Now It Can Be Told. Philip Gibbs
the Sussex boy. “A man's a fool to be a soldier. Eh, lads?”
They agreed heartily, though they were all volunteers.
“Not that we're skeered,” said one of them. “We'll be glad when the fighting begins.”
“Speak for yourself, Dick Meekcombe, and don't forget the shells last night.”
There was another roar of laughter. Those boys of the South Saxons were full of spirit. In their yokel way they were disguising their real thoughts—their fear of being afraid, their hatred of the thought of death—very close to them now—and their sense of strangeness in this scene on the edge of Armentieres, a world away from their old life.
The colonel sat in a little room at headquarters, a bronzed man with a grizzled mustache and light-blue eyes, with a fine tenderness in his smile.
“These boys of mine are all right,” he said. “They're dear fellows, and ready for anything. Of course, it was anxious work at first, but my N. C. O.'s are a first-class lot, and we're ready for business.”
He spoke of the recruiting task which had begun the business eleven months ago. It had not been easy, among all those scattered villages of the southern county. He had gone hunting among the farms and cottages for likely young fellows. They were of good class, and he had picked the lads of intelligence, and weeded out the others. They came from a good stock—the yeoman breed. One could not ask for better stuff. The officers were men of old county families, and they knew their men. That was a great thing. So far they had been very lucky with regard to casualties, though it was unfortunate that a company commander, a fine fellow who had been a schoolmaster and a parson, should have been picked off by a sniper on his first day out.
The New Army had received its baptism of fire, though nothing very fierce as yet. They were led on in easy stages to the danger-zone. It was not fair to plunge them straight away into the bad places. But the test of steadiness was good enough on a dark night behind the reserve trenches, when the reliefs had gone up, and there was a bit of digging to do in the open.
“Quiet there, boys,” said the sergeant-major. “And no larks.”
It was not a larky kind of place or time. There was no moon, and a light drizzle of rain fell. The enemy's trenches were about a thousand yards away, and their guns were busy in the night, so that the shells came overhead, and lads who had heard the owls hoot in English woods now heard stranger night-birds crying through the air, with the noise of rushing wings, ending in a thunderclap.
“And my old mother thinks I'm enjoying myself!” said the heir to a seaside lodging-house.
“Thirsty work, this grave-digging job,” said a lad who used to skate on rollers between the bath-chairs of Brighton promenade.
“Can't see much in those shells,” said a young man who once sold ladies' blouses in an emporium of a south coast village. “How those newspaper chaps do try to frighten us!”
He put his head on one side with a sudden jerk.
“What's that? Wasps?”
A number of insects were flying overhead with a queer, sibilant noise. Somewhere in the darkness there was a steady rattle in the throat of a beast.
“What's that, Sergeant?”
“Machine-gums, my child. Keep your head down, or you'll lose hold of it … Steady, there. Don't get jumpy, now!”
The machine-gun was firing too high to do any serious damage. It was probably a ricochet from a broken tree which made one of the boys suddenly drop his spade and fall over it in a crumpled way.
“Get up, Charlie,” said the comrade next to him; and then, in a scared voice, “Oh, Sergeant!”
“That's all right,” said the sergeant-major. “We're getting off very lightly. New remember what I've been telling you … Stretcher this way.”
They were very steady through the night, this first company of the New Army.
“Like old soldiers, sir,” said the sergeant-major, when he stood chatting with the colonel after breakfast.
It was a bit of bad luck, though not very bad, after all—which made the Germans shell a hamlet into which I went just as some of the New Army were marching through to their quarters. These men had already seen what shellfire could do to knock the beauty out of old houses and quiet streets. They had gone tramping through one or two villages to which the enemy's guns had turned their attention, and had received that unforgetable sensation of one's first sight of roofless cottages, and great gaps in garden walls, and tall houses which have tumbled inside themselves. But now they saw this destruction in the process, and stood very still, listening to the infernal clatter as shells burst at the other end of the street, tumbling down huge masses of masonry and plugging holes into neat cottages, and tearing great gashes out of red-brick walls.
“Funny business!” said one of the boys.
“Regular Drury Lane melodrama,” said another.
“Looks as if some of us wouldn't be home in time for lunch,” was another comment, greeted by a guffaw along the line.
They tried to see the humor of it, though there was a false note in some of the jokes. But it was the heroic falsity of boys whose pride is stronger than their fear, that inevitable fear which chills one when this beastliness is being done.
“Not a single casualty,” said one of the officers when the storm of shells ended with a few last concussions and a rumble of falling bricks. “Anything wrong with our luck?”
Everything was all right with the luck of this battalion of the New Army in its first experience of war on the first night in the danger-zone. No damage was done even when two shells came into one of their billets, where a number of men were sleeping after a hard day and a long march.
“I woke up pretty quick,” said one of them, “and thought the house had fallen in. I was out of it before the second came. Then I laughed. I'm a heavy sleeper, you know. [He spoke as if I knew his weakness.] My mother bought me an alarm-clock last birthday. 'Perhaps you'll be down for breakfast now,' she said. But a shell is better—as a knocker-up. I didn't stop to dress.”
Death had missed him by a foot or two, but he laughed at the fluke of his escape.
“K.'s men” had not forgotten how to laugh after those eleven months of hard training, and they found a joke in grisly things which do not appeal humorously to sensitive men.
“Any room for us there?” asked one of these bronzed fellows as he marched with his battalion past a cemetery where the fantastic devices of French graves rose above the churchyard wall.
“Oh, we'll do all right in the open air, all along of the German trenches,” was the answer he had from the lad at his side. They grinned at their own wit.
IV
I did not find any self-conscious patriotism among the rank and file of the New Army. The word itself meant nothing to them. Unlike the French soldier, to whom patriotism is a religion and who has the name of France on his lips at the moment of peril, our men were silent about the reasons for their coming out and the cause for which they risked their lives. It was not for imperial power. Any illusion to “The Empire” left them stone—cold unless they confused it with the Empire Music Hall, when their hearts warmed to the name. It was not because they hated Germans, because after a few turns in the trenches many of them had a fellow-feeling for the poor devils over the way, and to the end of the war treated any prisoners they took (after the killing in hot blood) like pet monkeys or tame bears. But for stringent regulations they would have fraternized with the enemy at the slightest excuse, and did so in the winter of 1914, to the great scandal of G. H. Q. “What's