The period in reserve had brought the whole battalion together once
more. The companies were no longer separated as they had been in the
trenches. Our Ensign found the officers established in regular messes
in the sand-bagged shelters of this pleasantly rural retreat, and the
whole routine of the Guards running smoothly on very similar lines to
the life in barracks at home.
Life was not at all strenuous in reserve--at any rate not in the
day-time. In the trenches the men get short commons in the way of
sleep, so during the period in reserve they are not worked very hard.
At night, however, fatigue parties were generally sent up to the
support or front lines on various digging undertakings. Otherwise,
a rifle inspection in the morning, and sometimes, additionally, an
inspection of feet (an army may fight on its stomach, but it marches on
its feet) or of gas helmets, was the only parade of the day.
Each company took it in turn to be “in waiting”--that is to say, to
be in readiness for any emergency. The company in waiting furnished
the guards and fatigue parties for any special jobs about the camp.
During the period in waiting, which lasted twenty-four hours, from
one afternoon to the afternoon of the following day, the officers
of the company in waiting were not supposed to leave the precincts
of the camp, and, the company commander excepted, they took it in
turns, during the period “in waiting,” to act as Piquet Officer, whose
functions in reserve were practically confined to stamping the letters
with the battalion censor stamp in the Orderly Room (a sand-bagged
shelter), before the post corporal collected the mail in the afternoons.
Our Ensign slipped very easily, almost imperceptibly, into his place
as a tiny cog in the great wheelwork of the army in France. He came
out prepared to have a roughish time in very congenial company--and
in neither respect was he disappointed. The Mess in which he found
himself had all the attraction of a cosmopolitan club in miniature.
His fellow-officers in the company to which he had been posted--No.
2--had what was known as a double-company mess with the officers of
No. 1 Company. At the quarters in reserve the mess was located in an
ambitious sort of sand-bagged shelter, with stain-glass windows, timber
floor and walls, a white deal sideboard (home-made), and a long table
and chairs. Here our Ensign met his company commander, a serene and
placid person, with a somewhat judicial manner, who, for that reason,
answered to the name of “The Beak.” Most of the other officers our
Ensign had known at home, so that he did not feel so much an intruder
as he had feared he would.
The double-company mess was a very happy family. In every stratum of
society type balances type. It is this easy counter-poise that makes
the world revolve. That great leveller, the War, has thrown together
in officers’ messes for a spell of intimate association a number of
men whose pursuits in other circumstances would all have radiated
in different directions. In that mess there were, amongst others, a
brace of budding diplomats, two Balliol undergraduates, a rancher, a
“literary gent.,” and an engineer. Some of the officers had decided to
adopt the Army as their profession, and to remain on in the regiment
after the war, but others would simply return to their pursuits and
professions on the proclamation of peace. The pleasant _cameraderie_
which reigned in the double-company mess must be based, our Ensign
decided, on the equilibrium of all these different temperaments and
mental outlooks balanced one against the other. So far as regimental
duties were concerned, every type was tempered down to the average
consistency given by the identical training which every Guards’ officer
receives on the square at home.
Therefore, though many and furious were the arguments on every
conceivable topic with which the young lions of the double-company
mess whiled away their leisure hours, there was perfect accord in the
general realisation by each of his duties and responsibilities as an
officer. In the privacy of the mess there might be heated wrangles
regarding the respective merits of No. 1 and No. 2 Companies; but
the whole mess presented a solid front in backing the two companies
against the rest of the battalion, the battalion against the rest of
the Brigade, and the regiment against every other regiment in the
Brigade of Guards.
Our Ensign had two or three spells in reserve at this peaceful spot,
and always looked forward to returning to it after the battalion’s turn
of duty in the trenches. There was practically no shelling; any German
shells that came over mostly fell in a more exposed position several
hundred yards away. All around them lay spread out the fair garb in
which summer dresses the Belgian countryside, and not even the ruined
farms or the shell-scored roads could detract from the beauty of the
poppies and corn-flowers running wild among the neglected fields, or
the roses and the hollyhocks and the snapdragon that bloomed in the
little gardens of the ravaged farms.
The men revelled in the snatch of quiet, in the pleasant surroundings,
in the beautiful summer weather. When their day’s work was done they
sat about in the shade, writing letters home, reading the newspapers,
or idly watching the afternoon spectacle of German _v._ British
aeroplanes. Some spent every moment of their leisure in dragging one of
the canals in which Belgium abounds for fish. The drag-net was a marvel
of ingenuity, constructed as it was out of rabbit netting, barbed wire,
bits of string, sandbags, and branches, towed along by eager hands
on either bank. Incredible as it may seem, the fishermen made quite
respectable catches of pike and eels, which they cooked for supper over
wood-fires, and consumed with relish,--all heedless of dark allusions
by their less enterprising comrades to the fabled discovery of portions
of a German helmet in the maw of one of these aquarian monsters.
The officers went for walks in the neighbourhood, extending their
rambles, with the perversity of youth, to the ruined city of Ypres,
still the shell-trap _par excellence_ of the countryside for miles
around. One afternoon, a subaltern in our Ensign’s mess who went by the
name of Apollo, from his statuesque appearance, and who was a perfect
Baedeker of information about the local attractions wherever the
battalion went, took Peter and our Ensign and one of the Balliol men,
known as The Don, to a certain field where, among various shell-holes
and felled apple-trees, a few rows of depressed currant bushes yet
lingered. The currants were red and scanty and abominably sour, and
an unusually large number of “dud” shells were falling in dangerous
proximity to the party from an “Archie” or anti-aircraft gun that was
vigorously shelling a German raider. There was plenty of fresh fruit in
the mess where the young men could have sat in the cool of the shelter
and eaten their fill, but they preferred to stand in the hot afternoon
sun and munch unripe currants at imminent risk of their necks. Truly
youth is a wonderful thing!
Another day a band of them strolled out over the fields to a certain
billet, where previously the battalion and other Guards’ battalions
had been quartered for some time. There they visited the pretty
garden which the Guards had laid out with wonderful centre-pieces,
representing the different regimental crests of the Guards in coloured
stones. But, while the Guards had been away, the heathen had raged.
There were shell-holes in the garden, and the rains had begun to gnaw
at the centre-pieces.... In the Salient everything, living and dead,
seems vowed to destruction.
The night fatigues were dull, dangerous, and depressing. Night after
night parties sallied forth with pick and spade, often in gum-boots,
if there was work to be done on a wet trench, and plodded through the
darkness to a more or less apocryphal rendezvous.
All the open ground close up to the Front in the Salient is sprayed by
machine-gun fire at night, and a brisk burst of shell fire in addition
was no uncommon experience for the nightly fatigue parties. Sometimes
the sapper folk would be late at the trysting-place, and the men would
stand huddled up together like a flock of sheep on a moor, while the
officers would fret and fume and mutter dire menaces about “reporting
the fellow to the Brigade.” Then the sapper would arrive, and the
officer, about to deliver himself of a few weighty and well-considered
remarks on punctuality, which is the politeness of soldiers as well as
of kings, would find himself confronted by an obsequious R.E. corporal
protesting that the “orficer” was “jest over there.”
Translated into the plain language of fact, this indication might mean
anything from 300 yards to a mile; but at length the sapper officer
would appear, silencing with honeyed words and profuse apology the
torrent of reproach bubbling at the Guardsman’s lips. After that the
sapper officer would take charge, and the Guards’ officer would find
his _rôle_ restricted to walking up and down for anything up to three
or four hours, bored to tears, unable even to smoke, because smoking
on these night fatigues is forbidden to the men. He had not even the
mental occupation of keeping the men to their task. They knew that they
could not go home to bed until the job was finished, whatever it was,
and therefore every man worked with a will, jackets discarded, sleeves
rolled up.
Everybody who has been up in the Salient knows what the “trenches”
there are like. The Hun holds the high ground everywhere: he has the
dry soil, the observation. In the British lines the ground is so wet
that a foot below the surface you strike water ... and probably a
dead man as well, so thick do they lie in this blood-drenched region.
Therefore the parapets are for the most part built up, and indeed
the whole defences--parapet, traverses, and parados--have to be built
up with sandbags, which, under the influence of shell fire and the
weather, have to be continually renewed and repaired.
A parapet that will shelter a platoon of the line will not do for a
platoon of Guardsmen. It is a question of inches. When the Gurkhas
relieved the Guards in the trenches in the Béthune region early in
the war, the Guards had to put a double tier of sandbags along the
fire-step so that the little hillmen could look over the top of the
parapet. Therefore, in the Salient, it often happened that the Guards
found themselves sheltering in the open behind a thin parapet in bad
repair, behind which they had to kneel in order to protect themselves
against the enemy snipers.
Work, with a capital “W,” loomed large in the orders of every company
commander of the Guards in the Salient. In truth, there was much to
be done. In places, the trench lines were not connected, parapets were
low and by no means bullet-proof, parados were distinguished mainly by
their absence. Thus, when one battalion of Guards relieved another in
the Salient, it took over not only the trench but a vast programme of
“improvements,” as the house-builders say.
The first night our Ensign went up to the front line with the company,
the Guards’ battalion which they were relieving had a big scheme of
work to hand over. As junior officer, our Ensign was given charge of
the men in the front line, for the first half of their turn “in,”
whilst The Beak and Peter remained, according to usage, in the company
headquarters in the support line. For the second half, Peter was to
relieve our Ensign.
While the relief was being effected, an ensign of the outgoing
company took our young man round the trench, and, with the air of a
Commissioner of the Office of Works, showed the new-comer the work
which had been begun, which the incoming company was to finish. The
barbed wire was probably defective and would have to be inspected and
possibly repaired; here they had put in three new traverses; here they
had repaired the parapet that had been blown in by an enemy trench
mortar; there they had started to build a parados; this part of the
parapet was not bullet-proof ... they had had a man wounded passing
there the previous day; and so on, and so forth. The officer explained
everything with admirable lucidity, and then, his men having all filed
out, trotted away, leaving our Ensign, rather bewildered, standing
on a precarious trench-board, half immersed in yellow water, with an
overpowering odour of death in his nostrils.
Both The Beak and Peter presently came up to help him over his
difficulties at his first taste of trench warfare, and together they
mapped out a scheme to spread the work remaining to be done over the
time they were to spend in the front line. The platoon sergeants were
called into consultation: they had already got the sentries posted in
the fire-bays, and the rest of the men they set at the task of filling
sandbags. It was agreed that our Ensign should go out and have a look
at the wire, and also the outside of the parapet, to see how it could
best be made bullet-proof.
A little later the officer, in company with his orderly, his rifle
slung at his back, a handsome and self-possessed young man, who was
introduced as the wiring corporal, and a rugged Irish sergeant called
Kinole, slung his leg over the parapet and dropped out into the open on
the other side.
It was a dark windy night. In front of them the German star-shells were
soaring aloft, and the night was alive with noises reverberating in the
darkness. Machine-guns on both sides coughed their harsh “tack-tack ...
tack-tack-tack.” Rifle shots rang out here and there; and every now
and then, with a bang and a whizz, a Verey light whirred up into the
dark sky from the trenches behind the little party. Somewhere on the
right a mighty British _strafe_ was in progress: our Ensign could hear
the steady racket of the shells and see their orange flicker in the sky
as they burst against the surrounding blackness.
The chinking of tools resounded very faintly out of the dark in front
of them.
“’Tis Fritz out workin’,” muttered Sergeant Kinole hoarsely. “Iv’ry
night ’tis the same, sir.... He works like anny ould mole.”
The party crossed a very wet ditch and came to the wire. Here the
wiring corporal took the lead and they all crawled along behind him,
bending their heads low, as he did, to examine the strands of wire
against the sky. In places the wire was broken and would have to be
replaced.
Then our Ensign took a look at the parapet from the outside. There was
no room to strengthen it from within, and outside the trench the ground
sloped away into a morass. The only thing would be to lay an earth
foundation and build it up on that. The sergeant hopped back into the
trench, and presently returned with a horde of bulky figures with pick
and shovel who scrambled over the parapet, and, dropping on the other
side, started shovelling dry earth on to the wet ground at the foot of
the parapet.
All night they worked and shovelled and built, inside and outside the
trench, while the star-shells spouted and the machine-guns rapped
loudly. With the first flicker of dawn they trooped in, and then, while
the dawn was breaking sullenly, the men stood to on the fire-step all
along the trench, while our Ensign, empty and cold and dreadfully
sleepy, wondered why the trench smells were so overpoweringly
accentuated in the early morning.
With the coming of dawn the men stood down, our Ensign inspected
rifles, the Commanding Officer, on his daily round of the trenches,
appeared and asked him a question or two, and after that, amid a
general sizzling of bacon all along the trench, the officer made for
the earthen cave which had been pointed out to him as his quarters.
There was the faithful Johnson with a mug of hot cocoa; there was our
Ensign’s blanket and his air-pillow arranged on a carpet of clean
sandbags.
Our young man slept until ten o’clock, and then rose to find his
washing things spread out in the sunshine, Johnson close by boiling his
shaving water in a mess tin. He made a leisurely toilet, then sauntered
down the communication trench to the company headquarters, where he
breakfasted joyously with The Beak and Peter off eggs and bacon and tea
and bread-and-butter and strawberry jam. Of course the double-company
mess was broken up when the battalion was in the line, so, by mutual
arrangement, No. 1 Company took the mess cook, and No. 2 the mess
waiter. It was the latter, rather more dishevelled than his wont, who
served the three officers at breakfast in a tiny dug-out four feet
square.
One turn in the trenches is very much like another. Sometimes they got
shelled, and on the first occasion, our Ensign, emerging rather hastily
from his cubby-hole to find out what the noise was about, was shamed
into complete nonchalance by the unshakable phlegm of the men. He soon
learned to adopt the prescribed air of indifference to such attentions
from the enemy, but, like most people, he never got used to shelling.
Once or twice he went out patrolling with his orderly, a completely
fearless, wholly unsqueamish, and eminently practical young man. It
was a messy business, crawling through the wet grass in the dark, and
rather trying to the nerves. But, as a sage friend of our Ensign’s used
to say, “If you can’t see the Hun, he can’t see you,” and our young
man more than once drew comfort from this practical maxim as he and
MacFinnigan crawled through No Man’s Land with eyes and ears strained
for sight or sound of the enemy.
Letters and newspapers arrived with unfailing regularity in the front
line every afternoon at tea-time. So they knew all about the great
events that were happening on the Somme, especially as the latest
bulletins came up daily from the army headquarters, and were stuck up
(by means of a cartridge driven into the sandbag walls) outside the
company headquarters. Everybody speculated endlessly as to the moment
when the Guards would be hurled into that boiling cauldron in the
south. Rumours of all kinds were rife: everybody had his own theories
and “information,” especially the men. Our Ensign used to hear them
gossiping round their breakfast fires in the trenches, where every
cookhouse rumour was thoroughly examined.
At last one day, when the Battalion was expecting to go out of the
trenches altogether for several weeks’ rest, it was reported that the
Somme was its next destination. This time rumour spoke true. About one
o’clock A.M., on a mellow summer night, the Battalion marched quietly
by companies across the market-place of an old Belgian town, where it
would in a day or two entrain for the Unknown.