The Somme (5 page)

Simultaneously with the rockets came the deafening tattoo of rapid fire from rifles and machine-guns. For some distance a fold in the ground gave cover, and, until he reached the farther slope, Everitt saw few casualties. Out there the ground showed patches of green where the winnowing of the shells had spared it. There was no attempt to charge: over such broken ground it was almost impossible to run, and tired men spared their strength. Their greatcoats were clogged with mud, and at every step their boots seized clods of earth: the weight of equipment dragged like an anchor. With slung rifles, and tin hats pressed down over their eyes, they went forward at a plodding walk. Never was there less likelihood of ‘running amok with bayonet.'

Everitt exchanged the sickliest of smiles with his neighbours. He saw that their faces were pale and their jaws tight clenched. The advance was maddeningly slow and laborious, and the journey forward seemed interminable. The firing ahead was growing fiercer, and soon seemed to creep round to either flank. ‘Enfilade fire of machine-guns is deadly.' A man near Everitt staggered and fell noisily into a shell-hole, curling up like a shot rabbit. There seemed no reason why he should do this, but it was not expedient to pause for questions. Men fell near and far, and sinister obstacles on the ground must be avoided. As they reached the top of the rise, the vicious rattle of the firing seemed to rise to desperation. The ‘crack, crack, crack' of the rifles gave not an instant's relief to the ear: in the din the hum of the bullets was inaudible. Against the background of grey sky and glittering rockets the flash of guns showed dimly, but the enemy was invisible.

Beyond the brow of the hill there seemed to be no one advancing. To the left some khaki figures were firing desperately from a fragment of trench, but directly ahead there was no movement. As they crossed the crest men began to fall rapidly all along the line. Everitt and his neighbours flung themselves on the ground, cowering into shell-holes if they were lucky enough to drop near one. ‘What do we do now?' asked someone. No one knew and there was no one to give orders. Higgins at least had given his last.

Now was the test of discipline and initiative. The choice lay between organized rushes forward and indefinite delay, and it was not entirely a matter of courage or cowardice; duty or shirking. Against what was evidently overwhelming fire, any advance might well be suicidal folly and in the absence of leadership and encouragement, the law of self-preservation swept aside all discipline: since no one seemed to care what happened, men determined to play their own hands. No doubt that moment of hesitation marked the failure of the attack. Hitherto, while there had never been any pretence of enthusiasm, at least the attempt was being made. Now they were fatally quiescent. It is a commonplace of war that a man who takes cover during an advance will never get up again until the battle is over. Everitt lay as flat as the bulging equipment allowed, and almost immediately felt horribly afraid. While he was walking forward he was doing something and his mind could occupy itself with the details of the advance – the men, the fire signals of the Germans, the lie of the land, the physical labour of covering the broken ground. All these things kept thought away. But now there was nothing to do but think, and the thoughts were black.

He was convinced that the attack was a failure. Lying face downwards, almost biting the earth, he could see nothing, but an occasional upward jerk of his head showed him that all forward movement had ceased completely. The man nearest to him yelled suddenly, ‘I'm hit, I'm hit,' and writhed helplessly in the tangle of his equipment. Everitt, feeling himself a cur, dragged himself away into the shallow depression of a small shell-hole. There he lay at first like a log, his nose and mouth pressed into the earth, not daring to raise his head. Then he began to scoop the soil from beneath his body, hoping thus to deepen his shelter. His legs from the knees downwards were hopelessly exposed, but by enlarging the hole he might at least obtain cover from view. The ‘crump' from a high explosive shell shook the ground like an earthquake, and a sharp pain stung his foot. But this was the merest momentary pang, like the prick of a needle, and the pain stirred him to fiercer efforts. Involuntarily he called out, ‘I've caught one,' but no one took the smallest notice. As he lay he could see the spurt of the earth where bullets were striking, and some of them were pitching not a yard away. His awkward scooping had done little to deepen the hole, and it was obvious that movement was dangerous.

Suddenly there came a tremendous jerk sideways to his left leg, much as though someone had kicked it with a padded boot. The sensation was sickening and numbing rather than painful, and involuntarily he grunted through gritted teeth to keep back a louder cry. The qualm of sickness and surprise passed quickly, and he realized that he was hit. In desperation he glanced sideways at his leg, and saw a red stain soaking through the puttees. But he felt no warm welling of blood and gambled on the safety of the artery. A severed main-artery will kill a man in five minutes, but to sit up and apply a tourniquet was suicide. It was better to leave the wound unbandaged. For the rest, he had no notion whether his leg were broken, and for the moment had not the courage to test his fears.

A machine-gun not two hundred yards away swept the ground in a leisurely traverse, the deliberate ‘pop, pop, pop, pop, pop' waxing to deafening sharpness as the fire drew nearer. Again and again the tattoo of the gun rose and fell with the sweep of its traverse, and always, at the zenith of its crescendo, Everitt clenched his teeth and shut his eyes in breathless anticipation of another wound. He had no means of knowing whether the Germans could see him or whether he was the victim of a chance shot. If he lay motionless was he invisible? Or would they think him dead? Perhaps after all they could
not
see him. Above all he must lie still, for it seemed that shots answered his slightest movement.

The man near him lay exposed on a mound of earth, and a body-wound made it impossible for him to roll or crawl to shelter. Twice more he was hit, and still he did not lose consciousness. Moaning and sobbing miserably, with tragic futility he called continually for stretcher-bearers (as though such could live for a moment in the open). ‘It hurts so, it hurts so,' he kept crying, a child again in his pain, and soon he was praying to God and his mother to help him. ‘Try to get in a hole, chum,' Everitt called to him. His duty was to try to help the other, at least to bandage his wounds and drag him to shelter, but he dared not leave his hole. The bullets continued to raise little spurts of earth around them, and he could do nothing but watch them in frozen fascination.

‘Would they hit him again? Where would they get him?' ‘That was a near one. If only it would get dark.' Night became a thing to watch for as a possible deliverer. It must be past three o'clock – five or six hours to wait, and then, if he wasn't hit again and the Germans didn't counter-attack at dusk, it might yet be possible to escape. This was the first faint glow of hope, a determination not to give in, to reach home yet in spite of everything.

He remembered again that this was Sunday. ‘P.S.A.,' he murmured, and thought of hymn-singing in church, where the sun filled the air with the smell of warm varnish. No doubt his father was dozing after dinner in his easy chair, with mouth agape and waistcoat unbuttoned. Outside the bees were busy with the flowers, and the cat was sleeping in the sunshine. What a fool he was to be there – what fools they all were. There were a hundred ways of avoiding this horror, and what was the good of it all? Thousands of men were lying crumpled in those fields, helpless, agonized, hopeless, frozen with terror, tortured with wounds. Blind fate slew them and spared them and death came often as a boon. And now the horror continued and grew greater, and more men were struck minute by inexorable minute. The bullets fell impartially on earth and flesh, and the maddening clamour of the machine-guns showed no sign of slackening. Moans, prayers, curses, entreaties inarticulate cries, the stench of mud and blood and fumes and smoke, the thunder of guns, the shriek of shells and the rattle of rifle-fire, a chill rain soaking unchecked into that medley of woe – a modern battlefield! And fools talk of the glory of war, and the joy of battle! ‘The lordliest life on earth!'

Perhaps Everitt was growing light headed, for abruptly his thoughts jerked in another direction. Was it any use to pray? He had heard in a dozen sermons that in extremity the stoutest atheist would pray for help to the God he denied. The parsons assured him that freethinker and agnostic joined with the most devout believer in instinctive supplication: the fact was stated as a final buttress of belief. But his actual experience was different. With men dead and dying on every side it was impossible to believe that God cared. Obviously He did not help the sufferers, call they never so poignantly. ‘Either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked.' How could the paltry individual expect a private miracle in his own behoof? The age of such things was past: the text of consolation: ‘A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee' was applicable only to spiritual experience, which, under present circumstances, made it a little inadequate. In point of fact it meant nothing at all. The healing solace of prayer as an instinctive exercise of the soul seemed more than a little at a discount. Everitt wanted help, and he received none.

This cannot be put on one side as the flippant disclaimer of the prosperous fool – untouched by misfortune and proportionately puffed up – the man was in deadly peril, in anguish of mind and body. Never had he felt less reason for intellectual pride. By a curious mental twist, he felt impelled to shape in his thoughts a statement of belief. Let the stress of the time be the excuse for its inadequacy. ‘A personal God may exist; there is no evidence of His existence, but ignorance cannot deny it. But, if He does, He cares nothing for the fate of individuals. Men are “tossed down into the field,” and left to the blind disposal of natural laws. These sequences of cause and effect leave him no room for “free-will.” Traced to its source, his every action is an automatic reaction to external influences. In ignorance of these causes, he calls his vicissitudes “Chance,” for any event, originating outside his experience, is necessarily fortuitous to reason. The God of Earth and Heaven by no means interferes arbitrarily with these natural laws, and in themselves these laws are impersonal, rigid, and without mercy. I can do nothing to help myself and the misty God of the Christians will do nothing to help me. If the path of a bullet passes through my brain I shall die. In the contrary event, I shall live.'

It was difficult to keep count of time (his watch had been broken long ago), but at the end of the longest hour of his life the firing showed signs of abating. Soon there was no doubt of it. Now it came in gusts, and gradually the continuous roar died away to sniping. But it was well he remained quiet, for, after perhaps another hour, the firing swelled out again to all its original fury. The old nerve-shaking suspense clutched him again, and the spurts of earth showed death searching and capricious. A sudden jab in his left elbow and a numbing pain after the manner of a jarred funny-bone must be another wound. Everitt could not help muttering ‘Number three,' though with but a twisted grin, and it seemed hopeless that his luck could hold much longer.

The renewed firing was occasioned by the advance of another line of khaki from the trench behind. These were men of the Loamshires from ‘D' Company in support. It was evident that part at least of the battalion had gained some kind of objective, and that these happy warriors were intended to stiffen the defence. Everitt risked looking up at them, and feebly croaked ‘stick it,' as they passed. The face of a man advancing against machine-guns is not good to see. Shell-fire can be regarded as haphazard at the worst, but a machine-gun in an attack fires almost point-blank at a very definite target. The men walked slowly, just as he had done, stumbling forward with a sort of dogged hopelessness, wincing and blinking in dread of a bullet. As far as he could see, for all their hopelessness there was no tendency to give up. It was a miracle that so few were hit.

The glare of a Verey light roused Everitt from a kind of stupor, and he found to his surprise that it was dusk. Either he had slept or fainted, and it must now be eight o'clock. It was an indescribable relief to know that the time of inaction was passed, and the glow of hope burned more brightly. He had survived the attack, and surely the worst was behind him. As soon as it was dark, venturing to sit up and look about him, he was startled to find that of all those who had thrown themselves down around him only some half-dozen remained, and that these lay motionless and silent. Evidently the others had risked everything to obtain some kind of shelter.

His first business was to examine his leg. To his great joy he found that he could move it freely without pain: evidently a simple flesh wound that had not yet had time to stiffen. Sitting upright, his next care was to tear off his equipment, and fling his bomb as far from him as he was able. This abandonment he marked as the first faint turning of the tide: never had a man fewer qualms in the surrender of property. He was getting rid of hated encumbrances and realized for the first time, and with a kind of fearful joy, that no one could blame him, and that, howsoever helpless, he was his own master until he should reach an ambulance.

And this brought home to him how far away help was, and how doubtful his chances. With a sinking heart he remembered the infinite toil of the journey to the line. How could he hope to reach even the trench, much less the road? He must see if he could find anyone to help him. It was a starry night, and within a circuit of perhaps twenty yards he could see some dozen motionless and contorted bodies. The gloom hid other horrors doubtless, but a faint and intermittent groaning showed that some at least of these muddy bundles yet held tortured life within them. The man who had been hit three times was still conscious, panting for breath, but speechless from exhaustion.