“Parade! Tchern!!” shouted Sergeant-Major Shandon; and a moment later the four company commanders came to attention and saluted as the Colonel passed in, sprinkling “Good mornings” to right and left.
I had one very uninteresting case of drunkenness; “A” had a couple of men who had overstayed their pass in England; “C” had a case held over from the day before for further evidence, and was now dismissed as not proven; while “D” had an unsatisfactory sergeant who was “severely reprimanded.” All these cases were quickly and unerringly disposed of, and we company commanders saluted again and clattered down the winding staircase out into the sunshine.
I had to pass from one end of the village to the other. The orderly-room was not far from our company “Mess” and was at a cross-roads. Opposite, in one of the angles made by the junction of the four roads, was a deep and usually muddy horse-pond. But even here the mud was getting hard under this spell of warm May weather, and the innumerable ruts and hoof-marks were crystallising into a permanent pattern. As I walked along the streets I passed sundry Tommies acting as road-scavengers; “permanent road fatigue” they were called, although they were anything but permanent, being changed every day. Formerly they had seemed to be engaged in a Herculean, though unromantic, task of scraping great rolling puddings of mud to the side of the road, in the vain hope that the mud would find an automatic exit into neighbouring gardens and ponds; for Morlancourt did not boast such modern things as gutters. To-day there were large pats of mud lining the street, but these were now caked and hard, and even crumbling into dust, that whisked about among the sparrows. The permanent road fatigue was gathering waste-paper and tins in large quantities, but otherwise was having a holiday.
Women were working, or gossiping at the doorsteps. The estaminet doors were flung wide open, and the floors were being scrubbed and sprinkled with sawdust. A little bare-legged girl, in a black cotton dress, was hugging a great wide loaf; an old man sat blinking in the sunshine; cats were basking, dogs nosing about lazily. A party of about thirty bombers passed me, the sergeant giving “eyes right” and waking me from meditations on the eternal calm of cats. Then I reached the headquarter guard, and the sentry saluted with a rattling clap upon his butt, and I did my best to emulate his smartness. So I passed along all the length of the shuttered houses of Morlancourt.
“A great day, this,” I thought, as I came to the small field where “B” Company was paraded; not two hundred and fifty men, as you will doubtless assume from the text-books, but some thirty or forty men only; one was lucky if one mustered forty. Where were the rest, you ask? Well, bombers bombing; Lewis gunners under Edwards; some on “permanent mining fatigue,” that is, carrying the sand-bags from the mine-shafts to the dumps; transport, pioneers, stretcher-bearers, men under bombing instruction, officers’ servants, headquarter orderlies, men on leave, etc. etc. The company sergeant-major will make out a parade slate for you if you want it, showing exactly where every man is. But here are forty men. Let’s drill them.
Half were engaged in arm-drill under my best drill-sergeant; the other half were doing musketry in gas-helmets, an unpleasant practice which nothing would induce me to do on a sunny May morning. They lay on their fronts, legs well apart, and were working the bolts of their rifles fifteen times a minute. After a while they changed over and did arm-drill, while the other half took over the gas-helmets, the mouthpieces having first been dipped in a solution of carbolic brought by one of the stretcher-bearers in a canteen. These gas-helmets were marked D.P. (drill purposes), and each company had so many with which to practise.
When both parties were duly exercised, I gave a short lecture on the measures to be adopted against the use of Flammenwerfer, which is the “Liquid Fire” of the official communiqués. I had just been to a demonstration of this atrocity in the form of a captured German apparatus, and my chief object in lecturing the men about it was to make it quite clear that the flaming jets of burning gas cannot sink into a trench, but, as a matter of fact, only keep level so long as they are propelled by the driving power of the hose apparatus; as water from a hose goes straight, and then curves down to the ground, so gas, even though it be incandescent, goes straight and then rises. In the trench you are unscathed, as we proved in the demonstration, when they sprayed the flaming gas over a trench full of men. Indeed, the chief effect of this flammenwerfer is one of frightfulness, as the Germans cannot come over until the flames have ceased. The men were rather inclined to gape at all this, but I found the words had sunk in when I asked what should be done if the enemy used this diabolical stuff against us. “Get down at the bottom of the trench, sir, and as soon as they stop it, give the ——’s ’ell!”
The rest of the morning we spent “on the range,” which meant firing into a steep chalk bank at a hundred yards. Targets and paste-pot had been procured from the pioneers’ shop, and after posting a couple of “look-out” men on either side, we started range practice. The men are always keen about firing on the range, and it is really the most interesting and pleasant part of the infantryman’s training. I watched these fellows, hugging their rifle-butt into their shoulder, and feeling the smooth wood against their cheeks; they wriggled their bodies about to get a comfortable position; sometimes they flinched as they fired and jerked the rifle; sometimes they pressed the trigger as softly, as softly.... And gradually, carefully, we tried to detect and eliminate the faults. Then we ended up with fifteen rounds rapid in a minute. The “mad minute” it used to be called at home. After which we fell the men in, and Paul marched them back to the company “alarm post” outside the company office, where “B” Company always fell in; while Owen, Nicolson, and I walked back together.
II. Afternoon
“I still maintain,” said I, an hour later, as we finished lunch, “that bully-beef, some sort of sauce or pickle, and salad, followed by cheese, and ending with a cup of tea, is the proper lunch for an officer. I don’t mind other officers having tinned fruit, though, if they like it,” I added with a laugh.