George Mallory did something better than lend me books, and that
was to take me climbing on Snowdon in the school vacations. I knew
Snowdon very well from a distance, from my bedroom window at Harlech.
In the spring its snow cap was the sentimental glory of the landscape.
The first time I went with George to Snowdon we stayed at the Snowdon
Ranger Hotel at Quellyn Lake. It was January and the mountain was
covered with snow. We did little rock-climbing, but went up some good
snow slopes with rope and ice-axe. I remember one climb the objective
of which was the summit; we found the hotel there with its roof blown
off in the blizzard of the previous night. We sat by the cairn and
ate Carlsbad plums and liver-sausage sandwiches. Geoffrey Keynes, the
editor of the _Nonesuch Blake_, was there; he and George, who used to
go drunk with excitement at the end of his climbs, picked stones off
the cairn and shied them at the chimney stack of the hotel until they
had sent it where the roof was.
George was one of the three or four best climbers in climbing history.
His first season in the Alps had been spectacular; nobody had expected
him to survive it. He never lost his almost foolhardy daring; yet
he knew all that there was to be known about climbing technique.
One always felt absolutely safe with him on the rope. George went
through the war as a lieutenant in the artillery, but his nerves were
apparently unaffected—on his leaves he went rock-climbing.
When the war ended he was more in love with the mountains than ever.
His death on Mount Everest came five years later. No one knows whether
he and Irvine actually made the last five hundred yards of the
climb or whether they turned back or what happened; but anyone who
had climbed with George felt convinced that he did get to the summit,
that he rejoiced in his accustomed way and had not sufficient reserve
of strength left for the descent. I do not think that it was ever
mentioned in the newspaper account of his death that George originally
took to climbing when he was a scholar at Winchester as a corrective to
his weak heart.
George was wasted at Charterhouse, where, in my time at least, he was
generally despised by the boys because he was neither a disciplinarian
nor interested in cricket or football. He tried to treat his classes
in a friendly way and that puzzled and offended them. There was a
tradition in the school of concealed warfare between the boys and the
masters. It was considered no shame to cheat, to lie, or to deceive
where a master was concerned; yet to do the same to a member of the
school was immoral. George was also unpopular with the house-masters
because he refused to accept this state of war and fraternized with the
boys whenever he could. When two house-masters who had been unfriendly
to him happened to die within a short time of each other he joked to
me: ‘See, Robert, how mine enemies flee before my face.’ I always
called him by his Christian name, and so did three or four more of his
friends in the school. This lack of dignity in him put him beyond the
pale both with the boys and the masters. Eventually the falseness of
his position told on his temper; yet he always managed to find four
or five boys in the school who were, like him, out of their element,
and befriended them and made life tolerable for them. Before the final
Everest expedition he had decided to resign and do educational work at
Cambridge with, I believe, the Workers’ Educational Association. He
was tired of trying to teach gentlemen to be gentlemen.
I spent a season with George and a large number of climbers at the
hotel at Pen-y-Pass on Snowdon in the spring of 1914. This time it
was real precipice-climbing, and I was lucky enough to climb with
George, with H. E. L. Porter, a renowned technician of climbing, with
Kitty O’Brien and with Conor O’Brien, her brother, who afterwards
made a famous voyage round the world in a twenty-ton or five-ton or
some even-less-ton boat. Conor climbed principally, he told us, as a
corrective to bad nerves. He used to get very excited when any slight
hitch occurred; his voice would rise to a scream. Kitty used to chide
him: ‘Ach, Conor, dear, have a bit of wit,’ and Conor would apologize.
Conor, being a sailor, used to climb in bare feet. Often in climbing
one has to support the entire weight of one’s body on a couple of
toes—but toes in stiff boots. Conor said that he could force his naked
toes farther into crevices than a boot would go.
But the most honoured climber there was Geoffrey Young. Geoffrey had
been climbing for a number of years and was president of the Climbers’
Club. I was told that his four closest friends had all at different
times been killed climbing; this was a comment on the extraordinary
care with which he always climbed. It was not merely shown in his
preparations for a climb—the careful examination, foot by foot, of the
alpine rope, the attention to his boot-nails and the balanced loading
of his knapsack—but also in his cautiousness in the climbing itself.
Before making any move he thought it out foot by foot, as though it
were a problem in chess. If the next handhold happened to be just a
little out of his reach or the next foothold seemed at all unsteady
he would stop and think of some way round the difficulty. George used
sometimes to get impatient, but Geoffrey refused to be hurried. He
was short, which put him at a disadvantage in the matter of reach. He
was not as double-jointed and prehensile as Porter or as magnificent
as George, but he was the perfect climber. And still remains so. This
in spite of having lost a leg while serving with a Red Cross unit on
the Italian front. He climbs with an artificial leg. He has recently
published the only satisfactory text-book on rock-climbing. I was very
proud to be on a rope with Geoffrey Young. He said once: ‘Robert, you
have the finest natural balance that I have ever seen in a climber.’
This compliment pleased me far more than if the Poet Laureate had told
me that I had the finest sense of rhythm that he had ever met in a
young poet.
It is quite true that I have a good balance; once, in Switzerland, it
saved me from a broken leg or legs. My mother took us there in the
Christmas holidays of 1913–14, ostensibly for winter sports, but really
because she thought that she owed it to my sisters to give them a
chance to meet nice young men of means. About the third day that I put
on skis I went up from Champéry, where we were staying and the snow was
too soft, to Morgins, a thousand feet higher, where it was like sugar.
Here I found an ice-run for skeleton-toboggans. Without considering
that skis have no purchase on ice at all, I launched myself down it.
After a few yards my speed increased alarmingly and I suddenly realized
what I was in for. There were several sharp turns in the run protected
by high banks, and I had to trust entirely to body-balance in swerving
round them. I reached the terminus still upright and had my eyes damned
by a frightened sports-club official for having endangered my life
on his territory.
In an essay on climbing that I wrote at the time, I said it was a
sport that made all others seem trivial. ‘New climbs or new variations
of old climbs are not made in a competitive spirit, but only because
it is satisfactory to stand somewhere on the earth’s surface where
nobody else has stood before. And it is good to be alone with a
specially chosen band of people—people that one can trust completely.
Rock-climbing is one of the most dangerous sports possible, unless one
keeps to the rules; but if one does keep to the rules it is reasonably
safe. With physical fitness in every member of the climbing team, a
careful watch on the weather, proper overhauling of climbing apparatus,
and with no hurry, anxiety or stunting, climbing is much safer than
fox-hunting. In hunting there are uncontrollable factors, such as
hidden wire, holes in which a horse may stumble, caprice or vice in
the horse. The climber trusts entirely to his own feet, legs, hands,
shoulders, sense of balance, judgment of distance.’
The first climb on which I was taken was up Crib-y-ddysgel. It was a
test climb for beginners. About fifty feet up from the scree, a height
that is really more frightening than five hundred, because death is
almost as certain and much more immediate, there was a long sloping
shelf of rock, about the length of an ordinary room, to be crossed from
right to left. It was without handholds or footholds worth speaking of
and too steep to stand upright or kneel on without slipping. It shelved
at an angle of, I suppose, forty-five or fifty degrees. The accepted
way to cross it was by rolling in an upright position and trusting to
friction as a maintaining force. Once I got across this shelf without
disaster I felt that the rest of the climb was easy. The climb was
called The Gambit. Robert Trevelyan, the poet, was given this test in
the previous season, I was told, and had been unlucky enough to fall
off. He was pulled up short, of course, after a few feet by the rope
of the leader, who was well belayed; but the experience disgusted him
with climbing and he spent the rest of his time on the mountains just
walking about.
♦ “Crib-y-ddysgel” replaced with “Crib-y-ddysgl”
Belaying means making fast on a projection of rock a loop of the rope
which is wound round one’s waist, and so disposing the weight of the
body that, if the climber above or below happens to slip and fall, the
belay will hold and the whole party will not go down together. Alpine
rope has a breaking point of a third its own length. Only one member of
the climbing team is moving at any given time, the others are belayed.
Sometimes on a precipice it is necessary to move up fifty or sixty
feet before finding a secure belay as a point from which to start the
next upward movement, so that if the leader falls and is unable to put
on a brake in any way he must fall more than twice that length before
being pulled up. On the same day I was taken on a spectacular though
not unusually difficult climb on Crib Goch. At one point we traversed
round a knife-edge buttress. From this knife-edge a pillar-like bit of
rock, technically known as a monolith, had split away. We scrambled up
the monolith, which overhung the valley with a clear five hundred feet
drop, and each in turn stood on the top and balanced. The next thing
was to make a long, careful stride from the top of the monolith to the
rock face; here there was a ledge just wide enough to take the toe of
a boot, and a handhold at convenient height to give an easy pull-up to
the next ledge. I remember George shouting down from above: ‘Be careful
of that foothold, Robert. Don’t chip the edge off or the climb will
be impossible for anyone who wants to do it again. It’s got to last
another five hundred years at least.’
I was only in danger once. I was climbing with Porter on an
out-of-the-way part of the mountain. The climb, known as the Ribbon
Track and Girdle Traverse, had not been attempted for about ten years.
About half-way up we came to a chimney. A chimney is a vertical fissure
in the rock wide enough to admit the body; a crack is only wide enough
to admit the boot. One works up a chimney sideways with back and knees,
but up a crack with one’s face to the rock. Porter was leading and
fifty feet above me in the chimney. In making a spring to a handhold
slightly out of reach he dislodged a pile of stones that had been
wedged in the chimney. They rattled down and one rather bigger than a
cricket ball struck me on the head and knocked me out. Fortunately I
was well belayed and Porter was already in safety. The rope held me up;
I recovered my senses a few seconds later and was able to continue.
The practice of Pen-y-Pass was to have a leisurely breakfast and lie in
the sun with a tankard of beer before starting for the precipice foot
in the late morning. Snowdon was a perfect mountain for climbing. The
rock was sound and not slippery. And once you came to the top of any
of the precipices, some of which were a thousand feet high, but all
just climbable one way or another, there was always an easy way to run
down. In the evening when we got back to the hotel we lay and stewed in
hot baths. I remember wondering at my body—the worn fingernails, the
bruised knees, and the lump of climbing muscle that had begun to bunch
above the arch of the foot, seeing it as beautiful in relation to this
new purpose. My worst climb was on Lliwedd, the most formidable of
the precipices, when at a point that needed most concentration a raven
circled round the party in great sweeps. This was curiously unsettling,
because one climbs only up and down, or left and right, and the raven
was suggesting all the diverse possibilities of movement, tempting us
to let go our hold and join him.
X
I was at Harlech when war was declared; I decided to enlist a day
or two later. In the first place, though only a very short war was
expected—two or three months at the very outside—I thought that it
might last just long enough to delay my going to Oxford in October,
which I dreaded. I did not work out the possibilities of being actively
engaged in the war. I thought that it would mean garrison service
at home while the regular forces were away. In the second place, I
entirely believed that France and England had been drawn into a war
which they had never contemplated and for which they were entirely
unprepared. It never occurred to me that newspapers and statesmen
could lie. I forgot my pacifism—I was ready to believe the worst
of the Germans. I was outraged to read of the cynical violation of
Belgian neutrality. I wrote a poem promising vengeance for Louvain.
I discounted perhaps twenty per cent, of the atrocity details as
war-time exaggeration. That was not, of course, enough. Recently I
saw the following contemporary newspaper cuttings quoted somewhere in
chronological sequence:
‘When the fall of Antwerp got known the church bells were rung’
(_i.e._ at Cologne and elsewhere in Germany).—_Kölnische Zeitung_.
‘According to the _Kölnische Zeitung_, the clergy of Antwerp were
compelled to ring the church bells when the fortress was taken.’—_Le
Matin_ (Paris.)
‘According to what _The Times_ has heard from Cologne, via
Paris, the unfortunate Belgian priests who refused to ring the
church bells when Antwerp was taken have been sentenced to hard
labour.’—_Carriere della Sera_ (Milan.)
‘According to information to the _Carriere della Sera_ from Cologne,
via London, it is confirmed that the barbaric conquerors of Antwerp
punished the unfortunate Belgian priests for their heroic refusal to
ring the church bells by hanging them as living clappers to the bells
with their heads down.’—_Le Matin_ (Paris.)
When I was in the trenches a few months later I happened to belong to a
company mess in which four of us young officers out of five had, by a
coincidence, either German mothers or naturalized German fathers. One
of them said: ‘Of course I’m glad I joined when I did. If I’d put it
off for a month or two they’d have accused me of being a German spy.
As it is I have an uncle interned at Alexandra Palace, and my father’s
only been allowed to retain the membership of his golf club because
he has two sons in the trenches.’ I said: ‘Well, I have three or four
uncles sitting somewhere opposite, and a number of cousins too. One of
my uncles is a general. But that’s all right. I don’t brag about them.
I only advertise the uncle who is a British admiral commanding at the
Nore.’
Among my enemy relatives was my cousin Conrad, who was the same age
as myself, and the son of the German consul at Zurich. In January
1914 I had gone ski-ing with him between the trees in the woods above
the city. We had tobogganed together down the Dolderstrasse in Zurich
itself, where the lampposts were all sandbagged and family toboggans,
skidding broadside on at the turns, were often crashed into by
single-seater skeletons; arms and legs were broken by the score and the
crowds thought it a great joke. Conrad served with a crack Bavarian
regiment all through the war, and won the ‘Pour le Mérite’ Order, which
was more rarely awarded than the British Victoria Cross. He was killed
by the Bolsheviks after the war in a village on the Baltic where he
had been sent to make requisitions. He was a gentle, proud creature,
whose chief interest was natural history. He used to spend hours in the
woods studying the habits of wild animals; he felt strongly against
shooting them. Perhaps the most outstanding military feat was that of
an uncle who was dug out at the age of sixty or so as a lieutenant in
the Bavarian artillery. My youngest brother met him a year or two ago
and happened to mention that he was going to visit Rheims. My uncle
nudged him: ‘Have a look at the cathedral. I was there with my battery
in the war. One day the divisional general came up to me and said:
“Lieutenant, I understand that you are a Lutheran, not a Catholic?”
I said that this was so. Then he said: “I have a very disagreeable
service for you to perform, Lieutenant. Those misbegotten swine, the
French, are using the cathedral for an observation post. They think
they can get away with it because it’s Rheims Cathedral, but this is
war and they have our trenches taped from there. So I call upon you
to dislodge them.” I only needed to fire two rounds and down came the
pinnacle and the Frenchmen with it. It was a very neat bit of shooting.
I was proud to have limited the damage like that. Really, you must go
and have a look at it.’
The nearest regimental depot was at Wrexham: the Royal Welch Fusiliers.
The Harlech golf secretary suggested my taking a commission instead
of enlisting. He rang up the adjutant and said that I was a
public-school boy who had been in the Officers’ Training Corps at
Charterhouse. So the adjutant said: ‘Send him right along,’ and on 11th
August I started my training. I immediately became a hero to my family.
My mother, who said to me: ‘My race has gone mad,’ regarded my going as
a religious act; my father was proud that I had ‘done the right thing.’
I even recovered, for a time, the respect of my uncle, C. L. Graves, of
_The Spectator_ and _Punch_, with whom I had recently had a tiff. He
had given me a sovereign tip two terms previously and I had written my
thanks, saying that with it I had bought Samuel Butler’s _Note Books_,
_The Way of All Flesh_ and the two _Erewhons_. To my surprise this had
infuriated him.
The fellows who applied for commissions at the same time as myself
were for the most part boys who had recently failed to pass into the
Royal Military College at Sandhurst, and were trying to get into the
regular army by the old militia door—which was now known as the Special
Reserve. There were only one or two fellows who had gone into the army,
like myself, for the sake of the war and not for the sake of a career.
There were about a dozen of us recruit officers on the Square learning
to drill and be drilled. My Officers’ Training Corps experience made
this part easy, but I knew nothing about army traditions and made all
the worst mistakes; saluting the bandmaster, failing to recognize the
colonel when in mufti, walking in the street without a belt and talking
shop in the mess. But I soon learned to conform. My greatest difficulty
was to talk to men of the company to which I was posted with the
necessary air of authority. Many of them were old soldiers re-enlisted,
and I disliked bluffing that I knew more than they did. There were one
or two very old soldiers employed on the depot staff, wearing the
ribbon of Burma, 1885, and of even earlier campaigns, and usually also
the ribbon of the ‘Rooti’ or good service medal awarded for eighteen
years of undetected crime. There was one old fellow called Jackie
Barrett, a Kipling character, of whom it was said: ‘There goes Jackie
Barrett. He and his mucking-in chum deserted the regiment in Quetta and
went across the north-west frontier on foot. Three months later he gave
himself up as a deserter to the British consul at Jerusalem. He buried
his chum by the way.’
I was on the square only about three weeks before being sent off on
detachment duty to Lancaster to a newly-formed internment camp for
enemy aliens. The camp was a disused wagon-works near the river, a
dirty, draughty place, littered with old scrap-metal and guarded with
high barbed-wire fences. There were about three thousand prisoners
already there and more and more piled in every day; seamen arrested on
German vessels in Liverpool harbour, waiters from big hotels in the
north, an odd German band or two, harmless German commercial travellers
and shopkeepers. The prisoners were resentful at being interned,
particularly those who were married and had families and had lived
peaceably in England for years. The only comfort that we could give was
that they were safer inside than out; anti-German feeling was running
high, shops with German names were continually being raided and even
German women were made to feel that they were personally responsible
for the Belgian atrocities. Besides, we said, if they were in Germany
they would be forced into the army. At this time we made a boast of
our voluntary system. We did not know that there would come a time
when these internees would be bitterly envied by forcibly-enlisted
Englishmen because they were safe until the war ended.
In the summer of 1915 _The Times_ reprinted in the daily column,
_Through German Eyes_, a German newspaper account by Herr Wolff, an
exchanged prisoner, of his experiences at Lancaster in 1914. _The
Times_ found very amusing Herr Wolff’s allegations that he and forty
other waiters from the Midland Hotel, Manchester, had been arrested
and taken, handcuffed _and fettered_, in special railway carriages to
Lancaster under the escort of fifty Manchester policemen armed with
carbines. But it was true, because I was the officer who took them over
from the chief inspector. He was a fine figure in frogged uniform and
gave me a splendid salute. I signed him a receipt for his prisoners and
he gave me another salute. He had done his job well and was proud of
it. The only mishap was the accidental breaking of two carriage windows
by the slung carbines. Wolff also said that even children were interned
in the camp. This was true. There were a dozen or so little boys from
the German bands who had been interned because it seemed more humane to
keep them with their friends than to send them to a workhouse. Their
safety in the camp caused the commandant great concern.
I had a detachment of fifty Special Reservists, most of them with only
about six weeks’ service. They had joined the army just before war
started as a cheap way of getting a holiday at the training camp; to
find themselves forced to continue beyond the usual fortnight annoyed
them. They were a rough lot, Welshmen from the border counties, and
were constantly deserting and having to be fetched back by the police.
They made nervous sentries, and were probably more frightened of the
prisoners than the prisoners were of them. Going the round of sentries
on a dark night about 2 a.m. was dangerous. Very often my lantern used
to blow out and I would fumble to light it again in the dark and
hear the frightened voice of a sentry roar out, ‘Halt! Who goes there?’
and know that he was standing with his rifle aimed and his magazine
charged with five live rounds. I used to gasp out the password just
in time. Rifles were often being fired off at shadows. The prisoners
were a rowdy lot; the sailors particularly were always fighting. I saw
a prisoner spitting out teeth and blood one morning. I asked him what
was wrong. ‘Oh, sir, one no-good friend give me one clap on the chops.’
Frequent deputations were sent to complain of the dullness of the food;
it was the same ration food that was served to the troops. But after
a while they realized the war and settled down to sullen docility;
they started hobbies and glee parties and games and plans for escape.
I had far more trouble with my men. They were always breaking out of
their quarters. I could never find out how they did it. I watched all
the possible exits, but caught no one. Finally I discovered that they
used to crawl out through a sewer. They boasted of their successes with
the women. Private Kirby said to me: ‘Do you know, sir? On the Sunday
after we arrived, all the preachers in Lancaster took as their text,
“Mothers, take care of your daughters; the Royal Welch have come to
town.”’
The camp staff consisted of:
A fatherly colonel of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, the
commandant.
His secretary, by name C. B. Gull, one of the best-known pre-war
figures in Oxford, owner of the _Isis_, and combined divinity,
athletics and boxing coach. We used to box together to keep fit. He
also sponsored me as a candidate for the local lodge of The Royal
Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes. The Grand Marshal who officiated at
my initiation had drank four or five pints of ‘bitter-gatter’ and
a glass or two of ‘juniper’ (these were secret words) and continually
short-circuited in the ritual. He kept on returning to the part where
they intone:
Grand Marshal: Spirit of true Buffaloism hover around I us!
Response: Benevolence and joy ever attend us!
The assistant-commandant, who alleged that he had ten years more
seniority than any other major in the British army and made wistful
jokes about his lost virility. His recurrent theme was: ‘If you only
knew how much that would mean to an old man like me.’
The adjutant, an East Lancashire lieutenant, by name Deane. The day
after war was declared a German armed cruiser had held up the neutral
liner in which he was sailing home from the Cape and taken him off. He
was forced to give his parole not to fight against Germany in the war.
The cruiser was subsequently sunk by a British ship, the _Highflyer_,
and Deane was rescued; but the signed parole was saved by the German
captain, who escaped in a boat and gave it in charge of the German
consul at Las Palmas. So Deane was forbidden the trenches, and when I
met him in 1917 he was a staff-colonel.
A doctor who was the mess buffoon. I broke the scabbard of my sword on
his back one night.
The interpreter, a Thomas Cook man who could speak every European
language but Basque. He admitted to a weakness in Lithuanian, and when
asked what his own nationality was would answer, ‘I am Wagon-Lits.’
I had an inconvenient accident. The telephone bell was constantly going
from Western Command Headquarters; it was installed in an office-room
where I slept on a sloping desk. One night Pack-Saddle (the
code-name for the Chief Supply Officer of the Western Command) rang
up shortly after midnight with orders for the commandant. They were
about the rationing of a batch of four hundred prisoners who were
being sent up to him from Chester and North Wales. I was half asleep
and not clever at the use of the telephone. In the middle of the
conversation, which was difficult because a storm was going on at the
time and Pack-Saddle was irritable, the line was, I suppose, struck by
lightning somewhere. I got a bad electric shock, and was unable to use
a telephone properly again until some twelve years later.
Guarding prisoners seemed an unheroic part to be playing in the
war, which had now reached a critical stage; I wanted to be abroad
fighting. My training had been interrupted, and I knew that even when
I was recalled from detachment duty I would have to wait a month or
two at least before being sent out. When I got back to the depot in
October I found myself stale. The adjutant, a keen soldier, decided
that there were two things wrong with me. First of all, I dressed
badly. I had apparently gone to the wrong tailor, and had also had a
soldier-servant palmed off on me who was no good. He did not polish
my buttons and shine my belt and boots as he should have done, and
neglected me generally; as I had never had a valet before I did not
know how to manage him or what to expect of him. The adjutant finally
summoned me to the Orderly Room and threatened that he would not send
me to France until I had entirely overhauled my wardrobe and looked
more like a soldier. My company commander, he said, had reported me to
him as ‘unsoldierlike and a nuisance.’ This put me in a fix, because my
pay only just covered the mess bills, and I knew that I could not ask
my parents to buy me another outfit so soon after I had assured
them that I had everything necessary. The adjutant next decided that
I was not a sportsman. This was because on the day that the Grand
National (I think) was run all the young officers applied for leave
to see the race except myself, and I volunteered to take the job of
Orderly Officer of the Day for someone who wanted to go.
I saw my contemporaries one by one being sent out to France to take
the place of casualties in the First and Second Battalions, while I
remained despondently at the depot. But once more boxing was useful.
Johnny Basham, a sergeant in the regiment, was training at the time
for his fight (which he won) with Boswell for the Lonsdale Belt,
welter-weight. I went down to the training camp one evening, where
Basham was offering to fight three rounds with any member of the
regiment, the more the merrier. One of the officers put on the gloves
and Basham got roars of laughter from the crowd as soon as he had taken
his opponent’s measure, by dodging about and playing the fool with
him. I asked Basham’s manager if I could have a go. He gave me a pair
of shorts and I stepped into the ring. I pretended that I knew nothing
about boxing. I led off with my right and moved about clumsily. Basham
saw a chance of getting another laugh; he dropped his guard and danced
about with a you-can’t-hit-me challenge. I caught him off his balance
and knocked him across the ring. He recovered and went for me, but I
managed to keep on my feet; I laughed at him and he laughed too. We had
three very brisk rounds, and he was decent in making it seem that I
was a much better boxer than I was by accommodating his pace to mine.
As soon as the adjutant heard the story he rang me up at my billet
and told me that he was very pleased to hear of my performance,
that for an officer to box like that was a great encouragement to the
men, that he was mistaken about my sportsmanship, and that to show his
appreciation he had put me down for a draft to go to France in a week’s
time.
Of the officers who had been sent out before me several had already
been killed or wounded. Among the killed was Second-Lieutenant W. G.
Gladstone, whom we called Glad Eyes. He was in his early thirties; a
grandson of old Gladstone, whom he resembled in feature, a Liberal
M.P., and lord-lieutenant of his county. When war was hanging in the
balance he had declared himself against it. His Hawarden tenantry were
ashamed on his account, and threatened, he told us, to duck him in
the pond. Realizing, once war was declared, that further protest was
useless, he immediately joined the regiment as a second-lieutenant. His
political convictions remained. He was a man of great integrity and
refused to take the non-combative employment as a staff-colonel offered
him at Whitehall. When he went to France to the First Battalion he
took no care of himself. He was killed by a sniper when unnecessarily
exposing himself. His body was brought home for a military funeral at
Hawarden; I attended it.
I have one or two random memories of this training period at Wrexham.
The landlord of my billet was a Welsh solicitor, who greatly
overcharged us while pretending amicability. He wore a wig—or, to
be more exact, he had three wigs, with hair of progressive lengths.
When he had worn the medium-sized hair for a few days he would put on
the wig with long hair, and say that, dear him, it was time to get a
hair-cut. Then he would go out of the house and in a public lavatory
perhaps or a wayside copse would change into the short-haired wig,
which he wore until it was time to change to the medium one again.
This deception was only discovered when one of the officers billeted
with me got drunk and raided his bedroom. This officer, whose name
was Williams, was an extreme example of the sly border Welshman. The
drunker he got the more shocking his confessions. He told me one day
about a girl he had got engaged to in Dublin, and even slept with
on the strength of a diamond engagement ring. ‘Only paste really,’
he said. The day before the wedding she had had a foot cut off by a
Dalkey tram, and he had hurriedly left the city. ‘But, Graves, she was
a lovely, lovely girl before that happened.’ He had been a medical
student at Trinity College, Dublin. Whenever he went to Chester, the
nearest town, to pick up a prostitute, he not only used to appeal to
her patriotism to charge him nothing, but he always gave her my name.
I knew of this because these women used to write to me. One day I said
to him in mess: ‘In future you are going to be distinguished from all
the other Williams’ in the regiment by being called Dirty Williams.’
The name stuck. By one shift or another he escaped all trench-service
except for a short spell in a quiet sector, and lasted the war out
safely.
Private Robinson. He was from Anglesey, and had joined the Special
Reserve before the war for his health. In September the entire
battalion volunteered for service overseas except Robinson. He said he
would not go, and that he could be neither coaxed nor bullied. Finally
he was brought before the colonel, who was genuinely puzzled at his
obstinacy. Robinson explained that he was not afraid. ‘I have a wife
and pigs at home.’ The battalion was, in September, rigged out in a
temporary navy-blue uniform until khaki might be available. All but
Robinson. They decided to shame him. So he continued, by order, to
wear the peace-time scarlet tunic and blue trousers with a red stripe;
a very dirty scarlet tunic (they had put him on the kitchen staff). His
mates called him Cock Robin and sang a popular chorus at him:
And I never get a knock
When the boys call Cock
Cockity ock, cock,
Cock Robin!
In my old red vest I mean to cut a shine....
But Robinson did not care:
For the more they call me Robin Redbreast
I’ll wear it longer still.
I will wear a red waistcoat, I will,
I will, I will, I will, I will, I will![1]
So in October he was discharged as medically unfit: ‘Of under-developed
intelligence, unlikely to be of service in His Majesty’s Forces,’
and went home to his wife and pigs. While, of the singers, those who
survived Festubert in the following May did not survive Loos in the
following September.
Recruit officers spent a good deal of their time at Company and
Battalion Orderly Room, learning how to deal with crime. Crime,
of course, meant any breach of army regulations; and there was plenty
of it. In these days Battalion Orderly Room would last four or five
hours every day, at the rate of one crime dealt with every three or
four minutes.; This was apart from the scores of less serious offences
tried by company commanders. The usual Battalion Orderly Room crimes
were desertion, refusing to obey an order, using obscene language to a
non-commissioned officer, drunk and disorderly, robbing a comrade, and
so on. On pay-nights there was hardly a man sober; and no attention was
paid so long as there was silence as soon as the company officer came
on his rounds just before Lights Out. (Two years later serious crime
had diminished to a twentieth of that amount, though the battalion was
treble its original strength, and though many of the cases that the
company officers had dealt with summarily now came before the colonel;
and there was practically no drunkenness.)
There was a boy called Taylor in my company. He had been at Lancaster,
and I had bought him a piccolo to play when the detachment went out
on route-marches; he would give us one tune after another for mile
after mile. The other fellows carried his pack and rifle. At Wrexham,
on pay-nights, he used to sit in the company billet, which was a
drill-hall near the station, and play jigs for the drunks to dance to.
He never drank himself. The music was slow at first, but he gradually
quickened it until he worked them into a frenzy. He would delay this
climax until my arrival with the company orderly-sergeant. The sergeant
would fling open the door and bellow: ‘F Company, Attention!’ Taylor
would break off, thrust the piccolo under his blankets, and spring to
his feet. The drunks were left frozen in the middle of their capers,
blinking stupidly.
In the first Battalion Orderly Room that I attended I was
surprised to hear a private soldier charged with a nursery offence,
about the committal of which expert evidence was given and heard
without a smile. I have an accurate record of the trial but my
publishers advise me not to give it here.
Orderly Room always embarrassed and dispirited me. I never got used to
it even after sentencing thousands of men myself. There was something
shameful about it. The only change that the introduction of the
civilian element into the army brought was that about half-way through
the war an army order came out that henceforth the word of command was
to be ‘Accused and escort, right turn, quick march,’ etc., instead of
‘Prisoner and escort, right turn, quick march, etc.’ It was only very
seldom that an interesting case came up. Even the obscene language,
always quoted verbatim, was drearily the same; the only variation I
remember from the four stock words was in the case of a man charged
with using threatening and obscene language to an N.C.O. The man had,
it appeared, said to a lance-corporal who had a down on him: ‘Corporal
Smith, two men shall meet before two mountains.’ Humour only came from
the very Welsh Welshmen from the hills who had an imperfect command of
English. One of them, charged with being absent off ceremonial parade
and using obscene language to the sergeant, became very indignant in
Orderly Room and cried out to the colonel: ‘Colonel, sir, sergeant tole
me wass I for guard; I axed him no, and now the bloody bastard says
wass I.’
The greatest number of simultaneous charges that I ever heard preferred
against a soldier was in the case of Boy Jones at Liverpool in 1917.
He was charged with, first, using obscene language to the bandmaster;
the bandmaster, who was squeamish, reported it as: ‘Sir, he called
me a double effing c——.’ Next, with breaking out of the detention that
was awarded for this crime. Third, with ‘absenting himself from the
regiment until apprehended in the Hindenburg Line, France.’ Fourth,
with resisting an escort. Fifth, with being found in possession of
regimental property of the Cheshire Regiment. Boy Jones, who was only
fourteen and looked thirteen, had wriggled through the bars of his
detention-cell and, after getting a few things together at his hut, had
gone to Liverpool Exchange Station to wait for a victim. The victim was
a private in a Bantam Battalion just returning to France from leave.
He treated the bantam to a lot of drink and robbed him of his rifle,
equipment, badges and papers. He then went off in his place. Arrived
in France he was posted to the Bantam Battalion; but this did not suit
him. He wanted to be with his own regiment. He deserted the Bantams,
who were somewhere north of Arras, and walked south along the trenches
looking for his regiment, having now resumed his proper badges. After a
couple of days’ walk he found the Second Battalion and reported and was
immediately sent home, though he had a struggle with the escort at the
railhead. The punishment for all these offences was ten days confined
to camp and a spanking from the bandmaster.
The most unusual charge was against the regimental goat-major (a
corporal); it was first framed as _Lese majesty_, but this was later
reduced to ‘disrespect to an officer: in that he, at Wrexham—on such
and such a date—did prostitute the Royal Goat, being the gift of
His Majesty the Colonel-in-Chief from His royal herd at Windsor, by
offering his stud-services to ——, Esq., farmer and goat breeder, of
Wrexham.’ The goat-major pleaded that he had done this out of
kindness to the goat, to which he was much attached. He was reduced to
the ranks and the charge of the goat given to another.
The regular battalions of the regiment, though officered mainly by
Anglo-Welshmen of county families, did not normally contain more than
about one Welshman in fifty in the ranks. They were mainly recruited
in Birmingham. The only man at Harlech besides myself who had joined
the regiment at the start was a poor boy, a golf-caddie, who had got
into trouble a short time before for shoplifting. The chapels held
soldiering to be sinful, and in Merioneth the chapels were supreme.
Prayers were offered for me in the chapels, not because of the dangers
I ran in the war, but because I was in the army. Later, Lloyd George
persuaded the chapels that the war was a crusade. So there was a sudden
tremendous influx of Welshmen from North Wales. They were difficult
soldiers; they particularly resented having to stand still while the
N.C.O.’s swore at them. A deputation of North Welshmen came to me once
and said: ‘Captain Graves, sir, we do not like our sergeant-major; he
do curse and he do swear, and he do drink, and he is a maan of lowly
origin, too.’
At Wrexham we learned regimental history, drill, musketry, Boer War
field-tactics, military law and organization, how to recognize bugle
calls, how to work a machine-gun, and how to conduct ourselves as
officers on formal occasions. We dug no trenches, handled no bombs and
came to think of the company, not of the platoon, still less of the
section, as the smallest independent tactical unit. There were only
two wounded officers back from the front at the time; both had left
the Second Battalion on the retreat from Mons. Neither would talk much
of his experiences. All that one of them, Emu Jones, would tell
us was: ‘The first queer sight I saw in France was three naked women
hanging by their feet in a butcher’s shop.’ The other would say: ‘The
shells knock hell out of a man, especially the big black ones. Just
hell. And that fellow Emu; he wasn’t any good. We marched and marched
and he had a weak heart and used to faint and expect his poor, bloody
platoon to carry him as well as the rest of their load. We used to
swear he was shamming. Don’t believe what old Emu tells you of the
retreat.’