BOOK II—THE MARCH TO CONQUEST

I

THERE’. no end of a thrill in night-marching, if one doesn’t get too much of it. One feels curiously winged when mounted in the darkness, as though the limitations to speed, space and possibility had broken down. The present merges with the past and with eternity. Doors open in the night, giving entrance to previous incarnations. The mounted men are a robber-band; the guns are wagons piled with loot. The villages, lying flattened by shell-fire, are walled towns which hide medieval palaces. The country through which we pass, takes on a hundred exquisite and grotesque shapes, the one melting into the other at the bidding of the imagination. Everything is unusual, everything is shifting, everything is distorted and capable of being changed at will. One has an extraordinary sense of timelessness and an overwhelming certainty that he has done all this before, marching to the sack of cities, and suffering weariness and death for unremembered causes. The ghosts of those forgotten tragedies and triumphs throng about him, bewildering him with a faint familiarity which he fails to associate with any land or clime.

On that first night-march we had to keep our column closed up to prevent straggling, since on a secret march to an unknown destination a straggler inevitably gets lost. If a vehicle had to halt to refit harness, to have a horse shod or for any other cause, we had to leave out-riders at every cross-road to guide it back to the main body.

The first part of our journey was through country we had fought over, every contour of which, despite the darkness, was pictured vividly in our minds. We passed the narrow valley behind the Maison Blanche, in which our battery had lain hidden up to the time when the Ridge was captured. We passed the cross-roads at the Ariane Dump, where we used to assemble midnight after midnight to build the artillery road up to the Front-line, that our guns might pass forward across No Man’s Land within four hours of the start of the offensive. Many spots were memorable to us because of men who had died. It was over there to the right that the Hun sniper got our signalling sergeant, when we were observing from behind the Five Hundred Crater. It was over there to the left that a Hun shell scored a direct hit on B. Sub’s gun-pit and sent all the gun-detachment west. Though we were to forget these homes that we have had in the mud, our horses remember and remind us; each time they pass one of their old wagon-lines, they try to turn in off the road from force of habit.

Through the mist and moonlight we can just make out the twin towers, blunted and splintered, of Mount St. Eloi. They look like the thumb and index-finger of a solemn hand, pointing heavenward.

One tower is tall and defiant: the other has been shorn by shell-fire. The Huns commenced their work of destruction during the Franco-Prussian war; since this war started, they have done their utmost to complete it, even sending over bombing-planes for that purpose. They have a good military reason, for the towers command a panoramic view of forty miles of country. But still the towers stand, exclaiming in a valiant gesture of architectural oratory that God still dwells beyond the clouds.

In the hollow, between Mount St. Eloi and the road which we travel, lies God’s Acre, with its endless forest of white crosses. It is there that very many of the pals who have served with us are taking their last rest. They are wrapped in the army blankets which made so many journeys with them. Each has a little scooped out hole, three feet beneath the ground and only just big enough to take his body. The blanket is pulled up over the face and hurriedly sewn into place for fear the sleeper should stir and be cold beneath the sod. As I gaze through the darkness towards the hollow, I can feel the wounds of the sleeping men. There’s Rennet with a bullet through the centre of his forehead: that happened when we were observing from Sap 29 in front of Ecurie. There’s Gordon, who came bark from a gay leave in Paris to have his leg shattered at the entrance to the Bentata Tunnel. How he made us laugh the night before he died with his account of “ze lady wiz ze vite furs,” who tried to make him pay for her dinner at the Cafi de la Paix! And there’s Athol, who was Brigade medical officer when we occupied the railroad in front of Farbus. Brigade headquarters were on the Ridge and the batteries were in the plain. The moment he saw that we were being strafed, he would come racing down through the shell-fire to our assistance. He got smashed to atoms when he was binding up some of our chaps in a blown-in dug-out; there was nothing but his face left undamaged. I wonder why it is that I still walk the earth while they sleep there so quietly. We all took the same risks. We all dreamt of the same adventure—the adventure on which we now are bound—of the day when trench-warfare would end and we should break the German line, and take our guns into action at the gallop. Do they strain their ears where they lie so narrowly as they catch the rumble of our departing guns? Do they push back the earth from their sunken eyes, raising themselves on their elbows to listen? Dick Dirk is there by now—he who returned ahead of time from Blighty because he wanted to “go straight for her.” His house underground is newer than the others. Does he wish us luck, or does he pay us no attention?———No, they do not stir. They lie heedless and silent. Having done their bit, they are contented, for they were very tired. As the hollow is swallowed up in the all-surrounding pool of night, I look back just once to where my dead companions rest, and again the words take shape in my mind, “Those about to die, salute thee.”

We wheel out on to the straight pavi road which runs like an arrow’s flight from Arras to St. Pol. In a long and regular line on either side stand pollarded trees, marking its direction for miles. They seem gigantic sentinels, silent and impassive. From all directions, from main-roads and bye-roads, comes the muffled roar of transport pouring along every artery of travel to the same unknown bourne to which we journey. A tremendous movement of troops is taking place—taking place under cover of darkness, anonymously, timed absolutely and without hurry. If we doubted that a big offensive was on foot, we do not doubt it now. But whose is the controlling brain? Rumour says that even our Corps Commander has had no warning as to our ultimate destination. The Sergeant-Major rides back to tell me that the Major wants me at the head of the column. I trot forward and find that he is walking, while his groom leads Fury a few paces behind. I salute, dismount and hand over my horse to a signaller.

II

THE Major wants to talk—he feels lonely. We begin by making guesses as to the scope of the new offensive. We converse very quietly for fear we should be overheard by any of our men. A corps order has been published forbidding any discussion of the object of our present movements. Such discussion, if it takes place in public, comes under the heading of “Giving information to the enemy.” It’s impossible to say who of the people with whom we associate are spies. Many a good life has been thrown away as the result of careless and boastful conversations in estaminets and officers’ tea-rooms. Some bounder, out of the line for a day, wants to air his superior knowledge of doings up front; he talks with a raised voice in order to impress strangers who may or may not be in British uniforms. In any case, the uniform is no proof of integrity; many an English-speaking Hun has passed secretly through our lines in the uniform of the man he has murdered. The result of such loose speaking is that the raid, which ought to have succeeded, fails. The Huns are forewarned: their trenches are stiff with machine-guns and many of our men go west.

Every precaution is being taken this time that no information of importance to the enemy shall leak out. In the first place, we know nothing ourselves; in the second, we are forbidden to conjecture out loud. Though we recognise landmarks in the landscape, we are under orders not to mention the fact. We are only to march when night has blindfolded our eyes; our tongues, under pain of court-martial, are to be kept silent.

To judge by the north-easterly direction in which we are marching, we might be going up to Flanders to recapture the Hun gains at Kernel. The Major believes, however, that our present direction gives no indication, as we’re probably only going to a railroad junction at which we shall entrain. He thinks that our goal lies to the south. It may be the Rheims salient, in which case we shall be in entirely new territory, fighting with the French and joining up with, the Americans, concerning whom we are exceedingly optimistic and curious. On the other hand there are rumours that the Americans are taking over from the French in the Argonne sector, thus releasing many French veteran troops who will be behind us to back us up in the counterstroke of which we are the hammer-head. One fact is known definitely—Canadians have been sent north to Ypris; but whether to fool the Hun or because the thrust is to be made there, remains uncertain.

The Hun knows that the Canadians have been trained to be the point of the fighting-wedge; he, therefore, knows that where we are there the blow is to be struck. All summer he has made every effort to keep track of our position in the line, his object being that he may have his reserves rightly placed to push back our thrust. For the war on the Western Front has become entirely a game of the handling of reserves. Neither side has sufficient man power to defend its trench-system if an attack were to take place all along its front. So it remains for the attacker to muster his storm-troops with such stealth that the people to be attacked may be kept unaware of what is planned against them and may be tricked into withdrawing their reserves to a place remotest from the point where the blow is to fall. If such strategy succeeds, the attacker has the element of surprise in his favour and gains so much ground in the impetus of his first rush that, by the time the enemy reserves can be brought up, the entire defense has become disorganised.

The great aim of the new strategy is to make a gap—to get through the enemy so that his right and left flanks are out of touch and railroad communications in his rear can be cut.

The new strategy was first practised by our Third Army in its November Drive against Cambrai; that drive failed for want of sufficient reinforcements to back it up. Until that time the Allies had always gone after what were known as “limited objectives,” such as high ground, trench-systems, villages, salients. When the objective had been taken, the attack rested. The Vimy Ridge was a limited objective. We didn’t want to break the Hun line; what we desired was the Ridge, because it commanded a great enemy plain on the other side. For two months before we actually struck, we advertised the fact that we were going to strike by the intensity of our incessant shell-fire. Systematically, day by day and night by night, we cut the enemy’s wire-entanglements, blew up his dumps, mined beneath his front-line, pounded his cement machine-gun emplacements, harassed his means of communication and stole his morale by making his life perilous and wretched. He knew as well as we did what was planned; his only uncertainty was as to the exact hour at which the attack was to be launched. We kept him wearily guessing, and wore his nerves to a frazzle by putting on intense bombardments at inconvenient times. Usually these bombardments took place at dawn, lasted for fifteen minutes and had all the appearance of being the genuine zero hour. When our barrage had descended, he would man his trenches, call up his reserves and set all the machinery for his counterthrust working. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the hell would die down into the intensest quiet.

The new strategy does not advertise the point to be attacked. It does not cut wire-entanglements with shell-fire many days before the show commences; it tramples down obstacles with battalions of tanks at the very moment that the infantry are advancing. It does not set out to capture a given and solitary object; its ambition is to double up the enemy’s line and to penetrate as far as success will allow. The new strategy is in all things more stealthy, more tiger-like, more reckless, more deadly; its most dangerous feature is the use which it makes of surprise.

This new method of fighting has developed out of the necessity for defeating a heavily entrenched enemy. It is a method which the Allies at last are able to adopt because of the almost limitless resources in man-power which America has placed at their disposal. For the Western Front to be rightly understood, must be regarded as a banjo-string, composed of living men holding hands from Switzerland to the English Channel. Under pressure the string may give and give, but it must never break. The moment it breaks, the thing happens which takes place when a banjo-string snaps—it curls up towards the ends and leaves a gap. The only power that can save the day when the banjo-string has snapped, is the masterly strategic employment of the reserves. The reserves may stop the rush by selling their lives to a man, or they may do it by luring the attacker on until he has advanced beyond his strength. But if the side attacked has guessed wrongly as to the point to be attacked, so that its reserves are at a distance when the disaster happens, a calamitous retreat on either flank will have to be begun or the jig is up. To compel this retreat is the purpose of Foch’s present thrust.

In adopting these hide-and-seek tactics of night-marches we are borrowing a lesson from the Hun. He has already tried to do precisely what we now intend to accomplish. In his great drive of the spring, when he all but took Rheims and Amiens, he massed his storm-troops seventy miles behind his objective. Day by day he kept them hidden from spy and aeroplane observation, moving them only by night. His railroad and transportation arrangements were so perfect that, commencing at dusk, he was able to fling the whole weight of his fighting-wedge up front and have it hammering at our doors by daylight.

As we rode beneath the August night, my Major summed up the situation: “We’re trying to bluff the Hun into expecting us up north, while we make for the south as fast as we can hurry. I’ll tell you what it is, Chris; we can afford to die, now that the Americans are behind us with their millions. Believe me, before this month is ended, there’s going to be some tall dying.”

That phrase, “We can afford to die,” arrested my attention. It was so brutally financial, as though human lives were only so much national capital, and not the focus-points of loyalties and affections. It was as though the casualties for the military year could be apportioned ahead of time, so that the national books of birth and death might be made to balance. It was making a mathematical calculation as to men’s uncalculated and individual sacrifice; no more must be killed in any given twelve months than the bodies of the living could re-supply. And yet———

Yes, it was true: for the first time in the history of the war we could afford to die. During the previous four years we had died, but we could not afford it. We had had to be careful about our deaths, so that our man-power might not sink below that of the enemy who faced us. Now at last, because the Americans were behind us, we could afford to become lavish in the spending of our lives. Where one British soldier fell, three American boys would spring up. Though we became sightless, soundless, nameless, trodden by shells into the oozing horror of the mud, other idealists of another nation, but still of our tongue and blood, would cross by the bridge our bodies had made, lighting on and up till the decency for which we had perished was won. Viewed in this light, the knowledge that we could afford to die became not brutal, but glorious.

The Major whistled softly, strutting through the darkness on his little bowed legs. The thought that they could afford to let him die caused his spirits to rise.

III

KEEP to the Right,” and, after an interval, “Ha-alt!” Passed back down the unseen column ahead of us come the hoarse cries, followed by a sudden cessation of wheels and then, sharp and emphatic, “Dismount the drivers.”

Our Major shouts back the orders to the Sergeant-Major; from him they are picked up by the Section-Commanders and Numbers One. We listen to them as they travel down the battery through the darkness, altered in tone and made more faint as each new voice takes up the cry. The B. C. party back their ridden and led animals into the grass on the side of the road, loosen the reins and allow their beasts to graze. This is the first halt that we have made, so it should be long enough to give us time to check over the fitting of the harness and to make sure that everything is correct. I climb into the saddle to ride down the line; as I turn away, the Major calls to me, “Oh, Chris, one minute!” I bend down to catch his words: “Find out what’s happened to Bully Beef and Suzette.”

What’s happened to Bully Beef and Suzette? That question has been in my mind, in the mind of the Major, and probably in every gunner’s and driver’s mind ever since we marched out from the wagon-lines. It’s dead against all army orders that a woman and child should accompany a fighting unit into action. Since the war started, camp-followers of whatever sort have been forbidden. From time to time, even the dogs in the army areas have been shot because many of them were spies, carrying messages to the Germans across No Man’s Land at night. It’s dead against every dictate of decency and humanity that fighting-men should take non-combatants with them into the kind of furious carnage towards which we——. But, somehow, Bully Beef and Suzette do not seem to be non-combatants; we regard them as soldiers. They march with us as representatives of the impassioned soul of France. Yes, and more than that—for they stand to us for everything tender and kindly that would have been ours, had we not been selected to die. Suzette is to us what Joan of Arc must have been to her soldiers—the dream of the woman we would have married had Fate been more lavish with life. And Bully Beef—he’s the might-have-been child of every boy and man in the battery.

Gun-carriages and wagons have been pulled well over to the right, clear of the pavi road, so as not to cause a block in the passing traffic. It’s difficult to see them in detail on account of the blackness caused by the wall of trees on either side. One can just make out the heads of horses and the huddled figures of men on the limbers, too tired to know that we have halted. Usually when I enquire, I find that the sleepers were on guard or picket the night previous. We let them sleep on. They are wise; none of us know how far we have to go or how many nights of wakefulness lie before us.

Behind the darkness I can hear the drivers lifting up the feet of their horses and feeling for stones. Good boys, these drivers! They love their beasts and speak to them as pals. There’s so much discipline that one doesn’t get much time for loving in the army. I remember a march on this same road when the drivers were so frozen that they had to be lifted out of their saddles; no one had the strength to unfasten a bit till he had thawed his fingers between the horse’s back and the saddle-blanket. Yet there wasn’t one man who quit when we limped into our muddy standings. Every gunner and driver went to work on the horses, grooming them with a will and trying to make them comfortable before he thought of himself—and this, not because it was ordered, but because he realised through his own misery the forlornness of his four-footed comrades. Good boys, all of them! I think the Lord of Compassion, when the final reckoning comes, will remember kindnesses even to horses. When he judges those drivers, he’ll not forget the bitter cold of that winter’s march and what it meant to stand grooming in the snow and sleet when you were bitten to the bone and almost crying with misery. So he’ll pass over their swearing and the times when they got drunk, and he’ll say, pointing to the horses who will also be in Heaven, “inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye did it unto me.” If that should happen, the drivers will be most awfully surprised, because according to their standards they only did their duty.

Some of the chaps in my section, which is the leading and senior section of the battery, try to ask me questions as I pass.

“Are we going far, sir?”

“Are we going out for training?”

“Do you think, sir, that it’s the Big Push at last?” I cannot see their faces, but I recognise them by their voices. They are drawn from every class of society. Some of them were college boys, some were mechanics, some day-laborers, some adventurers, some came out of gaol to join. Now only one quality lifts one man above another—his courage. Their questions are asked from all kinds of motives—friendliness, curiosity, nervousness. I am conscious of an atmosphere of tension throughout the battery. It seems a shame that, they should be told nothing. In no other game in the world would you march men to their death, without so much as warning them that it was to their death that they were going. From one of my questioners—a man who was wounded eight months ago and has just re joined us—I pick up a significant piece of information.

“I can see you’re not telling, sir, but I know. It’s to the Big Push that we’re going. And here’s why I know—when we left England, they were emptying every camp—sending drafts to France secretly every night. When I got to our Corps Reinforcement Camp, not thirty kilometres from here, I found the place so jammed that you could hardly find a space to spread your blanket. With the men they have there, the Corps must be fifty per cent over-strength. That means just one thing, sir——that we’re getting ready for fifty per cent casualties.”

“Perhaps,” I answer him, “but, if I were you, I wouldn’t talk about it.”

I reach the centre section, which Tubby Grain is commanding. Tubby is a plump little officer and rides a wicked little Indian pony as well-fleshed as himself.

“The Major’s compliments, and he wants you to look over your section and report on it,” I tell him.

His reply is, as usual, insubordinate and cheery. “Holy, jumping cat-fish! What does the Major think I am? Don’t I always look over my section when there’s a halt?” And then confidentially, “I say, old top, what about Bully Beef and Suzette?”

I tell him that I’m on my way to find out. As I ride away he shouts after me the latest catchword from Blighty, “How’s your father?” To which, if you are in the know, the proper reply is, “Very well, thanks. He still has his baggy pants on.” I’m in too much of a hurry to give the correct countersign, so Tubby facetiously sends a mounted bombadier after me, who catches me up while I’m speaking to Gus Ed wine, the commander of the left and rear section. The bombadier salutes without a smile and sits to attention, waiting for me to take notice of him in the darkness.

“Well, what is it, Bombadier?”

“Mr. Grain’s compliments, sir, and if you meet his father, would you tell him that he really ought to have his baggy pants on these cold nights.”

Gus gaffaws and steals my dynamite by sending a return message: “My compliments to Mr. Grain, and tell him that it’s all right; Suzette is repairing his father’s baggy pants.” Then to me, “But how about Suzette? I went to look for her three hours before we left the wagon-lines; her bivouac was pulled down, and she and Bully Beef weren’t anywhere in sight. I didn’t like to ask because——. Well, you know, if we’re going to buck Army regulations, there are some things that most of us shouldn’t know too much about. If the General or the Colonel asks questions and you don’t know, you can’t tell. Ignorance saves a lot of lying.”

At the tail of the column I find the transport—the G. S. wagons, the water-cart, the officers’ mess-cart, the cook-cart, the shoeing-smith’s cart—looking humpy and nomadic as a travelling circus. The prisoners are there on foot with their escort, A group of stragglers are regaining their wind before reporting back to their proper sections. Mongrel curs, which we have adopted in our travels, yap down at me from the tarpaulin-covered mountains of stores or run sniffing about the heels of the horses. This house-keeping portion of our military life is in the care of the Captain. It is here, if anywhere, that I shall get the news I want.

I find Heming with the Quartermaster, directing the re-packing of some bales of hay which have shifted with the bumping of the journey. It always makes me smile to watch him engaged upon an unimaginative and practical task; he still has the aloofness of the artist. Beneath his khaki I can still discover the privileged dreamer whom the world flattered and who scarcely knew how to tie his own shoe-lace. He has compelled himself to become practical; but if the war were to end tomorrow, he would at once cease to be a soldier and fall back into his old way of life. I believe in his secret heart it is just that falling back that he dreads; out here he has learnt to be lean as a rapier. He loathes the thought of again becoming self-applauding and flabby. If the price of keeping lean is “going west” on the battlefield, he is perfectly content. To quote his own words, “There’s nothing leaner than a skeleton.”

“Captain Homing!”

“Hulloa, Chris! Pretty black, isn’t it? I didn’t see you. What’s your trouble?”

“A message from the Major.” I sink my voice. “He wants to know what you’ve done about Bully Beef and Suzette?”

“Suzette!” I can’t see his face. As he pronounces her name, he sucks the air through his teeth the way a man does when he shudders. Then, “Look here, does the Major really want to know what I’ve done with them?”

“He told me to find out.”

“But if he knows, he ought to take action. If he doesn’t take action, he becomes my accomplice and may get into trouble with those higher up. He’d better take it for granted that we left them behind at Vimy, unless——”

“Unless what?”

“Unless he really does wish that we had left them behind.”

“So——so we didn’t leave them behind?”

“Hand your horse over to one of the chaps,” he says; “you shall see for yourself.”

We go on foot towards the wagon on which the bales of hay were being re-packed. The job is all finished now; the tarpaulin has been pulled tightly over the top and roped down. The Quartermaster is standing in rear of the wagon as though he were on guard. He’s an old soldier who has fought through many wars; he wears the African ribbon and several Indian decorations. He’s a big, comfortable sort of man, with an immense stomach and a body over six foot high. He has a wart on the right side of his nose, which he rubs thoughtfully when he talks to you. His voice is thick, as though his throat were grown up with fat. Of all our noncommissioned officers he’s the kindest. He plays the part of a father to the chaps, and has saved many a young soldier from going on the wrong slant. His name is Dan Turpin—“Big Dan.” The only beast of sufficient strength to carry him is an ex-Toronto fire-engine horse, called “Little Dan”—not that he is little, but to distinguish him from his master. As we approach, Big Dan is singing to himself in a sepulchral voice,

Old soldiers never die

They simply fade away.

It would take more than a drive against the Huns to get Dan’s wind up.

“Quarter!”

“Yes sir.”

We hear his heels click together and the jingle of his spurs.

“Is the wagon re-packed all right?”

“All correct, sir.”

“Just loosen the flap of the tarpaulin at the back; I want to see for myself.”

The rope securing the flap is untied and we slip our heads under the tarpaulin. Carefully, so that none of the light may spill on to the road and give us away to aeroplanes, Heming turns on his flash. At first the illumination is blinding; then one sees that the bales of hay have been so stacked as to leave a hollow. Inside the hollow someone stirs, sighs and turns over, disturbed by the light. The figure is slight and covered by an officer’s trench-coat. Heming shifts the flash, so that it creeps along the body and reveals the face. Suzette! Her khaki tunic is unhooked and unbuttoned at the neck. Bully Beef lies snuggled in her arms, with his small head hidden against her breast. Her soldier’s cap has slipped aside and her hair, which was like honey and sunshine, has been cut square against the neck. From beneath the trench-coat I see that she is wearing puttees. I understand—she will pass for a man now. But why does she want to accompany us into danger? Is she so desperately alone and fed-up with life? And Heming, why does he——? She opens her eyes and smiles sleepily, knowing that we are friends.

From farther up the column we hear the order being shouted back, “Get mounted the drivers.” The flash goes out. “Good-night, Suzette.” The tarpaulin is lowered anil tied into place. From far ahead comes the groaning of guns and ammunition-wagons taking up the march.

All night as I ride, there burns in my brain the picture of that refugee French girl with her fatherless child, journeying with us towards the Calvary from which all the civilian world is fleeing. She is escaping towards death. And I think of another mother, no less a soldier-woman, who fled by Eastern highways that she might bring her son back to the death from which she fled, in order that men might live better.

Suzette! Why does she accompany us? She knows that we need her love, perhaps. That knowledge brings her very near to the peasant mother of Nazareth.

IV

THE dawn stole upon us like a ghost. It ran beside us, fell behind, dashed on ahead, following and peering from behind trees and ruins. Along the endless road we crawled, weary and spent. The gunners had been ordered to dismount from the limbers to ease the horses’ load. The out-riders and officers for the sake of example, had also dismounted and walked ahead of their chargers. All talking had ceased. We stumbled forward like somnambulists, pale and heavy-eyed. Had anyone been told that we were storm-troops, Foch’s Pets, the hammerhead of the attack, moving up to smash the Hun line, he would have laughed. We looked listless, washed out. Now and then a man would ask an officer, “How much further, sir?” The officer would reply, “I don’t know. Not much further, I should think.” The man’s head would sag forward again on his breast. In the army there is no complaining, no going on strike: one carries on and on til he drops. To carry on, however harsh the demands, and not to drop is one’s pride.

As day grew whiter and the sunrise reddened, we learnt a good deal about the condition of affairs that night had masked. Every few yards through the standing wheat new lines of defences had been dug. Trench-system behind trench-system stretched for miles, scarring the greenness of the landscape. They were all of recent construction, for the earth had been but newly turned. Here, behind a wood or a rise of ground, a battery position had been selected and gun-pits laid out. One came to what looked like a hay-stack or a pile of tumbled logs, only to find that it was a machine-gun nest, cunningly chosen to command a valley down which an advancing enemy must march. Beneath grass in ditches wire-entanglements had been hidden, so contrived that they could be set up across the road at a moment’s notice, to obstruct pursuing cavalry. One could follow the reasoning of the stealthy mind which had woven this maze of destruction. The enemy would have maps of our back-country worked out from their aeroplane photographs. They would know beforehand each dip and hollow where artillery and machine-gun resistance might be expected; consequently they would try to neutralise such resistance with their heavies before they sent their infantry forward. The stealthy mind had argued every probability; very often it had arranged its strong points in open places, where the position was so badly chosen that it would not be suspected. It became plain that whatever our game might be, this time it was to be neck or nothing. The Allies might be planning to attack; but, if they had to retire, they were reckoning on selling every yard of land at the highest cost in lives. All the machinery for the shambles was ready, only the bodies were lacking. One did not require to be highly imaginative to picture the murder holes these woods and valleys would become when once the slaughter started. For someone disaster was brewing; whether for ourselves or the Germans, it was impossible to guess.

Now that it was daylight, we recognised the country; it had been quiet and unwarlike when last we had passed through it. The rapid transformation enabled us to realise the terror of the fighting which had been taking place to the south—the desperate few, digging their toes in, determined not to budge, British, American, French, hanging on in the hope of reinforcements which could not come. The landscape lying smiling in the August dawn lost its peacefulness; one saw it as it might become—a hell ensanguined by death, through which men crawled from rifle-pit to rifle-pit like dogs with their spines broken.

Wherever the eye rested, fear threatened and muttered. The doubt sprang up that even we might be defeated. They marched us to and fro under sealed orders. They made us die and suffer; but they told us nothing. Who were they—these people who never spoke to us or saw us, these people whose lives were too valuable to endanger? They lived miles behind the lines in chbteaux. They slept in sheeted beds. They ate as much as they liked. They took two leaves to Blighty to our one. Their breasts were covered with decorations. They never knew the weariness of night-marches: staff-cars whisked them between breakfast and lunch across distances that it took us a week to trudge. What right had they to all this consideration? Were they really so wise as they thought they were? If they bungled, it was we who had to pay; it was our bodies that would be mangled; our blood, needlessly expended, that would wash out their errors. And when in spite of bad staff-work our courage had conquered, it would be we who would get whatever blame was coming and they who would get the credit.

In the centre section a horse fell down; it had gone to sleep while in draught. The driver must have been at fault; he, too, was probably nodding. From down the column Tubby Grain’s voice reached us, angrily strafing in unprintable language. The commotion grew fainter as the other teams swung out into the road and the column passed on.

At a bend we came across a Chinese Labour Battalion, shuffling up to work on the trenches. Across their shoulders they balanced poles, with the load tied on either end. Their clothing was nondescript—the refuse of every rag-shop of Europe and the Orient. The proudest Chinaman of the lot swaggered and sweltered in the remains of a great-coat, which had belonged to an officer in the Prussian Guard. They went by us clacking their tongues and laughing, happy as children if one of our chaps smiled back. Beside them, rigid and regimental, marched their British non-commissioned officers, hard, uncheerful men of the Indian service, who carried rods with which to enforce obedience.

A cruel war! A war to the point of exhaustion when the white man, that his God might be defended, had to rouse Confucius from his long contemplation. These men, they tell us, have been recruited from districts in China which have been stricken with famine. They have exchanged their rice-fields and pagodas for the bombed areas and dug-outs of war not for our sakes, but that their yellow wives and children may not starve. You can find representatives from all the world marching up to the trenches along the dusty roads of France. We Canadians have Japanese in our British Columbia battalions; our sharp-shooters are Red Indians. The New Zealanders have Maoris; the South Africans Kaffirs; the West Indians Negroes; the cavalry Sikhs. All mankind is here for one reason or another—for gain, adventure, principle, patriotism; but chiefly that they may prove that it was not in vain that Christ grew up in Nazareth. There are aborigines from the Pacific Islands, one generation removed from cannibals; Arab horsemen who have worshipped Allah in the desert; savages from the jungle; wanderers by divers trails, who had lost their way in the maze that leads out to civilization. They have all been sent here by their indignant gods that they may drag down the more brutal god of the Germans.

We drowse; we crawl; we halt. Again we move forward. Our eyes are aching with sleeplessness. We pass by a prison-camp, surrounded by a huge cage, inside of which Hun prisoners are lined up to get their breakfast. Our mouths are dry and we view their steaming mess-tins with envy.

We march on, scarcely interested now in our direction. Heels are blistered. Where we are going no longer matters, if they would only give us time to rest. Of a sudden there’s a cheering at the head of the column. Men pull themselves together. There’s been no order passed down that we should march to attention, but every gunner is marching close behind his vehicle and the drivers are sitting upright in their saddles. Far up the road, on the banks on either side, are standing men who wear a strange uniform. Their slouch hats at a distance look a little like the Australians’, but their tunics are much tighter. Before ever we come abreast of them, the word has been whispered back, “They’re here—the Americans!” There’s no sleepiness about us now. The blistered feet are forgotten; we’re marching like soldiers. “They’re here—the Americans!” It’s fifteen months since we heard that they were coming. We’ve sung their promise,

Over there, over there,

Send the word, send the word over there,

That the Yanks are coming——

We’ve waited and we’ve hoped—and many of the boys who hoped have died. We’ve heard that they were present at the great retreat before Cambrai in 1917. We’ve been told that they were coming by their thousands, but as yet we have seen none of them. Hun prisoners have consistently assured us that there were no Americans in France—that they were not coming. Now we are to see the Yanks with our own eyes.

“Battery, eyes front. March to attention”—the order passes smartly down the column.

We go by them, looking neither to left nor to right—so, after all, we can scarcely be said to have seen them. They are coloured troops—tremendous chaps with flashing teeth and rolling eyes. Our first Americans!

We no longer remember the wire-entanglements, the gun-emplacements and the new trendi-systems which are being constructed by Chinamen so many miles back of the line. Our tails are up. We shan’t retreat. The Yanks are no longer coming. They have come. We know now whither we are marching—to the end of the war and to conquest.

V

THE village into which we inarched this morning is an old friend; we were billeted here earlier in the summer when we were withdrawn from the line for training. It consists of, perhaps, a hundred grey farmhouses clustered together in a willow-swamp.

In the willow-groves nightingales were still singing when we entered.

In the swamp the River Scarpe has its source. At this point it is so weak and narrow that a boy could leap across it; the village geese touch bottom as they breast its ripples; a brigade of artillery could drink it dry if all the horses were led down together. Here it is peaceful, but to the south of Arras it becomes sufficiently broad to give its name to the valley through which the Hun tried to drive last spring, when the waters of the Scarpe ran scarlet. The houses of the village stand at irregular intervals, divided from the road by a strip of common upon which geese graze. One reaches the common by little bridges which cross the Scarpe, which wanders singing, paralleling the highway. Nothing has been marred by shell-fire; the roar of the guns is so distant that it is seldom heard by day—only at night does their flash flicker momentarily, like the glow of a lantern carried between trees.

It is a very quiet spot, well within the threatened area, where war is ignored and life has not altered its ways. Nature has conspired with the inhabitants in pretending that the world is unchanged. The gardens are fragrant with flowers; there are even more birds than formerly, for the refugee songsters from No Man’s Land have made these thickets their place of escape. The only terror that comes near to disturb them is the sullen explosion of bombs dropped at night from Hun planes, as is witnessed by raw scars in the greenness of the surrounding meadows.

When we entered, the white mists of morning still hung above the common; early risen cocks with their attendant harems were our only welcomers. We had set up our horse-lines and were half way through the grooming before the villagers discovered that old friends were again among them.

All day we have been wondering why we have been brought here. A part of the general plan of deception, I suppose—so that the Hun may think, if he hears of our whereabouts, that we’ve simply marched out for manoeuvres as before. All kinds of details confirm our belief that the big push is about to start. A Divisional Staff-car called in at Brigade this noon: the Canadian Maple Leaf and all the usual Divisional marks had been painted out. The patches and shoulder-badges of the car’s occupants had been torn off—nothing was left that would betray the fact that storm-troops are on the march. As yet we have received no orders as to how long we are to stay here—it would be normal to give us a few days’ rest; but none of the kit has been removed from the vehicles—which is significant. We could hook in and be off within the hour.

It was announced this morning that no more letters from our Corps would be accepted at the Army Post Office. This is the most certain sign we have had that an attack is going to be pulled off. Letters home are a frequent source of leakage of information. When men know that they are writing what may prove to be their last message to their mothers, wives, sweethearts, it is almost impossible for them to keep that knowledge to themselves. Moreover, we each one have codes, pre-arranged with our correspondents, by means of which we can get forbidden news past the censor—so it’s wise, if harsh, to insist on silence between ourselves and the outside world.

The outside world! How little it understands what our lives are like. In the outside world there are standards of freedom and politeness; in all personal matters a man has the power of choice. He is at liberty to make or ruin himself. He washes if he so desires; if he prefers to go dirty, he does not wash. Within reason, as far as is compatible with the earning of his daily bread, he sleeps as long as he wants. To miss one’s night’s rest is to court ill-health. To be verminous is to fall into the category of the slum-dweller; to go hungry is well-nigh impossible. To lay down one’s life for somebody else is exceptional and martyr like. To become a criminal is a really difficult affair.

With us everything is reversed. We grow moustaches under Army orders; we crop our hair to please the Colonel. We have no areas of privacy either in our bodies or our souls. We rise, sleep, eat and wash when we are commanded. We are physically examined, physicked, pumped full of anti toxins and marched off to church parade to worship God without our wishes being consulted. To die for someone else is not martyr-like, but our job. To go foodless, sleepless, shelterless and wet is not a matter for self-pity, but our accepted lot. We cannot give notice to our employers; we have no unions—no means of protest. To be always cheerful and smiling, the more cheerful and smiling in proportion to the hardship, is a duty for the performance of which we must expect no thanks. Our existence as individuals is ignored until we have fallen short, then, all of a sudden, we become important. What in civilian life would be errors in taste or mistakes in temper with us are offences and crimes. For a man in the ranks to come upon parade unshaven, with his buttons unshone or a few minutes late is an office offence To be found kicking a horse is a crime, demanding a court-martial. To strike a superior, to be asleep on sentry-go, or to be absent from the unit when it is moving into action means death.

Military punishments are largely physical and therefore degrading. They compel men to do better through fear of further punishment; they neither educate into a finer appreciation of righteousness, nor do they achieve any economic purpose. They consist in being strapped to a gun-wheel for so many hours a day or in being marched with heavy packs on the back when other men are resting. In the alloting of punishment the age, former social status or mental qualities of the offender are rarely taken into account. There are no excuses, no explanations. Take the gravest crime of all—cowardice. In peace times it was generally allowed that not every man was brave. Before anyone who had been unheroic was judged, his history and environment were taken into consideration. But in the Army if a man fails in courage he is shot. Had St. Peter been a soldier of the Allies, after denying Christ thrice he would never have been given the Keys of Heaven. He would have been executed at the feet of the hanging Judas. The Army asks every man to be infallible; it can afford to show no mercy and gives no second chance. We are judged and graded by our military virtues. What we knew, were or possessed, and what has been our individual sacrifice of happiness count for nought. We are fighting-men, and therefore not required to think—only to obey blindly.

I suppose I still retain my civilian mind, for I cannot treat men as automatons; I have to interpret them with imagination. If one were to see only their externals, they would appear to be rough chaps, coarse in speech and habits, with a scowling attitude towards authority which only an iron discipline can keep subordinate. But when you view them with imagination, you see their enthusiasm for an ideal, which made them willing to give up their freedom and jeopardise their lives. For no one in our brigade needed to be in France; they all came as volunteers. You also see how from the very first the Army has failed to appreciate or make use of that enthusiasm; it prefers to treat men as people who, having signed away their bodies and lives, have to obey because they cannot escape. Yet despite the Army, the enthusiasm of the men survives. It creeps out in their letters to their mothers and wives, to whom they still are heroes. It even creeps out in their conversation, when one’s up front with them and keeping watch through the dreary hours of the night. They are coarse and rough it is true, for they are leading a coarse and a rough existence. Their only bedding is their blanket; they can never remove their clothes at night. Their chances for bathing come very rarely. They can carry only one change of underclothing as their rolls have to be of an exact and limited size. While in the line their quarters consist of holes burrowed under-ground; when out at rest they consist of broken down stables and barns, into which they are packed so closely that they can scarcely turn over without disturbing the men on either side. All the niceties and decencies of civilised life are denied them; war is a nasty affair and its nastiness cannot be avoided. No outcast of the city streets, drowsing under bridges and being harried by the police, leads a more comfortless existence. At the end of the journey, as a reward for their sufferings, are probable mutilation and death. Is it to be wondered that some of them get drunk to escape their misery whenever the chance presents itself, and that when drunk, they become bold to challenge the discipline which in action is their greatest protection? The crimes which they commit are crimes only in the Army—few of them would be even offences anywhere else. A man suffers the death penalty on active service for an error which in a civil court would cost him no more than a warning and a fine.

I can never get out of my mind the contrast between the individual magnanimity of each Tommy’s sacrifice and the unimaginative callousness with which it is accepted. The self denial of the men in the ranks is always far in excess of the self-denial of their officers. The higher an officer climbs in rank, the greater is his authority and the less his self-denial, yet the stronger grows his contempt for those beneath him. War conducted from a chbteau and a Rolls Royce car is a comparatively pleasant affair; there is no temptation to get drunk or become a deserter. But war conducted from a frontline trench, upon bully beef, shell-hole water and hard tack, in a shirt that has been lousy for a month, with a body which is unwashed, unwarmed and famished for want of sleep—that kind of war is hell. This is the kind of war that the man in the ranks fights with a grin upon his lips and a fierce determination to meet every calamity with a jest. The man in the ranks is the best man on the Front when he’s at his best; there’s no brass hat or red tab safe behind the lines who’s worthy to touch the stretcher which carries him to his last, long rest. The red tab carries out laws for the private’s punishment; he strafes him on review and goes out of his way to find faults; he makes him take to the ditch when his staff-car splashes by; he plans an offensive and sends him over the top to be smashed by shell-fire; if the offensive succeeds, he is awarded decorations for an ordeal through which he has not passed; the fighting Tommy wins the decorations, but the red tab wears them; and if at last the fighting Tommy’s nerve forsakes him, it is the red tab who turns his thumbs down, confirming the sentence that he shall face the firing-squad. Yet the private is the better man every hour of the day and in his heart the red tab knows it—knows it and resents it. If the war is won, it will be won by the sacrifice of simple men who never wore a ribbon or any insignia of rank, but were content to die humbly and unnoticed. I love them, these gunners and drivers of mine—and I marvel at their patience.

We are marching to a life and death conflict in which we take it for granted that every man in our command will live up to the most heroic standards, yet to-day at noon we held office. The prisoners were marched in under escort, their heads bare and their arms held flatly to their sides. Most of the charges against them were paltry. This man had been caught with his candle burning after lights out had sounded; the next had been late upon early morning parade; the next had lost his box-respirator—he said it had been stolen; the next had been found riding on an ammunition-wagon after the order had been passed down the column for the gunners to dismount. Not one of the offences alleged amounted to more than a misdemeanour, yet these men who are the picked storm-troops of the British Armies and whom we expect to face the shambles without flinching within the next few days, upholding the best traditions of the Empire, were marched hatless under an armed guard through the village street, with all the French girls staring at them. Some of them escaped punishment—some were awarded extra fatigues, pack-drill, additional pickets; many of them will be dead before their sentences have been served. We ask too much when we treat them as feudal slaves and expect them to act like crusaders.

Four years ago they were freemen—professional men, prairie-farmers, ranchers, lumber-jacks, surveyors. They willfully forewent their liberty that an ideal might conquer. It is the fact that they were freemen in the truest sense that makes them fight so bravely. They were men accustomed to take risks, to stand upon two legs and confront Nature unafraid. We may treat them as schoolboys, but it is their triumphant manhood that gives them their dash and splendid self-reliance up front.

In other words, we try to crush the very spirit by our discipline which makes us victorious in battle. It seems strange that, knowing this to be the case, we should persist in governing them as people possessed of no intelligence.

Discipline is necessary—it is our stoutest safeguard in action; but it works unfairness in individual cases. Take for example the man unfortunately named Trottrot, who is one of the drivers in my section. Trottrot “got in bad” at the very start of the war; and he was in at the start—one of the first of the Canadian artillery-men to arrive in France. I think the trouble began with his name; some wag saw in it a chance for jocularity. Wherever he went men shouted after him “Where the hell did Trottrot trot?” I suppose his life was made so miserable that he lost his self-respect and did not care what happened. At any rate his crime-sheet became famous throughout the Canadian Corps. A man’s crime-sheet is the record of his punishments from the first day he becomes a part of the Army; it accompanies him from unit to unit and is his reference. His was as long and full of incident as a De Morgan novel. He had bucked authority in every way and suffered about every penalty short of being shot. To read it was a romance and an education. He had been absent without leave, drunk, insubordinate, late upon parade, had struck an officer, kicked more than one N. C. O. in the face and had spent six months of his service in a penal-settlement.

When he was attached to our battery a groan went up. No one wants to have a “bad actor” in a unit—his example is likely to become contagious. We tried to get out of taking him and, when that failed, had him brought before us. He was a slim, inoffensive looking youth, with pale eyes and a narrow, clever face. The Major was seated at a table, fingering his voluminous crime-sheet, while we junior officers formed a half-circle behind him.

When Trottrot had been marched in by the Sergeant-Major and ordered to “Right-Tarn,” and was standing stiffly at attention, the Major looked up.

“Driver Trottrot,” he said, “you’ve got the name for being the worst man in the Canadian Corps. If you go much further, you’ll end by being shot. Of course that’s entirely your own affair, but I’d like to help you to avoid it. I’m going to give you a new chance. I’m going to forget all about this Nick Carter novel you’ve been compiling.” He tapped the man’s crime-sheet and threw it aside. “I’m going to treat you as though you hadn’t a stain on your record—as though you were a white man. As long as you play white by me, I’ll treat you like a white man. The moment you act yellow, God help you. You’re dismissed—that’s all I have to say.”

Driver Trottrot was handed over to me and I had a private talk with him. He would give no assurances that he was going to reform, he distrusted me the way a dog does a man who holds a whip behind his back. Little by little, however, as days went by he began to respond to kindness. Within a month he was the smartest man upon parade, had the cleanest set of harness and the best groomed horses. He was promoted to a centre-team, then to a wheel-team and was finally made lead-driver of the first-line wagon. Beyond this we have not dared to promote him because the men declare that he is not to be trusted under shell-fire. There are two ammunition-wagons to each gun: the firing-battery wagon, which follows the gun into action, and the first-line which brings up the ammunition. The picked drivers of any sub-section are on the gun-teams, as their work is likely to prove the most dangerous; the next best are on the teams of the firing battery; the next on those of the first line; the remainder are kept as spare drivers. The best driver of any team rides in lead. Trottrot ought to be driving lead of the gun by virtue of his work. Whenever an inspecting officer is going the round of our horse-lines, he always stops to praise the glossy coats of Trottrot’s team and to comment on them as an example of what can be done by horsemanship. But we’re afraid to give him his deserts on account of the men’s belief that he lacks “guts.” Trottrot has lived down his reputation for being a “bad actor,” but his reputation for being “yellow” clings. We treat him like a “white man” and he acts as though he were one. Perhaps the carnage towards which we are marching may give him his chance to wipe the slate clean of his old record. I hope so and believe that that’s what he’s hoping. There’s a curious look of determination in his eyes, as though he waited breathless for the commencement of the danger. It’s as though he were trying to tell me: “I won’t let you down, sir, I’ll either die in this show or come out of it lead-driver of the gun.” I lay my money on Trottrot; he’s a white man to his marrow, if I know one.

VI

AFTER writing my prophecy concerning Driver Trottrot, I lay down to snatch a few hours sleep. My batman had spread my sleeping-sack on the tiled floor of the cottage bedroom in which I and three of my brother officers were billeted. The other three had been breathing heavily for some hours, wearied by the night’s march. They had not removed more than their boots and tunics for fear we should receive hurried orders to take to the road again. They lay curled up like dogs, with their knees drawn to their chins, for all the world like aborigines who had scooped a hole in the leaves of a forest. One learns to sleep that way on active service and to lose no time in tumbling off. My last memory was of wide-open lattice-windows, the heavy listlessness of garden-flowers and the perfumed stillness of trees drowsing in the sultry August sun.

I was wakened by someone shaking my arm, and opened my eyes to find Driver Trottrot bending over me. His expression was a little alarmed at the liberty he was taking. “I wasn’t told to come to you, sir,” he explained quickly; “but I thought you ought to know. The boys were paid after morning stables, before they’d had anything to eat. A lot of these Frenchies started selling them vin blink. What with having had no sleep and then getting that stuff on their empty stomachs, they’re getting fighting drunk. It’s none of my business, but I thought you ought to stop it.”

“Good for you, Trottrot,” I said. “Chuck me over my boots; I’ll be with you in half a second.”

For a moment I had a mind to rouse the other, officers, but they looked so fagged that I determined to let them sleep on. I finished buttoning my tunic and buckling my Sam Browne as I hurried across the common. We passed over the little bridge, consisting of a single plank, and struck the road which led towards the horse-lines and the centre of the village. As we walked I questioned Trottrot, trying to tap the experience he possessed as the exprofessional “bad man” of the Canadian Corps. “Why do the chaps do things like this? Getting drunk isn’t enjoyable and the after effects must be rotten.”

“Chaps get drunk for various reasons.” he answered. “They do it to forget; it isn’t all honey being a gunner or a driver, and kicked around by everybody. They do it because some N. C. O. or officer has got a grouch against them, and picks on them so that they can’t do anything right. They do it because they get tired of going straight; polishing harness and grooming horses three times a day is monotonous. They do it because there’s nothing else to do, and they do it because they’re lonely. Some does it because they likes it—it makes them feel that they own the world for a little while and are as good as anybody. And then there’s those that does it because they’re frightened.”

“How do you mean, frightened?”

“Well, sir, the war’s been going on for four years and it looks as though it might go on for twenty. A good many of us chaps have been wounded several times; we’ve not been killed yet, but we feel that our luck can’t last. Each new attack that we come through lessens our chances. We know that sooner or later we’re going to get it—and then it’s pushing daisies for us, with nobody caring much. This new attack is worse than the others; we’re told nothing and can only imagine. It isn’t good to imagine. It’s the suspense and the guessing that wears one. It’s different for you, sir, than it is for us—you have to set an example. It’s much harder just to follow. One has an awful lot of time for thinking on a long night march—he sees himself all messed up. It’s to stop thinking that most chaps get drunk.”

We were in the village by now, approaching the horse-lines. From the pretty cottages, which had looked so innocent in the early morning, came sounds of coarse laughter and discordant singing. Groups of men, swaying on their feet and arguing with uncouth, threatening gestures, tried to stand absurdly to attention and salute as we passed. “Vin blink,” as the Tommies call the poisonous concoction which is sold them as “white wine,” was doing its worst. No poilu would pour it down his gullet. Whatever it is made of, it acts like acid and works like poison in. the blood; especially is this the case with men who have been free from alcohol up front and are wearied in mind and body. A good deal of the traffic is carried on during prohibited hours and by unlicensed persons, at exorbitant rates and with a criminal disregard for consequences. Yet if property is damaged or a civilian assaulted the last centime of indemnity is exacted, the claims being pressed against defendants who are again in the line, making life safe for the relentless plaintiffs. Temptation is made easy for the Tommy; under the influence of “vin blink” he causes most of his trouble. A girl is usually the bait; she stands woodenly smiling in the doorway of her particular estaminet that he may see her as his unit enters a village. During all the four years of fighting this peculiarly cowardly form of profiteering has been going on. Nothing effectual has been done to stop it.

This being a village in which we had formerly been billeted, our men had required no one to give them pointers. At the morning stables they had been warned to keep sober and get all the sleep that was possible; but the moment they were dismissed, they had scattered to the various cottages where drink was obtainable. By this time many of them were mellow and some were completely intoxicated. On arriving at the horse-lines we found them lying beneath the guns and wagons and on the bales of hay, either dead to the world or staring dreamily at nothing. “One sees himself all messed up. It’s to stop thinking that most chaps get drunk!”

Poor laddies! They were little more than boys. Life hadn’t been over-gay for them since war started; by all accounts it would be even less gay in the coming months. Their faces told the story; boys of twenty looked forty. Their cheeks were hollow and lined; in their eyes was a strained expression of haggard expectancy. They were brave; they always would be brave. Their pride of race kept them up. Directly the battle had really started they would become alert and eager as runners. But for the moment they had broken training; the long tension had proved too much. They had seized their opportunity for forgetfulness. Throughout the fields and beneath the trees, wherever there was a bit of shade they lay fallen and crumpled, their tunics flung aside and their shirts torn open to the chest. They would look very much like this one day when the tornado of bullets and shell-fire had swept over them. The thought made me sick; the picture was too horribly similar and realistic. It was only when I looked at the horses, strung out in three long lines, peacefully swishing their tails and nosing round for any wisps of hay that were remaining, that I felt assured that the catastrophe which was always coming nearer, had not yet befallen.

The important task before us was to get them collected up and safely into billets, where they could sleep off the effects of their debauch. Any moment we might get orders to hook in and continue the march. It was unlikely that we would be given such orders until the cool of the evening; but should some emergency make the step necessary, we would find ourselves in a pretty mess. Suzette had already realised the seriousness of the situation; out in the meadows, where men had thrown themselves down in the glaring sun, I could see her rousing them and helping them to get under cover. The great danger from the individual man’s point of view, was that in his befuddled state he might wander away and be missing when we took up our march again. What would follow would depend on each particular Tommy. If he had sense, when he found that he had lost his unit, he would report to the first British officer he encountered and get a written statement from the officer to that effect. Every day that he was absent, until he re-found us, he would get a signed reference as to his movements. If, however, on coming out of his stupor he got frightened, he might hide himself; in which case, though he originally had no intention to desert, his action would be interpreted as desertion. Many a man has been court-martialed and condemned, when his only fault was stupidity ana ignorance of military procedure.

You can’t “crime” two-thirds of a battery; the only thing to be done was to take steps to avoid the consequences. I sent the guard to summon all the N.C.O.’. and officers to the horse-lines. We then brought together all the men who were still fit for duty and, having increased the guard, set to work to carry or lead all those who were incapable back to their quarters. When we had called the roll and knew that no one was absent, we made a search for any drink that might be concealed about the men’s persons and then proceeded to sober up the worst cases by dashing buckets of water over them. When this had been done, we placed an armed guard at the entrance to every billet, with orders to permit no one to go out or to enter. We then left them to sleep it off.

At sun-down a dispatch-rider dashed up to Brigade Headquarters. The sound of his motorbike chugging through the village had been sufficient warning to all the officers’ messes; there were representatives from all the batteries waiting in the courtyard when the adjutant came out to give us the Colonel’s orders. “The orders are to hook in at once and be ready to move off by 9 p.m.”

“In what direction?” we asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, “and that’s no lie. The Colonel doesn’t know, but he’s off to see the General. In any case we shan’t be told until the last minute.” Then commenced the appalling job of getting a half-sober battery harnessed up, hooked in and looking sufficiently respectable that its true condition might not be apparent. This was a case when the Iron discipline of the Army showed at its best. A well-disciplined unit is never so drunk that it can’t beat a teetotal one in which the discipline is lax. It was extraordinary how under the spur of necessity the men pulled themselves together; they had learnt how to make their insubordinate bodies obey their wills up front, flogging them forward to victory through mud and cold and weariness. With leaden eyes and shaking hands, they went through all the familiar motions, so that the battery was mounted and sitting to attention a quarter of an hour before the time appointed struck. In the inspection that followed, hardly a buckle was out of place or a piece of equipment ill-adjusted.

But there were some men who were kept hidden till the last moment—these were the dead drunk. It was our purpose to bring them out only at the last moment when, trusting to the gathering darkness to conceal their condition, we planned to bind them to the seats of the guns with drag-ropes. It takes all kinds to make an army; some who are the worst actors out at rest, are the finest heroes in action.

“There’s those that does it because they’re frightened.” That thought kept running through my head as I searched the stern and haggard faces of these boys who had been shipped from the ends of the earth to die together. They didn’t took the kind to be easily frightened. I knew they weren’t the kind, for I’d seen them fighting forward through the mud-bath of the Somme and driving their guns into action through the death-drops of Farbus. But no one can guess rightly the agony which lies hidden behind the impassive masque of the external.

The sunset, lying low on the horizon, cut a brilliant line behind the shoulders of the drivers, causing their metal-work to glitter and emphasising the erectness of their soldierly bearing in the saddle. They looked a very different lot from the disorganized mob which eight hours earlier had lain scattered throughout the ditches of the countryside.

We were waiting for the Major to arrive. He had gone to Brigade Headquarters with the other battery-commanders to receive final instructions from the Colonel. As we waited the pool of darkness, which had at first washed shallowly about the gun-wheels and feet of horses, began to creep higher, till only the heads of the men and horses remained distinct against the frieze of the vanishing sunset—all else was vague and lost. A nightingale in a neighboring thicket began to pour out its solitary song; far away in the intervals of silence a second bird answered. There was a heavy and yearning melancholy in what they said which played havoc with the accustomed stoicism of our hearts.

Suddenly along the road came the sound of a rider approaching at a rapid trot. The sharp tapping of the horse’s hoofs changed to a dull thudding as he turned into the field. Then the thudding stepped. The Major’s voice rang out in an abrupt word of command, “Fall out the officers.” From the various sections the officers galloped out and formed up before him in a half-circle.

“Take out your note-books and write down these names,” he said; “they’re the villages through which we shall pass on to-night’s march. You will not tell any of the men the names of the villages and you’ll burn your list in the morning. This information is only given to you in case some of the vehicles should break down, so that you may be able to bring them on to rejoin the main party. And remember, absolute secrecy is necessary. Here are the names.... Be careful with your flashlights as you write them down: keep them shaded. We don’t want any Hun planes to get wind of us.” When we had replaced our notebooks he nodded shortly, “That’s all. In about five minutes we move off.”

As I rejoined my section the Number One of A. Sub rode up and saluted. “One of my men’s missing, sir. He’s Gunner Standish—a steady, quiet sort of lad: the chap as kept the gun in action single-handed, when all the rest of the crew was knocked out in the Willerval racket.”

I remembered Standish well; I had had him in mind for the next promotion. He had won the Military Medal for his gallantry at Willerval, for fighting his gun alone, when the pit had become a shamble? and all his comrades were lying about him, either wounded or dead. A fine piece of work, and especially fine for a chap of his nature, for he was nervous and high-strung, and only seventeen, though in his keenness to enlist he had stated his military age as twenty.

I turned to the Number One brusquely. “But you reported your subsection as complete a good half hour ago?”

“And it was complete then, sir. I spoke with the man myself. He slipped off while we was waiting for the Major; he didn’t ask no permission and didn’t say a word to any one.”

“Perhaps he’d remembered that he’d left behind some of his kit. You’d better send someone after him at the double. Probably you’ll find him in his billets.”

“I’ve done that, sir, and he wasn’t there.”

“Had he been drinking?”

The Sergeant shook his head. “It doesn’t sound like Standish. He came of good people and was a trustworthy, well-conducted chap. He’s never been up for office and was proud of it.”

“Well,” I said, “I’ll have to report to the Major, and then you and I will go and search for him. I’ll wager we’ll find him in his billets.”

The Major told me “Righto,” and not to be long. We weren’t running a kindergarten. If the chap got left behind, it was his own look-out.

As we hurried through the battery, they were carrying out the men who were incapable and lashing them with drag-ropes to the gun-seats like sacks. The billets were not more than a hundred and fifty yards from the horse-lines; they consisted of a mouldy stable, standing on one side of a farm-yard, the whole of which was made foul by an accumulation of manure, a? is the custom in French farmyards.

We tiptoed our way across the reeking mess, choosing our path so as not to sink too deeply into it. At the doorway of the low barn-like stricture, we called the man’s name, “Standish.” When he did not answer, I loosened my flashlight from my belt and swept the ray along the broken floor and into the farthest corners. It seemed not unlikely that he might have fallen asleep there. All I saw was the refuse of worn-out equipment and empty bean-tins neatly gathered up into sacks. Already I could hear the first of the teams pulling out and the rattling of the guns on the road as they left the padded surface of the turf. If we did not hurry, we should be left behind ourselves.

“I told you he wasn’t here, sir,” the Sergeant said.

Just as we were leaving, I flashed my light round the building for one last look. In so doing I tilted the lamp, so that the ray groped among the rafters of the roof. The Sergeant started back with a curse, knocking the lamp from my hand. Just above his head he had seen it hanging, its face staring down at him crookedly.

We were too late when we cut him down; so we moved out that night upon our anonymous march with an extra passenger lashed to a gun-seat, on whose incapacity we had not counted.

The nightingales were still singing in the thickets when we left, singing of things forsaken, of beauty and of passion. I could not shake off the impression that it was their sweet, intolerable melancholy which had urged him to do it. If we had taken to the road an hour earlier, he would have been saved from that act. Poor lad! He had played the game to the top of his bent, till he had passed the limit of his power to suffer. What was the limit of us who remained? How much further had we to go till we reached the breaking-point?

“There’s those that does it because they’re frightened.” Trottrot knew of what he was talking.

VII

WE march, and sleep, and work as in a dream. Nothing that we do or see seems any longer real to us. This inverted way of living by night and drowsing by day, blunts one’s sense of actuality as with a drug. The only fact which remains constant is our ceaseless struggle against weariness.

There’s no longer the faintest doubt as to where we are going; we’re marching into the great shove, to which all the previous four years of war have been a preface. We’re marching, if human endurance can carry us, straight into the heart of Germany. Among ourselves we make no more attempts to disguise what is intended; as though the doors of a furnace had been suddenly flung wide, we feel the heat of the trial which will consume us. To-day is the fourth of August; we hope to be in Berlin by Christmas—some, but not all of us.

One looks curiously into the faces of his companions, half expecting to find their fates written on their foreheads. In so doing, he is not morbid: he simply braces himself to meet the facts of things which must surely happen. He knows that many of those who jest with him to-day, will lie endlessly asleep to-morrow. He wonders vaguely to which company he himself will belong—whether to the company of those who sleep or the company of those who go toiling forward. It seems as though those who are to fall in the battle must have been already selected; they must have been assigned some mark by which they may be detected. So one watches his comrades stealthily to discover the invisible tag which records their lot.

I find myself speaking to my men more as a friend and less as an officer; the thought of that last night-march, which all men must make solitarily, is drawing us together in a closer bond. A voice is continually whispering, “It may be the last time you can be decent to that chap—the last time.”

I notice the counterpart of my own feeling in the attitude of the drivers towards their horses. They, too, realise that for many of us, whether human or four-footed, the hour of parting is approaching fast When stables are ended and the hungry crowd is dashing for the cook-house in a greedy endeavour to collar the biggest portions, the drivers turn back to their teams to give Chum and Blighty an extra pat and to shake the hay a little loose for them. The horses sniff against the men’s shoulders and arch their necks to gaze after them with a mild wonder in their eyes.

In what part of the line lies the furnace into which they mean to hurl us? Some say that we are going to join up with the French—others that the Americans will be behind us and will leap-frog us when we have crumpled up the Hun Front by our attack. There are many wild rumours, the most likely of which is that the neighbourhood of Rheims will be our jumping-off point. But to get us there they will have to entrain us; there are no signs of entraining at present. Nothing is certain, except that every night we are crawling southwards.

Are we brave or merely indifferent? The Army crushes imagination and sentiment. To attain a certain object lives have to be expended—the mere lives in proportion to the worth of the object. For those who plan the game at General Headquarters death and courage are an impersonal sum in mathematics: so many men and horses in the held, of whom so many can be spared for corpses, But the sum is not impersonal for us. It consists of an infinite number of intimate computations: the little sums of what life means to us and of what our lives mean to the old men, mothers, wives, sweethearts who scan the casualty lists feverishly, hoping not to read our names among the fallen. General Headquarters cannot be expected to complicate their book-keeping by taking these bijou exercises in addition and subtraction into their immenser calculations.

For us, in its most heroic analysis, the arithmetic of war is an auditing of our characters—an impartial balancing of the selfish and the noble, the cowardly and courageous in our natures. Long ago when we first enlisted, before we had any knowledge of the horrors we were to suffer, we set ourselves on record as believing that there were principles of right and wrong at stake, in the defence of which it was worth our while to die. An offensive of this magnitude is the test as to whether, with an experienced knowledge of the horrors, we are still men enough to hold to our bargain and prove our sincerity with our blood. It is the test of scarlet—the fiercest of all tests, which we encounter as heroes or avoid as moral bankrupts.

Yesterday, when the battery got drunk, there can be little doubt as to why it was done: the suspense of a Judgment Day for which no place or time had been allotted, made men afraid. Standish symbolizes that, terror. He could struggle with a fear which was present and which he could defeat with his hands, as he proved at Willerval; the fear, the coming of which was indefinite and the shadow of which groped only in his mind, crushed him. Perhaps the rest of us avoided his fate because we were of a coarser type. Maybe it was the very fineness of his mental qualities that tripped him up. Whatever the difference, the fact remains that he failed in the test of scarlet; at the very moment when his comrades, equally weary, equally afraid, equally in love with life, were marching out to throttle the danger, he, poor lad, was dangling from a rafter, shameful and unsightly, a self-confessed quitter and pain-dodger. Why should a man do a thing like that? He rushed upon the certainty of death, when by living he would still have retained his chance of life. All through the war such incident have happened, self-maimings, suicides, desertions—all manners of make-shift means of escaping the Judgment Day of the attack. But death is not to be avoided by running away from it; those who flee from it in the Front-line find it waiting for them behind the lines at their comrades’ hands. “I couldn’t face the Huns.” one deserter said with a kind of self-wonder, as he squared his shoulders bravely to meet the impact of the firing-squad, “but I can face this.” To my way of thinking it requires more courage to put a rope round your neck and fling yourself down from the rafters of a foul stable, or to hold yourself erect in the early dawn with your eyes blind-folded, writing without whimpering for British bullets to strike you. There must be different kinds of courage, some of which war can employ and others——Cowardice gives one the courage of desperation, so that one can calmly perform the most terrible of acts. I suppose the explanation of such men as Standish is that terror, too long contemplated, drives them mad. How much longer can the rest of us stand its contemplation?

Last night’s march was like a night of delirium with moments of consciousness; the moments of consciousness were the worst. We had scarcely struck the road before men started to fall asleep in their saddles. When orders to halt or to pull over to the right were passed down the column, they were not complied with. At first the horses saved us from tangles, for they heard the orders and without guiding, carried them out. But then the horses commenced to sleep as they walked, adding to our danger the risk that they might stumble. The entire battery was worn out and it was difficult to know on whom you could depend. We officers rode up and down, rousing the men and trying to keep the sergeants and corporals on the alert; but they, too, in many cases were no better and wandered nodding in their saddles. Soon after the last of the sunset had faded the night had become intensely dark; it was scarcely possible to see your hand before your face. Rain began to descend. The temperature sank and, after the heat of the August day, it became as cold as November.

Orders were passed back that every gunner and employed man had to walk that the vehicles might be lightened. Some of them had sore feet from the previous night’s march; many of them were still groggy from their excesses. It required extraordinary vigilance to be sure that no one was falling behind and getting lost. We shuffled along under dripping trees in sullen silence. Very often our route lay by by-roads, that the traffic might be relieved on main thoroughfares. The by-roads were soggy and loose in their surface; branches and brambles slashed across our faces, leaping out on us from the dark.

Everything was on the move, tanks, heavies, siege-guns, transport. They were pushing south, all pouring in the same direction, and no one seemed to care whom he thrust aside so long as he himself got there. For long periods we were held up by lorries and caterpillars which had become ditched ahead of us. It seemed as though we could never reach our camping place before sunrise. Our strict orders were to be off the road and hidden before daylight. The men who had made themselves dead drunk before we started had the best of it; lashed to their gun-seats, they slept on blissfully unconscious of the rain and cold. From midnight till dawn was the worst period; one’s eyes were so heavy that it was an agony to keep them from closing. It became necessary to dismount and to lead one’s horse to prevent oneself from drowsing. This remedy only brought new complications, for it was impossible to superintend one’s section while on foot; mounted men in front who slept, kept colliding with the teams and vehicles. Every one was cross, and strafing, and unjust by the time the day began to whiten. It had seemed that the sun had set for good; now that it had risen, we felt ashamed of our appearance. We were muddy and sodden; our one desire was to find a place where we could lie down and rest.

When we had limped into the field in which we are at present bivouacked, we found that only two teams could be watered at one time at the ford. This meant that grooming had to be prolonged until the last horse in the battery had been watered. By the time stables had been dismissed, the men were so tired that they did not care for breakfast, but tumbled off to sleep where they dropped.

Today I am orderly-dog, on duty for twenty-four hours from reveille to reveille. I sit here among the bales of hay which have been thrown down from the G. S. wagons, and I watch—and I marvel, as I never cease to marvel, at the men’s indomitable pluck. Now that they know what lies ahead of them, their behaviour is completely nonchalant and ordinary. They have accepted the idea of catastrophe and have dismissed it from their minds. If they refer to it at all, it is merely as material out of which to manufacture jokes against themselves.

Last night’s march, with its cold and wet, being over is forgotten. More night-marches lie before them which may be worse than the last, but they cross no bridges until they come to them. For the moment the sun shines luxuriously and their fatigue is gone. Some of them are practising pitching with a base-ball; others are washing and cooling their swollen feet in the ford. The gramophone, which we always carry with us, is playing popular selections from the latest thing in musical comedy. It’s a point of honour with every officer in our mess when he goes on leave to bring back at least half-a-dozen new records. The tunes bring pleasant memories of girls and taxis and dinner-parties and dances, of crowded theatres jammed with cheering khaki, of uproarious laughter, of sirens blowing and bombs falling on London house-tops—the memories still are pleasant—and of late adventurous home-comings along unlighted thoroughfares to sheeted beds. All of which memories are in rosy contrast to the stern laboriousness of our present. Afar off I can see Bully Beef, toddling on chubby legs along the edge of the wood gathering wild-flowers. That slim young soldier, who follows him with her eyes between intervals of mending a tunic, must be Suzette. The scene is extraordinarily restful. We might be planning to live forever. Wherever the eye rests the prevailing note is sanity and calm. And yet our calmness is only an outward pretence; it means nothing more than this, that we are in hiding from the spies of the enemy. The woods which surround us were selected that no one might know that Foch’s Pets are on the march. A further emphasis was laid on the magnitude of the ordeal which awaits us by an order regarding men under arrest, which we received this morning; they are to be released and the charges against them dropped, that they may be available for cannon-fodder. This is no act of mercy; it simply means that every last man will be needed for the replacing of casualties.

The true attitude of the fighting-man towards this concert-pitch commotion was expressed by the Major, when he sat up in his sleeping-sack and rubbed his eyes at lunch-time. He looked an absurdly rebellious little figure in his khaki shirt-tails and without a tie or collar. “I tell you what it is; I’m fed up with all this secrecy and nonsense. I don’t wonder that the chaps got drunk; when you’re unconscious is the only time that you possess yourself. I don’t mind the fighting; what I object to is this being mucked about by everybody. I’m not a Major; I’m a policeman. And the Colonels and Generals who boss me, they’re bigger policemen. In the Army everyone who is not a Tommy is a policeman, with a stronger policeman above him to boss him. We interfere with one another to such an extent that we’re disciplined out of our initiative and self-confidence. I’m sick of it all; I’m off.”

He then explained in detail what it was he was sick of. He was sick of army-rations; sick of night-marches; sick of the paper-warfare which blew in from Headquarters every hour of the day demanding answers; sick of having to strafe his men and being strafed in his turn by the Colonel. He wanted to get away to where he didn’t have to blow his nose in accordance with King’s Regulations, where he didn’t have to eat what a Government had provided for him, where he didn’t have to do everything in the dread of a calling down from higher authorities.

“You’re orderly-dog for today,” he said. “You can carry on. If you have to pull out, leave a mounted man behind to guide me on. I’m going to find a place where the food tastes different; if I find more than I want. I’ll bring you back a portion. I’m going to take Captain Heming with me; the rest of the officers can wander about, so long as they get back by six o’clock and there are always two within call in the event of a movement order.”

The rest of the officers are Tubby Grain, the centre section commander, Gus Edwine, the commander of the left section, Sam Bradley, who is in charge of the signallers, and Steve Hoadley, who is attached as spare-officer. Of them all I like Tubby best. He’s fat, and brave, and humourous. He used to mix soft-drinks in a druggist’s store, and started his career at the Front as a sergeant. He has a weakness for referring to himself as a “temporary gent” and, if he weren’t so lazy, would make a cracking fine officer. He’s as scrupulously honourable with men as he is unreliable with women. In his pocket-book he carries a cheap photograph signed, “Yours lovingly, Gertie.” He shows it to you sentimentally as “the picture of my girl,” yet the next moment will recite all manner of escapades.

His most permanent affair since he came to France is with an estaminet-keeper’s daughter at Bruay. Out of the sale of intoxicants to British Tommies she has collected as her percentage a dot of fifty thousand francs—an immense sum to her. With this, when the war has been won and they are married, she proposes to buy a small hotel. Tubby is non-committal when she mentions marriage. I don’t know how serious his intentions are, and I don’t believe he knows himself. He gives her no definite answers, but writes her scores of letters. He gambles heavily and always loses; but whatever his losses, he’s invariably cheery and willing to lend money. One has to take his companions as he finds them at the Front; it’s the kindness of Tubby’s heart that recommends him.

Gus Edwine is of an entirely different stamp. He’s conscientious, unmerry, and solid. He never plays cards, is poor company, but knows his work.

He has a girl who’s a nursing-sister at a Casualty Clearing Station. He takes his love with sad seriousness, and beats his way to her by stealing lifts on Army lorries whenever we’re within thirty miles of her hospital. I have my suspicions that that’s where he’s gone at present. He never tells. In a stiff fight he’s a man to be relied on, and commands everyone’s respect on account of his high morals and cool courage.

Sam Bradley is the only married officer in our battery. I don’t think he can have been married long, for he smiles all the while quietly to himself as though he had a happy secret. Wherever we are, in a muddy dug-out or back at rest, the first piece of his possessions to be unpacked is a leather-framed portrait of a kind-looking girl. Much of his leisure is spent in writing letters, and most of his mail is in a round decided handwriting which we take to be hers.

Steve Hoadley is new to the war. He has never been in any important action and has yet to prove himself. He has a manner, which irritates the Major, of “knowing it all,” and is frequently in trouble. The men rather resent taking orders from him, since many of them have seen three years of active service. On the whole he does not have a happy lot. None of us have at first. He would get on all right if he wasn’t so positive. I think he’s made up his mind to seize this offensive to show his worth. Here’s good luck to him in his effort.

Dan Turpin, the Quartermaster—good old Dan with his large heart and immense sympathy for everybody—has just been to see me. He looked troubled as he halted in front of me, rubbing the wart on his nose thoughtfully.

“What is it, Quarter?” I asked. “Anything the matter with the transport? If it’s a long story, you’d better take a pew while you tell me.”

“It’s nothing to do with the transport, sir,” he said, and remained standing. “It’s to do with what Suzette’s doing over there.”

“What is she doing?” I glanced lazily over the sunlit distance in her direction. “She’s mending something, isn’t she?”

Dan shook his head. Then, in order to give me another chance to guess, he added, “And it’s got to do with what Bully Beef’s doing.”

“He’s gathering wild-flowers.”

“Yes, He’s gathering wild-flowers,” Dan said. “But she ain’t mending anything; she’s putting something together.”

I unslung my glasses and focussed them to get a closer view. “Ah, I see what she’s up to now. She’s made a kind of pillow out of a piece of horse-blanket and she’s stuffing it with leaves.”

“It’s a pillow for his head,” Dan said solemnly, “and the flowers is to cover him, before we throw the earth on.”

Then I knew what Dan wanted and, rising to my feet, accompanied him without further words. In the wood, which surrounds our camp, we have just buried Standish, with Suzette’s pillow beneath his head and Bully Beef’s wild-flowers for a covering. On account of the way he died, there was no parade of the battery to do him honour: but many of the men attended. Trottrot was there, whom everyone regards as untrustworthy under shell-fire. He was one of those who lowered the body, bruised by its last night’s march on the gun-seat, into its narrow bed. While the short ceremony was in progress, the sound of the gramophone was stopped and the shouts of the base-ball pitchers died into silence. As we were seen to emerge from the wood, with scarcely a moment’s delay, the sounds started up—not in callousness, but in a frenzied effort to forget. It was fully an hour after I had again seated myself among the bales of hay that I saw Suzette and Trottrot come back. I could guess what they had been doing—making the place beautiful. But why should Trottrot do that? He had not been the dead man’s friend. Was it because he himself had come so near to cowardice that he could stoop to be tender?

I shall have no time to see what they have done to mark the grave, for a runner has just brought a movement order from Brigade that we are to be prepared to march by sun-down. It doesn’t give us much of a margin, for the smoke-gray haze of evening is already creeping through the tree-tops. The Major and Heming have not yet retuned.

VIII

LAST night we had another terrible march; neither the men nor the horses can stand much more of it. It isn’t a matter of stoutness of heart; it’s a plain question of physical endurance. How many more nights can men and horses go without sleep and bungle through the darkness of a strange country without collapsing? It isn’t as though these were easy marches—all of them are forced. And then again, it isn’t as though we had the knowledge that in a few days’ time our present exertions would be followed by a rest; on the contrary, we know that our present exertions are as nothing compared with what will be demanded of us. Everybody is extraordinarily willing—there’s no grumbling; but we’re working under a high nervous tension of suspense which, in itself, is exhausting. If we were actually in battle, our excitement would carry us twice as far without letting us drop. In the presence of death one can achieve the incredible; these miracles are difficult to accomplish while one still has a reasonable certainty.

To tell the truth, our equipment isn’t equal to the strain which is being laid upon it. Our teams are not matched; many of them are worn out; some of them consist of mules. One wonders living, whether they could go into action at the gallop without falling down. For the past three years there’s been precious little galloping for the Field Artillery on the Western Front. Our work has consisted for the most part of dragging our guns up through mud at the crawl and afterwards of packing up ammunition on the horses’ backs. This has broken the hearts of the animals, and robbed us of our dash and snap.

The animals which have been sent to us during the past two years to replace casualties are of an utterly inferior physique and stamp from those we had when war started. They’re either ponies or draught-horses, or else patched-up, decrepit old-timers from the veterinary hospitals, which have been ill or wounded, and have been returned to active service to die in harness because no others are available. Our best animals are the few survivors we have of the original teams which we brought with us from Canada to France.

What is true of the horses is equally true of the men. The physical standard has dropped. In 1914, unless one were physically perfect, it was impossible to get accepted. To-day both among the officers and in the ranks, one sees spectacled faces, narrow chests, stooping shoulders and weak legs. Boys and old gray-haired men go struggling up front through the mud to-day in France. Apparently, whatever his appearance, anyone is eligible to wear khaki who can tell a lie about how long he has been in the world. I would make a guess that fully a third of our drivers and gunners had not seen their eighteenth birthdays at the time when their military age was recorded as twenty; on the other hand, there is a goodly proportion who are supposed to be thirty and are well over forty. And then, besides those who are too old or too young, there are the crocks—men who, like the houses from the veterinary-hospitals, have been patched up again and again and, after short rests at comfortless places somewhere between the base and the Frontline, have once more been returned to active service to help push the Hun a little farther back before they themselves stumble into an open grave. These crocks are for the most part men who have never had the luck to be wounded; if they had once reached a hospital in England, they would never have been allowed to see the Front again. But the hospitals in France are compelled to be less merciful; their job is to repair the broken human mechanism and return it to the fighting-line so long as it has any usefulness. Our crocks are chiefly men who have been crushed by exposure and hardship. They suffer from debility, poor feet, rheumatism, running-ears, etc.; the ear-troubles are caused by the sharp concussion of the guns in the pits when they are fired. I suppose those in authority have been forced to the opinion that all men are of equal value when they are dead, and that it’s a waste of energy, when you’re collecting material for cannon-fodder, to be too picksome.

In England, after the Hun drive of the spring had commenced, the magicians of the man-power boards were taking very much the same point of view, and arbitrarily improving the nation’s health by raising re-examined C III men to an A I category. There are few men now, except the very aged, who are not on paper sufficiently healthy to die for their country. This changed attitude is summed up in the treatment of wounded men. Whereas to have been severely wounded was formerly a just reason for honourable discharge, to-day we have men still fighting who have made the trip to Blighty five times on a stretcher. There are officers who have suffered amputations, who are still carrying on.

Necessity knows no law; nevertheless, this desperate use which we are making of both human and four-footed material which is below par, makes itself felt when we are called upon for unusual efforts. We’re beginning to fear lest before the show starts, these forced night marches may use up our reserves of strength. We do not own that there are any limitations to our power to obey and suffer, but common-sense tells us that there is a point beyond which the flesh cannot be driven, however great the heart.

Last night we were on the road from ten o’clock till seven this morning. It took two hours from the time when we pulled into our present place of hiding, till the men could lie down and rest. Very many of the horses had kicks and galls, all of which had to be attended to before anyone could think of himself.

I call this our place of hiding purposely, for it is so obviously just that. We are in a high rolling country, cut up into shadowy patterns by deep ravines, and dotted where it lies nearest the sky by squares and oblongs and triangles of woods. It is in one of these protecting woods that we have our bivouacs and horse-lines. We are so well covered from sight that peasants in the nearest village, two miles away, do not suspect our presence. We have not found it necessary to warn the men against revealing themselves; they’re too played out to walk a yard further than is necessary.

A glance at the map makes our game of guesswork grow interesting. We’re directly to the west of Amiens now; one night’s march would bring us into the line. Amiens is the great junction-point of the railroad system which feeds the entire British Front and which connects us up with the French. The Hun came perilously near to capturing it this spring; since then it has been vacated by its civilian population and kept by the Hun continually under shell-fire. The result has been that trains have had to make a ditour by branch-lines to get round behind the Amiens salient, and our military transportation, as a consequence, has been working under a heavy handicap. Every fighting-man has been aware of this, for whereas formerly one could buy almost anything within reason at the Expeditionary Force Canteens, since the spring stocks have not been replenished and only limited quantities have been allowed to be purchased by each person.

There have been weeks together when one has had to scour the country far and wide to find a packet of cigarettes. After so much mystery and so many conjectures, it seems not unlikely that the push is to be put on to save Amiens.

The rumour concerning some Canadian troops having been sent to Yprhs to deceive the Hun, was confirmed yesterday by our Major. In his ride abroad he met the Colonel of one of the battalions which had sent a detachment. From him he learnt that not only were Canadians and Australians sent over in a series of raids that they might be identified by the enemy, but that Canadian Maple Leaf badges and Australian slouch-hats had been issued to other units who were holding that line, that they might be mistaken for the storm-troops. Whether the ruse has succeeded in drawing the Hun reserves up north he could not learn.

The Major and Captain Heming rejoined us last night just as I commenced to lead the battery out of the woods on to the high road. Directly I spoke to Heming I had the feeling that something was wrong; it was about half-an-hour later that the Major sent back word for me to ride beside him and told me what had happened. It appears that at the officers tea-room, where they had dinner, a number of week-old London dailies were strewn about. They sat glancing through them as they waited for the meal to be served. The Major had got hold of a torn sheet, when he came across a column headed, The Coldest Woman In London. “This sounds promising,” he said to Heming; “I’ve met some of her sort myself.” Then he started to read the item aloud, throwing in his own racy comments. The coldest woman in London, it appeared, was a Mrs. Percy Dragott. She was reputed to have ruined many notable careers by her unresponsive attraction. She was extraordinarily beautiful and had been painted by many artists. The best known of all her portraits was one by————.

“Hulloa, Heming, this can’t be you, can it? A chap of your name is mentioned.————By Jove, it must be you though; it says that this Heming was in Ottawa when war broke out, and is at present at the Front with the Canadian Artillery.”

“Go on, sir, will you, if you don’t mind? I’d like to hear a little more about this Mrs. Dragott.” That, according to the Major, was all that Heming had said; but his face was very white, though his voice was hard and steady. So the Major had no option but to read on. Mrs. Dragott’s social eminence was recorded and hints were thrown out as to the personalities of the various prominent men who had broken themselves against her coldness. Her husband had committed suicide five years before, under circumstances which had helped to confirm her reputation for being a woman incapable of affection. And now, dramatically, after a hectic affair with a man who had proved to be already married, she had committed————. It was at this point that the paper was torn, leaving no due as to what it was that she had done. Heming had been terribly upset, the Major said, and had turned the place upside down to find the missing portion. “I have an idea,” the Major told me, “that Heming himself must have been fond of her.”

“Perhaps,” I said, and kept my mouth shut, for I remembered that Mrs. Percy Dragott was the name which Heming had handed to me that day on the Somme, when we were caught by the Hun out in No Man’s Land and he had wriggled his way forward that he might risk his own life and save ours. What was it that she had done? Had she killed herself or the man? I could imagine all the questions that kept running through Heming’s head, as he followed behind the wagon that carried Suzette, riding through the darkness at the rear of the column.

It only required a happening of this sort to bring home to us how much we are cut off from the outside world. Whatever tragedies are suffered by those whom we have loved, we cannot go to their help. Between them and us there is a great gulf fixed.

It’s six o’clock in the evening. We had made up our minds that we would certainly be here for the night; it did not seem possible that, with men and horses so exhausted, they could send us on another march. That’s what they’re going to do, however. The harnessing up is nearly completed and the first of the teams are already being led out from the lines to the gun-park. A special order has just come in for me to join the Colonel with a blanket and rations for twenty-four hours. I and one officer from each of the batteries are to be prepared to go forward with him in a lorry. Where we are going and for what purpose, we are left to surmise.

IX

THE adventure has begun in earnest. All the monotony of being foot-sore and tired is forgotten in this new excitement. They can push us as hard as they like; we shall not fail until our strength gives out. It’s the game, the largeness and the splendour of it, that uplifts us. In the history of the world no fighting-men ever fought for such high stakes as those for which we are about to fight. Just as this war is out of all proportion titanic as compared with other wars which have been waged by men, so is this offensive, which we intend shall be the last and the decisive climax, out of all proportion titanic as compared with previous offensives. It doesn’t matter that we are physically inefficient for the task; we have been physically inefficient for other tasks, which we have nevertheless accomplished. We were sick, both men and horses, when we splashed our way furiously through the icy mud to those last attacks which won the battle of the Somme; none of us lay down on the job till we had been relieved in the line. The very day that we pulled out horses died in their tracks and men collapsed. We were like runners who had saved their last ounce for the final lap and had no strength left when they had broken the tape.

It will be like that again; stoutness of heart will carry us to success long after our bodies have backed down on us. From the first crack out of the box this is going to be a V. C. stunt for every man who takes part in it; that there won’t be enough V. C’s to go round doesn’t trouble us. To have been privileged to share in such an undertaking will be reward enough and a sufficient decoration. We’re going to bust the Hun Front so completely that it will never stand up again. We’re going to make a hole in his defences through which all the troops which are behind us can rush like a deluge. We’re going to achieve this end by the element of surprise and the devil-may-care ferocity of our attack. The effect will be like the breaking of a dam: we shall spread and spread till the military arrogance of Germany is flooded out of sight and only the steeples and roofs of the highest houses show up above the ruin’s surface to mark the spots where the ancient menace was trapped and drowned.

Last night we found our lorries waiting for us at a cross-roads; they were headed in the direction of the road which was marked To Amiens. The sun was sinking behind the uplands as we set out; the last sight we had as we looked back through the golden solitude was our brigade of artillery slowly winding like a black snake out of the wood and losing itself in a fold of the hills. The Colonel was silent; he gave us no information, save that we were going forward to choose battery positions and alternative routes for bringing in our guns and ammunition in case some of the routes were shelled. For the rest, we conjectured that the lorries were taking us past points where it would not be wise for the brigade to travel.

We had not been going long, when we began to pass Australian Infantry, first of all we met them in isolated groups, strolling down the lanes and through the wheat, two and two, with their arms about the waists of peasant-girls. Very often the girls had plucked wild-flowers for their lovers, and had stuck them in the button-holes of their tunics or had pinned them against the brims of their broad slouch-hats. One wondered with how many soldier-men these girls had walked since the war had started, and how many of their soldier-men still remained above ground to kiss the lips of a living girl. Without being told, there was something of false flippancy and yearning in their attitude which made us understand that these lovers for a moment were taking their last stroll together. Like the Canadians, they are storm-troops, and will be lost in the smoke of battle before many days are out.

At a turn in the road we came across a girl who had flung herself down beside the hedge and was sobbing with her face buried in her hands. Farther on, by a few hundred yards, we passed a boy-private, who kept halting and glancing back with trouble in his eyes, and then again making up his mind to go forward. Many a deserter has been shot not because he was a coward, but because he had grown too fond of a girl.

We entered a village where all was in commotion.

The dusk had fallen. In the windows lights glimmered. Trumpets were sounding. Across farmyards, and in and out of barns men hurried with lanterns. Infantry, in their full marching order, were tumbling out from houses and forming up, two deep, along the street. Rolls were being called and absentees searched for. Officers on horse-back fidgeted impatiently or went at the sharp trot, carrying messages. Bursts of laughter and song from the gardens behind the cottages, seemed to mock the atmosphere of military sternness. Behind the darkness there was the knowledge of stolen kisses. The storm-troops were saying “Good-bye” to life and moving one stage nearer to the slaughter. We won free from the village and were soon on a high road, doing our forty miles an hour.

In the dusk the sharp details of the country were blurred, but we saw enough to know that its aspect was changing. There were no more peasant-girls with their soldier-lovers: the fields were uncared for—all the civilian population had been pushed back. We came to villages full of deserted houses, with roofs smashed and walls gaping where bombs had been dropped. Under the protection of trees, in lanes and side-roads, motor and horse-transport was waiting for the sky to become sufficiently dark for it to be safe for them to advance. At every cross-road we were halted by military-police till our special order had been presented and examined. Ahead of us the cathedral spires and towers of Amiens grew up; like fire-flies flickering above them, though actually at a distance of miles behind them, the flares and rockets of the Hun Front commenced their maniac dance.

We crept into the city, slowing down to avoid gaping holes in the pavi. It was a city of the dead. No movement was allowed till night had grown completely dark.. Shutters sagged on their hinges. Doors stood wide, just as they had been left in the hurry of the exit. Windows stared blindly, with broken panes and curtains faded and flapping. On the pavement the dibris lay strewn of household furniture which had been carefully carried out, and then left in the mad stampede of the panic. One could picture it all as the terror had spread and the horror had been whispered from mouth to mouth, “He’s broken through—the Boche is coming.”

Amiens, as I last saw it, was the Front-line’s dream of Paradise—a place where one could keep warm, where one could wash to his heart’s content, where one could laugh and live without being hungry, where one could hear the voices of children and watch the faces of pretty girls. It was a city of clubs, tea-rooms, cinemas, canteens, tramways, hotels, hospitable fires. In Amiens one could still believe in the glory of war, for the Indian cavalry with their brilliant turbans and the hunting-men from the Home Counties were there, all waiting for the break in the line to occur when the swordsmen of the Empire would get their chance. It was more honestly gay than Paris, more gallantly mad than London, more wistful and unwise than either. From in front of Courcelette, where one drowned in the mud, it was possible to reach Amiens by lorry in a handful of hours. Amiens was to us, when I last saw it, a glimpse of Blighty set down at the backdoor of hell.

But since then the Hun drive of the spring had occurred and, with the approach of tragedy, every vestige of gallantry had vanished. War, with its inevitable squalor, had laid hands on everything, revealing itself in its true colours. Like mutilated human faces, the fronts of houses hung in tatters, indecently displaying all those intimate secrets of family life that the kindly walls had hidden. Shells had fallen; bombs had been dropped. Even as we entered, we could hear the angry roar of detonations. Dead men sprawled about the streets, twisted by the anguish of their final struggle. Dogs and cats, of appalling leanness, slunk in and out the ruins. As we passed the station, with its great span of girders, a shell crashed through with a splash of glass. It was a city through which demented solitude wandered. We hurried on. An ambulance lurched by us, returning from the Front, and halted by an emergency hospital. We had a glimpse of the stretchers being carried underground into the temporary security of the cellars. Overhead the fierce rat-a-tat of machine-guns commenced, where two fighting-planes circled in mid-air. Someone shouted to us to put out our cigarettes; after that there was no smoking.

Hunger is like strong wine; it drives out weariness. While our lives were secure, those long night-marches had seemed an intolerable hardship. Now that death was present, the entire manhood in us stiffened to fight off the peril. Mere weariness was forgotten—a good night’s rest could cure that; but if once death should get the upper-hand, there was no kindliness of human skill that could restore us. Our spirits rose as we drew nearer to the horror of the carnage. There is something wonderfully stimulating about terror; the challenge of it makes one forget his body. That night as we sped through Amiens and during all the days and nights that followed, it seemed more as if we were hunting death than as if death were hounding us.

We had left the Cathedral far behind. Whenever we looked back, so long as any light was in the sky, we could see it standing dark and brooding against the horizon. We had by now travelled off the maps in our possession, by means of which we had been following our journey. The Colonel, seated beside the driver of the leading lorry, gave him his directions. He alone was aware of where we were going. But we knew by the wholesale demolition that this was one of the main national roads which had been most fiercely contested in the spring fighting, before the headlong rush of the Hun had been stopped. The tracks of the railroad, which paralleled it, had been torn from their bed. Bridges had been blown up. Improvised forts had been constructed in hollows where an advance could be checked by machine-gun fire.

In my memory vivid descriptions recurred of the stubborn resistance which our men had put up. They had retreated and retreated, overpowered by weight of numbers. They had been deprived of water and food and sleep, and still they had fought on. Their officers had been killed: their N. C. O.s were gone; they had lost touch with their units, and yet they had never lost their sense of conquest—they dug their toes in and fought on. Along this very road they had crawled on hands and knees when they could no longer walk; but they had crawled backwards, with their faces always towards the enemy, who followed them staggering drunkenly in his steps from exhaustion. There were German battalions which had marched forty miles at a stretch, only to be shot down by these broken Tommies who never knew when they were beaten. As the agony of the spring became more and more obvious a cold anger grew in our hearts. We were going to revenge that mud-stained mob who ought to have been beaten, but had won by their own invincible doggedness. From graves in the darkness the anonymous dead watched us pass.

We were travelling more slowly now; the road was becoming congested with transport and with batteries pulling into action. From lanes and cross-country routes which avoided Amiens, they began to pour into this main artery of traffic. Fully two-thirds of the transport consisted of motor-lorries, bringing up ammunition to the various dumps which were being established in rear of the point where the blow was to be struck. We crept along without lights of any kind, speaking to each other in whispers lest the Hun should become aware of the commotion of our progress. By day all this country had appeared to be naked and nothing had been seen to stir. The moment night had gathered every road and land had become as dense with traffic as Piccadilly Circus at the theatre hour. One wondered where so much energy had concealed itself, and marvelled at the army organization which knew to within a hundred yards where each separate group of energy could be found. Behind these speculations and imaginings lay a graver thought—the thought of all the men, horses and engines of war which had been pouring eastward for four years, only to dash themselves to pulp and blood, and to sink from sight in the debatable quagmire which separates the hostile armies. Where had so many come from? How much longer could the stream be kept flowing? Above our heads, like invisible trains slowing down as they neared their destination, the long range shells of the Huns roared and lumbered, and almost halted before they plunged screaming among the sullen roofs of Amiens.

During the last part of the journey I nodded. It was midnight when I was awakened by the stir of my companions climbing out. “We’re here,” someone said. Where here was none of us knew, for the time being we were too sleepy to care. Everything was in total darkness; it was impossible to see more than a yard ahead. The air was stealthy with the muffled breathing of an immense crowd. You held out your hand to guide yourself and found it touching the leg of a mounted man. Then, as our eyes became accustomed to the blackness, we found that we were in a village street, packed with two streams of traffic, the one going up to the Front loaded, the other returning empty. We listened to the whispered orders—some were in English, but many were in French. So the French were going to be behind us!

Not a light was to be seen anywhere. Someone struck a match to start a cigarette; immediately, almost before the flame had burst, came the angry order, “Put that light out.” The windows of the houses were all dead; but if one pressed against them, he could hear voices and knew that behind the heavy curtains drawn across them men bent over tables and worked beneath shaded lamps. Carrying our blankets and rations, we wormed our way in single file through the traffic, entered a courtyard and found ourselves in a partially destroyed house. There were two rooms, mildewed with damp, bare of furniture and littered with the dibris of the last soldiers who had been billeted there. By the broken equipment that they had left, we knew that they had been French.

After waiting for about a quarter of an hour we were joined by the Colonel, who brought with him an armful of maps. We wedged up the windows with sacking and then lit a candle.

“Everyone will know by tomorrow,” he said, “so I may as well tell you now. We’re going to pull off the stunt for which we’ve been training all summer. We believe that we’ve got the Hun guessing; he doesn’t know where we are. By marching only at night and camping in woods by day, we’ve thrown him off our track. He knows that something is going to be pulled off and he’s restless; but he doesn’t suspect us in this part of the line—he’s looking for us further north. That he is still kept in ignorance must be the aim of every man and officer. Success depends on it. Our job is just this. On August 8th at dawn we attack. That gives us three days to make all our preparations. The work of building the gun-platforms and stocking the positions with ammunition must be carried on only by night. By day everything must be quiet—any unusual movement would give away all our plans. The enemy has the high ground: he can look directly down on’ us. We’re taking over from the French, so if the enemy sees khaki uniforms in this part of the line instead of blue-gray, he’ll know at once what to expect. We shan’t drag our guns into position until the night before the show commences. We shan’t register them—we shall get them on for line with instruments; so the first shot we fire will be in the attack and the first knowledge he has that there’s a concentration of artillery in this area will be at the identical moment when our infantry are advancing behind the tanks. By that time he’ll know too late; we shall have captured his defences. There’s only one other thing I want to say before we get to work on details: the positions which have been allotted to us are so exposed that he can look almost down the muzzles of our guns. Any tracks made on the turf will give us away: even if they’ve escaped his observers, they’ll show up on his aeroplane photographs. You must camouflage your ammunition with the greatest care, making use of natural camouflage to the greatest extent, such as ditches, wheat-fields and the shadows of trees. If once your positions are discovered, they’ll become murder holes for everyone concerned. And now for the positions themselves; in less than three hours we go forward to inspect them. I want each of you to choose one main position and an alternative one which you can take up in case you’re shelled out of the first. When you’ve settled upon your positions I want you to reconnoitre every possible route in... It’s nearly one now; we shall have to leave here in two hours. We’ve got to do all our work between dawn and when the morning mist rises. Meanwhile here’s a map apiece, which I should advise you to study, so that you may have some idea of the country. You’ll have to carry the idea in your heads: no flash-lamps will be allowed. Our brigade is going to sit astride the road which runs along the ridge from the Gentelles Wood to Domart. The general plan of strategy is to take the Hun by surprise and tumble him back—and so save Amiens. After that our game is to sail out into the blue and penetrate as far as we can.”

“To sail out into the blue and penetrate as far as we can. As long as the war has been going we have dreamt of that. Out in the blue one takes a sporting chance and, if the worst happens, goes west in clean fields and beneath an open sky. In the trenches one dies like a trapped rat, amid filth and corruption, nailed beneath a barrage. In the trenches men are so crowded that they lose their personalities; they kill and are killed in the mass. Out in the blue it’s a man to man fight, in which individual cunning and valour count. Long after the Colonel had left us and the candle had been blown out, we lay in our blankets and whispered of what “into the blue” might bring to us in the way of adventures.”

By three o’clock we were on the road, shivering in the raw night air. The traffic was all going in one direction now and consisted for the most part of ammunition-limbers returning empty to their wagonlines. About a mile out of the village we swung off to the left, travelling across country to where the eastern point of the Gentelles Woods showed shadowy against the sky. The going was rough and the night so black that it was difficult to see where one’s feet were treading. Several times we blundered into wire and stumbled into partly filled trenches. We had no one who had been over the ground to guide us, so had to rely for our direction on our memories of the maps. At the Gentelles Woods we struck the high road, which runs along the ridge between pollarded trees straight down to Domart and the Hun Front-line.

The sheer audacity of the offensive, as planned, took away our breath when we saw the nature of the landscape. It was a great plateau, lacking in any cover and scored by deep rapines to right and left; every inch of it was commanded by the enemy’s higher ground. The road along the ridge was a direct enfilade for the enemy; the air was heavy with decaying flesh and the sickening smell of explosives. It ran level for fifteen hundred yards, then it began to dip down to Demart, which lay in a valley which crossed the road at right angles. The near side of the valley was in our hands; the far side, which rose to a much greater height, was in the enemy’s. To attempt to bring artillery into that area, especially when all the work had to be carried on by night, and to expect to be able to do it unobserved, seemed madness.

Shells were coming over far too frequently for comfort; the enemy was searching and sweeping the Gentelles Woods, so we set out at a smart walk along the ridge in a south-easterly direction.

X

ONE by one our party left us, turning off along side-roads to search for the particular map-locations which had been suggested as positions for their batteries. At last only I and one other officer, named Strong, remained together. The spot for which we were looking was an orchard to the right of the road along the ridge which we were travelling.

We walked on and on. It seemed an interminable distance. A fine rain began to descend, which had the effect of mist, blurring the few landmarks which one could still identify as though a muslin curtain had been drawn across them. Every now and then the humpy figure of a man with a ground-sheet flung over his rifle and shoulders, would loom up out of the dark and pass us. It seemed as though he was always the same man, working like a beast of prey round and round us in circles, waiting for us to drop. We spoke to him several times, but he never deigned to answer. Men rarely answer when they are spoken to on the road up front at night. Whether it is that they enjoy the luxury which darkness affords them of not recognising authority, or that the sullenness of night has entered into their souls, or that they are afraid of being delayed one extra minute from the much needed sleep which awaits them in some wretched kennel, I do not know. But the effect of this silence on anyone who is travelling a country with which he is unfamiliar, is to arouse the suspicion that he may, unwittingly, have gone too far and have wandered behind the enemy’s line. This has happened quite often. Many an officer has started out on a night reconnaissance and disappeared as completely as if the ground had swallowed him up. In some cases the next news has been from a prisoners’ camp in Germany. In others a spy has been captured wearing his uniform; the presumption has been that he was murdered by a Hun agent on our side of the line and that his body has been tossed into some lonely shell-hole. On account of this danger no man or officer is allowed to go unaccompanied within two miles of the Front—a rule which is invariably broken.

We had walked so far that we had begun to think that we had passed our orchard, when quite suddenly we stumbled across it. It consisted of about a hundred trees. The first position lay behind the orchard in a wheat-field; the second in front, strung out along a dyke, with the whole of the Hun country staring at it. From every theoretical point of view the first position was the better, as the trees afforded it a certain amount of cover; on the other hand it had the disadvantage of being too obviously a good gun-position. If the Hun were to study his map for a likely place to shell a battery, he would be sure to pick on the rear of the orchard. The position was too ideal to be safe. Experience has proved that a bad position is often more healthy in the long run. It can be so damned bad that it’s almost good. The enemy would scarcely believe that any battery-commander would be fool enough to select it. Another disadvantage of the first position was that the wheat, while it would hide the guns, might easily be set on fire and be converted from a protection into a trap.

Strong and I tossed for the choice; when I won, rather to his amazement I chose the bad position in front of the orchard. How bad it was I had not realized till the dawn began to rise. Then I discovered that the muzzles of our guns would poke out straight across the valley. The road, from the Gentelles Woods to Domart, skirted the left of the position, dipped down into the valley across No Man’s Land and climbed the further slope by a mass of trees, marked on the map as Dodo Wood. From Dodo Wood the enemy could have watched a cat washing itself on the ground where our guns were to come into action. One false step and the entire position could be wiped out. On the other hand, if we could contrive to lie doggo until the show commenced, the smoke of battle would confuse an enemy observer, so that he would be likely to mistake our flash for the flash of the battery in the wheatfield behind the orchard—in which case it would be they and not we who would be knocked out. That was the gamble one had to take. If one guessed wrong, he brought down death on most of his chaps.

As day commenced to whiten, it became unwise to hang about in so exposed a place. All the transport that had creaked and thundered through the night, had vanished from sight and sound for over an hour. Under the sickly pallor which was spreading through the sky, the landscape looked afraid and haggard. One saw now for the first time how horribly it had been battered. Not a tree on the road along the ridge had escaped; they tottered like old prizefighters too proud to run away, with their arms drooping by their sides, waiting for the knock-out blow to fell them.

The rain had ceased, the smell of death was in the air. The ground seemed soaked with men who had died. Mingled with this smell was the sickly sweetness of gas and the suffocating fumes of explosives. The blanket of mist which had made us safe, was breaking up and drifting away in little ghostly clouds. It was the hour when the gunners on either side of No-Man’s-Land stand down on their harassing fire and wait breathlessly for the S. O. S. which betokens an attack. When that comes, they open up at an intense rate of fire, four rounds per gun per minute. To be caught in such a hail-storm of destruction is not pleasant, and especially unpleasant when you know that you are serving no good purpose by your presence. We gazed behind us at the Gentelles Woods; the shells had ceased to burst and all was quiet. “Let’s make our get-away while the going is good,” Strong said.

Crouching and running low along the ground, we scrambled through the orchard and plunged into the wheat-field. In order that we might reconnoitre a new route of approach to the positions, we struck off to the left, entering a ravine which led down to a lower road which paralleled the shell-torn highway along the ridge. From a distance the ravine looked wild and forsaken; not a plume of smoke rose; nothing stirred. As we walked down it, we discovered that what we had mistaken for rocks and patches of brush, were actually carefully camouflaged ammunition-dumps and battery positions. Not only this ravine, but every hill and slope was stiff with guns of every calibre, lying masked and silent, waiting for the great hour to strike when they would blow the Hun out of his strongholds. In rabbit-warrens dug far down beneath the surface, the French artillery-men bided their time. Some of them peeped out to watch us pass, with eyes uninterested and fatalistic.

Our idea of the scope of the attack which was planned grew as we investigated further. We also began to get a picture of what these preparations had already cost in lives. Horses and men lay strewn about in every stage of decomposition. Some had only been dead for hours; others were the skeletons of those who had fallen in the fierce counter-drive, which had halted the Huns’ rush towards Amiens. One wondered how that rush had ever been halted and, when it had been halted, how the line had been held. Every bit of high ground in our hands was over-topped by a higher point in the hands of the enemy. From all directions on the eastern horizon, from woods and coppices in a great semi-circle, the Hun gazed down; it was impossible to avoid his eyes. Every now and then a scurry of bullets or a whizz-bang bursting near us would remind us of this fact, and we would flatten ourselves.

It took us two hours to regain the town from which we had started where, by pre-arrangement, we were to make our reports to the Colonel. From him we learnt that our batteries had marched in during the night and had set up their horse-lines in the Boves Woods. That these woods should have been chosen for our camp was the crowning stroke of audacity; how audacious we did not realise until we saw the camp itself.

All the woods of this district are on hill-tops, the slopes of the valleys and the valleys themselves being cleared for agriculture; it is therefore a very difficult country in which to hide from the planes of the enemy. Infantry can keep out of sight in the villages and towns, taking their chances of shell-fire and digging themselves in beneath the houses. But the horse-lines of mounted troops are unmistakable when seen from the air, and almost impossible to disguise. To take to the woods was our only choice. The enemy was aware of this: he bombed every cluster of trees as soon as night had fallen, and raked them both day and night with shell-fire.

The Boves Woods lay behind the town. To reach them it was necessary to climb a bald ascent of chalk, almost incandescently white, and to cross a plateau which was as open and conspicuous as a parade-ground. In the old days of hand-to-hand fighting and cavalry charges the height must have been well-nigh impregnable. In general formation it was not unlike the Heights of Abraham, even to having a river for its defence, which wound about its foot. The ascent, the plateau and the woods were full in sight of the enemy on their eastward side. To select such a landmark for one’s horselines was the last word in foolhardiness. A water-cart wandering out on to the plateau in full daylight would have given the secret away. Had the enemy once started shelling, he would have discovered all that was necessary to make public the attack. The night-marches, the decoys sent up to Yprhs, the whole web of strategy, the object of which was to make him muster his reserves opposite to the most remote part of the line, would all have proved useless. In choosing the Boves Woods as our place of hiding we were staking our own foolishness against the enemy’s common-sense; he would never credit us with being so reckless. We were attempting to defeat his cleverness by our own seeming stupidity. Our chance of getting away with such a trick was one in a thousand. In the choice of our gun-positions and in all that we were attempting, it was on the thousandth chance that we were gambling.

On leaving the Colonel, since it was daylight, we had to work our way round the hill and approach our camp from the westward slope. We found that the town had been badly hammered, and except for the troops who hid like rats beneath the fallen roofs, was entirely deserted. We found also that a river which wandered through it, cut it in two, and was crossed by a single bridge, which was quite incapable of taking all the traffic. This bridge had to be shared by both ourselves and the French, and had evidently been responsible for the delays and congestions which we had noticed on the night of our arrival. One wondered what would happen if the attack failed, and a retreat became necessary. How could we get the guns away across a single bridge which the enemy would certainly keep under fire? It was plain that failure and retreat had not entered into the vision of our present strategy. It was neck or nothing. We were staking our all on success.

At the entrance to the woods Strong and I parted company and went in search of our respective batteries. The undergrowth was drenched and had been trampled into boggy lanes where the horses had been led down to water. Everything was dark and dank. The overhead foliage was so dense that heat and light never permeated. A cathedral dusk and chill mounted from the roots of the trees to the topmost branches. Distantly, at the end of the long aisles of trunks, the day shone like stained-glass windows.

I had to hunt for some time before I found my unit. The place was packed with weary horses and sleeping men. At last I came across them, the horses tethered to ropes stretched between the wheels of the limbers, and the men rolled in blankets, mud-splashed and motionless. Everything was so still that I might have stumbled across a refuge of the dead. There were no fires burning; without being told, I knew that fires were not allowed. We might be storm-troops, but we looked neither triumphant nor terrible.... beneath a stretch of canvas I espied my sleeping-sack. Without more ado, removing my boots and tunic, I tumbled into bed. My last conscious thought was of the gun-position, with Dodo Wood glaring down at it. Would it have been better to have chosen the other position behind the orchard?

XI

THIS is the last day; to-morrow at dawn we attack. We are still lying hidden in the Boves Woods; though other woods to the rear of us have been bombed and harassed, no shell has fallen here as yet. The enemy doubtless watches this wood for the flash of the guns and, having seen none, has not thought it worth his while to waste ammunition upon it. Our foolhardiness in camping directly under his eyes has certainly paid us, for there is scarcely any other place where we would not have suffered casualties.

It’s afternoon; beyond the dim cavernous shadow of these trees the hot August sun is shining. The white chalky hills gleam molten and dazzle one’s eyes with their glare. The valleys, which spread away for miles below us, float tethered in the hazy air. Everything looks tranquil and dreamlike; it is difficult to believe in our own reality and in the reality of our monstrous purpose. Surely we shall wake up to find ourselves safe at home and to laugh at our fantastic imagining that we are soldiers. Yet within a handful of hours all this peacefulness will vanish; the mask of summer quiet will be torn aside and every ridge and rock will belch fire and destruction. The French have dragged their guns into the most daringly inaccessible places; there they lie basking in the fragrance of wild thyme with all the world below them, their muzzles pointed towards the stolen country, waiting for the hour of reckoning to strike.

Our men were advised to rest this afternoon and to get as much sleep as possible; but already the fever of excitement is in their blood. Many of them have gone down behind the hill to bathe and are washing their clothes in the river. One of the amazing spectacles of our place of hiding is the impassive aspect of the eastern slope as compared with the stirring life which goes on on its western side.

All our preparations are completed; there is nothing more that can be done until darkness has gathered. It was on the morning of August 5th that the battery marched into those woods. The following night was spent in carrying up ammunition and sand-bags to the gun-position. We hid them in ditches on either side of the Gentelles-Domart Road and beneath the trees of the orchard. Last night we completed the stocking of the position with ammunition and dragged in the guns. The guns we also hid in the orchard, covering them with branches to break up their outline, so that they might not arouse suspicion in the mind of the enemy. The work was very exhausting and slow on account of the congestion of the traffic. The return from the Derby was nothing to it. It was like being caught in the procession of the Lord Mayor’s Show. In the case of a break-down in front, it was impossible to swing out and get forward. Men stood elbow to elbow and vehicles hub to hub. Limbers and led animals were packed solid, the one stream moving up and the other returning. In order to get the work done every horse and man had to make at least two journeys. The main ammunition-dumps, at which the limbers were loaded, were from two to three miles away; when one had been emptied another had to be located in the darkness. To forward-positions, such as ours, there are only two highways of approach—the road along the ridge and the road along the valley; the Hun keeps the ridge-road continually under harassing fire. If a team was ditched or struck, it meant that every battery for a mile back was held up.

The worst cause of delay was the single bridge across the river. Most of our confusion arose from the fact that the roads were used by both French and British troops, and were controlled by military-police of both nations. If a British Tommy wished to disobey a French traffic-control, he had ample excuse in pretending not to understand his language. The result was that the two streams, coming and going, often got wedged and double-banked. Everyone was working under a nervous tension. His own job was all important to him. It had to be accomplished between dusk and sunrise. If he failed, no matter what the delays, no excuse would be taken by superior officers. The consequence was a wild hustle and scramble, all of which took place under the cover of darkness There were only two nights in which everything had to be done. Our orders were that on the night previous to the attack, which is to-night, the roads were to be left free from wheel-traffic for the infantry and the tanks. The tanks are being brought in at the last moment to go over the top ahead of the attacking troops and to trample down the enemy’s defensive wire. The cutting of the wire is usually done by special artillery-shoots, which of course announce to the enemy’ something boisterous in the near future. But on this occasion we are doing no announcing, so the tanks have to perform the task which formerly fell to the artillery. Their job is to plunge their noses into our barrage and stamp a path through all obstacles that would impede our infantry.

If one survives this war, will it seem more real in retrospect than it does now? Now it seems a wild distorted dream from which we shall awake presently. The memory of these last two nights seem the ramblings of a disordered mind. The very air was acrid with the sweat of men and horses driven beyond their strength. You heard and smelt them floundering in the darkness, but you rarely saw or felt them. They went by you breathing hard and indistinct as shadows. You heard men swearing in English and in French—swearing as passionlessly and mechanically as one who repeats a remembered prayer, and through all the agony without intentional blasphemy recurred the name of Christ. Above our heads we could hear the purring of hostile planes. Every now and then a bomb dropped and the earth rose up to meet it flaming red. For a moment the country for miles round was ensanguined and we saw one another distinctly, frightened horses rearing, riders in steel helmets crouching low in their saddles and men hanging on to the bridles to hold the horses down. Then the flame failed, like a torch stamped out, and we heard nothing but sobbing breath. While on the road the fear was always with us that at any minute our doings might be discovered and the enemy might open fire. If he had, few would have escaped. Quite remarkably he still seems totally ignorant of what is planned. One would have supposed that the roar of so much travel, always springing up at night and dying down with the dawn, would have warned him. We can hear it ourselves, even though we are part of it. It sounds like the muffled beat of many drums, accompanied by the shuffling of an immense crowd. It commences very distantly from miles back as the dusk begins to settle, and swells and swells in volume throughout the night, receding and finally dying into silence as the dawn spreads anal the sun begins to rise. If the enemy knows or suspects, he is waiting to catch us the night before the attack—tonight—when with so many men crowded into one area he can deluge us with death. That may be his game, but according to our information he is still puzzled as to our whereabouts.

Our job to-night will be the heaviest we have tackled. We set out on foot as soon as the day begins to fail, taking with us the gun-crews, the signallers and a fatigue-party with sand-bags, picks and shovels. The work before us consists of digging gun-platforms and throwing up some kind of protection for the gunners, of man-handling the guns into position and getting them on for line, and of sorting out the shells and carrying them to immediately in the rear of the gun-platforms. We have not yet been told the exact hour at which the show opens, but we know that all our preparations for opening fire must be completed by 4 a. m.

The consideration which we have to show for our men fills me with shame. We have to work them as if they were in bondage. If we have to treat them remorselessly, we get no better treatment ourselves. In the army every man in authority is a slave-driver and himself, in turn, a slave. The more one does, the more he may do; in the ranks, where the greatest sacrifices are made, there are few rewards and precious little thanks. One smiles out here when he reads of strikes at home for shorter hours and higher rates of pay. Our pay is a mere pittance, which dees not pretend to be approximately equivalent to the service rendered. Our hours are as long as the authorities who control our destinies like. For the last five nights our men have marched and worked incessantly; during the day they have been able to get no proper rest, what with the constant interruptions caused by stable-parades, guard-mountings, fatigues and pickets. To-night will be the sixth night that they have gone without sleep; at dawn they have to face up to the strain of battle, showing coolness, courage and steadiness of nerve. The standard we demand of ordinary men is too heroic, especially when we treat their sufferings as of no consequence. And yet these perfectly ordinary men, bully-ragged by discipline, disrespected in their persons, handicapped by hardship and abused in their strength, rise unfailingly to heights of nobility whenever the occasion presents itself. What is more, they do it utterly unconsciously, with the careless untheatric grandeur of original men. The army and its steam-roller methods have done much to degrade their external appearance, but they have not been able to destroy the secret glory which made them willing to submit to the rigors and indignities of the scarlet test. They are out here to prove their manhood. They came here to die that the world might be better. The army chooses to regard such courage as natural—so natural that it is almost to be despised; but it cannot make them lose their elation and quiet gladness in their sacrifice.

Suzette———! My thoughts are forever turning to her—she impersonates the fineness for which we die. She moves among us with her patient serving hands and her quiet self-forgetting kindness. After all, our test—the test which we are called upon to face to-morrow—is the test which women have been facing without complaining throughout the ages, giving up their bodies to be smashed, that by the birth of a new life the world may start afresh The battle-fields on which her sisters have fallen lie far and wide, wherever men have trodden and still tread. For her and her sisters the test of scarlet is never ended. Perhaps it is because of this that she follows us and understands.

It’s time for evening-stables; the men are waking up and crawling out from the underbrush with blinking eyes. The chaps who are to go forward with us to fight the guns are already at the cookhouse, getting their supper. They’re laughing and joking as if they hadn’t a care. In about an hour we ought to make a start. The tanks have already commenced to move up; from miles back one can hear the rumble of their progress.

Where shall we be tomorrow? What new march shall we have undertaken? Shall we have broken the line and have sailed off into the blue, pursuing the Hun? Or shall we have finished our last march and be lying very quietly? So long as we break the enemy’s line, what happens to anyone of us does not matter. To lie very quietly would be pleasant; we shall have earned a long, unbroken rest.