_Copyright Imperial War Museum._]
Our greatest trial was the canister. It was a two-gallon drum with a
cylinder inside containing about two pounds of an explosive called
ammonal that looked like salmon paste, smelt like marzipan, and when
it went off sounded like the day of judgment. The hollow around the
cylinder was filled with scrap metal apparently collected by the
French villagers behind the German line—rusty nails, fragments of
British and French shells, spent bullets, and the screws, nuts, and
bolts that heavy lorries leave behind on the road. We dissected one
canister that had not exploded and found in it, among other things,
the cog-wheels of a clock and half a set of false teeth. The canister
was easy to hear coming and looked harmless in the air, but its shock
was as shattering as the very heaviest shell. It would blow in any but
the deepest dug-outs; and the false teeth and cog-wheels and so on
would go flying all over the place. We could not agree how a thing of
that size was fired. The problem was not solved until 1st July, when
the battalion attacked from these same trenches and found one of the
canister-guns with its crew. It was a wooden cannon buried in the earth
and fired with a time-fuse. The crew offered to surrender, but our men
refused; they had sworn for months to get the crew of that gun.
One evening I was in the trench with Richardson and David Thomas (near
‘Trafalgar Square,’ should anyone remember that trench-junction) when
we met Pritchard and the adjutant. We stopped to talk. Richardson
complained what a devil of a place it was for trench-mortars. Pritchard
said: ‘That is where I come in.’ He was the battalion trench-mortar
officer and had just been given the first two Stokes mortar-guns
that we had seen in France. Pritchard said: ‘They’re beauties. I’ve
been trying them out and to-morrow I’m going to get some of my own
back. I can put four or five shells in the air at the same time.’ The
adjutant said: ‘About time, too. We’ve had three hundred casualties
in the last month here. It doesn’t seem so many as that because we’ve
had no officer casualties. In fact we’ve had about five hundred
casualties in the ranks since Loos, and not a single officer.’ Then
he suddenly realized that he had said something unlucky. David said:
‘Touch wood.’ Everybody sprang to touch wood, but it was a French
trench and unriveted. I pulled a pencil out of my pocket; that was wood
enough for me. Richardson said: ‘I’m not superstitious, anyway.’
The next evening I was leading up A Company for a working-party. B and
D Companies were in the line and we overtook C, which was also going up
to work. David was bringing up the rear of C. He was looking strange,
worried about something. I had never seen him anything but cheerful all
the time I had known him. I asked what was the matter. He said: ‘Oh,
I’m fed up and I’ve got a cold.’ C Company went along to the right of
the battalion frontage and we went along to the left. It was a weird
kind of night, with a bright moon. A German occupied sap was only
forty or fifty yards away. We were left standing on the parapet piling
up the sandbags, with the moon behind us, but the German sentries
ignored us—probably because they had work on hand themselves. It often
happened when both sides were busy putting up proper defences that
they turned a blind eye to each other’s work. Sometimes, it was said,
the rival wiring-parties ‘as good as borrowed each other’s mallets’
for hammering in the pickets. The Germans were much more ready to live
and let live than we were. (The only time, so far as I know, besides
Christmas 1914, that both sides showed themselves in daylight without
firing at each other was once at Ypres when the trenches got so flooded
that there was nothing for it but for both sides to crawl out on top
to avoid drowning.) There was a continual exchange of grenades and
trench-mortars on our side; the canister was going over and the
men found it difficult to get out of its way in the dark. But for the
first time we were giving the enemy as good as they gave us. Pritchard
had been using his Stokes’ mortar all day and had sent over two or
three hundred rounds; twice they had located his emplacement and he had
had to shift hurriedly.
‘A’ Company worked from seven in the evening until midnight. We must
have put thousands of sandbags into position, and fifty yards of front
trench were beginning to look presentable. About half-past ten there
was rifle-fire on the right and the sentries passed down the news
‘officer hit.’ Richardson at once went along to see who it was. He came
back to say: ‘It’s young Thomas. He got a bullet through the neck,
but I think he’s all right; it can’t have hit his spine or an artery
because he’s walking down to the dressing-station.’ I was pleased
at this news. I thought that David would be out of it long enough
perhaps to escape the coming offensive and perhaps even the rest of
the war. At twelve o’clock we had finished for the night. Richardson
said to me: ‘Von Ranke’ (only he pronounced it Von Runicke—it was my
regimental nickname), ‘take the company down for their rum and tea,
will you? They’ve certainly deserved it to-night. I’ll be along in
a few minutes. I’m going out with Corporal Chamberlen to see what
work the wiring-party’s been doing all this time.’ So I took the men
back. When we were well started I heard a couple of shells come over
somewhere behind us. I noticed them because they were the only shells
fired that night; five-nines they seemed by the noise. We were nearly
back at Maple Redoubt, which was the name of the support line on the
reverse side of the hill, when we heard the cry ‘Stretcher-bearers!’
and after a while a man came running to say: ‘Captain Graves is hit.’
There was a general laugh and we went on; but a stretcher-party
went up anyhow to see what was wrong. It was Richardson; the shells
had caught him and the corporal among the wire. The corporal had his
leg blown off, and died of wounds a day or two later. Richardson had
been blown into a shell-hole full of water and had lain there stunned
for some minutes before the sentries heard the corporal’s cries and
realized what had happened. He was brought down semi-conscious; he
recognized us, told us he wouldn’t be long away from the company, and
gave us instructions about it. The doctor said that he had no wound in
any vital spot, though the skin of his left side was riddled, as we had
seen, with the chalky soil blown up against him. We felt a relief in
his case, as in David’s, that he would be out of it for a while.
Then news came that David had died. The regimental doctor, a throat
specialist in civil life, had told him at the dressing-station: ‘You’ll
be all right, only don’t raise your head for a bit.’ David had then,
it was said, taken a letter from his pocket, given it to an orderly,
and said: ‘Post that.’ It was a letter written to a girl in Glamorgan,
to be posted in case he got killed. Then the doctor saw that he was
choking; he tried trachotomy, but it was too late. Edmund and I were
talking together in the company headquarters at about one o’clock when
the adjutant came in. He looked ghastly. He told us that Richardson had
died at the dressing-station. His heart had been weakened by rowing
(he had been in the Eight at Radley) and the explosion and the cold
water had been too much for it. The adjutant said to me nervously: ‘You
know, somehow I feel, I—I feel responsible in a way for this; what
I said yesterday at ‘Trafalgar Square.’ Of course, really, I don’t
believe in superstition, but....’ Just at that moment there was a
noise of whizz-bang shells about twenty yards off; a cry of alarm,
followed by: ‘Stretcher-bearers!’ The adjutant turned quite white and
we knew without being told what it meant. We hurried out. Pritchard,
having fought his duel all night, and finally silenced the enemy, was
coming off duty. A whizz-bang had caught him at the point where the
communication trench reached Maple Redoubt; it was a direct hit. The
casualties of that night were three officers and one corporal.
It seemed ridiculous when we returned without Richardson to A Company
billets to find ‘Triste La Guerre’ still alive and to hear her once
more quaver out ‘Triste, la guerre’ when her daughter explained that
the _jeune capitaine_ had been killed. The old woman had taken a fancy
to the _jeune capitaine_; we used to chaff him about it. I felt David’s
death worse than any other death since I had been in France. It did not
anger me as it did Siegfried. He was acting transport-officer and every
night now, when he came up with the rations, he went out on patrol
looking for Germans. It just made me feel empty and lost.
One of the anthems that we used to sing was: ‘He that shall endure to
the end, shall be saved.’ The words repeated themselves in my head
like a charm whenever things were bad. ‘Though thousands languish
and fall beside thee, And tens of thousands around thee perish, Yet
still it shall not come nigh thee.’ And there was another bit: ‘To an
inheritance incorruptible.... Through faith unto salvation, Ready to
be revealed at the last trump.’ For ‘trump’ we always used to sing
‘crump.’ ‘The last crump’ was the end of the war and would we ever
hear it burst safely behind us? I wondered whether I could endure to
the end with faith unto salvation. I knew that my breaking point was
near now, unless something happened to stave it off.... It was
not that I was frightened. Certainly I feared death; but I had never
yet lost my head through fright, and I knew that I never would. Nor
would the breakdown come as insanity; I did not have it in me. It would
be a general nervous collapse, with tears and twitchings and dirtied
trousers. I had seen cases like that.
The battalion was issued with a new gas-helmet, popularly known as ‘the
goggle-eyed b——r with the tit.’ It differed from the previous models.
One breathed in through the nose from inside the helmet and breathed
out through a special valve held in the mouth. I found that I could not
manage this. Boxing with an already broken nose had recently displaced
the septum, so that I was forced to breathe through my mouth. In a
gas-attack I would be unable to use the helmet and it was the only type
claimed to be proof against the new German gas. The battalion doctor
advised me to have an operation done as soon as I could.
These months with the First Battalion have already been twice recorded
in literary history; though in both cases in a disguise of names
and characters. The two books are Siegfried Sassoon’s _Memoirs of a
Fox-hunting Man_, and _Nothing of Importance_, by Bill Adams, the
battalion sniping and intelligence officer. Adam’s book did not
sell, but was as good a book as 1917 censorship allowed; it should
be re-printed. Adams was killed; in fact, three out of five of the
officers of the First Battalion at that time were killed in the Somme
fighting. Scatter’s dream of open warfare was not realized. He himself
was very seriously wounded. Of A Company choir there is one survivor
besides myself—C. D. Morgan, who had his thigh smashed, and was still
in hospital sometime after the war ended.