To Fight Alongside Friends: The First World War Diaries of Charlie May

Another march today [to Candas]. It was only ten miles but it very nearly beat the men, already tired and worn out as they were. Old B got rather messed up this morning through Murray getting mixed over some order about great-coats with the Brigade Sergeant-Major. They got them off for the wagons to carry only to find that idea was off. We therefore had to put them on again, which made us late and the CO left us to follow on by ourselves. This we did to the best of our ability and eventually arrived at this village just on the tail of the battn. The Coy had been near beat but they bucked up to pass the other Coys, swinging along at a great rate and singing. Only we, their officers, knew how done the poor devils were. But they have a good sleep before them tonight and, as we are here for a fortnight at least, we hope to be right as rain and a thoroughly fit battalion before that time is out. And no doubt we shall be.

7th December ’15

I stole an hour this afternoon and rode out towards Canaples for a look round and to forget the battalion and the war and for a little time to imagine that you were with me and that we had the open countryside to stroll through as so often we have done in the dear days before all the world were soldiers. It is pretty country out this road, especially to the left where the ground slopes down into a little valley the sides of which are dotted with clumps of larch and birch and other such spidery limbed, delicate trees. I turned off the highway out there and Lizzie and I strolled down the slopes to the valley’s foot where we wandered along the edge of the woods cut off from all sight of man’s handiwork and with only the wood-pigeons and the magpies for company. It was all damp and clean-looking, fresh and peaceful – one of the few pretty spots I have yet seen in France – and it cleared my head and made me happy and sent me back to my work refreshed.

I thought of you as we strolled there, Lizzie with her reins slack wandering where she would and at her own pace and I longed that you could have been with me, for I know how you would have loved it and how happy we two would have been.

The green rides of Epping came back to me in a flash. You in that black spotted muslin dress you used to wear looking cool and lovely so that I just asked nothing more than to walk along and gaze at you dumbly, like any simple country lout gazes at his maid.

It is a strange world. Here I am in the midst of men, of work and dirt and close to fire and steel and sudden death. My heart should be fired with martial ardour, I should have no thought for anything but the fighting I am paid for but instead my whole being is filled to the exclusion of all else with the thought of you, dear heart, of our darling Baby and of the happiness which has been ours.

We are here I hear for about three weeks and already seem to have returned to our wonted routine. The Army is wonderful. One day it strains and strives and fights with blood and noise and dirt predominant, the next it returns to all its old starch and buckram and curses a man for a dirty boot whom the day before it had loved though he was mud-caked to his eyebrows in the trenches.

8th December ’15

We are now filled with ambition as house builders. Orders have arrived that we are to look out suitable buildings and convert them into fit habitations for L’Armée Brittanique, which is to feed, wash and sleep in them at its own sweet will and get strong and dangerous ready for the ever-recurring ‘new offensive in the Spring’. It is most interesting, and no end of a problem. We have one hammer per company, the promise of some wood, 25 yards of waterproof canvas for the battalion, a limited supply of chloride of lime, and 12lbs of nails. And thus armed we set forth, [illegible] is ordered, to produce four Ritz hotels replete with every comfort for the soldiers of the King. I ask you! Truly if it is accomplished, as I have no doubt it will be, my admiration for the Army will go up by leaps and bounds. If only we had some bundles of firewood and a screw or two the outlook might be more rosy. But 12lbs of nails, a hammer and 25yds of felt! I ask you!!!

We have been to see D Company again tonight and have gambled. Naughty boys! Yet somehow I do not feel so naughty as I might have done had I not won 28 francs.

9th December ’15

The house building continues, but very slowly. Up to now it has been mostly talk. In a day or two, however, we really expect to do something, and, personally, I am consumed with a fiendish desire to use up those 12lbs of nails. I feel that to smite lustily upon a nail would furnish some outlet for the awful amount of energy which is fast accumulating within me and causing me, in common with the rest, to fret and fume at the idleness which is now being forced upon us.

Rumour appears to be rife in Manchester that we, their darling ‘Pals’, have suffered heavy casualties. Save the mark. I should think it must have originated in some poor devil in another battalion dying of ennui. That is the only way I can account for it.

It is raining again. It always rains here. For that reason I can never understand why they haven’t a river or two knocking around. But they haven’t, nor even a decent stream. I haven’t seen running water, save the Somme, since we landed. It is rather remarkable when one thinks of it. They seem quite content with their village ponds, which are apparently kept going by the drainage from the ‘middens’, and from which the horses and cattle drink, apparently thriving thereon and so producing a somewhat pleasurable example of perpetual motion.

10th December ’15

I am something of a hero today. When I have screwed up my courage to a point where it permits one to face officials, who present forms which I fill up and sign, always feel that I am. And today I have sent off a parcel to you. That entailed a three mile ride, which was joyous, and an interview with a postal official and yellow forms, which was not. And to think that all this writing and signing was all around nothing more offensive than the poor, little, shell-chipped and harmless statuette of St Joseph which I had brought from the old ruined château, of affectionate memory.

And I got hot and excited about it, entered things in the wrong places and had to rewrite the forms, so that I feel sure I have aroused the suspicions of the post people and it is doubtful if the parcel will ever reach you after all. Oh, dear, it is terrible, this war.

We have orders today that we are to split up as a Division and mix ourselves with others which have been out longer.

It is a good thing and shows wisdom in the higher command which decreed it. It means stiffening for us in action and the fillip for the older crowd which the introduction of young, fresh and keen troops always produces.

We don’t know when we move yet, and it may not be for a long time but the news is something in that it shows we are not forgotten. It has bucked us all up wonderfully.

I have just heard that I do not get my company back till Monday. Two more days of this sickening idleness. It does not suit me at all. I am like a childless wife, peevish and ill content through having nothing on my hands to look after.

11th December ’15

It has rained again today, the 10th day in succession. They say you can get accustomed to anything. Perhaps you can, I do not know. All I can vouch for is that we do not get used to the rain. We only strafe it the more with each succeeding day of humidity. I had your letter today in which you say you have not heard from me since Nov 30th. I cannot understand it unless the Censor has been busy at the Base and I have unwittingly been too communicative.

Don Murray and I went out into the country by ourselves this afternoon and forgot building operations and rest billets and every other such objectionable thing in trying to shoot crows with our revolvers. Needless to say we did not succeed. But it took us completely out of ourselves and was therefore quite a success.

12th December ’15

The doctor came in to see me this morning on his way to Canaples and I decided to saddle up and go with him, the fresh breeze and stronger sunlight of the morning tempting me more strongly than the exhortations of the padre. So off we went, trotting along together down the open road, with the far-flung uplands on either side, the tempting curves of the road to lure us on, the buffeting breeze to set our blood a-tingling and the stronger sun to burn our spirits up with the joy of the morning. With such a morn as this was, with a good nag between his knees, a good friend at his side, with the merry clatter of hoofs in his ear and the open road before him, a man were surely but a common glutton if he asked more in an hour of his life?

We rattled under the railway bridge, where a picturesque but unsoldierly French territorial stood on guard, through Montrelet and Fieffes and so down the valley road to Canaples.

I found Prince there in good form but the others were out cutting wood.

Canaples must be noted. It has a stream, let that sink in. Also it is the proud possessor of a railway station, two street lamps, a milk refinery and a château. Canaples is some village in these parts and is typically French in that it has a café wherein two young ladies dispense drinks or, just as readily, photographs of themselves in the nude. Truly it is a pleasing country.

It was not possible for me to sample either of the chief wares of the café but I understand it has been overcrowded by my depraved company since the woodcutting commenced and the only reason any of its stock is still in the possession of its proprietors is the acute penury of my high-minded privates, who have not been paid for over a fortnight. I had intended paying them this morning but a wise providence decreed that I should forget the Acquittance Roll. Thus a prolonged moral depravity has by happy chance been avoided.

I have just discovered one reason why streams are so scarce. There are no field drains here, nor any attempt at ditching. Hence when it rains the water just lies on the surface till, in good time, it soaks in. Very simple and very rotten. Even the uplands are a bog.

13th December ’15

The Coy has come back and I feel a happier man than I have done for days. They blew in this morning looking dirty and wet and were at once turned loose to clean up & have an easy. And not before they wanted it, I’ll be bound. The big majority have not had a half-hour to themselves since they landed in France. I think it a mistake. ‘All work and no play’ is a very true axiom and I certainly know the men do twice the work after a day’s holiday.

Tomorrow I am going to let them have the day to themselves, even though the general is coming around. That may not be strictly military but it certainly is common sense, a factor one meets remarkably seldom in this game. I may be a heretic, certainly I am wrong to do so, but I cannot help but both see and feel that there is a vast wastage in this army of ours. Not, I mean, of materials or stores – for the distribution of such things is wonderfully organised – but of men and brains. Initiative is asked for, but woe to the man who displays it. Opinions are sometimes sought – but apparently with the sole idea of making an opportunity for the airing of some higher grade’s scheme, already settled in his own mind. So that one feels – and somewhat resents it – that there is humbug about and that one is being looked upon as more or less of a fool. One does not like being thought a fool, even though one has no claim to genius.

If I were alone in this I might be thought that unutterable thing – a man with a grievance. But I am not alone. All our officers feel as I do. And when thirty active business brains feel like that surely it were but foolishness to deny justification.

We came out here to fight, not heroically or in the heat of passion, but just to do our little bit like Englishmen should. We did not expect to be satiated with red tape and buckram or have our brains cramped into a hidebound receptacle of blank banality which those of a lad could fill.

There is still something wrong with the Army. I do not think it is with the higher command that the fault lies. Nor can I allow that it is with the company officers. It is with that vast sea of senior ranks, or climbers, that I find the fault and I cannot but believe that there the fault will be found by others more fitted to judge than I.

14th December ’15

It has been inspection of kit, cleanliness, rifles, etc. today and if one had been looking for proof of the efficacy of this time-honoured army institution he had only to have seen my dear, dirty Coy at 9 a.m. parade and then look upon them, brushed and cleaned, at 3.30 p.m. The difference in them was simply marvellous though they are by no means properly clean yet. The trenches leave their marks on a man in more ways than one.

We visited C Coy Mess this evening. It was quite a birthday party. Yet there was no real birthday. That, be it whispered, was Rambottom’s

own unaided invention, and was used solely for the more or less base purpose of beguiling his landlady into letting him entertain his friends up till 10.15pm. Until this night he has been forced to seek his couch at 9.30, his landlady believing in the axiom of ‘early to bed’ and being a woman of very considerable force of character, which, in Ramsbottom’s eyes, is in no way diminished by the fact that she has two charming daughters whom only very respectable young men who go to bed at very respectable hours may converse with. My dear pal Gordon is so awfully susceptible. He confided in me tonight that the young and pretty one had called him her ‘cher Capitaine Gordon’. It had made his heart flutter. I advised him in future not to risk his chances by telling horrid untruths to the desired-one’s parents.

15th December ’15

We route-marched today as a company. The whole of B let loose on a freezing, windy morning when the sun shone and the blood pulsed and one’s legs flung out untiringly. It was a most enjoyable little tour through Bonneville and Fieffes. The latter village with its twin, Montrelet, is more charmingly situated than any we have yet met in France. It flaunts red and purple roofs among the brown tree trunks in a most jumbled, picturesque mosaic and its old white church with the square tower and slate roof is quite Scotch in its simple, quaint design. Altogether a charming, little spot and one which in summer must be quite entrancing – viewed always with a respectful aloofness.

Prince very pertinently remarked, as we scrambled down the hill-side and feasted our eyes on the ripping little pictures in the valley below, ‘What a pity it stinks! And why is it that Art and a drainage scheme never will go together?’ I did not answer him, because I could not. Such things are beyond the mental capacity of a plain soldier such as I am.

16th December ’15

It is one of the many marvellous virtues of Tommy Atkins that he soon forgets. It is the thing which helps him more than all else to bear his none too rosy lot cheerfully. Therefore I suppose it is a trait everyone should be thankful for. Yet somehow one finds oneself looking upon the peculiarity with somewhat mixed feelings when one is the company officer of the aforesaid Tommy. For instance, today we went out to Auchen to do some firing on a very primal range. I conceived the idea of doing an attack, on the lines of field firing, and in due course it was duly launched.

Certainly the Company fired. There was no doubt about that. The ‘rapid’, simply ripped out. But as the attack of trained soldiers the manoeuvre was otherwise scarcely a success. They did everything wrong they could possibly do, and were most cheerful about it. They seemed to think they were still in the trenches. I should have strafed them, but I couldn’t find the heart to spoil the really happy afternoon they were having.

At Grantham and Salisbury [Plain] their attack was simply perfect. Now they are in the real thing it possesses a hundred faults. I suppose it is just human nature. And anyway we have had a jolly good afternoon.

17th December ’15

Your Xmas parcels came to me today. They made me feel a regular school-boy and I opened them with the same zest that one used to bring to bear on a tuck-box. They were ripping, the plum pudding especially being received with general cheers by the mess. Then your letter came, full of loving wishes to me. It was a sweet letter, the letter of a sweet woman.