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I was at Harlech when war was declared; I decided to enlist a day or two later. In the first place, though only a very short war was expected—two or three months at the very outside—I thought that it might last just long enough to delay my going to Oxford in October, which I dreaded. I did not work out the possibilities of being actively engaged in the war. I thought that it would mean garrison service at home while the regular forces were away. In the second place, I entirely believed that France and England had been drawn into a war which they had never contemplated and for which they were entirely unprepared. It never occurred to me that newspapers and statesmen could lie. I forgot my pacifism—I was ready to believe the worst of the Germans. I was outraged to read of the cynical violation of Belgian neutrality. I wrote a poem promising vengeance for Louvain. I discounted perhaps twenty per cent, of the atrocity details as war-time exaggeration. That was not, of course, enough. Recently I saw the following contemporary newspaper cuttings quoted somewhere in chronological sequence:
‘When the fall of Antwerp got known the church bells were rung’ (i.e. at Cologne and elsewhere in Germany).—Kölnische Zeitung.
‘According to the Kölnische Zeitung, the clergy of Antwerp were compelled to ring the church bells when the fortress was taken.’—Le Matin (Paris.)
‘According to what The Times has heard from Cologne, via Paris, the unfortunate Belgian priests who refused to ring the church bells when Antwerp was taken have been sentenced to hard labour.’—Carriere della Sera (Milan.)
‘According to information to the Carriere della Sera from Cologne, via London, it is confirmed that the barbaric conquerors of Antwerp punished the unfortunate Belgian priests for their heroic refusal to ring the church bells by hanging them as living clappers to the bells with their heads down.’—Le Matin (Paris.)
When I was in the trenches a few months later I happened to belong to a company mess in which four of us young officers out of five had, by a coincidence, either German mothers or naturalized German fathers. One of them said: ‘Of course I’m glad I joined when I did. If I’d put it off for a month or two they’d have accused me of being a German spy. As it is I have an uncle interned at Alexandra Palace, and my father’s only been allowed to retain the membership of his golf club because he has two sons in the trenches.’ I said: ‘Well, I have three or four uncles sitting somewhere opposite, and a number of cousins too. One of my uncles is a general. But that’s all right. I don’t brag about them. I only advertise the uncle who is a British admiral commanding at the Nore.’
Among my enemy relatives was my cousin Conrad, who was the same age as myself, and the son of the German consul at Zurich. In January 1914 I had gone ski-ing with him between the trees in the woods above the city. We had tobogganed together down the Dolderstrasse in Zurich itself, where the lampposts were all sandbagged and family toboggans, skidding broadside on at the turns, were often crashed into by single-seater skeletons; arms and legs were broken by the score and the crowds thought it a great joke. Conrad served with a crack Bavarian regiment all through the war, and won the ‘Pour le Mérite’ Order, which was more rarely awarded than the British Victoria Cross. He was killed by the Bolsheviks after the war in a village on the Baltic where he had been sent to make requisitions. He was a gentle, proud creature, whose chief interest was natural history. He used to spend hours in the woods studying the habits of wild animals; he felt strongly against shooting them. Perhaps the most outstanding military feat was that of an uncle who was dug out at the age of sixty or so as a lieutenant in the Bavarian artillery. My youngest brother met him a year or two ago and happened to mention that he was going to visit Rheims. My uncle nudged him: ‘Have a look at the cathedral. I was there with my battery in the war. One day the divisional general came up to me and said: “Lieutenant, I understand that you are a Lutheran, not a Catholic?” I said that this was so. Then he said: “I have a very disagreeable service for you to perform, Lieutenant. Those misbegotten swine, the French, are using the cathedral for an observation post. They think they can get away with it because it’s Rheims Cathedral, but this is war and they have our trenches taped from there. So I call upon you to dislodge them.” I only needed to fire two rounds and down came the pinnacle and the Frenchmen with it. It was a very neat bit of shooting. I was proud to have limited the damage like that. Really, you must go and have a look at it.’
The nearest regimental depot was at Wrexham: the Royal Welch Fusiliers. The Harlech golf secretary suggested my taking a commission instead of enlisting. He rang up the adjutant and said that I was a public-school boy who had been in the Officers’ Training Corps at Charterhouse. So the adjutant said: ‘Send him right along,’ and on 11th August I started my training. I immediately became a hero to my family. My mother, who said to me: ‘My race has gone mad,’ regarded my going as a religious act; my father was proud that I had ‘done the right thing.’ I even recovered, for a time, the respect of my uncle, C. L. Graves, of The Spectator and Punch, with whom I had recently had a tiff. He had given me a sovereign tip two terms previously and I had written my thanks, saying that with it I had bought Samuel Butler’s Note Books, The Way of All Flesh and the two Erewhons. To my surprise this had infuriated him.
The fellows who applied for commissions at the same time as myself were for the most part boys who had recently failed to pass into the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, and were trying to get into the regular army by the old militia door—which was now known as the Special Reserve. There were only one or two fellows who had gone into the army, like myself, for the sake of the war and not for the sake of a career. There were about a dozen of us recruit officers on the Square learning to drill and be drilled. My Officers’ Training Corps experience made this part easy, but I knew nothing about army traditions and made all the worst mistakes; saluting the bandmaster, failing to recognize the colonel when in mufti, walking in the street without a belt and talking shop in the mess. But I soon learned to conform. My greatest difficulty was to talk to men of the company to which I was posted with the necessary air of authority. Many of them were old soldiers re-enlisted, and I disliked bluffing that I knew more than they did. There were one or two very old soldiers employed on the depot staff, wearing the ribbon of Burma, 1885, and of even earlier campaigns, and usually also the ribbon of the ‘Rooti’ or good service medal awarded for eighteen years of undetected crime. There was one old fellow called Jackie Barrett, a Kipling character, of whom it was said: ‘There goes Jackie Barrett. He and his mucking-in chum deserted the regiment in Quetta and went across the north-west frontier on foot. Three months later he gave himself up as a deserter to the British consul at Jerusalem. He buried his chum by the way.’
I was on the square only about three weeks before being sent off on detachment duty to Lancaster to a newly-formed internment camp for enemy aliens. The camp was a disused wagon-works near the river, a dirty, draughty place, littered with old scrap-metal and guarded with high barbed-wire fences. There were about three thousand prisoners already there and more and more piled in every day; seamen arrested on German vessels in Liverpool harbour, waiters from big hotels in the north, an odd German band or two, harmless German commercial travellers and shopkeepers. The prisoners were resentful at being interned, particularly those who were married and had families and had lived peaceably in England for years. The only comfort that we could give was that they were safer inside than out; anti-German feeling was running high, shops with German names were continually being raided and even German women were made to feel that they were personally responsible for the Belgian atrocities. Besides, we said, if they were in Germany they would be forced into the army. At this time we made a boast of our voluntary system. We did not know that there would come a time when these internees would be bitterly envied by forcibly-enlisted Englishmen because they were safe until the war ended.
In the summer of 1915 The Times reprinted in the daily column, Through German Eyes, a German newspaper account by Herr Wolff, an exchanged prisoner, of his experiences at Lancaster in 1914. The Times found very amusing Herr Wolff’s allegations that he and forty other waiters from the Midland Hotel, Manchester, had been arrested and taken, handcuffed and fettered, in special railway carriages to Lancaster under the escort of fifty Manchester policemen armed with carbines. But it was true, because I was the officer who took them over from the chief inspector. He was a fine figure in frogged uniform and gave me a splendid salute. I signed him a receipt for his prisoners and he gave me another salute. He had done his job well and was proud of it. The only mishap was the accidental breaking of two carriage windows by the slung carbines. Wolff also said that even children were interned in the camp. This was true. There were a dozen or so little boys from the German bands who had been interned because it seemed more humane to keep them with their friends than to send them to a workhouse. Their safety in the camp caused the commandant great concern.
I had a detachment of fifty Special Reservists, most of them with only about six weeks’ service. They had joined the army just before war started as a cheap way of getting a holiday at the training camp; to find themselves forced to continue beyond the usual fortnight annoyed them. They were a rough lot, Welshmen from the border counties, and were constantly deserting and having to be fetched back by the police. They made nervous sentries, and were probably more frightened of the prisoners than the prisoners were of them. Going the round of sentries on a dark night about 2 a.m. was dangerous. Very often my lantern used to blow out and I would fumble to light it again in the dark and hear the frightened voice of a sentry roar out, ‘Halt! Who goes there?’ and know that he was standing with his rifle aimed and his magazine charged with five live rounds. I used to gasp out the password just in time. Rifles were often being fired off at shadows. The prisoners were a rowdy lot; the sailors particularly were always fighting. I saw a prisoner spitting out teeth and blood one morning. I asked him what was wrong. ‘Oh, sir, one no-good friend give me one clap on the chops.’ Frequent deputations were sent to complain of the dullness of the food; it was the same ration food that was served to the troops. But after a while they realized the war and settled down to sullen docility; they started hobbies and glee parties and games and plans for escape. I had far more trouble with my men. They were always breaking out of their quarters. I could never find out how they did it. I watched all the possible exits, but caught no one. Finally I discovered that they used to crawl out through a sewer. They boasted of their successes with the women. Private Kirby said to me: ‘Do you know, sir? On the Sunday after we arrived, all the preachers in Lancaster took as their text, “Mothers, take care of your daughters; the Royal Welch have come to town.”’
The camp staff consisted of:
A fatherly colonel of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, the commandant.
His secretary, by name C. B. Gull, one of the best-known pre-war figures in Oxford, owner of the Isis, and combined divinity, athletics and boxing coach. We used to box together to keep fit. He also sponsored me as a candidate for the local lodge of The Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes. The Grand Marshal who officiated at my initiation had drank four or five pints of ‘bitter-gatter’ and a glass or two of ‘juniper’ (these were secret words) and continually short-circuited in the ritual. He kept on returning to the part where they intone:
Grand Marshal: Spirit of true Buffaloism hover around I us!
Response: Benevolence and joy ever attend us!
The assistant-commandant, who alleged that he had ten years more seniority than any other major in the British army and made wistful jokes about his lost virility. His recurrent theme was: ‘If you only knew how much that would mean to an old man like me.’
The adjutant, an East Lancashire lieutenant, by name Deane. The day after war was declared a German armed cruiser had held up the neutral liner in which he was sailing home from the Cape and taken him off. He was forced to give his parole not to fight against Germany in the war. The cruiser was subsequently sunk by a British ship, the Highflyer, and Deane was rescued; but the signed parole was saved by the German captain, who escaped in a boat and gave it in charge of the German consul at Las Palmas. So Deane was forbidden the trenches, and when I met him in 1917 he was a staff-colonel.
A doctor who was the mess buffoon. I broke the scabbard of my sword on his back one night.
The interpreter, a Thomas Cook man who could speak every European language but Basque. He admitted to a weakness in Lithuanian, and when asked what his own nationality was would answer, ‘I am Wagon-Lits.’
I had an inconvenient accident. The telephone bell was constantly going from Western Command Headquarters; it was installed in an office-room where I slept on a sloping desk. One night Pack-Saddle (the code-name for the Chief Supply Officer of the Western Command) rang up shortly after midnight with orders for the commandant. They were about the rationing of a batch of four hundred prisoners who were being sent up to him from Chester and North Wales. I was half asleep and not clever at the use of the telephone. In the middle of the conversation, which was difficult because a storm was going on at the time and Pack-Saddle was irritable, the line was, I suppose, struck by lightning somewhere. I got a bad electric shock, and was unable to use a telephone properly again until some twelve years later.
Guarding prisoners seemed an unheroic part to be playing in the war, which had now reached a critical stage; I wanted to be abroad fighting. My training had been interrupted, and I knew that even when I was recalled from detachment duty I would have to wait a month or two at least before being sent out. When I got back to the depot in October I found myself stale. The adjutant, a keen soldier, decided that there were two things wrong with me. First of all, I dressed badly. I had apparently gone to the wrong tailor, and had also had a soldier-servant palmed off on me who was no good. He did not polish my buttons and shine my belt and boots as he should have done, and neglected me generally; as I had never had a valet before I did not know how to manage him or what to expect of him. The adjutant finally summoned me to the Orderly Room and threatened that he would not send me to France until I had entirely overhauled my wardrobe and looked more like a soldier. My company commander, he said, had reported me to him as ‘unsoldierlike and a nuisance.’ This put me in a fix, because my pay only just covered the mess bills, and I knew that I could not ask my parents to buy me another outfit so soon after I had assured them that I had everything necessary. The adjutant next decided that I was not a sportsman. This was because on the day that the Grand National (I think) was run all the young officers applied for leave to see the race except myself, and I volunteered to take the job of Orderly Officer of the Day for someone who wanted to go.
I saw my contemporaries one by one being sent out to France to take the place of casualties in the First and Second Battalions, while I remained despondently at the depot. But once more boxing was useful. Johnny Basham, a sergeant in the regiment, was training at the time for his fight (which he won) with Boswell for the Lonsdale Belt, welter-weight. I went down to the training camp one evening, where Basham was offering to fight three rounds with any member of the regiment, the more the merrier. One of the officers put on the gloves and Basham got roars of laughter from the crowd as soon as he had taken his opponent’s measure, by dodging about and playing the fool with him. I asked Basham’s manager if I could have a go. He gave me a pair of shorts and I stepped into the ring. I pretended that I knew nothing about boxing. I led off with my right and moved about clumsily. Basham saw a chance of getting another laugh; he dropped his guard and danced about with a you-can’t-hit-me challenge. I caught him off his balance and knocked him across the ring. He recovered and went for me, but I managed to keep on my feet; I laughed at him and he laughed too. We had three very brisk rounds, and he was decent in making it seem that I was a much better boxer than I was by accommodating his pace to mine. As soon as the adjutant heard the story he rang me up at my billet and told me that he was very pleased to hear of my performance, that for an officer to box like that was a great encouragement to the men, that he was mistaken about my sportsmanship, and that to show his appreciation he had put me down for a draft to go to France in a week’s time.
Of the officers who had been sent out before me several had already been killed or wounded. Among the killed was Second-Lieutenant W. G. Gladstone, whom we called Glad Eyes. He was in his early thirties; a grandson of old Gladstone, whom he resembled in feature, a Liberal M.P., and lord-lieutenant of his county. When war was hanging in the balance he had declared himself against it. His Hawarden tenantry were ashamed on his account, and threatened, he told us, to duck him in the pond. Realizing, once war was declared, that further protest was useless, he immediately joined the regiment as a second-lieutenant. His political convictions remained. He was a man of great integrity and refused to take the non-combative employment as a staff-colonel offered him at Whitehall. When he went to France to the First Battalion he took no care of himself. He was killed by a sniper when unnecessarily exposing himself. His body was brought home for a military funeral at Hawarden; I attended it.
I have one or two random memories of this training period at Wrexham. The landlord of my billet was a Welsh solicitor, who greatly overcharged us while pretending amicability. He wore a wig—or, to be more exact, he had three wigs, with hair of progressive lengths. When he had worn the medium-sized hair for a few days he would put on the wig with long hair, and say that, dear him, it was time to get a hair-cut. Then he would go out of the house and in a public lavatory perhaps or a wayside copse would change into the short-haired wig, which he wore until it was time to change to the medium one again. This deception was only discovered when one of the officers billeted with me got drunk and raided his bedroom. This officer, whose name was Williams, was an extreme example of the sly border Welshman. The drunker he got the more shocking his confessions. He told me one day about a girl he had got engaged to in Dublin, and even slept with on the strength of a diamond engagement ring. ‘Only paste really,’ he said. The day before the wedding she had had a foot cut off by a Dalkey tram, and he had hurriedly left the city. ‘But, Graves, she was a lovely, lovely girl before that happened.’ He had been a medical student at Trinity College, Dublin. Whenever he went to Chester, the nearest town, to pick up a prostitute, he not only used to appeal to her patriotism to charge him nothing, but he always gave her my name. I knew of this because these women used to write to me. One day I said to him in mess: ‘In future you are going to be distinguished from all the other Williams’ in the regiment by being called Dirty Williams.’ The name stuck. By one shift or another he escaped all trench-service except for a short spell in a quiet sector, and lasted the war out safely.
Private Robinson. He was from Anglesey, and had joined the Special Reserve before the war for his health. In September the entire battalion volunteered for service overseas except Robinson. He said he would not go, and that he could be neither coaxed nor bullied. Finally he was brought before the colonel, who was genuinely puzzled at his obstinacy. Robinson explained that he was not afraid. ‘I have a wife and pigs at home.’ The battalion was, in September, rigged out in a temporary navy-blue uniform until khaki might be available. All but Robinson. They decided to shame him. So he continued, by order, to wear the peace-time scarlet tunic and blue trousers with a red stripe; a very dirty scarlet tunic (they had put him on the kitchen staff). His mates called him Cock Robin and sang a popular chorus at him:
But Robinson did not care:
So in October he was discharged as medically unfit: ‘Of under-developed intelligence, unlikely to be of service in His Majesty’s Forces,’ and went home to his wife and pigs. While, of the singers, those who survived Festubert in the following May did not survive Loos in the following September.
Recruit officers spent a good deal of their time at Company and Battalion Orderly Room, learning how to deal with crime. Crime, of course, meant any breach of army regulations; and there was plenty of it. In these days Battalion Orderly Room would last four or five hours every day, at the rate of one crime dealt with every three or four minutes.; This was apart from the scores of less serious offences tried by company commanders. The usual Battalion Orderly Room crimes were desertion, refusing to obey an order, using obscene language to a non-commissioned officer, drunk and disorderly, robbing a comrade, and so on. On pay-nights there was hardly a man sober; and no attention was paid so long as there was silence as soon as the company officer came on his rounds just before Lights Out. (Two years later serious crime had diminished to a twentieth of that amount, though the battalion was treble its original strength, and though many of the cases that the company officers had dealt with summarily now came before the colonel; and there was practically no drunkenness.)
There was a boy called Taylor in my company. He had been at Lancaster, and I had bought him a piccolo to play when the detachment went out on route-marches; he would give us one tune after another for mile after mile. The other fellows carried his pack and rifle. At Wrexham, on pay-nights, he used to sit in the company billet, which was a drill-hall near the station, and play jigs for the drunks to dance to. He never drank himself. The music was slow at first, but he gradually quickened it until he worked them into a frenzy. He would delay this climax until my arrival with the company orderly-sergeant. The sergeant would fling open the door and bellow: ‘F Company, Attention!’ Taylor would break off, thrust the piccolo under his blankets, and spring to his feet. The drunks were left frozen in the middle of their capers, blinking stupidly.
In the first Battalion Orderly Room that I attended I was surprised to hear a private soldier charged with a nursery offence, about the committal of which expert evidence was given and heard without a smile. I have an accurate record of the trial but my publishers advise me not to give it here.
Orderly Room always embarrassed and dispirited me. I never got used to it even after sentencing thousands of men myself. There was something shameful about it. The only change that the introduction of the civilian element into the army brought was that about half-way through the war an army order came out that henceforth the word of command was to be ‘Accused and escort, right turn, quick march,’ etc., instead of ‘Prisoner and escort, right turn, quick march, etc.’ It was only very seldom that an interesting case came up. Even the obscene language, always quoted verbatim, was drearily the same; the only variation I remember from the four stock words was in the case of a man charged with using threatening and obscene language to an N.C.O. The man had, it appeared, said to a lance-corporal who had a down on him: ‘Corporal Smith, two men shall meet before two mountains.’ Humour only came from the very Welsh Welshmen from the hills who had an imperfect command of English. One of them, charged with being absent off ceremonial parade and using obscene language to the sergeant, became very indignant in Orderly Room and cried out to the colonel: ‘Colonel, sir, sergeant tole me wass I for guard; I axed him no, and now the bloody bastard says wass I.’
The greatest number of simultaneous charges that I ever heard preferred against a soldier was in the case of Boy Jones at Liverpool in 1917. He was charged with, first, using obscene language to the bandmaster; the bandmaster, who was squeamish, reported it as: ‘Sir, he called me a double effing c——.’ Next, with breaking out of the detention that was awarded for this crime. Third, with ‘absenting himself from the regiment until apprehended in the Hindenburg Line, France.’ Fourth, with resisting an escort. Fifth, with being found in possession of regimental property of the Cheshire Regiment. Boy Jones, who was only fourteen and looked thirteen, had wriggled through the bars of his detention-cell and, after getting a few things together at his hut, had gone to Liverpool Exchange Station to wait for a victim. The victim was a private in a Bantam Battalion just returning to France from leave. He treated the bantam to a lot of drink and robbed him of his rifle, equipment, badges and papers. He then went off in his place. Arrived in France he was posted to the Bantam Battalion; but this did not suit him. He wanted to be with his own regiment. He deserted the Bantams, who were somewhere north of Arras, and walked south along the trenches looking for his regiment, having now resumed his proper badges. After a couple of days’ walk he found the Second Battalion and reported and was immediately sent home, though he had a struggle with the escort at the railhead. The punishment for all these offences was ten days confined to camp and a spanking from the bandmaster.
The most unusual charge was against the regimental goat-major (a corporal); it was first framed as Lese majesty, but this was later reduced to ‘disrespect to an officer: in that he, at Wrexham—on such and such a date—did prostitute the Royal Goat, being the gift of His Majesty the Colonel-in-Chief from His royal herd at Windsor, by offering his stud-services to ——, Esq., farmer and goat breeder, of Wrexham.’ The goat-major pleaded that he had done this out of kindness to the goat, to which he was much attached. He was reduced to the ranks and the charge of the goat given to another.
The regular battalions of the regiment, though officered mainly by Anglo-Welshmen of county families, did not normally contain more than about one Welshman in fifty in the ranks. They were mainly recruited in Birmingham. The only man at Harlech besides myself who had joined the regiment at the start was a poor boy, a golf-caddie, who had got into trouble a short time before for shoplifting. The chapels held soldiering to be sinful, and in Merioneth the chapels were supreme. Prayers were offered for me in the chapels, not because of the dangers I ran in the war, but because I was in the army. Later, Lloyd George persuaded the chapels that the war was a crusade. So there was a sudden tremendous influx of Welshmen from North Wales. They were difficult soldiers; they particularly resented having to stand still while the N.C.O.’s swore at them. A deputation of North Welshmen came to me once and said: ‘Captain Graves, sir, we do not like our sergeant-major; he do curse and he do swear, and he do drink, and he is a maan of lowly origin, too.’
At Wrexham we learned regimental history, drill, musketry, Boer War field-tactics, military law and organization, how to recognize bugle calls, how to work a machine-gun, and how to conduct ourselves as officers on formal occasions. We dug no trenches, handled no bombs and came to think of the company, not of the platoon, still less of the section, as the smallest independent tactical unit. There were only two wounded officers back from the front at the time; both had left the Second Battalion on the retreat from Mons. Neither would talk much of his experiences. All that one of them, Emu Jones, would tell us was: ‘The first queer sight I saw in France was three naked women hanging by their feet in a butcher’s shop.’ The other would say: ‘The shells knock hell out of a man, especially the big black ones. Just hell. And that fellow Emu; he wasn’t any good. We marched and marched and he had a weak heart and used to faint and expect his poor, bloody platoon to carry him as well as the rest of their load. We used to swear he was shamming. Don’t believe what old Emu tells you of the retreat.’