Death of a Hero (52 page)

A British airplane fell in No Man's Land. Winterbourne saw the pilot, who was still alive, struggle to get from the wreckage. An enemy machine-gun was turned on him, and he fell limp across the side of the cockpit. The plane was smashed to pieces by British heavies to prevent the Germans from obtaining the model.

They shifted to another part of the line. The company were out in No Man's Land in the darkness strengthening their shattered wire against a threatened attack. Suddenly half a mile of German front leaped into a line of flame. There was a whistling roar of projectiles, and a thousand gas-containers crashed to the ground all about them. Men were killed outright by direct hits, and wounded by pieces of flying metal. Every man who took more than two breaths of the deadly concentration was doomed. All that night and far into the misty dawn the stretchers went down the communication trench carrying inert figures with horrible foam on their mouths.

The German attacks spent their force, and the huge Allied counter-attacks began. The starving German armies were hurled back to the Hindenburg Line, their impregnable defence. The Canadians miraculously stormed the Drocourt-Quéant switch line.

Winterbourne was back on the Somme, that incredible desert, pursuing the retreating enemy. They came up the Bapaume-Cambrai road by night, and bivouacked in holes scratched with entrenching tools in the side of a sandy bank. The wrecked countryside in the pale moonlight was a frigid and motionless image of Death. They spoke in whispers, awed by the immensity of desolation. By day the whole landscape was covered with the debris left by the broken German
armies. Smashed tanks, guns with their wheels broken, stood out like fixed wrecks in the unmoving ocean of shell-holes. The whole earth seemed a litter of overcoats, shaggy leather packs, rifles, water-bottles, gas-masks, steel helmets, bombs, entrenching tools, cast away in the panic of flight. By night the sky glowed with the flames of burning Cambrai, with the black hump of Bourlon Hill silhouetted against them.

They drove the Germans from Cambrai, and pressed on from village to village, constantly shelled and harassed by machine-gun fire from their rearguard. The German machine-gunners, fragments of the magnificent armies of the early War years, died at their posts. The demoralized German infantry surrendered wholesale.

For three days in succession Winterbourne's company formed the advance-guard, and he led it in the darkness over unknown ground, by compass-bearing, in a kind of dazed delirium. Pressing on through falling shells in the blank night, with the ever-present dread of falling into a machine-gun ambush, became an agony. They fought their way into inhabited villages, which had been held by the Germans for over four years. The terrified people crouched in cellars or ran distractedly into the fields. They took the village of F—, after a brief but fierce bombardment, an hour after dawn. The roads leading in and out were encumbered with dead Germans, smashed transport, the contorted bodies of dead horses. Dead German soldiers lay about the village street, which was cluttered with fallen tiles and bricks. In a garden a war-demented peasant was digging a grave to bury his wife, who had been killed by a shell-burst. In the ruined village school Winterbourne picked up a book – it was Pascal's
Thoughts on Christianity.

Part of Cambrai had been levelled to the ground in 1914, and stood a melancholy monument of neatly-piled wreckage. Part of the remainder was burned. In the undestroyed streets many houses had been looted. The furniture had been smashed, pictures and photographs torn from the walls, cushions ripped open with bayonets, curtains slashed down, carpets gashed into rags. The whole mass of desecrated objects had been flung into the centre of the floor, after which the Germans had urinated and dropped their excrement upon it. Winterbourne gazed into a dozen houses which had been treated in this way. The villages beyond Cambral had not been sacked, but were utterly filthy and swarming with buzzing legions of flies. Isolated
cottages had sometimes been completely gutted of their contents. In one place Winterbourne found an emaciated Frenchwoman and two starved children living in a cottage with nothing but straw – literally nothing but straw – in the place. He gave them his iron rations and twenty francs. The woman took them with a dull hopelessness.

They were approaching the Belgian border. On the evening of the 3rd of November, Winterbourne with about twenty men rushed into the village of K—, just as the Germans hastily retreated from the other end. He had been ordered to occupy the place if possible, and to arrange billets. He lodged his Company, placed guards and pickets, and then went through the cellars. The Germans were experts in placing booby-traps which would explode if carelessly moved, and Winterbourne did not know whether there might not be men concealed in the cellars to take them unawares. He went down into cellar after cellar with his electric torch, and was soon reassured. The Germans had fled in such haste that they had left their rifles and equipment in several cellars. The floors were strewn with straw. On a table he found a half-finished letter, abandoned in the middle of a sentence. In another a large black dog lay dead – its owner had killed it with a bullet rather than leave it to possible ill-treatment.

The Colonel explained over a map the dispositions for the coming battle. The conference of officers took notes of the orders, which were very elaborate, but precise and clear. It was nearly half-past three when they had finished, and zero hour was six-thirty. Winterbourne had been on foot since five the morning before. His eyes smarted with lack of sleep, and his mind was so dulled that he could scarcely comprehend and write down his orders. He mis-spelled words as he scrawled down notes in shaking, deformed handwriting. He puzzled a long time over map-references, and irritated the Colonel by repeatedly asking questions.

They had an hour or so before they moved out to their battle positions. The other officers hurried away to snatch a little sleep. Winterbourne felt utterly sleepy, but quite unable to sleep. The thought of another battle, even with the dispirited and defeated German rearguard, filled him with shrinking dread. How face another barrage? He tried to write letters to Fanny and Elizabeth, but his mind kept wandering away and he could not collect his thoughts sufficiently
to string together a few banal sentences. He sat on a chair brought him by his servant, with his head in his hands, staring at the straw and the dead black dog. He had only one thought – peace. He must at least have peace. He was at the very end of his endurance, had used up the last fraction of his energy and strength. He wished he was one of the skeletons lying on Hill 91, an anonymous body among the corpses lying outside in the street. He had not even the courage to shoot himself with his revolver; and added that last grain of self-contempt to his despair.

They assembled by platoons in the village street, and each officer marched off in silence to his allotted position. Winterbourne followed with his little knot of Company Headquarters, and saw that each platoon was in its proper place. He shook hands with each officer.

“Quite sure about your orders and objective?”

“Yes.”

“Good – bye.

“Oh, make it
au revoir.
”

“Good – bye.

Winterbourne returned to his own position and waited. He looked at his luminous wrist-watch. Six twenty-five. Five minutes to zero hour. The cold November night was utterly silent. Thousands of men and hundreds of guns were facing each other on the verge of battle, and there seemed not a sound. He listened. Nothing. His runner whispered something to a signaller, who whispered a reply. Three more minutes. Silence. He could feel the beating of his heart, more rapid than the tick of seconds as he held his watch to his ear.

C
RASH
! Like an orchestra at the signal of a baton the thousands of guns north and south opened up. The night sprang to flickering daylight with the gun-flashes, the earth trembled with the shock, the air roared and screamed with shells. Lights rushed up from the German line, and their artillery in turn flamed into action. Winterbourne could just see a couple of his sections advancing as he started off himself, and then everything was blotted out in a confusion of smoke and bursting shells. He saw his runner stagger and fall as a shell burst between them; then his corporal disappeared, blown to pieces by a direct hit. He came to a sunken road, and lay on the verge, trying to see what was happening in the faint light of dawn. He saw only smoke, and pushed on. Suddenly German helmets were all round him. He clutched at his revolver. Then he saw they were unarmed, holding shaking hands above their heads.

The German machine-guns were tat-tat-tatting at them, and there was a ceaseless swish of bullets. He passed the bodies of several of his men. One section wiped out by a single heavy shell. Other men lay singly. There was Jameson, dead; Halliwell, dead; Sergeant Morton, Taylor and Fish, dead in a little group. He came to the main road, which was three hundred yards short of his objective. A deadly machine-gun fire was holding up his Company. The officers and men were lying down, the men firing rifles, and the Lewis guns ripping off drums of bullets. Winterbourne's second runner was hit, and lay groaning:

“Oh, for God's sake kill me,
kill
me. I can't stand it. The agony.
Kill
me.”

Something seemed to break in Winterbourne's head. He felt he was going mad, and sprang to his feet. The line of bullets smashed across his chest like a savage steel whip. The universe exploded darkly into oblivion.

RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE

C
OMMANDEMENT EN CHEF DES ARMÉES ALLIÉES

Quartier Général.

G.Q.G.A., 12. 11. 1918.

OFFICERS, NON-COMMISSOINED OFFICERS, AND MEN OF THE ALLIED ARMIES

After resolutely holding the enemy in check, for months you have repeatedly attacked with unwearied energy and confidence.

You have won the greatest battle in history and saved the most sacred of all causes: the liberty of the world.

You may well be proud.

You have wreathed your colours with immortal fame.

Posterity is grateful to you.

(Signed) F. FOCH,
Marshal of France,
Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Armies.

EPILOGUE

Eleven years after the fall of Troy,

We, the old men – some of us nearly forty –

Met and talked on the sunny rampart

Over our wine, while the lizards scuttled

In dusty grass, and the crickets chirred.

Some bared their wounds;

Some spoke of the thirst, dry in the throat,

And the heart-beat, in the din of battle;

Some spoke of intolerable sufferings,

The brightness gone from their eyes

And the grey already thick in their hair.

And I sat a little apart

From the garrulous talk and old memories,

And I heard a boy of twenty

Say petulantly to a girl, seizing her arm:

“Oh, come away; why do you stand there

Listening open-mouthed to the talk of old men?

Haven't you heard enough of Troy and Achilles?

Why should they bore us for ever

With an old quarrel and the names of dead men

We never knew, and dull forgotten battles?”

And he drew her away,

And she looked back and laughed

As he spoke more contempt of us,

Being now out of hearing.

And I thought of the graves by desolate Troy

And the beauty of many young men now dust,

And the long agony, and how useless it all was.

And the talk still clashed about me

Like the meeting of blade and blade.

And as they two moved further away

He put an arm about her, and kissed her;

And afterwards I heard their gay distant laughter.

And I looked at the hollow cheeks

And the weary eyes and the grey-streaked heads

Of the old men – nearly forty – about me;

And I too walked away

In an agony of helpless grief and pity.