Let’s begin today with Kate Luard, who arrived in Amiens last night after a hasty evacuation. At first Luard and the other nurses went with their wounded to a last-minute ambulance train (she brought a bag of morphia and hypodermics to administer during the stops), but they were then picked up by cars and sent on ahead. The convoy had to wait outside Amiens while the city was bombed by German aircraft–surely not a good sign.
Sunday, March 24th. The Stationary Hospital people here (Amiens) were extraordinarily kind and gave us each a stretcher, a blanket and a stretcher-pillow in an empty hut. They had not the remotest idea they would be on the run themselves in a day or two.
We had tea and bread and butter and laid our tired heads and bones down at 1.30 a.m., and slept till early this morning when we woke shivering with the cold. After a hot wash in the Padre’s room and a topping
breakfast of fried eggs, 20 went off on a train to Abbeville and the rest go with me to-night, arriving there in the small hours. I went to High Mass at the Cathedral at 10.30 and had a good rest. ‘That Cathedral has just rested my soul,’ said my Scotch Sister, coming in hot and weary from the town. So it has mine… [1]
But it’s not all fried eggs and stained glass in other areas of the collapsing British rear. Jack Martin‘s tale of chaos at Achiet-le-Grand is not as bad as Eric Linklater’s scene of a firefight between Canadians and M.P.s, but it’s surely bad enough. Achiet is on the Arras front, quite close to Bapaume, captured at such cost that it was rhymed into Sassoon’s most violent anti-civilian fantasy. It has been held by the British for a year, and was the site of a large canteen…
The Corporal in charge had taken all the money and hurried back… In a very short time it was utterly ransacked… We were among the less fortunate in the scramble but some of our fellows brought back two cases of whisky and numerous boxes of biscuits and cigarettes.
They retreat again as German shells begin falling where they had spent the night…[2]
Henry Williamson, who is always careful to make Phillip Maddison’s experiences sketch the outlines of the major histories, confirms today’s theme. By the end of the day Maddison and “his” battalion of ‘Gaultshires’ have retreated to the edge of the 1916 Somme battlefield: all the gains of 1917 have been lost in three days.
After taking up a line in Railway Wood, they receive the order to “hold on at all costs.” But this is only rhetoric. When, late at night, it becomes clear that their left flank has once again been overrun by the German advance, Phillip decides that he needs actual tactical advice. He decides to go, accompanied only by his orderly and leaving his second-in-command in charge of the battalion, and find “Spectre” West in the hope of receiving orders more attuned to his actual situation…[3]
By tonight, a century back, Rowland Feilding‘s battalion had reached Sailly Lorette,
an old-fashioned and picturesque village, perched on the slope and summit of the steep escarpment which here forms the northern bank of the Somme, and, in less disturbed times, no more attractive place could be desired for tired troops to billet in.[4]
But these are more disturbed times, and Feilding’s assignment is to guard the local bridges over the Somme against any German cavalry or vanguard forces… and then make sure they are destroyed once the British withdrawal is complete.
One of the units yet to withdraw behind a defensible line is Isaac Rosenberg‘s 1st King’s Own. They, too, had been in the rear–in reserve–but the front line found them yesterday, a century back. They seem to have taken heavy casualties, because they were once again pulled back into reserve. This time they are only just behind the line, close enough to “stand to” at dawn in anticipation of a breakthrough.[5]
Two more autobiographical notes will complete our survey, before we end on a painful note of (fictional) desperation.
Eric Linklater has barely arrived at the front before his battalion, too, is nearly caught.
That night we were almost surrounded. There was a dramatic order — whispered, not shouted — to move by sections, at speed, but with all possible quietness. There was a brooding, tense excitement till the sky lightened and we saw, in the dimness of dawn, what seemed to be open, unoccupied and unperturbed fields in front of us. But immediately ahead lay a sunken road, and the first men who tried to cross it were shot down by fire from two German machine-guns whose gunners lay on the road perhaps a hundred yards away, to the right.
There was, momentarily, some consternation. But suddenly a dark-haired, thin-faced little corporal–his name I
forget, but I shall call him Alexander–jumped down to the road with a Lewis gun, and opened counter-fire with his lighter weapon. His nerve was steadier than the Germans’, he found a better aim, and killed or disabled both their gun-crews. Hastily, behind him, we crossed that treacherous road, and for an hour or two continued, unimpeded, our retreat.[6]
And Herbert Asquith, too, must withdraw. Despite the deadliness of machine guns in a fortified landscape, things have opened up enough that we are almost back to the days of cavalry charging through to the artillery, and infantry coming up behind to spike the guns…
Just before dawn on the 24th we moved to a position behind Esmery Hallon. About 7.30 a.m. the Germans
again began to advance covered by great numbers of machine guns and mortars, the tapping and chattering of separate guns being completely lost in the general volume of lashing sound which came out of the mist
in front of us…Some of our shells were set at fuze “0”, so as to burst near the muzzle in case the Germans tried to rush the guns. After continuing in action for two or three hours we again got orders to retire…
During these engagements, though our troops were feeling the shortage of rations, an even more important factor both for ourselves and the enemy was want of sleep. On the march to Ercheu we found a number of exhausted infantry lying prone on the grass by the side of the road; the German guns were in action, and many shells were falling near at hand, but the explosions did not seem to have the least effect on their slumbers. Some of us dismounted from our horses and tried to rouse them, but the sleep that drugged them was that of utterly weary men; it was so profound that it was almost impossible to wake them, and when at last we succeeded, I felt no confidence that they would be able to keep their eyes open for more than a few minutes…
The morale of the men was excellent and so it continued: the main danger was not the loss of morale, but the dull weight of physical fatigue which pressed more and mote heavily on the troops from day to day and from hour to hour…
When night came, we bivouacked in the open, and had just sat down, ravenously hungry, to our meagre meal of hard biscuit and a fragment of bully beef, when an orderly came trotting up through the shell-fire mounted on a tired and labouring horse.I glanced at a bulging bag that was slung over his shoulder and asked him what he had brought, “It’s the mail, Sir,” he said in a matter-of-fact voice, as though it were the most natural thing in the world that when the infantry were short of ammunition, and everyone was short of rations, the post should nevertheless arrive with due punctuality and in the middle of a moving battle should find its right destination. There was an exclamation from Tom, one of my brother officers, as he opened a parcel and exposed to our hungry eyes the neat rotund form of a haggis.
Tom, with his usual quixotism, insisted that we should all have a share of it, and I’m afraid his proposal was met with a very light resistance. The portions, when equally divided, were not large, but they were a luxury impossible to forget; some people dislike the name of haggis, others dislike its taste; I never had a great leaning to it before, but since that evening I have regarded it with an almost superstitious veneration.[7]
But this is not a day to end on a light (if stomach-turning) note. Instead, we turn to A.D. Gristwood’s grim–and, I think we can say, courageous–explication of the mind of a man overwhelmed by the war. “The Coward” and his battalion have been hunkered in the line on the far southern end of the offensive. For three days long days they waited their turn–but nothing happened. Then–this would seem to be last night, a century back, in the novella’s chronology–there is an emotional contact across the gulf, and it’s enough to sunder this soldier from his comrades and from any sense of duty that might keep him in his position. He hates the war, he thinks it madness, and he is stewing in his self-doubt and self-hatred and at the same time asserting his right to self-determination. Why should he be here? Doesn’t his family need him more than the army does?
The drowning man clutched at every straw.
But that evening I had received a letter from home, full of hopeful looking forward and eager prayers for present safety. Enclosed were some of the first flowers of spring — primroses, early violets and a sprig of rosemary. ‘There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts…’
In the intensity of my longing for the peace of the English countryside I lost all shame at leaving my companions.
So, in the early morning hours of today, a century back, the barrage picks up–the attack at last. The unnamed protagonist of this unhappy, difficult little book sneaks out into an empty fire bay and shoots himself in the left hand. He misses his aim, leaving a shallow, bloody groove. So he shoots again, “plumb through the centre of the palm. A bone snapped with a jerk and a sickening stab of pain.”
He is brave now, with the action begun–brave enough for that second shot, and to improvise when he realizes that the blackening of the wound will make it clear that he was shot at extreme close range. He conceals the wound, pretends to have forgotten his rifle, then pretends to have been hit by a shrapnel burst on his way out to retrieve it.
He is sure he will be recognized for what he is–a coward and an S.I.W. (self-inflicted wound), liable to ignominy and a death sentence. But he gets instead sympathy and a field dressing, and then he must face his fears after all: there is a long walk to the aid post through the German barrage.
Which he survives, at lest until he takes shelter in a signalers’ dugout part of the way back. There he spends the day–terrified, in pain, but happy (if that’s the right word) to have escaped worse, so far.[8]