Officers of the Royal Welch were honorary members of the Formby Golf Club. Siegfried and I went there often. He played golf seriously, while I hit a ball alongside him. I had once played at Harlech as a junior member of the Royal St David’s, but resigned when I found it bad for my temper. Afraid of taking the game up again seriously, I now limited myself to a single iron. My mis-hits did not matter. I played the fool and purposely put Siegfried off his game. This was a time of great food shortage; German submarines sank about every fourth food ship, and strict meat, butter, and sugar ration had been imposed. But the war had not reached the links. The leading Liverpool businessmen were members of the club, and did not mean to go short while there was any food at all coming in at the docks. Siegfried and I went to the club-house for lunch on the day before Christmas, and found a cold-buffet in the club dining-room, offering hams, barons of beef, jellied tongues, cold roast turkey, and chicken. A large, meaty-faced waiter presided. Siegfried asked him sarcastically: ‘Is this all? There doesn’t seem to be quite such a good spread as in previous years.’ The waiter blushed. ‘No, sir, this isn’t quite up to the usual mark, sir, but we are expecting a more satisfactory consignment of meat on Boxing Day.’ The dining-room at the club-house was always full, the links practically deserted.
We officers of the Mersey garrison made the Adelphi Hotel our favourite rendezvous. It had a swimming bath, and a cocktail bar generally crowded with very drunk Russian naval officers. One day, I met a major of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers there. I saluted him. Taking me aside, he muttered confidentially: ‘It’s nice of you to salute me, my boy, but I must confess that I am not what I seem. I wear a crown on my sleeve, and so does a C.S.M.; but then he’s not entitled to wear these three cuff-bands and the wavy border. Aren’t they pretty? No, I’m not what I seem to be. I’m a sham. I’ve got a sergeant-major’s stomach.’ Accustomed by now to drunken senior officers, I answered respectfully: ‘Really, sir, and how did you come to acquire that?’ He said: ‘You think I’m drunk. Well, perhaps I am, but it’s true about my stomach. You see, I got shot in the guts at the Beaumont-Hamel show. It hurt like hell, let me tell you. They took me down to the field-hospital. I was busy dying; but a company sergeant-major had got it through the head, and he was busy dying, too; and he did die. Well, as soon as ever the sergeant-major died, they took out that long gut, whatever you call the thing, the thing that unwinds – they say it’s as long as a cricket pitch – and they put it into me, grafted it on somehow. Wonderful chaps these medicos! They supply spare parts as though one were a motor-car… Well, this sergeant-major seems to have been an abstemious man. The lining of the new gut is much better than my old one; so I’m celebrating it. I only wish I’d borrowed his kidneys, too.’
An R.A.M.C. captain, sitting close by, broke into the conversation. ‘Yes, major, a stomach wound’s the worst of the lot. You were lucky to reach the field-ambulance alive. The best chance is to lie absolutely still. I got mine out between the lines, while I was bandaging a fellow. I flopped into a shell-hole. My stretcher-bearers wanted to carry me back, but I wouldn’t have any of that. I kept everyone off with a revolver for forty-eight hours, and saved my own life. I couldn’t count on a spare gut waiting for me at the dressing-station. My only chance was to lie still and let it heal.’
In December, I attended a medical board; they sounded my chest and asked how I was feeling. The president wanted to know whether I wanted a few months more home-service. I said: ‘No, sir, I should be much obliged if you would pass me fit for service overseas.’ In January I got my sailing orders.
I went back an old soldier, as my kit and baggage proved. I had reduced the original Christmas-tree to a pocket-torch with a fourteen-day battery, and a pair of insulated wire-cutters strong enough to cut German wire (the ordinary Army issue would cut only British wire). Instead of a haversack, I bought a pack like the ones carried by the men, but lighter and waterproof. I had lost my revolver when wounded and not bought another; a rifle and bayonet could always be got from the battalion. (Not carrying rifle and bayonet made officers conspicuous during an attack; in most divisions now they carried them; and also wore trousers rolled down over their puttees, like the men, instead of riding-breeches – because the Germans had learned to recognize officers by their thin knees.) The heavy blankets I had brought out before were now replaced by an eiderdown sleeping-bag in an oiled-silk cover. I also took a Shakespeare and a Bible, both printed on India paper, a Catullus and a Lucretius in Latin; and two light-weight folding canvas arm-chairs – one as a present for Yates, the quartermaster, the other for myself. I wore a very thick whip-cord tunic, with a neat patch above the second button and another between the shoulders – my only salvage from the last time out, except for the reasonably waterproof pair of ski-ing boots, in which also I had been killed – my breeches had been cut off me in hospital.
I commanded a draft of ten young officers. Young officers, at this period, were expected, as someone has noted in his war-memoirs, to be roistering blades over wine and women. These ten did their best. Three of them got venereal disease at the Rouen Blue Lamp. They were strictly brought-up Welsh boys of the professional classes, had never hitherto visited a brothel, and knew nothing about prophylactics. One of them shared a hut with me. He came in very late and very drunk one night, from the Drapeau Blanc, woke me up and began telling me about his experiences. ‘I never knew before,’ he said, ‘what a wonderful thing sex is!’
I said irritably, and in some disgust: ‘The Drapeau Blanc? Then I hope to God you washed yourself.’
He was very Welsh, and on his dignity. ‘What do you mean, captain? I did wass my fa-ace and ha-ands.’
There were no restraints in France; these boys had money to spend and knew that they stood a good chance of being killed within a few weeks anyhow. They did not want to die virgins. The Drapeau Blanc saved the life of scores by incapacitating them for future trench service. Base venereal hospitals were always crowded. The troops took a lewd delight in exaggerating the proportion of army chaplains to combatant officers treated there.
At the Bull Ring, the instructors were full of bullet-and-bayonet enthusiasm, with which they tried to infect the drafts. The drafts consisted, for the most part, either of forcibly enlisted men, or wounded men returning; and at this dead season of the year could hardly be expected to feel enthusiastic on their arrival. The training principles had recently been revised. Infantry Training, 1914, laid it down politely that the soldier’s ultimate aim was to put out of action or render ineffective the armed forces of the enemy. The War Office no longer considered this statement direct enough for a war of attrition. Troops learned instead that they must HATE the Germans, and KILL as many of them as possible. In bayonet-practice, the men had to make horrible grimaces and utter blood-curdling yells as they charged. The instructors’ faces were set in a permanent ghastly grin. ‘Hurt him, now! In at the belly! Tear his guts out!’ they would scream, as the men charged the dummies. ‘Now that upper swing at his privates with the butt. Ruin his chances for life! No more little Fritzes!… Naaoh! Anyone would think that you loved the bloody swine, patting and stroking ’em like that! BITE HIM, I SAY! STICK YOUR TEETHIN HIM AND WORRY HIM! EAT HIS HEART OUT!’
Once more I felt glad to be sent up to the trenches.
22
I FOUND the Second Battalion near Bouchavesnes on the Somme, but a very different Second Battalion. No riding-school, no battalion mess, no Quetta manners, no regular officers, except for a couple of newly arrived Sandhurst boys. I was more warmly welcomed this time; my supposed spying activities had been forgotten. But the day before I reported, Colonel Crawshay had been wounded while out in No Man’s Land inspecting the battalion wire: shot in the thigh by one of the ‘rotten crowd’ of his letter, who mistook him for a German and fired without challenging. He has been in and out of nursing homes ever since.
Doctor Dunn asked me with kindly disapproval what I meant by returning so soon. I said: ‘I couldn’t stand Engl
and any longer.’ He told the acting C.O. that I was, in his opinion, unfit for trench service, so I took command of the headquarter company and went to live with transport, back at Frises, where the Somme made a bend. My company consisted of regimental clerks, cooks, tailors, shoemakers, pioneers, transport men, and so on, who in a break-through could turn riflemen and be used as a combatant force, as at the First Battle of Ypres. We lived in dug-outs, close to the river, which was frozen over completely but for a narrow stretch of fast-running water in the middle. I have never been so cold in all my life. I used to go up to the trenches every night with the rations, Yates being sick; it was about a twelve-mile walk there and back.
General Pinney, now commanding the Thirty-third Division, felt teetotal convictions on behalf of his men and stopped their issue of rum, unless in emergencies; the immediate result being the heaviest sick-list that the battalion had ever known. Our men looked forward to their tot of rum at the dawn stand-to as the brightest moment of the twenty-four hours; when this was denied them, their resistance weakened. I took the rations up through Cléry, not long before a wattle-and-daub village with some hundreds of inhabitants. The highest part of it now standing was a short course of brick wall about three feet high; the remainder consisted of enormous overlapping shell-craters. A broken-down steamroller by the roadside had ‘CLÉRY’ chalked on it as a guide to travellers. We often lost a horse or two at Cléry, which the Germans went on shelling from habit.
Our reserve billets for these Bouchavesnes trenches were at Suzanne: not really billets, but dug-outs and shelters. Suzanne also lay in ruins. This winter was the hardest since 1894–5. The men played inter-company football matches on the river, now frozen two feet thick. I remember a meal here, in a shelter-billet: stew and tinned tomatoes on aluminium plates. Though the food arrived hot from the kitchen next-door, ice had formed on the edge of our plates before we finished eating. In all this area one saw no French civilians, no unshelled houses, no signs of cultivation. The only living creatures besides soldiers, horses, and mules, were a few moorhen and duck paddling in the unfrozen central stream of the river. The fodder ration for the horses, many of them sick, was down to three pounds a day, and they had open standings only. I have kept no records of this time, but the memory of its misery survives.
Then I got toothache, which forced me to take a horse and ride twenty miles to the nearest army dental station at corps headquarters. I found the dentist under the weather, like everyone else. He would do nothing at first but grumble what a fool he had been to offer his services to the King at such a low salary. ‘When I think,’ he complained, ‘of the terrible destruction to the nation’s teeth now being done by unqualified men at home, and the huge fees that they exact for their wicked work, it makes me boil with rage.’ There followed further complaints against his treatment at headquarters, and the unwillingness of the R.A.M.C. to give demists any promotion beyond lieutenant’s rank. Later he examined my tooth. ‘An abscess,’ he said. ‘No good tinkering about with this; must pull it out’ So he yanked at the tooth irritably, and the crown broke off. He tried again, damning the ineffective type of forceps which the Government supplied, found very little purchase, and broke off another piece. After half an hour he had dug the tooth out in sections. The local anaesthetic supplied by the Government seemed as ineffective as the forceps. I rode home with lacerated gums.
Brigade appointed me a member of a field general court-martial that was to sit on an Irish sergeant charged with ‘shamefully casting away his arms in the presence of the enemy’. I had heard about the case unofficially; the man, maddened by an intense bombardment, had thrown away his rifle and run with the rest of his platoon. An army order, secret and confidential, addressed to officers of captain’s rank and above, laid down that, in the case of men tried for their life on other charges, sentence might be mitigated if conduct in the field had been exemplary; but cowardice was punishable only with death, and no medical excuses could be accepted. Therefore I saw no choice between sentencing the man to death and refusing to take part in the proceedings. If I refused, I should be court-martialled myself, and a reconstituted court would sentence the sergeant to death anyhow. Yet I could not sign a death-verdict for an offence which I might have committed myself in similar circumstances. I evaded the dilemma. One other officer in the battalion, besides the acting C.O., had the necessary year’s service as a captain entitling him to sit on a field general court-martial. I found him willing enough to take my place. He was hard-boiled and glad of a trip to Amiens, and I took over his duties.
Executions were frequent in France. I had my first direct experience of official lying when I arrived at Le Havre in May 1915, and read the back-files of army orders at the rest camp. They contained something like twenty reports of men shot for cowardice or desertion; yet a few days later the responsible minister in the House of Commons, answering a question from a pacifist, denied that sentence of death for a military offence had been carried out in France on any member of His Majesty’s Forces.
James Cuthbert, the acting C.O., a Special Reserve major, felt the strain badly and took a lot of whisky. Dr Dunn pronounced him too sick to be in the trenches; so he came to Frises, where he shared a dug-out with Yates and myself. Sitting in my arm-chair, reading the Bible, I stumbled on the text: ‘The bed is too narrow to lie therein and the coverlet too small to wrap myself therewith.’ ‘Listen, James,’ I said, ‘here’s something pretty appropriate for this dug-out.’ I read it out.
He raised himself on an elbow, genuinely furious. ‘Look here, von Runicke,’ he shouted, ‘I am not a religious man. I’ve cracked a good many of the commandments since I’ve been in France; but while I’m in command here I refuse to hear you, or anyone bloody else blaspheme the Bible!’
I liked James, whom I had first met on the day I arrived at Wrexham to join the Regiment. He was then just back from Canada, and how hilariously he threw the chairs about in the junior anteroom of the mess! He had been driving a plough through virgin soil, he told us, and reciting Kipling to the prairie-dogs. His favourite piece was (I may be misquoting):
Are ye there, are ye there, are ye there?
Four points on a ninety-mile square –
With a helio winking like fun in the sun,
Are ye there, are ye there, are ye there?
James, who had served with the Special Reserve a year or two before he emigrated, cared for nobody, was most courageous, inclined to sentimentality, and probably saw longer service with the Second Battalion in the war than any officer except Yates.
A day or two later, because James was still sick, I found myself in temporary command of the battalion, and attended a commanding officers’ conference at brigade headquarters – ‘that it should ever have come to this!’ I thought. Opposite our trenches a German salient protruded, and the brigadier wanted to ‘bite it off’ in proof of the division’s offensive spirit. Trench soldiers could never understand the Staff’s desire to bite off an enemy salient. It was hardly desirable to be fired at from both flanks; if the Germans had got caught in a salient, our obvious duty must be to keep them there as long as they could be persuaded to stay. We concluded that a passion for straight lines, for which headquarters were well known, had dictated this plan, which had no strategic or tactical excuse. The attack had been twice postponed, and twice cancelled. I still have a field-message referring to it, dated February 21st (see next page).
Even this promise of special rum could not, however, hearten the battalion. Everyone agreed that the attack was unnecessary, foolish, and impossible. A thaw had now set in, and the four company commanders assured me that to cross three hundred yards of No Man’s Land, which constant shelling and the thaw had turned into a morass of mud more than knee-deep, would take even lightly armed troops four or five minutes. Not a man would be able to reach the enemy lines so long as a single section of Germans with rifles remained to defend them.
The general, when I arrived, inquired in a fatherly way whether I were not pr
oud to be attending a commanding officers’ conference at the age of twenty-one. I answered irritably that I had not examined my feelings, but that I was an old enough soldier to realize the impossibility of the attack. The colonel of the Cameronians, who were also to be engaged, took the same line. So the brigadier finally called off the show. That night, I went up with rations as usual; the officers were much relieved to hear of my stand at the conference.
We had been heavily shelled on the way, and while I took a drink at battalion headquarters, someone sent me a message about a direct hit on ‘D’ Company limber. Going off to inspect the damage, I passed our chaplain, who had come up with me from Frises Bend, and a group of three or four men. The chaplain was gabbling the burial service over a corpse lying on the ground covered with a waterproof sheet – the miserable weather and fear of the impending attack were responsible for his death. This, as it turned out, was the last dead man I saw in France and, like the first, he had shot himself.
I found the shattered limber, and remains of the petrol tins, full of water, which it was carrying, but no sign of the team. They were highly valued horses, having won a prize offered at a divisional horse show some months previously for the best-matched pair. So Meredith the transport sergeant and I sent the transport back, and went looking for the horses in the dark. We stumbled through miles of morass that night, but could not find hoof or hide of them. We used to boast that our transport animals were the best in France, and our transport men the best horse-thieves. No less than eighteen of our stable had been stolen from other units at one time or another, for their good looks. We even had ‘borrowed’ two from the Scots Greys. The horse I rode to the dentist came from the French police; its only fault being that, as the left-hand horse of a police squadron, it always pulled to the wrong side of the road. We had never lost a horse to any other battalion; so, naturally, Sergeant Meredith and I, who had started out with the rations at four o’clock in the afternoon, continued our search until long after midnight. When we reached Frises at 3 a.m. I collapsed on my bunk, completely exhausted.