A Canadian-Scot: ‘I was sent back with three bloody prisoners, you
see, and one was limping and groaning, so I had to keep on kicking the
sod down the trench. He was an officer. It was getting dark and I was
getting fed up, so I thought: “I’ll have a bit of a game.” I had them
covered with the officer’s revolver and I made ’em open their pockets.
Then I dropped a Mills’ bomb in each, with the pin out, and ducked
behind a traverse. Bang, bang, bang! No more bloody prisoners. No good
Fritzes but dead ’uns.’
An Australian: ‘Well, the biggest lark I had was at Morlancourt when
we took it the first time. There were a lot of Jerries in a cellar and
I said to ’em: “Come out, you Camarades.” So out they came, a dozen of
’em, with their hands up. “Turn out your pockets,” I told ’em. They
turned ’em out. Watches and gold and stuff, all dinkum. Then I said:
“Now back into your cellar, you sons of bitches.” For I couldn’t
be bothered with ’em. When they were all down I threw half a dozen
Mills’ bombs in after ’em. I’d got the stuff all right, and we weren’t
taking prisoners that day.’
The only first-hand account I heard of large-scale atrocities was from
an old woman at Cardonette on the Somme, with whom I was billeted in
July 1916. It was at Cardonette that a battalion of French Turcos
overtook the rear guard of a German division retreating from the Marne
in September 1914. The Turcos surprised the dead-weary Germans while
they were still marching in column. The old woman went, with gestures,
through a pantomime of slaughter, ending: ‘Et enfin, ces animaux leur
ont arraché les oreilles et les ont mis à la poche.’ The presence
of coloured troops in Europe was, from the German point of view, we
knew, one of the chief Allied atrocities. We sympathized. Recently,
at Flixécourt, one of the instructors told us, the cook of a corps
headquarter-mess used to be visited at the château every morning by
a Turco; he was orderly to a French liaison officer. The Turco used
to say: ‘Tommy, give Johnny pozzy,’ and a tin of plum and apple jam
used to be given him. One afternoon the corps was due to shift, so
that morning the cook said to the Turco, giving him his farewell tin:
‘Oh, la, la, Johnny, napoo pozzy to-morrow.’ The Turco would not
believe it. ‘Yes, Tommy, mate,’ he said, ‘pozzy for Johnny to-morrow,
to-morrow, to-morrow.’ To get rid of him the cook said: ‘Fetch me the
head of a Fritz, Johnny, to-night. I’ll ask the general to give you
pozzy to-morrow, to-morrow, to-morrow.’ ‘All right, mate,’ said the
Turco, ‘me get Fritz head to-night, general give me pozzy to-morrow.’
That evening the mess cook of the new corps that had taken over the
château was surprised to find a Turco asking for him and swinging
a bloody head in a sandbag. ‘Here’s Fritz head, mate,’ said the Turco,
‘general give me pozzy to-morrow, to-morrow, to-morrow.’ As Flixécourt
was twenty miles or more behind the line.... He did not need to end the
story, but swore it was true, because he had seen the head.
We discussed the continuity of regimental _morale_. A captain in a
line battalion of one of the Surrey regiments said: ‘It all depends on
the reserve battalion at home.’ He had had a year’s service when the
war broke out; the battalion, which had been good, had never recovered
from the first battle of Ypres. He said: ‘What’s wrong with us is that
we have a rotten depot. The drafts are bad and so we get a constant
re-infection.’ He told me one night in our sleeping hut: ‘In both the
last two attacks that we made I had to shoot a man of my company to
get the rest out of the trench. It was so bloody awful that I couldn’t
stand it. It’s the reason why I applied to be sent down here.’ This
was not the usual loose talk that one heard at the base. He was a good
fellow and he was speaking the truth. I was sorrier for Phillips—that
was not his name—than for any other man I met in France. He deserved
a better regiment. There was never any trouble with the Royal Welch
like that. The boast of every good battalion in France was that it
had never lost a trench; both our battalions made it. This boast had
to be understood broadly; it meant never having been forced out of a
trench by an enemy attack without recapturing it before the action
ended. Capturing a German trench and being unable to hold it for lack
of reinforcements did not count, nor did retirement from a trench by
order or when the battalion of the left or right had broken and left a
flank in the air. And in the final stages of the war trenches could be
honourably abandoned as being entirely obliterated by bombardment,
or because not really trenches at all, but a line of selected
shell-craters.
We all agreed on the value of arms-drill as a factor in _morale_.
‘Arms-drill as it should be done,’ someone said, ‘is beautiful,
especially when the company feels itself as a single being and each
movement is not a movement of every man together, but a single movement
of one large creature.’ I used to have big bunches of Canadians to
drill four or five hundred at a time. Spokesmen came forward once and
asked what sense there was in sloping and ordering arms and fixing and
unfixing bayonets. They said they had come to France to fight and not
to guard Buckingham Palace. I told them that in every division of the
four in which I had served there had been three different kinds of
troops. Those that had guts but were no good at drill; those that were
good at drill but had no guts; and those that had guts and were good at
drill. These last fellows were, for some reason or other, much the best
men in a show. I didn’t know why and I didn’t care. I told them that
when they were better at fighting than the Guards’ Division they could
perhaps afford to neglect their arms-drill.
We often theorized in the mess about drill. We knew that the best drill
never came from being bawled at by a sergeant-major, that there must be
perfect respect between the man who gives the order and the men that
carry it through. The test of drill came, I said, when the officer gave
an incorrect word of command. If the company could carry through the
order intended without hesitation, or, suppose the order happened to be
impossible, could stand absolutely still or continue marching without
any disorder in the ranks, that was good drill. The corporate spirit
that came from drilling together was regarded by some instructors
as leading to loss of initiative in the men drilled. Others denied this
and said it acted just the other way round. ‘Suppose there is a section
of men with rifles, and they are isolated from the rest of the company
and have no N.C.O. in charge and meet a machine-gun. Under the stress
of danger that section will have that all-one-body feeling of drill and
will obey an imaginary word of command. There will be no communication
between its members, but there will be a drill movement. Two men will
quite naturally open fire on the machine-gun while the remainder
will work round, part on the left flank and part on the right, and
the final rush will be simultaneous. Leadership is supposed to be
the perfection for which drill has been instituted. That is wrong.
Leadership is only the first stage. Perfection of drill is communal
action. Drill may seem to be antiquated parade-ground stuff, but it is
the foundation of tactics and musketry. It was parade-ground musketry
that won all the battles in our regimental histories; this war will be
won by parade-ground tactics. The simple drill tactics of small units
fighting in limited spaces—fighting in noise and confusion so great
that leadership is quite impossible.’ In spite of variance on this
point we all agreed that regimental pride was the greatest moral force
that kept a battalion going as an effective fighting unit, contrasting
it particularly with patriotism and religion.
Patriotism. There was no patriotism in the trenches. It was too remote
a sentiment, and rejected as fit only for civilians. A new arrival who
talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out. As Blighty, Great
Britain was a quiet, easy place to get back to out of the present
foreign misery, but as a nation it was nothing. The nation included
not only the trench-soldiers themselves and those who had gone home
wounded, but the staff, Army Service Corps, lines of communication
troops, base units, home-service units, and then civilians down to the
detested grades of journalists, profiteers, ‘starred’ men exempted from
enlistment, conscientious objectors, members of the Government. The
trench-soldier, with this carefully graded caste-system of honour, did
not consider that the German trench-soldier might have exactly the same
system himself. He thought of Germany as a nation in arms, a unified
nation inspired with the sort of patriotism that he despised himself.
He believed most newspaper reports of conditions and sentiments in
Germany, though believing little or nothing of what he read about
conditions and sentiments in England. His cynicism, in fact, was not
confined to his own country. But he never underrated the German as
a soldier. Newspaper libels on Fritz’s courage and efficiency were
resented by all trench-soldiers of experience.
Religion. It was said that not one soldier in a hundred was inspired
by religious feeling of even the crudest kind. It would have been
difficult to remain religious in the trenches though one had survived
the irreligion of the training battalion at home. A regular sergeant at
Montagne, a Second Battalion man, had recently told me that he did not
hold with religion in time of war. He said that the niggers (meaning
the Indians) were right in officially relaxing their religious rules
when they were fighting. ‘And all this damn nonsense, sir—excuse me,
sir—that we read in the papers, sir, about how miraculous it is that
the wayside crucifixes are always getting shot at but the figure of our
Lord Jesus somehow don’t get hurt, it fairly makes me sick, sir.’ This
was to explain why in giving practice fire-orders from the hill-top he
had shouted out: ‘Seven hundred, half left, bloke on cross, five
rounds consecrate, fire!’ His platoon, even the two men whose letters
home always had the same formal beginning: ‘Dear Sister in Christ,’ or
‘Dear Brother in Christ,’ blazed away.
The troops, while ready to believe in the Kaiser as a comic personal
devil, were aware that the German soldier was, on the whole, more
devout than himself in the worship of God. In the instructors’ mess
we spoke freely of God and Gott as opposed tribal deities. For the
regimental chaplains as a body we had no respect. If the regimental
chaplains had shown one tenth the courage, endurance, and other human
qualities that the regimental doctors showed, we agreed, the British
Expeditionary Force might well have started a religious revival. But
they had not. The fact is that they were under orders not to get mixed
up with the fighting, to stay behind with the transport and not to
risk their lives. No soldier could have any respect for a chaplain
who obeyed these orders, and yet there was not in our experience one
chaplain in fifty who was not glad to obey them. Occasionally on a
quiet day in a quiet sector the chaplain would make a daring afternoon
visit to the support line and distribute a few cigarettes, and that was
all. But he was always in evidence back in rest-billets. Sometimes the
colonel would summon him to come up with the rations and bury the day’s
dead, and he would arrive, speak his lines, and hastily retire. The
position was made difficult by the respect that most of the commanding
officers had for the cloth, but it was a respect that they soon
outwore. The colonel in one battalion I served with got rid of four new
chaplains in as many months. Finally he applied for a Roman Catholic
chaplain, alleging a change of faith in the men under his command. For,
as I should have said before, the Roman Catholics were not only
permitted in posts of danger, but definitely enjoined to be wherever
fighting was so that they could give extreme unction to the dying. And
we had never heard of an R.C. chaplain who was unwilling to do all that
was expected of him and more. It was recalled that Father Gleeson of
the Munsters, when all the officers were put out of action at the first
battle of Ypres, stripped off his black badges and, taking command of
the survivors, held the line.
Anglican chaplains were remarkably out of touch with their troops. I
told how the Second Battalion chaplain just before the Loos fighting
had preached a violent sermon on the battle against sin, and how one
old soldier behind me had grumbled: ‘Christ, as if one bloody push
wasn’t enough to worry about at a time.’ The Catholic padre, on the
other hand, had given his men his blessing and told them that if they
died fighting for the good cause they would go straight to Heaven, or
at any rate would be excused a great many years in Purgatory. Someone
told us of the chaplain of his battalion when he was in Mesopotamia,
how on the eve of a big battle he had preached a sermon on the
commutation of tithes. This was much more sensible than the battle
against sin, he said; it was quite up in the air, and took the men’s
minds off the fighting.
I was feeling a bit better after a few weeks at the base, though the
knowledge that this was only temporary relief was with me all the time.
One day I walked out of the mess to begin the afternoon’s work on the
drill ground. I had to pass by the place where bombing instruction was
given. A group of men was standing around the table where the various
types of bombs were set out for demonstration. There was a sudden
crash. An instructor of the Royal Irish Rifles had been giving a
little unofficial instruction before the proper instructor arrived. He
had picked up a No. 1 percussion grenade and said: ‘Now, lads, you’ve
got to be careful with this chap. Remember that if you touch anything
while you’re swinging it, it will go off.’ To illustrate the point he
rapped it against the edge of the table. It killed him and another man
and wounded twelve others more or less severely.