Good-bye to all that

Here are extracts from letters that I wrote at this time:

21st May 1915.—Back in billets again at a coal-mining village called La Bourse. It is not more than three miles and a half from the trenches, but the mines are still working. As we came out of the trenches the Germans were shelling the wood by Cambrin village, searching for one of our batteries. I don’t think they got it, but it was fun to see the poplar trees being lopped down like tulips when the whizz-bangs hit them square. When we marched along the pavé road from Cambrin the men straggled about out of step and out of fours. Their feet were sore from having had their boots on for a week—they only have one spare pair of socks issued to them. I enclose a list of their minimum load, which weighs about sixty pounds. A lot of extras get put on top of this—rations, pick or shovel, periscope, and their own souvenirs to take home on leave:

Well, anyhow, marching on cobbled roads is difficult, so when a staff-officer came by in a Rolls-Royce and cursed us for bad march-discipline I felt like throwing something at him. Trench soldiers hate the staff and the staff know it. The principal disagreement seems to be about the extent to which trench conditions should modify discipline. The La Bourse miners are old men and boys dressed in sloppy blue clothes with bulging pockets. There are shell craters all around the pit-head. I am billeted with a fatherly old man called Monsieur Hojdés, who has three marriageable daughters; one of them lifted up her skirt to show me a shell-wound on her thigh that laid her up last winter.

22nd May.—A colossal bombardment by the French at Souchez, a few miles away—continuous roar of artillery, coloured flares, shells bursting all along the ridge by Notre Dame de Lorette. I couldn’t sleep. It went on all night. Instead of dying away it grew and grew till the whole air rocked and shook; the sky was lit up with huge flashes. I lay in my feather bed and sweated. This morning they tell me there was a big thunderstorm in the middle of the bombardment. But, as Walker says: ‘Where the gunder ended and the thunder began was hard to say.’ The men had hot baths at the mines and cleaned up generally. Their rifles are all in an advanced state of disrepair and many of their clothes are in rags, but neither can be replaced, we are told, until they are much worse. The platoon is billeted in a barn full of straw. Old Burford, who is so old that he refuses to sleep with the other men of the platoon, has found a doss in an out-building among some farm tools. In trenches he will sleep on the fire-step even in the rain rather than in a warm dug-out with the other men. He says that he remembers the C.O. when he was in long skirts. Young Bumford is the only man he’ll talk to. The platoon is always ragging Bumford for his childish simplicity. Bumford plays up to it and begs them not to be too hard on ‘a lad from the hills.’

23rd May.—We did company drill in the morning. Afterwards Jones-Bateman and I lay on the warm grass and watched the aeroplanes flying above the trenches pursued by a trail of white shrapnel puffs. In the evening I was detailed to take out a working-party to Vermelles les Noyelles to work on a second line of defence—trench digging and putting up barbed wire under an R.E. officer. But the ground was hard and the men were tired out when they got back about two o’clock in the morning. They sang songs all the way home. They have one about Company Quartermaster-Sergeant Finnigan:

The chorus is:

Finnigan doesn’t mind the libel at all.

This is what happened the other day. Two young miners, in another company, disliked their sergeant, who had a down on them and gave them all the most dirty and dangerous jobs. When they were in billets he crimed them for things they hadn’t done. So they decided to kill him. Later they reported at Battalion Orderly Room and asked to see the adjutant. This was irregular, because a private is not allowed to speak to an officer without an N.C.O. of his own company to act as go-between. The adjutant happened to see them and said: ‘Well, what is it you want?’ Smartly slapping the small-of-the-butt of their sloped rifles they said: ‘We’ve come to report, sir, that we are very sorry but we’ve shot our company sergeant-major.’ The adjutant said: ‘Good heavens, how did that happen?’ They answered: ‘It was an accident, sir.’ ‘What do you mean? Did you mistake him for a German?’ ‘No, sir, we mistook him for our platoon sergeant.’ So they were both shot by a firing squad of their own company against the wall of a convent at Béthune. Their last words were the battalion rallying-cry: ‘Stick it, the Welsh!’ (They say that a certain Captain Haggard first used it in the battle of Ypres when he was mortally wounded.) The French military governor was present at the execution and made a little speech saying how gloriously British soldiers can die.

You would be surprised at the amount of waste that goes on in trenches. Ration biscuits are in general use as fuel for boiling up dixies, because fuel is scarce. Our machine-gun crews boil their hot water by firing off belt after belt of machine-gun ammunition at no particular target, just generally spraying the German line. After several pounds’ worth of ammunition has been used, the water in the guns—they are water-cooled—begins to boil. They say they make German ration and carrying parties behind the line pay for their early-morning cup of tea. But the real charge will be on income-tax after the war.

24th May.—To-morrow we return to trenches. The men are pessimistic but cheerful. They all talk about getting a ‘cushy’ one to send them back to ‘Blitey.’ Blitey is, it seems, Hindustani for ‘home.’ My servant, Fry, who works in a paper-bag factory at Cardiff in civil life, has been telling me stories about cushy ones. Here are two of them. ‘A bloke in the Munsters once wanted a cushy, so he waves his hand above the parapet to catch Fritz’s attention. Nothing doing. He waves his arms about for a couple of minutes. Nothing doing, not a shot. He puts his elbows on the fire-step, hoists his body upside down and waves his legs about till he get blood to the head. Not a shot did old Fritz fire. “Oh,” says the Munster man, “I don’t believe there’s a damn squarehead there. Where’s the German army to?” He has a peek over the top—crack! he gets it in the head. Finee.’ Another story: ‘Bloke in the Camerons wanted a cushy bad. Fed up and far from home, he was. He puts his hand over the top and gets his trigger finger taken off, and two more beside. That done the trick. He comes laughing through our lines by the old boutillery. “See, lads,” he says, “I’m aff to bony Scotland. Is it na a beauty?” But on the way down the trench to the dressing-station he forgets to stoop low where the old sniper was working. He gets it through the head too. Finee. We laugh fit to die.’

To get a cushy one is all that the old hands think of. Only twelve men have been with the battalion from the beginning and they are all transport men except one, Beaumont, a man in my platoon. The few old hands who went through the last fight infect the new men with pessimism; they don’t believe in the war, they don’t believe in the staff. But at least they would follow their officers anywhere, because the officers happen to be a decent lot. They look forward to a battle because a battle gives more chances of a cushy one, in the legs or arms, than trench warfare. In trench warfare the proportion of head wounds is much greater. Haking commands this division. He’s the man who wrote the standard textbook, Company Training. The last shows have not been suitable ones for company commanders to profit by his directions. He’s a decent man; he came round this morning to an informal inspection of the battalion and shook hands with the survivors. There were tears in his eyes. Sergeant Smith swore half-aloud: ‘Bloody lot of use that is, busts up his bloody division and then weeps over what’s bloody left.’ Well, it was nothing to do with me; I didn’t allow myself to feel either for the general or for the sergeant. It is said here that Haking has told General French that the division’s morale has gone completely. So far as I can see that is not accurate; the division will fight all right but without any enthusiasm. It is said too that when the new army comes out the division will be withdrawn and used on lines of communication for some months at least. I don’t believe it. I am sure no one will mind smashing up over and over again the divisions that are used to being smashed up. The general impression here is that the new-army divisions can’t be of much military use.

28th May.—In trenches among the Cuinchy brick-stacks. Not my idea of trenches. There has been a lot of fighting hereabouts. The trenches have made themselves rather than been made, and run inconsequently in and out of the big thirty-foot high stacks of brick; it is most confusing. The parapet of one of the trenches which we do not occupy is built up with ammunition-boxes and corpses. Everything here is wet and smelly. The lines are very close. The Germans have half the brick-stacks and we have the other half. Each side snipes down from the top of its brick-stacks into the other’s trenches. This is also a great place for rifle-grenades and trench-mortars. We can’t reply properly to these; we have only a meagre supply of rifle-grenades and nothing to equal the German sausage mortar bomb. This morning about breakfast time, just as I came out of my dug-out, a rifle-grenade landed within six feet of me. For some reason, instead of falling on its head and exploding, it landed with its stick in the wet clay and stood there looking at me. They are difficult to see coming; they are shot from a rifle, with its butt on the ground, tilted, and go up a long way before they turn over and come down. I can’t understand why this particular rifle-grenade fell as it did; the chances were impossibly against it.

Sausages are easy to see and dodge, but they make a terrible noise when they drop. We have had about ten casualties in our company to-day from them. I find that I have extraordinarily quick reactions to danger; but every one gets like that. We can sort out all the different explosions and disregard all the ones that don’t concern us—the artillery duel, machine-gun fire at the next company to us, desultory rifle-fire. But the faint plop! of the mortar that sends off the sausage or the muffled rifle noise when a grenade is fired, we pick out at once. The men are much afraid, yet always joking. The company sergeant-major stands behind Number Eleven brick-stack and shoots at the sausages with a rifle as they come over; trying to explode them in the air. He says that it’s better than pigeon-shooting. He hasn’t hit one yet. Last night a lot of stuff was flying about, including shrapnel. I heard one shell whish-whishing towards me. I dropped flat. It burst just over the trench. My ears sang as though there were gnats in them and a bright scarlet light shone over everything. My shoulder was twisted in falling and I thought I had been hit, but I hadn’t been. The vibration made my chest sing, too, in a curious way, and I lost my sense of equilibrium. I was much ashamed when the sergeant-major came along the trench and found me on all fours, because I couldn’t stand up straight. It was at a place where ‘Petticoat Lane’ runs into ‘Lowndes Square.’

There has been a dead man lying on the fire-step waiting to be taken down to the cemetery to-night. He was a sanitary-man, killed last night in the open while burying lavatory stuff between our front and support lines. His arm was stretched out and, when he was got in, it was still stiff, so that when they put him on the fire-step his stiff arm stretched right across the trench. His comrades joke as they push it out of the way to get by. ‘Out of the light, you old bastard. Do you own this bloody trench?’ Or they shake hands with him familiarly. ‘Put it there, Billy Boy.’ Of course, they’re miners and accustomed to death. They have a very limited morality, but they keep to it. They will, for instance, rob anyone, of anything, except a man in their own platoon; they will treat every stranger as an enemy until he is proved their friend, and then there is nothing they won’t do for him. They are lecherous, the young ones at least, but without the false shame of the English lecher. I had a letter to censor the other day written by a lance-corporal to his wife. He said that the French girls were nice to sleep with, so she mustn’t worry on his account, but that he far preferred sleeping with her and missed her a great deal.

6th June.—We have been billeted in Béthune, a fair-sized town about seven miles or so behind the front line. There is everything one wants, a swimming bath, all sorts of shops, especially a cake-shop, the best I’ve ever met, a hotel where you can get a really good dinner, and a theatre where we have brigade ‘gaffs.’ I saw a notice this morning on a building by the Béthune-La Bassée canal—‘Troops are forbidden to bomb fish. By order of the Town Major.’ Béthune is very little knocked about, except a part called Faubourg d’Arras, near the station. I am billeted with a family called Averlant Paul, in the Avenue de Bruay, people of the official class. They are refugees from Poimbert. There are two little boys and an elder sister, who is in what corresponds with the under-fifth of the local high-school. She was worried last night over her lessons and asked me to help her write out the theory of decimal division. She showed me the notes she had taken; they were full of abbreviations. I asked why she’d used abbreviations. She said: ‘The lady professor talked very fast because we were much hurried.’ ‘Why were you hurried?’ ‘Oh, because part of the school is used as a billet for the troops and the Germans were shelling it, and we were always having to take shelter in the cellar, and when we came back each time there was less and less time left.’

9th June.—I am beginning to realize how lucky I was in my gentle introduction to the trenches at Cambrin. We are now in a nasty salient a little to the south of the brick-stacks, where casualities are always heavy. The company had seventeen casualities yesterday from bombs and grenades. The front trench averages thirty yards from the Germans. To-day, at one part, which is only twenty yards away from an occupied German sap, I came along whistling The Farmer’s Boy, to keep up my spirits, when suddenly I saw a group bending over a man lying at the bottom of the trench. He was making a snoring noise mixed with animal groans. At my feet was the cap he had worn, splashed with his brains. I had never seen human brains before; I had somehow regarded them as a poetical figment. One can joke with a badly-wounded man and congratulate him on being out of it. One can disregard a dead man. But even a miner can’t make a joke that sounds like a joke over a man who takes three hours to die after the top part of his head has been taken off by a bullet fired at twenty yards range. Beaumont, of whom I told you in my last letter, was also killed. He was the last unwounded survivor of the original battalion, except for the transport men. He had his legs blown against his back. Every one was swearing angrily, then an R.E. officer came up and told me that there was a tunnel driven under the German front line and that if we wanted to do a bit of bombing, now was the time. So he sent the mine up—it was not a big one, he said, but it made a tremendous noise and covered us with dirt—and the chaps waited for a few seconds for the other Germans to rush up to help the wounded away and then they chucked all the bombs they had.

Beaumont had been telling me how he had won about five pounds in the sweepstake after the Rue du Bois show. It was a sweepstake of the sort that leaves no bitterness behind it. Before a show the platoon pools all its available cash and the winners, who are the survivors, divide it up afterwards. Those who are killed can’t complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.

24th June. —We are billeted in the cellars of Vermelles, which was taken and re-taken eight times last October. There is not a single house undamaged in the place. I suppose it once had two or three thousand inhabitants. It is beautiful now in a fantastic way. We came up two nights ago; there was a moon shining behind the houses and the shells had broken up all the hard lines. Next morning we found the deserted gardens of the town very pleasant to walk about in; they are quite overgrown and flowers have seeded themselves about wildly. Red cabbages and roses and madonna lilies are the chief ornaments. There is one garden with currant bushes in it. I and the company sergeant-major started eating along the line towards each other without noticing each other. When we did, we both remembered our dignity, he as a company sergeant-major and I as an officer. He saluted, I asknowledged the salute, we both walked away. After a minute or two we both came back hoping the coast was clear and again, after an exchange of salutes, had to leave the currants and pretend that we were merely admiring the flowers. I don’t quite know why I was feeling like that. The company sergeant-major was a regular and it was natural in him, and I suppose that it was courtesy to his scruples that made me stop. Anyhow, along came a couple of privates and stripped the bushes clean.

This afternoon we had a cricket match, officers versus sergeants, in an enclosure between some houses out of observation from the enemy. The front line is perhaps three quarters of a mile away. I made top score, twenty-four; the bat was a bit of a rafter, the ball was a piece of rag tied round with string, and the wicket was a parrot cage with the grisly remains of a parrot inside. It had evidently died of starvation when the French evacuated the town. The corpse was perfectly clean and dry and I recalled a verse of Skelton’s:

The match was broken up suddenly by machine-gun fire. It was not aimed at us; the Germans were shooting at one of our aeroplanes and the bullets falling down from a great height had a penetrative power greater than an ordinary spent bullet.

This is a very idle life except for night-digging on the reserve line. By day there is nothing to do. We can’t drill because it is too near the German lines, and there is no fortification work to be done in the village. To-day two spies were shot. A civilian who had hung on in a cellar and had, apparently, been flashing news, and a German soldier disguised as an R.E. corporal who was found tampering with the telephone wires. We officers spend a lot of time practising revolver-shooting. Jenkins brought out a beautiful target from the only undestroyed living-room in our billet area. It was a glass case full of artificial fruit and flowers, so we put it up on a post at fifty yards range. He said: ‘I’ve always wanted to smash one of these damn things. My aunt had one. It’s the sort of thing that would survive an intense bombardment.’ For a moment I felt a tender impulse to rescue it. But I smothered it. So we had five shots each, in turn. Nobody could hit it. So at last we went up to within twenty yards of it and fired a volley. Someone hit the post and that knocked it off into the grass. Jenkins said: ‘Damn the thing, it must be bewitched. Let’s take it back.’ The glass was unbroken, but some of the fruit had come loose. Walker said: ‘No, it’s in pain; we must put it out of its suffering.’ He gave it the coup de grâce from close quarters.

There is an old Norman church here, very much broken. What is left of the tower is used as a forward observation post by the artillery. I counted eight unexploded shells sticking into it. I went in with Jenkins; the floor was littered with rubbish, broken masonry, smashed chairs, ripped canvas pictures (some of them look several hundreds of years old), bits of images and crucifixes, muddied church vestments rotting in what was once the vestry. Only a few pieces of stained glass remained fixed in the edges of the windows. I climbed up by way of the altar to the east window and found a piece about the size of a plate. I gave it to Jenkins. ‘Souvenir,’ I said. When he held it up to the light it was St. Peter’s hand with the keys of heaven; medieval glass. ‘I’m sending this home,’ he said. As we went out we met two men of the Munsters. They were Irish Catholics. They thought it sacrilegious for Jenkins to be taking the glass away. One of them said: ‘Shouldn’t take that, sir; it will bring you no luck.’3

Walker was ragging Dunn this evening. ‘I believe you’ll be sorry when the war’s over, skipper. Your occupation will be gone and you’ll have to go back on the square at the depot for six months and learn how to form fours regimentally. You missed that little part of the show when you left Sandhurst and came straight here. You’ll be a full colonel by then, of course. I’ll give the sergeant-major half a crown to make you really sweat. I’ll be standing in civvies at the barrack-gate laughing at you.’

There is a company commander here called Furber. His nerves are in pieces, and somebody played a dirty joke on him the other day—rolling a bomb, undetonated, of course, down the cellar steps to frighten him. This was thought a great joke. Furber is the greatest pessimist out here. He’s laid a bet with the adjutant that the trench lines will not be more than a mile from where they are in this sector two years hence. Every one laughs at Furber, but they like him because he sings sentimental cockney songs at the brigade gaffs when we are back at Béthune.