VIII
IDOLS OF THE CAVE
Like the Cyclopes they dwelt in hollow caves, and each Colonel uttered the law to his children and recked not of the others except when the Brigadier came round. True there were two and a half battalions in their line of 2700 yards, but all they knew was that the next battalion to their own was the Highlanders; it was only when the five days were up and they were marched back to billets that they were able to cultivate that somewhat exclusive society. Their trenches were like the suburbs, they were faintly conscious that people lived in the next street, but they never saw them. Their neighbours were as self-contained and silent as themselves, except when their look-outs or machine-guns became loquacious. Then they too became eloquent, and the whole line talked freely at the Germans 200 yards away. By day the men slept heavily on straw in hollows under the parapet, supported with crates and sprinkled with chloride of lime; by night they were out at the listening posts, in the sap-heads, or behind the parapet, with their eyes glued to the field of yellow mustard in front of us. They had watched that field for three months. They knew every blade of grass therein. No experimental agriculturist ever studied his lucerne and sainfoin as they have studied the grasses of that field. They have watched it from winter to spring; they have seen the lesser celandine give way to pink clover and sorrel, and the grass shoot up from an inch to a foot. They have, indeed, been studying not botany but ethnology, searching for traces of that species of primitive man known to anthropologists as the Hun. They have never found him except once, when one of our look-outs saw something crawling across that field about midnight and promptly emptied his magazine. In the morning they saw a grey figure lying out in the open; the days passed and the long grass sprang up and concealed it till nothing was left to attest its obscene presence except a little cloud of black flies. Their horizon is bounded by rows of sand-bags, and their interest in those sand-bags is only equalled by their interest in the field in front of them. Occasionally one of our men finds them more than usually interesting. There is a loud report, the click of a bolt, and the pungent smell of burnt cordite. Then all is still again.
The tangent-sight on the standard of their machine-gun is always at 200, and they have not altered the range for three months. Occasionally at night the N.C.O. seizes the traversing-handles, and with his thumb on the button slowly sweeps that range of sand-bags, till the feed-block sucks up the cartridge-belt like a chaff-cutter and the empty cartridge-cases lie as thick round the tripod as acorns under an oak. The Huns reply by taking a flashlight photograph of us with a calcium flare, and then all is still again. In such excursions and alarms do they pass the long night.
Though five-sixths of them slept stertorously in their holes by day, by night they were as wakeful as owls, and not less predatory. Life in the trenches is one long struggle for existence, and in the course of it they developed those acquired characteristics whereby the birds of the air and the beasts of the field maintain themselves in a world of carnage. They learnt to walk delicately on the balls of their feet as silently as hares, to see in the dark like foxes, to wriggle like the creeping things of the field, to lower their voices with the direction of the wind, to select a background with the moonlight, and to stand motionless on patrol with muscles rigid like a pointer when the star-shells dissolved the security of the night. They studied to dissemble with their lips and to imitate the vocabulary of nature. They grew more and more chary of human speech, and listening posts talked with the trenches by pulls on a fishing-reel. They never sheathed their claws, and working-parties wore their equipment as though it were the integument of nature. Bayonets were never unfixed unless the moon were very bright. At night they scraped out their earths like a badger, and, like the badger's, those earths were exceeding clean. The men were numbered off by threes from the flank, and one in three watched for two hours while the other two worked, repairing parapets, strengthening entanglements, and filling sand-bags. Every half-hour the N.C.O. on duty crept round to report, or to post and relieve, while now and again a patrol went out to observe. All this was done stealthily and with an amazing economy of speech. Night was also the time of their foraging, when the company's rations were brought up the communication trench and handed over by the C.Q.M.S. to each platoon sergeant, who passed them on to the section commander, and he in turn distributed them among his men in such silence and with such little traffic that it seemed like the provision of manna in the wilderness. At dawn pick-axe and spade were laid aside, the rum ration was served out, and all men stood to, for dawn was the hour of their apprehension.
Two miles behind them is a battery of our field guns, and they have with them an observing officer who talks intimately to his battery on the field telephone in that laconic language of which gunners are so fond, such as "One hundred. Twenty minutes to the left." Then the shells sing over their heads with a pretty low trajectory, and the Huns, beginning to get annoyed, reply with their heavy guns. There is a low whistle up aloft, a noise like the fluttering of invisible wings, and the next moment a cloud of black smoke rises over the village of X—— Y——, behind the trenches. The Smoke Prevention Society ought to turn their attention to "Jack Johnsons"; their habits are positively filthy.
These things, however, disturbed them but little and bored them a great deal. So they set to work to make their particular rabbit-warren into a Garden City. They held it on a repairing lease, and were constantly filling sand-bags, but that was merely to prevent depreciation, and didn't count. They first of all paved their trenches with bricks; there was no difficulty about the supply, as the "Jack Johnsons" obligingly acted as house-breakers in the village behind our lines, and bricks could be had for the fetching. Then the orderly transplanted some pansies and forget-me-nots from the garden of a ruined house, and made a border in front of the company commander's dug-out. The communication trench had been carried across a stream with some planks, and one day a man with a gift for carpentry fixed up a balustrade out of the arms of an apple-tree, which had been lopped off by shell, and we had a rustic bridge. When May came, water anemones opened their star-like petals on the surface of the clear amber stream, the orchard through which the communication trench had been cut burst into blossom, the sticky clay walls of the trench became hard as masonry in the sun, and one morning a board appeared with the legend "Hyde Park. Keep off the grass."
With these amenities their manners grew more and more refined. I have read somewhere, in one of those dull collections of sweeping generalisations that are called sociology, that each species of the genus homo has to go through a normal sequence of stages from barbarism to civilisation, and that we were once what the South Sea Islanders are now. Which may be very true, but as regards that particular primitive community I can testify that their social evolution has in three months gone through all the stages that occupy other communities three thousand years. They began as cave-dwellers and they end by occupying suburban villas—the captain's dug-out has a roof of corrugated iron, a window, a book-shelf, a table, and even chairs, and his table manners have vastly improved. They have progressed from candles stuck in bully-beef tins to electric reading-lamps. Three months ago they were hairy men whose beards did grow beneath their shoulders, and their puttees were cemented with wet clay; to-day they are clean-shaven and their Burberrys might be worn in Piccadilly. They slept with nothing between them and the earth but a ground sheet what time they were not, like the elephant, sleeping on their feet and propped against a trench wall. Now they sleep on a bed with a wooden frame. I have read somewhere that for a thousand years Europe was unwashed. It may be so, but I know that this particular tribal community progressed rapidly through all such stages, from a bucket to a shower-bath in billets, in about six weeks, and you can see their men any day washing themselves to the waist near the support trenches—men who a month or two ago had forgotten how to take their clothes off. They are, in fact, a highly civilised community. Some traces of their aboriginal state they still retain, and they cherish their totem, which is a bundle of black ribbons, rather like the flattened leaves of an artichoke, attached to the back of their collars. It is the badge of their tribe. Also at night some of them develop the most primitive of all instincts and crawl out on their stomachs with a hand-grenade to get as near as may be to the enemy's listening posts and taste the joy of killing. But by day they are as demure and sleepy as the tortoiseshell cat which has taken up its quarters in the dug-out.
Such is their life. But they are quietly preparing to get a move on. Some R.G.A. men have arrived with four pretty toys from Vickers's, and one fine morning they are going to disturb those sand-bags opposite them with a battery of trench mortars; our field guns will draw a curtain of shrapnel in front of the German support trenches, and then they will satisfy their curiosity as to what is behind those inscrutable sand-bags.