Before the Storm

(March-April, 1918)

That dramatic month would have been memorable for the weather if for nothing else. Day after day 'the March sun felt like May,' if ever it did; and though it dried no hawthorn-spray in the broken heart of our little old town, and there was neither blade nor petal to watch a-blowing and a-growing, yet Spring was in our nostrils and we savoured it the more eagerly for all we knew it must bring forth. Then the overshadowing ruins took on glorious hues in the keen sunlight, especially towards evening; the outer grey so warm and soft, like a mouse's fur; the inner lining, of aged brick, an even softer tone of its own, neither red nor pink. Day after day a clean sky threw the jagged peaks into violent relief, and high lights snowed their Matterhorn, until a sidelong sunset picked the whole chain out with shadows like falls of ink. It was a sin to spend those afternoons indoors, even in the Rest Hut, where the two stoves stood idle for days on end, and all the windows open.

Then there were the still and starry nights. Then there were the moonlight nights, not so still, but nothing very dreadful happening our way. Our big local gun might have gone on tour; at least I seem to remember many a night when it did not shake us in our beds, when indeed there was little but the want of sheets and pillow-cases to remind us that we were not in England, where after all one can hear more guns than are noticed any longer, and an aeroplane at any hour of the twenty-four. Many a night there was no more than that to remind us that we were only just behind the Line.

Sometimes, as the two of us sat last thing over a nice open fireplace that had found its way into my room from one of the skeleton houses on the opposite side of the square, one or other would fall to moralising upon the past life of the place we had made so much our own. It was a dutiful effort to remember that the Hôtel de Ville had not always been a mangled pile, its palisaded courtyard once something other than the site of a Y.M.C.A. hut. But the reflection failed to haunt us as it might have done; the present and the living were too absorbing, to say nothing of the imminent future; and as for the dead past, we had our own. And yet we knew from guide-book and album what shining pools of parquet, what ceilings heavily ornate, what monumental intricacies in wood and stone, what crystal grandiosities, formed the huge rubbish-heaps between the mouse-grey walls with the reddish lining: we knew, but it was no use trying to care. The Hôtel de Ville had finished its course; the Rest Hut was just getting into its stride. Another chunk off the stump of the once delicate and dizzy belfry, what did it signify unless the chunk came through our roof? That was our only anxiety in the matter, and we debated whether such a chunk would fly so far, or fall straight down as apparently the rest of the campanile had done before it. My chief mate, however, wound up every debate with the reiterated conviction that there would be no German push at all; they were 'not such fools' as to make one. But for my part I never went to bed without wondering whether that would be the last of our quiet nights, or a quiet night at all. And deadly quiet they had grown; even the rats no longer disturbed us; every one of them had departed, and for no adequate reason within our knowledge. Even the sceptic of a mate had something trite but sinister to say about 'a sinking ship.' ...

One afternoon, two days before the date on which most people seemed to expect things to happen, a harbinger arrived as I sat perched behind the counter. We were not long open; most of the men present were clustered round the newspaper table; you really could have heard some pins drop. That was why, for a second or two, I did hear something I had never heard before, and have no wish to hear again. It sounded exactly like a miniature aeroplane approaching at phenomenal speed. I was just beginning to wonder what it was when there followed the most extraordinary crash. Not an explosion; not a breakage; but the loud flat smack a dining-table might make if you hauled it up to a ceiling by its castors and let it fall perfectly evenly upon a bare floor. It was the roof, however, that had been hit.

We went out to look, and one of the men picked up a fragment of shell, only about three inches long and less than an inch wide. That was my table-top. The jagged edge of it glittered as though incrusted with tiny brilliants; but the fragment was quite cold, showing that it had travelled far since the burst. 'One of our Archies,' said most of the men; but the Rest Hut orderly, who wore a Gunner badge said laconically: 'Fritz—range-finding!' He was borne out by a High Commander who honoured me with a visit some days later. I believe it was the first bit of German stuff that had found its way into the middle of the town since the previous November; and a very interesting and effective little entry it made, in the quietest hour of one of those uncannily quiet days, and in the precincts of what we flattered ourselves was the quietest hut on any front. But the funny (and rather disappointing) thing was that it had failed to leave so much as its mark upon our roof. It must have skimmed the apex and glanced off the downward slope—convex side down—as a stone glances off a pond. 'The little less,' and it would have drilled the reverse slope like a piece of paper. I have often thought of that cluster of forage caps, under the silky skylights, round the central table; but what I shall always hear, plainer than the terrific smack that left no mark, is that first little singing whirr as of a dwarf propeller of gigantic power. I think that must be the most sickening sound of all under heavy shell-fire in the open.

Next day was the eve of the expected attack, which did not in point of fact take place for another week and more; but how widespread was the expectation we learnt for ourselves by our own small signs and portents. A dozen francs were refunded on a dozen books whose borrowers were afraid they would have no more time just then to read another; but when it all blew over for that week, back they came with their deposits, and out went more books than ever. The mate was jubilant. Of course there had been no German attack; and never would be; they were not such fools! Nor was he by any means alone in his opinion; many officers—but enough! We were not, to be sure, by way of meeting many officers. And yet Wednesday, March 20th, brought two to my room whose respective deliverances are worth remembering in the light of subsequent events.

One was the Gunner who had given me steak and onions on our All Uppingham day in the dark depths of the earth. He was as cheery as if he had been making another century in the Old Boys' Match, instead of having just gone on with his heavies on a new pitch altogether. It was going to suit him. He felt like getting wickets. And the Pavilion was not a dug-out this time; it was an elephant, in which the Major and he could put me up any night I liked. Why not that night? He had come in a car; he could take me back with him.

Why not, I sometimes wonder to this day! There were good, there were even creditable, reasons; but, beyond the fact that I was now much attached to my counter, I honestly forget what they were. I only know that my hospitable friend's new wicket was one of the first to be overrun by a field-grey mob; and though the Major and he are still enjoying rude health on the right side of the Line, and it goes without saying that they left the ground with becoming dignity, I am afraid I should have been out of place in the procession. Exciting moments I must have had, but I should have been sorry to play Anchises to my friend's Æneas. And I was to have my little moments as it was.

My other visitor was, curiously, another cricketer, whom I had first seen bowling in the University match at Lord's. It is not his department of the greater game; nor do I intend to compromise this officer by means of any further clue; for he it was who informed me that the push was really coming before morning. 'So they say,' he smiled, and we passed on to matters of more immediate interest. Time enough to be interested in the push when it did come; from all reports I was likely to find myself in the stalls, and he of course would be on the stage. So that was that. In the meantime I had a great fixture arranged and billed for the Saturday evening. An old friend was coming over from the Press Château to lecture in the Rest Hut, for the first time on any platform; there were to be seats for all our other friends, officers and men, and some supper in my room for half-a-dozen of us and the lecturer. It was of this we talked, and probably of pre-war cricket, and my beloved men, over the last quiet tea I was to have there. Books went out very freely till we closed. With Our Faces to the Light, Heroes and Hero-Worship, The Supreme Test, and Our Life after Death, were among the last half-dozen titles!