One of them, blushing, admitted that he had once shot grouse two days before the Twelfth: ‘I was sailing next day to rejoin the battalion in India and this was my last chance.’ Another said that when a public-school boy, and old enough to know better, he had killed a sitting pheasant with a stone. Another had gone out with a poacher – in his Sandhurst days – and crumbled poison-berry into a trout-stream. An even more scandalous confession came from a New Army major, a gentleman-farmer: that his estate had been over-run by foxes one year and, the headquarters of the nearest hunt being thirty miles away, he had permitted his bailiff to protect the hen roosts with a gun. Then came the turn of the medical officer, who said: ‘Well, once while I was a student at St Andrews, a friend asked me to put ten bob for him on a horse in the Lincolnshire. I couldn’t find my bookmaker in time. The horse lost, but I never returned the ten bob.’ At this, one of the guests, an officer in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, suddenly grew excited, jumped up, and leaned over the table, doubling his fists, ‘And was not the name of the horse Strathspey? And will you not pay me my ten shillings now immediately?’
Only the bombing-field separated the camp from Brotherton’s factory, which made an especially sensitive explosive for detonators. The munition workers had permanently yellow faces and hands, and drew appropriately high wages. Attwater used to argue at mess sometimes what would happen when Brotherton’s blew up. Most of us held that the explosion would immediately kill all the three thousand men of the camp, besides destroying Litherland and a large part of Bootle. Attwater maintained that the very closeness of the camp would save it; that the vibrations would go over and strike a large munition camp about a mile away and probably set that off too. One Sunday afternoon, Attwater limped out of the mess and saw smoke rising from Brotherton’s. Part of the factory was on fire. He immediately had the camp fire-brigade bugled for, and they managed to smother the fire before it reached a vital spot; so the argument was never decided.
As much Welsh as English was now talked in the huts, the chapels having put their full manpower at Lloyd George’s disposal. A deputation of soldiers from Harlech and the neighbourhood came to me one morning and said solemnly: ‘Captain Graves, sir, we do not like our sergeant-major. He do curse, and he do swear, and he do drink, and he do smoke, and he is a man of lowly origin too.’
I told them to make their complaint in proper form, under the escort of an N.C.O. They did not return.
A deputation of Welsh chapel ministers went to Attwater and complained of the blasphemous language used by the N.C.O.s. Attwater agreed that swearing on parade, at least, was contrary to King’s Regulations; but called the ministers’ attention to a rise of nearly two hundred per cent in affiliation orders since their innocent flocks had come to Litherland for training.
I stayed at Litherland a few weeks only. On July 1st 1916, the Somme offensive began, and all available trained men and officers went out to replace casualties. I had the pleasure of riding up the line on a locomotive and helping the French stoker, thus fulfilling a childhood dream; though bitterly disappointed at finding myself posted to the Second Battalion, not the First.
The Second Battalion was in trenches at Givenchy, on the other side of the canal from the Cuinchy brick-stacks. I arrived on July 5th, to find one of our raids in progress. Prisoners were already coming down the trench, scared and chattering to each other: Saxons, just back from a divisional rest and a week’s leave to Germany, with new uniforms and their packs full of good lootable stuff. One prisoner got a stern talking-to from ‘C’ Company sergeant-major, a Birmingham man, shocked at a packet of indecent photographs found in the man’s haversack.
It was a retaliatory raid. Only a few days before, the Germans had sent up the biggest mine blown on the Western front so far. It caught our ‘B’ Company – the ‘B’s were proverbially unlucky. The crater, afterwards named ‘Red Dragon Crater’ after the Royal Welch Regimental badge, must have been about thirty yards across. There were few survivors of ‘B’ Company. The Germans immediately came over in force to catch the other companies in confusion. Stanway, who had been a company sergeant-major during the retreat, and was now a major, rallied some men on the flank and drove the Germans back. Blair, ‘B’ Company commander, buried by the mine up to his neck, remained for the rest of the day under constant fire. Though a Boer War veteran, he survived this experience, recovered from his wounds, and returned to the battalion a few months later.
This raid had been Stanway’s revenge. He and Colonel ‘Tibs’ Crawshay – the depôt adjutant who had originally sent me out to France – planned it most elaborately, with bombardments and smoke-screen diversion on the flanks. A barrage of shrapnel would shift forward and back from the German front line to the supports. The intention was that the Germans should go down into the shell-proof dug-outs at the first bombardment, leaving only sentries in the trench, and reappear as soon as the barrage lifted. When it started again, they would make another dash for the dug-outs. After this had happened two or three times they would be slow in emerging. Then, under cover of a smoke-screen, the raid would be made and the barrage put down uninterruptedly on the support and reserve lines, to prevent reinforcements from coming up.
My only part in the raid, which proved very successful, was to make a detailed report of it at Crawshay’s request – not the report for divisional headquarters, but a page of history to be sent to the depôt for filing in regimental records. I noted that for the first time since the eighteenth century the regiment had reverted to the pike: instead of rifle and bayonet, some of the raiders had used butchers’ knives secured with medical plaster to the ends of broomsticks. This pike, a lighter weapon than rifle and bayonet, was a useful addition to bombs and revolvers.
An official journalist at headquarters also wrote an account of the raid. The battalion enjoyed the bit about how they had gone over the top shouting: ‘Remember Kitchener!’ and ‘Avenge the Lusitania!’ ‘What a damn silly thing to shout,’ said someone. ‘Old Kitchener served his purpose as a figure-head, but nobody wants him back at the War Office, that I’ve heard. As for the Lusitana, the Germans gave the Yanks full warning; and if her sinking brings them into the war, that’s all to the good.’
Few officers in the Second Battalion had been with it when I went away after Loos; and not a single one – except Yates, the quartermaster, and Robertson, now adjutant (but killed soon afterwards) – remembered the battalion mess at Laventie. So I expected a friendlier welcome than on my first arrival. However, as Captain Dunn, the battalion doctor (I have since heard), recorded in his diary: ‘Graves had a chilly reception, which surprised me.’ The reason was simple. One of the officers who had joined the Third Battalion in August 1914, and been sent out to France ahead of me as the more efficient, had now achieved his ambition of a regular commission. But this made him only a second-lieutenant, and jealousy of my two extra stars embittered him. When he made a nasty remark in public about ‘jumped-up captains’, I refrained from putting him under arrest, as I should have done, and instead quoted at him the consoling lines:
O deem it pride, not lack of skill,
That will not let my sleeves increase.
The morning and the evening still
Have but one star apiece.
We had not met in France hitherto, and he now most unethically revived the suspicion raised by my German name on my first arrival at Wrexham: that I was a German spy. As a result, I found myself treated with great reserve by all officers who had not known me in trenches before. Unluckily, the most notorious German spy caught in England had assumed the name of Carl Graves. My enemy put it out that Carl and I were brothers. I consoled myself by thinking that a batde was obviously due soon, and would put an end either to me or to the suspicion – ‘So long as no N.C.O. is told off to shoot me on the slightest appearance of treachery.’ Such things were known.
As a matter of fact, though I myself had no traffic with the Germans, my mother and her sisters in Germany kept up a desultory cor
respondence through my aunt, Clara von Faber du Faur, whose husband was German Consul at Zürich: a register of the deaths of relatives, and discreet references to the war service of the survivors. My aunts wrote, as their Government had ordered every German with relatives or friends abroad to do, pointing out the righteousness of the German cause, and presenting Germany as the innocent party in a war engineered by France and Russia. My mother, equally strong for the Allied cause, wrote back that they were deluded, but that she forgave them.
The officers I liked best in the battalion, besides Robertson, were Colonel Crawshay and Doctor Dunn. Dunn, a hard-bitten Scot, had served as a trooper in the South African War, and there won the Distinguished Conduct Medal. Now he was far more than a doctor: living at battalion headquarters, he became the right-hand man of three or four colonels in succession. Whoever failed to take his advice usually regretted it afterwards. Once, in the aurumn fighting of 1917, a shell burst among the headquarters staff, knocking out colonel, adjutant, and signal officer. Dunn had no hesitation in becoming a temporary combatant officer of the Royal Welch, resigning his medical duties to the stretcher-bearer sergeant. The men had immense respect for him, and he earned his D.S.O. many times over.
20
FOUR days after the raid we marched through Béthune, now much knocked about and nearly deserted, to Fouquières, and there entrained for the Somme. The Somme railhead was near Amiens, and we proceeded by easy stages through Cardonette, Daours, and Buire until, on the afternoon of July 14th, we came to the original front line, close to where David Thomas, Richardson, and Pritchard had been killed. The fighting had moved two miles on. At 4 a.m. on July 15th, we struck the Méaulte-Fricourt-Bazentin road, which ran through ‘Happy Valley’, and reached the more recent battle area. Wounded and prisoners came streaming past in the half-light. I was shocked by the dead horses and mules; human corpses were all very well, but it seemed wrong for animals to be dragged into the war like this. We marched by platoons, at fifty yards’ distance. Just beyond Fricourt a German shell-barrage made the road impassable; so we left it and moved forward over thickly shell-pitted ground until 8 a.m., when we found ourselves on the fringe of Mametz Wood, among the dead of our own New Army battalions who had helped to capture it. There we halted in thick mist. The Germans had been using lachrymatory shell, and the mist held the fumes, making us cough. We tried to smoke, but our cigarettes tasted of gas, so we threw them away. Later, we cursed ourselves for fools, because it was our throats, not the cigarettes, that were affected.
When the mist cleared, we saw a German gun with ‘First Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers’ chalked on it – evidently a trophy. I wondered what had happened to Siegfried and my friends of ‘A’ Company. We found the battalion quite close in bivouacs; Siegfried was still alive, so were Edmund Dadd, and two other ‘A’ Company officers. The battalion had seen heavy fighting: in their first attack at Fricourt they overran our opposite number in the German Army, the Twenty-third Infantry Regiment, who were undergoing a special disciplinary spell in the trenches because an inspecting staff-officer, coming round, discovered all the officers ensconced in a deep dugout at Mametz village, instead of being up in the trenches with their men. (Edmund Dadd told me that throughout the bad time in March there were no German soldiers of higher rank opposite us than corporals.) The battalion’s next objective was ‘The Quadrangle’, a small copse this side of Mametz Wood, where Siegfried distinguished himself by taking, single-handed, a battalion frontage which the Royal Irish Regiment had failed to take the day before. He went over with bombs in daylight, under covering fire from a couple of rifles, and scared away the occupants. A pointless feat, since instead of signalling for reinforcements, he sat down in the German trench and began reading a book of poems which he had brought with him. When he finally went back he did not even report. Colonel Stockwell, then in command, raged at him. The attack on Mametz Wood had been delayed for two hours because British patrols were still reported to be out ‘British patrols’ were Siegfried and his book of poems. ‘I’d have got you a D.S.O., if you’d only shown more sense,’ stormed Stockwell. Siegfried had been doing heroic things ever since I left the battalion. His nickname in the Sevendi Division was ‘Mad Jack’. He won a Military Cross for bringing in a wounded lance-corporal from a mine-crater close to the German lines, under heavy fire. I missed him this time; he was down with the transport, having a rest But I sent him, by one of our own transport men, a rhymed letter about the times that we were going to have together when the war ended; how, after a rest at Harlech, we were going for a visit to the Caucasus and Persia and China; and what good poetry we would write. This was in answer to a rhymed letter he had written to me from the Army School at Flixécourt a few weeks previously. (It appears in The Old Huntsman.)
I went for a stroll with Edmund Dadd, who now commanded ‘A’ Company. ‘It’s not fair, Robert,’ Edmund began, plaintively. ‘You remember that “A” Company under Richardson was always the best in the battalion? Well, it’s kept up its reputation, and Stockpot shovesus in as the leading company at every show. We get our objectives and hold them, and so we’ve always got to do the same again. The worst of it is, he thinks I’m indispensable; and makes me go over each time, instead of giving me a rest and letting my second-in-command take his turn. I’ve had five shows in just over a fortnight, and I can’t go on being lucky much longer. Stockpot’s about due for his C.B. Apparently “A” Company is making sure he gets it.’
The next two days we spent in bivouacs outside Mametz Wood. We were in fighting kit and felt cold at night, so I went into the wood to find German overcoats to use as blankets. It was full of dead Prussian Guards Reserve, big men, and dead Royal Welch and South Wales Borderers of the New Army battalions, little men. Not a single tree in the wood remained unbroken. I collected my overcoats, and came away as quickly as I could, climbing through the wreckage of green branches. Going and coming, by the only possible route, I passed by the bloated and stinking corpse of a German with his back propped against a tree. He had a green face, spectacles, close-shaven hair; black blood was dripping from the nose and beard. I came across two other unforgettable corpses: a man of the South Wales Borderers and one of the Lehr Regiment had succeeded in bayoneting each other simultaneously. A survivor of the fighting told me later that he had seen a young soldier of the Fourteenth Royal Welch bayoneting a German in parade-ground style, automatically exclaiming: ‘In, out, on guard!’
I was still superstitious about looting or collecting souvenirs. ‘These greatcoats are only a loan,’ I told myself. Our brigade, the Nineteenth, was the reserve brigade of the Thirty-third Division; the other brigades, the Ninety-ninth and Hundredth, had attacked Martinpuich two days previously, but been halted with heavy losses as soon as they started. We were left to sit about in shell-holes and watch our massed artillery blazing away, almost wheel to wheel. On the 18th, we advanced to a position just north of Bazentin-le-Petit, and relieved the Tyneside Irish. I had been posted to ‘D’ Company. Our Irish guide was hysterical and had forgotten the way; we put him under arrest and found it ourselves. On the way up through the ruins of Bazentin-le-Petit, we were shelled with gas-shells. The standing order with regard to gas-shells was not to bother about respirators, but push on. Hitherto, they had all been lachrymatory ones; these were the first of the deadly kind, so we lost half a dozen men.
When at last ‘D’ Company reached the trenches, scooped beside a road and not more than three feet deep, the badly shaken Tyneside company we were relieving hurried off, without any of the usual formalities. I asked their officers where the Germans were. He said he didn’t know, but pointed vaguely towards Martinpuich, a mile to our front. Then I asked him who held our left flank, and how far off they were. He didn’t know. I damned his soul to Hell as he went away. Having got into touch with ‘C’ Company behind us on the right, and the Fourth Suffolks fifty yards to the left, we began deepening the trenches and presently located the Germans – in a trench system some five hundred y
ards to our front, keeping fairly quiet.
The next day, at dinnertime, very heavy shelling started: shells bracketed along the trench about five yards short and five yards over, but never quite got it. Three times running, my cup of tea was spilled by the concussion and filled with dirt. I happened to be in a cheerful mood, and just laughed. My parcel of kippers from home seemed far more important than any bombardment – I recalled with appreciation one of my mother’s sayings: ‘Children, remember this when you eat your kippers; kippers are cheap, yet if they cost a hundred guineas each they would still find buyers among the millionaires.’ A tame magpie had come into the trench; apparently belonging to the Germans driven out of the village by the Gordon Highlanders a day or two before. It looked very bedraggled. ‘That’s one for sorrow,’ I said. The men swore that it made some remark in German as it joined us, and talked of wringing its neck.
Being now off duty, I fell asleep in the trench without waiting for the bombardment to stop. It would be no worse getting killed asleep than awake. There were no dug-outs, of course. I found it quite easy to sleep through bombardments; though vaguely conscious of the noise, I let it go by. Yet if anybody came to wake me for my watch, or shouted ‘Stand-to!’, I was always alert in a second. I could fall asleep sitting down, standing, marching, lying on a stone floor, or in any other position, at a moment’s notice at any time of day or night. But on this occasion I had a fearful nightmare: of somebody handling me secretly, choosing the place to drive a knife into me. Finally, he gripped me in the small of the back. I woke up with a start, shouting, punched at the assassin’s hand – and found I had killed a mouse which had run down my neck for fear of the shells.
Goodbye to All That Page 22