1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [99]
Lieutenant Pickford was delighted with himself. Not for long though! He got a real bollocking from the Colonel for going out and doing that, because after they fired this machine-gun they started shelling like the devil and two or three of our men were killed. No, he wasn’t popular! It was a silly thing to do and we got no profit out of it. But people did things like that in those days before we learned better sense.
Pte. Η. Κ. Davis, 5th Bn., London Rifle Brig.
We were in Plugstreet Wood for about six months and we had a very quiet time there. Of course we had some casualties, but the main difficulty was keeping awake – especially when you were on these listening posts. In the early days, when the weather was bad, that was no joke. They were a waste of time as far as I was concerned. You’d get out of the trenches at Plugstreet, take the bayonet off your rifle and stick it in the scabbard so as not to catch any light that might be going, put one round in the breech of your rifle with the safety catch on, so that all you want to do is slip it off when you want to fire. The most important thing was a waterproof sheet. You take out the waterproof sheet and you put it on the ground and you lie on this thing and start listening to see if there’s any activity going on. We always went out in pairs and before very long the man I was lying with would be kicking my legs, because I’d fallen asleep. Shortly after that I’d be doing the same to him, so we kept each other awake. But in the winter months – even sometimes when it came to spring – it was usually wet and while the waterproof sheet stopped the water coming up it also stopped the rain from going away, so before very long you were lying in a pool of water. We did three or four hours at a time like that before we crawled back to the trench. There was no way of getting dry. But, never mind, we just had to put up with it.
Even if the old hands were not so inclined to take risks as the newcomers, they were not lacking in bravado. For reasons of their own the Germans had annoyed the London Rifle Brigade by planting a flag in front of their trenches. It flapped at them defiantly from the other side of No Man’s Land two hundred yards away, and this piece of impertinence was not to be borne. It was Corporal Jenkin who crept out on another misty morning to capture the flag and bring it triumphantly back to delight the battalion. Corporal Jenkin was the hero of the day, the flag was sent back as a trophy to London Rifle Brigade Headquarters in Bunhill Row in London and the story went with it. It even reached the ‘Charivari’ column of Punch.
We are not surprised to hear that Corporal Jenkin of the First Battalion London Rifle Brigade succeeded in capturing a German flag at the front. Corporal Jenkin is an artist, and it was only natural that he should make for the Colours.
It all helped to boost morale, but in the spring of 1915 in this quiet sector, morale was high. For once it was the Germans who were in the open. Facing them from their trenches on the edge of the wood with the sheltering depths of the wood itself behind them, with the undamaged trees coming into leaf and even some shell-shattered trunks showing an irrepressible tendency to push out new shoots, there were times when the British Tommies felt that the war was unreal. There were still civilians in the houses and hamlets close to the line and beyond the communication trenches and support lines that ran through the sun-dappled glades, disfigured though they were by barbed wire and the trampling of many feet, there was still a semblance of normal life.
Just two kilometres to the south, where the railway line ran through the village of le Touret, a local train from Armentieres had puffed into the station bound for Comines and all