In 1916, when on leave in England after being wounded on the Somme, I
began an account of my first few months in France. Unfortunately, I
wrote it as a novel and I have now to retranslate it into history. I
will give one reconstituted chapter:
On arrival in France we six Royal Welch Fusilier officers went
to the Harfleur base-camp near Havre. Later it was to become an
educational centre for trench-routine, use of bombs, trench-mortars,
rifle-grenades, gas-helmets, and similar technicalities. But now we did
a route-march or two through the French countryside and that was all,
except for fatigues in Havre at the docks, helping the Army Service
Corps unload stores from ships. The town was gay. As soon as we had
arrived we were accosted by numerous little boys pimping for their
sisters. ‘I take you to my sister. She very nice. Very good jig-a-jig.
Not much money. Very cheap. Very good. I take you now. Plenty champagne
for me?’ We were glad when we got orders to go up the line. But
disgusted to find ourselves attached not to the Royal Welch Fusiliers,
but to the Welsh Regiment.
We had heard little about the Welsh Regiment except that it was
tough but rough, and that the Second Battalion, to which we were now
attached, had a peculiar regimental history as the old Sixty-ninth
Foot. It had originally been formed as an emergency force from
pensioners and boy-recruits and sent overseas to do the work of a
regular battalion—I forget in which eighteenth-century campaign. At one
time it had served as marines. The Ups and Downs was the battalion’s
army nick-name, partly because 69 is a number which makes the same
sense whichever way up it is written. The 69 was certainly
upside-down when we joined it. All the company officers except two boys
recently from Sandhurst and a Special Reserve captain were attached
from other regiments. There were now six Royal Welch Fusiliers, two
South Wales Borderers, two East Surreys, two Wiltshires, one from the
Border Regiment, one from the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. Even
the quartermaster was an alien from the Connaught Rangers. There were
perhaps four time-serving N.C.O.’s left in the battalion. Of the men,
not more than fifty or so had been given more than a couple of months’
training before being sent out; some had only three weeks’ training;
a great many had never fired a musketry course. This was because the
First Division had been in constant hard fighting since the previous
August; the Second Welsh had in eight months lost its full fighting
strength five times over. The last occasion was the Richebourg fighting
of 9th May, one of the worst disasters of the early part of the war;
the division’s epitaph in the official _communiqué_ read: ‘Meeting
with considerable opposition in the direction of the Rue du Bois, our
attacks were not pressed.’
The Welsh ranks had been made up first with reservists of the later
categories, then with re-enlisted men, then with Special Reservists of
pre-war enlistment, then with 1914 recruits of three or four months’
training; but each class had in turn been exhausted. Now nothing
was left to send but recruits of the spring 1915 class, and various
sweepings and scourings. The First Battalion had, meanwhile, had the
same heavy losses. In Cardiff they advertised: ‘Enlist at the depot and
get to France quick.’ The recruits were principally men either over-age
or under-age—a repetition of regimental history—or men who had some
slight physical disability which prevented them from enlisting
in regiments more particular than the Welsh. I still have the roll of
my first platoon of forty men. The figures given for their ages are
misleading. When they enlisted all the over-age men had put themselves
in the late thirties and all the under-age men had called themselves
eighteen. But once in France the over-age men did not mind adding on
a few genuine years. No less than fourteen in the roll give their age
as forty or over and these were not all. Fred Prosser, a painter in
civil life, who admitted to forty-eight, was really fifty-six. David
Davies, collier, who admitted to forty-two, and Thomas Clark, another
collier who admitted to forty-five, were only one or two years junior
to Prosser. James Burford, collier and fitter, was even older than
these. When I first spoke to him in the trenches, he said: ‘Excuse me,
sir, will you explain what this here arrangement is on the side of
my rifle?’ ‘That’s the safety-catch. Didn’t you do a musketry course
at the depot?’ ‘No, sir, I was a re-enlisted man and I had only a
fortnight there. The old Lee-Metford didn’t have no safety-catch.’ I
asked him when he had last fired a rifle. ‘In Egypt in 1882,’ he said.
‘Weren’t you in the South African War?’ ‘I tried to re-enlist but they
told me I was too old, sir. I had been an old soldier when I was in
Egypt. My real age is sixty-three.’ He spent all his summers as a tramp
and in the bad months of the year worked as a collier, choosing a new
pit every season. I heard him and David Davies one night in a dug-out
opposite mine talking about the different seams of coals in Wales
and tracing them from county to county and pit to pit with technical
comments. It was one of the most informative conversations I ever heard.
The other half of the platoon contained the under-age section.
There were five of these boys; William Bumford, collier, for instance,
who gave his age as eighteen, was really only fifteen. He used to get
into trouble for falling asleep on sentry duty. The official penalty
for this was death, but I had observed that he could not help it. I had
seen him suddenly go to sleep, on his feet, while holding a sandbag
open for another fellow to fill. So we got him a job as orderly to a
chaplain for a while, and a few months later all men over fifty and all
boys under eighteen were combed out and sent to the base. Bumford and
Burford were both sent; but neither escaped the war. Bumford was old
enough to be sent back to the battalion in the later stages of the war,
and was killed; Burford was killed, too, in a bombing accident at the
base-camp. Or so I was told—the fate of many of my comrades in France
has come to me merely as hearsay.
The troop-train consisted of forty-seven coaches and took twenty-five
hours to arrive at Béthune, the rail-head. We went via St. Omer. It was
about nine o’clock in the evening and we were hungry, cold and dirty.
We had expected a short journey and so allowed our baggage to be put
in a locked van. We played nap to keep our minds off the discomfort
and I lost sixty francs, which was over two pounds at the existing
rate of exchange. On the platform at Béthune a little man in filthy
khaki, wearing the Welsh cap-badge, came up with a friendly touch of
the cap most unlike a salute. He was to be our guide to the battalion,
which was in the Cambrin trenches about ten kilometres away. He asked
us to collect the draft of forty men we had with us and follow him. We
marched through the unlit suburbs of the town. We were all intensely
excited at the noise and flashes of the guns in the distance. The men
of the draft had none of them been out before, except the sergeant
in charge. They began singing. Instead of the usual music-hall songs
they sang Welsh hymns, each man taking a part. The Welsh always sang
when they were a bit frightened and pretending that they were not; it
kept them steady. They never sang out of tune.
We marched towards the flashes and could soon see the flare-lights
curving over the trenches in the distance. The noise of the guns grew
louder and louder. Then we were among the batteries. From behind us
on the left of the road a salvo of four shells came suddenly over our
heads. The battery was only about two hundred yards away. This broke
up _Aberystwyth_ in the middle of a verse and set us off our balance
for a few seconds; the column of fours tangled up. The shells went
hissing away eastward; we could see the red flash and hear the hollow
bang where they landed in German territory. The men picked up their
step again and began chaffing. A lance-corporal dictated a letter home:
‘Dear auntie, this leaves me in the pink. We are at present wading
in blood up to our necks. Send me fags and a lifebelt. This war is a
booger. Love and kisses.’
The roadside cottages were now showing more and more
signs of dilapidation. A German shell came over and then
whoo—oo—ooooooOOO—bump—CRASH! twenty yards away from the party. We
threw ourselves flat on our faces. Presently we heard a curious
singing noise in the air, and then flop! flop! little pieces of
shell-casing came buzzing down all around. ‘They calls them the musical
instruments,’ said the sergeant. ‘Damn them,’ said Frank Jones-Bateman,
who had a cut in his hand from a jagged little piece, ‘the devils have
started on me early.’ ‘Aye, they’ll have a lot of fun with you before
they’re done, sir,’ grinned the sergeant. Another shell came over.
Every one threw himself down again, but it burst two hundred yards
behind us. Only Sergeant Jones had remained on his feet and laughed at
us. ‘You’re wasting yourselves, lads,’ he said to the draft. ‘Listen by
the noise they make coming where they’re going to burst.’
At Cambrin village, which was about a mile from the front trenches, we
were taken into a ruined house. It had been a chemist’s shop and the
coloured glass lights were still in the window. It was the billet of
the Welsh company quartermaster-sergeants. Here we were issued with
gas-respirators and field dressings. This was the first respirator
issued in France. It was a gauze-pad filled with chemically-treated
cotton waste, to be tied across the mouth and nose. It seems it was
useless against German gas. I never put it to the test. A week or two
later came the ‘smoke-helmet,’ a greasy grey-felt bag with a talc
window to look through, but no mouthpiece. This also was probably
ineffective against gas. The talc was always cracking and there were
leaks where it was stitched into the helmet.
These were early days of trench-warfare, the days of the jam-tin bomb
and the gas-pipe trench-mortar. It was before Lewis or Stokes guns,
steel helmets, telescopic rifle-sights, gas-shells, pill-boxes, tanks,
trench-raids, or any of the later improvements of trench-warfare.
After a meal of bread, bacon, rum and bitter stewed tea sickly with
sugar, we went up through the broken trees to the east of the village
and up a long trench to battalion headquarters. The trench was cut
through red clay. I had a torch with me which I kept flashed on the
ground. Hundreds of field mice and frogs were in the trench. They had
fallen in and had no way out. The light dazzled them and we could
not help treading on them. So I put the torch back in my pocket. We had
no picture of what the trenches would be like, and were not far off the
state of mind in which one young soldier joined us a week or two later.
He called out very excitedly to old Burford who was cooking up a bit of
stew in a dixie, apart from the others: ‘Hi, mate, where’s the battle?
I want to do my bit.’
The trench was wet and slippery. The guide was giving hoarse directions
all the time. ‘Hole right.’ ‘Wire high.’ ‘Wire low.’ ‘Deep place here,
sir.’ ‘Wire low.’ I had never been told about the field telephone
wires. They were fastened by staples to the side of the trench, and
when it rained the staples were always falling out and the wire falling
down and tripping people up. If it sagged too much one stretched it
across the top of the trench to the other side to correct the sag, and
then it would catch one’s head. The holes were the sump-pits used for
draining the trenches. We were now under rifle-fire. I always found
rifle-fire more trying than shell-fire. The gunner was usually, I
knew, firing not at people but at map-references—cross-roads, likely
artillery positions, houses that suggested billets for troops, and so
on. Even when an observation officer in an aeroplane or captive balloon
or on a church spire was directing the gun-fire it seemed unaimed,
somehow. But a rifle bullet even when fired blindly always had the
effect of seeming aimed. And we could hear a shell coming and take
some sort of cover, but the rifle bullet gave no warning. So though we
learned not to duck to a rifle bullet, because once it was heard it
must have missed, it gave us a worse feeling of danger. Rifle bullets
in the open went hissing into the grass without much noise, but when we
were in a trench the bullets, going over the hollow, made a tremendous
crack. Bullets often struck the barbed wire in front of the
trenches, which turned them and sent them spinning in a head-overheels
motion—ping! rockety-ockety-ockety-ockety into the woods behind.
Battalion headquarters was a dug-out in the reserve line about
a quarter of a mile from the front companies. The colonel, a
twice-wounded regular, shook hands with us and offered us the whisky
bottle. He said that we were welcome, and hoped that we would soon
grow to like the regiment as much as our own. It was a cosy dug-out
for so early a stage of trench-warfare. (This sector had only recently
been taken over from the French, who knew how to make themselves
comfortable. It had been a territorial division of men in the forties
who had a local armistice with the Germans opposite; there was no
firing and apparently even civilian traffic through the lines.) There
was an ornamental lamp, a clean cloth, and polished silver on the
table. The colonel, adjutant, doctor, second-in-command, and signalling
officer were at dinner. It was civilized cooking, with fresh meat and
vegetables. Pictures were pasted on the walls, which were wall-papered;
there were beds with spring mattresses, a gramophone, easy chairs. It
was hard to reconcile this with accounts I had read of troops standing
waist-deep in mud and gnawing a biscuit while shells burst all around.
We were posted to our companies. I went to C Company. ‘Captain Dunn is
your company commander,’ said the adjutant. ‘The soundest officer in
the battalion. By the way, remind him that I want that list of D.C.M.
recommendations for the last show sent in at once, but not more than
two names, or else they won’t give us any. Four is about the ration for
the battalion in a dud show.’
Our guide took us up to the front line. We passed a group of men
huddled over a brazier. They were wearing waterproof capes, for it
had now started to rain, and cap-comforters, because the weather was
cold. They were little men, daubed with mud, and they were talking
quietly together in Welsh. Although they could see we were officers,
they did not jump to their feet and salute. I thought that this was a
convention of the trenches, and indeed I knew that it was laid down
somewhere in the military textbooks that the courtesy of the salute was
to be dispensed with in battle. But I was wrong; it was just slackness.
We overtook a fatigue-party struggling up the trench loaded with
timber lengths and bundles of sandbags, cursing plaintively as they
slipped into sump-holes and entangled their burdens in the telephone
wire. Fatigue-parties were always encumbered by their rifles and
equipment, which it was a crime ever to have out of reach. When we had
squeezed past this party we had to stand aside to let a stretcher-case
past. ‘Who’s the poor bastard, Dai?’ the guide asked the leading
stretcher-bearer. ‘Sergeant Gallagher,’ Dai answered. ‘He thought he
saw a Fritz in No Man’s Land near our wire, so the silly b——r takes one
of them new issue percussion bombs and shoots it at ’im. Silly b——r aims
too low, it hits the top of the parapet and bursts back. Deoul! man,
it breaks his silly f——ing jaw and blows a great lump from his silly
f——ing face, whatever. Poor silly b——r! Not worth sweating to get him
back! He’s put paid to, whatever.’ The wounded man had a sandbag over
his face. He was dead when they got him back to the dressing-station.
I was tired out by the time I got to company headquarters. I was
carrying a pack-valise like the men, and my belt was hung with all
the usual furnishings—revolver, field-glasses, compass, whisky-flask,
wire-cutters, periscope, and a lot more. A Christmas-tree that was
called. (These were the days in which officers went out to France
with swords and had them sharpened by the armourer before sailing.
But I had been advised to leave my sword back in the billet where
we had tea; I never saw it again or bothered about it.) I was hot
and sweaty; my hands were sticky with the clay from the side of the
trench. C Company headquarters was a two-roomed timber-built shelter
in the side of a trench connecting the front and support lines. Here
were tablecloth and lamp again, whisky-bottle and glasses, shelves
with books and magazines, a framed picture of General Joffre, a large
mirror, and bunks in the next room. I reported to the company commander.
I had expected him to be a middle-aged man with a breastful of medals,
with whom I would have to be formal; but Dunn was actually two months
younger than myself. He was one of the fellowship of ‘only survivors.’
Captain Miller of the Black Watch in the same division was another.
Miller had only escaped from the Rue du Bois massacre by swimming down
a flooded trench. He has carried on his surviving trade ever since.[2]
Only survivors have great reputations. Miller used to be pointed at in
the streets when the battalion was back in reserve billets. ‘See that
fellow. That’s Jock Miller. Out from the start and hasn’t got it yet.’
Dunn had not let the war affect his morale at all. He greeted me very
easily with: ‘Well, what’s the news from England? Oh sorry, first I
must introduce you. This is Walker—clever chap, comes from Cambridge
and fancies himself as an athlete. This is Jenkins, one of those
patriotic chaps who chucked up his job to come here. This is Price, who
only joined us yesterday, but we like him; he brought some damn
good whisky with him. Well, how long is the war going to last and who’s
winning? We don’t know a thing out here. And what’s all this talk about
war-babies? Price pretends he knows nothing about them.’ I told them
about the war and asked them about the trenches.
‘About trenches,’ said Dunn. ‘Well, we don’t know as much about
trenches as the French do and not near as much as Fritz does. We can’t
expect Fritz to help, but the French might do something. They are
greedy; they won’t let us have the benefit of their inventions. What
wouldn’t we give for parachute-lights and their aerial torpedoes! But
there’s no connection between the two armies except when there’s a
battle on, and then we generally let each other down.
‘When I was out here first, all that we did in the trenches was to
paddle about in water and use our rifles. We didn’t think of them as
places to live in, they were just temporary inconveniences. Now we work
all the time we are here, not only for safety but for health. Night
and day. First, the fire-steps, then building traverses, improving
the communication trenches, and so on; lastly, on our personal
comfort—shelters and dug-outs. There was a territorial battalion that
used to relieve us. They were hopeless. They used to sit down in the
trench and say: “Oh my God, this is the limit.” They’d pull out pencil
and paper and write home about it. Did no work on the traverses or on
fire positions. Consequence—they lost half their men from frost-bite
and rheumatism, and one day the Germans broke in and scuppered a lot
more of them. They allowed the work we’d done in the trench to go to
ruin and left the whole place like a sewage-farm for us to take over
again. We were sick as muck. We reported them several times to brigade
headquarters, but they never got any better. Slack officers, of
course. Well, they got smashed, as I say, and were sent away to be
lines-of-communication troops. Now we work with the First South Wales
Borderers. They’re all right. Awful chaps those territorial swine.
Usen’t to trouble about latrines at all; left food about and that
encouraged rats; never filled a sandbag. I only once saw a job of work
that they did. That was a steel loop-hole they put in. But they put
it facing square to the front and quite unmasked, so they had two men
killed at it—absolute death-trap. About our chaps. They’re all right,
but not as right as they ought to be. The survivors of the show ten
days ago are feeling pretty low, and the big new draft doesn’t know
anything yet.’
‘Listen,’ said Walker, ‘there’s too much firing going on. The men have
got the wind up over something. Waste of ammunition, and if Fritz knows
we’re jumpy he’ll give us an extra bad time. I’ll go up and stop them.’
Dunn went on. ‘These Welshmen are peculiar. They won’t stand being
shouted at. They’ll do anything if you explain the reason for it. They
will do and die, but they have to know their reason why. The best way
to make them behave is not to give them too much time to think. Work
them off their feet. They are good workmen. Officers must work too, not
only direct the work. Our time-table is like this. Breakfast at eight
o’clock in the morning, clean trenches and inspect rifles, work all
morning; lunch at twelve, work again from one till about six, when the
men feed again. “Stand-to” at dusk for about an hour, work all night,
“stand-to” for an hour before dawn. That’s the general programme. Then
there’s sentry duty. The men do two-hour sentry spells, then work two
hours, then sleep two hours. At night sentries are doubled, so our
working parties are smaller. We officers are on duty all day and
divide up the night in three-hourly watches.’ He looked at his wrist
watch. ‘I say,’ he said, ‘that carrying-party must have got the R.E.
stuff by now. Time we all got to work. Look here, Graves, you lie down
and have a doss on that bunk. I want you to take the watch before
“stand-to.” I’ll wake you up and show you round. Where the hell’s my
revolver? I don’t like to go out without that. Hello, Walker, what was
wrong?’
Walker laughed. ‘A chap from the new draft. He had never fired his
musketry course at Cardiff, and to-night he fired ball for the first
time. It seemed to go to his head. He’d had a brother killed up at
Ypres and he said he was going to avenge him. So he blazed off all his
own ammunition at nothing, and two bandoliers out of the ammunition-box
besides. They call him the Human Maxim now. His foresight’s misty with
heat. Corporal Parry should have stopped him; but he was just leaning
up against the traverse and shrieking with laughter. I gave them both
a good cursing. Some other new chaps started blazing away, too. Fritz
retaliated with machine-guns and whizz-bangs. No casualties. I don’t
know why. It’s all quiet now. Everybody ready?’
They went out and I rolled up in my blanket and fell asleep. Dunn woke
me about one o’clock. ‘Your watch,’ he said. I jumped out of the bunk
with a rustle of straw; my feet were sore and clammy in my boots. I was
cold, too. ‘Here’s the rocket-pistol and a few flares. Not a bad night.
It’s stopped raining. Put your equipment on over your raincoat or you
won’t be able to get at your revolver. Got a torch? Good. About this
flare business. Don’t use the pistol too much. We haven’t many flares,
and if there’s an attack we will want as many as we can get. But use
it if you think that there is something doing. Fritz is always
sending up flare lights, he’s got as many as he wants.’
He showed me round the line. The battalion frontage was about eight
hundred yards. Each company held two hundred of these with two
platoons in the front line and two platoons in the support line about
a hundred yards back. Dunn introduced me to the platoon sergeants,
more particularly to Sergeant Eastmond of the platoon to which I was
posted. He asked Sergeant Eastmond to give me any information that I
wanted, then went back to sleep, telling me to wake him up at once if
anything was wrong. I was left in charge of the line. Sergeant Eastmond
was busy with a working-party, so I went round by myself. The men of
the working-party, who were building up the traverses with sandbags
(a traverse, I learned, was a safety-buttress in the trench), looked
curiously at me. They were filling sandbags with earth, piling them
up bricklayer fashion, with headers and stretchers alternating, then
patting them flat with spades. The sentries stood on the fire-step at
the corners of the traverses, stamping their feet and blowing on their
fingers. Every now and then they peered over the top for a few seconds.
Two parties, each of an N.C.O. and two men, were out in the company
listening-posts, connected with the front trench by a sap about fifty
yards long. The German front line was about three hundred yards beyond
them. From berths hollowed in the sides of the trench and curtained
with sandbags came the grunt of sleeping men.
I jumped up on the fire-step beside the sentry and cautiously raising
my head stared over the parapet. I could see nothing except the wooden
pickets supporting our protecting barbed-wire entanglement and a
dark patch or two of bushes beyond. The darkness seemed to move and
shake about as I looked at it; the bushes started travelling,
singly at first, then both together. The pickets were doing the same. I
was glad of the sentry beside me; his name, he told me, was Beaumont.
‘They’re quiet to-night, sir,’ he said, ‘a relief going on; I think so,
surely.’ I said: ‘It’s funny how those bushes seem to move.’ ‘Aye, they
do play queer tricks. Is this your first spell in trenches, sir?’ A
German flare shot up, broke into bright flame, dropped slowly and went
hissing into the grass just behind our trench, showing up the bushes
and pickets. Instinctively I moved. ‘It’s bad to do that, sir,’ he
said, as a rifle bullet cracked and seemed to pass right between us.
‘Keep still, sir, and they can’t spot you. Not but what a flare is a
bad thing to have fall on you. I’ve seen them burn a hole in a man.’
I spent the rest of my watch in acquainting myself with the geography
of the trench-section, finding how easy it was to get lost among _culs
de sac_ and disused alleys. Twice I overshot the company frontage and
wandered among the Munsters on the left. Once I tripped and fell with a
splash into deep mud. At last my watch was ended with the first signs
of dawn. I passed the word along the line for the company to stand-to
arms. The N.C.O’s whispered hoarsely into the dug-outs: ‘Stand-to,
stand-to,’ and out the men tumbled with their rifles in their hands.
As I went towards company headquarters to wake the officers I saw a
man lying on his face in a machine-gun shelter. I stopped and said:
‘Stand-to, there.’ I flashed my torch on him and saw that his foot was
bare. The machine-gunner beside him said: ‘No good talking to him,
sir.’ I asked: ‘What’s wrong? What’s he taken his boot and sock off
for?’ I was ready for anything odd in the trenches. ‘Look for yourself,
sir,’ he said. I shook the man by the arm and noticed suddenly
that the back of his head was blown out. The first corpse that I saw in
France was this suicide. He had taken off his boot and sock to pull the
trigger of his rifle with his toe; the muzzle was in his mouth. ‘Why
did he do it?’ I said. ‘He was in the last push, sir, and that sent him
a bit queer, and on top of that he got bad news from Limerick about
his girl and another chap.’ He was not a Welshman, but belonged to the
Munsters; their machine-guns were at the extreme left of our company.
The suicide had already been reported and two Irish officers came up.
‘We’ve had two or three of these lately,’ one of them told me. Then he
said to the other: ‘While I remember, Callaghan, don’t forget to write
to his next-of-kin. Usual sort of letter, cheer them up, tell them he
died a soldier’s death, anything you like. I’m not going to report it
as suicide.’
At stand-to rum and tea were served out. I had a look at the German
trenches through a periscope—a streak of sandbags four hundred yards
away. Some of these were made of coloured stuff, whether for camouflage
or from a shortage of plain canvas I do not know. There was no sign
of the enemy, except for a wisp or two of wood-smoke where they, too,
were boiling up a hot drink. Between us and them was a flat meadow
with cornflowers, marguerites and poppies growing in the long grass, a
few shell holes, the bushes I had seen the night before, the wreck of
an aeroplane, our barbed wire and theirs. A thousand yards away was a
big ruined house, behind that a red-brick village (Auchy), poplars and
haystacks, a tall chimney, another village (Haisnes). Half-right was a
pithead and smaller slag-heaps. La Bassée lay half-left; the sun caught
the weathervane of the church and made it twinkle.
I went off for a sleep. The time between stand-to and breakfast
was the easy part of the day. The men who were not getting in a bit
of extra sleep sat about talking and smoking, writing letters home,
cleaning their rifles, running their thumb-nails up the seams of their
shirts to kill the lice, gambling. Lice were a standing joke. Young
Bumford handed me one like this. ‘We was just having an argument as to
whether it was best to kill the old ones or the young ones, sir. Morgan
here says that if you kill the old ones, the young ones will die of
grief, but Parry here, sir, he says that the young ones are easier to
kill and you can catch the old ones when they come to the funeral.’ He
appealed to me as an arbiter. ‘You’ve been to college, sir, haven’t
you?’ I said: ‘Yes, I had, but so had Crawshay Bailey’s brother
Norwich.’ This was held to be a wonderfully witty answer. _Crawshay
Bailey_ is one of the idiotic songs of Wales. (Crawshay Bailey himself
‘had an engine and he couldn’t make it go,’ and all his relations in
the song had similar shortcomings. Crawshay Bailey’s brother Norwich,
for instance, was fond of oatmeal porridge, and was sent to Cardiff
College, for to get a bit of knowledge.) After that I had no trouble
with the platoon at all.
Breakfast at company headquarters was bacon, eggs, coffee, toast and
marmalade. There were three chairs and two ammunition-boxes to sit on.
Accustomed to company commanders in England not taking their junior
officers into their confidence, I was struck by the way that questions
of the day were settled at meal-times by a sort of board-meeting with
Dunn as chairman. On this first morning there was a long debate as to
the best way of keeping sentries awake. Dunn finally decided to issue
a company order against sentries leaning up against the traverse; it
made them sleepy. Besides, when they fired their rifles the flash
would come always from the same place. The Germans might fix a rifle
on the spot after a time. I told Dunn of the bullet that came between
Beaumont and myself. ‘Sounds like a fixed rifle,’ he said, ‘because not
one aimed shot in a hundred comes as close as that at night. And we had
a chap killed in that very traverse the night we came in.’ The Bavarian
Guards Reserve were opposite us at the time and their shooting was
good. They had complete control of the sniping situation.
Dunn began telling me the characters of the men in my platoon; also
which N.C.O.’s were trustworthy and which had to be watched. He
was going on to tell me just how much to expect from the men at my
platoon inspection of rifles and equipment, when there was a sudden
alarm. Dunn’s servant came rushing in, his eyes blank with horror
and excitement: ‘Gas, sir, gas! They’re using gas.’ ‘My God!’ said
Price. We all looked at Dunn. He said imperturbably: ‘Very well,
Kingdom, bring me my respirator from the other room, and another pot of
marmalade.’ This was only one of many gas alarms. It originated with
smoke from the German trenches where breakfast was also going on; we
knew the German meal-times by a slackening down of rifle-fire. Gas was
a nightmare. Nobody believed in the efficacy of the respirators, though
we were told that they were proof against any gas the enemy could send
over. Pink army forms marked ‘Urgent’ were constantly arriving from
headquarters to explain how to use these contrivances. They were all
contradictory. First the respirators were to be kept soaking wet, then
they were to be kept dry, then they were to be worn in a satchel, then,
again, the satchel was not to be used.
Frank Jones-Bateman came to visit me from the company on our
right. He mentioned with a false ease that he had shot a man just
before breakfast: ‘Sights at four hundred,’ he said. He was a quiet boy
of nineteen. He had just left Rugby and had a scholarship waiting for
him at Clare, Cambridge. His nickname was ‘Silent Night.’