Chapter 10

In the houses they passed through the men could still find sufficient traces of the former occupants to indicate their class and station. One might have been a labourer's cottage, with a rough deal table, a red-rusted stove-fireplace, an oleograph in flaming crude colours of the 'Virgin and Child' hanging on the plaster wall, the fragments of a rough cradle overturned in a corner, a few coarse china crocks and ornaments and figures chipped and broken and scattered about the mantel, and the bare board floor. Another house had plainly been a home of some refinement. The rooms were large, with lofty ceilings; there were carpets on the floors, although so covered with dirt and dried mud and the dust of fallen plaster that they were hardly discernible as carpets. In one room a large polished table had a broken leg replaced by an up-ended barrel, one big arm-chair had its springs and padding showing through the burst upholstering. Another was minus all its legs, and had the back wrenched off and laid flat with the seat on the floor, evidently to make a bed. There were several good engravings hanging askew on the walls or lying about the floor, all soiled with rain and cut and torn by their splintered glass. The large open-grate fireplace had an artistically carved overmantel sadly chipped and smoke-blackened, a tiled hearth in fragments; the wall-paper in a tasteful design of dark-green and gold was blotched and discoloured, and hung in peeling strips and gigantic 'dog's-ears'; from the poles and rings over the windows the tattered fragments of a lace curtain dangled. There was plenty of evidence that the room had been occupied by others since its lawful tenants had fled. It was strewn with broken or cast-off military equipments, worn-out boots, frayed and mud-caked putties, a burst haversack and pack-valise, a holed water-bottle, broken webbing straps and belts, a bayonet with a snapped blade, a torn grey shirt, and a goatskin coat. The windows had the shutters closed, and were sandbagged up three parts their height, the need for this being evident from the clean, round bullet-holes in the shutters above the sandbags, and the ragged tears and holes in the upper part of the opposite wall. In an upper corner a gaping shell-hole had linen table-cloths five or six fold thick hung over to screen the light from showing through at night. In a corner lay a heap of mouldy straw and a bed-mattress; the table and fireplace were littered with dirty pots and dishes, the floor with empty jam and biscuit tins, opened and unopened bully-beef tins, more being full than empty because the British soldier must be very near starving point before he is driven to eat 'bully.' Over everything lay, like a white winding-sheet, the cover of thick plaster-dust shaken down from the ceiling by the hammer-blows of the shells. The room door opened into a passage. At its end a wide staircase curved up into empty space, the top banisters standing out against the open blue sky. The whole upper storey had been blown off by shell fire and lay in the garden behind the house, a jumble of brickwork, window-frames, tiles, beams, beds and bedroom furniture, linen, and clothes.

These houses were inexpressibly sad and forlorn-looking, with all their privacy and inner homeliness naked and exposed to the passer-by and the staring sunlight. Some were no more than heaps of brick and stone and mortar; but these gave not nearly such a sense of desolation and desertion as those less damaged, as one, for instance, with its front blown completely out, so that one could look into all its rooms, upper and lower and the stairs between, exactly as one looks into those dolls' houses where the front is hinged to swing open.

The village had been on the edge of the fighting zone for months, had been casually shelled each day in normal times, bombarded furiously during every attack or counter-attack. The church, with its spire or tower, had probably been suspected as an artillery observing station by the Germans, and so had drawn a full share of the fire. All that was left of the church itself was one corner of shell-holed walls, and a few roof-beams torn and splintered and stripped of cover. The tower was a broken, jagged, stump--an empty shell, with one side blown almost completely out; the others, or what remained of them, cracked and tottering. The churchyard was a wild chaos of tumbled masonry, broken slates, uprooted and overturned tombstones, jumbled wooden crosses, crucifixes, black wooden cases with fronts of splintered glass, torn wreaths, and crosses of imitation flowers. Amongst the graves yawned huge shell craters; tossed hither and thither amongst the graves and broken monuments and bricks and rubbish were bones and fragments of coffins.

But all the graves were not in the churchyard. The whole village was dotted from end to end with them, some alone in secluded corners, others in rows in the backyards and vegetable gardens. Most of them were marked with crosses, each made of two pieces of packing-case or biscuit-box, with a number, rank, name, and regiment printed in indelible pencil. On some of the graves were bead-work flowers, on others a jam-pot or crock holding a handful of withered sun-dried flower-stalks. Nearly all were huddled in close to house or garden walls, one even in the narrow passage between two houses. There were, in many cases, other and less ugly open spaces and gardens offering a score of paces from these forlorn last resting-places apparently so oddly selected and sadly misplaced; but a second look showed that in each case the grave was dug where some wall or house afforded cover to the burying-party from bullets. In the bright sunlight, half-hidden under or behind heaps of debris, with crosses leaning drunkenly aslant, these graves looked woefully dreary and depressing. But the files of men moving round and between them, or stepping carefully over them, hardly gave them a glance, except where one in passing caught at a leaning cross and thrust it deeper and straighter into the earth. But the men's indifference meant no lack of feeling or respect for the dead. The respect was there, subtle but unmistakable, instanced slightly by the care every man took not to set foot on a grave, by the straightening of that cross, by those withered flowers and dirty wreaths, even as it has been shown scores of times by the men who crawl at risk of their lives into the open between the forward trenches at night to bring in their dead for decent burial.

Outside the shattered village stood the remains of a large factory, and on this the outcoming files of the Regiment converged, and the first arrivals halted to await the rest. What industry the factory had been concerned with it was impossible to tell. It was full of machinery, smashed, bent, twisted, and overturned, all red with rust, mixed up with and in parts covered by stone and brickwork, beams and iron girders, the whole sprinkled over with gleaming fragments of window-glass The outside walls were almost completely knocked flat, tossed helter-skelter outwards or on top of the machinery. The tall chimney--another suspected 'observing post' probably--lay in a heap of broken brickwork with the last yard or two of the base standing up out of the heap, and even in its remaining stump were other ragged shell-holes. A couple of huge boilers had been torn off their brick furnaces by the force of some monster shell and tossed clear yards away. One was poised across the broken outer wall, with one end in the road. The thick rounded plates were bent and dented in like a kicked biscuit-tin, were riddled and pierced through and through as if they had been paper. The whole factory and its machinery must once have represented a value of many thousands of francs. Now it was worth just the value of its site--less the cost of clearing it of debris--and the price of some tons of old iron.

Some of the men wandered about amongst the ruins, examining them curiously, tracing the work of individual shells, speculating on the number of hands the place had once employed, and where those hands were now.

'Man, man,' said a Scottish private, 'sic an awfu' waste. Think o' the siller it must ha' cost.'

''Ow would you like to be a shareholder in the company, Jock?' said his companion. 'Ain't many divvydends due to 'em this Christmas.'

The Scot shook his head sadly. 'This place an' the hale toon laid waste,' he said. 'It's awfu' tae think o' it.'

'An' this is one bloomin' pebble in a whole bloomin' beach,' said the other. 'D'you remember Wipers an' all them other towns? An' that old chap we saw sittin' on the roadside weepin' 'is eyes out 'cos the farm an' the fruit-trees 'e'd spent 'is life fixin' up was blowed to glory b' Jack Johnsons. We 'ave seed some rummy shows 'ere, 'aven't we? Not but what this ain't a pretty fair sample o' wreck,' he continued critically. 'There's plenty 'ud think they'd got their two-pennorth to see this on the screen o' a picture-show at 'ome, Jock.'

'Huh! Picturs!' sniffed Jock. 'Picturs, and the-ayters, and racin', and fitba'. Ah wanner folks hasna better use for their time and money, at sic a time 's this.'

'Aw,' said the other, 'But y' forget, Jock. Out 'ere they 'ave their 'ouses blown up an' their business blown in. A thousan' a day o' the like o' you an' me may be gettin' killed off for six months on end. But at 'ome, Jock--aw!'

He stooped and picked up a lump of white, chalky earth from the roadside, scrawled with it on the huge boiler-end that rested on the broken wall, and left the written words to finish the spoken sentence.

Jock read, and later the remains of the Regiment read as they moved off past the aching desolation of the silent factory, down the shell-torn road, across the war-swept ruins of a whole country-side. A few scowled at the thoughts the words raised, the most grinned and passed rough jests; but to all those men in the thinned ranks, their dead behind them, the scenes of ruin before them, the words bit, and bit deep. They ran:

But it's Bisness As Usual --AT HOME.

A HYMN OF HATE

'_The troops continue in excellent spirits._'--EXTRACT FROM OFFICIAL DESPATCH.

To appreciate properly, from the Army's point of view, the humour of this story, it must always be remembered that the regiment concerned is an English one--entirely and emphatically English, and indeed almost entirely East End Cockney.

It is true that the British Army on active service has a sense of humour peculiarly its own, and respectable civilians have been known, when jests were retailed with the greatest gusto by soldier raconteurs, to shudder and fail utterly to understand that there could be any humour in a tale so mixed up with the grim and ghastly business of killing and being killed.

A biggish battle had died out about a week before in the series of spasmodic struggles of diminishing fury that have characterised most of the battles on the Western Front, when the Tower Bridge Foot found themselves in occupation of a portion of the forward line which was only separated from the German trench by a distance varying from forty to one hundred yards. Such close proximity usually results in an interchange of compliments between the two sides, either by speech, or by medium of a board with messages written on it--the board being reserved usually for the strokes of wit most likely to sting, and therefore best worth conveying to the greatest possible number of the enemy.

The 'Towers' were hardly installed in their new position when a voice came from the German parapet, 'Hello, Tower Bridge Foot! Pleased to meet you again.'

The Englishmen were too accustomed to it to be surprised by this uncannily prompt recognition by the enemy of a newly relieving regiment of which they had not seen so much as a cap top.

'Hullo, Boshy,' retorted one of the Towers. 'You're makin' a mistake this time. We ain't the Tower Bridges. We're the Kamchatka 'Ighlanders.'

'An' you're a liar if you says you're pleased to meet us again,' put in another. 'If you've met us afore I lay you was too dash sorry for it to want to meet us again.'

'Oh, we know who you are all right,' replied the voice. 'And we know you've just relieved the Fifth Blankshires; and what's more, we know who's going to relieve you, and when.'

''E knows a bloomin' heap,' said a Tower Bridge private disgustedly; 'an' wot's more, I believe 'e does know it.' Then, raising his voice, he asked, 'Do you know when we're comin' to take some more of them trenches o' yours?'

This was felt by the listening Towers to be a master-stroke, remembering that the British had taken and held several trenches a week before, but the reply rather took the wind out of their sails.

'You can't take any more,' said the voice. 'You haven't shells enough for another attack. You had to stop the last one because your guns were running short.'

'Any'ow,' replied an English corporal who had been handing round half a dozen grenades, 'we ain't anyways short o' bombs. 'Ave a few to be goin' on with,' and he and his party let fly. They listened with satisfaction to the bursts, and through their trench periscopes watched the smoke and dust clouds billowing from the trench opposite.

'An' this,' remarked a Tower private, 'is about our cue to exit, the stage bein' required for a scene-shift by some Bosh bombs,' and he disappeared, crawling into a dug-out. During the next ten minutes a couple of dozen bombs came over and burst in and about the British trench and scored three casualties, 'slightly wounded.'

'Hi there! Where's that Soho barber's assistant that thinks 'e can talk Henglish?' demanded the Towers' spokesman cheerfully.

That annoyed the English-speaking German, as of course incidentally it was meant to do.

'I'm here, Private Petticoat Lane,' retorted the voice, 'and if I couldn't speak better English than you I'd be shaming Soho.'

'You're doing that anyway, you bloomin' renegade dog-stealer,' called back the private. 'Wy didn't you pay your landlady in Lunnon for the lodgin's you owed when you run away?'

'Schweinhund!' said the voice angrily, and a bullet slapped into the parapet in front of the taunting private.

'Corp'ril,' said that artist in invective softly, 'if you'll go down the trench a bit or up top o' that old barn behind I'll get this bloomin' Soho waiter mad enough to keep on shootin' at me, an' you'll p'raps get a chance to snipe 'im.'

The corporal sought an officer's permission and later a precarious perch on the broken roof of the barn, while Private Robinson extended himself in the manufacture of annoying remarks.

'That last 'un was a fair draw, Smithy,' he exulted to a fellow private. 'I'll bet 'e shot the moon, did a bolt for it, when 'e mobilised.'

'Like enough,' agreed Smithy. 'Go on, ol' man. Give 'im some more jaw.'

'I s'pose you left without payin' your washin' bill either, didn't you, sower-krowt,' demanded Private Robinson. There was no reply from the opposition.

'I expeck you ler' a lot o' little unpaid bills, didn't you?--if you was able to find anyone to give you tick.'

'I'll pay them--when we take London,' said the voice.

'That don't give your pore ol' landlady much 'ope,' said Robinson. 'Take Lunnon! Blimy, you're more like to take root in them trenches o' yours--unless we comes over again an' chases you out.'

Again there was no reply. Private Robinson shook his head. ''E's as 'ard to draw as the pay that's owin' to me,' he said. 'You 'ave a go, Smithy.'

Smithy, a believer in the retort direct and no trafficker in the finer shades of sarcasm, cleared his throat and lifted up his voice. ''Ere, why don't you speak when you're spoke to, you lop-eared lager-beer barrel, you. Take your fice out o' that 'orse-flesh cat's-meat sossidge an' speak up, you baby-butcherin' hen-roost robber.'

'That ain't no good, Smithy,' Private Robinson pointed out. 'Y'see, callin' 'im 'ard names only makes 'im think 'e's got you angry like--that 'e's drawed you.'

(Another voice called something in German.)

'Just tell them other monkeys to stop their chatter, Soho,' he called out, 'an' get back in their cage. If they want to talk to gen'l'men they must talk English.'

'I like your d--d impertinence,' said the voice scornfully. 'We'll make you learn German, though, when we've taken England.'

'Oh, it's Englan' you're takin' now,' said Private Robinson. 'But all you'll ever take of Englan' will be same as you took before--a tuppenny tip if you serves the soup up nice, or a penny tip if you gives an Englishman a proper clean shave.'

The rifle opposite banged again and the bullet slapped into the top of the parapet. 'That drawed 'im again,' chuckled Private Robinson, 'but I wonder why the corp'ril didn't get a whack at 'im.'

He pulled away a small sandbag that blocked a loophole, and, holding his rifle by the butt at arm-length, poked the muzzle out slowly. A moment later two reports rang out--one from in front and one behind.

'I got 'im,' said the corporal three minutes later. 'One bloke was looking with a periscope and I saw a little cap an' one eye come over the parapet. By the way 'is 'ands jerked up an' 'is 'ead jerked back when I fired, I fancy 'e copped it right enough.'

Private Robinson got to work with a piece of chalk on a board and hoisted over the parapet a notice, 'R.I.P. 1 Boshe, late lamented Soho garçon.'

'Pity I dunno the German for "late lamented," but they've always plenty that knows English enough to unnerstand,' he commented.

He spent the next ten minutes ragging the Germans, directing his most brilliant efforts of sarcasm against made-in-Germany English-speakers generally and Soho waiters in particular; and he took the fact there was no reply from the voice as highly satisfactory evidence that it had been the 'Soho waiter' who had 'copped it.'

'Exit the waiter--curtain, an' soft music!' remarked a private known as 'Enery Irving throughout the battalion, and whistled a stave of 'We shall meet, but we shall miss him.'

'Come on, 'Enery, give us 'is dyin' speech,' some one urged, and 'Enery proceeded to recite an impromptu 'Dyin' Speech of the Dachshund-stealer,' as he called it, in the most approved fashion of the East End drama, with all the accompaniments of rolling eyes, breast-clutchings, and gasping pauses.

'Now then, where's the orchestra?' he demanded when the applause had subsided, and the orchestra, one mouth-organ strong, promptly struck up a lilting music-hall ditty. From that he slid into 'My Little Grey Home,' with a very liberal measure of time to the long-drawn notes especially. The song was caught up and ran down the trench in full chorus. When it finished the orchestra was just on the point of starting another tune, when 'Enery held up his hand.

'"'E goes on Sunday to the church, an' sits among the choir."' he quoted solemnly and added, 'Voices 'eard, off.'

Two or three men were singing in the German trench, and as they sang the rest joined in and 'Deutschland über Alles' rolled forth in full strength and harmony.

'Bray-vo! An' not arf bad neither,' said Private Robinson approvingly. 'Though I dunno wot it's all abart. Now s'pose we gives 'em another.'

They did, and the Germans responded with 'The Watch on the Rhine.' This time Private Robinson and the rest of the Towers recognised the song and capped it in great glee with 'Winding up the Watch on the Rhine,' a parody which does not go out of its way to spare German feelings.

'An' 'ow d'you like that, ol' sossidge scoffers?' demanded Private Robinson loudly.

'You vait,' bellowed a guttural voice. 'Us vind you op--quick!'

'Vind op--squeak, an' squeakin',' retorted Private Robinson.

The German reply was drowned in a burst of new song which ran like wild-fire the length of the German trench. A note of fierce passion rang in the voices, and the Towers sat listening in silence.

'Dunno wot it is,' said one. 'But it sounds like they was sayin' something nasty, an' meanin' it all.'

But one word, shouted fiercely and lustily, caught Private Robinson's ear.

''Ark!' he said in eager anticipation. 'I do believe it's--s-sh! There!' triumphantly, as again the word rang out--the one word at the end of the verse . . . '_England_.'

'It's _it_. It's the "'Ymn of 'Ate"!'

The word flew down the British trench--'It's the 'Ymn! They're singin' the "'Ymn of 'Ate,"' and every man sat drinking the air in eagerly. This was luck, pure gorgeous luck. Hadn't the Towers, like many another regiment, heard about the famous 'Hymn of Hate,' and read it in the papers, and had it declaimed with a fine frenzy by Private 'Enery Irving? Hadn't they, like plenty other regiments, longed to hear the tune, but longed in vain, never having found one who knew it? And here it was being sung to them in full chorus by the Germans themselves. Oh, this _was_ luck.

The mouth-organist was sitting with his mouth open and his head turned to listen, as if afraid to miss a single note.

''Ave you got it, Snapper?' whispered Private Robinson anxiously at the end. 'Will you be able to remember it?'

Snapper, with his eyes fixed on vacancy, began to play the air over softly, when from further down the trench came a murmur of applause, that rose to a storm of hand-clappings and shouts of 'Bravo!' and 'Encore--'core--'core!'

The mouth-organist played on unheedingly and Private Robinson sat following him with attentive ear.

'I'm not sure of that bit just there,' said the player, and tried it over with slight variations. 'P'raps I'll remember it better after a day or two. I'm like that wi' some toons.'

'We might kid 'em to sing it again,' said Robinson hopefully, as another loud cry of 'Encore!' rang from the trench.

'Was you know vat we haf sing?' asked a German voice in tones of some wonderment.

'It's a great song, Dutchie,' replied Private Robinson. 'Fine song--goot--bong! Sing it again to us.'

'You haf not understand,' said the German angrily, and then suddenly from a little further along the German trench a clear tenor rose, singing the Hymn in English. The Towers subsided into rapt silence, hugging themselves over their stupendous luck. When the singer came to the end of the verse he paused an instant, and a roar leaped from the German trench . . . 'England!' It died away and the singer took up the solo. Quicker and quicker he sang, the song swirling upward in a rising note of passion. It checked and hung an instant on the last line, as a curling wave hangs poised; and even as the falling wave breaks thundering and rushing, so the song broke in a crash of sweeping sound along the line of the German trench on that one word--'England!'

Before the last sound of it had passed, the singer had plunged into the next verse, his voice soaring and shaking with an intensity of feeling. The whole effect was inspiring, wonderful, dramatic. One felt that it was emblematic, the heart and soul of the German people poured out in music and words. And the scorn, the bitter anger, hatred, and malice that vibrated again in that chorused last word might well have brought fear and trembling to the heart of an enemy. But the enemy immediately concerned, to wit His Majesty's Regiment of Tower Bridge Foot, were most obviously not impressed with fear and trembling. Impressed they certainly were. Their applause rose in a gale of clappings and cries and shouts. They were impressed, and Private 'Enery Irving, clapping his hands sore and stamping his feet in the trench-bottom, voiced the impression exactly. 'It beats Saturday night in the gallery o' the old Brit.,' he said enthusiastically. 'That bloke--blimy--'e ought to be doin' the star part at Drury Lane'; and he wiped his hot hands on his trousers and fell again to beating them together, palms and fingers curved cunningly, to obtain a maximum of noise from the effort.