Читать книгу The Secret Battle (Historical Novel) - A. P. Herbert - Страница 8

We were ordered to relieve the ——'s at midnight on the fourth day, and once again we braced ourselves for the last desperate battle of our lives. All soldiers go through this process during their first weeks of active service every time they 'move' anywhere. Immense expectations, vows, fears, prayers, fill their minds; and nothing particular happens. Only the really experienced soldier knows that it is the exception and not the rule for anything particular to happen; and the heroes of romance and history who do not move a muscle when told that they are to attack at dawn are generally quite undeserving of praise, since long experience has taught them that the attack is many times more likely to be cancelled than to occur. Until it actually does happen they will not believe in it; they make all proper preparations, but quite rightly do not move a muscle. We, however, were now to have our first illustration of this great military truth. For, indeed, we were to have no battle. Yet that night's march to the trenches was an experience that made full compensation. It was already dusk when we moved out of the rest-camp, and the moon was not up. As usual in new units, the leading platoons went off at a reckless canter, and stumbling after them in the gathering shadows over rocky, precipitous slopes, and in and out of the clumps of bush, falling in dark holes on to indignant sleepers, or maddeningly entangled in hidden strands of wire, the rear companies were speedily out of touch. To a heavily laden infantryman there are few things more exasperating than a night march into the line conducted too fast. If the country be broken and strewn with obstacles, at which each man must wait while another climbs or drops or wrestles or wades in front of him, and must then laboriously scamper after him in the shadows lest he, and thereby all those behind him, be lost; if the country be unknown to him, so that, apart from purely military considerations, the fear of being lost is no small thing, for a man knows that he may wander all night alone in the dark, surrounded by unknown dangers, cut off from sleep, and rations, and the friendly voices of companions, a jest among them when he discovers them: then such a march becomes a nightmare.

On this night it dawned gradually on those in front that they were unaccompanied save by the 1st platoon, and a long halt, and much shouting and searching, gathered most of the regiment together, hot, cursing, and already exhausted. And now we passed the five white Water Towers, standing mysteriously in a swamp, and came out of the open country into the beginning of a gully. These 'gullies' were deep, steep-sided ravines, driven through all the lower slopes of Achi Baba, and carrying in the spring a thin stream of water, peopled by many frogs, down to the Straits or the sea. It was easier going here, for there was a rough track beside the stream to follow; yet, though those in front were marching, as they thought, with inconceivable deliberation, the rear men of each platoon were doubling round the corners among the trees, and cursing as they ran. There was then a wild hail of bullets in all those gullies, since for many hours of each night the Turk kept up a sustained and terrible rapid fire from his trenches far up the hill, and, whether by design or bad shooting, the majority of these bullets passed high over our trenches, and fell hissing in the gully-bed.

So now all the air seemed full of the humming, whistling things, and all round in the gully-banks and the bushes by the stream there were vicious spurts as they fell. It was always a marvel how few casualties were caused by this stray fire, and to-night we were chiefly impressed with this wonder. In the stream the frogs croaked incessantly with a note of weary indifference to the medley of competing noises. At one point there was a kind of pot-hole in the stream where the water squeezing through made a kind of high-toned wail, delivered with stabbing emphasis at regular intervals. So weird was this sound, which could be heard many hundred yards away, and gradually asserted itself above all other contributions to that terrible din, that many of the men, already mystified and excited, said to themselves that this was the noise of the hideous explosive bullets of which they had heard.

Soon we were compelled to climb out of the gully-path to make way for some descending troops, and stumbled forward with a curious feeling of nakedness high up in open ground. Here the bullets were many times multiplied, and many of us said that we could feel them passing between us. Indeed, one or two men were hit, but though we did not know it, most of these near-sounding bullets flew high above us. After a little we were halted, and lay down, wondering, in the sibilant dark; then we moved on and halted again, and realized suddenly that we were very tired. At the head of the column the guide had lost his way, and could not find the entrance to the communication trench; and here in the most exposed area of all that Peninsula we must wait until he did. The march was an avoidable piece of mismanagement; the whole regiment was being unnecessarily endangered. But none of this we knew; so very few men were afraid. For we were still in the bliss of ignorance. It seemed to us that these strange proceedings must be a part of the everyday life of the soldier. If they were not, we raw creatures should not have been asked to endure them. We had no standard of safety or danger by which to estimate our position; and so the miraculous immunity we were enjoying was taken as a matter of course, and we were blissfully unafraid. At the same time we were extremely bored and tired, and the sweat cooled on us in the chill night air. And when at last we came into the deep communication trench we felt that the end of this weariness must surely be near. But the worst exasperations of relieving an unknown line were still before us. It was a two-mile trudge in the narrow ditches to the front line. No war correspondent has ever described such a march; it is not included in the official 'horrors of war'; but this is the kind of thing which, more than battle and blood, harasses the spirit of the infantryman, and composes his life. The communication trenches that night were good and deep and dry, and free from the awfulness of mud; but they were very few, and unintelligently used. There had been an attack that day, and coming by the same trench was a long stream of stretchers and wounded men, and odd parties coming to fetch water from the well, and whole battalions relieved from other parts of the line. Our men had been sent up insanely with full packs; for a man so equipped to pass another naked in the narrow ditch would have been difficult; when all those that he meets have also straps and hooks and excrescences about them, each separate encounter means heartbreaking entanglements and squeezes and sudden paroxysms of rage. That night we stood a total of hours hopelessly jammed in the suffocating trench, with other troops trying to get down. A man stood in those crushes, unable to sit down, unable to lean comfortably against the wall because of his pack, unable even to get his hand to his water-bottle and quench his intolerable thirst, unable almost to breathe for the hot smell of herded humanity. Only a thin ribbon of stars overhead, remotely roofing his prison, reminded him that indeed he was still in the living world and not pursuing some hideous nightmare. At long last some one would take charge of the situation, and by sheer muscular fighting for space the two masses would be extricated. Then one moved on again. And now each man has become a mere lifeless automaton. Every few yards there is a wire hanging across the trench at the height of a man's eyes, and he runs blindly into it, or it catches in the piling-swivel of his rifle; painfully he removes it, or in a fit of fury tears the wire away with him. Or there is a man lying in a corner with a wounded leg crying out to each passer-by not to tread on him, or a stretcher party slowly struggling against the tide. Mechanically each man grapples with these obstacles, mechanically repeats the ceaseless messages that are passed up and down, and the warning 'Wire,' 'Stretcher party', 'Step up,' to those behind, and stumbles on. He is only conscious of the dead weight of his load, and the braces of his pack biting into his shoulders, of his thirst, and the sweat of his body, and the longing to lie down and sleep. When we halt men fall into a doze as they stand, and curse pitifully when they are urged on from behind.

We reach the inhabited part of the line, and the obstacles become more frequent, for there are traverses every ten yards and men sleeping on the floor, and a litter of rifles, water-cans, and scattered equipment. For ever we wind round the endless traverses, and squeeze past the endless host we are relieving; and sometimes the parapet is low or broken or thin, or there is a dangerous gap, and we are told to keep our heads down, and dully pass back the message so that it reaches men meaninglessly when they have passed the danger-point, or are still far from it. All the time there is a wild rattle of rapid fire from the Turks, and bullets hammer irritably on the parapet, or fly singing overhead. When a man reached his destined part of the trench that night there were still long minutes of exasperation before him; for we were inexperienced troops, and first of all the men crowded in too far together, and must turn about, and press back so as to cover the whole ground to be garrisoned; then they would flock like sad sheep too far in the opposite direction. This was the subaltern's bad time; for the officer must squeeze backwards and forwards, struggling to dispose properly his own sullen platoon, and it was hard for him to be patient with their stupidity, for, like them, he only longed to fling off his cursed equipment and lie down and sleep for ever. He, like them, had but one thought, that if there were to be no release from the hateful burden that clung to his back, and cut into his shoulders and ceaselessly impeded him, if there were to be no relief for his thirst and the urgent aching of all his body—he must soon sink down and scream....