Front Line Continuous

by CHARLES MORGAN

1

SOMEWHERE east of Antwerp, on the same side I of the British front as Hertogenbosch, there is a small town which, like other small towns, has a principal industry. The directors of this industry are brothers; their two houses stand side by side at the end of a neat gravel sweep, and behind their houses are stables and barns and wire enclosures full of white rabbits and majestic Belgian hares. In a room of one of these houses, I spent my last night in Holland, with a great cavalry regiment, now armored, of whose name the enemy is so well aware — and has been so well aware for a century or two — that I need not mention it.

There were nine of us at dinner — the full colonel who was my traveling companion, the lieutenant colonel commanding the regiment, and six of his staff. The stove was drawing well, and for the first time since I had come to the Low Countries it seemed positively desirable to open a window. To have dined off pheasant was unique luxury, to be warm was rarest heaven; and when the meal was over, talk came easily. Earlier that evening the commanding officer had taken us out to visit, certain armored cars parked in a football field. While we were talking to his sergeant major, there had soared into the pale sky a column of smoke, whitened by the sun.

Our first impulse had been to say it was an airplane emitting a stream of vapor caught by the light; but this was no airplane; whatever it was, it rose at a speed beyond the dreams of pilots, and the line of trajectory was inclined at scarcely more than ten degrees from the vertical. High in the sky, the column of smoke ceased, curling over in a plume like some gargantuan feather, and we grasped that what we had seen, rising up from behind the German lines five or six miles away, was a rocket projectile on its way to the stratosphere. Talk of this led conversation at the stove back to England.

How long was it since I had been there? How the devil had I come out, who wore nothing on the shoulder straps of my battle dress — no badges of rank, not even the insignia of a correspondent? No such animal had ever before been seen, traveling with the authority of General Eisenhower and with freedom to go where he would within the territory of Montgomery’s army group. This took us back to the beginning. I confessed that, to make oddity more odd, I had, in the first instance, flown from London in plain clothes to recite a poem of mine at the reopening of the Comédie Française. It was in Paris that I had changed from white tie and white waistcoat into my improbable battle dress and had come on by jeep through Brussels and Eindhoven.

Now Eindhoven, as a glance at the map will show, lies on the spine of the great, salient which Montgomery’s command, the First Canadian and Second British Armies, has pushed out into the enemy’s right flank. Through it the supplies come up for Nijmegen and the continuing backbone towards Arnhem and the lower Rhine. Eindhoven, in brief, is to the British front, what Atlanta, Georgia, is to the South; you cannot easily go anywhere without passing through it; and I thought, not unreasonably, that the mention of it would lead conversation where it was my duty to lead it to a discussion of military affairs.

I was deceived. The commanding officer, when he was not talking of his men or of pheasants, would tell me what I pleased of the uses and abuses of armored cars, but on the other side of the table was a young captain, with his chin in his hands and the lamplight on his face, who wanted to talk of other things. For example, of the Comédic Française, for he had lived in France as a boy. Second, of Catullus. He was a scholar, and Catullus was his god. It happened that, in a story of mine, one of the characters had translated Jucundum,mea vita,mihi proponis amorem, and the young captain, if my scholarship had been equal to it, would have debated the niceties into the small hours. In any case, one subject leads to another, and poetry to all. Catullus liberates the mind, particularly when a writer is engaged with cavalry around a stove in Holland; I learned from the captain, and from the stories we exchanged, to understand better what I had already seen and heard — to understand, if I may put it so, the feel of being an English soldier in this, the thirty-first year of what seems to us of the first generation virtually a continuous war.

In November last, he was flown to Holland to observe the very country he had fought over in his youth.

2

THE odd and the blessed thing is that the second generation of fighting men is differently aware of the same continuity. The division between youth and age, which poisoned life and sterilized so great a part of literature between wars, no longer exists. We are engulfed in the same tragedy, pierced by the same compassion, torn by the same weariness, sustained by the same need. The young men are already veterans, and whether the ribbons we and they wear are of Mons, Le Cateau, and first Antwerp, or of the desert, Normandy, second Antwerp, and the Rhine, will make no difference between us. I had learned this from a sergeant three days earlier on the other side of the salient. He had fought through Dunkirk and the great victories of Africa, and told me, as the latest chapter in his history, of the advance of the British Eleventh Armored Division from the beaches of Caen, from Caen to Vernon, from the Seine to Amiens, from Amiens through Eastern France into Belgium, driving all day, all night, to take Antwerp by surprise.

And he said with a twist of his Up, “Colonel, they wouldn’t know about that at home. Somebody will think to mention it some day, and because it went quick they’ll give it good marks. But they won’t ever credit Caen, because that were a slow business. Yet the whole pick of the Heinie troops was there, Rommel’s bright boys — all of them.” He repeated this, urgent that I should understand. “The whole pick of the German Army. Six armored divisions, — seven it may be, — not to mention garrison troops and such. ‘Hold that little lot and you hold the hinge. Let them break it and the bleeding door falls down — that’s what we were told.”

This said, the sergeant glowed, as his general had done, in his admiration of the power and timing of Patton’s sweep to the south. “But that weren’t nothing without Caen, and Caen were nothing without that. You’ll find the soldiers know it. They know the score, both the Yanks and us. But the public won’t give it credit, never will. They want to get told about the bands and the flowers and the bomb sites. And wages and coupons and the next election. Not Caen, where the British and Canadians took it.”

The sergeant grinned at his own vehemence and returned to the more cheerful subject of the advance. The speed of it, the taking of the enemy by surprise, the capture of Antwerp with its docks undamaged, may well be seen by posterity as a prime cause of ultimate victory. Through the great port, supplies will flow; from it the long French lines of communication will be by-passed and the material of the Allied offensive be built up. If the Eleventh Armored had been slower by a few hours, the invasion of Germany might have been postponed by as many months.

The sergeant knew this, for he was a strategist, but he was not so austere a strategist as to have no interest in “flowers and bands”; and what he chiefly wanted to tell of was the entry into Antwerp itself, the route taken by the Belgian guides, the smoke rising from quisling houses that the Belgians fired within twenty minutes of the passage of our leading tanks. To aid his narrative, he drew with his forefinger on the side of an armored car a diagram of streets and river. Then, looking up, he asked whether by chance I knew Antwerp. I said that I had fought there, on the road to Lierre, thirty years ago.

“That’s when I was born,” he said, and his eyes went to my ribbons. “Nothing seems to change much.”

“The men don’t and the Germans don’t, but the weapons do.”

He patted his armor and asked what we had had in those days.

“One machine gun to a battalion.”

He whistled at that.

“And I carried a sword,” I added.

“Into action?” He looked at me as though I had said that I had fought at Waterloo. And as I told of this in the cavalry mess, a silence fell, out of which the young captain spoke abruptly. He tipped back his chair and said, “Sometimes it feels as if we had all fought there and had been at it ever since. I suppose the Germans and the French feel the same >— the French most of all, with the war of ‘70 thrown in and a falling population. . . .

“I wonder what this war will be called in the history books. The Great War won’t do. And World War II is a bit of a mouthful. I should like to call it the Fifth German War to remind people where the trouble begins. Schleswig-Holstein, Austria in ‘66, the Franco-Prussian, the war of '14, now this. The Fifth German War, each time a bit bigger than the last. And they were at Waterloo, too,” he added with a smile, “though I suppose we mustn’t blame them for that.”

“Anyhow,” said my traveling companion, who had served in the American Third Division, your Fifth German War won’t do as a name. It leaves out the Japs.”

But conversation ran for the time being on the nearer enemy and they asked me how near to him I had been. A visitor to the front is inevitably nursed a little, but I had gone into the forward observation posts and been given the run of my eyes. No man’s land is wide and the country so flat that every church tower left standing is worth its weight in gold to the gunners. To one of these towers I had gone. It belonged to a deserted village in a little salient of the line, and was guarded as men guard an irreplaceable treasure, by tanks during the day, by patrols at night, by mines and trip-wires at ail times. The Germans shelled it regularly — so regularly by the clock that the forward observation officers knew when it would be discreet to come downstairs for their meals and when, with luck, it would be safe to go up again.

Our course lay down a narrow, muddy track, of which the verges had not yet been cleared of German mines, through the village, to the church on its outskirts. We arrived a little after noon. That morning the church had been hit twice, one shell shattering the east end and surrounding the altar with debris; but the tower was undamaged, and we climbed into the belfry, where two observation officers were on duty with binoculars and telephones. Here at last it was possible to look across country —a dismal, featureless waste with woods clustered beyond it. In those woods was the enemy. Sometimes, we were told, he was visible in the gap between two woods, but though we watched for half an hour there was no sign of him but a wisp of smoke here and there which suggested that he had gone home for dinner.

Back then through the village, past the empty school and the shrine at the crossroads. Exchanging Dingo for Ford, we said good-bye to our gunners and pushed on to the headquarters of the armored brigade. Here, at tea in the parlor of a farmhouse, looked down upon by the ancestral photographs of a family still audibly in residence in the kitchen, we were briskly shelled. The brigadier had a map on his knees and was explaining his disposition and the lay of the land. He continued until a shell arrived at the edge of the front yard, and would have continued then if the cry of a man’s voice had not given warning of a casualty. We went out to see who was hit and how badly. The shelling slackened, but the German evidently knew his target; it might be necessary to shift headquarters half a mile; and the brigadier advised us to be moving, as he so courteously said, “while there was daylight.”

“So you missed your German that day,” the cavalry colonel said, knocking his pipe out on the stove.

“But two mornings later,” I answered, “one was brought to me,” and I saw before me then, and shall long see, the face of that prisoner in whose first interrogation I had shared. It was a thin, fulllipped face, with a long, humorous wrinkle at each side of the mouth — the face of a nervous man, not, it seemed, an unhappy one, whose natural instrument I guessed to be the flute. All men’s faces have an instrument that accords with them. There are cornet faces and horn faces; there are even bassoon faces, and foreheads designed to bend their dome over a cello. This was a flute face, with a raised eyebrow and a twitch at the left cheekbone.

3

TO TELL how he came into the bag is to return where all war returns at long last — to the infantry. In Holland and in winter, it is above all else an infantry war, a war of wading and nibbling and patrolling, and no one knows it better, or honors the infantry more, than the armor and the guns. They have reason. I found the infantry astride a road and a little network of canals running out into no man’s land. At the roadside, wherever there was a good line of fire, one of the Barsetshires had dug his pit, as deep as he was tall and with the diameter of a large barrel. There he stood on his fire-step, with his Bren gun covering the road, until he was relieved — and reliefs are not luxuriously frequent in a battalion which, even when the line is nominally static, suffers its daily tally of casualties by shell fire and patrol.

Day by day these casualties added up, and the territory to be defended did not decrease. Replacements were needed, officers above all. Rest was needed, and there was little hope of it. These men had been out of the line for one rest, of ten and another of five days since they landed in Normandy. On the canal-bank, with dripping trees above them and water six feet below, other sections had dug themselves into shallow foxholes, lined with straw, from which they crawled out to talk to us and to reset the trip-wires which were to give warning in the night. Their task was to stand and hold while on their flank a Scottish division was eating away an enemy salient across the Maas, and while, far away at the other end of the line, the Canadians and British were conducting a fierce and bloody offensive to open the Scheldt and clear the approaches to Antwerp by water.

To stand and hold, in the mud of a canal-bank, does not bring spectacular rewards. It is, moreover, extremely perilous when the weather denies aerial observation and when intelligence is blind. Then more and more depends on infantry patrols. “What we need,” said the second-in-command, “is prisoners. That’s what the division wants; and that, from the point of view of our humble canal-bank, is what puts our tails in the air.” That night they got prisoners, Flute-face among them, and it had been good to know next morning, as I watched him across the intelligence officer’s table at divisional headquarters, that the Barsetshires’ tails were up.

“Did he talk?” asked the young captain who was a scholar of Catullus.

Yes, he had talked. Why, heaven alone knew. He had only to give his name and produce the card he carried, and refuse to speak again. Instead he told all, and more than all, he was asked to tell. There was no vagueness about him. He could read a map, and coming over to the intelligence officer’s side of the table he pointed accurately to the place where the Barsetshires’ patrol had encountered his. From there he traced back the way by which he had come, named the units working with his own in the line, told all that he knew (and he knew much) of movements farther to the rear. He knew so much that we were suspicious of a plant, but what he told fitted into what we already knew and the jigsaw puzzle began to grow together under our eyes.

He had, moreover, an engaging shamelessness, saying frankly that he was tired, that he had worked his way up into the front line with the object of coming over, and that he had deliberately surrendered. When the Barsetshires had opened fire and three of his wounded comrades were screaming on the ground, he had flung himself down and screamed with them. When the battle was over and there was no chance of his being shot, from behind, he had stopped screaming and advanced with his hands up, shouting that he carried a safe-conduct.

It was not a gallant tale. One of Falstaff’s companions might have told it in a moment of selfrevelation. But the way in which Flute-face told it put its truth beyond doubt. When he began to lie, the lie was the more apparent. There were, he said, no Nazis on this section of the front. At home, he said, everyone thought only of how soon the war would end. After the war, Germany would be peacefully-minded. The Nazis and the Army would go. There would be a truly democratic government. He said it clumsily and without faith, as popular newspapers say what they think their readers wish to hear. It was more profitable to bring him back to the map. There his finger pointed to the truth.

While we were talking of him, the time came for bed. It was early, but the cavalry regiment would be up early in the morning. The commanding officer warned us that it would be a noisy night. The Poles were on the move, and a medium battery, in the field beyond the Belgian lanes, would be firing their support. Upstairs, in a cocoon of six blankets, I listened to the guns before falling asleep, and thought of the Barsetshires on their canal-bank, of the Scottish infantry driving for the Maas, of the Poles setting out, of the Canadians and English in the estuary of the Scheldt. And as I looked back over the way by which the armies had come, it appeared to me, between sleeping and waking, that there was little division of space and time, or between army and army, or between ally and ally.

An elder brother of the young captain was in the British Fourteenth Army, fighting the Japanese in Burma. His wife’s brother (who, he had said, was barbarian enough to put Horace before Catullus) was serving under Alexander in the entrance to the valley of the Po. As I rolled myself deeper into my cocoon, I wondered whether next morning, on the way to Brussels through Antwerp, I should succeed in finding my old trenches on the road to Lierre, and whether my colonel and traveling companion, now asleep beside me in his own cocoon, might be persuaded to teach me strategy on the field of Waterloo. . . .

Time and space were running together. Next door the medium battery was thundering its support of the Poles. In the darkness of no man’s land the patrols were out hunting. In the Arctic Sea, the Navy was convoying Russian supplies. The front fine was continuous from century to century, from world’s end. Was it Molière they had played tonight at the Française? Already, before this war began, a million British dead of my generation were lying in the earth of France. If they had lived and had sons, the Barsetshires would not now have had to wait long for replacements.