Chapter Twenty-Four
Curzon presided at the dinner of the staff of the Forty-fourth Corps on the night of March 20th. He remembered how Wayland-Leigh had provided champagne on the eve of other battles, and he sent Greven all the way back to Amiens by car in order to obtain a full supply of the Clicquot 1900 which Curzon specially favoured. Conditions were a little different from those other evenings, for Terry and Whiteman, commanding two of the divisions in the line, had been compelled to refuse Curzon’s invitation on the ground that they dared not leave their headquarters for so long. But Franklin was there, red-faced and be-ribboned, and Challis – for the glorious old Ninety-first Division had come back under Curzon’s orders. Challis sat silently as usual, handling his knife and fork so as not to draw attention to his maimed hand, about which he was morbidly sensitive.
The dinner was dull enough at first, because everyone present was overtired, and the smooth flow of conversation was continually being checked by interruptions as messages came in which could only be dealt with by particular individuals. The wine only loosened tongues gradually, but by degrees a buzz of talk grew up round the table. Stanwell told his celebrated story of how once when he had a bad cold he had been deputed to show a sight-seeing party of important civilians round the front. They had arrived in the dark, and his sore throat had compelled him to whisper as he guided them to where they were spending the night – ‘Step wide here, please,’ ‘Stoop under this wire, please.’
At last one of the civilians whispered back to him: ‘How far off are the Germans?’
‘Oh, about ten miles.’
‘Then what the hell are we whispering like this for?’
‘I don’t know why you are, but I’ve got a cold.’
Everyone laughed at that, even those who had heard it before; it was always good to hear of civilians and politicians making fools of themselves. Milward, the gas officer, down at the foot of the table (the Irregulars were dining with the Regulars on this special occasion) was tempted to tell how he had pleaded for a year with Curzon to experiment with dichlorethyl sulphide – mustard gas – and had been put off because he could not guarantee many deaths, but only thousands of disablements.
‘We want something that will kill,’ Curzon had said, and the British Army postponed the use of mustard gas until the Germans had proved its efficiency.
Milward almost began to tell this story, but he caught Curzon’s eye along the length of the table and forbore. Curzon noticed his change of expression, and with unusual sensitiveness felt Milward’s slight hostility. As host it was his duty to keep the party running smoothly; as commanding officer it was his duty too. He remembered Wayland-Leigh on the night before Loos quoting Shakespeare as he toasted the advance to the Rhine. He fingered his glass. There was no imminent advance before them, only a desperate defensive. Into his mind drifted a fragment which he remembered of one of Lewis Waller’s speeches in the old days when he was playing Henry V.
‘Come the four corners of the world in arms and we shall shock them,’ said Curzon, turning to Challis on his right.
‘Er – yes. Yes. Quite,’ said Challis, taken by surprise.
The presence of so many senior officers and the small number of young subalterns present prevented the evening developing into the sort of wild entertainment which Curzon had so often experienced in cavalry messes. The junior ranks were unusually quiet, too. Several of them withdrew early on the truthful plea that they had work to do, and Franklin, who was a determined bridge player, quietly collected a four and settled down, rather rudely and unsociably, Curzon thought.
He went out and stared through the darkness towards the line. The night was absolutely still. There was an aeroplane or two droning in the distance, but the sound of their passage was louder than any noise of guns from the front. The bobbing points of light which marked the line of trenches on the horizon were far fewer than he had ever noticed before. There was no breath of wind; the stars were just visible in a misty sky. Curzon went to bed. If Intelligence’s forecast was correct he would need all his energies for the morrow. He told Mason to call him at five o’clock.
Curzon was soundly asleep when Mason came in – he had the trick of sleeping sound until the exact moment when he had planned to wake. Mason had to touch his shoulder to rouse him.
‘Is it five o’clock?’ said Curzon, moving his head on the pillow, with his moustache lopsided.
‘It’s four-thirty, sir,’ said Mason. ‘Here’s Mr Greven wants to speak to you, sir.’
Curzon sat up.
‘Bombardment’s started, sir,’ said Greven. ‘Been going five minutes now.’
The house was trembling to the sound. A thousand German batteries – more guns than the whole world put together had possessed before the war – were firing at once.
‘Mason, fill my bath,’ said Curzon, leaping from the bed in his blue and white pyjamas.
‘I’ve done it, sir,’ said Mason.
‘Any reports?’ asked Curzon, flinging off his pyjamas.
‘Not yet, sir,’ said Greven.
‘No, of course there wouldn’t be,’ said Curzon. Not for two days did he expect any vital report – the Germans would be fools if they attacked after a briefer bombardment than that.
Curzon had his bath, and shaved, and dressed, and walked into his headquarters office to hear the latest news before he had his breakfast.
‘Bombardment’s heavy, sir,’ said Miller, sitting at a telephone. ‘Gas, mostly. Queer that they’re using gas at this stage of the preparation. And there’s thick fog all along the line. I’ve warned everyone to expect local raids.’
‘Quite right,’ said Curzon, and went off to eat porridge and bacon and eggs.
When he had eaten his breakfast he came back again. Miller seemed unusually worried.
‘Something very queer’s going on, sir,’ he said. ‘Back areas are coming in for it as much as the front line. They’re flooding places with gas.’
He proffered half a dozen reports for inspection.
‘And the cross-roads behind the line are catching it as well. We’ve never spread a bombardment out like this.’
‘I expect they think they know better than us,’ said Curzon lightly.
‘Terry’s reporting that all communication with his frontline units has been broken already, but that’s only to be expected, of course,’ said Miller.
‘Yes. Any raids?’
‘Nothing yet, sir.’
Curzon found his stolidity a little shaken by Miller’s alarmist attitude. There must be a long bombardment before the attack; in theory there would be no need to do anything for days, and yet – Curzon could not bring himself to order his horse and take his customary morning’s exercise. He paced restlessly about headquarters instead. The thick ground mist showed no sign of lifting; the roar of the bombardment seemed to have increased in intensity.
When next he came back Frobisher was speaking excitedly into a telephone.
‘Yes,’ he was saying. ‘Yes,’ and then he broke off. ‘Hallo! Hallo! Oh, hell,’ and he put the receiver back with a gesture of annoyance.
‘Wire’s gone, I suppose. That was General Whiteman, sir. Attack’s begun. That’s all I could hear.’
An orderly came running in with a message brought by a carrier pigeon and Frobisher snatched it from him. The attack had undoubtedly begun, and confusion descended upon headquarters.
Incredibly, it seemed, the line was crumbling along the whole corps front, and along the fronts of the corps on either flank as well. Curzon could hardly believe the reports which were coming in. One of the chief duties of a general is to sort out the true from the false, but here it was impossible to believe anything. One or two strong points in the front line whose communications had survived reported that they were holding out without difficulty; the entire absence of news from others might merely mean a rupture of communication. And yet from here and there in the second line came reports of the German advance – so far back in some places that Curzon fe
lt inclined to dismiss them as the result of over-imagination on the part of the officers responsible. The mist and the gas were causing confusion; and the German bombardment had been cunningly directed so as to cause as much havoc as possible in the means of communication. Curzon found himself talking to an artillery colonel who was reporting by telephone that the Germans were assaulting his battery positions.
‘Are you sure?’ asked Curzon.
‘Sure? We’re firing over open sights with fuses set at zero,’ blazed the colonel at the other end. ‘God damn it, sir, d’you think I’m mad?’
Through all the weak places in the British line – and they were many – the German attack was pouring forward like a tide through a faulty dyke. The strong points were being steadily cut off and surrounded – there was no heroic expenditure of German life to storm them by main force. Little handfuls of machine-gunners, assiduously trained, were creeping forward here and there, aided by the fog, taking up tactical positions which destroyed all possibility of unity in the defence.
Holnon and Dallon were lost. As the afternoon came Curzon sent orders to Challis and the Ninety-first Division to move up into the line and stop the advance. His old Ninety-first could be relied upon to do all their duty. Guns, ammunition dumps, bridges, all were falling intact into the hands of the enemy. At nightfall the British Army seemed to be on the verge of the greatest disaster it had ever experienced, and Curzon’s frantic appeals to Army Headquarters were meeting with no response.
‘We’ve got no reserves to give you at all,’ said Hudson. ‘You’ll have to do the best you can with the Ninety-first. It’ll be four days at least before we can give you any help. You’ve just got to hold on, Curzon. We know you’ll do it.’
All through the night the bombardment raved along the line. Challis was reporting difficulties in executing his orders. Roads were under fire, other roads were blocked with retreating transport. He could get no useful information from his fellow divisional generals. But he was not despairing. He was deploying his division where it stood, to cover what he guessed to be the largest gap opening in the British line. Curzon clung to that hope. Surely the Ninety-first would stop the Huns.
At dawn Franklin reported that he was shifting his headquarters – the German advance had reached that far. There was no news from Terry at all. He must have been surrounded, or his headquarters hit by a shell – four motor cyclists had been sent to find him, and none had returned. The coloured pins on Miller’s map indicated incredible bulgings of the line.
‘Message from Whiteman, sir,’ said Frobisher, white-cheeked. ‘He’s lost all his guns. Doesn’t know where Thomas’s brigade is. And he says Stanton’s is legging it back as fast as it can, what there is left of it.’
That meant danger to the right flank of the Ninety-first. Before Curzon could reply Miller called to him.
‘Challis on the telephone, sir. He says both flanks are turned. There are Huns in Saint-Félice, and nothing can get through Boncourt ’cause of mustard gas. Shall he hold on?’
Should he hold on? If he did the Ninety-first would be destroyed. If he did not there would be no solid point in the whole line, and in the absence of reserves there was no knowing how wide the gap would open. Could he trust the Ninety-first to hold together under the disintegrating stress of a retreat in the presence of the enemy? He went over to the telephone.
‘Hallo, Challis.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What are your men like?’
‘All right, sir. They’ll do anything you ask of them – in reason.’
‘Well –’
Frobisher came running over to him at that moment with a scrap of paper which an orderly had brought in – a message dropped from an aeroplane. It bore only three important words, and they were ‘Enemy in Félcourt’. At that rate the Germans were far behind Challis’s right flank, and on the point of intercepting his retreat. There could be no extricating the Ninety-first now.
‘I can’t order you to retreat, Challis,’ said Curzon. ‘The Huns are in Félcourt.’
‘Christ!’
‘There’s nothing for it but for you to hold on while you can. You must maintain your present position to the last man, Challis.’
‘Very good, sir. Good-bye.’
Those few words had condemned ten thousand men to death or mutilation.
‘If the Huns are in Flécourt, sir,’ said Miller, ‘it’s time we got out of here.’
Half a dozen eager pairs of eyes looked up at Curzon when Miller said that. He was voicing the general opinion.
‘Yes,’ said Curzon. What Miller said was only common sense. But Curzon suddenly felt very dispirited, almost apathetic. What was the use of withdrawing all this elaborate machinery of the Corps command when there was no Corps left? Three divisions were in ruins, and a fourth would be overwhelmed by converging attacks in the next two hours. And there was nothing to fill the gap. The Germans had achieved the break-through which the English had sought in vain for three years, and a break-through meant defeat and ruin. England had suffered a decisive defeat at a vital point. Curzon went back in his mind through a list of victories which had settled the fate of Europe – Sedan, Sadowa, Waterloo. Now England was among the conquered. He tried to find a precedent in English military history, and he went farther and farther back in his mind through the centuries. Not until he reached Hastings could he find a parallel. Hastings had laid England at the feet of the Normans, and this defeat would lay England at the feet of the Germans.
‘We’ll move in the usual two echelons,’ Miller was saying. ‘Frobisher, you’ll go with the first.’
What was the use of it all? A vivid flash of imagination, like lightning at night, revealed the future to Curzon. He would return to England a defeated general, one of the men who had let England down. There would be public reproaches. Courtsmartial, perhaps. Emily would stand by him, but he did not want her to have to do so. In an excruciating moment he realized that even with Emily at his side he could not face a future of professional failure. Emily whom he loved would make it all the worse. He would rather die, the way the old Ninety-first was dying.
He swung round upon Greven, who was standing helpless, as was only to be expected, amid the bustle of preparation for the transfer.
‘Send for my horse,’ he said.
Those who heard him gaped.
‘The motor cars are just coming round, sir,’ said Miller respectfully.
‘I shan’t want mine,’ replied Curzon. Even at that moment he sought to avoid the melodramatic by the use of curt military phrasing. ‘I’m going up the line. I shall leave you in charge, Miller.’
‘Up the line,’ someone whispered, echoing his words. They knew now what he intended.
‘I’ll send for my horse too, sir,’ said Follett. As A.D.C. it was his duty to stay by his general’s side, even when the general was riding to his death. One or two people looked instinctively at Greven.
‘And me too, of course,’ said Greven slowly.
‘Right,’ said Curzon harshly. ‘Miller, it’ll be your duty to reorganize what’s left of the Corps. We can still go down fighting.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Two minutes, Follett,’ said Curzon, and under the gaze of every eye he strode across the room and through the green baize doors into his quarters.
Mason was running round like a squirrel in a cage, packing his officer’s things.
‘Get my sword,’ snapped Curzon.
‘Your sword, sir?’
‘Yes, you fool.’
While Mason plunged in search of the sword into the rolled valise, Curzon wrenched open the silver photograph frame upon the wall. He stuffed Emily’s photograph into the breast of his tunic.
‘Here it is, sir,’ said Mason.
Curzon slipped the sword into the frog of his Sam Browne. There was still a queer military pleasure to be found in the tap of the sheath against his left boot. Mason was talking some foolishness or other, but Curzon did not stop to listen
. He walked out to the front of the house, where among the motor vehicles Greven and Follett were on horseback and a groom was holding his own horse. Curzon swung himself up into his saddle. The horse was full of oats and insufficiently exercised lately, besides being infected by the excitement and bustle. He plunged madly as Curzon’s right foot found the stirrup. Curzon brought the brute back to the level with the cruel use of the curb, and swung his head round towards the gate. Then he dashed out to the road, with Greven and Follett clattering wildly behind him.
The road was crowded with evidences of a defeat. Transport of all sorts, ambulances, walking wounded, were all pouring down it with the one intention of escaping capture. Puzzled soldiers stared at the three red-tabbed officers, magnificently mounted, who were galloping so madly over the clattering pavé towards the enemy. Far ahead Curzon could hear the roar of the guns as the Ninety-first fought its last battle. His throat was dry although he swallowed repeatedly. There was no thought in his head as he abandoned himself to the smooth rhythm of his galloping horse. Suddenly a flash of colour penetrated into his consciousness. There was a group of unwounded soldiers on the road, and the little squares on their sleeves showed that they belonged to the Ninety-first. He pulled up his horse and turned upon them.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he demanded.
‘We ain’t got no officer, sir,’ said one.
They were stragglers escaped by a miracle from the shattered left wing of their division.
‘D’you need an officer to show you how to do your duty? Turn back at once. Follett, bring them on with you. I expect you’ll find others up the road.’
Curzon wheeled his lathered horse round again and dashed on, only Greven followed him now. They approached the cross-roads where a red-capped military policeman was still directing traffic. An officer there was trying to sort out the able-bodied from the others.
‘Ah!’ said Curzon.
At that very moment a German battery four miles away opened fire. They were shooting by the map, and they made extraordinarily good practice as they sought for the vital spots in the enemy’s rear. Shells came shrieking down out of the blue and burst full upon the cross-roads, and Curzon was hit both by a flying fragment of red-hot steel and by a jagged lump of pavé. His right leg was shattered, and his horse was killed.