L. T. “Not when he’s outside the wire. And he doesn’t see things in the dark as much as some of ’em.” (Meditatively, mouth filled with fondants brought from home by Buffles.) “Filthy stuff this war-chocolate is.” (Pause.) “Er, what do you think? He’s lance already.”
Buffles. “I know it. I don’t think he’s much of a lance either. Well ...”
L. T. “Anyhow, he’s dead keen on night jobs. But if you took him once or twice and tried him.... He is dead keen.... Eh?”
Buffles. “All right. We’ll see. Where is that dam’ logbook?” Thus the matter is settled without one direct word being spoken, and “Spud” Hasken comes to his own for better or for worse.
On the 7th February, they were shifted, as they had anticipated, to the left of the right sector of the divisional front, which meant much less comfortable trenches round Pont du Hem, and badly battered Headquarters at Winchester House. They relieved the 1st Coldstream in the line on the 9th, and found at once plenty of work in strengthening parapets, raising trench-boards, and generally attending to their creature comforts. (“Never have I known any battalion in the Brigade that had a good word to say for the way the other battalions live. We might all have been brides, the way we went to our new housekeepings in every new place—turnin’ up our noses at our neighbours.”)
And while they worked, Headquarters were “briefly but accurately” shelled with whizz-bangs. On the 11th February the pace quickened a little. There was mining along that front on both sides, and our miners from two mines had reported they had heard work going on over their heads only a hundred and twenty yards out from our own parapets. It might signify that the enemy were working on “Russian saps”—shallow mines, almost like mole-runs, designed to bring a storming party right up to our parapets under cover. The miners were not loved for their theories, for at midnight along the whole Battalion front, pairs of unhappy men had to lie out on ground-sheets listening for any sound of subterranean picks. The proceedings, it is recorded, somewhat resembled a girls’ school going to bed, and the men said that all any one got out of the manœuvres was “blashts of ear-ache.” But, as the Diary observes, if there were any mining on hand, the Germans would naturally knock off through the quietest hours of the twenty-four.
In some ways it was a more enterprising enemy than round the Red House, and they felt, rather than saw, that there were patrols wandering about No Man’s Land at unseemly hours. So the Battalion sent forth a couple of Lewis-gunners with their weapon, two bombers with their bombs, and one telephonist complete with field telephones. These, cheered by hot drinks, lay up a hundred yards from our parapets, installed their gun in an old trench, and telephoned back on prearranged signals for Very lights in various directions to illumine the landscape and invite inspection. “The whole scheme worked smoothly. In fact, it only wanted a few Germans to make it a complete success.” And the insult of the affair was that the enemy could be heard whistling and singing all night as they toiled at their own mysterious jobs. In the evening, just as the Battalion was being relieved by the Coldstream, a defensive mine, which was to have been exploded after the reliefs were comfortably settled in, had to go up an hour before, as the officer in charge, fearing that the Germans who were busy in the same field might break into his galleries at any moment, did not see fit to wait. The resulting German flutter just caught the end of the relief, and two platoons of No. 1 Company were soundly shelled as they went down the Rue du Bacquerot to Rugby Road. However, no one was hurt. The men of the 2nd Battalion were as unmoved by mines as were their comrades in the 1st. They resented the fatigue caused by extra precautions against them, but the possibilities of being hoisted sky-high at any moment did not shake the Celtic imagination.
While in Brigade Reserve for a couple of days No. 1 Company amused itself preparing a grim bait to entice German patrols into No Man’s Land. Two dummies were fabricated to represent dead English soldiers. “One, designed to lie on its back, had a face modelled by Captain Alexander from putty and paint which for ghastliness rivalled anything in Madame Tussaud’s. The frame-work of the bodies was wire, so they could be twisted into positions entirely natural.” While they were being made, on the road outside Brigade Headquarters at Pont du Hem, a French girl came by and believing them to be genuine, fled shrieking down the street. They were taken up to the front line on stretchers, and it chanced that in one trench they had to give place to let a third stretcher pass. On it was a dead man, whom no art could touch.
Next night, February 15, between moonset and dawn, the grisliest hour of the twenty-four, Lieutenant Pym took the twins out into No Man’s Land, arranging them one on its face and the other on its back in such attitudes as are naturally assumed by the old warped dead. “Strapped between the shoulders of the former, for the greater production of German curiosity, was a cylinder sprouting india-rubber tubes. This was intended to resemble a flammenwerfer.” Hand- and rifle-grenades were then hurled near the spot to encourage the theory (the Hun works best on a theory) that two British patrols had fought one another in error, and left the two corpses. At evening, the Lewis-gun party and a brace of bombers lay out beside the kill, but it was so wet and cold that they had to be called in, and no one was caught. And all this fancy-work, be it remembered, was carried out joyously and interestedly, as one might arrange for the conduct of private theatricals or the clearance of rat-infested barns.
On the 16th they handed over to the 9th Welsh of the Nineteenth Division, and went back to La Gorgue for two days’ rest. Then the 2nd Guards Brigade moved north to other fields. The “spring meeting” that they talked about so much was a certainty somewhere or other, but it would be preceded, they hoped, by a period of “fattening up” for the Division. (“We knew, as well as the beasts do, that when Headquarters was kind to us, it meant getting ready to be killed on the hoof—but it never put us off our feed.”) Poperinghe, and its camps, was their immediate destination, which looked, to the initiated, as if Ypres salient would be the objective; but they had been promised, or had convinced themselves, that there would be a comfortable “stand-easy” before they went into that furnace, of which their 1st Battalion had cheered them with so many quaint stories. Their first march was of fifteen miles through Neuf and Vieux-Berquin—and how were they to know what the far future held for them there?—to St. Sylvestre, of little houses strung along its typical pavé. Only one man fell out, and he, as is carefully recorded, had been sick the day before. Thence, Wormhoudt on the 22nd February, nine miles through a heavy snow-storm, to bad billets in three inches of snow, which gave the men excuse for an inter-company snowball battle. The 1st Battalion had thankfully quitted Poperinghe for Calais, and the 2nd took over their just vacated camp, of leaky wooden huts on a filthy parade-ground of frozen snow at the unchristian hour of half-past seven in the morning. On that day 2nd Lieutenant Hordern with a draft of thirty men joined from the 7th Entrenching Battalion. (“All winter drafts look like sick sparrows. The first thing to tell ’em is they’ll lose their names for coughing, and the next is to strip the Warley fat off ’em by virtue of strong fatigues.”) They were turned on to digging trenches near their camp and practice-attacks with live bombs; this being the beginning of the bomb epoch, in which many officers believed, and a good few execrated. At a conference of C.O.’s of the Brigade at Headquarters the Brigadier explained the new system of trench-attack in successive waves about fifteen yards apart. The idea was that if the inevitable flanking machine-gun fire wiped out your leading wave, there was a chance of stopping the remainder of the company before it was caught.