A Minstrel In France by Harry Lauder

H >> Harry Lauder >> A Minstrel In France

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18

Aye, I was glad I had brought the cigarettes! They seemed to be even
more welcome than I had hoped they would be, and I only wondered how
long the supply would hold out, and if I would be able to get more if
it did not. So Johnson, little by little, was getting more room, as I
called for more and more of the cigarettes that walled him in in his
tonneau.

About noon, as we drove through a little town, I saw, for the first
time, a whole flock of airplanes riding the sky. They were swooping
about like lazy hawks, and a bonnie sight they were. I drew a long
breath when I saw them, and turned to my friend Adam.

"Well," I said, "I think we're coming to it, now!"

I meant the front--the real, British front.

Suddenly, at a sharp order from Captain Godfrey, our cars stopped. He
turned around to us, and grinned, very cheerfully.

"Gentlemen," he said, very calmly, "we'll stop here long enough to
put on our steel helmets."

He said it just as he might have said: "Well, here's where we will
stop for tea."

It meant no more than that to him. But for me it meant many things.
It meant that at last I was really to be under fire; that I was going
into danger. I was not really frightened yet; you have to see danger,
and know just what it is, and appreciate exactly its character,
before you can be frightened. But I had imagination enough to know
what that order meant, and to have a queer feeling as I donned the
steel helmet. It was less uncomfortable than I had expected it to
be--lighter, and easier to wear. The British trench helmets are
beautifully made, now; as in every other phase of the war and its
work they represent a constant study for improvement, lightening.

But, even had it not been for the warning that was implied in Captain
Godfrey's order, I should soon have understood that we had come into
a new region. For a long time now the noise of the guns had been
different. Instead of being like distant thunder it was a much nearer
and louder sound. It was a steady, throbbing roar now.

And, at intervals, there came a different sound; a sound more
individual, that stood out from the steady roar. It was as if the air
were being cracked apart by the blow of some giant hammer. I knew
what it was. Aye, I knew. You need no man to tell you what it is--the
explosion of a great shell not so far from you!

Nor was it our ears alone that told us what was going on. Ever and
anon, now, ahead of us, as we looked at the fields, we saw a cloud of
dirt rise up. That was where a shell struck. And in the fields about
us, now, we could see holes, full of water, as a rule, and mounds of
dirt that did not look as if shovels and picks had raised them.

It surprised me to see that the peasants were still at work. I spoke
to Godfrey about that.

"The French peasants don't seem to know what it is to be afraid of
shell-fire," he said. "They go only when we make them. It is the same
on the French front. They will cling to a farmhouse in the zone of
fire until they are ordered out, no matter how heavily it may be
shelled. They are splendid folk! The Germans can never beat a race
that has such folk as that behind its battle line."

I could well believe him. I have seen no sight along the whole front
more quietly impressive than the calm, impassive courage of those
French peasants. They know they are right! It is no Kaiser, no war
lord, who gives them courage. It is the knowledge and the
consciousness that they are suffering in a holy cause, and that, in
the end, the right and the truth must prevail. Their own fate,
whatever may befall them, does not matter. France must go on and
shall, and they do their humble part to see that she does and shall.

Solemn thoughts moved me as we drove on. Here there had been real war
and fighting. Now I saw a country blasted by shell-fire and wrecked
by the contention of great armies. And I knew that I was coming to
soil watered by British blood; to rows of British graves; to soil
that shall be forever sacred to the memory of the Britons, from
Britain and from over the seas, who died and fought upon it to redeem
it from the Hun.

I had no mind to talk, to ask questions. For the time I was content
to be with my own thoughts, that were evoked by the historic ground
through which we passed. My heart was heavy with grief and with the
memories of my boy that came flooding it, but it was lightened, too,
by other thoughts.

And always, as we sped on, there was the thunder of the guns. Always
there were the bursting shells, and the old bent peasants paying no
heed to them. Always there were the circling airplanes, far above us,
like hawks against the deep blue of the sky. And always we came
nearer and nearer to Vimy Ridge--that deathless name in the history
of Britain.

CHAPTER XV

Now Captain Godfrey leaned back and smiled at us.

"There's Vimy Ridge," he said. And he pointed.

"Yon?" I asked, in astonishment.

I was almost disappointed. We had heard so much, in Britain and in
Scotland, of Vimy Ridge. The name of that famous hill had been
written imperishably in history. But to look at it first, to see it
as I saw it, it was no hill at all! My eyes were used to the
mountains of my ain Scotland, and this great ridge was but a tiny
thing beside them. But then I began to picture the scene as it had
been the day the Canadians stormed it and won for themselves the
glory of all the ages. I pictured it blotted from sight by the hell
of shells bursting over it, and raking its slopes as the Canadians
charged upward. I pictured it crowned by defenses and lined by such
of the Huns as had survived the artillery battering, spitting death
and destruction from their machine guns. And then I saw it as I
should, and I breathed deep at the thought of the men who had faced
death and hell to win that height and plant the flag of Britain upon
it. Aye, and the Stars and Stripes of America, too!

Ye ken that tale? There was an American who had enlisted, like so
many of his fellow countrymen before America was in the war, in the
Canadian forces. The British army was full of men who had told a
white lie to don the King's uniform. Men there are in the British
army who winked as they enlisted and were told: "You'll be a
Canadian?"

"Aye, aye, I'm a Canadian," they'd say. "From what province?"

"The province of Kentucky--or New York--or California!"

Well, there was a lad, one of them, was in the first wave at Vimy
Ridge that April day in 1917. 'Twas but a few days before that a wave
of the wildest cheering ever heard had run along the whole Western
front, so that Fritz in his trenches wondered what was up the noo.
Well, he has learned, since then! He has learned, despite his Kaiser
and his officers, and his lying newspapers, that that cheer went up
when the news came that America had declared war upon Germany. And
so, it was a few days after that cheer was heard that the Canadians
leaped over the top and went for Vimy Ridge, and this young fellow
from America had a wee silken flag. He spoke to his officer.

"Now that my own country's in the war, sir," he said, "I'd like to
carry her flag with me when we go over the top. Wrapped around me,
sir--"

"Go it!" said the officer.

And so he did. And he was one of those who won through and reached
the top. There he was wounded, but he had carried the Stars and
Stripes with him to the crest.

Vimy Ridge! I could see it. And above it, and beyond it, now, for the
front had been carried on, far beyond, within what used to be the
lines of the Hun, the airplanes circled. Very quiet and lazy they
seemed, for all I knew of their endless activity and the precious
work that they were doing. I could see how the Huns were shelling
them. You would see an airplane hovering, and then, close by,
suddenly, a ball of cottony white smoke. Shrapnel that was, bursting,
as Fritz tried to get the range with an anti-aircraft gun--an Archie,
as the Tommies call them. But the plane would pay no heed, except,
maybe, to dip a bit or climb a little higher to make it harder for
the Hun. It made me think of a man shrugging his shoulders, calmly
and imperturbably, in the face of some great peril, and I wanted to
cheer. I had some wild idea that maybe he would hear me, and know
that someone saw him, and appreciated what he was doing--someone to
whom it was not an old story! But then I smiled at my own thought.

Now it was time for us to leave the cars and get some exercise. Our
steel helmets were on, and glad we were of them, for shrapnel was
bursting nearby sometimes, although most of the shells were big
fellows, that buried themselves in the ground and then exploded.
Fritz wasn't doing much casual shelling the noo, though. He was
saving his fire until his observers gave him a real target to aim at.
But that was no so often, for our airplanes were in command of the
air then, and his flyers got precious little chance to guide his
shooting. Most of his hits were due to luck.

"Spread out a bit as you go along here," said Captain Godfrey. "If a
crump lands close by there's no need of all of us going! If we're
spread out a bit, you see, a shell might get one and leave the rest
of us."

It sounded cold blooded, but it was not. To men who have lived at the
front everything comes to be taken as a matter of course. Men can get
used to anything--this war has proved that again, if there was need
of proving it. And I came to understand that, and to listen to things
I heard with different ears. But those are things no one can tell you
of; you must have been at the front yourself to understand all that
goes on there, both in action and in the minds of men.

We obeyed Captain Godfrey readily enough, as you can guess. And so I
was alone as I walked toward Vimy Ridge. It looked just like a lumpy
excrescence on the landscape; at hame we would not even think of it
as a foothill. But as I neared it, and as I rememered all it stood
for, I thought that in the atlas of history it would loom higher than
the highest peak of the great Himalaya range.

Beyond the ridge, beyond the actual line of the trenches, miles away,
indeed, were the German batteries from which the shells we heard and
saw as they burst were coming. I was glad of my helmet, and of the
cool assurance of Captain Godfrey. I felt that we were as safe, in
his hands, as men could be in such a spot.

It was not more than a mile we had to cover, but it was rough going,
bad going. Here war had had its grim way without interruption. The
face of the earth had been cut to pieces. Its surface had been
smashed to a pulpy mass. The ground had been plowed, over and over,
by a rain of shells--German and British. What a planting there had
been that spring, and what a plowing! A harvest of death it had been
that had been sown--and the reaper had not waited for summer to come,
and the Harvest moon. He had passed that way with his scythe, and
where we passed now he had taken his terrible, his horrid, toll.

At the foot of the ridge I saw men fighting for the first time--
actually fighting, seeking to hurt an enemy. It was a Canadian
battery we saw, and it was firing, steadily and methodically, at the
Huns. Up to now I had seen only the vast industrial side of war, its
business and its labor. Now I was, for the first time, in touch with
actual fighting. I saw the guns belching death and destruction,
destined for men miles away. It was high angle fire, of course,
directed by observers in the air.

But even that seemed part of the sheer, factory-like industry of war.
There was no passion, no coming to grips in hot blood, here. Orders
were given by the battery commander and the other officers as the
foreman in a machine shop might give them. And the busy artillerymen
worked like laborers, too, clearing their guns after a salvo, loading
them, bringing up fresh supplies of ammunition. It was all
methodical, all a matter of routine.

"Good artillery work is like that," said Captain Godfrey, when I
spoke to him about it. "It's a science. It's all a matter of the
higher mathematics. Everything is worked out to half a dozen places
of decimals. We've eliminated chance and guesswork just as far as
possible from modern artillery actions."

But there was something about it all that was disappointing, at first
sight. It let you down a bit. Only the guns themselves kept up the
tradition. Only they were acting as they should, and showing a proper
passion and excitement. I could hear them growling ominously, like
dogs locked in their kennel when they would be loose and about, and
hunting. And then they would spit, angrily. They inflamed my
imagination, did those guns; they satisfied me and my old-fashioned
conception of war and fighting, more than anything else that I had
seen had done. And it seemed to me that after they had spit out their
deadly charge they wiped their muzzles with red tongues of flame,
satisfied beyond all words or measure with what they had done.

We were rising now, as we walked, and getting a better view of the
country that lay beyond. And so I came to understand a little better
the value of a height even so low and insignificant as Vimy Ridge in
that flat country. While the Germans held it they could overlook all
our positions, and all the advantage of natural placing had been to
them. Now, thanks to the Canadians, it was our turn, and we were
looking down.

Weel, I was under fire. There was no doubt about it. There was a
droning over us now, like the noise bees make, or many flies in a
small room on a hot summer's day. That was the drone of the German
shells. There was a little freshening of the artillery activity on
both sides, Captain Godfrey said, as if in my honor. When one side
increased its fire the other always answered--played copy cat. There
was no telling, ye ken, when such an increase of fire might not be
the first sign of an attack. And neither side took more chances than
it must.

I had known, before I left Britain, that I would come under fire. And
I had wondered what it would be like: I had expected to be afraid,
nervous. Brave men had told me, one after another, that every man is
afraid when he first comes under fire. And so I had wondered how I
would be, and I had expected to be badly scared and extremely
nervous. Now I could hear that constant droning of shells, and, in
the distance, I could see, very often, powdery squirts of smoke and
dirt along the ground, where our shells were striking, so that I knew
I had the Hun lines in sight.

And I can truthfully say that, that day, at least, I felt no great
fear or nervousness. Later I did, as I shall tell you, but that day
one overpowering emotion mastered every other. It was a desire for
vengeance! You were the Huns--the men who had killed my boy. They
were almost within my reach. And as I looked at them there in their
lines a savage desire possessed me, almost overwhelmed me, indeed,
that made me want to rush to those guns and turn them to my own mad
purpose of vengeance.

It was all I could do, I tell you, to restrain myself--to check that
wild, almost ungovernable impulse to rush to the guns and grapple
with them myself--myself fire them at the men who had killed my boy.
I wanted to fight! I wanted to fight with my two hands--to tear and
rend, and have the consciousness that I flash back, like a telegraph
message from my satiated hands to my eager brain that was spurring me on.

But that was not to be. I knew it, and I grew calmer, presently. The
roughness of the going helped me to do that, for it took all a man's
wits and faculties to grope his way along the path we were following
now. Indeed, it was no path at all that led us to the Pimple--the
topmost point of Vimy Ridge, which changed hands half a dozen times
in the few minutes of bloody fighting that had gone on here during
the great attack.

The ground was absolutely riddled with shell holes here. There must
have been a mine of metal underneath us. What path there was
zigzagged around. It had been worn to such smoothness as it possessed
since the battle, and it evaded the worst craters by going around
them. My madness was passed now, and a great sadness had taken its
place. For here, where I was walking, men had stumbled up with
bullets and shells raining about them. At every step I trod ground
that must have been the last resting-place of some Canadian soldier,
who had died that I might climb this ridge in a safety so
immeasurably greater than his had been.

If it was hard for us to make this climb, if we stumbled as we walked,
what had it been for them? Our breath came hard and fast--how had it
been with them? Yet they had done it! They had stormed the ridge the
Huns had proudly called impregnable. They had taken, in a swift rush,
that nothing could stay, a position the Kaiser's generals had assured
him would never be lost--could never be reached by mortal troops.

The Pimple, for which we were heading now, was an observation post at
that time. There there was a detachment of soldiers, for it was an
important post, covering much of the Hun territory beyond. A major of
infantry was in command; his headquarters were a large hole in the
ground, dug for him by a German shell--fired by German gunners who had
no thought further from their minds than to do a favor for a British
officer. And he was sitting calmly in front of his headquarters,
smoking a pipe, when we reached the crest and came to the Pimple.

He was a very calm man, that major, given, I should say, to the
greatest repression. I think nothing would have moved him from that
phlegmatic calm of his! He watched us coming, climbing and making
hard going of it. If he was amused he gave no sign, as he puffed at
his pipe. I, for one, was puffing, too--I was panting like a grampus.
I had thought myself in good condition, but I found out at Vimy Ridge
that I was soft and flabby.

Not a sign did that major give until we reached him. And then, as we
stood looking at him, and beyond him at the panorama of the trenches,
he took his pipe from his mouth.

"Welcome to Vimy Ridge!" he said, in the manner of a host greeting a
party bidden for the weekend.

I was determined that that major should not outdo me. I had precious
little wind left to breathe with, much less to talk, but I called for
the last of it.

"Thank you, major," I said. "May I join you in a smoke?"

"Of course you can!" he said, unsmiling.

"That is, if you've brought your pipe with you." "Aye, I've my pipe,"
I told him. "I may forget to pay my debt, but I'll never forget my
pipe." And no more I will.

So I sat down beside him, and drew out my pipe, and made a long
business of filling it, and pushing the tobacco down just so, since
that gave me a chance to get my wind. And when I was ready to light
up I felt better, and I was breathing right, so that I could talk as
I pleased without fighting for breath.

My friend the major proved an entertaining chap, and a talkative one,
too, for all his seeming brusqueness. He pointed out the spots that
had been made famous in the battle, and explained to me what it was
the Canadians had done. And I saw and understood better than ever
before what a great feat that had been, and how heavily it had
counted. He lent me his binoculars, too, and with them I swept the
whole valley toward Lens, where the great French coal mines are, and
where the Germans have been under steady fire so long, and have been
hanging on by their eyelashes.

It was not the place I should choose, ordinarily, to do a bit of
sight-seeing. The German shells were still humming through the air
above us, though not quite so often as they had. But there were
enough of them, and they seemed to me close enough for me to feel the
wind they raised as they passed. I thought for sure one of them would
come along, presently, and clip my ears right off. And sometimes I
felt myself ducking my head--as if that would do me any good! But I
did not think about it; I would feel myself doing it, without having
intended to do anything of the sort. I was a bit nervous, I suppose,
but no one could be really scared or alarmed in the unplumbable
depths of calm in which that British major was plunged!

It was a grand view I had of the valley, but it was not the sort of
thing I had expected to see. I knew there were thousands of men
there, and I think I had expected to see men really fighting. But
there was nothing of the sort. Not a man could I see in all the
valley. They were under cover, of course. When I stopped to think
about it, that was what I should have expected, of course. If I could
have seen our laddies there below, why, the Huns could have seen them
too. And that would never have done.

I could hear our guns, too, now, very well. They were giving voice
all around me, but never a gun could I see, for all my peering and
searching around. Even the battery we had passed below was out of
sight now. And it was a weird thing, and an uncanny thing to think of
all that riot of sound around, and not a sight to be had of the
batteries that were making it!

Hogge came up while I was talking to the major. "Hello!" he said.
"What have you done to your knee, Lauder?"

I looked down and saw a trickle of blood running down, below my knee.
It was bare, of course, because I wore my kilt.

"Oh, that's nothing," I said.

I knew at once what it was. I remembered that, as I stumbled up the
hill, I had tripped over a bit of barbed wire and scratched my leg.
And so I explained.

"And I fell into a shell-hole, too," I said. "A wee one, as they go
around here." But I laughed. "Still, I'll be able to say I was
wounded on Vimy Ridge."

I glanced at the major as I said that, and was half sorry I had made
the poor jest. And I saw him smile, in one corner of his mouth, as I
said I had been "wounded." It was the corner furthest from me, but I
saw it. And it was a dry smile, a withered smile. I could guess his
thought.

"Wounded!" he must have said to himself, scornfully. And he must have
remembered the real wounds the Canadians had received on that
hillside. Aye, I could guess his thought. And I shared it, although I
did not tell him so. But I think he understood.

He was still sitting there, puffing away at his old pipe, as quiet
and calm and imperturbable as ever, when Captain Godfrey gathered us
together to go on. He gazed out over the valley.

He was a man to be remembered for a long time, that major. I can see
him now, in my mind's eye, sitting there, brooding, staring out
toward Lens and the German lines. And I think that if I were choosing
a figure for some great sculptor to immortalize, to typify and
represent the superb, the majestic imperturbability of the British
Empire in time of stress and storm, his would be the one. I could
think of no finer figure than his for such a statue. You would see
him, if the sculptor followed my thought, sitting in front of his
shell-hole on Vimy Ridge, calm, dispassionate, devoted to his duty
and the day's work, quietly giving the directions that guided the
British guns in their work of blasting the Hun out of the refuge he
had chosen when the Canadians had driven him from the spot where the
major sat.

It was easier going down Vimy Ridge than it had been coming up, but
it was hard going still. We had to skirt great, gaping holes torn by
monstrous shells--shells that had torn the very guts out of the
little hill.

"We're going to visit another battery," said Captain Godfrey. "I'll
tell you I think it's the best hidden battery on the whole British
front! And that's saying a good deal, for we've learned a thing or
two about hiding our whereabouts from Fritz. He's a curious one,
Fritz is, but we try not to gratify his curiosity any more than we
must."

"I'll be glad to see more of the guns," I said.

"Well, here you'll see more than guns. The major in command at this
battery we're heading for has a decoration that was given to him just
for the way he hid his guns. There's much more than fighting that a
man has to do in this war if he's to make good."

As we went along I kept my eyes open, trying to get a peep at the
guns before Godfrey should point them out to me. I could hear firing
going on all around me, but there was so much noise that my ears were
not a guide. I was not a trained observer, of course; I would not
know a gun position at sight, as some soldier trained to the work
would be sure to do. And yet I thought I could tell when I was coming
to a great battery. I thought so, I say!

Again, though I had that feeling of something weird and uncanny. For
now, as we walked along, I did hear the guns, and I was sure, from
the nature of the sound, that we were coming close to them. But, as I
looked straight toward the spot where my ears told me that they must
be, I could see nothing at all. I thought that perhaps Godfrey had
lost his way, and that we were wandering along the wrong path. It did
not seem likely, but it was possible.

And then, suddenly, when I was least expecting it, we stopped.

"Well--here we are!" said the captain, and grinned at our amazement.

And there we were indeed! We were right among the guns of a Canadian
battery, and the artillerymen were shouting their welcome, for they
had heard that I was coming, and recognized me as soon as they saw
me. But--how had we got here? I looked around me, in utter amazement.
Even now that I had come to the battery I could not understand how it
was that I had been deceived--how that battery had been so marvelously
concealed that, if one did not know of its existence and of its exact
location, one might literally stumble over it in broad daylight!

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18