1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [173]
It was all over a piece of nonsense. At stables one morning one of my horses was restless and started kicking the one next to him in the stall, so I picked up a broom – only a light affair – and gave the horse a whack to move him away. Well, as luck would have it, just at that moment this little Major came along, and he went absolutely purple in the face. He screeched, ‘Sergeant-Major, take that man’s name!’ Well, the Sergeant-Major, Billy Brown – a lovely chap – knew perfectly well who I was, but he had to come up and solemnly ask my name – as if he didn’t know! – and I was up before the Major on a charge of ‘cruelty to a horse’. And that’s how I lost my embarkation leave. All I managed to get was twenty-four hours’ compassionate leave, because I wrote to my parents and asked them to send a telegram saying my presence was needed to sign some business paper or other. Fortunately our own Major came back to us just before we left. He came back as Major Petrie. Someone who knew him said Petrie was his wife’s name and he’d adopted it to avoid any more trouble.
The Battery was dug in across the fields behind Richebourg St Vaast but Tennant and his fellow signaller Vallender were on permanent duty at the observation post in an empty house in the partly ruined village half a mile away on the main road to Neuve Chapelle. This suited them well. The Observing Officer seldom came to the post and in his absence the signallers amused themselves by scrounging, exploring, and souvenir hunting in the empty barns and houses. In the course of their wanderings they found an old drain-pipe and were struck by a brilliant idea for an emergency signalling system, and when they were next off duty they hastened to share this discovery with two gunners from the Battery. The first experiment was carried out next night, and it took them the best part of the day to prepare it. They built a bed of sandbags for the drain-pipe, laid it carefully in the direction of a pre-arranged fixed point to the left of the Battery, wedged it firmly into place and piled more sandbags on top. Morse code signalled through this narrow channel – a mere pin-prick of light – would surely be invisible to all but the recipients of the message and if the unreliable telephone line were to fail the drain-pipe would be worth its weight in gold. They were extremely pleased with themselves.
Unfortunately it was a large drain-pipe. The light that emerged from the other end was somewhat larger than a pin-prick, and when they began to signal at the appointed hour, the flickering beam flashed like a searchlight across the fields. The answering flash from the gunners at the battery was clearly visible in the observation post and doubtless just as visible to the Germans, since the gunners in the Battery were naturally signalling towards the enemy lines. The gunners had some difficulty in convincing the Military Police that they had not been signalling to the enemy and were not spies. Still chastened by the effect of a severe wigging from Major Petrie the signallers dismantled their ingenious apparatus, resigning themselves to conventional methods – and also to the weary prospect of crawling across the fields to repair the telephone line in the all-too-likely event of its being broken.
In the early hours