Читать книгу To Fight Alongside Friends: The First World War Diaries of Charlie May - David Crane - Страница 50

We went route-marching this morning, that is B, C and D Coys did. I took them and quite a little jaunt it was, the morning having cleared and the sun came out to glisten things up a bit. Especially the fog beads on the spider webs which hang about the trees on the hill between Bonneville and Montrelet.

Worthy rode with me and we chatted of home and the early days and such things and were very happy. And this afternoon his Coy played mine at football and beat them. We had a very poor team up and I must look into it before we play again.

The post has stopped once more for three or four days. We move on Monday down south another sixteen miles, to Fourdrinoy I believe. And there we become really members of 7th Division, Capper’s Division,^xx a regular hard-fighting lot, now down from Flanders resting. It looks as though with them we shall be ‘for it’, as the men say. At any rate we should see some fighting, a nice change from this messing about and continual strafing by the powers that be.

Our own particular bête noir has been at it again, bullying Ramsbottom and threatening to send him to England, all because a C Coy man had lost a wire-cutter.^xxi

I think our friend is something short in his mental outfit. There is nothing else I can put his disgusting manners down to. Until I met him always cherished the idea that the name ‘English officer’ was synonymous with that of ‘gentleman’. I am reluctantly compelled now to admit that it can mean ‘bully and cad’ also. It has been somewhat of a shock to me, as a disillusionment always is, and I wish with all my heart that he would go away from us and make room for some decent, mannered gentleman whom we would look up to and follow.

I cannot help feeling that an officer makes a fatal mistake in not endeavouring to win the respect and affection of those who serve under him. Men are so strange, all of us I mean. We are so ready to make a hero, and love him. Therein lies the secret of leadership, and I feel it in my bones that nothing will hold us so much when the time comes as the example of him whom we honour and love. Field punishments, CBs [Confined to Barracks] and other such minor irritants don’t help in the trenches. It is only the things that a man feels within him matter there. When you are right up alongside sudden death it is remarkable how one’s views alter and how you see what a man really is. And I know, I know, I know, that it is then that the man who has won respect and affection will triumph over him who has used his power as a bludgeon only. All of which sounds very dramatic and serious and not at all like me. But the truth, I suppose is seldom very humorous.