A Test to Destruction by Henry Williamson Read Free Book Online

might call them redans extended to enclose sited defensive positions of between four thousand square yards and ten thousand square yards in extent, according to the lie of the land. Each redoubt is self-contained, with ammunition and foodstores for the infantry and machine gunners, protected by barbed wire.”
    “And the preparation of these Battle Zones is only now being undertaken, and mainly by fighting soldiers? Is not the Labour Corps in sufficient strength for this particular work?”
    “That is the crux of the matter. For their own reasons, the Cabinet seems deliberately to be withholding reinforcements from the Western Front, while retaining well over a million men here in England, according to Freddy Maurice at the War House.”
    “When I was in the Lords the other day, Mowbray, I got the impression from Derby that the Cabinet has not altogether ruled out the possibility of a series of raids in strength, coming over from the Belgian coast under cover of darkness, or fog.”
    “I cannot say about that, of course, but I have it from Charteris at G.H.Q. that agents have identified forty-two German divisions rehearsing, behind barrages of live shell, fifty miles back from the German line. The rehearsals are for a land attack. Then there is the significant fact that von Hutier, who carried out that most successful attack at Riga against the Russians, has been put in opposite Hubert Gough’s Fifth Army. It is similar country, down by the marshes of the Somme, to that at Riga. There, of course, von Hutier relied on surprise, keeping his assault troops seventy miles behind his front, and only putting them into the forward areas a week or so before the attack, which was preceded by a six-hour bombardment only.”
    “Where did you say von Hutier is now?”
    “Opposite the junction of our Fifth Army with the French Sixth lying between the Oise and the Aisne.”
    Phillip found General Mowbray’s description of how von Hutier’s presence on the Western Front had become detected so interesting that he ceased to take notes, and merely listened. He would remember it better that way. Apparently the name Oskar von Hutier had been spotted in the correspondence columns of a local Königsberg newspaper smuggled with other newspapers into Sweden. Von Hutier had written a letter of condolence to the parents of a Pomeranian Grenadier, attached to the German Air Force, who had been killed in France. From that little item Intelligence had deduced the possibility of an attack similar to that across the marshes at Riga, which had broken through the Russian front and ended the war there.
    That night Phillip wrote in his journal.
    Pomeranian Grenadier, otherwise Prussian Guardsman! What romance in the very sound of the words! I see again the Prussian Guardsmen lying dead in the woods beside the Menin Road in November 1914, some on their backs, one with a knee up, bare cropped head, waxen face, large yellow moustache.
    Pomeranian Grenadier, face later the colour of pomegranate, that leathery, unsatisfactory fruit bitten into in boyhood, neither sweet nor sour, looking so juicy but hard-pipped, a cheating fruit.
    Pomeranian Grenadier, lying dead in France, gone for ever and ever, while proud parents, hiding grief in Vur Vaterland und Freiheit, somewhere on the Baltic coast, had done what my mother did in 1914, when she took one of my own letters to The Daily Express. They printed it, but failed to keep their promise to return the letter. I was critical of Mother for not making a copy in the first place, saying that such souvenirs would one day be valuable.
    Pomeranian Grenadier … Prussian parents maintained by pride because the great Herr General Oberst Oskar von Hutier had written to them about their son, once a boy perhaps living all his true life in thoughts of wild birds in the pine forests along the icebound shores of the Baltic, waiting for the spring migrants to arrive, and then the flowers, behind hot dry sand dunes of the