The troops with the worst reputation for acts of violence against prisoners were the Canadians (and later the Australians). The Canadians’ motive was said to be revenge for a Canadian found crucified with bayonets through his hands and feet in a German trench. This atrocity had never been substantiated; nor did we believe the story, freely circulated, that the Canadians crucified a German officer in revenge shortly afterwards. How far this reputation for atrocities was deserved, and how far it could be ascribed to the overseas habit of bragging and leg-pulling, we could not decide. At all events, most overseas men, and some British troops, made atrocities against prisoners a boast, not a confession.
Later in the war, I heard two first-hand accounts.
A Canadian-Scot: ‘They sent me back with three bloody prisoners, you see, and one started limping and groaning, so I had to keep on kicking the sod down the trench. He was an officer. It was getting dark and I felt fed up, so I thought: “I’ll have a bit of a game.” I had them covered with the officer’s revolver and made ‘em open their pockets without turning round. Then I dropped a Mills bomb in each, with the pin out, and ducked behind a traverse. Bang, bang, bang! No more bloody prisoners. No good Fritzes but dead ’uns.’
An Australian: ‘Well, the biggest lark I had was at Morlancourt, when we took it the first time. There were a lot of Jerries in a cellar, and I said to ’em: “Come out, you Camarades!” So out they came, a dozen of ’em, with their hands up. “Turn out your pockets,” I told ’em. They turned ’em out. Watches and gold and stuff, all din-kum. Then I said: “Now back to your cellar, you sons of bitches!” For I couldn’t be bothered with ’em. When they were all safely down I threw half a dozen Mills bombs in after ‘em. I’d got the stuff all right, and we weren’t taking prisoners that day.’
An old woman at Cardonette on the Somme gave me my firsthand account of large-scale atrocities. I was billeted with her in July 1916. Close to her home, a battalion of French Turcos overtook the rear-guard of a German division retreating from the Marne in September 1914. The Turcos surprised the dead-weary Germans while still marching in column. The old woman went, with gestures, through the pantomime of slaughter, and ended: ‘Et enfin, ces animaux leur ont arraché les oreilles et les ont mises à la poche!’
The presence of semi-civilized coloured troops in Europe was, from the German point of view, we knew, one of the chief Allied atrocities. We sympathized. Recently, at Flixécourt, one of the instructors told us, the cook of a corps headquarters mess used to be visited at the château, every morning by a Turco – the orderly to a French liaison officer. The Turco used to say: ‘Tommy, give Johnny pozzy,’ and got his tin of plum-and-apple jam.
One day the corps had orders to shift by the afternoon, so the cook told the Turco, giving him his farewell tin: ‘Oh la, la, Johnny, napoo pozzy tomorrow!’
The Turco would not believe it. ‘Yes, Tommy, mate,’ he insisted, ‘pozzy for Johnny tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow!’
To get rid of him, the cook said: ‘Fetch me the head of a Fritz, Johnny, tonight. I’ll ask the general to give you pozzy tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.’
‘Right, mate,’ said the Turco, ‘me get Fritz head tonight, general give me pozzy tomorrow.’
That evening the mess cook of the new corps that had taken over the château found a Turco asking for him and swinging a bloody head in a sandbag. ‘Here Fritz head, mate,’ said the Turco, ‘general give me pozzy tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.’
As Flixécourt lay more than twenty miles, behind the line…
We discussed the continuity of regimental morale. A captain in a line battalion of a Surrey regiment said: ‘Our battalion has never recovered from the first battle of Ypres. What’s wrong is that we have a rotten depôt. The drafts are bad, and so we get a constant re-infection.’ He told me one night in our sleeping hut: ‘In both the last two shows I had to shoot a man of my company to get the rest out of the trench. It was so bloody awful, I couldn’t stand it. That’s why I applied to be sent down here.’ This was the truth, not the usual loose talk that one heard at the Base. I felt sorrier for him than for any other man I met in France. He deserved a better regiment.
The boast of every good battalion was that it had never lost a trench; both our line battalions made it – meaning, that they had never been forced out of a trench without recapturing it before the action ended. Capturing a German trench and being unable to hold it for lack of reinforcements did not count; nor did retirement by order from headquarters, or when the battalion next door had broken and left a flank in the air. And, towards the end of the war, trenches could be honourably abandoned as being wholly obliterated by bombardment, or because not really trenches at all, but a line of selected shell-craters.
We all agreed on the value of arms-drill as a factor in morale. ‘Arms-drill as it should be done,’ someone said, ‘is beautiful, especially when the company feels itself as a single being, and each movement is not a synchronized movement of every man together, but the single movement of one large creature.’ I used to get big bunches of Canadians to drill: four or five hundred at a time. Spokesmen stepped forward once and asked what sense there was in sloping and ordering arms, and fixing and unfixing bayonets. They said they had come across to fight, and not to guard Buckingham Palace. I told them that in every division of the four in which I had served – the First, Second, Seventh, and Eighth – there were three different kinds of troops. Those that had guts but were no good at drill; those that were good at drill but had no guts; and those that had guts and were good at drill. These last, for some reason or other, fought by far the best when it came to a show – I didn’t know why, and I didn’t care. I told them that when they were better at fighting than the Guards they could perhaps afford to neglect their arms-drill.
We often theorized in the mess about drill. I held that the best drill never resulted from being bawled at by a sergeant-major: that there must be perfect respect between the man who gives the order and the men that carry it out. The test of drill came, I said, when the officer gave an incorrect word of command. If the company could, without hesitation, carry out the order intended or, if the order happened to be impossible, could stand absolutely still, or continue marching, without confusion in the ranks, that was good drill… Some instructors regarded the corporate spirit that resulted from drilling together as leading to loss of initiative in the men drilled.
Others argued that it acted just the other way round: ‘Suppose a section of men with rifles get isolated from the rest of the company, without an N.C.O. in charge, and meet a machine-gun. Under the stress of danger this section will have that all-one-body feeling of drill, and obey an imaginary word of command. There may be no communication between its members, but there will be a drill movement, with two men naturally opening fire on the machine-gun while the remainder work round, part on the left flank and part on the right; and the final rush will be simultaneous. Leadership is supposed to be the perfection for which drill has been instituted. That’s wrong. Leadership is only the first stage. Perfection of drill is communal action. Though drill may seem to be antiquated parade-ground stuff, it’s the foundation of tactics and musketry. Parade-ground musketry won all the battles in our regimental histories; this war, which is unlikely to open out, and must almost certainly end with the collapse, by “attrition”, of one side or the other, will be won by parade-ground tactics – by the simple drill tactics of small units fighting in limited spaces, and in noise and confusion so great that leadership is quite impossible.’ Despite variance on this point we all agreed that regimental pride remained the strongest moral force that kept a battalion going as an effective fighting unit; contrasting it particularly with patriotism and religion.
Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out. As ‘Blighty’, a geographical concept, Great Britain was a quiet, easy place for getting back to out of the
present foreign misery; but as a nation it included not only the trench-soldiers themselves and those who had gone home wounded, but the staff, Army Service Corps, lines of communication troops, base units, home-service units, and all civilians down to the detested grades of journalists, profiteers, ‘starred’ men exempted from enlistment, conscientious objectors, and members of the Goverment. The trench-soldier, with this carefully graded caste-system of honour, never considered that the Germans opposite might have built up exactly the same system themselves. He thought of Germany as a nation in arms, a unified nation inspired with the sort of patriotism that he himself despised. He believed most newspaper reports on conditions and sentiments in Germany, though believing little or nothing of what he read about similar conditions and sentiments in England. Yet he never underrated the German as a soldier. Newspaper libels on Fritz’s courage and efficiency were resented by all trench-soldiers of experience.
Hardly one soldier in a hundred was inspired by religious feeling of even the crudest kind. It would have been difficult to remain religious in the trenches even if one survived the irreligion of the training battalion at home. A regular sergeant at Montagne, a Second Battalion man, had recently told me that he did not hold with religion in time of war. He said that the niggers (meaning the Indians) were right in officially relaxing their religious rules while fighting. ‘And all this damn nonsense, sir – excuse me, sir – that we read in the papers, sir, about how miraculous it is that the wayside crucifixes are always getting shot at, but the figure of our Lord Jesus somehow don’t get hurt, it fairly makes me sick, sir.’ This was his explanation why, when-giving practice fire-orders from the hilltop, he had shouted, unaware that I stood behind him: ‘Seven hundred, half left, bloke on cross, five rounds, concentrate, FIRE!’ And why, for ‘concentrate’, he had humorously substituted ‘consecrate’. His platoon, including the two unusual ‘bible-wallahs’ whose letters home always began in the same formal way: ‘Dear Sister in Christ’, or ‘Dear Brother in Christ’, blazed away.
The troops, while ready to believe in the Kaiser as a comic personal devil, knew the German soldier to be, on the whole, more devout than himself. In the instructors’ mess we spoke freely of God and Gott as opposed tribal deities. For Anglican regimental chaplains we had little respect. If they had shown one-tenth the courage, endurance, and other human qualities that the regimental doctors showed, we agreed, the British Expeditionary Force might well have started a religious revival. But they had not, being under orders to avoid getting mixed up with the fighting and to stay behind with the transport. Soldiers could hardly respect a chaplain who obeyed these orders, and yet not one in fifty seemed sorry to obey them. Occasionally, on a quiet day in a quiet sector, the chaplain would make a daring afternoon visit to the support line and distribute a few cigarettes, before hurrying back. But he was always much to the fore in rest-billets. Sometimes the colonel would summon him to come up with the rations and bury the day’s dead; he would arrive, speak his lines, and shoot off again. The position was complicated by the respect that most commanding officers had for the cloth – though not all. The colonel in one battalion I served with got rid of four new Anglican chaplains in four months; finally he applied for a Roman Catholic, alleging a change of faith in the men under his command. For the Roman Catholic chaplains were not only permitted to visit posts of danger, but definitely enjoyed to be wherever fighting was, so that they could give extreme unction to the dying. And we had never heard of one who failed to do all that was expected of him and more. Jovial Father Gleeson of the Munsters, when all the officers were killed or wounded at the first battle of Ypres, had stripped off his black badges and, taking command of the survivors, held the line.
Anglican chaplains were remarkably out of touch with their troops. The Second Battalion chaplain, just before the Loos fighting, had preached a violent sermon on the Battle against Sin, at which one old soldier behind me grumbled: ‘Christ, as if one bloody push wasn’t enough to worry about at a time!’ A Roman Catholic padre, on the other hand, had given his men his blessing and told them that if they died fighting for the good cause they would go straight to Heaven or, at any rate, be excused a great many years in Purgatory. When I told this story to the mess, someone else said that on the eve of a battle in Mesopotamia the Anglican chaplain of his battalion had preached a sermon on the commutation of tithes. ‘Much more sensible than that Battle against Sin. Quite up in the air, and took the men’s minds off the fighting.’
I felt better after a few weeks at Harfleur, though the knowledge that this was merely a temporary relief haunted me all the time. One day I left the mess to begin the afternoon’s work on the drill-ground, and passed the place at which bombing instruction went on. A group of men stood around a table where the various types of bombs were set out for demonstration. I heard a sudden crash. A sergeant of the Royal Irish Rifles had been giving a little unofficial instruction before the proper instructor arrived. He picked up a No. I percussion-grenade and said: ‘Now lads, you’ve got to be careful here! Remember that if you touch anything while you’re swinging this chap, it’ll go off.’ To illustrate the point, he rapped the grenade against the table edge. It killed him and the man next to him and wounded twelve others more or less severely.
18
IN March I rejoined the First Battalion on the Somme. It was the primrose season. We went in and out of the Fricourt trenches, with billets at Morlancourt, a country village still untouched by shell-fire. (Later it got knocked to pieces; the Australians and the Germans captured and recaptured it from each other several times, until only the site remained.) ‘A’ Company headquarters were a farmhouse kitchen, where we slept in our valises on the red-brick floor. An old lady and her daughter stayed to safeguard their possessions. The old lady was senile and paralysed; almost all she could do was to shake her head and say: ‘Triste, la guerre!’ We called her ‘Triste la Guerre’. The daughter used to carry her about like a child.
At Fricourt, the trenches were cut in chalk, which we found more tolerable in wet weather than La Bassée clay. Division had given us a brigade-frontage where the lines came closer to each other than at any other point for miles. The British had only recently extended their line down to the Somme, and the French had been content, as they usually were, unless definitely contemplating a battle, to be at peace with the Germans and not dig in too near. But here a slight ridge occurred, and neither side could afford to let the other hold the crest, so they shared it, after a prolonged dispute. This area was used by both the Germans and ourselves as an experimental station for new types of bombs and grenades. The trenches were wide and tumble-down, too shallow in many places, and without sufficient traverses. The French had left relics both of their nonchalance – corpses buried too near the surface; and of their love of security – a number of deep though lousy dug-outs. We busied ourselves raising the frontline parapet and building traverses to limit the damage of the trench-mortar shells that fell continually. Every night not only the companies in the front line, but both support companies, kept hard at work all the time. It was an even worse place than Cuinchy for rats; they scuttled about ‘A’ Company mess at meal-times. We always ate with revolvers beside our plates, and punctuated our conversation with sudden volleys at a rat rummaging at somebody’s valise or crawling along the timber support of the roof above our heads. ‘A’ Company officers were gay. We had all been in our school choirs, except Edmund Dadd, who sang like a crow, and used to chant anthems and bits of cantatas whenever things went well. Edmund insisted on taking his part.
At dinner one day a Welsh boy came rushing in, hysterical from terror. He shouted to Richardson: ‘Sirr, sirr, there is a trenss-mortar in my dug-out!’
His sing-song Welsh made us all shout with laughter. ‘Cheer up, 33 Williams,’ Richardson said, ‘how did a big thing like a trench-mortar happen to occur in your dug-out?’
But 33 Williams could not explain. He went on again and again: ‘Sirr, sirr, there is a trenss-mortar in my d
ug-out!’
Edmund Dadd went out to investigate. He reported that a mortar-shell had fallen into the trench, bounced down the dug-out steps, exploded, and killed five men. 33 Williams, the only survivor, had been lying asleep, protected by the body of another man.
Our greatest trial was the German canister – a two gallon drum with a cylinder containing about two pounds of an explosive called ammonal that looked like salmon paste, smelled like marzipan, and, when it went off, sounded like the Day of Judgement. The hollow around the cylinder contained scrap metal, apparently collected by French villagers behind the German lines: rusty nails, fragments of British and French shells, spent bullets, and the screws, nuts, and bolts that heavy lorries leave behind on the road. We dissected one unexploded canister, and found in it, among other things, the cog-wheels of a clock and half a set of false teeth. The canister could easily be heard approaching and looked harmless in the air, but its shock was as shattering as the very heaviest shell. It would blow in any but the very deepest dug-outs; and the false teeth, rusty nails, cog-wheels, and so on went flying all over the place. We could not agree how the Germans fired a weapon of that size. The problem remained unsolved until July 1st, when the battalion attacked from these same trenches and discovered a wooden cannon buried in the earth and discharged with a time-fuse. The crew offered to surrender, but our men had sworn for months to get them.