I WENT on leave in April 1916. That Good Friday was the last occasion on which I ever attended a church service, apart from subsequent weddings, church parades, and so on. I remember the date, because the choir boys wore no surplices, and the psalms were read, not sung. My father wanted me to attend the early morning service, and even tried to bully me into it, but I was owed thirteen months’ sleep; and though he came hobbling along to my bedroom door at half past six, banging loudly and saying that my mother counted on my accompanying her, this day of all days, I did not turn out. I pleaded a bad toothache; and it wasn’t an excuse. A rear molar had flared up. So they had a grievance at breakfast and, having won the first trick, I knew that I must lost the second and attend the morning service. Not wanting to face a religious argument, I decided to humour my parents; if they believed that God stood squarely behind the British Expeditionary Force, it would be unkind to dissent.
I smelt no rat beyond a slight suspicion that they were anxious to show me off in church wearing my battle-stained officer’s uniform. But my toothache got the better of me and arguments arose at the breakfast-table, during which I said things that angered my father and grieved my mother. At last, on her account alone – because she took no active part in the argument just looking sad and only officially siding with my father – I consented to come with them.
At nine o’clock they went upstairs to dress. The service was to be at half past nine. I thought this unusually early for matins, but attributed it to the new wartime principle of getting things over quickly. Then a ring came at the door. The proprietor of a neighbouring bath-chair business had arrived with a bath-chair. He explained that, as he had previously told my mother, they could not spare a man to take it to church, being seriously under-staffed because of the war – his sole remaining employee, in fact, had a job pulling the aged Countess of I-forget-what to the parish church, a mile or so in the opposite direction. For the moment I thought that it had been a very generous thought of my mother’s on my behalf but, ill as I felt, I could surely manage to reach the church, about half a mile away, without such a parade of infirmity. I forgot my father’s gout, and also forgot that passage in Herodotus about the two dutiful sons who yoked themselves to an ox-cart to pull their mother, the priestess, to the Temple and were oddly used by Solon, in a conversation with King Croesus, as a symbol of ultimate happiness.
When I realized what I was in for, I could only laugh. Then down came my mother with her prayer-book, veil, and deep religious look, and I could not spoil the day for her. I took hold of the beastly vehicle without a word; my father appeared in a top-hat and his better carpet-slippers and hoisted himself in; and we set off The bath-chair needed oiling badly; also, one tyre kept coming unstuck and winding itself around the axle. There was an appreciable slope down towards the church, and so the going, though heavy, was easier than the returning. By half past ten the service did not seem to be getting on so fast as it should have, and I grew dreadfully bored, longing to sneak outside for – well, anyhow, I wanted to sneak outside.
I whispered to my mother: ‘Isn’t it nearly over?’
She answered: ‘My dear, didn’t your father tell you that it would be a three-hour service? And, of course, since you couldn’t get up to pull him to church for the early service, he’ll want to stay for Holy Communion at the end. That will make it a little longer.’
So I stayed and tried to compose Latin epigrams, which was, in those days, my way of killing time – on ceremonial parades, for instance, or in the dentist’s chair, or at night in the trenches when things were quiet. I composed a maledictory epigram on the strapping young curate – besides myself, my father, the verger, and an old, old man with a palsied hand sitting just in front of me, the only male in the congregation, though there were sixty or seventy women present I tried to remember whether the i of clericuswas long or short, and couldn’t; but it did not matter, because I could make alternative versions to suit either case:
O si bracchipotens qui fulminat ore clericus…
and:
O si bracchipotens clericus qui fulminat ore…*
For he was now preaching a sermon about Divine Sacrifice, and bellowing about the Glurious Performances of our Sums and Brethren in Frurnce today. I decided to ask him afterwards why, if he felt like that, he wasn’t himself either in Frurnce or in khurki.
To please my mother I took the Sacrament, though by no means in the required mood of spiritual resignation. That ends the story, except the being introduced at the church door to new family friends – ‘Your father has showed us your very interesting letters from the trenches. Do tell me, etc., etc.’ – and the dreary push up-hill, my mother helping me, my father holding her prayer-book, myself sweating like a bull.
The next day I went first to a dentist, and then to the Milbank Military Hospital in London, where I had my nose operated on free by an Army surgeon. In peacetime this would have cost me sixty guineas, and another twenty guineas in nursing-home fees. On the other hand, I should have been able to pick my specialist; this one bungled the job, and I still cannot breathe properly through one nostril.
After a stay in hospital, I went up to Harlech and walked the hills. The verse of a psalm: ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help’, had been another charm against trouble; though I have since learned that the last five words of the original Hebrew are really a question, not a relative clause. I bought a small two-roomed cottage from my mother, who owned considerable house-property at Harlech. This was done in defiance of the war: something to look forward to when the guns stopped. We always thought of the end of the war as ‘when the guns stop’. I white-washed the cottage, which stood at some distance from the village, and furnished it with a table, a chair, a bed, a few dishes, and cooking utensils. I had decided to live there one day on bread and butter, bacon and eggs, lettuce in season, cabbage and coffee; and to write poetry. My war-bonus would keep me for a year or two at least Having put in a big window to look out over the wood below and across the broad plain to the sea, I wrote two or three poems here as a foretaste of the good life to come; but have suppressed them all since.
Later, in London, my father took me to a dinner of the Honourable Cymmrodorion Society – a Welsh literary club – where Lloyd George, then Secretary for War, and W. M. Hughes, the Australian Prime Minister, both spoke. Hughes was perky, dry, and to the point; Lloyd George was up in the air on one of his ‘glory of the Welsh hills’ speeches. The power of his rhetoric amazed me. The substance of the speech might be commonplace, idle, and false, but I had to fight hard against abandoning myself with the rest of his authence. He sucked power from his listeners and spurted it back at them. Afterwards, my father introduced me to Lloyd George, and when I looked closely at his eyes they seemed like those of a sleep-walker.
I rejoined the Third Battalion at Litherland, near Liverpool, where it had been shifted from Wrexham as part of the Mersey defence force. The senior officers generously put no more work on me than I wished to undertake, and I met again three of my Wrexham contemporaries who had been severely wounded (all of them, by a coincidence, in the left thigh), and seemed to be out of it for the rest of the war – Frank Jones-Bateman and ‘Father’ Watkin, who had been in the Welsh Regiment with me, and Aubrey Attwater, the assistant adjutant, who had gone to the Second Battalion early in 1915, and been badly hit when out on patrol. Attwater came from Cambridge at the outbreak of the war and was known as ‘Brains’ in the battalion. The militia majors, for the most part country gentlemen with estates in Wales and no thoughts in peacetime beyond hunting, shooting, fishing, and the control of their tenantry, were delighted with Attwater’s informative talk over the port at mess. Sergeant Malley, the mess-sergeant, would go round with his ‘Light or vintage, sir?’, and the old majors would prompt Attwater: ‘Now, Brains! Tell us about Shakespeare. Is it true that Bacon wrote him?’ Or: ‘Well, Brains! What do you think about this chap Hilaire Belloc? Does he really know when the war’s going to end?’ Attwater would humorously accept his position as combined encyclopedia and almanac Sergeant Malley, another friend whom I was always pleased to see again, could pour more wine into a glass than any other waiter in the world: it bulged up over the top like a cap, and he never spilled a drop.
Wednesdays were guest-nights in the mess, when the colonel expected the married officers, who usually dined at home, to attend. The band played Gilbert and Sullivan music behind a curtain. In the intervals, the regimental harper gave solos – Welsh melodies picked out rather uncertainly on a hand-harp. Afterwards the bandmaster was invited to the senior officers’ table for his complimentary glass of Light or Vintage. When he and the junior officers had retired, the port went round and round, and the conversation, at first very formal, became rambling and intimate. Once, I remember, an old major laid it down axiomatically that every so-called sportsman had at some time or other committed a sin against sportsmanship. When challenged to make good this slander, he cross-examined each of his neighbours in turn, putting them on their honour to tell the truth.
One of them, blushing, admitted that he had once shot grouse two days before the Twelfth: ‘I was sailing next day to rejoin the battalion in India and this was my last chance.’ Another said that when a public-school boy, and old enough to know better, he had killed a sitting pheasant with a stone. Another had gone out with a poacher – in his Sandhurst days – and crumbled poison-berry into a trout-stream. An even more scandalous confession came from a New Army major, a gentleman-farmer: that his estate had been over-run by foxes one year and, the headquarters of the nearest hunt being thirty miles away, he had permitted his bailiff to protect the hen roosts with a gun. Then came the turn of the medical officer, who said: ‘Well, once while I was a student at St Andrews, a friend asked me to put ten bob for him on a horse in the Lincolnshire. I couldn’t find my bookmaker in time. The horse lost, but I never returned the ten bob.’ At this, one of the guests, an officer in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, suddenly grew excited, jumped up, and leaned over the table, doubling his fists, ‘And was not the name of the horse Strathspey? And will you not pay me my ten shillings now immediately?’
Only the bombing-field separated the camp from Brotherton’s factory, which made an especially sensitive explosive for detonators. The munition workers had permanently yellow faces and hands, and drew appropriately high wages. Attwater used to argue at mess sometimes what would happen when Brotherton’s blew up. Most of us held that the explosion would immediately kill all the three thousand men of the camp, besides destroying Litherland and a large part of Bootle. Attwater maintained that the very closeness of the camp would save it; that the vibrations would go over and strike a large munition camp about a mile away and probably set that off too. One Sunday afternoon, Attwater limped out of the mess and saw smoke rising from Brotherton’s. Part of the factory was on fire. He immediately had the camp fire-brigade bugled for, and they managed to smother the fire before it reached a vital spot; so the argument was never decided.
As much Welsh as English was now talked in the huts, the chapels having put their full manpower at Lloyd George’s disposal. A deputation of soldiers from Harlech and the neighbourhood came to me one morning and said solemnly: ‘Captain Graves, sir, we do not like our sergeant-major. He do curse, and he do swear, and he do drink, and he do smoke, and he is a man of lowly origin too.’
I told them to make their complaint in proper form, under the escort of an N.C.O. They did not return.
A deputation of Welsh chapel ministers went to Attwater and complained of the blasphemous language used by the N.C.O.s. Attwater agreed that swearing on parade, at least, was contrary to King’s Regulations; but called the ministers’ attention to a rise of nearly two hundred per cent in affiliation orders since their innocent flocks had come to Litherland for training.
I stayed at Litherland a few weeks only. On July 1st 1916, the Somme offensive began, and all available trained men and officers went out to replace casualties. I had the pleasure of riding up the line on a locomotive and helping the French stoker, thus fulfilling a childhood dream; though bitterly disappointed at finding myself posted to the Second Battalion, not the First.
The Second Battalion was in trenches at Givenchy, on the other side of the canal from the Cuinchy brick-stacks. I arrived on July 5th, to find one of our raids in progress. Prisoners were already coming down the trench, scared and chattering to each other: Saxons, just back from a divisional rest and a week’s leave to Germany, with new uniforms and their packs full of good lootable stuff. One prisoner got a stern talking-to from ‘C’ Company sergeant-major, a Birmingham man, shocked at a packet of indecent photographs found in the man’s haversack.
It was a retaliatory raid. Only a few days before, the Germans had sent up the biggest mine blown on the Western front so far. It caught our ‘B’ Company – the ‘B’s were proverbially unlucky. The crater, afterwards named ‘Red Dragon Crater’ after the Royal Welch Regimental badge, must have been about thirty yards across. There were few survivors of ‘B’ Company. The Germans immediately came over in force to catch the other companies in confusion. Stanway, who had been a company sergeant-major during the retreat, and was now a major, rallied some men on the flank and drove the Germans back. Blair, ‘B’ Company commander, buried by the mine up to his neck, remained for the rest of the day under constant fire. Though a Boer War veteran, he survived this experience, recovered from his wounds, and returned to the battalion a few months later.
This raid had been Stanway’s revenge. He and Colonel ‘Tibs’ Crawshay – the depôt adjutant who had originally sent me out to France – planned it most elaborately, with bombardments and smoke-screen diversion on the flanks. A barrage of shrapnel would shift forward and back from the German front line to the supports. The intention was that the Germans should go down into the shell-proof dug-outs at the first bombardment, leaving only sentries in the trench, and reappear as soon as the barrage lifted. When it started again, they would make another dash for the dug-outs. After this had happened two or three times they would be slow in emerging. Then, under cover of a smoke-screen, the raid would be made and the barrage put down uninterruptedly on the support and reserve lines, to prevent reinforcements from coming up.
My only part in the raid, which proved very successful, was to make a detailed report of it at Crawshay’s request – not the report for divisional headquarters, but a page of history to be sent to the depôt for filing in regimental records. I noted that for the first time since the eighteenth century the regiment had reverted to the pike: instead of rifle and bayonet, some of the raiders had used butchers’ knives secured with medical plaster to the ends of broomsticks. This pike, a lighter weapon than rifle and bayonet, was a useful addition to bombs and revolvers.
An official journalist at headquarters also wrote an account of the raid. The battalion enjoyed the bit about how they had gone over the top shouting: ‘Remember Kitchener!’ and ‘Avenge the Lusitania!’ ‘What a damn silly thing to shout,’ said someone. ‘Old Kitchener served his purpose as a figure-head, but nobody wants him back at the War Office, that I’ve heard. As for the Lusitana, the Germans gave the Yanks full warning; and if her sinking brings them into the war, that’s all to the good.’
Few officers in the Second Battalion had been with it when I went away after Loos; and not a single one – except Yates, the quartermaster, and Robertson, now adjutant (but killed soon afterwards) – remembered the battalion mess at Laventie. So I expected a friendlier welcome than on my first arrival. However, as Captain Dunn, the battalion doctor (I have since heard), recorded in his diary: ‘Graves had a chilly reception, which surprised me.’ The reason was simple. One of the officers who had joined the Third Battalion in August 1914, and been sent out to France ahead of me as the more efficient, had now achieved his ambition of a regular commission. But this made him only a second-lieutenant, and jealousy of my two extra stars embittered him. When he made a nasty remark in public about ‘jumped-up captains’, I refrained from putting him under arrest, as I should have done, and instead quoted at him the consoling lines:
O deem it pride, not lack of skill,
That will not let my sleeves increase.
The morning and the evening still
Have but one star apiece.
We had not met in France hitherto, and he now most unethically revived the suspicion raised by my German name on my first arrival at Wrexham: that I was a German spy. As a result, I found myself treated with great reserve by all officers who had not known me in trenches before. Unluckily, the most notorious German spy caught in England had assumed the name of Carl Graves. My enemy put it out that Carl and I were brothers. I consoled myself by thinking that a batde was obviously due soon, and would put an end either to me or to the suspicion – ‘So long as no N.C.O. is told off to shoot me on the slightest appearance of treachery.’ Such things were known.
As a matter of fact, though I myself had no traffic with the Germans, my mother and her sisters in Germany kept up a desultory correspondence through my aunt, Clara von Faber du Faur, whose husband was German Consul at Zürich: a register of the deaths of relatives, and discreet references to the war service of the survivors. My aunts wrote, as their Government had ordered every German with relatives or friends abroad to do, pointing out the righteousness of the German cause, and presenting Germany as the innocent party in a war engineered by France and Russia. My mother, equally strong for the Allied cause, wrote back that they were deluded, but that she forgave them.
The officers I liked best in the battalion, besides Robertson, were Colonel Crawshay and Doctor Dunn. Dunn, a hard-bitten Scot, had served as a trooper in the South African War, and there won the Distinguished Conduct Medal. Now he was far more than a doctor: living at battalion headquarters, he became the right-hand man of three or four colonels in succession. Whoever failed to take his advice usually regretted it afterwards. Once, in the aurumn fighting of 1917, a shell burst among the headquarters staff, knocking out colonel, adjutant, and signal officer. Dunn had no hesitation in becoming a temporary combatant officer of the Royal Welch, resigning his medical duties to the stretcher-bearer sergeant. The men had immense respect for him, and he earned his D.S.O. many times over.