With my regiment

by Arthur Mills

An hour before dawn the men stood to their arms in the trenches, but as the daylight grew and there was no sound or sight of the enemy, first one man and then another got out of the trench. These being allowed to walk about with impunity the others soon followed their example. Fires were lit for cooking, and men spread themselves on the ground behind the trench reading old copies of newspapers, or mending their clothes, or cleaning their rifles. Here and there parties could be seen carrying away corpses which had been stiff and cold behind the trench for the last forty-eight hours. Goyle, my company commander, walked across from his headquarters. The day before it had been impossible for him to get to us, and messages were brought by orderlies, who crawled up on their stomachs along a narrow ditch.

"Morning," said Goyle; "looks as though they had cleared."

"Yes, sir," I answered, "there has been no sign of anything ahead this morning."

"I reckon that was their transport we heard, sir—they was rumbling along a road there, sir, all the night," said my platoon-sergeant.

The man was probably right, for all through the night a rumbling of wagons had been plainly audible along a road behind the enemy's lines. The night before we had been attacked fiercely, but though they had come very near us they had not been able to break through. During the day the enemy had remained quiet, contenting themselves with sniping, and now evidently, under cover of darkness, they had withdrawn to another position.

"Well, I suppose we shall push on now," I said to Goyle.

"Yes, I expect so," he answered.

Our orders to advance came at four o'clock. Goyle came down to give the necessary instructions to platoon commanders. We were to push forward straight to our front, keeping under cover as much as possible. He said he believed that the ground was all clear in front of us, but that it would be as well to take precautions.

Evans and I therefore led our platoons down a ditch which led direct to the front. We eventually came out by a large farm building which a day or two ago had been in the hands of the Germans. It had been known to the British troops as "the hospital," because the Germans had hoisted a Red Cross flag on a pole on the roof. But "the hospital" had also been used by the enemy as an observing station, and our guns had been obliged to shell it on two or three occasions. We examined the building with interest. The place was evidently a dairy farm on a large scale, for three sides were cowsheds, and there was a big store of hay. At the far end was the dwelling-house, over which the Red Cross had been hoisted. The place had perhaps been used as a hospital, for in the bottom room we found a long riding boot, which had been cut off a wounded man, and a blood-soaked pair of the well-known blue-grey breeches. However, on going up on to the roof we found the facilities for seeing over our lines so remarkable that the shells from our guns were evidently justly placed.

I made the tour of the farm with the doctor of the Dorchesters, who was thinking of taking it over as a hospital himself. When we came down from the roof we found two farm girls outside. They asked us anxiously if it would be safe for them to stay there that night, and we assured them it would. They said they had gone off a mile or two for two or three days, but now they had come back to look after the cows. They were a pair of very cool young ladies, who seemed to regard the German occupation of their farm as no more than a heavy rainstorm, to be avoided while it lasted, but not to be worried about once it was over. The doctor and I went round to look at the cowsheds. The beasts were all in their stalls, some evidently suffering a good deal from want of milking. In the first shed we came to there was a most appalling stench. The doctor sniffed and said he thought it was something dead. We examined the cows that were lying down, but they were all alive. Then the doctor made an orderly rake over all the straw. He said that the Germans had a habit of hiding dead men under straw, if they were vacating a place, just by way of providing a pleasant surprise for any tired British soldiers who might make the straw their bed. However, there were no corpses in the cowshed, and we never discovered the cause of the smell, though it was strong and nasty enough to prevent my ever forgetting it.