On Monday night the colonel was told that his battalion would be relieved, and managed to send this order to a part of it. It was sent through by various routes, but some men who carried it came back with the news that it was still impossible to get into touch with the companies holding the advanced positions above the Menin road.
In trying to do so they had had astounding escapes. Several of them had been blown as far as ten yards by the air-pressure of exploding shells and had been buried in the scatter of earth.
“When at last my men came back—those of them who had received the order,” said the colonel, “I knew the price of their achievement—its cost in officers and men.” He spoke as a man resentful of that bloody sacrifice.
There were other men still alive and still holding on. With some of them were four young officers, who clung to their ground all through the next night, before being relieved. They were without a drop of water and suffered the extreme miseries of the battlefield.
There was no distinction in courage between those four men, but the greater share of suffering was borne by one. Early in the day he had had his jaw broken by a piece of shell, but still led his men. Later in the day he was wounded in the shoulder and leg, but kept his command, and he was still leading the survivors of his company when he came back on the morning of Tuesday, August 10th.
Another party of men had even a longer time of trial. They were under the command of a lance-corporal, who had gained possession of the stables above the Menin road and now defended their ruins. During the previous twenty-four hours he had managed to send through several messages, but they were not to report his exposed position nor to ask for supports nor to request relief. What he said each time was, “Send us more bombs.” It was only at seven-thirty in the morning of Tuesday, after thirty hours under shellfire, that the survivors came away from their rubbish heap in the lines of death.
So it was at Hooge on that day of August. I talked with these men, touched hands with them while the mud and blood of the business still fouled them. Even now, in remembrance, I wonder how men could go through such hours without having on their faces more traces of their hell, though some of them were still shaking with a kind of ague.
X
Here and there on the roadsides behind the lines queer sacks hung from wooden poles. They had round, red disks painted on them, and looked like the trunks of human bodies after Red Indians had been doing decorative work with their enemy’s slain. At Flixecourt, near Amiens, I passed one on a Sunday when bells were ringing for high mass and a crowd of young soldiers were trooping into the field with fixed bayonets.
A friend of mine—an ironical fellow—nudged me, and said, “Sunday-school for young Christians!” and made a hideous face, very comical.
It was a bayonet-school of instruction, and “O.C. Bayonets”—Col. Ronald Campbell—was giving a little demonstration. It was a curiously interesting form of exercise. It was as though the primitive nature in man, which had been sleeping through the centuries, was suddenly awakened in the souls of these cockney soldier-boys. They made sudden jabs at one another fiercely and with savage grimaces, leaped at men standing with their backs turned, who wheeled round sharply, and crossed bayonets, and taunted the attackers. Then they lunged at the hanging sacks, stabbing them where the red circles were painted. These inanimate things became revoltingly lifelike as they jerked to and fro, and the bayonet men seemed enraged with them. One fell from the rope, and a boy sprang at it, dug his bayonet in, put his foot on the prostrate thing to get a purchase for the bayonet, which he lugged out again, and then kicked the sack.
“That’s what I like to see,” said an officer. “There’s a fine fighting-spirit in that lad. He’ll kill plenty of Germans before he’s done.”
Col. Ronald Campbell was a great lecturer on bayonet exercise. He curdled the blood of boys with his eloquence on the method of attack to pierce liver and lights and kidneys of the enemy. He made their eyes bulge out of their heads, fired them with bloodlust, stoked up hatred of Germans—all in a quiet, earnest, persuasive voice, and a sense of latent power and passion in him. He told funny stories—one, famous in the army, called “Where’s ’Arry?”
It was the story of an attack on German trenches in which a crowd of Germans were captured in a dugout. The sergeant had been told to blood his men, and during the killing he turned round and asked, “Where’s ’Arry? … ’Arry ’asn’t ’ad a go yet.”
’Arry was a timid boy, who shrank from butcher’s work, but he was called up and given his man to kill. And after that ’Arry was like a man-eating tiger in his desire for German blood.
He used another illustration in his bayonet lectures. “You may meet a German who says, ‘Mercy! I have ten children.’ … Kill him! He might have ten more.”
At those training-schools of British youth (when nature was averse to human slaughter until very scientifically trained) one might see every form of instruction in every kind of weapon and instrument of death—machine-guns, trench-mortars, bombs, torpedoes, gas, and, later on, tanks; and as the months passed, and the years, the youth of the British Empire graduated in these schools of war, and those who lived longest were experts in divers branches of technical education.
Col. Ronald Campbell retired from bayonet instruction and devoted his genius and his heart (which was bigger than the point of a
