''Contemptible'' by - (ebooks online reader .TXT) 📖

with unabated fury. They stood there to the end without flinching, and when they fell other men took their places. It is mean and untruthful to say that the Germans are cowards. Certain it was that their pathetic bravery—there is always something sad about bravery—so touched the British that they accepted the surrender without reserve or suspicion. Even the artillery ceased fire.

At this point the leading Platoon broke clean away. They could not be held in. The orderly advance degenerated into a wild dash. Men bent double and rushed. Determination was written on each flushed face. The Germans must have been terrified; it looked as if they were to be bayoneted as they stood, with their arms raised in surrender. It must have been a very trying moment for them, indeed, as the British raced towards them up the incline. The leading men were soon clambering up the embankment. What would happen? Was a disgraceful and bloody massacre about to begin? The excitement was intense. The Subaltern ran on harder than ever, with some vague idea of "stopping a scene," but he need not have bothered. The men were not out for blood or scalps. All they wanted was souvenirs or helmets! They got them with such success that there was little left for the other platoons.

When the Subaltern came up the "show" was over. There were a great many dead Germans lying, as they had died, behind the embankment. The thought of taking something which they had worn never occurred to him. If it had been he would have dismissed it on the grounds that there was no means of sending such things home, while to add to the weight and worry of his kit by carrying a "Pickelhaube" about, indefinitely, for the rest of the campaign, was, of course, unthinkable.

Then the "rally" sounded, and the companies that had taken part in the attack began to re-form. There was a considerable delay before two of the platoons appeared at the rallying point. The men did not come in a body but by driblets. He began to get nervous about the other two Subalterns, and in a few minutes went to see what had happened to them.

"Lord bless you, sir, 'e's all right," said a man in answer to the Subaltern's inquiry. "We wouldn't let no harm come to 'im." The man who spoke was an old soldier whom he knew well, tall, wiry, commanding—the sort of man that a young officer leans upon, and who, reciprocally, relies on his officer. In the old Peace days, if any special job that required intelligence or reliance were going, he always saw that this man got it. He had made a sort of pet of him; and now he was openly, frankly displaying a state of mind akin to worship towards another officer. It was defection, rank desertion. A ridiculous feeling of jealousy surged up in the Subaltern's mind, as he turned back towards the Company.

As he regained the road, many stretchers passed. They were no longer things of tragedy, to be passed by with a shudder and averted eyes—he was getting used to horror.

CHAPTER XX DEFENCE

It was now midday, and the Officers of the two companies that had been deployed gathered round the mess-cart. The remaining companies, who had been kept in local reserve during the fight, were sent out to bury the dead. The rain began to fall in torrents, and somehow the memory of crouching under the mess-cart to get shelter has left a far more definite and indelible impression upon the Subaltern's mind than the actual moments of danger and excitement.

A large band of prisoners had been captured by our troops that day. Small detachments had from time to time been captured ever since the turn at Chaumes, but this was different. There were long lines of them, standing bolt upright, and weaponless. The Subaltern looked at them curiously. They struck him as on the whole taller than the English, and their faces were not brown, but grey. He admired their coats, there was a martial air in the long sweep of them. And he confessed that one looked far more of a soldier in a helmet. There is a ferocity about the things, a grimness well suited to a soldier.... Not that clothes make the man.

He sternly refused himself the pleasure of going to get a closer sight of them. He wanted very badly to see them, perhaps to talk French with them, but a feeling that it was perhaps infra dignitatem debarred him. The men, however, had no such scruples. They crowded round their captives, and slowly and silently surveyed them. They looked at them with the same sort of interest that one displays towards an animal in the Zoo, and the Germans paid just as much attention to their regard as Zoo animals do. Considering that only a short hour ago they had been trying to take each other's lives, there seemed to be an appalling lack of emotion in either party. Fully half an hour the Tommies inspected them thus. Then, with infinite deliberation, one man produced a packet of "Caporal" cigarettes and offered one, with an impassive countenance, to a German. As far as the Subaltern could see, not a single word was exchanged nor a gesture made. They did not move away until it was time to fall in.

The advance was continued until it was dark, and intermittent firing was heard throughout the afternoon on either flank. The German retreat, which had in its first stages been conducted with such masterly skill, was rapidly developing into a hurried and ill-conducted movement, that bade fair to lead to disaster. Reports of large quantities of prisoners were coming in more frequently than ever.

It was at this time that the Subaltern first heard the now notorious story of the German who had been at the Savoy, and who gave himself up to the Officer whom he recognised as an old habitué. One of the Officers in the Regiment said that this had happened to him, and was believed—for the moment. Later on, Officers out of every corps solemnly related similar experiences, with occasional variations in the name of the hotel. Usually it was the Savoy or the Ritz; less often the Carlton, or even the Cecil, but the "Pic" or the "Troc" were absolutely barred. The story multiplied so exceedingly that one began to suspect that the entire German corps in front was exclusively composed of ex-waiters of smart London hotels.

Another sign that the Germans were beginning to be thrust back more quickly than they liked was the frequent abandonment of transport. Whole trains of motor lorries that had been hastily burned and left by the roadside, and all sorts of vehicles with broken wheels, were constantly being passed. The Subaltern remembers seeing a governess cart, and wondering what use the Germans had found for it. Perhaps a German colonel had been driven gravely in it, at the head of his men. He wondered whether the solemn Huns would have been capable of seeing the humour of such a situation.

Horses, too, seemed to have been slaughtered by the score. They looked like toy horses, nursery things of wood. Their faces were so unreal, their expressions so glassy. They lay in such odd postures, with their hoofs sticking so stiffly in the air. It seemed as if they were toys, and were lying just as children had upset them. Even their dimensions seemed absurd. Their bodies had swollen to tremendous sizes, destroying the symmetry of life, confirming the illusion of unreality.

The sight of these carcases burning in the sun, with buzzing myriads of flies scintillating duskily over their unshod hides, excited a pity that was almost as deep as his pity for slain human beings. After all, men came to the war with few illusions, and a very complete knowledge of the price to be paid. They knew why they were there, what they were doing, and what they might expect. They could be buoyed up by victory, downcast by defeat. Above all, they had a Cause, something to fight for, and if Fate should so decree, something to die for. But these horses were different; they could neither know nor understand these things. Poor, dumb animals, a few weeks ago they had been drawing their carts, eating their oats, and grazing contentedly in their fields. And then suddenly they were seized by masters they did not know, raced away to places foreign to them, made to draw loads too great for them, tended irregularly, or not at all, and when their strength failed, and they could no longer do their work, a bullet through the brain ended their misery. Their lot was almost worse than the soldiers'!

To the Subaltern it seemed an added indictment of war that these wretched animals should be flung into that vortex of slaughter. He pitied them intensely, the sight of them hurt him; and the smell of them nauseated him. Every memory of the whole advance is saturated with that odour. It was pungent, vigorous, demoralising. It filled the air, and one's lungs shrank before it. Once, when a man drove his pick through the crisp, inflated side, a gas spurted out that was positively asphyxiating and intolerable.

However much transport the Germans abandoned, however severe the losses they sustained, they always found time to break open every estaminet they passed, and drain it dry. Wretched inns and broken bottles proved to be just as reliable a clue to their passing as the smell of them.

CHAPTER XXI THE DEFENCE OF THE BRANDY

The next morning two companies were detached from the Battalion as escort to a brigade of artillery. The other two companies, who had returned during the night, did not seem to be greatly upset by their gruesome task of burying the dead.

They did not come in contact with the enemy, and no outstanding incident impressed itself upon the Subaltern's mind. The heat had abated with dramatic swiftness. A wind that was almost chilly swept the plains, driving grey clouds continually across the sun. The summer was over. That day they joined battle with the outposts of a foe that was to prove more hateful and persistent than the German winter.

The name of a village known as Suchy-le-Château figured on many of the signposts that they passed, but they never arrived there, and, branching off east of Braisne, they came upon the remainder of the Battalion, drawn up in a stubble field.

A driving rain had begun to fall early in the afternoon, and when at length the march was finished their condition was deplorable. Though tired out with a long day's march, they dared not rest, because to lie down in the sodden straw was to court sickness. Their boots, worn and unsoled, offered no resistance whatever to the damp. Very soon they could hear their sodden socks squelching with water as they walked. A night of veritable horror lay in front of them; they were appalled with the prospect of it. The rain seemed to mock at the completeness of their misery.

However, the Fates were kind, for the General, happening to pass, took pity on them and allowed them to be billeted in the outhouses of a farm near by. The sense of relief which this move gave to the Subaltern was too huge to describe. Contentment took possession of him utterly. The tension of his nerves and muscles relaxed: he thought that the worries and hardships of that day, at least, were over.

But he was wrong.

No sooner had his Platoon wearily thrown their rifles and equipment into the musty barn that was allotted to them, than the Colonel told him that he would have to sleep with his men, the reason being that the owner of the farm, on the approach of the Germans, had hidden a large stock of brandy beneath the straw in the very barn that his men had entered.