Goodbye to All That Page 11

  Our guide took us up to the front line. We passed a group of men huddled over a brazier – small men, daubed with mud, talking quietly together in Welsh. They were wearing waterproof capes, for it had now started to rain, and cap-comforters, because the weather was cold for May. Although they could see we were officers, they did not jump to their feet and salute. I thought that this must be a convention of the trenches; and indeed it is laid down somewhere in the military text-books that the courtesy of the salute must be dispensed with in battle. But, no, it was just slackness. We overtook a fatigue-party struggling up the trench loaded with timber lengths and bundles of sandbags, cursing plaintively as they slipped into sump-holes or entangled their burdens in the telephone wire. Fatigue-parties were always encumbered by their rifles and equipment, which it was a crime ever to have out of reach. After squeezing past this party, we had to stand aside to let a stretcher-case pass. ‘Who’s the poor bastard, Dai?’ the guide asked the leading stretcher-bearer. ‘Sergeant Gallagher,’ Dai answered. ‘He thought he saw a Fritz in No Man’s Land near our wire, so the silly booger takes one of them new issue percussion bombs and shots it at ‘im. Silly booger aims too low, it hits the top of the parapet and bursts back. Deoul! man, it breaks his silly f—ing jaw and blows a great lump from his silly f—ing face, whatever. Poor silly booger! Not worth sweating to get him back! He’s put paid to, whatever.’ The wounded man had a sandbag over his face. He died before they got him to the dressing-station.

  I felt tired out by the time I reached company headquarters, sweating under a pack-valise like the men, and with all the usual furnishings hung at my belt – revolver, field-glasses, compass, whisky-flask, wire-cutters, periscope, and a lot more. A ‘Christmas-tree’ that was called. Those were the days in which officers had their swords sharpened by the armourer before sailing to France. I had been advised to leave mine back in the quartermaster-sergeants’ billet, and never saw it again, or bothered about it. My hands were sticky with the clay from the side of the trench, and my legs soaked up to the calves. At ‘C’ Company headquarters, a two-roomed timber-built shelter in the side of a trench connecting the front and support lines, I found tablecloth and lamp again, whisky bottle and glasses, shelves with books and magazines, and bunks in the next room. I reported to the company commander.

  I had expected a grizzled veteran with a breastful of medals; but Dunn was actually two months younger than myself – one of the fellowship of ‘only survivors’. Captain Miller of the Black Watch in the same division was another. Miller had escaped from the Rue du Bois massacre by swimming down a flooded trench. Only survivors had great reputations. Miller used to be pointed at in the streets when the battalion was back in reserve billets. ‘See that fellow? That’s Jock Miller. Out from the start and hasn’t got it yet.’ Dunn did not let the war affect his morale at all. He greeted me very easily with: ‘Well, what’s the news from England? Oh, sorry, first I must introduce you. This is Walker – clever chap from Cambridge, fancies himself as an athlete. This is Jenkins, one of those elder patriots who chucked up their jobs to come here. This is Price – joined us yesterday, but we liked him at once: he brought some damn good whisky with him. Well, how long is the war going to last, and who’s winning? We don’t know a thing out here. And what’s all this talk about war-babies? Price pretends ignorance on the subject.’ I told them about the war, and asked them about the trenches.

  ‘About trenches,’ said Dunn. ‘Well, we don’t know as much about trenches as the French do, and not near as much as Fritz does. We can’t expect Fritz to help, but the French might do something. They are too greedy to let us have the benefit of their inventions. What wouldn’t we give for their parachute-lights and aerial torpedoes! But there’s never any connexion between the two armies, unless a battle is on, and then we generally let each other down.

  ‘When I came out here first, all we did in trenches was to paddle about like ducks and use our rifles. We didn’t think of them as places to live in, they were just temporary inconveniences. Now we work here all the time, not only for safety but for health. Night and day. First, at fire-steps, then at building traverses, improving the communication trenches, and so on; last comes our personal comfort – shelters and dug-outs. The territorial battalion that used to relieve us were hopeless. They used to sit down in the trench and say: “Oh, my God, this is the limit.” Then they’d pull out pencil and paper and write home about it. Did no work on the traverses or on fire positions. Consequence – they lost half their men from frost-bite and rheumatism, and one day the Germans broke in and scuppered a lot more of them. They’d allowed the work we’d done in the trench to go to ruin, and left the whole place like a sewage farm for us to take over again. We got sick as muck, and reported them several times to brigade headquarters; but they never improved. Slack officers, of course. Well, they got smashed, as I say, and were sent away to be lines-of-communication troops. Now we work with the First South Wales Borderers. They’re all right. Awful swine, those territorials. Usen’t to trouble about latrines at all; left food about to encourage rats; never filled a sandbag. I only once saw a job of work that they did: a steel loop-hole for sniping. But they put it facing square to the front, and quite unmasked, so two men got killed at it – absolute death-trap. Our chaps are all right, but not as right as they ought to be. The survivors of the show ten days ago are feeling pretty low, and the big new draft doesn’t know a thing yet.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Walker, ‘there’s too much firing going on. The men have got the wind up over something. If Fritz thinks we’re jumpy, he’ll give us an extra bad time. I’ll go up and stop them.’

  Dunn went on: ‘These Welshmen are peculiar. They won’t stand being shouted at. They’ll do anything if you explain the reason for it – do and die, but they have to know their reason why. The best way to make them behave is not to give them too much time to think. Work them off their feet. They are good workmen, too. But officers must work with them, not only direct the work. Our time-table is: breakfast at eight o’clock in the morning, clean trenches and inspect rifles, work all morning; lunch at twelve, work again from one till about six, when the men feed again. “Stand-to” at dusk for about an hour, work all night, “stand-to” for an hour before dawn. That’s the general programme. Then there’s sentry-duty. The men do two-hour sentry spells, then work two hours, then sleep two hours. At night, sentries are doubled, so working parties are smaller. We officers are on duty all day, and divide up the night into three-hourly watches.’ He looked at his wristwatch. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘that carrying-party must have brought up the R.E. stuff by now. Time we all got to work. Look here, Graves, you lie down and have a doss on that bunk. I want you to take the watch before “stand-to”. I’ll wake you up and show you around. Where the hell’s my revolver? I don’t like to go out without it. Hello, Walker, what was wrong?’

  Walker laughed. ‘A chap from the new draft. He had never fired his musketry course at Cardiff, and tonight he fired ball for the first time. It went to his head. He’d had a brother killed up at Ypres, and swom to avenge him. So he blazed off all his own ammunition at nothing, and two bandoliers out of the ammunition-box besides. They call him the “Human Maxim” now. His foresight’s misty with heat. Corporal Parry should have stopped him; but he just leant up against the traverse and shrieked with laughter. I gave them both a good cursing. Some other new chaps started blazing away too. Fritz retaliated with machine-guns and whizz-bangs. No casualties. I don’t know why. It’s all quiet now. Everybody ready?’

  When they went off, I rolled up in my blanket and fell asleep. Dunn woke me at about one o’clock. ‘Your watch,’ he said. I jumped out of the bunk with a rustle of straw; my feet were sore and clammy in my boots. I was cold, too. ‘Here’s the rocket-pistol and a few flares. Not a bad night. It’s stopped raining. Put your equipment on over your raincoat, or you won’t be able to get at your revolver. Got a torch? Good. About this flare business. Don’t use the pistol too much, We haven’t m
any flares, and if there’s an attack we’ll need as many as we can get. But use it if you think something’s doing. Fritz is always sending up flare-lights; he’s got as many as he wants.’

  Dunn showed me around the line. The battalion frontage was about eight hundred yards. Each company held some two hundred of these, with two platoons in the front line, and two in the support line about a hundred yards back. He introduced me to the platoon sergeants, more particularly to Sergeant Eastmond and told him to give me any information I wanted; then went back to sleep, asking to be woken at once if anything went wrong. I found myself in charge of the line. Sergeant Eastmond being busy with a working-party, I went round by myself. The men of the working-party, whose job was to replace the traverses, or safety-buttresses, of the trench, looked curiously at me. They were filling sandbags with earth, piling them up bricklayer fashion, the headers and stretchers alternating, then patting them flat with spades. The sentries stood on the fire-step at the comers of the traverses, stamping their feet and blowing on their fingers. Every now and then they peered over the top for a few seconds. Two parties, each of an N.C.O. and two men, were out in the company listening-posts, connected with the front trench by a sap about fifty yards long. The German front line stretched some three hundred yards beyond. From berths hollowed in the sides of the trench and curtained with sandbags came the grunt of sleeping men.

  I jumped up on the fire-step beside the sentry and cautiously raised my head, staring over the parapet. I could see nothing except the wooden pickets supporting our protecting barbed-wire entanglements, and a dark patch or two of bushes beyond. The darkness seemed to move and shake about as I looked at it; the bushes started travelling, singly at first, then both together.. The pickets did the same. I was glad of the sentry beside me; he gave his name as Beaumont. ‘They’re quiet tonight, sir,’ he said. ‘A relief going on; I think so, surely.’

  I said: ‘It’s funny how those bushes seem to move.’

  ‘Aye, they do play queer tricks. Is this your first spell in trenches, sir?’

  A German flare shot up, broke into bright flame, dropped slowly and went hissing into the grass just behind our trench, showing up the bushes and pickets. Instinctively I moved.

  ‘It’s bad to do that, sir,’ he said, as a rifle-bullet cracked and seemed to pass right between us. ‘Keep still, sir, and they can’t spot you. Not but what a flare is a bad thing to fall on you. I’ve seen them burn a hole in a man.’

  I spent the rest of my watch in acquainting myself with the geography of the trench-section, finding how easy it was to get lost among culs-de-sac and disused alleys. Twice I overshot the company frontage and wandered among the Munster Fusiliers on the left. Once I tripped and fell with a splash into deep mud. My watch ended when the first signs of dawn showed. I passed the word along the line for the company to stand-to-arms. The N.C.O.S whispered hoarsely into the dug-outs: ‘Stand-to, stand-to,’ and out the men tumbled with their rifles in their hands. Going towards company headquarters to wake the officers I saw a man lying on his face in a machine-gun shelter. I stopped and said: ‘Stand-to, there!’ I flashed my torch on him and saw that one of his feet was bare.

  The machine-gunner beside him said: ‘No good talking to him, sir.’

  I asked: ‘What’s wrong? Why has he taken his boot and sock off?’

  ‘Look for yourself, sir!’

  I shook the sleeper by the arm and noticed suddenly the hole in the back of his head. He had taken off the boot and sock to pull the trigger of his rifle with one toe; the muzzle was in his mouth.

  ‘Why did he do it?’ I asked.

  ‘He went through the last push, sir, and that sent him a bit queer; on top of that he got bad news from Limerick about his girl and another chap.’

  He belonged to the Munsters – their machine-guns overlapped the left of our company – and his suicide had already been reported. Two Irish officers came up. ‘We’ve had several of these lately,’ one of them told me. Then he said to the other: ‘While I remember, Callaghan, don’t forget to write to his next-of-kin. Usual sort of letter; tell them he died a soldier’s death, anything you like. I’m not going to report it as suicide.’

  At stand-to, rum and tea were served out. I looked at the German trenches through a periscope – a distant streak of sandbags. Some of these were made of coloured cloth, whether for camouflage or from a shortage of plain sacking, I do not know. The enemy gave no sign, except for a wisp or two of wood-smoke where they, too, were boiling up a hot drink. Between us and them lay a flat meadow with cornflowers, marguerites, and poppies growing in the long grass, a few shell holes, the bushes I had seen the night before, the wreck of an aeroplane, our barbed wire and theirs. Three-quarters of a mile away stood a big ruined house; a quarter of a mile behind that, a red-brick village – Auchy – poplars and haystacks, a tall chimney, and another village – Haisnes. Half-right, pit-head and smaller slag-heaps. La Bassée lay half-left; the sun caught the weather-vane of the church and made it twinkle.

  In the interval between stand-to and breakfast, the men who were not getting in a bit of extra sleep sat about talking and smoking, writing letters home, cleaning their rifles, running their thumb-nails up the seams of their shirts to kill lice, gambling. Lice were a standing joke. Young Bumford handed me one: ‘We was just having an argument as to whether it’s best to kill the old ones or the young ones, sir. Morgan here says that if you kill the old ones, the young ones die of grief; but Parry here, sir, he says that the young ones are easier to kill and you can catch the old ones when they go to the funeral.’ He appealed to me as an arbiter: ‘You’ve been to college, sir, haven’t you?’

  I said: ‘Yes, I have, but so had Crawshay Bailey’s brother Norwich.’

  The platoon treasured this as a wonderfully witty answer. Crawshay Bailey is one of the idiotic songs of Wales. Crawshay Bailey himself ‘had an engine and he couldn’t make it go’, and all his relatives in the song had similar shortcomings. Crawshay Bailey’s brother Norwich, for instance, was fond of oatmeal porridge, but was sent to Cardiff College, for to get a bit of knowledge. After that, I had no trouble with the platoon.

  Breakfast at company headquarters consisted of bacon, eggs, coffee, toast, and marmalade. There were three chairs and two ammunition-boxes to sit on. Accustomed to company commanders who never took junior officers into their confidence, I liked the way that questions of the moment were settled at meal-times by a sort of board-meeting with Dunn as chairman. On this first morning we had a long debate on how to keep sentries awake. Dunn finally issued a company order forbidding them to lean against traverses; it made them sleepy. Besides, when they fired, the flash would come always from the same place. The Germans might fix a rifle on the spot after a time. I told Dunn of the bullet that passed between Beaumont and myself.

  ‘Sounds like a fixed rifle,’ he said, ‘because not one aimed shot in a hundred comes as close as that at night. And we had a chap killed in that very traverse the night we came in.’ The Bavarian Guards Reserve, who were opposite us at the time, seemed to have complete control of the sniping situation.

  Dunn gave me the characters of the N.C.O.s in my platoon: which were trustworthy and which had to be watched. He had begun telling me just how much I could expect from the men at my platoon inspection of rifles and equipment, when a soldier came rushing in, his eyes blank with horror and excitement. ‘Gas, sir, gas! They’re using gas!’

  ‘My God!’ exclaimed Price. We all looked at Dunn, whose soldier-servant the man was.

  Dunn said imperturbably: ‘Very well, Kingdom, bring me my respirator from the other room, and another pot of marmalade.’

  The alarm had originated with smoke blowing across from the German trenches, where breakfast must also have been in progress; we knew the German meal-times by a slackening down of rifle-fire. Gas had become a nightmare. Nobody believed in the efficacy of our respirators, though advertised as proof against any gas the enemy could send over. Pink army forms marked ‘Urgen
t’ constantly arrived from headquarters to explain how to use these accessories: all contradictory. First, the respirators were to be kept soaking wet, then they were to be kept dry, then they were to be worn in a satchel, then, again, the satchel was not to be used.

  Frank Jones-Bateman, a quiet boy of nineteen, came to visit me from the company on our right. He mentioned with a false ease that he had shot a German just before breakfast: ‘Sights at four hundred,’ he said. He had just left Rugby with a scholarship waiting for him at Clare, Cambridge. His nickname was ‘Silent Night’.

  13

  HERE are extracts from letters that I wrote at this time. I have restored the names of places, which we were forbidden to mention:

  May 21st, 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 front line, but the miners 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. As we marched down the pavé road from Cambrin, the men straggled along 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:

  Greatcoat

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