Welsh Journals

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WALES ON THE WESTERN FRONT. Edited by John Richards. University of Wales Press, 1994. Pp. xiv, 225. ¤'10. 95. Robert Graves, in the extract from Goodbye to All That included in this collection of first-hand reports, memoirs, letters and poems from the Welsh-manned trenches of the Great War, quotes an English officer as saying of the troops under his command, 'These Welshmen are peculiar. They won't stand being shouted at. They'll do anything if you explain the reason for it do and die, but they have to know the reason why.' The war on the Western Front must have been a period of extraordinary mental frustration, as well as great physical suffering, for the Welsh infantry, if Graves's colleague was correct. For, from the evidence of this book, it would appear that the majority of the offensives in which Welsh battalions participated involved bafflements and bungling on an epic scale. The battle scenes recorded here, frequently with anger, read like so many 'Charges of the Light Brigade' writ large. At the Battle of Loos, Royal Welch officers on the ground, aware of an unfavourable wind, were unable to countermand the orders for the first British use of poison gas; the gas blew back to the British trenches, and the Germans opened fire on a front line struggling with inadequate gas masks. At Arras in 1917 Morgan Watcyn-Williams 'sat in a shell-hole fuming at the callous stupidity which directed our slaughter'. And the bloodbath of Mametz Wood, an early episode in the 1916 Somme offensive in which 57,540 British soldiers were killed on the first day, is most vividly brought alive to us in this volume by a combination of extracts from Wyn Griffiths's Up to Mametz and David Jones's In Parenthesis. As the Royal Welch go over the top, the officer knows 'someone had blundered': 'Our men were assembled in trenches above a dip in the ground, and from these they were to advance and cross the bare slope in the teeth of the machine-gunners in the Wood There was no smoke screen, for some reason never explained perhaps someone forgot about it.' The private soldier only knows that he is ordered into hell: 'sweet sister death has gone debauched today and stalks on this high ground with strumpet confidence how intolerably bright the morning is where we who are alive and remain, walk lifted up, carried forward by an effective word.' One consequence of a perusal of John Richards's book is likely to be a heightened appreciation of David Jones's achievement in In Parenthesis. Most of the eye-witnesses of trench warfare whose accounts are collected in this volume are shocked into dumbness by the memory of their worst experiences, and forced understandably to resort to some such phrase as 'I can't hope to describe it to you' (Saunders Lewis). But every detail of