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LATE HOME OFFICE COMMISSIONER WITH THE BRITISH EXPEDITIONARY FORCE
LATE HOME OFFICE COMMISSIONER WITH THE BRITISH EXPEDITIONARY FORCE
"And my delights were with the sons of men." Publisher's logo MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO DALLAS SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd . TORONTO 1916 TO Lieut.-General Sir C.F.N. MACREADY, K.C.B., K.C.M.G. ADJUTANT-GENERAL TO THE BRITISH EXPEDITIONARY FORCE...
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PREFACE
PREFACE
This book is an unofficial outcome of the writer's experiences during the five months he was attached to the General Headquarters Staff as Home Office Commissioner with the British Expeditionary Force. His official duties during that period involved daily visits to the headquarters of almost every Corps, Division, and Brigade in the Field, and took him on one or two occasions to the batteries and into the trenches. They necessarily involved a familiar and domestic acquaintance with the work of t
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I BOBS BAHADUR
I BOBS BAHADUR
It had gone eight bells on the s.s. G—— . The decks had been washed down with the hosepipe and the men paraded for the morning's inspection. The O.C. had scanned them with a roving eye, till catching sight of an orderly two files from the left he had begged him, almost as a personal favour, to get his hair cut. To an untutored mind the orderly's hair was about one-eighth of an inch in length, but the O.C. was inflexible. He was a colonel in that smartest of all medical services, the I.M.S., whos
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II AT THE BASE DEPÔT
II AT THE BASE DEPÔT
Any enunciation by officers responsible for training of principles other than those contained in this Manual or any practice of methods not based on those principles is forbidden.— Infantry Training Manual. The officers in charge of details at No. 19 Infantry Base Depôt had made their morning inspections of the lines. They had seen that blankets were folded and tent flies rolled up, had glanced at rifles, and had inspected the men's kits with the pensive air of an intending purchaser. Having don
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III THE WILTSHIRES
III THE WILTSHIRES
"You talk to him, sir. He zeed a lot though he be kind o' mazed like now; he be mortal bad, I do think. But such a cheerful chap he be. I mind he used to say to us in the trenches: 'It bain't no use grousing. What mun be, mun be.' Terrible strong he were, too. One of our officers wur hit in front of the parapet and we coulden get 'n in nohow—'twere too hot; and Hunt, he unrolled his puttees and made a girt rope of 'em and threw 'em over the parapet and draw'd en in. Ah! that a did." It was in on
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IV THE BASE
IV THE BASE
If G.H.Q. is the brain of the Army, the Base is as certainly its heart. For hence all the arteries of that organism draw their life, and on the systole and diastole of the Base, on the contractions and dilatations of its auricles and ventricles, the Army depends for its circulation. To and from the Base come and go in endless tributaries men, horses, supplies, and ordnance. The Base feeds the Army, binds up its wounds, and repairs its wastage. If you would get a glimpse of the feverish activitie
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V A COUNCIL OF INDIA
V A COUNCIL OF INDIA
"And I said, 'Nay, I who have eaten the King's salt cannot do this thing.' And the German-log said to me, 'But we will give you both money and land.' And I said, 'Wherefore should I do this thing, and bring sorrow and shame upon my people?'" It was a Sepoy in the 9th who spake, and his words were exceeding clear as Holy Writ. "And what did they do then?" "They took my chupattis , sahib, and offered me of their bread in return. But I said, 'Nay, I am a Brahmin, and cannot touch it.' And they said
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VI THE TROOP TRAIN
VI THE TROOP TRAIN
We were standing in the lounge of the Hotel M—— at the Base. "I'll introduce you to young C—— of the Guards when he comes in," the Major was saying to me. "He is going up to the Front with me to-night by the troop train. You don't mind if I rag a bit, do you, old chap? You see he's only just gazetted from Sandhurst, a mere infant, in fact, and he's a bit in the blues, I fancy, at having to say good-bye to his mother. He's her only child, and she's a widow. The father was an old friend of mine. H
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VII THE TWO RICHEBOURGS
VII THE TWO RICHEBOURGS
We had business with the maire of the commune of Richebourg St. Vaast. Any one who looks at a staff map of North-West France will see that there are two Richebourgs; there is Richebourg St. Vaast, but there is also Richebourg l'Avoué, and although those two communes are separated by a bare three or four kilometres there was in point of climate a considerable difference between the two. In those days we had not yet taken Neuve Chapelle, and Richebourg l'Avoué, which was in front of our lines, was
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VIII IDOLS OF THE CAVE
VIII IDOLS OF THE CAVE
Like the Cyclopes they dwelt in hollow caves, and each Colonel uttered the law to his children and recked not of the others except when the Brigadier came round. True there were two and a half battalions in their line of 2700 yards, but all they knew was that the next battalion to their own was the Highlanders; it was only when the five days were up and they were marched back to billets that they were able to cultivate that somewhat exclusive society. Their trenches were like the suburbs, they w
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IX STOKES'S ACT
IX STOKES'S ACT
An offender when in arrest is not to bear arms except by order of his C.O. or in an emergency.— The King's Regulations....
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I
I
The President of the Court and the Judge-Advocate stood in private colloquy in one of the deep traverse-like windows of the Hôtel de Ville over-looking the Place. A heavy rain was falling from a sullen sky, and the deserted square was a dancing sea of agitation as the raindrops smote the little pools between the cobbles and ricochetted with a multitudinous hiss. Now and again a gust of wind swept across, and the rain rattled against the windows. On the opposite side of the square one of the hous
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II
II
When John Stokes found himself once more in charge of a platoon he was greatly puzzled. He had been suddenly given back his arms and his belt, which no prisoner, whether in close or open arrest, is supposed to wear, and his guard had gone with him. He knew nothing about Paragraph 482 of the King's Regulations, which contemplates "emergencies"; still less did he know that an emergency had arisen—such an emergency as will cast lustre upon British arms to the end of time. But that strange things we
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III
III
"Yes, a curious case," said one officer to the other as he sat in a certain room at Headquarters, staring abstractedly at the list of Field Ambulances and of their Chaplains attached to the wall. "A very curious case. It reminds me of something Smith said to me about bad law making hard cases. It was jolly lucky the findings of the Court were held up all that time. If the C.-in-C. had confirmed them and the sentence had been promulgated, Stokes would now be doing five years at Woking. Whereas, t
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X THE FRONT
X THE FRONT
Persons of a rheumatic habit are said to apprehend the approach of damp weather by certain presentiments in their bones. So people of a nervous temperament—like the writer—have premonitions of the approach to "the Front" by a feeling of cold feet. These are usually induced by the spectacle of large and untimely cavities in the road, but they may be accentuated, as not infrequently happened, by seeing the process of excavation itself—and hearing it. The effect on the auditory nerves is known as "
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XI AT G.H.Q.[8]
XI AT G.H.Q.[8]
The Camp Commandant, who is a keeper of lodging-houses and an Inspector of Nuisances, had given me a slip of paper on which was inscribed the address No. 131 rue Robert le Frisson and a printed injunction to the occupier to know that by these presents she was enjoined to provide me with bed, fire, and lights. Armed with this billeting-paper and accompanied by my servant, a private in the Suffolks, who was carrying my kit, I knocked at the door of No. 131, affecting an indifference to my receptio
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XII MORT POUR LA PATRIE
XII MORT POUR LA PATRIE
Two days later a French staff-officer greeted me in the vestibule of the Hôtel de Crillon at Paris. It was the Comte de G——; he had been deputed by the Ministry of War to act as my escort on my tour of the French lines. He proved to be a charming companion. He was a magnificent figure of a man six feet three inches in height at least, an officer of dragoons, and he wore the red and white brassard, embroidered in gold with a design of forked lightning, which is the prerogative of the staff. A mil
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XIII MEAUX AND SOME BRIGANDS
XIII MEAUX AND SOME BRIGANDS
We lay the night at Meaux. It was a town which breathed the enchantments of the Middle Ages and had for me the intimacy of a personal reminiscence. Sixteen years earlier, when reading for a prize essay at Oxford, I had studied the troubled times of Étienne Marcel in the treasures of the Bibliothèque de l'École des Chartes, and I knew every kilometre of this country as though I had trodden it. Meaux, Compiègne, Senlis—they called to my mind dreamy hours in the dim religious light of muniment-room
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XIV THE CONCIERGE AT SENLIS
XIV THE CONCIERGE AT SENLIS
We rose early the next day, and, having paid our reckoning, were away betimes, for we were to visit the French lines and wished also to pay a flying visit to Senlis. As we left Crépy-en-Valois we entered the Forest of Compiègne, a forest of noble beeches which rose tall and straight and grey like the piers of Beauvais Cathedral, their arms meeting overhead in an intricate vaulting through which we saw the winter sun in a sapphire sky. We met two Chasseurs d'Afrique, mounted on superb Arabs and w
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XV A "CONSEIL DE LA GUERRE"
XV A "CONSEIL DE LA GUERRE"
Il y a une convenance et un pacte secret entre la jeunesse et la guerre. Manier des armes, revêtir l'uniforme, monter à cheval ou marcher au commandement, être redoutable sans cesser d'être aimable , dépasser le voisin en audace, en vitesse, et en grâce s'il se peut, défier l'ennemi, connaître l'aventure, jouer ce qui a peu duré, ce qui est encore illusion, rêve, ambition, ce qui est encore une beauté, ô jeunesse, voilà ce que vous aimez! Vous n'êtes pas liée, vous n'êtes pas fanée, vous pouvez
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XVI PETER
XVI PETER
My friend T—— and myself were smoking a pipe after dinner in his sitting-room at the Base. He was a staff-captain who had done his term as a "Political" in India, and had now taken on an Army job of a highly confidential nature. He was one of those men who, when they make up their minds to give you their friendship, give it handsomely and without reserve, and in a few weeks we had got on to the plane of friends of many years. As we talked we suddenly heard the sound of many feet on the cobbles o
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XVII THREE TRAVELLERS
XVII THREE TRAVELLERS
( October 1914 ) My train left Paris at 1.52 in the afternoon. It was due at Calais at eight o'clock the same evening. But it soon became apparent that something was amiss with our journey—we crawled along at a pace which barely exceeded six miles an hour. At every culvert, guarded by its solitary sentry, we seemed to pause to take breath. As we approached Amiens, barely halfway on our journey, somewhere about 9.30 p.m. , we passed on the opposite line of rails a Red Cross train, stationary, and
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XVIII BARBARA
XVIII BARBARA
It was the Duchess of X.'s Hospital at a certain plage on the coast. I had motored thither through undulating country dotted with round beehive ricks and past meadows on which a flock of gulls, looking in the distance like a bed of white crocuses, were settled in platoons. As we neared the coast the scenery changed to shifting dunes of pale sand, fine as flour, and tufted with tussocks of wiry grass. Here clumps of broom and beech, with an occasional fir, maintained a desperate existence against
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XIX AN ARMY COUNCIL
XIX AN ARMY COUNCIL
( October 1914 ) All the morning I had travelled through the pleasant valleys of Normandy between chalk-hills crowned with russet beeches. The country had the delicacy of one of Corot's landscapes, and the skies were of that unforgettable blue which is the secret of France. The end of my journey found me at No. —— General Hospital. The chaplain, an old C.F. attached to the Base Hospitals, who had rejoined on the outbreak of the war, and myself were the centre of a group of convalescents. They wo
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XX THE FUGITIVES
XX THE FUGITIVES
"But pray that your flight be not in the winter." Some four or five miles north of Bailleul, where the douane posts mark the marches of the Franco-Belgian frontier, is the village of Locre. Here the clay of the plains gives way to a wooded ridge of low hills, through which the road drives a deep cutting, laying bare the age of the earth in a chronology of greensand and limestone. Beyond the ridge lies another plain, and there it was that on a clammy winter's day I came upon two lonely wayfarers.
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XXI A "DUG-OUT"[24]
XXI A "DUG-OUT"[24]
Driver George Hawkins, of the ——th Battery (K), was engaged in drying one of the leaders of the gun team. The leader, who answered, when he felt so inclined, to the name of "Tommy," had been exercised that morning in a driving rain, and Driver Hawkins was concerned lest Tommy should develop colic with all its acute internal inconveniences. He performed his ministrations with a wisp of straw, and seemed to derive great moral support in the process from the production of a phthisical expiration of
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XXII CHRISTMAS EVE
XXII CHRISTMAS EVE
( 1914 ) "Halt! Stop, I mean." The ring of choristers in khaki and blue flannel faced with cotton wool looked at their conductor, a sergeant in the Glosters, with intense and painful concentration. They were rehearsing carols in the annexe of a Base hospital on Christmas Eve, and the sergeant was as hard to please as if they were recruits doing their first squad drill. They were a scratch lot, recruited by a well-meaning chaplain to the Forces, from Base "details" and convalescents. Their voices
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XXIII THE COMING OF THE HUN
XXIII THE COMING OF THE HUN
The maire sat in his parlour at the Hôtel de Ville dictating to his secretary. He was a stout little man with a firm mouth, an indomitable chin, and quizzical eyes. His face would at any time have been remarkable; for a French provincial it was notable in being clean-shaven. Most Frenchmen of the middle class wear beards of an Assyrian luxuriance, which to a casual glance suggest stage properties rather than the work of Nature. The maire was leaning back in his chair, his elbows resting upon its
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XXIV THE HILL
XXIV THE HILL
It was one of those perfect spring days when the whole earth seems to bare her bosom to the caresses of the sun. The sky was without a cloud and in the vault overhead, blue as a piece of Delft, a lark was ascending in transports of exultant song. The hill on which we stood was covered with young birch saplings bursting into leaf, and the sky itself was not more blue than the wild hyacinths at our feet. Here and there in the undergrowth gleamed the pallid anemone. A copper wire ran from pole to p
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XXV THE DAY'S WORK
XXV THE DAY'S WORK
It was dinner hour in the Mess. There were some dozen of us all told—the Camp Commandant, the Deputy-Assistant-Adjutant-General, the Assistant-Provost-Marshal, the Assistant-Director of Medical Services, the Sanitary Colonel (which adjective has nothing to do with his personal habits), the Judge-Advocate, two men of the Intelligence, a padre , and myself. Most of us were known by our initials—our official initials—for the use of them saves time and avoids pomposity. Our duties were both extensiv
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XXVI FIAT JUSTITIA
XXVI FIAT JUSTITIA
PARQUET du Tribunal de I ère Instance d'Ypres At last I had found it. I had spent a mournful morning at Ypres seeking out the procureur du roi , and I had sought in vain. He was nowhere to be found. Ypres was a city of catacombs, wrapt in a winding-sheet of mortar, fine as dust, which rose in clouds as the German shells winnowed among the ruins. The German guns had been threshing the ancient city like flails, beating her out of all recognition, beating her into shapes strange, uncouth, and lamen
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XXVII HIGHER EDUCATION
XXVII HIGHER EDUCATION
British Headquarters must, I think, be the biggest Military Academy in the world. It has its Sandhurst and its Woolwich and even its Camberley. It ought long ago to have been incorporated by Order in Council as a University with Sir John French as Chancellor. It has more schools in the Art of War than I can remember, and every School has an Instructor who deserves to rank as a full-time Professor. To graduate in one of those schools you must get a fortnight's leave from your trenches or your bat
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XXVIII THE LITTLE TOWNS OF FLANDERS AND ARTOIS
XXVIII THE LITTLE TOWNS OF FLANDERS AND ARTOIS
The little towns of Flanders and Artois are Aire, Hazebrouck, Bethune, Armentières, Bailleul, Poperinghe, and Cassel. They are known in the Army vernacular as Air, Hazybrook, Betoon, Arm-in-tears, Ballyhool (occasionally Belial), Poperingy, and Kassel. The fairest of these is Cassel. For Cassel is set upon a hill which rises from the interminable plain, salient and alluring as a tor in Somerset, and seems to say to the fretful wayfarer, "Come unto Me all ye that are weary, and I will give you re
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XXIX THE FRONT ONCE MORE
XXIX THE FRONT ONCE MORE
A witty subaltern once described the present war as a period of long boredom punctuated by moments of intense fear. All men would emphasise the boredom, and most men would admit the fear. The only soldiers I ever met who affected to know nothing of the fear were Afridis, and the Afridi is notoriously a ravisher of truth. But the predominant feeling—in the winter months at any rate—was the boredom. There was a time when some units, owing to the lack of reserves, were only relieved once every thre
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XXX HOME AGAIN
XXX HOME AGAIN
Sykes had finished packing my kit and had succeeded with some difficulty in re-establishing the truth of the axiom that a whole is greater than its parts. When I contemplated my valise and its original constituents, it seemed to me that the parts would prove greater than the whole, and I had in despair abandoned the problem to Sykes. He succeeded, as he always did. One of the first things that an officer's servant learns is that, as regards the regulation Field Service allowance of luggage, noth
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