With our army in Flanders

by Valentine Williams

When going round the battalions collecting material for the story of Neuve Chapelle which I was writing—it was the first newspaper message of the kind to be written from the British front in France in this war—I came upon this tale of the women of Neuve Chapelle in every imaginable form. Now the victims were peasant women, now they were beautifully dressed demimondaines from Lille, or, again, they were little more than children. Finally I reached the Rifle Brigade, the regiment that was first to enter the village, and heard the truth. In one of the cellars in which some German officers had been living a quantity of ladies’ undergarments were found. The sight of these lying on the ground outside the cellar apparently gave rise to a story that was firmly believed at the time right through the army.

I saw these German trenches at Neuve Chapelle within ten days of the battle. They showed many grim traces of the fighting in the shape of dismembered bodies, blood-stained parts of uniform, and discarded equipment. I must say I was surprised to find that the trenches were extremely filthy. The straw in the dug-outs was old and malodorous, and must have been crawling with vermin. I believe that the plague of lice from which everybody in the trenches, be he never so cleanly in his personal habit, suffers more or less, was introduced by the German soldiers who had been brought from Poland, notoriously the most vermin-ridden country in the world. There were an extraordinary number of letters, documents, books, and newspapers scattered about. In some places the flooring of the trench disappeared under the litter. Our Intelligence must have spent weeks in going over this material. Such labours are well expended, however. Has not Von der Goltz himself, in his book on War, told us of the value of such captures of letters and documents to the Intelligence branch of the army?

The Volkscharakter, as the Germans say, finds very definite expression in the trenches constructed by the Germans, the French, and the British. I do not propose to make comparisons, which are always invidious, and which, moreover, might involve me in paths where I should find the blue pencil of the Censor blocking my passage. The German, with his craze for organization and his love of bodily ease, builds a solid trench, admirably suited, one must admit, to the purposes of this war. But I am one of those who contend that there is such a thing as over-organization, and I am inclined to believe that the German, with all his elaborations of trench warfare, his cemented trenches, his “super-barbed-wire,” his iron-doored ammunition stores, overlades his organization with detail.

The exquisite neatness of the French mind shows itself clearly in the perfect orderliness of the French trenches, with tidily bricked flooring, the sides lined with plaited branches or rabbit netting. The French trenches contain the largest dug-outs to be found on this front—deep subterranean caves, tremendously solid in construction, with sometimes as many as three or four layers of massive tree-trunks laid across the roof. I think that the perfect network of communication and support trenches, which are always found about trench-lines constructed by the French, denote a certain æstheticism in the French mind.

The British trenches are the least elaborate of the trenches of the three belligerents. Nothing that would make for efficiency in them is sacrificed to comfort, and the striving, first and last, is to evolve a defence work that not only affords adequate protection to the men, but is equally well suited for an offensive as well as a defensive. Both the Germans and the French, thanks to the universal service system, have large stocks of workmen—navvies, carpenters, engineers, and the like—who have been called to the colours, who, though not first-class fighting-men, can be usefully employed in squads on trench work. We, on the other hand, with our army recruited haphazard, must take our resources as we find them. The pioneers, who have done magnificently in this war, cannot be expected to do all the digging and construction work that trench warfare demands; their efforts must be supplemented by the soldiers themselves, some of whom, by chance, may be labourers with their hands, many of whom, however, are not.

But we can never regard the training of our army as finished. We started the war with the merest skeleton of an army, so that we were compelled, even while we fought, to expand it into a great Continental force. Therefore, it often happens that the British soldier is more usefully employed in practising bombing, or taking a machine-gun course, or learning to manipulate a trench mortar, than in adding to his bodily comfort in a trench which already fulfils its primary object—that of affording him shelter, or enabling him to beat off an assault, and of being easy to get out of in the attack. These are considerations which should be borne in mind when one hears invidious comparisons between the comfort of the German trenches and the more Spartan simplicity of ours.

Not that there are not many very comfortable dug-outs and shelters in our trenches. I dined in the officers’ mess in some trenches in the Ypres salient one night in a dug-out furnished with cushioned seats, a trap in the wall with a practicable glass window through to the “kitchen” (a fire contained between six bricks in the open behind the trench!), where the dishes were handed through, excellent lighting in the shape of an acetylene lamp, and, by way of table decorations, some beautiful roses, fresh from the ruined gardens of Ypres, in 18-pounder shell-cases. The menu was as soigné as the dining-room. Here it is:

Soup
Pork Chops.
Haricots Verts.
Potatoes.
Stewed Pears and Cream.
Coffee.
Wines.
Red Wine of the Country.
Armentières Beer.
Black and White Whisky.
Liqueurs.
Ration Rum.
Benedictine.
Kümmel.

After dinner we retired to the company commander’s dug-out, which I found to be as comfortable as the mess-room. It was sunk to one-half below the ground level; it had a boarded floor, a brass bedstead with a spring mattress, a wash-hand stand, a large mirror and a big settee. Like the mess-room, it was lit by acetylene.

The Captain was musical, and it was with tears in his voice that he related to me the tragedy of the piano. It appears that in the only room remaining in a ruined house on one of the roads leading out of Ypres he had located a piano, a cottage piano, sadly out of tune, it is true, from its long exposure to the weather, but otherwise sound in wind and limb. The Captain, a practical man, found no difficulty in procuring a cart and some willing hands to cart the piano by night up to his dug-out in the support trench. Everything was ready for the transfer when disaster, in the shape of a German shell, overtook the plan. Three German shells fell into the ruins of the house containing the piano, and of those three shells one went into the very vitals of the instrument. When the musical-minded Captain visited the spot, he found house and garden strewn with pieces of piano.