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Secret Battle, The

<h2>V</h2> Mid-June came with all its plagues and fevers and irritable distresses. Life in the rest-camp became daily more intolerable. There set in a steady wind from the north-east which blew all day down the flayed rest-areas of the Peninsula, raising great columns of blinding, maddening dust. It was a hot, parching wind, which in no way mitigated the scorch of the sun, and the dust it brought became a definite enemy to human peace. It pervaded everything. It poured into every hole and dug-out, and filtered into every man's belongings; it formed a gritty sediment in water and tea, it passed into a man with every morsel of food he ate, and scraped and tore at his inside. It covered his pipe so that he could not even smoke with pleasure; it lay in a thick coating on his face so that he looked like a wan ghost, paler than disease had made him. It made the cleaning of his rifle a too, too frequent farce; it worked under his breeches, and gathered at the back of his knees, chafing and torturing him; and if he lay down to sleep in his hole it swept in billows over his face, or men passing clumsily above kicked great showers upon him. Sleep was not possible in the rest-camps while that wind blew. But indeed there were many things which made rest in the rest-camps impossible. Few more terrible plagues can have afflicted British troops than the flies of Gallipoli. In May, by comparison, there were none. In June they became unbearable; in July they were literally inconceivable. Most Englishmen have lain down some gentle summer day to doze on a shaded lawn and found that one or two persistent flies have destroyed the repose of the afternoon; many women have turned sick at the sight of a blowfly in their butcher's shop. Let them imagine a semi-tropical sun in a place where there is little or no shade, where sanitary arrangements are less than primitive, where, in spite of all precautions, there are scraps of bacon and sugar and tea-leaves lying everywhere in the dust, and every man has his little daily store of food somewhere near him, where there are dead bodies and the carcasses of mules easily accessible to the least venturesome fly—let them read for 'one' fly a hundred, a thousand, a million, and even then they will not exaggerate the horror of that plague. Under it the disadvantages of a sensitive nature and a delicate upbringing were easy to see. An officer lies down in the afternoon to sleep in his hole. The flies cluster on his face. Patiently, at first, he brushes them away, with a drill-like mechanical movement of his hand; by and by he does it angrily; his temper is going. He covers his face with a handkerchief; it is distressingly hot, but at least he may have some rest. The flies settle on his hand, on his neck, on the bare part of his leg. Even there the feel of them is becoming a genuine torment. They creep under the handkerchief; there is one on his lip, another buzzing about his eye. Madly he tears off the handkerchief and lashes out, waving it furiously till the air is free. The flies gather on the walls of the dug-out, on the waterproof sheet, and watch; they are waiting motionless till he lies down again. He throws his coat over his bare knees and lies back. The torment begins again. It is unendurable. He gets up, cursing, and goes out; better to walk in the hot sun or sit under the olive-tree in the windy dust. But look into the crowded ditches of the men. Some of them are fighting the same fight, hands moving and faces twitching, like the flesh of horses, automatically. But most of them lie still, not asleep, but in a kind of dogged artificial insensibility. The flies crowd on their faces; they swarm about their eyes, and crawl unmolested about their open mouths. It is a horrible sight, but those men are lucky. Then there was always a great noise in the camp, for men would be called for from Headquarters at the end of it or orders passed down, and so great was the wind and the noise of the French guns and the Turkish shells, that these messages had to be bawled from man to man. The men grew lazy from sheer weariness of these messages, so that they were mutilated as they came and had to be repeated; and there was this babel always. The men, too, like the officers, became irritable with each other, and wrangled incessantly over little things; only the officers argued quietly and bitterly, and the men shouted oaths at each other and filthy epithets. There was only a yard between the holes of the officers and the holes of the men, and their raucous quarrelling grated on nerves already sensitive from the trials of the day, and the officer came near to cursing his own men; and that is bad. So there was no rest to be had in the camp during the day; and at night we marched out in long columns to dig in the whispering gullies, or unload ships on the beach. There were many of these parties, and we were much overworked, as all infantry units invariably are; and only at long intervals there came an evening when a man might lie down under the perfect stars and sleep all night undisturbed. Then indeed he had rest; and when he woke to a sudden burst of shell-fire, lay quiet in his hole, too tired and dreamy to be afraid. Dust and flies and the food and the water and our weakness joined forces against us, and dysentery raged among us. There were many who had never heard of the disease, and thought vaguely of the distemper of dogs. Those who had heard of it thought of it as something rather romantically Eastern, like the tsetse fly, and the first cases were invested with a certain mysterious distinction—especially as most of them were sent away. But it became universal; everybody had it, and everybody could not be sent away. One man in a thousand went through that time untouched; one in ten escaped with a slight attack. But the remainder lived permanently or intermittently in a condition which in any normal campaign would have long since sent them on stretchers to the base. The men could not be spared; they stayed and endured and tottered at their work. Thus there was every circumstance to encourage infection and little to resist it. One by one the officers of D Company were stricken. The first stages were mildly unpleasant, encouraging that comfortable sense of martyrdom which belongs to a recognized but endurable complaint. As it grew worse, men became querulous but were still interested in themselves, and those not in the final stages discussed their symptoms, emulously, disgustingly—still a little anxious to be worse than their fellows. In the worst stage there was no emulation, only a dull misery of recurrent pain and lassitude and disgust. A man could not touch the coarse food which was all we had; or, if from sheer emptiness he did, his sufferings were immediately magnified. Yet always he had a wild craving for delicate food, and as he turned from the sickening bacon in the gritty lid of his mess-tin, conjured bright visions of lovely dainties which might satisfy his longing and give him back his strength. So men prayed for parcels. But when they came, or when some wanderer came back from the Islands with a basket of Grecian eggs, too often it was too late for the sickest men, and their agonies were only increased. Scientific dieting was impossible. They could only struggle on, for ever sick, yet for ever on duty: this was the awful thing. When a man reached this stage, the army was lucky indeed if it did not lose him; he was lucky himself if he did not die. But so strong is the human spirit and so patient the human body, that most won through this phase to a spasmodic existence of alternate sickness and precarious health; and when they said to themselves 'I am well,' and ate heartily, and said to their companions 'This and that is what you should do,' the disease gripped them again, each time more violently. All this sapped the strength of a man; and finally there came a terrible debility, a kind of paralysing lassitude when it needed a genuine flogging of the will for him to lift himself and walk across the camp, and his knees seemed permanently feeble, as if a fever had just left him. Yet many endured this condition for weeks and months till the fever definitely took them. Some became so weak that while they still tottered up to the line and about their duties, they could not gratuitously drag themselves to the beach to bathe. Then indeed were they far gone, for the evening swims were the few paradisial moments of that time. When the sun had but an hour to live, and the wind and the dust and the flies were already dwindling, we climbed down a cliff-path where the Indians kept their sacred but odorous goats. There was a fringe of rocks under the cliffs where we could dive. There we undressed, hot and grimy, lousy, thirsty, and tired. Along the rocks solitary Indians were kneeling towards Mecca. Some of the old battered boats of the first landing were still nosing the shore, and at a safe distance was a dead mule. The troops did not come here but waded noisily in the shallow water; so all was quiet, save for an occasional lazy shell from Asia and the chunk-chunk of a patrol-boat. The sea at this hour put on its most perfect blue, and the foot-hills across the Straits were all warm and twinkling in the late sun. So we sat and drank in the strengthening breeze, and felt the clean air on our contaminated flesh; and plunging luxuriously into the lovely water forgot for a magical moment all our weariness and disgust. When a man could not do this, he was ill indeed. <h3>II</h3> And by this time we had found each other out. We had discovered a true standard of right and wrong; we knew quite clearly now, some of us for the first time, what sort of action was 'dirty,' and we were fairly clear how likely each of us was to do such an action. We knew all our little weaknesses and most of our serious flaws; under that olive-tree they could not long be hid. In the pleasant life of London or Oxford we had had no occasion to do anything dishonourable or underhand; in our relations with other men we had not even wished to be guilty of anything worse than mild unkindnesses or consistent unpunctuality. But behind the footlights of Gallipoli we had found real burning temptations; and we had found our characters. D Company on the whole was lucky, and had stood the test well. We knew that Burnett was 'bogus'; but we knew that Williams of A Company was incalculably more 'bogus'; we had stood in the dark sap at night and reluctantly overheard the men of his company speak of him and his officers. But little weaknesses beget great irritations in that life, and the intimate problems of communal feeding were enough to search out all our weaknesses. We knew that some of us, though courageous, were greedy; that others, though not greedy, were querulous about their food and had a nasty habit of 'sticking out for their rights': indeed, I think I developed this habit myself. We had had trouble about parcels. Parcels in theory were thrown into the common stock of the mess: but Egerton and Burnett never had parcels, and were by no means the most delicate eaters of other people's dainties. Harry and Hewett reserved some portion of each parcel, a cake or a slab of chocolate, which they ate furtively in their dug-outs, or shared with each other in the dusk; Burnett ostentatiously endowed the mess with his entire stock, but afterwards at every meal hinted sombrely at the rapacity of those who had devoured it. Harry and Hewett each made contributions to the mess; but Harry objected to the excessive consumption of this food by Burnett, and Hewett, who gave ungrudgingly to the rest of us, had a similar reservation—never expressed—as against Egerton. So all this matter of food set in motion a number of antagonisms seldom or never articulate, but painfully perceptible at every meal. The parcel question, I think, was one of the things which embittered the quarrel between Harry and Burnett. A parcel from home to schoolboys and soldiers and prisoners and sailors, and all homesick exiles, is the most powerful emblem of sentiment and affection. A man would willingly preserve its treasures for himself to gloat over alone, in no mere fleshly indulgence, but as a concrete expression of affection from the home for which he longs. This is not nonsense. He likes to undo the strings in the grubby hole which is his present home, and secretly become sentimental over the little fond packages and queer, loving thoughts which have composed it. And though in a generous impulse he may say to his companions, 'Come, and eat this cake,' and see it in a moment disappear, it is hard for him not to think, 'My sister (or wife, or mother) made this for me; they thought it would give me pleasure for many days. Already it is gone—would they not be hurt if they knew?' He feels that he has betrayed the tenderness of his home; and though the giving of pleasure to companions he likes may overcome this feeling, the compulsory squandering of such precious pleasure on a man he despises calls up the worst bitterness of his heart. So was it between Harry and Burnett. If, by the way, it be suggested that Burnett was entitled to feel the same sentimental jealousy about his parcels, I answer that Burnett's parcels came on his own order from the soulless hand of Fortnum and Mason. All of us were very touchy, very raw and irritable in that fevered atmosphere. Men who were always late in relieving another on watch, or unreasonably resented a minute's postponement of their relief, or never had any article of their own but for ever borrowed mess-tins and electric torches and note-books from more methodical people, or were overbearing to batmen, or shifted jobs on to other officers, or slunk off to bathe alone when they should have taken their sultry platoon—such men made enemies quickly. Between Eustace and Hewett, who had been good friends before and were to be good friends again, there grew up a slow animosity. Hewett was one of the methodical class of officer, Eustace was one of the persistent borrowers. Moreover, as I have said, he was a cynic, and he would argue. He had a contentious remark for every moment of the day; and though this tormented us all beyond bearing, Hewett was the only one with both the energy and the intellectual equipment to accept his challenges. So these two argued quietly and fiercely in the hot noon, or the blue dusk, till the rest of us were weary of them both, and the sound of Eustace's harsh tones was an agony to the nerves. They were both too consciously refined to lose their tempers healthily, and when they reached danger-point, Hewett would slink away like an injured animal to his burrow. In this conflict Harry took no speaking part, for while in spirit and affection he was on Hewett's side, he paid intellectual tribute to Eustace's conduct of the argument, and listened as a rule in puzzled silence. Eustace again was his cordial ally against Burnett, while Hewett had merely the indifference of contempt for that officer. So it was all a strange tangle of friendship and animosity and good-nature and bitterness. Yet on the surface, you understand, we lived on terms of toleration and vague geniality; except for the disputations of Hewett and Eustace there was little open disagreement. In the confined space of a company mess permanent hostilities would make life impossible; it is only generals who are allowed to find that they can no longer 'act with' each other, and resign: platoon commanders may come to the same conclusion, but they have to go on acting. And so openly we laughed and endured and bore with each other. Only there was always this undertone of irritations and animosities which, in the maddening conditions of our life, could never be altogether silenced, and might at any moment rise to a strangled scream. Harry's appointment as Scout Officer was the first thing to set Burnett against Harry, though already many things had set Harry against Burnett. It had been commonly assumed, in view of Burnett's 'backwoods' reputation, that he would succeed Martin as Scout Officer. The Colonel's selection of Harry took us a little by surprise, though it only showed that the Colonel was a keener judge of character and ability than the rest of us. No one, I think, was more genuinely pleased that Burnett was not to be Scout Officer than Burnett himself; but in the interests of his 'dare-devil' pretensions he had to affect an air of disappointment, and let it be known by grunts and shrugs and sour looks that he considered the choice of Harry to be an injury to himself and the regiment. As far as Harry was concerned this resentment of Burnett's was more or less genuine, for his reluctance to take on the job did not prevent him being jealous of the man who did. Then Burnett was one of the people who had nothing of his own, and seemed to regard Harry, as the youngest of us all, as the proper person to provide him with all the necessaries of life. In those days we had no plates or crockery, but ate and drank out of our scratched and greasy mess-tins. Harry's mess-tin disappeared, and for three days he was compelled to borrow from Hewett or myself—a tedious and, to him, hateful business. One day Burnett had finished his meal a long way ahead of any of us, and Harry, in the desperation of hungry waiting, asked him for the loan of his mess-tin. Automatically he looked at the bottom of the tin, and there found his initials inscribed. It was his own tin. Further, some one had tried to scratch the initials out. Harry kept his temper with obvious difficulty. Burnett knew well that he had lost his mess-tin (we were all sick of hearing it), but he said he was quite ignorant of having it in his possession. When Harry argued with him, Burnett sent for his batman and cursed him for taking another officer's property. The wretched man mumbled that he had 'found' it, and withdrew; and we all sat in silence teeming with distrustful thoughts. We were sorry for the batman; we were sorry for Harry. Burnett may not have taken the mess-tin with his own hands, but morally he stood convicted of an action which was 'dirty.' Then Burnett and Harry took a working-party together to dig in the gully. Burnett was the senior officer, but left Harry to work all night in the whispering rain of stray bullets, while he sat in an Engineers' dug-out and drank whisky. Harry did not object to this, the absence of Burnett being always congenial to him. But next day there came a complimentary message from the Brigadier about the work of that working-party. Burnett was sent for and warmly praised by the Colonel. Burnett stood smugly and said nothing. Harry, when he heard of it, was furious, and wanted, he said, to 'have a row' with him. What he expected Burnett to say, I don't know; the man could hardly stand before his Colonel and say, 'Sir, Penrose did all the work, I was in the Engineers' dug-out nearly all the time with my friends, and had several drinks.' A row, in any case, would be intolerable in that cramped, intimate existence, and I dissuaded Harry, though I made Egerton have a few words with Burnett on the subject. Harry contented himself with ironic comments on Burnett's 'gallantry' and 'industry,' asking him blandly at meals if he expected to get his promotion over that working-party, and suggesting to Egerton that Burnett should take Harry's next turn of duty 'because he is so good at it.' This made Burnett beautifully angry. But it was bitter badinage, and did not improve the social atmosphere. There were a number of such incidents between the two; they were very petty in themselves, some of them, like a fly, but in their cumulative effect very large and distressing. In many cases there was no verbal engagement, or only an angry, inarticulate mutter. Public, unfettered angers were necessarily avoided. But this pent-up, suppressed condition of the quarrel made it more malignant, like a disease. And it got on Harry's nerves; indeed, it got on mine. It became an active element in that vast complex of irritation and decay which was eating into his young system; it was leagued with the flies, and the dust, and the smells, and the bad food, and the wind, and the harassing shells of the Turks, and the disgustful torment of disease. <h3>III</h3> For Harry was a very sick man. He had endured through all the stages of dysentery, and now lived with that awful legacy of weakness of which I have spoken. And the disease had not wholly left him, but some days he lay faint with excruciating spasms of pain. Slightly built and constitutionally fragile at the beginning, he was now a mere wasted wisp of a man. The flesh seemed to have melted from his face, and when he stood naked on the beach it seemed that the moving of his bones must soon tear holes in the unsubstantial skin. Standing in the trench with the two points of his collar-bone jutting out like promontories above his shirt, and a pale film of dust over his face, he looked like the wan ghost of some forgotten soldier. On the Western Front, where one case of dysentery created a panic among the authorities, and in the most urgent days they have never had to rely on skeletons to fight, he would long since have been bundled off. But in this orgy of disease, no officer could be sent away who was willing to stay and could still totter up the gully. And Harry would not go. When he went to the battalion doctor it was with an airy request for the impotent palliatives then provided for early dysentery, and with no suggestion of the soul-destroying sickness that was upon him. One day he would not come down to the rocks and bathe, so feeble he was. 'I know now,' he said, 'the meaning of that bit in the psalms, "My knees are like water and all my bones are out of joint."' 'Harry,' I said, 'you're not fit to stay here—why not go sick?' At which he smiled weakly, and said that he might be better in a day or two. Pathetic hope! all men had it. And so Hewett and I walked down, a little sadly, alone, marvelling at the boy's courage. For it seemed to us that he wanted to stay and see it through, and if indeed he might recover we could not afford to lose him. So we said no more. But by degrees I gained a different impression. Harry still opened his mind to Hewett and myself more than to any one else, but it was by no direct speech, rather by the things he did not say, the sentences half finished, the look in his eyes, that the knowledge came—that Harry did want to go away. The romantic impulse had perished long since in that ruined trench; but now even the more mundane zest of doing his duty had lost its savour in the long ordeal of sickness and physical distress. He did want to go sick. He had only to speak a word; and still he would not go. When I knew this, I marvelled at his courage yet more. For many days I watched him fighting this lonely conflict with himself, a conflict more terrible and exacting than any battle. Sometimes the doctor came and sat under our olive-tree, and some of us spoke jestingly of the universal sickness, and asked him how ill we must be before he would send us home. Harry alone sat silent; it was no joke to him. 'And how do you feel now, Penrose?' said the doctor. 'Are you getting your arrow-root all right?' Harry opened his mouth—but for a moment said nothing. I think it had been in his mind to say what he did feel, but he only murmured, 'All right, thank you, doctor.' The doctor looked at him queerly. He knew well enough, but it was his task to keep men on the Peninsula, not to send them away. Once I spent an afternoon in one of the hospital ships in the bay: when I came back and told them of the cool wards and pleasant nurses, and all the peace and cleanliness and comfort that was there, I caught Harry's wistful gaze upon me, and I stopped. It was well enough for the rest of us in comparative health to imagine luxuriously those unattainable amenities. None of us were ill enough then to go sick if we wished it. Harry was. And I knew that such talk must be an intolerable temptation. Then one day, on his way up to the line with a working-party, he nearly fainted. 'I felt it coming on,' he told me, 'in a block. I thought to myself, "This is the end of it all for me, anyhow." I actually did go off for a moment, I think, and then some one pushed me from behind—and as we moved on it wore off again. I did swear——' Harry stopped, realizing the confession he had made. I tried to feel for myself the awful bitterness of that awakening in the stifling trench, shuffling uphill with the flies.... But he had told me now everything I had only guessed before, and once more I urged him to go sick and have done with it. 'I would,' he said, 'only I'm not sure ... I know I'm jolly ill, and not fit for a thing ... but I'm not sure if it's only that ... I was pretty brave when I got here, I think' (I nodded), 'and I think I am still ... but last time we were in the line I found I didn't like looking over the top nearly so much ... so I want to be sure that I'm quite all right ... in that way ... before I go sick.... Besides, you know what everybody says....' 'Nobody could say anything about you,' I told him; 'one's only got to look at you to see that you've got one foot in the grave.' 'Well, we go up again to-morrow,' he said, 'and if I'm not better after that, I'll think about it again.' I had to be content with that, though I was not content. For my fears were fulfilled, since in the grip of this sickness he had begun at last to be doubtful of his own courage. But that night Burnett went to the doctor and said that he was too ill to go on. So far as the rest of us knew, he had never had anything but the inevitable preliminary attack of dysentery, though it is only fair to say that most of us were so wrapped up in the exquisite contemplation of our own sufferings, that we had little time to study the condition of others. The doctor, however, had no doubts about Burnett; he sent him back to us with a flea in his ear and a dose of chlorodyne. The story leaked out quickly, and there was much comment adverse to Burnett. When Harry heard it, he led me away to his dug-out. It was an evening of heavy calm, like the inside of a cathedral. Only a few mules circling dustily at exercise in the velvet gloom, and the distant glimmer of the Scotsmen's fires, made any stir of movement. The men had gone early to their blankets, and now sang softly their most sentimental songs, reserved always for the night before another journey to the line. They sang them in a low croon of ecstatic melancholy, marvellously in tune with the purple hush of the evening. For all its aching regret it was a sound full of hope and gentle resolution. Harry whispered to me, 'You heard about Burnett? Thank God, nobody can say those things about me! I'm not going off this Peninsula till I'm pushed off.' I said nothing. It was a heroic sentiment, and this was the heroic hour. It is what men say in the morning that matters.... In the morning we moved off as the sun came up. There had been heavy firing nearly all night, and over Achi Baba in the cloudless sky there hung a portent. It was as though some giant had been blowing smoke-rings, and with inhuman dexterity had twined and laced these rings together, without any of them losing their perfection of form.... As the sun came up these cloud-rings stood out a rosy pink against the blue distance, and while we marched through the sleeping camps turned gently through dull gold to pale pearl. I have never known what made this marvel, a few clouds forgotten by the wind, or the smoke of the night's battle; but I marched with my eyes upon it all the stumbling way to Achi Baba. And when I found Harry at a halt, he, too, was gazing at the wonder with all his men. 'It's an omen,' he said. 'Good or bad?' 'Good,' he said. I have never understood omens; I suppose they are good or bad according to the mind of the man who sees them: and I was glad that Harry thought it was good. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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