‘We’ve even got a polo-ground here. There was a polo-match between the First and Second Battalions the other day. The First had all their decent ponies pinched last October when they were massacred at Ypres and the cooks and transport men had to come up into the line to prevent a break-through. So the Second won easily. Can you ride? Not decently? Well, subalterns who can’t ride like angels have to attend riding-school every afternoon while we’re in billets. They give us hell, too. Two of us have been at it for four months and haven’t passed out yet They keep us trotting round the field, with crossed stirrups most of the time, and on pack-saddles instead of riding-saddles. Yesterday we were called up suddenly without being given time to change into breeches. That reminds me, you notice everybody’s wearing shorts? It’s a regimental order. The battalion thinks it’s still in India. The men treat the French civilians just like “niggers”, kick them about, talk army Hindustani at them. It makes me laugh sometimes. Well, what with a greasy pack-saddle, bare knees, crossed stirrups, and a wild new transport pony that the transport men had pinched from the French, I got a pretty thin time. The colonel, the adjutant, the second-in-command, and the transport officer stood at the four corners of the ring and slogged at the ponies as they came round. I fell off twice and got so wild with anger, I nearly decided to ride the second-in-command down. The funny thing is that they don’t realize how badly they’re treating us – it’s such an honour to be serving with the regiment. So better pretend you don’t care what they do or say.’
I protested: ‘But all this is childish. Is there a war on here, or isn’t there?’
‘The Royal Welch don’t recognize it socially,’ he answered. ‘Still, in trenches I’d rather be with this battalion than with any other I have met. The senior officers do know their job, whatever else one may say about them, and the N.C.O.s are absolutely to be trusted, too.’
The Second Battalion was peculiar, in having a battalion mess instead of company messes: another peacetime survival. The Surrey-man said grimly: ‘It’s supposed to be more sociable.’
We went together into the big château near the church. About fifteen officers of various ranks were sitting in chairs reading the week’s illustrated papers or, the seniors at least, talking quietly. At the door I said: ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ the new officer’s customary greeting to the mess. No answer. Everybody glanced at me curiously. The silence that my entry had caused was soon broken by the gramophone, which began carolling:
We’ve been married just one year,
And Oh, we’ve got the sweetest,
We’ve got the neatest,
We’ve got the cutest
Little oil stove.
I found a chair in the background and picked up the Field. The door burst open suddenly, and a lieutenant-colonel with a red face and angry eye burst in. ‘Who the blazes put that record on?’ he shouted to the mess. ‘One of the bloody warts, I expect. Take it off, somebody! It makes me sick. Let’s have some real music. Put on the “Angelus”.’
Two subalterns (in the Royal Welch a subaltern had to answer to the name of ‘wart’) sprang up, stopped the gramophone, and put on ‘When the Angelus is ringing’. The young captain who had put on ‘We’ve been married’ shrugged his shoulders and went on reading; the other faces in the room remained blank.
‘Who’s that?’ I whispered to the Surrey-man.
He frowned. ‘That’s Buzz Off,’ he muttered, ‘the second-in-command.’
Before the record had finished, the door opened and in came the colonel; Buzz Off reappeared with him. Everybody jumped up and said in unison; ‘Good morning, sir,’ this being his first appearance that day.
Instead of returning our loyal greeting and asking us to sit down, he turned spitefully to the gramophone: ‘Who on earth puts this wretched “Angelus” on every time I come into the mess? For heaven’s sake play something cheery for a change!’ With his own hands he took off the ‘Angelus’, wound up the gramophone, and put on ‘We’ve been married just one year’. At that moment a gong rang for lunch, and he abandoned his task.
We filed into the next room, a ball-room with mirrors and a decorated ceiling, and took our places at a long, polished table. The seniors sat at the top, the juniors competed for seats as far away from them as possible. Unluckily I got a seat at the foot of the table, facing the colonel, the adjutant, and Buzz Off. Not a word was spoken down my end, except an occasional whisper for the salt or the beer – very thin French stuff. Robertson, who had not been warned, asked the mess-waiter for whisky. ‘Sorry, sir,’ said the mess-waiter, ‘it’s against orders for the young officers.’ Robertson was a man of forty-two, a solicitor with a large practice, and had stood for Parliament in the Yarmouth division at the previous election.
I saw Buzz Off glaring at us and busied myself with my meat and potatoes.
He nudged the adjutant ‘Who are those two funny ones down there, Charley?’ he asked.
‘New this morning from the militia. Answer to the names of Robertson and Graves.’
‘Which is which?’ asked the colonel.
‘I’m Robertson, sir.’
‘I wasn’t asking you.’
Robertson winced but said nothing. Then Buzz Off noticed something.
‘T’other wart’s wearing a wind-up tunic.’ Then he bent forward and asked me loudly: ‘You there, wart! Why the hell are you wearing your stars on your shoulder instead of your sleeve?’
My mouth was full, and everybody had his eyes on me. I swallowed the lump of meat whole and said: ‘Shoulder stars were a regimental order in the Welsh Regiment, sir. I understood that it was the same everywhere in France.’
The colonel turned puzzled to the adjutant: ‘Why on earth is the man talking about the Welsh Regiment?’ And then to me: ‘As soon as you have finished your lunch you will visit the master-tailor. Report at the orderly room when you’re properly dressed.’
In a severe struggle between resentment and regimental loyalty, resentment for the moment had the better of it. I said under my breath: ‘You damned snobs! I’ll survive you all. There’ll come a time when there won’t be one of you left in the battalion to remember this mess at Laventie.’
We went up to the trenches that night. They were ‘high-command’ trenches – because water was struck whenever one dug down three feet, the parapet and parados had been built up man-high. I found my platoon curt and reserved. Even on sentry-duty at night my men would never talk confidentially about themselves and their families, like my platoon in the Welsh Regiment. Townsend, the platoon-sergeant, was an ex-policeman who had been on the reserve when war broke out. He used to drive his men rather than lead them. ‘A’ Company held Red Lamp Corner; the front trench broke off short here and started again farther back on the right, behind a patch of marsh. A red lamp hung at the corner, invisible to the enemy; after dark it warned the company behind us on our right not to fire left of it. Work and duties were done with a silent, soldier-like efficiency quite foreign to the Welsh Regiment.
My first night, Captain Thomas asked whether I would like to go out on patrol. It was the regimental custom to test new officers in this way, and none dared excuse himself. During my whole service with the Welsh I had never once been out in No Man’s Land, even to inspect the barbed-wire; the wire being considered the responsibility of the battalion intelligence officer and the Royal Engineers. When Hewitt, the Welsh machine-gun officer, used to go out on patrol sometimes, we regarded this as a mad escapade. But both battalions of the Royal Welch Fusiliers had made it a point of honour to dominate No Man’s Land from dusk to dawn. There was never a night at Laventie when a message did not come down the line from sentry to sentry: ‘Pass the word; officer’s patrol going out.’ My orders for this patrol were to see whether a certain German sap-head was occupied by night or not.
Sergeant Townsend and I went out from Red Lamp Corner at about ten o’clock; both carrying revolvers. We had pulled socks, with the toes cut off, over our bare knees, to prevent them showing
up in the dark and to make crawling easier. We went ten yards at a time, slowly, not on all fours, but wriggling flat along the ground. After each movement we lay and watched for about ten minutes. We crawled through our own wire entanglements and along a dry ditch; ripping our clothes on more barbed-wire, glaring into the darkness until it began turning round and round. Once I snatched my fingers in horror from where I had planted them on the slimy body of an old corpse. We nudged each other with rapidly beating hearts at the slightest noise or suspicion: crawling, watching, crawling, shamming dead under the blinding light of enemy flares, and again crawling, watching, crawling. A Second Battalion officer, who revisited these Laventie trenches after the war ended, told me the other day of the ridiculously small area of No Man’s Land compared with its seeming immensity on the long, painful journeys that he had made over it. ‘It was like the real size of a hollow in one’s tooth compared with how it feels to the tongue.’
We found the gap in the German wire and at last came within five yards of the sap-head. We waited quite twenty minutes, listening for any signs of its occupation. Then I nudged Sergeant Townsend and, revolver in hand, we wriggled quickly forward and slid into it. It was about three feet deep and unoccupied. On the floor were a few empty cartridges, and a wicker basket containing something large and smooth and round, twice the size of a football. Very, very carefully I groped and felt all around it in the dark. I was afraid that it might be some sort of infernal machine. Eventually I dared lift it out and carry it back, suspecting that it might be one of the German gas-cylinders we had heard so much about.
We got home after making a journey of perhaps two hundred yards in rather more than two hours. The sentries passed along the word that we were in again. Our prize proved to be a large glass container quarter-filled with some pale yellow liquid. This was sent down to battalion headquarters, and from there to the divisional intelligence officer. Everybody seemed greatly interested in it. The theory was that the vessel contained a chemical for re-damping gas-masks, though it may well have been dregs of country wine mixed with rain water. I never heard the official report. The colonel, however, told Captain Thomas in the hearing of the Surrey-man: ‘Your new wart seems to have more guts than the others.’
After this I went on patrol fairly often, finding that the only thing respected in young officers was personal courage. Besides, I had cannily worked it out like this. My best way of lasting through to the end of the war would be to get wounded. The best time to get wounded would be at night and in the open, with rifle fire more or less unaimed and my whole body exposed. Best, also, to get wounded when there was no rush on the dressing-station services, and while the back areas were not being heavily shelled. Best to get wounded, therefore, on a night patrol in a quiet sector. One could usually manage to crawl into a shell hole until help arrived.
Still, patrolling had its peculiar risks. If a German patrol found a wounded man, they were as likely as not to cut his throat. The bowie-knife was a favourite German patrol weapon because of its silence. (We inclined more to the ‘cosh’, a loaded stick.) The most important information that a patrol could bring back was to what regiment and division the troop opposite belonged. So if it were impossible to get a wounded enemy back without danger to oneself, he had to be stripped of his badges. To do that quickly and silently, it might be necessary first to cut his throat or beat in his skull.
Sir Pyers Mostyn, a Royal Welch lieutenant who often went out patrolling at Laventie, had a feud with a German patrol on the left of the battalion frontage. Our patrols usually consisted of an officer and one, or at the most, two men; German patrols of six or seven men under an N.C.O. German officers did not, as one of our sergeant-majors put it, believe in ‘keeping a dog and barking themselves’; so they left as much as they decently could to their N.C.O.s. One night Mostyn caught sight of his opponents; he had raised himself on his knees to throw a percussion bomb, when they fired and wounded him in the arm, which immediately went numb. He caught the bomb before it hit the ground, threw it at them with his left hand, and in the confusion that followed got back to the trench.
Like everyone else, I had a carefully worked out formula for taking risks. In principle, we would all take any risk, even the certainty of death, to save life or to maintain an important position. To take life we would run, say, a one-in-five risk, particularly if there was some wider object than merely reducing the enemy’s manpower; for instance, picking off a well-known sniper, or getting fire ascendancy in trenches where the lines came dangerously close. I only once refrained from shooting a German I saw, and that was at Cuinchy, some three weeks after this. While sniping from a knoll in the support line, where we had a concealed loop-hole, I saw a German, perhaps seven hundred yards away, through my telescopic sights. He was taking a bath in the German third line. I disliked the idea of shooting a naked man, so I handed the rifle to the sergeant with me. ‘Here, take this. You’re a better shot than I am.’ He got him; but I had not stayed to watch.
About saving the lives of enemy wounded there was disagreement; the convention varied with the division. Some divisions, like the Canadians and a division of Lowland territorials, who claimed that they had atrocities to avenge, would not only avoid taking risks to rescue enemy wounded, but go out of their way to finish them off. The Royal Welch were gentlemanly: perhaps a one-in-twenty risk to get a wounded German to safety would be considered justifiable. An important factor in calculating risks was our own physical condition. When exhausted and wanting to get quickly from one point in the trenches to another without collapse, we would sometimes take a short cut over the top, if the enemy were not nearer than four or five hundred yards. In a hurry, we would take a one-in-two-hundred risk; when dead tired, a one-in-fifty risk. In battalions where morale was low, one-in-fifty risks were often taken in laziness or despair. The Munsters of the First Division were said by the Welsh to ‘waste men wicked’, by not keeping properly under cover while in the reserve lines. The Royal Welch never allowed wastage of this sort. At no time in the war did any of us believe that hostilities could possibly continue more than another nine months or a year, so it seemed almost worth while taking care; there might even be a chance of lasting until the end absolutely unhurt.
The Second Royal Welch, unlike the Second Welsh, believed themselves better trench fighters than the Germans. With the Second Welsh it was not cowardice but modesty. With the Second Royal Welch it was not vainglory but courage: as soon as they arrived in a new sector they insisted on getting fire ascendancy. Having found out, from the troops whom they relieved, all possible information as to enemy snipers, machine-guns, and patrols, they set themselves to deal with them one by one. Machine-guns first. As soon as a machine-gun started traversing down a trench by night, the whole platoon farthest removed from its fire would open five rounds rapid at it. The machine-gun would usually stop suddenly, but start again after a minute or two. Again five rounds rapid. Then it gave up.
The Welsh seldom answered a machine-gun. If they did, it was not with organized local fire, beginning and ending in unison, but in ragged confused protest all along the line. The Royal Welch almost never fired at night, except with organized fire at a machine-gun, or a persistent enemy sentry, or a patrol close enough to be distinguished as a German one. With all other battalions I met in France there was a continuous random popping off; the sentries wanted to show their spite against the war. Flares were rarely used in the Royal Welch, except as signals to our patrols that they should be starting back.
When the enemy machine-guns had been discouraged, our patrols would go out with bombs to claim possession of No Man’s Land. At dawn next morning came the struggle for sniping ascendancy. The Germans had special regimental snipers, trained in camouflaging themselves. I saw one killed once at Cuinchy, who had been firing all day from a shell-hole between the lines. He wore a sort of cape made of imitation grass, his face was painted green and brown, and his rifle was also green-fringed. A number of empty cartridges lay beside him, and
his cap bore the special oak-leaf badge. Few of our battalions attempted to get control of the sniping situation. The Germans had the advantage of having many times more telescopic sights than we did, and bullet-proof steel loop-holes. Also a system by which snipers were kept for months in the same sector until they knew all the loopholes and shallow places in our trenches, and the tracks that our ration parties used above-ground by night, and where our traverses occurred, and so on, better than most of us did ourselves. British snipers changed their trenches, with their battalions, every week or two, and never had time to study the German trench-geography. But at least we counted on getting rid of the unprofessional sniper. Later we secured an elephant-gun that could send a bullet through enemy loop-holes; and if we failed to locate the loop-hole of a persistent sniper, we tried to dislodge him with a volley of rifle-grenades, or even by ringing up the artillery.
It puzzled us that when a sniper had been spotted and killed, another sniper would often begin operations next day from the same position. The Germans probably underrated us, and regarded their loss as an accident. The willingness of other battalions to allow the Germans sniping ascendancy helped us; enemy snipers, even the professionals, often exposed themselves unnecessarily. There was one advantage of which no progress or retreat of the enemy could rob us, namely that we always more or less faced east. Dawn broke behind the German lines, and they did not realize that for several minutes every morning we could see them, while still invisible ourselves. German night wiring-parties often stayed out too long, and we could get a man or two as they went back; sunsets went against us, of course; but sunset was a less critical time. At night, our sentries had orders to stand with their heads and shoulders above the parapet, and their rifles in position. This surprised me at first, but it implied greater vigilance and self-confidence in the sentry, and also put the top of his head above the level of the parapet. Enemy machine-guns were trained on this level, and it would be safer to get hit in the chest or shoulders than in the forehead. The risk of unaimed fire at night being negligible, this was really the safest plan. It happened in battalions which did not insist on the head-and-shoulder rule, but let their sentries just steal an occasional peep over the top, that an enemy patrol would sneak up unseen to the British wire, throw a few bombs, and get safely back. With the Royal Welch, the barbed-wire entanglement became the responsibility of the company it protected. One of our first acts on taking over trenches was to inspect and repair it. We did a lot of work on our wire.