Goodbye to All That Page 8
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. – Corriere della Sera.
According to information which has reached the Corriere 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.
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: ‘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 in 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 told him: ‘Well, I have three or four uncles sitting somewhere opposite, and a number of cousins, too. One of those uncles is a general. But that’s all right. I don’t brag about them. I only advertise my uncle Dick Poore, the British admiral commanding at the Nore.’
Among these enemy relatives was my cousin Conrad, only son of the German Consul at Zürich. In January 1914, I had gone ski-ing with him between the trees in the woods above the city. And once we tobogganed together down the Dolderstrasse in Zürich itself, where the lamp-posts were sandbagged and family toboggans, skidding broadside on at the turns, were often crashed into by single-seater skeletons; arms and legs got broken by the score, and the crowds thought it a great joke. Conrad served with a crack Bavarian regiment throughout the war, and won the ‘Pour le Mérite’, an order even more rarely awarded than the British Victoria Cross. Soon after the war ended, a party of Bolsheviks killed him in a Baltic village, where he had been sent to make requisitions. Conrad was a gentle, proud creature, chiefly interested in natural history, who used to spend hours in the woods studying the habits of wild animals; he had strong feelings against shooting them.
Perhaps my family’s most outstanding military feat was a German uncle’s; he had been dug out at the age of forty-five as a lieutenant in the Bavarian artillery. My brother John met him a year or two ago, and happened to mention a coming visit to Rheims. My uncle nudged him: ‘Have a look at the cathedral. One day, during the war, my divisional general called for me. “Gunner-lieutenant von Ranke, I understand that you are a Lutheran, not a Roman Catholic?” I admitted this was so. Then he said: “I have a very disagreeable service for you to perform, Lieutenant. Those misbegotten French are using the cathedral for an observation post. They think they can get away with it because it’s Rheims Cathedral, but they have our trenches taped from there. I call upon you to dislodge them.” I fired only two rounds, and down came the pinnacle and the Frenchmen with it. A very neat bit of shooting. I felt proud to have limited the damage like that. Really, you must take a look at it.’
The Harlech golf club secretary suggested my taking a commission instead of enlisting. He rang up the nearest regimental depôt – the Royal Welch Fusiliers at Wrexham – and told the adjutant that I had served in the Officers Training Corps at Charterhouse. The adjutant said: ‘Send him right along.’ On August 11th I began my training, and immediately became a hero. My mother announced: ‘Our race has gone mad!’ and regarded my going as a religious act; my father felt proud that I had ‘done the right thing’. I even recovered, for a time, the respect of C. L. Graves, of the Spectator and Punch, the uncle with whom I had recently had a tiff. When he tipped me a sovereign, two terms previously, I had written to thank him, saying that I was at last able to buy Samuel Buder’s Note Books, The Way of All Flesh, and the two Erewhons. This had infuriated him, as a good Victorian.
Most of the other applicants for commissions at Wrexham were boys who had recently failed to pass into the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, and were now trying to get into the regular army at the old militia back-door – re-named the Special Reserve. Only one or two fellows had come, 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 O.T.C. experience helped me here, but I knew nothing of Army tradition and made all the worst mistakes – saluting the bandmaster, failing to recognize the colonel when in mufti, walking in the street without a belt, talking shop in the mess. Though I soon learned to conform, my greatest difficulty was talking to the men of my platoon with the proper air of authority. Many of them were re-enlisted old soldiers, and I disliked bluffing that I knew more than they did. We had two or three very old soldiers employed on the depôt staff, wearing ribbons of Burma, 1885, and even earlier campaigns, and usually also the ribbon of the ‘Rooti’, or good service, medal awarded for ‘eighteen years of undetected crime’. Of one old fellow, called Jackie Barrett, a Kipling character, I heard it said: ‘There goes Jackie Barrett. He and his mucking-in chum deserted the regiment at Quetta, and crossed the North-West Frontier on foot. Three months later, Jackie gave himself up as a deserter to the British Consul in Jerusalem; He buried his chum by the way.’
After only three weeks on the Square, I went off on detachment duty, to a newly-formed internment camp for enemy aliens at Lancaster. The camp was a disused waggon-works near the river, a dirty, draughty place, littered with old scrap metal and guarded by high barbed-wire fences. About three thousand prisoners had already arrived there, and more and more crowded in every day: seamen arrested on German vessels in Liverpool harbour, waiters from large hotels in the North, an odd German band or two, harmless German commercial travellers and shopkeepers. The prisoners resented being interned, particularly family men who had lived at peace in England for many years. The one comfort that we could offer them was: ‘You are safer inside than out.’ For anti-German feeling had begun to run high; shops with German names were continually raided; and even German women made to feel that they were personally responsible for the alleged Belgian atrocities. Besides, we pointed out, in Germany they would be forced to join the army. At this time, we could make a boast of our voluntary system, and never foresaw the time when these internees would be bitterly envied by forcibly-enlisted Englishmen for being kept safe until the war ended.
In the summer of 1915, The Times reprinted a German newspaper account by Herr Wolff, an exchanged prisoner, of his experiences at Lancaster in 1914. The Times amused itself with 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, escorted by fifty Manchester policemen armed with carbines. But it was true, because I myself took over from the Chief Inspector, a fine figure in a frogged tunic, who gave me a splendid salute. He had done his job well and seemed proud of it, the only mishap being the accidental breaking of two carriage windows by the slung carbines. Wolff reported that even children were interned in the camp; and this also was true. A dozen or so little boys from the German bands had been interned because it seemed more humane to keep them with their friends than to send them to a workhouse. But their moral safety in the camp caused the commandant great concern.
I commanded a detachment of fifty Special Reservists, most of them with only six weeks’ service: a rough lot of Welshmen from the border counties. They had joined the army just before war started, as a cheap way of getting a training camp holiday; being forced to continue beyond the usual fortnight exasperated them. They were constantly deserting and having to be fetched back by the police, and seemed more scared of the prisoners than the prisoners were of them. I hated doing my round of sentries on a dark night at 2 or 3 a.m. Very often the lantern used to blow out and, fumbling to light it again in the dark, I would hear the frightened voice of a sentryroar: ‘Halt! Who goes there?’ I knew that he would be standing with his rifle aimed and five live rounds in his magazine; but always gave him
the pass-word just in time. Sentries often fired at shadows. The prisoners, particularly the sailors, fought a good deal among themselves. I saw a prisoner spit out teeth and blood one morning, and asked him what was wrong. ‘Oh, sir, one no-good friend give me one clap on the chops.’ Frequent deputations came to complain of the dullness of the food – the same ration food served to the troops. But after a while the prisoners settled down to sullen docility, starting hobbies, glee parties, games, and plans for escape. I had far more trouble with my Welshmen, who were always escaping from their quarters, though I guarded all possible exits. Finally I discovered that they had been crawling 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 Lancashire took as their text: “Mothers, take care of your daughters; the Royal Welch have come to town.”’
An inconvenient accident happened to me at Lancaster. The telephone was installed at an office where I slept on a sloping desk. One night, Pack Saddle (the code name for the Chief Supply Officer, Western Command) rang up from Chester after midnight, with orders for the commandant. They concerned the rationing of another batch of four hundred prisoners, who were being sent to him from Chester and North Wales. In the middle of a conversation made difficult by a thunderstorm, my sleepiness, and Pack Saddle’s irritability, the line got struck by lightning somewhere. An electric shock spun me round, and I could not use a telephone again without sweating and stammering until some twelve years later.
Guarding prisoners seemed an unheroic part to be playing in the war which, by October, had reached a critical stage; I wanted to be abroad fighting. My training had been interrupted, and I knew that even when recalled from detachment duty, I should have to wait a month or two at least before getting sent out. When I returned to the depôt, ‘Tibs’ Crawshay, the adjutant, a keen regular soldier, found two things wrong with me. First of all – I had not only gone to an inefficient tailor, but also hada soldier-servant who neglected to polish my buttons and shine my belt and boots as he should have done. Never having owned a valet before, I did not know what to expect of him. Crawshay finally summoned me to the Orderly Room. He would not send me to France, he said, until I had entirely overhauled my wardrobe and looked more like a soldier – my company commander’s report on me was ‘unsoldier like and a nuisance’. But my pay only just covered the mess bills, and I could hardly ask my parents to buy me another outfit so soon after assuring, them that I had everything necessary. Crawshay next decided that I must be a poor sportsman – probably because on the day of the Grand National, in which a horse of his was running, all the young officers applied for leave to see the race, except myself. I volunteered to take the job of Orderly Officer for the Day for someone who wanted to go.
One by one my contemporaries were sent out to France to take the place of casualties in the First and Second Battalions, while I remained despondently at the depôt. But again boxing helped me. 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 visited the training camp one evening, where Basham was offering to fight three rounds with any member of the regiment – the more the merrier. A young officer pulled on the gloves, and Basham got roars of laughter from the crowd as soon as he had taken his opponent’s measure, by dodging around and playing the fool with him. I asked Basham’s manager if I could have a go. He lent me some shorts, and I stepped into the ring. Pretending to know nothing of boxing, I led off with my right and moved 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. When I laughed at him, he laughed too. We had three very brisk rounds, and he very decently made me seem a much better boxer than I was, by accommodating his pace to mine. As soon as Crawshay heard the story, he rang me up at my billet and told me that he had learned with pleasure of my performance; that for an officer to box like that was a great encouragement for the men; that he was mistaken about my sportsmanship; and that, to show his appreciation, he would put me down for a draft to France in a week’s time.
Of the officers sent out before me, several had already been killed or wounded. The killed included a Liberal M.P., 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, and Lord-Lieutenant of his county. While war hung in the balance he had declared himself against it, whereupon his Hawarden tenantry, much ashamed, threatened to duck him in the pond. Realizing that, once war was declared, further protest would be useless, he joined the regiment as a second-lieutenant. His political convictions remained unaltered but, being a man of great integrity, he refused to take the non-combative employment as a staff-colonel offered him in the War Office. Soon after joining the First Battalion in France he was killed by a sniper while unnecessarily exposing himself. General French sent his body home for a military funeral at Hawarden; I attended it.
One or two random memories remain of this training period at Wrexham. The landlord of my billet, a Welsh solicitor, greatly overcharged us though pretending amicability. He wore a wig – or, to be more exact, three wigs, with hair of progressive lengths. After wearing the medium-sized hair for a few days, he would put on the long-haired wig, and say that, dear him! he really ought to get a hair-cut. Then he would leave the house and, in a public lavatory perhaps, or a wayside copse, change into the short-haired wig, which he wore until he thought it time to change to the medium once more. The deception came to light when one of the officers billeted with me got drunk and raided his bedroom. This officer, a Williams, was an extreme example of the sly Border Welshman. The drunker he became, the more shocking his confessions. He told me once about a Dublin girl whom he had promised to marry, and even slept with on the strength of a diamond engagement ring. ‘Only paste, really,’ he boasted. The day before the wedding she lost a foot – cut off by a Dal key tram, and he hurriedly left Dublin. ‘But, Graves, she was a lovely, lovely girl until that happened!’ Williams had been a medical student at Trinity College, Dublin. Whenever he visited Chester, the nearest town, to pick up a prostitute, he would not only appeal to her patriotism to charge him nothing, but always gave my name. I knew of this because these women wrote me reproachful letters. At last I told him in the mess: ‘In future you are going to be distinguished from all the other Williamses 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 Probert came from Anglesey, and had joined the Special Reserve in peacetime for his health. In September, the entire battalion volunteered for service overseas, except Probert. He refused to go, and could be neither coaxed nor bullied. Finally he came before the colonel, whom he genuinely puzzled by his obstinacy. Probert explained: ‘I’m not afraid, colonel, sir. But I don’t want to be shot at. I have a wife and pigs at home.’ The battalion was now rigged out in a temporary navy-blue uniform until khaki might be available – all but Probert. The colonel decided to shame him, and he continued, by order, to wear the peacetime scarlet tunic and blue trousers with a red stripe: a very dirty scarlet tunic, too, because he had been put on the kitchen staff. His mates called him ‘Cock Robin’, and sang a popular chorus in his honour:
And I never get a knock
When the boys call Cock
Cockity ock, ock,
Cock Robin!
In my old red vest I mean to cut a shine,
Walking down the street they call me ‘Danger on the line’…
But Probert did not care:
For the more they call me Robin Redbreast
I’ll wear it longer still.
I will wear a red waistcoat, I will,
I will, I will, I will, I w
ill, I will!
So, in October, he got discharged as medically unfit: ‘Of underdeveloped intelligence, unlikely to be of service in His Majesty’s Forces’, and went happily home to his wife and pigs. Of the singers, few who survived Festubert in the following May, survived 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’ meant any breach of King’s Regulations; and there was plenty of it. 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 being 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 noncommissioned officer, drunk and disorderly, robbing a comrade, and so forth. On pay-nights, hardly a man stayed sober; but no attention was paid if silence reigned as soon as the company officer came on his rounds at 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 officer had dealt with summarily now came before the colonel; and drunkenness practically vanished.
Taylor, a young soldier in my company, had been with me at Lancaster, where I bought him a piccolo to play when the detachment went 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 on an upturned bucket in the company billet – a drill-hall near the railway station – and play jigs for the drunks to dance to. He never drank himself. The music began slow, but gradually quickened, until he had worked them into a frenzy, delaying this climax for my arrival with the company orderly-sergeant. As the sergeant flung open the door and bellowed: ‘“F” Company, Attention!’ Taylor would break off, thrust the piccolo under his blankets, and jump to his feet. The drunks were left frozen in the middle of their capers, blinking stupidly.