Courcelles and Bus by Frederic Manning

 

Battalion headquarters in Courcelles was in a small chateau, which stood, with its farm buildings, on a little hill practically encircled by a road. On their first morning there, Bourne and Shem, coming from the barn in which they had slept, to get their breakfast from the dixie a few yards away, could see some distance beyond the road the men of a Scots battalion, which was brigaded with them, lined up with their mess-tins waiting for breakfast. As Bourne and Shem were returning to their barn, leaving behind Martlow, who had followed them out, they heard a shell coming, and, as they dived for cover, a terrific explosion. There was a instant’s stillness; and then from across the road shouts and cries. Again a shell whined overhead, and exploded; and then a third. That was apparently the ration. The next moment Martlow, with a white face, appeared in the doorway.

‘Them poor, bloody Jocks,’ he said in a slow, pitiful whisper.

What the casualties were they did not know, though various rumors gave precise, and different, details; one shell did all the damage, the others exploding in an empty field. The sympathy they felt with the Scotsmen was very real; the same thing might so easily have happened to themselves; and as they talked about it, the feeling turned gradually into resentment against an authority which regulated, so strictly, every detail of their daily lives. The shell falling where it did, at that particular time, would probably have caused a certain number of casualties, even if the men had been moving about freely; but this kind of discipline, excusable enough when men have to be kept under control, as with a carrying party lined up at a dump, was unnecessary on this occasion. After all, the place was liable to be shelled at any moment; and for that reason alone, it was wiser to avoid assembling a large number of men at any point. They remembered their own experience at Philosophe.

‘Bloody swank. They don’t care a fuck what ‘appens to us’ns.’ They were angry and restive, as men are who expect that they may be ordered to make an attack at any time. That kind of feeling is not without value as a military asset, provided that behind the discipline against which it is a natural reaction, there is sufficient intelligence and foresight to avoid mistakes. It does a man no harm to know that he may be sacrificed with some definite object in view, it was the kind of hazard which man Lewis-gunners faced continually, with great courage; but no man likes to think that his life may be thrown away wantonly, through stupidity or mere incompetence. Officers and men alike grew careless as they became accustomed to danger, and then an incident of this kind, and event almost inevitable, filled them with surprise.

Whether it was justified or not, however, the sense of being at the disposal of some inscrutable power, using them for its own ends, and utterly indifferent to them as individuals, was perhaps the most tragic element in the men’s present situation. It was not much use telling them that war was only the ultimate problem of human life stated barely, and pressing for immediate solution. When each individual conscience cried out for its freedom, that implacable thing said: ‘Peace, peace: your freedom is only in me!’ Men recognized the truth intuitively, even with the their reason checking at a fault. There was no man of them unaware of the mystery which encompassed him, for he was part of it; he could neither separate himself entirely from it, nor identify himself with it completely. A man might rave against war; but war, from, among its myriad faces, could always turn towards him one which was his own. All this resentment against officers, against authority, meant very little, even to the men themselves. It fell away from them in words .  .  .


They moved back to Bus in the afternoon, marching through fine, steady rain. Days passed, and the weather showed no signs of mending: as they settled down to the routine of a battalion holding the line, the attack, without fading from their minds, no longer seemed and imminent trial, becoming only a vague probability of the future. It had certainly been delayed. The colors with which they had been so gaily bedecked became a little dingy. Their life was now one un-resting struggle against the encroaching mud, which threated to engulf roads and trenches in liquid ruin. Daily, when out of the line, they were sent off with shovels and brooms to sweep it off  the roadway, and shovel it up as a kind of embankment against the barns and stables bordering the road. What was too liquid to heap up, they trapped in sumps. A man pushing a broom through it would find two converging streams closing behind him. A train of limbers or lorries passing seemed to squeeze it up out of the road-metaling. Earth extrude mud. Most of it had the consistency of thin cream, and threatened, if it were neglected for a moment, to become tidal. They had to scrape it from their puttees and trousers with their jack-knives, and what was left hardened the serge to cardboard. When they became dry they were beaten against the corner of a hut, and dust flew from them; but that was seldom. In the line there were trenches tat could only be kept clear by pumping. Sometimes the frost would congeal the mud, and then a quick thaw would cause part of the trench to slide in, and it had to be built up again: sand-bagged and revetted.  They became almost indistinguishable from the mud in which they lived.

The weather grew colder too, and they wore their cardigans; then leather jerkins, lined with fleeces or thick serge, were issued to them, and in the resulting warmth the lice increased and multiplied beyond imagining. It was some weeks before they could get a bath; and then necessarily it was makeshift. Half a company stood under trickling showers, while the other half-company pumped up water outside, and when the men were covered with a lather of soap the water invariably failed.

The strange thing was that the greater the hardships they had to endure, for wet and cold bring all kinds of attendant miseries in their train, the less they grumbled. They became a lot quieter and more reserved in themselves, and yet the estaminets would be swept by roaring storms of song. It may have been a merely subjective impression, but it seemed that once they were in the front line, men lost a great deal of their individuality; their characters, even their faces, seemed to become more uniform; they worked better, the work seeming to take some of the strain off their minds, the strain of waiting. It was perhaps that they withdrew more into themselves, and became a little more diffident in the matter of showing their feelings.

Actually, though the pressure of external circumstances seemed to wipe out individuality, leaving little if any distinction between man and man, in himself each man became conscious of his own personality as of something very hard, and sharply defined against a background of other men, who remained merely generalized  as ‘the others.’ The mystery of his own being increased for him enormously; and he had to explore that doubtful darkness alone, finding a foothold here, and hand hold there, grasping one support after another and relinquishing it when it yielded, crumbling; the sudden menace of ruin, as it slid into an insubstantial past, calling forth another effort, to gain another precarious respite. If a man could not be certain of himself, he could be certain of nothing.

The problem which confronted them all equally, though some were unable or unwilling to define it, did not concern death so much as the affirmation of their own will in the face of death; and once the nature of the problem was clearly stated, they realized that its solution was continuous, and could never be final. Death set the limit to the continuance of one factor in the problem, and peace to that of the of another; but neither of them really affected the nature of the problem itself.

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Bourne sometimes wondered how far a battalion recruited mainly from London, or from one of the provincial cities, differed from his own, the men of which came from farms, and, in lesser measure, from mining villages of no great importance. The simplicity of their outlook on life gave them a certain dignity, because it was free from irrelevances. Certainly they had all the appetites of men, and, in the aggregate, probably embodied most of the vices to which flesh is prone; but they were not preoccupied with their vices and appetites, they could master them with rather splendid indifference; and even sensuality has is aspects of tenderness. These apparently rude and brutal natures comforted, encouraged and reconciled each other  to fate, with a tenderness and tact which was more moving than anything in life. They had nothing; not even their own bodies, which had become the mere implements of warfare. They turned from the wreckage and misery of life to an empty heaven, and from an empty heaven to the silence of their own hearts. They had been brought to the last extremity of hope, and yet they put their hands on each other’s shoulders and said with passionate conviction that it would be all right, though they had faith in nothing but in themselves and each other.