We started out for St Vaast but found that, on arrival, to be in the possession of an Ammunition Column and no room left for us. We had, therefore, to hump on to this little village [Fremont] where we have been rewarded by finding comfortable billets and a most hospitable country folk.
We B officers are billeted in on old farmhouse whose good dame is full of tender felicity for ‘le pauvre soldat Anglais’. Her son is a trooper in the Chasseurs and has been at the war since August 1914.xiv She is a really kindly soul and is doing her utmost to make us as comfortable as circumstances permit and now we are all sitting round the tiled kitchen with a roaring fire rushing up the chimney, thawing ourselves out and talking shocking French to the inhabitants. Shocking that is with the exception of Shelmerdine. He is very good at the game and I am afraid we will be rather lost when he leaves us and will run grave danger of obtaining lamp oil when we ask for jam.
Cotton has just made a sound remark. ‘We who are nearest the firing line,’ he says, ‘Know least about the war.’ It is sound, is that. We know nothing. And we have had no news of the progress of events for more than a week. It came as quite a shock to me to realise it. I have not thought of the actual fighting for days. How different to when we were in England and The Times came every morning. Then we were greatly concerned with what was going on down the road. Now we do not trouble. We are too busy.
18th November ’15
Another trek today. Up whilst the moon was still in possession, with a wash in a bucket in the farmyard in water from which the ice had to be broken before we could use it. Then petit dejeuner of bread and butter and the finest café au lait one could wish for, prepared by our good friend Madame de la ferme. Afterwards came a ripping march over frozen roads through a freezing air to these our present quarters [at Raineville].
We rest here, I believe, for four days. It has some pretensions as a village but is only really more or less of a large collection of mud and wattle buildings surrounding an untold number of ‘middens’. The men are snug enough in straw strewn barns but we officers have struck rather a bad patch as regards chambers though so far as comfort is concerned we are not doing badly. We are in a peasant’s cottage, Murray, Bowly and myself have commandeered wood and are now sitting in an inglenook thawing ourselves and scratching notes by the feeble light of a tallow candle. Our rations stand on the table – some bacon, two chickens, several loaves and a tin of jam. With the candle, stuck in an empty baccy tin, shedding its flickering light on them, with Bowly asleep in his chair and Don Murray bent over his letter pad, both so familiar and yet so strange in these meagre surroundings, it all seems to me unreal and at the same time familiar. Unreal because of my comfort loving companions, familiar because so d’Artagnan soldiered as did Micah Clarke and the one and only Sir Nigel.xv
I had a letter from you today. A very welcome letter, breathing as it did of you and Baby and home and all dear, clean English things in this new land where dirt and stinks seem the accepted companions of the populace and where comfort is not even slightly understood.
19th November ’15
A more or less uneventful day in billets. Getting them in order, with all the little odd arrangements which make so much for comfort, takes a long time and considerable thought but there is not a deal to show for them afterwards and really nothing to record. One thing, however, worthy of note is the way in which the men have come on in the way of making themselves comfortable. Mostly town-bred, they were slow at first to see that men can live in comparative comfort in the most unpromising circumstances but they learn with avidity and in another week or so the oldest campaigner will be able to tell them little indeed.
As yet they still lose things – lose them at a most appalling rate – but they are now getting into trouble for it, which brings it home, and I feel sure there will be little lost from now on.
20th November ’15
This has been a red letter day. Worthyxvi and I have been to Amiens, bought some tobacco and indulged in a civilized lunch off a clean table-cloth. How one appreciates such little things after one has been denied them even for the short time we have.xvii
Amiens, as a city, we were not impressed with, its cathedral, as a cathedral, we were – greatly. It is indeed a lovely edifice and one which I sincerely trust may be spared the fate of Rheims. Its altar and rose windows I can recommend to any man who has an hour to spare and desires elevation of the soul.
If he also desires bodily comfort he may go to the Hôtel de la Paix, lunch there and come away satisfied. It was some lunch they gave us and I record it amongst my choicest memories. Worthy ran very near to making a beast of himself on it and the waiter was obviously relieved when at length we called for the bill. Three francs fifty perhaps did not leave a great margin of profit when two hungry devils like us are suddenly introduced to a lunch. But, even so, I do not think a really properly trained garçon would display palpable relief at its termination. I can only think, therefore, that the French have engrained mercenary instincts.
21st November ’15
A day of slight disaster. The field cashier was at Brigade HQ for officers to draw what pay they could. We all requisitioned, but when Bland came back he had everyone’s cash but B Coy’s. The reason is that we sent in the wrong form. I had somehow taken it down incorrectly. How, I do not know; but it is most distressing and all the more so since it reduces us to the painful necessity of borrowing from the more fortunate others. This we have done with success and are now suffering from an excess of sorrow – for those who have trusted us.
22nd November ’15
Another uneventful day so far as general interest is concerned. Just the usual Brigade Route march for the battalion during the day and the usual unfruitful tour round the byways after dark in search of wood for the fire at which we are wont to thaw our feet before retiring. It is not our fault that we take the spare wood of the village in this clandestine fashion. One must be warm. That is unanswerable. Yet the people are so constituted that they will not sell their beloved bois. Then, what would you? To see an otherwise honest and respectable English gentleman, sneaking stealthily from one shadowy wall to another and flitting swiftly across the open spaces where the moonbeams flicker, with a large and cumbersome fence post under his arm, is not a sight one of a strict moral rectitude similar to my own, can look upon with equanimity, but when one is reduced to a choice between witnessing it or enduring the sensation of slowly freezing from the feet up, not to mention the other minor disadvantage of becoming the possessor of an enduring dew-drop, one is liable to find oneself weak. And certainly I confess that as the flame leaps joyously upwards from our stolen fuel it thaws into non-existence the last ice of my own honesty.
23rd November ’15
It seems to me that one or two little remarks of the men, heard en passant, are worthy of record here and today seems propitious for writing them down, there being an absence of news more suitable for inclusion in this my notebook.
One fed-up one, writing home, expresses his opinion of this fair land thus, ‘I can’t imagine why the Germans want this country. If it was mine, I’d give it to them and save all the fuss.’ Evidently a man of personality that, a man who judges from what he sees rather than from what he hears.
Overheard near the cooker, ‘Well I hopes as how they’ll fight the next blinking war in England and give a swotty a “chanst” to do the decent by hisself.’
The next was in answer to a young fellow who was grousing at the food, which is excellent and, for active service, plentiful. ‘Rotten grub! You don’t know you’re alive. I once lived on potatoes for a fortnight, and got worms.’ The relevance of the penalty may not be quite apparent but the retort had the wholesome effect of silencing the grouser, and of adding to the gaiety of the remainder of