The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston 3 - Sherston's Progress

by Siegfried Sassoon

  Hitherto no such person had existed, and I was beginning to feel the strain. In that private life of mine which more or less emerges from my diary, solemn introspection was getting the better of my sense of humour.

  But now a beneficent presence arrived in the shape of Velmore, and I very soon began to say to myself that I really didn’t know what I’d have done without him. It was like having an extra head and a duplicate pair of eyes. Velmore was a tall, dark, young man who had been up at Oxford for an academic year when the outbreak of war interrupted his studies. More scholastic than soldier-like in appearance (mainly because he wore spectacles) he had the look of one who might some day occupy a professorial chair. His previous experience at the front gave him a solid basis of usefulness, and to this was added a temperament in which kindliness, humour, and intelligence divided the honours equally, with gentleness and modesty in readiness to assert themselves by the power of non-assertion.

  With these valuable qualities he combined – to my astonishment and delight – what in conventional military circles might have been described as ‘an almost rabid love of literature’. To hear poetry talked about in our company mess was indeed a new experience for me. But Velmore, on his very first evening, calmly produced Flecker’s poems from his pocket and asked young ‘Stiffy’ if he had ever read The Golden Journey to Samarkand. When he volunteered to read some of it aloud the junior officers exchanged embarrassed glances and took an early opportunity to leave me alone with my second-in-command, who was soon enunciating, with ingratiating gusto:

  Across the vast blue shadow-sweeping plain

  The gathered armies darken through the grain

  Swinging curved swords and dragon-sculptured spears,

  Footmen, and tiger-hearted cavaliers.

  A paraphrase of the last two lines became Velmore’s stock joke when reporting that the company was on parade and it was a great consolation to me to hear that fine body of men described as ‘the footmen with their dragon-sculptured spears’. But Velmore was never anything else but a consolation to me.

  With an all-pervading sense of relief I used to smoke my pipe and watch him doing the office-work for me. Whenever an automatic annoyance arrived from Orderly Room I merely passed it on and he squared it up with facetious efficiency.

  In the fourth year of the war the amount of general information which descended on us from higher quarters had become prodigious. But I no longer received it seriously now. Corps H.Q. could send along anything it chose and Orderly Room forward it on for my ‘necessary attention’ but until Velmore decided that it was worth looking at, I allowed it to be superseded by the next consignment of ‘hot air’ from those who were such experts at putting things on paper.

  Toward the end of June we moved north. I can remember that Velmore, on a fat cob, ambled away in advance of us to act as brigade billeting officer. Our destination was St. Hilaire, a village near Lillers, and I know that we were there on July 1st. This information is obtained from an army notebook which has accidentally survived destruction. My final entry in the company messing accounts reads as follows: ‘St. Hilaire, July 1st. Rent of Mess. 24 francs. Sardines, etc. 41 francs.’ Not much to go on, is it?…Sardines, etc…. Those sardines never suspected that they would one day appear in print.

  The influenza epidemic having blown over, we were now feeling fairly well tuned up for our first tour of trenches in France. As far as my own career was concerned it certainly seemed to be about time to be up and doing, for it was now fully seven months since my dim and distant medical board, and my offensiveness toward the enemy had so far been restricted to telling other people how to behave offensively when a future effort was required of them. On July 7th we were still awaiting the order to move up to the Line. It was a Sunday, and there was a church parade for the whole battalion. This was a special occasion, for we were addressed by a bishop in uniform, a fact which speaks for itself.

  In a spare notebook I wrote down the main points of his sermon, so I am able to transcribe what might otherwise appear to be inaccurately remembered.

  ‘The bishop began by saying how very proud and very pleased he was to have the privilege of welcoming us to the Western Front on behalf of his branch of the service. Every heart, he said, had thrilled with pride when the news came that our Division had captured Jerusalem. The armies in France had been enthusiastic about it. He then gave us the following information, speaking with stimulating heartiness, as one having authority from a Higher Quarter.

  ‘(1) Owing to the Russian Revolution the Germans have got the initiative and are hammering us hard.

  ‘(2) The troops are more enthusiastic about winning the War than they were last year. Our lads feel that they’d rather die than see their own land treated like Belgium.

  ‘(3) It is religion which keeps the morale of the British Army so high.

  ‘(4) (With extreme unction.) Thank God we hold the seas!

  ‘(5) The Americans are coming across in large numbers.

  ‘(6) A distinguished general told me last week that the Huns are getting weaker every week. Time is on our side!

  ‘He then preached a bit about the spiritual aspects and implications of the labours, dangers, and sufferings of which we were about to partake.

  ‘Great was the sacrifice, but it was supremely glorious. He compared us to the early Christians who were burnt alive and thrown to the lions. “You must not forget,” he added, “that Christ is not the effete figure in stained-glass windows but the Warrior Son of God who moves among the troops and urges them to yet further efforts of sacrifice.”

  ‘He concluded impressively by reciting, with lifted hand, two verses from the American hymn God goes marching on. Except, perhaps, for the early Christian comparison, the troops rather liked it.’

  Talking to Velmore (whose eye I had resolutely avoided during the oration) I remarked that it was the spiritual equivalent of Campbell’s bayonet fighting lecture, and I still think that I was somewhere near the truth. It was the bishop’s business to say that sort of thing to the troops, and no one was any the worse for it – least of all himself, for I never saw a man who looked more pink and well-nourished. Would he talk like that again, I wonder, if he got another chance?

  Anyhow his optimism was confined to the immediate present and did not include the pluperfect future. What he should have said was, ‘We are going on with this War because we ruddy well don’t intend to be beaten by the Germans. And I am here because I believe in keeping religion in touch with the iniquitous methods by which nations settle their disputes. And you are here to try and prevent it happening again.’ But when he told us that the Huns were getting weaker every week, not a man in the battalion believed him. They had heard that sort of thing too often before.

  If he had told us that the War would end in four months’ time we should have charitably assumed that he was suffering from martial religious mania. In July 1918 everyone took it for granted that we should hold on till the winter and then wait for the ‘1919 offensive’ which staff-officers on the boat from Alexandria had discussed with such professional earnestness. It is worth remembering that the German collapse in the autumn came as a complete surprise to the armies in France. They knew nothing and had become extremely sceptical about everything they were told.

  On that fine summer morning the bishop, like a one-armed sign-post pointing westward, directed us on the road to victory. But he did it without knowing that his optimism was to be justified by future events.

  2

  The village of St. Hilaire was at that time about nine miles from the line to which the British army had retreated during the German offensive in April. In the late afternoon of the following day I found myself riding up there on the company charger, a quadruped who has left me no describable memory, except that he suffered from string-halt and his hind-leg action was the only lively thing about him. Well primed with map-references and urgent instructions from Orderly Room, I was going up to obtain all possible information from the bat
talion we were to relieve next day. Jogging along the pavé road from Lillers to St. Venant I felt agreeably excited, though anxious lest I might fail to grasp (and jot down) the entire situation when I arrived there. As was usual in such emergencies, I assumed that everything would go wrong with the ‘relief’ if I made the slightest mistake, and I felt no certainty that I could achieve what I had been told to do. It did not occur to my simple mind that by to-morrow afternoon our quarter-master would probably know quite as much about the essential facts as I should. Details of organization in the army always scared and over-impressed me. Such things seemed so much easier when one was actually doing them than when they were being conferred about and put on paper in the mysterious language of the military profession.

  This anxious devotion to duty probably prevented me from acquiring a permanent mental picture of my surroundings while I was nearing the end of my ride. The fact remains that I can now only see myself as ‘a solitary horseman’ crossing the La Bassée Canal in the dusk and then going on another two miles to battalion headquarters, which were in what appeared to be a fairly well-preserved farmhouse. There I was given food, drink, and technical enlightenment, and sent on to the Front Line.

  Communication-trenches were non-existent. My guide led me along a footpath among damaged crops and looming willows, past the dug-outs of the support-company, until we arrived at an enormous shell-hole which contained a company headquarters. In a sort of rabbit-hole, with just enough room for three people in it, I was welcomed by two East Lancashire officers, and forthwith I scribbled five pages of rough notes in my Field Message Book. I could reproduce these notes in full, for the book is on my table now; but I will restrict myself to a single entry.

  ‘Battalion code-word. ELU. No messages by buzzer except through an officer. Relief word. JAMA. (To be confirmed by runner.)’ ‘To be confirmed by rumour’ was what I actually thought as I wrote it down, but I kept the witticism to myself as the captain didn’t look likely to be amused by it. He seemed a bit fussed, which caused me to feel rather confident and efficient in an unobtrusive way.

  He was a decent little chap, and I got a laugh out of him by telling him that a bishop had told our battalion, only yesterday, that the Huns were getting weaker every week. Over a mug of tea he confided in me that his company would be doing a small raid, in about half an hour, and he was evidently worrying about it, though he didn’t say so.

  This, however, was more in my line than scribbling down what time water cart would be sent up to ration dump and how many food-containers and water tins would be taken over from out-going battalion, and it seemed much more to the point when I followed him up to the Front Line to get an idea of what the sector was like and see how the show went off. The front-line defences were still in their infancy compared with the Canadian trenches I’d visited a month before. A series of breast-high sentry-posts were connected by a shallow ditch, and no-man’s-land was a cornfield which still seemed to be doing quite well. I was told that there was very little wire out in front. One felt that recent occupants of the sector had erred in the direction of a laissez-faire policy. It was a quiet moonless night, and the raiding-party, about a dozen strong, were assembled, and appeared to be doing their best to let the Germans know that they intended to come over. Stage whispers in broad Lancashire accents were making the best of an unhopeful situation, and I suspected that a double rum ration had been prematurely issued. (Rum rations should not precede raids.)

  Why weren’t they slipping across from some place where the trench was shallow, I wondered – instead of clambering clumsily over the parapet where it was highest? One by one they disappeared into the jungle of growing corn. The ensuing silence was accentuated by various sounds which clearly indicated human progress on all fours through a weak belt of barbed wire. Shortly afterwards the inevitable machine-gun demonstrated awareness of their whereabouts, flares went up from the other side, and there was a proper mix-up which ended when they blundered back, having achieved nothing but a few casualties less than half-way across. When the confusion had abated, I continued my instructive investigations for an hour or two, but the next thing that I clearly remember is that I was riding home in the early morning.

  Quite distinctly I can recover a certain moment when I was trotting past the shuttered houses of some unawakened village, with the sun just coming up beyond the roadside poplars. What I felt was a sort of personal manifesto of being intensely alive – a sense of physical adventure and improvident jubilation; and also, as I looked at the signs of military occupation around me, a feeling that I was in the middle of some interesting historical tale. I was glad to be there, it seemed; and perhaps my thoughts for a moment revisited Slateford Hospital and were reminded of its unescapable atmosphere of humiliation. That was how active service used to hoodwink us. Wonderful moments in the War, we called them, and told people at home that after all we wouldn’t have missed it for worlds. But it was only one’s youngness, really, and the fact of being in a foreign country with a fresh mind. Not because of the War, but in spite of it, we felt such zest and fulfilment, and remembered it later on with nostalgic regret, forgetting the miseries and grumblings, and how we longed for it to come to an end. Nevertheless, there I was, a living antithesis to the gloomier entries in my diary, and a physical retraction of my last year’s protest against the ‘political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men were being sacrificed’.

  But our inconsistencies are often what make us most interesting, and it is possible that, in my zeal to construct these memoirs carefully, I have eliminated too many of my own self-contradictions. Anyhow, human nature being what it is, I wasn’t finding time to feel sorry for the raiding-party whose dud effort I’d recently witnessed. No; I was callously resolving to make a far better job of it with my own men, and wishing that I could consult the incomparable Captain Duclos. And I am afraid I was also cogitating about how I would demonstrate the superiority of A Company over the other three. My Company’s officers were just up when I got back. I must have been tired out, for my only recollection of returning to St. Hilaire is of Velmore taking charge of my notebook and urging me to stop talking and swallow my breakfast before having a good sleep. Meanwhile he promised that he would faithfully expound to the Adjutant the details which I had accumulated.

  That evening we relieved the East Lancashires. Nothing worth describing in that, I tell myself. But the remembering mind refuses to forget, and imbues the scene of past experience with significant finality. For when we marched away from the straggling village and out into the flat green fertile farmlands, the world did seem to be lit up as though for some momentous occasion. There had been thunder showers all the afternoon and the sunset flared with a sort of crude magnificence which dazzled us when our road took a sudden twist to the left. More memorable now, perhaps; but memorable even then, for me, whose senses were so teemingly alive as I gazed on that rich yet havoc-bordered landscape and thought of the darkness toward which we were going. The clouds flamed and the clover was crimson and the patches of tillage were vividly green as we splashed along between the poplars. And then, with dusk, the rain came down again as though to wash the picture out for ever.

  We had five or six miles to go before we crossed the La Bassée Canal, and then it was another mile (with hundred yard intervals between platoons) to the rendezvous. Beyond the poplars was the ominous glare of the line, and the rattle of rifles and machine-guns competed with a local thunderstorm – ‘overhead artillery’, one of the men called it….

  Here, at the cross roads, were the guides – quite a crowd of them, since we were the leading company. Two-minute intervals between platoons. Lead on Number One. I watched them file away into the gloom, while Velmore wiped his spectacles and conferred with the company sergeant-major in undertones. Lead on headquarters. And then a couple of miles easy walking brought us to the big shell-hole and its diminutive dug-outs. It was now one o’clock in the morning, and the relief was completed when I signed the list of trenc
h-stores taken over. Referring to this document, I find that we ‘took over’ 30,000 rounds of small arms ammunition, 12 gas gongs, 572 grenades, 120 shovels, 270 Véry lights, and 9 reaping hooks, besides other items too numerous to mention.

  Howitt was the only platoon officer with the company. ‘Stiffy’ had been made battalion Lewis-gun officer, and the other two were away on ‘courses’. As I went up to visit the trench-mortar battery on our left flank it struck me that I was likely to have a fairly busy time while A Company was being initiated into the mysteries of the Western Front.

  That didn’t worry me, however, for I was, if anything, a bit too much ‘on my toes’, and the Great War had reduced itself to a little contest between my company and the Central Powers, with Velmore standing by to send back situation reports from our five hundred yard sector. Velmore, of course, was ‘on his toes’ too, but in a more temperate style than mine. His methods were unobtrusive but thorough. While on this subject I must mention Sergeant Wickham, who was more ‘on his toes’ than any of us, and had no alternative relaxations, such as ruminating or reading Flecker’s poems. Wickham had been through the Boer War, and had already won a D.C.M. and a Military Medal in this one. But he wasn’t resting on his laurels, and having recently returned from a month’s ‘refresher course’ at the army school, he was a complete embodiment of the offensive spirit. I think he was one of the most delightful N.C.O.s I’ve ever known. Except for being a little over-excitable, he had all the qualities of a fine soldier including the ‘women and children first’ kind of chivalry, which made it easy for one to imagine him as the last to leave the sinking troopship. Always smart and cheerful – was Sergeant Wickham – and if ever a man deserved to be shaken hands with by his Sovereign, it was he. During our first twenty-four hours in the line, however, his adventurous spirit discovered nothing sensational except a long-dead German up in an old knotted willow; and in the evening Velmore sent him down to the support-line with a working party, though he was obviously aching to go out on patrol.