Carry On, Carry On!

IN AUGUST, 1914, when the newsboys were running and shouting every day and all day, I was alone in the house, my family being at the seaside. I waited until they came back before I enlisted, in early September. I joined, like a chump, the infantry — to be precise, the Duke of Wellington’s West Riding Regiment, known in some circles as “The Havercake Lads,” in others as “The Dirty Duke’s.” I reported at the regimental depot in Halifax, where a regular sergeant, noting sardonically the newish sports coat and flannel trousers that, like a fool, I was wearing, set me to work at once removing the congealed fat from immense cooking pots. For a week or so I was free to return home at night, so long as I was back in barracks before eight in the morning.

Then I left with a thousand others, by train at four in the morning, for a tented camp at Frensham in Surrey. Until the rains of winter finally washed us out of this camp altogether, we slept twelve in a bell tent, kneeling after lights out to piss in our boots and then emptying them under the flap. The old soldiers told us that this was good for our boots, making them easier for route marches. Unlike battalions formed later, we had plenty of old soldiers, many of whom had served in India and carried little tins of curry powder to sprinkle over any meat that came their way. Some of them of course were already wearing crowns or stripes, but many others, dour or wily types, refused promotion. They would do what they considered their essential duty, and in all circumstances, as time proved, but they were, so to speak, against the military establishment, would not be associated with it, and remained suspicious and grumbling privates to the end. (Though genuinely anxious, during the first year or so, to get into some fighting, I soon discovered that I belonged by temperament to this type myself.)

It is not true, as some young critics of the First War British high command have suggested, that Kitchener’s army consisted of brave but halftrained amateurs, so much pitiful cannon fodder. In the earlier divisions like ours, the troops had months and months of severe intensive training. Our average program was ten hours a day, and nobody grumbled more than the old regulars, who had never been compelled before to do so much for so long. It was only in musketry that we were far behind the regular army, simply because we had to wait for months for the rifles we would eventually use.

The only time off we had at Frensham was Sunday afternoon and early evening, and two or three of us, to get out of the camp, would walk to various farmhouses where we could eat a huge sixpenny tea and then, a rare pleasure, sit in front of a fire. It is odd to remember now how rural and remote that Surrey countryside seemed in 1914: the farmhouses, their enormous kitchen fireplaces hung with hams, looked in my eyes then to be out of Thomas Hardy. It was not until late November, after the whole camp had been sinking into mud for weeks, that we were finally washed out of Frensham. I had come to loathe those dripping and steaming bell tents. Some objects are to my mind symbols of that half of England I detest, and one of them, mean and cramping and a miserable idea, is the bell tent.

Aldershot, where we moved into barracks at last, was no Victorian inspiration, a whole town given up to button polishing and saluting, bugle calls and guards turning out; but after Frensham its brick huts were a Ritz. It was from Aldershot some weeks later, toward the end of February, 1915, that we made what I called in my jubilant letter home “the great march,” ending for our battalion at Folkestone. We went a roundabout way; only towns of some size could provide the schools and public halls where we slept; we averaged twenty miles a day for several days, and on one day marched over twenty-six miles, not bad going when you remember the weight of full equipment we had to carry then, and that we were moving (I take this out of my letter) in a column a mile and a quarter long. We looked like soldiers now; all four battalions had a band; and all along the route we were waved at and cheered, not foolishly either, for an infantry brigade marching in full equipment with its bands booming and clashing is an impressive spectacle. This was my idea of soldiering — constant movement, unknown destinations, fluttering handkerchiefs and cheers — and I enjoyed it hugely, sore feet and bully beef and kips on hard floors and all.

IN FRANCE I was hotter than I had ever been in my life before, just as in a few months’ time I was to be wetter and colder. Humping along those cobbled roads in full marching order, choked by the dust ot military transport, was murderous, and even the rat-infested barns we slept in every night never seemed to have known cool fresh air. Yet, while aware of unpleasant physical sensations, I felt at heart detached from them, moving — as I wrote in my first letter home — almost floating, in a long dream. I suspect that this feeling, that here was no reality, never from this time entirely left me, out at the front or back at home, until the day I was demobilized, nearly four years later.

Unlike some later divisions, who found themselves entangled in German barbed wire and slaughtered by machine-gun fire before they knew where they were, we were lucky, being initiated by degrees. We relieved the long-service regulars of the 8th Division in what was then a quiet sector, Bois Grenier-Laventie-Fleurbaix, where in many places the two front lines were wide apart, so that we had listening posts out in no-man’s-land. I spent two or three hours alone in one of these, I think on my second or third night in the line, staring so hard at black nothing that it stopped being black or nothing and began to crawl with grayish shapes; I would then shut my eyes for a few moments, and when I opened them again the shapes had vanished. Youth, hard training, a genuine desire to get into the war at some point had turned me temporarily into a brave soldier. I was less and less brave, in that sense, the more and more I saw of this war. Terror arrives first through the ear. Turn off the sound on a television set, when old newsreels of war, later of course than the 1914 War, are on the screen, and the menace goes; we stare unmoved at a shadow play.

Now, the First War, with its massed artillery, was the noisiest of all time; the sound hit you harder and harder as the months passed; some things you got used to — sniping and machine-gun fire if you were not entangled in the open and a sitting duck, hand bombs and rifle grenades if you had sandbags and room to dodge — but as time went on the vast cannonading, drumming hell into your ears, no matter whether it was their guns or yours, began to wear you down, making you feel that flesh and blood had no place in this factory of destruction. So in that war it was not the recruit but the veteran who began to feel he was being hammered into the ground. Every time I went back into the line, especially after being out of it long enough for my ears to be open to civilization again, I felt more and more apprehension. In that listening post I was the gallant Tommy of the home-front legends; but as time wore on I was more and more a chap who wondered what the hell he was doing there and how he could get out of it — a mouse in a giant mincing machine.

On September 25, 1915, when the disastrous Battle of Loos was fought, we were in the front line, wearing full kit and so weighed down with extra cartridges and bombs we could hardly move, waiting to climb the scaling ladders all along the fire trench. Over our heads, where the ladders would take us, invisible express trains seemed to be passing both ways, there was such an unceasing exchange of shells. Once up the ladders and out of the trench, not even a cat would live five minutes. But the luck was in — I had a lucky war — and because the attack on our right had not gained sufficient ground we were never thrown into the assault, stayed where we were, and saw the scaling ladders taken away. In the months that followed, after the rains came, then sleet and snow, there were no more full-scale attacks, only occasional raids. These could be very unpleasant, and I was on one when the barbed-wire entanglements, which the artillery said had been cut there, proved to be still intact; and there we were, trapped, no longer in darkness but in the sinister illumination of star shells and pistol lights, asking to be machine-gunned out of this world, as many were. I never knew how many, but I know that another man and I, untouched, somehow contrived to crawl back, half carrying and half dragging between us a third man, badly wounded.

Worse then than the raids, worse than the German heavy batteries that occasionally got our range and dropped Jack Johnsons among us, were the mere conditions of existence in front-line and communication trenches, now with winter upon us, that were mud and water. For days and days on end, wearing six pairs of socks and high gum boots and a sheepskin jacket that was either wet or caked with mud, I slithered around, trying to sleep on the trench fire step or crawling into some hole in the wet clay, filthy and maddeningly lousy, never seeing anything that looked like hot food. Some of the worst nights in that winter were spent carrying heavy coils of barbed wire up communication trenches, knee-deep in water and sometimes under shellfire, continually slipping and then being pinned down by the coils of wire. I saw men, no weaklings but powerful fellows, break down and weep. It was not the danger, which might easily have been worse — though at that I lost every close friend I had in the company that winter — but the conditions in which the lower ranks of the infantry were condemned to exist month after month, worse conditions than the Germans and French ever knew except briefly in battle, that drained away health, energy, spirit, and with them any real confidence in those cavalry captains, back in the château, who saw themselves as generals fit for high command.

Sometimes we were in situations impossible to imagine, far stranger than bad dreams. I wonder how many men still alive remember being in that support trench that ran through a French village cemetery. There we had great crosses and monuments of marble and granite all around us, unbelievable at night when the darkness was split by the white glare of Véry lights and the shadows were gigantically grotesque, though often we had not time to notice them, having to duck down as machine-gun bullets ricocheted off the funeral stones.

After a few more weeks in the line I was wounded in the hand by a rifle grenade — no great matter, not the “blighty” that sent you to England. I was dispatched to a hospital and then a convalescent camp at Le Tréport on the coast. I did not like either of them, especially the convalescent camp, where we never had enough to eat, were always being rounded up for fatigue duties (detested by all front-line soldiers), and, being cut off, had no money, no letters, no parcels, no anything. I was glad to get back to the battalion, a kind of home, however dangerous and uncomfortable. I was not the keen fit warrior I had been months before, but I still felt that if I had to wear a uniform, obey orders, serve in France, then I wanted to be with the battalion wherever it was. By this time I might have had a commission, but I refused to apply; I still wanted to be with the men who had gone up Gibbet Lane, Halifax, when I did, even though one friend after another was vanishing. Later I was sorry I had not applied; it was a rough war for junior officers but an even rougher one for men in the ranks. It is true that in attack the subalterns had to move around more than their men, and so were more likely to get killed or wounded, but they were not so badgered and sworn at, underfed and overworked, and escaped the very worst conditions. They were all right, our own junior officers; my quarrel, which still continues, was with their superiors, especially the red-tabbed kind, who seemed to me then, so far as I could judge in my raw youth and innocence, mostly a lot of jackasses. And now that I am no longer young and have lost all innocence, I see it was a good guess.

IN MARCH, 1916, the whole division came out of the line, preparing to move further down, to relieve the 17th French Division on the CarencySouchez front. It happened that I was one of a tiny advance party. A glance at the map today suggests we made the kind of move that would take about forty minutes in a car. But in this war, in another world, another time, it seemed an immense and complicated journey, like going to Afghanistan now. We might have been explorers creeping into some blank space on the map. I remember how four or five of us in this advance party, now utterly lost (we had a genius for getting lost) and completely out of touch with the British Expeditionary Force, found ourselves in some unknown French town with nobody to report to, no food, no money to buy any food, so that to bring ourselves out of destitution we had to sell — we called it “flog” — all but the most essential parts of our kit and equipment. When finally we reached the French lines we made some discoveries that heightened our prejudice against the British higher command. The poilu, a bloke supposedly so low in morale that he was near mutiny, enjoyed substantial and tasty hot meals when we would have been opening another tin of bully. Unshaven, untidy, and at ease, he sat in deep dugouts passing the wine and talking about women when we would have been — and shortly would be — shoved into forward fire trenches, however bad they were, and then ordered on a raid or given some hopeless task just because it was assumed by château types that muck, jeopardy, and misery were good for us.

Spring came suddenly, and between the pounded and bloody chalk of the front lines and the mining area in the rear there would be glimpses, good enough for Pissarro and Sisley, of fields bright with poppies and lanes beginning to smell of honeysuckle. When we were given a few days’ rest, we went back to a mining village that had an enormous slag heap. Far away, behind the ridge they held, the Germans had a great naval gun that had the range of this village. The shell it fired was of such a monstrous caliber that you could easily hear it coming, like an aerial express. We would be hanging about, smoking and talking, enjoying the sunshine and the quiet, when suddenly we would hear this monster coming. There was only one safe place, behind the slag heap, and everybody would run for it pell-mell. Shirrr-brirrrbump! There it went, and we would come from behind the slag heap and see the smoke clearing and another six houses gone. Fortunately, that gun did no night work, and we did not really mind it during the day.

Up in the line, what we did mind, what soon began to get us down, were the Minenwerfers, the big trench mortars; and at Souchez we always appeared to have the Minenwerfer specialists against us. Often we asked for their attention; not us, the ordinary infantry who had to stay in the front line, but the brigade, the division, the corps, the army. What happened all too often was that our own specialists would rush their Stokes guns up into the support trenches, blast away for a quarter of an hour, and then hurry off with their infernal things to where their transport was waiting. Pampered and heartless fellows — this is how we regarded them — lunatic experts who had to interfere, off they went to some back area, to roofs and beds and estaminets, beer and wine, chips and eggs; while we poor devils, left behind in holes in the ground, now had to face the anger of the Boches they had been strafing. The Minenwerfer teams got to work on us. Up and then down came those monstrous canisters of high explosive, making hell’s own din when they landed, blasting or burying us. If there was any infantryman who was not afraid of these things, who was not made uneasy by any rumors that they would shortly be arriving, I never met him. Perhaps because they were such short-range affairs, perhaps because if you were on the alert, looking and listening hard, you could just dodge them, perhaps because they made such a hellish row, they frightened us more than bullets, bombs, shells of all calibers. And in and around Souchez we crouched below a nest of them.

So one day it had to happen. It was June now, hot again, thirsty weather, a lot of chalk dust about, and we were in the front line on a beautiful morning. The platoon rations had just come up. I sent Private O’Neill down the communication trench to bring up some water — and sixteen years went by before we saw each other again. I helped a young soldier, who had only just joined us out there, to take the rations into a dugout, not a deep dugout but a small one hollowed out of the parapet. In this dugout I began sorting out the bread, meat, tea, sugar, tinned milk, and so on, to give each section its proper share, a tricky little job. I had done it many times before, hardly ever to anybody’s complete satisfaction; but on this morning I suspect that it saved my life. After the explosion, when everything had caved in, nobody was certain I was there, but several fellows knew the platoon rations were in there somewhere — that stuff would have to be dug out. There I was, then, deciding on each section’s share, when I heard a rushing sound, and I knew what it meant and knew, though everything had gone into slow motion, I had no hope of getting away before the thing arrived. Just as on earlier and later occasions, when I have thought all was up, the first shrinking in terror was followed, as I went into the new slow time, by a sense of detachment. I believe from what I learned long afterward that the Minenwerfer landed slap in the trench, two or three yards away. All I knew at the time was that the world blew up.

I do not remember how and by what route I traveled from the front line at Souchez to the military hospital at North Evington, a suburb of Leicester. Any man who was ever around, not as close as I was but, let us say, about three times the distance, when a big German trench mortar went off will agree that I was lucky to be carted away in one piece. Had I been as near as that and out in the trench, I would have been blown to bits. As it was, though I had some minor injuries from the dugout’s caving in, was partly deaf, and ran a high temperature that kept me in bed for some weeks, no parts of me were missing, and there was nothing wrong with me that prolonged treatment and rest would not cure. I was lucky in that war and have never ceased to be aware of the fact.

IT WAS in 1918, three years after I had first gone to France, that a little batch of us subalterns were given our orders and crossed again to Boulogne. We sailed by day in a fantastic American ship that might have been fetched from the Mississippi. We were the only British aboard among thousands of American troops, new, raw, and hearty, with nothing in their mode of address to distinguish their rank. A vast bunch of Kiwanians or Shriners might have been off on a river picnic. Way up on the top deck — it was a tall narrow sort of ship with a lot of decks — a big band, with more than its share of those gleaming sousaphones, blared and clashed out ragtime. It seemed a hell of a way to sail to a war but not completely ridiculous, not without a suggestion of something more generous and heartwarming, much closer to the democracy we boasted about on our side, than anything we had known before. On that daft but not altogether inglorious troopship, I realized afterward, I was for the first time in America.

Where all those doughboys went I do not know, but our little group had to join what was left of a battalion of dismounted yeomanry. It was somewhere beyond Peronne, and took some finding in the dust and heat, on roads jammed with transport. There were about six of us, I think, mostly going out for the first time; and I never knew what happened to three of them, but the two I knew best, friends I made at Devonport, were killed within a few days. Again, I was lucky, or perhaps by this time unconsciously artful. The battalion, which I never really took in as a unit, was far below strength but still up in front, attacking. We were in a narrow railway cutting one evening -at least the only troops I knew anything about were there — and into it the Germans dropped a lot of gas shells. Gas-masked myself, I ran about to make sure the men were wearing their masks, a thing they hated to do. No doubt some gas seeped through my mask, as the doctors said afterward; but I must add here that later that night, when we crept out of the cutting, ready to move forward just after dawn, I drank a good many tots of rum, which now, unlike 1915 and 1916, was in generous supply.

We went to the attack in the early morning, on a front much too wide for us, and there was one of those very thick mists, dense as fog, common in September. After ten minutes — and you may put it down to gas, rum, or carelessness, just as you please — I had lost the whole battle, which I could hear all around me but could not see. I was wandering about, befogged inside and out, entirely alone. But I must have been more or less advancing, not retreating, for a figure came looming up through the whiteness, and I saw it was a German and waved my revolver at him. After all, he was not to know that I had been on two revolver courses and never could hit anything. He was a lad about sixteen who ought to have been several hundred miles away, putting his school books into a satchel. He raised his arms, poor lad, and made gibbering noises. I tried to look a little less idiotic than I felt, and pointed sternly in what I hoped was the direction of the British and not the German Army, and off he trotted, leaving me alone once more in the mist, wondering where to find the battle. I never did catch up with it. My head going around, too short of breath to move any further, I took a rest in a shell hole, where I was found by a couple of stretcher-bearers. So much for my last glimpse of action in the Great War.

THE medical board in Rouen decided I was unfit for active service but fit for something. I was told to report at the other side of the town. There I found a very neat little colonel; the depressing house in which I found him, and its Rouen back street, came straight out of French fiction of the eighties. The colonel was fighting it all, tooth and nail brush; he was a responsible and solemn English gentleman in one of the waste places; he spoke to me gravely about dinner and dress. The Labour Corps Depot, to which I had been sent for duty, was itself a large factory building, swarming with men who never seemed quite real, ghostly perhaps because they were so tired, so bored. Only the sergeants, spick and span, terrific saluters and callers to attention, were familiar figures; they could be found at all depots and bases, keeping the old flag flying, the brass buttons polished; real professional soldiers, waiting for this monstrous amateur affair, this bloodthirsty melodrama of bomber bank clerks and machine-gunner gardeners to blow itself to pieces. This factory had been turned into a lunatic labor exchange. There we had only to receive, in correct triplicate, an indent for any form of labor, and we would supply it.

During dinner, with the little colonel at the head of the table, correct but at ease, we talked a good deal about the war, which was beginning to wobble. A report came of an armistice, and the little colonel bought us all champagne on the strength of it and was furious when the report was denied. And then the genuine Armistice took us by surprise after so many false reports, and we had to hurry to get drunk enough to go shouting and reeling around the town. I can remember trying to work myself up into the right bacchanalian mood, trying to ignore the creeping shadows, the mysterious rising tide of regret and sadness, which I think all but the simplest men suffer from on these occasions.

Two or three mornings later, I was told to report for duty at a prisoner-of-war camp near Calais, and to take a party of men with me. This journey, Rouen to Calais, took us about three days, mostly spent in a motionless and windowless train in some siding, where we used the locomotive’s boiler for a constant service of tea. During my first evening in the POW camp mess, I decided I had run out of luck, for here was a collection of fellows I disliked on sight. Later, when I had retired to my thin-walled cubicle, I overheard, not being able to help it, two of them discussing me in the next cubicle, making it clear they did not like the look and sound of me either. This did not upset me because I had never considered myself a charmer, and most of these types, who had dug themselves in here long ago, looked to me like artful base wallahs.

The company to which I was attached was commanded by a red-faced major, not himself a regular soldier—he had done some easy job “out East” — but closely related to the red-tabbed Top. From the first he obviously considered me an opinionated young North Country cad, and I thought him a pompous ass who did not even try to do properly the soft job he had been given. And on these terms we were to be associated for the next three and a half months, though fortunately he gave himself a lot of leave.

This big camp supplied prison labor, working in shifts around the clock, for the largest quarries I had ever seen, grayish-white canyons, from which had come the road metal used by the Chinese coolies. I rather enjoyed my turn at the late-night shift in these quarries, where I had little to do but marvel at the eerie effects of the brilliant artificial lighting down there, the dazzling cliffs and battlements, the dead-black shadows, the glimpses of distant groups who looked like ants at work. The German prisoners were not driven hard; their living conditions were not bad; they were fed better than they would have been in their own army, far better than their folks at home, whose parcels, which we had to open and inspect, were pathetic offerings of ersatz sausage and all manner of crumbling muck. Yet just because they were prisoners, because the psychological effect of their status was so strong, most of them had the drawn and large-eyed look of men overworked, beaten, and half starved. In point of fact they were far more frightened of their own sergeant-major characters — iron men with Iron Crosses, Kaiser mustaches, terrible rasping words of command — than they were of us, the unmilitary amateur British. Though these iron characters showed me tremendous respect, as if I were a general, I went a little in awe of them myself.

Later, when our company was on its own, far from these quarries, and it was Christmas, I remember how astonished I was, paying an official visit to the German warrant officers’ tiny mess, to discover these four military monsters sitting around a very small illuminated Christmas tree, deep in a sentimental reverie before they caught sight of me and jumped quivering to attention, banging their heels. There was all Germany in that little scene.

Long before Christmas, however, our company received orders to move up to the Lille-RoubaixTourcoing area, to do salvage work. By chance, the major and the lieutenant senior to me being away, I was in charge of the company when these orders arrived, and I had to be responsible for the move. We had between six and seven hundred prisoners, and about eighty British troops, all men no longer fit for active service. Though the fighting was over, conditions were no easier, perhaps rather more chaotic, so that problems of transport, rationing, supplies, medical services were no joke, especially with such an odd mixture involving seven to eight hundred men.

This was easily the most responsible job that had come my way in the army, and it lasted for a couple of weeks or so, and I enjoyed every moment of it, planning and working hard with several decent and conscientious senior noncoms. I cannot believe there was in me somewhere a master of logistics, a first-class staff officer; I make no claim to any peculiar merit; but I must set on record the fact that I did the job, and for once in my four and a half years of army knockabout, really enjoyed doing it. We had to march the company through Tourcoing, which had had years of German occupation, and its citizens lined the streets to curse and scream at our columns of prisoners, whom we had to guard not against possible escape but lynching. We ended up in the country outside, packed into a few big barns. It was then, after a few days, that I ran into trouble, finally picking a quarrel, a most enjoyable schemozzle, with the Fifth Army: A four-round contest between Subaltern One, in the blue corner, and Army H.Q., in the red-and-gilt corner.

After more than forty years it is easy to oversimplify or to exaggerate, but this brief report of the contest is as true as I can make it. Round one: still temporarily in charge of the company, I receive an army order telling me to move it to a given map reference, the chosen site for a camp under canvas. And it is now early December. I go to this place, find it pitted with shell holes and waterlogged, and point out there must have been some mistake, a wrong map reference.

Round two: army informs me in writing that no mistake has been made, that I have had my orders and any further delay will not be tolerated. Counterpunching, I reply in writing that the chosen site is utterly unsuitable even for seven hundred and fifty fit men, that many of our men, British and Germans, are not fit, and that I have on my hands a number of sick prisoners, some of them running temperatures.

Round three: a carload of red tabs and brass hats arrives, important chaps with staring eyes and those voices that are the equivalent in sound of hard stares, who ask what the devil I think I am doing, who the devil I think I am, and say that they are giving me one last chance before I find myself facing a court-martial. Covering up and hanging on, in boxing terms, I mutter that the place they have chosen, which I cannot believe they can have seen for themselves, is impossible, that I cannot accept the responsibility of moving these men there, that my war is over, and if the Fifth Army wants to court-martial me, let them get on with it. They stare at me again, climb haughtily into the car, and drive off.

Fourth and last round: I lead with some smart left jabs, for now I have found, not too far from the site they chose, the widespread ruin of a German hut encampment, and promise that if the army will leave us alone, then, without incurring any expense or demanding any help from the engineers, out of this wreck my Germans will build their own camp. To my surprise, I am given a grudging consent, along with a few more warnings. Subaltern wins on points.

Not trusting my halting German on this occasion, I addressed the warrant officers and senior noncoms through the chief interpreter, a redhaired schoolmaster from Bavaria, and explained that their men had a chance to build a decent snug camp for themselves, to house them through the winter, if they worked hard and at full speed. Now, among these hundreds of prisoners we had scores of skilled men, and whatever faults the average German may have, he cannot be accused of a lack of application and diligence; and as I bustled around, entirely out of character for once, I saw with delight a new camp, solid and weatherproof, rise almost magically out of those ruins I had discovered. From the morning I planned the move from Calais until the day this camp was finished, I had lived, most happily too, the sort of life known to men very different in temperament and outlook from me. I had unexpectedly enjoyed glimpses of roads I had never even thought of taking. I had let loose a part of myself I did not even know was there; for a few astonishing and rewarding days I played the man of action, not long before settling down to live by putting words together and passing around the hat.

Finally, I was told I could go home, not because I was already inquiring about an educational grant, but because I had been a casualty three times and came into some category that had a slight priority of release. The day arrived. Our own noncoms, with whom I had worked during that move and camp building afterward, seemed genuinely sorry to see me go. “The only bloody officer we ever had who was any good,” I overheard one of the men say, “an’ now of course he’s off.” The Germans, through the redhaired interpreter, made me a solemn speech of thanks and farewell and presented me with two group photographs, which I still have.

As one who served in the British Army, not brilliantly and with a lot of luck but bearing some share of the jeopardy and misery, I should like to add a few observations to the record. Nobody, nothing will shift me from the belief, which I shall take to the grave, that the generation to which I belong, destroyed between 1914 and 1918, was a great generation, marvelous in its promise. This is not sell-praise, because those of us who are left know that we are the runts.

The British Army never saw itself as a citizens’ army. It behaved as if a small gentlemanly officer class still had to make soldiers out of undergardeners’ runaway sons and slum lads known to Lhe police. These fellows had to be kept up to scratch. Let ‘em get slack, they’d soon be a rabble again. So where the Germans and French would hold a bad front line with the minimum of men, allowing the majority to get some rest, the British command would pack men into rotten trenches, start something to keep up their morale, pile up casualties, and drive the survivors to despair. This was done not to win a battle, not even to gain a few yards of ground, but simply because it was supposed to be the thing to do. All the armies in that idiot war shoveled divisions into attacks, often as boneheaded as ours were, just as if healthy young men had begun to seem hateful in the sight of Europe, but the British command specialized in throwing men away for nothing. The tradition of an officer class, defying both imagination and common sense, killed most of my friends as surely as if those cavalry generals had come out of the château with polo mallets and beaten their brains out. Gall this class prejudice if you like. I went into that war without any such prejudice, free of any class feeling. No doubt I came out of it with a chip on my shoulder; a big heavy chip, probably some friend’s thighbone.

One morning in the early spring of 1919 in some town, strangely chosen, in the Midlands — and I have forgotten both the date and the place — I came blinking out at last into civilian daylight. No awards for gallantry had come, or were to come, my way; but I was entitled to certain medals and ribbons. I never applied for them; I was never sent them; I have never had them. Feeling that the giant locusts that had eaten my four and a half years could have them, glad to remember that never again would anybody tell me to carry on, I shrugged the shoulders of a civvy coat that was a bad fit — and carried on.