FRED KARNO'S ARMY.
(_January to April 1917._)
My servant, Spencer, and I arrived at St Pol, where officers going on
leave used to grow impatient with the official method of travel, desert
the slow uncomfortable train, and haunt the Rest House in the hope of
obtaining a seat in a motor-car to Boulogne. I had expected that the
R.T.O. would call me into his office, and in hushed tones direct me to
the secret lair of the tanks. Everything possible, it was rumoured, had
been done to preserve the tanks from prying eyes. I was undeceived at
once. An official strode up and down the platform, shouting that all
men for the tanks were to alight immediately. I found on inquiry that
the train for the tank area would not depart for several hours, so,
leaving my servant and my kit at the station, I walked into the town
full of hope.
I lunched moderately at the hotel, but, though there was much talk
of tanks there, I found no one with a car. I adjourned in due course
to the military hairdresser, and at dusk was speeding out of St Pol
in a luxurious Vauxhall. I was deposited at Wavrans with the Supply
Officer, a melancholy and overworked young man, who advised me to
use the telephone. Tank headquarters informed me that I was posted
provisionally to D Battalion, and D Battalion promised to send a
box-body. I collected my servant and baggage from the station at
Wavrans, accepted the Supply Officer's hospitality, and questioned him
about my new Corps.
Tanks, he told me, were organised as a branch of the Machine-Gun
Corps for purposes of camouflage, pay, and records. Six companies had
been formed, of which four had come to France and two had remained
in England. The four overseas companies had carried out the recent
operations on the Somme (September-October 1916). The authorities
had been so much impressed that it was decided to expand each of
these companies into a battalion, by the embodiment of certain Motor
Machine-Gun Batteries and of volunteers expected from other corps in
response to the appeal that had been sent round all formations. Thus A,
B, C, and D Battalions were forming in France, E, F, and sundry other
battalions, in England. Each battalion, he believed, consisted of three
companies. Each company possessed twelve or more tanks, and the Company
Commander owned a car.
Primed with this information and some hot tea, I welcomed the arrival
of the box-body. We drove at breakneck speed through the darkness and
the rain to Blangy-sur-Ternoise. I entered a cheerful, brightly-lit
mess. Seeing a venerable and imposing officer standing by the fire, I
saluted him. He assured me that he was only the Equipment Officer. We
sat down to a well-served dinner, I discovered an old 'Varsity friend
in the doctor, and retired content to a comfortable bed after winning
slightly at bridge.
In the morning I was sent in a car to Bermicourt, where I was
interviewed by Colonel Elles.[5] As the result of the interview I was
posted to D Battalion, and on the following evening took over the
command of No. 11 Company from Haskett-Smith....
The usual difficulties and delays had occurred in the assembling of the
battalions. Rations were short. There was no equipment. The billets
were bad. Necessaries such as camp kettles could not be obtained. That
was now old if recent history. The battalions had first seen the light
in October. By the beginning of January officers and men were equipped,
fed, and under cover.
The men were of three classes. First came the "Old Tankers," those
who had been trained with the original companies. They had been drawn
for the most part from the A.S.C.: M.T. Some had been once or twice
in action; some had not. They were excellent tank mechanists. Then
came the motor machine-gunners--smart fellows, without much experience
of active operations. The vast majority of officers and men were
volunteers from the infantry--disciplined fighting men.
On parade the company looked a motley crew, as indeed it was. Men from
different battalions knew different drill. Some from the less combatant
corps knew no drill at all. They resembled a "leave draft," and nobody
can realise how undisciplined disciplined men can appear, who has not
seen a draft of men from various units marching from the boat to a rest
camp. The men are individuals. They trail along like a football crowd.
They have no pride in their appearance, because they cannot feel they
are on parade. They are only a crowd, not a company or a regiment.
Corporate pride and feeling are absent. The company was composed of
drafts. Before it could fight it must be made a company. The men
described themselves with admirable humour in this song, to the tune
"The Church's one foundation"--
"We are Fred Karno's army, the Ragtime A.S.C.,
We do not work, we cannot fight, what ruddy use are we?
And when we get to Berlin, the Kaiser he will say--
'Hoch, hoch, mein Gott!
What a ruddy rotten lot
Are the Ragtime A.S.C.!'"
The company lived in a rambling hospice, built round a large courtyard.
The original inhabitants consisted of nuns and thirty or forty aged
and infirm men, who, from their habits and appearance, we judged to be
consumptives.
The nuns were friendly but fussy. They allowed the officers to use a
large kitchen, but resented the intrusion of any but officers' mess
cooks, and in putting forward claims for alleged damages and thefts the
good nuns did not lag behind their less pious sisters in the village.
We were grateful to them for their courtesy and kindliness; yet it
cannot be said that any senior officer in the company ever went out of
his way to meet the Mother Superior. She possessed a tactless memory.
The consumptives had a large room to themselves. It stank abominably.
Where they slept at night was a mystery. They died in the room next to
my bed-chamber.
The door of my room was inscribed "Notre Dame des Douleurs," and the
room justified its title. All operations planned in it were cancelled.
The day after I had first slept in it I fell ill. Colonel Elles, with
Lieut.-Colonel Burnett, came to see me in my bed. I had not shaved, and
my temperature made me slightly familiar. I could never keep the room
warm of nights. Once, when I was suffering from a bad cold, I put out
my hand sleepily for my handkerchief, and, without thinking, tried to
blow my nose. It was a freezing night, and I still have the scar.
The majority of the men had wire beds, made by stretching wire-mesh
over a wooden frame; but the rooms were draughty. We made a sort of
dining-hall in a vast barn, but it was cold and dark.
In these chilly rooms and enormous barns the official supply of fuel
did not go far. The coal trains from the "Mines des Marles" often
rested for a period in Blangy sidings. I am afraid that this source was
tapped unofficially, but the French naturally complained, strict orders
were issued, and our fires again were low. It was necessary to act, and
to act with decision. I obtained a lorry from the battalion, handed
it over to a promising subaltern, and gave him stern instructions to
return with much coal. Late in the afternoon he returned, on foot. The
lorry had broken down six miles away. Three tons of coal made too heavy
a load in frosty weather. The lorry was towed in, and once again we
were warm.
I did not ask for details, but a story reached my ears that a subaltern
with a lorry had arrived that same morning at a certain Army coal dump.
He asked urgently for two tons of coal. The Tanks were carrying out
important experiments: coal they must have or the experiments could not
be continued. Permission was given at once--he would return with the
written order, which the Tanks had stupidly forgotten to give him. A
little gift at the dump produced the third ton. To a Heavy Gunner the
story needs no comment.
The mess was a dining-hall, medieval in size, with an immense open
fireplace that consumed much coal and gave out little heat. We placed
a stove in the middle of the hall. The piping was led to the upper
part of the fireplace, but in spite of Jumbo's ingenuity it was never
secure, and would collapse without warning. The fire smoked badly.
As the hall would seat at least fifty, we specialised in weekly
guest-nights, and the reputation of the company for hospitality was
unequalled. In those days canteens met all reasonable needs: the
allotment system had not been devised; a worried mess-president,
commissioned with threats to obtain whisky, was not offered fifty bars
of soap in lieu. And we bought a piano that afterwards became famous.
Luckily, we had an officer, nicknamed Grantoffski, who could play any
known tune from memory.
Our mess was so large that we were asked to entertain temporarily
several officers from other units of the Tank Corps in process of
formation. Several of these guests came from the central workshops of
the Tank Corps at Erin, and later returned our hospitality by doing us
small services.
One engineer, who remained with the Tank Corps for a few weeks only,
told us a remarkable story. We were talking of revolvers and quick
shooting and fighting in America. Suddenly to our amazement he became
fierce.
"Do you see my hand? You wouldn't think it, but it's nearly
useless--all through a Prussian officer. It was in Louisiana, and he
went for me although I was unarmed. I caught his knife with my bare
hand--it cut to the bone--I jerked back his wrist and threw him. My
pal had a Winchester. He pushed it into the brute's face, smashed it
all up, and was just going to pull the trigger when I knocked it away.
But the sinews of my hand were cut and there was no doctor there....
I've been after that Prussian ever since. I'm going to get him--oh yes,
don't you fear. I'm going to get him. How do I know he is still alive?
I heard the other day. He is on the other side. I've pursued him for
five years, and now I'm going to get him!"
He was a Scots engineer, a sturdy red-faced fellow with twinkling eyes
and a cockney curl to his hair.
The mess was a pleasant place, and training proceeded smoothly, because
no company commander ever had better officers. My second-in-command
was Haigh, a young and experienced regular from the infantry. He left
me after the second battle of Bullecourt, to instruct the Americans.
My officers were Swears, an "old Tanker," who was instructing at
Bermicourt, Wyatt, and "Happy Fanny," Morris, Puttock, Davies,
Clarkson, Macilwaine, Birkett, Grant, King, Richards, Telfer, Skinner,
Sherwood, Head, Pritchard, Bernstein, Money, Talbot, Coghlan--too few
remained long with the company. Of the twenty I have mentioned, three
had been killed, six wounded, three transferred, and two invalided
before the year was out.
Training began in the middle of December and continued until the middle
of March. Prospective tank-drivers tramped up early every morning
to the Tank Park or "Tankodrome"--a couple of large fields in which
workshops had been erected, some trenches dug, and a few shell-craters
blown. The Tankodrome was naturally a sea of mud. Perhaps the mud was
of a curious kind--perhaps the mixture of petrol and oil with the mud
was poisonous. Most officers and men working in the Tankodrome suffered
periodically from painful and ugly sores, which often spread over the
body from the face. We were never free from them while we were at
Blangy.
The men were taught the elements of tank driving and tank maintenance
by devoted instructors, who laboured day after day in the mud, the
rain, and the snow. Officers' courses were held at Bermicourt. Far too
few tanks were available for instruction, and very little driving was
possible.
"Happy Fanny" toiled in a cold and draughty out-house with a couple
of 6-pdrs. and a shivering class. Davies, our enthusiastic Welsh
footballer, supervised instruction in the Lewis gun among the draughts
of a lofty barn in the Hospice.
The foundation of all training was drill. As a very temporary soldier
I had regarded drill as unnecessary ritual, as an opportunity for
colonels and adjutants to use their voices and prance about on horses.
"Spit and polish" seemed to me as antiquated in a modern war as
pipeclay and red coats. I was wrong. Let me give the old drill-sergeant
his due. There is nothing in the world like smart drill under a
competent instructor to make a company out of a mob. Train a man to
respond instantly to a brisk command, and he will become a clean,
alert, self-respecting soldier.
We used every means to quicken the process. We obtained a bugle. Our
bugler was not good. He became careless towards the middle of his
calls, and sometimes he erred towards the finish. He did not begin them
always on quite the right note. We started with twenty odd calls a day.
Everything the officers and the men did was done by bugle-call. It was
very military and quite effective. All movements became brisk. But the
bugler became worse and worse. Out of self-preservation we reduced the
number of his calls. Finally he was stopped altogether by the colonel,
whose headquarters were at the time close to our camp.
Our football team helped to bring the company together. It happened to
excel any other team in the neighbourhood. We piled up enormous scores
against all the companies we played. Each successive victory made the
men prouder of the company, and more deeply contemptuous of the other
companies who produced such feeble and ineffective elevens. Even
the money that flowed into the pockets of our more ardent supporters
after each match strengthened the belief in the superiority of No.
11 Company. The spectators were more than enthusiastic. Our C.S.M.
would run up and down the touch-line, using the most amazing and lurid
language.
Towards the middle of February our training became more ingenious and
advanced. As painfully few real tanks were available for instruction,
it was obviously impossible to use them for tactical schemes. Our
friendly Allies would have inundated the Claims Officer if tanks had
carelessly manoeuvred over their precious fields. In consequence the
authorities provided dummy tanks.
Imagine a large box of canvas stretched on a wooden frame, without
top or bottom, about six feet high, eight feet long, and five feet
wide. Little slits were made in the canvas to represent the loopholes
of a tank. Six men carried and moved each dummy, lifting it by the
cross-pieces of the framework. For our sins we were issued with eight
of these abortions.
We started with a crew of officers to encourage the men, and the first
dummy tank waddled out of the gate. It was immediately surrounded by
a mob of cheering children, who thought it was an imitation dragon
or something out of a circus. It was led away from the road to avoid
hurting the feelings of the crew and to safeguard the ears and
morals of the young. After colliding with the corner of a house, it
endeavoured to walk down the side of the railway cutting. Nobody was
hurt, but a fresh crew was necessary. It regained the road when a
small man in the middle, who had been able to see nothing, stumbled and
fell. The dummy tank was sent back to the carpenter for repairs.
We persevered with those dummy tanks. The men hated them. They were
heavy, awkward, and produced much childish laughter. In another company
a crew walked over a steep place and a man broke his leg. The dummies
became less and less mobile. The signallers practised from them, and
they were used by the visual training experts. One company commander
mounted them on waggons drawn by mules. The crews were tucked in with
their Lewis guns, and each contraption, a cross between a fire-engine
and a triumphal car in a Lord Mayor's Show, would gallop past targets
which the gunners would recklessly endeavour to hit.
Finally, these dummies reposed derelict in our courtyard until one by
one they disappeared, as the canvas and the wood were required for
ignobler purposes.
We were allowed occasionally to play with real tanks. A sham attack was
carried out before hill-tops of generals and staff officers, who were
much edified by the sight of tanks moving. The total effect was marred
by an enthusiastic tank commander, who, in endeavouring to show off the
paces of his tank, became badly ditched, and the tank was for a moment
on fire. The spectators appeared interested.
On another day we carried out experiments with smoke-bombs. Two gallant
tanks moved slowly up a hill against trenches. When the tanks drew
near, the defenders of the trenches rushed out, armed with several
kinds of smoke-producing missiles. These they hurled at the tanks,
and, growing bolder, inserted them into every loophole and crevice
of the tanks. At length the half-suffocated crews tumbled out, and
maintained with considerable strength of language that all those who
had approached the tanks had been killed, adding that if they had only
known what kind of smoke was going to be used they would have loaded
their guns to avoid partial asphyxiation.
In addition to these open-air sports, the senior officers of the
battalion carried out indoor schemes under the colonel. We planned
numerous attacks on the map. I remember that my company was detailed
once to attack Serre. A few months later I passed through this
"village," but I could only assure myself of its position by the fact
that there was some brick-dust in the material of the road.
By the beginning of March the company had begun to find itself. Drill,
training, and sport had each done their work. Officers and men were
proud of their company, and were convinced that no better company
had ever existed. The mob of men had been welded into a fighting
instrument. My sergeant-major and I were watching another company march
up the street. He turned to me with an expression of slightly amused
contempt.
"They can't march like us, sir!"