The next afternoon I was placed in a hospital train and the following morning I reached Versailles, where I was put in the Trianon Palace Hotel. The congestion of the medical services was such that I passed two nights after being wounded before I got my boots off. Ten days later my arm wound was healed and I was sent back on leave to England.
I reached my parents’ home at Oxford, and at last removed my uniform, which was both bloody and lousy. My arm remained stiff, and it turned out that the X-ray examination at Versailles had been inadequate. A piece of shell had run right up my fore-arm and lodged above the elbow. I was operated on, and the wound turned out to be septic. I awoke in great pain, which continued for a week, while green pus oozed from my arm. It is still occasionally painful. The shell splinter remains in my arm, and the scar tissue on my chin is very liable to bleed when I shave.
I went back to duty with my special reserve battalion in July. I believe that I was a genuine case of shell-shock, as opposed to the war neurosis which was usually dignified by that name, for I jumped like a shot rabbit at any explosion. However I volunteered to organize a bombing school, and fatigued this reflex out of existence in about a week.
I commanded this bombing school in the north of Scotland for nine months, during which I instructed some hundreds of officers and N.C.O.s in the technique of killing other people with hand and rifle grenades. My methods were unorthodox. I took the view that almost all accidents arose, either from unavoidable causes, such as gross faults in the grenade, or from carelessness or panic, both of which have psychological roots.
I began by lecturing on the anatomy of hand grenades, and made each pupil attach a detonator to a fuze with his teeth. Should the detonator explode in the mouth, I explained that the mouth would be considerably enlarged, though the victim might be so unfortunate as to survive with rather little face. Pupils who did not show alacrity when confronted with this and similar tests were returned to duty, as unlikely to become efficient instructors.
The principal danger of academic bombing is as follows. The grenade has a time-fuze, taking five seconds to burn in the Willis Grenade, 3 ½ seconds in those now used in Spain. If, at the end of this period the bomb and its thrower are not on opposite sides of a bank of earth or a stout wall, he is unlikely to throw any more bombs. A pupil occasionally drops his bomb, or it may fall back into the trench. Once or twice I have known a man, after lighting his bomb, hold onto it paralyzed with terror, perhaps fascinated by the hissing of the fuze, as birds are alleged to be fascinated by serpents.
In such cases the instructor has somewhat under five seconds in which to save two or more lives. He must decide whether to pick up the grenade, to dodge round a corner, to strike the paralytic pupil on the chin and throw his bomb for him, or to throw a sandbag, the pupil, or himself, on the top of the bomb, in order to save other lives.
If his mind is clear he will do one of these things, if not, not. If a bomber is filled with inhibitions, and hedged round with precautions, he will make an error of judgement at the critical moment. During my command we had no accidents beyond an occasional scratch not involving hospitalization. Three weeks after I left an officer was killed during an act of quite unnecessary heroism, the alternative to cowardice in a man whose soul has not been adequately dealt with by the instructor. After some months I found this job exceedingly dull. Once a month I got leave to spend a week-end in the great and wicked city of Inverness, where on one occasion I got disgracefully drunk, and might have been court-martialled but for the kindness of a superior officer.
Twenty years later I discovered that I was left at this school and later given a particularly silly administrative job which lasted for six weeks or so, instead of being sent back to France, through the intervention of a general at the War Office who was a friend of my late uncle, Lord Haldane. If he is alive and reads this book he may repent of his favouritism.
In September 1916 I was sent out to Mesopotamia to join the 2nd Black Watch (73rd foot). The voyage round the Cape in an overcrowded transport took eight weeks. As ship’s adjutant I had charge of over 2,000 men. I also made the acquaintance of various brothels in Dakar, Durban and Bombay, from which I had to see that my officer comrades returned in due time. The hostesses in Bombay were European women. English prostitutes were forbidden on grounds of national prestige. However English women were permitted to manage the brothels. The distinction throws an interesting light on the official mind.
We reached Basra in December 1916, and I went up the Tigris in a small steamer towing two barges with Indian troops. On the ship I read the only two serious books which I could buy in Basra, Robert Doyle’s “The sceptical chymist” and Robert Browning’s longer poems. I belong to the small class of human beings who have read “Sordello,” but not to the far more select band who have understood it. The river was low, and we constantly ran aground. I made my first acquaintance with the remarkable objects with which a local bard (an artillery Officer, I think) described as follows in “The Mesopotamian Alphabet.”
[“]B is the biscuit that’s made in Delhi.
It breaks your teeth and bruises your belly,
And grinds your intestines into a jelly,
In the land of Mesopotamia.”
I soon discovered that about one tin in three of these biscuits was infested with weevils, which mined their way into them and softened them considerably. Many of the men under my command did not like eating live weevils. However I had long since discovered that a soldier must get rid of many emotions appropriate to a civilized man, if he is not to be so acutely miserable as to lose much of his efficiency. I was generally able to get biscuits which had been partially predigested by the weevils, and liked them well enough. Nevertheless I broke two of my teeth.
I joined the 2nd Black Watch (73rd foot) then in reserve behind the trench system which ran from the river Tigris to Lake Suwaikiyeh. Colonel Wauchope (who later held Pontius Pilate’s office of governor of Palestine) was in command.5 He was a real liberal, and proved the futility of most of the “good order and military discipline” which infests the British army, and which is in the main a mere byproduct of the class struggle.
Even in the 1st battalion there had been a quite unusual solidarity between officers and men. This was shown by the fact that N.C.O.s who were given commissions remained with the battalion, though transferred to a different company. Serjeant Wallace, who was in charge of the officers’ mess, was definitely biassed [sic] in favour of existence. He therefore resisted the offer of a commission as long as possible. But when he became an officer neither he nor we who had recently eaten his excellent meals, felt appreciably awkward. For, whilst a sergeant, he had been treated as a human being. He accepted his promotion with a humorous resignation, and survived it for two months.
In the 73rd things went a good deal further. Perhaps half the officers had started as privates, and several others were of working class origin. 2nd Lieutenants invariably wielded a stick and shovel with their men. While orders were enforced, any officer giving an unnecessary order, was censured. The colonel took the men into his confidence. If an attack was ordered he would draw up half the battalion at a time, and point out to it not only the grounds for this particular order, but the reasons against it, and the ways in which the operation might be expected to fail. This was valuable for two reasons. To quote the alphabet again,
“W stands for the wonder and pain
With which we regard the infirm and insane
Old Indian generals who run the campaign
We’re waging in Mesopotamia.”
The “Indian” generals in question were of course British officers in the Indian army, and their incompetence had been largely responsible for the capture of Townshend’s army in Kut-al-Amara.
The Indian troops presented a different problem. We were the only British battalion in a brigade containing three Indian infantry battalions and innumerable Indian mule and camel drivers. During a battle any British soldier might have to lead or rally a
number of Indians, and for this purpose a knowledge of the tactical situation was necessary.
In the officers’ mess we spoke the language which was native to the majority of us; Lowland Scots. This keeps a far better correspondence with the written language than does the dialect of South Britain. For example the letter R is universally pronounced. And many features of its grammar, particularly the use of prepositions as objects, as in “I want out,” appear to be in the natural line of development of our language.
Our conversation was often fairly intelligent. We would discuss incidents in mediaeval Scots history or topics in elementary physics, with a vehemence which was encouraged by the complete absence of reference books. I did not subsequently come across as intelligent a group of officers until in March-April 1937 I was with the Englishspeaking battalion of the Spanish People’s Army. There I remember one evening when the conversation in the battalion head-quarters dug-out passed from adultery to telegony. The commanding officer (a former mutineer in the navy) upheld the view that the foetal and maternal circulations anastomose in the human placenta, and a fascist attack unfortunately terminated my effort to convince him that he was wrong.
Our economics were of interest. There was very little that we could buy. I spent a quite inordinate sum on Libby’s tinned asparagus. Had I not been on duty and near the front line, I might have got drunk. I had taken up auction bridge on joining the army, and used to make an average income of about £1 per week by it for 1/- a hundred. In Mesopotamia money was irrelevant. We might hope for a month’s leave in India after a year in Mesopotamia, but this was a remote prospect, like the resurrection of the dead, and indeed the latter perhaps concerned us more closely. So bridge became a bad game. No-one worried to pay his debts or to ask for payment, and we frequently went down three tricks re-doubled.
I was appointed second-in-command of a company, and also took charge of the battalion snipers. For a while we held some miles of the right bank of the Tigris while the Turks held the left. We occupied the site of the Battle of Beit Bissa, and occasionally played a crude football with the sun-dried heads of the unidentified dead of the previous year, whether British, Indian or Turkish we did not know. We had become psychologically adapted to war, and wholly accustomed to the idea that next year someone would be playing football with our own heads. I think that my snipers and I accounted for a few Turks. We also toured the neighbourhood. The [sic] The Bhopal rifles on our left complained that they were being killed by Turkish snipers. I went along with a couple of men to deal with their problem. These wretched Indians were completely and utterly fed up. They hated the war, and did not wish to kill the Turks, their fellow Muslims. They hated life, and allowed the Turks to kill them. By a judicious display of helmets on sticks we drew the Turks’ fire and located them. We returned their fire and got our gunmen to give then a few rounds of shrapnel. The Turks, who had no desire to die for their country, but could not resist the opportunity to kill the Indians who were no more dangerous than rabbits, went away to a safer place. The majority of Indian battalions were not so demoralized, and in particular the 6th Jats struck me as firstrate soldiers.
On normal days we would crawl among the scrub by the river bank and exchange bullets with the Turks opposite. We claimed to have hit some of them. They did not hit any of us, but sometimes came fairly near it. In the evenings, especially when we were at rest behind the line, I used to practice marching on bearings with a prismatic compass. I finally managed to achieve errors of only half a degree or so, and it would have been my business to guide the brigade on a night march had I taken part in the subsequent advance.
Life would have been pleasant enough had I not suffered from constant tooth-ache. I once got down the river to the solitary dentist who ministered to some 20,000 men, but he merely had time to enlarge some cavities.
The trench warfare was entirely uneventful. We had markedly superior artillery, though not decisively so. To destroy the Turkish trenches we relied on trench mortars. But the main attack was made on a different part of the front. On the day when the British forces crossed the Tigris at Shumran, a day’s march to our north, our battalion attacked almost abandoned trenches, and advanced a long way with very small loss.
Along with two or three other officers, and some N.C.O.s, including a serjeant who had frequently been recommended for the V.C. and was very angry, I was left behind to reconstitute the battalion should it be wiped out. Fate however decided quite firmly that the intentions of my guardian in the War Office should be frustrated that day.
About noon the adjutant (Captain Blair) and I were whiling away the time putting fuzes into Mills grenades. I heard a shout, which conveyed little to me, and jumped up just in time to see a bomb which he had been fuzing burst about five yards from me. He had dodged behind some boxes, but I had not understood his warning.
I was not hit by any of the numerous splinters, but about 6 p.m. one of the hangers of the aerodrome near our camp caught alight. With several comrades I ran to deal with the fire. We got a number of lorries out of the burning hangar (a very large tent) and then went nearer to the fire to see what we could do. The Air Force had somewhat imprudently stored their bombs and their petrol side by side. The petrol flared up magnificently. But whenever a bomb went off the blast from it blew out the flames. However enough glowing sparks were left to ignite the petrol again.
I was running towards this fire inside the hangar when a bomb went off with a particularly violent report. I could not breathe, and supposed that my throat had been blown away, in which case I could expect another half minute or so of life. However I felt my throat, which was intact, and now attribute my choking to a reflex spasm of the glottis. I noticed that I was hit in the leg, and proceeded to run away as fast as I could, which was not very fast, though a number of other explosions increased my zeal.
I found that I had a fairly deep but almost painless flesh wound. Another officer was slightly wounded, but one of the men had a splinter in his stomach, from which I think he died. I was put onto an ambulance, and jolted over an execrable road to a field dressing station, holding the hand of the man with the stomach wound, who was in great pain, and trying to prevent him from being jolted too intolerably.
But I had one more trial in store. I was dumped in a small tent, where I think I collapsed into stupor. Anyway an officer who was brought in soon after said that when he arrived I woke up saying “That was a proper bang”. My comrade was wounded in both legs and one arm. He tried to light his cigarette with the remaining hand, but only succeeded in lighting the tent above his head, which someone had thoughtfully soaked with oil. The tent burned above our heads in a steady and undemonstrative manner, and neither of us was in a position to get up and put it out. However we managed to shout, and someone else extinguished the fire.
My wound was almost painless. To be accurate, it was more painful than my toothache for about two minutes while being cleaned up for the first time. This was lucky, for although the medical services were vastly improved since the previous year, they left a good deal to be desired. We were, it is true, afforded the services of a chaplain at the Casualty Clearing Station. He enquired my religion, and when I answered “none” put me down as C. of E. It is not obvious to me that military discipline is improved when wounded men are insulted by attributing to them opinions to which some of them object strongly.
However on the hospital ship things were somewhat primitive. We lay on the deck in rows on stretchers, and when I rushed to relieve myself I had to crawl downstairs to a lower deck, which, when one’s leg is wounded, is definitely uncomfortable. I noted, with interest, that the officer on my right was reading Lamb’s “Infinitesimal Calculus,” whilst I was engaged on Kelland and Tait’s “Introduction to Quaternions,” which incidentally I do not recommend as a preliminary course in vectorial analysis.
I passed a week or so in hospital at Amara, and went down to Basra in a much better ship. The wounded were mostly very cheerful. A man next to me had a colosto
my (i.e. an opening into his intestine) from which the products of his digestion escaped every few hours. He appeared to be particularly interested in the fashion pages of the London papers. Another had lost his hand, and was smiling constantly. Perhaps he was glad to be definitely incapable of returning to the front. And he certainly did not know that his disability pension was later going to be reckoned as part of his income under the means test.
As my wound would not heal, I was shipped to India, where I passed another month in hospital in Poona before it finally skinned over. There I learned Urdu, an easy language which is picturesque both in its script and diction. Thus the following conversation would occur when my servant wakened me (for I soon obtained a Muslim servant with a beautiful beard).
“Peace, Presences.”
“Peace, Lord Glorified Longer.”
“Which clothes will the Presences deign to wear?”
“We shall wear our khaki shorts and stockings.”
It is characteristic of British imperialism that boys of the ruling class get no opportunity of learning any of the Indian languages at any “public” school known to me, and that English women in India are often unable to speak one grammatically even after many years’ residence. It is not obvious why they should expect to continue indefinitely to go on ruling a group of peoples which they make so little effort to understand. There were of course exceptions. The wife of my cousin, Gerald Keatinge, in the I.C.S., who did much to improve agriculture in the Deccan, accompanied her husband through the country and loved it. But there were not enough exceptions.
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