The day following was Sunday 25 June, a lovely summer day. After getting the mud off and sprucing up a bit I went for a stroll with Billy and Charlie. The country round about was lovely, all pretty villages and thick woods. Fresnicourt was a pretty place and so was Ohlain, another small village nearby; Fresnicourt contained the church that does for both places. However, as Ohlain contained the estaminets and cafés we made our way there. We were just trying to decide a very important point; should we go in that estaminet for a vin rouge or should we go into that café for a tasse du fresh?
We had almost decided on the vin rouge when a vision of loveliness all in the black of France swept past us with a swish of silk and a very demure ‘Bonjour Messieurs’. We watched her with our mouths wide open. We couldn’t imagine the war had left things like that hanging round there. We watched her as she turned into a farmyard and, as she glanced round once, we decided to ask for a glass of milk. ‘Oh yes,’ they had milk, but perhaps we would sooner have bière, or wine or champagne at 15 francs a bottle?
We had vin rouge and grenadine several times. Jeanne was a charming girl and made us feel quite at home, even before she had taken her hat off. She had been to church at Fresnicourt and was in black for one of her brothers who had been killed in the fighting at Souchez. He may have been the poor devil we chopped up while making that communication trench. We decided to make that our café special for as long as we stopped at Fresnicourt.
We had five very uneventful days until 1 July. Monday the 26th saw a start with proper routine. Up at 6.00am for PT, then breakfast, then, from 9.15am to 11.30am, turnings and saluting by numbers, section and platoon drill, and company drill from 2.30pm to 4.30pm. The troops were absolutely fed up to the teeth. We didn’t know very much about drilling sections and platoons, but we did know our job up the line, and that’s more than our company officers did.
Captain Edwards was a dream. He knew very little about drill and up the line was about as lively as a dead horse. Lieutenant Torrens was a bit better down the line and up the trench he would come and mix with the men a bit. Surman, of course, was a washout both up and down the line. The remaining officer was Second Lieutenant Mitchell, ‘Wanky Mitchell’ we called him. He was as loony as anything I’ve seen in a Sam Browne, with perhaps the exception of Compton Domville of Gallipoli fame. None of our officers had seen active service before and now they’d had a taste they didn’t seem enamoured. Time would tell with them. Perhaps we wouldn’t have long to wait for a fresh lot of officers.
Billy and I shared sick corporal’s job, so that wasn’t so bad for us. The rain came down in plenty which didn’t help to cheer the men up much. The rats in the huts caused a little diversion at night as the whole camp was overrun by them; one night I was awakened by a brute as big as a rabbit sitting on my face. I knocked it off with my hand and it scampered off with a cry of rage, leaving three claw marks down one side of my face. It put the wind up me for the rest of the night and, in the morning, I organised a rat hunt in which we caught and killed eight. Great big brutes they were, quite capable almost of killing and eating a man. We had always plenty of dogs hanging around for a job of that description. Almost every time we went out for a march two or three mongrels would attach themselves to us and either follow us to camp or up the line, whichever way we were going. A dog never stayed up the trenches long, though. It would cringe and cower with every explosion until, its fear getting the better of it, it would set off for the nearest village again. Cats were just the opposite and so were birds, the latter not fluttering a wing even when a shell burst nearby.
The monotony of life was broken a bit on 1 July. Taubes came over in the morning and dropped several bombs on the countryside, but did no great damage. Then we could hear heavy gunfire from the south practically all day. Towards five o’clock orders were issued with news of the ‘Big Push’ on the Somme. III and IV Army Corps., in conjunction with the French, had advanced and had made good progress at practically all points. Another item of interest; we were paid, so Billy, Charlie and I went down to Jeanne’s and had a bottle of champagne to celebrate the victory. Heavy firing in the Vimy sector continued all night, but died down towards dawn. Good news continued to come through the next day: our troops had gained considerable ground and had captured more than 6,000 prisoners and over 100 guns.
I was strolling up from Ohlain about 6.00pm with Charlie, when we came across a queer-looking chap wandering aimlessly about on the road. He was dressed in a filthy suit of khaki with neither cap nor belt. All his buttons were tarnished through being exposed to poison gas, and he was muttering away to himself. I spoke to him but he took not the slightest notice of me, and then I could tell by the expression on his face and in his eyes that he was daft. I asked him a few questions. Where had he come from? What was his name and regiment? Had he a paybook on him? He just shook his head as though he didn’t understand my language.
I made for his pocket to see if he had a paybook but he fired up at once. ‘Don’t touch that,’ he said, ‘That’s my wife.’ He pulled a photograph from his pocket then and started kissing it and crying. He had a letter, too, and said someone had sent it to tell him that his wife had gone off with a black man. ‘I’ll kill ’em!’ he started shouting. Then he called his wife all the things that applied to a woman of that description and a few that didn’t apply but which added a bit of colour to it and then kissed the photo again and said he loved her. I induced him to go with me as far as the sick bay where I turned him over to Jimmy Ross. He wasn’t long before he turned him over to field ambulance.
Sergeant Jeffries found a site suitable for a rifle range, so on the 3rd we had to start firing a short musketry course. That man was rifle mad.
Ohlain was placed out of bounds. Joe Woods and a few more ‘birds’ caused a rough-house in the Army Service Corps canteen down there one night and half a dozen men had to receive medical attention. They spoil everything with their rotten old soldier moods.
The battalion was inoculated against typhoid on the 5th. That makes about the umpteenth time since joining up. We reckoned to have forty-eight hours stand-off after an affair like that, but we carried on with drill. A touch of typhoid more or less was nothing compared to acquiring a knowledge of the Drill Book. Joe Woods always said he could quote anything from either the Bible or infantry drill. That’s all he had to read when he did ‘cells’ in the Army before the war. He must have done some cells in his time to swallow that lot.
Chief item of interest during the next few days was the departure to England on leave of an officer who came out last October. Both Captains Eagle and Tetley were granted their majorities and Tetley was to leave to take over the command of Drake Battalion.
We gave in our blankets on 12 July. It was very evident that our stay in these parts was drawing to a close. Everybody was fed up and a change, wherever it might be for, would be welcome. Marched to Hersin on the 13th at 2.00pm and were billeted in the convent again overnight. Moved to the Bully Grenay sector next morning, our company being in general reserve for the start. Our trenches were about 500 yards in front of the little village of Corons d’Aix and, though the Bosch was always dropping shells in it, the French people were living there pretty much as usual. To our right rear was the white village of Aix Noulette.
We had some decent dry dugouts constructed in a valley behind the reserve trenches, so that we had plenty of freedom of movement, being quite unobserved by the Bosch, but liable to get plenty of shells as our artillery had a field-gun battery just behind us in the valley. We passed a lot of time watching the efforts of the Bosch to hit this battery, but he was never successful. When the Bosch, with the aid of his aeroplanes, thought he had got the range nicely, the gunners would move in the night to an alternative position, and the next morning Jerry would waste a lot of ammunition on the deserted gunpits.
We lost our Mr Surman who volunteered to go to a mining company where he need never go up the line. I tried my hardest to persuade Kelly Clayton to go with him, but he wouldn’t. That man used to get more lousy every day. I think that when lice crawl out of a man’s lace holes, he must be lousy indeed. It was a sight to watch Kelly doing two hours on the fire-step. His body would keep undergoing various contortions. First one shoulder would go up, then the other, then his body would slew round, then he would shake first one leg and then the other. His hands were nearly always pushed through his tunic front and shirt and his thumbnails were always thick with the blood of murdered lice. ‘What the Hell are you wriggling about for Kelly?’ we would say to him at times. ‘Just turning t’owd b******s on the back to gie’ young uns a chance’ was usually the response.
We had another in the platoon almost as bad, George Hedley, who went out to Gallipoli with us on the Gloucester Castle. He was even lousy before we had been at sea seven days and was the cause of the whole battalion having our first ‘Scabie’ exam and a sulphur bath. He deserted from the trenches at Gaba Tepe and was found a week later wandering about on the beach. He was court martialled, did part of his sentence, and was sent back to us to try and make good but we could make nothing of him: the man was too damned lazy to scratch himself. There was only one thing he got enthusiastic about: jam. He’d thieve and scrounge jam from anybody and at all times. I’d seen on Gallipoli, when we couldn’t bear the sight of jam, the whole section would pass him the jam ration, and he would open and eat tin after tin. It’s a peculiar thing but neither Kelly nor Hedley would ‘pig’ in with the other. Hedley said Kelly was too lousy to live with and Kelly, who had a sense of humour, said he’d got a decent breed and wasn’t going to let them mix with Hedley’s. So much for the present about the lousy ones. I should say the extra lousy ones, because everybody was more or less lousy. The Colonel even kept having a quiet fake.
A Mr Wrangham took Surman’s place as platoon officer to No.1 and had every appearance of being a decent chap. He had seen service before, having been a corporal in the King’s Royal Rifles (KRRs).