Gun fodder; the diary of four years of war

Introduction

There seems no reason to me why I should write a preface to my brother's book except that I have been, as it were, a herald of war proclaiming the achievements of Knights and men-at-arns in this great conflict that has passed, and so may take up my scroll again on his behalf, because here is a good soldier who has told, in a good book, his story of

"most disastrous chances of moving accidents by flood and field ; of hair-breadth 'scapes i ' the imminent-deadly breach."

That he was a good soldier I can say not because my judgment is swayed by brotherly partiality, but because I saw him at his job, and heard the opinions of his fellow officers, which were immensely in his favor. "Your brother is a born soldier," said my own Chief who was himself a gallant officer and had a quick eye for character. I think that was true. The boy whom once I wheeled in a go-cart when he was a shock-headed Peter and I the elder brother with a sense of responsibility towards him, had grown up before the war into a strong man whose physical prowess as an amateur pugilist, golfer, archer (in any old sport) was quite outside my sphere of activities, which were restricted to watching the world spin round and recording its vi INTRODUCTION

movements by quick penmanship. Then the war came and like all the elder brothers of England I had a quick kind of heart-beat when I knew that the kid brother had joined up and in due time would have to face the music being played by the great orchestra of death across the fields of life.

I saw the war before he did, knew the worst before he guessed at the lesser evils of it, heard the crash of shell fire, went into burning and bombarded towns, helped to carry dead and wounded, while he was training in England under foul-mouthed sergeants — training to learn how to fight, and, if need be, how to die, like a little gentleman. But I from the first was only the onlooker, the recorder, and he was to be, very quickly, one of the actors in the drama, up to his neck in the "real thing." His point of view was to be quite different from mine. I saw the war in the mass, in its broad aspects and movements from the front line trenches to the Base, from one end of the front to the other. I went into dirty places, but did not stay there. I went from one little corner of hell to another, but did not dwell in its narrow boundaries long enough to get its intimate details of hellishness burnt into my body and soul. He did. He had not the same broad vision of the business of war — appalling in its vastness of sacrifice and suffering, wonderful in its massheroism — but was one little ant in a particular muck-heap for a long period of time, until the stench of it, the filth of it, the boredom of it, the futility of it, entered into his very being, and was part of him as he was part of it. His was the greater knowledge.

INTRODUCTION vii

He was the sufferer, the victim. Our ways lay apart for a long time. He became a ghost to me, during his long spell in Salonica, and I thought of him only as a ghost figure belonging to that other life of mine which I had known "before the war", that far-off period of peace which seemed to have gone forever. Then one day I came across him again out in Flanders in a field near Armentieres, and saw how he had hardened and grown, not only in years but in thoughtfulness and knowledge. He was a commander of men, with the power of life and death over them. He was a commander of guns with the power of death over human creatures lurking in holes in the earth, invisible creatures beyond a hedge of barbed wire and a line of trench. But he also was under the discipline of other powers with higher command than his — who called to him on the telephone and told him to do things he hated to do, but had to do, things which he thought were wrong to do, but had to do ; and among those other powers, disciplining his body and soul was German gun-power from that other side of the barbed-wire hedge, always a menace to him, always teasing him with the chance of death, — a yard this way, a yard that, as I could see by the shell-holes round about his gun-pits, following the track of his field-path, clustering in groups outside the little white house in which he had his mess. I studied this brother of mine curiously. How did he face all the nerve-strain under which I had seen many men break? He was merry and bright (except for sudden silences and a dark look in his eyes at times) .

viii INTRODUCTION

He had his old banjo with him and tinkled out a tune on it. How did he handle his men and junior officers? They seemed to like him "this side idolatry ", yet he had a grip on them, and demanded obedience, which they gave with respect. Queer! My kid-brother had learned the trick of command. He had an iron hand under a velvet glove. The line of his jaw, his straight nose (made straighter by that boxing in his old Oxford days) were cut out for a job like this. He looked the part. He was born to it. All his training had led up to this soldier's job in the field, though I had not guessed so when I wheeled him in that old go-cart.

For me he had a slight contempt, which he will deny when he reads this preface. Though a writer of books before the war, he had now the soldier's scorn of the chronicler. It hurt him to see my green arm-bands, my badge of shame. That I had a motorcar seemed to him, in his stationary exile, the sign of a soft job — as, compared with his it was — disgraceful in its luxury. From time to time I saw him, and, in spite of many narrow escapes under heavy shelling, he did not change, but was splendidly cheerful. Even on the eve of the great German offensive in March of 1918, when he took me to see the graves dug in under the embankment south of St. Quentin, he did not seem apprehensive of the awful ordeal ahead of him. I knew more than he did about that. I knew the time and place of its coming, and I knew that he was in a very perilous position. We said "so long" to each other at parting, with a grip of hands, and I thought it

INTRODUCTION ix

might be the last time I should see him. It was I think ten days later when I saw him, and in that time much had happened, and all that time I gave him up as lost. Under the overwhelming weight of numbers — 114 Divisions to 48 — the British line had broken, and, fighting desperately, day by day, our men fell back mile after mile with the enemy outflanking them, cutting off broken battalions, threatening to cut off vast bodies of men. Every day I was in the swirl of that Retreat, pushing up to its rearguards, seeing with increasing dismay the fearful wreckage of our organization and machine of war which became for a little while like the broken springs of a watch, with Army, Corps, and Divisional staffs entirely out of tune with the fighting units owing to the break-down of all lines of communication. In that tide of traffic, of men, and guns, and transport, I made a few enquiries about that brother of mine. Nobody had seen, or heard of his battery. I must have been close to him at times in Noyon, and Guiscard and Ham, but one individual was like a needle in a bunch of hay, and the enemy had rolled over in a tide, and there did not seem to me a chance of his escape. Then, one morning, in a village near Poix, when I asked a gunner-officer whether he had seen my brother's battery, he said, "Yes — two villages up that road." "Do you happen to know Major Gibbs?" "Yes ... I saw him walking along there a few minutes ago."

It was like hearing that the dead had risen from the grave.

Half an hour later we came face to face.

x INTRODUCTION

He said :

"Hulloa,oldman!"

And I said :

"Hulloa, young fellow!"

Then we shook hands on it, and he told me some of his adventures, and I marvelled at him, because after a wash and shave he looked as though he had just come from a holiday at Brighton instead of from the Valley of Death. He was as bright as ever, and I honestly believe even now that in spite of all his danger and suffering, he had enjoyed the horrible thrills of his adventures. It was only later when his guns were in action near Albert that I saw a change in him. The constant shelling, and the death of some of his officers and men, had begun to tell on him at last. I saw that his nerve was on the edge of snapping, as other men's nerves had snapped after less than his experiences, and I decided to rescue him by any means I could. ... I had the luck to get him out of that hole in the earth just before the ending of the war.

Now I have read his book. It is a real book. Here truthfully, nakedly, vividly, is the experience not only of one soldier in the British Army, but of thousands, and hundreds of thousands. All our men went through the training he describes, were shaped by its hardness and its roughness, were trampled into obedience of soul and body by its heavy discipline. Here is the boredom of war, as well as its thrill of horror, that devastating long-drawn Boredom which is the characteristic of war and the cause of much of its suffering. Here is the sense of futility which

INTRODUCTION xi

sinks into the soldier's mind, tends to sap his mental strength and embitters him, so that the edge is taken off his enthusiasm, and he abandons the fervor of the ideal with which he volunteered.

There is a tragic bitterness in the book, and that is not peculiar to the temperament of the author, but a general feeling to be found among masses of demobilized officers and men, not only of the British Armies, but of the French, and I fancy, also, of the American forces. What is the cause of that ? Why this spirit of revolt on the part of men who fought with invincible courage and long patience? It will seem strange to people who have only seen war from afar that an officer like this, decorated for valour, early in the field, one of the old stock and tradition of English loyalty, should utter such fierce words about the leaders of the war, such ironical words about the purpose and sacrifice of the world conflict. He seems to accuse other enemies than the Germans, to turn round upon Allied statesmen, philosophers, preachers, mobs and say, "You too were guilty of this fearful thing. Your hands are red also with the blood of youth. And you forget already those who saved you by their sacrifice."

That is what he says, clearly, in many passionate paragraphs; and I can bear witness that his point of view is shared by many other soldiers who fought in France. These men were thinking hard when day by day they were close to death. In their dug-outs and ditches they asked of their own souls enormous questions. They asked whether the war was being fought really for Liberty, really to crush Militarism, xii INTRODUCTION

really on behalf of Democracy, or whether to bolster up the same system on our side of the lines which had produced the evils of the German menace. Was it not a conflict between rival Powers imbued with exactly the same philosophy of Imperialism and Force? Was it not the product of commercial greed, diplomatic fears and treacheries and intrigues (conducted secretly over the heads of the peoples) and had not the German people been led on to their villainy by the same spell- words and "dope" which had been put over our peoples, so that the watchwords of "patriotism", "defensive warfare" and "Justice" had been used to justify this massacre in the fields of Europe by the Old Men of all nations, who used the Boys as pawns in their Devil's game? The whole structure of Europe had been wrong. The ministers of the Christian churches had failed Christ by supporting the philosophy of Force, and diplomatic wickedness and old traditions of hatred. All nations were involved in this hark-back to the jungleworld, and Germany was only most guilty because first to throw off the mask, most efficient in the mechanism of Brute-government, most logical in the damnable laws of that philosophy which poisoned the spirit of the modern world.

That was the conclusion to which, rightly or wrongly — I think rightly — many men arrived in their secret conferences with their own souls when death stood near the door of their dug-outs.

That sense of having fought for ideals which were not real in the purpose of the war embittered them ; and they were most bitter on their home coming,

INTRODUCTION xiii

after Armistice, or after Peace, when in England they found that the victory they had won was being used not to inaugurate a new era of liberty, but to strengthen the old laws of "Might and Right", the old tyrannies of government without the consent of peoples, the old Fetish worship of hatred masking under the divine name of Patriotism. Disillusionment, despair, a tragic rage, filled the hearts of fighting men who after all their sacrifices found themselves unrewarded, unemployed, and unsatisfied in their souls. Out of this psychological distress have come civil strife and much of the unrest which is now at work.

My brother's book reveals something of this at work in his own mind, and, as such, is a revelation of all his comrades. I do not think he has yet found the key to the New Philosophy which will arise out of all that experience, emotion, and thought ; just as the mass of fighting men are vague about the future which must replace the bad old past. They are perplexed, illogical, passionate without a clear purpose. But undoubtedly out of their perplexities and passion the New Era will be born.

So I salute my "kid-brother" as one of the makers of History greater than that which crushed German militarism and punished German crimes (which were great), and I wish him luck with this book, which is honest, vital, and revealing.

Philip Gibbs.

Part I The Ranks

I. THE RANKS 1.

In June, 1914, I came out of a hospital in Philadelphia after an operation, faced with two facts. One was that I needed a holiday at home in England, the second that after all hospital expenses were paid I had five dollars in the world. But there was a half-finished novel in my trunk and the last weeks of the theatrical tour which had brought me to Philadelphia would tide me over. A month later the novel was bought by a magazine and the boat that took me to England seemed to me to be the tangible result of concentrated will power. "Man proposes. . . ." My own proposal was to return to America in a month or six weeks to resume the task of carving myself a niche in the fiction market.

The parting advice of the surgeon had been that I was not to play ball or ride a horse for at least six months. The green sweeping uplands of Buckinghamshire greeted me with all their fragrance and a trig golf course gave me back strength while I thought over ideas for a new novel.

Then like a thunderbolt the word "War" crashed out. Its full significance did not break through the ego of one who so shortly would be leaving Europe far behind and to whom a personal career seemed of vital importance. England was at war. The Army would be buckling on its sword, running out its guns ; the Navy clearing decks for action. It was their job, not mine. The Boer War had only touched upon my childish consciousness as a shouting in the streets, cheering multitudes and brass bands. War, as such, was something which I had never considered as having any personal meaning for me. Politics and war were the business of politicians and soldiers. My business was writing and I went up to London to arrange accommodations on the boat to New York.

London was different in those hot August days. Long queues waited all day, — not outside theatres, but outside recruiting offices, — city men, tramps, bricklayers, men of all types and ages with a look in their eyes that puzzled me. Every taxi hoot drew one's attention to the flaring poster on each car "Young Men of England, Your King and Country need you !"

How many millions of young men there were who would be glad to answer that call to adventure, - — an adventure which surely could not last more than six months ? It did not call me. My adventure lay in that wonderland of sprouting towers that glistened behind the Statue of Liberty.

But day by day the grey wave swept on, tearing down all veils from before the altar of reality. Belgian women were not merely bayoneted.

"Why don't we stop this? What is the Army doing?" How easy to cry that out from the leafy lanes of Buckinghamshire. A woman friend of mine travelled up in the train with me one morning, a friend whose philosophy and way of life had seemed to me more near the ideal than I had dreamed of being able to reach. She spoke of war, impersonally and without recruiting propaganda. All unconsciously she opened my eyes to the unpleasant fact that it was my war too. Suppose I had returned to New York and the Germans had jumped the tiny Channel and "bayoneted" her and her children? Could I ever call myself a man again ?

I took a taxi and went round London. Every recruiting office looked like a four-hour wait. I was in a hurry. So I went by train to Bedford and found it crowded with Highlanders. When I asked the way to the recruiting office they looked at me oddly. Their speech was beyond my London ear but a pointing series of arms showed it to me.

By a miracle the place was empty except for the doctor and an assistant in khaki.

"I want to join the Cavalry," said I.

"Very good, sir. Will you please take off your clothes."

It was the last time a sergeant called me sir for many a long day.

I stripped, was thumped and listened to and gave description of tattoo marks which interested that doctor greatly. The appendix scar didn't seem to strike him. " What is it ? " said he, looking at it curiously, and when I told him merely grunted. Shades of Shaw ! I thought with a jump of that

Philadelphia surgeon. "Don't ride a horse for six months." Only three had elapsed.

I was passed fit. I assured them that I was English on both sides, unmarried, not a spy, and was finally given a bundle of papers and told to take them along to the barracks.

The barracks were full of roughnecks and it occurred to me for the first time, as I listened to them being sworn in, that these were my future brother soldiers. What price Mulvaney, Learoyd and Ortheris? thought I.

I repeated the oath after an hour's waiting and swore to obey orders and respect superior officers and in short do my damnedest to kill the King's enemies. I've done the last but when I think of the first two that oath makes me smile.

However, I swore, received two shillings and threepence for my first two days' pay and was ordered to report at the Cavalry Depot, Woolwich, the following day, September 3, 1914.

The whole business had been done in a rush of exaltation that didn't allow me to think. But when I stepped out into the crowded streets with that two shillings rattling in my pocket I felt a very sober man. I knew nothing whatever of soldiering. I hardly even knew a corporal from a private or a rifle from a ramrod, and here I was Trooper A. H. Gibbs, 9th Lancers, with the sullen rumble of heavy guns just across the Channel — growing louder.

Woolwich !

Bad smells, bad beer, bad women, bad language ! — - Those early days ! None of us who went through the ranks will ever forget the tragedy, the humour, the real democracy of that period. The hand of time has already coloured it with the glow of romance, but in the living it was crude and raw, like waking up to find your nightmare real.

Oxford University doesn't give one much of an idea of how to cope with the class of humanity at that Depot in spite of Ruskin Hall, the workingman's college, of which my knowledge consisted only of climbing over their wall and endeavoring to break up their happy home. But the Ruskin Hall man was a prince by the side of those recruits. They came with their shirts sticking out of trousers seats, naked toes showing out of gaping boots, and their smell — We lay at night side by side on adjoining bunks, fifty of us in a room. They had spent their two days' pay on beer, bad beer. The weather was hot. Most of them were stark naked. I'd had a bath that morning. They hadn't.

The room was enormous. The windows had no blinds. The moon streamed in on their distorted bodies in all the twistings of uneasy sleep. Some of them smoked cigarettes and talked. Others blasphemed them for talking but the bulk snored and ground their teeth in their sleep.

A bugle rang out.

Aching in every limb from the unaccustomed hardness of the iron bed it was no hardship to answer the call. There were lavatories outside each room and amid much sleepy blasphemy we shaved, those of us who had razors, and washed, and in the chill of dawn went down to a misty common. It was too early for discipline. There weren't enough N.C.O.'s, so for the first few days we hung about waiting for breakfast instead of doing physical jerks.

Breakfast ! One thinks of a warm room with cereals and coffee and eggs and bacon with a morning paper and, if there's a soot in our cup, a sarcastic reference as to cleanliness. That was before the war.

We lined up before the door of a gun shed, hundreds of us, shivering, filing slowly in one by one and having a chunk of bread, a mug of tea and a tin of sardines slammed into our hands, the sardines having to be divided among four.

The only man in my four who possessed a jackknife to open the tin had cleaned his pipe with it, scraped the mud off his boots, cleaned out his nails and cut up plug tobacco. Handy things, jackknives. He proceeded to hack open the tin and scoop out sardines. It was only my first morning and my stomach wasn't strong in those days. I disappeared into the mist, alone with my dry bread and tea. Hunger has taught me much since then.

The mist rolled up later and daylight showed us to be a pretty tough crowd. We were presently taken in hand by a lot of sergeants who divided us into groups, made lists of names and began to teach us how to march in files, and in sections, —

I the elements of soldiering. Some of them didn't seem to know their left foot from their right but the patience of those sergeants was only equalled by the cunning of their blasphemy and the stolidity of their victims.

After an hour of it we were given a rest for fifteen minutes, this time to get a handful of tobacco. Then it went on again and again, — and yet again.

The whole of that first period of seven days was a long jumble of appalling happenings ; meals served by scrofulitic hands on plates from which five other men's leavings and grease had to be removed; bread cut in quarter loaves ; meat fat, greasy, and stewed — always stewed, tea, stewed also, without appreciable milk, so strong that a spoon stood up in it unaided ; sleeping in one's clothes and inadequate washing in that atmosphere of filth indescribable; of parades to me childish in their elementariness ; of long hours in the evening with nothing to do, no place to go, no man to talk to, — a period of absolute isolation in the middle of those thousands broken only by letters which assumed a paramount importance, constituting as they did one's only link with all that one had left behind, that other life which now seemed like a mirage.

Not that one regretted the step. It was a firsthand experience of life that only Jack London or Masefield could have depicted. It was too the means of getting out to fight the Boche. A monotonous means, yes, but every day one learnt some new drill and every day one was thrilled with the absolute cold-blooded reality of it all. It was good to be alive, to be a man, to get one's teeth right into things. It was a bigger part to play than that of the boy in "The Blindness of Virtue."

Two incidents stand out in that chrysalis stage of becoming soldiers.

One was a sing-song, spontaneously started among the gun sheds in the middle of the white moonlight. One of the recruits was a man who had earned his living — hideously sarcastic phrase ! — by playing a banjo and singing outside public houses. He brought his banjo into the army with him. I hope he's playing still !

He stuck his inverted hat on the ground, lit a candle beside it in the middle of the huge square, smacked his dry lips and drew the banjo out of its baize cover.

"Perishin' thirsty weather, Bill."

He volunteered the remark to me as to a brother.

"Going to play for a drink?" I asked.

He was already tuning. He then sat down on a large stone and began to sing. His accompaniment was generous and loud and perhaps once he had a voice. It came now with but an echo of its probable charm, through a coating of beer and tobacco and years of rough living.

It was extraordinary. Just he sitting on the stone, and I standing smoking by his side, and the candle flickering in the breeze, and round us the hard black and white buildings and the indefinable rumble of a great life going on somewhere in the distance.

Presently, as though he were the Pied Piper, men came in twos and threes and stood round us, forming a circle.

"Give us the 'Little Grey 'Ome in the West', George !"

And " George ", spitting after the prolonged sentiment of Thora, struck up the required song. At the end of half an hour there were several hundred men gathered round joining in the choruses, volunteering solos, applauding each item generously. The musician had five bottles of beer round his inverted hat and perhaps three inside him, and a collection of coppers was taken up from time to time.

They chose love ballads of an ultra-sentimental nature with the soft pedal on the sad parts, — these men who to-morrow would face certain death. How little did that thought come to them then. But I looked round at their faces, blandly happy, dirty faces, transformed by the moon and by their oath of service into the faces of crusaders.

How many of them are alive to-day, how many buried in nameless mounds somewhere in that silent desolation? How many of them have suffered mutilation? How many of them have come out of it untouched, to the waiting arms of their women? Brothers, I salute you.

The other incident was the finding of a friend, a kindred spirit in those thousands which accentuated one's solitude.

We had been standing in a long queue outside the Quartermaster's store, being issued with khaki one by one. I was within a hundred yards of getting outfitted when the Q.M. came to the door in person and yelled that the supply had run out. I think we all swore. The getting of khaki meant a vital step nearer to the Great Day when we should cross the Channel. As the crowd broke away in disorder, I heard a voice with an 'h' say "How perfectly ruddy!" I could have fallen on the man's neck with joy. The owner of it was a comic sight. A very battered straw hat, a dirty handkerchief doing the duty of collar, a pair of grey flannel trousers that had been slept in these many nights. But the face was clear and there was a twinkle of humorous appreciation in the blue eye. I made a bee-line for that man. I don't remember what I said, but in a few minutes we were swapping names, and where we lived and what we thought of it, and laughing at our mutually draggled garments.