Preparations for Loos
"Death will give us all a clean sheet."—Dudley Pryor.
We, the London Irish Rifles, know Les Brebis well, know every café and estaminet, every street and corner, every house, broken or sound, every washerwoman, wine-shop matron, handy cook, and pretty girl. Time after time we have returned from the trenches to our old billet to find the good housewife up and waiting for us. She was a lank woman, made and clothed anyhow. Her garments looked as if they had been put on with a pitchfork. Her eyes protruded from their sockets, and one felt that if her tightly strained eyelids relaxed their grip for a moment the eyes would roll out on the floor. Her upper teeth protruded, and the point of her receding chin had lost itself somewhere in the hollow of her neck. Her pendant breasts hung flabbily, and it was a miracle how her youngest child, Gustave, a tot of seven months, could find any[40] sustenance there. She had three children, who prattled all through the peaceful hours of the day. When the enemy shelled Les Brebis the children were bundled down into the cellar, and the mother went out to pick percussion caps from the streets. These she sold to officers going home on leave. The value of the percussion cap was fixed by the damage which the shell had done. A shell which fell on Les Brebis school and killed many men was picked up by this good woman, and at the present moment it is in my possession. We nicknamed this woman "Joan of Arc."
We had a delightful billet in this woman's house. We came in from war to find a big fire in the stove and basins of hot, steaming café-au-lait on the table. If we returned from duty dripping wet through the rain, lines were hung across from wall to wall, and we knew that morning would find our muddy clothes warm and dry. The woman would count our number as we entered. One less than when we left! The missing man wore spectacles. She remembered him and all his mannerisms. He used to nurse her little baby boy, Gustave, and play games with the mite's toes. What had happened to him? He was killed by a shell, we told her. On the road to the trenches he was hit. Then a mist gathered in the woman's[41] eyes, and two tears rolled down her cheeks. We drank our café-au-lait.
"Combien, madam?"
"Souvenir," was the reply through sobs, and we thanked her for the kindness. Upstairs we bundled into our room, and threw our equipment down on the clean wooden floor, lit a candle and undressed. All wet clothes were flung downstairs, where the woman would hang them up to dry. Everything was the same here as when we left; save where the last regiment had, in a moment of inspiration, chronicled its deeds in verse on the wall. Pryor, the lance-corporal, read the poem aloud to us:
"Gentlemen, the Guards,
When the brick fields they took
The Germans took the hook
And left the Gentlemen in charge."
The soldiers who came and went voiced their griefs on this wall, but in latrine language and Rabelaisian humour. Here were three proverbs written in a shaky hand:
"The Army pays good money, but little of it."
"In the Army you are sertin to receive what you get."
"The wages of sin and a soldir is death."
Under these was a couplet written by a fatalist:
"I don't care if the Germans come,
If I have an extra tot of rum."
[42]
Names of men were scrawled everywhere on the wall, from roof to floor. Why have some men this desire to scrawl their names on every white surface they see, I often wonder? One of my mates, who wondered as I did, finally found expression in verse, which glared forth accusingly from the midst of the riot of names in the room:
"A man's ambition must be small
Who writes his name upon this wall,
And well he does deserve his pay
A measly, mucky bob a day."
The woman never seemed to mind this scribbling on the wall; in Les Brebis they have to put up with worse than this. The house of which I speak is the nearest inhabited one to the firing line. Half the houses in the street are blown down, and every ruin has its tragedy. The natives are gradually getting thinned out by the weapons of war. The people refuse to quit their homes. This woman has a sister in Nouex-les-Mines, a town five kilometres further away from the firing line, but she refused to go there. "The people of Nouex-les-Mines are no good," she told us. "I would not be where they are. Nobody can trust them."
The history of Les Brebis must, if written, be written in blood. The washerwoman who washed our shirts could tell stories of adventure that would eclipse tales of romance[43] as the sun eclipses a brazier. Honesty and fortitude are the predominant traits of the Frenchwoman.
Once I gave the washerwoman my cardigan jacket to wash, and immediately afterwards we were ordered off to the trenches. When we left the firing line we went back to Nouex-les-Mines. A month passed before the regiment got to Les Brebis again. The washerwoman called at my billet and brought back the cardigan jacket, also a franc piece which she had found in the pocket. On the day following the woman was washing her baby at a pump in the street and a shell blew her head off. Pieces of the child were picked up a hundred yards away. The washerwoman's second husband (she had been married twice) was away at the war; all that remained in the household now was a daughter whom Pryor, with his nicknaming craze, dubbed "Mercédès."
But here in Les Brebis, amidst death and desolation, wont and use held their sway. The cataclysm of a continent had not changed the ways and manners of the villagers, they took things phlegmatically, with fatalistic calm. The children played in the gutters of the streets, lovers met beneath the stars and told the story of ancient passion, the miser hoarded his money, the preacher spoke to his Sunday congregation, and the plate[44] was handed round for the worshippers' sous, men and women died natural deaths, children were born, females chattered at the street pumps and circulated rumours about their neighbours.... All this when wagons of shells passed through the streets all day and big guns travelled up nearer the lines every night. Never had Les Brebis known such traffic. Horses, limbers and guns, guns, limbers and horses going and coming from dawn to dusk and from dusk to dawn. From their emplacements in every spinney and every hollow in the fields the guns spoke earnestly and continuously. Never had guns voiced such a threat before. They were everywhere; could there be room for another in all the spaces of Les Brebis and our front line? It was impossible to believe it, but still they came up, monsters with a mysterious air of detachment perched on limbers with caterpillar wheels, little field guns that flashed metallic glints to the café lamps, squat trench howitzers on steel platforms impassive as toads....
The coming and passing was a grand poem, and the poem found expression in clanging and rattle in the streets of Les Brebis through the days and nights of August and September, 1915. For us, we worked in our little ways, dug advanced trenches under shell fire in a field where four thousand dead Frenchmen[45] were wasting to clay. These men had charged last winter and fell to maxim and rifle fire; over their bodies we were to charge presently and take Loos and the trenches behind. The London Irish were to cross the top in the first line of attack, so the rumour said.
One evening, when dusk was settling in the streets, when ruined houses assumed fantastic shapes, and spirits seemed to be lurking in the shattered piles, we went up the streets of Les Brebis on our way to the trenches. Over by the church of Les Brebis, the spire of which was sharply defined in the clear air, the shells were bursting and the smoke of the explosions curled above the red roofs of the houses. The enemy was bombarding the road ahead, and the wounded were being carried back to the dressing stations. We met many stretchers on the road. The church of Bully-Grenay had been hit, and a barn near the church had been blown in on top of a platoon of soldiers which occupied it. We had to pass the church. The whole battalion seemed to be very nervous, and a presentiment of something evil seemed to fill the minds of the men. The mood was not of common occurrence, but this unaccountable depression permeates whole bodies of men at times.
We marched in silence, hardly daring to breathe. Ahead, under a hurricane of shell,[46] Bully-Grenay was withering to earth. The night itself was dark and subdued, not a breeze stirred in the poplars which lined the long, straight road. Now and again, when a star-shell flamed over the firing line, we caught a glimpse of Bully-Grenay, huddled and helpless, its houses battered, its church riven, its chimneys fractured and lacerated. We dreaded passing the church; the cobbles on the roadway there were red with the blood of men.
We got into the village, which was deserted even by the soldiery; the civil population had left the place weeks ago. We reached the church, and there, arm in arm, we encountered a French soldier and a young girl. They took very little notice of us, they were deep in sweet confidences which only the young can exchange. The maiden was "Mercédès." The sight was good; it was as a tonic to us. A load seemed to have been lifted off our shoulders, and we experienced a light and airy sensation of heart. We reached the trenches without mishap, and set about our work. The enemy spotted us digging a new sap, and he began to shell with more than usual vigour. We were rather unlucky, for four of our men were killed and nine or ten got wounded.
Night after night we went up to the trenches and performed our various duties.[47] Keeps and redoubts were strengthened and four machine guns were placed where only one stood before. Always while we worked the artillery on both sides conducted a loud-voiced argument; concussion shells played havoc with masonry, and shrapnel shells flung their deadly freight on roads where the transports hurried, and where the long-eared mules sweated in the traces of the limbers of war. We spoke of the big work ahead, but up till the evening preceding Saturday, September 25th, we were not aware of the part which we had to play in the forthcoming event. An hour before dusk our officer read instructions, and outlined the plan of the main attack, which would start at dawn on the following day, September 25th, 1915.
In co-operation with an offensive movement by the 10th French Army on our right, the 1st and 4th Army Corps were to attack the enemy from a point opposite Bully-Grenay on the south to the La Bassée Canal on the north. We had dug the assembly trenches on our right opposite Bully-Grenay; that was to be the starting point for the 4th Corps—our Corps. Our Division, the 47th London, would lead the attack of the 4th Army Corps, and the London Irish would be the first in the fight. Our objective was the second German trench which lay[48] just in front of Loos village and a mile away from our own first line trench. Every movement of the operations had been carefully planned, and nothing was left to chance. Never had we as many guns as now, and these guns had been bombarding the enemy's positions almost incessantly for ten days. Smoke bombs would be used. The thick fumes resulting from their explosion between the lines would cover our advance. At five o'clock all our guns, great and small, would open up a heavy fire. Our aircraft had located most of the enemy's batteries, and our heavy guns would be trained on these until they put them out of action. Five minutes past six our guns would lengthen their range and shell the enemy's reserves, and at the same moment our regiment would get clear of the trenches and advance in four lines in extended order with a second's interval between the lines. The advance must be made in silence at a steady pace.
Stretcher-bearers had to cross with their companies; none of the attacking party must deal with the men who fell out on the way across. A party would be detailed out to attend to the wounded who fell near the assembly trenches.... The attack had been planned with such intelligent foresight that our casualties would be very few. The job before us was quite easy and simple.
[49]
"What do you think of it?" I asked my mate, Bill Teake. "I think a bottle of champagne would be very nice."
"Just what I thought myself," said Bill. "I see Dudley Pryor is off to the café already. I've no money. I'm pore as a mummy."
"You got paid yesterday," I said with a laugh. "You get poor very quickly."
An embarrassed smile fluttered around his lips.
"A man gets pore 'cordin' to no rule," he replied. "Leastways, I do."
"Well, I've got a lot of francs," I said. "We may as well spend it."
"You're damned right," he answered. "Maybe, we'll not 'ave a chance to——"
"It doesn't matter a damn whether——"
"The officer says it will be an easy job. I don't know the——"
He paused. We understood things half spoken.
"Champagne?" I hinted.
"Nothing like champagne," said Bill.