The Fight

  “And — about this Jutland fight?” I hinted, not for the first time.

  “Oh, that was just a fight. There was more of it than any other fight, I suppose, but I expect all modern naval actions must be pretty much the same.”

  “But what does one do — how does one feel?” I insisted, though I knew it was hopeless.

  “One does one’s job. Things are happening all the time. A man may be right under your nose one minute — serving a gun or something — and the next minute he isn’t there.”

  “And one notices that at the time?”

  “Yes. But there’s no time to keep on noticing it. You’ve got to carry on somehow or other, or your show stops. I tell you what one does notice, though. If one goes below for anything, or has to pass through a flat somewhere, and one sees the old wardroom clock ticking, or a photograph pinned up, or anything of that sort, one notices that. Oh yes, and there was another thing — the way a ship seemed to blow up if you were far off her. You’d see a glare, then a blaze, and then the smoke — miles high, lifting quite slowly. Then you’d get the row and the jar of it — just like bumping over submarines. Then, a long while after p’raps, you run through a regular rain of bits of burnt paper coming down on the decks — like showers of volcanic ash, you know.” The door of the operating-room seemed just about to open, but it shut again.

  “And the Huns’ gunnery?”

  “That was various. Sometimes they began quite well, and went to pieces after they’d been strafed a little; but sometimes they picked up again. There was one Hun-boat that got no end of a hammering, and it seemed to do her gunnery good. She improved tremendously till we sank her. I expect we’d knocked out some scientific Hun in the controls, and he’d been succeeded by a man who knew how.”

  It used to be “Fritz” last year when they spoke of the enemy. Now it is Hun or, as I have heard, “Yahun,” being a superlative of Yahoo. In the Napoleonic wars we called the Frenchmen too many names for any one of them to endure; but this is the age of standardisation.

  “And what about our Lower Deck?” I continued.

  “They? Oh, they carried on as usual. It takes a lot to impress the Lower Deck when they’re busy.” And he mentioned several little things that confirmed this. They had a great deal to do, and they did it serenely because they had been trained to carry on under all conditions without panicking. What they did in the way of running repairs was even more wonderful, if that be possible, than their normal routine.

  The Lower Deck nowadays is full of strange fish with unlooked-for accomplishments, as in the recorded case of two simple seamen of a destroyer who, when need was sorest, came to the front as trained experts in first-aid.

  “And now — what about the actual Hun losses at Jutland?” I ventured.

  “You’ve seen the list, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, but it occurred to me — that they might have been a shade under-estimated, and I thought perhaps — ”

  A perfectly plain asbestos fire-curtain descended in front of the already locked door. It was none of his business to dispute the drive. If there were any discrepancies between estimate and results, one might be sure that the enemy knew about them, which was the chief thing that mattered.

  It was, said he, Joss that the light was so bad at the hour of the last round-up when our main fleet had come down from the north and shovelled the Hun round on his tracks. Per contra, had it been any other kind of weather, the odds were the Hun would not have ventured so far. As it was, the Hun’s fleet had come out and gone back again, none the better for air and exercise. We must be thankful for what we had managed to pick up. But talking of picking up, there was an instance of almost unparalleled Joss which had stuck in his memory. A soldier-man, related to one of the officers in one of our ships that was put down, had got five days’ leave from the trenches which he spent with his relative aboard, and thus dropped in for the whole performance. He had been employed in helping to spot, and had lived up a mast till the ship sank, when he stepped off into the water and swam about till he was fished out and put ashore. By that time, the tale goes, his engine-room-dried khaki had shrunk half-way up his legs and arms, in which costume he reported himself to the War Office, and pleaded for one little day’s extension of leave to make himself decent. “Not a bit of it,” said the War Office. “If you choose to spend your leave playing with sailor-men and getting wet all over, that’s your concern. You will return to duty by to-night’s boat.” (This may be a libel on the W.O., but it sounds very like them.) “And he had to,” said the boy, “but I expect he spent the next week at Headquarters telling fat generals all about the fight.”

  “And, of course, the Admiralty gave you all lots of leave?”

  “Us? Yes, heaps. We had nothing to do except clean down and oil up, and be ready to go to sea again in a few hours.”

  That little fact was brought out at the end of almost every destroyer’s report. “Having returned to base at such and such a time, I took in oil, etc., and reported ready for sea at — — o’clock.” When you think of the amount of work a ship needs even after peace man[oe]uvres, you can realise what has to be done on the heels of an action. And, as there is nothing like housework for the troubled soul of a woman, so a general clean-up is good for sailors. I had this from a petty officer who had also passed through deep waters. “If you’ve seen your best friend go from alongside you, and your own officer, and your own boat’s crew with him, and things of that kind, a man’s best comfort is small variegated jobs which he is damned for continuous.”

  The Silent Navy

  Presently my friend of the destroyer went back to his stark, desolate life, where feelings do not count, and the fact of his being cold, wet, sea-sick, sleepless, or dog-tired had no bearing whatever on his business, which was to turn out at any hour in any weather and do or endure, decently, according to ritual, what that hour and that weather demanded. It is hard to reach the kernel of Navy minds. The unbribable seas and mechanisms they work on and through have given them the simplicity of elements and machines. The habit of dealing with swift accident, a life of closest and strictest association with their own caste as well as contact with all kinds of men all earth over, have added an immense cunning to those qualities; and that they are from early youth cut out of all feelings that may come between them and their ends, makes them more incomprehensible than Jesuits, even to their own people. What, then, must they be to the enemy?

  Here is a Service which prowls forth and achieves, at the lowest, something of a victory. How far-reaching a one only the war’s end will reveal. It returns in gloomy silence, broken by the occasional hoot of the long-shore loafer, after issuing a bulletin which though it may enlighten the professional mind does not exhilarate the layman. Meantime the enemy triumphs, wirelessly, far and wide. A few frigid and perfunctory-seeming contradictions are put forward against his resounding claims; a Naval expert or two is heard talking “off”; the rest is silence. Anon, the enemy, after a prodigious amount of explanation which not even the neutrals seem to take any interest in, revises his claims, and, very modestly, enlarges his losses. Still no sign. After weeks there appears a document giving our version of the affair, which is as colourless, detached, and scrupulously impartial as the findings of a prize-court. It opines that the list of enemy losses which it submits “give the minimum in regard to numbers though it is possibly not entirely accurate in regard to the particular class of vessel, especially those that were sunk during the night attacks.” Here the matter rests and remains — just like our blockade. There is an insolence about it all that makes one gasp.

  Yet that insolence springs naturally and unconsciously as an oath, out of the same spirit that caused the destroyer to pick up the dog. The reports themselves, and tenfold more the stories not in the reports, are charged with it, but no words by any outsider can reproduce just that professional tone and touch. A man writing home after the fight, points out that the great consolation for not having cleaned up the enemy altogether was that “anyhow those East Coast devils” — a fellow-squadron, if you please, which up till Jutland had had most of the fighting — ”were not there. They missed that show. We were as cock-ahoop as a girl who had been to a dance that her sister has missed.”

  This was one of the figures in that dance:

  “A little British destroyer, her midships rent by a great shell meant for a battle-cruiser; exuding steam from every pore; able to go ahead but not to steer; unable to get out of anybody’s way, likely to be rammed by any one of a dozen ships; her syren whimpering: ‘Let me through! Make way!’; her crew fallen in aft dressed in life-belts ready for her final plunge, and cheering wildly as it might have been an enthusiastic crowd when the King passes.”

  Let us close on that note. We have been compassed about so long and so blindingly by wonders and miracles; so overwhelmed by revelations of the spirit of men in the basest and most high; that we have neither time to keep tally of these furious days, nor mind to discern upon which hour of them our world’s fate hung.

  THE NEUTRAL

  Brethren, how shall it fare with me When the war is laid aside, If it be proven that I am he For whom a world has died?

  If it be proven that all my good, And the greater good I will make, Were purchased me by a multitude Who suffered for my sake?

  That I was delivered by mere mankind Vowed to one sacrifice, And not, as I hold them, battle-blind, But dying with opened eyes?

  That they did not ask me to draw the sword When they stood to endure their lot, What they only looked to me for a word, And I answered I knew them not?

  If it be found, when the battle clears, Their death has set me free, Then how shall I live with myself through the years Which they have bought for me?

  Brethren, how must it fare with me, Or how am I justified, If it be proven that I am he For whom mankind has died; If it be proven that I am he Who being questioned denied?

  THE END

  THE WAR IN THE MOUNTAINS

  This 1917 military work consists of articles by Kipling regarding his visit to the Italian battlefront during the Great War.

  CONTENTS

  THE ROADS OF AN ARMY

  PODGORA

  A PASS, A KING, AND A MOUNTAIN

  “ONLY A FEW STEPS HIGHER UP”

  THE TRENTINO FRONT

  THE ROADS OF AN ARMY

  June 6 1917

  WHEN ONE REACHED the great Venetian plain near Army Headquarters , the Italian fronts were explained with a clearness that made maps unnecessary.

  ‘We have three fronts,’ said my informant. , ‘On the first, the Isonzo front, which is the road to Trieste, our troops can walk, though the walking is not good. On the second, the Trentino, to the north, where the enemy comes nearest to our plains, our troops must climb and mountaineer, you will see.’

  He pointed south-east and east across the heat haze to some evil-looking ridges a long way off where there was a sound of guns debating ponderously. ‘That is the Carso, where we are going now,’ he said; then he turned north-east and north where nearer, higher mountains showed streaks of snow in their wrinkles.

  ‘Those are the Julian Alps,’ he went on. ‘Tolmino is behind them , north again . Where the snow is thicker - do you see? - are the Carnic Alps; we fight among them. Then to the west of them come the Dolomites, where tourists use to climb and write books. There we fight, also. The Dolomites join on to the Trentino and the Asiago Plateau, and there we fight. And from there we go round north till we meet the Swiss border. All mountains, you see.’

  He picked up the peaks one after another with the ease of a man accustomed to pick up landmarks at any angle and any change of light. A stranger’s eyes could make out nothing except one sheer rampart of brooding mountains - ‘like giants at a hunting’ - all along the northern horizon.

  The glass split them into tangled cross-chains of worsted hillocks, hollow-flanked peaks cleft by black or grey ravines, stretches of no-coloured rock gashed and nicked with white, savage thumbnails of hard snow thrust up above cockscombs of splinters , and behind everything an agony of tortured crags against the farthest sky. Men must be borne or broke to the mountains to accept them easily. They are too full of their own personal devils.

  The plains around Udine are better - the fat, flat plains crowded with crops - wheat and barley patches between trim vineyards, every vine with her best foot forwards and arms spread to welcome spring. Every field hedged with old, strictly pollarded mulberry-trees for the silkworms, and every road flanked with flashing water-channels that talk pleasantly in the heart.

  At each few score yards of road there was a neat square of limestone road-metal, with the water- channel led squarely round it. Each few hundred yards, and old man and a young boy worked together, the one with a long spade, the other with a tin pot at the end of a pole. The instant that any wear showed in the surface, the elder padded the hollow with a spoonful of metal, the youth sluiced it, and at once it was ready to bind down beneath the traffic as tight as an inner-tube patch.

  There was curiously little traffic by our standards, but all there was moved very swiftly. The perfectly made and tended roads do most of the motor’s work. Where there are no bump there can be no strain, even under maximum loads. The lorries glide from railhead to their destination, return, and are off again without overhaul or delay. On the simple principle that transportation is civilisation, the entire Italian campaign is built, and every stretch of every road proves it.

  But on the French front Providence does not supply accommodating river-beds whence the beautiful self-binding stuff can be shovelled ready-made into little narrow-gauge trucks all over the landscape. Nor have we in France solid mountains where man has but to reach out his hand to all the stone of all the pyramids. Neither, anywhere, have we populations expert from birth at masonry. To parody Macaulay, what the axe is to the Canadian, what the bamboo is to the Malay, what the snow-block is to the Esqimaux, stone and cement is to the Italian, as I hope to show later.

  They are a hard people habituated to handling hard stuffs, and, I should imagine, with a sense of property as keen as the Frenchman’s. The innumerable grey-green troops in the bright fields moved sympathetically among the crops and did not litter their surroundings with rubbish. They have their own pattern of steel helmet, which differs a little from ours, and gives them at a distance a look of Roman Legionaires on a frieze of triumph. The infantry and, to a less extent, other arms are not recruited locally but generally, so that the men from all parts come to know each other, and losses are more evenly spread. But the size, physique, and, above all, the poise of the men struck one at every step. They seem more supple in their collective movements and less loaded down with haberdashery than either French or British troops. But the indescribable difference lay in their tread - the very fall of their feet and the manner in which they seemed to possess the ground they covered. Men whose life runs normally in the open own and are owned by their surroundings more naturally than those whom climate and trade keep housed through most of the year. Space, sunlight, and air, the procession of life under vivid skies, furnish the Italian with a great deal of his mental background, so when, as a soldier, he is bidden to sit down in the clean dust and be still as the hours while the shells pass, he does so as naturally as an Englishman draws a chair to the fire.

  The Belly of Stones

  ‘And that is the Isonzo River ,’ said the officer, when we reached the edge of the Udine plain. It might have come out from Kashmir with its broad sweeps of pale shoals that tailed off downstream into dancing haze. The milky jade waters smelt of snow from the hills as they plucked at the pontoon bridges’ moorings which were made to allow for many feet rise and fall. A snow-fed river is as untrustworthy as a drunkard.

  The flavour of mules, burning fuels, and a procession of high-wheeled Sicilian carts, their panels painted with Biblical stories, added to the Eastern illusion. But the ridge on the far side of the river that looked so steep, and was in reality only a small flattish mound among mountains, resembled no land on earth. If the Matoppos had married the Karroo they might have begotten some such abortion of stone-speckled, weather- hacked dirt. All along the base of it, indifferent to the thousands of troops around, to the scream of mules, the cough of motors, the whirr of machinery and the jarring carts, lay in endless belts of cemeteries those Italian dead who had first made possible the way to the heights above.

  ‘We brought them down and buried them after each fight,’ said the officer. ‘There were many fights. Whole regiments lie there - and there - and there. Some of them died in the early days when we made war without roads, some of them died afterwards, when we had the roads but the Austrians had the guns. Some of them died at the last when we beat the Austrians. Look!’

  As the poet says, the battle is won by the men who fall. God knows how many mothers’ sons sleep along the river before Gradisca in the shadow of the first ridge of the wicked Carso. They can hear their own indomitable people always blasting their way towards the east and Trieste. The valley of the Isonzo multiplies the roar of the heavy pieces around Goritzia and in the mountains to the north, and sometimes enemy aeroplanes scar and rip up their resting-places. They lie, as it were, in a giant smithy where the links of the new Italy are being welded under smoke and flame and heat - heat from the dry shoals of the river-bed before, and heat from the dry ridge behind them.

  The road wrenched itself uphill among the dead trenches, through wire entanglements red-rusted on the ground - looking like ‘harrows fit to reel men’s bodies out like silk’- between the usual mounds of ruptured sand-bags, and round empty gun-pits softened at their angles by the passage of the seasons.

  Trenches cannot be dug, any more than water can be found, on the Carso, for a spade’s depth below the surface the unkindly stone turns to sullen rock, and everything must be drilled and blasted out. For the moment, because spring had been wet, the stones were greened over with false growth of weeds which wither utterly in the summer, leaving the rocks to glare and burn alone. As if all this savagery were not enough, the raw slopes and cusps of desolation were studded with numberless pits and water-sinks, some exquisitely designed by the Devil for machine-gun positions, others like small craters capable of holding eleven-inch howitzers, which opened at the bottom through rifts into dry caverns where regiments can hide - and be dug out.