From Bazancourt to Hattonchâtel

At Bazancourt, a dreary little town in Champagne, the company was quartered in the school, which, owing to the really surprising feeling for order shown by the regiment, very soon had the appearance of a peacetime barracks. There was an orderly sergeant to turn us out in the morning, hut fatigue and roll-call by sections at night. Every morning we marched out for a few hours’ drill on the waste and untilled fields round about. After a few days I left this busy scene of military duties and exercises. I was detailed to attend an O.T.C. course at Recouvrence.

Recouvrence was a remote little village hidden among delightful chalk hills. A certain number of the more youthful of us were sent there from the division to receive a thorough military training from a staff of officers and N.C.O.s detailed by each regiment. Those of us who came from the 73rd had good reason, in connection with this course, to be grateful to Lieutenant Hoppe, an extremely capable officer, who, unfortunately, was killed soon after.

Life in this secluded spot was a strange mixture of the rigours of military training and the freedom of a university. During the day we were licked into military shape in accordance with all the rules of the art of war. At night we gathered together with our instructors, and in quite as radical a manner emptied enormous barrels of beer furnished by the canteen at Montcornet. When in the early morning hours we streamed out from our various messes, the village street had the unusual appearance of a students’ Walpurgis night. Our C.O., a captain, had, however, the very educational habit of taking in hand the duties of the day following with redoubled energy.

Once we were actually kept at it for forty-eight hours at a stretch. The reason was this: It was our respectful custom to offer the captain a safe-conduct to his billet at the close of a carousal. One evening a godlessly tipsy fellow, a true Simplicius Academicus, who always reminded me of Magister Lankard, was entrusted with this important duty. He was soon back to announce with beams of joy that instead of taking the “old ’un” to bed he had accommodated him with a stall in a byre.

Punishment was not long delayed. We had scarcely reached our quarters in hopes of a brief repose when the alarm sounded. With curses we strapped on our equipment and ran to the place appointed. There stood the old ’un waiting for us in as evil a temper as can be imagined and displaying an unusual energy.

He greeted us with the shout, “Fire alarm! The guardroom’s on fire!”

Before the eyes of the astonished inhabitants the fire-engine was trundled out of its shed and the hose screwed on, and the guardroom was then deluged with a magnificent stream of water. The old ’un stood on some stone steps like a grim Jupiter Pluvius and took charge of the proceedings, urging us on from above to unstinted exertions. Sometimes his thunder broke over the head of some soldier or civilian who peculiarly aroused his anger and he gave the order for him to be instantly removed. The unfortunate was hurried with all speed behind the nearest house and so removed from his sight. When morning dawned we still stood with sinking knees at the pump. At last we were dismissed to get ready to go on parade.

When we got to the parade-ground the old ’un was there before us, brisk and spruce, and ready to devote himself with peculiar ardour to our instruction.

We treated the little episode for what it was⁠—a cheerful interlude between two acts of war.

Our intercourse with each other was very free and easy, for we all came from the same social class. Three or four of us used to live and mess together. I still have a grateful memory of the scrambled eggs and fried potatoes for supper. On Sundays we had a rabbit or a fowl. As I was mess secretary, our landlady laid before me a number of chits she had had from requisitioning soldiers. The substance of most of them was that Fusilier So-and-So had kissed the daughter of the house and in return requisitioned twelve eggs. Unfortunately this amusing bouquet, culled from the fields of folk-humour, is too obscene to quote from.

The inhabitants were surprised that common soldiers like us all spoke French more or less fluently. Sometimes a comic situation arose from it. I was sitting one morning in the village barber’s, with a friend called Clement. There were several villagers waiting, and one of them said to the barber, who was just setting to work on Clement with his razor: “Eh, coupez la gorge avec!” at the same time drawing his hand across his throat. To his consternation Clement replied quietly: “Quant à moi, j’aimerais mieux la garder,” displaying thereby the equanimity that well befits a soldier.

In mid-February we of the 73rd were taken aback by the news of the heavy losses our regiment had suffered near Perthes, and we regretted having spent those days away from our fellows. On the 21st March, after a brief examination, we went back to the regiment, which was at Bazancourt once more. At this date there was a parade and a farewell address by General von Emmick on the occasion of our leaving the 10th Corps. On the 24th March we were entrained and conveyed to the neighbourhood of Brussels, and there we were brigaded with the 76th and the 164th in the 111th Infantry Division.

Our battalion was quartered in Hérinnes (Flemish: Herne), a small town in a pleasant Flemish countryside, and here on the 29th March I spent a very happy twentieth birthday.

Though the Belgians had plenty of room in their houses, our company was, from false scruples, stuck in a great draughty barn, with the raw sea winds of that district blowing through it in those cold March nights. It was always: “Belgium must not be treated as the enemy’s country.” That was a very natural consideration to show; but when once the military necessity of marching through it had been accepted, it was absurd to boggle over the petty consequences. It is in a war more important than may perhaps be thought that the men should sometimes have beds to sleep in. And when no beds are empty, then some must be emptied. The soldier must have the first consideration. We sometimes made ourselves ridiculous with our misplaced human kindness, and might well have taken more care of our dignity.

The population, half Flemish and half Walloon, was very friendly towards us. I had many talks with the owner of an estaminet, a keen socialist and freethinker, who invited me to celebrate Easter Sunday with him, and even refused payment for what I drank. Such encounters are almost unbelievably welcome and beneficial after the rough companionship of the ranks.

Towards the end of our time there the weather was fine, and tempted us to go for walks in the delightful and well-watered country round. The scene was made the more picturesque by the many naked figures seated all along the poplar-fringed stream with their laundry on their knees, engaged in a zealous hunt for lice.

As I had so far been more or less free from this plague, I assisted a friend, Priepke, to deal with his woollen vest, which was as populous as the habit of Simplicius Simplicissimus of yore. So we wrapped it round a large stone and sank it in a stream. As our departure from Herne followed very suddenly upon this, it is likely that the garment enjoys a quiet resting-place there to this day.

On the 12th of April 1915 we entrained at Hal, and, to defeat the spies, were taken by way of the north wing of the front to the neighbourhood of the battlefield of Mars-la-Tour. The company had their customary barn quarters in the village of Trouville, one of the usual squalid hamlets of Lorraine, whose flat-roofed, windowless houses look like a lot of stone boxes thrown together in a heap. On account of the danger from aircraft we had to keep ourselves close in the overcrowded place. In the neighbourhood are the famous fields of Mars-la-Tours and Gravelotte. A few hundred metres from the village the road from the frontier to Gravelotte was cut and the French boundary-post lay smashed on the ground. In the evenings we often had the melancholy satisfaction of a walk over the boundary to Germany.

Our barn was so ruinous that we had to pick our way with care over what remained of the boarded floor, or else we found ourselves on the ground underneath.

One evening, as our platoon was busied, under the presidency of our esteemed corporal, Kerkhoff, in dividing out our rations on a manger, one of the huge oak beams of the timber roof came crashing down. By good fortune it caught between two cob-walls just above our heads. We got off with the fright, but our beautiful ration of meat disappeared for good beneath a shower of rubble. We had scarcely settled down again after this ominous disaster when there was a thundering knock at the door and the voice of the sergeant-major warned us to fall in. At first, as always on such occasions, there was a moment’s silence. Then a regular stirabout: “My helmet! where’s my haversack? I can’t get my boots on! You’ve got hold of my cartridges! Oh, shut up!”

Finally, however, all was shipshape and we marched to the railway station of Chamblay, whence we were conveyed in a few minutes to Pagny-sur-Moselle. In the early morning we climbed the heights above the Moselle and came to a halt in Prény, a romantic hill village, surmounted by the ruins of a castle. This time our barn was a stone one filled with scented mountain hay, and through its window slits we looked out on the vineclad slopes of the Moselle and the little town of Pagny in the valley, which was often shelled and bombed. Sometimes a shot hit the Moselle and flung up a great column of water.

The warm weather and the magnificent country worked on us like magic, and we went for long walks whenever we had time off. We were in such high spirits that at night we had to indulge in ragging before we could settle down to sleep. A favourite game, among others, was pouring water or coffee into the open mouths of the snorers.

On the evening of the 22nd April we left Prény, and after a march of over thirty kilometres reached the village of Hattonchâtel without a single man falling out, and this with full pack. We pitched tents in the forest on the right of the famous Grande Tranchée. Everything pointed to our being put into the fighting on the following day. Field dressings, second tins of bully, and artillery flag signals were given out.

At night, in that mood of foreboding known to soldiers of every time, I sat a long while on the stump of a tree overgrown with blue anemones, before I crept over the others to my bed in the tent; and that night I had a confused dream in which a death’s-head played the leading part. Priepke, to whom I told it in the morning, hoped the skull was a French one.