Kitabı oku: «Front Lines», sayfa 7
IX
THE GILDED STAFF
A TALE OF THE OLD CONTEMPTIBLES
Broadly speaking, the average regimental officer and man of the fighting units is firmly convinced beyond all argument that a “Staff job” is an absolutely safe and completely cushy2 one, that the Staff-wallah always has the best of food and drink, a good roof over him, and a soft bed to lie on, nothing to do except maybe sign his name to a few papers when he feels so inclined, and perhaps in a casual and comfortable chat after a good dinner decide on a tactical move, a strafe of some sort, issue the orders in a sort of brief “Take Hill 999” or “retire by Dead Cow Corner to Two Tree Trench” style, and leave the regiments concerned to carry on. Briefly, the opinion of the firing line might be summed up in a short Credo:
“I believe the Staff is No Good.
“I believe the Staff has the cushiest of cushy jobs.
“I believe the Staff never hears a bullet whistle or sees a shell burst except through a telescope.
“I believe the Staff exists solely to find soft jobs for the wealthy and useless portion of the aristocracy.
“I believe the Staff does nothing except wear a supercilious manner and red tabs and trimmings.
“I believe the Staff is No Good.”
As to the average of correctness in this Credo I say nothing, but I can at least show that these things are not always thus.
The Staff had been having what the General’s youthful and irrepressibly cheerful aide-de-camp called “a hectic three days.” The Headquarters signallers had been going hard night and day until one of them was driven to remark bitterly as he straightened his bent back from over his instrument and waggled his stiffened fingers that had been tapping the “buzzer” for hours on end, “I’m developin’ a permanent hump on my back like a dog scrapin’ a pot, an’ if my fingers isn’t to be wore off by inches I’ll have to get the farrier to put a set of shoes on ’em.” But the signallers had some advantages that the Staff hadn’t, and one was that they could arrange spells of duty and at least have a certain time off for rest and sleep. The Staff Captain would have given a good deal for that privilege by about the third night. The worst of his job was that he had no time when he could be sure of a clear ten minutes’ rest. He had messages brought to him as he devoured scratch meals; he was roused from such short sleeps as he could snatch lying fully dressed on a camp bed, by telephone and telegraph messages, or, still worse, by horrible scrawls badly written in faint pencillings that his weary eyes could barely decipher as he sat up on his bed with a pocket electric glaring on the paper; once he even had to abandon an attempt to shave, wipe the lather from his face, and hustle to impart some information to a waiting General. A very hot fight was raging along that portion of front, and almost every report from the firing line contained many map references which necessitated so many huntings of obscure points on the maps that the mere reading and understanding of a message might take a full five or ten minutes; and in the same way the finding of regiments’ positions for the General’s information or the sending of orders added ten-fold to the map-hunting.
The third day was about the most “hectic” of all. For the Captain it began before daybreak with a call to the telephone which came just two hours after he had shuffled and shaken together the papers he had been working on without a break through the night, pulled off his boots, blown out his lamp, and dropped with a sigh of relief on his bed in a corner of the room. It was an urgent and personal call, and the first dozen words effectually drove the lingering sleep from the Captain’s eyes and brain. “Yes, yes, ‘heavily attacked,’ I got that; go on … no, I don’t think I need to refer to the map; I very nearly know the beastly thing by heart now … yes … yes … Who? … killed outright … that’s bad… Who’s in command now then … right. The Dee and Don Trenches – wait a minute, which are they? Oh yes, I remember, south from the Pigsty and across to Stink Farm … right. I’ll pass it on at once and let you know in five minutes … just repeat map references so I can make a note … yes … yes … yes
… right … ’Bye.”
The urgency of the message, which told of a heavy and partially successful attack on the Divisional Front, wiped out any hope the Captain might have had of a return to his broken sleep. For the next two hours his mind was kept at full stretch reducing to elaborated details the comprehensive commands of the General, locating reserves and supports and Battalion H.Q.s, exchanging long messages with the Artillery, collecting figures of ammunition states, available strengths, casualty returns, collating and sifting them out, reshuffling them and offering them up to the Brigade Major or the General, absorbing or distributing messages from and to concrete personalities or nebulous authorities known widely if vaguely as the D.A.A.G., D.A.Q.M.G., D.A.D.O.S., A.D.M.S., C.D.S., and T., and other strings of jumbled initials.
He washed in the sparing dimensions of a canvas wash-stand, Field Service, x Pattern, deliberately taking off his coat and rolling up his shirt-sleeves, and firmly turning a deaf and soap-filled ear to the orderly who placed a ruled telephone message form on his table and announced it urgent. Afterwards he attended to the message, and talked into the telephone while his servant cleared one side of his table and served plentiful bacon, and eggs of an unknown period. Immediately after this a concentrated bombardment suddenly developed on a ruined château some three or four hundred yards from the H.Q. farm. To the youthful aide-de-camp who had arrived from the outer dampness dripping water from every angle of a streaming mackintosh he remarked wrathfully on the prospect of having to move once again in the middle of such beastly waterfall weather. The aide stood at the brown-paper patched window, chuckling and watching the shells rewreck the already wrecked château. “Looks as if their spies had sold ’em a pup this time,” he said gleefully. “I believe they must have been told we were in that old ruin instead of here. Or they were told this place and mistook it on the map for the château. Rather a lark – what!”
“Confound the larks,” said the Captain bitterly, “especially if they come any nearer this way. This place is quite leaky and draughty enough now without it getting any more shrap or splinter holes punched in it.”
Here the Captain had a short break from his inside job, leaving another officer to look after that and accompanying the General on horseback to a conference with various Brigadiers, Colonels, and Commanding Officers. The ride was too wet to be pleasant, and at no time could a better pace than a jog trot be made because on the road there was too much horse, foot, and wheeled traffic, and off the road in the swimming fields it took the horses all their time to keep their feet.
The conference was held under the remaining quarter-roof of a shell-smashed farm, and the Captain listened and made notes in a damp book, afterwards accompanying the General on a ride round to where something could be seen of the position, and back to H.Q. Here, under the General’s direction in consultation with the Brigade Major, he elaborated and extended his notes, drafted detailed directions for a number of minor moves next day, and translated them into terms of map-reference language, and a multitude of details of roads to be followed by different units, billeting areas, rationing, and refilling points, and so on.
He made a hasty, tinned lunch, and at the General’s request set out to find one of the Battalion Headquarters and there meet some C.O.s and make clear to them certain points of the dispositions arranged. He went in a motor, sped on his way by the cheerful information of the aide that the town through which he must pass had been under “a deuce of a hot fire” all day, had its streets full of Jack Johnson holes, and was in a continual state of blowing up, falling down, or being burnt out. “I was through there this morning,” said the aide, “and I tell you it was warmish. Sentry outside on the road wanted to stop me at first; said he’d orders to warn everybody it wasn’t safe. Wasn’t safe,” repeated the youth, chuckling, “Lord, after I’d been through there I’d have given that sentry any sort of a certificate of truthfulness. It was not safe.”
The Captain went off with his motor skating from ditch to ditch down the greasy road. The guns were rumbling and banging up in front, and as the car bumped and slithered nearer to the town the Captain could hear the long yelling whistle and the deep rolling crashes of heavy shells falling somewhere in it. He too was stopped at the outskirts by a sentry who held up his hand to the driver, and then came and parleyed with the Captain through the window. The Captain impatiently cut his warning short. There was no other road that would take him near the point he desired to reach; he must go through the town; he must ride since he could not spare time to walk. He climbed out and mounted beside the driver, with some instinctive and vaguely formed ideas in his mind that if the driver were hit he might have to take the wheel, that the car might be upset and pin him underneath, that he might be able to assist in picking a course through rubbish and shell-holes, to jump out and clear any slight obstruction from in front of the wheels. The car ran on slowly into the town. Decidedly the aide had been right, except that “warmish” was a mild word for the state of affairs. The Germans were flinging shells into the town as if they meant to destroy it utterly. The main street through was littered with bricks and tiles and broken furniture; dead horses were sprawled in it, some limp and new killed with the blood still running from their wounds, others with their four legs sticking out post-stiff in the air; in several places there were broken-down carts, in one place a regular mass of them piled up and locked in a confused tangle of broken wheels, splintered shafts, cut harness, and smashed woodwork, their contents spilled out anyhow and mixed up inextricably with the wreckage.
There was not much traffic in the main street, and such as was there was evidently, like the Captain himself, only there because no other road offered. There were half a dozen artillery ammunition waggons, a few infantry transport carts, several Army Service Corps vehicles. All of them were moving at a trot, the waggons rumbling and lumbering heavily and noisily over the cobblestones, the drivers stooped forward and peering out anxiously to pick a way between the obstacles in their path. The shells were coming over continuously, moaning and howling and yelling, falling with tearing crashes amongst the houses, blowing them wall from wall, slicing corners off or cutting a complete top or end away, breaking them down in rattling cascades of tiles and bricks, bursting them open and flinging them high and far upwards and outwards in flying fragments. As the car crawled cautiously through the debris that littered the street, pieces of brick and mortar, whole or broken slates, chips of wood and stone, pattered and rapped constantly down about and on the car; the wheels crunched and ground on splintered glass from the gaping windows. A shell roared down on the street ahead of them, burst thunderously in a vivid sheet of flame and spurting black cloud of smoke, an appalling crash that rolled and reverberated loud and long up and down the narrow street. “Go easy,” cautioned the Captain as the black blinding reek came swirling down to meet them, “or you’ll run into the hole that fellow made.” The driver’s face was set and white, and his hands gripped tight on the wheel; the Captain had a sudden compunction that he had brought him, that he had not left the car outside the town and walked through. They edged carefully past the yawning shell-crater with the smoke still clinging and curling up from its edges, and, free of the smoke again, saw a fairly clear stretch ahead of them. The Captain heard the thin but rising whistle of another heavy shell approaching, and “Open her out,” he said quickly, “and let her rip.” The driver, he noticed, for all his white face had his nerves well under control, and steadily caught the change of gear on the proper instant, speeded up sharply but quite smoothly. The car swooped down the clear stretch, the roar of the shell growing louder and closer, and just as they reached and crammed the brakes on to take the corner, they heard the shell crash down behind them. The Captain leaned out and looked back, and had a momentary glimpse of a house on the street spouting black smoke, dissolving and cascading down and out across the road in a torrent of bricks and wreckage. In another two minutes they shot out clear of the town. A mile farther on a soldier warned them that the cross-roads were practically impassable, the roadway being broken and churned up by the heavy shells that all afternoon had been and were still at intervals falling upon it. So the Captain left the car and went on a-foot. He was nearly caught at the cross-roads, a shell fragment ripping a huge rent in his mackintosh just over his ribs. Before he reached the communication trenches too he had a highly uncomfortable minute with light high-explosive shells bursting round him while he crouched low in a muddy shell-crater. He reached the meeting-place at last, and spent an hour talking over plans and movements, and by the time he was ready to start back it was rapidly growing dark. It was completely dark before he found his way back to the road again, stumbling over the shell-holed ground, slipping and floundering through the mud, tripping once and falling heavily over some strands of barbed wire. When he found the car again he was so dirty and draggled and dishevelled and ragged – the barbed wire had taken the cap from his head and dropped it in a mud puddle, and left another tear or two in his mackintosh – so smeared and plastered with mud, that his driver at first failed to recognise him. In the town he found parties of the Sappers filling up the worst of the shell-holes and clearing away the debris that blocked the road where he had seen the house blown down, while the shells still screamed up and burst clattering over and amongst the houses, and bullets and splinters whistled and sang overhead, clashed and rattled on the causeway.
He slept snatchily through the rest of the journey, waking many times as the car bumped badly, and once, when it dropped heavily into a shell-hole and bounced out again, flinging him bodily upwards until his head and shoulder banged solidly against the roof, taking half a minute to regain his scattered wits and dissipate a wild dream that the car had been fairly hit by a shell.
And when at last he reached H.Q., crawled wearily out of the car, and staggered, half asleep and utterly worn out, into his room, he found there the other officer he had left to handle his work and the youthful aide humped over the table copying out reports.
“Hullo,” said the senior, “you’re late. I say, you do look tucked up.”
The Captain grunted. “Not more’n I feel,” he said, blinking at the light. “Thank the Lord my job’s over and everything fixed and ready so far’s this end goes.”
“You’ve heard, I suppose!” said the other. “No? Baddish news. Our left has cracked and the Germ has a slice of their trenches. It upsets all our plans, and we’ve got ’em all to make over again.”
The Captain stared blankly at him. “All to make … that means all to-day’s work to begin and go through again. All to-day’s work – well, I’m …”
The aide had been eyeing the mud-bedaubed figure with water dripping from the torn coat, the sopping cap dangling in the dirty hand, the blue unshaven chin and red-rimmed eyes. He giggled suddenly. “I say, you know what the troops call the Staff?” He spluttered laughter. “The Gilded Staff,” he said, pointing at the Captain. “Behold – oh, my aunt – behold the Gilded Staff.”
X
A RAID
For several days our artillery had been bombarding stretches of the front German trenches and cutting the wire entanglements out in front of them preparatory to a big attack. The point actually selected for the raid was treated exactly the same as a score of other points up and down the line. By day the guns poured a torrent of shrapnel on the barbed wire, tearing it to pieces, uprooting the stakes, cutting wide swathes through it. Because the opposing lines were fairly close together, our shells, in order to burst accurately amongst and close over the wire, had to skim close over our own parapet, and all day long the Forward Officers crouched in the front trench, observing and correcting the fall of their shells that shrieked close over them with an appalling rush of savage sound. And while they busied themselves on the wire, the howitzers and heavier guns methodically pounded the front-line trench, the support and communication trenches, and the ground behind them. At night the tempest might slacken at intervals, but it never actually ceased. The guns, carefully laid on “registered” lines and ranges during the day, continued to shoot with absolute accuracy during the darkness – although perhaps “darkness” is a misleading term where the No Man’s Land glowed with light and flickered with dancing shadows from the stream of flares that tossed constantly into the air, soaring and floating, sinking and falling in balls of vivid light. If no lights were flung up for a period from the German line, our front line fired Verey pistol lights, swept the opposing trench and wire with gusts of shrapnel and a spattering hail of machine-gun bullets to prevent any attempt on the enemy’s part to creep out and repair their shattered defences.
Our bombardment had not been carried out unmolested. The German gunners “crumped” the front and support lines steadily and systematically, searched the ground behind, and sought to silence the destroying guns by careful “counter-battery” work. But all their efforts could not give pause to our artillery, much less silence it, and the bombardment raged on by day and night for miles up and down the line. It was necessary to spread the damage, because only by doing so, only by threatening a score of points, was it possible to mislead the enemy and prevent them calculating where the actual raid was to be made.
The hour chosen for the raid was just about dusk. There was no extra-special preparation immediately before it. The guns continued to pour in their fire, speeding it up a little, perhaps, but no more than they had done a score of times in the past twenty-four hours. The infantry clambered out of their trench and filed out through the narrow openings in their own wire entanglements, with the shells rushing and crashing over them so close that instinctively they crouched low to give them clearance. Out in front, and a hundred yards away, the ground was hidden and indistinct under the pall of smoke that curled and eddied from the bursting shrapnel, only lit by sharp, quick-vanishing glare after glare as the shells burst. In the trench the infantry had just left, a Forward Officer peered out over the parapet, fingered his trench telephone, glanced at the watch on his wrist, spoke an occasional word to his battery checking the flying seconds, and timing the exact moment to “lift.”
Out in front a faint whistle cut across the roar of fire. “They’re off,” said the Forward Officer into his ’phone, and a moment later a distinct change in the note of sound of the overhead shells told that the fire had lifted, that the shells were passing higher above his head, to fall farther back in the enemy trenches and leave clear the stretch into which the infantry would soon be pushing.
For a minute or two there was no change in the sound of battle. The thunder of the guns continued steadily, a burst of rifle or machine-gun fire crackled spasmodically. Over the open No Man’s Land the infantry pressed rapidly as the broken ground would allow, pressed on in silence, crouching and dodging over and amongst the shell-holes and craters. Four German “crumps” roared down and past, bursting with shattering roars behind them. A group of light “Whizz-bang” shells rushed and smashed overhead, and somewhere out on the flank an enemy machine-gun burst into a rapid stutter of fire, and its bullets sang whistling and whipping about the advancing line. Men gulped in their throats or drew long breaths of apprehension that this was the beginning of discovery of their presence in the open, the first of the storm they knew would quickly follow. But there were no more shells for the moment, and the rattle of machine-gun fire diminished and the bullets piped thinner and more distant as the gun muzzle swept round. The infantry hurried on, thankful for every yard made in safety, knowing that every such yard improved their chance of reaching the opposing trench, of the raid being successfully accomplished.
Now they were half-way across, and still they were undiscovered. But of a sudden a rifle spat fire through the curling smoke; a machine-gun whirred, stopped, broke out again in rapid and prolonged fire. From somewhere close behind the German line a rocket soared high and burst in a shower of sparks. There was a pause while the advancing men hurried on, stumbling forward in silence. Another rocket leaped, and before its sparks broke downward the German guns burst into a deluge of fire. They swept not only the open ground and trenches where the raiders were attacking, but far up and down the line. Rocket after rocket whizzed up, and to right and left the guns answered with a fire barrage on the British front trench and open ground.
But at the attacking point the infantry were almost across when the storm burst, and the shells for the most part struck down harmlessly behind them. The men were into the fragments of broken wire, and the shattered parapet loomed up under their hands a minute after the first shell burst. Up to this they had advanced in silence, but now they gave tongue and with wild yells leaped at the low parapet, scrambled over and down into the trench. Behind them a few forms twisted and sprawled on the broken ground, but they were no sooner down than running stretcher-bearers pounced on them, lifted and bore them back to the shelter of their own lines. The men with the stretchers paid no more heed to the pattering shrapnel, the rush and crack of the shells, the hiss and whistle of bullets, than if these things had been merely a summer shower of rain.
In the German trench the raiders worked and fought at desperate speed, but smoothly and on what was clearly a settled and rehearsed plan. There were few Germans to be seen and most of these crouched dazed and helpless, with hands over their heads. They were promptly seized, bundled over the parapet, and told by word or gesture to be off. They waited for no second bidding, but ran with heads stooped and hands above their heads straight to the British line, one or two men doubling after them as guards. Some of the prisoners were struck down by their own guns’ shell-fire, and these were just as promptly grabbed by the stretcher-bearers and hurried in under cover. Where any Germans clung to their weapons and attempted to resist the raiders, they were shot down or rushed with the bayonet. Little parties of British sought the communication ways leading back to the support trenches, forced a way down, hurling grenades over as they advanced, halted at suitable spots, and, pulling down sandbags or anything available to block the way, took their stand and beat back with showers of bombs any appearance of a rush to oust them.
Up and down the selected area of front-line trench the raiders spread rapidly. There were several dug-outs under the parapet, and from some of these grey-coated figures crawled with their hands up on the first summons to surrender. These too were bundled over the parapet. If a shot came from the black mouth of the dug-out in answer to the call to surrender, it was promptly bombed. At either end of the area of front line marked out as the limits of the raid, strong parties made a block and beat off the feeble attacks that were made on them. There was little rifle or bayonet work. Bombs played the principal part, and the trench shook to their rapid re-echoing clashes, flamed and flared to their bursts of fire, while overhead the British shells still rushed and dropped a roaring barrage of fire beyond the raided area.
In five minutes all sign of resistance had been stamped out, except at one of the communication-way entrances and at one end of the blocked front line. At both of these points the counter-attack was growing stronger and more pressing. At the communication trench it was beaten back by sheer weight of bombing, but at the trench end, where heavy shells had smashed in the walls, and so rendered the fighting less confined to a direct attack, the defenders of the point were assailed from the German second line, man after man fell fighting fiercely, and there looked to be a danger of the whole trench being flooded by the counter-attack. The prompt action of a young officer saved the situation. It had been no plan of the raid to touch the support or second trench, but, ignoring this understanding, the officer gathered a handful of men, climbed from the front trench, and dashed across the open to the second one. His party pelted the counter-attackers massing there with as many bombs as they could fling in a few seconds, turned and scrambled back to the front line, and fell into the scuffle raging there in a vigorous butt-and-bayonet onslaught.
But now it was time to go. The object of the raid had been carried out, and it was risking all for nothing to wait a moment longer. The word was passed, and half the men climbed out and ran for their own line. A minute later the remainder followed them, carrying the last of their wounded. An officer and two or three men left last, after touching off the fuses connected up with charges placed in the first instance in their duly selected places.
A moment later, with a muffled report, a broad sheet of fire flamed upward from the trench. Three other explosions followed on the heels of the first, and a shower of earth and stones fell rattling about the ground and on the shrapnel-helmets of the retiring raiders, and the earth shuddered under their feet. The German gunners slackened and ceased their fire, probably waiting to hear from the front what this new development meant, or merely checking instinctively at the sight and sound. For a moment the shells ceased to crash over the open ground, the raiders took advantage of the pause, and with a rush were back and over their own parapet again.
Over their heads the British shells still poured shrieking and crashing without pause as they had done throughout.
In military phraseology the raid had been entirely successful, a score of prisoners being taken, a stretch of trench completely destroyed, and few casualties sustained. The raiders themselves summed it up in words more terse but meaning the same – “a good bag, and cheap at the price.”
