A few days later, when the battalion was back at Morlancourt, and Kinjack was having a look round the Transport lines, he remarked that he wasn’t sure that I wasn’t rather wasted as Transport Officer. ‘I’d much rather be with “C” Company, sir.’ Some sort of anger surged up inside me as I said it…. He agreed. No doubt he had intended me to return to my platoon.
6
Easter was late in April that year; my first three tours of trenches occupied me during the last thirty days of Lent. This essential season in the Church calendar was not, as far as I remember, remarked upon by anyone in my company, although the name of Christ was often on our lips, and Mansfield (when a canister made a mess of the trench not many yards away from him) was even heard to refer to our Saviour as ‘murry old Jesus!’ These innocuous blasphemings of the holy name were a peculiar feature of the War, in which the principles of Christianity were either obliterated or falsified for the convenience of all who were engaged in it. Up in the trenches every man bore his own burden; the Sabbath was not made for man; and if a man laid down his life for his friends it was no part of his military duties. To kill an enemy was an effective action; to bring in one of our own wounded was praiseworthy, but unrelated to our war-aims. The Brigade chaplain did not exhort us to love our enemies. He was content to lead off with the hymn ‘How sweet the name of Jesus sounds’!
I mention this war-time dilemma of the Churches because my own mind was in rather a muddle at that time. I went up to the trenches with the intention of trying to kill someone. It was my idea of getting a bit of my own back. I did not say anything about it to anyone; but it was this feeling which took me out patrolling the mine-craters whenever an opportunity offered itself. It was a phase in my war experience – no more irrational than the rest of the proceedings, I suppose; it was an outburst of blind bravado which now seems paltry when I compare it with the behaviour of an officer like Julian Durley, who did everything that was asked of him as a matter of course.
Lent, as I said before, was not observed by us. Barton got somewhere near observing it one evening. We had just returned to our dug-out after the twilight ritual of ‘standing-to’. The rations had come up, and with them the mail. After reading a letter from his wife he looked at me and said: ‘O Kangar, how I wish I were a cathedral organist!’ (I was known as ‘the Kangaroo’ in ‘C’ company.) His remark, which had no connection with any religious feeling, led us on to pleasant reminiscences of cathedral closes. Nothing would be nicer, we thought, than to be sauntering back, after Evensong, to one of those snug old houses, with a book of anthems under our arms – preferably on a mild evening toward the end of October. (In his civilian days Barton had attended race meetings regularly; his musical experience had been confined to musical comedy.)
The mail that evening had brought me a parcel from Aunt Evelyn, which contained two pots of specially good jam. Ration jam was usually in tins, and of tins it tasted. Barton gazed affectionately at the coloured label, which represented a cherry-growing landscape. The label was a talisman which carried his mind safely to the home counties of England. He spoke of railway travelling: ‘Do you remember the five-thirty from Paddington? What a dear old train it was!’ Helping himself to a spoonful of cherry jam he mentally passed through Maidenhead in a Pullman carriage…. The mail had also brought me the balance sheet of the Ringwell Hunt. These Hunt accounts made me feel homesick. And it appeared that the late Mr S. Colwood had subscribed ten pounds. He must have sent it early in September, just before he was killed. No doubt he wrote the cheque in a day dream about hunting….
In the meantime we were down in that frowsty smelling dug-out, listening to the cautious nibbling of rats behind the wooden walls; and above ground there was the muffled boom of something bursting. And two more officers had been killed. Not in our company though. The Germans had put up another mine that afternoon without doing us any damage. Their trenches were only a hundred and fifty yards from ours; in some places less than fifty. It was a sector of the line which specialized in mines; more than half of our 750-yard frontage was pitted with mine-craters, some of them fifty feet deep….
‘They were digging in front of Bois Français Trench again last night,’ I remarked.
Barton had just received a message from battalion headquarters saying that the company front was to be thoroughly patrolled.
‘I’ll take O’Brien out with me tonight,’ I added.
Barton’s ruddy face had resumed the worried expression which it wore when messages came from Kinjack or the Adjutant.
‘All right, Kangar; but do be careful. It puts the fear of God into me when you’re out there and I’m waiting for you to come in.’
It put the fear of God into me too, but it was the only escape into freedom which I could contrive, up in those trenches opposite Fricourt and Mametz. And I was angry with the War.
Memory eliminates the realities of bodily discomfort which made the texture of trench-life what it was. Mental activity was clogged and hindered by gross physical actualities. It was these details of discomfort which constituted the humanity of an infantryman’s existence. Being in the trenches meant among other things having a ‘trench-mouth’.
I can see myself sitting in the sun in a nook among the sandbags and chalky debris behind the support line. There is a strong smell of chloride of lime. I am scraping the caked mud off my wire-torn puttees with a rusty entrenching tool. Last night I was out patrolling with Private O’Brien, who used to be a dock labourer at Cardiff. We threw a few Mills’ bombs at a German working-party who were putting up some wire and had no wish to do us any harm. Probably I am feeling pleased with myself about this. Now and again a leisurely five-nine shell passes overhead in the blue air where the larks are singing. The sound of the shell is like water trickling into a can. The curve of its trajectory sounds peaceful until the culminating crash. A little weasel runs past my outstretched feet, glancing at me with tiny bright eyes, apparently unafraid. One of our shrapnel shells, whizzing over to the enemy lines, bursts with a hollow crash. Against the clear morning sky a cloud of dark smoke expands and drifts away. Slowly its dingy wrestling vapours take the form of a hooded giant with clumsy expostulating arms. Then, with a gradual gesture of acquiescence, it lolls sideways, falling over into the attitude of a swimmer on his side. And so it dissolves into nothingness. Perhaps the shell has killed someone. Whether it has or whether it hasn’t, I continue to scrape my puttees, and the weasel goes about his business. The sun strokes the glinting wings of an aeroplane, foraging away westward. Somewhere on the slope behind me a partridge makes its unmilitary noise – down there where Dick was buried a few weeks ago. Dick’s father was a very good man with a gun, so Dick used to say….
Down in the reserve line I was sitting in the gloom of the steel hut (like being inside a boiler) reading a novel by candle-light while Barton and Mansfield snored on their beds and my servant Flook sang ‘Dixieland’ in some adjoining cubby-hole. Being in reserve was a sluggish business; in the front line we were much less morose. Outside there was a remote rumble going on, like heavy furniture being moved about in a room overhead. But the little wooden weather-vane on the roof kept on spinning and rattling, as though nothing were amiss with the world. Then the patter of rain began, and I shivered and turned chilly and thought of home and safety. It was time to be going up with that working-party. We should be out from eight till midnight, piling sandbags on the parapet of the front-line trench, which had suffered from the wet weather.
It was a pitch dark night. As we were going up across the open to the support line, the bombardment, about two miles away in the low country on our left, reached a climax. The sky winked and flickered like a thunderstorm gone crazy. It was a battle seen in miniature against a screen of blackness. Rocket-lights, red and white, curved upward; in the rapid glare of bursting explosives the floating smoke showed rufous and tormented; it was like the last hour of Gomorrah; one couldn’t imagine anything left alive there. But it was only a small local attack –
probably a raid by fifty men, which would be reported in two lines of the G.H.Q. communiqué. It would soon be our turn to do a raid. The Brigadier had made it quite clear that he ‘wanted a prisoner’. One would be enough. He wanted to make certain what troops were in front of us.
For identification purposes a dead body would be better than nothing, Kinjack said. O’Brien and I went out one moonlight night into a part of no-man’s-land where there were no mine-craters. We had been instructed to bring in a dead body which (so our Observation Officer said) was lying out there. The Germans had been across the night before, cutting our wire, and the Lewis-gun officer was certain that he had inflicted severe casualties on them. Anyhow, a pair of boots could be seen sticking up out of a shell-hole. But when we arrived at the boots we found them attached to the body of a French soldier who had been there several months. I didn’t like this much; but O’Brien whispered to me: ‘T’Colonel shall have t’boot,’ and the boot, with half a leg on it, was sent down to Kinjack, as a proof of our efficiency.
Prisoners were seldom seen at that time. I never saw one myself until the Somme battle began in the summer. The landscape was in front of us; similar in character to the one behind us, but mysterious with its unknown quality of being ‘behind the Boche line’. We could see the skeleton villages of Fricourt and Mametz, and the ruinous cemetery (which the men called ‘the rest camp’). But the enemy was invisible. On still nights our sleepy sentries heard him cough from the far side of the craters. He patrolled, and we patrolled. Often when I was crawling about on my belly, I imagined a clod of earth to be a hostile head and shoulders watching me from a shell-hole. But patrols had a sensible habit of avoiding personal contact with one another. Men in the Tunnelling Company who emerged, blinking and dusty white, from the mine-shafts, had heard the enemy digging deep underground. They may even have heard the muffled mutter of German voices. But, apart from the projectiles he sent us, the enemy was, as far as we were concerned, an unknown quantity. The Staff were the people who knew all about him….
Spring arrived late that year. Or was it that spring kept away from the front line as long as possible? Up there it seemed as though the winter would last for ever. On wet days the trees a mile away were like ash-grey smoke rising from the naked ridges, and it felt very much as if we were at the end of the world. And so we were; for that enemy world (which by daylight we saw through loopholes or from a hidden observation post) had no relation to the landscape of life. It had meant the end of the world for the man whose helmet was still lying about the trench with a jagged hole through it. Steel hats (which our Division had begun to wear in February) couldn’t keep out a rifle bullet….
By five o’clock on a frosty white morning it would be daylight. Trees and broken roofs emerged here and there from the folds of mist that drifted in a dense blur; above them were the white shoals and chasms of the sky flushed with the faint pink of dawn. Standing-to at dawn was a desolate affair. The men stamped their feet and rats scurried along the crannied parapets. But we’d had our tot of rum, and we were to be relieved that afternoon…. Dandelions had begun to flower along the edges of the communication trenches. This was a sign of spring, I thought, as we filed down Canterbury Avenue, with the men making jokes about the estaminet in Morlancourt. Estaminet! What a memory-evoking word!… It was little enough that they had to go back to.
As for me, I had more or less made up my mind to die; the idea made things easier. In the circumstances there didn’t seem to be anything else to be done. I only mention the fact because it seems, now, so strange that I should have felt like that when I had so much of my life to lose. Strange, too, was the thought of summer. It meant less mud, perhaps, but more dust; and the ‘big push’ was always waiting for us.
Safe in Morlancourt, I slept like a log. Sleep was a wonderful thing when one came back from the Line; but to wake was to remember. Talking to Joe Dottrell did me good. A new transport officer had arrived – a Remount man from England. It was said that he had been combed out of a cushy job. I was glad I’d given up the transport. Glad, too, to be able to ride out on the black mare.
After the ugly weather in the trenches a fine afternoon in the wood above Méaulte was something to be thankful for. The undergrowth had been cut down, and there were bluebells and cowslips and anemones, and here and there a wild-cherry tree in blossom. Teams of horses, harrowing the uplands, moved like a procession, their crests blown by the wind. But the rural spirit of the neighbourhood had been chased away by supply sheds and R.E. stores and the sound of artillery on the horizon. Albert (where Jules Verne used to live), with its two or three chimney-stacks and the damaged tower of the basilica, showed above a line of tall trees along the riverside; a peaceful medley of roofs as I watched it, but in reality a ruined and deserted town. And in the foreground Bécourt church tower peeped above a shoulder of hill like a broken tooth.
Anyhow the black mare had got the better of the new transport officer. That was something, I thought, as I jogged home again.
My faithful servant Flook always contrived to keep me supplied with oranges when we were up in the trenches. An orange, and taking my sodden boots off whenever I got the chance (though it was against the rules), were my two favourite recreations in the front line. Flook called me (with an orange) at two in the morning; I had to relieve Ormand, who had been on duty since midnight. The orange woke me up. But it was a wet night, and I’d been out with the wiring-party from ten till twelve. Lugging coils of concertina wire along a narrow trench swilling with mud and water wasn’t much fun. Stumbling with it over shell-holes and trip-wires was worse. However, we had got quite a lot out….
Once I’d shaken off my stupor it wasn’t so bad to be out in the night air. The rain had stopped and Ormand had nothing to report. For the next two hours I should loiter up and down with my knobkerrie in my hand; now and again I had a whack at a rat running along the parados. From one ‘bay’ to another I went, stopping for a word in an undertone with the sentries; patient in their waterproof sheets they stood on the firestep, peering above the parapet until bleak daylight began to show itself. The trench was falling in badly in places after the rain….
Then there was the bombing-post up a sap which went thirty or forty yards out into no-man’s-land. Everything had been very quiet, the bombers muttered….
Back in the main trench, I stood on the firestep to watch the sky whitening. Sad and stricken the country emerged. I could see the ruined village below the hill and the leafless trees that waited like sentries up by Contalmaison. Down in the craters the dead water took a dull gleam from the sky. I stared at the tangles of wire and the leaning posts, and there seemed no sort of comfort left in life. My steel hat was heavy on my head while I thought how I’d been on leave last month. I remembered how I’d leant my elbows on Aunt Evelyn’s front gate. (It was my last evening.) That twilight, with its thawing snow, made a comfortable picture now. John Homeward had come past with his van, plodding beside his weary horse. He had managed to make his journey, in spite of the state of the roads…. He had pulled up for a few minutes, and we’d talked about Dixon, who had been such an old friend of his. ‘Ay; Tom was a good chap; I’ve never known a better….’ He had said good-bye and good-night and set his horse going again. As he turned the corner the past had seemed to go with him….
And here I was, with my knobkerrie in my hand, staring across at the enemy I’d never seen. Somewhere out of sight beyond the splintered tree-tops of Hidden Wood a bird had begun to sing. Without knowing why, I remembered that it was Easter Sunday. Standing in that dismal ditch, I could find no consolation in the thought that Christ was risen. I sploshed back to the dug-out to call the others up for ‘stand-to’.
with friends
The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston 1 - Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man Page 31