1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [216]
No one felt inclined to look a gift-horse in the mouth, and even if the Military Police took a different view, qualms were easily overcome. But when the opportunity arose, some bolder spirits were not averse to giving fate a helping hand when they came across items whose owners – though absent – had not, strictly speaking, ‘abandoned’ them.
Sgt. G. Butler, 12th Machine Gun Coy., 4 Div.
It was my first guard as a lance-corporal and I took the responsibility very keen. About 2 a.m. the sentry reported to me that a 36-gallon barrel of vin blanc was stood on a farm cart at the back of the estaminet. We couldn’t see the sense of it being out in the cold all night so we decided to move it. We got some old bags out of the warehouse we were billeted in, and a brush. It took about five of us to get it off the wagon, and we rolled this barrel along the cobbles on bags all the way to a well, just past the village, one man sweeping the road behind, so you couldn’t see any marks where the barrel had been. When we got to the well, a dixie and half a dozen mess tins suddenly appeared – of course the lads only took a drink just to confirm that it was vin blanc! Then they put the bung back into the barrel and we lowered it down with some ropes and the chain attached to the well handle.
When morning came I had difficulty getting the guard up. Of course, I put it down to the smell of that stuff in the barrel. The fumes must have gone to their heads! About nine o’clock we heard a hell of a noise and two gendarmes and three or four men appeared. They informed us, to our great surprise, that they had lost a barrel of vin blanc so, of course, we helped them to look for it. Well, they searched here and they searched there – they even looked down the well, but there wasn’t a Sherlock Holmes among them. We watched them look down the well! The following night we pulled the barrel up again to see how it had fared, down under. You never saw such a game! But that was the last of it for our lads. We went in the line next night and we never saw the barrel again. We never got back to that billet again, that was the trouble.
Lt. J. D. Pratt, U Coy., 4th Bn., Gordon Highlanders (TF), 8th Brig., 3rd Div.
I had to send a platoon from my company into Ypres – a party of sergeant and seven men, and they went in and they were supposed to be relieved after twenty-four hours. But the sergeant came to me and he said, ‘Can we stay another twenty-four hours?’ And I said, ‘Why, Arthur,’ I said, ‘do you like it?’ ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘We’re having a wonderful time! You see, the population’s all fled and there’s any number of people from all sorts of regiments in there. They’re grabbing stuff like hell and we’re getting plenty of booze all over the place. We’re having a grand time!’
I believe that lots of lads pinched quite a bit of valuable stuff from Ypres and they went and buried it and hid it away in various places where they thought they would find it later, and a lot of them – probably most of them – got killed. So it’s likely that for years to come people will be unearthing all sorts of caches of jewellery and other stuff, quite accidentally.
The army called it ‘plunder’. The soldiers called it simple common-sense. Even though the first rich pickings had run out there was still a treasure trove of desirable booty going begging (as the Tommies saw it) in the ruined streets of Ypres, and if officers seldom overtly encouraged theft it was not in their interest to ask searching questions when a mattress, or an armchair or a much-needed table was found for a Headquarters billet, or even for some damp and smelly dug-out near the line. On the whole they shared the Tommies’ view that, when welcome creature-comforts were so easy to come by, only a fool would refuse to take advantage of it.