book 1

Disc, identity 1 Waterproof sheet 1 Tin of grease 1 Field-service dressing 1 Respirator 1 Spine protector 1 Jack knife 1 Set of equipment Lather brush 1 Comb 1 Fork 1 Knife 1 Spoon 1 Tooth brush 1 Laces, pair 1 Rounds ammunition 150 Rifle and bayonet Rifle cover 1 Oil bottle and pull-through. Entrenching tool 1

Well, anyhow, marching on cobbled roads is difficult, so when a staff-officer came by in a Rolls-Royce and cursed us for bad march-discipline I felt like throwing something at him. Trench soldiers hate the staff and the staff know it. The principal disagreement seems to be about the extent to which trench conditions should modify discipline. The La Bourse miners are old men and boys dressed in sloppy blue clothes with bulging pockets. There are shell craters all around the pit-head. I am billeted with a fatherly old man called Monsieur Hojdés, who has three marriageable daughters; one of them lifted up her skirt to show me a shell-wound on her thigh that laid her up last winter.

22_nd May_.—A colossal bombardment by the French at Souchez, a few miles away—continuous roar of artillery, coloured flares, shells bursting all along the ridge by Notre Dame de Lorette. I couldn’t sleep. It went on all night. Instead of dying away it grew and grew till the whole air rocked and shook; the sky was lit up with huge flashes. I lay in my feather bed and sweated. This morning they tell me there was a big thunderstorm in the middle of the bombardment. But, as Walker says: ‘Where the gunder ended and the thunder began was hard to say.’ The men had hot baths at the mines and cleaned up generally. Their rifles are all in an advanced state of disrepair and many of their clothes are in rags, but neither can be replaced, we are told, until they are much worse. The platoon is billeted in a barn full of straw. Old Burford, who is so old that he refuses to sleep with the other men of the platoon, has found a doss in an out-building among some farm tools. In trenches he will sleep on the fire-step even in the rain rather than in a warm dug-out with the other men. He says that he remembers the C.O. when he was in long skirts. Young Bumford is the only man he’ll talk to. The platoon is always ragging Bumford for his childish simplicity. Bumford plays up to it and begs them not to be too hard on ‘a lad from the hills.’

23_rd May_.—We did company drill in the morning. Afterwards Jones-Bateman and I lay on the warm grass and watched the aeroplanes flying above the trenches pursued by a trail of white shrapnel puffs. In the evening I was detailed to take out a working-party to Vermelles les Noyelles to work on a second line of defence—trench digging and putting up barbed wire under an R.E. officer. But the ground was hard and the men were tired out when they got back about two o’clock in the morning. They sang songs all the way home. They have one about Company Quartermaster-Sergeant Finnigan:

Coolness under fire, Coolness under fire, Mentioned in dispatches For pinching the company rations, Coolness under fire.

Now he’s on the peg, Now he’s on the peg, Mentioned in dispatches For drinking the company rum, Now he’s on the peg.

The chorus is:

Whiter than the milky cokernuts, Whiter than the milky cokernuts, Wash me in the water That you washed your dirty daughter in And I shall be whiter than the milky cokernuts. Nuts, Nuts, Oooooh nuts.

Finnigan doesn’t mind the libel at all.

This is what happened the other day. Two young miners, in another company, disliked their sergeant, who had a down on them and gave them all the most dirty and dangerous jobs. When they were in billets he crimed them for things they hadn’t done. So they decided to kill him. Later they reported at Battalion Orderly Room and asked to see the adjutant. This was irregular, because a private is not allowed to speak to an officer without an N.C.O. of his own company to act as go-between. The adjutant happened to see them and said: ‘Well, what is it you want?’ Smartly slapping the small-of-the-butt of their sloped rifles they said: ‘We’ve come to report, sir, that we are very sorry but we’ve shot our company sergeant-major.’ The adjutant said: ‘Good heavens, how did that happen?’ They answered: ‘It was an accident, sir.’ ‘What do you mean? Did you mistake him for a German?’ ‘No, sir, we mistook him for our platoon sergeant.’ So they were both shot by a firing squad of their own company against the wall of a convent at Béthune. Their last words were the battalion rallying-cry: ‘Stick it, the Welsh!’ (They say that a certain Captain Haggard first used it in the battle of Ypres when he was mortally wounded.) The French military governor was present at the execution and made a little speech saying how gloriously British soldiers can die.

You would be surprised at the amount of waste that goes on in trenches. Ration biscuits are in general use as fuel for boiling up dixies, because fuel is scarce. Our machine-gun crews boil their hot water by firing off belt after belt of machine-gun ammunition at no particular target, just generally spraying the German line. After several pounds’ worth of ammunition has been used, the water in the guns—they are water-cooled—begins to boil. They say they make German ration and carrying parties behind the line pay for their early-morning cup of tea. But the real charge will be on income-tax after the war.

24_th May_.—To-morrow we return to trenches. The men are pessimistic but cheerful. They all talk about getting a ‘cushy’ one to send them back to ‘Blitey.’ Blitey is, it seems, Hindustani for ‘home.’ My servant, Fry, who works in a paper-bag factory at Cardiff in civil life, has been telling me stories about cushy ones. Here are two of them. ‘A bloke in the Munsters once wanted a cushy, so he waves his hand above the parapet to catch Fritz’s attention. Nothing doing. He waves his arms about for a couple of minutes. Nothing doing, not a shot. He puts his elbows on the fire-step, hoists his body upside down and waves his legs about till he get blood to the head. Not a shot did old Fritz fire. “Oh,” says the Munster man, “I don’t believe there’s a damn squarehead there. Where’s the German army to?” He has a peek over the top—crack! he gets it in the head. Finee.’ Another story: ‘Bloke in the Camerons wanted a cushy bad. Fed up and far from home, he was. He puts his hand over the top and gets his trigger finger taken off, and two more beside. That done the trick. He comes laughing through our lines by the old boutillery. “See, lads,” he says, “I’m aff to bony Scotland. Is it na a beauty?” But on the way down the trench to the dressing-station he forgets to stoop low where the old sniper was working. _He_ gets it through the head too. Finee. We laugh fit to die.’

To get a cushy one is all that the old hands think of. Only twelve men have been with the battalion from the beginning and they are all transport men except one, Beaumont, a man in my platoon. The few old hands who went through the last fight infect the new men with pessimism; they don’t believe in the war, they don’t believe in the staff. But at least they would follow their officers anywhere, because the officers happen to be a decent lot. They look forward to a battle because a battle gives more chances of a cushy one, in the legs or arms, than trench warfare. In trench warfare the proportion of head wounds is much greater. Haking commands this division. He’s the man who wrote the standard textbook, _Company Training_. The last shows have not been suitable ones for company commanders to profit by his directions. He’s a decent man; he came round this morning to an informal inspection of the battalion and shook hands with the survivors. There were tears in his eyes. Sergeant Smith swore half-aloud: ‘Bloody lot of use that is, busts up his bloody division and then weeps over what’s bloody left.’ Well, it was nothing to do with me; I didn’t allow myself to feel either for the general or for the sergeant. It is said here that Haking has told General French that the division’s _morale_ has gone completely. So far as I can see that is not accurate; the division will fight all right but without any enthusiasm. It is said too that when the new army comes out the division will be withdrawn and used on lines of communication for some months at least. I don’t believe it. I am sure no one will mind smashing up over and over again the divisions that are used to being smashed up. The general impression here is that the new-army divisions can’t be of much military use.

28_th May_.—In trenches among the Cuinchy brick-stacks. Not my idea of trenches. There has been a lot of fighting hereabouts. The trenches have made themselves rather than been made, and run inconsequently in and out of the big thirty-foot high stacks of brick; it is most confusing. The parapet of one of the trenches which we do not occupy is built up with ammunition-boxes and corpses. Everything here is wet and smelly. The lines are very close. The Germans have half the brick-stacks and we have the other half. Each side snipes down from the top of its brick-stacks into the other’s trenches. This is also a great place for rifle-grenades and trench-mortars. We can’t reply properly to these; we have only a meagre supply of rifle-grenades and nothing to equal the German sausage mortar bomb. This morning about breakfast time, just as I came out of my dug-out, a rifle-grenade landed within six feet of me. For some reason, instead of falling on its head and exploding, it landed with its stick in the wet clay and stood there looking at me. They are difficult to see coming; they are shot from a rifle, with its butt on the ground, tilted, and go up a long way before they turn over and come down. I can’t understand why this particular rifle-grenade fell as it did; the chances were impossibly against it.

[Illustration: THE BRICKSTACKS AT GIVENCHY

_Copyright Imperial War Museum._]

Sausages are easy to see and dodge, but they make a terrible noise when they drop. We have had about ten casualties in our company to-day from them. I find that I have extraordinarily quick reactions to danger; but every one gets like that. We can sort out all the different explosions and disregard all the ones that don’t concern us—the artillery duel, machine-gun fire at the next company to us, desultory rifle-fire. But the faint plop! of the mortar that sends off the sausage or the muffled rifle noise when a grenade is fired, we pick out at once. The men are much afraid, yet always joking. The company sergeant-major stands behind Number Eleven brick-stack and shoots at the sausages with a rifle as they come over; trying to explode them in the air. He says that it’s better than pigeon-shooting. He hasn’t hit one yet. Last night a lot of stuff was flying about, including shrapnel. I heard one shell whish-whishing towards me. I dropped flat. It burst just over the trench. My ears sang as though there were gnats in them and a bright scarlet light shone over everything. My shoulder was twisted in falling and I thought I had been hit, but I hadn’t been. The vibration made my chest sing, too, in a curious way, and I lost my sense of equilibrium. I was much ashamed when the sergeant-major came along the trench and found me on all fours, because I couldn’t stand up straight. It was at a place where ‘Petticoat Lane’ runs into ‘Lowndes Square.’

There has been a dead man lying on the fire-step waiting to be taken down to the cemetery to-night. He was a sanitary-man, killed last night in the open while burying lavatory stuff between our front and support lines. His arm was stretched out and, when he was got in, it was still stiff, so that when they put him on the fire-step his stiff arm stretched right across the trench. His comrades joke as they push it out of the way to get by. ‘Out of the light, you old bastard. Do you own this bloody trench?’ Or they shake hands with him familiarly. ‘Put it there, Billy Boy.’ Of course, they’re miners and accustomed to death. They have a very limited morality, but they keep to it. They will, for instance, rob anyone, of anything, except a man in their own platoon; they will treat every stranger as an enemy until he is proved their friend, and then there is nothing they won’t do for him. They are lecherous, the young ones at least, but without the false shame of the English lecher. I had a letter to censor the other day written by a lance-corporal to his wife. He said that the French girls were nice to sleep with, so she mustn’t worry on his account, but that he far preferred sleeping with her and missed her a great deal.

6_th June_.—We have been billeted in Béthune, a fair-sized town about seven miles or so behind the front line. There is everything one wants, a swimming bath, all sorts of shops, especially a cake-shop, the best I’ve ever met, a hotel where you can get a really good dinner, and a theatre where we have brigade ‘gaffs.’ I saw a notice this morning on a building by the Béthune-La Bassée canal—‘Troops are forbidden to bomb fish. By order of the Town Major.’ Béthune is very little knocked about, except a part called Faubourg d’Arras, near the station. I am billeted with a family called Averlant Paul, in the Avenue de Bruay, people of the official class. They are refugees from Poimbert. There are two little boys and an elder sister, who is in what corresponds with the under-fifth of the local high-school. She was worried last night over her lessons and asked me to help her write out the theory of decimal division. She showed me the notes she had taken; they were full of abbreviations. I asked why she’d used abbreviations. She said: ‘The lady professor talked very fast because we were much hurried.’ ‘Why were you hurried?’ ‘Oh, because part of the school is used as a billet for the troops and the Germans were shelling it, and we were always having to take shelter in the cellar, and when we came back each time there was less and less time left.’

9_th June_.—I am beginning to realize how lucky I was in my gentle introduction to the trenches at Cambrin. We are now in a nasty salient a little to the south of the brick-stacks, where casualities are always heavy. The company had seventeen casualities yesterday from bombs and grenades. The front trench averages thirty yards from the Germans. To-day, at one part, which is only twenty yards away from an occupied German sap, I came along whistling _The Farmer s Boy_, to keep up my spirits, when suddenly I saw a group bending over a man lying at the bottom of the trench. He was making a snoring noise mixed with animal groans. At my feet was the cap he had worn, splashed with his brains. I had never seen human brains before; I had somehow regarded them as a poetical figment. One can joke with a badly-wounded man and congratulate him on being out of it. One can disregard a dead man. But even a miner can’t make a joke that sounds like a joke over a man who takes three hours to die after the top part of his head has been taken off by a bullet fired at twenty yards range. Beaumont, of whom I told you in my last letter, was also killed. He was the last unwounded survivor of the original battalion, except for the transport men. He had his legs blown against his back. Every one was swearing angrily, then an R.E. officer came up and told me that there was a tunnel driven under the German front line and that if we wanted to do a bit of bombing, now was the time. So he sent the mine up—it was not a big one, he said, but it made a tremendous noise and covered us with dirt—and the chaps waited for a few seconds for the other Germans to rush up to help the wounded away and then they chucked all the bombs they had.

Beaumont had been telling me how he had won about five pounds in the sweepstake after the Rue du Bois show. It was a sweepstake of the sort that leaves no bitterness behind it. Before a show the platoon pools all its available cash and the winners, who are the survivors, divide it up afterwards. Those who are killed can’t complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.

24_th June_. —We are billeted in the cellars of Vermelles, which was taken and re-taken eight times last October. There is not a single house undamaged in the place. I suppose it once had two or three thousand inhabitants. It is beautiful now in a fantastic way. We came up two nights ago; there was a moon shining behind the houses and the shells had broken up all the hard lines. Next morning we found the deserted gardens of the town very pleasant to walk about in; they are quite overgrown and flowers have seeded themselves about wildly. Red cabbages and roses and madonna lilies are the chief ornaments. There is one garden with currant bushes in it. I and the company sergeant-major started eating along the line towards each other without noticing each other. When we did, we both remembered our dignity, he as a company sergeant-major and I as an officer. He saluted, I asknowledged the salute, we both walked away. After a minute or two we both came back hoping the coast was clear and again, after an exchange of salutes, had to leave the currants and pretend that we were merely admiring the flowers. I don’t quite know why I was feeling like that. The company sergeant-major was a regular and it was natural in him, and I suppose that it was courtesy to his scruples that made me stop. Anyhow, along came a couple of privates and stripped the bushes clean.

This afternoon we had a cricket match, officers versus sergeants, in an enclosure between some houses out of observation from the enemy. The front line is perhaps three quarters of a mile away. I made top score, twenty-four; the bat was a bit of a rafter, the ball was a piece of rag tied round with string, and the wicket was a parrot cage with the grisly remains of a parrot inside. It had evidently died of starvation when the French evacuated the town. The corpse was perfectly clean and dry and I recalled a verse of Skelton’s:

Parrot is a fair bird for a ladie. God of His goodness him framed and wrought. When parrot is dead he doth not putrify, Yea, all things mortal shall turn unto nought Save mannës soul which Christ so dear bought, That never can die, nor never die shall. Make much of parrot, that popajay royal.

The match was broken up suddenly by machine-gun fire. It was not aimed at us; the Germans were shooting at one of our aeroplanes and the bullets falling down from a great height had a penetrative power greater than an ordinary spent bullet.

This is a very idle life except for night-digging on the reserve line. By day there is nothing to do. We can’t drill because it is too near the German lines, and there is no fortification work to be done in the village. To-day two spies were shot. A civilian who had hung on in a cellar and had, apparently, been flashing news, and a German soldier disguised as an R.E. corporal who was found tampering with the telephone wires. We officers spend a lot of time practising revolver-shooting. Jenkins brought out a beautiful target from the only undestroyed living-room in our billet area. It was a glass case full of artificial fruit and flowers, so we put it up on a post at fifty yards range. He said: ‘I’ve always wanted to smash one of these damn things. My aunt had one. It’s the sort of thing that _would_ survive an intense bombardment.’ For a moment I felt a tender impulse to rescue it. But I smothered it. So we had five shots each, in turn. Nobody could hit it. So at last we went up to within twenty yards of it and fired a volley. Someone hit the post and that knocked it off into the grass. Jenkins said: ‘Damn the thing, it must be bewitched. Let’s take it back.’ The glass was unbroken, but some of the fruit had come loose. Walker said: ‘No, it’s in pain; we must put it out of its suffering.’ He gave it the _coup de gracê_ from close quarters.

There is an old Norman church here, very much broken. What is left of the tower is used as a forward observation post by the artillery. I counted eight unexploded shells sticking into it. I went in with Jenkins; the floor was littered with rubbish, broken masonry, smashed chairs, ripped canvas pictures (some of them look several hundreds of years old), bits of images and crucifixes, muddied church vestments rotting in what was once the vestry. Only a few pieces of stained glass remained fixed in the edges of the windows. I climbed up by way of the altar to the east window and found a piece about the size of a plate. I gave it to Jenkins. ‘Souvenir,’ I said. When he held it up to the light it was St. Peter’s hand with the keys of heaven; medieval glass. ‘I’m sending this home,’ he said. As we went out we met two men of the Munsters. They were Irish Catholics. They thought it sacrilegious for Jenkins to be taking the glass away. One of them said: ‘Shouldn’t take that, sir; it will bring you no luck.’[3]

Walker was ragging Dunn this evening. ‘I believe you’ll be sorry when the war’s over, skipper. Your occupation will be gone and you’ll have to go back on the square at the depot for six months and learn how to form fours regimentally. You missed that little part of the show when you left Sandhurst and came straight here. You’ll be a full colonel by then, of course. I’ll give the sergeant-major half a crown to make you really sweat. I’ll be standing in civvies at the barrack-gate laughing at you.’

There is a company commander here called Furber. His nerves are in pieces, and somebody played a dirty joke on him the other day—rolling a bomb, undetonated, of course, down the cellar steps to frighten him. This was thought a great joke. Furber is the greatest pessimist out here. He’s laid a bet with the adjutant that the trench lines will not be more than a mile from where they are in this sector two years hence. Every one laughs at Furber, but they like him because he sings sentimental cockney songs at the brigade gaffs when we are back at Béthune.

XIV

Now as the summer advanced there came new types of bombs and trench-mortars, heavier shelling, improved gas-masks and a general tightening up of discipline. We saw the first battalions of the new army and felt like scarecrows by comparison. We went in and out of the Cambrin and Cuinchy trenches, with billets in Béthune and the neighbouring villages. By this time I had caught the pessimism of the division. Its spirit in the trenches was largely defensive; the policy was not to stir the Germans into more than their usual hostility. But casualties were still very heavy for trench warfare. Pessimism made everyone superstitious. I became superstitious too: I found myself believing in signs of the most trivial nature. Sergeant Smith, my second sergeant, told me of my predecessor in command of the platoon. ‘He was a nice gentleman, sir, but very wild. Just before the Rue du Bois show he says to me: “By the way, sergeant, I’m going to get killed to-morrow. I know that. And I know that you’re going to be all right. So see that my kit goes back to my people. You’ll find their address in my pocket-book. You’ll find five hundred francs there too. Now remember this, Sergeant Smith, you keep a hundred francs yourself and divide up the rest among the chaps left.” He says: “Send my pocket-book back with my other stuff, Sergeant Smith, but for God’s sake burn my diary. They mustn’t see that. I’m going to get it _here_!” He points to his forehead. And that’s how it was. He got it through the forehead all right. I sent the stuff back to his parents. I divided up the money and I burnt the diary.’

One day I was walking along a trench at Cambrin when I suddenly dropped flat on my face; two seconds later a whizz-bang struck the back of the trench exactly where I had been. The sergeant who was with me, walking a few steps ahead, rushed back: ‘Are you killed, sir?’ The shell was fired from a battery near Auchy only a thousand yards away, so that it must have arrived before the sound of the gun. How did I know that I should throw myself on my face?

I saw a ghost at Béthune. He was a man called Private Challoner who had been at Lancaster with me and again in F company at Wrexham. When he went out with a draft to join the First Battalion he shook my hand and said: ‘I’ll meet you again in France, sir.’ He had been killed at Festubert in May and in June he passed by our C Company billet where we were just having a special dinner to celebrate our safe return from Cuinchy. There was fish, new potatoes, green peas, asparagus, mutton chops, strawberries and cream, and three bottles of Pommard. Challoner looked in at the window, saluted and passed on. There was no mistaking him or the cap-badge he was wearing. There was no Royal Welch battalion billeted within miles of Béthune at the time. I jumped up and looked out of the window, but saw nothing except a fag-end smoking on the pavement. Ghosts were numerous in France at the time.

There was constant mining going on in this Cambrin-Cuinchy sector. We had the prospect of being blown up at any moment. An officer of the R.E. tunnelling company was awarded the Victoria Cross while we were here. A duel of mining and counter-mining was going on. The Germans began to undermine his original boring, so he rapidly tunnelled underneath them. It was touch and go who would get the mine ready first. He won. But when he detonated it from the trench by an electric lead, nothing happened. He ran down again into the mine, retamped the charge, and was just back in time to set it off before the Germans. I had been into the upper boring on the previous day. It was about twenty feet under the German lines. At the end of the gallery I found a Welsh miner, one of our own men who had transferred to the Royal Engineers, on listening duty. He cautioned me to silence. I could distinctly hear the Germans working somewhere underneath. He whispered: ‘So long as they work, I don’t mind; it’s when they stop.’ He did his two-hour spell by candle-light. It was very stuffy. He was reading a book. The mining officer had told me that they were allowed to read; it didn’t interfere with their listening. It was a paper-backed novelette called _From Mill Girl to Duchess_. The men of the tunnelling companies were notorious thieves, by the way. They would snatch things up from the trench and scurry off with them into their borings; just like mice.

After one particularly bad spell of trenches I got bad news in a letter from Charterhouse. Bad news in the trenches might affect a man in either of two ways. It might drive him to suicide (or recklessness amounting to suicide), or it might seem trivial in comparison with present expediences and be disregarded. But unless his leave was due he was helpless. A year later, when I was in trenches in the same sector, an officer of the North Staffordshire Regiment had news from home that his wife was living with another man. He went out on a raid the same night and was either killed or captured; so the men with him said. There had been a fight and they had come back without him. Two days later he was arrested at Béthune trying to board a leave-train to go home; he had intended to shoot up the wife and her lover. He was court-martialled for deserting in the face of the enemy, but the court was content to cashier him. He went as a private soldier to another regiment. I do not know what happened afterwards.

The bad news was about Dick, saying that he was not at all the innocent sort of fellow I took him for. He was as bad as anyone could be. The letter was written by a cousin of mine who was still at Charterhouse. I tried not to believe it. I remembered that he owed me a grudge and decided that this was a very cruel act of spite. Dick’s letters had been my greatest stand-by all these months when I was feeling low; he wrote every week, mostly about poetry. They were something solid and clean to set off against the impermanence of trench life and the uncleanness of sex-life in billets. I was now back in Béthune. Two officers of another company had just been telling me how they had jslept, in the same room, one with the mother and one with the daughter. They had tossed for the mother because the daughter was a ‘yellow-looking little thing like a lizard.’ And the Red Lamp, the army brothel, was round the corner in the main street. I had seen a queue of a hundred and fifty men waiting outside the door, each to have his short turn with one or the other of the three women in the house. My servant, who had been in the queue, told me that the charge was ten francs a man—about eight shillings at that time. Each woman served nearly a battalion of men every week for as long as she lasted. The assistant provost-marshal had told me that three weeks was the usual limit, ‘after which the woman retires on her earnings, pale but proud.’ I was always being teased because I would not sleep even with the nicer girls. And I excused myself, not on moral grounds or on grounds of fastidiousness, but in the only way they could understand: I said that I didn’t want a dose. A good deal of talk in billets was about the peculiar bed-manners of the French women. ‘She was very nice and full of games. I said to her: “S’il vous plaît, ôtes-toi la chemise, ma chérie.” But she wouldn’t. She said, “Oh no’-non, mon lieutenant. Ce n’est pas convenable.”’ I was glad when we were back in trenches. And there I had a more or less reassuring letter from Dick. He told me that I was right, that my cousin had a spite against him and me, that he had been ragging about in a silly way, but that there was not much harm to it; he was very sorry and would stop it for the sake of our friendship.

At the end of July, I and Robertson, one of the other five Royal Welch officers who had been attached to the Welsh, got orders to proceed to the Laventie sector, some miles to the north. We were to report to the Second Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Frank Jones-Bateman and Hanmer Jones, two more of us, went to the First Battalion. The remaining two of the six had already gone back, McLellan sick and Watkin with bomb wounds that have kept him limping ever since. We were sorry to say good-bye to the men; they all crowded round to shake hands and wish us luck. And we felt a little sorry too that we had to start all over again getting to know a new company and new regimental customs. But it would be worth it, to be with our own regiment. Robertson and I agreed to take our journey as leisurely as possible. Laventie was only seventeen miles away, but our orders were to go there by train; so a mess-cart took us down to Béthune. We asked the railway transport officer what trains he had to Laventie. He told us one was going in a few minutes; we decided to miss it. There was no train after that until the next day, so we stopped the night at the Hotel de la France. (The Prince of Wales, who was a lieutenant in the Fortieth Siege Battery, was billeted there sometimes. He was a familiar figure in Béthune. I only spoke to him once; it was in the public bath, where he and I were the only bathers one morning. He was graciously pleased to remark how emphatically cold the water was and I loyally assented that he was emphatically right. We were very pink and white and did exercises on the horizontal bar afterwards. I joked to Frank about it: ‘I have just met our future King in a bath.’ Frank said: ‘I can trump that. Two days ago I had a friendly talk with him in the A.S.C. latrines.’ The Prince’s favourite rendezvous was the _Globe_, a café in the Béthune market square reserved for British officers and French civilians; principally spies by the look of them. I once heard him complaining indignantly that General French had refused to let him go up into the line.)

The next day we caught our train. It took us to a junction, the name of which I forget. Here we spent a day walking about in the fields. There was no train until next day, when one took us on to Berguette, a railhead still a number of miles from Laventie, where a mess-cart was waiting for us in answer to a telegram we had sent. We finally rattled up to battalion headquarters in Laventie High Street. We had taken fifty-two hours to come seventeen miles. We saluted the adjutant smartly, gave our names, and said that we were Third Battalion officers posted to the regiment. He did not shake hands with us, offer us a drink, or give us a word of welcome. He said coldly: ‘I see. Well, which of you is senior? Oh, never mind. Give your particulars to the regimental sergeant-major. Tell him to post whoever is senior to A Company and the other to B Company.’ The sergeant-major took our particulars. He introduced me to a young second-lieutenant of A Company, to which I was to go. He was a special reservist of the East Surrey Regiment and was known as the Surrey-man. He took me along to the company billet. As soon as we were out of earshot of battalion headquarters I asked him: ‘What’s wrong with the adjutant? Why didn’t he shake hands or give me any sort of decent welcome?’

The Surrey-man said: ‘Well, it’s your regiment, not mine. They’re all like that. You must realize that this is a regular battalion, one of the only four infantry battalions in France that is still more or less its old self. This is the Nineteenth Brigade, the luckiest in France. It has not been permanently part of any division, but used as army reserve to put in wherever a division has been badly knocked. So, except for the retreat, where it lost about a company, and Fromelles, where it lost half of what was left, it has been practically undamaged. A lot of the wounded have rejoined since. All our company commanders are regulars, and so are all our N.C.O.’s. The peace-time custom of taking no notice of newly-joined officers is still more or less kept up for the first six months. It’s bad enough for the Sandhurst chaps, it’s worse for special reservists like you and Rugg and Robertson, it’s worse still for outsiders like me from another regiment.’ We were going down the village street. The men sitting about on the door-steps jumped up smartly to attention as we passed and saluted with a fixed stony glare. They were magnificent looking men. Their uniforms were spotless, their equipment khaki-blancoed and their buttons and cap-badges twinkling. We reached company headquarters, where I reported to my company commander, Captain G. O. Thomas. He was a regular of seventeen years’ service, a well-known polo-player, and a fine soldier. This is the order that he would himself have preferred. He shook hands without a word, waved me to a chair, offered a cigarette and continued writing his letter. I found later that A was the best company I could have struck.

The Surrey-man asked me to help him censor some company letters before going over to the battalion mess for lunch; they were more literate than the ones in the Welsh regiment, but duller. On the way to the mess he told me more about the battalion. He asked me whether it was my first time out. ‘I was attached to the Second Welsh Regiment for three months; I commanded a company there for a bit.’ ‘Oh, were you? Well, I’d advise you to say nothing at all about it, then they’ll not expect too much of you. They treat us like dirt; in a way it will be worse for you than for me because you’re a full lieutenant. They’ll resent that with your short service. There’s one lieutenant here of six years’ service and second-lieutenants who have been out here since the autumn. They have already had two Special Reserve captains foisted on them; they’re planning to get rid of them somehow. In the mess, if you open your mouth or make the slightest noise the senior officers jump down your throat. Only officers of the rank of captain are allowed to drink whisky or turn on the gramophone. We’ve got to jolly well keep still and look like furniture. It’s just like peace time. Mess bills are very high; the mess was in debt at Quetta last year and we are economising now to pay that back. We get practically nothing for our money but ordinary rations and the whisky we aren’t allowed to drink.

‘We’ve even got a polo-ground here. There was a polo-match between the First and Second Battalions the other day. The First Battalion had had all their decent ponies pinched that time when they were sent up at Ypres and the cooks and transport men had to come up into the line to prevent a break through. So this battalion won easily. Can you ride? No? Well, subalterns who can’t ride have to attend riding-school every afternoon while we’re in billets. They give us hell, too. Two of us have been at it for four months and haven’t passed off yet. They keep us trotting round the field, with crossed stirrups most of the time, and they give us pack-saddles instead of riding-saddles. Yesterday they called us up suddenly without giving us time to change into breeches. That reminds me, you notice everybody’s wearing shorts? It’s a regimental order. The battalion thinks it’s still in India. They treat the French civilians just like “niggers,” kick them about, talk army Hindustani at them. It makes me laugh sometimes. Well, what with a greasy pack-saddle, bare knees, crossed stirrups, and a wild new transport pony that the transport men had pinched from the French, I had a pretty thin time. The colonel, the adjutant, the senior major and the transport officer stood at the four corners of the ring and slogged at the ponies as they came round. I came off twice and got wild with anger, and nearly decided to ride the senior major down. The funny thing is that they don’t realize that they are treating us badly—it’s such an honour to be serving with the regiment. So the best thing is to pretend you don’t care what they do or say.’

I protested: ‘But all this is childish. Is there a war on here or isn’t there?’

‘The battalion doesn’t recognize it socially,’ he answered. ‘Still, in trenches I’d rather be with this battalion than in any other that I have met. The senior officers do know their job, whatever else one says about them, and the N.C.O.’s are absolutely trustworthy.’

The Second Battalion was peculiar in having a battalion mess instead of company messes. The Surrey-man said grimly: ‘It’s supposed to be more sociable.’ This was another peace-time survival. We went together into the big château near the church. About fifteen officers of various ranks were sitting in chairs reading the week’s illustrated papers or (the seniors at least) talking quietly. At the door I said: ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ the new officer’s customary greeting to the mess. There was no answer. Everybody looked at me curiously. The silence that my entry had caused was soon broken by the gramophone, which began singing happily:

We’ve been married just one year, And Oh, we’ve got the sweetest, And Oh, we’ve got the neatest, And Oh, we’ve got the cutest Little oil stove.

I found a chair in the background and picked up _The Field_. The door burst open suddenly and a senior officer with a red face and angry eye burst in. ‘Who the blazes put that record on?’ he shouted to the room. ‘One of the bloody warts I expect. Take it off somebody. It makes me sick. Let’s have some real music. Put on the _Angelus_.’ Two subalterns (in the Royal Welch a subaltern had to answer to the name of ‘wart’) sprang up, stopped the gramophone, and put on _When the Angelus is ringing_. The young captain who had put on _We’ve been married_ shrugged his shoulders and went on reading, the other faces in the room were blank.

‘Who was that?’ I whispered to the Surrey-man.

He frowned. ‘That’s Buzz Off,’ he said.

Before the record was finished the door opened and in came the colonel; Buzz Off reappeared with him. Everybody jumped up and said in unison: ‘Good morning, sir.’ It was his first appearance that day. Before giving the customary greeting and asking us to sit down he turned spitefully to the gramophone: ‘Who on earth puts this wretched _Angelus_ on every time I come into the mess? For heaven’s sake play something cheery for a change.’ And with his own hands he took off the _Angelus_, wound up the gramophone and put on _We’ve been married just one year_. At that moment a gong rang for lunch and he abandoned it. We filed into the next room, a ball-room with mirrors and a decorated ceiling. We sat down at a long, polished table. The seniors sat at the top, the juniors competed for seats as far away from them as possible. I was unlucky enough to get a seat at the foot of the table facing the commanding officer, the adjutant and Buzz Off. There was not a word spoken down that end except for an occasional whisper for the salt or for the beer—very thin French stuff. Robertson, who had not been warned, asked the mess waiter for whisky. ‘Sorry, sir,’ said the mess waiter, ‘it’s against orders for the young officers.’ Robertson was a man of forty-two, a solicitor with a large practice, and had stood for Parliament in the Yarmouth division at the previous election.

I saw Buzz Off glaring at us and busied myself with my meat and potatoes.

He nudged the adjutant. ‘Who are those two funny ones down there, Charley,’ he asked.

‘New this morning from the militia. Answer to the names of Robertson and Graves.’

‘Which is which?’ asked the colonel.

‘I’m Robertson, sir.’

‘I wasn’t asking you.’

Robertson winced, but said nothing. Then Buzz Off noticed something.

‘T’other wart’s wearing a wind-up tunic.’ Then he bent forward and asked me loudly. ‘You there, wart. Why the hell are you wearing your stars on your shoulder instead of your sleeve?’

My mouth was full and I was embarrassed. Everybody was looking at me. I swallowed the lump of meat whole and said: ‘It was a regimental order in the Welsh Regiment. I understood that it was the same everywhere in France.’

The colonel turned puzzled to the adjutant: ‘What on earth’s the man talking about the Welsh Regiment for?’ And then to me: ‘As soon as you have finished your lunch you will visit the master-tailor. Report at the orderly room when you’re properly dressed.’

There was a severe struggle in me between resentment and regimental loyalty. Resentment for the moment had the better of it. I said under my breath: ‘You damned snobs. I’ll survive you all. There’ll come a time when there won’t be one of you left serving in the battalion to remember battalion mess at Laventie.’ This time came, exactly a year later.[4]

We went up to the trenches that night. They were high-command trenches; because water was struck when one dug down three feet, the parapet and parados were built up man-high. I found my platoon curt and reserved. Even when on sentry-duty at night they would never talk confidentially about themselves and their families like my platoon in the Welsh Regiment. Townsend, the platoon-sergeant, was an ex-policeman who had been on the reserve when war broke out. He used to drive his men rather than lead them. ‘A’ company was at Red Lamp Corner; the front trench broke off short here and started again further back on the right. A red lamp was hung at the corner, invisible to the enemy, but a warning after dark to the company on our right not to fire to the left of it. Work and duties were done with a silent soldier-like efficiency quite foreign to the Welsh.

The first night I was in trenches my company commander asked me to go out on patrol; it was the regimental custom to test new officers in this way. All the time that I had been with the Welsh I had never once been out in No Man’s Land, even to inspect the barbed wire. In the Welsh Regiment the condition of the wire was, I believe, the responsibility of the battalion intelligence officer. I never remember any work done on it by C Company. I think we left it to the Royal Engineers. When Hewitt, the machine-gun officer, used to go out on patrol sometimes it was regarded as a mad escapade. But with both battalions of the Royal Welch Fusiliers it was a point of honour to be masters of No Man’s Land from dusk to dawn. There was not a night at Laventie that a message did not come down the line from sentry to sentry: ‘Pass the word; officer’s patrol going out.’ My orders for this patrol were to see whether a German sap-head was occupied by night or not.

I went out from Red Lamp Corner with Sergeant Townsend at about ten o’clock. We both had revolvers. We pulled socks, with the toes cut off, over our bare knees, to prevent them showing up in the dark and to make crawling easier. We went ten yards at a time, slowly, not on all fours, but wriggling flat along the ground. After each movement we lay and watched for about ten minutes. We crawled through our own wire entanglements and along a dry ditch; ripping our clothes on more barbed wire, glaring into the darkness till it began turning round and round (once I snatched my fingers in horror from where I had planted them on the slimy body of an old corpse), nudging each other with rapidly beating hearts at the slightest noise or suspicion, crawling, watching, crawling, shamming dead under the blinding light of enemy flares and again crawling, watching, crawling. (A Second Battalion officer who revisited these Laventie trenches after the war was over told me of the ridiculously small area of No Man’s Land compared with the size it seemed on the long, painful journeys that he made over it. ‘It was like the real size of the hollow in a tooth compared with the size it feels to the tongue.’)

We found a gap in the German wire and came at last to within five yards of the sap-head that was our objective. We waited quite twenty minutes listening for any signs of its occupation. Then I nudged Sergeant Townsend and, revolvers in hand, we wriggled quickly forward and slid into it. It was about three feet deep and unoccupied. On the floor were a few empty cartridges and a wicker basket containing something large and smooth and round, twice as large as a football. Very, very carefully I groped and felt all around it in the dark. I couldn’t guess what it was. I was afraid that it was some sort of infernal machine. Eventually I dared to lift it out and carry it back. I had a suspicion that it might be one of the German gas-cylinders that we had heard so much about. We got back after making the journey of perhaps two hundred yards in rather more than two hours. The sentries passed along the word that we were in again. Our prize turned out to be a large glass container quarter-filled with some pale yellow liquid. This was sent down to battalion headquarters and from there sent along to the divisional intelligence office. Everybody was very interested in it. The theory was that the vessel contained a chemical for re-damping gas masks. I now believe it was the dregs of country wine mixed with rainwater. I never heard the official report. The colonel, however, told my company commander in the hearing of the Surrey-man: ‘Your new wart seems to have more guts than the others.’ After this I went out fairly often. I found that the only thing that the regiment respected in young officers was personal courage.

Besides, I had worked it out like this. The best way of lasting the war out was to get wounded. The best time to get wounded was at night and in the open, because a wound in a vital spot was less likely. Fire was more or less unaimed at night and the whole body was exposed. It was also convenient to be wounded when there was no rush on the dressing-station services, and when the back areas were not being heavily shelled. It was most convenient to be wounded, therefore, on a night patrol in a quiet sector. You could usually manage to crawl into a shell-hole until somebody came to the rescue. Still, patrolling had its peculiar risks. If you were wounded and a German patrol got you, they were as likely as not to cut your throat. The bowie-knife was a favourite German patrol weapon; it was silent. (At this time the British inclined more to the ‘cosh,’ a loaded stick.) The most important information that a patrol could bring back was to what regiment and division the troops opposite belonged. So if a wounded man was found and it was impossible to get him back without danger to oneself, the thing to be done was to strip him of his badges. To do that quickly and silently it might be necessary first to cut his throat or beat in his skull.

Sir P. Mostyn, a lieutenant who was often out patrolling at Laventie, had a feud on with a German patrol on the left of the battalion frontage. (Our patrols usually consisted of an officer and one or, at the most, two men. German patrols were usually six or seven men under an N.C.O. German officers left as much as they decently could to their N.C.O.’s. They did not, as one of our sergeant-majors put it, believe in ‘keeping a dog and barking themselves.’) One night Mostyn caught sight of his ♦opponets; he had raised himself on one knee to throw a percussion bomb at them when they fired and wounded him in the arm, which immediately went numb. He caught the bomb before it hit the ground and threw it with his left hand, and in the confusion that followed managed to return to the trench.

♦ “opponets” replaced with “opponents”

Like every one else I had a carefully worked out formula for taking risks. We would all take any risk, even the certainty of death, to save life or to maintain an important position. To take life we would run, say, a one-in-five risk, particularly if there was some wider object than merely reducing the enemy’s man-power; for instance, picking off a well-known sniper, or getting fire ascendancy in trenches where the lines were dangerously close. I only once refrained from shooting a German I saw, and that was at Cuinchy about three weeks after this. When sniping from a knoll in the support line where we had a concealed loop-hole I saw a German, about seven hundred yards away, through my telescopic sights. He was having a bath in the German third line. I somehow did not like the idea of shooting a naked man, so I handed the rifle to the sergeant who was with me and said: ‘Here, take this. You’re a better shot than me.’ He got him, he said; but I had not stayed to watch.

About saving the lives of enemy wounded there was disagreement; the convention varied with the division. Some divisions, like the Canadians and a division of Lowland territorials, who had, they claimed, atrocities to avenge, would not only take no risks to rescue enemy wounded, but would go out of their way to finish them off. The Royal Welch Fusiliers were gentlemanly: perhaps a one-in-twenty risk to get a wounded German to safety would be considered justifiable. An important factor in taking risks was our own physical condition. When exhausted and wanting to get quickly from one point in the trenches to another without collapse, and if the enemy were not nearer than four or five hundred yards, we would sometimes take a short cut over the top. In a hurry we would take a one-in-two-hundred risk, when dead tired a one-in-fifty risk. In some battalions where the _morale_ was not high, one-in-fifty risks were often taken in mere laziness or despair. The Munsters in the First Division were said by the Welsh to ‘waste men wicked’ by not keeping properly under cover when in the reserve lines. In the Royal Welch there was no wastage of this sort. At no time in the war did any of us allow ourselves to believe that hostilities could possibly continue more than nine months or a year more, so it seemed almost worth while taking care; there even seemed a chance of lasting until the end absolutely unhurt.

The Second Royal Welch, unlike the Second Welsh, believed themselves better trench fighters than the Germans. With the Second Welsh it was not cowardice but modesty. With the Second Royal Welch it was not vainglory but courage: as soon as they arrived in a new sector they insisted on getting fire ascendancy. Having found out from the troops they relieved all possible information as to enemy snipers, machine-guns, and patrols, they set themselves to deal with them one by one. They began with machine-guns firing at night. As soon as one started traversing down a trench the whole platoon farthest removed from its fire would open five rounds rapid at it. The machine-gun would usually stop suddenly but start again after a minute or two. Again five rounds rapid. Then it usually gave up.

The Welsh seldom answered a machine-gun. If they did, it was not with local organized fire, beginning and ending in unison, but in ragged confused protest all along the line. There was almost no firing at night in the Royal Welch, except organized fire at a machine-gun or a persistent enemy sentry, or fire at a patrol close enough to be distinguished as a German one. With all other battalions I met in France there was random popping off all the time; the sentries wanted to show their spite against the war. Flares were rarely used in the Royal Welch; most often as signals to our patrols that it was time to come back.

As soon as enemy machine-guns had been discouraged, our patrols would go out with bombs to claim possession of No Man’s Land. At dawn next morning came the struggle for sniping ascendancy. The Germans, we were told, had special regimental snipers, trained in camouflaging themselves. I saw one killed once at Cuinchy who had been firing all day from a shell-hole between the lines. He had a sort of cape over his shoulders of imitation grass, his face was painted green and brown, and his rifle was also green fringed. A number of empty cartridges were found by him, and his cap with the special oak-leaf badge. Few battalions attempted to get control of the sniping situation. The Germans had the advantage of having many times more telescopic sights than we did, and steel loopholes that our bullets could not pierce. Also a system by which the snipers were kept for months in the same sector until they knew all the loopholes and shallow places in our trenches, and the tracks that our ration-parties used above-ground by night, and where our traverses came in the trench, and so on, better than we did ourselves. British snipers changed their trenches, with their battalions, every week or two, and never had time to learn the German line thoroughly. But at least we counted on getting rid of the unprofessional German sniper. Later we had an elephant-gun in the battalion that would pierce the German loopholes, and if we could not locate the loophole of a persistent sniper we did what we could to dislodge him by a volley of rifle-grenades, or even by ringing up the artillery.

It puzzled us that if a sniper were spotted and killed, another sniper would begin again next day from the same position. The Germans probably underrated us and regarded it as an accident. The willingness of other battalions to let the Germans have sniping ascendancy helped us; enemy snipers often exposed themselves unnecessarily, even the professionals. There was, of course, one advantage of which no advance or retreat of the enemy could rob us, and that was that we were always facing more or less East; dawn broke behind the German lines, and they seldom realized that for several minutes every morning we could see them though still invisible ourselves. German night wiring-parties often stayed out too long, and we could get a man or two as they went back; sunsets were against us, but sunset was a less critical time. Sentries at night were made to stand with their head and shoulders above the trenches and their rifles in position on the parapet. This surprised me at first. But it meant greater vigilance and self-confidence in the sentry, and it put the top of his head above the level of the parapet. Enemy machine-guns were trained on this level, and it was safer to be hit in the chest or shoulders than in the top of the head. The risk of unaimed fire at night was negligible, so this was really the safest plan. It often happened in battalions like the Second Welsh, where the head-and-shoulder rule was not in force and the sentry just took a peep now and then, that an enemy patrol would sneak up unseen to the British wire, throw a few bombs and get safely back. In the Royal Welch the barbed-wire entanglement was the responsibility of the company behind it. One of our first acts on taking over trenches was to inspect and repair it. We did a lot of work on the wire.

Thomas was an extremely silent man; it was not sullenness but shyness. ‘Yes’ and ‘no’ was the limit of his usual conversation; it was difficult for us subalterns. He never took us into his confidence about company affairs, and we did not like asking him too much. His chief interests seemed to be polo and the regiment. He was most conscientious in taking his watch at night, a thing that the other company commanders did not always do. We enjoyed his food-hampers sent every week from Fortnum and Mason; we messed by companies when in the trenches. Our only complaint was that Buzz Off, who had a good nose for a hamper, used to spend more time than he would otherwise have done in the company mess. This embarrassed us. Thomas went on leave to England about this time. I heard about it accidentally. He walked about the West End astonished at the amateur militariness that he met everywhere. To be more in keeping with it he gave elaborate awkward salutes to newly joined second-lieutenants and raised his cap to dug-out colonels and generals. It was a private joke at the expense of the war.

I used to look forward to our spells in trenches at Laventie. Billet life meant battalion mess, also riding-school, which I found rather worse than the Surrey-man had described it. Parades were carried out with peace-time punctiliousness and smartness, especially the daily battalion guard-changing which every now and then, when I was orderly officer, it was my duty to supervise. On one occasion, after the guard-changing ceremony and inspection were over and I was about to dismiss the old guard, I saw Buzz Off cross the village street from one company headquarters to another. As he crossed I called the guard to attention and saluted. I waited for a few seconds and then dismissed the guard, but he had not really gone into the biliet; he had been waiting in the doorway. As soon as I dismissed the guard he dashed out with a great show of anger. ‘As you were, as you were, stand fast!’ he shouted to the guard. And then to me: ‘Why in hell’s name, Mr. Graves, didn’t you ask my permission to dismiss the parade? You’ve read the King’s Regulations, haven’t you? And where the devil are your manners, anyhow?’ I apologized. I said that I thought he had gone into the house. This made matters worse. He bellowed at me for arguing; then he asked me where I had learned to salute. ‘At the depot, sir,’ I answered. ‘Then, by heaven, Mr. Graves, you’ll have to learn to salute as the battalion does. You will parade every morning before breakfast for a month under Staff-sergeant Evans and do an hour’s saluting drill.’ Then he turned to the guard and dismissed them himself. This was not a particular act of spite against me but the general game of ‘chasing the warts,’ at which all the senior officers played. It was honestly intended to make us better soldiers.

I had been with the Royal Welch about three weeks when the Nineteenth Brigade was moved down to the Béthune sector to fill a gap in the Second Division; the gap was made by taking out the brigade of Guards to go into the Guards Division which was then being formed. On the way down we marched past Lord Kitchener. Kitchener, we were told, commented to the brigadier on the soldier-like appearance of the leading battalion—which was ourselves—but said cynically: ‘Wait until they’ve been a week or two in the trenches; they will lose some of that high polish.’ He apparently mistook us for one of the new-army battalions.

The first trenches we went into on our arrival were the Cuinchy brick-stacks. The company I was with was on the canal-bank frontage, a few hundred yards to the left of where I had been with the Welsh Regiment at the end of May. The Germans opposite wished to be sociable. They sent messages over to us in undetonated rifle-grenades. One of these messages was evidently addressed to the Irish battalion we had relieved:

We all German korporals wish you English korporals a good day and invite you to a good German dinner to-night with beer (ale) and cakes. You little dog ran over to us and we keep it safe; it became no food with you so it run to us. Answer in the same way, if you please.

Another message was a copy of the _Neueste Nachrichten_, a German army newspaper printed at Lille. It gave sensational details of Russian defeats around Warsaw and immense captures of prisoners and guns. But we were more interested in a full account in another column of the destruction of a German submarine by British armed trawlers; no details of the sinking of German submarines had been allowed to appear in any English papers. The battalion cared no more about the successes or reverses of our Allies than it did about the origins of the war. It never allowed itself to have any political feelings about the Germans. A professional soldier’s job was to fight whomsoever the King ordered him to fight; it was as simple as that. With the King as colonel-in-chief of the regiment it was even simpler. The Christmas 1914 fraternization, in which the battalion was among the first to participate, was of the same professional simplicity; it was not an emotional hiatus but a commonplace of military tradition—an exchange of courtesies between officers of opposite armies.

Cuinchy was one of the worst places for rats. They came up from the canal and fed on the many corpses and multiplied. When I was here with the Welsh a new officer came to the company, and, as a token of his welcome, he was given a dug-out containing a spring-bed. When he turned in that night he heard a scuffling, shone his torch on the bed, and there were two rats on his blankets tussling for the possession of a severed hand. This was thought a great joke.

The colonel called for a patrol to go out along the side of the tow-path, where we had heard suspicious sounds on the previous night, to see whether a working-party was out. I volunteered to go when it was dark. But there was a moon that night so bright and full that it dazzled the eyes to look at it. Between us and the Germans was a flat stretch of about two hundred yards, broken only by shell-craters and an occasional patch of coarse grass. I was not with my own company, but lent to B, which had two officers away on leave. Childe-Freeman, the company commander, said: ‘You’re not going out on patrol to-night, are you? It’s almost as bright as day.’ I said: ‘All the more reason for going; they won’t be expecting me. Will you please have everything as usual? Let the men fire an occasional rifle and send up a flare every half hour. If I go carefully they’ll not see me.’ But I was nervous, and while we were having supper I clumsily knocked over a cup of tea, and after that a plate. Freeman said: ‘Look here, I’ll ’phone through to battalion and tell them it’s too bright for you to go out.’ But I knew Buzz Off would accuse me of cold feet, so Sergeant Williams and I put on our crawlers and went out by way of a mine-crater at the side of the tow-path. There was no need that night for the usual staring business. We could see only too clearly. All we had to do was to wait for an opportunity to move quickly, stop dead and trust to luck, then move on quickly again. We planned our rushes from shell-hole to shell-hole; the opportunities were provided by artillery or machine-gun fire which would distract the sentries. Many of the craters contained corpses of men who had been wounded and crept in and died. Some of them were skeletons, picked clean by the rats. We got to within thirty yards of a big German working-party who were digging a trench ahead of their front line. Between them and us we could count a covering party of ten men lying on the grass in their great-coats. We had gone far enough. There was a German lying on his back about twelve yards away humming a tune. It was the ‘Merry Widow’ waltz. The sergeant, who was behind me, pressed my foot with his hand and showed me the revolver he was carrying. He raised his eyebrows inquiringly. I gave him the signal for ‘no.’ We turned to go back; it was hard not to go back too quickly. We had got about half-way back when a German machine-gun opened traversing fire along the top of our trenches. We immediately jumped to our feet; the bullets were brushing the grass, so it was safer to be standing up. We walked the rest of the way back, but moving irregularly to distract the aim of the covering party if they saw us. Back in the trench I rang up the artillery and asked them to fire as much shrapnel as they could spare fifty yards short of where the German front trench touched the tow-path; I knew that one of the night-lines of the battery supporting us was trained near enough to this point. A minute and a quarter later the shells started coming over. We heard the clash of downed tools and distant shouts and cries; we reckoned the probable casualties. The next morning at stand-to Buzz Off came up to me: ‘I hear you were on patrol last night?’ I said: ‘Yes, sir.’ He asked me for particulars. When I had told him about the covering party he cursed me for ‘not scuppering them with that revolver of yours. Cold feet,’ he snorted as he turned away.

One day while we were here the Royal Welch were instructed to shout across to the enemy and induce them to take part in a conversation. The object was to find out how strongly the German front trenches were manned at night. A German-speaking officer in the company among the brick-stacks was provided with a megaphone. He shouted: ‘Wie gehts ihnen, kamaraden?’ Somebody shouted back in delight: ‘Ah, Tommee, hast du den deutsch gelernt?’ Firing stopped and a conversation began across the fifty yards or so of No Man’s Land. The Germans refused to say what regiment they were. They would not talk any military shop. One of them shouted out: ‘Les sheunes madamoiselles de La Bassée bonnes pour coucher avec. Les madamoiselles de Béthune bonnes aussi, hein?’ Our spokesman refused to discuss this. In the pause that followed he asked how the Kaiser was. They replied respectfully that he was in excellent health, thank you. ‘And how is the Crown Prince?’ he asked them. ‘Oh, b——r the Crown Prince,’ shouted somebody in English, and was immediately suppressed by his comrades. There was a confusion of angry voices and laughter. Then they all began singing the ‘Wacht am Rhein.’ The trench was evidently very well held indeed.

XV

This was the end of August 1915, and particulars of the coming offensive against La Bassée were beginning to leak through the young staff officers. The French civilians knew that it was coming and so, naturally, did the Germans. Every night now new batteries and lorry-trains of shells came rumbling up the Béthune-La Bassée road. There were other signs of movement: sapping forward at Vermelles and Cambrin, where the lines were too far apart for a quick rush across, to make a new front line; orders for evacuation of hospitals; the appearance of cavalry and new-army divisions. Then Royal Engineer officers supervised the digging of pits at intervals in the front line. They were sworn not to say what these were for, but we knew that they were for gas-cylinders. Scaling ladders for climbing quickly out of trenches were brought up by the lorry-load and dumped at Cambrin village. As early as September 3rd I had a bet with Robertson that our division would attack on this Cambrin-Cuinchy sector. When I went home on leave on September 9th the sense of impending events was so great that I almost wished I was not going.

Leave came round for officers about every six or eight months in ordinary times; heavy casualties shortened the period, general offensives cut off leave altogether. There was only one officer in France who was ever said to have refused to go on leave when his turn came round—Cross of the Fifty-second Light Infantry (the Second Battalion of the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry, which insisted on its original style as jealously as we kept our ‘c’ in ‘Welch’). Cross is alleged to have refused leave on these grounds: ‘My father fought with the regiment in the South African War and had no leave; my grandfather fought in the Crimea with the regiment and had no leave. I do not regard it in the regimental tradition to take home-leave when on active service.’ Cross was a professional survivor and was commanding the battalion in 1917 when I last heard of him.

London seemed unreally itself. In spite of the number of men in uniform in the streets, the general indifference to and ignorance about the war was remarkable. Enlistment was still voluntary. The universal catchword was ‘Business as usual.’ My family were living in London now, at the house formerly occupied by my uncle, Robert von Ranke, the German consul. He had been forced to leave in a hurry on August 4th, 1914, and my mother had undertaken to look after it for him while the war lasted. So when Edward Marsh, then secretary to the Prime Minister, rang me up from Downing Street to arrange a meal, someone intervened and cut him off. The telephone of the German consul’s sister was, of course, closely watched by the anti-espionage men of Scotland Yard. The Zeppelin scare had just begun. Some friends of the family came in one night. They knew I had been in the trenches, but were not interested. They began telling me of the air-raids, of bombs dropped only three streets off. So I said: ‘Well, do you know, the other day I was asleep in a house and in the early morning an aeroplane dropped a bomb next door and killed three soldiers who were billeted there, and a woman and child.’ ‘Good gracious,’ they said, looking at me with sudden interest, ‘what did you do then?’ I said: ‘I went to sleep again; I was tired out. It was at a place called Beuvry, about four miles behind the trenches.’ They said: ‘Oh, but that was in France,’ and the look of interest faded from their faces, as though I had taken them in with a stupid catch. I went up to Harlech for the rest of my leave, and walked about on the hills in an old shirt and a pair of shorts. When I got back, ‘The Actor,’ a regular officer in A Company, asked me: ‘Had a good time on leave?’ I said ‘Yes.’ He said: ‘Go to many dances?’ I said: ‘Not one.’ ‘What shows did you go to?’ ‘I didn’t go to any shows.’ ‘Hunt?’ ‘No!’ ‘Slept with any nice girls?’ ‘No, I didn’t. Sorry to disappoint you.’ ‘What the hell _did_ you do, then?’ ‘Oh, I just walked about on some hills.’ ‘Good God,’ he said, ‘chaps like you don’t deserve to go on leave.’

On September 19th we relieved the Middlesex at Cambrin, and it was said that these were the trenches from which we were to attack. The preliminary bombardment had already started, a week in advance. As I led my platoon into the line I recognized with some disgust the same machine-gun shelter where I had seen the suicide on my first night in trenches. It seemed ominous. This was the first heavy bombardment that I had yet seen from our own guns. The trenches shook properly and a great cloud of drifting shell-smoke clouded the German trenches. The shells went over our heads in a steady stream; we had to shout to make our neighbours hear. Dying down a little at night, the noise began again every morning at dawn, a little louder each time. We said: ‘Damn it, there can’t be a living soul left in those trenches.’ And still it went on. The Germans retaliated, though not very vigorously. Most of their heavy artillery had been withdrawn from this sector, we were told, and sent across to the Russian front. We had more casualties from our own shorts and from blow-backs than from German shells. Much of the ammunition that our batteries were using came from America and contained a high percentage of duds; the driving-bands were always coming off. We had fifty casualties in the ranks and three officer casualties, including Buzz Off, who was badly wounded in the head. This was before steel helmets were issued; we would not have lost nearly so many if we had had them. I had two insignificant wounds on the hand which I took as an omen on the right side. On the morning of the 23rd Thomas came back from battalion headquarters with a notebook in his hand and a map for each of us company officers. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘and copy out all this skite on the back of your maps. You’ll have to explain it to your platoons this afternoon. To-morrow morning we go back to Béthune to dump our blankets, packs, and greatcoats. On the next day, that’s Saturday the 25th, we attack.’ It was the first definite news we had been given and we looked up half startled, half relieved. I still have the map and these are the orders as I copied them down:

First Objective.—_Les Briques Farm._—The big house plainly visible to our front, surrounded by trees. To get this it is necessary to cross three lines of enemy trenches. The first is three hundred yards distant, the second four hundred, and the third about six hundred. We then cross two railways. Behind the second railway line is a German trench called the Brick Trench. Then comes the Farm, a strong place with moat and cellars and a kitchen garden strongly staked and wired.

Second Objective.—_The Town of Auchy._—This is also plainly visible from our trenches. It is four hundred yards beyond the Farm and defended by a first line of trench half way across, and a second line immediately in front of the town. When we have occupied the first line our direction is half-right, with the left of the battalion directed on Tall Chimney.

Third Objective.—_Village of Haisnes._—Conspicuous by high-spired church. Our eventual line will be taken up on the railway behind this village, where we will dig in and await reinforcements.

When Thomas had reached this point the shoulders of The Actor were shaking with laughter. ‘What’s up?’ asked Thomas irritably. The Actor asked: ‘Who in God’s Name is originally responsible for this little effort?’ Thomas said: ‘Don’t know. Probably Paul the Pimp or someone like that.’ (Paul the Pimp was a captain on the divisional staff, young, inexperienced and much disliked. He ‘wore red tabs upon his chest, And even on his undervest.’) ‘Between you and me, but you youngsters be careful not to let the men know, this is what they call a subsidiary attack. We’ll have no supports. We’ve just got to go over and keep the enemy busy while the folk on our right do the real work. You notice that the bombardment is much heavier over there. They’ve knocked the Hohenzollern Redoubt to bits. Personally, I don’t give a damn either way. We’ll get killed anyhow.’ We all laughed. ‘All right, laugh now, but by God on Saturday we’ve got to carry out this funny scheme.’ I had never heard Thomas so talkative before. ‘Sorry,’ The Actor apologized, ‘carry on with the dictation.’ Thomas went on:

‘The attack will be preceded by forty minutes discharge of the accessory,[5] which will clear the path for a thousand yards, so that the two railway lines will be occupied without difficulty. Our advance will follow closely behind the accessory. Behind us are three fresh divisions and the Cavalry Corps. It is expected we shall have no difficulty in breaking through. All men will parade with their platoons; pioneers, servants, etc. to be warned. All platoons to be properly told off under N.C.O.’s. Every N.C.O. is to know exactly what is expected of him, and when to take over command in case of casualties. Men who lose touch must join up with the nearest company or regiment and push on. Owing to the strength of the accessory, men should be warned against remaining too long in captured trenches where the accessory is likely to collect, but to keep to the open and above all to push on. It is important that if smoke-helmets have to be pulled down they must be tucked in under the shirt.’

[Illustration: THE CAMBRIN—CUINCHY—VERMELLES TRENCH SECTOR]

The Actor interrupted again. ‘Tell me, Thomas, do you believe in this funny accessory?’ Thomas said: ‘It’s damnable. It’s not soldiering to use stuff like that even though the Germans did start it. It’s dirty, and it’ll bring us bad luck. We’re sure to bungle it. Look at those new gas-companies, (sorry, excuse me this once, I mean accessory-companies). Their very look makes me tremble. Chemistry-dons from London University, a few lads straight from school, one or two N.C.O.’s of the old-soldier type, trained together for three weeks, then given a job as responsible as this. Of course they’ll bungle it. How could they do anything else? But let’s be merry. I’m going on again:

‘Men of company: what they are to carry:

Two hundred rounds of ammunition (bomb-throwers fifty, and signallers one hundred and fifty rounds).

Heavy tools carried in sling by the strongest men.

Waterproof sheet in belt.

Sandbag in right coat-pocket.

Field dressing and iodine.

Emergency ration, including biscuit.

One tube-helmet, to be worn when we advance, foiled up on the head. It must be quite secure and the top part turned down. If possible each man will be provided with an elastic band.

One smoke-helmet, old pattern, to be carried for preference behind the back where it is least likely to be damaged by stray bullets, etc.

Wire-cutters, as many as possible, by wiring party and others; hedging-gloves by wire party.

Platoon screens, for artillery observation, to be carried by a man in each platoon who is not carrying a tool.

Packs, capes, greatcoats, blankets will be dumped, not carried.

No one is to carry sketches of our position or anything likely to be of service to the enemy.’

‘That’s all. I believe we’re going over first with the Middlesex in support. If we get through the German wire I’ll be satisfied. Our guns don’t seem to be cutting it. Perhaps they’re putting that off until the intense bombardment. Any questions?’

That afternoon I repeated it all to the platoon and told them of the inevitable success attending our assault. They seemed to believe it. All except Sergeant Townsend. ‘Do you say, sir, that we have three divisions and the Cavalry Corps behind us?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Well, excuse me, sir, I’m thinking it’s only those chaps on the right that’ll get reinforcements. If we get half a platoon of Mons Angels, that’s about all we will get.’ ‘Sergeant Townsend,’ I said, ‘you are a well-known pessimist. This is going to be a good show.’ The next morning we were relieved by the Middlesex and marched back to Béthune, where we dumped our spare kit at the Montmorency Barracks. The battalion officers messed together in a big house near by. This billet was claimed at the same time by the staff of a new-army division which was to take part in the fighting next day. The argument was settled in a friendly way by division and battalion messing together. It was, someone pointed out, like a caricature of The Last Supper in duplicate. In the middle of the long table sat the two pseudo-Christs, the battalion colonel and the divisional general. Everybody was drinking a lot; the subalterns were allowed whisky for a treat, and were getting rowdy. They raised their glasses with: ‘Cheero, we will be messing together to-morrow night in La Bassée.’ Only the company commanders were looking worried. I remember C Company commander especially, Captain A. L. Samson, biting his thumb and refusing to join in the general excitement. I think it was Childe-Freeman of B company who said that night: ‘The last time the regiment was in these parts it was under decent generalship. Old Marlborough knew better than to attack the La Bassée lines; he masked them and went round.’

The G.S.O. 1 of the new-army division, a staff-colonel, knew the adjutant well. They had played polo together in India. I happened to be sitting next to them. The G.S.O. 1 said to the adjutant, rather drunkenly: ‘Charley, do you see that silly old woman over there? Calls himself General Commanding. Doesn’t know where he is; doesn’t know where his division is; can’t read a map properly. He’s marched the poor sods off their feet and left his supplies behind, God knows where. They’ve had to use their iron rations and what they could pick up in the villages. And to-morrow he’s going to fight a battle. Doesn’t know anything about battles; the men have never been in trenches before, and to-morrow’s going to be a glorious balls-up, and the day after to-morrow he’ll be sent home.’ Then he said, quite seriously: ‘Really, Charley, it’s just like that, you mark my words.’

That night we marched back again to Cambrin. The men were singing. Being mostly from the Midlands they sang comic songs instead of Welsh hymns: _Slippery Sam_, _When we’ve Wound up the Watch on the Rhine_, and _I do like a S’nice S’mince Pie_, to concertina accompaniment. The tune of the _S’nice S’mince Pie_ ran in my head all next day, and for the week following I could not get rid of it. The Second Welsh would never have sung a song like _When we’ve Wound up the Watch on the Rhine_. Their only songs about the war were defeatist:

I want to go home, I want to go home, The coal-box and shrapnel they whistle and roar, I don’t want to go to the trenches no more, I want to go over the sea Where the Kayser can’t shoot bombs at me. Oh, I Don’t want to die, I want to go home.

There were several more verses in the same strain. Hewitt, the Welsh machine-gun officer, had written one in a more offensive spirit:

I want to go home, I want to go home. One day at Givenchy the week before last The Allmands attacked and they nearly got past. They pushed their way up to the keep, Through our maxim-gun sight we did peep, Oh my! They let out a cry, They never got home.

But the men would not sing it, though they all admired Hewitt.

The Béthune-La Bassée road was choked with troops, guns, and transport, and we had to march miles north out of our way to get back to Cambrin. As it was we were held up two or three times by massed cavalry. Everything seemed in confusion. A casualty clearing-station had been planted astride one of the principal crossroads and was already being shelled. When we reached Cambrin we had marched about twenty miles in all that day. We were told then that the Middlesex would go over first with us in support, and to their left the Second Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, with the Cameronians in support; the junior officers complained loudly at our not being given the honour of leading the attack. We were the senior regiment, they protested, and entitled to the ‘Right of the Line.’ We moved into trench sidings just in front of the village. There was about half a mile of communication trench between us and the trenches proper, known as Maison Rouge Alley. It was an hour or so past midnight. At half-past five the gas was to be discharged. We were cold, tired and sick, not at all in the mood for a battle. We tried to snatch an hour or two of sleep squatting in the trench. It had been raining for some time. Grey, watery dawn broke at last behind the German lines; the bombardment, which had been surprisingly slack all night, brisked up a little. ‘Why the devil don’t they send them over quicker?’ asked The Actor. ‘This isn’t my idea of a bombardment. We’re getting nothing opposite us. What little there is is going into the Hohenzollern.’ ‘Shell shortage. Expected it,’ answered Thomas. We were told afterwards that on the 23rd a German aeroplane had bombed the Army Reserve shell-dump and sent it up. The bombardment on the 24th and on the day of the battle itself was nothing compared with that of the previous days. Thomas looked strained and ill. ‘It’s time they were sending that damned accessory off. I wonder what’s doing.’

What happened in the next few minutes is difficult for me now to sort out. It was more difficult still at the time. All we heard back there in the sidings was a distant cheer, confused crackle of rifle-fire, yells, heavy shelling on our front line, more shouts and yells and a continuous rattle of machine-guns. After a few minutes, lightly-wounded men of the Middlesex came stumbling down Maison Rouge Alley to the dressing-station. I was at the junction of the siding and the alley. ‘What’s happened? What’s happened?’ I asked. ‘Bloody balls-up’ was the most detailed answer I could get. Among the wounded were a number of men yellow-faced and choking, with their buttons tarnished green; these were gas cases. Then came the stretcher cases. Maison Rouge Alley was narrow and the stretchers had difficulty in getting down. The Germans started shelling it with five-point-nines. Thomas went through the shelling to battalion headquarters to ask for orders. It was the same place that I had visited on my first night in the trenches. This group of dug-outs in the reserve line showed very plainly from the air as battalion headquarters, and should never have been occupied on the day of a battle. Just before Thomas arrived the Germans put five shells into it. The adjutant jumped one way, the colonel another, the regimental sergeant-major a third. One shell went into the signals dug-out and destroyed the telephone. The colonel had a slight wound on his hand; he joined the stream of wounded and was carried as far as the base with it. The adjutant took charge. All this time A Company had been waiting in the siding for the rum to arrive; the tradition of every attack was a double tot of rum beforehand. All the other companies got it except ours. The Actor was cursing: ‘Where the bloody hell’s that storeman gone?’ We fixed bayonets in readiness to go up to the attack as soon as Thomas came back with orders. The Actor sent me along the siding to the other end of the company. The stream of wounded was continuous. At last Thomas’s orderly appeared, saying: ‘Captain’s orders, sir: A Company to move up to the front line.’ It seems that at that moment the storeman appeared with the rum. He was hugging the rum-bottle, without rifle or equipment, red-faced and retching. He staggered up to The Actor and said: ‘There you are, sir,’ then fell on his face in the thick mud of a sump-pit at the junction of the trench and the siding. The stopper of the bottle flew out and what was left of the three gallons bubbled on the ground. The Actor said nothing. It was a crime deserving the death-penalty. He put one foot on the storeman’s neck, the other in the small of his back, and trod him into the mud. Then he gave the order ‘Company forward.’ The company went forward with a clatter of steel over the body, and that was the last heard of the storeman.

What had happened in the front line was this. At half-past four the commander of the gas-company in the front line sent a telephone message through to divisional headquarters: ‘Dead calm. Impossible discharge accessory.’ The answer came back: ‘Accessory to be discharged at all costs.’ Thomas’s estimate of the gas-company’s efficiency was right enough. The spanners for unscrewing the cocks of the cylinders were found, with two or three exceptions, to be misfits. The gas-men rushed about shouting and asking each other for the loan of an adjustable spanner. They discharged one or two cylinders with the spanners that they had; the gas went whistling out, formed a thick cloud a few yards away in No Man’s Land, and then gradually spread back into the trenches. The Germans had been expecting the attack. They immediately put their gas-helmets on, semi-rigid ones, better than ours. Bundles of oily cotton-waste were strewn along the German parapet and set alight as a barrier to the gas. Then their batteries opened on our lines. The confusion in the front trench was great; the shelling broke several of the gas-cylinders and the trench was soon full of gas. The gas-company dispersed.

No orders could come through because the shell in the signals dug-out at battalion headquarters had cut communication both between companies and battalion headquarters and between battalion headquarters and division. The officers in the front trench had to decide on immediate action. Two companies of the Middlesex, instead of waiting for the intense bombardment which was to follow the forty minutes of gas, charged at once and got as far as the German wire-which our artillery had not yet attempted to cut. What shelling there had been on it was shrapnel and not high explosive; shrapnel was no use against barbed wire. The Germans shot the Middlesex men down. It is said that one platoon found a gap and got into the German trench. But there were no survivors of the platoon to confirm the story. The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders went over too, on their left. Two companies, instead of charging at once, rushed back to the support line out of the gas-filled front trench and attacked from there. It will be recalled that the front line had been pushed forward in preparation for the battle; these companies were therefore attacking from the old front line. The barbed wire entanglements in front of this trench had not been removed, so that they were caught and machine-gunned between their own front and support lines. The leading companies were equally unsuccessful. When the attack started, the German N.C.O.’s had jumped up on the parapet to encourage their men. It was a Jaeger regiment and their musketry was good.

The survivors of the first two companies of the Middlesex were lying in shell-craters close to the German wire, sniping and making the Germans keep their heads down. They had bombs to throw, but these were nearly all of a new type issued for the battle; the fuses were lit on the match-and-matchbox principle and the rain had made them useless. The other two companies of the Middlesex soon followed in support. Machine-gun fire stopped them half-way. Only one German machine-gun was now in action, the others had been knocked out by rifle or trench-mortar fire. Why the single gun remained in action is a story in itself.

It starts like this. British colonial governors and high-commissioners had the privilege of nominating one or two officers from their countries to be attached in war-time to the regular British forces. Under this scheme the officers appointed began as full lieutenants. The Governor-General of Jamaica (or whatever his proper style may be) nominated the eighteen-year-old son of a rich Jamaica planter. He was sent straight from Jamaica to the First Middlesex. He was good-hearted enough but of little use in the trenches. He had never been out of the island in his life and, except for a short service with the West Indian militia, knew nothing of soldiering. His company commander took a fatherly interest in Young Jamaica, as he was called, and tried to teach him his duties. This company commander was known as The Boy. He had twenty years’ service in the Middlesex, and the unusual boast of having held every rank from ‘boy’ to captain in the same company. His father, I believe, had been the regimental sergeant-major. The difficulty was that Jamaica was a full lieutenant and so senior to the other experienced subalterns in the company, who were only second-lieutenants. The colonel decided to shift Jamaica off on some course or extra-regimental appointment at the earliest opportunity. Somewhere about May or June he had been asked to supply an officer for the brigade trench-mortar company, and he had sent Jamaica. Trench-mortars at that time were dangerous and ineffective; so the appointment seemed suitable. At the same time the Royal Welch Fusiliers had also been asked to detail an officer, and the colonel had sent Tiley, an ex-planter from Malay, who was what is called a fine natural soldier. He had been chosen because he was attached from another regiment and had showed his resentment at the manner of his welcome somewhat too plainly. By September mortars had improved in design and become an important infantry arm; Jamaica was senior to Tiley and was therefore in the responsible position of commanding the company.

When the Middlesex made the charge, The Boy was mortally wounded as he climbed over the parapet. He fell back and began crawling down the trench to the stretcher-bearers’ dug-out. He passed Jamaica’s trench-mortar emplacement. Jamaica had lost his gun-team and was serving the trench-mortars himself. When he saw The Boy he forgot about his guns and ran off to get a stretcher-party. Tiley meanwhile, on the other flank, opposite Mine Point, had knocked out the machine-guns within range. He went on until his gun burst. The machine-gun in the Pope’s Nose, a small salient opposite Jamaica, remained in action.

It was at this point that the Royal Welch Fusiliers came up in support. Maison Rouge Alley was a nightmare; the Germans were shelling it with five-nines bursting with a black smoke and with lachrymatory shells. This caused a continual scramble backwards and forwards. There were cries and counter-cries: ‘Come on!’ ‘Get back, you bastards!’ ‘Gas turning on us!’ ‘Keep your heads, you men!’ ‘Back like hell, boys.’ ‘Whose orders?’ ‘What’s happening?’ ‘Gas!’ ‘Back!’ ‘Come on!’ ‘Gas!’ ‘Back!’ Wounded men and stretcher-bearers were still trying to squeeze past. We were alternately putting on and taking off our gas-helmets and that made things worse. In many places the trench was filled in and we had to scramble over the top. Childe-Freeman got up to the front line with only fifty men of B Company; the rest had lost their way in some abandoned trenches half-way up. The adjutant met him in the support line. ‘You ready to go over, Freeman?’ he asked. Freeman had to admit that he had lost most of his company. He felt this keenly as a disgrace; it was the first time that he had commanded a company in battle. He decided to go over with his fifty men in support of the Middlesex. He blew his whistle and the company charged. They were stopped by machine-gun fire before they had passed our own entanglements. Freeman himself died, but of heart-failure, as he stood on the parapet. After a few minutes C Company and the remainder of B reached the front line. The gas-cylinders were still whistling and the trench full of dying men. Samson decided to go over; he would not have it said that the Royal Welch had let down the Middlesex. There was a strong comradely feeling between the Middlesex and the Royal Welch. The Royal Welch and Middlesex were drawn together in dislike of the Scots. The other three battalions in the brigade were Scottish, and ♦the brigadier was a Scot and, unjustly no doubt, accused of favouring them. Our adjutant voiced the general opinion: ‘The Jocks are all the same, the trousered variety and the bare-backed variety. They’re dirty in trenches, they skite too much, and they charge like hell—both ways.’ The Middlesex, who were the original Diehard battalion, had more than once, with the Royal Welch, considered themselves let down by the Jocks. So Samson with C and the rest of B Company charged. One of the officers told me later what happened to himself. It had been agreed to advance by platoon rushes with supporting fire. When his platoon had run about twenty yards he signalled them to lie down and open covering fire. The din was tremendous. He saw the platoon on the left flopping down too, so he whistled the advance again. Nobody seemed to hear. He jumped up from his shell-hole and waved and signalled ‘Forward.’ Nobody stirred. He shouted: ‘You bloody cowards, are you leaving me to go alone?’ His platoon sergeant, groaning with a broken shoulder, gasped out: ‘Not cowards, sir. Willing enough. But they’re all f——ing dead.’ A machine-gun traversing had caught them as they rose to the whistle.

♦ “the the” replaced with “the”

Our company too had become separated by the shelling. The Surrey-man got a touch of gas and went coughing back. The Actor said he was skrim-shanking and didn’t want the battle. This was unfair. The Surrey-man looked properly sick. I do not know what happened to him, but I heard that the gas was not much and that he managed, a few months later, to get back to his own regiment in France. I found myself with The Actor in a narrow trench between the front and support lines. This trench had not been built wide enough for a stretcher to pass the bends. We came on The Boy lying on his stretcher wounded in the lungs and the stomach. Jamaica was standing over him in tears, blubbering: ‘Poor old Boy, poor old Boy, he’s going to die; I’m sure he is. He’s the only one who was decent to me.’ The Actor found we could not get by. He said to Jamaica: ‘Take that poor sod out of the way, will you? I’ve got to get my company up. Put him into a dug-out or somewhere.’ Jamaica made no answer; he seemed paralysed by the horror of the occasion. He could only repeat: ‘Poor old Boy, poor I old Boy.’ ‘Look here,’ said The Actor, ‘if you can’t shift him into a dug-out we’ll have to lift him on top of the trench. He can’t live now and we’re late getting up.’ ‘No, no,’ Jamaica shouted wildly. The Actor lost his temper and shook Jamaica roughly by the shoulders. ‘You’re the bloody trench-mortar wallah, aren’t you?’ he asked fiercely. Jamaica nodded miserably. ‘Well, your battery is a hundred yards from here. Why the hell aren’t you using your gas-pipes on that machine-gun in the Pope’s Nose? Buzz off back to them.’ And he kicked him down the trench. Then he called over his shoulder: ‘Sergeant Rose and Corporal Jennings, lift this stretcher up across the top of the trench. We’ve got to pass.’ Jamaica leaned against a traverse. ‘I do think you’re the most heartless beast I’ve ever met,’ he said weakly.

We went on up to the front line. It was full of dead and dying. The captain of the gas-company, who had kept his head and had a special oxygen respirator, had by now turned off the gas. Vermorel-sprayers had cleared out most of the gas, but we still had to wear our masks. We climbed up and crouched on the fire-step, where the gas was not so thick—gas was heavy stuff and kept low. Then Thomas arrived with the remainder of A Company and, with D, we waited for the whistle to follow the other two companies over. Fortunately at this moment the adjutant appeared. He told Thomas that he was now in command of the battalion and he didn’t care a damn about orders; he was going to cut his losses. He said he would not send A and D over until he got definite orders from brigade. He had sent a runner back because telephone communication was cut, and we must wait. Meanwhile the intense bombardment that was to follow the forty minutes’ discharge of gas began. It concentrated on the German front trench and wire. A good deal of it was short and we had further casualties in our trenches. The survivors of the Middlesex and of our B and C Companies in craters in No Man’s Land suffered heavily.

My mouth was dry, my eyes out of focus, and my legs quaking under me. I found a water-bottle full of rum and drank about half a pint; it quieted me and my head remained clear. Samson was lying wounded about twenty yards away from the front trench. Several attempts were made to get him in. He was very badly hit and groaning. Three men were killed in these attempts and two officers and two men wounded. Finally his own orderly managed to crawl out to him. Samson ordered him back, saying that he was riddled and not worth rescuing; he sent his apologies to the company for making such a noise. We waited for about a couple of hours for the order to charge. The men were silent and depressed. Sergeant Townsend was making feeble, bitter jokes about the good old British army muddling through and how he thanked God we still had a navy. I shared the rest of the rum with him and he cheered up a little. Finally a runner came with a message that the attack was off for the present.

Rumours came down the trenches of a disaster similar to our own in the brick-stack area, where the Fifth Brigade had gone over, and again at Givenchy, where it was said that men of the Sixth Brigade at the Duck’s Bill salient had fought their way into the enemy trenches, but had been bombed out, their own supply of bombs failing. It was said, however, that things were better on the right, where there had been a slight wind to take the gas over. There was a rumour that the First, Seventh, and Forty-seventh Divisions had broken through. My memory of that day is hazy. We spent it getting the wounded down to the dressing-station, spraying the trenches and dug-outs to get rid of the gas, and clearing away the earth where trenches were blocked. The trenches stank with a gas-blood-lyddite-latrine smell. Late in the afternoon we watched through our field-glasses the advance of the reserves towards Loos and Hill 70; it looked like a real break through. They were being heavily shelled. They were troops of the new-army division whose staff we had messed with the night before. Immediately to the right of us was the Highland Division, whose exploits on that day Ian Hay has celebrated in _The First Hundred Thousand_; I suppose that we were ‘the flat caps on the left’ who ‘let down’ his comrades-in-arms.

As soon as it was dusk we all went out to get in the wounded. Only sentries were left in the line. The first dead body I came upon was Samson’s. I found that he had forced his knuckles into his mouth to stop himself crying out and attracting any more men to their death. He had been hit in seventeen places. Major Swainson, the second-in-command of the Middlesex, came crawling in from the German wire. He seemed to be wounded in the lungs, the stomach and a leg. Choate, a Middlesex second-lieutenant, appeared; he was unhurt, and together we bandaged Swainson and got him into the trench and on a stretcher. He begged me to loosen his belt; I cut it with a bowie-knife that I had bought in Béthune for use in the fighting. He said: ‘I’m about done for.’[6] We spent all that night getting in the wounded of the Royal Welch, the Middlesex and those of the Argyll and Sutherland who had attacked from the front trench. The Germans behaved generously. I do not remember hearing a shot fired that night, and we kept on until it was nearly dawn and we could be plainly seen; then they fired a few shots in warning and we gave it up. By this time we had got in all the wounded and most of the Royal Welch dead. I was surprised at some of the attitudes in which the dead had stiffened—in the act of bandaging friends’ wounds, crawling, cutting wire. The Argyll and Sutherland had seven hundred casualties, including fourteen officers killed out of the sixteen that went over; the Middlesex five hundred and fifty casualties, including eleven officers killed.

Two other Middlesex officers besides Choate were unwounded; their names were Henry and Hill, second-lieutenants who had recently come with commissions from, I think, the Artists’ Rifles; their welcome in the Middlesex had been something like mine in the Royal Welch. They had been lying out in shell-holes in the rain all day, sniping and being sniped at. Henry, according to Hill, had dragged five wounded men into his shell-hole and thrown up a sort of parapet with his hands and a bowie-knife that he was carrying. Hill had his platoon sergeant with him, screaming for hours with a stomach wound, begging for morphia; he was dying, so Hill gave him five pellets. We always carried morphia with us for emergencies like this. When Choate, Henrv and Hill arrived back in the trenches with a few stragglers they reported at the Middlesex headquarters. Hill told me the story. The colonel and the adjutant were sitting down to a meat pie when he and Henry arrived. Henry said: ‘Come to report, sir. Ourselves and about ninety men of all companies. Mr. Choate is back, unwounded, too.’ They looked up dully. The colonel said: ‘So you’ve come back, have you? Well, all the rest are dead. I suppose Mr. Choate had better command what’s left of A Company, the bombing officer will command what’s left of B (the bombing officer had not gone over but remained with headquarters), Mr. Henry goes to C Company, Mr. Hill to D. The Royal Welch are holding the front line. We are here in support. Let me know where to find you if I want you. Good night.’ There was no offer to have a piece of meat pie or a drink of whisky, so they saluted and went miserably out. They were called back by the adjutant. ‘Mr. Hill! Mr. Henry!’ ‘Sir?’ Hill said that he expected a change of mind as to the propriety with which hospitality could be offered by a regular colonel and adjutant to temporary second-lieutenants in distress. But it was only to say: ‘Mr. Hill, Mr. Henry, I saw some men in the trench just now with their shoulder-straps unbuttoned and their equipment fastened anyhow. See that this practice does not occur in future. That’s all.’ Henry heard the colonel from his bunk complaining that he had only two blankets and that it was a deucedly cold night. Choate arrived a few minutes later and reported; the others had told him of their reception. After he had saluted and reported that Major Swainson, who had been thought killed, was wounded and on the way down to the dressing-station, he leaned over the table, cut a large piece of meat pie and began eating it. This caused such surprise that nothing further was said. He finished his meat pie and drank a glass of whisky, saluted, and joined the others.

Meanwhile, I had been given command of the survivors of B Company. There were only six company officers left in the Royal Welch. Next morning there were only five. Thomas was killed by a sniper. He was despondently watching the return of the new-army troops on the right. They had been pushed blindly into the gap made by the advance of the Seventh and Forty-seventh Divisions on the previous afternoon; they did not know where they were or what they were supposed to do; their ration supply had broken down. So they flocked back, not in a panic, but stupidly, like a crowd coming back from a cup final. Shrapnel was bursting above them. We noticed that the officers were in groups of their own. We could scarcely believe our eyes, it was so odd. Thomas need not have been killed; but he was in the sort of mood in which he seemed not to care one way or the other. The Actor took command of A. We lumped our companies together after a couple of days for the sake of relieving each other on night watch and getting some sleep. The first night I agreed to take the first watch, waking him up at midnight. When I went to call him I could not wake him up; I tried everything. I shook him, shouted in his ear, poured water over him, banged his head against the side of the bed. Finally I threw him on the floor. I was desperate for want of sleep myself, but he was in a depth of sleep from which nothing could shake him, so I heaved him back on the bunk and had to finish the night out myself. Even ‘Stand-to!’ failed to arouse him. I woke him at last at nine o’clock in the morning and he was furious with me for not having waked him at midnight.

The day after the attack we spent carrying the dead down to burial and cleaning the trench up as well as we could. That night the Middlesex held the line while the Royal Welch carried all the unbroken gas-cylinders along to a position on the left flank of the brigade, where they were to be used on the following night, September 27th. This was worse than carrying the dead; the cylinders were cast-iron and very heavy and we hated them. The men cursed and sulked, but got the carrying done. Orders came that we were to attack again. Only the officers knew; the men were only to be told just beforehand. It was difficult for me to keep up appearances with the men; I felt like screaming. It was still raining, harder than ever. We knew definitely this time that ours was only a subsidiary night attack, a diversion to help a division on our right to make the real attack. The scheme was the same as before. At four p.m.the gas was to be discharged again for forty minutes, then came a quartet of an hour’s bombardment, and then the attack. I broke the news to the men about three o’clock. They took it very well. The relations of officers and men, and of senior and junior officers, had been very different in the excitement of the attack. There had been no insubordination, but a greater freedom, as if everyone was drunk together. I found myself calling the adjutant Charley on one occasion; he appeared not to mind it in the least. For the next ten days my relations with my men were like those I had with the Welsh Regiment; later discipline reasserted itself and it was only occasionally that I found them intimate.

At four p.m., then, the gas went off again. There was a strong wind and it went over well; the gas-men had brought enough spanners this time. The Germans were absolutely silent. Flares went up from the reserve lines and it seemed as though all the men in the front line were dead. The brigadier decided not to take too much for granted; after the bombardment he sent out twenty-five men and an officer of the Cameronians as a feeling-patrol. The patrol reached the German wire; there was a burst of machine-gun and rifle fire and only two wounded men regained the trench. We: waited on the fire-step from four to nine o’clock, with fixed; bayonets, for the order to go over. My mind was a blank except for the recurrence of ‘S’nice smince spie, s’nice smince spie.... I don’t like ham, lamb or jam and I don’t like roley-poley....’ The men laughed at my singing. The sergeant who was acting company sergeant-major said to me: ‘It’s murder, sir.’ ‘Of course it’s murder, you bloody fool,’ I agreed. ‘But there’s nothing else for it, is there?’ It was still raining. ‘But when I see’s a s’nice smince spie, I asks for a helping twice....’ At nine o’clock we were told that the attack was put off; we were told to hold ourselves in readiness to attack at dawn.

No order came at dawn. And no more attacks were promised us after this. From the morning of September 24th to the night of October 3rd I had in all eight hours of sleep. I kept myself awake and alive by drinking about a bottle of whisky a day. I had never drank it before and have seldom drank it since; it certainly was good then. We had no blankets, greatcoats, or waterproof sheets. We had no time or material to build new shelters, and the rain continued. Every night we went out to get in the dead of the other battalions. The Germans continued to be indulgent and we had few casualties. After the first day or two the bodies swelled and stank. I vomited more than once while superintending the carrying. The ones that we could not get in from the German wire continued to swell until the wall of the stomach collapsed, either naturally or punctured by a bullet; a disgusting smell would float across. The colour of the dead faces changed from white to yellow-grey, to red, to purple, to green, to black, to slimy.

On the morning of the 27th a cry was heard from No Man’s Land. It was a wounded man of the Middlesex who had recovered consciousness after two days. He was close to the German wire. Our men heard it and looked at each other. We had a lance-corporal called Baxter and he was tender-hearted. He was the man to boil up a special dixie of tea for the sentries of his section when they came off duty. When he heard the wounded man cry out he ran up and down the trench calling for a volunteer to come out with him and bring the man in. Of course no one would go; it was death to put one’s head over the trench. He came running to ask me. I excused myself as the only officer in the company. I said I would come out with him at dusk, but I would not go now. So he went out himself. He jumped quickly over the parapet, then strolled across waving a handkerchief; the Germans fired at him to frighten him, but he came on, so they let him come up close. They must have heard the Middlesex man themselves. Baxter continued towards them and, when he got up to the Middlesex man, he stopped and pointed to show the Germans what he was at. Then he dressed the man’s wounds, gave him a drink of rum and some biscuit that he had with him, and told him that he would come back again for him in the evening. He did come back for him with a stretcher-party and the man eventually recovered. I recommended Baxter for the Victoria Cross, being the only officer who had seen the thing done; but he only got a Distinguished Conduct Medal.

The Actor and I had decided to get into touch with the battalion on our right. It was the Tenth Highland Light Infantry. I went down their trench some time in the morning of the 26th. I walked nearly a quarter of a mile before seeing either a sentry or an officer. There were dead men, sleeping men, wounded men, gassed men, all lying anyhow. The trench had been used as a latrine. Finally I met a Royal Engineer officer. He said to me: ‘If the Boche knew what an easy job it was, he’d just walk over and take this trench.’ So I came back and told The Actor that we might expect to have our flank in the air at any moment. We turned the communication trench that made the boundary between the two battalions into a fire-trench facing right; a machine-gun was mounted to put up a barrage in case they ran. On the night of the 27th the Highlanders mistook some of our men, who were out in No Man’s Land getting in the dead, for the enemy. They began firing wildly. The Germans retaliated. Our men caught the infection, but were at once told to cease fire. ‘Cease fire’ went along the trench until it came to the H.L.I., who misheard it as ‘Retire.’ A panic seized them and they came rushing back. Fortunately they came down the trench instead of over the top. They were stopped by a sergeant of the Fifth Scottish Rifles, a territorial battalion now in support to ourselves and the Middlesex. He chased them back into their trench at the point of the bayonet.

On the 3rd of October we were relieved. The relieving troops were a composite battalion consisting of about a hundred men of the Second Royal Warwickshire Regiment and about seventy Royal Welch Fusiliers, all that was left of our own First Battalion. Hanmer Jones and Frank Jones-Bateman had both been wounded. Frank had his thigh broken with a rifle-bullet while stripping the equipment off a wounded man in No Man’s Land; the cartridges in the man’s pouches had been set on fire by a shot and were exploding.[7] We went back to Sailly la Bourse for a couple of days, where the colonel rejoined us with his bandaged hand, and then further back to Annezin, a little village near Béthune, where I lodged in a two-roomed cottage with an old woman called Adelphine Heu.

XVI

At Annezin we reorganized. Some of the lightly wounded rejoined for duty and a big draft from the Third Battalion arrived, so that in a week’s time we were nearly seven hundred strong, with a full complement of officers. Old Adelphine made me comfortable. She used to come into my room in the morning when I was shaving and tell me the local gossip—how stingy her daughter-in-law was, and what a rogue the Maire was, and about the woman at Fouquières who had just been delivered of black twins. She said that the Kaiser was a bitch and spat on the floor to confirm it. Her favourite subject was the shamelessness of modern girls. Yet she herself had been gay and beautiful and much sought after when she was young she said. She had been in service as lady’s maid to a rich draper’s wife of Béthune, and had travelled widely with her in the surrounding country, and even over the border into Belgium. She asked me about the various villages in which I had recently been billeted, and told me scandal about the important families who used to live in each. She asked me if I had been in La Bassée; she did not realize that it was in the hands of the enemy. I said no, but I had tried to visit it recently and had been detained. ‘Do you know Auchy, then?’ I said that I had seen it often from a distance. ‘Then perhaps you know a big farm-house between Auchy and Cambrin called Les Briques Farm?’ I said, startled, that I knew it very well, and that it was a strong place with a moat and cellars and a kitchen garden now full of barbed wire. She said: ‘Then I shall tell you. I was staying there in 1870. It was the year of the other war and there was at the house a handsome young _petit-caporal_ who was fond of me. So because he was a nice boy and because it was the war, we slept together and I had a baby. But God punished me and the baby died. That’s a long time ago.’

She told me that all the girls in Annezin prayed every night for the war to end and for the English to go away as soon as their money was spent. She said that the clause about the money was always repeated in case God should miss it.

Troops serving in the Pas de Calais loathed the French; except for occasional members of the official class, we found them thoroughly unlikeable people, and it was difficult to sympathize with their misfortunes. They had all the shortcomings of a border people. I wrote home about this time:

‘I find it very difficult to love the French here. Even when we have been billeted in villages where no troops have been before, I have not met a single case of the hospitality that one meets among the peasants of other countries. It is worse than inhospitality here, for after all we are fighting for their dirty little lives. They suck enormous quantities of money out of us too. Calculate how much has flowed into the villages around Béthune, which for many months now have been continuously housing about a hundred thousand men. Apart from the money that they get paid directly as billeting allowance, there is the pay that the troops spend. Every private soldier gets his five-franc note (nearly four shillings) every ten days, and spends it on eggs, coffee, and beer in the local _estaminets_; the prices are ridiculous and the stuff bad. In the brewery at Béthune, the other day, I saw barrels of already thin beer being watered from the canal with a hose-pipe. The _estaminet_-keepers water it further.’ (The fortunes made in the war were consolidated after the Versailles Treaty, when every peasant in the devastated areas staked preposterous compensation claims for the loss of possessions that he had never had.) It was surprising that there were so few clashes between the British and French as there were. The Pas de Calais French hated us and were convinced that when the war was over we intended to stay and hold the Channel ports. It was impossible for us at the time to realize that it was all the same to the peasants whether they were on the German or the British side of the line—it was a foreign military occupation anyhow. They were not at all interested in the sacrifices that we were making for ‘their dirty little lives.’ Also, we were shocked at the severity of French national accountancy; when we were told, for instance, that every British hospital train, the locomotive and carriages of which had been imported from England, had to pay a £200 fee for use of the rails on each journey they made from railhead to base.

The fighting was still going on around Loos. We could hear the guns in the distance, but it was clear that the thrust had failed and that we were now skirmishing for local advantages. But on October 13th there was a final flare-up; the noise of the guns was so great that even the inhabitants of Annezin, accustomed to these alarms, were properly frightened, and began packing up in case the Germans broke through. Old Adelphine was in tears with fright. Early that afternoon I was in Béthune at the _Globe_ drinking champagne-cocktails with some friends who had joined from the Third Battalion, when the assistant provost-marshal put his head in the door and called out: ‘Any officers of the Fifth, Sixth, or Nineteenth Brigades here?’ We jumped up. ‘You are to return at once to your units.’ ‘Oh God,’ said Robertson, ‘that means another show.’ Robertson had been in D Company and so escaped the charge. ‘We’ll be pushed over the top to-night to reinforce someone, and that’ll be the end of us.’

We hurried back to Annezin and found everything in confusion. ‘We’re standing-to—at half an hour’s notice for the trenches,’ we were told. We packed up hastily and in a few minutes the whole battalion was out in the road in fighting order. We were to go up to the Hohenzollern Redoubt and were now issued with new trench maps of it. The men were in high spirits, even the survivors of the show. They were singing songs to the accompaniment of an accordion and a penny whistle. Only at one time, when a ‘mad-minute’ of artillery noise was reached, they stopped and looked at each other, and Sergeant Townsend said sententiously: ‘That’s the charge. Many good fellows going west at this moment; maybe chums of ours.’ Gradually the noise died down, and a message came at last from brigade that we would not be needed. It had been another dud show, chiefly to be remembered for the death of Charles Sorley, a captain in the Suffolks, one of the three poets of importance killed in the war. (The other two were Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen.)

This ended the operations for 1915. Tension was relaxed. We returned to battalion mess, to company drill, and to riding-school for the young officers. It was as though there had been no battle except that the senior officers were fewer and the Special Reserve element larger. Two or three days later we were back in trenches in the same sector. In October I was gazetted a captain in the Third (Special Reserve) Battalion. Promotion in the Third Battalion was rapid for subalterns who had joined early, because the battalion had trebled its strength and so was entitled to three times as many captains as before. It was good to have my pay go up several shillings a day, with an increase of war bonus and possible gratuity and pension if I were wounded, but I did not consider that side of it much. It was rank that was effective overseas. And here I was promoted captain over the heads of officers who had longer trench service and were older and better trained than myself. I went to the adjutant and offered not to wear the badges of rank while serving with the battalion. He said not unkindly: ‘No, put your stars up. It can’t be helped.’ I knew that he and the colonel had no use for Special Reserve captains unless they were outstandingly good, and would not hesitate to get rid of them.

A Special Reserve major and captain had been recently sent home from the First Battalion, with a confidential report of inefficiency. I was anxious to avoid any such disgrace. Nor was my anxiety unfounded; shortly after I left the Second Battalion two other Special Reserve captains, one of whom had been promoted at the same time as myself, were sent back as ‘likely to be of more service in the training of troops at home.’ One of them was, I know, more efficient than I was.

I was in such a depressed state of nerves now that if I had gone into the trenches as a company officer I should probably have modified my formula for taking risks. Fortunately, I had a rest from the front line, being attached to the brigade sappers. Hill of the Middlesex was also having this relief. He told me that the Middlesex colonel had made a speech to the survivors of the battalion as soon as they were back in billets, telling them that the battalion had been unfortunate but would soon be given an opportunity of avenging its dead and making a fresh and, this time he hoped, successful attack upon La Bassée. ‘I know you Diehards! You will go like lions over the top.’ Hill’s servant had whispered confidentially to Hill: ‘Not on purpose I don’t, sir!’ The sapping company specialized in maintaining communication and reserve trenches in good repair. I was with it for a month before being returned to ordinary company duty. My recall was a punishment for failing, one day when we were in billets, to observe a paragraph in battalion orders requiring my presence on battalion parade.

My remaining trench service with the Second Battalion this autumn was uneventful. There was no excitement left in patrolling, no horror in the continual experience of death. The single recordable incident I recall was one of purely technical interest, a new method that an officer named Owen and myself invented for dealing with machine-guns firing at night. The method was to give each sentry a piece of string about a yard long, with a cartridge tied at each end; when the machine-gun started firing, sentries who were furthest from the fire would stretch the string in the direction of the machine-gun and peg it down with the points of the cartridges. This gave a pretty accurate line on the machine-gun. When we had about thirty or more of these lines taken on a single machine-gun we fixed rifles as accurately as possible along them and waited for it; as soon as it started we opened five rounds rapid. This gave a close concentration of fire and no element of nervousness could disturb the aim, the rifles being secured between sandbags. Divisional headquarters asked us for a report of the method. There was a daily exchange of courtesies between our machine-guns and the Germans’ at stand-to; by removing cartridges from the ammunition belt it was possible to rap out the rhythm of the familiar call: ‘Me—et me do—wn in Pi—cca-di—ll—y,’ to which the Germans would reply, though in slower tempo, because our guns were faster than theirs: ‘Se—e you da—mned to He—ll first.’

It was late in this October that I was sent a press-cutting from _John Bull_. Horatio Bottomley, the editor, was protesting against the unequal treatment for criminal offences meted out to commoners and aristocrats. A young man, he said, convicted in the police-court of a criminal offence was merely bound over and put in the care of a physician—because he was the grandson of an earl! An offender not belonging to the influential classes would have been given three months without the option of a fine. The article described in some detail how Dick, a sixteen-year old boy, had made ‘a certain proposal’ to a corporal in a Canadian regiment stationed near ‘Charterhouse College,’ and how the corporal had very properly given him in charge of the police. This news was nearly the end of me. I decided that Dick had been driven out of his mind by the war. There was madness in the family, I knew; he had once shown me a letter from his grandfather scrawled in circles all over the page. It would be easy to think of him as dead.

I had now been in the trenches for five months and was getting past my prime. For the first three weeks an officer was not much good in the trenches; he did not know his way about, had not learned the rules of health and safety, and was not yet accustomed to recognizing degrees of danger. Between three weeks and four months he was at his best, unless he happened to have any particular bad shock or sequence of shocks. Then he began gradually to decline in usefulness as neurasthenia developed in him. At six months he was still more or less all right; but by nine or ten months, unless he had a few weeks’ rest on a technical course or in hospital, he began to be a drag on the other members of the company. After a year or fifteen months he was often worse than useless. Officers had a less laborious but a more nervous time than the men. There were proportionately twice as many neurasthenic cases among officers as among men, though the average life of a man before getting killed or wounded was twice as long as an officer’s. Officers between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-three had a longer useful life than those older or younger. I was too young. Men over forty, though they did not suffer from the want of sleep so much as those under twenty, had less resistance to the sudden alarms and shocks. Dr. W. H. R. Rivers told me later that the action of one of the ductless glands—I think the thyroid—accounted for this decline in military usefulness. It pumped its chemical into the blood as a sedative for tortured nerves; this process went on until the condition of the blood was permanently affected and a man went about his tasks in a stupid and doped way, cheated into further endurance. It has taken some ten years for my blood to run at all clean. The unfortunates were the officers who had two years or more continuous trench service. In many cases they became dipsomaniacs. I knew three or four officers who had worked up to the point of two bottles of whisky a day before they were lucky enough to get wounded or sent home in some other way. A two-bottle company commander of one of our line battalions still happens to be alive who, in three shows running, got his company needlessly destroyed because he was no longer capable of taking clear decisions.

Aside from wounds, gas, and the accidents of war, the life of the trench soldier was, for the most part, not unhealthy. Food was plentiful and hard work in the open air made up for the discomfort of wet feet and clothes and draughty billets. A continual need for alertness discouraged minor illnesses; a cold was thrown off in a few hours, an attack of indigestion was hardly noticed. This was true, at least, in a good battalion, where the men were bent on going home either with an honourable wound or not at all. In an inferior battalion the men would prefer a wound to bronchitis, but would not mind the bronchitis. In a bad battalion they did not care ‘whether,’ in the trench phrase, ‘the cow calved or the bull broke its bloody neck.’ In a really good battalion, as the Second Battalion was when I went to it first, the question of getting wounded and going home was not permitted to be raised. Such a battalion had a very small sick list. In the 1914–15 winter there were no more than four or five casualties from ‘trench feet’ in the Second, and the following winter no more than eight or nine; the don’t-care battalions lost very heavily indeed. Trench feet was almost entirely a matter of morale, in spite of the lecture-formula that N.C.O.’s and officers used to repeat time after time to the men: ‘Trench feet is caused by tight boots, tight puttees or any other clothing calculated to interfere with the circulation of blood in the legs.’ Trench feet was caused rather by going to sleep with wet boots, cold feet, and depression. Wet boots, by themselves, did not matter. If the man warmed his feet at a brazier or stamped them until they were warm and then went off to sleep with a sandbag tied round them he took no harm. He might even fall asleep with cold, wet feet, and they might swell slightly owing to tightness of boots or puttees; but trench feet only came if he did not mind getting trench feet or anything else, because his battalion had lost the power of sticking things out. At Bouchavesnes on the Somme in the winter of 1916–17 a battalion of dismounted cavalry lost half its strength in two days from trench feet; our Second Battalion had just had ten days in the same trenches with no cases at all.

Autumn was melancholy in the La Bassée sector; in the big poplar forests the leaves were French yellow and the dykes were overflowing and the ground utterly sodden. Béthune was not the place it had been; the Canadians billeted there drew two or three times as much pay as our own troops and had sent the prices up. But it was still more or less intact and one could still get cream buns and fish dinners.

In November I had orders to join the First Battalion, which was reorganizing after the Loos fighting. I was delighted. I found it in billets at Locon, behind Festubert, which was only a mile or two to the north of Cambrin. The difference between the two battalions continued markedly throughout the war, however many times each battalion got broken. The difference was that the Second Battalion at the outbreak of war had just finished its eighteen years overseas tour, while the First Battalion had not been out of England since the South African War. The First Battalion was, therefore, less old-fashioned in its militarism and more human; livers were better; the men had dealings with white women and not with brown. It would have been impossible in the First Battalion to see what I once saw in the Second—a senior officer pursuing a private soldier down the street, kicking his bottom because he had been slack in saluting. The First Battalion was as efficient and as regimental, on the whole more successful in its fighting, and a much easier battalion to live in.

The battalion already had its new company commanders and I went as second-captain to young Richardson of A Company. He was from Sandhurst, and his company was one of the best that I was ever with. They were largely Welshmen of 1915 enlistment. None of the officers in the company were more than twenty-two or twenty-three years old. A day or two after I arrived I went to visit C Company, where a Third Battalion officer whom I knew was commanding. The C’s greeted me in a friendly way. As we were talking I noticed a book lying on the table. It was the first book (except my Keats and Blake) that I had seen since I came to France that was not either a military text-book or a rubbish novel. It was the _Essays of Lionel Johnson_. When I had a chance I stole a look at the fly-leaf, and the name was Siegfried Sassoon. I looked round to see who could possibly be called Siegfried Sassoon and bring _Lionel Johnson_ with him to the First Battalion. He was obvious, so I got into conversation with him, and a few minutes later we were walking to Béthune, being off duty until that night, and talking about poetry. Siegfried had, at the time, published nothing except a few privately-printed pastoral pieces of eighteen-ninetyish flavour and a satire on Masefield which, about half-way through, had forgotten to be a satire and was rather good Masefield. We went to the cake shop and ate cream buns. At this time I was getting my first book of poems, _Over the Brazier_, ready for the press; I had one or two drafts in my pocket-book and showed them to Siegfried. He told me that they were too realistic and that war should not be written about in a realistic way. In return he showed me some of his own poems. One of them began:

Return to greet me, colours that were my joy, Not in the woeful crimson of men slain....

This was before Siegfried had been in the trenches. I told him, in my old-soldier manner, that he would soon change his style.

That night the whole battalion went up to work at a new defence scheme at Festubert. Festubert was nightmare, and had been so since the first fighting there in 1914, when the inmates of its lunatic asylum had been caught between two fires and broken out and run all over the countryside. The British trench line went across a stretch of ground marked on the map as ‘Marsh, sometimes dry in the summer.’ It consisted of islands of high-command trench, with no communication between them except at night, and was a murderous place for patrols. The battalion had been nearly wiped out here six months previously. We were set to build up a strong reserve line. It was freezing hard and we were unable to make any progress on the frozen ground. We came here night after night. We raised a couple of hundred yards of trench about two or three feet high, at the cost of several men wounded from casual shots skimming the trench in front of us. Work was resumed by other troops when the thaw came and a thick seven foot-high ramp built. We were told later that it gradually sank down into the marsh, and in the end was completely engulfed.

When I left the Second Battalion I was permitted to take my servant, Private Fahy (known as Tottie Fay, after the actress), with me. Tottie was a reservist from Birmingham who had been called up when war broke out, and had been with the Second Battalion ever since. By trade he was a silversmith and he had recently, when on leave, made a cigarette case and engraved it with my name as a present. He worked well and we liked each other. When he arrived at the First Battalion he met a Sergeant Dickens who had been his boozing chum in India seven or eight years back; so they celebrated it. The next morning I was surprised to find my buttons not polished and no hot water for shaving. I was annoyed; it made me late for breakfast. I could get no news of Tottie. On my way to rifle inspection at nine o’clock at the company billet I noticed something unusual at the corner of a farm-yard. It was Field Punishment No. 1 being carried out—my first sight of it. Tottie was the victim. He had been awarded twenty-eight days for ‘drunkenness in the field.’ He was spread-eagled to the wheel of a company limber, tied by the ankles and wrists in the form of an X. He remained in this position—‘Crucifixion,’ they called it—for several hours a day; I forget how many, but it was a good working-day. The sentence was to be carried out for as long as the battalion remained in billets, and was to be continued after the next spell of trenches. I shall never forget the look that Tottie gave me. He was a quiet, respectful, devoted servant, and he wanted to tell me that he was sorry for having let me down. His immediate reaction was an attempt to salute; I could see him try to lift his hand to his forehead, and bring his heels together, but he could do nothing; his eyes filled with tears. The battalion police-sergeant, a fierce-looking man, had just finished knotting him up when I arrived. I told Tottie that I was sorry to see him in trouble. That drink, as it proved, did him good in the end. I had to find another servant. Old Joe, the quartermaster, knowing that Tottie was the only trained officer’s servant in the battalion, took him from me when his sentence expired; he even induced the colonel to remit a few days of it. Tottie was safer in billets with Old Joe than in trenches with me. Some time in the summer of the following year his seven years’ contract as a reservist expired. When their ‘buckshee seven’ expired, reservists were sent home for a few days and then ‘deemed to have re-enlisted under the Military Service Act,’ and recalled to the battalion. But Tottie made good use of his leave. His brother-in-law was director of a munitions factory and took Tottie in as a skilled metal-worker. He was made a starred man—his work was so important to industry that he could not be spared for military service, so Tottie is, I hope, still alive. Good luck to him and to Birmingham. Sergeant Dickens was a different case. He was a fighter, and one of the best N.C.O.’s in either battalion of the regiment. He had been awarded the d.c.m. and Bar, the Military Medal and the French Médaille Militaire. Two or three times already he had been promoted to sergeant’s rank and each time been reduced for drunkenness. He escaped field-punishment because it was considered sufficient for him to lose his stripes, and whenever there was a battle Dickens would distinguish himself so conspicuously as a leader that he would be given his stripes back again.

Early in December the rumour came that we were going for divisional training to the back areas. I would not believe it, having heard stories of this kind too often, and was surprised when it turned out to be true. Siegfried Sassoon, in his _Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man_, has described this battalion move. It was an even more laborious experience for our A Company than for his C Company. We got up at five o’clock one morning, breakfasted hastily, packed our kits, and marched down to the railhead three miles away. Here we had the task of entraining all the battalion stores, transport and transport-animals. This took us to the middle of the morning. We then entrained ourselves for a ten-hour journey to a junction on the Somme about twenty miles away from the front line. The officers travelled in third-class apartments, the men in closed trucks marked: ‘Hommes 40, chevaux 8’—they were very stiff when they arrived. ‘A’ Company was called on to do the detraining job too. When we had finished, the dixies of tea prepared for us were all cold. The other companies had been resting for a couple of hours; we had only a few minutes. The march was along _pavé_ roads and the rough chalk tracks of the Picardy downland. It started about midnight and finished about six o’clock next morning, the men carrying their packs and rifles. There was a competition between the companies as to which would have the fewest men falling out; A won. The village we finally arrived at was called Montagne le Fayel. No troops had been billeted here before, and its inhabitants were annoyed at being knocked up in the middle of the night by our advance-guard to provide accommodation for eight hundred men at two hours’ notice. We found these Picard peasants much more likeable than the Pas de Calais people. I was billeted with an old man called Monsieur Elie Caron, a retired schoolmaster with a bright eye and white hair. He lived entirely on vegetables, and gave me a vegetarian pamphlet entitled _Comment Vivre Cent Ans_. We already knew of the coming Somme offensive, so this was a good joke. He also gave me Longfellow’s _Evangeline_ in English. I have always been sorry for English books stranded in France, whatever their demerits; so I accepted it and later brought it home.

We were at Montagne for six weeks. The colonel, who appears in Siegfried’s book as Colonel Winchell, was known in the regiment as Scatter, short for Scatter-cash, because when he first joined the regiment he had been so lavish with his allowance. Scatter put the battalion through its paces with peace-time severity. He asked us to forget the trenches and to fit ourselves for the open warfare that was bound to come once the Somme defences were pierced. Every other day was a field-day; we were back again in spirit to General Haking’s _Company Training_. Even those of us who did not believe in the break-through thoroughly enjoyed these field-days. The guns could only just be heard in the distance, it was quite unspoilt country, and every man in the battalion was fit. Days that were not field-days were given up to battalion drill and musketry. This training seemed entirely unrelated to war as we had experienced it. We played a lot of games, including inter-battalion rugger; I played full-back for the battalion. Three other officers were in the team; Richardson as front-row scrum-man; Pritchard, another Sandhurst boy, who was fly-half; and David Thomas, a Third Battalion second-lieutenant, who was an inside three-quarter. David Thomas and Siegfried were the closest friends I made while in France. David was a simple, gentle fellow and fond of reading. Siegfried, he, and I were together a lot.

One day David met me in the village street. He said: ‘Did you hear the bugle? There’s a hell of a row on about something. All officers and warrant-officers are to meet in the village schoolroom at once. Scatter’s looking as black as-thunder. No one knows yet what the axe is about.’ We went along together and squeezed into one of the school desk-benches. When the colonel entered and the room was called to attention by the senior major, David and I hurt ourselves standing up, bench and all. Scatter told us all to be seated. The officers were in one class, the warrant-officers and non-commissioned officers in another. The colonel glared at us from the teacher’s desk. He began his lecture with general accusations. He said that he had lately noticed many signs of slovenliness in the battalion—men with their pocket-flaps undone, and actually walking down the village street with their hands in their trousers-pockets—boots unpolished—sentries strolling about on their beats at company billets instead of marching up and down in a soldier-like way—rowdiness in the _estaminets_—slackness in saluting—with many other grave indications of lowered discipline. He threatened to stop all leave to the United Kingdom unless discipline improved. He promised us a saluting parade every morning before breakfast which he would attend in person. All this was general axe-ing and we knew that he had not yet reached the particular axe. It was this: ‘I have here principally to tell you of a very disagreeable occurrence. As I was going out of my orderly room early this morning I came upon a group of soldiers; I will not mention their company. One of these soldiers was in conversation with a lance-corporal. You may not believe it, but it was a fact that he addressed the corporal by his Christian name; _he called him Jack_. The corporal made no protest. To think that the First Battalion has sunk to a level where it is possible for such familiarity to exist between N.C.O.’s and the men under their command! Naturally, I put the corporal under arrest, and he appeared before me at once on the charge of ‘conduct unbecoming to an N.C.O.’ He was reduced to the ranks, and the man was given field-punishment for using insubordinate language to an N.C.O. And, I warn you, if any further case of the sort comes to my notice—and I expect you officers to report the slightest instance to me at once instead of dealing with it as a company matter....’ I tried to catch Siegfried’s eye, but he was busy avoiding it, so I caught David’s instead. This is one of those caricature scenes that now seem to sum up the various stages of my life. There was a fresco around the walls of the class-room illustrating the evils of alcoholism. It started with the innocent boy being offered a drink by his mate, and then his downward path, culminating in wife-beating, murder, and _delirium tremens_.

The battalion’s only complaint against Montagne was that women were not so easy to get hold of in that part of the country as around Béthune; the officers had the unfair advantage of being able to borrow horses and ride into Amiens. I remained puritanical. There was a Blue Lamp at Amiens as there was at Abbéville, Havre, Rouen, and all the big towns behind the lines. The Blue Lamp was for officers, as the Red Lamp was for men. It was most important for discipline to be maintained in this way.

In January the Seventh Division sent two company officers from each brigade to instruct troops at the base. I and a captain in the Queen’s were the two who had been out longest, so we were chosen; it was a gift of two months longer life to us.

XVII

I was one of about thirty instructors at the Havre ‘Bull Ring,’ where newly-arrived drafts were sent for technical instruction before going up the line. Most of my colleagues were specialists in musketry, machine-gun, gas, or bombs. I had no specialist training, only general experience. I was put on instructional work in trench relief and trench discipline in a model set of trenches. My principal other business was arms-drill. One day it rained, and the commandant of the Bull Ring suddenly ordered me to lecture in the big concert hall. ‘There are three thousand men there waiting for you, and you’re the only available officer with a loud enough voice to make himself heard.’ They were Canadians, so instead of giving my usual semi-facetious lecture on ‘How to be happy though in the trenches,’ I paid them the compliment of telling them the story of Loos, and what a balls-up it was, and why it was a balls-up. It was the only audience that I ever held for an hour with real attention. I expected the commandant to be furious with me because the principal object of the Bull Ring was to inculcate the offensive spirit, but he took it well and I had several more concert-hall lectures put on me after this.

In the instructors’ mess the chief subjects of conversation besides local and technical talk were _morale_, the reliability of various divisions in battle, the value of different training methods, and war-morality, with particular reference to atrocities. We talked more freely there than would have been possible either in England or in the trenches. We decided that about a third of the troops in the British Expeditionary Force were dependable on all occasions; these were the divisions that were always called on for the most important tasks. About a third were variable, that is, where a division contained one or two bad battalions, but could be more or less trusted. The remainder were more or less untrustworthy; being put in positions of comparative safety they had about a quarter of the casualties that the best divisions had. It was a matter of pride to belong to one of the recognized best divisions—the Seventh, the Twenty-ninth, Guards’, First Canadian, for instance. They were not pampered when in reserve as the German storm-troops were, but promotion, leave, and the chance of a wound came quicker in them. The mess agreed that the most dependable British troops were the Midland county regiments, industrial Yorkshire and Lancashire troops, and the Londoners. The Ulsterman, Lowland Scots and Northern English were pretty good. The Catholic Irish and the Highland Scots were not considered so good—they took unnecessary risks in trenches and had unnecessary casualties, and in battle, though they usually made their objective, they too often lost it in the counter-attack; without officers they were no good. English southern county regiments varied from good to very bad. All overseas troops were good. The dependability of divisions also varied with their seniority in date of promotion. The latest formed regular divisions and the second-line territorial divisions, whatever their recruiting area, were usually inferior. Their senior officers and warrant-officers were not good enough.

We once discussed which were the cleanest troops in trenches, taken in nationalities. We agreed on a list like this, in descending order: English and German Protestants; Northern Irish, Welsh and Canadians; Irish and German Catholics; Scottish; Mohammedan Indians; Algerians; Portuguese; Belgians; French. The Belgians and French were put there for spite; they were not really dirtier than the Algerians or Portuguese.

Atrocities. Propaganda reports of atrocities were, we agreed, ridiculous. Atrocities against civilians were surely few. We remembered that while the Germans were in a position to commit atrocities against enemy civilians, Germany itself, except for the early Russian cavalry raid, had never had the enemy on her soil. We no longer believed accounts of unjustified German atrocities in Belgium; know the Belgians now at first-hand. By atrocities we meant, specifically, rape, mutilation and torture, not summary shootings of suspected spies, harbourers of spies, _francs-tireurs_, or disobedient local officials. If the atrocity list was to include the accidental-on-purpose bombing or machine-gunning of civilians from the air, the Allies were now committing as many atrocities as the Germans. French and Belgian civilians had often tried to win our sympathy and presents by exhibiting mutilations of children—stumps of hands and feet, for instance—representing them as deliberate, fiendish atrocities when they were merely the result of shell-fire, British or French shell-fire as likely as not. We did not believe that rape was any more common on the German side of the line than on the Allied side. It was unnecessary. Of course, a bully-beef diet, fear of death, and absence of wives made ample provision of women necessary in the occupied areas. No doubt the German army authorities provided brothels in the principal French towns behind the line, as did the French on the Allied side. But the voluntary system would suffice. We did not believe stories of forcible enlistment of women.

As for atrocities against soldiers. The difficulty was to say where to draw the line. For instance, the British soldier at first regarded as atrocious the use of bowie-knives by German patrols. After a time he learned to use them himself; they were cleaner killing weapons than revolvers or bombs. The Germans regarded as atrocious the British Mark VII rifle bullet, which was more apt to turn on striking than the German bullet. For true atrocities, that is, personal rather than military violations of the code of war, there were few opportunities. The most obvious opportunity was in the interval between surrender of prisoners and their arrival (or non-arrival) at headquarters. And it was an opportunity of which advantage was only too often taken. Nearly every instructor in the mess knew of specific cases when prisoners had been murdered on the way back. The commonest motives were, it seems, revenge for the death of friends or relations, jealousy of the prisoner’s pleasant trip to a comfortable prison camp in England, military enthusiasm, fear of being suddenly overpowered by the prisoners or, more simply, not wanting to be bothered with the escorting job. In any of these cases the conductors would report on arrival at headquarters that a German shell had killed the prisoners; no questions would be asked. We had every reason to believe that the same thing happened on the German side, where prisoners, as useless mouths to feed in a country already on short rations, were even less welcome. We had none of us heard of prisoners being more than threatened at headquarters to get military information from them; the sort of information that trench-prisoners could give was not of sufficient importance to make torture worth while; in any case it was found that when treated kindly prisoners were anxious, in gratitude, to tell as much as they knew.

The troops that had the worst reputation for acts of violence against prisoners were the Canadians (and later the Australians). With the Canadians the motive was said to be revenge for a Canadian found crucified with bayonets through his hands and feet in a German trench; this atrocity was never substantiated, nor did we believe the story freely circulated that the Canadians crucified a German officer in revenge shortly afterwards. (Of the Australians the only thing to be said was that they were only two generations removed from the days of Ralph Rashleigh and Marcus Clarke.) How far this reputation for atrocities was deserved, and how far it was due to the overseas habit of bragging and leg-pulling, we could not decide. We only knew that to have committed atrocities against prisoners was, among the overseas men, and even among some British troops, a boast, not a confession.

I heard two first-hand accounts later in the war.

A Canadian-Scot: ‘I was sent back with three bloody prisoners, you see, and one was limping and groaning, so I had to keep on kicking the sod down the trench. He was an officer. It was getting dark and I was getting fed up, so I thought: “I’ll have a bit of a game.” I had them covered with the officer’s revolver and I made ’em open their pockets. Then I dropped a Mills’ bomb in each, with the pin out, and ducked behind a traverse. Bang, bang, bang! No more bloody prisoners. No good Fritzes but dead ’uns.’

An Australian: ‘Well, the biggest lark I had was at Morlancourt when we took it the first time. There were a lot of Jerries in a cellar and I said to ’em: “Come out, you Camarades.” So out they came, a dozen of ’em, with their hands up. “Turn out your pockets,” I told ’em. They turned ’em out. Watches and gold and stuff, all dinkum. Then I said: “Now back into your cellar, you sons of bitches.” For I couldn’t be bothered with ’em. When they were all down I threw half a dozen Mills’ bombs in after ’em. I’d got the stuff all right, and we weren’t taking prisoners that day.’

The only first-hand account I heard of large-scale atrocities was from an old woman at Cardonette on the Somme, with whom I was billeted in July 1916. It was at Cardonette that a battalion of French Turcos overtook the rear guard of a German division retreating from the Marne in September 1914. The Turcos surprised the dead-weary Germans while they were still marching in column. The old woman went, with gestures, through a pantomime of slaughter, ending: ‘Et enfin, ces animaux leur ont arraché les oreilles et les ont mis à la poche.’ The presence of coloured troops in Europe was, from the German point of view, we knew, one of the chief Allied atrocities. We sympathized. Recently, at Flixécourt, one of the instructors told us, the cook of a corps headquarter-mess used to be visited at the château every morning by a Turco; he was orderly to a French liaison officer. The Turco used to say: ‘Tommy, give Johnny pozzy,’ and a tin of plum and apple jam used to be given him. One afternoon the corps was due to shift, so that morning the cook said to the Turco, giving him his farewell tin: ‘Oh, la, la, Johnny, napoo pozzy to-morrow.’ The Turco would not believe it. ‘Yes, Tommy, mate,’ he said, ‘pozzy for Johnny to-morrow, to-morrow, to-morrow.’ To get rid of him the cook said: ‘Fetch me the head of a Fritz, Johnny, to-night. I’ll ask the general to give you pozzy to-morrow, to-morrow, to-morrow.’ ‘All right, mate,’ said the Turco, ‘me get Fritz head to-night, general give me pozzy to-morrow.’ That evening the mess cook of the new corps that had taken over the château was surprised to find a Turco asking for him and swinging a bloody head in a sandbag. ‘Here’s Fritz head, mate,’ said the Turco, ‘general give me pozzy to-morrow, to-morrow, to-morrow.’ As Flixécourt was twenty miles or more behind the line.... He did not need to end the story, but swore it was true, because he had seen the head.

We discussed the continuity of regimental _morale_. A captain in a line battalion of one of the Surrey regiments said: ‘It all depends on the reserve battalion at home.’ He had had a year’s service when the war broke out; the battalion, which had been good, had never recovered from the first battle of Ypres. He said: ‘What’s wrong with us is that we have a rotten depot. The drafts are bad and so we get a constant re-infection.’ He told me one night in our sleeping hut: ‘In both the last two attacks that we made I had to shoot a man of my company to get the rest out of the trench. It was so bloody awful that I couldn’t stand it. It’s the reason why I applied to be sent down here.’ This was not the usual loose talk that one heard at the base. He was a good fellow and he was speaking the truth. I was sorrier for Phillips—that was not his name—than for any other man I met in France. He deserved a better regiment. There was never any trouble with the Royal Welch like that. The boast of every good battalion in France was that it had never lost a trench; both our battalions made it. This boast had to be understood broadly; it meant never having been forced out of a trench by an enemy attack without recapturing it before the action ended. Capturing a German trench and being unable to hold it for lack of reinforcements did not count, nor did retirement from a trench by order or when the battalion of the left or right had broken and left a flank in the air. And in the final stages of the war trenches could be honourably abandoned as being entirely obliterated by bombardment, or because not really trenches at all, but a line of selected shell-craters.

We all agreed on the value of arms-drill as a factor in _morale_. ‘Arms-drill as it should be done,’ someone said, ‘is beautiful, especially when the company feels itself as a single being and each movement is not a movement of every man together, but a single movement of one large creature.’ I used to have big bunches of Canadians to drill four or five hundred at a time. Spokesmen came forward once and asked what sense there was in sloping and ordering arms and fixing and unfixing bayonets. They said they had come to France to fight and not to guard Buckingham Palace. I told them that in every division of the four in which I had served there had been three different kinds of troops. Those that had guts but were no good at drill; those that were good at drill but had no guts; and those that had guts and were good at drill. These last fellows were, for some reason or other, much the best men in a show. I didn’t know why and I didn’t care. I told them that when they were better at fighting than the Guards’ Division they could perhaps afford to neglect their arms-drill.

We often theorized in the mess about drill. We knew that the best drill never came from being bawled at by a sergeant-major, that there must be perfect respect between the man who gives the order and the men that carry it through. The test of drill came, I said, when the officer gave an incorrect word of command. If the company could carry through the order intended without hesitation, or, suppose the order happened to be impossible, could stand absolutely still or continue marching without any disorder in the ranks, that was good drill. The corporate spirit that came from drilling together was regarded by some instructors as leading to loss of initiative in the men drilled. Others denied this and said it acted just the other way round. ‘Suppose there is a section of men with rifles, and they are isolated from the rest of the company and have no N.C.O. in charge and meet a machine-gun. Under the stress of danger that section will have that all-one-body feeling of drill and will obey an imaginary word of command. There will be no communication between its members, but there will be a drill movement. Two men will quite naturally open fire on the machine-gun while the remainder will work round, part on the left flank and part on the right, and the final rush will be simultaneous. Leadership is supposed to be the perfection for which drill has been instituted. That is wrong. Leadership is only the first stage. Perfection of drill is communal action. Drill may seem to be antiquated parade-ground stuff, but it is the foundation of tactics and musketry. It was parade-ground musketry that won all the battles in our regimental histories; this war will be won by parade-ground tactics. The simple drill tactics of small units fighting in limited spaces—fighting in noise and confusion so great that leadership is quite impossible.’ In spite of variance on this point we all agreed that regimental pride was the greatest moral force that kept a battalion going as an effective fighting unit, contrasting it particularly with patriotism and religion.

Patriotism. There was no patriotism in the trenches. It was too remote a sentiment, and rejected as fit only for civilians. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out. As Blighty, Great Britain was a quiet, easy place to get back to out of the present foreign misery, but as a nation it was nothing. The nation included not only the trench-soldiers themselves and those who had gone home wounded, but the staff, Army Service Corps, lines of communication troops, base units, home-service units, and then civilians down to the detested grades of journalists, profiteers, ‘starred’ men exempted from enlistment, conscientious objectors, members of the Government. The trench-soldier, with this carefully graded caste-system of honour, did not consider that the German trench-soldier might have exactly the same system himself. He thought of Germany as a nation in arms, a unified nation inspired with the sort of patriotism that he despised himself. He believed most newspaper reports of conditions and sentiments in Germany, though believing little or nothing of what he read about conditions and sentiments in England. His cynicism, in fact, was not confined to his own country. But he never underrated the German as a soldier. Newspaper libels on Fritz’s courage and efficiency were resented by all trench-soldiers of experience.

Religion. It was said that not one soldier in a hundred was inspired by religious feeling of even the crudest kind. It would have been difficult to remain religious in the trenches though one had survived the irreligion of the training battalion at home. A regular sergeant at Montagne, a Second Battalion man, had recently told me that he did not hold with religion in time of war. He said that the niggers (meaning the Indians) were right in officially relaxing their religious rules when they were fighting. ‘And all this damn nonsense, sir—excuse me, sir—that we read in the papers, sir, about how miraculous it is that the wayside crucifixes are always getting shot at but the figure of our Lord Jesus somehow don’t get hurt, it fairly makes me sick, sir.’ This was to explain why in giving practice fire-orders from the hill-top he had shouted out: ‘Seven hundred, half left, bloke on cross, five rounds consecrate, fire!’ His platoon, even the two men whose letters home always had the same formal beginning: ‘Dear Sister in Christ,’ or ‘Dear Brother in Christ,’ blazed away.

The troops, while ready to believe in the Kaiser as a comic personal devil, were aware that the German soldier was, on the whole, more devout than himself in the worship of God. In the instructors’ mess we spoke freely of God and Gott as opposed tribal deities. For the regimental chaplains as a body we had no respect. If the regimental chaplains had shown one tenth the courage, endurance, and other human qualities that the regimental doctors showed, we agreed, the British Expeditionary Force might well have started a religious revival. But they had not. The fact is that they were under orders not to get mixed up with the fighting, to stay behind with the transport and not to risk their lives. No soldier could have any respect for a chaplain who obeyed these orders, and yet there was not in our experience one chaplain in fifty who was not glad to obey them. Occasionally on a quiet day in a quiet sector the chaplain would make a daring afternoon visit to the support line and distribute a few cigarettes, and that was all. But he was always in evidence back in rest-billets. Sometimes the colonel would summon him to come up with the rations and bury the day’s dead, and he would arrive, speak his lines, and hastily retire. The position was made difficult by the respect that most of the commanding officers had for the cloth, but it was a respect that they soon outwore. The colonel in one battalion I served with got rid of four new chaplains in as many months. Finally he applied for a Roman Catholic chaplain, alleging a change of faith in the men under his command. For, as I should have said before, the Roman Catholics were not only permitted in posts of danger, but definitely enjoined to be wherever fighting was so that they could give extreme unction to the dying. And we had never heard of an R.C. chaplain who was unwilling to do all that was expected of him and more. It was recalled that Father Gleeson of the Munsters, when all the officers were put out of action at the first battle of Ypres, stripped off his black badges and, taking command of the survivors, held the line.

Anglican chaplains were remarkably out of touch with their troops. I told how the Second Battalion chaplain just before the Loos fighting had preached a violent sermon on the battle against sin, and how one old soldier behind me had grumbled: ‘Christ, as if one bloody push wasn’t enough to worry about at a time.’ The Catholic padre, on the other hand, had given his men his blessing and told them that if they died fighting for the good cause they would go straight to Heaven, or at any rate would be excused a great many years in Purgatory. Someone told us of the chaplain of his battalion when he was in Mesopotamia, how on the eve of a big battle he had preached a sermon on the commutation of tithes. This was much more sensible than the battle against sin, he said; it was quite up in the air, and took the men’s minds off the fighting.

I was feeling a bit better after a few weeks at the base, though the knowledge that this was only temporary relief was with me all the time. One day I walked out of the mess to begin the afternoon’s work on the drill ground. I had to pass by the place where bombing instruction was given. A group of men was standing around the table where the various types of bombs were set out for demonstration. There was a sudden crash. An instructor of the Royal Irish Rifles had been giving a little unofficial instruction before the proper instructor arrived. He had picked up a No. 1 percussion grenade and said: ‘Now, lads, you’ve got to be careful with this chap. Remember that if you touch anything while you’re swinging it, it will go off.’ To illustrate the point he rapped it against the edge of the table. It killed him and another man and wounded twelve others more or less severely.

XVIII

I rejoined the First Battalion in March, finding it in the line again, on the Somme. It was the primrose season. We went in and out of the Fricourt trenches, with billets at Morlancourt, a country village at that time untouched by shell-fire. (Later it was knocked to pieces; the Australians and the Germans captured and recaptured it from each other several times, until there was nothing left except the site.) ‘A’ Company headquarters were in a farmhouse kitchen. We slept in our valises on the red-brick floor. The residents were an old lady and her daughter. The old lady was senile and paralysed; about all she could do was to shake her head and say: ‘Triste, la guerre.’ We called her ‘Triste la Guerre.’ Her daughter used to carry her about in her arms.

The Fricourt trenches were cut in chalk, which was better in wet weather than the La Bassée clay. We were unlucky in having a battalion-frontage where the lines came closer to each other than at any other point for miles. It was only recently that the British line had been extended down to the Somme. The French had been content, as they usually were, unless they definitely intended a battle, to be at peace with the Germans and not dig in too near. But here there was a slight ridge and neither side could afford to let the other hold the crest, so they shared it, after a prolonged dispute. It was used by both the Germans and ourselves as an experimental station for new types of bombs and grenades. The trenches were wide and tumbledown, too shallow in many places, and without sufficient traverses. The French had left relics of their nonchalance—corpses buried too near the surface; and of their love of security—a number of lousy but deep dug-outs. We busied ourselves raising the front-line parapet and building traverses to limit the damage of the trench-mortar shells that were continually falling. Every night not only the companies in the front line but both support companies were hard at work all the time. It was even worse than Cuinchy for rats; they used to run about A Company mess while we were at meals. We used to eat with revolvers beside our plates and punctuate our conversation with sudden volleys at a rat rummaging at somebody’s valise or crawling along the timber support of the roof above our heads. A Company officers were gay. We had all been in our school choirs except Edmund Dadd, who sang like a crow, and we used to chant church anthems and bits of cantatas whenever things were going well. Edmund insisted on joining in.

We were at dinner one day when a Welsh boy came rushing in, hysterical with terror. He shouted out to Richardson: ‘Sirr, sirr, there is a trenss-mortar in my dug-out.’ This in sing-song Welsh made us all shout with laughter. Richardson said: ‘Cheer up, 33 Williams, how did a big thing like a trench-mortar happen to be in your dug-out?’ But 33 Williams could not explain. He went on again and again: ‘Sirr, sirr, there is a trenss-mortar in my dug-out!’ Edmund Dadd went out to investigate. He found that a trench-mortar shell had fallen into the trench, bounced down the dug-out steps, exploded and killed five men. 33 Williams had been lying asleep and had been protected by the body of another man; he was the only one unhit.

[Illustration: SOMME TRENCH MAP

CONTALMAISON—FRICOURT

_Copyright Imperial War Museum._]

Our greatest trial was the canister. It was a two-gallon drum with a cylinder inside containing about two pounds of an explosive called ammonal that looked like salmon paste, smelt like marzipan, and when it went off sounded like the day of judgment. The hollow around the cylinder was filled with scrap metal apparently collected by the French villagers behind the German line—rusty nails, fragments of British and French shells, spent bullets, and the screws, nuts, and bolts that heavy lorries leave behind on the road. We dissected one canister that had not exploded and found in it, among other things, the cog-wheels of a clock and half a set of false teeth. The canister was easy to hear coming and looked harmless in the air, but its shock was as shattering as the very heaviest shell. It would blow in any but the deepest dug-outs; and the false teeth and cog-wheels and so on would go flying all over the place. We could not agree how a thing of that size was fired. The problem was not solved until 1st July, when the battalion attacked from these same trenches and found one of the canister-guns with its crew. It was a wooden cannon buried in the earth and fired with a time-fuse. The crew offered to surrender, but our men refused; they had sworn for months to get the crew of that gun.

One evening I was in the trench with Richardson and David Thomas (near ‘Trafalgar Square,’ should anyone remember that trench-junction) when we met Pritchard and the adjutant. We stopped to talk. Richardson complained what a devil of a place it was for trench-mortars. Pritchard said: ‘That is where I come in.’ He was the battalion trench-mortar officer and had just been given the first two Stokes mortar-guns that we had seen in France. Pritchard said: ‘They’re beauties. I’ve been trying them out and to-morrow I’m going to get some of my own back. I can put four or five shells in the air at the same time.’ The adjutant said: ‘About time, too. We’ve had three hundred casualties in the last month here. It doesn’t seem so many as that because we’ve had no officer casualties. In fact we’ve had about five hundred casualties in the ranks since Loos, and not a single officer.’ Then he suddenly realized that he had said something unlucky. David said: ‘Touch wood.’ Everybody sprang to touch wood, but it was a French trench and unriveted. I pulled a pencil out of my pocket; that was wood enough for me. Richardson said: ‘I’m not superstitious, anyway.’

The next evening I was leading up A Company for a working-party. B and D Companies were in the line and we overtook C, which was also going up to work. David was bringing up the rear of C. He was looking strange, worried about something. I had never seen him anything but cheerful all the time I had known him. I asked what was the matter. He said: ‘Oh, I’m fed up and I’ve got a cold.’ C Company went along to the right of the battalion frontage and we went along to the left. It was a weird kind of night, with a bright moon. A German occupied sap was only forty or fifty yards away. We were left standing on the parapet piling up the sandbags, with the moon behind us, but the German sentries ignored us—probably because they had work on hand themselves. It often happened when both sides were busy putting up proper defences that they turned a blind eye to each other’s work. Sometimes, it was said, the rival wiring-parties ‘as good as borrowed each other’s mallets’ for hammering in the pickets. The Germans were much more ready to live and let live than we were. (The only time, so far as I know, besides Christmas 1914, that both sides showed themselves in daylight without firing at each other was once at Ypres when the trenches got so flooded that there was nothing for it but for both sides to crawl out on top to avoid drowning.) There was a continual exchange of grenades and trench-mortars on our side; the canister was going over and the men found it difficult to get out of its way in the dark. But for the first time we were giving the enemy as good as they gave us. Pritchard had been using his Stokes’ mortar all day and had sent over two or three hundred rounds; twice they had located his emplacement and he had had to shift hurriedly.

‘A’ Company worked from seven in the evening until midnight. We must have put thousands of sandbags into position, and fifty yards of front trench were beginning to look presentable. About half-past ten there was rifle-fire on the right and the sentries passed down the news ‘officer hit.’ Richardson at once went along to see who it was. He came back to say: ‘It’s young Thomas. He got a bullet through the neck, but I think he’s all right; it can’t have hit his spine or an artery because he’s walking down to the dressing-station.’ I was pleased at this news. I thought that David would be out of it long enough perhaps to escape the coming offensive and perhaps even the rest of the war. At twelve o’clock we had finished for the night. Richardson said to me: ‘Von Ranke’ (only he pronounced it Von Runicke—it was my regimental nickname), ‘take the company down for their rum and tea, will you? They’ve certainly deserved it to-night. I’ll be along in a few minutes. I’m going out with Corporal Chamberlen to see what work the wiring-party’s been doing all this time.’ So I took the men back. When we were well started I heard a couple of shells come over somewhere behind us. I noticed them because they were the only shells fired that night; five-nines they seemed by the noise. We were nearly back at Maple Redoubt, which was the name of the support line on the reverse side of the hill, when we heard the cry ‘Stretcher-bearers!’ and after a while a man came running to say: ‘Captain Graves is hit.’ There was a general laugh and we went on; but a stretcher-party went up anyhow to see what was wrong. It was Richardson; the shells had caught him and the corporal among the wire. The corporal had his leg blown off, and died of wounds a day or two later. Richardson had been blown into a shell-hole full of water and had lain there stunned for some minutes before the sentries heard the corporal’s cries and realized what had happened. He was brought down semi-conscious; he recognized us, told us he wouldn’t be long away from the company, and gave us instructions about it. The doctor said that he had no wound in any vital spot, though the skin of his left side was riddled, as we had seen, with the chalky soil blown up against him. We felt a relief in his case, as in David’s, that he would be out of it for a while.

Then news came that David had died. The regimental doctor, a throat specialist in civil life, had told him at the dressing-station: ‘You’ll be all right, only don’t raise your head for a bit.’ David had then, it was said, taken a letter from his pocket, given it to an orderly, and said: ‘Post that.’ It was a letter written to a girl in Glamorgan, to be posted in case he got killed. Then the doctor saw that he was choking; he tried trachotomy, but it was too late. Edmund and I were talking together in the company headquarters at about one o’clock when the adjutant came in. He looked ghastly. He told us that Richardson had died at the dressing-station. His heart had been weakened by rowing (he had been in the Eight at Radley) and the explosion and the cold water had been too much for it. The adjutant said to me nervously: ‘You know, somehow I feel, I—I feel responsible in a way for this; what I said yesterday at ‘Trafalgar Square.’ Of course, really, I don’t believe in superstition, but....’ Just at that moment there was a noise of whizz-bang shells about twenty yards off; a cry of alarm, followed by: ‘Stretcher-bearers!’ The adjutant turned quite white and we knew without being told what it meant. We hurried out. Pritchard, having fought his duel all night, and finally silenced the enemy, was coming off duty. A whizz-bang had caught him at the point where the communication trench reached Maple Redoubt; it was a direct hit. The casualties of that night were three officers and one corporal.

It seemed ridiculous when we returned without Richardson to A Company billets to find ‘Triste La Guerre’ still alive and to hear her once more quaver out ‘Triste, la guerre’ when her daughter explained that the _jeune capitaine_ had been killed. The old woman had taken a fancy to the _jeune capitaine_; we used to chaff him about it. I felt David’s death worse than any other death since I had been in France. It did not anger me as it did Siegfried. He was acting transport-officer and every night now, when he came up with the rations, he went out on patrol looking for Germans. It just made me feel empty and lost.

One of the anthems that we used to sing was: ‘He that shall endure to the end, shall be saved.’ The words repeated themselves in my head like a charm whenever things were bad. ‘Though thousands languish and fall beside thee, And tens of thousands around thee perish, Yet still it shall not come nigh thee.’ And there was another bit: ‘To an inheritance incorruptible.... Through faith unto salvation, Ready to be revealed at the last trump.’ For ‘trump’ we always used to sing ‘crump.’ ‘The last crump’ was the end of the war and would we ever hear it burst safely behind us? I wondered whether I could endure to the end with faith unto salvation. I knew that my breaking point was near now, unless something happened to stave it off.... It was not that I was frightened. Certainly I feared death; but I had never yet lost my head through fright, and I knew that I never would. Nor would the breakdown come as insanity; I did not have it in me. It would be a general nervous collapse, with tears and twitchings and dirtied trousers. I had seen cases like that.

The battalion was issued with a new gas-helmet, popularly known as ‘the goggle-eyed b——r with the tit.’ It differed from the previous models. One breathed in through the nose from inside the helmet and breathed out through a special valve held in the mouth. I found that I could not manage this. Boxing with an already broken nose had recently displaced the septum, so that I was forced to breathe through my mouth. In a gas-attack I would be unable to use the helmet and it was the only type claimed to be proof against the new German gas. The battalion doctor advised me to have an operation done as soon as I could.

These months with the First Battalion have already been twice recorded in literary history; though in both cases in a disguise of names and characters. The two books are Siegfried Sassoon’s _Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man_, and _Nothing of Importance_, by Bill Adams, the battalion sniping and intelligence officer. Adam’s