The Somme (15 page)

At ten o'clock the ambulance was still to seek, and my impatience grew rapidly towards panic. At all costs I must escape from the neighbourhood of my own battalion. At any moment I might be face to face with discovery.

Thus goaded, I asked leave to join some men of the R.A.M.C. who were on the point of returning from the aid-post to the advanced dressing-station at Sinceny. Permission was readily given, but an unexpected difficulty delayed us.

The only other casualty in the dug-out was a shell-shocked artilleryman – a timid, shrinking little man with wandering, lack-lustre eyes and a livid yellow face above a limp black moustache. For some time it was impossible to rouse him. To all questions he gave but one answer: ‘Anything so long as I get away from those guns!' He repeated these words continually in an expressionless, whispering monotone, and, when at last with shuffling, dragging footsteps the poor fellow made shift to accompany us, we had not covered fifty yards before he collapsed in a ditch by the wayside. A drink of water revived him, but it was clear that he must return to the aid-post. We tried in vain to make him understand that an ambulance would soon be carrying him to safety. Our words meant nothing to him, and, gazing at vacancy with clouded eyes that still saw horrors to us invisible, he fell once more to the recital of his litany, and did not even know that we were leaving him.

‘Coal-boxes' were bursting behind us over the Buttes, and to escape them we steered a zigzag course over the meadows. These were the last fringe of danger, however, and presently we returned to the road for the sake of better going. Out here on the grassy slopes that skirted the forest we could see neither man nor horse nor gun. The wide misty landscape was empty; a darting biplane (whether friend or foe we knew not) was the only thing that seemed alive. But away across the valley the rattle of machine-guns waxed and waned capriciously, and tall columns of dun-coloured smoke marked the sites of burning villages.

At a bend in the road, where all traffic by day must make a detour into the fields to avoid hostile observation, we came suddenly upon a French mitrailleuse mounted upon a lorry, its outlines hidden by a tangle of fir-branches. The gunners in their smart blue uniforms grinned cheerfully at us as we passed, but a British military policeman at the cross-roads was less amiable. Had he but known it, he had good reason for his suspicions; but my ticket was not to be denied, and he opened for us the last barrier to safety. Outwardly I was forlorn enough, but I laughed in my sleeve.

Sinceny village was strongly garrisoned by the French. Officers were staring through field-glasses towards the enigma beyond the river; the smoke of field-kitchens curled lazily among the ruined houses; men were digging trenches behind the shelter of a line of hedges.

In a house less shattered than most we found the Advanced Dressing-station, already three parts empty, and the officer in charge fussing desperately. He had, perhaps, reason for his impatience. The Y.M.C.A. hut over the way was forlorn and deserted; Brigade Headquarters had vanished; canteen and post office alike had folded their tents. But the major did not sufficiently conceal his anxiety, and fumed and shouted until even his own men laughed at him. He was one of those large pink men, clean-shaven and immaculate, who do themselves well under all circumstances, and he seemed by no means to appreciate so sudden and urgent a catastrophe.

In this excitement of departure I once again avoided examination, but secured in exchange for my roughly scribbled ticket an official Field Casualty Card. Medical stores, furniture and kit were dumped into waiting lorries, and two motor-ambulances just sufficed to contain the staff and perhaps a score of casualties. In less than half an hour the dressing-station was empty.

We had only travelled as far as the Chauny high road, however, when we were stopped by a man badly wounded in arm and shoulder. Where he came from no one knew, but his plight was obviously desperate. Unfortunately there was not an inch of room in any of the ambulances, and no one seemed anxious to leave their shelter. Not a man of the Royal Army Medical Corps could be spared from duty, and there was therefore only one way out of the difficulty. Were any of the patients able to walk?

This was an invidious and doubtful question. Two of the men were bad cases of shell-shock. Pale beneath a mask of grime, and with eyes that blinked and wandered, not a muscle in their bodies but quivered and trembled convulsively. Head and limbs were racked by a merciless palsy, and one of them who was trying to smoke a cigarette could hold it neither in his mouth nor his fingers. The elder of the two, stuttering and stammering horribly, told me how he had been sitting on the ground with his back against the trunk of an apple tree. A shell hit the base of the tree, and the explosion flung him ten yards across the orchard. He recovered consciousness as we saw him – deaf and dazed and twitching.

The other men were variously afflicted. Two had lost an arm and one a leg. Another, his jaw smashed by shrapnel into a pulp of flesh and bone, groaned and grunted like a wild beast in a hopeless effort to speak. Blood and saliva oozed in a red foam from the mouth of a man shot through the lung. On one of the cots lay a poor fellow whose left leg, snapped at the ankle, projected from a swathe of bandages as a splinter of bone stained black with iodine.

All were manifestly worse off than I – all, that is, save a smiling poilu who discreetly knew no English – and, to the delight of the palpitating major, I volunteered to leave the convoy and make my own way to the field-ambulance at Quirczy. If this should seem inconsistent with my late conduct, I can only suggest that I had no quarrel with fellow-victims.

From Sinceny to Quirczy is about six kilometres, and it took me three hours to cover them. My gas-mask I had left behind at the dressing-station, but I retained my shrapnel helmet as a sunshade. It was a wretched enough journey, and by three o'clock, when I reached the field-ambulance, I was ready to drink from a puddle and sleep in a ditch.

Mounted military police were warning every one to get away to the rear, and spread panic by insisting that certain dull and loaded detonations near at hand marked the demolition of the Chauny bridges. Once a captain of machine-gunners emerged from the shelter of a hedge and questioned me eagerly. Where was the line, and where were the Huns? Naturally I could tell him nothing save that the Germans had so far delivered no attack on this side of the river.

Everywhere the road was blocked with artillery, and even the ‘Archies' were pausing only to fire half a dozen rounds by the wayside. Horses, men, guns and transport were streaming towards the west, packed more and more closely as they left the line farther behind them. The paraphernalia of two armies mingled pell-mell together. French infantry in horizon-blue straggled over the road, overburdened by their mountainous equipment; a string of cantankerous mules pressed hard upon a battery of ‘seventy-fives'; and close on their heels came a jumble of British field-kitchens, transport-wagons, camouflaged eighteen-pounders, ambulances, staff-cars, and innumerable lorries.

It was a sunny, cloudless afternoon. The dust powdered the clothes of the men, and sweat drew shining muddy channels on their faces. The air was heavy with the stench of men and mules and petrol. Sometimes the men sang, and sometimes they swore; but always they gave me a friendly nod, and more than once a priceless Woodbine. ‘Cheerio, chum. Caught one?' A ‘walking-wounded' is privileged indeed. For the moment he is his own master, and concerned with nothing except his own safety. Thus he is in some sort a care-free spectator, and, cheered by the knowledge that he is leaving all this maddened welter behind him, he is encouraged to notice details that at any other time would pass unheeded and unseen.

Despite persistent rumours to the contrary, the Oise bridges at Chauny were still intact, and the sergeant of Engineers in charge of the demolition-party there gave me from his water-bottle the finest draught of red wine that ever gladdened the heart of man. I am thus hyperbolical deliberately, for mere words were inadequate to thank him. This good Samaritan, like a thousand others we met in France, helped me and passed on, and stayed not for gratitude. We never saw them again, and whether they lived or died we knew not.

Divisional Headquarters was evacuating Quirczy, and the field-ambulance, where not long ago I had spent a lazy week of convalescence, was preparing to follow it. When last I saw it the orderly activities of a ‘forward area' seemed set to run for ever, but now nothing but was out of joint. In the dismantled reception-room a solitary staff-corporal examined my hand, washed and rebandaged the wound, and gave me the inevitable injection against lock-jaw. Now that I had escaped from the battalion I could safely assert that my trouble was a point-blank bullet-wound. Hence the scorching. ‘I can see you've been mixed up with them,' said the corporal with an air of admiration, but my sense of the humour of the occasion was sadly blunted by shame.

In a marquee near at hand three men, with but two useful hands between them, managed to cut up some hunks of stale bread, and drank cold tea from a sooty dixie. While we were eating, a wandering sergeant amused us with cheerful conversation. ‘This ambulance has been a ruddy shambles since the morning of the 21st. Hardly a man of us has had a wink of sleep for three days. Now we're off somewhere towards Noyon, but God knows where we're going. You chaps had better hop into anything you can find on wheels. The Jerries'll be here in an hour or two, and if you don't look slippy you'll catch another bumping.'

This was sufficiently explicit. We made haste to claim a place in a waiting ambulance, and so rode back another fifteen kilometres along roads dusty with a variegated traffic to the Casualty Clearing-station at Noyon. In the fields men were digging shallow emergency-trenches and mounting machine-guns behind the hedges. Civilians reappeared on the roads and, as we drew nearer to Noyon, we came upon parties of peasants in carts and farm-wagons, crouching wretchedly among bales and crates and boxes that held all that they had been able to save from homes suddenly abandoned. Old women were pushing along the dusty road wheelbarrows and mailcarts piled high with bundles, toiling forward slowly and hopelessly, while the tears ran down their faces. These were adventurous souls who had returned to their ruined villages after the great German retreat of 1917. No sooner had they settled themselves to the long task of restoration than the new blow fell, and once again they must abandon everything and trust to the charity of strangers.

It was no wonder that they looked sourly on us – the Allies who seemed to have failed them. The bad news had spread like the shadow of black clouds, and roused the countryside. ‘English no bon,' yapped the emigrants as we passed them, and it was hard to blame their anger. Everywhere was the same atmosphere of incredulous anxiety. Had all our boastings come to this? On the faces of a group of staff-officers I thought I saw an expression of shamefaced rage – as though they suspected us of cursing their fine linen, and the strategy that had led to a débâcle.

The clearing-station at Noyon lay, of course, close to the railway, and thither the wounded had filtered by a hundred streams. Built originally by the French, the place was made up of some dozens of wooden huts and large canvas marquees, with wood-paved paths between them and lawns and flowerbeds beside the paths. A throng of men crowded every corner, and order and discipline had long since vanished. In such a hurly-burly there could be no systematic examination of new-comers, and only desperate cases – mangled shreds and patches of men – were admitted to wards already paved with stretchers. There was a rumour of bread and tea in a canteen beside the railway, but such was the shouting and turmoil round the entrance that it seemed hopless to join in the struggle. We threw our ‘tin-hats' into a huge growing dump by the wayside and waited with what patience we might for the train to the base. Always the crowd was growing larger: always the bearers were carrying to the mortuary something hidden from sight beneath a blanket.

But it did us good to see the Sisters. To keep a stiff upper lip in such surroundings; to force a smile when tears long to come; to treat grown men tenderly, as a mother treats her baby; to persevere under the utmost pressure of emergency – what does it cost to do these things? One of the nurses told me that a hospital ward tried to breaking-point her trust in God, while it strengthened immeasurably her faith in man. Such sufferings borne in grim, tight-lipped silence or with quaint facetiousness! The heroism of the ordinary man! The persistence of courage against all odds! Yet it was man that inflicted these torments, and one at least of that unhappy multitude could claim no share in their praise. But even to him the sight of these brave women carried a message from a better world, and from the moment he set eyes on them he realized again the meaning of home and England.

We had been promised a train by eight o'clock; but nine came, and ten, and eleven, and still not a sign of it! Long before dark we were wild with impatience; the aimless lounging, the flying rumours and bartered tales of horror exasperated us to desperation. A story gained ground that the Germans were within an hour's march of the town, and as dusk grew to darkness, the men crowded round the officers' quarters and shouted for ambulances as an alternative to trekking. Military police were powerless to check them, for not even the ‘red-caps' could do anything drastic to wounded men.

It was a weird scene in the moonlight (for not a lamp could be lighted for fear of aeroplanes) where some thousands of wanderers lay scattered in every stage of dirt and rags and maiming. Excitement kept them garrulous and lurid yarns of adventure inflamed their fears. An uncontrollable restlessness sent them prying and peering into corners, feverishly wandering and looking for they knew not what. Sometimes they sought rest on stretchers or tumbled piles of blankets, but always the rumour of a train disturbed them, and they dared not sleep lest they should lose their chance of safety. Several poor fellows only partially crippled were crawling and hopping desperately in a crowd which seemed inclined rather to hinder than to help them.