When I was given leave in April 1916 I went to a military hospital in
London and had my nose operated on. It was a painful operation, but
performed by a first-class surgeon and cost me nothing. In peace-time
it would have cost me sixty guineas, and another twenty guineas in
nursing-home fees. After hospital I went up to Harlech to walk on the
hills. I had in mind the verse of the psalm: ‘I will lift up mine eyes
unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.’ That was another charm
against trouble. I bought a small two-roomed cottage from my mother,
who owned considerable cottage property in the neighbourhood. I bought
it in defiance of the war, as something to look forward to when the
guns stopped (‘when the guns stop’ was how we always thought of the end
of the war). I whitewashed the cottage and put in a table, a chair, a
bed and a few dishes and cooking utensils. I had decided to live there
by myself on bread and butter, bacon and eggs, lettuce in season,
cabbage and coffee; and to write poetry. My war-bonus would keep me
for a year or two at least. The cottage was on the hillside away from
the village. I put in a big window to look out over the wood below
and across the Morfa to the sea. I wrote two or three poems here as a
foretaste of the good life coming after the war.
It was about this time, but whether before or after my operation I
cannot remember, that I was taken by my father to a dinner of the
Honourable Cymmrodorion Society—a Welsh literary club—where Lloyd
George, then Prime Minister, and W. M. Hughes, the Australian Prime
Minister, were to speak. Hughes was perky, dry and to the point;
Lloyd George was up in the air on one of his ‘glory of the Welsh
hills’ speeches. The power of his rhetoric was uncanny. I knew that
the substance of what he was saying was commonplace, idle and false,
but I had to fight hard against abandoning myself with the rest of the
audience. The power I knew was not his; he sucked it from his hearers
and threw it back at them. Afterwards I was introduced to him, and when
I looked closely at his eyes they were like those of a sleep-walker.
I rejoined the Third Battalion at Litherland, near Liverpool, where
it had been shifted from Wrexham as part of the Mersey defence force;
I liked the Third Battalion. The senior officers were generous in
not putting more work on me than I wished to undertake, and it was
good to meet again three of my Wrexham contemporaries who had been
severely wounded (all of them, by a coincidence, in the left thigh)
and seemed to be out of it for the rest of the war—Frank Jones-Bateman
and ‘Father’ Watkin, who had been in the Welsh Regiment with me, and
Aubrey Attwater, the assistant adjutant, who had gone to the Second
Battalion early in 1915 and had been hit when out on patrol. Attwater
had come from Cambridge, at the outbreak of war and was known as
‘Brains’ in the battalion. The militia majors, who were for the most
part country gentlemen with estates in Wales, and had no thoughts in
peace-time beyond hunting, shooting, fishing, and the control of their
tenantry, were delighted with Attwater’s informative talk over the
port at mess. Sergeant Malley, the mess-sergeant, would go round with
his ‘Light or vintage, sir?’ and the old majors would say to Attwater:
‘Now, Brains! Tell us about Shakespeare. Is it true that Bacon wrote
him?’ Or, ‘Well, Brains! What do you think about this chap Hilaire
Belloc? Does he really know when the war’s going to end?’ And Attwater
would humorously accept his position as combined encyclopaedia and
almanac. Sergeant Malley was another friend whom I was always pleased
to meet again. He could pour more wine into a glass than any other man
in the world; it bulged up over the top of a glass like a cap and he
was never known to spill a drop.
Wednesdays were guest-nights in the mess, when the married officers who
usually dined at home were expected to attend. The band played Gilbert
and Sullivan music behind a curtain. In the intervals the regimental
harper gave solos—Welsh melodies picked out rather uncertainly on a
hand-harp. When the programme was over the bandmaster was invited to
the senior officers’ table for his complimentary glass of light or
vintage. When he was gone, and the junior officers had retired, the
port went round and round, and the conversation, at first very formal,
became rambling and intimate. Once, I remember, a senior major laid
it down axiomatically that every so-called sportsman had at one time
or another committed a sin against sportsmanship. When challenged,
he cross-examined each of his neighbours in turn, putting them on
their honour to tell the truth. One of them, blushing, admitted that
he had once shot grouse two days before the Twelfth: ‘It was my last
chance before I rejoined the battalion in India.’ Another said that
when a public-school boy, and old enough to know better, he had
killed a sitting pheasant with a stone. The next one had gone out
with a poacher—in his Sandhurst days—and crumbled poison-berry into a
trout-stream. An even more scandalous admission came from a new-army
major, a gentleman-farmer, that his estate had been overrun with
foxes one year and, the headquarters of the nearest hunt being thirty
miles away, he had given his bailiff permission to protect the
hen-roosts with a gun. Finally it was the turn of the medical officer
to be cross-examined. He said: ‘Well, once when I was a student at St.
Andrews a friend asked me to put ten bob for him on a horse in the
Lincolnshire. I couldn’t find my bookmaker in time. The horse lost and
I never returned the ten bob.’ At this one of the guests, an officer
in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, became suddenly excited, jumped
up and leant over the table, doubling his fists. ‘And was not the name
of the horse Strathspey? And will you not pay me my ten shillings now
immediately?’
The camp was only separated by the bombing-field from Brotherton’s,
where a specially sensitive explosive for detonators was made. The
munition makers had permanently yellow faces and hands and drew
appropriately high wages. Attwater used to argue at mess sometimes what
would happen if Brotherton’s blew up. Most of us held that the shock
would immediately kill all the three thousand men of the camp besides
destroying Litherland and a large part of Bootle. He maintained that
the very closeness of the camp would save it; that the vibrations would
go over and strike a big munition camp about a mile away and set that
off. One Sunday afternoon Attwater limped out of the mess and suddenly
saw smoke rising from Brotherton’s. Part of the factory was on fire.
The camp fire-brigade was immediately bugled for and managed to put
the fire out before it reached a vital spot. So the argument was never
decided. I was at Litherland only a few weeks. On 1st July 1916 the
Somme offensive started, and all available trained men and officers
were sent out to replace casualties. I was disappointed to be sent back
to the Second Battalion, not the First.
It was in trenches at Givenchy, just the other side of the canal
from the Cuinchy brick-stacks. I arrived at the battalion on July
5th to find it in the middle of a raid. Prisoners were coming down
the trench, scared and chattering to each other. They were Saxons
just returned from a divisional rest and a week’s leave to Germany.
Their uniforms were new and their packs full of good stuff to loot.
One prisoner got a good talking-to from C Company sergeant-major, a
Birmingham man, who was shocked at a packet of indecent photographs
found in the man’s haversack. It had been a retaliatory raid. Only a
few days before, the Germans had sent up the biggest mine blown on the
Western front so far. It caught our B Company—the B’s were proverbially
unlucky. The crater, which was afterwards named Red Dragon Crater after
the Royal Welch regimental badge, must have been about thirty yards
across. There were few survivors of B Company. The Germans immediately
came over in force to catch the other companies in confusion. Stanway,
who had been a company sergeant-major on the retreat and was now an
acting-major, rallied some men on the flank and drove them back. Blair,
B Company commander, was buried by the mine up to his neck and for the
rest of the day was constantly under fire. Though an oldish man (he had
the South African ribbon), he survived this experience, recovered from
his wounds, and was back in the battalion a few months later.
This raid was Stanway’s revenge. He organized it with the colonel; the
colonel was the Third Battalion adjutant who had originally sent me
out to France. The raid was elaborately planned, with bombardments and
smoke-screen diversions on the flanks. A barrage of shrapnel shifted
forward and back from the German front line to the supports. The
intention was that the Germans at the first bombardment should go
down into the shell-proof dug-outs, leaving only their sentries in the
trench, and reappear as soon as the barrage lifted. When it came down
again they would make another dash for the dug-outs. After this had
happened two or three times they would be slow in coming out at all.
Then, under cover of a smoke-screen, the raid would be made and the
barrage put down uninterruptedly on the support and reserve lines to
prevent reinforcements. My only part in the raid, which was successful,
was to write out a detailed record of it at the colonel’s request. It
was not the report for divisional headquarters but a page of regimental
history to be sent to the depot to be filed in regimental records. In
my account I noted that for the first time for two hundred years the
regiment had reverted to the pike. Instead of rifle and bayonet some of
the raiders had used butchers’ knives secured with medical plaster to
the end of broomsticks. This pike was a lighter weapon than rifle and
bayonet and was useful in conjunction with bombs and revolvers.
An official journalist at headquarters also wrote an account of the
raid. The battalion enjoyed the bit about how they had gone over
shouting ‘Remember Kitchener!’ and ‘Avenge the _Lusitania_!’ ‘What a
damn silly thing to shout,’ said someone. ‘Old Kitchener was all right,
but nobody wants him back at the War Office, that I’ve heard. And as
for the _Lusitania_, the Germans gave her full warning, and if it
brings the States into the war, it’s all to the good.’
There were not many officers in the Second who had been with it when
I left it a month after Loos, but at any rate I expected to have a
friendlier welcome than the first time I had come to the battalion at
Laventie. But, as one of them recorded in his diary: ‘Graves had a
chilly reception, which surprised me.’ The reason was simple. One of
the officers who had joined the Third Battalion in August 1914,
and had been on the Square with me, had achieved his ambition of a
regular commission in the Second Battalion. He was one of those who had
been sent out to France before me as being more efficient and had been
wounded before I came out. But now he was only a second-lieutenant in
the Second Battalion, where promotion was slow, and I was a captain
in the Third Battalion. Line-battalion feeling against the Special
Reserve was always strong, and jealousy of my extra stars made him
bitter. It amused him to revive the suspicion raised at Wrexham by my
German name that I was a German spy. Whether he was serious or not I
cannot say, probably he could not have said either; but the result was
that I found myself treated with great reserve by all the officers
who had not been with me in trenches before. It was unlucky that the
most notorious German spy caught in England had assumed the name
of Karl Graves. It was put about that he was a brother of mine. My
consolation was that there was obviously a battle due and that would
be the end either of me or of the suspicion. I thought to myself: ‘So
long as there isn’t an N.C.O. told off to watch me and shoot me on the
slightest appearance of treachery.’ Such things had been known. As a
matter of fact, though I had myself had no traffic with the enemy,
there was a desultory correspondence kept up between my mother and her
sisters in Germany; it came through her sister, Clara von Faber du
Faur, mother of my cousin Conrad, whose husband was German consul at
Zurich. It was not treasonable on either side, merely a register of the
deaths of relations and discreet references to the war service of the
survivors. The German aunts wrote, as the Government had ordered every
German with relations or friends in enemy or neutral countries to do,
pointing out the righteousness of the German cause and presenting
Germany as the innocent party in a war engineered by France and Russia.
My mother, equally strong for the Allied cause, wrote back that they
were deluded. The officers I liked in the battalion were the colonel
and Captain Dunn, the battalion doctor. Doctor Dunn was what they call
a hard-bitten man; he had served as a trooper in the South African War
and won the d.c.m. He was far more than a doctor; living at
battalion headquarters he became the right-hand man of three or four
colonels in succession. When his advice was not taken this was usually
afterwards regretted. On one occasion, in the autumn fighting of 1917,
a shell burst among the headquarters staff, knocking out adjutant,
colonel, and signals officer. Dunn had no hesitation in pulling off the
red-cross armlets that he wore in a battle and becoming a temporary
combatant officer of the Royal Welch, resigning his duties to the
stretcher-bearer sergeant. He took command and kept things going. The
men were rather afraid of him, but had more respect for him than for
anyone else in the battalion.