1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [123]
Tpr. P. Batchelor, D Squadron, Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars.
We waited there for hours before anyone turned up and we didn’t have a clue what was happening. Of course we were used to that – all through Neuve Chapelle we’d waited to go into action and nothing happened. We’d had no grub, so Captain Gill let us go off a few at a time for a quarter of an hour to get some coffee and maybe a bit of bread and cheese in the village. It was half-way through the afternoon before we finally moved off, and the road was so packed with troops marching up that we could hardly get the squadron through. It took us more than three hours to cover three miles and then we were dismounted and waited for hours again while they tried to find billets. By the time we’d fed and watered the horses it was past midnight before we turned in ourselves – and we’d hardly got to sleep before we were up again and off on the road to Ypres.
By setting off before first light when the roads were slightly quieter and the weary infantry still slept, by riding across country after daylight, spurred on by the sound of the guns booming louder as they approached, the Oxfordshire Hussars arrived shortly after nine in the morning and unsaddled in fields near Vlamertinghe three miles behind the front. One latecomer got there almost ten hours behind the others and his arrival by taxi-cab caused something of a sensation. Lieutenant Wellesley had been on a machine-gun course at Wisques and on his way back, arriving at St Omer on market day, he had indulged in a little shopping for provisions to enliven meals in the mess. Flanders is renowned for succulent asparagus, in season for a few short weeks in April and early May. One stall was piled high with the pick of the crop – the fattest, whitest, freshest stalks Wellesley had ever seen. Like most officers of the Oxfordshire Yeomanry, Wellesley belonged to the landed gentry and enjoyed a comfortable income which enabled him to indulge his epicurean tastes. He purchased a capacious hamper from a stall selling baskets, had it filled with a large quantity of asparagus and, leaving it in charge of his servant, strolled off to find a wine merchant. He bought two cases of the best champagne that St Omer could offer and, after a satisfactory lunch in a restaurant, he hired a ramshackle taxi-cab for the eighteen-mile journey to Pradelles. Wellesley’s servant sat in front with the driver and Wellesley travelled in the back with their luggage plus his bulky purchases. It was a tight squeeze, but Wellesley did not mind. For dinner there would be champagne and asparagus – dripping with country butter (for he had not forgotten that!) – and he looked forward with pleasure to surprising his brother officers with a rare feast.
It was nothing to the surprise that awaited Wellesley himself at Pradelles when he discovered that billets were empty and the Oxfordshire Hussars had gone. Brigade Headquarters had gone too and, given the situation, the confusion of orders, the congestion of troops, no one could tell him precisely where to find his regiment. He guessed, wrongly, that it might have gone south, and the elderly cab-driver, who was no doubt congratulating himself on picking up a lucrative long-distance fare, changed his mind at Laventie when a clutch of shells exploded on the road less than three hundred yards ahead. He stopped the cab and dived beneath it for shelter, flatly refusing to go on, and it was some considerable time before he could be induced to return to the driving seat. Even then, only a large bribe with the promise of more to come dissuaded him from driving straight back to St Omer. By the time their wanderings ended, by the time they had scrounged petrol, lost their way a dozen times, made a thousand enquiries, and roamed the length of the front within earshot of the bombardments, the driver was a broken man.
It was more than twenty-four hours before they tracked down the Oxfordshire Hussars encamped in miserable