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                         _The Grey Wave_




                         _THE GREY WAVE_

                    _By Major A. Hamilton Gibbs_

                _With an introduction by Philip Gibbs_


                      [Illustration: (icon)]


                     _LONDON: HUTCHINSON & CO_
                  _::  PATERNOSTER ROW 1920  ::_




  MY DEAR MRS. POOLE


  I dedicate this book to you because your house has been a home to
  me for so many years, and because, having opened my eyes to the
  fact that it was my job to join up in 1914, your kindness and help
  were unceasing during the course of the war.

          Yours affectionately,

      ARTHUR HAMILTON GIBBS

  Metz, January, 1919




                    CONTENTS


                     PART I
                                         PAGE

  THE RANKS                                 1


                     PART II

  UBIQUE                                   73


                    PART III

  THE WESTERN FRONT                       123


                     PART IV

  THE ARMISTICE                           263




                         INTRODUCTION


There seems no reason to me why I should write a preface to my
brother’s book except that I have been, as it were, a herald of war
proclaiming the achievements of knights and men-at-arms in this great
conflict that has passed, and so may take up my scroll again on his
behalf, because here is a good soldier who has told, in a good book,
his story of

  “most disastrous chances of moving accidents by flood and field; of
  hair-breadth ’scapes i’ the imminent-deadly breach.”

That he was a good soldier I can say not because my judgment is
swayed by brotherly partiality, but because I saw him at his job, and
heard the opinions of his fellow officers, which were immensely in
his favour. “Your brother is a born soldier,” said my own Chief who
was himself a gallant officer and had a quick eye for character. I
think that was true. The boy whom once I wheeled in a go-cart when
he was a shock-headed Peter and I the elder brother with a sense of
responsibility towards him, had grown up before the war into a strong
man whose physical prowess as an amateur pugilist, golfer, archer
(in any old sport) was quite outside my sphere of activities, which
were restricted to watching the world spin round and recording its
movements by quick penmanship. Then the war came and like all the
elder brothers of England I had a quick kind of heart-beat when I
knew that the kid brother had joined up and in due time would have
to face the music being played by the great orchestra of death across
the fields of life.

I saw the war before he did, knew the worst before he guessed at the
lesser evils of it, heard the crash of shell fire, went into burning
and bombarded towns, helped to carry dead and wounded, while he was
training in England under foul-mouthed sergeants--training to learn
how to fight, and, if need be, how to die, like a little gentleman.
But I from the first was only the onlooker, the recorder, and he was
to be, very quickly, one of the actors in the drama, up to his neck
in the “real thing.” His point of view was to be quite different from
mine, I saw the war in the mass, in its broad aspects and movements
from the front line trenches to the Base, from one end of the front
to the other. I went into dirty places, but did not stay there. I
went from one little corner of hell to another, but did not dwell
in its narrow boundaries long enough to get its intimate details of
hellishness burnt into my body and soul. He did. He had not the same
broad vision of the business of war--appalling in its vastness of
sacrifice and suffering, wonderful in its mass-heroism--but was one
little ant in a particular muck-heap for a long period of time, until
the stench of it, the filth of it, the boredom of it, the futility
of it, entered into his very being, and was part of him as he was
part of it. His was the greater knowledge. He was the sufferer, the
victim. Our ways lay apart for a long time. He became a ghost to
me, during his long spell in Salonica, and I thought of him only
as a ghost figure belonging to that other life of mine which I had
known “before the war,” that far-off period of peace which seemed
to have gone forever. Then one day I came across him again out in
Flanders in a field near Armentières, and saw how he had hardened
and grown, not only in years, but in thoughtfulness and knowledge.
He was a commander of men, with the power of life and death over
them. He was a commander of guns with the power of death over human
creatures lurking in holes in the earth, invisible creatures beyond
a hedge of barbed wire and a line of trench. But he also was under
the discipline of other powers with higher command than his--who
called to him on the telephone and told him to do things he hated
to do, but had to do, things which he thought were wrong to do, but
had to do; and among those other powers, disciplining his body and
soul, was German gun-power from that other side of the barbed-wire
hedge, always a menace to him, always teasing him with the chance
of death,--a yard this way, a yard that, as I could see by the
shell holes round about his gun pits, following the track of his
field-path, clustering in groups outside the little white house in
which he had his mess. I studied this brother of mine curiously. How
did he face all the nerve-strain under which I had seen many men
break? He was merry and bright (except for sudden silences and a dark
look in his eyes at times). He had his old banjo with him and tinkled
out a tune on it. How did he handle his men and junior officers?
They seemed to like him “this side idolatry,” yet he had a grip on
them, and demanded obedience, which they gave with respect. Queer!
My kid-brother had learned the trick of command. He had an iron hand
under a velvet glove. The line of his jaw, his straight nose (made
straighter by that boxing in his old Oxford days) were cut out for
a job like this. He looked the part. He was born to it. All his
training had led up to this soldier’s job in the field, though I had
not guessed so when I wheeled him in that old go-cart.

For me he had a slight contempt, which he will deny when he reads
this preface. Though a writer of books before the war, he had now
the soldier’s scorn of the chronicler. It hurt him to see my green
arm-band, my badge of shame. That I had a motor-car seemed to him,
in his stationary exile, the sign of a soft job--as, compared with
his, it was--disgraceful in its luxury. From time to time I saw him,
and, in spite of many narrow escapes under heavy shelling, he did not
change, but was splendidly cheerful. Even on the eve of the great
German offensive in March of 1918, when he took me to see his guns
dug in under the embankment south of St. Quentin, he did not seem
apprehensive of the awful ordeal ahead of him. I knew more than he
did about that. I knew the time and place of its coming, and I knew
that he was in a very perilous position. We said “so long” to each
other at parting, with a grip of hands, and I thought it might be the
last time I should see him. It was I think ten days later when I saw
him, and in that time much had happened, and all that time I gave him
up as lost. Under the overwhelming weight of numbers--114 Divisions
to 48--the British line had broken, and fighting desperately, day by
day, our men fell back mile after mile with the enemy outflanking
them, cutting off broken battalions, threatening to cut off vast
bodies of men. Every day I was in the swirl of that Retreat, pushing
up to its rearguards, seeing with increasing dismay the fearful
wreckage of our organization and machine of war which became for a
little while like the broken springs of a watch, with Army, Corps,
and Divisional staffs, entirely out of touch with the fighting units
owing to the break-down of all lines of communication. In that tide
of traffic, of men, and guns, and transport, I made a few inquiries
about that brother of mine. Nobody had seen, or heard of his battery.
I must have been close to him at times in Noyon, and Guiscard and
Ham, but one individual was like a needle in a bunch of hay, and the
enemy had rolled over in a tide, and there did not seem to me a
chance of his escape. Then, one morning, in a village near Poix, when
I asked a gunner-officer whether he had seen my brother’s battery,
he said, “Yes--two villages up that road.” “Do you happen to know
Major Gibbs?” “Yes.... I saw him walking along there a few minutes
ago.”

It was like hearing that the dead had risen from the grave.

Half an hour later we came face to face.

He said:

“Hulloa, old man!”

And I said:

“Hulloa, young fellow!”

Then we shook hands on it, and he told me some of his adventures,
and I marvelled at him, because after a wash and shave he looked
as though he had just come from a holiday at Brighton instead of
from the Valley of Death. He was as bright as ever, and I honestly
believe even now that in spite of all his danger and suffering, he
had enjoyed the horrible thrills of his adventures. It was only later
when his guns were in action near Albert that I saw a change in him.
The constant shelling, and the death of some of his officers and men,
had begun to tell on him at last. I saw that his nerve was on the
edge of snapping, as other men’s nerves had snapped after less than
his experiences, and I decided to rescue him by any means I could....
I had the luck to get him out of that hole in the earth just before
the ending of the war.

Now I have read his book. It is a real book. Here truthfully,
nakedly, vividly, is the experience not only of one soldier in the
British Army, but of thousands, and hundreds of thousands. All our
men went through the training he describes, were shaped by its
hardness and its roughness, were trampled into obedience of soul and
body by its heavy discipline. Here is the boredom of war, as well as
its thrill of horror, that devastating long-drawn Boredom which is
the characteristic of war and the cause of much of its suffering.
Here is the sense of futility which sinks into the soldier’s mind,
tends to sap his mental strength and embitters him, so that the edge
is taken off his enthusiasm, and he abandons the fervour of the ideal
with which he volunteered.

There is a tragic bitterness in the book, and that is not peculiar
to the temperament of the author, but a general feeling to be found
among masses of demobilized officers and men, not only of the British
Armies, but of the French, and I fancy, also, of the American forces.
What is the cause of that? Why this spirit of revolt on the part of
men who fought with invincible courage and long patience? It will
seem strange to people who have only seen war from afar that an
officer like this, decorated for valour, early in the field, one of
the old stock and tradition of English loyalty, should utter such
fierce words about the leaders of the war, such ironical words about
the purpose and sacrifice of the world conflict. He seems to accuse
other enemies than the Germans, to turn round upon Allied statesmen,
philosophers, preachers, mobs and say, “You too were guilty of this
fearful thing. Your hands are red also with the blood of youth. And
you forget already those who saved you by their sacrifice.”

That is what he says, clearly, in many passionate paragraphs; and
I can bear witness that his point of view is shared by many other
soldiers who fought in France. These men were thinking hard when day
by day they were close to death. In their dug-outs and ditches they
asked of their own souls enormous questions. They asked whether the
war was being fought really for Liberty, really to crush Militarism,
really on behalf of Democracy, or whether to bolster up the same
system on our side of the lines which had produced the evils of the
German menace. Was it not a conflict between rival Powers imbued with
exactly the same philosophy of Imperialism and Force? Was it not the
product of commercial greed, diplomatic fears and treacheries and
intrigues (conducted secretly over the heads of the peoples) and
had not the German people been led on to their villainy by the same
spell-words and “dope” which had been put over our peoples, so that
the watch-words of “patriotism,” “defensive warfare” and “Justice”
had been used to justify this massacre in the fields of Europe by the
Old Men of all nations, who used the Boys as pawns in their Devil’s
game? The whole structure of Europe had been wrong. The ministers of
the Christian churches had failed Christ by supporting the philosophy
of Force, and diplomatic wickedness and old traditions of hatred.
All nations were involved in this hark-back to the jungle-world, and
Germany was only most guilty because first to throw off the mask,
most efficient in the mechanism of Brute-government, most logical in
the damnable laws of that philosophy which poisoned the spirit of the
modern world.

That was the conclusion to which, rightly or wrongly--I think
rightly--many men arrived in their secret conferences with their own
souls when death stood near the door of their dug-outs.

That sense of having fought for ideals which were not real in the
purpose of the war embittered them; and they were most bitter on
their home-coming, after Armistice, or after Peace, when in England
they found that the victory they had won was being used not to
inaugurate a new era of liberty, but to strengthen the old laws
of “Might and Right,” the old tyrannies of government without
the consent of peoples, the old Fetish worship of hatred masking
under the divine name of Patriotism. Disillusionment, despair, a
tragic rage, filled the hearts of fighting men who after all their
sacrifices found themselves unrewarded, unemployed, and unsatisfied
in their souls. Out of this psychological distress have come civil
strife and much of the unrest which is now at work.

My brother’s book reveals something of this at work in his own mind,
and, as such, is a revelation of all his comrades. I do not think
he has yet found the key to the New Philosophy which will arise out
of all that experience, emotion, and thought; just as the mass of
fighting men are vague about the future which must replace the bad
old past. They are perplexed, illogical, passionate without a clear
purpose. But undoubtedly out of their perplexities and passion the
New Era will be born.

So I salute my “kid-brother” as one of the makers of History greater
than that which crushed German militarism and punished German crimes
(which were great), and I wish him luck with this book, which is
honest, vital, and revealing.

                                             PHILIP GIBBS.




                              PART I

                            _THE RANKS_




                           THE GREY WAVE


1

In June, 1914, I came out of a hospital in Philadelphia after an
operation, faced with two facts. One was that I needed a holiday at
home in England, the second that after all hospital expenses were
paid I had five dollars in the world. But there was a half-finished
novel in my trunk and the last weeks of the theatrical tour which
had brought me to Philadelphia would tide me over. A month later the
novel was bought by a magazine and the boat that took me to England
seemed to me to be the tangible result of concentrated will power.
“Man proposes....” My own proposal was to return to America in a
month or six weeks to resume the task of carving myself a niche in
the fiction market.

The parting advice of the surgeon had been that I was not to play
ball or ride a horse for at least six months. The green sweeping
uplands of Buckinghamshire greeted me with all their fragrance and a
trig golf course gave me back strength while I thought over ideas for
a new novel.

Then like a thunderbolt the word “War” crashed out. Its full
significance did not break through the ego of one who so shortly
would be leaving Europe far behind and to whom a personal career
seemed of vital importance. England was at war. The Army would be
buckling on its sword, running out its guns; the Navy clearing decks
for action. It was their job, not mine. The Boer War had only touched
upon my childish consciousness as a shouting in the streets, cheering
multitudes and brass bands. War, as such, was something which I had
never considered as having any personal meaning for me. Politics and
war were the business of politicians and soldiers. My business was
writing and I went up to London to arrange accommodations on the boat
to New York.

London was different in those hot August days. Long queues waited all
day,--not outside theatres, but outside recruiting offices,--city
men, tramps, brick-layers, men of all types and ages with a look in
their eyes that puzzled me. Every taxi hoot drew one’s attention to
the flaring poster on each car, “Young Men of England, Your King and
Country need you!”

How many millions of young men there were who would be glad to answer
that call to adventure,--an adventure which surely could not last
more than six months? It did not call me. My adventure lay in that
wonderland of sprouting towers that glistened behind the Statue of
Liberty.

But day by day the grey wave swept on, tearing down all veils from
before the altar of reality. Belgian women were not merely bayoneted.

“Why don’t we stop this? What is the Army doing?” How easy to cry
that out from the leafy lanes of Buckinghamshire. A woman friend of
mine travelled up in the train with me one morning, a friend whose
philosophy and way of life had seemed to me more near the ideal than
I had dreamed of being able to reach. She spoke of war, impersonally
and without recruiting propaganda. All unconsciously she opened my
eyes to the unpleasant fact that it was _my_ war too. Suppose I had
returned to New York and the Germans had jumped the tiny Channel
and “bayoneted” her and her children? Could I ever call myself a man
again?

I took a taxi and went round London. Every recruiting office looked
like a four-hour wait. I was in a hurry. So I went by train to
Bedford and found it crowded with Highlanders. When I asked the way
to the recruiting office they looked at me oddly. Their speech was
beyond my London ear, but a pointing series of arms showed it to me.

By a miracle the place was empty except for the doctor and an
assistant in khaki.

“I want to join the Cavalry,” said I.

“Very good, sir. Will you please take off your clothes.”

It was the last time a sergeant called me sir for many a long day.

I stripped, was thumped and listened to and gave description of
tattoo marks which interested that doctor greatly. The appendix
scar didn’t seem to strike him. “What is it?” said he, looking at
it curiously, and when I told him merely grunted. Shades of Shaw! I
thought with a jump of that Philadelphia surgeon. “Don’t ride a horse
for six months.” Only three had elapsed.

I was passed fit. I assured them that I was English on both sides,
unmarried, not a spy, and was finally given a bundle of papers and
told to take them along to the barracks.

The barracks were full of roughnecks and it occurred to me for the
first time, as I listened to them being sworn in, that these were my
future brother soldiers. What price Mulvaney, Learoyd and Ortheris?
thought I.

I repeated the oath after an hour’s waiting and swore to obey orders
and respect superior officers and in short do my damnedest to kill
the King’s enemies. I’ve done the last but when I think of the first
two that oath makes me smile.

However, I swore, received two shillings and three-pence for my
first two days’ pay and was ordered to report at the Cavalry Depot,
Woolwich, the following day, September 3, 1914.

The whole business had been done in a rush of exaltation that didn’t
allow me to think. But when I stepped out into the crowded streets
with that two shillings rattling in my pocket I felt a very sober
man. I knew nothing whatever of soldiering. I hardly even knew a
corporal from a private or a rifle from a ramrod, and here I was
Trooper A. H. Gibbs, 9th Lancers, with the sullen rumble of heavy
guns just across the Channel--growing louder.


2

Woolwich!

Bad smells, bad beer, bad women, bad language!--Those early days!
None of us who went through the ranks will ever forget the tragedy,
the humour, the real democracy of that period. The hand of time has
already coloured it with the glow of romance, but in the living it
was crude and raw, like waking up to find your nightmare real.

Oxford University doesn’t give one much of an idea of how to cope
with the class of humanity at that Depot in spite of Ruskin Hall,
the working-man’s college, of which my knowledge consisted only of
climbing over their wall and endeavouring to break up their happy
home. But the Ruskin Hall man was a prince by the side of those
recruits. They came with their shirts sticking out of trousers seats,
naked toes showing out of gaping boots, and their smell---- We lay
at night side by side on adjoining bunks, fifty of us in a room. They
had spent their two days’ pay on beer, bad beer. The weather was hot.
Most of them were stark naked. I’d had a bath that morning. They
hadn’t.

The room was enormous. The windows had no blinds. The moon streamed
in on their distorted bodies in all the twistings of uneasy sleep.
Some of them smoked cigarettes and talked. Others blasphemed them for
talking, but the bulk snored and ground their teeth in their sleep.

A bugle rang out.

Aching in every limb from the unaccustomed hardness of the iron
bed it was no hardship to answer the call. There were lavatories
outside each room and amid much sleepy blasphemy we shaved, those of
us who had razors, and washed, and in the chill of dawn went down
to a misty common. It was too early for discipline. There weren’t
enough N.C.O.’s, so for the first few days we hung about waiting for
breakfast instead of doing physical jerks.

Breakfast! One thinks of a warm room with cereals and coffee and eggs
and bacon with a morning paper and, if there’s a soot in our cup, a
sarcastic reference as to cleanliness. That was before the war.

We lined up before the door of a gun shed, hundreds of us, shivering,
filing slowly in one by one and having a chunk of bread, a mug of tea
and a tin of sardines slammed into our hands, the sardines having to
be divided among four.

The only man in my four who possessed a jack-knife to open the tin
had cleaned his pipe with it, scraped the mud off his boots, cleaned
out his nails and cut up plug tobacco. Handy things, jack-knives.
He proceeded to hack open the tin and scoop out sardines. It was
only my first morning and my stomach wasn’t strong in those days. I
disappeared into the mist, alone with my dry bread and tea. Hunger
has taught me much since then.

The mist rolled up later and daylight showed us to be a pretty tough
crowd. We were presently taken in hand by a lot of sergeants who
divided us into groups, made lists of names and began to teach us how
to march in the files, and in sections,--the elements of soldiering.
Some of them didn’t seem to know their left foot from their right,
but the patience of those sergeants was only equalled by the cunning
of their blasphemy and the stolidity of their victims.

After an hour of it we were given a rest for fifteen minutes,
this time to get a handful of tobacco. Then it went on again and
again,--and yet again.

The whole of that first period of seven days was a long jumble of
appalling happenings; meals served by scrofulitic hands on plates
from which five other men’s leavings and grease had to be removed;
bread cut in quarter loaves; meat fat, greasy, and stewed--always
stewed, tea, stewed also, without appreciable milk, so strong that
a spoon stood up in it unaided; sleeping in one’s clothes and
inadequate washing in that atmosphere of filth indescribable; of
parades to me childish in their elementariness; of long hours in the
evening with nothing to do, no place to go, no man to talk to,--a
period of absolute isolation in the middle of those thousands broken
only by letters which assumed a paramount importance, constituting
as they did one’s only link with all that one had left behind, that
other life which now seemed like a mirage.

Not that one regretted the step. It was a first-hand experience of
life that only Jack London or Masefield could have depicted. It was
too the means of getting out to fight the Boche. A monotonous means,
yes, but every day one learnt some new drill and every day one was
thrilled with the absolute cold-blooded reality of it all. It was
good to be alive, to be a man, to get one’s teeth right into things.
It was a bigger part to play than that of the boy in “The Blindness
of Virtue.”


3

Two incidents stand out in that chrysalis stage of becoming soldiers.

One was a sing-song, spontaneously started among the gun sheds in the
middle of the white moonlight. One of the recruits was a man who had
earned his living--hideously sarcastic phrase!--by playing a banjo
and singing outside public houses. He brought his banjo into the army
with him. I hope he’s playing still!

He stuck his inverted hat on the ground, lit a candle beside it in
the middle of the huge square, smacked his dry lips and drew the
banjo out of its baize cover.

“Perishin’ thirsty weather, Bill.”

He volunteered the remark to me as to a brother.

“Going to play for a drink?” I asked.

He was already tuning. He then sat down on a large stone and began to
sing. His accompaniment was generous and loud and perhaps once he had
a voice. It came now with but an echo of its probable charm, through
a coating of beer and tobacco and years of rough living.

It was extraordinary. Just he sitting on the stone, and I standing
smoking by his side, and the candle flickering in the breeze, and
round us the hard black and white buildings and the indefinable
rumble of a great life going on somewhere in the distance.

Presently, as though he were the Pied Piper, men came in twos and
threes and stood round us, forming a circle.

“Give us the ‘Little Grey ’Ome in the West,’ George!”

And “George,” spitting after the prolonged sentiment of Thora, struck
up the required song. At the end of half an hour there were several
hundred men gathered round joining in the choruses, volunteering
solos, applauding each item generously. The musician had five bottles
of beer round his inverted hat and perhaps three inside him, and a
collection of coppers was taken up from time to time.

They chose love ballads of an ultra-sentimental nature with the soft
pedal on the sad parts,--these men who to-morrow would face certain
death. How little did that thought come to them then. But I looked
round at their faces, blandly happy, dirty faces, transformed by the
moon and by their oath of service into the faces of crusaders.

How many of them are alive to-day, how many buried in nameless mounds
somewhere in that silent desolation? How many of them have suffered
mutilation? How many of them have come out of it untouched, to the
waiting arms of their women? Brothers, I salute you.

       *       *       *       *       *

The other incident was the finding of a friend, a kindred spirit in
those thousands which accentuated one’s solitude.

We had been standing in a long queue outside the Quartermaster’s
store, being issued with khaki one by one. I was within a hundred
yards of getting outfitted when the Q.M. came to the door in person
and yelled that the supply had run out. I think we all swore. The
getting of khaki meant a vital step nearer to the Great Day when
we should cross the Channel. As the crowd broke away in disorder,
I heard a voice with an ‘h’ say “How perfectly ruddy!” I could
have fallen on the man’s neck with joy. The owner of it was a comic
sight. A very battered straw hat, a dirty handkerchief doing the
duty of collar, a pair of grey flannel trousers that had been slept
in these many nights. But the face was clear and there was a twinkle
of humorous appreciation in the blue eye. I made a bee-line for that
man. I don’t remember what I said, but in a few minutes we were
swapping names, and where we lived and what we thought of it, and
laughing at our mutually draggled garments.

We both threw reserve to the wind and were most un-English, except
perhaps that we may have looked upon each other as the only two
white men in a tribe of savages. In a sense we were. But it was like
finding a brother and made all that difference to our immediate
lives. There was so much pent-up feeling in both of us that we
hadn’t been able to put into words. Never have I realized the value
and comfort of speech so much, or the bond established by sharing
experiences and emotions.


4

My new-found “brother’s” name was Bucks. After a few more days of
drilling and marching and sergeant grilling, we both got khaki
and spurs and cap badges and bandoliers, and we both bought white
lanyards and cleaning appliances. Smart? We made a point of being the
smartest recruits of the whole bunch. We felt we were the complete
soldier at last and although there wasn’t a horse in Woolwich we
clattered about in spurs that we burnished to the glint of silver.

And then began the second chapter of our military career. We all
paraded one morning and were told off to go to Tidworth or the
Curragh.

Bucks and I were for Tidworth and marched side by side in the great
squad of us who tramped in step, singing “Tipperary” at the top of
our lungs, down to the railway station.

That was the first day I saw an officer, two officers as a matter of
fact, subalterns of our own regiment. It gave one for the first time
the feeling of belonging to a regiment. In the depot at Woolwich were
9th Lancers, 5th Dragoon Guards, and 16th Lancers. Now we were going
to the 9th Lancer barracks and those two subalterns typified the
regiment to Bucks and me. How we eyed them, those two youngsters, and
were rather proud of the aloof way in which they carried themselves.
They were specialists. We were novices beginning at the bottom of the
ladder and I wouldn’t have changed places with them at that moment
had it been possible. As an officer I shouldn’t have known what to
do with the mob of which I was one. I should have been awkward,
embarrassed.

It didn’t occur to me then that there were hundreds, thousands, who
knew as little as we did about the Army, who were learning to be
second lieutenants as we were learning to be troopers.

We stayed all day in that train, feeding on cheese and bread which
had been given out wrapped in newspapers, and buns and biscuits
bought in a rush at railway junctions at which we stopped from time
to time. It was dark when we got to Tidworth, that end-of-the-world
siding, and were paraded on the platform and marched into barracks
whose thousand windows winked cheerily at us as we halted outside the
guardroom.

There were many important people like sergeant-majors waiting for us,
and sergeants who called them “sir” and doubled to carry out their
orders. These latter fell upon us and in a very short time we were
divided into small groups and marched away to barrack rooms for the
night. There was smartness here, discipline. The chaos of Woolwich
was a thing of the past.

Already I pictured myself being promoted to lance-corporal, the
proud bearer of one stripe, picking Boches on my lance like a row of
pigs,--and I hadn’t even handled a real lance as yet!


5

Tidworth, that little cluster of barrack buildings on the edge of
the sweeping downs, golden in the early autumn, full of a lonely
beauty like a green Sahara with springs and woods, but never a house
for miles, and no sound but the sighing of the wind and the mew of
the peewit! Thus I came to know it first. Later the rain turned it
into a sodden stretch of mud, blurred and terrible, like a drunken
street-woman blown by the wind, filling the soul with shudders and
despair.--The barrack buildings covered perhaps a square mile of
ground, ranged orderly in series, officers’ quarters--as far removed
from Bucks and me as the Carlton Hotel--married quarters, sergeants’
mess, stables, canteen, riding school, barrack rooms, hospital; like
a small city, thriving and busy, dropped from the blue upon that
patch of country.

The N.C.O.’s at Tidworth were regulars, time-serving men who had
learnt their job in India and who looked upon us as a lot of
“perishin’ amatoors.” It was a very natural point of view. We
presented an ungodly sight, a few of us in khaki, some in “blues,”
those terrible garments that make their wearers look like an
orphan’s home, but most in civilian garments of the most tattered
description. Khaki gave one standing, self-respect, cleanliness,
enabled one to face an officer feeling that one was trying at least
to be a soldier.

The barrack rooms were long and whitewashed, a stove in the middle,
rows of iron beds down either side to take twenty men in peace times.
As it was we late comers slept on “biscuits,” square hard mattresses,
laid down between the iron bunks, and mustered nearly forty in a
room. In charge of each room was a lance-corporal or corporal whose
job it was to detail a room orderly and to see furthermore that he
did his job, _i.e._, keep the room swept and garnished, the lavatory
basins washed, the fireplace blackleaded, the windows cleaned, the
step swept and whitewashed.

Over each bed was a locker (without a lock, of course) where each
man kept his small kit,--razor, towel, toothbrush, blacking and his
personal treasures. Those who had no bed had no locker and left
things beneath the folded blankets of the beds.

How one missed one’s household goods! One learnt to live like a
snail, with everything in the world upon one’s person,--everything
in the world cut down to the barest necessities, pipe and baccy,
letters, a photograph, knife, fork and spoon, toothbrush, bit of
soap, tooth paste, one towel, one extra pair of socks. Have you ever
tried it for six months--a year? Then don’t. You miss your books and
pictures, the bowl of flowers on the table, the tablecloth. All the
things of everyday life that are taken for granted become a matter of
poignant loss when you’ve got to do without them. But it’s marvellous
what can be done without when it’s a matter of necessity.

Bucks unfortunately didn’t get to the same room with me. All of
us who had come in the night before were paraded at nine o’clock
next morning before the Colonel and those who had seen service or
who could ride were considered sheep and separated from the goats
who had never seen service nor a horse. Bucks was a goat. I could
ride,--although the sergeant-major took fifteen sulphuric minutes
to tell me he didn’t think so. And so Bucks and I were separated by
the space of a barrack wall, as we thought then. It was a greater
separation really, for he was still learning to ride when I went out
to France to reinforce the fighting regiment which had covered itself
with glory in the retreat from Mons. But before that day came we
worked through to the soul of Tidworth, and of the sergeant-major,
if by any stretch of the imagination he may be said to have had a
soul. I think he had, but all the other men in the squadron dedicated
their first bullet to him if they saw him in France. What a man! He
stands out among all my memories of those marvellous days of training
when everything was different from anything I had ever done before.
He stands before me now, a long, thin figure in khaki, with a face
that had been kicked in by a horse, an eye that burnt like a branding
iron, and picked out unpolished buttons like a magnet. In the saddle
he was a centaur, part of the horse, wonderful. His long, thin thighs
gripped like tentacles of steel. He could make an animal grunt, he
gripped so hard. And his language! Never in my life had I conceived
the possibilities of blasphemy to shrivel a man’s soul until I heard
that sergeant-major. He ripped the Bible from cover to cover. He
defied thunderbolts from on high and referred to the Almighty as
though he were a scullion,--and he’s still doing it. Compared to the
wholesale murder of eight million men it was undoubtedly a pin-prick,
but it taught us how to ride!


6

Reveille was at 5.30.

Grunts, groans, curses, a kick,--and you were sleepily struggling
with your riding breeches and puttees.

The morning bath? Left behind with all the other things.

There were horses to be groomed and watered and fed, stables to be
“mucked out,” much hard and muscular work to be done before that
pint of tea and slab of grease called bacon would keep body and
soul together for the morning parade. One fed first and shaved and
splashed one’s face, neck, and arms with water afterwards. Have
you ever cleaned out a stable with your bare hands and then been
compelled to eat a meal without washing?

By nine o’clock one paraded with cleaned boots, polished buttons and
burnished spurs and was inspected by the sergeant-major. If you were
sick you went before the doctor instead. But it didn’t pay to be
sick. The sergeant-major cured you first. Then as there weren’t very
many horses in barracks as yet, we were divided half into the riding
school, half for lance and sword drill.

Riding school was invented by the Spanish Inquisition. Generally
it lasted an hour, by which time one was broken on the rack and
emerged shaken, bruised and hot, blistered by the sergeant-major’s
tongue. There were men who’d never been on a horse more than twice
in their lives, but most of us had swung a leg over a saddle.
Many in that ride were grooms from training stables, riders of
steeple-chasers. But their methods were not at all those desired in
His Majesty’s Cavalry and they suffered like the rest of us. But the
sergeant-major’s tongue never stopped and we either learned the
essentials in double-quick time or got out to a more elementary ride.

It was a case of the survival of the fittest. Round and round that
huge school, trotting with and without stirrups until one almost fell
off from sheer agony, with and without saddle over five-foot jumps
pursued by the hissing lash of the sergeant-major’s tongue and whip,
jumping without reins, saddle or stirrups. The agony of sitting down
for days afterwards!

Followed a fifteen-minute break, after the horses were led back to
the stables and off-saddled, and then parade on the square with lance
and sword. A lovely weapon the lance--slender, irresistible--but
after an hour’s concentrated drill one’s right wrist became red-hot
and swollen and the extended lance points drooped in our tired grasp
like reeds in the wind. At night in the barrack room we used to have
competitions to see who could drive the point deepest into the door
panels.

Then at eleven o’clock “stables” again: caps and tunics off, braces
down, sleeves rolled up. We had a magnificent stamp of horse, but
they came in ungroomed for days and under my inexpert methods of
grooming took several days before they looked as if they’d been
groomed at all.

Dinner was at one o’clock and by the time that hour struck one was
ready to eat anything. Each squadron had its own dining-rooms,
concrete places with wooden tables and benches, but the eternal stew
went down like caviar.

The afternoon parades were marching drill, physical exercises,
harness cleaning, afternoon stables and finish for the day about five
o’clock, unless one were wanted for guard or picquet. Picquet meant
the care of the horses at night, an unenviable job. But guard was a
twenty-four hours’ duty, two hours on, four hours off, much coveted
after a rough passage in the riding school. It gave one a chance to
heal.

Hitherto everything had been a confused mass of men without
individuality but of unflagging cheerfulness. Now in the team work
of the squadron and the barrack room individuality began to play its
part and under the hard and fast routine the cheerfulness began to
yield to grousing.

The room corporal of my room was a re-enlisted man, a schoolmaster
from Scotland, conscientious, liked by the men, extremely simple.
I’ve often wondered whether he obtained a commission. The other
troopers were ex-stable boys, labourers, one a golf caddy and one an
ex-sailor who was always singing an interminable song about a highly
immoral donkey. The caddy and the sailor slept on either side of me.
They were a mixed crowd and used filthy language as naturally as they
breathed, but as cheery and stout a lot as you’d wish to meet. Under
their grey shirts beat hearts as kindly as many a woman’s. I remember
the first time I was inoculated and felt like nothing on earth.

“Christ!” said the sailor. “Has that perishin’ doctor been stickin’
his perishin’ needle into you, Mr. Gibbs?”--For some reason they
always called me Mr. Gibbs.--“Come over here and get straight to bed
before the perishin’ stuff starts workin’. I’ve ’ad some of it in the
perishin’ navy.” And he and the caddy took off my boots and clothes
and put me to bed with gentle hands.

The evening’s noisiness was given up. Everybody spoke in undertones
so that I might get to sleep. And in the morning, instead of sweeping
under my own bed as usual, they did it for me and cleaned my buttons
and boots because my arm was still sore.

Can you imagine men like that nailing a kitten by its paws to a door
as a booby-trap to blow a building sky high, as those Boches have
done? Instead of bayoneting prisoners the sailor looked at them
and said, “Ah, you poor perishin’ tikes!” and threw them his last
cigarettes.

They taught me a lot, those men. Their extraordinary acceptation of
unpleasant conditions, their quickness to resent injustice and speak
of it at once, their continual cheeriness, always ready to sing, gave
me something to compete with. On wet days of misery when I’d had
no letters from home there were moments when I damned the war and
thought with infinite regret of New York. But if these fellows could
stick it, well, I’d had more advantages than they’d had and, by Jove,
I was going to stick it too. It was a matter of personal pride.

Practically they taught me many things as well. It was there that
they had the advantage of me. They knew how to wash shirts and socks
and do all the menial work which I had never done. I had to learn.
They knew how to dodge “fatigues” by removing themselves just one
half-minute before the sergeant came looking for victims. It didn’t
take me long to learn that.

Then one saw gradually the social habit emerge, called “mucking
in.” Two men became pals and paired off, sharing tobacco and pay
and saddle soap and so on. For a time I “mucked in” with Sailor--he
was always called Sailor--and perforce learned the song about the
Rabelaisian donkey. I’ve forgotten it now. Perhaps it’s just as well.
Then when the squadron was divided up into troops Sailor and I were
not in the same troop and I had to muck in with an ex-groom. He was
the only man who did not use filthy language.

It’s odd about that language habit. While in the ranks I never caught
it, perhaps because I considered myself a bit above that sort of
thing. It was so childish and unsatisfying. But since I have been
an officer I think I could sometimes have almost challenged the
sergeant-major!


7

As soon as one had settled into the routine the days began to roll
by with a monotony that was, had we only known it, the beginning of
knowledge. Some genius has defined war as “months of intense boredom
punctuated by moments of intense fear.” We had reached the first
stage. It was when the day’s work was done that the devil stalked
into one’s soul and began asking insidious questions. The work itself
was hard, healthy, of real enjoyment. Shall I ever forget those
golden autumn dawns when I rode out, a snorting horse under me, upon
the swelling downs, the uplands touched by the rising sun; but in the
hollows the feathery tops of trees poked up through the mist which
lay in velvety clouds and everywhere a filigree of silver cobwebs,
like strung seed pearls. It was with the spirit of crusaders that we
galloped cross-country with slung lances, or charged in line upon an
imaginary foe with yells that would demoralise him before our lance
points should sink into his fat stomach. The good smells of earth and
saddlery and horse flesh, the lance points winking in the sun, were
all the outward signs of great romance and one took a deep breath of
the keen air and thanked God to be in it. One charged dummies with
sword and lance and hacked and stabbed them to bits. One leaped from
one’s horse at the canter and lined a bank with rifles while the
numbers three in each section galloped the horses to a flank under
cover. One went over the brigade jumps in troop formation, taking
pride in riding so that all horses jumped as one, a magnificent bit
of team work that gave one a thrill.

It was on one of those early morning rides that Sailor earned undying
fame. Remember that all of the work was done on empty stomachs before
breakfast and that if we came back late, a frequent occurrence, we
received only scraps and a curse from the cook. On the morning in
question the sergeant-major ordered the whole troop to unbuckle their
stirrup leathers and drop them on the ground. We did so.

“Now,” said he, “we’re going to do a brisk little cross-country
follow-my-leader. I’m the leader and” (a slight pause with a flash
from the steely eye), “God help the weak-backed, herring-gutted sons
of ---- who don’t perishin’ well line up when I give the order to
halt. Half sections right! walk, march!”

We walked out of the barracks until we reached the edge of the downs
and then followed such a ride as John Gilpin or the Baron Munchausen
would have revelled in--perhaps. The sergeant-major’s horse could
jump anything, and what it couldn’t jump it climbed over. It knew
better than to refuse. We were indifferently mounted, some well, some
badly. My own was a good speedy bay. The orders were to keep in half
sections--two and two. For a straight half-mile we thundered across
the level, drew rein slightly through a thick copse that lashed one’s
face with pine branches and then dropped over a precipice twenty
feet deep. That was where the half-section business went to pieces,
especially when the horses clambered up the other side. We had no
stirrups. It was a case of remaining in the saddle somehow. Had I
been alone I would have ridden five miles to avoid the places the
sergeant-major took us over, through, and under,--bramble hedges that
tore one’s clothes and hands, ditches that one had to ride one’s
horse at with both spurs, banks so steep that one almost expected
the horse to come over backwards, spinneys where one had to lie down
to avoid being swept off. At last, breathless, aching and exhausted,
those of us who were left were halted and dismounted, while the
sergeant-major, who hadn’t turned a hair, took note of who was
missing.

Five unfortunates had not come in. The sergeant-major cast an eye
towards the open country and remained ominously silent. After about a
quarter of an hour the five were seen to emerge at a walk from behind
a spinney. They came trotting up, an anxious expression on their
faces, all except Sailor, who grinned from ear to ear. Instead of
being allowed to fall in with us they were made to halt and dismount
by themselves, facing us. The sergeant-major looked at them, slowly,
with an infinite contempt, as they stood stiffly to attention. Then
he began.

“Look at them!” he said to us. “Look at those five....” and so on in
a stinging stream, beneath which their faces went white with anger.

As the sergeant-major drew breath, Sailor stepped forward. He was no
longer grinning from ear to ear. His face might have been cut out of
stone and he looked at the sergeant-major with a steady eye.

“That’s all right, Sergeant-Major,” he said. “We’re all that and a
perishin’ lot more perhaps, but not you nor Jesus Christ is going
to make me do a perishin’ ride like that and come back to perishin’
barracks and get no perishin’ breakfast and go on perishin’ parade
again at nine with not a perishin’ thing in my perishin’ stomach.”

“What do you mean?” asked the sergeant-major.

“What I says,” said Sailor, standing to his guns while we, amazed,
expected him to be slain before our eyes. “Not a perishin’ bit of
breakfast do we get when we go back late.”

“Is that true?” The sergeant-major turned to us.

“Yes,” we said, “perishin’ true!”

“Mount!” ordered the sergeant-major without another word and we
trotted straight back to barracks. By the time we’d watered,
off-saddled and fed the horses we were as usual twenty minutes late
for breakfast. But this morning the sergeant-major, with a face like
a black cloud, marched us into the dining-hall and up to the cook’s
table.

We waited, breathless with excitement. The cook was in the kitchen, a
dirty fellow.

The sergeant-major slammed the table with his whip. The cook came,
wiping a chewing mouth with the back of his hand.

“Breakfast for these men, quick,” said the sergeant-major.

“All gone, sir,” said the cook, “we can’t----”

The sergeant-major leaned over with his face an inch from the cook’s.
“Don’t you perishin’ well answer me back,” he said, “or I’ll put you
somewhere where the Almighty couldn’t get you out until I say so.
Breakfast for these men, you fat, chewing swine, or I’ll come across
the table and cut your tripes out with my riding whip and cook _them_
for breakfast! Jump, you foul-feeder!” and down came the whip on the
table like a pistol shot.

The cook swallowed his mouthful whole and retired, emerging presently
with plenty of excellent breakfast and hot tea. We laughed.

“Now,” said the sergeant-major, “if you don’t get as good a breakfast
as this to-morrow and every to-morrow, tell me, and I’ll drop this
lying bastard into his own grease trap.”

Sailor got drunk that night. We paid.


8

The evenings were the hardest part. There was only Bucks to talk
to, and it was never more than twice a week that we managed to get
together. Generally one was more completely alone than on a desert
island, a solitude accentuated by the fact that as soon as one ceased
the communion of work which made us all brothers on the same level,
they dropped back, for me at least, into a seething mass of rather
unclean humanity whose ideas were not mine, whose language and habits
never ceased to jar upon one’s sensitiveness. There was so little
to do. The local music hall, intensely fifth rate, only changed its
programme once a week. The billiard tables in the canteen had an
hour-long waiting list always.

The Y.M.C.A. hadn’t developed in those early days to its present
manifold excellence. There was no gymnasium. The only place one had
was one’s bed in the barrack room on which one could read or write,
not alone, because there was always a shouting incoming and outgoing
crowd and cross fire of elementary jokes and horseplay. It seemed
that there was never a chance of being alone, of escaping from this
“lewd and licentious soldiery.” There were times when the desert
island called irresistibly in this eternal isolation of mind but not
of body. All that one had left behind, even the times when one was
bored and out of temper, because perhaps one was off one’s drive at
the Royal and Ancient, or some other trivial thing like that, became
so glorious in one’s mind that the feel of the barrack blanket was
an agony. Had one _ever_ been bored in that other life? Had one been
touchy and said sarcastic things that were meant to hurt? Could it
be possible that there was anything in that other world for which
one wouldn’t barter one’s soul now? How little one had realised,
appreciated, the good things of that life! One accepted them as a
matter of course, as a matter of right.

Now in the barrack-room introspections their real value stood out in
the limelight of contrast and one saw oneself for the first time: a
rather selfish, indifferent person, thoughtless, hurrying along the
road of life with no point of view of one’s own, doing things because
everybody else did them, accepting help carelessly, not realising
that other people might need one’s help in return, content with a
somewhat shallow secondhand philosophy because untried in the fire
of reality. This was reality, this barrack life. This was the first
time one had been up against facts, the first time it was a personal
conflict between life and oneself with no mother or family to fend
off the unpleasant; a fact that one hadn’t attempted to grasp.

The picture of oneself was not comforting. To find out the truth
about oneself is always like taking a pill without its sugar coating;
and it was doubly bitter in those surroundings.

Hitherto one had never been forced to do the unpleasant. One simply
avoided it. Now one had to go on doing it day after day without a
hope of escape, without any more alleviation than a very occasional
week-end leave. Those week-ends were like a mouthful of water to
Dives in the flames of hell,--but which made the flames all the
fiercer afterwards! One prayed for them and loathed them.

The beating heart with which one leaped out of a taxi in London and
waited on the doorstep of home, heaven. The glory of a clean body and
more particularly, clean hands. It was curious how the lack of a bath
ceased after a time to be a dreadful thing, but the impossibility
of keeping one’s hands clean was always a poignant agony. They were
always dirty, with cracked nails and a cut or two, and however many
times they were scrubbed, they remained appalling. But at home on
leave, with hot water and stacks of soap and much manicuring, they
did not at least make one feel uncomfortable.

The soft voices and laughter of one’s people, their appearance--just
to be in the same room, silent with emotion--God, will one ever
forget it? Thin china to eat off, a flower on the table, soft lights,
a napkin.--The little ones who came and fingered one’s bandolier
and cap badge and played with one’s spurs with their tiny, clean
hands--one was almost afraid to touch them, and when they puckered up
their tiny mouths to kiss one good night.--I wonder whether they ever
knew how near to tears that rough-looking soldier-man was?

And then in what seemed ten heart-beats one was saying good-bye to
them all. Back to barracks again by way of Waterloo and the last
train at 9 p.m.--its great yellow lights and awful din, its surging
crowd of drunken soldiers and their girls who yelled and hugged and
screamed up and down the platform, and here and there an officer
diving hurriedly into a first-class compartment. Presently whistles
blew and one found oneself jammed into a carriage with about twelve
other soldiers who fought to lean out of the window and see the
last of their girls until the train had panted its way out of the
long platform. Then the foul reek of Woodbine cigarettes while they
discussed the sexual charms of those girls--and then a long snoring
chorus for hours into the night, broken only by some one being sick
from overmuch beer.

The touch of the rosebud mouth of the baby girl who had kissed me
good-bye was still on my lips.


9

It was in the first week of November that, having been through an
exhaustive musketry course in addition to all the other cavalry work,
we were “passed out” by the Colonel. I may mention in passing that
in October, 1914, the British Cavalry were armed, for the first time
in history, with bayonets in addition to lance, sword and rifle.
There was much sarcastic reference to “towies,” “foot-sloggers,”
“P.B.I.”--all methods of the mounted man to designate infantry; and
when an infantry sergeant was lent to teach us bayonet fighting
it seemed the last insult, even to us recruits, so deeply was the
cavalry spirit already ingrained in us.

The “passing out” by the Colonel was a day in our lives. It meant
that, if successful, we were considered good enough to go and fight
for our country: France was the Mecca of each of us.

The day in question was bright and sunny with a touch of frost which
made the horses blow and dance when, with twinkling lance-points at
the carry, we rode out with the sergeant-major, every bright part of
our equipment polished for hours overnight in the barrack room amid
much excited speculation as to our prospects.

The sergeant-major was going to give us a half-hour’s final rehearsal
of all our training before the Colonel arrived. Nothing went right
and he damned and cursed without avail, until at last he threatened
to ride us clean off the plain and lose us. It was very depressing.
We knew we’d done badly, in spite of all our efforts, and when we
saw, not far off, the Colonel, the Major and the Adjutant, with a
group of other people riding up to put us through our paces, there
wasn’t a heart that didn’t beat faster in hope or despair. We sat to
attention like Indians while the officers rode round us, inspecting
the turnout.

Then the Colonel expressed the desire to see a little troop drill.

The sergeant-major cleared his throat and like an 18-pounder shell
the order galvanised us into action. We wheeled and formed and spread
out and reformed without a hitch and came to a halt in perfect
dressing in front of the Colonel again, without a fault. Hope revived
in despairing chests.

Then the Colonel ordered us over the jumps in half sections, and
at the order each half section started away on the half-mile
course--walk, trot, canter, jump, steady down to trot, canter,
jump--_e da capo_ right round about a dozen jumps, each one over
a different kind of obstacle, each half section watched far more
critically perhaps by the rest of the troop than by the officers. My
own mount was a bay mare which I’d ridden half a dozen times. When
she liked she could jump anything. Sometimes she didn’t like.

This day I was taking no chances and drove home both spurs at the
first jump. My other half section was a lance-corporal. His horse was
slow, preferring to consider each jump before it took it.

Between jumps, without moving our heads and looking straight in front
of us, we gave each other advice and encouragement.

Said he, “Not so perishin’ fast. Keep dressed, can’t you.”

Said I, “Wake your old blighter up! What’ve you got spurs on
for?--Hup! Over. Steady, man, steady.”

Said he, “Nar, then, like as we are. Knee to knee. Let’s show ’em
what the perishin’ Kitchener’s mob perishin’ well _can_ do.” And
without a refusal we got round and halted in our places.

When we’d all been round, the Colonel with a faint smile on his face,
requested the sergeant-major to take us round as a troop--sixteen
lancers knee to knee in the front rank and the same number behind.

It happened that I was the centre of the front rank--technically
known as centre guide--whose job it was to keep four yards from the
tail of the troop leader and on whom the rest of the front rank
“dressed.”

When we were well away from the officers and about to canter at the
first jump the sergeant-major’s head turned over his shoulder.

“Oh, _you_’re centre guide, Gibbs, are you! Well, you keep your
distance proper, that’s all, and by Christ, if you refuse----”

I don’t know what fate he had in store for me had I missed a jump but
there I was with a knee on either side jammed painfully hard against
mine as we came to the first jump. It was the man on either flank of
the troop who had the most difficult job. The jumps were only just
wide enough and they had to keep their horses from swinging wide of
the wings. It went magnificently. Sixteen horses as one in both ranks
rose to every jump, settled down and dressed after each and went
round the course without a hitch, refusal or fall, and at last we sat
at attention facing the Colonel, awaiting the verdict which would
either send us back for further training, or out to--what? Death,
glory, or maiming?

The Major looked pleased and twisted his moustache with a grin. He
had handled our squadron and on the first occasion of his leading us
in a charge, he in front with drawn sword, we thundering behind with
lances menacing his back in a glittering row, we got so excited that
we broke ranks and flowed round him, yelling like cowboys. How he
damned us!

The Colonel made a little speech and complimented us on our work
and the sergeant-major for having trained us so well,--us, the first
of Kitchener’s “mob” to be ready. Very nice things he said and our
hearts glowed with appreciation and excitement. We sat there without
a movement but our chests puffed out like a row of pouter pigeons.

At last he saluted us--saluted _us_, he, the Colonel--and the
officers rode away,--the Major hanging behind a little to say with
a smile that was worth all the cursings the sergeant-major had ever
given us, “Damn good, you fellows! _Damn_ good!” We would have
followed him to hell and back at that moment.

And then the sergeant-major turned his horse and faced us. “You may
_think_ you’re perishin’ good soldiers after all that, but by Christ,
I’ve never seen such a perishin’ awful exhibition of carpet-baggers.”

But there was an unusual twinkle in his eye and for the first time in
those two months of training he let us “march at ease,” _i.e._, smoke
and talk, on the way back to stables.


10

That was the first half of the ordeal.

The second half took place in the afternoon in the barrack square
when we went through lance drill and bayonet exercises while the
Colonel and the officers walked round and discussed us. At last we
were dismissed, trained men, recruits no longer; and didn’t we throw
our chests out in the canteen that night! It made me feel that the
Nobel prize was futile beside the satisfaction of being a fully
trained trooper in His Majesty’s Cavalry, and in a crack regiment
too, which had already shown the Boche that the “contemptible little
army” had more “guts” than the Prussian Guards regiments and
anything else they liked to chuck in.

I foregathered with Bucks that night and told him all about it. Our
ways had seemed to lie apart during those intensive days, and it was
only on Sundays that we sometimes went for long cross-country walks
with biscuits and apples in our pockets if we were off duty. About
once a week too we made a point of going to the local music-hall
where red-nosed comedians knocked each other about and fat ladies in
tights sang slushy love songs; and with the crowd we yelled choruses
and ate vast quantities of chocolate.

Two other things occurred during those days which had an enormous
influence on me; one indeed altered my whole career in the army.

The first occurrence was the arrival in a car one evening of an
American girl whom I’d known in New York. It was about a week after
my arrival at Tidworth. She, it appeared, was staying with friends
about twenty miles away.

The first thing I knew about it was when an orderly came into stables
about 4.30 p.m. on a golden afternoon and told me that I was wanted
at once at the Orderly Room.

“What for?” said I, a little nervous.

The Orderly Room was where all the scallawags were brought up before
the Colonel for their various crimes,--and I made a hasty examination
of conscience.

However, I put on my braces and tunic and ran across the square.
There in a car was the American girl whom I had endeavoured to teach
golf in the days immediately previous to my enlistment. “Come on
out and have a picnic with me,” said she. “I’ve got some perfectly
luscious things in a basket.”

The idea was heavenly but it occurred to me I ought to get
permission. So I went into the Orderly Room.

There were two officers and a lot of sergeants. I tiptoed up to a
sergeant and explaining that a lady had come over to see me, asked
if I could get out of camp for half an hour? I was very raw in those
days,--half an hour!

The sergeant stared at me. Presumably ladies in motor-cars didn’t
make a habit of fetching cavalry privates. It wasn’t “laid down” in
the drill book. However, he went over to one of the officers,--the
Adjutant, I discovered later.

The Adjutant looked me up and down as I repeated my request, asked
me my name and which ride I was in and finally put it to the other
officer who said “yes” without looking up. So I thanked the Adjutant,
clicked to the salute and went out. As I walked round the front of
the car, while the chauffeur cranked up, the door of the Orderly Room
opened and the Adjutant came on to the step. He took a good look at
the American girl and said, “Oh--er--Gibbs! You can make it an hour
if you like.”

It may amuse him to know, if the slaughter hasn’t claimed him, that I
made it exactly sixty minutes, much as I should have liked to make it
several hours, and was immensely grateful to him both for the extra
half hour and for the delightful touch of humour.

What a picnic it was! We motored away from that place and all its
roughness and took the basket under a spinney in the afternoon sun
which touched everything in a red glow.

It wasn’t only tea she gave me, but sixty precious minutes of great
friendship, letting fall little remarks which helped me to go back
all the more determined to stick to it. She renewed my faith in
myself and gave me renewed courage,--for which I was unable to thank
her. We British are so accursedly tongue-tied in these matters. I did
try but of course made a botch of it.

There are some things which speech cannot deal with. Your taking
me out that day, oh, American girl, and the other days later, are
numbered among them.


11

The other occurrence was also brought about by a woman, _the_ woman
for whom I joined up. It was a Sunday morning on which fortunately
I was not detailed for any fatigues and she came to take me out to
lunch. We motored to Marlborough, lunched at the hotel and after
visiting a racing stable some distance off came back to the hotel
for tea, a happy day unflecked by any shadow. In the corner of the
dining-room were two officers with two ladies. I, in the bandolier
and spurs of a trooper, sat with my back to them and my friend told
me that they seemed to be eyeing me and making remarks. It occurred
to me that as I had no official permission to be away from Tidworth
they might possibly be going to make trouble. How little I knew what
was in their minds. When we’d finished and got up to go one of the
officers came across as we were going out of the room and said, “May
I speak to you a moment?”

We both stopped. “I see you’re wearing the numerals of my regiment,”
said he and went on to ask why I was in the ranks, why I hadn’t asked
for a commission, and strongly advised me to do so.

I told him that I hadn’t ever thought of it because I knew nothing
about soldiering and hadn’t the faintest idea of whether I should
ever be any good as an officer. He waved that aside and advised me
to apply. Then he added that he himself was going out to France one
day in the following week and would I like to go as his servant?
Would I? My whole idea was to get to France; and this happened before
I had been passed out by the Colonel. So he took down my name and
particulars and said he would ask for me when he came to Tidworth,
which he proposed to do in two days’ time.

Whether he ever came or not I do not know. I never saw him again. Nor
did I take any steps with regard to a commission. My friend and I
talked it over and I remember rather laughing at the idea of it.

Not so she, however. About a fortnight later I was suddenly sent for
by the Colonel.

“I hear you’ve applied for a commission,” said he.

It came like a bolt from the blue. But through my brain flashed the
meeting in the Marlborough Hotel and I saw in it the handiwork of my
friend.

So I said, “Yes, sir.”

He then asked me where I was educated and whether I spoke French and
what my job was in civil life and finally I was sent off to fill up a
form and then to be medically examined.

And there the matter ended. I went on with the daily routine, was
passed out by the Colonel and a very few days after that heard the
glorious news that we were going out as a draft to France on active
service.

We were all in bed in the barrack room one evening when the door
opened and a sergeant came in and flicked on the electric light,
which had only just been turned out.

“Wake up, you bloodthirsty warriors,” he cried. “Wake up. You’re for
a draft to-morrow all of you on this list,” and he read out the names
of all of us in the room who had been passed out. “Parade at the
Quartermaster’s stores at nine o’clock in the morning.” And out went
the light and the door slammed and a burst of cheering went up.

And while I lay on my “biscuits,” imagining France and hearing in my
mind the thunder of guns and wondering what our first charge would
be like, the machinery which my friend had set in motion was rolling
slowly (shades of the War Office!) but surely. My name had been
submerged in the “usual channels” but was receiving first aid, all
unknown to me, of a most vigorous description.


12

Shall I _ever_ forget that week-end, with all its strength of
emotions running the gamut from exaltation to blank despair and back
again to the wildest enthusiasm?

We paraded at the Quartermaster’s stores and received each a kit
bag, two identity discs--the subject of many gruesome comments--a
jack-knife, mess tin, water bottle, haversack, and underclothes. Thus
were we prepared for the killing.

Then the Major appeared and we fell in before him.

“Now which of you men want to go to the front?” said he. “Any man who
wants to, take one pace forward.”

As one man the whole lot of us, about thirty, took one pace forward.

The Major smiled. “Good,” said he. “Any man _not_ want to go--prove.”

No man proved.

“Well, look here,” said the Major, “I hate to disappoint anybody but
only twenty-eight of you can go. You’ll have to draw lots.”

Accordingly bits of paper were put into a hat, thirty scraps of
paper, two of them marked with crosses. Was it a sort of inverted
omen that the two who drew the crosses would never find themselves
under little mounds in France?

We drew in turn, excitement running high as paper after paper came
out blank. My heart kicked within me. How I prayed not to draw a
cross. But I did!

Speechless with despair the other man who drew a cross and I received
the good-natured chaff of the rest.

I saw them going out, to leave this accursed place of boredom and
make-believe, for the real thing, the thing for which we had slaved
and sweated and suffered. We two were to be left. We weren’t to go
on sharing the luck with these excellent fellows united to us by the
bonds of fellow-striving, whom we knew in sickness and health, drunk
and sober.

We had to remain behind, eating our hearts out to wait for the next
draft--a lot of men whom we did not know, strangers with their own
jokes and habits--possibly a fortnight of hanging about. The day was
a Friday and our pals were supposed to be going at any moment. The
other unlucky man and myself came to the conclusion that consolation
might be found in a long week-end leave and that if we struck while
the iron of sympathy was hot the Major might be inclined to lend a
friendly ear. This indeed he did and within an hour we were in the
London train on that gloomy Friday morning, free as any civilian till
midnight of the following Tuesday. Thus the Major’s generosity. The
only proviso was that we had both to leave telegraphic addresses in
case----

But in spite of that glorious week-end in front of us, we refused
to be consoled, yet, and insisted on telling the other occupants of
the carriage of our rotten luck. We revelled in gloom and extraneous
sympathy until Waterloo showed up in the murk ahead. Then I’m bound
to confess my own mental barometer went up with a jump and I said
good-bye to my fellow lancer, who was off to pursue the light o’ love
in Stepney, with an impromptu Te Deum in my heart.

My brother, with whom I spent all my week-ends in those days, had a
house just off the Park. He put in his time looking like a rather
tired admiral, most of whose nights were passed looking for Zeppelins
and yearning for them to come within range of his beloved “bundooks”
which were in the neighbourhood of the Admiralty. Thither I went at
full speed in a taxi--they still existed in those days--and proceeded
to wallow in a hot bath, borrowing my brother’s bath salts (or were
they his wife’s?), clean “undies” and hair juice with a liberal
hand. It was a comic sight to see us out together in the crowded
London streets, he all over gold lace, me just a Tommy with a cheap
swagger stick under my arm. Subalterns, new to the game, saluted him
punctiliously. I saluted them. And when we met generals or a real
admiral we both saluted together. The next afternoon, Saturday, at
tea time a telegram came. We were deep in armchairs in front of a
gorgeous fire, with muffins sitting in the hearth and softly shaded
electric lights throwing a glow over pictures and backs of books and
the piano which, after the barrack room, made us as near heaven as
I’ve ever been. The telegram was for me, signed by the Adjutant.

“Return immediately.”

It was the echo of a far-off boot and saddle.--I took another look
round the room. Should I ever see it again? My brother’s eye met mine
and we rose together.

“Well, I must be getting along,” said I. “Cheero, old son.”

“I’ll come with you to the station,” said he.

I shook my head. “No, please don’t bother.--Don’t forget to write.”

“Rather not.--Good luck, old man.”

“Thanks.”

We went down to his front door. I put on my bandolier and picked up
my haversack.

“Well--so long.”

We shook hands.

“God bless you.”

I think we said it together and then the door closed softly behind me.

_Partir, c’est mourir un peu.--Un peu._--God!


13

The next day, Sunday, we all hung about in a sort of uneasy waiting,
without any orders.

It gave us all time to write letters home. If I rightly remember,
absolute secrecy was to be maintained so we were unable even to hint
at our departure or to say good-bye. It was probably just as well but
they were difficult letters to achieve. So we tied one identity disc
to our braces and slung the other round our necks on a string and did
rather more smoking than usual.

Next morning, however, all was bustle. The orders had come in and we
paraded in full fighting kit in front of the guardroom.

The Colonel came on parade and in a silence that was only broken by
the beating of our hearts told us we were going out to face the Boche
for our King and Country’s sake, to take our places in the ranks of a
very gallant regiment, and he wished us luck.

We gave three rather emotional cheers and marched away with our chins
high, followed by the cheers of the whole barracks who had turned out
to see us off. Just as we were about to entrain the Major trotted up
on his big charger and shook us individually by the hand and said he
wished he were coming with us. His coming was a great compliment and
every man of us appreciated it to the full.

The harbour was a wonderful sight when we got in late that afternoon.
Hundreds of arc lights lit up numbers of ships and at each ship was
a body of troops entraining,--English, Scotch and Irish, cavalry,
gunners and infantry. At first glance it appeared a hopeless tangle,
a babel of yelling men all getting into each other’s way. But
gradually the eye tuned itself up to the endless kaleidoscope and one
saw that absolute order prevailed. Every single man was doing a job
and the work never ceased.

We were not taking horses and marched in the charge of an officer
right through the busy crowd and halted alongside a boat which
already seemed packed with troops. But after a seemingly endless wait
we were marched on board and, dodging men stripped to the waist who
were washing in buckets, we climbed down iron ladders into the bowels
of the hold, were herded into a corner and told to make ourselves
comfortable. Tea would be dished out in half an hour.

Holds are usually iron. This was. Furthermore it had been recently
red-leaded. Throw in a strong suggestion of garlic and more than
a hint of sea-sickness and you get some idea of the perfume that
greeted us, friendly-like.

The comments, entirely good-natured, were unprintable. There were no
bunks. We had one blanket each and a greatcoat. My thoughts turned to
the first-class stateroom of the _Caronia_ in which only four months
previously I had had no thought of war. The accepted form of romance
and the glamour of war have been altered. There are no cheering
crowds and fluttering handkerchiefs and brass bands. The new romance
is the light of the moon flickering on darkened ships that creep
one after the other through the mine barrier out into deep waters,
turning to silver the foam ripped by the bows, picking out the white
expressionless faces of silent thousands of khaki-clad men lining the
rail, following the will-o’-the-wisp which beckoned to a strange land.

How many of them knew what they were going to fight for? How many of
them realized the unforgettable hell they were to be engulfed in, the
sacrifice which they so readily made of youth, love, ambition, life
itself--and to what end? To give the lie to one man who wished to
alter the face of the world? To take the part of the smaller country
trampled and battered by the bully? To save from destruction the
greasy skins of dirty-minded politicians, thinking financially or
even imperially, but staying at home?

God knows why most of us went.

But the sting of the Channel wind as we set our faces to the
enemy drove all reason from the mind and filled it with a mighty
exultation. If Death were there to meet us, well, it was all in the
game.


14

We climbed up from the hold next morning to find ourselves in
Portsmouth harbour. The word submarines ran about the decks. There
we waited all day, and again under cover of dark made our way out to
open water, reaching Havre about six o’clock next morning.

We were marched ashore in the afternoon and transferred to another
boat. Nobody knew our destination and the wildest guesses were made.
The new boat was literally packed. There was no question of going
down into a hold. We were lucky to get sufficient deck space to lie
down on, and just before getting under way, it began to rain. There
were some London Scottish at our end of the deck who, finding that
we had exhausted our rations, shared theirs with us. There was no
question of sleeping. It was too cold and too uncomfortable. So we
sang. There must have been some two thousand of us on board and all
those above deck joined in choruses of all the popular songs as they
sat hunched up or lying like rows of sardines in the rain. Dawn found
us shivering, passing little villages on either bank of the river as
we neared Rouen. The early-rising inhabitants waved and their voices
came across the water, “_Vivent les Anglais! A bas les Boches!_” And
the sun came out as we waved out shaving brushes at them in reply. We
eventually landed in the old cathedral city and formed up and marched
away across the bridge, with everybody cheering and throwing flowers
until we came to La Bruyère camp.

Hundreds of bell tents, thousands of horses, and mud over the ankles!
That was the first impression of the camp. It wasn’t until we were
divided off into tents and had packed our equipment tight round the
tent pole that one had time to notice details.

We spent about nine days in La Bruyère camp and we groomed horses
from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day, wet or fine. The lines were endless
and the mud eternal. It became a nightmare, relieved only by the
watering of the horses. The water was about a kilometre and a half
distant. We mounted one horse and led two more each and in an
endless line splashed down belly-deep in mud past the hospital where
the slightly wounded leaned over the rail and exchanged badinage.
Sometimes the sisters gave us cigarettes for which we called down
blessings on their heads.

It rained most of the time and we stood ankle-deep all day in the
lines, grooming and shovelling away mud. But all the time jokes
were hurled from man to man, although the rain dripped down their
faces and necks. We slept, if I remember rightly, twenty men in
a tent, head outwards, feet to the pole piled on top of each
other,--wet, hot, aching. Oh, those feet, the feet of tired heroes,
but unwashed. And it was impossible to open the tent flap because of
the rain.--Fortunately it was cold those nights and one smoked right
up to the moment of falling asleep. Only two per cent. of passes to
visit the town were allowed, but the camp was only barb-wired and
sentried on one side. The other side was open to the pine woods and
very pretty they were as we went cross-country towards the village
of St. Etienne from which a tram-car ran into Rouen in about twenty
minutes. The military police posted at the entrance to the town
either didn’t know their job or were good fellows of Nelsonian
temperament, content to turn a blind eye. From later experience I
judge that the former was probably the case. Be that as it may,
several hundreds of us went in without official permission nearly
every night and, considering all things, were most orderly. Almost
the only man I ever saw drunk was, paradoxically enough, a police
man. He tried to place my companion and myself under arrest, but was
so far gone that he couldn’t write down our names and numbers and we
got off. The hand of Fate was distinctly in it for had I been brought
up and crimed for being loose in the town without leave it might have
counted against me when my commission was being considered.

One evening, the night before we left for the front, we went down
for a bath, the last we should get for many a day. On our way we
paid a visit to the cathedral. It was good to get out of the crowded
streets into the vast gloom punctured by pin-points of candlelight,
with only faint footfalls and the squeak of a chair to disturb the
silence. For perhaps half an hour we knelt in front of the high
altar,--quite unconsciously the modern version of that picture of a
knight in armour kneeling, holding up his sword as a cross before
the altar. It is called the Vigil, I believe. We made a little vigil
in khaki and bandoliers and left the cathedral with an extraordinary
confidence in the morrow. There was a baby being baptised at the
font. It was an odd thing seeing that baby just as we passed out. It
typified somewhat the reason of our going forth to fight.

The bath was amusing. The doors were being closed as we arrived,
and I had just the time to stick my foot in the crack, much to the
annoyance of the attendant. I blarneyed him in French and at last
pushed into the hall only to be greeted by a cry of indignation from
the lady in charge of the ticket office. She was young, however and
pretty, and, determined to get a bath, I played upon her feelings
to the extent of my vocabulary. At first she was adamant. The baths
were closed. I pointed out that the next morning we were going to the
front to fight for France. She refused to believe it. I asked her if
she had a brother. She said she hadn’t. I congratulated her on not
being agonized by the possibilities of his death from hour to hour.
She smiled.

My heart leaped with hope and I reminded her that as we were possibly
going to die for her the least she could do was to let us die clean.
She looked me straight in the eye. There was a twinkle in hers. “You
will not die,” she said. Somehow one doesn’t associate the selling of
bath tickets with the calling of prophet. But she combined the two.
And the bath was gloriously hot.


15

That nine days at La Bruyère did not teach us very much,--not even
the realization of the vital necessity of patience. We looked upon
each day as wasted because we weren’t up the line. Everywhere were
preparations of war but we yearned for the sound of guns. Even the
blue-clad figures who exchanged jokes with us over the hospital
railing conveyed nothing of the grim tragedy of which we were only on
the fringe. They were mostly convalescent. It is only the shattered
who are being pulled back to life by a thread who make one curse
the war. We looked about like new boys in a school, interested but
knowing nothing of the workings, reading none of the signs. This
all bored us. We wanted the line with all the persistence of the
completely ignorant.

The morning after our bath we got it. There was much bustle and
running and cursing and finally we had our saddles packed, and a
day’s rations in our haversacks and a double feed in the nose-bags.

The cavalry man in full marching order bears a strange resemblance to
a travelling ironmonger and rattles like the banging of old tins. The
small man has almost to climb up the near foreleg of his horse, so
impossible is it to get a leg anywhere near the stirrup iron with all
his gear on. My own method was to stick the lance in the ground by
the butt, climb with infinite labour and heavings into the saddle and
come back for the lance when arranged squarely on the horse.

Eventually everything was accomplished and we were all in the saddle
and were inspected to see that we were complete in every detail. Then
we rode out of that muddy camp in sections--four abreast--and made
our way down towards the station. It was a real touch of old-time
romance, that ride. The children ran shouting, and people came out
of the shops to wave their hands and give us fruit and wish us luck,
and the girls blew kisses, and through the hubbub the clatter of our
horses over the cobbles and the jingle of stirrup striking stirrup
made music that stirred one’s blood.

There was a long train of cattle trucks waiting for us at the station
and into these we put our horses, eight to each truck, fastened
by their ropes from the head collar to a ring in the roof. In the
two-foot space between the two lots of four horses facing each other
were put the eight saddles and blankets and a bale of hay.

Two men were detailed to stay with the horses in each truck while
the rest fell in and were marched away to be distributed among the
remaining empty trucks. I didn’t altogether fancy the idea of looking
after eight frightened steeds in that two-foot alleyway, but before I
could fall in with the rest I was detailed by the sergeant.

That journey was a nightmare. My fellow stableman was a brainless
idiot who knew even less about the handling of horses than I did.

The train pulled out in the growing dusk of a cold November evening,
the horses snorting and starting at every jolt, at every signal and
telegraph pole that we passed. When they pawed with their front feet
we, sitting on the bale of hay, had to dodge with curses. There was
no sand or bedding and it was only the tightness with which they
were packed together that kept them on their feet. Every light that
flashed by drew frightened snorts. We spent an hour standing among
them, saying soothing things and patting their necks. We tried
closing the sliding doors but at the end of five minutes the heat
splashed in great drops of moisture from the roof and the smell was
impossible. Eventually I broke the bale of hay and threw some of
that down to give them a footing.

There was a lamp in the corner of the truck. I told the other
fellow to light it. He said he had no matches. So I produced mine
and discovered that I had only six left. We used five to find out
that the lamp had neither oil nor wick. We had just exhausted our
vocabularies over this when the train entered a tunnel. At no time
did the train move at more than eight miles an hour and the tunnel
seemed endless. A times I still dream of that tunnel and wake up in a
cold sweat.

As our truck entered great billows of smoke rushed into it. The eight
horses tried as one to rear up and crashed their heads against the
roof. The noise was deafening and it was pitch dark. I felt for the
door and slid it shut while the horses blew and tugged at their ropes
in a blind panic. Then there was a heavy thud, followed by a yell
from the other man and a furious squealing.

“Are you all right?” I shouted, holding on to the head collar of the
nearest beast.

“Christ!” came the answer. “There’s a ’orse down and I’m jammed up
against the door ’ere. Come and get me out, for Christ’s sake.”

My heart was pumping wildly.

The smoke made one gasp and there was a furious stamping and
squealing and a weird sort of blowing gurgle which I could not define.

Feeling around I reached the next horse’s head collar and staggered
over the pile of saddlery. As I leaned forward to get to the third
something whistled past my face and I heard the sickening noise of
a horse’s hoof against another horse, followed by a squeal. I felt
blindly and touched a flank where a head should have been. One of
them had swung round and was standing with his fore feet on the
fallen horse and was lashing out with both hind feet, while my
companion was jammed against the wall of the truck by the fallen
animal presumably.

And still that cursed tunnel did not come to an end. I yelled again
to see if he were all right and his fruity reply convinced me that at
least there was no damage done. So I patted the kicker and squeezed
in to his head and tried to get him round. It was impossible to get
past, over or under, and the brute wouldn’t move. There was nothing
for it but to remain as we were until out of the tunnel. And then I
located the gurgle. It was the fallen horse, tied up short by the
head collar to the roof, being steadily strangled. It was impossible
to cut the rope. A loose horse in that infernal _mêlée_ was worse
than one dead--or at least choking. But I cursed and pulled and
heaved in my efforts to get him up.

By this time there was no air and one’s lungs seemed on the point of
bursting. The roof rained sweat upon our faces and every moment I
expected to get a horse’s hoof in my face.

How I envied that fellow jammed against the truck. At last we came
out into the open again, and I slid back the door, and shoved my head
outside and gulped in the fresh air. Then I untied the kicker and
somehow, I don’t know how, got him round into his proper position and
tied him up, with a handful of hay all round to steady their nerves.

The other man was cursing blue blazes all this time, but eventually I
cut the rope of the fallen horse, and after about three false starts
he got on his feet again and was retied. The man was not hurt. He
had been merely wedged. So we gave some more hay all round, cursed a
bit more to ease ourselves and then went to the open door for air. A
confused shouting from the next truck reached us. After many yells we
made out the following, “Pass the word forward that the train’s on
fire.”

All the stories I’d ever heard of horses being burnt alive raced
through my brain in a fraction of a second.

We leaned to the truck in front and yelled. No answer. The truck was
shut.

“Climb on the roof,” said I, “and go forward.” The other man obeyed
and disappeared into the dark.

Minutes passed, during which I looked back and saw a cloud of smoke
coming out of a truck far along the train.

Then a foot dropped over from the roof and my companion climbed back.

“Better go yourself,” he said. “I carnt mike ’im understand. He threw
lumps of coal at me from the perishin’ engine.”

So I climbed on to the roof of the swaying coach, got my balance and
walked forward till a yard-wide jump to the next roof faced me in the
darkness.

“Lord!” thought I, “if I didn’t know that other lad had been here,
I shouldn’t care about it. However----” I took a strong leap and
landed, slipping to my hands and knees.

There were six trucks between me and the engine and the jumps varied
in width. I got there all right and screamed to the engine driver,
“_Incendie!--Incendie!_”

He paused in the act of throwing coal at me and I screamed again.
Apparently he caught it, for first peering back along all the train,
he dived at a lever and the train screamed to a halt. I was mighty
thankful. I hadn’t looked forward to going back the way I came and
I climbed quickly down to the rails. A sort of guard with a lantern
and an official appearance climbed out of a box of sorts and demanded
to know what was the matter, and when I told him, called to me to
follow and began doubling back along the track.

I followed. The train seemed about a mile long but eventually we
reached a truck, full of men and a rosy glare, from which a column of
smoke bellied out. The guard flashed his lantern in.

The cursed thing wasn’t on fire at all. The men were burning hay in a
biscuit tin, singing merrily, just keeping themselves warm.

I thought of the agony of those jumps in the dark from roof to roof
and laughed. But I got my own back. They couldn’t see us in the dark,
so in short snappy sentences I ordered them to put the fire out
immediately. And they thought I was an officer and did so.


16

The rest of the night passed in an endeavour to get to sleep in a
sitting position on the bale of hay. From time to time one dozed off,
but it was too cold, and the infernal horses would keep on pawing.

Never was a night so long and it wasn’t till eight o’clock in the
morning that we ran into Hazebrouck and stopped. By this time we
were so hungry that food was imperative. On the station was a great
pile of rifles and bandoliers and equipment generally, all dirty and
rusty, and in a corner some infantry were doing something round a
fire.

“Got any tea, chum?” said I.

He nodded a Balaklava helmet.

We were on him in two leaps with extended dixies. It saved our lives,
that tea. We were chilled to the bone and had only bully beef and
biscuits, of course, but I felt renewed courage surge through me
with every mouthful.

“What’s all that stuff?” I asked, pointing to the heap of equipments.

“Dead men’s weapons,” said he, lighting a “gasper.” Somehow it
didn’t sound real. One couldn’t picture all the men to whom that
had belonged dead. Nor did it give one anything of a shock. One
just accepted it as a fact without thinking, “I wonder whether _my_
rifle and sword will ever join that heap?” The idea of my being
_killed_ was absurd, fantastic. Any of these others, yes, but somehow
not myself. Never at any time have I felt anything but extreme
confidence in the fact--yes, fact--that I should come through, in all
probability, unwounded. I thought about it often but always with the
certainty that nothing would happen to me.

I decided that _if_ I were killed I should be most frightfully angry!
There were so many things to be done with life, so much beauty to be
found, so many ambitions to be realized, that it was impossible that
I should be killed. All this dirt and discomfort was just a necessary
phase to the greater appreciation of everything.

I can’t explain it. Perhaps there isn’t any explanation. But never at
any time have I seen the shell or bullet with my name on it,--as the
saying goes. And yet somehow that pile of broken gear filled one with
a sense of the pity of it all, the utter folly of civilization which
had got itself into such an unutterable mess that blood-letting was
the only way out.--I proceeded to strip to the waist and shave out of
a horse-bucket of cold water.

There was a cold drizzle falling when at last we had watered the
horses, fed and saddled them up, and were ready to mount. It
increased to a steady downpour as we rode away in half sections
and turned into a muddy road lined with the eternal poplar. In the
middle of the day we halted, numbed through, on the side of a road,
and watered the horses again, and snatched a mouthful of biscuit and
bully and struggled to fill a pipe with icy fingers. Then on again
into the increasing murk of a raw afternoon.

Thousands of motor lorries passed like an endless chain. Men muffled
in greatcoats emerged from farm-houses and faintly far came the sound
of guns.

The word went round that we were going up into the trenches that
night. Heaven knows who started it but I found it a source of
spiritual exaltation that helped to conquer the discomfort of that
ride. Every time a trickle ran down one’s neck one thought, “It
doesn’t matter. This is the real thing. We are going up to-night,”
and visualised a Hun over the sights of one’s rifle.

Presently the flames of fires lit up the murk and shadowy forms moved
round them which took no notice of us as we rode by.

At last in pitch darkness we halted at a road crossing and splashed
into a farmyard that was nearly belly-deep in mud. Voices came
through the gloom, and after some indecision and cursing we
off-saddled in a stable lit by a hurricane lamp, hand-rubbed the
horses, blanketed them and left them comfortable for the night.

We were given hot tea and bread and cheese and shepherded into an
enormous barn piled high with hay. Here and there twinkled candles in
biscuit tins and everywhere were men sitting and lying on the hay,
the vague whiteness of their faces just showing. It looked extremely
comfortable.

But when we joined them--the trench rumour was untrue--we found that
the hay was so wet that a lighted match thrown on it fizzled and
went out. The rain came through innumerable holes in the roof and the
wind made the candles burn all one-sided. However, it was soft to lie
on, and when my “chum” and I had got on two pairs of dry socks each
and had snuggled down together with two blankets over our tunics and
greatcoats, and mufflers round our necks, and Balaklava helmets over
our heads we found we could sleep warm till reveille.

The sock question was difficult. One took off soaking boots and
puttees at night and had to put them on again still soaking in the
morning. The result was that by day our feet were always ice-cold
and never dry. We never took anything else off except to wash, or to
groom horses.

The next morning I had my first lesson in real soldiering. The
results were curious.

The squadron was to parade in drill order at 9 a.m. We had groomed
diligently in the chilly dawn. None of the horses had been clipped,
so it consisted in getting the mud off rather than really grooming,
and I was glad to see that my horse had stood the train journey and
the previous day’s ride without any damage save a slight rubbing
of his tail. At about twenty minutes to nine, shaved and washed, I
went to the stables to saddle up for the parade. Most of the others
in that stable were nearly ready by the time I got there and to my
dismay I found that they had used all my gear. There was nothing but
the horse and the blanket left,--no saddle, no head collar and bit,
no rifle, no sword, no lance. Everything had disappeared. I dashed
round and tried to lay hands on some one else’s property. They were
too smart and eventually they all turned out leaving me. The only
saddle in the place hadn’t been cleaned for months and I should
have been ashamed to ride it. Then the sergeant appeared, a great,
red-faced, bad-tempered-looking man.

I decided on getting the first blow in. So I went up and told him
that all my things had been “pinched.” Could he tell me where I could
find some more?

His reply would have blistered the paint off a door. His adjectives
concerning me made me want to hit him. But one cannot hit one’s
superior officer in the army--more’s the pity--on occasions like
that. So we had a verbal battle. I told him that if he didn’t find
me everything down to lance buckets I shouldn’t appear on parade and
that if he chose to put me under arrest, so much the better, as the
Major would then find out how damned badly the sergeant ran his troop.

It was a good bluff. Bit by bit he hunted up a head collar, a saddle,
sword, lance, etc. Needless to say they were all filthy and I wished
all the bullets in Germany on the dirty dog who had pinched my clean
stuff. However, I was on parade just half a minute before the Major
came round to inspect us. He stopped at me, his eye taking in the
rusty bit and stirrup irons, the coagulations on the bridle, the
general damnableness of it all. It wasn’t nice.

“Did you come in last night?” The voice was hard.

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you come up from the base with your appointments in that state?”

“No, sir.”

“What do you mean?”

The sergeant was looking apoplectic behind him.

“These aren’t my things, sir,” said I.

“Whose are they?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Where are your things?”

“They were in the stables at reveille, sir, but they’d all gone when
I went to saddle up. The horse is the only thing I brought with me,
sir.”

The whole troop was sitting at attention, listening, and I hoped that
the man who had stolen everything heard this dialogue and was quaking
in his wet boots.

The Major turned. “What does this mean, Sergeant?”

There was a vindictive look in the sergeant’s eye as he spluttered
out an unconvincing reply that “these new fellows wanted nursemaids
and weren’t ’alf nippy enough in lookin’ arter ’emselves.”

The Major considered it for a moment, told me that I must get
everything clean for the next parade and passed on.

At least I was not under arrest, but it wasn’t good enough on the
first morning to earn the Major’s scorn through no fault of my own. I
wanted some one’s blood.

Each troop leader, a subaltern, was given written orders by the
Major and left to carry them out. Our own troop leader didn’t seem
to understand his orders and by the time the other three troops had
ridden away he was still reading his paper. The Major returned and
explained, asked him if all was clear, and getting yes for an answer,
rode off.

The subaltern then asked the sergeant if he had a map!

What was even more curious, the sergeant said yes. The subaltern
said we had to get to a place called Flêtre within three quarters of
an hour and they proceeded to try and find it on the sergeant’s map
without any success for perhaps five minutes.

During that time the troopers around me made remarks in undertones,
most ribald remarks. We had come through Flêtre the previous day and
I remembered the road. So I turned to a lance-corporal on my right
and said, “Look here, I know the way. Shall I tell him?”

“Yes, tell him for Christ’s sake!” said the lance-corporal. “It’s too
perishin’ cold to go on sitting ’ere.”

So I took a deep breath and all my courage in both hands and spoke.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” said I. “I know Flêtre.”

The subaltern turned round on his horse. “Who knows the place?” he
said.

“I do, sir,” and I told him how to get there.

Without further comment he gave the word to advance in half sections
and we left the parade ground, but instead of turning to the left as
I had said, he led us straight on at a good sharp trot.

More than half an hour later, when we should have been at the pin
point in Flêtre, the subaltern halted us at a crossroads in open
country and again had a map consultation with the sergeant. Again
it was apparently impossible to locate either the crossroads or the
rendezvous.

But in the road were two peasants coming towards us. He waited till
they came up and then asked them the way in bad German. They looked
at him blankly, so he repeated his question in worse French. His
pronunciation of Flêtre puzzled them but at last one of them guessed
it and began a stream of explanations and pointings.

“What the hell are they talking about?” said the subaltern to the
sergeant.

The lance-corporal nudged me. “Did _you_ understand?”

“Yes,” said I.

“Tell him again,” he said. “Go on.”

So again I begged his pardon and explained what the peasants had told
him. He looked at me for a moment oddly. I admit that it wasn’t
usual for a private to address his officer on parade without being
first spoken to. But this was war, the world war, and the old order
changeth. Anyhow I was told to ride in front of the troop as guide
and did and brought the troop to the rendezvous about twenty minutes
late.

The Major was not pleased.

Later in the day the subaltern came around the stables and, seeing
me, stopped and said, “Oh--er--you!”

I came to attention behind the horse.

“What’s your name?” said he.

I told him.

“Do you talk French?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where were you educated?”

“France and Oxford University, sir.”

“Oh!” slightly surprised. “Er--all right, get on with your work”--and
whether it was he or the sergeant I don’t know, but I had four horses
to groom that morning instead of two.

From that moment I decided to cut out being intelligent and remain
what the French call a “simple” soldier.

By a strange coincidence there was a nephew of that subaltern in
the Brigade of Gunners to which I was posted when I received a
commission. It is curious how accurately nephews sum up uncles.


17

When we did not go out on drill orders like that we began the day
with what is called rough exercise. It was. In the foggy dawn,
swathed in scarfs and Balaklava helmets, one folded one’s blanket
on the horse, bitted him, mounted, took another horse on either
side, and in a long column followed an invisible lance-corporal
across ploughed fields, over ditches, and along roads at a good stiff
trot that jarred one’s spine. It was generally raining and always
so cold that one never had the use of either hands or feet. The
result was that if one of the unbitted led horses became frolicsome
it was even money that he would pull the rope out of one’s hands
and canter off blithely down the road,--for which one was cursed
bitterly by the sergeant on one’s return. The rest of the day was
divided between stables and fatigues in that eternal heart-breaking
mud. One laid brick paths and brushwood paths and within twenty-four
hours they had disappeared under mud. It was shovelled away in sacks
and wheelbarrows, and it oozed up again as if by magic. One made
herring-bone drains and they merged in the mud. There seemed to be no
method of competing with it. In the stables the horses stood in it
knee-deep. As soon as one had finished grooming, the brute seemed to
take a diabolical pleasure in lying down in it. It became a nightmare.

The sergeant didn’t go out of his way to make things easier for
any of us and confided most of the dirtier, muddier jobs to me.
There seemed to be always something unpleasant that required
“intelligence,” so he said, and in the words of the army I
“clicked.” The result was that I was happiest when I was on guard, a
twenty-four-hour duty which kept me more or less out of the mud and
entirely out of his way.

The first time I went on I was told by the N.C.O. in charge that no
one was to come through the hedge that bounded the farm and the road
after lights out, and if any one attempted to do so I was to shoot
on sight. So I marched up and down my short beat in the small hours
between two and four, listening to the far-off muttering of guns and
watching the Verey lights like a miniature firework display, praying
that some spy would try and enter the gap in the hedge. My finger was
never very far from the trigger, and my beat was never more than two
yards from the hedge. I didn’t realize then that we were so far from
the line that the chances of a strolling Hun were absurd. Looking
back on it I am inclined to wonder whether the N.C.O. didn’t tell me
to shoot on sight because he knew that the sergeant’s billet was down
that road and the hedge was a short cut. The sergeant wasn’t very
popular.

There was an _estaminet_ across the road from the farm, and the
officers had arranged for us to have the use of the big room. It was
a godsend, that _estaminet_, with its huge stove nearly red-hot, its
bowls of coffee and the single glass of raw cognac which they were
allowed to sell us. The evenings were the only time one was ever
warm, and although there was nothing to read except some old and torn
magazines we sat there in the fetid atmosphere just to keep warm.

The patron talked vile French but was a kindly soul, and his small
boy, Gaston, aged about seven, became a great friend of mine. He used
to bring me my coffee, his tiny, dirty hands only just big enough to
hold the bowl, and then stand and talk while I drank it, calling me
“thou.”

“_T’es pas anglais, dis?_”

And I laughed and said I was French.

“_Alors comment qu’ t’es avec eux, dis?_”

And when one evening he came across and looked over my shoulder as I
was writing a letter, he said, “_Qué que t’écris, dis?_”

I told him I was writing in English.

He stared at me and then called out shrilly, “_Papa. V’là l’Français
qu’écrit en anglais!_”

He had seen the Boche, had little Gaston, and told me how one day
the Uhlans had cleaned the _estaminet_ out of everything,--wine,
cognac, bread, blankets, sheets--_les sales Boches!_

As the days dragged muddily through it was borne in on me that this
wasn’t fighting for King and Country. It was just Tidworth over
again with none of its advantages and with all its discomforts
increased a thousand-fold. Furthermore the post-office seemed to
have lost me utterly, and weeks went by before I had any letters at
all. It was heart-breaking to see the mail distributed daily and
go away empty-handed. It was as though no one cared, as though one
were completely forgotten, as though in stepping into this new life
one had renounced one’s identity. Indeed, every day it became more
evident that it was not I who was in that mud patch. It was some
one else on whom the real me looked down in infinite amazement. I
heard myself laugh in the farm at night and join in choruses; saw
myself dirty and unbathed, with a scarf around my stomach and another
round my feet, and a woollen helmet over my head; standing in the
mud stripped to the waist shaving without a looking-glass; drinking
coffee and cognac in that _estaminet_.--Was it I who sometimes
prayed for sleep that I might shut it all out and slip into the land
of dreams, where there is no war and no mud? Was it I who when the
first letters arrived from home went out into the rainy night with a
candle-end to be alone with those I loved? And was it only the rain
which made it so difficult to read them?


18

The culminating point was reached when I became ill.

Feeling sick, I couldn’t eat any breakfast and dragged myself
on parade like a mangy cat. I stuck it till about three in the
afternoon, when the horse which I was grooming receded from me and
the whole world rocked. I remember hanging on to the horse till
things got a bit steadier, and then asked the sergeant if I might go
off parade. I suppose I must have looked pretty ill because he said
yes at once.

For three days I lay wrapped up on the straw in the barn, eating
nothing; and only crawling out to see the doctor each morning at
nine o’clock. Of other symptoms I will say nothing. The whole affair
was appalling, but I recovered sufficient interest in life on the
fourth morning to parade sick, although I felt vastly more fit.
Indeed, the argument formed itself, “since I am a soldier I’ll play
the ‘old soldier’ and see how long I can be excused duty.” And I
did it so well that for three more days I was to all intents and
purposes a free man. On one of the days I fell in with a corporal of
another squadron, and he and I got a couple of horses and rode into
Bailleul, which was only about three miles south of us, and we bought
chocolates, and candles and books, and exchanged salutes with the
Prince of Wales, who was walking in the town. Then we came back with
our supplies after an excellent lunch at the hotel in the square,
the “Faucon,” and had tea with the officers’ servants in a cosy
little billet with a fire and beds. The remarks they made about their
officers were most instructive, and they referred to them either as
“my bloke” or “’is lordship.”

And there it was I met again a man I had spoken to once at Tidworth,
who knew French and was now squadron interpreter. He was a charming
man of considerable means, with a large business, who had joined up
immediately on the outbreak of war. But being squadron interpreter
he messed with the officers, had a billet in a cottage, slept on
a bed, had a private hip bath and hot water, and was in heaven,
comparatively. He suggested to me that as my squadron lacked an
interpreter (he was doing the extra work) and I knew French it was up
to me.

“But how the devil’s it to be done?” said I, alight with the idea.

“Why don’t you go and see the Colonel?” he suggested.

I gasped. The Colonel was nearly God.

He laughed. “This is ‘Kitchener’s Army,’” he said, “not the regular
Army. Things are a bit different.” They were indeed!

So I slept on the idea and every moment it seemed to me better and
better, until the following evening after tea, instead of going to
the _estaminet_, I went down to squadron headquarters. For about five
minutes I walked up and down in the mud, plucking up courage. I would
rather have faced a Hun any day.

At last I went into the farmyard and knocked at the door. There were
lights in the crack of the window shutters.

A servant answered the door.

“Is the Colonel in?” said I boldly.

He peered at me. “What the perishin’ ’ell do _you_ want to know for?”

“I want to see him,” said I.

“And what the ’ell do _you_ want to see him for?”

I was annoyed. It seemed quite likely that this confounded servant
would do the St. Peter act and refuse me entrance into the gates.

“Look here,” I said, “it doesn’t matter to you what for or why.
You’re here to answer questions. Is the Colonel _in_?”

The man snorted. “Oh! I’m ’ere to answer questions, am I? Well, if
you want to know, the Colonel ain’t in.--Anything else?”

I was stumped. It seemed as if my hopes were shattered. But luck was
mine--as ever. A voice came from the inner room. “Thomson! Who is
that man?”

The servant made a face at me and went to the room door.

“A trooper, sir, from one of the squadrons, askin’ to see the
Colonel.”

“Bring him in,” said the voice.

My heart leapt.

The servant returned to me and showed me into the room.

I saw three officers, one in shirt sleeves, all sitting around a
fire. Empty tea things were still on a table. There were a sofa, and
armchairs and bright pictures, a pile of books and magazines on a
table, and a smell of Egyptian cigarettes. They all looked at me as I
saluted.

“Thomson tells me you want to see the Colonel,” said the one whose
voice I had heard, the one in shirt sleeves. “Anything I can do?”

It was good to hear one’s own language again, and I decided to make a
clean breast of it.

“It’s awfully kind of you, sir,” said I. “Perhaps you can. I came to
ask for the interpretership of my squadron. We haven’t got one and
I can talk French. If you could put in a word for me I should be
lastingly grateful.”

His next words made him my brother for life. “Sit down, won’t you,”
he said, “and have a cigarette.”

Can you realize what it meant after those weeks of misery, with no
letters and the eternal adjective of the ranks which gets on one’s
nerves till one could scream, to be asked to sit down and have a
cigarette in that officers’ mess?

Speechless, I took one, although I dislike cigarettes and always
stick to a pipe. But that one was a link with all that I’d left
behind, and was the best I’ve ever smoked in my life. He proceeded to
ask me my name and where I was educated, and said he would see what
he could do for me, and after about ten minutes I went out again into
the mud a better soldier than I went in. That touch of fellow feeling
helped enormously. And he was as good as his word. For the following
morning the Major sent for me.


19

The rain had stopped and there had been a hard frost in the night
which turned the roads to ice. The horses were being walked round and
round in a circle, and the Major was standing watching them when I
came up and saluted.

“Yes, what is it?” he said.

“You sent for me, sir.”

“Oh--you’re Gibbs, are you?--Yes, let’s go in out of this wind.” He
led the way into the mess and stood with his back to the fire.

Every detail of that room lives with me yet. One went up two steps
into the room. The fireplace faced the door with a window to the
right of the fireplace. There was a table between us with newspapers
on it, and tobacco and pipes. And two armchairs faced the fire.

He asked me what I wanted the interpretership for. I told him I was
sick of the ranks, that I had chucked a fascinating job to be of use
to my King and country, and that any fool trooper could shovel mud as
I did day after day.

He nodded. “But interpreting is no damned good, you know,” he said.
“It only consists in looking after the forage and going shopping with
those officers who can’t talk French.--That isn’t what you want, is
it?”

“No, sir,” said I.

“Well, what other job would you like?”

That floored me completely. I didn’t know what jobs there were in the
squadron and told him so.

“Well, come and have dinner to-night and we’ll talk about it,” said
he.

Have dinner! My clothes reeked of stables, and I had slept in them
ever since I arrived.

“That doesn’t matter,” said the Major. “You come along to-night at
half-past seven. You’ve been sick all this week. How are you? Pretty
fit again?”

He’s Brigadier-General now and has forgotten all about it years ago.
I don’t think I ever shall.

There were the Major, the Captain and one subaltern at dinner that
night--an extraordinary dinner--the servant who a moment previously
had called me “chum” in the kitchen gradually getting used to waiting
on me at the meal, and I, in the same dress as the servant, gradually
feeling less like a fish out of water as the officers treated me as
one of themselves. It was the first time I’d eaten at a table covered
with a white tablecloth for over two months, the first time I had
used a plate or drunk out of a glass, the first time I had been with
my own kind.--It was very good.

The outcome of the dinner was that I was to become squadron scout,
have two horses, keep them at the cottage of the interpreter, where I
was to live, and ride over the country gathering information, which
I was to bring as a written report every night at six o’clock. While
the squadron was behind the lines it was, of course, only a matter
of training myself before other men were given me to train. But
when we went into action,--vistas opened out before me of dodging
Uhlan patrols and galloping back with information through a rain of
bullets. It was a job worth while and I was speechless with gratitude.

It was not later than seven o’clock the following morning, Christmas
Eve, 1914, that I began operations. I breakfasted at the cottage to
which I had removed my belongings overnight, and went along towards
the stables to get a horse.

The man with whom I had been mucking in met me outside the farm. He
was in the know and grinned, cheerily.

“The sergeant’s lookin’ for you,” he said. “He’s over in the stables.”

I went across. He was prowling about near the forage.

“Good morning, Sergeant,” said I.

He looked at me and stopped prowling. “Where the----” and he asked
me in trooperese where I had been and why I wasn’t at early morning
stables. I told him I was on a special job for the Major.

He gasped and requested an explanation.

“I’m knocked off all rolls, and parades and fatigues,” I said.
“You’ve got to find me a second horse. They are both going to be kept
down the road, and I shall come and see you from time to time when I
require forage.”

He was speechless for the first and only time. It passed his
comprehension.

At that moment the sergeant-major came in and proceeded to tell him
almost word for word what I had told him. It was a great morning, a
poetic revenge, and eventually I rode away leading the other horse,
the sergeant’s pop eyes following me as I gave him final instructions
as to where to send the forage.

Later, as I started out on my first expedition as squadron scout, he
waved an arm at me and came running. His whole manner had changed,
and he said in a voice of honey, “If you _should_ ’appen to pass
through Ballool would you mind gettin’ me a new pipe?--’Ere’s five
francs.”

I got him a pipe, and in Bailleul sought out every likely looking
English signaller or French officer, and dropped questions, and
eventually at 6 p.m., having been the round of Dramoutre, Westoutre,
and Locre, took in a rather meagre first report to the Major. How I
regretted that I had never been a newspaper reporter! However, it was
a beginning.

The following morning was Christmas Day, cold and foggy, and before
starting out I went about a mile down the road to another farm and
heard Mass in a barn. An odd little service for Christmas morning.
The altar was made of a couple of biscuit boxes in an open barn. The
priest wore his vestments, and his boots and spurs showed underneath.
About half a dozen troopers with rifles were all the congregation,
and we kneeled on the damp ground.

The first Christmas at Bethlehem came to mind most forcibly. The
setting was the same. An icy wind blew the wisps of straw and the
lowing of a cow could be heard in the byre. Where the Magi brought
frankincense and myrrh we brought our hopes and ambitions and laid
them at the Child’s feet, asking Him to take care of them for us
while we went out to meet the great adventure. What a contrast to
the previous Christmas, in the gold and sunshine of Miami, Florida,
splashed with the scarlet flowers of the bougainvillea, and at night
the soft, feathery palms leaning at a curious angle in the hard
moonlight as though a tornado had once swept over the land.

The farm people sold me a bowl of coffee and a slice of bread, and
I mounted and rode away into the fog with an apple and a piece of
chocolate in my pocket, the horse slipping and sliding on the icy
road. Not a sound broke the dead silence except the blowing of my
horse and his hoofs on the road. Every gun was silent during the
whole day, as though the Child had really brought peace and good will.

I got to within a couple of miles of Ypres by the map, and saw
nothing save a few peasants who emerged out of the blanket of fog on
their way to Mass. A magpie or two flashed across my way, and there
was only an occasional infantryman muffled to the eyes when I passed
through the scattered villages.

About midday I nibbled some chocolate, and watered my horse and gave
him a feed, feeling more and more miserable because there was no
means of getting any information. My imagination drew pictures of
the Major, on my return with a blank confession of failure, telling
me that I was no good and had better return to duty. As the short
afternoon drew in, my spirits sank lower and lower. They were below
zero when at last I knocked reluctantly at the door of the mess and
stood to attention inside. To make things worse all the officers were
there.

“Well, Gibbs?” said the Major.

“It isn’t well, sir,” said I. “I’m afraid I’m no damn good. I haven’t
got a thing to report,” and I told him of my ride.

There was silence for a moment. The Major flicked off the ash of his
cigarette. “My dear fellow,” he said quietly, “you can’t expect to
get the hang of the job in five minutes. Don’t be impatient with it.
Give it a chance.”

It was like a reprieve to a man awaiting the hangman.


20

The squadron, having been on duty that day, had not celebrated
Christmas, but the _estaminet_ was a mass of holly and mistletoe in
preparation for to-morrow, and talk ran high on the question of the
dinner and concert that were to take place. There were no letters for
me, but in spite of it I felt most unaccountably and absurdly happy
as I left the _estaminet_ and went back to my billet and got to bed.

The interpreter came in presently. He had been dining well and
Christmas exuded from him as he smoked a cigar on the side of his bed.

“Oh, by the way,” he said, “your commission has come through. They
were talking about it in mess to-night. Congratulations.”

Commission! My heart jumped back to the Marlborough Hotel.

“I expect you’ll be going home to-morrow,” he went on; “lucky devil.”

Home! Could it be? Was it possible that I was going to escape from
all this mud and filth? Home. What a Christmas present! No more
waiting for letters that never came. No more of the utter loneliness
and indifference that seemed to fill one’s days and nights.

The dingy farm room and the rough army blanket faded and in their
place came a woman’s face in a setting of tall red pines and gleaming
patches of moss and high bracken and a green lawn running up to a
little house of gables, with chintz-curtained windows, warm tiles
and red chimneys, and a shining river twisting in stately loops. And
instead of the guns which were thundering the more fiercely after
their lull, there came the mewing of sandpipers, and the gurgle of
children’s laughter, and the voice of that one woman who had given me
the vision.--


21

The journey home was a foretaste of the return to civilisation,
of stepping not only out of one’s trooper’s khaki but of resuming
one’s identity, of counting in the scheme of things. In the ranks
one was a number, like a convict,--a cipher indeed, and as such it
was a struggle to keep one’s soul alive. One had given one’s body.
They wanted one’s soul as well. By “they” I mean the system, that
extraordinary self-contained world which is the Army, where the
private is marched to church whether he have a religion or not, where
he is forced to think as the sergeant thinks and so on, right up to
the General commanding. How few officers realise that it is in their
power to make the lives of their juniors and men a hell or a heaven.

It was a merciful thing for me that I was able to escape so soon, to
climb out of that mental and physical morass and get back to myself.

From the squadron I went by motor lorry to Hazebrouck and thence in
a first-class carriage to Boulogne, and although the carriage was
crowded I thought of the horse truck in which I’d come up from Rouen,
and chuckled. At Boulogne I was able to help the Major, who was going
on leave. He had left a shirt case in the French luggage office weeks
before and by tackling the porter in his own tongue, I succeeded in
digging it out in five minutes. It was the only thing I’ve ever been
able to do to express the least gratitude,--and how ridiculously
inadequate.

We spent the night in a hotel and caught the early boat, horribly
early. But it was worth it. We reached London about two in the
afternoon, a rainy, foggy, depressing afternoon, but if it had snowed
ink I shouldn’t have minded. I was above mere weather, sailing in
the blue ether of radiant happiness. In this case the realisation
came up to and even exceeded the expectation. Miserable-looking
policemen in black waterproof capes were things of beauty. The noise
of the traffic was sweetest music. The sight of dreary streets with
soaked pedestrians made one’s eyes brim with joy. The swish of the
taxi round abrupt corners made me burst with song. I was glad of
the rain and the sort of half-fog. It was so typically London and
when the taxi driver stopped at my brother’s house and said to me
as I got out, “Just back from the front, chum?” I laughed madly and
scandalously overtipped him. No one else would ever call me chum.
That was done with. I was no longer 7205 Trooper A. H. Gibbs, 9th
Lancers. I was Second Lieutenant A. Hamilton Gibbs, R.F.A. and could
feel the stars sprouting.

My brother wasn’t at home. He was looking like an admiral still
and working like the devil. But his wife was and she most wisely
lent me distant finger tips and hurried me to a bath, what time she
telephoned to my brother.

That bath! I hadn’t had all my clothes off more than once in six
weeks and had slept in them every night. Ever tried it? Well, if you
really want to know just how I felt about that first bath, you try it.

I stayed in it so long that my sister-in-law became anxious and
tapped at the door to know if I were all right. All right! Before I
was properly dressed--but running about the house most shamelessly
for all that--my brother arrived.

It was good to see him again,--very good. We “foregathered,”--what?

And the next morning scandalously early, the breakfast things still
on the table, found me face to face once more with the woman who had
brought me back to life. All that nightmare was immediately washed
away for ever. It was past. The future was too vague for imaginings
but the present was the most golden thing I had ever known.




                              PART II

                             _UBIQUE_


1

The Division of Field Artillery to which I was posted by the War
Office was training at Bulford up to its neck in mud, but the brigade
had moved to Fleet two days before I joined. By that time--it was a
good fifteen days since I had come home--I had grown accustomed to
the feel and splendour of a Sam Browne belt and field boots and the
recurring joy of being saluted not merely by Tommies but by exalted
beings like sergeants and sergeant-majors; and I felt mentally as
well as physically clean.

At the same time I arrived at the Fleet Golf Club, where most of
the officers were billeted, feeling vastly diffident. I’d never
seen a gun, never given a command in my life and hadn’t the first
or foggiest idea of the sort of things gunners did, and my only
experience of an officers’ mess was my dinner with the Major in
France. Vaguely I knew that there was a certain etiquette demanded.
It was rather like a boy going to a new school.

It was tea time and dark when the cab dropped me at the door and
the place was practically empty. However, an officer emerged, asked
me if I’d come to join, and led me in to tea. Presently, however, a
crowd swarmed in, flung wet mackintoshes and caps about the hall and
began devouring bread and jam in a way that more and more resembled
school. They looked me over with the unintentional insolence of all
Englishmen and one or two spoke. They were a likely-looking lot,
mostly amazingly young and full of a vitality that was like an
electric current. One, a fair willowy lad with one or two golden
fluffs that presumably did duty as a moustache, took me in hand. He
was somewhat fancifully called Pot-face but he had undoubtedly bought
the earth and all things in it. Having asked and received my name he
informed me that I was posted to his battery and introduced me to the
other subaltern, also of his battery. This was a pale, blue-eyed,
head-on-one-side, sensitive youth who was always just a moment too
late with his repartee. Pot-face, who possessed a nimble, sarcastic
tongue, took an infinite delight in baiting him to the verge of
tears. His nickname, to which incidentally he refused to answer, was
the Fluttering Palm.

The others did not assume individualities till later. It was an
amusing tea and afterwards we adjourned to the big club room with
two fireplaces and straw armchairs and golfing pictures. The
senior officers were there and before I could breathe Pot-face
had introduced me to the Colonel, the Adjutant, and the Captain
commanding our battery, a long, thin, dark man with India stamped all
over him and a sudden infectious laugh that crinkled all his face. He
turned out to be the owner of a vitriolic tongue.

A lecture followed, one of a series which took place two or three
evenings a week attended by all the officers in the brigade, a good
two thirds of whom were billeted in the village and round about. Of
technical benefit I don’t think I derived any, because I knew no
gunnery, but it helped me to get to know everybody. A further help
in that respect was afforded by my Captain who on that first evening
proposed getting up a concert. Having had two years on the stage in
America I volunteered to help and was at once made O. C. Concert.
This gave me a sort of standing, took away the awful newness and
entirely filled my spare time for two weeks. The concert was a big
success and from that night I felt at home.

To me, after my experience in the ranks, everything was new and
delightful. We were all learning, subalterns as well as men. Only the
Colonel and the Battery Commanders were regulars and every single
officer and man was keen. The work therefore went with a will that
surprised me. The men were a different class altogether to those with
whom I had been associated. There were miners, skilled men, clerks,
people of some education and distinct intelligence. Then too the
officers came into much closer contact with them than in the Cavalry.
Our training had been done solely under the sergeant-major. Here
in the Gunners the officers not only took every parade and lecture
and stable hour and knew every man and horse by name, but played in
all the inter-battery football matches. It was a different world,
much more intimate and much better organised. We worked hard and
played hard. Riding was of course most popular because each of us
had a horse. But several had motor-bicycles and went for joy-rides
half over the south of England between tattoo and reveille. Then the
Golf Club made us honorary members, and the Colonel and I had many a
match, and he almost invariably beat me by one hole.

My ignorance of gunnery was monumental and it was a long time before
I grasped even the first principles. The driving drill part of it
didn’t worry me. The Cavalry had taught me to feel at home in the
saddle and the drawing of intricate patterns on the open country with
a battery of four guns was a delightful game soon learnt. But once
they were in action I was lost. It annoyed me to listen helplessly
while children of nineteen with squeaky voices fired imaginary salvos
on imaginary targets and got those gunners jumping. So I besought
the Colonel to send me on a course to Shoebury and he did.

Work? I’d never known what it meant till I went to Shoebury and put
on a canvas duck suit. We paraded at ungodly hours in the morning,
wet or fine, took guns to bits and with the instructor’s help put
them together again; did gun drill by the hour and learnt it by heart
from the handbook and shouted it at each other from a distance;
spent hours in the country doing map-reading and re-section; sat
through hours of gunnery lectures where the mysteries of a magic
triangle called T.O.B. became more and more unfathomable; knocked
out countless churches on a miniature range with a precision that
was quite Boche-like; waded through a ghastly tabloid book called
F.A.T. and flung the thing in despair at the wall half a dozen times
a day; played billiards at night when one had been clever enough to
arrive first at the table by means of infinite manœuvring; ate like
a Trojan, got dog-tired by 9 p.m., slept like a child; dashed up to
London every week-end and went to the theatre, and became in fact the
complete Shoeburyite.

Finally I returned to the brigade extraordinarily fit, very keen
and with perhaps the first glimmerings of what a gun was. A scourge
of a mysterious skin disease ran through the horses at that time.
It looked like ringworm and wasn’t,--according to the Vet. But we
subalterns vied with each other in curing our sections and worked day
and night on those unfortunate animals with tobacco juice, sulphur
and every unpleasant means available until they looked the most
wretched brutes in the world.

Little by little the training built itself up. From standing gun
drill we crept to battery gun drill and then took the battery out for
the day and lost it round Aldershot in that glorious pine country,
coming into action over and over again.

The Colonel watched it all from a distance with a knowledgeable eye
and at last took a hand. Brigade shows then took place, batteries
working in conjunction with each other and covering zones.

Those were good days in the early spring with all the birds in full
chorus, clouds scudding across a blue sky, and the young green
feathering all the trees, days of hard physical work with one’s blood
running free and the companionship of one’s own kind; inspired by a
friendly rivalry in doing a thing just a little bit better than the
other fellow--or trying to: with an occasional week-end flung in like
a sparkling jewel.

And France? Did we think about it? Yes, when the lights were turned
out at night and only the point of the final cigarette like a
glowworm marked the passage of hand to mouth. Then the talk ran on
brothers “out there” and the chances of our going soon. None of them
had been except me, but I could only give them pictures of star-shell
at night and the heart-breaking mud, and they wanted gunner talk.

It was extraordinary what a bond grew up between us all in those
days, shared, I think, by the senior officers. We declared ourselves
the first brigade in the Division, and each battery was of course
hotly the finest in the brigade; our Colonel was miles above any
other Colonel in the Army and our Battery Commanders the best fellows
that ever stepped. By God, we’d show Fritz!----


2

We had left Fleet and the golf club and moved into hutments at
Deepcut about the time I returned from the gunnery course. Now the
talk centred round the firing practice when every man and officer
would be put to the test and one fine morning the order came to
proceed to Trawsfynydd, Wales.

We “proceeded” by train, taking only guns, firing battery wagons and
teams and after long, long hours found ourselves tucked away in a
camp in the mountains with great blankets of mist rolling down and
blotting everything out, the ground a squelching bog of tussocks
with outcrops of rock sprouting up everywhere. A strange, hard, cold
country, with unhappy houses, grey tiled and lonely, and peasants
whose faces seemed marked by the desolation of it all.

The range was a rolling stretch of country falling away from a
plateau high above us, reached by a corkscrew path that tore the
horses to pieces, and cut up by stone walls and nullahs which after
an hour’s rain foamed with brown water. Through glasses we made out
the targets--four black dots representing a battery, a row of tiny
figures for infantry, and a series of lines indicating trenches. For
three days the weather prevented us from shooting but at last came a
morning when the fog blanket rolled back and the guns were run up,
and little puffs of cotton wool appeared over the targets, the hills
ringing with countless echoes as though they would never tire of the
firing.

Each subaltern was called up in turn and given a target by the
Colonel who, lying silently on his stomach, watched results through
his glasses and doubtless in his mind summed each of us up from the
methods of our orders to the battery, the nimbleness and otherwise
with which we gauged and corrected them. A trying ordeal which
was, however, all too short. Sixteen rounds apiece were all that
we were allowed. We would have liked six hundred, so fascinating
and bewildering was the new game. It seemed as if the guns took a
malignant pleasure in disobeying our orders, each gun having its own
particular devil to compete with.

In the light of to-day the explanation is simple. There was no such
thing as calibration then, that exorciser of the evil spirit in all
guns.

And so, having seen at last a practical demonstration of what I had
long considered a fact--that the Gunners’ Bible F.A.T. (the handbook
of Field Artillery Training) was a complete waste of time, we all
went back to Deepcut even more than ever convinced that we were the
finest brigade in England. And all on the strength of sixteen rounds
apiece!

Almost at once I was removed from the scientific activities
necessitated by being a battery subaltern. An apparently new
establishment was made, a being called an Orderly Officer, whose
job was to keep the Colonel in order and remind the Adjutant of all
the things he forgot. In addition to those two matters of supreme
moment there were one or two minor duties like training the brigade
signallers to lay out cables and buzz messages, listen to the
domestic troubles of the regimental sergeant-major, whose importance
is second only to that of the Colonel, look after some thirty men and
horses and a cable wagon and endeavour to keep in the good books of
the Battery Commanders.

I got the job--and kept it for over a year.

Colonel, didn’t I keep you in order?

Adj, did I _ever_ do any work for you?

Battery Commanders, didn’t I come and cadge drinks daily--and
incidentally wasn’t that cable which I laid from Valandovo to Kajali
the last in use before the Bulgar pushed us off the earth?


3

So I forgot the little I ever knew about gunnery and laid spiders’
webs from my cable wagon all over Deepcut, and galloped for the
Colonel on Divisional training stunts with a bottle of beer and
sandwiches in each wallet against the hour when the General, feeling
hungry, should declare an armistice with the opposing force and
Colonels and their Orderly Officers might replenish their inner men.
Brave days of great lightheartedness, untouched by the shadow of what
was to come after.

May had put leaves on all the trees and called forth flowers in every
garden. Then came June to perfect her handiwork and with it the call
to lay aside our golf clubs and motor-cycles, to say good-bye to
England in all her beauty and go out once more to do our bit.

There was much bustle and packing of kits and writing of letters and
heartburnings over last week-end leaves refused and through it all a
thirst for knowledge of where we were going. Everything was secret,
letters severely censored. Rumour and counter-rumour chased each
other through the camp until, an hour before starting, the Captain in
whose battery I had begun appeared with a motor car full of topees.

Then all faces like true believers were turned towards the East and
on every tongue was the word Gallipoli.

Avonmouth was the port of embarkation and there we filled a mass of
waiting boats, big and little.

The Colonel, the Adjutant and I were on one of the biggest. My horses
had been handed over to a battery for the voyage and I had only the
signallers to look after. Everything was complete by ten o’clock in
the morning. The convoy would not sail till midnight, so some of us
got leave to explore and took train to Bristol, lunching royally for
the last time in a restaurant, buying innumerable novels to read on
board, sending final telegrams home.

How very different it was to the first going out! No red lead. No
mud. The reality had departed. It seemed like going on a picnic, a
merry outing with cheery souls, a hot sun trickling down one’s back;
and not one of us but heard the East a-calling.

A curious voyage that was when we had sorted ourselves out. The
mornings were taken up with a few duties,--physical jerks, chin
inspection and Grand Rounds when we stood stiffly to attention,
rocking with the sway of the boat while the two commanders of the
sister services inspected the ship; life-boat drill, a little
signalling; and then long hours in scorching sunshine, to lie in a
deck chair gazing out from the saloon deck upon the infinite blue,
trying to find the answer to the why of it all, arguing the alpha and
omega with one’s pals, reading the novels we had bought in Bristol,
writing home, sleeping. Torpedoes and mines? We never thought about
them.

Boxing competitions and sports were organized for the men and they
hammered each other’s faces to pulp with the utmost good fellowship.

Then we passed The Rock and with our first glimpse of the African
coast--a low brown smudge--we began to stir restlessly and think
of terra firma. It broke the spell of dreams which had filled the
long days. Maps were produced and conferences held, and we studied
eagerly the contours of Gallipoli, discussed the detail of landings
and battery positions, wagon lines and signalling arrangements,
even going so far as to work off our bearing of the line of fire.
Fragments of war news were received by wireless and a _communiqué_
was posted daily, but it all seemed extraordinarily unreal, as
though it were taking place in another world.

One night we saw a fairyland of piled-up lights which grew swiftly as
we drew nearer and took shape in filigreed terraces and arcades when
our anchor at last dropped with a mighty roar in Valetta harbour.
Tiny boats like gondolas were moored at the water’s edge in tight
rows, making in the moonlight a curious scalloped fringe. People in
odd garments passed in noiseless swarms up and down the streets, cabs
went by, shop doors opened and shut, and behind all those lights
loomed the impenetrable blackness of the land towering up like a
mountain. From the distance at which we were anchored no sound could
be heard save that of shipping, and those ant-sized people going
about their affairs, regardless of the thousands of eyes watching
them, gave one the effect of looking at a stage from the gallery
through the wrong end of an opera glass.

Coaling began within an hour, and all that night bronze figures naked
to the waist and with bare feet slithered up and down the swaying
planks, tireless, unceasing, glistening in the arc light which
spluttered from the mast of the coaling vessel; the grit of coal dust
made one’s shoes crunch as one walked the decks in pyjamas, filled
one’s hair and neck, and on that stifling night became as one of the
plagues of Pharaoh.

A strange discordant chattering waked one next morning as though
a tribe of monkeys had besieged the ship. Then one leaped to the
port-hole to get a glimpse of Malta, to us the first hint of the
mysterious East. There it was, glistening white against the turquoise
blue, built up in fascinating tiers with splashes of dark green trees
clinging here and there as though afraid of losing their hold and
toppling into the sea. All round the ship the sea was dotted with
boats and dark people yelling and shouting, all reds and blues and
bright yellows; piles of golden fruit and coloured shawls; big boats
with high snub noses, the oarsmen standing, showing rows of gleaming
teeth; baby boats the size of walnut shells with naked brown babies
uttering shrill cries and diving like frogs for silver coins.

Was it possible that just a little farther on we should meet one end
of the line of death that made a red gash right across Europe?

We laughed a little self-consciously under the unusual feel of our
topees and went ashore to try and get some drill khaki. Finding none
we drank cool drinks and bought cigars and smiled at the milk sellers
with their flocks of goats and the _café au lait_ coloured girls,
some of whom moved with extraordinary grace and looked very pretty
under their black mantillas. The banks distrusted us and would give
us no money, and the Base cashier refused to undo his purse strings.
We cursed him and tried unsuccessfully to borrow from each other,
having only a few pounds in our pockets. Down a back street we found
a Japanese tattooist and in spite of the others’ ridicule I added a
highly coloured but pensive parrot to my collection. But the heat was
overwhelming and our puttees and tunics became streaked with sweat.
We were glad to get back to the boat and lie in a cold bath and climb
languidly into the comparative coolness of slacks. The men had not
been allowed ashore but hundreds of them dived overboard and swam
round the boat, and the native fruit sellers did a thriving trade.

After dinner we went ashore again. It was not much cooler. We
wandered into various places of amusement. They were all the same,
large dirty halls with a small stage and a piano and hundreds of
marble-topped tables where one sat and drank. Atrociously fat women
appeared on the stage and sang four songs apiece in bad French. It
didn’t matter whether the first song was greeted with stony silence
or the damning praise of one sarcastic laugh. Back came each one
until she’d finished her repertoire. Getting bored with that I
collected a fellow sufferer and together we went out and made our way
to the top of the ramparts. The sky looked as if a giant had spilt
all the diamonds in the world. They glittered and changed colour. The
sea was also powdered as if little bits of diamond dust had dropped
from the sky. The air smelled sweet and a little strange, and in that
velvety darkness which one could almost touch one’s imagination went
rioting.

As if that were not enough a guitar somewhere down below was suddenly
touched with magic fingers and a little love song floated up in a
soft lilting tenor.--We were very silent on the old wall.


4

The next morning on waking up, that song still echoing in our ears,
we were hull down. Only a vague disturbance in the blue showed where
Malta had been, and but for the tattoo which irritated slightly, it
might have been one of the Thousand and One Nights. We arrived at
last at Alexandria instead of Gallipoli. The shore authorities lived
up to the best standards of the Staff.

They said, “Who the devil are you?”

And we replied, “The ---- Division.”

And they said, “We’ve never heard of you, don’t know where you come
from, have no instructions about you, and you’d better buzz off
again.”

But we beamed at them and said, “To hell with you. We’re going to
land,”--and landed.

There were no arrangements for horses or men; and M.L.O.’s in all the
glory of staff hats and armlets chattered like impotent monkeys. We
were busy, however, improvising picketing-ropes from ships’ cables
borrowed from the amused ship’s commander and we smiled politely and
said, “Yes, it _is_ hot,” and went on with the work. Never heard of
the ---- Division? Well, well!

Hot? We had never known what heat was before. We thought we did lying
about on deck, but when it came to working for hours on end,--tunics
disappeared and collars and ties followed them. The horses looked
as if they had been out in the rain and left a watery trail as we
formed up and marched out of the harbour and through the town. We
bivouacked for the night in a rest camp called Karaissi where there
wasn’t enough room and tempers ran high until a couple of horses
broke loose in the dark and charged the tent in which there were two
Colonels. The tent ropes went with a ping and camp beds and clothing
and Colonels were mixed up in the sand. No one was hurt, so we
emptied the Colonels’ pyjamas, called their servants and went away
and laughed.

Then we hooked in and marched again, and in the middle of the
afternoon found Mamoura--a village of odd smells, naked children,
filthy women and pariah dogs--and pitched camp on the choking sand
half a mile from the seashore.

By this time the horses were nearly dead and the only water was
a mile and a half away and full of sand. But they drank it, poor
brutes, by the gallon,--and two days after we had our first case of
sand colic.

The Staff were in marquees on the seashore. Presumably being bored,
having nothing earthly to do, they began to exhibit a taste for
design and each day the camp was moved, twenty yards this way,
fifteen that, twelve and a half the other, until, thank God, the sun
became too much for them and they retired to suck cool drinks through
straws and think up a new game.

By this time the Colonel had refused to play and removed himself,
lock, stock and barrel, to the hotel in the village. The Adjutant
was praying aloud for the mud of Flanders. The Orderly Officer made
himself scarce and the Battery Commanders were telling Indian snake
stories at breakfast. The sergeants and the men, half naked and with
tongues hanging out, were searching for beer.

The days passed relentlessly, scorching hot, the only work, watering
the horses four times a day, leaving everybody weak and exhausted.
At night a damp breeze sighed across the sand from the sea, soaking
everything as though it had rained. The busiest men in the camp were
the Vet. and the doctor.

Sand colic ran through the Division like a scourge, and dysentery
began to reduce the personnel from day to day. The flies bred in
their billions, in spite of all the doctor’s efforts, loyally backed
up by us. The subalterns’ method of checking flies was to catch
salamanders and walk about, holding them within range of guy ropes
and tent roofs where flies swarmed, and watch their coiled tongues
uncurl like a flash of lightning and then trace the passage of
the disgruntled fly down into the salamander’s interior. Battery
Commanders waking from a fly-pestered siesta would lay their piastres
eagerly on “Archibald” versus “Yussuf.” Even Wendy would have
admitted that it was “frightfully fascinating.”

Every morning there was a pyjama parade at six o’clock when we all
trooped across to the sea and went in as nature made us. Or else we
rode the horses with snorts and splashings. The old hairy enjoyed
it as much as we did and, once in, it was difficult to get him out
again, even with bare heels drumming on his ribs.

The infantry, instead of landing at Alexandria, had gone straight
to the Dardanelles, and after we had been in camp about a fortnight
the two senior brigades of Gunners packed up and disappeared in the
night, leaving us grinding our teeth with envy and hoping that they
wouldn’t have licked the Turk until we got there too.

Five full months and a half we stayed in that camp! One went through
two distinct phases.

The first was good, when everything was new, different, romantic,
delightful, from the main streets of Alexandria with European shops
and Oriental people, the club with its white-burnoused waiters with
red sash and red fez, down to the unutterable filth and foul smells
of the back streets where every disease lurked in the doorways.
There were early morning rides to sleepy villages across the desert,
pigeons fluttering round the delicate minarets, one’s horse making
scarcely any sound in the deep sand until startled into a snort
by a scuttling salamander or iguana as long as one’s arm. Now and
then one watched breathless a string of camels on a distant skyline
disappearing into the vast silence. Then those dawns, with opal
colours like a rainbow that had broken open and splashed itself
across the world! What infinite joy in all that riot of colour.
The sunsets were too rapid: one great splurge of blood and then
darkness, followed by a moonlight that was as hard as steel mirrors.
Buildings and trees were picked out in ghostly white but the shadows
by contrast were darker than the pit, made gruesome by the howling of
pariah dogs which flitted silently like damned souls.

The eternal mystery of the yashmak caught us all,--two deep eyes
behind that little veil, the lilting, sensuous walk, the perfect
balance and rhythm of those women who worshipped other gods.

Then there was the joy of mail day. Letters and papers arrived
regularly, thirteen days old but more precious because of it. How
one sprang to the mess-table in the big marquee, open to whatever
winds that blew, when the letters were dumped on it, and danced with
impatience while they were being sorted, and retired in triumph to
one’s reed hut like a dog with a bone to revel in all the little
happenings at home that interested us so vitally, to marvel at the
amazingly different points of view and to thank God that although
thousands of miles away one “belonged.”

Then came the time when we had explored everything, knew it all
backwards, and the colours didn’t seem so bright. The sun seemed
hotter, the flies thicker and the days longer. Restlessness attacked
everybody and the question “What the devil are we doing here?” began
to be asked, only to draw bitter answers. Humour began to have a
tinge of sarcasm, remarks tended to become personal and people
disappeared precipitately after mess instead of playing the usual
rubbers. The unfortunate subaltern who was the butt of the mess--a
really excellent and clever fellow--relapsed into a morose silence,
and every one who had the least tendency to dysentery went gladly
to hospital. Even the brigade laughter-maker lost his touch. It
had its echo in the ranks. Sergeants made more frequent arrests,
courts-martial cropped up and it was more difficult to get the work
done in spite of concerts, sports and boxing contests. Interest
flagged utterly. Mercifully the Staff held aloof.

The courts-martial seemed to me most Hogarthian versions of justice,
satirical and damnable. One in particular was held on a poor little
rat of an infantryman who had missed the boat for Gallipoli and
was being tried for desertion. The reason of his missing the boat
was that she sailed before her time and he, having had a glass or
two--and why not?--found that she had already gone when he arrived
back in the harbour five minutes before the official time for her
departure. He immediately reported to the police.

I am convinced that she was the only boat who ever sailed before her
time during the course of the war!

However, I was under instruction--and learnt a great deal. The heat
was appalling. The poor little prisoner, frightened out of his
life, utterly lost his head, and the Court, after hours of formal
scribbling on blue paper, brought him in guilty. Having obtained
permission to ask a question I requested to know whether the Court
was convinced that he had the intention of deserting.

The Court was quite satisfied on that point and, besides, there had
been so many cases of desertion lately from the drafts for Gallipoli
that really it was time an example was made of some one. He got three
years!

Supposing I’d hit that bullying sergeant in the eye in Flanders?


5

Two incidents occurred during that lugubrious period that helped to
break the dead monotony.

The first was the sight of a real live eunuch according to all the
specifications of the Arabian Nights. We were to give a horse show
and as the flag of residence was flying from the Sultan’s palace I
asked the Colonel if I might invite the Sultan. The Colonel was quite
in favour of it. So with an extra polish on my buttons and saddlery
I collected a pal and together we rode through the great gateway
into the grounds of the palace, ablaze with tropical vegetation
and blood-red flowers. Camped among the trees on the right of the
drive was a native guard of about thirty men. They rose as one man,
jabbered at the sight of us but remained stationary. We rode on at
a walk with all the dignity of the British Empire behind us. Then
we saw a big Arab come running towards us from the palace, uttering
shrill cries and waving his arms. We met him and would have passed
but he made as though to lay hands upon our bits. So we halted and
listened to a stream of Arabic and gesticulation.

Then the eunuch appeared, a little man of immense shoulders and
immense stomach, dressed in a black frock coat and stiff white
collar, yellow leather slippers and red fez and sash. He was about
five feet tall and addressed us in a high squeaky voice like a fiddle
string out of tune. His dignity was surprising and he would have done
justice to the Court of Haroun al Raschid. We were delighted with him
and called him Morgiana.

He didn’t understand that so I tried him in French, whereupon
he clapped his hands twice, and from an engine room among the
outbuildings came running an Arab mechanic in blue jeans. He spoke a
sort of hybrid Levantine French and conveyed our invitation of the
Sultan to the eunuch who bowed and spoke again. The desire to laugh
was appalling.

It appeared that the Sultan was absent in Alexandria and only the
Sultana and the ladies were here and it was quite forbidden that we
should approach nearer the palace.

Reluctantly, therefore, we saluted, which drew many salaams and
bowings in reply, and rode away, followed by that unforgettable
little man’s squeaks.

The other incident covered a period of a week or so. It was a
question of spies.

The village of Mamoura consisted of a railway terminus and hotel
round which sprawled a dark and smelly conglomeration of hovels out
of which sprouted the inevitable minaret. The hotel was run by people
who purported to be French but who were of doubtful origin, ranging
from half-caste Arab to Turk by way of Greek and Armenian Jew. But
they provided dinner and cooling drinks and it was pleasant to sit
under the awninged verandah and listen to the frogs and the sea or to
play their ramshackle piano and dance with the French residents of
Alexandria who came out for week-ends to bathe.

At night we used to mount donkeys about as big as large beetles and
have races across the sands back to camp, from which one could see
the lights of the hotel. Indeed we thought we saw what they didn’t
intend us to see, for there were unmistakable Morse flashings out at
sea from that cool verandah. We took it with grim seriousness and
lay for hours on our stomachs with field glasses glued to our eyes.
I posted my signalling corporal in a drinking house next door to the
hotel, gave him late leave and paid his beer so that he might watch
with pencil and notebook. But always he reported in the morning that
he’d seen nothing.

The climax came when one night an orderly burst into the hut which
the Vet. and I shared and said, “Mr. ---- wants you to come over at
once, sir. He’s taken down half a message from the signalling at the
hotel.”

I leapt into gum boots, snatched my glasses and ran across to the
sand mound from where we had watched.

The other subaltern was there in a great state of excitement.

“Look at it,” he said. “Morsing like mad.”

I looked,--and looked again.

There was a good breeze blowing and the flag on the verandah was
exactly like the shutter of a signalling lamp!


6

Having sat there all those months, the order to move, when it did
finally come, was of the most urgent nature. It was received one
afternoon at tea time and the next morning before dawn we were
marching down the canal road.

Just before the end we had done a little training, more to get the
horses in draught than anything else. With that and the horse shows
it wasn’t at all a bad turnout.

Once more we didn’t know for certain where we were bound for, but
the betting was about five to four on Greece. How these things leak
out is always a puzzle, but leak out they do. Sure enough we made
another little sea voyage and in about three days steamed up the
Ægean, passing many boats loaded with odd looking soldiers in khaki
who turned out to be Greek, and at last anchored outside Salonica in
a mass of shipping, French and English troopships, destroyers and
torpedo boats and an American battleship with Eiffel-tower masts.

From the sea Salonica was a flashing jewel in a perfect setting.
Minarets and mosques, white and red, sprouted everywhere from the
white, brown and green buildings. Trees and gardens nestled within
the crumbling old city wall. Behind it ran a line of jagged peaks,
merging with the clouds, and here and there ran a little winding
ribbon of road, climbing up and up only to lose itself suddenly by
falling over a precipice.

Here again the M.L.O. had not quite the Public School and Varsity
manner and we suffered accordingly. However, they are a necessary
evil presumably, these quayside warriors. The proof undoubtedly lies
in the number of D.S.O.’s they muster,----but I don’t remember to
have seen any of them with wound stripes. Curious, that.

We marched through mean streets, that smelled worse than Egypt, and a
dirty populace, poverty-stricken and covered with sores; the soldiers
in khaki that looked like brown paper and leather equipments that
were a good imitation of cardboard. Most of the officers wore spurs
like the Three Musketeers and their little tin swords looked as if
they had come out of toy shops. None of them were shaved. If first
impressions count for anything then God help the Greeks.

Our camp was a large open field some miles to the north-west of the
town on the lower slopes of a jagged peak. The tinkle of cow bells
made soft music everywhere. Of accommodation there was none of any
sort, no tents, nothing but what we could improvise. The Colonel
slept under the lee of the cook’s cart. The Adjutant and the doctor
shared the Maltese cart and the Vet. and I crept under the forage
tarpaulin, from which we were awakened in the dark by an unrestrained
cursing and the noise of a violent rainfall.

Needless to say everybody was soaked, fires wouldn’t light, breakfast
didn’t come, tempers as well as appetites became extremely sharp and
things were most unpleasant,--the more so since it went on raining
for three weeks almost without stopping. Although we hadn’t seen rain
for half a year it didn’t take us five minutes to wish we were back
in Egypt. Fortunately we drew bell tents within forty-eight hours and
life became more bearable. But once more we had to go through a sort
of camp drill by numbers,--odd numbers too, for the order came round
that tents would be moved first, then vehicles, and lastly the horses.

Presumably we had to move the guns and wagons with drag-ropes while
the horses watched us, grinning into their nose bags.

Anyhow, there we were, half the artillery in Greece, all
eighteen-pounders, the other half and the infantry somewhere in the
Dardanelles. It appeared, however, that the ---- Division had quite a
lot of perfectly good infantry just up the road but their artillery
hadn’t got enough horses to go round. So we made a sort of Jack Sprat
and his wife arrangement and declared ourselves mobile.

About four days after we’d come into camp the _Marquette_ was wrecked
some thirty miles off Salonica. It had the ---- Divisional Ammunition
Column on board and some nurses. They had an appalling time in the
water and many were lost. The surviving officers, who came dressed
in the most motley garments, poor devils, were split up amongst the
brigade.

On the Headquarters Staff we took to our bosoms a charming fellow
who was almost immediately given the name of Woodbine,--jolly old
Woodbine, one of the very best, whom we left behind with infinite
regret while we went up country. I’d like to know what his golf
handicap is these days.

The political situation was apparently delicate. Greece was still
sitting on the fence, waiting to see which way the cat would jump,
and here were we and our Allies, the French, marching through their
neutral country.

Slight evidences of the “delicacy” of the times were afforded by
the stabbing of some half dozen Tommies in the dark streets of the
town and by the fact that it was only the goodly array of guns
which prevented them from interning us. I don’t think we had any
ammunition as yet, so we couldn’t have done very much. However that
may be and whatever the political reasons, we sat on the roadside day
after day, watching the French streaming up country,--infantry, field
guns, mountain artillery and pack transport,--heedless of Tino and
his protests. Six months in Egypt, and now this! We _were_ annoyed.

However, on about the twentieth day things really happened.
“Don” battery went off by train, their destination being some
unpronounceable village near the firing line. We, the Headquarters
Staff, and “AC” battery followed the next day. The railway followed
the meanderings of the Vardar through fertile land of amazing
greenness and passed mountains of stark rock where not even live oak
grew. The weather was warm for November, but that ceaseless rain put
a damper on everything, and when we finally arrived we found “Don”
battery sitting gloomily in a swamp on the side of the road. We
joined them.


7

The weather changed in the night and we were greeted with a glorious
sunshine in the morning that not only dried our clothes but filled us
with optimism.

Just as we were about to start the pole of my G.S. wagon broke.
Everybody went on, leaving me in the middle of nowhere with a broken
wagon, no map, and instructions to follow on to the “i” of Causli in
a country whose language I couldn’t speak and with no idea of the
distance. Fortunately I kept the brigade artificer with me and a
day’s bully beef and biscuits, for it was not till two o’clock in the
afternoon that we at last got that wagon mended, having had to cut
down a tree and make a new pole and drive rivets. Then we set off
into the unknown through the most glorious countryside imaginable.
The autumn had stained all the trees red and the fallen leaves made
a royal carpet. Vaguely I knew the direction was north by east and
once having struck the road out of the village which led in that
direction I found that it went straight on through beds of streams,
between fields of maize and plantations of mulberries and tumbled
villages tenanted only by starving dogs. The doors of nearly every
house were splashed with a blue cross,--reminiscences of a plague of
typhus. From time to time we met refugees trudging behind ox-drawn
wagons laden with everything they possessed in the world, including
their babies,--sad-faced, wild-looking peasants, clad in picturesque
rags of all colours with eyes that had looked upon fear. I confess to
having kept my revolver handy. For all I knew they might be Turks,
Bulgars or at least brigands.

The sense of solitude was extraordinary. There was no sign of an army
on the march, not even a bully beef tin to mark the route, nothing
but the purple hills remaining always far away and sending out a
faint muttering like the beating of drums heard in a dream. The road
ahead was always empty when I scanned it through my glasses at hour
intervals, the sun lower and lower each time. Darkness came upon us
as it did in Egypt, as though some one had flicked off the switch.
There was no sign of the village which might be Causli and in the
dark the thought which had been uneasily twisting in my brain for
several hours suddenly found utterance in the mouth of the artificer
sergeant.

“D’you think we’re on the right road, sir?”

The only other road we could have taken was at the very start. Ought
I to have taken it? In any case there was nothing to be done but go
on until we met some one, French or English, but the feeling of
uncertainty was distinctly unpleasant. I sent the corporal on ahead
scouting and we followed silently, very stiff in the saddle.

At last I heard a shout, “Brigade ’Eadquarters?” I think both the
team drivers and myself answered “Yes” together.

The corporal had found a guide sent out by the Adjutant, who turned
us off across fields and led us on to another road, and round a bend
we saw lights twinkling and heard the stamp and movement of picketed
horses and answered the challenge of sentries. Dinner was over, but
the cook had kept some hot for me, and my servant had rigged up my
bivvy, a tiny canvas tent just big enough to take a camp bed. As
there was a touch of frost I went to the bivvy to get a woollen
scarf, heard a scuffle, and saw two green eyes glaring at me.

I whipped out my revolver and flicked on an electric torch. Crouched
down on the bed was a little tortoise-shell kitten so thin that
every rib stood out and even more frightened than I was. I caught
it after a minute. It was ice cold so I tucked it against my chest
under the British warm and went to dinner. After about five minutes
it began to purr and I fed it with some bits of meat which it
bolted ravenously. It followed that up by standing in a saucer of
milk, growling furiously and lapping for dear life. Friendship was
established. It slept in the British warm, purring savagely when I
stroked it, as though starved of affection as well as food; followed
close to my heels when I went out in the morning but fled wildly back
to the bivvy if any one came up to me, emerging arched like a little
caterpillar from under the bed, uttering cries of joy when I lifted
the bivvy flap.

It was almost like finding a refugee child who had got frightened and
lost and trusted only the hand that had done it a kindness.


8

The “i” of Causli showed itself in the morning to be a stretch of
turf in a broad green trough between two rows of steep hills. Causli
was somewhere tucked behind the crest in our rear and the road on
which I had travelled ran back a couple of miles, doubled in a
hairpin twist and curved away on the other side of the valley until
it lost itself behind a belt of trees that leaped out of the far
hill. Forward the view was shut in by the spur which sheltered us,
but our horses were being saddled and after breakfast the Colonel
took me with him to reconnoitre. Very soon the valley ceased and the
road became a mountain path with many stone bridges taking it over
precipitous drops. Looking over, one saw little streams bubbling
in the sunlight. After about three miles of climbing we came upon
a signal station on the roadside with linesmen at work. It was the
first sign of any troops in all that country, but miles behind us,
right back to Salonica, the road was a long chain of troops and
transport. Our brigade was as yet the only one up in action.

The signal station proved to be infantry headquarters. It was the
summit of the pass, the mountains opening like a great V in front
through which further mountains appeared, with that one endless road
curling up like a white snake. There was a considerable noise of
firing going on and we were just in time to see the French take a
steep crest,--an unbelievable sight. We lay on our stomachs miles
behind them and through glasses watched puffs of cotton wool, black
and white, sprout out of a far-away hill, followed by a wavering line
of blue dots. Presently the cotton wool sprouted closer to the crest
and the blue dots climbed steadily. Then the cotton wool disappeared
over the top and the blue dots gave chase. Now and then one stumbled
and fell. Breathless one watched to see if he would get up again.
Generally he didn’t, but the line didn’t stop and presently the last
of it had disappeared over the crest. The invisible firing went on
and the only proof that it wasn’t a dream was the motionless bundles
of blue that lay out there in the sun.--

It was the first time I’d seen men killed and it left me silent,
angry. Why “go out” like that on some damned Serbian hill? What was
it all about that everybody was trying to kill everybody else? Wasn’t
the sun shining and the world beautiful? What was this disease that
had broken out like a scab over the face of the world?--why did those
particular dots have to fall? Why not the ones a yard away? What was
the law of selection? Was there a law? _Did_ every bullet have its
billet? Was there a bullet for the Colonel?--For _me_?--No. It was
impossible! But then, why those others and which of us?--

I think I’ve found the answer to some of those questions now. But on
that bright November day, 1915, I was too young. It was all in the
game although from that moment there was a shadow on it.


9

“Don” battery went into action first.

The Headquarters moved up close to the signalling station--and I
lost my kitten--but “Don” went down the pass to the very bottom and
cross-country to the east, and dug themselves in near a deserted
farmhouse on the outskirts of Valandovo. “Beer” and “C” batteries
came up a day or two later and sat down with “AC.” There seemed to
be no hurry. Our own infantry were not in the line. They were in
support of the French and with supine ignorance or amazing pluck, but
anyhow a total disregard of the laws of warfare, proceeded to dig
trenches of sorts in full daylight and in full view of the Bulgar. We
shouldn’t have minded so much but our O.P. happened to be on the hill
where most of these heroes came to dig.

The troops themselves were remarkably ill-chosen. Most of those who
were not Irish were flat-footed “brickees” from Middlesex, Essex
and the dead-level east coast counties, so their own officers told
me, where they never raise one ankle above the other. Now they were
chosen to give imitations of chamois in these endless hills. Why not
send an aviator to command a tank? Furthermore, the only guns were
French 75’s and our eighteen-pounders and, I think, a French brigade
of mountain artillery, when obviously howitzers were indicated. And
there were no recuperators in those days. Put a quadrant angle of
28° and some minutes on an old pattern eighteen-pounder and see how
long you stay in action,--with spare springs at a premium and the
nearest workshops sixty miles away. My own belief is that a couple
of handfuls of Gurkhas and French Tirailleurs would have cleaned up
Serbia in a couple of months. As it was...--

The French gave us the right of the line from north-west of Valandovo
to somewhere east of Kajali in the blue hills, over which, said the
Staff, neither man nor beast could pass. We needn’t worry about
our right, they said. Nature was doing that for us. But apparently
Nature had allowed not less than eight Greek divisions to march
comfortably over that impassable right flank of ours in the previous
Græco-Bulgarian dust-up. Of course the Staff didn’t find it out till
afterwards. It only cost us a few thousand dead and the Staff were
all right in Salonica, so there was no great harm done! Till then the
thing was a picnic. On fine mornings the Colonel and I rode down the
pass to see Don battery, climbed the mountain to the stone sangar
which was their O.P. and watched them shoot--they were a joyous
unshaven crowd--went on down the other side to the French front line
and reconnoitred the country for advanced positions and generally got
the hang of things.

As I knew French there were occasions when I was really useful,
otherwise it was simply a joy-ride for me until the rest of the
batteries came into action. One morning the Colonel and I were right
forward watching a heavy barrage on a village occupied by the Bulgar.
The place selected by the Colonel from which to enjoy a really fine
view was only ten yards from a dead Bulgar who was in a kneeling
position in a shallow trench with his hands in his pockets, keeled
over at an angle. He’d been there many days and the wind blew our
way. But the Colonel had a cold. I fled to a flank. While we watched,
two enemy batteries opened. For a long time we tried to locate their
flash. Then we gave it up and returned up the pass to where a French
battery was tucked miraculously among holly bushes just under the
crest. One of their officers was standing on the sky line, also
endeavouring to locate those new batteries. So we said we’d have
another try, climbed up off the road, lay upon our stomachs and drew
out our glasses. Immediately a pip-squeak burst in the air about
twenty yards away. Another bracketed us and the empty shell went
whining down behind us. I thought it was rather a joke and but for
the Colonel would have stayed there.

He, however, was a regular Gunner, thank God, and slithered off the
mound like an eel. I followed him like his shadow and we tucked
ourselves half crouching, half sitting, under the ledge, with our
feet on the road. For four hours the Bulgar tried to get that
French battery. If he’d given five minutes more right he’d have
done it,--and left us alone. As it was he plastered the place with
battery fire every two seconds.--Shrapnel made pockmarks in the road,
percussion bursts filled our necks with dirt from the ledge and ever
the cases whined angrily into the ravine. We smoked many pipes.

It was my first experience under shell fire. I found it rather like
what turning on the quarter current in the electric chair must
be,--most invigorating, but a little jumpy. One never knew. Thank
heaven they were only pip-squeaks. During those crouching hours two
French poilus walked up the pass--it was impossible to go quickly
because it was so steep--and without turning a hair or attempting to
quicken or duck walked through that barrage with a _sangfroid_ that
left me gasping. Although in a way I was enjoying it, I was mighty
glad to be under that ledge, and my heart thumped when the Colonel
decided to make a run for it and went on thumping till we were a good
thousand yards to a flank.

The worst of it was, it was the only morning that I hadn’t brought
sandwiches.


10

When the other three batteries went into action and the ammunition
column tucked itself into dry nullahs along the road we moved up
into Valandovo and established Brigade Headquarters in a farmhouse
and for many days the signallers and I toiled up and down mountains,
laying air lines. It was an elementary sort of war. There were
not balloons, no aeroplanes and camouflage didn’t seem to matter.
Infantry pack transport went up and down all day long. It was only
in the valley that the infantry were able to dig shallow trenches.
On the hills they built sangars, stone breastwork affairs. Barbed
wire I don’t remember to have seen. There were no gas shells, no
5.9’s, nothing bigger than pip-squeaks. The biggest artillery the
Allies possessed were two 120-centimetre guns called respectively
Crache Mort and Chasse Boche. One morning two Heavy Gunners blew in
and introduced themselves as being on the hunt for sixty-pounder
positions. They were burning to lob some over into Strumnitza. We
assisted them eagerly in their reconnaissance and they went away
delighted, promising to return within three days. They were still
cursing on the quayside when we came limping back to Salonica.
Apparently there was no one qualified to give them the order to come
up and help. In those days Strumnitza was the Bulgar rail-head, and
they could have pounded it to bits.

As it was, our brigade was the only English Gunner unit in action,
and the Battery Commanders proved conclusively to the French (and the
Bulgar) that the eighteen-pounder was a handy little gun. The French
General ordered one of the 75 batteries to advance to Kajali. They
reconnoitred the hills and reported that it was impossible without
going ten miles round. The General came along to see for himself and
agreed. The Captain of “C” battery, however, took a little walk up
there and offered to get up if the Colonel would lend him a couple
of hundred infantry. At the same time he pointed out that coming
down in a hurry was another story, absolutely impossible. However,
it was discussed by the powers that were and the long and short of
it was that two of our batteries were ordered forward. “C” was the
pioneer; and with the two hundred infantry,--horses were out of the
question--and all the gunners they laboured from 4.30 p.m. to 6 a.m.
the next morning, at which hour they reported themselves in action
again. It was a remarkable feat, brought about by sheer muscle and
will power, every inch of the way a battle, up slopes that were
almost vertical, over small boulders, round big ones with straining
drag ropes for about two miles and a half. The 75’s refused to
believe it until they had visited the advanced positions. They bowed
and said “Touché!”


11

Then the snow came in blinding blizzards that blotted out the whole
world and everybody went underground and lived in overcoats and
stoked huge fires,--everybody except the infantry whose rifle bolts
froze stiff, whose rations didn’t arrive and who could only crouch
behind their stone sangars. The cold was intense and they suffered
terribly. When the blizzard ceased after about forty-eight hours the
tracks had a foot of snow over them and the drifts were over one’s
head.

Even in our little farmhouse where the Colonel and I played chess
in front of a roaring fire, drinks froze solid on the mantelpiece
and we remained muffled to the eyes. Thousands of rock pigeons
appeared round the horse lines, fighting for the dropped grain, and
the starving dogs became so fierce and bold that it was only wise
to carry a revolver in the deserted villages. Huge brutes some of
them, the size of Arab donkeys, a cross between a mastiff and a great
Dane. Under that clean garment of snow which didn’t begin to melt
for a fortnight, the country was of an indescribable beauty. Every
leaf on the trees bore its little white burden, firm and crisp, and
a cold sun appeared and threw most wonderful lights and shadows. The
mountains took on a virgin purity.

But to the unfortunate infantry it was one long stretch of suffering.
Hundreds a day came down on led mules in an agonised string, their
feet bound in straw, their faces and hands blue like frozen meat.
The hospitals were full of frost-bite cases, and dysentery was not
unknown in the brigade. Pot-face in particular behaved like a hero.
He had dysentery very badly but absolutely refused to let the doctor
send him down.

Our rations were none too good, and there were interminable spells
of bully beef, fried, hashed, boiled, rissoled, _au naturel_ with
pickles, and bread became a luxury. We reinforced this with young
maize which grew everywhere in the valley and had wonderful soup
and corn on the cob, boiled in tinned milk and then fried. Then too
the Vet. and I had a wonderful afternoon’s wild bull hunting with
revolvers. We filled the wretched animal with lead before getting
near enough to give the _coup de grâce_ beside a little stream. The
Vet. whipped off his tunic, turned up his sleeves and with a long
trench knife conducted a masterly post mortem which resulted in
about forty pounds of filet mignon. The next morning before dawn the
carcase was brought in in the cook’s cart and the Headquarters Staff
lived on the fat of the land and invited all the battery commanders
to the discussion of that excellent bull.

From our point of view it wasn’t at all a bad sort of war. We hadn’t
had a single casualty. The few rounds which ever came anywhere near
the batteries were greeted with ironic cheers and the only troubles
with telephone lines were brought about by our own infantry who
removed lengths of five hundred yards or so presumably to mend their
bivvies with.

But about the second week of December indications were not wanting
of hostile activity. Visibility was very bad owing to early morning
fogs, but odd rounds began to fall in the valley behind us in the
neighbourhood of the advancing wagon lines, and we fired on infantry
concentrations and once even an S.O.S. Rifle fire began to increase
and stray bullets hummed like bees on the mountain paths.

In the middle of this I became ill with a temperature which remained
for four days in the neighbourhood of 104°. The doctor talked of
hospital but I’d never seen the inside of one and didn’t want to.

However, on the fourth day it was the Colonel’s order that I should
go. It transpired afterwards that the doctor diagnosed enteric. So
away I went labelled and wrapped up in a four-mule ambulance wagon.
The cold was intense, the road appalling, the pip-squeaks not too far
away until we got out of the valley, and the agony unprintable. That
night was spent in a Casualty Clearing Station in the company of half
a dozen infantry subalterns all splashed with blood.

At dawn next morning when we were in a hospital train on our way to
Salonica, the attack began. The unconsidered right flank was the
trouble. Afterwards I heard about a dozen versions of the show,
all much the same in substance. The Bulgars poured over the right
in thousands, threatening to surround us. Some of the infantry put
up a wonderful fight. Others--didn’t. Our two advanced batteries
fired over open sights into the brown until they had exhausted their
ammunition, then removed breech blocks and dial sights, destroyed
the pieces and got out, arming themselves with rifles and ammunition
picked up ad lib. on the way down. “Don” and “AC” went out of one
end of the village of Valandovo while the enemy were held up at the
other by the Gunners of the other two batteries. Then two armies,
the French and English, got tangled up in the only road of retreat,
engineers hastening the stragglers and then blowing up bridges. “Don”
and “AC” filled up with ammunition and came into action in support
of the other brigades at Causli which now opened fire while “Beer”
and “C” got mounted and chased those of our infantry who “didn’t,”
rounded them up, and marched them back to face the enemy. Meanwhile
I was tucked away in a hospital bed in a huge marquee, trying to
get news from every wounded officer who was brought in. The wildest
rumours were going about but no one knew anything officially. I heard
that the infantry were wiped out, that the gunners had all been
killed or captured to a man, that the remnants of the French were
fighting desperately and that the whole thing was a _débâcle_.

There we all were helpless in bed, with nurses looking after us,
splendid English girls, and all the time those infernal guns coming
nearer and nearer.--At night, sleepless and in a fever, one could
almost hear the rumble of their wheels, and from the next tent where
the wounded Tommies lay in rows, one or two would suddenly scream in
their agony and try and stifle their sobs, calling on Jesus Christ to
kill them and put them out of their pain.--

The brigade, when I rejoined, was in camp east of Salonica, under the
lee of Hortiac, knee-deep in mud and somewhat short of kit. It was
mighty good to get back and see them in the flesh again, after all
those rumours which had made one sick with apprehension.

Having pushed us out of Serbia into Greece the Bulgar contented
himself with sitting on the frontier and making rude remarks. The
Allies, however, silently dug themselves in and prepared for the
defence of Salonica in case he should decide to attack again.
The Serbs retired to Corfu to reform, and although Tino did a
considerable amount of spluttering at this time, the only sign of
interest the Greeks showed was to be more insolent in the streets.

We drew tents and moved up into the hills and Woodbine joined us
again, no longer a shipwrecked mariner in clothes off the peg, but in
all the glory of new uniform and breeches out from home, a most awful
duke. Pot-face and the commander of “C” battery went to hospital
shortly afterwards and were sent home. Some of the Brass Hats also
changed rounds. One, riding forth from a headquarters with cherry
brandy and a fire in each room, looked upon our harness immediately
on our return from the retreat and said genially that he’d heard that
we were a “rabble.” When, however, the commander of “Don” battery
asked him for the name and regiment of his informant, the Brass Hat
rode away muttering uncomfortably. Things were a little strained!


12

However, Christmas was upon us so we descended upon the town with
cook’s carts and visited the Base cashier. Salonica was a modern
Babel. The cobbles of the Rue Venizelos rang with every tongue in
the world,--Turkish, Russian, Yiddish, Serbian, Spanish, Levantine,
Arabic, English, French, Italian, Greek and even German. Little tin
swords clattered everywhere and the place was a riot of colour, the
Jew women with green pearl-sewn headdresses, the Greek peasants in
their floppy-seated trousers elbowing enormous Russian soldiers in
loose blouses and jack boots who in turn elbowed small-waisted Greek
highlanders in kilts with puffballs on their curly-toed shoes. There
were black-robed priests with long beards and high hats, young men in
red fezzes, civilians in bowlers, old hags who gobbled like turkeys
and snatched cigarette ends, all mixed up in a kaleidoscopic jumble
with officers of every country and exuding a smell of garlic, fried
fish, decaying vegetable matter, and those aromatic eastern dishes
which fall into no known category of perfume. Fling into this chaos
numbers of street urchins of untold dirt chasing turkeys and chickens
between one’s legs and you get a slight idea of what sort of place we
came to to do our Christmas shopping.

The best known language among the shopkeepers was Spanish, but French
was useful and after hours of struggling one forced a passage out
of the crowd with barrels of beer, turkey, geese, pigs, fruit and
cigarettes for the men, and cigars and chocolates, whisky, Grand
Marnier and Cointreau for the mess. Some fund or other had decided
that every man was to have a plum pudding, and these we had drawn
from the A.S.C. on Christmas Eve.

In Egypt letters had taken thirteen days to arrive. Here they took
from fifteen to seventeen, sometimes twenty-one. Christmas Day,
however, was one of the occasions when nothing came at all and we
cursed the unfortunate post office in chorus. I suppose it’s the
streak of childhood in every man of us that makes us want our letters
_on_ the day. So the morning was a little chilly and lonely until we
went round to see that the men’s dinner was all right. It was, with
lashings of beer.

This second Christmas on active service was a tremendous contrast to
the first. Then there was the service in the barn followed by that
depressing lonely day in the fog and flat filth of Flanders. Now
there was a clear sunny air and a gorgeous view of purple mountains
with a glimpse of sea far off below.

In place of Mass in the barn Woodbine and I went for a walk and
climbed up to the white Greek church above the village, surrounded
by cloisters in which shot up cypress trees, the whole picked out
in relief against the brown hill. We went in. The church was empty
but for three priests, one on the altar behind the screen, one in a
pulpit on each side in the body of the church. For a long time we
stood there listening as they flung prayers and responses from one to
another in a high, shrill, nasal minor key that had the wail of lost
souls in it. It was most un-Christmassy and we came out with a shiver
into the sun.

Our guest at dinner that night was a Serbian liaison officer from
Divisional Headquarters. We stuffed him with the usual British food
and regaled him with many songs to the accompaniment of the banjo and
broke up still singing in the small hours but not having quite cured
the ache in our hearts caused by “absent friends.”


13

The second phase of the campaign was one of endless boredom, filthy
weather and the nuisance of changing camp every other month. The
boredom was only slightly relieved by a few promotions, two or three
full lieutenants becoming captains and taking command of the newly
arranged sections of D.A.C., and a few second lieutenants getting
their second pip. I was one. The weather was characteristic of the
country, unexpected, violent. About once a week the heavens opened
themselves. Thunder crashed round in circles in a black sky at
midday, great tongues of lightning lit the whole world in shuddering
flashes. The rain made every nullah a roaring waterfall with three or
four feet of muddy water racing down it and washing away everything
in its path. The trenches round our bell tents were of little avail
against such violence. The trench sides dissolved and the water
poured in. These storms lasted an hour or two and then the sky
cleared almost as quickly as it had darkened and the mountain peaks
gradually appeared again, clean and fresh. On one such occasion,
but much later in the year, the Adjutant was caught riding up from
Salonica on his horse and a thunderbolt crashed to earth about thirty
yards away from him. The horse stood trembling for full two minutes
and then galloped home in a panic.

The changing of camps seemed to spring from only one reason,--the
desire for “spit and polish” which covers a multitude of sins. It
doesn’t matter if your gunners are not smart at gun drill or your
subalterns in utter ignorance of how to lay out lines of fire and
make a fighting map. So long as your gun park is aligned to the
centimetre, your horse lines supplied conspicuously with the type
of incinerator fancied by your Brigadier-General and the whole camp
liberally and tastefully decorated with white stones,--then you are
a crack brigade, and Brass Hats ride round you with oily smiles and
pleasant remarks and recommend each other for decorations.

But adopt your own incinerator (infinitely more practical as a rule
than the Brigadier-General’s) and let yourself be caught with an
untidy gun park and your life becomes a hell on earth. We learnt it
bitterly, until at last the Adjutant used to ride ahead with the
R.S.M., a large fatigue party and several miles of string and mark
the position of every gun muzzle and wagon wheel in the brigade. And
when the storms broke and washed away the white stones the Adjutant
would dash out of his tent immediately the rain ceased, calling upon
God piteously, the R.S.M. irritably, and every man in the brigade
would collect other stones for dear life.

Time hung very heavy. The monotony of week after week of brigade
fatigues, standing gun drill, exercising and walking horses,
inspecting the men’s dinners, with nothing to do afterwards except
play cards, read, write letters and curse the weather, and the war
and all Brass Hats. Hot baths in camp were, as usual, as diamonds
in oysters. Salonica was about twelve miles away for a bath, a long
weary ride mostly at a walk on account of the going. But it was good
to ride in past the village we used to call Peacockville, for obvious
reasons, put the horses up in a Turkish stable in a back street in
Salonica, and bathe and feed at the “Tour Blanche,” and watch the
crowd. It was a change, at least, from the eternal sameness of camp
and the cramped discomfort of bell tents, and there was always a
touch of mystery and charm in the ride back in the moonlight.

The whole thing seemed so useless, such an utter waste of life. There
one sat in the mud doing nothing. The war went on and we weren’t
helping. All our civil ambitions and hopes were withering under our
very eyes. One hopeless dawn succeeded another. I tried to write, but
my brain was like a sponge dipped into khaki dye. One yearned for
France, where at least there was fighting and leave, or if not leave
then the hourly chance of a “blighty” wound.

About April there came a welcome interlude. The infantry had also
chopped and changed, and been moved about and in the intervals had
been kept warm and busy in digging a chain of defences in a giant
hundred-mile half-circle around Salonica, the hub of our existence.
The weather still didn’t seem to know quite what it wanted to
do. There was a hint of spring but it varied between blinding
snow-storms, bursts of warm sun and torrents of rain.

“Don” battery had been moved to Stavros in the defensive chain, and
the Colonel was to go down and do Group Commander. The Adjutant
was left to look after the rest of the brigade. I went with the
Colonel to do Adjutant in the new group. So we collected a handful
of signallers, a cart with our kits and servants, and set out on a
two-day trek due east along the line of lakes to the other coast.

The journey started badly in a howling snow-storm. To reach the lake
level there was a one-way pass that took an hour to go down, and an
hour and a half to climb on the return trip. The Colonel went on
ahead to see the General. I stayed with the cart and fought my way
through the blizzard. At the top of the pass was a mass of Indian
transport. We all waited for two hours, standing still in the storm,
the mud belly-deep because some unfortunate wagon had got stuck in
the ascent. I remember having words with a Captain who sat hunched
on his horse like a sack the whole two hours and refused to give an
order or lend a hand when every one of his teams jibbed, when at last
the pass was declared open. God knows how he ever got promoted.

However, we got down at last and the sun came out and dried us. I
reported to the Colonel, and we went on in a warm golden afternoon
along the lake shore with ducks getting up out of the rushes in
hundreds, and, later, woodcock flashing over our heads on their way
to water. As far as I remember the western lake is some eight miles
long and about three wide at its widest part, with fairy villages
nestling against the purple mountain background, the sun glistening
on the minarets and the faint sound of bells coming across the
water. We spent the night as guests of a battery which we found
encamped on the shore, and on the following morning trekked along the
second lake, which is about ten miles in length, ending at a jagged
mass of rock and thick undergrowth which had split open into a wild,
wooded ravine with a river winding its way through the narrow neck to
the sea, about five miles farther on.

We camped in the narrow neck on a sandy bay by the river, rock
shooting up sheer from the back of the tents, the horses hidden under
the trees. The Colonel’s command consisted of one 60-pounder--brought
round by sea and thrown into the shallows by the Navy, who said to
us, “Here you are, George. She’s on terra firma. It’s up to you
now”--two naval 6-inch, one eighteen-pounder battery, “Don,” one 4.5
howitzer battery, and a mountain battery, whose commander rode about
on a beautiful white mule with a tail trimmed like an hotel bell
pull. “AC” battery of ours came along a day or two later to join the
merry party, because, to use the vulgar but expressive phrase, the
Staff “got the wind up,” and saw Bulgars behind every tree.


14

In truth it was a comedy,--though there were elements of tragedy in
the utter inefficiency displayed. We rode round to see the line of
our zone. It took two days, because, of course, the General had to
get back to lunch. Wherever it was possible to cut tracks, tracks
had been cut, beautiful wide ones, making an enemy advance easy.
They were guarded by isolated machine-gun posts at certain strategic
points, and in the nullahs was a little barbed wire driven in on
wooden stakes. Against the barbed wire, however, were piled masses
of dried thorn,--utterly impassable but about as inflammable as
gun-powder. This was all up and down the wildest country. If a
massacre had gone on fifty yards to our right or left at any time, we
shouldn’t have been able to see it. And the line of infantry was so
placed that it was impossible to put guns anywhere to assist them.

It is to be remembered that although I have two eyes, two ears, and a
habit of looking and listening, I was only a lieutenant with two pips
in those days, and therefore my opinion is not, of course, worth the
paper it is written on. Ask any Brass Hat!

An incident comes back to me of the action before the retreat.
I had only one pip then. Two General Staffs wished to make a
reconnaissance. I went off at 3 a.m. to explore a short way, got
back at eight o’clock, after five hours on a cold and empty stomach,
met the Staffs glittering in the winter sun, and led them up a goat
track, ridable, of course. They left the horses eventually, and I
brought them to the foot of the crest, from which the reconnaissance
was desired. The party was some twenty strong, and walked up on to
the summit and produced many white maps. I was glad to sit down,
and did so under the crest against a rock. Searching the opposite
sky line with my glasses, I saw several parties of Bulgars watching
us,--only recognisable as Bulgars because the little of them that
I could see moved from time to time. The Colonel was near me and I
told him. He took a look and went up the crest and told the Staffs.
The Senior Brass Hat said, “Good God! What are you all doing up here
on the crest? Get under cover at once,”--and he and they all hurried
down. The reconnaissance was over!

On leading them a short way back to the horses (it saved quite twenty
minutes’ walk) it became necessary to pass through a wet, boggy patch
about four yards across. The same Senior Brass Hat stopped at the
edge of it, and said to me, “What the devil did you bring us this way
for? You don’t expect me to get my boots dirty, do you?--Good God!”

I murmured something about active service,--but, as I say, I had only
one pip then.--

It isn’t that one objects to being cursed. The thing that rankles
is to have to bend the knee to a system whose slogan is efficiency,
but which retains the doddering and the effete in high commands
simply because they have a quarter of a century of service to their
records. The misguided efforts of these dodderers are counteracted
to a certain extent by the young, keen men under them. But it is the
dodderers who get the credit, while the real men lick their boots
and have to kowtow in the most servile manner. Furthermore, it is no
secret. We know it and yet we let it go on: and if to-day there are
twenty thousand unnecessary corpses among our million dead, after
all, what are they among so many? The dodderers have still got enough
life to parade at Buckingham Palace and receive another decoration,
and we stand in the crowd and clap our hands, and say, “Look at old
so-and-so! Isn’t he a grand old man? Must be seventy-six if he’s a
day!”

So went the comedy at Stavros. One Brass Hat dug a defence line
at infinite expense and labour. Along came another, just a pip
senior, looked round and said, “Good God! You’ve dug in the wrong
place.--Must be scrapped.” And at more expense and more labour a new
line was dug. And then a third Brass Hat came along and it was all to
do over again. Men filled the base hospitals and died of dysentery;
the national debt added a few more insignificant millions,--and the
Brass Hats went on leave to Alexandria for a well-earned rest.

Not only at Stavros did this happen, but all round the half circle in
the increasingly hot weather, as the year became older and disease
more rampant.

After we’d been down there a week and just got the hang of the
country another Colonel came and took over the command of the group,
so we packed up our traps and having bagged many woodcock and duck,
went away, followed after a few days by “AC” and “Don.”

About that time, to our lasting grief, we lost our Colonel, who went
home. It was a black day for the brigade. His thoughtfulness for
every officer under him, his loyalty and unfailing cheeriness had
made him much loved. I, who had ridden with him daily, trekked the
snowy hills in his excellent company, played chess with him, strummed
the banjo while he chanted half-remembered songs, shared the same
tent with him on occasions and appreciated to the full his unfailing
kindness, mourned him as my greatest friend. The day he went I took
my last ride with him down to the rest camp just outside Salonica, a
wild, threatening afternoon, with a storm which burst on me in all
its fury as I rode back miserably, alone.

In due course his successor came and we moved to Yailajik--well
called by the men, Yellow-Jack--and the hot weather was occupied with
training schemes at dawn, officers’ rides and drills, examinations
A and B (unofficial, of course), horse shows and an eternity of
unnecessary work, while one gasped in shirt sleeves and stupid felt
hats after the Anzac pattern; long, long weeks of appalling heat
and petty worries, until it became a toss-up between suicide or
murder. The whole spirit of the brigade changed. From having been
a happy family working together like a perfect team, the spirit of
discontent spread like a canker. The men looked sullen and did their
work grudgingly, going gladly to hospital at the first signs of
dysentery. Subalterns put in applications for the Flying Corps,--I
was one of their number,--and ceased to take an interest in their
sections. Battery Commanders raised sarcasm to a fine art, and cursed
the day that ever sent them to this ghastly back-water.

I left the headquarters and sought relief in “C” battery, where,
encouraged by the sympathetic commanding officer, I got nearer to the
solution of the mysterious triangle T.O.B. than I’d ever been before.
He had a way of talking about it that the least intelligent couldn’t
fail to grasp.

At last I fell ill and with an extraordinary gladness went down to
the 5th Canadian hospital, on the eastern outskirts of Salonica,
on the seashore. The trouble was an ear. Even the intensest pain,
dulled by frequent injections of morphia, did not affect my relief
in getting away from that brigade, where, up to the departure of
the Colonel, I had spent such a happy time. The pity of it was that
everybody envied me.

They talked of an operation. Nothing would have induced me to let
them operate in that country where the least scratch turned septic.
After several weeks I was sent to Malta, where I was treated for
twenty-one days. At the end of that time the specialist asked
me if my career would be interfered with if he sent me home for
consultation as to an operation. One reason he could not do it was
that it was a long business, six weeks in bed, at least, and they
were already overfull. The prison door was about to open! I assured
him that on the contrary my career would benefit largely by a sight
of home, and to my eternal joy he then and there, in rubber gloves,
wrote a recommendation to send me to England. His name stands out in
my memory in golden letters.

Within twenty-four hours I was on board.

The fact that all my kit was still with the battery was a matter of
complete indifference. I would have left a thousand kits. At home all
the leaves were turning, blue smoke was filtering out of red chimneys
against the copper background of the beech woods--and they would be
waiting for me in the drive.




                             PART III

                        _THE WESTERN FRONT_


1

England had changed in the eighteen months since we put out so
joyously from Avonmouth. Munition factories were in full blast,
food restrictions in force, women in all kinds of uniforms, London
in utter darkness at night, the country dotted with hutted training
camps. Everything was quiet. We had taken a nasty knock or two and
washed some of our dirty linen in public, not too clean at that. My
own lucky star was in the ascendant. The voyage completely cured me,
and within a week I was given a month’s sick leave by the Medical
Board,--a month of heaven more nearly describes it, for I passed my
days in a state of bliss which nothing could mar, except perhaps the
realisation, towards the end, of the fact that I had to go back and
settle into the collar again.

My mental attitude towards the war had changed. Whatever romance
and glamour there may have been had worn off. It was just one long
bitter waste of time,--our youth killed like flies by “dug-outs,”
at the front, so that old men and sick might carry on the race,
while profiteers drew bloated profits and politicians exuded noxious
gas in the House. Not a comforting point of view to take back into
harness. I was told on good authority that to go out to France in a
field battery was a certain way of finding death. They were being
flung away in the open to take another thousand yards of trench,
so as to make a headline in the daily papers which would stir the
drooping spirits of the old, the sick, and the profiteer over their
breakfast egg. The _embusqué_ was enjoying those headlines too. The
combing-out process had not yet begun. The young men who had never
been out of England were Majors and Colonels in training camps. It
was the officers who returned to duty from hospital, more or less
cured of wounds or sickness, who were the first to be sent out again.
The others knew a thing or two.

That was how it struck me when I was posted to a reserve brigade just
outside London.

Not having the least desire to be “flung away in the open,” I did
my best to get transferred to a 6-inch battery. The Colonel of the
reserve brigade did his best, but it was queered at once, without
argument or appeal, by the nearest Brass Hat, in the following
manner. The Colonel having signed and recommended the formal
application, spoke to the General personally on my behalf.

“What sort of a fellow is he?” asked the General.

“Seems a pretty useful man,” said the Colonel.

“Then we’ll keep him,” said the General.

“The pity of it is,” said the Colonel to me later, “that if I’d said
you were a hopeless damned fool, he would have signed it.”

On many subsequent occasions the Colonel flung precisely that
expression at me so he might just as well have said it then.

However, as it seemed that I was destined for a short life, I
determined to make it as merry as possible, and in the company of a
kindred spirit, who was posted from hospital a couple of days after
I was, and who is now a Bimbashi in the Soudan, I went up to town
about three nights a week, danced and did a course of theatres.
By day there was no work to do as the brigade already had far too
many officers, none of whom had been out. The battery to which we
were both posted was composed of category C1 men,--flat-footed
unfortunates, unfit to fight on medical grounds, not even strong
enough to groom horses properly.

A futile existence in paths of unintelligence and unendeavour
worshipping perforce at the altar of destruction, creating nothing,
a slave to dishonesty and jobbery,--a waste of life that made one
mad with rage in that everything beautiful in the world was snapped
in half and flung away because the social fabric which we ourselves
had made through the centuries, had at last become rotten to the core
and broken into flaming slaughter, and was being fanned by yellow
press hypocrisy. Every ideal cried out against it. The sins of the
fathers upon the wilfully blind children. The Kaiser was only the
most pitch-covered torch chosen by Nemesis to set the bonfire of
civilisation ablaze. But for one branch in the family tree he would
have been England’s monarch, and then----?

There have been moments when I have regretted not having sailed to
New York in August, 1914,--bitter moments when all the dishonesty has
beaten upon one’s brain, and one has envied the pluck of the honest
conscientious objector who has stood out against the ridicule of the
civilised world.

The only thought that kept me going was “suppose the Huns had landed
in England and I had not been fighting?” It was unanswerable,--as I
thought then.

Now I wish that the Hun had landed in England in force and laid waste
the East coast, as he has devastated Belgium and the north of France.
There would have been English refugees with perambulators and babies,
profiteers crying “Kamerad!” politicians fleeing the House. There
would have been some hope of England’s understanding. But she doesn’t
even now. There were in 1918, before the armistice, men--MEN!--who,
because their valets failed to put their cuff links in their shirts
one morning, were sarcastic to their war-working wives, and talked of
the sacrifices they had made for their country.

How _dared_ they have valets, while we were lousy and unshaved, with
rotting corpses round our gun wheels? How _dared_ they have wives,
while we “unmarried and without ties” were either driven in our
weakness to licensed women, or clung to our chastity because of the
one woman with us every hour in our hearts, whom we meant to marry if
ever we came whole out of that hell?


2

Christmas came. They would not let me go down to that little
house among the pines and beeches, which has ever been “home” to
me. But the day was spent quietly in London with my best pal.
Seven days later I was on my way to Ireland as one of the advance
representatives of the Division. The destination of my brigade was
Limerick, that place of pigs, and smells, and pretty girls and
schoolboy rebels, who chalked on every barrack wall, “Long live the
Kaiser! Down with the King!” Have you ever been driven to the depths
of despair, seen your work go to pieces before your eyes, and spent
the dreadful days in dishonest idleness on the barrack square, hating
it all the while, but unable to move hand or foot to get out of the
mental morass? That is what grew up in Limerick. Even now my mind
shivers in agony at the thought of it.

Reinforcements had poured into the battery of cripples, and the order
came that from it a fighting battery should be formed. As senior
subaltern, who had been promised a captaincy, I was given charge of
them. The only other officer with me was the loyalest pal a man ever
had. He had been promoted on the field for gallantry, having served
ten years in the ranks as trumpeter, gunner, corporal and sergeant.
Needless to say, he knew the game backwards, and was the possessor
of amazing energy and efficiency. He really ought to have had the
command, for my gunnery was almost nil, but I had one pip more than
he, and so the system put him under my orders. So we paraded the
first men, and told them off into sections and were given a horse or
two, gradually building up a battery as more reinforcements arrived.

How we worked! The enthusiasm of a first command! For a fortnight we
never left the barracks,--drilling, marching, clothing and feeding
the fighting unit of which we hoped such great things. All our hearts
and souls were in it, and the men themselves were keen and worked
cheerily and well. One shook off depressing philosophies and got
down to the solid reality of two hundred men. The early enthusiasm
returned, and Pip Don--as my pal was called--and I were out for glory
and killing Huns.

The Colonel looked us over and was pleased. Life wasn’t too bad,
after all.

And then the blight set in. An officer was posted to the command of
the little fighting unit.

In a week all the fight had gone out of it. In another week Pip Don
and I declared ourselves beaten. All our interest was killed. The
sergeant-major, for whom I have a lasting respect, was like Bruce’s
spider. Every time he fell, he at once started reclimbing. He alone
was responsible for whatever discipline remained. The captaincy which
I had been promised on certain conditions was filled by some one
else the very day I carried out the conditions. It didn’t matter.
Everything was so hopeless that the only thing left was to get
out,--and that was the one thing we couldn’t do, because we were more
or less under orders for France. It reached such a pitch that even
the thought of being flung away in the open was welcome. At least
it would end it all. There was no secret about it. The Colonel knew.
Didn’t he come to my room one night, and say, “Look here, Gibbs, what
is the matter with your battery?” And didn’t we have another try, and
another?

So for a time Pip Don and I smoked cigarettes on the barrack square,
strolling listlessly from parade to parade, cursing the fate that
should have brought us to such dishonour. We went to every dance in
Limerick, organised concerts, patronised the theatre and filled our
lives as much as we could with outside interests until such time as
we should go to France. And then.--It would be different when shells
began to burst!


3

In the ranks I first discovered that it was a struggle to keep one’s
soul alive. That struggle had proved far more difficult as an officer
in the later days of Salonica. The bitterness of Limerick, together
with the reason, as I saw it, of the wholesale slaughter, made one’s
whole firmament tremble. Rough hands seemed to tear down one’s ideals
and fling then in the mud. One’s picture of God and religion faded
under the red light of war. One’s brain flickered in the turmoil,
seeking something to cling to. What was there? Truth? There was none.
Duty? It was a farce. Honour? It was dead. There was only one thing
left, one thing which might give them all back again,--Love.

If there was not that in one’s heart to keep fragrant, to cherish,
to run to for help, to look forward to as the sunshine at the end of
a long and awful tunnel, then one’s soul would have perished and a
bullet been a merciful thing.

I was all unconscious that it had been my salvation in the ranks,
in Salonica. Now, on the eve of going out to the Western Front I
recognized it for the first time to the full. The effect of it was
odd,--a passionate longing to tear off one’s khaki and leave all this
uncleanness, and at the same time the certain knowledge that one must
go on to the very end, otherwise one would lose it. If I had been
offered a war job in New York, how could I have taken it, unwounded,
the game unfinished, much as New York called me? So its third effect
was a fierce impatience to get to France, making at least one more
battery to help to end the war.

The days dragged by, the longer from the new knowledge within me.
From time to time the Sinn Fein gave signs of renewed activity, and
either we were all confined to barracks in consequence, presumably to
avoid street fighting, or else we hooked into the guns and did route
marches through and round about the town. From time to time arrests
were made, but no open conflict recurred. Apart from our own presence
there was no sign of war in Ireland. Food of all kinds was plentiful
and cheap, restrictions nil. The streets were well lit at night.
Gaiety was the keynote. No aeroplanes dropped bombs on that brilliant
target. The Hun and pro-Hun had spent too much money there.

Finally our training was considered complete. The Colonel had
laboured personally with all the subalterns, and we had benefited by
his caustic method of imparting knowledge. And so once more we sat
stiffly to attention while Generals rode round us, metaphorically
poking our ribs to see if we were fat enough for the slaughter.
Apparently we were, for the fighting units said good-bye to their
parent batteries--how gladly!--and shipped across to England to do
our firing practice.

The camp was at Heytesbury, on the other side of the vast plain which
I had learnt so well as a trooper. We were a curious medley, several
brigades being represented, each battery a little distrustful of the
next, a little inclined to turn up its nose. Instead of being “AC,”
“Beer,” “C” and “Don,” as before, we were given consecutive numbers,
well into the hundreds, and after a week or so of dislocation were
formed into brigades, and each put under the command of a Colonel.
Then the stiffness wore off in friendly competition of trying to pick
the best horses from the remounts. Our men challenged each other to
football, sergeant-majors exchanged notes. Subalterns swapped lies
about the war and Battery Commanders stood each other drinks in
the mess. Within a fortnight we were all certain we’d got the best
Colonel in England, and congratulated ourselves accordingly.

Meanwhile Pip Don and I were still outcasts in our own battery, up
against a policy of continual distrust, suspicion, and scarcely
veiled antagonism. It was at the beginning of April, 1917, that we
first got to Heytesbury, and snow was thick upon the ground. Every
day we had the guns out behind the stables and jumped the men about
at quick, short series, getting them smart and handy, keeping their
interest and keeping them warm. When the snow disappeared we took
the battery out mounted, taking turns in bringing it into action,
shooting over the sights on moving targets--other batteries at work
in the distance--or laying out lines for indirect targets. We took
the staff out on cross-country rides, scouring the country for miles,
and chasing hares--it shook them down into the saddle--carrying out
little signalling schemes. In short, we had a final polish up of all
the knowledge we had so eagerly begun to teach them when he and I had
been in sole command. I don’t think either of us can remember any
single occasion on which the commanding officer took a parade.

Embarkation leave was in full swing, four days for all ranks, and
the brigade next to us was ordered to shoot. Two range officers were
appointed from our brigade. I was one. It was good fun and extremely
useful. We took a party of signallers and all the rations we could
lay hands on, and occupied an old red farmhouse tucked away in a fold
of the plain, in the middle of all the targets. An old man and his
wife lived there, a quaint old couple, toothless and irritable, well
versed in the ways of the army and expert in putting in claims for
fictitious damages. Our job was to observe and register each round
from splinter proofs, send in a signed report of each series, stop
the firing by signalling if any stray shepherd or wanderer were seen
on the range, and to see that the targets for the following day’s
shoot had not been blown down or in any other way rendered useless.
It was a four-day affair, firing ending daily between three and four
p.m. This left us ample time to canter to all the battery positions
and work out ranges, angle of sight and compass bearings for every
target,--information which would have been invaluable when our turn
to fire arrived. Unfortunately, however, several slight alterations
were intentionally made, and all our labour was wasted. Still, it
was a good four days of bracing weather, with little clouds scudding
across a blue sky, never quite certain whether in ten minutes’ time
the whole world would be blotted out in a blizzard. The turf was
springy, miles upon endless miles, and we had some most wonderful
gallops and practised revolver shooting on hares and rooks, going
back to a huge tea and a blazing wood fire in the old, draughty
farmhouse.

The practice over, we packed up and marched back to our respective
batteries. Events of a most cataclysmic nature piled themselves
one upon the other,--friction between the commanding officer and
myself, orders to fire on a certain day, orders to proceed overseas
on a certain later day, and my dismissal from the battery, owing to
the aforesaid friction, on the opening day of the firing. Pip Don
was furious, the commanding officer wasn’t, and I “pursued a policy
of masterly inactivity.” The outcome of the firing was not without
humour, and certainly altered the whole future career of at least
two of us. The Captain and the third subaltern left the battery and
became “details.” The commanding officer became second in command
under a new Major, who dropped out of the blue, and I was posted back
to the battery, together with a new third subaltern, who had just
recovered from wounds.

The business of getting ready was speeded up. The Ordnance
Department, hitherto of miserly reluctance, gave us lavishly of their
best. Gas masks were dished out, and every man marched into a gas
chamber,--there either to get gassed or come out with the assurance
that the mask had no defects! Final issues of clothing and equipment
kept the Q.M.S. sweating from dawn to dusk, and the Major signed
countless pay books, indents and documents generally.

Thus we were ready and eager to go and strafe the Hun in the merry
month of May, 1917.


4

The personnel of the battery was odd but extremely interesting. Pip
Don and myself knew every man, bombardier, corporal and sergeant,
what he had done, tried to do, or could do. In a word we knew the
battery inside out and exactly what it was worth. Not a man of them
had ever been on active service, but we felt quite confident that the
test of shell fire would not find them wanting. The great majority of
them were Scots, and they were all as hard as nails.

The third subaltern was an unknown quantity, but all of us had been
out. The Captain hadn’t.

The Major had been in every battle in France since 1914, but he
didn’t know us or the battery, and if we felt supremely confident in
him, it was, to say the least of it, impossible for him to return
the compliment. He himself will tell you that he didn’t win the
confidence of the battery until after a bold and rapidly-decided
move in full light of day, which put us on the flank of a perfectly
hellish bombardment. That may be true of some of the men, but as far
as Pip Don and myself went, we had adopted him after the first five
minutes, and never swerved,--having, incidentally, some wonderful
arguments about him in the sleeping quarters at Heytesbury with the
subalterns of other batteries.

It is extraordinary how the man at the head of a little show like
that remains steadily in the lime-light. Everything he does, says or
looks is noted, commented on and placed to either his credit or debit
until the men have finally decided that he’s all right or--not. If
they come to the first decision, then the Major’s life is not more
of a burden to him than Divisional and Corps Staffs and the Hun can
make it. The battery will do anything he asks of it, at any hour of
day or night, and will go on shooting till the last man is knocked
out. If, on the other hand, they decide that he is not all right,
God help him. He gives orders. They are not carried out. Why? An
infinite variety of super-excellent excuses. It is a sort of passive
resistance, and he has got to be a mighty clever man to unearth the
root of it and kill it before it kills him.

We went from Southampton to Havre--it looked exactly the same as when
I’d landed there three years previously--and from Havre by train to
Merville. There a guide met us in the chilly dawn and we marched up
to Estaires, the guide halting us at a mud patch looking like the
abomination of desolation, which he said was our wagon line. It was
only about seven miles from the place where I’d been in the cavalry,
and just as muddy, but somehow I was glad to be back. None of those
side shows at the other end of the map had meant anything. France was
obviously where the issue would ultimately be decided, and, apart
from the Dardanelles, where the only real fighting was, or ever had
been. Let us, therefore, get on with the war with all speed. Every
year had brought talk of peace before Christmas, soon dwindling into
columns about preparations for another winter campaign. Even our own
men just landed discussed the chances of being back in Scotland for
the New Year!

We were an Army brigade,--one of a series of illegitimate children
working under Corps orders and lent to Divisions who didn’t evince
any friendliness when it came to leave allotments, or withdrawn from
our Divisional area to be hurried to some other part of the line and
flung in in heaps to stiffen the barrage in some big show. Nobody
loved us. Divisions saved their own people at our expense,--it was
always an Army brigade which hooked in at zero hour and advanced at
zero + 15, until after the Cambrai show. Ordnance wanted to know
who the hell we were and why our indents had a Divisional signature
and not a Corps one, or why they hadn’t both, or neither; A.S.C.
explained with a straight face how we _always_ got the best fresh
meat ration; Corps couldn’t be bothered with us, until there was a
show brewing; Army were polite but incredulous.

The immortal Pyecroft recommends the purchase of a ham as a sure
means of seeing life. As an alternative I suggest joining an Army
brigade.


5

In the old days of trench warfare the Armentières front was known as
the peace sector. The town itself, not more than three thousand yards
from the Hun, was full of happy money-grubbing civilians who served
you an excellent dinner and an equally excellent bottle of wine, or,
if it was clothes you sought, directed you to Burberry’s, almost as
well installed as in the Haymarket. Divisional infantry used it as a
rest billet. Many cook’s carts ambled peacefully along the cobbled
streets laden with eggs, vegetables and drinks for officers’ messes.
Now and then a rifle was fired in the front line resulting, almost,
in a Court of Enquiry. Three shells in three days was considered a
good average, a trench mortar a gross impertinence.

Such was the delightful picture drawn for us by veterans who heard we
were going there.

The first step was the attaching of so many officers and N.C.O.’s to
a Divisional battery in the line for “instruction.” The Captain and
Pip Don went up first and had a merry week. The Major and I went up
next and heard the tale of their exploits. The battery to which we
were attached, in command of a shell-shocked Major, was in a row of
houses, in front of a smashed church on the fringe of the town, and I
learnt to take cover or stand still at the blast of a whistle which
meant aeroplanes; saw a fighting map for the first time; an S.O.S.
board in a gun pit and the explanation of retaliation targets; read
the Divisional Defence Scheme through all its countless pages and
remained in _statu quo_; went round the front-line trench and learned
that a liaison officer didn’t take his pyjamas on raid nights;
learned also that a trench mortar bombardment was a messy, unpleasant
business; climbed rung by rung up a dark and sooty chimney, or was
hauled up in a coffin-like box, to a wooden deck fitted with seats
and director heads and telescopes and gazed down for the first time
on No Man’s Land and the Hun trench system and as far as the eye
could reach in his back areas, learning somewhat of the difficulties
of flank observation. Every day of that week added depths to the
conviction of my exceeding ignorance. Serbia had been nothing like
this. It was elementary, child’s play. The Major too uttered strange
words like calibration, meteor corrections, charge corrections. A
memory of Salonica came back to me of a huge marquee in which we had
all sat and listened to a gilded staff officer who had drawn diagrams
on a blackboard and juggled with just such expressions while we tried
hard not to go to sleep in the heat; and afterwards the Battery
Commanders had argued it and decided almost unanimously that it was
“all right for schools of gunnery but not a damn bit o’ use in the
field.” To the Major, however, these things seemed as ordinary as
whisky and pickles.

I came to the conclusion that the sooner I began to learn something
the better. It wasn’t easy because young Pip Don had the hang of it
all, so he and the Major checked each other’s figures while I looked
on, vainly endeavouring to follow. There was never any question
as to which of us ought to have had the second pip. However it
worked itself out all right because, owing to the Major, he got his
captaincy before I did, which was the best possible thing that could
have happened, for I then became the Major’s right-hand man and felt
the responsibility of it.

At the end of our week of instruction the brigade went into action,
two batteries going to the right group, two to the left. The group
consisted of the Divisional batteries, trench mortar batteries, the
60-pounders and heavy guns attached like ourselves. We were on the
left, the position being just in front of a 4.5 howitzer battery and
near the Lunatic Asylum.

It was an old one, four gun pits built up under a row of huge elms,
two being in a row of houses. The men slept in bunks in the pits
and houses; for a mess we cleaned out a room in the château at the
corner which had been sadly knocked about, and slept in the houses
near the guns. The château garden was full of lilac and roses, the
beds all overgrown with weeds and the grass a jungle, but still very
beautiful. Our zone had been allotted and our own private chimney
O.P.--the name of which I have forgotten--and we had a copy of that
marvellous defence scheme.

Then for a little we found ourselves in the routine of trench
warfare,--tours of duty at the O.P. on alternate days and keeping
a detailed log book in its swaying deck, taking our turn weekly to
supply a liaison officer with the infantry who went up at dark, dined
in their excellent mess, slept all night in the signalling officer’s
bunk, and returned for a shave and a wash after breakfast next
morning; firing retaliation salvos at the call of either the O.P.
or the infantry; getting up rations and ammunition and letters at a
regular hour every night; sending off the countless “returns” which
are the curse of soldiering; and quietly feeling our feet.

The O.P. was in an eastern suburb called Houplines, some twenty
minutes’ walk along the tram lines. At dawn one had reached it with
two signallers and was looking out from the upper deck upon an
apparently peaceful countryside of green fields splashed yellow with
mustard patches, dotted with sleepy cottages, from whose chimneys
smoke never issued, woods and spinneys in all the glory of their
spring budding running up on to the ridge, the Aubers ridge. The
trenches were an intricate series of gashes hidden by Nature with
poppies and weeds. Then came a grim brown space unmarked by any
trench, tangled with barbed wire, and then began the repetition of it
all except for the ridge at our own trenches. The early hours were
chilly and misty and one entered in the log book, “6 a.m. Visibility
nil.”

But with the sun the mist rolled up like a blind at one’s window and
the larks rocketed into the clear blue as though those trenches were
indeed deserted. Away on the left was a town, rising from the curling
river in terraces of battered ruins, an inexpressible desolation,
silent, empty, dead. Terrible to see that gaping skeleton of a town
in the flowering countryside. Far in the distance, peeping above the
ridge and visible only through glasses, was a faint pencil against
the sky--the great factory chimney outside Lille.

Peace seemed the keynote of it all in the soft perfumed heat of that
early summer. Yet eyes looked steadily out from every chimney and
other eyes from the opposite ridge; and with just a word down the
wire trenches went in smoking heaps, houses fell like packs of cards
touched by a child’s finger, noise beat upon the brain and Death
was the master whom we worshipped, upon whose altar we made bloody
sacrifice.

We hadn’t been there much more than a week when we had our first
hint of the hourly reality of it. The third subaltern, who hadn’t
properly recovered from the effect of his wound, was on his way up to
the O.P. one morning and had a misadventure with a shell. He heard it
coming, a big one, and sought refuge in the nearest house. The shell
unfortunately selected the same house.

When the dust had subsided and the ruins had assumed their final
shape the subaltern emerged, unwounded, but unlike his former
self.--The doctor diagnosed shell shock and the work went on without
him.

It seemed as though that were the turning point in the career of the
peace sector.

The Hun began a leisurely but persistent destruction of chimneys with
five-nines. One heard the gun in the distance, not much more than the
popping of a champagne cork at the other end of the Carlton Grill.
Some seconds later you thought you heard the inner circle train
come in at Baker Street. Dust choked you, the chimney rocked in the
frightful rush of wind, followed by a soul-shaking explosion,--and
you looked through the black aperture of the chimney to see a pillar
of smoke and falling earth spattering down in the sunshine. And
from the lower deck immediately beneath you came the voice of the
signaller, “They ought to give us sailor suits up ’ere, sir!”

And passing a finger round the inside of your sticky collar which
seemed suddenly a little tight, you sat down firmly again and said,
“Yes.--Is the steward about?”

Within sixty seconds another champagne cork popped. Curse the Carlton
Grill!

In addition to the delights of the O.P. the Hun “found” the battery.
It happened during the week that the Captain came up to have a look
round and in the middle of the night. I was sleeping blissfully at
liaison and returned next morning to find a most unpleasant smell
of cordite hanging about, several houses lying on the pavement,
including the one Pip Don and I shared, great branches all over the
road and one gun pit looking somewhat bent. It appeared that Pip
Don had spent the remainder of the night rounding up gunners in his
pyjamas. No one was hurt. The Captain returned to the wagon line
during the course of the morning.

Having found us, the Hun put in a few hundred rounds whenever he
felt bored,--during the 9 a.m. parade, at lunch time, before tea and
at the crack of dawn. The old red garden wall began to look like a
Gruyère cheese, the road was all pockmarked, the gun pits caught fire
and had to be put out, the houses began to fall even when there was
no shelling and it became a very unhealthy corner. Through it all the
Major was a tower of strength. So long as he was there the shelling
didn’t seem to matter, but if he were absent one didn’t _quite_
know whether to give the order to clear for the time being or stick
it out. The Hun’s attentions were not by any means confined to our
position. The systematic bombardment of the town had begun and it
became the usual thing to hear a horrible crackling at night and see
the whole sky red. The Major of one of our batteries was killed, the
senior subaltern badly wounded and several of their guns knocked out
by direct hits. We were lucky.


6

Meanwhile the Right Group, who had been watching this without envy
from the undisturbed calm of the countryside, decided to make a
daylight raid by way of counter-attraction and borrowed us for the
occasion. The Major and I went down to reconnoitre a battery position
and found a delightful spot behind a hedge under a row of spreading
elms. Between the two, camouflage was unnecessary and, as a cobbled
road ran immediately in front of the hedge, there was no danger of
making any tracks. It was a delightful position with a farmhouse
two hundred yards along the road. The relief of getting out of the
burning city, of not having to dodge shells at unexpected moments, of
knowing that the rations and ammunition could come up without taking
a twenty to one chance of being scuppered!

The raid was just like any other raid, except that it happened to
be the first barrage we fired, the first barrage table we worked
out, the first time we used the 106 fuse, and the first time that at
the eleventh hour we were given the task, in which someone else had
failed, of cutting the wire. I had been down with the Major when he
shot the battery in,--and hadn’t liked it. In places there was no
communication trench at all and we had to crawl on our bellies over a
chaos of tumbled earth and revetments in full view of any sniper, and
having to make frequent stops because the infernal signaller would
lag behind and turn off. And a few hours before the show the Major
was called upon to go down there and cut the wire at all costs. Pip
Don was signalling officer. He and every available signaller, stacks
of wire and lamps, spread themselves in a living chain between the
Major and the front-line trench and me at the battery. Before going
the Major asked me if I had the barrage at my finger tips. I had.
Then if he didn’t get back in time, he said, I could carry out the
show all right? I could,--and watched him go with a mouth full of
bitter curses against the Battery Commander who had failed to cut
that wire. My brain drew lurid pictures of stick-bombs, minnies,
pineapples, pip-squeaks and five-nines being the reason why the Major
wouldn’t get back “in time.” And I sat down by the telephonist,
praying for the call that would indicate at least his safe arrival in
the front-line trench.

Beside every gun lay a pile of 106 fuses ready. Orders were to
go on firing if every German plane in the entire Vaterland came
over.--Still they weren’t through on the ’phone!

I went along from gun to gun, making sure that everything was all
right and insisting on the necessity of the most careful laying,
stopping from time to time to yell to the telephonist “Through yet?”
and getting a “No, sir” every time that almost made me hear those
cursed minnies dropping on the Major. At last he called up. The
tension was over. We had to add a little for the 106 fuse but each
gun was registered on the wire within four rounds. The Major was a
marvel at that. Then the shoot began.

Aeroplanes came winging over, regardless of our Archies. But we,
regardless of the aeroplanes, were doing “battery fire 3 secs.” as
steadily as if we were on Salisbury Plain, getting from time to time
the order, “Five minutes more right.” We had three hundred rounds to
do the job with and only about three per gun were left when the order
“Stop” arrived. I stopped and hung on to the ’phone. The Major’s
voice, coming as though from a million miles away, said, “Napoo wire.
How many more rounds?”

“Three per gun, sir.”

“Right.--All guns five degrees more right for the onlooker, add two
hundred, three rounds gun fire.”

I made it so, received the order to stand down, put the fitter and
the limber gunners on to sponging out,--and tried to convince myself
that all the noise down in front was miles away from the Major and
Pip Don.--It seemed years before they strolled in, a little muddy but
as happy as lambs.

It occurred to me then that I knew something at least of what our
women endured at home every day and all day,--just one long suspense,
without even the compensation of _doing_ anything.

The raid came off an hour or so later like clockwork, without
incident. Not a round came back at us and we stood down eventually
with the feeling of having put in a good day’s work.

We were a very happy family in those days. The awful discouragement
of Limerick had lifted. Bombardments and discomforts were subjects
for humour, work became a joy, “crime” in the gun line disappeared
and when the time arrived for sending the gunners down to the wagon
line for a spell there wasn’t one who didn’t ask if he might be
allowed to stay on. It was due entirely to the Major. For myself I
can never be thankful enough for having served under him. He came at
a time when one didn’t care a damn whether one were court-martialled
and publicly disgraced. One was “through” with the Army and cared
not a curse for discipline or appearances. With his arrival all
that was swept away without a word being said. Unconsciously he
set a standard to which one did one’s utmost to live, and that
from the very moment of his arrival. One found that there was
honour in the world and loyalty, that duty was not a farce. In some
extraordinary way he embodied them all, forcing upon one the desire
for greater self-respect; and the only method of acquiring it was
effort, physical and mental, in order to get somewhere near his
high standard. I gave him the best that was in me. When he left the
brigade, broken in health by the ceaseless call upon his own effort,
he wrote me a letter. Of all that I shall take back with me to civil
life from the Army that letter is what I value most.


7

We had all cherished the hope that we had seen the last of the town;
that Right Group, commanded by our own colonel, would keep us in our
present position.

There was a distinct drop in the mental temperature when, the raid
over, we received the order to report back to Left Group. But
we still clung to the hope that we might be allowed to choose a
different gun position. That avenue of trees was far too accurately
pin-pointed by the Hun. Given, indeed, that there were many other
places from which one could bring just as accurate and concentrated
fire to bear on our part of the zone, it was criminal folly to order
us back to the avenue. That, however, was the order. It needed a big
effort to find any humour in it.

We hooked in and pulled out of that peaceful raid position with a
sigh of regret and bumped our way back over the cobbles through the
burning town, keeping a discreet distance between vehicles. The two
houses which had been the emplacements of the left section were
unrecognizable as gun pits, so we used the other four pits and put
the left section forward in front of the Asylum under camouflage. Not
less than ten balloons looked straight down on the gun muzzles. The
detachment lived in a cellar under the Asylum baths.

Then Pip Don got his captaincy and went to another battery, to the
safety and delights of the wagon line. One missed him horribly. We
got a new subaltern who had never been out before but who was as
stout as a lion. Within a few days our Captain was sent back ill and
I followed Pip Don to the wagon lines as Captain in my own battery,
a most amazing stroke of luck. We foregathered in a restaurant
at Estaires and held a celebration dinner together, swearing that
between us we would show the finest teams and the best harness in
France, discussing the roads we meant to build through the mud, the
improvements we were instantly going to start in the horse standings.

Great dreams that lasted just three days! Then his Major went on
leave and he returned to command the battery, within five hundred
yards of ours. The following day I was hurriedly sent for to find the
whole world reeking with gas, mustard gas. Everybody had streaming
eyes and noses. Within three minutes I was as bad as the rest.

How anybody got through the next days I don’t know. Four days and
nights it lasted, one curious hissing rain of shells which didn’t
burst with a crash but just uttered a little pop, upon which the
ground became spattered with yellow liquid and a greyish fog
spread round about. Five-nines, seventeen-inch, high explosive and
incendiary shells were mixed in with the gas. Communications went
wholesale. Fires roared in every quarter of the town. Hell was let
loose and always the gas choked and blinded. Hundreds of civilians
died of it although they had previously been warned repeatedly to
clear out. The conviction was so strong that Armentières was the
peace sector that the warnings were disregarded.

The howitzer battery behind us had been reinforced with ninety
men and two officers the day before the show started. After that
first night one officer was left. He had been up a chimney O.P.
all night. The rest went away again in ambulance wagons. It was a
holocaust, a shambles. A colossal attack was anticipated, and as all
communications had gone the signallers were out in gas masks all over
the town, endeavouring to repair lines broken in a hundred places,
and a constant look-out was kept for S.O.S. signals from the infantry.

Except when shooting all our men were kept underground in gas masks,
beating the gas away with “flappers.” The shelling was so ceaseless
and violent round about the position that when men were sent from
one section to another with messages they went in couples, their
departure being telephoned to the section. If their arrival was not
reported within ten minutes a search party was sent to find them. To
put one’s head above ground at any moment of day or night was to take
one’s life in one’s hands. Ammunition went up, and gun pits caught
fire and the rain of shells never ceased. To get to the O.P. one had
to fling oneself flat in a ditch countless times, always with an ear
stretched for the next shell. From minute to minute it was a toss-up,
and blackened corpses and screaming, mangled wounded left a bloody
trail in the stinking, cobbled streets. The peace sector!

Was it just a Boche measure to prevent us from using the town as
billets any more? Or was it a retaliation for the taking of the
Messines Ridge which we had watched from our chimney not many weeks
before, watched in awe and wonder, thanking God we were not taking
part in that carnage? The unhealthy life and the unceasing strain
told even on the Major. We were forced to live by the light of
candles in a filthy cellar beneath the château, snatching uneasy
periods of rest when one lay on a bunk with goggles on one’s smarting
eyes, breathing with labour, listening to the heavy thud of shells up
above and the wheezing and sneezing of the unfortunate signallers,
getting up and going about one’s work in a sort of stupor, dodging
shells rather by instinct than reason and tying up wounded with a
dull sickness at the pit of one’s stomach.

But through it all one’s thoughts of home intertwined with the reek
of death like honeysuckle with deadly nightshade, as though one’s
body were imprisoned in that foul underground hole while one’s mind
soared away and refused to come back. It was all a strange dream,
a clammy nightmare. Letters came, filled with all the delicious
everyday doings of another world, filling one’s brain with a scent of
verbena and briar rose, like the cool touch of a woman’s hands on the
forehead of a man in delirium.


8

On the morning of the fifth day the gas shelling ceased and the big
stuff became spasmodic,--concentrations of twenty minutes’ duration.

One emerged into the sun, sniffing carefully. The place was even
more unrecognizable than one had imagined possible. The château
still stood but many direct hits had filled the garden with blocks
of stone. The Asylum was a mass of ruins, the grounds pitted with
shell holes. The town itself was no longer a place to dine and shop.
A few draggled inhabitants slunk timidly about like rats, probing the
debris of what had once been their homes. The cobbled streets were
great pits where seventeen-inch shells had landed, half filled again
with the houses which had toppled over on either side. The hotels,
church and shops in the big square were gutted by fire, great beams
and house fronts blocking the roadway. Cellars were blown in and
every house yawned open to the sky. In place of the infantry units
and transports clattering about the streets was a desolate silent
emptiness punctuated by further bombardments and the echoing crash of
falling walls. And, over all, that sickly smell of mustard.

It was then that the Left Group Commander had a brain wave and
ordered a trial barrage on the river Lys in front of Frelinghein.
It was about as mad a thing as making rude noises at a wounded
rhinoceros, given that every time a battery fired the Boche opened a
concentration.

Pip Don had had three seventeen-inch in the middle of his position.
Nothing much was found of one gun and its detachment except a head
and a boot containing a human foot.

The Group Commander had given the order, however, and there was
nothing to do but to get on with it.--

The barrage was duly worked out. It was to last eighteen minutes with
a certain number of lifts and switches. The Group Commander was going
to observe it from one of the chimneys.

My job was to look after the left section in the open in front of the
Asylum. Ten minutes before zero I dived into the cellar under the
baths breathless, having dodged three five-nines. There I collected
the men and gathered them under cover of the doorway. There we waited
for a minute to see where the next would burst. It hit a building
twenty-five yards away.

“Now!” said I, “double!” and we ran, jumping shell holes and flinging
ourselves flat for one more five-nine. The guns were reached all
right, the camouflage pulled back and everything made ready for
action. Five Hun balloons gazed down at us straight in front, and
three of his aeroplanes came and circled low over our heads, and
about every minute the deafening crash of that most demoralizing
five-nine burst just behind us. I lay down on the grass between the
two guns and gazed steadfastly at my wrist watch.

“Stand by!”

The hands of the Numbers 3 stole out to the handles of the firing
lever.

“Fire!”

The whole of Armentières seemed to fire at once. The Group Commander
up in his chimney ought to have been rather pleased. Four rounds
per gun per minute was the rate. Then at zero plus one I heard that
distant pop of Hun artillery and with the usual noise the ground
heaved skyward between the two guns just in front. It wasn’t more
than twelve and a half yards away. The temptation to run made me itch
all over.

Pop! it went again. My forehead sank on to my wrist watch.

A good bracket, twelve and a half yards behind, and again lumps of
earth spattered on to my back. The itch became a disease. The next
round, according to all the laws of gunnery, ought to fall between my
collar and my waist.--

I gave the order to lift, straining my ears.

There came no pop. I held my breath so that I might hear better,--and
only heard the thumping of my heart. We lifted again and again.--

I kept them firing for three full seconds after the allotted
time before I gave the order to cease fire. The eighteen
minutes--lifetimes--were over and that third pop didn’t come till
we had stopped. Then having covered the guns we ran helter-skelter,
each man finding his own way to the cellar through the most juicy
bombardment we’d heard for quite twenty-four hours.

Every man answered to his name in the cellar darkness and there was
much laughter and tobacco smoke while we got back our breath.

Half an hour later their bombardment ceased. The sergeant and I went
back to have a look at the guns. Number 5 was all right. Number 6,
however, had had a direct hit, one wheel had burnt away and she lay
on her side, looking very tired.

I don’t know how many other guns had been knocked out in the
batteries taking part, but, over and above the value of the
ammunition, that trial barrage cost at least one eighteen-pounder!
And but for a bit of luck would have cost the lives of the detachment.


9

The Major decided to move the battery and gained the reluctant
consent of the Group Commander who refused to believe that there
had been any shelling there till he saw the gun lying burnt and
smashed and the pits burnt and battered. The Hun seemed to take a
permanent dislike to the Asylum and its neighbourhood. It may have
been coincidence but any time a man showed there a rain of shells
chivvied him away. It took the fitter and the detachment about seven
trips before they got a new wheel on, and at any hour of day or
night you could bet on at least a handful of four-twos. The gas was
intermittent.

At four o’clock in the morning after a worrying night when I had
gone out twice to extinguish gun pits reported on fire, the Major
announced that he was going to get the gun out and disappeared out of
the cellar into the shell-lit darkness.

Two hours later he called up from Group Headquarters and told me
to get the other out and take her to Archie Square, a square near
the station, so-called because a couple of anti-aircraft guns had
used it as an emplacement in the peace days. With one detachment on
each drag rope we ran the gauntlet in full daylight of a four-two
bombardment, rushing shell holes and what had once been flower beds,
keeping at a steady trot, the sweat pouring off us.

The Major met us in Archie Square and we went back to our cellar for
breakfast together.

Of the alternative positions one section was in Chapelle
d’Armentières. We hoped great things of it. It looked all right, pits
being built in the back yards of a row of small houses, with plenty
of trees for cover and lots of fruit for the men,--raspberries,
plums, and red currants. Furthermore the shell holes were all old.
The only crab about it was getting there. Between us and it were two
much-shelled spots called Sandbag Corner and Snow Corner. Transports
used to canter past them at night and the Hun had an offensive habit
of dropping barrages on both of them any time after dark. But there
was a place called Crown Prince House at Sandbag Corner and I fancy
he used this as a datum point. While the left section went straight
on to the Chapelle the other two turned to the right at Snow Corner
and were to occupy some houses just along the road and a garden next
to them under camouflage.

I shall not forget the night of that move in a hurry. In the
afternoon the Major returned to the battery at tea time. There was no
shelling save our own anti-aircraft, and perfect sunshine.

“The teams are due at ten o’clock,” said he. “The Hun will start
shelling precisely at that time. We will therefore move _now_. Let us
function.” We functioned!

The battery was called together and the nature of the business
explained. Each detachment pulled down the parados in the rear of
the gun pits and such part of the pit itself as was necessary to
allow the gun to come out,--no light task because the pits had been
built to admit the gun from the front. As soon as each reported ready
double detachments were told off to the drag ropes and the gun,
camouflaged with branches, was run out and along the lane and round
the corner of the château. There they were all parked, one by one.
Then the ammunition was brought, piles of it. Then all the gun stores
and kits.

At ten o’clock the teams were heard at the other end of the cobbled
street. A moment later shells began to burst on the position, gun
fire. From the cover afforded by the château and the wall we loaded
up without casualty and hooked in, bits of shell and wall flying over
our heads viciously.

I took charge of the left section in Archie Square. The vehicles were
packed, dixies tied on underneath. The Major was to follow with the
four guns and the other subaltern at ten minutes’ interval.

Keeping fifty yards between vehicles I set off, walking in front
of the leading gun team. We clattered along the cobbled streets,
rattling and banging. The station was being bombarded. We had to go
over the level crossing a hundred yards or so in rear of it. I gave
the order to trot. A piece of shell sent up a shower of sparks in
front of the rear gun team. The horses bucked violently and various
dixies fell off, but I kept on until some distance to a flank under
the houses. The dixies were rescued and re-tied. There was Sandbag
Corner to navigate yet, _and_ Snow Corner. It was horribly dark,
impossible to see shell holes until you were into them, and all the
time shells were bursting in every direction. The road up to the two
Corners ran straight towards the Hun, directly enfiladed by him.
We turned into it at a walk and were half-way along when a salvo
fell round Crown Prince House just ahead. I halted immediately,
wondering where in heaven’s name the next would fall, the horses
snorting and prancing at my back. For a couple of minutes there was
a ragged burst of gun fire while we stood with the bits missing us.
Then I gave the order to trot. The horses needed no encouragement.
I could only just keep in front, carrying maps and a torch and with
most of my equipment on. We carried on past Crown Prince House, past
Sandbag Corner and walked again, blown and tottering, towards Snow
Corner, and only just got past it when a barrage dropped right on the
cross-roads. It was there that the Major would have to turn to the
right with his four guns presently. Please God it would stop before
he came along.

We weren’t very far behind the support lines now and the pop-pop-pop,
pop-pop-pop of machine guns was followed by the whistling patter of
bullets. I kept the teams as close under the houses as I dared. There
was every kind of devilment to bring a horse down, open drains, coils
of tangled wire, loose debris. Eventually we reached the Chapelle and
the teams went off at the trot as soon as the ammunition was dumped
and the kits were off.

Then in the black night we heaved and hauled the guns into their
respective pits and got them on to their aiming posts and S.O.S.
lines.

It was 3 a.m. before I got back to the new headquarters, a house in
an orchard, and found the Major safe and sound.

A couple of days later the Major was ordered to a rest camp and at
a moment’s notice I found myself in command of the battery. It was
one of the biggest moments of my life. Although I had gone down to
take the Captain’s place my promotion hadn’t actually gone through
and I was still a subaltern, faced with the handling of six guns at
an extremely difficult moment and with the lives of some fifty men
in my hands, to say nothing of the perpetual responsibility to the
infantry in the front line.

It was only when the Major had said good-bye and I was left that
I began to realize just how greatly one had depended on him. All
the internal arrangements which he had handled so easily that they
seemed no trouble loomed up as insurmountable difficulties--returns,
ammunition, rations, relieving the personnel--all over and above the
constant worry of gun detachments being shelled out, lines being
cut, casualties being got away. It was only then that I realized
what a frightful strain he must have endured during those days of
continual gas and bombardment, the feeling of personal responsibility
towards every single man, the vital necessity through it all of
absolute accuracy of every angle and range, lest by being flustered
or careless one should shoot one’s own infantry, the nights spent
with one ear eternally on the telephone and the added strain of
sleeplessness.--A lonely job, Battery Commander.

I realized, too, what little use I had been to him. Carrying out
orders, yes, but not really taking any of the weight off his
shoulders.

The insignificance of self was never so evident as that first night
with my ear to the ’phone, all the night noises accentuated in the
darkness, the increasing machine-gun fire which might mean an attack,
the crashing of shells which might get my supply wagons on their way
back, the jump when the ’phone buzzed suddenly, making my heart leap
against my ribs, only to put me through to Group for an order to send
over thirty rounds on a minnie firing in C 16 d o 4.--It was good to
see the blackness turn to grey and recognize objects once more in
the room, to know that at last the infantry were standing down and
to sink at last into deep sleep as the grey became rose and the sun
awoke.

Do the men ever realize, I wonder, that the Major who snaps out
orders, who curses so freely, who gives them extra guards and docks
their pay, can be a human being like themselves whose one idea is
_their_ comfort and safety, that they may strafe the Hun and not get
strafed?

It was my first experience in handling subalterns, too, and I came
to see them from a new point of view. Hitherto one’s estimation
of them had been limited by their being good fellows or not. The
question of their knowledge or ignorance hadn’t mattered. One could
always give them a hand or do the thing oneself. Now it was reversed.
Their knowledge, working capabilities and stout-heartedness came
first. Their being good fellows was secondary, but helpful. The most
ignorant will learn more in a week in the line than in ten weeks in a
gunnery school.


10

The first few days in the new position were calm. It gave one time to
settle down. We did a lot of shooting and apart from a spare round or
two in our direction nothing came back in return. The Hun was still
plastering the Asylum and the avenue at all times of day, to our
intense joy. The more he shelled it the more we chuckled. One felt
that the Major had done Fritz in the eye. So we gathered plums and
raspberries in the warm sun, rejoicing that the horrible smell of
mustard gas was no more. There was a fly in the ointment, of course.
It consisted of several thousand rounds of ammunition in the Asylum
which we were ordered to salvage. The battery clerk, a corporal of
astounding stout-heartedness who had had countless escapes by an
inch already in the handling of it, and who subsequently became
one of the best sergeants in the battery, undertook to go and see
what could be done. He took with him the fitter, a lean Scot, who
was broken-hearted because he had left a file there and who wanted
to go and scratch about the ruins to try and recover it. These two
disappeared into the Asylum during a momentary lull. Before they
returned the Hun must have sent in about another fifteen hundred
rounds, all big stuff. They came in hot and covered with brick dust.
The fitter had got his file and showed it with joy and affection. The
corporal had made a rough count of the rounds and estimated that at
least a couple of hundred had “gone up” or were otherwise rendered
useless.

To my way of thinking it would have been manslaughter to have sent
teams to get the stuff away, so I decided to let time solve the
problem and leave well alone. Eventually it did solve itself. Many
weeks later another battery occupied the position (Poor devils. It
still reeked of gas) and I had the pleasure of showing the Battery
Commander where the ammunition was and handing it over.

Meanwhile the Boche had “found” the left and centre sections.
In addition to that the Group Commander conceived a passion to
experiment with guns in the front-line trenches, to enfilade the
enemy over open sights at night and generally to put the fear of God
into him. Who more suitable than the Army brigade battery commanded
by that subaltern?

I was sent for and told all about it, and sent to reconnoitre
suitable positions. Seeing that the enemy had all the observation and
a vast preponderance of artillery I did all in my power to dissuade
the Commander. He had been on active service, however, before I was
born--he told me so--and had forgotten more things than I should ever
know. He had, indeed, forgotten them.

The long and short of it was that I took a subaltern with me, and
armed with compasses and trench maps, we studied the whole zone
at distances varying from three to five hundred yards from the
enemy front-line trench. The best place of all happened to be near
Battalion Headquarters. Needless to say, the Colonel ordered me off.

“You keep your damn things away. There’s quite enough shelling here
without your planting a gun. Come and have a drink.”

Eventually, however, we got two guns “planted” with cover for the
detachments. It was an absolute waste of guns. The orders were only
to fire if the enemy came over the top by day and on special targets
by night. The difficulty of rationing them was extreme, it made
control impossible from battery headquarters, because the lines went
half a dozen times a day and left me only two sections to do all the
work with.

The only thing they ever fired at was a very near balloon one
afternoon. Who gave the order to fire remains a mystery. The sergeant
swore the infantry Colonel gave it.

My own belief is that it was a joy shoot on the sergeant’s part. He
was heartily cursed for his pains, didn’t hit the balloon, and within
twenty-four hours the gun was knocked out. The area was liberally
shelled, to the discomfort of the infantry, so if the Colonel did
give the order, he had only himself to thank for the result.

The headquarters during this time was an odd round brick building,
like a pagoda in the middle of a narrow orchard. A high red brick
wall surrounded the orchard which ran down to the road. At the road
edge were two houses completely annihilated. Plums, greengages,
raspberries and red currants were in abundance. The signallers and
servants were in dug-outs outside the wall. Curiously enough, this
place was not marked on the map. Nor did the Hun seem to have it on
his aeroplane photographs. In any case, although he shelled round
about, I can only remember one which actually burst inside the walls.

Up at Chapelle d’Armentières the left section was almost
unrecognizable. Five-nines had thumped it out of all shape, smashed
down the trees, ploughed up the garden and scattered the houses into
the street. The detachment spent its time day and night in clearing
out into neighbouring ditches and dug-outs, and coming back again.
They shot between whiles, neither of the guns having been touched,
and I don’t think they slept at all. None of them had shaved for days.

As regards casualties we were extraordinarily lucky. Since leaving
the town not a man had been hit or gassed. For the transport at night
I had reconnoitred a road which avoided the town entirely and those
dangerous cross-roads, and took them right through the support line,
within a quarter of a mile of the Boche. The road was unshelled, and
only a few machine-gun bullets spat on it from time to time. So they
used it nightly, and not a horse or driver was touched.

Then the Right Group had another raid and borrowed us again. The
white house and the orchard which we had used before were unoccupied.
I decided to squeeze up a bit and get all six guns in. The night of
the move was a colossal undertaking. The teams were late, and the
Hun chose to drop a gas barrage round us. More than that, in the
afternoon I had judged my time and dodged in between two bombardments
to visit the left section. They were absolutely done in, so tired
that they could hardly keep their eyes open. The others were little
better, having been doing all the shooting for days. However, I
ordered them to vacate the left section and come along to me at
Battery Headquarters for a rest before the night’s work. They dragged
themselves there, and fell asleep in heaps in the orchard in the
wet. The subaltern and the sergeant came into the building, drank a
cup of tea each and filled the place with their snores. So I sent
for another sergeant and suggested that he and his men, who had had
a brief rest that day, should go and get the left section guns out
while these people handled his as best they could. He jumped at it
and swore he’d get the guns out, begging me to keep my teams well to
the side of the road. If he had to canter they were coming out, and
he was going to ride the lead horse himself,--splendid fellow.

Then I collected the subalterns and detailed them for the plan of
campaign. The left section man said he was going with his guns. So I
detailed the junior to see the guns into the new positions, and send
me back the ammunition wagons as he emptied them. The third I kept
with the centre section. The corporal clerk was to look after the
headquarters. I was to function between the lot.

The teams should have been up at 9 p.m. They didn’t arrive till ten,
by which time the gas hung about thick, and people were sneezing
right and left. Then they hung up again because of a heavy shelling
at the corner on the way to the left section. However, they got
through at last, and after an endless wait, that excellent sergeant
came trotting back with both guns intact. We had, meanwhile yanked
out the centre section and sent them back. The forward guns came
back all right from the trenches, but no ammunition wagons or G.S.
returned from the position, although filled by us ages before and
sent off.

So I got on a bicycle and rode along to see what the trouble was. It
was a poisonous road, pitch dark, very wet and full of shell holes.
I got there to find a column of vehicles standing waiting all mixed
up, jerked the bicycle into a hedge and went downstairs to find the
subaltern.

There was the Major! Was I pleased?--I felt years younger. However,
this was his night off. I was running the show. “Carry on, Old
Thing,” said he.

So I went out into the chaotic darkness and began sorting things out.
Putting the subaltern in charge of the ammunition I took the guns. It
was a herculean task to get those six bundooks through the wet and
spongy orchard with men who were fresh. With these men it was asking
the impossible. But they did it, at the trot.

You know the sort of thing--“Take the strain--together--heave!
Together--heave! Now keep her going! Once more--heave!
Together--heave! and again--heave! Easy all! Have a blow--Now
look here, you fellows, you _must_ wait for the word and put your
weight on _together_. Heels into the mud and lean on it, but lean
together, all at the same moment, and she’ll go like a baby’s pram.
Now then, come on and I’ll bet you a bottle of Bass all round that
you get her going at a canter if only you’ll heave together--Take
the strain--_together_--heave! Ter-rot! Canter! Come on now, like
that--splendid,--and you owe me a bottle of Bass all round.”

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? but oh, my God, to see those poor devils,
dropping with fatigue, putting their last grunting ounce on to it,
with always just one more heave left! Magnificent fellows, who worked
till they dropped, and then staggered up again, in the face of gas
and five-nines, and went on shooting till they were dead,--_they’ve_
won this war for us if anybody has, these Tommies who don’t know
when they’re beaten, these “simple soldiers,” as the French call
them, who grouse like hell but go on working whether the rations come
up or whether they don’t, until they’re senseless from gas or stop
a shell and get dropped into a hole in an army blanket. These are
the men who have saved England and the world, these,--and not the
gentlemen at home who make fortunes out of munitions and “war work,”
and strike for more pay, not the _embusqué_ who cannot leave England
because he’s “indispensable” to his job, not the politicians and
vote-seekers, who bolster up their parties with comfortable lies more
dangerous than mustard gas, not the M.L.O.’s and R.T.O.’s and the
rest of the alphabetic fraternity and Brass Hats, who live in comfort
in back areas, doing a lot of brain work and filling the Staff leave
boat,--not any of these, but the cursing, spitting, lousy Tommy, God
save him!


11

The last of the guns was in by three o’clock in the morning, but
there wasn’t a stitch of camouflage in the battery. However, I
sent every last man to bed, having my own ideas on the question
of camouflage. The subaltern and I went back to the house. The
ammunition was also unloaded and the last wagon just about to depart.
The servants had tea and sandwiches waiting, a perfect godsend.

“What about tracks?” The Major cocked an eye in my direction. He was
fully dressed, lying on his valise. I stifled a million yawns, and
spoke round a sandwich. “Old Thing and I are looking after that when
it gets light.”

“Old Thing” was the centre section commander, blinking like a tired
owl, a far-away expression on his face.

“And camouflage?” said the Major.

“Ditto,” said I.

The servants were told to call us in an hour’s time. I was asleep
before I’d put my empty tea-cup on the ground. A thin grey light was
creeping up when I was roughly shaken. I put out a boot and woke Old
Thing. Speechless, we got up shivering, and went out. The tracks
through the orchard were feet deep.

We planted irregular branches and broke up the wheel tracks. Over
the guns was a roof of wire netting which I’d had put up a day
previously. Into these we stuck trailing vine branches one by one,
wet and cold. The Major appeared in the middle of the operation
and silently joined forces. By half-past four the camouflage was
complete. Then the Major broke the silence.

“I’m going up to shoot ’em in,” he said.

Old Thing, dozing on a gun seat, woke with a start and stared. He
hadn’t been with the Major as long as I had.

“D’you mind if one detachment does the whole thing?” said I. “They’re
all just about dead, but C’s got a kick left.”

The Major nodded. Old Thing staggered away, collected two signallers
who looked like nothing human, and woke up C sub-section. They came
one by one, like silent ghosts through the orchard, tripping over
stumps and branches, sightless with sleep denied.

The Major took a signaller and went away. Old Thing and I checked
aiming posts over the compass.

Fifteen minutes later the O.P. rang through, and I reported ready.

The sun came out warm and bright, and at nine o’clock we “stood
down.” Old Thing and I supported each other into the house and fell
on our valises with a laugh. Some one pulled off our gum boots. It
must have been a servant but I don’t know. I was asleep before they
were off.

The raid came off at one o’clock that night in a pouring rain. The
gunners had been carrying ammunition all day after about four hours’
sleep. Old Thing and I had one. The Major didn’t have any. The
barrage lasted an hour and a half, during which one sub-section made
a ghastly mistake and shot for five full minutes on a wrong switch.

A raid of any size is not just a matter of saying, “Let’s go over the
top to-night, and nobble a few of ’em! Shall us?”

And the other fellow in the orthodox manner says, “Let’s”--and over
they go with a lot of doughty bombers, and do a lot of dirty work. I
wish it were.

What really happens is this. First, the Brigade Major, quite a
long way back, undergoes a brain-storm which sends showers of
typewritten sheets to all sorts of Adjutants, who immediately talk of
transferring to the Anti-Aircraft. Other sheets follow in due course,
contradicting the first and giving also a long list of code words of
a domestic nature usually, with their key. These are hotly pursued
by maps on tracing paper, looking as though drawn by an imaginative
child.

At this point Group Commanders, Battalion Commanders, and Battery
Commanders join in the game, taking sides. Battery Commanders walk
miles and miles daily along duck boards, and shoot wire in all sorts
of odd places on the enemy front trench, and work out an exhaustive
barrage.

Then comes a booklet, which is a sort of revision of all that has
gone before, and alters the task of every battery. A new barrage
table is worked out. Follows a single sheet giving zero day.

The raiders begin cutting off their buttons and blacking their faces
and putting oil drums in position.

Battery wagon lines toil all night, bringing up countless extra
rounds. The trench mortar people then try and cut the real bit of
wire, at which the raiders will enter the enemy front line. As a
rule they are unsuccessful, and only provoke a furious retaliatory
bombardment along the whole sector.

Then Division begins to get excited and talks rudely to Group. Group
passes it on. Next a field battery is ordered to cut that adjective
wire and does.

A Gunner officer is detailed to go over the top with the raid
commander. He writes last letters to his family, drinks a last
whisky, puts on all his Christmas-tree, and says, “Cheero” as though
going to his own funeral. It may be.

Then telephones buzz furiously in every brigade, and everybody says
“Carrots” in a whisper.

You look up “Carrots” in the code book, and find it means “raid
postponed 24 hours.” Everybody sits down and curses.

Another paper comes round saying that the infantry have changed the
colours of all the signal rockets to be used. All gunners go on
cursing.

Then comes the night! Come up to the O.P. and have a dekko with me,
but don’t forget to bring your gas mask.

Single file we zigzag down the communication trenches. The O.P. is a
farmhouse, or was, in which the sappers have built a brick chamber
just under the roof. You climb up a ladder to get to it, and find
room for just the signaller and ourselves, with a long slit through
which you can watch Germany. The Hun knows it’s an O.P. He’s got
a similar one facing you, only built of concrete, and if you don’t
shell him he won’t shell you. But if you do shell him with a futile
18-pounder H.E. or so, he turns on a section of five-nines, and the
best thing you can do is to report that it’s “snowing,” clear out
quick and look for a new O.P. The chances are you won’t find one
that’s any good.

It’s frightfully dark; can’t see a yard. If you want to smoke, for
any sake don’t strike matches. Use a tinder. See that sort of extra
dark lump, just behind those two trees--all right, poles if you like.
They _were_ trees!--Well, that’s where they’re going over.

Not a sound anywhere except the rumble of a battle away up north.
Hell of a strafe apparently.

Hullo! What’s the light behind that bank of trees?--Fritz started
a fire in his own lines? Doesn’t look like a fire.--It’s the moon
coming up, moon, moon, so brightly shining. Pity old Pelissier turned
up his toes.--Ever heard the second verse of “Au Clair de la Lune?”

  (singing)

      Au clair de la lune
      Pierrot répondit,
      “Je n’ai pas de plume,
      Je suis dans mon lit.”

      “Si tu es donc couché,”
      Chuchotta Pierrette,
      “Ouvre-moi ta porte
      Pour que je m’y mette.”

_’Tis_ the moon all right, a corker too.--What do you make the
time?--A minute to go, eh? Got your gas mask at the alert?

The moon came out above the trees and shed a cold white light on the
countryside. On our side, at least, the ground was alive with men,
although there wasn’t a sound or a movement. Tree stumps, blasted by
shell fire, stood out stark naked. The woods on the opposite ridge
threw a deep belt of black shadow. The trenches were vague uneven
lines, camouflaging themselves naturally with the torn ground.

Then a mighty roar that rocked the O.P., made the ground tremble and
set one’s heart thumping, and the peaceful moonlight was defiled.
Bursts of flame and a thick cloud of smoke broke out on the enemy
trenches. Great red flares shot up, the oil drums, staining all the
sky the colour of blood. Rifle and machine-gun fire pattered like the
chattering of a thousand monkeys, as an accompaniment to the roaring
of lions. Things zipped past or struck the O.P. The smoke out there
was so thick that the pin-points of red fire made by the bursting
shells could hardly be seen. The raiders were entirely invisible.

Then the noise increased steadily as the German sky was splashed
with all-coloured rockets and Verey lights and star shells, and
their S.O.S. was answered. There’s a gun flash! What’s the bearing?
Quick.--There she goes again!--Nine-two magnetic, that’s eighty true.
Signaller! Group.--There’s another! By God, that’s some gun. Get
it while I bung this through.--Hullo! Hullo, Group! O.P. speaking.
Flash of enemy gun eight--0 degrees true. Another flash, a hell of a
big one, what is it?--One, one, two degrees,--Yes, that’s correct.
Good-bye.

Then a mighty crash sent earth and duckboards spattering on to the
roof of the O.P., most unpleasantly near. The signaller put his mouth
to my ear and shouted, “Brigade reports gas, sir.” Curse the gas. You
can’t see anything in a mask.--Don’t smell it yet, anyhow.

Crash again, and the O.P. rocked. Damn that five-nine. Was he
shooting us or just searching? Anyhow, the line of the two bursts
doesn’t look _quite_ right for us, do you think? If it hits the
place, there’s not an earthly. Tiles begin rattling down off the roof
most suggestively. It’s a good twenty-foot drop down that miserable
ladder. Do you think his line.--Look out! She’s coming.--Crash!

God, not more than twenty yards away! However, we’re all right. He’s
searching to the left of us. Where _is_ the blighter? Can you see his
flash? Wonder how our battery’s getting on?--

Our people were on the protective barrage now, much slower. The
infantry had either done their job or not. Anyhow they were getting
back. The noise was distinctly tailing off. The five-nine was
searching farther and farther behind to our left. The smell of gas
was very faint. The smoke was clearing. Not a sign of life in the
trenches. Our people had ceased fire.

The Hun was still doing a ragged gun fire. Then he stopped.

A Verey light or two went sailing over in a big arc.

The moon was just a little higher, still smiling inscrutably.
Silence, but for that sustained rumble up north. How many men were
lying crumpled in that cold white light?

Division reported “Enemy front line was found to be unoccupied. On
penetrating his second line slight resistance was encountered. One
prisoner taken. Five of the enemy were killed in trying to escape.
Our casualties slight.”

At the end of our barrage I called that detachment up, reduced
three of them to tears and in awful gloom of spirit reported the
catastrophe to the Major. He passed it on to Brigade who said they
would investigate.

A day later Division sent round a report of the “highly successful
raid which from the adverse weather conditions owed its success to
the brilliance of the artillery barrage....”

That same morning the Colonel went to Division, the General was on
leave. The Major was sent for to command the Group, and my secret
hopes of the wagon line were dashed to the ground. I was a Battery
Commander again in deed if not in rank.


12

The wagon line all this while had, in the charge of the
sergeant-major, been cursed most bitterly by horse masters and
A.D.V.S.’s who could not understand how a sergeant-major, aged
perhaps thirty-nine, could possibly know as much about horse
management as a new-fledged subaltern anywhere between nineteen and
twenty-one.

From time to time I pottered down on a bicycle for the purpose
of strafing criminals and came away each time with a prayer of
thanks that there was no new-fledged infant to interfere with the
sergeant-major’s methods.

On one occasion he begged me to wait and see an A.D.V.S. of sorts who
was due at two o’clock that afternoon and who on his previous tour of
inspection had been just about as nasty as he could be. I waited.

Let it be granted as our old enemy Euclid says that the horse
standings were the worst in France--the Division of course had the
decent ones--and that every effort was being made to repair them.
The number of shelled houses removed bodily from the firing line
to make brick standings and pathways through the mud would have
built a model village. The horses were doing this work in addition
to ammunition fatigues, brigade fatigues and every other sort of
affliction. Assuming too that a sergeant-major doesn’t carry as much
weight as a Captain (I’d got my third pip) in confronting an A.S.C.
forage merchant with his iniquities, and I think every knowledgeable
person admitted that our wagon line was as good as, if not better
than, shall we say, any Divisional battery. Yet the veterinary
expert (?) crabbed my very loyal supporter, the sergeant-major,
who worked his head and his hands off day in, day out. It was
displeasing,--more, childish.

In due course he arrived,--in a motor car. True, it wasn’t a
Rolls-Royce, but then he was only a Colonel. But he wore a fur coat
just as if it had been a Rolls-Royce. He stepped delicately into
the mud, and left his temper in the car. To the man who travels in
motors, a splash of mud on the boots is as offensive as the sight of
a man smoking a pipe in Bond Street at eleven o’clock in the morning.
It isn’t done.

I saluted and gave him good morning. He grunted and flicked a finger.
Amicable relations were established.

“Are you in charge of these wagon lines?” said he.

“In theory, yes, sir.”

He didn’t quite understand, and cocked a doubtful eye at me.

I explained. “You see, sir, the B.C. and I are carrying on the war.
He’s commanding Group and I’m commanding the battery. But we’ve got
the fullest confidence in the sergeant-maj.--”

Was it an oath he swallowed? Anyhow, it went down like an oyster.

The Colonel moved thus expressing his desire to look round.

I fell into step.

“Have you got a hay sieve?” said he.

“Sergeant-Major, where’s the hay sieve?” said I.

“This way, sir,” said the sergeant-major.

Two drivers were busily passing hay through it. The Colonel told them
how to do it.

“Have you got wire hay racks above the horses?”

“Sergeant-Major,” said I, “have we got wire hay racks?”

“This way, sir,” said the sergeant-major.

Two drivers were stretching pieces of bale wire from pole to pole.

The Colonel asked them if they knew how to do it.

“How many horses have you got for casting?” said the Colonel.

“Do we want to cast any horses, Sergeant-Major?” said I.

“Yes, sir,” said the Sergeant-Major. “We’ve got six.”

It was a delightful morning. Every question that the Colonel asked
I passed on to the sergeant-major, whose answer was ever ready.
Wherever the Colonel wished to explore, there were men working.

Could a new-fledged infant unversed in the ways of the Army have
accomplished it?

One of the sections was down the road, quite five minutes away.
During the walk we exchanged views about the war. He confided to me
that the ideal was to have in each wagon line an officer who knew no
more about gunnery than that turnip, but who knew enough about horses
to take advice from veterinary officers.

In return I told him that there ought not to be any wagon lines,
that the horse was effete in a war of this nature, that over half
the man-power of the country was employed in grooming and cleaning
harness, half the tonnage of the shipping taken up in fetching
forage, and that there was more strafing over a bad turn-out than if
a battery had shot its own infantry for four days running.

The outcome of it all was pure farce. He inspected the remaining
section and then told me he was immensely pleased with the marked
improvement in the condition of the animals and the horse management
generally (nothing had been altered), and that if I found myself
short of labour when it came to building a new wagon line, he
thought he knew where he could put his hand on a dozen useful men.
Furthermore, he was going to write and tell my Colonel how pleased he
was.

The sergeant-major’s face was a study!

The psychology of it is presumably the same that brings promotion to
the officer who, smartly and with well-polished buttons, in reply to
a question from the General, “What colour is black?” whips out like a
flash, “White, sir!”

And the General nods and says, “Of course!--Smart young officer that!
What’s his name?”

Infallible!


13

It is difficult to mark the exact beginnings of mental attitudes when
time out there is one long action of nights and days without names.
One keeps the date, because of the orders issued. For the rest it
is all one. One can only trace points of view, feelings, call them
what you will, as dating before or after certain outstanding events.
Thus I had no idea of war until the gas bombardment in Armentières,
no idea that human nature could go through such experiences and
emotions and remain sane. So, once in action, I had not bothered
to find the reason of it all, contenting myself merely with the
profound conviction that the world was mad, that it was against
human nature,--but that to-morrow we should want a full échelon of
ammunition. Even the times when one had seen death only gave one a
momentary shock. One such incident will never leave me, but I cannot
feel now anything of the horror I experienced at the moment.

It was at lunch one day before we had left the château. A trickle
of sun filtered down into the cellar where the Major, one other
subaltern and myself were lunching off bully beef and ration pickles.
Every now and again an H.E. shell exploded outside, in the road along
which infantry were constantly passing. One burst was followed by
piercing screams. My heart gave a leap and I sprang for the stairs
and out. Across the way lay three bodies, a great purple stain on the
pavement, the mark of a direct hit on the wall against which one was
huddled. I ran across. Their eyes were glassy, their faces black.
Grey fingers curled upwards from a hand that lay back down. Then the
screams came again from the corner house. I dashed in. Our corporal
signaller was trying to bandage a man whose right leg was smashed
and torn open, blood and loose flesh everywhere. He lay on his back,
screaming. Other screams came from round the corner. I went out
again and down the passage saw a man, his hands to his face, swaying
backwards and forwards.

I ran to him. “Are you hit?”

He fell on to me. “My foot! Oh, my foot! Christ!”

Another officer, from the howitzer battery, came running. We formed a
bandy chair and began to carry him up towards the road.

“Don’t take me up there,” he blubbered. “Don’t take me there!”

We had to. It was the only way, to step over those three black-faced
corpses and into that house, where there was water and bandages.
There was a padre there now and another man. I left them and returned
to the cellar to telephone for an ambulance. I was cold, sick. But
they weren’t _our_ dead. They weren’t our gunners with whose faces
one was familiar, who were part of our daily life. The feeling
passed, and I was able to go on with the bully beef and pickles and
the war.

During the weeks that followed the last raid I was to learn
differently. They were harassing weeks with guns dotted all over the
zone. The luck seemed to have turned, and it was next to impossible
to find a place for a gun which the Hun didn’t immediately shell
violently. Every gun had, of course, a different pin-point, and map
work became a labour, map work and the difficulty of battery control
and rationing. One’s brain was keyed incessantly up to concert pitch.

Various changes had taken place. We had been taken into Right Group
and headquarters was established in a practically unshelled farm
with one section beside it. Another section was right forward in the
Brickstack. The third was away on the other side of the zone, an
enfilade section which I handed over, lock, stock and barrel, to the
section commander, who had his own O.P. in Moat Farm, and took on his
own targets. We were all extremely happy, doing a lot of shooting.

One morning, hot and sunny, I had to meet the Major to reconnoitre
an alternative gun position. So I sent for the enfilade section
commander to come and take charge, and set out in shorts and shirt
sleeves on a bicycle. The Major, another Headquarters officer and
myself had finished reconnoitring, and were eating plums, when a
heavy bombardment began in the direction of the battery farm.
Five-nines they were in section salvos, and the earth went up in
spouts, not on the farm, but mighty close. I didn’t feel anxious at
first, for that subaltern had been in charge of the Chapelle section
and knew all about clearing out. But the bombardment went on. The
Major and the other left me, advising me to “give it a chance” before
I went back.

So I rode along to an O.P. and tried to get through to the battery on
the ’phone. The line was gone.

Through glasses I could see no signs of life round about the farm.
They must have cleared, I thought. However, I had to get back some
time or other, so I rode slowly back along the road. A track led
between open fields to the farm. I walked the bicycle along this
until bits of shell began flying. I lay flat. Then the bombardment
slackened. I got up and walked on. Again they opened, so I lay flat
again.

For perhaps half an hour bits came zooming like great stagbeetles all
round, while I lay and watched.

They were on the gun position, not the farm, but somehow my anxiety
wouldn’t go. After all, I was in charge of the battery, and here
I was, while God knew what might have happened in the farm. So I
decided to make a dash for it, and timed the bursts. At the end of
five minutes they slackened and I thought I could do it. Two more
crashed. I jumped on the bike, pedalled hard down the track until it
was blotted out by an enormous shell hole into which I went, left the
bike lying and ran to the farm gate, just as two pip-squeaks burst in
the yard. I fell into the door, covered with brick dust and tiles,
but unhurt.

The sound of singing came from the cellar. I called down, “Who’s
there?” The servants and the corporal clerk were there. And the
officer? Oh, he’d gone over to the guns to see if everybody
had cleared the position. He’d given the order as soon as the
bombardment began. But over at the guns the place was being chewed up.

Had he gone alone? No. One of the servants had gone with him. How
long ago? Perhaps twenty minutes. Meanwhile, during question and
answer, four more pip-squeaks had landed, two at the farm gate, one
in the yard, one just over.

It was getting altogether too hot. I decided to clear the farm first.
Two at a time, taking the word from me, they made a dash for it
through the garden and the hedge to a flank, till only the corporal
clerk and myself were left. We gathered the secret papers the “wind
gadget,” my compass and the telephone and ran for it in our turn.

We caught the others who were waiting round the corner well to
a flank. I handed the things we’d brought to the mess cook, and
asked the corporal clerk if he’d come with me to make sure that the
subaltern and the gunners had got away all right.

We went wide and got round to the rear of the position. Not a sign
of any of the detachments in any houses round about. Then we worked
our way up a hedge which led to the rear of the guns, dropping flat
for shells to burst. They were more on the farm now than the guns. We
reached the signal pit,--a sort of dug-out with a roof of pit props,
and earth and a trench dug to the entrance.

The corporal went along the trench. “Christ!” he said, and came
blindly back.

For an instant the world spun. Without seeing I saw. Then I climbed
along the broken trench. A five-nine had landed on the roof of the
pit and crashed everything in.

A pair of boots was sticking out of the earth.--

He had been in charge of the battery for _me_. From the safety of
the cellar he had gone out to see if the men were all right. He had
done _my_ job!

Gunners came with shovels. In five minutes we had him out. He was
still warm. The doctor was on his way. We carried him out of the
shelling on a duck board. Some of the gunners went on digging for the
other boy. The doctor was there by the time we’d carried him to the
road. He was dead.


14

A pair of boots sticking out of the earth.

For days I saw nothing else. That jolly fellow whom I’d left
laughing, sitting down to write a letter to his wife,--a pair of
boots sticking out. Why? Why?

We had laid him in a cottage. The sergeant and I went back, and by
the light of a candle which flickered horribly, emptied his pockets
and took off his ring. How cold Death was. It made him look ten years
younger.

Then we put him into an army blanket with his boots on and all his
clothes. The only string we had was knotted. It took a long time to
untie it. At last it was done.

A cigarette holder, a penknife, a handkerchief, the ring. I took them
out with me into the moonlight, all that King and country had left of
him.

What had this youngster been born for, sent to a Public School,
earned his own living and married the pretty girl whose photo I had
seen in the dug-out? To die like a rat in a trap, to have his name
one day in the Roll of Honour and so break two hearts, and then be
forgotten by his country because he was no more use to it. What was
the worth of Public School education if it gave the country no
higher ideal than war?--to kill or be killed. Were there no brains
in England big enough to avert it? He hadn’t wanted it. He was a
representative specimen. What had he joined for? Because all his pals
had. He didn’t want them to call him coward. For that he had left his
wife and his home, and to-morrow he would be dropped into a hole in
the ground and a parson would utter words about God and eternal life.

What did it all mean? Why, because it was the “thing to do,” did we
all join up like sheep in a Chicago packing yard? What right had our
country--the “free country”--to compel us to live this life of filth
and agony?

The men who made the law that sent us out, they didn’t come too. They
were the “rudder of the nation,” steering the “Ship of State.” They’d
never seen a pair of boots sticking out of the earth. Why did we bow
the neck and obey other men’s wills?

Surely these conscientious objectors had a greater courage in
withstanding our ridicule than we in wishing to prove our possession
of courage by coming out. What was the root of this war,--honour? How
can honour be at the root of dishonour, and wholesale manslaughter?
What kind of honour was it that smashed up homesteads, raped
women, crucified soldiers, bombed hospitals, bayoneted wounded?
What idealism was ours if we took an eye for an eye? What was our
civilization, twenty centuries of it, if we hadn’t reached even to
the barbaric standards,--for no barbarian could have invented these
atrocities. What was the festering pit on which our social system was
built?

And the parson who talked of God,--is there more than one God, then,
for the Germans quoted him as being on their side with as much
fervour and sincerity as the parson? How reconcile any God with this
devastation and deliberate killing? This war was the proof of the
failure of Christ, the proof of our own failure, the failure of the
civilized world. For twenty centuries the world had turned a blind
eye to the foulness stirring inside it, insinuating itself into the
main arteries; and now the lid was wrenched off and all the foul
stench of a humbug Christian civilization floated over the poisoned
world.

One man had said he was too proud to fight. We, filled with the
lust of slaughter, jeered him as we had jeered the conscientious
objectors. But wasn’t there in our hearts, in saner moments, a
respect which we were ashamed to admit,--because we in our turn would
have been jeered at? Therein lay our cowardice. Death we faced daily,
hourly, with a laugh. But the ridicule of our fellow cowards, that
was worse than death. And yet in our knowledge we cried aloud for
Peace, who in our ignorance had cried for War. Children of impulse
satiated with new toys and calling for the old ones! We would set
back the clock and in our helplessness called upon the Christ whom we
had crucified.

And back at home the law-makers and the old men shouted patriotically
from their club fenders, “We will fight to the last man!”

The utter waste of the brown-blanketed bundle in the cottage room!

What would I not have given for the one woman to put her arms round
me and hide my face against her breast and let me sob out all the
bitterness in my heart?


15

From that moment I became a conscientious objector, a pacifist, a
most bitter hater of the Boche whose hand it was that had wrenched
the lid off the European cesspit. Illogical? If you like, but what is
logic? Logically the war was justified. We crucified Christ logically
and would do so again.

From that moment my mind turned and twisted like a compass needle
that had lost its sense of the north. The days were an endless burden
blackened by the shadow of death, filled with emptiness, bitterness
and despair.

The day’s work went on as if nothing had happened. A new face took
his place at the mess table, the routine was exactly the same. Only
a rough wooden cross showed that he had ever been with us. And all
the time we went on shooting, killing just as good fellows as he,
perhaps, doing our best to do so at least. Was it honest, thinking
as I did? Is it honest for a convict who doesn’t believe in prisons
to go on serving his time? There was nothing to be done but go on
shooting and try and forget.

But war isn’t like that. It doesn’t let you forget. It gives you a
few days, or weeks, and then takes some one else. “Old Thing” was the
next, in the middle of a shoot in a front line O.P.

I was lying on my bed playing with a tiny kitten while the third
subaltern at the ’phone passed on the corrections to the battery.
Suddenly, instead of saying “Five minutes more right,” he said,
“_What’s_ that?--Badly wounded?” and the line went.

I was on the ’phone in a flash, calling up battalion for stretcher
bearers and doctors.

They brought me his small change and pencil-ends and pocketbook,--and
the kitten came climbing up my leg.

The Major came back from leave--which he had got on the Colonel’s
return--in time to attend Old Thing’s funeral with the Colonel and
myself. Outside the cemetery a football match was going on all the
time. They didn’t stop their game. Why should they? They were too
used to funerals,--and it might be their turn in a day or two.

Thanks to the Major my leave came through within a week. It was like
the answer to a prayer. At any price I wanted to get away from the
responsibility, away from the sight of khaki, away from everything to
do with war.

London was too full of it, of immaculate men and filmy girls who
giggled. I couldn’t face that.

I went straight down to the little house among the beeches and
pines,--an uneasy guest of long silences, staring into the fire,
of bursts of violent argument, of rebellion against all existing
institutions.

But it was good to watch the river flowing by, to hear it lapping
against the white yacht, to hear the echo of rowlocks, flung back
by the beech woods, and the wonderful whir! whir! whir! of swans
as they flew down and down and away; to see little cottages with
wisps of blue smoke against the brown and purple of the distant
woods, not lonely ruins and sticks; to see the feathery green moss
and the watery rays of a furtive sun through the pines, not smashed
and torn by shells; at night to watch the friendly lights in the
curtained windows and hear the owls hooting to each other unafraid
and let the rest and peace sink into one’s soul; to shirk even the
responsibility of deciding whether one should go for a walk or out in
the dinghy, or stay indoors, but just to agree to anything that was
suggested.

To decide anything was for out there, not here where war did not
enter in.

Fifteen dream days, like a sudden strong whiff of verbena or
honeysuckle coming out of an envelope. For the moment one shuts one’s
eyes,--and opens them again to find it isn’t true. The sound of guns
is everywhere.

So with that leave. I found myself in France again, trotting up in
the mud and rain to report my arrival as though I’d never been away.
It was all just a dream to try and call back.


16

Everything was well with the battery. My job was to function with all
speed at the building of the new horse lines. Before going on leave I
had drawn a map to scale of the field in which they were to be. This
had been submitted to Corps and approved, and work had started on it
during my leave.

My kit followed me and I installed myself in a small canvas hut with
the acting-Captain of another of our batteries whose lines were belly
deep in the next field. He had succeeded Pip Don who went home gassed
after the Armentières shelling and who, on recovering, had been sent
out to Mesopotamia.

The work was being handled under rather adverse conditions. Some of
the men were from our own battery, others from the Brigade Ammunition
Column, more from a Labour Company, and there was a full-blown Sapper
private doing the scientific part. They were all at loggerheads;
none of the N.C.O.’s would take orders from the Sapper private, and
the Labour Company worked Trades Union hours, although dressed in
khaki and calling themselves soldiers. The subaltern in charge was on
the verge of putting every one of them under arrest,--not a bad idea,
but what about the standings?

By the time I’d had a look round tea was ready. At least there seemed
to be plenty of material.

At seven next morning I was out. No one else was. So I took another
look round, did a little thinking, and came and had breakfast. By
nine o’clock there seemed to be a lot of cigarette smoke in the
direction of the works.

I began functioning. My servant summoned all the heads of departments
and they appeared before me in a sullen row. At my suggestion tongues
wagged freely for about half an hour. I addressed them in their own
language and then, metaphorically speaking, we shook hands all round,
sang hymn number 44 and standings suddenly began to spring up like
mushrooms.

It was really extraordinary how those fellows worked once they’d
got the hang of the thing. It left me free to go joy-riding with
my stable companion in the afternoons. We carried mackintoshes on
the saddle and scoured the country, splashing into Bailleul--it was
odd to revisit the scene of my trooper days after three years--for
gramophone records, smokes, stomachic delicacies and books. We also
sunk a lot of francs in a series of highly artistic picture postcards
which, pinned all round the hut at eye level, were a constant source
of admiration and delight to the servants and furnished us with a
splash of colour which at least broke the monotony of khaki canvas.
These were--it goes without saying--supplemented from time to time
with the more reticent efforts of _La Vie Parisienne_.

All things being equal we were extremely comfortable, and, although
the stove was full of surprises, quite sufficiently frowzy during the
long evenings, which were filled with argument, invention, music and
much tobacco. The invention part of the programme was supplied by my
stable companion who had his own theories concerning acetylene lamps,
and who, with the aid of a couple of shell cases and a little carbide
nearly wrecked the happy home. Inventions were therefore suppressed.

They were tranquil days, in which we built not only book shelves,
stoves and horse standings but a great friendship,--ended only by his
death on the battlefield. He was all for the gun line and its greater
strenuousness.

As for me, then, at least, I was content to lie fallow. I had seen
too much of the guns, thanked God for the opportunity of doing
something utterly different for a time and tried to conduct a mental
spring-clean and rearrangement. As a means to this I found myself
putting ideas on paper in verse--a thing I’d never done in all my
life--bad stuff but horribly real. One’s mind was tied to war, like
a horse on a picketing rope, and could only go round and round in a
narrow circle. To break away was impossible. One was saturated with
it as the country was with blood. Every cog in the machinery of war
was like a magnet which held one in spite of all one’s struggles,
giddy with the noise, dazed by its enormity, nauseated by its results.

The work provided one with a certain amount of comic relief.
Timber ran short and it seemed as if the standings would be denied
completion. Stones, gravel and cinders had been already a difficulty,
settled only by much importuning. Bricks had been brought from the
gun line. But asking for timber was like trying to steal the chair
from under the General. I went to Division and was promptly referred
to Corps, who were handling the job. Corps said, “You’ve had all
that’s allowed in the R.E. handbook. Good morning.” I explained that
I wanted it for wind screens. They smiled politely and suggested my
getting some ladies’ fans from any deserted village. On returning to
Division they said, “If Corps can’t help you, how the devil can you
expect us to?”

I went to Army. They looked me over and asked me where I came from
and who I was, and what I was doing, and what for and on what
authority, and why I came to them instead of going to Division and
Corps? To all of which I replied patiently. Their ultimate answer was
a smile of regret. There wasn’t any in the country, they said.

So I prevailed upon my brother who, as War Correspondent, ran a big
car and no questions asked about petrol, to come over and lunch with
me. To him I put the case and was immediately whisked off to O.C.
Forests, the Timber King. At the lift of his little finger down came
thousands of great oaks. Surely a few branches were going begging?

He heard my story with interest. His answer threw beams of light.
“Why the devil don’t Division and Corps and all the rest of them
_ask_ for it if they want it? I’ve got tons of stuff here. How much
do you want?”

I told him the cubic stature of the standings.

He jotted abstruse calculations for a moment. “Twenty tons,” said he.
“Are you anywhere near the river”?

The river flowed at the bottom of the lines.

“Right. I’ll send you a barge. To-day’s Monday. Should be with you by
Wednesday. Name? Unit?”

He ought to have been commanding an army, that man.

We lunched most triumphantly in Hazebrouck, had tea and dinner at
Cassel and I was dropped on my own doorstep well before midnight.

It was not unpleasing to let drop, quite casually of course, to
Division and Corps and Army, that twenty tons of timber were being
delivered at my lines in three days and that there was more where
that came from. If they wanted any, they had only to come and ask
_me_ about it.


17

During this period the Major had handed over the eighteen-pounders,
receiving 4.5 howitzers in exchange, nice little cannons, but
apparently in perpetual need of calibration. None of the gunners
had ever handled them before but they picked up the new drill with
extraordinary aptitude, taking the most unholy delight in firing gas
shells. They hadn’t forgotten Armentières either.

My wagon line repose was roughly broken into by an order one
afternoon to come up immediately. The Colonel was elsewhere and the
Major had taken his place once more.

Furthermore, a raid was to take place the same night and I hadn’t
the foggiest idea of the numberless 4.5 differences. However we did
our share in the raid and at the end of a couple of days I began to
hope we should stick to howitzers. The reasons were many,--a bigger
shell with more satisfactory results, gas as well as H.E., four guns
to control instead of six, far greater ease in finding positions and
a longer range. This was in October, ’17. Things have changed since
then. The air recuperator with the new range drum and fuse indicator
have made the 18-pounder a new thing.

Two days after my going up the Hun found us. Between 11 a.m. and 4
p.m. he sent over three hundred five-nines, but as they fell between
two of the guns and the billet, and he didn’t bother to switch, we
were perfectly happy. To my way of thinking his lack of imagination
in gunnery is one of the factors which has helped him to lose the
war. He is consistent, amazingly thorough and amazingly accurate. We
have those qualities too, not quite so marked perhaps, but it is the
added touch of imagination, of sportingness, which has beaten him.
What English subaltern for instance up in that Hun O.P. wouldn’t have
given her five minutes more right for luck,--and got the farm and
the gun and the ammunition? But because the Boche had been allotted
a definite target and a definite number of rounds he just went on
according to orders and never thought of budging off his line. We all
knew it and remained in the farm although the M.P.I. was only fifty
yards to a flank.

The morning after the raid I went the round of the guns. One of them
had a loose breechblock. When fired the back flash was right across
the gun pit. I put the gun out of action, the chances being that
very soon she would blow out her breech and kill every man in the
detachment.

As my knowledge was limited to eighteen-pounders, however, I sent for
the brigade artificer. His opinion confirmed mine.

That night she went down on the tail of a wagon. The next night she
came back again, the breech just as loose. Nothing had been done. The
Ordnance workshop sent a chit with her to say she’d got to fire so
many hundred more rounds at 4th charge before she could be condemned.

What was the idea? Surely to God the Hun killed enough gunners
without our trying to kill them ourselves? Assuming that a 4.5 cost
fifteen hundred pounds in round figures, four gunners and a sergeant
at an average of two shillings a day were worth economising, to say
nothing of the fact that they were all trained men and experienced
soldiers, or to mention that they were human beings with wives and
families. It cannot have been the difficulty of getting another gun.
The country was stiff with guns and it only takes a busy day to fire
four hundred rounds.

It was just the good old system again! I left the gun out of action.

Within a couple of days we had to hand over again. We were leaving
that front to go up into the salient, Ypres. But I didn’t forget to
tell the in-coming Battery Commander all about that particular gun.

Ypres! One mentions it quite casually but I don’t think there was an
officer or man who didn’t draw a deep breath when the order came. It
was a death trap.

There was a month’s course of gunnery in England about to take
place,--the Overseas Course for Battery Commanders. My name had been
sent in. It was at once cancelled so that the Ypres move was a double
disappointment.

So the battery went down to the wagon line and prepared for the
worst. For a couple of days we hung about uneasily. Then the Major
departed for the north in a motor lorry to take over positions.
Having seen him off we foregathered with the officers of the Brigade
Ammunition Column, cursed with uneasy laughter and turned the
rum-specialist on to brewing flaming toddy.

The next day brought a telegram from the Major of which two words at
least will never die: “Move cancelled.”

We had dinner in Estaires that night!

But the brigade was going to move, although none of us knew where.
The day before they took the road I left for England in a hurry to
attend the Overseas Course. How little did I guess what changes were
destined to take place before I saw them again!


18

The course was a godsend in that it broke the back of the winter.
A month in England, sleeping between sheets, with a hot bath every
day and brief week-ends with one’s people was a distinct improvement
on France, although the first half of the course was dull to
desperation. The chief interest, in fact, of the whole course was to
see the fight between the two schools of gunners,--the theoretical
and the practical. Shoebury was the home of the theoretical. We
filled all the Westcliff hotels and went in daily by train to
the school of gunnery, there to imbibe drafts of statistics--not
excluding our old friend T.O.B.--and to relearn all the stuff we
had been doing every day in France in face of the Hun, a sort of
revised up-to-date version, including witty remarks at the expense of
Salisbury which left one with the idea, “Well, if this is the last
word of _the_ School of Gunnery, I’m a damned sight better gunner
than I thought I was.”

Many of the officers had brought their wives down. Apart from them
the hotels were filled with indescribable people,--dear old ladies
in eighteenth-century garments who knitted and talked scandal and
allowed their giggling daughters to flirt and dance with all and
sundry. One or two of the more advanced damsels had left their
parents behind and were staying there with “uncles,”--rather
lascivious-looking old men, rapidly going bald. Where they all came
from is a mystery. One didn’t think England contained such people,
and the thought that one was fighting for them was intolerable.

After a written examination which was somewhat of a farce at the end
of the first fortnight, we all trooped down to Salisbury to see the
proof of the pudding in the shooting. Shoebury was routed. A couple
of hundred bursting shells duly corrected for temperature, barometer,
wind and the various other disabilities attaching to exterior
ballistics will disprove the most likely-sounding theory.

Salisbury said, “Of course they will tell you _this_ at Shoebury.
They may be perfectly right. I don’t deny it for a moment, but I’ll
show you what the ruddy bundook says about it.” And at the end of
half an hour’s shooting the “ruddy bundook” behind us had entirely
disposed of the argument. We had calibrated that unfortunate battery
to within half a foot a second, fired it with a field clinometer, put
it through its paces in snow-storms and every kind of filthy weather
and went away impressed. The gun does not lie. Salisbury won hands
down.

The verdict of the respective schools upon my work was amusing and
showed that at least they had fathomed the psychology of me.

Shoebury said, “Fair. A good second in command.” Salisbury said,
“Sound practical work. A good Battery Commander.”

Meanwhile the papers every day had been ringing with the Cambrai
show. November, ’17, was a memorable month for many others besides
the brigade. Of course I didn’t know for certain that we were in it,
but it wasn’t a very difficult guess. The news became more and more
anxious reading, especially when I received a letter from the Major
who said laconically that he had lost all his kit; would I please
collect some more that he had ordered and bring it out with me?

This was countermanded by a telegram saying he was coming home on
leave. I met him in London and in the luxury of the Carlton Grill he
told me the amazing story of Cambrai.

The net result to the brigade was the loss of the guns and many
officers and men, and the acquiring of one D.S.O. which should have
been a V.C., and a handful of M.C.’s, Military Medals, and Croix de
Guerre.

I found them sitting down, very merry and bright, at a place called
Poix in the Lines of Communication, and there I listened to stories
of Huns shot with rifles at one yard, of days in trenches fighting
as infantry, of barrages that passed conception, of the amazing
feats of my own Major who was the only officer who got nothing out
of it,--through some gross miscarriage of justice and to my helpless
fury.

There was a new Captain commanding my battery in the absence of the
Major. But I was informed that I had been promoted Major and was
taking over another battery whose commander had been wounded in the
recent show. Somehow it had happened that that battery and ours had
always worked together, had almost always played each other in the
finals of brigade football matches and there was as a result a strong
liking between the two. It was good therefore to have the luck to
go to them instead of one of the others. It completed the entente
between the two of us.

Only the Brigade Headquarters was in Poix. The batteries and the
Ammunition Column had a village each in the neighbourhood. My new
battery, my first command, was at Bergicourt, some three miles
away, and thither I went in the brigade trap, a little shy and
overwhelmed at this entirely unexpected promotion, not quite sure of
my reception. The Captain was an older man than I, and he and some
of the subalterns had all been lieutenants together with me in the
Heytesbury days.

From the moment of getting out of the trap, as midday stables
was being dismissed, the Captain’s loyalty to me was of the most
exceptional kind. He did everything in his power to help me the
whole time I remained in command, and I owe him more gratitude and
thanks than I can ever hope to repay. The subalterns too worked like
niggers, and I was immensely proud of being in command of such a
splendid fighting battery.

Bergicourt was a picturesque little place that had sprung up in
a hillside cup. A tiny river ran at the bottom of the hill, the
cottages were dotted with charming irregularity up and down its
flank and the surrounding woody hills protected it a little from
the biting winter winds. The men and horses were billeted among
the cottages. The battery office was in the Mairie, and the mess
was in the presbytery. The Abbé was a diminutive, round-faced,
blue-chinned little man with a black skull cap, whose simplicity
was altogether exceptional. He had once been on a Cook’s tour to
Greece, Egypt and Italy but for all the knowledge of the world he got
from it he might as well have remained in Bergicourt. He shaved on
Sundays and insinuated himself humbly into the mess room--his best
parlour--with an invariable “_Bonjour, mon commandant!_” and a “_je
vous remerc--ie_,” that became the passwords of the battery. The
S sound in _remercie_ lasted a full minute to a sort of splashing
accompaniment emerging from the teeth. We used to invite him in
to coffee and liqueurs after dinner and his round-eyed amazement
when the Captain and one of the subalterns did elementary conjuring
tricks, producing cards from the least expected portions of his
anatomy and so on as he sat there in front of the fire with a drink
in his hand and a cigarette smouldering in his fingers, used to send
us into helpless shrieks of laughter.

He bestowed on me in official moments the most wonderful title,
that even Haig might have been proud of. He called me “_Monsieur le
Commandant des armées anglaises à Bergicourt_,”--a First Command
indeed!

Christmas Day was a foot deep in snow, wonderfully beautiful
and silent with an almost canny stillness. The Colonel and the
Intelligence Officer came and had dinner with us in the middle of the
day, after the Colonel had made a little speech to the men, who were
sitting down to theirs, and been cheered to the echo.

At night there was a concert and the battery got royally tight. It
was the first time they’d been out of action for eight months and it
probably did them a power of good.

Four Christmases back I had been in Florida splashing about in the
sea, revelling in being care free, deep in the writing of a novel.
It was amazing how much water had flowed under the bridges since
then,--one in Fontainehouck, one in Salonica, one in London, and now
this one at Bergicourt with six guns and a couple of hundred men
under me. I wondered where the next would be and thought of New York
with a sigh. If anyone had told me in Florida that I should ever be a
Major in the British Army I should have thought he’d gone mad.


19

The time was spent in Poix in completing ourselves with all the
things of which the batteries were short--technical stores--in making
rings in the snow and exercising the horses, in trying to get frost
nails without success, in a comic _chasse au sanglier_ organised by a
local sportsman in which we saw nothing but a big red fox and a hare
and bagged neither, in endeavouring to camouflage the fuel stolen by
the men, in wondering what 1918 would bring forth.

The bitter cold lasted day after day without any sign of a break and
in the middle of it came the order to move. We were wanted back in
the line again.

I suppose there is always one second of apprehension on receiving
that order, of looking round with the thought, “Whose turn this
time?” There seemed to be no hope or sign of peace. The very idea was
so remote as to be stillborn. Almost it seemed as if one would have
to go on and on for ever. The machine had run away with us and there
was no stopping it. Every calendar that ran out was another year of
one’s youth burnt on the altar of war. There was no future. How could
there be when men were falling like leaves in autumn?

One put up a notice board on the edge of the future. It said,
“Trespassers will be pip-squeaked.” The present was the antithesis
of everything one had ever dreamed, a ghastly slavery to be borne
as best one could. One sought distractions to stop one’s thinking.
Work was insufficient. One developed a literary gluttony, devouring
cannibalistically all the fiction writers, the war poets, everything
that one could lay hands on, developing unconsciously a higher
criticism, judging by the new standards set by three years of
war--that school of post-impressionism that rubs out so ruthlessly
the essential, leaving the unessential crowing on its dunghill. It
only left one the past as a mental playground and even there the
values had altered. One looked back with a different eye from that
with which one had looked forward only four years ago. One had seen
Death now and heard Fear whispering, and felt the pulse of a world
upheaved by passions.

The war itself had taken on a different aspect. The period of peace
sectors was over. Russia had had enough. Any day now would see the
released German divisions back on the western front. It seemed that
the new year must inevitably be one of cataclysmic events. It was
not so much “can we attack?” as “will they break through?” And yet
trench warfare had been a stalemate for so long that it didn’t seem
possible that they could. But whatever happened it was not going to
be a joy-ride.

We were going to another army. That at least was a point of interest.
The batteries, being scattered over half a dozen miles of country,
were to march independently to their destinations. So upon the
appointed day we packed up and said good-bye to the little priest and
interviewed the mayor and haggled over exorbitant claims for damages
and impossible thefts of wood and potatoes, wondering all the while
how the horses would ever stand up on the frozen roads without a
single frost nail in the battery. It was like a vast skating rink and
the farrier had been tearing his hair for days.

But finally the last team had slithered down to the gun park, hooked
in and everything was reported ready. Billeting parties had gone on
ahead.

It is difficult to convey just what that march meant. It lasted four
days, once the blizzard being so thick and blinding that the march
was abandoned, the whole brigade remaining in temporary billets.
The pace was a crawl. The team horses slid into each other and
fell, the leads bringing the centres down, at every twenty yards
or so. The least rise had to be navigated by improvising means of
foothold--scattering a near manure heap, getting gunners up with
picks and shovels and hacking at the road surface, assisting the
horses with drag-ropes--and all the time the wind was like a razor
on one’s face, and the drivers up on the staggering horses beat
their chests with both arms and changed over with the gunners when
all feeling had gone from their limbs. Hour after hour one trekked
through the blinding white, silent country, stamping up and down at
the halts with an anxious eye on the teams, chewing bully beef and
biscuits and thanking God for coffee piping hot out of a thermos
in the middle of the day. Then on again in the afternoon while the
light grew less and dropped finally to an inky grey and the wind grew
colder,--hoping that the G.S. wagons, long since miles behind, would
catch up. Hour after hour stiff in the saddle with icy hands and
feet, one’s neck cricked to dodge the wind, or sliding off stiffly
to walk and get some warmth into one’s aching limbs, the straps
and weight of one’s equipment becoming more and more irksome and
heavy with every step forward that slipped two back. To reach the
destination at all was lucky. To get there by ten o’clock at night
was a godsend, although watering the horses and feeding them in the
darkness with frozen fingers that burned on straps and buckles drew
strange Scotch oaths. For the men, shelter of sorts, something at
least with a roof where a fire was lit at risk of burning the whole
place down. For the officers sometimes a peasant’s bed, or valises
spread on the floor, unpacking as little as possible for the early
start on the morning, the servants cooking some sort of a meal,
either on the peasant’s stove or over a fire of sticks.

The snow came again and one went on next day, blinded by the feathery
touch of flakes that closed one’s eyes so gently, crept down one’s
neck and pockets, lodged heavily in one’s lap when mounted, clung in
a frozen garment to one’s coat when walking, hissed softly on one’s
pipe and made one giddy with the silent, whirling, endless pattern
which blotted out the landscape, great flakes like white butterflies,
soft, velvety, beautiful but also like little hands that sought to
stop one persistently, insidiously. “Go back,” said their owner, “go
back. We have hidden the road and the ditches and all the country.
We have closed your eyelids and you cannot see. Go back before you
reach that mad place where we have covered over silent things that
once were men, trying to give back beauty to the ugliness that you
have made. Why do you march on in spite of us? Do you seek to become
as they? Go back. Go back,” they whispered.

But we pushed blindly through, stumbling to another billet to hear
that the snow had stalled the motor lorries and therefore there were
no rations for the men and that the next day’s march was twenty miles.

During the night a thaw set in. Snowflakes turned to cold rain and
in the dawn the men splashed, shivering, and harnessed the shivering
horses. One or two may have drunk a cup of coffee given them by the
villagers. The rest knew empty stomachs as well as shivering. The
village had once been in the war zone and only old women and children
clung precariously to life. They had no food to give or sell. The
parade was ordered for six o’clock. Some of the rear wagons, in
difficulties with teams, had not come in till the dawn, the Captain
and all of them having shared a biscuit or two since breakfast. But
at six the battery was reported ready and not a man was late or sick.
The horses had been in the open all night.

So on we went again with pools of water on the icy crust of the road,
the rain dripping off our caps. Would there be food at the other end?
Our stomachs cried out for it.

And back in England full-fed fathers hearing the rain splashing
against the windows put an extra coal on the fire, crying again, “We
will fight to the last man!”; railway men and munitioners yelled,
“Down tools! We need more pay!” and the Government flung our purses
to them and said, “Help yourselves--of course we shall count on you
to keep us in power at the next election.”


20

The village of Chuignolles, ice-bound, desolate, wood-patched was
our destination. The battles of the Somme had passed that way,
wiping everything out. Old shell holes were softened with growing
vegetation. Farm cottages were held together by bits of corrugated
iron. The wind whistled through them, playing ghostly tunes on
splintered trunks that once had been a wood.

Two prison camps full of Germans, who in some mysterious way knew
that we had been in the Cambrai push and commented about it as we
marched in, were the only human beings, save the village schoolmaster
and his wife and child, in whose cottage we shared a billet with a
Canadian forester. The schoolmaster was minus one arm, the wife had
survived the German occupation, and the child was a golden-haired boy
full of laughter, with tiny teeth, blue eyes and chubby fingers that
curled round his mother’s heart. The men were lodged under bits of
brick wall and felting that constituted at least shelter, and warmed
themselves with the timber that the Canadian let them remove from
his Deccaville train which screamed past the horse lines about four
or five times a day. They had stood the march in some marvellous way
that filled me with speechless admiration. Never a grouse about the
lack of rations, or the awful cold and wet, always with a song on
their lips they had paraded to time daily, looked after the horses
with a care that was almost brotherly, put up with filthy billets and
the extremes of discomfort with a readiness that made me proud. What
kept them going? Was it that vague thing patriotism, the more vague
because the war wasn’t in their own country? Was it the ultimate
hope of getting back to their Flos and Lucys, although leave, for
them, was practically non-existent? What had they to look forward to
but endless work in filth and danger, heaving guns, grooming horses,
cleaning harness eternally? And yet their obedience and readiness and
courage were limitless, wonderful.

We settled down to training and football and did our best to acquire
the methods of the new army. My Major, who had been in command of the
brigade, had fallen ill on the march and had been sent to England.
The doctor was of opinion that he wouldn’t be coming out again.
He was worn out. How characteristic of the wilfully blind system
which insists that square pegs shall be made to fit round holes!
There was a man who should have been commanding an army, wasted in
the command of a battery, while old men without a millionth part
of his personality, magnetism or knowledge recklessly flung away
lives in the endeavour to justify their positions. In the Boer War
if a General lost three hundred men there was an inquiry into the
circumstances. Now if he didn’t lose three hundred thousand he was a
bad General. There were very few bad ones apparently!

At least one could thank God that the Major was out of it with a
whole skin, although physically a wreck.

The guns we drew from Ordnance at Poix and Chuignolles were not
calibrated, but there was a range half a day’s march distant and
we were ordered to fire there in readiness for going back into the
line. So one morning before dawn we set out to find the pin-point
given us on the map. Dawn found us on a road which led through a
worse hell than even Dante visited. Endless desolation spread away on
every side, empty, flat, filled with an infinite melancholy. No part
of the earth’s surface remained intact. One shell hole merged into
another in an endless pattern of pockmarks, unexploded duds lying in
hundreds in every direction. Bits of wreckage lay scattered, shell
baskets, vague shapes of iron and metal which bespoke the one-time
presence of man. Here and there steam rollers, broken and riddled,
stuck up like the bones of camels in the desert. A few wooden crosses
marked the wayside graves, very few. For the most part the dead had
lain where they fell, trodden into the earth. Everywhere one almost
saw a hand sticking up, a foot that had worked up to the surface
again. A few bricks half overgrown marked where once maidens had
been courted by their lovers. The quiet lane ringing with the songs
of birds where they had met in the summer evenings at the stroke
of the Angelus was now one jagged stump, knee-high, from which the
birds had long since fled. The spirits of a million dead wailed
over that ghastly graveyard, unconsecrated by the priests of God.
In the grey light one could nearly see the corpses sit up in their
countless hundreds at the noise of the horses’ feet, and point with
long fingers, screaming bitter ridicule through their shapeless
gaping jaws. And when at last we found the range and the guns broke
the eerie stillness the echo in the hills was like bursts of horrible
laughter.

And on the edge of all this death was that little sturdy boy with the
golden hair, bubbling with life, who played with the empty sleeve of
his young father spewed out of the carnage, mutilated, broken in this
game of fools.


21

February found us far from Chuignolles. Our road south had taken us
through a country of optimism where filled-in trenches were being
cultivated once more by old women and boys, barbed wire had been
gathered in like an iron harvest and life was trying to creep back
again like sap up the stem of a bruised flower. Their homes were
made of empty petrol tins, bits of corrugated iron, the wreckage
of the battlefield,--these strange persistent old people, clinging
desperately to their clod of earth, bent by the storm but far from
being broken, ploughing round the lonely graves of the unknown dead,
sparing a moment to drop a bunch of green stuff on them. Perhaps some
one was doing the same to their son’s grave.

We came to Jussy and Flavy-le-Martel, an undulating country of
once-wooded hillsides now stamped under the Hun’s heel and where even
then the spiteful long-range shell came raking in the neatly swept
muck heaps that once had been villages. The French were there, those
blue-clad, unshaven poilus who, having seen their land laid waste,
turned their eyes steadily towards Germany with the gleam of faith
in them that moves mountains, officered by men who called them “_mes
enfants_” and addressed each one as “thou.”

We had reached the southern end of the British line and were to take
over the extra bit down to Barisis. Our own zone was between Essigny
and Benay and in a morning of thick fog the Divisional Battery
Commanders and ourselves went up to the gun positions held by the
slim French 75’s. They welcomed us politely, bowing us into scratches
in the earth and offering sausages and red wine and cigarettes
of Caporal. It appeared that peace reigned on that front. Not a
shell fell, hardly was a round ever fired. Then followed maps and
technical details of pin-points and zero lines and O.P.’s and the
colour of S.O.S. rockets. We visited the guns and watched them fire
a round or two and discussed the differences between them and our
eighteen-pounders and at last after much shaking of hands bade them
au revoir and left them in the fog.

The relief took place under cover of night without a hitch, in a
silence unbroken by any gun, and finally, after having journeyed to
the O.P. with the French Battery Commander, up to our thighs in mud,
fired on the zero point to check the line, reported ourselves ready
to take on an S.O.S. and watched the French officer disappear in
the direction of his wagon line, we found ourselves masters of the
position.

The fog did eventually lift, revealing the least hopeful of any
gun positions it has ever been my lot to occupy. The whole country
was green, a sort of turf. In this were three great white gashes
of upturned chalk visible to the meanest intelligence as being the
three battery positions. True, they were under the crest from any
Hun O.P., but that didn’t minimize the absurdity. There were such
things as balloons and aeroplanes. Further inspection revealed shell
holes neatly bracketing the guns, not many, but quite sufficient to
prove that Fritz had done his job well. Beside each gun pit was a
good deep dugout for the detachment and we had sleeping quarters that
would stop at least a four-two. The mess was a quaint little hut of
hooped iron above ground, camouflaged with chalky earth, big enough
to hold a table and four officers, if arranged carefully. We rigged
up shelves and hung new fighting maps and Kirchners and got the stove
to burn and declared ourselves ready for the war again. We spent
long mornings exploring the trenches, calling on a rather peevish
infantry whose manners left much to be desired, and found that as
usual the enemy had all the observation on the opposite ridge. Behind
the trench system we came upon old gun positions shelled out of all
recognition, and looked back over an empty countryside with rather a
gloomy eye. It was distinctly unprepossessing. If there were ever a
show----

So we played the gramophone by night and invented a knife-throwing
game in the door of the hut and waited for whatever Fate might have
in store for us. The Captain had gone on leave from Chuignolles. The
night after his return he came up to the guns as my own leave was due
again. So having initiated him into the defence scheme and the S.O.S.
rules I packed up my traps and departed,--as it turned out for good.

Fate decreed that my fighting was to be done with the battery which I
had helped to make and whose dead I had buried.

On my return from leave fourteen days later, towards the end of
February, I was posted back to them. The end of February,--a curious
period of mental tightening up, of expectation of some colossal
push received with a certain incredulity. He’d push all right, but
not here. And yet, in the depths of one’s being, there formed a
vague apprehension that made one restless and took the taste out
of everything. The work seemed unsatisfactory in the new battle
positions to which we were moved, a side-step north, seven thousand
yards from the front line, just behind Essigny which peeped over a
million trenches to St. Quentin. The men didn’t seem to have their
hearts in it and one found fault in everything. The new mess, a
wooden hut under trees on a hilltop with a deep dugout in it, was
very nice, allowing us to bask in the sun whenever it shone and
giving a wonderful view over the whole zone, but seemed to lack
privacy. One yearned to be alone sometimes and always there was some
one there. The subalterns were practically new to me, and although
one laughed and talked one couldn’t settle down as in the old days
with the Major and Pip Don. The Scots Captain was also occupying
the hilltop. It was good to go off on long reconnaissances with him
and argue violently on all the known philosophies and literatures,
to challenge him to revolver shooting competitions and try and
escape the eternal obsession that clouded one’s brain, an uneasiness
that one couldn’t place, like the feeling that makes one cold in
the pit of the stomach before going down to get ready for a boxing
competition, magnified a million times.

The weather was warm and sunny after misty dawns and the whole
country was white with floating cobwebs. The last touches were being
put to the gun position and a narrow deep trench ran behind the guns
which were a quarter of a mile beyond the hilltop, down beyond the
railway line under camouflage in the open. Word came round that “The
Attack,” was for this day, then that, then the other, and the heavy
guns behind us made the night tremble with their counter-preparation
work, until at last one said, “Please God, they’ll get on with it,
and let’s get it over!” The constant cry of “Wolf! Wolf!” was trying.

Everybody knew about it and all arrangements were made, extra
ammunition, and extra gunners at the positions, details notified as
to manning O.P.’s, the probable time at which we should have to open
fire being given as ten o’clock at night at extreme range.

My Captain, a bloodthirsty Canadian, had gone on leave to the south
of France, which meant leaving a subaltern in the wagon line while I
had three with me.

The days became an endless tension, the nights a jumpy stretch of
darkness, listening for the unknown. Matters were not helped by my
brother’s rolling up one day and giving out the date definitely as
the twenty-first. It was on the ninth that he arrived and took me for
a joy-ride to Barisis to have a look at the Hun in the Forêt de St.
Gobain, so deeply wooded that the car could run to within a hundred
yards of the front-line trench. We dined at the charming old town of
Noyon on the way back and bought English books in a shop there, and
stayed the night in a little inn just off the market square. The next
morning he dropped me at the battery and I watched him roll away in
the car, feeling an accentuated loneliness, a yearning to go with him
and get out of the damned firing line, to escape the responsibility
that rode one like an Old Man from the Sea.

In war there is only one escape.

The nights of the eighteenth and nineteenth were a continuous roll of
heavy guns, lasting till just before the dawn, the days comparatively
quiet. Raids had taken place all along the front on both sides and
identifications made which admitted of no argument.

On the night of the twentieth we turned in as usual about midnight
with the blackness punctuated by flashes and the deep-voiced rumble
of big guns a sort of comfort in the background. If Brother Fritz
was massing anywhere for the attack at least he was having an
unpleasant time. We were unable to join in because we were in battle
positions seven thousand yards behind the front line. The other
eighteen-pounders in front of us were busy, however, and if the show
didn’t come off we were going up to relieve them in a week’s time. So
we played our goodnight tune on the gramophone, the junior subaltern
waiting in his pyjamas while the last notes were sung. Then he
flicked out the light and hopped into bed, and presently the hut was
filled by his ungentle snores. Then one rang through a final message
to the signaller on duty at the guns and closed one’s eyes.


22

The twenty-first of March, 1918, has passed into history now, a page
of disaster, blood and prisoners, a turning point in the biggest war
in history, a day which broke more hearts than any other day in the
whole four and a half years; and yet to some of us it brought an
infinite relief. The tension was released. The fight was on to the
death.

We were jerked awake in the darkness by a noise which beat upon the
brain, made the hill tremble and shiver, which seemed to fill the
world and all time with its awful threat.

I looked at my watch,--4 a.m.

The subaltern who lay on the bed beside mine said, “She’s off!” and
lit a candle with a laugh. He was dead within six hours. We put coats
over our pyjamas and went out of the hut. Through the fog there
seemed to be a sort of glow along the whole front right and left,
like one continuous gun flash. The Scots Captain came round with his
subalterns and joined us, and two “Archie” gunners who shared a tent
under the trees and messed with us. We stood in a group, talking
loudly to make ourselves heard. There was nothing to be done but to
stand by. According to plan we should not come into action until
about 10 p.m. that night to cover the retreat, if necessary, of the
gunners and infantry in the line. Our range to start with would be
six thousand yards.

So we dressed and talked to Brigade, who had no information. At six
o’clock Brigade issued an order, “Man O.P.’s at once.” The fog still
hung like a blanket, and no news had come through from the front
line. The barrage was reported thick in front of and in Essigny with
gas.

The signallers were ready, three of them. The subaltern detailed had
only to fill his pockets with food.

The subaltern detailed! It sounds easy, doesn’t it? But it isn’t
any fun detailing a man to go out into a gas barrage in any sort
of a show, and this was bigger than the wildest imagination could
conceive. I wondered, while giving him instructions, whether I
should ever see him again. I never did. He was taken prisoner, and
the signallers too.

They went out into the fog while the servants lit the fire and
bustled about, getting us an early breakfast. The Anti-Aircraft
discussed the advisability of withdrawing immediately or waiting to
see what the barrage would do. They waited till about 9 a.m. and then
got out. The Scots Captain and I wished them luck and looked at each
other silently and refilled pipes.

There was a hint of sun behind the fog now, but visibility only
carried about two hundred yards. The Guns reported that the barrage
was coming towards them. The Orderly Officer had been down and
found all things in readiness for any emergency. None of the O.P.’s
answered. Somewhere in that mist they were dodging the barrage while
we sat and waited, an eye on the weather, an eye on the time, an ear
always for the buzz of the telephone; box respirators in the alert
position, the guns laid on the S.O.S. loaded with H.E.

Does one think in times like that? I don’t know. Only little details
stand out in the brain like odd features revealed in a flash of
lightning during a storm. I remember putting a drawing-pin into the
corner of a Kirchner picture and seeing the headlines of the next
day’s paper at home; I saw the faces of my people as they read them.
I saw them just coming down to breakfast at the precise moment that
I was sticking in the drawing-pin, the door open on to the lawn--in
America, still asleep, as they were six hours behind, or possibly
only just turning in after a dance--in Etaples, where perhaps the
noise had already reached one of them. When would they hear from me
again? They would be worrying horribly.

The ’phone buzzed. “Brigade, sir!”

“Right. Yes?--S.O.S. 3000! _Three_ thousand?--Right! Battery! Drop to
_three_ thousand, S.O.S.--Three rounds per gun per minute till I come
down.”

It was 10 a.m. and that was the range, when according to plan it
shouldn’t have come till 10 p.m. at double the range.

The subalterns were already out, running down to the guns as I
snatched the map and followed after, to hear the battery open fire as
I left the hut.

The greater significance of this S.O.S. came to me before I’d left
the hut. At that range our shells would fall just the other side of
Essigny, still a vague blur in the mist. What had happened to the
infantry three thousand yards beyond? What had become of the gunners?
There were no signs of our people coming back. The country, as far
as one could see in the fog, was empty save for the bursting shells
which were spread about between Essigny and the railway, with the
battery in the barrage. The noise was still so universal that it was
impossible to know if any of our guns farther forward were still in
action. They couldn’t be if we were firing. It meant--God knew what
it meant!

The subalterns went on to the guns while I stopped in the control dug
into the side of the railway and shed my coat, sweating after the
quarter-mile run. Five-nines and pip-squeaks were bursting on the
railway and it seemed as if they had the battery taped.

To get off my coat was a matter of less than half a minute. It had
only just dropped to the ground when the signaller held me the
instrument. “Will you speak here, sir?”

I took it.

“Is that the Major?”

“Yes.”

“Will you come, sir? Mr. B.’s badly wounded. Sergeant ---- has lost
an eye and there’s no one here to----”

“Go on firing. I’m coming over.” Badly wounded?

I leaped up out of the dugout and ran. There was no shell with
my name on it that morning. The ground went up a yard away from
me half a dozen times but I reached the guns and dived under the
camouflage into the trench almost on top of poor old B. who was lying
motionless, one arm almost smashed off, blood everywhere. It was he
who had said “She’s off!” and lit the candle with a laugh. A man was
endeavouring to tie him up. Behind him knelt a sergeant with his face
in his hands. As I jumped down into the trench he raised it. “I’m
blind, sir,” he said. His right eye was shot away.

The others were all right. I went from gun to gun and found them
firing steadily.

Somehow or other we tied up the subaltern and carried him along the
narrow trench. Mercifully he was unconscious. We got him out at last
on to a stretcher. Four men went away with it, the sergeant stumbling
after. The subaltern was dead before they reached a dressing station.
He left a wife and child.

There were only the junior subaltern and myself left to fight the
battery. He was twenty last birthday and young at that. If I stopped
anything there was only that boy between King and country and the
Hun. Is _any_ reward big enough for these babes of ours?

Perhaps God will give it. King and country won’t.

       *       *       *       *       *

Vague forms of moving groups of men could be seen through my glasses
in the neighbourhood of Essigny impossible to say whether British or
German. The sun was struggling to pierce the mist. The distance was
about a thousand yards. We were still firing on the S.O.S. range, as
ordered.

I became aware of a strange subaltern grinning up at me out of the
trench.

“Where the devil do you spring from?” said I.

He climbed out and joined me on the top, hatless, minus box
respirator, cheery. Another babe.

“I’m from the six-inch section straight in front, sir,” he said.
“They’ve captured my guns. Do you think you could take ’em on?”

They _were_ Germans, then, those moving forms!

I swept the glasses round once more anxiously. There were six, seven,
ten, creeping up the railway embankment on the left flank _behind_
the battery. Where the hell were our infantry reinforcements? My Babe
sent the news back to Brigade while I got a gun on top and fired at
the six-inch battery in front over open sights at a thousand yards
with fuse 4. The Hun was there all right. He ran at the third round.
Then we switched and took on individual groups as they appeared.

The party on the railway worried me. It was improper to have the
enemy behind one’s battery. So I got on the ’phone to the Scots
Captain and explained the position. It looked as if the Hun had
established himself with machine guns in the signal box. The skipper
took it on over open sights with H.E. At the fourth round there was
only a settling mass of red brick dust. I felt easier in my mind
and continued sniping groups of two or three with an added zest and
most satisfactory results. The Hun didn’t seem to want to advance
beyond Essigny. He hung about the outskirts and, when he showed, ran,
crouching low. From his appearance it looked as if he had come to
stay. Each of them had a complete pack strapped on to his back with
a new pair of boots attached. The rest of the battery dropped their
range and searched and swept from the pits. The Skipper joined in the
sniping.

A half platoon of infantry came marching at a snail’s pace along the
railway behind me,--on the top of course, in full view! I wanted
to make sure of those Huns on the embankment, so I whistled to the
infantry officer and began semaphoring, a method of signalling at
which I rather fancied myself.

It seemed to frighten that infantry lad. At the first waggle he
stopped his men and turned them about. In twenty leaps I covered the
hundred yards or so between us, screaming curses, and brought him to
a halt. He wore glasses and looked like a sucking curate. He may have
been in private life but I gave tongue at high pressure, regardless
of his feelings, and it was a very red-faced platoon that presently
doubled along the other side of the railway under cover towards
the embankment, thirsting for blood, mine for choice, Fritz’s from
_embarras de richesse_.

I returned to my sniping, feeling distinctly better, as the little
groups were no longer advancing but going back,--and there was that
ferocious platoon chivvying them in the rear!

Things might have been much worse.

A megaphone’s all right, but scream down it for three hours and
see what happens to your voice. Mine sounded much like a key in
a rusty lock. Hunger too was no longer to be denied about three
o’clock in the afternoon after breakfast at cock-crow. The six-inch
subaltern had tried unsuccessfully to get back to his guns. The Hun,
however, had established a machine-gun well the other side of them
and approach single-handed was useless. Lord knew where his gunners
were! Prisoners, probably. So he returned and asked if I had any use
for him. Stout lads of his kidney are not met with every day. So I
sent him up the hill to get food and a box respirator. He returned,
grinning more cheerily than before, so I left him and the Babe to
fight the good fight and went to get a fresh point of view from the
tree O.P. up the hill. They seemed to be doing useful work between
them by the time I got up the tree, so I left them to it and went to
the mess to get some food.

It seemed curiously empty. Kits, half-packed, lay about the floor.
The breakfast plates, dirty, were still on the table. I called each
servant by name. No answer.

The other battery’s servants were round the corner. I interviewed
them. They had seen nothing of my people for hours. They thought
that they had gone down to the wagon line. In other words it meant
that while we were stopping the Hun, with poor old B. killed and the
sergeant with an eye blown out, those dirty servants had run away!

It came over me with something of a shock that if I put them under
arrest the inevitable sentence was death.

I had already sent one officer and three men to their death, or
worse, at the O.P. and seen another killed at the guns. Now these
four! Who would be a Battery Commander?

However, food was the immediate requirement. The other battery helped
and I fed largely, eased my raw throat with pints of water and drank
a tot of rum for luck. Those precious servants had left my even more
precious cigars unpacked. If the Hun was coming I’d see him elsewhere
before he got those smokes. So I lit one and filled my pockets with
the rest, and laden with food and a flask of rum went back to the
guns and fed my subaltern. The men’s rations had been carried over
from the cook house.

A few more infantry went forward on the right and started a bit of a
counter-attack but there was no weight behind it. They did retake
Essigny or some parts of it, but as the light began to fail they
came back again, and the Hun infantry hung about the village without
advancing.

With the darkness we received the order to retire to Flavy as soon as
the teams came up. The barrage had long since dropped to desultory
fire on the Hun side, and as we were running short of ammunition, we
only fired as targets offered. On returning up the hill I found it
strongly held by our infantry, some of whom incidentally stole my
trench coat.

The question of teams became an acute worry as time went on. The Hun
wasn’t too remote and one never knew what he might be up to in the
dark, and our infantry were no use because the line they held was a
quarter of a mile behind the nearest battery. The skipper and I sent
off men on bicycles to hurry the teams, while the gunners got the
guns out of the pits in the darkness ready to hook in and move off at
a moment’s notice.

Meanwhile we ate again and smoked and summoned what patience we
could, endeavouring to snatch a sleep. It wasn’t till ten o’clock
that at last we heard wheels,--the gun limbers, cooks’ cart and a
G.S. wagon came up with the wagon line officer who had brought the
servants back with him. There was no time to deal with them. The
officer went down to hook in to the guns and I saw to the secret
papers, money, maps and office documents which are the curse of all
batteries. The whole business of packing up had to be done in pitch
darkness, in all the confusion of the other battery’s vehicles and
personnel, to say nothing of the infantry. We didn’t bother about the
Hun. Silence reigned.

It was not till midnight that the last of the guns was up and the
last of the vehicles packed, and then I heard the voice of the Babe
calling for me. He crashed up on a white horse in the darkness and
said with a sob, “Dickie’s wounded!”

“Dickie” was the wagon line subaltern, a second lieutenant who had
got the D.S.O. in the Cambrai show, one of the stoutest lads God ever
made. In my mind I had been relying on him enormously for the morrow.

“Is he bad? Where is he?”

“Just behind, sir,” said the Babe. “I don’t know how bad it is.”

Dickie came up on a horse. There was blood down the horse’s shoulder
and he went lame slightly.

“Where is it, Dickie, Old Thing?”

His voice came from between his teeth. “A shrapnel bullet through the
foot,” he said. “I’m damn sorry Major.”

“Let’s have a look.” I flashed a torch on it. The spur was bent into
his foot just behind the ankle, broken, the point sticking in.

There was no doctor, no stretcher, no means of getting the spur out.

“Can you stick it? The wagon is piled mountains high. I can’t shove
you on that. Do you think you can hang on till we get down to Flavy?”

“I think so,” he said.

He had a drink of rum and lit a cigarette and the battery got
mounted. I kept him in front with me and we moved off in the dark,
the poor little horse, wounded also, stumbling now and again. What
that boy must have suffered I don’t know. It was nearly three hours
later before the battery got near its destination and all that time
he remained in the saddle, lighting one cigarette from another and
telling me he was “damn sorry.” I expected him to faint every moment
and stood by to grab him as he fell.

At last we came to a crossroads at which the battery had to turn off
to reach the rendezvous. There was a large casualty clearing station
about half a mile on.

So I left the battery in charge of the Babe and took Dickie straight
on, praying for a sight of lights.

The place was in utter darkness when we reached it, the hut doors
yawning open, everything empty. They had cleared out!

Then round a corner I heard a motor lorry starting up. They told me
they were going to Ham. There was a hospital there.

So Dickie slid off his horse and was lifted into the lorry.

As my trench coat had been stolen by one of the infantry he insisted
that I should take his British warm, as within an hour he would be
between blankets in a hospital.

I accepted his offer gladly,--little knowing that I was not to take
it off again for another nine days or so!

Dickie went off and I mounted my horse again, cursing the war and
everything to do with it, and led his horse, dead lame now, in search
of the battery. It took me an hour to find them, parked in a field,
the gunners rolled up in blankets under the wagons.

The 21st of March was over. The battery had lost three subalterns, a
sergeant, three signallers and a gunner.

France lost her temper with England.

Germany, if she only knew it, had lost the war.


23

The new line of defence was to be the canal at Flavy.

After two hours’ sleep in boots, spurs and Dickie’s coat, a servant
called me with tea and bacon. Washing or shaving was out of the
question. The horses were waiting--poor brutes, how they were worked
those days--and the Quartermaster-sergeant and I got mounted and rode
away into the unknown dark, flickering a torch from time to time on
to the map and finding our way by it.

With the Captain on leave, one subaltern dead, another left behind in
Germany, a third wounded, one good sergeant and my corporal signaller
away on a course, it didn’t look like a very hopeful start for
fighting an indefinite rearguard action.

I was left with the Babe, keen but not very knowledgeable, and one
other subaltern who became a stand-by. They two were coming with me
and the guns; the sergeant-major would be left with the wagon line.
Furthermore I had absolutely no voice and couldn’t speak above a
whisper.

Of what had happened on the flanks of our army and along the whole
front, there was absolutely no news. The Divisional infantry and
gunners were mostly killed or captured in the mist. We never saw
anything of them again but heard amazing tales of German officers
walking into the backs of batteries in the fog and saying, “Will you
cease fire, please? You are my prisoners,” as polite as you please.

What infantry were holding the canal, I don’t know,--presumably
those who had held our hilltop overnight. All we knew was that our
immediate job was to meet the Colonel in Flavy and get a position in
the Riez de Cugny just behind and pump shells into the Germans as
they advanced on the canal. The Babe and the Stand-by were to bring
the battery to a given rendezvous. Meanwhile the Colonel and all of
us foregathered in a wrecked cottage in Flavy and studied maps while
the Colonel swallowed a hasty cup of tea. He was ill and a few hours
later was sent back in an ambulance.

By eight o’clock we had found positions and the guns were coming in.
Camouflage was elementary. Gun platforms were made from the nearest
cottage wall or barn doors. Ammunition was dumped beside the gun
wheels.

While that was being done I climbed trees for an O.P., finding one
eventually in a farm on a hill, but the mist hid everything. The Huns
seemed to get their guns up as if by magic and already shells were
smashing what remained of Flavy. It was impossible to shoot the guns
in properly. The bursts couldn’t be seen so the line was checked and
rechecked with compass and director, and we opened fire on targets
ordered by Brigade, shooting off the map.

Riez de Cugny was a collection of cottages with a street running
through and woods and fields all around and behind. The inhabitants
had fled in what they stood up in. We found a chicken clucking
hungrily in a coop and had it for dinner that night. We installed
ourselves in a cottage and made new fighting maps, the Scots Captain
and I--his battery was shooting not a hundred yards from mine--and
had the stove lit with anything burnable that came handy, old chairs,
meat rolling boards, boxes, drawers and shelves.

It seemed that the attack on the canal was more or less half-hearted.
The bridges had been blown up by our sappers and the machine gunners
made it too hot for the Hun. Meanwhile we had the gun limbers hidden
near the guns, the teams harnessed. The wagon line itself was a
couple of miles away, endeavouring to collect rations, forage and
ammunition. The sergeant-major was a wonder. During the whole show he
functioned alone and never at any time did he fail to come up to the
scratch.

Even when I lost the wagon line for two days I knew that he was all
right and would bring them through safely. Meanwhile aeroplanes
soared over and drew smoke trails above the battery and after a
significant pause five-nines began searching the fields for us. Our
own planes didn’t seem to exist and the Hun explored at will. On
the whole things seemed pretty quiet. Communication was maintained
all the time with Brigade; we were quietly getting rid of a lot of
ammunition on targets indicated by the infantry and the five-nines
weren’t near enough to worry about. So the Scot and I went off in
the afternoon and reconnoitred a way back by a cross-country trail
to the wagon line,--a curious walk that, across sunny fields where
birds darted in and out of hedges in utter disregard of nations which
were stamping each other into the earth only a few hedges away. Tiny
buds were on the trees, tingling in the warmth of the early sun.
All nature was beginning the new year of life while we fools in our
blind rage and folly dealt open-handedly with death, heeding not the
promise of spring in our veins, with its colour and tenderness and
infinite hope.

Just a brief pause it was, like a fleecy cloud disappearing from
view, and then we were in the wagon lines, soldiers again, in a
tight position, with detail trickling from our lips, and orders
and arrangements. Dickie was well on his way to England now, lucky
Dickie! And yet there was a fascination about it, an exhilaration
that made one “fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth
of distance run.” It was the real thing this, red war in a moving
battle, and it took all one’s brain to compete with it. I wouldn’t
have changed places with Dickie. A “Blighty” wound was the last thing
that seemed desirable. Let us see the show through to the bitter end.

We got back to the guns and the cottage and in front of us Flavy
was a perfect hell. Fires in all directions and shells spreading
all round and over the area. Our wagons returned, having snatched
ammunition from blazing dumps, like a new version of snapdragon, and
with the falling darkness the sky flared up and down fitfully. That
night we dished out rum all round to the gunners and turned half of
them in to sleep beside the guns while the other half fought. Have
you ever considered sleeping beside a firing eighteen-pounder? It’s
easy--when you’ve fought it and carried shells for forty-eight hours.

We had dinner off that neglected fowl, both batteries in the cottage,
and made absurd remarks about the photos left on the mantelpiece and
fell asleep, laughing, on our chairs or two of us on a bed, booted
and spurred still, taking turns to wake and dash out and fire a
target, called by the liaison officer down there with the infantry,
while the others never moved when the salvos rocked the cottage to
its foundations, or five-nines dropped in the garden and splashed it
into the street.

The Hun hadn’t crossed the canal. That was what mattered. The
breakfast was very nearly cooked next morning about seven and we were
shooting gun fire and salvos when the order came over the ’phone
to retire immediately and rendezvous on the Villeselve-Beaumont
crossroads. Fritz was over the canal in the fog. The Babe dashed
round to warn the teams to hook in. They had been in cottages about
two hundred yards from the guns, the horses harnessed but on a line,
the drivers sleeping with them. The Stand-by doubled over to the
guns and speeded up the rate of fire. No good leaving ammunition
behind. The signallers disconnected telephones and packed them on gun
limbers. Both gunners and drivers had breakfasted. We ate ours half
cooked in our fingers while they were packing up.

The mist was like a wet blanket. At twenty yards objects lost their
shape and within about twenty minutes of receiving the order the
battery was ready. We had the other battery licked by five good
minutes and pulled out of the field on to the road at a good walk.
In the fog the whole country looked different. Direction was
impossible. One prayed that one wasn’t marching towards Germany--and
went on. At last I recognised the cross-country track with a sigh
of relief. It was stiff going for the horses, but they did it and
cut off a mile of road echoing with shouts and traffic in confusion,
coming out eventually on an empty main road. We thought we were well
ahead but all the wagon lines were well in front of us. We caught up
their tail-ends just as we reached Beaumont, which was blocked with
every kind of infantry, artillery and R.A.M.C. transport, mules,
horses and motors. However there was a Headquarters in Beaumont with
Generals buzzing about and signallers, so I told the Stand-by to take
the battery along with the traffic to the crossroads and wait for me.

Our own General was in that room. I cleaved a passage to him and
asked for orders. He told me that it was reported that the Hun was
in Ham--right round our left flank. I was, therefore, to get into
position at the crossroads and “Cover Ham.”

“Am I to open fire, sir?”

“No. Not till you see the enemy.”

I’d had enough of “seeing the enemy” on the first day. It seemed to
me that if the Hun was in Ham the whole of our little world was bound
to be captured. There wasn’t any time to throw away, so I leaped on
to my horse and cantered after the battery followed by the groom.
At the crossroads the block was double and treble while an officer
yelled disentangling orders and pushed horses in the nose.

The map showed Ham to be due north of the crossroads. There proved to
be an open field, turfed just off the road with a dozen young trees
planted at intervals. What lay between them and Ham it was impossible
to guess. The map looked all right. So I claimed the traffic
officer’s attention, explained that a battery of guns was coming into
action just the other side and somehow squeezed through, while the
other vehicles waited. We dropped into action under the trees. The
teams scattered about a hundred yards to a flank and we laid the line
due north.

At that moment a Staff subaltern came up at the canter. “The General
says that the Hun is pretty near, sir. Will you send out an officer’s
patrol?”

He disappeared again, while I collected the Stand-by, a man of
considerable stomach.

The orders were simply, “Get hold of servants, cooks, spare
signallers and clerks. Arm them with rifles and go off straight into
the fog. Spread out and if you meet a Hun fire a salvo and double
back immediately to a flank.”

While that was being done the Babe went round and had a dozen shells
set at fuse 4 at each gun. It gives a lovely burst at a thousand
yards. The Stand-by and his little army went silently forth. The
corner house seemed to indicate an O.P. I took a signaller with me
and we climbed upstairs into the roof, knocked a hole in the tiles
and installed a telephone which eventually connected with Brigade.

I began to get the fidgets about the Stand-by. This cursed fog was
too much of a good thing. It looked as if the God the Huns talked so
much about was distinctly on their side. However, after an agonising
wait, with an ear strained for the salvo of rifle fire, the fog
rolled up. Like dots in the distant fields I saw the Stand-by with
two rows of infantry farther on. The Stand-by saw them too and turned
about. More than that, through glasses I could see troops and horse
transports advancing quickly over the skyline in every direction.
Columns of them, Germans, far out of range of an eighteen-pounder.
As near as I could I located them on the map and worried Brigade for
the next hour with pin-points.

Ham lay straight in front of my guns. The Germans were still shelling
it and several waves of our own infantry were lying in position in
series waiting for their infantry to emerge round the town. It was
good to see our men out there, although the line looked dangerously
bulgy.

After a bit I climbed down from the roof. The road had cleared of
traffic and there was a subaltern of the Scot’s battery at the corner
with the neck of a bottle of champagne sticking out of his pocket. A
thoughtful fellow.

So was I! A little later one of the Brigade Headquarters officers
came staggering along on a horse, done to the world, staying in the
saddle more by the grace of God than his own efforts. Poor old thing,
he was all in, mentally and physically. We talked for a while but
that didn’t improve matters and then I remembered that bottle of
fizz. In the name of humanity and necessity I commandeered it from
the reluctant subaltern and handed it up to the man in the saddle.
Most of it went down his unshaven chin and inside his collar, but it
did the trick all right.

What was left was mine by right of conquest, and I lapped it down, a
good half bottle of it. There were dry biscuits forthcoming too, just
as if one were in town, and I was able to cap it with a fat cigar.
Happy days!

Then the Scot arrived upon his stout little mare followed by his
battery, which came into position on the same crossroads a hundred
yards away, shooting at right angles to me, due east, back into Cugny
from where we had come. Infantry were going up, rumours of cavalry
were about and the bloodstained Tommies who came back were not very
numerous. There seemed to be a number of batteries tucked away
behind all the hedges and things looked much more hopeful. Apart from
giving pin-points of the far distant enemy there was nothing to be
done except talk to all and sundry and try and get news. Some French
machine-gunner officers appeared who told us that the entire French
army was moving by forced marches to assist in stopping the advance
and were due to arrive about six o’clock that night. They were late.

Then too, we found that the cellar of the O.P. house was stored with
apples. There weren’t many left by the time the two batteries had
helped themselves. As many horses as the farmyard would hold were
cleared off the position and put under cover. The remainder and the
guns were forced to remain slap in the open. It was bad luck because
the Hun sent out about a dozen low-flying machines that morning and
instead of going over Ham, which would have been far more interesting
for them, they spotted us and opened with machine guns.

The feeling of helplessness with a dozen great roaring machines
spitting at you just overhead is perfectly exasperating. You can’t
cock an eighteen-pounder up like an Archie and have a bang at them,
and usually, as happened then, your own machine gun jams. It was a
comic twenty minutes but trying for the nerves. The gunners dived
under the gun shields and fired rifles through the wheels. The
drivers stood very close to the horses and hoped for the best. The
signallers struggled with the machine gun, uttering a stream of
blasphemies. And all the time the Hun circled and emptied drum after
drum from a height of about a hundred feet. I joined in the barrage
with my revolver.

Two horses went down with a crash and a scream. A man toppled over in
the road. Bullets spat on the ground like little puffs of smoke. Two
went through my map, spread out at my feet, and at last away they
roared,--presumably under the impression that they had put us out of
action. The horses were dead!

The man was my servant, who had run away on the first morning. Three
through his left leg. Better than being shot at dawn, anyhow.

Curiously enough, the mess cook had already become a casualty. He was
another of the faint-hearted and had fallen under a wagon in the fog
and been run over. A rib or two went. Poetic justice was rampant that
morning. It left me two to deal with. I decided to let it go for the
time and see if fate would relieve me of the job. As a matter of fact
it didn’t, and many many lifetimes later, when we were out of action,
I had the two of them up in a room with a ceiling and a cloth on the
table, and the Babe stood at my elbow as a witness.

One was a man of about thirty-eight or forty, a long-nosed, lazy,
unintelligent blighter. The other was a short, scrubby, Dago-looking,
bullet-headed person,--poor devils, both cannon fodder. My face may
have looked like a bit of rock but I was immensely sorry for them.
Given a moment of awful panic, what kind of intelligence could they
summon to fight it, what sort of breeding and heredity was at the
back of them? None. You might as well shoot two horses for stampeding
at a bursting shell. They were gripped by blind fear and ran for it.
They didn’t want to. It was not a reasoned thing. It was a momentary
lack of control.

But to shoot them for it was absurd, a ridiculous parody of justice.
Supposing I had lost my nerve and cleared out? The chances are that
being a senior officer I should have been sent down to the base as
R.T.O. or M.L.O. and after a few months received the D.S.O. It has
been done. They, as Tommies, had only earned the right to a firing
party.

It seemed to me, therefore, that my job was to prevent any
recurrence, so in order to uproot the fear of death I implanted the
fear of God in them both. Sweat and tears ran down their faces at the
end of the interview,--and I made the Dago my servant forthwith.

He has redeemed himself many times under worse shell fire than that
barrage of the 21st of March.


24

Headquarters gave me another subaltern during the day. He had been
with the battery in the early days at Armentières but for various
reasons had drifted to another unit.

He joined us just before the order was received to take up another
position farther back and lay out a line on the Riez de Cugny. The
enemy was apparently coming on. So we hooked in once more about 4.30
in the afternoon and trekked up the road on to a ridge behind which
was the village of Villeselve. The Hun seemed to have taken a dislike
to it. Five-nines went winging over our heads as we came into action
and bumped into the village about two hundred yards behind. The Babe
rode back to Brigade to report and ask for orders. There were no
means of knowing where our infantry were except through Brigade who
were at infantry headquarters, and obviously one couldn’t shoot blind.

Meanwhile the Dago servant collected bread and bully and a Tommy’s
water bottle, which stank of rum but contained only water, and the
Stand-by, the new lad and myself sat under a tree watching the Hun
barrage splash in all directions and made a meal.

The Babe didn’t return as soon as he ought to have done. With all
that shooting going on I was a little uneasy. So the new lad was told
to go to Brigade and collect both the orders and the Babe.

It was getting dark when the Scot brought up his battery and wheeled
them to drop into action beside us. As he was doing so the Babe and
the new lad returned together. Their news was uncomforting. Brigade
Headquarters had retired into the blue, and the other two batteries
which had been on the road had also gone. There was no one there at
all.

So the Scotsman and I held a council of war, while the Stand-by
went off on a horse to reconnoitre a passable way round the shelled
village. The light had gone and the sky behind us was a red glare.
The village was ablaze and at the back of it on the next ridge some
aeroplane hangars were like a beacon to guide storm-tossed mariners.
The crackling could be heard for miles.

There was no one to give us the line or a target, no means of finding
where the headquarters were or any likelihood of their finding us as
we hadn’t been able to report our position. We were useless.

At the back of my brain was the word Guivry. I had heard the Adjutant
mention it as a rendezvous. On the map it seemed miles away, but
there was always the chance of meeting some one on the way who would
know. So while the other people snatched a mouthful of ration biscuit
we brought the teams up and hooked in.

The Scotsman led as his battery was nearest the track that the
Stand-by reported passable. The only light was from the burning
hangars and we ran into mud that was axle deep. Incidentally we ran
into the barrage. A subaltern of the other battery was blown off
his feet and deposited in a sitting position in a mud hole. He was
fished out, spluttering oaths, and both batteries went off at a trot
that would have made an inspecting General scream unintelligible
things in Hindustani. Mercifully they don’t inspect when one is
trying to hurry out of a barrage, so we let it rip up the slope
until we had got past the hangars in whose glow we showed up most
uncomfortably on the top of the ridge. As soon as we had got into
darkness again we halted and took stock of ourselves. No one was hurt
or missing, but all the dismounted men were puffing and using their
sleeves to wipe the sweat off their faces. I was one.

It was from this point that the second phase of the retreat began.
It was like nothing so much as being in that half dead condition on
the operating table when the fumes of ether fill one’s brain with
phantasies and flapping birds and wild flights of imagination just
before one loses consciousness, knowing at the time that one hasn’t
quite “gone.” Overfatigue, strain, lack of food and above all was a
craving to stop everything, lie down, and sleep and sleep and sleep.
One’s eyes were glued open and burnt in the back of one’s head, the
skin of one’s face and hands tightened and stretched, one’s feet were
long since past shape and feeling; wherever the clothes touched one’s
body they irritated--not that one could realize each individual ache
then. The effect was one ceaseless dolour from which the brain flung
out and away into the no man’s land of semi-consciousness, full of
thunder and vast fires, only to swing back at intervals to find the
body marching, marching, endlessly, staggering almost drunkenly,
along the interminable roads of France in the rain and cold. Hour
after hour one rode side by side with the Scot, silent, swaying in
the saddle, staring hollow-eyed into the dark ahead, or sliding with
a stiff crash to the ground and blundering blindly from rut to rut,
every muscle bruised and torn. Unconsciously every hour one gave a
ten-minute halt. The horses stood drooping, the men lay down on the
side of the road, motionless bundles like the dead, or sprawled over
the vehicles, limp and exhausted, not smoking, not talking, content
to remain inert until the next word of command should set them in
motion again; wonderful in their recognition of authority, their
instant unquestioning obedience, their power of summoning back all
their faculties for just one more effort, and then another after that.

The country was unknown. Torches had given out their last flicker.
Road junctions were unmarked. We struck matches and wrestled with
maps that refused to fold in the right place, and every time Guivry
seemed a million miles away. The noise of shelling dropped gradually
behind until it became a mere soothing lullaby like the breaking
of waves upon a pebble beach while we rolled with crunching wheels
down the long incline into Buchoire, a village of the dead, without
lights, doors creaking open at the touch of the wind.

We halted there to water the horses and give them what forage could
be scraped together. The Scot and I rode on alone to Guivry, another
seven kilometres. As we neared it so the sound of guns increased
again as though a military band had died away round one corner and
came presently marching back round another, playing the same air,
getting louder as it came.

In a small room lit by oil lamps, Generals and Staffs were bending
over huge maps scored heavily with red and blue pencils. Telephones
buzzed and half conversations with tiny voices coming from back there
kept all the others silent. Orderlies came in motor overalls with all
the dust of France over them.

They gave us food,--whisky, bully and bread, apples with which we
filled our pockets. Of our Corps they knew nothing, but after much
telephoning they “thought” we should find them at Château Beines.

The Scot and I looked at one another. Château Beines was ten minutes
from the burning hangars. We had passed it on our way down empty,
silent, hours ago, in another life. Would the horses get us back up
that interminable climb? Who should we find when we got there--our
people or Germans? We rode back to Buchoire and distributed apples to
the Babe, the Stand-by and the others and broke it to them that we
had to go back on the chance of finding our brigade. The horses had
been watered but not fed.

We turned about and caught up French transport which had blocked the
road in both directions. We straightened them out, a wagon at a time,
after endless wagging of hands and tongues and finally got to Château
Beines to find a French Headquarters installed there who knew nothing
about our brigade. There were English artillery in the farm a mile
farther.

We went there. The farm was a ruin wreathed in fog, but from beneath
the now smoking hangars a battery of ours was spitting shells into
the night. Headquarters was somewhere in the farm cellar. We followed
up a chink of light to its source and found a row of officers lying
on wooden beds of rabbit netting, a signaller squatting on a reel
of wire in the corner over a guttering candle, the concrete roof
dripping moisture upon them. It was 3 a.m.

Orders were to come into action at once and open fire on a certain
main-road junction.

The Scot and I went out and scoured ploughed fields waist-deep in
drifting mist, looking for a position, found a belt of turf on the
edge of a road and fetched the guns up. Locating the position on the
map, working out the angle of the line of fire and the range with
protractors took us back to the cellar where those lucky devils
who were not commanding batteries were lying stertorous. Horses and
men sweated their heart’s blood in getting the guns into position
on the spongy ground and within an hour the first ear-splitting
cracks joined in the chorus of screaming resistance put up by the
other two batteries, with gunners who lost their balance at the
weight of a shell and fell upon their faces, picking themselves up
without even an oath and loading up again in a stupor by a process of
sub-conscious reflex energy.

What are the limits of human endurance? Are there any? We had three
more days and nights of it and still those men went on.


25

Sometime or other the Babe, the Stand-by and the other lad got some
tea down in the cellar and fell asleep over their cups. Sometime or
other I too got some tea, closed my eyes and fell off the box on
which I was sitting. Sometime or other we got the order to cease
fire and seek covered positions for the day’s work. Time, as one
ordinarily recognizes it, had ceased. There was no night, marked by
rest, nor day divided off into duties and meals. Time was all one,
a blurry mixture of dark and cold; light, which hurt one’s eyes,
and sweat. Sleep and rest were not. What was happening we did not
know. It might have been the end of the world and we shouldn’t have
known till we were in the next. There were just guns to be fired at
given points for ever and ever, always and always, world with or
without end, amen. Guns, guns and nothing but guns, in front, behind,
right and left, narrowing down to those of mine which grew hot and
were sponged out and went on again and still on, unhurriedly,
remorselessly into the German advance, and would go on long and long
after I was dead.

One’s mind refused to focus anything but angles and ranges and
ammunition supply. There was nothing of importance in the world but
those three things, whether we moved on or stayed where we were,
whether we walked or whether we rode, whether we ate or whether we
starved. In a sort of detached fog one asked questions and gave
orders about food and forage and in the same fog food eventually
appeared while one stared at the map and whispered another range
which the Stand-by shouted down the line of guns.

With spades we cut a gap in a hedge which shut off an orchard from
the road. The ditch was filled with stones and bricks from the farm.
The horses took the guns in one by one, and other gaps were cut in
the front hedge for the gun muzzles. Platforms were dug and trail
beds, and ammunition began to pile up beside each gun as the sun came
out and thinned the fog.

A telephone line ran away across the fields and a new voice came
through the receiver, tickling one’s ear,--that of an uncaptured
Colonel of a captured brigade who honoured us by taking command of
our brigade. With a shaven face and washed hands he had looked upon
our bearded chins and foul appearance and talked of the condition of
our horses.

In front of the guns a long line of French machine gunners had dug
themselves in and we were on the top of a high ridge. Below us the
ground sloped immediately away to a beautiful green valley which
rose up again to a feathery wood about to burst into green and ran
past it in undulations like the green rollers of the Atlantic.
Away in the distance were the great bulbous ever-watching eyes of
the enemy,--balloons, which as the sun came up, advanced steadily,
hypnotically, many of them strung out in a long line. Presently from
the wood below came trickling streams of men, like brown insects
coming from a dead horse. The sun glinted on their rifles. Steadily
they came, unhurriedly, plodding up to the ridge, hundreds of them,
heedless of the enemy barrage which began climbing too in great
hundred-yard jumps.

“What news?” said I, as one trickle reached me. It was led by a
Colonel.

He shook his head. “We’ve been relieved by the French,” said he, not
stopping.

“Relieved? But God’s truth, isn’t there a war on?”

“Who the hell are you talking to?” He flung it over his shoulder and
his men followed him away.

Somehow it didn’t seem credible. And yet there all along the ridge
and the valley was the entire British infantry, or what looked like
it, leisurely going back, while the French machine gunners looked
at them and chattered. I got on the ’phone to Brigade about it. The
Colonel said, “Yes, I know.”

We went on firing at long range. The teams were just behind the guns,
each one under an apple tree, the drivers lying beside their horses.
The planes which came over didn’t see us. The other batteries were
in the open behind the crest tucked into folds of the ground, all
the wagon lines clinging to a farmhouse about a mile back where the
headquarters was. The Hun barrage was quickly coming nearer.

A troop of cavalry trotted down into it and took cover under one
end of the wood. They had only one casualty. A shell struck a tree
and brought it crashing down on top of a horse and rider. The last
of our infantry had passed behind us and the wood was empty again.
The opposite ridge was unoccupied; glasses showed no one in the
country that stretched away on the left. Only the balloons seemed
almost on top of us. The cavalry left the wood and trotted over the
ridge in a long snake of half sections, and then the fringe of the
barrage reached us. It splashed into the orchard. Drivers leaped to
the horses’ heads. No man or animal was touched. Again one heard
it coming, instinctively crouching at its shriek. Again it left us
untouched as with an inattentive eye I saw the cavalry come trotting
quietly back. It was followed by a chattering of the French. The
reason was obvious. Out of the wood other streams came trickling,
blue this time, in little parties of four and five, momentarily
increasing in number and pace.

The first lot reached the battery and said they were the second line.
The Boche was a “_sale race, b’en zut alors!_” and hitching their
packs they passed on.

The machine gunners began to get ready. The battery began to look at
me. The Stand-by gave them another salvo for luck and then ordered
ten rounds per gun to be set at fuse 6--the edge of the wood was
about fifteen hundred.

The next stream of poilus was hotter. They sweated much all among
the orchard and told me with a laugh that the Boche would be here in
five minutes. But when I suggested that they should stay and see what
we could do together they shrugged their shoulders, spat, said, “_En
route!_” and en routed.

The gunners had finished setting the fuses and were talking earnestly
together. The machine gunners weren’t showing much above ground. The
barrage had passed over to our rear.

I called up the Colonel again and told him. He told me I could drop
the range to three thousand.

The Stand-by passed the order. It got about as far as the first
gun and there died of inanition. The battery was so busy talking
about the expected arrival of the Boche that orders faded into
insignificance. The Stand-by repeated the order. Again it was not
passed. I tried a string of curses but nothing more than a whisper
would leave my throat. The impotence of it was the last straw. I
whispered to the Stand-by to repeat word for word what I said.
He megaphoned his hands and you could have heard him across the
Channel,--a lovely voice, a bull of Bashan, that rose above the crash
of shells and reached the last man at the other end of the line of
guns. What he repeated was totally unprintable. If voice failed
me, vocabulary hadn’t. I rose to heights undreamed of by even the
Tidworth sergeant-major.

At the end of two minutes we began a series which for smartness,
jump, drive, passing and execution of orders would have put a
Salisbury depot battery into the waste-paper basket. Never in my life
have I seen such gunnery as those fellows put up. Salvos went over
like one pistol shot. Six rounds battery fire one second were like
the ticking of a stop watch. Gun fire was like the stoking of the
fires of hell by demons on hot cinders.

One forgot to be tired, one forgot to look out for the Hun in the
joy of that masterly performance, a fortissima cantata on a six pipe
organ of death and hate. Five minutes, ten minutes? I don’t know, but
the pile of empty shell cases became a mountain behind each gun.

A signaller tugged at my arm and I went to the ’phone.

“Retire immediately! Rendezvous at Buchoire!”

I was still caught up with the glory of that shooting.

“What the hell for?” said I. “I can hang on here for ages yet.”

“Retire immediately!” repeated the Colonel.

I came to earth with a bang and began to apologize. Somehow it
doesn’t do to talk like that to one’s Colonel even in moments of
spiritual exaltation.

We ceased fire and packed up and got mounted and hooked in like
six bits of black ginger, but the trouble was that we had to leave
the comparative safety of our orchard and go out into the barrage
which was churning up the fields the other side of the hedge. I
collected the Stand-by and gave him the plan of campaign. They were
to follow me in column of route at a trot, with twenty yards between
guns,--that is, at right angles to the barrage, so as to form a
smaller target. No man can have failed to hear his voice but for some
unknown reason they failed to carry out the order. The leading gun
followed me over the ditch on to the field, shells bursting on every
side. About sixty yards across the field I looked over my shoulder
and saw that they were all out of the orchard but wheeling to form
line, broadside on to the barrage.

The leading gun, which the Stand-by took on, was the only one that
got safely away. The five others all stuck with horses dead and men
wounded, and still that barrage dropped like hail.

We cut out the dead horses and shot the badly wounded ones and
somehow managed a four-horse team for each gun. The wounded who
couldn’t walk were lifted on to limbers and held there by the others,
and the four-horse teams nearly broke their hearts before we got
the guns off that devilish bit of ploughed land on to a road, and
after another twenty minutes had got out of the shell fire. Three
sergeants were wounded, a couple of drivers and a gunner. The road
was one solid mass of moving troops, French and English, infantry,
gunners and transport. There was no means of going cross-country with
four-horse teams. One had to follow the stream. Fortunately there
were some R.A.M.C. people with stretchers and there was a motor
ambulance. Between the two we got all our casualties bandaged and
away. The other batteries had been gone already three quarters of an
hour. There was no sign of them anywhere.

My own battery was scattered along a mile of traffic; one gun here,
another there, divided by field kitchens and French mitrailleuse
carts, marching infantry and limbered G.S. wagons. Where the
sergeant-major was with the wagon line was beyond the bounds of
conjecture. One hoped to find him at the rendezvous at Buchoire.
There was nothing with us in the way of rations or forage and we
only had the limbers full of ammunition. Fortunately the men had
had a midday ration issued in the orchard, and the horses had been
watered and fed during the morning. In the way of personnel I had the
Quartermaster-sergeant, and two sergeants. The rest were bombardiers,
gunners, and drivers,--about three men per gun all told. The outlook
was not very optimistic.

The view itself did not tend to lighten one’s depression. We climbed
a fairly steep slope which gave a view of the country for miles on
either side. The main roads and every little crossroad as far as the
eye could carry were all massed with moving troops going back. It
looked like the Allied armies in full retreat, quite orderly but none
the less routed. Where would it end? From rumours which ran about we
were almost surrounded. The only way out was south. We were inside a
bottle which we could not break, all aiming for the neck.

And yet everywhere on that slope French infantry had dug themselves
in, each man in a little hole about knee-deep with a tiny bank of mud
in front of him, separated from the next man by a few yards. They
sat and smoked in their holes, so like half-dug graves, waiting for
the enemy, watching us go back with a look in their eyes that seemed
to be of scorn. Now and again they laughed. It was difficult to meet
those quiet eyes without a surge of rage and shame. How much longer
were we going to retreat? Where were our reinforcements? Why had
our infantry been “relieved” that morning? Why weren’t we standing
shoulder to shoulder with those blue-clad poilus? What was the brain
at the back of it all? Who was giving the orders? Was this the end of
the war? Were we really beaten? Could it be possible that somewhere
there was not a line of defence which we could take up and hold,
hold for ever? Surely with magnificent men like ours who fought till
they dropped and then picked themselves up and fought again, surely
something could be done to stop this appalling débâcle!


26

The tide of traffic took us into Guiscard where we were able to pull
out of the stream one by one and collect as a battery,--or at least
the gun part of it. While studying the map a mounted orderly came up
and saluted.

“Are you the ---- Brigade, sir?” he said.

I said yes.

“The orders are to rendezvous at Muiraucourt instead of Buchoire.”

To this day that man remains a mystery. The rest of the brigade did
rendezvous at Buchoire and fought twice again that day. The Colonel
never gave any order about Muiraucourt and had never heard of the
place. Where the orderly came from, who he was, or how he knew the
number of the brigade are unsolved problems. I never saw him again.
Having given the message he disappeared into the stream of traffic,
and I, finding the new rendezvous to be only about three kilometres
away in a different direction to Buchoire and out of the traffic road
led on again at once.

We passed French gunners of all calibres firing at extreme range and
came to Muiraucourt to find it absolutely empty and silent. While the
horses were being watered and the wounded ones bandaged I scouted on
ahead and had the luck to find an A.S.C. officer with forage for us
and a possibility of rations if we waited an hour. It was manna in
the wilderness.

We drew the forage and fed the starving horses. At the end of the
hour an A.S.C. sergeant rode in to say that the ration wagons had
been blown up.--We took up an extra hole in our Sam Brownes. It
appeared that he had seen our headquarters and the other batteries
marching along the main road in the direction of Noyon, to which
place they were undoubtedly going.

The Quartermaster whispered something about bread and tea. So we
withdrew from the village and halted on a field just off the road
and started a fire. The bread ration was a snare and a delusion.
It worked out at about one slice per every other man. He confided
this to me sadly while the men were spread-eagled on the bank at
the roadside, enjoying all the anticipation of a full stomach. We
decided that it wasn’t a large enough quantity to split up so I went
over and put the position to them, telling them that on arrival at
Noyon we hoped to find the brigade looking out for us with a meal
for everybody ready. Meanwhile there wasn’t enough to go round. What
about tossing for it?... The ayes had it. They tossed as if they were
going to a football match, the winners sending up a cheer, and even
the losers sitting down again with a grin.

I decided to ride on into Noyon and locate the brigade and find out
where to get rations. So I handed the battery to the Stand-by to
bring on when ready, left him the Babe and the other lad, and took
the Quartermaster on with me.

It was a nightmare of a ride through miles and miles of empty
villages and deserted country, blown-up bridges like stricken giants
blocking every way, not a vehicle on the roads, no one in sight,
the spirit of desertion overhanging it all, with the light failing
rapidly and Noyon apparently as far off as ever. The horses were so
done that it was difficult to spur them out of a walk, we ourselves
so done that we could hardly raise the energy to spur them. At last
after hours of riding we came to the main Roye-Noyon road but didn’t
recognize it in the dark and turned the wrong way, going at least
half an hour before we discovered our mistake! It was the last straw.

A thing that added to our anxiety was the sight of big guns on
caterpillars all coming away from the place we were going to and
as we got nearer the town the roar of bursting shells seemed to be
very near. One didn’t quite know that streams of the enemy would
not pour over the crest at any minute. Deep in one’s brain a vague
anxiety formed. The whole country was so empty, the bridges so well
destroyed. Were we the last--had we been cut off? Was the Hun between
us and Noyon? Suppose the battery were captured? I began to wish
that I hadn’t ridden on but had sent the Stand-by in my place. For
the first time since the show began, a sense of utter loneliness
overwhelmed me, a bitter despair at the uselessness of individual
effort in this gigantic tragedy of apocalyptic destruction. Was it
a shadow of such loneliness as Christ knew upon the Cross when He
looked out upon a storm-riven world and cried, “My God, my God, why
hast Thou forsaken Me?” All the evil in the world was gathered here
in shrieking orgy, crushing one to such mental and physical tiredness
that death would only have been a welcome rest.

Unaided I should not have regretted that way out, God knows. But two
voices came to me through the night,--one from a little cottage among
the pine trees in England, the other calling across the Atlantic with
the mute notes of a violin.

“Your men look to you,” they whispered. “_We_ look to you....”


27

We came to Noyon!

It was as though the town were a magnet which had attracted all the
small traffic from that empty countryside, letting only the big guns
on caterpillars escape. The centre of the town, like a great octopus,
has seven roads which reach out in every direction. Each of these was
banked and double-banked with an interlocked mass of guns and wagons.
Here and there frantic officers tried to extricate the tangle but for
the most part men sat silent and inert upon their horses and vehicles
beyond effort and beyond care.

Army Headquarters told me that Noyon would begin to be shelled in
an hour’s time and gave me maps and a chit to draw food from the
station, but they had never heard of the brigade and thought the
Corps had been wiped out. As I left, the new lad came up and reported
that the battery had halted on the outskirts of the town. We went
back to it and collected the limbers and tried to take them with us
to the station, with hearts beating high at the thought of food. It
was impossible, so we left them on the pavement and dodged single
file between wagon wheels and horses’ legs. After an hour’s fighting
every yard of the way we got to the station to find a screaming
mob of civilians carrying bundles, treading on each other in their
efforts to enter a train, weeping, praying, cursing, out of all
control.

The R.S.O. had gone. There was no food.

We fought our way back to Army Headquarters where we learned that a
bombardier with two wagons of rations destined to feed stray units
like us had gone to Porquericourt, five kilometres out. If we found
him we could help ourselves. If we didn’t find him--a charming smile,
and a shrug of the shoulders.

I decided to try the hotel where I had spent a night with my brother
only three weeks ago. Three weeks, was it possible? I felt years
older. The place was bolted and barred and no amount of hammering or
shouting drew an answer. The thought of going back empty-handed to my
hungry battery was an agony. The chances of finding that bombardier
were about one in a million, so small that he didn’t even represent a
last hope. In utter despair one called aloud upon Christ and started
to walk back. In a narrow unlit street we passed a black doorway in
which stood a soldier.

“Can you give me a drink of water?” said I.

“Yes,” said he. “Come in, sir. This is the officers’ club.”

Was it luck? Or did Christ hear? You may think what you like but I am
convinced that it was Christ.

We went in. In one room were sleeping officers all over the floor.
The next was full of dinner tables uncleared, one electric light
burning. It was long after midnight. We helped ourselves to bits of
bread from each table and drank the leavings of milk which had been
served with the coffee. Then a waiter came. He said he would cook us
some tea and try and find a cold tongue or some ham. I told him that
I had a starving battery down the road and wanted more than tea and
ham. I wanted food in a sack, two sacks, everything he could rake up,
anything.

He blinked at me through his glasses. “I’ll see what I can do, sir,”
he said and went away.

We had our tea and tongue and he brought a huge sack with loaves and
tins of jam and bits of cheese and biscuits and packets of cigarettes
and tins of bully. Furthermore he refused all payment except two
francs for what we had eaten.

“That’s all right, sir,” he said. “I spent three days in a shell hole
outside Wipers on one tin o’ bully.--That’s the best I can do for
you.”

I wrung him by the hand and told him he was a brother and a pal, and
between us the lad and I shouldered the sack and went out again,
thanking God that at least we had got something for the men to eat.

On returning to the battery I found that they had been joined by six
wagons which had got cut off from the sergeant-major’s lot and the
entire wagon line of the Scots Captain’s battery with two of his
subalterns in charge. They, too, were starving.

The sack didn’t go very far. It only took a minute or so before the
lot was eaten. Then we started out, now a column about a mile long,
to find Porquericourt, a tiny village some two kilometres off the
main road, the gunners sleeping as they walked, the drivers rocking
in the saddle, the horses stumbling along at a snail’s pace. None
of us had shaved or washed since the 21st. We were a hollow-eyed,
draggled mob, but we got there at last to be challenged by sentries
who guarded sleeping bits of units who had dropped where they stood
all over the place. While my two units fixed up a wagon line I took
the Quartermaster with me and woke up every man under a wagon or near
one asking him if he were Bombardier So and So,--the man with the
food. How they cursed me. It took me an hour to go the rounds and
there was no bombardier with food. The men received the news without
comment and dropped down beside the wagons. The Babe had collected
a wagon cover for us to sleep under and spread it under a tree. The
four of us lay on it side by side and folded the end over ourselves.
There was a heavy dew. But my job wasn’t over. There was to-morrow
to be considered. I had given orders to be ready to move off at six
o’clock unless the Hun arrived before that. It was then 3 a.m.

The Army had told me that if our Corps was not completely wiped out,
their line of retreat was Buchoire, Crissolles and so back in the
direction of Lassigny. They advised me to go to Crissolles. But one
look at the map convinced me that Crissolles would be German by six
o’clock in the morning. So I decided on Lagny by the secondary road
which went straight to it from Porquericourt. If the brigade was not
there, surely there would be some fighting unit who would have heard
of them, or who might at least be able to spare us rations, or tell
us where we could get some. Fighting on scraps of bread was all right
but could not be prolonged indefinitely.

At six o’clock we set out as a squadron of cavalry with slung lances
trotted like ghosts across the turf. We had only been on the march
five minutes when a yell from the rear of the battery was passed
quickly up to me as I walked in the lead.

“Halt! Action rear!”

My heart stood still. Were the Germans streaming up in the mist?
Were we caught at last like rats in a trap? It _couldn’t_ be. It was
some fool mistake. The Babe was riding just behind me. I called
him up. “Canter back and find out who gave that order and bring him
here.--You, lead driver! Keep on walking till I give you the order to
do anything else.”

We went on steadily. From moment to moment nothing seemed to happen,
no rifle or machine-gun fire.--The Babe came back with a grin. “The
order was ‘All correct in rear,’ sir.”

Can you get the feeling of relief? We were not prisoners or fighting
to the last man with clubbed rifles in that cold grey dawn on empty
stomachs.

I obeyed the natural instinct of all mothers who see their child
snatched from destruction,--to slap the infant. “Find out the man who
passed it up wrongly and damn his soul to hell?”

“Right, sir,” said the Babe cheerily, and went back. Good Babe, he
couldn’t damn even a mosquito properly!

The road was the most ungodly track imaginable, blocked here and
there by 60-pounders coming into action. But somehow the horses
encompassed the impossible and we halted in the lane outside the
village at about seven o’clock. The Stand-by remained in charge of
the battery while the Babe and I went across gardens to get to the
village square. There was an old man standing at a door. He gazed
at us motionless. I gave him _bon jour_ and asked him for news of
British troops, gunners. Yes, the village was full. Would we care
for some cider? Wouldn’t we! He produced jugfuls of the most perfect
cider I’ve ever drunk and told us the story of his life. He was a
veteran of 1870 and wept all down himself in the telling. We thanked
him profusely, shook his trembling hand and went out of his front
door into the main street.

There were wagons with the brigade mark! I could have wept with joy.

In a couple of minutes we had found Headquarters. The man I’d dosed
with champagne on the road corner two days before fell on my neck
with strong oaths. It appeared that I’d been given up as wiped out
with the whole battery, or at least captured. He looked upon me as
back from the dead.

The Colonel had a different point of view. He was no longer shaved
and washed, and threatened to put me under arrest for not having
rendezvoused at Buchoire! Relations between us were strained,
but everybody was in the act of getting mounted to reconnoitre
positions so there was no time for explanations or recriminations.
Within three-quarters of an hour the battery was in action, but the
Quartermaster had found the sergeant-major, who, splendid fellow, had
our rations. He functioned mightily with cooks. Tea and bacon, bread
and butter,--what could the “Carlton” have done better than that?

And later, when the sun came out, there was no firing to be done, and
we slept beside the gun wheels under an apple tree, slept like the
dead for nearly a whole hour.


28

The Hun was indeed at Crissolles, for the brigade had fought there
the previous evening. So much for Army advice.

The day was marked by two outstanding events; one, the return of
the Major of the Scots Captain’s battery, his wound healed, full of
bloodthirst and cheeriness; the other, that I got a shave and wash.
We advanced during the morning to cover a village called Bussy. We
covered it,--with gun fire and salvos, the signal for each salvo
being a wave from my shaving brush. There was a hell of a battle in
Bussy, street fighting with bayonets and bombs. The brigade dropped
a curtain of fire on the outer fringe of the village and caught
the enemy in full tide. Four batteries sending over between them a
hundred rounds a minute of high explosive and shrapnel can make a
nasty mess of a pin-point. The infantry gloated,--our infantry.

On our right Noyon was the centre of a whirlwind of Hun shells. We
were not out any too soon. The thought added zest to our gun fire.
Considering the amount of work those guns had done in the last five
days and nights it was amazing how they remained in action without
even breaking down. The fitter worked like a nigger and nursed them
like infants. Later the Army took him from me to go and drive rivets
in ships!

We pulled out of action again as dusk was falling, and the word was
passed that we had been relieved and were going out of the line. The
brigade rendezvoused at Cuy in a field off the road while the traffic
crept forward a yard and halted, waited an hour and advanced another
yard, every sort of gun, wagon, lorry, ambulance and car, crawling
back, blocked at every crossroads, stuck in ditches, sometimes
abandoned.

All round the sky glared redly. Hour after hour we sat in that cup
of ground waiting for orders, shivering with cold, sleeping in
uneasy snatches, smoking tobacco that ceased to taste, nibbling
ration biscuits until the night became filled with an eerie strained
silence. Jerky sentences stopped. Faint in the distance came the
crunch of wheels, a vague undercurrent of sound. The guns had
stopped. Now and again the chink of a horse mumbling his bit. The
tail end of the traffic on the road below us was silent, waiting, the
men huddled, asleep. And through it all one’s ear listened for a new
sound, the sound of marching feet, or trotting horses which might
mean an Uhlan patrol. Bussy was not far.

Suddenly one voice, far away, distinct, pierced the darkness like a
thin but blinding ray. “Les Boches!--Les Boches!”

A sort of shivering rustle ran over the whole brigade. Men stirred,
sat up, muttered. Horses raised their heads with a rattle of harness.
Hands crept to revolvers. Every breath was held and every head stared
in the direction of the voice.

For a moment the silence was spellbound.

Then the voice came again, “_A gauche! A gauche! Nom de Dieu!_” and
the crunch of wheels came again.

The brigade relaxed. There came a laugh or two, a mumbled remark, a
settling down, a muttered curse and then silence once more.

Eventually came a stir, an order. Voices were raised. Sleeping
figures rolled over stiffly, staggered up. Officers came forward. The
order “Get mounted!” galvanized everybody.

Wagon by wagon we pulled out of the field. My battery was the last.
No sooner on the road, with our noses against the tailboard of the
last vehicle of the battery in front, than we had to halt again and
wait endlessly, the drivers sleeping in their saddles until pulled
out by the N.C.O.’s, the gunners flinging themselves into the ditch.
At last on again, kicking the sleepers awake,--the only method of
rousing them. It was very cold. To halt was as great an agony as
to march, whether mounted or on foot. For five days and nights one
had had one’s boots on. The condition of feet was indescribable. In
places the road was blocked by abandoned motor lorries. We had to
extemporize bridges over the ditch with rocks and tins and whatever
was in the lorries with a tailboard placed on top, to unhook lead
horses from a four-horse gun team and hook them into a loaded wagon
to make a six-horse team, to rouse the drivers sufficiently to make
them drive properly and get the full team to work together, and at
last, having reached a good metalled road, to follow the battery in
front, limping and blind, hour after hour. From time to time the
gunners and drivers changed places. For the most part no word was
spoken. We halted when the teams bumped their noses on the wagon
in front, went on again when those in front did. At one halt I sat
on a gun seat, the unforgivable sin for a gunner on the line of
march,--and I was the Battery Commander. Sprawled over the breech
of the gun in a stupor I knew no more for an indefinite period when
I woke again to find us still marching. The sergeant-major confided
to me afterwards that he was so far my accomplice in that lack of
discipline that he posted a gunner on either side to see that I
didn’t fall off. We had started the march about five o’clock in the
afternoon.

We didn’t reach our destination till nine o’clock next morning.
The destination consisted of halting in the road outside a village
already full of troops, Chevrincourt. The horses were unhooked and
taken off the road, watered, and tied to lines run up between the
trees. Breakfast was cooked, and having ascertained that we were not
going to move for the rest of the day we spread our valises, and got
into pyjamas, not caring if it snowed ink.


29

We stayed there two days, doing nothing but water and feed the
horses and sleep. I succeeded in getting letters home the first
morning, having the luck to meet a junior Brass Hat who had done
the retreat in a motor-car. It was good to be able to put an end to
their anxiety. Considering all things we had been extraordinarily
lucky. The number of our dead, wounded and missing was comparatively
slight and the missing rolled up later, most of them. On the second
night at about two in the morning, Battery Commanders were summoned
urgently to Brigade Headquarters. The Colonel had gone, leaving
the bloodthirsty Major in command. It transpired that a Divisional
brigade plus one battery of ours was to go back into the line.
They would take our best guns, some of our best teams and our best
sergeants. The exchanges were to be carried out at once. They were.

We marched away that day, leaving one battery behind. As it happened,
it didn’t go into the line again but rejoined us a week later.

The third phase of the retreat, marching back to the British area--we
were far south into the French area at Chevrincourt, which is near
Compiègne, and all its signboards showed Paris so many kilometres
away--gave us an impression of the backwash of war. The roads
were full, not of troops, but of refugees, women, old men, girls
and children, with what possessions they could load into a farm
wagon piled sky high. They pulled their cattle along by chains or
ropes tied round their horns. Some of them pushed perambulators
full of packages and carried their babies. Others staggered under
bundles. Grief marked their faces. The hope of return kept them
going. The French have deeper roots in the soil than we. To them
their “_patelin_” is the world and all the beauty thereof. It was a
terrible sight to see those poor women trudging the endless roads,
void of a goal as long as they kept away from the pursuing death,
half starved, sleeping unwashed in leaky barns, regardless of sex,
begging milk from the inhabited villages they passed through to
satisfy their unhappy babies, managing somehow to help the aged
and infirm who mumbled bitter curses at the “_sale Boche_” and
“_soixante-dix_.” I heard one woman say “_Nous savons c’qu c’est que
la guerre! Nous avons tout fait excepté les tranchées._” “We know
what war is. We have done everything except the trenches.” Bombarded
with gas and long-range guns, bombed by aeroplanes, homeless, half
starved, the graves of their dead pillaged by ghoul-like Huns, their
sons, husbands, and lovers killed, indeed they knew the meaning of
war.

England has been left in merciful ignorance of this side of war,
but woe unto her if she ever forgets that these women of France are
her blood-sisters, these peasant women who later gave food to the
emaciated Tommies who staggered back starving after the armistice,
food of which they denied themselves and their children.

On the third day we reached Poix where only three months previously
we had spent a merry Christmas and drunk the New Year in, the third
day of ceaseless marching and finding billets in the middle of the
night in villages crowded with refugees. The whole area was full,
British and French elbowing each other, the unfortunate refugees
being compelled to move on.

Here we exchanged old guns for new, received reinforcements of men
and horses, drew new equipment in place of that which was destroyed
and lost, found time to ride over to Bergicourt to pay our respects
to the little Abbé, still unshaved, who was now billeting Moroccan
troops, and who kissed us on both cheeks before all the world, and in
three more days were on our way to their firing line again.

It was here that the runaway servants were dealt with; here, too,
that my brother came rolling up in his car to satisfy himself that I
was still this side of eternity or capture. And very good it was to
see him. He gave us the number of divisions engaged against us, and
we marvelled again that any of us were still alive.

We went north this time for the defence of Amiens, having been joined
by our fourth battery, and relieved a brigade in action behind the
village of Gentelles. The Anzacs were in the line from Villers
Brettoneux to Hangard where their flank touched the French. The spire
of Amiens cathedral peeped up behind us and all day long-range shells
whizzed over our heads into the stricken city.

Some one was dissatisfied with our positions behind the village.
The range was considered too long. Accordingly we were ordered to
go forward and relieve some other batteries down the slope in front
of Gentelles. The weather had broken. It rained ceaselessly. The
whole area was a mud patch broken by shell holes. The Major, who
had remained behind at Chevrincourt, and I went forward together
to locate the forward batteries. Dead horses everywhere, and fresh
graves of men marked our path. Never have I seen such joy on any
faces as on those of the officers whom we were coming to relieve.

On our return we reported unfavourably, urging strongly that we
should remain where we were. The order was inexorable. That night we
went in.

We stayed there three days, at the end of which time we were
withdrawn behind the village again. Our dead were three officers--one
of whom was the Babe--half the gunners, and several drivers. Our
wounded were one officer and half the remaining gunners. Of the guns
themselves about six in the brigade were knocked out by direct hits.

Who was that dissatisfied “some one” who, having looked at a map
from the safety of a back area, would not listen to the report of
two Majors, one a regular, who had visited the ground and spoke from
their bitterly-earned experience? Do the ghosts of those officers
and men, unnecessarily dead, disturb his rest o’ nights, or is he
proudly wearing another ribbon for distinguished service? Even from
the map he ought to have known better. It was the only place where a
fool would have put guns. The German artillery judged him well.

Poor Babe, to be thrown away at the beginning of his manhood at the
dictate of some ignorant and cowardly Brass Hat!

“Young, unmarried men, your King and country need you!”


30

So we crawled out of the valley of death. With what remained of us
in men and guns we formed three batteries, two of which went back to
their original positions behind the village and in disproof of their
uselessness fired four thousand rounds a day per battery, fifty-six
wagon-loads of ammunition. The third battery tucked itself into a
corner of the village and remained there till its last gun had been
knocked out. One S.O.S. lasted thirty-six hours. One lived with a
telephone and a map. Sleep was unknown. Food was just food, eaten
when the servants chose to bring it. The brain reeled under the
stupendousness of the strain and the firing. For cover we lived in a
hole in the ground, some four feet deep with a tarpaulin to keep the
rain out. It was just big enough to hold us all. The wings of the
angel of death brushed our faces continuously. Letters from home were
read without being understood. One watched men burned to death in the
battery in front, as the result of a direct hit, without any emotion.
If there be a hell such as the Church talks about, then indeed we had
reached it.

We got a new Colonel here, and the bloodthirsty Major returned to his
battery, the Scots Captain having been one of the wounded. My own
Captain rolled up again too, having been doing all sorts of weird
fighting up and down the line. It was only now that we learned the
full extent of the retreat and received an order of the day from
the Commander in Chief to the effect that England had its back up
against the wall. In other words the Hun was only to pass over our
dead bodies. He attempted it at every hour of the day and night. The
Anzacs lost and retook Villers Brettoneux. The enemy got to Cachy,
five hundred yards in front of the guns, and was driven back again.
The French Colonials filled Hangard Wood with their own and German
dead, the wounded leaving a trail of blood day and night past our
hole in the ground. The Anzacs revelled in it. They had never killed
so many men in their lives. Their General, a great tall man of mighty
few words, was round the outpost line every day. He was much loved.
Every officer and man would gladly have stopped a shell for him.

At last we were pulled out of the line, at half an hour’s notice.
Just before hooking in--the teams were on the position--there was
a small S.O.S. lasting five minutes. My battery fired four hundred
rounds in that time,--pretty good going for men who had come through
such an inferno practically without sleep for fifteen days.

We sat under a haystack in the rain for forty-eight hours and the
Colonel gave us lectures on calibration. Most interesting!

I confess to having been done in completely. The Babe’s death
had been a frightful shock. His shoulder was touching mine as he
got it and I had carried him spouting blood to the shelter of a
bank. I wanted to get away and hide. I was afraid, not of death,
but of going on in that living hell. I was unable to concentrate
sufficiently to dictate the battery orders. I was unable to face the
nine o’clock parade and left it to the Orderly Officer. The day’s
routine made me so jumpy that I couldn’t go near the lines or the
horses. The sight of a gun filled me with physical sickness. The
effort of giving a definite order left me trembling all over.

The greatest comfort I knew was to lie on my valise in the wet straw
with closed eyes and listen to “Caprice Viennois” on the gramophone.
It lifted one’s soul with gentle hands and bore it away into infinite
space where all was quiet and full of eternal rest and beauty. It
summed up the youth of the world, the springtime of love in all its
fresh cleanness, like the sun after an April shower transforms the
universe into magic colours.

I think the subalterns guessed something of my trouble for they went
out of their way to help me in little things.

We marched north and went into the line again behind Albert, a
murdered city whose skeleton melted before one’s eyes under the
ceaseless rain of shells from our heavy artillery.

During and since the retreat the cry on all sides was “Where the
devil are the Americans?”--those mysterious Americans who were
reported to be landing at the rate of seven a minute. What became
of them after landing? They seemed to disappear. Some had seen them
buying up Marseilles, and then painting Paris all colours of the
rainbow, but no one had yet heard of them doing any fighting. The
attitude was not very bright, until Pershing’s offer to Foch. Then
everybody said, “Ah! _Now_ we shall see something.” Our own recruits
seemed to be the dregs of England, untrained, weedy specimens who had
never seen a gun and were incapable of learning. Yet we held the Hun
all right. One looked for the huskies from U.S.A., however, with
some anxiety.

At Albert we found them, specimens of them, wedged in the line with
our infantry, learning the game. Their one desire was to go out into
No Man’s Land and get to close quarters. They brought Brother Boche
or bits of him every time. One overheard talk on one’s way along the
trenches to the O.P. “Danger?” queried one sarcastically, “Say, I
ain’t bin shot at yet.” And another time when two officers and I had
been shelled out of the O.P. by a pip-squeak battery to our extreme
discomfort and danger, we came upon a great beefy American standing
on the fire step watching the shells burst on the place we had just
succeeded in leaving. “If that guy don’t quit foolin’ around with
that gun,” he said thoughtfully, “some one’ll likely get hurt in a
minute.”

Which was all to the good. They shaped well. The trouble apparently
was that they had no guns and no rifles.

Our own positions were another instance of the criminal folly of
ignorance,--great obvious white gashes in a green field, badly
camouflaged, photographed and registered by the Hun, so placed that
the lowest range to clear the crest was 3,500 and the S.O.S. was
3,550. It meant that if the Germans advanced only fifty yards we
could not bring fire to bear on them.

The dawn of our getting in was enlivened by an hour’s bombardment
with gas and four-twos. Every succeeding dawn was the same.

Fortunately it proved to be a peace sector, comparatively speaking,
and I moved out of that unsavoury spot with no more delay than was
required in getting the Colonel’s consent. It only took the death
of one man to prove my point. He was a mere gunner, not even on
proficiency pay, so presumably it was cheap knowledge. We buried him
at midnight in pouring rain, the padre reading the service by the
light of my electric torch. But the Colonel wasn’t there.

From the new position so reluctantly agreed to, we fired many
hundreds of rounds, as did our successors, and not a single man
became a casualty.

What is the psychology of this system of insisting on going into
childishly unsuitable positions? Do they think the Battery Commander
a coward who balks at a strafed emplacement? Isn’t the idea of field
gunners to put their guns in such a place as will permit them to
remain in action effectively for the longest possible time in a show?
Why, therefore, occupy a position already accurately registered by
the enemy, which he can silence at any given moment? Do they think
that a Major of two years’ experience in command of a battery in the
line has not learned at least the rudiments of choosing positions for
his guns? Do they think it is an attempt to resent authority, or to
assert their own importance? Do they think that the difference of one
pip and a foot of braid is the boundary between omniscience and crass
stupidity?

In civil life if the senior partner insists on doing the junior’s job
and bungles it, the junior can resign,--and say things.

While we were outside Albert we got our first leave allotment and
the ranks were permitted to return to their wives and families for
fourteen days, provided always that they had been duly vaccinated,
inoculated, and declared free from vermin and venereal disease by the
medical officer.

A delightful game, the inoculation business. Army orders are careful
not to make it compulsory, but if any man refuses to be done his
commanding officer is expected to argue with him politely, and, if
that fails, to hound him to the needle. If he shies at the needle’s
point then his leave is stopped,--although he has sweated blood for
King and country for eighteen months or so, on a weekly pay with
which a munitioneer daily tips the waiter at the “Carlton.” If he has
been unlucky enough to get venereal disease then his leave is stopped
for a year.

In the next war every Tommy will be a munition maker.


31

The desire to get out of it, to hide, refused to leave me.

I wrote to my brother and asked him if he could help me to become an
R.T.O. or an M.L.O.; failing that, a cushy liaison job miles away
from shambles and responsibility and spit and polish. He knew of the
very thing, and I was duly nominated for liaison. The weeks went by
and the nomination papers became a mass of illegible recommendations
and signatures up to the highest Generals of the English Army and a
Maréchal of France. But the ultimate reply was that I was a Battery
Commander and therefore far too important to be allowed to go.
Considering that I was half dead and not even allowed an opinion in
the choosing of a position for my own battery, Gilbert and Sullivan
could have conceived no more priceless paradox.

Somewhere about the end of May we were relieved and went to a rest
camp outside Abbeville which was being bombed every night. A special
week’s leave to England was granted to “war-weary officers.” I sent
a subaltern and, prepared to pawn my own soul to see England again,
asked if I might go too.

The reply is worthy of quotation. “You don’t seem to understand that
this is a rest camp, the time when you are supposed to train your
battery. You’ll get your leave in the line.”

The camp was on turf at the edge of a deep lake. All day the horses
roamed free grazing, and the men splashed about in the water whenever
they felt inclined. The sun shone and footballs appeared from nowhere
and there were shops in the village where they could spend money,
and Abbeville was only about a mile and a half away. In the morning
we did a little gun drill and cleaned vehicles and harness. Concerts
took place in the evenings. Leslie Henson came with a theatrical
company and gave an excellent show. The battery enjoyed its time of
training.

Most of those officers who weren’t sufficiently war-weary for the
week in England, went for a couple of days to Tréport or Paris-Plage.
For myself I got forty-eight hours in Etaples with my best pal,
who was giving shows to troops about to go up the line, feeding
train-loads of refugees and helping to bandage wounded; and somehow
or other keeping out of the way of the bombs which wrecked the
hospital and drove the reinforcement camps to sleep in the woods on
the other side of the river. We drove out to Paris-Plage and lunched
and dined and watched the golden sea sparkling and walked back in a
moonlight filled with the droning of Gothas, the crashing of bombs
and the impotent rage of an Archie barrage.

Not only were there no horses to look after nor men to handle but
there was a kindred spirit to talk with when one felt like it, or
with whom to remain silent when one didn’t. Blessed be pals, for they
are few and far between, and their value is above rubies.

Our rest camp came to an end with an inspection from Field-Marshal
Sir Douglas Haig and once more we took the trail. The battery’s
adventures from then until the first day of the attack which was to
end the war can be briefly summed up, as we saw hardly any fighting.
We went back to Albert and checked calibrations, then entrained and
went off to Flanders where we remained in reserve near St. Omer for a
fortnight or so. Then we entrained once more and returned to Albert,
but this time south of it, behind Morlancourt.

There was an unusual excitement in the air and a touch of optimism.
Foch was said to have something up his sleeve. The Hun was reported
to be evacuating Albert. The Americans had been blooded and had come
up to expectations. There was a different atmosphere about the whole
thing. On our own sector the Hun was offensive. The night we came in
he made a raid, took two thousand yards of front line on our right,
and plastered us with gas and four-twos for several hours. No one was
hurt or gassed except myself. I got a dose of gas. The doctor advised
me to go down to the wagon line for a couple of days, but the barrage
was already in for our attack and the Captain was in England on the
Overseas Course. The show started about 4 p.m. right along the front.

It was like the 21st of March with the positions reversed. South of
us the whole line broke through and moved forward. At Morlancourt the
Hun fought to the death. It was a sort of pivot, and for a couple of
days we pounded him. By that time the line had ceased to bulge and
was practically north and south. Then our infantry took Morlancourt
and pushed the Hun back on to the Fricourt ridge and in wild
excitement we got the order to advance. It was about seven o’clock
at night. All Battery Commanders and the Colonel dashed up in a car
to the old front line to reconnoitre positions. The car was missed
by about twelve yards with high explosive and we advanced in the
dark, falling over barbed wire, tumbling into shell holes, jumping
trenches and treading on corpses through a most unpleasant barrage.
The Hun had a distinct sting in his tail.

We came into position about three hundred yards north-west of
Morlancourt. The village and all the country round stank of festering
corpses, mostly German, though now and again one came upon a British
pair of boots and puttees with legs in them,--or a whole soldier
with a pack on his back, who looked as if he were sleeping until
one saw that half his face was blown away. It made one sick, sick
with horror, whether it was our own Tommies or a long trench chaotic
with rifles, equipment, machine guns and yellow, staring and swollen
Germans.

The excitement of advancing died away. The “glory of victory” was
just one long butchery, one awful smell, an orgy of appalling
destruction unequalled by the barbarians of pre-civilization.

Here was all the brain, energy and science of nineteen hundred years
of “progress,” concentrated on lust and slaughter, and we called it
glorious bravery and rang church bells! Soldier poets sang their swan
songs in praise of dying for their country, their country which gave
them a period of hell, and agonizing death, then wept crocodile tears
over the Roll of Honour, and finally returned with an easy conscience
to its money-grubbing. The gladiators did it better. At least they
were permitted a final sarcasm, “_Morituri, te salutant!_”

Even gentle women at home, who are properly frightened of mice and
spank small boys caught ill-treating an animal, even they read the
flaming headlines of the papers with a light in their eyes, and said,
“How glorious! We are winning!” Would they have said the same if they
could have been set down on that reeking battlefield where riddled
tanks splashed with blood heaved drunkenly, ambulances continuously
drove away with the smashed wrecks of what once were men, leaving a
trail of screams in the dust of the road, and always the guns crashed
out their pæan of hate by day and night, ceaselessly, remorselessly,
with a terrible trained hunger to kill, and maim and wipe out?

There was no stopping. I was an insignificant cog in that vast
machine, but no man could stop the wheels in their mighty
revolutions. Fate stepped in, however.

We advanced again to Mametz, and there, mercifully, I got another
dose of gas. The effects of the first one, seven days previously, had
not worked off. This was the last straw. Three days later it toppled
me over. The doctors labelled me and sent me home.




                              PART IV

                          _THE ARMISTICE_


1

The battery, commanded by I know not whom, went on to the bitter end
in that sweeping advance which broke the Hindenburg line and brought
the enemy to his knees. Their luck held good, for occasional letters
from the subalterns told me that no one else had been killed. The
last I heard of them they were at Tréport, enjoying life with the
hope of demobilization dangling in front of their eyes. May it not
dangle too long.

For me the war was over. I have never fired a gun again, nor, please
God, will I ever do so.

In saying the war was over I was wrong. I should have said the
fighting. There were other and equally terrible sides of this
world-tragedy which I was destined to see and feel.

Let me sketch briefly the facts which led to my return to duty.

The Medical Authorities sent me to a place called The Funkhole
of England, a seaside town where never a bomb from airships or
raiding Gothas disturbed the sunny calm, a community of convalescent
hospitals with a list of rules as long as your arm, hotels full of
moneyed Hebrews, who only journeyed to London by day to make more
money, and retired by night to the security of their wives in the
Funkhole, shop-keepers who rejoiced in the war because it enabled
them to put up their prices two hundred per cent., and indecent
flappers always ready to be picked up by any subaltern.

The War Office authorities hastened to notify me that I was now
reduced to subaltern, but somehow I was “off” flappers. Another
department begged me to get well quickly, because, being no longer
fit to command a battery, I was wanted for that long-forgotten
liaison job.

The explanation of degrading from Major to subaltern is not
forthcoming. Perhaps the Government were thinking of the rate payers.
The difference in pay is about two shillings and sixpence a day, and
there were many thousands of us thus reduced.--But it does not make
for an exuberant patriotism. My reply was that if I didn’t go out as
a Major, I should not hurry to get well. This drew a telegram which
stated that I was re-appointed acting-Major while employed as liaison
officer, but what they gave with one hand they took back with the
other, for the telegram ordered me to France again three weeks before
the end of my sick leave.

It was a curious return. But for the fact that I was still in uniform
I might have been a mere tourist, a spectator. The job was more
“cushy” even than that of R.T.O. or M.L.O. Was I glad? Enormously.
Was I sorry? Yes, for out there in the thick of it were those men of
mine, in a sense my children, who had looked to me for the food they
ate, the clothes they wore, the pay they drew, the punishments they
received, whose lives had been in my keeping so long, who, for two
years, had constituted all my life, with whom I had shared good days
and bad, short rations and full, hardships innumerable, suffering
indescribable. It was impossible to live softly and be driven in a
big Vauxhall car, while they were still out there, without a twinge
of conscience, even though one was not fit to go back to them. I
slept in a bed with sheets, and now and again a hot bath, receiving
letters from home in four days instead of eight, and generally
enjoying all the creature comforts which console the back-area
officer for the lack of excitement only found in the firing line. It
was a period of doing little, observing much and thinking a great
deal among those lucky ones of the earth, whose lines had been cast
in peaceful waters far behind even the backwash of that cataclysmic
tidal wave in which so many less fortunate millions had been sucked
under.

My first job was to accompany a party of French war correspondents to
the occupied territory which the enemy had recently been forced to
evacuate,--Dunkerque, Ostend, Bruges, Courtrai, Denain, Lille. There
one marvelled at the courage of those citizens who for four years had
had to bow the neck to the invader. From their own mouths we heard
stories of the systematic, thought-out cruelty of the Germans who
hurt not only the bodies of their victims, but their self-respect,
their decency, their honour, their souls. How they survived that
interminable hopeless four years of exaggerated brutality and
pillage, cut off from all communication with the outside world; fed
with stories of ghastly defeats inflicted upon their countrymen and
allies, of distrust and revolt between England and France; fined
and imprisoned for uncommitted offences against military law, not
infrequently shot in cold blood without trial; their women submitted
to the last indignities of the “_Inspection sanitaire_,” irrespective
of age or class, wrenched from their homes and deported into the
unknown interior, sent to work for the hated enemy behind the
firing line, unprotected from the assault of any German soldier or
officer,--for those women there were worse things than the firing
trenches.

We saw the results of the German Official Department of
Demobilization, which had its headquarters in Alsace-Lorraine at
Metz, under a General, by whose direct orders all the factories in
the occupied regions were dismantled and sent back piecemeal to
Germany, the shells of the plant then being dynamited under pretence
of military necessity. We saw a country stripped of its resources,
gutted, sacked, rendered sterile.

What is the Kultur, the philosophy which not only renders such
conduct thinkable, but puts it into the most thorough execution? Are
we mad to think that such people can be admitted into a League of
Nations until after hundreds of years of repentance and expiation
in sackcloth and ashes? They should be made the slaves of Europe,
the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the road-sweepers and
offal-burners, deprived of a voice in their own government, without
standing in the eyes of all peoples.


2

French General Headquarters, to which I was then sent as liaison
officer, was established in a little old-world town, not far from
Paris, whose walls had been battered by the English centuries ago.
Curious to think that after hundreds of years of racial antagonism
we should at last have our eyes opened to the fact that our one-time
enemies have the same qualities of courage and endurance, a far truer
patriotism and a code of honour which nothing can break. No longer do
we think of them as flippant and decadent. We know them for a nation
of big-hearted men, loyal to the death, of lion-like courage, with
the capacity for hanging on, which in our pride we ascribed only to
the British bull dog. We have seen Verdun. We have stood side by side
with them in mud and blood, in fat days and lean, and know it to be
true.

In this little town, where the bells chimed the swift hours, and
market day drew a concourse of peasant women, we sat breathless at
the ’phone, hourly marking the map that liberated each time a little
more of France. Days of wild hope that the end was at hand, the end
which such a short time back had seemed so infinitely remote, days
when the future began to be a possibility, that future which for four
years one had not dared to dream about. Will the rose colours ever
come back? Or will the memory of those million dead go down with one
to the grave?

The Armistice was signed. The guns had stopped. For a breathless
moment the world stood still. The price was paid. The youth of
England and France lay upturned to the sky. Three thousand miles
across the ocean American mothers wept their unburied sons. Did
Germany shed tears of sorrow or rage?

The world travail was over, and even at that sacred moment when
humanity should have been purged of all pettiness and meanness,
should have bowed down in humility and thankfulness, forces were
astir to try and raise up jealousy, hatred and enmity between
England, France and America.

Have we learnt _nothing_? Are these million dead in vain? Are we to
let the pendulum swing back to the old rut of dishonest hypocritical
self-seeking, disguised under the title of that misunderstood
word “patriotism?” Have we not yet looked into the eyes of Truth
and seen ourselves as we are? Is all this talk of world peace and
league of nations mere newspaper cant, to disguise the fear of being
out-grabbed at the peace conference? Shall we return to lying, hatred
and all malice and re-crucify Christ? What is the world travail for?
To produce stillborn through our own negligence the hope of Peace?
The leopard cannot change his spots, you say. My answer is that the
leopard does not want to. What does the present hold out to us who
have been through the Valley of the Shadow? What does it look like
to us who gaze down upon it from the pinnacle of four years upon the
edge of eternity?

Your old men shall see visions and your young men shall dream dreams.

The vision of the old men has been realized. In the orgy of effort
for world domination they have dug up a world unrest fertilized by
the sightless faces of youth upturned to the sky. Their working
hypothesis was false. The result is failure. They have destroyed
themselves also in the conflagration which they started. It has burnt
up the ancient fetishes, consumed their shibboleths. Their day is
done. They stand among the still-smoking ruins, naked and very ugly.

The era of the young men has begun. Bent under the Atlas-like burden
loaded upon their shoulders, they have stood daily for five years
upon the edge of eternity. They have stared across into the eyes of
Truth, some unrecognizing, others with disdain, but many there are in
whose returning faces is the dawn of wisdom. They are coming back,
the burden exchanged. On them rests the fate of the unborn. Already
their feet are set upon the new way. But are they strong enough
unaided to keep the pendulum from swinging back? No. It is too heavy.
Every one of us must let ourselves hear the new note in their voices,
calling us to the recognition of the ideal. For five years all the
science, philosophy and energy of mankind has been concentrated on
the art of dealing death. The young men ask that mankind should
now concentrate on the art of giving life. We have proved the
power within us because the routine of the world’s great sin has
established this surprising paradox, that we daily gave evidence of
heroism, tolerance, kindliness, brotherhood.

Shall we, like Peter who denied Christ, refuse to recognize the
greatness within ourselves? We found truth while we practised war.
Let us carry it to the practice of peace.


                              THE END


                             PRINTED AT
                       THE CHAPEL RIVER PRESS,
                          KINGSTON, SURREY.




  TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

  Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been
  corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within
  the text and consultation of external sources.

  Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text,
  and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.

  Pg 40: ‘unforgetable hell’ replaced by ‘unforgettable hell’.
  Pg 40: ‘set out faces’ replaced by ‘set our faces’.
  Pg 78: ‘by 9 P.M.’ replaced by ‘by 9 p.m.’.
  Pg 97: ‘Just as were were’ replaced by ‘Just as we were’.
  Pg 108: ‘were not wanted’ replaced by ‘were not wanting’.
  Pg 125: ‘to-towards the end’ replaced by ‘towards the end’.
  Pg 144: ‘the 106 fuze’ replaced by ‘the 106 fuse’.
  Pg 169: ‘causalties slight’ replaced by ‘casualties slight’.
  Pg 175: ‘all extremly happy’ replaced by ‘all extremely happy’.
  Pg 179: ‘they dind’t come’ replaced by ‘they didn’t come’.
  Pg 183: ‘who, on rcovering’ replaced by ‘who, on recovering’.
  Pg 185: ‘in all my live’ replaced by ‘in all my life’.
  Pg 186: ‘near he river’ replaced by ‘near the river’.
  Pg 186: ‘had ea and dinner’ replaced by ‘had tea and dinner’.