1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [28]
It is a most extraordinary journey! Everyone turns out to cheer us and the men are most cheerful. We reached Mâcon at 1 p.m. and stopped for forty-five minutes, so we dashed into the buffet and had a meal – two helpings of steaming omelette, vin ordinaire and cafe au lait. For the rest of the afternoon we had a triumphal progress. Every time the train stops there’s a fearful jolt as it is braked like a goods train. Everywhere we stopped for a few minutes we had a royal reception – vociferous cheers and the men had presents of wine, fruit and cigarettes showered on them, and the donors would insist on signing their autographs in their paybooks. It was rather a wonderful sight.
At 7.15 p.m. we made a stop of nearly an hour at a place called Les Laumes Alesia where we took the opportunity of getting a meal in the local inn, very simple, but very good – soup, peas, omelette and beef as four separate courses – 2 francs 50, washed down by vin ordinaire. The men had hot coffee, over which I presided as orderly officer. We left Les Laumes about ten past eight. It was a very cold night, and when they changed engines they forgot to attach the heating pipe! I slept like a rock, however.
Trundling through the January night the thousand men in the wagons behind the first-class coaches that contained their officers did not notice the loss of heating since they had not enjoyed this amenity in the first place, but everyone, from the Colonel downwards, noticed that it was getting colder and colder as the train travelled north. When they woke, cramped and chilled, they were well north of Paris. There was snow on the ground and the train had swung on to the Calais line that would take them on up to Flanders. And if the freezing winter weather was hard to take after the balmy Mediterranean, if the home leave they had been hoping for was clearly not to be, it was at least some consolation that they were on their way to the real war.
In fact, they were on their way to Etaples, and when they reached there it was not much to their liking. Even in far-off Malta the troops had heard of the legendary Flanders mud, but they had hardly expected to meet it, ankle deep, as they stepped in pitch darkness on to the station platform. The passage of two battalions and numerous teams of horses coming in from the country roads had churned the snow into a mess of slush and slime and the Battalion, weighed down by heavy kit-bags, slipped and slithered and swore as they struggled to keep their footing and form up by companies in the street outside. It took the best part of an hour before they could set off in the teeth of a hail-storm to march to the camp and, although it was only three-quarters of a mile away, it was almost another hour before they reached it.
In due course the camp at Etaples would be one of the largest base camps in France, but in January of 1915 it was in its infancy, a makeshift affair scarcely large enough to hold the three battalions of the London Infantry Brigade whose unhappy lot it was to inhabit the sagging tents pitched across open country beyond the sand dunes on a desolate coast. Behind them a belt of trees and the slopes of more fertile farmland gave a certain amount of shelter, but the tent lines had been badly placed with the openings towards the sea and all night they flapped and ballooned in the icy wind that whistled through every fold and crevice. With fifteen men jammed into tents meant for twelve nobody got much sleep.
Next morning, their labours cheered on by frequent showers of sleet, all three battalions spent three hours striking camp and re-positioning the lines and re-pitching the tents to face inland while company cooks, working under difficulties to keep the fires going, contrived to brew endless supplies of tea and cook hot dinners at the same time. At the end of the day the camp was much improved, and it was all to the good for, as everyone knew, they were likely to be there for some time.
There was much to be done, and it