CHAPTER II

A REINFORCEMENTS CAMP

I

_The Sunny Valley_

The reinforcements camp lay pleasantly in a sunny valley. The nearest
town was Harfleur, besieged exactly five hundred years earlier by Henry
V. of England, who placed his chief reliance on his big guns and his
mines and was not disappointed. The camp commandant was insistent that
the ground round the tents and huts should be turned into gardens, and
before long the valley was bright with flowers. There was peace over all
the landscape here. Sometimes a train of horse trucks, crowded with men
standing at the sliding doors or sitting with legs dangling over the
rails, panted up the long slope past the foot of the valley, and every
evening the supply trains pulled slowly off on their way to the front,
each laden with one day's rations for twelve thousand men. Fresh drafts
for the infantry and artillery arrived every day, stayed a few days, and
then were sent up the line. Probably a thousand men a month would be a
fair estimate for the wastage from a division at that time, that is, the
whole Expeditionary Force had to be renewed completely once a year, as
far as its fighting units were concerned. Drafts therefore were
continually passing through our camp, and I had many opportunities of
studying the morale of individuals of all ranks. The result was
interesting and worth setting down. My experience was that the good
heart of fighting men was affected by only two avoidable causes. The
first was the large number of young able-bodied men engaged in
occupations, on the lines of communications and at the base, which might
have been carried through effectively by others. These young men never
were in danger, while those who happened to have enlisted in combatant
corps were sent back to face death again and again. This (we are told)
has now been rectified, but it was for long a source of great soreness.
The second influence making for soreness was the amazing amount of
wrangling that went on at home, among the newspapers, between masters
and men, and so on. Officers would get furious with the conduct of the
'workers,' and condemn them wholesale as a class. One had to be at once
cautious and persistent in bringing home to them the fact that their
own men, whom they admired and loved, whom they knew would follow them
anywhere, were drawn from just the same class as those men who were out
on strike. Another reason why it would have been better to have had
older men and