The move was made the occasion, by our C.O., of very elaborate and careful operation orders. No details were left to chance, and a conference of officers was called to explain the procedure of getting a battalion on a train and getting it off again. As usual, the officers’ valises had to be ready at a very early hour, and the company mess-boxes packed correspondingly early. Edwards, I think, was detailed as O.C. loading-party. Everything like this was down in the operation orders. The adjutant had had a time of it.
Certainly the entraining went like clockwork, and once more I was seated in a grey-upholstered corridor carriage; the men were in those useful adaptable carriages inscribed “Chevaux 10. Hommes 30.” Our Tommies were evidently a kind of centaur class, for they went in by twenties. As far as I can remember, we entrained at 10.0 a.m.; we arrived at a station a few miles from Amiens at 9.0 p.m. A slow journey, but I felt excited like a child. I must keep going to the corridor to put my head out of the window. It was a sparkling, nippy air; the smell of the steam, the grit of the engine—these were things I had forgotten; and soon there were rolling plains, hills, clustering villages. The route, through St. Pol, Doullens, and Canaples, is ordinary enough, no doubt; and so, too, the gleam of white chalk that came at last. But if you think that ordinary things cannot be wonderful beyond measure, then go and live above ground and underground in Flanders for two months on end in winter; then, perhaps, you will understand a little of my good spirits.
It was quite dark when we arrived. Then for three and a half hours we waited in a meadow outside the station, arms piled, the men sitting about on their waterproof sheets. Meanwhile the transport detrained, a lengthy business. Tea was produced from those marvellous field-kitchens. The night was cold, though, and it was too damp to sit down. For hours we stood about, tired. Then came the news that our six-mile march would be more like double six; that the billets had been altered!... At half-past twelve we marched off. It was starlight, but pretty dark. Eighteen miles we marched, reaching Montagne at half-past seven; every man was in full marching kit, and most of them carried sandbagfuls of extras. It was a big effort, especially as the men had done nothing in the nature of a long march for months. Well I remember it—the tired silence, the steady tramp, along the interminable road. Sometimes the band would strike up for a little, but even bands tire, and cannot play continuously. Mile after mile of hard road, and then the hedges would spring up into houses, and from the opened windows would gaze down awakened women. Hardly ever was a light shown in any house. Then the village would be left behind, and men shifted their packs and exchanged a sand-bag, unslung a rifle from one shoulder to the other, and settled down to another stretch, wondering if the next village would be the last.
So it went on interminably all through the winter night. Once we halted in a village, and I sat on a doorstep with O’Brien discussing methods of keeping our eyes open. Edwards had been riding the horse, and had nearly tumbled off asleep. At another halt, half-way up a hill, I discovered a box of beef lozenges and distributed it among No. 6 platoon. All the last ten miles I was carrying a rifle and a sand-bag. Sergeant Callaghan had the same, besides all his own kit. Sergeant Andrews kept on as steady as a rock. There were falterers, but we kept them in; only in the last two miles did one or two drop out. And all the while I was elated beyond measure; partly at seeing men like Ginger Joe, with his dry wit flashing, and Tudor, with his stolid power; but partly, too, at the climb uphill, the swing down, mysterious woods, and the unmistakable trunks of pines. And all the time we were steadily climbing; we must be upon a regular tableland.
Dawn broke, and it got lighter and lighter—and so we entered Montagne. The quartermaster had had a nice job billeting at 2.0 a.m., but he had done it, and the men dropped on to their straw, into outhouses, anywhere. The accommodation seemed small and bad, but that could be arranged later. To get the men in, that was the main thing. One old woman fussed terribly, and the men looked like bayoneting her! We soon got the men in somehow. Then for our own billets. We agreed to have a scratch breakfast as soon as it could be procured. Meanwhile I went to the end of the village and found myself on the edge of the tableland; before me was spread out a great valley, with a poplar-lined road flung right across it; villages were dotted about; there were woods, and white ribbon by-roads. And over it all glowed the slant morning sun. I was on the edge of a chalky plateau; it was all just as I had imagined. I slept from 11.0 a.m. to 7.0 p.m., when I got up for a meal at which we were all short-tempered! And at 9.0 p.m. I retired again to sleep till 7.0 next morning.
Montagne—How shall I be able to create a picture of Montagne? As I look back at all those eight months, the whole adventure seems unreal, a dream; yet somehow those first few days in the little village had for me a dream-like quality, unlike any other time. I think that then I felt that I was living in an unreality; whereas at other times life was real enough; and it is only now, afterwards, that these days are gradually melting through distance into dreams. At any rate, if the next few pages are dull to the reader, let him try and weave into them a sort of fairy glamour, and imagine a kind of spell cast over everything in which people moved as in a dream.
First, there was the country itself. The next day (after a day’s sleep and a night’s on top of it) was, if I remember right, rather wet, and we had kit inspection in billets, and tried to eke out the hours by gas-helmet drill, and arm-drill in squads distributed about the various farmyards and barns. Then Captain Dixon decided to take the company out on a short route march, and as it was raining very steadily we took half the company with two waterproof sheets per man. One sheet was thrown round the shoulders in the usual way; the other was tied kilt-wise round the waist. The result was an effective rainproof, if unmilitary-looking dress! We set off and soon came to a large wood with a broad ride through it.
Along this ride we marched, two-deep now, and I at the rear as second-in-command. Here I felt most strongly that strange glamour of unreality. It was but three months ago, and I was in the heart of Wales, yet such was the effect of a few months that I looked on everything with the most exuberant sense of novelty. The rain-beads on the red-brown birch trees; the ivy; the oaks; the strange stillness in the thick wood after the gusts of wind and slashes of rain; especially the sounds—chattering jays, invisible peeping birds, the squelching of boots on a wet grass track—everything reminded me of a past world that seemed immeasurably distant, of past winters that had been completely forgotten. Then we emerged into a wide clearing along the edge of the wood, full of stunted gorse and junipers. Long coarse grass grew in tussocks that matted under foot; and now I could see the whole company straggling along in front of me, slipping and sliding about on the wet grass in their curious kilt-like costumes, some of which were now showing signs of uneasiness and tending to slip in rings to the ground. Everyone was very pleased with life. A halt was called at length, and while officers discussed buying shot-guns at Amiens, or stalking the wily hare with a revolver, Tommy, I have reason to believe, was planning more effective means of snaring Brer rabbit. Next day in orders appeared an extract from corps orders re prohibition of poaching and destruction of game. It was all part of the dream that we were surprised, almost shocked, at this unwarranted exhibition of property rights! Not that there was much game about, anyhow.
The next day we did an advance guard scheme, down in the plain. It was a crisp winter day, and I remember the great view from the top of the hill, on the edge of the plateau as you leave Montagne. It was all mapped out, with its hedgeless fields, its curling white roads, and its few dark triangles and polygons of fir woods. But we had not long to see it, for we came into observation then (so this dream game pretended!) and were soon in extended order working our way along over the plain. It all came back to one, this “open warfare” business, the advancing in short rushes, the flurried messages from excited officers to stolid platoon-sergeants, the taking cover, the fire-orders, the rattling of the bolts, the lying on the belly in a ploughed field; and yes! the spectator, old man or woman, gazing in stupid amazement at the khaki figures rushing over his fields. Then came the assault, bayonets fixed, and the C.O.’s whistle, ending the game for that day. “Game,” that was it: it is all a game, and when you get tired you go home to a good meal, and discuss the humour of it, and probably have a pow-wow in the evening in which the O.C. “A” is asked why he went off to the left, the real answer being that he lost direction badly, but the actual answer given explaining the subtlety of a detour round a piece of dead ground! Which is the dream? this, or the mud-slogging in the trenches and the interminable nights?
For, every night we went to bed! Think of it! Every night! Always that bed, that silence, that priceless privacy of sleep! I had a rather cold ground-floor billet with a door that would not shut; yet it was worth any of your beds at home! And I should be here for a month, perhaps six weeks! I wrote for my basin and stand, for books, for all sorts of things. I felt I could accumulate, and spread myself. It was like home after hotels! For always we had been moving, moving; even our six days out were often in two or even three different billets.