The crime at Vanderlynden's

by R. H. Mottram

An offensive was an offensive, could be nothing more or less. Every offensive had been a failure except for some local or temporary object, and in his opinion, always must be a failure. The idea of an offensive conducted across a hundred leagues of sea made him smile. It was hard enough to get a mile forward on dry land, but fancy the job of maintaining communications across the water! He attended enough drills to fill in the time, organized the football of the Brigade to his liking and let it go at that. At moments he was tempted to apply to be sent to France, at others to try and join one of these Eastern expeditions, Salonika, Palestine or Mespot. But the certainty of being more bored and of being farther than ever from the only life he cared for, made him hesitate. He hesitated for two long months.

Then on the 21st March he was ordered by telegram to proceed to France. He felt, if anything, a not unpleasant thrill. With all his care, he had not been able to dodge boredom altogether. The depôt camp had also been much too near the scenes of his pre-War life. He had gone home, as a matter of duty, for several week-ends and had always returned finely exasperated, it was so near to and yet so far from home as he had pictured it, in his dreams. Now, here was an end to this Peace-time soldiering. The news, according to the papers, seemed pretty bad, but he remembered so well the awful scurry there was for reinforcements on the morning that the nature of the Second Battle of Ypres became known. This could not be so desperate as that was. Practically the whole of the rank and file in the depôt were under orders. He took jolly good care not to get saddled with a draft, and spent the night in London. People were in a rare stew there. He had a bath and a good dinner and left it all behind. He took a little more note of the traffic at the port of embarkation. On the other side, he found lorries waiting and went jolting and jamming away up to Frecourt, forty miles. He rather approved. It looked as though our people were waking up.

At Corps reinforcement camp—a new dodge evidently—he got posted to a North Country battalion; and proceeded to try and find their whereabouts. He was told that they were going to Bray, but it took him some time to understand that they were falling back on that place. When, by chance, he hit upon the Division to which they belonged, they were on the road, looking very small, but intact and singing. He soon found plenty to do, for he grasped that practically the whole battalion was composed of reinforcements, and had only been together two or three days. They set to work at once to strengthen some half-completed entrenchments, but after two days were moved back again.

It was during those two days that he saw what he had never to that moment beheld, an army in retreat. The stream of infantry, artillery and transport was continuous—here in good formation, there a mere mass of walking wounded mixed up with civilians, as the big hospitals and the small villages of the district turned out before the oncoming enemy. He thought it rotten luck on those people, many of whom had been in German hands until February, 1917, and had only had a twelvemonth in their small farms, living in huts, and had now to turn out before a further invasion. The bombardment was distinctly nasty, he never remembered a nastier, but as usual, the pace of the advance soon outdistanced the slow-moving heavy artillery, whose fire was already lessening. He had no feelings of sharp despair, for as he had foreseen, a modern army could not be crumpled up and disposed of. What he did now anticipate, was any amount of inconvenience.

Amiens, he gathered, was uninhabitable, that meant many good restaurants out of reach. New lines of rail, new lateral communications would be necessary, that meant marching. Just when they had begun to get the trenches fairly reliable, they were entrained and sent wandering all round the coast. The wonderful spring weather broke with the end of March, as the weather always did, when it had ceased to be of any use to the Bosche, and had he been superstitious, he might have thought a good deal of that. It was in a cold and rainy April that he found himself landed on the edge of the coal-fields, behind a canal, with a slag heap on one side of him, and a little wood on the other, amid an ominous quiet.

The company of which he had been given command was now about a hundred and fifty strong and he had done what little he could to equalize the four platoons. He had one officer with him, a middle-aged Lieutenant called Merfin, of no distinguishable social status, or local characteristics. The day when a battalion came from one town or corner of a county, under officers that were local personages in the civil life of its district, was long past. Dormer placed his second-in-command socially as music-hall, or pawnbroking, but the chap had been out before and had been wounded, and probably knew something of the job. The men were satisfactory enough, short, stumpy fellows with poor teeth, but exactly that sort of plainness of mind that Dormer appreciated. They would do all right. Perhaps a quarter of them had been out before, and the remainder seemed fairly efficient in their musketry and bombing, and talked pigeons and dogs in their spare time, when not gambling.

The bit of line they held was Reserve, a bridge-head over the canal, a strong point round a half-demolished château in the wood, and some wet trenches to the right, where the next battalion joined on. Battalion Head-quarters was in a farm half a mile back. Dormer and Merfin improvised a Mess in the cellar of the Château, saw that the cooker in the stables was distributing tea, and let all except the necessary guards turn in. He had some machine gunners at the strong point, and across the canal were two guns, whose wagons had just been up with rations and ammunition. His own lot of rations came soon after and he told Merfin to take the first half of the night, and rolled himself in his coat to sleep.

As he lay there, listening to the scatter of machine-gun fire, and the mutter of officers’ servants in the adjoining coal-hole, watching the candle shadows flicker on the walls that had been whitewashed, as the draught stirred the sacking over the doorway, his main thought was how little anything changed. Two and a half years ago he had been doing exactly the same thing, a few miles away, in the same sort of cellar, in front of an enemy with the same sort of advantage in ground and initiative, machine guns and heavy artillery. He was as far from beating the Germans as ever he had been. He supposed that practically all the gains of 1916 and 1917 south of Arras had been lost. On the other hand, the Germans, so far as he could see, were equally far from winning. What he now feared was, either by prolonged War or premature Peace, a continuance of this sort of thing. And slowly, for he was as mild and quiet-mannered a man as one could find, his gorge began to rise. He began to want to get at these Germans. It was no longer a matter of principle, a feeling that it was his duty as it had been in the days when he enlisted, took a commission, and had come to France. He was no longer worrying about the injustice of the attack on Belgium or the danger of a Germany paramount in Europe. He had now a perfectly plain and personal feeling. But being Dormer, this did not make him cry out for a sortie en masse like a Frenchman, nor evolve a complicated and highly scientific theory as to how his desire was to be realized. The French and Portuguese who fought beside him would have found him quite incomprehensible. The Germans actually invented a logical Dormer whom they had to beat, who was completely unlike him. If he had any ideas as to what he was going to do, they amounted to a quiet certainty that once the enemy came away from his heavy and machine guns, he, Dormer, could do him in.

So he went on with the next thing, which was to turn over and sleep. He woke, sitting bolt upright, to the sound of two terrific crashes. One was right over his head. The candle had been blown out, and as he struggled out of the cellar, barking his shins and elbows, he was aware that the faint light of the sky was obscured by a dense cloud all round him. Instinctively he pulled up his gas mask, but the sound of falling masonry and the grit he could taste between his lips, reassured him. It was a cloud of brick dust. Across the canal, the barrage was falling on the front lines with the thunder of a waterfall. The Bosche had hit the Château, and if he were not mistaken, had put in another salvo, somewhere near by. At the gate of the little park-like garden he ran into a figure he recognized for Merfin, by the red light of the battle, just across the canal.

“What is it?”