Part 17

Early in December the rumour came that we were going for divisional training to the back areas. I would not believe it, having heard stories of this kind too often, and was surprised when it turned out to be true. Siegfried Sassoon, in his _Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man_, has described this battalion move. It was an even more laborious experience for our A Company than for his C Company. We got up at five o’clock one morning, breakfasted hastily, packed our kits, and marched down to the railhead three miles away. Here we had the task of entraining all the battalion stores, transport and transport-animals. This took us to the middle of the morning. We then entrained ourselves for a ten-hour journey to a junction on the Somme about twenty miles away from the front line. The officers travelled in third-class apartments, the men in closed trucks marked: ‘Hommes 40, chevaux 8’—they were very stiff when they arrived. ‘A’ Company was called on to do the detraining job too. When we had finished, the dixies of tea prepared for us were all cold. The other companies had been resting for a couple of hours; we had only a few minutes. The march was along _pavé_ roads and the rough chalk tracks of the Picardy downland. It started about midnight and finished about six o’clock next morning, the men carrying their packs and rifles. There was a competition between the companies as to which would have the fewest men falling out; A won. The village we finally arrived at was called Montagne le Fayel. No troops had been billeted here before, and its inhabitants were annoyed at being knocked up in the middle of the night by our advance-guard to provide accommodation for eight hundred men at two hours’ notice. We found these Picard peasants much more likeable than the Pas de Calais people. I was billeted with an old man called Monsieur Elie Caron, a retired schoolmaster with a bright eye and white hair. He lived entirely on vegetables, and gave me a vegetarian pamphlet entitled _Comment Vivre Cent Ans_. We already knew of the coming Somme offensive, so this was a good joke. He also gave me Longfellow’s _Evangeline_ in English. I have always been sorry for English books stranded in France, whatever their demerits; so I accepted it and later brought it home.

We were at Montagne for six weeks. The colonel, who appears in Siegfried’s book as Colonel Winchell, was known in the regiment as Scatter, short for Scatter-cash, because when he first joined the regiment he had been so lavish with his allowance. Scatter put the battalion through its paces with peace-time severity. He asked us to forget the trenches and to fit ourselves for the open warfare that was bound to come once the Somme defences were pierced. Every other day was a field-day; we were back again in spirit to General Haking’s _Company Training_. Even those of us who did not believe in the break-through thoroughly enjoyed these field-days. The guns could only just be heard in the distance, it was quite unspoilt country, and every man in the battalion was fit. Days that were not field-days were given up to battalion drill and musketry. This training seemed entirely unrelated to war as we had experienced it. We played a lot of games, including inter-battalion rugger; I played full-back for the battalion. Three other officers were in the team; Richardson as front-row scrum-man; Pritchard, another Sandhurst boy, who was fly-half; and David Thomas, a Third Battalion second-lieutenant, who was an inside three-quarter. David Thomas and Siegfried were the closest friends I made while in France. David was a simple, gentle fellow and fond of reading. Siegfried, he, and I were together a lot.

One day David met me in the village street. He said: ‘Did you hear the bugle? There’s a hell of a row on about something. All officers and warrant-officers are to meet in the village schoolroom at once. Scatter’s looking as black as-thunder. No one knows yet what the axe is about.’ We went along together and squeezed into one of the school desk-benches. When the colonel entered and the room was called to attention by the senior major, David and I hurt ourselves standing up, bench and all. Scatter told us all to be seated. The officers were in one class, the warrant-officers and non-commissioned officers in another. The colonel glared at us from the teacher’s desk. He began his lecture with general accusations. He said that he had lately noticed many signs of slovenliness in the battalion—men with their pocket-flaps undone, and actually walking down the village street with their hands in their trousers-pockets—boots unpolished—sentries strolling about on their beats at company billets instead of marching up and down in a soldier-like way—rowdiness in the _estaminets_—slackness in saluting—with many other grave indications of lowered discipline. He threatened to stop all leave to the United Kingdom unless discipline improved. He promised us a saluting parade every morning before breakfast which he would attend in person. All this was general axe-ing and we knew that he had not yet reached the particular axe. It was this: ‘I have here principally to tell you of a very disagreeable occurrence. As I was going out of my orderly room early this morning I came upon a group of soldiers; I will not mention their company. One of these soldiers was in conversation with a lance-corporal. You may not believe it, but it was a fact that he addressed the corporal by his Christian name; _he called him Jack_. The corporal made no protest. To think that the First Battalion has sunk to a level where it is possible for such familiarity to exist between N.C.O.’s and the men under their command! Naturally, I put the corporal under arrest, and he appeared before me at once on the charge of ‘conduct unbecoming to an N.C.O.’ He was reduced to the ranks, and the man was given field-punishment for using insubordinate language to an N.C.O. And, I warn you, if any further case of the sort comes to my notice—and I expect you officers to report the slightest instance to me at once instead of dealing with it as a company matter....’ I tried to catch Siegfried’s eye, but he was busy avoiding it, so I caught David’s instead. This is one of those caricature scenes that now seem to sum up the various stages of my life. There was a fresco around the walls of the class-room illustrating the evils of alcoholism. It started with the innocent boy being offered a drink by his mate, and then his downward path, culminating in wife-beating, murder, and _delirium tremens_.

The battalion’s only complaint against Montagne was that women were not so easy to get hold of in that part of the country as around Béthune; the officers had the unfair advantage of being able to borrow horses and ride into Amiens. I remained puritanical. There was a Blue Lamp at Amiens as there was at Abbéville, Havre, Rouen, and all the big towns behind the lines. The Blue Lamp was for officers, as the Red Lamp was for men. It was most important for discipline to be maintained in this way.

In January the Seventh Division sent two company officers from each brigade to instruct troops at the base. I and a captain in the Queen’s were the two who had been out longest, so we were chosen; it was a gift of two months longer life to us.

XVII

I was one of about thirty instructors at the Havre ‘Bull Ring,’ where newly-arrived drafts were sent for technical instruction before going up the line. Most of my colleagues were specialists in musketry, machine-gun, gas, or bombs. I had no specialist training, only general experience. I was put on instructional work in trench relief and trench discipline in a model set of trenches. My principal other business was arms-drill. One day it rained, and the commandant of the Bull Ring suddenly ordered me to lecture in the big concert hall. ‘There are three thousand men there waiting for you, and you’re the only available officer with a loud enough voice to make himself heard.’ They were Canadians, so instead of giving my usual semi-facetious lecture on ‘How to be happy though in the trenches,’ I paid them the compliment of telling them the story of Loos, and what a balls-up it was, and why it was a balls-up. It was the only audience that I ever held for an hour with real attention. I expected the commandant to be furious with me because the principal object of the Bull Ring was to inculcate the offensive spirit, but he took it well and I had several more concert-hall lectures put on me after this.

In the instructors’ mess the chief subjects of conversation besides local and technical talk were _morale_, the reliability of various divisions in battle, the value of different training methods, and war-morality, with particular reference to atrocities. We talked more freely there than would have been possible either in England or in the trenches. We decided that about a third of the troops in the British Expeditionary Force were dependable on all occasions; these were the divisions that were always called on for the most important tasks. About a third were variable, that is, where a division contained one or two bad battalions, but could be more or less trusted. The remainder were more or less untrustworthy; being put in positions of comparative safety they had about a quarter of the casualties that the best divisions had. It was a matter of pride to belong to one of the recognized best divisions—the Seventh, the Twenty-ninth, Guards’, First Canadian, for instance. They were not pampered when in reserve as the German storm-troops were, but promotion, leave, and the chance of a wound came quicker in them. The mess agreed that the most dependable British troops were the Midland county regiments, industrial Yorkshire and Lancashire troops, and the Londoners. The Ulsterman, Lowland Scots and Northern English were pretty good. The Catholic Irish and the Highland Scots were not considered so good—they took unnecessary risks in trenches and had unnecessary casualties, and in battle, though they usually made their objective, they too often lost it in the counter-attack; without officers they were no good. English southern county regiments varied from good to very bad. All overseas troops were good. The dependability of divisions also varied with their seniority in date of promotion. The latest formed regular divisions and the second-line territorial divisions, whatever their recruiting area, were usually inferior. Their senior officers and warrant-officers were not good enough.

We once discussed which were the cleanest troops in trenches, taken in nationalities. We agreed on a list like this, in descending order: English and German Protestants; Northern Irish, Welsh and Canadians; Irish and German Catholics; Scottish; Mohammedan Indians; Algerians; Portuguese; Belgians; French. The Belgians and French were put there for spite; they were not really dirtier than the Algerians or Portuguese.

Atrocities. Propaganda reports of atrocities were, we agreed, ridiculous. Atrocities against civilians were surely few. We remembered that while the Germans were in a position to commit atrocities against enemy civilians, Germany itself, except for the early Russian cavalry raid, had never had the enemy on her soil. We no longer believed accounts of unjustified German atrocities in Belgium; know the Belgians now at first-hand. By atrocities we meant, specifically, rape, mutilation and torture, not summary shootings of suspected spies, harbourers of spies, _francs-tireurs_, or disobedient local officials. If the atrocity list was to include the accidental-on-purpose bombing or machine-gunning of civilians from the air, the Allies were now committing as many atrocities as the Germans. French and Belgian civilians had often tried to win our sympathy and presents by exhibiting mutilations of children—stumps of hands and feet, for instance—representing them as deliberate, fiendish atrocities when they were merely the result of shell-fire, British or French shell-fire as likely as not. We did not believe that rape was any more common on the German side of the line than on the Allied side. It was unnecessary. Of course, a bully-beef diet, fear of death, and absence of wives made ample provision of women necessary in the occupied areas. No doubt the German army authorities provided brothels in the principal French towns behind the line, as did the French on the Allied side. But the voluntary system would suffice. We did not believe stories of forcible enlistment of women.

As for atrocities against soldiers. The difficulty was to say where to draw the line. For instance, the British soldier at first regarded as atrocious the use of bowie-knives by German patrols. After a time he learned to use them himself; they were cleaner killing weapons than revolvers or bombs. The Germans regarded as atrocious the British Mark VII rifle bullet, which was more apt to turn on striking than the German bullet. For true atrocities, that is, personal rather than military violations of the code of war, there were few opportunities. The most obvious opportunity was in the interval between surrender of prisoners and their arrival (or non-arrival) at headquarters. And it was an opportunity of which advantage was only too often taken. Nearly every instructor in the mess knew of specific cases when prisoners had been murdered on the way back. The commonest motives were, it seems, revenge for the death of friends or relations, jealousy of the prisoner’s pleasant trip to a comfortable prison camp in England, military enthusiasm, fear of being suddenly overpowered by the prisoners or, more simply, not wanting to be bothered with the escorting job. In any of these cases the conductors would report on arrival at headquarters that a German shell had killed the prisoners; no questions would be asked. We had every reason to believe that the same thing happened on the German side, where prisoners, as useless mouths to feed in a country already on short rations, were even less welcome. We had none of us heard of prisoners being more than threatened at headquarters to get military information from them; the sort of information that trench-prisoners could give was not of sufficient importance to make torture worth while; in any case it was found that when treated kindly prisoners were anxious, in gratitude, to tell as much as they knew.

The troops that had the worst reputation for acts of violence against prisoners were the Canadians (and later the Australians). With the Canadians the motive was said to be revenge for a Canadian found crucified with bayonets through his hands and feet in a German trench; this atrocity was never substantiated, nor did we believe the story freely circulated that the Canadians crucified a German officer in revenge shortly afterwards. (Of the Australians the only thing to be said was that they were only two generations removed from the days of Ralph Rashleigh and Marcus Clarke.) How far this reputation for atrocities was deserved, and how far it was due to the overseas habit of bragging and leg-pulling, we could not decide. We only knew that to have committed atrocities against prisoners was, among the overseas men, and even among some British troops, a boast, not a confession.

I heard two first-hand accounts later in the war.

A Canadian-Scot: ‘I was sent back with three bloody prisoners, you see, and one was limping and groaning, so I had to keep on kicking the sod down the trench. He was an officer. It was getting dark and I was getting fed up, so I thought: “I’ll have a bit of a game.” I had them covered with the officer’s revolver and I made ’em open their pockets. Then I dropped a Mills’ bomb in each, with the pin out, and ducked behind a traverse. Bang, bang, bang! No more bloody prisoners. No good Fritzes but dead ’uns.’

An Australian: ‘Well, the biggest lark I had was at Morlancourt when we took it the first time. There were a lot of Jerries in a cellar and I said to ’em: “Come out, you Camarades.” So out they came, a dozen of ’em, with their hands up. “Turn out your pockets,” I told ’em. They turned ’em out. Watches and gold and stuff, all dinkum. Then I said: “Now back into your cellar, you sons of bitches.” For I couldn’t be bothered with ’em. When they were all down I threw half a dozen Mills’ bombs in after ’em. I’d got the stuff all right, and we weren’t taking prisoners that day.’

The only first-hand account I heard of large-scale atrocities was from an old woman at Cardonette on the Somme, with whom I was billeted in July 1916. It was at Cardonette that a battalion of French Turcos overtook the rear guard of a German division retreating from the Marne in September 1914. The Turcos surprised the dead-weary Germans while they were still marching in column. The old woman went, with gestures, through a pantomime of slaughter, ending: ‘Et enfin, ces animaux leur ont arraché les oreilles et les ont mis à la poche.’ The presence of coloured troops in Europe was, from the German point of view, we knew, one of the chief Allied atrocities. We sympathized. Recently, at Flixécourt, one of the instructors told us, the cook of a corps headquarter-mess used to be visited at the château every morning by a Turco; he was orderly to a French liaison officer. The Turco used to say: ‘Tommy, give Johnny pozzy,’ and a tin of plum and apple jam used to be given him. One afternoon the corps was due to shift, so that morning the cook said to the Turco, giving him his farewell tin: ‘Oh, la, la, Johnny, napoo pozzy to-morrow.’ The Turco would not believe it. ‘Yes, Tommy, mate,’ he said, ‘pozzy for Johnny to-morrow, to-morrow, to-morrow.’ To get rid of him the cook said: ‘Fetch me the head of a Fritz, Johnny, to-night. I’ll ask the general to give you pozzy to-morrow, to-morrow, to-morrow.’ ‘All right, mate,’ said the Turco, ‘me get Fritz head to-night, general give me pozzy to-morrow.’ That evening the mess cook of the new corps that had taken over the château was surprised to find a Turco asking for him and swinging a bloody head in a sandbag. ‘Here’s Fritz head, mate,’ said the Turco, ‘general give me pozzy to-morrow, to-morrow, to-morrow.’ As Flixécourt was twenty miles or more behind the line.... He did not need to end the story, but swore it was true, because he had seen the head.

We discussed the continuity of regimental _morale_. A captain in a line battalion of one of the Surrey regiments said: ‘It all depends on the reserve battalion at home.’ He had had a year’s service when the war broke out; the battalion, which had been good, had never recovered from the first battle of Ypres. He said: ‘What’s wrong with us is that we have a rotten depot. The drafts are bad and so we get a constant re-infection.’ He told me one night in our sleeping hut: ‘In both the last two attacks that we made I had to shoot a man of my company to get the rest out of the trench. It was so bloody awful that I couldn’t stand it. It’s the reason why I applied to be sent down here.’ This was not the usual loose talk that one heard at the base. He was a good fellow and he was speaking the truth. I was sorrier for Phillips—that was not his name—than for any other man I met in France. He deserved a better regiment. There was never any trouble with the Royal Welch like that. The boast of every good battalion in France was that it had never lost a trench; both our battalions made it. This boast had to be understood broadly; it meant never having been forced out of a trench by an enemy attack without recapturing it before the action ended. Capturing a German trench and being unable to hold it for lack of reinforcements did not count, nor did retirement from a trench by order or when the battalion of the left or right had broken and left a flank in the air. And in the final stages of the war trenches could be honourably abandoned as being entirely obliterated by bombardment, or because not really trenches at all, but a line of selected shell-craters.

We all agreed on the value of arms-drill as a factor in _morale_. ‘Arms-drill as it should be done,’ someone said, ‘is beautiful, especially when the company feels itself as a single being and each movement is not a movement of every man together, but a single movement of one large creature.’ I used to have big bunches of Canadians to drill four or five hundred at a time. Spokesmen came forward once and asked what sense there was in sloping and ordering arms and fixing and unfixing bayonets. They said they had come to France to fight and not to guard Buckingham Palace. I told them that in every division of the four in which I had served there had been three different kinds of troops. Those that had guts but were no good at drill; those that were good at drill but had no guts; and those that had guts and were good at drill. These last fellows were, for some reason or other, much the best men in a show. I didn’t know why and I didn’t care. I told them that when they were better at fighting than the Guards’ Division they could perhaps afford to neglect their arms-drill.

We often theorized in the mess about drill. We knew that the best drill never came from being bawled at by a sergeant-major, that there must be perfect respect between the man who gives the order and the men that carry it through. The test of drill came, I said, when the officer gave an incorrect word of command. If the company could carry through the order intended without hesitation, or, suppose the order happened to be impossible, could stand absolutely still or continue marching without any disorder in the ranks, that was good drill. The corporate spirit that came from drilling together was regarded by some instructors as leading to loss of initiative in the men drilled. Others denied this and said it acted just the other way round. ‘Suppose there is a section of men with rifles, and they are isolated from the rest of the company and have no N.C.O. in charge and meet a machine-gun. Under the stress of danger that section will have that all-one-body feeling of drill and will obey an imaginary word of command. There will be no communication between its members, but there will be a drill movement. Two men will quite naturally open fire on the machine-gun while the remainder will work round, part on the left flank and part on the right, and the final rush will be simultaneous. Leadership is supposed to be the perfection for which drill has been instituted. That is wrong. Leadership is only the first stage. Perfection of drill is communal action. Drill may seem to be antiquated parade-ground stuff, but it is the foundation of tactics and musketry. It was parade-ground musketry that won all the battles in our regimental histories; this war will be won by parade-ground tactics. The simple drill tactics of small units fighting in limited spaces—fighting in noise and confusion so great that leadership is quite impossible.’ In spite of variance on this point we all agreed that regimental pride was the greatest moral force that kept a battalion going as an effective fighting unit, contrasting it particularly with patriotism and religion.