A Fox Under My Cloak Read online

  The battalion turned off at a lesser lane about two kilometres beyond the village, and they saw the wooded slopes of Mont Kemmel rising dark against the hesitant paleness of the eastern sky. The muddy lane led under the hill through Kemmel village to cross-roads, and a wider tram-lined road leading to a distant line of flares rising along the crest of the Wytschaete-Messines ridge, of Hallo’e’en memory.

  A little way on the pavé route they halted; and with relief Phillip learned that No. 1 Company was to be billeted for the night in some sheds and lofts around a farm. Here speculation ceased, when Sergeant Douglas told them that they were taking over part of the line the next day. The Germans, he said, had attacked down south, and the battalion was to remain in support while diversionary attacks were made to relieve the pressure.

  This was cheerful news to Phillip, heard as he rested with others staring at smoky coal flames behind the wall of a farm outbuilding, where black-faced, sweating cooks stirred dixies of skilly. While they stood there, enjoying drowsy warmth, a great white flash followed by a double crack smote them. Some of the draft flinched. Phillip was also startled, but he knew it for a sixty-pounder gun firing down the road.

  “Don’t get the wind up,” he said to Glass, one of his four friends of the draft. “It’s one of our naval guns, a Long Tom, by the double report. They fire lyddite shells, which burst with a sort of nitro-di-oxide smell, a brown-yellow smoke—usually in our own trenches.” He was quite the old soldier.

  *

  In the morning the villages of Wytschaete and Messines were visible at the end of the tree-lined road, about a couple of miles away, at the end of a long and gradual slope. Phillip stared at the scene of the first acceptance, in battle, that life was become nightmare. The remote skyline villages seemed to have an everlasting remoteness. Somewhere up there lay his friends of the old August days in Charterhouse Square and Bleak Hill, of the time on lines of communication outside Paris in September, and Orleans in October. Baldwin, Elliott, Costello, the Iron Colonel, the three Wallace brothers—all lay up there. He thought back to the day and the night of Hallo’e’en, reliving moments which in memory were without fear, only of deep sadness that they were gone.

  But it was a sunny day; when he looked around him again, he felt hopeful. And with hope was curiosity; he wanted to see everything he could about the war. So down he walked to look at the long slender gun on straked iron wheels, half concealed in a cart-shed beside a cottage, that had fired while they were waiting for the skilly. The gunners told him that they fired only twice every twenty-four hours, usually in the evening, to catch the Alleyman horse transport coming along the road from Warneton. They were still limited to two rounds a day, a bombardier said.

  From the gun he walked on down the lane to look at the lines of mules belonging to Indian soldiers in an orchard. The bark of the trees was gnawn away, with hundreds of tooth-marks nearly an inch wide. The bearded soldiers wore pale blue turbans. They looked, he thought, cold and disheartened, like the mules on the picket line. It seemed a bit of a shame to have brought the Indians to France, when they belonged to a hot country; and the mules too, that had Spanish blood. He decided to be affable to one of the pale Indians.

  “You one-feller, you come from Orleans? Base wallahs, eh? Me help makee your camp, carry wood all day, knock knock wash-house up, savvy?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the Indian soldier, gravely. “We were at Orleans, but for a few days only.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Phillip, and giving the grave one a little salute, he went back to his platoon.

  *

  The damp December dusk was closing down as they approached the dark, still mass of leafless tress; and filed towards the edge of a wood. Then a novel kind of path began, firm but nobbly to the feet, but so welcome after the mud of the preceding field. The path was like walking on an uneven and wide ladder. The rough rungs, laid close together, were made of little sawn-off branches, nailed to laid trunks of trees. As they went nearer the flares, bullets began to crack. He found that he, like the new draft, was ducking, as during the first time under fire. But soon he grew accustomed to the cracks, and walked on upright.

  They came to a cross-ride in the wood and waited there, near some bunkers in which braziers glowed brightly. The sight was cheering. Figures in balaclavas stood about. “What’s it like, mate?” he asked. “Cushy,” came the reply, as a cigarette brightened. These were regulars; he felt happy again. Braziers, lovely crackling coke flames!

  They filed on down the corduroy path, and came to the edge of the wood, beyond which the flares were clear and bright, like lilies. The trench was just inside the wood. There was no water in it; he saw sandbag dugouts behind the occupants standing-to for the relief. It was indeed cushy.

  Thus began a period or cycle of eight days for No. 1 Company: two in the front line followed by two back in battalion reserve in billets, two in support in the wood, and two more again in the front line. It was not unenjoyable: the danger negligible—a shell arriving now and again—subject more of curiosity than of fear—news of someone getting sniped; work in the trench, digging by day, revetting the parapet and fatigues in the wood by night: for the weather was fine. One trench, called Birdcage Walk, had a beautifully made parapet with steel loop-holes built in; and was paved along a length of fifty yards entirely by unopened tins of bully beef, taken from some of the hundreds of boxes lying about in the wood. These boxes had been chucked away by former carrying parties, in the days before corduroy paths. The trench had been built by the Grenadiers, now no longer bearded, though some of their toes were showing through their boots; it was said among the London Highlanders that a cigarette-end, dropped anywhere in it, while the Bill Browns were in, was a “crime”, heavily punished. Phillip said it seemed rather awful, to be treated like that. “It’s the form,” remarked Church, and he wondered what Church meant.

  *

  All form, and shape even, of the carefully-made trenches disappeared under the rains falling upon the yellow clay which retained them. Phillip was soaked all day and all night; the weight of his greatcoat was doubled with clay.

  After the rain, mists lay over a countryside that had no soul, with its broken farmhouse roofs, dead cattle in No Man’s Land, its daylight nihilism beyond the parapet, with never a movement of life, never a glimpse of a German; except those that were dead, and lying motionless, in varying attitudes of complete stillness, day after day upon the level brown field extending to the yellow subsoil parapet of the German trench behind its barbed-wire fence.

  At night mists blurred the brightness of the light-balls, the Véry lights or flares as they were now generally called; the mists, hanging heavier in the woods, settled to hoar, which rimed trees and duck-boards and tiles of shed and barn and clarified a keener air in cheerful sunlight. Frost formed floating films of ice upon the clay-blue water in the shell-holes, which tipped when mess-tins were dipped for brewing the daily ration of tea mixed with sugar. It was pleasant in the wood, squatting by a little stick fire. Movement was laborious now upon the paths not yet laid with corduroy; boots became pattened with yellow clay. Still, it might be worse—memory of the tempest that had fallen on the last day of the battle for Ypres, of the misery of cold and wet, was still in the fore-front of Phillip’s mind.

  Chapter 2

  REALITY AND APPEARANCES

  ONE evening, when the company was in the half-finished support line, called Princes Street, a harder frost settled upon the battlefield. By midnight trees, bunkers, paths, sentries’ balaclavas and greatcoat shoulders, were thickly rimed. From some of the new men in Phillip’s bunker came suppressed whimpering sounds; only those older soldiers, who had scrounged sandbags and straw from Inniskilling Farm at one edge of the wood, and put their feet inside, lay still and sleeping. Lying with his unprotected boots outside the open end, Phillip endured the pain in his feet until the moment of final agony, when he got up and hobbled outside. He would make a fire, and boil his mess-tin for some Nestlé’s café-au-l
ait. There were many shell-fractured oak branches lying about; they were heavy with frozen sap, but no matter. He passed the hours of painful sleeplessness in blowing and fanning the weak embers amidst the hiss of bubbling branch-ends. As soon as he sat still, or stood up to beat his arms, the weak red glow went dull. His eyes smarted with smoke; there was no flame, unless he fanned all the time. Move he must; his arms were heavy in the frozen greatcoat sleeves; while the skirts, mud-slabbed, were hard as boards. He set off upon a slow stumbling walk, his senseless feet like wooden props taking the shocks on the hard corrugated surface of the path. Hardly knowing where he was going (for the pain of the pierced nerves of his hands was multiplied with movement) suddenly he came across what seemed to be a little paradise, the glowing coke-brazier in the doorway of the signallers’ bunker at Battalion Headquarters; and peering in, was told that he looked like Jack Frost. After twenty minutes’ jumping about outside, the pains abated; and he crept in, the ice in his greatcoat creaking and crackling as he sat down.

  After struggling against a desire to sleep as he warmed his hands at the pink-blue brazier flames before the gap in the blanket-hung entrance of the signallers’ bunk—each company in the line had its morse buzzer—he saw what looked like a tobacconist’s shop, at least along one wall, on shelves fixed into the sandbags. Surely the signallers weren’t hoping to sell that tobacco, with so much already lying about in the wood?

  From talk at the Ration Dump on the road outside the wood, where the battalion wagons unloaded and returned (lucky devils) to their farmhouse two miles back, Phillip had learned that A.S.C. lorry drivers were selling hundreds of thousands of packets of cigarettes of every description to Belgian and French civvies of the towns along the supply route. A great quantity of tobacco was being sent at this time duty-free from England to the British Expeditionary Force. Many Comfort Funds for the Troops had been started by newspapers. As Christmas approached, “Smokes for Tommy” arrived in such bulk that the daily ration for each man was said to be anything between two and five thousand cigarettes a day, or a pound of pipe tobacco, or both. Carrying parties on the icy corduroy paths cursed the extra weights of wooden boxes. Scores of such boxes containing cigarettes, or air-tight tins of leaf tobacco, were lying about in the wood.

  “How about a cup of cocoa, old boy?” said Journend, one of the signallers. Journend was in the Guarantee Department at Head Office. It seemed paradise to Phillip to be able to live, and sleep, in such a bunker. There was straw on the floor, a hanging hurricane lamp, and magazines which made it seem wonderfully home-like. If only he had volunteered for the section when at Bleak Hill! But in those days semaphore flag-wagging and heliograph signalling in the sun had seemed pretty dull.

  He sipped the thick hot liquid, sweet with condensed milk, offered to him in an enamel mug, while listening to Journend telling him that the section was collecting tins and packets of tobacco, of which two kinds of each brand were ranged on the shelves put up against the wall, resting on German bayonets.

  “Let me know if you come across any unusual brands.”

  “Yes, I will, certainly.”

  Phillip looked at them, remembering when he had bought his first pipe, a huge curved Artist’s, under the arches of London Bridge Station; and how he had been unable to choose a tobacco, not knowing one from another. Here, in the bunk, were more kinds than he had ever seen or heard of before. Sweet Briar Flake, Black Bell Shag, Three Feathers, Walnut Plug, Juggler, Battle Axe Sliced Bar, Coral Flake, Winner Shag Blue Label, Tarn o’ Shanter, Castle Honeydew, Bulwark Cut Plug, Baby’s Bottom—what a name to give it!—Bogie Roll, Heather Bell, Dandy—he had to fight to keep his eyes open—then the trade marks of various firms on the labels: tortoise of Churchman, two boars’ heads for Hignett Bros.—dear old Hignett’s Cavalier, Mr. Howlett the manager upstairs in his office smoking away, and Mr. Hollis the chief clerk once saying to him as he came down the lead stairs, pipe in mouth, “Hi, no smoking in office hours!”

  He jerked his head upright again, rubbed his eyes. Adkin & Son had three tobacco leaves; Wills a capstan; Mitchell a lurcher dog under a tree; Clarke & Son a lark inside the letter C and a smaller e added.

  His Civic pipe, what had happened to it? Was it still lying in l’Enfer wood, where he had flung it that morning, in panic as they advanced to the crest of Messines, clearing his pockets for cartridges? Had a German found it, and kept it as a souvenir of one of the “ladies from Hell”? It was a startling thought: that a German would want a souvenir of an Englishman.

  “Hi! old boy, this isn’t Wine Vaults Lane! You can’t doss here! Maddison! Wake up! Don’t fall asleep!”

  “Who? Me? I wasn’t asleep, honestly!”

  “Well, you were snoring pretty loudly, old boy! I could hardly hear the buzzer. Sorry, but it’s against orders to let anybody except the battalion runners in.”

  “Oh, I see. Well, thanks for the cocoa. I’ll stand you a café-rhum in the Rossignol, next time. Honestly, though, I wasn’t asleep.”

  He crawled out of the bunker, and was once again in frore air, bullets smacking through trees spicket and sparket with frost. Returning to the smouldering fire, he sat over it and fanned little flames from it, his eyes red and smarting with smoke, until the morning came. When at last he got up, his water-bottle was felt to be frozen solid. Later, when thawed out over a brazier, it leaked, being split; but there were many lying about in the wood, with rifles and other equipment.

  *

  The march back to reserve in the starry darkness of the next night, despite the fatigue of carrying R.E. duckboards all day, was made contentedly. They were going out! Their billets were in a village a mile behind the front line, in a row of cottages, each with a stove in its front room, and a dry brick floor. Oh blessed hour, candle-lit supper at a table, parcels and letters to open!

  With others of his section in the billet, Phillip slept till midday; spent the afternoon cleaning up: puttees hung up to dry with greatcoats; shaving; and after pay-parade, when they received the usual five-franc note, marched to the brewery for a bath and change of small clothes. They undressed chirpily in a grain-drying loft, slats open to the wind; hopped naked down wooden steps to the ground floor where into big round mash tubs hot water gushed from pipes. It was rather fun to be ten in a tub at once, to run about afterwards, drying and playing jokes. Then into clean underwear, shirts and hose, their kilts and tunics meanwhile having been ironed, to kill lice.

  Outside, the Belgian brewer scowled, beside the mayor wearing cocked hat and sash. The water had been heated, the tubs used without his permission. But a salvo of 5.9 shells bursting two hundred yards away made them retreat. And they needn’t have worried; the brewery was rubble before very long.

  Clean all over, No. 1 Company marched back, content with life, but no longer singing the songs of the old battalion, or any songs at all; the old careless gaiety remained on the crest of Messines, in the Brown Wood Line, in the woods near Gheluvelt. But one thing helped the heart to open, the cheer to fly from the throat—the sight of a slim and boyish figure in the Grenadier uniform, looking the more slight in riding breeches, puttees, and spurs, instead of the regulation knickerbockers. Service cap set at a slight angle on his head, walking stick in hand, H.R.H. the Prince of Wales took the salute at attention; a smile was on his face as he was cheered by the marching London Highlanders who had passed him unexpectedly in the street.

  *

  Some speculation—coming, as from most rumours among the infantry, from indirect hope—arose in the platoon when knee-length goat’s-skin coats were issued. Did it mean that the battalion was to be turned into an Officers’ Training Corps? That there would be no more attacks until, at least, the Spring? The jerkins had broad tapes which cross-bound the white and yellow hairy skins against the chest and round the waist. Balaclava helmets of thick dark wool, folded well down over the ears, were the thing to wear with the goat-skins; one could please oneself. Officers and men looked alike, except for the expression on an off
icer’s face, and the fact that an officer appeared to stand more upright, an effect given, perhaps, by the shoulder-high thumb-sticks of ash many of them walked about with.

  The senior officers now wore Norwegian-type knee-boots, laced to the knee and then treble-strapped, Phillip noticed with envy. He thought about asking his father to send him out a pair, when a thaw came in the third week of December; and the misery of mud returned. And then, with a jump of concealed fear, orders were read out for an attack, on the 19th, two days after the new moon. The company lay out at the edge of the wood, shivering and beating aching hands and feet, in support to a regular battalion’s assault on a cottage in No Man’s Land called Sniper’s House and a section of German trench that enfiladed the dreaded and dangerous Diehard T-trench. The assault of muttering and tense-faced bearded men took place under a serried bank of bursting red stars of shrapnel, and supporting maxim-gun fire: figures floundering across the root-field, with its sad decaying lumps that were dead cows and men. Hoarse yells of fear become rage arose; while short of, into, and beyond the British front line dropped shell after shell to burst with acrid yellow fumes of lyddite—from the Long Toms of the Boer War, whose rifling was worn.

  The survivors, coming back through the wood, wet through and covered with mud, their uniforms ripped by barbed-wire, were singing as they passed the London Highlanders. When they had gone—away from the line, death behind them—a clear baritone voice floated back through the trees, singing “Oh, for the wings, for the wings of a dove—far away, far would I rove”. They were wonderful, remarked Sergeant Douglas, the rugger-playing Old Blue. Yes, because they were going out, thought Phillip; they were marching away from death, to warmth and sleep. The local attack had failed before the uncut German wire; but Sniper’s House was taken.