might have been in Kamtchatka. The Major had gone to the C.O. (_after_
lunch) and told him we had “found a little place to shelter in,” and
as the latter had written a particularly biting, satirical, not to
say hectic note to the Brigadier on the subject of the Town-Major’s
villainy, and was therefore feeling better, he just told the Major to
carry on, and did not worry about us in the least.
Nineteen of us--Majors, Captains, and “Loots”--sat down to dinner. It
was a good dinner, the batmen performed prodigies of waitership; the
wine bubbled and frothed, frothed and bubbled, and we all bubbled too.
It was a red-letter night. After about the seventeenth speech, in which
the Doc. got a little mixed concerning the relationship of Bacchus and
a small statue of the Venus de Milo which adorned one corner of the
room, some one called for a song. It was then about 11 “pip emma.”
We were in the midst of what the P.M. called a little “Close
Harmony”--singing as Caruso and McCormack NEVER sang--when we heard the
sound of feet in the passage, feet that clanked and clunk--feet with
spurs on.
A hush fell over us, an expectant hush. The door opened, without
the ceremony of a knock, and in walked not any of your common or
garden Brigadiers, not even a Major-General, but a fully-fledged
Lieutenant-General, followed by his staff, and the Town-Major.
In our regiment we have always prided ourselves on the fact that we can
carry on anywhere and under any circumstances. But this fell night our
untarnished record came very near to disaster. It was as though Zeus
had appeared at a Roman banquet being held in his most sacred grove.
The General advanced three paces and halted. Those of us who were able
to do so got up. Those who could not rise remained seated. The silence
was not only painful, it was oppressive. A steel-grey, generalistic
eye slowly travelled through each one of us, up and down the table,
unadorned with the remnants of many bottles, the half-finished glasses
of many drinks. Just then the Town-Major took a step forward; he was a
palish green, with an under-tinge of yellow.
“WHAT is the meaning of----” said the General, in a voice tinged with
the iciest breath of the far distant Pole, but he got no further.
There was a sudden rending, ear-splitting roar, the lights went out,
the walls of the château seemed to sway, and the plaster fell in great
lumps from the frescoed ceiling.
That (as we afterwards discovered) no one was hurt was a marvel. It is
the one and only time when we of this regiment have thanked Fritz for
shelling us. In the pale light of early dawn the last member of the
party slunk into the bivouac ground. The General, where was he? We knew
not, neither did we care.
But it was the first and last time that “A” Company rustled a Corps
Commander’s Château!
“MINNIE AND ‘FAMILY’”
When first I met her it was a lush, lovely day in June; the birds were
singing, the grass was green, the earth teemed with life, vegetable and
animal, and the froglets hopped around in the communication trenches.
Some cheery optimist was whistling “Down by the Old Mill Stream,” and
another equally cheery individual was potting German sniping plates
with an accuracy worthy of a better cause. It was, in sooth, “A quiet
day on the Western Front.”
And then _she_ came. Stealing towards me silently, coming upon me like
a brigand in the leafy woods. I did not see her ere she was descending
upon me, but others did. There came distant yells, which I failed
to interpret for a moment; then, glancing upward, I saw her bobbing
through the air, her one leg waving, her round ugly head a blot on
the sky’s fair face. The next thing that happened was that the trench
gathered unto itself wings, rose and clasped me lovingly from the neck
down in a cold, earthy embrace, the while the air was rent with an
ear-splitting roar, like unto a battery of 17-inch naval guns firing a
salvo. After that I respected Minnie; I feared her--nay, I was deadly
scared of her.
Of all the nasty things “old Fritz” has invented, the Minenflamm
is perhaps the nastiest of all. She is purely vicious, utterly
destructive, and quite frightful. The very slowness with which she
sails through the air is in itself awe-inspiring. I never see Minnie
without longing for home, or the inside of the deepest German dug-out
ever digged by those hard-working German Pioneer blighters, who must
all have been moles in their respective pre-incarnations. Minnie
reminds one of Mrs. Patrick Campbell in _The Second Mrs. Tangueray_:
all fire and flame and perdition generally.
If you are a very wide-awake Johnny, absolutely on the spot,
don’t-you-know--you may hear her sigh ere she leaves the (temporary)
Vaterland to take flight. It is a gentle sigh, which those
verblitzender English artillery-men are not meant to hear. If you _do_
happen by chance to hear it, then the only thing to do, although it is
not laid down in K. R. & O. or Divisional Orders (you see they only
_hear_ about these things), is to silently steal away; to seek the
seclusion which your dug-out grants. Later, if you are a new officer,
and want to impress the natives, as it were, you saunter jauntily
forth, cigarette at the correct slope, cane pending vertically from the
right hand, grasped firmly in the palm, little finger downwards, cap at
an angle of 45°, and say: “Minnie, by Jove! Eh what? God bless my soul.
Did it fall over heah or over theah?” Which is a sure way of making
yourself really popular.
Fortunately Minnie has her dull days. Days when she positively refuses
to bust, and sulks, figuratively speaking, in silent wrath and
bitterness on the upper strata of “sunny” France, or Belgium, as the
case may be. After many Agags have trodden very delicately around her,
and she has proved incurably sulky and poor-spirited, some one infused
with the Souvenir spirit carts her away, and pounds her softly with a
cold-chisel and a mallet, until he has either dissected her interior
economy, or else she has segmented _his_.
Minnie has her little family. The eldest male child is called by the
euphonious name of Sausage, and he has brothers of various sizes, from
the pure-blood Hoch-geboren down to the bourgeois little chap who
makes an awful lot of fuss and clatter generally. I remember meeting
little Hans one day, about the dinner hour, when he was a very naughty
boy indeed. The Company was waiting to get a half-canteenful of the
tannin-cum-tea-leaves, called “tea” on the Western front (contained in
one large dixie placed in a fairly open spot in the front line), when
suddenly little Hans poked his blunt nose into the air, and all notions
of tea-drinking were banished _pro tem_. In other words, the Company
took cover automatically, as it were, without awaiting any word of
command. Personally I tripped over a bath-mat, came into close contact
with an old shell-hole full of mud, and offered up a little prayer in
the record time of one-fifth of a second. Instead of entering Nirvana
I only heard a resounding splash, followed by a sizzling sound, like
that made by an exhausted locomotive. Little Hans had fallen into the
dixie, and positively refused to explode. I think the tannin (or the
tea leaves) choked him!
There is also an infant--a female infant--who deserves mention. Her
name is Rifle-grenade, and, according to the very latest communication
from official sources, the gentleman who states with some emphasis
that he is divinely kingly, refuses to sanction any further production
of her species. Like many females she is one perpetual note of
interrogation. She starts on her wayward course thus: “Whrr-on?
Whrr-oo? Whoo? Whoo? Whe-oo? Whe-_oo_?” And then she goes off with
a bang, just as Cleopatra may have done when Antony marked a pretty
hand-maid.
To sum up: Minnie and her children are undoubtedly the product of
perverted science and Kultur, aided and abetted by the very Devil!
AN OFFICER AND GENTLEMAN
He was a tall well-built chap, with big, blue eyes, set far apart, and
dark wavy hair, which he kept too closely cropped to allow it to curl,
as was meant by nature. He had a cheery smile and a joke for every one,
and his men loved him. More than that, they respected him thoroughly,
for he never tolerated slackness or lack of discipline for an instant,
and the lips under the little bronze moustache could pull themselves
into an uncompromisingly straight line when he was justly angry.
When he strafed the men, he did it directly, without sparing them or
their failings, but he never sneered at them, and his direct hits were
so patently honest that they realised it at once, and felt and looked
rather like penitent little boys.
He never asked an N.C.O. or man to do anything he would not do himself,
and he usually did it first. If there was a dangerous patrol, he
led. If there was trying work to do, under fire, he stayed in the
most dangerous position, and helped. He exacted instant obedience
to orders, but never gave an order that the men could not understand
without explaining the reason for it. He showed his N.C.O.’s that he
had confidence in them, and did not need to ask for their confidence in
him. He had it.
In the trenches he saw to his men’s comfort first--his own was a
secondary consideration. If a man was killed or wounded, he was
generally on the spot before the stretcher-bearers, and, not once, but
many times, he took a dying man’s last messages, and faithfully wrote
to his relations. A sacred duty, but one that wrung his withers. He
went into action not only _with_ his men, but at their head, and he
fought like a young lion until the objective was attained. Then, he
was one of the first to bind up a prisoner’s wounds, and to check any
severity towards unwounded prisoners. He went into a show with his
revolver in one hand, a little cane in the other, a cigarette between
his lips.
“You see,” he would explain, “it comforts a fellow to smoke, and the
stick is useful, and a good tonic for the men. Besides, it helps me
try to kid myself I’m not scared--and I _am_, you know! As much as any
one could be.”
On parade he was undoubtedly the smartest officer in the regiment, and
he worked like a Trojan to make his men smart also. At the same time
he would devote three-quarters of any leisure he had to training his
men in the essentials of modern warfare, his spare time being willingly
sacrificed for their benefit.
No man was ever paraded before him with a genuine grievance that he did
not endeavour to rectify. In some manner he would, nine times out of
ten, turn a “hard case” into a good soldier. One of his greatest powers
was his particularly winning smile. When his honest eyes were on you,
when his lips curved and two faint dimples showed in his cheeks, it was
impossible not to like him. Even those who envied him--and among his
brother officers there were not a few--could not bring themselves to
say anything against him.
If he had a failing it was a weakness for pretty women, but his manner
towards an old peasant woman, even though she was dirty and hideous,
was, if anything, more courteous than towards a woman of his own class.
He could not bear to see them doing work for which he considered they
were unfit. One day he carried a huge washing-basket full of clothes
down the main street of a little village in Picardy, through a throng
of soldiers, rather than see the poor old dame he had met staggering
under her burden go a step farther unaided.
The Colonel happened to see him, and spoke to him rather sharply about
it. His answer was characteristic: “I’m very sorry, sir. I forgot about
what the men might think when I saw the poor old creature. In fact,
sir, if you’ll pardon my saying so, I would not mind much if they did
make fun of it.”
He loved children. He never had any loose coppers or small change
long, and two of his comrades surprised him on one occasion slipping a
five-franc note into the crinkled rosy palm of a very, very new baby.
“He looked so jolly cute asleep,” he explained simply.
Almost all his fellow-officers owed him money. He was a poor financier,
and when he had a cent it belonged to whoever was in need of it at the
time.
One morning at dawn, he led a little patrol to examine some new work in
the German front line. He encountered an unsuspected enemy listening
post, and he shot two of the three Germans, but the remaining German
killed him before his men could prevent it. They brought his body back
and he was given a soldier’s grave between the trenches. There he lies
with many another warrior, taking his rest, while his comrades mourn
the loss of a fine soldier and gallant gentleman.
“S.R.D.”
When the days shorten, and the rain never ceases; when the sky is ever
grey, the nights chill, and the trenches thigh deep in mud and water;
when the front is altogether a beastly place, in fact, we have one
consolation. It comes in gallon jars, marked simply “S.R.D.” It does
not matter how wearied the ration party may be, or how many sacks of
coke, biscuits, or other rations may be left by the wayside, the rum
always arrives.
Once, very long ago, one of a new draft broke a bottle on the way up
to Coy. H.Q. (The rum, by the way, _always_ goes to Coy. H.Q.) For a
week his life was not worth living. The only thing that saved him from
annihilation was the odour of S.R.D., which clung to him for days. The
men would take a whiff before going on a working-party, and on any
occasion when they felt low and depressed.
There are those who would deny Tommy his three spoonfuls of rum in the
trenches; those who declare that a man soaked to the skin, covered
with mud, and bitterly cold, is better with a cayenne pepper lozenge.
Let such people take any ordinary night of sentry duty on the Western
front in mid-winter, and their ideas will change. There are not one,
but numberless occasions, on which a tot of rum has saved a man from
sickness, possibly from a serious illness. Many a life-long teetotaler
has conformed to S.R.D. and taken the first drink of his life on the
battle-fields of France, not because he wanted to, but because he
had to. Only those who have suffered from bitter cold and wet, only
those who have been actually “all-in” know what a debt of gratitude is
owing to those wise men who ordered a small ration of rum for every
soldier--officer, N.C.O., and man--on the Western front in winter.
The effect of rum is wonderful, morally as well as physically. In
the pelting rain, through acres of mud, a working-party of fifty men
plough their weary way to the Engineers’ dump, and get shovels and
picks. In single file they trudge several kilometres to the work
in hand, possibly the clearing out of a fallen-in trench, which
is mud literally to the knees. They work in the mud, slosh, and
rain, for at least four hours. Four hours of misery--during which
any self-respecting Italian labourer would lose his job rather than
work--and then they traipse back again to a damp, musty billet, distant
five or six kilometres. To them, that little tot of rum is not simply
alcohol. It is a God-send. Promise it to them before they set out, and
those men will work like Trojans. Deny it to them, and more than half
will parade sick in the morning.
It is no use, if the rum ration is short, to water it down. The men
know it is watered, and their remarks are “frequent and painful, and
free!” Woe betide the officer who, through innocence or intentionally,
looks too freely on the rum when it is brown! His reputation is gone
for ever. If he became intoxicated on beer, champagne, or whisky, he
would only be envied by the majority of his men, but should he drink
too much rum--that is an unpardonable offence!
As a rule, one of the hardest things in the world to do is to awaken
men once they have gone to sleep at night. For no matter what purpose,
it will take a company a good half-hour to pull itself together and
stand to. But murmur softly to the orderly Sergeant that there will be
a rum issue in ten minutes, and though it be 1 A.M. or the darkest hour
before dawn, when the roll is called hardly a man will be absent! That
little word of three letters will rouse the most soporific from their
stupor!
Few men take their rum in the same fashion or with the same expression.
The new draft look at it coyly, carry the cup gingerly to their lips,
smell it, make a desperate resolution, gulp it down, and cough for five
minutes afterwards. The old hands--the men of rubicund countenance and
noses of a doubtful hue--grasp the cup, look to see if the issue is a
full one, raise it swiftly, and drain it without a moment’s hesitation,
smacking their lips. You can see the man who was up for being drunk
the last pay-day coming from afar for his rum. His eyes glisten, his
face shines with hopefulness, and his whole manner is one of supreme
expectation and content.
It is strange how frequently the company staff, from the
Sergeant-Major down to the most recently procured batman, find it
necessary to enter the inner sanctum of H.Q. after the rum has come.
The Sergeant-Major arrives with a large, sweet smile, acting as guard
of honour. “Rum up, sir.” “Thank you, Sergeant-Major.” “I’ve detailed
that working-party, sir.” “Thank you, Sergeant-Major.” “Is that all,
sir?” “Yes, thank you, Sergeant-Major.” He vanishes, to reappear a
minute later. “Did you CALL me, sir?” “No” ... long pause ... “Oh!
Still there? Er, have a drink, Sergeant-Major?” “Well, sir, I guess I
_could_ manage a little drop! Thank you, sir. _Good_-night, sir!”
BEDS
“Think of my leave coming in two weeks, and of getting a decent bed to
sleep in, with sheets!”
Sancho Panza blessed sleep, but perhaps he always had a good bed to
sleep in; we, who can almost slumber on “apron” wire, have a weakness
for good beds.
To appreciate fully what a good bed is, one must live for a time
without one, and go to rest wrapped in a martial cloak--to wit a
British warm or a trench coat, plus the universal sand-bag, than which
nothing more generally useful has been seen in this war. Any man who
has spent six months (in the infantry) at the front knows all about
beds. Any man with a year’s service is a first-class, a number one,
connoisseur. The good bed is so rare that whoever spends a night in one
talks about it for a week, and brings it up in reminiscences over the
charcoal brazier.
“You remember when we were on the long hike from the salient? And the
little place we struck the third night--Cattelle-Villeul I think it
was called? By George, I had a good bed. A peach! It had a spring
mattress and real linen sheets--not cotton--and two pillows with frilly
things on them, and a ripping quilt, with a top-hole eider-down. I was
afraid to get into it until my batman produced that new pair of green
pyjamas with the pink stripes. It simply hurt to give that bed up!”
And if you let him he will continue in like vein for half an hour.
Recollections of that bed have entered into his soul; it is one of the
bright spots in a gloomy life.
Needless to say, the farther you go back from the line, the better the
beds. They can be roughly classified as follows: Battle beds. Front
line beds. Support beds. Reserve beds. Divisional rest beds. Corps
reserve beds, and Army Reserve beds. Beyond this it is fifty-fifty you
will get a good bed, provided there are not too many troops in the
place you go to.
Battle beds, as such, are reserved for battalion commanders, seconds
in command, and adjutants. Sometimes Os.C. units have a look-in, but
the humble sub. has _not_, unless he is one of those Johnnies who can
always make something out of nothing.
When there is a “show” on nobody expects to sleep more than two hours
in twenty-four, and he’s lucky if he gets that. The C.O. takes his
brief slumber on some bare boards raised above the floor-level in a
dug-out. The Os.C. units use a stretcher, with a cape for a pillow, and
the others sleep any old where--on a broken chair, in a corner on the
ground, on the steps of a dug-out, on the fire-step of a parapet, or
even leaning against the parapet. One of the best snoozes we ever had
was of the last variety, while Fritz was plastering the communication
trenches with a barrage a mouse could not creep through.
There is one thing about battle beds; one is far too weary to do
anything but flop limply down, and go instantly to sleep. The nature
of your couch is of secondary importance. Possibly the prize goes to
the man who slept through an intense bombardment, curled up between two
dead Germans, whom he thought were a couple of his pals, asleep, when
he tumbled in to rest.
Front line beds vary according to sector. Usually they are simply a
series of bunks, tucked in one above the other as in a steamer-cabin,
and made of a stretch of green canvas nailed to a pair of two by fours.
Sometimes an ingenious blighter introduces expanded metal or chicken
wire into the general make-up, with the invariable result that it gets
broken by some 200-pounder, and remains a menace to tender portions
of the human frame until some one gets “real wild” and smashes up the
whole concern.
In support, the “downy couch” does not improve very much. Sometimes it
is worse, and it is always inhabited by a fauna of the largest and most
voracious kind.
There is a large element of chance as to reserve beds. They are
generally snares of disillusionment, but once in a while the
connoisseur strikes oil. It will not have sheets--clean sheets, at
all events--but it may possess the odd blanket, and the room may have
been cleaned a couple of weeks ago. If Madame is clean the bed will be
clean; if otherwise, otherwise also.
All the beds at the front are the same in some respects. They are all
wooden, and they nearly all have on them huge piles of mattresses,
four or five deep. It is wisest not to investigate too thoroughly the
inner consciousnesses of the latter, or the awakening may be rude. In
the old days, long, long ago, when the dove of Peace billed and cooed
over the roof of the world, no self-respecting citizen would sleep in
them, but now with what joy do we sink with a sigh of relief into the
once abominated feather-bed of doubtful antecedents, which has been
slept in for two years by one officer after another, and never, never,
never been aired.
C’est la guerre!
Divisional rest beds are at least two points superior to the last. They
are the kind of beds run by a sixth-rate lodging-house in Bloomsbury,
taken on the whole. Usually there is one bed short per unit, so some
one has to double up, with the result that the stronger of the twain
wraps _all_ the bed-clothes around him, and the other chap does not
sleep at all, or is ignominiously rolled out on to the brick _pavé_.
Every one in French villages must go to bed with their stockings on.
Judging by the permanent kinks in all the beds, they must have been
beds _solitaire_ for a life-time, before the soldiers came.
Once we were asked to share a bed with _bébé_, who was three. We
refused. On another occasion, when we were very tired indeed, we were
told that the only bed available was that usually dwelt in by “Jeanne.”
We inspected it, and made a peaceful occupation. “Jeanne” came home
unexpectedly at midnight, and slipped indoors quietly to her room. It
was a bad quarter of an hour, never to be forgotten! Especially when
we found out in the morning that “Jeanne” was twenty years old, and
decidedly pretty. Our reputation in that household was a minus quantity.
In corps reserve one gets beds with coffee in the morning at 7 A.M.
“Votre café, M’sieu.” “Oui, oui, mercy; leave it outside the door--la
porte--please!” “Voiçi, M’sieu! Vous avez bien dormi?” And of course
you can’t say anything, even if Madame stands by the pillow and tells
you the whole story of how Yvonne makes the coffee!
They are fearless, these French women!
MARCHING
We have left the statue of the Virgin Mary which pends horizontally
over the Rue de Bapaume far behind us and the great bivouacs, and the
shell-pitted soil of the Somme front. Only at night can we see the
flickering glare to the southward, and the ceaseless drum of the guns
back yonder is like the drone of a swarm of bees. Yesterday we reached
the last village we shall see in Picardy, and this morning we shall
march out of the Departement de la Somme, whither we know not.