The natives of Les Brebis were now quite accustomed to being awakened at all hours of the night to receive new lodgers, for their houses were the billets of the Battalion in reserve to the front line at Grenay and Maroc, near by.
The heat during the day of the 7th of June had been of the real midsummer variety, and it was little better at night, when the march from Sailly Labourse took place. It was not a long march, but the troops were very thankful when it ended, for they found their equipment very heavy on that hot June night.
Les Brebis had had a most extraordinary experience during the war. Here was a village only about two miles from the front line, practically untouched, and fully inhabited with civilians who still went about their daily round as in pre-war times. The mines were still being worked, and an excellent bathing place was found under the water tower of the electric light works.
The men were billeted for the first time in France in close billets, six men on an average sleeping on the small attic floors of the miners’ cottages. The miners and their families were very friendly disposed towards the Civil Service Rifles to judge from the scribe who says:
“Mesdames were very good to us and cooked the delicacies we purchased in the town with the utmost care. There was a barrel of beer in almost every billet, and veal cutlets, cut thin and ‘done to a turn,’ with pommes de terre frites, egg salad and stewed fruit made a favourite meal. Indeed, a French housewife, whose mari was having a hard time in the Vosges on a couple of sous a day expressed her conviction in a burst of confidence that ‘English soldat do no work and eat too much.’”
The early months of the summer of 1915 were passed very pleasantly in this mining district without any event of importance.
The front line was well furnished with various home comforts taken from the almost deserted village of Maroc, the enemy was some distance away, there was little shelling and there were very few casualties. Indeed it was, after Festubert, very much in the nature of a picnic. No Man’s Land was a field of waving corn, with scarlet poppies and blue cornflowers to complete the rural scene. New potatoes and other fresh vegetables, red currants and gooseberries could be picked in abundance from the gardens near the trenches, and there are men who claim to have slipped away from the line to a neighbouring estaminet “to have a quick one” between their turns of sentry duty in the line.
The chief enemy was the ferocious fly, which, according to one victim, “crawled under our clothes, down our backs, between our eyelids and into our mouths and ears. Over one dug-out a wit had inscribed Itch Den (Ich Dien) below the Prince of Wales’s feathers, testifying to the fact that we were now not only doing our bit but being well bitten in the process.”
More than one scribbler relieved the monotony of trench routine by recording this phase of the Great War in his diary:
“‘The chief fatigues,’ according to Loxdale, ‘were sand-bagging, water fetching and dug-out digging, and the game in connection with them all was to dodge them. This was generally effected by never being about when fatigues were going. Other methods which still worked occasionally were preoccupation with imaginary duties, profound slumber, or serious indisposition at the psychological moment.’”