With our army in Flanders

by Valentine Williams

People at home often imagine that our troops live in the trenches. They do not. Generally speaking, they live in billets behind the line, and move into the trenches at regular intervals. They take their turn for duty in the trenches like policemen going on their beat. As a rule the procedure is for them to spend a fixed period in the front-line trenches, another period in reserve (living in billets behind the firing-line, which are occupied in rotation by the troops who, in this particular sector, are out of the trenches), and a further period resting somewhere in the rear. The turn for duty in the trenches is therefore something exceptional, requiring a special effort of endurance, for, if there is any liveliness, or, as we say out here, “frightfulness,” going, there may be no sleep for anybody for several days and nights on end, something demanding special preparations in the way of supplies of cigarettes and other luxuries likely to drop out if there is any difficulty about getting rations up.

The greater part of the life of our men at the front is therefore spent in billets in our zone of occupation. Naturally, these billets vary enormously. Roofless houses in ruined villages or dug-outs in the open in a country absolutely devoid of food of any kind are as like as not the sour lot of the troops awaiting their turn of duty in the trenches, though sometimes a village situated at no great distance from the firing-line will provide admirable accommodation for men just out of the firing-line. I dined one June evening with the officers of the famous Princess Patricia’s Light Infantry. I found them waiting their turn for duty in the trenches in a positively palatial mansion, the home of a wealthy French merchant of these parts.

I well remember the pride with which they showed me over their quarters. I saw their bedrooms, vast apartments with huge four-poster beds with heavy, old-fashioned ciels, and their bath-room, renowned throughout their division—a pleasant, clean, white-tiled place, with three different sizes of baths, as great an array of douches as you would find at a spa, and an apparatus for warming bath-towels. When I thought of other officers I had seen, painfully scrubbing themselves in a few inches of tepid water in a leaky canvas bath in the sordid surroundings of a filthy Flemish farm, I agreed that the “Princess Pat.’s” had every reason to bless the good fortune which had endowed them with a super-bathroom within a few miles of the firing-line.

Before dinner we walked round the garden. It was a kind of St. James’s Theatre garden scene, with masses of greenery and banks of flowering plants and great beds of flowers gushing over on to the exquisite stretch of soft green turf. As we strolled they told me of their charming host and hostess. The latter, it appeared, had given them their best rooms, and had installed for them a special kitchen, where their orderlies might mess about—as orderlies do all over the world—to their heart’s content. The model of charity and goodness, this French merchant and his lady wife every morning distributed handfuls of copper to the poor of the place who gathered in long files at their gates. On the Feast of the Sacred Heart in June the host and hostess, patterns of pious Catholics, sent a message, worded with charming diffidence, to the British officers asking them whether they would care to join in a service of prayer in the private chapel of the mansion. The Feast of the Sacred Heart had been set aside by the French Bishops as a special day of intercession for the victory of French arms. Of course the officers agreed. Presently you might have seen them assembled in the little chapel with the host and hostess and the members of their household, the stalwart forms of the Canadian officers, heroes of the stricken field of Ypres, kneeling in prayer to the God that knows not nations for the triumph of the right. Afterwards the host took his guests down to his little study, and there, in a bottle of his best wine, cobwebbed and reverently handled, the company drank success to the Allied arms.

In the billets near the front our men are birds of passage. One goes up to the trenches as light as possible, so everything that is not essential for the comfort of the inner and outer man in the highly uncomfortable surroundings of the front line is left behind. These squalid ruined houses in the wrecked villages behind the firing-line are sad places to visit when the battalion returning to them has been in action. There in the common room which the officers use both for messing and for sleeping you may see the kits and personal belongings of officers who will return to that billet no more. You may see letters there addressed to the dead, unopened, expectant, as though waiting to be unburdened of the messages of love and anxious inquiry they bear.

Ah, those empty billets at the front! Their atmosphere is charged with mourning. With what tense expression one sees in the face of men who have been through a modern artillery bombardment. The survivors sit about in silence, seeming almost to resent the presence of the new-comers drafted in from England without delay to take the places of their fallen comrades. This depression, however, is only a phase. It soon passes. Men get used to the loss of their comrades. But if you know them well you will find how hard, how defiant, how reckless it makes them.

A battalion that has “copped it,” as the soldiers say, is not allowed to sit about in billets and brood over its losses. For they will brood unless they are stirred up. After Neuve Chapelle Sir John French, going round the battalions that had taken part in that gallant fight, came upon some depleted billets, such as I have described, with the Colonel, one of the few officers surviving, sitting by the fire with his head between his hands, prone to overwhelming grief. The Commander-in-Chief is a man of heart and understanding. He talked to that Colonel as one soldier to another, and told him that the losses of his fine battalion were the price that had to be paid for victory. Then Sir John had the battalion paraded, and spoke to the men in the same sense.

This war gets you by the heart-strings when you see the awful gaps it tears in the ranks of men who have been closely associated for years. After that fight at Neuve Chapelle, when our losses were heavy, but not so heavy as in fights to come, I lunched with the Rifle Brigade in their billets close behind the firing-line. The battalion had been the first in the village of Neuve Chapelle, and over lunch (out of tin plates in a workman’s cottage) the Colonel and the officers gave me a most picturesque account of the Riflemen’s sweeping rush into the ruined village, and their adventures in getting the Germans out of the cellars and dug-outs.

It was a jolly meal. Five of the officers were there, beside the Colonel, including the machine-gun officer (formerly the Regimental Quartermaster-Sergeant), who had just got his commission. Three months later I lunched with the Colonel again. He had by that time become a Brigadier. Of all that merry luncheon-party, only he and the machine-gun officer (now a Captain with the Military Cross, and promoted Brigade Machine-Gun Officer) survived. The other three were dead, killed within a few hours of one another on the Fromelles ridge. The survivors at luncheon that day spoke of them with infinite affection, with obvious regret, but without any lamentation. Death has another aspect out here. It is often the matter of a fraction of an inch. One friend is taken and the other left. And the survivor “carries on,” only in his heart wondering “Why he and not I?”

Our men make longer stays in the billets situated farther away from the front than in those which are merely the jumping-off place for the trenches. Some of the cavalry spent months on end in the same billets, cursing this horseless war and chafing at their inaction. From time to time they took their turn in the trenches, and played their part manfully, as at Ypres on May 13, when the flower of the cavalry suffered cruel losses from a terrible German bombardment. But for the most part they carried on what was practically peace training in conditions which were depressing and monotonous to the last degree.