We climbed in with the nearest approach to alacrity we could muster, and such was our preoccupation with making our temporary quarters as comfortable as we could that no one of us had the imagination to lean out of the window and take a last look at the “Somme,” to listen to the muffled drumming of the guns, or watch their flashes stabbing the oncoming dusk. We were still arranging ourselves to the best advantage, when, without warning, there was a grating of wheels on rusting lines, and we were off.
It was only then that we became sensible of our damp and mud-plastered condition, which obtruded itself not only in the shape of feet which became rapidly like blocks of ice, but in the stale, sickly odour of wet clothes and the mud itself. We had lived with it and in it for so long that we had ceased to notice it till the mere fact of being in a railway carriage again brought it back to our nostrils. The explanation was probably that, noses being the keenest aids to memory, we sought unconsciously but in vain for the familiar smells of English railway travel, only to register infallibly the “bouquet des tranchées” we had brought with us,
Not that any reference was made to this phenomenon. The business in hand was to get comfortable. For this the first requisite was a light and, George producing a stub of candle, this was lit and stuck on the top of a steel helmet. No matter with what care we shielded it from draughts it repeatedly went out, and even while it remained alight it flickered and guttered abominably. Nevertheless its uncertain gleams were sufficient to allow us to hunt through packs and haversacks for any forgotten or closely hoarded scrap of provender, and the search yielding nothing more exciting than a bar or two of chocolate and the inevitable biscuits and bully, these were duly eaten and washed down with the last drops of whisky in our water-bottles. Though this took time it must not be thought that the train was bowling merrily on its way. Far from it. War-time journeying on the French railways was always an affair of starts and stoppages, but at no time or place during the whole war was it worse than in the Somme area during that winter of 1916. Every few minutes the train would grind and shudder to a standstill. It might remain stationary, its engine gently exhaling steam or whistling in a tone of plaintive inquiry, for any period from a few seconds up to half an hour, then with a jerk and a groan, creak onwards for a few more hundred yards. We soon wearied of poking our heads out of the windows each time to see where we were, for there was nothing to see. We never seemed to halt at a station, and the only exhibit would probably be an aged and hirsute French railwayman, armed with a little trumpet on which he would toot, or who would attempt to harangue our engine-driver from the rear-end of the train. Besides, now that the first excitement was ebbing, the craving for sleep was stealing over us, sapping minds and bodies of their energy. We were short of sleep and were not to be denied, so each one of us independently loosened his puttees, unbuttoned his jacket, curled up in his corner in such a way that his trench coat would cover feet as well as shoulders, and with pack or helmet as pillow soon passed into a fitful slumber.
It is meet here to interpolate a word in praise of the steel helmet. Æsthetically it was a failure—though not so mediævally hideous as the coalscuttles worn by the enemy—but though it might be less graceful a headgear than the French equivalent, it more efficiently fulfilled the protective purpose for which it was designed. The beauty of it was that it could also, as you have seen, be used when occasion demanded as a candle-stick, or, without its lining, as a washing-bowl. Inverted, it was equally serviceable as a pillow or a seat. Indeed, most of us at some time during the wait at Grove Town had eased our legs by sitting down on our helmets.
Hour succeeded hour as the train jerked and clattered through the night, and we snored, turned, half awoke, rearranged ourselves, and dozed off again. Nobody would pretend that we were comfortable, but we must have slept for quite respectable stretches because we had no idea of the passage of time. Yet we were vaguely conscious always of the spasmodic lurching of the train and the noises outside whenever it stopped. At the big junction of Longeau, outside Amiens—little did we dream that we should know this same station in daylight two years later when it would be under shell-fire from the enemy we had now pushed back at such a cost !—we were properly aroused to consciousness by a demonstration of the musical shunting so dear to our gallant allies. So far as we could judge from the sounds and the flashing of lamps in the darkness, the procedure was for the shunter to blow a ta ! ta ! ta ! on his trumpet for the operation to begin. When the backing train was a few yards from the trucks to be coupled, he would yell “Arretez !” and blow a quick blast. These vocal and instrumental efforts were entirely lost on the engine-driver, who almost inevitably waited till, with a resounding crash, he had run into the stationary vehicles before he applied his brakes. It was an interesting sidelight on the Gallic mind, but then, as Mac observed with a yawn, “What can you expect of a country where even the butcher and the baker blow some musical instrument when they come to your door ?”
Even had we then known that Longeau was an important railway junction just outside Amiens, we should have been none the wiser as to our destination or the direction in which we were proceeding, so little did the ordinary company officer, let alone the rank and file, know of the movements of his own unit or the lie of the land “behind the front.” (Later, during a temporary attachment on the staffs of the brigade and division, I was to realise the truth of this still more forcibly.) At the time, the shunting about at Longeau was merely a peculiarly prolonged and irritating disturbance in the long series of disturbances that kept jerking us back to wakefulness, or so it seemed, each time we managed to doze off.
At last there came a halt accompanied by English voices shouting in the darkness, followed by the sound of carriage doors banging. Wearily we roused ourselves. Lights showed here and there, but it was still night. The familiar ringing tones of the Regimental Sergeant-Major, “Come on, there ! All out ! All out !” removed any uncertainty. We had reached our destination, wherever it might be.
Sleep-drugged, leaden-footed, with our vitalities at their lowest ebb, we made clumsily hasty efforts to collect our scattered paraphernalia, forced unwilling fingers to buckle on equipment, and almost fell as we dropped from our compartment on to the permanent way. Followed a jostling and pushing in the gloom, men elbowing their way towards the voices of Company Sergeant-Majors raised in a medley of “D Company, this way !” “Fall in here, A Company !” “B Company, fall in here, B Company !”
Where the hell were we ? As we blundered towards the sound of Scott's voice we passed a station notice-board whereon by the wobbling light of a hanging lantern we read the one word “OISEMONT.” Where was Oisemont ? What was it ? The unasked question was answered by the thought, Why worry ? We were obviously far from the battle zone, witness the fresh keen air which blew sharply on our faces and sent shivers down bodies a-chill after the night's inaction. Still in a torpor, we took our places with the Company, registered rather than heard the command to move off, mechanically repeated it, and found ourselves on the march. Our footsteps, faltering at first, quickly gained in vigour, till they rang bravely on cobbled setts, echoed through the village and crunched out on to a crisp, firm road where the before-dawn wind blew stronger. Let it blow ! By now we were awake, action had restored our circulations, and the wind had no longer any power to numb us. Instead it came as a breath of deliverance out of the night, reassuring us of the existence of green fields, and copses, and farmsteads with smoking cowsheds and all the thousand-and-one sights of the countryside which we could not yet see with our own eyes.
Slowly but surely our spirits rose. The march had begun in silence, then a few muttered remarks, soon a rising flow of conversation, conjecture, and chuckles. And as we marched, the sky began its imperceptible change from dull black to that queer translucent grey. Dimly we were aware that our path lay between the shoulders of hills that humped up above us, dark shapes that made me think of the English Downs in prehistoric ages. The light grew steadily stronger. We saw everything
in varying tones of grey, save where the road ran white through the chalk. Soon colour would appear.
Meanwhile a spasm ran through the column, like the contraction of a concertina or the ripple of buffer hitting buffer as a goods train shunts backwards. There had been a momentary halt in front, and as we moved on we passed a figure attended by stretcher-bearers lying on the grass—Yes ! by God, we could see it was green !—by the roadside. “Sergeant Greenwood, the Orderly-room Sergeant, sir, has fainted,” explained Scott.
It was now nearly light. We could see clearly about us, found that we were in country indeed, still the same downland country of the Somme, but with what a difference. We needed no eyes to tell us that it was unscarred by battle, but more welcome still, we could detect no trace of it having been fouled and spoilt by military occupation. The fields bore no marks of encampments, no incinerators with their piles of charred tins; the cottages no notice-boards or billeting signs. Instead, comfortable farmsteads with buff walls of crude lath and plaster, with strings of dried beans rustling under the eaves, nestled amid trees in the folds of the hills. Each, after the manner of French farms, was built around three sides of a square, the centre of which was the manure heap and general refuse dump, from which the house and outbuildings were separated by a cobbled causeway. As we passed one, more dilapidated than the rest, which stood on the roadside, Scott, marching at my side, jerked his thumb towards the walls underneath whose cracked plaster the lath framework could be seen in patches, and quietly said:
“It seems to me, sir, that the way they build a farm in France is to put up a lot of sticks and then throw muck at them. What sticks is the house. What falls down is the midden.”
We marched on, keenly alert to each fresh, welcome sight, scent, and sound. Just as the sun tried to force its way through the morning sky, the road dropped between high hawthorn hedges, behind which sheltered apple orchards and tilled fields. A score of magpies, flirting their beautiful tails, rose scolding us, and winged away on their dipping flight. And on the outskirts of the tiny hamlet which was to be our home for a month of glorious recreation, an ass, a patient domesticated farmyard ass, and none of your military mules, poked his rugged head over a gate and brayed us a long and hearty welcome.
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Twelve Days on the Somme: A Memoir of the Trenches, 1916 Page 15