Chapter 2

"Well, sir," he began, "it 'appened like this 'ere. After what you said the other day abaht bully beef, I went orf ter try ter git a rebbit or an 'are. I seen sev'ral, sir, but I never 'it one nor wired one. Then, on Friday, jest as I was shootin' at an 'ole 'are what I see, up kime an orficer, one o' thim Staff gints. 'Who are you?' 'e asks. I told 'im as I was a servant, and was jest tryin' ter git an 'are fer my bloke--beggin' yer pardon, sir, I mean my orficer. Then, after a lot more talk, 'e says, 'Do yer know that yer gone and nearly 'it the Gen'ril?' That's all as I knows abaht it, sir. I never wanted ter 'it no Gen'ril."

"All this, and not even a rabbit!" I sighed. "It's a serious business, and you ought to have known better than to go letting off ammunition behind the firing line. However, I'll see what can be done," and my servant went away, rather crestfallen, to drown his sorrows in a glass of very mild, very unpleasant Belgian beer.

An hour or two later, I strolled across to a neighbouring billet to see a friend, and to tell him of my coming interview.

"You'll get hell," was his only comfort. Then, as an afterthought, he said, "You'd better wear my spurs; they'll help to impress him. A clink of spurs will make even your salute seem smart."

Thus it was that I, who am no horseman, rode over to Brigade Headquarters, a mile away, with my toes turned in, and a pair of bright and shining spurs turned away as far as possible from my horse's flanks.

Unhappy and ill at ease, I was shown into the General's room.

"Mr. Newcombe," he began, after a preliminary glance at a paper in front of him, "this is a very serious matter. It is a serious offence on the part of Private Jones, who, I understand, is your servant."

"Yes, sir."

"It is also an example of gross carelessness on your part."

"Yes, sir."

"I was returning from the trenches on your right on Friday last, when a bullet flew past my head, coming from the direction opposed to the Germans. I have a strong objection to being shot at by my own men, right behind the fire trenches, so I sent Captain Neville to find out who had fired, and he found your servant."

"Yes, sir."

"Well, can you give any explanation of this extraordinary event?"

I explained to the best of my ability.

"It is a very unusual case," said the General, when I had finished. "I do not wish to pursue the matter further, as you are obviously the real person to blame."

"Yes, sir."

"I am very dissatisfied about it, and you must please see that better discipline is kept. I do not like to proceed against officers under my command, so the matter drops here. You must reprimand your servant very severely, and, I repeat, I am very dissatisfied. You may go, Mr."--here another glance at the paper before him--"Newcombe. Good afternoon."

I brought my heels together for a very smart salute ... and locked my spurs! For some seconds I stood swaying helplessly in front of him, then I toppled forward, and, supporting myself with both hands upon his table, I at length managed to separate my feet. When I ventured to look at him again to apologise, I saw that his frown had gone, and his mouth was twitching in a strong inclination to laugh.

"You are not, I take it, Mr. Newcombe, quite accustomed to wearing spurs?" he said presently.

I blushed horribly, and, in my confusion, blurted out my reason for putting them on. This time he laughed unrestrainedly. "Well, you have certainly impressed me with them." Then, just as I was preparing to go, he said, "Will you have a glass of whisky, Newcombe, before you go? Neville," he called to the Staff Captain in the next room, "you might ask Andrews to bring the whisky and some glasses."

"Good afternoon," said the General, very affably, when, after a careful salute, I finally took my leave.

Let anyone who will try this recipe for making friends with a General. I do not venture to guarantee its infallibility, however, for that depends entirely on the General himself, and, to such, rules and instruction do not apply.

III

"MUD!"

Those at home in England, with their experience of war books and photographs, of Zeppelin raids and crowded hospitals, are beginning to imagine they know all there is to know about war. The truth is that they still have but little idea of the life in the trenches, and, as far as mud is concerned, they are delightfully ignorant. They do not know what mud is.

They have read of Napoleon's "Fourth Element," they have listened to long descriptions of mud in Flanders and France, they have raised incredulous eyebrows at tales of men being drowned in the trenches, they have given a fleeting thought of pity for the soldiers "out there" as they have slushed home through the streets on rainy nights; but they have never realised what mud means, for no photograph can tell its slimy depth, and even the pen of a Zola or a Victor Hugo could give no adequate idea of it.

And so, till the end of the war, the old story will be continued--while the soldier flounders and staggers about in that awful, sucking swamp, the pessimist at home will lean back in his arm-chair and wonder, as he watches the smoke from his cigar wind up towards the ceiling, why we do not advance at the rate of one mile an hour, why we are not in Berlin, and whether our army is any good at all. If such a man would know why we are not in German territory, let him walk, on a dark night, through the village duck-pond, and then sleep in his wet clothes in the middle of the farmyard. He would still be ignorant of mud and wet, but he would cease to wonder and grumble.

It is the infantryman who suffers most, for he has to live, eat, sleep, and work in the mud. The plain of dragging slime that stretches from Switzerland to the sea is far worse to face than the fire of machine guns or the great black trench-mortar bombs that come twisting down through the air. It is more terrible than the frost and the rain--you cannot even stamp your feet to drive away the insidious chill that mud always brings. Nothing can keep it from your hands and face and clothes; there is no taking off your boots to dry in the trenches--you must lie down just as you are, and often you are lucky if you have two empty sandbags under you to save you from the cold embrace of the swamp.

But if the mud stretch is desolate by day, it is shocking by night. Imagine a battalion going up to the trenches to relieve another regiment. The rain comes beating pitilessly down on the long trail of men who stumble along in the blackness over the _pavé_. They are all well loaded, for besides his pack, rifle, and equipment, each man carries a pick or a bag of rations or a bundle of firewood. At every moment comes down the line the cry to "keep to the right," and the whole column stumbles off the _pavé_ into the deep mud by the roadside to allow the passage of an ambulance or a transport waggon. There is no smoking, for they are too close to the enemy, and there is the thought of six days and six nights of watchfulness and wetness in the trenches.

Presently the winding line strikes off the road across the mud. This is not mud such as we know it in England--it is incredibly slippery and impossibly tenacious, and each dragging footstep calls for a tremendous effort. The men straggle, or close up together so that they have hardly the room to move; they slip, and knock into each other, and curse; they are hindered by little ditches, and by telephone wires that run, now a few inches, now four or five feet from the ground. One man trips over an old haversack that is lying in his path--God alone knows how many haversacks and how many sets of equipment have been swallowed up by the mud on the plain of Flanders, part of the equipment of the wounded that has been thrown aside to lighten the burden--and when he scrambles to his feet again he is a mass of mud, his rifle barrel is choked with it, it is in his hair, down his neck, everywhere. He staggers on, thankful only that he did not fall into a shell hole, when matters would have been much worse.

Just when the men are waiting in the open for the leading platoon to file down into the communication trench, a German star shell goes up, and a machine gun opens fire a little farther down the line. As the flare sinks down behind the British trench it lights up the white faces of the men, all crouching down in the swamp, while the bullets swish by, "like a lot of bloomin' swallers," above their heads.

And now comes the odd quarter of a mile of communication trench. It is very narrow, for the enemy can enfilade it, and it is paved with brushwood and broken bricks, and a little drain, that is meant to keep the floor dry, runs along one side of it. In one place a man steps off the brushwood into the drain, and he falls headlong. The others behind have no time to stop themselves, and a grotesque pile of men heaps itself up in the narrow, black trench. One man laughing, the rest swearing, they pick themselves up again, and tramp on to the firing line.

Here the mud is even worse than on the plain they have crossed. All the engineers and all the trench pumps in the world will not keep a trench decently dry when it rains for nine hours in ten and when the trench is the lowest bit of country for miles around. The men can do nothing but "carry on"--the parapet must be kept in repair whatever the weather; the sandbags must be filled however wet and sticky the earth. The mud may nearly drag a man's boot off at his every step--indeed, it often does; but the man must go on digging, shovelling, lining the trench with tins, logs, bricks, and planks in the hope that one day he may have put enough flooring into the trench to reach solid ground beneath the mud.

All this, of course, is only the infantryman's idea of things. From a tactical point of view mud has a far greater importance--it is the most relentless enemy that an army can be called upon to face. Even without mud and without Germans it would be a very difficult task to feed and look after a million men on the move; with these two discomforts movement becomes almost impossible.

It is only after you have seen a battery of field artillery on the move in winter that you can realise at all the enormous importance of good weather when an advance is to be made. You must watch the horses labouring and plunging in mud that reaches nearly to their girths; you must see the sweating, half-naked men striving, with outstanding veins, to force the wheels round; you must hear the sucking cry of the mud when it slackens its grip; and you must remember that this is only a battery of light guns that is being moved.

It is mud, then, that is the great enemy. It is the mud, then, and not faulty organisation or German prowess that you must blame if we do not advance as fast as you would like. Even if we were not to advance another yard in another year, people in England should not be disheartened. "Out there" we are facing one of the worst of foes. If we do not advance, or if we advance too slowly, remember that it is mud that is the cause--not the German guns.

IV

THE SURPRISE ATTACK

"Do you really feel quite fit for active service again?" asked the President of the Medical Board.

It was not without reason that Roger Dymond hesitated before he gave his answer, for nerves are difficult things to deal with. It is surprising, but it is true, that you never find a man who is afraid the first time he goes under fire. There are thousands who are frightened beforehand--frightened that they will "funk it" when the time comes, but when they see men who have been out for months "ducking" as each shell passes overhead they begin to think what brave fellows they are, and they wonder what fear is. But after they have been in the trenches for weeks, when they realise what a shell can do, their nerve begins to go; they start when they hear a rifle fired, and they crouch down close to the ground at the whistle of a passing shell.

Thus had it been with Roger Dymond. At the beginning of the war he had enjoyed himself--if anyone could enjoy that awful retreat and awful advance. He had been one of the first officers to receive the Military Cross, for brilliant work by the canal at Givenchy; he had laughed and joked as he lay all day in the open and listened to the bullets that went "pht" against the few clods of earth he had erected with his entrenching tool, and which went by the high-sounding name of "head cover."

And then, one day a howitzer shell had landed in the dug-out where he was lunching with his three particular friends. When the men of his company cleared the sandbags away from him, he was a gibbering wreck, unwounded but paralysed, and splashed with the blood of three dead men.

Now, after months of battle dreams and mad terror, of massage and electrical treatment, he was faced with the question--"Do you feel quite fit for active service again?"

He was tired to death of staying at home with no apparent complaint, he was sick of light duty with his reserve battalion, he wanted to be out at the front again with the men and officers he knew ... and yet, supposing his nerve went again, supposing he lost his self-control....

Finally, however, he looked up. "Yes, sir," he said, "I feel fit for anything now--quite fit."

* * * * *

Three months later the Medical Officer sat talking to the C.O. in the Headquarter dug-out.

"As for old Dymond," he said, "he ought never to have been sent out here again. He's done his bit already, and they ought to have given him a 'cushy' job at home, instead of one of those young staff blighters"--for the M.O. was no respecter of persons, and even a "brass hat" failed to awe him.

"Can't you send him down the line?" said the C.O. "This is no place for a man with neurasthenia. God! did you see the way his hand shook when he was in here just now?"

"And he's a total abstainer now, poor devil," sighed the Doctor with pity, for he was, himself, fond of his drop of whisky. "I'll send him down to the dressing station to-morrow with a note telling the R.A.M.C. people there that he wants a thorough change."

"Good," said the C.O. "I'm very sorry he's got to go, for he's a jolly good officer. However, it can't be helped. Have another drink, Doc."

It is bad policy to refuse the offer of a senior officer, and the M.O. was a man with a thirst, so he helped himself with liberality. Before he had raised the glass to his lips, the sudden roar of many bursting shells caused him to jump to his feet. "Hell!" he growled. "Another hate. More dirty work at the cross roads." And he hurried off to the little dug-out that served him as a dressing station, his beloved drink standing untouched on the table.

Meanwhile, Roger Dymond crouched up against the parapet, and listened to the explosions all around him. "Oil cans" and "Minnewerfer" bombs came hurtling through the air, "Crumps" burst with great clouds of black smoke, bits of "Whizz-bangs" went buzzing past and buried themselves deep in the ground. Roger Dymond tried to light his cigarette, but his hand shook so that he could hardly hold the match, and he threw it away in fear that the men would see how he trembled.

Thousands of people have tried to describe the noise of a shell, but no man can know what it is like unless he can put himself into a trench to hear the original thing. There is the metallic roar of waves breaking just before the rain, there is the whistle of wind through the trees, there is the rumble of a huge traction engine, and there is the sharp back-fire of a motor car. With each different sinister noise, Roger Dymond felt his hold over himself gradually going ... going....

Next to him in the trench crouched Newman, a soldier who had been in his platoon in the old days when they tramped, sweating and half-dead, along the broiling roads towards Paris.

"They'm a blasted lot too free with their iron crosses and other souvenirs," growled that excellent fellow. "I'd rather be fighting them 'and to 'and like we did in that there churchyard near Le Cateau, wouldn't you, sir?"

Dymond smiled sickly assent, and Newman, being an old soldier, knew what was the matter with his captain. He watched him as, bit by bit, his nerve gave way, but he dared not suggest that Dymond should "go sick," and he did the only thing that could be done under the circumstances--he talked as he had never talked before.

"Gawd!" he said after a long monologue that was meant to bring distraction from the noise of the inferno. "I wish as 'ow we was a bit closer to the devils so that they couldn't shell us. I'd like to get me 'and round some blighter's ugly neck, too."

A second later a trench-mortar bomb came hurtling down through the air, and fell on the parados near the two men. There was a pause, then an awful explosion, which hurled Dymond to the ground, and, as he fell, Newman's words seemed to run through his head: "I wish as 'ow we was a bit closer to the devils so that they couldn't shell us." He was aware of a moment's acute terror, then something in his brain seemed to snap and everything that followed was vague, for Captain Roger Dymond went mad.

He remembered clambering out of the trench to get so close to the Huns that they could not shell him; he remembered running--everybody running, his own men running with him, and the Germans running from him; he had a vague recollection of making his way down a long bit of strange trench, brandishing an entrenching tool that he had picked up somewhere; then there was a great flash and an awful pain, and all was over--the shelling was over at last.

* * * * *

It was not until Roger Dymond was in hospital in London that he worried about things again. One evening, however, the Sister brought in a paper, and pointed out his own name in a list of nine others who had won the V.C. He read the little paragraph underneath in the deepest astonishment.

"For conspicuous gallantry," it ran, "under very heavy shell fire on August 26th, 1916. Seeing that his men were becoming demoralised by the bombardment, Captain Dymond, on his own initiative, led a surprise attack against the enemy trenches. He found the Germans unprepared, and at the head of his men captured two lines of trenches along a front of two hundred and fifty yards. Captain Dymond lost both legs owing to shell fire, but his men were able to make good almost all their ground and to hold it against all counter-attacks.

"This officer was awarded the Military Cross earlier in the war for great bravery near La Bassée."

He finished the amazing article, and wrote a letter, in a wavering hand that he could not recognise as his own, to the War Office to tell them of their mistake--that he was really running away from the enemy's shells--and received a reply visit from a general.

"My dear fellow," he said, "the V.C. is never awarded to a man who has not deserved it. The only pity is that so many fellows deserve it and don't get it. You deserved it and got it. Stick to it, and think yourself damned lucky to be alive to wear it. There's nothing more to be said."

And this is the story of Captain Roger Dymond, V.C., M.C. Of the few of us who were there at the time, there is not one who would grudge him the right to put those most coveted letters of all after his name, for we were all in the shelling ourselves, and we all saw him charge, and heard him shout and laugh as he made his way across to the enemy. The V.C., as the general said, is never given to a man who has not deserved it.

V

"PONGO" SIMPSON ON BOMBS

"Pongo" Simpson was sitting before a brazier fire boiling some tea for his captain, when the warning click sounded from the German trenches. Instinctively he clapped the cover on the canteen and dived for shelter, while the great, black trench-mortar bomb came twisting and turning down through the air. It fell to ground with a dull thud, there was a second's silence, then an appalling explosion. The roof of the dug-out in which "Pongo" had found refuge sagged ominously, the supporting beam cracked, and the heavy layer of earth and bricks and branches subsided on the crouching man.

It took five minutes to dig him out, and he was near to suffocation when they dragged him into the trench. For a moment he looked wonderingly about him, and then a smile came to his face. "That's what I likes about this 'ere life, there ain't no need to get bored. No need for pictcher shows or pubs, there's amusements for you for nothing." And as he got to his feet, a scowl replaced the smile. "I bet I knows the blighter what sent that there bomb," he growled. "I guess it's old Fritz what used to 'ang out in that old shop in Walworth Road--'im what I palmed off a bad 'arf-crown on. 'E always said as 'ow 'e'd get 'is own back."

Five minutes later he had exchanged the battered wreck of his canteen for a new one belonging to Private Adams, who was asleep farther down the trench, and had set to boiling a fresh lot of tea for his captain.

"Darned funny things, bombs and things like that," he began presently. "You can't trust them no'ow. Look at ole Sergeant Allen f'r example. 'E went 'ome on leave after a year out 'ere, and 'e took an ornary time fuse from a shell with 'im to put on 'is mantelpiece. And the very first night as 'e was 'ome, the blamed thing fell down when 'e wasn't lookin', and bit 'im in the leg, so that 'e 'ad to spend all 'is time in 'orspital. They're always explodin' when they didn't ought to. Did I ever tell you about me brother Bert?"

A chorus in the negative from the other men who stood round the brazier encouraged him to continue.

"Well, Bert was always a bit silly like, and I thought as 'ow 'e'd do somethin' foolish when 'e got to the front. Sure 'nough, the very first bloomin' night 'e went into a trench, 'e was filin' along it when 'e slipped and sat right on a box of bombs. It's gorspel what I'm tellin' you--nine of the blighters went off, and 'e wasn't killed. 'E's 'ome in England now in some 'orspital, and 'e's as fit as a lord. The only thing wrong about 'im now is that 'e's always the first bloke what stands and gives 'is place to a lady when a tram's full--still a bit painful like."

Joe Bates expectorated with much precision and care over the parapet in the direction of the Germans. "It ain't bombs wot I mind," he said, "it's them there mines. When I first kime aht ter fight the 'Uns, I was up at St. Eloi, an' they blew the 'ole lot of us up one night. Gawd, it ain't like nothin' on earth, an' the worst of it was I'd jest 'ad a box of fags sent out by some ole gal in 'Blighty,' an' when I got back to earth agen there weren't a bloomin' fag to be found. If thet ain't enough to mike a bloke swear, I dunno wot is. 'As any sport 'ere got a fag to gi' me? I ain't 'ad a smoke fer two days," he finished, "cept a li'l bit of a fag as the Keptin threw away."

Private Parkes hesitated for a minute, and then, seeing Joe Bates's eyes fixed expectantly on him, he produced a broken "Woodbine" from somewhere inside his cap.

"Yes," resumed "Pongo," while Joe Bates was lighting his cigarette, "this ain't what you'd call war. I wouldn't mind goin' for ole Fritz with an 'ammer, but, what with 'owitzers and 'crumps,' and 'Black Marias,' and 'pip-squeaks' and 'whizz-bangs,' the infantry bloke ain't got a chanst. 'Ere 'ave I been in a bloomin' trench for six months, and what 'ave I used my bay'nit for? To chop wood, and to wake ole Sandy when 'e snores. Down the line our blokes run over and give it to the Alleymans like 'ell, and up 'ere we sits jest like a lot of dolls while they send over those darned bombs. I'll give 'em what for. I'll put it acrost 'em." And he disappeared round the traverse with the canteen of tea for his officer.