Part 9

The Army Council, which is usually composed of cavalry, engineer, and artillery generals, with the infantry hardly represented, had never encouraged regimental peculiarities, and perhaps could not easily forget the irregularity of the colonel’s direct appeal to the Sovereign in the matter of the flash. The flash was, at any rate, not sanctioned by the Army Council on the new khaki service dress. None the less, the officers and warrant-officers continued to wear it. There was a correspondence in the early stages of the war, I was told, between the regiment and the Army Council. The regiment maintained that since the flash was a distinctive mark won in war it should be worn with service dress and not merely with peace-time scarlet. The Army Council put forward the objection that it was a distinctive mark for enemy marksmen and particularly dangerous when worn only by officers. The regiment retorted by inquiring on what occasion since the retreat from Corunna, when the regiment was the last to leave Spain, with the key of the town postern in the pocket of one of its officers, had any of His Majesty’s enemies seen the back of a Royal Welch Fusilier? The Army Council was firm, but the regiment was obstinate, and the matter was in abeyance throughout the war. Once in 1917, when an officer of my company went to Buckingham Palace to be decorated with the Military Cross, the King, as colonel-in-chief of the regiment, showed a personal interest in the matter. He asked: ‘You are serving in one of the line battalions?’ ‘The Second Battalion, Your Majesty.’ So the King gave him the order: ‘About turn,’ and looked at the flash, and then ‘About turn’ again. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘you’re still wearing it, I see,’ and then, in a stage whisper: ‘Don’t ever let anyone take it from you.’ The regiment was delighted. After the war, when scarlet was abandoned on the grounds of expense, the Army Council saw that it could reasonably sanction the flash on service dress for all ranks. As an additional favour it consented to recognize another defiant regimental peculiarity, the spelling of the word ‘Welch’ with a ‘c’. The permission was published in a special Army Order in 1919. The _Daily Herald_ commented ‘’Strewth!’ as if it were unimportant. That was ignorance. The spelling with a ‘c’ was as important to us as the miniature cap-badge worn at the back of the cap was to the Gloucesters (a commemoration of the time when they fought back to back: was it at Quatre Bras?). I have seen a young officer sent off battalion parade because his buttons read Welsh instead of Welch. ‘Welch’ referred us somehow to the antique North Wales of Henry Tudor and Owen Glendower and Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the founder of the regiment; it dissociated us from the modern North Wales of chapels, liberalism, the dairy and drapery business, Lloyd George, and the tourist trade.

The regiment was extremely strict on the standard measurements of the flash. When new-army battalions were formed and rumours came to Wrexham that in, I think, the Eighteenth Battalion officers were wearing flashes nearly down to their waists, there was great consternation. The adjutant sent off the youngest subaltern on a special mission to the camp of the Eighteenth Battalion, the colonel of which was not a Royal Welch Fusilier, but a loan from one of the Yorkshire regiments. He was to present himself at the Battalion Orderly Room with a large pair of shears.

The new-army battalions were as anxious to be regimental as the line battalions. It once happened in France that a major of the Royal Fusiliers entered the mess of the Nineteenth (Bantam) Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He greeted the mess with ‘Good afternoon, gentlemen,’ and called for a drink from the mess sergeant. After he had talked for a bit he asked the senior officer present: ‘Do you know why I ordered that drink from the mess sergeant?’ The Welch Fusilier said: ‘Yes, you wanted to see if we remembered about Albuhera.’ The Royal Fusilier answered: ‘Well, our mess is just along behind that wood there. We haven’t forgotten either.’ After Albuhera the few survivors of the Royal Welch Fusiliers and the Royal Fusiliers had messed together on the captured hill. It was then decided that henceforth and for ever the officers of each regiment were honorary members of the other’s mess, and the N.C.O.’s the same.

Perhaps the most legendary item was Thomas Atkins. He was a private soldier in the First Battalion who had served under Wellington in the Peninsular War. It is said that when, many years later, Wellington at the War Office was asked to approve a specimen form for military attestation, he had ordered it to be amended from: ‘I, Private John Doe of the blank regiment, do hereby, etc.,’ to ‘I, Private Thomas Atkins of the Twenty-third Foot, do hereby, etc.’ And now I am going to spoil the story, because I cannot for the life of me remember what British grenadierish conduct it was that made Wellington remember. And so here ends my very creditable (after eleven years) lyrical passage.

I was, as a matter of fact, going on to St. David’s Night. To the raw leeks eaten to the roll of the drum with one foot on a chair and one on the mess table enriched with spoils of the Summer Palace at Pekin. (They are not at all bad to eat raw, despite Shakespeare.) And to the Royal Goat with gilded horns that once leapt over the mess table with the drummerboy on its back. And Major Toby Purcell’s Golden Spurs. And Shenkin Ap Morgan, the First Gentleman of Wales. And ‘The British Grenadiers,’ the regimental march-past. I was going to explain that British grenadiers does not mean, as most people think, merely the Grenadier Guards. It includes all regiments, the Royal Welch among them, which wear a bursting grenade as a collar and cap-badge to recall their early employment as storm troops armed with bombs.

In the war the Royal Welch Fusiliers grew too big; this damaged regimental _esprit de corps_. Before the war there were the two line battalions and the depot; the affiliated and flash-less territorials, four battalions recruited for home service, could be disregarded, in spite of their regular adjutants. The Third Battalion, which trained at the depot, was a poor relation. Now more and more new-army battalions were added (even a Twenty-fifth Battalion was on service in 1917, and was as good a battalion as the Eighth). So the regiment (that is, consensus of opinion in the two line battalions) only tentatively accepted the new-army battalions one by one as they proved themselves worthy, by service in the field. The territorials it never accepted, disowning them contemptuously as ‘dog-shooters.’ The fact was that three of the four territorial battalions failed signally in the Suvla Bay landing at Gallipoli. One battalion, it was known, had offered violence to its officers; the commanding officer, a regular, had not cared to survive that day. Even the good work that these battalions did later in Palestine could not cancel this disgrace. The remaining territorial battalion was attached to the First Division in France early in 1915, where, at Givenchy, it quite unnecessarily lost its machine-guns. Regimental machine-guns in 1915 were regarded almost as sacred. To lose one’s machine-guns before the annihilation of the entire battalion was considered as bad as losing the regimental colours would have been in any eighteenth or nineteenth-century battle. The machine-gun officer had congratulated himself on removing the machine-gun bolts before abandoning the guns; it would make them useless to the enemy. But he had forgotten to take away the boxes of spare-parts. The Second Battalion made a raid in the same sector a year and a half later and recaptured one of the guns, which had been busy against the British trenches ever since.

As soon as we arrived at the depot we Special Reserve officers were reminded of our great good fortune. We were to have the privilege of serving with one or the other of the line battalions. In peace-time a candidate for a commission in the regiment had not only to distinguish himself in the passing-out examination at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and be strongly recommended by two officers of the regiment, but he had to have a guaranteed independent income that enabled him to play polo and hunt and keep up the social reputation of the regiment. These requirements were not insisted on; but we were to understand that we did not belong to the ‘regiment’ in the special sense. To be allowed to serve with it in time of war should satisfy our ambitions. We were not temporary officers, like those of the new army, but held permanent commissions in the Special Reserve battalion. We were reminded that the Royal Welch considered themselves second to none, even to the Guards. Representations had been made to the regiment after the South African War, inquiring whether it was willing to become the Welsh Guards, and it had indignantly refused; such a change would have made the regiment junior, in the Brigade of Guards, even to the Irish Guards only so recently formed. We were warned that while serving with a line battalion we were none of us to expect to be recommended for orders or decorations. An ordinary campaigning medal inscribed with a record of service with the battalion should be sufficient reward. Decorations were not regarded in the regiment as personal awards, but as representative awards for the whole battalion. They would therefore be reserved for the professional soldiers, to whom they would be more useful than to us as helps to extra-regimental promotion. And this was what happened. There must have been something like two or three hundred Special Reserve officers serving overseas. But except for three or four who were not directly recommended by the battalion commander, but distinguished themselves while attached to brigade or divisional staffs, or those who happened to be sent to new-army battalions or other regiments, we remained undecorated. I can only recall three exceptions. The normal proportion of awards, considering the casualties we suffered, which was about sixty or seventy killed, should have been at least ten times that amount. I myself never performed any feat for which I might conceivably have been decorated throughout my service in France.

The regimental spirit persistently survived all catastrophes. Our First Battalion, for instance, was annihilated within two months of joining the British Expeditionary Force. Young Orme, who joined straight from Sandhurst, at the crisis of the first battle of Ypres, found himself commanding a battalion reduced to only about forty rifles. With these and another small force, the remnants of the Second Battalion of the Queen’s Regiment, reduced to thirty men and two officers, he helped to recapture three lines of lost trenches and was himself killed. The reconstituted battalion, after heavy fighting at Bois Grenier in December, was again all but annihilated at the Aubers Ridge and Festubert in the following May, and again at Loos in September, when the one officer-survivor of the attack was a machine-gun officer loaned from the South Staffordshire Regiment. The same sort of thing happened time after time in fighting at Fricourt, the Quadrangle, High Wood, Delville Wood, and Ginchy on the Somme in 1916, and again at Puisieux and Bullecourt in the spring fighting of 1917. In the course of the war at least fifteen or twenty thousand men must have passed through each of the two line battalions, whose fighting strength was never more than eight hundred. After each catastrophe the ranks were filled up with new drafts from home, with the lightly wounded from the previous disaster returning after three or four months’ absence, and with the more seriously wounded returning after nine months or a year.

In the First and Second Battalions throughout the war it was not merely the officers and non-commissioned officers who knew their regimental history. The men knew far more about Minden and Albuhera and Waterloo than they did about the fighting on the other fronts or the official causes of the war.

XII

In 1916, when on leave in England after being wounded on the Somme, I began an account of my first few months in France. Unfortunately, I wrote it as a novel and I have now to retranslate it into history. I will give one reconstituted chapter:

On arrival in France we six Royal Welch Fusilier officers went to the Harfleur base-camp near Havre. Later it was to become an educational centre for trench-routine, use of bombs, trench-mortars, rifle-grenades, gas-helmets, and similar technicalities. But now we did a route-march or two through the French countryside and that was all, except for fatigues in Havre at the docks, helping the Army Service Corps unload stores from ships. The town was gay. As soon as we had arrived we were accosted by numerous little boys pimping for their sisters. ‘I take you to my sister. She very nice. Very good jig-a-jig. Not much money. Very cheap. Very good. I take you now. Plenty champagne for me?’ We were glad when we got orders to go up the line. But disgusted to find ourselves attached not to the Royal Welch Fusiliers, but to the Welsh Regiment.

We had heard little about the Welsh Regiment except that it was tough but rough, and that the Second Battalion, to which we were now attached, had a peculiar regimental history as the old Sixty-ninth Foot. It had originally been formed as an emergency force from pensioners and boy-recruits and sent overseas to do the work of a regular battalion—I forget in which eighteenth-century campaign. At one time it had served as marines. The Ups and Downs was the battalion’s army nick-name, partly because 69 is a number which makes the same sense whichever way up it is written. The 69 was certainly upside-down when we joined it. All the company officers except two boys recently from Sandhurst and a Special Reserve captain were attached from other regiments. There were now six Royal Welch Fusiliers, two South Wales Borderers, two East Surreys, two Wiltshires, one from the Border Regiment, one from the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. Even the quartermaster was an alien from the Connaught Rangers. There were perhaps four time-serving N.C.O.’s left in the battalion. Of the men, not more than fifty or so had been given more than a couple of months’ training before being sent out; some had only three weeks’ training; a great many had never fired a musketry course. This was because the First Division had been in constant hard fighting since the previous August; the Second Welsh had in eight months lost its full fighting strength five times over. The last occasion was the Richebourg fighting of 9th May, one of the worst disasters of the early part of the war; the division’s epitaph in the official _communiqué_ read: ‘Meeting with considerable opposition in the direction of the Rue du Bois, our attacks were not pressed.’

The Welsh ranks had been made up first with reservists of the later categories, then with re-enlisted men, then with Special Reservists of pre-war enlistment, then with 1914 recruits of three or four months’ training; but each class had in turn been exhausted. Now nothing was left to send but recruits of the spring 1915 class, and various sweepings and scourings. The First Battalion had, meanwhile, had the same heavy losses. In Cardiff they advertised: ‘Enlist at the depot and get to France quick.’ The recruits were principally men either over-age or under-age—a repetition of regimental history—or men who had some slight physical disability which prevented them from enlisting in regiments more particular than the Welsh. I still have the roll of my first platoon of forty men. The figures given for their ages are misleading. When they enlisted all the over-age men had put themselves in the late thirties and all the under-age men had called themselves eighteen. But once in France the over-age men did not mind adding on a few genuine years. No less than fourteen in the roll give their age as forty or over and these were not all. Fred Prosser, a painter in civil life, who admitted to forty-eight, was really fifty-six. David Davies, collier, who admitted to forty-two, and Thomas Clark, another collier who admitted to forty-five, were only one or two years junior to Prosser. James Burford, collier and fitter, was even older than these. When I first spoke to him in the trenches, he said: ‘Excuse me, sir, will you explain what this here arrangement is on the side of my rifle?’ ‘That’s the safety-catch. Didn’t you do a musketry course at the depot?’ ‘No, sir, I was a re-enlisted man and I had only a fortnight there. The old Lee-Metford didn’t have no safety-catch.’ I asked him when he had last fired a rifle. ‘In Egypt in 1882,’ he said. ‘Weren’t you in the South African War?’ ‘I tried to re-enlist but they told me I was too old, sir. I had been an old soldier when I was in Egypt. My real age is sixty-three.’ He spent all his summers as a tramp and in the bad months of the year worked as a collier, choosing a new pit every season. I heard him and David Davies one night in a dug-out opposite mine talking about the different seams of coals in Wales and tracing them from county to county and pit to pit with technical comments. It was one of the most informative conversations I ever heard.

The other half of the platoon contained the under-age section. There were five of these boys; William Bumford, collier, for instance, who gave his age as eighteen, was really only fifteen. He used to get into trouble for falling asleep on sentry duty. The official penalty for this was death, but I had observed that he could not help it. I had seen him suddenly go to sleep, on his feet, while holding a sandbag open for another fellow to fill. So we got him a job as orderly to a chaplain for a while, and a few months later all men over fifty and all boys under eighteen were combed out and sent to the base. Bumford and Burford were both sent; but neither escaped the war. Bumford was old enough to be sent back to the battalion in the later stages of the war, and was killed; Burford was killed, too, in a bombing accident at the base-camp. Or so I was told—the fate of many of my comrades in France has come to me merely as hearsay.

The troop-train consisted of forty-seven coaches and took twenty-five hours to arrive at Béthune, the rail-head. We went via St. Omer. It was about nine o’clock in the evening and we were hungry, cold and dirty. We had expected a short journey and so allowed our baggage to be put in a locked van. We played nap to keep our minds off the discomfort and I lost sixty francs, which was over two pounds at the existing rate of exchange. On the platform at Béthune a little man in filthy khaki, wearing the Welsh cap-badge, came up with a friendly touch of the cap most unlike a salute. He was to be our guide to the battalion, which was in the Cambrin trenches about ten kilometres away. He asked us to collect the draft of forty men we had with us and follow him. We marched through the unlit suburbs of the town. We were all intensely excited at the noise and flashes of the guns in the distance. The men of the draft had none of them been out before, except the sergeant in charge. They began singing. Instead of the usual music-hall songs they sang Welsh hymns, each man taking a part. The Welsh always sang when they were a bit frightened and pretending that they were not; it kept them steady. They never sang out of tune.

We marched towards the flashes and could soon see the flare-lights curving over the trenches in the distance. The noise of the guns grew louder and louder. Then we were among the batteries. From behind us on the left of the road a salvo of four shells came suddenly over our heads. The battery was only about two hundred yards away. This broke up _Aberystwyth_ in the middle of a verse and set us off our balance for a few seconds; the column of fours tangled up. The shells went hissing away eastward; we could see the red flash and hear the hollow bang where they landed in German territory. The men picked up their step again and began chaffing. A lance-corporal dictated a letter home: ‘Dear auntie, this leaves me in the pink. We are at present wading in blood up to our necks. Send me fags and a lifebelt. This war is a booger. Love and kisses.’

The roadside cottages were now showing more and more signs of dilapidation. A German shell came over and then whoo—oo—ooooooOOO—bump—CRASH! twenty yards away from the party. We threw ourselves flat on our faces. Presently we heard a curious singing noise in the air, and then flop! flop! little pieces of shell-casing came buzzing down all around. ‘They calls them the musical instruments,’ said the sergeant. ‘Damn them,’ said Frank Jones-Bateman, who had a cut in his hand from a jagged little piece, ‘the devils have started on me early.’ ‘Aye, they’ll have a lot of fun with you before they’re done, sir,’ grinned the sergeant. Another shell came over. Every one threw himself down again, but it burst two hundred yards behind us. Only Sergeant Jones had remained on his feet and laughed at us. ‘You’re wasting yourselves, lads,’ he said to the draft. ‘Listen by the noise they make coming where they’re going to burst.’

At Cambrin village, which was about a mile from the front trenches, we were taken into a ruined house. It had been a chemist’s shop and the coloured glass lights were still in the window. It was the billet of the Welsh company quartermaster-sergeants. Here we were issued with gas-respirators and field dressings. This was the first respirator issued in France. It was a gauze-pad filled with chemically-treated cotton waste, to be tied across the mouth and nose. It seems it was useless against German gas. I never put it to the test. A week or two later came the ‘smoke-helmet,’ a greasy grey-felt bag with a talc window to look through, but no mouthpiece. This also was probably ineffective against gas. The talc was always cracking and there were leaks where it was stitched into the helmet.

These were early days of trench-warfare, the days of the jam-tin bomb and the gas-pipe trench-mortar. It was before Lewis or Stokes guns, steel helmets, telescopic rifle-sights, gas-shells, pill-boxes, tanks, trench-raids, or any of the later improvements of trench-warfare.

After a meal of bread, bacon, rum and bitter stewed tea sickly with sugar, we went up through the broken trees to the east of the village and up a long trench to battalion headquarters. The trench was cut through red clay. I had a torch with me which I kept flashed on the ground. Hundreds of field mice and frogs were in the trench. They had fallen in and had no way out. The light dazzled them and we could not help treading on them. So I put the torch back in my pocket. We had no picture of what the trenches would be like, and were not far off the state of mind in which one young soldier joined us a week or two later. He called out very excitedly to old Burford who was cooking up a bit of stew in a dixie, apart from the others: ‘Hi, mate, where’s the battle? I want to do my bit.’