Here are extracts from letters that I wrote at this time:
21_st May_ 1915.—Back in billets again at a coal-mining village
called La Bourse. It is not more than three miles and a half from
the trenches, but the mines are still working. As we came out of
the trenches the Germans were shelling the wood by Cambrin village,
searching for one of our batteries. I don’t think they got it, but it
was fun to see the poplar trees being lopped down like tulips when the
whizz-bangs hit them square. When we marched along the _pavé_ road from
Cambrin the men straggled about out of step and out of fours. Their
feet were sore from having had their boots on for a week—they only
have one spare pair of socks issued to them. I enclose a list of their
minimum load, which weighs about sixty pounds. A lot of extras get
put on top of this—rations, pick or shovel, periscope, and their own
souvenirs to take home on leave:
Greatcoat 1
Tin, mess 1
„ cover 1
Shirt 1
Socks, pair 1
Soap 1
Towel 1
Housewife 1
Holdall 1
Razor 1
„ case 1
Cardigan 1
Cap, fatigue comforter 1
Pay-book 1
Disc, identity 1
Waterproof sheet 1
Tin of grease 1
Field-service dressing 1
Respirator 1
Spine protector 1
Jack knife 1
Set of equipment
Lather brush 1
Comb 1
Fork 1
Knife 1
Spoon 1
Tooth brush 1
Laces, pair 1
Rounds ammunition 150
Rifle and bayonet
Rifle cover 1
Oil bottle and pull-through.
Entrenching tool 1
Well, anyhow, marching on cobbled roads is difficult, so when
a staff-officer came by in a Rolls-Royce and cursed us for bad
march-discipline I felt like throwing something at him. Trench soldiers
hate the staff and the staff know it. The principal disagreement
seems to be about the extent to which trench conditions should modify
discipline. The La Bourse miners are old men and boys dressed in sloppy
blue clothes with bulging pockets. There are shell craters all around
the pit-head. I am billeted with a fatherly old man called Monsieur
Hojdés, who has three marriageable daughters; one of them lifted up
her skirt to show me a shell-wound on her thigh that laid her up last
winter.
22_nd May_.—A colossal bombardment by the French at Souchez, a few
miles away—continuous roar of artillery, coloured flares, shells
bursting all along the ridge by Notre Dame de Lorette. I couldn’t
sleep. It went on all night. Instead of dying away it grew and grew
till the whole air rocked and shook; the sky was lit up with huge
flashes. I lay in my feather bed and sweated. This morning they tell me
there was a big thunderstorm in the middle of the bombardment. But, as
Walker says: ‘Where the gunder ended and the thunder began was hard to
say.’ The men had hot baths at the mines and cleaned up generally.
Their rifles are all in an advanced state of disrepair and many of
their clothes are in rags, but neither can be replaced, we are told,
until they are much worse. The platoon is billeted in a barn full of
straw. Old Burford, who is so old that he refuses to sleep with the
other men of the platoon, has found a doss in an out-building among
some farm tools. In trenches he will sleep on the fire-step even in the
rain rather than in a warm dug-out with the other men. He says that he
remembers the C.O. when he was in long skirts. Young Bumford is the
only man he’ll talk to. The platoon is always ragging Bumford for his
childish simplicity. Bumford plays up to it and begs them not to be too
hard on ‘a lad from the hills.’
23_rd May_.—We did company drill in the morning. Afterwards
Jones-Bateman and I lay on the warm grass and watched the aeroplanes
flying above the trenches pursued by a trail of white shrapnel puffs.
In the evening I was detailed to take out a working-party to Vermelles
les Noyelles to work on a second line of defence—trench digging and
putting up barbed wire under an R.E. officer. But the ground was hard
and the men were tired out when they got back about two o’clock in the
morning. They sang songs all the way home. They have one about Company
Quartermaster-Sergeant Finnigan:
Coolness under fire,
Coolness under fire,
Mentioned in dispatches
For pinching the company rations,
Coolness under fire.
Now he’s on the peg,
Now he’s on the peg,
Mentioned in dispatches
For drinking the company rum,
Now he’s on the peg.
The chorus is:
Whiter than the milky cokernuts,
Whiter than the milky cokernuts,
Wash me in the water
That you washed your dirty daughter in
And I shall be whiter than the milky cokernuts.
Nuts,
Nuts,
Oooooh nuts.
Finnigan doesn’t mind the libel at all.
This is what happened the other day. Two young miners, in another
company, disliked their sergeant, who had a down on them and gave
them all the most dirty and dangerous jobs. When they were in billets
he crimed them for things they hadn’t done. So they decided to kill
him. Later they reported at Battalion Orderly Room and asked to see
the adjutant. This was irregular, because a private is not allowed to
speak to an officer without an N.C.O. of his own company to act as
go-between. The adjutant happened to see them and said: ‘Well, what is
it you want?’ Smartly slapping the small-of-the-butt of their sloped
rifles they said: ‘We’ve come to report, sir, that we are very sorry
but we’ve shot our company sergeant-major.’ The adjutant said: ‘Good
heavens, how did that happen?’ They answered: ‘It was an accident,
sir.’ ‘What do you mean? Did you mistake him for a German?’ ‘No,
sir, we mistook him for our platoon sergeant.’ So they were both shot
by a firing squad of their own company against the wall of a convent at
Béthune. Their last words were the battalion rallying-cry: ‘Stick it,
the Welsh!’ (They say that a certain Captain Haggard first used it in
the battle of Ypres when he was mortally wounded.) The French military
governor was present at the execution and made a little speech saying
how gloriously British soldiers can die.
You would be surprised at the amount of waste that goes on in trenches.
Ration biscuits are in general use as fuel for boiling up dixies,
because fuel is scarce. Our machine-gun crews boil their hot water by
firing off belt after belt of machine-gun ammunition at no particular
target, just generally spraying the German line. After several pounds’
worth of ammunition has been used, the water in the guns—they are
water-cooled—begins to boil. They say they make German ration and
carrying parties behind the line pay for their early-morning cup of
tea. But the real charge will be on income-tax after the war.
24_th May_.—To-morrow we return to trenches. The men are pessimistic
but cheerful. They all talk about getting a ‘cushy’ one to send them
back to ‘Blitey.’ Blitey is, it seems, Hindustani for ‘home.’ My
servant, Fry, who works in a paper-bag factory at Cardiff in civil
life, has been telling me stories about cushy ones. Here are two of
them. ‘A bloke in the Munsters once wanted a cushy, so he waves his
hand above the parapet to catch Fritz’s attention. Nothing doing. He
waves his arms about for a couple of minutes. Nothing doing, not a
shot. He puts his elbows on the fire-step, hoists his body upside down
and waves his legs about till he get blood to the head. Not a shot
did old Fritz fire. “Oh,” says the Munster man, “I don’t believe
there’s a damn squarehead there. Where’s the German army to?” He has
a peek over the top—crack! he gets it in the head. Finee.’ Another
story: ‘Bloke in the Camerons wanted a cushy bad. Fed up and far from
home, he was. He puts his hand over the top and gets his trigger finger
taken off, and two more beside. That done the trick. He comes laughing
through our lines by the old boutillery. “See, lads,” he says, “I’m aff
to bony Scotland. Is it na a beauty?” But on the way down the trench to
the dressing-station he forgets to stoop low where the old sniper was
working. _He_ gets it through the head too. Finee. We laugh fit to die.’
To get a cushy one is all that the old hands think of. Only twelve
men have been with the battalion from the beginning and they are all
transport men except one, Beaumont, a man in my platoon. The few
old hands who went through the last fight infect the new men with
pessimism; they don’t believe in the war, they don’t believe in the
staff. But at least they would follow their officers anywhere, because
the officers happen to be a decent lot. They look forward to a battle
because a battle gives more chances of a cushy one, in the legs or
arms, than trench warfare. In trench warfare the proportion of head
wounds is much greater. Haking commands this division. He’s the man who
wrote the standard textbook, _Company Training_. The last shows have not
been suitable ones for company commanders to profit by his directions.
He’s a decent man; he came round this morning to an informal inspection
of the battalion and shook hands with the survivors. There were tears
in his eyes. Sergeant Smith swore half-aloud: ‘Bloody lot of use that
is, busts up his bloody division and then weeps over what’s bloody
left.’ Well, it was nothing to do with me; I didn’t allow myself
to feel either for the general or for the sergeant. It is said here
that Haking has told General French that the division’s _morale_ has
gone completely. So far as I can see that is not accurate; the division
will fight all right but without any enthusiasm. It is said too that
when the new army comes out the division will be withdrawn and used on
lines of communication for some months at least. I don’t believe it. I
am sure no one will mind smashing up over and over again the divisions
that are used to being smashed up. The general impression here is that
the new-army divisions can’t be of much military use.
28_th May_.—In trenches among the Cuinchy brick-stacks. Not my idea of
trenches. There has been a lot of fighting hereabouts. The trenches
have made themselves rather than been made, and run inconsequently
in and out of the big thirty-foot high stacks of brick; it is most
confusing. The parapet of one of the trenches which we do not occupy
is built up with ammunition-boxes and corpses. Everything here is
wet and smelly. The lines are very close. The Germans have half the
brick-stacks and we have the other half. Each side snipes down from the
top of its brick-stacks into the other’s trenches. This is also a great
place for rifle-grenades and trench-mortars. We can’t reply properly
to these; we have only a meagre supply of rifle-grenades and nothing
to equal the German sausage mortar bomb. This morning about breakfast
time, just as I came out of my dug-out, a rifle-grenade landed within
six feet of me. For some reason, instead of falling on its head and
exploding, it landed with its stick in the wet clay and stood there
looking at me. They are difficult to see coming; they are shot from
a rifle, with its butt on the ground, tilted, and go up a long way
before they turn over and come down. I can’t understand why this
particular rifle-grenade fell as it did; the chances were impossibly
against it.
[Illustration: THE BRICKSTACKS AT GIVENCHY
_Copyright Imperial War Museum._]
Sausages are easy to see and dodge, but they make a terrible noise when
they drop. We have had about ten casualties in our company to-day from
them. I find that I have extraordinarily quick reactions to danger; but
every one gets like that. We can sort out all the different explosions
and disregard all the ones that don’t concern us—the artillery duel,
machine-gun fire at the next company to us, desultory rifle-fire. But
the faint plop! of the mortar that sends off the sausage or the muffled
rifle noise when a grenade is fired, we pick out at once. The men are
much afraid, yet always joking. The company sergeant-major stands
behind Number Eleven brick-stack and shoots at the sausages with a
rifle as they come over; trying to explode them in the air. He says
that it’s better than pigeon-shooting. He hasn’t hit one yet. Last
night a lot of stuff was flying about, including shrapnel. I heard one
shell whish-whishing towards me. I dropped flat. It burst just over the
trench. My ears sang as though there were gnats in them and a bright
scarlet light shone over everything. My shoulder was twisted in falling
and I thought I had been hit, but I hadn’t been. The vibration made my
chest sing, too, in a curious way, and I lost my sense of equilibrium.
I was much ashamed when the sergeant-major came along the trench and
found me on all fours, because I couldn’t stand up straight. It was at
a place where ‘Petticoat Lane’ runs into ‘Lowndes Square.’
There has been a dead man lying on the fire-step waiting to be taken
down to the cemetery to-night. He was a sanitary-man, killed last night
in the open while burying lavatory stuff between our front and support
lines. His arm was stretched out and, when he was got in, it was still
stiff, so that when they put him on the fire-step his stiff arm
stretched right across the trench. His comrades joke as they push it
out of the way to get by. ‘Out of the light, you old bastard. Do you
own this bloody trench?’ Or they shake hands with him familiarly. ‘Put
it there, Billy Boy.’ Of course, they’re miners and accustomed to
death. They have a very limited morality, but they keep to it. They
will, for instance, rob anyone, of anything, except a man in their own
platoon; they will treat every stranger as an enemy until he is proved
their friend, and then there is nothing they won’t do for him. They
are lecherous, the young ones at least, but without the false shame of
the English lecher. I had a letter to censor the other day written by
a lance-corporal to his wife. He said that the French girls were nice
to sleep with, so she mustn’t worry on his account, but that he far
preferred sleeping with her and missed her a great deal.
6_th June_.—We have been billeted in Béthune, a fair-sized town about
seven miles or so behind the front line. There is everything one wants,
a swimming bath, all sorts of shops, especially a cake-shop, the best
I’ve ever met, a hotel where you can get a really good dinner, and a
theatre where we have brigade ‘gaffs.’ I saw a notice this morning on
a building by the Béthune-La Bassée canal—‘Troops are forbidden to
bomb fish. By order of the Town Major.’ Béthune is very little knocked
about, except a part called Faubourg d’Arras, near the station. I am
billeted with a family called Averlant Paul, in the Avenue de Bruay,
people of the official class. They are refugees from Poimbert. There
are two little boys and an elder sister, who is in what corresponds
with the under-fifth of the local high-school. She was worried last
night over her lessons and asked me to help her write out the theory of
decimal division. She showed me the notes she had taken; they were
full of abbreviations. I asked why she’d used abbreviations. She said:
‘The lady professor talked very fast because we were much hurried.’
‘Why were you hurried?’ ‘Oh, because part of the school is used as a
billet for the troops and the Germans were shelling it, and we were
always having to take shelter in the cellar, and when we came back each
time there was less and less time left.’
9_th June_.—I am beginning to realize how lucky I was in my gentle
introduction to the trenches at Cambrin. We are now in a nasty salient
a little to the south of the brick-stacks, where casualities are always
heavy. The company had seventeen casualities yesterday from bombs and
grenades. The front trench averages thirty yards from the Germans.
To-day, at one part, which is only twenty yards away from an occupied
German sap, I came along whistling _The Farmer s Boy_, to keep up
my spirits, when suddenly I saw a group bending over a man lying at
the bottom of the trench. He was making a snoring noise mixed with
animal groans. At my feet was the cap he had worn, splashed with his
brains. I had never seen human brains before; I had somehow regarded
them as a poetical figment. One can joke with a badly-wounded man and
congratulate him on being out of it. One can disregard a dead man.
But even a miner can’t make a joke that sounds like a joke over a man
who takes three hours to die after the top part of his head has been
taken off by a bullet fired at twenty yards range. Beaumont, of whom I
told you in my last letter, was also killed. He was the last unwounded
survivor of the original battalion, except for the transport men. He
had his legs blown against his back. Every one was swearing angrily,
then an R.E. officer came up and told me that there was a tunnel
driven under the German front line and that if we wanted to do a
bit of bombing, now was the time. So he sent the mine up—it was not a
big one, he said, but it made a tremendous noise and covered us with
dirt—and the chaps waited for a few seconds for the other Germans to
rush up to help the wounded away and then they chucked all the bombs
they had.
Beaumont had been telling me how he had won about five pounds in the
sweepstake after the Rue du Bois show. It was a sweepstake of the sort
that leaves no bitterness behind it. Before a show the platoon pools
all its available cash and the winners, who are the survivors, divide
it up afterwards. Those who are killed can’t complain, the wounded
would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the
unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.
24_th June_. —We are billeted in the cellars of Vermelles, which was
taken and re-taken eight times last October. There is not a single
house undamaged in the place. I suppose it once had two or three
thousand inhabitants. It is beautiful now in a fantastic way. We came
up two nights ago; there was a moon shining behind the houses and the
shells had broken up all the hard lines. Next morning we found the
deserted gardens of the town very pleasant to walk about in; they are
quite overgrown and flowers have seeded themselves about wildly. Red
cabbages and roses and madonna lilies are the chief ornaments. There is
one garden with currant bushes in it. I and the company sergeant-major
started eating along the line towards each other without noticing
each other. When we did, we both remembered our dignity, he as a
company sergeant-major and I as an officer. He saluted, I asknowledged
the salute, we both walked away. After a minute or two we both
came back hoping the coast was clear and again, after an exchange of
salutes, had to leave the currants and pretend that we were merely
admiring the flowers. I don’t quite know why I was feeling like that.
The company sergeant-major was a regular and it was natural in him,
and I suppose that it was courtesy to his scruples that made me stop.
Anyhow, along came a couple of privates and stripped the bushes clean.
This afternoon we had a cricket match, officers versus sergeants, in an
enclosure between some houses out of observation from the enemy. The
front line is perhaps three quarters of a mile away. I made top score,
twenty-four; the bat was a bit of a rafter, the ball was a piece of
rag tied round with string, and the wicket was a parrot cage with the
grisly remains of a parrot inside. It had evidently died of starvation
when the French evacuated the town. The corpse was perfectly clean and
dry and I recalled a verse of Skelton’s:
Parrot is a fair bird for a ladie.
God of His goodness him framed and wrought.
When parrot is dead he doth not putrify,
Yea, all things mortal shall turn unto nought
Save mannës soul which Christ so dear bought,
That never can die, nor never die shall.
Make much of parrot, that popajay royal.
The match was broken up suddenly by machine-gun fire. It was not
aimed at us; the Germans were shooting at one of our aeroplanes and
the bullets falling down from a great height had a penetrative power
greater than an ordinary spent bullet.
This is a very idle life except for night-digging on the reserve
line. By day there is nothing to do. We can’t drill because it is
too near the German lines, and there is no fortification work to be
done in the village. To-day two spies were shot. A civilian who had
hung on in a cellar and had, apparently, been flashing news, and a
German soldier disguised as an R.E. corporal who was found tampering
with the telephone wires. We officers spend a lot of time practising
revolver-shooting. Jenkins brought out a beautiful target from the only
undestroyed living-room in our billet area. It was a glass case full of
artificial fruit and flowers, so we put it up on a post at fifty yards
range. He said: ‘I’ve always wanted to smash one of these damn things.
My aunt had one. It’s the sort of thing that _would_ survive an intense
bombardment.’ For a moment I felt a tender impulse to rescue it. But I
smothered it. So we had five shots each, in turn. Nobody could hit it.
So at last we went up to within twenty yards of it and fired a volley.
Someone hit the post and that knocked it off into the grass. Jenkins
said: ‘Damn the thing, it must be bewitched. Let’s take it back.’ The
glass was unbroken, but some of the fruit had come loose. Walker said:
‘No, it’s in pain; we must put it out of its suffering.’ He gave it the
_coup de gracê_ from close quarters.
There is an old Norman church here, very much broken. What is left
of the tower is used as a forward observation post by the artillery.
I counted eight unexploded shells sticking into it. I went in with
Jenkins; the floor was littered with rubbish, broken masonry, smashed
chairs, ripped canvas pictures (some of them look several hundreds of
years old), bits of images and crucifixes, muddied church vestments
rotting in what was once the vestry. Only a few pieces of stained
glass remained fixed in the edges of the windows. I climbed up by way
of the altar to the east window and found a piece about the size
of a plate. I gave it to Jenkins. ‘Souvenir,’ I said. When he held
it up to the light it was St. Peter’s hand with the keys of heaven;
medieval glass. ‘I’m sending this home,’ he said. As we went out we met
two men of the Munsters. They were Irish Catholics. They thought it
sacrilegious for Jenkins to be taking the glass away. One of them said:
‘Shouldn’t take that, sir; it will bring you no luck.’[3]
Walker was ragging Dunn this evening. ‘I believe you’ll be sorry when
the war’s over, skipper. Your occupation will be gone and you’ll have
to go back on the square at the depot for six months and learn how to
form fours regimentally. You missed that little part of the show when
you left Sandhurst and came straight here. You’ll be a full colonel by
then, of course. I’ll give the sergeant-major half a crown to make you
really sweat. I’ll be standing in civvies at the barrack-gate laughing
at you.’
There is a company commander here called Furber. His nerves are in
pieces, and somebody played a dirty joke on him the other day—rolling
a bomb, undetonated, of course, down the cellar steps to frighten him.
This was thought a great joke. Furber is the greatest pessimist out
here. He’s laid a bet with the adjutant that the trench lines will
not be more than a mile from where they are in this sector two years
hence. Every one laughs at Furber, but they like him because he sings
sentimental cockney songs at the brigade gaffs when we are back at
Béthune.