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Secret Battle, The

<h2>IV</h2> Such was life in the line at that time. But I should make the soldier's almost automatic reservation, that it might have been worse. There might have been heavy shelling; but the shelling on the trenches was negligible—then; there might have been mud, but there was not. And eight such days might have left Harry Penrose quite unaffected in spirit, in spite of his physical handicaps, by reason of his extraordinary vitality and zest. But there were two incidents before we went down which did affect him, and it is necessary that they should be told. On the fifth day in the line he did a very brave thing—brave, at least, in the popular sense, which means that many another man would not have done that thing. To my mind, a man is brave only in proportion to his knowledge and his susceptibility to fear; the standard of the mob, the standard of the official military mind, is absolute; there are no fine shades—no account of circumstance and temperament is allowed—and perhaps this is inevitable. Most men would say that Harry's deed was a brave one. I have said so myself—but I am not sure. Eighty to a hundred yards from one section of our line was a small stretch of Turkish trench, considerably in advance of their main line. From this trench a particularly harassing fire was kept up, night and day, and the Brigade Staff considered that it should be captured. High officers in shirt sleeves and red hats looked long and wisely at it through periscopes; colonels and adjutants and subalterns and sergeants stood silent and respectful while the great men pondered. The great men then turned round with the air of those who make profound decisions, and announced that 'You ought to be able to "enfilade" it from "over there,"' or 'I suppose they "enfilade" you from there.' The term 'enfilade' invariably occurred somewhere in these dicta, and in the listeners' minds there stirred the suspicion that the Great Ones had not been looking at the right trench; if indeed they had focused the unfamiliar instrument so as to see anything at all. But the decision was made; and for the purposes of a night attack it was important to know whether the trench was held strongly at night, or occupied only by a few busy snipers. Harry was ordered to reconnoitre the trench with two scouts. The night was pitch black, with an unusual absence of stars. The worst of the rapid fire was over, but there was a steady spit and crackle of bullets from the Turks, and especially from the little trench opposite. Long afterwards, in France, he told me that he would never again dream of going out on patrol in the face of such a fire. But to-night it did not occur to him to delay his expedition. The profession of scouting made a special appeal to the romantic side of him; the prospect of some real, practical scouting was exciting. According to the books much scouting was done under heavy fire, but according to the books, and in the absence of any experience to the contrary, it was probable that the careful scout would not be killed. Then why waste time? (All this I gathered indirectly from his account of the affair.) Two bullets smacked into the parapet by his head as he climbed out of the dark sap and wriggled forward into the scrub; but even these did not give him pause. Only while he lay and waited for the two men to follow did he begin to realize how many bullets were flying about. The fire was now really heavy, and when I heard that Harry had gone out, I was afraid. But he as yet was only faintly surprised. The Colonel had sent him out; the Colonel had said the Turks fired high, and if you kept low you were quite safe—and he ought to know. This was a regular thing in warfare, and must be done. So on like reptiles into the darkness, dragging with hands and pushing with knees. Progress in the orthodox scout fashion was surprisingly slow and exhausting. The scrub tickled and scratched your face, the revolver in your hands caught in the roots; the barrel must be choked with dust. Moreover, it was impossible to see anything at all, and the object of a reconnaissance being to see something, this was perplexing. Even when the frequent flares went up and one lay pressed to the earth, one's horizon was the edge of a tuft of scrub five yards away. This always looked like the summit of some commanding height; but labouring thither one saw by the next flare only another exactly similar horizon beyond. So must the worm feel, wandering in the rugged spaces of a well-kept lawn. It was long before Harry properly understood this phenomenon; and by then his neck was stiff and aching from lying flat and craning his head back to see in front. But after many hours of crawling the ground sloped down a little, and now they could see the sharp, stabbing flashes from the rifles of the snipers in the little trench ahead of them. Clearly they were only snipers, for the flashes came from only eight or nine particular spots, spaced out at intervals. Now the scouts glowed with the sense of achievement as they watched. They had found out. Never again could Harry have lain like that, naked in the face of those near rifles, coldly calculating and watching, without an effort of real heroism. On this night he did it easily—confident, unafraid. Elated with his little success, something prompted him to go farther and confirm his deductions. He whispered to his men to lie down in a fold of the ground, and crept forward to the very trench itself, aiming at a point midway between two flashes. There was no wire in front of the trench, but as he saw the parapet looming like a mountain close ahead, he began to realize what a mad fool he was, alone and helpless within a yard of the Turks, an easy mark in the light of the next flare. But he would not go back, and squirming on worked his head into a gap in the parapet, and gazed into a vast blackness. This he did with a wild incautiousness, the patience of the true scout overcome by his anxiety to do what he intended as soon as possible. The Turks' own rifles had drowned the noise of his movements, and providentially no flare went up till his body was against the parapet. When at length the faint wavering light began and swelled into sudden brilliance, he could see right into the trench, and when the shadows chased each other back into its depths as the light fell, he lay marvelling at his own audacity: so impressed was he by the wonder of his exploit that he was incapable of making any intelligent observations, other than the bald fact that there were no men in that part of the trench. He was still waiting for another flare when there was a burst of rapid fire from our own line a little to the right. Suddenly he realized that B Company did not know he was out; C Company knew, but in his haste he had forgotten to see that the others were informed before he left, as he had arranged to do with the Colonel. He and his scouts would be shot by B Company. Obsessed with this thought he turned and scrambled breathlessly back to the two waiting men. God knows why he wasn't seen and sniped; and his retirement must have been very noisy, for as he reached the others all the snipers in the trench opened fire feverishly together. Harry and his men, who were cold with waiting, wriggled blindly back; they no longer pretended to any deliberation or cunning, but having come to no harm so far were not seriously anxious about themselves; only it seemed good to go back now. But after a few yards one of the men, Trower, gave a scream of agony and cried out, 'I'm hit, I'm hit.' In that moment, Harry told me, all the elation and pride of his exploit ebbed out of him. A sick disgust with himself and everything came over him. Williams, the other scout, lay between him and Trower, who was now moaning horribly in the darkness. For a moment Harry was paralysed; he lay there, saying feebly, 'Where are you hit? Where is he hit, Williams? Where are you hit?' When at last he got to his side, the man was almost unconscious with pain, but he had managed to screech out 'Both legs.' In fact, he had been shot through the femoral artery, and one leg was broken. In that blackness skilled hands would have had difficulty in bandaging any wound; Harry and Williams could not even tell where his wound was, for all his legs were wet and sticky with blood. But both of them were fumbling and scratching at their field-dressings for some moments before they realized this. Then they started to take the man in, half dragging, half carrying him. At every movement the man shrieked in agony. When they stood up to carry him bodily, he screamed so piercingly that the storm of bullets was immediately doubled about them. When they lay down and dragged him he screamed less, but progress was impossibly slow. And now it seemed that there were Turks in the open scrub about them, for there were flashes and loud reports at strangely close quarters. The Turks could not see the miserable little party, but Trower's screams were an easy guide. Then Harry bethought him of the little medical case in his breast-pocket where, with needles and aspirin and plaster and pills, was a small phial of morphine tablets. For Trower's sake and their own, his screaming must be stilled. Tearing open his pocket he fumbled at the elastic band round the case. The little phial was smaller than the rest; he knew where it lay. But the case was upside-down; all the phials seemed the same size. Trembling, he pulled out the cork and shook out one of the tablets into his hand; a bullet cracked like a whip over his head; the tablet fell in the scrub. He got another out and passed it over to Williams. Williams's hand was shaking, and he dropped it. Harry groaned. The next two were safely transferred and pressed into Trower's mouth: he did not know how strong they were, but he remembered vaguely seeing 'One or two' on the label, and at that black moment the phrase came curiously into his head, 'As ordered by the doctor.' Trower was quieter now, and this made the other two a little calmer. Harry told me he was now so cool that he could put the phial back carefully in the case and return them to his pocket; even, from sheer force of habit, he buttoned up the pocket. But when they moved off they realized with a new horror that they were lost. They had come out originally from the head of a long sap; in the darkness and the excitement they had lost all sense of direction, and had missed the sap. Probably they were not more than fifty yards from friends, but they might be moving parallel to the sap or parallel to the front line, and that way they might go on indefinitely. They could not drag their wretched burden with them indefinitely; so Harry sent Williams to find the trench, and lay throbbing by the wounded man. No one who has not been lost in the pitchy dark in No Man's Land can understand how easy it is to arrive at that condition, and the intense feeling of helplessness it produces. That solitary wait of Harry's must have been terrible; for he had time now to ponder his position. Perhaps Williams would not find the trench; perhaps he, too, would be hit; perhaps he would not be able to find the scouts again. What should they do then? Anything was possible in this awful darkness, with these bullets cracking and tearing about him. Perhaps he would be killed himself. Straining his ears he fancied he could hear the rustle of creeping men, any moment he expected a rending blow on his own tender body. But his revolver had been dropped in the dragging of Trower. He could do nothing—only try to bind up the poor legs again. Poor Harry! as he lay there bandaging his scout, he noticed that the lad had stopped moaning, and said to himself that his morphine tablets had done their work. That was something, anyhow. But the man was already dead. He could not have lived for ten minutes, the doctor told me. And when Williams at last returned, trailing a long string from the sap, it was a dead man they brought painfully into the trench and handed over gently to the stretcher-bearers. I was in the sap when they came, and dragged Harry away from it. And when they told him he nearly cried. <h3>II</h3> The other incident is briefly told. On our last day in the line Harry's platoon were working stealthily in the hot sun at a new section of trench connecting two saps, and some one incautiously threw a little new-turned earth over the parapet. The Turks, who seldom molested any of the regular, established trenches with shell-fire, but hotly resented the making of new ones, opened fire with a light high-velocity gun, of the whizz-bang type. This was our first experience of the weapon, and the first experience of a whizz-bang is very disturbing. The long shriek of the ordinary shell encourages the usually futile hope that by ducking one may avoid destruction. With the whizz-bang there is no hope, for there is no warning; the sound and the shell arrive almost simultaneously. Harry's platoon did not like these things. The first three burst near but short of the trench, filling the air with fumes; the fourth hit and removed most of the parapet of one bay. Harry, hurrying along to the place, found the four men there considerably surprised, crouching in the corners and gazing stupidly at the yawning gap. It was undesirable, if not impossible, to rebuild the parapet during daylight, so he moved them into the next bay. He then went along the trench to see that all the men had ceased work. He heard two more shells burst behind him as he went. On his way back two men rushing round a corner—two men with white faces smeared with black and a little blood—almost knocked him down; they were speechless. He went through the bay which had been blown in; it was silent, empty; the bay beyond was silent too, save for the buzzing of a thousand flies. In it he had left eight men; six of them were lying dead. Two had marvellously escaped. The first whizz-bang had blown away the parapet; the second, following immediately after, had passed miraculously through the hole, straight into the trench—a piece of astounding bad luck or good gunnery. The men could not be buried till dusk, and we left them there. Two hours later, as we sat under a waterproof sheet and talked quietly of this thing, there came an engineer officer wandering along the trench. He had come, crouching, through those two shattered and yawning bays: he was hot and very angry. 'Why the hell don't you bury those Turks?' he said, 'they must have been there for weeks!' This is the kind of charge which infuriates the soldier at any time; and we did not like the added suggestion that those six good men of the 14th Platoon were dead Turks. We told him they were Englishmen, dead two hours. 'But, my God, man,' he said, 'they're black!' We led him back, incredulous, to the place. When we got there we understood. Whether from the explosion or the scorching sun in that airless place, I know not, but those six men were, as he said, literally black—black and reeking and hideous—and the flies...! Harry and I crouched at the end of that bay, truly unable to believe our eyes. I hope I may never again see such horror as was in Harry's face. They were his platoon, and he knew them, as an officer should. After the explosion, there had been only four whom he could definitely identify. Now there was not one. In two hours... <hr style="width: 45%;" /> I do not wish to labour this or any similar episode. I have seen many worse things; every soldier has. In a man's history they are important only in their effect upon him, and the effect they have is determined by many things—by his experience, and his health, and his state of mind. But if you are to understand what I may call the battle-psychology of a man, as I want you to understand Harry's, you must not ignore particular incidents. For in this respect the lives of soldiers are not uniform; though many may live in the same regiment and fight in the same battles, the experiences which matter come to them diversely—to some crowded and overwhelming, to some by kind and delicate degrees. And so do their spirits develop. These two incidents following so closely upon each other had a most unhappy cumulative effect on Harry. His night's scouting, in spite of its miserable end, had not perceptibly dimmed his romantic outlook; it had been an adventure, and from a military point of view a successful adventure. The Colonel had been pleased with the reconnaissance, as such. But the sight of his six poor men, lying black and beastly in that sunlit hole, had killed the 'Romance of War' for him. Henceforth it must be a necessary but disgusting business, to be endured like a dung-hill. But this, in the end, was inevitable; with all soldiers it is only a matter of time, though for a boy of Harry's temperament it was an ill chance that it should come so soon. What was more serious was this. The two incidents had revived, in a most malignant form, his old distrust of his own competence. I found that he was brooding over this—accusing himself, quite wrongly, I think, of being responsible for the death of seven men. He had bungled the scouting; he had recklessly attracted attention to the party, and Trower, not he, had paid for it. He had moved four men into a bay where four others already were, and six of them had been killed. I tried hard to persuade him, not quite honestly, that he had done absolutely the right thing. In scouting, of all things, I told him, a man must take chances; and the matter of the two whizz-bangs was sheer bad luck. It was no good; he was a fool—a failure. Unconsciously, the Colonel encouraged this attitude. For, thinking that Harry's nerve might well have been shaken by his first experience, he would not let him go out on patrol again on our next 'tour' in the line. I think he was quite mistaken in this view, for the boy did not even seem to realize how narrow his own escapes had been, so concerned was he about his lost men. Nor did this explanation of the Colonel's veto even occur to him. Rather it confirmed him in his distrust of himself, for it seemed to him that the Colonel, too, must look upon him as a bungler, a waster of men's lives.... All this was very bad, and I was much afraid of what the reaction might be. But there was one bright spot. So far he only distrusted his military capacity; there was no sign of his distrusting his own courage. I prayed that that might not follow. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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