the situation. Up the trench he found a
big Grenadier lying on his face motionless in
a great welter of blood, while round the
traverse an Irish Guardsman was flat on his
back on the trench-boards, a little rosary
between his fingers, with a stretcher-bearer
ripping up one of his puttees, which was
soaked with blood.
The wounded man lifted a pallid face to
the officer as he came up. The stretcher-
bearer was soothing him gently as he
worked.
" Be asy now," he was saying, " a little
skelp like that won't kill yez. I'll put yez
in the dug-out beyond . . . ye'll be grand
and snug there till it's dark, and then we'll
take yez down."
" The others is all right, sir," the stretcher-
bearer added to our Ensign ; " him round the
traverse was killed on the spot, but there's
nobody else touched barrin' this chap here ! "
THE ADVENTURES OF AN ENSIGN 55
The wounded man said nothing, but his
breath came heavily. His face was very
pale. The officer saw him tucked away
into the dug-out, and went back to tea
with a heavy heart. It was his first
casualty. . . .
The next night our Ensign led his two
platoons out of the trenches in the wake of a
guide sent up to meet them. He was a
little disappointed to find how lightly his
responsibility as an officer rested upon him.
He had not the least idea of where they
were going as they followed the guide out
into the darkness.
Their journey came to its finish on a
timbered walk, leading past a long array of
shelters dug out of a bank and protected by
layers of neatly built-up sandbags. Every-
body had gone to bed, for it was after 2 a.m.
— that is, everybody save our Ensign's ser-
vant, who, after our hero had seen his men
safely into their quarters, led the officer into
a fine roomy dug-out with a wooden door
56 THE ADVENTURES OF AN ENSIGN
and wooden flooring. There, on a bed made
of sacking stretched over a framework, he
found his sleeping -sack spread, with his
pyjamas on top ; his canvas washing-bucket,
full of hot water, smoked on a primitive-
looking washstand ; while a complete change
of clothes was laid out on a soap-box beside
the bed.
"And what time will I call you in the
morning, sir ? " said Johnson — such was
the name of our Ensign's servant — at the
door.
"What time is parade?" asked the
officer.
"There's no parade for you, sir, — only
rifle inspection at eleven. Perhaps you'd
care for a bath in the morning, sir ! "
Our Ensign jumped at the suggestion and
ordered a hot bath for half-past nine. He
crept gratefully into his sleeping-bag, his
mind bewildered by the sudden contrasts in
his new and remarkable life. . . .
57
CHAPTER IV.
The period in reserve had brought the
whole battaUon together once more. The
companies were no longer separated as they
had been in the trenches. Our Ensign
found the officers established in regular
messes in the sand-bagged shelters of this
pleasantly rural retreat, and the whole rou-
tine of the Guards running smoothly on
very similar lines to the life in barracks at
home.
Life was not at all strenuous in reserve —
at any rate not in the day-time. In the
trenches the men get short commons in the
way of sleep, so during the period in reserve
they are not worked very hard. At night,
58 THE ADVENTURES OF AN ENSIGN
however, fatigue parties were generally sent
up to the support or front lines on various
digging undertakings. Otherwise, a rifle
inspection in the morning, and sometimes,
additionally, an inspection of feet (an army
may fight on its stomach, but it marches on
its feet) or of gas helmets, was the only
parade of the day.
Each company took it in turn to be " in
waiting " — that is to say, to be in readiness
for any emergency. The company in wait-
ing furnished the guards and fatigue parties
for any special jobs about the camp.
During the period in waiting, which
lasted twenty-four hours, from one after-
noon to the afternoon of the following
day, the officers of the company in waiting
were not supposed to leave the precincts of
the camp, and, the company commander ex-
cepted, they took it in turns, during the
period " in waiting," to act as Piquet Officer,
whose functions in reserve were practically
confined to stamping the letters with the
THE ADVENTURES OF AN ENSIGN 59
battalion censor stamp in the Orderly lioom
(a sand - bagged shelter), before the post
corporal collected the mail in the after-
noons.
Our Ensign slipped very easily, almost
imperceptibly, into his place as a tiny cog
in the great wheelwork of the army in
France. He came out prepared to have a
roughish time in very congenial company —
and in neither respect was he disappointed.
The Mess in which he found himself had
all the attraction of a cosmopolitan club
in miniature. His fellow - officers in the
company to which he had been posted —
No. 2 — had what was known as a double-
company mess with the officers of No. 1
Company. At the quarters in reserve the
mess was located in an ambitious sort of
sand - bagged shelter, with stain - glass
windows, timber floor and walls, a white
deal sideboard (home - made), and a long
table and chairs. Here our Ensig'n met
his company commander, a serene and
60 THE ADVENTURES OF AN ENSIGN
placid person, with a somewhat judicial
manner, who, for that reason, answered to
the name of "The Beak." Most of the
other officers our Ensign had known at
home, so that he did not feel so much
an intruder as he had feared he would.
The double - company mess was a very
happy family. In every stratum of society
type balances type. It is this easy counter-
poise that makes the world revolve. That
great leveller, the War, has thrown to-
gether in officers' messes for a spell of
intimate association a number of men
whose pursuits in other circumstances
would all have radiated in different direc-
tions. In that mess there were, amongst
others, a brace of budding diplomats,
two Balliol undergraduates, a rancher, a
"literary gent.," and an engineer. Some
of the officers had decided to adopt the
Army as their profession, and to remain
on in the regiment after the war, but
others would simply return to their pur-
f
THE ADVENTURES OF AN ENSIGN 61
suits and professions on the proclamation
of peace. The pleasant cameraderie which
reigned in the douhle-company mess must
be based, our Ensign decided, on the
equilibrium of all these different tempera-
ments and mental outlooks balanced one
against the other. So far as regimental
duties were concerned, every type was
tempered down to the average consistency
given by the identical training which every
Guards' officer receives on the square at
home.
Therefore, though many and furious were
the arguments on every conceivable topic
with which the young lions of the double-
company mess whiled away their leisure
hours, there was perfect accord in the
general realisation by each of his duties
and responsibilties as an officer. In the
privacy of the mess there might be heated
wrangles regarding the respective merits
of No. 1 and No. 2 Companies ; but the
whole mess presented a solid front in
62 THE ADVENTURES OF AN ENSIGN
backing the two companies against the
rest of the battalion, the battahon against
the rest of the Brigade, and the regiment
against every other regiment in the Brigade
of Guards.
Our Ensign had two or three spells in
reserve at this peaceful spot, and always
looked forward to returning to it after
the battalion's turn of duty in the
trenches. There was practically no shell-
ing ; any German shells that came over
mostly fell in a more exposed position
several hundred yards away. All around
them lay spread out the fair garb in
which summer dresses the Belgian country-
side, and not even the ruined farms or
the shell - scored roads could detract from
the beauty of the poppies and corn-flowers
running wild among the neglected fields,
or the roses and the hollyhocks and the
snapdragon that bloomed in the little
gardens of the ravaged farms.
The men revelled in the snatch of quiet,
THE ADVENTURES OF AN ENSIGN 63
in the pleasant surroundings, in the beau-
tiful summer weather. When their clay's
work was done they sat about in the
shade, writing letters home, reading the
newspapers, or idly watching the after-
noon spectacle of German i\ British aero-
planes. Some spent every moment of their
leisure in dragging one of the canals in
which Belg'ium abounds for fish. The
drag - net was a marvel of ingenuity, con-
structed as it was out of rabbit netting,
barbed wire, bits of string, sandbags, and
branches, towed along by eager hands on
either bank. Incredible as it may seem,
the fishermen made quite respectable catches
of pike and eels, which they cooked for
supper over wood-fires, and consumed with
relish, — all heedless of dark allusions by
their less enterprising comrades to the
fabled discovery of portions of a German
helmet in the maw of one of these
aquarian monsters.
The officers went for walks in the neigh-
64 THE ADVENTURES OF AN ENSIGN
bourhood, extending their rambles, with the
perversity of youth, to the ruined city of
Ypres, still the shell-trap par excellence of
the countryside for miles around. One after-
noon, a subaltern in our Ensign's mess who
went by the name of Apollo, from his statu-
esque appearance, and who was a perfect
Baedeker of information about the local at-
tractions wherever the battalion went, took
Peter and our Ensign and one of the Balliol
men, known as The Don, to a certain field
where, among various shell-holes and felled
apple-trees, a few rows of depressed currant
bushes yet lingered. The currants were red
and scanty and abominably sour, and an
unusually large number of " dud " shells
were falling in dangerous proximity to the
party from an " Archie " or anti-aircraft gun
that was vigorously shelling a German
raider. There was plenty of fresh fruit in
the mess where the young men could have
sat in the cool of the shelter and eaten their
fill, but they preferred to stand in the hot
THE ADVENTURES OF AN ENSIGN 65
afternoon sun and munch unripe currants at
imminent risk of their necks. Truly youth
is a wonderful thing 1
Another day a band of them strolled out
over the fields to a certain billet, where pre-
viously the battalion and other Guards' bat-
talions had been quartered for some time.
There they visited the pretty garden which
the Guards had laid out with wonderful
centre - pieces, representing the different
regimental crests of the Guards in coloured
stones. But, while the Guards had been
away, the heathen had raged. There were
shell-holes in the garden, and the rains had
begun to gnaw at the centre-pieces. . . .
In the Salient everything, living and dead,
seems vowed to destruction.
The night fatigues were dull, dangerous,
and depressing. Night after night parties
sallied forth with pick and spade, often in
gum-boots, if there was work to be done on a
wet trench, and plodded through the darkness
to a more or less apocryphal rendezvous.
E
66 THE ADVENTURES OF AN ENSIGN
All the open ground close up to the Front
in the Salient is sprayed by machine-gun
fire at night, and a brisk burst of shell fire
in addition was no uncommon experience for
the nightly fatigue parties. Sometimes the
sapper folk would be late at the trysting-
place, and the men would stand huddled
up together like a flock of sheep on a moor,
while the officers would fret and fume and
mutter dire menaces about " reporting the
fellow to the Brigade." Then the sapper
would arrive, and the officer, about to de-
liver himself of a few weighty and well-
considered remarks on punctuality, which
is the politeness of soldiers as well as of
kings, would find himself confronted by an
obsequious R.E. corporal protesting that the
"orficer" was "jest over there."
Translated into the plain language of fact,
this indication might mean anything from
300 yards to a mile ; but at length the
sapper officer would appear, silencing with
honeyed words and profuse apology the
THE ADVENTURES OF AN ENSIGN 67
torrent of reproach bubbling at the Guards-
man's lips. After that the sapper officer
would take charge, and the Guards' officer
would find his role restricted to walking
up and down for anything up to three or
four hours, bored to tears, unable even to
smoke, because smoking on these night
fatigues is forbidden to the men. He had
not even the mental occupation of keeping
the men to their task. They knew that
they could not go home to bed until the
job was finished, whatever it was, and
therefore every man worked with a will,
jackets discarded, sleeves rolled up.
Everybody who has been up in the
Salient knows what the " trenches " there
are like. The Hun holds the high ground
everywhere : he has the dry soil, the ob-
servation. In the British lines the ground
is so wet that a foot below the surface you
strike water . . . and probably a dead
man as well, so thick do they lie in this
blood-drenched region. Therefore the para-
68 THE ADVENTURES OF AN ENSIGN
pets are for the most part built up, and in-
deed the whole defences — parapet, traverses,
and parados — have to be built up with sand-
bags, which, under the influence of shell fire
and the weather, have to be continually
renewed and repaired.
A parapet that will shelter a platoon of
the line will not do for a platoon of Guards-
men. It is a question of inches. When the
Gurkhas relieved the Guards in the trenches
in the Bethune region early in the war, the
Guards had to put a double tier of sandbags
along the fire-step so that the little hillmen
could look over the top of the parapet.
Therefore, in the Salient, it often happened
that the Guards found themselves sheltering
in the open behind a thin parapet in bad
repair, behind which they had to kneel in
order to protect themselves against the
enemy snipers.
Work, with a capital " W," loomed large
in the orders of every company commander
of the Guards in the Salient. In truth.
THE ADVENTURES OF AN ENSIGN 69
there was much to be done. In places, the
trench lines were not connected, parapets
were low and by no means bullet - proof,
parados were distinguished mainly by their
absence. Thus, when one battalion of
Guards relieved another in the Salient, it
took over not only the trench but a vast
programme of " improvements," as the
house - builders say.
The first night our Ensign went up to the
front line with the company, the Guards'
battalion which they were relieving had a
big scheme of work to hand over. As junior
officer, our Ensign was given charge of the
men in the front line, for the first half of
their turn " in," whilst The Beak and Peter
remained, according to usage, in the company
headquarters in the support line. For the
second half, Peter was to relieve our Ensign.
While the relief was being effected, an
ensign of the outgoing company took our
young man round the trench, and, with
the air of a Commissioner of the Office of
70 THE ADVENTURIiS OF AN ENSIGN
Works, showed the new - comer the work
which had been begun, which the incoming
company was to finish. The barbed wire
was probably defective and would have to
be inspected and possibly repaired ; here
they had put in three new traverses ; here
they had repaired the parapet that had been
blown in by an enemy trench mortar ; there
they had started to build a parados ; this
part of the parapet was not bullet-proof
. . . they had had a man wounded passing
there the previous day ; and so on, and so
forth. The officer explained everything
with admirable lucidity, and then, his men
having all filed out, trotted away, leaving
our Ensign, rather bewildered, standing on
a precarious trench-board, half immersed in
yellow water, with an overpowering odour
of death in his nostrils.
Both The Beak and Peter presently came
up to help him over his difficulties at his
first taste of trench warfare, and together
they mapped out a scheme to spread the
THE ADVENTURES OF AN ENSIGN 7l
work remaining to be done over the time
they were to spend in the front line. The
platoon sergeants were called into consulta-
tion : they had already got the sentries
posted in the fire-bays, and the rest of the
men they set at the task of filling sandbags.
It was agreed that our Ensign should go out
and have a look at the wire, and also the
outside of the parapet, to see how it could
best be made bullet-proof.
A little later the officer, in company with
his orderly, his rifle slung at his back, a
handsome and self-possessed young man,
who was introduced as the wiring corporal,
and a rugged Irish sergeant called Kinole,
slung his leg over the parapet and dropped
out into the open on the other side.
It was a dark windy night. In front of
them the German star-shells were soaring
aloft, and the night was alive with noises
reverberating in the darkness. Machine-
guns on both sides coughed their harsh
** tack-tack . . . tack-tack-tack." Rifle
72 THE ADVENTURES OF AN ENSIGN
shots rang out here and there ; and every
now and then, with a bang and a whizz, a
Verey hght whirred up into the dark sky
from the trenches behind the little party.
Somewhere on the right a mighty British
strafe was in progress : our Ensign could
hear the steady racket of the shells and see
their orange flicker in the sky as they burst
against the surrounding blackness.
The chinking of tools resounded very
faintly out of the dark in front of them.
" 'Tis Fritz out workin','' muttered Ser-
geant Kinole hoarsely. " Iv'ry night 'tis
the same, sir. . . . He works like anny ould
mole."
The party crossed a very wet ditch and
came to the wire. Here the wiring corporal
took the lead and they all crawled along
behind him, bending their heads low, as he
did, to examine the strands of wire against
the sky. In places the wire was broken
and would have to be replaced.
Then our Ensign took a look at the
THE ADVENTURES OF AN ENSIGN 73
parapet from the outside. There was no
room to strengthen it from within, and out-
side the trench the ground sloped away into
a morass. The only thing would be to lay
an earth foundation and build it up on that.
The sergeant hopped back into the trench,
and presently returned with a horde of
bulky figures with pick and shovel who
scrambled over the parapet, and, dropping
on the other side, started shovelling dry
earth on to the wet ground at the foot of
the parapet.
All night they worked and shovelled and
built, inside and outside the trench, while
the star-shells spouted and the machine-
guns rapped loudly. With the first flicker
of dawn they trooped in, and then, while
the dawn was breaking sullenly, the men
stood to on the fire-step all along the trench,
while our Ensign, empty and cold and dread-
fully sleepy, wondered why the trench
smells were so overpoweringly accentuated
in the early morning.
74 THE ADVENTURES OF AN ENSIGN
With the coming of dawn the men stood
down, our Ensign inspected rifles, the Com-
manding Officer, on his daily round of the
trenches, appeared and asked him a question
or two, and after that, amid a general
sizzling of bacon all along the trench, the
officer made for the earthen cave which had
been pointed out to him as his quarters.
There was the faithful Johnson with a mug
of hot cocoa ; there was our Ensign's blanket
and his air-pillow arranged on a carpet of
clean sandbags.
Our young man slept until ten o'clock,
and then rose to find his washing things
spread out in the sunshine, Johnson close by
boiling his shaving water in a mess tin. He
made a leisurely toilet, then sauntered down
the communication trench to the company
headquarters, where he breakfasted joyously
with The Beak and Peter off eggs and bacon
and tea and bread-and-butter and straw-
berry jam. Of course the double-company
mess was broken up when the battalion was
THE ADVENTURES OF AN ENSIGN 75
in the line, so, by mutual arrangement,
No. ] Company took the mess cook, and
No. 2 the mess waiter. It was the latter,
rather more dishevelled than his wont, who
served the three officers at breakfast in a
tiny dug-out four feet square.
One turn in the trenches is very much
like another. Sometimes they got shelled,
and on the first occasion, our Ensign, em-
erging rather hastily from his cubby- hole
to find out what the noise was about, was
shamed into complete nonchalance by the
unshakable phlegm of the men. He soon
learned to adopt the prescribed air of indiffer-
ence to such attentions from the enemy, but,
like most people, he never got used to shell-
ing. Once or twice he went out patrolling
with his orderly, a completely fearless,
wholly unsqueamish, and eminently practical
young man. It was a messy business,
crawling through the wet grass in the dark,
and rather trying to the nerves. But, as a
sage friend of our Ensign's used to say,
76 THE ADVENTURES OF AN ENSIGN
" If you can't see the Hun, he can't see
you," and our young man more than once
drew comfort from this practical maxim as
he and MacFinnigan crawled through No
Man's Land with eyes and ears strained for
sight or sound of the enemy.
Letters and newspapers arrived with un-
failing regularity in the front line every
afternoon at tea-time. So they knew all
about the great events that were hap-
pening on the Somme, especially as the
latest bulletins came up daily from the
army headquarters, and were stuck up (by
means of a cartridge driven into the sand-
bag walls) outside the company head-
quarters. Everybody speculated endlessly
as to the moment when the Guards would be
hurled into that boiling cauldron in the south.
Rumours of all kinds were rife : everybody
had his own theories and " information,"
especially the men. Our Ensign used to
hear them gossiping round their breakfast
THE ADVENTURES OF AN ENSIGN 77
fires in the trenches, where every cookhouse
rumour was thoroughly examined.
At last one day, when the Battalion was
expecting to go out of the trenches alto-
gether for several weeks' rest, it was re-
ported that the Somme was its next destina-
tion. This time rumour spoke true. About
one o'clock a.m., on a mellow summer night,
the Battalion marched quietly by companies
across the market-place of an old Belgian
town, where it would in a day or two entrain
for the Unknown.
78
CHAPTER V.
And now the scene changes. The stage is
set afresh for another act of the great
drama in which our hero plays the leading
part or the tiniest of roles, according as
we take his conception or history's of the
great events amongst which his life is run-
ning its course. For, by analysis, war is
found to be made up of millions of little
dramas in which the " lead " is played
by every single combatant, in which the
greatest actors may have but the shadowiest
of roles, in which the most portentous
moments of history are but " noises of"
It is only the historian, coldly surveying
the stage through the lorgnette of posterity,
THE ADVENTURES OF AN ENSIGN 79
who can disentangle the myriad threads of
these subsidiary incidents and weave them
into the mighty drama, in which the great
actors are seen in their proper roles, where
such pygmies as our Ensign are but
blurred figures in a vast stage crowd, a
moving background, as it were, — after the
Meiningen school of the drama, — against
which the events of history are enacted.
The scene shifts, then, from Belgium to
France. Gone are the flat plains, the ugly
red-brick houses, uglier than ever now that
war has stripped them from roof to cellar ;
gone the dull, straight roads with their
strip of uneven, red-hot pave in the centre ;
gone that everlasting ragged silhouette of
Ypres' ravaged towers, seen from every
angle of the salient ; gone the stagnant
canals, the dirty estaminets. Slow and
protesting, with many halts, the train bear-
ing the Battalion southward, through the
heat and dust of a blazing summer day,
leaves the Belgian scene of war behind.
80 THE ADVENTURES OF AN ENSIGN
It carries them deep into the fair land of
France, among the green hills and undulat-
ing valleys, the long white roads, the pretty
and prosperous villages, the old-world cha-
teaux with their seigneurial dove-cots and
weather-stained towers peering forth from
the summer foliage, the natty auherges with
their white - curtained windows and little
tables before the door. This is all but the
" front cloth," however, behind which the
stage is being set for the drama in which
the Battalion is yet to play its part. This
fair picture of France, spread out in the