A Legend of the Great War

Andrew Dunbar had donned the kilt just two years after his first long trousers, and turned seventeen in the trenches of Flanders. It amazed him, sometimes, that he was there, for he had been odd man out among his four brothers. Among those feuding hoodlums in the slums of Glasgow, Andrew was timid and studious, and would as soon have spent his life in the Mitchell Library or the Art Galleries at Kelvingrove. A kindly recruiting-sergeant of the Black Watch, while people still had a peacetime idea of what kindness was, had told him he could be measured with his boots on, and cast a thoughtful eye towards the newspaper. So Andrew, whose worst enemies would never have called him slow on the uptake, got into the army with the Daily Mail for the 4th August 1914 wadded up inside his boots.

As he was so slight and unmilitary, but a very capable rifle shot, a benevolent company commander made the boy a sniper to keep him out of the violence, setting him on the path to more killing than most soldiers see. Two days in the autumn of 1915 saw all his brothers dead, three of them in a bad quarter of an hour on the Taupière redoubts, and himself sent to London to receive his Cross from the King-Emperor’s hand. When people called him lucky, he would always say he was a timid man, and that is how he learned that the naked truth can pass for modesty, if you tell it the right way.

With almost everyone he had known dead on the Taupière, Andrew’s closest friend, and usual companion in the almost umbilical partnership of sniper and observer, was a man whom most people took time to recognise as the giant he was. Staff-sergeant Colin Campbell Sime, born in Lucknow in the siege, had been a soldier two decades longer than regulations allowed. Most people wondered why an impeccable soldier, fearsome fighter, crafty wangler and staunch Army man like Ross, who should long since have made Regimental Sergeant-Major, had remained a sergeant. After all, it was only his peacetime rank, which he had held on the terrible retreat from Mons, as he carried three weaker men’s rifles for them, and the junior subaltern under his arm when he told it where drink was to be had. To casual inquirers Ross mentioned drinking and fighting, though never dishonesty, or disrespect to an officer of the crown.

Andrew knew the true story. On Prussian Guard day at Ypres, Colin Ross had scraped together a few remains of his own battalion, a few Indian Dogras and a couple of Gurkhas, and in his own words, ‘We gave the last wave the right aboot, and thatDie Wacht am Rhein song, they’ll be singin’ it in Nepal yet.’ A week later Ross had politely refused an exhausted general’s order to summarily execute a deserter, because ‘There’s time for due process, sir, so it’s no’ lawful.’

Not a word went on Ross’s record, of course, for the lowliest subaltern could have told the general he had been saved from far worse trouble than the old man. The general, once in possession of his faculties again, was rumoured to know it. But Ross’s promotion and medal had evaporated, without a word admitted in principle. Andrew – and what was more important, every one of Ross’s regimental officers – thought a medal as big as a soup-plate would have met the case nicely.

On returning from leave, Andrew and Ross were told that their battalion had been moved, and they would have to remain where they were pending further orders. So they waited in Boulogne with some more men of various regiments who had returned from leave, spending their mornings doing fairly light fatigues. After lunch they would report to the Town Major’s office to have their leave passes datestamped and receive a chit for a further day’s rations and billet. This was the process by which crafty soldiers had been known to obtain an extra week’s leave, and often some travel around France into the bargain.

In the afternoons they were sent to mark targets on the rifle range, which for Andrew was not work at all. When his civilian sporting rifle was noticed, he was detailed to instruct a new draft, while Colin Ross was borrowed to teach drill to groups of colonial officers, whose experience had brought direct commissions as captains and majors while they still required a final polish in the military arts. They were planters, ivory hunters, Boer War irregulars, and on one joyous occasion a former rissaldar of Bengal cavalry who had bought his own ticket to London. Ross’s theory of discipline was strained by meeting so many old friends.

Andrew’s work at Boulogne unsettled him more than he could have explained. He could teach, all right, in the sense that he understood and could communicate all that he did. But he felt his lack of self-projection, his inability to draw the interest of people who were only marginally interested in what he had to give.

Like frustrated teachers everywhere, he blamed his students, and the system which had sent such people to war, even though blaming the system was a far less automatic response in those days than it has since become. But beyond all doubt, the quality of some of the battalions arriving in France was not what it used to be. When it came to shooting, they were disinclined to make an effort, and far too prone to blame their weapons. This gained little sympathy from Andrew, who had been well taught with a Japanese Arisaka rifle, of all things, and learned to like it very well. But when he took a new Lee-Enfield from its grease and put twenty-six shots into the four hundred yard target in one pounding, roaring minute, they took it for some kind of trick.

Compared with his original battalion, among the First Hundred Thousand and well leavened from the old regular army, the new men seemed resigned to horrors which Andrew in his day had hardly suspected, blind to the possibility that the man who studied his own survival might outlive those who did not. Some were the very best of good men, but without the inclination to be good soldiers. They were in the army from the highest of motives, most of them, but thought their duty discharged by being there and enduring what was to be endured. Many would die so uselessly and so soon, Andrew thought, that they were virtually stealing the labour of valued soldiers who had been detached to train them, and wasting the equipment they took to the earth with them.

Andrew was forgetting the men whom early death or wounds had weeded out of his own battalion – for bad soldiers get unlucky faster – and he was forgetting, through details like his resentment of petty discipline or his inability to keep step in drill, just how high his own standards in trench soldiering had become.

Once Andrew was witness to a quite astonishing tirade, by which a sergeant proposed to educate some new arrivals:

‘Now this ‘ere is your rifle, and the nature of your rifle is to be a man’s weapon. That is why yer fucking queer fellows, clever as they may be in musical comedies an’ that,don’t ‘ave no chance of becoming proficient in its use. Now it’s well known that your southern races an’ such are kind of suspect that way, to say it polite-like – if you want proof, look at the fuss they make about their bleedin’ masculinity, hey? Which is why good musketry is the preserve of your northern European peoples, see. Take our gallant allies the Froggies, now, I don’t deny as they can fight. Very nice field artillery they got, what you aim by doing sums an’ turning handwheels, an’ they don’t mind cold steel, just like them fucking ‘omosexualists will scratch each other’s bleedin’eyes out, see? But that don’t make ’em rifleman like what we are – or even like the Huns, for them barstards are at least northern Europeans. Now you’ll get dahn an’ fire ten rounds rapid, an’ you’ll understand why, if any of you young ladies puts a shot off the paper –she don’t need to waste no breath explaining nothing!‘

Andrew stood numbed by the horror of it. It would have taken a lot to make him into a useless shot – but this, early in his military life, might have done it. For his own part, he taught his drafts that their lot was easier than it might have been, for rifle shooting was a rational science, the sole skill he knew in which achievement was precisely proportional to the amount of work put into it. But he would always remember the sergeant’s speech, as typifying the awful purpose of a man with an idea behind him. He did not think he knew any homosexualists personally, and had only the vaguest idea what they did, but for the moment at least, he was on their side. There were very credible rumours of a homosexual sergeant being killed on the Taupière, and Andrew knew the men had taken great care always to let him use the latrine alone, which was surely a mark of respect.

On the fourth morning they were sent by train to Étaples, there to be joyously reunited with their surviving comrades. Their battalion was in the process of amalgamation with another Black Watch battalion which had suffered badly at Loos, to be brought up to more or less full strength by the drafts of new men coming from Scotland.

This, above all other places, was where they realised that a great army is a society and as diverse as any other. The Bull Ring at Étaples was a training camp, which had been set up to give new arrivals their final preparation before going to the front. In theory it could have given the practical training, on war as it really was, which Andrew and his friends had lacked, but this opportunity was entirely thrown away.

The specialised courses were well-run, but they were for experienced soldiers, not the new drafts. Andrew was determined to be nothing but a sniper, so he got himself detailed for a course in demolition by explosives. Nothing, he felt, was so unlikely to find any application in France, where the problem was to get anything to stay up.

Far more than a technical school, though, the Bull Ring was a place where the function of drill and discipline had swelled to a monster, where merciless drill-sergeants seemed impelled to crush the last vestiges of civilian independence which any miscreant might try to smuggle up the line to the front. Andrew wondered whether the world actually needed the sort of men who became Bull Ring drill-instructors, and the presence of seasoned troops seemed only to incense them. Everybody hated them, just as everyone hated staff officers, munitions workers, or any others who had safe jobs and yet profited by war.