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.