1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [337]
Nevertheless the message was clear. Come next year new brooms would sweep aside the debris of the setbacks that littered the chronicle of 1915 and sweep the New Armies to victory in the year ahead.
Sir Douglas Haig was already installed as Commander-in-Chief and on Christmas Eve Sir John French motored for the last time to Calais and boarded a destroyer en route for England to take up his new post in command of the Home Forces. Officially, the Government had ‘reluctantly accepted his resignation’. Privately they thanked him profusely for his valuable services and assured him that no criticism was implied in their desire for a change. He was endowed with a peerage and also with the promise of a suitable pecuniary reward at the end of the war. The deposed Commander-in-Chief, newly ennobled, had given some thought to the choice of a title and decided on ‘Viscount French of Ypres’ – perhaps with a very natural desire to remind the nation down succeeding generations that his services had been thought to be of value when they were most needed.
Fifteen months of the strain and responsibility of command in a war waged on a scale which had never before been encountered, with anxieties and disappointments at every turn, would have taxed the capacities of a much younger and fitter man. French was now in his sixty-fourth year. He was bitterly aggrieved and indignant, but in his heart of hearts he could not have been sorry to be going home, even if he was not much in the mood to celebrate Christmas.
It was a stormy crossing, for the weather was filthy. At Ypres the rain had turned to sleet and it was bitterly cold. The 9th Norfolks were in wet trenches at Wieltje and B Company was in the front line where even the sandbags were disintegrating into slush and the duckboards were under water. Just before they left camp, Cushing had received a mammoth package of woollens from his Aunt Laura who was headmistress of the Girls’ Primary School at Swaffham. It represented months of work by the staff, the girls, and their relatives and it contained enough jerseys and mufflers and helmets and socks and gloves to kit out every member of No. 1 Platoon with at least one additional warm garment. They sorely needed them now and Cushing was sorry for them, for several were new to the platoon and were finding their initiation into trench life a spartan experience. Two inventive spirits thought to improve matters and, spotting some abandoned corrugated iron behind the trench, crawled out at night to retrieve it and propped it over their firebay to make a slightly weatherproof shelter. They were quite proud of their handiwork and actually went to fetch their platoon officer to admire it, feeling quite obviously that what the Army had lacked before their own arrival was brains. Cushing was forced to point out that the purpose of a firing bay was to fire from, and that their splendid roof entirely defeated that purpose. But he told them kindly and without undue blustering. Although he was several years their senior and had been a schoolmaster in civil life, it was not so very long ago that he himself had arrived, green and ignorant, to join the Battalion.
Even in that short time there were new faces in the ranks and in the mess, and every day there were more casualties.
2nd Lt. W. Cushing.
On the morning of Christmas Eve a man in B Company on our right was hit in the head by a sniper’s bullet, and died a few minutes later. The new Second-in-Command of the Battalion was in the line on a visit of inspection. He was an energetic and efficient officer but he was also a fire-eater. He made both platoons file past the dead man, saying to each, ‘You must avenge this. You must kill two Germans for every one of our dead.’ I said nothing, but I felt outraged. The men evidently thought he was mad. The object of war, the aim of a battle, is not primarily to kill numbers of the