Welsh Journals

To attempt to analyse and describe one's sensations in battle is to attempt the well nigh impossible. There are moments when the brain is heated to fever pitch, and others when the work in hand demands such complete concentration that, in the revulsion that follows, all impressions are lost or fade rapidly away, only to return in after years in the dim, hazy, form of half-forgotten memories. Yet, often in tense moments, one seems to live years and indelible im- pressions are received which alter the whole lives and characters of men. Of all the more interest then is the following manuscript. It is a short, thumb-nail sketch of war and was written by a Welsh officer during an attack which took place some weeks ago, and under the conditions which he describes Our objective is gained and the fighting is dying down, but the nerve strain is still terrible, and I feel that if I do not do something to occupy my thoughts I shall be approaching madness. I am writing down, then, what I can remember of all that has happened since marching up to the trenches 24 hours ago. That the enemy expected our attack was apparent. Never a moment passed but a star shell flared through the night. The air was full of dust and the shells burst in lurid flame amongst the enemy's wire. I sat on the fire- step of a trench packed with men awaiting the zero hour. One lad was snoring quietly on my shoulder, another near was droning something quietly to himself. The noise and thunder around, the dark figures in the trench, gave a sense of weirdness, of power and exaltation, the beginning of the Red Fever. The man near me stopped talking to himself and asked abruptly, "Have you ever killed a man, sir? Yes," I said, and then, "Have you?" "No! I've wounded many, but, My God! I'd rather myself be killed than take a life." His tense accents awakened my curiosity, and I glanced at him sharply, but he had sunk back into his reverie, his lips moving, his attitude like one who wrestles with the problems of life, and so I asked no more. When one accepts the principle of war, thought I, wounds and death, torture and discomfort are mere incidents by the way. The zero hour was near, and brushing aside thought, I awakened those who were asleep. Arms and bombs were examined, small details of equipment were attended to, anything was done to prevent thinking and imagination. My own feeling was one of curiosity-and confidence. Then we were crawling, slipping over the parapet towards the enemy's trenches. Shells and flares still lit up the ground and from the east the first gray light of dawn was stealing. I heard a shout, faintly above the roar of the shells, and instantly, it seemed, the enemy's trenches burst into a sheet of flame-flashes from machine gun and rifle. I leapt to my feet and ran heeding nothing, shouting, my whole being quivering and moving in lightning fashion, impelled by the intoxication, the lust of battle. THE ATTACK Some strands of wire barred my path. I dived over them, head first, into a layer of mud, at the bottom of a trench from which I rose gasping with maniacal fury. One of the enemy lay dead at my feet, and another paralysed, his features distorted with fear, was awaiting death from a man who towered above him. I was in time to save the poor wretch's life and the action sobered me. I grew cool, calmly cool, and remembered I was to lead a bombing party down a communication trench. By good luck, I was near this trench and some of my men were with me. Bombs were falling around us, and we pushed slowly, yard by yard, up the trench, hurling bombs with demoniacal vigour, now darting forward and now back to escape a bursting bomb. Occasionally, we saw the faces of our enemies, and, once, I saw a face close in, like a book, as my revolver bullet hit it. In a while, we reached a place where the trench was demolished. The shell fire raged ahead and around us, and we crawled forward in line with some infantry who were digging themselves in. It was now broad daylight, and the musketry fire still roared from enemy trenches a few hundred yards off. I lay panting, my chest and eyes aching, and looked along the line of men digging, digging, their entrenching tools keeping time with their palpitating hearts, groaning as they breathed. I smiled at the ludicrousness of it, and broke into a fit of laughter, when one or two stopped and regarded me nervously but soon resumed their digging A trench was completed and in this we lay ex- hausted. I had lifted some dead men out of the trench in order to do more digging and improve it, and was now sitting attending in a stupefied manner to two wounded men. One, shot in the neck and paralysed, was praying as he felt his life slipping, praying for his widowed mother at home. The other, shot in the stomach, clawed and bit at the ground in frightful agony, and him I dosed with morphia. It was now late in the afternoon. I was worn out, exhausted. The blood on my clothes and hands smelt sickly in the warmth of the sun, and the sense of the futility, the terrible madness of war, welled up in me again and I lay sick-horribly sick. I floundered for some firm moral support to cling to and find calm. Old argu- ments which drove me into the Army, flit and chase in eternal procession across my brain, but reason seems blunted, turned aside, poor and feeble. "Wounds and death are mere incidents by the way." I remember my specious philosophising of the night before and my words come back to mock me. There is something wrong, so hellishly wrong with it all, and I am helpless, tossed about, a puny thing I know that to-morrow I shall be calm and purposeful again, but now I want rest- rest. I want to laugh, but that spells madness. God in Heaven Give me the clear insight to see, and the grace to follow, or take from me reason and leave me unthinking, drifting to death with the beasts of the field Here the manuscript ends. E.C.H.