The Somme (14 page)

Now that the time had come my heart was thumping uncomfortably, and I needed all my determination to persevere. Crouching in a corner of the yard, I held the rifle in my right hand, with the forefinger crooked round the trigger and my left hand a foot or so from the muzzle. Scorching at this distance would, I thought, be negligible, and the beef-tin was forgotten. Listening intently for intruders, I several times set my teeth for action, but each time hesitated and dared not take the second pressure on the trigger. All the time the shells were mocking at my delay: it would be a grim irony should they do my business for me.

At last I shut my eyes and fired almost at random. A keen burning pain shot through my left hand, and the explosion echoed deafeningly in the close-cabined space of my hiding-place. But my cowardice had brought its own punishment. A bad aim had left only a clean-cut groove in the side of the hand, palpably a bullet wound, and all was to do again. Action had given me courage, however, and, first slashing the wound with a jack-knife to hide the track of the bullet, a second shot passed plumb through the centre of the palm. A bone snapped with a jerk and a sickening stab of pain, and I rolled on the ground involuntarily, and gritted my teeth to keep back the cry that might have betrayed me.

But already I was hiding the rifle beneath a pile of timber and listening for any sign of interruption. I need not have feared. Who would take notice of two rifle-shots, or who indeed would hear them among the noises of the night? Reassured, I uncovered my rifle and came out into the moonlight. Almost at once I realized that I was in a tight corner. Bad judgment had increased my danger a hundredfold, and my hand was scorched and black from wrist to finger-tips. It was impossible to conceal such suspicious evidence; somehow I must contrive to turn it to my advantage. It seemed probable that the next act of the comedy might well be a tragedy.

Making my way back to the dug-out, and hiding my injured hand beneath my jacket, I grumbled to the sentry that I had left my water-bottle at the well and must now risk the barrage again to recover it. Also I leaned my rifle against a tree and asked him to look after it until my return. Then away towards the village again, and then back to the sentry, stumbling this time and crying aloud that I was wounded! Thus I had created a most excellent alibi: the sentry could be sure that it was not my own rifle that had inflicted the wound. By this time, moreover, shock had made me feel realistically faint, and it was not deception that sent me staggering dizzily towards the aid-post. I was still deaf from the concentrated explosion. Obviously my story must be that I had been hit by shrapnel from a whizz-bang.

All went well. The sentry bandaged me with a field-dressing and showed not a shred of suspicion. In the stretcher-bearers' dug-out explanation was unnecessary. No doubt I looked haggard and shaken enough, and down there in the stifling heat of the braziers I grew so sick and giddy that men's words came to me only as a dull and meaningless murmur. The dressing was already soaked with blood, and expert hands now rebandaged the wound and supported my wrist in a canvas sling. Of my equipment, I need retain nothing save gas-mask and steel helmet. Everybody congratulated me and envied my good fortune. I wondered what they would have said to the truth.

Moreover I did not look forward with pleasure to the journey to the ambulance. I had still to pass through the barrage, and it was in vain that I protested I could find my way alone. At no time, save during an attack, must a wounded man leave the line unattended, and I realized with shame that my scheming must risk the life of a stranger. It seemed, however, that we must first report ourselves at the Regimental Aid-post. My heart sank dejectedly. What would the M.O. say to the blackening of my hand?

We started our journey amid a chorus of bad language and good wishes, and stumbled along the trench line to a sand-bagged cellar beneath what had once been an estaminet. There an officious sergeant insisted upon dressing my hand for the third time (and heartily I cursed his kindness), and pinned to my tunic a scrap of paper authorizing my departure from the line. I strained eyes and ears to catch the beginnings of suspicion, and even dared to ask why it was my hand had blackened. My genuine deafness, and my tale that the shell had burst beside me, carried me harmlessly through the ordeal, however, and the sergeant's sympathy extended even to cigarettes and a tot of rum.

We had next to make our way to the ‘B' Company dug-outs so justly hated by the ration-parties, and again we took a roundabout course through the safer ground on the flank of the village. For a time we found little to hinder us, but the danger grew greater as we drew nearer to the houses. The flash and clamour of the barrage bewildered us; exploding shells sprinkled us with dust and chips of pavé; flying fragments sent us cowering into a ditch by the wayside. We reached shelter scared and breathless, and our proposed five minutes' breathing-space seemed likely to swell to the best part of an hour.

For my companion was enjoying our expedition as little as I was. The route lay directly through the death-trap of the village, and we had good reason to believe that the path must be blocked with débris. The men in the dug-out did their best to make the way plain to us, but at night-time, and on such a night, I could see that they did not envy us our journey.

At last, however, we took our courage in both hands and started off at a run down the high street. Three days and nights of bombardment had changed utterly even ruined Amigny. Fallen masonry and heaps of broken bricks lay scattered over the roadway; the pavé was torn and pitted into treacherous holes and furrows. In this tumbled chaos, seen by fits and starts through the intermittent flash of the barrage, we could not distinguish the main road from side-tracks and courtyards, and we had only covered perhaps a quarter of a mile in twenty minutes when we realized that we were hopelessly astray from the proper path. For some time we groped blindly in a maze of narrow lanes and shattered mews and stables, and at last, when we emerged again in the high street not far from our starting-place, I could endure the hurly-burly no longer, and cried out desperately that ‘for God's sake' we should return to shelter. There seemed nothing else to be done, and a few minutes later we were back again in the dug-out.

Restored once more by rest and a mug of tea, I was at first eager to make another attempt that night. I was convinced that the Germans would attack at dawn, and imagined myself cooped helplessly below ground while the enemy swarmed round the dug-outs. What hope then for an injured man? But the others would not hear of our going until daylight should make the path plainer. The members of a carrying-party just returned from Headquarters declared that our only hope of reaching the Buttes de Rouy lay in a masterly inactivity, and events showed that they were right.

The dug-out was occupied by the Company signallers, and ever and again messages and inquiries came to them over the wires. The man on duty was continually speaking to other little groups of men buried like ourselves in a precarious shelter from the storm. ‘How are things going?' ‘Heavy shelling with gas and H.E., but no signs of an attack.' ‘Heard anything from “D” Company?' ‘Not a word, and the wire's just gone for the third time to-night. Three men outed on repairs.' And then the voice stopped abruptly and we were left to guess what had happened.

A little group of palsied, white-faced watchers, grimy, unshaven, hollow-eyed from four days and nights that had yielded sleep only in broken snatches, gnawed by anxiety and tortured by uncertainty, what wonder if they were silent and sullen? The consciousness of disaster sapped their courage – the certainty that this present horror was merely a necessary preliminary to the real business of battle. Men returning from duty outside (and some did not return) lay down silently wherever they could find a resting-place – on the floor, on the stairs, in the first cot that came to hand – and fell straightway into the sleep of exhaustion. Twitching fingers and gusty irritability discounted the feigned nonchalance of the officers. To add to their troubles, they must needs pretend that all was well.

Throughout the night I rested in a berth out of harm's way beneath the roof. Not one of the men would hear of my giving up my place, and the rations they had they shared with me. Seven o'clock brought breakfast and a loosening of tongues. The attack was still postponed and the shelling seemed set to last for ever. Refreshed by the meal, we were again ready to tempt Fortune, and climbed once more into the daylight. Warned by last night's misadventure, it was our intention to strike southwards into the Coucy Woods, where, so we were told, the shelling was far less troublesome. Tumbling breathlessly into the narrow winding trench that led thither, and passing half a dozen scattered posts of Lewis gunners, in less than ten minutes we came out upon a paved highway lined with poplars. The road ran almost exactly parallel with the line, and we only turned away from it towards the rear when well within the shelter of the forest.

And there, as by enchantment, we escaped from the dust and roar of the bombardment into another world – the old familiar world of trees and fields and sunshine. Behind us lay the Abomination of Desolation – a land of scorched and cratered meadows, of shattered riven hedgerows, and homes abandoned and made desolate. The smoke and reek of War hung over it; the fair face of the earth was warped and cankered in a long-drawn agony. Here the sun shone blithely from a sky of forget-me-not blue, the trees and fields were whole and fair, the noise of the guns lay behind us like a dying storm. For the first time for four long days and nights we could rest, and linger by the way, and watch the shadow of the clouds upon the meadows.

Our way wound through woods full of the fragrance of damp leaves by narrow paths of mingled shade and sunshine. Fragile nodding anemones and the yellow stars of Wordsworth's celandines smiled bravely at the sun. The ‘lambs' tails' hung in clusters from the hazel-bushes, and the honey-scented flowers of the palm were packed in mustard-yellow clusters upon tough leafless branches. Larks sang high above the tree-tops. ‘The lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf round the elm-tree bole were in tiny leaf.' But this gentle joy of Nature at Spring's birth-time men were too busy to see. Other and more important duties distracted their attention.

Beyond the forest our path lay over meadows among the tangled wire of the Battle Area. But the trenches were tenantless and the gun emplacements empty save for shining stacks of abandoned shells. High overhead beyond the river floated a German observation-balloon in ominous security.

We met not a soul between the Coucy Woods and the twin hummocks of the Buttes de Rouy, where Headquarters had long been raked by an obstinate bombardment. For there all manner of work and traffic had once found shelter, and in the lea of the hills, beneath an elaborate camouflage of painted canvas and green netting, had gathered a busy camp of field-kitchens, ammunition dumps, horse-lines, howitzer batteries, and all the ragtag and bobtail of the sector. But now the market-place was empty, and the booths and huts lay scattered in ruins. The guns and the transport-limbers had withdrawn towards the river. The canteen beside the road had been wrecked by a shell. The long narrow tunnels that honeycombed the hills were empty save for a group of signallers and the staff of the Regimental Aid-post.

But I had now to face perhaps the greatest risk of the journey. In broad daylight, and among men no longer distracted by the urgency of danger, deception would be far more difficult. Another examination might well prove my undoing, but the stretcher-bearer had heard my story, and I dared not abandon the myth of the whizz-bang. An unexpected piece of good fortune solved the problem, however. The M.O. was most fortunately asleep, and our explanation that the wound had already been dressed and ticketed was an excuse for the tired orderly to pass me without further formality into a kind of waiting-room, where I had only to rest and smoke and hope for an early ambulance.

Here I saw the last of my companion, who waited only for a drink of tea before beginning his long trudge back to Amigny. I heard later that he was killed that same day by shrapnel.

As I lay smoking peacefully in the straw-lined bunk, I remember saying to myself that at all events I had won the first round. My chief feeling for the moment was one of pride that I had been able so far to evade the strong hand of the law, and I redoubled my determination to cheat it to the end.

The ambulance was long delayed, and I passed the time plotting and planning my future movements. Suddenly I remembered a capital error. It was an absurdly trivial matter, but much might turn upon it. Had I got rid of my empty cartridge? For the life of me I could not remember ejecting it. I foresaw the examination of my rifle – almost certainly blood-stained. How did the marks come there if I had left it behind me before I was wounded? And what was the explanation of the empty case? For the moment I could think of no better answer to the first question than blank ignorance. Perhaps I had leaned against the rifle on my return to the dug-out. As for the empty cartridge, most opportunely I remembered the rumour of attack two hours before midnight. The battalion in the front line had opened rifle-fire on what proved afterwards to have been merely a German patrol. Stray shots fired in retaliation had whizzed past our ears in the second line, and, carried away by excitement, I had (obviously) fired in return and forgotten to eject the cartridge.

This was a weak enough defence, but I could think of nothing better. Above all I must keep to my tale of shrapnel so long as I remained in the company of those who knew that no hand-to-hand fighting had yet taken place on the sector; but at the first opportunity I was determined to substitute the far more plausible story of a wound received point-blank.

Already I was beginning to pay the price of my treachery. The shame of this petty scheming and a growing fear of discovery were an unforeseen punishment. Free from the distractions of action and danger, I grew fearful and despondent. I had bartered self-respect for safety.