it, but shame was not in him. ‘Yes, Sergeant,’ he says to me, ‘full I am, and this is full too,’ he says, pattin’ the rum jar (and it was!), ‘an’ I know where there’s plenty more,’ he says, ‘and it’s all for you an’ your great thrustfulness to me about them five francs.’ What could I do? He’d made me a laughing-stock to the Battalion. An awful man! He’d done it all on those five unlucky francs! Yes, he’d lead a bombin’ party or a drinkin’ party—his own or any other battalion’s; and he was worth a platoon an’ a half when there was anything doing, and I thrust in God he’s alive yet—him and his five francs! But an awful man!”
Drunkenness was confined, for the most part, to a known few characters, regular and almost privileged in their irregularities. The influence of the Priest and the work of the company officers went hand in hand here. Here is a tribute paid by a brother officer to Captain Gore-Langton, killed on the 10th October, which explains the secret. “The men liked him for his pluck and the plain way in which he dealt with, them, always doing his best for the worst, most idle, and stupidest men in our company. . . . One can’t really believe he’s gone. I always expect to see him swinging round a traverse.” The Battalion did not forget him, and while at Lapugnoy, sent a party to Vermelles to attend to his grave there.
On the 31st October Lieut.-Colonel R. C. McCalmont arrived from commanding a battalion of the New Ulster Army Division and took over the command from Major Alexander who reverted to the 2nd Battalion, from which he had been borrowed.
Laventie
On the 10th of the month the Guards Division were for duty again on the Laventie sector, which at every time of the year had a bad reputation for wet. The outcome of Loos had ended hope of a break-through, and a few thousand yards won there against a few thousand lost out Ypres way represented the balance of the account since November 1914. Therefore, once again, the line had to be held till more men, munitions and materials could be trained, manufactured and accumulated, while the price of making war on the spur of the moment was paid, day in and day out, with the bodies of young men subject to every form of death among the slits in the dirt along which they moved. It bored them extremely, but otherwise did not much affect their morale. They built some sort of decent life out of the monotonous hours; they came to know the very best and the very worst in themselves and in their comrades upon whom their lives and well-being depended; and they formed friendships that lasted, as fate willed, for months or even years. They lied persistently and with intent in their home letters concerning their discomforts and exposure, and lent themselves to the impression, cultivated by some sedulous newspapers, that the trenches were electrically-lighted abodes of comfort and jollity, varied with concerts and sports. It was all part of the trial which the national genius calls “the game.”
The Battalion (Lieut.-Colonel R. C. McCalmont commanding) was at Pacaut, due north of Béthune, on the 11th, at Merville on the 14th, training young soldiers how to use smoke-helmets—for gas was a thing to be expected anywhere now—and enjoying every variety of weather, from sodden wet to sharp frost. The effects of the gas-helmet on the young soliders were quaintly described as “very useful on them. ’Twas like throwin’ a cloth over a parrot-cage. It stopped all their chat.”
On the 20th November they took over reserve-billets from the 1st Scots Guards near Bout Deville, and the next day, after inspection of both battalions by General Feilding, commanding the Division, and the late Mr. John Redmond, M.P., went into trenches with the happy fore-knowledge that they were likely to stay there till the 2nd of January and would be lucky if they got a few days out at Christmas. It was a stretch of unmitigated beastliness in the low ditch-riddled ground behind Neuve Chapelle and the Aubers Ridge, on the interminable La Bassée–Estaires road, with no available communication-trenches, in many places impassable from wet, all needing sandbags and all, “in a very neglected state, except for the work done by the 2nd Guards Brigade the week before the Battalion moved in.” (It is nowhere on record that the Guards Division, or for that matter, any other, was ever contented with trenches that it took over.) The enemy, however, were quiet, being at least as uncomfortable as our people. Even when our field-guns blew large gaps in their parapets a hundred yards away there was very little retaliation, and our casualties on relief—the men lay in scattered billets at Riez Bailleul three miles or so up the road—were relatively few.
In one whole week not more than four or five men were killed and fifteen or sixteen wounded, two of them by our own shrapnel bursting short while our guns experimented on block-houses and steel cupolas, as these revealed themselves. Even when the Prince of Wales visited the line at the Major-General’s inspection of it, and left by the only possible road, “Sign Post Lane,” in broad daylight in the open, within a furlong of the enemy, casualties did not occur! There is no mention, either, of any of the aeroplane-visitations which sometimes followed his appearances. As a personal friend of one of the officers, he found reason to visit along that sector more often than is officially recorded.
At the beginning of the month the 1st Guards Brigade was relieved by the 3rd of its Division, and the Battalion handed its line over to the 4th Grenadiers, not without some housewifely pride at improvements it had effected. But, since pride ever precedes a fall, the sharp frost of the past week dissolved in heavy rain, and the neat new-made breastworks with their aligned sandbags collapsed. If the 4th Grenadiers keep veracious diaries, it is probable that that night of thaw and delayed reliefs is strongly recorded in them.
La Gorgue, under Estaires, upon the sluggish Lys in sodden wet weather (December 3-8) gave them a breathing space for a general wash-up and those “steady drills” necessary to mankind. The new stretch that they took over from their own 2nd Battalion was about two miles north of their previous one and southeast of Laventie, running parallel to the Rue Tilleloy, that endless road, flanked, like all others hereabouts, with farm-houses, which joins Armentières to Neuve Chapelle. The ground was, of course, sop, the parapets were perforable breastworks, but reliefs could arrive unobserved within five hundred yards of the front, and the enemy’s line lay in most places nearly a quarter of a mile from ours. More important still, there was reasonable accommodation for Battalion Headquarters in a farm-house (one of the many “Red Houses” of the war) which, by some accident, had been untouched so far, though it stood less than a mile from the front line. Where Headquarters are comfortable, Headquarters are happy, and by so much the more placable. Only very young soldiers grudge them protection and warmth.
For a few days it was a peaceful stretch of the great line that buttressed on Switzerland and the sea. Christmas was coming, and, even had the weather allowed it, neither side was looking too earnestly for trouble.
A company of Welsh Fusiliers with their C.O. and Adjutant came up for eight days’ instruction; and were distributed through the Battalion. The system in the front line at that moment was one of gangs of three, a digger, an armed man, and a bomber, relieving each other by shifts; and to each of these trios one Welshman was allotted.
The Welsh were small, keen and inquisitive. The large Irish praised their Saints aloud for sending them new boys to talk to through the long watches. It is related of one Welshman that, among a thousand questions, he demanded if his tutor had ever gone over the top. The Irishman admitted that he had. “And how often does one go over?” the Welshman continued. “I’ll show you. Come with me,” replied the other Celt, and, moving to a gap in the parapet, lifted the Welshman in his arms that he might the better see what remained, hung up in German wire, of a private of some ancient fight—withered wreckage, perhaps, of Neuve Chapelle. “He went over wanst,” said the Irishman. The working-party resumed their labours and, men say, that that new boy put no more questions “for the full of the half an hour—an’ that’s as long as a week to a Welshman.”
All four companies were held in the first line except for three posts—Picantin, Dead End, and Hougoumont—a few hundred yards behind that were manned with a platoon apiece, but on the 12th December rumours of a mine made it wise to evacuate a part of the right flank till one of our 9.2’s should have searched for the suspected mine-shaft. Its investigations roused the enemy to mild retaliation, which ended next day in one of our men being wounded by our own 9.2, and three by the enemy’s shrapnel—the first casualties in four days.
The wet kept the peace