Another party of men had even a longer time of trial. They were under the command of a lance-corporal, who had gained possession of the stables above the Menin road and now defended their ruins. During the previous twenty-four hours he had managed to send through several messages, but they were not to report his exposed position nor to ask for supports nor to request relief. What he said each time was, "Send us more bombs." It was only at seven-thirty in the morning of Tuesday, after thirty hours under shell-fire, that the survivors came away from their rubbish heap in the lines of death.
So it was at Hooge on that day of August. I talked with these men, touched hands with them while the mud and blood of the business still fouled them. Even now, in remembrance, I wonder how men could go through such hours without having on their faces more traces of their hell, though some of them were still shaking with a kind of ague.
Here and there on the roadsides behind the lines queer sacks hung from wooden poles. They had round, red disks painted on them, and looked like the trunks of human bodies after Red Indians had been doing decorative work with their enemy's slain. At Flixecourt, near Amiens, I passed one on a Sunday when bells were ringing for high mass and a crowd of young soldiers were trooping into the field with fixed bayonets.
A friend of mine--an ironical fellow--nudged me, and said, "Sunday-school for young Christians!" and made a hideous face, very comical.
It was a bayonet-school of instruction, and "O. C. Bayonets"--Col. Ronald Campbell--was giving a little demonstration. It was a curiously interesting form of exercise. It was as though the primitive nature in man, which had been sleeping through the centuries, was suddenly awakened in the souls of these cockney soldier--boys. They made sudden jabs at one another fiercely and with savage grimaces, leaped at men standing with their backs turned, who wheeled round sharply, and crossed bayonets, and taunted the attackers. Then they lunged at the hanging sacks, stabbing them where the red circles were painted. These inanimate things became revoltingly lifelike as they jerked to and fro, and the bayonet men seemed enraged with them. One fell from the rope, and a boy sprang at it, dug his bayonet in, put his foot on the prostrate thing to get a purchase for the bayonet, which he lugged out again, and then kicked the sack.