Trench Education
Although May had come, the day was dull and the clouds trailed sadly. In the hooded cart, we sat listening to the strong Sussex of the driver and looking out on the cultivated fields and the colonnades of trim trees. Here, explained the transport man, turning a corner, a night or two before, the Germans had dropped several very large shells almost on top of the quartermaster and his horse. Blew his horse one-sided. This information sat heavily on me. The roar of a heavy battery, soon following, also troubled me, for as yet I did not know that sound from the crash of arriving shells. ‘ ’Tis only some ’eavies our party brought up yesterday.’ The heavy battery was firing at the German area over the farmhouse, chickens, children and all, which ended this stage of our progress. Rustic le Touret was apparently making no such heavy weather of the war. In the farm we found the Quartermaster, Swain, and the Padre. It was a cool, shady, swept and garnished interior in which Swain first came into our view, a man whose warmth of heart often cheers me in these later times, a plain, brave, affectionate man. Swain had come from Canada to the battalion, his hair already gone grey, his cheeks bright, and his eyes gleaming purpose. I well remember him crossing the flagged floor of the farmer’s parlour to welcome and accustom two boys. He did it well, for he had a boyish readiness about him, such as gave confidence – and he knew what danger was and what duty was. Fear he respected, and he exemplified self-conquest.
Swain told us that the Colonel wished us to go up to the battalion in the front line that evening ‘with the rations.’ He gave us tea. He gave us anecdotes, even rallying the Padre on a visit to a boot-shop in Béthune. The howitzer occasionally loosing off outside punctuated these amenities. The Padre, a Catholic, selected Doogan as his affnity, Doogan also being a Catholic, and I felt that he repulsed me. Speak, any relic of honesty that may be in Blunden – was it not this slight and natural inequality, at this time, which caused you afterwards to spread satirical parodies of the Padre’s voice, remarks and habits? Walking up and down the road after tea, the new-comers fell in with friends who had been until lately in training with them. One of these, who came into view at the entrance to a YMCA canteen, was a doubtful blessing; he was noted for hairy raggedness and the desire to borrow a little money; he now appeared stumping along as though with a millstone about his neck, and, questioned, did not comfort us. The line was hell, he said, and flung his arms heavenwards as some explosions dully shook the silence. It was a likely description with him. In the huts at Shoreham, months before, he had been wont to quote soulfully the wild-west verses of Robert Service, then read by thousands, cantering rhetoric about huskies and hoboes on icy trails; at length he had said, with the modest yet authoritative tone suitable to such a disclosure, ‘I AM – Robert Service.’ Some believed. He never retreated from the claim; we heard it again in France; and the poor fellow was at last killed at Richebourg on June 30th in a hell more sardonic and sunnily devilish than ten thousand Robert Services could evolve, or wolves and grizzlies inhabit.
The other acquaintance was F. Prior, whose reputation was that of dryness and common sense. He, too, objected to the line. It was not a line at all, he said. I put in something about ‘trenches?’ ‘Trenches be damned,’ he said, ‘look here, I went up the road to the front line two nights ago and had to lie in the ditch every two minutes. There’s only one road and Fritz puts machine-guns on it through the night. Same on the duckboard track. Lend us your notebook.’ He drew a sketch something like this (see page 9). So the scattered breastwork posts called the Islands were our front line: no communication trench sheltered the approach to them. What, at this stage of the war? Yes, shamelessly. But, the newspaper correspondents? F. Prior told us to expect nothing, and went his ways.
In the shallow ditch outside that le Touret farm, among the black mud now nearly dry, were to be seen a variety of old grenades brown with rust, tumbled in with tin cans and broken harness. I looked at them with suspicion; and later on, returning on some errand, I saw them again. Why did no one see to it that these relics were duly destroyed? For that same summer they brought death to some sauntering Tommy whose curiosity led him to disturb the heap, seeming safe because of its antiquity. This was a characteristic of the war – that long talon reaching for its victim at its pleasure.
When dark had fallen, ‘the rations’ went up, a jolting, clattering series of waggons and limbers; Doogan and myself crept along somewhere in the middle, with the mules behind us nosing forward in a kindly manner, as if wishing to impart some experience to the novices. It seemed a great way, but it cannot have been so, before this column, passing cellars from which lights yellowed through chinks hung with canvas or blankets, halted. The rations were unloaded and packed in trolleys waiting at the edge of a field by several soldiers who had met the transport there with a bantering exchange of family remarks and criticism. With this ration-party Doogan and I went awkwardly up the tram-lines, often helping to push the trolleys, which fell off their wooden railway now and then.
It was both profoundly dark and still. In the afternoon, looking eastward from le Touret, I had seen nothing but green fields and plumy grey-green trees and intervening tall roofs; it was as though in this part the line could only be a trifling interruption of a happy landscape. I thought, the Vicarage must lie among those sheltering boughs. Now at night, following a trolley along a track which needed watching, I as yet made out little more about the fighting man’s zone, except the occasional lights flying on a curve and sinking away on the horizon. When at last the trolleys were at their terminus, and Doogan and myself went with a guide to report to battalion headquarters, several furious insect-like zips went past my ear, and slowly enough I connected these noises with loud hollow popping of rifles ahead, and knew that the fear of my infancy, to be among flying bullets, was now realized. The sense of being exposed suddenly predominated. We crossed a narrow wooden bridge, and came under the shelter of a sandbank rampart, which to eyes striving through the darkness appeared vast and safe.
Battalion headquarters was in this rampart, the Old British Line. It was a simple little cave, with a plain table and candlelight, and earth walls concealed with canvas. In it sat the commanding officer, H. J. Grisewood, dark-eyed and thoughtful, his brother, F. Grisewood, and his adjutant, T. Wallace. A somewhat severe air prevailed and not much was said, except that the Colonel was glad to see us, remarking that we were the first officer reinforcements to reach the 11th Royal Sussex. Of Colonel Grisewood, I cannot add much, for I seldom rose to the eminence of conversation with him. Once, presently, as we marched back to billets, he corrected me for carrying an untrimmed and sizeable stick which I had found in the line, ordering me to respect society and ‘get an ash plant.’ He was very grave and conscientious; there is an admiring view of him in Neville Lytton’s The Press and the General Staff.
Doogan was sent to A Company, I believe, then in the front trench; and luckier I, as I felt, to C Company in the Old British Line, along which on a greasy wooden track a guide soon led me past solemn sentries and strings of men with shovels and other burdens. The dugout in which C Company officers were was smaller and blacker and much more humane than that where the dark-eyed Grisewoods and austere Wallace sat. I had, of course, more introductions at once. In charge of C Company was the boyish Captain Penruddock, perhaps one-and-twenty years old, rosy-faced, slender, argumentative. Second in command, Edmond Xavier Kapp appeared, ready with scribbles and charcoal drawings not unworthy of his reputation as a satirical artist. Charlwood, inclined to stammer, who as I soon found out had played cricket for Sussex, and Limbery-Buse, the ‘Lumbering Bus,’ who did stammer, made up the headquarters. These I saw in the dugout. A call, ‘Mess,’ produced a young soldier like Mr Pickwick’s Fat Boy in khaki, who went away (humming ‘Everybody calls me Teddy’) with his orders, and soon I was given a large enamel plate full of meat and vegetable rations; not long after, Penruddock told me to ‘get down to it.’ At this early stage unused to going without sleep, I felt very weary, and gladly crawled into a kind of low recess in the dugout, where with sandbags below, above, around, and my British warm-coat, it was easy to sleep and sleep deeply, too.
I am ashamed to remember that I was accused of sleeping ten hours. The morning when I emerged was high and blue and inspiriting, but the landscape somewhat tattered and dingy. I washed ungrudgingly in a biscuit-tin, and Limbery-Buse took me for a walk along the reserve line, explaining as we went the system of sentries and trench duty. At some points in the trench, bones pierced through their shallow burial, and skulls appeared like mushrooms. The men with whom I was now consorted instantly appeared good men, shy, quiet, humorous and neat. The sandbag walls did not look so mighty as the night before, but still I thought that they must be able to withstand a great deal. Limbery-Buse thought not. As I look back on those breastworks, very often single walls, with no protection at all against the back-blast of shells, with their wooden fire-steps, their roofings of corrugated iron or old doors, I am of his opinion; and even that first morning I might have known; for the howling and whooping of shells suddenly began, and a small brick outbuilding between our trench and Festubert village behind began to jump away in explosions of dusty yellow smoke. The sight was attractive, until Limbery-Buse mentioned that Fritz might drop a shell or two short of his ruin, and in that event we were standing in the probable point of impact.
One of the first things that I was asked in C Company dugout was, ‘Got any peace talk?’ It was a rhetorical question. One of the first ideas that established themselves in my inquiring mind was the prevailing sense of the endlessness of the war. No one here appeared to conceive any end to it. I soon knew that
Day succeeded unto day,
Night to pensive night.
Such as it was, the Old British Line at Festubert had the appearance of great age and perpetuity; its weather-beaten sandbag wall was already venerable. It shared the past with the defences of Troy. The skulls which spades disturbed about it were in a manner coeval with those of the most distant wars; there is an obstinate remoteness about a skull. And, as for the future, one of the first hints that came home to me was implied in a machine-gun emplacement stubbornly built in brick and cement, as one might build a house.
We were well off in this reserve trench, though my blood ran high in the excitement of novelty. In the evenings, while some of the men were amusing themselves in digging out a colony of rats, for which sport they had enlisted a stray terrier, there would suddenly begin a tremendous upheaval two or three miles to the south. The officers not on definite duty would leave their dinner to stand and terrify their eyes with this violence. On the blue and lulling mist of evening, proper to the nightingale, the sheepbell and falling waters, the strangest phenomena of fire inflicted themselves. The red sparks of German trench mortars described their seeming-slow arcs, shrapnel shells clanged in crimson, burning, momentary cloudlets, smoke billowed into a tidal wave, and the powdery glare of many a signal-light showed the rolling folds. The roarings and cracklings of the contest between artilleries and small-arms sometimes seemed to lessen as one gigantic burst was heard. We watched, with murmured astonishment; and often Charlwood would say, ‘Hope to God we don’t go south of the Canal.’ The canal was that which runs from Béthune to La Bassée, and south of it festered that shattered and shattering length of battlefield of which Loos was the centre. Need I note that Charlwood’s sensible petition was to be rejected?
My trench education advanced, and I learned of sentry groups and trench stores, dispositions and defence schemes. I attached the requisite importance to the Vermoral Sprayers for counteracting gas – simple machines such as were used in Kent to wash cherry-trees with insect-killer – and to the clearance of match-sticks illegally thrown into the gutters under the duckboards. Above all the needs of the fighting man, except his pay-book, a rifle-rack now appeared to be paramount. There was a wonderful tidiness in trench housekeeping at that period. One night, something a little more adventurous in suggestion befell me. Penruddock went up to the front line by the ‘overland route,’ and he thought it would be for my good if I went with him. The moon was high and clear. We worked our way over old farmlands, and crossed the Old German Line, attacked and passed by the British a year before in that typically wasteful experiment or audacity, the Aubers Ridge battle. The old trench lay silent and formidable, a broad gully, like a rough sunk lane rather than a firing-trench. It was strewn with remains and pitiful evidences. The whole region of Festubert, being marshy and undrainable, smelt ill enough, but this trench was peculiar in that way. I cared little to stop in the soft drying mud at the bottom of it; I saw old uniforms, and a great many bones, like broken bird-cages. One uniform identified a German officer; the skeleton seemed less coherent than most, and an unexploded shell lay on the edge of the fragments. What an age since 1914! Meanwhile, so many bullets cracked with whip-like loudness just over our heads that it seemed we were being actually aimed at, though it was night and the enemy at half a mile’s distance. We went on, through straggling wire and wet grass, and then by a wooden track, until the lee of Cover Trench rose in view: we entered it by an opening known in that time and district as a ‘sally port,’ a term readily connecting us with Marlborough’s wars.
In Cover Trench night life was much more vigorous than where I had been so far. The Islands, each with its small contingent of infantry, lay yet ahead: but Cover Trench was the real front line. Doogan, my old companion, was here in the narrow hole which was company headquarters, talkative and cheerful, looking as if he liked it. Another officer who had been trained with me, Vorley by name, showed me where the sentries were posted, and how to fire a flare. This was very simple: he had with him a cumbrous brass gun, called a duck-gun; from this, going round a corner into an unused bay and mounting the fire-step, he fired a Very cartridge. Sergeant Williams encouraged me to sustain this event. But the effect was one of ejaculation rather than illumination; two or three deafening cartridges provided a thin whirl of sparks that died on their early way into the sightless sky; meanwhile the Germans were sending up fine confident lights, which soared and sank in beautiful curves, or, suspended on parachutes, delayed their spiral fall and sought out all nooks and corners. The superiority of their flares was mortifying, and may have been the original reason why British trench practice was to put up Very lights at the rarest moments. The abstention came to be defined as ‘a point of honour,’ and it certainly was no disadvantage in the long run, for the Germans mostly supplied an excellent profusion of illuminants. It was the dream of our rank and file that the capture of one of their signal-light cartridges would be rewarded with ten days’ leave. Several bold optimists went into danger pursuing this dream. And, on the other side of fate, there were tales of what happened to a man lying in No Man’s Land when a burning flare shot down on his back.
I was put in charge of No. 11 Platoon, but in the trenches a subaltern’s business was rather general than particular. He took his turns of trench watch with the others, which meant responsibility for the company’s whole front at those times. The courtesy of Sergeant Unsted, who continued to father No. 11 Platoon, was charming at every point. Chivalry was certainly not dead. Soon enough we relieved the forward company, and new excitements came my way. The nights were certainly a strange experience, which in retrospect largely defines itself as the mystery of finding where people and places were. The Cover Trench lay at the head of a salient, and darkness emphasizes the precariousness of such places; puzzling flares, evidently the enemy’s, would soar up as it were behind one’s back, and not only would these mislead one’s strained polarity, but bullets would smack into our parapet from the wrong side – a dismal thing to do. One night while Doogan was sitting in the headquarters dugout with La Vie Parisienne as a memento vivere, a shot arrived in the earth wall just above him by way of memento mori. The Islands in front were lonely places, and at first, as I followed a guide through the blackness, much like a hen, among old tins and holes and diggings and wreckage, it seemed to me likely that one would miss them altogether and end up in the German line. They were short butts of sandbag-work, without dugouts. Some were regularly manned by us, others not; and the circuit of them always hinted the fancy that a German ambush might be encountered in the derelicts. Our men were very quiet, but very watchful and fearless in these outposts. A strong group looked out on Canadian Orchard, with its naked historic trees: it was their habit to annoy the Germans opposite with a Lewis gun, and at their invitation I also caused the weapon to speak. The answers were bullets, that flayed the sandbags in awkward nearness to one’s head, and brought from our good Sergeant-Major Lee as he leaned there most violent phrases of contempt, as if he were being worried by street arabs.
Two German machine-guns were famous, ‘almost legendary monsters’ here. Blighty Albert and Quinque Jimmy fired across a road called Kinky-Roo, which our ration parties and others used: and I have dropped with the rest in its insufficient gutter while the sprays of bullets rushed as though endlessly just above, or sometimes struck fire from the cobbles, and while the long pallor and malice of the flares whitened the broken trees, the masses of brickwork, and the hummocks of old defences. Their subtle whiteness sometimes contoured the enemy’s parapet in staring proximity; then they fell, and darkness rushed up to meet the weary sky.
Want of sleep soon impressed me. There was always some interruption when one lay down. In the day time, Cover Trench was not to be reached from the Old British Line; but what with domestic details, reporting and mapping, the censoring of the letters scrawled in copying pencil by our home-yearning stalwarts, the inspection of stores and rifles and localities, one was busy. At night, higher ranks appeared in our midst, and, chief of all, one whose approach caused the bravest to quail – the Brigadier-General. I was reading in the headquarters shelter when the great man suddenly drew aside the sacking of the entrance, and gleamed stupendously in our candlelight, followed by an almost equally menacing Staff Captain. What was my name? I had not been round the company’s wire? Why not? I was to go. Authority was at this time persistent that all officers should take their nightly constitutional in No Man’s Land, and it was ungainsayable that such as myself should so exercise ourselves; but the rule did not except company commanders. They could only murmur and go forth. Shortly afterwards a valued captain in another battalion, generally known because he had played cricket for Surrey, was obeying the expensive mandate, when he was hit and killed.
Many harsh and even maledictory notes on the General passed among us. We still remember that brooding discontent. The wild look in his eye at this period used to accompany wild orders. Where the line was being held with some degree of contentment, mutual contact and pride, he was liable to set people off on cross purposes. He rejoiced in inventing new Army Forms, which he called ‘pro forma’s.’ There were ‘pro forma’s’ for everything; had they been good ‘pro forma’s’ criticism would be foolish, but some of them were such that one’s best information could not find a heading in them. A patrol went out, returned, and its officer had then to struggle in the candle’s flickering light with the composition of a report under such heads as ‘Enemy Activity,’ ‘Enemy Dispositions,’ ‘Our Activity,’ and so on, the result being strained and parcelled out of all value. One night, Kapp went out to study a suspected sniper’s post in a ruin. He stayed out too long, and when at last he scrambled back from the hurrying light of day to the Island where I awaited him, one of his men had been badly wounded. Poor Corporal Mills was carried down, and died later. But (at this cost) Kapp’s patrol had been remarkable, and he sent back a long precise report, full of suggestive information. The Olympian comment was, ‘Too flowery for a military report.’ Our chieftain could not encourage anything that bore the semblance of the mental method of a world before the war. That temperaments vary was a conception which he doggedly cancelled. But I shall have much more to say of this singular man, whom we all found difficult, and whom we honour.
As yet my notion of modern war was infinitesimal. Of the possibilities of artillery there was no example at Festubert; the spectacular outbursts round Givenchy seemed to be the extreme of mechanized fury, while for ourselves in the front trench the guns were quiet. A few rounds might occasionally go whizzing over our heads, and I was alarmed by the report that one had burst almost exactly over the doorway of battalion headquarters, a thousand yards behind! Was there no safety anywhere? The shortened, quietened cough of antiaircraft shells often came down from the blue morning sky, and it was fashionable to stand watching these pretty explosions, and counting up the waste of public money on the part of our ‘Archies’ shell by shell, the rumoured cost of these shells being then half a guinea each. Sometimes this cynical mathematics was brought to an end as the air round us began to buzz and drone with falling fragments; large and jagged shards of steel would plunge murderously into the sandbags, and one discreetly got into the dugout.
Let me take you back now from the imbecile, narrow, bullet-beaten, but tranquil front line into the stand-to billets in Festubert village. And let me say here that, whereas to my mind the order of our humble events may be confused, no doubt reference to the battalion records would right it; yet does it matter greatly? or are not pictures and evocations better than horology? What says Tristram? – ‘It was some time in the summer of that year.’
Festubert village was an interesting contortion of whimsically balanced bricks and beams, and on the whole friendly to the fighting man. The Brewery was shelled, being prominent and used as an observation post; if any other place received a salvo, the local public preferred to think that some mistake had been made. In ancient days, perhaps in 1914, the village had been bombarded with serious intention by guns of horrid weight, and one gazed wonderingly into several enormous holes. Our company headquarters in the hulk of a once pretty house could show two or three magnificent examples at its threshold, round the marble steps, and in one of these pits lay a monstrous rusty shell, which, it was said, our Engineers would not attempt to explode. (That remark shows the innocence and serenity of the period.) Apart from this, our garden was lovely, with flowering shrubs, streaked and painted blooms, gooseberry bushes, convenient new gaps and paths, and walks between evergreen hedges – ‘unsafe by day,’ as the notice-boards said. Not far down the road was a wooden bathhouse, where one splashed in cold water agreeably, yet with a listening ear. Not far, again, was a red brick wall, to which fruit-trees reached their covert; this red wall was an instance of man’s duplicity, for part of it, being but painted wood, presently swung open, and a field battery glaring brutally out would ‘poop off.’ The contrivance was universally admired; was it not the work of our own Divisional Artillery? Yet at this time I was more afraid of our own guns than of the enemy’s. Here and there, stretched from tree to tree, one saw wire netting, intended, we heard, to interrupt the roar of firing and so to hinder the Germans’ sound-ranging.
C Company officers were very amicable, though Penruddock was reckoned rather too young for the command; and, as I see him in the pool of time gone by, he appears as a boy, fair-haired, fine-eyed and independent of experience. Our lodging was an ‘elephant dugout,’ an arched iron framework, built into the house which I mentioned, and called advanced brigade headquarters. Here we were amused by the skill of Kapp, who made charcoal drawings, no doubt scarcely proper, but as clever as anything he has done; nor was he artist alone; he also tried to popularize rounds and catches, as ‘Great Tom is cast,’ ‘A Southerly Wind and a Cloudy Sky,’ ‘Go to Joan Glover.’ The intellects of the others scarcely rose to his magazines from home, among which was The Gypsy, a frolic in decadent irreverences published in Dublin; it was a most unexpected visitor to a table meant for Army notebooks, compasses, fuse-caps, aluminium mugs of lime-juice and plates of variegated bully beef. Kapp was a lively hand to have in a dugout; his probably imaginary autobiography, peeping out at intervals, and enriched by other versions, was also a diversion; but one day he was called away to an interview with the Colonel, and soon he disappeared into the irrelevant air of GHQ, far beyond the stars. He was a shrewd critic, and on the spot demonstrated the weakness of some verses which I wrote on a beautiful seventeenth-century shrine in Festubert, still peeping out its innocent but shrapnel-scarred assurance between its sycamore trees. Musically sounded the summer wind in the trees of Festubert.
Our men lived in the ‘keeps’ which guarded the village line. East Keep in particular was a murky sandbagged cellar and emplacement smelling of wet socks and boots. To go from keep to keep alone in the hour before dawn, by way of supervising the ‘stand to arms,’ was an eccentric journey. Then, the white mist (with the wafting perfume of cankering funeral wreaths) was moving with slow, cold currents above the pale grass; the frogs in their fens were uttering their long-drawn co-aash, co-aash; and from the line the popping of rifles grew more and more threatening, and more and more bullets flew past the white summer path. Festubert was a great place for bullets. They made a peculiar anthem, some swinging past with a full cry, some cracking loudly like a child’s burst bag, some in ricochet from the wire or the edge of ruins groaning as in agony or whizzing like gnats. Giving such things their full value, I took my road with no little pride of fear; one morning I feared very sharply, as I saw what looked like a rising shroud over a wooden cross in the clustering mist. Horror! but on a closer study I realized that the apparition was only a flannel gas helmet spread out over the memorial.
The quiet life here yet had its casualties, for we were sent up as working-parties in the night-time, to dig a new communication trench. The procession groped dispassionately past the church with its toppling crucifix, and the Brewery’s sentinel in the shadow (‘That you, Dick?’ ‘ ’Ow’s business, Dick?’ ‘Wind favourable for whizz-bangs?’) along the Old British Line, and so to the place of work. All trenches hereabouts were merely cast-up ridges of earth held in places by stakes, wire, hurdles and wooden framework. Underneath their floors of planks and slats, water welled and stagnated, and an indescribable nocturnal smell, mortal, greenweedy, ratty, accompanied the tramp of our boots to and fro. The process of thickening the trench walls meant working in the open, and the enemy laid his machine-guns accurately enough on the new job which could not be concealed from him, letting drive when he chose. So we lost men. The company worked well, though not in very good temper: the continued want of rest was naturally resented; but they were men who knew how to use spades, and I was ashamed of my puny hasty efforts in comparison with their long and easy stroke. After work, there was a glow of satisfaction among us. The nights being cold as yet, a soup-kitchen was still kept open in Festubert, and we were glad of it. There I first saw F. Worley, a glorious fellow whose real connection with my story begins somewhat later.
Over all our night activities the various German lights tossed their wild incoherence. Three blue lights, it was half-humorously said, were the signal for peace; as time went on the definition was revised – four black lights. But superstition could not be altogether thrust back in this district of miasma and mist, and when one evening a wisp of vapour was seen by my working party to glide over the whole sky from west to east, preserving all the time a strange luminous whiteness and an obvious shape, as some said, that of a cross, as others antipathetically held, of a sword, then there was a subdued conversation about it, which spread from man to man. My batman Shearing, whose characteristic attitude was ‘It is the Lord: let Him do what seemeth Him good,’ told me that he read coming disaster in this sword.