Of course as the weeks go by the valley is slowly changed: the features disappear with the topsoil; buildings retreat to their foundations; trees become stumps. The colors fade beneath the battering until all you have is a homogenous brown dip in the land between two ridges.
But I thought only of my idyllic prospect as I peered out through a thin embrasure in the sandbags as our tea was issued in the trenches. Admittedly the landscape in that part of Belgium is flatter and there are no real hedgerows, but as I looked out through our wire across a grassy meadow that ascended a gentle slope to the ridge opposite, I thought I might as well be in a valley of Oxfordshire. There were hawthorn bushes and scrubby hedges marking the intersections of field boundaries. I saw an unpaved road, small clumps of trees (somewhat knocked about), a group of farm buildings (ditto), but essentially it was no more than a section of run-of-the-mill countryside. If it had not been for the enemy wire and the dark outline of the earthworks of their trench system, I might not have been able to stifle a yawn. The evening sun was pleasantly warm and I could see wisps of smoke rising from their lines. No-man’s-land. It was unimpressive.
We spent a week on the canal bank, during which we had two days and two nights in the line. There, I was gratified to discover — despite the occasional barrages — that I was not panic stricken. It was still close enough to my experience of the trenches at Nieuport not to be too unnerving.
The most irritating consequence of our first visit to the trenches at the salient was that we became lousy. I tried all the usual remedies — powder; hours of diligent nit picking, like an ape; a candle flame run up and down the seams — but nothing worked. Eventually I used to turn my shirt inside out, wear it that way for a couple of days, then turn it back again, and so on. It seemed to regulate the itching at least. I was always scratching, but it no longer rose to peaks of intolerance.
After our time at the front we duly marched back to Bailleul and routine reestablished itself. Cleaning, drilling, sports, working parties and occasional visits to cafés in the town. I gained a real impression too of the vast organism that is an army: all those separate units that allow the whole to function — ordnance, transport, clothing, feeding, animals, signals, engineering, road building, policing, communications, health and sanitation … There was an invisible city camped in the fields round Ypres and it required its civil servants, paymasters, administrators, labor force and undertakers to make it function. The part the 13th Battalion played in its organization was to dig cable ditches for the signalers, muck out open-air stables in the brigade transport lines, help lay tracks for light railways, stand guard over vast supply dumps, dig graves and latrines at a field hospital. We were no more than ants in an ant heap. But at the same time in those weeks of waiting I played atrociously in goal for the D Company soccer team (we lost 11–2 against the Australian pioneers); came down with a dose of influenza; wrote a letter to my father and three to Hamish; almost had a fist fight with Teague when he accused me of stealing; felt bored, sexually frustrated, tired and occasionally miserable and one night dreamed vividly of my death — eviscerated by a German with an entrenching tool. I oscillated between the roles of soulless functionary and uniquely precious individual human being; from the disposable to the sine qua non.
It all came to an end on July 16 when the guns started up again in earnest. Then the one-week barrage preliminary to the attack was extended to two as the renewed offensive was continually delayed. For the first few nights the fireworks display on the horizon was tremendous, but as it continued night after night it became only another source of grumbles. The 13th was not even in reserve for the big push of July 31. The day the battle proper began, we were marched to a sugar beet factory near Locre for delousing.
We marched back to our billets that evening in heavy rain. It rained constantly for the next four days and nights. Suddenly the dark damp countryside seemed to ooze foreboding. Rumor abounded about the attack — all of it baleful. A company of the Australians, out rewiring one night, took heavy casualties (“heavy casualties”—a bland, soft phrase). I asked one man what it had been like. “Fuckin’ shambles,” he said.
On August 7 we were moved back up to brigade reserve on the canal bank. Before we occupied the trenches we were paraded in a field where Colonel O’Dell addressed us. The battalion, he said, had been ordered to provide reinforcements for other units in the brigade. I do not remember the details; two companies were going to the Royal Welch, I think. D Company was to be attached to a battalion of the Grampian Highlanders.
I already thought of us as the “unlucky” 13th and this latest move seemed to me yet another turn for the worse. Teague and Somerville-Start, however, rejoiced. There was much excited talk about the “Jocks” and their fighting spirit, and ill-informed speculation about this venerable regiment’s battle honors.
The next night we set off, having left most of our kit at the battalion dump. Ralph was entrusted to the quartermaster. The bombers made a great fuss of their farewells; you would have thought they were saying good-bye to their grandmothers. I had nothing to do with it — I was glad to be rid of the animal at last.
It took hours to join our new unit. There was immense toing and froing behind the front. We followed duckboard and fascine paths across black fields and were often redirected back down them. Once we eventually gained the trench system, we were continually halted to allow a passage of ration and ordnance parties, engineers and signalers. Eventually we found the right communication trench. We toiled up this. Ahead I heard Louise reporting to an officer in the Grampians. Soon we were deployed in the support lines.
It was immediately clear that these trenches were not what we were used to: no dugouts, not even ledges cut for sleeping. I put my waterproof cape on the ground and sat down, my back against the rear wall. Druce passed among us, checking that all was well. I tipped my helmet forward and tried to sleep. My nostrils were full of the smell of wet earth and from the right came Bookbinder’s body odor — truly appalling, a vile hogo. On my left Pawsey was having a shit in his helmet — he was too scared to go to the latrine sap.
From my diary:
August 9, 1917. Our first morning with the Grampians. Woken by random shelling. Stand to. Misty dawn. Up ahead, beyond our wire, a low ridge and two obliterated farms. Over to our right, according to Druce, the Frezenburg-Zonnebecke road. I can see no sign of it.
It is not very evocative, I admit. The biggest shock for me was not the shelling but the transformation in the landscape. All the ground as far up as the ridge looked as though it had been badly plowed. Almost all the long grass and shrubs that I had seen five weeks earlier had disappeared. I could not see behind me, nor much to either side, but the countryside we occupied was a more or less uniform dark brown. It was hard to believe we were in high summer. I was also — curiously, for I am not particularly fastidious — somewhat offended at the mess everywhere. The trench was full of litter — empty tins, discarded equipment, boxes and fragments of boxes — and through slits in the parapet of sandbags, no-man’s-land seemed to be scattered with heaps of burst mattresses. I swear it was five minutes before I realized they were dead bodies.
Druce sent me, Kite and Somerville-Start into the Grampians’ trenches to draw our water ration for the section. We passed along the support line through our company looking for the lead-off trench to the battalion ration store. We turned the corner of a firebay.
“Where are the Grampians?” Kite asked.