Part 18

Patriotism. There was no patriotism in the trenches. It was too remote a sentiment, and rejected as fit only for civilians. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out. As Blighty, Great Britain was a quiet, easy place to get back to out of the present foreign misery, but as a nation it was nothing. The nation included not only the trench-soldiers themselves and those who had gone home wounded, but the staff, Army Service Corps, lines of communication troops, base units, home-service units, and then civilians down to the detested grades of journalists, profiteers, ‘starred’ men exempted from enlistment, conscientious objectors, members of the Government. The trench-soldier, with this carefully graded caste-system of honour, did not consider that the German trench-soldier might have exactly the same system himself. He thought of Germany as a nation in arms, a unified nation inspired with the sort of patriotism that he despised himself. He believed most newspaper reports of conditions and sentiments in Germany, though believing little or nothing of what he read about conditions and sentiments in England. His cynicism, in fact, was not confined to his own country. But he never underrated the German as a soldier. Newspaper libels on Fritz’s courage and efficiency were resented by all trench-soldiers of experience.

Religion. It was said that not one soldier in a hundred was inspired by religious feeling of even the crudest kind. It would have been difficult to remain religious in the trenches though one had survived the irreligion of the training battalion at home. A regular sergeant at Montagne, a Second Battalion man, had recently told me that he did not hold with religion in time of war. He said that the niggers (meaning the Indians) were right in officially relaxing their religious rules when they were fighting. ‘And all this damn nonsense, sir—excuse me, sir—that we read in the papers, sir, about how miraculous it is that the wayside crucifixes are always getting shot at but the figure of our Lord Jesus somehow don’t get hurt, it fairly makes me sick, sir.’ This was to explain why in giving practice fire-orders from the hill-top he had shouted out: ‘Seven hundred, half left, bloke on cross, five rounds consecrate, fire!’ His platoon, even the two men whose letters home always had the same formal beginning: ‘Dear Sister in Christ,’ or ‘Dear Brother in Christ,’ blazed away.

The troops, while ready to believe in the Kaiser as a comic personal devil, were aware that the German soldier was, on the whole, more devout than himself in the worship of God. In the instructors’ mess we spoke freely of God and Gott as opposed tribal deities. For the regimental chaplains as a body we had no respect. If the regimental chaplains had shown one tenth the courage, endurance, and other human qualities that the regimental doctors showed, we agreed, the British Expeditionary Force might well have started a religious revival. But they had not. The fact is that they were under orders not to get mixed up with the fighting, to stay behind with the transport and not to risk their lives. No soldier could have any respect for a chaplain who obeyed these orders, and yet there was not in our experience one chaplain in fifty who was not glad to obey them. Occasionally on a quiet day in a quiet sector the chaplain would make a daring afternoon visit to the support line and distribute a few cigarettes, and that was all. But he was always in evidence back in rest-billets. Sometimes the colonel would summon him to come up with the rations and bury the day’s dead, and he would arrive, speak his lines, and hastily retire. The position was made difficult by the respect that most of the commanding officers had for the cloth, but it was a respect that they soon outwore. The colonel in one battalion I served with got rid of four new chaplains in as many months. Finally he applied for a Roman Catholic chaplain, alleging a change of faith in the men under his command. For, as I should have said before, the Roman Catholics were not only permitted in posts of danger, but definitely enjoined to be wherever fighting was so that they could give extreme unction to the dying. And we had never heard of an R.C. chaplain who was unwilling to do all that was expected of him and more. It was recalled that Father Gleeson of the Munsters, when all the officers were put out of action at the first battle of Ypres, stripped off his black badges and, taking command of the survivors, held the line.

Anglican chaplains were remarkably out of touch with their troops. I told how the Second Battalion chaplain just before the Loos fighting had preached a violent sermon on the battle against sin, and how one old soldier behind me had grumbled: ‘Christ, as if one bloody push wasn’t enough to worry about at a time.’ The Catholic padre, on the other hand, had given his men his blessing and told them that if they died fighting for the good cause they would go straight to Heaven, or at any rate would be excused a great many years in Purgatory. Someone told us of the chaplain of his battalion when he was in Mesopotamia, how on the eve of a big battle he had preached a sermon on the commutation of tithes. This was much more sensible than the battle against sin, he said; it was quite up in the air, and took the men’s minds off the fighting.

I was feeling a bit better after a few weeks at the base, though the knowledge that this was only temporary relief was with me all the time. One day I walked out of the mess to begin the afternoon’s work on the drill ground. I had to pass by the place where bombing instruction was given. A group of men was standing around the table where the various types of bombs were set out for demonstration. There was a sudden crash. An instructor of the Royal Irish Rifles had been giving a little unofficial instruction before the proper instructor arrived. He had picked up a No. 1 percussion grenade and said: ‘Now, lads, you’ve got to be careful with this chap. Remember that if you touch anything while you’re swinging it, it will go off.’ To illustrate the point he rapped it against the edge of the table. It killed him and another man and wounded twelve others more or less severely.

XVIII

I rejoined the First Battalion in March, finding it in the line again, on the Somme. It was the primrose season. We went in and out of the Fricourt trenches, with billets at Morlancourt, a country village at that time untouched by shell-fire. (Later it was knocked to pieces; the Australians and the Germans captured and recaptured it from each other several times, until there was nothing left except the site.) ‘A’ Company headquarters were in a farmhouse kitchen. We slept in our valises on the red-brick floor. The residents were an old lady and her daughter. The old lady was senile and paralysed; about all she could do was to shake her head and say: ‘Triste, la guerre.’ We called her ‘Triste la Guerre.’ Her daughter used to carry her about in her arms.

The Fricourt trenches were cut in chalk, which was better in wet weather than the La Bassée clay. We were unlucky in having a battalion-frontage where the lines came closer to each other than at any other point for miles. It was only recently that the British line had been extended down to the Somme. The French had been content, as they usually were, unless they definitely intended a battle, to be at peace with the Germans and not dig in too near. But here there was a slight ridge and neither side could afford to let the other hold the crest, so they shared it, after a prolonged dispute. It was used by both the Germans and ourselves as an experimental station for new types of bombs and grenades. The trenches were wide and tumbledown, too shallow in many places, and without sufficient traverses. The French had left relics of their nonchalance—corpses buried too near the surface; and of their love of security—a number of lousy but deep dug-outs. We busied ourselves raising the front-line parapet and building traverses to limit the damage of the trench-mortar shells that were continually falling. Every night not only the companies in the front line but both support companies were hard at work all the time. It was even worse than Cuinchy for rats; they used to run about A Company mess while we were at meals. We used to eat with revolvers beside our plates and punctuate our conversation with sudden volleys at a rat rummaging at somebody’s valise or crawling along the timber support of the roof above our heads. A Company officers were gay. We had all been in our school choirs except Edmund Dadd, who sang like a crow, and we used to chant church anthems and bits of cantatas whenever things were going well. Edmund insisted on joining in.

We were at dinner one day when a Welsh boy came rushing in, hysterical with terror. He shouted out to Richardson: ‘Sirr, sirr, there is a trenss-mortar in my dug-out.’ This in sing-song Welsh made us all shout with laughter. Richardson said: ‘Cheer up, 33 Williams, how did a big thing like a trench-mortar happen to be in your dug-out?’ But 33 Williams could not explain. He went on again and again: ‘Sirr, sirr, there is a trenss-mortar in my dug-out!’ Edmund Dadd went out to investigate. He found that a trench-mortar shell had fallen into the trench, bounced down the dug-out steps, exploded and killed five men. 33 Williams had been lying asleep and had been protected by the body of another man; he was the only one unhit.

Our greatest trial was the canister. It was a two-gallon drum with a cylinder inside containing about two pounds of an explosive called ammonal that looked like salmon paste, smelt like marzipan, and when it went off sounded like the day of judgment. The hollow around the cylinder was filled with scrap metal apparently collected by the French villagers behind the German line—rusty nails, fragments of British and French shells, spent bullets, and the screws, nuts, and bolts that heavy lorries leave behind on the road. We dissected one canister that had not exploded and found in it, among other things, the cog-wheels of a clock and half a set of false teeth. The canister was easy to hear coming and looked harmless in the air, but its shock was as shattering as the very heaviest shell. It would blow in any but the deepest dug-outs; and the false teeth and cog-wheels and so on would go flying all over the place. We could not agree how a thing of that size was fired. The problem was not solved until 1st July, when the battalion attacked from these same trenches and found one of the canister-guns with its crew. It was a wooden cannon buried in the earth and fired with a time-fuse. The crew offered to surrender, but our men refused; they had sworn for months to get the crew of that gun.

One evening I was in the trench with Richardson and David Thomas (near ‘Trafalgar Square,’ should anyone remember that trench-junction) when we met Pritchard and the adjutant. We stopped to talk. Richardson complained what a devil of a place it was for trench-mortars. Pritchard said: ‘That is where I come in.’ He was the battalion trench-mortar officer and had just been given the first two Stokes mortar-guns that we had seen in France. Pritchard said: ‘They’re beauties. I’ve been trying them out and to-morrow I’m going to get some of my own back. I can put four or five shells in the air at the same time.’ The adjutant said: ‘About time, too. We’ve had three hundred casualties in the last month here. It doesn’t seem so many as that because we’ve had no officer casualties. In fact we’ve had about five hundred casualties in the ranks since Loos, and not a single officer.’ Then he suddenly realized that he had said something unlucky. David said: ‘Touch wood.’ Everybody sprang to touch wood, but it was a French trench and unriveted. I pulled a pencil out of my pocket; that was wood enough for me. Richardson said: ‘I’m not superstitious, anyway.’

The next evening I was leading up A Company for a working-party. B and D Companies were in the line and we overtook C, which was also going up to work. David was bringing up the rear of C. He was looking strange, worried about something. I had never seen him anything but cheerful all the time I had known him. I asked what was the matter. He said: ‘Oh, I’m fed up and I’ve got a cold.’ C Company went along to the right of the battalion frontage and we went along to the left. It was a weird kind of night, with a bright moon. A German occupied sap was only forty or fifty yards away. We were left standing on the parapet piling up the sandbags, with the moon behind us, but the German sentries ignored us—probably because they had work on hand themselves. It often happened when both sides were busy putting up proper defences that they turned a blind eye to each other’s work. Sometimes, it was said, the rival wiring-parties ‘as good as borrowed each other’s mallets’ for hammering in the pickets. The Germans were much more ready to live and let live than we were. (The only time, so far as I know, besides Christmas 1914, that both sides showed themselves in daylight without firing at each other was once at Ypres when the trenches got so flooded that there was nothing for it but for both sides to crawl out on top to avoid drowning.) There was a continual exchange of grenades and trench-mortars on our side; the canister was going over and the men found it difficult to get out of its way in the dark. But for the first time we were giving the enemy as good as they gave us. Pritchard had been using his Stokes’ mortar all day and had sent over two or three hundred rounds; twice they had located his emplacement and he had had to shift hurriedly.

‘A’ Company worked from seven in the evening until midnight. We must have put thousands of sandbags into position, and fifty yards of front trench were beginning to look presentable. About half-past ten there was rifle-fire on the right and the sentries passed down the news ‘officer hit.’ Richardson at once went along to see who it was. He came back to say: ‘It’s young Thomas. He got a bullet through the neck, but I think he’s all right; it can’t have hit his spine or an artery because he’s walking down to the dressing-station.’ I was pleased at this news. I thought that David would be out of it long enough perhaps to escape the coming offensive and perhaps even the rest of the war. At twelve o’clock we had finished for the night. Richardson said to me: ‘Von Ranke’ (only he pronounced it Von Runicke—it was my regimental nickname), ‘take the company down for their rum and tea, will you? They’ve certainly deserved it to-night. I’ll be along in a few minutes. I’m going out with Corporal Chamberlen to see what work the wiring-party’s been doing all this time.’ So I took the men back. When we were well started I heard a couple of shells come over somewhere behind us. I noticed them because they were the only shells fired that night; five-nines they seemed by the noise. We were nearly back at Maple Redoubt, which was the name of the support line on the reverse side of the hill, when we heard the cry ‘Stretcher-bearers!’ and after a while a man came running to say: ‘Captain Graves is hit.’ There was a general laugh and we went on; but a stretcher-party went up anyhow to see what was wrong. It was Richardson; the shells had caught him and the corporal among the wire. The corporal had his leg blown off, and died of wounds a day or two later. Richardson had been blown into a shell-hole full of water and had lain there stunned for some minutes before the sentries heard the corporal’s cries and realized what had happened. He was brought down semi-conscious; he recognized us, told us he wouldn’t be long away from the company, and gave us instructions about it. The doctor said that he had no wound in any vital spot, though the skin of his left side was riddled, as we had seen, with the chalky soil blown up against him. We felt a relief in his case, as in David’s, that he would be out of it for a while.

Then news came that David had died. The regimental doctor, a throat specialist in civil life, had told him at the dressing-station: ‘You’ll be all right, only don’t raise your head for a bit.’ David had then, it was said, taken a letter from his pocket, given it to an orderly, and said: ‘Post that.’ It was a letter written to a girl in Glamorgan, to be posted in case he got killed. Then the doctor saw that he was choking; he tried trachotomy, but it was too late. Edmund and I were talking together in the company headquarters at about one o’clock when the adjutant came in. He looked ghastly. He told us that Richardson had died at the dressing-station. His heart had been weakened by rowing (he had been in the Eight at Radley) and the explosion and the cold water had been too much for it. The adjutant said to me nervously: ‘You know, somehow I feel, I—I feel responsible in a way for this; what I said yesterday at ‘Trafalgar Square.’ Of course, really, I don’t believe in superstition, but....’ Just at that moment there was a noise of whizz-bang shells about twenty yards off; a cry of alarm, followed by: ‘Stretcher-bearers!’ The adjutant turned quite white and we knew without being told what it meant. We hurried out. Pritchard, having fought his duel all night, and finally silenced the enemy, was coming off duty. A whizz-bang had caught him at the point where the communication trench reached Maple Redoubt; it was a direct hit. The casualties of that night were three officers and one corporal.

It seemed ridiculous when we returned without Richardson to A Company billets to find ‘Triste La Guerre’ still alive and to hear her once more quaver out ‘Triste, la guerre’ when her daughter explained that the _jeune capitaine_ had been killed. The old woman had taken a fancy to the _jeune capitaine_; we used to chaff him about it. I felt David’s death worse than any other death since I had been in France. It did not anger me as it did Siegfried. He was acting transport-officer and every night now, when he came up with the rations, he went out on patrol looking for Germans. It just made me feel empty and lost.

One of the anthems that we used to sing was: ‘He that shall endure to the end, shall be saved.’ The words repeated themselves in my head like a charm whenever things were bad. ‘Though thousands languish and fall beside thee, And tens of thousands around thee perish, Yet still it shall not come nigh thee.’ And there was another bit: ‘To an inheritance incorruptible.... Through faith unto salvation, Ready to be revealed at the last trump.’ For ‘trump’ we always used to sing ‘crump.’ ‘The last crump’ was the end of the war and would we ever hear it burst safely behind us? I wondered whether I could endure to the end with faith unto salvation. I knew that my breaking point was near now, unless something happened to stave it off.... It was not that I was frightened. Certainly I feared death; but I had never yet lost my head through fright, and I knew that I never would. Nor would the breakdown come as insanity; I did not have it in me. It would be a general nervous collapse, with tears and twitchings and dirtied trousers. I had seen cases like that.

The battalion was issued with a new gas-helmet, popularly known as ‘the goggle-eyed b——r with the tit.’ It differed from the previous models. One breathed in through the nose from inside the helmet and breathed out through a special valve held in the mouth. I found that I could not manage this. Boxing with an already broken nose had recently displaced the septum, so that I was forced to breathe through my mouth. In a gas-attack I would be unable to use the helmet and it was the only type claimed to be proof against the new German gas. The battalion doctor advised me to have an operation done as soon as I could.

These months with the First Battalion have already been twice recorded in literary history; though in both cases in a disguise of names and characters. The two books are Siegfried Sassoon’s _Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man_, and _Nothing of Importance_, by Bill Adams, the battalion sniping and intelligence officer. Adam’s book did not sell, but was as good a book as 1917 censorship allowed; it should be re-printed. Adams was killed; in fact, three out of five of the officers of the First Battalion at that time were killed in the Somme fighting. Scatter’s dream of open warfare was not realized. He himself was very seriously wounded. Of A Company choir there is one survivor besides myself—C. D. Morgan, who had his thigh smashed, and was still in hospital sometime after the war ended.

XIX

When I was given leave in April 1916 I went to a military hospital in London and had my nose operated on. It was a painful operation, but performed by a first-class surgeon and cost me nothing. In peace-time it would have cost me sixty guineas, and another twenty guineas in nursing-home fees. After hospital I went up to Harlech to walk on the hills. I had in mind the verse of the psalm: ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.’ That was another charm against trouble. I bought a small two-roomed cottage from my mother, who owned considerable cottage property in the neighbourhood. I bought it in defiance of the war, as something to look forward to when the guns stopped (‘when the guns stop’ was how we always thought of the end of the war). I whitewashed the cottage and put in a table, a chair, a bed and a few dishes and cooking utensils. I had decided to live there by myself on bread and butter, bacon and eggs, lettuce in season, cabbage and coffee; and to write poetry. My war-bonus would keep me for a year or two at least. The cottage was on the hillside away from the village. I put in a big window to look out over the wood below and across the Morfa to the sea. I wrote two or three poems here as a foretaste of the good life coming after the war.

It was about this time, but whether before or after my operation I cannot remember, that I was taken by my father to a dinner of the Honourable Cymmrodorion Society—a Welsh literary club—where Lloyd George, then Prime Minister, and W. M. Hughes, the Australian Prime Minister, were to speak. Hughes was perky, dry and to the point; Lloyd George was up in the air on one of his ‘glory of the Welsh hills’ speeches. The power of his rhetoric was uncanny. I knew that the substance of what he was saying was commonplace, idle and false, but I had to fight hard against abandoning myself with the rest of the audience. The power I knew was not his; he sucked it from his hearers and threw it back at them. Afterwards I was introduced to him, and when I looked closely at his eyes they were like those of a sleep-walker.