xiv

An Ypres Christmas

So we have come North. We did not expect this, ten days ago. It is midnight, with intense stars and darkness, and one has rarely felt the frost strike sharper (the ponderous journey scarcely having aided those bodies so long in the mud and gunning to repel the climate); but we have come North, and the ground is solid and clean. The battalion detrains at an unknown siding and its forerunners guide it in to unknown M Camp. I am warmed by the sight of my old confederate Sergeant Worley, in the exit of the siding; he gives his usual candid views on the situation, but is on the whole favourable to it; and we go along the cobbled road between level fields. Suddenly turning aside we find the Quartermaster and the Transport Officer, Swain and Maycock, who, stamping their feet, rejoice with me, and Maycock seizes my shoulders with gloved hand and pretends to dance. These invincible officers have a pleasant surprise for us, and, although it is midnight, there is soon a sound of revelry. In a large wooden tavern a cheerful Belgian girl, under the argus-eyed direction of a masculine mother, is soon running hither and thither among the veterans, from colonel to subaltern, with some of the best victuals ever known. Rave on, you savage east, and gloom, you small hours: we will take our ease in our inn, by the red-hot stoves. We have come through.

Life in M Camp was sweet, and lasted quite a long time. Our quarters were a set of huts and tents surrounding a small ugly farmhouse, a mile or less from the road to Poperinghe, with field paths leading past the biscuit-tin and sugar-box dwellings of refugees around it. The frost broke up, the air grew sleepy and the ground sloppy, forewarning us of what we hardly yet troubled to discuss or fancy, the real object of our journey – the Ypres Salient. We had been in the mud of the Somme, and could not be forewarned. Epicurus would have liked the mood of M Camp. Inspections soon multiplied upon us, and the new Corps Commander, of whom already dry anecdotes were current among us, enraged us by a short speech in which he said, jovially enough, that we were very dirty. Training schemes were enjoined, modified, supplanted. Harrison took us out for running and walking in the morning’s ashen gloom under the avenue of dripping poplars, and caused a riding school for officers to be instituted by Maycock. I may claim to have popularized this by my extreme inefficiency in the new crisis. Maycock, brilliantly and sublimely horsey, his opportunity even adding an unusual rosiness to his cheek and jockeyism to his shoulders and legs, stood in the middle of the circus, cracking his whip and giving the most terrible orders about the stirrups, and the elbows, and trotting, and what not. A body of spectators was soon on the scene. Sergeant Ashford would say to me afterwards, with the smile of Ah Sin, ‘Yes, the first time they went round you were there. The second time you weren’t. It was very puzzling.’ Not content with this atrocity, Harrison obliged me to ride out with him over the ploughlands westward, broken as they were with low brushwood boundaries, ditches and coppices. How I rebelled, with Absalom’s fate ever impending! In the evenings, I would confer with my co-juvenile confidant James Cassells, upon the matter of the Colonel’s hardness of heart, his morning ‘physical jerks,’ his afternoon prancings. We resolved to lampoon him if these went on. His likeness cannot come again in this life, nor can man be more beloved.

During our enthralment in the Somme offensive, we had seen little of the country but what was raving mad, and no civilians were permitted within many miles of our usual haunts. That bad spell was broken. Here we saw life in her rural petty beauties. The windmills with their swinging sails beat off a white world of deathly oblivion, and the ploughman driving his share straight and glistening through the brown loam was a glory to see as we marched in the pale winter sun. We imitated his cacophonous but delightful orders to his massive horses with joy and thanksgiving. We had eyes alike to see the curiosities of weathercocks, such as represented a running fox or a coach and horses, and to lift up our souls to the hills whereon a monastery towered. The spires were gilded with our unhoped-for emancipation, and the streets rang with our surprising steps.

Poperinghe was a great town then – one of the seven wonders of the world. The other six, indeed, were temporarily disregarded. Poperinghe streets are narrow, and there were thousands of soldiers there, coming and going; yet the town disappointed none, except when the enemy spoiled an afternoon with gas or long-range guns. One of our first impressions here was caused by the prominent notices against the Post Office (open!) concerning gas and the state of the wind; the skeleton of Ypres thus began to give us a nudge and a whisper. Meanwhile, we marketed and strolled about in contentment, allured from one shop window to another – all were bright (though splashed with mud from the columns of lorries), all were alive. If one could not buy a new razor, or a new cap, or O. Henry’s works here, then Bohemia was nothing. The ladies spoke English with adroitness and amiable looks. Some observers preferred ‘La Poupée,’ the daughters of which tea-house were certainly fair and gentle; the youngest, ‘Ginger,’ was daily attending school in Hazebrouck, a courageous feat. ‘Ypriana’ also boasted some beautiful young persons who condescendingly sold gramophones, postcards of Ypres, and fountain pens. Up in the higher windows, the milder air once or twice allowing, one saw old women making lace or some such thing. There was one church into which we could go, white-walled and airy and cold, the delight of any who admired the Netherlands of the painters; another church in a tranquil side-street defied doubt with its strong and scarcely impaired tower. By the station, in a brick storehouse among many spacious buildings belonging to the hop factors, the ‘Red Roses’ in song and dance never ceased to gild the clouds of fate. The simple legend BOX OFFICE had its epic majesty, and one still sees the muddy track leading thither across the railway as the high road to Parnassus, and hurries to the feast.

In M Camp I acquired an extraordinary facility in issuing the mighty rum ration. There were so many (I forget the exact tally) to be served from each jar; each man brought his own favourite vessel at the welcome call ‘Roll up for your Rum,’ and the dispenser was confronted with need for all sorts of mental mensurations. The indefatigable dear Worley held up his candle, or turned on his pocket torch, as I stood at the door of each billet, and it was rare that anyone went short. The precious drops were fairly distributed, and when all was done Worley would prolong my visitation, in defiance of military principles, by luring me into his tent to join a party of old stagers whose bread and cheese was the emblem of an unforgettable kindness. And there was an occasion or two in which Cassells and myself were the guests of those good souls at a veritable banquet. An estaminet by St Jans ter Biezen was then the scene of much music, much champagne and a dinner of the best: there’s no higher honour to come. Daniels, Davey, Ashford, Roberts, Worley, Clifford, Seall, Unsted, do you remember me yet? I should know you among ten thousand. Your voices are heard, and each man longed for, beyond the maze of mutability.

There naturally began some mention of Ypres, and I was intending an unofficial visit (much to the cynical amusement of Lintott, who knew the place), when, instead of going forward, we went still farther away. This excess of good fortune was less real than it ought to have been, for we could not place it at all – it was out of our line. We went back to a nook of quietude and antiquity discoverable on the map some few miles behind St Omer. At Poperinghe station, as we entrained, we saw two officers standing beside the line, evidently pleased to see us; and one was waving his hand and singing out messages to the old hands. This was Vidler, who had been one of the battalion’s first casualties, and with him was his old schoolfellow Amon, a survivor from battles long ago in the Loos district. These joined us, and the life of the battalion was enriched beyond words. Not so can I mention the advent of another officer who had turned up at M Camp with a sinister, dry and staffy accent, recommending himself to Harrison on technical grounds and the claims of training, and being accepted by that good old soldier, whose sole weakness seemed to be a prejudice for the professional. (Or was the Colonel only allowing us to think, in the interests of discipline, that he accepted him?) The intruder was immediately given the duties of second in command; and, strutting with redoubled vanity and heel-clicking, on Harrison’s going on leave, actually reigned over the battalion for a short time. In vain did we mutter and hint that this man was a liar, for Harrison was glad to receive someone with what he thought ‘discipline’ in him, and easily allowed old tenets to deceive him into misplaced enthusiasm. It was felt by most of us that this was no good omen. Our second in command that should have been, Cooling, who had served continuously in and out of our trench sectors, went off as a Staff Learner. The family atmosphere was altered. The Silver Age was upon us.

In our village we trained ourselves in many subjects, which did not burden the spirits overmuch; or if they did, had alleviations, as the following memorandum shows:

Sergt.	SEALL	Frs.	40
Sergt.	CRADDOCK		40
	AUGUR		15
	BARNARD		15
	LOVELAND		15
	RACKLEY		15
	HUNT		15
	MITCHELL		15

Francs were still ninepenny ones.

The speedy putting on of gas helmets – the new ‘box respirators’ – was made a day’s business. We were employed to dig a large rifle-range in storms of rain and wind near the road from St Omer to Calais, and there were conferences and lectures. The French language became very popular and, the lectures being held in the evenings in the village school, suggestions for the children’s instruction next day were written on the blackboard – ‘Hommes 40 Chevaux 8’ and ‘Wait and See.’ The remembrance comes with kind modest voices and nun-like faces of the teachers, who seemed (unusual in their perception) to think of us as men wearied with a brutal war; I wish that I could name them, for their grace; far otherwise seemed the lady of the curé’s house in which I was lodged. She, with hostile rays of repellence, scarcely let me pass the door into that dim religious atmosphere as of cassock and taper, but perhaps something had gone wrong in the days before me. My room was adorned with inexpensive angels, who also seemed distant and cold. Another billet here was the lair of a most formidable woman of bosomy immenseness, who assailed me in full fury out of the void. Her children, who all rejoiced to inherit a bass voice and a squint, were very handy in filching our meat and coal. I was tempted to avenge myself and us by leaving her a safety razor as a parting gift. But these little charities were interrupted when suddenly the furious news reached me that I was to go on leave, and the mess-cart was driving down to St Omer with me in it and a yellow warrant in my hand.

How to express that hour?

Do not try.

At St Omer the expected report hit me a punch combining the talent of Spring, Fitzsimmons and Dempsey. ‘All leave stopped.’

This was a lie.

I wore a little warm-coat, a cyclist’s coat, experimentally made. Harrison had given it to me, and had repeated these words: ‘Rabbit, you are not to go on leave in that coat.’ As I was standing on Victoria Station about to enter the return train for Folkestone and France, I caught sight of my Colonel in conversation with someone even more Olympian than himself. There was no help for it. I ran up, and saluted. ‘Rabbit!’ Harrison roared with laughter. ‘That coat!’ His friend smiled sympathy at me, but I was in torment, and as usual, in the words of one of our contemporaries, I had only myself to blame.

Going on leave, I had heard a colonel on the seat opposite indulge in a little eloquence about the evil iciness of some gunpits by Zillebeke Lake, just out of Ypres, the winter before; and returning, I guessed by my movement order that the battalion was in the line, and meditated a little. Still, however, the weather was misty and peaceful, and the worst was not yet to be feared by a healthy youth. At Poperinghe a draft of perhaps sixty soldiers was put in my charge, and I was told to make my way to the Red Hart Estaminet on the canal bank near Ypres. It did not strike me at first that an estaminet with a name like that would be a foolish ruin, not dealing in malaga, thin beer or grenadine.

Nor, even when I arrived there, did the unholy Salient at first reveal itself. The battalion was in the long terrace of dugouts along the broad Yser Canal, with its pedestalled lines of slender trees, and its neat wooden bridges. Handing over my reinforcements to Daniels, whose swift glance and fine word of command immediately shepherded them into our fighting strength, I went along to the headquarters dugout, and, looking round first, asked ‘How’s things?’ The battalion had been in the trenches above, and a wonderful, almost woundless tranquillity had blessed it. There was only one flaw, and that was the presence of the ‘fraud,’ who at the moment was elsewhere. I meanly rejoiced to hear that he had slunk about the trenches with his head well down (whether he had or not), and we all hoped Harrison would shake off his trance and, like Lear, ‘see better’ when he returned. For two or three days we stayed here, in the remarkable line of shelters on the embankment of that drowsy canal, and working parties and wanderings were all that happened. Machine-guns did homage to Night, and that was almost the only unrest. A spy was reported to be lurking about some bricks called Wilson Farm, but nobody could catch him; and from company headquarters and cook-houses one heard such cheerful singings and improvisations as seemed to hail the Salient as the garden of Adonis. Here first I came upon Olive, a new officer younger than myself, and duly addressed him with the gravity and the superior philosophy of old age; and here Whitley, soon styled ‘OC Daily-Mirror,’ enlivened the day’s work.

The ruined wharves of Ypres were conspicuous enough a short way along the Canal, but no occasion arose as yet to go nearer. Clambering along the greasy black duckboards beside the water was not specially pleasant. The sluggish weather, the general silence and warlessness encouraged us to take life easy; and yet it was at this time that one poor fellow was charged with a self-inflicted wound, the first instance in the battalion. Perhaps he divined the devilish truth beyond this peaceful veil. It was easier to be deluded by the newness of the communication trenches and the appearance of quite good farmhouse walls in the area of the foremost trenches. This was, I think, the end of the quietest period ever known in the Salient, and one exploited the recent standards of carelessness and freedom of movement, unthinking that the enemy was looking on and taking notes from the low ridge ahead. The lowness of High Command Redoubt was stultifying, for it did not strike the eye; yet it was all that was needed for overwhelming observation of our flat territory, right back to the Poperinghe road, the artery.

Now winter, throwing aside his sleep and drowse, came out fierce and determined: first there was a heavy snow, then the steel-blue sky of hard frost. To our pleasure, we were back in a camp in the woods by Elverdinghe to celebrate Christmas. The snow was crystal-clean, the trees filigreed and golden. It was a place that retained its boorish loneliness, though hundreds invaded it: its odd buildings had the suggestion of Teniers. Harrison’s Christmas was appreciated by his followers perhaps more than by himself. He held a Church Parade and, while officiating, reading a Lesson or so, was interrupted by the Band, which somehow mistook its cue. The Colonel is thought to have said, ‘Hold your b— noise’ on this contretemps, which did not damp the ardour of the congregation, especially the back part of the room, as they thundered out ‘While Shepherds Watched.’ After prayers we were free for the rest of the day, and the Colonel visited all the men at their Christmas dinner. At each hut, he was required by tradition to perfect the joy of his stalwarts by drinking some specially and cunningly provided liquid, varying with each company, and ‘in a mug.’ He got round, but it was almost as much as intrepidity could accomplish.