Sir Edward Hulse on Activity in the Trenches; Vera Brittain on Inactivity and Contemplation

My Dearest Mother,

…I have got all your letters and parcels now. They came in a rush, and everything is coming regularly now. I have got O.’s socks, your Balaclava helmet, three lots of chocolate, a plum-pudding, Lady Hall’s things, etc…

I regret more than I can say not being able to talk German, as time and again I have heard conversations in their trenches which I should like to have been able to report, and every word of which I could hear, but could not understand.

Ottley (one of our five months’ Sandhurst lot)^[1] is a cousin of Bruce. He talks German well, and crawled out the night before last with two scouts. He heard two officers talking about their dug-out, and saying that our machine gun had killed three of their men the night before while they were digging the dug-out for these two officers. We dig our own! He also found out that they have got good discipline in front of us, as just as he got near to their trenches, there were several Germans talking aloud in the trenches, and an officer told them to shut up, and they boxed up complete ! (That’s more than some of our bright little lot do; some of these old hairies who served in South Africa are the devil to deal with.)

Amusingly, Edward Hulse will now, within the space of a paragraph, reverse course, and put some of those “old hairies” to work:

Every night pouring rain, and more and more of the trenches fell in, landslides everywhere, and as fast as one dug, one fell, and had revetted it, or shored it up properly, another bit of trench would come down with a run. My Company Sergeant Major went on leave with Pip, so that I had only an acting C.S.M., totally incompetent, and Swinton the only other officer. You will readily understand that that meant very little sleep night or day! I found the accommodation in the trenches very bad and anything but rain-proof. Having no time to dig myself, I got two defaulters on to a new Ritz-Carlton, and the servants on to a kitchen and bug-hutch for themselves, the whole connected by a neat little trench, and after two days’ hard work the new Coy. Head-quarters were completed;

So there are perquisites for one of His Majesty’s officers, after all. But I am giving Hulse, a hard-working officer and last month’s hard-fought hero, a hard time. He continues:

and having a little more time to myself, Swinton and I did the skilled labour, namely fitting up the inside and roofing—the latter we did quite extraordinarily well, and in the most scientific manner. It is quite rain-proof and proof from shrapnel, and luxurious beyond words. Little recesses, cut in the walls, hold a young library, food, plum puddings, and all the more valuable comestibles and drinks, which we do not trust in the servants’ cook-house dug-out. The inside, well lined with straw, is warm and well lit by a small oil lamp, supplemented by candles, for which we have cut little recesses. In short, the interior looks exactly like a shrine in a crypt!

A rosy picture, fired by enthusiasm, and just slightly macabre to boot. But then the down-side:

All this is all very well, but the trenches are inches deep in mud and water, and far worse than the ones we occupied before. The men’s bug-hutches are far worse than before…

So much for comfort. In what really is a perfect example of the trench-circumstances sub-genre of letters home, Hulse now fills his mother in on the wages of attrition:

We are now varying between 350 yards-500 yards from the enemy; I mean the trenches we have just left are. You will remember that our old trenches were only 100 yards from the enemy in places; but they make pretty good practice at us, and I had one man killed the first day in our new trenches, and two wounded. They had all three shown themselves, contrary to my orders, thinking that, as they were further off, they could put not only their heads but most of themselves outside the cover of the trenches.

I have accounted for two Germans myself, one on the night of the raid, whom I share with the scout who was next me. We both fired at once. The other I bagged two days ago, a fair shot at 400 yards; he was carrying wood along his parapet, and he threw up both arms and went by the board properly.

Again; the tone. The jocularity of murder. This is trench warfare, and this is a letter to a mother, who is certainly worried and very likely wishes to be made proud. But “sharing” a claim to a kill as if it were an act akin to sacking a quarterback, or, for that matter, shooting a bird. And “bagging…”

Well. Back to the subject of that raid:^[2]

Am delighted that you got the various messages about the raiding party, though it seems to have attained larger proportions than it deserves.

Indeed. With late November’s lack of narratively-enticing battles the historians were thrown back on representative incident. Conan Doyle mentions Hulse by name in his general history of the war amidst a paragraph devoted to

those smaller exploits which seem so slight in any chronicle, and yet collectively do so much to sustain the spirit of the Army. Now this dashing officer, now that, attempted some deed upon the German line, and never failed to find men to follow him to death…  in each case trenches were temporarily won, the enemy was damaged, and a spirit of adventure encouraged in the trenches.^[3]

This, it seems unnecessary to point out, hardly solves the problem of weighing strategically useless suffering–even Doyle throws “temporarily won” and “death” together–against the dubious morale benefit of staying active and hurting the enemy.

Back to Hulse and his worsening case of they-seem-more-offensive-now-plus-it’s-war-dammit-war hunting metaphors:

What annoyed me most was that owing to the enemy having been reinforced, we could not bag a prisoner, or even bring in ” fresh meat,” or a cap or badge, which was what the General really wanted. If it had come off two nights earlier, I believe we might have done a big thing…

I love Gramps’ remark on my exploit! It rather tallies with a letter which I have just got from Charlie Stanford, but puts it in a much more terse and business-like way! Charlie spends a whole page on congratulations, and another whole page on advice not to do it again! Priceless!

…Yes, please continue chocolate, plum puddings, etc., but send no clothing of any sort until I ask for it, as I have some over still.

Very best love to you and O., and another letter at first opportunity.

Ever your loving
Ted^[4]

 

Vera Brittain, home now for the Christmas holiday wrote to Roland Leighton today, a century back:

Buxton, 11 December 1914

I cannot tell you how delighted I was to hear of you and Edward getting together after all. It was one of the things I always wished might have happened but thought too satisfactory to be probable.

That may be the single greatest English Restraint sentence ever written. Is that a past perfect continuous contrafactual construction? And why speak of love and friendship when we can reflect upon the probability of things possibly being excessively satisfactory?

All Edward’s military experiences seemed at the beginning to be going so badly–first his difficulty in getting father’s consent, & then the long wait for a commission… But it really does seem to have happened for the best…

So far so polite and formal. But now, in response to Roland’s somewhat pompous letter of three days ago, a ladylike gauntlet is thrown down:

You must be glad to get out of the Territorial Force into the Regulars–they seem to touch the war so much closer. I can quite understand your feeling very far removed from such a life as University life and that the contemplative part is a waste of time compared with the active part you are playing at present. But of course it is not a waste of time really, and perhaps after all you will come again to see that it is not.^[5]