WITH the advance of summer came new types of bombs and trench-mortars, heavier shelling, improved gas-masks, and a general tightening up of discipline. We met the first battalions of the New Army, and felt like scarecrows by comparison. Our battalion went in and out of the Cambrin and Cuinchy trenches, with billets in Béthune and the neighbouring villages. By this time I had caught the pessimism of the First Division. Its spirit in the trenches was largely defensive; the policy being not to stir the Germans into more than their usual hostility. But casualties remained very heavy for trench warfare. Pessimism made everyone superstitious, and I found myself believing in signs of the most trivial nature.
Sergeant Smith, my second sergeant, told me of the officer who had commanded the platoon before I did. ‘He was a nice gentleman, sir, but very wild. Just before the Rue du Bois show, he says to me: “By the way, sergeant, I’m going to get killed tomorrow. I know that. And I know that you’re going to be all right. So see that my kit goes back to my people. You’ll find their address in my pocket-book. You’ll find five hundred francs there too. Now remember this, Sergeant Smith, you keep a hundred francs yourself and divide up the rest among the chaps left.” He says: “Send my pocket-book back with my other stuff, Sergeant Smith, but for God’s sake burn my diary. They mustn’t see that. I’m going to get it here!” He points to his forehead. And that’s how it was. He got it through the forehead all right. I sent the stuff back to his parents. I divided up the money and I burned the diary.’
One day, walking along a trench at Cambrin, I suddenly dropped flat on my face; two seconds later a whizz-bang struck the back of the trench exactly where my head had been. The sergeant who was with me walking a few steps ahead, turned round: ‘Are you killed, sir?’ The shell was fired from a battery near Les Brigues Farm, only a thousand yards away, so that I must have reacted simultaneously with the explosion of the gun. How did I know that the shell would be coming my way?
At Béthune, I saw the ghost of a man named Private Challoner, who had been at Lancaster with me, and again in ‘F’ Company at Wrexham. When he went out with a draft to join the First Battalion, he shook my hand and said: ‘I’ll meet you again in France, sir.’ In June he passed by our ‘C’ Company billet, where we were just having a special dinner to celebrate our safe return from Cuinchy – new potatoes, fish, green peas, asparagus, mutton chops, strawberries and cream, and three bottles of Pommard. Private Challoner looked in at the window, saluted, and passed on. I could not mistake him, or the cap-badge he wore; yet no Royal Welch battalion was billeted within miles of Béthune at the time. I jumped up, looked out of the window, and saw nothing except a fag-end smoking on the pavement. Challoner had been killed at Festubert in May.
Constant mining went on in this Cambrin-Cuinchy sector. We had the prospect of being blown up at any moment. An officer of the R.E. tunnelling company won the Victoria Cross while we were there. A duel of mining and counter-mining had been going on. When the Germans began to undermine his original boring, he rapidly tunnelled beneath them. It was touch and go who would get ready first He won. But when he detonated his mine from the trench by an electric lead, nothing happened. So he ran down again, retamped the charge, and got back just in time to set it off before the Germans fired theirs. I had visited the upper boring on the previous day. It ran about twenty feet under the German lines. At the end of the gallery I found a Welsh miner on listening duty, one of our own battalion, who had transferred to the Royal Engineers. He cautioned me to silence. I could distinctly hear the Germans working somewhere below us. He whispered: ‘So long as they work, I don’t mind. It’s when they bloody stop!’ He did his two-hour spell by candle-light in the cramped and stuffy dead-end, reading a book. The mining officer had told me that the men were allowed to read; it didn’t interfere with their listening. The book was a paper-backed novelette called From Mill Girl to Duchess.The tunnelling companies were notorious thieves, by the way. They would snatch things up from the trench and scurry off with them into their borings; just like mice.
After one particularly dangerous spell of trenches, I had bad news in a letter from Charterhouse. Bad news from home might affect a soldier in one of two ways. It might either drive him to suicide (or recklessness amounting to suicide), or else seem trivial by contrast with present experiences and be laughed off. But, unless due for leave, he could do nothing whatever to remedy matters. A year later, in the same sector, an officer of the North Staffordshire Regiment heard from home that his wife was living with another man. He went out on a raid that night and got either killed or captured; so the men with him said. There had been a fight and they came back without him. After two days he was arrested at Béthune, trying to board a leave-train; he had intended to go home and shoot up the wife and her lover. The officers who court-martialled him for deserting in the face of the enemy, were content with a sentence of cashiering. He went as a private soldier to another regiment. I never heard what happened to him afterwards.
The bad news came in a letter from a cousin of mine still at Charterhouse. He said that Dick was not at all the innocent fellow I took him for, but as bad as anyone could be. I remembered that my cousin owed me a grudge, and decided that this must be a very cruel act of spite. Dick’s letters had been my greatest stand-by all these months whenever I felt low; he wrote every week, mostly about poetry. They were something solid and clean to set off against the impermanence of trench life and the sordidness of life in billets. I was now back in Béthune. Two officers of another company had just been telling me how they had slept in the same room with a woman and her daughter. They had tossed for the mother, because the daughter was a ‘yellow-looking scaly little thing like a lizard’. The Red Lamp, the army brothel, was around the corner in the main street. I had seen a queue of a hundred and fifty men waiting outside the door, each to have his short turn with one of the three women in the house. My servant, who had stood in the queue, told me that the charge was ten francs a man – about eight shillings at that time. Each woman served nearly a battalion of men every week for as long as she lasted. According to the assistant provost-marshal, three weeks was the usual limit: ‘after which she retired on her earnings, pale but proud.’
I was always being teased because I would not sleep even with the nicer girls; and I excused myself, not on moral grounds or on grounds of fastidiousness, but in the only way that they could understand: I said that I didn’t want a dose. A good deal of talk in billets concerned the peculiar bed-manners of Frenchwomen. ‘She was very nice and full of games. But when I said to her: “S’il vous plaît, ôtes-toi la chemise, ma chérie,” she wouldn’t. She said: “Oh, no’-non, mon lieutenant. Ce n’est convenable.”’ I was glad when we got back to the trenches. There I had a more or less reassuring letter from Dick. He told me that my cousin did have a spite against him and me, and admitted that he had been ragging about in a silly way, but that nothing bad had happened. He said he was very sorry, and would stop it for the sake of our friendship.
At the end of July, Robertson, one of the other Royal Welch officers attached to the Welsh, and myself had orders to proceed to the Laventie sector. We were to report to the Second Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Frank Jones-Bateman and Hanmer Jones, two more of us, went to the First Battalion. The remaining two of the six had already gone back: McLellan sick, and Watkin with bomb wounds that have kept him limping ever since. We were sorry to say goodbye to our men, who all crowded round to shake hands and wish us luck. Nor did we look forward to a fresh start, with a new company and new regimental customs. But it would be worth it, just to serve with our own regiment. Robertson and I agreed to take our journey as leisurely as possible. Laventie lay only seventeen miles off, but our orders were to ‘proceed by train’; so a company mess-cart took us down to Béthune. We asked the railway transport officer what trains he had for Laventie. He told us that one would be going in a few minutes; we decided to miss it. No other train ran until the next day; so we stopped the night at the Hôtel de la France, in which the Prince of Wales, then a lieutenant in the Fortieth Siege Battery, was billeted sometimes. We did not find him in. I had spoken to him once – in the public bath at Béthune, where he and I were the only bathers one morning. Dressed in nothing at all, he graciously remarked how bloody cold the water was, and I loyally assented that he was too bloody right. We were very pink and white and did exercises on the horizontal bar afterwards. I joked to Frank Jones-Bateman about it: ‘I have just met our future King in a bath.’ Frank said: ‘I can trump that: two days ago I had a friendly talk with him in the A.S.C. latrines.’ The Prince’s favourite rendezvous was the ‘Globe’, a café in the Béthune market square reserved for British officers and French civilians. I once heard him complain indignantly that General French had refused to let him go up into the line.
The next day, Robertson and I caught our train. It took us to a junction, the name of which I forget, where we spent a day botanizing in the fields. No other train arrived until the following day, when we went on to Berguette, a rail-head still a number of miles from Laventie. There a mess-cart was waiting for us in answer to a telegram we had sent. We finally rattled up to battalion headquarters in Laventie High Street, having taken fifty-four hours to come those seventeen miles. We saluted the adjutant smartly, gave our names, and told him that we were Third Battalion officers posted to the regiment. He did not shake hands with us, offer us a drink, or say a word of welcome. ‘I see,’ he said coldly. ‘Well, which of you is senior? Oh, never mind. Give your particulars to the R.S.M. Tell him to post whoever is senior to “A” Company and the other to “B” Company.’
The regimental sergeant-major took our particulars and introduced me to Hilary Drake-Brockman, a young second-lieutenant of ‘A’ Company, to which I had been posted. He was a special reservist of the East Surrey Regiment, and contemptuously known as ‘the Surrey-man’. He took me along to the company billet. When out of earshot of battalion headquarters, I asked him: ‘What’s wrong with the adjutant? Why didn’t he shake hands or give me any sort of decent welcome?’
The Surrey-man said: ‘Well, it’s your regiment, not mine. They’re all like that here. You must realize that this is one of the only four regular infantry battalions in France that has remained still more or less its old self. This is the Nineteenth Brigade, the luckiest in France. It hasn’t been permanently attached to any division, but gets used as army reserve, to put in wherever one has been badly knocked. So except for the Retreat, where it lost about a company, and Fromelles, where it lost half of what was left, it’s been practically undamaged. More than two hundred of the wounded have rejoined since. All our company commanders are regulars, and so are all our N.C.O.s. The peacetime custom of taking no notice of newly-joined officers is still more or less kept up for the first six months. It’s hard enough on the Sandhurst chaps; but worse for special reservists, like you and Rugg and Robertson; and it’s worse still for outsiders like me.’ We were going down the village street. The men sitting about on the doorsteps jumped up smartly to attention as we passed and saluted with a fixed, stony glare. They were magnificent looking fellows. Their uniforms were spotless, their equipment khaki-blancoed, and their buttons and cap-badges twinkled. We reached company headquarters, where I reported to my company commander, Captain G. O. Thomas. He was a regular of seventeen years’ service, a well-known polo-player, and a fine soldier. This is the descriptive order that he would himself have preferred. He shook hands without a word, waved me to a chair, offered a cigarette, and continued writing his letter. I found later that ‘A’ was the best company I could have struck.
The Surrey-man asked me to help him censor some company letters before going over to the battalion mess for lunch; they were more literate than the Welsh Regiment ones, but duller. On the way to the mess he asked me whether I had been out in France before. ‘I was attached to the Second Welsh Regiment for three months; I commanded a company there for a bit.’
‘Oh, did you? Well, I’d advise you to say nothing at all about it, then they’ll not expect too much. They treat us like dirt; but it will be worse for you than for me because you’re a full lieutenant. They’ll resent that with your short service. There’s one lieutenant here with six years’ service, and several second-lieutenants who have been out since the autumn. Two Special Reserve captains have already been foisted on the battalion; the senior officers are planning to get rid of them somehow. The senior officers are beasts. If you open your mouth or make the slightest noise in the mess, they jump down your throat. Only officers of the rank of captain are allowed to drink whisky or turn on the gramophone. We’ve got to jolly well keep still and look like furniture. It’s just like peacetime. Mess bills are very high; the mess was in debt at Quetta last year, so they’re economizing now to pay that back. We get practically nothing for our money but ordinary rations, and we aren’t allowed to drink the whisky.
‘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.
Captain Thomas kept extremely silent; but from shyness, not sullenness. ‘Yes’ and ‘no’ were the limit of his usual conversation. He never took us subalterns into his confidence about company affairs, and we did not like asking him too much. He proved most conscientious in taking his watch at night, which the other company commanders did not always do. We enjoyed his food-hampers, sent every week from Fortnum & Mason – we messed by companies when in trenches. Our one complaint was that Buzz Off, who had a good nose for a hamper, used to spend longer than he would otherwise have done in the company mess. His presence embarrassed us. Thomas went on leave to England about this time. I heard of his doings there accidentally. He had walked through the West End in mufti, astonished at the amateur militariness that he met everywhere. To be more in keeping with it, he gave elaborate awkward salutes to newly-joined second-lieutenants, and raised his hat to dug-out colonels and generals – a private joke at the expense of the war.
At Laventie, I used to look forward to our spells in trenches. Billet life spelt battalion mess, also riding-school, which turned out to be rather worse than the Surrey-man had described. Parades were carried out with peacetime punctiliousness and smartness, especially the daily battalion guard-changing which, every now and then, it was my duty to supervise as orderly officer. On one occasion, after the guard-changing had ended and I was about to dismiss the old guard, I saw Buzz Off cross the village street from one company headquarters to another. As he went by I called the guard to attention and saluted. After waiting for half a minute, I dismissed the guard. But Buzz Off had not really gone into the billet; he was hiding in the doorway. Now he dashed out with a great show of anger. ‘As you were, as you were, stand fast!’ he shouted to the guard. And then to me: ‘Why in hell’s name, Mr Graves, didn’t you ask my permission to dismiss the parade? You’ve read the King’s Regulations, haven’t you? And where the devil are your manners, anyhow?’
I apologized, explaining that I thought he had gone into the billet. This made matters worse. He bellowed at me for arguing; then asked where I had learned to salute. ‘At the depôt, sir,’ I answered.
‘Then, by heaven, Mr Graves, you’ll have to learn to salute as the battalion does! You’ll parade every morning before breakfast for a month under staff-sergeant Evans and do an hour’s saluting drill.’
He turned to the guard and dismissed them himself. This was not a particular act of spite against me, but an incident in the general game of ‘chasing the warts’, at which all conscientious senior officers played, and honestly intended to make us better soldiers.
I had been with the Royal Welch about three weeks, when the Nineteenth Brigade moved south to the Béthune sector to fill a gap in the Second Division; the gap had been made by taking out the Brigade of Guards to include in a Guards division then being formed. On the way down, we marched past Lord Kitchener. Kitchener, we were told, commented to the brigadier on the soldier-like appearance of the leading battalion – which was ourselves – but said cynically: ‘Wait until they’ve been a week or two in the trenches; they’ll soon lose some of that high polish.’ He apparently mistook us for a New Army formation.
The first trenches we went into on arrival were the Cuinchy brick-stacks. My company held the canal-bank frontage, a few hundred yards to the left of where I had been with the Welsh Regiment at the end of May. The Germans opposite wanted to be sociable. They sent messages over to us in undetonated rifle-grenades. One of these was evidently addressed to the Irish battalion we had relieved:
We all German korporals wish you English korporals a good day and invite you to a good German dinner tonight with beer (ale) and cakes. Your little dog ran over to us and we keep it safe; it became no food with you so it run to us. Answer in the same way, if you please.
Another grenade contained a copy of the Neueste Nachrichten, a German Army newspaper printed at Lille, giving sensational details of Russian defeats around Warsaw, with immense captures of prisoners and guns. But what interested us far more was a full account in another column of the destruction of a German submarine by British armed trawlers; no details of the sinking of German submarines had been allowed to appear in any English papers. The battalion cared as little about the successes or reverses of our Allies as about the origins of the war. It never allowed itself to have any political feelings about the Germans. A professional soldier’s duty was simply to fight whomever the King ordered him to fight. With the King as colonel-in-chief of the regiment it became even simpler. The Christmas 1914 fraternization, in which the battalion was among the first to participate, had had the same professional simplicity: no emotional hiatus, this, but a common-place of military tradition – an exchange of courtesies between officers of opposing armies.
Cuinchy bred rats. They came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly. While I stayed here with the Welsh, a new officer joined the company and, in token of welcome, was given a dug-out containing a spring-bed. When he turned in that night, he heard a scuffling, shone his torch on the bed, and found two rats on his blanket tussling for the possession of a severed hand. This story circulated as a great joke.
The colonel called for a patrol to visit the side of the tow-path, where we had heard suspicious sounds on the previous night, and see whether they came from a working-party. I volunteered to go at dark. But that night the moon shone so bright and full that it dazzled the eyes. Between us and the Germans lay a flat stretch of about two hundred yards, broken only by shell craters and an occasional patch of coarse grass. I was not with my own company, but lent to ‘B’, which had two officers away on leave. Childe-Freeman, the company-commander, asked: ‘You’re not going out on patrol tonight, Graves, are you? It’s almost as bright as day.’
‘All the more reason for going,’ I answered. ‘They won’t be expecting me. Will you please keep everything as usual? Let the men fire an occasional rifle, and send up a flare every half-hour. If I go carefully, the Germans won’t see me.’
While we were having supper, I nervously knocked over a cup of tea, and after that a plate. Freeman said: ‘Look here, I’ll phone through to battalion and tell them it’s too bright for your patrol.’ But I knew that, if he did, Buzz Off would accuse me of cold feet.
So one Sergeant Williams and I put on our crawlers, and went out by way of a mine-crater at the side of the tow-path. We had no need to stare that night. We could see only too clearly. Our plan was to wait for an opportunity to move quickly, to stop dead and trust to luck, then move on quickly again. We planned our rushes from shell-hole to shell-hole, the opportunities being provided by artillery or machine-gun fire, which would distract the sentries. Many of the craters contained the corpses of men who had been wounded and crept in there to die. Some were skeletons, picked clean by the rats.
We got to within thirty yards of a big German working-party, who were digging a trench ahead of their front line. Between them and us we counted a covering party of ten men lying on the grass in their greatcoats. We had gone far enough. A German lay on his back about twelve yards off, humming a tune. It was the ‘Merry Widow’ waltz. The sergeant, from behind me, pressed my foot with his hand and showed me the revolver he was carrying. He raised his eyebrows inquiringly. I signalled ‘no’. We turned to go back; finding it hard not to move too quickly. We had got about half-way, when a German machine-gun opened traversing fire along the top of our trenches. We immediately jumped to our feet; the bullets were brushing the grass, so to stand up was safer. We walked the rest of the way home, but moving irregularly to distract the aim of the covering party if they saw us. Back in the trench, I rang up brigade artillery, and asked for as much shrapnel as they could spare, fifty yards short of where the German front trench touched the tow-path; I knew that one of the night-lines of the battery supporting us was trained near enough to this point. A minute and a quarter later the shells started coming over. Hearing the clash of downed tools and distant shouts and cries, we reckoned the probable casualties.
The next morning, at stand-to, Buzz Off came up to me: ‘I hear you were on patrol last night?’
‘Yes, sir.’
He asked for particulars. When I told him about the covering party, he cursed me for not ‘scuppering them with that revolver of yours.’ As he turned away, he snorted: ‘Cold feet!’
One night at Cuinchy we had orders from divisional headquarters to shout across No Man’s Land and make the enemy take part in a conversation. The object was to find out how strongly the German front trenches were manned after dark. A German-speaking officer in the company among the brick-stacks shouted through a megaphone: ‘Wie geht’s Ihnen, Kameraden?’
Somebody shouted back in delight: ‘Ach, Tommee, hast du denn deutsch gelernt?’
Firing stopped, and a conversation began across the fifty yards or so of No Man’s Land. The Germans refused to disclose what regiment they were, or talk any military shop.
One of them shouted out: ‘Les sheunes madamoiselles de La Bassée bonnes pour coucher avec. Les madamoiselles de Béthune bonnes aussi, hein?’
Our spokesman refused to discuss sex. In the pause that followed he asked after the Kaiser. They replied respectfully that he was in excellent health, thank you.
‘And how is the Crown Prince?’ he asked them.
‘Oh, b—r the Crown Prince,’ shouted somebody in English, and was immediately suppressed by his comrades. After a confusion of angry voices and laughter, they all began singing ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’. That trench was evidently very well held indeed.
I now had a trench periscope, a little rod-shaped metal one, sent me from home. When I poked it above the parapet, it offered only an inch-square target to the German snipers; yet a sniper at Cuinchy, in May, drilled it through, exactly central, at four hundred yards range. I sent it back as a souvenir; but my mother, practical as usual, returned it to the makers and made them change it for a new one.
My dug-out at Cuinchy was a rat-riddled culvert beside the tow-path; when we went back to support billets, I dossed in the cellar of a ruined house at Cambrin village, lit by a couple of shell-holes through the floor above; but when back in reserve billets at Béthune, I had a beautiful Louis XVI bedroom at the Château Montmorency with mirrors and tapestries, found the bed too soft for comfort, and laid my mattress on the parquet floor.