1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [98]
To bet an even shilling
We’re here for the duration of the war!
It brought the house down at camp concerts and it reflected the sentiments of virtually every Tommy in Kitchener’s Army.
Chapter 12
On the door of a broken-down barn a little way behind the front, some wag with nothing better to do had chalked a notice: ‘LOST, STOLEN OR STRAYED. KITCHENER’S ARMY. £5 REWARD TO FINDER.’ This was considered to be a good joke and similar notices, some of them less polite, sprouted up all over the place in villages behind the line. But if the promised flood of men had not yet arrived to help the troops in France, there was at least a hearteningly steady trickle of Territorial Battalions. Their arrival and the coming of spring had lifted everyone’s spirits. The air was warming up, the ground was drying out, there were buds on the trees and in places, when the sun shone, Plugstreet Wood took on an air of sylvan beauty. The men who had newly arrived in this quiet sector to take up soldiering in earnest found life tolerably pleasant, if not comfortable, with just a dash of danger to make it interesting. They learned to beware of snipers and to keep their heads down. They learned the importance of silence, to be vigilant on sentry duty, to take bombardments in their stride. But the bombardments were predictable, for the Germans shot ‘by the clock’ and, barring occasional accidents, casualties were light. There were listening patrols to spice things up and after dark there were exciting forays into No Man’s Land, close up to the German trenches. Ostensibly the purpose of patrols was to gather information. Their real purpose, as often as not, was to satisfy adventurous new officers in their desire to make their presence felt and show the enemy what was what.
CSM W. J. Coggins, D.C.M. 4th Bn., Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry (TF).
I used to go out with my company commander, Lieutenant Pickford. He was a master at Brackley High School and he was a silly sod really when it came to patrolling. Of course, usually you would go out at night and, of course, you were supposed to volunteer for these jobs. But he came to me one morning not long after we got there and he said, ‘I want you to come out with me this morning.’ It was thick with fog, you couldn’t see the German line and it was more or less an order. I was only a bugler then and I’d be just turned nineteen, because I’d joined the Ox. and Bucks. Territorials in 1912 as a bugle boy aged sixteen, so I wasn’t going to argue with the officer. I said, ‘All right, sir.’ He said, ‘I’m going to give them a bit of music over there this morning.’ I thought, ‘What the devil with?’ I thought he wanted me to blow the bugle or something, but he said, ‘Look, I’ve got an old gramophone here and some old records.’ I don’t know where he’d got them from. Of course there were old broken-up houses around so maybe someone had scrounged them. He said, ‘I’m going to get out as close as I can to that German trench and shove some records on for them.’
Well, it was a damn silly thing to do, but I was game, so off we went over the top and out into the fog. It was a good long way, it must have been nearly four hundred yards, but we were able to walk most of it because the fog hid us from the Germans. When we got maybe twenty or thirty yards from the German line we stopped and put down this gramophone I’d been humping, and it was a fair weight, because it was one of these old things with a big horn on it. We didn’t wind it up (he’d done that before we left the trench) so he fished out a record and put it on and set it going. I can’t remember what it was, some old scratchy band music, but the Germans must have got a fair old turn hearing it blasting out through this fog-horn thing almost right next to their trench. But we didn’t wait to see. We started back again the way we came, moving a lot faster this time! But on the way the blooming fog lifted and before we got back to our trench a machine-gun opened up. The Germans gave us music all right! You should have heard