My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleyappreciated—much more unpleasant and even more certainly fatal than staying in thetrench. To surrender while still armed with a machine-gun and plenty of ammunitionwould clearly also be too ignoble to contemplate. So in simple practice there wasnothing for it but to sit tight and shoot it out: result, therefore, death or Military Cross- it was as simple as that.These reflections were finally curtailed by the eventually rather disappointingrealisation that they were not going to attack. Nothing happened at all. Theycontinued to make life very lively, but no more. The Prussian Guard were apparentlythere just to wake up this part of the line, which was one of their minor missions. Theexperience was most instructive, and in due course I returned to the regiment all thebetter for my sojourn with the infantry.Soon the regiment was moved up to the scene of the Loos battle. We were in and outof the trenches for some time, alternating between a section which was disagreeablebecause we were often standing in water, and another sector which was on highground and therefore dry, but with the disadvantage of suffering from a competitionthen prevalent in blowing each other up by means of mines. The regiment hadconsiderable experience of this technique, having suffered terrible losses early in 1915by enemy mines. The method was to tunnel under the opposing line, place a mineunder their trench and explode it; then immediately to attack. By this time there wasmuch expertise in the business; when one side began to make a tunnel, the other sidewould make a tunnel underneath it; tunnel would blow up tunnel. Even more finessethen entered the game. You would not tunnel but would make noises as if you weretunnelling beneath them, thus causing them to desist or to explode their minesprematurely. This was done crudely by pulling up and down a wet sack of sand with adull thud in a hole dug sufficiently deep to make the sound realistic. The engineershad installed ingenious listening devices and instructed us in this whole technique. Itwas the war of moles supplemented by the most modern science then available. It wasone of war's most disagreeable forms, because, if caught, you were liable to be buriedalive.I was more at home in the trenches than anywhere else, for a particular reason. Theworst part of my life at that time was getting to and from the trenches. We moved upthrough communication trenches floored by duck-boards to keep us out of the mud.Because these boards were much used they developed many holes, which could not beseen in the dark. My worst leg used to go through them with a result not only painfulbut temporarily disabling. The men on these occasions used to assist me with the mostsympathetic friendship, and were, of course, enjoined not to say a word. Onceinstalled in the trench I was quite all right, because any movement outside it waslimited and in any case usually done on hands and knees.At that time I developed a considerable sympathy with an act of indiscipline which itwas my duty as an officer to prevent. The men always wanted to go up to the frontline not through the squalid misery of the twisting communication trenches but overthe top where the going was better. This risked losing one or two among us before wegot to the front line, as a good deal of shooting was always going on. Yet it is aninteresting fact of human psychology that at a certain degree of fatigue and boredommen lose all fear of death, just as people at the end of a long illness can be observedalmost to embrace it. Rather than endure that long, weary tramp through the muddy60 of 424