The Actor and I had decided to get in touch with the battalion on our right. It was the Tenth Highland Light Infantry. I went down their trench some time in the morning of the 26th and walked nearly a quarter of a mile without seeing either a sentry or an officer. There were dead men, sleeping men, wounded men, gassed men, all lying anyhow. The trench had been used as a latrine. Finally I met a Royal Engineer officer who said: ‘If the Boche knew what an easy job he had, he’d just walk over and take this trench.’
So I reported to The Actor that we might find our flank in the air at any moment. We converted the communication trench which made the boundary between the two battalions into a fire-trench facing right; and mounted a machine-gun to put up a barrage in case the Highlanders ran. On the night of the 27th they mistook some of our men, who were out in No Man’s Land getting in the dead, for the enemy, and began firing wildly. The Germans retaliated. Our men caught the infection, but were at once ordered to cease fire. ‘Cease fire!’ went along the trench until it reached the H.L.I., who misheard it as ‘Retire!’ A panic seized them and they went rushing away, fortunately down the trench, instead of over the top. They were stopped by Sergeant McDonald of the Fifth Scottish Rifles, a pretty reliable territorial battalion now in support to ourselves and the Middlesex. He chased them back at the point of the bayonet; and was decorated for this feat.
On October 3rd we were relieved by a composite battalion consisting of about a hundred men of the Second Warwickshire Regiment and about seventy Royal Welch Fusiliers – all that was left of our own First Battalion. Hanmer Jones and Frank Jones-Bateman had both been wounded. Frank had his thigh broken with a rifle bullet while stripping the equipment off a wounded man in No Man’s Land; the cartridges in the man’s pouches had been set on fire by a shot and were exploding.* We went back to Sailly la Bourse for a couple of days, where the colonel rejoined us with his bandaged hand; and then farther back to Annezin, a little village near Béthune, where I lodged in a two-roomed cottage with a withered old woman called Adelphine Heu.
16
AT Annezin we reorganized. Some of the lightly wounded rejoined for duty, and a big draft from the Third Battalion arrived, so that within a week we were nearly seven hundred strong, with a full supply of officers. Old Adelphine made me comfortable. She used to come into my room in the morning while I shaved and tell me the local gossip – about her stingy daughter-in-law and the unscrupulous Maire and the woman at Fouquières who had just been delivered of black twins. She called the Kaiser 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 young, she said. As lady’s maid to a rich draper’s wife at Béthune, she had travelled widely in the surrounding country, and even over the border into Belgium. She told me scandal about the important families who once lived in the various villages we were now using as billets. Once she innocently asked whether I knew La Bassée. I said that I had tried to visit it recently but been detained.
‘Do you know Auchy, then?’
‘I have seen it often from a distance.’
‘Well, perhaps you know a big farm-house between Auchy and Cambrin, called Les Briques Farm?’
I answered, startled, that I knew it very well as a strong place with moat and cellars, and a kitchen garden now full of barbed wire.
‘In that case I shall tell you a story,’ she said. ‘I was staying there in 1870, the year of the other war, and we had with us at the house a handsome petit-caporal who loved me. So, because he was a nice boy and because of 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. And that the clause about the money was always repeated in case God should miss it.
On the whole, troops serving in the Pas de Calais loathed the French and found it difficult to sympathize with their misfortunes. They had all the shortcomings of a border people. 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.
I wrote home about this time: ‘I find it very difficult to like the French here, except occasional members of the official class. Even when 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 housing about a hundred thousand men. Apart from what they get paid directly as billeting allowance, there is the pay that troops spend. Every private soldier gets his five-franc note (nearly four shillings) every ten days, and spends it at once 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.’*
It was surprising that there were so few clashes between the British and the local French – who returned our loathing and were convinced that, when the war ended, we would stay and hold the Channel ports. We failed to realize that the peasants did not much care whether they were on the German or the British side of the line. They just had no use for foreign soldiers, and were not at all interested in the sacrifices that we might be making for ‘their dirty little lives’.
Fighting still continued around Loos. We could hear the guns in the distance, but the main thrust had clearly failed, and we were now skirmishing for local advantages. On October 13th, there came a final flare-up; the noise of the guns increased until even the inhabitants of Annezin, accustomed to these alarms, were properly scared, and began packing up in case the Germans broke through. Old Adelphine wept for fright. In Béthune, early that afternoon, as I sat at the Globe drinking champagne-cocktails with some friends who had joined from the Third Battalion, 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!’ He had been with ‘D’ Company during the battle, and so escaped the charge. ‘We’ll be pushed over the top tonight to reinforce someone, and that’ll be the end of us!’
At Annezin, we found everything in confusion. ‘We’re standing-to – at half an hour’s notice for the trenches,’ they told us. We packed up hastily, and in a few minutes the whole battalion was out on the road in fighting order. Our destination was the Hohenzollern Redoubt, new trench maps of which were now issued to us. The men seemed in high spirits, even the survivors of the show: singing to the accompaniment of an accordion and a penny-whistle. But once, when a ‘mad-minute’ of artillery noise began, they stopped and looked at each other.
‘That’s the charge,’ Sergeant Townsend said sententiously. ‘Many good fellows going west at this moment; maybe chums of ours.’
Gradually the noise died down, and at last a message came from brigade that we would not be needed. It had been another dud show, chiefly notorious for the death of Charles Sorley, a twenty-year-old; captain in the Suffolks, one of the three poets of importance killed during the war. (The other two were Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen.)
So ended the operations for 1915. Tension relaxed. We returned to battalion mess, to company drill, and to riding-school for the young officers. There might have been no Battle of Loos, except that the senior officers were fewer, and the Special Reserve element larger. Two or three days later we went back to trenche
s in the same sector. On October 15th, I was gazetted a Special Reserve captain. Promotion was rapid for Special Reserve subalterns who had joined early, because the battalion had trebled its strength and become entided to three times as many captains as before. Though pleased to see my pay go up several shillings a day, with an increase of War Bonus and possibly gratuity and pension if I were wounded, I realized with disquiet that my new rank was effective overseas. And now I had been promoted captain, at the age of just twenty, over the heads of elder officers who had longer trench service and were better trained than myself. A Special Reserve major and a captain had recently been sent home from the First Battalion, with a confidential report of inefficiency. Being anxious to avoid any such disgrace, I went to the adjutant and offered not to wear my badges of rank while serving with the battalion. ‘No, put your stars up,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘It can’t be helped.’
This proved to have been a wise move. Pretty soon afterwards, two other Special Reserve captains, one of them promoted at the same time as myself, and certainly far more efficient, were sent back as ‘likely to be of more service in the training of troops at home’.
Had I returned to the trenches as a company officer, I should probably have modified my formula, for taking risks; because a black depression held me. However, I got attached to the brigade sappers. Hill of the Middlesex was also enjoying this relief. He told me that the Middlesex colonel had addressed the survivors of his battalion as soon as they were back in billets, promising them that they would soon be given an opportunity of avenging their 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: ‘Not on purpose I don’t, sir!’ The sapping company specialized in the repair and maintenance of communication and reserve trenches. The adjutant recalled me, a month later, to ordinary company duty; as a punishment for failing, one day in billets, to observe a paragraph in Orders requiring us sappers to attend battalion parade.
My remaining trench service with the Second Battalion that autumn proved uneventful; I found no excitement in patrolling, no horror in the continual experience of death. The single memorable event was one of purely technical interest: a new method that an officer named Owen and myself discovered for silencing machine-guns firing at night. We gave each sentry a piece of string about a yard long, with a cartridge tied at each end. When the machine-gun began traversing, sentries farthest from the line of fire would stretch their string towards it and peg them down with cartridge points; so we got 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 carefully as possible along them and waited; as soon as it started again 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 one could rap out the rhythm of the familiar prostitutes’ call: ‘MEET me DOWN in PICC-a-DILL-y’, to which the Germans would reply, though in slower tempo, because our guns were faster than theirs: ‘YES, with-OUT my DRAWERS ON!’
Late this October a press-cutting from John Bull reached me. 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 sexual delinquency had merely been bound over and placed in the care of a physician – because he happened to be 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 nearly finished 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. Well, with so much slaughter about, it would be easy to think of him as dead.
Having now been in the trenches for five months, I had passed my prime. For the first three weeks, an officer was of little use in the front line; he did not know his way about, had not learned the rules of health and safety, or grown accustomed to recognizing degrees of danger. Between three weeks and four weeks he was at his best, unless he happened to have any particular bad shock or sequence of shocks. Then his usefulness gradually declined as neurasthenia developed. At six months he was still more or less all right; but by nine or ten months, unless he had been given a few weeks’ rest on a technical course, or in hospital, he usually became a drag on the other company officers. After a year or fifteen months he was often worse than useless. Dr W. H. R. Rivers told me later that the action of one of the ductless glands – I think the thyroid – caused this slow general decline in military usefulness, by failing at a certain point to pump its sedative chemical into the blood. Without its continued assistance the man went about his tasks in an apathetic and doped condition, cheated into further endurance. It has taken some ten years for my blood to recover.
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 a man’s average expectancy of trench service before getting killed or wounded was twice as long as an officer’s. Officers between the ages of twenty-three and thirty-three could count on a longer useful life than those older or younger. I was too young. Men over forty, though not suffering from want of sleep so much as those under twenty, had less resistance to sudden alarms and shocks. The unfortunates were officers who had endured two years or more of continuous trench service. In many cases they became dipsomaniacs. I knew three or four who had worked up to the point of two bottles of whisky a day before being lucky enough to get wounded or sent home in some other way. A two-bottle company commander of one of our line battalions is still alive who, in three shows running, got his company needlessly destroyed because he was no longer capable of taking clear decisions.
Apart from wounds, gas, and the accidents of war, the life of the trench soldier could not be called unhealthy while his ductless glands still functioned well. Plentiful food and hard work in the open air made up for the discomfort of wet feet, wet clothes, and draughty billets. A continual need for alertness discouraged minor illnesses: a cold vanished in a few hours, an attack of indigestion passed almost unnoticed. 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 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, like the Second when I first joined it, the question of getting wounded and going home was not allowed to be raised. Such a battalion had a very small sick list. During the winter of 1914–15, the Second reported no more than four or five casualties from ‘trench feet’, and in the following winter no more than eight or nine; the don’t care battalions lost very heavily indeed.
‘Trench feet’ seemed to be 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 a man warmed his feet at a brazier, or stamped until they were warm, and then went off to sleep with a sandbag tied around them, he took no harm: He might even fall asleep with cold, wet feet, and find that they
had swelled slightly owing to the pressure of his boots or puttees; but trench feet came only 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 completed ten days in the same trenches with no cases at all.
Autumn brought melancholy to the Béthune-La Bassée sector; in the big poplar forests the leaves had turned French-yellow, the dykes were overflowing, and the ground utterly sodden. Béthune had lost some of its charm; 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 buy cream buns and fish dinners.
In November, much to my delight, I had orders to join the First Battalion, now reorganizing after the Loos fighting. I found it in billets at Locon, only a mile or so north of Cambrin. The difference between the two battalions continued markedly throughout the war, however many times each got broken. The difference was that, in August 1914, the Second Battalion had just finished its eighteen years overseas tour, whereas the First Battalion had not left England since the South African War and was, therefore, less old-fashioned in its militarism and more humane. Livers were better; the men had dealings with white women and not with brown; it would have been impossible there 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 given a slack salute. The First Battalion was as efficient and regimental, on the whole even more successful in its fighting, and a much easier battalion to live in.