1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [327]
Pte. F. Bastable.
We went in the trenches ten days at a time – sometimes it was twelve days, but if you was lucky it was ten – a day marching up, three days in the front line, three days in support and three days in reserve, and in that weather you was a right mess when you got out. You’d march back to your billet and when you got back your coat was covered in mud, you couldn’t lift them hardly sometimes because they’d be dragged down in mud, and you’re in mud all the time. Then you had to get these coats cleaned and your rifle cleaned and go on parade next morning. It’s impossible, you know, to get all the mud off your coat in that time and go on parade, and I was really unlucky. I was Mess Orderly and I had other duties to do and I suppose I got my coat clean but I hadn’t cleaned my rifle. It was loaded, and I went on parade with it loaded. Of course when they inspected your rifle you had to have it properly cleaned and you had to open and shut your bolts so that they clicked all together. Well, I went to pull my bolt and it fired out this bullet! It went right past the bloke’s nose next to me – nearly hit him. Well, I got court-martialled for that. I got ten days’ number one field punishment, and it was bleeding cold and the worst time of the year.
I got tied up against this cart-wheel. I never knew they was going to do that. I never knew they done such a thing (they don’t do it now!). It was done under the Military Police and there were a few of us who’d been court-martialled (not for the same thing) and they gave us orders to go to the wagon-lines and told us to bring up the wagons and clean the wheels, because they were covered in mud. Well, the old soldiers might have known what was going to happen, but I didn’t. I thought it was just like fatigues and this was the punishment, cleaning the wheels. But it wasn’t! After we’d cleaned them they tied us one up against each wheel for a couple of hours a day, an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon.
I wasn’t none too keen! I wasn’t all that eager to do it. I got froze! You had to run round to get warm after that and there was a school there and we used to run round the playground to get our circulation back, because it was bleeding cold. Anyway, I done this ten days and went back up the line again. When I got back (we were in the reserve line at the time) I laid on the firestep of the trench and went off to sleep. Now sometimes if you go off to sleep in the cold you don’t wake up again. They say that sometimes they used to find men dead of a morning, just with lying in the cold. Anyway I went off to sleep and I felt myself, like, sinking, just as though I was sinking down, and I roused myself and woke up. I was covered in snow. It must have been the first snow of winter, in fact we didn’t have much more of it until January time, but when I roused myself and woke up it was all snowing. I shan’t forget that. I shall always remember that. It was bleeding awful.
Snow before Christmas was unusual, but the bone-chilling night frosts that descended on the trenches were bad enough. Years later they said it was the worst winter of the war – but it was the first winter in memory in which tens of thousands of men had been forced to live exposed to the elements with only holes in the ground for shelter. Women at home were so busy knitting that the clack of millions of needles might almost have been heard in France, but they were knitting socks and there was hardly a parcel that did not contain at least one pair. Now, at the urgent request of battalions in France, there were published appeals for other garments – mufflers, mittens, wrist-warmers, woollen helmets, knitted waist-coats, and yet more mufflers. Many months ago someone