TRAINING
It would take me too long to detail all the delightful accidents that befell me. Suffice it to say that it was not till the middle of July that I began my full training, and on the 17th August I was sent to the front. At that time I had never been on patrol, or dug a trench, or seen a bomb. I had fired about ten rounds of live ammunition, and I scarcely knew one end of the bayonet from another. It is true that when I came out of hospital I had to go to a bayonet class. I had never been there before, and of course could not handle a bayonet properly. The instructor shouted, “Here, you there, you know nothing about bayonets, go back to the ranks.” He was only a country policeman, and it did not seem to strike him that the less I knew the more he had to teach me. Once the lieutenant in his tour of inspection invited me to have a fencing match with him. I suppose he thought that as an educated man I would have learnt my drill, and that we should give the company a high-class exhibition of fencing with the bayonet. Instead of which, I went for him like a wild cat and chased him round the quad. He came back, panting and tired, but quite good-natured, and he seemed rather to have enjoyed the experience.
I had never been taught any of those thousand and one things which are so necessary in the field. I could not roll my mantle, the N.C.O. had to do that for me, when I set out for the front. I had only once taken a rifle to pieces and cleaned it. All this means little to the layman, perhaps, but the soldier will read it with a grim smile. The fact was all the corporals said, “You’ll not go out with us, you are too far behind. You must wait and get trained with the next lot.”
I had tried to get transferred to a stretcher-bearer corps, but the sergeant-major said I must first finish my training, and that would take me three months yet. The same day he reported me as fit to go to the front. I protested to the captain that I was quite untrained, and he only answered, “You have been reported to me as fit to go to the front, and to the front you must go.”
Much has been written about the severe discipline of the German Army, but I noticed very little of it. The feeling which ruled among the officers was, here are people who are about to face death and unheard-of privations for the Fatherland, we must treat them well while they are still at home. Punishments were rarely given, except for gross disobedience. All sorts of things were winked at, which in times of peace would have brought us days of arrest. We had one fiery little lieutenant, who was continually losing his temper and inflicting on us extra drill, but we always ignored him, and so did the corporals, whose business it would have been to stay behind and superintend the drill. Some of the sergeants were abominably lazy. They would march us into the forest, select a likely place, tell us to lie down, and then wander about picking wild raspberries, first placing a sentry to see what the captain was doing. Suddenly a hoarse stage-whisper would be heard, “Herr Feldwebel, der Herr Hauptmann kommt!” (Sergeant, the Captain is coming), and the Feldwebel would roar in his best “command-voice,” “Sprung, auf, marsch, marsch,” and we would disappear into the depths of the forest. Once when we were idling like this by the side of a grassy lane, the General Commanding the Corps rode by. The silence became electric, we expected a great storm, and our expectations were heightened when he suddenly stopped his horse and ordered one of the men to rise and come to him. But the Great Man only pointed out that a strap was wrongly buckled, and then rode on.
Mr. Wells has made much in “Mr. Britling” of the stupid mistakes committed by the officers training English troops. Ours were no better. Nearly all our sham fights went wrong. One night we had orders to attack a certain party, but not finding them, marched away home. The “enemy,” meanwhile, had received no orders of any sort, so they remained on the “field of battle” for hours. Finally they took their courage in both their hands and marched home too. Such mistakes were always being committed. I do not say that our officers were especially stupid. It is only that blunders are inseparable from any form of human activity. Those made by English officers, which so much excite Mr. Wells, could be paralleled in any European country during the war. In one thing the English War Office did not blunder—that is, when they refused the offer of Mr. Wells’s services as a soldier, until they had got the younger men trained.
The spirit of the men was excellent. They were keen to learn what it was necessary to know; but as our curriculum was so meagre that it could be mastered in a month, they did not see why they should bother too much about repeating things they could do already. One aspect of military life bored us intolerably. With the idea of enlivening our existence, games were introduced, such as blind-man’s buff, hunt-the-slipper, and similar drawing-room fooleries. The men got so tired of these that they preferred to go to the front to do a man’s work. I need hardly say that such games as football were never heard of. We had, of course, all kinds of gymnastics, which would have been very good if carried out properly. But here discipline was at its slackest. One of the exercises, for example, was to climb a steep boarding fifteen feet high and then drop down on the other side as best one could. Those who were afraid were allowed to indulge their luxury of fear, no constraint being put on them whatever. A rage of disgust and contempt used to fill me at times when I saw how perfunctorily we were trained. The men were still intensely patriotic and confident of a quick and crushing victory. Drink and drabbing were looked down upon as unsoldierly by the majority of the men, but in this I think we were exceptional. From all that I could hear of other recruiting depôts, the war served with the majority of soldiers as an excuse for throwing restraint to the winds. The Government was on its guard, and in certain towns—for instance, Cologne—sentries were posted at the entrances to disreputable streets, and no soldier was allowed to pass. But in our depôt the soldiers were nearly all over thirty, and they were mostly married men. There was among them an exalted feeling of devotion to the Fatherland and of comradeship. When the call came to go to the front, many volunteered who could successfully have pleaded some physical ailment as an excuse for staying at home. I am proud to recall my association with these troops. We were a real band of brothers. Rich and poor, high and low, educated and uneducated, all mingled together on terms of simple and unaffected equality. I did not find it so afterwards. At the front and in captivity social distinctions played a great part in embittering the relations between the “kameraden.” It is true that in order to take your place in this society, you had to employ rather drastic methods. I remember once having a quarrel with the two soldiers who shared my locker with me. They were going off on a week’s holiday, and insisted on taking the key with them. It is no good being a gentleman in cases like this. I simply called them every bad name I could lay my tongue to, and in the army you learn some bad names. After I had finished (which was not soon), they handed me the key with every appearance of respect, and whenever afterwards trouble appeared to be brewing for me, they used to say, “Here, you leave that man alone: he is our friend.”
BARRACKS
Their patriotism is the more to be wondered at, because there is no doubt they were made to endure much hardness. For the first ten days of our training we all had to live in barracks. I shall never forget this time; not even the squalor of a Russian prison has left such an impression on my mind. There were far more soldiers than beds, so some of us had to sleep on mattresses on the floor. At the beginning there were many men with infectious diseases. The man who slept next to me was in an advanced state of tuberculosis, and he coughed all night. On the other side of this man was a soldier suffering from syphilis. We complained about his being put with us, and the doctor only shrugged his shoulders and answered that his was not a very infectious case. However, he was at last taken to hospital for treatment. We were never certain of getting the same bedding every night, and we were supposed to share washhand-basins. My first serious quarrel came when I insisted on washing myself under the tap. This was felt as a reflection on my partners in the washhand-basin.
The food was miserably insufficient for an active open-air life, and most of the men had to get supplies from home. Tea and coffee were dark slops scarcely to be distinguished from one another. On the other hand, the bread and sausage supplied were excellent—the best to be got in Germany at that time. We used to receive two loaves of bread a week, and when I took mine home the servant-girls all along the streets used to offer to buy them from me. We were paid about sixpence a day, but out of this we had to buy blacking, brushes, polishing materials, and several other odds and ends. We had two meals a day—dinner about twelve, and supper, a very light meal, at seven. Besides, coffee was supplied first thing in the morning. I am certain that no soldier who confined himself to the rations supplied could have held out for a week. After the first ten days those who could afford it received permission to live out.