considerable responsibility rested on Goyle, who was senior officer
of the three companies employed. Goyle had been through the war from
the beginning, and had learnt the difference between reckless dash and
careful handling of men. Goyle had had four of his subalterns killed
and most of his original company replaced by reinforcements. He had
held the canal bank at Mons and fought slowly backwards from house
to house at Le Cateau. What he did not know of the Germans and their
methods of fighting no general knew, nor staff officer with red-banded,
brass-rimmed cap. Perhaps the generals and their staff officers knew
as much theoretically and had learnt a good deal from the result of
actions in which the divisions and units under their command had been
engaged, but none knew more than Goyle, who was a plain regimental
officer and lived daily in the firing-line. Had many but he been in
command that night the advance guard would have been cut up.
We had covered the first part of our march uneventfully, and were now
moving along a stretch of open road which ran between two deep ditches
with ploughland on either side. The Dorchesters were following us,
and they, we knew, had reached a village about half a mile behind.
Goyle was from the first extremely anxious not to let the gap between
ourselves and the Dorchesters get too wide. Our orders were to halt on
a cross-road at some point farther down along the road on which we were
marching. It was quite dark, and we were proceeding very slowly, as we
were uncertain of the whereabouts or strength of the enemy. Goyle had
got all the men off the road, and was making them move single file by
companies along the ditches. We proceeded some distance in this way,
but no cross-roads could be found, and after a bit Goyle halted and
sent back for further instructions. He discovered at the same time
that communication had not been maintained with the brigade on the
right, and that the Dorchesters showed no inclination to leave the
village they had reached, but were disposed to billet there. In fact,
everything pointed to a slight muddle having arisen, as a result of
which the three companies of my regiment might be severe sufferers in
their isolated position if the enemy suddenly attacked. It was the sort
of occasion when many officers less experienced than Goyle might have
done something which would have led to a disaster. Many, for instance,
would have pushed boldly on until they found the cross-roads or met
the enemy. They would have said that those were their orders and that
it was not for them to wonder whether there was any mistake. However,
Goyle was not of this sort. He believed in using his own judgment and
acting as circumstances seemed to dictate. His first concern was for
the lives of his men, which he would throw away as lightly as his
own if necessary, but which he always guarded jealously against the
possible perils of tactical mistakes.
"I don't like this," he said once or twice, as we were standing there
waiting for the reply to the message he had sent back. "It is all very
well, you know, but if they came for us now in any strength we should
get scuppered." It was dark, and we seemed a long way out along the
road from the other troops. I understood what he meant, and saw the
danger. Presently the orderly returned with a written message from
the Commanding Officer: "You are to go on as far as the _R_ in ----,
and remain in the village for the night." Goyle pulled out his map,
and we bent over it. ---- was a village of a few cottages, apparently
about a quarter of a mile down the road. I could see Goyle did not like
the order. "It is all very well," he said; "probably the enemy are in
the village--a nice trap we shall be walking into. I shall send on a
patrol, and if the village is held I shan't move on till daylight, when
we have got some reinforcements up."
It was then decided that I should take out a patrol and go and scout
the village. "Take a lance-corporal and a man with you," said Goyle;
"and when you get to the village one of you go into the first house,
leaving the other two outside; if the one who goes into the house does
not come out, another is to follow him in, and if he stays too, the
third is to come back and tell me. If we hear shots and none of you
return we shall know the village is occupied."
"Very good, sir," I said; and, wishing I was anywhere else, I went off
to get the patrol. I called my platoon together, explained the work
on hand, and asked for volunteers. I got a N.C.O. without difficulty,
but there was no response when I asked for a man. Much disgusted at
the want of spirit in the men, I was preparing to go off alone with
the lance-corporal rather than force anyone to go with me, when a
man stepped out of the ranks and made the party complete. Afterwards
Jenkins, my soldier servant, from whom I used to get tips about
handling the men and various bits of barrack-room gossip, explained to
me why I had got an N.C.O. easily enough, but had had difficulty in
getting a man. It appeared that the men had a rooted dislike to patrols
composed of an officer, a non-commissioned officer, and a man, as they
considered the man was always made the victim of the enterprise, being
sent on when the danger point was reached to draw fire. He said that
had I asked for two men they would have come forward willingly, but,
having got the N.C.O., no one cared to offer himself to take the place
of the private.
I saw what Jenkins meant, and decided to remember the point for future
guidance. As a matter of fact, I had decided that we should all go
together, anyway until the occasion came for entering the houses, when
it would be time enough to arrange who should go first.
Having got my N.C.O. and man together, I explained to them the work
that was on foot, and said that at the first shot from the enemy each
was to run for himself, and that no one was to wait to reply to the
fire; all we had to do was to find out whether or not the place was
occupied. Liking the job less each minute, we started off down the
road. After going a little way it occurred to me that an old military
rule was to keep a Maxim on a road at night, and that we should get
rather in the way of this if the enemy had one and opened fire.
Accordingly I ordered the patrol off the road on to the ploughland
beside. This was a good manœuvre, as we were able to creep over the
soft soil noiselessly. We felt our way on for some distance, until I
saw two dark objects. These were the first of the houses we had to
explore. Praying fervently that they might be empty, I led the way
towards them. Suddenly there was a sharp burst of fire ahead along a
front of about fifty yards. The shots could not have been fired from
more than ten yards range. We had evidently all but walked into a
German trench. The enemy had heard us, and blazed into the night. The
effect of the shots suddenly fired out of nothing was most startling.
As one man we all three turned and bolted in the opposite direction.
The corporal dropped his rifle, I lost my cap; the private, being a
fine sprinter, got slightly ahead, and we all three ran like mad.
After a couple of hundred yards I went head over heels into a ditch.
The corporal paused a moment to see if I had been hit, but continued
as soon as I got up; the man kept an unchecked course for home,
looking neither to the right nor the left. In the fall I slightly
dislocated my knee, but this was as nothing, and, hardly hindered by
a limp, I followed at full speed in the wake of the rout, the man
now holding a good lead, the corporal lying second, and myself a bad
third. I bethought me as I ran that we should probably draw the fire
of our own men, who would think we were the enemy, and halloaed:
"Goyle--Goyle--this is the patrol returning."
"Shut up, you blithering idiot," I heard his voice from the road; "do
you want all Germany to know where we are?"
I flung myself on the ground beside him and breathlessly reported what
had happened. "H'm," said Goyle, "just what I thought. I shan't try to
occupy that village to-night."
Just then the Major commanding the regiment and Adjutant, who had been
back with the reserve company, came up. "Well, what is it, Goyle?" said
the Major testily; "why don't you push on into the village?"
The Major was a very gallant officer, with considerable war experience
behind him. To his mind "dash" was the great thing. But the Major's
experiences had been chiefly in savage warfare, and he had no knowledge
of German methods. He had only come out from England two days before to
take the place of our Colonel, who had been wounded.
Goyle pointed to me, said that he had sent out a patrol, and that the
village was occupied. "Oh," said the Adjutant, "probably only two or
three half-scared Uhlans. You ought to have tackled them and brought
back their helmets"--this to me.
I offered with acid politeness to indicate the position of the "Uhlans"
so that the Adjutant could go out himself and get their helmets.
"I think the enemy are entrenched, sir," said Goyle to the Major.
"Well, have at them and drive them out," the latter answered.
"We are rather isolated here, sir, and we are too weak to attack the
village by ourselves."
"Maybe--maybe--I should push on, though," the Major answered.
"If you will excuse me, sir, I feel the responsibility rather too
great--if you would take command of the attack, sir." This was a
master-stroke on Goyle's part, as it brought home to the Major the
responsibility of throwing his men without proper support against
a position of unknown strength in the dark. He hummed and hawed,
and finally decided to leave things as they were till daylight, and
returned with the Adjutant to the reserve company.
As things turned out, it was lucky for all of us that Goyle had been
firm about advancing farther; for, so far from there only being a few
half-scared Uhlans ahead of us, we discovered afterwards that the
Germans were in force and strongly entrenched, and any attempt at
attack by the three companies must have failed disastrously.
When the Major had gone Goyle decided to move back, so as to get in
closer touch with the Dorchesters. We withdrew, therefore, to the
outskirts of the village, lined out on the ploughland on either side of
the road, and set the men to entrench.
XVI. WITH THE SUPPORTS
The Support trenches lay along a road about fifty yards behind the
firing-line. The trenches themselves were made partly from a ditch by
the side of the road, and partly excavated from a ploughed field which
ran out in the direction of the enemy. The firing-line trenches were
beyond in the ploughed field itself; beyond the ploughland again came a
stretch of root crop, and at the end of this the enemy.
The Westshires were holding the firing-line, and we were close up
behind them in support. In spite of the narrow margin between the
supports and firing-line life was a good deal easier for the supports.
Indeed, we felt ourselves onlookers compared to the Westshires in
front. The ground sloped gently down from their trenches to the road.
They could not move without showing up against the sky-line, while we,
by crouching, could move about our trenches with comparative freedom.
But the chief blessing of being in support lay in the fact that we
were not directly responsible for giving the first alarm. The onus of
waiting and watching for the German attack lay on the Westshires, and
our men felt themselves to be more or less onlookers for the day, and
lay about reading the newspapers and smoking. Evans and I found plenty
to occupy ourselves during the afternoon. There was a small farm just
by the side of our trench, protected from view by a row of cottages.
The owners of the farm had gone the day before, when there had been
an attack on the village, and left their home just as it was. We took
over the farm for our own use, got a fire going in the kitchen, and set
our servants to work to prepare dinner. Jenkins, my servant, had been
a chauffeur valet before the war, and had great ideas how things ought
to be done. These ideas had on occasion been reduced to making tea
during a halt by the roadside in a small black and dirty pot, which he
kept fastened to his pack, but with a kitchen stove to cook over and an
unlimited supply of crockery he was in his element.
Having annexed the farm as an officers' mess and installed Jenkins in
the kitchen we made a tour of the yard. Here we found several things
which wanted doing. First there was the farm dog, who had been left
behind chained to his kennel. The dog had had nothing to eat for two
days, and was ravenous. We got him a large bone and loosed him, so that
if we had to scurry he would not have to stay behind. Then we found
some cows in a shed in great pain from want of milking. There was a
man in my platoon who had been a dairyman, and I set him to work on
them. In a barn we found a quantity of straw, which we sent down to the
trenches. Finally we got soap and towels from a bedroom, and repaired
to the pump for a much-needed cleaning.
After washing ourselves we went out for a stroll before dinner. We
found a little group standing in the lee of the cottage across the
road--the Adjutant of the Westshires, the regimental doctor, two
stretcher-bearers, and an N.C.O. A man had been hit in the trench just
ahead of us, and the doctor had been sent for to come up from the
field-ambulance. The doctor had just sent word up to the trench to find
out the nature of the man's injuries. If he was severely wounded and
required immediate attention, the doctor was prepared to send up his
stretcher-bearers to have him brought down, but it would be a difficult
job and exposing men's lives, and the doctor wanted, if possible, to
leave the man there till dark. Doctors attached to regiments have many
difficult points to settle, and occasions like this often arise when it
is hard for them to decide whether to risk more lives to save one. They
are called upon sometimes to go up and attend to cases in all sorts of
impossible places, and in the firing-line the old cry of "Send for the
doctor" is not quite so easily answered as in other places.
We left the group by the cottage waiting for the reply about the nature
of the wounded man's injuries. Not a head showed from the trench where
he was lying. The trench itself, though only twenty yards or so away,
was hardly visible in the field. Glad it was not our turn to lie like
logs in it all the day, we went on down the village street. Nearly all
the cottages were empty, but in one we came on a group of inhabitants
who had remained. They had all collected in a kitchen and were having
a last meal round their table. They had got a little bread and some
coffee, which they were sharing with three private soldiers, who in
exchange had contributed a tin of bully beef. It made a strange sight
to see the weeping, frightened women and the tired dusty soldiers who
had come to defend them. The women had given the men a place round the
fire, and were waiting on them attentively. The privates could speak no
French and the peasants no English, so conversation was impossible, but
an interchange of thought could be read in the eyes of both parties;
the women looking on the men sadly and devoutedly, realizing they had
come there perhaps to give their lives for them, and across the men's
faces would come a look of appreciation for the hot comforting coffee,
and at other times a look of inscrutable purposefulness, which is
hard to describe, but which all our men wear in France, and which is
symbolic of the spirit which is carrying them through the campaign.
Seeing officers outside, one of the women came out. I said
"good-morning" to her in French, and with a delighted "_Ah, Monsieur,
vous parlez Français_," she addressed herself to me excitedly. It
appeared that her husband had been missing since the day before. She
was very anxious about him. Two officers had come to the cottage, asked
him some questions, and then taken him away with them. She had not seen
the man since. What did I think could have become of him? I asked her
some questions about the officers who had taken her husband away, and
from her description gathered that they were a captain and subaltern
in the British Army. As the Westshire Regiment was the only regiment
that I knew had been in the village since the Germans left it, I felt
sure the officers the woman referred to must be from that regiment.
Accordingly I went back to ask the adjutant of the Westshires if he
could give any information on the subject. He told me that when the
regiment had got up to the village the day before they had searched
the cottages and found a man in one of the upper rooms behaving
suspiciously with a lamp by a window which looked on the German lines.
They had taken the man off with them and sent him back to the rear,
where he would probably be tried for his life for a spy. This put me
in an awkward position, as I did not know what to tell the poor woman,
who, whatever her husband had done, was herself innocent of any evil
intentions. I contended myself with telling her that her husband was
in British hands, and that she might rest assured he would be fairly
treated.
Another difficulty then presented itself. The little party of women
in the cottage all wished to leave the village. They had collected
their few most cherished possessions together in a cart and proposed
to go off as soon as it was dark. But this could not be permitted, as
the noise of the cart, which would have to go along a road that ran
through our lines, would have attracted the enemy's attention and drawn
their fire on our men. The women refused to leave the cart with their
treasures behind and the situation seemed to have reached an _impasse_.
Finally, after interviewing the colonel of the Westshires, I was able
to get permission for them to take their cart, provided they kept it
along the grassy side of the road.
I shall never forget the little procession as it moved off after dark.
First the cart, drawn by an old horse with a woman leading it, followed
by a sorrowful little procession of women and children with quick,
frightened steps and bowed heads. They were leaving their village,
their homes, nearly all their belongings, and the little plots of
garden and weaving looms which were their livelihood, to go out to the
country beyond--which had always appeared in the little hemisphere of
their lives as a strange land dealing hardly with wandering strangers.
They were going away and would, perhaps, never see their village again.
(Alas, indeed, they never did.) Well may they have wondered what they
had done to bring such misery about their heads--misery embodied in the
Scriptural curse of old: War, rape, desolation, and famine.
However, there is little sentiment in war, and as we watched them go we
had not more than a passing thought for them. We were chiefly conscious
of having a farm to ourselves, and the prospect of a night of unusual
comfort for the firing-line.
Jenkins had made great preparations while we were away, and had a
two-course dinner ready for us--roast chickens and stewed apples. We
fell to on this heartily, and then sat round the kitchen stove drinking
hot rum and water. We turned in early, two of us using two beds and
the other two mattresses on the floor. With the Westshires in front of
us we were care-free for the night. An hour before dawn we were called,
and went back to the trenches to rouse the men to stand to arms. Then
we went to bed again and slept till eight.
We pulled the kitchen table out to the garden for breakfast, and made
a capital meal of fried eggs and bread and marmalade. We sat over
breakfast smoking cigarettes and drinking last cups of tea. It seemed
odd to be living such a leisurely life 700 yards from the enemy, but
the cottages in front secured us as long as they did not use artillery.
However, this was to come later. An artillery observing officer came to
fix up a field telephone just by our breakfast table. He expressed his
opinion that the enemy had got their guns up, and that the day would be
lively.
"Well," said Goyle, "perhaps we had better get back to the trench
for a bit anyway." Our trench was only ten yards off, just the other
side of the garden, and we stepped into it. Scarcely had we done so
than--crash!--a black Maria fell fair and square on the farm where we
had been sleeping. It was a matter of seconds, and what happened to
the artillery observing officer, whom we had left behind adjusting
his telephone, I do not know. Perhaps he lived. Artillery observing
officers have a knack of living in places where any other man would
be killed. However, we had no time to speculate on his fate, for a
minute later another high-explosive shell burst fifty yards over the
trench, followed by a second twenty-five yards over us. The enemy were
shortening their range. The men stirred uneasily in their dug-outs. No
rat in a trap could feel worse than an infantryman in a trench when
a big gun is searching for him with high explosive. BANG! A shell
burst on the other side of the road--ten yards from us. The next would
undoubtedly do it.
"Here," I called to Goyle, "what about this? They are getting our
range."
"We had better quit," he said. "Don't let the men run--file out slowly
to the right, and lie down behind that bank there. The other platoon
must stay; they are not being molested at present."
With as much dignity as possible, considering I expected a black Maria
in the back at any moment, I led the men out of the trench, and we
threaded our way gingerly back to the bank indicated, from which we
watched the vicious demolition of our empty trench.
XVII. BETWEEN ACTIONS
Just before dusk I was sent up with my platoon to join D Company, who
had more line than the number of men in the company could safely hold.
After being shown the section of ground where my men were wanted, I
went off to join the other officers of the company, who were having a
bit of dinner in a cottage, leaving the men to improve the trench, and
telling Jenkins, my soldier-servant, to make a good big dug-out for us
both.
It is interesting now to record that the officer commanding the
company to which I was lent was a man I had known in times of peace
and loathed to the point which drives a man to homicide. He was a fine
great fellow, but a bit rough with subalterns, and had, as he no doubt
thought for my own good, made my life a burden to me when I joined
the regiment. I often used to say to myself, when discipline and mess
etiquette prevented my replying to his remarks to me in the anteroom
in days of peace: "My sainted aunt--if ever I get alone with you in the
desert, my friend, I'll shoot." For two or three years we never spoke
to each other, and then suddenly I found myself sent up to serve under
him in the firing-line in front of La Bassée. How circumstances alter
cases. He had me in his hands then. Had he been the bully I thought
him, there were a hundred dirty jobs he could have made me do. He could
have sent me out on patrol or with messages to the next regiment.
There were many nasty things which had to be done that night. But all
he said, when I came up and reported myself as having been sent up to
reinforce him with a platoon, was: "Hullo, old chap. Look here, I just
want you to put your men along here, do you see?"--indicating the gap
he wanted filled--"and when you've done that, come into the cottage and
have a bit of dinner."
It was hospitable at a time when each man carried his own rations for
the day, and I had none left. The putting out of patrols and walking up
and down the line he did himself rather than ask me, whose job it was
as his subaltern for the time being. A few days later, when I was hit,
he was one of the first people to come up to me, and he was himself
killed five minutes later, gallantly leading a charge to drive the
Germans back from the spot where the wounded were dying.
While we were having dinner, the other subalterns and myself compared
notes about the different quarters we had for the night; one saying
he had not room to lie down in his dug-out; another that he had found
a lot of hay and made a fine lair; and the machine-gun officer saying
that he was best off of all, as he had his guns peeping from the window
of a bedroom above, and proposed to spend the night in bed by the side
of them.