Yfc/ 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
NEW BORZOI NOVELS 
 SPRING. 1920 
 
 PETER JAMESON 
 By Gilbert Frankau 
 
 THE ROLLING STONE 
 By C. A. Dawson-Scott 
 
 THE CROSS PULL 
 By Hal G. Evarts 
 
 DELIVERANCE 
 
 By E. L. Grant Watson 
 
 THE TALLEYRAND MAXIM 
 By J. S. Fletcher 
 
 WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO 
 TREAD 
 
 By E. M. Forster 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 By 
 A. P. Herbert 
 
 New York 
 
 Alfred A Knopf 
 1920 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY L) lT*1 / 
 
 ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. 
 
 Published January, 1920 * 
 
 PRINTED IN TflE TJNJTEP STATES OF AMERICA 
 
I AM going to write down some of the his- 
 tory of Harry Penrose, because I do not 
 think full justice has been done to him, 
 and because there must be many other young 
 men of his kind who flung themselves into this 
 war at the beginning of it, and have gone out 
 of it after many sufferings with the unjust 
 and ignorant condemnation of their fellows. 
 At times, it may be, I shall seem to digress 
 into the dreary commonplaces of all war- 
 chronicles, but you will never understand the 
 ruthless progression of Penrose's tragedy 
 without some acquaintance with each chapter 
 of his life in the army. 
 
 He joined the battalion only a few days 
 before we left Plymouth for Gallipoli, a shy, 
 intelligent-looking person, with smooth, 
 freckled skin and quick, nervous movements; 
 
 [7] 
 
 i 
 
THe; Secret '-Battle 
 
 and although he was at once posted to my 
 company we had not become at all intimate 
 when we steamed at last into Mudros Bay. 
 But he had interested me from the first, and 
 at intervals in the busy routine of a troop- 
 ship passing without escort through subma- 
 rine waters, I had been watching him and de- 
 lighting in his keenness and happy disposition. 
 It was not my first voyage through the 
 Mediterranean, though it was the first I had 
 made in a transport, and I liked to sec my 
 own earlier enthusiasm vividly reproduced 
 in him. Cape Spartel and the first glimpse 
 of Africa; Tangicrs and Tarifa and all that 
 magical hour's steaming through the narrow 
 waters with the pink and white houses hiding 
 under the hills; Gibraltar Town shimmering 
 and asleep in the noonday sun; Malta and 
 the bumboat women, carozzes swaying 
 through the narrow, chattering streets; cool 
 drinks at cafes in a babel of strange tongues : 
 all these were to Penrose part of the authentic 
 glamour of the East; and he said so. I might 
 have told him, with the fatuous pomp of wider 
 experience, that they were in truth but a very 
 [8] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 distant reflection of the genuine East; but 1 
 did not. For it was refreshing to see any one 
 so frankly confessing to the sensations of ad- 
 venture and romance. To other members of 
 the officers' mess the spectacle of Gibraltar 
 from the sea may have been more stimulating 
 than the spectacle of Southend (though this 
 is doubtful) ; but it is certain that few of them 
 would have admitted the grave impeachment. 
 At Malta some of us spent an evening 
 ashore, and sat for a little in a tawdry, riotous 
 little cafe, where two poor singing women 
 strove vainly to make themselves heard above 
 the pandemonium of clinked glasses and 
 bawled orders; there we met many officers 
 newly returned from the landing at Cape 
 Helles, some of them with slight bodily 
 wounds, but all of them with grievous injury 
 staring out of their eyes. Those of them who 
 would speak at all were voluble with anec- 
 dotes of horror and blood. Most of our own 
 party had not yet lost the light-hearted mood 
 in which men went to the war in those days; 
 the "picnic" illusion of war was not yet dis- 
 pelled; also, individually, no doubt, we had 
 
 [9] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 that curious confidence of the unblooded sol- 
 dier that none of these strange, terrible things 
 could ever actually happen to us; we should 
 for ever hang upon the pleasant fringes of 
 war, sailing in strange seas, and drinking in 
 strange towns, but never definitely entangled 
 in the more crude and distasteful circum- 
 stances of battle. And if there were any of 
 us with a secret consciousness that we de- 
 ceived ourselves, tonight was no time to tear 
 away the veil. Let there be lights and laugh- 
 ter and wine; tomorrow, if need be, let us be 
 told how the wounded had drowned in the 
 wired shallows, and reckon the toll of that 
 unforgettable exploit and the terrors that were 
 still at work. And so we would not be dra- 
 gooned into seriousness by these messengers 
 from the Peninsula; but rather, with no injury 
 to their feelings, laughed at their croakings 
 and continued to drink. 
 
 But Harry Penrose was different He was 
 all eagerness to hear every detail, hideous and 
 heroic. 
 
 There was one officer present, from the 29th 
 Division, a man about thirty, with a tanned, 
 
 [10] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 melancholy face and great solemn eyes, which, 
 for all the horrors he related, seemed to have 
 something yet more horrible hidden in their 
 depths. Him Harry plied with questions, his 
 reveller's mood flung impatiently aside; and 
 the man seemed ready to tell him things, 
 though from his occasional reservations and 
 sorrowful smile I knew that he was pitying 
 Harry for his youth, his eagerness and his 
 ignorance. 
 
 Around us were the curses of overworked 
 waiters, and the babble of loud conversations, 
 and the smell of spilt beer; there were two 
 officers uproariously drunk, and in the dis- 
 tance pathetic snatches of songs were heard 
 from the struggling singer on the dais. We 
 were in one of the first outposts of the Empire, 
 and halfway to one of her greatest adventures. 
 And this excited youth at my side was the only 
 one of all that throng who was ready to hear 
 the truth of it, and to speak of death. I lay 
 emphasis on this incident, because it well il- 
 lustrates his attitude towards the war at that 
 time (which too many have now forgotten), 
 and because I then first found the image which 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 alone reflects the many curiosities of his per- 
 sonality. 
 
 He was like an imaginative, inquisitive 
 child; a child that cherishes a secret gallery 
 of pictures in its mind, and must continually 
 be feeding this storehouse with new pictures of 
 the unknown; that is not content with a vague 
 outline of something that is to come, a dentist, 
 or a visit, or a doll, but will not rest till the ex- 
 perience is safely put away in its place, a clear, 
 uncompromising picture, to be taken down 
 and played with at will. 
 
 Moreover, he had the fearlessness of a child 
 but I shall come to that later. 
 
 And so we came to Mudros, threading a 
 placid way between the deceitful Aegean Is- 
 lands. Harry loved them because they wore 
 so green and inviting an aspect, and again I 
 did not undeceive him and tell him how 
 parched and austere, how barren of comfort- 
 able grass and shade he would find them on 
 closer acquaintance. We steamed into Mu- 
 dros Bay at the end of an unbelievable sunset; 
 in the great harbour were gathered regiments 
 of ships battleship, cruiser, tramp, transport, 
 
 [12] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 and trawler, and as the sun sank into the west- 
 ern hills, the masts and the rigging of all of 
 them were radiant with its last rays, while all 
 their decks and hulls lay already in the soft 
 blue dusk. There is something extraordinar- 
 ily soothing in the almost imperceptible mo- 
 tion of a big steamer gliding at slow speed to 
 her anchorage; as I leaned over the rail of 
 the boat-deck and heard the tiny bugle-calls 
 float across from the French or English war- 
 ships, and watched the miniature crews at 
 work upon their decks, I became aware that 
 Pcnrosc was similarly engaged close at hand, 
 and it seemed to me an opportunity to learn 
 something of the history of this strange young 
 man. 
 
 Beginning with his delight in the voyage 
 and all the marvellous romance of our sur- 
 roundings, I led him on to speak of himself. 
 Both his parents had died when he was a boy 
 at school. They had left him enough to go to 
 Oxford upon (without the help of the Ex- 
 hibition he had won), and he had but just 
 completed his second year there when the war 
 broke out. For some mysterious reason he 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 had immediately enlisted instead of applying 
 for a commission, like his friends. I gathered 
 though not from anything he directly said 
 that he had had a hard time in the ranks. 
 The majority of his companions in training 
 had come down from the- north with the first 
 draft of Tynesiders; and though, God knows, 
 the Tynesider as a fighting man has been un- 
 surpassed in this war, they were a wild, rough 
 crowd before they became soldiers, and I can 
 understand that for a high-strung, sensitive 
 boy of his type the intimate daily round of 
 eating, talking, and sleeping with them, must 
 have made large demands on his patriotism 
 and grit. But he said it did him good; and 
 it was only the pestering of his guardian and 
 relations that after six months forced him to 
 take a commission. He had a curious lack of 
 confidence in his fitness to be an officer a feel- 
 ing which is deplorably absent in hundreds not 
 half as fit as he was; but from what I had 
 seen of his handling of his platoon on the voy- 
 age (and the men are difficult after a week 
 or two at sea) I was able to assure him that he 
 need have no qualms. He was, I discovered, 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 pathetically full of military ambitions; he 
 dreamed already, he confessed, of decorations 
 and promotions and glorious charges. In 
 short, he was like many another undergraduate 
 officer of those days in his eagerness and readi- 
 ness for sacrifice, but far removed from the 
 common type in his romantic, imaginative out- 
 look towards the war. "Romantic" is the only 
 word, I think, and it is melancholy for me to 
 remember that even then I said to myself, "I 
 wonder how long the romance will last, my 
 
 son." 
 
 But I could not guess just how terrible was 
 to be its decay. 
 
 II 
 
 We were not to be long at Mudros. For 
 three days we lay in the sweltering heat of the 
 great hill-circled bay, watching the warships 
 come and go, and buying fruit from the little 
 Greek sailing boats which fluttered round the 
 harbour. These were days of hot anxiety 
 about one's kit; hourly each officer reorgan- 
 ized and re-disposed his exiguous belongings, 
 and re-weighed his valise, and jettisoned yet 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 more precious articles of comfort, lest the 
 weight regulations be violated and for the sake 
 of an extra shirt the whole of one's equipment 
 be cast into the sea by the mysterious figure 
 we believed to watch over these things. 
 Afterwards we found that all our care was 
 in vain, and in the comfortless camps of the 
 Peninsula bitterly bewailed the little luxuries 
 we had needlessly left behind, now so unat- 
 tainable. Down in the odorous troop-decks 
 the men wrote long letters describing the bat- 
 tles in which they were already engaged, and 
 the sound of quite mythical guns. 
 
 But on the third day came our sailing or- 
 ders. In the evening a little trawler, pro- 
 moted to the dignity of a fleet-sweeper, came 
 alongside, and all the regiment of gross, over- 
 loaded figures festooned with armament and 
 bags of food, and strange, knobbly parcels, 
 tumbled heavily over the side. Many men 
 have written of the sailing of the first argosy 
 of troopships from that bay; and by this time 
 the spectacle of departing troops was an old 
 one to the vessels there. But this did not di- 
 minish the quality of their farewells. All the 
 [16] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 King's ships "manned ship" as we passed, and 
 sent us a great wave of cheering that filled the 
 heart with sadness and resolution. 
 
 In one of the French ships was a party of 
 her crew high up somewhere above the deck, 
 and they sang for us with astonishing accuracy 
 and feeling the "Chant du Depart"; so mov- 
 ing was this that even the stolid Northerners 
 in our sweeper were stirred to make some more 
 articulate acknowledgment than the official 
 British cheer; and one old pitman, searching 
 among his memories of some Lancashire mu- 
 sic-hall, dug out a rough version of the "Mar- 
 seillaise." By degrees all our men took up 
 the tune and sang it mightily, with no sus- 
 picion of words ; and the officers, not less tim- 
 idly, joined in, and were proud of the men for 
 what they had done. For many were moved 
 in that moment who were never moved be- 
 fore. But while we were yet warm with 
 cheering and the sense of knighthood, we 
 cleared the boom and shivered a little in the 
 breeze of the open sea. 
 
 The sun went down, and soon it was very 
 cold in the sweeper: and in each man's heart 
 
 [17] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 I think there was a certain chill. There were 
 no more songs, but the men whispered in 
 small groups, or stood silent, shifting uneasily 
 their wearisome packs. For now we were in- 
 deed cut off from civilization and committed 
 to the unknown. The transport we had left 
 seemed a very haven of comfort and security; 
 one thought longingly of white tables in the 
 saloon, and the unfriendly linen bags of bully- 
 beef and biscuits we carried were concrete evi- 
 dence of a new life. The war seemed no 
 longer remote, and each of us realized in- 
 dignantly that we were personally involved 
 in it. So for a little all these soldiers had a 
 period of serious thought unusual in the sol- 
 dier's life. But as we neared the Peninsula 
 the excitement and novelty and the prospect 
 of exercising cramped limbs brought back 
 valour and cheerfulness. 
 
 At Malta we had heard many tales of the 
 still terrifying ordeal of landing under fire. 
 But such terrors were not for us. There was 
 a bright moon, and as we saw the pale cliffs 
 of Cape Helles, all, I think, expected each 
 moment a torrent of shells from some obscure 
 [18] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 quarter. But instead an unearthly stillness 
 brooded over the two bays, and only a Morse 
 lamp blinking at the sweeper suggested that 
 any living thing was there. And there came 
 over the water a strange musty smell; some 
 said it was the smell of the dead, and some 
 the smell of an incinerator; myself I do not 
 know, but it was the smell of the Peninsula 
 for ever, which no man can forget. We dis- 
 embarked at a pier of rafts by the River Clyde, 
 and stumbled eagerly ashore. And now we 
 were in the very heart of heroic things. No- 
 where, I think, was the new soldier plunged 
 so suddenly into the genuine scenes of war as 
 he was at Gallipoli; in France there was a 
 long transition of training-camps and railway 
 trains and billets, and he moved by easy grada- 
 tions to the firing line. But here, a few hours 
 after a night in linen sheets, we stood suddenly 
 on the very sand where, but three weeks be- 
 fore, those hideous machine-guns in the cliffs 
 had mown down that astonishing party of 
 April 25. And in that silver stillness it was 
 difficult to believe. 
 
 We shambled off up the steady slope be- 
 
 [19] 
 

 The Secret Battle 
 
 twecn two cliffs, marvelling that any men 
 could have prevailed against so perfect a 
 "field of fire/' By now we were very tired, 
 and it was heavy work labouring through the 
 soft sand. Queer, Moorish-looking figures in 
 white robes peered at us from dark corners, 
 and here and there a man poked a tousled head 
 from a hole in the ground, and blinked upon 
 our progress. Some one remarked that it 
 reminded him of nothing so much as the 
 native camp at EaiTs Court on a fine August 
 evening, and that indeed was the effect. 
 
 After a little the stillness was broken by 
 a sound which we could not conceal from 
 ourselves was "the distant rattle of musketry" ; 
 somewhere a gun fired startlingly; and now 
 as we went each man felt vaguely that at any 
 minute we might be plunged into the thick of 
 a battle, laden as we were, and I think each 
 man braced himself for a desperate struggle. 
 Such is the effect of marching in the dark 
 to an unknown destination. Soon we were 
 halted in a piece of apparently waste land 
 circled by trees, and ordered to dig ourselves 
 a habitation at once, for "in the morning" it 
 
 [20] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 was whispered "the Turks search all this 
 ground." Everything was said in a kind of 
 hoarse, mysterious whisper, presumably to 
 conceal our observations from the ears of 
 the Turks five miles away. But then we did 
 not know they were five miles away; we had 
 no idea where they were or where we were our- 
 selves. Men glanced furtively at the North 
 Star for guidance, and were pained to find 
 that, contrary to their military teaching, it 
 told them nothing. Even the digging was 
 carried on a little stealthily till it was dis- 
 covered that the Turks were not behind those 
 trees. The digging was a comfort to the men, 
 who, being pitmen, were now in their element; 
 and the officers found solace in whispering to 
 each other that magical communication about 
 the prospective "searching"; it was the first 
 technical word they had used "in the field," 
 and they were secretly proud to know what it 
 meant 
 
 In a little the dawn began, and the grey 
 trees took shape; and the sun came up out of 
 Asia, and we saw at last the little sugar-loaf 
 peak of Achi Baba, absurdly pink and diminu- 
 
 [21] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 tive in the distance. A man's first frontal im- 
 pression of that great rampart, with the out- 
 lying slopes masking the summit, was that it 
 was disappointingly small; but when he had 
 lived under and upon it for a while, day by 
 day, it seemed to grow in menace and in bulk, 
 and ultimately became a hideous, overpower- 
 ing monster, pervading all his life; so that it 
 worked upon men's nerves, and almost every- 
 where in the Peninsula they were painfully 
 conscious that every movement they made 
 could be watched from somewhere on that 
 massive hill. 
 
 But now the kitchens had come, and there 
 was breakfast and viscous, milkless tea. We 
 discovered that all around our seeming soli- 
 tude the earth had been peopled with sleepers, 
 who now emerged from their holes; there was 
 a stir of washing and cooking and singing, and 
 the smoke went up from the wood fires in the 
 clear, cool air. D Company officers made 
 their camp under an olive-tree, with a view 
 over the blue water to Samothrace and Im- 
 bros, and now in the early cool, before the sun 
 had gathered his noonday malignity, it was 
 
 [22] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 very pleasant. At seven o'clock the "search- 
 ing" began. A mile away, on the northern 
 cliffs, the first shell burst, stampeding a num- 
 ber of horses. The long-drawn warning 
 scream and the final crash gave all the ex- 
 pectant battalion a faintly pleasurable thrill, 
 and as each shell came a little nearer the sen- 
 sation remained. No one was afraid; with- 
 out the knowledge of experience no one could 
 be seriously afraid on this cool, sunny morning 
 in the grove of olive-trees. Those chill hours 
 in the sweeper had been much more alarming. 
 The common sensation was: "At last I am 
 really under fire; today I shall write home and 
 tell them about it." And then, when it seemed 
 that the line on which the shells were falling 
 must, if continued, pass through the middle 
 of our camp, the firing mysteriously ceased. 
 
 Harry, I know, was disappointed; person- 
 ally, I was pleased. 
 
 I learned more about Harry that afternoon. 
 He had been much exhausted by the long 
 night, but was now refreshed and filled with 
 an almost childish enthusiasm by the pictorial 
 
 [23] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 attractions of the place. For this enthusiastic 
 soul one thing only was lacking in the site of 
 the camp : the rise of the hill which here runs 
 down the centre of the Peninsula, hid from us 
 the Dardanelles. These, he said, must im- 
 mediately be viewed. It was a bright after- 
 noon of blue skies and gentle air, not yet had 
 the dry north-east wind come to plague us 
 with dust-clouds, and all the vivid colours 
 of the scene were unspoiled. We walked over 
 the hill through the parched scrub, where 
 lizards darted from under our feet and tor- 
 toises lay comatose in the scanty shade, and 
 came to a kind of inland cliff, where the 
 Turks had had many riflemen at the landing, 
 for all the ground was littered with empty 
 cartridges. And there was unfolded surely 
 the most gorgeous panorama this war has pro- 
 vided for prosaic Englishmen to see. Below 
 was a cool, inviting grove of imperial cy- 
 presses; all along the narrow strip between 
 us and the shore lay the rest-lines of the 
 French, where moved lazy figures in blue and 
 red, and black Senegalese in many colours. 
 To the left was the wide sweep of Morto Bay, 
 
 [24] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 and beyond the first section of Achi Baba ris- 
 ing to De Tott's Battery in terraces of olives 
 and vines. But what caught the immediate 
 eye, what we had come to see and had sailed 
 hither to fight for, was that strip of unbeliev- 
 ably blue water before us, deep, generous blue, 
 like a Chinese bowl. On the farther shore, 
 towards the entrance to the Straits, we could 
 see a wide green plain, and beyond and to the 
 left, peak after peak of the mountains of Asia; 
 and far away in the middle distance there was 
 a glint of snow from some regal summit of the 
 Anatolian Mountains. 
 
 That wide green plain was the Plain of 
 Troy. The scarcity of classical scholars in 
 Expeditionary Forces, and the wearisome ob- 
 servations of pressmen on the subject of Troy, 
 have combined to belittle the significance of 
 the classical surroundings of the Gallipoli 
 campaign. I myself am a stolid, ill-read per- 
 son, but I confess that the spectacle of those 
 historic flats was not one, in diplomatic phrase, 
 which I could view with indifference. On 
 Harry, ridiculously excited already, the effect 
 was almost alarming. He became quite lyri- 
 
 [25] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 cal over two little sweepers apparently an- 
 chored near the mouth of the Straits. "That," 
 he said, "must have been where the Greek fleet 
 lay. God! it's wonderful." Up on the slope 
 towards De Tott's Battery the guns were busy, 
 and now and then Asiatic Annie sent over a 
 large shell from the region of Achilles' tomb, 
 which burst ponderously in the sea off Cape 
 Helles. And there we sat on the rough edge 
 of the cliff and talked of Achilles and Hector 
 and Diomed and Patroclus and the far-sound- 
 ing bolts of Jove. I do not defend or exalt 
 this action; but this is a truthful record of a 
 man's personality, and I simply state what oc- 
 curred. And I confess that with the best wish 
 in the world I was myself becoming a little 
 bored with Troy, when in the middle of a 
 sentence he suddenly became silent and gazed 
 across the Straits with a fixed, pinched look in 
 his face, like a man who is reminded of some 
 far-off calamity he had forgotten. For per- 
 haps a minute he maintained this rigid aspect, 
 and then as suddenly relaxed, murmuring in a 
 tone of relentless determination, "I will." It 
 was not in me not to inquire into the nature 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 of this passionate intention, and somehow I 
 induced him to explain. 
 
 It seemed that in spite of his genuine aca- 
 demic successes and a moderate popularity at 
 school and at Oxford, he had suffered from 
 early boyhood from a curious distrust of his 
 own capacity in the face of anything he had 
 to do. In a measure, no doubt, this had even 
 contributed to his successes. For his nervous- 
 ness took the form of an intimate, silent brood- 
 ing over any ordeal that lay before him, 
 whether it was a visit to his uncle, or 
 "Schools," or a dance: he would lie awake for 
 hours imagining all conceivable forms of er- 
 ror and failure and humiliation that might 
 befall him in his endeavour. And though he 
 was to this extent forewarned and forearmed, 
 it must have been a painful process. And it 
 explained to me the puzzling intervals of 
 seeming melancholy which I had seen vary- 
 ing his usually cheerful demeanour. 
 
 "You remember last night," he said, "I had 
 been detailed to look after the baggage when 
 we disembarked, and take charge of the un- 
 loading-party? As far as I know I did the 
 
 [27] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 job all right, except for losing old Tompkins' 
 valise but you can't think how much worry 
 and anxiety it gave me beforehand. All the 
 time on the sweeper I was imagining the hun- 
 dreds of possible disasters: the working-party 
 not turning up, and me left alone on the boat 
 with the baggage the Colonel's things being 
 dropped overboard a row with the M. L. O. 
 getting the baggage ashore, and then losing 
 the battalion, or the working-party, or the 
 baggage. It all worked out quite simply, but 
 I tell you, Benson, it gave me hell. And it's 
 always the same. That's really why I didn't 
 take a commission because I couldn't im- 
 agine myself drilling men once without be- 
 coming a permanent laughing-stock. I know 
 now that I was a fool about that I usually do 
 find that out but I can't escape the feeling 
 next time. 
 
 "And now, it's not only little things like that, 
 but that's what I feel about the whole war. 
 I've a terror of being a failure in it, a failure 
 out here you know, a sort of regimental dud. 
 I've heard of lots of them; the kind of man 
 that nobody gives an important job because 
 
 [28] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 he's sure to muck it up (though I do believe 
 Eccleston's more likely to be that than me). 
 But that's what I was thinking just now. 
 Somehow, looking at this view Troy and all 
 that and thinking how those Greeks sweated 
 blood for ten years on afternoons like this, do- 
 ing their duty for the damned old kings, and 
 how we've come out here to fight in the same 
 place thousands of years afterwards, and we 
 still know about them and remember their 
 names well, it gave me a kind of inspiration; 
 I don't know why. I've got a bit of confidence 
 God knows how long it will last but I 
 swear I won't be a failure, I won't be the bat- 
 talion dud and I'll have a damned good try 
 to get a medal of some sort and be like like 
 Achilles or somebody." 
 
 Sheer breathlessness put a sudden end to 
 this outburst, and since it was followed by a 
 certain shyness at his own revelations I did not 
 probe deeper. But I thought to myself that 
 this young man's spirit of romance would die 
 hard; I did not know whether it would ever 
 die; for certainly I had never seen that spirit 
 working so powerfully in any man as a posi- 
 
 [29] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 tive incentive to achievement. And I tell you 
 all this, because I want you to understand how 
 it was with him in the beginning. 
 
 But now the bay was in shadow below us ; 
 on the hill the solemn stillness that comes over 
 all trenches in the hour before dusk had al- 
 ready descended, and away towards the cape 
 the Indians were coming out to kneel in prayer 
 beside the alien sea. 
 
 The Romance of War was in full song. 
 And scrambling down the cliff, we bathed al- 
 most reverently in the Hellespont 
 
 [30] 
 
II 
 
 THOSE first three days were for many 
 of us, who did not know the mild au- 
 tumn months, the most pleasant we 
 spent on the Peninsula. The last weeks of 
 May had something of the quality of an old 
 English summer, and the seven plagues of the 
 Peninsula had not yet attained the intolerable 
 violence of June and July. True, the inhab- 
 ited portion of the narrow land we won had 
 already become in great part a wilderness; 
 the myrtle, and rock-rose, and tangled cistus, 
 and all that wealth of spring flowers in which 
 the landing parties had fallen and died in 
 April, had long been trodden to death, and 
 there were wide stretches of yellow desert 
 where not even the parched scrub survived. 
 But in the two and a half miles of bare coun- 
 try which lay between the capes and the foot- 
 hills of Achi Baba was one considerable oasis 
 of olives and stunted oaks, and therein, on 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 the slopes of the bridge, was our camp for- 
 tunately set. The word "camp" contains an 
 unmerited compliment to the place. The 
 manner of its birth was characteristic of mili- 
 tary arrangements in those days. When we 
 were told, on that first mysterious midnight, to 
 dig ourselves a shelter against the morning's 
 "searching," we were far from imagining that 
 what we dug would be our Peninsular "home" 
 and haven of rest from the firing-line for many 
 months to come. And so we made what we 
 conceived to be the quickest and simplest form 
 of shelter against a quite temporary emergency 
 long, straight, untraversed ditches, running 
 parallel to and with but a few yards between 
 each other. No worse form of permanent 
 dwelling-place could conceivably have been 
 constructed, for the men were cramped in 
 these places with a minimum of comfort and 
 a maximum of danger. No man could climb 
 out of his narrow drain without casting a 
 shower of dust from the crumbling parapet on 
 to his sleeping neighbour in the next ditch; 
 and three large German shells could have de- 
 stroyed half the regiment. Yet there were 
 
 [32] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 many such camps, most of them lacking the 
 grateful concealment of our trees. Such tar- 
 gets even the Turkish artillery must sometimes 
 hit. There were no dug-outs in the accepted 
 sense of the Western Front, no deep, elaborate, 
 stair-cased chambers, hollowed out by miners 
 with miners' material. Our dug-outs were 
 dug-outs in truth, shallow excavations scooped 
 in the surface of the earth. The only roof 
 for a man against sun and shells was a water- 
 proof sheet stretched precariously over his 
 hole. It is sufficient testimony to the indiffer- 
 ence of the Turkish artillery that with such 
 naked concentrations of men scattered about 
 the Peninsula, casualties in the rest-camps were 
 so few. 
 
 Each officer had his own private hole, set 
 democratically among the men's; and an offi- 
 cers' mess was simply made by digging a larger 
 hole, and roofing it with two waterproof sheets 
 instead of one. There was no luxury among 
 the infantry there, and the gulf which yawns 
 between the lives of officer and man in France 
 as regards material comfort was barely dis- 
 cernible in Gallipoli. Food was dull and 
 
 [33] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 monotonous : for weeks we had only bully-beef 
 and biscuits, and a little coarse bacon and tea, 
 but it was the same for all, one honourable 
 equality of discomfort. At first there were 
 no canteen facilities, and when some newcomer 
 came from one of the islands with a bottle of 
 champagne and another of chartreuse, we 
 drank it with "bully" and cast-iron biscuit. 
 Drinking water was as precious as the elixir of 
 life, and almost as unobtainable, but officer and 
 man had the same ration to eke out through the 
 thirsty day. Wells were sunk, and sometimes 
 immediately condemned, and when we knew 
 the water was clear and sweet to taste, it was 
 hard to have it corrupted with the metallic fla- 
 vour of chemicals by the medical staff. Then 
 indeed did a man learn to love water; then 
 did he learn discipline, when he filled his 
 water-bottle in the morning with the exiguous 
 ration of the day, and fought with the intol- 
 erable craving to put it to his lips and there 
 and then gurgle down his fill. 
 
 In the spring nights it was very cold, and 
 men shivered in their single blanket under the 
 unimaginable stars; but very early the sun 
 
 [34] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 came up, and by five o'clock all the camp were 
 singing; and there were three hours of fresh 
 coolness when it was very good to wash in a 
 canvas bucket, and smoke in the sun before 
 the torrid time came on; and again at seven, 
 when the sun sat perched on the great rock of 
 Samothrace, and Imbros was set in a fleecy 
 marvel of pink and saffron clouds, there were 
 two hours of pure physical content; but these, 
 I think, were more nearly perfect than the 
 morning because they succeeded the irritable 
 fevers of the day. Then the crickets in the 
 branches sang less tediously, and the flies 
 melted away, and all over the Peninsula the 
 wood fires began to twinkle in the dusk, as the 
 men cooked over a few sticks the little deli- 
 cacies which were preserved for this hour of 
 respite. When we had done we sat under our 
 olive-tree in the clear twilight, and watched 
 the last aeroplanes sail home to Rabbit Islands, 
 and talked and argued till the glow-worms 
 glimmering in the scrub, and up the hill the 
 long roll of the Turks' rapid fire, told us that 
 darkness was at hand, and the chill dew sent 
 us into our crannies to sleep. 
 
 [35] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 So we were not sorry for three days of quiet 
 in the camp before we went up the hill ; Harry 
 alone was all eagerness to reach the firing-line 
 with the least possible delay. But then Harry 
 was like none of us; indeed, none of us were 
 like each other. It would have been strange 
 if we had been. War-chroniclers have noted 
 with an accent of astonishment the strange di- 
 versity of persons to be found in units of the 
 New Army, and the essential sameness of their 
 attitude to the war. As though a man were 
 to go into the Haymarket and be surprised if 
 the first twelve pedestrians there were not of 
 the same profession; were then to summon 
 them to the assistance of a woman in the hands 
 of a rough, and be still surprised at the simi- 
 larity of their methods. 
 
 We were, in truth, a motley crowd, gath- 
 ered from everywhere; but when we sat under 
 that olive-tree we were very much alike with 
 the single exception of Harry. 
 
 Egerton, our company commander, a man 
 of about thirty, with a round face and a large 
 head, was a stockbroker by profession, and 
 rather improbably, an old Territorial by 
 
 [36] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 pastime. He was an excellent company com- 
 mander, but would have made a still more ad- 
 mirable second-in-command, for his training 
 in figures and his meticulous habits in such 
 things as the keeping of accounts were just 
 what is required of a second-in-command, and 
 were lamentably deficient in myself. The in- 
 tricacies of Acquittance Rolls and Imprest Ac- 
 counts, and page 3 of the Soldier's Pay-Book, 
 were meat and drink to him, and in general I 
 must confess that I shamefully surrendered 
 such delicacies to him. 
 
 Harry Penrose had the I4th Platoon. Of 
 the other three subalterns perhaps the most 
 interesting was Hewett. He, like Harry, had 
 been at Oxford before the war, though they 
 had never come together there. He was a 
 fair, dreamy person, of remarkably good looks. 
 Alone of all the "young Apollos" I have known 
 did he at all deserve that title. Most of these 
 have been men of surpassing stupidity and 
 material tastes, but Hewett added to his physi- 
 cal qualifications something of the mental re- 
 finement which presumably one should expect 
 of even a modern Apollo. Intensely fastidi- 
 
 [37] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 ous, he frankly detested the war, and all the 
 dirt and disgust he must personally encounter. 
 Like Harry, he was an idealist but more so; 
 for he could not idealize the war. But the 
 shrinking of his spirit had no effect on his con- 
 duct: he was no less courageous than Harry 
 or any one else, and no less keen to see the 
 thing through. Only, at that time, he was a 
 little less blind. A year senior to Harry, he 
 had taken Greats in 1914, and though his 
 degree had been disappointingly low he had 
 not yet lost the passionate attachment of the 
 "Greats" man to philosophy and thoughts of 
 the Ultimate Truths. Sometimes he would 
 try to induce one of us to talk with him of his 
 religious and philosophical doubts; but in that 
 feverish place it was too difficult for us, and 
 usually he brooded over his problems alone. 
 
 Eustace, of the i6th Platoon, was a journal- 
 ist by repute, though it was never discovered 
 to what journal, if any, he was specially at- 
 tached. His character was more attractive 
 than his appearance, which was long, awk- 
 ward, and angular; and if he had ever been to 
 school, he would have been quite undeservedly 
 
 [38] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 unpopular for not playing games: undeserv- 
 edly because one could not conceive of him 
 as playing any game. Physically, indeed, he 
 was one of Nature's gawks; intellectually he 
 was nimble, not to say athletic, with an acute 
 and deeply logical mind. As a companion, 
 more especially a companion in war, he was 
 made tedious by a habit of cynicism and a pas- 
 sion for argument. The cynicism, I think, 
 had developed originally from some early 
 grievance against Society, had been adopted 
 as an effective pose, and had now become part 
 of his nature. Whatever its origin it was 
 wearing to us, for in the actual scenes of war 
 one likes to cling to one's illusions while any 
 shred of them remains, and would rather they 
 faded honourably under the gentle influence 
 of time than be torn to fragments in a moment 
 by reasoned mockery. But Eustace was never 
 tired of exhibiting the frailty and subterfuge 
 of all men, particularly in their relations to 
 the war; the Nation arrived for him as regu- 
 larly as the German submarines would allow, 
 and all his views were in that sense distinctly 
 "National." If any of us were rash enough 
 
 [39] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 to read that paper ourselves, we were inevit- 
 ably provoked to some comment which led to 
 a hot wrangle on the Public Schools, or Kitch- 
 ener, or the rights of the war, and the pleasant 
 calm of the dusk was marred. For Eustace 
 could always meet us with a powerfully log- 
 ical case, and while in spirit we revolted 
 against his heresies, we were distressed by the 
 appeal they made to our reluctant reasons. 
 Harry, the most ingenuous of us all and the 
 most devoted to his illusions, was particularly 
 worried by this conflict. It seemed very 
 wrong to him that a man so loyal and gallant 
 in his personal relations with others should 
 trample so ruthlessly on their dearest opinions. 
 Burnett was of a very different type. Tall 
 and muscular, with reddish hair and vivid blue 
 eyes, he looked (as he wanted to look) a "man 
 of action" by nature and practice. He had 
 "knocked about" for some years in Africa and 
 Australia (a process which had failed equally 
 to establish his fortunes or soften his rough 
 edges), and from the first he affected the 
 patronizing attitude of the experienced cam- 
 paigner. The little discomforts of camp life 
 
 [40] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 were nothing to him, for were they not part 
 of his normal life? And when I emerged 
 from my dug-out pursued by a centipede of 
 incredible ferocity, he held forth for a long 
 time on the best method of dispatching rattle- 
 snakes in the Umgoga, or some such locality. 
 By degrees, however, as life became more un- 
 bearable, the conviction dawned upon us that 
 he was no less sensible to heat and hunger and 
 thirst than mere "temporary" campaigners, 
 and rather more ready to utter his complaints. 
 Finally, the weight of evidence became over- 
 whelming, and it was whispered at the end of 
 our first week at Gallipoli that "Burnett was 
 bogus." The quality of being "bogus" was 
 in those days the last word in military con- 
 demnation; and in Burnett's case events 
 showed the verdict to be lamentably correct. 
 So we were a strangely assorted crowd, only 
 alike, as I have said, in that we were keen on 
 the winning of this war and resolved to do our 
 personal best towards that end. Of the five 
 of us, Hewett and Eustace had the most in- 
 fluence on Harry. Me he regarded as a solid 
 kind of wall that would never let him down, 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 or be guilty of any startling deviations from 
 the normal. By Hewett he was personally 
 and spiritually attracted; by Eustace alter- 
 nately fascinated and disturbed. And it was 
 a very bad day for Harry when Hewett's death 
 removed that gentle, comfortable influence. 
 
 II 
 
 We were ordered to relieve the 7 s at 
 
 midnight on the fourth day, and once again 
 we braced ourselves for the last desperate bat- 
 tle of our lives. All soldiers go through this 
 process during their first weeks of active serv- 
 ice every time they "move" anywhere. Im- 
 mense expectations, vows, fears, prayers, fill 
 their minds; and nothing particular happens. 
 Only the really experienced soldier knows that 
 it is the exception and not the rule for anything 
 particular to happen; and the heroes of ro- 
 mance and history who do not move a muscle 
 when told that they are to attack at dawn are 
 generally quite undeserving of praise, since 
 long experience has taught them that the at- 
 tack is many times more likely to be cancelled 
 than to occur. Until it actually does happen 
 
 [42] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 they will not believe in it; they make all proper 
 preparations, but quite rightly do not move a 
 muscle. We, however, were now to have our 
 first illustration of this great military truth. 
 For, indeed, we were to have no battle. Yet 
 that night's march to the trenches was an ex- 
 perience that made full compensation. It was 
 already dusk when we moved out of the rest- 
 camp, and the moon was not up. As usual in 
 new units, the leading platoons went off at a 
 reckless canter, and stumbling after them in 
 the gathering shadows over rocky, precipitous 
 slopes, and in and out of the clumps of bush, 
 falling in dark holes on to indignant sleepers, 
 or maddeningly entangled in hidden strands 
 of wire, the rear companies were speedily out 
 of touch. To a heavily laden infantryman 
 there are few things more exasperating than a 
 night march into the line conducted too fast. 
 If the country be broken and strewn with ob- 
 stacles, at which each man must wait while 
 another climbs or drops or wrestles or wades 
 in front of him, and must then laboriously 
 scamper after him in the shadows lest he, and 
 thereby all those behind him, be lost; if the 
 
 [43] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 country be unknown to him, so that, apart from 
 purely military considerations, the fear of be- 
 ing lost is no small thing, for a man knows that 
 he may wander all night alone in the dark, 
 surrounded by unknown dangers, cut off from 
 sleep, and rations, and the friendly voices of 
 companions, a jest among them when he dis- 
 covers them: then such a march becomes a 
 nightmare. 
 
 On this night it dawned gradually on those 
 in front that they were unaccompanied save 
 by the ist platoon, and a long halt, and much 
 shouting and searching, gathered most of the 
 regiment together, hot, cursing, and already 
 exhausted. And now we passed the five white 
 Water Towers, standing mysteriously in a 
 swamp, and came out of the open country into 
 the beginning of a gully. These "gullies" 
 were deep, steep-sided ravines, driven through 
 all the lower slopes of Achi Baba, and carry- 
 ing in the spring a thin stream of water, peo- 
 pled by many frogs, down to the Straits or the 
 sea. It was easier going here, for there was 
 a rough track beside the stream to follow ; yet, 
 though those in front were marching, as they 
 
 [44] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 thought, with inconceivable deliberation, the 
 rear men of each platoon were doubling round 
 the corners among the trees, and cursing as 
 they ran. There was then a wild hail of bul- 
 lets in all those gullies, since for many hours 
 of each night the Turk kept up a sustained and 
 terrible rapid fire from his trenches far up the 
 hill, and, whether by design or bad shooting, 
 the majority of these bullets passed high over 
 our trenches, and fell hissing in the gully-bed. 
 So now all the air seemed full of the hum- 
 ming, whistling things, and all round in the 
 gully-banks and the bushes by the stream there 
 were vicious spurts as they fell. It was always 
 a marvel how few casualties were caused by 
 this stray fire, and tonight we were chiefly im- 
 pressed with this wonder. In the stream the 
 frogs croaked incessantly with a note of weary 
 indifference to the medley of competing noises. 
 At one point there was a kind of pot-hole in 
 the stream where the water squeezing through 
 made a kind of high-toned wail, delivered 
 with stabbing emphasis at regular intervals. 
 So weird was this sound, which could be heard 
 many hundred yards away, and gradually as- 
 
 [45] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 serted itself above all other contributions to 
 that terrible*din, that many of the men, already 
 mystified and excited, said to themselves that 
 this was the noise of the hideous explosive bul- 
 lets of which they had heard. 
 
 Soon we were compelled to climb out of 
 the gully-path to make way for some descend- 
 ing troops, and stumbled forward with a curi- 
 ous feeling of nakedness high up in open 
 ground. Here the bullets were many times 
 multiplied, and many of us said that we could 
 feel them passing between us. Indeed, one 
 or two men were hit, but though we did not 
 know it, most of these near-sounding bullets 
 flew high above us. After a little we were 
 halted, and lay down, wondering, in the sibi- 
 lant dark; then we moved on and halted again, 
 and realized suddenly that we were very tired. 
 At the head of the column the guide had lost 
 his way, and could not find the entrance to the 
 communication trench; and here in the most 
 exposed area of all that Peninsula we must 
 wait until he did. The march was an unavoid- 
 able piece of mismanagement; the whole regi- 
 ment was being unnecessarily endangered. 
 
 [46] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 But none of this we knew; so very few men 
 were afraid. For we were still in the bliss of 
 ignorance. It seemed to us that these strange 
 proceedings must be a part of the everyday 
 life of the soldier. If they were not, we raw 
 creatures should not have been asked to endure 
 them. We had no standard of safety or dan- 
 ger by which to estimate our position; and so 
 the miraculous immunity we were enjoying 
 was taken as a matter of course, and we were 
 blissfully unafraid. At the same time we 
 were extremely bored and tired, and the sweat 
 cooled on us in the chill night air. And when 
 at last we came into the deep communication 
 trench we felt that the end of this weariness 
 must surely be near. But the worst exaspera- 
 tions of relieving an unknown line were still 
 before us. It was a two-mile trudge in the nar- 
 row ditches to the front line. No war corre- 
 spondent has ever described such a march ; it is 
 not included in the official "horrors of war"; 
 but this is the kind of thing which, more than 
 battle and blood, harasses the spirit of the in- 
 fantryman, and composes his life. The com- 
 munication trenches that night were good and 
 
 [47] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 deep and dry, and free from the awfulness of 
 mud; but they were very few, and unintelli- 
 gently used. There had been an attack that 
 day, and coming by the same trench was a long 
 stream of stretchers and wounded men, and 
 odd parties coming to fetch water from the 
 well, and whole battalions relieved from other 
 parts of the line. Our men had been sent up 
 insanely with full packs ; for a man so equipped 
 to pass another naked in the narrow ditch 
 would have been difficult; when all those that 
 he meets have also straps and hooks and ex- 
 crescences about them, each separate encoun- 
 ter means heart-breaking entanglements and 
 squeezes and sudden paroxysms of rage. 
 That night we stood a total of hours hope- 
 lessly jammed in the suffocating trench, with 
 other troops trying to get down. A man stood 
 in those crushes, unable to sit down, unable to 
 lean comfortably against the wall because of 
 his pack, unable even to get his hand to his 
 water-bottle and quench his intolerable thirst, 
 unable almost to breathe for the hot smell of 
 herded humanity. Only a thin ribbon of stars 
 overhead, remotely roofing his prison, re- 
 
 [48] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 minded him that indeed he was still in the liv- 
 ing world and not pursuing some hideous 
 nightmare. At long last some one would take 
 charge of the situation, and by sheer muscular 
 fighting for space the two masses would be 
 extricated. Then one moved on again. And 
 now each man has become a mere lifeless au- 
 tomaton. Every few yards there is a wire 
 hanging across the trench at the height of a 
 man's eyes, and he runs blindly into it, or it 
 catches in the piling-swivel of his rifle; pain- 
 fully he removes it, or in a fit of fury tears 
 the wire away with him. Or there is a man 
 lying in a corner with a wounded leg crying 
 out to each passer-by not to tread on him, or 
 a stretcher party slowly struggling against the 
 tide. Mechanically each man grapples with 
 these obstacles, mechanically repeats the cease- 
 less messages that are passed up and down, and 
 the warning "Wire," "Stretcher party," "Step 
 up," to those behind, and stumbles on. He is 
 only conscious of the dead weight of his load, 
 and the braces of his pack biting into his 
 shoulders, of his thirst, and the sweat of his 
 body, and the longing to lie down and sleep. 
 
 [49] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 When we halt men fall into a doze as they 
 stand, and curse pitifully when they are urged 
 on from behind. 
 
 We reach the inhabited part of the line, 
 and the obstacles become more frequent, for 
 there are traverses every ten yards and men 
 sleeping on the floor, and a litter of rifles, 
 water-cans, and scattered equipment. For 
 ever we wind round the endless traverses, and 
 squeeze past the endless host we are relieving; 
 and sometimes the parapet is low or broken 
 or thin, or there is a dangerous gap, and we 
 are told to keep our heads down, and dully 
 pass back the message so that it reaches men 
 meaninglessly when they have passed the dan- 
 ger-point, or are still far from it. All the 
 time there is a wild rattle of rapid fire from 
 the Turks, and bullets hammer irritably on the 
 parapet, or fly singing overhead. When a 
 man reached his destined part of the trench 
 that night there were still long minutes of 
 exasperation before him; for we were inex- 
 perienced troops, and first of all the men 
 crowded in too far together, and must turn 
 about, and press back so as to cover the whole 
 
 [50] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 ground to be garrisoned; then they would 
 flock like sad sheep too far in the opposite di- 
 rection. This was the subaltern's bad time; 
 for the officer must squeeze backwards and 
 forwards, struggling to dispose properly his 
 own sullen platoon, and it was hard for him 
 to be patient with their stupidity, for, like 
 them, he only longed to fling off his cursed 
 equipment and lie down and sleep for ever. 
 He, like them, had but one thought, that if 
 there were to be no release from the hateful 
 burden that clung to his back, and cut into his 
 shoulders and ceaselessly impeded him, if there 
 were to be no relief for his thirst and the ur- 
 gent aching of all his body he must soon sink 
 down and scream. . . . 
 
 Ill 
 
 Harry's platoon was settled in when I found 
 him, hidden away somewhere in the third (Re- 
 serve) line. He had conscientiously posted a 
 few sentries, and done all those things which 
 a good platoon commander should do, and 
 was lying himself in a sort of stupor of fatigue. 
 Physically he was not strong, rather frail, in 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 fact, for the infantry; he had a narrow chest 
 and slightly round shoulders, and his heart 
 would not have passed any civilian doctor; 
 and from my own experience I knew that 
 the march must have tried him terribly. But 
 a little rest had soothed the intense nervous 
 irritation whose origins I have tried to de- 
 scribe, and his spirit was as sturdy as ever. 
 He struggled to his feet and leaned over the 
 parados with me. The moon was now high 
 up in the north-east; the Turks had ceased 
 their rapid fire at moonrise, and now an im- 
 mense peace wrapped the Peninsula. We 
 were high up on the centre slopes of Achi 
 Baba, and all the six miles which other men 
 had conquered lay bathed in moonlight below 
 us. Far away at the cape we could see the 
 long, green lights of the hospital ships, and all 
 about us were glow-worms in the scrub. Left 
 and right the pale parapets of trenches crept 
 like dim-seen snakes into the little valleys, and 
 vanished over the opposite slopes. Only a 
 cruiser off shore firing lazily at long intervals 
 disturbed the slumberous stillness. No better 
 sedative could have been desired. 
 
 [52] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 "How did you like the march?" I said. 
 
 "Oh, all right; one of my men was wounded, 
 I believe, but I didn't see him." 
 
 "All right?" I said. "Personally I thought 
 it was damned awful ; it's a marvel that any 
 of us are here at all. I hear A Company's 
 still adrift, as it is." 
 
 "Well, anyhow <we got here," said Harry. 
 "What a wonderful spot this is. And look at 
 those damned glow-worms." 
 
 I was anxious to know what impression the 
 night had made on Harry, but these and other 
 answers gave me no real clue. I had a sus- 
 picion that it had, in truth, considerably dis- 
 tressed him, but any such effect had clearly 
 given way to the romantic appeal of the quiet 
 moon. I, too, was enjoying the sense of peace, 
 but I was still acutely conscious of the un- 
 pleasantness of the night's proceedings; and a 
 certain envy took hold of me at this youth's 
 capacity to concentrate on the attractive 
 shadow of distasteful things. There was a 
 heavy, musty smell over all this part of the 
 trench, the smell of a dead Turk lying just 
 over the parapet, and it occurred to me, ma- 
 
 [53] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 liciously, to wake Harry from his dreams, 
 and bring home to him the reality of things. 
 
 "Funny smell youVe got here, Harry," I 
 said; "know what it is?" 
 
 "Yes, it's cactus or amaryllis, or one of 
 those funny plants they have here, isn't it? I 
 read about it in the papers." 
 
 This was too much. "It's a dead Turk," 
 I told him, with a wicked anticipation of the 
 effect I should produce. 
 
 The effect, however, was not what I ex- 
 pected. 
 
 "No!" said Harry, with obvious elation. 
 "Let's find the devil." 
 
 Forthwith he swarmed over the parapet, 
 full of life again, nosed about till he found 
 the reeking thing, and gazed on it with un- 
 disguised interest. No sign of horror or dis- 
 gust could I detect in him. Yet it was not 
 pure ghoulishness; it was simply the boy's 
 greed for experience and the savour of ad- 
 venture. Anyhow, my experiment had failed ; 
 and I found that I was glad. But when I 
 was leaving him for the next platoon, he was 
 lying down for a little sleep on the dirty floor 
 
 [54] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 of the trench, and as he flashed his electric 
 torch over the ground, I saw several small 
 white objects writhing in the dust. The com- 
 pany commander whom we had relieved had 
 told me how under all these trenches the Turks 
 and the French had buried many of their dead, 
 and in a moment of nauseating insight I knew 
 that these things were the maggots which fed 
 upon their bodies. 
 
 "Harry," I said, "you can't sleep there; look 
 at those things!" And I told him what they 
 were. 
 
 "Rubbish," he said, "they're glow-worm's 
 gone to sleep." 
 
 Well, then I left him. But that's how he 
 was in those days. 
 
 [55] 
 
Ill 
 
 SO many men have written descriptions 
 of trench life in France; there have 
 been so many poems, plays, and speeches 
 about it that the majority of our nation must 
 have a much clearer mental picture of life on 
 the Western Front than they have of life at 
 the Savoy, or life in East Ham. But the 
 Gallipoli Peninsula was never part of the 
 Western Front, and no man came back from 
 that place on leave; lucky, indeed, if he came 
 at all. The campaign was never, for obvious 
 reasons, an important item in the official propa- 
 ganda, and the various non-official agencies 
 which now bring home the war to Streatham 
 had not begun to articulate when the cam- 
 paign came to an end. And so neither Streat- 
 ham nor any one else knew anything about it. 
 And though for a soldier to speak, however 
 distantly, of the details of trench life in 
 France, is now in some circles considered a 
 
 [56] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 solecism equivalent to the talking of "shop," 
 I hope I may still without offence make some 
 brief reference to the trenches of the Penin- 
 sula. For, in truth, it was all very different. 
 Above all, from dawn to dawn it was genuine 
 infantry warfare. In France, apart from full- 
 dress attacks, an infantryman may live for 
 many months without once firing his rifle, or 
 running the remotest risk of death by a rifle 
 bullet. Patiently he tramps, and watches, 
 and digs, and is shelled, clinging fondly to his 
 rifle night and day, but seldom or never in a 
 position to use it; so that in the stagnant days 
 of the past he came to look upon it as a mere 
 part of his equipment, like his water-bottle, 
 only heavier and less comforting; and in real 
 emergencies fumbled stupidly with the unfa- 
 miliar mechanism. This was true for a long 
 time of the normal, or "peace-time," sectors 
 of France. 
 
 But in those hill-trenches of Gallipoli the 
 Turk and the Gentile fought with each other 
 all day with rifle and bomb, and in the eve- 
 ning crept out and stabbed each other in the 
 dark. There was no release from the strain 
 
 [57] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 of watching and listening and taking thought. 
 The Turk was always on higher ground; he 
 knew every inch of all those valleys and vine- 
 yards and scrub-strewn slopes; and he had an 
 uncanny accuracy of aim. Moreover, many 
 of his men had the devotion of fanatics, which 
 inspired them to lie out behind our lines, with 
 stores of food enough to last out their am- 
 munition, certain only of their own ultimate 
 destruction, but content to lie there and pick 
 off the infidels till they too died. They were 
 very brave men. But the Turkish snipers 
 were not confined to the madmen who were 
 caught disguised as trees in the broad day- 
 light and found their way into the picture pa- 
 pers. Every trench was full of snipers, less 
 theatrical, but no less effective. And in the 
 night they crept out with unbelievable stealth 
 and lay close in to our lines, killing our sen- 
 tries, and chipping away our crumbling para- 
 pets. 
 
 So the sniping was terrible. In that first 
 week we lost twelve men each day; they fell 
 without a sound in the early morning as they 
 stood up from their cooking at the brazier, 
 
 [58] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 fell shot through the head, and lay snoring 
 horribly in the dust; they were sniped as they 
 came up the communication trench with water, 
 or carelessly raised their heads to look back 
 at the ships in the bay; and in the night there 
 were sudden screams where a sentry had 
 moved his head too often against the moon. 
 If a periscope were raised, however furtively, 
 it was shivered in an instant; if a man peered 
 over himself, he was dead. Far back in the 
 Reserve Lines or at the wells, where a man 
 thought himself hidden from view, the sniper 
 saw and killed him. All along the line were 
 danger-posts where many had been hit; these 
 places became invested with a peculiar awe, 
 and as you came to them the men said, "Keep 
 low here, sir," in a mysterious whisper, as 
 though the Turk could hear them. Indeed, 
 so uncanny were many of the deaths, that some 
 men said that the Turk could see impos- 
 sibly through the walls of the trench, and 
 crouched nervously in the bottom. All the 
 long communication trenches were watched, 
 and wherever a head or a moving rifle showed 
 at a gap a bullet came with automatic regu- 
 
 [59] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 larity. Going down a communication-trench 
 alone a man would hear the tap of these bul- 
 lets on the parapet following him along, and 
 break into a half-hysterical run in the bright 
 sunlight to get away from this unnatural pur- 
 suit; for such it seemed to him to be. 
 
 The fire seemed to come from all angles; 
 and units bitterly accused their neighbours of 
 killing their men when it seemed impossible 
 that any Turk could have fired the shot. 
 
 For a little, then, this sniping was thor- 
 oughly on the men's nerves. Nothing in their 
 training had prepared them for it. They 
 hated the "blinded" feeling it produced; it 
 was demoralizing always to be wondering if 
 one's head was low enough, always to walk 
 with a stoop; it was tiring to be always taking 
 care; and it was very dangerous to relax that 
 care for a moment. Something had to be 
 done ; and the heavy, methodical way in which 
 these Tynesiders of ours learned to counter 
 and finally overcome the sniper, is character- 
 istic of the nation's efforts throughout this 
 war. The Turks were natural soldiers, fight- 
 ing in their own country; more, they were 
 [60] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 natural scouts. Our men were ponderous, un- 
 couth pitmen from Tyneside and the Clyde. 
 But we chose out a small body of them who 
 could shoot better than their fellows, and 
 called them snipers, and behold, they were 
 snipers. We gave them telescopes, and peri- 
 scopes, and observers, and set them in odd cor- 
 ners, and told them to snipe. And by slow 
 degrees they became interested and active and 
 expert, and killed many Turks. The third 
 time we came to those trenches we could move 
 about with comparative freedom. 
 
 In all this Harry took a leading part, for 
 the battalion scout officer was one of the first 
 casualties, and Harry, who had had some 
 training as a scout in the ranks, was appointed 
 in his place. In this capacity he was in 
 charge of the improvised snipers, and all day 
 moved about the line from post to post, en- 
 couraging and correcting. All this he did 
 with characteristic energy and enthusiasm, 
 and tired himself out with long wanderings 
 in the scorching sun. In those trenches all 
 movement was an intense labour. The sun 
 blazed always into the suffocating ditch, 
 
 [61] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 where no breath of air came; the men not on 
 duty lay huddled wherever they could steal 
 an inch of shade, with the flies crawling about 
 their eyes and open mouths. Progress was 
 a weary routine of squeezing past men, or 
 stepping over men, or running into men round 
 corners, as one stooped to escape death. In 
 little niches in the wall were mess-tins boil- 
 ing over box-wood fires, so that the eyes 
 smarted from their smoke, and the air was full 
 of the hot fumes; and everywhere was the 
 stuffy smell of human flesh. In the heat of 
 the day these things produced in the healthiest 
 man an intolerable irritation and fatigue: to 
 a frail, sensitive youth like Harry his day- 
 long rambles must have been torture; but 
 though he too became touchy he pursued his 
 task with determination, and would not be 
 tempted away. The rest of us, when not on 
 watch, lay torpid all the hot hours in the shal- 
 low holes we had scratched behind the trench, 
 and called Company Headquarters. These 
 places were roofed only with the inevitable 
 waterproof sheet, and, had there been any se- 
 rious shelling, would have been death-traps. 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 Into these dwellings came many strange ani- 
 mals, driven from their nests among the roots 
 of the scrub snakes, lizards, and hideous 
 centipedes. Large, clumsy, winged things, 
 which some said were locusts, fell into the 
 trench, and for a few hours strove vainly to 
 leap out again till they were trampled to 
 death; they had the colour of ivory, and shone 
 with bright tints in the sun like shot silk. The 
 men found tortoises derelict in near shell-holes, 
 and set them to walk in the trench, and they 
 too wandered sadly about till they disappeared, 
 no man knew where. The flies were not yet 
 at full strength, but they were very bad; and 
 all day we wrestled with thirst. He was a 
 lucky man who could sleep in the daylight 
 hours, and when the cool evening came, beck- 
 oning him to sleep, he must rise and bestir 
 himself for the work of the night. 
 
 Then all the line stirred with life again, 
 with the cleaning of rifles thick with heavy 
 dust, and the bustle of men making ready to 
 "Stand to Arms." Now, indeed, could a man 
 have slept when all the pests of the day had 
 been exorcized by the cool dusk, and the bitter 
 
 [63] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 cold of the midnight was not yet come. But 
 there was no sleep for any man, only watching 
 and digging and carrying and working and 
 listening. And so soon as Achi Baba was 
 swathed in shadow, and the sun well down be- 
 hind the westward islands, the Turk began his 
 evening fusillade of rapid fire. This was an 
 astonishing performance. Night after night 
 at this hour every man in his trench must have 
 blazed away till his rifle would do its work no 
 more. "Rapid fire" has been a specialty of 
 the Turkish infantryman since the days of 
 Plevna, and indeed he excels in it. Few Eng- 
 lish units could equal his performance for ten 
 minutes; but the Turk kept up the same sus- 
 tained deafening volume of fire for hours at 
 a stretch, till the moon came up and allayed 
 his fears. For it was an exhibition of nerv- 
 ousness as well as musketry: fearful of a 
 stealthy assault in the dark, he would not de- 
 sist till he could see well across his own wire. 
 Captured orders by the Turkish High Com- 
 mand repeatedly forbade this reckless expen- 
 diture of ammunition, and sometimes for two 
 nights he would restrain himself, but in the 
 
 [64] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 early days never for more. Our policy was 
 to lie down in the trench, and think sardon- 
 ically of the ammunition he was wasting; but 
 even this was not good for men's minds. Most 
 of the fire was high and whizzed over into the 
 gullies, but many hundreds of all those thou- 
 sands of bullets hit the parapet. There was 
 a steady, reiterant rap of them on the sand- 
 bags, very irritating to the nerves, and bits of 
 the parapet splashed viciously into the trench 
 over the crouching men. In that tornado of 
 sound a man must shout to make himself heard 
 by his friends, and this produced in his mind 
 an uncomfortable sense of isolation; he seemed 
 cut off from humanity, and brooded secretly 
 to himself. Safe he might be in that trench, 
 but he could not long sit alone in that tem- 
 pestuous security without imagining himself 
 in other circumstances climbing up the para- 
 pet leaving the trench walking into THAT. 
 So on the few murky nights when the moon 
 would not show herself but peeped temptingly 
 from behind large bolsters of cloud, so that 
 even the Turks diminished their fire, and then 
 with a petulant crescendo continued, men lay 
 
 [65] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 in the dust and prayed for the moon to come. 
 So demoralizing was this fire that it was not 
 easy to induce even sentries to keep an effect- 
 ive watch. Not unnaturally, they did not like 
 lifting their heads to look over, even for the 
 periodical peeps which were insisted upon. 
 An officer on his rounds wouM find them 
 standing on the firestep with their heads well 
 below the parapet, but gazing intently into the 
 heart of a sand-bag, with the air of a man 
 whom no movement of the enemy can escape. 
 The officer must then perform the melancholy 
 rite of "showing the man how safe it is." 
 This consisted in climbing up to the firestep, 
 and exposing an immoderate amount of his 
 head: gazing deliberately at the Turks, and 
 striving to create an impression of indifference 
 and calm. He then jumped down, shouting 
 cheerily, "That's the way, Thompson," and 
 walked off, thanking God. Personally I did 
 not like this duty. At the best it was an hy- 
 pocrisy. For the reluctance of the officer to 
 look over was no less acute than the man's; 
 and it was one thing to look for a moment or 
 two and pass on, and another to stand there 
 [66] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 and repeat the process at brief intervals. Of- 
 ficers performed this rite according to their 
 several characters: Eustace, for example, with 
 a cynical grin which derided, with equal in- 
 justice, both himself and his action; he was 
 notably courageous, and his nonchalance on 
 the parapet would have been definitely reas- 
 suring to the nervous sentry. But his expres- 
 sion and attitude said clearly: "This is all 
 damned nonsense, my good man; you don't 
 like standing up here, neither do I, and neither 
 of us is deceiving the other at all." Burnett 
 did it with genuine and ill-concealed distaste, 
 too hasty to be convincing. Harry, alone, did 
 it with a gallant abandon, like a knight throw- 
 ing down his challenge to the enemy; and he 
 alone can have been really inspiring to the re- 
 luctant sentry. He had a keen dramatic in- 
 stinct, and in these little scenes rather enjoyed 
 the part of the unperturbed hero calming the 
 timorous herd. Watching him once or twice 
 I wondered how much was acting and how 
 much real fearlessness; if it was acting he was 
 braver then than most of us but I think it was 
 the other just then. 
 
 [67] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 There were five or six hours between the 
 end of the rapid fire and the "Stand to" before 
 dawn. During these hours three of the com- 
 pany officers were always on duty. We split 
 the time in two, and it was a weary three hours 
 patrolling the still trench, stumbling over 
 sleeping men, sprawled out like dead in the 
 moonlight, and goading the tired sentries to 
 watchfulness. Terrible was the want of sleep. 
 The men fell asleep with their heads against 
 the iron loopholes, and, starting up as the offi- 
 cer shook them, swore that they had never 
 nodded. Only by constant movement could 
 the officer be sure even of himself; he dared 
 not sit for a moment or lean in the corner of 
 the traverse, though all his limbs ached for 
 rest, lest he, too, be found snoring at his post, 
 and he and all his men be butchered in their 
 guilty sleep. And so he drags his sore feet 
 ceaselessly backwards and forwards, marvel- 
 ling at the stillness and the stars and the 
 strange, musky night smell which has crept 
 out of the earth. Far away he can see the 
 green lights of a hospital ship, and as he looks 
 they begin to move and dwindle slowly into 
 [68] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 the distance, for she is going home; and he 
 thinks of the warmth and light and comfort 
 in that ship, and follows her wistfully with 
 his eyes till she is gone. Turning back he sees 
 a sentry, silent above him; he, too, is watching 
 the ship, and each man knows the other's 
 thoughts, but they do not speak. 
 
 At last comes the officer relieving him; cold 
 and irritable from his brief sleep. He is a 
 little late, and they compare watches resent- 
 fully; and unless they be firm friends, at that 
 moment they hate each other. But the one 
 who is relieved goes down to the dug-out in 
 the Support Line, a little jauntily now, though 
 his feet are painful, feeling already that he 
 could watch many hours more. And suddenly 
 the moon is beautiful, and the stars are 
 friendly for he is going to sleep. But when 
 he comes to the little narrow hole, which is 
 the dug-out, there are two officers already fill- 
 ing most of the floor, noisily asleep. One of 
 them is lying on his waterproof sheet: he tugs 
 angrily at it, but it is caught in something and 
 will not come away. He shakes the man, but 
 he does not wake. Too tired to continue he 
 
 [69] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 lies down awkwardly in the crooked space 
 which is left between the legs and arms and 
 equipment of the others. He draws his meagre 
 trench-coat over his body, and pulls his knees 
 up that they, too, may be covered; there is 
 nothing over his feet, and already they are 
 cold. His head he rests on a rough army hav- 
 ersack. In the middle of it there is a hard 
 knob, a soap-tin, or a book, or a tin of beef. 
 For a little he lies uncomfortably like this, hop- 
 ing for sleep ; his ear is crushed on the hard pil- 
 low; there is something knobbly under his 
 hip. He knows that he ought to get up and 
 re-arrange himself but he lacks the neces- 
 sary energy. Finally he raises himself on his 
 elbow and tugs at the towel in his haversack 
 to make him a pillow; the strap of the haver- 
 sack is fastened, and the towel will not emerge. 
 He unfastens the haversack, and in despera- 
 tion pulls out the whole of its contents with 
 the towel. His toothbrush and his sponge and 
 his diary are scattered in the dust. Some of 
 the pages of the diary are loose, and if he 
 leaves it they will be lost; he feels in the dark- 
 [70] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 ness for his electric torch, and curses because 
 he cannot find it. He has lent it to the 
 damned fool who relieved him. Why can't 
 people have things of their own? 
 
 Painfully groping he gathers his belongings 
 and puts them, one by one, in the haversack, 
 arranging his towel on the top. His elbow 
 is sore with leaning on it, but the pillow is 
 ready. Lying down again he falls quickly to 
 sleep. Almost at once there is a wild din in 
 his dreams. Rapid fire again. Springing 
 up, he rushes into the trench with the others. 
 It is an attack. Who is attacking? The men 
 in the trench know nothing. It started on the 
 right, they say, and now the whole line is 
 ablaze again with this maddening rifle-fire. 
 Running back to the dug-out he gropes in the 
 wreckage of coats and equipment for his belt 
 and revolver. He must hurry to the front line 
 to take charge of his platoon. There are no 
 telephones to the firing-line. What the hell 
 is happening? When he is halfway up the 
 communication trench, cannoning into the 
 walls in his haste and weariness, the firing sud- 
 
 [70 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 denly stops. It was a wild panic started by 
 the Senegalese holding the line on our right. 
 Damn them black idiots 1 
 
 He goes back swearing with the other offi- 
 cers, and they lie down anyhow; it is too late 
 now to waste time on fussy arrangements. 
 When he wakes up again there is already a 
 hint of light in the East. It is the "Stand to 
 Arms" before dawn. His feet are numb and 
 painful with cold, his limbs are cramped and 
 aching, and his right forearm has gone to 
 sleep. The flesh of his legs is clammy, and 
 sticks to the breeches he has lived and slept in 
 for five days: he longs for a bath. Slowly 
 with the others he raises himself and gropes 
 weakly in the muddle of garments on the floor 
 for his equipment. He cannot find his re- 
 volver. Burnett has lost his belt, and mut- 
 ters angrily to himself. All their belongings 
 are entangled together in the narrow space; 
 they disengage them without speaking to each 
 other. Each one is in a dull coma of endur- 
 ance; for the moment their spirit is at its low- 
 est ebb; it is the most awful moment of war- 
 fare. In a little they will revive, but just now 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 they cannot pretend to bravery or cheerful- 
 ness, only curse feebly and fumble in the dark- 
 ness. 
 
 They go out into the trench and join their 
 platoons. The N. C. O.'s are still shaking and 
 bullying the men still asleep; some of these 
 are almost senseless, and can only be roused 
 ' by prolonged physical violence. The officer 
 braces himself for his duties, and by and by 
 all the men are more or less awake and 
 equipped, though their heads droop as they 
 sit, and their neighbours nudge them into 
 wakefulness as the officer approaches. Me- 
 chanically he fills and lights a pipe, and takes a 
 cautious sip at his water-bottle; the pipe turns 
 his empty stomach, and an intolerable empti- 
 ness assails him. He knocks out the pipe and 
 peers over the parapet. It is almost light now, 
 but a thin mist hides the Turkish trench. His 
 face is greasy and taut with dirt, and the cor- 
 ners of his eyes are full of dust; his throat is 
 dry, and there is a loathsome stubble on his 
 chin, which he fingers absently, pulling at the 
 long hairs. 
 
 Steadily the light grows and grows, and the 
 
 [73] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 men begin to chatter, and suddenly the sun 
 emerges over the corner of Achi Baba, and 
 life and warmth come back to the numb souls 
 of all these men. "Stand to" is over; but as 
 the men tear off their hateful equipment and 
 lean their rifles against the wall of the trench 
 there is a sudden burst of shelling on the right. 
 Figures appear running on the sky-line. 
 They are against the light, and the shapes are 
 dark, but there seems to be a dirty blue in 
 their uniforms. No one quite knows how the 
 line runs up there; it is a salient. The figures 
 must be Turks attacking the French. The 
 men gape over the parapet. The officer gapes. 
 It is nothing to do with them. Then he re- 
 members what he is for, and tells his men ex- 
 citedly to fire on the figures. Some of the 
 men have begun cooking their breakfast, and 
 are with difficulty seduced from their task. 
 A spasmodic fire opens on the running figures. 
 It is hard to say where they are running, or 
 what they are doing. The officer is puzzled. 
 It is his first glimpse of battle, and he feels 
 that a battle should be simple and easy to un- 
 derstand. The officer of the next platoon 
 
 [74] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 comes along. He is equally ignorant of af- 
 fairs, but he thinks the figures are French, at- 
 tacking the Turks. They, too, wear blue. 
 The first officer rushes down the line telling 
 the men to "cease fire." The men growl and 
 go back to their cooking. It is fairly certain 
 that none of them hit any of the distant figures, 
 but the officer is worried. Why was nobody 
 told what was to happen? What is it all 
 about? He has been put in a false position. 
 Presently a belated chit arrives to say that the 
 French were to attack at sunrise, but the at- 
 tack was a fiasco, and is postponed. 
 
 And now all the air is sickly with the smell 
 of cooking, and the dry wood crackles in every 
 corner; little wisps of smoke go straight up in 
 the still air. All the Peninsula is beautiful 
 in the sunlight, and wonderful to look upon 
 against the dark blue of the sea; the dew 
 sparkles on the scrub; over the cypress grove 
 comes the first aeroplane, humming content- 
 edly. Another day has begun ; the officer goes 
 down whistling to wash in a bucket. 
 
 [75] 
 
IV 
 
 SUCH was life in the line at that time. 
 But I should make the soldier's almost 
 automatic reservation, that it might 
 have been worse. There might have been 
 heavy shelling; but the shelling on the trenches 
 was negligible then; there might have been 
 mud, but there was not. And eight such days 
 might have left Harry Penrose quite unaf- 
 fected in spirit, in spite of his physical handi- 
 caps, by reason of his extraordinary vitality 
 and zest. But there were two incidents be- 
 fore we went down which did affect him, and 
 it is necessary that they should be told. 
 
 On the fifth day in the line he did a very 
 brave thing brave, at least, in the popular 
 sense, which means that many another man 
 would not have done that thing. To my mind, 
 a man is brave only in proportion to his knowl- 
 edge and his susceptibility to fear; the stand- 
 ard of the mob, the standard of the official 
 
 [76] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 military mind, is absolute; there are no fine 
 shades no account of circumstance and tem- 
 perament is allowed and perhaps this is in- 
 evitable. Most men would say that Harry's 
 deed was a brave one. I have said so myself 
 but I am not sure. 
 
 Eighty to a hundred yards from one section 
 of our line was a small stretch of Turkish 
 trench, considerably in advance of their main 
 line. From this trench a particularly harass- 
 ing fire was kept up, night and day, and the 
 Brigade Staff considered that it should be cap- 
 tured. High officers in shirt sleeves and red 
 hats looked long and wisely at it through peri- 
 scopes; colonels and adjutants and subalterns 
 and sergeants stood silent and respectful while 
 the great men pondered. The great men then 
 turned round with the air of those who make 
 profound decisions, and announced that "You 
 ought to be able to 'enfilade' it from 'over 
 there/ " or "I suppose they 'enfilade' you from 
 there." The term "enfilade" invariably oc- 
 curred somewhere in these dicta, and in the 
 listeners' minds there stirred the suspicion that 
 the Great Ones had not been looking at the 
 
 [77] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 right trench; if indeed they had focused the 
 unfamiliar instrument so as to see anything 
 at all. But the decision was made; and for 
 the purposes of a night attack it was important 
 to know whether the trench was held strongly 
 at night, or occupied only by a few busy 
 snipers. Harry was ordered to reconnoitre 
 the trench with two scouts. 
 
 The night was pitch black, with an unusual 
 absence of stars. The worst of the rapid fire 
 was over, but there was a steady spit and 
 crackle of bullets from the Turks, and espe- 
 cially from the little trench opposite. Long 
 afterwards, in France, he told me that he 
 would never again dream of going out on pa- 
 trol in the face of such a fire. But tonight it 
 did not occur to him to delay his expedition. 
 The profession of scouting made a special ap- 
 peal to the romantic side of him; the prospect 
 of some real, practical scouting was exciting. 
 According to the books much scouting was 
 done under heavy fire, but according to the 
 books, and in the absence of any experience to 
 the contrary, it was probable that the careful 
 scout would not be killed. Then why waste 
 
 [78] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 time? (All this I gathered indirectly from 
 his account of the affair.) Two bullets 
 smacked into the parapet by his head as he 
 climbed out of the dark sap and wriggled for- 
 ward into the scrub; but even these did not 
 give him pause. Only while he lay and 
 waited for the two men to follow did he begin 
 to realize how many bullets were flying about. 
 The fire was now really heavy, and when I 
 heard that Harry had gone out, I was afraid. 
 But he as yet was only faintly surprised. The 
 Colonel had sent him out; the Colonel had 
 said the Turks fired high, and if you kept low 
 you were quite safe and he ought to know. 
 This was a regular thing in warfare, and must 
 be done. So on like reptiles into the dark- 
 ness, dragging with hands and pushing with 
 knees. Progress in the orthodox scout fash- 
 ion was surprisingly slow and exhausting. 
 The scrub tickled and scratched your face, 
 the revolver in your hands caught in the roots ; 
 the barrel must be choked with dust. More- 
 over, it was impossible to see anything at all, 
 and the object of a reconnaissance being to see 
 something, this was perplexing. Even when 
 
 [79] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 the frequent flares went up and one lay pressed 
 to the earth, one's horizon was the edge of a 
 tuft of scrub five yards away. This always 
 looked like the summit of some commanding 
 height; but labouring thither one saw by the 
 next flare only another exactly similar horizon 
 beyond. So must the worm feel, wandering 
 in the rugged spaces of a well-kept lawn. It 
 was long before Harry properly understood 
 this phenomenon; and by then his neck was 
 stiff and aching from lying flat and cranning 
 his head back to see in front. But after many 
 hours of crawling the ground sloped down a 
 little, and now they could see the sharp, stab- 
 bing flashes from the rifles of the snipers in 
 the little trench ahead of them. Clearly they 
 were only snipers, for the flashes came from 
 only eight or nine particular spots, spaced out 
 at intervals. Now the scouts glowed with 
 the sense of achievement as they watched. 
 They had found out. Never again could 
 Harry have lain like that, naked in the face 
 of those near rifles, coldly calculating and 
 watching, without an effort of real heroism. 
 On this night he did it easily confident, un- 
 
 [80] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 afraid. Elated with his little success, some- 
 thing prompted him to go farther and confirm 
 his deductions. He whispered to his men to 
 lie down in a fold of the ground, and crept 
 forward to the very trench itself, aiming at a 
 point midway between two flashes. There 
 was no wire in front of the trench, but as he 
 saw the parapet looming like a mountain close 
 ahead, he began to realize what a mad fool 
 he was, alone and helpless within a yard of 
 the Turks, an easy mark in the light of the next 
 flare. But he would not go back, and squirm- 
 ing on worked his head into a gap in the para- 
 pet, and gazed into a vast blackness. This he 
 did with a wild incautiousness, the patience of 
 the true scout overcome by his anxiety to do 
 what he intended as soon as possible. The 
 Turks 7 own rifles had drowned the noise of 
 his movements, and providentially no flare 
 went up till his body was against the parapet. 
 When at length the faint wavering light be- 
 gan and swelled into sudden brilliance, he 
 could see right into the trench, and when the 
 shadows chased each other back into its depths 
 as the light fell, he lay marvelling at his own 
 
 [81] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 audacity: so impressed was he by the wonder 
 of his exploit that he was incapable of making 
 any intelligent observations, other than the 
 bald fact that there were no men in that part 
 of the trench. He was still waiting for an- 
 other flare when there was a burst of rapid fire 
 from our own line a little to the right. Sud- 
 denly he realized that B Company did not 
 know he <was out; C Company knew, but in his 
 haste he had forgotten to see that the others 
 were informed before he left, as he had ar- 
 ranged to do with the Colonel. He and his 
 scouts would be shot by B Company. Ob- 
 sessed with this thought he turned and scram- 
 bled breathlessly back to the two waiting men. 
 God knows why he wasn't seen and sniped; 
 and his retirement must have been very noisy, 
 for as he reached the others all the snipers in 
 the trench opened fire feverishly together. 
 Harry and his men, who were cold with wait- 
 ing, wriggled blindly back ; they no longer pre- 
 tended to any deliberation or cunning, but hav- 
 ing come to no harm so far were not seriously 
 anxious about themselves; only it seemed good 
 to go back now. But after a few yards one of 
 
 [82] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 the men, Trower, gave a scream of agony and 
 cried out, "I'm hit, I'm hit." 
 
 In that moment, Harry told me, all the ela- 
 tion and pride of his exploit ebbed out of him. 
 A sick disgust with himself and everything 
 came over him. Williams, the other scout, 
 lay between him and Trower, who was now 
 moaning horribly in the darkness. For a mo- 
 ment Harry was paralysed; he lay there, say- 
 ing feebly, "Where are you hit? Where is he 
 hit, Williams? Where are you hit?" When 
 at last he got to his side, the man was almost 
 unconscious with pain, but he had managed 
 to screech out "Both legs." In fact, he had 
 been shot through the femoral artery, and one 
 leg was broken. In that blackness skilled 
 hands would have had difficulty in bandaging 
 any wound; Harry and Williams could not 
 even tell where his wound was, for all his legs 
 were wet and sticky with blood. But both of 
 them were fumbling and scratching at their 
 field-dressings for some moments before they 
 realized this. Then they started to take the 
 man in, half dragging, half carrying him. At 
 every movement the man shrieked in agony. 
 
 [83] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 When they stood up to carry him bodily, he 
 screamed so piercingly that the storm of bul- 
 lets was immediately doubled about them. 
 When they lay down and dragged him he 
 screamed less, but progress was impossibly 
 slow. And now it seemed that there were 
 Turks in the open scrub about them, for there 
 were flashes and loud reports at strangely close 
 quarters. The Turks could not see the miser- 
 able little party, but Trower's screams were 
 an easy guide. Then Harry bethought him 
 of the little medical case in his breast-pocket 
 where, with needles and aspirin and plaster 
 and pills, was a small phial of morphine tab- 
 lets. For Trower's sake and their own, his 
 screaming must be stilled. Tearing open his 
 pocket he fumbled at the elastic band round 
 the case. The little phial was smaller than 
 the rest; he knew where it lay. But the case 
 was upside-down; all the phials seemed the 
 same size. Trembling, he pulled out the 
 cork and shook out one of the tablets into his 
 hand; a bullet cracked like a whip over his 
 head; the tablet fell in the scrub. He got an- 
 other out and passed it over to Williams. 
 
 [84] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 Williams's hand was shaking, and he dropped 
 it. Harry groaned. The next two were 
 safely transferred and pressed into Trower's 
 mouth : he did not know how strong they were, 
 but he remembered vaguely seeing "One or 
 two" on the label, and at that black moment 
 the phrase came curiously into his head, "As 
 ordered by the doctor." Trower was quieter 
 now, and this made the other two a little 
 calmer. Harry told me he was now so cool that 
 he could put the phial back carefully in the 
 case and return them to his pocket; even, from 
 sheer force of habit, he buttoned up the pocket. 
 But when they moved off they realized with a 
 new horror that they were lost. They had 
 come out originally from the head of a long 
 sap; in the darkness and the excitement they 
 had lost all sense of direction, and had missed 
 the sap. Probably they were not more than 
 fifty yards from friends, but they might be 
 moving parallel to the sap or parallel to the 
 front line, and that way they might go on 
 indefinitely. They could not drag their 
 wretched burden with them indefinitely; so 
 Harry sent Williams to find the trench, and 
 
 [85] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 lay throbbing by the wounded man. No one 
 who has not been lost in the pitchy dark in No 
 Man's Land can understand how easy it is to 
 arrive at that condition, and the intense feeling 
 of helplessness it produces. That solitary wait 
 of Harry's must have been terrible; for he had 
 time now to ponder his position. Perhaps 
 Williams would not find the trench; perhaps 
 he, too, would be hit; perhaps he would not 
 be able to find the scouts again. What should 
 they do then? Anything was possible in this 
 awful darkness, with these bullets cracking and 
 tearing about him. Perhaps he would be 
 killed himself. Straining his ears he fancied 
 he could hear the rustle of creeping men, any 
 moment he expected a rending blow on his 
 own tender body. But his revolver had been 
 dropped in the dragging of Trower. He 
 could do nothing only try to bind up the poor 
 legs again. Poor Harry 1 as he lay there ban- 
 daging his scout, he noticed that the lad had 
 stopped moaning, and said to himself that his 
 morphine tablets had done their work. That 
 was something, anyhow. But the man was 
 already dead. He could not have lived for 
 [86] 
 

 The Secret Battle 
 
 ten minutes, the doctor told me. And when 
 Williams at last returned, trailing a long 
 string from the sap, it was a dead man they 
 brought painfully into the trench and handed 
 over gently to the stretcher-bearers. 
 
 I was in the sap when they came, and 
 dragged Harry away from it. And when they 
 told him he nearly cried. 
 
 II 
 
 The other incident is briefly told. On our 
 last day in the line Harry's platoon were work- 
 ing stealthily in the hot sun at a new section 
 of trench connecting two saps, and some one 
 incautiously threw a little new-turned earth 
 over the parapet. The Turks, who seldom mo- 
 lested any of the regular, established trenches 
 with shell-fire, but hotly resented the making 
 of new ones, opened fire with a light high- 
 velocity gun, of the whizz-bang type. This 
 was our first experience of the weapon, and 
 the first experience of a whizz-bang is very dis- 
 turbing. The long shriek of the ordinary 
 shell encourages the usually futile hope that by 
 ducking one may avoid destruction. With the 
 
 [87] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 whizz-bang there is no hope, for there is no 
 warning; the sound and the shell arrive almost 
 simultaneausly. Harry's platoon did not like 
 these things. The first three burst near but 
 short of the trench, filling the air with fumes ; 
 the fourth hit and removed most of the parapet 
 of one bay. Harry, hurrying along to the 
 place, found the four men there considerably 
 surprised, crouching in the corners and gazing 
 stupidly at the yawning gap. It was unde- 
 sirable, if not impossible, to rebuild the para- 
 pet during daylight, so he moved them into the 
 next bay. He then went along the trench to 
 see that all the men had ceased work. He 
 heard two more shells burst behind him as he 
 went. On his way back two men rushing 
 round a corner two men with white faces 
 smeared with black and a little blood almost 
 knocked him down ; they were speechless. He 
 went through the bay which had been blown 
 in; it was silent, empty; the bay beyond was 
 silent too, save for the buzzing of a thousand 
 flies. In it he had left eight men ; six of them 
 were lying dead. Two had marvellously es- 
 caped. The first whizz-bang had blown away 
 [88] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 the parapet; the second, following immedi- 
 ately after, had passed miraculously through 
 the hole, straight into the trench a piece of 
 astounding bad luck or good gunnery. The 
 men could not be buried till dusk, and we left 
 them there. 
 
 Two hours later, as we sat under a water- 
 proof sheet and talked quietly of this thing, 
 there came an engineer officer wandering along 
 the trench. He had come, crouching, through 
 those two shattered and yawning bays: he was 
 hot and very angry. ' Why the hell don't you 
 bury those Turks?" he said, "they must have 
 been there for weeks!" This is the kind of 
 charge which infuriates the soldier at any 
 time; and we did not like the added suggestion 
 that those six good men of the i4th Platoon 
 were dead Turks. We told him they were 
 Englishmen, dead two hours. "But, my God, 
 man," he said, "they're black!" We led him 
 back, incredulous, to the place. 
 
 When we got there we understood. 
 Whether from the explosion or the scorching 
 sun in that airless place, I know now, but those 
 six men were, as he said, literally black black 
 
 [89] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 and reeking and hideous and the flies . . .! 
 Harry and I crouched at the end of that 
 bay, truly unable to believe our eyes. I hope 
 I may never again see such horror as was in 
 Harry's face. They were his platoon, and 
 he knew them, as an officer should. After the 
 explosion, there had been only four whom he 
 could definitely identify. Now there was not 
 one. In two hours . . . 
 
 I do not wish to labour this or any similar 
 episode. I have seen many worse things; 
 every soldier has. In a man's history they 
 are important only in their effect upon him, 
 and the effect they have is determined by many 
 things by his experience, and his health, and 
 his state of mind. But if you are to under- 
 stand what I may call the battle-psychology of 
 a man, as I want you to understand Harry's, 
 you must not ignore particular incidents. For 
 in this respect the lives of soldiers are not uni- 
 form ; though many may live in the same regi- 
 ment and fight in the 1 same battles, the experi- 
 ences which matter come to them diversely 
 to some crowded and overwhelming, to some 
 
 [90] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 by kind and delicate degrees. And so do their 
 spirits develop. 
 
 These two incidents following so closely 
 upon each other had a most unhappy cumu- 
 lative effect on Harry. His night's scouting, 
 in spite of its miserable end, had not percep- 
 tibly dimmed his romantic outlook; it had 
 been an adventure, and from a military point 
 of view a successful adventure. The Colonel 
 had been pleased with the reconnaissance, as 
 such. But the sight of his six poor men, lying 
 black and beastly in that sunlit hole, had killed 
 the "Romance of War" for him. Henceforth 
 it must be a necessary but disgusting business, 
 to be endured like a dung-hill. But this, in the 
 end, was inevitable; with all soldiers it is only 
 a matter of time, though for a boy of Harry's 
 temperament it was an ill chance that it should 
 come so soon. 
 
 What was more serious was this. The two 
 incidents had revived, in a most malignant 
 form, his old distrust of his own competence. 
 I found that he was brooding over this ac- 
 cusing himself, quite wrongly, I think, of be- 
 ing responsible for the death of seven men. 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 He had bungled the scouting; he had reck- 
 lessly attracted attention to the party, and 
 Trower, not he, had paid for it. He had 
 moved four men into a bay where four others 
 already were, and six of them had been killed. 
 I tried hard to persuade him, not quite hon- 
 estly, that he had done absolutely the right 
 thing. In scouting, of all things, I told him, 
 a man must take chances; and the matter of 
 the two whizz-bangs was sheer bad luck. It 
 was no good ; he was a fool a failure. Un- 
 consciously, the Colonel encouraged this atti- 
 tude. For, thinking that Harry's nerve might 
 well have been shaken by his first experience, 
 he would not let him go out on patrol again 
 on our next "tour" in the line. I think he was 
 quite mistaken in this view, for the boy did not 
 even seem to realize how narrow his own es- 
 capes had been, so concerned was he about his 
 lost men. Nor did this explanation of the 
 Colonel's veto even occur to him. Rather it 
 affirmed him in his distrust of himself, for it 
 seemed to him that the Colonel, too, must look 
 upon him as a bungler, a waster of men's 
 lives. . . . 
 
 [92] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 All this was very bad, and I was much 
 afraid of what the reaction might be. But 
 there was one bright spot. So far he only 
 distrusted his military capacity; there was no 
 sign of his distrusting his own courage. I 
 prayed that that might not follow. 
 
 [931 
 
MID-JUNE came with all its plagues 
 and fevers and irritable distresses. 
 Life in the rest-camp became daily 
 more intolerable. There set in a steady wind 
 from the north-east which blew all day down 
 the flayed rest-areas of the Peninsula, raising 
 great columns of blinding, maddening dust. 
 It was a hot, parching wind, which in no way 
 mitigated the scorch of the sun, and the dust 
 it brought became a definite enemy to human 
 peace. It pervaded everything. It poured 
 into every hole and dug-out, and filtered into 
 every man's belongings; it formed a gritty 
 sediment in water and tea, it passed into a man 
 with every morsel of food he ate, and scraped 
 and tore at his inside. It covered his pipe 
 so that he could not even smoke with pleasure ; 
 it lay in a thick coating on his face so that he 
 looked like a wan ghost, paler than disease had 
 made him. It made the cleaning of his rifle 
 
 [94] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 a too, too frequent farce ; it worked under his 
 breeches, and gathered at the back of his knees, 
 chafing and torturing him ; and if he lay down 
 to sleep in his hole it swept in billows over his 
 face, or men passing clumsily above kicked 
 great showers upon him. Sleep was not pos- 
 sible in the rest-camps while that wind blew. 
 But indeed there were many things which 
 made rest in the rest-camps impossible. Few 
 more terrible plagues can have afflicted Brit- 
 ish troops than the flies of Gallipoli. In May, 
 by comparison, there were none. In June they 
 became unbearable; in July they were liter- 
 ally inconceivable. Most Englishmen have 
 lain down some gentle summer day to doze on a 
 shaded lawn and found that one or two per- 
 sistent flies have destroyed the repose of the 
 afternoon; many women have turned sick at 
 the sight of a blowfly in their butcher's shop. 
 Let them imagine a semi-tropical sun in a 
 place where there is little or no shade, where 
 sanitary arrangements are less than primitive, 
 where, in spite of all precautions, there are 
 scraps of bacon and sugar and tea-leaves lying 
 everywhere in the dust, and every man has his 
 
 [95] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 little daily store of food somewhere near him, 
 where there are dead bodies and the carcasses 
 of mules easily accessible to the least venture- 
 some fly let them read for "one" fly a hun- 
 dred, a thousand, a million, and even then they 
 will not exaggerate the horror of that plague. 
 Under it the disadvantages of a sensitive na- 
 ture and a delicate upbringing were easy to 
 see. An officer lies down in the afternoon to 
 sleep in his hole. The flies cluster on his face. 
 Patiently, at first, he brushes them away, with 
 a drill-like mechanical movement of his hand; 
 by and by he does it angrily; his temper is go- 
 ing. He covers his face with a handkerchief ; 
 it is distressingly hot, but at least he may have 
 some rest. The flies settle on his hand, on his 
 neck, on the bare part of his leg. Even there 
 the feel of them is becoming a genuine tor- 
 ment. They creep under the handkerchief; 
 there is one on his lip, another buzzing about 
 his eye. Madly he tears off the handkerchief 
 and lashes out, waving it furiously till the air 
 is free. The flies gather on the walls of the 
 dug-out, on the waterproof sheet, and watch; 
 they are waiting motionless till he lies down 
 
 [96] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 again. He throws his coat over his bare knees 
 and lies back. The torment begins again. It 
 is unendurable. He gets up, cursing, and 
 goes out; better to walk in the hot sun or sit 
 under the olive-tree in the windy dust. 
 
 But look into the crowded ditches of the 
 men. Some of them are fighting the same 
 fight, hands moving and faces twitching, like 
 the flesh of horses, automatically. But most 
 of them lie still, not asleep, but in a kind 
 of dogged artificial insensibility. The flies 
 crowd on their faces; they swarm about their 
 eyes, and crawl unmolested about their open 
 mouths. It is a horrible sight, but those men 
 are lucky. 
 
 Then there was always a great noise in the 
 camp, for men would be called for from Head- 
 quarters at the end of it or orders passed down, 
 and so great was the wind and the noise of 
 the French guns and the Turkish shells, that 
 these messages had to be bawled from man to 
 man. The men grew lazy from sheer weari- 
 ness of these messages, so that they were mu- 
 tilated as they came and had to be repeated; 
 and there was this babel always. The men, 
 
 [97] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 too, like the officers, became irritable with 
 each other, and wrangled incessantly over lit- 
 tle things ; only the officers argued quietly and 
 bitterly, and the men shouted oaths at each 
 other and filthy epithets. There was only a 
 yard between the holes of the officers and the 
 holes of the men, and their raucous quarrelling 
 grated on nerves already sensitive from the 
 trials of the day, and the officer came near to 
 cursing his own men ; and that is bad. 
 
 So there was no rest to be had in the camp 
 during the day; and at night we marched out 
 in long columns to dig in the whispering 
 gullies, or unload ships on the beach. There 
 were many of these parties, and we were much 
 overworked, as all infantry units invariably 
 are; and only at long intervals there came an 
 evening when a man might lie down under the 
 perfect stars and sleep all night undisturbed. 
 Then indeed he had rest; and when he woke 
 to a sudden burst of shell-fire, lay quiet in 
 his hole, too tired and dreamy to be afraid. 
 
 Dust and flies and the food and the water 
 and our weakness joined forces against us, 
 and dysentery raged among us. There were 
 
 [98] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 many who had never heard of the disease, and 
 thought vaguely of the distemper of dogs. 
 Those who had heard of it thought of it as 
 something rather romantically Eastern, like 
 the tsetse fly, and the first cases were invested 
 with a certain mysterious distinction espe- 
 cially as most of them were sent away. But it 
 became universal; everybody had it, and 
 everybody could not be sent away. One man 
 in a thousand went through that time un- 
 touched; one in ten escaped with a slight at- 
 tack. But the remainder lived permanently 
 or intermittently in a condition which in any 
 normal campaign would have long since sent 
 them on stretchers to the base. The men could 
 not be spared; they stayed and endured and 
 tottered at their work. Thus there was every 
 circumstance to encourage infection and little 
 to resist it. One by one the officers of D Com- 
 pany were stricken. The first stages were 
 mildly unpleasant, encouraging that comfort- 
 able sense of martyrdom which belongs to a 
 recognized but endurable complaint. As it 
 grew worse, men became querulous but were 
 still interested in themselves, and those not in 
 
 [99] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 the final stages discussed their symptoms, emu- 
 lously, disgustingly still a little anxious to be 
 worse than their fellows. 
 
 In the worst stage there was no emulation, 
 only a dull misery of recurrent pain and lassi- 
 tude and disgust. A man could not touch the 
 coarse food which was all we had; or, if from 
 sheer emptiness he did, his sufferings were im- 
 mediately magnified. Yet always he had a 
 wild craving for delicate food, and as he 
 turned from the sickening bacon in the gritty 
 lid of his mess-tin, conjured bright visions of 
 lovely dainties which might satisfy his longing 
 and give him back his strength. So men 
 prayed for parcels. But when they came, or 
 when some wanderer came back from the 
 Islands with a basket of Grecian eggs, too 
 often it was too late for the sickest men, and 
 their agonies were only increased. Scientific 
 dieting was impossible. They could only 
 struggle on, for ever sick, yet for ever on duty: 
 this was the awful thing. When a man 
 reached this stage, the army was lucky indeed 
 if it did not lose him; he was lucky himself if 
 he did not die. But so strong is the human 
 
 [100] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 spirit and so patient the human body, that most 
 won through this phase to a spasmodic exist- 
 ence of alternate sickness and precarious 
 health; and when they said to themselves "I 
 am well," and ate heartily, and said to their 
 companions "This and that is what you should 
 do," the disease gripped them again, each time 
 more violently. All this sapped the strength 
 of a man; and finally there came a terrible 
 debility, a kind of paralysing lassitude when 
 it needed a genuine flogging of the will for 
 him to lift himself and walk across the camp, 
 and his knees seemed permanently feeble, as if 
 a fever had just left him. Yet many endured 
 this condition for weeks and months till the 
 fever definitely took them. Some became 
 so weak that while they still tottered up to the 
 line and about their duties, they could not 
 gratuitously drag themselves to the beach to 
 bathe. Then indeed were they far gone, for 
 the evening swims were the few paradisial mo- 
 ments of that time. When the sun had but an 
 hour to live, and the wind and the dust and 
 the flies were already dwindling, we climbed 
 down a cliff-path where the Indians kept their 
 
 [101] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 sacred but odorous goats. There was a fringe 
 of rocks under the cliffs where we could dive. 
 There we undressed, hot and grimy, lousy, 
 thirsty, and tired. Along the rocks solitary 
 Indians were kneeling towards Mecca. Some 
 of the old battered boats of the first landing 
 were still nosing the shore, and at a safe dis- 
 tance was a dead mule. The troops did not 
 come here but waded noisily in the shallow 
 water; so all was quiet, save for an occasional 
 lazy shell from Asia and the chunk-chunk of 
 a patrol-boat. The sea at this hour put on its 
 most perfect blue, and the foot-hills across the 
 Straits were all warm and twinkling in the late 
 sun. So we sat and drank in the strengthen- 
 ing breeze, and felt the clean air on our con- 
 taminated flesh ; and plunging luxuriously into 
 the lovely water forgot for a magical moment 
 all our weariness and disgust. 
 
 When a man could not do this, he was ill 
 indeed. 
 
 II 
 
 And by this time we had found each other 
 out. We had discovered a true standard of 
 
 [102] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 right and wrong; we knew quite clearly now, 
 some of us for the first time, what sort of ac- 
 tion was "dirty," and we were fairly clear 
 how likely each of us was to do such an action. 
 We knew all our little weaknesses and most 
 of our serious flaws; under that olive-tree they 
 could not long be hid. In the pleasant life 
 of London or Oxford we had had no occasion 
 to do anything dishonourable or underhand; 
 in our relations with other men we had not 
 even wished to be guilty of anything worse 
 than mild unkindnesses or consistent unpunc- 
 tuality. But behind the footlights of Gallip- 
 oli we had found real burning temptations; 
 and we had found our characters. D Com- 
 pany on the whole was lucky, and had stood 
 the test well. We knew that Burnett was 
 "bogus"; but we knew that Williams of A 
 Company was incalculably more "bogus" ; we 
 had stood in the dark sap at night and re- 
 luctantly overheard the men of his company 
 speak of him and his officers. 
 
 But little weaknesses beget great irritations 
 in that life, and the intimate problems of com- 
 munal feeding were enough to search out all 
 
 [103] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 our weaknesses. We knew that some of us, 
 though courageous, were greedy; that others, 
 though not greedy, were querulous about their 
 food and had a nasty habit of "sticking out for 
 their rights" : indeed, I think I developed this 
 habit myself. We had had trouble about par- 
 cels. Parcels in theory were thrown into the 
 common stock of the mess: but Egerton and 
 Burnett never had parcels, and were by no 
 means the most delicate eaters of other people's 
 dainties. Harry and Hewett reserved some 
 portion of each parcel, a cake or a slab of 
 chocolate, which they ate furtively in their 
 dug-outs, or shared with each other in the 
 dusk; Burnett ostentatiously endowed the mess 
 with his entire stock, but afterwards at every 
 meal hinted sombrely at the rapacity of those 
 who had devoured it. Harry and Hewett 
 each made contributions to the mess; but 
 Harry objected to the excessive consumption 
 of this food by Burnett, and Hewett, who gave 
 ungrudgingly to the rest of us, had a similar 
 reservation never expressed as against Eg- 
 erton. So all this matter of food set in mo- 
 tion a number of antagonisms seldom or never 
 [104] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 articulate, but painfully perceptible at every 
 meal. 
 
 The parcel question, I think, was one of the 
 things which embittered the quarrel between 
 Harry and Burnett. A parcel from home to 
 schoolboys and soldiers and prisoners and 
 sailors, and all homesick exiles, is the most 
 powerful emblem of sentiment and affection. 
 A man would willingly preserve its treasures 
 for himself to gloat over alone, in no mere 
 fleshly indulgence, but as a concrete expres- 
 sion of affection from the home for which he 
 longs. This is not nonsense. He likes to 
 undo the strings in the grubby hole which is 
 his present home, and secretly become senti- 
 mental over the little fond packages and queer, 
 loving thoughts which have composed it. 
 And though in a generous impulse he may 
 say to his companions, "Come, and eat this 
 cake," and see it in a moment disappear, it is 
 hard for him not to think, "My sister (or wife, 
 or mother) made this for me; they thought 
 it would give me pleasure for many days. 
 Already it is gone would they not be hurt if 
 they knew?" He feels that he has betrayed 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 the tenderness of his home; and though the 
 giving of pleasure to companions he likes may 
 overcome this feeling, the compulsory squan- 
 dering of such precious pleasure on a man he 
 despises calls up the worst bitterness of his 
 heart. So was it between Harry and Burnett. 
 
 If, by the way, it be suggested that Burnett 
 was entitled to feel the same sentimental jeal- 
 ousy about his parcels, I answer that Burnett's 
 parcels came on his own order from the soul- 
 less hand of Fortnum and Mason. 
 
 All of us were very touchy, very raw and 
 irritable in that fevered atmosphere. Men 
 who were always late in relieving another on 
 watch, or unreasonably resented a minute's 
 postponement of their relief, or never had any 
 article of their own but for ever borrowed 
 mess-tins and electric torches and note-books 
 from more methodical people, or were over- 
 bearing to batmen, or shifted jobs on to other 
 officers, or slunk off to bathe alone when they 
 should have taken their sultry platoon such 
 men made enemies quickly. Between Eustace 
 and Hewett, who had been good friends before 
 and were to be good friends again, there grew 
 [106] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 up a slow animosity. Hewett was one of the 
 methodical class of officer, Eustace was one 
 of the persistent borrowers. Moreover, as I 
 have said, he was a cynic, and he would argue. 
 He had a contentious remark for every mo- 
 ment of the day; and though this tormented 
 us all beyond bearing, Hewett was the only 
 one with both the energy and the intellectual 
 equipment to accept his challenges. So these 
 two argued quietly and fiercely in the hot noon, 
 or the blue dusk, till the rest of us were weary 
 of them both, and the sound of Eustace's harsh 
 tones was an agony to the nerves. They were 
 both too consciously refined to lose their tem- 
 pers healthily, and when they reached danger- 
 point, Hewett would slink away like an in- 
 jured animal to his burrow. In this conflict 
 Harry took no speaking part, for while in 
 spirit and affection he was on Hewett's side, 
 he paid intellectual tribute to Eustace's con- 
 duct of the argument, and listened as a rule in 
 puzzled silence. Eustace again was his cor- 
 dial ally against Burnett, while Hewett had 
 merely the indifference of contempt for that 
 officer. 
 
 [107] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 So it was all a strange tangle of friendship 
 and animosity and good-nature and bitterness. 
 Yet on the surface, you understand, we lived 
 on terms of toleration and vague geniality; 
 except for the disputations of Hewett and 
 Eustace there was little open disagreement. 
 In the confined space of a company mess 
 permanent hostilities would make life impos- 
 sible; it is only generals who are allowed to 
 find that they can no longer "act with" each 
 other, and resign: platoon commanders may 
 come to the same conclusion, but they have 
 to go on acting. And so openly we laughed 
 and endured and bore with each other. Only 
 there was always this undertone of irritations 
 and animosities which, in the maddening con- 
 ditions of our life, could never be altogether 
 silenced, and might at any moment rise to a 
 strangled scream. 
 
 Harry's appointment as Scout Officer was 
 the first thing to set Burnett against Harry, 
 though already many things had set Harry 
 against Burnett. It had been commonly as- 
 sumed, in view of Burnett's "backwoods" repu- 
 tation, that he would succeed Martin as Scout 
 [108] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 Officer. The Colonel's selection of Harry 
 took us a little by surprise, though it only 
 showed that the Colonel was a keener judge 
 of character and ability than the rest of us. 
 No one, I think, was more genuinely pleased 
 that Burnett was not to be Scout Officer than 
 Burnett himself; but in the interests of his 
 "dare-devil" pretensions he had to affect an 
 air of disappointment, and let it be known 
 by grunts and shrugs and sour looks that he 
 considered the choice of Harry to be an in- 
 jury to himself and the regiment. As far as 
 Harry was concerned this resentment of 
 Burnett's was more or less genuine, for his re- 
 luctance to take on the job did not prevent him 
 being jealous of the man who did. 
 
 Then Burnett was one of the people who 
 had nothing of his own, and seemed to regard 
 Harry, as the youngest of us all, as the proper 
 person to provide him with all the necessaries 
 of life. In those days we had no plates or 
 crockery, but ate and drank out of our 
 scratched and greasy mess-tins. Harry's mess- 
 tin disappeared, and for three days he was 
 compelled to borrow from Hewett or myself 
 
 [109] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 a tedious and, to him, hateful business. One 
 day Burnett had finished his meal a long way 
 ahead of any of us, and Harry, in the despera- 
 tion of hungry waiting, asked him for the loan 
 of his mess-tin. Automatically he looked at 
 the bottom of the tin, and there found his in- 
 itials inscribed. It was his own tin. Fur- 
 ther, some one had tried to scratch the initials 
 out. Harry kept his temper with obvious dif- 
 ficulty. Burnett knew well that he had lost 
 his mess-tin (we were all sick of hearing it), 
 but he said he was quite ignorant of having it 
 in his possession. When Harry argued with 
 him, Burnett sent for his batman and cursed 
 him for taking another officer's property. 
 The wretched man mumbled that he had 
 "found" it, and withdrew; and we all sat in 
 silence teeming with distrustful thoughts. We 
 were sorry for the batman; we were sorry for 
 Harry. Burnett may not have taken the mess- 
 tin with his own hands, but morally he stood 
 convicted of an action which was "dirty." 
 
 Then Burnett and Harry took a working- 
 party together to dig in the gully. Burnett 
 was the senior officer, but left Harry to work 
 [no] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 all night in the whispering rain of stray bul- 
 lets, while he sat in an Engineers' dug-out and 
 drank whisky. Harry did not object to this, 
 the absence of Burnett being always congenial 
 to him. But next day there came a compli- 
 mentary message from the Brigadier about the 
 work of that working-party. Burnett was sent 
 for and warmly praised by the Colonel. Bur- 
 nett stood smugly and said nothing. Harry, 
 when he heard of it, was furious, and wanted, 
 he said, to "have a row" with him. What he 
 expected Burnett to say, I don't know ; the man 
 could hardly stand before his Colonel and say, 
 "Sir, Penrose did all the work, I was in the 
 Engineers' dug-out nearly all the time with 
 my friends, and had several drinks." A row, 
 in any case, would be intolerable in that 
 cramped, intimate existence, and I dissuaded 
 Harry, though I made Egerton have a few 
 words with Burnett on the subject. Harry 
 contented himself with ironic comments on 
 Burnett's "gallantry" and "industry," asking 
 him blandly at meals if he expected to get his 
 promotion over that working-party, and sug- 
 gesting to Egerton that Burnett should take 
 
 [mi 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 Harry's next turn of duty "because he is so 
 good at it." This made Burnett beautifully 
 angry. But it was bitter badinage, and did not 
 improve the social atmosphere. 
 
 There were a number of such incidents be- 
 tween the two ; they were very petty in them- 
 selves, some of them, like a fly, but in their 
 cumulative effect very large and distressing. 
 In many cases there was no verbal engagement, 
 or only an angry, inarticulate mutter. Public, 
 unfettered angers were necessarily avoided. 
 But this pent-up, suppressed condition of the 
 quarrel made it more malignant, like a dis- 
 ease. And it got on Harry's nerves; indeed, 
 it got on mine. It became an active element 
 in that vast complex of irritation and decay 
 which was eating into his young system ; it was 
 leagued with the flies, and the dust, and the 
 smells, and the bad food, and the wind, and the 
 harassing shells of the Turks, and the disgust- 
 ful torment of disease. 
 
 Ill 
 
 For Harry was a very sick man. He had 
 endured through all the stages of dysentery, 
 
 [112] 
 
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 and now lived with that awful legacy of weak- 
 ness of which I have spoken. And the dis- 
 ease had not wholly left him, but some days he 
 lay faint with excruciating spasms of pain. 
 Slightly built and constitutionally fragile at 
 the beginning, he was now a mere wasted wisp 
 of a man. The flesh seemed to have melted 
 from his face, and when he stood naked on the 
 beach it seemed that the moving of his bones 
 must soon tear holes in the unsubstantial skin. 
 Standing in the trench with the two points of 
 his collar-bone jutting out like promontories 
 above his shirt, and a pale film of dust over 
 his face, he looked like the wan ghost of some 
 forgotten soldier. On the Western Front, 
 where one case of dysentery created a panic 
 among the authorities, and in the most urgent 
 days they have never had to rely on skeletons 
 to fight, he would long since have been bun- 
 dled off. But in this orgy of disease, no offi- 
 cer could be sent away who was willing to 
 stay and could still totter up the gully. And 
 Harry would not go. When he went to the 
 battalion doctor it was with an airy request 
 for the impotent palliatives then provided for 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 early dysentery, and with no suggestion of the 
 soul-destroying sickness that was upon him. 
 One day he would not come down to the rocks 
 and bathe, so feeble he was. "I know now," 
 he said, "the meaning of that bit in the psalms, 
 'My knees are like water and all my bones are 
 out of joint.' " "Harry," I said, "you're not 
 fit to stay here why not go sick?" At which 
 he smiled weakly, and said that he might be 
 better in a day or two. Pathetic hope ! all men 
 had it. And so Hewett and I walked down, a 
 little sadly, alone, marvelling at the boy's 
 courage. For it seemed to us that he wanted 
 to stay and see it through, and if indeed he 
 might recover we could not afford to lose 
 him. So we said no more. 
 
 But by degrees I gained a different impres- 
 sion. Harry still opened his mind to Hewett 
 and myself more than to any one else, but it 
 was by no direct speech, rather by the things 
 he did not say, the sentences half finished, the 
 look in his eyes, that the knowledge came 
 that Harry did want to go away. The ro- 
 mantic impulse had perished long since in that 
 ruined trench; but now even the more mun- 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 dane zest of doing his duty had lost its savour 
 in the long ordeal of sickness and physical dis- 
 tress. He did want to go sick. He had only 
 to speak a word; and still he would not 
 go. When I knew this, I marvelled at his 
 courage yet more. 
 
 For many days I watched him fighting this 
 lonely conflict with himself, a conflict more 
 terrible and exacting than any battle. Some- 
 times the doctor came and sat under our olive- 
 tree, and some of us spoke jestingly of the 
 universal sickness, and asked him how ill we 
 must be before he would send us home. 
 Harry alone sat silent; it was no joke to him. 
 "And how do you feel now, Penrose?" said 
 the doctor. "Are you getting your arrow- 
 root all right?" Harry opened his mouth 
 but for a moment said nothing. I think it had 
 been in his mind to say what he did feel, but 
 he only murmured, "All right, thank you, 
 doctor." The doctor looked at him queerly. 
 He knew well enough, but it was his task to 
 keep men on the Peninsula, not to send them 
 away. 
 
 Once I spent an afternoon in one of the hos- 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 pital ships in the bay: when I came back and 
 told them of the cool wards and pleasant 
 nurses, and all the peace and cleanliness and 
 comfort that was there, I caught Harry's wist- 
 ful gaze upon me, and I stopped. It was well 
 enough for the rest of us in comparative health 
 to imagine luxuriously those unattainable 
 amenities. None of us were ill enough then 
 to go sick if we wished it. Harry was. And 
 I knew that such talk must be an intolerable 
 temptation. 
 
 Then one day, on his way up to the line 
 with a working-party, he nearly fainted. "I 
 felt it coming on," he told me, "in a block. 
 I thought to myself, 'This is the end of it all 
 for me, anyhow.' I actually did go off for a 
 moment, I think, and then some one pushed 
 me from behind and as we moved on it wore 
 
 off again. I did swear " Harry stopped, 
 
 realizing the confession he had made. I tried 
 to feel for myself the awful bitterness of that 
 awakening in the stifling trench, shuffling up- 
 hill with the flies. . . . But he had told me 
 now everything I had only guessed before, and 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 once more I urged him to go sick and have 
 done with it. 
 
 "I would," he said, "only I'm not sure . . . 
 I know I'm jolly ill, and not fit for a thing . . . 
 but I'm not sure if it's only that. ... I was 
 pretty brave when I got here, I think" (I nod- 
 ded) , "and I think I am still ... but last time 
 we were in the line I found I didn't like look- 
 ing over the top nearly so much ... so I 
 want to be sure that I'm quite all right . . . 
 in that way . . . before I go sick. . . . Be- 
 sides, you know what everybody says. . . ." 
 
 "Nobody could say anything about you," I 
 told him ; "one's only got to look at you to see 
 that you've got one foot in the grave." "Well, 
 we go up again tomorrow," he said, "and if 
 I'm not better after that, I'll think about it 
 again." 
 
 I had to be content with that, though I was 
 not content. For my fears were fulfilled, 
 since in the grip of this sickness he had begun 
 at last to be doubtful of his own courage. 
 
 But that night Burnett went to the doctor 
 and said that he was too ill to go on. So far 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 as the rest of us knew, he had never had any- 
 thing but the inevitable preliminary attack 
 of dysentery, though it is only fair to say that 
 most of us were so wrapped up in the exquisite 
 contemplation of our own sufferings, that we 
 had little time to study the condition of others. 
 The doctor, however, had no doubts about 
 Burnett; he sent him back to us with a flea in 
 his ear and a dose of chlorodyne. The story 
 leaked out quickly, and there was much com- 
 ment adverse to Burnett. When Harry heard 
 it, he led me away to his dug-out. It was an 
 evening of heavy calm, like the inside of a 
 cathedral. Only a few mules circling dustily 
 at exercise in the velvet gloom, and the dis- 
 tant glimmer of the Scotsmen's fires, made any 
 stir of movement. The men had gone early 
 to their blankets, and now sang softly their 
 most sentimental songs, reserved always for the 
 night before another journey to the line. 
 They sang them in a low croon of ecstatic mel- 
 ancholy, marvellously in tune with the purple 
 hush of the evening. For all its aching regret 
 it was a sound full of hope and gentle resolu- 
 tion. Harry whispered to me, "You heard 
 [118] 
 
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 about Burnett? Thank God, nobody can say 
 those things about me! I'm not going off this 
 Peninsula till I'm pushed off." 
 
 I said nothing. It was a heroic sentiment, 
 and this was the heroic hour. It is what men 
 say in the morning that matters. . . . 
 
 In the morning we moved off as the sun 
 came up. There had been heavy firing nearly 
 all night, and over Achi Baba in the cloudless 
 sky there hung a portent. It was as though 
 some giant had been blowing smoke-rings, and 
 with inhuman dexterity had twined and laced 
 these rings together, without any of them los- 
 ing their perfection of form. ... As the sun 
 came up these cloud-rings stood out a rosy 
 pink against the blue distance, and while we 
 marched through the sleeping camps turned 
 gently through dull gold to pale pearl. I 
 have never known what made this marvel, a 
 few clouds forgotten by the wind, or the smoke 
 of the night's battle; but I marched with my 
 eyes upon it all the stumbling way to Achi 
 Baba. And when I found Harry at a halt, 
 he, too, was gazing at the wonder with all his 
 men. "It's an omen," he said. 
 
 ["9] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 "Good or bad?" 
 
 "Good," he said. 
 
 I have never understood omens; I suppose 
 they are good or bad according to the mind of 
 the man who sees them: and I was glad that 
 Harry thought it was good. 
 
 [120] 
 
VI 
 
 IT was one of the Great Dates : one of those 
 red dates which build up the calendar 
 of a soldier's past, and dwell in his mem- 
 ory when the date of his own birth is almost 
 forgotten. It is strange what definite sign- 
 posts these dates of a man's battle-days become 
 in his calculation of time like the foundation 
 of Rome. An old soldier will sigh and say, 
 "Yes, I know that was when Jim died it was 
 ten days after the Fourth of June," or, "I was 
 promoted the day before the Twelfth of July." 
 The years pile up, and zero after zero day is 
 added for ever to his primitive calendar, and 
 not one of them is thrust from his reverent 
 memory ; but at each anniversary he wakes and 
 says, "This is the 3rd of February, or the ist 
 of July," and thinks of old companions who 
 went down on that day; and though he has 
 seen glorious successes since, he will ever think 
 
 [121] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 with a special tenderness of the black early 
 failures when he first saw battle and his friends 
 going under. And if in any place where sol- 
 diers gather and tell old tales, there are two 
 men who can say to each other, "I, too, was at 
 Helles on such a date," there is a great bond 
 between them. 
 
 On one of these days we sat under the olive- 
 tree and waited. Up the hill one of that long 
 series of heroic, costly semi-successes was go- 
 ing through. We were in reserve. We had 
 done six turns in the trenches without doing 
 an attack. When we came out we were very 
 ready to attack, very sure of ourselves. Now we 
 were not so sure of ourselves ; we were waiting, 
 and there was a terrible noise. Very early the 
 guns had begun, and everywhere, from the 
 Straits to the sea, were the loud barkings of 
 the French "seventy-fives," thinly assisted by 
 the British artillery, which was scanty, and 
 had almost no ammunition. But the big ships 
 came out from Imbros and stood off and 
 swelled the chorus, dropping their huge shells 
 on the very peak of the little sugar-loaf that 
 tops Achi Baba, and covering his western 
 
 [122] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 slopes with monstrous eruptions of black and 
 yellow. 
 
 Down in the thirsty wilderness of the rest- 
 camps the few troops in reserve lay restless 
 under occasional olive-trees, or huddled under 
 the exiguous shelter of ground-sheets stretched 
 over their scratchings in the earth. They 
 looked up and saw the whole of the great hill 
 swathed in smoke and dust and filthy fumes, 
 and heard the ruthless crackle of the Turks' 
 rifles, incredibly rapid and sustained ; and they 
 thought of their friends scrambling over in 
 the bright sun, trying to get to those rifles. 
 They themselves were thin and wasted with 
 disease, and this uncertainty of waiting in 
 readiness for they knew not what plucked at 
 their nerves. They could not rest or sleep, 
 for the flies crawled over their mouths and 
 eyes and tormented them ceaselessly, and great 
 storms of dust swept upon them as they lay. 
 They were parched with thirst, but they must 
 not drink, for their water-bottles were filled 
 with the day's allowance, and none knew when 
 they would be filled again. If a man took out 
 of his haversack a chunk of bread, it was im- 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 mediately black with flies, and he could not 
 eat. Sometimes a shell came over the Straits 
 from Asia with a quick, shrill shriek, and burst 
 at the top of the cliffs near the staff officers 
 who stood there and gazed up the hill with 
 glasses. All morning the noise increased, and 
 the shells streamed up the hill with a sound 
 like a hundred expresses vanishing into a hun- 
 dred tunnels: and there was no news. But 
 soon the wounded began to trickle down, and 
 there were rumours of a great success with 
 terrible losses. In the afternoon the news be- 
 came uncertain and disturbing. Most of the 
 morning's fruits had been lost. And by eve- 
 ning they knew that indeed it had been a ter- 
 rible day. 
 
 Under our olive-tree we were very fidgety. 
 There had been no mail for many days, and 
 we had only month-old copies of the Mall 
 and the Weekly Times, which we pretended 
 listlessly to read. Eustace had an ancient 
 Nation, and Hewett a shilling edition of Van- 
 ity Fair. Harry in the morning kept climb- 
 ing excitedly up the trees to gaze at the obscure 
 haze of smoke on the hill, and trying vainly 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 to divine what was going on ; but after a little 
 he too sat silent and brooding. We were no 
 longer irritable with each other, but studiously 
 considerate, as if each felt that tomorrow he 
 might want to take back a spiteful word and 
 the other be dead. All our valises and our 
 sparse mess-furniture had long been packed 
 away, for we had now been standing by for 
 twenty-four hours, and we lay uneasily on the 
 hard ground, shifting continually from pos- 
 ture to posture to escape the unfriendly pro- 
 tuberances of the soil. In the tree the crickets 
 chirped on always, in strange indifference to 
 the storm of noise about them. They were 
 hateful, those crickets. . . . Now and then 
 Egerton was summoned to Headquarters; and 
 when he came back each man said to himself, 
 "He has got our orders." And some would 
 not look at him, but talked suddenly of some- 
 thing else. And some said to him with a pain- 
 ful cheeriness, "Any orders?" and when he 
 shook his head, cursed a little, but in their 
 hearts wondered if they were glad. For the 
 waiting was bad indeed, but who knew what 
 tasks they would have when the orders came. 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 . . . Often the Reserves had the worst of it in 
 these affairs ... a forlorn hope of an attack 
 without artillery . . . digging a new line un- 
 der fire . . . beating off the counter-attack. . . . 
 But the waiting became intolerable, and all 
 were glad, an hour before sunset, when we 
 filed off slowly by half-platoons. Every gun 
 was busy again, and all along the path to the 
 hill batteries of "seventy-fives" barked sud- 
 denly from unsuspected holes, so close that a 
 man's heart seemed to halt at the shock. The 
 gully was full of confusion and wounded, and 
 tired officers and odd groups of men bandying 
 rumours and arguing in the sun. Half-way 
 up the tale came mysteriously down the line 
 that we were to attack a trench by ourselves ; 
 a whole brigade had tried and failed there 
 was a redoubt there were endless machine- 
 guns. . . . Some laughed "a rumour"; but 
 most men felt in their heart that there was 
 something in it, and inwardly "pulled them- 
 selves together." At last they were to be in 
 a real battle, and walk naked in the open 
 through the rapid fire. And as they moved 
 on, there came over them an overpowering 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 sense of the irrevocable. They thought of that 
 summer day in 1914 when they walked light- 
 hearted into the recruiting office. It had 
 seemed a small thing then, but that was what 
 had done it; had brought them into this blazing 
 gully, with the frogs croaking, and the men 
 moaning in corners with their legs messed up. 
 ... If they had known about this gully then 
 and these flies, and this battle they were going 
 to, then, perhaps, they would have done some- 
 thing else in that August . . . gone into a 
 dockyard . . . joined the A. S. C. like Jim 
 Roberts. . . . Well, they hadn't, and they 
 were not really sorry . . . only let there be 
 no more waiting . . . and let it be quick and 
 merciful, no stomach wounds and nastiness 
 ... no lying out in the scrub for a day with 
 the sun, and the flies, and no water. 
 
 Look at that officer on the stretcher . . . 
 he won't last long . . . remember his face . . . 
 his platoon relieved us somewhere . . . where 
 was it? ... Hope I don't get one like him 
 . . . nasty mess . . . would like one in the 
 shoulder if it's got to be ... hospital ship 
 . . . get home, perhaps ... no, they send 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 you to Egypt . . . officer said so. ... Hallo, 
 halting here . . . Merton trench . . . old 
 Reserve Line. . . . Getting dark . . . night- 
 attack? . . . not wait till dawn, I hope . . . 
 can't stand much more waiting. . . . Pass the 
 word, Company Commanders to see the 
 Colonel . . . that's done it, there goes Eger- 
 ton . . . good man, thinks a lot of me ... 
 try not to let him down. . . . 
 
 But what Egerton and the others heard from 
 the Colonel made a vain thing of all this brac- 
 ing of men's spirits. There was a muddle; 
 the attack was cancelled ... no one knew 
 where the Turks were, where anybody was 
 ... we were to stay the night in this old re- 
 serve trench and relieve the front line in the 
 morning. . . . 
 
 When Egerton told his officers only Burnett 
 spoke : he said "Damn. As usual. I wanted 
 a go at the old Turks": and we knew that it 
 was not true. The rest of us said nothing, for 
 we were wondering if it were true of ourselves. 
 I went with Harry to his platoon; they too 
 said nothing, and their faces were expression- 
 less. But they were cold now, and hungry, 
 [128] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 and suddenly very tired; and they had no 
 real fire of battle in them; they had waited 
 too long for this crowning experience of an 
 attack, braced themselves for it too often to 
 be disappointed ;. and I knew that they were 
 glad. But they did not mind being glad; 
 they pondered no doubts about themselves, 
 only curled up like animals in corners to 
 sleep. . . . 
 
 Harry, too, no doubt, had braced himself 
 like the rest of us, and he, too, must have been 
 glad, glad to lie down and look forward after 
 all to seeing another sunrise. But I thought 
 of his doubts about himself, and I felt that this 
 business was far from easing his burden. For 
 me and for the men it was a simple thing 
 the postponement of a battle with the Turks; 
 for Harry it was the postponement of a per- 
 sonal test: the battle inside him still went on; 
 only it went on more bitterly. 
 
 II 
 
 There was a great muddle in front. Troops 
 of two different brigades were hopelessly en- 
 tangled in the shallow trenches they had taken 
 
 [129] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 from the Turks. They had few officers left, 
 and their staffs had the most imperfect im- 
 pressions of the whereabouts of their mangled 
 commands. So the sun was well up when we 
 finally took over the line ; this was in defiance 
 of all tradition, but the Turk was shaken and 
 did not molest us. The men who passed us 
 on their way down grimly wished us joy of 
 what they had left; their faces were pale and 
 drawn, full of loathing and weariness, but they 
 said little; and the impression grew that there 
 was something up there which they could not 
 even begin to describe. It was a still, scorch- 
 ing morning, and as we moved on the air 
 became heavy with a sickening stench, the 
 most awful of all smells that man can be called 
 to endure, because it preyed on the imagina- 
 tion as well as the senses. For we knew now 
 what it was. We came into a Turkish trench, 
 broad and shallow. In the first bay lay two 
 bodies a Lowlander and a Turk. They lay 
 where they had killed each other, and they 
 were very foul and loathsome in the sun. A 
 man looked up at them and passed on, think- 
 ing, "Glad I haven't got to stay here." In the 
 [130] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 next bay there were three dead, all English- 
 men; and in the next there were more and 
 he thought, "It was a hot fight just here." 
 But as he moved on, and in each succeeding 
 bay beheld the same corrupt aftermath of 
 yesterday's battle, the suspicion came to him 
 that this was no local horror. Over the whole 
 front of the attack, along two lines of trenches, 
 these regiments of dead were everywhere 
 found, strung in unnatural heaps along the 
 parapets, or sprawling horribly half into the 
 trench so that he touched them as he passed. 
 Yet still he could not believe, and at each 
 corner thought, "Surely there will be none in 
 this bay." 
 
 But always there were more; until, if he 
 were not careful or very callous, it began to 
 get on his nerves, so that at the traverses he 
 almost prayed that there might be no more 
 beyond. Yet many did not realize what was 
 before them till they were finally posted in the 
 bays they were to garrison three or four in 
 a bay. Then they looked up at the sprawling 
 horrors on the parapet and behind them just 
 above their heads, and knew that these were 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 to be their close companions all that swelter- 
 ing day, and perhaps beyond. The regiment 
 we had relieved had been too exhausted by 
 the attack, or too short-handed, to bury more 
 than a few, and the Turkish snipers made it 
 impossible to do anything during the day. 
 And so we sat all the scorching hours of the 
 sun, or moved listlessly up and down, trying 
 not to look upwards. . . . But there was a 
 hideous fascination about the things, so that 
 after a few hours a man came to know the 
 bodies in his bay with a sickening intimacy, 
 and could have told you many details about 
 each of them their regiment, and how they 
 lay, and how they had died, and little things 
 about their uniforms, a missing button, or 
 some papers, or an old photograph sticking 
 out of a pocket. . . . All of these were alive 
 with flies, and at noon when we took out our 
 bread and began to eat, the flies rose in a great 
 black swarm and fell upon the food in our 
 hands. After that no one could eat. All 
 day men were being sent away by the doctor, 
 stricken with sheer nausea by the flies and the 
 stench and the things they saw, and went retch- 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 ing down the trench. To keep away the aw- 
 ful reek we went about for a little in the old 
 gas-helmets, but the heat and burden of them 
 in the hot, airless trench was intolerable. The 
 officers had no dug-outs, but sat under the 
 parapets, like the men. No officer went sick; 
 no officer could be spared; and indeed we 
 seemed to have a greater power of resistance 
 to this ordeal of disgust thafi the men. But 
 I don't know how Harry survived it. Being 
 already in a very bad way physically, it af- 
 fected him more than the rest of us, and it was 
 the first day I had seen his cheerfulness de- 
 feated. At the worst he had always been 
 ready to laugh a little at our misfortunes, the 
 great safety-valve of a soldier, and make iron- 
 ical remarks about Burnett or the Staff. This 
 day he had no laugh left in him, and I thought 
 sadly of that first morning when he jumped 
 over the parapet to look at a dead Turk. He 
 had seen enough now. 
 
 In the evening the Turk was still a little 
 chastened, and all night we laboured at the 
 burying of the bodies. It was bad work, but 
 so strong was the horror upon us that every 
 
 [133] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 man who could be spared took his part, care- 
 less of sleep or rest, so long as he should not 
 sit for another day with those things. But we 
 could only bury half of them that night, and 
 all the next day we went again through that 
 lingering torment. And in the afternoon 
 when we had orders to go up to the front line 
 after dusk for an attack, we were glad. It was 
 one of the very few moments in my experience 
 when the war-correspondent's legend of a regi- 
 ment's pleasure at the prospect of battle came 
 true. For anything was welcome if only we 
 could get out of that trench, away from the 
 smell and the flies, away from those 
 bodies. . . . 
 
 Ill 
 
 I am not going to tell you all about that 
 attack, only so much of it as affects this his- 
 tory, which is the history of a man and not of 
 the war. It was a one-battalion affair, and 
 eventually a failure. D Company was in re- 
 serve, and our only immediate task was to pro- 
 vide a small digging-party, forty men under 
 an officer, to dig some sort of communication 
 
 [134] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 ditch to the new line when taken. Burnett 
 was told off for this job ; we took these things 
 more or less in turn, and it was his turn. And 
 Burnett did not like it. We sat round a sin- 
 gle candle under a waterproof sheet in a sort of 
 open recess at the back of the front line, while 
 Egerton gave him his orders. And there ran 
 in my head the old bit about "they all began 
 with one accord to make excuse." Burnett 
 made no actual excuse; he could not. But 
 he asked aggressive questions about the ar- 
 rangements which plainly said that he con- 
 sidered this task too dangerous and too diffi- 
 cult for Burnett. He wanted more men, he 
 wanted another officer but no more could be 
 spared from an already small reserve. He 
 was full of "the high ground on the right" 
 from which his party would "obviously" be 
 enfiladed and shot down to a man. However, 
 he went. And we sat listening to the rapid 
 fire or the dull thud of bombs, until in front a 
 strange quiet fell, but to right and left were 
 the sounds of many machine-guns. As usual, 
 no one knew what had happened, but we ex- 
 pected a summons at any moment. We were 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 all restless and jumpy, particularly Harry. 
 For a man who has doubts of himself or too 
 much imagination, to be in reserve is the worst 
 thing possible. Harry was talkative again, 
 and held forth about the absurdity of the whole 
 attack, as to which he was perfectly right. 
 But I felt that all the time he was thinking, 
 "Shall I do the right thing? shall I do the 
 right thing? shall I make a mess of it?" 
 
 I went out and looked over the parapet, but 
 could make nothing out. Then I saw two 
 figures loom through the dark and scramble 
 into the trench. And after them came others 
 all along the line, coming in anyhow, in dis- 
 order. Then Burnett came along the trench, 
 and crawled in under the waterproof sheet. 
 I followed. "It's no good," he was saying, 
 "the men won't stick it. It's just what I told 
 you . . . enfiladed from that high ground 
 over there two machine-guns. . . ." 
 
 "How many casualties have you had?" said 
 Egerton. 
 
 "One killed, and two wounded." 
 
 There was silence, but it was charged with 
 eloquent thoughts. It was clear what had 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 happened. The machine-guns were firing 
 blindly from the right, probably over the heads 
 of the party. The small casualties showed 
 that. Casualties are the test. No doubt the 
 men had not liked the stream of bullets over- 
 head; at any moment the gun might lower. 
 But there was nothing to prevent the digging 
 being done, given an officer who would assert 
 himself and keep the men together. That was 
 what an officer was for. And Burnett had 
 failed. He had let the company down. 
 
 Egerton, I knew, was considering what to 
 do. The job had to be done. But should he 
 send Burnett again, with orders not to return 
 until he had finished, as he deserved, or should 
 he send a more reliable officer and make sure? 
 
 Then Harry burst in: "Let me take my 
 platoon," he said, "they'll stick it all right." 
 And his tone was full of contempt for Burnett, 
 full of determination. No doubts about him 
 now. 
 
 Well, we sent him out with his platoon. 
 And all night they dug and sweated in the 
 dark. The machine-gun did lower at times, 
 
 [137] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 and there were many casualties, but Harry 
 moved up and down in the open, cheerful and 
 encouraging, getting away the wounded, and 
 there were no signs of the men not sticking it. 
 I went out and stayed with him for an hour 
 or so, and thought him wonderful. Curious 
 from what strange springs inspiration comes. 
 For Harry, for the second time, had been gen- 
 uinely inspired by the evil example of his en- 
 emy. Probably, in the first place, he had wel- 
 comed the chance of doing something at last, 
 of putting his doubts to the test, but I am sure 
 that what chiefly carried him through that 
 night, weak and exhausted as he was, was the 
 thought, "Burnett let them down; Burnett let 
 them down; I'm not going to let them down." 
 Anyhow he did very well. 
 
 But in the morning he was carried down to 
 the beach in a high fever. And perhaps it was 
 just as well, for I think Burnett would have 
 done him a mischief. 
 
VII 
 
 SO Harry stayed till he was "pushed" off, 
 as he had promised. And I was glad 
 he had gone like that I had long 
 wanted him to leave the Peninsula somehow, 
 for I felt he should be spared for greater 
 things, but, knowing something of his peculiar 
 temperament, I did not want his career there 
 to end on a note of simple failure a dull sur- 
 render to sickness in the rest-camp. As it 
 turned out, the accident of the digging-party, 
 and the way in which Harry had seized his 
 chance, sent him off with a renewed confidence 
 in himself and, with regard to Burnett, even 
 a sense of triumph. So I was not surprised 
 when his letters began to reveal something of 
 the old enthusiastic Harry, chafing at the 
 dreary routine of the Depot, and looking for 
 adventure again. . . . But I am anticipating. 
 They sent him home, of course. It was no 
 good keeping any one in his condition at Egypt 
 
 [139] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 or Malta, for the prolonged dysentery had 
 produced the usual complications. I had a 
 letter from Malta, and one from the Mediter- 
 ranean Glub at Gibraltar, where he had a 
 sultry week looking over the bay, seeing the 
 ships steam out for England, he told me, and 
 longing to be in one. For it took many months 
 to wash away the taste of the Peninsula, and 
 much more than the austere comforts of the 
 hospital at Gibraltar. Even the hot August 
 sun in the Alameda was hatefully reminiscent. 
 Then six weeks' milk diet at a hospital in 
 Devonshire, convalescence, and a month's 
 leave. 
 
 Then Harry married a wife. I did not 
 know the lady a Miss Thickness and she 
 does not come into the story very much, though 
 she probably affected it a good deal. Wives 
 usually do affect a soldier's story, though they 
 are one of the many things which by the ab- 
 solute official standard of military duty are 
 necessarily not reckoned with at all. Not be- 
 ing the president of a court-martial I did 
 reckon with it; and when I had read Harry's 
 letter about his wedding I said : "We shan't 
 [140] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 see him again." For in those early years it 
 was generally assumed that a man returned 
 from service at the front need not go out again 
 (unless he wished) for a period almost incal- 
 culably remote. And being a newly married 
 man myself, I had no reason to suppose that 
 Harry would want to rush into the breach 
 just yet. 
 
 But about May that would be 1916; we 
 had done with Gallipoli and come to France, 
 after four months' idling in the Aegean Islands 
 I had another letter, much delayed, from 
 which I will give you an extract: 
 
 "I never thought I should want to go out 
 again (you remember we all swore we never 
 should) but I do. I'm fed to the teeth with 
 this place (the Depot, in Dorsetshire) ; noth- 
 ing but company drill and lectures on march 
 discipline, and all the old stuff. We still at- 
 tack Hill 219 twice weekly in exactly the same 
 way, and still .no one but a few of the officers 
 knows exactly which hill it is, since we always 
 stop halfway for lunchtime, or because there's 
 hopeless confusion. . . . There's nobody amus- 
 ing here. Williams has got a company and 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 swanks like blazes about 'the front' but I think 
 most people see through him. . . . My wife's 
 got rooms in a cottage near here, but they won't 
 let me sleep out, and I don't get there till pretty 
 late most days. . . . Can't you get the Colonel 
 to apply for me? I don't believe it's allowed, 
 but he's sure to be able to wangle it. Other- 
 wise I shall be here for the rest of the war, be- 
 cause the more you've been out the less likely 
 you are to get out again, if you want to, while 
 there are lots who don't want to go, and 
 wouldn't be any earthly good, and stand in 
 hourly danger of being sent. . . . I want to 
 see France. . . ." 
 
 I answered on a single sheet: 
 "All very well, but what about Mrs. P.? 
 Does she concur?" (I told you I was a mar- 
 ried man.) 
 
 His answer was equally brief: 
 "She doesn't know, but she would." 
 Well, it wasn't my business, so we "wangled" 
 it (I was adjutant then), and Harry came out 
 to France. But I was sorry for Mrs. Penrose. 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 ii 
 
 I do not know if all this seems tedious and 
 unnecessary; I hope not, for it is very relevant 
 to the end of the story, and if this record had 
 been in the hands of certain persons the end 
 of the story might have been different. I do 
 not know. Certainly it ought to have been 
 different. 
 
 Anyhow, Harry came to France and found 
 us in the line at Souchez. The recuperative 
 power of the young soldier is very marvellous. 
 No one but myself would have said that this 
 was not the same Harry of a year ago; for he 
 was fit and fresh and bubbling over with keen- 
 ness. Only myself, who had sat over the Dar- 
 danelles with him and talked about Troy, knew 
 what was missing. There were no more ro- 
 mantic illusions about war, and, I think, no 
 more military ambitions. Only he was suffi- 
 ciently rested to be very keen again, and had 
 not yet seen enough of it to be ordinarily 
 bored. 
 
 And in that summer of 1916 there was much 
 to be said for life in the Souchez sector. It 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 was a "peace-time" sector, where divisions 
 stayed for months at a time, and one went in 
 and out like clockwork at ritual intervals, 
 each time into the same trenches, the same 
 deep dug-outs, each time back to the same bil- 
 lets, or the same huts in the same wood. All 
 the deserted fields about the line were a mass 
 of poppies and cornflowers, and they hung 
 over one in extravagant masses as one walked 
 up the communication trench. In the thick 
 woods round Bouvigny and Noulette there 
 were clusters of huts where the resting time 
 was very warm and lazy and companionable, 
 with much white wine and singing in the eve- 
 nings. Or one took a horse and rode into Cou- 
 pigny or Barlin where there had not been too 
 much war, but one could dine happily at the 
 best estaminet, and then ride back contentedly 
 under the stars. 
 
 In the line also there was not too much war. 
 Few of the infantry on either side ever fired 
 their rifles; and only a few bombers with rifle 
 grenades tried to injure the enemy. There 
 were short sectors of the line on either side 
 which became spasmodically dangerous be- 
 
 [144] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 cause of these things, and at a fixed hour each 
 day the Germans blew the same portions of 
 the line to dust with minenwerfers, our men 
 having departed elsewhere half an hour pre- 
 viously, according to the established routine 
 from which neither side ever diverged. Our 
 guns were very busy by spasms, and every day 
 destroyed small sections of the thick red masses 
 of the German wire, which were every night 
 religiously repaired. The German guns were 
 very few, for the Somme battle was raging, 
 but at times they flung whizz-bangs vaguely 
 about the line or dropped big shells on the 
 great brows of the Lorette Heights behind us. 
 From the high ground we held there was a 
 good view, with woods and red and white vil- 
 lages on the far hills beyond the Germans ; and 
 away to the left one looked over the battered 
 pit country towards Lens, with everywhere the 
 tall pit-towers all crumpled and bent into un- 
 couth shapes, and grey slag-heaps rising like 
 the Pyramids out of a wilderness of broken red 
 cottages. To the south-east began the Vimy 
 Ridge, where the red Pimple frowned over 
 the lines at the Lorette Heights, and all day 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 there was the foam and blackness of bursting 
 shells. 
 
 In the night there was much patrolling and 
 bursts of machine-gun fire, and a few snipers, 
 and enormous labours at the "improvement 
 of the line," wiring and revetting, and exquis- 
 ite work with sand-bags. 
 
 It was all very gentle and friendly and ar- 
 tificial, and we were happy together. 
 
 Burnett had left us, on some detached duty 
 or other, and in that gentler atmosphere Eus- 
 tace was a good companion again. 
 
 Men grew lusty and well, and one could 
 have continued there indefinitely without 
 much injury to body or mind. But sometimes 
 on a clear night we saw all the southern sky 
 afire from some new madness on the Somme, 
 and knew that somewhere in France there was 
 real war. The correspondents wrote home 
 that the regiments "condemned so long to the 
 deadening inactivity of trench warfare were 
 longing only for their turn at the Great Bat- 
 tle." No doubt they had authority: though 
 I never met one of those regiments. For our 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 part we were happy where we were. We had 
 had enough for the present. 
 
 Ill 
 
 But I digress. And yet no. For I want 
 you to keep this idea of the diversity of war 
 conditions before you, and how a man may be 
 in a fighting unit for many months and yet go 
 unscathed even in spirit. Or in the most Ar- 
 cadian parts of the battle area he may come 
 alone against some peculiar shock from which 
 he never recovers. It is all chance. 
 
 We made Harry scout officer again, and he 
 was very keen. Between us and the German 
 lines was a honeycomb of old disused trenches 
 where French and Germans had fought for 
 many months before they sat down to watch 
 each other across this maze. They were all 
 over-grown now with flowers and thick grasses, 
 but for the purposes of future operations it was 
 important to know all about them, and every 
 night Harry wriggled out and dropped into 
 one of these to creep and explore, and after- 
 wards put them on the map. Sometimes I 
 
 [147] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 went a little way with him, and I did not like 
 it. It was very creepy in those forgotten al- 
 leys, worse than crawling outside in the open, 
 I think, because of the intense blackness and 
 the infinite possibilities of ambush. 
 
 The Boches, we knew, were playing the 
 same game as ourselves, and might always be 
 round the next traverse, so that every ten yards 
 one went through a new ordeal of expectancy 
 and stealthy, strained investigation. One 
 stood breathless at the corner, listening, peer- 
 ing, quivering with the strain of it, and then 
 a rat dropped into the next "bay," or behind 
 us one of our Lewis guns blazed off a few 
 bursts, shattering the silence. Surely there 
 was some one near moving hurriedly under 
 cover of the noise! Then you stood again, 
 stiff and cramped with the stillness, and you 
 wanted insanely to cough, or shift your weight 
 on to the other foot, or your nose itched and 
 the grasses tickled your ear but you must not 
 stir, must hardly breathe. For now all the 
 lines have become mysteriously hushed, and 
 no man fires ; far away one can hear the rumble 
 of the German limbers coming up with rations 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 to the dump, and the quiet becomes unbear- 
 able, so that you long for some Titanic explo- 
 sion to break it and set you free from waiting. 
 Then a machine-gun opens again, and you slip 
 round the corner to find nothing at all, only 
 more blackness and the rats scuttling away into 
 the grass, and perhaps the bones of a French- 
 man. And then you begin all over again. 
 . . . When he has done this sort of thing many 
 times without any happening, an imperfect 
 scout becomes careless through sheer weari- 
 ness, and begins to blunder noisily ahead. 
 And sooner or later he goes under. But 
 Harry was a natural scout, well trained, and 
 from first to last kept the same care, the same 
 admirable patience, and this means a great 
 strain on body and mind. ... In those old 
 trenches you could go right up to the German 
 line, two hundred yards away, and this Harry 
 often did. The Germans had small posts at 
 these points, waiting, and were very ready with 
 bombs and rifle grenades. It was a poor look- 
 out if you were heard about there, and perhaps 
 badly wounded, so that you could not move, 
 two hundred yards away from friends and all 
 
 [H9] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 those happy soldiers who spent their nights 
 comfortably in trenches when you were out 
 there on your stomach. Perhaps your com- 
 panion would get away and bring help. Or 
 he too might be hit or killed, and then you 
 would lie there for days and nights, alone in 
 a dark hole, with the rats scampering and 
 smelling about you, till you died of starvation 
 or loss of blood. You would lie there listen- 
 ing to your own men chattering in the distance 
 at their wiring, and neither they nor any one 
 would find you or know where you were, till 
 months hence some other venturesome scout 
 stumbled on your revolver in the dark. Or 
 maybe the line would advance at last, and 
 some salvage party come upon your uniform 
 rotting in the ditch, and they would take off 
 your identity disk and send it in to Headquar- 
 ters, and shovel a little earth above your bones. 
 It might be many years. . . . 
 
 I am not an imaginative man, but that was 
 the kind of thought I had while I prowled 
 round with Harry (and I never went so far 
 as he). He even had an occasional jest at the 
 Germans, and once planted an old dummy 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 close up to their lines. There was stony 
 ground there, and, as they took it there, he 
 told me, it clattered. The next night he went 
 there again in case the Germans came out to 
 capture "Reggie." They did not, but every 
 evening for many months they put a barrage 
 of rifle-grenades all about that dummy. 
 
 Then there was much talk of "raids," and 
 all the opposite wire had to be patrolled and 
 examined for gaps and weak places. This 
 meant crawling in the open close up to the 
 enemy, naked under the white flares ; and some- 
 times they fell to earth within a few feet of 
 a scout and sizzled brilliantly for intermin- 
 able seconds; there was a sniper somewhere 
 near, and perhaps a machine-gun section, and 
 surely they could see him, so large, so illum- 
 inated, so monstrously visible he felt. It was 
 easy when there was not too much quiet, but 
 many echoes of scattered shots and the noise 
 of bullets rocketing into space, or long bursts 
 of machine-gun fire, to cover your movements. 
 But when that terrible silence fell it was very 
 difficult. For then how loud was the rustle 
 of your stealthiest wriggle, how sinister the 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 tiny sounds of insects in the grass. Every- 
 where there were stray strands of old barbed 
 wire which caught in your clothes and needed 
 infinite patience to disentangle; when you got 
 rid of one barb another clung to you as the 
 wire sprang back, or, if you were not skilful, 
 it clashed on a post or a rifle, or a tin can, 
 with a noise like cymbals. You came across 
 strange things as you crawled out there dead 
 bodies, and bits of equipment, and huge un- 
 exploded shells. Or you touched a rat or a 
 grass-snake that made you shiver as it moved ; 
 the rats and the field-mice ran over you if you 
 lay still for long, and once Harry saw a Ger- 
 man patrol-dog sniffing busily in front of him. 
 Sometimes as you went up wind you put your 
 hand suddenly on a dead man, and had to lie 
 close beside him for cover. Or you scented 
 him far off like a dog nosing through the grass, 
 and made him a landmark, whispering to your 
 companion, "Keep fifty yards from the dead 
 'un," or "Make for the dead Boche." 
 
 When the lights went up you lay very close, 
 peering ahead under your cap ; and as they fell 
 away to the ground all your vision became full 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 of moving things and fugitive shadows. The 
 thick rows of wiring posts looked like men 
 working, and that cluster of stones like the 
 head of a man in a shell-hole, watching . . . 
 watching you . . . gone in an instant. . . . 
 Then you waited tensely for the next light. 
 There is the murmur of voices somewhere, 
 very difficult to locate. For a long while you 
 stalk it, ready to attack some patrol, some 
 working-party. Then you hear a familiar 
 Tyneside curse ... it is A Company wiring, 
 with much noise. 
 
 All this, as I have said, is a heavy strain on 
 mind and body and nerve. It requires a pe- 
 culiar kind of courage, a lonely, cold-blooded 
 kind of courage. Many men who would do 
 well in a slap-dash fight in the light of day 
 are useless as scouts. Not only are they noisy 
 and impatient, but they cannot stand it. 
 
 And yet it is no job for a very imaginative 
 man. There are too many things you can 
 imagine, if you once begin. The more you 
 know about it, the more there is to imagine, 
 and the greater the strain becomes. Now 
 Harry had a very vivid imagination, and he 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 knew all about it and yet he played this game 
 nearly every night we were in the line for three 
 months . . . nothing theatrical, you under- 
 stand, nor even heroic by popular standards, 
 no stabbing affrays, no medals . . . but by my 
 standards it was very nearly heroic, and I don't 
 know how he did it. 
 
 But this was forgotten later on. 
 
 IV 
 
 Then Harry had a shock. There was a 
 large sap running out from our line along the 
 crown of a steep ridge. This sap was not held 
 during the day, but at night was peopled with 
 bombers and snipers, and it was a great start- 
 ing-place for the patrols. One night Harry 
 went out from this sap and crawled down the 
 face of the ridge. It was a dark night, and 
 the Boches were throwing up many flares. 
 One of these came to earth ten yards from 
 Harry. At that moment he was halfway 
 down the slope, crouched on one knee. How- 
 ever, when flares are about, to keep still in 
 any posture is better than to move, so Harry 
 remained rigid. But one of the new scouts 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 behind was just leaving the sap, and hovered 
 uncertainly on the skyline as the light flared 
 and sizzled below. Possibly he was seen, pos- 
 sibly what followed was a chance freak of the 
 Germans. Anyhow, a moment later they 
 opened with every machine-gun in the line, 
 with rifles, rifle-grenades, and high-velocity 
 shells. So venomous was the fire that every 
 man in the line believed and afterwards 
 hotly asserted that the whole fury of it was 
 concentrated on his particular yard of trench. 
 Few of us thought of the unhappy scouts lying 
 naked outside. Harry, of course, flattened 
 himself to the ground, and tried to wriggle 
 into a hollow; on level ground you may with 
 luck be safe under wild fire of this kind for a 
 long time. Being on a slope, Harry was hope- 
 lessly exposed. "I lay there," he told me, 
 "and simply sweated with funk; you won't 
 believe me, but at one time I could literally 
 feel a stream of machine-gun bullets ruffling 
 my hair, and thudding into the bank just above 
 my back . . . and they dropped half a dozen 
 whizz-bangs just in front of me. While it was 
 going on I couldn't have moved for a thou- 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 sand pounds. ... I felt pinned to the ground 
 . . . then there was a lull, and I leapt up ... 
 so did old Smith . . . bolted for the sap, and 
 simply dived in head first . . . they were still 
 blazing off sixteen to the dozen, and it was the 
 mercy of God we weren't hit . . . talk about 
 wind-up. . . . And when we got in two bomb- 
 ers thought it was an attack, and took us for 
 Boches. . . . Rather funny, while the strafe 
 was going on I kept thinking, Toor old Smith, 
 he's a married man' (he was a few yards from 
 me) ... and Smith tells me he was think- 
 ing, 'Mr. Penrose ... a married man . . . 
 married man.' . . * What about some more 
 whisky?" 
 
 Well, he made a joke of it, as one tries to do 
 as long as possible, and that night was almost 
 happily exhilarated, as a man sometimes is 
 after escaping narrowly from an adventure. 
 But I could see that it had been a severe shock. 
 The next night he had a cold and a bad cough, 
 and said he would not go out for fear of "mak- 
 ing a noise and giving the show away." The 
 following night he went out, but came in very 
 soon, and sat rather glum in the dug-out, think- 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 ing of something. (I always waited up till 
 he came in to report, and we used to "discuss 
 the situation" over some whisky or a little 
 white wine.) 
 
 The following day the Colonel gave him a 
 special job to do. There was the usual talk 
 of a "raid" on a certain section of the enemy 
 lines; but there was a theory that this par- 
 ticular section had been evacuated. Flares 
 were sent up from all parts of it, but this was 
 supposed to be the work of one man, a hard 
 worker, who walked steadily up and down, 
 pretending to be a company. Harry was told 
 off to test the truth of this myth to get right 
 up to that trench, to look in, and see what was 
 in it. It was a thing he had done twice before, 
 at least, though myself I should not have cared 
 to do it all. It meant the usual breathless, 
 toilsome wriggle across No Man's Land, 
 avoiding the flares and the two snipers who 
 covered that bit of ground, finding a gap in the 
 wire, getting through without being seen, 
 without noise, without catching his clothes on 
 a wandering barb, or banging his revolver 
 against a multitude of tin cans. Then you 
 
 [157] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 had to listen and wait, and, if possible, get a 
 look into the trench. When (and if) you had 
 done that you had to get back, turn round in 
 a tiny space, pass the same obstacles, the same 
 snipers. ... If at any stage you were spotted 
 the odds against your getting back at all were 
 extremely large. . . . 
 
 However, Harry was a scout, and it was his 
 job. In the afternoon of that day I met him 
 somewhere in the line and made some 
 would-be jocular remark about his night's 
 work. He seemed to me a little worried, pre- 
 occupied, and answered shortly. Hewett was 
 sitting near, shaving in the sun, and said to 
 him: "You're a nasty, cold-blooded fellow, 
 Harry, crawling about like a young snake 
 every night. But I suppose you like it." 
 
 Harry said slowly, with a casual air: 
 "Well, so I did, but I must say that strafe the 
 other night put the wind up me properly 
 and when I went out last night I found I was 
 thinking all the time, 'Suppose they did that 
 again ?' . . . and when I got on the top of a 
 ridge or anywhere a bit exposed, I kept imag- 
 ining what it would be like if all those 
 [158] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 machine-guns started just then . . . simply 
 dashed into a shell-hole . . . and I found my- 
 self working for safe spots where one would 
 be all right in case of accidents. . . . Sort of 
 lost confidence, you know." 
 
 It was all said in a matter-of-fact manner, 
 as if he was saying, "I don't like marmalade 
 so much as I used to do," and there was no sug- 
 gestion that he was not ready to go and look 
 in the Boche Front Line or the Unter den 
 Linden, if necessary. But I was sorry about 
 this. I told him that he must not imagine; 
 that that strafe was an unique affair, never 
 likely to be repeated. But when I went back 
 to the dug-out I spoke to the Colonel. 
 
 That night I went up with Harry to Foster 
 Alley, and watched him writhing away into 
 the grey gloom. There were many stars, and 
 you could follow him for thirty yards. And 
 as I watched I wondered, "Is he thinking, 
 'Supposing they do that again?' and when he 
 gets over near the wire, will he be thinking, 
 'What would happen if they saw me now?' 
 If so," I said, "God help him," and went back 
 to Headquarters. 
 
 [159] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 Three hours later he came into the dug-out, 
 where I sat with the Colonel making out an 
 Intelligence Report. He was very white and 
 tired, and while he spoke to the Colonel he 
 stood at the bottom of the muddy steps with 
 his head just out of the candlelight. All the 
 front of his tunic was muddy, and there were 
 two rents in his breeches. 
 
 He said, "Very sorry, sir, but I couldn't get 
 through. I got pretty close to the wire, but 
 couldn't find a gap." "Was there much fir- 
 ing?" said the Colonel. "The usual two 
 snipers and a machine-gun on the left; from 
 what I heard I should say there were a good 
 many men in that part of the trench but I 
 couldn't swear." Now what the Colonel had 
 wanted was somebody who could swear; that 
 was what the Brigade wanted; so he was not 
 pleased. But he was a kind, understanding 
 fellow, and all he said was, "Well, I'm sorry, 
 too, Penrose, but no doubt you did your best." 
 And he went to bed. 
 
 Then I opened some Perrier (we still had 
 Perrier then), and gave Harry a strong 
 whisky, and waited. For I knew that there was 
 
 [i 60] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 more. He talked for a little, as usual, about 
 the mud, and the Boche line, and so on, and 
 then he said: "What I told the Colonel was 
 perfectly true I did get pretty close to the 
 wire, and there wasn't a gap to be seen but 
 that wasn't the whole of it . . . I couldn't face 
 it. ... The truth is, that show the other night 
 was too much for me. ... I found myself ly- 
 ing in a shell-hole pretending to myself that 
 I was listening, and watching, and so on, but 
 really absolutely stuck, trying to make myself 
 go on ... and I couldn't . . . I'm finished 
 as a scout . . . that's all." 
 
 Well, it was all for the present. No think- 
 ing, human C. O. is going to run a man in for 
 being beaten by a job like that. It is a spe- 
 cialist's affair, like firing a gun. It is his busi- 
 ness to put the right man on the job, and if he 
 doesn't, he can't complain. 
 
 So we made Harry Lewis gun officer. And 
 that was the first stage. 
 
 [161] 
 
VIII 
 
 SOON after that we went down to the 
 Somme. It was autumn then, and all 
 that desolate area of stark brown earth 
 was wet and heavy and stinking. Down the 
 Ancre valley there were still some leaves in 
 Thiepval Wood, and the tall trees along the 
 river were green and beautiful in the thin 
 October sun. But the centre of battle was 
 coming up to that valley ; in a month the green 
 was all gone, and there was nothing to see but 
 the endless uniform landscape of tumbled 
 earth and splintered trunks, and only the big 
 shells raising vain waterspouts in the wide 
 pools of the Ancre gave any brightness to the 
 tired eye. 
 
 But you know about all this. Every Eng- 
 lishman has a picture of the Somme in his 
 mind, and I will not try to enlarge it. We 
 were glad, in a way, to go there, not in the 
 expectation of liking it, but on the principle 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 of Henry v.'s speech on the eve of St. Crispin. 
 We saw ourselves in hospitals, or drawing- 
 rooms, or bars, saying, "Yes, we were six 
 months on the Somme" (as indeed we were) ; 
 we were going to be "in the swing." But it 
 was very vile. After Souchez it was real war 
 again, and many Souchez reputations wilted 
 there and died. Yet with all its horror and 
 discomfort and fear that winter was more 
 bearable than the Gallipoli summer. For, at 
 the worst, there was a little respite, spasms of 
 repose. You came back sometimes to billets, 
 cold, bare, broken houses, but still houses, 
 where you might make a brave blaze of a 
 wood fire and huddle round it in a cheery 
 circle with warm drinks and a song or two. 
 And sometimes there were estaminets and kind 
 French women ; or you went far back to an old 
 chateau, perched over the village, and there 
 was bridge and a piano and guests at Head- 
 quarters. Civilization was within reach, and 
 sometimes you had a glimpse of it and made 
 the most of it. 
 
 But we had a bad time, as every one did. 
 After a stiff three weeks of holding a nasty bit 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 of the line, much digging of assembly 
 trenches, and carrying in the mud, we took our 
 part in a great battle. I shall not tell you 
 about it (it is in the histories) ; but it was a 
 black day for the battalion. We lost 400 men 
 and 20 officers, more than twice the total Brit- 
 ish casualties at Omdurman. Hewett was 
 killed and six other officers, the Colonel and 
 twelve more were wounded. Eustace showed 
 superb courage with a hideous wound. Harry 
 and myself survived. Now I had made a mis- 
 take about Harry. After that scouting epi- 
 sode at Souchez I told myself that his "nerve" 
 was gone, that for a little anyhow he would be 
 no good in action. But soon after we got to 
 the Somme he had surprised me by doing a 
 very good piece of work under fire. We were 
 digging a new "jumping-off" line in No Man's 
 Land, two hundred men at work at once. 
 They were spotted, the Boches dropped some 
 Minnies about, and there was the beginnings 
 of a slight stampede you know the sort of 
 thing mythical orders to "Retire" came 
 along. All Harry did was to get the men back 
 and keep them together, and keep them dig- 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 ging: the officer's job but he did very well, 
 and to me, as I say, surprisingly well. The 
 truth was, as I afterwards perceived, that only 
 what I may call his "scouting" nerve was gone. 
 It is a peculiar kind of super-nerve, as I have 
 tried to show, and losing it he had lost a very 
 valuable quality, but that was all at present. 
 
 Or I may put it another way. There is 
 a theory held among soldiers, which I will 
 call the theory of the favourite fear. Every 
 civilian has his favourite fear, death by burn- 
 ing or by drowning, the fear of falling from 
 a great height, or being mangled in a ma- 
 chine something which it makes us shiver to 
 think about. Among soldiers such special 
 fears are even more acute, though less openly 
 confessed, but in the evenings men will some- 
 times lie on the straw in the smoky barns and 
 whisper the things of which they are most 
 afraid. 
 
 It is largely a matter of locality and circum- 
 stance. In Gallipoli, where the Turks' rapid 
 musketry fire was almost incredibly intense 
 and their snipers uncannily accurate, men 
 would say that they hated bullets, but shell- 
 
 [165] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 fire left them unmoved. The same men trav- 
 elled to France and found rifle fire practically 
 extinct but gun-powder increasingly terrible, 
 and rapidly reversed their opinions. 
 
 More often, however, there has been some 
 particular experience which, out of a multi- 
 tude of shocks, has been able to make a lasting 
 impression, and leave behind it the favourite 
 fear. 
 
 One man remembers the death of a friend 
 caught by the gas without his gas mask, and is 
 possessed with the fear that he may one day 
 forget his own and perish in the same agony. 
 And such is the effect on conduct of these ob- 
 sessions that this man will neglect the most or- 
 dinary precautions against other dangers, will 
 be reckless under heavy shell-fire, but will not 
 move an inch without his respirator. 
 
 With others it is the fear of being left to die 
 between the lines, caught on the wire and rid- 
 dled by both sides, the fear of snipers, of 5-9^, 
 even of whizz-bangs. One man feels safe in 
 the open, but in the strongest dug-out has a 
 horror that it may be blown in upon him. 
 There is the fear of the empty trench, where, 
 [i66] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 like a child on the dark staircase, another man 
 is convinced that there are enemies lying be- 
 hind the parapet ready to leap upon him; and 
 there is the horror of being killed on the way 
 down from the line after a relief. 
 
 But most to be pitied of all the men I have 
 known, was one who had served at Gallipoli 
 in the early days; few men then could have 
 an orderly burial in a recognized ground, but 
 often the stretcher-bearers buried them hastily 
 where they could in and about the lines. This 
 man's fear was that one day a sniper would get 
 him in the head; that unskilled companions 
 would pronounce his death sentence, and that 
 he would wake up, perhaps within a few yards 
 of his own trench, and know that he was buried 
 but not dead. 
 
 That was how it was with Harry. The one 
 thing he could not face at present was crawl- 
 ing lonely in the dark with the thought of that 
 tornado of bullets in his head. Nothing else 
 frightened him now more than it fright- 
 ened the rest of us, though, God knows, that 
 was enough. 
 
 So that he did quite well in this battle in a 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 sound, undistinguished way. He commanded 
 a platoon for the occasion, and took them 
 through the worst part of the show without 
 exceptional losses; and he got as far as any 
 of the regiment got. He held out there for 
 two days under very heavy shell-fire, with a 
 mixed lot of men from several battalions, and 
 a couple of strange officers. In the evening 
 of the second day we were to be relieved, and 
 being now in command I sent him down with 
 a runner to Brigade Headquarters to fix up 
 a few points about our position and the relief. 
 There was a terrific barrage to pass, but both 
 of them got through. When his business was 
 done he started back to rejoin the battalion. 
 By that time it was about eleven o'clock at 
 night, and the relief was just beginning; there 
 was no reason why he should have come back 
 at all; indeed, the Brigade Major told him he 
 had better not, had better wait there in the 
 warm dug-out, and join us as we passed down. 
 Now when a man has been through a two 
 days' battle of this kind, has had no sleep and 
 hardly any food for two days, and finished up 
 with a two-mile trudge over a stony wilder- 
 [168] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 ness of shell-holes, through a vicious barrage 
 of heavy shells; when after all this he finds 
 himself, worn and exhausted so that he can 
 hardly stand, but safe and comfortable in a 
 deep dug-out where there are friendly lights 
 and the soothing voices of calm men ; and when 
 he has the choice of staying there, the right 
 side of the barrage, till it is time to go out to 
 rest, or of going back through that same bar- 
 rage, staggering into the same shell-holes, with 
 the immediate prospect of doing it all over 
 again with men to look after as well as himself 
 well, the temptation is almost irresistible. 
 But Harry did resist it I can't tell you how 
 and he started back. The barrage was 
 worse than ever, all down the valley road, and, 
 apparently, when they came near the most 
 dangerous part, Harry's runner was hit by a 
 big splinter and blown twenty yards. There 
 were no stretchers unoccupied for five miles, 
 and it was evident that the boy he was only a 
 kid would die in a little time. He knew it 
 himself, but he was very frightened in that 
 hideous valley where the shells still fell, and 
 he begged Harry not to leave him. And so 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 we came upon them as we stumbled down, 
 thanking our stars we were through the worst 
 of it, Harry and the runner crouched together 
 in a shell-hole, with the heart of the barrage 
 blazing and roaring sixty yards off, and stray 
 shells all round. 
 
 From a military or, indeed, a common-sense 
 point of view, it was a futile performance 
 the needless risk of a valuable officer's life. 
 
 They do not give decorations for that kind 
 of thing. But I was glad he had stayed with 
 that young runner. 
 
 And I only tell you this to show you how 
 wrong I was, and how much stuff he had in 
 him still. 
 
 II 
 
 And now Colonel Philpott comes into the 
 story. I wish to God he had kept out of it 
 altogether. He was one of a class of officer 
 with which our division was specially afflicted 
 at least we believed so, if only for the credit 
 of the British Army; for if they were typical 
 of the Old Army I do not know how we came 
 out of 1914 with as much honour as we did. 
 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 But I am happy to think they were not. We 
 called them the Old Duds, and we believed 
 that for some forgotten sin of ours, or because 
 of a certain strong "Temporary" spirit we had, 
 they were dumped upon us by way of penalty. 
 We had peculiarly few Regular officers, and 
 so perhaps were inclined to be extra critical 
 of these gentlemen. Anyhow, at one time they 
 came in swarms, lazy, stupid, ignorant men, 
 with many years of service retired, reserve, 
 or what not but no discoverable distinction 
 either in intellect, or character, or action. 
 And when they had told us about Simla and 
 all the injustices they had suffered in the mat- 
 ter of promotion or pay, they ousted some 
 young and vigorous Temporary fellow who at 
 least knew something of fighting, if there were 
 stray passages in the King's Regulations which 
 he did not know by heart; and in about a week 
 their commands were discontented and slack. 
 In about two months they were evacuated sick 
 (for they had no "guts," most of them), and 
 that was the finest moment of their careers 
 for them and for us. 
 Lt-Col. (Tem'y) W. K. Philpott (Substan- 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 tive Captain after God knows how many years) 
 out-dudded them all, though, to give him his 
 due, he had more staying power than most 
 of them. He took over the battalion when 
 Colonel Roberts was wounded, and the con- 
 trast was painfully acute. I was his adjutant 
 for twelve months in all, and an adjutant 
 knows most things about his C. O. He was a 
 short, stoutish fellow, with beady eyes and an 
 unsuccessful moustache, slightly grey, like a 
 stubble-field at dawn. He had all the exag- 
 gerated respect for authority and his superiors 
 of the old-school Regular, with none of its 
 sincerity; for while he said things about the 
 Brigadier which no colonel should say before 
 a junior officer, he positively cringed when 
 they met. And though he bullied defaulters, 
 and blustered about his independence before 
 juniors, there was no superior military goose 
 to whom he would have said the most diffident 
 "Bo." He was lazy beyond words, physically 
 and mentally, but to see him double out of 
 the mess when a general visited the village was 
 an education. It made one want to vomit. . . . 
 Then, of course, he believed very strongly 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 in "The Book," not Holy Writ, but all that 
 mass of small red publications which expound 
 the whole art of being a soldier in a style cal- 
 culated to invest with mystery the most ob- 
 vious truths. "It says it in The Book" was his 
 great gambit and a good one too. Yet he 
 betrayed the most astonishing ignorance of 
 The Book. Any second lieutenant could have 
 turned him inside out in two minutes on Field 
 Service Regulations, and just where you ex- 
 pected him to be really efficient and knowl- 
 edgeable, the conduct of trials, and Military 
 Law, and so on, he made the most hideous 
 elementary howlers. 
 
 But ignorance is easily forgivable if a man 
 will work, if a man will learn. But he would 
 neither. He left everything to somebody else, 
 the second-in-command, the adjutant, the or- 
 derly-room. He would not say what he 
 wanted (he very seldom knew), and when in 
 despair you made out his orders for him he 
 invariably disagreed; when he disagreed he 
 was as obstinate as a mule, without being so 
 clever. When he did agree it took half an 
 hour to explain the simplest arrangement. If 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 you asked him to sign some correspondence 
 for the Brigade, he was too lazy and told you 
 to sign it yourself; and when you did that he 
 apologized to the Brigade for the irregulari- 
 ties of his adjutant "a Temporary fellow, 
 you know." For he had an ill-concealed con- 
 tempt for all Temporaries ; and that was per- 
 haps one reason why we disliked him so much. 
 He would not believe that a young officer, who 
 had not spent twenty years drinking in mess- 
 rooms, could have any military value what- 
 ever. Moreover, it annoyed him intensely 
 (and here he had my sympathy) to see such 
 men enjoying the same pay or rank as he had 
 enjoyed during the almost apocryphal period 
 of his captaincy. And having himself learned 
 practically nothing during that long lotus- 
 time, it was inconceivable to him that any man, 
 however vigorous or intelligent, could have 
 learned anything in two years of war. 
 
 Now let me repeat that I do not believe him 
 to be typical of the Old Army, I know he was 
 not (thank God) ; but this is a history of what 
 happened to Harry, and Colonel Philpott was 
 one of the things which happened very 
 

 The Secret Battle 
 
 forcibly. So I give him to you as we found 
 him, and since he may be alive I may say that 
 his name is fictitious, though there are, un- 
 happily, so many of him alive that I have no 
 fears that he will recognize himself. He 
 would not be the same man if he did. 
 
 We went out for a fortnight's rest after that 
 battle, and Harry had trouble with him almost 
 at once. He had amused and irritated Harry 
 from the first the Old Duds always did 
 for his respect for authority was very civilian 
 and youthful in character; he took a man for 
 what he was, and if he decided he was good 
 stood by him loyally for ever after; if he did 
 not he was severe, not to say intolerant, and 
 regrettably lacking in that veneration for the 
 old and incapable which is the soul of military 
 discipline. 
 
 Philpott's arrogance on the subject of Tem- 
 poraries annoyed him intensely; it annoyed 
 us all, and this I think it was that made him 
 say a very unfortunate thing. He was up 
 before the C. O. with some trifling request or 
 other (I forget what), and somehow the ques- 
 tion of his seniority and service came up. In- 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 cidentally, Harry remarked, quite mildly, that 
 he believed he was nearly due for promotion. 
 Colonel Philpott gave as close an imitation of 
 a lively man as I ever saw him achieve; he 
 nearly had a fit. I forget all he said he 
 thundered for a long time, banging his fist on 
 the King's Regulations, and knocking every- 
 thing off the rickety table but this was the 
 climax: 
 
 "Promotion, by God! and how old are you, 
 young man? and how much service have you 
 seen? Let me tell you this, Master Penrose, 
 when I was your age I hadn't begun to think 
 about promotion, and I did fifteen years as a 
 captain fifteen solid years!" 
 
 "And I don't wonder," said Harry. 
 
 It was very unfortunate. 
 
 Ill 
 
 When we went back to the line, Harry was 
 detailed for many working-parties; and some 
 of them, particularly the first, were very nasty. 
 The days of comfortable walking in communi- 
 cation trenches were over. We were in cap- 
 tured ground churned up by our own fire, and 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 all communication with the front was over the 
 open, over the shell-holes. Harry was told 
 off to take a ration-party, carrying rations up 
 to the battalion in the line, a hundred men. 
 These were bad jobs to do. It meant three- 
 quarters of a mile along an uphill road, heav- 
 ily shelled; then there was a mile over the 
 shell-hole country, where there were no land- 
 marks or duckboards, or anything to guide 
 you. For a single man in daylight, with a 
 map, navigation was difficult enough in this 
 uniform wilderness until you have been over 
 it a time or two ; to go over it for the first time, 
 in the dark, with a hundred men carrying 
 heavy loads, was the kind of thing that makes 
 men transfer to the Flying Corps. Harry got 
 past the road with the loss of three men only; 
 there, at any rate, you went straight ahead, 
 however slowly. But when he left the road, 
 his real troubles began. It was pitch dark and 
 drizzling, and the way was still uphill. With 
 those unhappy carrying-parties, where three- 
 fourths of the men carried two heavy sacks of 
 bread and tinned meat and other food, and the 
 rest two petrol tins of water, or a jar of rum, 
 
 [177] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 or rifle oil, or whale oil, besides a rifle and a 
 bandolier, and two respirators, and a great- 
 coat you must move with exquisite slowness, 
 or you will lose your whole party in a hun- 
 dred yards. And even when you are just put- 
 ting one foot in front of another, moving so 
 slowly that it maddens you, there are halts and 
 hitches every few yards: a man misses his foot- 
 ing and slides down into a crater with his aw- 
 ful load ; the hole is full of foul green water, 
 and he must be hauled out quickly lest he 
 drown. Halfway down the line a man halts 
 to ease his load, or shift his rifle, or scratch his 
 nose ; when he goes on he can see no one ahead 
 of him, and the cry "Not in touch" comes 
 sullenly up to the front. Or you cross the 
 path of another party, burdened as yours. In 
 the dark, or against the flaring skyline, they 
 look like yours, bent, murky shapes with bumps 
 upon them, and some of your men trail off 
 with the other party. And though you pity 
 your men more than yourself, it is difficult 
 sometimes to be gentle with them, difficult not 
 to yield to the intense exasperation of it all, 
 and curse foolishly. ... 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 But Harry was good with his men, and they 
 stumbled on, slipping, muttering, with a dull 
 ache at the shoulders and a dogged rage in 
 their hearts. He was trying to steer by the 
 compass, and he was aiming for a point given 
 him on the map, the rendezvous for the party 
 he was to meet. This point was the junction of 
 three trenches, but as all trenches thereabouts 
 had been blotted out as to be almost indistin- 
 guishable from casual shell-holes, it was not 
 so good a rendezvous as it had seemed to the 
 Brigade. However, Harry managed to find 
 it, or believed that he had found it for in that 
 murk and blackness nothing was certain; if 
 he had found it, the other party had not, for 
 there was no one there. They might be late, 
 they might be lost, they might be waiting else- 
 where. So Harry sent out a scout or two and 
 waited, while the men lay down in the muddy 
 ruins of the trench and dozed unhappily. 
 And while they waited, the Boche, who had 
 been flinging big shells about at random since 
 dusk, took it into his head to plaster these old 
 trenches with 5 9*8. Harry ran, or floundered 
 along the line, telling the men to lie close 
 
 [179] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 where they were. There was indeed nothing 
 else to do, but it gave the men confidence, and 
 none of them melted away. As he ran, a big 
 one burst very near and knocked him flat, but 
 he was untouched ; it is marvellous how local 
 the effect of H. E. can be. For about ten 
 minutes they had a bad time, and then it 
 ceased, suddenly. 
 
 And now was one of those crucial moments 
 which distinguish a good officer from a bad, 
 or even an ordinary officer. It was easy to 
 say, "Here I am at the rendezvous" (by this 
 time Harry had got his bearings a little by the 
 lights, and knew he was in the right spot) 
 "with these something rations; the men are 
 done and a bit shaken; so am I; the other 
 people haven't turned up; if they want their 
 rations they can damned well come here and 
 get them; IVe done my part, and Fm going 
 home." But a real good officer, with a con- 
 science and an imagination, would say: "Yes 
 but IVe been sent up here to get these ra- 
 tions to the men in the line ; my men will have 
 a rest tomorrow, and some sleep, and some 
 good food ; the men in the line now will still 
 [180] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 be in the line, with no sleep, and little rest, 
 and if these rations are left here in the mud 
 and not found before dawn, they'll have no 
 food either; and whatever other people may 
 do or not do, it's up to me to get these rations 
 up there somehow, if we have to walk all night 
 and carry them right up to the Front Line 
 ourselves, and I'm not going home till I've 
 done it." I don't know, but I think that that's 
 the sort of thing Harry said to himself; and 
 anyhow after the row with Philpott he was 
 particularly anxious to make good. So he 
 got his men out and told them about it all, 
 and they floundered on. It was raining hard 
 now, with a bitter wind when they passed the 
 crest of the hill. Harry had a vague idea of 
 the direction of the line so long as they were 
 on the slope; but on the flat, when they had 
 dodged round a few hundred shell-holes, halt- 
 ing and going on and halting again, all sense 
 of direction departed, and very soon they were 
 hopelessly lost. The flares were no good, for 
 the line curved, and there seemed to be lights 
 all around, going up mistily through the rain 
 in a wide circle. Once you were properly 
 
 [181] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 lost the compass was useless, for you might 
 be in the Boche lines, you might be anywhere. 
 ... At such moments a kind of mad, des- 
 perate self-pity, born of misery and weariness 
 and rage, takes hold of the infantryman, and 
 if he carries a load, he is truly ready to fall 
 down and sleep where he is or die. And in 
 the wretched youth in charge there is a sense 
 of impotence and responsibility that makes his 
 stomach sink within him. Some of the men 
 began to growl a little, but Harry held on 
 despairingly. And then by God's grace they 
 ran into another party, a N. C. O. and a few 
 men ; these were the party or some of them 
 that should have met them at the rendezvous ; 
 they too had been lost and were now wander- 
 ing back to the line. Well, Harry handed 
 over the rations and turned home, well 
 pleased with himself. He was too sick of the 
 whole affair, and it was too dark and beastly 
 to think of getting a receipt. It was a pity; 
 for while he trudged home, the N. C. O., as 
 we afterwards heard, was making a mess of the 
 whole business. Whether he had not enough 
 men, or perhaps lost them, or miscalculated 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 the amount of rations or what, is not clear, but 
 half of all that precious food was found lying 
 in the mud at noon the next day when it was 
 too late, and half the battalion in the line went 
 very short. Then the Colonel rang up Phil- 
 pott, and complained bitterly about the con- 
 duct of the officer in charge of our ration- 
 party. Philpott sent for Harry and accused 
 him hotly of dumping the rations carelessly 
 anywhere, of not finishing his job. 
 
 Harry gave his account of the affair quite 
 simply, without enlarging on the bad time he 
 had had, though that was clear enough to a 
 man with any knowledge. But he could not 
 show a receipt. Philpott was the kind of man 
 who valued receipts more than righteousness. 
 He refused to believe Harry's straightforward 
 tale, cursed him for a lazy swine, and sent him 
 to apologize to the Colonel of the Blanks. 
 That officer did listen to Harry's story, be- 
 lieved it, and apologized to him. Harry was 
 a little soothed, but from that day I know there 
 was a great bitterness in his heart. For he 
 had done a difficult job very well, and had 
 come back justly proud of himself and his men. 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 And to have the work wasted by a bungling 
 N. C. O., and his word doubted by a Phil- 
 pott. . . . 
 
 And that I may call the beginning of the 
 second stage. 
 
 
IX 
 
 FOR after that Harry began to be in a 
 bad way again. That shelling in the 
 night and the near concussion of the 
 shell that knocked him over had been one of 
 those capital shocks of which I have spoken. 
 From that time on, shell-fire in the open be- 
 came a special terror, a new favourite fear; 
 afterwards he told me so. And all that win- 
 ter we had shell-fire in the open even the 
 "lines" were not trenches, only a string of scat- 
 tered shell-holes garrisoned by a few men. 
 Everywhere, night and day, you had that 
 naked feeling. 
 
 Yet in France, at the worst, given proper 
 rest and variety, with a chance to nurse his 
 courage and soothe his nerves, a resolute man 
 could struggle on a long time after he began 
 to crack. But Harry had no rest, no chance. 
 The affaire Philpott was having a rich har- 
 vest. For about three weeks in the February 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 of that awful winter the battalion was em- 
 ployed solely on working-parties, all sorts of 
 them, digging, carrying, behind the line, in 
 the line, soft jobs, terrible jobs. Now as ad- 
 jutant I used to take particular care that the 
 safe jobs in the rear should be fairly shared 
 among the companies in a rough rotation, 2nd 
 that no officers or men should have too many 
 of the bad ones the night carrying-parties to 
 the front line. But about now Colonel Phil- 
 pott began to exert himself about these parties ; 
 he actually issued orders about the arrange- 
 ments, and whether by accident or design, his 
 orders had this particular effect, that Harry 
 took about three times as many of the danger- 
 ous parties as anybody else. We were in a 
 country of rolling down with long trough-like 
 valleys or ravines between. To get to the front 
 line you had to cross two of these valleys, and 
 in each of them the Boche put a terrific bar- 
 rage all night, and every night. The second 
 one the Valley of Death was about as near 
 to Inferno as I wish to see, for it was enfiladed 
 from both ends, and you had shell-fire from 
 three directions. Well, for three weeks 
 [i 86] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 Harry took a party through this valley four 
 or five nights a week. . . . Each party meant 
 a double passage through two corners of hell, 
 with a string of weary men to keep together, 
 and encourage and command, with all that 
 maddening accumulation of difficulties I have 
 tried already to describe . . . and at the end 
 of that winter, after all he had done, it was too 
 much. I protested to the Colonel, but it was 
 no good. "Master Penrose can go on with 
 these parties," he said, "till he learns how to 
 do them properly." 
 
 After ten days of this Harry began to be 
 afraid of himself; or, as he put it, "I don't 
 know if I can stand much more of this." All 
 his old distrust of himself, which lately I think 
 he had very successfully kept away, came 
 creeping back. But he made no complaint; 
 he did not ask me to intercede with Philpott. 
 The more he hated and feared these parties, 
 the worse he felt, the keener became his deter- 
 mination to stick it out, to beat Philpott at his 
 own game. Or so I imagine. For by the 
 third week there was no doubt; what is called 
 his "nerve" was clean gone; or, as he put it 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 to me in the soldier's tongue, "IVe got com- 
 plete wind-up." He would have given any- 
 thing except his pride to have escaped one 
 of those parties; he thought about them all 
 day. I did manage, in sheer defiance of Phil- 
 pott, to take him off one of them; but it was 
 only sheer dogged will-power, and perhaps 
 the knowledge that we were to be relieved the 
 following week, which carried him through 
 to the end of it. ... 
 
 If we had not gone out I don't know what 
 would have happened. But I can guess. 
 
 II 
 
 And so Philpott finally broke his nerve. 
 But he was still keen and resolute to go on, in 
 spite of the bitterness in his heart. Philpott 
 and other things had still to break his 
 spirit. And the "other things" were many 
 that winter. It was a long, cold, comfortless 
 winter. Billets became more and more broken 
 and windowless and lousy; firewood vanished, 
 and there was little coal. On the high slopes 
 there was a bitter wind, and men went sick in 
 hundreds pneumonia, fever, frost-bite. All 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 dug-outs were damp and chilling and greasy 
 with mud, or full of the acrid wood-smoke that 
 tortured the eyes. There were night advances 
 in the snow, where lightly wounded men per- 
 ished of exposure before dawn. For a fort- 
 night we lived in tents on a hill-top covered 
 with snow. 
 
 And one day Harry discovered he was 
 lousy. . . . 
 
 Then, socially, though it seems a strange 
 thing to say, these were dull days for Harry. 
 Few people realize how much an infantry- 
 man's life is lightened if he has companions 
 of his own kind not necessarily of the same 
 class, though it usually comes to that but of 
 the same tastes and education and experience 
 men who make the same kind of jokes. In 
 the line it matters little, a man is a man, as 
 the Press will tell you. But in the evenings, 
 out at rest, it was good and cheering to sit with 
 the Old Crowd and exchange old stories of 
 Gallipoli and Oxford and London; even to 
 argue with Eustace about the Public Schools ; 
 to be with men who liked the same songs, the 
 same tunes on the gramophone, who did not 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 always ask for u My Dixie Bird" or "The 
 Green Woman" waltz. . . . And now there 
 was none of the Old Crowd left, only Harry 
 and myself, Harry with a company now, and 
 myself very busy at Headquarters. And 
 Harry's company were very dull men, pro- 
 moted N. C. O.'s mostly, good fellows all 
 very good in the line but they were not the 
 Old Crowd. Now, instead of those great eve- 
 nings we used to have, with the white wine, 
 and the music, and old George dancing, eve- 
 nings that have come down in the history of 
 the battalion as our battles have done, evenings 
 that kept the spirit strong in the blackest times 
 there were morose men with wooden faces 
 sitting silently over some whisky and Battalion 
 Orders. . . . 
 
 And Hewett was dead, the laughing, lovable 
 Hewett. That was the black heart of it. 
 When a man becomes part of the great ma- 
 chine, he is generally supposed I know not 
 why to surrender with his body his soul and 
 his affections and all his human tendernesses. 
 But it is not so. 
 
 We never talked of Hewett very much. 
 [190] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 Only there was for ever a great gap. And 
 some times, when we tried to be cheerful in 
 the evenings, as in the old times, and were not, 
 we said to each other Harry and I "I wish 
 to God that he was here." Yet for long pe- 
 riods I forgot Hewett. Harry never forgot 
 him. 
 
 Then there was something about which I 
 may be wrong, for Harry never mentioned it, 
 and I am only guessing from my own opinion. 
 In two years of war he had won no kind of 
 medal or distinction except a "mention" in 
 dispatches, which is about as satisfying as a 
 caraway-seed to a starving man. In Gallip- 
 oli he had done things which in France in 
 modern times would have earned an easy deco- 
 ration. But they were scarce in those days; 
 and in France he had done much dogged and 
 difficult work, and a few very courageous, but 
 in a military sense perfectly useless things, 
 nothing dramatic, nothing to catch the eye 
 of the Brigade. I don't know whether he 
 minded much, but I felt it myself very keenly; 
 for I knew that he had started with ambitions; 
 and here were fellows with not half his service, 
 
 [191] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 or courage, or capacity, just ordinary men 
 with luck, ablaze with ribbon. . . . Any one 
 who says he cares nothing about medals is a 
 hypocrite, though most of us care very little. 
 But if you believe you have done well, and not 
 only is there nothing to show for it, but noth- 
 ing to show that other people believe it ... 
 you can't help caring. 
 
 And then, on top of it, when you have a gen- 
 uine sense of bitter injustice, when you know 
 that your own most modest estimate of your- 
 self is exalted compared with the estimate of 
 the man who commands you you begin to 
 have black moods. . . . 
 
 Ill 
 
 Harry had black moods. All these tor- 
 ments accumulated and broke his spirit. He 
 lost his keenness, his cheerfulness, and his 
 health. Once a man starts on that path, his 
 past history finds him out, like an old wound. 
 Some men take to drink and are disgraced. 
 In Harry's case it was Gallipoli. No man 
 who had a bad time in that place ever "got 
 over" it in body or soul. And when France 
 [192] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 or some other campaign began to work upon 
 them, it was seen that there was something 
 missing in their resisting power; they broke 
 out with old diseases and old fears . . . the 
 legacies of Gallipoli. 
 
 Harry grew pale, and nervous, and hunted 
 to look at; and he had a touch of dysentery. 
 But the worst of the poison was in his mind 
 and heart. For a long time, as I have said, 
 since he felt the beginning of those old doubts, 
 and saw himself starting downhill, he had 
 striven anxiously to keep his name high in 
 men's opinion; for all liked him and believed 
 in him. He had been ready for anything, and 
 done his work with a conscientious pride. 
 But now this bitterness was on him, he seemed 
 to have ceased to care what happened or what 
 men thought of him. He had unreasonable 
 fits of temper; he became distrustful and cyn- 
 ical. I thought then, sometimes, of the day 
 when he had looked at Troy and wanted to be 
 like Achilles. It was painful to me to hear 
 him talking as Eustace used to talk, suspicious, 
 intolerant, incredulous. ... I thought how 
 Harry had once hated that kind of talk, and it 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 was most significant of the change that had 
 come over the good companion I had known. 
 Yet sometimes, when the sun shone, and once 
 when we rode back into Albert and dined 
 quietly alone, that mask of bitterness fell 
 away; there were flashes of the old cheerful 
 Harry, and I had hopes. I hoped Philpott 
 would be killed. . . . 
 
 IV 
 
 But he survived, for he was very careful. 
 And though, as I have said, he stuck it for a 
 long time, he was by no means the gallant fire- 
 eater you would have imagined from his treat- 
 ment of defaulters. Once round the line just 
 before dawn was enough for him in that sort 
 of country. "Things are quiet then, and you 
 can see what's going on." He liked it best 
 when "things were quiet." So did all of us, 
 and I don't blame him for that. 
 
 But that winter there was a thick crop of 
 S. I. W.'s. S. I. W. is the short title for a man 
 who has been evacuated with self-inflicted 
 wounds shot himself in the foot, or held a 
 finger over the muzzle of his rifle, or dropped 
 
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The Secret Battle 
 
 a great boulder on his foot done himself any 
 reckless injury to escape from the misery of it 
 all. It was always a marvel to me that any 
 man who could find courage to do such things 
 could not find courage to go on; I suppose 
 they felt it would bring them the certainty of 
 a little respite, and beyond that they did not 
 care, for it was the uncertainty of their life 
 that had broken them. You could not help 
 being sorry for these men, even though you 
 despised them. It made you sick to think 
 that any man who had come voluntarily to 
 fight for his country could be brought so low, 
 that humanity could be so degraded exactly 
 where it was being so ennobled. 
 
 But Philpott had no such qualms. He was 
 ruthless, and necessarily so ; but, beyond that, 
 he was brutal, he bullied. When they came 
 before him, healed of their wounds, haggard, 
 miserable wisps of men, he kept them stand- 
 ing there while he told them at length exactly 
 how low they had sunk (they knew that well 
 enough, poor devils), and flung at them a rich 
 vocabulary of abuse words of cowardice and 
 dishonour, which were strictly accurate but 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 highly unnecessary. For these men were go- 
 ing back to duty now; they had done their 
 punishment though the worst of it was still 
 to come ; all they needed was a few quiet words 
 of encouragement from a strong man to a 
 weaker, a little human sympathy, and that 
 appeal to a man's honour which so seldom fails 
 if it is rightly made. 
 
 Well, this did not surprise me in Philpott; 
 he had no surprises for me by now. What did 
 surprise me was Harry's intolerant, even cruel, 
 comments on the cases of the S. I. W.'s. He 
 had always had a real sympathy with the men, 
 he knew the strange workings of their minds, 
 and all the wretchedness of their lives; he un- 
 derstood them. And yet here he was, as scorn- 
 ful, as Prussian, on the subject of S. I. W.'s 
 as even Philpott. It was long before I un- 
 derstood this I don't know that I ever did. 
 But I thought it was this: that in these wrecks 
 of men he recognized something of his own 
 sufferings ; and recognizing the disease he was 
 the more appalled by the remedy they took. 
 The kind of thing that had led them to it was 
 the kind of thing he had been through, was go- 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 ing through. There the connection ceased. 
 There was no such way out for him. But 
 though it ceased, the connection was so close 
 that it was degrading. And this scorn and 
 anger was a kind of instinctive self-defence 
 put on to assure himself, to assure the world, 
 that there was no connection none at all. . . . 
 But I don't know. 
 
 At the end of February I was wounded and 
 went home. Without any conceit, without ex- 
 aggerating our friendship, I may say that this 
 was the final blow for Harry. I was the last 
 of the Old Crowd; I was the one man who 
 knew the truth of things as between him and 
 Philpott. . . . And I went. 
 
 I was hit by a big shell at Whizz-Bang Cor- 
 ner, and Harry saw me on the stretcher as we 
 came past D Company on the Bapaume Road. 
 He walked with me as far as the cookers, and 
 was full of concern for my wound, which was 
 pretty painful just then. But he bucked me 
 up and talked gaily of the good things I was 
 going to. And he said nothing of himself. 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 But when he left me there was a look about 
 him what is the word? wistful it is the 
 only one, like a dog left behind. 
 
 While I was still in hospital I had two let- 
 ters from the battalion. The first was from 
 Harry, a long wail about Philpott and the 
 dulness of everybody now that the Old Crowd 
 were extinct, though he seemed to have made 
 good friends of some of the dull ones. At the 
 end of that endless winter, when it seemed as 
 if the spring would never come, they had 
 pulled out of the line and "trekked" up north, 
 so that there had been little fighting. They 
 were now in shell-holes across the high ridge 
 in front of Arras, preparing for an advance. 
 
 The other letter was from old Knight, the 
 Quartermaster, dated two months after I left. 
 
 I will give you an extract: 
 
 "Probably by now you will have seen or 
 heard from young Penrose. He was hit on 
 the ibth, a nasty wound in the chest from a 
 splinter. . . . It was rather funny not funny, 
 but you know what I mean how he got it. 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 I was there myself though I didn't see it. 
 I had been up to H. Q. to see about the rations, 
 and there were a lot of us, Johnson (he is now 
 Adj. in your place) and Fellowes f and so on, 
 standing outside H. Q. (which is on a hill 
 what you people call a forward slope, I be- 
 lieve) , and watching our guns bombarding 
 the village. It was a remarkable sight, etc., 
 etc. (a long digression). . . . Then the Boche 
 started shelling our hill; he dropped them in 
 pairs, first of all at the other end of the hill, 
 about 500 yards off, and then nearer and 
 nearer, about 20 yards at a time . . . the line 
 they were on was pretty near to us, so we 
 thought the dug-out would be a good place to 
 go to. . . . Penrose was just starting to go 
 back to his company when this began, and as 
 we went down somebody told him he'd better 
 wait a bit. But he said 'No, he wanted to get 
 back' I was the last down, and as I disap- 
 peared (pretty hurriedly) I told him not to 
 be a fool. But all he said was, 'This is noth- 
 ing, old bird you wait till you live up here; 
 I'm going on.' The next thing we heard was 
 the hell of an explosion on top. We ran up 
 
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 afterwards, and there he was, about thirty 
 yards off. . . . The funny thing is that I un- 
 derstood he rather had the wind-up just now, 
 and was anything but reckless . . . in fact, 
 some one said he had the Dug-out Disease. 
 . . . Otherwise, you'd have said he wanted to 
 be killed. I don't know why he wasn't, asking 
 for it like that. . . . Well, thank God I'm a 
 Q. M., etc., etc." 
 
 I read it all very carefully, and wondered. 
 "You'd have said he wanted to be killed." I 
 wondered about that very much. 
 
 And there was a postscript which interested 
 me: 
 
 "By the way, I hear Burnetts got the M. C. 
 for Salvage, I believe/" 
 
 [200] 
 
I WAS six months in that hospital, and I 
 did not see Harry for seven. For I was 
 at Blackpool, and he at Lady Radmore's 
 in Kensington. His was quicker business 
 than mine; and when I had finished with the 
 hospitals and the homes and came to London 
 for a three weeks' laze, he was back at the 
 Depot. Then he got seven days' leave for 
 some mysterious reason (I think there was a 
 draft leaving shortly, and everybody had some 
 leave), and I dined twice with him at home. 
 They had a little house in Chelsea, very taste- 
 fully furnished by Mrs. Penrose, whom I now 
 saw for the first time. But I saw more of her 
 that evening than I did of Harry, who was 
 hopelessly entangled with two or three "in- 
 laws." She was a dark, gentle little person, 
 with brown, and rather sorrowful, eyes. 
 When I first saw her I thought, "She was never 
 meant to be a soldier's wife," but after we had 
 
 [201] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 talked a little, I added, "But she is a good one." 
 She was clearly very much in love with Harry, 
 and delighted to meet some one who had been 
 with him in France, and was fond of him for, 
 like all wives, she soon discovered that. But 
 all the time I felt that there were questions 
 she wanted to ask me, and could not. I will 
 not pretend to tell you how she was dressed, 
 because I don't know; I seldom notice, and 
 then I never remember. But she appealed to 
 me very much, and I made up my mind to 
 look after her interests if I ever had the chance, 
 if there was ever a question between Harry 
 and a single man. I had no chance of a talk 
 with Harry, and noticed only that he seemed 
 pretty fit again but sleepless-looking. 
 
 The second night I went there was the last 
 night of Harry's leave. If I had known that 
 when I was asked I think I should not have 
 gone; for while it showed I was a privileged 
 person, it is a painful privilege to break in on 
 the "last evening" of husband and wife; I 
 know those last evenings. And though Harry 
 was only going back to the Depot in the morn- 
 ing, it was known there had been heavy losses 
 [202] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 in the regiment; there was talk of a draft . . . 
 it might well be the last evening of all. 
 
 I got there early, at Harry's request, about 
 half-past five, on a miserable gusty evening in 
 early November. Harry was sitting in a kind 
 of study, library, or den, writing; he looked 
 less well, and very sleepless about the eyes. 
 
 It was the anniversary of one of the great 
 battles of the regiment; and we talked a little 
 of that day, as soldiers will, with a sort of 
 gloomy satisfaction. Then Harry said, 
 slowly: 
 
 "I've been offered a job at the War Office 
 by Major Mackenzie Intelligence." 
 
 "Oh," I said, "that's very good." (But I 
 was thinking more of Mrs. Harry than 
 Harry.) 
 
 Harry went on, as if he had not heard. "I 
 was writing to him when you came in. And 
 I don't know what to say." 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "Well," he said, "you know as well as any 
 one what sort of time I've had, and how I've 
 been treated by Philpott and others. And 
 I've had about enough of it. I remember 
 
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The Secret Battle 
 
 telling you once on the Peninsula that I 
 thought myself fairly brave when I first went 
 out . . . and, my God, so I was compared 
 with what I am now. ... I suppose every 
 one has his breaking-point, and IVe certainly 
 had mine. ... I simply feel I can't face it 
 again." 
 
 "Very well," I said, "take the job and have 
 done with it. YouVe done as much as you 
 can, and you can't do more. What's the trou- 
 ble?" 
 
 But he went on, seemingly to convince him- 
 self rather than me. "IVe never got over 
 those awful working-parties in that val- 
 ley; I had two or three 5-9*8 burst right on top 
 of me, you know . . . the Lord knows how I 
 escaped . . . and now I simply dream of 
 them. I dream of them every night . . . 
 usually it's an enormous endless plain, full of 
 shell-holes, of course, and raining like hell, 
 and I walk for miles (usually with you) look- 
 ing over my shoulder, waiting for the shells 
 to come . . . and then I hear that savage kind 
 of high-velocity shriek, and I run like hell 
 . . . only I can't run, of course, that's the 
 
 [204] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 worst part . . . and I get into a ditch and lie 
 there . . . and then one comes that I know 
 by the sound is going to burst on top of me 
 . . . and I wake up simply sweating with 
 funk. I've never told anybody but you about 
 this, not even Peggy, but she says I wake her 
 up sometimes, making an awful noise." 
 
 He was silent for a little, and I had nothing 
 to say. 
 
 "And then it's all so different now, so 
 damnably . . . dull. ... I wouldn't mind if 
 we could all go out together again . . . just 
 the Old Crowd ... so that we could have 
 good evenings, and not care what happened. 
 But now there's nobody left (I don't expect 
 they'll let you go out again), only poor old 
 Egerton he's back again . . . and I can't 
 stand all those boot-faced N. C. O. officers and 
 people like Philpott, and all the Old Duds. 
 . . . You can't get away from it the boot- 
 faces aren't officers, and nothing will make 
 them so ... even the men can't stand them. 
 And they get on my nerves. . . . 
 
 "It all gets on my nerves, the mud, and the 
 cold, and the futile Brigadiers, and all the 
 
 [205] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 damned eyewash we have nowadays . . . 
 never having a decent wash, and being 
 cramped up in a dug-out the size of a chest- 
 of-drawers with four boot-faces . . . where 
 you can't move without upsetting the candle 
 and the food, or banging your head . . . and 
 getting lousy. And all those endless ridicu- 
 lous details you have to look after day after 
 day . . . working-parties . . . haversack ra- 
 tions . . . has every man got his box-respira- 
 tor? . . . why haven't you cleaned your rifle? 
 . . . as if I cared a damn! . . . No, I won't 
 say that . . . but there you are, you see, it's 
 on my nerves. . . . But sometimes" (and 
 though I sympathized I was glad there was 
 a "but") "when I think of some of the bogus 
 people who've been out, perhaps once, and 
 come home after three months with a nice 
 blighty in the shoulder, and got a job, and 
 stayed in it ever since ... I feel I can't do 
 that either, and run the risk of being taken for 
 one of them. . . ." 
 
 "I don't think there's any danger of that," 
 I remarked. 
 
 "I don't know one 'officer' is the same as 
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The Secret Battle 
 
 another to most people. . . . And then, you 
 know, although you hate it, it does get hold of 
 you somehow out there . . . and after a bit, 
 when you've got used to being at home you get 
 restless. ... I know I did last time, and some- 
 times I do now. ... I don't say I hunger for 
 the battle, I never want to be in a 'stunt' again 
 . . . but you feel kind of 'out of it' when you 
 read the papers, or meet somebody on leave 
 . . . you think of the amusing evenings we 
 used to have. . . . And I rather enjoyed 'trek- 
 king' about in the back areas . . . especially 
 when I had a horse . . . wandering along on 
 a good frosty day, and never sure what village 
 you were going to sleep in ... marching 
 through Doullens with the band . . . estami- 
 nets, and talking French, and all the rest of 
 it. ... 
 
 "And then I think of a 5-9 and I know 
 I'm done for. . . . I've got too much imagina- 
 tion, that's the trouble (I hope you're not fed 
 up with all this, but I want your advice). . . . 
 It's funny, one never used to think about get- 
 ting killed, even in the war ... it seemed 
 impossible somehow that you yourself could 
 
 [207] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 be killed (did you ever have that feeling?) 
 . . . though one was ready enough in those 
 days ... but now even in the train the 
 other day, going down to Bristol by the ex- 
 press, I found I was imagining what would 
 happen if there was a smash . . . things one 
 reads of, you know . . . carriages catching 
 fire, and so on ... just 'wind-up.' And the 
 question is is it any good going out, if youVe 
 got into that state? . . . And if one says ( No,' 
 is one just making it an excuse? . . . It's no 
 good telling a military doctor all this . . . 
 they'd just say, 'Haw, skrim-shanker! what 
 you want is some fresh air and exercise, my 
 son!' . . . And for all I know they may be 
 right. ... As a matter of fact, I don't think 
 I'm physically fit, really ... my own doctor 
 says not . . . but you're never examined prop- 
 erly before you go out, as you know. . . . You 
 all troop in by the dozen at the last moment 
 . . . and the fellow says, 'Feeling quite fit?' 
 . . . And if you've just had a good breakfast 
 and feel buckish, you say, 'Yes, thank you,' 
 and there you are. . . . Unless you ask them 
 to examine you you might have galloping 
 
 [208] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 consumption for all they know, and I'm 
 damned if I'd ask them. . . . After all, I sup- 
 pose the system's right. ... If a man can stick 
 it for a month or two in the line, he's worth 
 sending there if he's an officer . . . and it 
 doesn't matter to the country if he dies of con- 
 sumption afterwards. . . . But my trouble is 
 can I stick it for a month or two ... or 
 shall I go and do some awful thing, and let a 
 lot of fellows down? . . . Putting aside my 
 own inclinations, which are probably pretty 
 selfish, what is it my duty to do? ... After 
 friend Philpott I don't know that I'm so keen 
 on duty as I was . . . but I do want to stick 
 
 this war out on the right line, if I can. 
 
 . . . What do you think?" 
 
 "Before I answer that," I said, "there's one 
 consideration you seem to have overlooked 
 and that is Mrs. Penrose. . . . After all, 
 you're a married man, and that makes a differ- 
 ence, doesn't it?" 
 
 "Well, does it? I don't really see why it 
 should make any difference about going out, 
 or not going out . . . otherwise every shirker 
 could run off and many a wife, and live hap- 
 
 [209] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 pily ever after. ... But it certainly makes it 
 a damned sight harder to decide . . . and it 
 makes the hell of a difference when you're out 
 there. . . . You can make up your mind not 
 to think of it when you're at home . . . like 
 this . . . but out there, when you're cold and 
 fed up, and just starting up the line with a 
 working-party . . . you can't help thinking 
 of it, and it makes things about ten times more 
 difficult . . . and as you know, it's jolly hard 
 not to let it make a difference to what you do. 
 . . . But, damn it, why did you remind me of 
 that? I didn't want to think about it." 
 
 And then Mrs. Penrose came in, and we 
 went down to dinner. 
 
 II 
 
 I did not enjoy that dinner. To begin with, 
 I felt like a vulgar intruder on something that 
 was almost sacred, and certainly very precious. 
 For all the signs of the "last evening" were 
 there. The dishes we had were Harry's fa- 
 vourites, procured at I know what trouble and 
 expense by Mrs. Harry; and she watched 
 
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The Secret Battle 
 
 tremulously to see that he liked them. She 
 had gone out and bought him a bottle of well- 
 loved Moselle, for a special surprise, and some 
 port; which was a huge extravagance. But 
 that was nothing, if these things could only 
 give a special something to this meal which 
 would make him remember it; for the flowers 
 he never saw, and the new dress went un- 
 noticed for a long time. But I felt that it 
 would all have gone much better, perhaps, if 
 I had not been there, and I hoped she did not 
 hate me. 
 
 And Harry was not at his best. The ques- 
 tion he asked me I had had no time to answer, 
 and he had not answered it himself. Through 
 most of that dinner, which by all the rules 
 should have been, superficially at least, cheer- 
 ful and careless, as if there were no such thing 
 as separation ahead, Harry was thoughtful 
 and preoccupied. And I knew that he was 
 still arguing with himself, "What shall I say 
 to Mackenzie? Yes or No?" wandering up 
 and down among the old doubts and resolu- 
 tions and fears. . . . Mrs. Harry saw this as 
 
 [211] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 well as I ... and, no doubt, she cursed me 
 for being there because in my presence she 
 could not ask him what worried him. 
 
 But the Moselle began to do its work: 
 Harry talked a little and noticed the new 
 dress, and we all laughed a lot at the pudding, 
 which came up in such a curious shape. . . . 
 We were very glad to laugh at something. 
 
 Then Mrs. Harry spoke of some people in 
 the regiment of whom she had heard a good 
 deal George Dawson, and Egerton, and old 
 Colonel Roberts. I knew that in a minute we 
 should stumble into talking about the trenches 
 or shells, or some such folly, and have Harry 
 gloomy and brooding again. I could not 
 stand that, and I did not think Mrs. Harry 
 could, so I plunged recklessly into the 
 smoother waters of life in France. I told 
 them the old story about General Jackson and 
 the billet-guard ; and then we came on to the 
 famous night at Forceville, and other historic 
 battalion orgies the dinner at Monchy 
 Breton, when we put a row of candles on the 
 floor of the tent for footlights, and George 
 and a few subs made a perfect beauty chorus. 
 [212] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 Those are the things one likes to remember 
 about active service, and I was very glad to 
 remember them then. The special port came 
 in and was a great success; Harry warmed up, 
 and laughed over those old gaieties, and was 
 in great form. At that moment I think his an- 
 swer to Major Mackenzie would have been 
 definitely "No." 
 
 Mrs. Harry laughed very much too, and 
 said she envied us the amusing times we had 
 together "out there." "You men have all the 
 fun." And that made me feel a heartless 
 ass for having started on that topic. For I 
 knew that when Harry was away there was 
 little "fun" for her; and whether he was lying 
 on his stomach in a shell-hole, or singing songs 
 in an estaminet, not thinking much of his wife, 
 perhaps, except when they drank "Sweethearts 
 and Wives" it was all one uniform, hideous 
 wait for her. So I think it was hollow laugh- 
 ter for Mrs. P. ... 
 
 Moreover, though I did not know how much 
 she knew about Harry's difficulties, the "job" 
 and so on, I felt sure that with the extraor- 
 dinary instinct of a wife she scented some- 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 thing of the conflict that was going on; and 
 she knew vaguely that this exaggerated lauda- 
 tion of the amenities of France meant some- 
 how danger to her. ... So that just as I was 
 beginning to congratulate myself on the buck- 
 ing up of Harry, I tardily perceived that be- 
 tween us we were wounding the wife. And I 
 more than ever wished myself anywhere than 
 sitting at that pretty table with the shaded 
 lights. 
 
 Well, we nearly finished the port Harry 
 still in excellent form and went upstairs. 
 Harry went oft to look for smokes or some- 
 thing, and I knew at once that Mrs. Harry 
 was going to ask me questions about him. 
 You know how a woman stands in front of 
 the fire, and looks down, and kind of paws 
 the fender with one foot when she is going to 
 say something confidential. Then she looks 
 up suddenly, and you're done. Mrs. Harry 
 did that, and I was done. At any other time 
 I should have loved to talk to her about 
 Harry, but that night I felt it was dangerous 
 ground. 
 
 "How do you think Harry is looking?" she 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 said. "You probably know better than I do, 
 nowadays." 
 
 I said I thought he seemed pretty fit, con- 
 sidering all things. 
 
 "Do you think he'll have to go out again?" 
 she asked. "I don't think he ought to but 
 they seem so short of men still. He's not 
 really strong, you know." 
 
 So she knew nothing about the "job" ; and 
 this put me in a hole. For if I told her about 
 it, and he did not take it, but went out again, 
 the knowledge would be a standing torture to 
 her. On the other hand, I wanted him to take 
 it, I thought he ought to and if she knew 
 about it she might be able to make him. 
 Wives can do a great deal in that way. But 
 that would be disloyal to Harry. . . . 
 
 Well, I temporized with vague answers 
 while I wrestled with this problem, and she 
 told me more about Harry. "You know, he 
 has the most terrible dreams . . . wakes up 
 screaming at night, and quite frightens me. 
 And I don't think they ought to be allowed 
 to go out again when they're like that. . . . 
 I don't want him to go out again. ... At 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 least," she added half-heartedly (as a kind of 
 concession to convention), "if it's his duty, of 
 course . . ." Then, defiantly, "No, I don't 
 want him to go ... anyhow ... I think 
 he's done his bit ... hasn't he, Mr. Benson?" 
 
 "He has, indeed," I said, with sincerity at 
 last. 
 
 "Well, you have some influence with him. 
 Can't you " 
 
 But then Harry came in, and I had lost my 
 chance. I have noticed that while on the 
 stage, conversations which must necessarily be 
 private are invariably concluded without in- 
 terruption, in private life, and especially pri- 
 vate houses, they are always interrupted long 
 before the end. 
 
 Mrs. Harry went to the piano, and Harry 
 and I sat down to smoke; and since it was 
 the last night Harry was allowed to smoke 
 his pipe. The way Mrs. Harry said that 
 nearly made me weep. 
 
 So I sat there and watched Harry, and his 
 wife played and played soft, melancholy, 
 homesick things (Chopin, I think), that 
 leagued with the wine and the warm fire and 
 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 the deep chairs in an exquisite conspiracy of 
 repose. She played for a long time, but I saw 
 that she too was watching. And the fancy 
 came to me that she was fighting for Harry, 
 fighting, perhaps unconsciously, that vague 
 danger she had seen at dinner, when it had 
 beaten her . . . fighting it with this music 
 that made war seem so distant and home so 
 lovable. . . . 
 
 And soon I began to see that she was win- 
 ning. For when she began playing Harry 
 had sat down, a little restless again, and 
 fidgeted, as if the music reminded him of good 
 things too much . . . and his eyes wandered 
 round the room and took in all the familiar 
 things, like a man saying good-bye the old 
 chair with the new chintz, and the yellow 
 curtains, and the bookcase his father left him 
 and the little bookcase where his history 
 books were (he looked a long time at them) 
 . . . and the firelight shining on the piano 
 . . . and his wife playing and playing. . . . 
 And when he had looked at her, quickly, he 
 sat up and poked the fire fiercely, and sat back, 
 frowning. He was wondering again. This 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 music was being too much for him. Then 
 she stopped, and looked across at Harry and 
 smiled. 
 
 When she played again it was, I think, a 
 nocturne of Chopin's (God knows which but 
 it was very peaceful and homesick), and as 
 I watched, I made sure that she had won. 
 For there came over Harry a wonderful re- 
 pose. He no longer frowned or fidgeted, or 
 raised his eyebrows in the nervous way he 
 had, but lay back in a kind of abandonment 
 of content. . . . And I said to myself, "He 
 has decided he will say 'Yes' to Mackenzie." 
 
 Mrs. Harry, perhaps, also perceived it. 
 For after a little she stopped and came over 
 to us. And then I did a fateful thing. There 
 was a copy of The Times lying by my chair, 
 and because of the silence that was on us, I 
 picked it up and looked aimlessly at it. 
 
 The first thing I saw was the Casualty List, 
 buried in small type among some vast ad- 
 vertisements of patent foods. I glanced down 
 the list in that casual manner which came to 
 us when we knew that all our best friends were 
 already dead or disposed of. Then my eye 
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The Secret Battle 
 
 caught the name of the regiment and the name 
 of a man I knew. CAPTAIN EGERTON, V. R. 
 Killed. There was another near it, and an- 
 other, and many more ; the list was thick with 
 them. And the other battalions in the Bri- 
 gade had many names there fellows one had 
 relieved in the line, or seen in billets, or talked 
 with in the Cocktail Cafe at Nceux-les-Mines. 
 There must have been a masscre in the Bri- 
 gade ... ten officers killed and ten wounded 
 in our lot alone. 
 
 I suppose I made that vague murmur of 
 rage and regret which slips out of you when 
 you read these things, for Harry looked up 
 and asked, "What's that?" I gave him the 
 paper, and he too looked down that list. . . . 
 Only two of those names were names of the 
 Old Crowd, and many of them were the dull 
 men ; but we knew them very well for all that, 
 and we knew they were good men . . . 
 Egerton, Gordon, young Matthews, Spenser, 
 Smith, the bombing fellow, Tompkinson all 
 gone. . . . 
 
 So we were silent for a long minute, re- 
 membering those men, and Mrs. Harry stared 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 into the fire. I wondered what she was think- 
 ing of, and I was sorry for her. For when 
 Harry got up there was a look about him 
 which I had seen before, though not for many 
 months not since the first days on the 
 Somme. . . . 
 
 While I was groping after my coat in the 
 hall, Harry came out of his den with a letter 
 which he asked me to "drop in the box." I 
 looked at it without shame ; it was addressed 
 to Major Mackenzie, D. S. O., etc. 
 
 "And what have you said?" I asked. 
 
 "No," said Harry, with a kind of challeng- 
 ing look. 
 
 "Well, I think you're wrong " I told 
 
 him, though I knew then that I was too late. 
 Mrs. Harry was beaten now, finally beaten, 
 poor thing. ... 
 
 "And what are you two talking about?" said 
 Mrs. Harry. 
 
 "About a dinner, my dear." 
 
 I went out and posted that accursed letter, 
 thanking God that I was not a wife. 
 
 [220] 
 
XI 
 
 HARRY went to France again a month 
 later, after the futile kind of medical 
 examination he had foretold. I had 
 a letter from him from the Base, and after 
 that there was silence. I even began to hunt 
 about in the casualty lists, but he was never 
 there. And seven weeks later they let me go 
 out again myself, to the astonishment of all 
 but the military doctors. 
 
 At the Base I heard of Harry. Some one 
 had been wanted for some kind of job down 
 there, an officer to instruct the Details in the 
 mysteries of Iron Rations, or something of the 
 sort. Harry, happening to be there at the 
 time, and pleasing the eye of the aldermanic 
 officer in command of our Base Depot, had 
 been graciously appointed to the post But 
 he had caused a considerable flutter in the 
 tents of the mighty by flatly declining it, and 
 
 [221] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 stating insanely that he preferred to go up to 
 the line. This being still the one topic of 
 conversation in the camp, I did not linger 
 there longer than was absolutely necessary. 
 Infantry Base Depots are bad places, and that 
 one was very bad; you had worse food, worse 
 treatment, and worse company than you ever 
 had in the line much discomfort, and no dig- 
 nity. I never understood why officers should 
 be treated with such contempt whenever there 
 were a number of them together. If you went 
 about by yourself, or with another officer or 
 two, you had a certain amount of politeness and 
 consideration from military officials; but as 
 soon as you got with a "herd" of officers you 
 were doomed you were dirt. If the inten- 
 tion at the Base was to make the line seem a 
 haven of refuge and civility, it was highly 
 successful as far as I was concerned. . . . 
 
 I got back to the battalion under the usual 
 conditions ... a long jog in the mess-cart 
 under the interminable dripping poplars, with 
 a vile wind lashing the usual rain over the 
 usual flat fields, where the old women 
 laboured and stooped as usual, and took 
 
 [222] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 no notice of anything. The heart sinks a 
 little as you look at the shivering drear- 
 iness of it all. And if it is near the line 
 you hope secretly that the battalion is "out" 
 for at least a few days more, that you may 
 have just two days to get used to this beastli- 
 ness again, and not be met by some cheery 
 acclimatized ass with a "Glad to see you, 
 old son just in time going up tonight, do- 
 ing a 'stunt' on Tuesday!" Yet, as you come 
 to the village, there is a strange sense of 
 home-coming that comes with the recogni- 
 tion of familiar things limbers clattering and 
 splashing along, and the regimental postman 
 trudging back with the mail, and C Company 
 cooker steaming pleasantly under an outhouse, 
 and odd men with waterproof sheets draped 
 over the shoulders, wet and glistening. . . . 
 Today I was lucky, for the battalion was a 
 long way back, resting, so that this home-com- 
 ing sense was strong upon me. And I wanted 
 to see Harry. 
 
 When I came near to the usual main street 
 I saw the battalion marching in by a side road, 
 coming back from a route march. I sent my 
 
 [223] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 gear ahead, and got down to see them pass. 
 It was strangely pleasant. The drums of the 
 little band were covered because of the wet, 
 and only the bugles brayed harshly, but very 
 cheerfully. Old Philpott was ahead of them, 
 riding fatly on his mild black mare, and re- 
 turned my salute quite pleasantly. You could 
 see a lot of young recruits among the men, and 
 there were many officers I had never seen, but 
 the welcoming grins of the old men we had 
 had from the beginning, mostly N. C. O.'s 
 now, made up for that. Young Smith I saw, 
 in command of C Company now, and Tarrant, 
 our late Transport Officer, was squelching at 
 the head of a platoon, obviously not liking it 
 much. Then came D Company, and I looked 
 eagerly for Harry. Stephenson I knew, in 
 command (how young the company com- 
 manders were !) , but there were only two other 
 officers, and they both strange. The last of 
 them tramped past, and I was left silent in the 
 rain, foolishly disturbed. . . . Where was 
 Harry? Ass no doubt he is orderly officer, 
 or away on a course. But I 'was disturbed; 
 and the thought came to me that if any- 
 [224] 
 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 thing had happened to him I, too, should be 
 lonely here, with none of the Old Crowd 
 left. 
 
 I walked on then, and came to the little flag 
 of D Company headquarters flapping damply 
 outside an estaminet. In the mess they greeted 
 me very kindly and gave me tea but there 
 was still no Harry. But they all talked very 
 fast, and the tea was good. 
 
 "And where's Penrose?" I asked at last. 
 "I haven't seen him yet." 
 
 I had spoken to Stephenson. He did not 
 answer immediately ; but he picked up his cup 
 and drank, assiduously; then he kind of mum- 
 bled, very low and apologetic : 
 
 "He's in his billet under close arrest." 
 
 "Under arrest! My God, what for?" 
 
 Stephenson began to drink again; he was a 
 good fellow, who knew that Harry and I were 
 friends; also he had known Harry in the 
 Souchez days, and he did not like having to 
 tell me this. 
 
 But one of his young subalterns, a young 
 pup just out, was less sensitive, and told me, 
 brutally: 
 
 [225] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 "Running away cowardice in the face of 
 et cetera have some more tea?" 
 
 II 
 
 Bit by bit I heard the whole miserable story 
 or rather that naked kernel of it which 
 passed publicly for the whole story. I had to 
 make my own footnotes, my own queries. 
 
 The first night Harry was with the battalion 
 Philpott had sent him up with a carrying- 
 party to the Front Line, or thereabouts, fifty 
 men and some engineering stuff of sorts, 
 wiring trestles, barbed wire, or something. 
 It was shell-hole country, no communication 
 trenches or anything, and since there had been 
 an attack recently, the Boche artillery was 
 very active on the roads and back areas. Also 
 there was the usual rotten valley to cross, with 
 the hell of a barrage in it. So much these 
 young braves conceded. Harry had started 
 off with his party, had called at the Brigade 
 Dump, and picked up the stuff. Later on 
 some one rang up Brigade from the line and 
 said no party had arrived. Brigade rang up 
 Philpott, and he sent up the Assistant Adju- 
 [226] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 tant to investigate. Somewhere in the Arras 
 Road he had come upon Harry, with most of 
 the party, running down the road towards 
 the Dump away from the line. The stores 
 were urgently needed at the front; they never 
 got there. That was all. The court-martial 
 was tomorrow. 
 
 Well, it was a black story, but I made one 
 or two footnotes at once. 
 
 The very first night he was back. The aw- 
 ful luck the cruelty of it! Just back, in the 
 condition of nerves I knew him to be in, with 
 that first miserable feeling upon him, wonder- 
 ing probably why the hell he had driven him- 
 self out there, and praying to be let down easy 
 for one night at least and then to be sent 
 straight up on a job like that, the job that had 
 broken him before. 
 
 And by Philpott! I seemed to see Philpott 
 arranging that, with a kind of savage glee: 
 "Oh, here's Master Penrose again well, he'd 
 better take that party tonight instead of Mr. 
 Gibson. . . ." 
 
 And who was the Assistant Adjutant? God 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 knows, if every working-party that went 
 wrong meant a court-martial, there would be 
 no officers left in the army ; and if some busy- 
 body had been at work. . . . 
 
 "Who's the Assistant Adjutant?" I asked. 
 
 "Fellow who was attached to the Division 
 used to be in this battalion in your time, 
 I believe whatVhis-name ? Burnett Bur- 
 nett he rang up the Colonel and told him 
 about it." 
 
 Burnett! I groaned. The gods were 
 against Harry indeed. Burnett had been 
 away from the battalion for eighteen months, 
 drifting about from odd job to odd job Town 
 Major here, Dump Officer there, never in the 
 line. . . . Why the devil had he come back 
 
 now to put his foot in it and, perhaps 
 
 But I could not believe that. 
 
 Stephenson's two young officers Wallace 
 and Brown made no footnote, naturally. 
 They had come out by the same draft as 
 Harry, one from Sandhurst, the other from a 
 cadet school; they were fresh, as Harry had 
 been, and they had no mercy. And while I 
 
 [228] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 resented their tone, I tried to remember that 
 they knew not Harry, and said nothing. 
 
 But when young Wallace summed up the 
 subject with "Well, all I can say is he's a cold- 
 footed swine, and deserves all he gets," I ex- 
 ploded. "You young pup," I said, "just 
 
 out, and hardly seen a shot fired you dare to 
 say anything about Penrose. I tell you you're 
 not fit to lick his boots. Do you know that 
 he joined up in the ranks in August '14, and 
 went through Gallipoli, and had done two 
 years' active service before you even had a 
 uniform? Do you know he's just refused a 
 job at home in order to come out here, and 
 another job at the Base? Does that look like 
 cold feet? You wait till you've been out a 
 year, my son, before you talk about cold feet. 
 
 You " But I couldn't control myself any 
 
 further. I went out, cursing. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Then I got leave to go and see Harry. He 
 was in his billet, in a small bedroom on the 
 ground floor. There was a sentry standing at 
 
 [229] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 the window, fixed bayonet and all, so that he 
 should neither escape nor make away with 
 himself. 
 
 He was surprised and, I think, really 
 pleased to see me, for before me, as he said, 
 or any one who knew his history, he was not 
 ashamed. ... It was only when the ignorant, 
 the Wallaces, were near that he was filled with 
 humiliation, because of the things he knew 
 they were thinking. "That sentry out there," 
 he told me, "was in my platoon at Gallipoli 
 one of my old men; just before you came 
 in he tapped on the window and wished me 
 luck; he said that all the 'old lads' did the 
 same. ... It bucked me up no end." 
 
 Not that he needed much "bucking up." 
 For he was strangely quiet and resigned more 
 nearly at peace with everything than I had 
 seen him for many months. "Only," he said, 
 "I wish to God that I was a single man, and I 
 wish to God they would get on with it. . . ." 
 He had been under arrest for six weeks, six 
 solid weeks . . . carted about from place to 
 place like some animal waiting for slaughter; 
 while the Summaries of Evidence and the 
 [230] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 Memos and the Secret Envelopes went back- 
 wards and forwards through "Units" and 
 through "Formations," from mandarin to 
 mandarin, from big- wig to big-wig; while 
 generals, and legal advisers, and judge advo- 
 cates, and twopenny-halfpenny clerks wrote 
 their miserable initials on the dirty forms, and 
 wondered what the devil they should decide 
 and decided nothing at all. All this ter- 
 rible time Harry had been writing to his wife, 
 pretending that all was well with him, describ- 
 ing route marches and scenery, and all the 
 usual stuff about weather and clothes and food. 
 . . . Now at least somebody had decided, and 
 Harry was almost happy. For it was an end 
 of suspense. . . . "Once they settled on a 
 court-martial," he said, "I knew I was done 
 . . . and except for Peggy, I don't care. . . . 
 I don't know what they've told you, but I'd like 
 you to know what really happened. I found 
 the battalion at Monval (the same old part), 
 and got there feeling pretty rotten. Old Phil- 
 pott, of course, sent me off with a working- 
 party like a shot out of a gun before I'd been 
 there an hour. I picked up some wiring stuff 
 
 [230 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 at the Brigade Dump it was a long way up 
 the road then, not far from Hellfire Corner. 
 Fritz was shelling the road like hell, going up 
 and down, dropping them in pairs, fifty yards 
 further every time, you know the game. . . . 
 I had the wind-up pretty badly, and so had the 
 men, poor devils . . . but what was worse, 
 they seemed to know that I had. . . . We had 
 a lot of shells very close to us, and some of the 
 men kept rushing towards the bank when they 
 heard one coming. . . . Well, you don't get 
 on very fast at that rate, and it's damned hard 
 to keep hold of them when they're like that. 
 . . . And knowing they were like that made 
 me even worse. When we got to Dead Mule 
 Tree about ten of them were missing . . . 
 just stayed under the bank in the holes. ... I 
 don't say this to excuse myself ... I just tell 
 you what happened. Then we got to that 
 high bit where the bank stops and the valley 
 goes up on the left. . . . You know the awful 
 exposed feeling one has there, and they had a 
 regular barrage just at the corner. ... I got 
 the men under the bank, and waited till a shell 
 burst . . . and then tried to dash them past 
 [232] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 before the next. But the next one came too 
 fast, and fell plunk into the middle of the col- 
 umn behind me. . . . Three men were killed 
 outright, and those of us who hadn't flung 
 themselves down were knocked over. I fell 
 in a kind of narrow ditch by the road. When 
 I put my head up and looked back I saw some 
 of the men vanishing back under the bank. 
 Then another one came 8-inch I should think 
 they were and I grovelled in the ditch again. 
 ... It was just like my awful dreams. . . . 
 I must have been there about ten minutes. 
 After every one I started to get up and go back 
 to the men under the bank, meaning to get 
 them together again. Every time the next one 
 came too quick, and I was pinned, simply 
 pinned in that ditch. Then Fritz stopped for 
 a minute or two altering the program, I 
 suppose and I got up and ran like hell for 
 the bank. The four or five men lying near 
 me got up and ran too. 
 
 "When we got under the bank we lay down 
 and I looked round . . . there was not a man 
 to be seen. I shouted, but at first nothing 
 happened. And, I tell you, I was glad. . . . 
 
 [233] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 Some of the men who had gone back, not see- 
 ing me anywhere, had melted away home. 
 ... I don't blame them. . . . Then a few 
 drifted along from further down the bank. 
 ... By degrees most of the party turned up 
 . . . there must have been between thirty and 
 forty of them in the end. . . . : 
 
 "And then, you see, I knew I should have 
 to go on again . . . get past the corner some- 
 how. . . . And 
 
 "And I couldn't. ... I simply couldn't 
 face it. ... Peters (the N. C. O.) said 
 something about 'Going to have another 
 shot, sir?' He was pretty shaken him- 
 self they all were . . . but he'd have gone. 
 . . . We ought to have gone on. ... I know 
 that. . . . But . . . Anyhow, I told him I 
 didn't think we should ever get by at present, 
 and said we'd better go back a bit and wait 
 under cover . . . some yarn or other. . . . 
 So we started back down the road. . . . The 
 Boche was still doing the up and down game 
 on the road, only about twice as much. . . . 
 By this time I can tell you there was no shame 
 between those men and me . . . we under- 
 
 [234] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 stood each other . . . every time we heard that 
 damned shriek we fell into shell-holes and 
 prayed. . . . They were following us down 
 the road, getting nearer and nearer. . . . You 
 know that dug-out in the bank where Head- 
 quarters used to be. Well, just when it looked 
 as if the next lot must come right on top of 
 us, I saw a light coming from the dug-out, 
 and most of us ran hell for leather for the 
 door. Some one was standing at the entrance 
 as we dashed in ... just in time ... we 
 nearly knocked him over. . . . And guess who 
 it was," said Harry, with a horrible kind of 
 hysterical laugh, "guess who it was . . . 
 it was Burnett Burnett of all people. 
 . . . He had been sent up to find out 
 what had happened. Well, he asked what 
 the hell I was doing, and said I was to go on 
 at once. ... I said I was going to wait a bit, 
 there was too much of a barrage. . . . Then 
 he said, very offensively, he couldn't help that 
 . . . my orders were to go on at once. . . . 
 That annoyed me, and I said I'd see him 
 damned first, and told him if it was so urgent 
 he could take the party up himself if he liked. 
 
 [235] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 . . . But he didn't, naturally ... no reason 
 why he should. . . . Then he rang up Phil- 
 pott and told him that he had seen the officer 
 in charge and some of the party running down 
 the road demoralized. So he had, of course, 
 he saw me running for the dug-out . . . 
 though the joke of it is the joke of it is ... 
 he was sheltering there himself I" And at the 
 enormity of that joke Harry went off into 
 that hideous laughter again. "He said I re- 
 fused to obey orders, and asked for instruc- 
 tions. Philpott said it was too late now, the 
 stuff had been wanted by midnight. ... He 
 told Burnett to put me under arrest . . . and 
 come back. 
 
 "That's what happened," he went on, "and 
 I don't care only I wish it had been anybody 
 but Burnett though I suppose he was quite 
 right; but it makes no odds ... I had got 
 the wind-up, and I had failed with the party, 
 and I don't deny it ... even if I wasn't really 
 running when he saw me. . . . One thing I 
 can say if I did have the wind-up I've never 
 had cold feet till that night. ... I'm glad 
 I came out this time if I did fail at the pinch. 
 [236] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 . . . Burnett wouldn't have. ... I knew I 
 was done when I came . . . and I know I'm 
 done now. 
 
 "But I wish you'd just explain it all to Peggy 
 and the people who don't know." 
 
 And that is what I am trying to do. 
 
 [237] 
 
XII 
 
 THE Court-Martial was held in an old 
 farm lying just outside the village. 
 There was a large courtyard where 
 the chickens clucked all day, and children 
 and cattle roamed unchecked in the spacious 
 midden. The court-room was unusually suit- 
 able to its purpose, being panelled all round in 
 some dark wood with great black beams under 
 a white-washed ceiling, high and vaulted, and 
 an open hearth where the dry wood crackled 
 heartlessly all day. Usually these trials are 
 conducted in the best bedroom of some estami- 
 net, and the Court sits defensively with a vast 
 white bed at their backs. But this room was 
 strangely dignified and legal: only at first 
 Madame persisted in marching through it with 
 saucepans to the kitchen all these curious 
 English functions were the same to her, a 
 Christmas dinner, or a mess-meeting, or the 
 trial of a soldier for his life. 
 The Court impressed me rather favourably 
 
 [238] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 a Major-General, and four others. The 
 Major-.General, who was President of the 
 Court, was a square, fatherly-looking person, 
 with a good moustache, and rather hard blue 
 eyes. He had many rows of ribbons, so many 
 that as I looked at them from a dark corner at 
 the back, they seemed like some regiment of 
 coloured beetles, paraded in close column of 
 companies. All these men were very excel- 
 lently groomed : "groomed" is the right word, 
 for indeed they suggested a number of well- 
 fed horses; all their skins were bright, and 
 shiny, and well kept, and the leather of their 
 Sam Brownes, and their field boots, and jing- 
 ling spurs, and all their harness were beautiful 
 and glistening in the firelight. I once went 
 over the royal stables at Madrid. And when 
 all these glossy -creatures jingled heavily up 
 to their table I was reminded of that. They 
 sat down and pawed the floor restively with 
 their well-polished, hoofs, cursing in their 
 hearts because they had been brought so far 
 "to do some damned court-martial." But all 
 their faces said, "Thank God, at least I have 
 had my oats today." 
 
 [239] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 And there was an atmosphere of greyness 
 about them. The hair of some of them was 
 splashed with grey; the faces of most of them 
 were weathered and grey; and one felt that 
 the opinions of all of them were grey, but not 
 weathered. 
 
 For they were just men, according to their 
 views. They would do the thing conscien- 
 tiously, and I could not have hoped for a better 
 Court. But as judges they held the fatal mil- 
 itary heresy, that the forms and procedure of 
 Military Law are the best conceivable machin- 
 ery for the discovery of truth. It was not 
 their fault; they had lived with it from their 
 youth. And since it is really a form of con- 
 ceit, the heresy had this extension, that they 
 themselves, and men like them, blunt, honest, 
 straightforward men, were the best conceiv- 
 able ministers for the discovery of truth and 
 they needed no assistance. Any of them would 
 have told you, "Damn it, sir, there's nothing 
 fairer to the prisoner than a Field General 
 Court-Martial"; and if you read the books or 
 witness the trial of a soldier for some simple 
 "crime," you will agree. But given a com- 
 [240] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 plex case, where testimony is at all doubtful, 
 where there are cross-currents and hidden ani- 
 mosities, the "blunt, honest" men are lost. 
 
 To begin with, being in their own view all- 
 seeing and all-just, they consider the Prison- 
 er's Friend to be superfluous: and if he at- 
 tempts any genuine advocacy they cannot 
 stomach the sight of him. "Prisoner's Friend 
 be damned!" they will tell you, "the Prose- 
 cutor does all that! and anything he doesn't 
 find out the Court will." Now the Prosecutor 
 is indeed charged with the duty of "bringing 
 out anything in the favour of the Accused": 
 that is to say, if Private Smith after looting 
 his neighbour becomes afterwards remorseful 
 and returns his loot to its owner, the Prose- 
 cutor will ask questions to establish the fact. 
 In a case like Harry's it means practically 
 nothing. The Prosecutor will not cross-ex- 
 amine a shifty or suspicious witness dive 
 into his motives get at the secret history of 
 the business, first, because it is not his job, and 
 secondly, because being as a rule only the ad- 
 jutant of his battalion, he does not know how. 
 
 The Court will not do this, because they do 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 not know anything about the secret history, 
 and they are incapable of imagining any ; be- 
 cause they believe implicitly that any witness, 
 officer or man (except perhaps the accused), 
 is a blunt, honest, straightforward man like 
 themselves, and incapable of deception or con- 
 cealment. 
 
 This is the job of the Prisoner's Friend. 
 Now "The Book" lays down very fairly that 
 if he be an officer, or otherwise qualified, Pris- 
 oner's Friend shall have all the rights of de- 
 fending counsel in a civil court. In practice, 
 the "blunt men" often make nothing of this 
 safeguard. Many courts I have been before 
 had never heard of the provision; many, hav- 
 ing heard of it, refused flatly to recognize it, 
 or insisted that all questions should be put 
 through them. When they do recognize the 
 right, they are immediately prejudiced against 
 the prisoner if that right is exercised. Any 
 attempt to discredit or genuinely cross-exam- 
 ine a witness is regarded as a rather sinister 
 piece of "cleverness"; and if the Prisoner's 
 Friend ventures to sum up the evidence in the 
 accused's favour at the end it is too often 
 
 [242] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 "that damned lawyer-stuff." Usually it is 
 safer for a prisoner to abandon his rights alto- 
 gether in that respect. 
 
 But that should not be in a case like Harry's. 
 The question of counsel was vital in his case. 
 I make no definite charges against Philpott 
 and Burnett. All I say is that it was unfor- 
 tunate that the two men most instrumental in 
 bringing Harry to trial should have been the 
 only two men with whom he had ever had any 
 bitterness during his whole military career. 
 It was specially unfortunate that Burnett 
 should be the first and principal accuser, 
 when you remembered that almost the last 
 time Harry had seen Burnett he had shown 
 courage where Burnett had shown cowardice, 
 and thus humiliated him. This case could 
 have been passed over; hundreds such have 
 been passed over, and on their merits, from 
 any human standpoint, rightly. Why was 
 this one dragged up and sent stinking to the 
 mandarins? Well, one possible answer was 
 "Look at the history of these three men." 
 And in the light of that history I say that 
 Philpott and Burnett should have been ruth- 
 
 [243] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 lessly cross-examined by a really able man, 
 till the very heart of them both lay bare. 
 Whether the issue would have been different 
 I don't know, but at least there would have 
 been some justice on both sides. And it may 
 even be that a trained lawyer could not only 
 have got at the heart of the matter, but also 
 prevailed upon the Court not to be prejudiced 
 against him by his getting at it. For that 
 brings you back to the real trouble. I could 
 have done it myself and gladly; if any one 
 knew anything about these men, I did. But 
 if I, acting for Harry, had really cross-exam- 
 ined Burnett, asked him suddenly what he was 
 doing in that dug-out, and when he hesitated, 
 suggested that he too was sheltering, and quite 
 rightly, because the fire was so heavy; or if I 
 brought out the history of that night at Gallip- 
 oli, and suggested that the animosity between 
 the two men might both explain Harry's con- 
 duct in the dug-out, and account for Burnett 
 having made the charge in the first place, 
 thus throwing some doubt on the value of his 
 evidence all that would have been "clever- 
 ness." And if I had suggested that Philpott 
 
 [244] 
 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 himself, my C. O., might have some slight 
 spite against the accused, or asked him why 
 he had applied for a Court-Martial on this 
 case after hushing up so many worse ones, I 
 think the Court would have become apoplec- 
 tic with horror at the sacrilege. 
 
 Then again it had been fixed that Travers 
 should be Prisoner's Friend; he knew more 
 about the Papers and the Summary of Evi- 
 dence, and so on, than any one (though as the 
 papers had only been sent down the morning 
 before, he did not know a great deal) . So we 
 left it at that. Travers was a young law stu- 
 dent in private life, but constitutionally timid 
 of authority, and he made no great show, in 
 spite of the efforts of the Deputy Judge Ad- 
 vocate, a person supposed to assist every- 
 body. But, as I have said, perhaps it was as 
 well. 
 
 For what they thought of as the "hard facts 
 of the case' 7 were all that mattered to the 
 Court, and as related by Philpott and Burnett 
 and Peters, they were pretty damning. That 
 bit about the "running" was fatal. It made 
 a great impression. Both the Prosecutor and 
 
 [245] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 two of the Court asked Burnett, "Are you sure 
 he was running?" If he had only been walk- 
 ing away from the enemy it would have made 
 so much difference! 
 
 Travers did ask Burnett why was he in the 
 dug-out entrance; and it showed you what a 
 mockery any kind of cross-examination would 
 h&ve been. In the absence of short-hand 
 writers every question and almost every an- 
 swer was written down, word for word, by 
 the Deputy Judge Advocate. After a ques- 
 tion was put there was a lengthy pause while 
 the officer wrote; then there was some un- 
 certainty and some questions about the exact 
 form of the question. Had Travers said, 
 "Why were you in the dug-out?" or "Why did 
 you go to the dug-out?" Finally, all being 
 satisfactorily settled and written down, the 
 witness was allowed to answer. But by then 
 the shiftiest witness had had time to invent a 
 dozen suitable answers. No liar could pos- 
 sibly be caught out no deceiver ever be de- 
 tected under this system. That was "being 
 fair to the witness." 
 
 Burnett answered, of course, that he had 
 
 [246] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 gone there to inquire if the working-party had 
 been seen. 
 
 To do Burnett justice, he did not seem at 
 all happy at having to tell his tale again. If 
 his original report had really been made un- 
 der a sudden impulse of spite and revenge 
 (and, however that may be, he could certainly 
 have made a very different report), I think 
 perhaps he had not realized how far the mat- 
 ter would go had not imagined that it would 
 come to a Court-Martial, and now regretted 
 it. But it was too late. He could not eat his 
 words. And that was the devil of it. Bur- 
 nett might have made a different report; Phil- 
 pott could have "arranged things" with the 
 Brigade could have had Harry sent to the 
 Base on the ground of his record and medical 
 condition, and not have applied for a Court- 
 Martial. But once those "hard facts" came 
 before the Court, to be examined under that 
 procedure, simply as "hard facts" an officer 
 ordered up with a party and important stores; 
 some of the party scattered; officer seen run- 
 ning, running, mind you in the wrong direc- 
 tion; officer "shaken" on the evidence of his 
 
 [247] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 men, and refusing to obey an order it was too 
 late to wonder whether the case should ever 
 have come there. That was Philpott's busi- 
 ness. He did not seem disturbed. He even 
 mentioned casually that "there had been a 
 similar incident with this officer once before, 
 when his conduct with a working-party by no 
 means satisfied me." Quite apart from the 
 monstrous misrepresentation of the thing, the 
 statement was wholly inadmissible at that 
 stage, and the President stopped him. But 
 that also was too late. It had sunk in. ... 
 
 And so the evidence went slowly on, un- 
 shaken not that it was all unshakable ; no one 
 tried to shake it. 
 
 After Philpott came Peters, the N. C. O., a 
 good fellow. 
 
 He told the Court what Harry had said 
 about "going back to wait a bit," instead of 
 going straight on when the party collected 
 again. 
 
 They asked him, "Was there any reason 
 why the party should not have gone on 
 then?" 
 
 "Well, sir," he said, "the shelling was bad, 
 [248] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 and we should have had some casualties, but 
 I daresay we should have got through. I've 
 seen as bad before." 
 
 Then there was one of the men who had 
 been with Harry, a good fellow, who hated 
 being there. He told the story of the move- 
 ments of the party with the usual broken ir- 
 relevances, but by his too obvious wish to help 
 Harry did him no good. When asked "in 
 what condition" the officer was, he said, "Well, 
 sir, he seemed to have lost his nerve, like . . . 
 we all of us had as far as that goes, the shelling 
 was that 'eavy." But that was no defence for 
 Harry. 
 
 Harry could either "make a statement" not 
 on oath, or give evidence on oath and be 
 cross-examined. He chose the latter related 
 simply the movements of the party and him- 
 self, and did not deny any of the facts of 
 which evidence had already been given. 
 
 "When you had collected the party under 
 the bank by this corner you speak of," said the 
 President, "why did you not then proceed with 
 the party?" 
 
 "I thought the shelling was too heavy, sir, 
 
 [249] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 just then; I thought it would be better to go 
 back and wait a bit where there was more 
 cover till the shelling got less. . . ." 
 
 "But Sergeant Peters says the party would 
 probably have got through?" 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "In view of the orders you had received, 
 wouldn't it have been better to go straight 
 on?" 
 
 "I don't know, sir perhaps it would." 
 
 "Then why didn't you do that?" 
 
 "At the time, sir, I thought it best to go 
 back and wait." 
 
 "And that was what you were doing when 
 you were seen er, running to the dug-out?" 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 Well, the Court did not believe it, and I 
 cannot blame them. For I knew that Harry 
 was not being perfectly ingenuous. I knew 
 that he could not have gone on. ... 
 
 Yet it was a reasonable story. And if the 
 Court had been able to imagine themselves in 
 Harry's condition of mind and body, crouch- 
 ing in the wet dark under that bank, faint with 
 weariness and fear, shaken with those blind- 
 
 [250] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 ing, tearing concussions, not knowing what 
 they should do, or what they could do, per- 
 haps they would have said in their hearts, "I 
 will believe that story." But they could not 
 imagine it. For they were naturally stout- 
 hearted men, and they had not seen too much 
 war. They were not young enough. 
 
 And, indeed, it was not their business to 
 imagine that. . . . 
 
 Another of the Court asked: "Is it true to 
 say, as Private Mallins said, that you had 
 ah lost your nerve?" 
 
 "Well, sir, I had the wind-up pretty badly; 
 one usually does at that corner and I've had 
 too much of it." 
 
 "I see." 
 
 I wondered if he did see if he had ever 
 had "too much of it." 
 
 Harry said nothing about Burnett; nothing 
 about Philpott; probably it would have done 
 no good. And as he told me afterwards, 
 "The real charge was that I'd lost my nerve 
 and so I had. And I don't want to wangle 
 out of it like that." 
 
 That was the end of it. They were kind 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 enough, those grey men; they did not like 
 the job, and they wanted only to do their duty. 
 But they conceived that their duty was "laid 
 down in The Book," to look at the "hard 
 facts," and no further. And the "hard facts" 
 were very hard. . . . 
 
 The Court was closed while they considered 
 their verdict; it was closed for forty minutes, 
 and when it reopened they asked for evidence 
 of character. And that meant that the ver- 
 dict was "Guilty." On the only facts they 
 had succeeded in discovering it could hardly 
 have been anything else. 
 
 The Adjutant put in formal evidence of 
 Harry's service, age, record, and so on; and 
 I was allowed to give evidence of character. 
 
 I told them simply the sort of fighting rec- 
 ord he had, about Gallipoli, and the scouting, 
 and the job he had refused in England. 
 
 I am glad to believe that I did him a little 
 good ; for that evening it got about somehow 
 that he was recommended to mercy. 
 
 And perhaps they remembered that he was 
 twenty-three. 
 
 [252] 
 
XIII 
 
 THAT evening I sat in C Company mess 
 for an hour and talked with them 
 about the trial. They were very sad 
 and upset at this thing happening in the regi- 
 ment, but they were reasonable and generous, 
 not like those D Company pups, Wallace and 
 the other. For they were older men, and had 
 nearly all been out a long time. Only one of 
 them annoyed me, a fellow in the thirties, 
 making a good income in the City, who had 
 only joined up just before he had to under the 
 Derby scheme, and had been out a month. 
 This fellow was very strong on "the honour 
 of the regiment" ; and seemed to think it de- 
 sirable for that "honour" that Harry should 
 be shot. Though how the honour of the regi- 
 ment would be thereby advanced, or what 
 right he had to speak for it, I could not dis- 
 cover. 
 
 But the others were sensible, balanced men, 
 
 [253] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 and as perplexed and troubled as I. I had 
 been thinking over a thing that Harry had 
 said in his talk with me "If I did have the 
 wind-up I've never had cold feet." It is a 
 pity one cannot avoid these horrible terms, 
 but one cannot. I take it that "wind-up" 
 whatever the origin of that extraordinary ex- 
 pression may be signifies simply "fear." 
 "Cold feet" also signifies fear, but, as I under- 
 stand it, has an added implication in it of base 
 yielding to that fear. I told them about this 
 distinction of Harry's, and asked them what 
 they thought. 
 
 "That's it," said Smith, "that's just the 
 damned shame of the whole thing. There are 
 lots of men who are simply terrified the whole 
 time they're out, but just go on sticking it by 
 sheer guts will-power, or whatever you like 
 that's having the wind-up, and you can't 
 prevent it. It just depends how you're made. 
 I suppose there really are some people who 
 don't feel fear at all that fellow Drake, for 
 example though I'm not sure that there are 
 many. Anyhow, if there are any they don't 
 deserve much credit though they do get the 
 
 [254] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 V. C.'s. Then there are the people who feel 
 fear like the rest of us and don't make any ef- 
 fort to resist it, don't join up or come out, and 
 when they have to, go back after three months 
 with a blighty one, and get a job, and stay 
 there " 
 
 "And when they are here wangle out of all 
 the dirty jobs," put in Foster. 
 
 "Well, they're the people with 'cold feet' 
 if you like," Smith went on, "and as you say, 
 Penrose has never been like that. Fellows 
 like him keep on coming out time after time, 
 getting worse wind-up every time, but simply 
 kicking themselves out until they come out 
 once too often, and stop one, or break up sud- 
 denly like Penrose, and " 
 
 "And the question is ought any man like 
 that to be shot?" asked Foster. 
 
 "Ought any one who volunteers to fight for 
 his country be shot?" said another. 
 
 "Damn it, yes," said Constable; he was a 
 square, hard-looking old boy, a promoted N. 
 C. O., and a very useful officer. "You must 
 have some sort of standard or where would 
 the army be?" 
 
 [255] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 "I don't know," said Foster, "look at the 
 Australians they don't have a death-penalty, 
 and I reckon they're as good as us." 
 
 "Yes, my son, perhaps that's the reason" 
 this was old Constable again "the average 
 Australian is naturally a sight stouter-hearted 
 than the average Englishman they don't 
 need it." 
 
 "Then why the hell do they punish Eng- 
 lishmen worse than Australians, if they can't 
 even be expected to do so well?" retorted Fos- 
 ter; but this piece of dialectics was lost on 
 Constable. 
 
 "Anyhow, I don't see that it need be such 
 an absolute standard," Smith began again, 
 thoughtfully; he was a thoughtful young fel- 
 low. "They don't expect everybody to have 
 equally strong arms or equally good brains; 
 and if a chap's legs or arms aren't strong 
 enough for him to go on living in the trenches 
 they take him out of it (if he's lucky). But 
 every man's expected to have equally strong 
 nerves in all circumstances, and to go on hav- 
 ing them till he goes under; and when he goes 
 under they don't consider how far his nerves, 
 
 [256] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 or guts, or whatever you call it, were as good 
 as other people's. Even if he had nerves like 
 a chicken to begin with he's expected to be- 
 have as a man with nerves like a lion or a 
 Drake would do. . . ." 
 
 "A man with nerves like a chicken is a 
 damned fool to go into the infantry at all," 
 put in Williams "the honour of the regi- 
 ment" person. 
 
 "Yes, but he may have had a will-power like 
 a lion, and simply made himself do it." 
 
 "You'd be all right, Smith," somebody said, 
 "if you didn't use such long words ; what the 
 hell do you mean by an absolute standard?" 
 
 "Sorry, George, I forgot you were so ig- 
 norant. What I mean is this. Take a case 
 like Penrose's: All they ask is, was he seen 
 running the wrong way, or not going the right 
 way? If the answer is Yes the punishment 
 is death, et cetera, et cetera. To begin with, 
 as I said, they don't consider whether he was 
 capable physically or mentally I don't know 
 which it is of doing the right thing. And 
 then there are lots of other things which we 
 know make one man more 'windy' than an- 
 
 [257] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 other, or windier today than he was yesterday 
 things like being a married man, or having 
 boils, or a bad cold, or being just physically 
 weak, so that you get so exhausted you haven't 
 got any strength left to resist your fears (Pve 
 had that feeling myself) none of those things 
 are considered at all at a court-martial and 
 I think they ought to be." 
 
 "No," said Foster, "they ought to be con- 
 sidered before they decide to have a court- 
 martial at all. A case like Penrose's never 
 ought to have got so far." 
 
 "You're right I don't know why the devil 
 it did." 
 
 "After all," said Williams, "you've got to 
 consider the name of the regiment. What 
 would happen " 
 
 But I could not stand any more of that. "I 
 think Smith's on the right line," I said, 
 "though I don't know if it would ever be 
 workable. There are, of course, lots of fel- 
 lows who feel things far more than most of us, 
 sensitive, imaginative fellows, like poor Pen- 
 rose and it must be hell for them. Of course 
 there are some men like that with enormously 
 
 [258] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 strong wills who manage to stick it out as well 
 as anybody, and do awfully well I should 
 think young Aston, for instance and those I 
 call the really brave men. Anyhow, if a man 
 like that really does stick it as long as he can, 
 I think something ought to be done for him, 
 though I'm damned if I know what. He 
 oughtn't . . ." 
 
 "He oughtn't to be allowed to go on too 
 long that's what it comes to, 7 ' said Smith. 
 
 "Well, what do you want," Foster asked, 
 "a kind of periodical Wind-up Examina- 
 tion?" 
 
 "That's the kind of thing, I suppose. It is 
 a medical question, really. Only the doctors 
 don't seem to recognize or else they aren't 
 allowed to any stage between absolute shell- 
 shock, with your legs flying in all directions, 
 and just ordinary skrim-shanking." 
 
 "But damn it, man," Constable exploded, 
 "look at the skrim-shanking you'll get if you 
 have that sort of thing. You'd have all the 
 mother's darlings in the kingdom saying they'd 
 had enough when they got to the Base." 
 
 "Perhaps no, I think that's silly. I don't 
 
 [259] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 know what it is that gives you bad wind-up 
 after a long time out here, nerves or imagina- 
 tion or emotion or what, but it seems to me 
 the doctors ought to be able to test when a 
 man's really had enough; just as they tell 
 whether a man's knee or a man's heart are 
 really bad or not. You'd have to take his 
 record into account, of course. . . ." 
 
 "And you'd have to make it a compulsory 
 test," said Smith, "because nowadays no one's 
 going to go into a Board and say, 'Look here, 
 doctor, I've been out so long and I can't stand 
 any more.' They'd send you out in the next 
 draft!" 
 
 "Compulsory both ways," added Foster: 
 "when they'd decided he'd done enough, and 
 wasn't safe any longer, he oughtn't to be al- 
 lowed to do any more because he's danger- 
 ous to himself and everybody else." * 
 
 "As a matter of fact," said Williams, "that's 
 what usually does happen, doesn't it? When 
 
 1 It is only fair to say that, long after the supposed date 
 of this conversation, a system of sending "war-weary" soldiers 
 home for six months at a time was instituted, though I doubt 
 if Foster would have been satisfied with that. 
 
 [260] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 a chap gets down and out like that after a de- 
 cent spell of it, he usually gets a job at home- 
 instructor at the Depot, or something." 
 
 "Yes, and then you get a fellow with the 
 devil of a conscience like Penrose and you 
 have a nasty mess like this." 
 
 "And what about the men?" asked Con- 
 stable. "Are you going to have the same 
 thing for them?" 
 
 "Certainly only, thank God, there are not 
 so many of them who need it. All that chat 
 you read about the 'wonderful fatalism' of 
 the British soldier is so much bunkum. It 
 simply means that most of them are not cursed 
 with an imagination, and so don't worry about 
 what's coming." 
 
 "That's true; you don't see many fatalists 
 in the middle of a big strafe." 
 
 "Of course there are lots of them who are 
 made like Penrose, and with a record like his, 
 something " 
 
 "And it's damned lucky for the British 
 Army there are not more of them," put in 
 Constable. 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 "Certainly, but it's damned unlucky for 
 them to be in the British Army in the in- 
 fantry, anyhow." 
 
 "And what docs that matter?" 
 
 "Oh, well, you can take that line if you like 
 but it's a bit Prussian, isn't it?" 
 
 "Prussia's winning this dirty war, anyhow, 
 at present." 
 
 So the talk rambled on, and we got no fur- 
 ther, only most of us were in troubled agree- 
 ment that something perhaps many things 
 were wrong about the System, if this young 
 volunteer, after long fighting and suffering, 
 was indeed to be shot like a traitor in the cold 
 dawn. 
 
 Nine times out of ten, as Williams had said, 
 we knew that it would not have happened, 
 simply because nine men out of ten surrender 
 in time. But ought the tenth case to be even 
 remotely possible? That was our doubt. 
 
 What exactly was wrong we could not pre- 
 tend to say. It was not our business. But 
 if this was the best the old men could do, we 
 felt that we could help them a little. I give 
 you this scrap of conversation only to show the 
 [262] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 kind of feeling there was in the regiment 
 because that is the surest test of the Tightness 
 of these things. 
 
 They were still at it when I left. And as I 
 went out wearily into the cold drizzle I heard 
 Foster summing up his views with: "Well, 
 the whole thing's damned awful. They've 
 recommended him to mercy, haven't they? 
 and I hope to God he gets it." 
 
 II 
 
 But he got no mercy. The sentence was 
 confirmed by the higher authorities. 
 
 I cannot pretend to know what happened, 
 but from some experience of the military 
 hierarchy I can imagine. I can see those 
 papers, wrapped up in the blue form, with all 
 the right information beautifully inscribed in 
 the right spaces, very neat and precise, care- 
 fully sealed in the long envelopes, and sent 
 wandering up through the rarefied atmosphere 
 of the Higher Formations. Very early they 
 halt, at the Brigadier, or perhaps the Divi- 
 sional General, some one who thinks of him- 
 self as a man of "blood and iron." He looks 
 
 [263] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 upon the papers. He reads the evidence 
 very carefully. At the end he sees "Recom- 
 mended to Mercy." "All very well, but we 
 must make an example sometimes. Where's 
 that confidential memo, we had the other day? 
 That's it, yes. 'Officer who fails in his duty 
 must be treated with the same severity as 
 would be awarded to private in the same cir- 
 cumstances.' Quite right too. Shan't ap- 
 prove recommendation to mercy. Just write 
 on it, 'See no reason why sentence should not 
 be carried out,' and I'll sign it." Or, more 
 simply perhaps : "Mercy ! mercy be damned ! 
 must be treated with the same severity as 
 cold feet in my Command." And so the blue 
 form goes climbing on, burdened now with 
 that fatal endorsement, labouring over ridge 
 after ridge, and on each successive height the 
 atmosphere becomes more rarefied (though 
 the population is more numerous). And at 
 long last it comes to some Olympian peak I 
 know not where beyond which it may not 
 go, where the air is so chill and the popula- 
 tion so dense, that it is almost impossible to 
 breathe. Yet here, I make no doubt, they 
 
 [264] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 look at the Blue Form very carefully and 
 gravely, as becomes the High Gods. But in 
 the end they shake their heads, a little sadly, 
 
 maybe, and say, "Ah, General B does not 
 
 approve recommendation to mercy. He's the 
 man on the spot, he ought to know. Must 
 support him. Sentence confirmed." 
 
 Then the Blue Form climbs sadly down to 
 the depths again, to the low regions where men 
 feel fear. . . . 
 
 
 
 The thing was done seven mornings later, in 
 a little orchard behind the Casquettes' farm. 
 
 The Padre told me he stood up to them very 
 bravely and quietly. Only he whispered to 
 him, "For God's sake make them be quick." 
 That is the worst torment of the soldier from 
 beginning to end the waiting. . . . 
 
 Ill 
 
 After three months I had some leave and 
 visited Mrs. Harry. I had to. But I shall 
 not distress you with an account of that inter- 
 view. I will not even pretend that she was 
 "brave." How could she be? Only, when 
 
 [265] 
 
The Secret Battle 
 
 I had explained things to her, as Harry had 
 asked, she said: "Somehow, that does make 
 it easier for me and I only wish I wish you 
 could tell everybody what you have told 
 
 me." 
 
 And again I say, that is all I have tried to 
 do. This book is not an attack on any person, 
 on the death penalty, or on anything else, 
 though if it makes people think about these 
 things, so much the better. I think I believe 
 in the death penalty I don't know. But I 
 did not believe in Harry being shot. 
 
 That is the gist of it; that my friend Harry 
 was shot for cowardice and he was one of the 
 bravest men I ever knew. 
 
 THE END 
 
 [266] 
 
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