XI The Brigade that Went Through
A young brigadier—A regular soldier—No heroics—How his brigade charged—Systematically cleaning up the dugouts—“It was orders. We did it.”—The second advance—Holding on for two sleepless days and nights—Soda water and cigars—Yorkshiremen, and a stubborn lot—British phlegm—Five officers out of twenty who had “gone through”—Stereotyped phrases and inexpressible emotions.
No sound of the guns was audible in this quiet French village where a brigade out of the battle line was in rest. The few soldiers moving about were looking in the shop windows, trying their French with the inhabitants, or standing in small groups. Their faces were tired and drawn as the only visible sign of the torment of fire that they had undergone. They had met everything the German had to offer in the way of projectiles and explosives; but before we have their story we shall have that of the young brigadier-general who had his headquarters in one of the houses. His was the brigade that went “through,” and he was the kind of brigadier who would send a brigade “through.”
With its position in the attack of July 1st in the joint, as it were, between the northern sector where the German line was not broken and the southern where it was, this brigade had suffered what the charges which failed had suffered and it had known the triumph of those which had succeeded, at a cost in keeping with the experience.
The brigadier was a regular soldier and nothing but a soldier from head to foot, in thought, in manner and in his decisive phrases. Nowadays, when we seem to be drawing further and further away from versatility, perhaps more than ever we like the soldier to be a soldier, the poet to be a poet, the surgeon to be a surgeon; and I can even imagine this brigadier preferring that if another man was to be a pacifist he should be a real out and out pacifist. You knew at a glance without asking that he had been in India and South Africa, that he was fond of sport and probably fond of fighting. He had rubbed up against all kinds of men, as the British officer who has the inclination may do in the course of his career, and his straight eye—an eye which you would say had never been accustomed to indefiniteness about anything—must have impressed the men under his command with the confidence that he knew his business and that they must follow him. Yet it could twinkle on occasion with a pungent humor as he told his story, which did not take him long but left you long a-thinking. A writer who was as good a writer as he was a soldier if he had had the same experience could have made a book out of it; but then he could not have been a man of action at the same time.
He made it clear at once that he had not led his brigade in person over the parapet, or helped in person to bomb the enemy’s dugouts, or indulged in any other kind of gallery play. I do not think that all the drawing-rooms in London or all the reception committees which receive gallant sons in their home towns could betray him into the faintest simulation of the pose of a hero. He was not a hero and he did not believe in heroics. His occupation was commanding men and taking trenches.
Not once did he utter anything approaching a boast over a feat which his friends and superiors had expected of him. This would be “swank,” as they call it, only he would characterize it by even a stronger word. He is the kind of officer, the working, clear-thinking type, who would earn promotion by success at arms in a long war, while the gallery-play crowd whose promotion and favors come by political gift and academic reports in time of peace would be swept into the dustbin. He was simply a capable fighter; and war is fighting.
His men had gone over the “lid” in excellent fashion, quite on time. He had seen at once what they were in for, but he had no doubt that they would keep on, for he had warned them to expect machine gun fire and told them what to do in case it came. They applied the system in which he had trained them with a coolness that won his approbation as a directing expert—his matter-of-fact approbation in the searching analysis of every detail, with no ecstasies about their unparalleled gallantry. He expected them to be gallant. However, I could imagine that if you said a word against them his eyes would flash indignation. They were his men and he might criticize them, but no one else might except a superior officer. The first wave reached the first-line German trench on time, that is, half of them did; the rest, including more than half of the officers, were down, dead or wounded, in No Man’s Land in the swift crossing of two hundred yards of open space.
He had watched their advance from the first-line British trench. Later, when the situation demanded it, I learned that he went up to the captured German line and on to the final objective, but this fact was drawn out of him. It might lead to a misunderstanding; you might think that he had been taking as much risk as his officers and men, and risk of any kind for him was an incident of the business of managing a brigade.
“How about the dugouts?” I asked.
This was an obvious question. The trouble on July 1st had been, as we know, that the Germans hiding in their dugouts had rushed forth as soon as the British curtain of fire lifted and sometimes fought the British in the trench traverses with numbers superior. Again, they had surrendered, only to overpower their guards, pick up rifles and man their machine guns after the first wave had passed on, instead of filing back across No Man’s Land in the regular fashion of prisoners.
“I was looking out for that,” said the brigadier, like a lawyer who has stated his opponent’s case; but other commanders had taken the same precautions with less fortunate results. When he said that he was “looking out for that” it meant, in his case, that he had so thoroughly organized his men—and he was not the only brigadier who had, he was a type—in view of every emergency in “cleaning up” that the Germans did not outwit them. The half which reached the German trench had the situation fully in hand and details for the dugouts assigned before they went on. And they did go on. This was the wonderful thing.
“With your numbers so depleted, wasn’t it a question whether or not it was wise for you to attempt to carry out the full plan?”
He gave me a short look of surprise. I realized that if I had been one of the colonels and made such a suggestion I should have drawn a curtain of fire upon myself.
“It was orders,” he said, and added: “We did it.”
Yes, they did it—when commanding officers, majors and senior captains were down, when companies without any officers were led by sergeants and even by corporals who knew what to do, thanks to their training.
In order to reach the final objective the survivors of the first charge which had gone two hundred yards to the first line must cover another thousand, which must have seemed a thousand miles; but that was not for them to consider. The spirit of the resolute man who had drilled them, if not his presence, was urging them forward. They reached the point where the landmarks compared with their map indicated their stopping place—about one-quarter of the number that had left the British trench.
They had enough military sense to realize that if they tried to go back over the same ground which they had crossed there might be less than one-quarter of the fourth remaining. They preferred to die with their faces rather than their backs to the enemy. No, they did not mean to die. They meant to hold on and “beat the Boche,” according to their teaching.
As things had been going none too well with the brigade on their left their flank was exposed. They met this condition by fortifying themselves against enfilade in an old German communication trench and rushing other points of advantage to secure their position. When a German machine gun was able to sweep them, a corporal slipped up another communication trench and bombed it out of business. Running out of bombs of their own, they began gathering German bombs which were lying about plentifully and threw these at the Germans. Short of rifle ammunition they found that there was ammunition for the German rifles which had been captured. They were not choice about their methods and neither were the Germans in that cheek-by-jowl affair with both sides so exhausted that a little more grit on one side struck the balance in its favor.
This medley of British and Germans in a world of personal combat shared shell fire, heat and misery. The British sent their rocket signals up to say that they had arrived. In two or three other instances the signals had meant that a dozen men only had reached their objective, a force unable to hold until reinforcements could come. Not so this time. The little group held; they held even when the Germans got some fresh men and attempted a counter-attack; they held until assistance came. For two sleepless days and nights under continual fire they remained in their dearly won position until, under cover of darkness, they were relieved.
In the most tranquil of villages the survivors looking in shop windows and trying out their French might wonder how it was that they were alive, though they were certain that their brigadier thought well of them. Ask them or their officers what they thought of their brigadier and they were equally certain of that, too. Theirs was the best brigadier in the army. Think what this kind of confidence means to men in such an action when their lives are the pawns of his direction!
I felt a kind of awe in the presence of one of the battalions in billet in a warehouse, more than in the presence of prime ministers or potentates. Most of them were blinking and mind-stiff after having slept the clock around. They were Yorkshiremen, chiefly workers in worsted mills and a stubborn lot.
“What did you most want to do when you got out of the fight?” I asked.
They spoke with one voice which left no question of their desires in a one-two-three order. They wanted a wash, a shave, a good meal, and then sleep. And personal experiences? Tom called on Jim and Jim had bayoneted two Germans, he said; then Jim called on Bill, who had had a wonderful experience according to Jim, though all that Bill made of it was that he got there first with his bombs. Told among themselves the stories might have been thrilling. Before a stranger they were mere official reports. It had been quick work, too quick for anything but to dodge for cover and act promptly in your effort to get the other fellow before he got you.
Generically, they had a job to do and they did it just as they would have done one in the factories at home. They were not so interested in any exhibition of courage as in an encounter which had the element of sport. Each narrator invariably returned to the subject of soda water. The outstanding novelty of the charge to these men was the quantity of soda water in bottles which they had found in the German dugouts. They went on to their second objective with bottles of soda water in their pockets and German light cigars in the corners of their mouths and stopped to drink soda water between bombing rushes after they had arrived. It was a hot, thirsty day.
Through the curtains of artillery fire which were continually maintained back of their new positions supplies could not be brought up, but Boche provisions saved the day. In fact, I think this was one of the reasons why they felt almost kindly toward the Germans. They found the canned meat excellent, but did not care for the “K.K.” bread.
Thus in the dim light of the warehouse they talked on, making their task appear as a half-holiday of sport. It seemed to me that this was in keeping with their training; the fashionable attitude of the British soldier toward a horrible business. If this helps him to endure what these men had endured without flinching, with comrades being blown to bits around them by shell-bursts, why, then, it is the attitude best suited to develop the fighting quality of the British. They had it from their officers who, in turn, perhaps, had it in part from such British regulars as the brigadier, though mostly I think that it was inborn racial phlegm.
I met the five officers who were the survivors of the twenty in one battalion, the five who had “carried through.” One was a barrister, another just out of Oxford, a third, as I remember, a real estate broker in a small town. They told their stories without a gesture, quite as if they were giving an account of a game of golf. It might have seemed callous, but you knew better.
You knew when they said that it was “a bit stiff,” or “a bit thick,” or “it looked as if they had us,” what inexpressible emotion lay behind the accepted army phrases. The truth was they would not permit themselves to think of the void in their lines made by the death of their comrades. They had drawn the curtain on all incidents which had not the appeal of action and finality as a part of the business of “going through.” One officer with a twitch of the lips remarked almost casually that new officers and drafts were arriving and that it would seem strange to see so many new faces in the mess.
Those of their old comrades who were not dead were already in hospital in England. When an officer who had been absent joined the group he brought the news that one of their number who had been badly hit would live. The others’ quiet ejaculation of “Good!” had a thrill back of it which communicated its joy to me. Eight of the wounded had not been seriously hit, which meant that these would return and that, after all, only four were dead. This was the first intimate indication I had of how the offensive exposing the whole bodies of men in a charge against the low-velocity shrapnel bullets and high-velocity bullets from rifles and machine guns must result in the old ratio of only one mortal wound for every five men hit.
There was consolation in that fact. It was another advantage of the war of movement as compared with the war of shambles in trenches. And none, from the general down to the privates, had really any idea of how glorious a part they had played. They had merely “done their bit” and taken what came their way—and they had “gone through.”