School, not at Wittenberg
My horse ambled on through the caressing haze over the hills and past the windmills, in the direction of Mont-des-Cats. The signalling school was two miles from that monastery, on high ground, whence in the best light Ypres was easily seen. A young and inexperienced Scots officer was in command of the place, which everybody present seemed to resent, although it was in accordance with a common active-service maxim. Training and lecturing soon began, but they were tasteless to me, and I think I had the slightest aptitude for understanding the principles of electricity, the mechanism of the ‘fullerphone’ or ‘power buzzer,’ the nature of the wireless apparatus (then so apt to squeal nonsense of its own) that ever man or woman had. Hitherto I had been concerned with signalling chiefly as a regimental organization, combining other duties with it, and I had to some degree acquired what working knowledge I needed; but now, confronted with an exhaustive academic training, I revolted silently. So long as I could send and receive messages by flag or disc or buzzer, and had the practice of communication at my fingers’ ends, I had been satisfied; now I was to become a student. The professors were not perfect, I suspect, in those theories to which they drew our attention by the hour, but at any rate they were excellent operators, and useful throaty vocalists at the concert hut in the evenings.
Probably the underlying cause of the numberless ‘schools’ in the BEF at this time was as much the desire to give officers and men a rest as to instruct them. Rest and recreation undoubtedly occupied our minds in this camp, situated about midway between Poperinghe and Bailleul, of which the latter was the general choice, though I recall that I once directed, with some difficulty, a party of grinning Chinese to ‘Poplinge.’ Even when we heard some vicious long-range shell racing across Belgium into Bailleul, it did not deter or detain us on our way to the still unshattered civic illusion, with its little market place behind the church always filled with waiting horses, its long Grande Place of cleanly shops, the packed Officers’ Club, with its air of Victorian tradition and much good company. But the journey there and back was itself a pleasure and reward, being entirely bucolic and antique in its effect. The military occupation was always moving and altering, the old farms and farmers and their property did not change, nor, essentially, did they move. Old furrowed faces, blue caps, velvet trousers, wooden slippers were always visible one way or another among those hop-holes, under those onion-tasselled eaves, by the dusty shrines. It was thought that they hated the soldiers, and on one of our signalling ‘schemes’ a peasant levelled his gun at a section who had posted themselves in a corner of his midden yard. This was in a place whence the skeleton of Ypres could often be seen in the sunlight.
That was the skeleton of our holiday. To see that distorted whiteness even in calm was a sharp cut; to look that way when the rain was slanting down and blotting out distinctions and filling the ruts and gullies at the camp gate was worse, for at this period attacks were still being launched (an appropriate equivocation) against Passchendaele. Three months of sacrificial misery had not been enough to pay for that village height, and so in the distance we heard through the ruining autumn many mornings of gunfire, stubborn and constant, and knew that wounded men were drowning and the unwounded being driven mad before the concrete forts. It was said that the Canadians took Passchendaele, and finding it utterly untenable, of their own accord came back to their old posts. It was said that the Australians themselves had taken an hour to advance one hundred yards. It was said that certain divisional headquarters, themselves a dozen miles behind the front, judging merely by the state of the ground round themselves, challenged GHQ about the madness of a proposed attack; but without result. What might be happening to my battalion? It was a relief when at length I heard that they had been employed in digging and in carrying, not in these attacks.
To us the news of the Cambrai drama, which suddenly arrived now, was exciting, in part, because it suggested that the Ypres aberration was at a close. The secret of Cambrai was guessed by none of us before the event, neither did anyone anticipate the sequel, which intensified the gloom of endlessness cloaking all genuine optimism. The German wireless beat out the remorseless truth for us. I began to be careless whether I was in the line or out of it; nothing seemed to signify except the day’s meals, and those were still substantial despite the lean supplies of the people at home. The price of all luxuries in the shops was rising fast, but still one could manage it; why trouble about getting back to the battalion? This was the general spirit, and we did not lament when the course was lengthened and the year ended with us waving flags in unison in the snow, or attempting the heliograph, or rapping out ludicrous messages to the instructors’ satisfaction, or listening to muddled addresses on alternating current.
At the moment of midnight, December 31, 1917, I stood with some acquaintances in a camp finely overlooking the whole Ypres battlefield. It was bitterly cold, and the deep snow all round lay frozen. We drank healths, and stared out across the snowy miles to the line of casual flares, still rising and floating and dropping. Their writing on the night was as the earliest scribbling of children, meaningless; they answered none of the questions with which a watcher’s eyes were painfully wide. Midnight; successions of coloured lights from one point, of white pendants from another, bullying salutes of guns in brief bombardment, echoes racing into space, crackling of machine-guns small on the tingling air; but the sole answer to unspoken but importunate questions was the line of lights in the same relation to Flanders and our lives as at midnight a year before. All agreed that 1917 had been a sad offender. All observed that 1918 did not look promising at its birth, or commissioned ‘to solve this dark enigma scrawled in blood.’
The thaw came, just as our ‘examination’ took place, and soon I rejoined the battalion in a bleak camp north-east of Ypres. They had been holding a position at Westroosebeke, where their main enemy was the weather, flooding them out of all shelter, and sending up the figures of ‘trench feet,’ an ailment now treated as a military crime! It was their last tour in the Salient for the present. A reckless, disunited spirit seemed to be working among them. I found to my anger that the battalion was in the temporary command of one of our old companies, not the most cordial, who had been attached to the staff for some time, and whose industry and self-esteem had grown altogether in excess of his tact and sincerity. I also found that my turn for leave had come round again. The new commander called for me with assumed and patronizing jocularity and ‘young-fellowed’ me over this coincidence. But now I had my revenge. I said I would not give up the leave if I could help it; it had been against my own desire that I had been sent to the signal school for two months, and so on. So away from St Jean with its new railway siding and its prodigious new crater, caused by some unlucky private dropping a fuse beside a dump, away from a battalion headquarters of sycophancy (so I thought) I went next evening. Before going, Olive and I walked round our old assembly positions of July 31, now clustered with round-roofed Nissen huts, and traversed with elaborately drained roads. We could not recapture ourselves at all! We also went to a lecture by a war correspondent, who invited questions, whereon a swarthy old colonel rose and said, ‘The other day I was obliged to take part in a battle. I afterwards read a war correspondent’s account of the battle, which proved to me that I hadn’t been there at all. Will the lecturer explain that, please?’