Herbert Read‘s day began about as badly as it could have. After the capture of two German infantrymen who wandered into their position from behind, Read and his colonel were told that a reserve battalion would be attacking up toward their position in an effort to dislodge the German forces surrounding them. In the dark. With no communications lines connecting either unit to each other, or to the rear. The attack was to begin precisely at 1.33 a.m.
The whole thing was a ghastly failure… About two o’clock a stray officer came to us, having lost his company. Eventually, about four o’clock, one company did appear. It went forward into darkness…. Dawn found us as dusk had found us, with the sole difference that some two hundred men of the counter-attack battalion had found refuge in our redoubt, and in the keeps in front.
I think by then we were past hope or despair. We regarded all events with an indifference of weariness, knowing that with the dawn would come another attack. We distributed ammunition, reorganized our Lewis guns, and waited dully, without apprehension.
There is a desultory attack in the morning, then a pause, and then another attack, which seems to overwhelm the lightly-manned forward “keeps.”
Shortly after midday, the enemy came in direct contact with the inner ring of the redoubt.
We fired like maniacs. Every round of ammunition had been distributed. The Lewis guns jammed; rifle bolts grew stiff and unworkable with the expansion of heat.
The Green Howards now withdraw 250 yards to a gun-pit, where one of their own guns, firing short or on the assumption that the Germans have taken the entire redoubt, drops a shell on the very edge of the pit.
We were all hurled to the ground by the explosion, but, on recovering ourselves, found only one casualty: the colonel had received a nasty gash on the forearm.
Once the colonel begins to lose consciousness from loss of blood he is sent to the rear. Read–a soldier of only three years’ standing, a twenty-four-year-old whose only previous commands have been an infantry company and a small Modernist review–is now directing a battalion at the beginning of the most difficult fighting retreat in British military history.
As the afternoon wanes, the Germans mass for another attack, which seems to be pressing around both flanks of Read’s isolated position.
In the height of this attack, while my heart was heavy with anxiety I received a message from the brigade. Surely reinforcements were coming to our aid! Or was I at length given permission to withdraw? Neither: it was a rhetorical appeal to hold on to the last man. I rather bitterly resolved to obey the command.
After duly holding on for another hour, Read decides on his own authority to withdraw the survivors of his battalion still clinging to a line of trench ahead of his new command post.
I lay on my belly in the grass and watched through my field-glasses every minute trickling of the enemy’s progress. Gradually they made their way round the rim of the redoubt, bombing along the traverses. And now we only held it as lips might touch the rim of the saucer. I could see the heads of my men, very dense and in a little space. And on either side, incredibly active, gathered the grey helmets of the Germans. It was like a long bowstring along the horizon, and our diminished forces the arrow to be shot into a void…
Then, after a little while, the arrow was launched. I saw a piteous band of men rise from the ground, and run rapidly towards me. A great shout went up from the Germans: a cry of mingled triumph and horror. ‘Halt Eenglisch!’ they cried, and for a moment were too amazed to fire; as though aghast at the folly of men who could plunge into such a storm of death. But the first silent gasp of horror expended, then broke the crackling storm. I don’t remember in the whole war an intenser taste of hell.
The survivors of the battalion are shot down in droves–there is even a mention of bayonet fighting. When they draw near, Read leaves his shell hole and runs with them.
It seemed to take a long time to race across those few hundred yards. My heart beat nervously, and I felt infinitely weary. The bullets hissed about me, and I thought: then this is the moment of death. But I had no emotions. I remembered having read how in battle men are hit, and never feel the hurt till later, and I wondered if I had yet been hit. Then I reached the line. I stood petrified, enormously aghast. The trench has not been dug, and no reinforcements occupied it. It was as we had passed it on the morning of the 21st, the sods dug off the surface, leaving an immaculately patterned ‘mock’ trench…
I looked about me wildly, running along the line and signalling to the men to drop as they reached the slender parapet of sods. But the whole basis of my previous tactics had been destroyed. I should never have ordered my men to cross that plain of death, but for the expectation that we were falling back to reinforce a new line. We found an empty mockery, and I was in despair…
But Read rallies his men, and most respond to his signals. Others do not–“there was something like a stampede” and revolvers are drawn by officers against their own men. Then the Germans, once more, come around the flanks, and once more the Green Howards withdraw, this time to a real trench. But as the sun goes down, German aircraft equipped with radios call down heavy artillery, and when “contact” flares go up, marking the position of the German advance for their own guns, Read returns to italics of disbelief:
They did not merely stretch in a line in front of us: they encircled us like a horse-shoe, the points of which seemed (and actually were) miles behind us.
Once again they withdraw, at last outdistancing their German pursuers and reaching safe billets in the rear, where they eat biscuits and canned meat and fall asleep after midnight. Only four officers remain with the battalion, and Read attempts no estimate of the number of men.[1]
Phillip Maddison’s (fictional) experience mirrors Read’s. Maddison, too, is an adjutant whose colonel becomes a casualty, and he too takes command of the battalion, leading a retreat and organizing a new firing line. The style, of course, is very different, and we are party to the doubts that plague Phillip as he tries to remember his tactics, and as the pressure of knowing that hundreds of men are awaiting his decisions begins to grow on him. There are strange and unlikely incidents, too, such as the reappearance of a captured officer and a German attack somehow blundering straight onto their new line of defense in a wood. But the strength of the novel (as well as one of its weaknesses) is the scope: before the day is done we are also party to the thoughts and actions of General Haig, and of Phillip’s family at home.[2]
Rowland Feilding still commands the 6th Connaught Rangers as they too retreat.
Throughout the day that followed, owing to our heavy losses in guns the previous day, we were practically without artillery support. At 3.30 a.m. all stood to, but in spite of a thick fog which seemed entirely to favour the enemy, daylight arrived without any sign of further activity on his part. It was beginning to look as if we might be going to have a restful day, when, at about six o’clock, three German prisoners (an officer and two other ranks) were passed back from the fire-trench. They spoke English fluently, and upon being questioned as to whether it was intended to renew the attack during the morning, replied that it was…
The information we had extracted was at once sent back to Brigade, and in less than half an hour, its accuracy was confirmed by the sudden outburst of the enemy’s barrage on a similar scale to that of the previous day. This was followed in due course by the German infantry, who swept forward, wave after wave, in overwhelming hordes…
The situation is dire:
…our troops, having endured twenty-six hours of the most terrible punishment; largely reduced in numbers; the Lewis guns or their teams (which is the same thing) knocked out, were overcome or surrounded after a stubborn resistance. In the case of my own Companies, which, as I have described, had already suffered so severely, and had lost three Captains and two seconds in command out of four during the counter-attack of the preceding afternoon, not an officer escaped.
Feilding also the praises the exceptional courage of the runners sent out into the barrage carrying messages–none refused, few returned. But, writing as he is only just after the battle, he doesn’t pause further to give us their names. There are too many casualties dated today, a century back, among the 6th Connaught Rangers to search them out…
In the afternoon a general retirement was ordered to a prepared line (the Green line), in front of Tincourt, some miles behind the original front line. We reached it at the cost of a few casualties from shell-fire. I must say I had hoped to find some fresh troops there, but there were none.
Indeed, the trench was practically empty. The battalion was now reduced to the Headquarters Company and thirty-four stragglers.
And in the evening, a very rare note of bitterness from the careful, considerate, well-bred former regular. Feilding is fair-minded and polite, generally loath to speak ill of others. But when those who should have done better are absent, and the nature of their absence calls attention to both their hypocrisies and their failures…
Looking for a billet at the end of the day’s retreat, Feilding finds
…a comfortable three-roomed hut in Tincourt Wood, formerly the abode of an officer of the Divisional Staff, whose Headquarters had been here until the proximity of the enemy during the last two days had driven them further back.
Having in my mind the heroic exhortations which had of late been coming so unsparingly, addressed to us in the Front line from this wood, I confess I was not prepared for the aspect of sudden abandonment which the hut
presented.Its appearance suggested that some sudden and deadly cataclysm had overcome the occupant while he was having his breakfast, the remains of which, together with one or two half-finished cups of tea, still littered the table. The walls were hung with book-shelves and maps (of which latter I have annexed a useful specimen): the floor had a carpet: expensive oil lamps, crockery, and a profusion of knick-knacks lay about: but there was no sign of any effort having been made to save these treasures, so rapid apparently, had been the owner’s exit. Lastly, and to our great satisfaction, there were two camp-beds and a mattress of the softest down…[3]
Stanley Spencer, too, is in retreat, but his unit is comparatively fortunate. Early in the morning he received “a long message” from a runner ordering his unit to withdraw, since the entire Cambrai salient has been outflanked. Going along the line in order to give instructions personally, Spencer finds, at the end of his company’s front, two sentries, exhausted after a day’s fighting (and the evening rum ration), and fast asleep. They could, in theory, be shot for this. Spencer wakes them up with a rough shake and an aside to the reader”–it had been a trying day for all of us–“and continues on his way. The West Yorkshires withdraw, however, only a few hundred yards to the line of battalion HQ, and pass a mostly quiet day. After panicking troops of another regiment give away their position they are strafed by a German plane, and Spencer responds, ineffectually, with a Lewis gun. As night falls they have no idea whether they will retreat again or stand and fight.[4]
It may be worth noting once again that one reason so many of our sources seem to tell the same story is that the German attack was so well-organized that it did indeed produce similar results everywhere–and yet all of our men seem, at least initially, to be in the little salients, the bits that held on for a day or two, and not in the units (the ones always on their flanks) that give way and thus forced our writers’ valiant bands to retreat… why is this? A prejudice for one’s own unit, fed by rumor, is possible; honest mistakes arising from the fog of war are likely, too. But it’s probably also an after-the-fact selection bias: the men in the forward companies and the unfortunate battalions who were overrun by the Germans will play less of a role in their unit histories (if there is any unit left to be written about), and, while prisoners occasionally write memoirs, the dead very rarely do.
Even Herbert Asquith, whose unit held its position until the afternoon, a century back, emphasizes the disbelief of the fighting troops at the comprehensiveness of their defeat. First, though, he testifies once again to his artillery brigade’s stout defense:
Our gunners had now been firing with scarcely any rest since the early morning of the 21st of March, a period of about thirty-six hours: the recoil mechanism of two of the guns had failed and they had now to be run out by hand; for some part of this time our men had been firing in gas-masks; their eyes were inflamed by the gas and by fumes from the breeches, and their faces were lined with fatigue, but after their long endurance their response to our appeal was magnificent. It was a fine spurt at the end of a long race; and the end came before we expected it: while we were still firing to check the advance on the north of the wood, a mounted orderly appeared on our flank galloping up through the smoke. He was narrowly missed by a German shell: his horse started aside, then came on again, and halting behind the battery, he handed us a written order from headquarters to retire to Ham.
Until this point we had thought that we were fighting a delaying action to allow reinforcements time to arrive; we should not have been surprised by an order to retire for half a mile, but as the crow flies, Ham was about seven miles to our rear, and a ten mile march by road.
Such an order as this was entirely beyond our experience; we read it with amazement, and it dawned on us at last that the reinforcements we had imagined were creatures of our own fancy…
The retreat then commences.
This march was a sombre experience. As we rode through Foreste, great shells from the German long-range guns were roaring through the sky and falling on farms and villages far away from the battlefield. There were a number of wounded men walking along the road, and during a short halt I found a medical officer to attend to them; but we could not discover an ambulance, and we were not allowed to hoist them on to our limbers, as we had to be ready to go into action again at (any moment. At Villers St. Christophe a heavy German shell burst near the battery and killed some infantry who were passing the crossroads. In front and on either side of the road farms and steadings had been set on fire, and their smoke rolled upward in dense curling clouds that brooded heavily beneath the low sultry sky.
During one of our halts I was suddenly conscious of intense hunger and realised almost for the first time that during the last forty hours we had had very little to eat. I remembered that somewhere in my pocket was a nugget of chocolate, and in my search for it I found nestling against it my small edition of Pickwick. I ate that worn and rounded nugget with a ravenous appetite, and as for Pickwick, the mere thought of him seemed by Its contrast to add a startling emphasis to the scene that surrounded us.[5]
I don’t know much about the marriage of Cynthia and Herbert Asquith, and I have been following their two accounts for no more than a few months. It’s a memoir and a diary–I don’t what letters passed between them, neither how many nor of what sort. I don’t know the exact shape of her dalliance with (or near-stalking by) Bernard Freyberg; I don’t know what sort of a husband he was… and all of this is special pleading: I am putting Cynthia’s diary–which does not mention her husband–here not to make her seem like a monster, nor to go for the cheap shock of comparison, i.e. she shops while he fights for his life?!?!, etc.
(And besides, what else, after all, was she supposed to do? If she is desperately distracting herself from the consuming anxiety that her beloved husband may be dead or dying, would she write “also, I am rather concerned about Beb?” We could, at least, choose to read ignoring the subject as a preservation mechanism rather than hard-heartedness.)
The future, a century back, may tell us more about what she is feeling…
But anyway, I’m really juxtaposing these two bits, today, because there is a lovely little nugget of hard-bound evidence of married fellow-feeling and shared interest. Though they may be separated by the experiential gulf, one thing, at least, unites them: Beb went into battle with Dickens’s Pickwick in his pocket–perhaps the very book that Cynthia would herself choose for such service.
To Cynthia’s diary, then, at last:
Friday, 22nd March
A day of the most amazing beauty—really hot. Fancy having to seek for shade in March. The spring sparkle in the air was wonderful—it seemed incredible that that hideous tomfoolery in France should be going on under the same sun. Such a day should lead to fraternising between any armies. I had to go and buy a straw hat…
Maud and I shopped together. We jostled against the Prince of Wales who was sauntering down Bond Street all by himself. Went home very tired.
So the staff has abandoned their knick-knacks, and the Prince of Wales saunters in London while his father’s armies reel back in disorder. Asquith plays–for her own entertainment, in her own diary–the crushingly blasé society wit, who can toss off a light remark for the cleverness of it while hundreds of thousands of men fight for their lives.
But of course she’s right: it is hideous tomfoolery.
Finally, however, the double irony. She doesn’t go home to The Pickwick Papers today, a century back, but surges ahead into 20th century English literature instead.
The huge manuscript of Lawrence’s unpublished work called Women in Love had been sent to me and I
began to read it.[6]
If Asquith could be read as making the fairer sex look foul (at least in the manner that Sassoon generally lumps all women into the worst category of profiteers and home-front hypocrites) one of our nurses will shortly ride to the rescue. But it’s not a matter of gender: it’s a matter of that impossible experiential gulf (London cannot be France, and a sunny day cannot share in the horror of battle) and it’s a matter of social class. It’s not the safety or the reading of fancy books or the naughty dropping of phrases such as “tomfoolery” when less fortunate men have been conscripted to die in it…
It’s the sauntering. Or, as it happens, the floating.
Also in London, Duff Cooper–an officer of the Guards, mind you–lingered over lunch at the Cafe Royal, thereby standing up Diana Manners, who waited an hour and a half for him and then cried when he arrived without any plans for an outing. The day–we have confirmation that “it was the most beautiful afternoon imaginable”–was saved by a taxi, a volume of Keats, cakes and preserved pears, and a row in a hired boat on the Serpentine. The two lovers eventually snuggled close, allowing the boat to drift, and together read Isabella “verse by verse–a most memorable afternoon.”
This will be the last entry in Cooper’s diary for quite some time that is not overshadowed by the possibility of immediate deployment. Which would make this idle paddle on the Serpentine, then, the last, most belated afternoon of England’s Last Summer. It’s 1914 in 1918, the day after the trench war ended, the day 20th century open warfare and modern literature began… it’s very symbolic indeed![7]
Last of all, we go back to France, and to Vera Brittain, who got her Romantic poetry-citing out of the way yesterday, when she was stricken by the ominous sight of a tower on the dunes.
I went on duty the next day to find that my light medical hut had been hastily “converted” into a surgical ward during the night. The harassed and bewildered V.A.D. who had taken in the convoy gave me the report. Ten patients, she explained, were for immediate operation; a dozen more were for X-ray; several were likely to haemorrhage at any moment, and others were marked down for visits by specialists No, she was afraid she didn’t know who had had breakfast and who had not, as the orderly was away on picket-duty. Then she departed, leaving me in sole charge of forty desperately wounded men.
Brittain, who, despite her lack of extensive medical training, is by now an experienced nurse, will remember this moment
standing alone in a newly created circle of hell… gazing, half hypnotised, at the dishevelled beds, the stretchers on the floor, the scattered boots and piles of muddy khaki, the brown blankets turned back from smashed limbs bound to splints by filthy blood-stained bandages. Beneath each stinking wad of sodden wool and gauze an obscene horror waited for me — and all the equipment that I had for attacking it in this ex-medical ward was one pair of forceps standing in a potted-meat glass half full of methylated spirit.
For a moment my sword of Damocles, the ever-brooding panic, came perilously near to descending on my head. And then, unexpectedly, I laughed, and the danger disappeared. Triumphantly elated by the realisation that I had once again done it in, I began to indent quite gaily for surgical instruments, tourniquets, bandages, splints, wool, gauze, peroxide, eusol and saline. But I had to bombard the half-frantic dispensary for nearly an hour before I could get my stores, and without them it was impossible even to begin on the dressings. When I returned I found to my relief that a Sister had been sent to help me. Though only recently out from England she was level-headed and competent, and together we started on the daily battle against time and death which was to continue, uninterrupted, for what seemed an eternity.[8]