Steel Helmets for All
The now familiar ‘surprise’ soon followed. We were needed almost at once to hold the trenches again, at Richebourg as before. A short, cool tantalization in some orchards near Lacouture, and we marched up among the ruins. In the interval three divisions had attacked near Laventie, a few miles north, without the least success; the rumours of their ordeal were not at all disbelieved in the Brigade, and when a telegram was received giving the order of battle and the approximate positions, there was bitter jesting about. My memory of the trench tour following is disordered, but there is still something to say about Richebourg L’Avoué.
It was still (even after June 30th) a sort of ‘1915 sector,’ with a conventional performance of rifle fire swelling up and dying out at dawn and dusk. One or two mornings, this old-fashioned musketry became so voluminous that I thought something was going to happen. Sometimes Humour even adopted machine-guns. You would hear from the German line or our own the rhythm
‘Ri-tiddley-i-ti …
Pom POM,’
done in bullets. The maps so far issued for this part were very simple, and showed our communication trenches as innocuous arrows with their names, as Fry, Cadbury, Factory, Pipe and the rest; the German lines admitted thereupon looked very humanely thin, with economical crosses for barbed wire here and there. Our own line was one breastwork, with a presumably powerful arrangement of keeps behind, and also a patchwork of derelict trenches, which had acquired superstitious fame. For instance, there was somewhere, according to somebody, a large dugout, containing six or seven old German corpses, yellow with gas; and another dugout was reputed to entomb a German officer in bed with a woman – likewise skeletonized. These bony stories might have been easily disproved, but by daylight those derelict dens were watched by the enemy’s gunners, and would-be investigators soon had reasons for letting sleeping dugouts (or aluminium nose-caps) lie; at night the romance of the matter escaped attention in our other business. Old trenches towards Neuve Chapelle were safer to study; I haunted one 1915 assembly-position, beaten into humps and holes and red with shrapnel cases and duds. A huge old shell adorned the little-frequented Guards’ Trench, like some brutal image in a place of sacrifice.
Port Arthur again, to which I was sent with my platoon, seemed remembering the war of a year ago. It was a brewery ruin, if our diagnosis was right – a long-shafted dray lay in its shadow; its iron boilers looked abroad in some resemblance of the pictures of the original Port Arthur. And of course the gunners had their ladder and spyglass inside the ruin; there was an excellent view from the top, but it quickly ceased to charm. The queer, disabled building was encircled with sandbag ramparts, a map of the whole looking like a diagram of the intestines. In the large cellars there was room for forty men or so; the officer had a side cellar to himself, with a sound bed, and a private stock of new sandbags for bedclothes. Opposite this unsafe but habitually trusted burrow was a little outhouse turned into a machine-gun position, with a store-room; and thence some mole of an engineer, but hopeful beyond good sense, had hollowed out a low tunnel, a secret passage, which led into the communication trench, Hun Street, some way off. We did not realize that this was the work of our enemy in days gone by, nor even that Port Arthur was a part of the Neuve Chapelle fortress. Near by was a pit, the result of much sandbag filling; among its broken spades and empty tins I found a pair of boots, still containing someone’s feet.
Detached duty is pleasant. A young officer at Port Arthur was left alone in an unusual and enviable way; his main trouble was to see that, having received when he arrived a list of 146 screw pickets large, 193 screw pickets small, 53 picks, 5 mallets, and so on, he obtained on departure his successor’s signature for 146, 193, 53, 5 and the others. Every night the enemy would shell and make a wide gap in the parapet; so that good exercise could be taken regularly. One had time also to study food. I worked through the several brands of bully beef while I was there, on purpose to decide whether my epicure batman’s list of them in order of merit could stand. There was at Port Arthur a litter of tins of bully, as in many a dugout at that time; we did not give one thought to the question whence rations would come as time went on. Such heaps would not be found in 1917, but ours not to reason why, unless to-morrow’s rations went astray. Fresh meat was often sent up to the line. The Brigade was well catered for in such things; but a trench breakfast with its fat bacon was always without charms, not to mention that a man innocently eating might at any time find a shower of dirt and shrapnel arrived in his mess-tin, or himself half buried.
We were sharply bombarded at all hours. Battalion headquarters, a group of huts Rembrandtesque enough in their rustic structure, with shell-cases of all sizes arranged in a kind of museum at the entrance, was disturbed with obvious intention. Since the tenants were at the time enforcing disliked shows of discipline upon us in the companies forward – there were three rifle inspections daily, and a programme including two hours’ ‘compulsory sleep’ was in operation – the interlude was not distasteful to some rebels; but their turns quickly followed. One afternoon, as Worley was discussing with me the love affairs of his brother, the bay where we stood was suddenly aimed at with round after round of shrapnel and high explosive; we dropped on the duckboards, and looked up as the shells burst a yard or two too far. I watched the flame of explosion with a sort of brainless observancy; but poor Nice, a sixteen-year-old boy who had brought off some trick to get to France, lay moaning and sobbing, do what Worley could. The performance stopped; an hour later it was suddenly reopened a bay or two away, and there the adjutant, Wallace, coming up to make his inspection, was, with his runner, badly wounded. I ran to the place, and he gave me instructions for the last time. His grave gallantry and quiet conversation as he lay there, while the stretcher-bearers came, and fresh arrivals burst, were such that I wondered if, after all, the world in which these incidents happened was not normal. The Germans about this time also fired minenwerfers into our poor draggled front line; this inhumanity could not be allowed, and the rifle-grenades that went over No Man’s Land in reply for once almost carried out the staff ’s vicarious motto, Give him three for every one. One glared hideously at the broken wood and clay flung up from our grenades and trench mortar shells in the German trenches, finding that for once a little hate was possible. To throw minnies into that ghost of a front line!
Once again we had a night or two out of trenches, and I saw anew the farmhouse where I had joined the battalion, still steadfast, still unchangeable, children and chickens and kitchen stove. It was now my luck to have a room in a farm cottage, a bed of mahogany, sheets, the usual straw mattress, with an interesting camber. Peaceful little one, standest thou yet? cool nook, earthly paradisal cupboard with leaf-green light to see poetry by, I fear much that 1918 was the ruin of thee. For my refreshment, one night’s sound sleep, I’ll call thee friend, ‘not inanimate.’ After the pause, we went without excitement into the old position east of Festubert, which was not greatly revised; the main difference was that Pioneer Trench now reached Cover Trench, allowing free communication by daylight, and the grass was thicker and taller, the ground easy and dry. The ‘Islands’ were there yet, on which the war was so often deplorable or agreeable according as rations worked out at seven or four ‘in a loaf.’ For want of something better to do, I resolved to see whether these Islands could be reached from Cover Trench in daylight, and, in spite of the accepted impossibility, got across, carrying with me little wants such as chloride of lime and the latest news. Nervous haste at the last moment drew on me the fire of a sniper or two, but I was too early. Beyond the Islands, No Man’s Land was cut up with abandoned diggings, and these I looked into, scaring the rats, and lugging back old rifles, helmets, and, in the bliss of ignorance, unexploded German bombs with ‘fins.’ Our colonel, Harrison, who followed me in the daylight route to the Islands, met me after such an occasion, frightening me greatly. He looked at my collection, and asked, ‘Been big-game hunting?’ but I was tongue-tied, as I had been once in Richebourg village, where he, notebook in hand, in the heat both of the sun and my apprehension, stopped me as I led my platoon out, and asked which post I had been holding. ‘Port Arthur’ would not come: I stood striving for speech; he smiled, and I ruefully asked my nearest man.
Daytime was play in the Islands that summer; night was a perpetual tangle. Straight lines did not exist. If one went forward patrolling, it was almost inevitable that one would soon creep round some hole or suspect heap or stretch of wired stumps, and then, suddenly one no longer knew which was the German line, which our own. I almost joined a German working party ‘in all good faith’ after such a careless circuit. Puzzling dazzling lights flew up, fell in the grass beside and flared like bonfires; one heard movements, saw figures, conjectured distances, and all in that state of dilemma. Willow-trees seemed moving men. Compasses responded to old iron and failed us. At last by luck or some stroke of recognition one found oneself, but there was danger of not doing so; and the battalion which relieved us sent a patrol out, only to lose it that way. The patrol came against wire, and bombed with all its skill; the men behind the wire fired their Lewis gun with no less determination; and, when the killed and wounded amounted to a dozen or more, it was found that the patrol and the defenders were of the same battalion. I knew the officer who led that patrol; he was by temperament suited for a quiet country parsonage, and would usually have mislaid his spectacles.
The parapets were thin and treacherous in this place. One afternoon a sentry of ours was hit in the head and killed while he stood quite out of observation. I was in my tiny dugout reading Mr Masefield’s Good Friday when I heard that shot, which at once told me that a man had gone west.
Past deaths were not so piercing. At night, men digging out Pioneer Trench found numerous bodies; but nothing extraordinary was talked of until someone disentangled a watch and some money. Lucky devil!
By now I felt myself to be an honest part of C Company, and although Northcote (he was called ‘The Satire’) had not been long commanding us, we were all working together in good ease. If there had to be trenches for the rest of our lives, which appeared the best possible future, the alternative being massacre in No Man’s Land, well, then we should like to be left together as the happy family. Northcote was certainly paterfamilias. A little worried on every pretext, he would pull at his light and reluctant moustache; but he was earnestly pleased with his young men. When I evolved a large and well-filled map of the sector, he more than made up for his recent reproof of me (and Limbery-Buse) on a mistake about guides. He seldom rested, plodding alone with his head thrust forward, his sad eyes seeking thoroughness, his whole face deep-lined with sense of duty. Nor did Limbery-Buse and myself, who were as thick as thieves, find much rest: the shortage of officers meant that our trench watches came oftener, and no doubt we became more confident and serviceable. Still, in daytime, we sometimes got out of the trench into the tall sorrelled grass behind, which the sun had dried, and enjoyed a warm indolence with a book (not Infantry Training, I think). The war seemed to have forgotten us in that placid sector. It is true that steel helmets now became the rule, their ugly useful discomfort supplanting our old friendly soft caps; and the parachute flares winding down from the cloud of night glistened here and there on those curious green mushrooms, or domes, where listening-posts perhaps listened, probably dozed among the weeds and rustlings of No Man’s Land. The dethronement of the soft cap clearly symbolized the change that was coming over the war, the induration from a personal crusade into a vast machine of violence, that had come in the South, where vague victory seemed to be happening. The South! what use thinking about it? If we were doomed to go, we thought, we were, and we pressed no further. No one seemed to have any mental sight or smell of that vast battle; and it was undoubtedly better so.