In addition to the Transport, the Quartermaster and his staff spent a good deal of their time at Delanotte Farm, where also the Civil Service Rifles’ dentist, Corporal E. Pitt, was installed with all his stock in trade. The Civil Service Rifles claim to be unique among Infantry Battalions in the B. E. F. in that they alone possessed their own dentist, who, although fully qualified, was primarily an infantryman and was not one of the R. A. M. C. attached.
During his service in France, Corporal Pitt has attended to a distinguished clientele, including at least one Brigadier General, but he showed no class distinctions in his dental chair, and the humble private was always sure of just as careful treatment as was given to his Brigadier.
Pitt often had to work amid strange surroundings, but his surgery at Delanotte Farm was perhaps his best known home, and one of his patients has recorded his impressions of it:
“In the last great European War the ambitious Emperor who may be regarded as the Kaiser’s prototype stated that an army marched on its stomach. But what is a stomach without its teeth? (vide any advertisements of ‘a complete set from one guinea upwards’). At any rate the British Army has come to regard the teeth of its lads as anxiously as the fond mother regards her little one’s chewing organs. These few remarks will serve to introduce our hero.
“Imagine a brick farm-house in a part of Belgium where the mud is too muddy for words. The house nestles in a swamp of green viscous slime. This was for many months the locale of the C. S. R. Transport while the boys were disporting themselves in the ditches (misnamed ‘trenches’) in the Ypres district. The room of the farmhouse was of fairly decent size, with a low ceiling supported by stout smoke-grimed beams. It was always well patronised by the lads of the Transport, who would discuss the inevitable eggs and chips and sip their coffee or beer all day long. At a large sink by the window the good lady of the house, assisted variously by a submissive husband, a daughter (who could by no stretch of imagination be called a coquette!) and a son, seemed eternally engaged either in preparing a salad of chickweed and groundsel (or so it seemed), or in counting the stock of dried haricots. In the other corner by the window, there was a complete dental establishment installed. This was the scene of the labours of the indefatigable Pitt, and there was nothing of the horse-doctor’s methods about him. I can assure you that he wielded the cocaine-injecting needle as expertly as the one and only Sherlock himself. Did you want a tooth scraped or stopped, or filled, or coddled in any way whatever, our dentist would say ‘right,’ and place a fresh cigarette in his holder (would that I received a royalty on the cigarettes he smoked!) Then he would select some fearsome-looking—but really harmless—instruments from his plenteous stock, and carry on. His sideline (something like the ‘making bricks in spare time’ stunt) was treating cases that would ordinarily fall to the care of the M.O. if he were available. It was surprising how the fame of Pitt spread near and far; and many and various were his clients. The amusing part was the complete nonchalance of the people of the house. They would carry on their weird and wonderful culinary processes at the sink while the amateur doctor extracted teeth and poured away bloody water and rinsed foul dressings under their very noses. In this atmosphere of eggs and chips, steaming coffee, stale beer, tobacco smoke, flies, and sometimes washing, Pitt carried on his labours day by day, month by month, until the Battalion was sent away to happier (?) hunting grounds....
“Jolly old Pitt! How many of us had cause to bless the fact that we could go to him for healing balm in our time of bitter sorrow!”
The Battalion was reassembled after being employed for a month as Works Battalion, and on the 21st of March renewed its acquaintance with the front line trenches in the Ravine. The trenches were no longer ice-bound, but the official first day of Spring did not live up to its name, for snow and sleet fell throughout the night. Eight uneventful days in the Ravine were followed by a similar period in support in the neighbourhood of Swan Château and Château Segard. Hitherto when the Battalion had been at Swan Château the chief recreation had been sliding on the pond in the château grounds. Captain Ind, in fact, made a nightly practice of leading Headquarter Company in sliding on the ice by moonlight. On this occasion, however, boating and fishing were freely indulged in. There was an odd looking craft on the pond, which was in great demand, and the most popular bait for the fish seemed to be a Mills bomb—though this bait was not sanctioned by the B. E. F. Angling Society. It was in fact forbidden by G.R.O., so it naturally follows that no angler was ever known to use the bait.
Any man who thought the Battalion had come to the Ypres Salient for boating and fishing, however, was rudely disillusioned when a return was made to the front line in the familiar Ravine. The London Irish had just finished a big raid on the German lines when the Civil Service Rifles relieved them on the night of the 7th of April, and henceforth things livened up very considerably in this sector, where life had previously been tolerably quiet. The Bosche now bombarded furiously, and on the 9th of April (Easter Monday) he raided the Battalion on the immediate left of the Civil Service Rifles, causing pretty heavy casualties. The raid took place at 6.30 p.m. and the accompanying fireworks were kept up throughout the night. As a sample of the frightfulness that could be served up in the Salient, it was fairly complete, and the Civil Service Rifles, although not in the raided trenches, lost thirteen killed and eighteen wounded during the night.
The Division very soon afterwards had to take over a little more of the line immediately south of the Ypres-Comines Canal, known as the Spoil Bank Sector, and as it meant giving up the hated Hill 60 Sector, the change was a very popular one.
Ottawa Camp now came within the area of another Division, and the Civil Service Rifles, on being relieved on the 12th of April by the First Surrey Rifles, moved into Divisional Reserve in Devonshire Camp, near Busseboom.
Early in April rumours of a big Spring offensive began to relieve the monotony, and the story was passed from one to another in strict confidence that the Civil Service Rifles would soon attack a château in a wood just south of the canal, where the Adjutant was of opinion that “we shall have some interesting wood fighting.”