To O.C. B Co. 2nd R.W.F. 20.7.16.
Companies will move as under
to same positions in S14b
as were to have been
taken over from Cameronians aaa
A Coy. 12.30 a.m.
B Coy. 12.45 a.m.
C Coy. 1 a.m.
D Coy. 1.15 a.m. aaa
At 2 a.m. Company Commanders
will meet C.O. at X
Roads S14b 99. aaa
Men will lie down and
get under cover but equipment
will not be taken off aaa
S14b 99 was a map reference for Bazentin churchyard. We lay here on
the reverse slope of a slight ridge about half a mile from the wood.
I attended the meeting of company commanders; the colonel told us the
plan. He said: ‘Look here, you fellows, we’re in reserve for this
attack. The Cameronians are going up to the wood first, then the Fifth
Scottish Rifles; that’s at five a.m. The Public Schools Battalion
are in support if anything goes wrong. I don’t know if we shall
be called on; if we are, it will mean that the Jocks have legged it.
As usual,’ he added. This was an appeal to prejudice. ‘The Public
Schools Battalion is, well, what we know, so if we are called for, that
means it will be the end of us.’ He said this with a laugh and we all
laughed. We were sitting on the ground protected by the road-bank; a
battery of French 75’s was firing rapid over our heads about twenty
yards away. There was a very great concentration of guns in Happy
Valley now. We could hardly hear what he was saying. He told us that
if we did get orders to reinforce, we were to shake out in artillery
formation; once in the wood we were to hang on like death. Then he said
good-bye and good luck and we rejoined our companies.
At this juncture the usual inappropriate message came through from
Division. Division could always be trusted to send through a warning
about verdigris on vermorel-sprayers, or the keeping of pets in
trenches, or being polite to our allies, or some other triviality, when
an attack was in progress. This time it was an order for a private in C
Company to report immediately to the assistant provost-marshal back at
Albert, under escort of a lance-corporal. He was for a court-martial.
A sergeant of the company was also ordered to report as a witness in
the case. The private was charged with the murder of a French civilian
in an estaminet at Béthune about a month previously. Apparently there
had been a good deal of brandy going and the French civilian, who had
a grudge against the British (it was about his wife), started to tease
the private. He was reported, somewhat improbably, as having said:
‘English no bon, Allmand trés bon. War fineesh, napoo the English.
Allmand win.’ The private had immediately drawn his bayonet and run the
man through. At the court-martial the private was exculpated; the
French civil representative commended him for having ‘energetically
repressed local defeatism.’ So he and the two N.C.O.’s missed the
battle.
What the battle that they missed was like I pieced together afterwards.
The Jocks did get into the wood and the Royal Welch were not called
on to reinforce until eleven o’clock in the morning. The Germans put
down a barrage along the ridge where we were lying, and we lost about
a third of the battalion before our show started. I was one of the
casualties.
It was heavy stuff, six and eight inch. There was so much of it that
we decided to move back fifty yards; it was when I was running that
an eight-inch shell burst about three paces behind me. I was able
to work that out afterwards by the line of my wounds. I heard the
explosion and felt as though I had been punched rather hard between
the shoulder-blades, but had no sensation of pain. I thought that
the punch was merely the shock of the explosion; then blood started
trickling into my eye and I felt faint and called to Moodie: ‘I’ve
been hit.’ Then I fell down. A minute or two before I had had two very
small wounds on my left hand; they were in exactly the same position
as the two, on my right hand, that I had got during the preliminary
bombardment at Loos. This I had taken as a sign that I would come
through all right. For further security I had repeated to myself a line
of Nietsche’s, whose poems, in French, I had with me:
Non, tu ne peus pas me tuer.
It was the poem about a man on the scaffold with the red-bearded
executioner standing over him. (This copy of Nietsche, by the
way, had contributed to the suspicions about me as a spy. Nietsche was
execrated in the papers as the philosopher of German militarism; he
was more popularly interpreted as a William le Queux mystery-man—the
sinister figure behind the Kaiser.)
One piece of shell went through my left thigh, high up near the groin;
I must have been at the full stretch of my stride to have escaped
emasculation. The wound over the eye was nothing; it was a little chip
of marble, possibly from one of the Bazentin cemetery headstones. This
and a finger wound, which split the bone, probably came from another
shell that burst in front of me. The main wound was made by a piece of
shell that went in two inches below the point of my right shoulder and
came out through my chest two inches above my right nipple, in a line
between it and the base of my neck.
My memory of what happened then is vague. Apparently Doctor Dunn came
up through the barrage with a stretcher-party, dressed my wound, and
got me down to the old German dressing-station at the north end of
Mametz Wood. I just remember being put on the stretcher and winking at
the stretcher-bearer sergeant who was looking at me and saying: ‘Old
Gravy’s got it, all right.’ The dressing-station was overworked that
day; I was laid in a corner on a stretcher and remained unconscious for
more than twenty-four hours.
It was about ten o’clock on the 20th that I was hit. Late that night
the colonel came to the dressing-station; he saw me lying in the corner
and was told that I was done for. The next morning, the 21st, when they
were clearing away the dead, I was found to be still breathing; so they
put me on an ambulance for Heilly, the nearest field-hospital. The pain
of being jolted down the Happy Valley, with a shell-hole at every
three or four yards of the roads, woke me for awhile. I remember
screaming. But once back on the better roads I became unconscious
again. That morning the colonel wrote the usual formal letters of
condolence to the next-of-kin of the six or seven officers who had been
killed. This was his letter to my mother:
22/7/16
Dear Mrs. Graves,
I very much regret to have to write and tell you your son has died
of wounds. He was very gallant, and was doing so well and is a great
loss.
He was hit by a shell and very badly wounded, and died on the way
down to the base I believe. He was not in bad pain, and our doctor
managed to get across and attend him at once.
We have had a very hard time, and our casualties have been large.
Believe me you have all our sympathy in your loss, and we have lost a
very gallant soldier.
Please write to me if I can tell you or do anything.
Yours sincerely,
* * *
Later he made out the official casualty list and reported me died of
wounds. It was a long casualty list, because only eighty men were left
in the battalion.
Heilly was on the railway; close to the station was the
hospital—marquee tents with the red cross painted prominently on the
roofs to discourage air-bombing. It was fine July weather and the
tents were insufferably hot. I was semi-conscious now, and realized
my lung-wound by the shortness of breath. I was amused to watch the
little bubbles of blood, like red soap-bubbles, that my breath made
when it escaped through the hole of the wound. The doctor came over to
me. I felt sorry for him; he looked as though he had not had any sleep
for days. I asked him for a drink. He said: ‘Would you like some tea?’
I whispered: ‘Not with condensed milk in it.’ He said: ‘I’m afraid
there’s no fresh milk.’ Tears came to my eyes; I expected better of
a hospital behind the lines. He said: ‘Will you have some water?’ I
said: ‘Not if it’s boiled.’ He said: ‘It is boiled. And I’m afraid I
can’t give you anything with alcohol in it in your present condition.’
I said: ‘Give me some fruit then.’ He said: ‘I have seen no fruit for
days.’ But a few minutes later he came back with two rather unripe
greengages. I felt so grateful that I promised him a whole orchard when
I recovered.
The nights of the 22nd and 23rd were very bad. Early on the morning of
the 24th, when the doctor came to see how I was, I said: ‘You must send
me away from here. The heat will kill me.’ It was beating through the
canvas on my head. He said: ‘Stick it out. It’s your best chance to lie
here and not to be moved. You’d not reach the base alive.’ I said: ‘I’d
like to risk the move. I’ll be all right, you’ll see.’ Half an hour
later he came back. ‘Well, you’re having it your way. I’ve just got
orders to evacuate every case in the hospital. Apparently the Guards
have been in it up at Delville Wood and we’ll have them all coming in
to-night.’ I had no fears now about dying. I was content to be wounded
and on the way home.
I had been given news of the battalion from a brigade-major, wounded in
the leg, who was in the next bed to me. He looked at my label and said:
‘I see you’re in the Second Royal Welch Fusiliers. Well, I saw your
High Wood show through field-glasses. The way your battalion shook
out into artillery formation, company by company-with each section of
four or five men in file at fifty yards interval and distance—going
down into the hollow and up the slope through the barrage, was the
most beautiful bit of parade-ground drill I’ve ever seen. Your company
officers must have been superb.’ I happened to know that one company at
least had started without a single officer. I asked him whether they
had held the wood. He said: ‘They hung on at the near end. I believe
what happened was that the Public Schools Battalion came away as soon
as it got dark; and so did the Scotsmen. Your chaps were left there
alone for some time. They steadied themselves by singing. Later, the
chaplain—R.C. of course—Father McCabe, brought the Scotsmen back. They
were Glasgow Catholics and would follow a priest where they wouldn’t
follow an officer. The middle of the wood was impossible for either the
Germans or your fellows to hold. There was a terrific concentration
of artillery on it. The trees were splintered to matchwood. Late that
night the survivors were relieved by a brigade of the Seventh Division;
your First Battalion was in it.’
That evening I was put in the hospital train. They could not lift
me from the stretcher to put me on a bunk, for fear of starting
hæmorrhage in the lung; so they laid the stretcher on top of it, with
the handles resting on the head-rail and foot-rail. I had been on the
same stretcher since I was wounded. I remember the journey only as a
nightmare.
My back was sagging, and I could not raise my knees to relieve the
cramp because the bunk above me was only a few inches away. A German
officer on the other side of the carriage groaned and wept unceasingly.
He had been in an aeroplane crash and had a compound fracture of the
leg. The other wounded men were cursing him and telling him to
stow it and be a man, but he went on, keeping every one awake. He was
not delirious, only frightened and in great pain. An orderly gave me
a pencil and paper and I wrote home to say that I was wounded but all
right. This was July 24th, my twenty-first birthday, and it was on
this day, when I arrived at Rouen, that my death officially occurred.
My parents got my letter two days after the letter from the colonel;
mine was dated July 23rd, because I had lost count of days when I was
unconscious; his was dated the 22nd.[8] They could not decide whether
my letter had been written just before I died and misdated, or whether
I had died just after writing it. ‘Died of wounds’ was, however, so
much more circumstantial than ‘killed’ that they gave me up. I was in
No. 8 Hospital at Rouen; an ex-château high above the town. The day
after I arrived a Cooper aunt of mine, who had married a Frenchman,
came up to the hospital to visit a nephew in the South Wales Borderers
who had just had a leg amputated. She happened to see my name in a list
on the door of the ward, so she wrote to my mother to reassure her. On
the 30th I had a letter from the colonel:
30/7/16
Dear von Runicke,
I cannot tell you how pleased I am you are alive. I was told your
number was up for certain, and a letter was supposed to have come in
from Field Ambulance saying you had gone under.
Well, it’s good work. We had a rotten time, and after succeeding
in doing practically the impossible we collected that rotten crowd
and put them in their places, but directly dark came they legged it.
It was too sad.
We lost heavily. It is not fair putting brave men like ours alongside
that crowd. I also wish to thank you for your good work and bravery,
and only wish you could have been with them. I have read of bravery
but I have never seen such magnificent and wonderful disregard for
death as I saw that day. It was almost uncanny—it was so great. I
once heard an old officer in the Royal Welch say the men would follow
you to Hell; but these chaps would bring you back and put you in a
dug-out in Heaven.
Good luck and a quick recovery. I shall drink your health to-night.
* *
I had little pain all this time, but much discomfort; the chief pain
came from my finger, which had turned septic because nobody had taken
the trouble to dress it, and was throbbing. And from the thigh, where
the sticky medical plaster, used to hold down the dressing, pulled
up the hair painfully when it was taken off each time the wound was
dressed. My breath was very short still. I contrasted the pain and
discomfort favourably with that of the operation on my nose of two
months back; for this I had won no sympathy at all from anyone, because
it was not an injury contracted in war. I was weak and petulant and
muddled. The R.A.M.C. bugling outraged me. The ‘Rob All My Comrades,’
I complained, had taken everything I had except a few papers in my
tunic-pocket and a ring which was too tight on my finger to be pulled
off; and now they mis-blew the Last Post flat and windily, and with the
pauses in the wrong places, just to annoy me. I remember that I
told an orderly to put the bugler under arrest and jump to it or I’d
report him to the senior medical officer.
Next to me was a Welsh boy, named O. M. Roberts, who had joined us
only a few days before he was hit. He told me about High Wood; he had
reached the edge of the wood when he was wounded in the groin. He had
fallen into a shell-hole. Some time in the afternoon he had recovered
consciousness and seen a German officer working round the edge of the
wood, killing off the wounded with an automatic pistol. Some of our
lightly-wounded were, apparently, not behaving as wounded men should;
they were sniping. The German worked nearer. He saw Roberts move and
came towards him, fired and hit him in the arm. Roberts was very weak
and tugged at his Webley. He had great difficulty in getting it out
of the holster. The German fired again and missed. Roberts rested the
Webley against the lip of the shell-hole and tried to pull the trigger;
he was not strong enough. The German was quite close now and was going
to make certain of him this time. Roberts said that he just managed to
pull the trigger with the fingers of both hands when the German was
only about five yards away. The shot took the top of his head off.
Roberts fainted.
The doctors had been anxiously watching my lung, which was gradually
filling with blood and pressing my heart too far away to the left of my
body; the railway journey had restarted the hæmorrhage. They marked the
gradual progress of my heart with an indelible pencil on my skin and
said that when it reached a certain point they would have to aspirate
me. This sounded a serious operation, but it only consisted of putting
a hollow needle into my lung through the back and drawing the blood off
into a vacuum flask through it. I had a local anæsthetic; it hurt
no more than a vaccination, and I was reading the _Gazette de Rouen_
as the blood hissed into the flask. It did not look much, perhaps half
a pint. That evening I heard a sudden burst of lovely singing in the
courtyard where the ambulances pulled up. I recognized the quality
of the voices. I said to Roberts: ‘The First Battalion have been in
it again,’ and asked a nurse to verify it; I was right. It was their
Delville Wood show, I think, but I am uncertain now of the date.
A day or two later I was taken back to England by hospital ship.