War Letters of a Public-School Boy

by Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

October 11th, 1915.

I continue to be very busy. You must understand that it is my job to supplement the ordinary supplies that come up on the Supply Column from the railway with supplies obtained locally. These latter are frequently as essential as the former. Especially is this the case with cavalry, who are naturally apt, when moving, to get separated from their supplies, owing to the rapidity of their progress. Then comes the Requisitioning Officer's real task. That is not to say that this is the only case in which he has to work. On the contrary, the work is absolutely continuous. The men always want all sorts of things that the Supply Column does not provide, and it is up to me to get those things, and what is more, in most cases, to transport them also. I am in charge of a number of wagons, limbers, etc., to carry out this latter job, and I am responsible for the care and transport of the ordinary supplies for our Brigade Headquarters after they leave the Supply Column. I have also to do the following jobs: (1) Distribute pay to the large number of A.S.C. men attached to Headquarters; (2) when we are in billets, to see to the billeting arrangements for the brigade, and adjust the relations between the troops and whatever inhabitants there may be.

You must not imagine that there are no inhabitants in these districts. On the contrary, it is my experience that people cling to their homes and lead their ordinary lives right up into the fire zone. Our authorities take the greatest care not to offend the inhabitants. Let me give you an illustration. Recently we were at a small village, now quite blown to atoms, and considered a hot spot even out here, and which really has no inhabitants. Well, on the occasion of entrenching operations our chaps found it necessary to take some doors from ruined houses. They wanted the timber for planks for trench supports and dug-outs. Though all the inhabitants had fled or been killed long before, and the village was little better than a dust-heap, yet a solemn and portentous court of inquiry was held on those doors: were we justified in taking them, and should payment be made for them to the old inhabitants or their representatives? Eventually it was decided that, as the doors were taken to help to make trenches, they might be considered as destroyed by a fait de guerre, which, I believe, corresponds to an "act of God" in the civil courts, and payment ought not therefore to be made for the doors. It was, however, pointed out that if the said doors had been used to make a road, not a trench, they would not be faits de guerre, and in such case payment would have had to be made to the Mayor of the destroyed commune!

"Business as usual" is the motto they try to live up to throughout these parts, and every effort is made to persuade people that the war is only a sort of accident. Money remains money, and there are people selling and buying right up to places where many lives are lost every day. The position is really almost that described in a Bystander cartoon, depicting a peasant standing above a line of our trenches amid a hell of shot and bursting shrapnel, and saying, "Messieurs, I am desolated to trouble you, but I must request you to fight in my other field, as I plough this one to-day." By the way, The Bystander has succeeded, as no other paper save perhaps Punch has done, in catching the atmosphere that exists out here.

I assure you that just behind the firing-line people are minting money out of our occupation. Not only do they get paid regularly if British troops are billeted on them, but they can name their own prices for milk, beer, eggs, etc., and all those other things that Tommy is anxious for, and for which he can afford to pay. He is, I think, paid three times as much as either the French or the Boche soldiers. True, I have met some pitiful cases of refugeeism, but to a very large number of people in Northern France the war is nothing but somewhat of a nuisance. Of course, where they do feel it is in their own terrible casualty lists. I have known family after family in the little villages who have lost one or two sons. In many communes one finds that the Mayor has been killed while serving at the front, and a deputy acts in his stead. The Mayor of the place where we are now stationed has three sons fighting, one at Verdun. I had an agreeable chat a few days back with the local schoolmaster, who was home on short leave from the trenches.

It is curious that only The Bystander and Punch should have succeeded in catching the atmosphere of "Somewhere in France." Many of the war correspondents, brilliantly though they write, have missed it altogether. John Buchan is not so bad, when he writes soberly, but he will let his imagination run away with him. Talking of writers, what a delightful thing was that article of Zangwill's in the Daily Chronicle on "The Perils of Walking in War-time"! Its brilliant satire, firm grasp of facts, lively humour and racy style quite took my fancy.

I have had some interesting chats with some of the old soldiers in our division about Mons, the Marne and the Aisne, and all "those brave days of old." One chap, now acting as a clerk at Headquarters, wears the ribbons of the D.C.M. and French Médaille Militaire for swimming a river (on the retreat from Mons) amid a tempest of shot and shell, and giving warning to a party of our people on the other side who were in the greatest danger of being surrounded—and quite oblivious of the fact—by the Boches who had forced the passage of a bridge some way off. This brave fellow led his menaced comrades to another bridge, and so enabled them all to get clear.

The Supply Officer of one of our brigades is F. P. Knox, a Dulwich man, who captained the old school at cricket back in 1895 or so and I believe led Oxford to victory after that. His brother you may know—N. A. Knox, the famous fast bowler.

I was horrified to see in a recent casualty list among the killed the name of Second Lieutenant H. O. Beer. I remember him as a rather clever, quiet, inoffensive, distinctly popular fellow in Doulton's House. He left at the end of July, 1914, without getting any colours, but after doing quite well in all games. He won a Junior Scholarship, but failed to get a Senior. He was made a School Prefect in September, 1913, and you will see him in the very middle of the back row of the photo of the Prefects that we have—a markedly good-looking fellow, with light hair brushed across his forehead. What a wealth of tragedy and yet also of honour is expressed in the last line of his obituary notice in The Times—"He fell leading his platoon, aged twenty years." Only yesterday, as it were, we were at school together—I remember handing him off with great vigour on the football field—and now! It was just the same with poor Reynolds[2] and Bray.[3] But I mustn't go on in this strain.

October 15th, 1915.