1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [225]
The exhausted survivors sank thankfully into bivouacs to sleep, and far out in the line U Company held on to the trenches captured the previous day. They cleaned up as best they could. They carried out the wounded, and munched on iron rations in lieu of a hot meal. They posted sentries every few yards and the rest settled down to snatch what sleep they could in the few remaining hours of the night. Presently the gun-fire tailed away. The night was almost quiet, but there was a rustle of movement in front. Reinforced by fresh troops the Germans had crept back down the hill, and the clink of shovels and a stealthy stirring in the dark told that they were working through the night to strengthen their battered line. Out in front, where the ground was littered with the silent dead, Bryden McKinnell’s body was lying among the scattered bodies of his men. They had been killed before ten o’clock in the morning.
Chapter 27
Scott McFie passed a miserable day. A few more men had straggled in, but there was not much to do. The survivors slept. There was tea on tap all day, and bully-beef sandwiches for any who woke up, but it was almost evening before they roused and began to stumble bleary-eyed out of bivouacs. A meal had been prepared, and the stew had been simmering since dinner time. McFie stood beside the boiler as it was dished out with hefty hunks of bread, and with so many absent there was more than enough to go round. There was good strong tea to wash it down, and afterwards he saw to it that the men had a ration of rum and walked round with the Sergeant as he measured it out, murmuring the suggestion that he might be generous. And he lingered to chat with the men. They were eager to talk and the Quartermaster marvelled at their spirit. When the camp had settled down for the night, he retired to his own office-tent and, weary though he was, wrote a letter to his father.
They told tales of the greatest heroism and tales of unutterable horror. Excepting the mistake of great haste, our men did nobly – but the gains are not very great, and the cost is terrible. They are queer chaps. You would imagine that our camp is plunged in gloom. Not a bit of it! After a good sleep and a good meal the men at once recovered their spirits and they are peacocking about in German helmets, taken with their own hands, and proudly showing their souvenirs, and showing off the rents in their clothing and recounting how they bayoneted Huns, or how they had narrow escapes. Of course this disaster has brought much work to me. Will you please tell Cyril Dennis that his biscuits arrived safely, Jenny that her parcel came and is now in the process of consumption, and Charlie that I received his letter in the tent in which I am writing at 11 p.m.! And now to bed in my other tent – the rough and ready blanket one.
The ‘rough and ready’ blanket bivouac was exactly the same as the men’s but McFie was perfectly happy with it. He was never a man to pull rank, and certainly not in the present circumstances. The blankets, and packs and overcoats had been retrieved and next day when the hospital returns came in and the first rough casualty list was made up, he and his storemen would begin drawing up an inventory of unclaimed possessions. There was a large quantity and it was the Company Quartermaster’s responsibility to sort them out, to return those that were the Army’s to battalion stores, to go through the packs of the dead and the missing and, in due course, when all hope of news had been given up, to see that their personal effects were sent home. It was a dispiriting task which McFie was not looking forward to, and when he woke to another glorious day, even the fine weather did little to cheer him.
It was 18 June, and the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. Across the Channel