The Penguin Book of First World War Stories

by None

  Stan’s got a bagful of big, noble ideas; all schemed out carefully, with what he calls ‘captions’ attached.

  Well, I can’t say nothing against big, noble ideas. I was a red-hot Labour-man myself for a time, forty years ago now, when the Kayser’s war ended and the war-profiteers began treading us ex-heroes into the mud. But that’s all over long ago – in fact, Labour’s got a damn sight too respectable for my taste! Worse than Tories, most of their leaders is now – especially them that used to be the loudest in rendering ‘We’ll Keep the Red Flag Flying Still’.1 They’re all Churchwardens now, or country gents, if they’re not in the House of Lords.

  Anyhow, yesterday Stan came around, about a big Ban-the-Bomb march all the way across England to Trafalgar Square. And couldn’t I persuade a few of my old comrades to form a special squad with a banner marked ‘First World War Veterans Protest Against the Bomb’? He wanted us to head the parade, ribbons, crutches, wheel-chairs and all.

  I put my foot down pretty hard. ‘No, Mr Stanley,’ I said politely, ‘I regret as I can’t accept your kind invitation.’

  ‘But why?’ says he. ‘You don’t want another war, Grandfather, do you? You don’t want mankind to be annihilated? This time it won’t be just a few unlucky chaps killed, like Uncle Arthur in the First War, and Dad in the Second… It will be all mankind.’

  ‘Listen, young ’un,’ I said. ‘I don’t trust nobody who talks about mankind – not parsons, not politicians, nor anyone else. There ain’t no such thing as “mankind”, not practically speaking there ain’t.’

  ‘Practically speaking, Grandfather,’ says young Stan, ‘there is. Mankind means all the different nations lumped together – us, the Russians, the Americans, the Germans, the French, and all the rest of them. If the bomb goes off, everyone’s finished.’

  ‘It’s not going off,’ I says.

  ‘But it’s gone off twice already – at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,’ he argues, ‘so why not again? The damage will be definitely final when it does go off.’

  I wouldn’t let Stan have the last word. ‘In the crazy, old-fashioned war in which I lost my foot,’ I said, a bit sternly, ‘the Fritzes used poison gas. They thought it would help ’em to break through at Wipers. But somehow the line held, and soon our factories were churning out the same stinking stuff for us to use on them. All right, and now what about Hitler’s war?’

  ‘What about it?’ Stan asks.

  ‘Well,’ I says, ‘everyone in England was issued an expensive mask in a smart-looking case against poison-gas bombs dropped from the air – me, your dad, your ma, and yourself as a tiny tot. But how many poison-gas bombs were dropped on London, or on Berlin? Not a damned one! Both sides were scared stiff. Poison-gas had got too deadly. No mask in the market could keep the new sorts out. So there’s not going to be no atom bombs dropped neither, I tell you, Stanley my lad; not this side of the Hereafter! Everyone’s scared stiff again.’

  ‘Then why do both sides manufacture quantities of atom bombs and pile them up?’ he asks.

  ‘Search me,’ I said, ‘unless it’s a clever way of keeping up full employment by making believe there’s a war on. What with bombs and fall-out shelters, and radar equipment, and unsinkable aircraft-carriers, and satellites, and shooting rockets at the moon, and keeping up big armies – takes two thousand quid nowadays to maintain a soldier in the field, I read the other day – what with all that play-acting, there’s full employment assured for everyone, and businessmen are rubbing their hands.’

  ‘Your argument has a bad flaw, Grandfather. The Russians don’t need to worry about full employment.’

  ‘No,’ said I, ‘perhaps they don’t. But their politicians and commissars have to keep up the notion of a wicked Capitalist plot to wipe out the poor workers. And they have to show that they’re well ahead in the Arms Race. Forget it, lad, forget it! Mankind, which is a term used by maiden ladies and bun-punchers, ain’t going to be annihilated by no atom bomb.’

  Stan changed his tactics. ‘Nevertheless, Grandfather,’ he says, ‘we British want to show the Russians that we’re not engaged in any such Capitalist plot. All men are brothers, and I for one have nothing against my opposite number in Moscow, Ivan Whoever-he-may-be… This protest march is the only logical way I can show him my dislike of organized propaganda.’

  ‘But Ivan Orfalitch2 ain’t here to watch you march; nor the Russian telly ain’t going to show him no picture of it. If Ivan thinks you’re a bleeding Capitalist, then he’ll go on thinking you’re a bleeding Capitalist; and he won’t be so far out, neither, in my opinion. No, Stan, you can’t fight organized propaganda with amachoor propaganda.’3

  ‘Oh, can it, Grandfather!’ says Stan. ‘You’re a professional pessimist. And you didn’t hate the Germans even when you were fighting them – in spite of the newspapers. What about that Christmas Truce?’

  Well, I’d mentioned it to him one day, I own; but it seems he’d drawn the wrong conclusions and didn’t want to be put straight. However, I’m a lucky bloke – always being saved by what other blokes call ‘coincidences’, but which I don’t; because they always happen when I need ’em most. In the trenches we used to call that ‘being in God’s pocket’. So, of course, we hear a knock at the door and a shout, and in steps my old mucking-in chum Dodger Green, formerly 301691, Pte Edward Green of the 1st Batt., North Wessex Regiment – come to town by bus for a Saturday-night booze with me, every bit of twenty miles.

  ‘You’re here in the exact nick, Dodger,’ says I, ‘as once before.’ He’d nappooed4 a Fritz officer one day when I was lying with one foot missing outside Delville Wood,5 and the Fritz was kindly putting us wounded out of our misery with an automatic pistol.

  ‘What’s new, Fiddler?’ he asks.

  ‘Tell this lad about the two Christmas truces,’ I said. ‘He’s trying to enlist us for a march to Moscow, or somewhere.’

  ‘Well,’ says Dodger, ‘I don’t see no connexion, not yet. And marching to Moscow ain’t no worse nor marching to Berlin, same as you and me did – and never got more nor a few hundred yards forward in the three years we were at it. But, all right, I’ll give him the facts, since you particularly ask me.’

  Stan listened quietly while Dodger told his tale. I’d heard it often enough before, but Dodger’s yarns improve with the telling. You see, I missed most of that first Christmas Truce, as I’ll explain later. But I came in for the second; and saw a part of it what Dodger didn’t. And the moral I wanted to impress on young Stan depended on there being two truces, not one: them two were a lot different from one another.

  I brings a quart bottle of wallop from the kitchen, along with a couple of glasses – not three, because young Stan don’t drink anything so ‘common’ as beer – and Dodger held forth. Got a golden tongue, has Dodger – I’ve seen him hold an audience spellbound at The Three Feathers from opening-time to stop-tap, and his glass filled every ten minutes, free.

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘the first truce was in 1914, about four months after the Kayser’s war began. They say that the old Pope suggested it, and that the Kayser agreed, but that Joffre,6 the French C-in-C wouldn’t allow it. However, the Bavarians were sweating on a short spell of peace and goodwill, being Catholics, and sent word around that the Pope was going to get his way. Consequently, though we didn’t have the Bavarians in front of us, there at Boy Greneer,7 not a shot was fired on our sector all Christmas Eve. In those days we hadn’t been issued with Mills bombs,8 or trench-mortars, or Very pistols, or steel helmets, or sandbags, or any of them later luxuries; and only two machine-guns to a battalion. The trenches were shallow and knee-deep in water, so that most of the time we had to crouch on the fire step. God knows how we kept alive and smiling … It wasn’t no picnic, was it, Fiddler? – and the ground half-frozen, too!

  ‘Christmas Eve, at seven thirty p.m., the enemy trenches suddenly lit up with a row of coloured Chinese lanterns, and a bonfire started in the village behind. We stood to arms, prepared for whatever happened
. Ten minutes later the Fritzes began singing a Christmas carol called “Stilly Nucked”.9 Our boys answered with “Good King Wenceslas”, which they’d learned the first verse of as Waits, collecting coppers from door to door. Unfortunately no one knew more than two verses, because Waits always either get a curse or a copper before they reach the third verse.

  ‘Then a Fritz with a megaphone shouts, “Merry Christmas, Wessex!”

  ‘Captain Pomeroy was commanding us. Colonel Baggie had gone sick, second-in-command still on leave, and most of the other officers were young second-lieutenants straight from Sandhurst – we’d taken such a knock, end of October. The Captain was a real gentleman: father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all served in the Wessex. He shouts back: “Who are you?” And they say that they’re Saxons, same as us, from a town called Hully in West Saxony.10

  ‘“Will your commanding officer meet me in no man’s land to arrange a Christmas truce?” the Captain shouts again. “We’ll respect a white flag,” he says.

  ‘That was arranged, so Captain Pomeroy and the Fritz officer, whose name was Lieutenant Coburg, climbed out from their trenches and met half-way. They didn’t shake hands, but they saluted, and each gave the other word of honour that his troops wouldn’t fire a shot for another twenty-four hours. Lieutenant Coburg explained that his Colonel and all the senior officers were back taking it easy at Regimental HQ. It seems they liked to keep their boots clean, and their hands warm: not like our officers.

  ‘Captain Pomeroy came back pleased as Punch, and said: “The truce starts at dawn, Wessex; but meanwhile we stay in trenches. And if any man of you dares break the truce tomorrow,” he says, “I’ll shoot him myself, because I’ve given that German officer my word. All the same, watch out, and don’t let go of your bundooks.”11

  ‘That suited us; we’d be glad to get up from them damned fire steps and stretch our legs. So that night we serenaded the Fritzes with all manner of songs, such as “I want to go Home!”12 and “The Top of the Dixie Lid”,13 and the one about “Old Von Kluck, He Had a Lot of Men”;14 and they serenaded us with “Deutschland Über Alles”,15 and songs to the concertina.

  ‘We scraped the mud off our puttees and shined our brasses, to look a bit more regimental next morning. Captain Pomeroy, meanwhile, goes out again with a flashlight and arranges a Christmas football match – kick-off at ten thirty – to be followed at two o’clock by a burial service for all the corpses what hadn’t been taken in because of lying too close to the other side’s trenches.

  ‘“Over the top with the best of luck!” shouts the Captain at eight a.m., the same as if he was leading an attack. And over we went, a bit shy of course, and stood there waiting for the Fritzes. They advanced to meet us, shouting, and five minutes later, there we were…

  ‘Christmas was a peculiar sort of day, if ever I spent one. Hobnobbing with the Hun, so to speak: swapping fags and rum and buttons and badges for brandy, cigars and souvenirs. Lieutenant Coburg and several of the Fritzes talked English, but none of our blokes could sling a word of their bat.

  ‘No man’s land had seemed ten miles across when we were crawling out on a night patrol; but now we found it no wider than the width of two football pitches. We provided the football, and set up stretchers as goalposts; and the Reverend Jolly, our Padre,16 acted as ref. They beat us three–two, but the Padre had showed a bit too much Christian charity – their outside-left shot the deciding goal, but he was miles offside and admitted it soon as the whistle went. And we spectators were spread nearly two deep along the touch-lines with loaded rifles slung on our shoulders.

  ‘We had Christmas dinner in our own trenches, and a German bugler obliged with the mess call – same tune as ours. Captain Pomeroy was invited across, but didn’t think it proper to accept. Then one of our sentries, a farmer’s son, sees a hare loping down the line between us. He gives a view halloo, and everyone rushes to the parapet and clambers out and runs forward to cut it off. So do the Fritzes. There ain’t no such thing as harriers in Germany; they always use shot-guns on hares. But they weren’t allowed to shoot this one, not with the truce; so they turned harriers same as us.

  ‘Young Totty Fahy and a Saxon corporal both made a grab for the hare as it doubled back in their direction. Totty catches it by the forelegs and the Corporal catches it by the hindlegs, and they fall on top of it simultaneous.

  ‘Captain Pomeroy looked a bit worried for fear of a shindy about who caught that hare; but you’d have laughed your head off to see young Totty and the Fritz both politely trying to force the carcase on each other! So the Lieutenant and the Captain gets together, and the Captain says: “Let them toss a coin for it.” But the Lieutenant says: “I regret that our men will not perhaps understand. With us, we draw straws.” So they picked some withered stems of grass, and Totty drew the long one. He was in our section, and we cooked the hare with spuds that night in a big iron pot borrowed from Duck Farm; but Totty gave the Fritz a couple of bully-beef tins, and the skin. Best stoo I ever ate!

  ‘We called ’em “Fritzes” at that time. Afterwards they were “Jerries”, on account of their tin hats. Them helmets with spikes called Pickelhaubes was still the issue in 1914, but only for parade use. In the trenches caps were worn; like ours, but grey, and no stiffening in the top. Our blokes wanted pickelhaubes badly to take their fiancêes when they went home on leave; but Lieutenant Coburg says, sorry, all pickelhaubes was in store behind the lines. They had to be content with belt-buckles.

  ‘General French17 commanded the BEF at the time – decent old stick. Said afterwards that if he’d been consulted about the truce, he’d have agreed for chivalrous reasons. He must have reckoned that whichever side beat, us or the Germans, a Christmas truce would help considerably in signing a decent peace at the finish. But the Kayser’s High Command were mostly Prussians, and Lieutenant Coburg told us that the Prussians were against the truce, which didn’t agree with their “frightfulness” notions; and though other battalions were fraternizing with the Fritzes up and down the line that day – but we didn’t know it – the Prussians weren’t having any. Nor were some English regiments: such as the East Lancs on our right flank and the Sherwood Foresters on the left – when the Fritzes came out with white flags, they fired over their heads and waved ’em back. But they didn’t interfere with our party. It was worse in the French line: them Frogs machine-gunned all the “Merry Christmas” parties… Of course, the French go in for New Year celebrations more than Christmas.

  ‘One surprise was the two barrels of beer that the Fritzes rolled over to us from the brewery just behind their lines. I don’t fancy French beer; but at least this wasn’t watered like what they sold us English troops in the estaminets. We broached them out in the open, and the Fritzes broached another two of their own.

  ‘When it came to the toasts, the Captain said he wanted to keep politics out of it. So he offered them “Wives and Sweethearts!” which the Lieutenant accepted. Then the Lieutenant proposed “The King!”18 which the Captain accepted. There was a King of Saxony too, you see, in them days, besides a King of England; and no names were mentioned. The third toast was “A Speedy Peace!” and each side could take it to mean victory for themselves.

  ‘After dinner came the burial service – the Fritzes buried their corpses on their side of the line; we buried ours on ours. But we dug the pits so close together that one service did for both. The Saxons had no Padre with them; but they were Protestants, so the Reverend Jolly read the service, and a German divinity student translated for them. Captain Pomeroy sent for the drummers and put us through that parade in proper regimental fashion: slow march, arms reversed, muffled drums, a Union Jack and all.

  ‘An hour before dark, a funny-faced Fritz called Putzi came up with a trestle table. He talked English like a Yank. Said he’d been in Ringling’s Circus over in the United States. Called us “youse guys”, and put on a hell of a good gaff with conjuring tricks and juggling – had his face made up like a proper clown. Never hea
rd such applause as we gave Herr Putzi!

  ‘Then, of course, our bastard of a Brigadier, full of turkey and plum pudding and mince pies, decides to come and visit the trenches to wish us Merry Christmas! Captain Pomeroy got the warning from Fiddler here, who was away down on light duty at Battalion HQ. Fiddler arrived in the nick, running split-arse across the open, and gasping out: “Captain, sir, the Brigadier’s here; but none of us hasn’t let on about the truce.”

  ‘Captain Pomeroy recalled us at once. “Imshi,19 Wessex!” he shouted. Five minutes later the Brigadier came sloshing up the communication trench, keeping his head well down. The Captain tried to let Lieutenant Coburg know what was happening; but the Lieutenant had gone back to fetch him some warm gloves as a souvenir. The Captain couldn’t speak German; what’s more, the Fritzes were so busy watching Putzi that they wouldn’t listen. So Captain Pomeroy shouts to me: “Private Green, run along the line and order the platoon commanders from me to fire three rounds rapid over the enemies’ heads.” Which I did; and by the time the Brigadier turns up, there wasn’t a Fritz in sight.

  ‘The Brigadier, whom we called “Old Horseflesh”, shows a lot of Christmas jollity. “I was very glad,” he says, “to hear that Wessex fusillade, Pomeroy. Rumours have come in of fraternization elsewhere along the line. Bad show! Disgraceful! Can’t interrupt a war for freedom just because of Christmas! Have you anything to report?”

  ‘Captain Pomeroy kept a straight face. He says: “Our sentries report that the enemy have put up a trestle table in no man’s land, sir. A bit of a puzzle, sir. Seems to have a bowl of goldfish on it.” He kicked the Padre, and the Padre kept his mouth shut.