Chapter IV

The period in reserve had brought the whole battalion together once more. The companies were no longer separated as they had been in the trenches. Our Ensign found the officers established in regular messes in the sand-bagged shelters of this pleasantly rural retreat, and the whole routine of the Guards running smoothly on very similar lines to the life in barracks at home.

Life was not at all strenuous in reserve--at any rate not in the day-time. In the trenches the men get short commons in the way of sleep, so during the period in reserve they are not worked very hard. At night, however, fatigue parties were generally sent up to the support or front lines on various digging undertakings. Otherwise, a rifle inspection in the morning, and sometimes, additionally, an inspection of feet (an army may fight on its stomach, but it marches on its feet) or of gas helmets, was the only parade of the day.

Each company took it in turn to be “in waiting”--that is to say, to be in readiness for any emergency. The company in waiting furnished the guards and fatigue parties for any special jobs about the camp. During the period in waiting, which lasted twenty-four hours, from one afternoon to the afternoon of the following day, the officers of the company in waiting were not supposed to leave the precincts of the camp, and, the company commander excepted, they took it in turns, during the period “in waiting,” to act as Piquet Officer, whose functions in reserve were practically confined to stamping the letters with the battalion censor stamp in the Orderly Room (a sand-bagged shelter), before the post corporal collected the mail in the afternoons.

Our Ensign slipped very easily, almost imperceptibly, into his place as a tiny cog in the great wheelwork of the army in France. He came out prepared to have a roughish time in very congenial company--and in neither respect was he disappointed. The Mess in which he found himself had all the attraction of a cosmopolitan club in miniature. His fellow-officers in the company to which he had been posted--No. 2--had what was known as a double-company mess with the officers of No. 1 Company. At the quarters in reserve the mess was located in an ambitious sort of sand-bagged shelter, with stain-glass windows, timber floor and walls, a white deal sideboard (home-made), and a long table and chairs. Here our Ensign met his company commander, a serene and placid person, with a somewhat judicial manner, who, for that reason, answered to the name of “The Beak.” Most of the other officers our Ensign had known at home, so that he did not feel so much an intruder as he had feared he would.

The double-company mess was a very happy family. In every stratum of society type balances type. It is this easy counter-poise that makes the world revolve. That great leveller, the War, has thrown together in officers’ messes for a spell of intimate association a number of men whose pursuits in other circumstances would all have radiated in different directions. In that mess there were, amongst others, a brace of budding diplomats, two Balliol undergraduates, a rancher, a “literary gent.,” and an engineer. Some of the officers had decided to adopt the Army as their profession, and to remain on in the regiment after the war, but others would simply return to their pursuits and professions on the proclamation of peace. The pleasant _cameraderie_ which reigned in the double-company mess must be based, our Ensign decided, on the equilibrium of all these different temperaments and mental outlooks balanced one against the other. So far as regimental duties were concerned, every type was tempered down to the average consistency given by the identical training which every Guards’ officer receives on the square at home.

Therefore, though many and furious were the arguments on every conceivable topic with which the young lions of the double-company mess whiled away their leisure hours, there was perfect accord in the general realisation by each of his duties and responsibilities as an officer. In the privacy of the mess there might be heated wrangles regarding the respective merits of No. 1 and No. 2 Companies; but the whole mess presented a solid front in backing the two companies against the rest of the battalion, the battalion against the rest of the Brigade, and the regiment against every other regiment in the Brigade of Guards.

Our Ensign had two or three spells in reserve at this peaceful spot, and always looked forward to returning to it after the battalion’s turn of duty in the trenches. There was practically no shelling; any German shells that came over mostly fell in a more exposed position several hundred yards away. All around them lay spread out the fair garb in which summer dresses the Belgian countryside, and not even the ruined farms or the shell-scored roads could detract from the beauty of the poppies and corn-flowers running wild among the neglected fields, or the roses and the hollyhocks and the snapdragon that bloomed in the little gardens of the ravaged farms.

The men revelled in the snatch of quiet, in the pleasant surroundings, in the beautiful summer weather. When their day’s work was done they sat about in the shade, writing letters home, reading the newspapers, or idly watching the afternoon spectacle of German _v._ British aeroplanes. Some spent every moment of their leisure in dragging one of the canals in which Belgium abounds for fish. The drag-net was a marvel of ingenuity, constructed as it was out of rabbit netting, barbed wire, bits of string, sandbags, and branches, towed along by eager hands on either bank. Incredible as it may seem, the fishermen made quite respectable catches of pike and eels, which they cooked for supper over wood-fires, and consumed with relish,--all heedless of dark allusions by their less enterprising comrades to the fabled discovery of portions of a German helmet in the maw of one of these aquarian monsters.

The officers went for walks in the neighbourhood, extending their rambles, with the perversity of youth, to the ruined city of Ypres, still the shell-trap _par excellence_ of the countryside for miles around. One afternoon, a subaltern in our Ensign’s mess who went by the name of Apollo, from his statuesque appearance, and who was a perfect Baedeker of information about the local attractions wherever the battalion went, took Peter and our Ensign and one of the Balliol men, known as The Don, to a certain field where, among various shell-holes and felled apple-trees, a few rows of depressed currant bushes yet lingered. The currants were red and scanty and abominably sour, and an unusually large number of “dud” shells were falling in dangerous proximity to the party from an “Archie” or anti-aircraft gun that was vigorously shelling a German raider. There was plenty of fresh fruit in the mess where the young men could have sat in the cool of the shelter and eaten their fill, but they preferred to stand in the hot afternoon sun and munch unripe currants at imminent risk of their necks. Truly youth is a wonderful thing!

Another day a band of them strolled out over the fields to a certain billet, where previously the battalion and other Guards’ battalions had been quartered for some time. There they visited the pretty garden which the Guards had laid out with wonderful centre-pieces, representing the different regimental crests of the Guards in coloured stones. But, while the Guards had been away, the heathen had raged. There were shell-holes in the garden, and the rains had begun to gnaw at the centre-pieces.... In the Salient everything, living and dead, seems vowed to destruction.

The night fatigues were dull, dangerous, and depressing. Night after night parties sallied forth with pick and spade, often in gum-boots, if there was work to be done on a wet trench, and plodded through the darkness to a more or less apocryphal rendezvous.

All the open ground close up to the Front in the Salient is sprayed by machine-gun fire at night, and a brisk burst of shell fire in addition was no uncommon experience for the nightly fatigue parties. Sometimes the sapper folk would be late at the trysting-place, and the men would stand huddled up together like a flock of sheep on a moor, while the officers would fret and fume and mutter dire menaces about “reporting the fellow to the Brigade.” Then the sapper would arrive, and the officer, about to deliver himself of a few weighty and well-considered remarks on punctuality, which is the politeness of soldiers as well as of kings, would find himself confronted by an obsequious R.E. corporal protesting that the “orficer” was “jest over there.”

Translated into the plain language of fact, this indication might mean anything from 300 yards to a mile; but at length the sapper officer would appear, silencing with honeyed words and profuse apology the torrent of reproach bubbling at the Guardsman’s lips. After that the sapper officer would take charge, and the Guards’ officer would find his _rôle_ restricted to walking up and down for anything up to three or four hours, bored to tears, unable even to smoke, because smoking on these night fatigues is forbidden to the men. He had not even the mental occupation of keeping the men to their task. They knew that they could not go home to bed until the job was finished, whatever it was, and therefore every man worked with a will, jackets discarded, sleeves rolled up.

Everybody who has been up in the Salient knows what the “trenches” there are like. The Hun holds the high ground everywhere: he has the dry soil, the observation. In the British lines the ground is so wet that a foot below the surface you strike water ... and probably a dead man as well, so thick do they lie in this blood-drenched region. Therefore the parapets are for the most part built up, and indeed the whole defences--parapet, traverses, and parados--have to be built up with sandbags, which, under the influence of shell fire and the weather, have to be continually renewed and repaired.

A parapet that will shelter a platoon of the line will not do for a platoon of Guardsmen. It is a question of inches. When the Gurkhas relieved the Guards in the trenches in the Béthune region early in the war, the Guards had to put a double tier of sandbags along the fire-step so that the little hillmen could look over the top of the parapet. Therefore, in the Salient, it often happened that the Guards found themselves sheltering in the open behind a thin parapet in bad repair, behind which they had to kneel in order to protect themselves against the enemy snipers.

Work, with a capital “W,” loomed large in the orders of every company commander of the Guards in the Salient. In truth, there was much to be done. In places, the trench lines were not connected, parapets were low and by no means bullet-proof, parados were distinguished mainly by their absence. Thus, when one battalion of Guards relieved another in the Salient, it took over not only the trench but a vast programme of “improvements,” as the house-builders say.

The first night our Ensign went up to the front line with the company, the Guards’ battalion which they were relieving had a big scheme of work to hand over. As junior officer, our Ensign was given charge of the men in the front line, for the first half of their turn “in,” whilst The Beak and Peter remained, according to usage, in the company headquarters in the support line. For the second half, Peter was to relieve our Ensign.

While the relief was being effected, an ensign of the outgoing company took our young man round the trench, and, with the air of a Commissioner of the Office of Works, showed the new-comer the work which had been begun, which the incoming company was to finish. The barbed wire was probably defective and would have to be inspected and possibly repaired; here they had put in three new traverses; here they had repaired the parapet that had been blown in by an enemy trench mortar; there they had started to build a parados; this part of the parapet was not bullet-proof ... they had had a man wounded passing there the previous day; and so on, and so forth. The officer explained everything with admirable lucidity, and then, his men having all filed out, trotted away, leaving our Ensign, rather bewildered, standing on a precarious trench-board, half immersed in yellow water, with an overpowering odour of death in his nostrils.

Both The Beak and Peter presently came up to help him over his difficulties at his first taste of trench warfare, and together they mapped out a scheme to spread the work remaining to be done over the time they were to spend in the front line. The platoon sergeants were called into consultation: they had already got the sentries posted in the fire-bays, and the rest of the men they set at the task of filling sandbags. It was agreed that our Ensign should go out and have a look at the wire, and also the outside of the parapet, to see how it could best be made bullet-proof.

A little later the officer, in company with his orderly, his rifle slung at his back, a handsome and self-possessed young man, who was introduced as the wiring corporal, and a rugged Irish sergeant called Kinole, slung his leg over the parapet and dropped out into the open on the other side.

It was a dark windy night. In front of them the German star-shells were soaring aloft, and the night was alive with noises reverberating in the darkness. Machine-guns on both sides coughed their harsh “tack-tack ... tack-tack-tack.” Rifle shots rang out here and there; and every now and then, with a bang and a whizz, a Verey light whirred up into the dark sky from the trenches behind the little party. Somewhere on the right a mighty British _strafe_ was in progress: our Ensign could hear the steady racket of the shells and see their orange flicker in the sky as they burst against the surrounding blackness.

The chinking of tools resounded very faintly out of the dark in front of them.

“’Tis Fritz out workin’,” muttered Sergeant Kinole hoarsely. “Iv’ry night ’tis the same, sir.... He works like anny ould mole.”

The party crossed a very wet ditch and came to the wire. Here the wiring corporal took the lead and they all crawled along behind him, bending their heads low, as he did, to examine the strands of wire against the sky. In places the wire was broken and would have to be replaced.

Then our Ensign took a look at the parapet from the outside. There was no room to strengthen it from within, and outside the trench the ground sloped away into a morass. The only thing would be to lay an earth foundation and build it up on that. The sergeant hopped back into the trench, and presently returned with a horde of bulky figures with pick and shovel who scrambled over the parapet, and, dropping on the other side, started shovelling dry earth on to the wet ground at the foot of the parapet.

All night they worked and shovelled and built, inside and outside the trench, while the star-shells spouted and the machine-guns rapped loudly. With the first flicker of dawn they trooped in, and then, while the dawn was breaking sullenly, the men stood to on the fire-step all along the trench, while our Ensign, empty and cold and dreadfully sleepy, wondered why the trench smells were so overpoweringly accentuated in the early morning.

With the coming of dawn the men stood down, our Ensign inspected rifles, the Commanding Officer, on his daily round of the trenches, appeared and asked him a question or two, and after that, amid a general sizzling of bacon all along the trench, the officer made for the earthen cave which had been pointed out to him as his quarters. There was the faithful Johnson with a mug of hot cocoa; there was our Ensign’s blanket and his air-pillow arranged on a carpet of clean sandbags.

Our young man slept until ten o’clock, and then rose to find his washing things spread out in the sunshine, Johnson close by boiling his shaving water in a mess tin. He made a leisurely toilet, then sauntered down the communication trench to the company headquarters, where he breakfasted joyously with The Beak and Peter off eggs and bacon and tea and bread-and-butter and strawberry jam. Of course the double-company mess was broken up when the battalion was in the line, so, by mutual arrangement, No. 1 Company took the mess cook, and No. 2 the mess waiter. It was the latter, rather more dishevelled than his wont, who served the three officers at breakfast in a tiny dug-out four feet square.

One turn in the trenches is very much like another. Sometimes they got shelled, and on the first occasion, our Ensign, emerging rather hastily from his cubby-hole to find out what the noise was about, was shamed into complete nonchalance by the unshakable phlegm of the men. He soon learned to adopt the prescribed air of indifference to such attentions from the enemy, but, like most people, he never got used to shelling. Once or twice he went out patrolling with his orderly, a completely fearless, wholly unsqueamish, and eminently practical young man. It was a messy business, crawling through the wet grass in the dark, and rather trying to the nerves. But, as a sage friend of our Ensign’s used to say, “If you can’t see the Hun, he can’t see you,” and our young man more than once drew comfort from this practical maxim as he and MacFinnigan crawled through No Man’s Land with eyes and ears strained for sight or sound of the enemy.

Letters and newspapers arrived with unfailing regularity in the front line every afternoon at tea-time. So they knew all about the great events that were happening on the Somme, especially as the latest bulletins came up daily from the army headquarters, and were stuck up (by means of a cartridge driven into the sandbag walls) outside the company headquarters. Everybody speculated endlessly as to the moment when the Guards would be hurled into that boiling cauldron in the south. Rumours of all kinds were rife: everybody had his own theories and “information,” especially the men. Our Ensign used to hear them gossiping round their breakfast fires in the trenches, where every cookhouse rumour was thoroughly examined.

At last one day, when the Battalion was expecting to go out of the trenches altogether for several weeks’ rest, it was reported that the Somme was its next destination. This time rumour spoke true. About one o’clock A.M., on a mellow summer night, the Battalion marched quietly by companies across the market-place of an old Belgian town, where it would in a day or two entrain for the Unknown.