It was not until July of 1915 that the Commander-in-Chief announced
that a part of the New Army was in France, and lifted the veil from the
secret which had mystified people at home whose boys had gone from them,
but who could not get a word of their doings in France.
I saw the first of the “Kitchener men,” as we called them then. The
tramp of their feet in a steady scrunch, scrunch, along a gritty road of
France, passed the window of my billet very early in the mornings, and I
poked my head out to get another glimpse of those lads marching forward
to the firing-line. For as long as history lasts the imagination of our
people will strive to conjure up the vision of those boys who, in the
year of 1915, went out to Flanders, not as conscript soldiers, but as
volunteers, for the old country's sake, to take their risks and “do
their bit” in the world's bloodiest war. I saw those fellows day by day,
touched hands with them, went into the trenches with them, heard their
first tales, and strolled into their billets when they had shaken down
for a night or two within sound of the guns. History will envy me that,
this living touch with the men who, beyond any doubt, did in their
simple way act and suffer things before the war ended which revealed
new wonders of human courage and endurance. Some people envied me
then--those people at home to whom those boys belonged, and who in
country towns and villages and suburban houses would have given their
hearts to get one look at them there in Flanders and to see the way of
their life... How were they living? How did they like it? How were they
sleeping? What did the Regulars think of the New Army?
“Oh, a very cheerful lot,” said a sergeant-major of the old Regular
type, who was having a quiet pipe over a half-penny paper in a shed
at the back of some farm buildings in the neighborhood of Armentieres,
which had been plugged by two hundred German shells that time the day
before. (One never knew when the fellows on the other side would take it
into their heads to empty their guns that way. They had already killed a
lot of civilians thereabouts, but the others stayed on.)
“Not a bit of trouble with them,” said the sergeant-major, “and all
as keen as when they grinned into a recruiting office and said, `I'm
going.' They're glad to be out. Over-trained, some of 'em. For ten
months we've been working 'em pretty hard. Had to, but they were willing
enough. Now you couldn't find a better battalion, though some more
famous... Till we get our chance, you know.”
He pointed with the stem of his pipe to the open door of an old barn,
where a party of his men were resting.
“You'll find plenty of hot heads among them, but no cold feet. I'll bet
on that.”
The men were lying on a stone floor with haversacks for pillows, or
squatting tailor-wise, writing letters home. From a far corner came a
whistling trio, harmonized in a tune which for some reason made me think
of hayfields in southern England.
They belonged to a Sussex battalion, and I said, “Any one here from
Burpham?”
One of the boys sat up, stared, flushed to the roots of his yellow hair,
and said, “Yes.”
I spoke to him of people I knew there, and he was astonished that I
should know them. Distressed also in a queer way. Those memories of a
Sussex village seemed to break down some of the hardness in which he had
cased himself. I could see a frightful homesickness in his blue eyes.
“P'raps I've seed the last o' Burpham,” he said in a kind of whisper, so
that the other men should not hear.
The other men were from Arundel, Littlehampton, and Sussex villages.
They were of Saxon breed. There was hardly a difference between them
and some German prisoners I saw, yellow-haired as they were, with fair,
freckled, sun-baked skins. They told me they were glad to be out in
France. Anything was better than training at home.
“I like Germans more'n sergeant-majors,” said one young yokel, and the
others shouted with laughter at his jest.
“Perhaps you haven't met the German sergeants,” I said.
“I've met our'n,” said the Sussex boy. “A man's a fool to be a soldier.
Eh, lads?”
They agreed heartily, though they were all volunteers.
“Not that we're skeered,” said one of them. “We'll be glad when the
fighting begins.”
“Speak for yourself, Dick Meekcombe, and don't forget the shells last
night.”
There was another roar of laughter. Those boys of the South Saxons
were full of spirit. In their yokel way they were disguising their real
thoughts--their fear of being afraid, their hatred of the thought of
death--very close to them now--and their sense of strangeness in this
scene on the edge of Armentieres, a world away from their old life.
The colonel sat in a little room at headquarters, a bronzed man with
a grizzled mustache and light-blue eyes, with a fine tenderness in his
smile.
“These boys of mine are all right,” he said. “They're dear fellows, and
ready for anything. Of course, it was anxious work at first, but my N.
C. O.'s are a first-class lot, and we're ready for business.”
He spoke of the recruiting task which had begun the business eleven
months ago. It had not been easy, among all those scattered villages of
the southern county. He had gone hunting among the farms and cottages
for likely young fellows. They were of good class, and he had picked the
lads of intelligence, and weeded out the others. They came from a
good stock--the yeoman breed. One could not ask for better stuff. The
officers were men of old county families, and they knew their men.
That was a great thing. So far they had been very lucky with regard to
casualties, though it was unfortunate that a company commander, a fine
fellow who had been a schoolmaster and a parson, should have been picked
off by a sniper on his first day out.
The New Army had received its baptism of fire, though nothing very
fierce as yet. They were led on in easy stages to the danger-zone. It
was not fair to plunge them straight away into the bad places. But the
test of steadiness was good enough on a dark night behind the reserve
trenches, when the reliefs had gone up, and there was a bit of digging
to do in the open.
“Quiet there, boys,” said the sergeant-major. “And no larks.”
It was not a larky kind of place or time. There was no moon, and a light
drizzle of rain fell. The enemy's trenches were about a thousand yards
away, and their guns were busy in the night, so that the shells came
overhead, and lads who had heard the owls hoot in English woods now
heard stranger night-birds crying through the air, with the noise of
rushing wings, ending in a thunderclap.
“And my old mother thinks I'm enjoying myself!” said the heir to a
seaside lodging-house.
“Thirsty work, this grave-digging job,” said a lad who used to skate on
rollers between the bath-chairs of Brighton promenade.
“Can't see much in those shells,” said a young man who once sold ladies'
blouses in an emporium of a south coast village. “How those newspaper
chaps do try to frighten us!”
He put his head on one side with a sudden jerk.
“What's that? Wasps?”
A number of insects were flying overhead with a queer, sibilant noise.
Somewhere in the darkness there was a steady rattle in the throat of a
beast.
“What's that, Sergeant?”
“Machine-gums, my child. Keep your head down, or you'll lose hold of
it... Steady, there. Don't get jumpy, now!”
The machine-gun was firing too high to do any serious damage. It was
probably a ricochet from a broken tree which made one of the boys
suddenly drop his spade and fall over it in a crumpled way.
“Get up, Charlie,” said the comrade next to him; and then, in a scared
voice, “Oh, Sergeant!”
“That's all right,” said the sergeant-major. “We're getting off very
lightly. New remember what I've been telling you... Stretcher this way.”
They were very steady through the night, this first company of the New
Army.
“Like old soldiers, sir,” said the sergeant-major, when he stood
chatting with the colonel after breakfast.
It was a bit of bad luck, though not very bad, after all--which made the
Germans shell a hamlet into which I went just as some of the New Army
were marching through to their quarters. These men had already seen
what shellfire could do to knock the beauty out of old houses and quiet
streets. They had gone tramping through one or two villages to which
the enemy's guns had turned their attention, and had received that
unforgetable sensation of one's first sight of roofless cottages, and
great gaps in garden walls, and tall houses which have tumbled inside
themselves. But now they saw this destruction in the process, and stood
very still, listening to the infernal clatter as shells burst at the
other end of the street, tumbling down huge masses of masonry and
plugging holes into neat cottages, and tearing great gashes out of
red-brick walls.
“Funny business!” said one of the boys.
“Regular Drury Lane melodrama,” said another.
“Looks as if some of us wouldn't be home in time for lunch,” was another
comment, greeted by a guffaw along the line.
They tried to see the humor of it, though there was a false note in
some of the jokes. But it was the heroic falsity of boys whose pride
is stronger than their fear, that inevitable fear which chills one when
this beastliness is being done.
“Not a single casualty,” said one of the officers when the storm of
shells ended with a few last concussions and a rumble of falling bricks.
“Anything wrong with our luck?”
Everything was all right with the luck of this battalion of the New Army
in its first experience of war on the first night in the danger-zone.
No damage was done even when two shells came into one of their billets,
where a number of men were sleeping after a hard day and a long march.
“I woke up pretty quick,” said one of them, “and thought the house had
fallen in. I was out of it before the second came. Then I laughed. I'm a
heavy sleeper, you know. [He spoke as if I knew his weakness.] My mother
bought me an alarm-clock last birthday. 'Perhaps you'll be down for
breakfast now,' she said. But a shell is better--as a knocker-up. I
didn't stop to dress.”
Death had missed him by a foot or two, but he laughed at the fluke of
his escape.
“K.'s men” had not forgotten how to laugh after those eleven months
of hard training, and they found a joke in grisly things which do not
appeal humorously to sensitive men.
“Any room for us there?” asked one of these bronzed fellows as he
marched with his battalion past a cemetery where the fantastic devices
of French graves rose above the churchyard wall.
“Oh, we'll do all right in the open air, all along of the German
trenches,” was the answer he had from the lad at his side. They grinned
at their own wit.