I FOUND the Second Battalion near Bouchavesnes on the Somme, but a very different Second Battalion. No riding-school, no battalion mess, no Quetta manners, no regular officers, except for a couple of newly arrived Sandhurst boys. I was more warmly welcomed this time; my supposed spying activities had been forgotten. But the day before I reported, Colonel Crawshay had been wounded while out in No Man’s Land inspecting the battalion wire: shot in the thigh by one of the ‘rotten crowd’ of his letter, who mistook him for a German and fired without challenging. He has been in and out of nursing homes ever since.
Doctor Dunn asked me with kindly disapproval what I meant by returning so soon. I said: ‘I couldn’t stand England any longer.’ He told the acting C.O. that I was, in his opinion, unfit for trench service, so I took command of the headquarter company and went to live with transport, back at Frises, where the Somme made a bend. My company consisted of regimental clerks, cooks, tailors, shoemakers, pioneers, transport men, and so on, who in a break-through could turn riflemen and be used as a combatant force, as at the First Battle of Ypres. We lived in dug-outs, close to the river, which was frozen over completely but for a narrow stretch of fast-running water in the middle. I have never been so cold in all my life. I used to go up to the trenches every night with the rations, Yates being sick; it was about a twelve-mile walk there and back.
General Pinney, now commanding the Thirty-third Division, felt teetotal convictions on behalf of his men and stopped their issue of rum, unless in emergencies; the immediate result being the heaviest sick-list that the battalion had ever known. Our men looked forward to their tot of rum at the dawn stand-to as the brightest moment of the twenty-four hours; when this was denied them, their resistance weakened. I took the rations up through Cléry, not long before a wattle-and-daub village with some hundreds of inhabitants. The highest part of it now standing was a short course of brick wall about three feet high; the remainder consisted of enormous overlapping shell-craters. A broken-down steamroller by the roadside had ‘CLÉRY’ chalked on it as a guide to travellers. We often lost a horse or two at Cléry, which the Germans went on shelling from habit.
Our reserve billets for these Bouchavesnes trenches were at Suzanne: not really billets, but dug-outs and shelters. Suzanne also lay in ruins. This winter was the hardest since 1894–5. The men played inter-company football matches on the river, now frozen two feet thick. I remember a meal here, in a shelter-billet: stew and tinned tomatoes on aluminium plates. Though the food arrived hot from the kitchen next-door, ice had formed on the edge of our plates before we finished eating. In all this area one saw no French civilians, no unshelled houses, no signs of cultivation. The only living creatures besides soldiers, horses, and mules, were a few moorhen and duck paddling in the unfrozen central stream of the river. The fodder ration for the horses, many of them sick, was down to three pounds a day, and they had open standings only. I have kept no records of this time, but the memory of its misery survives.
Then I got toothache, which forced me to take a horse and ride twenty miles to the nearest army dental station at corps headquarters. I found the dentist under the weather, like everyone else. He would do nothing at first but grumble what a fool he had been to offer his services to the King at such a low salary. ‘When I think,’ he complained, ‘of the terrible destruction to the nation’s teeth now being done by unqualified men at home, and the huge fees that they exact for their wicked work, it makes me boil with rage.’ There followed further complaints against his treatment at headquarters, and the unwillingness of the R.A.M.C. to give demists any promotion beyond lieutenant’s rank. Later he examined my tooth. ‘An abscess,’ he said. ‘No good tinkering about with this; must pull it out’ So he yanked at the tooth irritably, and the crown broke off. He tried again, damning the ineffective type of forceps which the Government supplied, found very little purchase, and broke off another piece. After half an hour he had dug the tooth out in sections. The local anaesthetic supplied by the Government seemed as ineffective as the forceps. I rode home with lacerated gums.
Brigade appointed me a member of a field general court-martial that was to sit on an Irish sergeant charged with ‘shamefully casting away his arms in the presence of the enemy’. I had heard about the case unofficially; the man, maddened by an intense bombardment, had thrown away his rifle and run with the rest of his platoon. An army order, secret and confidential, addressed to officers of captain’s rank and above, laid down that, in the case of men tried for their life on other charges, sentence might be mitigated if conduct in the field had been exemplary; but cowardice was punishable only with death, and no medical excuses could be accepted. Therefore I saw no choice between sentencing the man to death and refusing to take part in the proceedings. If I refused, I should be court-martialled myself, and a reconstituted court would sentence the sergeant to death anyhow. Yet I could not sign a death-verdict for an offence which I might have committed myself in similar circumstances. I evaded the dilemma. One other officer in the battalion, besides the acting C.O., had the necessary year’s service as a captain entitling him to sit on a field general court-martial. I found him willing enough to take my place. He was hard-boiled and glad of a trip to Amiens, and I took over his duties.
Executions were frequent in France. I had my first direct experience of official lying when I arrived at Le Havre in May 1915, and read the back-files of army orders at the rest camp. They contained something like twenty reports of men shot for cowardice or desertion; yet a few days later the responsible minister in the House of Commons, answering a question from a pacifist, denied that sentence of death for a military offence had been carried out in France on any member of His Majesty’s Forces.
James Cuthbert, the acting C.O., a Special Reserve major, felt the strain badly and took a lot of whisky. Dr Dunn pronounced him too sick to be in the trenches; so he came to Frises, where he shared a dug-out with Yates and myself. Sitting in my arm-chair, reading the Bible, I stumbled on the text: ‘The bed is too narrow to lie therein and the coverlet too small to wrap myself therewith.’ ‘Listen, James,’ I said, ‘here’s something pretty appropriate for this dug-out.’ I read it out.
He raised himself on an elbow, genuinely furious. ‘Look here, von Runicke,’ he shouted, ‘I am not a religious man. I’ve cracked a good many of the commandments since I’ve been in France; but while I’m in command here I refuse to hear you, or anyone bloody else blaspheme the Bible!’
I liked James, whom I had first met on the day I arrived at Wrexham to join the Regiment. He was then just back from Canada, and how hilariously he threw the chairs about in the junior anteroom of the mess! He had been driving a plough through virgin soil, he told us, and reciting Kipling to the prairie-dogs. His favourite piece was (I may be misquoting):
Are ye there, are ye there, are ye there?
Four points on a ninety-mile square –
With a helio winking like fun in the sun,
Are ye there, are ye there, are ye there?
James, who had served with the Special Reserve a year or two before he emigrated, cared for nobody, was most courageous, inclined to sentimentality, and probably saw longer service with the Second Battalion in the war than any officer except Yates.
A day or two later, because James was still sick, I found myself in temporary command of the battalion, and attended a commanding officers’ conference at brigade headquarters – ‘that it should ever have come to this!’ I thought. Opposite our trenches a German salient protruded, and the brigadier wanted to ‘bite it off’ in proof of the division’s offensive spirit. Trench soldiers could never understand the Staff’s desire to bite off an enemy salient. It was hardly desirable to be fired at from both flanks; if the Germans had got caught in a salient, our obvious duty must be to keep them there as long as they could be persuaded to stay. We concluded that a passion for straight lines, for which headquarters were well known, had dictated this plan, which had no strategic or tactical excuse. The attack had been twice postponed, and twice cancelled. I still have a field-message referring to it, dated February 21st (see next page).
Even this promise of special rum could not, however, hearten the battalion. Everyone agreed that the attack was unnecessary, foolish, and impossible. A thaw had now set in, and the four company commanders assured me that to cross three hundred yards of No Man’s Land, which constant shelling and the thaw had turned into a morass of mud more than knee-deep, would take even lightly armed troops four or five minutes. Not a man would be able to reach the enemy lines so long as a single section of Germans with rifles remained to defend them.
The general, when I arrived, inquired in a fatherly way whether I were not proud to be attending a commanding officers’ conference at the age of twenty-one. I answered irritably that I had not examined my feelings, but that I was an old enough soldier to realize the impossibility of the attack. The colonel of the Cameronians, who were also to be engaged, took the same line. So the brigadier finally called off the show. That night, I went up with rations as usual; the officers were much relieved to hear of my stand at the conference.
We had been heavily shelled on the way, and while I took a drink at battalion headquarters, someone sent me a message about a direct hit on ‘D’ Company limber. Going off to inspect the damage, I passed our chaplain, who had come up with me from Frises Bend, and a group of three or four men. The chaplain was gabbling the burial service over a corpse lying on the ground covered with a waterproof sheet – the miserable weather and fear of the impending attack were responsible for his death. This, as it turned out, was the last dead man I saw in France and, like the first, he had shot himself.
I found the shattered limber, and remains of the petrol tins, full of water, which it was carrying, but no sign of the team. They were highly valued horses, having won a prize offered at a divisional horse show some months previously for the best-matched pair. So Meredith the transport sergeant and I sent the transport back, and went looking for the horses in the dark. We stumbled through miles of morass that night, but could not find hoof or hide of them. We used to boast that our transport animals were the best in France, and our transport men the best horse-thieves. No less than eighteen of our stable had been stolen from other units at one time or another, for their good looks. We even had ‘borrowed’ two from the Scots Greys. The horse I rode to the dentist came from the French police; its only fault being that, as the left-hand horse of a police squadron, it always pulled to the wrong side of the road. We had never lost a horse to any other battalion; so, naturally, Sergeant Meredith and I, who had started out with the rations at four o’clock in the afternoon, continued our search until long after midnight. When we reached Frises at 3 a.m. I collapsed on my bunk, completely exhausted.
The next day, Dr Dunn diagnosed bronchitis, and I went back in an ambulance to Rouen, once more to No. 8 Red Cross Hospital. The R.A.M.C. major recognized me and said: ‘What on earth are you doing out in France, young man? If I find you and those lungs of yours in my hospital again, I’ll have you court-martialled.’
Yates wrote to reassure me that the horses had been found shortly after I left – unhurt except for grazes on their bellies, and in possession of the Fourth Division machine-gun company. The machine-gunners were caught disguising them with stain, and trying to remove the regimental marks.
At Rouen they asked me where in England I should like to be hospitalized. I said, at random: ‘Oxford.’