Memoirs of an Infantry Officer quotes

I have said that Spring arrived late in 1916, and that up in the trenches opposite Mametz it seemed as though Winter would last forever.

I also stated that as for me, I had more or less made up my mind to die because in the circumstances there didn’t seem anything else to be done.

Well, we came back to Morlancourt after Easter, and on the same evening a message from the Orderly Room instructed me to proceed to the Fourth Army School next morning for a month’s refresher-course. Perhaps Colonel Kinjack had heard that I’d been looking for trouble.

Children in a village street surprised me: I saw a little one fall, to be gathered, dusted, cuffed and cherished by its mother.

Up in the line one somehow lost touch with such humanities.

The War was abundantly visible in supply-convoys, artillery horse-lines, in the dirty white tents of a Red Cross camp, or in troops going placidly to their billets. But everyone seemed to be off duty; spring had arrived and the fruit trees were in blossom;

the human significance of the audience was obliterated then, and its outlook on life became restricted to destruction and defence. A gas expert from G.H.Q. would inform us that “gas was still in its infancy.” (

Most of us were either dead or disabled before gas had had time to grow up.

) An urbane Artillery General assured us that high explosive would be our best friend in future battles, and his ingratiating voice made us unmindful, for the moment, that explosives often arrived from the wrong direction.

With rifle and bayonet he illustrated the Major’s ferocious aphorisms, including facial expression. When told to “put on the killing face,” he did so, combining it with an ultra-vindictive attitude. “To instil fear into the opponent” was one of the Major’s main maxims.

Man, it seemed, had been created to jab the life out of Germans.

To hear the Major talk, one might have thought that he did it himself every day before breakfast. His final words were: “Remember that every Boche you fellows kill is a point scored to our side;

When told to “put on the killing face,” he did so, combining it with an ultra-vindictive attitude. “To instil fear into the opponent” was one of the Major’s main maxims. Man, it seemed, had been created to jab the life out of Germans.

To hear the Major talk, one might have thought that he did it himself every day before breakfast.

His final words were: “Remember that every Boche you fellows kill is a point scored to our side; every Boche you kill brings victory one minute nearer and shortens the war by one minute. Kill them! Kill them!

News of the Battalion came from the Quartermaster, to whom I had sent an account of my “cushy” existence.

Dottrell wrote that things had been quiet up in the Line, but advised me to make the most of my rest-cure, adding that he’d always noticed that the further you got from the front-line the further you got from the War.

In accordance with my instructions he was making good progress with the box of kippers (which Aunt Evelyn sent me twice a month); ditto the Devonshire cream, though some of it hadn’t stood the journey well.

None of us could know how insignificant we were in the so-called “Great Adventure” which was sending up its uneasy flares along the Western Front. No doubt we thought ourselves something very special.

But what we thought never mattered; nor does it matter what sort of an inflated fool I was when I blundered into Kinjack’s Headquarters at Maple Redoubt to report the presence of the raiders and ask whether I might go across with them.

“Certainly not,” said the Colonel, “your job is to stop in our trench and count the men as they come back.” He spoke with emphasis and he was not a man who expected to have to say a thing twice.

He spoke kindly to me in his rough way, and in doing so made me very thankful that I had done what I could to tidy up the mess in No Man’s Land.

Larks were shrilling in the drizzling sky as I went down to 71. North. I felt a wild exultation.

Behind me were the horror and the darkness. Kinjack had thanked me.

Kinjack had thanked me. It was splendid to be still alive, I thought, as I strode down the hill, skirting shell-holes and jumping over communication trenches, for I wasn’t in a mood to bother about going along wet ditches.

The landscape loomed around me, and the landscape was life, stretching away and away into freedom.

Even the dreary little warren at 71. North seemed to await me with a welcome, and Flook was ready with some hot tea.

I was looking westward, away from the war, and the evening star twinkled serenely. Guns were grumbling miles away. Cartwheels could be heard on the roads behind Fricourt; it still made me feel strange when I remembered that they were German cartwheels.

Moments like those are unreproduceable when I look back and try to recover their living texture.

One’s mind eliminates boredom and physical discomfort, retaining an incomplete impression of a strange, intense, and unique experience.

they were competing for the favours of a handsome young woman in the farmhouse, and a comedy of primitive courtship was being enacted in the kitchen.

Death would be lying in wait for the troops next week, and now the flavour of life was doubly strong.

As I went to my room across the road, the cool night smelt of mown grass and leafy gardens. Away toward Corbie there was the sound of a train, and bullfrogs croaked continuously in the marshes along the river. I wasn’t sorry to be back;

Woolman’s young lady in England had sent him a bulletproof waistcoat; so far it had only caused its wearer to perspire profusely; and although reputed to be extremely vulnerable, it had inspired a humorist in his company to refer to him as “Asbestos Bill.”

Time seems to have obliterated the laughter of the war. I cannot hear it in my head.

How strange such laughter would sound, could I but recover it as it was on such an evening as I am describing, when we all knew that we’d got to do an attack that night;

for shortsighted Barton and the other company commanders had just returned from a reconnaissance of the ground which had left them little wiser than when they started. In the meantime we’d got some rum inside us and could find something to laugh about.

Our laughter leapt up, like the flames of camp fires in the dusk, soon to be stamped out, or extinguished by our impartial opponent the rain.

The consoling apparition of Dottrell departed, and I don’t suppose he did much laughing once he was alone with his homeward rattling limbers.

I mention this because, as the day went on, I definitely wanted to kill someone at close quarters. If this meant that I was really becoming a good “fighting man,” I can only suggest that, as a human being, I was both exhausted and exasperated.

My courage was of the cockfighting kind.

Cockfighting is illegal in England, but in July 1916 the man who could boast that he’d killed a German in the Battle of the Somme would have been patted on the back by a bishop in a hospital ward.

It was going to be a bad lookout for two such bewildered companies, huddled up in the Quadrangle, which had been over-garrisoned by our own comparatively small contingent.

Visualizing that forlorn crowd of khaki figures under the twilight of the trees, I can believe that I saw then, for the first time, how blindly War destroys its victims.

The sun had gone down on my own reckless brandishings, and I understood the doomed condition of these half trained civilians who had been sent up to attack the Wood. As we moved out, Barton exclaimed, “By God, Kangar, I’m sorry for those poor devils!”

Kinjack favoured me with a good-humoured grin. He only made one further comment on my non-consolidation of that fortuitously captured trench. He would probably leave me out of the “next show” as a punishment, he said.

Some people asserted that he had no sense of humour, but I venture to disagree with them.

Nobody had any illusions about the duration of our holiday at Heilly. Our Division had been congratulated by the Commander-in-Chief, and our Brigadier had made it clear that further efforts would be required of us in the near future.

I leant on a wooden bridge, gazing down into the dark green glooms of the weedy little river, but my thoughts were powerless against unhappiness so huge.

I couldn’t alter European history, or order the artillery to stop firing.

I could stare at the War as I stared at the sultry sky, longing for life and freedom and vaguely altruistic about my fellow-victims. But a second-lieutenant could attempt nothing—except to satisfy his superior officers;

None the less I had seen something that night which overawed me. It was all in the day’s work—an exhausted Division returning from the Somme Offensive—but for me it was as though I had watched an army of ghosts.

It was as though I had seen the War as it might be envisioned by the mind of some epic poet a hundred years hence.

But it was a case of every man for himself, and the corporate effect was optimistic and untroubled. A London editor driving along the road in a Staff car would have remarked that the spirit of the troops was amazing. And so it was.

But somehow the newspaper men always kept the horrifying realities of the War out of their articles, for it was unpatriotic to be bitter, and the dead were assumed to be gloriously happy.

However, it was no use worrying about all that; I was part of the Battalion, and now I’d got to see about getting the men settled into billets.

… myself to the idea that his dead body was somewhere among the Somme shell-holes, and it was a queer experience, to be disentangling myself from the mental obituary notices which I had evolved out of my luminous memories of our companionship in the First Battalion.

“Silly old devil,” I thought affectionately; “he always manages to do things differently from other people.”

By the end of August I was back at Butley with a month’s sick-leave and the possibility of an extension. So for the first week or two I forgot the future and enjoyed being made a fuss of by Aunt Evelyn.

The sun would dry it nicely there, she said, adding that I must find her a very dull old party nowadays, since she had no conversation and seemed to spend all her time trying to catch a new housemaid.

I assured her that it was a great relief, after being incessantly ordered about in the Army, to be with someone who had no conversation.

But after dinner that evening I did find myself a bit dull, so I walked across the fields for a chat with Protheroe, a middle-aged bachelor who lived in a modest old house with his quiet sister.

The raw material to be trained was growing steadily worse. Most of those who came in now had joined the Army unwillingly, and there was no reason why they should find military service tolerable. The war had become undisguisedly mechanical and inhuman.

What in earlier days had been drafts of volunteers were now droves of victims.

I was just beginning to be aware of this.

But the nightmare of smoke and sunlight had been in his eyes, with a sense of confusion and calamity of which I could only guess at the reality.

He was the shattered survivor of a broken battalion which had “done all that was expected of it.”

I asked about young Fernby. Durley had been in the same hospital with him at Rouen and had seen him once. “They were trying to rouse him up a bit, as he didn’t seem to recognize anybody.

… with life that I’d been in love then?—for the days had seemed saturated with the fecundity of physical health and fine weather, and it had been almost as if my own germinant aliveness were interfused with some sacrificial rite which was to celebrate the harvest.

“Germinating and German-hating,” I thought, recovering my sense of reality with a feeble joke.

After that I fell asleep.

It was, in fact, the most disgusting little conversation I’d ever listened to. But what right had I to blame the poor devils for trying to have a good time before they went up to the Line? …

Nevertheless, the War seemed to be doing its best to make me feel unheroic.

Next day I found the 5th I.B.D. Mess dispiriting. I knew nobody, and it wasn’t a place where people felt inclined to be interested in one another, since none of them were there for more than a few days.

Parkins did not conceal his dislike of the Front Line, and was now in hopes of getting a job as Railway Transport Officer.

But he was the sort of man who would get killed in some unutterably wretched attack after doing his best to dodge it.

Young Holt was another second-rate character, plump, smooth-faced and spuriously smart. He had escaped from the Infantry into the Balloon Section, and now fancied himself in a leather overcoat with a fur collar—playing at “being in the Royal Flying Corps.” He felt that R.F.C.

The surf-like sighing of the lofty colonnades could tranquillize my thoughts after the boredom of the tent and the chatter of the cardplayers crouching by the stove.

The pine-trees are patiently waiting for the guns to stop, I thought

, and I felt less resentment against the War than I had done since I left England. … One afternoon I followed an alley which led downhill to a big shuttered house.

Made good, and was killed in the trenches.” He smiled grimly. Discipline had to be enforced by brutality, said the Major; and, as I have already remarked, he wasn’t amenable to argument.

I hadn’t formed any opinion about Conscientious Objectors, but I couldn’t help thinking that they must be braver men than some I’d seen wearing uniforms in safe places and taking salutes from genuine soldiers.

Resolved to make the most of my last day at the Base, I went down to Rouen early in the afternoon without having wasted any time in applying for leave from the Adjutant. A tram took me most of the way;

modern warfare offered a niche for everyone, and many of them looked better qualified for a card-table than a military campaign. They were as much the victims of circumstances as the unfortunate troops in the trenches.

Puffing a cigar, I decided that there was a tolerant view to be taken about almost everybody, especially after a good dinner at the Hôtel de la Poste.

tonight, or tomorrow, or “some old time or other,” they’d be crawling up to the War in an over-ventilated reinforcement train, gazing enviously at the Red Cross trains which passed them—going the other way—and disparaging the French landscape, “so different to good old Blighty.”

Compared with “the troops,” who travelled in vans designed for horses and cattle, they were in clover.

The Colonel, on the other hand, probably supervised an office full of clerks who made lists of killed, wounded, and reinforcements.

Although the War has been described as the greatest event in history, it could be tedious and repetitional for an ordinary Infantry Officer like myself.

From Corbie Station the War had started me on my home journey in a Hospital Train.

The Battalion was in low spirits because the Colonel had been wounded a few weeks before, and he had been so popular that everyone regarded him as irreplaceable. His successor was indulgent and conciliatory, but it seemed that greater aggressiveness would have been preferable.

Contrasting him with the rough-tongued efficiency of Kinjack, I began to realize that, in a Commanding Officer, amiability is not enough.

Meanwhile we were in what was called “Corps Reserve,” and Colonel Easby had issued the order, “carry on with platoon training” (a pronouncement which left us free to kill time as best we could). No.

Col. E. “No, sir.” (Dismounts hastily and salutes again.) As Leake’s Company went by, the General was yelling something about why the hell hadn’t the men got the muzzles of their rifles covered (this being one of his “special ideas”).

“Pity he don’t keep his own muzzle covered,” remarked someone in the ranks, thereby voicing a prevalent feeling.

The Corps Commander was equally abusive because the “Cookers” were carrying brooms and other utilitarian objects. Also the Companies were marching with fifty yard intervals between them (by a special order of the late Rawlinson).

… There is nothing in all this, the reader will expostulate. But there was a lot in it, for us. We were moving steadily nearer to the Spring Offensive; for those who thought about it the days had an ever intensifying significance.

For me, the idea of death made everything seem vivid and valuable.

The War could be like that to a man, until it drove him to drink and suffocated his finer apprehensions.

Thus the Battalion slogged on into an ominous Easter, and every man carried his own hazardous hope of survival.

Overshadowed by the knowledge of what was ahead of us, I became increasingly convinced that a humble soldier holding up a blistered foot could have greater dignity than a blustering Corps Commander.

That night we were in huts among some wooded hills. I can remember how we had supper out in the moonlight, sitting round a brazier with plates of ration stew on our knees.

The Battalion spirit meant living oneself into comfortable companionship with the officers and N.C.O.s around one; it meant winning the respect, or even the affection, of platoon and company.

But while exploring my way into the War I had discovered the impermanence of its humanities.

One evening we could be all together in a cosy room in Corbie, with Wilmot playing the piano and Dunning telling me about the eccentric old ladies who lived in his mother’s boardinghouse in Bloomsbury.

by the middle of September it had been almost obliterated. I knew that a soldier signed away his independence; we were at the front to fight, not to think. But it became a bit awkward when one couldn’t look even a week ahead.

And now there was a steel curtain down between April and May.

On the other side of the curtain, if I was lucky, I should meet the survivors, and we should begin to build up our little humanities all over again.

It seemed to me, in my confused and exhausted condition, that I was at a crisis in my military career; and, as usual, my main fear was that I should make a fool of myself.

The idea of making a fool of oneself in that murderous mix-up now appears to me rather a ludicrous one; for I see myself merely as a blundering flustered little beetle; and if someone happens to put his foot on a beetle, it is unjust to accuse the unlucky insect of having made a fool of itself.

When I got back to Leake and Rees and Shirley I felt so lost and perplexed that I went straight on to Battalion H.Q.

and if I am being caustic and captious about them I can only plead the need for a few minutes’ postwar retaliation.

Let the Staff write their own books about the Great War say I.

The Infantry were biased against them, and their authentic story will be read with interest.

came sauntering up the trench with the detached demeanour of a gentle botanist. “Trust him to be up there having a look round,” I thought.

Within four hours of leaving it I was back in the Tunnel.

Back at Battalion Headquarters in the Tunnel I received from our Colonel and Adjutant generous congratulations on my supposedly dashing display. In the emergency candlelight of that draughty cellar-recess I bade them goodbye with voluble assurances that I should be back in a few weeks;

But the “bombing show” had increased my self-importance, and my exodus from the front-line was a garrulous one. A German bullet had passed through me leaving a neat hole near my right shoulder-blade and this patriotic perforation had made a different man of me.

I now looked at the War, which had been a monstrous tyrant, with liberated eyes.

For the time being I had regained my right to call myself a private individual.

of its burdens. The Adjutant would go on till he dropped, for he had an inexhaustible sense of duty. I never saw him again; he was killed in the autumn up at Ypres. …

I would like to be able to remember that I smiled grimly and departed reticently.

But the “bombing show” had increased my self-importance, and my exodus from the front-line was a garrulous one. A German bullet had passed through me leaving a neat hole near my right shoulder-blade and this patriotic perforation had made a different man of me.

But our minds were still out of breath and our inmost thoughts in disorderly retreat from bellowing darkness and men dying out in shell-holes under the desolation of returning daylight.

We were the survivors; few among us would ever tell the truth to our friends and relations in England.

We were carrying something in our heads which belonged to us alone, and to those we had left behind us in the battle. There were dying men, too, on board that Red Cross train, men dying for their country in comparative comfort.

We were the survivors; few among us would ever tell the truth to our friends and relations in England.

We were carrying something in our heads which belonged to us alone, and to those we had left behind us in the battle.

There were dying men, too, on board that Red Cross train, men dying for their country in comparative comfort.

… Obviously the woman journalist who wrote those words was deriving enjoyment from the War, though she may not have been aware of the fact. I wondered why it was necessary for the Western Front to be “attractively advertised” by such intolerable twaddle.

What was this camouflage War which was manufactured by the press to aid the imaginations of people who had never seen the real thing?

Many of them probably said that the papers gave them a sane and vigorous view of the overwhelming tragedy. “Naturally,” they would remark, “the lads from the front are inclined to be a little morbid about it; one expects that, after all they’ve been through.

one expects that, after all they’ve been through. Their close contact with the War has diminished their realization of its spiritual aspects.” Then they would add something about “the healing of Nations.”

Such people needed to have their noses rubbed in a few rank physical facts, such as what a company of men smelt like after they’d been in action for a week.

… The gong rang for luncheon, and Lady Asterisk left off reading a book by Tagore (whose mystical philosophies had hitherto seemed to me nebulous and unsatisfying).

At first I felt that I had so much to say that I didn’t know where to begin. But after several verbose failures it seemed as though the essence of my manifesto could be stated in a single sentence:

“I say this War ought to stop.”

During the struggle to put my unfusilierish opinions into some sort of shape, my confidence often diminished.

… of deception, etc., which prevents people from facing the truth and demanding some guarantee that the torture of humanity shall not be prolonged unnecessarily through the arrogance and incompetence of … Here it broke off, and I wondered how many c’s there were in “unnecessarily.”

I am not a conscientious objector. I am a soldier who believes he is acting on behalf of soldiers.

How inflated and unconvincing it all looked! If I wasn’t careful I should be yelling like some crank on a barrel in Hyde Park. Well, there was nothing for it but to begin all over again.

When I remarked to Tyrrell that “people couldn’t say I did it so as to avoid going back to France if I had been given a job in England,” he pulled me up short.

“What people say doesn’t matter. Your own belief in what you are doing is the only thing that counts.”

Knowing that he was right, I felt abashed; but I couldn’t help regretting that my second decoration had failed to materialize.

Walking restlessly about the garden at night I was oppressed by the midsummer silence and found no comfort in the twinkling lights along the Weald. At one end of the garden three poplars tapered against the stars; they seemed like sentries guarding a prisoner.

Across the uncut orchard grass, Aunt Evelyn’s white beehives glimmered in the moonlight like bones.

The hives were empty, for the bees had been wiped out by the Isle of Wight disease. But it was no good moping about the garden.

So I gazed fixedly at the floor and said, “Hadn’t you better have me put under arrest at once?”—thereby causing poor Major Macartney additional discomfort. My remark recoiled on me, almost as if I’d uttered something unmentionable.

“I’d rather die than do such a thing!” he exclaimed.

He was a reticent man, and that was his way of expressing his feeling about those whom he had watched, month after month, going out to the trenches, as he would have gone himself had he been a younger man.