This afternoon we had a cricket match, officers versus sergeants, in an enclosure between some house out of observation from the enemy. Our 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, a piece of rag tied round with string; and the wicket, a parrot cage with the clean, dry corpse of a parrot inside. It had evidently died of starvation when the French evacuated the town. I recalled a verse of Skelton’s:
Parrot is a fair bird for a ladie.
God of His goodness him framéd and wrought.
When parrot is dead he doth not putrify,
Yea, all things mortal shall turn unto nought
Save mannés soul which Christ so dear bought,
That never can die, nor never die shall.
Make much of parrot, that popajay royál.
Machine-gun fire broke up the match. It was not aimed at us; the Germans were shooting at one of our aeroplanes, and the bullets falling 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. We can’t drill because we are too near the Germans, and no fortification needs doing in the village. Today two spies were shot: a civilian who had hung on in a cellar and was, apparently, flashing news to the Germans; and a German soldier disguised as an R.E. corporal; found tampering with the telephone wires. We officers spend a lot of time revolver-shooting. Jenkins brought out a beautiful target from the only undestroyed living-room in our billet-area: a glass case full of artificial fruit and flowers. We put it up on a post at fifty yards’ range. He said: ‘I’ve always wanted to smash one of these damn objects. My aunt has one. It’s the sort of thing that would survive an intense bombardment.’ I smothered a tender impulse to rescue it. So we had five shots each, in turn. Everyone missed. Then we went up to within twenty yards and fired a volley. Someone hit the post and knocked the case 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 grâce from close quarters.
The old Norman church here has been very much broken. What remains of the tower is used as a forward observation-post by the Artillery. I counted eight unexploded shells sticking into it. Jenkins and I went in and found the floor littered with rubbish, broken masonry, smashed chairs, ripped canvas pictures (some of them looked 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 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. Being Irish Catholics, they thought it sacrilegious for Jenkins to be taking the glass away. One of them warned him: ‘Shouldn’t take that, sir; it will bring you no luck.’ (Jenkins got killed not long after.)
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 depôt 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.’
One of our company commanders here is Captain Furber, whose nerves are in pieces. Somebody played a dirty trick on him the other day – rolling a bomb, undetonated, of course, down the cellar steps to frighten him. This was thought a wonderful joke. Furber is the greatest pessimist in France. He’s laid a bet with the adjutant that the trench lines won’t be more than a mile from where they are in this sector two years hence.* Everyone laughs at Furber, but they like him because he sings sentimental cockney songs at the brigade gaffs when we are back in Béthune.
14
WITH the advance of summer came new types of bombs and trench-mortars, heavier shelling, improved gas-masks, and a general tightening up of discipline. We met the first battalions of the New Army, and felt like scarecrows by comparison. Our battalion 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 First Division. Its spirit in the trenches was largely defensive; the policy being not to stir the Germans into more than their usual hostility. But casualties remained very heavy for trench warfare. Pessimism made everyone superstitious, and I found myself believing in signs of the most trivial nature.
Sergeant Smith, my second sergeant, told me of the officer who had commanded the platoon before I did. ‘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 tomorrow. 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 burned the diary.’
One day, walking along a trench at Cambrin, I suddenly dropped flat on my face; two seconds later a whizz-bang struck the back of the trench exactly where my head had been. The sergeant who was with me walking a few steps ahead, turned round: ‘Are you killed, sir?’ The shell was fired from a battery near Les Brigues Farm, only a thousand yards away, so that I must have reacted simultaneously with the explosion of the gun. How did I know that the shell would be coming my way?
At Béthune, I saw the ghost of a man named 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.’ In June he passed by our ‘C’ Company billet, where we were just having a special dinner to celebrate our safe return from Cuinchy – new potatoes, fish, green peas, asparagus, mutton chops, strawberries and cream, and three bottles of Pommard. Private Challoner looked in at the window, saluted, and passed on. I could not mistake him, or the cap-badge he wore; yet no Royal Welch battalion was billeted within miles of Béthune at the time. I jumped up, looked out of the window, and saw nothing except a fag-end smoking on the pavement. Challoner had been killed at Festubert in May.
Constant mining went 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 won the Victoria Cross while we were there. A duel of mining and counter-mining had been going on. When the Germans began to undermine his original boring, he rapidly tunnelled beneath them. It was touch and go who would get ready first He won. But when he detonated his mine from the trench by an electric lead, nothing happened. So he ran down again, retamped the charge, and got back just in time to set it off before the Germans fired theirs. I had visited the upper boring on the previous day. It ran about twenty feet under the German lines. At the end of the gallery I found a Welsh miner on listening duty, one of our own battalion, who had transferred to the Royal Engineers. He cautioned me to silence. I could distinctly hear the Germans working somewhere below us. He whispered: ‘So long as they work, I don’t mind. It’s when they bloody stop!’ He did his two-hour spell by candle-light in the cramped and stuffy dead-end, reading a book. The mining officer had told me that the men were allowed to read; it didn’t interfere with
their listening. The book was a paper-backed novelette called From Mill Girl to Duchess. 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 dangerous spell of trenches, I had bad news in a letter from Charterhouse. Bad news from home might affect a soldier in one of two ways. It might either drive him to suicide (or recklessness amounting to suicide), or else seem trivial by contrast with present experiences and be laughed off. But, unless due for leave, he could do nothing whatever to remedy matters. A year later, in the same sector, an officer of the North Staffordshire Regiment heard from home that his wife was living with another man. He went out on a raid that night and got either killed or captured; so the men with him said. There had been a fight and they came back without him. After two days he was arrested at Béthune, trying to board a leave-train; he had intended to go home and shoot up the wife and her lover. The officers who court-martialled him for deserting in the face of the enemy, were content with a sentence of cashiering. He went as a private soldier to another regiment. I never heard what happened to him afterwards.
The bad news came in a letter from a cousin of mine still at Charterhouse. He said that Dick was not at all the innocent fellow I took him for, but as bad as anyone could be. I remembered that my cousin owed me a grudge, and decided that this must be a very cruel act of spite. Dick’s letters had been my greatest stand-by all these months whenever I felt 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 sordidness of life in billets. I was now back in Béthune. Two officers of another company had just been telling me how they had slept in the same room with a woman and her daughter. They had tossed for the mother, because the daughter was a ‘yellow-looking scaly little thing like a lizard’. The Red Lamp, the army brothel, was around 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 of the three women in the house. My servant, who had stood 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. According to the assistant provost-marshal, three weeks was the usual limit: ‘after which she retired 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 that they could understand: I said that I didn’t want a dose. A good deal of talk in billets concerned the peculiar bed-manners of Frenchwomen. ‘She was very nice and full of games. But when I said to her: “S’il vous plaît, ôtes-toi la chemise, ma chérie,” she wouldn’t. She said: “Oh, no’-non, mon lieutenant. Ce n’est convenable.”’ I was glad when we got back to the trenches. There I had a more or less reassuring letter from Dick. He told me that my cousin did have a spite against him and me, and admitted that he had been ragging about in a silly way, but that nothing bad had happened. He said he was very sorry, and would stop it for the sake of our friendship.
At the end of July, Robertson, one of the other Royal Welch officers attached to the Welsh, and myself had orders to proceed to the Laventie sector. 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 goodbye to our men, who all crowded round to shake hands and wish us luck. Nor did we look forward to a fresh start, with a new company and new regimental customs. But it would be worth it, just to serve with our own regiment. Robertson and I agreed to take our journey as leisurely as possible. Laventie lay only seventeen miles off, but our orders were to ‘proceed by train’; so a company mess-cart took us down to Béthune. We asked the railway transport officer what trains he had for Laventie. He told us that one would be going in a few minutes; we decided to miss it. No other train ran until the next day; so we stopped the night at the Hôtel de la France, in which the Prince of Wales, then a lieutenant in the Fortieth Siege Battery, was billeted sometimes. We did not find him in. I had spoken to him once – in the public bath at Béthune, where he and I were the only bathers one morning. Dressed in nothing at all, he graciously remarked how bloody cold the water was, and I loyally assented that he was too bloody right. We were very pink and white and did exercises on the horizontal bar afterwards. I joked to Frank Jones-Bateman 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. I once heard him complain indignantly that General French had refused to let him go up into the line.
The next day, Robertson and I caught our train. It took us to a junction, the name of which I forget, where we spent a day botanizing in the fields. No other train arrived until the following day, when we went on to Berguette, a rail-head still a number of miles from Laventie. There 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, having taken fifty-four hours to come those seventeen miles. We saluted the adjutant smartly, gave our names, and told him that we were Third Battalion officers posted to the regiment. He did not shake hands with us, offer us a drink, or say a word of welcome. ‘I see,’ he said coldly. ‘Well, which of you is senior? Oh, never mind. Give your particulars to the R.S.M. Tell him to post whoever is senior to “A” Company and the other to “B” Company.’
The regimental sergeant-major took our particulars and introduced me to Hilary Drake-Brockman, a young second-lieutenant of ‘A’ Company, to which I had been posted. He was a special reservist of the East Surrey Regiment, and contemptuously known as ‘the Surrey-man’. He took me along to the company billet. When 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 here. You must realize that this is one of the only four regular infantry battalions in France that has remained still more or less its old self. This is the Nineteenth Brigade, the luckiest in France. It hasn’t been permanently attached to any division, but gets used as army reserve, to put in wherever one 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’s been practically undamaged. More than two hundred of the wounded have rejoined since. All our company commanders are regulars, and so are all our N.C.O.s. The peacetime custom of taking no notice of newly-joined officers is still more or less kept up for the first six months. It’s hard enough on the Sandhurst chaps; but worse for special reservists, like you and Rugg and Robertson; and it’s worse still for outsiders like me.’ We were going down the village street. The men sitting about on the doorsteps jumped up smartly to attention as we passed and saluted with a fixed, stony glare. They were magnificent looking fellows. Their uniforms were spotless, their equipment khaki-blancoed, and their buttons and cap-badges twinkled. 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 descriptive 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 Welsh Regiment ones, but duller. On the way to the mess he asked m
e whether I had been out in France before. ‘I was attached to the Second Welsh Regiment for three months; I commanded a company there for a bit.’
‘Oh, did you? Well, I’d advise you to say nothing at all about it, then they’ll not expect too much. They treat us like dirt; but 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 with six years’ service, and several second-lieutenants who have been out since the autumn. Two Special Reserve captains have already been foisted on the battalion; the senior officers are planning to get rid of them somehow. The senior officers are beasts. If you open your mouth or make the slightest noise in the mess, they 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 peacetime. Mess bills are very high; the mess was in debt at Quetta last year, so they’re economizing now to pay that back. We get practically nothing for our money but ordinary rations, and we aren’t allowed to drink the whisky.