1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [273]
The Battalion was being toughened up, and if route-marching was not to the men’s taste rifle-practice was another matter, and the new short Lee Enfield rifles were a vast improvement on the wooden weapons they had toted for almost ten months. They were heavy to carry on the march and not many of their owners were more than half proficient in using them but they were still a novelty. Marching along the rough country roads with their new rifles on their shoulders they felt like soldiers at last although there was no word of their going to the front. ‘We may train here for a month or two I hear,’ wrote Captain Pole, ‘route-marching, bomb-throwing, machine-gunning, etc’ Only if they listened very carefully when the wind was in the right direction could they hear the sound of the guns.
The guns were never silent but although machine-gun bullets frequently came ripping over the trenches from the other side of No Man’s Land and snipers in concealed positions were lying in wait for the unwary, apart from an occasional flurry of shots when there was real or imagined cause for alarm, the eight miles of trench-line that stretched from Aubers Ridge across the coalfields around Loos and Lens was reasonably quiet. It was so quiet that one German sniper amused himself for several days in idle moments by training his rifle on the wall of a ruined cottage near the British front-line trench and ‘carving’ a cross in the bricks. It took shape over the course of several days and the soldiers of the Post Office Rifles whose trench ran through the cottage garden rather admired his artistry. It was chalky country and the deep chalk walls of the trenches were a positive invitation to bored Tommies manning the support lines and it was not long before the trench walls were covered with graffiti. There were cartoons: ‘Know Your Enemy’ was a favourite caption, usually under a lampoon laboriously carved out with a jack-knife, and representing some well-known pacifist hanging from a gallows; rough but recognisable. One trench displayed a show-piece that must have taken some patient earth-dweller many hours to carve. It had obviously been copied from the kind of picture post-card which was popular at home and were posted by the thousand to Tommies at the front. It showed a country cottage with roses round the door and a mesh of fine lines to indicate its thatched roof. There was a garden too, with a postman standing at the gate and an old lady rushing down the path to meet him. The outlines stood out boldly in charcoal and the carved caption read ‘A letter from Tommy’. But most offerings were less ambitious and the troops generally confined themselves to written slogans or lines of doggerel inscribed with a combination of indelible pencil and spit. ‘I have no pain, dear Mother, but blimey I am dry, so take me to a brewery and leave me there to die.’ Sometimes they were disgruntled – ‘A loaf in the trench is worth ten at the base’ – and some leaned towards romance with hearts and arrows and mysterious initials. There were also solitary arrows, usually pointing in an easterly direction and confidently announcing To Berlin’.
From a military point of view the chalky ground put the Army at a considerable disadvantage for although the permanent trenches could be reasonably well camouflaged by sandbagged parapets the new trenches could not, and as the Army prepared for the coming battle the long lines of glistening white chalk in full view of the Germans were impossible to miss. Night after night the working parties went out digging. They dug assembly trenches behind the lines, they dug communication trenches, they dug saps that poked into No Man’s Land and they dug trenches in No Man’s Land itself. In the ten nights before the battle they dug twelve thousand yards of them. The Germans would have been blind if they had not realised that a major attack would soon be launched.
Lt. A. Waterlow, 19th (County of London) Bn. (St Pancras), 5 London Brig., 47 (London) Div.
Our job was a somewhat ticklish one. The whole battalion