WITH OUR ARMY IN FLANDERS
[Illustration:
_From the drawing by Georges Scott._
_Reproduced from “L’Illustration” by kind permission._
_Silent Ypres._]
WITH OUR ARMY
IN FLANDERS
BY
G. VALENTINE WILLIAMS
LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD
1915
_All rights reserved_
TO
THE BRITISH SOLDIER
PREFACE
In the words of the Chief of the Italian General Staff, the war
correspondent is the link between that part of the nation that fights
and that part which is watching--“a noble and fertile mission, as
great as any mission ever was, and as necessary, too, for no army can
long and resolutely march to victory if it has not the support and
enthusiasm of the whole country behind it.”
As the accredited correspondent of the _Daily Mail_ at the General
Headquarters of Field-Marshal Sir John French, I have spent the greater
part of the past six months with the British Army in Flanders. I have
seen for myself the life and work of our army in the field. I have
visited in person the trenches along practically our whole front. I
have talked with our organizers of victory from the Commander-in-Chief
downwards to the man in the saphead ten yards from the enemy.
This book is the result. It was written in the field, under the
Censorship. That familiar phrase, “Passed by Censor,” stands at the
foot of every chapter in the manuscript, as it will stand at the foot
of this preface. To that part of the nation which is watching at home
I could, in fulfilment of my mission, have offered a more detailed
narrative of the life of that other part that is fighting in Flanders,
did not considerations of military necessity stand in the way. But,
apart altogether from the question of patriotism, the large measure of
trust which the army has, in most instances, extended to the writer
has made me the more anxious to respect a privileged position, and to
eschew anything calculated to afford to the enemy the least information
of value. My endeavour has rather been to present a picture of the life
of our army in Flanders built up out of a series of impressions, to
reveal the soul of the army as it has been unbared to me in the actual
conditions of warfare.
If I should not seem to paint war as terrible or our task in Flanders
as stupendous as it is, you must set it down to the army’s contagious
habit of making the best of things. The army knows that, man for man,
it is more than a match for the German. It knows that, given a lead,
it can draw upon resources which, both physically and mentally, are
better than anything the Germans have now remaining. With unconcealed
impatience it looks to the Government at home to increase our machinery
of war until, in this respect as well, we can claim superiority over
our redoubtable and unscrupulous foe.
I have praised freely--and God knows there is enough to praise out
here!--and if my criticism is sparing, it is solely because military
criticism in the mouth of an accredited war correspondent acquires
a weight in the eyes of the enemy that gives it the value of direct
information.
I am anxious to express my gratitude to the Editor of the _Daily Mail_,
who has generously allowed me to reproduce some of the admirable
photographs in my book, and to M. René Baschet, _Directeur-Gérant_ of
the very excellent French weekly, _L’Illustration_, for his courtesy in
permitting me to reprint M. Georges Scott’s striking sketch of “Silent
Ypres.”
G. VALENTINE WILLIAMS.
IN THE FIELD,
_September, 1915_.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. OF OUR ARMY IN THE FIELD 1
II. THE WAR OF POSITIONS 21
III. THE FIGHT FOR THE SALIENT 46
IV. SILENT YPRES 97
V. BILLETS IN THE FIELD 117
VI. CASTLES IN FLANDERS 139
VII. G.H.Q. 151
VIII. THE CHIEF 169
IX. INTO THE FIRING-LINE 188
X. THE COMRADESHIP OF THE TRENCHES 213
XI. THE PRINCE OF WALES 234
XII. THE GUARDS IN FLANDERS 245
XIII. THE ARBITERS OF VICTORY 264
XIV. CHILDREN OF THE RAJ 280
XV. T.F. 300
XVI. THE EYES OF THE ARMY 319
XVII. ENTER THE NEW ARMY 337
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
SILENT YPRES _Frontispiece_
PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR _Facing page_ 1
A CORNER OF A TRENCH WITH A TRAVERSE ON
THE EXTREME LEFT ” ” 24
THE WAR OF BOMB AND KNIFE; FRENCH SOLDIERS WITH MASKS
AND STEEL HELMETS ” ” 28
A BURSTING MINE ” ” 34
MAP TO ILLUSTRATE THE SECOND BATTLE OF YPRES ” ” 49
BILLETS IN THE FIELD: THE BRITISH SOLDIER
AND HIS PEASANT HOSTS ” ” 126
CRICKET AT THE FRONT ” ” 132
A SCENE AT A BASE ” ” 160
“THE CHIEF” ” ” 170
UNDER THE EYE OF “THE CHIEF”--TROOPS MARCHING PAST SIR
JOHN FRENCH AT THE FRONT ” ” 180
IN A GERMAN TRENCH ” ” 202
GERMAN PRISONERS ” ” 230
BIG SHELL EXPLODING ON A ROAD IN FRANCE--GERMAN
SOLDIERS IN FOREGROUND ” ” 266
INDIAN CAVALRY IN A FRENCH VILLAGE ” ” 288
INDIAN INFANTRY ON THE MARCH ” ” 296
[Illustration:
_Elliott & Fry phot._
MR. G. VALENTINE WILLIAMS.]
WITH OUR ARMY IN FLANDERS
CHAPTER I
OF OUR ARMY IN THE FIELD
All wars present a series of contrasts. Is not war itself the greatest
of all contrasts of life? The antithesis of Man at Peace and Man at War
is one with which the poets and artists have familiarized mankind all
through the ages. And so, though we are in the thirteenth month of the
overwhelming change which this, the greatest of all wars, has wrought
in our lives, I find, on sitting down to record my impressions of the
life and work of the British Army in the field, that I am continually
reverting to the perpetual, the confounding contrast between the world
at peace and the world at war.
Never were contrasts so marked as in this war. To cast the mind back
a twelvemonth is like looking back on one’s early childhood. “This
time last year!...” How often one hears the phrase out here, with
recollections of last year’s glorious, golden Ascot, of distant,
half-forgotten strife about Ulster, of a far rumbling, as yet
indistinctly heard, in the Balkans, where swift and sudden death was
preparing for that sinister Prince whose passing plunged the world into
war.
“This time last year ...”--City men use the phrase. _They_ were then
the top-hatted strap-hangers of Suburbia, their thoughts divided
between their business, their families, their hobbies. _Then_ the
word _Territorial_ might raise a laugh at a music-hall; on Saturday
afternoons soldiering was a pleasant relief from the office grind,
and in summer afforded a healthful open-air holiday. London was full
of Germans. We all knew Germans, and in our insular way toadied to
the big fry and ridiculed the small, holding our state of military
unpreparedness to be the finest tribute to our pacific aims, and
making fun of the German, his steadfastness of purpose, his strict
national discipline, his thrift. We welcomed at our tables the
vanguard of the German army of invasion, the charming, salaried spies
of the Embassy who made their way everywhere in that loose-tongued,
light-thinking cosmopolitan crowd that in London passes for society,
and the humbler secret agents, the waiters who in the trenches in
Flanders are now turning their knowledge of our tongue to profitable
account. We had German clerks, nice, well-spoken, cheap--cheap labour
covers a multitude of sins!--hard-working young fellows who lived
in boarding-houses at Brondesbury or Lancaster Gate, according to
their means, and who, over their port after Sunday dinner, exchanged
assurances with the “_dummen Engländern_” of the mutual esteem
entertained by England and Germany for each other.
“This time last year ...”--Aldershot, its ugly barrack buildings
standing out hard in the brilliant sunlight, went peacefully about
its routine pursuits of war. Maybe the stray bullet that was destined
to put a premature end to the splendid career of General John Gough,
best beloved of Aldershot Staff officers, had not yet been cast. The
army officer went in mufti save in the intervals of duty; the general
public had never heard of General Sam Browne and his famous belt. At
the Curragh, still seething with the bubbles of the Ulster whirlpool
which had swept John French from the War Office, the training went on
as before. The machine-gun was still a weapon preeminently of experts,
not common to the army at large, its paramount usefulness as an added
strength to the forces not yet realized.
“This time last year ...”--polo at Ranelagh, where neither of the
immortal Grenfell twins, the Castor and Pollux of our glorious army,
saw Black Care that sits behind the horseman, cricket at Lord’s,
throngs at Boulter’s Lock, lunchings and dinings and dancings
innumerable....
“This time last year ...”--joyful holidays at Blackpool, New Brighton,
or the Isle of Man at hand for the workers of the north, the brief
relaxation from the loom, the spindle, the mine, the shipyard. All the
life of England, in fine, ran along in its accustomed groove. We made a
great deal of money; we spent a great deal more; we played our games;
we talked them to the exclusion of topics of vital national importance;
we rocked ourselves with dreams of universal peace based on political
cries, such as “Two keels to one,” or the “pacific policy of the German
Emperor.” One of the leading pacificist societies was arranging a great
international peace congress at Vienna.
All at once, in a few hours of a hot August night, with great crowds
waiting breathlessly in Whitehall, with a mob surging and singing round
Buckingham Palace, it was swept away. The old life stopped. The new
life began. Slowly, haltingly, as is our wont, we realized we were at
war, though the process of mobilization was hindered by such idiotic
cries (never was a people so swayed by cries as the British!) as
“Business as usual!” the contraption of the astute City man who would
save what business there was to save at the expense of the army, a
catchword that kept the able-bodied young man at the counter measuring
out yards of ribbon when he should have been shouldering a rifle at
the front. Business as usual, indeed, when nothing was as usual in the
world, when the Hun was halfway through Belgium, blasting his path
with Titan howitzers larger than any the Allies possessed, and with
machine-guns which he elected and made to be the primary weapon of the
war, firing villages as he went to light up his work of murder and
rapine! Business as usual when our little Expeditionary Force had not
even set foot on the ships destined to transport it to France!
“This time last year ...”--the men who use the phrase to me are in the
trenches now, Aldershot and Curragh regulars, City men in the famous
London Territorial regiments, miners and factory hands and workers from
all over the country, in the horse or foot or artillery or air corps
or supply services. Every time I pass a regiment on the roads here, or
meet one in the trenches, I find myself wondering what most of them
did in civil life, what they would look like in civilian clothes.
“All wars are abnormal” is a saying of Sir John French. Though the
civilized world must now perforce accept as a normal state of things
the organized slaying which is going on right across Europe and over a
good part of the rest of the world. I for one cannot bring my mind to
adapt itself to the spectacle of the British people in arms as I see it
day by day on all sides of me in this narrow but all-important wedge of
the allied battle-line, where the ultimate fate of the British Empire
will be sealed. The mind boggles at almost every one of the great
stream of fresh impressions which pour in upon it in an irresistible
torrent every day, the sea of English faces surging down a white ribbon
of Flemish road, the unfamiliar sound of our mother tongue in settings
which you intuitively know demand the smooth flow of French, the plain
wooden cross over a simple grave which, without realizing it, you
automatically accept as containing the mortal remains of a man you
loved or admired, or maybe even disliked, one who had made his name
in England, not in this bloody business of war, but at the Bar or in
politics or in the City, at polo or at golf or football.
No, war is not normal, as all nations, except the Germans, know. It is
abnormal in the events it produces as in the passions and virtues it
engenders. Particularly it is abnormal to the British, strangest of all
peoples, quick at a bargain and keenly sensible, singularly lacking in
intuition, absorbed in business, slow to move, slow to mistrust, now,
after basking in the sunshine of decades of peace (the Boer War hardly
disturbed the national life of the country), saved only from the fate
of Belgium by the ever-sounding sea that has stood so often between
England and her enemies.
Yet, while following the fortunes of our army in the field, I have
often found myself pondering the fact whether, after all, war is such
an abnormal thing to this great host of ours, Britishers of all stamps
and from every clime drawn to the fighting-line by the same high ideal.
The world, I grant you, has never seen so many men of Britain arrayed
for battle on their own or any other soil. Yet we were once a military
nation. The whole history of these lands of Picardy and Flanders, where
our army is now fighting, during the past six centuries proclaims it.
Since the days of the third Edward to the present time Englishmen have
fought at intervals in these richly cultivated fields. The bones of
many a fair-haired, straight-backed bowman of England are crumbling
beneath the smiling plains through which our trenches run in a long
winding line.
The country is replete with souvenirs of our military past, of the
Black Prince, of Henry V., of the Duke of York, of Marlborough. There
are houses still standing in Ypres, despite German “frightfulness,”
which witnessed the burning of the suburbs of the ancient capital of
Flanders by the English and the burghers of Ghent in 1383. Half an
hour’s motor drive from General Headquarters of our army in France will
take you to the field of Agincourt, where, 500 years ago, King Harry
and his archers struck a brave blow for England.
I went to the field of Agincourt. It was a pious pilgrimage. As
another son of England with England’s fighting men in Picardy, I wanted
to stretch forth a hand across that gulf of 500 years, and say to those
stout English bowmen, who from their native shires followed their
knights and squires across the sea, “It is well. We are carrying on.
You may rest in peace.” I wanted to tell them in their graves beneath
the warm grass ablaze, as I saw it, with buttercups and daisies and the
gentle speedwell, that theirs was a clean fight that had left no bitter
memories, that the gentlemen of France who fought so valiantly at
Agincourt are with us to-day in spirit as surely as their descendants
are with us in the flesh; that, like the Dickons and Peterkins and Wats
of Agincourt, our men in Picardy and Flanders are brave and steadfast
and true till death.
A little grove of trees enclosing a great crucifix planted in a solid
base of brick is the only memorial on the battlefield. On a slab of
stone affixed to the plinth the inscription runs:
25 OCTOBER, 1415.
C’EST ICI QUE NOS VAILLANS GUERRIERS ONT SUCCOMBÉ. LEUR ESPÉRANCE EST
PLEINE D’IMMORTALITÉ. LA PRIÈRE POUR LES MORTS AFIN QU’ILS SOIENT
DÉLIVRÉS DE LA PEINE QU’ILS SUBISSENT POUR LEURS FAUTES EST UNE SAINTE
ET SALUTAIRE PENSÉE. CETTE CROIX A ÉTÉ ÉRIGÉE PAR VICTOR MARIE LÉONARD
MARQUIS DE TRAMECOURT ET MADAME ALINE MARIE CÉCILE DE TRAMECOURT, SON
ÉPOUSE, À LA MÉMOIRE DE CEUX QUI AVEC LEURS ANCÊTRES ONT PÉRI DANS LA
FATALE JOURNÉE D’AGINCOURT.
PRIEZ POUR EUX.
There were woods on either side of the battlefield, possibly occupying
the site of the woods in which our archers of Agincourt waited for
the French. But there was no visible means of following the course
of the fight from the conformation of the ground. A friendly peasant
who was passing, and who proved to be the holder of some of the land,
vouchsafed the information that the curé knew all the details of the
battle. But the curé was in church.
The slab at the foot of the crucifix--the Calvary, the peasants
call it--was covered with inscriptions cut in the stone or written
in pencil. The dates showed that almost every one had been written
since the outbreak of the war. They were martial and inspiring in
tone. Most of them were the work of French soldiers quartered in the
neighbouring villages, and they had signed their names, with the
surname first, in approved military style, followed by the number of
regiment and company. “_Hommage à nos braves Alliés! Vive la France!_”
ran one. “_Dieu protège la France!_” was another, with the more prosaic
addition, “_Mort aux Boches!_” “_Vive Joffre! Vive l’armée!_” ran a
third. It was signed “_Une petite Française_.” Though Agincourt and
the brave men who died there are remembered, the feud it stood for is
forgotten. “_C’est bien changé maintenant!_” said the peasant at my
side. Not only did the inscriptions on the stone attest that: they
were also the eloquent expression of the great national revival which
has been incorrectly summarized in the phrase, “_The New France_,” but
which is in reality only the reawakening of a nation that led the world
until it suffered the sordid pettiness of politics to carry it away
from the true path of national greatness.
Maybe many of the bowmen sleeping under the green grass of Agincourt
would recognize the speech of the army that is fighting in France
to-day. Every accent, every burr and brogue, every intonation and
inflexion, which one may meet with between Land’s End and the Hebrides,
between the Wash and the Bay of Galway, may be heard in the ranks of
our great volunteer army, in its way unique amongst the armed hosts
standing in the field.
Englishmen travel but little in their own country. I am no exception
to the rule, though I can plead in excuse a long period of service
abroad as a newspaper correspondent. But a morning spent among the
troops of the great army which has sprung from our little Expeditionary
Force is equivalent to a six weeks’ tour of the British Isles. Going
from regiment to regiment, you pass from county to county, with its
characteristic speech, its colouring, its fetishes, its customs. At
the end of my first day with the army, as long ago as last March,
when reinforcements came very slowly, and a Territorial Division was
a thing to take guests to see, “to write home about,” as the saying
goes (though in this case the Censor would probably intervene), I felt
that I had seen the microcosm of Britain, this Empire so vast, so
widespread, so heterogeneous, that its essence has never been distilled
before.
One of the most fascinating things to me about our army in France
are the variations of speech. I have sometimes closed my eyes when a
battalion has been marching past me on the road, and tried to guess,
often with some measure of success, at the recruiting area of the
regiment from the men’s accents or from their tricks of speech.
Take the Scottish regiments, for instance. I have little acquaintance
with the dialects of Scotland, but my ear has told me that the speech
of almost every Scottish regiment, save such regiments as the Gordons
and the Black Watch, that attract men from all over the United Kingdom,
differs. I spent a most fascinating half-hour one morning with a
handful of Glasgow newsboys serving in a famous Scottish regiment
that wears the trews. Their speech was unmistakably the speech of the
Glasgow streets, and their wits were as sharp as their bayonets. I told
them they were newsboys, and newsboys they were, or of the same class,
van-boys and the like. I visited the Cameron Highlanders--what was left
of their Territorial battalion--after the second battle of Ypres, and
heard, in the speech of Inverness-shire, their story of the battle.
Many of them speak Gaelic. One of their officers confided to me that
during the battle, requiring two men to go down to the rear, the wires
being cut, to ascertain the whereabouts of the brigade headquarters, he
selected two notorious deer poachers as likely to have their wits about
them. How many poachers of the red deer of Sherwood or the New Forest
were there not at Agincourt?
Leaving the red tartan of the Camerons and getting back to the trews,
I remember an afternoon spent with the shattered remnants of the
Scottish Rifles, about 150 men all told led out of action at Neuve
Chapelle by a Second Lieutenant of Special Reserve. The Cameronians,
which is the official title of the regiment, recruit in Lanarkshire and
Aberdeenshire, and their speech was, I presume, the speech of those
parts, for it was an accent--a Scottish accent--different from any
other I had heard from the other Scotsmen out here.
It is a gratifying task, this identification of dialects. I have heard
two sappers “fra’ Wigan” engaged in a lively argument with two privates
(from Cork) of the Leinster Regiment, in whose trench the two gentlemen
“fra’ Wigan” were operating. A London cockney, say, from one of the
innumerable battalions of the Royal Fusiliers, would have understood
less of that conversation if it had been carried on in German, but
only a little less. During the Battle of Ypres two privates of the
Monmouthshire Regiment, who were talking Welsh, were pounced upon by
two prowling Southerners from one of the Home Counties, and carried off
to Brigade Headquarters as German spies. What with Welsh miners talking
Welsh and Cameron Highlanders Gaelic, the broad speech of the Yorkshire
_Geordies_, the homely burr of the 3rd Hussars and other regiments
recruited in the West Country, the familiar twang of the cockneys, the
rich brogue of the Irish regiments, the strong American intonation
of the Canadians, a man out here begins to realize of what composite
layers our race is formed.
Of that race our army in the field is the quintessence. The voluntary
system may collect the scallywags, but it primarily attracts, in
circumstances like those of to-day, that brand of Englishman who has
done everything worth doing in England’s history “for conscience’
sake.” There was a theory freely ventilated at the front at one time to
the effect that the first of the new armies raised by Lord Kitchener
would not be of the same material, morally and physically, as the
succeeding ones, owing to the fact that, on the outbreak of the war,
many men flocked to the colours because they had lost their employment.
The second and third armies, it is alleged, being principally composed
of men who, having taken a few months to wind up their affairs, had
joined alone from a high feeling of duty to their country, would be
of a better stamp. This theory does not hold water. Everyone who has
seen the men of the new armies at the front has been alike impressed by
their fine physique, their magnificent military bearing, their smart,
soldierly appearance. “They’re all right” is the verdict. No body of
troops in an army in the field wants higher praise than this.
Everybody who is anybody is at the front. Never was there such a place
for meetings as Flanders. The Strand is not in it. My own experience
is that of everybody else. One finds at the front men one has lost
sight of for years, old friends who have dropped away in the hurry of
existence, chance acquaintances of a Riviera _train de luxe_, men one
has met in business, men who have measured one for clothes. Often I
have heard my name sung out from the centre of a column of marching
troops, and a figure has stepped out to the roadside who, after my mind
has shredded it of the unfamiliar uniform, the deep brown sunburn, the
set expression, has revealed itself as old Tubby Somebody whom one had
known at school, or Brown with whom one had played golf on those little
links behind the Casino at Monte Carlo, or the manager of Messrs. Blank
in the City.
Fortune, the fair goddess, has high jinks at the front. I wanted to
find a relation of mine, a sergeant in a famous London regiment,
and wrote to his people to get the number of his battalion and his
company. When the reply came I discovered that the man I wanted was
billeted not a hundred yards from me in the village, in which the War
Correspondents’ Headquarters were situated, where he had come with
the shattered remnant of his battalion to rest after the terrible
“gruelling” they sustained in the second battle of Ypres. At the front
one constantly witnesses joyous reunions, brother meeting brother in
the happy, hazardous encounter of two battalions on the road or in the
trenches. The very first man I met on coming out to the front was a
motorcar driver whose father had particularly asked me to look out for
his boy. I discovered that he was the man appointed to drive me!
What is it that has knit this great and representative body of the
British people into one splendid harmonious whole, capable of gallantry
and tenderness such as Homer sang, of steadfast endurance which
Leonidas in Elysian fields must contemplate smiling through tear-dimmed
eyes? We know that there is a deep strain of idealism in our race,
lying far below a granite-like surface of cynical indifference, of
frigid reserve. But who should have suspected its existence in the
crowd of underground strap-hangers and tramway passengers, in the
noonday throngs pouring out of the factories and workshops, in all that
immense mass of workaday, civilian England from which our firing-line
in France is now being fed? You cannot go among our soldiers in the
field without becoming conscious of the fact that, beneath their
unflagging high spirits, their absolute indifference to danger, their
splendid tenacity, there burns an immense determination of purpose, an
iron determination to set wrong right. For in the mind of the British
soldier, who wastes no time over the subtleties of high politics, the
world is wrong as long as the German is free to work his own sweet will
in it.
Humour is probably the largest component part of the spirit of the
British soldier, a paradoxical, phlegmatic sense of humour that comes
out strongest when the danger is the most threatening. A Jack Johnson
bursts close beside a British soldier who is lighting his pipe with one
of those odious French sulphur matches. The shell blows a foul whiff of
chemicals right across the man’s face. “Oh dear! oh dear!” he exclaims
with a perfectly genuine sigh, “these ’ere French matches will be the
death o’ me!” A reply which is equally characteristic of the state of
mind of the British soldier who goes forth to war is that given by
the irate driver of a Staff car to a sentry in the early days of the
war. The sentry, in the dead of night, had levelled his rifle at the
chauffeur because the car had not stopped instantly on challenge. The
driver backed his car towards where the sentry was standing. “I’ll ’ave
a word with you, young feller,” he said. “Allow me to inform you that
this car can’t be stopped in less than twenty yards. If you go shoving
that rifle of yours in people’s faces someone will get shot before this
war’s over!”
There is a great strain of tenderness in the British soldier, a great
readiness to serve. Hear him, on a wet night in the trenches, begrimed,
red-eyed with fatigue, chilled to the bone, just about to lie down for
a rest, offer to make his officer, tired as he is, “a drop of ’ot tea!”
Watch him with German prisoners! His attitude is paternal, patronizing,
rather that of a friendly London policeman guiding homeward the
errant footsteps of a drunkard. Under influence of nameless German
atrocities of all descriptions the attitude of the British soldier
in the fighting-line is becoming fierce and embittered. Nothing will
induce him, however, to vent his spite on prisoners, though few Germans
understand anything else but force as the expression of power. They
look upon our men as miserable mercenaries whose friendliness is simply
an attempt to curry favour with the noble German _Krieger_; our men
regard them as misguided individuals who don’t know any better.
The great strain of tenderness in the British soldier comes out most
strongly in his attitude of mind towards the wounded and the dead.
No British soldier will rest quiet in his trench whilst there are
wounded lying out in front, and the deeds of heroism performed by men
in rescuing the wounded have been so numerous in this war that it has
been found necessary to restrict the number of Victoria Crosses awarded
for this class of gallant action. No British soldier will lie quiet
while our dead are unburied. Men will expose themselves fearlessly to
recover the body of a comrade and give it decent burial.
A friend of mine in the Cavalry gave me a striking account of a burial
service he conducted thus on the Marne. A shrapnel burst right over
him and his troop, but by great good luck only one man was killed.
The troop was on the move, and it was necessary to bury the man at
once. No military funeral this, with the chaplain reciting, “I am the
Resurrection and the Life ...” and a firing-party rigid at attention;
but a handful of men scraping a shallow hole in the earth, whilst
others removed the dead man’s identity disc and effects and equipment.
There was no time for prayer, but, my friend said, it was one of the
most pathetic ceremonies he had ever attended. They were a rough lot
in his squadron, but they showed a great tenderness as they laid the
still form in its stained khaki in the ground. “Oh dear! pore ole Jack
gorn to ’is last rest!” This and similar ejaculations came from the
little group standing at the graveside, the rest of the squadron, with
stamping horses, waiting a little distance away. “Now then, chaps,
’ats orf!” cried a veteran private, an old scamp of a soldier who had
re-engaged for the war. The men bared their heads reverently as the
poor body was laid in the chill earth. Someone produced a rough cross
made out of an ammunition-box, with the man’s name and regiment written
on it in indelible pencil, the grave was filled in, the cross set up,
and the squadron proceeded on its way.
The line of fighting of the British Army is marked by these crosses,
now gradually being replaced by that admirable organization, the
Graves Commission, which identifies graves and furnishes them with
properly inscribed crosses as a permanent identification. Our men do
the rest. Troops always look after graves in the vicinity of their
billets, plant them with turf and flowers, or, in the case of Catholic
soldiers, with statues or holy pictures from the ruined churches which
are so plentiful in the fighting zone.
What is the spirit of the British Army in the field? I have been asked.
How was it inculcated, and how is it maintained? And I would reply
that the spirit of our army is the spirit of our public schools, for
it was inculcated and is maintained by the Regimental Officer, himself
the product of our public schools. In saying this I do not mean that
the British Army is dominated by an aristocratic caste. I mean that
its spirit of courage, self-sacrifice, loyalty, and public-spirited
obedience is the spirit upon which the whole of our public school
system is based, a great commonwealth in which no man is for the party,
but all are for the State.
The Regimental Officer, who has blazed for himself an imperishable
trail of glory in this war, has cherished and fostered this feeling.
His spirit of quiet, unostentatious courage, of uncomplaining devotion
to duty, of never-failing thoughtfulness for the other man, the
new-comer, “the fellow who’s a bit rattled, don’t you know?” carries
on the tradition of our forefathers who fought with Marlborough and
Wellington and Raglan. It is an eminently English spirit. That is why,
no doubt, despite the expansion of our little Expeditionary Force into
a great democratic host, our new armies have slipped it on with their
tunics and their belts, so that the spirit of the new is the spirit of
the old.
When this war is over I shall hope to see a monument erected in London,
in the most prominent site that can be found, that the honour may be
greater, with the plain inscription, “To the Regimental Officer, 1914.”
Let it be white like his escutcheon, of marble like his fortitude, and
in size vast and overwhelming and imposing like the pile of heroic
deeds he has amassed to his credit in all our wars. German organization
may have given the German armies high-explosive shells innumerable
and machine-guns galore to break our bodies, and asphyxiating gases
to stop our breath; they have no weapon to break the spirit of the
Regimental Officer, which is the spirit of his men, the spirit of the
army. The German Army is inspired by a magnificent military tradition,
but it seems to linger principally in the regulars, and to be present
only in a diminished form in the officers and men of the Reserve, the
_Landwehr_, and the _Landsturm_. For the spirit of the German Army is
artificial, the atmosphere of a military caste. The spirit of our army
is the spirit of England that sent Drake sailing over the seven seas,
that gave our greatest sailor that far-famed “Nelson touch”; it is the
vivifying breath of the greatest Empire that the world has ever seen.
“Gentlemen, hats off!” as Napoleon said at the grave of Frederick the
Great--hats off to the Regimental Officer. The military correspondent
of _The Times_ sounded a sane note, in the midst of the great clamour
about the shortage of shells, when he bade us remember the value of
good infantry, dashing in the attack, steady on the defensive. The
Regimental Officer is the soul of our infantry. No matter that he is a
boy, or that he is out from home but a few weeks, his sergeants will do
the technical part of the job if needs be. But the Regimental Officer
will show them all how to die.
Lord Wolseley used to tell how, standing on the parapet of the
earthworks before Tel-el-Kebir, he saw a shell, a huge, clumsy
projectile, hurling through the air before him. In an instant the
question flashed across his mind whether it was the duty of the
Regimental Officer to preserve his life usefully for the battalion, or
to take a risk and give the men an example in indifference to danger.
The shell answered the question for him by passing him by and bursting
innocuously behind him. But I know what Wolseley’s, what any Regimental
Officer’s answer would have been: “Stay where you are and take your
chance!”
Revolutionary changes have been wrought in the army in everything,
save in its spirit, since the outbreak of the war. We have come to
rely on heavy artillery and high-explosive shells and machine-guns;
we count our men by the hundred thousand where we counted them by the
thousand before. The Territorial, the raw recruit, have proved their
metal in the fiercest fire; the Canadian has not belied the reputation
of our fighting race. Caste restrictions in the army have been swept
away; exclusive regiments are now exclusive only to the incompetent.
That jealously guarded, poorly paid, and, if the truth were told,
rather ill-considered little army that the British people kept to
fight its battles before August, 1914, has been swallowed up in the
millions of Britons who have heard the country’s call. But the soul
of the army marches on unchanged, with the same self-sacrifice, the
same willing obedience, the same admirable discipline. The soul of the
army is enshrined in the Regimental Officer. In the remoteness and
the obscurity of the trenches and the billets he goes about his work
quietly and without fuss, in the same way as he performs the deeds that
win him distinction, in the same way that he goes to his death. His men
worship him. His Brigadier trusts him. “The Regimental Officer,” said a
General to me, “by God, he’s the salt of the earth!”