Passion
Dale
36
THE YPRES TIMES
A passage from the author's new work, Warrior.")
By Lieut.-Colonel Graham Seton Hutchison, D.S.O., M.C.
Author of The W Plan," Footslogger," etc.
1GREW to love the Passchendaele Salient. The eeriness of the bleeding landscape
haunted me. Seemingly endless miles of rotting lifeless life, lying crazily in
seemingly endless pools. Danger, deadly danger was always present, dogging
the footsteps, and ahead. On either side death lurked tugging at the elbow, luring
the unwary to the pools from which waved skeleton fingers, beckoning. And death
shrieked suddenly from on high, breathing fire and gas and molten metal, and roared
his laughter in great gusts as man ran and ducked and swayed and bobbed, eluding
laughter, mocking the vale of tears.
I could stumble and glissade for hours across those trackless wastes, always finding
something surprising, each day choosing a different path between my scattered posts.
Duty, bravado, the desire to snap my fingers again and again in Death's face, con
temptuously to kick the sweeping scythe aside, sent me daily on my giddy tramp across
the Salient.
Dodging the wheels of swaying limbers, evading plunging mules and horses as
I plodded the road scuppers through Potijze to Zonnebeke. Then turning aside I went
north-east following the sleeper track which led to the battery positions behind Tyne
Cotts Pillbox on its eminence. The great baulks of timber squelched and heaved
upon the morass beneath. Some, like the headstones in a graveyard, stood on end
mocking and marking the deathbed of a mule and his hapless driver. The night would
yet be dark. Then feet, long accustomed to stealthy movement after dusk, instinctively
groped, finding each firm step, discarding the place of treachery. I walked quickly.
The night air was chilled, and it was hot with bursting cordite. I hurried for both
reasons.
At Tyne Cotts I would dive through the soaking heavy blanket and descend to
flickering light bound by solid concrete. Great shadows fluttered on the roof and
walls. The air was stuffy with coke fumes, soggy clothing and unwashed humanity.
It smote me unpleasantly as I came from the freshness of the night air, albeit tainted
with the fumes of gas and rotting corpses.
There were bunks of wire netting stretched on timber upon which lay figures
breathing heavily, one snoring. Before a rude table, casting shadows, sat two officers,
a map before them. They would look up wearily, smiling wanly. A week, maybe
a few days more or less, of that waste made men heavy-eyed. They slept little and
intermittently. The eyes were seared with blood, dim and discoloured with mustard
gas. They were unshaven, haggard, grey-faced, grimy clothing stained, encrusted
with drying yellow mud.
Thus the portrait of the Passchendaele soldier. He lived unbelievably as it were
upon the outer crust of a honeycomb, its honey putrid water. Each death pool was
separated from its neighbour by a foot or two of muddy cone. To the sides of the
greasy, slithering edge, huddled above the stinking water, with bodies bowed beneath
the crest, men lived out their days and nights, swept by shell and machine-gun fire,
soaked in gas. When stormed by phosgene, its sickly, pear-perfumed stench dulling
the senses, almost men ignored its delayed horrors. Then as maniacs, gripped by
poison, they would hurry to the posts of battle civilization, the Canteen and the Aid
Post. There they would stagger, as the quickened blood diffused the phosgene poisons
