XIV

Now as the summer advanced there came new types of bombs and

trench-mortars, heavier shelling, improved gas-masks and a general

tightening up of discipline. We saw the first battalions of the new

army and felt like scarecrows by comparison. We went in and out of

the Cambrin and Cuinchy trenches, with billets in Béthune and the

neighbouring villages. By this time I had caught the pessimism of the

division. Its spirit in the trenches was largely defensive; the policy

was not to stir the Germans into more than their usual hostility. But

casualties were still very heavy for trench warfare. Pessimism made

everyone superstitious. I became superstitious too: I found myself

believing in signs of the most trivial nature. Sergeant Smith, my

second sergeant, told me of my predecessor in command of the platoon.

‘He was a nice gentleman, sir, but very wild. Just before the Rue du

Bois show he says to me: “By the way, sergeant, I’m going to get killed

to-morrow. I know that. And I know that you’re going to be all right.

So see that my kit goes back to my people. You’ll find their address in

my pocket-book. You’ll find five hundred francs there too. Now remember

this, Sergeant Smith, you keep a hundred francs yourself and divide

up the rest among the chaps left.” He says: “Send my pocket-book back

with my other stuff, Sergeant Smith, but for God’s sake burn my diary.

They mustn’t see that. I’m going to get it _here_!” He points to his

forehead. And that’s how it was. He got it through the forehead all

right. I sent the stuff back to his parents. I divided up the money and

I burnt the diary.’

One day I was walking along a trench at Cambrin when I suddenly dropped

flat on my face; two seconds later a whizz-bang struck the back

of the trench exactly where I had been. The sergeant who was with me,

walking a few steps ahead, rushed back: ‘Are you killed, sir?’ The

shell was fired from a battery near Auchy only a thousand yards away,

so that it must have arrived before the sound of the gun. How did I

know that I should throw myself on my face?

I saw a ghost at Béthune. He was a man called Private Challoner who

had been at Lancaster with me and again in F company at Wrexham. When

he went out with a draft to join the First Battalion he shook my hand

and said: ‘I’ll meet you again in France, sir.’ He had been killed at

Festubert in May and in June he passed by our C Company billet where

we were just having a special dinner to celebrate our safe return from

Cuinchy. There was fish, new potatoes, green peas, asparagus, mutton

chops, strawberries and cream, and three bottles of Pommard. Challoner

looked in at the window, saluted and passed on. There was no mistaking

him or the cap-badge he was wearing. There was no Royal Welch battalion

billeted within miles of Béthune at the time. I jumped up and looked

out of the window, but saw nothing except a fag-end smoking on the

pavement. Ghosts were numerous in France at the time.

There was constant mining going on in this Cambrin-Cuinchy sector. We

had the prospect of being blown up at any moment. An officer of the

R.E. tunnelling company was awarded the Victoria Cross while we were

here. A duel of mining and counter-mining was going on. The Germans

began to undermine his original boring, so he rapidly tunnelled

underneath them. It was touch and go who would get the mine ready

first. He won. But when he detonated it from the trench by an electric

lead, nothing happened. He ran down again into the mine, retamped

the charge, and was just back in time to set it off before the Germans.

I had been into the upper boring on the previous day. It was about

twenty feet under the German lines. At the end of the gallery I found

a Welsh miner, one of our own men who had transferred to the Royal

Engineers, on listening duty. He cautioned me to silence. I could

distinctly hear the Germans working somewhere underneath. He whispered:

‘So long as they work, I don’t mind; it’s when they stop.’ He did his

two-hour spell by candle-light. It was very stuffy. He was reading a

book. The mining officer had told me that they were allowed to read; it

didn’t interfere with their listening. It was a paper-backed novelette

called _From Mill Girl to Duchess_. The men of the tunnelling companies

were notorious thieves, by the way. They would snatch things up from

the trench and scurry off with them into their borings; just like mice.

After one particularly bad spell of trenches I got bad news in a

letter from Charterhouse. Bad news in the trenches might affect a man

in either of two ways. It might drive him to suicide (or recklessness

amounting to suicide), or it might seem trivial in comparison with

present expediences and be disregarded. But unless his leave was due

he was helpless. A year later, when I was in trenches in the same

sector, an officer of the North Staffordshire Regiment had news from

home that his wife was living with another man. He went out on a raid

the same night and was either killed or captured; so the men with him

said. There had been a fight and they had come back without him. Two

days later he was arrested at Béthune trying to board a leave-train

to go home; he had intended to shoot up the wife and her lover. He

was court-martialled for deserting in the face of the enemy, but

the court was content to cashier him. He went as a private soldier to

another regiment. I do not know what happened afterwards.

The bad news was about Dick, saying that he was not at all the innocent

sort of fellow I took him for. He was as bad as anyone could be. The

letter was written by a cousin of mine who was still at Charterhouse.

I tried not to believe it. I remembered that he owed me a grudge and

decided that this was a very cruel act of spite. Dick’s letters had

been my greatest stand-by all these months when I was feeling low;

he wrote every week, mostly about poetry. They were something solid

and clean to set off against the impermanence of trench life and

the uncleanness of sex-life in billets. I was now back in Béthune.

Two officers of another company had just been telling me how they

had jslept, in the same room, one with the mother and one with the

daughter. They had tossed for the mother because the daughter was a

‘yellow-looking little thing like a lizard.’ And the Red Lamp, the army

brothel, was round the corner in the main street. I had seen a queue

of a hundred and fifty men waiting outside the door, each to have his

short turn with one or the other of the three women in the house. My

servant, who had been in the queue, told me that the charge was ten

francs a man—about eight shillings at that time. Each woman served

nearly a battalion of men every week for as long as she lasted. The

assistant provost-marshal had told me that three weeks was the usual

limit, ‘after which the woman retires on her earnings, pale but proud.’

I was always being teased because I would not sleep even with the nicer

girls. And I excused myself, not on moral grounds or on grounds of

fastidiousness, but in the only way they could understand: I said that

I didn’t want a dose. A good deal of talk in billets was about

the peculiar bed-manners of the French women. ‘She was very nice and

full of games. I said to her: “S’il vous plaît, ôtes-toi la chemise, ma

chérie.” But she wouldn’t. She said, “Oh no’-non, mon lieutenant. Ce

n’est pas convenable.”’ I was glad when we were back in trenches. And

there I had a more or less reassuring letter from Dick. He told me that

I was right, that my cousin had a spite against him and me, that he had

been ragging about in a silly way, but that there was not much harm to

it; he was very sorry and would stop it for the sake of our friendship.

At the end of July, I and Robertson, one of the other five Royal Welch

officers who had been attached to the Welsh, got orders to proceed to

the Laventie sector, some miles to the north. We were to report to the

Second Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Frank Jones-Bateman

and Hanmer Jones, two more of us, went to the First Battalion. The

remaining two of the six had already gone back, McLellan sick and

Watkin with bomb wounds that have kept him limping ever since. We were

sorry to say good-bye to the men; they all crowded round to shake

hands and wish us luck. And we felt a little sorry too that we had to

start all over again getting to know a new company and new regimental

customs. But it would be worth it, to be with our own regiment.

Robertson and I agreed to take our journey as leisurely as possible.

Laventie was only seventeen miles away, but our orders were to go there

by train; so a mess-cart took us down to Béthune. We asked the railway

transport officer what trains he had to Laventie. He told us one was

going in a few minutes; we decided to miss it. There was no train after

that until the next day, so we stopped the night at the Hotel de la

France. (The Prince of Wales, who was a lieutenant in the Fortieth

Siege Battery, was billeted there sometimes. He was a familiar

figure in Béthune. I only spoke to him once; it was in the public bath,

where he and I were the only bathers one morning. He was graciously

pleased to remark how emphatically cold the water was and I loyally

assented that he was emphatically right. We were very pink and white

and did exercises on the horizontal bar afterwards. I joked to Frank

about it: ‘I have just met our future King in a bath.’ Frank said: ‘I

can trump that. Two days ago I had a friendly talk with him in the

A.S.C. latrines.’ The Prince’s favourite rendezvous was the _Globe_,

a café in the Béthune market square reserved for British officers and

French civilians; principally spies by the look of them. I once heard

him complaining indignantly that General French had refused to let him

go up into the line.)

The next day we caught our train. It took us to a junction, the name

of which I forget. Here we spent a day walking about in the fields.

There was no train until next day, when one took us on to Berguette,

a railhead still a number of miles from Laventie, where a mess-cart

was waiting for us in answer to a telegram we had sent. We finally

rattled up to battalion headquarters in Laventie High Street. We had

taken fifty-two hours to come seventeen miles. We saluted the adjutant

smartly, gave our names, and said that we were Third Battalion officers

posted to the regiment. He did not shake hands with us, offer us a

drink, or give us a word of welcome. He said coldly: ‘I see. Well,

which of you is senior? Oh, never mind. Give your particulars to

the regimental sergeant-major. Tell him to post whoever is senior

to A Company and the other to B Company.’ The sergeant-major took

our particulars. He introduced me to a young second-lieutenant of A

Company, to which I was to go. He was a special reservist of the East

Surrey Regiment and was known as the Surrey-man. He took me along

to the company billet. As soon as we were out of earshot of battalion

headquarters I asked him: ‘What’s wrong with the adjutant? Why didn’t

he shake hands or give me any sort of decent welcome?’

The Surrey-man said: ‘Well, it’s your regiment, not mine. They’re all

like that. You must realize that this is a regular battalion, one of

the only four infantry battalions in France that is still more or less

its old self. This is the Nineteenth Brigade, the luckiest in France.

It has not been permanently part of any division, but used as army

reserve to put in wherever a division has been badly knocked. So,

except for the retreat, where it lost about a company, and Fromelles,

where it lost half of what was left, it has been practically undamaged.

A lot of the wounded have rejoined since. All our company commanders

are regulars, and so are all our N.C.O.’s. The peace-time custom of

taking no notice of newly-joined officers is still more or less kept

up for the first six months. It’s bad enough for the Sandhurst chaps,

it’s worse for special reservists like you and Rugg and Robertson, it’s

worse still for outsiders like me from another regiment.’ We were going

down the village street. The men sitting about on the door-steps jumped

up smartly to attention as we passed and saluted with a fixed stony

glare. They were magnificent looking men. Their uniforms were spotless,

their equipment khaki-blancoed and their buttons and cap-badges

twinkling. We reached company headquarters, where I reported to my

company commander, Captain G. O. Thomas. He was a regular of seventeen

years’ service, a well-known polo-player, and a fine soldier. This is

the order that he would himself have preferred. He shook hands without

a word, waved me to a chair, offered a cigarette and continued

writing his letter. I found later that A was the best company I could

have struck.

The Surrey-man asked me to help him censor some company letters before

going over to the battalion mess for lunch; they were more literate

than the ones in the Welsh regiment, but duller. On the way to the mess

he told me more about the battalion. He asked me whether it was my

first time out. ‘I was attached to the Second Welsh Regiment for three

months; I commanded a company there for a bit.’ ‘Oh, were you? Well,

I’d advise you to say nothing at all about it, then they’ll not expect

too much of you. They treat us like dirt; in a way it will be worse

for you than for me because you’re a full lieutenant. They’ll resent

that with your short service. There’s one lieutenant here of six years’

service and second-lieutenants who have been out here since the autumn.

They have already had two Special Reserve captains foisted on them;

they’re planning to get rid of them somehow. In the mess, if you open

your mouth or make the slightest noise the senior officers jump down

your throat. Only officers of the rank of captain are allowed to drink

whisky or turn on the gramophone. We’ve got to jolly well keep still

and look like furniture. It’s just like peace time. Mess bills are very

high; the mess was in debt at Quetta last year and we are economising

now to pay that back. We get practically nothing for our money but

ordinary rations and the whisky we aren’t allowed to drink.

‘We’ve even got a polo-ground here. There was a polo-match between the

First and Second Battalions the other day. The First Battalion had had

all their decent ponies pinched that time when they were sent up at

Ypres and the cooks and transport men had to come up into the line to

prevent a break through. So this battalion won easily. Can you

ride? No? Well, subalterns who can’t ride have to attend riding-school

every afternoon while we’re in billets. They give us hell, too. Two

of us have been at it for four months and haven’t passed off yet.

They keep us trotting round the field, with crossed stirrups most of

the time, and they give us pack-saddles instead of riding-saddles.

Yesterday they called us up suddenly without giving us time to change

into breeches. That reminds me, you notice everybody’s wearing shorts?

It’s a regimental order. The battalion thinks it’s still in India.

They treat the French civilians just like “niggers,” kick them about,

talk army Hindustani at them. It makes me laugh sometimes. Well, what

with a greasy pack-saddle, bare knees, crossed stirrups, and a wild

new transport pony that the transport men had pinched from the French,

I had a pretty thin time. The colonel, the adjutant, the senior major

and the transport officer stood at the four corners of the ring and

slogged at the ponies as they came round. I came off twice and got wild

with anger, and nearly decided to ride the senior major down. The funny

thing is that they don’t realize that they are treating us badly—it’s

such an honour to be serving with the regiment. So the best thing is to

pretend you don’t care what they do or say.’

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

there?’

‘The battalion doesn’t recognize it socially,’ he answered. ‘Still, in

trenches I’d rather be with this battalion than in any other that I

have met. The senior officers do know their job, whatever else one says

about them, and the N.C.O.’s are absolutely trustworthy.’

The Second Battalion was peculiar in having a battalion mess instead of

company messes. The Surrey-man said grimly: ‘It’s supposed to be more

sociable.’ This was another peace-time survival. We went together

into the big château near the church. About fifteen officers of various

ranks were sitting in chairs reading the week’s illustrated papers

or (the seniors at least) talking quietly. At the door I said: ‘Good

morning, gentlemen,’ the new officer’s customary greeting to the mess.

There was no answer. Everybody looked at me curiously. The silence that

my entry had caused was soon broken by the gramophone, which began

singing happily:

We’ve been married just one year,

And Oh, we’ve got the sweetest,

And Oh, we’ve got the neatest,

And Oh, we’ve got the cutest

Little oil stove.

I found a chair in the background and picked up _The Field_. The door

burst open suddenly and a senior officer with a red face and angry

eye burst in. ‘Who the blazes put that record on?’ he shouted to the

room. ‘One of the bloody warts I expect. Take it off somebody. It

makes me sick. Let’s have some real music. Put on the _Angelus_.’ Two

subalterns (in the Royal Welch a subaltern had to answer to the name of

‘wart’) sprang up, stopped the gramophone, and put on _When the Angelus

is ringing_. The young captain who had put on _We’ve been married_

shrugged his shoulders and went on reading, the other faces in the room

were blank.

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

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

Before the record was finished the door opened and in came the

colonel; Buzz Off reappeared with him. Everybody jumped up and said

in unison: ‘Good morning, sir.’ It was his first appearance that

day. Before giving the customary greeting and asking us to sit down he

turned spitefully to the gramophone: ‘Who on earth puts this wretched

_Angelus_ on every time I come into the mess? For heaven’s sake play

something cheery for a change.’ And with his own hands he took off the

_Angelus_, wound up the gramophone and put on _We’ve been married just

one year_. At that moment a gong rang for lunch and he abandoned it.

We filed into the next room, a ball-room with mirrors and a decorated

ceiling. We sat down at a long, polished table. The seniors sat at the

top, the juniors competed for seats as far away from them as possible.

I was unlucky enough to get a seat at the foot of the table facing the

commanding officer, the adjutant and Buzz Off. There was not a word

spoken down that end except for an occasional whisper for the salt

or for the beer—very thin French stuff. Robertson, who had not been

warned, asked the mess waiter for whisky. ‘Sorry, sir,’ said the mess

waiter, ‘it’s against orders for the young officers.’ Robertson was a

man of forty-two, a solicitor with a large practice, and had stood for

Parliament in the Yarmouth division at the previous election.

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

potatoes.

He nudged the adjutant. ‘Who are those two funny ones down there,

Charley,’ he asked.

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

and Graves.’

‘Which is which?’ asked the colonel.

‘I’m Robertson, sir.’

‘I wasn’t asking you.’

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

‘T’other wart’s wearing a wind-up tunic.’ Then he bent forward and

asked me loudly. ‘You there, wart. Why the hell are you wearing your

stars on your shoulder instead of your sleeve?’

My mouth was full and I was embarrassed. Everybody was looking at me. I

swallowed the lump of meat whole and said: ‘It was a regimental order

in the Welsh Regiment. I understood that it was the same everywhere in

France.’

The colonel turned puzzled to the adjutant: ‘What on earth’s the man

talking about the Welsh Regiment for?’ And then to me: ‘As soon as you

have finished your lunch you will visit the master-tailor. Report at

the orderly room when you’re properly dressed.’

There was a severe struggle in me between resentment and regimental

loyalty. Resentment for the moment had the better of it. I said under

my breath: ‘You damned snobs. I’ll survive you all. There’ll come a

time when there won’t be one of you left serving in the battalion to

remember battalion mess at Laventie.’ This time came, exactly a year

later.[4]

We went up to the trenches that night. They were high-command trenches;

because water was struck when one dug down three feet, the parapet and

parados were built up man-high. I found my platoon curt and reserved.

Even when on sentry-duty at night they would never talk confidentially

about themselves and their families like my platoon in the Welsh

Regiment. Townsend, the platoon-sergeant, was an ex-policeman who had

been on the reserve when war broke out. He used to drive his men rather

than lead them. ‘A’ company was at Red Lamp Corner; the front trench

broke off short here and started again further back on the right.

A red lamp was hung at the corner, invisible to the enemy, but a

warning after dark to the company on our right not to fire to the left

of it. Work and duties were done with a silent soldier-like efficiency

quite foreign to the Welsh.

The first night I was in trenches my company commander asked me to

go out on patrol; it was the regimental custom to test new officers

in this way. All the time that I had been with the Welsh I had never

once been out in No Man’s Land, even to inspect the barbed wire. In

the Welsh Regiment the condition of the wire was, I believe, the

responsibility of the battalion intelligence officer. I never remember

any work done on it by C Company. I think we left it to the Royal

Engineers. When Hewitt, the machine-gun officer, used to go out on

patrol sometimes it was regarded as a mad escapade. But with both

battalions of the Royal Welch Fusiliers it was a point of honour to

be masters of No Man’s Land from dusk to dawn. There was not a night

at Laventie that a message did not come down the line from sentry to

sentry: ‘Pass the word; officer’s patrol going out.’ My orders for this

patrol were to see whether a German sap-head was occupied by night or

not.

I went out from Red Lamp Corner with Sergeant Townsend at about ten

o’clock. We both had revolvers. We pulled socks, with the toes cut

off, over our bare knees, to prevent them showing up in the dark and

to make crawling easier. We went ten yards at a time, slowly, not on

all fours, but wriggling flat along the ground. After each movement

we lay and watched for about ten minutes. We crawled through our own

wire entanglements and along a dry ditch; ripping our clothes on more

barbed wire, glaring into the darkness till it began turning round and

round (once I snatched my fingers in horror from where I had planted

them on the slimy body of an old corpse), nudging each other with

rapidly beating hearts at the slightest noise or suspicion, crawling,

watching, crawling, shamming dead under the blinding light of enemy

flares and again crawling, watching, crawling. (A Second Battalion

officer who revisited these Laventie trenches after the war was over

told me of the ridiculously small area of No Man’s Land compared with

the size it seemed on the long, painful journeys that he made over it.

‘It was like the real size of the hollow in a tooth compared with the

size it feels to the tongue.’)

We found a gap in the German wire and came at last to within five yards

of the sap-head that was our objective. We waited quite twenty minutes

listening for any signs of its occupation. Then I nudged Sergeant

Townsend and, revolvers in hand, we wriggled quickly forward and slid

into it. It was about three feet deep and unoccupied. On the floor

were a few empty cartridges and a wicker basket containing something

large and smooth and round, twice as large as a football. Very, very

carefully I groped and felt all around it in the dark. I couldn’t guess

what it was. I was afraid that it was some sort of infernal machine.

Eventually I dared to lift it out and carry it back. I had a suspicion

that it might be one of the German gas-cylinders that we had heard

so much about. We got back after making the journey of perhaps two

hundred yards in rather more than two hours. The sentries passed along

the word that we were in again. Our prize turned out to be a large

glass container quarter-filled with some pale yellow liquid. This was

sent down to battalion headquarters and from there sent along to the

divisional intelligence office. Everybody was very interested in it.

The theory was that the vessel contained a chemical for re-damping gas

masks. I now believe it was the dregs of country wine mixed with

rainwater. I never heard the official report. The colonel, however,

told my company commander in the hearing of the Surrey-man: ‘Your new

wart seems to have more guts than the others.’ After this I went out

fairly often. I found that the only thing that the regiment respected

in young officers was personal courage.

Besides, I had worked it out like this. The best way of lasting the

war out was to get wounded. The best time to get wounded was at night

and in the open, because a wound in a vital spot was less likely. Fire

was more or less unaimed at night and the whole body was exposed.

It was also convenient to be wounded when there was no rush on the

dressing-station services, and when the back areas were not being

heavily shelled. It was most convenient to be wounded, therefore, on

a night patrol in a quiet sector. You could usually manage to crawl

into a shell-hole until somebody came to the rescue. Still, patrolling

had its peculiar risks. If you were wounded and a German patrol got

you, they were as likely as not to cut your throat. The bowie-knife

was a favourite German patrol weapon; it was silent. (At this time

the British inclined more to the ‘cosh,’ a loaded stick.) The most

important information that a patrol could bring back was to what

regiment and division the troops opposite belonged. So if a wounded

man was found and it was impossible to get him back without danger to

oneself, the thing to be done was to strip him of his badges. To do

that quickly and silently it might be necessary first to cut his throat

or beat in his skull.

Sir P. Mostyn, a lieutenant who was often out patrolling at Laventie,

had a feud on with a German patrol on the left of the battalion

frontage. (Our patrols usually consisted of an officer and one

or, at the most, two men. German patrols were usually six or seven men

under an N.C.O. German officers left as much as they decently could to

their N.C.O.’s. They did not, as one of our sergeant-majors put it,

believe in ‘keeping a dog and barking themselves.’) One night Mostyn

caught sight of his ♦opponets; he had raised himself on one knee to

throw a percussion bomb at them when they fired and wounded him in the

arm, which immediately went numb. He caught the bomb before it hit

the ground and threw it with his left hand, and in the confusion that

followed managed to return to the trench.

♦ “opponets” replaced with “opponents”

Like every one else I had a carefully worked out formula for taking

risks. We would all take any risk, even the certainty of death, to save

life or to maintain an important position. To take life we would run,

say, a one-in-five risk, particularly if there was some wider object

than merely reducing the enemy’s man-power; for instance, picking off

a well-known sniper, or getting fire ascendancy in trenches where the

lines were dangerously close. I only once refrained from shooting a

German I saw, and that was at Cuinchy about three weeks after this.

When sniping from a knoll in the support line where we had a concealed

loop-hole I saw a German, about seven hundred yards away, through my

telescopic sights. He was having a bath in the German third line. I

somehow did not like the idea of shooting a naked man, so I handed

the rifle to the sergeant who was with me and said: ‘Here, take this.

You’re a better shot than me.’ He got him, he said; but I had not

stayed to watch.

About saving the lives of enemy wounded there was disagreement; the

convention varied with the division. Some divisions, like the Canadians

and a division of Lowland territorials, who had, they claimed,

atrocities to avenge, would not only take no risks to rescue

enemy wounded, but would go out of their way to finish them off. The

Royal Welch Fusiliers were gentlemanly: perhaps a one-in-twenty risk

to get a wounded German to safety would be considered justifiable. An

important factor in taking risks was our own physical condition. When

exhausted and wanting to get quickly from one point in the trenches to

another without collapse, and if the enemy were not nearer than four or

five hundred yards, we would sometimes take a short cut over the top.

In a hurry we would take a one-in-two-hundred risk, when dead tired a

one-in-fifty risk. In some battalions where the _morale_ was not high,

one-in-fifty risks were often taken in mere laziness or despair. The

Munsters in the First Division were said by the Welsh to ‘waste men

wicked’ by not keeping properly under cover when in the reserve lines.

In the Royal Welch there was no wastage of this sort. At no time in the

war did any of us allow ourselves to believe that hostilities could

possibly continue more than nine months or a year more, so it seemed

almost worth while taking care; there even seemed a chance of lasting

until the end absolutely unhurt.

The Second Royal Welch, unlike the Second Welsh, believed themselves

better trench fighters than the Germans. With the Second Welsh it

was not cowardice but modesty. With the Second Royal Welch it was

not vainglory but courage: as soon as they arrived in a new sector

they insisted on getting fire ascendancy. Having found out from the

troops they relieved all possible information as to enemy snipers,

machine-guns, and patrols, they set themselves to deal with them one

by one. They began with machine-guns firing at night. As soon as one

started traversing down a trench the whole platoon farthest removed

from its fire would open five rounds rapid at it. The machine-gun

would usually stop suddenly but start again after a minute or two.

Again five rounds rapid. Then it usually gave up.

The Welsh seldom answered a machine-gun. If they did, it was not with

local organized fire, beginning and ending in unison, but in ragged

confused protest all along the line. There was almost no firing at

night in the Royal Welch, except organized fire at a machine-gun or

a persistent enemy sentry, or fire at a patrol close enough to be

distinguished as a German one. With all other battalions I met in

France there was random popping off all the time; the sentries wanted

to show their spite against the war. Flares were rarely used in the

Royal Welch; most often as signals to our patrols that it was time to

come back.

As soon as enemy machine-guns had been discouraged, our patrols would

go out with bombs to claim possession of No Man’s Land. At dawn next

morning came the struggle for sniping ascendancy. The Germans, we

were told, had special regimental snipers, trained in camouflaging

themselves. I saw one killed once at Cuinchy who had been firing all

day from a shell-hole between the lines. He had a sort of cape over his

shoulders of imitation grass, his face was painted green and brown,

and his rifle was also green fringed. A number of empty cartridges

were found by him, and his cap with the special oak-leaf badge. Few

battalions attempted to get control of the sniping situation. The

Germans had the advantage of having many times more telescopic sights

than we did, and steel loopholes that our bullets could not pierce.

Also a system by which the snipers were kept for months in the same

sector until they knew all the loopholes and shallow places in our

trenches, and the tracks that our ration-parties used above-ground by

night, and where our traverses came in the trench, and so on,

better than we did ourselves. British snipers changed their trenches,

with their battalions, every week or two, and never had time to learn

the German line thoroughly. But at least we counted on getting rid of

the unprofessional German sniper. Later we had an elephant-gun in the

battalion that would pierce the German loopholes, and if we could not

locate the loophole of a persistent sniper we did what we could to

dislodge him by a volley of rifle-grenades, or even by ringing up the

artillery.

It puzzled us that if a sniper were spotted and killed, another sniper

would begin again next day from the same position. The Germans probably

underrated us and regarded it as an accident. The willingness of other

battalions to let the Germans have sniping ascendancy helped us; enemy

snipers often exposed themselves unnecessarily, even the professionals.

There was, of course, one advantage of which no advance or retreat of

the enemy could rob us, and that was that we were always facing more or

less East; dawn broke behind the German lines, and they seldom realized

that for several minutes every morning we could see them though still

invisible ourselves. German night wiring-parties often stayed out too

long, and we could get a man or two as they went back; sunsets were

against us, but sunset was a less critical time. Sentries at night were

made to stand with their head and shoulders above the trenches and

their rifles in position on the parapet. This surprised me at first.

But it meant greater vigilance and self-confidence in the sentry,

and it put the top of his head above the level of the parapet. Enemy

machine-guns were trained on this level, and it was safer to be hit in

the chest or shoulders than in the top of the head. The risk of unaimed

fire at night was negligible, so this was really the safest plan.

It often happened in battalions like the Second Welsh, where the

head-and-shoulder rule was not in force and the sentry just took a peep

now and then, that an enemy patrol would sneak up unseen to the British

wire, throw a few bombs and get safely back. In the Royal Welch the

barbed-wire entanglement was the responsibility of the company behind

it. One of our first acts on taking over trenches was to inspect and

repair it. We did a lot of work on the wire.

Thomas was an extremely silent man; it was not sullenness but shyness.

‘Yes’ and ‘no’ was the limit of his usual conversation; it was

difficult for us subalterns. He never took us into his confidence about

company affairs, and we did not like asking him too much. His chief

interests seemed to be polo and the regiment. He was most conscientious

in taking his watch at night, a thing that the other company commanders

did not always do. We enjoyed his food-hampers sent every week from

Fortnum and Mason; we messed by companies when in the trenches. Our

only complaint was that Buzz Off, who had a good nose for a hamper,

used to spend more time than he would otherwise have done in the

company mess. This embarrassed us. Thomas went on leave to England

about this time. I heard about it accidentally. He walked about the

West End astonished at the amateur militariness that he met everywhere.

To be more in keeping with it he gave elaborate awkward salutes to

newly joined second-lieutenants and raised his cap to dug-out colonels

and generals. It was a private joke at the expense of the war.

I used to look forward to our spells in trenches at Laventie. Billet

life meant battalion mess, also riding-school, which I found rather

worse than the Surrey-man had described it. Parades were carried

out with peace-time punctiliousness and smartness, especially the

daily battalion guard-changing which every now and then, when I was

orderly officer, it was my duty to supervise. On one occasion, after

the guard-changing ceremony and inspection were over and I was about

to dismiss the old guard, I saw Buzz Off cross the village street

from one company headquarters to another. As he crossed I called the

guard to attention and saluted. I waited for a few seconds and then

dismissed the guard, but he had not really gone into the biliet; he

had been waiting in the doorway. As soon as I dismissed the guard he

dashed out with a great show of anger. ‘As you were, as you were, stand

fast!’ he shouted to the guard. And then to me: ‘Why in hell’s name,

Mr. Graves, didn’t you ask my permission to dismiss the parade? You’ve

read the King’s Regulations, haven’t you? And where the devil are your

manners, anyhow?’ I apologized. I said that I thought he had gone into

the house. This made matters worse. He bellowed at me for arguing;

then he asked me where I had learned to salute. ‘At the depot, sir,’ I

answered. ‘Then, by heaven, Mr. Graves, you’ll have to learn to salute

as the battalion does. You will parade every morning before breakfast

for a month under Staff-sergeant Evans and do an hour’s saluting

drill.’ Then he turned to the guard and dismissed them himself. This

was not a particular act of spite against me but the general game of

‘chasing the warts,’ at which all the senior officers played. It was

honestly intended to make us better soldiers.

I had been with the Royal Welch about three weeks when the Nineteenth

Brigade was moved down to the Béthune sector to fill a gap in the

Second Division; the gap was made by taking out the brigade of Guards

to go into the Guards Division which was then being formed. On

the way down we marched past Lord Kitchener. Kitchener, we were told,

commented to the brigadier on the soldier-like appearance of the

leading battalion—which was ourselves—but said cynically: ‘Wait until

they’ve been a week or two in the trenches; they will lose some of

that high polish.’ He apparently mistook us for one of the new-army

battalions.

The first trenches we went into on our arrival were the Cuinchy

brick-stacks. The company I was with was on the canal-bank frontage,

a few hundred yards to the left of where I had been with the Welsh

Regiment at the end of May. The Germans opposite wished to be sociable.

They sent messages over to us in undetonated rifle-grenades. One of

these messages was evidently addressed to the Irish battalion we had

relieved:

We all German korporals wish you English korporals a good day and

invite you to a good German dinner to-night with beer (ale) and

cakes. You little dog ran over to us and we keep it safe; it became

no food with you so it run to us. Answer in the same way, if you

please.

Another message was a copy of the _Neueste Nachrichten_, a German army

newspaper printed at Lille. It gave sensational details of Russian

defeats around Warsaw and immense captures of prisoners and guns.

But we were more interested in a full account in another column of

the destruction of a German submarine by British armed trawlers; no

details of the sinking of German submarines had been allowed to appear

in any English papers. The battalion cared no more about the successes

or reverses of our Allies than it did about the origins of the

war. It never allowed itself to have any political feelings about the

Germans. A professional soldier’s job was to fight whomsoever the

King ordered him to fight; it was as simple as that. With the King as

colonel-in-chief of the regiment it was even simpler. The Christmas

1914 fraternization, in which the battalion was among the first to

participate, was of the same professional simplicity; it was not an

emotional hiatus but a commonplace of military tradition—an exchange of

courtesies between officers of opposite armies.

Cuinchy was one of the worst places for rats. They came up from the

canal and fed on the many corpses and multiplied. When I was here with

the Welsh a new officer came to the company, and, as a token of his

welcome, he was given a dug-out containing a spring-bed. When he turned

in that night he heard a scuffling, shone his torch on the bed, and

there were two rats on his blankets tussling for the possession of a

severed hand. This was thought a great joke.

The colonel called for a patrol to go out along the side of the

tow-path, where we had heard suspicious sounds on the previous night,

to see whether a working-party was out. I volunteered to go when it

was dark. But there was a moon that night so bright and full that it

dazzled the eyes to look at it. Between us and the Germans was a flat

stretch of about two hundred yards, broken only by shell-craters and an

occasional patch of coarse grass. I was not with my own company, but

lent to B, which had two officers away on leave. Childe-Freeman, the

company commander, said: ‘You’re not going out on patrol to-night, are

you? It’s almost as bright as day.’ I said: ‘All the more reason for

going; they won’t be expecting me. Will you please have everything

as usual? Let the men fire an occasional rifle and send up a flare

every half hour. If I go carefully they’ll not see me.’ But I was

nervous, and while we were having supper I clumsily knocked over a

cup of tea, and after that a plate. Freeman said: ‘Look here, I’ll

’phone through to battalion and tell them it’s too bright for you to

go out.’ But I knew Buzz Off would accuse me of cold feet, so Sergeant

Williams and I put on our crawlers and went out by way of a mine-crater

at the side of the tow-path. There was no need that night for the

usual staring business. We could see only too clearly. All we had

to do was to wait for an opportunity to move quickly, stop dead and

trust to luck, then move on quickly again. We planned our rushes from

shell-hole to shell-hole; the opportunities were provided by artillery

or machine-gun fire which would distract the sentries. Many of the

craters contained corpses of men who had been wounded and crept in and

died. Some of them were skeletons, picked clean by the rats. We got to

within thirty yards of a big German working-party who were digging a

trench ahead of their front line. Between them and us we could count

a covering party of ten men lying on the grass in their great-coats.

We had gone far enough. There was a German lying on his back about

twelve yards away humming a tune. It was the ‘Merry Widow’ waltz. The

sergeant, who was behind me, pressed my foot with his hand and showed

me the revolver he was carrying. He raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

I gave him the signal for ‘no.’ We turned to go back; it was hard not

to go back too quickly. We had got about half-way back when a German

machine-gun opened traversing fire along the top of our trenches. We

immediately jumped to our feet; the bullets were brushing the grass,

so it was safer to be standing up. We walked the rest of the way

back, but moving irregularly to distract the aim of the covering party

if they saw us. Back in the trench I rang up the artillery and asked

them to fire as much shrapnel as they could spare fifty yards short of

where the German front trench touched the tow-path; I knew that one of

the night-lines of the battery supporting us was trained near enough

to this point. A minute and a quarter later the shells started coming

over. We heard the clash of downed tools and distant shouts and cries;

we reckoned the probable casualties. The next morning at stand-to Buzz

Off came up to me: ‘I hear you were on patrol last night?’ I said:

‘Yes, sir.’ He asked me for particulars. When I had told him about the

covering party he cursed me for ‘not scuppering them with that revolver

of yours. Cold feet,’ he snorted as he turned away.

One day while we were here the Royal Welch were instructed to shout

across to the enemy and induce them to take part in a conversation.

The object was to find out how strongly the German front trenches were

manned at night. A German-speaking officer in the company among the

brick-stacks was provided with a megaphone. He shouted: ‘Wie gehts

ihnen, kamaraden?’ Somebody shouted back in delight: ‘Ah, Tommee, hast

du den deutsch gelernt?’ Firing stopped and a conversation began across

the fifty yards or so of No Man’s Land. The Germans refused to say

what regiment they were. They would not talk any military shop. One of

them shouted out: ‘Les sheunes madamoiselles de La Bassée bonnes pour

coucher avec. Les madamoiselles de Béthune bonnes aussi, hein?’ Our

spokesman refused to discuss this. In the pause that followed he asked

how the Kaiser was. They replied respectfully that he was in excellent

health, thank you. ‘And how is the Crown Prince?’ he asked them. ‘Oh,

b——r the Crown Prince,’ shouted somebody in English, and was immediately

suppressed by his comrades. There was a confusion of angry voices and

laughter. Then they all began singing the ‘Wacht am Rhein.’ The trench

was evidently very well held indeed.