Part 12 (1/2)
That march at both ends of the motor trip was the adjutant's salvation.
When the battalion splashed up to its appointed billets, and found them calculated for receiving only half of its number of soldiers awake, he s.h.i.+fted two-thirds of them in; and, as they promptly fell to sleep the moment the column ceased to move, he s.h.i.+fted in the remainder when they were asleep.
When the battalion drew its breath next morning, it was inclined to think that it was enduring the full horror of war; and was preparing to summarise the situation. But before it could draw a second breath it was marched off to--to what I will call a reserve camp. It was not technically a reserve camp, which was farther on; but they knew it was a camp for battalions to rest in--when they have been very good, and it is desired to give them time to recover their wind. They were rather ”bucked” with the idea of this resting-place.
At midday they arrived there. That is to say, they waded up to a collection of little tents, not unlike bushmen's tents in Australia, and stood knee deep at the entrances, looking into them--speechless. They were not much by way of tents at the best of times. There was nearly as much mud inside as there was outside. But on top of the normal conditions came the fact that the last battalion to occupy those tents must have camped there in dry weather. Since there was not enough headroom upwards it had dug downwards. And, as it had not put a drain round them, the water had come in, and the interior of a fair proportion of these residences consisted of a circular lake, varying in depth from a few inches to a foot and a half.
The battalion could only find one word, when its breath came--and, as the regiment which had made those holes, and the town major to whom they now belonged, were probably of unimpeachable ancestry, I do not think the accusation was justified. But when it realised that, good or bad, this was the place where it was to pa.s.s the night, it split itself up, as good Australian battalions have a way of doing.
”Which is the way to our tents, Bill?” asked the rear platoon of one of the band, which had arrived half an hour before.
”I don't know--I'm not the blanky harbour-master,” was the reply. The battalion set to work, like a tribe of beavers, to make a home. It banked up little parapets of mud to prevent water coming in. It dug capacious drains to let the water which was in run out. It sc.r.a.ped the mud out of the interior of its lake dwellings, until it reached more or less dry earth. A fair proportion of the regiment melted out into the landscape, and returned during the rest of the day by ones and twos, carrying odd bits of timber, broken wood, bricks, f.a.g ends of rusty sheet iron, old posts, wire and straw. By nightfall those Australians were, I will not say in comfort, but moderately and pa.s.sably warm and dry.
It so happened that they stayed in that camp four days. By the time they left it they were looking upon themselves as almost fortunate. There was only one break in its improvement--and that was when a dug-out was discovered. It was a charming underground home, dug by some French battery before the British came--with bunks and a table and stove. The privates who discovered it made a most comfortable home until its fame got abroad, and the regimental headquarters were moved in there.
Dug-outs became all the fas.h.i.+on for the moment--everyone set about searching for them. But the supply in any works on the Allied side is, unfortunately, limited--and after half a day's enthusiasm the battalion fell back resignedly on its canvas home.
When it came back some time later to these familiar dwellings, heavy-eyed and heavy-footed, there was no insincerity in the relief with which it regarded them. They were a resting-place then. Another battalion had kept them decently clean, and handed them over drained and dry; for which thoughtfulness, not always met with, they were more grateful than those tired men could have explained.
For they had been up into the line, and the places behind the line, and out again.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE WINTER OF 1916
_France, December 20th._
A friend has shown me a letter from Melbourne. Its writer had asked a man--an educated man--if he would give a subscription for the Australian Comforts Fund. ”Certainly not,” was the reply. ”The men have every comfort in the trenches.”
That is the sort of dense-skinned ignorance which makes one unspeakably angry--the ignorance which, because it has heard of or read a letter from some brave-hearted youngster, making light of hards.h.i.+ps for his mother's sake, therefore flies to the conclusion that everything written and spoken about the horrors of this war is humbug, and what the Army calls ”eyewash”--a big conspiracy to deceive the people who are not there.
As a matter of fact, the early winter of 1916 which these men have just been going through will have a chapter to itself in history as long as history lasts. It is to some extent past history now--to what extent I do not suppose anyone on the German side or ours can tell.
I, personally, do not know how the men and their officers can live through that sort of time. Remember that a fair proportion of them were a few months ago adding up figures in the office of an insurance company or a s.h.i.+pping firm--gulping down their midday coffee and roll in a teashop in King or Collins Streets. But take even a Central District farmer or a Newcastle miner--yes, or a Scottish shepherd or an English poacher--take the hardest man you know, and put him to the same test, and it is a question whether the ordeal would not break even his spirit.
Put him out of doors into the thick of a dirty European winter; march him ten miles through a bitter cold wind and driving rain, with--on his back--all the clothing, household furniture, utensils and even the only cover which he is allowed to take with him; dribble him in through mud up to his knees--sometimes up to his waist--along miles and miles of country that is nothing but broken tree stumps and endless sh.e.l.l holes--holes into which, if a man were to fall, he might lie for days before he were found, or even might never be found at all. After many hours, trickle him, half dead with dragging his feet at every step out of the putty-like mud, into a shallow, straggling, open ditch not in any way different from a watery drain between two sodden country paddocks, except that there is no gra.s.s about it--nothing but brown, slippery mud on floor and trench sides and over the country in all directions as far as eye can see. At the end of it all put him to live there, with what baggage he carried on his back and nothing more; put him in various depths of mud, to stay there all day in rain, wind, fog, hail, snowstorm--whatever weather comes--and to watch there during the endless winter nights, when the longed-for dawn only means another day and another night out there in the mud ditch, without a shred of cover. And this is what our men have had to go through.
The longed-for relief comes at last--a change to other sh.e.l.l-battered areas in support or reserve--and the battalion comes back down the long road to the rear, white-faced and dreary-eyed, dragging slowly through the mud without a word. For they have been through a life of which you, or any people past and present who have not been to this war, have not the first beginnings of a conception; something beside which a South Polar expedition is a dance and a picnic. And that is without taking into account the additional fact that night and day, on the Somme where these conditions existed, men live under the unceasing sound of guns. I can hear them as I write--it is the first longed-for gloriously bright day, and therefore there is not an interval of a second in that continuous roar, hour after hour. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world--there has never yet been anything to approach it except at Verdun.
Life is hard enough in winter in the old-established trenches along more settled parts of the front--there is plenty for the Comforts Fund to do there. Dropping into the best of quiet front trenches straight from his home life the ordinary man would consider himself as undergoing hards.h.i.+ps undreamt of. Visiting those trenches straight from the Somme the other day, with their duck-boards and sandbags, and the occasional ping of a sniper's bullet, and the momentary spasm of field guns and trench mortars which appeared in the official summary next day as ”artillery and trench mortar activity”--after the Somme, I say, one found oneself looking on it, in the terms of the friend who went with me, as ”war de luxe.”
It is unwise to take what one man writes of one place as true of all places or all times, or indeed of anything except what he personally sees and knows at the moment. These conditions which I have described are what I have seen, and are fortunately past history, or I should not be describing them. I personally know that English troops, Scottish troops and Australian troops went through them, and have, in some cases, issued from such trenches and taken similar German trenches in front of them. Our troops are more comfortable than they were, but it is in the nature of war to find yourself plunged into extremes of exertion and hards.h.i.+p without warning; and no man knows when he writes to-day--and I doubt whether anyone of his superiors could tell him--whether he will, at any given date, be in a worse condition or a better one.
What the German is going through on his side of the muddy landscape is described in another chapter. For our grand men--and though to be called a hero is the last thing most Australians desire, the men are never grander than at these times--the Australian Comforts Fund, the Y.M.C.A.
and the canteen groceries provide almost all the comfort that ever enters that grim region. In the areas to which those tired men come for a spell, the Comforts Fund is beginning to give them theatres for concert troupes and cinemas. It provides some hundreds of pounds to be spent locally on the most obtainable small luxuries at Christmas, besides such gifts in kind as Christmas brings.
But, for those who are actually in the front or just behind it, one cup of warm coffee in a jam-tin from a roadside stall has been, in certain times and places, all that can be given; the Fund has given that, and it has been the landmark in the day for many men. In those conditions there was but one occasional solace. A friend of mine found an Australian in the trenches in those days, standing in mud nearly to his waist, s.h.i.+vering in his arms and every body muscle, leaning back against the trench side, fast asleep.