NOW IT CAN BE TOLD
PSYCHOLOGY ON THE SOMME
XIV
The struggle of men from one low ridge to another low ridge in a territory
forty miles wide by more than twenty miles deep, during five months
of fighting, was enormous in its intensity and prolongation of slaughter,
wounding, and endurance of all hardships and terrors of war. As an eye-witness
I saw the full scope of the bloody drama. I saw day by day the tidal
waves of wounded limping back, until two hundred and fifty thousand
men had passed through our casualty clearing stations, and then were
not finished. I went among these men when the blood was wet on them,
and talked with hundreds of them, and heard their individual narratives
of escapes from death until my imagination was saturated with the spirit
of their conflict of body and soul. I saw a green, downy countryside,
beautiful in its summer life, ravaged by gun-fire so that the white
chalk of its subsoil was flung above the earth and grass in a wide,
sterile stretch of desolation pitted with shell-craters, ditched by
deep trenches, whose walls were hideously upheaved by explosive fire,
and littered yard after yard, mile after mile, with broken wire, rifles,
bombs, unexploded shells, rags of uniform, dead bodies, or bits of bodies,
and all the filth of battle. I saw many villages flung into ruin or
blown clean off the map. I walked into such villages as Contalmaison,
Martinpuich, Le Sars, Thilloy, and at last Bapaume, when a smell of
burning and the fumes of explosives and the stench of dead flesh rose
up to one's nostrils and one's very soul, when our dead and German dead
lay about, and newly wounded came walking through the ruins or were
carried shoulder high on stretchers, and consciously and subconsciously
the living, unwounded men who went through these places knew that death
lurked about them and around them and above them, and at any second
might make its pounce upon their own flesh. I saw our men going into
battle with strong battalions and coming out of it with weak battalions.
I saw them in the midst of battle at Thièpval, at Contalmaison,
at Guillemont, by Loupart Wood, when they trudged toward lines of German
trenches, bunching a little in groups, dodging shell-bursts, falling
in single figures or in batches, and fighting over the enemy's parapets.
I sat with them in their dugouts before battle and after battle, saw
their bodies gathered up for burial, heard their snuffle of death in
hospital, sat by their bedside when they were sorely wounded. So the
full tragic drama of that long conflict on the Somme was burned into
my brain and I was, as it were, a part of it, and I am stilled seared
with its remembrance, and shall always be.
But however deep the knowledge of tragedy, a man would be a liar if
he refused to admit the heroism, the gallantry of youth, even the gaiety
of men in these infernal months. Psychology on the Somme was not simple
and straightforward. Men were afraid, but fear was not their dominating
emotion, except in the worst hours. Men hated this fighting, but found
excitement in it, often exultation, sometimes an intense stimulus of
all their senses and passions before reaction and exhaustion. Men became
jibbering idiots with shell-shock, as I saw some of them, but others
rejoiced when they saw our shells plowing into the enemy's earthworks,
laughed at their own narrow escapes and at grotesque comicalities of
this monstrous deviltry. The officers were proud of their men, eager
for their honor and achievement. The men themselves were in rivalry
with other bodies of troops, and proud of their own prowess. They were
scornful of all that the enemy might do to them, yet acknowledged his
courage and power. They were quick to kill him, yet quick also to give
him a chance of life by surrender, and after that were -- nine times
out of ten -- chivalrous and kindly, but incredibly brutal on the rare
occasions when passion overcame them at some tale of treachery. They
had the pride of the skilled laborer in his own craft, as machine-gunners,
bombers, raiders, trench-mortar-men, and were keen to show their skill,
whatever the risks. They were healthy animals, with animal courage as
well as animal fear, and they had, some of them, a spiritual and moral
fervor which bade them risk death to save a comrade, or to save a position,
or to kill the fear that tried to fetter them, or to lead men with greater
fear then theirs. They lived from hour to hour and forgot the peril
or the misery that had passed, and did not forestall the future by apprehension
unless they were of sensitive mind, with the worst quality men might
have in modern warfare -- imagination.
They trained themselves to an intense egotism within narrow boundaries.
Fifty yards to the left, or five hundred, men were being pounded to
death by shell-fire. Fifty yards to the right, or five hundred, men
were being mowed down by machine-gun fire. It was their luck. Why worry
about the other fellow? The length of a traverse in a ditch called a
trench might make all the difference between heaven and hell. Dead bodies
were being piled up on one side of the traverse. A shell had smashed
into the platoon next door. There was a nasty mess. Men sat under their
own mud-bank and scooped out a tin of bully beef and hoped nothing would
scoop them out of their bit of earth. This protective egotism seemed
to me the instinctive soul-armor of men in dangerous places when I saw
them in the line. In a little way, not as a soldier, but as a correspondent,
taking only a thousandth part of the risks of fighting-men, I found
myself using this self-complacency. They were strafing on the
left. Shells were pitching on the right. Very nasty for the men in either
of those places. Poor devils! But meanwhile I was on a safe patch, it
seemed. Thank Heaven for that!
"Here," said an elderly officer -- one of those rare exalted
souls who thought that death was a little thing to give for one's country's
sake -- "here we may be killed at any moment!"
He spoke the words in Contalmaison with a glow in his voice as though
announcing glad tidings to a friend who was a war artist camouflaged
as a lieutenant and new to the scene of battle.
"But," said the soldier-artist, adjusting his steel hat nervously,
"I don't want to be killed! I hate the idea of it!"
He was the normal man. The elderly officer was abnormal. The normal
man, soldier without camouflage, had no use for death at all, unless
it was in connection with the fellow on the opposite side of the way.
He hated the notion of it applied to himself. He fought ferociously,
desperately, heroically, to escape it. Yet there were times, many times,
when he paid not the slightest attention to the near neighborhood of
that grisly specter, because in immediate, temporary tranquillity he
thrust the thought from his mind, and smoked a cigarette, and exchanged
a joke with the fellow at his elbow. There were other times when, in
a state of mental exaltation, or spiritual self-sacrifice, or physical
excitement, he acted regardless of all risks and did mad, marvelous,
almost miraculous things, hardly conscious of his own acts, but impelled
to do as he did by the passion within him -- passion of love, passion
of hate, passion of fear, or passion of pride. Those men, moved like
that, were the leaders, the heroes, and groups followed them sometimes
because of their intensity of purpose and the infection of their emotion,
and the comfort that came from their real or apparent self-confidence
in frightful situations. Those who got through were astonished at their
own courage. Many of them became convinced consciously or subconsciously
that they were immune from shells and bullets. They walked through harassing
fire with a queer sense of carelessness. They had escaped so often that
some of them had a kind of disdain of shell-bursts, until, perhaps,
one day something snapped in their nervous system, as often it did,
and the bang of a door in a billet behind the lines, or a wreath of
smoke from some domestic chimney, gave them a sudden shock of fear.
Men differed wonderfully in their nerve-resistance, and it was no question
of difference in courage.
In the mass all our soldiers seemed equally brave. In the mass they
seemed astoundingly cheerful. In sprite of all the abomination of that
Somme fighting our troops before battle and after battle -- a few days
after -- looked bright-eyed, free from haunting anxieties, and were
easy in their way of laughter. It was optimism in the mass, heroism
in the mass. It was only when one spoke to the individual, some friend
who bared his soul a second, or some soldier-ant in the multitude, with
whom one talked with truth, that one saw the hatred of a man for his
job, the sense of doom upon him, the weakness that was in his strength,
the bitterness of his grudge against a fate that forced him to go on
in this way of life, the remembrance of a life more beautiful which
he had abandoned -- all mingled with those other qualities of pride
and comradeship, and that illogical sense of humor which made up the
strange complexity of his psychology.