"I crawled a thousand yards or so," he said, "and thought I was finished. I had no more strength than a baby, and my head was all queer and dizzy-like, so that I had uncommon strange thoughts and saw things that weren't there. The shells kept coming near me, and the noise of them shook inside my head so that it went funny. For a long time while I lay there I thought I had my chums all round me, and that made me feel a kind of comfortable. I thought I could see them lying in the mud all round with just their shoulders showing humped up and the tops of their packs covered in mud. I spoke to them sometimes and said, 'Is that you, Alf?' or 'Come a bit nearer, mate.' It didn't worry me at first because they didn't answer. I thought they were tired. But presently something told me I was all wrong. Those were mud-heaps, not men. Then I felt frightened because I was alone. It was a great, queer kind of fear that got hold of me, and I sat up and then began to crawl again just to get into touch with company, and I went on till daylight came and I saw other men crawling out of shell-holes and some of them walking and holding on to each other. So we got back together."
They came back to the field dressing-stations, where there was warmth for them and hot drinks, and clean bandages for their wounds; and groups of men, who had fought with the same courage, and now, in spite of all they had endured, spoke brave words, and said it was not the enemy that had checked them but only the mud. Their spirit had not been beaten, for no hardships in the world will ever break that.
But while I was talking with these men a figure came and sat on a bench among them speechless, because no one understood his tongue. It was a wounded German prisoner, and I saw from his shoulder-strap that he belonged to the 233rd Regiment of the 119th Division. Among all these men of ours who spoke with a fine hopefulness of what they would do next time he was hopeless. "We are lost," he said. "My division is ended. My friends are all killed." When asked what his officers thought, he made a queer gesture of derision, with one finger under his nose when he says "Zut." "They think we are 'kaput' too; they only look to the end of the war."
"And when do they think that will come?" He said, "God willing, before the year ends."
In civilian life he was a worker in an ammunition factory at Thuringen, by the Black Forest. He had seen many English there, and never thought he should fight against them one day. His father, who is forty-seven, is in the war. He himself looked a man of that age—old and worn, with a week's beard on his chin; but when I asked him his age he replied, "I am twenty-one. Last night I was twenty-one, when I lay after three days in a shell-hole—['ein granatenloch']—and your men helped me out because I was wounded."
"What do you think of our men?" he was asked, and he said, "They are good. Your artillery is good. It is very bad for us. We are 'kaput.'"
On one side of the fire were the men who think they are winning, whatever checks they may have, and who always attack with that faith in their hearts. On the other side was the man who said "We are finished," and sat huddled up in despair. All of them had suffered the same things.
To-day the sky is clear again, and the pale gold of autumn sunlight lies over the fields, and all the woods behind the lines are clothed in russet foliage. It is two days late, this quiet of the sky, and if Friday had been like this there would have been a flag of ours on the northern heights of Passchendaele Ridge. But still the gunners go on with their toil, those wonderful gunners of ours, who get very little sleep and very little rest and go down for an hour or two into a hole in the earth in those sodden fields where all day long and all night there is the tumult of bombardment. Piles of shells lie on the ground, heaps around them, and behind men are labouring to bring up more; and across the battlefields, strangely close to the actual fighting-line, black trains go steaming along rails which hundreds of men have risked their lives to lay a hundred yards, so that the guns shall be fed and the gunners have no respite. On the left of the line there is blue among the brown of our armies, and on the morning of the battle I saw French limbers and transport wagons using the same tracks as our own, and heard the rattle of the "soixante-quinze" again below Houthulst Forest, where there are still leaves on the trees and the beauty of a dense yellowing foliage is there beyond all those other woods where there are only fangs and stumps of trees in the fields where our men have fought.
October 23