Indian Summer Notebook

by Henry Williamson

  This was an occasion of that phenomenon known as wind-up. As before a wind, fire swept with bright yellow-red stabs of thorn-flame up the line towards the light-ringed salient around Ypres: bullets in flight, hissing, clacking or whining, crossed the lines of the hosts of the unburied dead slowly being absorbed into Flanders field. The wind of fear, the nightly wind of the battlefield of Western Europe, from the cold North Sea to the great barrier of the Alps – a fire travelling faster than any wind, was speckling the ridges above the drained marsh that surrounded Ypres, stabbing in wandering aimless design the darkness on the slopes of the Commines canal, running in thin crenellations upon the plateau of Wytschaete and Messines, sweeping thence down to the plain of Armentières, among the coal-mines and slags of Artois, across the chalk uplands of Picardy, and the plains of the rivers. The wind of fear rushed on, to die out, expended, beyond the dark forest of the Argonne, beyond the fears of massed men, where snow-field, ravine, torrent and crag ended before the peaks in silence under the constellation of Orion, shaking gem-like above all human hope.

  It was still freezing hard on Christmas Eve. We had been detailed for what seemed to be a perilous fatigue in no man’s land – going out between the lines to knock in posts in a zigzag line towards the German front line. Around the posts wire was to be wound. On this wire, hurdles taken from a shed were to be laid. Then drying tobacco leaves, hung on the hurdles (as the leaves had been in the shed), would give cover from view should it be necessary, in an attack, to reinforce the front line.

  What an idea, I thought. It would draw machine gun fire. It was about as sensible as the brigade commander’s idea for the December 19 attack across no man’s land, for some men to carry straw palliasses, to lean against the German wire and enable men to cross over the entanglements. As for the knocking-in of posts into frozen ground, that was utterly wrong! And in bright moonlight, 40 yards away from the Alleyman!

  After our platoon commander, a courteous man in his early 20s and fresh from Cambridge, had outlined the plan quietly, he asked for questions. I dared to say that the noise of knocking in posts would be heard. There was silence; then we were told that implicit directions had come from brigade, and must be carried out. We debouched from the wood, and were exposed. After an initial stab of fear, I was not afraid. Everything was so still, so quiet in the line. No flares, no crack of the sniper’s rifle. No gun firing.

  Soon we were used to the open moonlight in which all life and movement seemed unreal. Men were fetching and laying down posts, arranging themselves in couples, one to hold, the other to knock. Others prepared to unwind barbed wire previously rolled on staves. I was one who followed the platoon commander and three men to a tarred wooden shed, to fetch hurdles hung with long dry tobacco leaves, which we brought out and laid on the site of the reinforcement fence.

  And not a shot was fired from the German trench. The unbelievable had soon become the ordinary, so that we talked as we worked, without caution, while the night passed as in a dream. The moon moved down to the treetops behind us. Always, it seemed, had we been moving bodilessly, each with his shadow.

  After a timeless dream I saw what looked like a large white light on top of a pole put up in the German lines. It was a strange sort of light. It burned almost white, and was absolutely steady. What sort of lantern was it? I did not think much about it; it was part of the strange unreality of the silent night, of the silence of the moon, now turning a brownish yellow, of the silence of the frost mist. I was warm with the work, all my body was in glow, not with warmth but with happiness.

  Suddenly there was a short quick cheer from the German lines – Hoch! Hoch! Hoch! With others I flinched and crouched, ready to fling myself flat, pass the leather thong of my rifle over my head and aim to fire; but no other sound came from the German lines.

  We stood up, talking about it, in little groups. For other cheers were coming across the black spaces of no man’s land. We saw dim figures on the enemy parapet, about more lights; and with amazement saw that a Christmas tree was being set there, and around it Germans were talking and laughing together. Hoch! Hoch! Hoch!, followed by cheering.

  Our platoon commander, who had gone from group to group during the making of the fence, looked at his watch and told us that it was eleven o’clock. One more hour, he said, and then we would go back.

  ‘By Berlin time it is midnight. A Merry Christmas to you all! I say, that’s rather fine, isn’t it?’, for from the German parapet a rich baritone voice had begun to sing a song I remembered from my nurse Minne singing it to me after my evening tub before bed. She had been maid to my German grandmother, one of the Lune family of Hildesheim. Stille Nacht! Heilige Nacht!

  Tranquil Night! Holy Night! The grave and tender voice rose out of the frozen mist; it was all so strange; it was like being in another world, to which one had come through a nightmare: a world finer than the one I had left behind me in England, except for beautiful things like music, and springtime on my bicycle in the countryside of Kent and Bedfordshire.

  And back again in the wood it seemed so strange that we had not been fired upon; wonderful that the mud had gone; wonderful to walk easily on the paths; to be dry; to be able to sleep again.

  The wonder remained in the low golden light of a white-rimed Christmas morning. I could hardly realise it; but my chronic, hopeless longing to be home was gone.

  The post arrived while I was frying my breakfast bacon, beside a twig fire where stood my canteen full of hot sugary tea. I sat on an unopened 28-lb box of 2-ounce Capstan tobacco: one of scores thrown down in the wood, with large bright metal containers of army biscuits, of the shape and size and taste of dog biscuits. The tobacco issue per day was reckoned to be 5,000 cigarettes at this time, or 24 lbs of tobacco. This was not the ‘issue’ ration, but from the many ‘Comforts for the Troops’ appeals in newspapers, all tobacco being duty free to our benefactors at home.

  There was a Gift Package to every soldier from the Princess Royal. A brass box embossed with Princess Mary’s profile, containing tobacco and cigarettes. This I decided to send home to my mother, as a souvenir.

  ‘There’s bloody hundreds of them out there!’ said a kilted soldier to me as I sat there.

  I walked through the trees, some splintered and gashed by fragments of Jack Johnsons, as we called the German 5.9-inch gun, and into no man’s land and found myself face to face with living German soldiers, men in grey uniforms and leather knee-boots – a fact which was at the time for me beyond belief. Moreover the Germans were, some of them, actually smiling as they talked in English.

  Most of them were small men, rather pale of face. Many wore spectacles, and had thin little goatee beards. I did not see one pickelhaube. They were either bare-headed, or had on small grey pork-pie hats, with red bands. Each bore two metal buttons, ringed with white, black and red rather like tiny archery targets: the Imperial German colours.

  Among these smaller Saxons were tall, sturdy men taking no part in the talking, but regarding the general scene with detachment. They were red-faced men and their tunics and trousers above the leather knee-boots showed dried mud marks. Some had green cords round a shoulder, and under the shoulder tabs.

  Looking in the direction of the mass of Germans, I saw, judging by the serried rows of figures standing there, at least three positions or trench lines behind the front trench. They were dug at intervals of about 200 yards.

  ‘It only shows,’ said one of our chaps, ‘what a lot of men they have, compared to our chaps. We’ve only got one line, really, the rest are mere scratches.’ He said quietly, ‘See those green lanyards and tassels on that big fellow’s shoulders? They’re sniper’s cords. They’re Prussians. That’s what some Saxons told me. They dislike the Prussians. “Kill them all,” said one, “and we’ll have peace”.’

  ‘Yes, my father was always against the Prussians,’ I told him. One of the small Saxons was contentedly standing alone and smoking a new and large meerschaum pipe. He wore spectacles and looked li
ke a comic-paper ‘Hun’. The white bowl of the pipe bore the face and high-peaked cap of ‘Little Willie’ painted on it. The Saxon saw me looking at it and taking pipe from mouth said with quiet satisfaction: ‘Kronprinz! Prächtiger Kerl!’ before putting back the mouthpiece carefully between his teeth.

  Someone told me that Prächtiger Kerl meant ‘Good Chap’ or ‘Decent Fellow’. Of course, I thought, he is to them as the Price of Wales is to us.

  A mark of German efficiency I noted: two aluminium buttons where we had one brass button on our trousers. Men were digging, to bury stiff corpses. Each feld grau ‘stiffy’ was covered by a red-black-white German flag. When the grave had been filled in an officer read from a prayer-book, while the men in feld grau stood to attention with round grey hats clutched in left hands. I found myself standing to attention, my balaclava in my hand. When the grave was filled, someone wrote, in indelible pencil, these words on the rough cross of ration-box wood: Hier Ruht In Gott Ein Unbekannter Deutscher Held. ‘Here rests in God an unknown German hero’, I found myself translating: and thinking that it was like the English crosses in the little cemetery in the clearing within the wood.

  I learned, with surprise, that the German assaults in mass attack through the woods and across the arable fields of the salient, during the last phase of the Battle for Ypres, had been made by young volunteers, some arm in arm, singing, with but one rifle to every three. They had been ‘flung in’ (as the British military term went) after the failure of the Prussian Guard, the élite Corps du Garde, modelled on Napoleon’s famous soldiers, to break our line. And here was the surprise: ‘You had too many automatische pistolen in your line, Englische friend!’

  As a fact, we had few if any machine guns left after the battle; the Germans had mistaken their presence for our ‘fifteen rounds rapid’ fire! Every infantry battalion had been equipped with two machine guns, of the type used in the South African War of 1902; with one exception. That was the London Scottish, the 14th Battalion of the London Regiment, which had bought, privately before the war, two Vickers guns. These also were lost during the battle.

  Another illusion of the Germans appeared to be that we had masses of reserve troops behind our front line, most of them in the woods. If only they had known that we had very few reserves, including some of the battalions of an Indian Division, the turbanned soldiers of which suffered greatly from the cold.

  The truce lasted, in our part of the line (under the Messines Ridge), for several days. On the last day of 1914, one evening, a message came over no man’s land, carried by a very polite Saxon corporal. It was that their regimental (equivalent to our brigade, but they had three battalions where we had four) staff officers were going round their line at midnight; and they would have to fire their automatische pistolen, but would aim high, well above our heads. Would we, even so, please keep under cover, ‘lest regrettable accidents occur’.

  And at 11 o’clock – for they were using Berlin time – we saw the flash of several Spandau machine guns passing well above no man’s land.

  I had taken the addresses of two German soldiers, promising to write to them after the war. And I had, vaguely, a childlike idea that if all those in Germany could know what the soldiers had to suffer, and that both sides believed the same things about the righteousness of the two national causes, it might spread, this truce of Christ on the battlefield, to the minds of all, and give understanding where now there was scorn and hatred.

  I was still very young. I was under age, having volunteered after the news of the Retreat from Mons had come to us one Sunday in the third week of August 1914. Our colonel had made a speech to the battalion, then in London, declaring that the British Expeditionary Force of the Regular army was very reduced in numbers after the 90-mile retreat which had worn out boots and exhausted so many, and was in dire need of help.

  And now the New Year had come, the frost was settling again in little crystals upon posts and on the graves and icy shell holes in no man’s land. Once more the light-balls were rising up to hover under little parachutes over no man’s land with the blast of machine guns, and the brutal downward droning of heavy shells. And the rains came, to fall upon Flanders field, while preparations were in hand for the spring offensive.

  Contribution to History of the First World War, Vol. 2, no. 4

  Purnell & Sons, 1970

  When I Was Demobilised

  I and my friends and others of our generation went into the war in a state of excitement and left it in a state of vacancy bordering on disillusion.

  Perhaps I was more eccentric than most; for I had gone to the front in 1914, very young, to see action before my eighteenth birthday; and while trench-life at first had been exciting, and even enjoyable, nothing I had heard or read or been told had prepared me for the reality of men in battle.

  When I came home a few months later, after some time in hospital, I was treated as a hero, on the basis that the enemy was stupid, cowardly, and always ran away from our heroic selves. Any attempt to stammer the truth was at once regarded as modesty; later, as unpatriotic. Civilians saw the war from newspapers; and what the man from the actual fighting tried to say was not acceptable.

  So the two worlds drew apart; the world of the soldier was different from the mental sphere of the civilian. A schism arose, which was not closed again (and then only superficially) until Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front swept the reading public of all nations in 1928.

  The book was an exaggeration, the work of a war-haunted German youth who had not experienced all that he wrote about; it sold five million copies.

  I left the Army in the summer following the armistice. I was then with the reserve battalion at Cannock Chase, and I had done with the war. I had discovered myself as a writer, and spent my days in my asbestos cubicle writing, and reading Galsworthy, Shakespeare, Shelley, and Richard Jefferies.

  I was immensely exhilarated by the world I had discovered my true self to be part of. I wanted to write the truth as I had seen it, and to do this it was necessary to keep myself entirely apart from my fellows. Parades, what were parades? I had done with parades!

  So I stayed in my cubicle, eating biscuits and making tea, and occasionally going into mess dinner at night. I knew nobody there, and avoided speaking to them, as to strangers. I had a racing motor-cycle, the first post-war model turned out by a famous Birmingham firm, and sometimes went to Stratford to buy food, and meet acquaintances in the bars of hotels.

  After two or three weeks of such irregular conduct, during which time I had ignored all chits summoning me to the orderly room, from both assistant adjutant and adjutant – both junior in service to myself – I was sent for by the colonel. He said curtly that I must hand in my papers.

  He had been through the war from the beginning, and so I apologised to him for my conduct. He said he was glad I had apologised; and then I told him, in halting words, that I was possessed by an overwhelming feeling to devote myself to writing. We shook hands, while my eyes could not see properly; and the next day I left on my motor-cycle for London and demobilisation. A few formalities at the Crystal Palace, and I was out again, a free man.

  It was then that I felt lost; all my years since boyhood – a very long time to me – the Army had been my home, indeed it had been my entire grown-up world. Now I had no world, except the shadowy and diminished sphere of civvy life which had been steadily dissolving since 1914. I could hardly speak to my parents; there were hardly any light-rays between our worlds.

  I remember going slowly round the streets of Sydenham, wondering what I could do. At last I went to London, to stay in an hotel and visit some of my war-time leave-haunts. But I might have been a ghost. I drank beer alone, yet with imaginary comrades.

  The next day I went to the Army bankers to see about my ‘blood-money’, or gratuity. This was payable at the rate of 180 days’ pay for the first year of commissioned service, with 90 days’ pay for every subsequent year or part of a year. I found I had nearly £300 to come. O
f this, £100 had already been spent on the racing motor-cycle.

  I wrote at night, and loafed about during the day. I ran into some of my friends and we hailed one another with cries of happiness. One was thinking of starting a poultry farm in Suffolk; another wanted to raise a loan to supplement his gratuity and buy a tractor to do contract ploughing in Essex.

  A third wanted to be an actor; he had been a great success on guest nights in the past, with monologues accompanied with music from a home-made cigar-box violoncello. He told us of Major X, a ranker who had won both DSO and DCM, being seen outside a picture palace in the uniform of a commissionaire.

  Another, a rather wild fellow who was an artist of sorts before the war, was going round the West End wearing a mask and uniform without rank-badges or buttons, and playing a barrel-organ.

  It was a strange world; but the lighted bars at night, which we haunted, gave us a feeling of war-time comradeship. What did the future matter? It had never mattered in the only world we knew, that of the war.

  There was an ex-Officers’ Association, to which I and a friend went, putting down our names for jobs. Any jobs; at home or abroad. We learned that what we were in the Army was of little use in the new world we were now becoming accustomed to.

  One of my friends was offered a job as clerk in a shirt-factory in the East End. Later he went to South Africa, on a Government scheme, farming. I heard from him once only; he must have lost out when the slump came, later on.

  Gradually we drifted apart. The new world took us our different ways. I don’t say that all were like ourselves; I can speak only of my little clique, made up of chaps a little less steady than the majority. One of them, a polished youth with charming manners and considerable skill at bridge, who had somehow wangled himself a job as ADC to a divisional commander, had managed to stay out of the fighting all through.