IN March I rejoined the First Battalion on the Somme. It was the primrose season. We went in and out of the Fricourt trenches, with billets at Morlancourt, a country village still untouched by shell-fire. (Later it got knocked to pieces; the Australians and the Germans captured and recaptured it from each other several times, until only the site remained.) ‘A’ Company headquarters were a farmhouse kitchen, where we slept in our valises on the red-brick floor. An old lady and her daughter stayed to safeguard their possessions. The old lady was senile and paralysed; almost all she could do was to shake her head and say: ‘Triste, la guerre!’ We called her ‘Triste la Guerre’. The daughter used to carry her about like a child.
At Fricourt, the trenches were cut in chalk, which we found more tolerable in wet weather than La Bassée clay. Division had given us a brigade-frontage where the lines came closer to each other than at any other point for miles. The British had only recently extended their line down to the Somme, and the French had been content, as they usually were, unless definitely contemplating a battle, to be at peace with the Germans and not dig in too near. But here a slight ridge occurred, and neither side could afford to let the other hold the crest, so they shared it, after a prolonged dispute. This area was used by both the Germans and ourselves as an experimental station for new types of bombs and grenades. The trenches were wide and tumble-down, too shallow in many places, and without sufficient traverses. The French had left relics both of their nonchalance – corpses buried too near the surface; and of their love of security – a number of deep though lousy dug-outs. We busied ourselves raising the frontline parapet and building traverses to limit the damage of the trench-mortar shells that fell continually. Every night not only the companies in the front line, but both support companies, kept hard at work all the time. It was an even worse place than Cuinchy for rats; they scuttled about ‘A’ Company mess at meal-times. We always ate with revolvers beside our plates, and punctuated our conversation with sudden volleys at a rat rummaging at somebody’s valise or crawling along the timber support of the roof above our heads. ‘A’ Company officers were gay. We had all been in our school choirs, except Edmund Dadd, who sang like a crow, and used to chant anthems and bits of cantatas whenever things went well. Edmund insisted on taking his part.
At dinner one day a Welsh boy came rushing in, hysterical from terror. He shouted to Richardson: ‘Sirr, sirr, there is a trenss-mortar in my dug-out!’
His sing-song Welsh made us all shout with laughter. ‘Cheer up, 33 Williams,’ Richardson said, ‘how did a big thing like a trench-mortar happen to occur in your dug-out?’
But 33 Williams could not explain. He went on again and again: ‘Sirr, sirr, there is a trenss-mortar in my dug-out!’
Edmund Dadd went out to investigate. He reported that a mortar-shell had fallen into the trench, bounced down the dug-out steps, exploded, and killed five men. 33 Williams, the only survivor, had been lying asleep, protected by the body of another man.
Our greatest trial was the German canister – a two gallon drum with a cylinder containing about two pounds of an explosive called ammonal that looked like salmon paste, smelled like marzipan, and, when it went off, sounded like the Day of Judgement. The hollow around the cylinder contained scrap metal, apparently collected by French villagers behind the German lines: rusty nails, fragments of British and French shells, spent bullets, and the screws, nuts, and bolts that heavy lorries leave behind on the road. We dissected one unexploded canister, and found in it, among other things, the cog-wheels of a clock and half a set of false teeth. The canister could easily be heard approaching and looked harmless in the air, but its shock was as shattering as the very heaviest shell. It would blow in any but the very deepest dug-outs; and the false teeth, rusty nails, cog-wheels, and so on went flying all over the place. We could not agree how the Germans fired a weapon of that size. The problem remained unsolved until July 1st, when the battalion attacked from these same trenches and discovered a wooden cannon buried in the earth and discharged with a time-fuse. The crew offered to surrender, but our men had sworn for months to get them.
One evening (near ‘Trafalgar Square’, should any reader remember that trench-junction), Richardson, David Thomas, and I met Pritchard and the adjutant. We stopped to talk. Richardson complained what a devil of a place this was for trench-mortars.
‘That’s where I come in,’ said Pritchard. As battalion trench-mortar officer he had just been given two Stokes mortar-guns. ‘They’re beauties,’ Pritchard went on. ‘I’ve been trying them out, and tomorrow I’m going to get some of my own back. I can put four or five shells in the air at once.’
‘About time, too,’ the adjutant said. ‘We’ve had three hundred casualties in the last month here. It doesn’t seem so many as that because, curiously enough, none of them have been officers. In fact, we’ve had about five hundred casualties in the ranks since Loos, and not a single officer.’
Then he suddenly realized that his words were unlucky.
‘Touch wood!’ David shouted.
Everybody jumped to touch wood, but it was a French trench and unrevetted. I pulled a pencil out of my pocket; that was wood enough for me.
Richardson said: ‘I’m not superstitious, anyway.’
The following evening I led ‘A’ Company forward as a working-party. ‘B’ and ‘D’ Companies were in the line, and we overtook ‘C’ also going to work. David, bringing up the rear of ‘C’, looked worried about something. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I’m fed up,’ he answered, ‘and I’ve got a cold.’
‘C’ Company filed along to the right of the battalion frontage; and we went to the left. It was a weird kind of night, with a bright moon. Germans occupied a sap only forty or fifty yards away. We stood on the parapet piling the sandbags, with the moon at our backs, but the German sentries ignored us – probably because they had work on hand themselves. It happened at times, when both sides were busy putting up proper defences, that they turned a blind eye to each other’s work. Occasionally, it was said, the rival wiring-parties ‘as good as used the same mallets’ for hammering in the pickets. The Germans seemed much more ready than we were to live and let live. (Only once, so far as I know, apart from Christmas 1914, did both sides show themselves in daylight without firing at each other: one February at Ypres, when the trenches got so flooded that everyone had to crawl out on top to avoid drowning.) Nevertheless, a continuous exchange of grenades and trench-mortars had begun. Several canisters went over, and the men found it difficult to get out of their way in the dark; but for the first time we were giving the enemy as good as they gave us. Pritchard had been using his Stokes mortars all day, and sent over hundreds of rounds; twice the Germans had located his emplacement and forced him to shift hurriedly.
‘A’ Company worked from seven in the evening until midnight. We must have put three thousand sandbags into position, and fifty yards of front trench were already looking presentable. About half past ten, rifle fire broke out on the right, and the sentries passed along the news: ‘Officer hit.’
Richardson hurried away to investigate. He came back to say: ‘It’s young Thomas. A bullet through the neck; but I think he’s all right. It can’t have hit his spine or an artery, because he’s walking to the dressing-station.’
I was delighted: David should now be away long enough to escape the coming offensive, and perhaps even the rest of the war.
At twelve o’clock we finished for the night. Richardson said: ‘Von Ranke,’ (only he pronounced it ‘von Runicke’ – which was my regimental nickname) ‘take the company down for their rum and tea, will you? They’ve certainly earned it tonight. I’ll be back in a few minutes. I’m going out with Corporal Chamberlen to see what the wiring-party’s been at’ As I took the men back, I heard a couple of shells fall somewhere behind us. I noticed them, because they were the only shells fired that night: five-nines by the noise. We had hardly reached the support line on the reverse side of the hill, when we heard the cry: ‘Stretcher-bearers!’ and presently a man ran up to say: ‘Captain Graves is hit!’
That raised a general laugh, and we walked on; but all the same I sent a stretcher-party to investigate. It was Richardson: the shells had caught him and Corporal Chamberlen among the wire. Chamberlen lost his leg and died of wounds a day or two later. Richardson, blown into a shell-hole full of water, lay there stunned for some minutes before the sentries heard the corporal’s cries and realized what had happened. The stretcher-bearers brought him down semi-conscious; he recognized us, said he wouldn’t be long away from the company, and gave me instructions about it. The doctor found no wound in any vital spot, though the skin of his left side had been riddled, as we saw, with the chalky soil blown against it We felt the same relief in his case as in David’s: that he would be out of it for a while.
Then news came that David was dead. The regimental doctor, a throat specialist in civil life, had told him at the dressing-station: ‘You’ll be all right only don’t raise your head for a bit.’ David then took a letter from his pocket, gave it to an orderly, and said: ‘Post this!’ It had been written to a girl in Glamorgan, for delivery if he got killed. The doctor saw that he was choking and tried tracheotomy; but too late.
Edmund and I were talking together in ‘A’ Company headquarters at about one o’clock when the adjutant entered. He looked ghastly. Richardson was dead: the explosion and the cold water had overstrained his heart weakened by rowing in the Eight at Radley. The adjutant said nervously: ‘You know, somehow I feel – responsible in a way for this; what I said yesterday at Trafalgar Square. Of course, really, I don’t believe in superstition, but…’
Just at that moment three or four whizz-bang shells burst about twenty yards off. A cry of alarm went up, followed by: ‘Stretcher-bearers!’
The adjutant turned white, and we did not have to be told what had happened. Pritchard, having fought his duel all night and finally silenced the enemy, was coming off duty. A whizz-bang had caught him at the point where the communication trench reached Maple Redoubt – a direct hit. The total casualties were three officers and one corporal.
It seemed ridiculous, when we returned without Richardson to ‘A’ Company billets in Morlancourt to find the old lady still alive, and to hear her once more quaver: ‘Triste, la guerre!’, when her daughter explained that le jeune capitaine had been killed. The old woman had taken a fancy to le jeune capitaine; we used to chaff him about it.
I felt David’s death worse than any other since I had been in France, but it did not anger me as it did Siegfried. He was acting transport-officer and every evening now, when he came up with the rations, went out on patrol looking for Germans to kill. I just felt empty and lost.
One of the anthems that we used to sing in the mess was: ‘He that shall endure to the end, shall be saved.’ The words repeated themselves in my head, like a charm, whenever things went wrong. ‘Though thousands languish and fall beside thee, And tens of thousands around thee perish, Yet still it shall not come nigh thee.’ And there was another bit: ‘To an inheritance incorruptible… Through faith unto salvation, Ready to be revealed at the last trump.’ For ‘trump’ we always used to sing ‘crump’. A crump was a German five-point-nine shell, and ‘the last crump’ would be the end of the war. Should we ever live to hear it burst safely behind us? I wondered whether I could endure to the end with faith unto salvation… My breaking-point was near now, unless something happened to stave it off. Not that I felt frightened. I had never yet lost my head and turned tail through fright, and knew that I never would. Nor would the breakdown come as insanity; I did not have it in me. It would be a general nervous collapse, with tears and twitchings and dirtied trousers; I had seen cases like that.
We were issued with a new gas-helmet popularly known as ‘the goggle-eyed booger with the tit’. It differed from the previous models. One breathed in through the nose from inside the helmet, and breathed out through a special valve held in the mouth; but I could not manage this. Boxing with an already broken nose had recently displaced the septum, which forced me to breathe through my mouth. In a gas-attack, I would be unable to use the helmet – the only type claimed to be proof against the newest German gas. The battalion doctor advised a nose-operation as soon as possible.
I took his advice, and missed being with the First Battalion when the expected offensive started. Three out of five of my fellow-officers were killed in it Scatter’s dream of open warfare failed to materialize. He himself got very badly wounded. Of ‘A’ Company choir, there is one survivor besides myself: C. D. Morgan, who had his thigh smashed, and was still in hospital some months after the war ended.