IN 1916, when on leave in England after being wounded, I began an account of my first few months in France. Having stupidly written it as a novel, I have now to re-translate it into history. Here is one reconstituted chapter:
On arrival in France, we six Royal Welch Fusilier officers went to the Harfleur base camp near Le Havre. Later it became an educational centre for trench routine, use of bombs, trench-mortars, rifle-grenades, gas-helmets, and similar technicalities. But now we did a route-march or two through the French countryside and that was all, apart from fatigues at the Le Havre docks, helping the Army Service Corps unload stores from ships. The town was gay. As soon as we arrived, numerous little boys accosted us, pimping for their alleged sisters. ‘I take you to my sister. She very nice. Very good jig-a-jig. Not much money. Very cheap. Very good. I take you now. Plenty champagne for me?’ I was glad when we got orders to go ‘up the line’, though disgusted to find ourselves posted not to the Royal Welch Fusiliers, but to the Welsh Regiment.
I had heard little about the Welsh Regiment, except that it was tough and rough, and that the Second Battalion, to which we were going, had a peculiar regimental history as the old Sixty-ninth Foot. It had originally been formed as an emergency force from pensioners and boy-recruits, and sent overseas to do the work of a regular battalion – I forget in which eighteenth-century campaign. At one time, the Sixty-ninth had served as marines. They were nicknamed the ‘Ups and Downs’, partly because ‘69’ makes the same sense whichever way up it is written. The 69 was certainly upside-down when we joined. All the company officers, with the exception of two boys recently posted from Sandhurst, and one Special Reserve captain, came from other regiments. There were six Royal Welch Fusiliers, two South Wales Borderers, two East Surreys, two Wiltshires, one from the Border Regiment, one from the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. Even the quartermaster was an alien from the Connaught Rangers. There were still perhaps four time-serving N.C.O.s left in the battalion. Of the men, perhaps fifty or so had got more than a couple of months’ training before being sent out; some had only three weeks’ training; a great many had never fired a musketry course. All this, because the First Division had been in constant hard fighting since the previous August; in eight months the battalion had lost its full fighting strength five times over. The last occasion was at Riche-bourg, on May 9th, one of the worst disasters hitherto. The Division’s epitaph in the official communiqué read: ‘Meeting with considerable opposition in the direction of the Rue du Bois, our attacks were not pressed.’
The battalion’s ranks were made up first with reservists of the later categories, then with re-enlisted men, then with Special Reservists of pre-war enlistment, then with 1914 recruits of three or four months’ training; but each class in turn had been expended. Now, nothing remained to send, except recruits of the spring 1915 class, with various sweepings and scourings. The First Battalion had, meanwhile, suffered the same heavy losses. In Cardiff the Welsh Regiment advertised: ‘Enlist at the depôt and get to France quick.’ The recruits were mostly men either over-age or under-age – a repetition of regimental history – or with some slight physical disability which prevented them from enlisting in regiments more particular than the Welsh.
I still have the roll of my first platoon of forty men. The figures given for their ages are misleading. On enlistment, all over-age men had put themselves in the late thirties, and all under-age men had called themselves eighteen. But once in France, the over-age men did not mind adding on a few genuine years. No less than fourteen in the roll give their age as forty or over, and these were not all. Fred Prosser, a painter in civil life, who admitted to forty-eight, was really fifty-six. David Davies, collier, who admitted to forty-two, and Thomas Clark, another collier who admitted to forty-five, were only one or two years junior to Prosser. James Burford, collier and fitter, was the oldest soldier of all. When I first spoke to him in the trenches, he said: ‘Excuse me, sir, will you explain what this here arrangement is on the side of my rifle?’ ‘That’s the safety-catch. Didn’t you do a musketry-course at the depôt?’ ‘No, sir, I was a re-enlisted man, and I spent only a fortnight there. The old Lee-Metford didn’t have no safety-catch.’ I asked him when he had last fired a rifle. ‘In Egypt in 1882,’ he said. ‘Weren’t you in the South African War?’ ‘I tried to re-enlist, but they told me I was too old, sir. I had been an old soldier in Egypt. My real age is sixty-three.’ He spent all his summers as a tramp, and in the bad months of the year worked as a collier, choosing a new pit every season. I heard him and David Davies one night discussing the different seams of coal in Wales, and tracing them from county to county and pit to pit with technical comments.
The other half of the platoon contained the under-age section. I had five of these boys; William Bumford, collier, for instance, who gave his age as eighteen, was really only fifteen. He used to get into trouble for falling asleep on sentry duty, an offence punishable with death, but could not help it. I had seen him suddenly go to sleep, on his feet, while holding a sandbag open for another fellow to fill. So we got him a job as orderly to a chaplain for a while, and a few months later all men over fifty and all boys under eighteen got combed out. Bumford and Burford were both sent to the base; but neither escaped the war. Bumford grew old enough by 1917 to be sent back to the battalion, and was killed that summer; Burford died in a bombing accident at the base-camp. Or so I was told – the fate of hundreds of my comrades in France came to me merely as hearsay.
The troop-train consisted of forty-seven coaches, and took twenty-four hours to arrive at Béthune, the railhead, via Saint Omer. We detrained at about 9 p.m., hungry, cold, and dirty. Expecting a short journey, we had allowed our baggage to be locked in a van; and then played nap throughout the journey to keep our minds off the discomfort. I lost sixty francs, which was over two pounds at the existing rate of exchange. On the platform at Béthune, a little man in filthy khaki, wearing the Welsh cap-badge, came up with a friendly touch of the cap most unlike a salute. He had orders to guide us to the battalion, at present in the Cambrin trenches, about ten kilometres away. Collecting the draft of forty men we had with us, we followed him through the unlit suburbs of the town – all intensely excited by the noise and flashes of the guns in the distance. None of the draft had been out before, except the sergeant in charge. They began singing. Instead of the usual music-hall songs they sang Welsh hymns, each man taking a part. The Welsh always sang when pretending not to be scared; it kept them steady. And they never sang out of tune.
We marched towards the flashes, and could soon see the flare-lights curving across the distant trenches. The noise of the guns grew louder and louder. Presently we were among the batteries. From about two hundred yards behind us, on the left of the road, a salvo of four shells whizzed suddenly over our heads. This broke up Aberystwyth in the middle of a verse, and sent us off our balance for a few seconds; the column of fours tangled up. The shells went hissing away eastward; we saw the red flash and heard the hollow bang where they landed in German territory. The men picked up their step again and began chaffing. A lance-corporal dictated a letter home: ‘Dear auntie, this leaves me in the pink. We are at present wading in blood up to our necks. Send me fags and a life-belt. This war is a booger. Love and kisses.’
The roadside cottages were now showing more and more signs of dilapidation. A German shell came over and then whoo – oo – ooo – oooOOO – bump – CRASH! landed twenty yards short of us. We threw ourselves flat on our faces. Presently we heard a curious singing noise in the air, and then flop! flop! little pieces of shell-casing came buzzing down all around. ‘They calls them the musical instruments,’ said the sergeant. ‘Damn them,’ said my friend Frank Jones-Bateman, cut across the hand by a jagged little piece, ‘the devils have started on me early.’ ‘Aye, they’ll have a lot of fun with you before they’re done, sir,’ grinned the sergeant. Another shell came over. Everyone threw himself down again, but it burst two hundred yards behind us. Only Sergeant Jones had remained on his feet. ‘You’re wasting your strength, lads,’ he said to the draft. ‘Listen by the noise they make where they’re going to burst.’
At Cambrin village, about a mile from the front trenches, we were taken into a ruined chemist’s shop with its coloured glass jars still in the window: the billet of the four Welsh company-quartermaster-sergeants. Here they gave us respirators and field-dressings. This, the first respirator issued in France, was a gauze-pad filled with chemically treated cotton waste, for tying across the mouth and nose. Reputedly it could not keep out the German gas, which had been used at Ypres against the Canadian Division; but we never put it to the test. A week or two later came the ‘smoke-helmet’, a greasy grey-felt bag with a talc window to look through, and no mouthpiece, certainly ineffective against gas. The talc was always cracking, and visible leaks showed at the stitches joining it to the helmet.
Those were early days of trench warfare, the days of the jam-tin bomb and the gas-pipe trench-mortar: still innocent of Lewis or Stokes guns, steel helmets, telescopic rifle-sights, gas-shells, pill-boxes, tanks, well-organized trench-raids, or any of the later refinements of trench warfare.
After a meal of bread, bacon, rum, and bitter stewed tea sickly with sugar, we went through the broken trees to the east of the village and up a long trench to battalion headquarters. The wet and slippery trench ran through dull red clay. I had a torch with me, and saw that hundreds of field mice and frogs had fallen into the trench but found no way out. The light dazzled them, and because I could not help treading on them, I put the torch back in my pocket. We had no mental picture of what the trenches would be like, and were almost as ignorant as a young soldier who joined us a week or two later. He called out excitedly to old Burford, who was cooking up a bit of stew in a dixie, apart from the others: ‘Hi, mate, where’s the battle? I want to do my bit.’
The guide gave us hoarse directions all the time. ‘Hole right.’ ‘Wire high.’ ‘Wire low.’ ‘Deep place here, sir.’ ‘Wire low.’ The field-telephone wires had been fastened by staples to the side of the trench, and when it rained the staples were constantly falling out and the wire falling down and tripping people up. If it sagged too much, one stretched it across the trench to the other side to correct the sag, but then it would catch one’s head. The holes were sump-pits used for draining the trenches.
We now came under rifle-fire, which I found more trying than shell-fire. The gunner, I knew, fired not at people but at map-references – crossroads, likely artillery positions, houses that suggested billets for troops, and so on. Even when an observation officer in an aeroplane or captive balloon, or on a church spire directed the guns, it seemed random, somehow. But a rifle-bullet, even when fired blindly, always seemed purposely aimed. And whereas we could usually hear a shell approaching, and take some sort of cover, the rifle-bullet gave no warning. So, though we learned not to duck a rifle-bullet because, once heard, it must have missed, it gave us a worse feeling of danger. Rifle-bullets in the open went hissing into the grass without much noise, but when we were in a trench, the bullets made a tremendous crack as they went over the hollow. Bullets often struck the barbed wire in front of the trenches, which sent them spinning with a head-over-heels motion – ping! rockety-ockety-ockety-ockety into the woods behind.
At battalion headquarters, a dug-out in the reserve line, about a quarter of a mile behind the front companies, the colonel, a twice-wounded regular, shook hands with us and offered us the whisky bottle. He hoped that we would soon grow to like the regiment as much as our own. This sector had not long before been taken over from a French territorial division of men in the forties, who had a local armistice with the Germans opposite – no firing, and apparently even civilian traffic allowed through the lines. So this dug-out happened to be unusually comfortable, with an ornamental lamp, a clean cloth, and polished silver on the table. The colonel, adjutant, doctor, second-in-command, and signalling officer had just finished dinner: it was civilized cooking – fresh meat and vegetables. Pictures pasted on the papered walls; spring-mattressed beds, a gramophone, easy chairs: we found it hard to reconcile these with the accounts we had read of troops standing waist-deep in mud, and gnawing a biscuit while shells burst all around. The adjutant posted us to our companies. ‘Captain Dunn of “C” is your company commander,’ he told me. ‘The soundest officer in the battalion. By the way, remind him that I want him to send in that list of D.C.M. recommendations for the last show at once; but not more than two names, or else they won’t give us any. Four is about the ration for any battalion in a dud show.’
Our guide took us up to the front line. We passed a group of men huddled over a brazier – small men, daubed with mud, talking quietly together in Welsh. They were wearing waterproof capes, for it had now started to rain, and cap-comforters, because the weather was cold for May. Although they could see we were officers, they did not jump to their feet and salute. I thought that this must be a convention of the trenches; and indeed it is laid down somewhere in the military text-books that the courtesy of the salute must be dispensed with in battle. But, no, it was just slackness. We overtook a fatigue-party struggling up the trench loaded with timber lengths and bundles of sandbags, cursing plaintively as they slipped into sump-holes or entangled their burdens in the telephone wire. Fatigue-parties were always encumbered by their rifles and equipment, which it was a crime ever to have out of reach. After squeezing past this party, we had to stand aside to let a stretcher-case pass. ‘Who’s the poor bastard, Dai?’ the guide asked the leading stretcher-bearer. ‘Sergeant Gallagher,’ Dai answered. ‘He thought he saw a Fritz in No Man’s Land near our wire, so the silly booger takes one of them new issue percussion bombs and shots it at ‘im. Silly booger aims too low, it hits the top of the parapet and bursts back. Deoul! man, it breaks his silly f—ing jaw and blows a great lump from his silly f—ing face, whatever. Poor silly booger! Not worth sweating to get him back! He’s put paid to, whatever.’ The wounded man had a sandbag over his face. He died before they got him to the dressing-station.
I felt tired out by the time I reached company headquarters, sweating under a pack-valise like the men, and with all the usual furnishings hung at my belt – revolver, field-glasses, compass, whisky-flask, wire-cutters, periscope, and a lot more. A ‘Christmas-tree’ that was called. Those were the days in which officers had their swords sharpened by the armourer before sailing to France. I had been advised to leave mine back in the quartermaster-sergeants’ billet, and never saw it again, or bothered about it. My hands were sticky with the clay from the side of the trench, and my legs soaked up to the calves. At ‘C’ Company headquarters, a two-roomed timber-built shelter in the side of a trench connecting the front and support lines, I found tablecloth and lamp again, whisky bottle and glasses, shelves with books and magazines, and bunks in the next room. I reported to the company commander.
I had expected a grizzled veteran with a breastful of medals; but Dunn was actually two months younger than myself – one of the fellowship of ‘only survivors’. Captain Miller of the Black Watch in the same division was another. Miller had escaped from the Rue du Bois massacre by swimming down a flooded trench. Only survivors had great reputations. Miller used to be pointed at in the streets when the battalion was back in reserve billets. ‘See that fellow? That’s Jock Miller. Out from the start and hasn’t got it yet.’ Dunn did not let the war affect his morale at all. He greeted me very easily with: ‘Well, what’s the news from England? Oh, sorry, first I must introduce you. This is Walker – clever chap from Cambridge, fancies himself as an athlete. This is Jenkins, one of those elder patriots who chucked up their jobs to come here. This is Price – joined us yesterday, but we liked him at once: he brought some damn good whisky with him. Well, how long is the war going to last, and who’s winning? We don’t know a thing out here. And what’s all this talk about war-babies? Price pretends ignorance on the subject.’ I told them about the war, and asked them about the trenches.
‘About trenches,’ said Dunn. ‘Well, we don’t know as much about trenches as the French do, and not near as much as Fritz does. We can’t expect Fritz to help, but the French might do something. They are too greedy to let us have the benefit of their inventions. What wouldn’t we give for their parachute-lights and aerial torpedoes! But there’s never any connexion between the two armies, unless a battle is on, and then we generally let each other down.
‘When I came out here first, all we did in trenches was to paddle about like ducks and use our rifles. We didn’t think of them as places to live in, they were just temporary inconveniences. Now we work here all the time, not only for safety but for health. Night and day. First, at fire-steps, then at building traverses, improving the communication trenches, and so on; last comes our personal comfort – shelters and dug-outs. The territorial battalion that used to relieve us were hopeless. They used to sit down in the trench and say: “Oh, my God, this is the limit.” Then they’d pull out pencil and paper and write home about it. Did no work on the traverses or on fire positions. Consequence – they lost half their men from frost-bite and rheumatism, and one day the Germans broke in and scuppered a lot more of them. They’d allowed the work we’d done in the trench to go to ruin, and left the whole place like a sewage farm for us to take over again. We got sick as muck, and reported them several times to brigade headquarters; but they never improved. Slack officers, of course. Well, they got smashed, as I say, and were sent away to be lines-of-communication troops. Now we work with the First South Wales Borderers. They’re all right. Awful swine, those territorials. Usen’t to trouble about latrines at all; left food about to encourage rats; never filled a sandbag. I only once saw a job of work that they did: a steel loop-hole for sniping. But they put it facing square to the front, and quite unmasked, so two men got killed at it – absolute death-trap. Our chaps are all right, but not as right as they ought to be. The survivors of the show ten days ago are feeling pretty low, and the big new draft doesn’t know a thing yet.’
‘Listen,’ said Walker, ‘there’s too much firing going on. The men have got the wind up over something. If Fritz thinks we’re jumpy, he’ll give us an extra bad time. I’ll go up and stop them.’
Dunn went on: ‘These Welshmen are peculiar. They won’t stand being shouted at. They’ll do anything if you explain the reason for it – do and die, but they have to know their reason why. The best way to make them behave is not to give them too much time to think. Work them off their feet. They are good workmen, too. But officers must work with them, not only direct the work. Our time-table is: breakfast at eight o’clock in the morning, clean trenches and inspect rifles, work all morning; lunch at twelve, work again from one till about six, when the men feed again. “Stand-to” at dusk for about an hour, work all night, “stand-to” for an hour before dawn. That’s the general programme. Then there’s sentry-duty. The men do two-hour sentry spells, then work two hours, then sleep two hours. At night, sentries are doubled, so working parties are smaller. We officers are on duty all day, and divide up the night into three-hourly watches.’ He looked at his wristwatch. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘that carrying-party must have brought up the R.E. stuff by now. Time we all got to work. Look here, Graves, you lie down and have a doss on that bunk. I want you to take the watch before “stand-to”. I’ll wake you up and show you around. Where the hell’s my revolver? I don’t like to go out without it. Hello, Walker, what was wrong?’
Walker laughed. ‘A chap from the new draft. He had never fired his musketry course at Cardiff, and tonight he fired ball for the first time. It went to his head. He’d had a brother killed up at Ypres, and swom to avenge him. So he blazed off all his own ammunition at nothing, and two bandoliers out of the ammunition-box besides. They call him the “Human Maxim” now. His foresight’s misty with heat. Corporal Parry should have stopped him; but he just leant up against the traverse and shrieked with laughter. I gave them both a good cursing. Some other new chaps started blazing away too. Fritz retaliated with machine-guns and whizz-bangs. No casualties. I don’t know why. It’s all quiet now. Everybody ready?’
When they went off, I rolled up in my blanket and fell asleep. Dunn woke me at about one o’clock. ‘Your watch,’ he said. I jumped out of the bunk with a rustle of straw; my feet were sore and clammy in my boots. I was cold, too. ‘Here’s the rocket-pistol and a few flares. Not a bad night. It’s stopped raining. Put your equipment on over your raincoat, or you won’t be able to get at your revolver. Got a torch? Good. About this flare business. Don’t use the pistol too much, We haven’t many flares, and if there’s an attack we’ll need as many as we can get. But use it if you think something’s doing. Fritz is always sending up flare-lights; he’s got as many as he wants.’
Dunn showed me around the line. The battalion frontage was about eight hundred yards. Each company held some two hundred of these, with two platoons in the front line, and two in the support line about a hundred yards back. He introduced me to the platoon sergeants, more particularly to Sergeant Eastmond and told him to give me any information I wanted; then went back to sleep, asking to be woken at once if anything went wrong. I found myself in charge of the line. Sergeant Eastmond being busy with a working-party, I went round by myself. The men of the working-party, whose job was to replace the traverses, or safety-buttresses, of the trench, looked curiously at me. They were filling sandbags with earth, piling them up bricklayer fashion, the headers and stretchers alternating, then patting them flat with spades. The sentries stood on the fire-step at the comers of the traverses, stamping their feet and blowing on their fingers. Every now and then they peered over the top for a few seconds. Two parties, each of an N.C.O. and two men, were out in the company listening-posts, connected with the front trench by a sap about fifty yards long. The German front line stretched some three hundred yards beyond. From berths hollowed in the sides of the trench and curtained with sandbags came the grunt of sleeping men.
I jumped up on the fire-step beside the sentry and cautiously raised my head, staring over the parapet. I could see nothing except the wooden pickets supporting our protecting barbed-wire entanglements, and a dark patch or two of bushes beyond. The darkness seemed to move and shake about as I looked at it; the bushes started travelling, singly at first, then both together.. The pickets did the same. I was glad of the sentry beside me; he gave his name as Beaumont. ‘They’re quiet tonight, sir,’ he said. ‘A relief going on; I think so, surely.’
I said: ‘It’s funny how those bushes seem to move.’
‘Aye, they do play queer tricks. Is this your first spell in trenches, sir?’
A German flare shot up, broke into bright flame, dropped slowly and went hissing into the grass just behind our trench, showing up the bushes and pickets. Instinctively I moved.
‘It’s bad to do that, sir,’ he said, as a rifle-bullet cracked and seemed to pass right between us. ‘Keep still, sir, and they can’t spot you. Not but what a flare is a bad thing to fall on you. I’ve seen them burn a hole in a man.’
I spent the rest of my watch in acquainting myself with the geography of the trench-section, finding how easy it was to get lost among culs-de-sac and disused alleys. Twice I overshot the company frontage and wandered among the Munster Fusiliers on the left. Once I tripped and fell with a splash into deep mud. My watch ended when the first signs of dawn showed. I passed the word along the line for the company to stand-to-arms. The N.C.O.S whispered hoarsely into the dug-outs: ‘Stand-to, stand-to,’ and out the men tumbled with their rifles in their hands. Going towards company headquarters to wake the officers I saw a man lying on his face in a machine-gun shelter. I stopped and said: ‘Stand-to, there!’ I flashed my torch on him and saw that one of his feet was bare.
The machine-gunner beside him said: ‘No good talking to him, sir.’
I asked: ‘What’s wrong? Why has he taken his boot and sock off?’
‘Look for yourself, sir!’
I shook the sleeper by the arm and noticed suddenly the hole in the back of his head. He had taken off the boot and sock to pull the trigger of his rifle with one toe; the muzzle was in his mouth.
‘Why did he do it?’ I asked.
‘He went through the last push, sir, and that sent him a bit queer; on top of that he got bad news from Limerick about his girl and another chap.’
He belonged to the Munsters – their machine-guns overlapped the left of our company – and his suicide had already been reported. Two Irish officers came up. ‘We’ve had several of these lately,’ one of them told me. Then he said to the other: ‘While I remember, Callaghan, don’t forget to write to his next-of-kin. Usual sort of letter; tell them he died a soldier’s death, anything you like. I’m not going to report it as suicide.’
At stand-to, rum and tea were served out. I looked at the German trenches through a periscope – a distant streak of sandbags. Some of these were made of coloured cloth, whether for camouflage or from a shortage of plain sacking, I do not know. The enemy gave no sign, except for a wisp or two of wood-smoke where they, too, were boiling up a hot drink. Between us and them lay a flat meadow with cornflowers, marguerites, and poppies growing in the long grass, a few shell holes, the bushes I had seen the night before, the wreck of an aeroplane, our barbed wire and theirs. Three-quarters of a mile away stood a big ruined house; a quarter of a mile behind that, a red-brick village – Auchy – poplars and haystacks, a tall chimney, and another village – Haisnes. Half-right, pit-head and smaller slag-heaps. La Bassée lay half-left; the sun caught the weather-vane of the church and made it twinkle.
In the interval between stand-to and breakfast, the men who were not getting in a bit of extra sleep sat about talking and smoking, writing letters home, cleaning their rifles, running their thumb-nails up the seams of their shirts to kill lice, gambling. Lice were a standing joke. Young Bumford handed me one: ‘We was just having an argument as to whether it’s best to kill the old ones or the young ones, sir. Morgan here says that if you kill the old ones, the young ones die of grief; but Parry here, sir, he says that the young ones are easier to kill and you can catch the old ones when they go to the funeral.’ He appealed to me as an arbiter: ‘You’ve been to college, sir, haven’t you?’
I said: ‘Yes, I have, but so had Crawshay Bailey’s brother Norwich.’
The platoon treasured this as a wonderfully witty answer. Crawshay Bailey is one of the idiotic songs of Wales. Crawshay Bailey himself ‘had an engine and he couldn’t make it go’, and all his relatives in the song had similar shortcomings. Crawshay Bailey’s brother Norwich, for instance, was fond of oatmeal porridge, but was sent to Cardiff College, for to get a bit of knowledge. After that, I had no trouble with the platoon.
Breakfast at company headquarters consisted of bacon, eggs, coffee, toast, and marmalade. There were three chairs and two ammunition-boxes to sit on. Accustomed to company commanders who never took junior officers into their confidence, I liked the way that questions of the moment were settled at meal-times by a sort of board-meeting with Dunn as chairman. On this first morning we had a long debate on how to keep sentries awake. Dunn finally issued a company order forbidding them to lean against traverses; it made them sleepy. Besides, when they fired, the flash would come always from the same place. The Germans might fix a rifle on the spot after a time. I told Dunn of the bullet that passed between Beaumont and myself.
‘Sounds like a fixed rifle,’ he said, ‘because not one aimed shot in a hundred comes as close as that at night. And we had a chap killed in that very traverse the night we came in.’ The Bavarian Guards Reserve, who were opposite us at the time, seemed to have complete control of the sniping situation.
Dunn gave me the characters of the N.C.O.s in my platoon: which were trustworthy and which had to be watched. He had begun telling me just how much I could expect from the men at my platoon inspection of rifles and equipment, when a soldier came rushing in, his eyes blank with horror and excitement. ‘Gas, sir, gas! They’re using gas!’
‘My God!’ exclaimed Price. We all looked at Dunn, whose soldier-servant the man was.
Dunn said imperturbably: ‘Very well, Kingdom, bring me my respirator from the other room, and another pot of marmalade.’
The alarm had originated with smoke blowing across from the German trenches, where breakfast must also have been in progress; we knew the German meal-times by a slackening down of rifle-fire. Gas had become a nightmare. Nobody believed in the efficacy of our respirators, though advertised as proof against any gas the enemy could send over. Pink army forms marked ‘Urgent’ constantly arrived from headquarters to explain how to use these accessories: all contradictory. First, the respirators were to be kept soaking wet, then they were to be kept dry, then they were to be worn in a satchel, then, again, the satchel was not to be used.
Frank Jones-Bateman, a quiet boy of nineteen, came to visit me from the company on our right. He mentioned with a false ease that he had shot a German just before breakfast: ‘Sights at four hundred,’ he said. He had just left Rugby with a scholarship waiting for him at Clare, Cambridge. His nickname was ‘Silent Night’.