Part 22

I was posted to the Second Battalion again. I found it near Bouchavesnes on the Somme. It was a very different Second Battalion. No riding-school, no battalion-mess, no Quetta manners. I was more warmly welcomed this time; my suspected spying activities were forgotten. But the day before I arrived, the colonel had been wounded while out in front of the battalion inspecting the wire. He had been shot in the thigh by one of the ‘rotten crowd’ of his letter, who mistook him for a German and fired without challenging; he has been in and out of nursing homes ever since. Doctor Dunn asked me with kindly disapproval what I meant by coming back so soon. I said that I could not stand England any longer. He told the acting C.O. that I was, in his opinion, unfit for trench service, so I was put in command of the headquarter company. I went to live with the transport back at Frises, where the Somme made a bend. My company consisted of regimental clerks, cooks, tailors, shoemakers, pioneers, transport men, and so on, who in an emergency could become riflemen and used as a combatant force. We were in dug-outs close to the river, which was frozen completely over except for a narrow stretch of fast water in the middle. I had never been so cold in my life; it made me shudder to think what the trenches must be like. I used to go up to them every night with the rations, the quartermaster being sick; it was about a twelve-mile walk there and back. The general commanding the Thirty-third Division had teetotal convictions on behalf of his men and stopped their issue of rum except for emergencies; the immediate result was a much heavier sick-list than the battalion had ever had. The men had always looked forward to their tot of rum at the dawn stand-to as the one bright moment of the twenty-four hours. When this was denied them, their resistance weakened. I took the rations up through Cléry, which had been a wattle and daub village of some hundreds of inhabitants. The highest part of it now standing was a short course of brick wall about three feet high; the rest was enormous overlapping shell-craters. A broken-down steam-roller by the roadside had the name of the village chalked on it as a guide to travellers. We often lost a horse or two at Cléry, which the Germans continued to shell from habit.

Our reserve billets for these Bouchavesnes trenches were at Suzanne. They were not really billets, but dug-outs and shelters. Suzanne was also in ruins. The winter was the hardest since 1894–5. The men played inter-company football matches on the river, which was now frozen two feet thick. I remember a meal here in a shelter-billet; stew and tinned tomato on metal plates. Though the food came in hot from the kitchen next door, before we had finished it there was ice on the edge of the plate. In all this area there were no French civilians, no unshelled houses, no signs of cultivation. The only living creatures that I saw except soldiers and horses and mules were a few moorhen and duck in the narrow unfrozen part of the river. There was a shortage of fodder for the horses, many of which were sick; the ration was down to three pounds a day, and they had only open standings. I have kept few records of this time, but the memory of its misery survives.

Then I had bad toothache, and there was nothing for it but to take a horse and ride twenty miles to the nearest army dental station. The dentist who attended me was under the weather like everyone else. He would do nothing at first but grumble what a fool he had been to offer his services to his country at such a low salary. ‘When I think,’ he said, ‘of the terrible destruction to the nation’s teeth that is being done by unqualified men at home, and the huge fees that they are exacting for their wicked work, it makes me boil with rage.’ There followed further complaints against the way he was treated and the unwillingness of the Royal Army Medical Corps to give dentists any promotion beyond lieutenant’s rank. Later he began work on my tooth. ‘An abscess,’ he said, ‘no good tinkering about with this; must pull it out.’ So he yanked at it irritably and the tooth broke off. He tried again; there was very little purchase and it broke off again. He damned the ineffective type of forceps that the Government supplied. After about half an hour he got the tooth out in sections. I rode home with lacerated gums.

I was appointed a member of a field general court-martial on an Irish sergeant charged with ‘shamefully casting away his arms in the presence of the enemy.’ I had heard about the case unofficially. He had been maddened by an intense bombardment, thrown down his rifle, and run with the rest of his platoon. An army order, secret and confidential, had recently instructed me that, in the case of men tried for their life on other charges, sentence might be mitigated if conduct in the field had been exemplary; but cowardice was only punishable with death and no medical excuses could be accepted. But I knew that there was nothing between sentencing the man to death and refusing to take part in the proceedings. If I chose the second course I would be court-martialled myself, and a reconstituted court would bring in the death verdict anyhow. Yet I would not sentence a man to death for an offence which I might have committed myself in the same circumstances. I was in a dilemma. I met the situation by evading it. There was one other officer in the battalion with the year’s service, as a captain, which entitled him to sit on a field general court-martial. I found him willing to take my place. He was hard-boiled and glad of a trip to Amiens, and I took over his duties for him.

Executions were frequent in France. My first direct experience of official lying was when I was at the base at Havre in May 1915 and read the back-files of army orders in the officers’ mess at the rest-camp. There were something like twenty reports of men shot for cowardice or desertion; yet not a week later the responsible Minister in the House of Commons, answering a question from a pacifist member, had denied that sentence of death for a military offence had been carried out in France on any member of His Majesty’s forces.

The acting commanding-officer was sick and irritable; he felt the strain badly and took a lot of whisky. One spell he was too sick to be in the trenches, and came down to Frises, where he shared a dug-out with Yates the quartermaster and myself. I was sitting in my arm-chair reading the Bible and came on the text: ‘The bed is too narrow to lie down therein and the coverlet too small to wrap myself therewith.’ ‘I say, James,’ I said, ‘that’s pretty appropriate for this place.’ He raised himself on an elbow, genuinely furious. ‘Look here, von Runicke,’ he said, ‘I am not a religious man. I’ve cracked a good many of the commandments since I’ve been in France; but while I am in command here I refuse to hear you or anyone bloody else blaspheme Holy Writ.’ I liked James a lot. I had met him first on the day I arrived at Wrexham to join the regiment. He was just back from Canada and hilariously throwing chairs about in the junior ante-room of the mess. He had been driving a plough through virgin soil, he told us, and reciting Kipling to the prairie-dogs. His favourite piece was (I may be misquoting):

Are ye there, are ye there, are ye there? Four points on a ninety-mile square. With a helio winking like fun in the sun, Are ye there, are ye there, are ye there?

He had been with the Special Reserve a year or two before he emigrated. He cared for nobody, was most courageous, inclined to be sentimental, and probably saw longer service with the Second Battalion in the war than any officer except Yates.

A day or two later, because he was still sick and I was the senior officer of the battalion, I attended the Commanding Officers’ Conference at brigade headquarters. Opposite our trenches was a German salient and the brigadier wanted to ‘bite it off’ as a proof of the offensive spirit of his command. Trench soldiers could never understand the Staff’s desire to bite off an enemy salient. It was not a desirable thing to be exposed to fire from both flanks; if the Germans were in a salient, our obvious duty was to keep them there as long as they could be persuaded to stay. We concluded that it was the passion for straight lines for which headquarters were well known, and that it had no strategic or tactical significance. The attack had been twice proposed and twice cancelled because of the weather. This was towards the end of February, in the thaw. I have a field-message referring to it, dated the 21st:

Please cancel Form 4 of my AA 202 units will draw from 19th brigade B. Echelon the following issue of rum which will be issued to troops taking part in the forth coming operations at the discretion of O.C. units 2nd R.W.F. 7½ gallons.

Even this promise of special rum could not encourage the battalion. Every one agreed that the attack was unnecessary, foolish, and impossible. The company commanders assured me that to cross the three hundred yards of No Man’s Land, which because of constant shelling and the thaw was a morass of mud more than knee-deep, would take even lightly-armed troops four or five minutes. It would be impossible for anyone to reach the German lines while there was a single section of Germans with rifles to defend them. The general, when I arrived, inquired in a fatherly way how old I was, and whether I was not proud to be attending a Commanding Officers’ Conference at the age of twenty-one. I said that I had not examined my feelings, but that I was an old enough soldier to realize the ♦impossibility of the attack. The colonel of the Cameronians, who were also to be engaged, took the same line. So the attack was finally called off. That night I went up with rations as usual; the battalion was much relieved to hear the decision.

♦ “impossiblity” replaced with “impossibility”

We had been heavily shelled on the way up, and while I was at battalion headquarters having a drink a message came to say that D Company limber had been hit by a shell. As I went to inspect the damage I passed the chaplain, who had come up with me from Frises bend, and a group of three or four men. He was gabbling the burial service over a dead man lying on the ground covered with a waterproof sheet. It was a suicide case. The misery of the weather and the knowledge of the impending attack had been too much for him. This was the last dead man I was to see in France, and like the first, a suicide.

I found that the limber, which contained petrol tins of water for the company, had had a direct hit. There was no sign of the horses; they were highly prized horses, having won a prize at a divisional horse-show some months back for the best-matched pair of the division. So the transport sergeant and I sent the transport back and went looking for the horses in the dark. We stumbled through miles of morass that night but could not find them or get any news of them. We used to boast that our transport animals were the best in France. Our transport men were famous horse-thieves, and no less than eighteen of our stable had been stolen from other units at one time or another, for their good looks. There were even two which we had ‘borrowed’ from the Scots Greys. The horse I rode to the dentist came from the French police; its only fault was that it was the left-hand horse of the police squadron, and so had a tendency to pull to the wrong side of the road. We had never lost a horse to any other battalion, so naturally Sergeant Meredith and I, who had started out with the rations at about four o’clock in the afternoon, kept on with the search until long after midnight. When we reached Frises at about three o’clock in the morning I was completely exhausted. I collapsed on my bunk.

The next day it was found that I had bronchitis and I went back in an ambulance to Rouen, once more to No. 8 Red Cross hospital. The major of the R.A.M.C. recognized me and said: ‘What on earth are _you_ doing out in France, young man? If I find you in my hospital again with those lungs of yours I’ll have you court-martialled.’

The quartermaster wrote to me there that the horses had been found shortly after I had gone; they were unhurt except for grazes on their bellies and were in the possession of the machine-gun company of the Fourth Division; the machine-gunners were found disguising them with stain and trying to remove the regimental marks.

At Rouen I was asked to say where in England I would like to go to hospital. I said, at random, ‘Oxford.’

XXIII

So I was sent to Oxford, to Somerville College, which, like the Examination Schools, had been converted into a hospital. It occurred to me here that I was probably through with the war, for it could not last long now. I both liked and disliked the idea. I disliked being away from the regiment in France and I liked to think that I would probably be alive when the war ended. As soon as I was passed fit Siegfried had got boarded toe and tried to follow me to the Second Battalion. He was disappointed to find me gone. I felt I had somehow let him down. But he wrote that he was unspeakably relieved to know that I was back at Oxford.

I liked Oxford and wanted to stay there. I applied, on the strength of a chit from the Bull Ring commandant at Havre, for an instructional job in one of the Officer-Cadet Battalions quartered in the men’s colleges. I was posted to the Wadham Company of No. 4 Battalion. These battalions had not been formed long; they had grown out of instructional schools for young officers. The cadet course was only three months (later increased to four), but it was a severe one and particularly intended to train platoon commanders in the handling of the platoon as an independent unit. About two-thirds of the cadets were men recommended for commissions by colonels in France, the remainder were public-school boys from the officers’ training corps. Much of the training was drill and musketry, but the important part was tactical exercises with limited objectives. We used the army textbook S.S. 143, or ‘_Instructions for the training of platoons for offensive action_, 1917,’ perhaps the most important War Office publication issued during the war. The author is said to have been General Solly-Flood, who wrote it after a visit to a French army school. From 1916 on the largest unit possible to control in sustained action was the platoon. Infantry training had hitherto treated the company as the chief tactical unit.

Though the quality of the officers had deteriorated from the regimental point of view (in brief, few of the new officers were now gentlemen), their deficiency in manners was amply compensated for by their greater efficiency in action. The cadet-battalion system, in the next two years, saved the army in France from becoming a mere rabble. We failed about a sixth of the candidates for commissions; the failures were sometimes public-school boys without the necessary toughness, but usually men who had been recommended, from France, on compassionate grounds—rather stupid platoon sergeants and machine-gun corporals who had been out too long and were thought to need a rest. Our final selection of the right men to be officers was made by watching them play games, principally rugger and soccer. The ones who played rough but not dirty and had quick reactions were the men we wanted. We spent most of our spare time playing games with them. I had a platoon of New Zealanders, Canadians, South Africans, two men from the Fiji Island contingent, an English farm-labourer, a Welsh miner and two or three public-school boys. They were a good lot and most of them were killed later on in the war. The New Zealanders went in for rowing; the record time for the river at Oxford was made by a New Zealand eight that year. I found the work too much for my lungs, for which the climate of Oxford was unsuitable. I kept myself going for two months on a strychnine tonic and then collapsed again. I fainted and fell downstairs one evening in the dark, cutting my head open; I was taken back to Somerville. I had kept going as long as I could.

I had liked Wadham, where I was a member of the senior common-room and had access to the famous brown sherry of the college; it is specially mentioned in a Latin grace among the blessings vouchsafed to the fellows by their Creator. My commanding officer, Colonel Stenning, in better times University Professor of Hebrew, was a fellow of the college. The social system at Oxford was dislocated. The St. John’s don destined to be my moral tutor when I came up was a corporal in the General Reserve; he wore grey uniform, drilled in the parks, and saluted me whenever we met. A college scout had a commission and was instructing in the other cadet battalion. There were not, I suppose, more than a hundred and fifty undergraduates at Oxford at this time; these were Rhodes scholars, Indians, and men who were unfit. I saw a good deal of Aldous Huxley, Wilfred Childe, and Thomas Earp, who were running an undergraduates’ literary paper of necessarily limited circulation called _The Palatine Review_, to which I contributed. Earp had set himself the task of keeping the Oxford tradition alive through the dead years; he was president and sole member, he said, of some seventeen undergraduate social and literary societies. In 1919 he was still in residence, and handed over the minute-books to the returning university. Most of the societies were then reformed.

I enjoyed being at Somerville. It was warm weather and the discipline of the hospital was easy. We used to lounge about in the grounds in our pyjamas and dressing-gowns, and even walk out into St. Giles’ and down the Cornmarket (also in pyjamas and dressing-gowns) for a morning cup of coffee at the Cadena. And there was a V.A.D. probationer with whom I fell in love. I did not tell her so at the time. This was the first time that I had fallen in love with a woman, and I had difficulty in adjusting myself to the experience. I used to meet her when I visited a friend in another ward, but we had little talk together. I wrote to her after leaving hospital. When I found that she was engaged to a subaltern in France I stopped writing. I had seen what it felt like to be in France and have somebody else playing about with one’s girl. Yet by the way she wrote reproving me for not writing she may well have been as fond of me as she was of him. I did not press the point. There was the end of it, almost before it started.

While I was with the cadet battalion I used to go out to tea nearly every Sunday to Garsington. Siegfried’s friends, Philip and Lady Ottoline Morrell, lived at the manor house there. The Morrells were pacifists and it was here that I first heard that there was another side to the question of war guilt. Clive Bell was working on the manor farm; he was a conscientious objector, and had been permitted to do this, as work of national importance, instead of going into the army. Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey and the Hon. Bertrand Russell were frequent visitors. Aldous was unfit, otherwise he would certainly have been in the army like Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, Herbert Read, Siegfried, Wilfred Owen, myself and most other young writers of the time, none of whom now believed in the war. Bertrand Russell, who was beyond the age of liability for military service but an ardent pacifist (a rare combination), turned sharply on me one afternoon and said: ‘Tell me, if a company of men of your regiment were brought along to break a strike of munition makers and the munition makers refused to submit, would you order the men to fire?’ I said: ‘Yes, if everything else failed. It would be no worse than shooting Germans, really.’ He was surprised and asked: ‘Would your men obey you?’ ‘Of course they would,’ I said; ‘they loathe munition makers and would be only too glad of a chance to shoot a few. They think that they’re all skrim-shankers.’ ‘But they realize that the war’s all wicked nonsense?’ ‘Yes, as well as I do.’ He could not understand my attitude.

Lytton Strachey was unfit, but instead of allowing himself to be rejected by the doctors he preferred to appear before a military tribunal as a conscientious objector. He told us of the extraordinary impression that was caused by an air-cushion which he inflated during the proceedings as a protest against the hardness of the benches. Asked by the chairman the usual question: ‘I understand, Mr. Strachey, that you have a conscientious objection to war?’ he replied (in his curious falsetto voice), ‘Oh no, not at all, only to _this_ war.’ Better than this was his reply to the chairman’s other stock question, which had previously never failed to embarrass the claimant: ‘Tell me, Mr. Strachey, what would you do if you saw a German soldier trying to violate your sister?’ With an air of noble virtue: ‘I would try to get between them.’

In 1916 I met more well-known writers than ever before or since. There were two unsuccessful meetings. George Moore had just written _The Brook Kerith_ and my neurasthenic twitchings interrupted the calm, easy flow of his conversational periods. He told me irritably not to fidget; in return I taunted him with having introduced cactus into the Holy Land some fifteen centuries before the discovery of America, its land of origin. At the Reform Club, H. G. Wells, who was Mr. Britling in those days and full of military optimism, talked without listening. He had just been taken for a ‘Cook’s Tour’ to France and had been shown the usual sights that royalty, prominent men of letters, and influential neutrals were shown by staff-conductors. He described his experiences at length and seemed unaware that I and the friend who was with me had also seen the sights. But I liked Arnold Bennett for his kindly unpretentiousness. And I liked Augustine Birrell. I happened to correct him when he said that the Apocrypha was not read in the church services; and again when he said that Elihu the Jebusite was one of Job’s comforters. He tried to over-ride me in both points, but I called for a Bible and proved them. He said, glowering very kindly at me: ‘I will say to you what Thomas Carlyle once said to a young man who caught him out in a misquotation, “Young man, you are heading straight for the pit of Hell!”’

And who else? John Galsworthy; or was my first meeting with him a year or two later? He was editor of a magazine called _Réveillé_, published under Government auspices (and was treated very ungenerously), the proceeds of which were to go to a disabled-soldier fund. I contributed. When I met him he asked me technical questions about soldier-slang—he was writing a war-play and wanted it accurate. He seemed a humble man and except for these questions listened without talking. This is, apparently, his usual practice; which explains why he is a better writer if a less forceful propagandist than Wells.... And Ivor Novello, in 1918. Then aged about twenty and already world famous as the author and composer of the patriotic song:

Keep the home fires burning While the hearts are yearning....

There was some talk of his setting a song of mine. I found him, wearing a silk dressing-gown, in a setting of incense, cocktails, many cushions, and a Tree or two. I felt uncomfortably military. I removed my spurs (I was a temporary field-officer at the time) out of courtesy to the pouffes. He was in the Royal Naval Air Service, but his genius was officially recognized and he was able to keep the home fires burning until the boys came home.