the farmhouses anywhere within two miles of the enemy were shelled
pretty regularly as regards quantity of explosive material devoted to
them--though, as regards dates, they varied considerably. Battalion
headquarters had to be dumped down in farms half shot to pieces, with
all windows broken and howling icy draughts tearing through the
shell-holed walls. If you did not like this, you could go and dig a
big hole in the side of a road or a turnip-field and live in that. The
reserves were always the difficulty, and so, for a long time, were
even the supports. For whatever and wherever the trenches that we
dug for them, the rain came steadily down and broke away the sides of
the dug-outs and provided wet legs for those that sat therein. Later
on, more timber being available, as well as iron sheeting, hurdles and
other things, they became a good deal more weather-proof; but at first
the men as well as the officers were, I fear, very uncomfortable.
In those days one could not dream of going up to or into a trench
except in the dark, or, indeed, of moving about anywhere near there
except at night. Nowadays one can visit all one's trenches in broad
daylight, and never care a rap for the occasional bullets which
whistle over the comfortable deep communication trenches; but up to
the spring of 1915 it was very different almost throughout.
I used to visit the trenches every third night or so; at least I tried
to, but it was not by any means always possible. It meant a three-mile
ride there, putting up the horses in Wulverghem or Lindenhoek, and a
walk of a mile or so to the trenches, then a mile or less along the
trenches. It was lucky for you if there was any light of moon or stars
to see by, and lucky if you did not go over your knees in mud in the
dark. On one occasion it came down a pitchy dead blackness just as I
was arriving at the trenches, so that you literally could not see your
hand in front, or the road, or anything else; so I gave it up and went
back. Other nights were impossible for the same reason; and
occasionally the brilliance of the moon was in fault, though not
often. So we had to select our nights carefully.
Johnston, V.C.,[26] R.E., was in R.E. charge of our trenches. (Poor
fellow, he was killed by a sniper near St Éloi on April 15.) He must
have worked something like eighteen hours out of the twenty-four. For
by 9 A.M. he was collecting material near Dranoutre and receiving
reports, and settling his company administrative work. At 11.30 he
came to see me, and we discussed and settled the ensuing night's task.
Then back to his farm to give out instructions to his sappers, and
fifty other things to do before he rode out about 6 P.M. to the
trenches, remaining there till 3 A.M. or even 6 A.M.--to superintend
the work and struggle about in the mud all night. He never spared
himself an ounce. He was occasionally so nearly dead with want of
sleep that I once or twice ordered him to take a night's sleep; but he
always got out of it on some pretext or other.
[Footnote 26: He had received the V.C. for a particularly
plucky piece of raft work under heavy fire at Missy.]
And with it all he was as plucky as the devil--he seemed to like
getting shot at. One night he got a ricochet bullet over his heart,
but this only put him in a furious rage (if you can use the word about
such a seeming mild person), and spent the next twenty-four hours in
collecting ammunition and bombs and extra trench-mortars and firing
them himself; this seemed to soothe him. He was a wonderful fellow all
round, always full of expedients and never disheartened by the cruel
collapse of all his plans caused by the wet weather; and if there was
a dangerous piece of work on hand, he was always first in giving the
lead. One very nasty place on the left there was which was commanded
by the enemy at short range, yet we could not dig in it, as the water
was only a foot below the ground, and breastworks there were
practically impossible; yet if the enemy had seized this bit they
would have enfiladed the rest of the line; why they did not do so I do
not know. He was always pressing me to attack the Germans at this
point and seize a bit of false crest that they held; but my better
judgment was against it, as, if we had taken the bit, we should have
been commanded there from three sides instead of one, and could not
have held it for half an hour. I know Johnston's private opinion of me
in this matter was that I was a funk, but he was too polite to say so.
After I left, the following Brigade not only did not attack the point,
but fell back some distance here, "on its own"; and I am sure they
were right.
Poor Johnston--he became Brigade-Major after Weatherby left for the
5th Divisional Staff (some time in April 1915, I think), and, as I
remarked, was killed shortly afterwards. His death was a very heavy
loss to the Brigade.
At Dranoutre we--that is, the Brigade staff--lived in a perpetual
atmosphere of mud and draughts. The Curé's house was very small and
very dirty, and was not improved by the pounds of mud which every one
brought in on his boots at all hours of the day and left on our best
drugget--a cheap, thin thing which I bought in Bailleul (they had not
such a thing as a carpet in the whole town) wherewith to cover the
nakedness of the brick floor of the one tiny room in which we all
worked and ate.
Weatherby and I slept in the house, and the others were billeted
outside, but the quarters were none of them more than passable--poor
villagers' rooms, with a frowzy though comfortable bed, a rickety
washhand-stand, if you were lucky (I did not even have that), no
carpet on the dirty wooden floor, and one small hard-backed chair,
generally minus a portion of a leg; never any chest of drawers or
anywhere to put your things, as if there by any chance was such a
thing in the room, it was sure to be full of the inhabitants' rusty
old black clothes and dirty blue flannel shirts, and petticoats, thick
and musty, by the ton,--I never saw so many petticoats per inhabitant.
Our mess had only had one change since the beginning of the war, and
that was in the signal officer. Cadell had gone sick in November, and
Miles had replaced him in December. For about a month, including all
the period at Ypres, we had had no signal officer (except Naylor for
two days), nor any Brigade-Major from about the 12th November (at
Ypres) till the beginning of December; so Sergeant King, a first-rate
signaller, though not the senior, had carried on for Cadell, and
Moulton-Barrett had added the duties of Brigade-Major to his own. But
by the middle of December we were complete again. Weatherby had
returned from his sick leave, and Miles, of the K.O.S.B.'s, was now
signalling officer. A quite excellent one he was, too--very silent,
always an hour or two late for dinner (owing to strenuous night work),
never asking questions, but always doing things before they were even
suggested, and very thoroughly at that; he was a great acquisition.
Moulton-Barrett was still Staff Captain--very hard-working and
conscientious, and very thorough; Weatherby was still Brigade-Major--keen
and resourceful; Beilby was still veterinary officer--capable and
helpful; and St André was still interpreter and billeting
officer--cheerful and most willing. His duties were mostly to
investigate the numerous cases of natives who wanted to go somewhere
or do something--generally to fetch their cows off a shell-swept
field, or to rescue their furniture from a burnt village, or to fetch
or buy something from Bailleul--and recommend them (or otherwise) to
me for passes--a most trying duty, wearing to the temper; but he was
angelic in patience, and, as a light recreation, used to accompany me
to the trenches fairly often.
One case there was where, for three nights running, great fids of wire
were cut out of some artillery cables connecting them with their
observers--a most reprehensible deed. So I had patrols out to spy
along the lines,--no result, except that next morning another 100
yards had gone. So I made St André publish a blood-and-thunder
proclamation threatening death to any one found tampering with our
wires. Spies were plentiful, and a gap in our wires might be fatal.
And then the culprit owned up. It was an old woman near whose cottage
the wires passed, and her fences required mending.
Neuve Église, which we inhabited for a fortnight or more, and where we
spent Xmas Day, was a good cut above Dranoutre. Except for the first
three days, when we lived with a doctor,--and his stove smoked
frightfully till we discovered a dead starling in the pipe,--we dwelt
in exceeding comfort, comparatively speaking. It was a brewer's house,
about the biggest in the village--which was three times the size of
Dranoutre,--with real furniture in it, a real dining-room (horribly
cold, as the stove refused to work), and a most comfortable series of
highly civilized bedrooms. (Last time I was in the neighbourhood--August
1915--there was long grass in the streets, not a soul in the place,
half the houses in absolute ruins, and our late quarters with one side
missing and three parts of the house as well.) The trenches were much
less pestered with shells and bullets than the Dranoutre lot, and it
was easier work altogether for the men. We quite enjoyed it, and on
Xmas Day so did the Germans. For they came out of their trenches and
walked across unarmed, with boxes of cigars and seasonable remarks.
What were our men to do? Shoot? You could not shoot unarmed men. Let
them come? You could not let them come into your trenches; so the only
thing feasible at the moment was done--and some of our men met them
halfway and began talking to them.
We got into trouble for doing it. But, after all, it is difficult to
see what we could otherwise have done, unless we shot the very first
unarmed man who showed himself--_pour encourager les autres_; but we
did not know what he was going to do. Meanwhile our officers got
excellent close views of the German trenches, and we profited
accordingly; the Boche did not, for he was not allowed close enough to
ours.
Which reminds me that on one occasion, when going round the trenches,
I asked a man whether he had had any shots at the Germans. He
responded that there was an elderly gentleman with a bald head and a
long beard who often showed himself over the parapet.
"Well, why didn't you shoot him?"
"Shoot him?" said the man; "why, Lor' bless you, sir, 'e's never done
_me_ no 'arm!" A case of "live and let live," which is certainly not
to be encouraged. But cold-blooded murder is never popular with our
men.
Talking of anecdotes, and the trend of our men's minds, I heard that
on another occasion a groom, an otherwise excellent creature, wrote
home to his "girl" thus: "Me and the master rode out to the trenches
last night. We was attacked by a strong German patrol. I nips off me
horse, pulls out my rifle and shoots two of them, and the rest
bolted." Not a single atom of truth in the story, except that he was
nestling in a warm stable at an advanced village, whilst his master
was shivering in the mud of the trenches that night.
Another gem was a statement by a Transport officer's servant that he
had shot 1200 Germans himself with a machine-gun. This was a man who,
I verily believe, had never even been within earshot of a gun, much
less seen a German, his duties being exclusively several miles in rear
of the firing line. And, being a civilian up till quite recently, I am
sure he did not know the muzzle of a maxim from its breech.
During our tours in "Divisional reserve" we generally spent the time
in St Jan's Cappel (already described) or Bailleul. The latter town,
with its rather quaint old brick fourteenth-century church, porched _à
la_ Louis Quinze, was tolerable rather than admirable. Nothing of
civil interest, and hardly anything to buy except magnificent grapes
from the "Grapperies," even in November. We housed a battalion or
more in the man's series of greenhouses, and he responded--after
several more battalions had been quartered there--with a claim for
2,000,000 francs. He could not prove that a single pane of glass or
any of his vines had been broken, nor any grapes stolen, for indeed
they had not been, but he based his claim on the damage done to them
by tobacco smoke (which I always thought was particularly good for
them), and by the report of the big guns, which shattered the vines'
nerves so that he was sure they would not produce again (also a
fallacy, for I had some more excellent grapes there nearly a year
afterwards--September '15). I did not hear what compensation he got,
but he would have been lucky to get 20 francs.
I once went into a poorly furnished watchmaker's shop, but the lady
there could do nothing for my watch. She told me that, being an
optician in a small way as well, she had had a whole stock of
spectacles and glasses. When the Germans came through the town in
October, they demanded fieldglasses. The few ones she had they stole,
and then because she had no more they stole her watchmaker's tools,
and swept all the spectacles and glasses and watches on to the floor
and stamped them to powder.
There is really little more to relate about our time at Dranoutre and
neighbourhood. It was a time of a certain amount of nerve-strain, for
we all knew that our trenches were by no means perfect, and that if
the enemy did attack us we should have great difficulty in bringing up
reserves in time to beat them off; for we could not keep them under
cover within decent range--there were no billets or houses,--and if we
dug trenches for them they were not only exposed to the enemy's shell
fire but were certain to be half full of water in two days; whilst we
could not get anything like enough trench stores and timber, and what
we did get we had enormous difficulty in bringing up to the trenches.
During all this time the artillery helped us all they knew, and were
extremely well run, first by Ballard, then Saunders, and then Sandys,
as Brigade Commanders. But they were badly handicapped by want of
shells, especially howitzer high explosives, and we had to suffer a
great deal of shell fire without returning it.
We used to average about four casualties a day in each battalion, say
fifteen to twenty a day in the Brigade, which made a big hole in the
strengths. Officers were always getting killed--often, alas, their own
fault, through excess of zeal; and men used perpetually to lose their
lives through getting out of the trenches in order to stretch their
half-frozen limbs. Sickness was, strange to say, almost negligible.
There were far more cases of arthritis and other things due to cold
wet feet than anything else; and the men were extraordinarily healthy,
comparatively speaking, considering the desperately uncomfortable hard
life.
General Morland was, of course, commanding the Division during this
time, and used to come nearly every morning in his car to see us; also
Sir C. Fergusson, now Corps Commander, often came.
But during the whole of that winter there was very little for the
higher commands to do, except to collect and send up material for the
trenches, and to try and keep pace with the German developments--for
we could do little or nothing in the way of offensive action.
I tried to get the thing neatly organised, as to stores and times and
amounts and transport for taking the things up to the trenches; but
it was very difficult, as sometimes there were no engineer stores to
be had, or the wires got broken by shell fire and took a long time to
repair, or it was more urgent to bring up rations or water or
ammunition, and the requisite transport for all was not available. But
all the same, the trenches gradually improved.
At last, on the 18th February, we got news that there was to be a move
from our present line. The fact was that the 28th Division (also the
27th), composed of white troops from India and other tropical places,
had had an exceedingly nasty time. Many of the men were rotten with
fever, and the cold wet weather had sent scores and scores into
hospital. They had been put into the trenches round St Éloi to relieve
the French, who had held all the line round here chiefly with their
field artillery and a very few men; and the trenches were,
consequently, most sketchy, according to British ideas, and the
approaches under heavy fire. The French did not mind, for, if they
were shelled out of their trenches, as often happened, they just
skipped out of them and turned their guns on till the Germans were
cleared out; and then they went back again. But this sort of thing did
not suit us; and when the Germans did attack our trenches here they
took a good many and we lost a lot of men, especially when we tried to
counter-attack and retake them. So the 28th Division was _hors de
combat_ for the moment, and was sent down to recuperate in a quieter
area--which was that of the 5th Division.
Our orders were for the 13th and 15th Brigades to move north to St
Éloi and be replaced by the 83rd and 84th Brigades. This was done,--a
most complicated move, for the 84th Brigade, which fell to our lot,
was composed of four very weak battalions, and we had five battalions,
mostly rather strong; and by the 24th February we had six battalions,
including the 9th Londons (an excellent battalion) and 6th Cheshires
(a strong and hard-working one).
We ought to have been relieved, in the normal state of affairs, on the
17th February, but we were kept on, as a matter of fact, till the
27th, because of this new arrangement.
On that morning I received word that an extraordinary lamp message
had been read during the night in the enemy's lines by a signaller of
the 6th Cheshires. It was a long, confused message in English,
repeating that "the hill" was going to be attacked at noon on that
day, with messages about "B.C. codes"--whatever that may be,--trumpery
wire entanglements, the unready English, good leading essential, &c.,
and a lot of other undecipherable nonsense. The whole message had
lasted nearly two hours, with interruptions and repetitions. I did not
know what to make of it. It was probably a "leg-pull," or somebody
practising his English; but as there was a 1000 to 1 chance of its
being sent by some sympathiser in our front, and of the projected
"attack" being a real one, I sent two companies down as a reserve to
the Bus Farm in our reserve line, and held a battery ready before its
time. But nothing happened, and we were relieved without incident.
Bols, by the way, had, from commanding the Dorsets, been appointed to
command the 84th Brigade, and he took over before leaving, on the day
before we left. I was very sorry indeed to lose him, but knew that,
once his foot was well on the ladder, he would go right ahead--as he
has.[27] The same applied to Ballard, who also had been given a
Brigade--the 7th.
[Footnote 27: He is now (1917) Major-General.]
The 15th Brigade thereupon retired into billets at Bailleul, with
orders to stay there for three days only, and then to go straight to
St Éloi and take over these trenches of the 28th Division. Not much
rest--twenty days in the trenches, three out, and then trenches again.
As regards myself, however, my days of connection with the Brigade
were numbered. I had heard, with mixed but pleasant feelings, that I
had been promoted Major-General "for distinguished service" on the
18th February (Weatherby got a brevet majority in the same 'Gazette'),
and I was now ordered to go home and report myself in London. My
successor was to be Northey, of the 60th Rifles, from Givenchy way,
and he turned up on the 2nd March at our Headquarters, which were then
at 28 Rue de Lille. I at once recognised that he would carry on
excellently well, and had no compunction in leaving the command in his
hands. All that was left for me to do was to take a tender farewell
of the officers of the Brigade and of my staff, and to publish a final
farewell order to the old Brigade. I was very sad at leaving, and had
I known what an awful time they were going to have at St Éloi and Hill
60, I should have been sadder still.[28] Of all the regimental
officers and men who had left Ireland with me on the 14th August 1914,
six and a half months previously, I could count on my ten fingers the
number of officers left:--
Norfolks--Done[29] and Bruce (both ill in hospital from strenuous
overwork), Megaw (killed later), Paterson.
Dorsets--Ransome, Partridge.
Bedfords--Griffith[29] (trustiest of C.O.'s, who had been under
heavier fire than almost any one in the Brigade, yet never
touched), Allason (thrice wounded), Gledstanes (killed later).
Cheshires--Frost (killed later).
[Footnote 28: They lost 2400 men out of not quite 4000 in a
fortnight in April.]
[Footnote 29: Now (1917) commanding a Brigade.]
I do not think there was another officer except the
quartermasters--Smith (Norfolks), Sproule (Cheshires), and Pearce
(Bedfords)[30]; and as for the men, there may have been ten or so per
battalion, but I really do not think there were more.
I took the evening train at Bailleul and spent an agreeable evening
with Ker Seymer, the train officer. I got to Boulogne and on board the
boat at midnight, and next day, the 3rd March, saw me arrive at 8.30
A.M. in London.
[Footnote 30: The Dorset one had been promoted.]
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