At Annezin we reorganized. Some of the lightly wounded rejoined for
duty and a big draft from the Third Battalion arrived, so that in a
week’s time we were nearly seven hundred strong, with a full complement
of officers. Old Adelphine made me comfortable. She used to come
into my room in the morning when I was shaving and tell me the local
gossip—how stingy her daughter-in-law was, and what a rogue the Maire
was, and about the woman at Fouquières who had just been delivered of
black twins. She said that the Kaiser was a bitch and spat on the floor
to confirm it. Her favourite subject was the shamelessness of modern
girls. Yet she herself had been gay and beautiful and much sought after
when she was young she said. She had been in service as lady’s maid
to a rich draper’s wife of Béthune, and had travelled widely with her
in the surrounding country, and even over the border into Belgium.
She asked me about the various villages in which I had recently been
billeted, and told me scandal about the important families who used
to live in each. She asked me if I had been in La Bassée; she did not
realize that it was in the hands of the enemy. I said no, but I had
tried to visit it recently and had been detained. ‘Do you know Auchy,
then?’ I said that I had seen it often from a distance. ‘Then perhaps
you know a big farm-house between Auchy and Cambrin called Les Briques
Farm?’ I said, startled, that I knew it very well, and that it was a
strong place with a moat and cellars and a kitchen garden now full of
barbed wire. She said: ‘Then I shall tell you. I was staying there in
1870. It was the year of the other war and there was at the house a
handsome young _petit-caporal_ who was fond of me. So because he was a
nice boy and because it was the war, we slept together and I had a
baby. But God punished me and the baby died. That’s a long time ago.’
She told me that all the girls in Annezin prayed every night for the
war to end and for the English to go away as soon as their money was
spent. She said that the clause about the money was always repeated in
case God should miss it.
Troops serving in the Pas de Calais loathed the French; except for
occasional members of the official class, we found them thoroughly
unlikeable people, and it was difficult to sympathize with their
misfortunes. They had all the shortcomings of a border people. I wrote
home about this time:
‘I find it very difficult to love the French here. Even when we have
been billeted in villages where no troops have been before, I have not
met a single case of the hospitality that one meets among the peasants
of other countries. It is worse than inhospitality here, for after
all we are fighting for their dirty little lives. They suck enormous
quantities of money out of us too. Calculate how much has flowed into
the villages around Béthune, which for many months now have been
continuously housing about a hundred thousand men. Apart from the money
that they get paid directly as billeting allowance, there is the pay
that the troops spend. Every private soldier gets his five-franc note
(nearly four shillings) every ten days, and spends it on eggs, coffee,
and beer in the local _estaminets_; the prices are ridiculous and the
stuff bad. In the brewery at Béthune, the other day, I saw barrels
of already thin beer being watered from the canal with a hose-pipe.
The _estaminet_-keepers water it further.’ (The fortunes made in the
war were consolidated after the Versailles Treaty, when every peasant
in the devastated areas staked preposterous compensation claims
for the loss of possessions that he had never had.) It was surprising
that there were so few clashes between the British and French as there
were. The Pas de Calais French hated us and were convinced that when
the war was over we intended to stay and hold the Channel ports. It
was impossible for us at the time to realize that it was all the same
to the peasants whether they were on the German or the British side of
the line—it was a foreign military occupation anyhow. They were not
at all interested in the sacrifices that we were making for ‘their
dirty little lives.’ Also, we were shocked at the severity of French
national accountancy; when we were told, for instance, that every
British hospital train, the locomotive and carriages of which had been
imported from England, had to pay a £200 fee for use of the rails on
each journey they made from railhead to base.
The fighting was still going on around Loos. We could hear the guns
in the distance, but it was clear that the thrust had failed and that
we were now skirmishing for local advantages. But on October 13th
there was a final flare-up; the noise of the guns was so great that
even the inhabitants of Annezin, accustomed to these alarms, were
properly frightened, and began packing up in case the Germans broke
through. Old Adelphine was in tears with fright. Early that afternoon
I was in Béthune at the _Globe_ drinking champagne-cocktails with some
friends who had joined from the Third Battalion, when the assistant
provost-marshal put his head in the door and called out: ‘Any officers
of the Fifth, Sixth, or Nineteenth Brigades here?’ We jumped up. ‘You
are to return at once to your units.’ ‘Oh God,’ said Robertson, ‘that
means another show.’ Robertson had been in D Company and so escaped
the charge. ‘We’ll be pushed over the top to-night to reinforce
someone, and that’ll be the end of us.’
We hurried back to Annezin and found everything in confusion. ‘We’re
standing-to—at half an hour’s notice for the trenches,’ we were told.
We packed up hastily and in a few minutes the whole battalion was out
in the road in fighting order. We were to go up to the Hohenzollern
Redoubt and were now issued with new trench maps of it. The men were in
high spirits, even the survivors of the show. They were singing songs
to the accompaniment of an accordion and a penny whistle. Only at one
time, when a ‘mad-minute’ of artillery noise was reached, they stopped
and looked at each other, and Sergeant Townsend said sententiously:
‘That’s the charge. Many good fellows going west at this moment; maybe
chums of ours.’ Gradually the noise died down, and a message came at
last from brigade that we would not be needed. It had been another
dud show, chiefly to be remembered for the death of Charles Sorley, a
captain in the Suffolks, one of the three poets of importance killed in
the war. (The other two were Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen.)
This ended the operations for 1915. Tension was relaxed. We returned to
battalion mess, to company drill, and to riding-school for the young
officers. It was as though there had been no battle except that the
senior officers were fewer and the Special Reserve element larger.
Two or three days later we were back in trenches in the same sector.
In October I was gazetted a captain in the Third (Special Reserve)
Battalion. Promotion in the Third Battalion was rapid for subalterns
who had joined early, because the battalion had trebled its strength
and so was entitled to three times as many captains as before. It
was good to have my pay go up several shillings a day, with an
increase of war bonus and possible gratuity and pension if I were
wounded, but I did not consider that side of it much. It was rank that
was effective overseas. And here I was promoted captain over the heads
of officers who had longer trench service and were older and better
trained than myself. I went to the adjutant and offered not to wear the
badges of rank while serving with the battalion. He said not unkindly:
‘No, put your stars up. It can’t be helped.’ I knew that he and the
colonel had no use for Special Reserve captains unless they were
outstandingly good, and would not hesitate to get rid of them.
A Special Reserve major and captain had been recently sent home from
the First Battalion, with a confidential report of inefficiency. I
was anxious to avoid any such disgrace. Nor was my anxiety unfounded;
shortly after I left the Second Battalion two other Special Reserve
captains, one of whom had been promoted at the same time as myself,
were sent back as ‘likely to be of more service in the training of
troops at home.’ One of them was, I know, more efficient than I was.
I was in such a depressed state of nerves now that if I had gone into
the trenches as a company officer I should probably have modified my
formula for taking risks. Fortunately, I had a rest from the front
line, being attached to the brigade sappers. Hill of the Middlesex was
also having this relief. He told me that the Middlesex colonel had made
a speech to the survivors of the battalion as soon as they were back
in billets, telling them that the battalion had been unfortunate but
would soon be given an opportunity of avenging its dead and making a
fresh and, this time he hoped, successful attack upon La Bassée. ‘I
know you Diehards! You will go like lions over the top.’ Hill’s
servant had whispered confidentially to Hill: ‘Not on purpose I don’t,
sir!’ The sapping company specialized in maintaining communication
and reserve trenches in good repair. I was with it for a month before
being returned to ordinary company duty. My recall was a punishment for
failing, one day when we were in billets, to observe a paragraph in
battalion orders requiring my presence on battalion parade.
My remaining trench service with the Second Battalion this autumn was
uneventful. There was no excitement left in patrolling, no horror in
the continual experience of death. The single recordable incident I
recall was one of purely technical interest, a new method that an
officer named Owen and myself invented for dealing with machine-guns
firing at night. The method was to give each sentry a piece of string
about a yard long, with a cartridge tied at each end; when the
machine-gun started firing, sentries who were furthest from the fire
would stretch the string in the direction of the machine-gun and peg
it down with the points of the cartridges. This gave a pretty accurate
line on the machine-gun. When we had about thirty or more of these
lines taken on a single machine-gun we fixed rifles as accurately
as possible along them and waited for it; as soon as it started we
opened five rounds rapid. This gave a close concentration of fire and
no element of nervousness could disturb the aim, the rifles being
secured between sandbags. Divisional headquarters asked us for a report
of the method. There was a daily exchange of courtesies between our
machine-guns and the Germans’ at stand-to; by removing cartridges
from the ammunition belt it was possible to rap out the rhythm of the
familiar call: ‘Me—et me do—wn in Pi—cca-di—ll—y,’ to which the Germans
would reply, though in slower tempo, because our guns were faster
than theirs: ‘Se—e you da—mned to He—ll first.’
It was late in this October that I was sent a press-cutting from
_John Bull_. Horatio Bottomley, the editor, was protesting against
the unequal treatment for criminal offences meted out to commoners
and aristocrats. A young man, he said, convicted in the police-court
of a criminal offence was merely bound over and put in the care of
a physician—because he was the grandson of an earl! An offender not
belonging to the influential classes would have been given three
months without the option of a fine. The article described in some
detail how Dick, a sixteen-year old boy, had made ‘a certain proposal’
to a corporal in a Canadian regiment stationed near ‘Charterhouse
College,’ and how the corporal had very properly given him in charge
of the police. This news was nearly the end of me. I decided that Dick
had been driven out of his mind by the war. There was madness in the
family, I knew; he had once shown me a letter from his grandfather
scrawled in circles all over the page. It would be easy to think of him
as dead.
I had now been in the trenches for five months and was getting past
my prime. For the first three weeks an officer was not much good in
the trenches; he did not know his way about, had not learned the
rules of health and safety, and was not yet accustomed to recognizing
degrees of danger. Between three weeks and four months he was at
his best, unless he happened to have any particular bad shock or
sequence of shocks. Then he began gradually to decline in usefulness
as neurasthenia developed in him. At six months he was still more or
less all right; but by nine or ten months, unless he had a few weeks’
rest on a technical course or in hospital, he began to be a drag on
the other members of the company. After a year or fifteen months he
was often worse than useless. Officers had a less laborious but
a more nervous time than the men. There were proportionately twice as
many neurasthenic cases among officers as among men, though the average
life of a man before getting killed or wounded was twice as long as an
officer’s. Officers between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-three
had a longer useful life than those older or younger. I was too young.
Men over forty, though they did not suffer from the want of sleep so
much as those under twenty, had less resistance to the sudden alarms
and shocks. Dr. W. H. R. Rivers told me later that the action of one
of the ductless glands—I think the thyroid—accounted for this decline
in military usefulness. It pumped its chemical into the blood as a
sedative for tortured nerves; this process went on until the condition
of the blood was permanently affected and a man went about his tasks in
a stupid and doped way, cheated into further endurance. It has taken
some ten years for my blood to run at all clean. The unfortunates were
the officers who had two years or more continuous trench service. In
many cases they became dipsomaniacs. I knew three or four officers
who had worked up to the point of two bottles of whisky a day before
they were lucky enough to get wounded or sent home in some other way.
A two-bottle company commander of one of our line battalions still
happens to be alive who, in three shows running, got his company
needlessly destroyed because he was no longer capable of taking clear
decisions.
Aside from wounds, gas, and the accidents of war, the life of the
trench soldier was, for the most part, not unhealthy. Food was
plentiful and hard work in the open air made up for the discomfort
of wet feet and clothes and draughty billets. A continual need for
alertness discouraged minor illnesses; a cold was thrown off in a few
hours, an attack of indigestion was hardly noticed. This was
true, at least, in a good battalion, where the men were bent on going
home either with an honourable wound or not at all. In an inferior
battalion the men would prefer a wound to bronchitis, but would not
mind the bronchitis. In a bad battalion they did not care ‘whether,’ in
the trench phrase, ‘the cow calved or the bull broke its bloody neck.’
In a really good battalion, as the Second Battalion was when I went
to it first, the question of getting wounded and going home was not
permitted to be raised. Such a battalion had a very small sick list.
In the 1914–15 winter there were no more than four or five casualties
from ‘trench feet’ in the Second, and the following winter no more than
eight or nine; the don’t-care battalions lost very heavily indeed.
Trench feet was almost entirely a matter of morale, in spite of the
lecture-formula that N.C.O.’s and officers used to repeat time after
time to the men: ‘Trench feet is caused by tight boots, tight puttees
or any other clothing calculated to interfere with the circulation of
blood in the legs.’ Trench feet was caused rather by going to sleep
with wet boots, cold feet, and depression. Wet boots, by themselves,
did not matter. If the man warmed his feet at a brazier or stamped
them until they were warm and then went off to sleep with a sandbag
tied round them he took no harm. He might even fall asleep with cold,
wet feet, and they might swell slightly owing to tightness of boots or
puttees; but trench feet only came if he did not mind getting trench
feet or anything else, because his battalion had lost the power of
sticking things out. At Bouchavesnes on the Somme in the winter of
1916–17 a battalion of dismounted cavalry lost half its strength in two
days from trench feet; our Second Battalion had just had ten days in
the same trenches with no cases at all.
Autumn was melancholy in the La Bassée sector; in the big poplar
forests the leaves were French yellow and the dykes were overflowing
and the ground utterly sodden. Béthune was not the place it had been;
the Canadians billeted there drew two or three times as much pay as our
own troops and had sent the prices up. But it was still more or less
intact and one could still get cream buns and fish dinners.
In November I had orders to join the First Battalion, which was
reorganizing after the Loos fighting. I was delighted. I found it in
billets at Locon, behind Festubert, which was only a mile or two to the
north of Cambrin. The difference between the two battalions continued
markedly throughout the war, however many times each battalion got
broken. The difference was that the Second Battalion at the outbreak of
war had just finished its eighteen years overseas tour, while the First
Battalion had not been out of England since the South African War. The
First Battalion was, therefore, less old-fashioned in its militarism
and more human; livers were better; the men had dealings with white
women and not with brown. It would have been impossible in the First
Battalion to see what I once saw in the Second—a senior officer
pursuing a private soldier down the street, kicking his bottom because
he had been slack in saluting. The First Battalion was as efficient and
as regimental, on the whole more successful in its fighting, and a much
easier battalion to live in.
The battalion already had its new company commanders and I went as
second-captain to young Richardson of A Company. He was from Sandhurst,
and his company was one of the best that I was ever with. They were
largely Welshmen of 1915 enlistment. None of the officers in the
company were more than twenty-two or twenty-three years old. A
day or two after I arrived I went to visit C Company, where a Third
Battalion officer whom I knew was commanding. The C’s greeted me in a
friendly way. As we were talking I noticed a book lying on the table.
It was the first book (except my Keats and Blake) that I had seen since
I came to France that was not either a military text-book or a rubbish
novel. It was the _Essays of Lionel Johnson_. When I had a chance I
stole a look at the fly-leaf, and the name was Siegfried Sassoon. I
looked round to see who could possibly be called Siegfried Sassoon and
bring _Lionel Johnson_ with him to the First Battalion. He was obvious,
so I got into conversation with him, and a few minutes later we were
walking to Béthune, being off duty until that night, and talking about
poetry. Siegfried had, at the time, published nothing except a few
privately-printed pastoral pieces of eighteen-ninetyish flavour and a
satire on Masefield which, about half-way through, had forgotten to
be a satire and was rather good Masefield. We went to the cake shop
and ate cream buns. At this time I was getting my first book of poems,
_Over the Brazier_, ready for the press; I had one or two drafts in my
pocket-book and showed them to Siegfried. He told me that they were too
realistic and that war should not be written about in a realistic way.
In return he showed me some of his own poems. One of them began:
Return to greet me, colours that were my joy,
Not in the woeful crimson of men slain....
This was before Siegfried had been in the trenches. I told him, in my
old-soldier manner, that he would soon change his style.
That night the whole battalion went up to work at a new defence
scheme at Festubert. Festubert was nightmare, and had been so since the
first fighting there in 1914, when the inmates of its lunatic asylum
had been caught between two fires and broken out and run all over the
countryside. The British trench line went across a stretch of ground
marked on the map as ‘Marsh, sometimes dry in the summer.’ It consisted
of islands of high-command trench, with no communication between them
except at night, and was a murderous place for patrols. The battalion
had been nearly wiped out here six months previously. We were set to
build up a strong reserve line. It was freezing hard and we were unable
to make any progress on the frozen ground. We came here night after
night. We raised a couple of hundred yards of trench about two or
three feet high, at the cost of several men wounded from casual shots
skimming the trench in front of us. Work was resumed by other troops
when the thaw came and a thick seven foot-high ramp built. We were told
later that it gradually sank down into the marsh, and in the end was
completely engulfed.
When I left the Second Battalion I was permitted to take my servant,
Private Fahy (known as Tottie Fay, after the actress), with me. Tottie
was a reservist from Birmingham who had been called up when war broke
out, and had been with the Second Battalion ever since. By trade he
was a silversmith and he had recently, when on leave, made a cigarette
case and engraved it with my name as a present. He worked well and
we liked each other. When he arrived at the First Battalion he met a
Sergeant Dickens who had been his boozing chum in India seven or eight
years back; so they celebrated it. The next morning I was surprised to
find my buttons not polished and no hot water for shaving. I was
annoyed; it made me late for breakfast. I could get no news of Tottie.
On my way to rifle inspection at nine o’clock at the company billet I
noticed something unusual at the corner of a farm-yard. It was Field
Punishment No. 1 being carried out—my first sight of it. Tottie was
the victim. He had been awarded twenty-eight days for ‘drunkenness in
the field.’ He was spread-eagled to the wheel of a company limber,
tied by the ankles and wrists in the form of an X. He remained in
this position—‘Crucifixion,’ they called it—for several hours a day;
I forget how many, but it was a good working-day. The sentence was to
be carried out for as long as the battalion remained in billets, and
was to be continued after the next spell of trenches. I shall never
forget the look that Tottie gave me. He was a quiet, respectful,
devoted servant, and he wanted to tell me that he was sorry for having
let me down. His immediate reaction was an attempt to salute; I could
see him try to lift his hand to his forehead, and bring his heels
together, but he could do nothing; his eyes filled with tears. The
battalion police-sergeant, a fierce-looking man, had just finished
knotting him up when I arrived. I told Tottie that I was sorry to see
him in trouble. That drink, as it proved, did him good in the end. I
had to find another servant. Old Joe, the quartermaster, knowing that
Tottie was the only trained officer’s servant in the battalion, took
him from me when his sentence expired; he even induced the colonel
to remit a few days of it. Tottie was safer in billets with Old Joe
than in trenches with me. Some time in the summer of the following
year his seven years’ contract as a reservist expired. When their
‘buckshee seven’ expired, reservists were sent home for a few days and
then ‘deemed to have re-enlisted under the Military Service Act,’ and
recalled to the battalion. But Tottie made good use of his leave.
His brother-in-law was director of a munitions factory and took Tottie
in as a skilled metal-worker. He was made a starred man—his work was so
important to industry that he could not be spared for military service,
so Tottie is, I hope, still alive. Good luck to him and to Birmingham.
Sergeant Dickens was a different case. He was a fighter, and one of
the best N.C.O.’s in either battalion of the regiment. He had been
awarded the d.c.m. and Bar, the Military Medal and the French
Médaille Militaire. Two or three times already he had been promoted to
sergeant’s rank and each time been reduced for drunkenness. He escaped
field-punishment because it was considered sufficient for him to lose
his stripes, and whenever there was a battle Dickens would distinguish
himself so conspicuously as a leader that he would be given his stripes
back again.
Early in December the rumour came that we were going for divisional
training to the back areas. I would not believe it, having heard
stories of this kind too often, and was surprised when it turned out to
be true. Siegfried Sassoon, in his _Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man_, has
described this battalion move. It was an even more laborious experience
for our A Company than for his C Company. We got up at five o’clock
one morning, breakfasted hastily, packed our kits, and marched down to
the railhead three miles away. Here we had the task of entraining all
the battalion stores, transport and transport-animals. This took us to
the middle of the morning. We then entrained ourselves for a ten-hour
journey to a junction on the Somme about twenty miles away from the
front line. The officers travelled in third-class apartments, the men
in closed trucks marked: ‘Hommes 40, chevaux 8’—they were very stiff
when they arrived. ‘A’ Company was called on to do the detraining
job too. When we had finished, the dixies of tea prepared for us were
all cold. The other companies had been resting for a couple of hours;
we had only a few minutes. The march was along _pavé_ roads and the
rough chalk tracks of the Picardy downland. It started about midnight
and finished about six o’clock next morning, the men carrying their
packs and rifles. There was a competition between the companies as
to which would have the fewest men falling out; A won. The village
we finally arrived at was called Montagne le Fayel. No troops had
been billeted here before, and its inhabitants were annoyed at being
knocked up in the middle of the night by our advance-guard to provide
accommodation for eight hundred men at two hours’ notice. We found
these Picard peasants much more likeable than the Pas de Calais people.
I was billeted with an old man called Monsieur Elie Caron, a retired
schoolmaster with a bright eye and white hair. He lived entirely on
vegetables, and gave me a vegetarian pamphlet entitled _Comment Vivre
Cent Ans_. We already knew of the coming Somme offensive, so this was a
good joke. He also gave me Longfellow’s _Evangeline_ in English. I have
always been sorry for English books stranded in France, whatever their
demerits; so I accepted it and later brought it home.
We were at Montagne for six weeks. The colonel, who appears in
Siegfried’s book as Colonel Winchell, was known in the regiment as
Scatter, short for Scatter-cash, because when he first joined the
regiment he had been so lavish with his allowance. Scatter put the
battalion through its paces with peace-time severity. He asked us to
forget the trenches and to fit ourselves for the open warfare that
was bound to come once the Somme defences were pierced. Every other
day was a field-day; we were back again in spirit to General
Haking’s _Company Training_. Even those of us who did not believe in
the break-through thoroughly enjoyed these field-days. The guns could
only just be heard in the distance, it was quite unspoilt country, and
every man in the battalion was fit. Days that were not field-days were
given up to battalion drill and musketry. This training seemed entirely
unrelated to war as we had experienced it. We played a lot of games,
including inter-battalion rugger; I played full-back for the battalion.
Three other officers were in the team; Richardson as front-row
scrum-man; Pritchard, another Sandhurst boy, who was fly-half; and
David Thomas, a Third Battalion second-lieutenant, who was an inside
three-quarter. David Thomas and Siegfried were the closest friends I
made while in France. David was a simple, gentle fellow and fond of
reading. Siegfried, he, and I were together a lot.
One day David met me in the village street. He said: ‘Did you hear
the bugle? There’s a hell of a row on about something. All officers
and warrant-officers are to meet in the village schoolroom at once.
Scatter’s looking as black as-thunder. No one knows yet what the axe
is about.’ We went along together and squeezed into one of the school
desk-benches. When the colonel entered and the room was called to
attention by the senior major, David and I hurt ourselves standing up,
bench and all. Scatter told us all to be seated. The officers were
in one class, the warrant-officers and non-commissioned officers in
another. The colonel glared at us from the teacher’s desk. He began his
lecture with general accusations. He said that he had lately noticed
many signs of slovenliness in the battalion—men with their pocket-flaps
undone, and actually walking down the village street with their
hands in their trousers-pockets—boots unpolished—sentries strolling
about on their beats at company billets instead of marching up and
down in a soldier-like way—rowdiness in the _estaminets_—slackness in
saluting—with many other grave indications of lowered discipline. He
threatened to stop all leave to the United Kingdom unless discipline
improved. He promised us a saluting parade every morning before
breakfast which he would attend in person. All this was general axe-ing
and we knew that he had not yet reached the particular axe. It was
this: ‘I have here principally to tell you of a very disagreeable
occurrence. As I was going out of my orderly room early this morning I
came upon a group of soldiers; I will not mention their company. One
of these soldiers was in conversation with a lance-corporal. You may
not believe it, but it was a fact that he addressed the corporal by his
Christian name; _he called him Jack_. The corporal made no protest. To
think that the First Battalion has sunk to a level where it is possible
for such familiarity to exist between N.C.O.’s and the men under their
command! Naturally, I put the corporal under arrest, and he appeared
before me at once on the charge of ‘conduct unbecoming to an N.C.O.’
He was reduced to the ranks, and the man was given field-punishment
for using insubordinate language to an N.C.O. And, I warn you, if any
further case of the sort comes to my notice—and I expect you officers
to report the slightest instance to me at once instead of dealing
with it as a company matter....’ I tried to catch Siegfried’s eye,
but he was busy avoiding it, so I caught David’s instead. This is one
of those caricature scenes that now seem to sum up the various stages
of my life. There was a fresco around the walls of the class-room
illustrating the evils of alcoholism. It started with the innocent
boy being offered a drink by his mate, and then his downward path,
culminating in wife-beating, murder, and _delirium tremens_.
The battalion’s only complaint against Montagne was that women were not
so easy to get hold of in that part of the country as around Béthune;
the officers had the unfair advantage of being able to borrow horses
and ride into Amiens. I remained puritanical. There was a Blue Lamp at
Amiens as there was at Abbéville, Havre, Rouen, and all the big towns
behind the lines. The Blue Lamp was for officers, as the Red Lamp was
for men. It was most important for discipline to be maintained in this
way.
In January the Seventh Division sent two company officers from each
brigade to instruct troops at the base. I and a captain in the Queen’s
were the two who had been out longest, so we were chosen; it was a gift
of two months longer life to us.