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 The German trench-line looks old and untidy and weather-beaten.
The only neat thing about it are the dark grey steel plates let in at
intervals all along the line. These are the plates with a loophole that
may be opened or shut for firing purposes.
The trench-line is finite. Here England, the Empire, ends. Up to the
line, by grace of the A.S.C., you may live your life as an Englishman,
eat your bully beef and drink your dixie of tea, receive your two posts
a day and your newspaper, and enjoy the safety of the strong iron
ring which the Grand Fleet has thrown about our vast possessions.
Beyond the line the Polizei-Staat very soon begins. Behind the
parapet across the intervening space framed in the little loophole of
our firing-plate everything is feldgrau. As regular and universal as the
drab grey uniform of the German hordes is the mentality of that
people moving like one man to the wires pulled in Berlin—wires that
stretch from the ugly yellow building of the Grosser General Stab, by
the Koenigsplatz, to this narrow ditch in Flanders.
It is overwhelming, this first glance into the enemy’s country.
Spires and towers, mine-shafts and chimney-stacks, are as fingers
beckoning to the Allies, pointing to them the path of duty and honour.
A forest of tall factory chimneys, seen cold and smokeless in the
blue of the horizon, mark where Lille waits feverishly the hour of her
deliverance. From all parts of our line I have gazed long into the
zone of the German Army, from the banks of the Yser Canal in the
north, down to the heart of the Artois country in the south, and
woven for myself mental pictures of the life of the Germans in the
field, with only a hundred yards or so separating them from our lines,
nearer than most of them have ever been to England or, please God,
ever will be. Did ever, in the whole course of history, a hundred yards
bridge a gulf so vast as that existing here—between individual liberty
and chivalry and mutual forbearance, on the one hand, and, on the
other, a police-controlled mentality, a blind adoration of brute force,
and a cynical disregard of the teachings of Christ?
With the combatants on both sides securely hidden from view
deep in the ground, there is little opportunity in this siege warfare of
seeing the daily life of the German at the front. A French General
who had been in the field since last October jubilantly informed a
friend of mine one day this summer that he had that morning seen a
German for the first time. I may therefore, I presume, esteem myself
fortunate to have seen quite a number of Germans in their lines in
the course of my journeyings up and down the front.
I shall never forget the first German I saw. It is true that he was not
in the German lines, but in the British military hospital installed in the
Trianon Palace Hotel at Versailles. It was in September, and the
army was on the Aisne. This German was lying in a tent in the
beautiful garden of the hotel abutting on the park of Versailles. He
was dying of gangrene, and his condition made it impossible to keep
him indoors in a ward with the other wounded. His bed had therefore
been moved into this tent—a large, airy place. With him there was
another gangrene victim, a British soldier.
It was a grim and poignant meeting. A civilian doctor, who was
with me, whispered, directly he saw the man and breathed the air of
that tent, that the case was hopeless. The German was a thick-set,
bearded Landsturm man, nearing the fifties. His face was very
bronzed, and looked almost black beside the whiteness of his pillow.
He was fiercely and bitterly hostile, and his eyes, already dulling with
the shadow of approaching death, blazed for a moment with
unconcealed enmity as he looked at the Englishman by his bedside.
I spoke to him in German. He never took his eyes off my face as
he heard again the familiar sounds of his mother-tongue. I asked him
his name. He told me. I have forgotten it, but I remember he said he
was a farmer from near Hanover. His voice was very, very weak, and
the intonation was indescribably sad. I asked him how he felt. “Es
geht mit mir zu Ende!” (I am all but finished), he replied slowly.
I asked him if he was in need of anything. He shook his big brown
head, and answered: “Man ist sehr gut zu mir” (They are very good
to me).
Had he relatives? I asked. Could I write to anybody for him? “Ich
habe niemand,” came the reply in his sad voice.
A widower, all his children dead, this old German had left his farm
on being mobilized, and had gone all through Belgium with the
German Army until they had abandoned him, wounded, on the
retreat from the Marne. When I left him, with a phrase about keeping
a good heart, for he would soon be well (how senseless it must have
sounded to that man who for days had seen the Black Angel
hovering at his bedside!), he shook his head, and said: “Ich glaub’ es
nicht!” I never saw him again or learnt his fate, for I left Paris that
same afternoon. But I have often thought since then of the peaceful
life of that humble Hanoverian farmer sacrificed to the insensate
arrogance of the neurasthenic who wears the purple of the
Hohenzollerns.
Apart from prisoners, the first German I encountered at the front in
this war was in the space between the lines. His work for “Kaiser und
Reich” was done. With hundreds of his fellows he lay stiff and stark
in the moonlight before our trenches at Neuve Chapelle. He looked
like a waxen image as he lay on his back in the grass, in his grey
uniform all splashed with mud, his helmet, clotted with blood (I have
it as a memento of that night), still on his head, his rifle with its
rusting bayonet grasped in one hand flung wide. All around him lay
his comrades as the machine-guns of the Indians had mowed them
down. By the light of the flares I could see the grass dotted with
these sprawling figures, so inert and limp that one would have said it
was a group in a wax-work show rather than an actual picture of war.
I have looked down on the villages of Messines and Wytschaete,
built upon the slope of the ridge that bears their names, where the
Germans dwell in desolate cities and in houses which no man
inhabiteth, which are ready to become heaps. I have seen the smoke
of their Mittagessen rising into the air from the cellars and dug-outs
in which they live by day, and once I caught a glimpse of a figure,
grey against a red wall, slipping in and out of the ruins.
Looking out over the German lines with a telescope one day, my
Ross focussed suddenly and surprisingly a portly German, a little
forage cap on his head, absorbed in the preparation of something in
a little pot. Presently he dipped down and disappeared, but almost
the next moment two other grey figures came bobbing along down
the trench. They were out of range of our rifles, and, with ammunition
a luxury, not worth wasting a shell on.
 More than once I have watched Germans at work behind their
lines. One summer afternoon, in particular, I had a regular surfeit of
Germans. First a cart appeared, slowly descending a field. As I
followed it with my glass until it stopped, my eye caught two
diminutive figures digging. In another part of my field of vision I saw
two German officers out riding, the one on a bay, the other on a
white horse. They galloped across a field, then walked their horses,
to cool them, alongside the fringe of a belt of black forest. They were
engaged in animated conversation, and as I watched I wondered
what their feelings would have been had they known that two artillery
officers at my side were discussing whether it was worth while
putting a shell over at them. The verdict was against a shot, so the
two officers continued their ride undisturbed.
There is nothing more thrilling than to watch the discovery and
shelling of a working party by our guns. I was present one day when
a detachment of Germans were made out digging on a road behind
a screen of trees. I saw four of them myself quite distinctly, working
busily in their white shirts, their tunics discarded. A few brief
directions about angle and direction and shell went over the
telephone to the battery behind us. Then I glued my eye to the glass
and waited.
The four men worked on. I could see the flash of their shirt-sleeves
behind the trees. One man had a loose sleeve which kept coming
unrolled, and which he kept rolling up again. A loud explosion ... a
rushing noise ... the telephone orderly’s voice, “First gun fired, sir!” ...
three more explosions, and three more shells cleaving the air, and,
almost simultaneously, as it seemed, a pear-shaped ball of white
smoke, then another and another and another ... four detonations—
boom! bum-bum-bum! Between the appearance of the first white
pear-drop and the second there was a flash of white cloth between
the trees ... then all was quiet. And presently I heard the telephone
orderly slowly dictating a report to the Brigade ... “dispersed a
German working-party on the —— road.”
The men love to get these glimpses of the Germans. When the
line is quiet, and the messages, “Nothing to report,” accumulate in
piles on the table in the Operations Section of the General Staff,
sniping is a welcome break in the monotony of trench life. I was in
the trenches of the Leinster Regiment one day and presently found
myself in an outpost established in the ruins of a farm which was
only some 15 yards from the enemy. As it was not desired that the
Germans should know the farm was occupied, the men in the
outpost had strict injunctions that they were not to fire except in case
of an attack. The men squatting in a narrow trench—to have raised
oneself to one’s full height would have meant instant death—showed
me the German trench a stone’s-throw away in a periscope. “’Tis a
pity we mayn’t shoot now,” they whispered to me. “D’ye see that bit
of tree beyond there? Sure, the Allemans is always potterin’ about
there. There’s a fine big fellow with great whiskers on him comes out
of that sometimes. Faith! you couldn’t miss him!” They spoke with
such regret that I almost laughed.
The Leinsters had given all the German snipers names. One,
believed to be established in a tree, was known as Peter Weber,
another was Hans, another Fritz. One of the Leinsters, an excellent
marksman, spent the whole of his spare time sniping. He had his
little corner, and when he came back he used to regale his friends
with fabulous stories of old Germans with long white beards that he
had seen. He had “got” an officer the morning of the day I was in
those trenches, and the “frightfulness,” which always follows after a
sniper’s bullet has found its billet, went on with great regularity all
through the afternoon in the shape of half-hourly salvoes of whizz-
bangs.
The sniper’s job is no sinecure. Both sides are always engaged in
trying to locate snipers, and once a sniper’s nest is discovered, a few
rounds with a machine-gun will generally bring him down, however
well concealed he may be. A sniper never knows but that an enemy
marksman has found him out, and is waiting, finger on trigger, for the
slightest movement on his quarry’s part to pick him off.
Sniping is an integral part of trench warfare. The Germans attach
so much importance to it that they have not hesitated to issue
expensive telescopic-sight rifles to their picked marksmen. They
keep machine-guns and clamped rifles trained on certain spots, and
a man always ready to open fire immediately a movement becomes
visible over a certain measured space with a good background. A
certain amount of wastage from sniping is inevitable. The trench
lines wind so much that it is not always possible to make trenches
secure from every angle of fire. We have to buy our experience, and
I have passed in our trenches many a newly heightened parapet or
freshly constructed traverse, the price of which was a man’s life.
As far as sniping is concerned, I believe that the British soldier
holds the mastery. In our Regular army, the private cannot reach the
maximum of pay until he has passed as a first-class shot, with the
result that almost all our Regulars are fair marksmen, and some are
very fine shots indeed. Of the Territorials, probably the London
battalions contain the best riflemen. There are some very good
snipers among the Indians and also the Canadians, as both possess
in their ranks a good percentage of hunters.
 In a German trench.
One soldier watches the periscope and the other attends to the
telephone.
I have been in several German trenches, and they were all well
constructed. The Germans are the beavers of trench warfare. They
were quick to recognize the rôle that heavy artillery was destined to
play in deciding the fortunes of the war of positions. Their aim has
therefore been to construct dug-outs, proof, if possible, even against
hits with high-explosive shells, in which their men can take shelter
during an artillery bombardment, and emerge, when the guns lift and
the infantry assault, to defend the trench with machine-guns, many
of which are made to sink at will into specially constructed cement
shelters.
The Germans work with antlike industry. Thus, in the eight days
that elapsed between the loss of the trenches round and about the
château of Hooge, on the Ypres-Menin road, on July 30, and their
recapture by our infantry on August 9, they constructed an amazing
network of trenches and dug-outs. The vast mine-crater (caused by
the mine we exploded here on July 19 when we reoccupied it)
resembled an amphitheatre with its tiers of bomb proof shelters
scooped out of the crumbling sides of the chasm, and shored up with
tree-trunks. The dug-outs in the trenches took a diagonal plunge
downwards, were most solidly constructed, and afforded
accommodation for four or five men at a time. They were, like all
German dug-outs, quite comfortably furnished with beds and
furniture from the abandoned cottages in the vicinity.
There are known to be trenches in the German lines which are lit
by electric light from Lille, but I have not seen any of these. Apropos
of the Lille electric-light supply, it is a fact that for many weeks after
the Germans had occupied Lille, Armentières, the important
industrial centre which is in our lines and which received its electric
current from Lille, only five miles or so away, continued to draw its
electric power as before. The joke was too good to last, and one day
without warning the current was cut off. It is believed that a spy
revealed to the Germans the fact that they were lighting the
operations of the Allies.
 What has struck me particularly about the German trenches I have
been in is the extraordinary collection of objects of all kinds that the
men have accumulated there. The German soldier resembles the
magpie in his pilfering and hoarding habits. Psychologists must
explain the mental state of a man who will go into action with articles
of ladies’ underwear in his haversack, or who will take ladies’ boots,
a feather boa, or a plush-covered photograph-album with him into
the trenches. Their predilection for looting ladies’ lingerie gave rise to
a legend which in its numerous versions resembles the story of the
Russians or the Bowmen of Mons. This story, which was generally
current after Neuve Chapelle, was to the effect that the infantry on
entering the village had found some girls, half demented with fright,
hiding in a cellar. The theory was that they had been carried off by
the German troops for their own base uses.
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.
You must picture the trenches as deep, rather narrow gangways,
which are much more like street excavations than anything else one
can imagine. Some are dug down in the soil, but many of them are
only a foot or two in the ground, the parapet being built up with
sandbags, as in many parts of our line, especially in Flanders, the
water lies too close to the surface to allow of deep digging. The
bottom of the trench has a wooden flooring composed of “grids,” as
they are called, footways made of short pieces of wood nailed
laterally on planks placed edgeways.
A deep broad step is cut in the parapet and boarded over. It looks
like a deep window-seat. This is the “fire-stand,” where the look-out
men are posted at the loopholes to fire at the enemy. In most parts of
the line there is but little rifle-fire by day, save for sniping, as neither
side can expose its men by daylight, even for a momentary shot,
without grave risk.
Round and about the fire-stand the whole life of the soldier in the
trenches centres. While his comrade takes his turn of duty at the
parapet he sleeps on the fire-stand, or cooks his food over fires, or
cleans his rifle, or writes a letter home. Shelters, that the men call
“funk-holes”—long holes scraped out of the side of the trench and
holding two or three men—give him a dry place to sleep in and
protection from the rain. But should the funk-holes be full in rainy
weather, the soldier has his waterproof sheet, issued with his
equipment, and thus covered he will not hesitate to lie down and
sleep in the wet.
What with traverses and communication trenches and outposts,
what with second and third lines and support trenches, the firing-line
is such a winding maze that it is utterly impossible to get a
comprehensive view of it as a whole. A walk round the trenches of a
single company, which will take you a good half-hour, leaves you
with a confused mass of impressions: of rather grimy figures, looking
very business-like with their bandoliers strapped crosswise over their
overcoats, their rifles by their sides, standing at the parapet; of men
in all stages of undress, cooking, eating, washing, writing, in the
narrow trench; of faces seen white against the dark background of a
dug-out, strained to a telephone which wails fretfully with a puny
whine like the toot of a child’s trumpet; of officers in shirt-sleeves and
trench boots going their rounds or writing reports amid thousands of
flies in a shelter....
You walk up a trench and down a trench, you see the angular
outline of machine-guns under their canvas covers in their
emplacements, you are shown case upon case of ammunition,
bombs, and grenades, large and small, and rocket-like cartridges
which are flare-lights.
It is so unutterably strange to find all this life, this vast preparation
and organization, going forward in the open country where, but a
twelvemonth back, the peasants were gathering the harvest, to know
that it was going forward before you came, and will go forward after
you have left. With such feelings of bewilderment, I fancy, must the
traveller, in the early days of gold-mining, have come upon the
mining-camps that sprang up in a day in the midst of barren wastes,
and stood, in incredulous amazement, watching the ceaseless
activity of a great host of humans returned to the era of the
troglodyte.
Neither by day nor by night are the trenches restful. Seldom a day
or a night goes by without the “whoosh” of a shell or the clumsy rush
of a trench-mortar bomb. The hollow reports of the rifles never
cease. Scarcely an afternoon passes, should the weather not be
misty, but the firmament quakes with the rapid reverberations of the
anti-aircraft guns. “Pom-pom-pom-pom-pom” is their note, sharp and
unmistakable, as they throw circles of snow-white smoke-puffs about
the aeroplanes soaring high in the sky.
The firing-line by night is restless as a storm-tossed sea. One dark
and starless night in June I climbed a commanding height which
afforded a wonderful view of a great part of our line. A thin crescent
of yellow moon hung low on the skyline. A cold east wind rustled
through the trees. Far below me in the plain a never-ceasing spout of
brilliant green-white star-shells marked the winding course of the
British and German lines.
It was an unforgettable picture. For one brief moment a desolate
ridge, broken with the jagged silhouette of ruined houses, stood out
hard and clear before my eyes, and then was blotted out as a flare
fell earthward and died. The ragged outline of a shattered belfry was
revealed for a fraction of time, black and sinister as a Doré glimpse
of Hell, and then melted away into the surrounding darkness. The
soft soughing of the wind in the trees was mingled with an incessant
dull thrumming from the plain. Now it rose in a swelling burst of
sound, from the right, from the left, from the centre, of the darkness
at my feet; now it died away into single blows that echoed noisily in
their isolation.
Sometimes the spout of star-shells ran dry, and for a minute or two
all the plain lay swathed in its pall of darkness. Then silently, swiftly,
a flare would wing its way aloft, and once more unbare the plain of
death to view.
Guns boomed now and then from the distance. Along the blurred
line of the horizon fitful bursts of light blazed up and died, like
lightning in a summer sky. Sometimes the blaze was orange,
sometimes yellow, and the air throbbed to the ear.
So the night dragged on towards the lemon dawn, with star-shells
and distant shell-bursts and the throb of musketry in the plain. With
the coming of the light the flares were seen no more, but the angry
drumming of rifles never ceased. Daybreak showed the crumbling
towers of Ypres, with the smoke of shell-bursts encircling them like a
funeral wreath, but the morning mists enshrouded the trenches in the
plain.
 CHAPTER X
THE COMRADESHIP OF THE TRENCHES

“All the bright company of Heaven

Hold him in their high comradeship,
The Dog-Star and the Sisters Seven,
Orion’s Belt and sworded hip ...
Through joy and blindness he shall know,
Not caring much to know, that still
Nor lead nor shell shall reach him, so
That it be not the Destined Will.”

(“Into Battle,” by Captain Julian Grenfell, killed in action,

Ypres, May, 1915.)
The firing-line is the touchstone of character. It is the final
instance. There is no appeal beyond it. A man may have shown
himself at home to be the best of officers, self-possessed, self-
reliant, conscientious, thoughtful for his men; but half an hour’s
“frightfulness” at the front can undo the good impression made in
months of home training. A good sergeant will relieve an officer of a
great deal of routine in ordinary circumstances, but when the
company comes under fire the sergeant will, like the men, lean
unconsciously on the moral strength of the officer.
No man can hope to be eternally master of his nerves. Modern
shell-fire wears the nerves away. A man who would lead his platoon
fearlessly into the jaws of hell may feel himself inwardly cringing
when he hears the long high whistle of a shell, mingling with the
ominous hiss that means it is nearing the end of its journey. But if a
man is what the army calls “a good officer,” the first thought that will
rise to the surface in him when he comes under fire is, “The men.”
 He will know that, almost automatically, the men are watching him
to see what he will do. Be they the toughest of veterans, and he the
greenest of “subs.,” there is always a subconscious disposition in the
soldier under fire to mould himself on the example given by an
officer. An officer who is always exhorting his men to be careful (and
by this I do not mean the officer who takes sensible measures to
check the irrepressible foolhardiness of the British soldier under fire),
who indulges in exaggerated demonstrations of horror when a shell
shatters a man to fragments at his very elbow, will “rot” the finest
company. The men will begin to think before they act, and in
consequence lose that singleness of purpose that takes the soldier
straight to his appointed goal, that makes just the difference between
good and bad troops.
The firing-line is a strange place. There are few situations in life
where a man is called upon to hold himself permanently in check.
There are emergencies in civil life where a man must subordinate his
feelings to a higher interest, but only in war is he compelled to make
the perpetual sacrifice of his feelings, to face again and again an
ordeal which perhaps never loses its terrors for him.
Do you realize the weight of responsibility resting on the shoulders
of the Regimental Officer in war? Here is a situation he is frequently
called upon to face. A shell falls right into the midst of his platoon as
he is leading his men to or from the trenches. Maybe the men are
fresh from home, and this sudden horror that cleaves its bloody path
through their ranks is their first taste of war.
There is one man in that platoon who must not lose his head. That
is the officer, boy though he be. Those raw and mangled corpses,
those groaning, whimpering men that strew the ground, may affright
the rank and file; they may make no visible impression on him. In his
hands repose the lives of a couple of hundred men. He owes them
not only to those men themselves, but to the State. He must
maintain his calm, so that the men shall come to see with him that
this is but a common incident of war; he must decide whether to put
the men under cover or to march straight on; he must collect the
survivors, and form them up again; he must, in short, take command
for the moment, not only of his own feelings, but of those of his men
as well. Though a senseless terror, which highly strung men who
come under shell-fire for the first time know all too well, creep over
him, he must not show it. He must play the veteran, though the
heavens fall in.
The whole relationship between officer and man in our army is
based on incidents like these. To get the best out of his men, an
officer must show them that he does not fear to do what he demands
of them. Seldom, if ever, is a stout-hearted officer “let down.” His
example endures, even after he is gone. More than once, I am sure,
the souls of our officers, slain in battle, have paused, as they winged
their way homewards, to contemplate with pride their men, their
officers all dead, holding on in an obliterated trench, sustained in
their resolution by the lesson their dead leaders taught them.
On countless occasions in this war the teachings of the
Regimental Officer have borne fruit, even after he himself had joined
the great majority. In the assault on Neuve Chapelle in March the
leading companies of the 1st 39th Garhwalis lost all their officers in
the first ten minutes. But the brave little Nepalese hillmen never
wavered. They had seen their officers die at the head of their
companies. They remembered ... and it kept them firm. In the same
historic fight the Scottish Rifles lost all their officers save one,
Lieutenant Somervail, a Second Lieutenant of Special Reserve. But
the men of this splendid regiment, whose tradition is that there shall
be no surrender, went on behind their non-commissioned officers,
despite heavy losses, against barbed wire and machine-guns,
“moulding themselves,” as their regimental sergeant-major said to
me afterwards, “on the glorious example of their officers.” When we
recaptured at Hooge on August 9 the positions we lost on July 30, a
party of twenty-five men of the 2nd Durham light Infantry, under the
command of Lance-Corporal Smith, were lost in the dense smoke of
battle, and held out alone in an obliterated trench for more than
twenty-four hours, without orders, without connection with the rest of
the troops, and only came away when they saw a fresh line being
dug behind the line they were holding. The officers of this fine
battalion had created in their men’s minds the proper idea of the
functions of an officer, so that, when there were no officers left to
lead, this young lance-corporal stepped forward and “carried on” in
the best traditions of the service.
In the firing-line you get down to bedrock. Character tells. The cult
is of the “stout fellow,” the “thruster.” The men will vaguely admire the
clever strategy of their Generals which enabled the soldier to sing:
“We gave them hell
At Neuve Chapelle.
Here we are again!”
But their outspoken praise of any one General will always be
traceable back to qualities of personal bravery that he has displayed.
If they admire and respect Sir John French, it is because they recall
him on the South African veld, because they remember him sitting
on the roadside with them among the shells during the retreat from
Mons. If they think a world of Sir Douglas Haig, it is likewise because
they have seen him in the midst of his men on many critical
occasions, not forgetting that historic afternoon in the first battle of
Ypres, when the Commander-in-Chief and Sir Douglas Haig, waiting
at Hooge, heard the news that the Germans had broken our line, and
later that the 2nd Worcesters had saved the day. In present
circumstances practically the only Generals that come into direct
contact with the men are the Brigadiers, and I have found that the
Brigadiers who are the best loved are those who are constantly
making the round of the trenches, who show the men that they are
willing to expose themselves to the same perils as they ask the men
to incur.
I have been on many a long round of trenches with the Brigadiers
through mud and water and evil smells, along roads in view of the
Germans where bullets sang and snapped, across fields where
shells were plumping, right up to the firing-line, where “whizz-bangs”
were demolishing the parapet. I have often found myself admiring
the physical endurance and the calm courage of these Brigadiers—
who are not all young men—and have read the reflection of my own
thought in the eyes of the men in the trenches who saluted as we
passed.
 It is in the firing-line that the relationship between officer and man,
which it has taken so many decades to build up in the British Army,
comes to full fruition. Its essence is the spirit of the playground. I am
sure that the British officer is to his men, more than anything else,
the captain of the team. The game is stern, the stakes are high, but
the spirit is the old one: “Buck up! and play the game!”
Officer and man live together in closer companionship than ever
was possible before they entered the firing-line. Their bond of mutual
confidence is sealed by a thousand recollections of dangers faced
together, of assaults side by side against the enemy, of perilous
patrols at night. The daily tragedies of the trenches unite them still
closer, drawing them together as men sleeping in the open will
huddle up for warmth.
A young Captain was in his dug-out in the trenches one day, when
word came back to him that one of his men had been sniped. He
hurried out and along the trench to the spot indicated. As he came to
a traverse, a man sprang out of a “funk-hole.” “Don’t go round there,
sir,” he said; “there’s a sniper watching that traverse. He’s just got
one of the men.” In a feeling of spontaneous sympathy the young
officer went on. As he rounded the traverse in sight of his man, who
had just expired on the floor of the trench, the sniper’s rifle cracked
again, and the officer collapsed with a bullet through the body.
There was no doctor in the trench at the time. The wounded man’s
comrades, who examined him, found that he had been shot through
the abdomen. The only chance of life was to leave him where he lay.
So, while a message was sent down for the doctor, his men built a
shelter over him in the open trench.
Food or drink are fatal in the case of grave internal wounds like
this. The wounded man was racked with thirst, but all they could do
was to moisten his lips from time to time with a damp handkerchief.
The men in his company went about their duties with set faces, for,
one and all, they loved their Captain. His servant was in despair, and
watched him in his shelter. His best friend in the regiment, the
Captain of another company, sat with him until evening, when he had
to go to take his company back into reserve.
 That night the wounded man died. One who saw him laid to rest in
the little burial-ground of the battalion by a ruined farm says the grief
of his men at the graveside was poignant to witness. When the dead
man first took over the company it was slack and unruly, the worst
company in the battalion. The new man who succeeded him told me
it was the best company he had ever seen, for the spirit of the dead
officer was living in every man. Such are the relations of officer and
man; such are the little dramas that keep friendship green in our
army in the field.
The British soldier’s indifference to danger, while it is one of his
finest qualities, is often the despair of his officer. The Irish regiments
are the worst. Their recklessness is proverbial. An officer in one of
the Irish battalions—he was a “ranker,” and therefore knew his
subject—told me some amazing instances of the complete
indifference of his men to the dangers of their situation. Crossing a
railway on one occasion, in full view of the Germans, he came upon
a party of men engaged in setting up bottles along the line. To his
vigorous inquiry as to what they were doing, they disingenuously
replied that they were setting up targets to shoot at from an angle of
the trench! If the Germans had turned on a machine-gun down the
line, not one of those men would have escaped alive.
I have had more than one experience myself of the British soldier’s
indifference to danger. When I was going up to some trenches in the
Ypres salient one day, the guide, a particularly stolid-looking private,
stopped suddenly on a road and said: “Will you go by the road or the
trench, sir?” Of course, I had not the least choice, not knowing the
ground, so I asked him which was the shorter way. “The road’s a
long way the shorter,” he replied. So we went by the road. But when I
told the officers up at the mess in the trenches that I had come by
that road they stared, and asked if we had been shelled. I said we
had not. Then they told me that that particular stretch of road was
one of the most “unhealthy” spots in the neighbourhood by day.
The guide was interrogated. “Some takes the road, and some the
trench,” he said. “But don’t you know they are always shelling that
road?” the officer asked. “They do put one over now and again,” the
man replied, “but the road’s a deal shorter, sir!” “You’ll find it a short-