X + 

At the Front + 

I + 

Dick and I were on our way to the first battalion. The real War, that big bullying bogey, had stood up and beckoned to us at last, and now the Base Camp was behind us with its overcrowded discomforts that were unmitigated by esprit de corps. Still more remote, the sudden shock of being uprooted from the Camp at Clitherland, and the strained twenty-four hours in London before departure. For the first time in our lives we had crossed the Channel. We had crossed it in bright moonlight on a calm sea⁠—Dick and I sitting together on a tarpaulin cover in the bow of the boat, which was happily named Victoria. Long after midnight we had left Folkestone; had changed our course in an emergency avoidance of Boulogne (caused by the sinking of a hospital ship, we heard afterwards), had stared at Calais harbour, and seen sleepy French faces in the blear beginnings of November daylight. There had been the hiatus of uncertainty at Etaples (four sunless days of north wind among pine-trees), while we were waiting to be “posted” to our battalion. And now, in a soiled fawn-coloured first-class compartment, we clanked and rumbled along and everything in the world was behind us.⁠ ⁠… + 

Victoria Station: Aunt Evelyn’s last, desperately forced smile; and Dick’s father, Canon Tiltwood, proud and burly, pacing the platform beside his slender son and wearing cheeriness like a light unclerical overcoat, which couldn’t conceal the gravity of a heart heavy as lead. What did they say to one another, he and Aunt Evelyn, when the train had snorted away and left an empty space in front of them?⁠ ⁠… + 

To have finished with farewells; that in itself was a burden discarded. And now there was nothing more to worry about. Everything was behind us, and the first battalion was in front of us. + 

At nine o’clock we were none of us looking over-bright, for we had paraded with kit at two in the morning, though the train, in its wartime way, hadn’t started till three hours later. There we sat, Dick and I and Mansfield (at last released from peacetime Army conventions) and Joe Barless (a gimlet-moustached ex-sergeant-major who was submitting philosophically to his elevation into officerdom and spat on the floor at frequent regular intervals). On our roundabout journey we stopped at St. Pol and overheard a few distant bangs⁠—like the slamming of a heavy door, they sounded. Barless had been out before; had been hit at the first battle of Ypres; had left a wife and family behind him; knocked his pipe out and expectorated, with a grim little jerk of his bullet head, when he heard the guns. We others looked to him for guidance now, and he was giving us all we needed, in his taciturn, matter-of-fact way, until he got us safely reported with the first battalion. + 

It felt funny to be in France for the first time. The sober-coloured country all the way from Etaples had looked lifeless and unattractive, I thought. But one couldn’t expect much on a starved grey November morning. A hopeless hunting country, it looked.⁠ ⁠… The opening meet would have been last week if there hadn’t been this war.⁠ ⁠… Dick was munching chocolate and reading the Strand Magazine, with its cosy reminder of London traffic on the cover. I hadn’t lost sight of him yet, thank goodness. The Adjutant at Clitherland had sworn to do his best to get us both sent to the first battalion. But it was probably an accident that he had succeeded. It was a lucky beginning, anyhow. What a railway-tasting mouth I’d got! A cup of coffee would be nice, though French coffee tasted rather nasty, I thought.⁠ ⁠… We got to Bethune by half-past ten. + 

We got to Bethune by half-past ten: I am well aware that the statement is, in itself, an arid though an accurate one. And at this crisis in my career I should surely be ready with something spectacular and exciting. Nevertheless, I must admit that I have no such episode to exhibit. The events in my experience must take their natural course. I distinctly remember reporting at battalion headquarters in Bethune. In a large dusky orderly room in⁠—was it a wine-merchant’s warehouse?⁠—the Colonel shook hands with me. I observed that he was wearing dark brown field boots, small in the leg, and insinuating by every supple contour that they came from Craxwell. And since the world is a proverbially small place, there was, I hope, nothing incredible in the fact that the Colonel was a distant relative of Colonel Hesmon, and had heard all about how I won the Colonel’s Cup. It will be remembered that Colonel Hesmon’s conversational repertoire was a limited one, so it wasn’t to be wondered at that my new Commanding Officer could tell me the name of my horse, or that I was already well acquainted with his name, which was Winchell. For the old Colonel had frequently referred to the exploits of his dashing young relative. + 

I mention this mainly because my first few minutes with my unit in France transported me straight back to England and the Ringwell Hunt. Unfortunately, the migration was entirety mental; my physical feet took me straight along a pavé road for about three miles, to Le Hamel, where my company was in billets. Anyhow, it was to my advantage that I was already known to Colonel Winchell as a hunting man. For I always found that it was a distinct asset, when in close contact with officers of the Regular Army, to be able to converse convincingly about hunting. It gave one an almost unfair advantage in some ways. + 

Mansfield (who had been received with reservations of cordiality), Dick (persona grata on account of his having been at Sandhurst, and also because no one could possibly help liking him at sight), and I (no comment required) were all posted to C company which was short of officers. The battalion had lately been much below full strength, and was now being filled up with drafts. We had arrived at a good time, for our Division was about to be withdrawn to a back area for a long rest. And the Givenchy trenches on the La Bassée Canal had taken their toll in casualties. For the time being the Western Front received us into comparative comfort and domesticity. We found Captain Barton, the company commander, by a stove (which was smoking badly) in a small tiled room on the ground floor of a small house on the road from Bethune to Festubert. The smoke made my eyes water, but otherwise things were quite cheerful. We all slept on the floor, the hardness and coldness of which may be imagined. But then, as always, my sleeping-bag (or “fleabag” as we called it) was a good friend to me, and we were in clover compared with the men: (no one who was in the War need be reminded of that unavoidable circumstance). + 

Barton (like all the battalion officers except the C.O., the Second-in-Command, and the quartermaster, and four or five subalterns from Sandhurst) was a civilian. He was big, burly, good-natured, and easygoing; had been at Harrow and, until the War, had lived a comfortably married life on an adequate unearned income. He was, in fact, a man of snug and domesticated habits and his mere presence (wearing pince-nez) in a front line trench made one feel that it ought, at any rate, to be cosy. Such an inherently amicable man as Barton was a continual reminder of the incongruity of war with everyday humanity. In the meantime he was making gallant efforts to behave professionally, and keep his end up as a company commander. But that stove had no business to be making the room uninhabitable with its suffocating fumes. It really wasn’t fair on a chap like old Barton, who had always been accustomed to a bright fire and a really good glass of port.⁠ ⁠… + 

So my company received me; and for an infantry subaltern the huge unhappy mechanism of the Western Front always narrowed down to the company he was in. My platoon accepted me apathetically. It was a diminished and exhausted little platoon, and its mind was occupied with anticipations of “Divisional Rest.” + 

To revert to my earlier fact, “got to Bethune by half-past ten,” it may well be asked how I can state the time of arrival so confidently. My authority is the diary which I began to keep when I left England. Yes; I kept a diary, and I intend to quote from it (though the material which it contains is meagre). But need this be amplified?⁠ ⁠… + 

“Thursday. Went on working-party, 3 to 10:30 p.m. Marched to Festubert, a ruined village, shelled to bits. About 4:30, in darkness and rain, started up half a mile of light-railway lines through marsh, with sixty men. Then they carried hurdles up the communication trenches, about three quarters of a mile, which took two hours. Flares went up frequently; a few shells, high overhead, and exploding far behind us. The trenches are very wet. Finally emerged at a place behind the first- and second-line trenches, where new trenches (with ‘high-command breastworks’) are being dug. + 

“Saturday. Working-party again. Started 9:45 p.m. in bright moonlight and iron frost. Dug 12⁠–⁠2. Men got soup in ruined house at Festubert, with the moon shining through matchwood skeleton rafters. Up behind the trenches, the frost-bound morasses and ditches and old earthworks in moonlight, with dusky figures filing across the open, hobbling to avoid slipping. Home 4:15. + 

“Sunday. Same as Saturday. Dug 12⁠–⁠2. Very cold. + 

“Monday. Went with working-party at 3 p.m. Wet day. Awful mud. Tried to dig, till 7:30, and came home soaked. Back 9:45. Beastly night for the men, whose billets are wretched.” + 

I can see myself coming in, that last night, with Julian Durley, a shy, stolid-faced platoon commander who had been a clerk in Somerset House. He took the men’s discomforts very much to heart. Simple and unassertive, he liked sound literature, and had a sort of metropolitan turn of humour. His jokes, when things were going badly, reminded me of a facetious bus conductor on a wet winter day. Durley was an inspiration toward selfless patience. He was an ideal platoon officer, and an example which I tried to imitate from that night onward. I need hardly say that he had never hunted. He could swim like a fish, but no social status was attached to that. + 

II + 

When I had been with the battalion a week we moved away from the La Bassée sector at nine o’clock on a fine bright morning. In spite of my quite mild experiences there, I felt that I’d seen more than enough of that part of the country. Barton and Durley and young Ormand (who was now second-in-command of the company) were always talking about the Givenchy trenches and how their dugout had been “plastered with trench-mortars and whizzbangs.” Now that they were out of it they seemed to take an almost morbid delight in remembering their escapes. No one knew where we were moving to, but the quartermaster had told Barton that we might be going south. “New Army” battalions were beginning to arrive in France, and the British line was being extended. + 

On our second day’s march (we had done ten kilometres to a comfortable billet the first day) we passed an infantry brigade of Kitchener’s Army. It was raining; the flat dreary landscape was half-hidden by mist, and the road was liquid mud. We had fallen out for a halt when they passed us. Four after four they came, some of them wearing the steel basin-helmets which were new to the English armies then. The helmets gave them a Chinese look. To tell the truth, their faces looked sullen, wretched, and brutal as they sweated with their packs under glistening waterproof capes. Worried civilian officers on horses, young-looking subalterns in new rainproof trench-coats; and behind the trudging column the heavy transport horses plodding through the sludge, straining at their loads, and the stolid drivers munching, smoking, grinning, yelling coarse gibes at one another. It was the War all right, and they were going in the direction of it. + 

Late that afternoon I walked out a little way from our billets. In the brooding stillness I watched the willows and poplars, and the gleaming dykes which reflected the faint flush of a watery sunset. A heron sailed slowly away across the misty flats of ploughed land. Twilight deepened, and a flicker of star-shells wavered in the sky beyond Bethune. The sky seemed to sag heavily over Flanders; it was an oppressive, soul-clogging country, I thought, as I went back to our company mess in the squalid village street, to find Dick polishing his pipe against his nose, Ormand and Mansfield playing “nap,” and Durley soberly reading The Cloister and the Hearth in an Everyman edition. Already we were quite a happy family. “Old Man Barton,” as we called him, had gone out to invite the Quartermaster to dinner with us. Until that evening I had only seen the Q.M. from a distance, but I was already aware that he was the bedrock of the battalion (as befitted one on whom we relied for our rations). I saw him clearly for what he was, on that first evening (though not so clearly as I can see him now). + 

Joe Dottrell had been quartermaster-sergeant before the War; he was now Acting Quartermaster, with the rank of captain, since the real Q.M. had faded away into a “cushy job” at Army Headquarters. (He had, in fact, found that haven before the battalion went into action at the first battle of Ypres, whence it had emerged with eighty-five men and one officer⁠—Joe Dottrell.) Whatever might happen Joe was always there, and he never failed to get the rations up; no bombardment could have prevented him doing that. And what those “dixies” of hot tea signified no one knows who wasn’t there to wait for them. He was a small, spare man⁠—a typical “old soldier.” He had won his D.C.M. in South Africa, and had a row of ribbons to match his face, which was weather-beaten and whiskyfied to purple tints which became blue when the wind was cold. + 

Joe Dottrell now entered, his cap hiding his bald brow, and his British-warm coat concealing his medal ribbons, and old man Barton beaming beside him. + 

“I’ve brought Dottrell in to jolly you all up,” he said, with his nervous giggle. “Have a drink, Joe,” he continued, holding up a squat bottle of “Old Vatted Highland.” + 

“Well, my lucky lads!” exclaimed Joe, in his Lancashire voice. + 

Accepting the proffered glass he wished us all “the best,” and his presence gave us just that sense of security which we were in need of. But something went wrong in the kitchen, and the dinner was a disgrace. Barton “strafed” the servants until they were falling over one another, but Dottrell said the toasted cheese wasn’t too bad, and “There’s worse things in the world than half-warmed Maconochie,” he remarked. (Maconochie, it will be remembered, was a tinned compound of meat and vegetables; but perhaps it has survived the War. If so, it has my sympathy.) + 

Next day we took it easy. The day after that we travelled to our destination. I have been looking at the map. The distance, by a straight line, was fifty miles. Sixty-five, perhaps, by road; an easy three hours’ drive for the Divisional General in his car. Not so easy for the rank and file, whose experiences of migration were summarized well and truly by a private soldier, in a simple sentence which once met my eye while I was censoring the correspondence of my platoon. “Our company have been for a bath today and had a clean shirt given us and socks. We had to march five miles each way, so we had a good walk for it didn’t we? My feet are minus all the top skin. Everywhere we go seems such a long way.” In those last words one infantry private speaks for them all. + 

Our big move to the back area began at six a.m. We had to be up by then, for our kits had to be packed and ready by half-past seven. As soon as we had eaten our bacon and eggs in the stuffy billet by the light of a candle, the officers’ servants began to pack up the tin plates and dishes, and I remember how I went out alone into the first grey of the morning and up the village street with the cocks crowing. I walked slowly up to some higher ground with a view of woods and steeples and colliery chimneys: rooks were cawing in some tall trees against the faint colours of a watery daybreak, and the curé came out of his gate in a garden wall and said good morning to me as he passed. It was Sunday morning, and by eight o’clock there was a sound of church bells from far and near. Then a troop of mules and horses clattered along the road at their morning exercise, some of them led by turbaned Indians. I sat on a milestone and watched the sun come out, and a thrush sang a little way off⁠—the first I’d heard in France. But solitude was scanty and precious in the Army, and at half-past ten I was on parade. + 

We marched two miles into Lillers and entrained. The train started at noon. Ten hours later we detrained at a station three miles from Amiens. We had averaged four miles an hour, and it was now after ten; a dark, still night, with a little rain at times. Men, transport horses, officers’ chargers, limbers, and field-kitchens (known as “the cookers”) were unloaded. All this took two hours. We had some tea.⁠ ⁠… If I could taste that tea out of the dixies now I should write it all very much as it was. Living spontaneity would be revived by that tea, the taste of which cannot be recovered by any effort of memory. + 

Fifteen minutes after midnight we moved off. It was rumoured that we had only a few miles to go. On we went to the steady beat of the drums, halting for ten minutes at the end of each fifty. After the second halt the road seemed to become more hilly. About once in an hour we passed through a dark sleeping village. There was a lamp hung on a limber in the rear of the column. Twice I saw our shadows thrown on a white wall in a village. The first time it was a few colossal heads with lurching shoulders and slung rifles; and a second time, on a dead white wall, it was a line of legs; legs only; huge legs striding away from us as if jeering at our efforts to keep going. Movement became mechanical, and I found myself falling asleep as I walked. The men had the weight of their packs and equipment to keep them awake! + 

A little after six, just before it began to get light, we halted for the sixth time in a small town with a fine church. I sat on the steps at the church door with Dick beside me. Barton came and told us that we had another five kilometres to go “up a high hill.” How we managed it I can’t say, but an hour afterwards we entered a straggling village on the wooded uplands. As we hobbled in we were met by the Quartermaster, who had got there a few hours ahead of us with the Interpreter (a spindle-shanked Frenchman with a gentle soul and a large military moustache⁠—exiled, poor man, from his jewelery shop at Pau). + 

As we were the first troops who had ever been billeted in the village, old Joe and Monsieur Perrineau had been having quite a lively time with the rustic inhabitants, who had been knocked up out of their beds and were feeling far from amiable as regards the Flintshire Fusiliers. Having seen the men into their ramshackle barns we sorted ourselves out into our own billets. Dick and I shared a small room in an empty cottage. My diary informs me that I slept from eleven till five. We had marched sixteen miles. It was no easy matter to move an infantry battalion fifty miles. Let those who tour the continent in their comfortable cars remember it and be thankful. + 

III + 

Dick and I and Mansfield were starting our active service with a peaceful interlude which we had no right to expect. We had “struck it lucky” as Mansfield remarked. Young Ormand made round eyes under his dark eyebrows as he gloated over the difference between Divisional Rest and those ruddy Givenchy trenches. He was a sturdy little public-school boy who made no secret of his desire to avoid appearing in the Roll of Honour. He wanted life, and he appeared capable of making good use of it, if allowed the opportunity. Dick remained silent; he usually kept his thoughts to himself, confirming other people’s opinions with one of his brilliant smiles and the trustful look which he carried in his grey eyes. Julian Durley, too contented for speech, stretched his hands toward the blazing wood fire which crackled cheerfully while the wind blustered comfortably around the cottage. + 

We were all five of us sitting round the fire in my billet, which had a good open grate, a few pieces of old furniture, and a clock which ticked sedately, as if there were no war on. The owner of the cottage was with the French army. There wasn’t a man in the village under forty, and most of them looked gaffers of seventy. They complained that the Battalion was burning all their wood, but firewood was plentiful, since the village was only half a mile from a small forest, and there were trees all round it. This, and its rural remoteness, gave it an air of avoiding conscription. While we were sitting there, my servant Flook (who had been a railway signalman in Lancashire) blundered in at the door with a huge sack of firewood, which he dropped on the tiled floor with a gasp of relief and an exclamation, in the war jargon which is so difficult to remember, which made us all laugh. He explained that the people had been playing up hell to the Interpreter, so he’d slipped round to an adjacent woodstack as soon as it was dark to get some more of the “stoof” before the trouble began. Having emptied the sack in a corner he went out for another cargo. + 

Memories of our eight weeks at Montagne are blurred, like the war jargon which was around me then. I remember it by the light of a couple of ration candles, stuck in bottles; for our evenings were almost homely, except on the few occasions when we went out for a couple of hours of night-work. And even that was quite good fun, especially when old man Barton dropped his pince-nez in the middle of a wood. Mansfield’s lurid language was another source of amusement. By daylight we were “training for open warfare.” Colonel Winchell was very much on his toes and intent on impressing the Brigadier with his keenness and efficiency. He persistently preached “open warfare” at us, prophesying a “big advance” in the spring. + 

So we did outpost schemes at the forest’s edge, and open-order attacks across wheat-fields and up the stubbled slopes, while sandy hares galloped away, and an old shepherd, in a blue frieze cloak with a pointed hood, watched us from the nook where he was avoiding the wind. + 

Every evening, at sunset, the battalion fifes and drums marched down the village street with martial music to signify that another day was at an end and the Flintshire Fusiliers in occupation. Ploughmen with their grey teams drove a last furrow on the skyline; windmills spun their sails merrily; rooks came cawing home from the fields; pigeons circled above farmstead stacks with whistling sober-hued wings; and the old shepherd drove his sheep and goats into the village, tootling on a pipe. Sometimes a rampart of approaching rain would blot out the distance, but the foreground would be striped with vivid green, lit with a gleam of sun, and an arc of iridescence spanned the slate-coloured cloud. The War was fifty kilometres away, though we could hear the big guns booming beyond the horizon. + 

I was happy as I trudged along the lanes in the column, with my platoon chattering behind me and everything gilt with the sun’s good humour. Happier still when I borrowed the little black mare no one could ride and cantered about the open country by myself, which I did two or three afternoons a week. The black mare was well-bred, but had lost the use of one eye. She had a queer temper, and had earned an evil reputation by kicking various officers off or bolting back to the transport lines with them after going half a mile quite quietly. She was now used as a pack-pony for carrying ammunition, but by gentle treatment I gained her confidence and she soon became a sort of active-service echo of my old favourites. Dick rode out with me as often as he could persuade the Transport Officer to let him have a horse. + 

When riding alone I explored the country rather absentmindedly, meditating on the horrors which I had yet to experience: I was unable to reconcile that skeleton certainty with the serenities of this winter landscape⁠—clean-smelling, with larks in the sky, the rich brown gloom of distant woods, and the cloud shadows racing over the lit and dappled levels of that widespread land. And then I would pass a grey-roofed château, with its many windows and no face there to watch me pass. Only a bronze lion guarding the well in the middle of an overgrown lawn, and the whole place forlorn and deserted. Once, as I was crossing the main road from Abbeville to Beauvais, I watched the interminable column of a French army corps which was moving southward. For the first time I saw the famous French field-guns⁠—the 75’s. + 

But even then it wasn’t easy to think of dying.⁠ ⁠… Still less so when Dick was with me, and we were having an imitation hunt. I used to pretend to be hunting a pack of hounds, with him as my whipper-in. Assuming a Denis Milden manner (Denis was at Rouen with the cavalry and likely to remain there, in spite of the C.O.’s assumptions about open warfare), I would go solemnly through a wood, cheering imaginary hounds. After an imaginary fox had been found, away we’d scuttle, looking in vain for a fence to jump, making imaginary casts after an imaginary check, and losing our fox when the horses had done enough galloping. An imaginary kill didn’t appeal to me, somehow. Once, when I was emerging rapidly from a wood with loud shouts, I came round a corner and nearly knocked the Brigadier off his horse. He was out for a ride with his staff-captain; but no doubt he approved of my sporting make-believe, and I didn’t dare to stop for apologies, since the Brigadier was a very great man. Dick enjoyed these outings and was much impressed by my hunting noises. The black mare seemed to enjoy it also. + 

Thus, in those delusive surroundings, I reverted fictitiously to the jaunts and jollities of peacetime, fabricating for my young friend a lighthearted fragment of the sport which he had not lived long enough to share. It was queer, though, when we met some of the black-bearded Bengal Lancers who were quartered in one of the neighbouring villages. What were they doing among these wooded ridges with the little roads winding away over the slopes, toward a low yellow sunset and the nowhere of life reprieved to live out its allotted span? + 

Christmas came⁠—a day of disciplined insobriety⁠—and the First Battalion entered 1916 in a state of health and happiness. But it was a hand-to-mouth happiness, preyed upon by that remote noise of artillery; and as for health⁠—well, we were all of us provisionally condemned to death in our own thoughts, and if anyone had been taken seriously ill and sent back to “Blighty” he would have been looked upon as lucky. For anybody who allowed himself to think things over, the only way out of it was to try and feel secretly heroic, and to look back on the old life as pointless and trivial. I used to persuade myself that I had “found peace” in this new life. But it was a peace of mind which resulted from a physically healthy existence combined with a sense of irresponsibility. There could be no turning back now; one had to do as one was told. In an emotional mood I could glory in the idea of the supreme sacrifice. + 

But where was the glory for the obscure private who was always in trouble with the platoon sergeant and got “medicine and duty” when he went to the medical officer with rheumatism? He had enlisted “for the duration” and had a young wife at home. It was all very well for Colonel Winchell to be lecturing in the village schoolroom on the offensive spirit, and the spirit of the regiment, but everyone knew that he was booked for a brigade, and some said that he’d bought a brigadier’s gold-peaked cap last time he was on leave. + 

When I instructed my platoon, one or two evenings a week, I confined myself to asking them easy questions out of the infantry training manual, saying that we had got to win the War (and were certain to), and reading the League Football news aloud. I hadn’t begun to question the rights and wrongs of the War then; and if I had, nothing would have been gained by telling my platoon about it⁠—apart from the grave breach of discipline involved in such heart-searchings. + 

Early in the New Year the first gas-masks were issued. Every morning we practiced putting them on, transforming ourselves into grotesque goggle-faced creatures as we tucked the grey flannel under our tunics in flustered haste. Those masks were an omen. An old woodcutter in high leather leggings watched us curiously, for we were doing our gas-drill on the fringes of the forest, with its dark cypresses among the leafless oaks and beeches, and a faint golden light over all. + 

One Sunday in January I got leave to go into Amiens. (A rambling train took an hour and a half to do the eighteen-mile journey.) Dick went with me. After a good lunch we inspected the Cathedral, which was a contrast to the life we had been leading. But it was crowded with sightseeing British soldiers: the kilted “Jocks” walked up and down the nave as if they had conquered France, and I remember seeing a Japanese officer flit in with curious eyes. The long capes which many of the soldiers wore gave them a medieval aspect, insolent and overbearing. But the background was solemn and beautiful. White columns soared into lilies of light, and the stained-glass windows harmonized with the chanting voices and the satisfying sounds of the organ. I glanced at Dick and thought what a Galahad he looked (a Galahad who had got his school colours for cricket). + 

Back in the company mess at Montagne we found the Quartermaster talking to Barton, who was looking none too bright, for old Joe seemed to think that we might be moving back to the Line any day now. + 

Young Ormand had got his favourite record going on his little gramophone. That mawkish popular song haunts me whenever I am remembering the War in these after-days: + 

And when I told them how wonderful you were + 

They wouldn’t believe me; they wouldn’t believe me; + 

Your hands, your eyes, your lips, your hair, + 

Are in a class beyond compare⁠ ⁠… + 

and so on. His records were few, and all were of a similar kind. I would have liked to hear a Handel violin sonata sometimes; there was that one which Kreisler had played the first time I heard him.⁠ ⁠… And I’d have liked to hear Aunt Evelyn playing “The Harmonious Blacksmith” on that Sunday evening when we began to pull ourselves together for “the Line.”⁠ ⁠… In her last letter she had said how long the winter seemed, in spite of being so busy at the local hospital. She was longing for the spring to come again. “Spring helps one so much in life.” (In the spring, I thought, the “Big Push” will begin.) Her chief bit of news was that Dixon was in France. Although he had enlisted in the Army Veterinary Corps he was now attached to the Army Service Corps, and was a sergeant. “He seems quite happy, as he has charge of a lot of horses,” she wrote. I wondered whether there was any chance of my seeing him, but it seemed unlikely. Anyhow, I would try to find out where he was, as soon as I knew where our division was going. Dottrell thought we were for the Somme trenches, which had lately been taken over from the French. + 

But before we left Montagne Colonel Winchell sent for me and told me to take over the job of Transport Officer. This was an anticlimax, for it meant that I shouldn’t go into the trenches. The late Transport Officer had gone on leave, and now news had come that he had been transferred to a reserve battalion in England. Mansfield remarked that “God seemed to watch over some people.” He seemed to be watching over me too. Everybody in C company mess expressed magnanimous approval of my appointment, which was considered appropriate, on account of my reputation as a foxhunting man. I entered on my new duties with “new-broom” energy. And the black mare was now mine to ride every day. For the time being I remained with C company mess, but when we got to the Line I should live with Dottrell and the Interpreter. It was a snug little job which would have suited Barton down to the ground. + 

There was one thing which worried me; I disliked the idea of Dick going into the front line while I stayed behind. I said so, and he told me not to be an old chump. So we had a last ride round the woods, and the next morning, which was raw and foggy, we turned our backs on the little village. The First Battalion never had such a peaceful eight weeks again for the remainder of the War. + 

We crossed the Somme at Picquigny: after that we were in country unknown to us. I rode along with the rattle and rumble of limber and wagon wheels, watching the patient dun-coloured column winding away in front; conscious of what they were marching to, I felt myself strongly identified with this queer community, which still contained a few survivors from the original Expeditionary Force battalion which had “helped to make history” at Ypres in October 1914. Most of the old soldiers were on the strength of the Transport, which numbered about sixty. + 

On the roll of the Transport were drivers, officers’ grooms, brakesmen, and the men with the nine pack animals which carried ammunition. Then there was the transport-sergeant (on whose efficiency my fate depended), his corporal, and a farrier-corporal; and those minor specialists, the shoeing-smith, saddler, carpenter, and cook. Our conveyances were the G.S. wagon (with an old driver who took ceaseless pride in his horses and the shining up of his steel-work), the mess wagon (carrying officers’ kits, which were strictly limited in weight), the company cookers (which lurched cumbersomely along with the men’s dinners stewing away all the time), the water-cart and a two-wheeled vehicle known as “the Maltese cart” (which carried a special cargo connected with the Quartermaster’s stores and was drawn by an aged pony named Nobbie). There were also the limbers, carrying the machine-guns and ammunition. + 

The transport-sergeant was a Herefordshire man who could easily be visualized as a farmer driving to market in his gig. The C.O. had told me that the transport had been getting rather slack and needed smartening up; but I was already aware that Dottrell and the transport-sergeant could have managed quite easily without my enthusiastic support; they knew the whole business thoroughly, and all I could do was to keep an eye on the horses, which were a very moderate assortment, though they did their work well enough. + 

So far I have said next to nothing about the officers outside my own company, and there is nothing to be said about them while they are on their way to the Line, except that their average age was about twenty-five, and that I had known the majority of them at Clitherland. It was a more or less untried battalion which marched across the Somme that misty morning. But somehow its original spirit survived, fortified by those company sergeant-majors and platoon sergeants whose duties were so exacting; how much depended on them only an ex-infantry officer can say for certain; according to my own experience, everything depended on them. But the Army was an interdependent concern, and when the Brigadier met us on the road Colonel Winchell’s face assumed a different expression of anxiety from the one which it wore when he was riding importantly up and down the column with the Adjutant at his heels. (The Adjutant, by the way, became a Roman Catholic priest after the War, and it doesn’t surprise me that he felt the need for a change of mental atmosphere.) The Brigadier, in his turn, became a more or less meek and conciliatory man when he encountered the Division General. And so on, up to Field-Marshal French, who was then reigning at St.-Omer (with many a socially eligible young man to assist him). + 

We went thirteen miles that day. I remember, soon after we started on the second day, passing the end of an avenue, at the far end of which there was an enticing glimpse of an ancient château. My heart went out to that château: it seemed to symbolize everything which we were leaving behind us. But it was a bright morning, and what had I got to complain, riding cockily along on my one-eyed mare while Dick was trudging in front of his platoon?⁠ ⁠… + 

On the third day, having marched thirty-three miles altogether, we entered Morlancourt, a village in the strip of undulating landscape between the Somme and the Ancre rivers. This was our destination (until the next day, when the troops went up to the trenches, which were four or five miles away). It was an ominous day, but the sun shone and the air felt keen; as we marched down to Morlancourt a flock of pigeons circled above the roofs with the light shining through their wings. It was a village which had not suffered from shellfire. Its turn came rather more than two years afterwards. + 

We were all kept busy that afternoon: Barton and the other company commanders were harassed by continuous “chits” from battalion H.Q. and, as young Ormand remarked when he came to leave his gramophone in my care, “everyone had fairly got the breeze up.” The only person who showed no sign of irritability was the Quartermaster, who continued to chaff M. Perrineau, with whom he stumped about the village mollifying everyone and putting difficulties to rights. + 

Late in the evening I was sent off to a hamlet a mile away to find out (from the billeting officer of the New Army battalion we were relieving next day) certain details of routine connected with the transport of rations to the Line. This billeting officer recognized me before I remembered who he was. His name was Regel (which he now pronounced “Regal”). I had forgotten his existence since we were at school together. He now dictated his methodical information, and when I had finished scribbling notes about “water-trolley horses,” “mule-stable just beyond first barricade,” and so on, we talked for a while about old days. + 

“How’s your cousin Willie?” I asked, for want of anything else to say. His chubby face looked embarrassed, and he replied (in a low voice, for there were two other officers in the room), “He’s on the other side⁠—in the artillery.”⁠ ⁠… + 

I remembered then that Willie (a very nice boy) had always gone home to Hanover for the holidays. And now he might be sending a five-nine shell over at us for all we, or he, knew. It was eleven o’clock when I got back to Morlancourt. Dottrell was having a glass of rum and hot water before turning in. He had already found out all the details which I had scribbled in my notebook. + 

IV + 

Morlancourt was tucked away among the fold of long slopes and bare ridges of ploughland. Five roads entered the village and each road, in its friendly convergence with the others, had its little crop of houses. There was a church with a slated tower and a gilt vane, round which birds wheeled and clacked. In the hollow ground in the middle, where the five roads met, there was a congregation of farm buildings round an open space with a pond on one side of it. It seemed a comfortable village when one looked down on its red and grey roofs and its drab and ochre walls. + 

The long lines of the high ground hid the rest of the world: on the ridge one saw a few straggling trees, a team of greys ploughing or dredging, and some horsemen or a hooded farm-cart moving along the white edge of the skyline. The wind piped across the open, combing the thorn bushes which grew under high banks, and soughing in isolated plane trees and aspens. It was a spacious landscape of distant objects delicately defined under an immense sky. The light swept across it in a noble progress of wind and cloud, and evening brought it mystery and sadness. At night the whole region became a dusk of looming slopes with lights of village and bivouac picked out here and there, little sparks in the loneliness of time. And always the guns boomed a few miles away, and the droning aeroplanes looked down on the white seams of the reserve trench lines with their tangle of wires and posts. + 

Here, while the battalion began its “tours of trenches” (six days in and four days out), I had my meals comfortably with mild M. René Perrineau and Joe Dottrell. I slept in a canvas hut close to the transport lines, falling asleep to the roar and rattle of trench warfare four miles away, and waking to see, on sunny mornings, the shadows of birds flitting across my canvas room, and to hear the whistling of starlings from the fruit trees and gables of the farm near by. After breakfast I would sit for a while reading a book by the fire in Dottrell’s billet, while the soldier cook sang “I want to go to Michigan” at the top of his voice about three yards away. But however much he wanted to go to Michigan, he was lucky not to be in the trenches, and so was I; and I knew it as I toddled down to the transport lines to confer with Sergeant Hoskins about getting some carrots and greenstuff for the horses and indenting for some new nosebags and neckpieces for the limber harness. Some of the horses were looking hidebound, and I promised the sergeant that I’d buy a couple of hundredweight of linseed for them when I went on leave. Linseed was a cosy idea; it reminded me of peacetime conditions. + 

Our serious activities began after lunch. At half-past two I mounted the black mare, and old Joe soused himself into the saddle of his pony Susan (a veteran who had sustained a shrapnel wound on the near hip at the first battle of Ypres), and the transport moved off along the Bray road with the rations for the battalion. As the days lengthened the expedition started later, for we couldn’t go beyond Bray until after dusk. It was a roundabout journey of seven miles, and if we started at three we were never home before ten. But home we came, to find Monsieur Perrineau solacing himself with Ormand’s gramophone: “But when I told them how wonderful you were” or “Just a little love, a little kiss”: (Perrineau was hoping to go on leave soon, and his wife was waiting for him at Pau). + 

There were times when I felt that I ought to be somewhere else; I always went up to see my company, and when they were in the front line I was reluctant to leave them. One night (during the second time they were in) I arrived while our batteries were busily retaliating after a heavy afternoon bombardment by the Germans. I had some difficulty in getting up to the front line as the communication trenches were badly knocked about. But I found the five C company officers none the worse for having been “strafed” with trench-mortars, and my visit seemed to cheer them. I came home across the open country that night (which saved three miles), and it was a relief to leave it all behind me⁠—the waterlogged trenches, and men peering grimly at me from under their round helmets: riding home there was friendly gloom around me, while the rockets soared beyond the ridge and the machine-guns rattled out their mirthless laughter. I left the mare to find her way to the gap in the reserve trench line: (she never hesitated, though she had only been up that way once by daylight). I was seeing the War as a looker-on, it seemed. + 

I had written to Dixon, telling him all about my new job, and I now received a reply. We were, apparently, in the same army corps, so he couldn’t be so very many miles away. + 

“I have been wondering, sir,” he wrote, “whether it might possibly be fixed up for me to exchange into your battalion as transport-sergeant. You say your sergeant has been in France since the beginning, so he’s done his bit all right! It would be quite like old times for me to be your transport-sergeant. That was a rotten business about Mr. Colwood being killed, sir. We shall all miss him very much when this War is over.” + 

Dixon’s letter sent me off into pleasant imaginings; to have him near me would make all the difference, I thought. Everything I had known before the War seemed to be withering away and falling to pieces. Denis seldom wrote to me, and he was trying to get a job on the Staff; but with Dixon to talk to I should still feel that the past was holding its own with the War; and I wanted the past to survive and to begin again; the idea was like daylight on the other side of this bad weather in which life and death had come so close to one another. I couldn’t get used to the idea of Stephen being dead. And Denis had become so remote that I seldom remembered him, though I couldn’t say why it was. + 

So, by the time I was showing Dottrell the letter, I had made up my mind that Dixon’s exchange was as good as settled. Joe read the letter through twice. “Your old groom must be a good sport,” he remarked pouring himself out a couple of inches of O.V.H. and adding a similar amount of water. “But it would take a deal of wangling to work his exchange. And if you want my private opinion, young George, he’d far better stay where he is. We’ll find ourselves in much less cushy places than this, and you say he’s turned forty-five.⁠ ⁠…” He handed me the letter. “And you might find yourself back with C company again if we had some casualties. Things change pretty quick nowadays. And I don’t mind betting there’ll be a few changes when Kinjack rolls up to take command of the battalion!” + 

I nodded wisely. For everyone now knew that Winchell had got his brigade, and Major Kinjack was expected (from the Second Battalion) in a week or two. And Kinjack had a somewhat alarming reputation as a disciplinarian. He was, according to Dottrell, who had known him since he was a subaltern, “a bloody fine soldier but an absolute pig if you got the wrong side of him.” Old man Barton was in a twitter about the new C.O., his only hope being, he said, that Kinjack would send him home as incompetent. Barton came in at this moment, for the battalion had returned from the trenches the day before. + 

“Why, Barton,” exclaimed Dottrell, “you look as if you’d just come out of quod!” + 

Barton’s hair had been cut by an ex-barber (servant to the medical officer), who had borrowed a pair of horse-clippers to supplement his scissors. Barton giggled and rubbed his cropped cranium. He said it made him feel more efficient, and began to chaff Dick (who had come in to ask if he might go for a ride with me that afternoon) about his beautifully brushed hair. “Kinjack’ll soon have the horse-clippers on your track, young man!” he said. Dick smiled and said nothing. + 

We arranged to go for a ride, and he went off to inspect the company’s dinners. When he had gone Barton remarked that he wished he could get Dick to take more care of himself up in the Line. “I sent him out on a short patrol two nights ago, but he stayed out there nearly an hour and a half and went right up to the Boche wire.” Old Joe agreed that he was a rare good lad; no cold feet about him; the country couldn’t afford to lose many more like that.⁠ ⁠… + 

And he got on to his favourite subject⁠—“The Classes and the Masses.” For Joe had been brought up in the darkest part of Manchester, and he prided himself on being an old-fashioned socialist. But his Socialism was complicated by his fair-minded cognizance of the good qualities of the best type of the officer class, with whom he had been in close contact ever since he enlisted. He clenched a knotted fist. “This war,” he exclaimed in his husky voice, “is being carried on by the highest and the lowest in land⁠—the blue-blooded upper ten and the poor unfortunate people that some silly bastard called ‘the Submerged Tenth.’ All the others are making what they can out of it and shirking the dirty work. Selfish hogs! And the politicians are no better.” + 

“That’s right, Joe. That’s the stuff to give ’em!” said Barton. + 

And they both drank damnation to the (enigmatic) part of the population which was leaving all the dirty work to the infantry. Their generalizations, perhaps, were not altogether fair. There was quite a lot of blue blood at G.H.Q. and Army Headquarters. And Mansfield and Durley, to name only two of our own officers, were undoubtedly members of “the middle class,” whatever that may be. + 

My ride with Dick was a great success. Over the rolling uplands and through an occasional strip of woodland, with the sun shining and big clouds moving prosperously on a boisterous northwest wind, we rode to a village six or seven miles away, and had tea at an unbelievable shop where the cakes were as good as anything in Amiens. I wouldn’t like to say how many we ate, but the evening star shone benevolently down on us from among a drift of rosy clouds while we were cantering home to Morlancourt. But about a fortnight later, when Dick was up in the trenches, I received a letter in reply to the one I had sent Dixon. Someone informed me that Sergeant Dixon had died of pneumonia. Major Kinjack arrived to take command a day or two afterwards. + 

V + 

Lieutenant-Colonel Kinjack (to give him his new rank) exceeded all our expectations. He was the personification of military efficiency. Personal charm was not his strong point, and he made no pretension to it. He was aggressive and blatant, but he knew his job, and for that we respected him and were grateful. His predecessor had departed in his Brigadier’s cap without saying goodbye to anyone. For that we were less grateful; but as Dottrell said, “He’d had Brigadier on the brain ever since he came back off leave, and now he’d never be satisfied till he’d got a Division and another decoration to go with it.” Dottrell had just got his D.S.O., so he had no cause to feel jealous, even if he had been capable of that feeling, which he wasn’t. His only complaint was that they didn’t make his “acting rank” permanent. He aired that grievance several evenings a week, especially when he had got back late with the ration party, and his reference to the “permanent” Quartermaster (at Army Headquarters) were far from flattering. + 

Colonel Kinjack stopped one night in Morlancourt, and on the following afternoon I guided him up to the Line, going by the shortcut across the open country and the half-dug and feebly wired reserve trench which, we hoped, would never be utilized. The new C.O. had inspected the Transport in the morning without active disapproval, but he was less pleased when our appearance on the ridge (half a mile behind the front line) attracted a few shells, none of which exploded near us. This was considered quite a good joke in the battalion, and I was often reminded afterwards of how I’d got Kinjack welcomed with whizzbangs. + 

“The Boches saw Kinjack coming all right. The Transport Officer made sure of that!” Barton would say, with a chuckle. + 

For in spite of my easy job, it was supposed that I could be a bit of a daredevil if I liked. Not that I wanted to be, that afternoon; Kinjack frightened the life out of me, and was so sceptical of my ability to find the way that I began to feel none too sure about it myself.⁠ ⁠… It is, however, just conceivable that at that time I didn’t care what happened to the new Colonel or anybody else.⁠ ⁠… + 

That same day, at about midnight, I was awakened by Dottrell, who told me that I was to go on leave next morning. I drove to the station in the Maltese cart; the train started at 9:30, crawled to Havre, and by ten o’clock next day I was in London. I had been in France less than four months. As regards war experience I felt a bit of an impostor. I had noticed that officers back from their ten days’ leave were usually somewhat silent about it. Then, after a few weeks, they began to look forward to their next leave again, and to talk about this future fact. But there wasn’t much to be said about mine, for it was bitterly cold and a heavy fall of snow knocked my hopes of hunting on the head. So I remained quietly with Aunt Evelyn at Butley, telling myself that it was a great luxury to have a hot bath every day, and waiting for a thaw. If it thawed I should have two or three days with the Ringwell on Colonel Hesmon’s horses. And I should stay at Hoadley Rectory. But no thaw came, and I returned to France without having been to the Rectory, which had been a painful idea, in any case. The Rector evidently felt the same, for he wrote me a sad letter in which he said “as I think of all the suffering and death, the anxieties and bereavements of this terrible struggle, I feel that in our ignorance we can only rest on the words, ‘What I do thou knowest not now but thou shalt know hereafter.’ Obedience and self-sacrifice for right and truth in spite of suffering and death is Christianity.⁠ ⁠…” I received this letter on my last day at Butley. Sitting alone in the schoolroom late at night, I felt touched by the goodness and patience of my old friend, but I was unable to accept his words in the right spirit. He spoke too soon. I was too young to understand. And England wasn’t what it used to be. I had been over to say goodbye to Captain Huxtable that afternoon; but the War was making an old man of him, though he did his best to be bright. And kind Aunt Evelyn talked bitterly about the Germans and called them “hellhounds.” I found myself defending them, although I couldn’t claim acquaintance with a single one of them (except Willie Regel, and I shouldn’t have known him by sight if I’d met him). + 

Looking round the room at the enlarged photographs of my hunters, I began to realize that my past was wearing a bit thin. The War seemed to have made up its mind to obliterate all those early adventures of mine. Point-to-point cups shone, but without conviction. And Dixon was dead.⁠ ⁠… + 

Perhaps, after all, it was better to be back with the battalion. The only way to forget about the War was to be on the other side of the Channel. But the fire burnt brightly and the kettle was hissing on the hob. It was nice to be wearing my old civilian clothes, and to make myself a cup of tea. Old Joe will be on his way home with the transport now, I thought, contrasting my comfort with him joggling along the Bray road in this awful weather. His bronchitis had been bad lately, too. Dick was a thought which I repressed. He would be getting his leave soon, anyhow.⁠ ⁠… The Rector said we were fighting for right and truth; but it was no use trying to think it all out now. There were those things to take back for the others⁠—a bottle of old brandy for Dottrell and some smoked salmon for C company mess⁠—I mustn’t make any mistake about that when I get to town in the morning, I thought.⁠ ⁠… + 

And the next evening I was on the boat at Southampton; the weather had turned mild again; it was a quiet evening; I watched the red and green lights across the harbour, and listened to the creaking cries of the gulls, like the sound of windlasses and pulleys, as they swooped in circles or settled on the smooth dusk of the water. From the town came the note of a bugle, a remote call, like the last thought of home. And then we were churning across the dark sea, to find France still under snow. + 

There was a continuous rumble and grumble of bombardment while we were going up with the rations on the day after I got back from leave. As we came over the hill beyond Bray the darkness toward Albert was lit with the glare of explosions that blinked and bumped. Dottrell remarked that there seemed to be a bit of a mix-up, which was his way of saying that he didn’t altogether like the look of things that evening. + 

When we arrived at the ration dump the quartermaster-sergeant told us that the battalion had been standing-to for the past two hours. It was possible that the Boches might be coming across. C company was in the front line. The noise was subsiding, so I went up there, leaving Joe to pay his nightly call at battalion headquarters. + 

Stumbling and splashing up a communication trench known as Canterbury Avenue, with the parcel of smoked salmon stuffed into my haversack, I felt that smoked salmon wasn’t much of an antidote for people who had been putting up with all that shellfire. Still, it was something.⁠ ⁠… Round the next corner I had to flatten myself against the wall of that wet ditch, for someone was being carried down on a stretcher. An extra stretcher-bearer walking behind told me it was Corporal Price of C company. “A rifle-grenade got him⁠ ⁠… looks as if he’s a goner.⁠ ⁠…” His face was only a blur of white in the gloom; then, with the drumming of their boots on the trenchboards, Corporal Price left the War behind him. I remembered him vaguely as a quiet little man in Durley’s platoon. No use offering him smoked salmon, I thought, as I came to the top of Canterbury Avenue, and, as usual, lost my way in the maze of saps and small trenches behind the front line. Watling Street was the one I wanted. Finding one’s way about the trenches in the dark was no easy job when one didn’t live up there. I passed the dugouts of the support company at Maple Redoubt. Candles and braziers glinted through the curtain-flaps and voices muttered gruffly from the little underground cabins (which would have been safer if they had been deeper down in the earth). Now and again there was the splitting crack of a rifle-shot from the other side, or a five-nine shell droned serenely across the upper air to burst with a hollow bang; voluminous reverberations rolled along the valley. The shallow blanching flare of a rocket gave me a glimpse of the mounds of bleached sandbags on the Redoubt. Its brief whiteness died downward, leaving a dark world; chilly gusts met me at corners, piping drearily through crannies of the parapet; very different was the voice of the wind that sang in the cedar tree in the garden at home.⁠ ⁠… + 

Pushing past the gas-blanket, I blundered down the stairs to the company headquarters’ dugout. There were twenty steps to that earthly smelling den, with its thick wooden props down the middle and its precarious yellow candlelight casting wobbling shadows. Barton was sitting on a box at the rough table, with a tin mug and a half-empty whisky bottle. His shoulders were hunched and the collar of his trench-coat was turned up to his ears. Dick was in deep shadow, lying on a bunk (made of wire-netting with empty sandbags on it). It was a morose cramped little scene, loathsome to live in as it is hateful to remember. The air was dank and musty; lumps of chalk fell from the “ceiling” at intervals. There was a bad smell of burnt grease, and the frizzle of something frying in the adjoining kennel that was called the kitchen was the only evidence of ordinary civilization⁠—that and Barton’s shining pince-nez, and the maps and notebooks which were on the table.⁠ ⁠… + 

Smoked salmon from Piccadilly Circus was something after all. It cheered Barton immensely. He unpacked it; he sniffed it; and no doubt it brought the lights of London into his mind. + 

“Gosh, if only this war would stop!” he exclaimed. “I’d be off to Scott’s oyster-bar like a streak of light and you’d never get me away from it again!” + 

He held the smoked salmon under Dick’s nose and told him what a lucky young devil he was to be going on leave in two or three days’ time. Dick wasn’t as bright as usual; he’d got a rotten headache, he said. Barton told him he’d better let Ormand go out with the wiring-party instead of him. But he said no, he’d be all right by then, and Ormand had been out last night. Barton told me they’d had a lively time with the C.O. lately: “He gave orders for the whole of the front line to be rewired; we’ve been at it every night, but he came up this morning with his big periscope, strafing like hell about the gaps along by the mine-craters. He says the wire isn’t strong enough to stop a wheelbarrow⁠—why a wheelbarrow God knows!” He laughed, rather hysterically; his nerves were on edge, and no wonder.⁠ ⁠… For, as he said, what with the muck everything was in since the snow melted, and being chivvied by Kinjack, and then being “crumped” all the afternoon, life hadn’t been worth living lately. The odd thing was that good old Barton seemed equally concerned because the snowy weather had prevented me from having any hunting while on leave. And Dick agreed that it had been very rough on me. + 

Mansfield and Ormand came in at that moment; these two were very good friends, and they always seemed to be cheering one another up. They had left Durley on duty in the front trench. They wanted to hear all about the shows I had been to in London, but I couldn’t tell them anything (though I wished I could), for I hadn’t been to a theatre, and it was no use talking about the Symphony Concert at Queen’s Hall, which now made me feel rather a prig. + 

Dick was still lying in his dark corner when I said good night and groped my way up the steps, leaving them to make the most of the smoked salmon. Going down Canterbury Avenue it was so pitch black that I couldn’t see my own hand; once or twice a flare went up in the spectral region on the shoulder of the hill behind me; lit by that unearthly glare the darkness became desolation. + 

Coming up from the transport lines at twelve o’clock next morning I found Joe Dottrell standing outside the Quartermaster’s stores. His face warned me to expect bad news. No news could have been worse. Dick had been killed. He had been hit in the throat by a rifle bullet while out with the wiring-party, and had died at the dressing-station a few hours afterwards. The battalion doctor had been a throat specialist before the War, but this had not been enough. + 

The sky was angry with a red smoky sunset when we rode up with the rations. Later on, when it was dark, we stood on the bare slope just above the ration dump while the Brigade chaplain went through his words; a flag covered all that we were there for; only the white stripes on the flag made any impression on the dimness of the night. Once the chaplain’s words were obliterated by a prolonged burst of machine-gun fire; when he had finished, a trench-mortar “cannister” fell a few hundred yards away, spouting the earth up with a crash.⁠ ⁠… A sack was lowered in the hole in the ground. The sack was Dick. I knew Death then. + 

A few days later, when the battalion was back at Morlancourt, and Kinjack was having a look round the Transport lines, he remarked that he wasn’t sure that I wasn’t rather wasted as Transport Officer. “I’d much rather be with C company, sir.” Some sort of anger surged up inside me as I said it.⁠ ⁠… He agreed. No doubt he had intended me to return to my platoon. + 

VI + 

Easter was late in April that year; my first three tours of trenches occupied me during the last thirty days of Lent. This essential season in the Church calendar was not, as far as I remember, remarked upon by anyone in my company, although the name of Christ was often on our lips, and Mansfield (when a cannister made a mess of the trench not many yards away from him) was even heard to refer to our Saviour as “murry old Jesus!” These innocuous blasphemings of the holy name were a peculiar feature of the War, in which the principles of Christianity were either obliterated or falsified for the convenience of all who were engaged in it. Up in the trenches every man bore his own burden; the Sabbath was not made for man; and if a man laid down his life for his friends it was no part of his military duties. To kill an enemy was an effective action; to bring in one of own wounded was praiseworthy, but unrelated to our war-aims. The Brigade chaplain did not exhort us to love our enemies. He was content to lead off with the hymn “How sweet the name of Jesus sounds!” + 

I mention this wartime dilemma of the Churches because my own mind was in rather a muddle at that time. I went up to the trenches with the intention of trying to kill someone. It was my idea of getting a bit of my own back. I did not say anything about it to anyone; but it was this feeling which took me out patrolling the mine-craters whenever an opportunity offered itself. It was a phase in my war experience⁠—no more irrational than the rest of the proceedings, I suppose; it was an outburst of blind bravado which now seems paltry when I compare it with the behaviour of an officer like Julian Durley, who did everything that was asked of him as a matter of course. + 

Lent, as I have said before, was not observed by us. But Barton got somewhere near observing it one evening. We had just returned to our dugout after the twilight ritual of standing-to. The rations had come up, and with them the mail. After reading a letter from his wife he looked at me and said: “O Kangar, how I wish I were a cathedral organist!” (I was known as “the Kangaroo” in C company.) His remark, which had no connection with any religious feeling, led us on to pleasant reminiscences of cathedral closes. Nothing would be nicer, we thought, than to be sauntering back, after Evensong, to one of those snug old houses, with a book of anthems under our arms⁠—preferably on a mild evening toward the end of October. (In his civilian days Barton had attended race meetings regularly; his musical experience had been confined to musical comedy.) + 

The mail that evening had brought me a parcel from Aunt Evelyn, which contained two pots of specially good jam. Ration jam was usually in tins, and of tins it tasted. Barton gazed affectionately at the coloured label, which represented a cherry-growing landscape. The label was a talisman which carried his mind safely to the home counties of England. He spoke of railway travelling. “Do you remember the five-thirty from Paddington? What a dear old train it was!” Helping himself to a spoonful of cherry jam he mentally passed through Maidenhead in a Pullman carriage.⁠ ⁠… The mail had also brought me the balance sheet of the Ringwell Hunt. These Hunt accounts made me feel homesick. And it appeared that the late Mr. S. Colwood had subscribed ten pounds. He must have sent it early in September, just before he was killed. No doubt he wrote the cheque in a daydream about hunting.⁠ ⁠… + 

In the meantime we were down in that frowsty smelling dugout, listening to the cautious nibbling of rats behind the wooden walls; and above ground there was the muffled boom of something bursting. And two more officers had been killed. Not in our company though. The Germans had put up another mine that afternoon without doing us any damage. Their trenches were only a hundred and fifty yards from ours; in some places less than fifty. It was a sector of the line which specialized in mines; more than half of our 750 yard frontage was pitted with mine-craters, some of them fifty feet deep.⁠ ⁠… + 

“They were digging in front of Bois Francais Trench again last night,” I remarked. + 

Barton had just received a message from battalion headquarters saying that the company front was to be thoroughly patrolled. + 

“I’ll take O’Brien out with me tonight,” I added. + 

Barton’s ruddy face had resumed the worried expression which it wore when messages came from Kinjack or the Adjutant. + 

“All right, Kangar; but do be careful. It puts the fear of God into me when you’re out there and I’m waiting for you to come in.” + 

It put the fear of God into me too, but it was the only escape into freedom which I could contrive, up in those trenches opposite Fricourt and Mametz. And I was angry with the War. + 

Memory eliminates the realities of bodily discomfort which made the texture of trench-life what it was. Mental activity was clogged and hindered by gross physical actualities. It was these details of discomfort which constituted the humanity of an infantryman’s existence. Being in the trenches meant among other things having a “trench-mouth.” + 

I can see myself sitting in the sun in a nook among the sandbags and chalky debris behind the support line. There is a strong smell of chloride of lime. I am scraping the caked mud off my wire-torn puttees with a rusty entrenching tool. Last night I was out patrolling with Private O’Brien, who used to be a dock labourer at Cardiff. We threw a few Mills bombs at a German working-party who were putting up some wire and had no wish to do us any harm. Probably I am feeling pleased with myself about this. Now and again a leisurely five-nine shell passes overhead in the blue air where the larks are singing. The sound of the shell is like water trickling into a can. The curve of its trajectory sounds peaceful until the culminating crash. A little weasel runs past my outstretched feet, glancing at me with tiny bright eyes, apparently unafraid. One of our shrapnel shells, whizzing over to the enemy lines, bursts with a hollow crash. Against the clear morning sky a cloud of dark smoke expands and drifts away. Slowly its dingy wrestling vapours take the form of a hooded giant with clumsy expostulating arms. Then, with a gradual gesture of acquiescence, it lolls sideways, falling over into the attitude of a swimmer on his side. And so it dissolves into nothingness. Perhaps the shell has killed someone. Whether it has or whether it hasn’t, I continue to scrape my puttees, and the weasel goes about his business. The sun strikes the glinting wings of an aeroplane, forging away westward. Somewhere on the slope behind me a partridge makes its unmilitary noise⁠—down there where Dick was buried a few weeks ago. Dick’s father was a very good man with a gun, so Dick used to say.⁠ ⁠… + 

Down in the reserve line I was sitting in the gloom of the steel hut (like being inside a boiler) reading a novel by candlelight while Barton and Mansfield snored on their beds and my servant Flook sang “Dixieland” in some adjoining cubbyhole. Being in reserve was a sluggish business; in the front line we were much less morose. Outside there was a remote rumble going on, like heavy furniture being moved about in a room overhead. But the little wooden weathervane on the roof kept on spinning and rattling as though nothing were amiss with the world. Then the patter of rain began, and I shivered and turned chilly and thought of home and safety. It was time to be going up with that working-party. We should be out from eight till midnight, piling sandbags on the parapet of the front line trench, which had suffered from the wet weather. + 

It was a pitch dark night. As we were going up across the open to the support line the bombardment, about two miles away in the low country on our left reached a climax. The sky winked and flickered like a thunderstorm gone crazy. It was a battle seen in miniature against a screen of blackness. Rocketlights, red and white, curved upward; in the rapid glare of bursting explosives the floating smoke showed rufous and tormented; it was like the last hour of Gomorrah; one couldn’t imagine anything left alive there. But it was only a small local attack⁠—probably a raid by fifty men, which would be reported in two lines of the G.H.Q. communique. It would soon be our turn to do a raid. The Brigadier had made it quite clear that he “wanted a prisoner.” One would be enough. He wanted to make certain what troops were in front of us. + 

For identification purposes a dead body would be better than nothing, Kinjack said. O’Brien and I went out one moonlight night into a part of No Man’s Land where there were no mine-craters. We had been instructed to bring in a dead body which (so our Observation Officer said) was lying out there. The Germans had been across the night before, cutting our wire, and the Lewis-gun officer was certain that he had inflicted severe casualties on them. Anyhow, a pair of boots could be seen sticking up out of a shell-hole. But when we arrived at the boots we found them attached to the body of a French soldier who had been there several months. I didn’t like this much; but O’Brien whispered to me: “T’Colonel shall have t’boot,” and the boot, with half a leg on it, was sent down to Kinjack, as a proof of our efficiency. + 

Prisoners were seldom seen at that time. I never saw one myself until the Somme battle began in the summer. The landscape was in front of us; similar in character to the one behind us, but mysterious with its unknown quality of being “behind the Boche line.” We could see the skeleton villages of Fricourt and Mametz, and the ruinous cemetery (which the men called “the rest camp”). But the enemy was invisible. On still nights our sleepy sentries heard him cough from the far side of the craters. He patrolled, and we patrolled. Often, when I was crawling about on my belly, I imagined a clod of earth to be a hostile head and shoulders watching me from a shell-hole. But patrols had a sensible habit of avoiding personal contact with one another. Men in the Tunnelling Company who emerged, blinking and dusty white, from the mine-shafts, had heard the enemy digging deep underground. They may even have heard the muffled mutter of German voices. But, apart from the projectiles he sent us, the enemy was, as far as we were concerned, an unknown quantity. The Staff were the people who knew all about him.⁠ ⁠… + 

Spring arrived late that year. Or was it that spring kept away from the front line as long as possible? Up there it seemed as though the winter would last forever. On wet days the trees a mile away were like ash-grey smoke rising from the naked ridges, and it felt very much as if we were at the end of the world. And so we were; for that enemy world (which by daylight we saw through loopholes or from a hidden observation post) had no relation to the landscape of life. It had meant the end of the world for the man whose helmet was still lying about the trench with a jagged hole through it. Steel hats (which our Division had begun to wear in February) couldn’t keep out a rifle bullet.⁠ ⁠… + 

By five o’clock on a frosty white morning it would be daylight. Trees and broken roofs emerged here and there from the folds of mist that drifted in a dense blur; above them were the white shoals and chasms of the sky flushed with the faint pink of dawn. Standing-to at dawn was a desolate affair. The men stamped their feet and rats scurried along the crannied parapets. But we’d had our tot of rum, and we were to be relieved that afternoon.⁠ ⁠… Dandelions had begun to flower along the edges of the communication trenches. This was a sign of spring, I thought, as we filed down Canterbury Avenue, with the men making jokes about the estaminet in Morlancourt. Estaminet! What a memory evoking word!⁠ ⁠… It was little enough that they had to go back to. + 

As for me, I had more or less made up my mind to die; the idea made things easier. In the circumstances there didn’t seem to be anything else to be done. I only mention the fact because it seems, now, so strange that I should have felt like that when I had so much of my life to lose. Strange, too, was the thought of summer. It meant less mud, perhaps, but more dust; and the “big push” was always waiting for us. + 

Safe in Morlancourt, I slept like a log. Sleep was a wonderful thing when one came back from the Line; but to wake was to remember. Talking to Joe Dottrell did me good. A new transport officer had arrived⁠—a Remount man from England. It was said that he had been combed out of a cushy job. I was glad I’d given up the transport. Glad, too, to be able to ride out on the black mare. + 

After the ugly weather in the trenches a fine afternoon in the wood above Méaulte was something to be thankful for. The undergrowth had been cut down, and there were bluebells and cowslips and anemones, and here and there a wild-cherry tree in blossom. Teams of horses, harrowing the uplands, moved like a procession, their crests blown by the wind. But the rural spirit of the neighborhood had been chased away by supply sheds and R.E. stores and the sound of artillery on the horizon. Albert (where Jules Verne used to live), with its two or three chimneystacks and the damaged tower of the basilica, showed above a line of tall trees along the riverside; a peaceful medley of roofs as I watched it, but in reality a ruined and deserted town. And in the foreground Becourt church tower peeped above a shoulder of hill like a broken tooth. + 

Anyhow, the black mare had got the better of the new transport officer. That was something, I thought, as I jogged home again. + 

My faithful servant Flook always contrived to keep me supplied with oranges when we were up in the trenches. An orange, and taking my sodden boots off whenever I got the chance (though it was against the rules) were my two favourite recreations in the front line. Flook called me (with an orange) at two in the morning; I had to relieve Ormand, who had been on duty since midnight. The orange woke me up. But it was a wet night, and I’d been out with the wiring-party from ten till twelve. Lugging coils of concertina wire along a narrow trench swilling with mud and water wasn’t much fun. Stumbling with it over shell-holes and trip-wires was worse. However, we had got quite a lot out.⁠ ⁠… + 

Once I’d shaken off my stupor it wasn’t so bad to be out in the night air. The rain had stopped and Ormand had nothing to report. For the next two hours I should loiter up and down with my knobkerrie in my hand; now and again I had a whack at a rat running along the parados. From one “bay” to another I went, stopping for a word in an undertone with the sentries; patient in their waterproof sheets they stood on the firestep, peering above the parapet until bleak daylight began to show itself. The trench was falling in badly in places after the rain.⁠ ⁠… + 

Then there was the bombing-post up a sap which went thirty or forty yards out into No Man’s Land. Everything had been very quiet, the bombers muttered.⁠ ⁠… + 

Back in the main trench, I stood on the firestep to watch the sky whitening. Sad and stricken the country emerged. I could see the ruined village below the hill and the leafless trees that waited like sentries up by Contalmaison. Down in the craters the dead water took a dull gleam from the sky. I stared at the tangles of wire and the leaning posts, and there seemed no sort of comfort left in life. My steel hat was heavy on my head while I thought how I’d been on leave last month. I remembered how I’d leant my elbows on Aunt Evelyn’s front gate (it was my last evening); that twilight, with its thawing snow, made a comfortable picture now. John Homeward had come past with his van, plodding beside his weary horse. He had managed to make his journey, in spite of the state of the roads.⁠ ⁠… He had pulled up for a few minutes, and we’d talked about Dixon, who had been such an old friend of his. “Ay; Tom was a good chap; I’ve never known a better.⁠ ⁠…” He had said goodbye and good night and set his horse going again. As he turned the corner the past had seemed to go with him.⁠ ⁠… + 

And here I was, with my knobkerrie in my hand, staring across at the enemy I’d never seen. Somewhere out of sight beyond the splintered treetops of Hidden Wood a bird had begun to sing. Without knowing why, I remembered that it was Easter Sunday. Standing in that dismal ditch, I could find no consolation in the thought that Christ was risen. I sploshed back to the dugout to call the others up for stand-to. + 