Part 44 (1/2)
”But,” said the soldier-artist, adjusting his steel hat nervously, ”I don't want to be killed! I hate the idea of it!”
He was the normal man. The elderly officer was abnormal. The normal man, soldier without camouflage, had no use for death at all, unless it was in connection with the fellow on the opposite side of the way. He hated the notion of it applied to himself. He fought ferociously, desperately, heroically, to escape it. Yet there were times, many times, when he paid not the slightest attention to the near neighborhood of that grisly specter, because in immediate, temporary tranquillity he thrust the thought from his mind, and smoked a cigarette, and exchanged a joke with the fellow at his elbow. There were other times when, in a state of mental exaltation, or spiritual self-sacrifice, or physical excitement, he acted regardless of all risks and did mad, marvelous, almost miraculous things, hardly conscious of his own acts, but impelled to do as he did by the pa.s.sion within him-pa.s.sion of love, pa.s.sion of hate, pa.s.sion of fear, or pa.s.sion of pride. Those men, moved like that, were the leaders, the heroes, and groups followed them sometimes because of their intensity of purpose and the infection of their emotion, and the comfort that came from their real or apparent self-confidence in frightful situations. Those who got through were astonished at their own courage. Many of them became convinced consciously or subconsciously that they were immune from sh.e.l.ls and bullets. They walked through hara.s.sing fire with a queer sense of carelessness. They had escaped so often that some of them had a kind of disdain of sh.e.l.l-bursts, until, perhaps, one day something snapped in their nervous system, as often it did, and the bang of a door in a billet behind the lines, or a wreath of smoke from some domestic chimney, gave them a sudden shock of fear. Men differed wonderfully in their nerve-resistance, and it was no question of difference in courage.
In the ma.s.s all our soldiers seemed equally brave. In the ma.s.s they seemed astoundingly cheerful. In spite of all the abomination of that Somme fighting our troops before battle and after battle-a few days after-looked bright-eyed, free from haunting anxieties, and were easy in their way of laughter. It was optimism in the ma.s.s, heroism in the ma.s.s. It was only when one spoke to the individual, some friend who bared his soul a second, or some soldier-ant in the mult.i.tude, with whom one talked with truth, that one saw the hatred of a man for his job, the sense of doom upon him, the weakness that was in his strength, the bitterness of his grudge against a fate that forced him to go on in this way of life, the remembrance of a life more beautiful which he had abandoned-all mingled with those other qualities of pride and comrades.h.i.+p, and that illogical sense of humor which made up the strange complexity of his psychology.
XV
It was a colonel of the North Staffords.h.i.+res who revealed to me the astounding belief that he was ”immune” from sh.e.l.l-fire, and I met other men afterward with the same conviction. He had just come out of desperate fighting in the neighborhood of Thiepval, where his battalion had suffered heavily, and at first he was rude and sullen in the hut. I gaged him as a hard Northerner, without a shred of sentiment or the flicker of any imaginative light; a stern, ruthless man. He was bitter in his speech to me because the North Staffords were never mentioned in my despatches. He believed that this was due to some personal spite-not knowing the injustice of our military censors.h.i.+p under the orders of G.H.Q.
”Why the h.e.l.l don't we get a word?” he asked. ”Haven't we done as well as anybody, died as much?”
I promised to do what I could-which was nothing-to put the matter right, and presently he softened, and, later was amazingly candid in self-revelation.
”I have a mystical power,” he said. ”Nothing will ever hit me as long as I keep that power which comes from faith. It is a question of absolute belief in the domination of mind over matter. I go through any barrage unscathed because my will is strong enough to turn aside explosive sh.e.l.ls and machine-gun bullets. As matter they must obey my intelligence. They are powerless to resist the mind of a man in touch with the Universal Spirit, as I am.”
He spoke quietly and soberly, in a matter-of-fact way. I decided that he was mad. That was not surprising. We were all mad, in one way or another or at one time or another. It was the unusual form of madness that astonished me. I envied him his particular ”kink.” I wished I could cultivate it, as an aid to courage. He claimed another peculiar form of knowledge. He knew before each action, he told me, what officers and men of his would be killed in battle. He looked at a man's eyes and knew, and he claimed that he never made a mistake... He was sorry to possess that second sight, and it worried him.
There were many men who had a conviction that they would not be killed, although they did not state it in the terms expressed by the colonel of the North Staffords.h.i.+res, and it is curious that in some cases I know they were not mistaken and are still alive. It was indeed a general belief that if a man funked being hit he was sure to fall, that being the reverse side of the argument.
I saw the serene cheerfulness of men in the places of death at many times and in many places, and I remember one group of friends on the Somme who revealed that quality to a high degree. It was when our front-line ran just outside the village of Martinpuich to Courcelette, on the other side of the Bapaume road, and when the 8th-10th Gordons were there, after their fight through Longueval and over the ridge. It was the little crowd I have mentioned before in the battle of Loos, and it was Lieut. John Wood who took me to the battalion headquarters located under some sand-bags in a German dug-out. All the way up to Contalmaison and beyond there were the signs of recent bloodshed and of present peril. Dead horses lay about, disemboweled by sh.e.l.l-fire. Legs and arms protruded from sh.e.l.l-craters where bodies lay half buried. Heavy crumps came howling through the sky and bursting with enormous noise here, there, and everywhere over that vast, desolate battlefield, with its clumps of ruin and rows of dead trees. It was the devil's hunting-ground and I hated every yard of it. But John Wood, who lived in it, was astoundingly cheerful, and a fine, st.u.r.dy, gallant figure, in his kilted dress, as he climbed over sand-bags, walked on the top of communication trenches (not bothering to take cover) and skirting round hedges of barbed wire, apparently unconscious of the ”crumps” that were bursting around. I found laughter and friendly greeting in a hole in the earth where the battalion staff was crowded. The colonel was courteous, but busy. He rather deprecated the notion that I should go up farther, to the ultimate limit of our line. It was no use putting one's head into trouble without reasonable purpose, and the German guns had been blowing in sections of his new-made trenches. But John Wood was insistent that I should meet ”old Thom,” afterward in command of the battalion. He had just been buried and dug out again. He would like to see me. So we left the cover of the dugout and took to the open again. Long lines of Jocks were digging a support trench-digging with a kind of rhythmic movement as they threw up the earth with their shovels. Behind them was another line of Jocks, not working. They lay as though asleep, out in the open. They were the dead of the last advance. Captain Thom was leaning up against the wall of the front-line trench, smoking a cigarette, with his steel hat on the back of his head-a handsome, laughing figure. He did not look like a man who had just been buried and dug out again.
”It was a narrow shave,” he said. ”A beastly sh.e.l.l covered me with a ton of earth... Have a cigarette, won't you?”
We gossiped as though in St. James's Street. Other young Scottish officers came up and shook hands, and said: ”Jolly weather, isn't it? What do you think of our little show?” Not one of them gave a glance at the line of dead men over there, behind their parados. They told me some of the funny things that had happened lately in the battalion, some grim jokes by tough Jocks. They had a fine crowd of men. You couldn't beat them. ”Well, good morning! Must get on with the job.” There was no anguish there, no sense of despair, no sullen hatred of this life, so near to death. They seemed to like it... They did not really like it. They only made the best of it, without gloom. I saw they did not like this job of battle, one evening in their mess behind the line. The colonel who commanded them at the time, Celt of the Celts, was in a queer mood. He was a queer man, aloof in his manner, a little ”fey.” He was annoyed with three of his officers who had come back late from three days' Paris leave. They were giants, but stood like schoolboys before their master while he spoke ironical, bitter words. Later in the evening he mentioned casually that they must prepare to go into the line again under special orders. What about the store of bombs, small-arms ammunition, machine-guns?
The officers were stricken into silence. They stared at one another as though to say: ”What does the old man mean? Is this true?” One of them became rather pale, and there was a look of tragic resignation in his eyes. Another said, ”h.e.l.l!” in a whisper. The adjutant answered the colonel's questions in a formal way, but thinking hard and studying the colonel's face anxiously.
”Do you mean to say we are going into the line again, sir? At once?”
The colonel laughed.
”Don't look so scared, all of you! It's only a field-day for training.”
The officers of the Gordons breathed more freely. Poof! They had been fairly taken in by the ”old man's” leg-pulling... No, it was clear they did not find any real joy in the line. They would not choose a front-line trench as the most desirable place of residence.
XVI
In queer psychology there was a strange mingling of the pitiful and comic-among a division (the 35th) known as the Bantams. They were all volunteers, having been rejected by the ordinary recruiting-officer on account of their diminutive stature, which was on an average five feet high, descending to four feet six. Most of them came from Lancas.h.i.+re, Ches.h.i.+re, Durham, and Glasgow, being the dwarfed children of industrial England and its mid-Victorian cruelties. Others were from London, banded together in a battalion of the Middles.e.x Regiment. They gave a shock to our French friends when they arrived as a division at the port of Boulogne.
”Name of a dog!” said the quayside loungers. ”England is truly in a bad way. She is sending out her last reserves!”
”But they are the soldiers of Lilliput!” exclaimed others.
”It is terrible that they should send these little ones,” said kind-hearted fishwives.