Wessex Tales: "A Short Walk in France" (Story 30)

This is one among 38 stories in the collection

  ~ WESSEX TALES ~

  Eight thousand years in the life of an English village

  ‘ A Short Walk in France ’

  (Story 29 of 38)

  Robert Fripp

  Copyright Robert Fripp 2013

  ISBN: 978-0-9918575-6-2

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  Cover

  First World War ‘Official Photographs’ (51) D.1154

  Photo: John Warwick Brooks and Ernest Brooks,

  National Library of Scotland

  Permanent URL: https://digital.nls.uk/74548222

  Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-SA

  Cover design by The Design Unit,

  www.thedesignunit.com

  Table of Contents

  A Short Walk in France

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Endnotes

  The Author’s Note

  Books by Robert Fripp

  Reach me Online

  A List of my Stories

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  ~ WESSEX TALES ~

  ‘ A Short Walk in France ’

  “There died a myriad

  And of the best, among them…

  For an old bitch gone in the teeth,

  
For a botched civilization…”

  Ezra Pound

  “These fought in any case”

  It was early September, 1916, when Jack Okeford and his regiment scraped off the mud of trenches near Arras and marched south, smiling in their hearts for the glorious summer afforded by French countryside. For one brief interlude this might have been a time of tranquil peace; they saw little of war on the open road. It was, as one old combatant described it, seventy-three years later: “A heaven of green fields, with friendly people living in peaceful villages under quiet skies”. For a week and a bit they marched, knowing but the calm of vagabonds caught up between blue sky above, bright-costumed peasants in green fields below, a glass of wine or two, the comradeship of others each with other loves, the same fears—and peace. But always, from the south, each day nearer, each night louder, came the bruit of an incessant thunder that would soon become the chorus of the guns.

  Thus the first week of September passed for Jack Okeford, marching as if through a peasant-peopled canvas by Millet, with haystacks by Monet, that was late summer in Artois and Picardy.

  From one of Jack’s letters to his mother at the time:

  My dearest Mother,

  I hope you are well, I am too. I am writing you a letter now because they say that we are moving on at last. I don’t know where. We spent the last while digging new trenches near a town called Aras and living in them too. We built a whole village under the ground with a kitchen and bunks only we don’t have a pub. The last week of June we thought that we would drown because it rained all of the time and the wooden catwalks floated off so it was all mud but they fed us well, so I am feeling good. When the catwalks were floating I remembered the little raft I made out of those old sheep hurdles which was left behind at the sheep washing pond Uncle Ted dams with straw bales each June on the Cookwell Brook. I thought of floating down the river on them and getting stuck in reeds on the wrong bank and coming home late for tea and all over muddy. I do a lot of thinking like that here. I hope Uncle Ted didn’t get washed as well as the ewes this year like last year when that big one raised up and knocked him under water. I shouldn’t laugh but I can’t help to smile sometimes because there’s not much here to smile about and you need a chuckle sometimes. We can hear the guns sometimes when the weather is right but a battalion of Guards coming off the line said it was all right because they were ours. They were supposed to go over the top at the end of June but the weather kept them in their trenches and our guns kept pasting the Huns for another week. They’re attacking the Germans at a place 25 miles from us called the river Somm. Then the weather cleared in July and the army gave the guns a breather. When the sun shon I thought of every one of you haying in the low field. Here in France the grass is in full growth and very sweet so I suppose it must be at Okeford. I was thinking how Reggie slipped the traces between Blackie’s legs this time last year and he took on in circles with Old Sheba in her collar and the empty wain behind and frighted all the girls. Well you’ve got to laugh don’t you? Every morning here when the dew is off the grass I think of Uncle Ted and Reggie and Susan with the team and making hay with the side-rake hitched to Sheba, and Susan with her tedding rake to turn the swathes she says rips the bottom of her skirt. Tell her Jack says to rub grounsel and dock leaves on her legs to stop the chiggers biting. I suppose little Reggie will be hardish up enough now he can use the long pitchfork and put it over the reams proper-like this summer. Times past, he did always pitch as much on Uncle Ted up on the box as on the wain. Did Reggie learn to make a proper swan-back load on the wain yet? I hope we knock the Kaizer back to Berlin before his time comes. When it do come on to rain here, I wonder if the hay is cut and home at Okeford and if the girls need to ted it all over again before it do dry, or if the rain that we had here have passd you on by. Our corporal whos a decent chap though he dont half talk queer, his name is King and he’s from London, just came by saying Look Sharp Okeford, so I suppose we’re off. Say hello to every body home from Jack and a kiss to you and Susan.

  Yours very respectful, your loving son

  Jack

  The British General Staff meanwhile was sparing no expense to butcher its own troops on an unprecedented scale. On the first day of the first battle of the Somme, Generals Sir Douglas Haig and Sir Henry Rawlinson managed to place nearly sixty thousand men in harm’s way. Such is the contempt that institutional ineptitude combined with foul ambition holds for better beings.

  The first battle of the Somme began by re-staging the British military debacle and slaughter at New Orleans a century before, but on a more ambitious scale. After New Orleans came the Crimean war. Little had been learned. After repulsing a British attack on Sevastopol, a Russian officer coined an enduring phrase, that British troops were ‘lions commanded by asses’. Fifty years after the Crimea came South Africa. Despite defeats at the battle of Two Rivers, at Magersfontein, at Colenso and the slaughter on Spion Kop, British commanders were still unable to grasp a simple truth: Advancing infantry could not win battles against well dug-in troops equipped with contemporary firearms. As late as 1910, Boers in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State were still resisting the British under the slogan: ‘Depend on God and Mausers’.

  In 1815 the British took 2,042 casualties (including two generals killed) marching across open country against well dug-in defenders at New Orleans. A century later, some red-tabbed, brass-bound buttock of humanity dreamed up a plan of attack whereby, in perfect visibility, battalions of men would walk upright towards German lines across eight hundred yards of open ground into vectored machine gun fire. To ensure that the Germans enjoyed perfect conditions for mass slaughter, British infantry advanced into the sun as it rose behind German lines.

  On that first day, British commanders managed to murder, maim or wound fifty-seven thousand four hundred and fifty of their soldiers, a figure rounded to the nearest life, or ten—for what was the value of a single young man’s life, or ten thousand, set against proud military traditions of pomp, hubris and brick-thick stupidity?

  Once again, these dinosaurs of Empire learned nothing from their folly. By mid-September thei
r reward for butchering their troops was one thousand yards of mud. If they learned anything at all, it was to demand: More men. Give us more men, more sons, more fathers, husbands, uncles, widows, orphans, lives and futures lost. Give us more death. More blood. And in return we promise French and Belgian mud.

  From somewhere on the road between Le Sars and the Somme:

  My dearest Mother,

  I hope you are well, I am too but my feet are sore after three days marching when we sat about in trenches weeks before that. I forgot to say my stomach is right as rain now. I couldn’t keep anything in for ten days, it was like feed through a goose but the MO give me yellow pills to put in the water and it cured up before we left Aras. We passt a lot of German prisoners coming out yesterday and they looked that sick and grey there were hundreds of them and they don’t look different from our lads except their uniforms, some of our chaps shouted at them they mostly didn’t know what it was but one chap who knew our language shouted back Your Time Comes Soon English. and then they marched away. The same day we passt some people near the roadside taking supers off beehives which is a month late but the weather has been that good that bees are still making honey. They must have been section supers because it’s too late to take off whole combs. There is white clover here which you know is the best. I saw they had already started to feed them but I couldn’t stop to look could I? Imagine what corporal King would say. I wisht I could have helped Mr. Forbes with his new hives again this year. Some of these people still has barley-straw flat topped skeps which is really old. They can grow anywhere around Okeford and if you know how to smoke them properly with puffballs and cardboard they don’t ever sting. It’s a shame Susan and Uncle Ted don’t want them near the house because they do well on charlock though you have to heat charlock honey to get crystals out, and they make lots when they eat the rose-bay near the river Mr. Forbes says. Some of our lads got really frightened when we were drinking red wine in an estaminey, that’s like a pub but they don’t drink beer in France, and a Guardsman who had been in the Somm told me When You Go Over the Top Son (that’s what we call charging the enemy) the Only Thing you can Do is Walk a Yard or Two, then Spin Sideways as if you’d been hit, lie in the Nearest Shellhole and then Stay There. He said we should Make a Plan and I will make a plan when we get there so you must not worry about me. Because I’m not frightened at all. I’ll be all right. I know you have all done with the harvest by now. It’s all over here. I thought of Reggie the other day when we saw a farm with the peas harvest gathered in hovels of hurdles and a little boy with a clapper-rattle scaring crows just like Reggie use to. Who’s scaring crows off our peas now Reggie’s growed up? You can tell me when you write. I don’t think I’ll ever be as good with a scythe as Uncle Ted, when he cuts out the first two swathes to get the binder to the field, and it seems a miracle how quick he can make up his ties for sheaves. Its getting dark so I can’t see to write any more, I hope our guns will let me sleep. Say hello to every body and tell them Jack says he’s fine.

  Yours very respectfully, your loving son

  Jack

  P.S. I’m giving this to the Guardsman I met in the estaminay to post because he’s coming out. He’s a good chap and he told me he’ll post it soon.