Behind the Lines

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Behind the Lines

A Novel

W. F. Morris

T
O

G
EOFFREY
B
LES

AND

C
URTIS
B
ROWN

IN

G
RATITUDE

PREFACE

Major Walter Frederick Morris was born in Norwich in 1892. He met his wife Lewine Corney in Bonn, was married in 1919 and had two children, Audrey and Peter, shortly thereafter. They in turn provided him with eleven grandchildren, all of whom knew Major Morris as “Grand Pa Peter”. Even to the rest of his family and friends he was always “Peter”; it appears, for reasons we have never been able to clarify, Walter was known by his son's rather than his own given name.

Walter “Peter” Morris was educated at Norwich Grammar School and later at St Catharine's College, Cambridge. On graduating in 1914 with a degree in History, he was appointed by the colonial office to a post in British East Africa, but the outbreak of war intervened and, despite the offer of another appointment after the war, it seems he never set foot on that continent. Instead he joined the ranks of Britain's volunteer army, left for France and later that year was given a temporary commission. It was as an officer he fought on the Somme – no doubt this experience helped him capture so tangibly in his two war novels
Bretherton
and
Behind the Lines
(published in 1929 and 1930 respectively) the everyday horror, squalor and camaraderie of trench warfare.

Awarded the Military Cross and mentioned in despatches for acts of unknown bravery, our Grand Pa Peter, a quiet gentle man, never spoke of the war. However, he continued his close association with the
army long after 1918, being appointed a Major in command of a Cycle Battalion in the Rhineland. Even after his retirement in 1920, he was active in the reserve and training corps. He also retained a particular affection for France: his honeymoon was in Clermont-Ferrand and one of his later novels –
The Hold Up
– was set in the Auvergne. ‘As a teenager I read my grandfather's short stories with pleasure and pride at his being a bestselling author but it wasn't until 2015 when, well into middle age and the same year Casemate Publishing rediscovered his work, I actually began to read his wartime novels. Now having done so I am confident future readers will quickly understand as I did, how well my youthful pride was justified.

David Morris

June 2016

PART I

CHAPTER I

I

I was asked the other day by my charming young niece what was the quaintest thing I had come across during the war. I assured her that the whole war was
“
quaint,
”
every bit of it—from the two pals I lost drowned in the mud at Passchendale to the spontaneous combustion which a court of inquiry I once served on decided was the cause of the loss of two Army bicycles. Had she asked what was the most extraordinary thing I had come across, I could have answered her; for I still believe that my eyes did not play me false that morning in March '18 and that it was Peter Rawley I saw in that chalk pit near Bapaume.

Rawley and I were at school together, and later when I went up to Cambridge and he went into an insurance office, we corresponded and met at intervals. We were spending a holiday together on the Broads in August 1914, and when one morning, as we lay at Horning Ferry, a newspaper with glaring headlines “War” was thrown on board, we held a pow-wow over our bacon and tea in the well, the result of which was that we started up the auxiliary and went chugging back to Wroxham.

Two days later we were both full-fledged privates in a Territorial battalion, and after a short period of training we joined our Company on coast defence work. We arrested
dozens of spies. But after a couple of months of vainly scanning the night sky for Zeppelins and of watching the sun come up above the North Sea without disclosing an invading flotilla we grew restless. Eventually I was commissioned to a Yeomanry regiment training on the Plain, and Rawley got a commission in the R.F.A.

I got out to France several months before he did, and it was more than a year since I had seen him when one morning as I was sitting down to a meal in the Quatre Fils at Doullens he walked in.

We had lunch together and swopped experiences. He had been out about two months then, up near Arras firing barrages and getting plastered in return. He was the same old Rawley, as interested in things and as enthusiastic as ever, and dead keen on his job. But there was an added assurance and quiet self-reliance about him which I knew meant that he had made good under fire. His brigade was back in Army reserve, and his battery was having a quiet time in a village a few kilometres from Doullens. But I saw no more of him, for I had to get back to the Squadron after lunch, and the next day we trekked north to the Salient.

It must have been about two months later, as we were passing down to the Cambrai show, that I ran across Rawley's division. We billeted a night in the area, and I decided to look him up. I had only a few hours to spare, but I thought I could just do it, and so I obtained from Divisional Headquarters the position of the battery and set out.

I got a lift part of the way on a limber along the usual appalling, pot-holed road bordered at intervals by riven, leafless trees and on either hand by the desolate downland country covered with rank jungle grass. I left the limber by a fork road where a derelict Nissen hut, rusty and full of holes, slanted drunkenly like a dog wounded in the hind quarters. I watched the limber amble over the crest of the slope out of sight and, leaving the branch road with its bordering fruit trees, which brother Bosche had cut down before his retreat last winter, lying like matches across it, I set off across country.

There was not a living soul in sight. An occasional shell waddled across the empty sky and burst distantly or moderately close, though what there could be worth destroying in that deserted and depressing desert I could not imagine. An old trench system ran roughly parallel with my path, and the ground was broken by low banks and hummocks of dirty chalk and half-filled ditches. Bleached and rotting sandbags gaped here and there, and tangles of rusty wire lay half hidden in the rank grass. Bent screw pickets, with a few curled rusty strands at the top like hairs on a wart, showed where the wire had been.

I scrambled across a couple of half-filled communicating trenches and began to descend the slope to the little valley in which the battery lay. The bottom of the valley was flat and rather marshy, and the stream which meandered through it was enclosed by banks about five feet in height. Dug in to the near bank in a broad loop of the stream, which I could
see as I walked down hill, I had been told I should find the battery.