THE OLD CONTEMPTIBLES: THE FIRST CHRISTMAS.
BY BOYD CABLE.
The Divisional Ammunition and Supply Column had done a long march on the Christmas Eve. It was not so much that the distance was long in measured kilometres, but from a point of time, of dragging weariness, of bad roads, of cold and wet and discomfort it was prolonged to a heart-breaking length.
The column had taken the road at daybreak, and this meant that the men had to be on parade a full quarter-hour before, had to turn out of their uncomfortable billets and sleeping-places an hour and a half before the time to parade. In that time they had to pack their kits (a quick enough and simple job, to be sure), put on their wet boots, water and feed their horses, eat a biscuit-and-cheese breakfast, scramble for a ‘lick and a promise’ sort of wash, harness up their teams, pack picketing gear and odd stores on the wagons and sheet them over, have themselves and everything belonging to them packed and harnessed and standing ready to turn out promptly to the shout of ‘Hook in.’ They were all ready, and with a nicely-timed handful of seconds to spare, when the word came, because the practice that makes perfect had been their regular routine for a good many months past, and there had been plenty of times when they had been obliged to do the same routine in very much less than this present leisured hour and a half.
It was raining when the wagons turned out, formed up on the road, and, dropping into place unit by unit, rolled steadily off on the march. The rain was taken quite philosophically and as a matter of course, as indeed it had come to be by now and any time for a month past. There were a good many even by then who had wondered where all the rain could come from, and held a firm opinion that it must cease very soon, on the reasonable assumption that no rain supply is inexhaustible and that the past month must have ‘pretty well emptied the watering-pot.’ They were to learn for another solid three months almost without a break what the Flanders watering-pot can supply when it really sets about the job in earnest, and it was to come to be a standing joke and boast of the first Expeditionaries that you could always tell one of the men who went through that first winter in France because an examination of his toes would show him to be web-footed.
But at the end of December the wet had not been accepted as such a permanent feature of life as it was to become, and there were plenty of men in the column who, as they marched out that Christmas Eve, looked up at the sky and round the grey horizon and tried to find, or persuade themselves and each other they could see, a spot where it was ‘lifting.’ But it did not lift, and before long the men’s damp clothes, half dried by body heat in sleeping in them, had become soaked and saturated through again. It was cold too, and fingers gripped about the wet reins of their pairs of horses grew numbed and stiff, were periodically revived with much blowing of warm breath—the only item of warmth left about a man—into cupped hands, and arm beating and flapping. The roads were heavy, rutted and inches deep in stiff mud, flooded in parts by the overflow from brimming-over ditches.
The march was bad enough in its early stages; it became acute in its discomfort as the day wore on, and men and horses grew tired and more tired. By far the worst feature was the constant series of halts. The road taken by the column was filled for miles with a slow-crawling and packed procession of horses and wagons. The slightest check at the head of the procession meant a stop to all the rest, and because each wagon took a fraction of time longer than the one ahead to see its predecessor started and to get under way itself, what to a wagon in the front ranks was no more than a slowing to avoid running into the wagon ahead was easily translated a few teams back into a pull-up and immediate move on, and further back the line to a longer and longer interval of halt. So that in the middle and rear of the line there were frequent halts of a minute, two, three, and up to ten minutes. And if a wagon driving through an extra soft portion of road was caught and held beyond the immediate strength of the tired team to pull out, the halt might spin out into anything up to fifteen minutes. Several times during the day there were hour-long halts at cross- or fork-roads, while cross streams of traffic passed clear or entering streams were shuffled in. Towards mid-day exasperated officers strove to avail themselves of the frequent halts to water and feed. Buckets would be unhooked from their places under the wagons, and the drivers, leaning out and scooping the water up from the ditches, would perhaps get so far in the watering performance when there would be a hurried order to ‘Get mounted,’ the buckets would be emptied, the drivers hurriedly remount and move on again—to halt again perhaps within a hundred yards. No officer dare halt or hold his section of the column to complete his watering and feeding because the orders were imperative to press on and avoid halting the whole. A halt to feed was actually made about 2 P.M. when it was plain that there was no hope of getting the column in, as had been intended, by the early afternoon; but the halt was so short that there could be no attempt to cook food or make a hot drink for the men. They ate cold bully beef and biscuit while the horses fed, and finished their meal in the saddle when the horses moved again.
During the afternoon it grew steadily colder, and the rain drizzled on without ceasing. The road ran parallel now with the firing line, and as the darkness fell the horizon was lit continually with rising and falling belts of light from the trench flares, while the guns flashed quick leaping and vanishing gusts of vivid light, rolled and grumbled and roared incessantly. The rattle and splutter of rifle fire swelled to what one might have thought an alarming nearness when the road twisted in towards the firing line, or a falling away of the ground or change in the wind allowed the sound to carry better, dropped away again to no more than a distant crackle as a belt of wood shut it off or the road ran wide out from the battle line.
But of all these things the men on the road were heedless. They were concerned only with the slowness of the journey, the wish for it to end, the approach of dark long before it could be completed. The column carried no lights, and as the night shut down the road under the horses’ feet became almost invisible to the eyes of the drivers sitting on their horses or box seats. Each lead driver had to be content to follow close on the tracks of the wagon in front of him, to hold his tired horses up when they stumbled, to halt them quickly when the wagon ahead halted, to move them on again instantly on the other vehicle starting. Every man kept his eyes carefully away from the dancing lights on the horizon, because watching them for a few seconds meant a temporary total blindness and the vanishing of the road beneath them when they came to look down, and this driving in the dark was quite bad enough without that.
The inevitable happened at last. A team driven too close to the road-side brought its wagon wheels within a foot of the ditch, just at a part, unfortunately, where the road-edge sloped sharply to the steep side of the ditch. The ‘long-rein driver’ perched on the box called a sharp word of warning and swung his wheelers to the left, felt the wagon beneath him skid sideways, lurch suddenly, sink sharply ‘by the stern’ and halt abruptly. The driver of the next team saw what had happened, shouted to the other drivers behind him, wrenched his horses’ heads clear of the bogged wagon and tried to pull up. But the horses, jerked from their sleepy plodding, swerved, plunged, slithered wildly on the wet road; the wagon wheels, gripped fast by the sharp thrust of the brake, failed to bite on the slippery surface, skidded forward, butted the wheelers heavily, slewed, slithered again and brought up with a splintering jar and a rear wheel fast locked in the wheel of the bogged wagon. The near wheeler of the second team, floundering and splashing and scrambling wildly for foothold, caught the bump of the wagon, fell, and slid wholesale into the ditch. The road was completely and effectually blocked.