household and my hot bath last night. The town is a queer little place;
farming centre, you know. The farm-houses are all inside the village,
and mine--M. le Maire's--is one of the best. From the street you see
huge great double doors, that a laden wagon can drive through, in a
white wall. That is the granary wall. You enter by the big archway into
a big open yard, the centre part of which is a wide-spreading dung-hill
and reservoir. All round the yard are sheds and stables enclosing
it, and facing you at the back the low, long white house, with steps
leading up to the front door, which opens into the kitchen. This is
also the living-room of M. le Maire and his aged mother. Their family
lived here before the Revolution, and the three sturdy young women and
one old, old man employed on the farm, all live in the house.
M. le Maire is a warm man, reputed to have a thorough mastery of the
English tongue, among other things, as a result of "college" education.
So I gather from the really delightful old mother, who, though bent
nearly double, appears to run the whole show, including the Town Hall
opposite our Battalion Headquarters. I have never succeeded in inducing
the Mayor to speak a word of English, but he has a little dictionary
like a prayer-book, with perfectly blinding print, and somehow carries
on long and apparently enjoyable conversations with my batman (who
certainly has no French), though, as I say, one never heard a word of
English on his lips.
I know what the newspapers are. They pretend to give you the war
news. But I'll bet they'll tell you nothing of yesterday's really
great event, when the Commander of No. 1 Platoon took a hot bath, as
it were under municipal auspices, attended by two Company Headquarters
orderlies, his own batman, and the cordially expressed felicitations
of his brother officers, not to mention the mayoral household, and the
whole of No. 1 Platoon, which is billeted in the Mayor's barns and
outbuildings. Early in the day the best wash-tub had been commandeered
for this interesting ceremony, and I fancy it has an even longer
history behind it than the Mayor's pre-Revolution home. It is not
definitely known that Marie Antoinette used this tub, bathing being
an infrequent luxury in her day; but if she had been cursed with our
modern craze for washing, and chanced to spend more than a year or
so in this mud-set village of M----, she certainly would have used
this venerable vessel, which, I gather, began life as the half of a
cider barrel, and still does duty of that sort on occasion, and as a
receptacle for the storing of potatoes and other nutritious roots, when
not required for the more intimate service of M. le Maire's mother, for
the washing of M. le Maire's corduroys and underwear, or by M. le Maire
himself, at the season of Michaelmas, I believe, in connection with the
solemn rite of his own annual bath, which festival was omitted this
year out of deference to popular opinion, because of the war.
The household of the Mayor, headed by this respected functionary
himself, received me at the portals of his ancestral home and ushered
me most kindly and graciously, if with a dash of grave, half-pitying
commiseration, to what I thought at first was the family vault,
though, as I presently discovered, it was in reality the mayoral
salon or best parlour--as seen in war time--draped in sacking and
year-old cobwebs. Here, after some rather embarrassing conversation,
chiefly gesticulatory on my side--my conversational long suit is "Pas
du tout! Merci beaucoup," and "Mais oui, Madame," with an occasional
"Parfaitement," stirred in now and again, not with any meaning, but as
a kind of guarantee of good faith, because I think it sounds amiable,
if not indeed like my lambs in their billets, "Bien gentil," and "Très
convenable, Monsieur." It is thus they are invariably described to me
when I go inspecting. As I was saying, here I was presently left alone
with the household cat, two sick rabbits in a sort of cage which must
once have housed a cockatoo or parrot, my own little towel (a torn
half, you know, designed to reduce valise weight), my sponge (but,
alack! not my dear old worn-out nail-brush, now lying in trenches on
Salisbury Plain), and the prehistoric wash-tub, now one quarter filled
by what the Mayor regarded, I gathered, as perhaps the largest quantity
of hot water ever accumulated in one place--two kettles and one oil-can
full, carried by the orderlies.
The cat and the rabbits watched my subsequent proceedings with the
absorbed interest of an intelligent mid-Victorian infant at its first
pantomime. The cat, I blush to say, was female, and old enough to know
better, but I trust the rabbits were of my own sex. Anyhow, they were
sick, so perhaps it doesn't matter. The entire mayoral household, with
my batman and others, were assembled in the big kitchen, separated
from the chamber of my ablutions only by a door having no kind of
fastening and but one hinge. Their silence was broken only by an
occasional profound sigh from the Mayor's aged mother, and three sounds
of reflective expectoration at considerable intervals from the Mayor
himself. So I judged my bathing to be an episode of rare and anxious
interest to the mayoral family.
My feet I anointed copiously with a disgusting unguent of great
virtue--it's invaluable for lighting braziers when one's only fuel is
muddy coke and damp chits--called anti-frostbite grease, that is said
to guard us from the disease known as "Trench Feet," rumoured prevalent
in our sector by reason of the mellow quality and depth of its mud,
which, whilst apparently almost liquid, yet possesses enough body
and bouquet--remember how you used to laugh at our auction catalogue
superlatives in cellar lots?--to rob a man of his boots at times. For
my hands--chipped about a bit now--I used carbolated vaseline. (Do you
remember the preternaturally slow and wall-eyed salesman, with the
wart, in the Salisbury shop where we bought it?) And then, clothed most
sumptuously in virginal underwear, I crawled into my flea-bag, there to
revel from 10.40 P.M. to 6 A.M., as I am about to do now, less one hour
in the morning. How I wish one could consciously enjoy the luxury of
sleep while sleeping! Good night and God bless you! God bless all the
sweet, brave waiting women of England, and France, and Russia; and I
wish I could send a bit of my clean comfort to-night to as many as may
be of our good chaps, and France's _bon camarades_, out here.
When next I write we shall have seen a bit of the trenches, I hope, and
so then you should have something more like real news from your
"_Temporary Gentleman_."
THE TRENCHES AT LAST
You must forgive my not having sent anything but those two Field
Service post cards for a whole week, but, as our Canadian subaltern,
Fosset, says, it really has been "some" week. My notion was to write
you fully my very first impression of the trenches, but the chance
didn't offer, and perhaps it's as well. It couldn't be fresher in my
mind than it is now, and yet I understand it more, and see the thing
more intelligently than on the first night.
We are now back in the village of B----, three miles from our
trenches. We are here for three days' alleged rest, and then, as a
Battalion, take over our own Battalion sub-sector of trenches. So
far, we have only had forty-eight hours in, as a Battalion; though,
as individuals, we have had more. When we go in again it will be as
a Battalion, under our own Brigade and Divisional arrangements, to
hold our own Brigade front, and be relieved later by the other two
Battalions of our Brigade.
"A" Company is, I am sorry to say, in tents for these three days out;
tents painted to look like mud and grass (for the benefit of the Boche
airmen) and not noticeably more comfortable than mud and grass. An old
fellow having the extraordinary name of Bonaparte Pinchgare, has been
kind enough to lend us his kitchen and scullery for officers' mess and
quarters; and we, like the men, are contriving to have a pretty good
time, in despite of chill rain and all-pervading mud. We are all more
or less caked in mud, but we have seen Huns, fired at 'em, been fired
at by them, spent hours in glaring through rag and tin-decked barbed
wire at their trenches, and generally feel that we have been blooded to
trench warfare. We have only lost two men, and they will prove to be
only slightly wounded, I think; one, before he had ever set foot in a
trench--little Hinkson of my No. 2 section--and the other, Martin, of
No. 3 Platoon, only a few hours before we came out.
Hinkson was pipped by a chance bullet in the calf of the leg, as we
passed through a wood, behind the support trench. Very likely a Boche
loosed that bullet off in mere idleness, a couple of thousand yards
away; and I doubt if it will mean even a Blighty for Hinkson. He may
be put right in the Field Ambulance or Clearing Station near here,
or, at farthest, down at the Base. Or he may chance to go across to
Blighty--the first casualty in the Battalion. The little chap was
furiously angry over getting knocked out before he could spot a Hun
through the foresight of his rifle, but his mate, Kennedy, has sworn to
lay out a couple of Boches for Hinkson, before he gets back to us, and
Kennedy will do it.
First impressions! Do you know, I think my first impression was of
the difficulty of finding one's way about in a maze of muddy ditches
which all looked exactly alike, despite a few occasional muddy
notice-boards perched in odd corners: "Princes Street," "Sauchiehall
Street," "Manchester Avenue," "Stinking Sap," "Carlisle Road," and the
like. I had a trench map of the sector, but it seemed to me one never
could possibly identify the different ways, all mud being alike, and
no trench offering anything but mud to remember it by. In the front or
fire-trench itself, the firing line, one can hop up on the fire-step,
look round quickly between bullets, and get a bearing. But in all these
interminable communication and branch trenches where one goes to and
fro, at a depth varying from six to ten or twelve feet, seeing only
clay and sky, how the dickens could one find the way?
And yet, do you know, so quickly are things borne in upon you in this
crude, savage life of raw realities, so narrow is your world, so vital
your need of knowing it; so unavoidable is your continuous alertness,
and so circumscribed the field of your occupation, that I feel now I
know nothing else in the world quite so well and intimately as I know
that warren of stinking mud: the two sub-sectors in which I spent last
week. Manchester Avenue, Carlisle Road, Princes Street, with all their
side alleys and boggy by-ways! Why, they are so photographed on the
lining of my brain that, if I were an artist (instead of a very muddy
subaltern ex-clerk) I could paint the whole thing for you--I wish I
could. Not only do I know them, but I've merely to shut my eyes to
see any and every yard of them; I can smell them now; I can feel the
precise texture of their mud. I know their hidden holes and traps,
where the water lies deep. I know to an inch where the bad breaks are
in the duck-boards that you can't see because the yellow water covers
them. Find one's way! I know them far better than I know the Thames
Embankment, the Strand, or Brixton Hill! That's not an exaggeration.
Duck-boards, by the way, or duck-walks, are a kindly invention (of
the R.E., I suspect) to save soldiers from the bottomless pit, and to
enable officers on duty to cover rather more than a hundred yards an
hour in getting along their line of trench. Take two six-or eight-feet
lengths of two inches by four inches' scantling; nail two or three inch
bits of batten across these with two or three inch gaps between, the
width of the frame being, say, eighteen inches. Thus you have a grating
six or eight feet long and narrow enough to lie easily in the bottom of
a trench. If these gratings rest on trestles driven deep down into the
mud, and your trenches are covered by them throughout--well, then you
may thank God for all His mercies and proceed to the more interesting
consideration of strafing Boches, and avoiding being strafed by them.
If you haven't got these beneficent inventions of the R.E., and you are
in trenches like ours, then you will devote most of your energies to
strafing the R.E., or some other unseen power for good, through your
own headquarters, for a supply of duck-walks, and you will (if you are
wise) work night and day without check, in well and truly laying every
single length you can acquire.
("Acquire" is a good, sound word. I would never blame a man for
stealing duck-walks from any source whatsoever--providing, of course,
he is not so far lost to all sense of decency as to steal 'em from "A"
Company; and even then, if he could manage it, his cleverness would
almost deserve forgiveness; and, equally, of course, that he's going
to use 'em for their legitimate purpose, and not just to squat on in a
dug-out; least of all for the absolutely criminal purpose of using as
fuel.)
"What a fuss you make about mere things to walk on!" perhaps you'll
say. "I thought the one thing really important was getting to grips
with the enemy." Mmmf! Yes. Quite so. It is. But, madam, how to do it?
"There be ways and means to consider, look you, whateffer," as Billy
Morgan says. (Billy was the commander of No. 2 Platoon, you remember,
and now, as reserve Machine-Gun officer, swanks insufferably about
"the M.G. Section," shoves most of his Platoon work upon me, and will
have a dug-out of his own. We rot him by pretending to attribute these
things to the influence of his exalted compatriot, the Minister of
Munitions. As a fact, they are due to his own jolly hard work, and
really first-rate abilities.)
This trench warfare isn't by any means the simple business you might
suppose, and neither, of course, is any other kind of warfare. There
can be no question of just going for the enemy bald-headed. He wishes
you would, of course; just as we wish to goodness _he_ would. You have
to understand that up there about the front line, the surrounding
air and country can at any moment be converted into a zone of living
fire--gas, projectiles, H.E. (High Explosive, you know) flame, bullets,
bursting shrapnel. If you raise a finger out of trenches by daylight,
you present Fritz with a target, which he will very promptly and
gratefully take, and blow to smithereens. That's understood, isn't it?
Right. To be able to fight, in any sort of old way at all, you must
continue to live--you and your men. To continue to live you must have
cover. Hence, nothing is more important than to make your trenches
habitable, and feasible; admitting, that is, of fairly easy and quick
communication.
To live, you see, you must eat and drink. The trenches contain no
A B C's. Every crumb of bread, every drop of tea or water, like
every cartridge you fire, must be carried up from the rear on men's
shoulders, along many hundreds of yards of communicating trenches.
Also, in case you are suddenly attacked, or have to attack, quick
movement is vital. Nature apparently abhors a trench, which is a kind
of a vacuum, and not precisely lovable, anyhow; and, in this part of
the world, she proceeds wherever possible to fill it with water. Pumps?
Why, certainly. But clay and slush sides cave in. Whizz-bangs and H.E.
descend from on high displacing much porridge-like soil. Men hurrying
to and fro day and night, disturb and mash up much earth in these
ditches. And, no matter how or why, there is mud; mud unspeakable and
past all computation. Consider it quietly for a moment, and you will
feel as we do about duck-walks--I trust the inventor has been given
a dukedom--and realise the pressing importance of various material
details leading up to that all-important strafing of Boches.
But there, the notion of trying to tell you about trenches in one
letter is, I find, hopelessly beyond me, and would only exhaust you,
even if I could bring it off. I can only hope gradually to get some
sort of a picture into your mind, so that you will have a background
of sorts for such news of our doings as I'm able to send you as we go
on. Just now, I am going to tackle an alarming stack of uncensored
letters from Nos. 1 and 2 Platoons--some of the beggars appear to be
extraordinarily polygamous in the number of girls they write to; bless
'em!--and then to turn in and sleep. My goodness, it's a fine thing,
sleep, out of trenches! But I'll write again, probably to-morrow.
The men are all remarkably fit and jolly. One or two old hands here
have told me the line we are taking over is really pretty bad.
Certainly it was a revelation to our fellows, after the beautiful,
clean tuppenny-tubes of trenches we constructed on Salisbury Plain.
But one hears no grousing at all, except of the definitely humorous
and rather pleased kind--rather bucked about it, you know--the men are
simply hungry for a chance to "get" at the Hun, and they work like
tigers at trench betterment. We are all well and jolly, and even if
sometimes you don't hear often, there's not the slightest need to worry
in any way about your
"_Temporary Gentleman_."
A DISSERTATION ON MUD
The second of our rest days is over, and to-morrow night we shall go
into the firing line and relieve the ----s. We shall march back the
way we came out, down the sad-looking green valley round the lips of
which some of our batteries are hidden; through the deserted streets
of ----, with its boarded-up shops and houses; on over the weed-grown
railway track, through a little village whose church is still unbroken;
though few of its cottage windows have any glass left in them; across
the busy little river to Ambulance Corner--a favourite target for Boche
shells, that bit of road--and so through the wooded hollow where the
German gas lies deadly thick when it comes, into the foot of Manchester
Avenue, the long communication trench leading up to the Battalion's
trench headquarters in the support line, where "A" Company will branch
off to the right, "B" to the left, and "C" to the extreme left of our
sub-sector.
That town I mentioned--not the little village close to Ambulance
Corner, where most roofs and walls show shell-torn rents and a few are
smashed to dust--is rather like a city of the dead. It has a cathedral
which the gentle Hun has ranged on with thoughtful frightfulness.
But though, under the guidance of his aerial observers, the Boche
has smashed up that cathedral pretty thoroughly, and its tower has
great gaping chunks riven out of its sides by shells, yet, as folk
say miraculously, its crowning attraction, a monstrous gilt figure of
the Madonna and Child, thirty to fifty feet high, remains intact. But
this remarkable gilt statue has been undermined at its base by H.E.
shell, and now hangs over at right angles to the street far below it--a
most extraordinary sight. The devout naturally claim that no German
projectile will prove powerful enough to lower the sacred emblem any
farther. Boche savagery in France has not weakened anyone's faith, I
think; possibly the reverse.
A foundry or factory near by is now a tangled mass of scrap iron, and
as one marches through the town one has queer intimate glimpses of
deserted bedroom interiors, with homely furnishings exposed to all the
weather, where a shell has sliced one wall clean down from a first or
second storey and left the ground floor intact.
But I was going to tell you about trenches. When I first began to walk
up Manchester Avenue, my thought was, "There's nothing much to grumble
at here. I call this pretty good. A little sloppy under foot perhaps,
but really nothing to write home about." I've often laughed at that
since. For several hundred yards it cuts through a ridge of chalk. It
is wide enough to enable one to pass a man in it anywhere with comfort.
Its parapet and parados tower white, clean, and unbroken a foot or so
over your head. Its sides are like the sides of a house or a tunnel;
good, dry, solid chalk, like our Salisbury trenches, with never a sign
of caving in about them. And on the hard bottom under foot-perhaps two
or three inches of nice clean chalky slime and water. It has a gentle
gradient which makes it self-draining.
You could easily go right up it to Battalion Headquarters in the
support trench in ordinary marching boots, and be none the worse.
And since then I've known what it means to get a bootful of muddy
water, when wearing trench boots; rubber thigh-boots, you know, with
straps buckling to your belt. The change begins a little way above the
Battalion Headquarters dug-out, in support line. You leave the chalk
behind you and get into clay, and then you leave the clay behind you
and get into yellow porridge and treacle. And then you come to a nice
restful stretch of a couple of hundred yards or so, in which you pray
for more porridge; and it seems you're never coming to any more. This
is a vein of glue in the section which "A" will go to-morrow night.
"Very old and curious!" "Remarkably fine, full body!" Oh! that glue
vein is from the end bin, genuine old-vatted, I can assure you. It must
have eaten up some hundreds of pairs of boots by now, and a regular
Noah's Ark full of trench stores, ammunition, and other useful material.
The glue vein probably had a bottom in bygone days, but now I fancy
the Hun has knocked the bottom out of it. In any case, we never met
anyone who had found bottom in that bit of line, and as the tallest man
in the company is only six foot two, I hope we never shall. At first
you think you will skip along quick, like skating fast on very thin
ice, and with feet planted far apart, so as to get the support of the
trench sides. That bit of trench is possessed of devils, and they laugh
when you stretch your legs, meaning to get through with it as quick as
you can. The glue's so thick and strong, after the soupy stuff you've
been wading through, that you welcome the solid look of it. (That's
where the devils begin their chuckling.)
Perhaps at the first few steps you only sink about a foot, leaving your
knees easily clear. "Oh! come!" you say (and that's where the devils
of the glue patch laugh out loud). At the next step you go in a little
deeper, and in your innocence give quite a sharp tug to lift your
foot. You lift it all right, perhaps half-way up the leg of your boot,
possibly ripping off a brace button in the process, if you've been
unwise enough to fasten up the top straps of your boots that way. (The
devils go on laughing.) Then you pause, reflectively, while shoving
your foot down in your boot again, and take a good look round you,
wondering what sort of a place you've struck. (This is where the devils
have to hold their sides in almost painful hilarity.)
While you reflect you sink, so slowly and softly that you don't notice
it till you try the next step. And then, with the devils of that
section roaring their ugly Hunnish heads off all round you, if you
have no better luck than Tommy Dodd had, his first night in, you may
continue reflecting for quite a long while, till somebody comes along
who knows that particular health resort. Then two or three Samaritans
with picks and shovels and a post or two will be brought, and, very
laboriously, you'll be dug and levered out; possibly with your boots,
possibly without either them or your socks.
But what reduces the devils to helpless, tearful contortions of
merriment, is a coincidental decision on the part of a Boche gunner
to start peppering that bit of trench with shrap., or a machine-gun,
during your reflective period. Then it's great; a really first-class
opportunity for reviewing the errors of your past life.
After this substantial _pièce de résistance_ (yes, thanks, I'm
progressing very nicely with my French this term), you come to a
delicately refreshing dessert in Sauchiehall Street, where the water
lies very deep in most parts, but so sweetly liquid as to wash the glue
well off up to our coat pockets. This innocent stuff can be pumped
out quite easily, and is pumped out every day, into a gully, which
we devoutly hope leads well into a Boche sap. But pump as you will,
it fills up very rapidly. And so, with new washed boots (and coat
pockets) to Whizz-bang Corner, where Sauchiehall Street enters the fire
trench, and the Hun loves to direct his morning and evening hymns of
hate in the hope of catching tired ration-carriers, and, no doubt, of
spilling their rations. It was there that Martin of No. 3 Platoon got
his quietener on the morning we came out. But with luck and no septic
trouble, hell be back in a month or so. The surroundings are a bit
toxic, as you may imagine. That's why, after even the slightest wound,
they inoculate with anti-tetanus--marvellously successful stuff.