Curzon saw the columns reel under the fire, and marvelled at their bravery as they strove to struggle on. They bore terrible losses before they fell back again over the crest.
Curzon did not know – and he did not have either time or inclination at the moment to ponder over the enemy’s tactics – that the attacking troops at this point were drawn from the six German divisions of volunteers, men without any military training whatever, who were being sent forwards in these vicious formations because they simply could not manoeuvre in any other. What he did realize was that as soon as the enemy realized the hopelessness of these attacks, and turned his artillery against the regiment, the latter would be blasted into nothingness in an hour of bombardment unless it could contrive shelter. He walked along the line, with the bullets still crackling round him.
‘Get your men digging,’ he said to Captain Phelps, the first officer he saw.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Phelps. ‘Er – what are they going to dig with, sir?’
Curzon looked Phelps up and down from his cropped fair hair and pop-eyes to his sword-belt and his boots. It was a question which might reasonably have been asked on manoeuvres. Cavalry had no entrenching tools, and the Twenty-second Lancers had, from motives of pride, evaded throughout their corporate existence the annual two hours’ instruction in field fortification which the regulations prescribed for cavalry. But this was war now. A battle would be lost, England would be endangered, if the men did not entrench. Curzon boiled with contempt for Phelps at that moment. He felt he could even see trembling on Phelps’ lips a protest about the chance of the men soiling their uniforms, and he was angered because he suspected that he himself would have been stupid and obstructive if his brain had not been activated by his urgent, imminent responsibility.
‘God damn it, man,’ he blazed. ‘Get your men digging, and don’t ask damn-fool questions.’
The fear of death or dishonour will make even cavalry dig, even without tools – especially when they were urged on by a man like Curzon, and when they were helped by finding themselves in muddy fields whose soil yielded beneath the most primitive makeshift tools. A man could dig in that mud with his bare hands – many men did. The Twenty-second sank into the earth just as will a mole released upon a lawn. The crudest, shallowest grave and parapet quadrupled a man’s chance of life.
The fortunate ditch which constituted the greater part of the regiment’s frontage, and the shallow holes dug on the rest of it, linked together subsequently by succeeding garrisons, constituted for months afterwards the front line of the British trench system in the Salient – a haphazard line, its convolutions dictated by pure chance, and in it many men were to lose their lives for the barren honour of retaining that worthless ground, overlooked and searched out by observation from the slight crests (each of which, from Hill 60 round to Pilckem, was to acquire a name of ill-omen) which the cavalry brigade had chanced to be too late, by a quarter of an hour, to occupy.
For the moment there could be no question of readjustment of the line. Some time in the late afternoon the bombardment began – a rain of shells compared with which anything Curzon had seen in South Africa was as a park lake to the ocean. It seemed impossible for anything to live through it. The bombardment seemed to reduce men to the significance of ants, but, like ants, they sought and found shelter in cracks in the ground; the very pits the shells dug gave them protection, for this bombardment, so colossal to their dazed minds, was not to be compared with the later bombardments of the war when mathematical calculations showed that every patch of ground must be hit by three separate shells.
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