PART I
THE NEW "UBIQUE"
BEGINNING AGAIN
As the long troop train rumbled slowly over the water-logged wastes of Flanders, I sat in the corner of a carriage which was littered with all the débris of a twenty-four hours' journey and watched the fiery winter's sun set gorgeously. It was Christmas evening. Inevitably my mind went back to that other journey of sixteen months ago when we set forth so proudly, so exultantly to face the test of war.
But how different, how utterly different is everything now! Last time, with the sun shining brilliantly from a cloudless sky and the French sentries along the line waving enthusiastically, we passed cheerfully through the pleasant land of France towards our destination on the frontier. I was a subaltern then, a subordinate member of a battery which, according to pre-war standards, was equipped and trained to perfection—and I can say this without presumption, for having only joined it in July I had had no share in the making of it. But I had been in it long enough to appreciate its intense esprit-de-corps, long enough to share the absolute confidence in its efficiency which inspired every man in it from the major to the second trumpeter.
But now it is midwinter, the second winter of the war, and the French sentries no longer wave to us, for they have seen too many train-loads of English troops to be more than mildly interested. The war to which we set out so light-heartedly sixteen months ago has proved itself to be not the "greatest of games," but the greatest of all ghastly horrors threatening the final disruption of civilised humanity. More than a year has passed and the end is not in sight. But the cause is as righteous, the victory as certain now as it was then.... The methods and practice of warfare have been revolutionised. Theory after theory has been disproved by the devastating power of the high explosive and the giant gun. Horse and field batteries no longer dash into action to the music of jingling harness and thudding hoofs. They creep in by night with infinite precautions and place their guns in casemates which are often ten feet thick; they occupy the same position not for hours, but for months at a time; they fire at targets which are sometimes only fifty yards or even less in front of their own infantry, with the knowledge that the smallest error may mean death to their comrades; and the control of their shooting is no longer an affair of good eyesight and common sense, but of science, complicated instruments, and a multiplicity of telephones.
And I, a novice at all this kind of work, am no longer a subaltern. I am directly responsible for the welfare and efficiency of the battery which this long train is bearing into the zone of war. How we fare when we get there, what kind of tasks are allotted to us, and how we succeed in coping with them I hope to record in due course. But this I know now—the human material with which I have to deal is good enough. We have the advantage of being a homogeneous unit, for we belong to one of the "locally raised" divisions. With only a very few exceptions (notably the sergeant-major, who is a "serving soldier" of vast proportions and great merit), the N.C.O.'s and men all come from the same district. Many of them were acquainted in private life and enlisted in little coteries of five or six. Christian names are freely used, which is fortunate seeing that we have four Jones', five Davies', and no less than eight Evans' on our roll. In moments of excitement or of anger they resort to their own language and encourage or abuse each other in voluble Welsh....
A few miles back we passed G.H.Q. I was vaguely impressed with the silent dignity, the aloofness, as it were, of that now celebrated place. Our train drew up in the station, which seemed as deserted as that of a small English country town on a Sunday. "Here, within a mile of me," I thought, "dwell the Powers that Be, whose brains control the destinies of a million men. Here somewhere is the individual who knows my destination and when I am likely to get to it." But this surmise proved incorrect. It was three-thirty on Christmas afternoon and even the staff must lunch. Presently a R.T.O.[1] issued from a cosy-looking office and crossed the line towards me. His first question was positively painful in its naïve simplicity.