War's Dark Frame/The Base
CHAPTER XVI
THE BASE
WHATEVER the custom of the Germans, tea wasn't neglected here. After we had visited the other guns we walked, still tingling from the noise, to a hut in which rows of young men sat at a table between lines of cots, laughing and chattering amid a rattle of cups and spoons. A heavily banked bomb-proof was convenient to the entrance.
“And it wouldn't take long to get there," the colonel said grimly.
Two men and a woman stood in the yard of the farm.
“They're not quite so near," I said. "It's like living on a powder magazine."
The colonel nodded.
They're probably doomed. Sooner or later the Huns will get them. What can we do? We can't move them. Truly the French are a wonderful people."
That is the most persistent phrase of this war. The woman waved her hand gaily, wishing us a safe walk, as we started back across the field. We paused at the gate of the colonel's cottage, waiting for the others to come up. A subaltern rounded the hedge.
“Where are the others?" the colonel asked irritably.
"Taking it in a long line, sir," the subaltern said. “It seemed safer that way."
The colonel led me into his dining-room, and, while we waited for the others, ordered tea. Across the wall were spread his range charts and his tir de barrage plan like an architect's blueprint
“It makes an absolute curtain of shells on their trenches," he said. “Where's that tea?"
A private with a startled expression left the room, returning with a huge, blue-patterned tea pot. The others straggled in. We sat down and drank, and ate biscuits, and listened to the gun roar, which, even with the approach of night, scarcely diminished. Suddenly the colonel laughed. He fumbled in his desk and found a clipping from one of London's most revered newspapers.
Seen this, Williams?"
Williams scanned the clipping and passed it on. It was a letter from an officer to his father, reciting a strange ornithological experience in this neighbourhood. During several nights this young man had, he declared, heard shells whistling over his billet. They had, however, been preceded by no sound of guns. Investigation of the ghostly incident had proved that the shell whistling had come from chickens in the yard. These clever birds had after many months learned to imitate precisely the distant passing of shells.
The colonel finished his tea and lighted a cigar.
“We've devised," he said, "a letter which I fancy the editor will have to print or else acknowledge he's been made a fool of."
He found the letter, put on his glasses, and read it with an air of satisfaction.
The army in this section, it regretted, was seriously affected by loss of sleep. The crickets had acquired a most annoying practice of imitating machine guns. Constantly they disturbed rest by firing an apparent salvo in a man's ear. The squirrels made a noise like approaching whiz. bangs. Worst of all, a big bullfrog in a pool near his headquarters had caught the raucous trick of the gas alarm.
"'It's a rare night when he doesn't sit on his bank and call us forth with our masks on. So far he has resisted our best snipers.'"
For a moment in the little room our laughter was louder than the gun mutter. Williams left us to telephone somebody, probably about going back across that naked road. After a long delay word came to him and he said we might leave. We took the road on the run, and through the twilight sped rapidly out of range. When we could no longer see the twin balloons we felt comparatively safe.
The country had a peaceful appearance. As we approached headquarters the sky was grey save for an ugly, dull red splotch in the west. It was like an old blood stain, like a wound in something already dead.
The peace of the château that night was unnatural. From habit we raised our voices. The silence jibed at us.
We drove into one of the great bases the next morning, and there we heard the news. But bigger than the news itself was the manner in which the officers received it. No clearer example of the shift in British psychology could be asked.
A man from the commandant's staff had joined us. We stood in the yard of an ordnance depot. Williams and this man were whispering. Williams' face all at once shared the expression of the other's — something I had appraised at first as a natural surliness. Quickly Williams beckoned me. “We've had a nasty smack in the eye off the coast of Denmark," one of them said.
It was our first word of the great naval battle, that garbled report that indicated a sweeping German victory. It was what the army in the field got, and the army took it as these men took it, with a sullen anger, a fear only that it might lengthen the war. If anything it strengthened the determination in the young faces. It made one feel what a hopeless task it is to try to discourage this growing British army. But the most arresting element was this new willingness to face the hard facts, to polish nothing for themselves or for the stranger within their gates.
Sixteen of our ships gone and only one Hun!" the staff man groaned. “It won't sweep us off the seas, by gad, but it's tough."
One questioned if the heavy fire we had experienced the day before hadn't been the German fashion of expressing joy. If that was so such a celebration wouldn't wear itself out all at once. It made the trip we had arranged for Arras even then less inviting. The day's inspection lost its interest. We went about grumbling.
"When can we get a paper?"
We asked every one we met for papers.
"Transport isn't in yet," was the usual reply. We commenced to ask everybody what time the transport would be in.
Only once that day did the old attitude creep through, and it was properly squelched. We were lunching in the maritime station with the staff. A very nice, elderly officer said pleasantly:
“In my opinion we lost those ships winning a great victory."
"Sixteen to one!" a man scoffed. He turned to me. “Did not one of your politicians win a great victory on those figures?"
"Well," the elderly officer persisted, "we drove them back to their base."
A quiet chorus of protest arose.
The hard facts were stated to him plainly. He subsided, his elderly face a trifle bewildered. Probably he hadn't been here long. Probably he had never been in the trenches. Perhaps he was wondering, too, about the fruits of this new attitude which must certainly grow in economics and politics after the war.
He joined our restlessness, however, when some one entered, saying the transport had been sighted.
The official statements in the first papers we saw were cheering, but by no means all the truth. They made it possible for the officers to glance over the list of birthday honours which were printed that day. They sent us with some interest through the great hangars where provisions and munitions were passed in a constant stream from transport to train. They gave us brcath to exclaim at this minute efficiency which had been developed in two years from almost nothing. It expressed itself most strikingly in a great factory building, once owned by a German.
Endless sacks of flour were lifted to the upper floor on chain elevators. Great soft mattresses of dough flopped down steep slides into the hands of a regiment of bakers, white-clothed, covered with flour, with the appearance of clowns half made up. At the entrance to each room a sergeant would remind us that these comic figures were soldiers, regularly enlisted. He would sing out:
"Bakers! 'Shun!"
And the long, ridiculous lines would stiffen. Only the staff officer's careless "Carry on would send them back to their labour of turning out more than two hundred thousand pounds of bread before night.
Efficiency stared at us from posters which carried minute instructions to be followed in case of an air attack, and about the occupations most peacefully industrial always the tattered garment of war. In a shoe shop thousands of pairs of stumpy, studded black boots busied an army of workers. Rows of shoes dripped oil after their bath to soften the leather.
“You see," the officer in charge explained, " these are all old shoes in process of remaking. Dead men's shoes."
The odour of oil and wet leather was sickening. From the first glimpse you had known what those rows of dripping, studded, stolid boots had reminded you of—boots, too still, on the feet of dead men.
"You see, we don't waste anything," the officer was saying prosaically.
Even among the little children at the Belgian orphilinat where we had tea that afternoon the war dominated. It lurked in the black uniforms, in the young faces where that eternal question was more pitiful than ever, in the heap of hay at the end of the yard which the babies with a perfect seriousness modelled into the semblance of trenches and redoubts.
After dinner that night we heard Williams telephoning in his little room. Afterwards he joined us, laughing with satisfaction.
“Word's come in from General —'s headquarters that Blank has shown up. His parachute was shot so full of holes that it's a wonder it didn't drop him, but the wind carried him inside our lines and he wasn't touched. War's full of miracles. Blessed good thing, too. Blank's a corking good fellow."
We had never seen Blank, but it cheered us somehow a lot to hear him spoken of at last in the present tense.
The prospect of the trip to Arras the next day drove Blank almost immediately into the background. It seemed to be a matter of some doubt. There was a good deal of talk about the city's proximity to the German trenches, about the necessity of walking close to the house walls because the Germans could see down the streets and had the range of each corner. One wondered just what Williams meant when he said:
"It promises to be a pretty interesting programme.
And another encouraged us by adding:
"Oh, you're almost certain to get some shells."