Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1181 page)

It was the mildest of upheavals — a standard-pattern affair hardly noted by any one, but it serves to show what a priest’s and a doctor’s duties are when the immediate heavy silence after a shell-burst, that seems so astoundingly long, is cut by the outcries of wounded men, and the two hurry off together, stumbling and feeling through the dark, till the electric torch picks up some dim, veiled outline, or hideously displays the wounds on the body they seek. There is a tale of half a platoon among whom a heavy gas-shell dropped as they lay in the flank of a cutting beside a road. Their platoon-commander hurried to them, followed by the sergeant, calling out to know the extent of the damage. No one replied. The question was repeated. Then “Speak up when the Officer’s askin’,” cried the scandalized sergeant. But even that appeal failed. They were all dead where they lay, and, human nature being what it is, the sergeant’s words became a joke against him for many days after. Men cannot live in extreme fear for more than a very limited time. Normal little interests save them; so while they lay in cellars by candle-light at Ypres and worked stealthily at night, the Battalion found time to make a most beautiful Irish Star, four feet across, of glass and pounded brick from the rubbish of the Convent garden. It was a work of supererogation, accomplished while cleaning up the billets, which drew favourable notice from high authorities.

On the 16th April they were shifted to relieve the 2nd Grenadiers at Railway Wood north-west of Hooge. This was almost the most easterly point of the Salient on the north of the Menin road by the Roulers railway, and ranked as quite the least desirable stretch of an acutely undesirable line. In addition to every other drawback, the wood welled water at every pore, for the Bellewaarde Beck brought to it all the drainage from the Bellewaarde ridge, and even the trenches on high ground were water-logged. They were bombed from overhead as soon as they moved in; Hell Fire Corner was shelled on the 17th April and six men were wounded.

The 18th April was quiet, only two men wounded, and “except for violent bombardments, north and south, and an attack on Wieltje and other places,” so was the 19th. Wieltje was two thousand yards, and the “other places” even farther away. The “disturbance” was nothing more than principal German attacks on four different fronts of the Salient among mud and mudfilled shell-holes and craters of old mines where men sunk and choked where they fought waist-deep in the dirt; where the clogged rifles were useless, and the bomb and the bayonet were the only hope. From any reasonable point of view the Salient was a particularly weak position, always worth an attack in the intervals of its regular use as a gunnery school for German artillery. The enemy knew that we were on the way to take the pressure off the French at Verdun, which had been a factory of death since February, and argued that it would be well to make trouble anywhere they could. They chose the 1st and 2nd Canadian Divisions round Ypres, and fought them for two days with very little profit beyond filling more shell-holes with more dead.

At that date men had learned by experience the comparative values of their flanking divisions and the battalions immediately beside them. When a local attack fell on some of these, those unaffected would rest as unconcernedly as the watch below takes its ease when the watch on deck is struggling with the squall. The syren-like hoot of the gas-horns, one or two miles off, might break their rest on relief, but the division involved being known to be adequate, the Battalion was not roused and “spent a quiet day.” Other divisions, new to the line caused anxiety and interfered with regular routine, till they had shaken into place; and yet others might be always trusted to hoot and signal for help on the least provocation. These peculiarities would be discussed in the cantonments and coffee-bars of the rest-areas, or, later, out on the roadside with an occasional far-ranging German shell to interrupt a really pleasant inter-battalion or divisional argument where, if reports be true, even the Military Police sometimes forget to be impartial. And there were unambitious, unimproving units quite content to accept anything that their predecessors had left them in the way of openwork parapets, gapped sandbags, and smashed traverses. Against these, experienced corps builded, not without ostentation, strong flanks so that if their neighbours went of a sudden, they themselves might still have a chance for their lives. The Irish had a saying of their own — a sort of lilting call that ran down the trenches at odd times — to the effect that God being in his Heaven and “the Micks in the line, all was well. Pom-pom!” Every battalion, too, had its own version of the ancient war-song which claims that they themselves were in the front line with their best friends of the moment immediately behind them, but that when they went to look for such-and-such a battalion with whom they were unfriends for the moment, they were blessed (or otherwise) if they could find them.

Theirs was the misfortune to be the only battalion of the division available for fatigues during their sixteen days’ tour; so they supplied parties without intermission, both to the trenches round Railway Wood, and in battered Ypres in the cellars where they rested by candle-light to the accompaniment of crashing masonry and flying pavement blocks. A fatigue-party, under Lieutenant T. K. Walker, carrying Engineers’ stuff to near Railway Wood, was caught and shelled on the 24th, on the last two hundred yards or so of utterly exposed duckboards, every piece of which the enemy guns had taped to a yard. The water-logged soil made any sort of trenches here out of the question. Men slid, and staggered across the open under their loads till the shells chose to find them, or they reached Railway Wood and found some cover in the mine which was always being made there and always pumped out. Lieutenant Walker and four men were killed at once and seven men were wounded, of whom two afterwards died. It was as swift as the shelling of Headquarters at Poperinghe on the 11th; and Captain Woodhouse, the M.O., had to get forward to the wreckage under a heavy fire of shells and aerial torpedoes. With, or not far from him, went, crawled, ran or floundered the priest; for if by any means the body could be relieved, repaired or eased, so could the soul. It is true that both these men more or less respected direct orders not to expose themselves too much, but they suffered from curious lapses of memory.

Then Spring came to the Salient in one swift rush, so warm and so windless that, at the end of April, when they were in rest under leafing trees at Poperinghe, it was possible to dine in shirt sleeves in the open by candle and starlight. The gentle weather even softened the edge of war for a day or two, till Ypres and the neighbourhood were vigorously shelled on the 5th May. The Battalion was then in Ypres prison and the cellars beneath it, where some unloved enthusiast had discovered that there was plenty of room for drill purposes in the main gaol-corridor, and drilled they were accordingly to the music of the bombardments. On such occasions men were sometimes seen to “budge,” i.e. roll their eyes in the direction of plaster and stones falling from the ceiling, for which heinous “crime” their names were justly taken.

On the 9th May they relieved the 2nd Grenadiers on the left sector of their Brigade’s front at Wieltje, where what were once trenches had been bombed and shelled into a sketchy string of bombing-posts — or as a man said, “grouse-butts.” It was perhaps one degree worse than their stretch at Hooge and necessitated companies and posts being scattered, as the ground served, between what was left of Wieltje, St. Jean, and La Brique. The enemy opened by shelling the Reserve Company (No. 4) at St. Jean and wounding eight men, while their machine-gun fire held up all work in the front line where No. 1 Company was trying to dig a communication-trench through old dirt and dead to No. 2 Company in support.

The demonstration might have meant anything or nothing, but to be on the safe side and to comply with Brigade orders, regular observation and snipers’ posts were posted henceforward, and Lieutenant Rodakowski was struck off all trench duties as “Intelligence (and Sniping) Officer.” The arrangements and supervision of a dozen or so snipers, imaginative, stolid or frankly bored, as the case might be, and the collation of their various reports based (for very little could be actually seen) on the Celtic imagination operating at large; the whole to be revised and corrected from hour to hour by one’s own faculties of observation and deduction; make Intelligence work a little strenuous.

On the 12th May St. Jean, which included Battalion Headquarters, half way between St. Jean and Wieltje, was heavily shelled for eight hours of the night with heavy stuff but no casualties beyond a couple of men wounded.

On the 18th May, when they were in the line once more, the enemy who had recently been remarkably quiet made an attempt to rush a bombing-post, but, says the Diary, “Lieutenant Tisdall and 4182 Private A. Young came upon them unexpectedly, and owing to the former’s coolness and the latter’s vigorous offensive action with rifle and bombs, the hostile party, about twenty, fled.” The Diary is never emotional in such little matters as these, and the officers concerned say less than nothing. It is the old-timers among the men who cherish memories of the “vigorous offensive” action. No pen dare put on paper the speech of the orderly who, with rifle and bomb, erupts along the trench or over the edge of the shell-crater either in deadly silence or with threatenings and slaughter in his own dialect, and, when the quick grisly business is over, convulses his associates with his private version of it.

The orderly got the D.C.M. and the officer the Military Cross.

The enemy retaliated next night by shelling the support line and wounded seven men just as the Battalion was going into rest and was relieved late, which they noticed with deep displeasure, by a battalion of the Twentieth Division.

The 20th May saw them in the clean back-area at the pleasant well-treed village of Longuenesse, three miles south-west of St. Omer, all together in good billets and plenty of clean straw at one farm; Headquarters at a neighbouring Château, the 2nd Coldstream, their particular friends with them, and the other battalions of their brigade at villages near by. The weather was good; for a week at least work was reasonable, and they all went to pay a visit disguised as a “Battalion Drill” to the parade ground of the cadet-school at Blendecques, of which Lieutenant J. Halligan, late Orderly-Room Quartermaster-Sergeant of the Battalion, was Adjutant. It is reasonable to infer that the Russian General at the Poperinghe camp got no better in the way of a ceremonial parade than did their old comrade.

The shadow of preparations for the Somme fell over them afterwards. They dug quadruple lines of trenches and assaulted them in full kit with gas helmets; and found time, between whiles, to hold a boxing competition, at which the 12th Lancers arrived with “their private Young,” who was defeated by the Battalion’s Company Sergeant-Major Voyles. These things are as sacred as the Eton dinner at St. Omer on the 3rd June, which seven officers from the Battalion attended.

On the 7th June they moved on a twelve-mile march to Hondeghem, under Cassel,
en route
for a Poperinghe camp once more, and developed several cases of sore feet. This was put down to a “bad issue of socks,” but it supports the theory of the Sergeant’s Mess, that nothing but careful inspection, coupled with steady route-marching, can “put a foot” on men who have been paddling in trench-mud with twisted, waterlogged boots.

At Poperinghe they were coolies again till they went into line on the 15th June. A permanent fatigue-party of 150, under 2nd Lieutenants Hegarty and Earle, was sent to the Engineers near Ypres. Another, a hundred strong, helped to bury field-cables by night at Brielen on the Ypres–Elverdinghe road, a place much sought after by the enemy’s artillery. But digging is reckoned better than drill, and their next tour of duty was to be a wearisome one. Lieutenant J. N. Marshall from the Entrenching Battalion joined on the 15th, and Lieutenant J. K. Greer took command of

No. 1 Company, Lieutenant Law being on a course.

They relieved the 11th Essex and the 8th Bedfordshires (Sixth Division) on the night of the 16th, in the surprisingly short time of one hour, which was nearly a record and showed that all hands were abreast of their work. Their new sector lay north-west of Wieltje and due north of Ypres, covering the Ypres–Pilckem road, with supports at Lancashire farm, and the Battalion Headquarters amid loose bricks and mud on the Canal bank. The trenches were bad; only one communication-trench (Skipton Road) was moderately dry, and the parapets were thin, low and badly gapped, which gave enemy snipers their chance. Two men were killed outright the first day; one died of wounds and four were wounded.

No Man’s Land at this point was several hundred yards deep, and covered with long grass and weeds. The periscopes soon learned to know that poppies and thistles grew brightest and tallest round the edges of shell-holes, and since shell-holes meant cover, all patrols directed their belly-flat course to them.

On the 18th June officer patrols went out to look at the enemy’s wire. Second Lieutenant F. H. N. Lee was wounded in the leg while close to it, and was carried back by No. 3836 Corporal Redmond; dying later of gangrene. Another officer, Lieutenant Hon. P. Ogilvy, ran by mistake into wire on his return journey, and had to fight his way back with his orderly. One man was killed and one wounded, besides the wounded officer.

On the 19th Lieutenant J. N. Marshall, while out with a working-party, was sniped in the arm, but finished his work before reporting it. A man was killed and two were wounded. “The day was normal — probably the quietest of the tour,” says the Diary, but one may be certain that certain inconspicuous German snipers were congratulating themselves on their bag. The bulk of the trouble came from five old dug-outs known as the “Canadian dug-outs,” some two or three hundred yards away, which had once been in our hands. These had been wired round collectively and individually, and their grass-grown irregular moundage made perfect snipers’ nests.