Part 44 (2/2)

Under the training of General Pi, who commanded them, they became smart and brisk in the ranks. They saluted like miniature Guardsmen, marched with quick little steps like clockwork soldiers. It was comical to see them strutting up and down as sentries outside divisional headquarters, with their bayonets high above their wee bodies. In trench warfare they did well-though the fire-step had to be raised to let them see over the top-and in one raid captured a German machine-gun which I saw in their hands, and hauled it back (a heavier weight than ours) like ants struggling with a stick of straw. In actual battle they were hardly strong enough and could not carry all that burden of fighting-kit-steel helmet, rifle, hand-grenades, shovels, empty sand-bags-with which other troops went into action. So they were used as support troops mostly, behind the Black Watch and other battalions near Bazentin and Longueval, and there these poor little men dug and dug like beavers and crouched in the cover they made under d.a.m.nable fire, until many of them were blown to bits. There was no ”glory” in their job, only filth and blood, but they held the ground and suffered it all, not gladly. They had a chance of taking prisoners at Longueval, where they rummaged in German dugouts after the line had been taken by the 15th Scottish Division and the 3d, and they brought back a number of enormous Bavarians who were like the Brobdingnagians to these little men of Lilliput and disgusted with that humiliation. I met the whole crowd of them after that adventure, as they sat, half naked, picking the lice out of their s.h.i.+rts, and the conversation I had with them remains in my memory because of its grotesque humor and tragic comicality. They were excited and emotional, these stunted men. They cursed the war with the foulest curses of Scottish and Northern dialects. There was one fellow-the jester of them all-whose language would have made the poppies blush. With ironical laughter, outrageous blasphemy, grotesque imagery, he described the suffering of himself and his mates under barrage fire, which smashed many of them into bleeding pulp. He had no use for this war. He cursed the name of ”glory.” He advocated a trade-unionism among soldiers to down tools whenever there was a threat of war. He was a Bolshevist before Bolshevism. Yet he had no liking for Germans and desired to cut them into small bits, to slit their throats, to disembowel them. He looked homeward to a Yorks.h.i.+re town and wondered what his missus would say if she saw him scratching himself like an ape, or lying with his head in the earth with sh.e.l.ls bursting around him, or prodding Germans with a bayonet. ”Oh,” said that five-foot hero, ”there will be a lot of murder after this b.l.o.o.d.y war. What's human life? What's the value of one man's throat? We're trained up as murderers-I don't dislike it, mind you-and after the war we sha'n't get out of the habit of it. It'll come nat'ral like!”

He was talking for my benefit, egged on to further audacities by a group of comrades who roared with laughter and said: ”Go it, Bill! That's the stuff!” Among these Lilliputians were fellows who sat aloof and sullen, or spoke of their adventure with its recent horror in their eyes. Some of them had big heads on small bodies, as though they suffered from water on the brain... Many of them were sent home afterward. General Haldane, as commander of the 6th Corps, paraded them, and poked his stick at the more wizened ones, the obviously unfit, the degenerates, and said at each prod, ”You can go... You. ..You....” The Bantam Division ceased to exist.

They afforded many jokes to the army. One anecdote went the round. A Bantam died-of disease (”and he would,” said General Haldane)-and a comrade came to see his corpse.

”Shut ze door ven you come out,” said the old woman of his billet. ”Fermez la porte, mon vieux.”

The living Bantam went to see the dead one, and came downstairs much moved by grief.

”I've seed poor Bill,” he said.

”As-tu ferme la porte?” said the old woman, anxiously.

The Bantam wondered at the anxious inquiry; asked the reason of it.

”C'est a cause du chat!” said the old woman. ”Ze cat, Monsieur, 'e 'ave 'ad your friend in ze pa.s.sage tree time already to-day. Trois fois!”

Poor little men born of diseased civilization! They were volunteers to a man, and some of them with as much courage as soldiers twice their size.

They were the Bantams who told me of the Anglican padre at Longueval. It was Father Hall of Mirfield, attached to the South African Brigade. He came out to a dressing station established in the one bit of ruin which could be used for shelter, and devoted himself to the wounded with a spiritual fervor. They were suffering horribly from thirst, which made their tongues swell and set their throats on fire.

”Water!” they cried. ”Water! For Christ's sake, water!”

There was no water, except at a well in Longueval, under the fire of German snipers, who picked off our men when they crawled down like wild dogs with their tongues lolling out. There was one German officer there in a sh.e.l.l-hole not far from the well, who sat with his revolver handy, and he was a dead shot.

But he did not shoot the padre. Something in the face and figure of that chaplain, his disregard of the bullets snapping about him, the upright, fearless way in which he crossed that way of death, held back the trigger-finger of the German officer and he let him pa.s.s. He pa.s.sed many times, untouched by bullets or machine-gun fire, and he went into bad places, pits of horror, carrying hot tea, which he made from the well water for men in agony.

XVII

During these battles I saw thousands of German prisoners, and studied their types and physiognomy, and, by permission of Intelligence officers, spoke with many of them in their barbed-wire cages or on the field of battle when they came along under escort. Some of them looked degraded, b.e.s.t.i.a.l men. One could imagine them guilty of the foulest atrocities. But in the ma.s.s they seemed to me decent, simple men, remarkably like our own lads from the Saxon counties of England, though not quite so bright and brisk, as was only natural in their position as prisoners, with all the misery of war in their souls. Afterward they worked with patient industry in the prison-camps and established their own discipline, and gave very little trouble if well handled. In each crowd of them there were fellows who spoke perfect English, having lived in England as waiters and hairdressers, or clerks or mechanics. It was with them I spoke most because it was easiest, but I know enough German to talk with the others, and I found among them all the same loathing of war, the same bewilderment as to its causes, the same sense of being driven by evil powers above them. The officers were different. They lost a good deal of their arrogance, but to the last had excuses ready for all that Germany had done, and almost to the last professed to believe that Germany would win. Their sense of caste was in their nature. They refused to travel in the same carriages with their men, to stay even for an hour in the same inclosures with them. They regarded them, for the most part, as inferior beings. And there were castes even among the officers. I remember that in the last phase, when we captured a number of cavalry officers, these elegant sky-blue fellows held aloof from the infantry officers and would not mix with them. One of them paced up and down all night alone, and all next day, stiff in the corsets below that sky-blue uniform, not speaking to a soul, though within a few yards of him were many officers of infantry regiments.

Our men treated their prisoners, nearly always, after the blood of battle was out of their eyes, with a good-natured kindness that astonished the Germans themselves. I have seen them filling German water-bottles at considerable trouble, and the escorts, two or three to a big batch of men, were utterly trustful of them. ”Here, hold my rifle, Fritz,” said one of our men, getting down from a truck-train to greet a friend.

An officer standing by took notice of this.

”Take your rifle back at once! Is that the way to guard your prisoners?”

Our man was astonished.

”Lor' bless you, sir, they don't want no guarding. They're glad to be took. They guard themselves.”

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