There was one thing which worried me; I disliked the idea of Dick going into the front line while I stayed behind. I said so, and he told me not to be an old chump. So we had a last ride round the woods, and the next morning, which was raw and foggy, we turned our backs on the little village. The First Battalion never had such a peaceful eight weeks again for the remainder of the War.
We crossed the Somme at Picquigny: after that we were in country unknown to us. I rode along with the rattle and rumble of limber and wagon wheels, watching the patient dun-coloured column winding away in front; conscious of what they were marching to, I felt myself strongly identified with this queer community, which still contained a few survivors from the original Expeditionary Force battalion which had “helped to make history” at Ypres in October 1914. Most of the old soldiers were on the strength of the Transport, which numbered about sixty.
On the roll of the Transport were drivers, officers’ grooms, brakesmen, and the men with the nine pack animals which carried ammunition. Then there was the transport-sergeant (on whose efficiency my fate depended), his corporal, and a farrier-corporal; and those minor specialists, the shoeing-smith, saddler, carpenter, and cook. Our conveyances were the G.S. wagon (with an old driver who took ceaseless pride in his horses and the shining up of his steel-work), the mess wagon (carrying officers’ kits, which were strictly limited in weight), the company cookers (which lurched cumbersomely along with the men’s dinners stewing away all the time), the water-cart and a two-wheeled vehicle known as “the Maltese cart” (which carried a special cargo connected with the Quartermaster’s stores and was drawn by an aged pony named Nobbie). There were also the limbers, carrying the machine-guns and ammunition.
The transport-sergeant was a Herefordshire man who could easily be visualized as a farmer driving to market in his gig. The C.O. had told me that the transport had been getting rather slack and needed smartening up; but I was already aware that Dottrell and the transport-sergeant could have managed quite easily without my enthusiastic support; they knew the whole business thoroughly, and all I could do was to keep an eye on the horses, which were a very moderate assortment, though they did their work well enough.
So far I have said next to nothing about the officers outside my own company, and there is nothing to be said about them while they are on their way to the Line, except that their average age was about twenty-five, and that I had known the majority of them at Clitherland. It was a more or less untried battalion which marched across the Somme that misty morning. But somehow its original spirit survived, fortified by those company sergeant-majors and platoon sergeants whose duties were so exacting; how much depended on them only an ex-infantry officer can say for certain; according to my own experience, everything depended on them. But the Army was an interdependent concern, and when the Brigadier met us on the road Colonel Winchell’s face assumed a different expression of anxiety from the one which it wore when he was riding importantly up and down the column with the Adjutant at his heels. (The Adjutant, by the way, became a Roman Catholic priest after the War, and it doesn’t surprise me that he felt the need for a change of mental atmosphere.) The Brigadier, in his turn, became a more or less meek and conciliatory man when he encountered the Division General. And so on, up to Field-Marshal French, who was then reigning at St.-Omer (with many a socially eligible young man to assist him).
We went thirteen miles that day. I remember, soon after we started on the second day, passing the end of an avenue, at the far end of which there was an enticing glimpse of an ancient château. My heart went out to that château: it seemed to symbolize everything which we were leaving behind us. But it was a bright morning, and what had I got to complain, riding cockily along on my one-eyed mare while Dick was trudging in front of his platoon? …
On the third day, having marched thirty-three miles altogether, we entered Morlancourt, a village in the strip of undulating landscape between the Somme and the Ancre rivers. This was our destination (until the next day, when the troops went up to the trenches, which were four or five miles away). It was an ominous day, but the sun shone and the air felt keen; as we marched down to Morlancourt a flock of pigeons circled above the roofs with the light shining through their wings. It was a village which had not suffered from shellfire. Its turn came rather more than two years afterwards.
We were all kept busy that afternoon: Barton and the other company commanders were harassed by continuous “chits” from battalion H.Q. and, as young Ormand remarked when he came to leave his gramophone in my care, “everyone had fairly got the breeze up.” The only person who showed no sign of irritability was the Quartermaster, who continued to chaff M. Perrineau, with whom he stumped about the village mollifying everyone and putting difficulties to rights.
Late in the evening I was sent
