Part 8

He took it, looked an instant at the handwriting, and thrust it inside his tunic. The postmark was the same as that of the wire he had received at the port of embarkation.

THREE RED ROSES

In the distance rose the spires of Ypres, and the water-tower, useless now for the purpose for which it was built, but still erect on its foundations. The silvery mist of early April hung very lightly over the flat surrounding land, hiding one corner of Vlamertinghe from sight, where the spire of the church still raised its head, as yet unvanquished. A red sun was rising in the East, and beyond Ypres a battle still raged, though nothing to the battle of a few short days before. Hidden batteries spoke now and then, and the roads were a cloud of dust, as men, transport, guns, and many ambulances passed along them. Overhead aeroplanes droned, and now and again shells whistled almost lazily overhead, to fall with a thunderous “crrumph” in Brielen and Vlamertinghe.

By the canal there was a dressing-station. The little white flag with its red cross hung listless in the still air. Motor ambulances drove up at speed and departed with their burdens. Inside the dressing-station men worked ceaselessly, as they had been working for days. Sometimes shells fell near by. No one heeded them.

Beyond the dressing-station, down the road, the banks of which were filled with little niches hollowed out with entrenching tools, hurried a figure. He was but one of many, but there was that about him which commanded the attention of all who saw him. His spurs and boots were dirty, his uniform covered with stains and dust, his face unshaven. He walked like a man in a dream, yet as of set purpose. Pale and haggard, he strode along, mechanically acknowledging salutes.

Arrived at the dressing-station, without pausing he entered, and went up to one of the doctors who was bandaging the remnants of an arm.

“Have they come yet?” he asked.

The other looked at him gravely with a certain respect and pity, and with the eye also of a medical man.

“Not yet, Colonel,” he answered. “You had better sit down and rest, you are all in.”

The Colonel passed a weary hand over his forehead.

“No,” he said. “No, Campbell; I shall go back and look for the party. They may have lost their way, and--they were three of my best officers, three of my boys.... I--I----”

“Here, sir! Take this.”

It was more of a command than a request. The Colonel drained what was given him, and went out without a word.

Back he trudged, along the shell-pitted road, even now swept by occasional salvos of shrapnel. He took no notice of anything, but continued feverishly on his way, his eyes ever searching the distance. At last he gave vent to an exclamation. Down the road was coming a stretcher party. They had but one stretcher, and on it lay three blanketed bundles.

The Colonel met them, and with bowed head accompanied them back to the dressing-station.

“You found them--all?” It was his only question.

“Yes, sir, all that was left.”

The stretcher was taken to a little empty dug-out, and with his own hands the C.O. laid the Union Jack over it.

“When will the--the graves be ready?” he asked the doctor.

“By five o’clock, sir.”

“I will be back at 4.30.”

“You must take some rest, Colonel, or you’ll break down.”

“Thank you, Campbell, I can look after myself!”

“Very good, sir.”

As he went away Captain Campbell looked after him rather anxiously.

“Never would have thought _he could_ be so upset,” he mused. “He’ll be in hospital, if----”

Straight back to Brielen the Colonel walked, and there he met his orderly with the horses. He mounted without a word, and rode on, through Vlamertinghe, until he reached Popheringe. There he dismounted.

“I shall be some time,” he said to the orderly.

He went through the square, up the noisy street leading to the Vehrenstraat, and along it, until he reached a little shop, in which were still a few flowers. He entered, and a frightened-looking woman came to serve him.

“I want three red roses,” he said.

It took the saleswoman several minutes to understand, but finally she showed him what she had. The roses were not in their first bloom, but they were large and red. The Colonel had them done up, and left carrying them carefully. The rest of his time he spent in repairing as well as might be the ravages of battle on his clothes and person. At 4.20 he was again at the dressing-station.

A quiet-voiced padre awaited him there, a tall, ascetic-looking man, with the eyes of a seer.

They carried the bundles on the stretcher to the graves, three among many, just behind the dressing-station.

“Almighty God, as it has pleased Thee to take the souls of these, our dear brothers ...” the sonorous voice read on, while the C.O. stood, bare-headed, at the head of the graves, holding in his hand the three red roses. The short burial service came to an end.

The Colonel walked to the foot of each grave in turn, and gently threw on each poor shattered remnant a red rose. Straightening himself, he stood long at the salute, and then, with a stern, set face, he strode away, to where the Padre awaited him, not caring that his eyes were wet. The Padre said nothing, but took his hand and gripped it.

“Padre,” said the Colonel, “those three were more to me than any other of my officers; I thought of them as my children.”

ADJUTANTS

If Fate cherishes an especial grievance against you, you will be made an Adjutant.

One of those bright beautiful mornings, when all the world is young and, generally speaking, festive, the sword of Damocles will descend upon you, and you will be called to the Presence, and told you are to be Adjutant. You will, perhaps, be rather inclined to think yourself a deuce of a fellow on that account. You will acquire a pair of spurs, and expect to be treated with respect. You will, in fact, feel that you are a person of some importance, quite the latest model in good little soldiers. You may--and this is the most cruel irony of all--be complimented on your appointment by your brother officers.

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, saith the preacher!

As soon as you become the “voice of the C.O.,” you lose every friend you ever possessed. You are just about as popular as the proverbial skunk at a garden-party. It takes only two days to find this out.

The evening of the second day you decide to have a drink, Orderly Room or no Orderly Room. You make this rash decision, and you tell the Orderly-Room Sergeant--only heaven knows when _he_ sleeps--that you are going out.

“I will be back in half an hour,” you say.

Then you go forth to seek for George--George, your pal, your intimate, your bosom friend. You find George in your old Coy. head-quarters, and a pang of self-pity sweeps over you as you cross the threshold and see the other fellows there: George, Henry, John, and the rest.

“Come and have a----” you begin cheerily. Suddenly, in the frosty silence you hear a cool, passionless voice remark,

“Good evening, SIR!”

It is George, the man you loved and trusted, whom you looked on as a friend and brother.

“George, come and have a----” again the words stick in your throat.

George answers, in tones from which all amity, peace, and goodwill towards men have vanished:

“Thanks very much, sir”--oh baleful little word--“but I’ve just started a game of poker.”

Dimly light dawns in your reeling brain; you realise the full extent of your disabilities, and you know that all is over. You are the Adjutant--the voice of the C.O.!

Sadly, with the last glimmer of Adjutant pride and pomp cast from out your soul, you return to Orderly Room, drinkless, friendless, and alone.

“The Staff Captain has been ringing you up, sir. He wants to know if the summary of evidence ...” and so on. In frenzied desperation you seize the telephone. Incidentally you call the Staff Captain away from his dinner. What he says, no self-respecting man--not even an Adjutant--could reveal without laying bare the most lacerated portions of his innermost feelings.

You go to bed, a sadder and a wiser man, wondering if you could go back to the Company, even as the most junior sub., were you to make an impassioned appeal to the C.O.

About 1 A.M. some one comes in and awakens you.

“Message from Brigade, sir.”

With an uncontrite heart you read it: “Forward to this office immediately a complete nominal roll of all men of your unit who have served continuously for nine months without leave.” That takes two hours, and necessitates the awakening of all unit commanders, as the last Adjutant kept no record. In psychic waves you feel curses raining on you through the stilly night. Having made an application--in writing--to the C.O., to be returned to duty, you go to bed.

At 3.30 A.M. you are awakened again. “Movement order from Brigade, sir!”

This time you say nothing. All power of speech is lost. The entire regiment curses you, while by the light of a guttering candle you write a movement order, “operation order number”--what the deuce _is_ the number anyhow. The Colonel is--shall we say--indisposed as to temper, and the companies get half an hour to fall in, ready to march off. One Company loses the way, and does not arrive at the starting-point.

“Did you specify the starting-point quite clearly, Mr. Jones?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where did you say it was?”

“One hundred yards south of the ‘N’ in CANDIN, sir.”

“There are _two_ ‘N’s’ in CANDIN, Mr. Jones; _two_ ‘N’s’! How can you expect a company commander to know _which_ ‘N’? Gross carelessness. Gross carelessness. Go and find the Company, please.”

“Yessir.”

You find the Company only just out of billets, after scouring the miserable country around the wrong ‘N’ for fifteen minutes, and falling off your horse into one of those infernal ditches.

The battalion moves off half an hour later, and the C.O. has lots to say about it. He also remarks that his late Adjutant was “a good horseman”--a bitter reflection!

There is absolutely no hope for an Adjutant. If he is a good man at the “job” everybody hates him. If he is feeble the C.O. hates him. The Brigade staff hate him on principle. If he kow-tows to them they trample on him with both feet, if he does _not_ they set snares for him, and keep him up all night. He is expected to know everything: K. R. and O. backwards and forwards, divisional drill, and the training of a section. Routine for the cure of housemaid’s knee in mules, and the whole compendium of Military Law. He is never off duty, and even his soul is not his own. He is, in fact, The Adjutant.

Sometimes people try to be nice to him. They mean well. They will come into the Orderly Room and say: “Oh, Mr. Jones, can you tell me where the 119th Reserve Battery of the 83rd Reserve Stokes Gun Coy. is situated?” Of course, Adjutants know _everything_.

And when you admit ignorance they look at you with pained surprise, and go to Brigade.

“I asked the Adjutant of the --th Battalion, but he did not seem to know.”

Adjutants die young.

HOME

There is one subject no man mentions at the Front unless it be very casually, _en passant_. Even then it brings with it a sudden silence. There is so much, so very much in that little word “Home.”

If a man were to get up at a sing-song and sing “Home, Sweet Home,” his life would be imperilled. His audience would rise and annihilate him, because they could not give vent to their feelings in any other way. There are some things that strike directly at the heart, and this is one of them.

You see the new officer, the men of the new draft, abstracted, with a rather wistful look on their faces, as they gaze into the brazier, or sit silently in billets when their work is done. You have felt like that, and you know what is the matter. The symptoms are not to be encouraged in the individual nor the mass. They lead to strong drink and dissipation, for no man can preserve his inward calm for long, if he dwells much on his dearest recollections of Home. There is but one remedy: work, and lots of it, action, movement, anything to distract.

Many a man has committed some small “crime” that brought him to Orderly Room because he allowed his mind to wander ... Home--and realised too fully the percentage of his chances of ever seeing that home again. The Front is not a garden of Allah, or a bed of roses, or even a tenth-rate music-hall as some people would have us believe. It has to be made bearable by the spirit of those who endure it.

There is enough that is grim and awe-inspiring--aye! and heart-rending, without seeking it. That is why we do not like certain kinds of music at the Front, why the one-time student of “intense” music develops an uncontrollable predilection for wild and woolly rag-time strains, and never winces at their execution however faulty. That is why the Estaminets sell so much bad beer, and so much _vin mousseux_ under the generic title of Champagne.

Men want to forget about Home, for they dare not think of it too much. I have never heard a man speak of Home without a little hush in his voice, as though he spoke of something sacred that was, and might not be again.

How often one heard the remark, a kind of apologia: “One must do something.” Yet, in spite of all they do to forget Home, they are least happy who have none to forget. Fortunately they are few. It is a strange provision of Providence that lends zest to the attempt at oblivion, and induces a frame of mind that yearns through that attempt for the very things it would fain forget!

After all, it is very much like the school-boy who longs for privacy where he can blubber unseen, and is at the same time very glad that he has not got it, and _can’t_ blubber, because his school-fellows would see him!

A superficial observer might think that the men at the Front are purely callous, intent on seizing lustily on every possible chance of doubtful and other pleasures that they can obtain. He may think that war has brutalised them, numbed their consciences, steeled their hearts. Or he may class them as of low intellect. In all of which he is wrong, and has utterly failed to grasp the morale of the man who lives to fight to-day, never knowing of a certainty if he will see another dawn.

The soldier knows that he may not dwell in his heart on all he holds most dear. It “takes the stuffing out of him.” So, according to his lights, he works very hard indeed to keep up his spirits; to forget. Not _really_ to forget, only to pretend to himself that he is forgetting.

What good is it for the man whose sweetheart ran away with the other fellow to think about it? Therefore, Tommy rises above his thoughts, he puts them away from him--as best he can. And if that best is not all that people at home might wish it to be, surely some allowance may be made for what may be called the exigencies of the military situation!

Perhaps it is the last thing some people would imagine, but homesickness is a very real disease at the Front, and he may count himself lucky who escapes it.

“Wot price the Hedgeware Road?” says Bill, ruminatively, as he drinks his glass of mild--very mild--beer.

And his pal sums up _his_ feelings in the one word “Blimey!”

If you have seen men go into action, not once, but many times; if you have heard them sing, “Oh _my_, I _don’t_ want to die; _I_ want to go Home,” “My Little Grey Home in the West,” and many other similar ditties, then you will understand.

The very trenches shout it at you, these universal thoughts of Home. Look at some of the names: Oxford Street, Petticoat Lane, The Empire, Toronto Avenue, Bayou Italien--even the German trenches have their Wilhelmstrasse! Each nation in arms is alike in this respect. Every front-line soldier longs for Home.

A singer whose voice was chiefly remarkable for its sympathetic quality, gave a concert within sound of the guns. A battalion, just out of the trenches, went to hear her. She sang several bright little songs, every one encored uproariously, and finally she sang one of those beautiful Kashmir love songs which go straight to the depths. There was a moment’s tense silence when she had finished, and then the “house” rocked with applause, followed by a greater trumpeting of handkerchiefed noses than was ever before indulged in by any regiment _en masse_. She had awakened memories of Home.

There are many who rest beneath foreign skies for whom all earthly homes are done with. _They_ have been gathered to the greatest Home of all.

ACTION

“Message from Head-quarters, sir.” The runner was breathing hard, and his eyes were strained and tense-looking. He had not shaved for days. Fritz’s “thousand guns on the Somme,” that the papers talk of so glibly, were tuning up for business.

Major Ogilvie took the message, read it, and handed it on to me. “Zero hour will be at 6.30 P.M. AAA. Our artillery will bombard from 5.30 to 6.20 P.M., slow continuous, and from 6.20 to 6.29 P.M. hurricane fire AAA. You will give all possible assistance, by means of rifle and machine-gun fire to ULTRAMARINE, and arrange to reinforce, if necessary, in case of heavy counter-attack AAA. ULTRAMARINE will indicate that objective has been gained by firing two red rockets simultaneously AAA. Please render situation reports every half-hour to B.H.Q., A.21.d.1.4½.AAA.”

We looked at each other and smiled a little grimly. To be on the flank of an attack is rather worse than to attack, for it means sitting tight while Fritz pounds the life out of you.

“You stop here,” said Ogilvie, “in this glory-hole of ours, while I go up and see Niven. He will have to put his men in those forward saps. If you get any messages, deal with them, and make sure that Townley keeps those bombers of his on both sides of the road. They _must_ stop there, as long as there are any of them left, or the Hun might try to turn our flank. So long.”

He set out towards the north, leaving me in “AK” Coy.’s “head-quarters.” The latter consisted of a little niche, three feet wide, ran back a foot, and was four feet high, cut in the parapet of the front line. The runner, Thomson, one of our own company, was curled up in a little cubby-hole at my feet, and had fallen asleep.

It was lonely in that trench, although there were invisible men, not thirty feet away, on both sides of me.

The time was 5.25 P.M.

Our guns were still silent. Fritz was warming up more and more. He was shelling our right most persistently, putting “the odd shell” around head-quarters.

Punctually to the minute our artillery started in. Salvos of heavies, way back, shrapnel all along the front line and supports.

A wickedly pretty sight along a thousands yard front: Fritz began to get irritated, finally to be alarmed. Up went his red lights, one after the other, as he called on his guns, called, and kept on calling. They answered the call. Above us the air hissed unceasingly as shells passed and exploded in rear. He was putting a barrage on our supports and communication trenches. Then he opened up all along our trench. High explosive shrapnel, and those thunder-crackling “woolly bears.” I wondered where Ogilvie was, if he was all right, and I huddled in close to the damp crumbling earth.

It was 5.50 P.M.

“Per-loph-UFF.” An acrid smell of burnt powder, a peculiar, weird feeling that my head was bursting, and a dreadful realisation that I was pinned in up to my neck, and could not stir. A small shell, bursting on graze, had lit in the parapet, just above my head, exploded, and buried me up to the neck, and the runner also. He called out, but the din was too great for me to hear what he said. I struggled until my hands were free, and then with the energy of pure fear tore at the shattered sand-bags that weighed me down. Finally I was free to bend over to Thomson.

“Are you hurt?”

“No, sir, but I can’t move. I thought you was dead.”

I clawed him out with feverish haste. The air reeked with smoke, and the shelling was hellish. Without any cessation shells burst in front of, above, and behind the trench; one could feel their hot breath on one’s cheek, and once I heard above the din a cry of agony that wrung my torn and tattered nerves to a state of anguish.

“Get out of here,” I yelled, and we crawled along the crumbling trench to the right.

“Hrrumph!” A five-nine landed just beyond us. I stopped a second. “Stretcher-bearer!” came weakly from a dim niche at my side. Huddled there was one of my boys. He was wounded in the foot, the leg, the chest, and very badly in the arm. It took five minutes to put on a tourniquet, and while it was being done a scout lying by my side was killed. He cried out once, turned, shivered, and died. I remember wondering how his soul could go up to Heaven through that awful concentration of fire and stinging smoke.

It was 6.15 P.M.

There were many wounded, many dead, one of those wonderfully brave men, a stretcher-bearer, told me, when he came crawling along, with blood-stained hands, and his little red-cross case. None of the wounded could be moved then, it was impossible. I got a message, and read it by the light of the star shells: “Please report at once if enemy are shelling your area heavily AAA.” The answer was terse: “Yes AAA.”

Suddenly there was a lull. One of those inexplicable, almost terrifying lulls that are almost more awesome than the noise preceding them. I heard a voice ten yards away, coming from a vague, shadowy figure lying on the ground:

“Are you all right, ‘P.’?” It was Ogilvie.

“Yes. Are you?”

We crawled together, and held a hurried conversation at the top of our voices, for the bombardment had now started in with violent intensity from our side, as well as from Fritz’s.

“We’ll have to move to the sap, with Niven ... bring ... runners ... you ... make ... dash for it.”

“How ... ’bout Townley?”

“’S’all right.”

Then we pulled ourselves together and went for it, stumbling along the trench, over heaped-up mounds of earth, past still forms that would never move again. On, on, running literally for our lives. At last we reached the saps. Two platoons were out there, crowded in a little trench a foot and a half wide, nowhere more than four feet deep. Some shrapnel burst above it, but it was the old front line, thirty yards in rear, on which the Germans were concentrating a fire in which no man could live long.

The runners, Major Ogilvie, Niven, and myself, and that amazing Sergeant-Major of ours, who would crack a joke with Charon, were all together in a few yards of trench.

Our fire ceased suddenly. It was zero hour. In defiance of danger Ogilvie stood up, perfectly erect, and watched what was going on. Our guns opened again, they had lifted to the enemy supports and lines of communication.

“They’re over!” we cried all together.

Machine-guns were rattling in a crescendo of sound that was like the noise of a rapid stream above the roar of a water-wheel. The enemy sent up rocket upon rocket--three’s, four’s, green and red. Niven, as plucky a boy as ever lived, watched eagerly. Then a perfect hail of shells began to fall. One could almost see our old trench change its form as one glanced at it. It was almost as light as day. Major Ogilvie was writing reports. One after another he sent out the runners to head-quarters, those runners every one of whom deserves the Victoria Cross. Some went never to return.

All at once two red rockets burst away forward, on the right, falling slowly, slowly to earth.

ULTRAMARINE had attained the objective.

It was then 6.42 P.M.

Curious, most curious, to see the strain pass momentarily from men’s faces. Two runners took the message down. It proved to be the earliest news received at H.Q. that the objective was reached.