The challenge of the dead

by Stephen Graham

So the Army went back to its football leagues and boxing competitions which afforded a happy subsidiary interest. True, some of the athletes and bright particular sporting stars had fallen, but others constantly arrived from inexhaustible old England. As regards the war a rigorous optimism set in. Complete victory was postponed for two months. There must be more and better rehearsals, that was all. A passion for discipline and the shooting of cowards set in. Poor R—— was shot beside Laventie. Sergeant-majors "came into their own."

Now however a new peace has settled upon Laventie. Even the workmen seem working quietly. Most of the old billets of 1914-15 lie in tumultuous heaps of brick dust and beams, though here and there are houses with the number of the billet marked and the number of men it would hold. Many a tap-room where our fellows gave voice to beer and vin blanc has passed into nothingness—the heavy boots clattering under the tables, the red faces above, the bottles and glasses, the gambling-boards, the pale-faced non-committal French women unashamed by the filth of the talk—where are they all? The old owners have gone, dead perhaps, or they found better business elsewhere. Often those who served in those taverns behind the line were not the real owners but a sort of adventurer who came in when the real people fled in panic. Tommy was the source of their profit, they plied him with beer and girls, and gave shelter to gambling sharps and got France a bad name. Anyhow, the people you see now are a sober quiet-faced folk with a real unending gratitude and affection for the British soldier. They preserve nothing but good memories of him, and no calculations enter into their love.

The old tavern of the Blue Horse seems to be down, but the Grand Cheval Blanc still stands and other taverns of the horse—Laventie was a horse-breeding place in days gone by. To-day it has only a tiny population—and is nothing. It perhaps will not be a notable place again.

The mind goes on to the rest-billets of Hinges and Busnes and to the march to Festubert across a country less scarred by war than there, less gassed perhaps, for gas killed more than shells. There are new plans of battle, more auguries of complete victory. Brigadiers themselves come to lesser commanders to explain in person the secrets of the Festubert attack. It amounts to little more than an intensification of the bombardment rehearsed at Neuve Chapelle, and the pouring of a greater number of men through the neck of devastation thus made, a pitiful suicide trap as it turned out, but a natural experiment.

Hinges, though in 1915 far enough from shell fire to be a place of rest-billets and the drilling of new drafts and the bringing of musketry practice up to high regimental standards, is now a wreck, its church as completely ruined as our Wenlock Abbey and looking not unlike it. Hinges has a commanding position with a view far o'er the stricken Nord du France. Behind its ridge of high land Bethune remained comparatively immune, its centre alone being utterly destroyed. No doubt parts of Bethune would have fallen into German hands in 1918 had Hinges not held. The neighbouring village of Locon fell—a mile or so to the North-east. Merville which is due North fell also, and shells from three sides screamed against this little village and the Canadians defending it.

Hinges now is quietly rebuilding itself and is a little-visited war hamlet. A memory and shrine of the Festubert fight is the wayside cemetery with its Gordons and Black Watch and Lancs men. Here lie two unknown British soldiers of Lancashire regiments and on their temporary wooden crosses have been nailed metal discs of the Lancastrians with bright red roses and the words:—"They win or die who wear the rose of Lancashire." Some devotee of his county has placed this disc on thousands of the graves of the Lancastrians.

On the evening of the 15th May 1915, 2nd and 6th Gordons, 1st Grenadiers, 2nd Scots and Borders marched out to the junction of the roads rue de Bois and rue de l'Epinette, then filed through trenches held by Indian troops, and reached an allotted storming position west of "Princes Road." An elaborate time-table had been arranged, and each unit knew its angle relative to the "gap in the wire" which the artillery were going to make. At midnight all the troops were in position. At a quarter past three in the morning Scots Guards and Borders started up to lead the assault. What a narrow-fronted concentrated effort it was may be judged by the battalion formation, which was in eight lines of two platoons each.

One cannot be sure now what trenches each unit filled, but the trenches are there and it is not difficult to imagine the crush of khaki in the warm May night, the shrieking and thundering of the bombardment. Three o'clock in the morning and the rum being doled out and the men poised and ready for the race of death.

Near the corner of rue de l'Epinette and just before the village of Richebourg l'Avoué lie three Colonels and a Major side by side—they are the commanders of the Grenadiers and of the 2nd Border regiment, Major Kennet the second in command of the 1st Grenadiers, and Colonel Alexander of a Yorkshire regiment—all four perished at Festubert. The corner of rue de l'Epinette has now a cottage of wood and bricks with a cast-iron roof, a bright garden of flowers and beans. Opposite stands a new estaminet. There is a jolly field of gathered haricots hanging to dry on ten-foot poles. Once more, iron thorn-bushes of barbed wire each side of the way, and where the men dug themselves in by the side of the road—water and reeds. The Indian section has become the Indian cemetery, and the brave dusky boys of Asian hills have passed away. Festubert is a little place where the pile of old white stone and cement which was the village church is higher than the huts which have sprung up around it. But where are those blossoming orchards through which our boys charged in the dawn twilight, where are the dead who lay so long unrecovered in that pitiful no-man's land beyond? Unrecovered then and irrecoverable now.

On the 27th May 1915, ten days after the battle, General Joffre inspected the whole Seventh Division, which was drawn up in three great columns, a brigade in each, and with the 20th Brigade and its pipers leading, all marched past to the salute. Another day came the Divisional Commander General Gough, and perched high up on the central pile of straw and midden in a large farm-yard he thanked the men for Festubert—they had done what was asked and more—"as always," he added.