Disheartening

It was at Locon that we first made our acquaintance with French beer. I can think of no sight more depressing than that of a healthy British “Tommy” seated in an estaminet[1], gloomily absorbing pint after pint of that thin, sour beverage in the pious hope that he might attain to a reasonable state of intoxication before it made him sick.

But of course he never did. Even if he mixed his drinks with vin blanc or vin rouge, he only succeeded in making himself frightfully ill. And to add insult to injury, at an adjoining table a couple of the “natives” would have attained to a state of heavenly intoxication after a couple of drinks.

It was all most disheartening.

We rejoined our unit only to learn that the battery was already in the line, having reinforced the 119^th Battery instead of relieving them as originally planned. “Apparently (to use the words of the official diary) they think the Bosche may attack”.

For the same reason all the gunnery NCO’s rode up to the guns on the following day in charge of the first-line wagons loaded with ammunition.

On our way up we had our first baptism of fire when a section salvo of 5·9s dropped in Beuvry[2] as we passed through, demolishing several cottages.

Against orders we went through the village at a canter, narrowly escaping a disaster of our own making when one of the limbers flew open depositing several 18-pounder H.E. shells under the hoofs of the following wagon team. By some miracle, however, not a single one went off.

Speaking of cantering on horseback, I often wondered what bright genius at the War Office designed the field equipment of an artilleryman. The only horses he ever rode must have been wooden ones.

Everything we had to carry – haversack, water-bottle, hood respirator, bandolier with 50 rounds of ammunition and tin hat – were all slung alternately from our shoulders, so that the whole of our impedimenta dangled loosely all around us.

No wonder one harassed driver of “B” sub-section on the occasion of our first trek in Field Service Marching Order remarked with appropriate profanity that he “felt like a ruddy Christmas tree”.

When trotting one jangled like a travelling tinker, whilst at regular intervals a lumpy water-bottle or a map-case or a respirator inserted itself between one’s seat and the saddle with painful persistence.

LIKE HOME

The countryside in the back areas of the La Bassée sector was very like that of our own Lancashire. There were coal mines in the vicinity, at Annequin[3], and land subsidences had made “Flashes” and marshy patches such as one finds in the neighbourhood of Wigan. Had it not been for the long-straight roads, with their interminable avenues of poplars we might well have been at home.

Although the entire district was subjected to promiscuous shelling, we were surprised to see with that fatalistic pertinacity the local Iandowners and small farmers clung to their tiny holdings. It was a common enough sight to see a couple of women in their heavy wooden sabots stolidly hoeing in one field while a few hundred yards away shells would be bursting like miniature volcanoes.

Uncanny, bizarre yet typical of the adaptability of human nature.

[1] Estaminet (m): a small café or tavern, a Flanders dialect word, probably from the Walloon for ‘cowshed’

[2] Beuvry is a suburb of Béthune, awarded the Croix de Guerre for its heroism during World War I

[3] Annequin is a large farming (and ex-mining) village situated some 4 miles east of Béthune

Intensive Course

But that was the end of our hopes for an early posting over-seas. We returned to Colchester in ignominy and were subjected to an intensive course of training by a certain Lieutenant Carter, who was specially seconded to the battery for that purpose.

He was a martinet, with the eye of a basilisk and a staccato voice that crackled across the parade ground like a machine-gun, but he knew his job and soon we began to know ours.

Day after day we were subjected to the same routine, battery gun drill, followed by interminable gun-laying practice, until by the end of the year I found myself proudly wearing my first stripe, with a first-class gun-layer’s badge surmounting it. At last I could really call myself an artilleryman.

As an NCO I had had to pass through the riding school and to learn something about handling horses, but somehow I was never very happy at the tail-end of a charger: I think my memories of that maverick “Red Tape”, who could kick with all four feet at once and bite at the same time, had something to do with my diffidence.

WE SAIL FOR FRANCE – AND GET 0UR BAPTISM OF FIRE

While home on my embarkation leave I went up to my den in the attic one night and made it solemn holocaust of all my youthful scribblings, including thousands of lines of my epic “The Universe”.

Looking back on the incident after a lapse of almost fifty years, I realise there was something symbolic in the gesture. It was a case of “Goodbye to all that”, for even then some instinct told me the world I had known as a youth would never be the same again. Maybe an odd tear or two dropped upon the pile of charred ash in the grate but I went through with the ritual to the bitter end.

Also, in conformity with another grim wartime custom, I had my photograph taken. Not that it had any real significance, of course: we all meant to come back after our brief trip across the Channel … but still, one never could tell. Perhaps it was as well to know one’s portrait was hanging in the hall, behind the aspidistra … just in case.

IN QUARANTINE

The Battery left Colchester on two trains on Friday, March 2^nd, 1917, and embarked for Le Havre at Southampton in the early hours of the following morning. But alas “B” Sub-section, to which I belonged, was detained at the last minute in quarantine.

One of our drivers had contracted something infectious and the authorities kept us kicking our heels in isolation for another fortnight just in case someone else had been bitten by the same bug.

We were loud in our lamentations, for it was by no means certain that we should rejoin our own unit once we had landed over there.

However, all’s well that ends well and on March 21^st we caught up with the Battery at a tiny French village called Locon[1] not far from Béthune.

It had been a long, wearisome journey in cattle trucks, appropriately stencilled “Chevaux 8 ou Hommes 40“, to drive home to our minds the relative value of a man and a horse, as seen through the eyes of the authorities.

[1] Locon is situated some 5 miles north of Béthune, an important railway junction and hospital site, holding the 33^rd Casualty Station until December 1917