With my regiment

by Arthur Mills

"Yes, I've been married a year—got a brat too," he said with an air of having conclusively reformed; then, returning to the subject of the war, "absolutely certain to get hit, you know—it's all very well—never even had time to say good-bye to my wife and kid."

A month or two afterwards I saw from the papers that his regiment had been in action and lost fourteen officers—eleven wounded and three killed. It seemed just the infernal luck of the thing that he should have been one of the three killed.

The voyage lasted three days. By the middle of the second day quite half the troops were sea-sick. It also came on to rain. The men had therefore all to remain in the hold. Owing to the exigencies of war they had to be packed like Chinese coolies, and there was no room for them to walk about, barely enough for them to lie down. The boards on which they lay soon became littered with bits of biscuit, cheese, clots of jam, and fragments of bully beef. The rain found its way down to the hold through the improvised companion ways, and not more than half the men could keep dry. The stench in the hold soon became appalling. The men themselves did not seem to worry much, but lay about, those who were well enough smoking, those who were not, with the aggrieved expression Tommy often wears when he is sorely tried, as much as to say: "—— it, what next am I going to be asked to do?" But when Tommy wears this expression it by no means follows he is not going to carry out the command. He retreated from Mons in this fashion.

The sun was shining again as we arrived off the mouth of the Loire. As we steamed slowly up the river we began to see the first signs of war. There was a large concentration camp on the left bank. We were passed and were vociferously cheered by another transport, lying off the dock with her decks thick with men waiting to be disembarked. We were eventually moored alongside a quay and told we must all remain on board till to-morrow morning. This was a disappointment to the men, a few of whom endeavoured to land on their own initiative by means of a rope ladder. A guard was put over the ladder and most of the officers retired to the saloon for drinks. We had various distractions during the evening. First a visit from a wounded officer who had been sent down from the base camp. He said his regiment had been badly cut up. Some of the others asked him about individual officers in his regiment. "The colonel—oh, the colonel has 'gone.' Chippendale—poor Chippendale, he thought he'd been hit in the stomach and was dead. 'Curtes,' yes, Curtes had been alongside him in the trench and shot through the head. There was a fellow in hospital with him who had had eleven bullets in his leg. He was dying. He didn't know how long he'd be at the base camp. They had tried to put him on a hospital boat for England, but he had got off again. He thought he'd go back in a week. It was awful up there."

He was the first wounded man we had seen, and we said one to another: "By Jove, he has been through it."

Now I know that his funny way of saying everybody was dead, and the shocked look on his face, combined with the wish to go back, and "we are in for a bigger thing than we ever thought" attitude, were all symptoms of nervous strain, which most men get after a certain time in action.

Besides our visitor we saw something of the life of the town from the sides of the boat. There were a good many men in khaki coming and going along the streets and in cafés, apparently all rather the worse for drink, and there was an officer's picket parading the streets putting the more drunken under arrest. It was the first few days of the new base camp, and the provost-marshal was just getting the town in order.

As Mulligan and I were turning in for the night an orderly reported that a man had been drowned trying to get off the boat, and an officer was wanted to go down to the quay. Mulligan was up immediately. It seemed rather an unpleasant job for a boy like him, so I said there was no need for him to go as the man might not belong to our draft.

He grinned and put on his cap. "I think I'll go and get a sight of my first corpse," he said.

It was pouring with rain when we landed the next morning. We were told to march to No. 7a base camp, which we should find two miles outside the town, shown the direction, and off we started. There were the details of some five divisions quartered round the town, first reinforcements, second reinforcements, artillery units, cavalry, A.S.C., and Royal Flying Corps. As these were all divided into various small settlements, which each guarded its domain jealously and denied all knowledge of us when we offered ourselves for accommodation, it was no easy matter to arrive at the right spot. It rained steadily during our search; however, at last, after plodding through miles of tents and across a half-dried swamp, we found a small camp in a field which had a board by the guard-tent marked "7a."