Carleton Case - Stories from the Trenches - Humorous and Lively Doings of Our 'Boys Over There'

There are some rare creatures who are built that way. Shortly afterward he was wounded again, and while walking to the dressing station was wounded a third time, on this occasion very badly.

He stuck it at the hospital as long as he could – then one day he disappeared. No one saw him go. He had got out, borrowed a horse, and ridden back to his lines.

The absence of the fighting men from the view of an observer of a modern battle strongly impressed the writer, who says:

Most men who come upon a modern battle for the first time would confess to finding it not what they expected. For the old accepted idea of battle is hard to eliminate. One has become accustomed to looking for great arrays of fighters ready for the bout, with squadrons of cavalry waiting somewhere beyond a screen of trees, and guns – artfully hidden guns – bellying smoke from all points of the compass. The battle pictures in our galleries, the lead soldiers we played with as children and engaged in visible conflict, have kept up the illusion.

You know before you come to it that it is not so in this war, but this battle of hidden men pulls you up with a jolt as not being quite what you expected to see. You feel almost as if you had been robbed of something.

The first battle I saw on the western front I watched for two and a half hours, and during that time (with the exception of five men who debouched from a distant wood like five ants scuttling out of a nest of moss, to be promptly shot down) I did not see a man at all. The battle might have been going on in an enormous house and I standing on the roof trying to see it.

But if there is little or nothing to be seen of the human agents that direct the devastating machines of war during a battle, the scene of the field after the fight has been waged discloses all the horror that has not been visible to the eye of an observer. Mr. Flower thus describes one section of the theater of war in France:

Our car rushes down a long descending road, and is driven at breakneck speed by one of those drivers with which the front is strewn, who are so accustomed to danger that to dance on the edge of it all the time is the breath of life. To slow down to a rational thirty miles an hour is to them positive pain; to leap shell holes at fifty or plow across a newly made road of broken brick at the same velocity is their ecstasy. And one of the greatest miracles of the war is the cars that stand it without giving up the unequal contest by flying into half a hundred fragments.

But this road is tolerable even for a war road, and it runs parallel with a long down which has been scrabbled out here and there into patches of white by the hands of men. It is Notre Dame de Lorette, no higher than an average Sussex down, mark you, and lower than most. Yet I was told that on this patch of down over a hundred thousand men have died since the war began. Running at right angles at its foot is a lower hill, no higher than the foothill to a Derbyshire height, but known to the world now as Vimy Ridge. And this road leads you into a small section of France, a section of four square miles or so, every yard of which is literally soaked with the blood of men.

On the right is Souchez, and the wood of Souchez all bare stumps and brokenness; here the sugar refinery, which changed hands eight times, and is now no more than a couple of shot-riddled boilers, tilted at odd angles with some steel girders twirled like sprung wire rearing over them; and around this conglomeration a pile of brick powder. You wonder what there was here worth dying for, since a rat would fight shy of the place for want of a square inch of shelter. And where is Souchez River? you ask, for Souchez River is now as famous as the Amazon. Here it is, a sluggish sort of brook, crawling in and out of broken tree-trunks that have been blasted down athwart it, running past banks a foot high or so, a river you could almost step across, and which would be well-nigh too small to name in Devonshire.

We leave our cars under a bank and come on down through the dead jetsam of the village of Ablain St. Nazaire. The old church is still here on the left, the only remnant of a respectable rate-paying hamlet. The remaining portion of its square tower is clear and white, for the stonework has been literally skinned by flying fragments of steel, till it is about as clean as when it was built.

We reach the foot of Vimy Ridge and climb up. Here, some one told me, corn once grew, but now it is sodden chalk, pasted and mixed as if by some giant mixing machine with the shattered weapons of war.

Broken trenches – the German front line – in places remain and extend a few yards, only to disappear into the rubble where the tide swept over them.

As we climb, the earth beneath my foot suddenly gives way, letting me down with a jerk to the hip, and opening up a hole through which I peer and see a dead Boche coiled up, his face – or so I suspect it was – resting upon his arm to protect it from some oncoming horror.

We climb on up. We drop into pits and grope out of them again, pasted with the whiteness of chalk. From somewhere behind us a howitzer is throwing shells over our heads, shells that come on and pass with the rush of a train pitching itself recklessly out of control. We listen to the clamor as it goes on – a couple of miles or so – separating itself from the ill assortment of snarling and smashing and breaking and grunting that rises from the battlefield.

As they climbed the ridge the guns seemed to be muffled until they got beyond the shelter of Notre Dame de Lorette. Then, says the writer:

We suddenly appeared to tumble into a welter of sound. And the higher we climbed Vimy, the louder the tumult became. “Aunty,” throwing over heavy stuff, had but a few moments before been the only near thing in the battle. Now the contrast was such as if we had been suddenly pushed into the middle of the battle. The air was full of strange, harsh noises and crackings and cries. And the earth before us was alive with subdued flame flashes and growing bushes of smoke.

Five miles away, Lens, its church spires adrift in eddies of smoke, appeared very unconscious of it all. Just showing on the horizon was Douai, and I wondered what forests of death lay waiting between those Lens churches and the Douai outlines where the ground was sunken and mysterious under the haze.

Here, then, was the panorama of battle. Never a man in sight, but the entire earth goaded by some vast invisible force. Clots of smoke of varying colors arrived from nowhere, died away, or were smudged out by other clots. A big black pall hung over Givenchy like the sounding-board over a cathedral pulpit. A little farther on the village of Angres seemed palisaded with points of flame. Away to the right the long, straight road from Lens to Arras showed clear and strong without a speck of life upon it.

No life anywhere, no human thing moving. And yet one believed that under a thin crust of earth the whole forces of Europe were struggling and throwing up sound.

Among all the combatants there is a desire for peace, says Mr. Flower, who found a striking example of the sentiment of the Boche in what had been the crypt of the Bapaume cathedral. He writes:

I saw scores of skulls of those who were dead many decades before the war rolled over Europe, and on the skull of one I saw scribbled in indelible pencil:

“ Dass der Friede kommen mag ”

(“Hurry up, Peace.”) — Otto Trübner.

Now, Otto Trübner may be a very average representative of his type. And maybe Otto Trübner’s head now bears a passing likeness to the skull he scribbled on in vandal fashion before he evacuated Bapaume. But whether or no, he is, metaphorically speaking, a straw which shows the play of the wind.

Sergeant (drilling awkward squad) – “Company! Attention company, lift up your left leg and hold it straight out in front of you!”