XVI
At Annezin we reorganized. Some of the lightly wounded rejoined for duty and a big draft from the Third Battalion arrived, so that in a week’s time we were nearly seven hundred strong, with a full complement of officers. Old Adelphine made me comfortable. She used to come into my room in the morning when I was shaving and tell me the local gossip—how stingy her daughter-in-law was, and what a rogue the Maire was, and about the woman at Fouquières who had just been delivered of black twins. She said that the Kaiser was a bitch and spat on the floor to confirm it. Her favourite subject was the shamelessness of modern girls. Yet she herself had been gay and beautiful and much sought after when she was young she said. She had been in service as lady’s maid to a rich draper’s wife of Béthune, and had travelled widely with her in the surrounding country, and even over the border into Belgium. She asked me about the various villages in which I had recently been billeted, and told me scandal about the important families who used to live in each. She asked me if I had been in La Bassée; she did not realize that it was in the hands of the enemy. I said no, but I had tried to visit it recently and had been detained. ‘Do you know Auchy, then?’ I said that I had seen it often from a distance. ‘Then perhaps you know a big farm-house between Auchy and Cambrin called Les Briques Farm?’ I said, startled, that I knew it very well, and that it was a strong place with a moat and cellars and a kitchen garden now full of barbed wire. She said: ‘Then I shall tell you. I was staying there in 1870. It was the year of the other war and there was at the house a handsome young petit-caporal who was fond of me. So because he was a nice boy and because it was the war, we slept together and I had a baby. But God punished me and the baby died. That’s a long time ago.’
She told me that all the girls in Annezin prayed every night for the war to end and for the English to go away as soon as their money was spent. She said that the clause about the money was always repeated in case God should miss it.
Troops serving in the Pas de Calais loathed the French; except for occasional members of the official class, we found them thoroughly unlikeable people, and it was difficult to sympathize with their misfortunes. They had all the shortcomings of a border people. I wrote home about this time:
‘I find it very difficult to love the French here. Even when we have been billeted in villages where no troops have been before, I have not met a single case of the hospitality that one meets among the peasants of other countries. It is worse than inhospitality here, for after all we are fighting for their dirty little lives. They suck enormous quantities of money out of us too. Calculate how much has flowed into the villages around Béthune, which for many months now have been continuously housing about a hundred thousand men. Apart from the money that they get paid directly as billeting allowance, there is the pay that the troops spend. Every private soldier gets his five-franc note (nearly four shillings) every ten days, and spends it on eggs, coffee, and beer in the local estaminets; the prices are ridiculous and the stuff bad. In the brewery at Béthune, the other day, I saw barrels of already thin beer being watered from the canal with a hose-pipe. The estaminet-keepers water it further.’ (The fortunes made in the war were consolidated after the Versailles Treaty, when every peasant in the devastated areas staked preposterous compensation claims for the loss of possessions that he had never had.) It was surprising that there were so few clashes between the British and French as there were. The Pas de Calais French hated us and were convinced that when the war was over we intended to stay and hold the Channel ports. It was impossible for us at the time to realize that it was all the same to the peasants whether they were on the German or the British side of the line—it was a foreign military occupation anyhow. They were not at all interested in the sacrifices that we were making for ‘their dirty little lives.’ Also, we were shocked at the severity of French national accountancy; when we were told, for instance, that every British hospital train, the locomotive and carriages of which had been imported from England, had to pay a £200 fee for use of the rails on each journey they made from railhead to base.
The fighting was still going on around Loos. We could hear the guns in the distance, but it was clear that the thrust had failed and that we were now skirmishing for local advantages. But on October 13th there was a final flare-up; the noise of the guns was so great that even the inhabitants of Annezin, accustomed to these alarms, were properly frightened, and began packing up in case the Germans broke through. Old Adelphine was in tears with fright. Early that afternoon I was in Béthune at the Globe drinking champagne-cocktails with some friends who had joined from the Third Battalion, when the assistant provost-marshal put his head in the door and called out: ‘Any officers of the Fifth, Sixth, or Nineteenth Brigades here?’ We jumped up. ‘You are to return at once to your units.’ ‘Oh God,’ said Robertson, ‘that means another show.’ Robertson had been in D Company and so escaped the charge. ‘We’ll be pushed over the top to-night to reinforce someone, and that’ll be the end of us.’
We hurried back to Annezin and found everything in confusion. ‘We’re standing-to—at half an hour’s notice for the trenches,’ we were told. We packed up hastily and in a few minutes the whole battalion was out in the road in fighting order. We were to go up to the Hohenzollern Redoubt and were now issued with new trench maps of it. The men were in high spirits, even the survivors of the show. They were singing songs to the accompaniment of an accordion and a penny whistle. Only at one time, when a ‘mad-minute’ of artillery noise was reached, they stopped and looked at each other, and Sergeant Townsend said sententiously: ‘That’s the charge. Many good fellows going west at this moment; maybe chums of ours.’ Gradually the noise died down, and a message came at last from brigade that we would not be needed. It had been another dud show, chiefly to be remembered for the death of Charles Sorley, a captain in the Suffolks, one of the three poets of importance killed in the war. (The other two were Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen.)
This ended the operations for 1915. Tension was relaxed. We returned to battalion mess, to company drill, and to riding-school for the young officers. It was as though there had been no battle except that the senior officers were fewer and the Special Reserve element larger. Two or three days later we were back in trenches in the same sector. In October I was gazetted a captain in the Third (Special Reserve) Battalion. Promotion in the Third Battalion was rapid for subalterns who had joined early, because the battalion had trebled its strength and so was entitled to three times as many captains as before. It was good to have my pay go up several shillings a day, with an increase of war bonus and possible gratuity and pension if I were wounded, but I did not consider that side of it much. It was rank that was effective overseas. And here I was promoted captain over the heads of officers who had longer trench service and were older and better trained than myself. I went to the adjutant and offered not to wear the badges of rank while serving with the battalion. He said not unkindly: ‘No, put your stars up. It can’t be helped.’ I knew that he and the colonel had no use for Special Reserve captains unless they were outstandingly good, and would not hesitate to get rid of them.
A Special Reserve major and captain had been recently sent home from the First Battalion, with a confidential report of inefficiency. I was anxious to avoid any such disgrace. Nor was my anxiety unfounded; shortly after I left the Second Battalion two other Special Reserve captains, one of whom had been promoted at the same time as myself, were sent back as ‘likely to be of more service in the training of troops at home.’ One of them was, I know, more efficient than I was.
I was in such a depressed state of nerves now that if I had gone into the trenches as a company officer I should probably have modified my formula for taking risks. Fortunately, I had a rest from the front line, being attached to the brigade sappers. Hill of the Middlesex was also having this relief. He told me that the Middlesex colonel had made a speech to the survivors of the battalion as soon as they were back in billets, telling them that the battalion had been unfortunate but would soon be given an opportunity of avenging its dead and making a fresh and, this time he hoped, successful attack upon La Bassée. ‘I know you Diehards! You will go like lions over the top.’ Hill’s servant had whispered confidentially to Hill: ‘Not on purpose I don’t, sir!’ The sapping company specialized in maintaining communication and reserve trenches in good repair. I was with it for a month before being returned to ordinary company duty. My recall was a punishment for failing, one day when we were in billets, to observe a paragraph in battalion orders requiring my presence on battalion parade.
My remaining trench service with the Second Battalion this autumn was uneventful. There was no excitement left in patrolling, no horror in the continual experience of death. The single recordable incident I recall was one of purely technical interest, a new method that an officer named Owen and myself invented for dealing with machine-guns firing at night. The method was to give each sentry a piece of string about a yard long, with a cartridge tied at each end; when the machine-gun started firing, sentries who were furthest from the fire would stretch the string in the direction of the machine-gun and peg it down with the points of the cartridges. This gave a pretty accurate line on the machine-gun. When we had about thirty or more of these lines taken on a single machine-gun we fixed rifles as accurately as possible along them and waited for it; as soon as it started we opened five rounds rapid. This gave a close concentration of fire and no element of nervousness could disturb the aim, the rifles being secured between sandbags. Divisional headquarters asked us for a report of the method. There was a daily exchange of courtesies between our machine-guns and the Germans’ at stand-to; by removing cartridges from the ammunition belt it was possible to rap out the rhythm of the familiar call: ‘Me—et me do—wn in Pi—cca-di—ll—y,’ to which the Germans would reply, though in slower tempo, because our guns were faster than theirs: ‘Se—e you da—mned to He—ll first.’
It was late in this October that I was sent a press-cutting from John Bull. Horatio Bottomley, the editor, was protesting against the unequal treatment for criminal offences meted out to commoners and aristocrats. A young man, he said, convicted in the police-court of a criminal offence was merely bound over and put in the care of a physician—because he was the grandson of an earl! An offender not belonging to the influential classes would have been given three months without the option of a fine. The article described in some detail how Dick, a sixteen-year old boy, had made ‘a certain proposal’ to a corporal in a Canadian regiment stationed near ‘Charterhouse College,’ and how the corporal had very properly given him in charge of the police. This news was nearly the end of me. I decided that Dick had been driven out of his mind by the war. There was madness in the family, I knew; he had once shown me a letter from his grandfather scrawled in circles all over the page. It would be easy to think of him as dead.
I had now been in the trenches for five months and was getting past my prime. For the first three weeks an officer was not much good in the trenches; he did not know his way about, had not learned the rules of health and safety, and was not yet accustomed to recognizing degrees of danger. Between three weeks and four months he was at his best, unless he happened to have any particular bad shock or sequence of shocks. Then he began gradually to decline in usefulness as neurasthenia developed in him. At six months he was still more or less all right; but by nine or ten months, unless he had a few weeks’ rest on a technical course or in hospital, he began to be a drag on the other members of the company. After a year or fifteen months he was often worse than useless. Officers had a less laborious but a more nervous time than the men. There were proportionately twice as many neurasthenic cases among officers as among men, though the average life of a man before getting killed or wounded was twice as long as an officer’s. Officers between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-three had a longer useful life than those older or younger. I was too young. Men over forty, though they did not suffer from the want of sleep so much as those under twenty, had less resistance to the sudden alarms and shocks. Dr. W. H. R. Rivers told me later that the action of one of the ductless glands—I think the thyroid—accounted for this decline in military usefulness. It pumped its chemical into the blood as a sedative for tortured nerves; this process went on until the condition of the blood was permanently affected and a man went about his tasks in a stupid and doped way, cheated into further endurance. It has taken some ten years for my blood to run at all clean. The unfortunates were the officers who had two years or more continuous trench service. In many cases they became dipsomaniacs. I knew three or four officers who had worked up to the point of two bottles of whisky a day before they were lucky enough to get wounded or sent home in some other way. A two-bottle company commander of one of our line battalions still happens to be alive who, in three shows running, got his company needlessly destroyed because he was no longer capable of taking clear decisions.
Aside from wounds, gas, and the accidents of war, the life of the trench soldier was, for the most part, not unhealthy. Food was plentiful and hard work in the open air made up for the discomfort of wet feet and clothes and draughty billets. A continual need for alertness discouraged minor illnesses; a cold was thrown off in a few hours, an attack of indigestion was hardly noticed. This was true, at least, in a good battalion, where the men were bent on going home either with an honourable wound or not at all. In an inferior battalion the men would prefer a wound to bronchitis, but would not mind the bronchitis. In a bad battalion they did not care ‘whether,’ in the trench phrase, ‘the cow calved or the bull broke its bloody neck.’ In a really good battalion, as the Second Battalion was when I went to it first, the question of getting wounded and going home was not permitted to be raised. Such a battalion had a very small sick list. In the 1914–15 winter there were no more than four or five casualties from ‘trench feet’ in the Second, and the following winter no more than eight or nine; the don’t-care battalions lost very heavily indeed. Trench feet was almost entirely a matter of morale, in spite of the lecture-formula that N.C.O.’s and officers used to repeat time after time to the men: ‘Trench feet is caused by tight boots, tight puttees or any other clothing calculated to interfere with the circulation of blood in the legs.’ Trench feet was caused rather by going to sleep with wet boots, cold feet, and depression. Wet boots, by themselves, did not matter. If the man warmed his feet at a brazier or stamped them until they were warm and then went off to sleep with a sandbag tied round them he took no harm. He might even fall asleep with cold, wet feet, and they might swell slightly owing to tightness of boots or puttees; but trench feet only came if he did not mind getting trench feet or anything else, because his battalion had lost the power of sticking things out. At Bouchavesnes on the Somme in the winter of 1916–17 a battalion of dismounted cavalry lost half its strength in two days from trench feet; our Second Battalion had just had ten days in the same trenches with no cases at all.
Autumn was melancholy in the La Bassée sector; in the big poplar forests the leaves were French yellow and the dykes were overflowing and the ground utterly sodden. Béthune was not the place it had been; the Canadians billeted there drew two or three times as much pay as our own troops and had sent the prices up. But it was still more or less intact and one could still get cream buns and fish dinners.
In November I had orders to join the First Battalion, which was reorganizing after the Loos fighting. I was delighted. I found it in billets at Locon, behind Festubert, which was only a mile or two to the north of Cambrin. The difference between the two battalions continued markedly throughout the war, however many times each battalion got broken. The difference was that the Second Battalion at the outbreak of war had just finished its eighteen years overseas tour, while the First Battalion had not been out of England since the South African War. The First Battalion was, therefore, less old-fashioned in its militarism and more human; livers were better; the men had dealings with white women and not with brown. It would have been impossible in the First Battalion to see what I once saw in the Second—a senior officer pursuing a private soldier down the street, kicking his bottom because he had been slack in saluting. The First Battalion was as efficient and as regimental, on the whole more successful in its fighting, and a much easier battalion to live in.
The battalion already had its new company commanders and I went as second-captain to young Richardson of A Company. He was from Sandhurst, and his company was one of the best that I was ever with. They were largely Welshmen of 1915 enlistment. None of the officers in the company were more than twenty-two or twenty-three years old. A day or two after I arrived I went to visit C Company, where a Third Battalion officer whom I knew was commanding. The C’s greeted me in a friendly way. As we were talking I noticed a book lying on the table. It was the first book (except my Keats and Blake) that I had seen since I came to France that was not either a military text-book or a rubbish novel. It was the Essays of Lionel Johnson. When I had a chance I stole a look at the fly-leaf, and the name was Siegfried Sassoon. I looked round to see who could possibly be called Siegfried Sassoon and bring Lionel Johnson with him to the First Battalion. He was obvious, so I got into conversation with him, and a few minutes later we were walking to Béthune, being off duty until that night, and talking about poetry. Siegfried had, at the time, published nothing except a few privately-printed pastoral pieces of eighteen-ninetyish flavour and a satire on Masefield which, about half-way through, had forgotten to be a satire and was rather good Masefield. We went to the cake shop and ate cream buns. At this time I was getting my first book of poems, Over the Brazier, ready for the press; I had one or two drafts in my pocket-book and showed them to Siegfried. He told me that they were too realistic and that war should not be written about in a realistic way. In return he showed me some of his own poems. One of them began:
This was before Siegfried had been in the trenches. I told him, in my old-soldier manner, that he would soon change his style.
That night the whole battalion went up to work at a new defence scheme at Festubert. Festubert was nightmare, and had been so since the first fighting there in 1914, when the inmates of its lunatic asylum had been caught between two fires and broken out and run all over the countryside. The British trench line went across a stretch of ground marked on the map as ‘Marsh, sometimes dry in the summer.’ It consisted of islands of high-command trench, with no communication between them except at night, and was a murderous place for patrols. The battalion had been nearly wiped out here six months previously. We were set to build up a strong reserve line. It was freezing hard and we were unable to make any progress on the frozen ground. We came here night after night. We raised a couple of hundred yards of trench about two or three feet high, at the cost of several men wounded from casual shots skimming the trench in front of us. Work was resumed by other troops when the thaw came and a thick seven foot-high ramp built. We were told later that it gradually sank down into the marsh, and in the end was completely engulfed.
When I left the Second Battalion I was permitted to take my servant, Private Fahy (known as Tottie Fay, after the actress), with me. Tottie was a reservist from Birmingham who had been called up when war broke out, and had been with the Second Battalion ever since. By trade he was a silversmith and he had recently, when on leave, made a cigarette case and engraved it with my name as a present. He worked well and we liked each other. When he arrived at the First Battalion he met a Sergeant Dickens who had been his boozing chum in India seven or eight years back; so they celebrated it. The next morning I was surprised to find my buttons not polished and no hot water for shaving. I was annoyed; it made me late for breakfast. I could get no news of Tottie. On my way to rifle inspection at nine o’clock at the company billet I noticed something unusual at the corner of a farm-yard. It was Field Punishment No. 1 being carried out—my first sight of it. Tottie was the victim. He had been awarded twenty-eight days for ‘drunkenness in the field.’ He was spread-eagled to the wheel of a company limber, tied by the ankles and wrists in the form of an X. He remained in this position—‘Crucifixion,’ they called it—for several hours a day; I forget how many, but it was a good working-day. The sentence was to be carried out for as long as the battalion remained in billets, and was to be continued after the next spell of trenches. I shall never forget the look that Tottie gave me. He was a quiet, respectful, devoted servant, and he wanted to tell me that he was sorry for having let me down. His immediate reaction was an attempt to salute; I could see him try to lift his hand to his forehead, and bring his heels together, but he could do nothing; his eyes filled with tears. The battalion police-sergeant, a fierce-looking man, had just finished knotting him up when I arrived. I told Tottie that I was sorry to see him in trouble. That drink, as it proved, did him good in the end. I had to find another servant. Old Joe, the quartermaster, knowing that Tottie was the only trained officer’s servant in the battalion, took him from me when his sentence expired; he even induced the colonel to remit a few days of it. Tottie was safer in billets with Old Joe than in trenches with me. Some time in the summer of the following year his seven years’ contract as a reservist expired. When their ‘buckshee seven’ expired, reservists were sent home for a few days and then ‘deemed to have re-enlisted under the Military Service Act,’ and recalled to the battalion. But Tottie made good use of his leave. His brother-in-law was director of a munitions factory and took Tottie in as a skilled metal-worker. He was made a starred man—his work was so important to industry that he could not be spared for military service, so Tottie is, I hope, still alive. Good luck to him and to Birmingham. Sergeant Dickens was a different case. He was a fighter, and one of the best N.C.O.’s in either battalion of the regiment. He had been awarded the d.c.m. and Bar, the Military Medal and the French Médaille Militaire. Two or three times already he had been promoted to sergeant’s rank and each time been reduced for drunkenness. He escaped field-punishment because it was considered sufficient for him to lose his stripes, and whenever there was a battle Dickens would distinguish himself so conspicuously as a leader that he would be given his stripes back again.
Early in December the rumour came that we were going for divisional training to the back areas. I would not believe it, having heard stories of this kind too often, and was surprised when it turned out to be true. Siegfried Sassoon, in his Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man, has described this battalion move. It was an even more laborious experience for our A Company than for his C Company. We got up at five o’clock one morning, breakfasted hastily, packed our kits, and marched down to the railhead three miles away. Here we had the task of entraining all the battalion stores, transport and transport-animals. This took us to the middle of the morning. We then entrained ourselves for a ten-hour journey to a junction on the Somme about twenty miles away from the front line. The officers travelled in third-class apartments, the men in closed trucks marked: ‘Hommes 40, chevaux 8’—they were very stiff when they arrived. ‘A’ Company was called on to do the detraining job too. When we had finished, the dixies of tea prepared for us were all cold. The other companies had been resting for a couple of hours; we had only a few minutes. The march was along pavé roads and the rough chalk tracks of the Picardy downland. It started about midnight and finished about six o’clock next morning, the men carrying their packs and rifles. There was a competition between the companies as to which would have the fewest men falling out; A won. The village we finally arrived at was called Montagne le Fayel. No troops had been billeted here before, and its inhabitants were annoyed at being knocked up in the middle of the night by our advance-guard to provide accommodation for eight hundred men at two hours’ notice. We found these Picard peasants much more likeable than the Pas de Calais people. I was billeted with an old man called Monsieur Elie Caron, a retired schoolmaster with a bright eye and white hair. He lived entirely on vegetables, and gave me a vegetarian pamphlet entitled Comment Vivre Cent Ans. We already knew of the coming Somme offensive, so this was a good joke. He also gave me Longfellow’s Evangeline in English. I have always been sorry for English books stranded in France, whatever their demerits; so I accepted it and later brought it home.
We were at Montagne for six weeks. The colonel, who appears in Siegfried’s book as Colonel Winchell, was known in the regiment as Scatter, short for Scatter-cash, because when he first joined the regiment he had been so lavish with his allowance. Scatter put the battalion through its paces with peace-time severity. He asked us to forget the trenches and to fit ourselves for the open warfare that was bound to come once the Somme defences were pierced. Every other day was a field-day; we were back again in spirit to General Haking’s Company Training. Even those of us who did not believe in the break-through thoroughly enjoyed these field-days. The guns could only just be heard in the distance, it was quite unspoilt country, and every man in the battalion was fit. Days that were not field-days were given up to battalion drill and musketry. This training seemed entirely unrelated to war as we had experienced it. We played a lot of games, including inter-battalion rugger; I played full-back for the battalion. Three other officers were in the team; Richardson as front-row scrum-man; Pritchard, another Sandhurst boy, who was fly-half; and David Thomas, a Third Battalion second-lieutenant, who was an inside three-quarter. David Thomas and Siegfried were the closest friends I made while in France. David was a simple, gentle fellow and fond of reading. Siegfried, he, and I were together a lot.
One day David met me in the village street. He said: ‘Did you hear the bugle? There’s a hell of a row on about something. All officers and warrant-officers are to meet in the village schoolroom at once. Scatter’s looking as black as-thunder. No one knows yet what the axe is about.’ We went along together and squeezed into one of the school desk-benches. When the colonel entered and the room was called to attention by the senior major, David and I hurt ourselves standing up, bench and all. Scatter told us all to be seated. The officers were in one class, the warrant-officers and non-commissioned officers in another. The colonel glared at us from the teacher’s desk. He began his lecture with general accusations. He said that he had lately noticed many signs of slovenliness in the battalion—men with their pocket-flaps undone, and actually walking down the village street with their hands in their trousers-pockets—boots unpolished—sentries strolling about on their beats at company billets instead of marching up and down in a soldier-like way—rowdiness in the estaminets—slackness in saluting—with many other grave indications of lowered discipline. He threatened to stop all leave to the United Kingdom unless discipline improved. He promised us a saluting parade every morning before breakfast which he would attend in person. All this was general axe-ing and we knew that he had not yet reached the particular axe. It was this: ‘I have here principally to tell you of a very disagreeable occurrence. As I was going out of my orderly room early this morning I came upon a group of soldiers; I will not mention their company. One of these soldiers was in conversation with a lance-corporal. You may not believe it, but it was a fact that he addressed the corporal by his Christian name; he called him Jack. The corporal made no protest. To think that the First Battalion has sunk to a level where it is possible for such familiarity to exist between N.C.O.’s and the men under their command! Naturally, I put the corporal under arrest, and he appeared before me at once on the charge of ‘conduct unbecoming to an N.C.O.’ He was reduced to the ranks, and the man was given field-punishment for using insubordinate language to an N.C.O. And, I warn you, if any further case of the sort comes to my notice—and I expect you officers to report the slightest instance to me at once instead of dealing with it as a company matter....’ I tried to catch Siegfried’s eye, but he was busy avoiding it, so I caught David’s instead. This is one of those caricature scenes that now seem to sum up the various stages of my life. There was a fresco around the walls of the class-room illustrating the evils of alcoholism. It started with the innocent boy being offered a drink by his mate, and then his downward path, culminating in wife-beating, murder, and delirium tremens.
The battalion’s only complaint against Montagne was that women were not so easy to get hold of in that part of the country as around Béthune; the officers had the unfair advantage of being able to borrow horses and ride into Amiens. I remained puritanical. There was a Blue Lamp at Amiens as there was at Abbéville, Havre, Rouen, and all the big towns behind the lines. The Blue Lamp was for officers, as the Red Lamp was for men. It was most important for discipline to be maintained in this way.
In January the Seventh Division sent two company officers from each brigade to instruct troops at the base. I and a captain in the Queen’s were the two who had been out longest, so we were chosen; it was a gift of two months longer life to us.