boredom punctuated by moments of intense fear. All men would emphasise
the boredom, and most men would admit the fear. The only soldiers I ever
met who affected to know nothing of the fear were Afridis, and the
Afridi is notoriously a ravisher of truth. But the predominant
feeling--in the winter months at any rate--was the boredom. There was a
time when some units, owing to the lack of reserves, were only relieved
once every three weeks, and time hung heavy on their hands. Under these
circumstances they began to take something more than a professional
interest in their neighbours opposite. The curiosity was reciprocated.
Items of news, more or less mendacious, were exchanged when the trenches
were near enough to permit of vocal intercourse. Curious conventions
grew up, and at certain hours of the day and, less commonly, of the
night, there was a kind of informal armistice. In one section the hour
of 8 to 9 A.M. was regarded as consecrated to "private business," and
certain places indicated by a flag were regarded as out of bounds by the
snipers on both sides. On many occasions working parties toiled with
pick and shovel within talking distance of one another, and, although it
was, of course, never safe to presume upon immunity, they usually
forbore to interfere with one another. The Bedfords and the South
Staffords worked in broad daylight with their bodies half exposed above
the trenches, raising the parapet as the water rose. About 200 yards
away the Germans were doing the same. Neither side interfered with the
navvy-work of the other, and for the simplest of all reasons: both were
engaged in fighting a common foe--the underground springs. When two
parties are both in danger of being drowned they haven't time to fight.
To speak of drowning is no hyperbole; the mud of Flanders in winter is
in some places like a quicksand, and men have been sucked under beyond
redemption. A common misery begat a mutual forbearance.
It was under such circumstances that the following exchange of
pleasantries took place. The men of a certain British regiment heard at
intervals a monologue going on in the trenches opposite, and every time
the speaker stopped his discourse shouts of guttural laughter arose,
accompanied by cries of "Bravo, Müller!" "Sehr komisch!" "Noch einmal,
Müller!" Our men listened intently, and an acquaintance with German, so
imperfect as to be almost negligible, could not long disguise from them
the fact that their Saxon neighbours possessed a funny man whose name
was Müller. Their interest in Müller, always audible but never visible,
grew almost painful. At last they could restrain it no longer. At a
given signal they began chanting, like the gallery in a London theatre,
except that their voices came from the pit:
We--want--Müller! We--want--Müller! We--want--Müller!
The refrain grew more and more insistent. At last a head appeared above
the German parapet. It rose gradually, as though the owner were being
hoisted by unseen hands. He rose, as the principal character in a Punch
and Judy show rises, with jerky articulations of his members from the
ventriloquial depths below. The body followed, until a three-quarter
posture was attained. The owner, with his hand upon his heart, bowed
gracefully three times and then disappeared. It was Müller!
It is some months since I was in the British trenches,[28] and I often
wonder how our men have accommodated themselves to the ever-increasing
multiplication of the apparatus of war. The fire trenches I visited were
about wide enough to allow two men to pass one another--and that was
all. Obviously the wider your trench the greater your exposure to the
effects of shell-fire, and if we go on introducing trench-mortars, and
gas-pumps, and gas-extinguishers, to say nothing of a great store of
bombs, as pleasing in variety and as startling in their effects as
Christmas crackers, our trenches will soon be as full of furniture as a
Welsh miner's parlour. But doubtless the sappers have arranged all that.
Some of these improvements are viewed by company officers without
enthusiasm. The trench-mortar, for example, is distinctly unpopular, for
it draws the enemy's fire, besides being an uncanny thing to handle,
although the handling is done not by the company but by a "battery" of
R.G.A. men, who come down and select a "pitch." I have seen a
trench-mortar in action--it is like a baby howitzer, and makes a
prodigious noise. Our own men deprecate it and the enemy resent it. It
is an invidious thing. The gas-extinguisher is less objectionable, and,
incidentally, less exacting in the matter of accommodation. It is a
large copper vessel resembling nothing so much as the fire-extinguishing
cylinders one sees in public buildings at home. About our gas-pumps I
know nothing except by hearsay. They are in charge of "corporals" in
the chemical corps of the sappers, and your corporal is, in nine cases
out of ten, a man whose position in the scientific world at home is one
of considerable distinction. He is usually a lecturer or
Assistant-Professor in Chemistry at one of our University Colleges who
has left his test-tubes and quantitative analysis for the more exciting
allurements of the trenches. I sometimes wonder what name the fertile
brain of the British soldier has found for him--probably "the squid." He
has three gases in his repertoire, each more deadly than the other. One
of them is comparatively innocuous--it disables without debilitating;
and its effect passes off in about twenty minutes. The truth is that we
do not take very kindly to the use of this kind of thing. Still, our men
know their business, and our gas, whichever variety it was, played a
very effective part in the capture of the Hohenzollern Redoubt.
For the greater part of the winter months the "Front" was, to all
appearances above ground, as deserted as the Sahara and almost as
silent. Everybody who had to be there was, for obvious reasons,
invisible, and the misguided wayfarer who found himself between the
lines was in a wilderness whose intimidating silence was occasionally
interrupted by the sound of projectiles coming he knew not whence and
going he knew not whither. The effect was inexpressibly depressing. But
a mile or two behind our lines all was animation, for here were
Battalion and Brigade Headquarters, all linked up by a network of field
telephones, which in turn communicated with Divisional Headquarters
farther back. Baskets of carrier-pigeons under the care of a pigeon
fancier, who figures in the Army List as a captain in the R.E., are kept
at these places for use in sudden emergency when the wires get destroyed
by shell-fire. The sappers must, I think, belong to the order of
Arachnidae; they appear to be able to spin telephone wires out of their
entrails at the shortest notice. Moreover, they possess an uncanny
adhesiveness, and a Signal Company man will leg up a tree with a coil of
wire on his arm and hang glutinously, suspended by his finger-tips,
while he enjoys the view. These acrobatic performances are sometimes
exchanged for equestrian feats. He has been known to lay cable for two
miles across country at a gallop with the cable-drum paying out lengths
of wire. The sapper is the "handy man" of the Army.
The location of these Headquarters on our side of the line is a constant
object of solicitude to the enemy on the other. Very few officers even
on our side know where they all are. I had confided to me, for the
purpose of my official duties, a complete list of such Headquarters,
and the first thing I did, in pursuance of my instructions, was to
commit it to memory and then burn it. To find out the enemy's H.Q.--with
a view to making them as unhealthy as possible--is almost entirely the
work of aeroplane reconnaissance. To discover the number and composition
of the units whose H.Q. they are is the work of our "Intelligence." Of
our Intelligence work the less said the better--by which I intend no
aspersion but quite the contrary. The work is extraordinarily effective,
but half its effectiveness lies in its secrecy. It is all done by an
elaborate process of induction. I should hesitate to say that the "I"
officers discover the location of the H.Q. of captured Germans by a
geological analysis of the mud on the soles of their boots, in the
classical manner of Sherlock Holmes; but I should be equally indisposed
to deny it. There is nothing too trivial or insignificant to engage the
detective faculties of an "I" man. He has to allow a wide margin for the
probability of error in his calculations; shoulder-straps, for example,
are no longer conclusive data as to the composition of the enemy's
units, for the intelligent Hun has taken of late to forging
shoulder-straps with the same facility as he forges diplomatic
documents. Oral examination of prisoners has to be used with caution.
But there are other resources of which I shall say nothing. It is not
too much to say, however, that we have now a pretty complete
comprehension of the strength, composition, and location of most German
brigades on the Western front. Possibly the Germans have of ours. One
thing is certain. Any one who has seen the way in which an Intelligence
staff builds up its data will not be inclined to criticise our military
authorities for what may seem to an untutored mind a mere affectation of
mystery about small things. In war it is never safe to say _De minimis
non curatur_.
If "I" stands for the Criminal Investigation Department (and the study
of the Hun may be legitimately regarded as a department of criminology)
the Provost-Marshal and his staff may be described as a kind of
Metropolitan Police. The P.M. and his A.P.M.'s are the _Censores Morum_
of the occupied towns, just as the Camp Commandants are the _Aediles_.
It is the duty of an A.P.M. to round up stragglers, visit _estaminets_,
keep a cold eye on brothels, look after prisoners, execute the sentences
of courts-martial, and control street traffic. Which means that he is
more feared than loved. He is never obtrusive but he is always there. I
remarked once when lunching with a certain A.P.M. that although I had
already been three weeks at G.H.Q., and had driven through his
particular district daily, I had never once been stopped or questioned
by his police. "No," he said quietly, "they reported you the first day
two minutes after you arrived in your car, and asked for instructions;
we telephoned to G.H.Q. and found you were attached to the A.G.'s staff,
and they received orders accordingly. Otherwise you might have had quite
a lively time at X----," which was the next stage of my journey. G.H.Q.
itself is patrolled by a number of Scotland Yard men, remarkable for
their self-effacing habits and their modest preference for dark
doorways. Indeed it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a
needle than to get into that town--or out of it. As for the "Society
ladies," of whom one hears so much, I never saw one of them. If they
were there they must have been remarkably disguised, and none of us knew
anything of them. A conversational lesson in French or English may be
had gratuitously by any Englishman or Frenchman who tries to get into
G.H.Q.; as he approaches the town he will find a French sentry on the
left and an English sentry on the right, the one with a bayonet like a
needle, the other with a bayonet like a table-knife, and each of them
takes an immense personal interest in you and is most anxious to assist
you in perfecting your idiom. They are students of phonetics, too, in
their way, and study your gutturals with almost pedantic affection for
traces of Teutonisms. If the sentry thinks you are not getting on with
your education he takes you aside like Joab, and smites you under the
fifth rib--at least I suppose he does. If he is satisfied he brings his
right hand smartly across the butt of his rifle, and by that masonic
sign you know that you will do. But it is a mistake to continue the
conversation.
Still, holders of authorised passes sometimes lose them, and
unauthorised persons sometimes get hold of them and "convert" them to
their own unlawful uses. The career of these adventurers is usually as
brief as it is inglorious; when apprehended they are handed over to the
French authorities, and the place that knew them knows them no more.
They are shot into some mysterious _oubliette_. The rest is silence, or,
as a mediaeval chronicler would say, "Let him have a priest."
We have taught the inhabitants of Flanders and Artois three things: one,
to sing "Tipperary"; two, to control their street traffic; and three, to
flush their drains. The spectacle of the military police on point duty
agitatedly waving little flags like a semaphore in the middle of narrow
and congested street corners was at first a source of great
entertainment to the inhabitants, who appeared to think it was a kind of
performance thoughtfully provided by the Staff for their delectation.
Their applause was quite disconcerting. It all so affected the mind of
one good lady at H---- that she used to rush out into the street every
time she saw a motor-lorry coming and make uncouth gestures with her
arms and legs, to the no small embarrassment of the supply columns, the
confusion of the military police, and the unconcealed delight of our
soldiers, who regard the latter as their natural enemy. Gentle
remonstrances against such gratuitous assistance were of no avail, and
eventually she was handed over to the French authorities for an inquiry
into the state of her mind.
Drains are looked after by the Camp Commandant, assisted by the sanitary
section of the R.A.M.C. It is an unlovely duty. I am not sure that the
men in the trenches are not better off in this respect than the
unfortunate members of the Staff who are supposed to live on the fat of
the land in billets. In the trenches there are easy methods of disposing
of "waste products"; along some portion of the French front, where the
lines are very close together, the favourite method, so I have been
told, is to hurl the buckets at the enemy, accompanied by extremely
uncomplimentary remarks. In the towns where we are billeted public
hygiene is a neglected study, and the unfortunate Camp Commandants have
to get sewage pumps from England and vast quantities of chloride of
lime. Fatigue parties do the rest.
The C.C. has, however, many other things to do.
Finding my office unprovided with a fire shovel, I wrote a "chit" to the
C.C.:
Mr. M. presents his compliments to the Camp Commandant, and would
be greatly obliged if he would kindly direct that a shovel be
issued to his office.
A laconic message came back by my servant:
No. 105671A. The Camp Commandant presents his compliments to
--------- Mr. M., and begs to inform him that he is not an
2 ironmonger. The correct procedure is for Mr. M.
to direct his servant to purchase a shovel and to send in the
account to the C.C., by whom it will be discharged.
The Commandant, quite needlessly, apologised to me afterwards for his
reply, explaining mournfully that the whole staff appeared to be under
the impression that he was a kind of Harrods' Stores. He could supply
desks and tables--the sappers are amazingly efficient at turning them
out at the shortest notice--and he could produce stationery, but he drew
the line at ironmongery. But his principal task is to let lodgings.
The Q.M.G. and his satellites, who are the universal providers of the
Army, have already been described. Their waggons are known as
"transports of delight," and they can supply you with anything from a
field-dressing to a toothbrush, and from an overcoat to a cake of soap.
And as the Q.M.G. is concerned with goods, the A.G. is preoccupied with
men. He makes up drafts as a railway transport officer makes up trains,
and can tell you the location of every unit from a brigade to a
battalion. Also, he and his deputy assistants make up casualty lists. It
is expeditiously done; each night's casualty list contains the names of
all casualties among officers up till noon of the day on which it is
made out. (The lists of the men, which are, of course, a much bigger
affair, are made up at the Base.) The task is no light one--the
transposition of an initial or the attribution of a casualty to a wrong
battalion may mean gratuitous sorrow and anxiety in some distant home in
England. And there is the mournful problem of the "missing," the
agonised letters from those who do not know whether those they love are
alive or dead.
It is only right to say that everything that can possibly be done is
done to trace such cases. More than that, the graves of fallen officers
and men are carefully located and registered by a Graves Registry
Department, with an officer of field rank in charge of it. Those graves
lie everywhere; I have seen them in the flower-bed of a château used as
the H.Q. of an A.D.M.S.; they are to be found by the roadside, in the
curtilage of farms, and on the outskirts of villages. The whole of the
Front is one vast cemetery--a "God's Acre" hallowed by prayers if
unconsecrated by the rites of the Church. The French Government has
shown a noble solicitude for the feelings of the bereaved, and a Bill
has been submitted to the Chamber of Deputies for the expropriation of
every grave with a view to its preservation.
The Deputy Judge-Advocate-General and his representatives with the
Armies are legal advisers to the Staff in the proceedings of
courts-martial. The Judge-Advocate attends every trial and coaches the
Court in everything, from the etiquette of taking off your cap when you
are taking the oath to the duty of rejecting "hearsay." He never
prosecutes--that is always the task of some officer specially assigned
for the purpose--but he may "sum up." Officers are not usually familiar
with the mysteries of the Red Book,[29] however much they may know of
the King's Regulations; and a Court requires careful watching. One
Judge-Advocate whom I knew, who was as zealous as he was conscientious,
instituted a series of Extension lectures for officers on the subject of
Military Law, and used to discourse calmly on the admissibility and
inadmissibility of evidence in the most "unhealthy" places. Speaking
with some knowledge of such matters, I should say that court-martial
proceedings are studiously fair to the accused, and, all things
considered, their sentences do not err on the side of severity. Even the
enemy is given the benefit of the doubt. There was a curious instance of
this. A wounded Highlander, finding himself, on arrival at one of the
hospitals, cheek by jowl with a Prussian, leapt from his bed and "went
for" the latter, declaring his intention to "do him in," as he had, he
alleged, seen him killing a wounded British soldier in the field. There
was a huge commotion, the two were separated, and the Judge-Advocate was
fetched to take the soldier's evidence. The evidence of identification
was, however, not absolutely conclusive--one Prussian guardsman is
strangely like another. The Prussian therefore got the benefit of the
doubt.
The prisoner gets all the assistance he may require from a "prisoner's
friend" if he asks for one, and the prosecutor never presses a
charge--he merely unfolds it. Moreover, officers are pretty good judges
of character, and if the accused meets the charge fairly and squarely,
justice will be tempered with mercy. I remember the case of a young
subaltern at the Base who was charged with drunkenness. His defence was
as straightforward as it was brief:
I had just been ordered up to the Front. So I stood my friends a
dinner; I had a bottle of Burgundy, two liqueurs, and a brandy and
soda, and--I am just nineteen.
This ingenuous plea in confession and avoidance pleased the Court. He
got off with a reprimand.
The _liaison_ officers deserve a chapter to themselves. Their name alone
is so endearing. Their mission is not, as might be supposed, to promote
_mariages de convenance_ between English Staff officers and French
ladies, but to transmit billets-doux between the two Armies and,
generally, to promote the amenities of military intercourse. As a rule
they are charming fellows, chosen with a very proper eye to their
personal qualities as well as their proficiency in the English language.
Among them I met a Count belonging to one of the oldest families in
France, an Oriental scholar of European reputation, and a Professor of
English literature. The younger ones studied our peculiarities with the
most ingratiating zeal, and one of them, in particular, played and sang
"Tipperary" with masterly technique at an uproarious tea-party in a
_pâtisserie_ at Bethune. Also they smoothed over little
misunderstandings about _délits de chasse_, gently forbore to smile at
our French, and assisted in the issue of the _laisser-passer_. Doubtless
they performed many much more weighty and mysterious duties, but I only
speak of what I know. To me they were more than kind; they gave me
introductions to their families when I went on official visits to Paris
and to the French lines; zealously assisted me to hunt down evidence,
and sometimes accompanied me on my tour of investigation. Among the many
agreeable memories I cherish of the _camaraderie_ at G.H.Q. the
recollection of their constant kindness and courtesy is not the least.
One word before I leave the subject of the Staff. There has been of late
a good deal of pestilential gossip by luxurious gentlemen at home about
the Staff and its work. It is, they say, very bad--mostly beer and
skittles. I have already referred to these charges elsewhere; here I
will only add one word. A Staff is known by its chief. He it is who sets
the pace. During the time I was attached to it, the G.H.Q. Staff had two
chiefs in succession. The first was a brilliant soldier of high
intellectual gifts, now chief of the Imperial Staff at home, who,
although embarrassed by indifferent health, worked at great pressure
night and day. His successor at G.H.Q. is a man of stupendous energy,
commanding ability, and great force of character, who has risen from the
ranks to the great position he now holds. By their chiefs ye shall know
them. Under such as these there was and is no room for the "slacker" at
G.H.Q. He got short shrift. There were very few of that undesirable
species at G.H.Q., and as soon as they were discovered they were sent
home. I sometimes wonder whether one could not trace, if it were worth
while (which it isn't), these ignoble slanders to their origin in the
querulous lamentations of these deported gentlemen, whence they have
percolated into Parliamentary channels. But it really isn't worth while.
The public has, I believe, taken the thing at its true valuation. In
plain speech it is "all rot."
NOTE.--The last paragraph was written before the recent changes at
G.H.Q. and at the War Office, but the reader will not need any
assistance in the identification of the two distinguished Chiefs of
Staff here referred to.--J.H.M.
FOOTNOTES:
[28] The writer's experience of the trenches is described in some detail
in Chapter VIII.
[29] _The Manual of Military Law_.
XXX
HOME AGAIN
Sykes had finished packing my kit and had succeeded with some difficulty
in re-establishing the truth of the axiom that a whole is greater than
its parts. When I contemplated my valise and its original constituents,
it seemed to me that the parts would prove greater than the whole, and I
had in despair abandoned the problem to Sykes. He succeeded, as he
always did. One of the first things that an officer's servant learns is
that, as regards the regulation Field Service allowance of luggage,
nothing succeeds like excess.
Sykes had not only stowed away my original impedimenta but had also
managed to find room for various articles of _vertu_ which had enriched
my private collection, to wit:
(1) One Bavarian bayonet of Solingen steel.
(2) Two German time-fuses with fetishistic-looking brass heads.
(3) A clip of German cartridges with the bullets villainously
reversed.
(4) A copper loving-cup--_i.e._, an empty shell-case presented to
me with a florid speech by Major S---- on behalf of the ----th
Battery of the R.F.A.
(5) An autograph copy of _The Green Curve_ bestowed on me by my
friend "Ole Luk-Oie" (to whom long life and princely royalties).
(6) The sodden Field Note-book of a dead Hun given me by Major
C---- of the Intelligence, with a graceful note expressing the hope
that, as a man of letters, I would accept this gift of
_belles-lettres_.
(7) A duplicate of a certain priceless "chit" about the uses of
Ammonal[30] (original very scarce, and believed to be in the
muniment-room of the C.-in-C., who is said to contemplate putting
it up to auction at Sotheby's for the benefit of the Red Cross
Fund).
(8) An autograph copy of a learned Essay on English political
philosophers presented to me by the author, one of the _liaison_
officers, who in the prehistoric times of peace was a University
professor at Avignon.
(9) A cigarette-case (Army pattern), of the finest Britannia metal,
bestowed on me with much ceremony by a Field Ambulance at Bethune,
and prized beyond rubies and fine gold.
(10) A pair of socks knitted by Jeanne.[31]
To these Madame[32] had added her visiting-card--it was nearly as big
as the illuminated address presented to me by the electors of a Scottish
constituency which I once wooed and never won--wherewith she reminded me
that my billet at No. 131 rue Robert le Frisson would always be waiting
for me, the night-light burning as for a prodigal son, and steam up in
the hot-water bottle.
I had said my farewells the night before to the senior officers on the
Staff, in particular that distinguished soldier and gallant gentleman
the A.G., to whose staff I had been attached (in more senses than one),
and who had treated me with a kindness and hospitality I can never
forget. The senior officers had done me the honour of expressing a hope
that I should soon return; their juniors had expressed the same
sentiments less formally and more vociferously by an uproarious song at
their mess overnight.