dim. For the first time in his life he saw the stars plainly above

Piccadilly. In the King’s Road he heard the warning bugles for an air raid. He got into bed, extinguished the light, and lay there listening, wide awake. To his shame he found the shell-fear came back as the Archies opened up, and he started each time he heard the thud of a bomb. They came closer and one crashed in the next street. He found he was sweating.

Elizabeth did not get back until three. Reggie and she had taken shelter in the Piccadilly Hotel. Winterbourne was still awake when she came in, but did not call to her.

* * * * *

His leave came to an end, and he spent five weeks of vague routine at his Depot. He hated coming back to barrack-room life, and did not like the men he was with. They were all Expeditionary men, but strangely different from what they were in the line. Most of the comradeship had gone; they were selfish, rather malicious to each other, and servilely flattered the N.C.O.’s who could get them passes. They seemed to think about nothing except getting passes out, so that they could meet girls or go to pubs. They grumbled ceaselessly. Some of them occasionally told hair-raising War stories, which Winterbourne thought quite probable, though he refused to accept their evidence as conclusive. He always remembered one story, or rather episode, related by a Sergeant in the Light Infantry:

“We ’ad a bloody awful time on the Somme. I shan’t forget some of the things I saw there.”

“What things?” asked Winterbourne.

“Well, one of our orfficers laid out there wounded, and we see a German run up with one of those stick bombs, pull the string and stick it under the orfficer’s head. ’E was wounded in both arms, and couldn’t move. So ’e ’ad five seconds waitin’ for his ’ead to be blowed off by that bomb sizzlin’ under ’is ear. We ’adn’t time to get to ’im. Some one shot the German and then some o’ our chaps picked up a wounded German orfficer and threw ’im alive into a burning ammunition dump. ’E screamed something ’orrible.”

* * * * *

From the depot he was sent to the Officers’ Training Camp with two days’ leave. He managed to get Fanny and Elizabeth to meet, and had lunch with them on the day he left. They both saw him off from Waterloo, and then parted outside the station.

The months of dreary Training in the cold dreary camp dragged by. He had two days’ Leave in the middle of the course, then “passed out” as an officer, and was sent on Leave again, with orders to wait until he received official notice of his appointment.

* * * * *

Elizabeth and Fanny both admired the cut and material of his cadet’s uniform, which was exactly like an officer’s except that it bore no badges of rank and that he did not wear the shoulder-strap of his Sam Browne belt. He looked ever so much smarter in his new officer’s clothes, with the little blue chevron, marking service over seas, sewed on his left sleeve. They both quite took to him again, and during his month’s Leave gave him a good time. Fanny thought him still an excellent lover. Only, instead of gay and amusing talk “in between,” he sat heavily silent, or drank and talked about that boring awful War. It was such a pity—he used to be such a charming companion.

This Leave came to an end too. He was gazetted, and went to his new regimental Depot, situated in wooden huts on a desolate heath in the North of England, a place swept by rain and wind and deadeningly chill in the wet winter days. The other officers were sharply divided into two sections or sects. Wounded survivors from the early days of the War, now on Permanent Home Service; and the newly gazetted officers, with a sprinkling of wounded on Temporary Home Service. They ate in one large mess room, but had two common rooms, which seemed to be tacitly reserved for each of the two groups, who scarcely ever mingled. Only the cadets from Sandhurst were admitted into the more exclusive room.

There was very little to do—parading with the Company, inspection, a little drill, Orderly Officer occasionally. There were so many new officers waiting to go overseas that the quarters were uncomfortably crowded, and there seemed to be almost as many officers as men on parade. He got the impression that Infantry subalterns were cheap as stinking fish.

At last he got his orders to proceed overseas—France again, though he had hoped for Egypt or Salonika. He had two more days of Leave and a quarrel with Elizabeth, who found him writing a loving note to Fanny on the morning he arrived. He went off in dudgeon and spent the time with Fanny. He saw Elizabeth again on the afternoon of the day before he left and patched matters up with her. She was now furiously jealous of his spending nights with Fanny, but “forgave” him. She said that the War had affected his mind so much that he did not know what he was doing, and anyway as he was going out again at once, they might as well be friends. They kissed, and he went off to keep a dinner engagement with Fanny.

His train left at seven the next morning. He got up at five-thirty, and kissed Fanny, who woke up and sleepily offered to get him coffee. But he made her lie still, dressed hastily, made himself some coffee, found he could not eat anything, and went back to the bedroom. Fanny had fallen asleep again. He kissed her very tenderly and gently, not to wake her; and softly let himself out of the flat. He had difficulty in finding a taxi, and was horribly worried lest he should miss his train and be suspected of over-staying Leave. He got to the platform one minute before the train started. There was no porter to carry his large valise, but he managed to get into a carriage just as the train started. It was a Pullman, so crowded with officers that he hadn’t room to sit down, and had to stand all the way to Dover. Most of them had newspapers. The news of the crushing defeat of the Fifth Army was just coming through. They were being sent out to replace losses. He thought of something which had happened the night before....

* * * * *

Fanny had insisted on his coming with her for a couple of hours to a party of the intelligentsia given by some one with chambers near the Temple. As they passed Charing Cross station, Winterbourne bumped into a man from his own Company who had just arrived by the Leave train.

“Go on with the others, Fanny dear. I’ll catch you up. Anyway, I’ve got the address.”

He turned to Corporal Hobbs, and said:

“Are you still with the old lot?”

“No, I left ’em in November. Got trench feet at Ypres. I was supposed to be court-martialled, but that was washed out. I’ve got a job at the Base now.”

“You’re lucky.”

“You’ve heard the news, I s’pose?”

“No, what?”

“Well, we heard there’s a big surprise attack on the Somme. We’re retiring, and our old Division is s’posed to have copped it badly, smashed to pieces, the R.T.O. said.”

“Good God!”

“I think it must be true. All Leaves stopped. I just managed to get away before the order came. There were only about ten men on the boat. Lucky for me I went down early.”

“Well, so long, old man.”

“I see you’re an officer now.”

“Yes, I’m just going out again.”

“Best of luck to you.”

“Best of luck.”

He found the man’s chambers. There were about ten people present. Winterbourne knew some of them. They had also heard the news of the battle through a man in Whitehall and were discussing it.

“It’s a bad defeat,” he said. “I’m told that the highest authorities think it adds another year to the war and will cost at least three hundred thousand men.”

He said it carelessly, as if it were a matter of casual importance. Winterbourne heard them constantly using the phrase “three hundred thousand men,” as if they were cows or pence or radishes. He walked up and down the large room apart from the others, thinking, no longer listening to their chatter. The phrase “Division smashed to pieces” rang in his brain. He wanted to seize the people in the room, the people in authority, every one not directly in the war, and shout to them: “Division smashed to pieces! Do you know what that means? You must stop it, you’ve got to stop it! Division smashed to pieces!...”

[ XIII ]

Winterbourne listened intently. Yes, it was! He turned to his Runner:

“Did you hear that, Baker?”

“Hear what, Sir?”

“Listen.”

A plane droned gently and distantly in the still air, and then very faintly but distinctly:

_Claaang!_

“There! Did you hear it?”

“No, Sir.”

“It was one of the heavies falling into M——. You’ll hear them soon enough. But come on, we must hurry. We’ve a long way to go if we’re to get back before dark.”

* * * * *

A year, almost to the day, after he had gone into M—— for the first time, Winterbourne was returning to it as an officer in command of a Company.

From London he had proceeded direct to Etaples, where he remained for several days under canvas on the sandy slopes among the pines. Large numbers of officers were being sent out, and they had to sleep four to a tent. Winterbourne thought this a luxurious allotment of space, but the other three subalterns, who had never been to France before, complained that there was not enough room for their camp-beds and that they had to sleep in their flea-bags. Winterbourne had not troubled to bring a camp-bed, knowing how few opportunities there would be to use it.

There was very little to do in Etaples, even with the more extended opportunities of an officer. They messed in a large draughty marquee, but there was a camp cinema where he spent part of each evening. There were numbers of Waacs at the Base, and he noticed many of them were pregnant. Apparently there was no attempt at concealment; but then the birth-rate was declining rapidly in England, and babies were urgently needed for the Next War. He observed that the cemetery had doubled in size since he had last seen it from the train a few months before. That Ypres offensive must have been very costly. Such acres of wooden crosses, the old ones already battered and weather-stained, the new ones steadily gaining on the dunes. And now there was this smashing defeat on the Somme. Haig had issued his back to the wall Order, there was unity of Allied Command under Foch, and America had been frantically petitioned to send reinforcements immediately. And still the front daily yielded under the pressure of repeated German attacks. It looked like being a longer War than ever.

At Etaples he was allotted to the 2/9 Battalion of the Foddershires, and left to join them with about fifteen other subalterns, most of whom had never been in the line. He found the Battalion on rest in a small village about twenty miles behind M——. They belonged to one of the Divisions which had been smashed to pieces, and the battalion had suffered severely, losing most of its officers (including the Colonel) and the greater part of its effectives. The new Colonel was an ex-Regular Corporal who had obtained a commission early in the War, and by dexterity and martinet methods had risen to the rank of acting Lieutenant-Colonel. He was not a fighting soldier, but an expert trainer. He had the bullying manner of the barrack-square drill instructor, and his method of “training” was to harass every officer and man under his command from morning to night. After a week’s “rest” under this commander, Winterbourne felt nearly as tired as if he had been in the line. The subalterns who had never been under fire were exhausted and dismayed.

However, it must in justice be admitted that Colonel Straker was faced with appalling difficulties, and Winterbourne would have sympathized with the man if he had not so obviously been trying to push his own professional career in the Army at the expense of every one he commanded. The old battalion was a wreck. It had four of its officers left, one of whom was the Adjutant; a few of its old N.C.O.’s and a sprinkling of men were there; mostly signallers and headquarters men. Not a single one of the Lewis Gunners remained. Two Companies had been captured, and the remainder had fought a way out with terrific losses. The gaps had been filled chiefly by raw half-trained boys of eighteen and a half, many of whom were scared stiff by the mere thought of going into the trenches. To secure an adequate number of N.C.O.’s, the Colonel had to promote nearly every man who had any experience of the War, even transport drivers who could scarcely write their names.

Winterbourne had expected to go into the line at first as a supernumerary officer under instruction, and to pick up his duties by watching others and always going about with them. To his dismay, but also a certain amount of flattered vanity, he found himself immediately appointed as acting commander of B Company. But it was inevitable. Several of the new officers were mere boys, others volunteers from the Army Service Corps—perfectly competent at their own job but quite ignorant of trench warfare—and others again were “keymen” from business houses, reluctantly yielded to the “combings out” of 1917. Winterbourne had four subalterns under him, Hutchinson, Cobbold, Paine, and Rushton. They were all good fellows, but three of them had seen no service whatever and the fourth had been in Egypt only.

When Winterbourne inspected his company on the first day, his heart sank within him. He felt it was monstrous to send these scared-looking boys into the line without a proper stiffening of more experienced men. It would have been far better to spread them out. They cleaned their buttons perfectly, drilled very neatly, turned right or left with an imitation Guards stamp, and trembled when an officer spoke to them. But they were mighty raw stuff for the job ahead of them. Winterbourne thought of his own greenness when he had first gone into the line, and his heart sank lower as he thought of his own utter inexperience as an officer. He had a very sketchy idea of how a Company was run in the line. Of course, he had heard and carried orders, and had been roughly schooled in Company organization—on paper—at the Cadet School. But that was very different from assuming the responsibility for a hundred and more men, most of them frightened boys who had never seen any but practice trenches and never heard a shell burst. Well, the only thing was to carry on, and do his best....

* * * * *

The Division was to take over part of the M—— sector, from the Canadian Army. Winterbourne had to occupy part of the Reserve line just to the left of M——. The four Company commanders with their Runners were sent on ahead in a lorry to reconnoitre the positions and arrange details of “taking over.” The Colonel particularly impressed upon Winterbourne the necessity for obtaining and carefully reading the written instructions for defence which would be with the Officer he was relieving.

They were to have met Canadian guides at a given rendezvous, but the guides were not there. Winterbourne, who could have found his way to M—— in the blackest darkness, and who had twenty times passed up and down the trench he was to occupy, decided to push on. The other three, mistrusting him, stayed. He set out with Baker, his servant and runner. Owing to the shortage of men, the officers’ servants had to act as runners, with the result that they performed both jobs abominably. Baker had been allotted to Winterbourne by the despotic Colonel, who interfered in the minutest details and then held the Company commander responsible for everything which went wrong. Thus, he was in a position to take credit for every success and push off the responsibility for failure on some one else.

Winterbourne would certainly not have chosen Baker for himself, and wondered what possible caprice of the Colonel had forced the boy on him. He was a decent enough lad—a milliner’s delivery boy—but timid, unintelligent and lazy. Baker seemed to think that he had performed all his duties as a Runner if he followed Winterbourne so closely that he continually trod on his officer’s heels.

They passed many places familiar to Winterbourne—the cemetery (now much enlarged), the ruined village (now still more ruined), the long slag-hill, Southampton Row. Nothing had changed, except to become a little more desolate and smashed. He noticed that several large shells had fallen in the cemetery that morning or the night before, digging up the graves violently, scattering bones and torn blankets and broken crosses over the other graves. He turned in for five minutes, and walked down the long row containing the graves of his Pioneer companions. He stood a couple of minutes at Thompson’s grave. A shell splinter had knocked the cross crooked. He set it straight.

* * * * *

Winterbourne found the trench easily enough, and asked the first Canadian sentry for Company Headquarters. The man was leaning very negligently on the parapet, chewing gum. Winterbourne, accustomed to perpetual “Sirring” and heel-clicking and general servility, was almost shocked when the man very casually jerked his thumb over his left shoulder without saying a word, and returned thoughtfully to his gum-chewing. He found the Company commander, a Major, democratically sitting in the trench on a double-seated latrine, talking humorously to one of his men. The British always had separate latrines for officers.

Winterbourne enjoyed this hugely, and liked the Canadians. They at once invited him to whiskey high-balls and bridge. He managed to evade this, and then explained his own situation, asked for the written orders of defence and to see all the positions. The Canadian officer stared and said they had no written instructions.

“Well, what do you do if you’re attacked?”

“I guess you’d form a defensive flank—if they ever got past the machine-gunners in M——.”

The Canadian officer walked Winterbourne round the positions. He was bare-headed—strictly against orders—and his men greeted him as he passed with friendly nods and an occasional brief remark. Winterbourne noticed that they did not wait for him to speak first and did not call him “Sir.” He reflected with amusement that the Canadians were easily the crack troops of the British armies, and were sent into all the hardest fighting. And yet they didn’t even say “Sir” to an officer!

* * * * *

This meeting with the Canadians was probably the last piece of enjoyment or tranquillity that Winterbourne ever had. From the moment he went back to his own Battalion his life became one long harassed nightmare. He was deluged with all sorts of documents requiring information and statistics he was totally unable to furnish. The blunders, the mistakes, the negligences of his inexperienced men were legion, and all were visited upon him by the martinet Colonel. For days and weeks he got scarcely any sleep and never once even took his boots off. He had continually to be up and down the trench, especially during the periodic six days in the Front line, and even in Support. He spent hours a day answering idiotic written questions brought by weary Runners and trying to puzzle out minute and unnecessary orders. He was always being told to report to Battalion Headquarters, where he was savagely attacked and reprimanded for the most piffling and unimportant errors. He went on patrol himself, contrary to orders, to make sure that at least one patrol a night was properly done—and was severely reprimanded for that. The boys, suddenly released from button-polishing and saluting and drill (which they had been taught to consider all important) became deplorably slack in important matters. They lost portions of their equipment, dropped their ammunition, never knew their orders as sentries, went to sleep on sentry duty, shivered when ordered to go on patrol, cried when put in listening posts in No Man’s Land, littered up the trench with paper, bully beef tins and fragments of food, urinated in the trenches, and “forgot” perpetually everything they were told. While Winterbourne was at one end of his section of trench, desperately and sweatingly trying to get some sort of order and sense into them, others were committing all sorts of military abominations at the other end. It was useless to “take their names” for punishment, especially as there aren’t many punishments as bad as being in the line. One day he did exasperatedly make the Sergeant-Major “Take their names” and by nightfall found he had collected forty-two. Ludicrous. The N.C.O.’s gave the job up in despair and let things drift.

He found most of the recruits were hopelessly slow in getting on their gas masks, and appeared to be in such a state of hebetude that they did not realize that gas was dangerous. They did preposterous things. They would, for instance, entirely abandon a Lewis Gun post to get their dinners. It was ten days before Winterbourne discovered this. The subalterns had seen it, of course, but had not known that they ought to report it. Winterbourne “ran” the responsible N.C.O. as an example. He “ran” a boy for sleeping on sentry duty, and then washed out the charge when he reflected that the poor wretch might be shot for so serious a military crime. His Front line positions were an exhausting nightmare, too. His front was over five hundred yards. He had an outpost line of four listening and observation posts with a section in each. Three hundred yards farther back he had his main defence line and his own headquarters. Behind that he had various isolated Lewis Gun positions. All these were imposed upon him in spite of his protests. The defence scheme might be all very well on paper, and might have worked out with experienced troops, but it was hopeless under these peculiar circumstances. He realized after a couple of nights in the Front line that under any determined attack it would be impossible for him to hold his positions for ten minutes. He urged this on the Colonel, begging that the dispositions might be temporarily revised and the men brought more closely together under his own eyes. He was told that he was incompetent and not fit to be a Lance-Corporal. Winterbourne sarcastically replied that some people are born Corporals and some are not. He offered to resign his command, and was ordered to continue it under threat of immediate arrest and court-martial for negligence and disobeying orders in the face of the enemy. Knowing how easily a court-martial can be “cooked,” Winterbourne unwillingly carried on.

Most fortunately, he was not at first attacked, but he lost several men. Two were wounded on a ration party, having lost contact and wandered about half the night. One was shot through the neck by a fixed rifle, although Winterbourne had thrice ordered every N.C.O. to warn the men about it. At Stand-to one morning, the Germans bombarded them with mustard gas shells. Winterbourne had warned them of the gas until he was sick of doing so. Two mustard shells fell just outside the parapet of a fire-step with six men on it. They ducked down when the shells burst and then stood stupidly looking at the bright yellow shell-hole, wondering what the funny smell was. Three of them were gassed, and two died.

Winterbourne spent most of each night plodding up and down his immense area of trenches to see that every one was at his post. After dawn one morning, instead of trying to snatch an hour’s sleep, he went up to inspect his listening posts, feeling an uneasy intuition about them. There were four, about a hundred yards apart, isolated in what had once been the Front line. At the third listening post, he found six rifles leaning against the trench and no men. They had been captured by a silent raiding party in broad daylight! Probably all asleep. Winterbourne was furious, sent his Runner back for another section, and remained on guard himself. The Runner came back timidly after an interminable time, and said the Sergeant wouldn’t come. Winterbourne didn’t want the other posts to know that one had been captured, fearing a panic. It was useless to leave the Runner on guard; he would simply have waited until Winterbourne’s back was turned and have run to the other posts and spread an alarmist report. Winterbourne hurried back, and found that the Runner had delivered such a garbled and incoherent message that the Sergeant had been utterly unable to understand, and had sent him back for precise orders. Of course, the Colonel put all the responsibility upon Winterbourne, and threatened him again with a court-martial. Winterbourne protested and they had a furious row; after which the Colonel re-doubled his persecutions. When they went out for four days’ “rest” after their first three weeks in the line Winterbourne felt more exhausted and depressed than he would have believed possible. He saw that the men got into their billets, after infinite tramplings and shoutings in the darkness, and fell on to a sacking bed. He slept for fourteen hours.

* * * * *

Of course, Winterbourne had taken all this far too tragically and responsibly. The situation happened to be one which most disastrously fed his “worry” neurosis. A bitterly humorous destiny seemed intentionally to involve him in circumstances which rent his mind to pieces and exhausted his body—unnecessarily. It was a misfortune, due possibly to the fact that the initial of his name made him come towards the end of a list, that he was sent to a battalion so raggedly composed and so naggingly commanded. We passed out almost together at the Cadet School, but where everything ran comparatively easily and smoothly for me, all went wrong with him. He brooded incessantly and saw all things in terms of the bleakest despair—the collapse of his own life, his present situation, the continued retirement of the Allied Armies which seemed to promise an indefinite continuation of the War, his feeling that even if he came out alive he would never be able to re-build his life. It was unlucky to go straight back to M——, which had such tragic associations for him and made it doubly hard to repress shell-shocked nerves. His state of mind, what with sleeplessness and worry and shock and ague, which came back as soon as he was in the line again, and physical exhaustion and inhibited fear, almost fringed dementia, and he would have collapsed but for his strength of will and pride. But he was a wrecked man, swept along in the swirling cataracts of the War.

* * * * *

The days passed into weeks, the weeks into months. He moved through impressions like a man hallucinated. And every incident seemed to beat on his brain, Death, Death, Death. All the decay and death of battle fields entered his blood and seemed to poison him. He lived among smashed bodies and human remains in an infernal cemetery. If he scratched his stick idly and nervously in the side of a trench he pulled out human ribs. He ordered a new latrine to be dug out from the trench, and thrice the digging had to be abandoned because they came upon terrible black masses of decomposing bodies. At dawn one morning when it was misty he walked over the top of Hill 91, where probably nobody had been by day since its capture. The heavy mist brooded about him in a strange stillness. Scarcely a sound on their immediate front, though from north and south came the vibration of furious drum-fire. The ground was a desert of shell-holes and torn rusty wire, and everywhere lay skeletons in steel helmets still clothed in the rags of sodden khaki or field grey. Here a fleshless hand still clutched a broken rusty rifle, there a gaping decaying boot showed the thin knotty foot-bones. He came on a skeleton violently dismembered by a shell explosion; the skull was split open and the teeth lay scattered on the bare chalk; the force of the explosion had driven coins and a metal pencil right into the hip-bones and femurs. In a concrete pill-box three German skeletons lay across their machine-gun with its silent nozzle still pointing at the loop hole. They had been attacked from the rear with phosphorous grenades, which burn their way into the flesh and for which there is no possible remedy. A shrunken leather strap still held a battered wrist-watch on a fleshless wrist-bone. Alone in the white curling mist, drifting slowly past like wraiths of the slain, with the far-off thunder of drum-fire beating the air, Winterbourne stood in frozen silence and contemplated the last achievements of civilized man.

* * * * *

A raiding party was sent out from his front. He watched the box barrage from the front line. The Germans filled the night with Verey lights and coloured rockets. Their artillery and trench-mortars and machine-guns retaliated fiercely. Smoke and gas drifted across. After interminable waiting the officer and three of the men staggered back, bleeding, blackened with smoke, their clothes torn to pieces on the wire. The raid had failed.

* * * * *

A Company of Gas Experts came up from the Base, and sent over some thousands of Stokes mortars loaded with a heavy concentration of poison gas. As soon as the last mortar was fired they were in a fearful hurry to get away. The German artillery retaliation smashed their trenches. Next morning, Winterbourne watched through glasses the Germans carrying out their dead on stretchers.

* * * * *

A British airplane fell in No Man’s Land. Winterbourne saw the pilot, who was still alive, struggle to get out from the wreckage. An enemy machine-gun was turned on him, and he fell limp across the side of the cock-pit. The plane was smashed to pieces by British heavies to prevent the Germans from obtaining the model.

* * * * *

They shifted to another part of the line. The Company was out in No Man’s Land in the darkness strengthening their shattered wire against a threatened attack. Suddenly from half a mile of German front leaped a line of flame. There was a whistling roar of projectiles, and a thousand gas containers crashed to the ground all about them. Men were killed outright by direct hits, and wounded by pieces of flying metal. Every man who took more than two breaths of the deadly concentration was doomed. All that night and far into the misty dawn the stretchers went down the communication trench carrying inert figures with horrible foam on their mouths.

* * * * *

The German attacks spent their force, and the huge Allied counter-attacks began. The starving German armies were hurled back to the Hindenburg Line, their impregnable defence. The Canadians miraculously stormed the Drocourt-Quéant switch line.

Winterbourne was back on the Somme, that incredible desert, pursuing the retreating enemy. They came up the Bapaume-Cambrai road by night, and bivouacked in holes scratched with entrenching tools in the side of a sandy bank. The wrecked country-side in the pale moonlight was a frigid and motionless image of Death. They spoke in whispers, awed by the immensity of desolation. By day the whole landscape was covered with the débris left by the broken German armies. Smashed tanks, guns with their wheels broken, stood out like fixed wrecks in the unmoving ocean of shell-holes. The whole earth seemed a litter of overcoats, shaggy leather packs, rifles, water-bottles, gas masks, steel helmets, bombs, entrenching tools, cast away in the panic of flight. By night, the sky glowed with the flames of burning Cambrai, with the black hump of Bourlon Hill silhouetted against them.

They drove the Germans from Cambrai, and pressed on from village to village, constantly shelled and harassed by machine-gun fire from their rear-guard. The German machine-gunners, fragments of the magnificent armies of the early War years, died at their posts. The demoralized German Infantry surrendered wholesale.

For three days in succession Winterbourne’s Company formed the advance guard, and he led it in the darkness over unknown ground by compass bearing in a kind of dazed delirium. Pressing on through falling shells in the blank night, with the ever present dread of falling into a machine-gun ambush, became an agony. They fought their way into inhabited villages which had been held by the Germans for over four years. The terrified people crouched in cellars or ran distractedly into the fields. They took the village of F——, after a brief but fierce bombardment, an hour after dawn. The roads leading in and out were encumbered with dead Germans, smashed transport, the contorted bodies of dead horses. Dead German soldiers lay about the village street, which was cluttered with fallen tiles and bricks. In a garden a war-demented peasant was digging a grave to bury his wife, who had been killed by a shell-burst. In the ruined village school Winterbourne picked up a book—it was Pascal’s “Thoughts on Christianity.”

* * * * *

Part of Cambrai had been levelled to the ground in 1914, and stood a melancholy monument of neatly-piled wreckage. Part of the remainder was burned. In the undestroyed streets many houses had been looted. The furniture had been smashed, pictures and photographs torn from the walls, cushions ripped open with bayonets, curtains slashed down, carpets gashed into rags. The whole mass of desecrated objects had been flung into the centre of the floor, after which the Germans had urinated and dropped their excrement upon it. Winterbourne gazed into a dozen houses which had been treated in this way. The villages beyond Cambrai had not been sacked, but were utterly filthy and swarming with buzzing legions of flies. Isolated cottages had sometimes been completely gutted of their contents. In one place Winterbourne found an emaciated French woman and two starved children living in a cottage with nothing but straw—literally nothing but straw in the place. He gave them his iron rations and twenty francs. The woman took them with a dull hopelessness.

* * * * *

They were approaching the Belgian border. On the evening of the 3rd of November Winterbourne with about twenty men rushed into the village of K——, just as the Germans hastily retreated from the other end. He had been ordered to occupy the place if possible, and to arrange billets. He lodged his Company, placed guards and pickets and then went through the cellars. The Germans were experts in placing booby-traps which would explode if carelessly moved, and Winterbourne did not know whether there might not be men concealed in the cellars to take them unawares. He went down into cellar after cellar with his electric torch, and was soon re-assured. The Germans had fled in such haste that they had left their rifles and equipment in several cellars. The floors were strewn with straw. On a table he found a half-finished letter, abandoned in the middle of a sentence. In another a large black dog lay dead—its owner had killed it with a bullet rather than leave it to possible ill-treatment.

* * * * *

The Colonel explained the dispositions for the coming battle over a map. The conference of officers took notes of the orders which were very elaborate, but precise and clear. It was nearly half-past three when they had finished, and zero hour was six-thirty. Winterbourne had been on foot since five the morning before. His eyes smarted with lack of sleep, and his mind was so dulled that he could scarcely comprehend and write down his orders. He misspelled words as he scrawled down notes in shaking deformed handwriting. He puzzled a long time over map-references, and irritated the Colonel by repeatedly asking questions.

They had an hour before they moved out to their battle positions. The other officers hurried away to snatch an hour’s sleep. Winterbourne felt utterly sleepy, but quite unable to sleep. The thought of another battle, even with the dispirited and defeated German rear-guard, filled him with shrinking dread. How face another barrage? He tried to write letters to Fanny and Elizabeth, but his mind kept wandering away and he could not collect his thoughts sufficiently to string together a few banal sentences. He sat on a chair brought him by his servant, with his head in his hands, staring at the straw and the dead black dog. He had only one thought—peace. He must at least have peace. He was at the very end of his endurance, had used up the last fraction of his energy and strength. He wished he was one of the skeletons lying on Hill 91, an anonymous body among the corpses lying outside in the street. He had not even the courage to shoot himself with his revolver; and added that last grain of self-contempt to his despair.

* * * * *

They assembled by platoons in the village street, and each officer marched off in silence to his allotted position. Winterbourne followed with his little knot of Company Headquarters, and saw that each platoon was in its proper place. He shook hands with each officer.

“Quite sure about your orders and objective?”

“Yes.”

“Good-bye.”

“Oh, make it au revoir.”

“Good-bye.”

Winterbourne returned to his own position and waited. He looked at his luminous wrist-watch. Six twenty-five. Five minutes to zero hour. The cold November night was utterly silent. Thousands of men and hundreds of guns were facing each other on the verge of battle, and there seemed not a sound. He listened. Nothing. His Runner whispered something to a signaller, who whispered a reply. Three more minutes. Silence. He could feel the beating of his heart, more rapid than the tick of seconds as he held his watch to his ear.

CRASH! Like an orchestra at the signal of a baton the thousands of guns north and south opened up. The night sprang to flickering day-light with the gun-flashes, the earth trembled with the shock, the air roared and screamed with shells. Lights rushed up from the German line, and their artillery in turn flamed into action. Winterbourne could just see a couple of his sections advancing as he started off himself, and then everything was blotted out in a confusion of smoke and bursting shells. He saw his Runner stagger and fall as a shell burst between them; then his Corporal disappeared, blown to pieces by a direct hit. He came to a sunken road, and lay on the verge, trying to see what was happening in the faint light of dawn. He saw only smoke; and pushed on. Suddenly German helmets were all round him. He clutched at his revolver. Then he saw they were unarmed, holding shaking hands above their heads.

The German machine-guns were tat-tat-tatting at them, and there was a ceaseless swish of bullets. He passed the bodies of several of his men. One section wiped out by a single heavy shell. Other men lay singly. There was Jameson dead; Halliwell dead; Sergeant Morton, Taylor and Fish, dead in a little group. He came to the main road, which was three hundred yards short of his objective. A deadly machine-gun fire was holding up his Company. The officers and men were lying down, the men firing rifles, and the Lewis Guns ripping off drums of bullets. Winterbourne’s second Runner was hit, and lay groaning: “O for God’s sake kill me, _kill_ me. I can’t stand it. The agony. _Kill_ me.”

Something seemed to break in Winterbourne’s head. He felt he was going mad, and sprang to his feet. The line of bullets smashed across his chest like a savage steel whip. The universe exploded darkly into oblivion.

RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE

COMMANDEMENT EN CHEF DES ARMÉES ALLIÉES

_Officers, Non-commissioned Officers and Men of the Allied Armies._

After resolutely holding the enemy in check, for months you have repeatedly attacked with unwearied energy and confidence.

You have won the greatest battle in History and saved the most sacred of all causes: The liberty of the world.

You may well be proud.

You have wreathed your Colours with immortal fame.

Posterity is grateful to you.

(Signed) F. FOCH

MARSHAL OF FRANCE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF THE ALLIED ARMIES

EPILOGUE

_EPILOGUE_

Eleven years after the fall of Troy, We, the old men—some of us nearly forty— Met and talked on the sunny rampart Over our wine, while the lizards scuttled In dusty grass, and the crickets chirred.

Some bared their wounds; Some spoke of the thirst, dry in the throat, And the heart-beat, in the din of battle; Some spoke of intolerable sufferings, The brightness gone from their eyes And the grey already thick in their hair.

And I sat a little apart From the garrulous talk and old memories, And I heard a boy of twenty Say petulantly to a girl, seizing her arm: “Oh, come away, why do you stand there Listening open-mouthed to the talk of old men? Haven’t you heard enough of Troy and Achilles? Why should they bore us for ever With an old quarrel and the names of dead men We never knew, and dull forgotten battles?”

And he drew her away, And she looked back and laughed As he spoke more contempt of us, Being now out of hearing.

And I thought of the graves by desolate Troy And the beauty of many young men now dust, And the long agony, and how useless it all was. And the talk still clashed about me Like the meeting of blade and blade.

And as they two moved further away He put an arm about her, and kissed her; And afterwards I heard their gay distant laughter.

And I looked at the hollow cheeks And the weary eyes and the grey-streaked heads Of the old men—nearly forty—about me; And I too walked away In an agony of helpless grief and pity.

THE END