Luckily the problem did not concern me, as there was only a short time to while away before joining the lorry-party for Amiens. For the first time for a fortnight I was scrupulous about the lustre of my buttons and the shine on boots and Sam Brown belt. Not that these have not been cleaned every day, but simply that, whereas this daily polish was a matter of routine, I was now anxious to look clean and well-turned-out in front of officers from the other regiments of the Brigade. From the geographical point of view, the 23rd Infantry Brigade was a mixed one, comprising, besides the 2nd Devons and ourselves, the 2nd Battalions of the Middlesex and the Scottish Rifles. The clash of dialects was consequently so marked that it sometimes happened that the men of one unit could barely understand those of another. Still, all the Battalions being regular formations brought back from Eastern service, there was a solid core of Cockneys who spoke “pidgin-Hindustani” in each one, so that a sort of lingua franca was available in case of difficulties !
I learned from orderly room that I was the only officer from the regiment going with the party, which, on reaching the lorry, I found to include representatives of the Brigade Machine-Gun Company and Trench Mortar Battery as well as of the line regiments. Only one of them was known to me, a temporary captain whose regiment shall not be specified. B——was one of the very few officers I met in France who conformed to the type popularised by Journey's End or All Quiet . . ., personally gallant, floridly handsome, and devil-may-care, but a “soaker,” a womaniser, and one whose language was a string of blasphemies. He was in short one of those whom Matheson, with true Canadian pithiness, described as “solid ivory from the shoulders up, with never a thought above his navel.” However, for want of any one more congenial, he was an agreeable enough companion for a short while. His conversation chiefly concerned the quantity of liquor he would be able to imbibe during the day, so I foresaw little difficulty in giving him the slip in Amiens.
The lorry jerked protestingly in low gear along the crowded, pitted roads until Albert was reached. There we craned our necks from under the tarpaulin hood to catch a glimpse of the Virgin leaning at a perilous angle from the Cathedral tower. Few of us had seen this famous phenomenon, though all were familiar with it from illustrations in the papers from home.
It was the town's one show-piece. All else was squalid and depressing. Even in the days of its prosperity Albert could never have been picturesque. Now it was in the least attractive stage of decay. There was something impressive in the remains of a town or village shattered by shell-fire. For all their wreckage there was an affinity between them and the ruins of ancient monasteries in rural England. Indeed, once the tide of war had left them in its wake, and Nature had covered their scars with a mantle of grass and weeds it was difficult to believe that they had been populous centres a bare two years previously. But the intermediate stage, when the civilian inhabitants had left and the guns had no more than started their work of destruction, was merely depressing. So it was with Albert. Here and there the red-brick artisan's houses had already tumbled into heaps of dust and rubble, but for the most part were still standing. You could truthfully say that “the love and laughter and work and hum of the city were utterly dead,” yet though the houses had ceased to be homes they were still tenanted, as the notice-boards showed, by the hundred and one heterogeneous units which clung round the skirts of the army. Their souls had gone with their window-panes, and not even the hessian blinds which flapped over window or doorway could hide their hollowness. Albert was a corpse in which an ichneumon life still lingered.
We steered through the town and out on to the long road which marches straight as a foot-rule between its poplars into Amiens. As the congestion lessened and the surface improved our speed increased. But the worst of lorry riding was that, except for the fortunate ones who had managed to take the seats next to the driver, the passengers could only get a view astern. All we could do was to balance ourselves precariously on petrol tins and watch the road peeling off into the distance behind. Of the surrounding country we could see nothing until it came into our wake. Not that we seemed to be missing much. If the ground was less battered by hostilities than the trench area, the effect was much the same. The hand of war, working with spade and mud, had dealt with it almost as thoroughly as high-explosive. The feeble winter grass had been trampled into the mire under camps and horse-standings. Lorry wheels and caterpillar tracks had done their work as effectively as the plough. Smoke-blackened incinerators stood where once there had been haystacks. The roadside banks were pock-marked with scooped shelters, disfigured by tarpaulin lean-to's, on which the bare, grey poplars looked down as if with disfavour. The fields were full of Australian transport and horses, and of the less mobile units of the army services.
We slowed down through Querrieu, where the red and black pennon with its boar's head device proclaimed the residence of the army commander, the man who held in his hands the destinies of the greatest host the English peoples had ever launched to battle. Then on again until the open country gave place to town, and we ran into Amiens, coming to a halt in the square outside the station. We looked about us goggle-eyed. There was not one of us who did not feel a flutter of excitement. Civilisation ! A city with shops, restaurants, and civilian women ! It was for all the world like the thrill of adventure experienced in distant schooldays when school bounds were lifted and we had been allowed in term-time to visit a neighbouring town. We scrambled out, agreed on the hour to rendezvous for the return journey, and split up to go our various ways.
In the succeeding years I was to come to know Amiens well, but this was my first visit, and the impression it left on me was one of disappointment. The first elation born of being again in civilisation was momentary. It evaporated rapidly, leaving me with a feeling that I had been deluded, and that notwithstanding its bustle, its shops, and its civilians, Amiens was really as much an integral part of the battle front as Albert or even Meaulte. The difference was one of degree only, and the air of business and forced gaiety was but a veneer over the real life of the city which was as much preoccupied with war as were we visitors from the mud-belt nearer the Germans. It was only necessary to observe the civilians. The men, as we had expected, were either all in uniform or else stooping ancients and gawky youths too big for their knickerbocker suits. It was the women who were the disillusionment. Young or old, they were almost all garbed in black—how thorough the French are in their mourning, and how they appear to rejoice in it !—and not in black only, but in the roughest kinds of black stuffs, with black woollen shawls, black coarse stockings, black slovenly boots. What a contrast was here with the voluptuous Kirchner drawings we had pinned to our dug-out walls or with memories from our last leave of London shopgirls outside Victoria Station, our first and therefore abiding glimpse of English womanhood, pert, fresh - complexioned, silken - hosed, and neatly dressed ! Who was it had told us that French women were beautiful, or knew how to wear their clothes ? Bah ! these women of Amiens with their flat peasant faces and their shuffling walk were drab bundles of humanity possessing none of those feminine attractions of which we had had our visions. That they were representative of the sturdy soul of France, mothers, wives, and daughters of her troops, each one of them bowed with past loss or ever-present anxiety for loved ones in danger, we never paused to consider. We had come to Amiens with high hopes. These were not realised. That was all.
There are those who will ascribe our reaction to frustrated carnal desires. (Indeed this aspect of war-time existence has already been emphasised out of all reason.) But it is not the truth. There were not unnaturally many whose animal natures, suppressed during long periods in the line, ran amok at every fleeting opportunity for indulgence. Yet these men would not normally be unduly deterred by appearance. A woman was to them a woman. If good-looking, so much the better, but good looks were only an unexpected pleasure, not an essential. The truth lies far deeper. Our life was not only celibate for long periods, but was one in which all the softer if not the finer
influences were absent. It was a rough, dirty life, often lacking the ordinary amenities of peace-time and almost always the more sensuous refinements. It was not surprising, therefore, that Woman stood as a symbol of much that we were missing, and so we came not perhaps to idealise her, but to build up each his own idea of a dream woman, a “woman of the horizon,” some one who should be soft, and silken, and scented. As often as not the image might be inspired by nothing more truly beautiful than a drawing of the “chocolate-box” variety in some illustrated periodical. It is not without significance that the song, “The girl I love is on a magazine cover,” was popular. The point is that the longing was sensuous as opposed to sensual. And this is indicated by the fact that the shapeless, cart-horse peasant women of Flanders and Picardy, although essentially women, did not satisfy our conceptions. Actually Woman, though a symbol, was not the only one. You could watch the men giving expression to the same feeling in the delight with which they played with the local children. You could recognise it also in the eagerness with which we rushed to buy silk pyjamas, scented soaps, and other minor luxuries whenever we got the opportunity. They were each aids to escape. I, who even at Cambridge had never thought of using bath crystals, found myself buying some in Bethune on coming out of my first tour in the trenches.
Even now one of the excuses for my visit to Amiens was to procure some hair-oil, not the conventional English variety, for that I could have got from the Expeditionary Force Canteen, but the highly perfumed yellow pomade one bought in little glass jars with gold labels. Other requisites were a razor, “cut-throat” type, and some khaki collars. Neither purchase presented much difficulty, except that I learnt to ask for a “42” razor and to give my size in collars as “quarante-et-un” instead of 16. As it happened, I should have been better advised to have got my collars from the canteen, for their colour disappeared with the first washing, leaving them an anaemic yellow and bringing down on me an official reprimand for wearing them! Lastly, there was the matter of some drawing materials to supplement the rather grubby sketchbook which I always carried with me, and in particular to attempt to record certain incidents which seemed to merit illustration. I had naturally in mind the observation made to Mac on patrol about “the conscientious objectors firing their recruits' course,” and that other retort, overheard at the Citadel, warning workers of the fate which awaited any one who stopped to pick flowers alongside the decauville track.
Though my actual purchases were few, my shopping took me a long time. There was so much to see, so many temptations to squander money. It says something for my self-control that after so long away from shops I did not succumb and buy for the sheer joy of buying. Inquiries of various people during the morning had elicited the information that one might eat well at the Hotel du Rhin, the Belfort, the Godebert, or the Savoy. The last having the added recommendation of a familiar name, we repaired thither to eat an extravagant but not too costly meal, the plat de resistance of which was a huge langouste, that clawless cousin of the lobster, about the exact English name of which there was some speculation. It was pleasant to sit down again to a civilised meal in surroundings bordering on the luxurious, but when we came to get up, we found that energy had gone from us. Gone was the eagerness to poke round the shops, the zest in searching for fresh sights. We were content to saunter gently about till the time came for our return. We did, however, inspect “Aux Huitres” and “Charley's Bar” in the quaintly named “Rue Corps Nu sans Teste”—what a smack of the Middle Ages there was about that name !—and the great cathedral rising out of its protective padding of sandbags. But we agreed that Amiens had little to show. Its restaurants seemed to have impressed us most— langouste and mayonnaise was a real breath from another world—and there was no one who was disappointed to leave it when the time came to go. Even B——, in the words of a Canadian, had “collected such a bun that he was glad to take it home with him.” The impressions left by the return journey were, like so many lorry rides during the war, that I was rather uncomfortable and very cold. The inner warmth and somnolence engendered by a heavy meal soon wore off, while the biting coldness of the early morning returned with the dark. The result was that what with the cold, the jolting of the lorry, and the petrol fumes, we all felt numb and a little queasy when we were deposited on the road outside the Citadel about 6 p.m.
Moreover, it was to a couple of very morose officers that I returned. Not that this was surprising, for to have been confined to the camp all day with nothing to do and with no practical means of keeping warm was hardly conducive to high spirits. Both Mac and George were huddled in trench coats and blankets close to the brazier, which after the manner of braziers was succeeding in giving more smoke than heat just when warmth was most needed. Mac nodded towards it. “There's no coke left, so we've had to burn coal again.” The working party had got back all right, he replied in answer to my question. “At least our chaps are all right. They had a rough time. Got badly strafed several times during the day, and were lucky only to have two men wounded. Both of A Company, I think.”
This was all the news. No orders had arrived, and nothing more was known as to our movements. There were the usual rumours, possibly more explicit and persistent than usual, that we were going to follow the transport back eventually, but nothing definite as to where we were going or whether into rest or on to some other front. One official document had arrived, and this turned out to be a series of rules and orders issued by the Divisional Commander, a new one whom we had not seen, but who was reputed to be a bit of a slave-driver. These were intended to govern the conduct of battalions in and near the front line. We read them through with growing amusement. “‘Units must arrange that no man remains in the front line for more than 48 hours’ That's a good start, but listen to this. ‘Every Battalion moving up to the front must carry up as many trench boards as can be arranged.’ ‘Every endeavour must be made to construct new and improve existing trenches.’” (“That means picks and shovels,” chimed in George. “Yes, and wire and screw pickets,” added Mac.) “‘Spare S.A.A. should always be carried for the use of Lewis guns.’ ‘The danger of trench feet is now considerable. If possible, each man should be supplied with a small bottle of whale-oil for his personal use.’” (“Glory be,” exclaimed Mac, “whatever next ?”)
“Anyway,” I said, “if we take a trench-board, a bottle of whale-oil, a pick and shovel, a coil of wire, a box of S.A.A. and some mills bombs, and add them to the panoply that Mr. Atkins already has to carry, he will be a sight worth seeing.”
“Yes,” put in George, “but you've missed the cream of the lot. See here. ‘Rifle fire is becoming more important every day.’ Damn it all, a bloke gets few enough chances to use his bundook now ! How in Hell is the poor perisher going to use it at all if he's got to carry enough for a draught camel !”
Mac produced a copy of John Bull just received from home. There across the front page was blazoned the title of the great Horatio Bottomley's weekly article. “Non-stop to Berlin,” it declared. It was too good an opportunity to be missed. To us whose experience of the line was so recent, the spectacle of an infantryman up to his knees in mud, piled as high with impedimenta as a heavy-weight furniture remover, yet moving non-stop to Berlin, was ludicrous in the extreme. Those orders were a welcome comic relief. The new drawing materials were dragged out at once, and despite the cold and the discomfort of sprawling on unyielding boards, some attempt was made to record the absurdity on paper. Meantime the brazier puffed smoke, Briggs came and went, apologetically serving the best meal that Purkiss could manage with his depleted resources, and the tent grew steadily colder.
Yet chilled and despondent though we might be, the servants were in unaccountably high spirits, and from their tent which adjoined ours, and which did duty as kitchen as well as sleeping quarters, came repeated peals of laughter, occasioned by the quick Cockney wit of Purkiss or the pungency of Parkin's retorts. Few people got the better of Private Parkin at repartee. Though the reply might be sl
ow in coming, it was usually devastating. Was there not an occasion at a Christmas night jollification, when amid the revelry Parkin was sitting silent and apparently lugubrious. One Drake, slightly “oiled,” went up to him, slapped him on the shoulder, and said:
“Cheer up, Parkin ! Damn it all, what's the matter ? You look as if you were going to give birth to a baby elephant.”
A grunt from Parkin.
“Tell me,” Drake went on, “what would you do if you suddenly did produce a baby elephant ?”
“I'd suckle it,” came the reply without a smile or change of countenance.
Parkin was a man of many parts. Asked what his civilian occupation was, he would reply, “I mind a donkey engine at ——'s works, but I don't do much to it. I pay a young lad to do that for me.”
Twelve Days on the Somme: A Memoir of the Trenches, 1916 Page 13