THE WAR THE INFANTRY KNEW 1914 - 1919 (EXCERPT)
[preface] [chapter 9] [chapter 10] [chapter 11]

CHAPTER XI

Somme -- Winter, a hard one -- A chilly rest -- Live and let live: Abbeville: The downs above Clery -- The thermometer below zero -- Les Bouffes! -- "Thank God -- and the Brigadier:" -- Implications and Interactions

Contributors: KENT; MORGAN JONES; MOODY; RADFORD

Sketches: 1, 11, 12

At 11:15 forenoon we marched to Buire, and entrained at 2. The train took 11 hours to do the first I5 miles. At the end of an hour of one of the halts a wag at the rear called, "Pass it along,

[November 12th] 'steady in front'." We arrived at Airaines at 3:30, then we marched 7 miles more alongside the same railway line to Forceville, where there is a station: C and D Companies went on to adjoining Neuville. Since the Transport left us three days ago to travel by road the men had to carry a lot of gear, but they came along well. Those near me had breath to spare to speak of the scenery, a rare topic of outspoken remark. What charmed them to speech was a wooded knoll rising from pasture, with horses and cattle and more trees, in a Corotesque mist. On beech and chestnut the deeper yellows, amber, graded brown, russet and red of leaves ripe to fall were beautiful even in a sunless dawn. A little snow, our first this winter; fell as we neared our billets. H.Q. is in the chateau of the Comte de Forceville. It may be seventeenth century. Trees grow close to it; the ground floor is the ground paved with flags of freestone, our room has coco-matting, it smells musty and is raw-cold. A bit of English park is unkept, but pleasing, nothing else is. The pall of neglect is on everything. The comfortless barns, that are the Companies billets, struck everyone with a chill, but our conjurer again raised his voice to the tune, more or less, of "Somewhere the sun is shining." Then he found an estaminet where cafe cognac, so called, was on sale. Nrxt morning he was charged with being "drunk and resisting his escort." D'Arcy Fox, the Acting C.O., suggested that the second charge be dropped since the prisoner had to be wheeled to the Guard-room in a barrow. Bracey, Butcher's mild-mannered successor, had, in fact, given him a belting before carting him. I left Mann putting into shape a scheme of training the C.O. drew up before going on leave, and went on leave myself. In London I made a note of driving from the station in a hansom; the scarcity of taxis caused many of these famed, obsolete carriages to be brought back to the streets.

[November 24th] Returning through Etaples these lines painted in bold letters on a board at the station confronted us:

A wise old owl lived in an oak;
The more he saw the less he spoke,
The less he spoke the more he heard.
Soldiers should imitate that old bird.

During my twelve days absence the scene has changed. The exquisite wood is now colorless, leafless; and under the plow the country is becoming an even drab.

[November 25th.] Forceville is mainly a group of farms. The village pond takes the surface drainage, and that consists in no small measure of the outflow of the farm middens. The Mayor has just been along to ask us not to wash our limbers in the pond for a few days; the villagers would like the water to settle because they are going to make their cider.

[December 1st] Practicing with the new box respirator. Gaspirator soon put out exaspirator as its common name. There was nothing but training to be done at Forceville. The days were raw and misty, and often wet; the nights very cold, sometimes freezing. The Company cooks, having burned swill tubs to eke out the skimp issue of coal, pretended to be scandalized, and helped the farmer to look for them;, and the treads of granary stairs went into the men's billet fire when other fuel failed. A lot of the men had chilblains on hands and feet; and a mild influenza was epidemic, it lasted until spring.

[December 7th] The Transport gone by road, we're waiting to go. The Mayor dined at H.Q. He is the most genial official of his kind we have had to do with. He has done all in his power to be helpful; he has tolerated in his house one of our number who lapses into rowdiness. He seems to own the village: has a jute and sail-cloth factory : has visited England, repeatedly, and knows s Germany better. He did not like unfavorable comparisons of the local climate with ours, but he was most appreciative of Parry's cooking. The district is ultra-clerical.

[December 8th] 6.45 a.m. -- marched to Airaines, thence by train via Amiens to Méricourt, thence again marched to Vaux-sur-Somme. What a contrast between this country now -- leafless, muddy, gray -- and its greenery, dust and bright sunshine in July and August. The Division is taking over from the 30th French Division in the line.

[December 9th] At noon we marched to Bray, where we stayed for five days just sheltering from damp and rain, cold and frost. Officers and men, milk-goat and Christmas poultry, were all together in a hut built by the French; it was too large to heat, and its sanitation too French for us.

There has been a lot of agitation among our Regular rank and file over a proposal, that is being pressed, to admit "duration" men to membership of the Regimental Comrades Association. The Old Army won't have it; the 1st and 2nd Battalions are firm in their opposition.

During a reminiscent talk a regimental field-day in this Battalion twelve years ago was described. The attack-formation was two paces interval between each man. After an advance of 100 yards the C.O. and the R.S.M. paced the intervals; if they were ragged the movement was repeated. It seems ridiculous. But if the fatal gregarious instinct can be overcome, and men prevented from closing where the going looks easier or for company, it will be only by insistent training.

Division holds a terrible threat over us: "If this Order is not complied with it will be cancelled." The dear Q. man means that if the privilege of extra baths he has offered is not used it will be withdrawn.

No more will be heard of the German peace offer. The French are regaining lost ground at Verdun, capturing guns by the hundred and Germans by the thousand; and a political General has been made Commander-in-Chief. It was told of Joffre that he consoled Generals he dismissed by saying that he too would be dismissed.

[December 14th] We marched 8 1/2 miles to Maurepas, on a dull afternoon, and bivouacked in the Ravine where all the divisional transport is, and the mud is many inches deep. Our route was through the valley in which are the remains of Combles : a surprising amount of it is standing -- but dumb and mournful walls. Our new Corps is the XV, now du Cane's.

[December 16] The C.O. is back after a week in hospital.

[December 17th] This is the second day without a potato issue, those supplied being uneatable. The troops think the deprivation is an outrageous wrong. It was our first experience of the shortage which was being felt at home; the whole food supply of our civil population had become a serious problem.

[December 18th] We relieved the 5th S.R. at Bouchavesnes, near the southern edge of St. Pierre Vaast Wood. Contrary to an invariable habit of footing it when the Battalion marches I had to ride. It is thirty-five years since I had such chilblains, the year most of a Christmas holiday was spent in bed. H.Q. is a louse infested French excavation in the chalk by the side of the Péronne-Bapaume road: a whizz-bang will be enough to stave in the roof. We all live and cook in it. The Companies were in rudely dug trenches on the crest of a steep-sided down, which were so exposed that there could be no movement in them by day, or access to them, for there were no communos. The only wire was a single strand of barb and an occasional coil of French concertina. But the sector was quiet. We took over a tacit live-and-let-live arrangement, and Division did not require any work to be done. At Rancourt, just left of us, it was quite different; attack and counter-attack was of daily happening, and shelling was limited only by the difficulty of getting up shells.

Two weeks of continuously bad weather extended over this time. There was snow and rain, frost and thaw by turns -- the conditions which cause trench-foot. A four days tour cost us 30 to hospital with broken chilblains and a few trench-foot cases. This was quite a new experience for the Battalion, but the number was said to be the smallest in the Division; one battalion was debited -- by report -- with 200 cases. Inactivity chilled the two front Companies, fatigues on steep gradients and heavy going tired the support Companies. Just behind the front men struggled with loads, and pack-horses foundered in mud taking up ammunition of which the guns could not get enough, yet a Decauville railway the French had made and used, was abandoned. On the dejection of that existence one of the C.O.'s orderlies broke, one day, with the news that Péronne had been captured by the French. He replied to the C.O.'s skepticism, "it's official, sir." "What do you mean by 'official'?" "Bob Owens, the cook, told me, sir, and Bob had it from Sergeant Morgan of the Divisional Water Point, sir." The story is typical of the channels through which rumor runs and of the belief rumor gains, but the source of rumors is one of the mysteries of this life. A few days later a report of French origin credited the B.E.F. with the capture of Bapaume. This orderly is one of our minor characters. At Buire, after our first dip in the Somme, it amused and surprised a few chance spectators to see the C.O. greet, like a long-lost child, a little, stocky, newly joined private. H. is a prosperous little Welshman, a haberdasher in the Midlands. I suspect that his wife runs the business. He shares the C.O.'s fancy for Sealyham terriers; the two are friends and rivals in the show-ring. To be C.O.'s orderly is quite a good job these days. H. preens himself in the reflected glory of his office, exaggerates its importance, and has the men believe that he is "a power".

[December 22nd] Relieved, and taken in buses to a comfortable English hutted camp, No. III, near Bray. Our Army huts hereabout, of plain creosoted deal, made to hold a company, are said to cost £1000 each by the time they have been erected. G.S.W. casualties are 2 killed and 3 or 4 wounded during these four days.

[December 23rd] D Company's cooker has been troublesome for a long time, and once or twice at Ordnance Repair Shops. The cooks' attempt yesterday to get away with one belonging to the Labour Battalion failed from neglect to obliterate completely the identification marks of the one they left in its stead. We are ashamed of them. They have been admonished. And Yates is complaining that Meredith, who succeeded Gittens as Transport Sergeant, "is no good. He's so honest and truthful that you can't trust him." He had butted in with a higher figure than Yates had declared when a Remounts Officer came to comb out horses surplus to establishment.

[December 24th] A most untimely draft has arrived; it unbalances our numbers and our provision for the men's Christmas dinner. The new men are dismounted Yeomanry, the best physically we have had since Spring. The evidence that they had had a year's training was far to seek.

[December 25th] Conning was suspected of being Father Christmas when I found a tin of vermin paste in a sock, but it was Mann. These two youths are our most popular officers with the men of the Battalion. Radford is the most popular Company Commander, as was made plain today; he shares his men's esteem with "Snookie", one of his bad hats. Before the C.O. went down with influenza he decreed a merry Christmas if we were out of the line. The officers and the Canteen subscribed a fund for extras for the men. There were no duties today. In the morning there was a distribution of writing-pads and cigarettes from home. One o'clock dinner was soup; roast meat with potato, carrot, turnip, and onion; plum-pudding; an apple, or orange, and nuts. The sergeants had whisky, port and cigars. The afternoon was left free for digestion. Few walked out in two inches of thawing snow. At 5 o'clock there was tea with cake, candied fruit, and sweets. That was followed by a sing-song in each company hut, when every man had a canteenful of beer. Plum-pudding from the Comforts Committee at home had divided up at less than a half-pound per man; a half-pound per man from a private donor arrived later. This year H.Q. made sure of its goose and turkey; we've been fattening them for a month. We had paté de foie gras, julienne, curried prawns, roast goose; potato and cauliflower, plum-pudding; anchovy on toast, dessert; Veuve Cliquot; port; cognac, Benedictine; coffee. Each Company dined alone; after dinner we all forgathered and had a jolly.

[December 26th] We marched 8 1\2 miles to Camp 13. It is in a muddy hollow in the Sailly-Laurette neighborhood: very uncomfortable, no coal or firewood. A sergeant died in his sleep, from natural causes. It was always a treat to me to see him walk, he had such a fine carriage.

[December 27th] To Buire, 41 miles, and entrained. at "Edge Hill". A cold, otherwise good, railway journey to Pont Remy, west of our recent quarters at Forceville, was followed by a 4-mile march to Vauchelles-les-Quesnoy on the higher ground east of Abbeville. The Transport made a two-days march of it from Bray.

[January 1st 1917] H.Q. had haggis for lunch. The Southerners can't get enough of that mysterious Scotch dish. -- Mrs. "Tiger" Phillips and one of her Y.M.C.A. Canteen companions came to tea. -- With facilities for cooking Parry sent up an uncommonly good dinner. Vermouth; hors d'oeuvres, variées; clear soup; sole and a perfect sauce; roast turkey and sausage, celery; plum pudding; savory --enigmatic, but delicious; Veuve Cliquot, port, benedictine; coffee. Present: the C.O., D'Arcy Fox, Mann, Harries, Robertson -- all of H.Q.; Binge Owen, Cuthbert de Miremont, Coster -- commanding companies; Barkworth -- bombs ; Conning -- Lewis guns; Yates and Radford. Only one of the party was a nuisance. Our servants must have enjoyed

[January 2nd] themselves afterwards. Harries, whose intake of alcohol is never other or more than a half-glass of port in twenty-four hours, was called by his man at 1.30 a.m.; when he cursed Lewis mumbled in answer "I'm not quite right thyself, sir": and a quiet little hill-farm boy has laughed and wept all day.

The Somme Despatch is enlightening as an expression of the views of G.H.Q., which differ from those of the infantry -- notably on the fighting quality and morale of our and the enemy's formations. The German is not what he was, but his falling off seems, on contact, to be. no greater than ours. Without our superiority in guns where would we be? The French seem to be far ahead of us in recent attack technique, formation, and the co-ordination of rifle-grenade and automatic rifle-fire.

Three dull weeks-were spent at Vauchelles. The highly paid Australians had just gone, so the price of everything in the village was appalling. The Companies were in the out-buildings of farms which were quite good but so cold that the men were rarely warm. H.Q. was well housed in the chateau of a frigidly pious couple with 15 children: surely a record for France. Monsieur had made money in Boulogne and bought this pretentious mansion; its staircase is oak-grained deal, the walls are marmoreal to the eye but varnished paper to touch. A program of training, which the C.O. put on a platoon basis, and games went on under his supervision as continuously as bad weather would allow. There was frost, or rain, or snow all the time. "Sunshine, a welcome sight, after a morning of drizzle", is my note on January 4th, "fine moonlight, followed by our first fine day", on the 5th: "our second fine day", on the 15th. -- The daily sick parade had become a serious affair by this date in the War. A year ago it was very exceptional to see a dozen "sick"; now nothing was too trivial to be a pretext for "going sick," and 60 was the daily average. Cleanly habits kept the Old Army men remarkably free from minor ailments. Neglect of cleanliness caused most of the foot sores, and the vast amount of itch, lousiness, and consequent debilitating maladies that ravaged the Territorial and "duration" troops, and taxed the capacity of the hospitals. One day a youth reported with a local, and not common, form of parasite: "Where do you think you got this?" I asked. He said that he had "noticed it after sleeping with a Scotsman." -- One evening the Mess-waiter made a mystery of telling me that a civilian wanted to see me. A sickly, misshapen youth had a live fowl under his arm which he offered, with rare natural courtesy, as an honorarium for attendance on his wife.

Abbeville is within walking distance. It is a sleepy town to be on highways. It clings to its age-long sail-making industry although it has ceased for so long to be a port. Its only cab, a four-wheeler, was in much demand for the uphill return journey : a cold journey by cab, because the prudent old cabby took out the windows and stowed them in safety when frolicsome youths bespoke him.

[January 7th, Sunday] A great to-do was made of a Drumhead Service on our lawn, conducted by a bishop. Troops from the surroundings, were brought over. Division and Brigade turned up in panoply and in force. It is said that a bishop once preached to a mere half-dozen voluntaries. He made such a fuss about the indignity, and the waste of spiritual unction, that an Order from High Up required the attendance of "the greatest possible number" on these solemn occasions: hence this crush. One can almost pardon the bishops their banalities since audiences were ordered for them. By special request of Division we have a Chaplain at H.Q. We, for our part, are complaining that Division's arrangements for the delousing of the men's clothing are inefficient, that the refusal of blankets for sterilization at the same time as clothing stultifies its treatment.

[January 8th] A very young officer on the Divisional Staff, much disliked for his airs by front-line subalterns, has returned from a Special Course. Mann asked him if the pass-out exam was stiff. "No," he said, "it wasn't only for the Staff, there were regimental officers there too." Swelled-headed youth apart, the gap between the Staff and the Front Line widens. Recently, at the Army School, a strong minded C.O. asked if Staff Officers could not be attached to infantry battalions during the quiet winter months to learn something of their job from the business end; it is the French system. The reply was as expected -- half the Staff is on leave these months and the other half "is too busy to be spared".

The Chaplain, who crossed recently, described a scene, typical of the new regime, which he witnessed. Lord Northcliffe was embarking at Boulogne for England; he had visited France to testify in his many papers to the excellence of everything under the Government which he thinks, with some reason, he has in big pocket. Several General Officers, among others, were ordered off a part of the deck on to which a special gangway was run for him and his numerous ink-slinging retinue of serviceable indispensables. The Generals swore roundly. Before we left Vauchelles some officers were overdue off leave. They and many others were hung up for a week at Havre; owing to a shortage of coal, under the new regime, trains could not be run.

[January 13th] The Drums played in the Place de I'Amiral at Abbeville. Our little Drum-Sergeant's bow to the French audience was worth going to see. The price of chocolates has gone up to 6 and 8 francs the pound.

[January 17th] 4:30 a.m., reveille and snow: 6 a.m., marched in snow to Pont Remy: arrived at 7.30 for a train at 9, and did not start until 1.30 p.m. While we hung about the name of an estaminet across the. road caught my eye: "C'est mieux ici qu'en face". I was leaning against the railing of the local jail. Its like is unthinkable at home. Arrived at Bray 11:30 a.m.; back to the cosy huts of Camp III. Measles, probably brought from Vauchelles, is among us.

[January 18th] A Paris bus, to appearance stranded here, is the loft of the French pigeon post in this area. Our pigeons are hired locally by the month.

[January 19th] The B.E.F. is being extended to the Somme; the Division is relieving the French 17th Division in the Clery Sector. Marching at 2 p.m. on very good French-repaired roads, we passed their artillery coming out. They were mightily interested in our Drums. It seems that the French have 1 officer to 8 guns; we have a captain and 3 subalterns to 6 guns. Our billets at Suzanne cramped; we were packed like herrings.

[January 21st] At 9.45 we marched via Curlu and Hem, again on excellent roads remade by the French. The night was quiet, and snow on the ground made it light. A communication trench, in part an old German trench, two kilometers long seemed ten; everyone was laden, and weary at the end of it. No one talked; the only sounds were the drumming of many feet on frozen ground and the clink of accoutrements. Coming again into the desolation felt eerie, and the eerieness grew each time a rocket glowing above the ridge in front gave us our spectral selves for company, and in falling snatched them away, scurrying backwards. behind us.

The C.O. was in nominal command of the Brigade during the relief, because the Brigadier would be senior to the French Colonel. We took over from a battalion of the 90th Regiment. Our H.Q.

[January 22nd] was regaled with sausage, paté, and sweet champagne at 5 o'clock. Later, the Frenchmen ate with gusto an English breakfast of quaker oats, and egg and bacon, but they didn't like our bread: their bread is excellent. The Colonel told us of a visit he paid to the Russian Brigade in France. Invited to "coffee", he was given a slice of melon and then kept drinking champagne for two unbroken hours, which he seemed little likely to forget. The Battalion Commander, a cavalry officer, admits that the German is top dog here.

French rations are abundant. Every regiment, three battalions, has a canteen which sells all we do and such live stock as poultry. Their medical organization does not necessitate such early clearance to the ambulance as ours. Their dug-outs are roomy, but they live too much over or alongside their latrines for our liking. French construction is as much superior to ours as German work is to theirs. The construction and upkeep of communications is the work of a permanent local staff; not, as with us, of R.E. with infantry fatigue-parties that come and go with every division and brigade. Their good communications and use of tramways close to the support line make easy the delivery of material in quantities that are beyond our manhandling ways of doing. Their telephone-system is good, their trenches free from "festoons" -- for our arrival anyhow, and they have direct communication with the units to right and left. Their system of relief is confusing to us, and original; they do not go out by platoons; the men are given a rendezvous and an hour, and each post buzzes off, collectively or individually, on a relief's arrival.

No one at Division or Brigade has thought of putting ammunition, R.E. stores, or the ingredients of a vaunted trench-foot preventive on order, so we can't get any. This is the eighth day of continuous frost and occasional snow showers. The ground is ice-bound; it rings to one's tread; but there is to be no issue of fuel. What does the G.O.C. think his men are made of?

[January 23rd] Lateral telephoning has been cut out : there are festoons of wire in the trenches. In the morning two French planes attacked three Germans: by their speed, and maneuver they shot down one in flames and one crippled in a few minutes; the third escaped. Great flying by the Frenchmen. After dark we took over the front of Clery Left.

[January 24th] What a night! I have not been so cold, or for so long, since bivouacking on the Basuto Border. We are on the top of a bare 7200-foot down among downs. Mont St. Quentin, a truncated sugar-loaf peak, is half right; beyond it the steeples of Péronne (seen from our right) are features of a wonderful panorama. The Tortille and the Canal du Nord are in an intervening valley 200 feet below us, and unseen, but on the right the mostly frozen Somme winds between the reedy Clery-Biaches marsh and a high bank on which pine trees grow. A lofty sky is almost cloudless, the air is crystalline, and the dazzling winter sunbeams sparkle on the filmy mantle of frozen snow that drapes everything, as if it were jeweled. But the delight of it doesn't warm chilled bones. During the next four weeks the gunners were reporting temperatures of 15 degrees of frost, and the ground became ice-bound to a depth of 16 inches. The crude untraversed trenches the Division had taken over had no cubby-holes, and no dugouts except for the various H.Q. These got small quantities of coke. There were cases of coke-fume poisoning-headache on waking; or being roused off the floor, and even to the stage of vomiting; men would not deny themselves warmth who had the chance of it, however unventilated their abode. There was no means of having warmth in the trenches. Cooking was forbidden in them. Tea and cooked food were sent up in tins wrapped in hay in sand-bags, but on arrival the contents were tepid at the best. "Tommy's cooker" of solidified alcohol was not allowed, although the next division had an issue of a slab a man each day. The surroundings in reach were bare of wood of any kind; a little planting of saplings had been cut down already, but men hacked at the roots for chips, and chance graves were robbed of their rude crosses, to make a miniature fire.

[January 25th] An Anglo-German air duel took place after lunch. As the other plane was coming down on fire behind H.Q. the pilot jumped to his death rather than be roasted. His clothing was just singed. He wore the ribbon of the Iron Cross, 1st Class. The G.O.C.'s chauffeur struck a match to see how much petrol there was in his tank, and burned down part of our Q.M. store containing Shoey Johnson's watch-mending and engraving tools. -- The C.O. was wounded in the arm and side when inspecting the wire, fired on by one man of a German patrol who would see our party against the sky, dark though the night was. Bad luck.

[January 26th] The Battalion was relieved to "P.C. Madame", a dirty place at the end of the limb of Road Wood. I remained behind for one night because my 5th S.R. relief took ill -- and this is the eve of the Kaiser's birthday. But he is fallen, fallen from

[January 27th] his high estate; there was no celebration. The wind has changed, but not the weather so far.

[January 29th] Back in the front of Clery Left, the conditions are unchanged.

[January 30th] Sergeant Francis, a good man, was killed on the wire opposite owing to bungling by a patrol. Later, Lindsley was wounded in the elbow; he was fired on by a sentry group of his Company whom he forgot to warn that he was going out on patrol a second time. He died of tetanus, lockjaw, the only death of the kind to my knowledge in my time; it was common in the early months of the War, before there was enough serum.

[January 3lst] Relieved in bright moonlight, we were brought in lorries to a tented camp among the trees at Suzanne. The wintry scene from this camp was most attractive. We looked over snow and ice on a reed-grown marsh, to pines lining the river and canal, and climbing the rising bank beyond; everything sparkled, whether in sunshine or moonlight.

[February 1st] Frise ("Freeze") Bend, where Henry V crossed at - Eclusier, is a short walk upstream. The marsh looks much as it is described in Henry's day, although it may be smaller. The river was being shelled to break the ice lest raiders cross on it, and the water was rising into the sunshine in great fountains with rainbow-hued fringes. A poacher's rifle echoes in the valley at long intervals. The starved water-fowl are easy prey, exhausted birds can be walked down.

[February 2nd] Candlemas Day is clear and fair. -- When last we were here a Chaplain bombasted: he was new to the forward area. He laid it down, with a jingo air, that "a man's attitude to war service is quite a simple affair: if he's for it he's for it, and vice versa." He has vice versa'd back to the Base already. His predecessor disliked war, even at this range, as much as he, but he had a sense of humor that steadied him. The Chaplain's tent was next a Canteen from which he heard such frequent mention of "(obscene) biscuits", that he asked, and got, his C.O. to make the sergeant post a sentry over the tin, "to see that the biscuits committed no indecency".

[February 3rd] The modern chateau here is in the debased, bride's-cakey Renaissance style. There is little real damage to the outside, the inside has been stripped and damaged -- by whom? Its owner came to see it today. He exclaimed "réclamation" in crescendo as he went from room to room. His last word, spoken with a smile, was "réclamation". He'll try, like the rest of his countrymen, for compensation from his own Government and ours. -- Something about a passing French transport driver, a fine-looking man of about my own age, attracted me, so I spoke to him and his fellows. One of them told me that the driver had news of the destruction of his home near Verdun. To my halting words of sympathy he replied, "Mans, j'ai bonne santé, oui. Ça ne fait rien. J'ai bonne santé".

[February 6th] The frost relaxes, a high easterly wind is blowing.

[February 8th] Thaw where the sun strikes. Glad to be away from Camp 17, although we are back to the front in Béthune. The right and left sub-sectors have been allowed to keep their French names, Girodon and Béthune. Generally the French trench names have been changed, although they were mostly those of dead French officers, thus "Oursel" has become "Wurzel." One was called after Captain Fryatt, one of our splendid merchant skippers. The name Béthune reminds me that last winter my usual trench kit was waders to keep my legs clean and dry, this winter they have not been worn yet. Binge Owen is Acting O.C., Cuthbert having gone to hospital.

[February 10th] A report on the arrangements at the waterpoint, which Division called for, read like a satire. To supply two or three thousand men, two men bail water out of a small tub into petrol-tins and one scoops their spillings out of a hollow in the ice that has formed round the tub. But the conditions are exceptional. To get extra water the men learned what a heap of snow has to be melted to fill a cup. B and C relieved A and D in front.

[February 12th] Relieved : we went out through interminable communication trenches to reserve in Howitzer Wood, an old German artillery position east of Clery, and a fairly comfortable

[February 13th] place as things are. Trench boards are greasy, nearly all the bite is out of the wind.

Since February 3rd, when I noted "we are for it soon", the absorbing preoccupations of H.Q. and the Company Commanders had been a minor operation and the weather conditions, the two interacted. The French had observation of the Tortille Valley; they were driven from it; No Man's Land was dotted with the dead of their attempts to regain it. At one place close to the parapet a Frenchman and a German lay as they had bayoneted each other, the throat of the one, the chest of the other, pierced. The German withdrawal, which we heard of four months ago, was about due; that fact increased the Staff's wish to regain observation. It was said that Brigade had toyed, after its manner, with a fancy to "do something": then Division blew hot and grew cold about it: finally Corps took up the idea in earnest. The seizure, and consolidation of Hertzfeldt Trench was ordered. It was a shallow blunt salient on a reverse slope a mile south of Bouchavesnes and 500 yards west of the Péronne-Bapaume road. Its capture would give us a deeper blunt salient on a forward slope. Until our prospective undertaking had been floated it had several "onlie begetters"; they were all outside the Battalion, which damned it from the first as foolish and wicked. From the 3rd to the 16th there are nine entries in my diary on the progress of the scheme. Assuming that the ground was no longer white with crackling snow, and not too slippery with thaw for men to keep their feet and formation in the dark, that our assembly was not given away by every third man coughing, we held that there remained the fundamental difficulty of attacking, on a narrow front, dead ground in which the enemy had an overwhelming advantage. The most observant of us inferred, from what had been seen of shoots, that there were no guns behind us which could fire on the vital part off the German defense, and that the scale and conditions of the operation denied us any practical means of dealing with it. Lastly, consolidation was impossible owing to the frozen state of the ground. The first or second of three or four conferences at Brigade took place on the 6th. It was summarized thus: the Brigadier exchanged small jokes with the O.C. 20th R.F., who made puns; the G.S.0.3 and the Actin. Brigade-Major exchanged social gossip; Mann raised the problem of the artillery, the Brigadier said with pontifical finality, "Ah, that will be all right, Mann"; Cuthbert and Modera didn't open their mouths. We arranged that Mann should ask for the attendance of a Gunner at the next conference, or that the outline of the plan be shown to the C.R.A. before it went further. When he came back empty-handed, and was cursed, he exclaimed through tears, "They won't listen to me, I'm too junior." First Cuthbert, then Binge Owen, was our senior representative; both were overawed. And so by conference the data were contributed from which the Brigadier was to draw up a scheme.

[February 16th] A mild night. A seeming bombardment is the large Plateau Dump, on the high ground behind us, going up; an air-raider started a fire in it early in the morning. -- Yesterday 105 paraded sick, today 80; there were some of the Old Lot among them. Sore feet, trench-fever, influenza and colds are the chief real items, but the Battalion is having to carry pickets, wire, duck-boards, bombs, and ammunition through "miles" of trench. Binge Owen is off to hospital with measles. Mann is Acting O.C. himself. -- An unseen bird twittered. It is long since I heard the voice of any bird except the water-fowl, but a man tells me he has heard a lark.

In the evening C Company relieved the 5th S.R.; A, B, and D Companies are stowed on the left. C is to prepare the line and assembly position, the other Companies are to side-step into it in time to go over to the tune of the guns : then, while A, B, and D consolidate the captured position, C is to dig a communication trench out to it. "Of many absolutely futile ideas given effect to in my three years in France, this operation was one of the worst."

[February 17th] Greasy mud abounds; communications on the hillside have become water channels, and the French drains are not being kept open. The best way to get about is on top, and it can be used in the morning mist. In these miserable conditions the men are weary and apathetic after several days of long, heavy fatigues carrying R.E. stores and ammunition. Our R.F. comrades in this adventure soon chucked their loads out on top of the communications, a labor-saving device that deprives them of the material needed for their share in the Show. Our patrols say that since last we were in the Germans have been allowed to repair the gaps made in their wire. This front has wakened to activity again. Last night German heavies and bombers were active on the back areas, both very destructively; today they have been strafing all along the line here, their machine-guns claming in.

Late at night the Brigade Operation Order arrived. A first skimming shows that our concentrated artillery is to treat a trench to 15 minutes "intense" when an earlier paragraph has timed us to be consolidating in it. Mann and the Gunner sat down to the Order and found many wrong co-ordinates -- experience points to these being Brigade's contribution; the hand of G.1 appears in the outline, and much of Mann's in the detail. We were still conning over this masterpiece, and had counted dozens of manuscript

[February 18th] changes in the typescript, when the G.O.C. blew in to wish us luck. Some things he said made us wonder what operation he was talking about. Was one of his other brigades raiding too? He seemed to have difficulty in understanding that getting through the wire to the assembly tapes while the guns make a distracting noise is not the same as making the assault under their barrage; but we did get a silent, if quizzical, hearing for our complete distrust of the barrage planned for us. The Gunner observer was induced to go away a little earlier than his orders to allow his Group Commander more time to look into some questions we have wanted answered from the first.

The morning was damp and misty. I stood garter-deep in liquid mud retrieving articles from an advanced aid-post. Stores looked like being swamped wherever we put them. Everywhere parapet and parados were sliding in towards each other. There were no duck-boards, scoops or pumps. The one pair of gum-boots in the front line was passed by the officer on duty to his relief. Dry socks had come up with the rations as usual, but the men could not change into them; in dumb wretchedness they stood in 6 to 12 inches of ice-cold fluid, unable anywhere to take their boots off. By midday we heard that the Gunners had confirmed our opinion that they had no guns which could carry out the part of the artillery program needed to cover our advance across the deadly zone. After lunch the Brigadier paid a flying visit. He had left his usual aplomb behind, and we were not inclined to talk. Next, we learned by telephone that there was to be no release yet from the caprice of the abstract tactician who from far-away disposes of us : someone playing fantastic tricks with reality had substituted 30 seconds shooting by two unregistered trench-mortars for the impotent batteries of guns. This was confirmed in an amended Brigade Operation Order, spread over an extra half-sheet of paper. There are times when foolscap is fitting, and ironic mirth is a safety-valve.

5.30 p.m. "Stand fast". At last : thank God -- and the Brigadier. Even the soleplate of the 60-pound trench-mortar had risen "in mutiny and rage", and floated into the communication trench. At night the very few who had anything to lie on lay down early.

[February 79th] The stunt is postponed until the 23rd. -- The 20th R.F. Operation Order is a curiosity, although this is their first raid. But for necessarily different map references, and company parts, it is a word-for-word copy of Mann's Order issued, and sent to them, yesterday.

Lieut.-Colonel W. B. Garnett, from the 20th R.F., arrived to be our C.O. He soon had us harassed and embarrassed by his rare accomplishment, spelling. At last Conning inveigled him into "kneading" for "needing" bread, and the subject dropped for the time.

[February 20th] An idle day: conditions worse than ever. After dark we were relieved. The night was black as the pit; tracks and landmarks were washed out; we walked by faith, stumbling down the hillside until we chanced on the road. It was long after midnight before anyone came on "Madame", that foul spot that was as bad as parts of the trenches. C Company strayed off any practical route; they were eight hours in reaching the support

[February 21st] line half-way down the slope, a distance of a few hundred yards. The position had just been quitted by the 20th R.F. Its drainage had been so neglected that water overflowed the entrances to dug-outs; a communication was waist-deep in water, one man disappeared from view in it and was fished out by his equipment. Radford "lay down on a board at 6.45 a.m. and was woken up about 7.30 by a loud explosion. The cook had started a fire and put on it a French S.O.S. rocket, thinking, in the gloom, that it was a lump of wood. He was rather badly scorched, but I nearly cried with laughing at the funny side of the affair. I then went across country to Battalion H.Q. to report, and found myself under arrest." The G.O.C. had come up at dawn; he was followed counter-clockwise by the Brigadier, who had got wind that he was about. Passing through C Company's resting-place, the G.O.C. saw rifles and equipment lying on the parapet and parados, muddy-naturally. In the written explanation he required of his prisoner it was pleaded that these were the least wet and dirty places on which the men could justifiably put anything. The affair went no further. Had the old dear expected to see the men scraped clean and shaved? One man had committed suicide, 84 were being sent to hospital, and 18 to rest at the Transport, nearly all victims of the weather conditions.

[February 22nd] 50 more go to hospital or Transport; 60 of the total for these two days are from C Company. 1 p.m. Reprieved -- the Show is off. Throughout the three weeks run of this farce the O.C.s, the Cameronians and 5th S.R., Lieut.-Colonels Chaplin and Clayton, were unfailing in their support of our views of its tactical side, and they could not be too helpful. Colonel Chaplin, who relieved A, B, and D Companies for the operation, arranged unofficially to send out Lewis guns, whose flank fire would give some cover to our advance and might let us close with the German screen, and to lend a company to try to dig a communication trench. The Pioneer Battalion had been allowed to cry off that job. None knew better than they that the ground was unworkable. Two weeks after this there were still three or four inches of ice-bound soil a foot below the thawed surface. By the 25th is came out that neither Brigade nor Division had any expectation of Hertzfetdt Trench being held, or of any measure of success.

The purpose of relating this projected operation in so much detail will not be "o'ertook unless the deed go with it". The 100th Brigade relieved us : the surface was considered passable by the 28th : raiding for information was wanted; and to wipe the eye of another brigade and battalion is in the game. Our Brigade retold, with amusing naivety, how the early stages of its operation were borrowed for a small in-and-out raid: all went well until the raiders rose to their feet to make the assault, then they were raked by machine-guns and got no farther. Theirs, on a small scale, was the fate we had foretold all along as ours, because the plan of attack imposed on us ignored or belittled the shell-hole screen the Germans placed at night on the edge of the dead ground.

[February 23rd] No home mail for three days: a rumor that submarine sinkings in the Channel is the cause. Rations are very short: little or no bread, less than a half-ration of bully, no jam. We have not been short yet, but we can't be wasteful as formerly we were. Relieved and well away, for the bivouac is in part the site of a cemetery of which the surface indications have been obliterated or removed, and it smelt like it. The men came along well, and were quite cheery on the march. We got into Suzanne at

[February 24th] 1 a.m. Thin stew was to me as nectar, then to bed. Lousy, very. -- A fine white goat from the Wynnstay Hills, the

[February 25th] gift of the 3rd Battalion, made his first appearance on a Church Parade: he arrived three days ago. We are being [February 28th] employed on light work in the camp.

[March 1st] St. David's Day. A genial, almost windless day ending in a crisp, starlit night. With times of rawness the weather was generally fine during this week. Fritz is said to have withdrawn from Gommecourt. When last we were in the line he blew a mine in the road that crossed No Man's Land on our left front. As he is expected to withdraw on this front any day now, we, being on an hour's notice, have had little to do since coming here. It was nearing noon before there was any assurance that the officers St. David's Day Dinner could be held. Provisional plans had been made, and leeks had been bought for the Battalion. Yates, Mann, Mess-servants, Pioneers and defaulters, all pulled together. A very scratch kitchen was fitted up in a broken' and dismantled shrine, to the scandal of some French details ; a hut built on to it, and used as a chapel during the French occupation, was repaired and enlarged. Timber had been got from the Engineers. Tables and benches were run up by the Pioneer Sergeant, "Daisy" Horton. The merit of a plain menu was Parry's excellent cooking: soup, lobster mayonnaise, stew, steam-pudding -- the sauce was the thing, Scotch woodcock, dessert; whisky, port, champagne cup; coffee. Roger Poore, transferred from the Hants Yeomanry and recently posted as Second-in-Command, presided; the C.O. way on leave. We had a jolly night. None of the traditional ritual was wanting, and there were many to eat the leek. A German howitzer shell-case, which had been used by the French as a gas-gong, served as loving-cup. It was to have been sent home after being inscribed and decorated by Sergeant-Shoemaker Johnson, a remarkably good artist in metal, but it was lost before Poore could make up his mind about the wording.

[March 2nd] A lot of us watched a clever piece of work by a German flier two or three miles off. He came over at a great speed, made for one of our sausage balloons, maneuvered to keep it between him and our Archie-guns, and set it alight. The observers leapt out. One came down safely; but pieces of the burning balloon fell on the parachute of the other and burned it; so he dropped, and died of his injuries; this was his second leap from a burning balloon.

[March 3rd.] There is a coating of ice on still water. Today's is the second great flight of starlings and of crows since we came here. Do French crows, like Scotch crows, start housekeeping on the first Sunday in March? We have scraped together a trench strength of 450 by taking in the Drums and other details usually left out. We marched by Eclusier. Near Feuillères a whizz-bang had stuck in the stem of a tree, projecting fore and aft. Enough of Clery is standing to make it ghostly. A village razed is not so sad to see as roofless, windowless, sagging walls; they give one creeps at night. On the wreck of one house a cat sat and blinked listlessly as we marched through. The O.C. battalion we are relieving is the kind of ass who can't take a drink without saying his "doctor recommends it". Poore's talk with him was excellent, comedy, thus -- "You put out your wire at night, what!" P. has not been in a trench in his life. Two of his eccentricities of speech were timed: in 45 seconds he said "you see" five times, and punctuated a phrase with "what!" thrice.

[March 4th] Girodon left: we are on about a mile of front.

[March 6th] A sort of raid on one of our saps last night was easily beaten off. Fritz is spendthrift with his ammunition; he checked all his barrages to-day. There are Guards on this front, very militant they are. At Rancourt, north of us, 6 or 8 Germans come over every day. Poore, alive to his job and a real strafer, is waking up everyone from here to Division. But for his zeal the day was peaceful in front.

[March 8th] Indications of a raid woke me at 5 o'clock. It turned out to be on our neighbors, two were lifted. Not a sentry of ours or of the auxiliary company, lent by the relieving battalion, was to be seen in our rear position. The German line is still held strongly, but near and far in rear fires glow each night where houses and stores are being destroyed. Fritz's method of holding his line now is to have isolated, sheltered posts with easy, foot-boarded communications, and supports at hand. It's a contrast to our front line, which exposes the greatest number of men. Our men have stuck a trying tour well. We have not had so many killed and wounded -- about half and half, and nearly all by shells -- for a long time.

A fine frosty night, and a peaceful relief: our last relief from the pitiless Somme, where 200 of us have been buried or left unburied. We got into strongly timbered French dug-outs at Frise Bend shortly after midnight. There was a powdering of snow when we

[March 9th] marched to Suzanne in the morning. This is again the third day of no home mail; the cross-Channel service is said to be suspended. A battalion issue of sardines instead of meat is odd.

[March 10th] Overcast and raw. Another move, Camp 13 again. There are elements of comparative comfort that were not here before, but it's a wat'ry nest indeed that larks leave in this sodden hollow, they are the only joyous creatures in the camp. There are other pilgrims of the sky alongside us. The antics of our new Naval

[March I2th] triplanes, from an aerodrome close by, are an unfailing interest, there is none other at Camp 13.

Since the advent of our new Government at Christmas I find increasingly frequent notes on the interactions of politicians and soldiers in High Command. Politically minded soldiers, whatever their rank or qualification, were given the ear of the politicians. The Prime Minister was meddling with strategy. Baffled in his attempts to dictate it, he had some success with tactics. Later on by withholding drafts, and by other administrative contrivances, he affected operations until our backs were to the wall. There was a hubbub in Parliament at the end of February over a newspaper interview in which the C.-in-C. defended himself against the implied hostility of the Government, actually of the Prime Minister. Emphasis on a determination to get the cavalry through was the part of the interview which won no sympathy from the infantry, sickened by its Somme experience as battering-ram.

After the extension of the British line to the Somme we heard much about the collecting of a large French Reserve Army. Part of it had a notably successful try-out at Verdun, which made our High Command sit up and think. The organization and training of the French infantry was made the subject of a General Instruction. It is a fighting training. Football and cross-country running, however useful the latter may be in case of a rout, don't appear in the French code, not even disguised as "training, recreational". The letter let the Army into the secret that training on a platoon basis, instead of a company basis, was the solution of our tactical troubles. It is safe to assume that G.H.Q. did not foresee one consequence of making the platoon the unit. In practice it allowed senior officers to cast their burden, if so minded, on the most junior. Planning might be left to the discretion, and arrangement among themselves, of company commanders, and it was not unknown for a company commander to be as uninterested in his subalterns' doings as his superiors were in what he did or left undone. In January, when first the Battalion's training was put on a platoon basis, the C.O. planned the whole scheme; specialists, ground and ranges were allotted, there was daily supervision, and discussion and interchange of ideas. Besides the opening for slackness up and down the middle stratum of command, which emphasis on the platoon and the section in action allowed, the lessening of touch between fighting front and ordering rear increased perceptibly at this period.

We had come into the XVIII Corps. Its commander, Lieut.-General Maxse, ordered "platoon training". In our formation interest seemed to end when Corps' curt order had been passed on. Our strongest platoon, before we filled up with drafts, numbered as when the specialists were withdrawn; one platoon numbered 4. Such was the toll the weather, chiefly, had taken of us. One of the lesser factors was a form of fever and digestive disturbance; it seemed to come with a draft in October, the last of it was being seen only now.

Rumor of a return to our recent front, to follow the retreating Germans, came to nothing more than the detachment of the Brigade Field Ambulance to run a Refugee Camp at Péronne, which was entered on the 18th. A sergeant washed the old folk, a corporal ran a créche. The French civilians were most appreciative of both.

[March 14th] Late at night my leave warrant came in. Dated the 21st, it was an incitement to conduct to the prejudice of discipline. Home leave about this time began and ended with a test of hardiness for divisions on the Somme. The direct route by Boulogne was reserved for senior and privileged officers, everyone else had to make the long round-about by Havre. Three to five days might be spent on the journey owing to traffic interruptions such as mines and submarines in the Channel and, until recently, frozen points and signals on the railway. The trains were unheated, the windows of most compartments were broken, the doors of many were torn off. Moody tells of a night he spent at Havre. The Rest Camp was pitched on the summit of the downs -- for air. He could not sleep for cold in spite of heaping about him all the clothing and blankets he had. Three rats, snuggling in next his shirt for warmth, roused him from one of the fitful doses into which he fell. I was in no state to face such a journey; for weeks I had been unfit after a second attack of influenza. Arranging to steal a few extra days occupied my day. In the Camp and Ambulance

[March 16th] accomplices were easily found; at Amiens authority was asleep when I boarded the midnight train for Boulogne, and

[March 17th] there it had a blind eye. We had a fine crossing -- to what? On debarking we were ordered to report at, once to our local police, and be in readiness for any emergency. This is the only time I know of anything of the kind being required. It was whispered that civil disturbance was feared.

In Russia the Czar Nicholas had been deposed, and the monarchy was in abeyance. A Government of well-meaning men had installed itself under a verbose ideologue. The Revolution was only a week old, but, as is usual, discontent in other countries had been emboldened to be doing. Already parties everywhere threatened trouble. In all the belligerent countries economic and social conditions, which had become the anxious concern of Government, aided these sympathetic reactions. At home the political air was sharpened by the contrasted privation of many and the vastness with which war-wealth had been created for others; by the effect on many minds of the two-months-old German naval policy of sinking every ship at sight; and by the losses, disappointment, and disillusion of the battles of the Somme. The large doctrinaire element among us, for the most part aloof from public affairs, took to political abstraction, and agitated social and economic theories. Men in academic positions, or living on an inheritance, or, by their wits -- all unfitted for and averse from business affairs and enterprise -- became equal to any adventure in an armchair. They found allies in the exponents of political Trade Unionism, and a tool in the organization of the Unions. The alliance, aped Russian models later on. It affected the Government's action; and before the year was out the Government was acting to the serious hurt of the Army.

 

FOOTNOTES

 

(1) In trench warfare much of an officer's time was taken up with making returns and reports, and reading and noting orders and circulars. During the later months' a at Béthune the company commander had to make these daily returns to Brigade : ; r a.m. -- 3 30, one; 8.;0, one; t t.;o one. p.m. -- 3, one; 3.30, one; 7, three; to, ' two indents. Besides daily Battalion returns, occasional returns and reports were called for by both Brigade and Battalion. Incoming orders and circulars, which had to be digested for observance, might run to several foolscap sheets of type.

(2) Two months later he was sent to hospital with early lung disease of which he died in a few years.

(3) Comic Cuts -- Army Intelligence reports.

(4) Shorts -- shells from the British side which fell short -- and hence, which fell on their own men.

(5) Sergeant '200 J. Jones : he became Quartermaster in after-years.

(6) Our 1st Battalion, who were about to be relieved when the German guns opened, stood fast until things were quiet again.

(7) tout de suite, at once.

(8) The true cash figure was about one-third of that sum.

(9) de Miremont.

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[preface] [chapter 9] [chapter 10] [chapter 11]