. We shall not look upon their like again. It is to be doubted if any generation will—or any race.
Sometimes, in these later days of reaction and uncertainty, we are inclined to wonder whether that sacrifice was justified; whether it would not have been better to wait just a little longer. But in truth we had waited long enough. Strategy might advocate delay, but honour could not. For four months Verdun had stood up like a rock against the rolling tide of assault; it was time we took some weight off Verdun's shoulders. For two years the half-equipped armies of Russia had maintained a suicidal offensive on our account; even now fresh German divisions were streaming away from the Western Front to the Eastern. It was time we called them back. Strategy or no strategy, we meant to accomplish those two purposes. And we did—with something over. Perhaps the Flowers who sleep by the Somme to-day feel, on that account, that what they perished for was worth while. They kept the faith.
I had just dictated provisional Battalion Orders for the morrow; made the usual mistakes in the weekly Strength Return; and was wrestling with an incomprehensible document—highly prized by that section of the Round Games Department which sees to it that wherever the British soldier goes, whether singly or in battalions, his daily rations and weekly pay are diverted from their normal course to meet him—when there came a scuttering of hooves, and Master Roy Birnie, our esteemed sniping and intelligence officer, came flying round the corner on a borrowed horse (mine), as if all the Germans in Picardy were after him. However, this was merely Roy's exuberant way of coming home for his tea. He descended, hitched his steed to the farm-pump, and came striding into the kitchen with blood in his young eye. I dismissed the sergeant in quest of tea. Roy favoured me with a formal salute, then sat down, and began:
"Uncle Alan, I wonder why every battalion in the British Army (except ours) is entirely composed of damn fools!"
"I have heard that speculation so often upon the lips of members of other units of the British Army," I replied, "that I have given up trying to find the answer. Tell me your trouble."
Roy accepted the invitation at once.