1915: The Death of Innocence – Read Now and Download Mobi
PENGUIN BOOKS
1915: THE DEATH OF INNOCENCE
Over the past twenty years Lyn Macdonald has established a reputation as a popular author and historian of the First World War. Her books are They Called It Passchendaele, an account of the Passchendaele campaign in 1917; The Roses of No Man’s Land, a chronicle of the war from the neglected viewpoint of the casualties and the medical teams who struggled to save them; Somme, a history of the legendary and horrifying battle that has haunted the minds of succeeding generations; 1914: The Days of Hope, a vivid account of the first months of the war and winner of the 1987 Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award; 1914–1918: Voices and Images of the Great War, an illuminating account of the many different aspects of the war; and 1915: The Death of Innocence, a brilliant evocation of the year that saw the terrible losses of Aubers Ridge, Loos, Neuve Chapelle, Ypres and Gallipoli. Her most recent book is To the Last Man: Spring 1918, the story of the massive German offensive that broke the British line and almost broke the British Army. All are based on the accounts of eye-witnesses and survivors, and cast a unique light on the First World War. All are published in Penguin.
Lyn Macdonald is married and lives in London.
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First published by Hodder Headline 1993
Published in Penguin Books 1997
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Copyright © Lyn Macdonald, 1993
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
The poems on the part-title pages are reproduced with kind permission of the Estate of Robert Service, John Murray (Publishers) Ltd, Sidgwick and Jackson, Literary Executor of the estate of Roben Nichols, the Estate of Patrick MacGill
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-196117-0
Contents
Author’s Foreword and Acknowledgements
Part 1: ‘We’re here because we’re here, because we’re here…’
Part 2: Into Battle: Neuve Chapelle
Part 3: ‘This is the happy warrior – this is he!’
Part 5: ‘Damn the Dardanelles – they will be our grave’
Part 6: Slogging On: The Salient to Suvla
Part 7: Loos: The Dawn of Hope
Author’s Foreword and Acknowledgements
In the chronicle of the Great War the resonant names of great battles – Mons, Somme, Passchendaele – have echoed down the years. But although the Battles of Neuve Chapelle, Ypres, Loos were far from insignificant and have received some attention from historians (and the Gallipoli campaign has received a great deal), 1915 as a year has been strangely neglected.
Looking back in harsh hindsight 1915 appears to be a saga of such horrors, of such mismanagement and muddle, that it is easy to see why it coloured the views of succeeding generations and gave rise to prejudices and myths that have been applied to the whole war. But it was a year of learning. A year of cobbling together, of frustration, of indecision. In a sense a year of innocence. Therein lies its tragedy.
The battles of the early months of the war in 1914 were not ‘battles’ in any sense that Wellington would have understood. From the British point of view Mons, the Marne, the Aisne and the First Battle of Ypres were rather struggles for survival, and by January 1915 their names had already passed into legend. The incomparable Regular soldiers of the original British Expeditionary Force had suffered ninety per cent casualties and to all intents and purposes it was no more. The few who were left or had been hastily brought back from foreign stations held the line through the winter, together with the erstwhile ‘Saturday Afternoon Soldiers’ of the Territorial Force. The line ran through the Flanders swamps. The men who held it fought the wet; they fought the snow, the rain, the cold; they fought the floods and the mud. Ill-equipped and with pathetically small supplies of ammunition, they fought the Germans. And they waited – for the coming of spring, for the promised reinforcements, and for the better weather which would herald the start of the offensive that would surely break the German line and send them roaring through to victory.
The first months of 1915 were a time of hope, of wide-ranging plans and far-reaching ideas which were destined to end, at best, in stalemate and in another gallant litany of fortitude and loss – Neuve Chapelle, Aubers Ridge, Festubert, Gallipoli, Ypres (always Ypres!) and Loos. By the end of the year all the old ideas of warfare had been swept away, although some of those responsible for the conduct of the war were slow to realise it. It was the year that brought the new armies they called ‘Kitchener’s Mob’ into the fight, sent the Anzacs to Gallipoli, the Canadians to Ypres. By the end of it there were some who already felt that the war had taken on a momentum of its own. It was a long time before the lessons of 1915 were learned and applied, for it was cursed with partial victories which implanted the idea that in better circumstances, with more ammunition, more men, better communications, more detailed planning, with firm leadership and with a modicum of luck, the enemy’s resistance could be finally crushed.
Words like gallantry, endurance and patriotism have an old-fashioned ring about them which strikes discordantly on modern ears. It is easy to dismiss the soldiers as gullible victims, the generals and their political masters as incompetent dolts, the nation as a whole as unprotesting sheep blind to the realities which, eighty years on, a generation that believes itself to be endowed with superior sensibilities is quick to appreciate and condemn. To subscribe to this point of view is to show little understanding of human nature and the spirit of the times. We cannot alter history by disapproving of it. I hope that, by setting events in context, this book might add a little to the understanding of how and why things happened as they did. As always, my intention has been to ‘tell it like it was’, to tune in to the heartbeat of the experience of the people who lived through it. In the end it is the people who matter.
My thanks, as always, must go first to the Old Soldiers who have told me their stories personally, written them down, or often vividly described what happened as we stood on the battlefields during one of my many trips to Flanders in their company. Many whose stories appear in this book have, alas, not survived to see them in print. Time is running out, and it is all the more important that we should listen, and listen carefully, before the curtain finally falls on the generation who experienced the Great War that was the watershed of the tumultuous twentieth century and the bridge between the old world and our own.
It was a literate generation of inveterate letter-writers and diary keepers, and it is almost impossible to list the staggering number of people who have so very kindly sent me collections of letters, diaries, photographs, papers, belonging to their families or, occasionally, rescued from abandonment in antique shops. The latter give me particular pleasure – Corporal Letyford’s diary, from which extracts have appeared in 1914 as well as in this book, is just one example. I like to think he would have been pleased. My thanks to Andrew Taylor, to Ian Swindale for Pte. Harry Crask, to Dr R.C. Brookes for Pte. Bernard Brookes, Brenda Field for the memoir of Trooper Harry Clarke, R. A. Watson for Alan Watson’s diary, and to the many other people who have so generously endowed me with valuable contemporary written material and given me permission to make use of it. It goes without saying that my archive of first-hand material, written and oral, will in due course (on my demise or retirement) be passed to the care of the Imperial War Museum for the benefit of future students and historians.
My thanks are also due to the Imperial War Museum, and in particular to Roderick Suddaby, Keeper of Documents, for his great interest and assistance in the preparation of this book and for making available unpublished material which makes a considerable contribution to its scope. Also to my friend and colleague Mike Willis, whose knowledge of the photographic archive is second to none, for his invaluable assistance with the illustrations.
Many people have assisted in interviewing the Old Soldiers, and I must especially thank Barbara Taylor, Colin Butler, Chris Sheeran, and Eric Warwick. Others have helped enormously with the research in parts of the world which were not immediately accessible to me. I should like in particular to thank Elspeth Ewan in Scotland for local research in pursuit of extra information on Jim Keddie, Bill Paterson in Edinburgh, and Vivien Riches, who was my assistant a long time ago and who has maintained her interest since moving to Australia, where she found and interviewed the Australian veterans of Gallipoli.
My French and Belgian friends have, as always, taken a great interest and, by sharing civilian recollections, added another dimension to the story of 1915. Yves de Cock generously made available his research on the gas attack. My friend Stephan Maenhout introduced his Tante Paula’ (Mevrow Hennekint née Barbieur) who told the story of her family in 1915. I must pay particular tribute to the senior members of my own much-loved French family, Pierre and Germaine Dewavrin, who have added so much to my understanding over the years, and whose recollections of 1915 appear in this book.
Colonel Terry Cave most kindly helped with information on the Indians; Peter Thomas of Ρ & O and Vivien Riches in Australia between them researched different aspects of the story of the Southport; and Lord Sterling, Chairman of Ρ & O, also deserves my gratitude for his interest and for his generosity to the Old Soldiers.
I must also thank Rennie McOwen and many readers of the Edinburgh Evening News who responded overwhelmingly to his request and showered me with unique photographs and personal recollections of the Royal Scots rail disaster. Anne Mackay of the Scottish Music Information Centre took a great interest and went to considerable trouble to supply me with the words of The March of the Cameron Men’ which, to our shame as Scots, neither General Christison nor I could wholly remember.
Of all my books on the First World War 1915 has been the longest and most complicated to write. (My publisher, Alan Brooke, remarked ‘It’s taken as long as the war itself!’) With the deadline looming the last few months have been trying for my family. I must thank my husband, Ian Ross, for suffering almost in silence, for his constant interest and support, and for all the take-aways he brought home when there wasn’t any dinner!
I have been blessed with colleagues over the years who have given unstintingly of their time, interest and support. Some are mentioned above. Tony Spagnoly is always available for interesting discussion and gave much appreciated help with the maps; and John Woodroff, my military researcher, deserves my warmest thanks for answering a million queries on corps, divisions, battalions and individual soldiers – plus many other topics – and he very occasionally took as long as five minutes to come up with the answer.
Last, but by no means least, I must thank my stalwart assistant Sandra Layson, not just for her competence and efficiency, but for her bright presence, her sharp appreciation, her support and sympathy – evidenced by the occasional tear over the ‘sad bits’ – and for a great deal of extremely hard work.
Lyn Macdonald
London, 1993
List of Maps
Neuve Chapelle: German positions, 11 March
Neuve Chapelle: The line at the end of the battle
The Ypres Salient 22 April 1915
Ypres: The Salient after Retirement
Ypres: Bellewaerde and Frezenberg Ridge
Gallipoli: Helles and the Southern Sector
Gallipoli: Gully Ravine, 28 June 1915
Gully Ravine: Final line 5 July
Gallipoli: Suvla Bay and Anzac
Part 1
‘We’re here because we here, because we’re here…’
Oh, the rain, the mud, and the cold
The cold the mud and the rain.
With weather at zero it’s hard for a hero
From language that’s rude to refrain.
With porridgy muck to the knees
With the sky that’s still pouring a flood,
Sure the worst of our foes
Are the pains and the woes
Of the rain, the cold and the mud.
Robert Service
Chapter 1
Across the chill wasteland that was Flanders in winter the armies had gone to ground. During the short hours of murky daylight, rifles occasionally crackled along some stretch of the line. From time to time a flurry of rooks, startled by a shot that ricocheted through a wood, rose cawing from the trees to wheel in the grey sky. Here and there, when some half-frozen soldier drew hard on his pipe, as if hoping its minuscule glow might keep out the cold, a stray puff of smoke would rise to mingle with the ground-mist that lay most days above the bogs and ditches. In Flanders, where the merest rise counted as a ridge and the smallest hill was regarded as a mountain, vantage points high enough to give a bird’s-eye view were rare, but on a quiet day even a vigilant observer standing almost anywhere above the undulating length of the front line would have been hard pressed to detect any sign of life and, apart from the odd burst of desultory fire, any evidence that the trenches were manned at all.
On the British side the fire was desultory because bullets were too precious to waste, and also because the soldiers were disinclined to shoot. Nineteen fifteen had swept in on the back of a gale, and high winds and violent rainstorms continued to torment the men in the trench line for day after dreary day. Peering across the parapet, enveloped in a clammy groundsheet that mainly served to channel the rain into rivers that trickled into his puttees and seeped downwards to chill his feet, contemplating the ever-worsening state of the rifle that rested on the oozing mud-filled sandbags, the last thing a soldier wished to do was foul the barrel by firing it if he could help it. Cleaning the outside was bad enough, and no sensible soldier was belligerent enough to wish to spend hours cleaning the bore for the sake of a few pot-shots in the general direction of the enemy.
Such belligerence as there was at present was largely directed by officers towards their own troops. Authority on both sides of the line had strongly disapproved of the Christmas spirit of goodwill that had brought the front-line soldiers of both sides out of their trenches to swap greetings and gifts, and the rebukes that had passed down the chain of command through discomfited Brigadiers, Colonels and Majors to the rank and file, had left them in no doubt that such a thing must not occur again. But it was good while it lasted.
Parcels had arrived by the trainload from Germany and by the boatload from England, from places as far apart as Falmouth and Flensburg, Ullapool and Ulm. So many trains were required to bring the flood of Christmas mail to France from the Fatherland that German transport and supply depots were seriously disrupted, and even officers at the front complained that crowded billets and narrow trenches were becoming dangerously congested, for goods and parcels were showered on the troops by legions of anonymous donors as well as by friends and families. In most Germans towns and villages committees had been formed to raise funds and send Christmas parcels, Weinachtspaketen, to the troops. The more sentimental called them ‘love parcels’ – Liebespaketen – and at least one recipient, fighting for the Kaiser in the comfortless trenches of the Argonne was struck by the irony of the name. He expressed his thoughts in a plaintive verse that appeared in one of the many columns of thank-you letters in a German newspaper whose readers had been particularly generous. ‘So much love,’ he sighed, ‘and no girls to deliver it!’* Even the Kaiser sent cigars – ten per man – in tasteful individual boxes inscribed ‘Weinachten im Feld, 1914’.
The British soldiers had also received a royal gift (a useful metal box from Princess Mary, containing cigarettes, or pipe tobacco, or chocolate for non-smokers); they had plum puddings sent by the Daily Mail, chocolate from Cadbury, butterscotch from Callard & Bowser, gifts from the wives of officers of a dozen different regiments, and a mountain of private parcels bulging with homemade cake, sweetmeats, and comforts galore. There was more than enough to spare, and plenty to share with temporary friends over the way. The men drew the line at presenting an enemy soldier with socks or mufflers knitted by the home fireside, but kind donors in Britain, as in Germany, would have been astonished had they known how much plum pudding and Christmas cake would end up in Fritz’s stomach, swapped for a lump of German sausage or a drop of beer or Rheinwein shared matily in No Man’s Land.
The Germans had quantities of candied fruits, gingerbread, lavish supplies of beer and schnapps and, as if that weren’t enough, cognac lozenges (guaranteed by the German manufacturers to contain enough real alcohol to banish winter chill) and tablets that would dissolve in water to make genuine rum-grog. And if they did not quite fulfil their promise, and the ‘real alcohol’ had lost something of its potency in the manufacturing process, at least the flavour was a pleasant reminder of Christmas festivities at home.
The truce had begun on those parts of the front where the easygoing Saxons and Bavarians held the German line but, even there, by no means all British and German officers had allowed their men to fraternise or even to relax and let the war take care of itself over the Christmas season. In other places the truce had continued for days. Both sides had taken advantage of it to mend and straighten their barbed wire, to improve their trenches, to shore up the slithering walls of mud, to lay duckboards and bale out the water that lay boot-high along the bottom and rose higher with every rainstorm. Now commanding officers, who had cast a benevolent eye on the friendly gatherings in No Man’s Land and been glad of the chance to bury the dead in places where there had been an attack, spent the days after Christmas miserably composing the written explanations for these lapses of discipline which had enraged higher authority and for which higher authority was holding them personally responsible. The job of a Battalion Commander, they were acerbically reminded, was not to allow their men to strike up friendships with the enemy – it was to encourage the offensive spirit and to win the war in 1915.
An hour before midnight on 31 December the fusillade of fire that blazed from the German trenches was all that the most ardent advocate of the offensive spirit could desire. These did not include the Tommies, enjoying a quiet life in the trenches opposite. They regarded this sudden resumption of the war with some annoyance until it struck them that, by Berlin time, the Germans were celebrating the New Year and that they were taking pains to fire well above the Tommies’ heads so that there should be no misunderstanding. This courtesy was not greatly appreciated by the Adjutant of the London Rifle Brigade. Strolling serenely to his billet a safe quarter-mile behind the trenches in Ploegsteert Wood, he received a smart blow from a spent bullet landing abruptly on his head.
An hour later, at midnight London time, the Tommies marked the arrival of 1915 by treating the Germans to a fraternal volley from the British trenches. Despite specific orders to shoot to kill they were not in the mood to cause damage. In the present circumstances there was no special reason to celebrate the coming of a new year, but no one was sorry to see the back of the old one.
The five months since the outbreak of war were littered with a mish-mash of plans that had gone awry. There had been triumphs on all sides, but they were triumphs only in the sense that stalemate had been snatched out of defeat. The Russians’ bold march into East Prussia had foundered at Tannenberg. Austria, raising an imperious jackboot to stamp Serbia into submission, had been tripped up by fierce resistance. The French, dashing impetuously eastward towards the Rhine to thwart the German invasion and seize back their lost territories of Alsace and Lorraine, were appalled to find that the main German force had struck in the west, marching through Belgium and into France by the back door. But the Germans too had been cheated of outright victory, and the great strategic encirclement by which they had meant to conquer France had been baulked on the very doorstep of Paris. The see-sawing fortunes of the tiny British Expeditionary Force had encompassed a masterly withdrawal that had kept the Germans guessing from Mons to the Marne, a fighting pursuit that had driven them back to the Aisne, a race to the north that denied the northern seaports to the enemy and kept open the vital lifeline to England, and a great battle to hold the last unoccupied fragment of Belgium. Now the Germans were dug in within whistling distance of Ypres but the allies still kept a toehold in Flanders and held the city itself.
As the old year died and warring nations from the Balkans to the English Channel took stock and braced themselves for the new, it was only natural that all the adversaries should dwell on their victories and gloss over the defeats. In a thousand ringing phrases in New Year’s messages from emperors, kings, and commanders, soldiers were lauded for feats of valour and, with confident assurances of Almighty aid, exhorted to make the further effort that would lead to sure and certain victory in the New Year. Even given the infinite resources of celestial impartiality, the Almighty was going to have his hands full.
In Britain, as in Germany, such sentiments were approved by the civilian population whose enthusiasm for the war had not abated, despite the irritating setbacks of the last few months. In some circles, and particularly in London, the war was positively fashionable. The Lord Mayor’s Juvenile Fancy Dress Party had gone ahead as usual, but this year the frivolous columbines and harlequins, the troops of elves and fairies, so popular in peacetime, had been ousted by fleets of juvenile sailors, contingents of small red-caped nurses, battalions of miniature soldiers shouldering toy rifles – even a six-year-old admiral, wearing a small cocked hat and sporting a little sword.
A field service uniform, complete in every detail but scaled down to fit children from six to twelve, could be bought at Gamages store for as little as five shillings and eleven pence. Hundreds were sold, over the counter and by mail order, and the sight of khaki-clad tots trailing at the heels of self-satisfied adults became as common in the streets and parks as the sight of youngsters in sailor suits.
Having been brought up in the belief that the security of the British Empire could safely be left in the hands of its army – trained, drilled and disciplined to the highest standards of competence – confident that the shores of their islands were protected by a navy that ruled the oceans of the world, the British public was inclined to take a complacent view of the war. A whole century had gone by since a European power had seriously threatened Britain’s shores, and it had been a century of unprecedented prosperity and expansion. It had also been a century of progress, and it was popularly believed by every Briton, from the monarch to the man in the street, that the British system of democratic government, wise administration and spreading enlightenment was an example to the world. It was a century in which full-scale wars had been far-off affairs, and warring tribes and upstart nations had been easily swatted down. It was hard to break the habit of believing that this state of affairs was based on a natural law of superiority and would continue forever. True, there had been some unfortunate setbacks in the progress of the war so far, but even Waterloo had been described by the victorious Duke of Wellington as ‘a damned close run thing’. The centenary of the Battle of Waterloo would fall in June 1915; by a happy chance, Wellington’s own pistol had come up for sale and a group of well-wishers had bought it as a New Year’s gift for his successor, Sir John French, now in command of Britain’s army in the field. Few people doubted that 1915 would be another annus mirabilis, that Sir John French and his allies would soon have the Kaiser on the run and would defeat him as decisively as the great duke and his allies had defeated Napoleon a hundred years before.
But to those who took a long, hard and realistic look at matters as they stood it was clear that on the western front there was deadlock. The great autumn battles had brought the Germans to a standstill and the armies now faced each other in a long line of trenches that began among the sand dunes of the Belgian coast, snaked across the
face of France and ended within sight of the mountains of Switzerland. And there, it seemed, the German invaders intended to stay. They were assiduously digging in – not just a single line of entrenchments, but a second behind the first, and behind that another. With well-sited machine-guns and well-disciplined rifle fire their positions were virtually impregnable and in the No Man’s Land beyond their line, the bodies of the men who had tried to breach it had been lying since November. They were the proof, if proof were needed, that the war that had been anticipated and prepared for had been fought and was over. Nobody had won. Slowly the realisation began to dawn that the armies must now prepare for a war that no one had anticipated and for which they were ill equipped. All that anyone could be sure of was that this war would be different from any that had ever been fought before. The machine-guns would see to that. The Germans were outnumbered in places by as many as three to one but, thanks to machine-guns liberally sited along their trenches, they could repel attack after attack. Not for nothing was the machine-gun called Queen of the Battlefield. Soon, they would be calling it the Grim Reaper.
The machine-gun was hardly a new-fangled ‘wonder-weapon’. It was not even a new invention. The first hand-cranked versions had been used more than half a century earlier during the American Civil War and the pioneers of the expanding British Empire were quick to realise its usefulness. It could inflict such carnage on an army of native warriors armed with shield and spear that their chiefs could be speedily persuaded to part with land and mineral concessions. A single Gatling could bring a whole troop of horsemen to book. Against primitive weapons, a couple of them could win a small-scale war. One anti-imperialist spokesman summed it up in an ironical verse:
Onward Christian Soldiers, on to heathen lands,
Prayerbooks in your pockets, rifles in your hands,
Take the glorious tidings where trade can be done,
Spread the peaceful gospel – with a Maxim gun.
But, as a weapon of conventional warfare, the machine-gun had not found favour with the hierarchy of the British Army. Some people in Germany had been quicker to appreciate its possibilities – and almost the first had been the Kaiser himself.
The Kaiser’s passion for his Army was equalled only by his obsession with his Navy, and his dearest desire was that both should match the Army and Navy of Great Britain, and even surpass them in strength and magnificence. Military matters occupied a large part of the Kaiser’s attention. Soon after he came to the throne in 1888 he had decreed that court dress would henceforth be military uniform, and heaven help the officer, even the long-retired officer approaching his dotage, who appeared in the Imperial Presence wearing mufti. Unless he was hunting, the Kaiser himself seldom wore civilian clothes, and he had once gone so far as to order that the officers of a Guards regiment should be confined to barracks for two weeks on hearing that they had dared to attend a private party in civilian evening dress.
The Kaiser himself had uniforms for every occasion, many designed by himself, and it was even whispered that he had a special uniform, based on that of an Admiral of the Fleet, for attending performances of The Flying Dutchman. The joke had a ring of truth. In the first seventeen years of his reign he had introduced no fewer than thirty-seven alterations to the uniform of the army until it was brought discreetly to his notice that, although military tailors were prospering, some officers were having serious difficulty keeping up with the expense.
The Kaiser was interested in everything, had opinions on everything, particularly on military subjects, and he never tired of expounding his views. His mouth seemed as large as the waxed moustaches that bristled across his face, and it seemed to some of his long-suffering ministers that the Kaiser’s mouth often appeared to be functioning independently of his brain. They had thought so at the time of the Boxer Rebellion when Germany proposed the dispatch of an international force to China after the seizure of foreign embassies in Peking. The Kaiser travelled to Wilhelmshaven to give his personal farewell to the German contingent and the manner in which he harangued the troops on the quayside had caused even the most loyal of his ministers to quail. The Kaiser wanted revenge. He wanted blood. He wanted Peking razed to the ground. He commanded his troops to show no mercy and to take no prisoners. He reminded them (inaccurately) of their forebears who had fought under Attila the Hun and urged them to follow their example. They must stamp the name ‘German’ so indelibly on the face of China that no Chinese would ever again dare to look a German in the face.
This bravura performance was unrehearsed and even though Germany had suffered a gross insult at the hands of the nationalists (the German ambassador had been murdered) the Kaiser’s language and demeanour caused his military entourage deep disquiet.*
The episode was disturbing, even allowing for the fact that this first whiff of military adventure in his twelve years’ peaceful reign had gone slightly to the Kaiser’s head. Now he was set on a mammoth programme of costly shipbuilding to quadruple the navy, was planning a huge expansion of the army, and had recently assumed the rank of Field Marshal, asserting that he had been begged by senior officers to do so. Now that he held this high-ranking position, he airily announced, he might easily dispense with the services of a General Staff. No one was quite sure if the All-Highest was jesting. But his opinion of his General Staff officers was expressed in terms that left no room for doubt. They were a bunch of old donkeys, the Kaiser raged, who thought they knew better than he did just because they happened to be older than himself – and at forty-one he was hardly a child!
The fact was that despite the military upbringing, obligatory for Hohenzollern princes, despite his pretension to military knowledge, the outwardly respectful members of the General Staff were deeply wary of their Kaiser and his meddlesome ways. Let him design dress uniforms for his regiments, let him order parades and reviews, let him play at manoeuvres – let him do anything at all with the Army that would keep him harmlessly amused, but prevent him at all costs from doing anything that would upset the long-established status quo.
But there was a grain of justification for the Kaiser’s impatience with his senior Generals, for among the torrent of half-baked notions that poured with inexhaustible energy from his restless brain there was an occasional flash of insight or an idea worth considering. The machine-gun was one of them and, like so many things the Kaiser admired and envied, it had come from England. He had first seen one years before when he had attended the Golden Jubilee celebrations of his grandmother, Queen Victoria.
It was the glorious summer of 1887 and for the whole of June it was ‘Queen’s Weather’ – day after day of cloudless skies and brilliant sunshine. There was a large gathering of European royalties, most of them related to each other and to the Queen. There were maharajahs from India, gorgeous in silk brocades and bedizened with jewels; there was the Queen of Hawaii, and the heirs to the exotic thrones of Japan, Persia, Siam, and when the Queen rode to Westminster Abbey in an open carriage drawn by six white horses, no fewer than five crowned heads and thirty-two princes rode in her procession. Silks shone, plumes nodded, jewels flashed, orders and medals glistened in the sun, harnesses burnished to blinding radiance gleamed and glinted on horses groomed to look hardly less magnificent than their riders. Even the Queen, though simply dressed, wore diamonds in her bonnet. London had never seen such a display and the crowds went wild.
Queen Victoria’s children and grandchildren had married into every royal house, every dukedom and principality of united Germany, from the mighty ruling house of Prussia downwards, and a host of Hohenzollerns and Hesses, Hohenlohes, Coburgs and Battenbergs, with her British blood mingling with Albert’s German blood in their veins, were living proof of the ties of friendship and brotherhood that bound the two nations. On this most glorious day of Queen Victoria’s glorious reign it was unthinkable that those ties could ever be severed.
The Queen’s eldest daughter, the Crown Princess of Prussia, drove with the Queen in her carriage. In front rode her husband the Crown Prince and some distance behind, in strict order of precedence, rode the future Kaiser, their twenty-eight-year-old son, Prince William of Prussia. Prince William was vexed. He was not pleased with his position and while he was a little too much in awe of his grandmother the Queen-Empress to complain to her directly, he let it be known that in his opinion a Prince of Prussia, although at present only the son of a Crown Prince, deserved to rank before princes and even kings of duskier complexions who ruled over less eminent domains.
William was always an awkward presence in the royal circle and the Queen, when confiding her dread of entertaining ‘the royal mob’ to her daughter, had made no bones about the fact that she would prefer him not to come: ‘I did not intend asking Willie for the Jubilee, first because Fritz and you come, and secondly because… we shall be awfully squeezed at Buckingham Palace… and I fear he may show his dislikes and be disagreeable.… I think Germany would understand his remaining in the country when you are away on account of the Emperor at his age.’
The Prince of Wales, on the other hand, was quick to appreciate that the age of the German Emperor was very much to the point. He was over ninety and he was frail. Inevitably he must die soon. His heir, Prince William’s father, was dying too. This fifty-six-year-old Crown Prince (who was, in the words of his mother-in-law, Queen Victoria, ‘noble and liberal-minded’) had been waiting thirty years for the throne and with it the opportunity of bringing much-needed reform to autocratic government in Germany. Now he was mortally ill with cancer of the throat and, like it or not, the chances were that Prince William would soon be Kaiser. Ever the diplomat, the Prince of Wales talked his mother round to the view that for the sake of future relations with the German Empire it would be unwise to offend its Emperor-to-be. The Queen relented, but held the Prince of Wales responsible for ‘keeping William sweet’.*
‘Keeping William sweet’ was a matter of keeping him occupied and, if possible, flattered. The Jubilee programme fortunately included almost enough parades, reviews and tattoos to satisfy even Prince William’s passion for military pageantry, and they would keep him busy for some of the time; for the rest of it, his uncle shrewdly guessed that nothing would keep his nephew sweeter than arranging for him to inspect a few regiments. From the future Kaiser’s point of view the highlight of this agreeable programme was the day he spent with the Prince of Wales’ own regiment, the 10th Royal Hussars, at their barracks in Hounslow. The visit was a huge success and the future Kaiser came back full of it. In particular, he was impressed by a delightful novelty the like of which he had never seen before. It was the regimental machine-gun and it was the private property of the Commanding Officer, Colonel Liddell. The previous year he had purchased it out of his own pocket from the Nordenfeld Company and had it mounted on a light two-wheeled carriage that a horse could gallop into action. Prince William had been charmed. He inspected the regiment, rode with it in the morning, lunched in the officers’ mess, rode out again in the afternoon and, as a grand finale to the day, even joined the Hussars in a wild cavalry charge. The Prince made a flattering speech before his departure and soon after he returned to Berlin sent his signed photograph, in the uniform of his own Hussars of the Guard, in appreciation of the splendid day he had spent at Hounslow. That was not all. Four invitations were dispatched by his grandfather, the German Emperor. They were addressed to the Colonels of the four regiments the Prince had inspected during his visit and invited them to spend three weeks as the Emperor’s guests in Berlin.
When the four Colonels travelled to Berlin, they took with them a wonderful present by command of the Prince of Wales. It was a machine-gun, just like the one William had admired at Hounslow, complete with an identical ‘galloping carriage’. It capped William’s pleasure in what were to be three blissful weeks. With his parents wintering in Italy in the vain hope of improving his father’s health there was no one in Berlin to cramp his style. Under the rheumily indulgent eye of his aged grandfather, who found this young turkey-cock more to his taste than his gentler, liberal-minded heir, William could strut and show off to his heart’s content.
Like his uncle, the Prince of Wales, Colonel-in-Chief of the 10th Royal Hussars, Prince William had a cavalry regiment of his own. They were the Hussars of the Guard, the crack Garde Husarien Regiment, and he instantly whisked the two Cavalry Colonels off to Potsdam to enjoy the hospitality of his regiment for the duration of their visit. It gave him huge pleasure to show off his troops, to ride with the British officers as his horsemen drilled, to escort them on inspections of the stables and the barracks, to ride out with them on manoeuvres, to fight mock battles, to entertain his visitors at formal dinners in the mess and at the Palace, to present them to his grandfather the Emperor. At all these events the new machine-gun had pride of place, trundling through manoeuvres on its carriage driven by Corporal Hustler of the British Hussars, or standing on the parade ground with a cluster of Prussian Hussars listening respectfully as Hustler, or occasionally Prince William himself, explained its finer points. Hustler was to stay on for several weeks to instruct a nucleus of Prussian troopers in its use. But, by the time of the last grand review on the eve of the British Colonels’ departure, when the machine-gun bowled past the Emperor and his guests at the head of the regiment, quite a number of the men had already mastered the art of firing it, and Prince William was well pleased.
But already in 1887 the clumsy hand-cranked Nordenfeld was obsolescent. Before long it was replaced by the quick-firing fully automatic Maxim and the new Kaiser brought even the ‘old donkeys’ of his General Staff round to the view that a few more machine-guns in other regiments would not come amiss. By the turn of the century the German Army possessed more of them than any other in Europe – and once they had taken up the idea they made the most of it. Machine-gunners were highly trained, there were inter-regimental competitions to keep them on their toes and, as a further incentive, prizes for the winners, who each received a watch inscribed with the Kaiser’s name and presented as his personal gift. The standard of firing was high and every German machine-gunner was a marksman.
In the British military establishment there were men who grasped the significance of this new weapon – the great Sir Garnet Wolseley as early as 1885, General Allenby as late as 1910, and in the years between there were others who urged and lobbied, pleading the case for machine-guns. A few were grudgingly purchased, but the High Command remained unconvinced.
To these professional minds – trained long ago to study ancient battles, schooled in the belief that the classic practices of war were inviolable – the idea of the machine-gun as a short-range weapon for the use of infantry did not come easily, for the infantry were still expected to charge cheering with the bayonet, clearing the way for the cavalry to dash gloriously past and take up the real battle. The General Staff were cavalrymen almost to a man, and if they bothered to think of machine-guns at all they thought of them as highly over-rated weapons. Even when they blazed into action in the Russo-Japanese war, even when Sir Ian Hamilton as British Military Observer reported on their devastating effect, the British General Staff remained unmoved.
The assessment of supplies of equipment and ammunition likely to be required in any foreseeable circumstances had been fixed in 1901 at the end of the Boer War. In 1904 it was reviewed and confirmed. That year Vickers supplied the British Government with ten machine-guns for the use of the British Army. By 1914 when Great Britain went to war with Germany, this standard annual order had not been increased. By now the Infantry Training Manual devoted just a dozen pages to machine-guns, and the Cavalry Manual still enjoined that ‘it must be accepted as a principle that the rifle, effective as it is, cannot replace the effect produced by the speed of the horse, the magnetism of the charge, and the terror of cold steel’.
This principle was still held sacred by the army commanders when the British Army went to war with Germany in 1914. By the turn of the year when the bogged-down armies were standing face to face across a dreary stretch of Flanders mud, they had seen no particular reason to change their view. Winter was always a time of breathing space. Soon the spring would come, the armies would be on the move and the cavalry would come into its own.
Chapter 2
There were new graves in the burgeoning cemeteries behind the lines where they had buried the missing of the autumn battles whose bodies had been recovered during the Christmas truce. During January, as the sad parcels of belongings reached home and the last sparks of hope were extinguished, a series of poignant letters appeared in The Times, under the heading ‘Swords of Fallen Officers’. Officers who had gone with the Regular Army to France had gone equipped and accoutred almost as elaborately as their military ancestors had gone to Waterloo, and there was much heart-burning when their effects reached home and their swords were found to be missing. It was hard for mourning relatives to accept the most likely explanation that these prized possessions had been pilfered en route and the tone of the letters from bereaved fathers left little doubt of their firm belief that their sons had died charging the enemy trenches, sword in hand:
My late son’s sword may have been picked up and forwarded to someone else. It is a Claymore, No. 106,954, made by S. J. Pillin, and has embossed on it the battles of the regiment and ‘DCM from DFM’.
•
I am a fellow-sufferer, having received the effects of my late son, admirably packed but minus the sword, to my great sorrow and disappointment.
•
I would like to endorse the letter from ‘The Father of an Officer Killed in Action’. The pain caused to relatives by non-receipt of a lost one’s sword is great.
•
To any private soldier, English or Indian, who may have found the sword and returns it to me through his officer, I will send a present of £5.
•
We are all giving of our best and dearest for our country, and the least we ask for is that those precious relics should be restored to us.
•
The colonel of my son’s regiment kindly wrote and told me it had been sent to the depot some days before, but I can hear nothing of it, so I suppose it has gone with the others, but where? There does not seem much demand for swords at the Front; if there was, I would not grudge it.
•
It is suggested to me that when my son was struck down he may have been carrying the sword in his hand, and it fell into the wet trench and sank – not improbable.
But it was spades not swords that were wanted in the trenches. And manpower. And muscle-power. And hard grinding labour. The brunt of the work fell on the Royal Engineers.
The 5th Field Company, Royal Engineers, had been out since the beginning. They had dug the Army out of Mons, they had dug trenches for the infantry throughout the long retreat, blown bridges over rivers in full view of the Germans when the last of the infantry had safely crossed, and, when the tide had turned, they built pontoon bridges across the same rivers to take the infantry back, first to the Marne, then to the Aisne, and finally along the long road north as they raced the Germans back to Flanders. The engineers had toiled again at Ypres, digging trenches for reserves and supports and, always under shellfire, throwing up entanglements of barbed wire to protect them. And when the Germans attacked and the troops were pushed back, as the front line gave way, and battalions were decimated, the engineers had gone into the trenches and helped the thinning ranks of infantrymen to beat the Germans off. The 5th Field Company had been in at the kill when the last wavering line faltered and briefly gave way, when the Prussian Guard streamed through and every man was needed to try to stop them. In retrospect it had been their moment of glory, for the sappers had flung down their spades, picked up their rifles, formed up with the ragged remnants of the infantry, fixed bayonets and charged into Nonnebosschen Wood to drive the Germans back. It had not seemed very glorious at the time – but it had saved the day.
Now the infantry were returning the favour by turning out working parties night after night to labour alongside the sappers constructing defences. Working in the flooded marshland to the south of Armentieres where the River Lys, swollen by incessant rain, wound across the waterlogged plain and overflowed to mingle with a thousand streams and ditches, even the battle-hardened veterans who had been out since the start of the war agreed that this was the worst yet. It was a waterscape rather than a landscape. Trenches filled up with water as fast as they were dug and the culverts and dams they made to divert it merely channelled the flood to another trench in another part of the line. They built bridges across watery trenches that collapsed into the stream with the next rainstorm in a cascade of mud as the sodden banks that supported them gave way. They took levels, drew up plans, set up pumps, but still the water rose. The trenches were knee deep in it. The men who manned them, soaking, shivering, plastered from head to foot with mud, reflected bitterly that it was not so much the Germans as the weather that was the adversary.
Lt. C. Tennant, 1/4 Bn., Seaforth Highlanders (TF), Dehra Dun Brig., Meerut Div.
Water is the great and pressing problem at present, the weather has been almost unprecedently wet and the whole countryside is soaked in mud and like a sponge. Owing to its flatness it is generally impossible to drain the trenches and in many cases those now being held were only taken in the first instance as a temporary stopping place in the attack. A battalion would dig itself in at night – perhaps improve an ordinary water ditch with firing recesses – in the expectation of getting on a bit further the next day. The change and chance of war has caused these positions to become more or less permanent and every day of rain has made them more and more unpleasant until now the chief question is how to keep the men more or less out of the water. In a summer campaign it would not matter, but when a hard frost sets in at night, and we have had several (luckily short) spells, frostbite sets in at once and the man is done for so far as his feet and legs are concerned. Our own British troops have stood it wonderfully well but some of the Indian regiments have suffered pretty severely in this respect. As you may well imagine some of these trenches that have been held for a long time are in a pretty grizzly state.
In the fight against the elements there was little energy to spare for fighting the enemy and, in any event, in such conditions attack was all but impossible. It was obvious that the Germans were in the same plight and on frosty nights, when the clouds cleared and the light from a hazy moon rippled on lagoons of ice and water spread across the morass, when the machine-guns fell silent and only the occasional smack of a bullet cracked in the frosty air, the Tommies could hear the splosh and thud of boots and spades in front and see the Germans silhouetted fifty yards away engaged on the same dreary task, bailing and digging, and doubtless cursing, just as they were themselves.
Day after day throughout the cheerless month of January, Corporal Alex Letyford recorded a terse catalogue of miseries in the pocket diary he kept wrapped in oilcloth to protect it from the wet.
Cpl. A. Letyford, 5th Field Coy., Royal Engineers.
1.1.15 At 6 p.m. (in dark) go to the trenches making culvert and dams. Trenches knee-deep in water. We work until 3 a.m.
2.1.15 6 p.m. off to the trenches. I take some men and make dam to prevent water coming from German trench and return at 5 a.m.
3.1.15 Parade at 6 a.m. March to trenches. We dig communication trenches and are fired at the whole time. Work until 6 p.m.
4.1.15 During the day we build stables near billet for our horses. At 6 p.m. we go to the lines and trace out redoubts. Rather risky work as we are only eighty yards from the Germans who are doing a lot of sniping from their lines. We also make a bridge across our front line. Four feet of water in this part of the trench line. Return to billets about midnight.
5.1.15 Spend the morning trying to dry out our clothes. We are all covered in mud from head to foot. At 6 p.m. I go with Captain Reed to the trenches and fix six pumps. Wading about in water to our waists until 2 a.m.
6.1.15 We go up at 8.45 a.m. and improve trenches for reserves.
7.1.15 Go out at 3 a.m. and make a bridge in the line of trenches about a hundred and fifty yards from Fritz. Return at daylight and rest remainder of day.
8.1.15 Again at work on the reserve trenches. At nightfall I remain with eight men and make the bridge again, it having been knocked into the stream. It rains nearly all the time and the enemy torment us with their Very lights and sniping. Return at 9 p.m.
9.1.15 Parade at 8 a.m. I take four men to dig communication trench. Work until 5 p.m. and reach billet at 6.30 p.m. The trenches are now waist-deep in water, part of section returned early, being soaked through, breast-high. My party had to run the gauntlet on returning across the open in preference to coming through the trenches!
The journey was slow and hazardous, because it was impossible to accomplish it silently. The sound of splashing and sliding, the clink of tools, an inadvertent cry as a bridge collapsed or someone plunged into a water hole, were a sure sign that men were on the move, and the enemy flares would hiss into the sky, bathing the lines in incandescent light that showed up every tree, every twig, every man who was caught in its glare. Then machine-guns would spit from their hidden posts and snipers take aim at such targets as they could see before the rocket burned out and plopped, sizzling, back to the sodden earth. It lasted seconds but, to the men standing motionless for fear of being spotted, it seemed an eternity.
Even quite far behind the front line it could be as dangerous by day, for the ‘line’ was hardly a line at all, but a succession of outpost trenches cut off by the water-filled dykes that crisscrossed the flooded land. Under the cover of mist and darkness it was easy enough for snipers to slip through and find hideouts convenient for taking pot-shots at unsuspecting or unwary soldiers. In the lines themselves, marooned all day in barrels begged from breweries to provide reasonably dry standing, sentries kept a sharp look-out, but snipers were devious and some, more courageous and ingenious, were skilled in the arts of disguise and deceit. Stories of spies and snipers abounded – and some of them were true.
Lt. R. Macleod, V Bty., RHA, 2 Indian Cavalry Div.
We had a little spy hunt the other day. We shifted our billet to a new place. On going into the loft we discovered a little observation place very neatly made in the roof. There was a place where two tiles could be easily slid up, giving a very good view over part of the country. (The rest of the tiles being cemented down.) There was also a supply of provisions concealed up there. At the back of the house there is a large barn, apparently filled with straw. On examining the place it was found that the straw was hollow, and contained a small room with a passage leading to it through which a man could crawl. There was also another passage leading out to a trap-door very cunningly concealed under a heap of straw above a cow stall. No spy has been near the place since. We only discovered the presence of the room and passage by walking on top of the straw, and finding it giving way under our feet.
Major Elliot-Hill had an even more thrilling encounter.
I was riding along a quiet country road when I heard a report from a rifle. I dismounted, tied my horse to a tree, and had a good look round. Presently I saw what at home we would call a farm labourer working at a turnip clamp in a field. Keeping out of his sight I rode back to the farm house where we are billeted and borrowed some not-very-savoury farm labourer’s clothes. I went back on foot and started walking up the ploughed field towards him as if I was very interested in the straightness of the furrow, but I was actually more interested in my automatic revolver. When I got within reach of the fellow I tackled him. It was a fairly good struggle but I overpowered him and managed to march him back and hand him over to the authorities. They were not much inclined to take me seriously at first, but they locked him up anyway. They soon changed their tune when we went back to the turnip clamp and found a rifle and fifty rounds of ammunition hidden in it.
News of such morale-boosting exploits was made much of in letters home, and although the stories were mostly based on hearsay, much embellished, and usually owed more to the writer’s imagination than to hard facts, they were frequently passed on to the local newspapers in which ‘Letters from the Front’ were a popular feature. A favourite story, current in the early days of January, told of a heroic Tommy who went into a barn to fetch straw and bumped into two fully armed Germans. Keeping a cool head he pointed the only weapon he had – a pair of wire-cutters – and shouted ‘Hands up!’ The Germans obligingly dropped their rifles, raised their hands, and meekly allowed themselves to be taken prisoner. The public loved such stories. If British brawn was not yet sufficient to defeat the Germans the assurance that British brain could be depended on to dupe them was the next best thing.
The best of all stories of duping the Germans had just reached Britain from Australia and caused much gloating and excitement. It concerned the tramp steamer Southport, out of Cardiff – but a long time out, because the Southport belonged to the raggle-taggle fleet of tramp steamers that sailed the oceans of the world, picking up contracts and cargoes where they could. It was sometimes years before such a ship returned to its home port and, unless there were children to keep her at home, the captain’s wife, as often as not, accompanied her husband on the voyage. Some, like Captain Clopet’s wife, had circled the globe several times. Early in 1914 Mrs Clopet had crossed the Atlantic and had passed two pleasurable weeks in New York while the Southport unloaded and took on a cargo of American machinery. She had endured the gales of the south Atlantic, rounded the Cape of Good Hope to Durban, supervised the loading of provisions and shopped personally for the fresh fruit and other dainties that would ensure Captain Clopet’s domestic comfort on the long onward haul to Australia. It was May before they got there, and early June before the Southport sailed on to New Zealand with a cargo of coal. Having plied her leisurely way from Auckland to Wellington and on to Dunedin she turned north for Ocean Island in the Pacific to load phosphates bound for Rotterdam. At Ocean Island orders were changed and the South-port was to sail on to Nauru to take on a cargo of phosphates for Stettin, but bad weather, and congestion in the harbour, made the task impossible and Captain Clopet was forced to return to Ocean Island and then sail on an inter-island hop to the Gilberts, picking up small workaday cargoes as he went to fill the time.
The Southport was not the most ramshackle of freighters – she was only fourteen years old, she was more than three thousand tons, had a crew of twenty-three and her single deck was lit by electricity, which was a welcome improvement on the lanterns and candles of Captain Clopet’s youth, but she had no modern refinement so sophisticated as radio. For all she knew of the outside world as she hopped between the atolls of the Pacific Ocean, she might as well have been sailing on the moon. The only thing for it, decided Captain Clopet, was to make for Kusaie in the Caroline Islands where the fast mail-ship Germania called every two months. She would be arriving any day now. She might well be bringing him new orders as she had done in the past, and at least she would be able to replenish their scanty supplies to tide them over until orders arrived. The Southport anchored in the bay at Kusaie on 4 August. That day, twelve thousand miles away, Britain declared war on Germany.
Fresh water was obtainable and that was a relief, but there was no food on the island, for a cyclone early in the year had destroyed the crops, killed cattle and pigs, and the natives were subsisting on roots and coconuts. There was nothing to be done but to cut the ship’s rations and wait, day after day, for the arrival of the overdue Germania. The Germania never came. But, on 4 September, the Geier did. She was a German warship, and she had every right to be there because the Caroline Islands were German, and although German rule was limited to collecting from King Sigrah an annual tax of six marks per head of his subjects, the German flag flew in the tiny township outside the mission church. This circumstance was of no concern to the crew of the Southport who had not heard a hint of the international tensions that had bubbled to the surface in Europe during their absence, nor did they have the faintest idea that Britain was at war with Germany. The crew crowded on deck, cheering the Geier as she sailed into the anchorage. The captain and his wife were ashore and it was Chief Officer Dodd who ordered the ship’s ensign to be dipped and who waited on deck, beaming in welcome, as a cutter from the battleship approached. He attached no significance to the fact that the Geier’s guns were trained on his vessel, and he was only slightly surprised to see that the boarding party was armed to the teeth and looking far from affable. The German officer saluted correctly then, speaking English, but without so much as wishing him a good day, dropped the bombshell.
Chief Officer C. Dodd, SS Southport.
He said, ‘Of course you know that war has broken out between Britain and Germany?’ I said, ‘No.’ The German said, ‘Oh yes. We have been fighting about a month.’ I said, in as casual a manner as I could muster, ‘I suppose we are prisoners of war then.’ The officer made no reply. He said he preferred to wait until the captain arrived on board. But he was perfectly polite. There was nothing domineering about him, but he posted the armed guard around the ship, and they looked none too friendly. Then he wanted to know what provisions we had but when I told them of what straits we were in for tucker ourselves, they didn’t bother. Still, they went over the ship with a fine toothcomb and spent a long time in the engine room, fiddling about with things, which the chief engineer didn’t like at all. We were all dumbfounded. Then the captain came back and had a long talk with the officer.
Capt. A. Clopet, SS Southport.
The upshot was that our flag was hauled down and the German flag hoisted for half an hour while the Germans read me the proclamation that my ship had been seized in the name of the Kaiser. They left the guard on board and stayed in the bay for two days. Next day another ship sailed in. It was the German merchant steamer Tsintau of Bremen and they sent the steamer alongside the Southport and took a great deal of our coal. Soon afterwards an officer in command of marines on the Geier came on board with another party whose job was to put the engines out of commission to prevent us putting to sea. They removed nearly all the eccentrics and other parts of the machinery and took away the main stop valve.
The officer of the Geier told me that he would not sink us but that we would have to remain at Kusaie until after the war was over. I pointed out to him that we were short of provisions and that the natives, on account of the cyclone, were also short of food. The officer replied that there were coconuts on the island and he said, very sneeringly, ‘The people of Paris once lived on rats.’ This infuriated me. I was born of French parents, although I am a naturalised British subject, and my parents were in Paris during the siege by the Germans in 1870 and they told me enough of that terrible time to make me fully appreciate the reference to rats! I told him in no uncertain terms that my men would be starved out, and I could not be responsible for what starving men might do on the island. That gave him second thoughts, he wrote out there and then an order to King Sigrah to secure supplies of meat and so on. It said that whatever he gave me would be paid for after the war.
Not content with taking our coal the Germans on the steamer Tsintau took some of our kerosene oil and everything else they thought would be of use to them, although the officer on the Geier had obviously told them not to touch our provisions, because we had none to spare. The Geier also took off our boatswain and two of our firemen, who were all German and they went willingly enough, and one of our Norwegian sailors – a man with a good appetite! – left the ship voluntarily to go on the German steamer Tsintau. This, of course, left us short-handed but, as the German officer pointed out, since we were not going anywhere, it hardly mattered. The fate of your ship will be decided by a prize court,’ he said, and then they sailed off in a great hurry it seemed. But his last words to me were that they would be back in a fortnight and expected to find us there when they returned.
Mrs Clopet, who had been confined to her cabin on her husband’s orders for most of the last two days, was now released and accompanied Captain Clopet when he went ashore to visit King Sigrah to negotiate food supplies. He took the German order with him – for all the good it was likely to do! While the Captain was gone and the deck crew passed the time by fishing over the side in the hope of a tasty catch to augment the meagre rations, the engine-room crew got down to more serious business. Chief Engineer Harold Cox was no novice when it came to engines. He had served on ships far older than the Southport, and had repaired and nursed and cosseted engines that were on their last legs. Given a hammer, a hacksaw, a soldering iron, a length of tow, even a ball of string, he could repair anything and make a faltering engine sing sweetly enough to bring a ship to port. He was determined not to be defeated now and Harris and Griffiths, the 2nd and 3rd engineers, were of the same mind. While the Captain was ashore they investigated the damage.
The Captain was not in a happy frame of mind. The negotiations had been long and wearisome and the outcome only partly satisfactory. Faced with the German order, King Sigrah had been obliged, with great reluctance, to hand over supplies, but he could give no more than he had got, and all he had (and could ill spare at that) was coconuts and the roots of trees which, ground up and mixed with coconut milk, were all that his own people had to eat. Equally reluctantly the captain agreed. It was Hobson’s choice. He arranged to send a party of men ashore the following day to supervise the loading of the native long-boats that would ferry this miserable provender to his ship, and returned gloomily on board. But his gloom was quickly dispelled by his chief engineer who met him with the happy news that the damage to the engines was not so great as they had feared. He believed it might just be possible to manufacture some of the missing parts and to contrive makeshift parts to replace some others, and thought that, with a little time and patience, they could get the Southport on the move.
It took more than time and patience. It took working round the clock, monumental effort, plus liberal applications of ingenuity and elbow grease. And it took ten days, with the thud and clanging of hammers echoing across the bay, the rasp of saws on metal, while lookouts fearfully scanned the horizon for signs of the Geier’s return. On the afternoon of the tenth day they managed to get up steam – the fact that it was a poor head of steam was a good deal less important than the fact that the engines would take the ship ahead, but not astern. The Captain thought he could manage. It would have been worse after all, he remarked, if it had been the other way round.
It was a feat even to get her to face outwards from the anchorage but that night in the darkness, with all her own lights extinguished, the Southport limped out to sea. It took them twelve days to reach Brisbane, sailing via the Solomon Islands – partly in German hands, but they had to take the risk – and they sailed at quarter power, with the crew on quarter rations. It was better than subsisting on roots.
The welcome they received in Australia almost made up for the hazards and privations of the voyage. The people of Brisbane showered them with gifts. Food was brought aboard – sacks of rice, dozens of loaves, butter, sugar and flour by the stone, ducks and chickens, whole sides of beef. In their elation the crew were, with difficulty, restrained from dumping the loathsome roots and coco-nuts into the harbour and persuaded to unload them in the conventional way. They were fêted and petted and treated in waterside bars, and they recounted their adventure again and again and again. It took a long time to repair the engines, and a long time for the story to filter through to Great Britain. By the time it did get there in early January the Southport was on her way again, taking up the voyage that had been so rudely interrupted four months earlier, sailing towards the Pacific to Ocean Island to pick up her cargo of phosphates and head for Rotterdam. Mrs Clopet, who had refused the offer of a fast passage home from Australia, was still on board.*
The saga of the Southport enlivened many a breakfast table and similar, though less spectacular, stories of scoring off the Germans, contained in letters home were passed round, and gloated over at work parties the length and breadth of Britain, where news from the front was exchanged and gossiped over as the ladies of Britain did their bit for the war effort, rolling bandages, knitting socks, hemming khaki handkerchiefs and sewing nightshirts and flannel bedjackets for the wounded in hospital. Many such ladies made use of the pin-cushions that had enjoyed a large sale at Christmas. They were soft dolls, rather than conventional pin-cushions, shaped, unflatteringly, to represent the Kaiser, and there was certain satisfaction to be gained in giving the arch-enemy a sharp jab from time to time in the course of their work.
But anti-German feeling, innocent enough when it was confined to sticking the occasional pin or needle into the Kaiser’s effigy, had a more sinister side, and one tragedy, hastily hushed up, had caused the authorities some discomfiture. It happened at Henham in Suffolk. People had been edgy ever since Scarborough had been shelled by German warships in December, and stories of spies signalling from beaches were rife on the east coast. An over-officious Chief Constable, whose suspicions were based entirely on malicious gossip, ordered an innocent schoolmaster and his wife to move, not merely out of his area, but out of Suffolk entirely. The Smiths had one son, a brilliant boy who had studied languages in France, and, more ominously, in Germany long before the war. ‘Where was this son now?’ the local busy-bodies asked themselves, and the answer came pat. ‘Why, in Germany of course!’ The rumour was embroidered as it spread. Young Smith was known for a fact to have taken German nationality and enlisted in the German Navy. Young Smith was Captain of a warship, a U-boat Commander, the officer in charge of a fleet of fast armoured motor boats – it hardly mattered which. The Smiths lived not far from the coast, lights had been seen flashing on the beach and the only likely explanation was that this elderly couple had been signalling to their German son lurking in an enemy vessel off the coast and doubtless preparing to blow them all to smithereens. The Smiths were ostracised. Wherever they went there were wagging tongues and knowing nods, and finally the Chief Constable, acting far beyond his powers under the Defence of the Realm Act, issued his ultimatum. The following day Mrs Smith was found hanging from a beam in her kitchen. Her son, who had been teaching languages in Guatemala, was even now on his way home to join up.
When the story came out, there were some who felt ashamed, but it was easier for a bad conscience to take refuge in disbelief and righteous indignation. The slightest hint or taint of Germanism was enough to ruin the most illustrious reputation. Names were being anglicised wholesale, and an innocent misprint brought wrath down on the head of the social editor of The Times who was forced to grovel to the furious father of one bride-to-be and to make amends by inserting a notice free of charge among the announcements of ‘Forthcoming Marriages’:
Mr O. C. Hawkins and Miss Holman
An engagement is announced between Osmond Crutchley, eldest son of Mr and Mrs Thomas A. Hawkins, Glenthorne, Chealyn Hay, and Marie, eldest daughter of Mr and Mrs Ernest Holman (NOT Hofman, as stated through a clerical error in a previous announcement).
22 Gloucester Square, Hyde Park, W.
Real indignation was reserved for the judge who had the temerity to find in favour of a plaintiff accused of trading with the enemy. This unfortunate man was an American who must have regretted, in the present circumstances, that he had ever taken out British citizenship. He was manager of the London branch of an American firm which also had a branch in Frankfurt, managed by his brother. There was a large sum of money owing and, at his brother’s request, the London manager had found a means of sending it to Germany via Holland. He was caught in the act and had spent six uncomfortable weeks in prison before the case came up. The judge took into account some extenuating circumstances and set him free. The extenuating circumstances, ironic to say the least, were that the Frankfurt manager had also been jailed for pro-British activities. But the irony was lost on an indignant British public who clung to the axiom that there was no smoke without fire.
The Trading with the Enemy Act was a godsend to some British firms who held large stocks of German goods – as yet unpaid for – which, in the present climate of anti-German feeling, they had little prospect of selling. The matter of mouth organs was a case in point, and it was a tricky one. Mouth organs were in demand. There was a dearth of mouth organs at the front and the relatives of soldiers were scouring the shops to obtain them. They were cheap, they were small enough to be easily packed in parcels, and nothing was more likely to cheer the troops in the monotony of life in the trenches. But, mouth organs were almost exclusively of German manufacture and it would never do to boost enemy trade – even retrospectively! – by buying pre-war stocks of goods made in Germany, let alone be so crassly unpatriotic as to send them to the boys who were being shot at by the mouth organ makers themselves. Wholesalers scoured every possible neutral source of supply and eventually found enough mouth organs in Holland to fill the gap until a Birmingham firm was persuaded to take up the cause and meet the demand. This boycott of German goods, like the taboo against buying toys of German manufacture at Christmas, was not based entirely on blind prejudice, for it was widely known that the bombs which the Germans were hurling at British trenches had been made in many cases in toy factories, and that the fuses were manufactured in Bavaria by makers of clocks and watches. Cuckoo clocks were removed from walls on which they had sometimes hung for decades and anxiously scrutinised to make sure that they had originated in neutral Switzerland and not in hateful Germany, and the once-proud owners of expensive Bechstein or Steinway pianos were torn between reluctantly closing the lids for the duration of the war or trumping the enemy by abandoning Mozart and Handel in favour of British patriotic songs thumped out endlessly on their German keys.
Patriotic songs were all the rage at home and some starry-eyed idealists were a little disappointed that they were not equally popular with the troops. Some newspapers took up the cause. Teach them the songs of Agincourt,’ suggested one enthusiastic patriot without, however, specifying what particular songs these were or where they were to be found. ‘English folk songs,’ suggested another, ‘would be more appropriate, to be sung with gusto!’ The strains of ‘Greensleeves’ were seldom heard on the lips of the Tommies, and if the kind of songs they sang as they endlessly route-marched round the country bore little resemblance to those such innocent civilians would have preferred to hear, it only reinforced their missionary zeal. It seldom struck them that the bawdy dirges that cheered the troops on the long training marches in all probability faithfully echoed the sentiments of the songs that had cheered foot-soldiers on the road to Agincourt centuries before.
Music was in the air. Sheet music poured from the printing presses, ‘Tipperary’, the hit of the previous summer which had found favour with the troops, had gone into umpteen editions, and ‘Sister Susie’s Sewing Shirts for Soldiers’, the felicitous show-stopper of a Christmas pantomime, was threatening to overtake it in popularity. And music was all the rage in ten thousand towns and villages where several hundred thousand soldiers were in training camps from Inverness to Salisbury Plain. The fact that they were not quite soldiers yet was neither here nor there. They must be entertained, and entertained they were. Local talent was rounded up by entertainment committees as forceful as any press-gang, and in many places there were concerts once a week. Sometimes the programmes were a little above the heads of the troops. Cellists droned, violinists scraped, sopranos warbled, elocutionists spouted, basses boomed, but there was often a good feed to accompany the entertainment, kind ladies distributed cigarettes, and the troops took the bad with the good. The highlight of one concert in Jedburgh was a rendering by the local doctor’s wife of ‘My Little Grey Home in the West’. It had a recognisable tune, it came as a welcome change after a programme of cultural music and heroic poems, and the troops encored it three times. They were the l/7th Battalion of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and most of them had recently left some little grey home in the west of Scotland at Lord Kitchener’s behest.
The tune, if not precisely catchy, was easy to play on a mouth organ and it was equally popular with soldiers holding the miserable outposts of the British line in Flanders. But the words were not appropriate, and in Flanders they had adopted their own version:
I’ve a little wet home in a trench,
Where the rainstorms continually drench,
There’s a dead cow close by
With her feet towards the sky
And she gives off a horrible stench.
Underneath, in the place of a floor,
There’s a mass of wet mud and some straw,
But with shells dropping there,
There’s no place to compare
With my little wet home in the trench.
The dead cow was a realistic touch. In the one-time farmyards close up to the lines there were dead cows all over the place and not all of them had been victims of enemy action. Private Crossingham of the Grenadier Guards was still trying to live down the episode when he had accidentally shot one while on sentry duty. His protestations that the cow had failed to reply to his challenge did him no good at all. His fame had spread throughout the Battalion and, wherever he went, even complete strangers were apt to taunt him as he passed with a verse of doggerel composed by a wag he would have dearly liked to get his hands on.
Last night at the setting of the sun,
I shot a farmer’s cow.
I thought she was a German Hun –
I beg her pardon now!
Despite the miseries of wet and cold and the dangers of their day-to-day existence, the troops in Flanders had not lost their sense of humour. The biggest laugh was raised in the leaking ruined cottage that served as the officers’ mess of the 1st Worcestershires behind the line at Festubert. Buckling on his equipment, staring out into the pelting rain as he prepared to take another hapless working-party up the line, Lieutenant Roberts remarked thoughtfully, ‘I went to see my Great Aunt Agnes while I was on leave. She said to me, “Tell me, are there any picture palaces where you and your friends can go when you get back from the trenches in the evening?”’ And, for a time, ‘off to the picture palace’ became a popular synonym for ‘going out with a working-party’ until the joke wore thin.
But if the majority of civilians were isolated from the full realities of war they were not entirely unaware of conditions at the front and of the physical hardships the men were undergoing. Knitting became a patriotic duty and mountains of parcels and bales of ‘comforts’ arrived in France by the boatload.
CQMS, R.A., S. McFie, 1/10th (Scottish) Bn. (TF), King’s (Liverpool Regt.).
Yesterday I drew a lot of cigarettes presented by somebody, and a pipe per man sent by the Glasgow tramway-men, as well as some peppermint sweets from the manufacturers. Today again there was a supply of cigarettes, tobacco and matches as well as a lot of tinned salmon given by the Government of British Columbia. We have also had socks from Princess Mary, gloves from the Archduke Michael, razors from a man in Sheffield, etc. Also socks, body belts, cap-comforters, combs – surely no army has ever before been so well looked after.
Pullovers, socks and mufflers were welcome enough, but what the Army needed most, and needed urgently, was sandbags. They had given up trying to dig trenches across the worst of the morass; now they were building breastworks instead, filling sandbags with earth – more often mud! – and building high protective walls with crude shanties behind for shelter and redoubts in front for protection. They needed sandbags by the thousand, by the million, and appeals went out to churches and work-groups to supply them.
Sewing sandbags was hard labour, and working with rough canvas not unlike sewing mailbags, but the women of Britain set to and turned them out by the million. Before Easter the Surrey village of Newdigate alone had sent off 1,665. But while such industry was laudable and the country was enthusiastically doing its bit, it was doing little to speed the progress of the war and it seemed to some who were in a position to take an informed, objective view that the war was proceeding in a way that was too dilatory by half and that there was an unforgivable complacency in high places.
One was Sir Maurice Hankey, Secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence, the other was David Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer. By coincidence, and without consultation, the two men had spent the days between Christmas and New Year putting their misgivings on paper. On New Year’s Day both memoranda were distributed to members of the Cabinet. In their assessment of the situation they were surprisingly similar. Lloyd George, who had recently visited France, dwelt on the apparently leisurely approach to the war and begged that the War Cabinet might meet regularly every few days rather than at intervals of two weeks or longer. He deplored the lack of policy, and criticised the generals who seemed to him to be so flummoxed by the Germans’ decision to dig in that they could think of no apparent means to break the deadlock.
In Sir Maurice Hankey’s memorandum he turned his mind to practical means by which the deadlock could be broken. Victories were needed to encourage the people at home. How were they to be achieved?
He incorporated a list of ideas. Numbers of large, heavy rollers propelled by motor engines to roll down the barbed wire by sheer weight; bullet-proof shields or armour; smoke balls to be thrown by the troops towards the enemy’s trenches to screen their advance; rockets throwing a rope with a grapnel attached to grip the barbed wire ‘which can then be hauled in by the troops in the trench from which the rocket is thrown’; spring catapults, or special pumping apparatus to throw oil or petrol into the enemy’s trenches. He had privately gone so far as to have some prototypes made and tested.
But the results of Hankey’s experiments had not found favour
with either the military commanders in the field or the military hierarchy at the War Office, and so far as the War Office was concerned they already had their hands full with the mammoth task of organising three hundred thousand volunteers and supervising the million and one details that would lick them into shape and turn an amorphous mass of civilians into something that approximated to an army. They were already being inundated with bright ideas from would-be inventors, but there was simply no time to give them serious consideration and, as Hankey sadly remarked, The bright ideas are not new, and the new ideas are not bright.’ The commanders in the field had other things on their minds than the invention of unconventional new weapons. They would have been more than happy to have a sufficient supply of the old ones, and Sir John French was already confiding his disquietude to his diary:
23.1.15 There is more delay in sending these new 9.2 guns. It is said to be caused by the Christmas holidays which the men in the factories insisted on having! It appears they get very high wages and are accordingly independent! I am also somewhat disappointed in the promised supply of ammunition.
The troops themselves displayed some ingenuity in supplying the deficiency. Dumps were scoured for empty jam tins and the engineers, who had passed most of the night improving the defences in the line, spent hours during the day filling them with old nails, tamped down with gun cotton to make primitive bombs. The bright sparks of the 15th Field Company Royal Engineers of the 24th Brigade even manufactured a trench mortar. It was only a length of drainpipe soldered up at one end with a touch-hole bored above it and was ignited with a match and gunpowder. But it fired the jam-tin bombs a good distance towards the Germans and, despite a few unfortunate accidents in the course of its erratic performance, it cheered the troops wonderfully.
A battalion of the Cambridgeshires in Plugstreet Wood* acquired an even more primitive weapon – a replica of an ancient catapult, designed by a professor of history at Cambridge University. He was an acquaintance of their Commanding Officer to whom he eagerly canvassed the merits of the catapult in screeds of sketches and instructions. It could throw bombs or even boulders at a push, and it could throw them a long distance. The Romans, he added, had used an identical weapon with satisfactory results to batter down the wooden gates of rebellious cities, and he was convinced that it could be used with equal success against the German trenches. It seemed worth a try. Working parties were organised, first to scrounge suitable timber, then to construct the catapult itself. It took several days and two more nights of strenuous work to build an emplacement and dig the monster in. It was more than seven feet long, and being constructed of hefty beams filched from shell-torn buildings, it weighed several hundredweight. But the Tommies were less practised than the Romans in the art of catapulting, and any missiles they managed to fire as often as not fell harmlessly to the ground or, worse, back on their own heads. The experiment was abandoned, the Colonel tore up the design in disgust and the Tommies chopped up the Roman weapon for firewood.
But although it was impractical, the idea of the catapult as a weapon of siege warfare was not entirely inappropriate, but many months would pass and many men would die before people would understand that siege warfare was exactly what the Army was engaged in. Their faith was still vested in the cavalry, now dismounted and valiantly, if not uncomplainingly, suffering the indignities of working-parties as they waited for the breakthrough that would send them charging through the German lines, scattering all before them as they rode non-stop to Berlin.
But not everyone shared such sanguine expectations. Lloyd George had been disquieted by his recent visit to France where he had observed the effects of the impasse at first hand in both British and French sectors, and a meeting with General Joffre had given him food for thought. Joffre had been adamant that the Germans would never succeed in breaking his lines, not even if they outnumbered the French by two or even three to one, and he reminded Lloyd George that even the thinly held line round Ypres had not given way in the face of the German onslaught of recent weeks. Lloyd George took the point but, although he kept his opinion to himself, he reflected soberly that the opposite was equally true and that the allies had just as little chance of breaching the line held by the Germans.
Lt. C. Tennant.
The war in the western area has reached a pretty disgusting phase. The opposing trenches are very close to each other – in some cases not more than twenty yards apart and there we sit facing each other and killing each other by every possible means. Attacks on each other’s trenches are as often as not absolutely useless. If we rush a German trench we lose an enormous lot of men in doing it and those who do get there are promptly blown up by mines left there while the enemy retires to another line of trenches a few yards to the rear from which he makes the hard-won trench untenable. Moreover, the advance, unless successful over a very long section of the line, is no use as it merely creates a dangerous salient liable to enfilade by artillery and machine-guns from the flanks. Such a position has been created just in front of us where we were from the 19th to the 24th December and our own 1st Battalion had a terrible time. The trench they were holding was a very bad one (the water up to the men’s waists in places) and owing to the retiral of some Indian troops on their flank, they were left practically ‘in air’. But they held on for nine days until they were relieved by another Battalion who – I’m sorry to have to say it – after two hours evacuated the trench as utterly untenable!
The hostile trenches are now in many places so close together that the war is almost reverting to continuous hand-to-hand fighting. I was told of an incident the other day when a double company (nominally two hundred men) of the HLI – after a long burst of fire repelling an attack – had only nineteen rifles working at the end of it.
But for the majority of the troops, dodging bullets and exploding shells as they shivered in the mud flats, there was nothing for it but to dig and bail, to bail and dig, slogging through the mud in the dark as they laboured to build defences.
Cpl. A. Letyford.
1.2.15 to 5.2.15 Go up to the trenches each night making continuous breastworks. Have a hundred infantry working with us each night. We lose a few of the working-party killed by snipers. Came unexpectedly on a German listening post last night whilst searching in front of breastworks.
6.2.15 I go with second relief at 9.30 p.m. Continue breastworks and meet no. 4 section, so that now the work is completed from Festubert to Givenchy. We have thus advanced about six hundred yards without fighting.
This achievement was duly noticed and reported triumphantly in the war news columns of the press. It doubtless cheered up the people at home but, to the troops, one muddy position was very much like another and, as the casualties mounted and men sank wounded and dying into the swamp, as the hospitals filled up with men sick with fever and crippled with rotting feet, a six-hundred-yard advance was nothing to write home about or even anything like sufficient compensation for their efforts.
The population of Great Britain, with a century of Empire building behind them, was accustomed to regarding even large-scale wars as distant affairs that could safely be left in the hands of professional soldiers. But now their own boys were in khaki, milling around in camps and training grounds as they prepared to go to the front, and Sir Maurice Hankey was not alone in realising that when the new armies took the field people at home would take a keener and more personal interest in the conduct of the war as they followed the fortunes of their nearest and dearest. This new army, the battering ram that was to smash the German defences, must be properly used. The new recruits were of high calibre, volunteers motivated by a desire to do something positive for their country, unlike most peacetime recruits. Few of the men who joined the ranks of the Regular Army prior to the war were drawn to enlist for love of a uniform or the seductive call of fife and drum, but they were professionals to a man, so highly trained and skilled in the arts of soldiering that they were second to none. They could fire fifteen rounds a minute, and fifteen aimed rounds at that, and six months earlier they had fired their rifles to such effect at Mons that the Germans still genuinely believed that they had been met by machine-guns. But there were precious few Regulars left, and the thinned-out ranks of the old army could never have held out since November had it not been for the Territorials who, strictly speaking, had no business to be there at all.
The Territorial Army was a mere six years old, formed in 1908 from a nucleus of the old County Volunteers and augmented by young civilians who enjoyed a bit of drill and military training of an evening or a weekend, and who looked forward all year to a free holiday under canvas at the annual camp. They called them the Saturday afternoon soldiers, they were intended for ‘home service only’ and, in the event of an emergency, their role was to guard the country in the absence of the standing army which might be fighting abroad. That idea had been abandoned many months ago. The Territorial Force, as its name implied, could not be sent to serve overseas, but it could be asked to volunteer – and it had volunteered almost to a man. Now the Territorial battalions of a dozen different regiments were serving in France with the remnants of the Regulars and their reserves, and although some of the early arrivals had seen action before the end of the autumn battles, most of the Territorials were champing at the bit as they waited to get on with the war.
Lt. C. Tennant.
The poor old Territorials have little to do except keep themselves in training and a good deal of trench digging and fatigue work. And so though we have now been within sound of the guns for nearly two months we have seen nothing of the actual fighting except digging a trench before Christmas. It is a little maddening as, however inefficient we may be as compared with our own Regulars of the original expeditionary force, we are every bit as good as the second and third line troops that Germany is now bringing up: at least we should like an opportunity of seeing how we compare! However Kitchener and French know their own job best and I am very certain that all in good time we shall get our chance. In fact our Divisional General when inspecting us two days ago as good as promised that we should get a move on after this rest.
Getting a move on was what everyone wanted to do. But the most urgent need, before they could even think of it, was for more men.
Chapter 3
The Territorial Force had been on the move for months and where they ended up depended on the luck of the draw. Some people in the higher echelons of the War Office would have preferred to keep the Territorials at home to act as a foundation on which new armies of raw volunteers could be built. But it was not to be thought of while there were trained Regulars, fit and ready to fight, now kicking their heels in foreign stations round the Empire. The first priority was to bring them home again and to send the Territorials to protect Great Britain’s interests in their place. So the grand reshuffle began, troopships set sail, and the Terriers were packed off to Ireland, to Egypt, to South Africa. More than thirty battalions embarked on the long voyage to India but the optimists who had expected something resembling a holiday cruise were doomed to disappointment. The ships were packed and the accommodation was basic, particularly in vessels that had been hastily requisitioned and refitted. There were up to four ‘sittings’ for meals which the men ate catch-as-catch-can, squatting wherever they could find a space on a crowded deck or narrow passageway. But deck space was hard to find, for at any hour of the day there was hardly a corner that was not occupied by some sweating platoon drilling or practising musketry or signalling at the insistence of an NCO or officer who was anxious to make the most of the allotted time before the precious space must be surrendered to the next platoon on the rota. Throughout the voyage, from dawn to nightfall, the men were kept hard at it in a rigorous programme of lectures and physical training to keep them alert and fit for duty at the other end. At least there were no route-marches.
The same could not be said for the Territorials in Malta where the luck of the draw had taken Arthur Agius and his battalion as part of the 1st London Infantry Brigade which was detailed to carry out garrison duties while training at the same time for the war. They were fitter than most of the raw recruits now endlessly tramping the roads of Great Britain, footsore in civilian shoes, and the two companies that marched every four days by the coast road to the ninth milestone rather enjoyed the exercise in the mild Mediterranean climate. Their duties were important but hardly onerous, for they amounted to little more than manning the coastline in the unlikely event of an enemy attack, and keeping a sharp look-out for submarines that might threaten the sealanes and the ships of the Royal Navy.
The Londons camped under canvas and they looked forward to their four-day stints away from barracks, much as they had looked forward in peacetime to getting away from the office to the summer camp. Like life in the office, the routine at Imtarfa Barracks kept every nose to the grindstone. There were drills and lectures all day long to keep the men busy and bring the Battalion up to scratch for active service. The Londons pounded the barrack square, drilling by platoons, by companies and eventually joining up with sister battalions to drill and manoeuvre as a brigade. There were extra sessions, mostly early in the morning, for the specialist sections, the signallers, the machine-gunners, the scouts – even the band was detailed for stretcher-bearing practice from 6 to 7.30 every morning except Sundays. It was hardest of all on the officers who not only had to supervise the training of the men but had to be trained themselves in the finer arts of war. Officers’ lectures were held literally at crack of dawn in the two hours before the battalion day officially began with breakfast at 8 and first parade at 8.30. There were more lectures for the officers at 5.30 p.m. while the men were enjoying tea at the end of an arduous day, and later, after dinner in the mess, the officers were obliged to write up notes and clarify their own thoughts on such matters as ‘Esprit de Corps’, ‘March Discipline’, ‘Personal Hygiene’, ‘The Origin of the War’ and ‘Malta’ so that they in turn could deliver lectures on these topics to their men. ‘Personal Hygiene’ was the source of deep embarrassment to younger officers afflicted with shyness. It was true that the lecture gave useful advice on the inadvisability of eating unwashed fruit and drinking unboiled goats’ milk or water, but its real purpose was to warn adventurous soldiers of the dire consequences likely to befall any who succumbed to the wiles of prostitutes plying their trade in the back streets of Valletta. Some officers delivered this information in a manner so obscure and so ambiguous that some youthful innocents were led to believe that all feminine society was to be avoided, from the vendors who sold grapes and apples outside the barracks to the refined lady volunteers who doled out books, writing paper and cups of tea at the Floriana Soldiers’ Club.
The Commanding Officer, Colonel Howells, was ultimately responsible for the whole complicated training programme and no one in the Battalion worked harder. His most exacting task – and it seemed at times to be never ending – was to instil the idea that the Battalion was now on a war footing. The men were no longer ‘Saturday Afternoon Soldiers’ and the happy-go-lucky attitude, the spirit of friendly bonhomie that had bonded the battalion in peacetime simply would not do in time of war. It was a difficult message to get across. For all their enthusiasm and goodwill the Territorials were independent spirits and despite their rapidly improving skills as soldiers their attitudes were still those of civilians. The Army frowned on ‘conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline’ and it was the Colonel’s duty to put aside his personal feelings and crack down hard.
In every Territorial battalion it was a time-honoured custom after drills, and sometimes before them, for its members to repair to the local pub for a beer with their mates, and frequently with an officer. Pubs in the vicinity of a drill-hall did good trade on Wednesdays and Saturdays – the Lilliput in Bermondsey had even given its name to the local Territorial battalion, the 12th East Surreys, universally known as ‘The Lilliput Lancers’. It was too much to expect that such men would take kindly to the army regulation that sergeants might not walk out in the company of corporals when off-duty, and that corporals and lance-corporals might not walk out with privates. Colonel Howells was not the only Commanding Officer of a Territorial battalion who was having difficulty in getting this message across to his men.
But if the order was flagrantly breached, it was not because the men were insubordinate, but because they were genuinely unable to see the sense of it and could not believe that the Colonel was serious. ‘But sir,’ blurted one aggrieved soldier, marched into Captain Agius’s company orderly room on the heinous charge of strolling out of barracks with his brother, ‘we sleep in the same bed at home!’ He was perhaps the sixth man who had been hauled up on the same charge at company office that morning, and Agius was weary. ‘Seven days confined to barracks,’ he rapped. But he saw the point. It so happened that his own brother, Richard, was an officer in the battalion.
Many had been workmates in civvy street. There was almost a whole platoon from Brooks’ Piano Manufacturers, a contingent from Holt’s Bank, a happy band of dustmen and roadsweepers from Westminster Cleansing Department, and groups of friends or colleagues from a score of sports clubs and business concerns were scattered through the battalion. In a Territorial battalion rank was something to be observed within the bounds of the drill-hall and parade-ground and in peacetime a Terrier would no more have thought of walking ten paces behind a workmate who happened to be a sergeant than of saluting the lady at the breakfast table who happened to be his mother. All ranks enjoyed the social life, mixing in free-and-easy comradeship at the ‘family hops’ held once a month in the drill-hall, and at the children’s parties and smoking concerts at Christmas. How could they be expected to take kindly to being split up now according to the number of stripes a friend might sport on his arm?
In peacetime this camaraderie had been the strength of the Battalion – but it could be a fatal weakness on the battlefield where authority and discipline might tip the balance between failure and success. The real headache, when the Colonel clamped down, was that the NCOs, who were the backbone of the Battalion, resigned en masse rather than give in. Day after day Battalion Orders contained lists of NCOs – many recently promoted – followed by the ominous words ‘reverted to private at his own request’. In the face of the Colonel’s displeasure the officers detailed to supply replacements from the ranks were forced to resort to stratagems ranging from flattery to near-bribery, in their efforts to persuade men to accept a stripe. Most refused. Colonel Howells, now thoroughly exasperated and well aware that the efficiency of his Battalion could be at stake, ordered that henceforth any man ‘desiring to relinquish rank’ must first be interviewed by himself. But that was as far as he could insist. The men knew their rights and if persuasion didn’t work there was nothing the Colonel could do but acquiesce.
The matter of rights was the subject of eager discussion in any battalion of Territorials. Most companies in a battalion of Regular soldiers would have a barrack-room lawyer, but in a battalion composed mainly of men drawn from the business and professional world every man knew his rights and saw no reason why he should not avail himself of the privilege he had enjoyed as a private individual of exercising his own judgement. Grievances were not many (the walking-out order had been the most resented) but the Colonel was appalled to receive a curt notice from Brigade. It had travelled down the chain of command from the frosty eminence of Whitehall itself and it conveyed the unwelcome news that a number of his men had complained of minor grievances direct to the War Office. This was not only a breach of military etiquette but was in breach of King’s Regulations.
Wearily the Colonel ordered a special parade of each company for the purpose of hearing paragraph 439 of King’s Regulations read aloud by the Company Commander. He also ordered each officer to confirm in writing that this had been done and that he, personally, was satisfied that the men understood the position. In accordance with the Army Act, complaints must be made through their captain; if the complaint concerned their captain they might approach their commanding officer, and if it concerned the commanding officer they might complain, in the last resort, to the General during the annual inspection. The Londons were not unfamiliar with King’s Regulations, but in their eagerness to inform themselves of a soldier’s rights, they had tended to skim over the sections that set out his obligations.
But by November the Battalion had settled down and, on the whole, Colonel Howells was not displeased with his men. They worked hard, they were cheerful and enthusiastic and they were beginning to understand the necessity of obeying the rules imposed on them by the Army. There were almost sufficient NCOs, some of the originals had even come back to the fold, and the slap-happy chumminess of the early months was giving way to pride in esprit de corps.
Off duty the Londons amused themselves as best they could. Football enthusiasts organised scratch games on the barrack-square, there were swimming parties and at weekends there were passes to Valletta, where the entertainment ranged from quiet afternoons at the Floriana Soldiers’ Home to visits to the cinema, an occasional concert at the theatre, and the rougher attractions of bars and cafes frequently followed by a good deal of horse play on the way home. Monday after Monday a procession of soldiers who were marched into the orderly room on a charge of appearing capless on parade explained with an air of injured innocence that the cap had been ‘knocked off on the last train from Valletta’. Their reward was invariably seven days CB as well as having to stump up for a replacement.
Although Colonel Howells was required to turn these amateur soldiers into professionals, and although he went by the book and doled out punishments as severely as any regimental martinet, he had a sneaking sympathy for the men who had difficulty in adapting to the new regime. Notwithstanding the harsher discipline demanded by the circumstances, the Battalion was still very much a family. Five babies had been born into the Battalion since their fathers had been in Malta and, just as they had in peacetime, these happy events had appeared in Battalion Routine Orders. Officially it was noted that the new arrivals had ‘been taken on strength of the Married Establishment’ and the babies’ heads had been joyously wetted in celebratory pints. But there had been sadness too, and the Battalion mourned two stillborn infants and one young mother who had died in childbirth. It had grieved the Colonel that he had not been able to grant compassionate leave. The distance was too great, and there was neither time nor shipping space to spare. The Royal Navy was stretched to the limit, and the troopships that were passing the shores of Malta every day were crammed to capacity with Regulars on their way to the war. The Londons followed their progress and, watching through binoculars from the guard post at milestone 9, wondered when their own turn would come.
It had come just after Christmas, and the last days of the old year had bustled with preparation, with packing up, with kit inspections, and a grand parade at which the London Infantry Brigade had been inspected by the Governor of Malta who, now that the brigade was on the point of departure, showered them with praise and compliments. Relations between the soldiers and the Maltese had not always been so cordial. The soldiers had been convinced that everyone was out to do them down, from the hawkers of fruit who haunted the barracks to certain strait-laced Maltese ladies who had caused them to be reprimanded for bathing in the nude. Now, all was forgiven and all Valletta turned out to cheer the London Brigade on its way as it mustered on the Custom House Quay. The Grand Harbour was full of ships, dressed overall in honour of the Brigade, and, riding at anchor among them, the Neuralia and the Avon waited to take them on board.
Capt. A. J. Agius, MC, 3rd (City of London) Bn., London Regt., Royal Fusiliers (TF).
We embarked on the SS Avon in two parties. I was in the second lot. The Avon was in mid-harbour and we were taken out in a tug with a lighter on each side and got on board about 12.40 p.m. The Avon was a big ship, about eleven thousand tons, and very comfortable, though the saloon had been spoilt by being divided in two by wooden boarding. The officers feed on the port side and the men in the centre and to starboard. The Smoking Room is the Sergeants’ Mess. Several of the men have 1st Class two-berth cabins temporarily made into four-berth. The 4th Battalion embarked after we did and we sailed about 3.30 p.m. – the Neuralia sailing just before us.
What an impressive scene it was! The Barraccas were crowded with people cheering and waving. All the boats in the harbour hooted. The crew of the French battleship France lined up on deck and cheered us as we went by, and there were two bands, one on the Lower Barracca and one on Fort St Elmo. They played ‘Auld Lang Syne’ as we sailed out of the harbour – and we sang, and they cheered, and the ships’ sirens kept on hooting until we cleared the harbour and turned out to sea. What a send-off!
On 6 January they disembarked at Marseilles to a welcome that almost matched the send-off from Malta, and marched through streets lined with cheering crowds to entrain for the long journey north. It took a good half hour to squeeze the Battalion and its baggage on to the long train. There were two first-class coaches for the officers to share, three to a compartment, but the men came off worse. They looked in dismay at what they took to be cattle trucks – the windowless military rolling-stock designed by the practical French to be equally suitable for the transportation of supplies, ammunition, eight horses or forty men. Even with clean straw on the floor, with warm blankets and kit-bags propped up as makeshift armchairs, this accommodation was a bleak comedown from the soft berths of the Avon. But they were not cast down, and the humorists of the Battalion were soon busily embellishing the wide sliding doors with slogans they considered more suitable than the stencilled notice ‘40 hommes. 8 chevaux’ favoured by the military authorities. Don’t breathe on the windows ran a close second in popularity to Non-stop train to Berlin. Teas were dished out and a generous issue of cheese, bread, jam and bully beef, with the warning that these rations were to last over the two-day journey.
The officers, who were allowed to leave the train in batches in search of dinner, did rather better. Arthur Agius went off with Harry Pulman, Cyril Crichton and Harold Moore to the Hotel Bristol and dined sumptuously on hors d’oeuvre, bouillabaisse, and jambon aux epinards, washed down with Asti Spumante. Then, with appetites whetted by the delicious French food, they skipped cheese and dessert in favour of dashing to the shops in search of something better than army rations to sustain them on the way north.
Capt. A. J. Agius, MC.
We got back to the station at 8 and the train finally left at 8.50 p.m. We settled down very comfortably. We arranged three bunks round the compartment, Edouard and Giles on the seats on either side and I in the middle. I put a packing case in the gap and a long cushion over. In the daytime we put the seats back and we each have a corner. The fourth is our larder – on the rack the bread, cheese, bully beef, jam and water, on the seat bottles of beer and wine, sardines, butter, chocolate and biscuits and, hanging near the window, a very moist chicken and some rather warm cheese. The drawback was that, being a non-corridor coach, there were no conveniences! We washed in our canvas buckets, shaved in water in my mess tin (warmed by being put on the hot radiator) and did our teeth in our cups. We had brekker of bread, cheese, sardines and beer.
It is a most extraordinary journey! Everyone turns out to cheer us and the men are most cheerful. We reached Mâcon at 1 p.m. and stopped for forty-five minutes, so we dashed into the buffet and had a meal – two helpings of steaming omelette, vin ordinaire and cafe au lait. For the rest of the afternoon we had a triumphal progress. Every time the train stops there’s a fearful jolt as it is braked like a goods train. Everywhere we stopped for a few minutes we had a royal reception – vociferous cheers and the men had presents of wine, fruit and cigarettes showered on them, and the donors would insist on signing their autographs in their paybooks. It was rather a wonderful sight.
At 7.15 p.m. we made a stop of nearly an hour at a place called Les Laumes Alesia where we took the opportunity of getting a meal in the local inn, very simple, but very good – soup, peas, omelette and beef as four separate courses – 2 francs 50, washed down by vin ordinaire. The men had hot coffee, over which I presided as orderly officer. We left Les Laumes about ten past eight. It was a very cold night, and when they changed engines they forgot to attach the heating pipe! I slept like a rock, however.
Trundling through the January night the thousand men in the wagons behind the first-class coaches that contained their officers did not notice the loss of heating since they had not enjoyed this amenity in the first place, but everyone, from the Colonel downwards, noticed that it was getting colder and colder as the train travelled north. When they woke, cramped and chilled, they were well north of Paris. There was snow on the ground and the train had swung on to the Calais line that would take them on up to Flanders. And if the freezing winter weather was hard to take after the balmy Mediterranean, if the home leave they had been hoping for was clearly not to be, it was at least some consolation that they were on their way to the real war.
In fact, they were on their way to Etaples, and when they reached there it was not much to their liking. Even in far-off Malta the troops had heard of the legendary Flanders mud, but they had hardly expected to meet it, ankle deep, as they stepped in pitch darkness on to the station platform. The passage of two battalions and numerous teams of horses coming in from the country roads had churned the snow into a mess of slush and slime and the Battalion, weighed down by heavy kit-bags, slipped and slithered and swore as they struggled to keep their footing and form up by companies in the street outside. It took the best part of an hour before they could set off in the teeth of a hail-storm to march to the camp and, although it was only three-quarters of a mile away, it was almost another hour before they reached it.
In due course the camp at Etaples would be one of the largest base camps in France, but in January of 1915 it was in its infancy, a makeshift affair scarcely large enough to hold the three battalions of the London Infantry Brigade whose unhappy lot it was to inhabit the sagging tents pitched across open country beyond the sand dunes on a desolate coast. Behind them a belt of trees and the slopes of more fertile farmland gave a certain amount of shelter, but the tent lines had been badly placed with the openings towards the sea and all night they flapped and ballooned in the icy wind that whistled through every fold and crevice. With fifteen men jammed into tents meant for twelve nobody got much sleep.
Next morning, their labours cheered on by frequent showers of sleet, all three battalions spent three hours striking camp and re-positioning the lines and re-pitching the tents to face inland while company cooks, working under difficulties to keep the fires going, contrived to brew endless supplies of tea and cook hot dinners at the same time. At the end of the day the camp was much improved, and it was all to the good for, as everyone knew, they were likely to be there for some time.
There was much to be done, and it could not be done in a day. The most welcome event was the issue of warm clothing, mufflers, cardigans, caps with ear-flaps to let down against the cold, serge uniforms to replace thin khaki drill and, best of all, warm overcoats. Packs were issued to replace the peacetime kit-bags which were packed with superfluous kit and sent home. The officers’ tin trunks went too, and with them the blue patrol dress worn as mess-kit in the palmy days in Malta, the Sam Browne belts of shining leather, and the swords which were now deemed by the Army to be surplus to the requirements of trench warfare. The officers were issued with revolvers instead (they had to pay for them) and from now on were to carry haversacks and wear practical webbing straps and equipment like the men. Personal kits were issued in dribs and drabs – but the battalion equipment was another matter. Day after day they waited for the transport – the general service wagons to carry rations and forage, the water-carts, the cooks’ wagons, the tool-carts, the carts for small-arms ammunition, and the horses that would pull them all.
Without its wheels the Battalion was useless. Without weapons it could do nothing at all, and the few rifles that had been required for garrison duties had been left behind in Malta. It was all very well for the Colonel to receive instructions that ‘training will continue’ but lacking weapons, in the absence of a parade ground or even of fields that were firm underfoot, with no dry huts or marquees where the men could be assembled, and since it only stopped raining in order to snow, it was difficult to keep the men occupied let alone train them. There was nothing for it but to route-march them round the country roads hour after dreary hour, to go through the motions of practising ‘company attacks’ with sticks to represent rifles, flags to represent the enemy, and string to represent the trenches which, for lack of spades and shovels, they were unable to practise digging in the sodden ground. As often as possible, as a welcome diversion, the men were marched to Etaples in mud-spattered batches to wash in hot water at the fishmarket or at the gasworks. Every day brought fresh rumours and expectations but it was more than two weeks before the tools and the transport finally arrived. Last of all came the rifles.
The machine-guns arrived too, to the profound relief of Arthur Agius who had been endeavouring to train a machine-gun section without the benefit of guns to train them on. He had managed to commandeer a freezing leaky shed where he expounded as much of the theory as was possible with the aid of diagrams, but when they had gone over it a hundred times in wearisome detail and inspiration had long run out, he was reduced to sending the men off to ‘practise reconnoitring’. By the alacrity with which they set off Agius had a shrewd suspicion that their intention was to reconnoitre some warm farmhouse kitchen where eggs and hot coffee could be obtained, and judiciously refrained from questioning them too closely on their return.
But now that the weapons had arrived there was plenty to do and his command was a machine-gun section in more than name. They had 4 guns, 4 wagons, 12 horses and 36 men. At last, the Battalion was ready and on 25 January they received orders to move the following day.
Capt. A. J. Agius.
We got up at 3.30. It was a beautiful night and just on freezing point. I struggled with a cold-water shave of which I felt rather proud considering the hour and the dark and the temperature. We finally paraded at 6.30 – there had been a lot to do in the meantime and it was not very easy to get it all done in the dark.
We got clear after having had quite a decent meal of bread and butter, cold bacon and tea. We reached the station about 7. The train was due to start at 8.25, though by the time we had packed in all our transport (some thirteen wagons and fifty-eight horses) it was about 8.50 before we got off. We officers were eight in a compartment and we entrained just in time, for we had only been in the train a few minutes when it began to sleet and finally turned into snow. The carriage was pretty cold.
It was pretty slow going as our speed wasn’t by any means fast and we made several short stops. The distance to GHQ at St Omer is only thirty or forty kilometres, but we didn’t arrive until 3 p.m. We detrained and paraded in the station which took some time. We moved off at last and marched out to our billets at Tatinghem. It is about three miles out of St Omer, which is GHQ. All the roads are paved, but as they are paved with cobblestones marching is rather uncomfortable. We reached billets after about an hour’s march feeling a bit tired. We were wearing equipment for the first time, including a large pack in which the men carry their worldly belongings. It feels a bit heavy on one’s back. The village looks a bit desolate and a lot of the inhabitants have gone. We were a very long time getting settled and getting the men into billets. Most of them are in barns and very comfortable. My sleeping quarters are only fairly comfortable – the place is, alas, the quartermaster’s stores. I have a large room which, when I arrived, contained little furniture but I managed to scrounge a washing cabinet, a chair and a table. There is a bed of sorts.
We are not yet assigned to any brigade or division and are Army Troops. We are apparently to continue training until the advance, which people say is to be in April.
But even ‘a bed of sorts’ and a roof overhead was a welcome improvement on the tented camp at Etaples where, since their camp beds had been sent back as ‘superfluous kit’, the officers’ sleeping bags had rested on hard tent boards. And the men, deep-bedded on straw in barns that were dry if not warm, had no complaints. The wind was blowing from the east and from time to time they could hear a gentle thudding in the distance. It was the sound of the guns at the front, now barely thirty miles away. The men nudged each other, listened, and were thrilled. But, as they burrowed into nests of warm rustling straw, pulling rough blankets over limbs wearied by the long march, and settled themselves contentedly to sleep, not many soldiers were inclined to give much serious thought to the future.
Chapter 4
Three miles away at his headquarters at St Omer, the Commander-in-Chief, Sir John French, in consultation with his staff officers, was giving the future very serious thought indeed. There was a great deal to think about and the Commander-in-Chief was a frustrated man. He wanted to get on with the war and it seemed to him that people and events were conspiring against him. He was under pressure from two directions – by General Joffre, in command of the French armies, who required his help in mounting an offensive of his own, and by the War Council in London who appeared to Sir John French to be thwarting his every move and had, moreover, failed to keep the promises of supplying the men and munitions on which his plans depended. Part of the trouble lay in the fact that the War Council was not convinced that French’s plans were sound or even if the war on the western front should be carried on in more than token terms. They were staggered by the casualties, disillusioned by the lack of any significant gains, and dismayed above all by the total failure of attacks undertaken in conjunction with the French in mid-December. They had seriously considered withdrawing the British Expeditionary Force completely, leaving a strong reserve near the French coast in case of emergency, and sending the bulk of the troops with the new armies, as they became-available, to strike at the enemy in some other place where their efforts might possibly bring the war to a speedier end. Opinion was divided as to where that place should be, but the politicians were united in the view that the deadlock on the western front was absolute and that the chances of either French or British breaking through the German lines were small.
The Germans had been digging in and, even in winter conditions, with the advantage of higher, drier, ground they had managed to construct a formidable network of defences protected by burgeoning thickets of barbed wire that seemed to British observers to be expanding to forests as the winter days passed. Since the lines were continuous and there were no flanks to be turned there was nothing for it but to sit it out or even, in the last resort, to get out.
The French who were defending their own soil, and were in no position to get out, would not have taken kindly to this idea, even if anyone had had the courage to suggest it. But neither would Sir John French. Far from London and the deliberations of the War Council the British and French Commanders had been hatching plans of their own. General Joffre wished to launch an offensive that would strike at the Germans’ Achilles heel – those long and straggling lines of supply that led from the heart of France across the conquered territories to the heart of Germany.
The line held by the Germans ran from the Alps across the Vosges mountains in Alsace, into Lorraine, across Champagne, swinging north through Picardy and Flanders to meet the North Sea on the coast of Belgium. It was a long, long line to keep supplied with troops and materials and behind it in places the roads and rail lines essential to German transport and communications were few and far between. Joffre’s plan was to breach them in a series of piecemeal attacks on either side of the huge salient where the German line bulged deep into France. He would strike north from Reims, north from Verdun, and east from Arras, and he would keep up the pressure, gradually squeezing, always tightening his grip. It might take months, but the prize would be worth it, for if the French could slice across the salient cutting German communications as they went, the enemy would be deprived of his lifeline to the Fatherland and might well be obliged to retire and eventually give up the line.
This plan attracted Sir John French, for it fitted in well with a plan of his own. It was an idea which had met with only half-hearted approval from the War Council, which had already turned down his plan to attack with the Belgian Army up the Belgian coast along the minuscule strip of unflooded land that lay behind the sand dunes and the sea. That project had been mooted and encouraged by Winston Churchill who, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had promised naval support – but now Churchill had other fish to fry and the War Council, as a whole, had a shoal of them. Since the end of October when Turkey had entered the war on the side of the Germans, the options had increased, and it seemed that every minister had his own pet theory as to how the war should be waged. Fisher, the First Sea Lord, favoured an attack on Germany from the Baltic; Lloyd George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, favoured striking at Austria by attacking from the Adriatic coast; Lord Kitchener proposed launching an attack on the Turks from the coast of Palestine. But it was Winston Churchill who came up with the one irresistible idea. To seize the Dardanelles, to capture Constantinople and thus, at one blow, open up the Black Sea highway to the Russians, relieve the pressure on Russia’s army on the eastern front, and – best of all – force open Germany’s back door by way of the Danube. Not least of the attractions was that all this would be achieved by the Royal Navy who would merely be required to enter the straits and bombard the forts that protected them. Casualties would be few, and only a small force of men need be landed in the wake of the navy to secure the forts and raise the British flag. The plan had been drawn up by Admiral Carden, Commander of the Mediterranean fleet, at Winston Churchill’s request, and it was more than irresistible. All things being equal, it was fool-proof.
It was put forward at a meeting of the War Council on 13 January – the very meeting at which Sir John French’s plan to attempt an advance up the Belgian coast had been turned down. French had travelled to London to attend it and even he had reacted with lukewarm (and temporary) enthusiasm to Winston Churchill’s plan, presented with all the force of Churchillian passion and eloquence. But he was not prepared to regard an expedition to the Dardanelles as a substitute for action on the western front, and so far as that was concerned he had ideas of his own.
Now that the plan for a coastal attack had been finally scotched Sir John French began to consider alternative plans of attack – for attack he must, if only to raise the morale of the troops ‘after their trying and enervating experiences of winter in the trenches’. On 8 February he put his view cogently in a memorandum to the War Council. Nowhere had the experience of the troops been more ‘trying and enervating’ than in the flat lands at the end of the British line where the flooded River Lys and its tributaries seeped across the marsh. It was here the Commander-in-Chief proposed to mount an offensive. He did not accept the view that it was impossible to break through the German line, and he said so forcibly. An attack at Neuve Chapelle held out several tantalising possibilities. Not least was the chance – and French and his staff believed it to be a certainty – of capturing the Aubers Ridge that ran along the eastern edge of the valley. It was not much of a ridge, a mere four miles long, with a maximum elevation of fourteen metres at most, but it was high enough to give the Germans who held it a considerable advantage. If the offensive were launched as soon as conditions improved and the foul weather began to abate, the troops could be on top of the ridge in two days at most, and out of the slough forever.
Sir John French was encouraged in this idea by General Joffre, who informed him that, as part of his own ambitious project to breach the German salient, he proposed to launch his 10th Army to force the German front and capture the high ground to the east between Arras a few miles to the south and la Bassée where the French sector joined the British. If the British could attack simultaneously on the French left, the possibilities were boundless. Since this was exactly what Sir John French had in mind, he was delighted. But Joffre made one condition. If his offensive was to succeed, if he were to be in a position to press home his advantage, he must have more men. He had two whole Army Corps north of the British line at Ypres and he was insistent that Sir John French should now replace them with British troops and extend his own line to the north.
The Commander-in-Chief was not averse to this idea – indeed he had first proposed it himself when he had mooted his Belgian coast offensive in order to place the British Army adjacent to the Belgians. The fact was that, with a conglomeration of units and nationalities still holding the line in positions where the early battles had left them, the allied line in the north was something of a hotch-potch creating unnecessary difficulties of liaison and command. The teeming roads behind it were a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of uniforms and nationalities, for there were always troops on the move. French Cuirassiers on horseback, their once-gleaming breastplates dulled and rusting in the all-pervading damp; turbanned Indian troops hunched against the cold; foot-slogging poilus, mud-spattered in their horizon blue; Tommies, muffled up in khaki, leather jerkins and a variety of woollen caps, mufflers and mittens that would have reduced a peacetime sergeant-major to apoplexy. And in the extreme north, Belgian troops on their way to the marshes where the allied line trickled into flooded land, and where the line itself was little more than a straggle of duckboard causeways and island outposts in the morass.*
For the British to sidestep and join up with the Belgians, for the piecemeal French corps, at present between them, to go south and join up with the main French Army would obviously make sense. But, since the proposal had been put forward, things had changed. General Joffre had already reduced the force that stood between the British and the coast by more than a hundred thousand men in order to create an armee de manoeuvre – a flying column that could be held in reserve and thrust in to support any part of his three-hundred-mile front that might be seriously threatened. Without the support of a strong French force standing between them and the sea the British front was more vulnerable than ever and the men who held it were already strained to the limit. It would be a tall order to supply troops to replace the two corps of the French Army that stood between the British and Belgians on a front that ran eight miles north from Ypres, for a corps of the French Army at full strength comprised thirty-six thousand men. But it was a quiet front for the moment, and Sir John French had been confident that he could replace them and hold the line with half as many. All he required was two divisions – but they would have to be good ones, and professional to a man.
Two first-class divisions* made up from Regular battalions returned from overseas had already arrived and taken over part of the front from the French. A third (the 29th Division) now assembling in England had been promised and the 1st Canadian Division was expected to embark shortly for France. But the War Council was having second thoughts, and it was a severe blow to Sir John French when he was informed on 19 February that the 29th Division was no longer available.
Three days earlier there had been a drastic change of plan. Even as the fleet was steaming towards the Dardanelles carrying with it the hopes and aspirations of the War Council a bombshell had exploded in their midst and it had been dropped by the Admiralty Staff. They now declared that, whatever its initial success, the strength of the Royal Navy alone would not be enough to force the Dardanelles, to capture Constantinople and to force a Turkish garrison on the Gallipoli Peninsula to evacuate it without a fight. The fact was that the professional sailor and First Sea Lord, Admiral Fisher, had been pressured and out-argued by the politician Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty. But Fisher had all along been deeply suspicious of the plan. Now the Admiralty Staff had dug in its heels and made its views known in a memorandum that amounted to an ultimatum. Admiral Sir Henry Jackson had set out the situation clearly and concisely and in his last sentence he punched the message home: ‘The naval bombardment is not recommended as a sound military operation, unless a strong military force is ready to assist in the operation, or at least to follow it up immediately the forts are silenced.’
This was a disconcerting departure from the original plan, so tempting in its promise of easy victory, so seductive in its power to demonstrate to skittish Bulgaria, still teetering indecisively on the fence, that the allies were on the side of the angels and it had best join them forthwith. Reluctantly, and after much discussion, the War Council gave way. It was true that there were not many troops to spare – but there was still the 29th Division. Two battalions of Royal Marines, detailed to provide landing parties to finish off the forts after bombardment, were already on the Greek island of Lemnos (borrowed to provide a forward base) and it was likely that the French could be persuaded to help, for the French Government had already sent a flotilla to assist the Royal Navy in attacking the straits. Why should they not send a division also?* It was agreed to ask them, and to send such troops as could be raised to Lemnos to be on the spot to assist the navy if need be. If a real emergency arose, troops could be brought from Egypt to reinforce them. No one seemed to remember that the beauty of the naval plan was that, if it did not succeed, it could be speedily broken off and, without loss of face, be regarded as a raid – a mere growl, a baring of the British bulldog’s teeth, which might be equally effective in reminding Bulgaria that, if it chose, it could snarl and bite.
The fleet was even now steaming towards the Dardanelles and would attack in three days’ time. It would be at least a month before the troops could possibly get there. If it struck any member of the War Council that it would be wise to postpone the naval operations until the troops were at hand, his misgiving was overruled. They were first and foremost politicians, and they were on the brink of a demonstration that would bring vacillating Bulgaria, and perhaps Greece and Rumania as well, into the fold. There was no time to be lost. Throughout their consultations with the Admiralty it did not occur to the War Council to seek the advice of the soldiers on the General Staff. No one even thought to inform the General Staff that a military operation was contemplated.
Lord Kitchener had by no means decided to agree to the proposal that the 29th Division should be sent to the Dardanelles – but he was equally reluctant to throw his last remaining force of expert, seasoned soldiers into the maw of the western front which had already chewed up the cream of the British Army and with little to show for it. Sir John French was informed that the 46th Division would be sent in its place. Since this division from the South Midlands was a Territorial Division which, in the opinion of the Commander-in-Chief, would require more training and tutelage in practical trench warfare before it would be fit for front-line service, this well and truly threw a spanner into the works, and French was considerably annoyed. Without first-class troops it was now impossible for him to accede to Joffre’s request to stretch his line and sidestep to release the French troops Joffre required to strengthen his attack. If he did so, he would have too few troops for his own offensive. As it was, the untried and inexperienced Canadians were already earmarked to take over part of the front adjacent to the line of his proposed attack in order to release troops of his own to stiffen it. This then was his dilemma: to relieve the French and abandon his offensive, or to refuse to relieve the French and go ahead with it. Alternatively he could try to persuade Joffre to change his mind or, at the very least, to agree to delay the takeover until after their joint attack had been crowned, as it surely would be, with success. Approach after approach, meeting after meeting, throughout the last days of February produced no result. Joffre was adamant. No troops, no joint attack, and that was that.
Based on what Joffre saw as the abysmal performance of the British troops in the joint December offensive when they failed to achieve the smallest result and had incurred heavy casualties Joffre held a poor opinion of their chances of succeeding. At best he looked on the British contribution to the ‘joint offensive’ as providing a useful diversion on his left. The breakthrough, if it came at all, would be made by his own troops – and only if there were enough of them to carry it through. Lacking French elan, in Joffre’s secret opinion, the British Army could be most usefully employed in holding a static line and keeping the enemy pinned down while the French got on with the real job.
Already Joffre had modified his plans and halved his demands. He now required the British Commander-in-Chief to relieve a single corps, not two. But, without the 29th Division, even that was beyond Sir John French, and without the release of the troops that would provide him with a cast-iron guarantee of success, Joffre had no intention of committing his Tenth Army to another forlorn ‘joint offensive’ only to be dragged down by British failure. He would wait until the time was ripe. As for Sir John French, if he was still determined to fight, then he must fight alone.
Not far away from GHQ where their future, had they known it, was being decided in the scores of telegrams and memoranda flying between St Omer, Downing Street and Whitehall, the 3rd Londons had spent the weeks of indecision shaking down, learning to use their new equipment, and carrying out intensive training in open country. The weather was foul, and although the hours of wintry daylight were blessedly short, ploughing around the sodden, often snow-covered, fields, fighting an invisible foe in imaginary battles, was not a pastime that appealed to them. The whole of the London Infantry Brigade was there (apart from the 1st Battalion which had been left behind to assist the relief garrison in Malta) and the one bright spot in the dark February days was occasional meetings on the march with their sister battalion, the 2nd Londons. This event was eagerly looked forward to and no matter how tired and dispirited they were, it never failed to cheer them up. This was due to the doctor’s horse.
When horses were issued to the officers at Etaples the medical officer of the 2nd Battalion had acquired a charger whose pure white coat would have been admired anywhere else but in France where, as his brother officers gleefully pointed out, it would present a prime target to an enemy marksman if he rode within a mile of the battle-line. Captain McHoul had taken this to heart and, with the assistance of his servant, had attempted to dye his horse with permanganate of potash. This was standard practice, but something had gone wrong and McHoul’s mount had emerged from the treatment a bright canary yellow. It could be seen for miles in the open country and the 3rd Londons took a lively delight in spotting it and subjecting their sister battalion to jeers, catcalls and a barrage of chirrups and bird-whistles.
Although the 2nd Londons loyally riposted to these insults – and in good measure – every member of his own Battalion (with the understandable exception of the doctor himself) was equally tickled, and the MO was the butt of merciless leg-pulling. He took it in good enough part until Lieutenant Teddy Cooper was inspired to compose a ditty for the delectation of the officers’ mess. It had many verses, leaden with ponderous humour, but it was the last two stanzas that hit home:
Henceforward when he rode abroad
A ribald whisper flew,
Whilst Tommies tittered, Captains roared
And urged a dry shampoo.
The rumour was he murmured ‘Cheep’
Instead of saying ‘Whoa’
And gave it groundsel in a heap
To make the beggar grow.
This was the last straw, and the MO resorted to desperate measures. Repeated application of a mild solution of bleach only made matters worse, for it dried out in unsightly piebald streaks, but a sympathetic farrier sergeant made up a new concoction which he assured the doctor would transform his charger from a canary to a respectable chestnut. Unfortunately, reacting to the bleach which had been generously applied, his horse emerged an interesting shade of deep violet. There was nothing McHoul could do but put up with the hilarity with as much dignity as he could muster and console himself with the thought that at least he would no longer attract the attention of an enemy sniper.
In any event there was serious business ahead. The London Brigade was about to be split up. Soon the 2nd Londons would be setting off to join the 6th Division in the trenches near Armentieres, complete with purple horse and its embarrassed rider. The 3rd had already gone. Their ultimate destination was the trenches behind Neuve Chapelle where Sir John French was gathering his forces for the battle.
Capt. A. J. Agius, MC.
9th February It was a very threatening morning, cloudy and windy, with a fierce yellow sky forewarning more wind. Our expectations were fully justified, for soon after we had started it came on to rain and hail, and the wind, which blew across from our right front, grew stronger. We made a march of ten or twelve miles. It was a beastly march, but everyone stuck it very cheerily, though wet through. Being mounted I had started with my British Warm and as the rain grew worse I slipped my Burberry on top. Yet so penetrating were the wind and rain that the wet came through.
If conditions were bad for the officers on horseback, they were a good deal worse for the men on foot, for half the battalion had just been issued with new boots and, unlike their more fortunate comrades who had received theirs a fortnight earlier, had to take to the road with no opportunity of breaking them in. In mid-afternoon when they finally stopped in the rain-lashed village of Wittes the chorus of groans and curses that came from a dozen barnyard billets was indescribable. Five hundred men were struggling to pull the soaking boots from their swollen feet. Packing the boots with straw, attempting with more optimism than success to dry them out by the flame of a single candle, merely made matters worse. By morning the new leather had hardened and shrunk and the men were in a sorry state as they set off to hobble to Ham. It was a march of fifteen kilometres. Mercifully, the gale had blown out and it was a clear sunny day; mercifully, it was to be five days before the Battalion took to the road again. It was just about long enough for the sore feet to recover.
And it was long enough for some of the officers to have a beano. It was the birthday of Captain E. V. Noël, whose initials had caused him to be nicknamed ‘Evie’. Harry Pulman and Arthur Agius had struck lucky in the matter of billets. The old lady in the farm where they lodged was unusually welcoming, fussing over them like a mother and feeding them like princes, and they had been so loud in her praises that it was unanimously decided to hold Evie’s birthday party there. Their hostess was charmed with the idea and determined to do them proud.
Capt. A. J. Agius, MC.
We had quite a feast! We got a table rigged up on a couple of trestles, and the old lady supplied us with linen and crockery galore. There was a linen tablecloth and a napkin each – eleven of us sat down – a large glass and a small one each, knife, fork, spoon etc. We ate hors d’oeuvres of sardines and local pate, soup (a thick, warming, village soup), then a priceless omelette and two fowls with fried potatoes and gravy. (And what a job she’d had to kill them that morning, chasing round the farmyard with a cleaver!) We ended up with birthday cake, and that was about as much as anyone could manage. We had wine, red and white, to drink and liqueurs and coffee to finish up with. There were speeches from Harry and Bertie Mathieson, to which Evie replied. After that we sang choruses. And finally, very late, we got to bed.
They had passed many jolly evenings in peacetime, and quite a few since the war, but it was generally voted that this was the best yet. It was also the last that this coterie of old companions would spend together. Ahead lay the battle, and not all of them would survive it.
Chapter 5
If there were those who had serious doubts that it was the right moment to launch an offensive, in the opinion of Sir John French there could hardly have been a better one. Even without the cooperation of General Joffre, French and his staff were confident of success. The responsibility would be in the hands of the officer in command of the First Army, General Sir Douglas Haig. His troops were to fight the battle and he and his staff were now engaged in drawing up the detailed plans that would take them to victory. Lately there had been a marked change in the enemy’s tactics. The Germans seemed content to maintain their positions by standing on the defensive, and reliable intelligence reports confirmed that they had drastically reduced their manpower on the western front, and that their reserves were few. The German High Command had decided to pitch its strength at the east.
As far back as the early eighteen nineties the Germans had drawn up plans for a possible European war and had realised that, if it came, it would be necessary to fight in the east as well as the west. In 1894 France and Russia had extended their formal alliance by a military agreement that guaranteed assistance in the event of either being attacked. This meant that there were two potential enemies on the borders of the German Empire and Count von Schlieffen had drawn up a military plan to deal with them both. In August 1914 it had been put into effect.
The nub of the plan was the swift invasion of France, striking through neutral Belgium where she would least expect it, and to proceed with maximum strength in a vast encircling movement that would capture Paris, force France to sue for peace and put victorious Germany in such a position of advantage that she could safely remove her troops from France and turn her attention to defeating Russia. The peace terms would be stringent, and punitive war reparations imposed on France would fuel the German war machine at no cost to the German people. But everything hinged on speed.
Six weeks had been allowed for the defeat of France. The Germans had looked carefully at the probabilities and, calculating the vast distances that separated the regions of the sprawling Russian Empire and the difficulties of concentrating troops, taking into account the lack of roads, the scarcity of railways (which were not even of European gauge), they had concluded that at least six weeks must elapse after mobilisation before a Russian army would be able to enter the field. By that time, the German armies, fresh from victory in the west, could be moved east to join battle with Russia and win the war. So confident were the Germans of success, so anxious to commit the best of their resources to ensuring it, so sure of their assessment that Russia would be slow to take up arms, that they were equally sanguine in their conviction that the defence of the vulnerable border of East Prussia could safely be left to local Landsturm troops.
But the Russians were true to their obligation to support their French ally, and they took the Germans completely by surprise. On 17 August, before Russian mobilisation was halfway complete, two Russian armies had invaded East Prussia, broken the front, and advanced more than a hundred miles into German territory. This had come as a rude shock to the Germans and, long before France could be overwhelmed, they were forced to reduce the force dedicated to defeating her by three army corps which might have tipped the balance in the west, had they not been rushed back to save the situation in the east. They had arrived too late to cheat Russia of early victories which did much to hearten her allies, but a few days later they roundly defeated the Russians at Tannenberg. Russia had held her own, fighting against the Germans in East Prussia, against the Austrians to the south, against the Turks further east. But the Russians were struggling, and by January the situation was critical. There was no lack of men to fight, but they needed guns to fight with and ammunition for the guns to fire. Every day they were firing almost three times as much as the munitions factories could possibly produce and eating into reserve supplies that were now dangerously low. Above all, they needed weapons. Rifles were now so scarce that one man in four was being sent to the front without one and the Russians had to rely on retrieving the arms of men killed or wounded on the battlefield to equip the men who had come to take their place. If the Russians were defeated, and if the Germans were then able to take large numbers of troops from the east and mass them for an offensive in France, then the game would be up on the western front. It was for this reason that the War Council wished to relieve the pressure on Russia by opening an offensive in a new theatre of war where it would do Russia most good. It was also the reason behind Sir John French’s fervent desire to attack in the west.
In December, eight more divisions of German infantry and four of cavalry had left the western front to fight the Russians and, they hoped, to finish them off, and Sir John French was itching to take advantage of this thinning of the German line as soon as the ground and weather conditions improved. The British troops were fewer than the Commander-in-Chief could have wished for but, just for once, and possibly not for long, they substantially outnumbered their opponents. They must grasp the nettle and seize the moment to strike. The risks would be small; the rewards would be rich.
The Aubers Ridge was a desirable objective in itself, but beyond it lay the promised land – a wide flat plateau, ideal for open warfare with little cover and none of those convenient ridges so easy for the enemy to defend. Beyond it lay the real prize, the German-occupied city of Lille, capital of French Flanders, with its satellite textile towns of Roubaix and Tourcoing. They could not be captured in a day but, given the success of the initial assault (and how could it fail?), given the assistance of the French in pushing forward (and they would surely join in!), and given the lack of large reserves of German soldiers to defend them, these important industrial towns could be captured in a campaign of two weeks. At a single blow their captive populations would be liberated and the wheels of their factories set turning to assist the allied war effort. Long before reinforcements could be brought from Germany the way would be opened to the great plain of Douai, Joffre’s army would advance, his grander design would succeed and, in the west at least, the war would be won.
For the French population of the occupied towns it was tantalising to be so close to the line, lying beneath the heel of the Germans within the sound of the guns little more than twenty miles away. For the people of Tourcoing the frustration was worst of all. Drawing an imaginary triangle on the map Tourcoing would lie at the apex, as near to Ypres as to Aubers Ridge at either end of its base. In those early days of the war, every local attack, every minor action, every exchange of gunfire heard so clearly in the streets, raised hopes that the allies were on the move and liberation was at hand. But there were a few who took a more realistic view and Henri Dewavrin was one:
M. Pierre Dewavrin.
My father was always a pessimist. He had gone to a military school, the College Ste Genevieve. He intended to make a career in the army but, when he was only seventeen, there was a slump in the wool trade and he had to leave and help his father restore his business as a wool broker. But he always kept his interest in military matters. I had just turned twelve when we were occupied by the Germans. I remember very well that every day they used to post up the official army communiqués on the door of the Hôtel de Ville – not just their own German one, but the French and British communiqués as well, which was remarkable when you think of it.
My father used to study them for hours at a time, trying to work out what was really happening, and he always took a very gloomy view, because he knew the country well, and he knew that the so-called advances that the French or the British were proclaiming were really nothing at all. He used to discuss the situation for hours at a time. He could think of nothing else. His friends and colleagues nicknamed him ‘Général’ Dewavrin because he spent his days at his club for businessmen, always talking about the war. Of course, he was naturally concerned because two of my elder brothers were with the French Army and there was no news of them. He just had to try to work out for himself what was happening and there was plenty of time to talk things over because there was no work and no business to be done.
Everything had come to a standstill. The factories were shut down because the Germans were short of war material and the first thing they had done was to strip the factories and take all the copper parts from the machines, right down to the smallest components. Even if they could have run the machines without them there were no raw materials to work with, and all the workers of military age had been mobilised and were fighting on the other side of the line. In any event, no one wanted to work for the Germans. They occupied Tourcoing on the 10th of October and on the Sunday we went to mass as usual at our church, St Christophe. Chanoine Leclercq gave the sermon and I shall never forget it. He was a saintly man, and a brave man, because he defied the Germans. He reviled them, and he didn’t mince his words. He said that the factories must close and that, whatever happened, no one must work for the Germans or do anything at all to help them if they could avoid it. We couldn’t fight, he said, but we could show that we were Frenchmen and defy them. A few days later he was arrested and sent to Germany. He was a prisoner there for exactly four years, from 18 October 1914 to 18 October 1918. Many people were arrested and sent as hostages or prisoners to Germany. It happened in my wife’s family, that is, in the family of the lady who became my wife ten years later.
Mme Germaine Dewavrin.
My father was a manufacturer of wool, in partnership with his brother. It was a huge enterprise. It was called ‘Usines Auguste et Louis Lepoutre’. They had twelve factories round Roubaix and Tourcoing and two more in America, near Providence in Massachusetts. Every day between them they used the wool of ten thousand sheep – thirty thousand kilos of wool. When we were occupied, naturally all that stopped. The Germans requisitioned everything, stripped the factories bare, but my father had large stocks of wool. The Germans had taken a certain amount, but he was determined that they should not have the rest. So he hid it.
The biggest factory was in Roubaix, and it was a huge place. In one building there was a long corridor with doors leading to the store-rooms. The wool used to be delivered on wooden pallets, so the store-rooms were packed to the ceilings with wool and then the pallets were propped up against the walls all along the corridor so that the doors were hidden. But my father was denounced. One of the workers who must have had some grievance, or who wanted money, gave him away to the Germans.
Of course as children we knew nothing of all this until the Germans came to our house to arrest him. They took my father and my mother. We saw them go, surrounded by soldiers with fixed bayonets, they marched them on foot all the way to Tourcoing. It was terrible, terrible. I was ten years old, the youngest of the family, and we had an English nursery governess called Nellie Smale. She was absolutely distracted! Naturally, being English, she was terrified. She could have gone home when the war began, but she had been with our family for so many years she decided to stay. Of course, we never expected that things would go so fast and so badly. And the occupation, when it happened, came so quickly! Even so, many people were evacuated and Nellie could have gone too, but she chose not to. Then when she saw my father and mother being marched off she thought she would be taken next. She was terrified every day of the war!
My mother came home next day, but my father was taken as a hostage to Germany. Months afterwards they released him but after he had been home for a time they arrested him again and sent him back to Germany. Many, many prominent citizens and industrialists were taken hostage. I suppose it was to make an example of them and ensure the good behaviour of the people in the occupied towns. It was a very hard time. It was even harder for the people who had worked in our factories and were less well off. There was great hardship. Every municipality gave out vouchers so they could buy the food the Germans were supposed to provide, but there was very little of it.
M. Pierre Dewavrin.
In Tourcoing we had a large house, because we were a large family, and we could not avoid having Germans billeted from time to time. Of course, we had as little as possible to do with them, but they were in our house. Sometimes they were officers, who were very correct and polite, but when there were troop movements, we often got ordinary soldiers – sometimes as many as twenty or thirty of them sleeping on the floors and eating in our kitchen. In early 1915 they were very simple men, mostly Bavarian peasants, and their officers treated them like animals, with absolute contempt. Of course, being Bavarians, they were devout Catholics and it amazed us youngsters when we saw them cross themselves when they were handed their bread ration. We asked ourselves how the Boche could possibly be Christians!
In their communiqués the Germans had been trumpeting their successes on the eastern front. Studying them as he did, weighing up the evidence of his own ears that the sound of gunfire to the west was lessening every day as February drew to a close, ‘Général’ Henri Dewavrin could hardly be blamed for taking a gloomy view of the progress of the war. He would have been right in deducing that British ammunition was in short supply, but it might have heartened him to know that the British guns were silent because Sir John French was economising ammunition in order to build up a reserve for the battle that lay ahead. The field guns had been rationed to six rounds a day. The heavy Howitzers were forbidden to fire more than two.
The question of ammunition was a serious one, and for months past the sparseness of supplies reaching France had been causing Sir John French great anxiety. He was not interested in the trials and difficulties that faced the War Office, his sole concern was that supplies of guns and ammunition fell far short of the amounts that had been promised and that even if the promised supplies had been met in full they would still have fallen woefully short of the amount he required to prosecute the war with any hope of success.
It was all very well for the army to demand more guns and munitions, but it was by no means easy to supply them. For one thing, there was the question of premises. Even if empty factories were requisitioned and others turned over to the manufacture of munitions, who was to man them? In the infectious enthusiasm of early recruiting no one had stopped to reflect that the services of skilled men would be of more use to King and Country in engineering workshops than as raw recruits in the expanding ranks of the New Armies where, for want of proper weapons, the infantry was drilling with wooden rifles and would-be gunners were learning their trade on ancient artillery pieces borrowed from museums. Some were actually obliged to practise gun-drill on a home-made contrivance, the barrel represented by a tree trunk balanced on a trestle, with two cross-sections lopped from it to imitate the wheels.
Even if all the engineers who had disappeared into the army were combed out and brought back it would not be enough, or nearly enough. Rifles were needed. Guns were needed – machine-guns, fuses, shells by the thousands, bullets by the million. Large orders had been placed at the start of the war, and there was no shortage of raw materials, but even if the existing factories had been working flat out it would have been impossible to fulfil more than a fraction of them. But they were not working flat out and, worse, there was an upsurge of industrial troubles and disputes.
Many of the jobs involved in the manufacture of munitions could have been carried out by unskilled labour, but the Amalgamated Society of Engineers had absolutely vetoed this suggestion and, in the face of such union opposition, employers were forced to turn down countless volunteers. Even within the skilled workforce itself there were restrictive practices. One man per machine was the rule, even where output could have been increased by working shifts, and no doubling up of jobs would be accepted. Nor was there any question of a single-union agreement that would allow an engineer to mend a fuse, if need be, or an electrician to loosen a bolt or tighten a screw.
The attitude of the skilled men was understandable. It took seven years of hard-grafting apprenticeship, working for a pittance, to qualify as a tradesman, and even a skilled journeyman’s wage could be as little as £2 a week. The minimum wage agreement had been won only after years of struggle, and decades of exploitation in Victorian workshops were still fresh in the minds of the men who had fought for the rights and conditions they now enjoyed. Was it all to be sacrificed now? If cheap unskilled labour was swept up by the national emergency to fill the factories, might not their own jobs be swept away when the emergency was over and employers – whom they had good reason not to trust – were tempted to use the precedent to undermine the hard-won rights of skilled workers?
Employers were at the nub of the industrial trouble that came to a head in February, for the men believed that they were making huge profits from the war, and making them at the men’s expense. Prices were rising, but wages were not and while employers on the one hand were urging the workforce to greater effort and ever-rising output, they were refusing, on the other, to meet even reasonable pay claims. Workers threatening to strike were vilified wholesale by the press, whipping up a frenzy of patriotic indignation. Few people stopped to consider the problems faced by the War Office or the culpability of manufacturers who, through greed or over-optimism and not least by reason of self-interest led by fear of competition, were probably most to blame. The workforce was a useful scapegoat and not many took the trouble to look at things from the workers’ point of view – least of all Sir John French. And least of all the gunners standing idly by their guns in Flanders while the Commander-in-Chief gathered up a supply of precious shells for his offensive.
He was gathering men too.
During their five-day stay at Ham the 3rd Londons had been mildly surprised to be inspected by General Willcocks and welcomed ‘to the Indian Army’ and to find that they were to form part of the Meerut Division. ‘Army’ was a forgivable conceit on the part of the general, who had good reason to be proud of his troops, but it was something of an exaggeration for it comprised a corps of two infantry divisions and one of cavalry. In addition to native Indian troops each infantry brigade contained one battalion of British Regulars (as it had done in India) and each was now to be augmented by a battalion of Territorials or Special Reservists.
If wintry Flanders came as a rude shock to the 3rd Londons fresh from the mild climate of Malta, it had been considerably worse for the Indians and most of them had been there for months. The Indian troops had played an active part and proved their worth in spite of the dreary conditions, the icy chill of the northern marshes, the water-logged trenches where, vaselined and oiled to the waist, the men on outpost duty had to stand for hours with barely a glimpse of the pallid disc that masqueraded as the sun in those alien northern skies. Many had fallen in action and some in the trench-raids at which the Indians were so expert; frostbite, influenza and pneumonia had all taken their toll and recently measles and mumps, encountered in Europe for the first time, had swept through the ranks. But the cold was the worst, and the Indians could hardly remember the sensation of being warm, still less the fierce heat of the Indian plains burning under the sun they called ‘the Bengal blanket’. The British public were sympathetic to the plight of the men plucked so cruelly out of their element. Tons of warm comforts had been sent and it was no unusual sight to see turbanned Indian troops hunched over tiny cooking fires, cocooned in a dozen or more khaki scarves and shawls plaited and knotted across khaki overcoats. Their khaki service dress was a far cry from the colourful silken glamour of the regimental uniforms that were the joy of the Indian Army, but the names of the regiments still rang like a litany that celebrated all the pomp and panoply of Empire – the Dogras, the Baluchis, Garhwalis, the Deccan Horse, the Secunderabad Cavalry, Pathans, Sikhs, Punjabis, the Jodhpur Lancers.
They came from every corner of the Indian sub-continent and represented every caste and creed, and this presented the military authorities with certain problems. At the base camps in Marseilles and later in Orleans and Rouen it required six separate kitchens to cater for the different dietary and religious needs and although the problem had been tackled in the field by issuing rations and allowing the Indians to cook them for themselves, this system brought other difficulties. One officer, walking past such a group cooking food on the roadside, was amazed to see them tip out the contents of their cooking pot as he passed. The ‘shadow of the infidel’ had fallen across their food and they would rather go hungry than eat it. Even the basic army rations were unacceptable to Indian troops. To the exasperation of Captain Maurice Mascall, who was an officer in a mountain gun battery, his drivers refused to eat the biscuits he was forced to issue in lieu of scarce chapatti flour. But the drivers seemed unconcerned. They politely pointed out, when called to account, that they did not expect to survive anyway and might as well die of starvation in a state of grace than be consigned to damnation by a German bullet with a stomach defiled by impure food. ‘This argument,’ remarked Mascall, ‘rather took the wind out of the Major’s sails as he had hoped that the pangs of hunger would prove stronger than caste prejudice.’
It seldom did, and provisioning the Indians was a headache. Beef was not acceptable to many and, since pork was absolutely taboo, all France as far afield as the island of Corsica was scoured for goats, as old and tough as possible, to supply the Indians’ needs. Such was their horror of anything connected with pork that exhausted Sikhs newly out of the line even refused to enter the pigsties they were allocated as temporary billets. The officers who had served with the Indian Army in peacetime understood these shibboleths but as casualties mounted and they were replaced by others with no experience of Indian troops, difficulties and misunderstandings increased.
But in Britain the Indian soldiers were hugely popular. Public imagination had been caught by the munificence of the maharajas who had offered troops, money, even lakhs of rubies, to assist the war effort, and also by the loyalty of these soldiers of the Empire who had obeyed the Empire’s call to come and fight. Everyone approved when the Royal Pavilion in Brighton was turned into a hospital for Indian wounded, for what could be more appropriate and more likely to make them feel at home than its sparkling minarets and oriental decor? Money poured into the Indian Soldiers’ Fund. Speakers of Indian languages – many of them retired from the Indian Civil Service – visited them in hospital. There were outings, even sight-seeing trips to London for the convalescents (including a visit to Lord Roberts’ grave in the crypt of St Paul’s). Everything Indian was fashionable and an oriental matinee at the Shaftesbury Theatre raised a large sum of money for the benefit of Indian troops. It featured oriental dances, songs, recitations, and tableaux, including ‘an Indian Garden scene with characters represented by Indian ladies and gentlemen’. The performance was attended by several royal ladies, including the Queen Mother, Queen Alexandra, and it was voted a resounding success.
The sturdy little Gurkhas from the hill country of Nepal were just as popular. They were tough fighters, proud of their prowess and their skill with their kukris, those lethal weapons whose curved blades were honed razor sharp and which, in the opinion of the Gurkhas, were miles better than any rifle. They had been mobbed at Marseilles by girls demanding to have their fingers scratched ‘for luck’, and the Gurkhas had obliged, grinning with delight. It was the first time they had drawn blood, although so little had they known about the war that they had spent the last two hours of the train journey to Calcutta sharpening kukris in the belief that they would be meeting the enemy the instant they arrived.
When they finally did meet the enemy in the alien land of Flanders they had quickly adapted and shown their mettle. Killing Germans was what they were there for, and killing Germans was what they intended to do. The Gurkhas were particularly adept at scouting and patrolling, and delighted in creeping undetected to a German outpost and dispatching some unsuspecting enemy with a silent swipe of the deadly kukri.
Lt. Col. D. H. Drake-Brockman, 2nd Bn., Garhwal Rifles, Garhwal Brig., Meerut Div.
We organised a raid on the German trenches opposite our right flank where it ran into what we called ‘the gap’. This was a portion of ditch which ran along our front at this place. Our right and the 1st Battalion’s left ran into it.
Fifty men from each battalion were lined up in the ditch on the right flank and the signal to advance was given. The special feature of a night attack is the imperative necessity for absolute silence till you are actually ready to charge and close up to your objective – otherwise cheering too soon only gives the enemy notice of your intention and time to prepare to meet your attack. Our men crawled right up to the German parapet in silence and lay under it without being noticed. Major Taylor lay there too, watching, and when he considered the psychological moment had arrived he gave the signal to charge into the trench by firing his revolver at some grey-coated Germans he could just see walking by below him and immediately they all jumped into the German trench with an almighty yell.
I don’t suppose men were ever scared so much as these Germans were, for they bolted down every handy communication trench as if all the demons in Asia were after them. I think it must have been this incident that gave rise to the yarns and pictures which one saw in the illustrated papers of men dressed like Gurkhas with drawn kukris in their mouths crawling up to the German trenches. We took six live prisoners, one of whom was wounded, and we know that two were killed. But the great thing was the moral effect which it must have produced on the enemy.
Stories of the Gurkhas abounded. One favourite told of a German soldier looking over the parapet just as a Gurkha crawled up. The kukri swished and the German sneered and shook his head. ‘You missed, Gurkha!’ The Gurkha replied, ‘You wait, German, wait until you try to nod head.’ Apocryphal though it was, it precisely summed up the spirit and character of the tough little hillmen. Outlandish rumours of blood-chilling deeds spread like wildfire among the Germans who soon developed a healthy respect for Asian soldiers. In some cases it amounted to outright fear and one unfortunate German who had been captured by a patrol and brought into the British line was so overcome by terror on being patted and stroked by a smiling Indian soldier that he actually fainted. The Indian was extremely put out. His intention had been to reassure the prisoner by demonstrating sympathy and friendship. But the German’s imagination had been fired by lurid rumours of cannibalism and he assumed that his captor was exploring his person with a view to identifying the plumpest, juiciest cuts.
On the night of 21 February detachments of the 3rd Londons went into the trenches for the first time with the front-line battalions of the Meerut Division. Some were attached to the Gurkhas who gave them a friendly welcome. It was only possible to communicate in sign language but in quiet spells there was much displaying of kukris, which the British men were anxious to examine, and the Gurkhas were equally anxious to show off, as well as the trophies and souvenirs that were proof of the number of Germans they had bagged. Among the caps and helmets and tunic-buttons were a number of desiccated objects which on closer examination were shown to be human ears, and grinning dumbshows of throat-cutting gestures left no doubt in the mind as to how the Gurkhas had come by them.
They were treated occasionally to a short unpleasant fusillade of pip-squeaks, which the Gurkhas called ‘Swee-thak’s’ and appeared to shrug off with a certain derision that was heartening to men coming under fire for the first time. But for once it was a bright day and the blue sky buzzed with aeroplanes, wheeling and climbing and dodging the shell-bursts as the guns sought to bring them down. It was fascinating to watch the white puff of an explosion appearing as if by magic against the blue of the sky, followed a moment later by the crack of the explosion and the whirr of the shell travelling through the air. They were British aeroplanes, and it was fortunate that the German shells failed to hit them because they were engaged on an important task. The first air cameras had just been delivered and the planes were taking advantage of the clear fog-free weather to photograph the German trenches and the fortifications behind their front line. These first aerial photographs would be flat affairs compared with the finely detailed shots that would later prove so invaluable, but they were infinitely better than nothing. The map-makers were working overtime and for the first time since the stalemate had set in the Army would have eyes, would be able to see beyond ridges and round corners, and the troops preparing for the coming battle would know precisely where they were going and what they would be up against.
There was another new innovation which the Army had been slow to accept. It was the idea that guns could be accurately ranged by aeroplanes observing their fire and sending back instant corrections by wireless, and it was the brainchild of Lieutenant Donald Lewis, a signals specialist of the Royal Engineers on secondment to the Royal Flying Corps. Had it depended on official channels it would never have got off the ground at all, but Donald Lewis had friends, and Lieutenant James, a fellow sapper, was equally enthusiastic. Together they installed a prototype wireless in Lewis’s aircraft and that was the easy bit. Neither officer was an expert in speedily sending morse and it took them weeks to work up their speed and efficiency, Lewis in the air and James on the ground. Then they approached another friend, the commander of a 9.2 Howitzer battery, and invited him to join in the experiment. It was a startling success. An aircraft observing a shoot firing blind ‘by the map’ at a specified target could instantly signal back the result and the correction that would lay the gun accurately on the target. They had worked out a code using an imaginary clock face divided into segments superimposed on the map. It was simple and it was fool-proof. The War Office gave Lewis and James their blessing and sent them with their new system to France where they kicked their heels for a month before they were allowed to try it out.
Lt. D. S. Lewis, Royal Engineers, Att. RFC.
We went out with three machines, fitted with 300-watt Rouget sets, run off the crankshaft, and receiving sets with Brown relays. For a month they wouldn’t use us, having a very British distrust of things new! At last we got our chance and made about the biggest success of the war. We do nothing but range artillery, sending down the position of new targets and observing the shorts. The results are really magnificent. In this flat country all heavy artillery shooting is utterly blind without aeroplane observation. As it is, during a battle, every enemy battery that opens fire can be promptly dealt with and accurately ranged on. With ‘Mother’, the 9.2-inch ‘How’, one can generally hit a target with the first three shots. We signal the shots by a clock method, direction by figures, distances by letters, i.e. C9 means 200 yards at nine o’clock to the true north.
The problem was that in the run-up to the offensive there were precious few shells to spare, not even for the task of ensuring the accuracy of the guns in the all-important bombardment. But not all the guns had yet arrived and the Battery Commanders of those that were in place were none too keen to send precious rationed shells flying into the blue without good reason. Sir John French had calculated that by economising on ammunition he would store up enough for three days’ fighting. And a three-day fight would put him on top of the Aubers Ridge.
He was sure of it. It had to, it must succeed.
Part 2
Into Battle: Neuve Chapelle
How do you feel as you stand in a trench
Awaiting the whistle to blow?
Are you frightened, anxious, shaking with fear,
Or are you ready to go?
All men react in a different way
But few to heroics aspire
But should a man boast that he never felt fear
Then, in my book, that man is a liar.
Sgt. Harry Fellowes
12th Northumberland Fusiliers
Chapter 6
The sixteen thousand men of the 46th North Midland Territorial Division did not share the qualms of the Commander-in-Chief with regard to their ability to fight. They had been ready, willing and waiting for months, weary of training and itching to get into the real war.
But they were not all so experienced as the Terriers who had been rushed to France in the early days. When war broke out not many Territorial battalions were up to full strength and some in country districts had been nowhere near it. In the first weeks of the war they had been forced to enrol new volunteers to make up their numbers and so far as the new recruits were concerned the Territorials were a popular choice. For one thing they were issued with uniforms and rifles right away and for months now they had been swanking over their khaki-less comrades of Kitchener’s Mob in cloth caps and civilian clothes. The trouble was that as many as two in ten of the Territorials were as raw and inexperienced as the masses that flooded into the ranks of Kitchener’s New Armies. In the early days, this had caused difficulties in many Territorial battalions, not least in the 6th Battalion of the South Staffordshire Regiment. They still remembered one embarrassing incident which, although amusing in retrospect, had not impressed the Colonel at the time.
It had been unfortunate for the Battalion that when the Commander of the North Midland Brigade arrived unexpectedly to confer with Lieutenant-Colonel Waterhouse he was not greeted with the ‘military compliments’ which a full colonel of the regular army was entitled to receive. The soldier enjoying the sun outside the guard-room merely glanced at him with no apparent interest. It was 12 August, the ‘guard-room’ was the gate-house of a brewery in Burton-on-Trent, where the South Staffs had been ordered to concentrate, and ten days ago the soldier leaning against the wall had been a tram-driver. Today, by some fluke of authority, he had been told off for guard-duty, and he had only the haziest notion of what this entailed. He couldn’t recognise a Brigadier when he saw one and, since the sentry was correctly attired in the uniform of a Territorial, Colonel Bromilow did not recognise a raw recruit. Turn out the Guard!’ he snapped. The only response was, ‘Eh?’ ‘Where is the Guard?’ ‘I don’t know.’
The Colonel twigged at once and changed his approach. ‘Where are the other fellows?’ The sentry jerked his head at the guard-room ‘In there.’ Bromilow made for the door but the sentry had gleaned from somewhere that the purpose of a sentry was to guard something which might well be the guard-room itself, and he sprang to life bellowing, ‘‘ERE YOU! You can’t go in there!’ He even went so far as to shove his superior officer out of the way.
Colonel Bromilow was an old soldier. It was thirty years since he had been commissioned into his parent regiment, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. He had fought in the South African War at the battle of Ladysmith and been in the legendary charge of the Irish Brigade at Colenso. He had served in Egypt, in India, in the Sudan. And he knew when he was beaten. He turned on his heel and strode off to exchange a few curt words with Lieutenant-Colonel Waterhouse. Next day, for the benefit of newcomers, the regulations governing the duties of the guard were reproduced in Battalion Orders, with the rider that platoon officers must see to it that newly enlisted men were trained to carry them out.
Most Territorial officers in the 6th South Staffs had at least one or two years’ service, but this did not mean that they encountered no difficulties. They were perfectly familiar with duties of Orderly Officer of the day but it was natural that in the course of afternoon or evening drills they had never been called upon to perform the routine task of ‘inspecting men’s dinners’, and it had seldom fallen to their lot during annual camps. ‘Inspecting dinners’ was simply a matter of visiting the cookhouse while the food was being prepared and going to the mess halls when the meal had been served to ask ‘Any complaints?’ It was at the cookhouse that Lieutenant Langley had come to grief, for when the sergeant-cook ordered the lid of a huge dixie to be lifted for his inspection, he realised that he had not the faintest idea what he was supposed to do next. He peered into the bubbling brew, playing for time and racking his brains. ‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘Boiled beef, sir.’ All that occurred to Lieutenant Langley were the queries ‘Is it beef?’ and ‘Is it boiled?’ – and he could see that that was ridiculous. The expected response – and universal escape-route in awkward situations – was a laconic ‘Very good. Carry on, Sergeant’, but these words completely escaped him. The cooks were waiting expectantly. Langley, now uncomfortably enveloped in steam, went on earnestly scrutinising the contents of the dixie. How was he meant to ‘inspect’ the food? He was finally driven by heat and desperation to prodding the beef gingerly with the end of his short Malacca cane. And then, at last, the blessed formula came to mind. ‘Very good. Carry on, Sergeant.’ The cooks sportingly showed no sign of astonishment. Later a few scornful words from the Adjutant, who had happened to be passing the open cookhouse door (and also happened to be Langley’s elder brother), put the over-zealous inspector right.
But, like other battalions of the 46th Division, the 6th South Staffs had been licked into shape and trained for war service. Now they were to have the honour of being the first division composed entirely of Territorials to go to the front and the Commanding Officer of the 6th South Staffs was determined that their arrival should not go unnoticed. He had issued orders to the company officers to ensure that every man was familiar with the tune of the French national anthem and, although he was not so ambitious as to expect them to learn the words, he insisted that they should practise whistling it. The Battalion enthusiastically took to the idea, were encouraged by the officers to rehearse it on route marches and picked it up in no time. They were whistle perfect long before they embarked for France. It was not easy to fit English words to the tune of ‘The Marseillaise’ but, as the weeks passed, a few wags were moved to vary the eternal whistling by warbling When are we go-ing, when are we go-o-ing, When are we go-ing to the front? But they could get no further. Neither, it seemed, could the battalion.
Their departure was delayed so long, and every man had been home on his ‘last’ forty-eight-hour pass so often that his family, who had bidden him an emotional goodbye on the first occasion, became blasé, if not downright bored, by numerous repeat performances of ‘The Soldier’s Farewell’. Even the men got fed up with it and it was a relief to all when they finally embarked on 5 March. The departure from Southampton was thrilling.
2nd Lt. F. Best, Army Service Corps, 46 Div. Supply Column.
The sea was absolutely calm. I counted fourteen searchlights looking aimlessly for aircraft and the water was raked by as many horizontal ones on the lookout for submarines while we were gliding down the Solent. The water looked a dazzling blue green in the zone of light. A more gorgeous sight you couldn’t imagine – the coloured lights and signals, the still water and the misty land disappearing gradually into the haze. Further south a couple of destroyers escorted us – little black streaks ploughing along in the dull light. That made us feel very secure. It suddenly occurred to me that we were performing the famous tableau I’d seen so often as a lad at Hamilton’s Panorama – it was called Troopship Leaving Southampton.
We anchored among several other vessels outside the harbour of Le Havre, with French and English destroyers flitting round us all the time. Then the pilot led us in. We took a short time to land and proceeded to a large shed at the side of the line a mile and a half from the dock. We were joined later by masses of others. The troops and citizens in Le Havre were startled by the spectacle of an officer charging through the town at break-neck speed, taking no notice of tram lines or level crossings – sparks flying from the granite setts. This was Eric Milner on a stylish looking charger he’d selected from the Remount Depot at Southampton when his own horse Jingly Geordie died there of cold. He was some miles on the other side of town before he managed to stop the beast!
Lieutenant Milner narrowly escaped being the very first casualty of the entire division and, compared to his dramatic entrance into the field of war, the arrival of the 6th South Staffs was something of an anti-climax. It was also a deep disappointment to Colonel Water-house. His men played their part to perfection, marching smartly through the streets to the transit camp, lustily whistling The Marseillaise’ in compliment to their French allies. But the allies, as represented by the civilian population of le Havre, took not the slightest notice. The 46th Divisional supply column had been longer on the way for it was a laborious job to pack up and move the 200 wagons, 600 men and as many as 550 horses that made up the Divisional train. The men who had reached France before the supply column got there were more than pleased to see it when it finally arrived. No one was happier than Captain Ashwell of the 8th Battalion, Notts and Derby, known to the army as the Sherwood Foresters. Ashwell had drawn what turned out to be the short straw, for he had been sent to France in charge of the advance guard, and if the fifty men who made up this vanguard had been inclined to crow over the laggards who were left behind, they very soon regretted it.
Advance guards were nobody’s children. Even at le Havre, while waiting for space in a train going north, no one seemed inclined to find them billets. They were obliged to shift for themselves and bed down in empty trucks and, when they finally did reach their destination, with no transport, and with no Divisional, Brigade or Battalion headquarters to issue orders or to turn to in case of difficulty, they felt more than ever like lost sheep. There were naturally no battalion postal arrangements and one new arrival, anxious to let his family know his whereabouts, scribbled a hasty note and posted it in a village post-box. No one had told him that troops in France were forbidden to use the civilian postal service and the question of censorship had not entered his head: ‘Dear Mum and Dad, Well, we got away all right. At the moment I am at a place near Cassel with a few other fellows. I expect the rest will arrive soon. I am in the pink, and hope this finds you as it leaves me…’This letter caused consternation, first in his family and later in the Battalion, for his parents looked up Cassel on a small-scale map of Europe, found only Kassel in Germany, and made the natural assumption that their son had been taken prisoner the moment he set foot in France. They wrote straight off to the War Office for information. Later, after the arrival of his Battalion, when the wrath of Whitehall eventually descended on the head of his Commanding Officer, the unfortunate soldier received a wigging he was unlikely to forget.
The task of the advance guard was to pave the way for the Battalion, to find billets for a thousand weary men at the end of their long journey, to select premises suitable for Battalion Headquarters and orderly rooms, places nearby where the cookers could set up, and suitable fields for the wagon lines. Finding billets in the scattered hamlets north of Cassel, Ashwell discovered, was a simple task compared to that of feeding his fifty men. Iron rations were soon exhausted, they had to forage further and further afield for supplies and, in the three days before the Battalion arrived, Ashwell reckoned that he had personally trudged no less than forty-five miles in search of food. They arrived on the evening of 4 March. Ashwell was heartily pleased to see them and even more pleased, when the next move came, to be back in the fold and travelling as one of the crowd.
It had taken ten days for the whole division to congregate. There had been time – but only just – to give a few of the earliest arrivals a brief stint in some quiet sector of the trench-line but soon after the last straggling unit arrived and the division was complete, the order came to move south. This time it was the real thing for they were moving into general reserve for the Battle of Neuve Chapelle. Untried though the 46th Division was, the Commander-in-Chief was forced to use it. There was no other to use.
But neither Sir John French, his staff, nor Sir Douglas Haig, the architect of the battle, was unduly concerned about this lack of experience. As reserves the Territorials of the 46th Division would not be in the thick of the attack. When the Regulars, assisted by their own attached Territorial Battalions, had smashed the line, when the cavalry had thrust ahead through the gap, only then would the soldiers in reserve be brought forward to support the troops who had broken through and to follow behind as they advanced.
It was twenty kilometres from the la Bassée Canal in the south to Bois Grenier further north and Haig’s First Army now held this front with six divisions. The Germans facing them held it with two – and those were greatly under strength. Six Battalions had just been
transferred to the front in Champagne, and they had been withdrawn from the precise sector of the line on which the first and most fearsome British attack would fall. Fifteen British Battalions were poised to attack the line held by just one and a half Battalions of German troops. In front of the Indian Corps, where nine Battalions of the Meerut Division were waiting to strike, there were just three German Battalions, and all of them were strung out by companies along the vulnerable length of their ill-manned front. The nearest reserves, a mere two companies, were at Halpegarbe just over two kilometres from the German front line.
It was true that the Germans had local reserves in stronger formations, but they were at least ten kilometres away. Sir Douglas Haig had taken them into account and had impressed on his Corps Commanders the vital importance of getting ahead as quickly as possible before German reserves could get there. Everything hinged on speed. The infantry must not hesitate but must push on as fast as possible. This order was handed down the line and there was no Brigadier, no Battalion Commanding Officer and, eventually, no Company Commander who was not fully aware of its importance.
As Commander of the First Army, General Haig had given a good deal of thought to the disposition of his troops and his plans had been approved by the Commander-in-Chief. He proposed to attack in depth. The attack would be narrow, but at the centre, where it mattered, it would be deep. Everything depended on the capture of Neuve Chapelle and the system of German trenches that formed the salient around it. Once the village had been captured and the line straightened, the troops on either side of it could advance in line with the victors and the battle would be as good as won. With one more push, long before the enemy was able to bring up his reserves, they would be on top of Aubers Ridge. The two essentials were that they should be the very best troops available and that there should be enough of them in close support to pass speedily through the first successful waves and continue the assault. Neuve Chapelle was the crux.
In normal circumstances, with the enemy ranged in a semi-circle around it, a salient is an awkward place to occupy and the men defending it can be harassed by rifle and shellfire coming from two sides as well as from their front. But on the British side there had been neither bullets nor shells to spare. In the months they had been holding it, the Germans had got off so lightly that it was they who had been able to harass the 8th Division who had the misfortune to surround them in this sector of the line. Neuve Chapelle was a sniper’s paradise. Its houses, still mostly intact, were full of them and, firing in all directions from behind stout walls, their long-range rifles fitted with telescopic sights had been giving the men of the 8th Division an uncomfortable time and they looked forward to squaring the accounts.
But a salient is also an awkward place to attack. The original plan had been for two brigades of the 8th Division to attack it in the flank from the north, but the Army had had second thoughts. So crucial was the position, so vital was its capture to the success of the whole plan, that it must be hit so fast and so hard at a single blow that there could not be the smallest possibility of delay or hold-up. To stiffen and deepen the attack, the Indian Corps, the immediate neighbours of the 8th Division on its right, was squeezed up to bring its Garhwal Brigade in front of Neuve Chapelle. The 8th Division squeezed up and moved left to make room. It was just one stage of a wholesale reshuffle.
The thirteen-mile front that ran from Neuve Chapelle north to Bois Grenier was held by IV Corps. It comprised the two Regular divisions that together represented the ace in the British hand – the 7th Division, which had borne the brunt of the Battle of Ypres in October, and the 8th Division composed of Regular Battalions brought back from foreign stations. Now there was the Canadian Division, newly arrived in France, but as willing and enthusiastic as any Commander could desire. They were to take over a quiet sector at the northern end of the corps front to allow the 7th Division to double its strength in front of Aubers Ridge. The reshuffling was complete twelve days before the battle. It was a large concentration of troops to compress into an area of a few thousand yards, and although, in principle, the process was much like ordering a single line of soldiers to form fours, to perform the same drill with some twenty thousand men – and in the face of the enemy – was no easy matter. But it had been done, and the troops were in position. Now the IV Corps, with the 23rd Brigade of the 8th Division on its right, joined hands with the Garhwal Brigade on the left of the Indian Corps. Together they formed a rough V-shape round the apex of the salient in front of Neuve Chapelle and when the battle began they would attack it simultaneously from both sides, linking up triumphantly when it had been captured to pursue the advance. This fateful arrangement was the flaw in a well-laid plan. The two brigades, each from a separate Corps, came under two different commands and this factor, in the place where the attack should be strongest, was destined to be the Achilles heel that would trip it up.
The supporting brigades of divisions in the line stretched far back into the rural hinterland for it had been impossible to find billets for so many in nearby farms and hamlets. They could be moved close up as the battle approached. In any event, it would be injudicious to run the risk of their being spotted by inquisitive enemy aircraft before the preparations were complete.
There was little enough time to prepare for the battle, but miracles were accomplished in a few days. For one thing there was the question of forming up trenches and jump-off positions that would give the infantry the all-important head start that would take the enemy by surprise. They could hardly be expected to climb laboriously across the high sandbagged breastworks that had sheltered them since the appalling weather had forced them out of the trenches. But the weather had improved and the ground had dried out – not so much as had been hoped, but enough to dig new trenches and to reclaim old ones, to pump out water, shore up crumbling walls. There would still be an inch or so of sloppy mud underfoot, but heavy planks could be laid to give reasonably dry standing while the men were waiting, and it was a foregone conclusion that they would be up and away in no time, and streaming far ahead. There were bridges to be constructed – scores of them – to lay across the ditches and culverts the troops would have to cross as they moved to the assault. Miles of telephone wire had to be laid, along the ground, festooned along communication trenches and, further back, strung between newly erected poles. The telephones and buzzers would keep Battalions in touch with Divisional Headquarters, link each Division to its Brigade Headquarters, connect Brigades with Corps, and Corps with First Army Headquarters at Merville where Sir Douglas Haig and his staff would be coordinating the offensive and issuing orders. Most important of all, telephones and buzzers would be the vital link between all of them and the guns.
There was the material to be carried up to dumps close to the line – large quantities of food and water, boxes of small arms ammunition for the rifles, shells for the guns, spades and pickaxes, bales of barbed wire, iron pickets, and the hundred and one items that the army would need to dig itself in as it advanced. None of the preparations could be carried out by day and, in the ten nights before the battle, the groans and curses of a thousand working parties might have been heard in Berlin.
L/cpl. W. L. Andrews, 1/4 Bn., Black Watch (Royal Highlanders) (TF), Bareilly Brig., Meerut Div.
We knew, of course, that we’d have to fight our way across fields so sodden with the winter rain that they were like morasses. Before the battle we had to throw bridges across drains and watercourses running through our own front so that the troops could concentrate quickly. We dragged our way up with ammunition, bombs, rations, sandbags, barbed wire, spare bridges, planks, hurdles and iron pickets, and stored them at dumps in the fields. We were carrying all through the hours of darkness night after night. It took a tremendous time to do this but it never occurred to us to wonder what to expect when we crossed to the fields the Germans were holding where we wouldn’t have hundreds of bridges to help us over the watery parts, and we would still have all our fighting material to carry forward.
Soldiers? We were more like sweating coolies. How we came to loathe the sodden tracks, with wire overhead, wire underfoot, every few yards! And we still had to carry our rifles and ammunition with us. That was the military way, although there was no danger of our being suddenly attacked and we’d have been a lot more useful as coolies without them!
The gunners, too, had been hard at it, labouring with whatever material was available – planks and bricks and hurdles – to build platforms strong enough to anchor the guns to the muddy earth. Every gun that could be begged or borrowed had been sited behind the front, and the combined field artillery of the IV and Indian Corps, augmented by light thirteen-pounders borrowed from the cavalry, was positioned in a deep horseshoe mostly in front of Neuve Chapelle. For days now they had been ranging on the enemy’s line, taking care not to arouse his suspicion and taking care also to expend as little as possible of the precious ammunition. At the start of the offensive they would fire the hurricane bombardment that would smash the German wire and blow open a path for the infantry to advance. Behind them were the heavy guns that would pulverise the trenches and destroy strong-points in the line – but there were not nearly enough of them. Of the two mammoth 15-inch Howitzers on which Sir John French had depended only one had arrived. It had brought little ammunition, and what it had was faulty.
As the days passed the Commander-in-Chief fumed and fretted. Two batteries of heavy guns were still missing and their eight 6-inch Howitzers would constitute a third of all the siege guns that had been faithfully promised weeks earlier. Far from being in position where they ought to be, they had not even embarked for France. They were the 59th and 81st Siege Batteries, but their high numbers gave a false impression for they did not indicate the number of siege guns at the disposal of the British Army. They were Indian numbers and although the gunners were not ready to embark they had arrived from India three months earlier.
Bdr. W. Kemp, A sub-section, 59 Siege Bty., RGA.
We were at Roorkee when the war broke out. At first it didn’t upset the routine in our battery at all, and that really annoyed us because we’d expected to be away to France on the next boat. But we didn’t get away until the middle of November and we landed in Devonport about Christmas and marched to Portsmouth barracks. What a reception we got from the crowd! We were heroes already, in their opinion. All we were thinking about was getting a feed of fish and chips, and to hell with the cheers! My last taste of them was in February 1909, before we sailed for India, so all I thought about was getting to the nearest chip shop.
We’d left our 25-hundredweight guns behind, but we kept our pre-war numbers and 59th and 81st Batteries kept their old Garrison Artillery numbers, so when we finally did get to France in March this caused some confusion to people who didn’t know owt about the Royal Garrison Artillery. Other batteries that came out later couldn’t understand why the number of our battery was higher than theirs. We went to Fort Fareham at the beginning of January to be equipped with 6-inch 30-hundredweight Howitzers and started to work with them. It was a different cup of tea from India!
For one thing the battery was horse-drawn. Out there we had bullocks, great hefty beasts, and when we went to camp we had elephants to pull the guns out when they managed to slide into a ditch – which was often! Compared to them these horses were ruddy devils! Now when we got stuck in a ditch or the mud it was a case of ‘Take out the ‘osses and put on the drag ropes.’ It was some change, because you could say we’d lived in luxury in India. Everything was done for us – we even got shaved in bed by the Nappi. He came round every morning and we paid him about fourpence a month. We didn’t know we were born!
Of course we worked hard too. I’d started on the old 4-inch gun mounted on an elephant carriage – no buffers, so when it fired it went back about ten yards and had to be wheeled forward to its correct position. We did gun-drill, we did some rifle exercises, a little semaphore, practice in observation, a guard now and again – and that was our life.
One of the things we had to do now was practise firing by the map at targets we couldn’t see, and that was absolutely new to us. In India we went to Battery Practice Camp once a year. A nice wide area was selected where the ‘enemy’ guns could be seen from the observation of fire instruments. The enemy very kindly fired powder puffs twice so that we could correct our line. We brought our instrument on to the centre line of the enemy’s battery, and when we fired we were able to record the fall of our shots easily, because the enemy always stopped firing so that the observers on our instrument wouldn’t get mixed up with the fall of shot and the gun-fire of the very obliging Enemy!
This was a wonderful system where the gunners ran with the hare and hunted with the hounds! Even we gunners on the instrument used to laugh at it, but to no avail. Fancy intelligent officers of the Royal Artillery falling for this daft idea which could only be carried out in practice camp!
Since mid-February a series of urgent telegrams had been flying between Staff Headquarters at St Omer and Ordnance Headquarters in England, and they grew more and more fiery as the weeks passed and there was no sign of the two missing batteries. First came the assurance that they would sail on 26 February, then without fail on 1 March. On the 3rd Sir John French was cast down by the news that the batteries had not yet left England. Time was running out. If they did not arrive soon they would hardly have time to dig in the guns or to range on targets before the battle began. Their targets had already been allotted, and both of them were crucial. The particular task of 59th Battery was to smash the German strongpoints around Mauquissart on the front of the 22nd Brigade who would attack it.
Chapter 7
Mauquissart was a cluster of ruined houses on the left of the planned attack. It was clear enough to see for it was barely a quarter mile behind the German line directly in front of Aubers on the ridge a mile beyond. Between them, close to Mauquissart, another landmark rose out of the tumbled grey waste. It was the Moulin du Pietre, a large double-storeyed working mill that had served local farmers for miles around and now doubtless served the Germans as a useful place from which to make observation close to their line. Beyond Mauquissart the enemy line began to curve, dipping back slightly behind the Ferme van Biesen, brooding, abandoned, a hundred yards ahead in No Man’s Land. It was a large farm, almost a manor, surrounded by trees and a once-ornamental waterscape that had doubled as a drainage ditch in the low-lying farmland. A hundred yards beyond it, British troops, looking from their own lines into No Man’s Land, christened it the Moated Grange.
The line that looked so clear-cut and distinct drawn as a firm black line on war maps in the newspapers was different when looked at from the air or the line itself. The two sets of trench-lines, separated by a hundred yards or so, straggled and meandered through a mish-mash of splintered trees, crumbling buildings, ruined roadways, here switching back to take advantage of higher ground, there jutting out to protect the prize of a fortified village or wood. As often as not the trenches ran in untidy loops and angles where the last loss or gain of a local attack had left them. There was nothing clear-cut about them.
Beyond the Moated Grange the German trenches ran south to cross the track the British called Signpost Lane, and then pushed out to form the salient enclosing Neuve Chapelle. Where that salient ended another began, jutting this time into the German lines. The British called it Port Arthur and it was small, but it was theirs, and this was all to the good, for it enclosed the crossroads where the Estaires road met the Rue du Bois that ran back towards Béthune and these were the vital, the indispensable routes to the trenches. Before the lines had been rudely carved across it the Rue du Bois had also led to the Bois du Biez, a large rectangular wood, half a mile in length and half a mile behind Neuve Chapelle. It was empty and untouched. In early March, as buds on the trees slowly opened, the wood beyond the Indians’ front line was gradually turning green.
This, then, was the battlefield. It was such a small stretch of land that an onlooker at a vantage point not much above ground level could have surveyed it at a glance, barely turning his head. The headache for artillery observation officers was that vantage points above ground level near their lines were few and far between. For want of anything better, haystacks were burrowed out to serve as makeshift observation posts and on the day before the battle no fewer than thirty observation officers crowded into a single ruined house at Pont Logy, training binoculars on the trenches of the salient that protected Neuve Chapelle. It was here at Pont Logy that the twenty machine-guns of the Indian Corps would be massed to cover the advance. The ammunition had been brought up and sandbagged emplacements constructed in the front line. All the previous night Arthur Agius and his men had been working. At six in the morning they returned to la Couture and Agius turned in to sleep for a few hours, stretched out on a wooden table. With so many troops crammed behind the front there was neither a bed nor floor-space to be found. But he slept the sleep of the just. In a short time they would be off and so far as his part went, he was satisfied that everything was ready.
At the eleventh hour and some eighteen hours before they were due to take part in the battle, the 59th Siege Battery finally arrived.
Bdr. W. Kemp.
We detrained at Estaires and went into action off the la Bassée Road. We pulled into the orchard of a farm and I was detailed to join the signallers – or telephonists as we really were. There was very little morse code used and visibility didn’t allow us to use flags. But we all had to set to and get our heavy guns set up double-quick and it was some job, although we were trained to do things double-quick and it seemed like practice camp all over again. It was what we had been used to and the only difference was the country we were in. The detachments put down their double-deck platforms and bulk holdfast – the guns were anchored to them by a volute spring. But the volute springs had been left behind! That was the first panic. The consequence was that when the guns fired they recoiled about ten yards and had to be run-up by hand to the correct position – just like the old days in India.
The line of fire was the next question. What to do? Well, what we did was to ask another battery not far away. We could only see about two hundred yards on account of trees, but we could see the spire of Neuve Chapelle Church. The officer on this job was told to get a line on the church, hit it, and then register this as his line of fire and switch from it to other targets. He set up a plane table with a map of the area, put a pin on the church and another in the centre of the battery position. Then, with a director marked in a 180 degrees left and right, he took a zero line from the pins and then gave individual angles to all the guns, which brought them into parallel lines with the line of his director. One gun fired and hit the church and the others took parallel lines to it. But, needless to say, it didn’t fire that afternoon, and it was doubtful if we could even be ready to fire a shot in the bombardment next day.
The Colonel of the Brigade came along about this time and spoke to the Major to tell him about the battle tomorrow. They stood at the plane table and the Colonel pointed to the map. I heard him say, ‘One division will go in and swing left, the next one will go in and swing right, and then the cavalry will go through.’ The Major looked at him and said, ‘Like Hell they will!’ I heard him say it.
The Major had good reason to be despondent. The Colonel had spared no pains to stress the importance of the role his Howitzers were expected to play, and the Battery-Commander well knew that it would be a near-impossibility to achieve it. Despite the gargantuan efforts of his men, he would be lucky if his guns were able to fire a shot in the next twenty-four hours, let alone hit the target, and on this occasion the enemy would not be so obliging as to fire puffs of signal smoke to help them. But, in the late afternoon, as the troops were assembling for the move to the line, there was hardly another man from Sir John French himself to the most newly arrived Territorial who was not full of optimism and confident of success.
L/cpl. W. L. Andrews.
We felt honoured to think we’d been chosen to serve in the battle. We were eager to fight, smarting to avenge the things that had been said about the Territorials. We might be raw – we’d only been out a couple of months – but we were keen men, intelligent men, and every one a volunteer. We meant to do our best and we were convinced that this was the battle that might end the war! In those days we thought we only had to break through the German front and the enemy would crumple up and we would be done with trenches because, once we had thrust through the trench system the line would be rolled up. That was a favourite phrase then, rolled up!
Later on, battles were more mysterious and the ordinary soldier never knew what was happening except in his own bit of battlefield. You could get stuck in a reeking shell pit for a whole day and night and not know whether it was friend or foe in the trench fifty yards away. Of course battle plans were not revealed to a humble lance-corporal like myself, but at Neuve Chapelle we had a good idea what we were after. We had a very fair idea of the ground to be covered and in our stints in the line we studied it as much as we could. The ground slowly rose towards the village of Aubers and we knew that about nine miles beyond was the city of Lille. We were hopeful and innocent enough to believe that there would be cosy billets for us in Lille on the night of the battle.
The men from Dundee knew that they were not to take part in the opening stages of the battle. Their job was to wait until Neuve Chapelle had been captured, only then would they move forward to hold the first captured trenches while the victors swept ahead. Every man knew what he had to do. Alex Letyford had spent most of the day making the scaling-ladders that would take the troops across the enemy’s sandbags, but he would be in the thick of it when the battle began. Around the salient, as aeriel photographs had shown, some trenches straggled back deep into German territory to link up with others that could not possibly be taken in the first assault. As soon as the first wave had gained a foothold engineers would go forward to construct barricades that would protect them as they consolidated and dug in, and a thousand Sikhs of the Lahore Division were standing by to repair the surface of the shattered road that ran through the German front line into Neuve Chapelle. As darkness fell and the troops began to gather for the move to the line, the Battalions who held it shuffled right or left to make room for them.
Capt. A. J. Agius, MC.
Until five o’clock we worked on the guns then we pushed up to the front again, via Richebourg St Vaast and Windy Corner. Our brigade was to make the attack on the Indian Corps frontage, four Battalions in the front line, with ours in support, and behind them the remainder of the Corps. The Brigade Machine-Guns were divided into two; half went forward with their own Battalions just behind the attacking line, the remainder were to bring supporting fire to bear from the trenches on the left flank south of Pont Logy and this was where I was with my colleague, Johnnie Sutcliffe.
Lt. C. Tennant.
On 9 March we were still at Vieille Chapelle, because our brigade had been in reserve. We had received orders on the 8th to be ready for a move and we spent the 9th packing up and sending away all superfluous kit to store at la Couture. We took nothing with us but rations, coats, a spare pair of socks and twenty rounds per man.
I turned in at 10.30 leaving orders that I was to be woken at one o’clock. Breakfast for the men was punctually at 2 a.m. and the Battalion was ready formed up in the road by 2.55. It was dry, but cold and rather misty. We marched to Richebourg and passed through it to a redoubt in an orchard and the companies were put into trenches and dug-outs and were all settled by about 5.30. An occasional shot from a field battery made the morning sound like any other morning during the last two months.
The troops were packed so tightly, the narrow country roads were so congested, and their progress was so slow and full of checks that it was dangerously close to dawn before the last of them reached the line. It was no bad thing that waiting time was shortened, for the assembly points were still wet and muddy and trenches that had been put into reasonable order had been soaked yet again by frequent showers of rain and sleet. It was dry now, but it was cold. A light mist carried frost across the battlefield and in the early hours, mercifully for the men who would advance across it, the ground froze hard. Stew that was still more or less hot had been carried up in dixies for the soldiers of the first wave who had been longest in position and, as they chewed and waited, they could hear movement in front, a medley of muffled voices, of chinking and loud twangs, as parties of Royal Engineers cut wide openings in their own barbed wire. In a little while the first wave would be charging through them on their way to the enemy line.
L/cpl. W. L. Andrews.
Snow swept down on us as we waited in the flooded trenches near Neuve Chapelle. We grew colder and colder – so cold that I never thought I could be so chilled and still live. It was sheer biting torture. We could hardly drag our feet along when the orders came to move from the trench to the Port Arthur dug-outs for a few hours sleep before the battle.
At five in the morning my platoon was routed out again to move to a reserve trench. We shambled over ground hardened by frost. It was colder than ever. We called it a trench, but it was more of a breastwork like a stockade strengthened with sandbags of earth, my pals Nicholson and Joe Lee and myself huddled together close to each other with our backs to the stockade. When dawn came we peered across at the German lines, wondering if Jerry knew we were coming.
Dawn broke on the day of battle at half past six in the morning. At just about that time the 6th Bavarian Reserve Battalion were marching to billets in Tourcoing. They were weary, for they had spent two weeks in the wintry trenches near Ypres. They had marched ten kilometres before transport met them at Menin and it had been a long cold night. Now they were looking forward to hot coffee, a breakfast of bread and sausage and cabbage soup, a wash to get rid of the mud, and two blessed weeks away from the dangers and discomfort of the front. In the courtyard behind the Dewavrin house a cooker had already been set up, and the family wakened to the sound of tramping feet and shouted commands as a half company of Bavarians marched in.
Lt. C. Tennant.
The daylight, as it strengthened, showed no sign of anything unusual taking place on our front. But at 7.30 punctually the whole sky was rent by noise – about four hundred British guns all opening fire at once in a concentrated bombardment of two hundred yards of German trenches. We had a battery of – I think – 4.7s only forty yards behind us and the din was terrific. The whole air and the solid earth itself became one quivering jelly. After the first few minutes and after I had gone round and told them to keep their mouths open (instead of trying to look grim with clenched teeth!) the men didn’t seem to worry much about the row which was enough to give anyone a sick headache. Funnily enough, I normally have a fanatical dislike for mere noise of any kind, but I was conscious of nothing except the extraordinary sense of security the infantry man gets from hearing artillery fire from his own side.
L/cpl. W. L. Andrews.
The bombardment started like all the furies of hell. The noise almost split our wits. The shells from the field guns were whizzing right over our heads and we got more and more excited. We couldn’t hear ourselves speak. Now we could make out the German trenches. They were like long clouds of smoke and dust, flashing with shell-bursts, and we could see enormous masses of trench material and even bodies thrown up above the smoke clouds. We thought the bombardment was winning the war before our eyes and soon we would be pouring through the gap.
Capt. W. G. Bagot-Chester, MC, 2/3 Gurkha Rifles, Garhwal Brig., Meerut Div.
At 7.30 a.m. artillery bombardment commenced, and never since history has there been such a one. I should think for a full half hour our guns, four hundred and eighty of them, fired without the fraction of a second’s break. You couldn’t hear yourself speak for the noise. It was a continual rattle and roar. We lay very low in our trenches, as several of our guns were firing short. Later I picked up two shrapnel bullets and the bottom of a shell fuse. They’d landed right beside me.
Lt. C. Tennant.
An aeroplane was observing not very far in front of us and flying fairly low down. A very risky job with that tremendous amount of big ‘iron ration’ flying about. Through all the bombardment and in fact through all the heavy shelling of that day and the next, the larks mounted carolling up to the sky with shells screaming all round them, as though all that devil’s din was only some insane nightmare and as though all that was really true was the coming of spring.
Capt. A. J. Agius.
It was hell let loose. The village and the trenches in front of it were blown to bits. The village seemed to melt away before our eyes. The Hun bracketed one of my guns and finally buried it, but no harm done. The infantry assault was launched at 8.05. Nearest us on the right were the 2/39 Garhwals. They went trotting over. Suddenly I saw a fellow stop then spin and spin till he fell. Others pushed on, tried to get through a hedge, eased to their left and got in further along. It was wonderful to watch the two attacks converge and meet.
Capt. W. G. Bagot-Chester, MC.
Our first attacking line of two double companies advanced, and our guns increased their range so as not to hit our men. Our first and second lines reached the enemy’s trenches without much loss because the Boche were obviously quite demoralised by the bombardment. I followed close behind with H Company. Last of all Major Dundas brought along G Company. We advanced right through to the front line under very light fire. We all reached our objective, an old trench-line called the Smith-Dorrien Line, with only about 96 casualties in the whole Battalion, and started to dig ourselves in in case of a counter-attack. There was very little firing from the German side and our attack seemed to have taken them completely by surprise. Some snipers left behind in our advance troubled us for some time until they were cleared out by the Leicesters on our right.
Since the 3rd Londons were in reserve for the early part of the action, Arthur Agius and his machine-gunners were the only men of their Battalion who had taken part in the first attack. His guns had covered it from emplacements in the front line and he had seen it all – the dash across No Man’s Land when the barrage lifted, the charge into the trenches of the salient and the signal flags that appeared in an encouragingly short time to show that the line had been captured. For the Germans had indeed been demoralised by the bombardment and they were overrun before they could recover. On the left, Captain Peake of the Lincolns, a blue flag held high above his head, rushed along behind his bombers while they cleared the trenches. Away on the right, Lieutenant Gordon of the Berkshires, waving a flag of bright pink, was doing the same thing. It was the signal for sappers to rush to block the captured trenches, and the signal for the second wave to pass across them and rush the defences of Neuve Chapelle.
Lt. C. Tennant.
We got word that all the first line of German trenches was taken and that an attack was pushing on into Neuve Chapelle. At 10.30 we were ordered to move up in support and marched forward to a place near the line. There was a big farm where No. 1 Company sheltered, while No. 2 lay down very comfortably in the sun under the lee of some straw stacks. From here through my glasses I could very clearly see our first line of supports lining an old trench. Presently across the field came trudging a cocky little Tommy of the Leicestershires with fixed bayonet following a dozen young German prisoners. He was munching a ration biscuit and he was yellow with lyddite fumes. Soon other parties began to pass with prisoners, most of them looking very shaken but delighted to be out of the inferno and in comfortable captivity (instead of having been shot at once which – according to their own officers – is the fate of all prisoners who fall into our hands!).
The outlying trenches had been captured so quickly and the troops had dashed so speedily through Neuve Chapelle to occupy trenches on the other side that the supporting Battalions following on their heels to secure the village might have had a dangerous time. Snipers lying low in the houses had been trapped there by the bombardment and, with shells exploding all around their hideouts, they had no chance of escaping before the British were upon them. But the snipers were not inclined to give trouble. One Artillery Observation Officer went forward soon after the village had been captured to reconnoitre a new observation post. Two signallers went with him, carrying telephones and the reels of new wire that would connect them with the guns, and he brought along the battery’s trumpeter, Jimmy Naylor, to run back to the battery with messages if required. Young Naylor was only seventeen, but he had been in France as a boy trumpeter since the beginning. He had blown the trumpet-call that brought the guns of his battery out of Mons, he had ridden back with them on the long retreat, he had been in the battles of the Marne and the Aisne. It all added up to the most amazing six months of his short life and even the privations of a winter in Flanders had not dampened his cocky enthusiasm. Compared to the Territorials on the battlefield, Jimmy was an old sweat, but this was his first experience of victory and it was the biggest thrill of the lot.
Tmptr. J. Naylor, 23 Brig., RFA, Att. 8 Div.
We came in just at the back of the troops, after the second wave. The first lot had gone on and they’d already consolidated on the far side of the village, and we could hear the guns firing on either side of us, but there was nothing in the village, just the odd burst of small-arms fire. The infantry were clearing the houses and I never saw anyone so pleased as these little Gurkhas! They looked as if they were having the time of their lives. There was one that caught my eye, and it was a really ghoulish sight, but being a boy and full of bravado I wasn’t a bit squeamish. I was a cold-blooded little blighter at that time, but I’ve never forgotten it, because he was carrying the face of a German – not his head, just his face, clean sliced off. And he was grinning like mad, this little Gurkha, which was more than you could say for the German prisoners who were being marched back. It must have given them a very nasty turn.
We were standing there waiting, because my officer wanted to get into these houses to bag a position to observe from – we thought we’d be moving the guns forward any minute – but we had to hang about until we were told it was safe to go in. All of a sudden a cheer went up, and coming down the street was another little Gurkha driving a bunch of Germans in front of him at bayonet point. There must have been half a dozen of them and they were twice his size! They all had their hands up, and he looked as pleased as punch. It was marvellous! Even the Major laughed to see them. We were exhilarated, all of us.
The Gurkha soldier’s name was Gane Gurung and no one was more exhilarated than he, for the Germans had still been firing from one house and he had gone into it alone and captured eight burly prisoners single-handed. It was the 2nd Rifle Brigade who had called for three cheers when he marched them out and, as the Indian Corps Commander later proudly pointed out, there was ‘probably no other instance of an individual Indian soldier being cheered for his bravery by a British Battalion in the midst of a battle’. It was Gane Gurung’s moment of glory. Another came a few weeks later when the whole brigade paraded and in front of them all Sir James Willcocks pinned the Indian Order of Merit on his chest. But that was only the icing on the cake.
Another Gurkha was just as anxious to show off his German prisoner, and he was so delighted with him that, by the time he had made his way over open ground and was crossing the old front line near Agius’s emplacement, he had shouldered his rifle and was walking chummily by the German’s side. Now that the advance had gone far ahead the machine-gunners had ceased firing and, as they waited for orders, they had time to look around. This was the first time any of them had clapped eyes on a German and, seeing them stare, the Gurkha stopped and ostentatiously offered his prisoner a cigarette. It was gratefully accepted, and as the German soldier pulled on it he stared back at the machine-gunners. ‘Offizier?’ he asked, pointing to Arthur Agius. His captor guessed his meaning and nodded, but the German was shaking his head. ‘Junge. Junge,’ he remarked. Agius, all of twenty-one and recently promoted to the rank of captain, was not greatly flattered by this uncalled-for comment on his boyish looks. He gave the German a frosty glare, indicated to his escort that he should get a move on and was rather pleased that, after only two weeks with the Meerut Division, the two words of dialect he had picked up now came in useful. ‘Jaldi Jow,’ he ordered. He had no idea which Indian language they belonged to – and they happened to be Urdu – but they worked, and the small Gurkha fell in smartly behind his prisoner and obediently started to hurry him along. Shells were beginning to fall dangerously close and the German showed no sign of being loath to go.
The victors of Neuve Chapelle were not having things all their own way and the Germans were beginning to answer back.
L/cpl. W. L. Andrews.
We thought the German guns must have been swept out of existence, but they soon opened up and we got the benefit of the counter-fire. Nicholson shouted, ‘Look, they’re shelling our fellows!’ Sure enough, looking along the breastwork I could see shrapnel plumping down on our own Black Watch Terriers. They were shelling all along our line and every shell came about ten yards nearer Nick and myself. We could see our turn coming and all we could do was lie and wait for it. Nick yelled, ‘The next one’s ours!’ Douglas Bruce, another pal, had crawled up to us for warmth, and he just shouted, ‘Och well, if we’re for it, we’re for it!’ I was amazed how calm we were. The shell came screaming over and we wormed down as low as we could. It burst with a great roar ten yards away and we were drenched with earth. Then it was past. A few more fell further and further behind us and it fell quiet. We could even hear birds singing.
Lt. D. S. Lewis.
I saw most of it from the air and I was badly scared. We had about four hundred guns all firing like hell and as we were flying at about twelve hundred feet owing to clouds, we were fairly surrounded by our own shells. It was quite a relief crossing the line to exchange German bullets for British shells. No troops would have withstood that bombardment. I fairly had the wind put up me by seeing a 9.2-inch shell whizz past my tail. Two of my subalterns were killed by a shell.
Owing to the weather we couldn’t do much in the way of ranging, but we caught most of their batteries firing, which was quite useful. The first part of the show was well run. We’d been registering all the batteries on all important points and every inch of the trenches had been photographed from above, so that every subaltern knew exactly where he was attacking and what trenches there were in front and to the flanks.
L/cpl. W. L. Andrews.
At eleven o’clock the order came: ‘4th Black Watch, move to the left in single file’. Neuve Chapelle had been taken and we were ordered to move forward to the captured German trenches. We passed many many Indian dead on the way and the ground was a mass of stinking shell-pits. There was a point where we had to jump a ditch in full view of the Germans. They were a longish way off but they must have had a rifle trained on it and they were hitting men as they jumped. Captain Boase was on the other side of the ditch calling on us to hurry, because so many men hesitated to jump that we were in a bunch. There were four in front of me. The first ran as fast as he could and jumped high. Crack! A bullet got him, but it was only a slight wound and he recovered himself and carried on. A little stumpy fellow was next. Crack! He was shot dead. The next man just flopped into the ditch and scrambled out soaking. Then Nicholson jumped and got away with it. Then it was my turn. I thought to myself, ‘Now for it!’ I’d jumped for my school, so I aimed to jump high, tucked my legs under me and then thrust them forward for landing. Bullets whistled past, but I wasn’t hit. It’s curious, but that jump is almost the last thing I remember! Everything is confusion after that, except that there seemed to be more and more fire, and I remember the stench of the shell-pits stinging my nostrils.
But Neuve Chapelle had fallen. It had been captured in less than an hour, and everything had gone like clockwork.
Messages flashed from First Army Headquarters. The Cavalry was ordered to move close up, and at mid-day the 8th Sherwood Foresters received instructions to start marching without delay to Bac St Maur. From there only two hours’ march would take them into battle and they were warned to be ready to move at a moment’s notice.
Chapter 8
The Rifle Brigade had gone so far and so fast that the first men who reached the other side of Neuve Chapelle were in serious risk of running into their own bombardment. They halted reluctantly and, more reluctantly still, returned to join the main body of the Battalion halted a little way in front of the village. But three men could dodge shells where hundreds could not, and Lieutenant Stacke of the Worcesters was not prepared to wait. His Battalion, the 1st Worcesters, was waiting at the old front line, ready to move forward and carry on the advance. His job was to reconnoitre the ground. He had picked two men to go with him, and they were the best scouts in the Battalion. They worked to their left, clear of the village and just clear of the bombardment, and made a dash for it up the remnants of a lane. Ahead there was nothing and no one to be seen, and peering at the Bois du Biez through binoculars, Stacke could detect not the slightest movement. A few stray bullets flew round as they worked their way back, but they were easily dodged and, if anything, they added spice to the adventure. They were in high spirits, hurrying now, for already the Battalion would be moving forward. They were to rendezvous at 9.30 in the village, and move instantly through the captured line to the attack. Stacke would have the satisfaction of reporting that it would be a piece of cake and, as the patrol went back through the captured line, he passed on the good news to the Rifle Brigade. Colonel Stephens could see as much for himself. The bombardment had stopped, there was no sign of the enemy on his front and already he had sent a message to Divisional Headquarters for permission to advance. He was astounded by the reply, but the order was unequivocal. The Battalion was to stand fast – and it was to dig in.
Lieutenant Stacke had reached the rendezvous, but there was no sign of the Worcesters. He moved on to the old line, expecting every moment to meet the Battalion on the way, but the Worcesters were still at the assembly point. They had been told to wait, and Stacke’s encouraging report did nothing to quell their impatience. They could not imagine where the difficulty lay.
It lay on their left where the attack had failed, and it had failed because the unfortunate 59th Siege Battery had been unable to destroy the defences in the German line.
Bdr. W. Kemp.
They’d worked in shifts all night, just taking turns for an hour’s sleep. You never saw men working like it – and all the light there was to work with was these old candle-lanterns we had, and the worst of them was that every time the guns fired the candle went out. Not that they did fire on that occasion! It was getting the blooming things stabilised that caused the trouble, and there were four of these big Howitzers to a battery. You can judge the size of them by the weight of the ammunition – these 6-inch shells came twenty-two to the ton, and of course they all had to be manhandled. When it came near daylight I was sent forward with some other signallers to the observation post. Well, it was no observation post! It was a straw stack! The officer got on top of it with his binoculars and we signallers were behind it with the telephones. As soon as it got daylight the guns were supposed to range on the target so the fire could be adjusted before the bombardment started at half past seven. But it was completely new country to us. How could the officer tell from the top of a haystack if the shells were dropping on the target on ground he’d never seen before? It wasn’t humanly possible. On top of that, our normal rate of fire should have been one shell every two minutes, but, not being solid enough on their platforms, they recoiled so far that they had to be run up by hand and re-positioned after every shot. Great heavy guns, remember. That first morning we were lucky if we fired two shots in ten minutes, and it was anybody’s guess where they were going. The upshot was that, when the infantry went over, the wire wasn’t cut at all.
The job should have been so easy that the Battalion Headquarters could hardly be blamed for thinking that it had been a brilliant success. The first wave of 2nd Middlesex went over and disappeared into the mist. A second followed quickly on its heels and, minutes later, a third. Two Battalions were assaulting a line held by only two companies of German Jaegers and it was hardly wishful thinking to assume that they had given up without a fight, for not a single wounded man returned. But the trenches had not been touched by the bombardment and neither had the Jaegers defending them. Few though they were they had plenty of machine-guns. The Middlesex had been mown down long before they reached the enemy trench and no wounded had returned because all of them were dead.
On their right the Scottish Rifles advancing alongside had at first been more fortunate but, while the right-hand companies got forward with comparative ease, one flank was ‘in the air’, for the companies on the left had been decimated by the same machine-guns that annihilated the Middlesex.
L/cpl. E. Hall, 2nd Bn., Cameronians (Scottish Rifles).
We’d taken our positions in the trenches the night before and we put up climbing ladders for jumping over the parapet. We were on tiptoe with excitement because we were fed up with trenches and living in a sea of mud and we just wanted to get the Germans out in the open. We’d seen them off at Messines Ridge when they attacked in November, but this was our offensive, the first our army had made since the trench warfare began.
I was company stretcher-bearer and so I had to follow the company as they advanced across No Man’s Land. They got up to the German trench, but the barbed wire wasn’t cut at all and the Germans were shooting like mad while our lads were crouching down in the mud trying to breach it with wire-cutters, and those that didn’t have wire-cutters hacking at it with bayonets. Eventually they did get through and over this high parapet of sandbags – it hadn’t been touched by the shells, mark you! – and in they went with the bayonet. They chased the Germans from traverse to traverse until they were all accounted for – at least in that part of the line.
But our losses were appalling during the few minutes it took to cut the wire. They went down like ninepins! Every single Company Commander went down leading the attack, and the Major, the Adjutant and the Colonel. They’d all been years in the Army, excellent soldiers, and we could ill-afford to lose such men! All the officers went, killed or wounded. By the end of three days we had just one subaltern left.
Far away on the right, at the extreme edge of the attack, a Battalion of the Indian Corps was also struggling with barriers of bristling barbed wire – but it was not the fault of the gunners. The l/39th Garhwalis had attacked the wrong objective. Perhaps the mist was to blame. Perhaps they had been misled by the line of the road swinging off at an angle towards la Bassée. Perhaps it was because their old reclaimed trenches did not directly face the line of their attack, or because, as some said, a tree which had been picked out as a landmark was blown to pieces in the bombardment. Whatever the reason, the Company lost direction and the others were propelled by sheer momentum to follow their lead.
Like the Scottish Rifles a mile away on their left, with no bombardment to prepare the way, with no cover on their flanks, and with no friendly guns to cover them as they advanced, they had hacked and clawed and battered their way through the Germans’ wire and captured a long length of their trench-line. It was a magnificent feat of arms, but it had scuppered the whole attack. It had also dislocated the plan of Sir Douglas Haig and, when they finally realised just what had happened, it placed both Corps Commanders in a dilemma. Now, where the attack had diverged, there was a gap in the line. On either side of it the troops had surged ahead and, between them, in the trenches that faced Port Arthur, the Germans were holding on, manning their machine-guns, and giving notice of their intention to hold out to the last man.
The battle orders had been precise:
As soon as the village of Neuve Chapelle has been captured and made good, the 7th and 8th Divisions, supported by the Indian Corps on their right, will be ordered by the Corps Commander to press forward to capture the high ground.
The village was undoubtedly secured. In the centre of the assault everything had gone according to plan. The ground in front was clear to the Aubers Ridge – but on either side, at two critical points, each on a separate corps front, the attack had failed and the enemy was still fighting back.
It was difficult for the two Corps Commanders to confer, for Sir Henry Rawlinson had his IV Corps headquarters at Marmuse, separated by eight kilometres of winding country road from Sir James Willcocks’ Indian Corps Headquarters at la Croix. For his own part, Rawlinson ordered a fresh attack on the trenches near the Moated Grange. It would be ushered in by a fresh bombardment and this time by guns familiar with the ground. A mile away on the right, Sir James Willcocks would also try again, and until the whole of the German front line had been captured the troops who were waiting to advance must continue to wait.
As the day wore on Colonel Stephens grew increasingly short-tempered, now gazing through binoculars at the tempting prospect ahead, now pacing up and down the length of the Battalion front where his Battalion was digging in. Wherever he turned he was met by a barrage of questions. ‘Why aren’t we getting a move on, sir?’ He fervently wished he knew the answer. The Battalion continued to dig in, as ordered.
It was less a case of digging in than of building up, for no digging was possible on the waterlogged ground and it had not even been feasible to occupy their original objective in Smith-Dorrien trench which had been the old British line before the battles of November. It was a long deep trench that ran clean across the front facing the Aubers Ridge, and the Command had believed that it would make an ideal jump-off for the second phase of the assault. But it was many months since Smith-Dorrien trench had been a trench at all. It was full of water, the Germans had long ago found it uninhabitable, and the bombardment that had been intended to pulverise its defences and cow its garrison had been so many shells wasted. There was nobody there. Fifty yards behind it, on the outskirts of Neuve Chapelle, chafing, fretting and frustrated, the Rifle Brigade was navvying, building a protective wall with bricks and rubble and broken masonry salvaged from the ruined houses and the brewery at their backs. They were working under difficulties. Earlier they had watched the Germans run away, abandoning field guns near the Bois du Biez. Now, seeing no signs of an advance, they had crept back again and were firing at point-blank range over open sights. Shells were bursting among the riflemen as they worked and a machine-gun travelling up and down the road in front of the wood raked them with vicious fire. They replied as best they could, but there were many casualties and the Battalion was dwindling away.
Later in the morning, as they worked, they were encouraged by the sound of British guns firing somewhere behind them to their left. It was the new bombardment on the trenches near the Moated Grange. When it stopped the troops advanced, running past the flung-out bodies of the Middlesex as they went. They could not help but trample on them because they lay in three distinct lines, shoulder to shoulder, just as they had advanced.
By mid morning the trenches had been taken. It was easy going. The new bombardment had been so devastatingly accurate that there was no fight left in the enemy soldiers who survived it. In the wake of the bombardment, as the first lines of Tommies came into view, they climbed out of the trenches behind the Moated Grange and surrendered in droves. The news was slow in reaching IV Corps Headquarters, but it was good when it came and, now that almost all the original objectives had been captured, it was the moment the army had been waiting for to advance on the Aubers Ridge. But the Corps Commander was hesitating. An orchard lay not two hundred yards beyond the captured line and Sir Henry Rawlinson believed that it was so fortified that, if it held out when the line moved forward, it might well be the stumbling block that would endanger the whole advance. When it began there must be no more gaps, no more hold- ups, and he could not afford to take risks. It would be better to wait and bring up reinforcements to attack the orchard in such force that resistance must crumble away. It was the last little bit of insurance that would guarantee success. Two companies of the Worcesters, still waiting at their assembly point, were ordered forward to help secure the orchard. They went off blithely, only too happy to be on the move at last.
General Capper, in command of the 7th Division, was far from happy, for he was equally impatient to get going, and his Division, spread along the line north of the Moated Grange, had been standing by all morning, anxious to get into the fight. There was no resistance in front of them, the church spire in the village of Aubers beckoned tantalisingly across the open ground, and by now they should have been – he believed they could have been – ensconced in the village itself. At noon, two and a half hours after the time originally fixed for the advance, in the absence of definite orders, he could restrain his impatience no longer. He managed, with difficulty, to telephone to IV Corps Headquarters and literally begged the Corps Commander for permission to press on. Sir Henry Rawlinson refused, but he took time to explain the situation and General Capper was obliged to be satisfied with a promise that, as soon as the orchard was secured, the advance would begin.
But, even as they spoke, the orchard had already been secured. The troops had strolled across without a shot being fired. The orchard was empty. There were no strongpoints, not even a trench among the tree stumps, and there was no sign that the enemy had ever thought of defending it.
Another hour had been lost. Communications were already slowing down, and it was more than an hour before the news reached corps headquarters. It took twenty more minutes for Rawlinson to prepare his report. At Merville, Sir Douglas Haig was at luncheon with his staff, but despite the excellent food, the well-appointed table, the discreet service of mess-waiters going imperturbably about their duties, it was an anxious meal and the Army Commander was glad to be interrupted when Rawlinson’s message arrived. He read his summary of the situation, noted that he proposed to issue orders for a general advance at 2 p.m. and dictated a message of approval. It reached Rawlinson’s Headquarters at twenty-five minutes to two. But now it was Rawlinson’s turn to champ at the bit. He had every reason to believe that the Indian Corps, by now, would have captured the segment of line – a mere two hundred yards – where the enemy was still holding out in front of Port Arthur, but a telephone call to Sir James Willcocks at Indian Corps Headquarters swiftly disabused him.
The gap was still open. The trenches had not been captured – but it was not for want of trying. The Leicesters had bombed their way into a section of the trench, at a cost of many men, and had even succeeded in building a barricade before they were forced back. The 3rd Londons had helped too. It was Harry Pulman’s company that had dashed through machine-gun fire and struggled in the wire to get at the enemy holding out behind it. Now Pulman was dead, as were Stevens and Bertie Mathieson, and Captain Reeves and ‘Evie’ Noël had been brought back badly wounded. The Germans still held out.
Now the two remaining companies were to try again. They waited all morning, and half the afternoon for orders.
Capt. G. Hawes, DSO, MC, Adjutant (City of London) Bn., London Regt., Royal Fusiliers (TF).
I went forward to a circular breastwork with Captain Livingston and Captain Moore and their companies on the right and the Colonel went with Captain Pulman and Captain Reeves on the left. Here in this circular breastwork we remained until about 4.30 p.m. I can’t describe what the breastwork was like, a mass of blackened, ruined walls of some old farm, built round with walls of earth and sandbags with machine-guns mounted on them, bodies lying about everywhere, dirt and squalor and misery on all sides. By this time the battle was in full blast. The shells were flying overhead, the noise was deafening and the sky was full of our aeroplanes. About 2 p.m. we got word that poor Captain Pulman, Mr Mathieson and Mr Stevens had been killed and Captain Noël wounded in an attack on the left.
Four hours had passed since the Indian Corps Commander had issued orders for a fresh attack. They had reached Brigade and later Division, but they had not reached the 1st Seaforths, already moving up from their support position to Neuve Chapelle, and it was the 1st Seaforths who were to repeat the action of the Leicesters, to attack the trenches from the flank and bear the brunt of the assault. Colonel Ritchie had done his best when instructions finally reached him at mid-day, but it took time to clarify them, to sum up the situation and to brief his Company Commanders. It took even longer to move his Battalion through the shell-fire, across open country, and into position for the attack. The fire was fearsome now and the signallers were having the worst of it. All along the line, and well behind it, the network of telephone wires was being cut to shreds. There was no communication between Battalions and Brigade Headquarters a mile or more away, and little between Brigade Headquarters and Division, who were even further off. Worst of all, there was no communication between the infantry and the guns. News and messages starting from the front line and carried back by relays of breathless runners were inevitably long out of date before they reached the anxious staff at Headquarters in the rear. They were working in the dark, trying to guess the situation as best they could, piecing together scant information and confused reports, hoping – although it was almost too much to hope – that circumstances had not changed by the time they reached them.
General Anderson, in command of the Meerut Division, had guessed wrong. It was well past two o’clock and at that hour, according to his latest information, the Seaforths had intended to attack. No word had reached him of the long delay and he did not know that, once again, the attack had been postponed. The only snippet of news that filtered through (and it was easy to misinterpret) was that the Seaforths had been ‘held up’. He ordered the guns to open up to help them forward. It was sixteen minutes to three o’clock. By the revised time-table the Seaforths were due to attack at 2.45 and they were already waiting, concealed by ruined houses on the flank of their objective, ready to charge. As the shells began to explode around the uncaptured trench, Colonel Ritchie could only assume that there had been a change of plan, and could only feel thankful that the bombardment had not begun a minute later. It was a violent bombardment and it was extraordinarily accurate. The enemy guns were swift to reply. All Ritchie could do in such a maelstrom was to wait for further orders and, meanwhile, suspend his attack until they came. A hundred yards or so away crouching behind their breastwork at right angles to the Seaforths, the bewildered 3rd Londons were waiting too.
Capt. G. Hawes, DSO, MC.
I can’t tell you what it’s like to have these shells whistling over one’s head and bursting nearer and nearer. The noise is terrific and the shock of the explosions is terrible. At last it calmed down and about 4.30 we received orders to send Captain Moore and Captain Livingston out of our breastwork to attack.
The Germans had to be dislodged from their trench, so our companies climbed over the breastwork in full view of the enemy. They opened a murderous fire, but no one hesitated for a second – everyone went straight on across that awful open country with bayonets at the charge. It was appalling – and it was splendid! No troops in the world could have done better. Crichton was first up. As soon as I gave the order to advance he stepped out in front of his platoon and shouted, ‘Follow me!’ Before many yards a bullet struck his leg, and he stumbled. One or two of the men following made as if to go over to help him, but he was too quick for them. He struggled to his feet and managed to stumble on. But he got no distance before another bullet caught him. He fell and didn’t rise again. Later the stretcher-bearers brought him in, but he only lived for a minute. Many, many men went down on the way across, but the others reached the trench and the Germans surrendered. Mr Sorley was wounded and I can’t tell how many of the men were killed or wounded.
After the charge the Colonel and I sat inside that breastwork and helped to tend the wounded as the stretcher-bearers brought them in. It was heart-rending – our first time in action. Those dear lads! I’m not ashamed to say it made the tears run down my face to see them. But they made so light of it! One boy, in great pain, was even smiling. He said to me, ‘They can’t call us Saturday night soldiers now, can they, sir?’ They were simply astonishing. No Battalion could have done better and many, I’m quite sure, wouldn’t have done nearly so well.
The Colonel and I stayed in that hell until 8 p.m. and then we went forward to a ruined house that had been captured from the Germans. There we tried to collect our companies together, and there we stayed, in reserve.
Like all adjutants of Territorial Battalions George Hawes was a Regular Army officer.* Praise from him was praise indeed. It was well deserved, for they had won a small but vital victory. It was not their fault that it came many hours too late.
A mile away on the left, misconceptions and misunderstandings had also dogged the fortunes of the IV Corps. At 2.45, confident of General Willcocks’s assurance that the ‘gap’ on the Indian Corps front was on the point of being captured and filled in, Rawlinson had, at last, felt able to send out the order for a general advance. They were complicated orders, and they were not entirely the orders that had been anticipated by the Battalion Commanders who had to carry them out on the ground. Instead of advancing straight ahead to the Aubers Ridge the leading Brigades of the 7th and 8th Division were to advance north-east, diagonally to their left. It was a sound plan. Although the enemy guns were busy, there had been few German troops behind their immediate front and those who were facing the 7th Division and had not yet been attacked had been keeping their heads well down. One Brigade of the 7th Division would remain opposite the enemy, while the others advanced across the ground behind the hostile trenches. General Capper ordered that, as soon as there were signs that the Germans in it were ‘unsettled’, the remainder of the 7th Division would swing out, capture their trenches, and join in the advance.
It was a complicated manoeuvre, for it meant that the 8th Division would advance behind the German line and across the 7th Division’s front. But it might have worked. It might have worked at three o’clock when Rawlinson had sent orders for the advance. It might even have worked in the daylight that remained after 3.30, the hour at which Rawlinson had directed the infantry to cross the old Smith-Dorrien line and move to the attack. But he had underestimated the time his orders would take to pass through Divisional and Brigade Headquarters to the Battalions waiting at the front. It was almost four o’clock before they reached them. Low clouds had been thickening all afternoon. The light was dull now, and threatening early dusk. Even so, it was not too late – but still the infantry waited. The 8th Division was to begin to move forward as soon as the 21st Brigade of the 7th Division came into line on its left. Time passed. There was no sign of movement in the 7th Division and it was hardly surprising, because the 21st Brigade had already moved forward to its position beyond the orchard, and there, a quarter of a mile away, the infantry had been marking time in accordance with their own Divisional Orders. These were that they were to advance as soon as the 8th Division moved into line beside them. It took many runners stumbling and slithering over the ditches and sodden ground, many exchanges of messages, much fuming and puzzlement, and precious time wasted before they could make sense of the situation. It was half past five before the leading Battalions of the 8th Division moved forward and into position to the right of the orchard. It was fully five hours since it had been captured and the enemy had made good use of the time.
Sir Henry Rawlinson had been right in suspecting the existence of a German redoubt, but it was not in the orchard and there was not one, but three. In the weeks before the battle the Germans had been tracing out a second defensive line behind their front. Most of it was still on paper, but they had made a beginning by constructing scattered strongholds and later, when the ground dried out, a new trench system would link them up. They had placed them with care. Houses in the hamlet of Mauquissart, sandbagged and loopholed, were encircled with breastworks, strongly wired, with machine-gun emplacements that commanded a wide field of fire. A little way south, and just east of the orchard, another group of cottages had been fortified in the same way, and there was a third redoubt where a bridge – a mere culvert – crossed the Layes between these nameless cottages and the Bois du Biez.* The nearby reserves had been swiftly brought forward. They only amounted to two companies of Jaegers but during the lull in the afternoon they had ample time to bring up more machine-guns and to filter into the line to reinforce the strongholds. They were ready, and they were waiting.
The redoubt at Mauquissart and the stronghold at ‘Nameless Cottages’ were directly in the line of the 8th Division advance. During the afternoon, after the capture of the first German trench-line, they were spotted and the guns were instructed to deal with them before the troops advanced. The gunners had done their best, but these important strongpoints, undiscovered until now, had not been registered, and in the deepening gloom they were not easy to pinpoint from the old observation posts. It was almost six o’clock before they finally set off, and it was very nearly dark. Even in daylight it would have been difficult for eight Battalions to keep direction, to pick their way over the sullen ground, floundering through water-ditches, clambering through hedges, wading, sliding and, where there was a foothold, twisting and wrenching ankles on the rotting remains of unhar-vested turnips and beets. It was hardly a charge. It was a disaster. They barely advanced five hundred yards, and it was a miracle that they had got as far as that in the face of a hail of fire from the redoubts. The German machine-gunners had little light to aim by, but they hardly needed to aim. They were traversing the guns, spraying fire non-stop, small orange jets from the muzzles of eight Maxims jabbed into the gloom, bullets flew into the massed, disorganised ranks, and the attack ground to a halt.
It began to rain. No orders came. Advancing blind, and at an angle, across unfamiliar ground the formations had become hopelessly mixed up. After a time, the machine-guns stopped, but intermittent bursts of warning fire kept the attackers at bay. Even that was hardly necessary. They were finished. The survivors could only stop where they were, huddling down as best they could to pass the long hours of the night, hoping for better luck in the morning. It was half past six. It took runners three hours to crawl back to report the position.
Beyond the Layes Bridge, in front of the Bois du Biez there were no redoubts, no defences. The Indian Corps had advanced with ease and the Gurkhas were lining the road along the near edge of the wood, cheerfully digging in by the light of a burning cottage on the edge of the wood. As they did so the first of the German reserves, under cover of darkness, were starting to file into the wood from the opposite side. They sent scouts ahead of them, and one of them had the misfortune to run into a Gurkha patrol. They captured him with glee, and sent him back to be interrogated. The information was disquieting, for the prisoner declared (or so the interpreter understood) that two German regiments were in the Bois du Biez.*
It was past seven o’clock when this information reached Brigadier General Jacob, and it faced him with a dilemma. His troops were on the right-hand extremity of the battle, his left had been held up by long-range fire from the Layes Bridge and, since there was no sign of the 2nd Rifle Brigade advancing to assist them, both his flanks were ‘in the air’. His men at the Bois du Biez were well ahead of their comrades on either side and with what seemed to be a significant force of Germans immediately in front of them. General Jacob was forced to a hard decision. His Brigade had waited all day to advance but, for safety’s sake, he had no choice but to order them back again. Shortly after nine o’clock, as the German reserves began to consolidate their position in the wood, the Gurkhas moved back across the Layes and began to dig in thirty yards behind it.
The 4th Seaforths, who had at last been able to move forward, were obliged reluctantly to move back in their wake.
Lt. C. Tennant.
We moved forward to the River Layes – a ditch about three or four feet deep and just too wide to jump in the dark. Some wading, some jumping (or trying to!) and some crossing by a small planked bridge we got across and advanced another hundred and fifty yards towards the Bois du Biez, when we received orders to stand fast and allow the Gurkhas who were in front of us to retire through us. While this was going on we lay down flat and watched a large house burning brilliantly a hundred yards away on our right front. To the left and right of us firing was still going on and a great many German flares were going up. We could see by their position that the attack on our flanks had not got nearly so far forward as where we were. Our position was so precarious that we were sent orders to retire after the Gurkhas and to dig in fifty yards behind the old Smith-Dorrien trench.
My own feeling is that if we and the 9th Gurkhas had been allowed to go on and take the risk of being cut off we would have carried the wood. The shelling of the morning had so demoralised the Germans that I am fairly confident that a determined advance at the Bois du Biez, which would have threatened the German rear on the right and the left, would have demoralised them even more and made it possible to advance along the whole front. As it was we reached the new position about 9 p.m. We sent a party back for rations which only arrived at 2 a.m. After getting the men to work I borrowed an entrenching tool and dug a scrape, where I lay down and slept for half an hour at a time from 3 a.m. until 5 a.m.
During the hours of darkness long-delayed messages and orders began to trickle through bottlenecks in the chain of communication and finally reached Battalions in the line. One order had been a long time on the way. It had gone out from Sir Douglas Haig’s Head-quarters the previous evening, just too late to inspire the assaulting troops whose morale it was intended to boost. They were already on the move, it would be days before it could be posted up to be read by the rank and file and, by that time, the words rang painfully hollow. Most Battalion Commanders, obliged even so belatedly to make it public, only had the heart to display it in an obscure corner of the orderly room.
SPECIAL ORDER
To the 1st Army
We are about to engage the enemy under very favourable conditions. Until now in the present campaign, the British Army has, by its pluck and determination, gained victories against an enemy greatly superior both in men and guns. Reinforcements have made us stronger than the enemy on our front. Our guns are now both more numerous than the enemy’s are and also larger than any hitherto used by any army in the field. In front of us we have only one German Corps, spread out on a front as large as that occupied by the whole of our Army (the First). We are now about to attack with about 48 Battalions a locality in that front which is held by some three German Battalions. It seems probable also that for the first day of the operations the Germans will not have more than four Battalions available as reinforcements for the counter attack. Quickness of movement is therefore of first importance to enable us to forestall the enemy and thereby gain success without severe loss. At no time in this war has there been a more favourable moment for us, and I feel confident of success. The extent of that success must depend on the rapidity and determination with which we advance…
(Signed) D. HAIG (General)
Commanding 1st Army.
9th March, 1915.
But the fact was that everyone had spent the day waiting for a move – and waiting for someone else to make it. By midnight, almost all the infantry were back on the line which had been captured in the first rush of the battle fifteen hours before. Sir Douglas Haig’s special order had accurately summed up the situation of the morning but while the troops rested and cat-napped as best they could in the hours of darkness, the Germans were gathering their resources and the situation was changing. The bulk of their reserves were still on the way, but two Battalions which had been reasonably close at hand had moved into position as darkness fell – and there were no cat-naps for them. They were labouring through the night to stiffen their defences, to haul up more guns, to set up machine-guns, to dig a snaking line that would link up the redoubts and create an unbroken front. Every man was working flat out and in front of the Bois du Biez, where there was no stronghold nearer than the Layes Bridge, they took particular pains. Creeping stealthily from the wood across the ground the Gurkhas had given up, the German soldiers began to dig fifty yards in front of it. Long before dawn they were lining the new trench just half-way between the wood and the Layes Brook, thankful for the chance to ease aching muscles as they waited wearily for reinforcements and the chance to get their own back in the morning.
Chapter 9
The German Command, with no disruptions of their own communications, had no difficulty in transmitting orders to the front and they were precise and unequivocal. Within three hours of the launch of the battle they had ordered that ‘The 14th Infantry Division will recapture Neuve Chapelle’, and at 10 p.m. that evening more precise instructions arrived:
Major-General von Ditfurth will carry out the attack on Neuve Chapelle. In case the troops at his disposal are not sufficient for the recapture of our former positions west of the village, the 14th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Brigade is placed at General von Ditfurth’s disposal. This Brigade must be in position in the Bois du Biez at 6 a.m. on the 11th.*
But they were not in the line by 6 a.m. Before midnight the troops from Lille had all arrived at the nearest railheads, three hours’ strenuous march from the front, but the night had been so dark, there were so many battalions travelling along narrow roads through unfamiliar country that they had been a long time on the way. As they assembled behind the Aubers Ridge dawn was reaching up the eastern sky behind them. Fog lay across the low ground but it might easily disperse, it was almost half-light, and it would clearly be madness to string a large body of troops along the skyline and march them down the ridge in full view of the British lines. General von Ditfurth had no alternative but to postpone his counter-attack and to order the troops to fan out into the villages behind Aubers, to hide from reconnaissance planes and lie low until dusk. Without them, even though the Germans had been able to double their numbers in the line, there were still only four Battalions facing the British troops and it would be twelve clear hours before darkness fell and reinforcements could come to their aid.
Twelve hours was enough, and more than enough, if all went well, for the British Army to sort out yesterday’s muddle, to keep up the pressure and thrust forward from the Rubicon of yesterday’s success. If all went well. But the second day of the battle was destined, like the first, to be a day of lost opportunities, of misunderstandings, mounting confusion, and unforeseen fatal delays.
The attack was due to take place at seven in the morning and at 6.45 the guns would open the bombardment. They had specific orders to destroy the strongpoints which had caused the infantry to founder in yesterday’s advance, but it was easier said than done. Peering into the foggy morning from their old observation posts, luckless artillery officers found it almost impossible to pinpoint targets. Firing blind and mostly by guesswork, they were horribly aware of the danger that they might be firing on their own troops – the ragged lines of survivors lying somewhere in front of the redoubts that had brought them to a standstill when they had first advanced. No one knew precisely where they were. And no one had the shadow of an inkling that a new defensive line was concealed in the mist beyond. When the guns lifted and lengthened range to cover the infantry’s advance the redoubts had hardly been touched – and the new trench that ran the length of the battle front had not been touched at all. At seven o’clock when the troops tried to advance they ran into an inferno. The air tingled with bullets streaming from machine-guns and the very earth seemed to explode beneath their feet as the German guns answered the bombardment with a bombardment of their own. It was fierce and it was accurate and the shells pounded the front for three hours. By the time it tailed away some thousands of British soldiers had been killed, Neuve Chapelle was a heap of smoking ruins, every line and wire had been severed in a dozen places and communication, even the sketchiest, was non-existent. The signallers had done their best, frantically repairing wires that were ruptured in another place even as they were mended, but the odds were against them.
Bdr. W. Kemp.
We signallers were still in the straw stack. We’d been there all night trying to keep the lines open to the battery. I’d been issued with wire-cutters – proper wire-cutters, the same as they used for barbed wire. They weighed about one and a half pounds, and I was supposed to use these on the D-3 telephone wire! I soon lost them. We had one pair of pliers for all of us. I don’t really know at this stage how we did manage to cut and mend the phone wire. I do know that the telephone we had was a C-Mk-11 magneto and you had to ring it by hand, but the batteries were six large cells in a wooden box. They had to be excited by adding water and leaving them for a few hours before they were any use. Well, some of them were ready to use when the battle started, but next morning when all hell was let loose it didn’t matter anyway.
The fog was lifting from the battlefield but it still hung thick around Brigade and Divisional Headquarters where the anxious staff were groping for vital information. Messengers were slow in coming and, when they did, the news they brought was mostly out-of-date and often contradictory or untrue. It was not the fault of the troops. The Grenadier Guards, starting off close to the Moated Grange, were brought to a halt at a stream not three hundred yards ahead, and the runner who struggled back through the bombardment reported in all good faith that they had been held up at the Layes Brook. It was the first good news General Capper had received, for here, on the left, the Layes ran well behind the German line and he joyfully ordered up the guns to bombard beyond it to clear the way for the Grenadiers to advance.
The Layes Brook (described ambitiously on local maps as a river) was an artificial drainage ditch, inexpertly dug by local farmers, and it straggled across the fields in front of the Bois du Biez and the Aubers Ridge to join a tributary of the River Lys. On the staff officers’ maps it stood out as an unmistakable feature which could safely be described as an objective on terrain that was singularly short of landmarks, but to a man on the ground itself the Layes could not easily be distinguished from a hundred other ditches that trickled in all directions across the dead and battered marsh. Few of them were narrow enough to leap, even without the weight of extra ammunition and equipment, and they were filled to the brim with filthy brackish water. It was deep enough to lap the chins of all but the tallest guardsmen as they floundered through. Now, soaked and shivering, they were digging in on the other side, and, even if most rifles were clogged with mud, trying to reply to the fire that pinned them down. Waiting for supports. Waiting for the guns. Waiting to get forward.
But the deep ditch they had forded was not the Layes Brook, and the guardsmen had advanced only half as far as the unfortunate Worcesters the evening before. When the bombardment began the shells fell far ahead of their position, far behind the strongholds that faced them, and far, far behind the enemy line. And there they stopped when the bombardment lifted. There was nothing else they could do.
The Meerut Division was stuck in front of the Bois du Biez. The opening bombardment had done them no good at all, for Corps Headquarters, knowing nothing of the new trench that now lay between them and the wood, had instructed the guns to bombard the edge of the wood and the wood itself, well behind the enemy and the enemy, safely entrenched on ground that had been occupied and given up without a fight, were unharmed.
Lt. C. Tennant.
The repellent facts are that the Germans (who were now well entrenched on this side of the Bois du Biez) at once opened a hot rifle and machine-gun fire both on the Gurkhas in the front trench and ourselves behind it. Our first orders were to attack again at 7.15, but owing to the want of support on our left, the colonel of the 9th Gurkhas came back to report to our Battalion Headquarters that he found it impossible to get forward with the heavy rifle and machine-gun fire, and he was ordered to stand fast. We had several casualties and our own colonel was wounded in the thigh at 7.30. One of the stretcher-bearers going to fetch him was shot stone dead through the head. His body fell back into my scrape in the ground. I’d left it just a moment before and moved to a neighbouring shell-hole where I’d started to dig a new shelter. Minchin very pluckily at once came out of his scrape and took the stretcher-bearer’s place and brought the C. O. in, but the firing was so heavy that we couldn’t send him back to the field ambulance post for some time. When he did go, he was unlucky enough to be hit again in almost exactly the same place high up in the thigh.
All morning the batteries kept up a very heavy fire against the Bois du Biez, and the Germans replied with high explosive, shrapnel and Jack Johnsons. A great many heavy shells were being fired with great effect into Neuve Chapelle. There was nothing we could do and, in spite of all the row, I managed to sleep very soundly for a good forty-five minutes in my shelter.
It was the first of the unfortunate misconceptions which, before the end of the day, were to cause the Commander of the Meerut Division to tear his hair and reduce the staff of the Dehra Dun Brigade first to bafflement and then to a state of despair. For Brigadier General Jacobs’s instructions, passed down to him from Indian Corps Headquarters, had been perfectly clear. From their forward position the leading Battalions of the Dehra Dun Brigade were to attack towards the Bois du Biez as soon as the 8th Division on their left arrived alongside them. But the Battalion of the 8th Division which stood immediately on their left, although slightly behind them, was the 2nd Rifle Brigade. The riflemen were still holding the trench on the outskirts of Neuve Chapelle and Colonel Stephens was not the only one who was fed up, because the Battalion, or what was left of it, was due to be relieved and to move back into support with the remainder of the 25th Brigade. The relief had duly taken place but, by some oversight, no one had appeared to take over from Stephens’s battalion. At eight o’clock, forty-five minutes after the Dehra Dun Brigade had tried vainly to advance, Major Walker, its Brigade Major, braved the storm of shelling to go personally to Colonel Stephens to demand the reason for the delay. He found him in the cellar of a tumbledown house behind the RB’s trench. Its brick walls had been white-washed by the Germans and ‘Gott Strafe England’ had been scrawled in many places and signed with the initials of the bored German soldiers who had once sheltered there. Half a dozen runners, sunken-eyed with fatigue, slumped near the cellar stairs, each awaiting the order that would send him out to take his chance in the inferno, dodging to the line or to the rear with the next urgent message. Inside, under the anxious eye of the Colonel, signallers hunched over their instruments were ringing and buzzing repeatedly without much hope of making contact. They worked by the light of candles that flickered and dimmed with close explosions. The circumstances were not conducive to pleasantries or the exchange of the usual courtesies; although a mug of lukewarm tea was offered it was brusquely refused and, from time to time, the two officers had to raise their voices to be heard above the thunderous explosions that were rocking Neuve Chapelle. Perhaps it relieved their feelings of frustration, for they were both equally in the dark. Colonel Stephens was obliged to confess that he had received no orders from IV Corps, from Division or from Brigade, that contained any mention of an advance. Quite the contrary. His last instructions had been to stand fast and consolidate and, in the absence of any others, he could only obey.
Major Walker returned in bewilderment to report to his Brigadier and it was some hours before his unpalatable news travelled up the chain of command and arrived at Indian Corps headquarters where it baffled Sir James Willcocks, for in a subsequent conversation with IV Corps he was assured by the Corps Commander that the 8th Division had advanced and, without the support of the Meerut Division on their right, had failed to get forward. It was a sad mix-up, they agreed, but it was vital to retrieve the situation and to try again. A fresh attack was arranged for 2.15 – but only the timing was changed and the new orders were precisely the same as the old ones. In the Indian Corps the Meerut Division was instructed, as before, to advance to the Bois du Biez as soon as the 8th Division was seen to be advancing alongside, and IV Corps had assured them in all good faith that the 8th Division would advance. No one passed on the vital information – and at that stage perhaps no one at IV Corps Headquarters knew – that the Battalion of the 8th Division which happened to be standing immediately beside the Meerut Division had been ordered to stay where it was.
The mistake over the relief of the 2nd Rifle Brigade had caused some irritation at 8th Division Headquarters and it was too late now to put it right. After the failure of the early morning assaults it was highly likely that the Germans would counter-attack in the wake of their devastating bombardment and, if the Germans were to launch it while troops in the front line were changing over, the consequences did not bear thinking about. The orders, when they finally did reach Colonel Stephens, were surprising – if not downright contradictory. The RBs were to stay where they were but, although they were in the forefront, they should consider themselves to be in reserve. However, if the counter-attack developed, then (and only then) Stephens could attack in his turn.
The Colonel lost no time in sending a reply that was more than a mere acknowledgement. Even before he received the message the heavy German bombardment had tailed away, the shelling had become spasmodic, and he was able to inform the staff that there was no movement in the enemy line and no sign whatever that they were preparing to attack. He reported his casualties and, putting his case as forcibly as brevity and military etiquette allowed, he requested permission to attack the enemy’s guns, near the Layes Bridge. They were only a short way ahead and Colonel Stephens was convinced, as he had been convinced the previous day, that the position could easily be captured and the guns knocked out. The reply, when he eventually received it, was stiff and coldly categorical. He was on no account to make any attack whatever without orders or permission. All the Battalion could do was to wait. They were still waiting at two o’clock when British guns began to thunder on the Bois du Biez. When the bombardment lifted the Gurkhas would go over. Two hundred yards behind their line close to the Layes Brook, the 4th Seaforth braced themselves to dash forward to reinforce the trench as the Gurkhas left it.
Lt. C. Tennant.
Just at this time the Germans got the range of our trench exactly and did some damage with high explosive and shrapnel. On seeing No. 1 Company move forward I ran across to get final instructions from Major Cuthbert, who was now in command. He was sitting in a shell hole with the adjutant, Macmillan and Sergeant Ross of the machine-gun team. Just after I had got there two shrapnel bursts clanged close beside us. Poor Macmillan got a terrible wound right across the forehead, and Cuthbert fell forward with the blood streaming from his head. I could see it was only a flesh wound and, as soon as I had put a field dressing on, the bleeding stopped, but Macmillan was in a bad state – so bad that the adjutant thought he was dying. I saw that his lungs and heart were still working, though part of his brain was laid bare, and I was going to put a field dressing on him too, when the adjutant said that as No. 1 Company had started off some time before, I should go on at once. So I got out and, having got hold of Jim, we gave a yell to the platoon and started off hell for leather across the open.
We took breath under cover of the Smith-Dorrien trench, fifty yards in front, before starting off on the hottest bit of our advance – the hundred and fifty yards of open ground, sloping slightly towards the front, between the Smith-Dorrien trench and the Gurkha trench which we were reinforcing. About twenty yards before we got to it the ground was practically dead and there we flung ourselves down and crawled the rest of the way up to the trench. With my head well down in the mud and my pack in front of it I had a look round to see how the boys were getting on and I only realised when I saw how many of them had been stopped on the way what a hot fire we had come through. A nice cheerful Londoner, Appleton, was blown to pieces by a shell just as he was getting out of the trench, handsome Macdonald, the piper, was killed stone dead by a bullet through the heart, and Speer through the head, and a dozen or more, including my jolly little batman Simpson, were wounded.
Jim had been close to me during the advance and we settled down together in a cramped but safe corner of the Gurkha trench to take stock of the position and to pull ourselves – literally – together. Both our kilt aprons had been practically torn off and I had lost my watch bracelet. Luckily I saw it lying only a yard or two back, so I rolled out at the back of the parapet and recovered it. Jim had a bullet right through his pack (there was hardly a man in the company who had not got a hole through him somewhere) and, generally speaking, it looked anything but tidy.
I naturally expected that as soon as we had brought up supports the Gurkhas would go ahead but their colonel, after discussing the matter with Cuthbert, reported to Brigade HQ and was ordered not to advance further until the people on our left came up.
This time it was Brigadier Jacob himself who made his way, fuming and incredulous, to confront Colonel Stephens in his cellar. What had caused the hold-up? Why had his troops been left out on a limb? Why had the 8th Division not advanced? The Brigadier was quivering with fury and frustration and when Stephens produced the order – the order that forbade him under any circumstances to attack – Jacobs read it, and then re-read it, hardly able to believe the evidence of his eyes. There was no more to be said. The Brigadier returned to his Headquarters and, angry, perplexed, and none the wiser, he called off his attack.
But the 8th Division had advanced – or, at least, some of them had.
It was almost a quarter to three when the orders for the attack reached Brigadier General Carter at 24th Brigade headquarters and he knew very well that, in the thirty-three minutes that remained until zero, it was useless even to hope that a runner might reach the troops in the forefront of the line where the Worcesters, the Northants, and the Sherwood Foresters were still lying out – still taking punishment, if they raised so much as a finger, from the fortress strongholds between Mauquissart and Pietre. Already the guns which were meant to destroy them had begun to fire. When they stopped the men must be ready to spring forward and capture the redoubts. They were barely five hundred yards away from their support line, but it was five hundred yards of open ground without a tree, without a bush, with no hollow, no incline, no single feature that would conceal a running man from the fire of the enemy, alert and watching in their line beyond. And yet the attack must go in. The Army Commander himself had insisted on it and such direct orders had to be obeyed.*
With deep misgivings General Carter issued his instructions. They were addressed to Colonel Woodhouse who waited with the two remaining companies of the 1st Worcesters in a captured German trench on the northern edge of Neuve Chapelle. The Colonel had spent an anxious, sleepless night and his anxiety had not diminished in the course of his restless morning. It had been hard to concentrate on routine duties, hard to hide his concern at the lack of definite news from his two companies in front, harder still to conceal his impatience at the absence of orders. He had spent much of his time in the line scanning the ground beyond and had seen for himself the faint flutters of movement in the distance, had guessed at the futile attempts to get forward, had heard for himself the lethal rap of the machine-guns that laid every attempt to waste. When the orders finally reached him from Brigade Headquarters they were not much to his liking, for General Carter had resorted to desperate measures. The advance was to be made at once. Under cover of the bombardment Woodhouse must push his two reserve companies up to the outpost line, scoop up the survivors of the three Battalions, and by their own impetus carry them forward to the assault.
It was well past two before the message reached Colonel Woodhouse and the bombardment that was to lead the way had finished five minutes earlier. It was all too clear that it had been intended as the prelude to an attack and the Germans were prepared for it. Shells were falling thick and fast across the open ground and machine-guns blazed out as the three hundred soldiers of the Worcesters began to cross it. Fewer than forty of them made it. They brought little in the way of impetus but they did bring the message that ordered the attack. A dozen copies had been distributed for fear of misunderstanding, and one of the men who carried it had managed to get through. It was passed to Major Winnington and, as second-in-command, it was his responsibility to decide what must be done. It was also his responsibility to pass it to the Northants on his left and the Sherwood Foresters on his right. A little later, from his position in the shallow trench in front of Nameless Cottages, he heard the faint sound of whistles, and the fire and the fury as the Sherwood Foresters tried to go over the top. They tried once, twice, three times to make headway, but, at the fourth attempt, they were successful, for they managed to get forward close to the Mauquissart Road and seized two abandoned buildings close to the German line. It cost many men to gain that hundred yards and the line beyond remained impregnable.
The Worcesters also tried to advance. Two platoons started out on a leap towards a ditch thirty yards from the German trench. Only a handful of them reached it. Lieutenant Conybeare was the only officer who had survived the rush, for Lieutenant Tristram, like so many of the men, had been killed on the way across. All he could do was to gather the shaken survivors of two platoons, to crouch squelching in the mud up to their knees in water, waiting for the rest of the Worcesters to come up. They waited a full half hour but no help came. And then the shells began to fall, coming closer and closer, and they were British shells. At last the guns had got the range of the German line and were exultantly bombarding it. At least it kept the Germans’ heads down and stopped them firing at the few survivors on their long crawl back.
The Northamptonshires on their left did not advance at all. Colonel Pritchard had lost half his men that morning, his Battalion had been cut to shreds, and the order that three hundred exhausted men should now renew an attack that was clearly futile was the catalyst that reduced him to cold fury. He did not try to dodge the issue and, with an angry disregard for discipline, quite at odds with his long service and training, he took pains to make his feeling perfectly clear in his reply.
I received a note from the Worcestershires, ‘We have got to advance. Will you give the order?’ I answered ‘No! It is a mere waste of life, impossible to go twenty yards much less two hundred yards.’ The trenches have not been touched by the artillery. If artillery cannot touch them the only way is to advance from the right flank. A frontal attack will not get near them.
When it finally arrived at Brigade Headquarters and wound its way up to Division, Corps, and Army Headquarters this message caused deep disappointment and put paid to any hopes of success that day. In front of Mauquissart and Nameless Cottages the survivors clung on, digging deep and toiling to improve their perilous positions. They were completely isolated. Far on the right the Dehra Dun Brigade precariously situated with both flanks ‘in the air’ retired after dark to a safer position behind the first of the captured trenches. The British line had advanced by hardly an inch since the morning.
Lt. C. Tennant.
At about sunset we received orders to retire to our last night’s position and as soon as the light began to fade I went back to look after the wounded. Thank Heaven I am not a thirsty person and though my water bottle had not been replenished for two days, it was more than half full and I was able to supply the terrible need of some of the sufferers. Poor John Allan (whom I have always liked best of all my NCOs – and he was in my opinion undeniably the best soldier of them all) was hit in three places – the leg, shoulder and stomach, and was in a bad way. Luckily an officer of the Gurkhas had some morphia tabloids with him and he gave them to the men who needed them most. As soon as I had done all that I could for the wounded I hurried back to get stretchers, but it was a desperate task as our casualty list during the afternoon had been very heavy, and moreover our first aid post was a long way back. It had been shelled out of the houses on the Neuve Chapelle Road and had had to go back into safety, so the few stretchers we had took a long, long time on the way. Finally we rigged up stretchers with puttees and greatcoats and rifles, but they were not very satisfactory and it took three hours and a lot of time and trouble to get the wounded carried down. Poor Allan died on the way, to my great sorrow.
In the early evening Sir Douglas Haig went forward to assess the situation for himself and to find out from personal meetings with his Generals and Brigadiers closer to the battlefront what had gone wrong. The reasons were all too clear. The breakdown in communications, the difficulties of relaying messages to and from the line, could not easily be rectified – but something could be done. The guns could be brought closer to the line – dangerously close if need be – and positioned to make such an all-out effort to destroy the German defences that, with one more push, the infantry would be able to sweep across and carry the day. To make doubly, trebly, sure, to give the gunners ample time and the advantage of good light to register their targets, the attack this time would be scheduled for ten thirty in the morning. The night lay before them, and four full hours of daylight. There was time, and surely time enough, for even such feeble strands of communication as there were to carry instructions to the front, to move the guns forward, to bring up the reserves, and to ensure that every infantryman was prepared to play his part tomorrow morning.
But the Germans also were preparing for tomorrow. Under the cloak of the darkness the movement of many men was masked by the enemy guns as the six battalions which had been skulking out of sight all day crossed the Aubers Ridge and took their places in the German line. They were well fed and well rested and it was all to the good for there was not much left of the night. Just before dawn they would launch the counter-attack.
The 4th Seaforths were out of it but they had waited six hours for their relief and it was a long, weary wait. Charles Tennant had formed up his men on open ground behind their trench and it was two in the morning before the HLI arrived to take over.
Lt. C. Tennant.
The C.O. told Jim and me to show their officers our line. By this time I was beginning to feel very sleepy – consequently stupid, though not really tired – and I felt as if I was handing over an unsolved Chinese puzzle in pieces instead of a fairly simple position, complicated only by the rather vague whereabouts of the shattered remnants of the Garhwalis and the 9th Gurkhas in front. Why we should have been ordered to hand over the old line to the HLI instead of putting them into the front trench with the Gurkhas I’m still at a loss to understand, but the whole strategy (or want of it) throughout the action was utterly incomprehensible to the lay mind. As a result on the following morning the Gurkhas (who for some unknown reason were not relieved that night) were driven in by a German counter-attack and the HLI lost heavily in men and officers recovering the position we could have put them into with no difficulty on the evening before. Such is war – at least under anyone but a Napoleon!
About 2.45 a.m. we roused the men who were sleeping like logs on the bare ground and marched back to la Couture – an uncomfortable march over smashed-up roads dodging shells and being chased by shrapnel. One burst on the road just before we passed and left six or seven wounded and moaning Gurkhas in its train: another passed over the rear of the column just clear of No. 3 Company. It was five o’clock by the time we reached la Couture and the men were pretty well done up but the transport had got hot tea and rations ready for them which cheered them up and then they turned in for a short hour’s rest. I made some Oxo in my mess tin and then lay down on some straw and had a glorious sound sleep for twenty-five minutes.
There were fewer of the Seaforths now as they marched away from the line and as they re-formed on the road it was all too clear that they had left many men behind them. As they closed up the thinned ranks and continued on the journey back to blessed rest and billets, the sound of the battle, carried west on the wind, followed them along the road. It had been raging for hours past.
The Germans attacked through the morning mist in the half-light of false dawn.
Capt. A. J. Agius, MC.
We’d been building up the parapet and, just before dawn, we got back into the trench and stood to. At this moment the Hun attacked. It was still dark but round the horizon it was growing light so that the enemy’s legs were clearly defined. It was an extraordinary sight to see this mass of legs coming forward. The mist was lying just above the ground, and at first, you couldn’t see their bodies. In our immediate front and half-right, they’d been able to get up through their trenches to within forty or fifty yards of us before they delivered their assault. Sutcliffe was with my left gun firing to the right, I was with the right gun firing to the left. We aimed low and just sat down to it. The guns fired beautifully. The Germans came on in dense lines about eight to ten yards between each line. We absolutely caught them in the dim light, in enfilade.
L/cpl E. Hall.
I was in the front line attending to wounded men who needed attention, and so I had a good view of the Germans as they were advancing. They came over in mass formation. Our reinforcements had come up after dark and they’d brought several machine-guns, so we were prepared to give the Germans a fight to the finish. There was thick wire in front of our position and our officers knew that the Germans would never be able to break through it under a hail of lead, so they gave strict orders that no one was to fire until the Germans were up to the entanglements. The idea was that at such short range the slaughter would be much greater, and fewer Germans would have a chance of getting back to their own lines when we forced them to retreat.
There wasn’t enough room on the firestep for all our men, because it was only a short length of trench on that side of our redoubt, and the unlucky ones left standing at the bottom of the trench were so excited while we were blasting them that they were actually dragging some of the men off the firestep, so they could get up there themselves and get a few rounds off to settle old scores with Fritz. What with the rapid fire of machine-guns and rifles the Germans were simply mown down. They tried to turn tail, but hardly any of them, not even their swiftest runners, managed to make a home run.
Capt. A. J. Agius, MC.
Later as it grew light we counted over five hundred dead in our front. The guns must have done most of this for they were just lying in rows, one behind the other. On the left there were about eight rows of dead, just like swathes of corn. On the right they were scattered – the ground was more broken. Thank God I got a little of my own back and helped to avenge the death of our poor fellows.
There were two points that wanted watching – on our left front a collection of houses on the road with orchards about two hundred yards away, and on our right and running right into us, the Boche system of trenches. Of course they worked up these trenches, sniping and bombing, and it was hot for a bit because they were able to get completely round our flank. But we drove them off – we had a little gas-pipe bomb gun but most had to be done with hand grenades. The Black Watch in our rear helped with rifle fire and later they sent out and got in some prisoners.
Capt. W. G. Bagot-Chester, MC.
When daylight began to appear there was nothing to be seen except lines of dead Germans. We counted about a hundred on our immediate front. There were lots more to our right and left, and the Dehra Dun Brigade’s evacuated trench in front of us was full of them. Only a few live ones remained there, and a company of the HLI turned them out by an attack at 1 p.m. The first line advanced through us under fairly heavy rifle fire – they lost about twenty men before they reached the trench. The second line was just about to advance, and the officer in command of it jumped up near me and shouted ‘Second line, advance’ when he suddenly dropped, shot through the head. The second line never advanced. On our right the 4th Gurkhas advanced and took up their position on the right of the HLI in the trench ahead of us. Our artillery all this time was firing heavily, and we were also firing. Suddenly white flags began to appear in the German trenches and they got up and began waving to us to cease fire and on both sides we stood up to see what was happening. Some men in the Gurkhas on the right started sending back Germans into our lines with their hands up, many of them badly wounded. More followed, until about a hundred or so passed through our trench and there were many more who wished to come from further to the left. They put up white flags but it was difficult to send anyone to bring them in as the Germans were firing from behind and they themselves didn’t dare to leave the cover of their trench altogether. However, we got a pretty good bag.
The Germans had been flung back all along the front – even in the shaky line near Mauquissart where the Northants and the Worcesters clung to their precarious foothold.
2nd Lt. E. B. Conybeare, 1st Bn., Worcestershire Regt., 24 Brig., 8 Div.
The Germans came on in a great mass. Their officers were in front waving swords, then a great rabble behind followed by a fat old blighter on a horse. There was a most extraordinary hush for a few seconds as we held our fire while they closed in on us. Then, at last, we gave them the ‘mad minute’ of rapid fire. We brought them down in solid chunks. Down went the officers, the sergeant-majors and the old blighter on the horse.* We counter-charged, and back the rabble went full tilt for their own trenches four hundred yards away.
The Worcesters had done more than drive the Germans back – they had followed behind, forced the enemy to abandon part of his position and captured the machine-guns that had caused such havoc in their ranks. And they had rescued the Sherwood Foresters when their weak line broke, swinging to their right to recapture it and to retake the ruined cottages when the Germans forced the Sherwood Foresters out. In the wake of the counter-attack the Worcesters thrust forward their fragile line and at last reached the objective they had strained in vain to capture more than thirty-six hours before.
Colonel Woodhouse made haste to send a message back to Brigade Headquarters on the other side of Neuve Chapelle. He was more than happy to be able to report that the Battalion had advanced. But, with unpleasant recollections of yesterday’s misunderstanding, he made a point of requesting that the artillery should be warned that the Worcesters were now occupying a part of the German line. He took pains to give a specific map reference, stressed that the Worcesters were now isolated and hanging on by the skin of their teeth, and added a plea for reinforcements to help them consolidate and continue the advance.
The Worcesters beat off three counter-attacks and held on for three despairing hours of shelling – mostly by British guns. No reinforcements arrived. By ten o’clock it was clear that they could hold on no longer and, with bitter reluctance, Colonel Woodhouse ordered the battalion to leave the captured buildings and fall back to the old line. It was a disciplined retirement. They fell back by platoons, each one endeavouring to give covering fire as the others ran the gauntlet through a horseshoe of crossfire from rifles and machine-guns ranged round them on three sides. One after another, as they dashed and dodged across the open ground, the platoons melted away. By the time the remnants of the Worcesters reached the trench they had left at dawn the ground was strewn with dead and wounded. The Colonel was gone, so was the Adjutant and the last surviving company officer. The Battalion had lost nineteen of its twenty-six officers and platoons had dwindled to fragmented knots of men with only corporals or lance-corporals to take charge. By 10.30, when the new advance was scheduled to begin, the Worcesters, like the Northants and the Sherwood Foresters, were far too weak to make a move. As it was, the attack had been postponed for, yet again, the thick ground mist had prevented artillery officers from making the final, vital observations that would pinpoint the enemy’s positions and guarantee the accuracy of the guns. This time they could not afford to take chances. This time the attack must succeed.
It was hard on the front-line troops to wait. They were flushed with their victory, anxious to get on, to follow up the demoralised Germans and hit them hard while they were still stunned and shaken by the failure of the counter-attack. If, like the Worcesters, the whole line had advanced, and chased the Germans into their line, if the reserves had followed, and the opportunity had been seized, their defences might easily have crumbled. But the enemy had been given a breathing space and made the most of it to re-organise the line and bring up support troops to defend it. They were hardly able to believe their luck as the hours ticked by and the British made no move.
Chapter 10
The Army Command had no idea that a golden opportunity had been missed. Reports were long delayed on the way to First Army headquarters and when they did arrive, scanty and incomplete, they gave no idea of the magnitude of the counter-attack, nor was it possible to assess the enemy’s numbers from scraps of information gleaned from isolated stretches of the front. But it was plain that the enemy had been brilliantly repulsed and heart-lifting news of prisoners surrendering en masse confirmed the impression that the enemy was demoralised and on the point of giving up the fight. Only the artillerymen were unhappy, still hampered by the mist and now frankly doubtful if the guns could be ranged with any hope of accuracy by mid-day when the bombardment was due to open.
Shortly after eleven General Rawlinson telephoned Sir Douglas Haig to pass on this disquieting news and discuss its implications. It was decided to take the risk and send troops forward as planned. But the plan was not altered in the slightest particular from the orders of the previous evening.
At long last the 2nd Rifle Brigade were to have their chance and they were to be in the vanguard of the attack moving forward with the Royal Irish Rifles to knock out the guns and the redoubt at the Layes Bridge. Forty-eight hours previously, when Colonel Stevens had begged to be allowed to assault that very objective, it had been manned by a skeleton force and was theirs for the taking. Now it was a bastion, and behind deep barricades of barbed wire fifteen machine-guns were poised to rake the battlefield. They could have held an army at bay and against them two Battalions had no chance at all. It was a sorry climax to the long impatient wait.
The first men to leave the trench were pulverised by a tornado of fire – from machine-guns at the Layes redoubt and the field guns behind it, from machine-guns and rifles in the new German trench. Even the guns behind the Bois du Biez, and the machine-guns in front of the wood itself were able to swing right and concentrate fire on the unfortunate riflemen, for the Indian Corps on their front was ordered to stand fast until the Layes Bridge redoubt was captured. Hardly a man survived to advance so much as fifty yards. Bullets whipped across the trench where the men of the next wave crouched low beneath the parapet, teeth clenched as the ground rocked, white knuckles clamped round rifles, waiting with fixed bayonets for the command that would send them over the top. They knew full well that it would be slaughter. The Colonel knew it too and, on his own responsibility, cancelled the attack.
As the artillery officers had feared, the noon bombardment that preceded the general attack was a disaster and on most of the front the troops failed to make any headway. But where it had succeeded, on the northern edge of the battle, the 7th Division did manage to advance the line and the Germans surrendered in droves. Some ground had been gained but beyond it the enemy fought back hard. The shelling reached a crescendo, movement was impossible and information dried up altogether. Desperate for news, the anxious British staff had to depend on reports from artillery observation officers trying to pierce the mist from positions of small advantage, and endeavouring as best they could to piece together what was happening out in front. The messages that got through to headquarters were long out of date and gave a completely false impression.
At one o’clock the welcome news that the Worcesters had captured part of the German defences near Mauquissart was received at First Army Headquarters to the satisfaction of Sir Douglas Haig. In the absence of other information he could have hardly have known that they had been forced out again and had been back on their old line for a full three hours. As staff officers pored eagerly over the battle-map, pinpointing the Worcesters’ supposed position, more news came through. Fourth Corps headquarters confirmed that the 7th Division had advanced and added, ‘Observation officer reports having seen British troops crossing the Mauquissart Road.’* That clinched it.
Sir Douglas Haig was an imperturbable soldier, but even his air of unruffled calm hinted at inner excitement, and the air of anxious speculation that had clouded the deliberations of his staff all morning was entirely swept away in moments. Haig was determined to take advantage of the promising situation. The attack must be pressed home and there was no time to be lost. Headquarters signallers, who had spent much of the day waiting for news or transmitting stern demands for information, were as busy now as their Commander could desire, tapping his order along the wires to the Corps and Divisional Commanders. ‘Information indicates that the enemy on our front are much demoralised. Indian Corps and IV Corps will push through the barrage of fire regardless of loss, using reserves if required.’ It was just after three o’clock and it would clearly take time before dispositions could be made and instructions passed on to the Battalion commanders at the front, but General Haig was optimistic.
In the light of the good news, he telephoned personally to Sir John French at GHQ and, with his agreement, ordered the 5th Cavalry Brigade to move forward into battle. Then, impatient of impotent waiting, and perhaps with the idea of stiffening his subordinate commanders with his own encouraging presence, he rode the five miles to Indian Corps headquarters at Marmuse. He looked at the map and listened courteously as Sir James Willcocks explained the failure of the Indian Corps and, jabbing his finger at the Layes redoubt, traced the line of fire that could not fail to catch his left in enfilade if his troops even attempted to advance. Haig understood his dilemma but, fired by the conviction that the line at Mauquissart had been breached, sure of his opinion that the Germans were on the verge of disarray, he impressed on Willcocks that a similar breakthrough at the opposite end of the line was the single factor that would break the enemy’s resistance and bring about his downfall. Even if Willcocks could not risk the left of his line, then the right must go forward without it and, if the whole of the Bois du Biez could not immediately be captured, they could take the southern part. He urged him to proceed with all possible speed, offered to bring up more cavalry to exploit the gap and, once they had passed through it and began to harass the enemy’s rear, the battle would be won and even the Layes redoubt would collapse as the enemy line crumbled. Such tactics were sound, the situation was crucial, and the moment, it seemed, was ripe.
General Rawlinson had also been on the move. As soon as he received Sir Douglas Haig’s signal he went first to 8th and then to 7th divisional headquarters to relay the orders in person and to stress to both divisions the urgency of carrying them out. It would necessarily be some hours before the Divisional Commanders would have made their dispositions, issued their instructions and passed them down to Battalions in the line. Before the troops went over, Rawlinson ordered, the Layes redoubt must be attacked and this time ‘at all costs’ it must be captured.
Capt. R. Berkeley, MC, Rifle Brig.
At 4 p.m. Colonel Stevens was sent for and ordered to make a second attack at 5.15 p.m. There was no opportunity to make
any plan. By the time he had reached his Battalion with the order it was nearly 5 p.m. and a small and inadequate artillery demonstration was already in progress. It was now the turn of C and D Companies. In the spirit of another famous Brigade, ‘Theirs not to reason why’, knowing that someone had blundered badly and knowing their task to be humanly impossible, they hurriedly formed up to obey orders.
Captain Bridgeman of C Company led his men headlong for the machine-guns on their left front. He reached the Smith-Dorrien trench and found himself with only Corporal Woolnough and Riflemen Rogers, Carbutt, and Jones left of those who had started with him. The rest of number eleven and twelve platoons had been shot down. Beyond Smith-Dorrien trench it was impossible to advance, even had there been anyone.
D Company on the right had an even more hopeless task. There was uncut wire in front of them – their own wire! Company Sergeant-Major Daniels and Corporal Noble rushed out with wire-cutters into the hail of bullets to make a passage by hand – they did so at the cost of Noble’s life. Lieutenant Mansel, the company commander, started out at the head of his men, and fell seriously wounded. Colonel Stevens, intervening once more, stopped the attack and at nightfall he recalled Captain Bridgeman and his party from Smith-Dorrien.*
Dusk fell quickly on that cloudy afternoon. It was quite dark by six o’clock – long before the troops could be reorganised and sent in to make the general advance Sir Douglas Haig so fervently desired, long before the ground could be reconnoitred, and long before final instructions could reach the weary soldiers waiting in the line. By seven o’clock mist had gathered beneath the low cloud, and the darkness thickened to pitchy black. Battalions groping forward to assembly positions lost their way and became hopelessly mixed up. The attacks were postponed, and postponed again. Finally they were cancelled.
The battle was over. They had captured Neuve Chapelle and in places north of the village the old line had crept forward by, at most, a thousand yards. In the last hour of the night, when the reliefs marched up to take over the trenches, the exhausted survivors had to be pummelled and kicked to their feet before they could be roused and marched out, dazed and staggering with fatigue.
There was no dawn that morning. The darkness gradually gave way to a strange yellow fog, thick with the fumes of lyddite that stung the eyes and burned the throat. Mercifully it shrouded the ground in front, so that the parties of stretcher-bearers could move freely in the open to search for any wounded who had survived the night. They prowled like phantoms in the gloom, picking their way through the carnage and the debris – the terrible litter of rifles torn from dead hands, ripped caps, German helmets, tatters of uniform, khaki and grey, the tumbled contents of pockets and haversacks, razors, pocket mirrors, photographs, smashed pipes and scraps of food, fragments of letters, tobacco pouches, crumpled packets of cigarettes. And everywhere distorted bodies, dead faces of livid yellow pallor staring blank-eyed into the yellow fog. Here and there a feeble movement caught a stretcher-bearer’s eye and another man was rescued before the fog began to thin and the German guns thundered out in anticipation of another attack.
L/cpl E. Hall.
For two days I carried the stretcher without a rest until at last I collapsed under the strain and had to rest for a few hours. How many men I carried I do not know, and the last few hours seemed like a dream, broken with the cries of the wounded.
My clothes were saturated with the blood of the men I bandaged and carried, and when I was finally relieved, I had to get a new suit from the quartermaster’s stores.
L/cpl W. Andrews.
I was stationed with my section to guard a pump at a brewery on the edge of Neuve Chapelle, and right beside it there was a notice-board still standing with just one word on it. It said ‘DANGER’. Nicholson laughed and laughed as if it was the greatest joke of the war! He couldn’t stop laughing. I was too tired to laugh. By that time I was absolutely stupid with fatigue and cold and the strain of it all.
Not all the troops had been relieved and those who were forced to remain until nightfall in the trenches passed a long and gruelling day under bombardments that were heavier than ever. They were not aware that the offensive was at an end and the enemy, no wiser than they were themselves, and still fearful of a new attack, pounded the British lines all day long. The British guns were firing back and the troops were kept on the alert, for it was perfectly possible that each German bombardment might mean a German counter-attack.
Already Sir Douglas Haig was in conference with his staff and his Corps Commanders outlining his plans for the next stage of the offensive. Now that they had lost the advantage of surprise it would be pointless to continue the campaign in the same sector but, once the troops had been re-shuffled (and more were expected any day) while the Germans were still disorganised (as they surely must be), they would launch a new British attack on another sector of the line and approach the Aubers Ridge from slightly further north. Sir Douglas Haig confidently expected to be ready in a matter of days. He ordered his Corps Commanders to prepare detailed plans and put forward his proposal for the sanction of the Commander-in-Chief.
It was true that there had been some unfortunate setbacks but, on the whole, Haig was not displeased with the outcome of the three days’ fighting. The British Army had shown that it could penetrate the invincible German defences and, with only a little more effort, the original objectives could surely be achieved.
Sir John French was at first inclined to agree, but when the artillery returns reached his headquarters at St Omer, he had an unpleasant shock. The expenditure of ammunition during the three days’ battle had been many times higher than the most extravagant estimate. It was the work of a moment to calculate that the ammunition available in reserve was not nearly enough to replace it and it was clear that there was no possibility of pursuing an offensive of any kind until supplies had been replenished and considerably augmented. In order to drive the point home, the Commander-in-Chief lost no time in dispatching a telegram to London, He did not beat around the bush: ‘Cessation of forward movement is necessitated today by the fatigue of the troops, and, above all, by the want of ammunition…’
Bdr. W. Kemp.
We signallers worked for seventy-two hours straight off and I was down and out at the finish. When the battle died away the battery had fired two hundred and forty rounds of 6-inch ammunition and we only had five rounds left between all four guns. They each kept one round ‘up the spout’ for three weeks, ready to give the Germans hell!
Tmptr. J. Naylor.
One of my jobs was to go up to the Battery Headquarters with dispatches and bring back the returns and I remember that day very well. I went up to one of the batteries and the Major said to me, ‘We’ve got—’ – I forget exactly how many rounds of ammunition they had per gun, but it was almost single figures. When I got back to headquarters the Colonel was talking to another battery commander who happened to be there, and he must have had a similar shortage of shells because the Colonel was saying to him that on no account was he to fire them except in a case of a really bad attack. I can’t remember what the Major said, but I remember the Colonel’s answer. He said, ‘Well, if the worst comes to the worst, you’ll just have to bloody well turn yourselves into infantry!’ I suppose it was a joke, but it really impressed me at the time. We were frightfully short of ammunition, but I don’t think it affected the morale at all. The British soldier is an extraordinary bloke and it takes a hell of a lot to get him down. I suppose we were worried but we always thought that something was going to happen that would put things right.
For many miles behind the line the narrow roads were stiff with traffic and the passage of many men. The reserves who had been stood down were moving back and reliefs were still moving up, for it had not been possible to relieve all the front-line troops in the early hours of the morning. Even the 4th Seaforths, who had got out the night before, were making slow, slow progress and they were still a long way from their destination.
Lt. C. Tennant.
What a road it was, blocked with traffic every two hundred yards, troops passing up to the front and ambulances passing down away from it. Progress was incredibly slow and in spite of the endless halts we were never able to get our packs off. Consequently the six miles seemed like sixteen and it was eleven o’clock before we got in. The men were billeted in the brewery and the officers were shown into a small cottage containing three very small and very lousy looking rooms full of dirty straw and filth. However a yard at the back provided a small barn full of clean straw and there we made ourselves fairly snug for the night. I rose at seven o’clock and after breakfast we paraded by companies for rifle inspection and checking of casualty rolls. Having heard several of the men repeating the old question ‘Why was all this waste made?’ I seized the occasion to check my platoon for the fault which I had been committing in thought myself ever since the action – namely criticising the wisdom of orders. But there was a well-deserved spoonful of jam administered with the pill, so they took the medicine well. The CO. detailed me to take a party of forty men back to Neuve Chapelle to check casualties’ kits as far as possible, but he countermanded this later, because the Germans were shelling all the roads very heavily all day and he didn’t want to risk men’s lives for the sake of dead men’s belongings. Rightly!
At 5.45 p.m. we marched off and after another incredibly tedious march – we were held up for over an hour by a blocked road – we reached our destination where we have the best billets we have had for many a long day. We arrived at nine o’clock without blankets or valises, as the transport had got hopelessly stuck up on the blocked road, but we were all tired enough to sleep anywhere, and after a good meal we turned in at 10.30 and had our first real sleep since Monday night. This was Saturday night. So ended our share of the week’s fighting.
At nightfall, as the Seaforths were thankfully nearing their billets and the prospect of food and rest, the remaining Battalions of the Indian Corps were at last preparing to move.
Capt. W. G. Bagot-Chester, MC.
At 5 p.m. we got news that we were to be relieved. Oh, how pleased we were! All my men bucked up, and started chattering away. One can have too much of a good thing! We hoped to go at dusk, but a message came to say that a German attack was expected, and we must remain for the time being. However, I got away at about 8 p.m. on being relieved by the HLI. Off I went with my men, pleased as could be, but I only got as far as brigade headquarters about a mile away when the General said he was very sorry but we had to stay in reserve to the Brigade which had taken over from us. This was rather hard after five days and nights, with not a wink of sleep for anyone, for all night we’d had to work at improving our trench and in the daytime it was almost impossible to sleep for the artillery bombardments and the fear of a German attack. However, there was nothing for it, so I explained the situation to the men and almost cried for pity for their disappointment. They took it very well, turned about without a word and marched back. No sooner had we got back to Battalion Headquarters than a staff officer came up, and said it was a mistake and we were no longer required. So, it was ‘about turn’ again and back we went at a snail’s pace, for we were all dead tired, and couldn’t walk straight. I halted at one place for water (the men had been short of it the whole time in the trench) and further on I halted again and gave the men an hour’s sleep on the roadside.
Capt. A. J. Agius, MC.
We were relieved on Saturday night. It was late and pitch dark and very muddy. We managed to get to Port Arthur through the debris and struggled down a trench. It was filled with Connaught Rangers coming up and we finally had to get out and try to go across country. It was dark country, strange country, with any number of hedges and ditches to get through, bullets and shells coming over, men fagged out and laden with heavy kit. The men couldn’t keep up. We finally struck a road, turned to our right and, thank God, at last got to Windy Corner – our rendezvous. We were the last out and they were all waiting for us. We had to wait some time trying to gather in stragglers. Before we arrived, Windy Corner had been shelled and my limber had bolted so I dumped spare ammunition in a house and off we trekked.
We marched for hours and hours. Every hour we lay down where we were in the middle of the road and slept for ten minutes – then on again. The men were awfully tired but full of buck and laden with loot, German helmets, etc. It was a perfect spring dawn and the peace of the Sunday morning was wonderful as we passed the Locon road. A lark sang. We finally got to our old billet at 6 a.m. only to find someone else in occupation! We waited some time for orders, and finally we were dispersed to our units. On we plunged down the road to les Lobes. The rest of the Battalion had been in for some time. We finally got to Harry Pulman’s old billet, which we were to share with the remains of A Company.
So few of A Company were left that there was ample room for them all and when they had slept and were rested, and awoke hungry, despite their ravenous appetites there were far too few of the Londons left to consume even half the food the company cooks had prepared. The officers ate together. It was a subdued meal, with long silences and, when it was clear that no more stragglers would come in, there was a roll-call. After it, while the men cleaned up and prepared for kit inspection, the officers dispersed to begin the task of writing the difficult letters of condolence to the next of kin of the men they knew for certain had been killed. And there were personal letters to be written too, for the first time in many days.
Charles Tennant settled down to write to his fiancee, Lucy Hilton:
Darling, Heaven only knows when this letter will reach you, but I hope it will eventually, and as I want to put down, before I forget them, some of the details of our share in the Neuve Chapelle fight I will seize the opportunity afforded by a lazy Sunday morning to do so. I went to Communion at 8 a.m. and so have cried off Battalion Church Parade. As a result I have the morning free, and what a lovely morning, the sun shining, the birds singing and the buds in the hedgerows visibly swelling before my very eyes. I am just going to jot down the bare facts and some day beside a comfortable fire I will fill in all the details…
Walter Bagot Chester brought his diary up to date: ‘I must thank my stars for being spared to see my birthday after such an action as we have had. Today was a day of rest for all.’
The weather had cleared up, the sun shone and, away from the stench and clamour of the battle, there was time to take stock and time to exult in the good fortune of being alive.
Lt. D. S. Lewis.
I’ve had huge luck in escaping being hit. My machine was hit eighty times in three days during the battle. One well-aimed shrapnel accounted for fifty-odd, and the rest were rifle bullets. Beyond a graze on the thumb and a bullet through my coat, I’ve never been touched. I’ve been brought down twice, once a bit of shell in the engine, the other time a smashed propeller, but each time I was easily high enough to get back. I can tell you I’m some nut in the artillery world! If only the initial push had been continued we should have broken through, I believe, and then anything might have happened.
In the aftermath of the battle, the delays that brought the first day’s fighting to a standstill were gone over again and again in the course of endless conclaves and discussions at General Headquarters. Reports, flooding in now, were collated, digested, compared and analysed a thousand times. Even so soon after the event it was glaringly obvious that the breakdown in communications, the inevitable lack of speedy reaction to the situation at the front, the shattering of the telephone lines between observers and the guns, had been almost wholly responsible for the frustrations and delays. But there were other factors which the staff could only ascribe to misfortune – if only the weather had been kinder, if only there had been no mist, if only orders had not been misinterpreted and certain Divisional Generals had been less hesitant, if only there had been enough shells. The qualifying arguments, even excuses, came thick and fast at every meeting and were reiterated over and over.
The blame had to be laid somewhere. It could not be laid on the shoulders of the troops, for they had been magnificent and the Command was full of praise, particularly for the prowess of the untried Territorials. It could not be shouldered by the staff, for they were confident that all their assessments had been correct and that the battleplan should have succeeded. In their view it had succeeded, and if their reasonable hopes had not been fully realised it was surely no fault of theirs. In the final analysis the fault lay with the pundits and politicians whose backing had been so singularly lacking, and whose lamentable failure to supply sufficient men and munitions had thwarted outright victory. The situation showed no signs of improving and the returns that showed the high expenditure of ammunition were far less shocking to Sir John French than the knowledge that production of ammunition in factories at home amounted to a fraction over seven miserable shells a day for every gun on his front. Three days after the battle he shot off another indignant telegram to London:
The supply of gun ammunition, especially the 18-pdr. and 4.5-inch howitzer, has fallen far short of what I was led to expect and I was therefore compelled to abandon further offensive operations until sufficient reserves are accumulated.
But, even if the battle had not led to the hoped-for result, the British commanders were nonetheless elated by success. They had penetrated the formidable German defences and broken the enemy line. They had confounded the pessimists who said that it could not be done. Best of all, they had demonstrated to their sceptical French allies that the British Army was capable of mounting a successful offensive. And if they had done it once it followed that, with very little modification of the same tactics, they could do it again.
The spectre of ‘success’ at Neuve Chapelle was to haunt the hopes and blight the plans of British commanders for the best part of the war. But the British public was heartened by news of victory and the newspapers made the most of it. A Times leader encouraged its readers to rejoice.
For the first time the British Army has broken the German line and struck the Germans a blow which they will remember to the end of their lives. The importance of our success does not lie so much in the capture of the German trenches along a front of two miles, the killing of some 6,000 Germans and the taking of 2,000 prisoners. It is the revelation of the fact that the much-vaunted German army-machine on which the whole attention of a mighty nation has been lavished for four decades is not invincible.
The politicians in the War Council were less enthusiastic and less sympathetic to Sir John French’s demands than he had hoped. Far from galvanising the War Office into activity, his telegram complaining of shortage of ammunition received a brusque reply in a letter from Lord Kitchener himself. He could promise no immediate increase in supplies; in his opinion the use of ammunition in the first sixteen days of March had been profligate, and he punched the point home by ordering that, in future, ‘the utmost economy will be made in the expenditure of ammunition’ To the Commander-in-Chief, basking in the glow of partial victory and anxious to exploit it, this edict was a severe blow.
The War Council was gratified by the reports of Neuve Chapelle and since, according to their information, the army had only narrowly failed to achieve a big success, its members were prepared to overlook the fact that Sir John French had undertaken his offensive without their full approval. But they were not over-impressed with the result. Seen from London, the situation on the western front was still unchanged, the prospect of all-out victory was still remote, and there was nothing to alter the opinion of the sceptics that the war could only be won elsewhere. They had other things on their minds and, in the course of a long meeting, they spent only a few minutes discussing events in France. Most of their attention and all of their interest was now focused on Gallipoli.
Sir Ian Hamilton was already on his way to the Dardanelles, travelling by fast destroyer, and he was still bemused by the events of the last few days. His appointment as Commander-in-Chief of a cobbled-together expeditionary force had come as a complete surprise. He had been summoned to the War Office on 12 March and, within twenty-four hours, had been sent off with such dispatch that he had only the vaguest idea of what was expected of him. His instructions, so far as they went, were to cooperate with the Royal Navy, to effect a landing on the Gallipoli peninsula and, thereafter, to proceed to occupy Constantinople. He was given no advice on how this was to be accomplished. He had no reliable maps, for there were none. He was given no information on the Turkish garrison or its defences, for no intelligence had been collected. No intelligence officers accompanied him, for none had yet been appointed. He was given no plan, for none had been drawn up, and his staff of thirteen officers, nastily co-opted, were as ignorant as he was himself. The General Staff, who had not been in the confidence of the War Council, had received no hint that a Dardanelles campaign was being mooted, and they were naturally in no position to supply more than the sketchiest outline of conditions on the peninsula. Even those dated from a scheme that had been studied and rejected as impracticable in 1906. The best they could do was to supply him with a pre-war copy of a Turkish Army handbook. It was better, but not much better, than nothing, and it was hardly surprising that Hamilton spent many solitary hours wrapped in his own thoughts as he paced the deck of the cruiser Phaeton, pausing at times to gaze reflectively at the inscrutable sea. He had plenty to think about.
The fate of the 29th Division had also been decided, for Lord Kitchener had at last agreed to release them. By 19 March the last man had embarked for Egypt where the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps were training hard. They were burdened with a clumsy title, awkward on the tongue, but the combination of initials was a happy one. Supply boxes, orders, papers, and all the stationery of the Corps was stamped with the letters ‘A. & N. Z. A. C.’ and it was only a matter of time before the convenient nickname ‘Anzac’ was universally adopted. One day it would be immortal – though no one knew it then. And it was many months before an army interpreter was struck by the shocking irony that ‘Anzac’ closely resembled a certain Turkish word. That word was ‘anjac’. Its meaning was ‘almost’.
But that was in the future. Meanwhile, like pawns in some giant tournament of chess, the troops were on the move. Hopes were high in that spring of 1915. But the battles in Europe, east and west, had been no more than the opening moves in the first rounds of the contest. Before it was concluded half the nations of the world would be vying for the role of grand master.
Part 3
‘This is the happy warrior – this is he!’
Where are our uniforms?
Far, far away.
When will our rifles come?
P’raps, p’raps some day.
All we need is just a gun
For to chase the bloody Hun
Think of us when we are gone
Far, far away.
Chapter 11
On the first day of spring the weather rose to the occasion and 21 March was bright and warm enough to bring out droves of Sunday strollers. They thronged into the parks to enjoy the sunshine, the early spring flowers, and the sight of young soldiers on weekend leave, swaggering self-consciously in stiff new khaki, accompanied by proud mothers or sweethearts in whose eyes they were already heroes. In parks near military hospitals there was the added attraction of genuine wounded heroes to be smiled at sympathetically as they took the air in suits of convalescent blue. Anything military was a draw. In London crowds streamed down the Mall to Buckingham Palace where the King was taking the salute at a march-past of newly fledged Battalions and, when it was over and the stirring music of the band had faded in the distance, hundreds of people flocked into St James’s Park and across Horseguards Parade to Whitehall to linger outside the War Office. There was nothing to be seen except the sentries guarding its austere walls, but the sightseers were satisfied with a fleeting sense of proximity to the seat of great events.
At Knowsley Hall, near Liverpool, where the weather was equally kind, it was the day of days for Lord Derby, for his own troops were on parade. By his own efforts and the expenditure of a considerable sum of money, he had raised and equipped no fewer than four Battalions and earned the title of ‘England’s best recruiting sergeant’. The locals knew them as ‘The Derby Comrades Brigade’, their solid silver cap-badges – provided personally by their patron – represented the Stanley family crest and, although some hundreds of admiring friends and relatives were there to cheer as they marched past, no one was prouder than Lord Derby. Lord Kitchener himself was there to take the salute from the steps of Knowsley Hall. It took fully forty minutes for twelve thousand soldiers to pass the saluting base and Lord Derby’s own recruiting band was there to play them past. Lord Kitchener was full of compliments. Lord Derby was delighted.
But if the Derby Comrades Brigade drew the loudest cheers of the day, the 15th and 16th Cheshires ran them a close second. They came from Birkenhead and not a man among them was taller than five feet two inches. They were the Bantams, small volunteers who had been thwarted by army regulations in their efforts to join up at the start of the war. When it struck those in authority, aghast at the numbers of would-be recruits rejected on grounds of height, that even diminutive soldiers could be useful, they had been only too glad to volunteer. There was a score of bantam Battalions now, and the Birkenhead boys marching past Lord Kitchener cared not a jot if they raised a laugh as well as a cheer. ‘All they’d be good for,’ remarked one unkind onlooker, ‘is to run round the back of a German, bite him in the arse, and make him run.’
Lord Kitchener was having a busy day. He had stayed overnight at Knowsley Hall, where the four thousand men of the Derby Comrades Brigade were encamped in the park, and now, without stopping for lunch, he set off by train to Manchester to take the salute for a second time as thirteen thousand men of the Manchester Regiment and Lancashire Fusiliers marched through Albert Square. The sun shone well into the afternoon, and the crowds cheered as lustily as they had cheered in Liverpool earlier in the day.
The brilliant weather over most of the country came as a tonic, for the euphoria and rejoicing that had greeted early reports of the victorious outcome of the British Army’s first successful offensive was tempered now with disquiet. The casualty lists, trickling through to a public encouraged by gloating reports of vast numbers of enemy soldiers killed and captured, were manifest evidence that the cost had been enormous. Sir John French’s dispatch had also been published and from his account of Neuve Chapelle, people could judge for themselves that the gains had been far, far less than the first published communiqués had led them to suppose. There was downright fury in some quarters of the press itself and the war correspondent of the Daily Mail launched into the attack with all guns blazing:
Sir John French’s despatch on the fighting at Neuve Chapelle is the one topic of conversation. On March 10th an official statement was issued that the British Army had taken the important village of Neuve Chapelle and had captured a thousand prisoners and some machine-guns. Two days afterwards a British official despatch described the magnitude of the victory, the effectiveness of our heavy artillery, and the defeat and heavy loss of the Germans when they attempted counterattacks.
The enemy for the time being was ‘beaten and on the run’. The whole incident was painted in couleur de rose. There was an outburst of national rejoicing. Then suddenly the rejoicing paused. Casualty figures were published in daily instalments, and were surprisingly heavy. Rumours spread from mouth to mouth. Every man one met had some fresh story to tell, stories not in keeping with the official description. Many of them were false – but they fell like a pall on the public mind.
Now Sir John French has given us the real story, and not before it was time. His long despatch is a splendid tribute to the courage and devotion of the British Army, and it records a real victory. But it is very different from the tale told in the first accounts.
The advance was a success. The Germans were, for the moment, overwhelmed. We might have swept right through, far on the road to Lille. It was clearly Sir John French’s intention that the Cavalry Brigade should pour through the breach in the German lines and get the enemy on the run. But our reserves were not brought up in time. The net result was that our real gain – a very important gain – was made during the first three hours of the three days’ battle. We did splendidly. But anyone who studies Sir John French’s despatch with insight can see that his aim was not to capture a village, but to advance on Lille itself. And, but for the unfortunate mist, he would probably have done so.
WHY NOT TRUST THE PEOPLE? Had the real story been told to us at the beginning, all would have been much better.
When the big advance comes, the big advance that would have started at Neuve Chapelle had things gone as well as was hoped, losses will be much greater. The nation will not shrink back. But our authorities would be well advised not to try to blind the public, even for a time, by telling of the victories and glossing over reverses.
The nation as a whole had no intention of shrinking back. It was clear to most people that the war which optimists had predicted would be ‘over by Christmas’ would be no brief affair and that it would take a good deal more than flag-waving enthusiasm to win it. Neuve Chapelle kindled a new spirit of resolve. Many men who had hesitated to join the army now hastened to enlist, and mothers and wives, fathers and sisters, uncles and aunts, redoubled their efforts to find ways of ‘doing their bit’.
The needs of the army were great and the personal columns of local and national newspapers were flooded with appeals. For flint-and-tinder lighters for the troops in the trenches, where smokers were many but matches were scarce and a naked flame might attract the unwelcome attention of the enemy. For dressinggowns, pyjamas, hot-water bottles for the wounded, and gramophones to cheer the lonely vigils of ships’ companies at sea. And for money, money, money. Money to buy stoves and boilers to provide hot baths for troops coming out of the lines. Money for canteens and rest-huts. Money for splints and surgical dressings. Money for comforts of every possible kind. The public were urged to dig so deep and for so many worthy causes that fund-raisers had to exercise a good deal of imagination to make their particular cause stand out among the thousand others that were equally likely to wring cash from a public-spirited citizen’s pocket. The ultimate in personal appeals was directed to the nation’s dogs and cats:
DOGS and CATS of the EMPIRE! The Kaiser said, ‘Germany will fight to last dog and cat.’ Will British dogs and cats give 6d. each to provide Y.M.C.A. Soldiers’ Hut in France?
Lady Bushman, who started an ambulance fund, came up with a winner. Her idea was that every ambulance should be known by a particular feminine Christian name and that every woman of the same name should contribute to its cost. This idea was appealing and it caught on like wildfire.
HILDAS – Miss HILDA WARDELL-YERBURGH, Hoole Hall, Chester, and Miss HILDA SMALLWOOD, 14 Oxford Terrace, Hyde Park, have joined forces in collecting for the HILDA AMBULANCE at Lady Bushman’s suggestion, and will be very grateful if all HILDAS will send donations, however small, to either address.
LOUISA (or LOUISE) MOTOR AMBULANCE – Will each LOUISA or LOUISE send a donation to Miss Louisa Dawson, Woodlands, Crouch End?
AGNES MOTOR AMBULANCE (in connection with Lady Bushman’s scheme) – Will every AGNES HELP? Miss Agnes Randolph, The Almonry, Ely.
All over the country Hildas, Louisas (or Louises!) Agnes’s, Madges, Helens, Dorothys, Marions, and women of every popular Christian name, were inspired to do their bit – opening their purses, importuning friends and relations and collecting cash in every way they could think of for their own particular ambulance. Lady Bushman realised enough money for a whole fleet and soon, to the satisfaction of the donors, Hilda, Louise, Agnes et al. were lurching in the wake of the Tommies along the rough pavé roads of France.
There were some ladies who were keen to do their bit and provide comfort to the troops on a more personal level. One pseudonymous soldier, who published a cri de coeur to a faithless fiancée above a box number, was so inundated by replies that he was forced to expend a further ten shillings on another heartfelt plea, addressed to ladies who were eager to do their bit by consoling him.
KHAKI CLAD, whose message to BROWN EYES appeared here on Tuesday, much regrets that it is impossible for him to answer personally the hundreds of kind people who offer their services in substitution for BROWN EYES.
Some people found even more remarkable ways of doing their bit and Henry Edwards was one of them. He was eighty-five years old, he sported a venerable white beard, and he spent his days waiting outside Lambeth register office. War weddings were the order of the day and business was brisk. This was gratifying to Mr Edwards. Early in the war he had not only seen an opportunity of doing his bit but had spotted the fact that there was a gap in the market.
In many cases, when the soldier-bridegroom expected to be leaving for the front, registry office weddings were hastily arranged, and sometimes with good reason. The licence would be obtained and the ring purchased well in advance, in anticipation of a forty-eight-hour pass, but when the bride and groom appeared for the ceremony itself they frequently forgot to bring along a witness. Henry Edwards, dapper in bowler hat and well-brushed overcoat, a festive flower in his button-hole, was happy to step into the breach and act as best man. Patriotism had its reward. Mr Edwards was not so crass as to demand a fee for his services, but he invariably received a tip ‘commensurate’, as he put it, ‘with the happiness of the bridegroom’. On one occasion this had only amounted to a souvenir fragment of shell from France, but Mr Edwards had not complained. He could afford to be generous for although, on occasion, he received as little as sixpence, he sometimes got as much as ten shillings, and usually not less than five. Since he had done his bit at several hundred military and naval weddings since the war began, he was doing nicely and was as satisfied with his war-work as his grateful clients. It was almost Easter and weddings were all the rage.
CQMS G. Fisher, 1st Bn. Hertfordshire Regt. (TF).
I came home on my first leave and in those days you only got four days and that included getting there and back. When I came home to St Albans they were just beginning to move the 47th London Division Territorials to St Albans for training and they were billeting these chaps in houses in the town. I was going steady with my future wife then, and she was living in a large flat over a shop. There was a regulation that soldiers would not be billeted in the house of the wife of a soldier serving abroad. I said, ‘I think we’d better get married. You won’t have anybody billeted on you then and you’ll get a separation allowance.’ So we decided to get married. We were married in the registry office in St Albans, and I was due to go back to France the next morning. I had to report to Victoria Station at half past four in the morning, so that meant I must be in London the night before, because there was no train from St Albans that early. We were married at three o’clock in the afternoon and in the evening we went up to London.
I had no idea where we could put up for the night. YMCA hostels would take a soldier, but they wouldn’t take a soldier with a lady friend. I was a bit puzzled, so I went up to a policeman outside Victoria Station and I explained the position and that I had to catch a train at 4.30 in the morning to go back to France. I’d got all my kit – rifle, pack and everything. I said, ‘I’ve got my wife with me and we’ve got to get in somewhere for the night. Can you suggest anywhere for me to go?’ So he looked at me and he looked at my wife, and he must have seen that it was all right. He said, ‘Don’t worry, chum. I’ve got a friend just round the corner. I’ll get you fixed up all right.’
He took me to his friend round the corner, knocked on the door, had a chin-wag with him and got us a bedroom. So there we stayed for the night. I was up at four in the morning to get to Victoria and my wife came with me to see me off to France. I didn’t get my honeymoon for two years, because it was two years before I got another leave. So I had my honeymoon two years after I got married, and there’s not many men can say that!
Returning to the front after several months in the trenches, fresh from the subsidiary attack to Neuve Chapelle, Gordon Fisher was an old soldier now. The young soldiers of Kitchener’s Army were still impatiently waiting to go, but there was little sign of their going.
Kitchener’s Mob no longer presented the raggle-taggle appearance of the early months of the war when the word ‘mob’ had all too aptly described them. It could hardly have been otherwise, for the army had been quite unable to clothe the first hundred thousand, let alone the second or the third, and for months they had worn the same civilian clothes they had worn on enlistment. They ranged from natty city suits and bowler hats to flannels worn with blazers and summer boaters, to shabby working clothes worn with mufflers and cloth caps, and even the best of them had long ago worn out and been replaced with uniforms of navy-blue material which frequently led to soldiers being mistaken for guards or even porters at railway stations. The government had placed large orders for khaki, and meanwhile scoured mills and factories all over the country to buy up stocks of whatever cloth was available. The stock of blankets was quickly exhausted and when they ran out Welsh troops were issued with bales of Brethyn Llwyd and Scottish troops with lengths of Harris Tweed to keep them warm. The mills were working overtime, turning out khaki serge by the mile, but buttons were another problem, for most factories which had produced them had now been turned over to the manufacture of munitions, and even working shifts around the clock it was many months before the remaining button manufacturers were able to meet the demand. So Kitchener’s Army had soldiered on, compensated by a clothing allowance of threepence a day, wearing out their own shoe leather for want of army boots, patching, darning, and inexpertly cobbling together holes that inevitably appeared in elbows and knees of suits that had never been intended for wear when crawling about fields and hedges or to come into contact with barbed wire. Now that the hated Kitchener’s blue had given way to soldierly khaki photographers across the country were doing a brisk trade in photos to send home. Many of the soldiers who posed proudly in front of some classical studio backdrop or beside a tasteful marble column supporting a drooping aspidistra, still had no belt or cap, for the equipment arrived in dribs and drabs. They also lacked rifles and, in the army’s view, that was much more serious. It was shortage of rifles that was holding Kitchener’s Army back, for, without them, training could not be completed.
The stock of efficient rifles had long ago been depleted to make up the losses of the early months and to supply the Territorial battalions who had first call on them, and the best that could be done for Kitchener’s Mob was to supply them, if they were lucky, with obsolete practice rifles. They were useless for action, and not much better for training, but they were better than nothing, even if there was no ammunition to go with them. Lacking ammunition, the hard-pressed instructors did their best to carry out such musketry training as could be done without it. The Tommies learned the care of arms, handling of arms, the theory of musketry and the mechanism of the rifle. They did visual training in the open, practised judging distances and drilled for endless hours on fire discipline and control. They did everything that could possibly be done with a rifle except fire it, and when service rifles finally arrived there were usually only enough for one, or, at most, two companies. One by one, after a few days’ serious practice, the companies were sent off to fire a musketry course and, to no one’s astonishment, the results were seldom spectacular. By the end of March not many Battalions had completed musketry training and, until it had, no Battalion had a hope of being pronounced fit for active service.
But the men were fitter than they had been in their lives despite the rigours of training in all weathers, frequently returning to bell tents that were often far from weather-proof. The healthy, outdoor life had hardened them and the drill, the digging, the marches, the football matches and a dozen other kinds of unaccustomed exercise had brought them to a peak of physical fitness. Boys who had enlisted straight from school had broadened out and added inches to their height, pasty-faced office workers were bronzed and hearty, professional men could dig and heave with the best of them, the under-nourished filled out on the plain but plentiful diet, plump sedentary workers became lean and wiry. Even athletes who had prided themselves on their fitness attained greater heights of prowess on army sports fields than they had ever achieved before the war. The scarecrow mob of the previous autumn could now reasonably be described as ‘a fine body of men’.
In the opinion of Kitchener’s Mob, marching occupied the minds of their commanders to an obsessive degree. They had marched for literally hundreds of miles in the course of their training, starting with gentle route-marches of five or six miles, gradually increasing in length and difficulty, carrying more and more equipment, until now they could march for up to twenty miles with a full pack and ‘ammunition’, represented by slabs of lead cut to fit the empty pouches. These were known throughout the army as ‘Kitchener’s Chocolate’ and the passage of a Battalion along a long march was easy to spot by the trail of hated ‘chocolate bars’ discarded by weary Tommies resting at the roadside.
Capt. Sir F. G. Kenyon, KCB, Inns of Court OTC (TF).
March discipline was important. The foundation of steady marching is observing the regulation hundred and twenty paces to the minute. This was practised in company work as well as when the whole Battalion was together and it was kept to, however short the distance. Guides were expected to check their step by looking at their watches at frequent intervals and not to drop the pace more than necessary going up hills. When a company has learnt to keep the regulation rate without distress and as a matter of habit, the foundation of good marching is laid, and the actual distance covered will not matter, provided the men are in reasonably good training.
We also observed march discipline in the matter of regular halts and intervals and, of course, in forming up the column again and keeping to the proper side of the road etc. The men liked to sing but, in that respect, they certainly did not come up to the best standards. The singing was usually spasmodic and none too good! If they had taken the trouble to learn the words of songs, and not merely fragments of choruses, singing on the march would have been far more inspiriting. It was surprising what a large proportion of men could continue to sing contentedly with the beat on the wrong foot, or even attempted to march to rag-time!
But the Tommies were oblivious to such criticisms and carried on singing in their own sweet way. It was their only means of asserting their individual feelings and by now some of the songs were very individual indeed. One Battalion found the tune of ‘Diamonds in Amsterdam’ convenient to march to, but their version, they believed, was an improvement on the original.
I’ve seen maggots in Tickler’s Jam,
Tickler’s Jam, Tickler’s Jam,
I’ve seen maggots in Tickler’s Jam
Crawling round.
And if you get some inside your tum
They’ll crawl through
Till they bite your bum,
So watch what you’re sucking
Next time you eat fucking
Old Tickler’s Jam!
It was crude enough to bring a blush to the cheeks of some younger soldiers in whose schoolboy vocabulary ‘Drat it!’ had ranked as a strong expletive. But there was safety in numbers, and with repetition their scruples were gradually overcome until they were singing as lustily as the rest. But the battalion reserved this ditty to enliven marches along quiet country roads where there was little danger of offending the prudish ears of civilians who chanced to be in earshot.
The Tommies of Kitchener’s Army were popular with civilians. They cheered them as they marched in interminable columns through country towns and villages. They hung around camps watching them at drill, at bayonet practice or marching in formation, and on open land and commons the sight of Tommies digging and revetting trench systems was a popular spectator sport. They dug trenches the length and breadth of the country and they had been digging them for months. By spring there were eight miles of trenches on Berkhamsted Common alone, and it was rumoured that there were more trenches in Great Britain than there were in France.
The civilian population took the Tommies to their hearts and, whenever they got the chance, showered them with kindnesses.
Pte. A. Simpson, 5th Bn. (TF), Yorkshire Regt.
As we got our khaki we became available for guard duties outside our billets. I did one outside the Beechwood Hotel, and a few days later I was detailed for another one. We were only supposed to do one guard a week, so I saw the sergeant-major and told him I’d already done one guard that week. ‘What!’ he said ‘And you’ve been selected again?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you must be extra good! Do this one and then I’ll see you get another.’ That was the beginning and end of complaining in the army for me!
If it had been a guard on the big house in Cold Bath Road I wouldn’t have complained – no one did! The house was used for isolating new recruits who arrived suffering from scabies, and an old lady in a very large house opposite used to send a servant to a fish and chip shop every night for four fish and chip suppers for the guard corporal and three men. On Sundays when the shop was closed she sent sandwiches across, and often there was a brand new pair of socks for each man. No, we didn’t mind a bit doing that guard.
Every night some Harrogate churches put on free suppers and provided free writing materials and rest-rooms for the troops, and there were no inquiries about your religion, if any. These kindnesses were particularly welcome to chaps like myself because I made an allotment to my mother which left me with only sixpence a day to provide Blanco, postage stamps, razor blades, and so on.
2nd Lt. W. Cushing, 9th Bn., Norfolk Regt.
In May we went by train to Reigate and spent a most delightful fortnight digging trenches on the hill outside the town. We were under the impression that they were for the defence of London, and a sorry bulwark they would have been! But the whole exercise was an excuse for a good time. We were billeted most comfortably, the men in good houses and the officers with the high society of the town. Two of my colleagues, Glanfield and Everett, were billeted with some well-to-do people in a fine house, really a mansion, and I was invited to dine there one evening. I can’t remember their name, but I do remember their lavish hospitality! Champagne, port, liqueurs, and goldfinger bowls. My God, those gold finger bowls! I stared helplessly at mine, wondering what they were and what we were supposed to do with them. (Glanfield and Everett were equally at a loss, because usually we all dined in the mess.) We were saved by the charming daughter of the house. She must have seen that we were embarrassed, because she whispered to a servant and had them quietly removed.
Rfn. W. Worrell, 12th Bn., Rifle Brig.
People were awfully kind. I was invited to tea with Lady Haliburton, but I’ve never had such an awkward afternoon in my life. I’d thought to get a good tuck-in and that there would be other people there, but I was all on my own in this fancy drawing room, and there was even a footman serving out the tea. I sat on the edge of a little chair trying to balance a tea-cup and eat these dainty little sandwiches, with a lady old enough to be my grandmother asking me questions and me trying to make polite replies and not to talk with my mouth full. I thought, ‘No more of this for me!’ But as I was going out Lady Haliburton said, ‘I don’t think you’ve enjoyed yourself, have you?’ I said, ‘Oh yes I have, and thank-you-very-much-for-having-me’ – like a well brought up lad. She gave a half-smile and said, ‘Perhaps you’d like to come back next Sunday and have tea with the servants?’ So out of politeness I had to say yes, and out of politeness I had to go back the next week.
They took me down to this big kitchen where there was the cook and the other maids and they made an immense fuss of me. They said, ‘What would you like for tea?’ I said, ‘Can I have anything I like?’ The cook said, ‘Yes, of course you can. What would you like?’ I said, ‘Well, I’d like smoked haddock with an egg on it’ – thinking I’d beat them! – but she said, ‘Yes, certainly.’ So I had poached haddock with an egg on it, and I don’t know what-all after that. We had a very jolly time, and I also had a large bag of home-made cakes to take back with me.
Pte. Η. N. Edwards, 6th (Bristol City) Bn., Gloucester Regt.
When we moved to Danbury in Essex I was billeted with two other blokes on some very nice people called Lancaster. I shared a room with a chap whose father was the man who cleaned out the dustbins in Bristol. You met all sorts in the army. The other chap was a bit of a snob and he rather looked down on this chap, Billy Williams, but I found out that he was as nice a chap under the skin as anybody else and we mucked in together and got on like smoke.
Mrs Lancaster was very good to us and looked after us really well. She always gave us an onion pudding before the main meal on the Sunday. It was a long roly-poly suet pudding with plenty of onion in it. She’d cut you a good thick slice of that and pour gravy on it. It was an old tradition in big families, because if you had that you wouldn’t eat so much meat, but we loved these onion puddings. We thought they were marvellous and, of course, with the exercise and all the fresh air you were getting, you were permanently ravenous. But she’d always put on a meal for us, though the billeting money couldn’t have gone far. Oh, she was good to us! We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves there. When we left we clubbed together to buy Mrs Lancaster a present, just some small thing but she was ever so pleased. Many’s the time when we got to France, sitting in some dirty old trench, nothing but bully beef and biscuits, we’d say, ‘Remember those onion puddings at Mrs Lancaster’s?’ We often used to think of them. We could have done with one then!
If the problem of housing the troops had not been entirely solved it was at least much improved since the chaotic early days of mass enlistment when they had squeezed sardine-like into camps and barracks, town-halls, public houses, even race-courses, sleeping in grandstands, on floors, on billiard tables and occasionally at first in the open. Those who were in private billets usually came off best, and even though the majority had moved into camps and the tents were gradually being replaced by huts, private billets were still in demand as Kitchener’s Mob moved around the country. There were few landladies who failed to give full value for the billeting allowance of seventeen shillings and sixpence a week, supplying hearty meals, washing clothes, darning socks and generally mothering their ‘boys’. Some even rose from their beds in the small hours to brew cocoa or Bovril for a Tommy returning wet and chilled from a night exercise and to stoke up the kitchen fire to dry his clothes for the morning.
Now that Kitchener’s Army had been licked into shape and equipment was trickling through, training was more intensive. There were night exercises at least once a week and they were not beloved by the troops, divided into companies, one to ‘attack’ the other, stumbling across dark countryside to some unknown rendezvous and not infrequently losing their way. The night on which novice guides led them on a compass bearing was not easily forgotten by one half-Battalion for the guides had omitted to allow for the difference between true and magnetic north. It was a night of torrential rain and the unfortunate Tommies were obliged to wait in the inadequate shelter of a hedge until the error was corrected. This took a long, long time and, as one unfortunate observed, ‘It’s hard to say how long we were held up – perhaps an hour, perhaps two – but I do know that, as we stood there in the downpour, everyone had ample time to reflect on how much he was enjoying himself.’ When they finally arrived hours late at the barn they were supposed to ‘capture’, the ‘enemy’ who held it had long ago succumbed to cold and boredom and they were all fast asleep. Their opponents were in no mood to wake them gently and the free-for-all that ensued was not precisely the ‘attack’ their Commanding Officer had had in mind.
But with the arrival of weapons, training was becoming more sophisticated and more interesting.
Pte. Η. N. Edwards 6th (Bristol City) Bn., Gloucester Regt.
I joined the machine-gun section when we were at Danbury. At first we only had two machine-guns, and one of them was an ancient old crock. They reckoned it had been used at the Battle of Omdurman! But it had been converted to fire 303 ammunition and it weighed a ton. We all tried to dodge carrying that one because it weighed at least ten pounds more than the other. That was the worst side of it – humping round and carrying these heavy guns and tripods. The glamour side was firing them and we were very proud of ourselves when we got to that stage. But first we had lectures and we had to study and learn all sorts of things, which was easy enough if you had some knowledge of mathematics. But I always remember one occasion when we were learning the use of the clinometer. Now, this simply means that if you’re carrying out direct fire, you put this thing on the gun, and you move it, and it registers so many degrees up, so then you can work out how far your bullets will go parabolically. So the officer who was instructing us took us through it a few times and then he left us to practise working it out. He said, ‘Carry on, Sergeant, will you?’ And Sergeant Mawley looked absolutely baffled and said, ‘I’m very sorry, sir, I don’t think I can do this. I’m a greengrocer in civil life.’ I always remember him saying that! He didn’t know anything about mathematics at all. Poor chap, we simply roared with laughter.
In the well-organised peacetime army it took three years to train a soldier to the standard of full-fledged efficiency which the men of Kitchener’s armies, grappling with every conceivable shortage and difficulty, were now expected to approach in a mere eight months. But they were men of a very different stamp from most pre-war recruits, drive by poor circumstances or unemployment to enlist. The majority of Kitchener’s men had joined up for very different reasons. They were fitter and stronger, they were enthusiastic and keen to learn, and the standard of intelligence was generally high, for the rank and file was made up of men from every stratum of Britain’s rigidly structured society. And they were doing well.
Many were professional men who had been encouraged to enlist in the first heady wave of recruitment and it was a matter of annoyance to some in authority that there were numbers of men serving in the ranks who might have been more usefully employed as officers and, since Commanding Officers were reluctant to weaken their Battalions by recommending their best men, the pleas of the War Office for suitable candidates fell on deaf ears. The supply of officers was a headache but although they were desperately needed the hierarchy at the War Office was not yet prepared to compromise on the rules that had governed the granting of commissions to career officers of the Regular Army in peacetime. Although a few exceptional men were occasionally commissioned from the ranks, the military authorities held to the belief that, with rare exceptions, the qualities of leadership and refinement required by potential army officers could only be nurtured in the public schools. In the present emergency the War Office was not prepared to grant even temporary commissions to men who had not enjoyed the benefit of a public school education.
2nd Lt. W. Cushing.
I applied for a commission on the strength of three years in the Cambridge OTC and in due course I was appointed Temporary Second Lieutenant in the 9th Service Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment. I joined my unit at the Old Ship Hotel, Brighton. The officers were billeted in the hotel, which also served as Battalion HQ. In the orderly room I found the CO., Colonel Shewen, and also Captain Stracey. They were very official, but very courteous – so courteous that they didn’t even rebuke me when I failed to salute the Colonel – and, what’s more, I even omitted to salute the Brigadier General when I had to report to him. Those officers must have said, ‘Upon my word, that’s a green one!’ Their judgement was true, because the Cambridge Officer Training Corps had not fitted me in any way to be a commissioned officer, and this fact was sharply brought home to me in the following weeks. I got very little training that was of any value.*
True, I shouted words of command at an obedient line of strange faces under the eye of a dear old boy. He was a white-haired superannuated sergeant-major and I suppose he had volunteered to come back to help in training the ‘awkward squad’, for he was far too old to fight. I can still hear him calling to the platoon in his thick Norfolk accent: ‘Give me your attention naow, while the orfcer ‘ere is a-larning of ‘is wark.’
I had no command of my own until I went to France. When I did eventually join the regiment overseas I was given a platoon and was expected not merely to bellow commands on parade, but to know how to feed, clothe and billet sixty men, know all their names and characters, keep a platoon roll, attend to their wants, be responsible for their efficiency and the good order of their arms and equipment – clothing, boots, gas-masks, entrenching-tools and a dozen oddments – and also lead them through the discomforts and dangers of trench warfare. My training fitted me for none of these things.
But the apprentice officers were shaping up and what they lacked in experience they made up for in enthusiastic application. As a matter of course, in the leisurely days of peacetime, army officers in home stations spent almost as much time on leave, on the hunting field and in sporting and social activities as they spent in performing their regimental duties. There was a vast gulf between them and the men they commanded, and the day-to-day running of infantry platoons was, more often than not, left entirely in the hands of an NCO.
These regular officers were not dilettantes, and they were certainly not amateurs. The army picked the cream of all applicants, the entrance examination was stiff, the training at Sandhurst or Woolwich was arduous and, even when a subaltern was commissioned into a regiment, promotion came slowly and had to be worked for. The high standard of professionalism in the Regulars had proved its worth again and again since the start of the war, and the Old Army had been decimated in the course of it. There were few enough Regular officers left to hold the fort at the front. There were certainly none to spare for the New Armies and their lack of trained officers was critical. Old officers, often long into comfortable retirement, had been brought back as Commanding Officers and adjutants of New Army battalions consisting of a thousand men and a dozen or so junior officers, temporarily commissioned, who were as inexperienced as the men themselves. Often they were the sons of family friends or acquaintances, chosen by the Colonel himself who then put their names forward for temporary commissions. On his recommendation they were usually granted.
But the retired Colonels and Majors were often pleasantly surprised. Although the new subalterns could be shockingly ignorant of traditional ‘mess manners’ they took a far closer interest in their men than the remote beings who had officered Battalions in peacetime. Junior officers spent eight hours a day with their platoons, they shared the rigours of route-marches, worked far into the night to master the arts of signalling, of map-reading, of calculating distances, and the manifold skills of soldiering that would enable them to keep at least one step ahead of their men and help them in their labours. They took a personal pride in their platoons and it was every subaltern’s ambition to make his particular platoon the best in his battalion. And if they occasionally made mistakes, if now and again a young officer lost his way and inadvertently trudged his disgruntled platoon round three sides of a sixteen-mile square, if he was slow to report defaulters and inclined to be soft on discipline, these faults would be rectified with experience. Meanwhile, the trust and esprit de corps that was gradually building up between the officers and men of Kitchener’s Army as they trained and worked together made up for a great deal.
Most public schools had Officers’ Training Corps, and they were popular with schoolboys whether or not they intended to make a career in the army. On one or two afternoons a week they marched and stamped and ‘shunned and formed fours, practised elementary rifle drill, and generally played at being soldiers under the instruction of some ex-army sergeant, who usually doubled as the school’s PT instructor. The cadets enjoyed field days and in the summer term weekend ‘army’ camps provided a welcome break from school routine, even though the ‘officers’ were only their own schoolmasters masquerading in khaki. Most men who could claim to have had even such rudimentary training in a public school or university OTC were automatically given commissions.
But the Officers’ Training Corps of the Inns of Court was different. It was one of the oldest, certainly the most respected, and when the Territorial Force came into being in 1908 the Inns of Court was the only OTC to be recognised officially and embodied ‘on the strength’. For many years after it was formed in 1859 (as the Inns of Court Rifle Volunteers) it was composed entirely of barristers and students at the bar but, of recent years, it had opened its doors to any university graduate. When the war began the Inns of Court OTC was swamped by new applicants and by past members anxious to re-enlist, and for some time was the only military unit devoted full-time to the training of officers. By the end of the war more than ten thousand men had passed through its ranks and been commissioned.
They made excellent officers.
Lt. Col Ε. H. L. Errington, VD, Inns of Court OTC (TF).
Unquestionably our own NCOs did not as a rule have the snap or smartness of the pre-war Regular. Although we tried to keep a certain number rather longer than the usual period, a man generally became an NCO simply as part of his training and, of course, went away as soon as he was fit for a commission. If we had been working on the Sandhurst system, the want of experience in the NCOs might have been a weak point, but our object was not perfect drill, nor were we dealing with boys, or trying to develop a particular type. Our object was a high standard of character. We were dealing with men, and trying to produce officers according to their individual characteristics, and the fact that all of us – officers, NCOs and men – were all of the same class was an enormous asset. The object of an officer’s training must be to equip him mentally and physically to play his part in the realities of war. In the military profession failure is paid for in the lives of others.
If our NCOs were inexperienced in the military sense, they were not inexperienced in life or ignorant of the meaning of true discipline. Above all, they had the unfailing advice and guidance of their Regimental and Company Sergeant-Majors, and the CSMs were all men who had declined to take commissions for the good of the Corps. CSM Walters, for example, was an old and famous ‘Varsity blue. He was also a born soldier and to see him deal with his company was a lesson in the art of training. He was feared by the slackers, adored by every man of backbone, and a constant source of joy to me as Commanding Officer.
There were few other battalions in the British Army which boasted a sergeant who quoted Cato (and in Latin!) to raw recruits on the parade ground or, when they assembled for a night exercise, addressed them in the words of Catullus, ‘Vesper adest, juvenes, consurgite.’* There were not many Battalions who had a quartermaster-sergeant who amused himself off-duty by turning King’s Regulations into perfect iambics, and there was none in which so many legal minds were bent on dissecting these sacrosanct military laws in search of legal niceties that would admit of novel and more advantageous interpretations. There was very little ‘crime’, as the army knew it, but on the rare occasions when some miscreant was brought before the Colonel this added a certain spice to the proceedings.
The fertile minds of the rank and file frequently came up with imaginative explanations to excuse their misdemeanours. Two men charged with over-staying weekend leave could not deny that they had missed the train, for an NCO of the Corps had seen them racing at the last minute towards the buffet, and madly racing back again as the train steamed out taking their kit with it. But their ‘defence’ was original. A band playing on the station had struck up ‘God Save The King’. As soldiers and as patriots they had no alternative but to stop and stand to attention, even if it meant missing the train – which, ‘to their deep regret’, had been the case. The Colonel did not believe a word of it, but he secretly admired their ingenuity, and let them off with a warning.
There was one member of the Corps with whom neither excuses nor legal falderols would wash, and only the most foolhardy private would have thought of trying it on. Regimental Sergeant-Major Burns was a Regular soldier of the Scots Guards, who had been appointed to the Corps a year earlier. His job was to lick the embryonic officers into shape and, barristers or not, he would stand no nonsense from anyone if he was the Lord Chief Justice himself. No one, from the Colonel downwards, ever dreamed of questioning his judgement or his authority. RSM Burns was an awesome figure, and well he knew it.
Lt. T. S. Wynn, 2nd Bn., Suffolk Regt.
The dominating character for the rank and file was undoubtedly the Regimental Sergeant-Major. Burns was everywhere. From the outset he gave us raw recruits a precise idea of our unworthiness to be members of the Corps, and of his great and singular condescension in instructing us. It was he who first expounded to us the great truth that although we might, by some fluke of fate, become lieutenants, or even captains and majors, we should not – we could not – become a real RSM. His voice spread desolation all over the parade ground. His eye always seemed to light on us cowering in the rear ranks and spotted a chilled hand straying into a greatcoat pocket. He was the best representative of the Regular Army that some of us ever met either before, during or after the war. It was even rumoured among gullible privates that RSM Burns was a member of the Army Council, and some of us could well believe it!
Capt. Sir F. G. Kenyon.
Every man entered the Corps as a private, and learned his recruit, squad and company drill as such. What differentiated the Corps from an ordinary infantry battalion came at a later stage in their training when the men began to learn to drill others, so the handling of sections and platoons, and even companies, was not confined to NCOs but given to every man in turn. They were never allowed to forget that they were learning to be privates so that they might learn to be officers. And as the NCOs gained experience they were given command of platoons and half companies in field exercises, with officers accompanying them to observe and assist or criticise later.
Lt. C. S. Wynn.
Battalion field days were an adventure, and if you had a motor cycle and a job as an orderly, it was a joyous adventure. But even lacking this, there were all kinds of possibilities. For instance, you might find yourself suddenly placed in command of a section or a platoon or even of a company. Then you learned in the bitter school of experience why things went wrong in a battle. You learned the importance of information (even ‘negative’ information) and of ‘keeping in touch’, and you learned from your own experience how terribly exhausting a ten-mile rearguard action can be to heavily laden men, sustained on bread and cheese. And I recall the Company Sergeant-Major pointing out very effectively that ‘fire orders’ lustily given and quickly carried out were not likely to produce good results if the sights were not adjusted! Of course you might more often be a mere ‘man’ (as distinct from an ‘officer’) and your lot might be to tramp round the Beacon in the snow, or attack it on a boiling hot day. But here again the gods might be kind, and there were worse things in life than being ‘reserves’ behind a sunny hedge for hours on end, knowing (without much sense of loss!) that you probably wouldn’t share in the glory of the battle. These excursions gave us heaps of practice in comparing the ground with the map, which can’t possibly be taught by lectures, and later on at the Somme, or at Arras or up the Menin Road, there was many an officer who was able to apply the lessons he’d learned with the Inns of Court, and was thankful that he had.
The War Office looked kindly on the Inns of Court and gave them a free hand. Theirs was not only the most effective means of training officers, it was also the most economical. Until they were commissioned, the men trained and were paid as rankers, and the cost of training a private on a three-month intensive course was a fraction of the cost of training temporarily commissioned officers who went straight into service Battalions to pick up such training as they could from their overworked Colonels and Adjutants.
If the OTC was in favour with the War Office, it was even more popular with distracted Commanding Officers trying to build up Battalions of the New Army with a sadly deficient complement of subalterns to assist them. Week after week, as recruits became efficient and progressed to the ‘special instruction class’, harassed Colonels travelled down to their training ground at Berkhamsted to look them over and pick out likely candidates as officers for their battalions. The demand was huge and even though the Inns of Court was constantly recruiting, it was hard to keep up with it.
Kitchener’s Army was not quite ready to go to war, but it soon would be and the War Office was already looking ahead. It was evident that many more men would be needed, recruiting figures had been tending to tail off, and at the end of March the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee launched a National Patriotic Campaign to bring laggards into the ranks. There were public meetings and special appeals during patriotic shows at cinemas and theatres where some soldiers even appeared on stage in rousing flag-waving finales. Kitchener’s Army, which now, in its own view, was fine-honed to military perfection and was sick of kicking its heels, was only too happy to help, and when battalions in training were canvassed for volunteers they were seldom slow to come forward. Recruiting made a welcome change from drills and parades and successful ‘recruiters’ were given small cash rewards and sometimes privilege leave, but it was not always a sinecure. The fledgling soldiers were immaculately turned out in new unblemished khaki, and when they knocked on doors to inquire if the household included a man of military age they sometimes received a dusty answer from the lady of the house. ‘My boy is already out in France. When are you going?’ It was a sore point.
Cpl. G. R. Daniels, 12th (Bermondsey) Bn., East Surrey Regt.
I had just attained the rank of corporal and one day the RSM on the parade ground said to me, ‘I hear you can do a bit of spouting.’ I assured him that I was never lost for a word or two and he promptly detailed me the following morning to march with thirty men led by the recruiting band from the town-hall and halt at various points in the district. When people stopped to listen to the music I was to address the crowd in general about the need for men and at the same time my men were to go round individually and tackle likely recruits. I felt extremely cocky leading my contingent at the head of a first-rate military band as we proudly marched up Jamaica Road, but my return to quarters was a different matter. I had lost no less than twenty-five of my thirty men. They’d had the nifty idea that they could best find suitable recruits in public houses and they had fallen by the wayside!
However we did have some successes. We were all well used to wearing our khaki uniforms and puttees by now, except for one poor chap called Ben Pendry. He was a stocky little man with extremely broad shoulders and a torso that by rights should have been attached to much longer legs and nothing had been found to fit him in all the stock of clothing we’d received. Poor old Pendry had to parade every day in a black suit and bowler hat, but we even managed to turn this to advantage. We used to volunteer to attend evening recruiting drives where people made rousing speeches and lads who were willing to join up were invited to mount the platform and do it there and then. Pendry used to go along in his civvies and mingle as one of the crowd and when the speaker asked for volunteers, he would dramatically rush forward up to the platform to set an example. I can’t say how often Pendry enlisted in the army before he got his khaki. It must have been a dozen times!
Now that they felt sure that their long delayed departure for France must be fast approaching some soldiers found other constructive ways of passing their leisure hours. Several men of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders took advantage of a local schoolmaster’s offer to teach themselves simple French. He believed in learning by rote and he favoured kindergarten methods. He did not trouble these awkward pupils with the complicated rules of grammar and construction, nor did he confuse them with French spelling. He chalked up useful phrases in phonetics on the blackboard and the soldiers laboriously printed them into notebooks and learned them by heart to recite in ‘class’. It was quite a sight to see the husky Highlanders squeezed into desks designed for ten-year-olds and earnestly chanting parrot-wise:
Ji sweez onglay
Amee onglay
Jiday zeer
kelki shows a mongjay
They rather enjoyed it until they discovered that Onglay’ meant English, and took offence. There were a few other difficulties for the teacher found it almost impossible to understand the Scottish tongue of his pupils, and this problem was mutual. One of the soldiers remarked, ‘I can manage the French all right. It’s the English the master talks I canna understand!’
The soldiers were hoping very soon to be able to put their newly acquired linguistic skills into action, and to get into action themselves. As the spring days lengthened and there was still no sign of marching orders, impatience mounted. The 10th Royal Fusiliers invented a sarcastic parody of a popular recruiting song.
On Sunday they say we’ll go to Flanders,
On Monday we’re down for Nice or Cannes
On Tuesday we smile
When they hint at the Nile,
On Wednesday the Sudan.
On Thursday it’s Malta or Gibraltar,
On Friday they’ll send us to Lahore,
But on Saturday we’re willing
To bet an even shilling
We’re here for the duration of the war!
It brought the house down at camp concerts and it reflected the sentiments of virtually every Tommy in Kitchener’s Army.
Chapter 12
On the door of a broken-down barn a little way behind the front, some wag with nothing better to do had chalked a notice: ‘LOST, STOLEN OR STRAYED. KITCHENER’S ARMY. £5 REWARD TO FINDER.’ This was considered to be a good joke and similar notices, some of them less polite, sprouted up all over the place in villages behind the line. But if the promised flood of men had not yet arrived to help the troops in France, there was at least a hearteningly steady trickle of Territorial Battalions. Their arrival and the coming of spring had lifted everyone’s spirits. The air was warming up, the ground was drying out, there were buds on the trees and in places, when the sun shone, Plugstreet Wood took on an air of sylvan beauty. The men who had newly arrived in this quiet sector to take up soldiering in earnest found life tolerably pleasant, if not comfortable, with just a dash of danger to make it interesting. They learned to beware of snipers and to keep their heads down. They learned the importance of silence, to be vigilant on sentry duty, to take bombardments in their stride. But the bombardments were predictable, for the Germans shot ‘by the clock’ and, barring occasional accidents, casualties were light. There were listening patrols to spice things up and after dark there were exciting forays into No Man’s Land, close up to the German trenches. Ostensibly the purpose of patrols was to gather information. Their real purpose, as often as not, was to satisfy adventurous new officers in their desire to make their presence felt and show the enemy what was what.
CSM W. J. Coggins, D.C.M. 4th Bn., Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry (TF).
I used to go out with my company commander, Lieutenant Pickford. He was a master at Brackley High School and he was a silly sod really when it came to patrolling. Of course, usually you would go out at night and, of course, you were supposed to volunteer for these jobs. But he came to me one morning not long after we got there and he said, ‘I want you to come out with me this morning.’ It was thick with fog, you couldn’t see the German line and it was more or less an order. I was only a bugler then and I’d be just turned nineteen, because I’d joined the Ox. and Bucks. Territorials in 1912 as a bugle boy aged sixteen, so I wasn’t going to argue with the officer. I said, ‘All right, sir.’ He said, ‘I’m going to give them a bit of music over there this morning.’ I thought, ‘What the devil with?’ I thought he wanted me to blow the bugle or something, but he said, ‘Look, I’ve got an old gramophone here and some old records.’ I don’t know where he’d got them from. Of course there were old broken-up houses around so maybe someone had scrounged them. He said, ‘I’m going to get out as close as I can to that German trench and shove some records on for them.’
Well, it was a damn silly thing to do, but I was game, so off we went over the top and out into the fog. It was a good long way, it must have been nearly four hundred yards, but we were able to walk most of it because the fog hid us from the Germans. When we got maybe twenty or thirty yards from the German line we stopped and put down this gramophone I’d been humping, and it was a fair weight, because it was one of these old things with a big horn on it. We didn’t wind it up (he’d done that before we left the trench) so he fished out a record and put it on and set it going. I can’t remember what it was, some old scratchy band music, but the Germans must have got a fair old turn hearing it blasting out through this fog-horn thing almost right next to their trench. But we didn’t wait to see. We started back again the way we came, moving a lot faster this time! But on the way the blooming fog lifted and before we got back to our trench a machine-gun opened up. The Germans gave us music all right! You should have heard these machine-gun bullets going swish, swish, swish. We both got down on the ground and you could hear the bullets going straight over the top of you, just above your head. We had to lie there a long time before we managed to get back into the trench and I was glad to get back in one piece.
Lieutenant Pickford was delighted with himself. Not for long though! He got a real bollocking from the Colonel for going out and doing that, because after they fired this machine-gun they started shelling like the devil and two or three of our men were killed. No, he wasn’t popular! It was a silly thing to do and we got no profit out of it. But people did things like that in those days before we learned better sense.
Pte. Η. Κ. Davis, 5th Bn., London Rifle Brig.
We were in Plugstreet Wood for about six months and we had a very quiet time there. Of course we had some casualties, but the main difficulty was keeping awake – especially when you were on these listening posts. In the early days, when the weather was bad, that was no joke. They were a waste of time as far as I was concerned. You’d get out of the trenches at Plugstreet, take the bayonet off your rifle and stick it in the scabbard so as not to catch any light that might be going, put one round in the breech of your rifle with the safety catch on, so that all you want to do is slip it off when you want to fire. The most important thing was a waterproof sheet. You take out the waterproof sheet and you put it on the ground and you lie on this thing and start listening to see if there’s any activity going on. We always went out in pairs and before very long the man I was lying with would be kicking my legs, because I’d fallen asleep. Shortly after that I’d be doing the same to him, so we kept each other awake. But in the winter months – even sometimes when it came to spring – it was usually wet and while the waterproof sheet stopped the water coming up it also stopped the rain from going away, so before very long you were lying in a pool of water. We did three or four hours at a time like that before we crawled back to the trench. There was no way of getting dry. But, never mind, we just had to put up with it.
Even if the old hands were not so inclined to take risks as the newcomers, they were not lacking in bravado. For reasons of their own the Germans had annoyed the London Rifle Brigade by planting a flag in front of their trenches. It flapped at them defiantly from the other side of No Man’s Land two hundred yards away, and this piece of impertinence was not to be borne. It was Corporal Jenkin who crept out on another misty morning to capture the flag and bring it triumphantly back to delight the battalion. Corporal Jenkin was the hero of the day, the flag was sent back as a trophy to London Rifle Brigade Headquarters in Bunhill Row in London and the story went with it. It even reached the ‘Charivari’ column of Punch.
We are not surprised to hear that Corporal Jenkin of the First Battalion London Rifle Brigade succeeded in capturing a German flag at the front. Corporal Jenkin is an artist, and it was only natural that he should make for the Colours.
It all helped to boost morale, but in the spring of 1915 in this quiet sector, morale was high. For once it was the Germans who were in the open. Facing them from their trenches on the edge of the wood with the sheltering depths of the wood itself behind them, with the undamaged trees coming into leaf and even some shell-shattered trunks showing an irrepressible tendency to push out new shoots, there were times when the British Tommies felt that the war was unreal. There were still civilians in the houses and hamlets close to the line and beyond the communication trenches and support lines that ran through the sun-dappled glades, disfigured though they were by barbed wire and the trampling of many feet, there was still a semblance of normal life.
Just two kilometres to the south, where the railway line ran through the village of le Touret, a local train from Armentieres had puffed into the station bound for Comines and all stations east to Courtrai. It had stood there all winter long, and there it would stand for the rest of the war. The wooden carriages were holed and splintered, the engine was bullet-grazed and streaked with rust beneath a grimy coat of mud, with its wheels rusting into the few rails that still lay on the battered track, and coarse weeds poked through the layer of mud and cinders where the track ran into No Man’s Land. The sleepers had long ago been carted off and used to strengthen dug-outs. But every morning on the dot of seven o’clock a railwayman picked his way across the debris and climbed into the signal box. And there he sat, trains or no trains, war or no war, until it was time to go home at six o’clock in the evening. It had apparently not occurred to the railway authorities to pay him off.
Sgt. B. J. Brookes, 1/16 Queen’s Westminster Rifles (County of London Regt.).
The station was about three hundred and fifty yards behind the trenches, and the trenches ran through the village, at right angles to the road. To get to the front line one went into the first house along the road, and a passage had been made by knocking big holes in the side walls of the houses. Two of these houses were still occupied, and were open to the troops as estaminets, and it was quite possible to come out of the trenches for a quarter of an hour to get a glass of beer. In one of these houses two old women and a young girl were carrying on the business (which, needless to say, was very brisk) and it was remarkable how they stood the strain. There was a curve in the road which prevented bullets from hitting the house, but they continually whizzed by as it was easily within range and the people didn’t dare go out of their house. The beer was brought to them by army transport when it was available. I think I can safely say that in no other part of the line were civilians living so near the danger zone.
Now that things had settled down and to all intents and purposes there was a lull in the war and time to take stock, Sir John French was at last able to accede to General Joffre’s request to stretch his line northwards and take over another sector of line from the French. Groups of officers were sent up in advance of their battalions to familiarise themselves with the terrain and to ensure that the changeover would go smoothly. Second Lieutenant Jock Macleod went up with a party of his fellow officers of the 2nd Battalion, the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders.
This was a Regular battalion, but young Jock was not a Regular soldier. He was a student at Cambridge University and, although he had been commissioned into the Camerons at the start of the war, he was a ‘temporary gentleman’ of a few months’ training who, strictly speaking, was not yet qualified to be at the front at all. But the Camerons had suffered heavy casualties, Jock had wangled his way into a draft of reinforcements and, after two months at the front, regarded himself as an old campaigner. He had had an enjoyable time. There had been a few exciting days in the trenches at St Eloi, three weeks away from the line on a machine-gun course and, having passed out with flying colours, he now had his own command as the battalion’s newly appointed machine-gun officer. The battalion had been out at rest when Jock rejoined it, but the machine-gun section had been kept hard at it under the eye of this energetic new officer who was intent on sharing the benefit of his newly acquired expertise. He was having the time of his life and his letters home were virtual paeans of enthusiasm. The only slight disappointment – for Jock was a fastidious young man – had been the discovery that the army did not permit him to send his washing home from the front. But he quite saw the point that, if every officer did so, the weekly passage of several thousand sets of shirts and pants, socks and pyjamas, would overload the mail boats and put an unreasonable strain on the army postal service. In passing on this news to his family, Jock took the trouble to remind them kindly that there was, after all, a war on. To underline this observation he added a gleeful postscript: ‘We shall be going into the trenches any day now.’
It was in his new capacity as machine-gun officer that Jock was included in the reconnoitring party that rode out from Ypres and up the Menin Road to Herenthage Chateau where the French trenches ran through the wooded grounds.* It was a warm spring day and there was hardly a shot to be heard. It seemed almost like a holiday outing and the French treated them as honoured guests.
2nd Lt. J. Macleod, 2nd Bn., Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, 81st Brig., 27 Div.
The first thing that struck you was their light-heartedness. It was most amusing to hear them speaking about the Germans opposite and when a German aeroplane went over they all got excited, and shouted insults, and three officers rushed out of their dug-outs, snatched up rifles from the men, and let fly at them! ‘Of course,’ they explained, ‘it does not derange the German airmen, but it shows what we think about the swine.’ We told them we had orders against firing rifles at aircraft, and they said they had too, but it was necessary to show the Boche that they were only Boche! In the afternoon their seventy-fives began shelling the German trenches, and the French officers in the support line leapt and shouted whenever a good hit was made.
They gave us a capital lunch – mackerel, ragout, bread, cold beef, vin rouge, and café with cognac. Our lunch party was very jolly. Four French and three British officers in a sort of semi-circular redoubt in a wood. On one side a roofless dug-out – the parapet protected with sandbags, and covered with branches – the firing trenches about two hundred yards away through the wood, and the Germans eighty yards further on in the same wood, but invisible from where we were. In the middle of the redoubt was a tree, and tied to it was a magnificent gilded eighteenth-century clock from the ruined chateau nearby. It was bright sunshine and the birds were singing and the officers were seated on the rickety remains of gorgeous chairs from the same place as the clock. Just beyond the wood was the shell-pitted remains of a golf-course, with a roller for the greens drunkenly straddling the side of a shell-hole – and all seven officers were uproariously cheerful, eating tinned mackerel with pocket knives, some off beautiful old china, others off war-worn mess tins. Every fourth tree was a splintered stump, for the Germans gave the wood a daily ration of shells. The French soldiers seemed very pleased with themselves, with us, and with everything. You should have heard them whistling The Merry Widow Waltz’ and The Marseillaise’ after lunch. They were very kind and polite to our little party, and altogether it was an admirable day.
In the afternoon they found some curtain pole rings. ‘Aha!’ they cried. ‘We’ll have a game.’ (Doubtless the poles themselves had gone the way of all curtain poles about here – for
firewood!) They stuck a stick in the ground and played quoits, and insisted on a most dignified major of ours playing too. One man got five out of six, so another rushed to the tree, snatched off the clock and offered it to him with a bow.
They wanted to get some water, and to do so it was necessary to cross an open space. So they chose a man who had been twice wounded already, and sent him, because, they said, it was clear that no German bullet could kill him! They explained this to the chap and he laughed happily at the joke and went across. Every time a bullet went near him everybody – himself included! – shouted with joyous mirth. He returned safely with the water I’m glad to say!
After dusk, as a great favour, they were going to show us one of their flares – magnificent flares they said, that lit up everything like day. After much rummaging they found a flare. Unfortunately, it was not a normal flare, but the SOS signal for artillery to open fire as hard as possible, on account of a dangerous German attack. The artillery, hearing no particularly heavy fire from the trench, telephoned inquiries, and after much jabbering on the telephone the affair ended with roars of happy laughter! If a mistake like that had been made by British infantry, our artillery would have been most annoyed, and sheets and sheets of paper would have been covered with official correspondence, giving reasons (or otherwise!) in writing.
It was a quiet night but after dark the flares went up intermittently, as they always did, all round the German line, and the flickering flashes, the fiery fingers stabbing into the sky to bathe the night in a brief glow of luminescent green, showed the outline of the German positions. Now a sentry on the fire-step of the shadowy trenches, turning cautiously to look about him, could see the arc of the salient etched in fire – stretching in a long straggling semi-circle that hugged the ridges from Hill 60 to Herenthage Wood, crept round to enclose Polygon Wood and Zonnebeke and, far to the left, curved down and trailed into the distance. It marked the line where the remnants of the British Army had stopped and held the Germans in the dying days of autumn, giving ground but holding fast to the beleaguered city of Ypres, fighting to keep open the vital route to the sea and to prevent this last small corner of Belgium from being swallowed up by the Germans as they had swallowed up all the rest.
Over tumultuous centuries of warfare in Flanders, Ypres had been threatened by invaders many times and the thick ramparts that were built round the town to keep them out had been designed by the famous Vauban – prince of military architects. Within its stout walls and ancient gateways Ypres had slumbered in safety and prosperity. Merchants grew rich on the wool trade and built grand houses, gabled and curlicued with statues and carvings. They raised churches, a cathedral, and fine civic buildings round the wide market square where the great Cloth Hall towered over them all. The towers and spires of Ypres could be seen from every part of the salient but they were sadly battered now, for they presented an irresistible target to the German guns.
There were empty spaces in the streets like unsightly gaps in a fine set of teeth, and heaps of rubble where a house once stood. Here and there a whole wall had been blown down to expose some abandoned doll’s-house interior with furniture teetering askew on sagging floors. There were ugly holes that exposed the ancient timbers of steep red-tiled roofs, and broken chimneys that had slithered down and pitched into the cobbled streets. There were sightless windows gazing from the empty shells of burnt-out buildings and others in still habitable houses hastily patched up with wooden panels when the panes and shutters had been blown away. The central tower of the Cloth Hall, blackened by fire, lacked two of its four spires, the embrasures of its high arched windows were innocent of glass and the end wall of the medieval town hall they called the Kleinstadthuis had been blown away. But Ypres still lived and although many of its inhabitants had fled during the November bombardment, much of the population hung grimly on. The town was far from empty and large numbers of the refugees who had flooded in as the Germans advanced across the surrounding countryside had simply stopped there, squatting in the ruins and abandoned houses because they had nowhere else to go.
People managed as best they could, taking their chance by day when stray shells fell from time to time, retiring at night to cellars for fear of heavier bombardments. There was business to be done and there was a large new clientele for the town was stiff with soldiers – headquarters troops, engineers and signallers who lived like troglodytes in the catacomb passages of the old ramparts, troops passing through and briefly resting on their way to the line on the salient, sightseeing groups from nearby rest-camps and billets, curious to see the heroic town for themselves. The fame of Ypres had spread and its name was fast becoming a byword in the British Army.
For the permanent inhabitants life in Ypres was far from easy. The town water supply was drawn from two lakes, Zillebeke to the east and Dickebusch to the west, and they were so polluted – by exploding shells, by rubbish and ordure and, in the case of Zillebeke, even with bodies – that an epidemic of typhoid was unavoidable. It had been raging now since January and despite the valiant efforts of the Friends Ambulance Unit, the nuns at the convent, the RAMC, and the town authorities themselves, it was raging still. Vaccination was compulsory and more than seven thousand people had been treated – almost five thousand of them at the convent alone. Water barrels were set up at the entrance to the town where the road to Menin and Zonnebeke led through the ramparts and people were forbidden on pain of a heavy fine to use water from any other source. But the epidemic could hardly be contained and every day there were fresh cases. It was rife among the unfortunate refugees, crammed into the doubtful shelter of ruined houses, living in unsanitary conditions. Lacking running water, with no means of washing and often with no possessions but the clothes on their backs, they went down like flies. The refugees were the despair of the town authorities. They could not force them to move on, they could not provide them with adequate shelter, and while they could do their best to ensure that they drank clean purified water, they could not oblige them to change their clothes for clean garments they did not possess.
But at night, when the inhabitants went to ground, when the skeletons of towers and turrets stood silhouetted against the tremulous horizon where the flares flashed and distant guns boomed, when the trundling of wheels and the tramp of the troops echoed across the cobbled square, there was a ghostly grandeur about the place that deeply impressed the soldiers passing through.
Capt. B. McKinnell, 10th (Scottish) Bn., King’s Liverpool Regt. (TF), 2 Brig.,1st Div.
A splendid march to Ypres, everybody feeling awfully fit. What a strange sight, a clear sky, new moon, and half the Battalion in kilts lying on the square in front of the famous Cloth Hall, every three or four men clustering round a candle and drinking hot tea supplied by our field cookers. The ruins make a most impressive sight. Silently glides past a battalion of Frenchmen in their quaint uniforms and heavy paraphernalia, which they are invariably encumbered with. Then our pals the Lincolns pass and we get up and follow, our men singing at the top of their voices all the way back.
From 26 March to 4 April we stayed in Ypres and had beautiful weather all the time. I took the opportunity of so much extra leisure to visit all the most interesting sights. Bullen and I climbed up what remains of the Cloth Hall and managed to get up above the clock into one of the small turrets, getting a splendid view of the surrounding country. Some jackdaws were building there and were very much perturbed at our paying them a visit. I also explored the cathedral, which dates back to the thirteenth century. We all meet at a place which we have named ‘Marie’s’ after the barmaid. Any drink can be had there. Dinner or lunch can be got at ‘Julia’s’, and tea at the ‘Patisserie’, which they say means ‘Among the Ruins’. Headquarters billet is a very fine one, 64 Rue de Chien, belonging to a local brewer. The brewery has been smashed by a shell and his private house is all that is left. We have a piano and a gramophone and all sorts of crockery.
All this uplifting of spirits is the result of good weather and in spite of our casualties being heavier this last week than ever before – with every prospect of them becoming heavier still.
Even in the day-to-day routine of the trenches, even when there were no battles and none of the raids or minor actions the army called ‘stunts’, with the constant shell-fire and eternal sniping, casualties were inevitable. The old hands were accustomed to them and accepted them with dull resignation. To the new men arriving, the first sight of wounded soldiers could come as a shock.
Trpr. P. Mason, 1/1st Yorkshire Hussars Yeomanry.
The first station we landed at where we could get out and water the horses was a place called Hazebrouck. I remember it well. A biggish town in Northern France on the way to Ypres. So we said, ‘Who’s going to get the water bottles filled?’ I said, ‘Give them to me.’ I was always a willing lad! They put the water bottles around my neck and I had about eight or ten water bottles from the lads in the truck. There were two or three taps in the station yard, you see, and I found my way there. Oh, Christ! I started to walk among wounded soldiers on the ground. Bloody terrible. Some fellows with arms off – and blood! All their clothes were soaked in blood. There were dozens of them waiting for the ambulances and the Red Cross trains. I wanted to be sick, seeing all these poor buggers, some of them with their faces bashed and all. You never saw anything like it. It frightened me to death, I don’t mind telling you.
I got these ruddy water bottles filled and put them around my neck again and I had to walk across fellows – pick my way between them to get back to the railway where the trucks and horses and our lads were. I think I was nearly going to faint and Jack Hutton, an old pal of mine, grabbed hold of me. I heard him shout, ‘Give us a hand here. This lad’s going out, you know.’ I broke out in a sweat and was really sick. I had seen such terrible injuries to so many men. I thought, ‘My Christ, if this is war!’ It makes you think. But, you know, after a fortnight you got hardened to it. That’s the funny thing.
The train shunted on to a siding to make way for the hospital train that would carry the wounded to safety, and after an interminable wait it began to trundle slowly north. Their journey was almost over. The odyssey which began the previous August in Middlesbrough and had taken Mason to Hitchin, to Bishop’s Stortford, and across the channel to France, at the end of that last long day finally brought him to Ypres.
A little way south-east of Ypres – an easy stroll away across the meadows – was the knoll they called Hill 60, and the Germans were firmly ensconced on top. One could hardly call it a summit, for it was a mere sixty metres high, an artificial hillock, man-made by the engineers who had dug the railway from Ypres to the small country town of Comines and had dumped the spoil on a convenient piece of ground close by. This was the hinge of the salient. It was from Hill 60 that the German line began, on the one hand, to wind north-east across the ridges encircling Ypres and, on the other, to swing south like the leg of a crooked question mark, along the Messines Ridge. These ridges above the flat Flanders Plain, insignificant though they were, gave the Germans an overwhelming advantage and Hill 60 was the keystone of their defence. Ever since they had taken over this sector from the French who had lost the hill to the Germans, the British Army had been anxious to get it back. Skirmishing and infantry attacks had been fruitless and, since conventional methods had not worked, it was decided the unconventional must be tried. In the first days of March they began to burrow into the earth a hundred yards from the German line to construct long tunnels that would reach out to Hill 60 and store up the explosives that would blow the Germans off. It was hard perilous work and, although some professional miners had been recruited for the job, progress was agonisingly slow. They had never before encountered conditions such as these.
Aeons ago, in the millennium before the oceans receded, the plain had been washed by the Northern Sea. Water lay just ten inches beneath the thick unyielding surface that turned to mud with every shower of rain. Far below the miners hacked their way through a stratum of thick clay, close-boarding the tunnels with stout timber as they went, fearful of the layer of running sand that lay underneath and the liquid mud that seeped from above and spouted through the slightest crack or cranny. As the tunnels lengthened it was hard to breathe in the fetid dark, working by the light of candles that sank and often guttered out for lack of air. Their stints at the tunnel face were short – they had to be – but many a man was dragged to the surface, blue and collapsed, long before his shift was due to finish. These miners, hastily co-opted into the army and thrust into uniform, were sent to France in a hurry. They were not soldiers, and many of them were neither young nor fit. But they were paid at a higher rate than the luckless soldiers of the working parties who dragged the spoil back to the shaft-head by day and carried it off by night for fear the Germans would spot it.
The Germans already suspected that something was up and they too were sapping and digging beneath their own line, listening and probing to find the British tunnels and blow them up, if they could, before the British succeeded in blowing up their own positions. There were many false alarms, there were many genuine heart-stopping scares and there was the constant fear of being emtombed if a lucky shell should demolish the entrance and cut off the way out. But the work went on.
As the tunnels drew near the German lines they splayed out in minor branches and six charges were laid. The worst job was bringing up the explosive, more than four tons of it packed in bags that weighed a hundred pounds apiece – half the weight of a hefty man. It took two men to lift a bag on to the shoulders of a third and every hundred yards they had to halt to change over. They were nightmare journeys, staggering by night across dark fields on a track of broken duckboards with bent knees quivering and muscles straining beneath the dead weight of the sacks. They moved as quietly as was humanly possible, praying for the next halt, praying that the enemy was not on the alert, that no flare would pierce the dark to give the show away, and hoping against hope that no shell would land nearby as they stumbled towards the mine shaft.
But at last the job was done. The charges were set, the mines were ready, and the plans were laid. The mines would be exploded at ten-second intervals, the guns were waiting to open the bombardment, and the infantry was standing by to go into the assault when Hill 60 went up.
It was seven o’clock in the evening of 19 April. Everything was quiet and the air was still warm at the end of a fine day. The mines were detonated precisely on time. The infantry watched transfixed and the ground shook beneath their feet as Hill 60 erupted like a volcano, throwing debris and the bodies of the German garrison high into the air. The shock waves were still rippling as the guns began to boom. The infantry sprang from the trenches and the gentle sky of the April evening died in a dense black pall of smoke and fumes. In less than fifteen minutes they were digging in beyond the reeking craters and consolidating their position on the battered crest of Hill 60.
Chapter 13
Jock Macleod had spent a happy day pottering in the garden of the fine house they called ‘Goldfish Chateau’ on the western outskirts of Ypres where the officers of the 2nd Camerons were billeted while the Battalion was at rest. It was hardly damaged by shell-fire, the garden was a blaze of spring flowers and even japonica and early roses were in bloom. In two days they would be returning to the trenches. There, encouraged by the fine weather over the last few days, a luxuriant display of cowslips had blossomed, and to continue the springtime theme Jock had carefully dug up some daffodils from the chateau garden. He packed them in a flower-pot, purloined from the conservatory, and when the battalion returned to the trenches, he proposed to plant them on the covering of soil that camouflaged the headquarters dug-out. Gardening was still in his mind after dinner, when he wrote his regular letter home, and he was struck by a happy thought: Please send me some penny packets of summer seeds to sow round the trenches – although I fully expect that we shall be well on our way to Berlin before they flower. Jock had good reason to be optimistic, for the roar of the mines going up at Hill 60 had been heard for miles and, fired by rumours, dinner in the officers’ mess had passed in a buzz of speculation and euphoria. It was Saturday night.
It was true that, at first, the Germans had been completely unbalanced by the explosion. From the high ground at Zandvoorde their guns were firing anywhere and everywhere. It was hours before the situation was appreciated, before the guns settled down to shoot accurately and in earnest, before the shocked survivors rushing back from the hill had been rallied and incoherent reports were understood and evaluated at German Corps Headquarters. By midnight reserves had been hurried to the front and the first counter-attack was launched. It was the first of dozens.
The Germans attacked by night, they attacked by dawn, they attacked by day, making desperate efforts to recover the hill. The fighting and the line swayed back and forth. The shells of both sides pulverised the hill until it was hard to believe that this tortured mound of devastation had ever been a hill at all. Trees and dug-outs were swallowed up. Trenches were obliterated as fast as they were dug through the mangled bodies of British and German dead. The stench was overpowering. Once they had recovered from the first assault the Germans had the advantage, for the British advance had thrust a wedge into their line and machine-guns and snipers concealed on the high ground on either side could sweep their foothold on the hill with deadly accuracy. It was such a small foothold – only two hundred and fifty yards long, and two hundred yards deep – that the enemy hardly needed to take aim and even the most haphazard shots could not fail to find a target.*
The first British troops to be pushed back from the hill in the early stages of the assault had caused some disquiet. Although their position had been quickly recovered in a counter-attack it had had to be made by other troops, for the men who had been forced off were finished – choking and gasping, overcome by fumes, they were convinced that they had been gassed, and they were right. But it had been an accident. It was true that the Germans had been planning to attack with poison gas, but they were not yet ready, and the conditions had not been favourable. Nevertheless gas cylinders had been dug into the side of the hill and the Germans soldiers who panicked and ran when the British stormed it, shaken though they were by the explosions, had been less afraid of British troops than of British shells shattering the cylinders and releasing the poisonous gas on friend and foe alike. Only a few had been damaged and the cylinders cracked so that the gas escaped slowly and covered only a small area on the right of Hill 60. It should have been enough to alert the staff to the danger, but so few soldiers were affected, there were so many fumes from the mines and from exploding shells and, since the enemy was known to have fired tear gas shells in the past, the significance of the incident paled against the magnitude of the continuing battle for the hill.
But for those who were not immediately involved in the struggle there were other clues and hints that something unusual was afoot. Strange clanging noises had been heard near the enemy’s trenches and patrols were sent out to investigate.
Trpr. P. Mason, 1/1st Yorkshire Hussars Yeomanry.
There was Captain Foster, Lance Corporal Armond, Trooper Mason, Trooper Heslop and Trooper Hutton. There were five of us. Our object was to get a prisoner, if possible. It was very, very nervous work, I can tell you, crawling about No Man’s Land, you know. Captain Foster said, ‘If anybody has the slightest suspicion that he has a cough he’s not going.’ He had this rule and thank God he did. We would suffocate ourselves rather than give a cough. Well, sometimes when I felt I was going to cough I used to push my face into the ground to stop me. I daren’t, you know, because it would give the game away. We got a bit nervy, I don’t mind telling you. One night Captain Foster went out carelessly with a luminous wristwatch on his ruddy wrist and Tom Armond said, ‘For Christ’s sake, take it off.’ I remember him saying that. Well, that was dangerous, you know.
It was Captain Foster’s routine to call Brigade Headquarters, to see what was needed, any instructions and information. He came back and he said, ‘This will interest you. Some of the infantry sentries on forward observation say at night time, just as it was getting dusk, they could hear reports of these iron clangs, metallic clanging, and then the news went around that Jerry was setting up a blacksmith’s shop in the front line and would the Yorkshire Hussars find out.’ So out we went. Our password was ‘Yorkshire’, that was the call, and the answer was ‘Hussar’. Well, no German of the highest intelligence would ever expect to meet a cavalryman in No Man’s Land, would they? So that was the password. Well, we were told on this particular night, up at Ypres, to find out if there was any substance in this claim of the infantry about this metallic clanging.
Well, they must have known that there was a small English patrol along that particular sector and the buggers were waiting for us. I remember very well, Captain Foster drawing on an envelope and saying, ‘This is where we’re going to be, lads.’ He said, ‘It’s only a farm track across the Ypres to Poelcapelle Road.’ Captain Foster and Tommy Armond went over first. I’m in the middle on my own, with Arthur Hutton and big Heslop behind. I didn’t get across it because some bugger coughed! We knew it wouldn’t be an animal, it was a man, and we knew it was a German, and immediately one or two bombs went over from our lads. Well, when I heard this cough, I knew what to do straight away, because the arrangement was, if there’s anybody coughs, throw a bomb where that sound came from. That was my first occasion where I had to throw a bomb and kill people.
Captain Foster and Tommy Armond scurried back as quick as a flash to get away from it and when the Very light went up there were about thirty buggers there waiting for us!
It was the luckiest escape in the world. You know, when you’re in a position like that you lose all sense of direction. You’ve got to lie quiet for a bit and just wonder in what direction to turn – whether you should about turn, or go left, or go right – because you’re all confused. Anyway, we all finished up safe and sound back in our own trenches. We could easily have bloody walked into the German trenches!
As it was we were near enough to hear that clanging as plain as a pikestaff, and about four or five days after that they let the gas off.
And there had been other warnings. There was talk that the Germans had already used gas against the French on the Champagne front, but nothing had been heard of it through official channels. But there was other evidence which could not so easily be dismissed. As far back as the end of March the French Tenth Army in the sector north of Ypres reported that they had captured a German prisoner who had been unusually forthcoming under interrogation, pouring out details of preparations for a gas attack. The man had been nervous and eager to mollify his captors, and the French dismissed his ramblings out of hand and did not consider them worth passing on. Two weeks later another prisoner captured in the same sector had told the same story. He gave precise information, meticulous descriptions of the cylinders, fifty-three inches long and filled with chlorine gas. He described how the German soldiers had been trained in their use, showed exactly where the cylinders had been dug in and where the attacks would be launched. He was even carrying one of the respirators which had been issued to protect the German soldiers against the lethal fumes. His story was convincing. But, conferring together, British and French Intelligence Officers, weighing the matter up, concluded that it was a little too convincing. The German had been too easily captured. He had virtually walked into the French lines. Might he not have been sent on purpose?* It might easily be a devious Teutonic ruse to mislead the allies, to persuade them to withdraw troops from the ‘danger zone’ and allow the Germans to advance in a bloodless victory on Ypres. Or, conversely, if the Germans were preparing an assault elsewhere the ruse might have been designed to prevent the allies withdrawing troops from the salient. Who could tell? Even a report from Belgian Army Intelligence, which also had evidence that German soldiers had been issued with gas-masks and were being instructed in the use of gas-cylinders, might easily be part of the same plot. War was war, but there were still certain rules to be observed. The use of poison gas was strictly proscribed by the Hague Convention and all civilised nations, including Germany, had signed it.
The Germans were not above employing devious tactics, particularly in the field of propaganda, which frequently backfired despite their best intentions and their desire to adopt a virtuous stance which would impress neutral nations with the justice of their cause. Two days after the capture of the second prisoner and on the very day of the British assault on Hill 60, the German newspapers carried a virulent story, dripping with righteous indignation, which categorically stated that the British had committed the unspeakable crime of using poison gas against defenceless German troops, thus contravening not only the laws of war but the unwritten laws of civilisation itself. It was a cover story, designed to justify the fact that the Germans themselves were planning to use the illegal weapon in an attack which they hoped would be seen at home and abroad as ‘retaliation’. It was reported by Reuter, noted in London and disregarded, if they ever heard of it, in France – although General Plumer had passed on the French report to his Divisional Commanders ‘for what it is worth’!
The Germans hoped that their new secret weapon would be worth a great deal. Their chemists had been working on it for a long time, and it was weeks since the first experimental cylinders had been dug into position. All that was lacking were the favourable winds that would carry the gas across to the British lines and the Ypres salient had been selected because, according to German meteorologists, the wind in springtime invariably blew in a south-westerly direction. A steady breeze was what was needed. If the wind were too strong the gas would be too quickly dissipated, if it blew in sudden gusts it would be just as ineffectual, and worse, if it suddenly changed direction there was no saying what the result might be.
As the weeks passed, and the wind disobligingly continued to blow from the wrong direction, the German Command began to be seriously worried. Too many people were in on the secret. Special troops, rudely referred to as ‘Stinkpionere’, had been instructed and trained to operate the gas cylinders, and, since it took eight men to carry one, hundreds of troops had slogged for many nights to carry the cylinders and the cumbersome ancillary apparatus to the line. Thousands of respirators had been manufactured locally in occupied Belgium where spies abounded, and now that they had been issued to soldiers in the Ypres sector, rumour was spreading like wildfire along the line and heavy hints that something interesting was in the offing were carried back to Germany by soldiers home on leave and also in optimistic letters from the front. Musketier Pieter Amlinger wrote home:
Within the next week we can expect to launch a large offensive between Bixschoote and Langemark. Follow the news bulletins closely. The great offensive about which you wrote is a fact and with some luck there may be peace at the end of May. We also have a ‘Dicke Bertha’ at our back whose loud voice – although not so beautiful – will be there to support us.
The ‘Big Bertha’, like the other heavy guns that would support the German attack, was all too necessary, for the German troops on the northern stretch of the western front were still vastly outnumbered by the allies. But the Germans had been heartened by the outcome of the battle of Neuve Chapelle and regarded the failure of the British to push home their initial success as a sign of weakness which could be turned to advantage. But success depended on surprise. As the weeks passed, as the gas attack was continually postponed, as more and more people were let into the secret, the German Commanders grew increasingly edgy. If the allies got wind of their plans, if they were able to take precautions against the gas, all would be lost.
The use of gas was essential to the Germans’ plan, for they were well aware that, against superior numbers, the front could not be broken by their infantry alone. They had studied the lessons of siege warfare and they planned a step-by-step advance. First the front-line troops would be overwhelmed by gas. Then the artillery would pound their lines and, pounding behind them simultaneously, would so reduce the salient and pulverise resistance that the Germans, advancing little by little, inexorably pressing on to the next limited objective, would gradually walk over the demoralised enemy and win the day. Pieter Amlinger was not the only German soldier shivering in the wind that so persistently blew from the north who genuinely believed that, when it turned, and before another month was out, he would be marching back to the Fatherland and that the war would be over and well and truly won. Hope was in the air.
Signals were arranged, code words decided on, guns and ammunition in undreamed of quantities brought up to the German front. This was to be an all-out effort. But the obdurate wind still blew from the north, and the German Command, champing on the bit as April dragged on, had to content themselves with ranging the heavy long-distance guns that were brought from the Belgian coast to swell the weight of the attack. They ranged them on Ypres.
The small city of Ypres was far from being the backwater it was to become in later years, when its importance relied largely on its notoriety as a focal point of the war. Tourists, in the modern sense, were few but its fame was widespread and it was a mecca for lovers of art and architecture. Fine buildings lined the streets, erected by a rich and cultured bourgeoisie, rare tapestries and paintings hung in the Cloth Hall. Pilgrims came too, for Ypres had become a noted religious centre in devout Catholic Flanders. There were two important monasteries not far away and several convents in the precincts of the town itself – the ‘Black’ sisters, the Poor Clares, and the convent of the Irish nuns who ran a private school for young ladies. But the school had closed down, the nuns had been evacuated, and the cubicles and dormitories where generations of virginal schoolgirls had slept and giggled were now inhabited by the heretical kilted soldiers of the 9th Royal Scots who, to their wry and lewd amusement, were billeted in the convent. Bill Hay was one of them, but it was an annoymous private of Β Company who recorded their impressions.
Our first tour of inspection degenerated into a hunt for souvenirs. We ransacked the bare attic rooms into which the Sisters had evidently gathered everything in great haste. One brought back in triumph a branching brass candlestick, another a crucifix and a small image of the Madonna – the most impossible things were secreted in packs to be quietly got rid of when we realised the folly of it. One or two lingered longer over the papers and ledgers strewn about the floor – the daily housekeeping of seventy or eighty years written in a clear, fine old-world hand touched us to the quick. What a peaceful, sequestered life, and what an awakening and an end! At first there was a sort of awed feeling at being in a convent, and we thought wonderingly of the schoolgirls and nuns who had lived their quiet life within these very walls. It showed us something of the convulsion into which Belgium had been thrown.
But how comfortable we were! A sacrilegious bunch of kilted heretics! The days we lay in the high-walled garden in the sun – the afternoon teas we gave when some of us struck it lucky with parcels. Even with fatigues – and we were out every night nearly – we had a slack time, for they were properly worked in two shifts, from eight to twelve and twelve to four, and we dug near the town. If anything we worked harder knowing relief was sure after four hours. And there were no bullets and no shells, only the far-off lights and crackle and grumble in the distance. Our unanimous decision was that fatigues at Ypres were a picnic.
We slept or lazed in the forenoon, and in the afternoon we strolled in the town. Walks by the canal, omelette and chip teas, shopping, patisserie-tasting, lace-buying, exploring the Cloth Hall ruins – all these we found time for in glorious weather, and very homely and pleasant it all was. We thought a lot of the gay little town where we had our happiest days since leaving home. For it was gay and full of people, the market square lined with booths on one side in front of the larger shops, although in the back streets there were shell-torn roofs and battered houses. And the Cloth Hall towering over it all, a gaunt and empty ruin, but every chipped and battered stone was eloquent, and its pinnacles still proudly cut into the sky.
In its symbolically battered state the Cloth Hall seemed to take on a grandeur it had not enjoyed since the days when Ypres was the centre of the rich Flanders wool trade, and since the wool trade had diminished lacemaking had taken its place. On fine summer days before the war, at open doors and windows all over the town, the ladies of Ypres, lace cushions on their laps, gossiped in the sun as their nimble fingers and flying bobbins worked the fine lace whose beauty rivalled even the coveted lace of Brussels. Their work was in demand all over the world and there were no fewer than twelve lace brokers in Ypres who bought up the lace, distributed it, and grew rich on the proceeds. One of them was Aimé van Nieuwenhove.
This gentleman was not a native of Ypres. He had started his career as a dashing young cavalry officer but fate had brought him to Ypres to its famous cavalry school and there he had met and married Clotilde Brunfaut, daughter of a prosperous lace merchant. Now he was a prosperous lace merchant himself, owner of a fine old house on the Rue de Lille which he had painstakingly renovated over the years, the father of two children, a prominent citizen of the town, a local politician, and one of the public-spirited men who had been co-opted on to the Comité Provisoire to safeguard the welfare of Ypres after the town council was evacuated. Long ago, when things had looked bad at the end of the previous October, he had sent his own wife and family to safety in Paris. But van Nieuwenhove himself stayed on and conscientiously recorded in his daily diary the trials that befell the little town he had come to love. On 20 April, the Germans began to range their heavy guns on Ypres.
Aimé van Nieuwenhove.
20 April Calm until 11 a.m. While I was at the post office counter a dozen shells fell all of a sudden. I took shelter right away in the cellars and went out at mid-day to see what had happened. When I got to the garden I ascertained that a shell had fallen in Lapierre’s shops and had destroyed part of the wall that separated them from my garden. A second and third had landed in the garden of M. Desaegher, one against the wall of Mlle Duval’s kitchen, the other beneath the carriage porch. When the first shell arrived Marie our washerwoman was in the wash house and dived into our cellar for shelter, where I found her very upset when I got back. The damaged wall belonged to Lapierre, but until it could be repaired, I was obliged myself to block up the hole with planks in order to prevent the English soldiers from getting into our premises.
At two o’clock in the afternoon I attended a meeting of the commission charged with paying the indemnity to support the refugees in the town. We met in the police headquarters building until 4.30, during which time eight huge shells fell on the town. When I came out of the meeting, our uncle, Auguste Liebaert, came to tell me that one of the shells that fell this morning hit the roof of his house and had destroyed one of the rooms. He was terribly upset and emotional. I advised him to go and spend the night in the post office cellars, then to go and find a temporary refuge at Poperinghe. Many more people are leaving the town again and it’s as deserted as it was in November. We have no more newspapers and are isolated from the rest of the world. Everywhere there is a feeling of discouragement and, for my part, I’m well aware that my nerves are no longer as strong as they proved to be during the first bombardments.
21 April I went to see the house of my uncle, who had spent a very bad night in the cellars, even though the night was quiet. Not being able to find a car anywhere to take him to Poperinghe, I advised him to take a porter and set off on the Vlamertinghe road, where, by offering a tip, he might be picked up by one or other of the ambulances. This he did.
At mid-day we learned that the eight big shells that arrived yesterday afternoon from the direction of Staden were 380 mm in diameter. This news threw consternation among my friends and it decided some of them to leave the town in case more of the same arrived. Seven civilians were killed on Monday and ten yesterday, besides that, more than a hundred English soldiers and many more wounded. Nevertheless today is reasonably calm. As for the bombardment, only a few shells were heard.
The Germans were ranging their big guns, still waiting impatiently for the wind to change and for the chance to launch their offensive.
The chance came next day on 22 April – but it was well into the afternoon before the wind shifted direction and began to blow gently towards the south-west. The timing was far from ideal. By the time the messages could be passed along the line, by the time the troops could be alerted and in position, there would not be many hours of daylight left. Ideally the gas should have been released in the morning leaving a long day for the German infantry to advance and press home the advantage and dig in by nightfall. But they had waited so long, they had postponed the attack so often, that when the wind turned in the afternoon of 22 April, the chance was too good to miss. The decision was taken. The codeword ‘Gott strafe Engelland’ was passed along the line. The assault troops were warned and moved into position, the special troops stood by the cylinders ready to open the cocks, the signal rockets were fired. 222 – ‘Everything is ready for the attack.’ 301 – ‘Fair Wind.’ 333 – ‘Get the troops ready to advance.’ There had been several false alarms, and these preliminary signals had been sent up before – always followed by the dispiriting 6666 – ‘Attack Cancelled.’ But this time the front-line German commanders, watching the flares and counting with bated breath, at last saw the signal they had been waiting for. 8888 – ‘Open the gas containers.’ The men of the ‘Stinkpionere’ pulled on their masks, bent over the cylinders, adjusted the long nozzles that would carry the gas into the wind, and wrenched open the cocks that would release it.
The attack came north of Ypres on the left of the salient and it fell in an awkward place, on the shoulder of the line where the Canadians joined hands with the French in front of Poelcapelle, and all across the French front to the Franco/Belgian boundary on the canal near Steenstraat. The Canadian Division had been holding the line for a matter of days, the French were in the process of changing over and their 45th Regiment had just moved into the line and had barely settled down. It was a regiment composed of French Colonials – native troops from North Africa – and it was on them that the full force of the gas cloud descended. At first, it looked as if it were going to envelop the Canadians. Two companies of the 48th Highlanders were in the front line and from his observation post in front of St julien Gunner Jim Sutton had a bird’s eye view.
It had been a quiet day, almost balmy for late April and, although a few shells had fallen in Ypres, away to the right behind them, only an occasional explosion or short burst of machine-gun fire had disturbed the monotonous routine of daytime in the trenches. It was almost five o’clock in the afternoon, the sun still shone, a pleasant light breeze had sprung up blowing, for once, towards the southwest, and as the soldiers, yawning and stretching, drummed up an early evening cup of tea, some of them were looking forward to nightfall and the prospect of being relieved at the end of their stint in the trenches. The guns of the 9th Canadian Battery were in action east of the village of St Julien on the edge of the Steenbeek stream, and the willow trees that bordered it provided perfect camouflage. Earlier in the day Gunner Jim Sutton had been sent forward to the observation post in front of Poelcapelle to take the place of Signaller-Corporal Lister who had been taken ill. The day had been not without incident for, earlier in the morning, a stray shell had broken the telephone line that connected the observation post with the guns and Sutton had spent most of the morning laboriously tracing the break. He found it eventually in the cemetery just north of St Julien and, squatting between the headstones of long-defunct villagers, mended it and made his way discreetly back to his post. For the rest of the day there had been so little doing that Major McDougall had sent the observing officer and another signaller back to the guns. Together Sutton and the Major whiled away the afternoon, looking out from time to time, from their position behind the Canadian trenches, towards the German front line but, as the pleasant afternoon drew on, with no real expectations that anything untoward was likely to happen. It was almost five o’clock and Jim Sutton was sweeping the German line through binoculars from the roof of a shell-battered farmhouse when he spotted the yellow cloud that rose from the German trenches and slowly drifted towards the British positions. He called to McDougall, ‘Take a look at this, sir. There’s something funny going on.’ The German artillery opened as he spoke and began to pound the line. Major McDougall yelled back above the noise and Sutton leapt to the telephone to warn the guns and pass on the Major’s orders to open fire on all targets right and left of the Poelcapelle road. He was only just in time. A moment later both telephone lines were cut but, as they anxiously watched, as the cloud drifted closer and closer to their own trenches, the British guns began to reply, the wind shifted and the cloud which had threatened to engulf the Canadians drifted north and rolled across the front of the Algerian Division, joining with others to form a high impenetrable wall of yellow-green smoke. The unfortunate Algerians had no chance. From their position above the gas cloud Sutton and his officer, staring aghast, could hardly have heard the screams, the gasping and choking as the gas cloud rolled across the troops – but they saw the panic – saw that the Algerians were running for their lives, throwing away rifles as they staggered and stumbled, dazed and terrified, away from the lethal fumes.
Jim Keddie, of the 48th Canadian Highlanders, saw it all from the trench a little way behind the front where Η Company was in support. It was his thirty-fourth birthday. He had no means of celebrating, but before they moved forward to take over the front line in the evening Jim was hopeful that the post corporal would deliver a birthday parcel from his mother in Jedburgh in Scotland. Although he had emigrated to Canada some fifteen years ago and was to all intents and purposes a Canadian, Mrs Keddie had never failed to remember his birthday. Now that he was serving with the Canadian Army in France and nearer home, the old lady was hoping at long last to have a sight of her eldest son when his turn came round for leave. Jim was equally keen to get home to his native Jedburgh and had spent much of his birthday in happy contemplation of a warm welcome. It was fortunate for the Canadians that the capricious wind had changed but, even so, the troops on the extreme left of the division on the right of the luckless French Colonials, got more than a whiff of it.
L/Cpl J. D. Keddie, Η Coy., 48th Royal Highlanders of Canada.
My company was in the reserve trenches and it was on the afternoon of my birthday that we noticed volumes of dense yellow smoke rising up and coming towards the British trenches. We did not get the full effect of it, but what we did was enough for me. It makes the eyes smart and run. I became violently sick, but this passed off fairly soon. By this time the din was something awful – we were under a crossfire of rifles and shells, and had to lie flat in the trenches. The next thing I noticed was a horde of Turcos (French colonial soldiers) making for our trenches behind the firing line; some were armed, some unarmed. The poor devils were absolutely paralysed with fear. They were holding a trench next to a section of the 48th, so the 48th had to move in to hold it also until some of their officers came and made the Turcos go back.
Here on the fringe of the attack the ‘Turcos’, as Keddie was pleased to call them, had not been badly affected. It was natural terror and fear of the unknown that had made them run and, when the temporary effects of the gas had worn off, it was natural discipline that sent them back. But they were the lucky ones, there were not many of them, and the plight of their comrades on their left was pitiable. In the front-line trenches where the gas was thicker they had no time to run, and not many survived. Rolling over the trenches the gas clouds overwhelmed them so swiftly that men collapsed at once. Lying retching, choking, gasping for breath at the foot of the deep ditch where the heavy gas settled and clung thickest of all, they suffocated to death in minutes. From the support lines fifty yards behind, the troops watched in horror and as the wall of smoke rolled forward to engulf them in their turn, as the wind brought the first wisps of the fumes that clutched the throat and stung the eyes, they panicked and ran.
Along four miles of its length, between Poelcapelle and Steen-straat, the line was empty. Fifteen minutes after the gas was first released the German infantry was ordered to don gas-masks and advance. They were prepared for a fight, but there was no one left to fight with. As their guns thundered ahead of them, the German soldiers simply walked forward through the allied line, over the bodies of the dead, lying sprawled out, faces discoloured and contorted in grimaces of agony. Within an hour the Germans had advanced more than a mile and they had hardly needed to fire a shot.
By nightfall the enemy had driven a deep wedge into the allied lines. Flushed with victory they started to dig in.
Chapter 14
Far above the lingering gas, the tornado of explosions and all the horrors below, long trailing clouds turned luminous pink as the sun set in the western sky.
Major McDougall and his signaller had long ago slithered down from their rooftop look-out, for there was nothing to be made of the chaos in front and observation was useless if information could not be sent back. In the first minutes of the attack the telephone lines that linked them to the guns were shattered. It was pointless to brave the inferno to try to repair them for the Germans had already penetrated beyond their position and a machine-gun trained on the back wall of the farmhouse opened up at the slightest movement. There was nothing for it but to try to get back to the guns. They crawled out through a ditch half full of rank, stagnant water but it was shelter of a kind from the ferocious shell-fire. Their hands and arms were plastered with mud, their clothing sodden and stinking, but at length they emerged near the Battery on the outskirts of St Julien, and made a dash for it.
Sgnr. J. E. Sutton, 9th Bty., Canadian Field Artillery.
The major told me that he had heard more shell-fire in one hour than he heard in the whole of the Boer War. When we reached the battery we found that our guns had swung considerably to the left. Gunner Budagier had been wounded and I took his place as number two gunner on number four gun. They were so close together that number three gun was firing almost directly into my left ear. Later when we stopped firing I went with Signaller Macdonald to see if the road was clear so that we could move our guns back to the rear. The German infantry were almost at the edge of the village and the cemetery at the cross-roads, which was filled with ornate memorials and artificial flowers under glass that morning, was completely wrecked. On the main street we saw six Highlanders moving a grand piano from a house. When we asked them where they were taking it, they said they didn’t know and they quit the job. Our casualties were six men wounded – four at the guns and two drivers bringing up ammunition.
After dark we moved back to a position on the outskirts of St Jean. Macdonald and I pushed our reel cart which held over two miles of telephone wire, our telephones, reels, pliers, etc. But we lost our kit-bags and coats in the move.
Now it was the Germans who had thrust their line forward into a salient. It jutted southwards from Poelcapelle into the open flank that ran westwards from the Canadian left, and doubled back to run north parallel to the canal bank to enclose the ground left empty by the French Colonials fleeing from the gas. A few were still there holding a straggling tenuous position that ran for a hundred or so yards east of the canal, far behind what had been the French right flank. A few of the others, least badly affected by the gas, had been rallied on the left of the Canadians’ original line. But there were precious few of them and four and a half miles of completely open country stretched east to west between the remnants of the line and the canal four miles behind. The first imperative was to close this gap.
In the smoke, in the midst of the confusion and the pulverising shelling, it was difficult to judge exactly what had happened from the muddled messages that filtered from the battlefield, but the panic on the roads north of Ypres told its own tale, and the chaos and congestion near the canal itself was frightening. On the long, straight stretch that ran north from the outskirts of Ypres there was one bridge only behind the British sector and another behind the French at Boesinghe and although the gas travelled slowly, thinning and spreading on the wind as it approached, the fumes now reached as far as the canal and even beyond it, spreading further alarm among the French reserves who had not been close enough to fall victim to gas in the early stages of the attack. As their eyes began to stream, as the sickening fumes were sucked in with each gasping breath to burn their throats and sear into their lungs, as they saw the survivors of their front-line troops dragging their way towards them, some staggering and dropping to the ground overcome with pain and exhaustion, with sickly pallor and blue foam-flecked lips, the reserves turned and ran. The retreat became a rout.
In the struggling mass crowding on to the narrow bridges men collapsed and were trampled underfoot. Some tried to swim for it, and a few drowned in the attempt. Many who made it to the other side could go no further and lay retching and gasping on the far bank or on the road beyond, unable to go further. Those who were still on their feet streamed across the fields and meadows towards Elver-dinghe and Vlamertinghe, progressing more slowly now but still pressing on in desperation to get well away from the horrors behind. Officers mounted on nervous rearing horses were frantically trying to stop the tide of frightened men and turn it back if they could, but they got short shrift, and the few small groups they managed to rally were clearly in no condition to return to the fight, even if they had been able to get through the press of soldiers and civilians streaming across the bridges and along the roads. The people who had obstinately refused to leave farms and cottages close to the battle-line, who had preferred to take their chance among the shells rather than abandon their land and possessions, had taken fright at last. Now they too were struggling to get away, laden with sacks and bundles, pushing hand carts, trailing weeping children, clutching bird cages, pictures, candle-sticks – whichever of their valued belongings they had been able to snatch up. And now that the big shells were thundering into Ypres as they had never thundered before, people were streaming out of the town to swell the mob.
Mme Marie de Milleville.
We lived in a cottage just outside Boesinghe. I was only twelve but I could never in all my life forget that afternoon! It was shocking. I was alone with my mother and the little yard in front of our house was full of coloured soldiers lying on the ground or slumping against the wall. We could do nothing for them but give them water. We had two big metal jugs that held two or three litres apiece and for hours I went back and forwards to the kitchen filling them and filling them again, one after the other, while my mother stayed outside pouring it out for the soldiers to drink. More and more came along, wanting a drink as they passed. I poured water for hours and hours. After a while I had to pump up more from the well at the back because we soon used up what we had drawn that morning. They could not tell us what had happened, but we knew that it was something dreadful and that Germans might come at any moment. We kept on pouring the water, even after it got dark. Much later in the night some carts and ambulances came along to take the poor soldiers away – at least two of them were dead by then. And all the time, although no shells were falling near us, we could hear the guns. They never stopped. I could never forget it.
Even before they knew the full extent of the catastrophe the Divisional Commanders on the spot did not wait for instructions before ordering reserves to the line. By a fortunate chance, two of them had seen the attack for themselves for the Commanding Officer of the Canadian Division had been visiting his gun batteries north east of St Julien at the time of the attack and General Snow, in command of the 27th Division, had been in the observation post above his headquarters in Potijze. Looking across the flat meadows both had seen the thick yellow cloud rolling out from the German lines and although their own lines had been quickly swallowed up in the turmoil of smoke and explosions, it was all too easy to surmise the rest. General Smith-Dorrien had seen it too as he walked back to Ypres after visiting Hill 60, and it was obvious to them all that there was no time to lose.
Had the gas been released and the attack launched early in the day the Germans might easily have poured through the gap and fought their way into Ypres, cutting off the troops in the salient with little resistance to stop them. The anxious commanders, conferring together by telephone, and with General Smith-Dorrien at his headquarters and the French General Putz at his, were fearful that, when morning came, that was precisely what the Germans would attempt.* Darkness came as a blessing, but it was a mixed blessing, for conditions on the roads were still chaotic and the rumours that spread among the civilian population caused more and more of them to take to their heels. It was not easy to get the reserves up. There was still little news to go on, and the scanty information that did reach Headquarters was far from reassuring.
The Canadians had spread out and flung back their line in a sharp angle facing north at right-angles to their original front. The military called it a defensive flank, but it was a short, short line of a few hundred yards and the snout of the German advance had pushed in well behind them. There was no one but Germans between them and Brigadier General Turner in his headquarters at Mouse Trap Farm beyond St Julien. Turner had acted quickly. Almost as soon as the attack began he ordered up his reserve battalion, keeping one company at Mouse Trap, where they had already prevented the Germans from advancing, and sending another two companies to defend St Julien as the Germans neared the edge of the village. The 10th Canadians who had just fallen in as a working party were ordered up to help, but it was a long time before they could get there along the roads blocked by fugitives. All round the salient and in the rest areas behind every battalion, every company, every detachment of engineers who could be spared from the line or was in rest behind it was warned to prepare to move to the shattered line.
Pte. W. J. McKenna, 16th Bn., (Canadian Scottish), 3rd Canadian Brig., 1st Canadian Div.
We were in rest billets in a big barn well behind the line and early in the evening when we were just enjoying tea there was a great commotion outside and we saw hordes of people rushing back – French Colonial troops – civilians with every kind of transport – perambulators, hand carts, barrows, all piled with personal possessions. We soon found out what had happened for the result was an order to ‘fall in’ with skeleton equipment and no overcoats. Extra ammunition was served out, and we had two hundred and twenty rounds. Then we started to march off and did about five miles. It was dark by then and the gas had practically dispersed, but over everything there was the thick smell which affected the eyes, mouth and throat. We lined up in a field and expected to be warned for trench duty but the fates decided otherwise and our battalion was wanted elsewhere. It transpired later on that about two miles behind the original front line which had been vacated by the French Colonials there was a battery of 4.7s of the Canadian heavy artillery. These guns had been abandoned, and the Germans, advancing behind their screen of gas, had taken them. This was our objective. I cannot help thinking that the enemy lost a wonderful opportunity, for surely he could have walked through us like a man could walk through a hoop of paper.
Even by nine in the evening the four and a half miles that ran straight back from the original Canadian left to the canal bank was held in only three places and the gaps between them were wide – two thousand yards, a thousand yards and, longest of all, three thousand yards whose only defence was a single French machine-gun post. Along the rest of the French front, between that one machine-gun and Steenstraat, although the French had formed a straggling line behind the western canal bank, on the enemy side, east of the canal there were no troops at all. The road to Ypres was open. The night was wild with shelling but there was one crumb of comfort. The German infantry had stopped and was digging in. It had been a long twilight but at last it was growing dark and there were seven hours in the allies’ favour before daylight. The misty moon was still in its first quarter and there was still some light in the sky as it rose.
Along unfamiliar tracks, across unreconnoitred ground, runners slogged through the night taking messages to and from the outposts, and the signal that finally reached the Canadians hanging on in the old front line was brief and to the point. It came from their Commander, General Alderson, and it could be summed up in two words, ‘Don’t budge.’ Although he was not a Canadian himself, the men from Canada thought a lot of General Alderson. It was barely two months since the Canadians had come to France and the General’s speech before they first went into the line had earned their respect. Alderson was a man’s man and a soldier’s soldier. He did not beat around the bush, nor did he make the same mistake as the Commander-in-Chief who had caused barely suppressed hilarity during his inspection when he addressed the Canucks as ‘Men and Canadians…’ Alderson spoke to them like a father. He pointed out the perils of the trenches, the danger of ever-vigilant snipers, the stupidity of risking a peep over the parapet from mere curiosity and took pains to point out that dead soldiers never won a battle. He advised his men to lie low and sit tight under shell-fire and to refrain from showing ‘nerves’ by shooting at nothing. And he praised them. He praised their physique, he praised their zeal as volunteers, he assured them of his confidence and his certainty that they would do well. ‘And,’ he said, ‘there is one thing more. My old regiment, the Royal West Kents, have been here since the beginning of the war, and it has never lost a trench. The Army says, “The West Kents never budge.” I am proud of the great record of my old regiment. I now belong to you, and you belong to me, and before long the Army will say, “The Canadians never budge “ Lads, it can be left there, and there I leave it. The Germans will never turn you out.’
In the Canadian line that night, Jim Keddie was not the only man who remembered these words, and Alderson’s latest message, when it arrived, reinforced them. ‘Don’t budge.’ Hanging grimly on to their straggling line, each man separated by several yards from the next, not knowing what the morning might bring, the Canadians would not budge if they could help it.
The Canadian batteries had succeeded in pulling back their guns but two heavy guns had been lost, for the 2nd London Heavy Battery in support of the Canadians were concealed in Kitchener’s Wood behind the French – and Kitchener’s Wood, not half a mile from Mouse Trap and St Julien, was now in the hands of the Germans. The reserves were still inching with difficulty towards the line, or what there was of it, but General Alderson had taken a bold decision. The 10th Canadian Battalion and the 16th Canadian Scottish were filtering towards the gap between Mouse Trap Farm and St Julien, but he did not intend them merely to fill it, they were to plunge forward, counter-attack the Germans, recapture Kitchener’s Wood and retrieve the guns.
Kitchener’s Wood was a prize worth having. Although its name had a contemporary ring it had nothing to do with Lord Kitchener whose imperious finger had recently beckoned so many recruits into the Army. It was a literal translation from the French ‘Bois de Cuisiniers’ (‘Cook’s Wood’) and the origin of the name had been lost to local memory. It was Cook’s Wood and that was that. Kitchener’s Wood was not large, only a few hundred yards in depth, but in the hands of the enemy, it was a position of huge advantage, lying on the small ridge that ran north from St Julien and protecting the village from the north-west. The Army called it Mouse Trap Ridge, for it ran behind Mouse Trap Farm and overlooked a wide valley of scattered farms and homesteads where only the previous day a soldier could have strolled with impunity. On the far side of the valley the ground rose for two hundred yards or so to the Pilckem Ridge and dropped gently across a mile of open farmland to the Yser Canal.
In Kitchener’s Wood the Germans were digging in to consolidate their position but in the morning they would be able to assemble unseen in the concealment of its trees and in the lee of the ridge behind ready to leap forward to renew the attack. A hop, a skip, and a jump would take them to the canal bank. It was vital to regain the wood before that happened.
The Colonels of the two Battalions were no strangers to adventure. Colonel Boyle of the 10th Battalion was a rancher from Calgary and Colonel Leckie of the 16th Canadian Scottish was a mining engineer who had roughed it in the remotest wilds of Canada. But it was another matter to lead a night attack with inexperienced troops, on unfamiliar ground and with no artillery support, for the ‘line’ was so fluid, the positions of the enemy – and even of their own men – so uncertain, that it would be folly to suppose that guns, newly pulled into unfamiliar positions, could do anything at all to help. A counter-attack seemed an impossible feat to attempt, but daring and surprise might just pull it off.
Like Bill McKenna, Harry Hall of the 10th Battalion was one of the Canadians who slogged up on the long laborious trek to make the attack. Three Hall brothers had gone to war, but the eldest, Edmund, who had been through the battle of Neuve Chapelle, had joined the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders before the rest of his family emigrated to Canada. It was years since he had seen his younger brothers although they had been not far off, supporting the left of the I Corps during the battle. Now Harry and Fred were both at Ypres, facing another battle and their first real fight.
Sgt. H. Hall, 10th Bn., 2nd Canadian Brig.
Our Battalion and the 16th Canadian Scottish were the only reserves in the whole salient and, as the Germans had broken through, things were looking very black for us. We were instantly summoned to fall in, and soon we were on our way to fill the gap – two thousand men to stop the German divisions in their thousands.
An ordinary general would have posted us in a reserve line of trenches until the Germans advanced the next morning, but not so General Alderson, our divisional commander. He tried a strategy which was one of the biggest bluffs of the war, and it utterly surprised the Germans. Instead of waiting for the Germans to swamp us the next morning he ordered us to make a night attack on Kitchener’s Wood, where the Germans were massing for their attack.
We made the attack in lines of double companies, five hundred men in each of the four lines. A and Β Companies were in the front line, supported by C and D Companies, and then the 16th Battalion behind them.
Pte. W. J. McKenna.
Our objective was not only the four guns in the little wood near St Julien, but also to convince the Germans that we were there in considerable force, and not only to take the guns but to have a strong moral effect on the enemy. Whatever the reasons, two Battalions of Canadian Scottish – the 16th of the 3rd Brigade, and the 10th of the 2nd Brigade – were lined out on a field, on a bitterly cold night nearly at midnight. We were told that our efforts were regarded as practically hopeless and that our work was to be in the nature of a sacrifice charge. At midnight, without bombs, machine-guns or artillery support, we started to advance. We had about two fields to cover and two hedges to pass through and the gaps weren’t too many. Presently a bullet whistled past, then another and, before you could close an eye, enemy machine-guns opened about as hot a fire as you could imagine. Men fell in hundreds, but some of us got there, and, when they were facing our bayonets, the Germans were soon beaten and those that weren’t killed escaped as fast as they could. We ran behind them through the wood, bayoneting as many as we could catch up with, and eventually we soon cleared the woods of live Germans! The guns were there and we put them out of action.
In order to deceive the enemy in regard to our numbers, we were told to make as much noise as we could and the shouting, swearing, cursing at the top of our voices was terrific! Added to the firing and the groans of the wounded, it made the night hideous. But the effect worked and the handful of us who did reach the enemy were able to drive him before us with the bayonet.
The onslaught on Kitchener’s Wood was intended as part of a larger plan, for the French on the left had been meant to advance too. But there was no sign of them and it was clear that, for whatever reason, they had not been able to get forward. The Canadians were riddled by machine-gun fire as they advanced in the dark through the wood across the thick tangled roots of ancient oaks. But they came at last to the abandoned guns and sent back the triumphant message that would bring up the gun teams to haul them back. Long before the teams could get there the German artillery had begun to bombard the wood.
Sgt. H. Hall.
An hour after we had dug in there was a terrible concentration of shells sweeping the wood – it was just like a tropical storm sweeps a forest. It was impossible for us to hold the position. But, instead of retiring, we tried our old tactics of advancing and attacking the Germans again. They were digging themselves in two hundred yards in front.
We got in a forward position and stayed there until the early hours of the morning. Our Colonel was killed and we only had two officers left, we were still losing men from the German artillery fire, and our ranks were now so thin that we couldn’t stay out in that exposed position. What could a few of us do against the German hordes? Sick as we were with the gas fumes and the terrific strain of it all, we retreated back through the wood to an old line of trenches and there we dug in and waited for reinforcements.
Pte. W. J. McKenna.
We worked for dear life to get cover before daylight. Fortunately for us it was a little misty in the morning, and that gave us another hour or so to burrow into the earth. It’s hard graft digging with an entrenching tool, especially after an exciting fight and when you’re hungry too, but we managed it at last and we were well out of sight when Fritz dropped a few shells among us next day. Our roll-call while we were in our trench was about three hundred and sixty, which means our battalion alone lost about seven hundred and forty men, all in about ten minutes, and we suffered more casualties before we got away.
Sgt. H. Hall.
But our object had been achieved, and the Germans were demoralised. Our first Brigade appeared on the scene and the line was strengthened, and then the Buffs, the famous English regiment, came up at the double after having marched miles from another part of the line.
So the bluff that we pulled off was entirely successful, and the Germans thought that we had about twenty thousand men attacking them. It never struck their cold-blooded unimaginative minds that two thousand men would have the audacity to attack whole German Divisions without artillery support.
Pte. W. J. McKenna.
To withdraw we had to go along a ditch full of wet muddy slime, and bent double. That’s no easy job at any time, but it’s worse when you’re nearly famished and weary for want of sleep. To get out of the ditch meant a bullet, because snipers were on the look-out. We were under rifle fire for about two miles from our trench, and it was a relief when we found ourselves at last out of range. We thought we were in for a rest, but we were told to fall in and go to relieve a battalion that had been in the trenches and had to retire. However, St Julien, the village we reported at, was suffering severely from shell-fire and several houses were on fire. We hung about for two hours before being told to retire.
Of the strength of two battalions, only ten officers remained to shepherd four hundred survivors away from the battle-line. It had been some consolation to find that the guns abandoned in Kitchener’s Wood had finally been destroyed by the enemy’s own shelling. Even if they had not managed to retrieve them they would at least be of no use to the enemy.
Two nights earlier when they had been relieved from a four-day stint in the trenches the 9th Royal Scots were disappointed to find that they were not to return to their cushy billets in Ypres and had to march on to Vlamertinghe. It was a long, long march and, after four days of inactivity in the trenches, the men were sore and stiff and weary by the time they turned into the field full of black-tarred tarpaulin huts where they were to spend their four days’ rest before going back. It was dawn before the huts were allocated and the weary soldiers of the Dandy Ninth were at last able to turn in. They slept most of the day and they binged most of the next night.
Pte. W. Hay, A Coy., 9th Bn., Royal Scots (Lothian Regt.), 27 Div.
We woke to parcels and letters – the height of bliss! Everybody passed everybody else his cakes or sweets, and the bully beef of our daily ration was stacked in a heap – untouched. What digestions we had! One man, whose only vices were cigarettes and tea, and who was bemoaning the scarcity of fags in the trenches and was hoping all the way down that some would be waiting for him, he sat grinning, opening box after box – seven hundred or so cigarettes. According to our tastes, we were all as happy as he was. Soon the tidy hut was strewn with cardboard boxes, paper, string, and luxuries, and what a mess there was to be cleared up when we got the order to move!
They had hardly recovered from the long march, hardly finished stretching after their long-awaited sleep, and had not nearly finished demolishing the contents of the parcels, when the order came. It was barely forty hours since the Royal Scots began the trek out of the line and they were just settling down to enjoy their second evening of relaxation and looking forward to their second long sleep, when rumours began to fly. It came as no surprise when they were ordered to pack up and to fall in at the double.
Pte. W. Hay.
We knew there was something wrong. We started to march towards Ypres but we couldn’t get past on the road because it was absolutely solid with troops marching up and with refugees coming down the road. We couldn’t pass them so we had to go up along the railway line half-way to Ypres and there were people, civilians and soldiers, lying along the roadside in a terrible state. We heard them say it was gas. We didn’t know what the Hell gas was! There were limbers parked at the side, because they couldn’t get through and it was an absolute turmoil. In fact we had to turn into a field and wait there for a while before we could get on at all. We knew the people must be trying to get away from Ypres, and we could see Ypres up ahead of us all on fire. Blazing! Eventually we got the word to move on, and we had pretty mixed feelings when we got to the outskirts and knew we were going to have to run the gauntlet through the fire, with shells falling all the time. The whole town seemed to be on fire. It was a terrible sight – appalling!
We were split up and we went by platoons, fifty yards between each platoon, and when we got to the big square opposite the town-hall there was blazing and smoking and shells bursting everywhere. We could feel the flames of the fire hot on our faces. Ypres was being demolished – literally razed to the ground with bricks and mortar flying everywhere. I was the Company Sergeant-Major’s batman, Sergeant-Major Ferguson, and he’d given me a sandbag to carry with his binoculars in it and the Company roll-book and his shaving gear and all that sort of thing. Of course I was loaded with my own gear, my pack and my rifle, and this sandbag was hampering me, dodging all the stuff that was flying about. Sergeant-Major Ferguson wasn’t carrying anything, being the Company Sergeant-Major. So I got rid of the sandbag – I just threw it into the fire, because I honestly didn’t think that any of us would get through Ypres the way it was being shelled and bombarded, and fires everywhere and buildings crashing down. You would never have dreamed that you were going to get through that and you’d have even less chance if you were carrying a lot of gear, so I slung the only thing I could get rid of, which was the sandbag. Just slung it into the fire as we passed.
It was a pity really, because we did get through. It was miraculous how we did it but eventually we got out on to the Menin Road and there wasn’t a single casualty in the whole battalion. I’ve always thought that was a miracle! Later on I was sorry I’d got rid of the sandbag because it wasn’t long before Sergeant-Major Ferguson was calling out for me, wanting his stuff, and I was in trouble. I told him I lost it in the inferno in Ypres, and I couldn’t tell you what he said! He gave me a full account of my personal charms, and it wasn’t printable what he said. I got dumped out of that job on the spot unfortunately, because as a batman you can dodge parades and a bit of fatigues. But of course, all that happened next day. That night we didn’t have time to think of anything but getting away from Ypres and getting up to the line. We were up at Potijze Wood by dawn and waited there in bitter cold until the early morning, and of course we didn’t really know what was happening. Then we were moved up to Wieltje not far away and it seems the idea was for the battalion to make an attack from there. Then the orders were changed and the battalion was split up and my company, A company, and Β company were told to fall in and we were marched off to make up part of a composite force with two companies of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry and we were sent up to fill this gap on the left of St Julien. Of course we were nothing like four full companies, because there had been a lot of casualties. We had to go into ditches and fire a few rounds, and go on a bit further and fire a few more, and come back again and fire again – and this was to give the impression to the Germans that there was plenty of troops there. There were a lot of Canadians lying there dead from gas the day before, poor devils, and it was quite a horrible sight for us young men. I was only twenty so it was quite traumatic and I’ve never forgotten nor ever will forget it. The first time that I’ve ever felt really terrified in my heart was when the Colonel gave us orders to fix bayonets.
We were in a ditch in a sunken road and lying there, rifle loaded and all ready, we were told to fix bayonets, and I was really apprehensive. We were all definitely scared thinking that we were going to have hand-to-hand fighting, which wasn’t what I thought we’d have to do. I thought we’d be firing rifles – I didn’t expect to be going bayonet fighting with the Germans. No, I didn’t expect that. There was a temporary sort of cottage they were using as a dressing station at St Julien and I took a look round the corner of it and saw loads and loads of Germans, just like rabbits! There were thousands of them there, a good bit away of course. You could see at a glance that we were very much outnumbered.
We got the order to advance – just to go forward a bit, because there was no barbed wire there and it was open country. However we went no further because it was getting late in the evening so we were told to start digging rifle pits, one to each man, so that they could be joined up to make the forerunner of a trench. We were all up there, because they needed every spare man, there was nobody hanging around, everybody had to go up into action and fill this gap – and I was digging with David Newbury. We were both young men and we didn’t know the name of psychology, but we’d both been brought up reading the old schoolboys’ magazines and we heard all the tales about Germans being frightened of the Highlanders. We came to the conclusion together that if both of us made for one German it would frighten the wits out of him if he saw two Highlanders come at him with their bayonets. We thought that if we looked ferocious enough as we ran at a German he’d just pack it in and run away, and maybe that would influence the others to do the same. That was our idea, but we never got to putting it into practice.
When we began to advance, their machine-guns opened on us and David got a bullet across his forehead and his blood was running all down his face. I thought he was killed, but even though he was my pal, I wasn’t allowed to stop and tie him up. We had to go on, so we went further and we came to a little hollow in the ground and got into it. We couldn’t see any Germans then because we were really under cover there in that slight hollow and the Germans were machine-gunning over our heads. And then the Captain got a bullet in his thigh, Captain Taylor. Of course we were stopped then, so I managed to tie it up roughly for him and then stretcher-bearers took him and as he went away, he told us to get on and dig these rifle pits.
We had to get over this stream where all the trees had been knocked down by shell-fire, so we clambered over them, hanging on to the branches to get over the other side and start digging this line such as it was. For some reason the Germans didn’t come on. If they had we’d all have been massacred. A few hours later we were pulled out and rushed back to Sanctuary Wood. And that went on for four days. Back and forwards. Out and in. Here and there. We never knew where we were or what we were supposed to be doing!
Hay now belonged to a force of men that was hastily cobbled together, put under the command of Colonel Geddes of the Buffs and rushed to the assistance of the hard-pressed Canadians. It was not much of a force, for it only consisted of a few half battalions, some odd companies, and a few battalions drawn from Divisional reserve, Corps reserve – even Army reserve. Many of them were already under-strength and together they only amounted to seven Battalions, thinned and weakened by casualties. But it was the best that could be done – and it was a dangerous ‘best’ because although a third of the strength was strung out in a ‘second line’ just behind the fluid front, every man was in the line. If the Germans made a move and poured through the gaps or broke through the embryo defences of the new flank before reinforcements arrived, there would be no reserves at all to stop them. Forty-two German battalions were on the march and only seventeen battalions of British and Canadians stood in their path. They could be brushed aside as easily as a single finger might push open a well-oiled door and, even with the paltry amount of information at their disposal, the senior officers knew it.
Colonel Geddes’s orders were not only to fill the gaps and extend his line to cover the open French front. He was ordered to attack, where he could, to pin the Germans down and, if possible, to push ahead and recover lost ground.
Geddes was as ignorant of the situation as anyone and, with no staff, with only a Brigade Major to assist him, and a platoon of cyclists as a makeshift signalling section, he hardly knew the whereabouts at any one time of all the scattered troops of his command. It was a mammoth task for any Battalion Commander to undertake. But somehow it had to be done.
Chapter 15
All down the line from Ploegstreet to Merville troops were ordered to prepare to move off at short notice but those in reserve or at rest nearest to Ypres were sent for first. They at least could cover some of the distance reasonably fast on foot. Telephone wires hummed and lights burned in Headquarters’ offices far into the night – and the next night, and the next. No matter how desperate the situation, Battalions and reserves could not be suddenly withdrawn from the line without first making complicated arrangements to ensure the safety of the line when they had gone. Vehicles had to be provided to carry them north and to follow them up with supplies of rations and ammunition, so transport parks were scoured for lorries and limbers, trains were rescheduled and diverted, and long lines of London buses trundled up to camps and villages behind the front to carry the troops away. No one had the faintest idea what had happened, or where or what they were bound for.
The London Rifle Brigade was rudely interrupted at the start of a spell of rest, made all the more enjoyable by the fact that the weather was fine. A sports day was planned to keep the men entertained, the Adjutant had already been to Bailleul to purchase prizes from battalion funds, and the athletes, excused from parades and fatigues, were spending energetic days training for the various events, sprinting, jumping and pole-vaulting in the mild spring weather.
The train they boarded at Steenwerck jolted first towards Hazebrouck on the first leg of the journey and prompted wild speculation. Various wagers were staked in cigarettes, although the joker who suggested that the war was over and they were bound for Calais and home found few takers. But at Hazebrouck, after much delay and shunting, the engine was reversed, the train began to head north and if there were still any doubts about their destination the trainloads of refugees they passed soon dispelled them. It was clear that something serious had happened and that it had happened at Ypres.
The three squadrons of the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars were in billets round the small village of Pradelles on the road from Hazebrouck to Bailleul, but when the colonel received the order to turn out his men as quickly as possible he had some difficulty in laying his hands on them. They had already trotted off on various training schemes in different parts of the countryside, but it was a fine morning for a gallop, they had let the horses have their heads, and there was no sign of them for miles. It took more than an hour before dispatch-riders, scouring the countryside on motor bikes, were able to track them down and bring them back and it was well after mid-day before they reached the rendezvous at Strazeele where they were to link up with the rest of the 1st Cavalry Division on the way to Ypres.
Tpr. P. Batchelor, D Squadron, Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars.
We waited there for hours before anyone turned up and we didn’t have a clue what was happening. Of course we were used to that – all through Neuve Chapelle we’d waited to go into action and nothing happened. We’d had no grub, so Captain Gill let us go off a few at a time for a quarter of an hour to get some coffee and maybe a bit of bread and cheese in the village. It was half-way through the afternoon before we finally moved off, and the road was so packed with troops marching up that we could hardly get the squadron through. It took us more than three hours to cover three miles and then we were dismounted and waited for hours again while they tried to find billets. By the time we’d fed and watered the horses it was past midnight before we turned in ourselves – and we’d hardly got to sleep before we were up again and off on the road to Ypres.
By setting off before first light when the roads were slightly quieter and the weary infantry still slept, by riding across country after daylight, spurred on by the sound of the guns booming louder as they approached, the Oxfordshire Hussars arrived shortly after nine in the morning and unsaddled in fields near Vlamertinghe three miles behind the front. One latecomer got there almost ten hours behind the others and his arrival by taxi-cab caused something of a sensation. Lieutenant Wellesley had been on a machine-gun course at Wisques and on his way back, arriving at St Omer on market day, he had indulged in a little shopping for provisions to enliven meals in the mess. Flanders is renowned for succulent asparagus, in season for a few short weeks in April and early May. One stall was piled high with the pick of the crop – the fattest, whitest, freshest stalks Wellesley had ever seen. Like most officers of the Oxfordshire Yeomanry, Wellesley belonged to the landed gentry and enjoyed a comfortable income which enabled him to indulge his epicurean tastes. He purchased a capacious hamper from a stall selling baskets, had it filled with a large quantity of asparagus and, leaving it in charge of his servant, strolled off to find a wine merchant. He bought two cases of the best champagne that St Omer could offer and, after a satisfactory lunch in a restaurant, he hired a ramshackle taxi-cab for the eighteen-mile journey to Pradelles. Wellesley’s servant sat in front with the driver and Wellesley travelled in the back with their luggage plus his bulky purchases. It was a tight squeeze, but Wellesley did not mind. For dinner there would be champagne and asparagus – dripping with country butter (for he had not forgotten that!) – and he looked forward with pleasure to surprising his brother officers with a rare feast.
It was nothing to the surprise that awaited Wellesley himself at Pradelles when he discovered that billets were empty and the Oxfordshire Hussars had gone. Brigade Headquarters had gone too and, given the situation, the confusion of orders, the congestion of troops, no one could tell him precisely where to find his regiment. He guessed, wrongly, that it might have gone south, and the elderly cab-driver, who was no doubt congratulating himself on picking up a lucrative long-distance fare, changed his mind at Laventie when a clutch of shells exploded on the road less than three hundred yards ahead. He stopped the cab and dived beneath it for shelter, flatly refusing to go on, and it was some considerable time before he could be induced to return to the driving seat. Even then, only a large bribe with the promise of more to come dissuaded him from driving straight back to St Omer. By the time their wanderings ended, by the time they had scrounged petrol, lost their way a dozen times, made a thousand enquiries, and roamed the length of the front within earshot of the bombardments, the driver was a broken man.
It was more than twenty-four hours before they tracked down the Oxfordshire Hussars encamped in miserable bivouacs at Vlamertinghe. The champagne and asparagus was unloaded at the entrance to a muddy field in the midst of a bombardment. The taxi-driver, lavishly paid off, set off thankfully to St Omer, and if, in the heat of the emergency, Lieutenant Wellesley did not receive precisely the welcome he had expected from the officers, at least they were impressed by his style. The mess cooks, working in difficult circumstances, were possibly less impressed by the prospect of scraping a hamperful of asparagus in the middle of a battle.
The first task of the Cavalry Division was to reconnoitre and, in particular, to reconnoitre the French front, for the situation was still far from clear and General Wanless O’Gowan, who had crossed the canal expecting to find French positions, had been appalled to discover that there were still large gaps where no troops were to be found. The new British line was fragile and tenuous enough, but the greatest danger zone was along the canal. The bulk of the French troops had fallen back beyond it and four long miles stretched between the British left and Steenstraat where the French joined hands with the Belgian front running to the north. Reports from French headquarters were patchy and imprecise and the British Command suspected that General Putz himself was not entirely sure of the whereabouts of his men. But one thing was certain. The Germans had crossed the bridge at Steenstraat and gained a foothold on the opposite bank. Luck and the Belgians had prevented them going further, and the Belgians had indeed been lucky. By some uncharacteristic mismanagement or misunderstanding on the part of the Germans not all the gas-cylinders at this crucial juncture of the front had been opened and the gas that had been released had so little effect that the Belgians north of Steenstraat had been able to beat back the Germans and bring their artillery into action to help French comrades on their right. But the Germans did manage to cross the canal. Now they were fighting at Lizerne to the west of it and although the French were fiercely resisting, the enemy was within an ace of driving a wedge between the French and Belgian armies. That would bring disaster. Disaster to the Belgians, who would be entirely cut off between the enemy and the northern swamps. Disaster to the French, already in disarray, whose lines could so easily be rolled up. Disaster to the British in their ragged vulnerable line in the salient round Ypres which could be cut off with ease from the rear. As soon as they arrived on the morning of the 23rd, as soon as the horses were watered and fed and rested, British cavalry patrols were sent off to reconnoitre. But one man was ahead of them.
Artur Barbieur was senior policeman at Proven. The bridge at Steenstraat was in his charge and, war or no war, he did not intend to shirk this responsibility. Barbieur was a family man, and his seven-year-old daughter Paula would remember that evening for the rest of her life.
Mevrouw Paula Hennekint.
My mother pleaded with him not to go, but he would go. Nothing would stop him. After he set off on his bicycle I remember my mother lighting candles in front of a little crucifix and kneeling down to pray. She was a very pious woman. She did the same every night – but that night I remember especially because she was so terribly anxious. She had done the same when the German Hussars passed through our village in August 1914. I remember how frightened we were. We closed all the shutters and kept very still and quiet, my mother on her knees in front of the crucifix.
Of course the Germans didn’t stay then, and the French came when the war really started. I had been going to school since September, and there were soldiers everywhere, French soldiers and Belgian soldiers passing through. The main road was always so blocked with troops and wagons and horses that we had to go to school by the back lanes because the main road was for the military and we were warned not to use it. Next to the police station in the village there was a little prison for soldiers who had misbehaved themselves – nothing serious, but they were under arrest, although it wasn’t rigid and they weren’t strictly guarded. We used to go and talk to them and take them water, and they asked if we could take them some wine – because the French soldiers liked wine. So my mother used to put a bottle of wine hidden in a big jug of water, and we children used to carry it to them in the prison. They could pay for it. It was all fun to us. The French soldiers were good to us. They used to give us some of their rations and white bread, which was wonderful to us.
Then, on the evening of the first gas attack, there were so many rumours going round that no one knew what had happened. All we knew was that something had happened at the canal at Steenstraat and my father decided that he must go to see if the bridge had been blown up, because it would have been his duty to make a report if it had. My mother didn’t try to stop him, but she was very worried and upset. I can understand why she was so emotional now, because my brother was born in December 1915, so she must have just recently found that she was pregnant. It must have been dreadful for her. But my father set off, wearing his police uniform and riding his bicycle as if it was nothing out of the ordinary. We children were sent to bed, but my mother waited up all night – and he didn’t come back.
Late in the evening, by the time Artur Barbieur reached Steenstraat, the fighting had died down. His police uniform enabled him to pass through the French lines. But the Germans were on the look-out and as Barbieur cycled towards the bridge they opened fire.
Mevrouw Paula Hennekint.
I shall never forget the next day. In the morning two Belgian policemen came to tell my mother that my father had been shot and wounded – but they could tell her no more, only that he had been taken away. My mother was distracted. She kept wringing her hands and saying over and over again, ‘What’s going to become of my husband!’ Mother, children, all of us, we were all crying. He just disappeared and we could find out nothing. Every day we saw trainloads of wounded going away, and there were camp hospitals all around us, but we could find out nothing. We didn’t know how badly he was wounded, we didn’t know where he was – or even if he was alive or dead. My poor mother! She almost went out of her mind. She thought he would never come back.
Three weeks later he walked in on crutches. He had been badly shot up in the legs with a big shell splinter in his thigh. He’d had several operations in one of the British camp hospitals and when he began to recover they were going to send him on to a military hospital in England. But he wouldn’t hear of it. He said, ‘No, no. I must get home to my wife and children.’ So they let him go. He hobbled in while my mother was on her knees praying. She went wild! We all did! It was the first news we’d had of him since he went out on his bicycle three weeks before.
Early on the morning of 23 April Sir John French drove to Cassel to discuss matters with General Foch at French headquarters. He did not by any means have a clear picture of the situation but he knew enough to judge that it was critical and that the line of the salient might have to be drastically reduced, if not withdrawn altogether. Foch was scandalised at the very idea. His only thought was to regain his original line and, he assured the British Commander-in-Chief, he had every intention of doing so. Reinforcements were on the way and as soon as they were in position the attack would go in. The British must support it. He was convinced that they would succeed.
General French was in two minds. The salient was so small, the situation on his left so perilous, the casualties were already so large and his own resources in men and materials so small, that all his instincts as a soldier told him that the sensible course would be to draw back to a line that could be more easily defended – even, in the last resort, to contemplate relinquishing Ypres. But it was difficult to refuse an ally who was so convinced that the situation could be retrieved. French hesitated, and finally, almost against his better judgement, he agreed. But he made one stipulation. If the French did not succeed, with his support, in restoring the situation within ‘a reasonable time’ he would be forced to reconsider his position and draw in his line. Meanwhile, he would reinforce his Second Army and fight on. Already fresh troops had been ordered to stand by and be prepared to move at short notice. As soon as he returned to his advanced headquarters at Hazebrouck the Commander-in-Chief issued the orders that would send them on their way.
The French Commander-in-Chief, Marshal Joffre, shared Sir John French’s misgivings. The unexpectedness of the German attack at Ypres was a disconcerting annoyance and not at all in conformance with his own plan for the prosecution of the war. Joffre had his sights firmly set on the triple attack that would disrupt the German lines of communication – the all-out effort, so carefully planned, that would reduce the huge German salient that swung deep into France, and release the towns and villages imprisoned in its maw. Preparations were almost complete, the British – who had risen in his estimation since their independent action at Neuve Chapelle – were committed to cooperate and, in Joffre’s view, the best way of relieving the pressure at Ypres was to distract the Germans with a major offensive elsewhere. Ypres, by comparison, was small beer and had the British 29th Division not been diverted to Gallipoli, thus preventing them from taking over his entire line in the north, Joffre would have had no French troops there at all.* As it was, in the light of the coming offensive, he was reluctant to commit any more of his men and to weaken his armies, poised for the assault, by bleeding them of badly needed resources in men and materials in order to commit them to what, at best, was a distraction and, at worst, might well turn out to be a lost cause. General Foch would have to fight hard to wrest reinforcements from the ample reserves at Marshal Joffre’s disposal.
Sir John French, who was equally anxious to participate in a breakthrough and to capitalise on the initial success at Neuve Chapelle, was in sympathy with the French Commander’s view. But a promise was a promise. General Foch had been so optimistic, so sure that the French could recover the lost ground, that Sir John French had only a few qualms as he issued the order for the counter-attack that would help them to get it back. General Foch, perhaps with a qualm or two of his own, had already driven to the headquarters of the unfortunate General Putz to urge him to take action as quickly as possible. He must attack, and attack at once. But it was an attack which General Putz was in no position to undertake and it had precious little chance of succeeding. The only reinforcements which Putz had yet received – two battalions and two batteries of guns rushed down from his isolated command at Nieuport – had already been thrown in at Lizerne where the French were holding back the German advance.
There was no time for preparation, no time for reconnaissance of the ground, and no exact knowledge of the enemy’s position. Nevertheless there was no arguing with a direct order from General Headquarters and, in the circumstances, both Smith-Dorrien and Plumer agreed that if an attack must be made it ought to be made speedily. The enemy front was ominously quiet and that could only be because the Germans were digging in, wiring a line that might soon become impregnable, and bringing up reserves to replace their casualties and increase their strength. But the hold-ups were many, the arrival of fresh troops was delayed by the congestion on the roads and the attack which should have gone in at three o’clock was not launched until almost half past four. Communications were so sketchy that it was all but impossible to arrange for artillery support and the batteries which did receive the message to fire a preliminary bombardment at 2.45 in support of the three o’clock attack did not receive the news of its postponement and the precious ammunition they fired in the general direction of the enemy went for nothing. When the troops finally started off, moving in broad daylight across open country towards the unseen German positions, the guns did their best to support them, but there was not much they could do. The German guns opened up, the infantry vanished into the smoke of explosions and half of those who survived to get within striking distance of the German positions were mown down by close-range fire from rifles and machine-guns. After the attack had started four hundred French colonial troops lining the eastern bank of the canal joined in, apparently spontaneously, but they very soon withdrew and no more was seen of the French. By seven o’clock it was all over and limp bands of survivors were lying low, waiting until darkness fell to cover the long crawl back. All the time the German heavy guns were thundering, as they had thundered all day, raining shells into the battlefield and into Ypres.
But the Commander-in-Chief had kept his promise to General Foch, although at a fearful price. No ground was captured which could not have been occupied if the fresh troops had simply walked forward under cover of darkness and now those badly needed troops who might have served to strengthen the line had themselves been decimated. They had lost most of their officers – including three Battalion Commanders – and more than half the men. It was only some consolation that matters might have been worse for, except at Lizerne, and apart from isolated bombing raids where the out flanked angle of the weak Canadian line turned to join the new extended front, the Germans had not followed up their success of the previous evening with a full-scale assault. But no one had any doubt that sooner rather than later they would, and every man would be needed to meet the attack when it came.
It was Friday night, 23 April. St George was the patron saint of the Northumberland Fusiliers and, as they marched towards Ypres, there was not a man of the 7th Battalion who was not aware that today was St George’s Day. It was exactly seventy-two hours since the 50th Northumbrian Territorial Division had landed in France and its 149th Brigade had spent one night in troop trains chugging slowly north, and another in billets around Mount Kemmel. Now they were going into battle, and if any such thoughts as iambs to the slaughter’ occurred to the mind of their Divisional Commander he kept them to himself.
L/cpl. J. Dorgan, 7th Bn., Northumberland Fusiliers, 50 Div. (TF).
We arrived at the outskirts of Ypres and marched through the square, the market place of Ypres. Shells were dropping on the cobbled stones and some of the lighter shells and the shrapnel were spreading right across the square and the Cloth Hall and the Cathedral were on fire. We had our first casualty in going through the square, Tommy Rachael, who was a postman in Ashington. He was marching behind me and he shouted out, he said, ‘I’m wounded.’ Nobody would believe him and then somebody said, There’s blood coming down his legs,’ and another fellow said, ‘Help him, help him somebody. He’s not going to drop out. We’re the Northumberland Fusiliers!’ That was the spirit we had.
As we reached the outskirts we didn’t know where we were going, neither officers nor men. After having an hour or two’s sleep just outside of Ypres we marched on in the early hours of 24 April under heavy shell-fire.
Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien had spent an anxious dispiriting evening, counting the cost of the counter-attack and poring over maps, trying as a soldier to read the soldier’s mind of his opposite number at German Headquarters. In the position of the German Commander, what would he do? It was true that there had been local skirmishes but, from the German point of view, they had demonstrated very little other than their desire to improve their position. The absence of a full-scale infantry assault – which could hardly have been withstood – was a blessing, but the strange lack of movement was ominous. More than twenty-four hours had passed since the Germans had broken the allied line, and still their infantry hesitated. Why? Something was bound to happen. Somewhere the blow would fall. But where?
Knowing, as the Germans must, that the allied line had been broken, guessing, as they surely would, that the scanty reserves had been used up to strengthen the new northern flank, knowing full well the extent of the casualties they had inflicted, Smith-Dorrien reasoned that a German General’s inclination might be to attack the southern face of the salient, to break through and take the northern flank from the rear or, by forcing the British to fight back-to-back on two flanks, to gradually squeeze them in and snuff them out. He was dismally aware that it was only one of several imponderable possibilities but it could not be discounted, and he made haste to send a signal to the troops in the thin denuded lines on the east and south of the salient to be vigilant and alert to the likelihood of attack.
But the line on the eastern face of the salient was more vulnerable than the line facing south, and no one knew better than Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien just how inadequate it was. The British Army had only begun to take over this sector from the French in the early part of April, the defences were woeful and even after a lot of hard work they were not much improved. The sector held by the 27th and 28th Divisions ran from the Menin Road, a mile in front of the village of Gheluvelt, lost to the Germans in the autumn of 1914, crept out to enclose Polygon Wood, swung north past Broodseinde east of Zonnebeke, and jutted east again across a slope to enclose the farms the French called Seine and Marne. Here for a few hundred yards the line ran very close to the Germans, a matter of yards away, and from this point the salient began to tail down on its slow curve to the north-west.*
Beyond the tiny copse they called Berlin Wood the Canadians took over the line that ran across the Ostnieuwkerke road half a mile north of the hamlet of Gravenstafel and on, sloping gently above the Gravenstafel Ridge, to the Poelcapelle Road half a mile in front of that village. It was here that the Canadians had joined hands with the French and it was just beyond the Poelcapelle Road that the French line had been forced in by the gas attack. The Canadians had been in the new line for just over a week and the defences they inherited from the French were lamentable. The front-line trenches were constructed of thin sandbagged parapets, far from bullet-proof, and with no sheltering parados to prevent shots striking from the rear. They were mere outposts grouped together at intervals with nothing to link them but a few shallow ditches, less than three feet deep, running back here and there to flimsy support positions behind. A few tumbledown dug-outs of wood and tarpaulin that were good enough to provide shelter from the rain would give much the same protection as umbrellas against bombardment.
A little way behind the front, on the western edge of the Gravenstafel Ridge, some unfinished trenches straggled across ground that was still littered with the unburied bodies of French and German soldiers killed six months ago in the First Battle of Ypres. The army referred to this sector as ‘Locality C’. Canadian working parties, given the distasteful task of scattering chloride of lime in an effort to smother the stench of corruption, referred to it in less printable terms.
But the one bright spot in this pathetically weak front was the deep belt of barbed wire entanglements that protected it and the French had depended on this, on machine-gun posts behind it, and on their excellent quick-firing .75 guns to defend it. And they had constructed another line, far stronger than the first. It was the line of last resort and it ran not far in front of Ypres, from Hill 60 to the Menin Road, across a gradual slope to pass north of Potijze, to encircle Wieltje and cross the low ridge between Mouse Trap Farm and Kitchener’s Wood. It was so far back that the British, dearly wishing when they took over their stretch of it that their allies had constructed a line half as strong two miles ahead, little thinking that they would ever need to make use of it as a front, named it ‘the GHQ line’. Now, pushing against the newly formed and fragile defensive flank, the Germans were ranged against its northern extremity.
The Germans had made the most of the twenty-four hours’ breathing space, and they were thinking on their feet, because the gas attack had been a tactical experiment and had not figured in their overall strategy as the preliminary to a full-scale planned campaign. But the opportunity presented by such remarkable success was too tantalising to resist. Their misfortune was that no reserves had been on hand to exploit it to the full. Even now there were few reserves to call on for their own casualties had not been small and the counter-attacks had taken them by surprise and even demoralised their troops.*
The best that could be done in the short term was to depend on heavy artillery fire to soften the British front and create havoc in Ypres, to fight on at Steenstraat and Lizerne, and to warn the tired troops facing the British defensive flank to dig in and stand fast. Even though these troops were in the best position to make a successful assault they were in no fit state to undertake it. But there was still the gas, and with gas they could repeat their success. On 23 April, all during the hours of daylight, through the dusk and on into the dark, while their big guns fired incessantly, the Germans moved up field guns and trench mortars to support their captured front and dug in fresh gas cylinders in front of the Canadians in their unbroken original line still facing them to the east. This time the Germans were determined to make no mistake and to give themselves ample time to press home their advantage.
The wind was steady and blowing in the right direction. Long before dawn they began to bombard the Canadians’ vulnerable line. An hour later the gas cylinders were opened and the gas was released across the centre of their front. It was four o’clock in the morning and the moon behind the flashes of the guns had barely begun to wane in the night sky when the first fumes drifted across. Drifting ghostly and lurid in the dim light in a bank fifteen feet high, it rolled across the wire and engulfed the Canadians in the makeshift trenches inherited from the French. They had nothing to protect them from the gas – only handkerchiefs, towels, even cotton bandoliers, hastily clapped across mouth and nose, and soon there was no time even for that, for the enemy was advancing in the wake of the fumes and the men who had not immediately collapsed had to mount the parapets to meet them. Only where the gas was thickest in front of part of Jim Keddie’s 48th Highlanders did the line give way after a bitter fight.
L/cpl. J. D. Keddie.
Just before 4 a.m. on the 24th we managed to get a mouthful of rum each. We had no sooner got it down than the enemy started an attack, beginning with gas. They then began to shell the reserve trenches, and they did it to some tune. You could hardly get breath for the concussion! They also had the range, and the loss of life was awful, and oh, the horrors, the sights were dreadful. One poor beggar came along crying for someone to tie up his arm. Nobody seemed to care for the job, so I got hold of him and did my best. The arm was completely off up to the elbow – a fearful sight. While I was attending to him, I got a flesh wound on the head, and, Lord, did it bleed! But it wasn’t sore. I’d fired about a hundred and fifty rounds by this time, and I’d sent two men to get more ammunition. I saw them coming back and they only had about thirty yards to go when one of them was shot right through the head. Well, I knew the other couldn’t carry it himself, so I crawled out to give him a lift, and on my way I got it through the sole of my right foot. It wasn’t very painful at the time. We got the box of ammunition to the trench somehow, then I looked for the quickest way to a First Aid Station and beat it as quick as I could. I could walk on the foot fairly well, and in fact I could sometimes do a little trot. But when I got there I found that an order had been given to retire, so they could do nothing for me.
The previous day when they had been brought up towards the line, the raw inexperienced troops of the 50th Northumbrian Division had only been intended to act as reserves. Now that every man of the reserves was needed, raw or not, they were pushed up into the salient and ordered to press on through the shelling to the front line.
L/cpl. J. Dorgan.
We suffered many casualties on the road up, many, many casualties. I remember a shell dropping when we were lying behind a hedge, and two men had both their legs taken off. One lived a few minutes, the other lived about half an hour. One was called Jackie Oliver and the other was Bob Young. Bob Young was the first to go. When he was hit he said, ‘Will you take my wife’s photograph out of my pocket?’ He was sensible to the last and jokingly, as I thought, he kept saying to me, he says, Tut my legs straight.’ Well, he’d no legs to put straight, and I just made a movement, touched the lower part of his body. What could I do? He died with his wife’s photograph in his hand.
Jackie Oliver had a brother in our Battalion and I shouted to our fellows who had to leave me with these two wounded men, Tell Weedy Oliver his brother’s wounded.’ He never recovered consciousness but eventually, some time later, Weedy Oliver came back and was with his brother when he died. No doctors available. No first aid available. I don’t know where they were, because our Battalion was still advancing towards the front line. I just had to leave them. I don’t know where they were buried. I never saw them or heard of them again. I had to go as fast as I could to catch up with our Battalion.
We went on and on and, as we went up the Canadians and the Highlanders were retreating from the front line because they had been under gas. There was no gas-masks, nothing for gas casualties, and all they had on was their bandage out of their first aid kit which every soldier carried in a pocket in his tunic, and they had these bandages on their eyes and there they went staggering back. Gas never affected me and there was fellows dropping behind all the time – I must have been one of the lucky ones. We came to the reserve trenches, but we didn’t recognise them as trenches, nobody in them, they were all retired. So we just jumped over, but we never reached the front line. The gas was too dense and then we had to retire. We never reached St Julien. I think we only got as far as St Jean but, wherever it was, we had to retire from there. We didn’t come out of the line for four days.
The Canadians had finally ‘budged’ – but only some of them, only in the last resort, and only because the odds against them were not humanly possible to overcome. But, on either side of the gap in the line they had left, others like Jim Keddie were fighting on, manning the parapets with rifles, blazing machine-gun fire to break up the German ranks as they closed in ahead of them, swinging round to pour crossfire on the enemy soldiers as they attempted to advance to ‘Locality C’. As soon as the situation was known in the scattered batteries every available gun joined in the fight to beat them off. The Germans took heavy punishment, but they had twenty-four Battalions against the Canadians’ eight to envelop the angle of the line that ran in front of Gravenstafel and swung back in front of St Julien to Kitchener’s Wood, with a dangerous gap in the eastern face where the Royal Highlanders of Canada had been forced to retire and part of the 3rd Battalion had been overrun in the first onslaught.
L/cpl. J. W. Finnimore, 3rd Bn., 1st Canadian Brig., 1st Canadian Div.
I’d only been four years in Canada when the war started. Before that I was an apprentice at Woolwich Arsenal, but times were slack and I knew perfectly well that as soon as my time was out and I reached twenty-one I would be sacked. It didn’t seem worth waiting around for that, so I emigrated to Canada in 1910. Still, I considered myself to be a Canadian, though proud of my British descent, and I considered it my duty to join up. I was glad to do it.
That day, 24 April, was the worst day of my life. It started with a really violent bombardment and then – you could only call it a cloud of death when the gas came over, and this time it was directed straight at us. People were suffocating, but some were worse affected than others and the word was passed down that we were to hold on at all costs. We did our best, but first I was wounded in the leg and then, when the Germans were advancing and we got the order to retire, I couldn’t move – naturally. All I can remember much later is a German soldier standing over me pointing his rifle and bayonet at my chest. It was my worst moment of the whole war because, being wounded in the leg, I couldn’t get up and I couldn’t walk. I thought he was going to let me have it. But he didn’t. We were near a deserted farmyard and he handed his rifle to a comrade and went off into this farm and came back a few minutes later with a wheelbarrow. He put me in it and then he pushed me all the way through to their rear dressing station – and it must have been a good mile behind their lines. The German doctors and orderlies were up to their eyes with their own casualties. They couldn’t do a lot for us. We wounded prisoners were laid down on some straw in a church hall and there we lay from Saturday to Monday. Then they put us in box-cars and took us to Paderborn in Westphalia, a journey of two or three days. They gave us a meal, and I remember thinking it was the first hot food I’d had for a week.
But the Canadians were holding the Germans at one dangerous point they had even counter-attacked, but they could not hold out indefinitely. Nor could the guns. And if the troops were forced to retire, the guns would be in danger.
Lt. Col. P. Burney, 9th Heavy Brig., RGA.
I was commanding the 9th Brigade of Heavy Artillery, consisting of the 71st Heavy Battery of four 4.7-inch guns and the 121st Battery, also 4.7-inch guns. The 121st Battery was in action at Wittepoert Farm, firing in a southerly direction. It was in the forenoon that I got a message by telephone to say that masses of Germans were advancing up the Poelcapelle to St Julien road. I kept Owen’s gun teams near his farm billet, to the rear and towards the railway, and had arranged with him for his line of retreat in case of emergency. Just about 11 a.m. my adjutant, Captain Pask, came up to say that numbers of Canadians were coming back from Zonnebeke and that they were not wounded, but he could not get them to turn back, although he had threatened to shoot them! I went down and in the hall of my billet I found about half a dozen Canadians looking very pale, having choking fits and asking for water. Many others were in the road outside, and none could explain what had happened to them.
I went back to my telephone room and called up Owen, told him the situation, and I asked him to turn his guns end for end (no easy job with a 4.7-inch deep in mud), and get on top of his billet at the farm, where he would probably get a view of the Poelcapelle to St Julien road, and keep up a heavy shrapnel fire on the advancing Germans. As soon as he had used up all his shrapnel he was to report to me on the telephone, or if that was cut, to use his own discretion about retiring along our prearranged route.
My billet was just outside the Menin Gate and around us were two other field artillery Brigade Headquarters, and one Belgian. The enemy were bombarding Ypres with huge 17-inch Howitzers and the shells were falling mostly on the Menin Gate. Both my horses in a stable across the road had been killed and the stable set on fire, and my Adjutant was somewhat worried and wanted to know whether we had better not shift. I told him to have everything packed and put into the wagon and to be ready to move at once.
About 2 p.m. I heard that the Germans had taken St Julien and were pressing on to Wieltje. Just at that moment Owen called me on the telephone. He said that he had got a good view of the enemy on the Poelcapelle to St Julien road and had kept a heavy shrapnel fire on them until all his shells were expended. He also said that the enemy were now beyond his left rear and asked if he was to retire. I ordered him to move to his wagon lines to the other side of Ypres, as arranged. All the time these 17-inch shells had been causing havoc at the Menin Gate and our billet was being badly shaken by the explosions. The telephone room was an outbuilt room of glass used by the previous owner as a dentistry, and it was literally tumbling to pieces, so I ordered my Adjutant to move to the other side of Ypres and to wait at the Vlamertinghe crossroads until I joined him.
Shortly afterwards it got very unhealthy and I then decided to leave the billet with the two telephone operators who had remained with me. In the street I saw a passing car and hailed it. It was a Staff Officer who was going back through Ypres to Poperinghe, so I got a lift and asked if I might sit alongside the driver, because I knew the best way through Ypres when it was being shelled. As we were passing along one of the streets I heard a shell coming straight for us, so I told the driver to stop. Sure enough, a 5.9-inch burst in the line of houses about two hundred yards ahead of us and blocked the street with debris. Our car was a Ford, and I asked the driver if he could drive over the debris. He said, ‘Yes,’ so I replied, ‘Drive like hell then, before another shell comes.’ He revved up the engine and that little car made for the pile of debris and we lurched and bumped and positively jumped over it! We got through safely.
At the Asylum Road junction I met General Gay and told him that I had retired the 121st Battery to its wagon lines and just before leaving the Menin Gate billet had heard from Major Owen that the battery had arrived safely with the loss of only two horses killed by shrapnel on the Hooge to Ypres road just where it crosses the railway.
It had been a day of close shaves. The Germans were on the move. St Mien had been captured. The guns were retreating. Every man was in the line. At nightfall the Canadians were ordered to retire from their hard-pressed front to a position further back and the Germans moved forward exultantly into the ground they had given up. But it was not over yet. Ypres and the shrunken salient around it still held out.
Part 4
The Desperate Days
The green and grey and purple day is barred with clouds of dun,
From Ypres city smouldering before the setting sun.
Another hour will see it flower, lamentable sight,
A bush of burning roses underneath the night.
Charles Scott-Moncrieff
Chapter 16
Until news of the battle at Ypres arrived and the Germans’ infamous use of gas caused general outrage, the British public had been avidly following the progress of a sensational murder trial. George Smith was appearing at the Old Bailey on a charge of triple murder in the notorious case of the Brides in the Bath, and it had pushed even the war from the headlines of all but the most ponderous newspapers.
Spring was well under way, the fine weather brought crowds of strollers into the parks and shoppers into the streets, and shipping companies were urging war-weary people who could afford it to book up now for recuperative sea voyages to Cape Town or Madeira. Only Egypt had been struck from their agendas of peacetime destinations.
Harrods of Knightsbridge was preparing a special event to display the new spring fashions which, for one week only, would be sold at promotional prices. Recently, business in the fashion departments had been slow. It was not exactly considered unpatriotic to buy new clothes but unnecessary purchases were looked on as something of an indulgence and Harrods’ customers on the whole were shopping with care and with an eye to the practical. In tune with the mood of the moment the advertisements that publicised the new spring fashions featured practical garments – light coloured coats, severely tailored in artificial silk, but in an enticing range of fashionable colours, and plain well-cut blouses in fine crêpe-de-chine – and in all the tasteful window displays there was hardly a frill or a furbelow to be seen. As a further inducement to bring customers into the store the whole event was to have a patriotic theme. In the restaurant the Royal Welsh Ladies Choir would give afternoon concerts, conducted by Madame Clara Novello-Davies, accompanied by her son Ivor Novello at the piano, and weary shoppers enjoying afternoon tea would be encouraged to purchase programmes and copies of the songs in aid of Queen Alexandra’s Field Force Fund. There would also be collections for the Red Cross and, as usual, demonstrations of bandage-making and a cutting-out service for flannel bed jackets suitable for wounded soldiers and expert staff would be on hand to give advice on the selection of knitting-wool and patterns for garments for the troops. It was all nicely judged to appeal to the frivolous and the dutiful alike.
When the call came for gas-masks Harrods had several samples made up within the hour and lost no time in replacing spring fashions in a window near the Knightsbridge entrance with a display of home-made gas-masks, showing step-by-step stages of production. Inside the store a special counter was hastily rigged up to sell the gauze, the cotton wool, and tape required to make them up according to War Office instructions and members of staff gave non-stop demonstrations to show the willing public how to go about it.
A face piece (to cover mouth and nostrils), formed of an oblong pad of bleached absorbent cotton-wool about 51/4in. × 3in. × 3/4in., covered with three layers of bleached cotton gauze and fitted with a band, to fit round the head and keep the pad in position, consisting of a piece of 1/2in. cotton elastic 16in. long, attached to the narrow end of the face pad, so as to form a loop with the pad.
These respirators should be sent in packages of not less than 100 to Chief Ordnance Office, Royal Army Clothing Department, Pimlico.
The War Office appeal for half a million gas-masks had been published in the national press and all over the country there was a run on gauze and cotton wool as Red Cross working-parties, schools, and tens of thousands of indignant individuals applied themselves eagerly to the task of making rudimentary gas masks for ‘the boys at the front’. The government hoped to be able to send a hundred thousand home-made masks to France within a week. Until they got there the boys at the front would have to manage as best they could.
Emergency measures had been quickly drawn up by the Director of Medical Services and sent out in priority signals to all units. Pending the arrival of gas-masks the troops were instructed to dampen any available piece of material – a handkerchief, a sock, a flannel body-belt – and tie it across mouth and nose until the gas passed over. They believed that a solution of bicarbonate of soda would be the most effective liquid to combat the fumes and Commanding Officers were instructed to obtain supplies locally and to have the solution made up and placed at intervals in buckets or biscuit tins along the trenches. In quiet sectors of the line this instruction was faithfully carried out. At Ypres, where the battle still raged and the ‘trenches’ were no more than scrapes in the wavering line, it was clearly impossible. Conceding this, the Director of Medical Services advised that, in an emergency, any liquid that was to hand would give some protection against gas fumes. The men in the line, correctly interpreting this suggestion in the personal terms it implied, felt that ‘to hand’ was a somewhat inappropriate choice of words. But whatever method they used to combat the gas the troops were told to hang on for dear life until the gas cloud passed over, to stand fast and meet the enemy as he came on. It could be done – and the Canadians had proved it.
Although it thinned and dissipated as it went, the gas had left its mark as it travelled. Grass turned yellow. Leaves shrivelled and died. Hens lay dead in abandoned farmyards. Birds fell from the trees, and there were dead rats everywhere. Even quite far beyond the site of the attack the bloated bodies of farm animals lay swelling in the sun. No one had time to bury them. And no one had much idea how to treat the survivors of the gas attack who were carried to the dressing stations and hospitals behind the salient.
The distress of the gas victims was pitiful to see. By the time the lucky ones reached the Casualty Clearing Stations many hours after they had been gassed most had passed into the second stage. Their throats still burned; they were still coughing and gasping, incapable of speech, their chests distended and seared with agonising pain. But the retching and vomiting had passed. The yellow froth that foamed so copiously from the mouth and nostrils in the first few hours gave way to a bright viscous mucus streaked with blood from haemorrhages in the trachea, or reddish-brown where blood vessels had burst and seeped into the tissues of the lung. Now the men were exhausted and weak from lack of oxygen for the lungs had become so engorged with fluid that they swelled to twice their normal size. In the worst cases the skin turned reddish violet, and if pneumonia or pleurisy set in, as it so often did, there was small hope of recovery. Little by little men drowned in their own secretions. It was a horrible death and, try as they would, there was little doctors could do to prevent it.
The doctors and medical orderlies in dressing stations and clearing stations, and in ambulance units run by civilians – the Quakers of the Friends Ambulance Unit, the faithful nuns in the convents – were all frantically over-worked, for men wounded in the fighting and by the incessant bombardments far outnumbered the gas casualties. Stretcher-bearers working under fire performed heroic feats but, even so, men who were wounded in the costly counter-attacks where no ground was gained (or where the troops were forced back) were all too often left to fall into the hands of the Germans if they were lucky, or simply to die if they were not. It was fortunate for Jim Keddie that he could fend for himself, but there were times on his long crawl back when he thought it was touch and go.
L/cpl. J. D. Keddie.
I kept going on and on in a perfect hail of bullets and shrapnel. At last I found an English gun battery. A doctor was there and he put me in a little shed on straw, took off my boot and cut off my sock and dressed the foot. He asked how far I had come and when I told him about three miles he said he did not know how I had got that length. He told me to sleep until he could find a stretcher. I must have slept for hours, but I was awakened by bursting shells, so I thought I’d better get out. But how? was the question. The battery fellows had gone, and now that my boot was off I had nothing to hold my foot together.
There was a farm about two hundred yards away. I saw people moving around so I thought if I could get that length I should be all right. I noticed an old shovel nearby so I hopped over and got hold of it, but it was more difficult than I thought, because my foot started to bleed again, and the blood was dripping through the bandages. The ground was so rough I couldn’t hop without falling – and then I found I had a marsh to get over, which I knew was impossible. So here was a fine fix! I could neither go back nor forward, and shells were bursting all around, so I lay down.
Then I saw two soldiers running towards me. They carried me up to the farm and laid me in the barn, gave me some army biscuits and cheese, and a bowl of milk. It was the best they had. I lay there for a while, when, all at once, a shell crashed through the building and killed one of the men billeted there, so they said they would have to try and get me out. There was a Dressing Station not far off, and they said they could take me over, but it was very dangerous owing to the shelling.* I said I would go. I was then carried on their shoulders, and laid on the floor beside a lot more and given an injection for lock-jaw. Later I was taken to a small place outside Ypres, and at daylight next morning to Ypres itself and on by motor from there to a place out of sound of guns and put into a school. Next day I was put on the ambulance train for Boulogne.
Keddie was a fortunate soldier. Those who were more severely wounded or were less determined had a smaller chance, because, as the troops fell back and the fighting grew dangerously near, the Advanced Aid Posts, if they were to be of any use at all, also had to pack up and retire further and further away from the shifting line. Even the main Dressing Stations in Ypres itself were forced either to move away or be shelled out of existence. Most of them concentrated near Vlamertinghe, and others from as far back as Bailleul moved up to help them cope with the flood of casualties.
But nowhere was safe from the bombarding shells of which the enemy seemed to have such an inexhaustible supply. His big guns roared and probed, targeted on Ypres and searching for British and Canadian batteries driven back to new positions.
Sgnr. J. E. Sutton.
We pulled back across the main road and went into action behind a wood. After being fired at by enemy guns, which we could see to our rear, we went back to the other side of Potijze Wood. In the wood was a chateau, deserted but undamaged. The occupants must have been heavy champagne drinkers as there were several walls in the grounds built of empty champagne bottles. A direct hit by an enemy shell threw glass fragments a considerable distance. We were hopelessly outgunned. I could count only eight field guns and two 4.7-inch guns in our vicinity. The wood was being shelled by over twenty-four enemy guns, mostly heavies. Some additional field guns moved in, but we were still out-gunned. The enemy were using 17-inch Howitzers to shell Ypres and the shells sounded almost like freight trains as they passed over. Looking back into the city you could see several houses disintegrate when a single shell exploded.
Pte. W. Hay.
We fell back and the chateau in Potijze Wood was our rendezvous. We had one battery of field guns there belonging to the Canadians, eighteen-pounders. And there was a farm ablaze, set alight by a German shell and inside the barn were two big wagons loaded with ammunition shells, and the farm was in flames, blazing. Well, there were two wounded artillerymen, Canadians, in the farm. We had stretcher-bearers (the bandsmen were made stretcher-bearers because they couldn’t fight so they were put on a much worse job. A stretcher-bearer is much worse than being in the line, carrying the wounded back under fire) – anyway there was two blokes, Edmondson and another fellow, both of them bandsmen, and they went over with the stretcher and brought these two artillerymen out. The place was blazing – any minute it could have gone up! So two of their gun limbers went in while the place was blazing and hooked up the ammunition wagons and pulled them out, and the two stretcher-bearers went up to the farmhouse and brought out a couple of artillerymen who were wounded. They got no medals for it. Later on you got medals for making a cup of tea for the captain – but not then!*
Sgnr. J. E. Sutton.
Behind our guns was the playhouse for the owner and his meal guests, servants’ quarters below with a panelled room above, reached by an outside stairway. There was some beautiful cut glass, but no liquor, also a large oil painting of drinking and wenching scenes. For about a week Macdonald and I slept in the upper room. The building had a thatched roof, which was hit by an incendiary shell. We got out with our belongings in a hurry. Next day Major McDougall said to me: ‘Sutton, I have cursed and damned every man in the Battery individually and collectively, and when I was foolish enough to go into a burning building to get a picture, a man from the 9th Battery came along to see I got out safely.’ I did not tell the Major that Macdonald had told me that he went back to get the picture but that the ‘old man’ beat him to it!
Sutton and Macdonald relished the joke. There was not much else to laugh at, and the outlook was grim. In theory the guns were still restricted to firing three rounds of ammunition a day – in practice they had been firing as much as they could lay hands on. But the supplies of shells, so pitifully inadequate to start with, were sinking at an alarming rate. The gunners had done what they could, and field guns firing at close range had achieved miracle after miracle in helping the infantry beat off the enemy. But heavy guns were scarce, many were obsolete, and heavy shells were scarcer still, so that even when they had been able to pinpoint new enemy positions, their efforts were of little avail. The artillery was outnumbered and out-gunned and in the shrinking salient round Ypres the German guns were clustered round three sides, firing at short range now that their field guns had moved forward to positions on the captured ground which they were labouring night and day to consolidate. And they were consolidating fast.
The new German defences were makeshift, but they were strong and easily able, with the help of powerful artillery, to repel assault by infantry massed in numbers far greater than their own. They might have been smashed by concentrated shelling with high explosive, but there was no high explosive – only shrapnel shell, and the short sparse bombardments that preceded the counter-attacks were as likely to destroy thick wire and heavily sandbagged strong-points as a handful of gravel thrown at a brick wall. And still the counter-attacks went on. Still the ragged battalions were sent forward to wrest back the lost ground, and still they were being ripped apart in the attempt.
The Germans had no lack of heavy guns and apparently no shortage of high-explosive ammunition. Day and night, and with remorseless energy, their big guns searched the salient. Firing from artillery charts on which targets had been accurately plotted from peacetime ordnance survey maps, they shelled every farm that might possibly be defended and every chateau that might be in use as Headquarters – they shelled woods where troops or guns might be concealed – they shelled roads and crossroads to catch transport on the move – they shelled indiscriminately, in the certain knowledge that somewhere in the crowded salient each shell would make its demoralising mark. And there was no means of retaliating.
The slow-moving transport had suffered badly on the shell-racked roads. So many horses had been killed, so many weapons and ambulances reduced to matchwood, so many loads of supplies and ammunition had been lost, that lorries had to be brought up and sent dangerously close to the line to carry rations to sustain the men, bullets to feed their rifles, and the ammunition so sorely needed by the guns. They were nerve-racking journeys.
Driver Rodger Fish, Motor Transport Service, Army Service Corps.
We were just unloading inside Ypres when the bombardment commenced and we had to clear out of it as quickly as possible. We came back next day, but an officer stopped us, and wouldn’t allow us to go in. He said it simply meant suicide, but we had to take the load up as far as possible. I shall never forget the sights in that town. We had to go right through it, dodging dead bodies of men and horses. Then the worst part of the journey came – two and a half miles of open road in view of the Germans. They didn’t seem to notice us till we came to the wire entanglements across the road, then they shelled us, but we got into the dug-outs till they eased up a bit, emptied the lorries, and made a dash for it. I don’t suppose you have the least idea what it feels like to be close behind the firing line during a battle. As a rule, the lorries deliver to the horse transport, which is a decent way behind, but we weren’t allowed to unload in case there might be a breakthrough. This was just at the time when the Canadians made their great stand, and I can tell you it was a night! Guns were going all round us, and when there was the slightest lull I could hear the Maxim and rifle fire, and from the position of the line we were in a horseshoe.
As the battle thundered on, officers in charge of ammunition columns, counting the losses of men and wagons and horses, wrestling with the difficulties of sending up ammunition to the batteries, were miserably aware that the stockpiled shells in the ammunition parks were dwindling away. Lack of transport was only part of the problem, but until more could be spared there was no possibility of replenishing supplies from reserve stock held further back on the lines of communication. And the reserve stock was meagre.
Among Sir John French’s many anxieties the lack of ammunition weighed heaviest of all. For months now, and almost daily, he had fumed and raged, begged and pleaded in letters and telegrams to the War Office, pointing out with all the force he could muster that the supply of ammunition – far from meeting his previous demands – had actually diminished. And it was true, although the War Office might have justly claimed that overall supplies had, in fact, increased, if only slightly, and that the discrepancy between their calculations and those of the Commander-in-Chief arose from the fact that Sir John French based his demands on a certain number of shells per gun. He now had more guns at his disposal but guns without sufficient shells were useless. Thrust into a defensive campaign that was neither of his choosing nor his making, French was in despair. Rifle ammunition was also running dangerously low and on 25 April he shot off another protest:
The Commander-in-Chief points out that the average number of rounds per rifle on Lines of Communication has been: January 216, February 191, March 138, and on 19th April 134. From this it will be seen that the Line of Communication reserve shows no tendency to increase, but rather the reverse, and there will be further considerable reduction when transport has been provided to carry the whole of the rounds allotted to the Field Units. The 22 million rounds for which transport at present is short will, when with field units, reduce that Line of Communication reserve from 134 to 61 rounds per rifle. 200 rounds was the figure which the Army Council agreed would be maintained.
The reserves of shells had fallen in almost the same proportion. With his back to the wall at Ypres the Commander-in-Chief could hardly be blamed for feeling impatient and aggrieved. As the days passed and the clock ticked towards the date set for Joffre’s campaign in Artois which French was committed to support (the battle for which he had been so carefully husbanding reserves of the ammunition on which any hope of success would depend) he was more than aggrieved. He was furious with indignation.
At home in Britain people were equally anxious and enraged. They were not yet aware that the troops lacked ammunition – the ‘shell shortage scandal’ had yet to break – but they were very much aware that the Germans had descended to new depths of ‘beastliness’ and that the troops at Ypres were in a tight corner. Public confidence had not been shaken, the full story was not yet known, official press communiqués, though bald and brief, stressed the fact that the army was fighting back, and rousing editorials praised the Tommies, damned the Germans, and urged encouragement with impartial enthusiasm. The British Army had seen the Germans off before, and no one had any doubt that it would do so again. But it was clear that matters had taken a new and serious turn for the worse.
It was Sunday 25 April, and in churches all over the country there were prayers for peace – but it must be peace with victory. A large congregation crowded into St Clement’s in Notting Hill where the Bishop of London took part in the evening service. He preached a powerful sermon and it was one close to his heart, for he had just returned from a visit to the army in France and had seen enough of the war at close quarters to realise that things were not going smoothly. He warned against the danger of ‘facile optimism’ and sketched the gravity of the situation – not only on the western front but on the far-off battle-line where the Germans had brought the Russians to a standstill. He stressed the paucity of information and boldly demanded facts and, although his formal text was conventionally drawn from the Bible, his theme was ‘stick it’. The fortitude of the army was unsurpassed and a source of justifiable pride. They were ‘sticking it’. The nation must stick it too.
Father Delaere had a smaller congregation in Ypres that morning when he celebrated mass in front of twelve of the Sisters at the convent, and there was no congregation at all in the church of St Jacques, for the church was a blazing inferno. As soon as seven o’clock mass was over and he had blessed and dismissed the Sisters, the priest ran through the tumbling shells to try to help.
Father Delaere.
We got into the burning houses nearby and carried out the most important pieces of furniture. With huge efforts we managed to contain the fire and saved a few houses. But many others were demolished or fell victim to the flames in the Rue de Dixmude, Rue Jansenius and in other parts of the town. The Palais de Justice went on fire too. The Grand Place, the Leete, the surroundings of the Cloth Hall and the Rue de Dixmude were like an abandoned battlefield.
Five horses, an overturned ammunition wagon, a shattered motor ambulance, clothes scattered around, a big bundle of blankets, three bodies – a soldier and two women lying spread out miserably on the stones covered with dirt beside the pavements shattered and shell-holed.
At my request my devoted assistants Cottinie and Kerrinck, accompanied by Mademoiselle, went to lift the three bodies and carried them to a back entrance of the Cloth Hall, where I went to say prayers over them under a rain of shrapnel and had them buried.
Ypres crumbled and blazed, but for every shell that fell on the town a score were falling in the salient beyond it and long before Father Delaere had finished celebrating mass two thousand men of the 10th Brigade had been wiped out as they advanced to recapture St Julien. Most of the battalions that should have advanced with them had never received the order – and those which did had such difficulty in reaching the line that, of the fifteen battalions which were meant to be in position, only five had reached the rendezvous and even those who had were slow in advancing from the startpoint in the GHQ line through two narrow gaps in the wire. Long before they were able to spread out and deploy across the fields, machine-guns and trench mortars firing from Kitchener’s Wood, from isolated farms, and from houses in St Julien, began to mow them down. The German field-guns finished the job. Their own guns stayed silent. It was full daylight. The attack had been postponed from half past three in the morning but, yet again, no news of the postponement had reached the guns. Yet again the gunners had fired the preliminary bombardment two hours before the troops began to move. All it achieved was to put the Germans on the alert and when the 10th Brigade started out the Germans were waiting. Few of the leading waves returned to tell the tale. The assault had been carried out on the direct order of the Commander-in-Chief. It was brought to Smith-Dorrien by a Staff Officer and it admitted of no discussion: ‘Every effort must be made at once to restore the situation about St Julien, or the situation of the 28th Division will be jeopardised.’
The effort had been made and most of the men who made it now lay dead or dying among the long rye grass and the newly planted crops in the fields in front of St Julien. At 9.45 a.m. General Hull wired GHQ with the news that the attack had failed. He added a strong recommendation that there should be no thought of renewing it.
The Germans did not try to press home their advantage by pushing forward. It was fortunate that they did not for there was little or nothing to stop them and it was to their credit that they ceased fire as soon as the British ground to a halt and did not interfere with stretcher-bearers moving across the open to carry in the wounded. But the German soldiers had orders of their own and it was not part of the day’s plan to advance beyond St Julien but to attack elsewhere on the shoulders of the salient. And to bombard, bombard, and to go on bombarding to beat the allies into submission and open the road to Ypres. At one point observers, counting fast, reported as many as sixty-eight explosions every minute. By nightfall, the Germans had nibbled further into the line. Ground had been lost and the flanks of some battalions were once again ‘in the air’. A straggle of troops – companies, half companies, odd battalions of disparate commands – moved up or sidestepped to fill the gaps as best they could. With only the vaguest of directions to guide them, marching through shell-fire in the misty dark across strange country to some indeterminate spot on the map, it was hardly surprising that some bodies of men lost their way and appeared at dawn in entirely the wrong place. It was fortunate that the Germans were not alive to the precarious situation in the British line. They made no move to advance, but they made use of the hours of darkness to dig trenches across the ground they had gained, to wire the new frontages and set up machine-gun posts to stop the British in their tracks if they tried to hit back. But the shelling went on and the clouds that hung low across the salient glowed red in the reflection of the fires that raged in Ypres and in the villages around it. They could be seen for miles and from the trenches near St Eloi where the Liverpool Scottish were holding the line, Bryden McKinnell had a grandstand view.
Capt. Β. McKinnell.
These are very trying days and certainly no rest, the news from the left is not very elevating, what little we get, and we find here that ‘no news is bad news’.
The nights are like day, full moon and clear sky; and the days – well, one can only liken them to southern climes – such sunshine, wonderful sunsets and beautiful blue sky all day.
There is a continuous roar of the great battle on the left. Every now and then one of the 17-inch German shells rushes along like an express train, and though this shell is coming towards us from thirteen thousand yards away and is hitting its target in Ypres about three miles away, yet it just sounds as if it was passing along our front, while a cloud of red brick dust flies up and we can feel our dug-outs shake. Every night now we can see a fire in Ypres. So far the Cathedral tower and spires of the Cloth Hall are still standing.
Watching the flames lick into the sky McKinnell found it difficult to believe that barely three weeks ago he disturbed nesting jackdaws by climbing that very tower for a tourist’s view of the countryside around. Where were the jackdaws now? What had happened to Marie the barmaid? As the air above their heads trembled in the slipstream of shells thundering towards Ypres, it was hard not to dwell on another question. When would their turn come?
Trpr. G. C. Chaplin, 1st Northants, Yeomanry.
That night another bloke and I were left with the horses not far outside Ypres, and in the distance I could see a church standing out quite clearly. About 1 a.m. the Germans started to shell the area and some shells were incendiaries. One landed in the church porch and started a blaze and in minutes the fire was roaring down the whole length of the place. I could hear the sound of the wood cracking and the glass of the windows smashing in the intense heat. Then the fire reached the tower and we waited to see what would happen next. It was fearful, a terrible thing to see. When the timbers burnt through the spire slid into the tower in showers of sparks and across the fields we could hear the clanging of the church bell as it went down with it. Moments later the whole place was a raging furnace.
The fires could not be doused or even contained, for there was no water to be had. The inhabitants who still remained in Ypres were cowering in cellars hoping and praying that their houses would not catch fire or collapse in a pile of rubble that would block their escape. But Father Delaere was out and about. Someone had braved the explosions and run through the blazing streets to bring him news of casualties. He was not a man to shirk his duty and, even if Ypres was tumbling about his ears, that duty was to succour the dying and give them the last rites.
Father Delaere.
The wounded were at the old wood market. I hurried there with the nurse, and the shells never stopped falling. One woman had her head cut, another her stomach split open, and Alfred Landtsheere had a hand cut off and his knee broken. These last two were mortally wounded.
After having given what aid we could we wanted to go back home. It was dark, but one would have thought that some barbarous assassins not only boxed us in but followed us all the way through the shadows. Many shells and shrapnel exploded just metres from us and followed on our heels through rue Courte de Thourout, Grand’ Place, rue St Jacques. We lost ourselves dozens of times, blinded by clouds of dust, and all round us the ground seemed paved with diamonds, for the shrapnel bullets struck the paving stones in a host of tiny scintillating stars, very bright, which sparkled all around us and seemed to spring up beneath our feet. It was very beautiful – but hardly reassuring. These evil little sprites followed us mercilessly. But we got through, and eventually Mademoiselle and I arrived safe and sound at the convent, covered with dust. Deo gratias!
All over the salient there were soldiers on the move and for the reinforcements marching into the salient the sight of Ypres ablaze was an ominous welcome.
Pte. Η. K. Davis.
We set off marching towards the front on cobblestones and cobblestones are the most awkward things to march on because they’re never level – one will be an inch higher, and the one before it an inch lower. You slip all over the place. To start off with, when we knew we were really going into it, we were paraded and they said, ‘It’s going to be a bit stiff. Anybody doesn’t think he can stand it, one pace forward.’ It took more pluck to do that than stand still, I can tell you, so we all stood still.
We started off just when dusk was falling and we kept going until one o’clock in the morning. Anyone who’s ever done any marching knows that if the man in front takes a quarter of an inch step shorter than you, you’re going to catch up and bang into him, and you’ve got to stop. And if he takes a quarter of an inch the other way he goes away from you and you have to run to catch him up. All the way we were either bumping or running. It’s hard to explain the sound of the guns. The best way is to imagine you’re walking up a clock face and you hear batteries firing on your left and your right, going pop, pop, pop, pop, and sometimes it was bong, bong, bong, bong because it was a louder battery than any of the others. We started off on this clock face, say at six o’clock, and the shells started off bursting, one at five and twenty to seven and one at five and twenty past seven, and gradually as you went on the batteries seemed to go up the scale until the shells were bursting at eleven o’clock and one o’clock, on your right and left. It was unnerving!
This march lasted all evening into the night and every now and again, something seemed to affect our eyesight and we could only walk on by the sound of men’s feet in front. I thought it was some disinfectant they had been putting down on dead men and horses but of course it was gas! The whole Battalion marched over the countryside in single file. We were filling up a hole in the line and the C.O. got four of us, one man each from the four companies, and we set off to fill up the line. He dropped me as the first one as a marker for my company. There I was alone in Belgium! He had gone off with the other three and before very long there was a whizz-bang, and then another one, and that made me wonder whether I was standing on the skyline and Jerry could see me, so I flopped down. I’ve never felt so lonely in my life being all alone in Belgium. Eventually the C.O. came back with the others and we were told not to fire because they didn’t know who was in front of us. So we got busy and dug ourselves in.
What I remember most is going up to the line, and Ypres was burning. I was crossing number 2 pontoon bridge across the Yser Canal, and just a bit half-right was Wipers on fire. I’ll never forget it. It was wonderful. For the moment everything was quite still, no war on so to speak. There was this town on fire with flames and smoke reflected in the waters of the canal, shimmering. It was a wonderful picture. Frightening too, but beautiful. The whole place seemed to be on fire.
Earlier that evening Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien drove from Poperinghe to Hazebrouck to confront the Commander-in-Chief at his Advanced Headquarters. He made a wide detour but for much of his journey the fires of Ypres were clearly visible, flickering in the distance, glowing red against the night sky. As Commander of the Second Army, Smith-Dorrien was deeply anxious about the situation round Ypres. He was concerned by abortive counter-attacks which, in Smith-Dorrien’s view, in the light of the failure of the French Army to fulfil bold promises, were not only costly but worthless. The catastrophe that morning had proved it, the virtual annihilation of the 10th Brigade was the last straw, the toll of casualties was frightful and they were men that could ill be spared. As his big staff car inched along congested country roads he brooded on the folly of throwing still more men into the maelstrom to no good purpose. The sight of soldiers on the march did nothing to relieve the mind of their Army Commander as he drove towards Hazebrouck. He was anxious above all to ascertain precisely how the Commander-in- Chief intended to make use of these reinforcements and to dissuade him if possible from dissipating their strength in more fruitless counter-attacks. Behind him, as he well knew, the Lahore Division, newly arrived, was already marching towards the line. The French had promised to launch another strong offensive, but Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien was not so sanguine as Sir John French that they would come up to scratch.
And the war was spreading. Early that morning a force of British, French and Australian troops had been landed on the shores of Gallipoli.
Chapter 17
Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien had not expected to receive a warm welcome and although the Commander-in-Chief received him with impeccable politeness the atmosphere cooled as their meeting progressed. The situation as seen by Sir John French from the eminence of headquarters differed greatly from the situation seen by the man on the spot, but the fact was that it was not possible from either point of view to get a clear idea of the position. Although the shrunken salient that contained them was only five miles deep and barely five miles wide hardly anyone knew where anyone else was. As one emergency succeeded the next and troops were detached from one brigade and hurried pell-mell to assist or reinforce another, or were bunched together piecemeal to make a counterattack, the very structure of command was in disarray. It was meaningless in the circumstances to refer to corps or even Brigades, and the makeshift formations could only be described by the name of the senior officer in command: Geddes’s force, Hull’s force, O’Gowan’s force. Even the Canadians now had so many ‘foreign’ troops attached that they could only be called ‘Alderson’s force’.
But it was easy for GHQ to inform a senior officer prior to an attack that a certain number of Battalions would be ‘put at his disposal’. The troops were there – somewhere – in the chaos of the salient, but they could not be marched from barracks to parade-ground as in peacetime, nor brought together as a body at some assembly point behind the lines. All telephone lines ran through Ypres and since most of them were out of action it was difficult to contact a Divisional Headquarters, let alone a Battalion Commander. The troops might be anywhere, and in the turmoil of events even a mounted man sent off to scour the ravaged salient would have little hope of finding them. All that could be done was to trust to luck – and to pluck and grim determination. There was no shortage of the last two, but luck was in short supply, and so was information. At the end of a long day’s fighting, amid a ferocious bombardment, with nothing to go on but scribbled and often contradictory messages, it was difficult to judge precisely how the line stood, what troops were holding it, and how far the Germans had advanced where the line had given way.
Part of the trouble was that there were too many men and too many guns squeezed into one small area. On the map the salient no longer resembled a straggling semi-circle, it was now like a clenched fist at the end of a thick wrist – and far from being in a position to punch a knock-out blow, the Army was fighting with one hand tied behind its back. There was no space to manoeuvre and the loss of material and the mounting casualty lists were ample evidence that a large mass of troops squeezed so tightly together could do little more than provide an inviting target for the enemy’s guns. Throwing them in willy-nilly to patch up the front could not staunch the flow of the German advance indefinitely, for the enemy was weaker in men but so hugely superior in firepower and lethal weapons that by merely pressing against the vulnerable salient, by biting into it bit by bit, it could only be a matter of time before it collapsed. Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien wished to reorganise the line and to withdraw the superfluous men and materials without delay. Reason told him that reinforcements could be better employed in relieving exhausted troops and manning and strengthening a shorter front that would be easier and less costly to defend. From this new line, and in due course, a well-planned and meticulously organised offensive could be launched to push the enemy back.
These were the matters he wished to discuss with the Commander-in-Chief.
Smith-Dorrien was not a man who shirked bold action when the situation demanded it. It was only a matter of months since the great retreat from Mons when Smith-Dorrien had averted possible catastrophe by turning to fight the Germans in a brilliant rearguard battle at le Cateau. He had fought it against Sir John French’s specific instructions and, although the Commander-in-Chief had initially commended him, there had been an undertone of friction in their dealings ever since. Sir John French did not lend a sympathetic ear to Smith-Dorrien’s views although they accorded closely with his own. But he had given his guarantee of support to General Foch and he must fulfil that promise by allowing the French every chance to fulfil theirs. If the French offensive succeeded and they managed to recapture the ground they had lost, it would restore the situation in the salient more quickly than any other course of action, and, in the view of the Commander-in-Chief, speed was of the essence. With his next offensive looming close, he was especially anxious that the salient should be ‘quietened down’ before it took place. It was perfectly possible, he informed Smith-Dorrien, that the Germans had got wind of the new plan and were merely attacking here in the north in an effort to thwart it. The fighting at Ypres must be concluded – and soon. If the French did not succeed, he conceded, it might well be necessary to fall back and tighten the line, but meanwhile, and he stressed the fact, ground must be given up only in the most extreme circumstances – and not at all if it could possibly be avoided. The French must have their chance, even if it was a gamble. ‘After all,’ he added, ‘it was the French who got us into this mess. It’s up to them to get us out.’
Smith-Dorrien could only stifle his misgivings and acquiesce, but he was far from happy and, on his return to Poperinghe, a message from General Putz did not lighten his heart, for it seemed that Putz did not share the view of the British Commander-in-Chief that it was ‘up to the French’ to retrieve the situation with a little help from the British. He proposed to attack at 5 p.m. next day. Two French divisions were already in the line and, for the purposes of the assault, Putz proposed to augment them by less than a whole division.* In the view of General Smith-Dorrien a total of seventeen Battalions was extremely unlikely to achieve a decisive result. He doubted, indeed, if they would succeed in retrieving any ground at all. But the orders of the Commander-in-Chief had been categorical. Reluctantly, and with many qualms, he was forced to commit his troops and send out his own orders for the British to attack on the right of the French. A general plan had already been drawn up in the course of a meeting that morning, but in Smith-Dorrien’s opinion the timing was premature. His reinforcements would have no time to rest, still less to prepare and reconnoitre the ground before they were flung into battle. There was worse to come. Well after midnight another message arrived from General Putz, and the news that he had put zero hour forward by almost three hours to five past two in the afternoon came as a bombshell.
By the time his Advanced Headquarters could be contacted the Commander-in-Chief had already retired for the night but at Smith-Dorrien’s insistence he was brought to the telephone. With this latest development Smith-Dorrien’s fears had increased ten-fold and he spoke eloquently and at length, repeating all he had said earlier and more. He expressed his outrage at the paltry numbers the French proposed to engage, he reiterated his reluctance to fling in weary troops in the most unpropitious circumstances, he begged the Commander-in-Chief to intervene. Their conversation was not a happy one and Sir John French soon cut it short. He gave Smith-Dorrien a direct order to proceed as planned. The attack must go ahead and there was no more to be said.
By the time new orders could be drafted and sent out to the artillery and the scattered infantry it was past two o’clock in the morning. The attack was now barely twelve hours away and the fresh troops who were destined to make it had not yet begun to make their way to the line.
The Lahore Division was in bivouacs near Ouderdom, some ten kilometres south-west of Ypres. They had marched thirty miles from Bethune to get there and, undisturbed by the clamour of the distant bombardment, most of them were sleeping like logs. The new orders meant that by 5.30 in the morning they would be on the road again, setting off at half hour intervals to march on Ypres and out to the salient beyond.
Like the Meerut Division the Lahore Division was low in numbers, weakened by sickness, and casualties at Neuve Chapelle had left wide gaps in the ranks and Indian reinforcements could not easily be brought from half-way round the world. The 4th Battalion of the London Regiment was attached to the Ferozepore Brigade to strengthen it, and although they were not the first battalion of the Brigade to set out that morning, Frank Udall thought it was early enough. His feet were still killing him.
Sgt. F. G. Udall MM (2 Bars), 1/4th (City of London) Bn. (Royal Fusiliers) (TF), Lahore Div.
The day before we left we were all issued with overcoats and a new pair of boots, because they wanted to get rid of these stores and the Quartermaster must have reckoned that the easiest way of carrying them north was to issue them to us and let us wear them. We moved off on a warm April morning to march from Neuve Chapelle to Ypres and with new boots our feet were so sore and bleeding that there were many, many stragglers. We couldn’t help but fall out! A good many Belgian women came out of their cottages and bathed our feet and bandaged them up as we sat at the side of the road, and there were so many dropped out that they eventually had to send lorries to pick us up and take us the rest of the way to Ouderdom Camp. The following morning the Connaught Rangers left to go to the line and a couple of hours afterwards, we followed them and marched on to Ypres. We eventually arrived and my feet were still sore, so I fell out again, had a rest and after a bit I struggled to my feet. In the Ypres residential part I looked into a house and saw a table was already laid for breakfast, and so people evidently must have scurried and just left it. They were shelling the place, so you couldn’t blame them. Further on I came to a jeweller’s shop and the front must have been just blown away. You could see all the stuff lying there in the rubble. Well, there was a Connaught Ranger in front of me. He’d already helped himself and I was about to do the same when a military policeman came along and told me to clear off.
Eventually I caught up with the battalion in an orchard and there was a Quartermaster Sergeant there with his battalion stores. He was giving the stuff away – all of his battalion’s rations! He said he hadn’t seen his Battalion for three days so we might as well have the stuff. I remember him handing out the tins of Maconochie rations and also big gross boxes of Bryant and May’s matches. The Colonel spoke to us while we were resting and said that the Germans had sprung a gas attack and might do it again. He told us, if that happened we should piss on a handkerchief and tie it round our mouths. He said that would do the trick. Then we got orders to move and we started off towards the front. The Connaughts were already in the front line and we were going into support. When we arrived, a few of the boys still had the stuff they’d got from the Quartermaster, but most of us had chucked it away long before.
The Lahore Division was a mixed bag. There were tall Pathans from the north-west territories around Peshawar and Rawalpindi, stocky Gurkhas from the highlands of Nepal, bearded Sikhs from the Punjab. There were soldiers from Bhopal, men of the Frontier Force and, fighting alongside them in their British battalions, Irishmen in the Connaught Rangers, Merseysiders in the King’s Liverpools, Scots in the Highland Light Infantry, a Lancashire contingent in the Manchesters, and the Londoners of the Royal Fusiliers. Together they were to launch out from the northern wall of the salient against the German line on Mauser Ridge. And they were to do more than capture it. Advancing with the French troops on their left and Hull’s force of ‘odd detachments’ on their right, they were to batter on and push the Germans back to Langemarck, while the French, advancing from just east of the canal, were to capture Pilckem village on the way.
In the course of the morning Sir John French took the trouble to telephone a personal message of encouragement to Second Army Headquarters. The Commander-in-Chief wished it to be known that he had no doubts about the successful outcome of the offensive as the enemy could not be ‘very strong or numerous, as he must have lost heavily and be exhausted’. These optimistic words did nothing to relieve Smith-Dorrien’s anxiety, and there certainly was no time to pass them on to the troops. It was now twenty minutes past eleven and, if all had gone well, even the tail-end of the Lahore Division should now be moving into position ready to deploy.
Major F. A. Robertson, 59th Scinde Rifles, Frontier Force, Lahore Div.
We had orders to make a counter-attack in the direction of St Julien. I had recently been through a course of bombing and had been told to take command of the bomb party of my regiment, but I had no time to put the men through their paces before we marched. Those were the days of frequent changes in the pattern of bombs. As we prepared to deploy I served out the Battye bombs to the sepoys and they looked at them with dismay. I asked them what was wrong and at last a young Sikh remarked, ‘But, Sahib, we have never seen a bomb with a fuse like this before! We’re used to lighting ours with matches.’ So that was a pleasant situation, I must say, when we were just going into action!
It was a bad start, but there was nothing to be done except to give the hastiest of demonstrations and advice, and to hope for the best.
It took a long time to spread the troops of three brigades into formation. They were still well back from the start-line but, apart from the three battalions in the lee of Hilltop Ridge, they were well within view of the Germans, and German aeroplanes, swooping low above them, had shown particular interest in such a large gathering of troops, and buzzed off busily northwards to report that an attack was underway. When the preliminary bombardment started up it could hardly be heard against the roar of enemy guns and the screech of enemy shells targeted on the infantry as they waited to move.
Under cover of the bombardment the infantry moved forward to jumping-off positions. At two o’clock precisely to the minute they began to advance. It was the only movement of the afternoon that went according to plan.
Major F. A. Robertson.
The idea had got about that the German trenches were two hundred yards away. When our front line went over the top they found that there was anything from twelve to fifteen hundred yards to go. Our artillery preparation had not at all shaken the nerves of the Germans, and the two British and four Indian regiments who led the way were absolutely mown down by rifles, machine-guns, and artillery of every calibre. The slaughter was cruel. It was men against every machine that frightfulness could devise. My bombers never even got to grips! It was a miracle that any men did manage to cross that wide shallow valley exposed to a torrent of fire from the German line on the rising ground beyond. Even the men who had started from behind the Hilltop Ridge were mown down in rows as they cleared the skyline. Heavy German Howitzers now had the range and whole platoons were being knocked out by a single massive shell. All across the shallow valley the dead and the dying were tossed into the air and dropped in mangled heaps.* But survivors of the leading waves pressed on until they were little more than a stone’s throw from the German wire a hundred yards beyond. A little to their left, where the French were attacking, luck was on the side of the Germans, for gas cylinders had been placed in front of it in preparation for an attack of their own. Like the Canadians four days earlier, the soldiers could see gas clouds passing across French troops, but this time, just as the gas enveloped their leading line, the wind shifted direction and slowly rolled the gas from west to east suffusing the ground where British and Indian soldiers were crouched on the slope beneath Mauser Ridge. All along the line the advance broke up.
Sgt. F. G. Udall, MM (2 Bars).
The Connaught Rangers went over first and we were waiting for the word to go forward, but within a few minutes we saw the Connaught Rangers leaving the line and coming back gassed. They were in no sort of order, and there was greenish colour about their clothing and they were coughing and staggering and some of them were dropping down on the way. I remember hearing an NCO shouting at them, ‘Don’t let the Territorials beat you!’ And many of the Connaught Rangers actually turned round and went back again to their line. Then it came to our turn to advance, so over we went and for the first time we used the entrenching tools for what they were made for and we dug ourselves in within a few hundred yards of Jerry with our entrenching tools. This was at Buffs Road, Hilltop Farm. But the attack seemed to have withered out and we were withdrawn after that. In the evening they came round for burial parties and I volunteered. We buried nine or ten who’d been hit the previous day while we were getting into position. And we’d left plenty more than that behind us in the line!
But the handful of survivors of the Manchesters and Connaughts, Sikhs and Pathans, still clung to the ground they had reached close up to the German wire. The slightest movement brought a fresh tornado of fire from machine-guns on the ridge. But they tended their wounded as best they could. At night guides were sent out to bring the survivors back. More than fifteen hundred casualties were left behind – and most of them were dead. The Colonels of three battalions had been killed and two other Commanding Officers wounded. The Connaught Rangers had lost all their officers. So had the Pathans. But, once again, the Germans made no attempt to advance.
Major F. A. Robertson.
It seems that the Germans were expected to walk into Ypres that day, and indeed there was little enough to stop them. But whenever you sprung a surprise on Fritz he would pause while his staff did a bit of thinking. Here he was being attacked by Indians who ought to have been some fifty miles away, as they must have known. An obvious case for consideration! So they stayed where they were and lost their last chance of walking in.
It was an impossibility to take the German trenches but the British line was pushed forward and the Germans were held back. The Lahore Division was rallied and for four days, sometimes by ourselves and sometimes working with other troops, we pressed against the German lines. The enemy never advanced one inch during that time and by the end of it the defence had been reorganised and Ypres was safe.
Later they were to call it the Battle of St Julien and in the aftermath of the failure of the first day’s fighting Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien took no satisfaction in the fact that he had been right. The absolute necessity of reorganising the line was now occupying his mind to the exclusion of all else. As he had anticipated, the French had failed miserably for, apart from the French troops on the immediate left of his own, the attack that had been promised and intended along the remainder of the French line had never got off the ground, and once again the British had suffered the consequences and footed the bill, as he saw it, for the French. He was not unsympathetic. He knew full well that, just as he himself was being pressed by Sir John French, General Putz was being pressed by Foch, and he knew too that, regarding the reinforcements he had been led to expect and the guns that had been promised to replace the seventy he had lost, Putz had been badly let down. But it was not good enough. The French planned to renew the assault next day and Smith-Dorrien took it upon himself to make it clear to General Putz that he did not intend to order any further offensives in his support unless and until Putz was in a position to make a very much more substantial contribution – and to make it effectively. Then he sat down to compose a longer and more difficult communication to General Headquarters. As etiquette demanded, he addressed it to Sir William Robertson, Chief of the General Staff, but its message was intended for the Commander-in-Chief.
Smith-Dorrien began by outlining the events of the day and, although he scrupulously reported some isolated minor successes as well as the major failure, he was human enough to succumb to the temptation of reminding GHQ of the views he had expressed at Hazebrouck and that he had not anticipated ‘any great results’. The French intended to renew the offensive a few hours hence, and the net result of General Putz’s latest dispositions, Smith-Dorrien pointed out, would be to add just one battalion to the existing force east of the canal.
I want the Chief to know this, as I do not think he must expect that the French are going to do anything very great – in fact, although I have ordered the Lahore Division to cooperate when the French attack at 1.15 p.m., I am pretty sure that our line tonight will not be in advance of where it is at the present moment. I fear the Lahore Division have had very heavy casualties and so, they tell me, have the Northumbrians, and I am doubtful if it is worth losing any more men to regain the French ground unless the French do something really big.
Smith-Dorrien was ignorant of the fact that the Commander-in-Chief had already complained to his staff about Smith-Dorrien’s ‘wordy’ missives and messages. Already he had filled several pages and he had not yet come to the purpose of his letter. That purpose was finally to convince the Commander-in-Chief of the need to withdraw the troops and tighten the line’ as speedily as was practicable. He reminded GHQ that the Germans’ guns dominated the salient, that the shelling was intense and that Poperinghe, as well as Ypres, was now within their range. Barely two hours ago his own report centre had been hit by splinters from a shell exploding too close for comfort, and all the approach roads of the salient were constantly swept by shell-fire. If the French were not going to make a big push (and he made no secret of the fact that he was more sceptical than ever about their chances of doing so) ‘the only line we can permanently hold and have a fair chance of keeping supplied would be the GHQ line passing just east of Wieltje and Potijze with a curved switch through Hooge and Sanctuary Wood to join on to our present line about a thousand yards north-east of Hill 60.’ He added several paragraphs of detailed map references to outline precisely the line he had in mind – a line that would reduce the salient to a quarter of its present size. And he continued with a certain boldness: ‘I intend tonight if nothing special happens to re-organise the new front and to withdraw superfluous troops west of Ypres.’
It was clear that in his own mind Smith-Dorrien fully expected that ‘nothing special’ would happen as a result of the day’s fighting – and he went further. They must consider the possibility that the Germans might break through the French lines and gain ground west of the canal. If that happened there would be no alternative for the British but to give up Ypres entirely and the whole of the salient beyond it.
At this point it may have seemed to Smith-Dorrien that he was giving the impression that he himself was pessimistic, for he hastened to assure the chief-of-staff that this was not the case and attempted to enliven the remaining pages of his voluminous letter with an air of optimism. He referred with enthusiasm to the ‘big offensive elsewhere’ which he knew was dear to the heart of the Commander-in-Chief, and asserted his own belief that it would do more to relieve this situation than anything else. He passed on the latest news, reported by the cavalry, that the French had recaptured Lizerne, and that, as a result of his own protest (which he had gone into in detail a dozen pages earlier), General Putz was putting an extra regiment into the line for that day’s attack. ‘We are to assist with heavy artillery fire,’ he added, ‘and the Lahore Division is only to advance if they see the French troops getting on.’
By the time Smith-Dorrien signed and sealed his letter it was well into the small hours of the morning and the staff officer who would motor with it to Hazebrouck was unlikely to get there much before dawn.
It was bright moonlight and eight miles away on the edge of the salient the outlines of Mauser Ridge, of Hilltop Ridge, of the jagged spire of the church in St Julien stood out sharp and black against the light of the clear sky. In the shadows below, stretcher-bearers were still on the move among the debris of the battle, picking their way between the deeper shadows of hunched and silent corpses, and keeping their ears pricked for some faint cry or groan or whisper that would guide them to a wounded man. In a few hours’ time the guns would start up and the infantry would line up again and attempt to advance across this ground still littered with the bodies of yesterday’s dead.
Weary and worried Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien stretched out on a camp bed to snatch a brief rest before the rigours of the day. He had done his best. All he could do now was hope that the letter now on its way to GHQ would induce the Commander-in-Chief and his staff to sanction his proposals. That hope, and with it most of his personal hopes and expectations, was soon to be shattered at a stroke.
Sir John French was furious. But it could hardly have been the content of Smith-Dorrien’s letter which caused him to fulminate against its author, for the proposal to withdraw to a safer line made sound military sense and in his heart of hearts the Commander-in-Chief was of the same opinion. But it was the tone of the letter that incensed him, with its apparent lack of confidence, its gloomy view of the French and its lukewarm commitment to the support that the Commander-in-Chief, albeit conditionally, had assured Foch would be forthcoming.
Faced as he was with a triple dilemma, Sir John French was in no mood to be trifled with and, shortly after luncheon, Sir William Robertson sent a telephone message to Smith-Dorrien that made this crystal clear. It was couched in lofty language but it was intended to leave Smith-Dorrien in no doubt that his unfavourable view of the situation was not accepted by the Commander-in-Chief, and it forcibly reminded him that he had more than enough troops and ample reserves to assist the French and trounce the Germans. Smith-Dorrien must ‘act vigorously’ to assist and cooperate with the French and must attack simultaneously ‘as previously instructed’ with every gun and every man he had.
This message was more than a slap in the face. It was a body blow. Reading between the lines it was plain that his lengthy letter had caused grave offence, that Smith-Dorrien’s analysis, so painstakingly set out, was interpreted unequivocally as lack of zeal, and that the conditional support he proposed to contribute to the latest French counter-offensive amounted to an. intolerable contravention of the personal orders of the Commander-in-Chief. So that there should be no possible doubt of his intentions a Staff Officer was sent from GHQ to Poperinghe to repeat the orders verbally and make absolutely sure that Smith-Dorrien understood that they were categorical.
Major-General Perceval was a senior Staff Officer and as sub-chief of the General Staff was second in importance only to Sir William Robertson, but he was junior in rank and seniority to General Smith-Dorrien. He could hardly have relished his task and, in the circumstances, it was doubtless an awkward interview – Smith-Dorrien resentful and icily courteous and Perceval stiff with distaste for an embarrassing task. But worse was to come – and even the signallers at Second Army Headquarters knew it before the Army Commander. Perhaps in error, but not impossibly with calculated disregard for Smith-Dorrien’s feelings, the wire from GHQ was not encoded but was sent ‘in clear’ for all to read:
Chief directs you to hand over forthwith to General Plumer the command of all troops engaged in the present operations about Ypres. You should lend General Plumer your Brigadier-General, General Staff, and such other officers of the various branches of your staff as he may require. General Plumer should send all reports direct to GHQ from which he will receive his orders.
It was repeated, also ‘in clear’, to the V Corps Commander, and Smith-Dorrien’s subordinate, Lieutenant-General Sir Herbert Plumer.
It was a humiliating insult and Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien was deeply wounded. Within two hours he left his advanced report centre and drove back to Second Army headquarters. After the hustle and bustle of Poperinghe the chateau seemed very quiet. Most of his staff had already gone to V Corps and there was precious little of his army left – only a single corps in the line south of the salient. He was unmoved by the news that the French counter-offensive had failed again. In the early hours of the morning he had written to GHQ: ‘I am pretty sure that our line tonight will not be in advance of where it is at the present moment.’
And he had been right.
Chapter 18
Lieutenant-General Sir Herbert Plumer was now master of the Ypres salient and so that there should be no room for ambiguity GHQ announced that the conglomerate force that had passed into his command would henceforth be known as ‘Plumer’s force’. Plumer was no intriguer and his appointment had come as a complete surprise, but the fruits of Smith-Dorrien’s efforts fell promptly into his hands and did a good deal to lighten his onerous task for, although Sir John French had dismissed Smith-Dorrien almost out of hand, he had not dismissed his assessment or his suggestions. That evening the removal of ‘superfluous men and materials’ from the salient began, just as Smith-Dorrien had proposed, and the instructions that reached Plumer later the same evening, while they ordered him to consolidate his present line, also directed him to prepare to withdraw to a line closer to Ypres.
The failure of the latest French venture had put things in a new light and early next morning a note from Sir William Robertson warned Plumer that ‘in all probability’ it would be necessary to begin to take measures for withdrawal that night. Sir John French had made up his mind and he drove to Cassel to inform General Foch. Foch was far from pleased. In the course of a long discussion he urged the Commander-in-Chief to change his mind, or at least to agree once more to postpone his retirement and give the French troops one more chance to retrieve their lost ground. Foch was very persuasive. In the face of his arguments – and they were many – Sir John French pointed out in vain that his troops were tired, that his casualties were large and that resources were being used up which could not be spared in the light of ‘the scheme further south’. Foch out-argued and out-manoeuvred him at every turn. He pointed out the tactical disadvantage of holding a line on lower ground overlooked by the enemy and insisted that retirement would be an admission of weakness that would simply invite the enemy to attack to push the allies even further back and possibly capture Ypres itself. He made much of the ‘moral ascendancy’ that would inevitably pass to the Germans. He admitted previous failures – admitted even that the attack planned for that same day might ‘not be important’ – but a large force of heavy artillery was expected hourly. Tomorrow they would succeed! There was no doubt of it – but they would succeed only if the British supported them unstintingly. Sir John French gave in, though not without misgivings. As soon as he had driven off, as if sensing his ambivalence, Foch drafted a letter to GHQ to summarise their discussion and to drive home the point that, rather than ordering retirement, a retirement should be positively forbidden. In conclusion he begged the British Commander-in-Chief to ‘be good enough to keep to his present intention and to support the French offensive to retake the Langemarck region at all costs’. The last nine words of this typewritten letter had been heavily underlined by General Foch himself.
In Sir John French’s absence another communication had arrived at GHQ, this time from General Plumer, and, although it formally confirmed acceptance of his new responsibilities, it pulled no punches with regard to the situation in the field. He gave his opinions more concisely than General Smith-Dorrien, but they were nevertheless identical to his. The present line could not be permanently held. Further attacks could only result in more loss of life and the longer the retirement was delayed the more difficult and costly it would be. Plumer accepted that ‘the French should be given a certain time to regain their trenches’ before the retirement began but, like Smith-Dorrien, he was prepared to give only artillery support unless French troops were seen to be making ‘appreciable progress’.
It was difficult to argue with this line of thought, but Sir John French had been swayed by Foch more than he might have admitted and Foch had painted a lurid picture of the consequences of retirement, emphasising the possibility that it might set in motion a train of events that would lose them Ypres itself. And that would be unthinkable.
Sir John French had not been infected or influenced by the belief, passionately held throughout the French Army, that every centimetre of stricken France should ‘at all costs’ be wrested from the grip of the hated invader and defended to the last man. His long military experience rebelled at the very thought and he knew full well that the cost and effort of clinging on to an awkward salient in defence of a ruined city was worthless in military terms. But nevertheless there were cogent reasons why the loss of Ypres would be disastrous.
If the British Army was not to risk diminishing its stature in world opinion it badly needed a decisive victory which, in the view of the Commander-in-Chief, his part in Joffre’s offensive would supply. It could certainly not afford a defeat, and the loss of Ypres – even the minor retirement that commonsense dictated – would be looked on as defeat by the rest of the world. The Germans would see to that.
Every German communiqué since the start of the war had trumpeted even the paltriest gain as a great victory and presented the slightest loss by the British as a resounding defeat. In the last fateful week the names of inconsequential Flemish villages and even of hamlets that were little more than crossroads – Langemarck, Pilckem, St Julien, Gravenstafel – had appeared in German communiqués as victories comparable to Austerlitz and Waterloo. If Ypres had to be abandoned it was excruciating to envisage how the enemy would crow!
The Germans were greatly given to crowing and, just as the British delighted in caricatures of sauerkraut-guzzling Germans, the effete Englishman was a figure of fun in Germany and this character was the leitmotiv of a smash-hit comedy that had been playing for months in a score of theatres in cities as far apart as Hamburg and Breslau, Munich and Stettin. In Frankfurt, where no theatre was large enough to contain the audiences clamouring to see it, it had transferred to the amphitheatre of the Circus Schumann which could seat four thousand people. It was packed out almost every night. With heavy irony the play was entitled Wir Barbaren (We Barbarians) and the comedy leaned heavily on ridiculing tales of atrocities committed by the German Army which had been widely published abroad and reprinted in the German press. No one in Germany believed them. This was, after all, the land of Schiller, Schumann, Goethe, home of all those Gemütlich homely virtues, so foreign to the natures of the cold English and dissolute French but dear to the hearts of the honest burghers of the Fatherland.
The piece opened on a typically domestic scene with mother, father, their daughter and her sweetheart, manservant and cook, all united in simple domestic bliss. Then a lusty postman arrives with the shocking news that the Fatherland’s foes have simultaneously and treacherously declared war on their beloved homeland. Cue for the strains of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles’ to come drifting through the window and the tramp of marching feet from the street. Mother, starting up in horror and, for some remarkable reason, speaking in English, exclaims: ‘Ze English gentlemens – can it be?’ The men on stage proceed to stamp and snarl, repeating her words many times in tones of scorn, ‘Ze gentlemens! Ze gentlemens!’ English, of necessity, then gives way to German for a series of impassioned speeches extolling the justice of the German cause, followed by a rousing rendition of The Watch on the Rhine’. The audience delightedly joins in, and the curtain falls to resounding cheers. But this is nothing by comparison to the scenes that follow. They drip with lofty sentiments and blatant sentimentality that reduces susceptible members of the audience to tears – not least in a trench scene depicting the sufferings of the noble and tender-hearted troops. For now a shivering prisoner is brought in, cowering in abject terror of the ‘barbarians’, grovelling and pleading for his life. He naturally receives a kindly, reassuring welcome – he is given food (he has not eaten for days!). He is showered with smiles and sympathy and wrapped in the overcoat of a noble German soldier who is only too happy to give it up and shiver in the prisoner’s stead in the freezing cold. Even this is tame stuff. Presently a postman arrives in the trench with a bundle of newspapers, eagerly handed round. It must contain a good few back numbers because the headlines bawled out in turn by the excited troops encapsulate the triumphs of many months. ‘Russians defeated by von Hindenburg!’ (Audience explodes, shrieking, ‘Hoch, Hindenburg! Napoleon Hindenburg! Hurrah!’) ‘Belgrade fallen!’ (More vociferous cheers, this time for Austria.) ‘Belgium crushed!’ (The cheering almost raises the roof.) ‘Line broken at Ypres. French and English in disarray. Our troops advance.’ (The house explodes in a frenzy of patriotic fervour.) When the play ends with many encores of patriotic songs the audience has reached such a pitch of euphoria that almost every night the house lights have to be dimmed before they can be induced to go home.
Although British audiences took their pleasures less vociferously, patriotism was not absent from the London stage. The play Alsace which, before the war, had been banned by the Lord Chamberlain for fear of giving offence to Germany, was now enjoying a successful run at the Court Theatre. This, naturally, showed the other side of the coin, but its special interest lay in the script, translated from the French and hardly altered from the pre-war version. It highlighted the hatred that had been simmering in France since it had lost Alsace and Lorraine to Germany forty years before. It also revealed that the French had long foreseen the war that would restore the lost territories to France.
This was no comedy but, like the German play, it portrayed a family circle of father, mother, son and fiancée, but with one difference – the fiancée is German and, although the son has been forced into service as a reservist in the German Army, the family remains fiercely loyal to France. War erupts. The German Army marches into Mulhouse en route to destroy France and this throws the parents into panic. Will their son go and fight for the Kaiser? Where do his loyalties lie? With the German girl he loves or with his true homeland?
The question is not resolved until the last act. Scene: a street in Mulhouse. Sound effects off-stage: heavy marching feet and raucous German voices. The boy and his sweetheart look on as a dozen spike-helmeted soldiers, the vanguard of a regiment, march into the street. The sound of marching reaches a crescendo as if trampling on the very soul of France, and the boy, unable to resist the temptation, shouts out fervently, ‘Vive La France!’ The furious Germans raise their rifles and shoot him on the spot and he staggers home bleeding and dying to his sad but proud parents. ‘Truly,’ declaims the mother, ‘the love of country is stronger than the love of woman.’ The curtain falls on a touching tableau as the parents bend sorrowfully over the corpse wrapped in the flag of France. The orchestra strikes up the ‘Marseillaise’. Loud applause and a tear or two from the audience which leaves the theatre in a buzz of righteous indignation.
Such theatricals in Britain, as in Germany, were commercially successful in their appeal to the popular mind but they were meaningless in terms of the real propaganda war and its efforts to influence international opinion and impress the neutral nations. There were more subtle ways of achieving such results and everything that came out of Germany, in the form of reports by neutral journalists and diplomats as well as from official sources, was weighed up, considered, and frequently given credence. In Sir John French’s opinions this was too often the case at the War Office whose frequent requests for ‘clarification’ thinly concealed a suspicion that his reports took too rosy a view and showed an irritating tendency to prefer the German version of events to his own. This did nothing to improve the stormy relations between the Commander-in-Chief and the General Staff in London, and it was yet another reason for his reluctance to be seen as the man who abandoned Ypres. But although such a cataclysmic failure would not be easily forgiven, much more than personal honour was at stake. There were overwhelming strategic and political considerations why such an event would be a disaster.
Ypres was the focal point of the last small corner of Belgium which had not been overrun by the German Army. To the south, the French border was a mere ten miles from its gates. Westwards the French port of Dunkirk was barely twenty miles distant, a half hour’s drive from Calais down the coast, and Calais, on a clear day, was within sight of Dover twenty miles across the English Channel. If Ypres went it was not impossible that the German Army would be able to occupy these vital ports in a matter of weeks. And, moreover, if Ypres went Belgium would have gone too – ‘gallant little Belgium’, and it was to save gallant little Belgium that Great Britain and her Empire had gone to war. Apart from its military significance, which could hardly be over-estimated, defeat in Belgium would have a catastrophic effect on opinion in neutral nations – Italy, Bulgaria, Rumania, Greece – still teetering on the verge of entering the war and just as likely to throw in their lot with one side as the other.
Belgium must be held. Therefore Ypres must be held. And that was that.
Miraculously the German bombardment had tailed off. As quiet days succeeded peaceful nights people in Ypres emerged bleary-eyed from cellars and began to creep warily about the streets between crumbling walls and smouldering embers, fetching water, foraging for food. A few shops opened up. They had little to sell, but a few dry-goods and provisions remained and one baker had managed to produce a batch of bread. They queued up to buy it with one ear cocked for the sound of approaching shells, and queued up again with basins and jugs to fetch water from the safe official supply at the Menin Gate. At night when the full moon rose and the ruined towers and gables cast crooked shadows across the pitted streets the citizens of Ypres prudently returned to their cellars for the night. But the nights were strangely quiet.
The weather continued fine and warm. Green shoots began to thrust through the rubble, even blighted trees burst into full luxuriant leaf and there was blossom everywhere in the ravaged gardens. From time to time a stray shell did explode in the town raising a haze of dust that hung for a long time in the sunshine. To the distress of Aimé van Nieuwenhove one of them fell in the Rue de Lille.
Aimé van Nieuwenhove.
Friday 30 April Not many shells during the night, but in the morning small-calibre shells arrive in great quantities. About half past one, while I was dining in the cellars of the post office, Paul Baekelandt came to tell me that a shell must have fallen on my house and that thick smoke was coming out of the windows. I rushed home immediately, but I could not go into the house because the smoke was absolutely suffocating. After a quarter of an hour I was able to ascertain that the shell had fallen on the second floor. The damage was confined to the room where I keep my papers, the roof was seriously damaged and fragments of shell had pierced the floor of the dining room where I usually spend my time. The whole house was filled with a thick layer of dust. I took my courage in both hands and immediately started the work of clearing up.
The Army had taken a hand in clearing debris from some streets to give a clear passage to the wagons that rumbled past all through the night with rations and ammunition and with the tools and sandbags, the wooden stakes, the bales of wire that were needed to construct and consolidate the new line. Every man who could be spared was digging in the moonlight, strengthening the GHQ line, carving out another ahead of it and constructing a switch line that would reach out to loop round Hooge, tracing communication trenches, making new gun positions. On the northern flank of the salient where the line would more or less follow the existing front they were working within sight of the Germans, but the Germans themselves were busy wiring and consolidating and allowed them to work undisturbed.
The Germans had been ominously quiet and, at least for the moment, seemed to have given up the initiative, using their efforts to defend their positions and their guns to repulse the attacks in which the French persisted. But they were feeble attacks and, although British artillery lent supporting fire and the heavy guns promised by Foch had belatedly arrived, they were no match for the German artillery and each new assault was as easily thwarted as those that had gone before.
Over three days of confusion, delay or failure, Sir John French postponed the retirement for a second time, and then for a third, in accordance with Foch’s wishes. But he was not a happy man and on 30 April he paid a visit to First Army headquarters to discuss various matters with Sir Douglas Haig, who recorded their conversation in his diary.
Friday, April 30 At 11.30 a.m. Sir John French came to see me to tell me of the situation generally, and to ask my opinion regarding the withdrawal from the Ypres salient. Lee, MP, arrived while we were talking, with a letter from CGS (Robertson) and enclosing one for Sir J.’s signature to Foch. Sir J. read me the letter. It was of the nature of an ultimatum, and stated that the withdrawal of the British troops from the salient would commence tonight, unless the French had succeeded in advancing their line… As to the policy of retiring, I said that I had no doubts in my mind as to the wisdom of such a step if the French did not regain the old front but continued in their present position. Our troops are now in a very sharp salient. This will be untenable under hostile artillery alone, while they will find it most difficult to withdraw, when forced to do so. They will also suffer most terribly from hostile artillery, which almost envelops them at the present moment. I considered that it was the Commander-in-Chief’s duty to remove his men from what was really a ‘death trap’.
Sir John also told me Smith-Dorrien had caused him more trouble. He was quite unfit (he said) to hold the Command of an Army and so Sir J. had withdrawn all the troops from his control except the 2nd Corps. Yet Smith-Dorrien stayed on! He would not resign! French is to ask Lord K. to find him something to do at home…
He added he could not express what he felt for the staunch support and help I had been to him throughout the war. He had never had any anxiety about my Command. He also alluded to Smith-Dorrien’s conduct on the retreat, and said he ought to have tried him by Court Martial, because, on the day of le Cateau, he ‘had ordered him to retire at 8 a.m. and he did not attempt to do so, but insisted on fighting in spite of his orders to retire’.
If Sir John French had finally made up his mind to send Foch something that was ‘in the nature of an ultimatum’, it was never sent, for Marshal Joffre had also had enough. He ordered Foch to abandon his plans for an all-out offensive and to confine himself to small-scale local attacks. The following morning Foch himself brought this news to British Headquarters to the great relief of Sir John French. A new ‘all-out’ attack was even then under way. Like the others it was a costly failure, but even before the outcome was known, the decision had been taken. Sir John French thankfully sent General Plumer instructions to begin the retirement that night.
The cost of the counter-attacks had been enormous. It had cost the French four thousand casualties to recapture the village of Lizerne and that number was multiplied many times along the French and British lines. Shell-fire alone had accounted for thousands killed and wounded. Everyone was tired, but the first priority was to relieve the most exhausted and, where possible, the units that had been hardest hit. Jack Dorgan’s battalion was one of the first to be withdrawn and it was a sorry sight.
Llcpl. J. Dorgan.
It was exactly a week after we’d landed in France – just one week to the day – and the next afternoon when we were assembled as a Battalion after all that hectic week in Flanders, we found ourselves with four hundred and odd men out of nearly twelve hundred men who had landed in France. It was terrible, terrible. Most of my pals were gone, either killed or wounded, and I don’t remember whether it was the Adjutant or Colonel who sent for me and he says, ‘You are now a corporal.’ By then practically all the officers and NCOs were wiped out. And it was just one week since we’d come off the boat. All gone!
The retirement had to be carried out methodically step by step, with caution and with stealth, for if the enemy got wind of it, if they were to attack en masse while the troops were actually on the move, the retirement could quite conceivably turn into a débâcle. The very last to go would be the men who had furthest to travel from the firing line at the very apex of the salient, at Inverness Copse, Brood-seinde, Polygon Wood. During the crisis some companies, and even whole Battalions of the 27th Division, had been rushed to sectors where the fighting was fiercest, but all of them were exhausted because the battalions which had remained to hold the vital front while the salient was shrinking behind them had been in the line now for up to twelve days. Some men were drunk with fatigue.
Pte. W. Hay.
I was sent in front, maybe about fifty yards. It was a covering party, meaning that so many men went out in front to lie there and watch for the Jerries in case they made a sudden counterattack. If you heard them coming you were supposed to fire a few shots and warn the blokes behind. We were all dead beat. A young man falls asleep quickly when he’s tired, and I fell asleep when I was supposed to be wide awake, and Sergeant McGill, he was my platoon sergeant, he came rushing over and woke me up. He said, ‘You could be shot for falling asleep over your post! Get back in, back where you were. Send another chap out.’
He was a great chap, Dave, he was a great friend of mine really. So of course he wouldn’t put me on a charge, but if he had I would have been court martialled for sleeping at my post and endangering the whole company which I was doing really. But I was exhausted, like everybody else. We’d had no sleep, no hot drinks, for four days and we had practically nothing to eat.
Despite their exhaustion and the privations of a week’s grim fighting the men of the 27th Division could not be pulled out completely, for the line at the tip of the salient had to be held until the last. The best that could be done, while the retirement continued behind them, was to rest them in relays a little distance behind the support lines. It was not a relief, but it was at least a respite. There was no chance of a wash or a clean-up, but there was food to eat and time to have a sleep, and time at last to write home to families waiting apprehensively for news. Jock Macleod had spent eight sleepless days and nights in the line.
2nd Lt. J. Macleod,
We are having a so-called rest in rear of the firing line, but we are still heavily shelled all day. It will be grand when the Huns run out of ammunition. In the last thirty days we have only had our clothes off three times, have never been out of shell-fire and have lost very heavily in casualties, officers and men.
My valise unfortunately had to be abandoned along with heaps of other stuff in the much bombarded town of Ypres. When things get quieter it may be possible to recover it but for the time being please send me a toothbrush and tooth powder, some soap and a towel, and some socks.
You would be rather astonished if you could see me now. Buttons have been shed galore. My hands are dirty. So is my face! I am unshaved and my bonnet has lost one of its ribbons. We are lying in a dug-out which contains some British officers and native telephone orderlies! The dug-out is in the remains of a charming country house estate, with statues and busts, and ornamental water. The natives all wear their shirts outside their trousers, a somewhat astonishing habit, and a good few have starched white cuffs, which look absolutely incongruous in these surroundings!
The many postponements had at least given General Plumer a breathing space and an opportunity to work out detailed plans for the retirement but it was no easy task to disentangle the scattered troops. Parts of the 4th Division alone were attached to six different divisions under five different commands in five different sectors. It would be days before they were reunited.
Mercifully the night was peaceful, the moon sailed high, the weather stayed fine and the first stage of the withdrawal went like clockwork, unharassed by the enemy. It was a luminous dawn and behind the German line on the ridge above Polygon Wood the sun rose early into a sky of pale, cloudless blue. The silence continued well into the morning, but it was an unnatural silence and it was too good to be true. The Germans had been biding their time and preparing another attack. It exploded just after noon on the front of the 4th Division and on the French on their left where the line ran towards the canal.
The German casualties had been lighter than those of the British and French, but they had been heavy enough and, while some reserves had been able to fill some of the gaps, there were no reinforcements to swell the ranks to a point that would guarantee success. But they had guns, and they had gas, and they were depending on the formidable strength of these weapons to sweep them through the allied line. Bombard the ground, pulverise the defenders, release gas to finish off the few who were left and, last of all, send the infantry forward to walk in and to mop up and consolidate almost without a fight. The quantity and even the calibre of their infantry would be secondary in terms of success. In the German view it was a war of materials now and their tactics had changed accordingly.
Lacking nine-tenths of the materials and resources at the disposal of the enemy, the Allies were depending on the men, first, last and always, and the British had changed their system of defence. The line had been reorganised and there were reserves close behind the trenches, ready to move swiftly to take the place of the supports when they dashed forward to assist the front-line troops. The bombardment that day was devastating and lasted for more than four hours. It was 4.30 p.m. when the gas came over but, happily, the clouds came low, they were thin in many places and, although the only respirators were improvised affairs, the men knew how to use them. They also knew what to expect and this time they did more than stand fast. But it took courage to take the initiative, to move forward through the waist-high deadly fumes to meet the German infantry preparing to come on, and they met them with rifle fire, so pitiless and so accurate that the attack faded away. In places it had been touch and go and there were many casualties, but they had held their ground.
It was a disconcerting setback to the German commander who later reported (erroneously) that the enemy position was very strongly fortified and protected by deep entanglements. Another gas attack was therefore planned. They assumed that the concentration of gas had not been strong enough and resolved to make sure that next time they would make no mistake.
The news of the assault was equally disconcerting to General Plumer but by eight o’clock in the evening all was quiet. He waited a little longer to make quite sure before giving the go-ahead for the second stage of the withdrawal. Spasmodic shelling during the night did little to interrupt it and by morning the men were safely installed in their new positions. It was not easy to move several thousand men over rough bombarded country in the dark, but at least they could move on their own feet. Trench stores had to be manhandled – tools, rations, boxes of ammunition, and the manifold equipment that sustained a battalion in the line had to be removed and humped for weary miles. But it had finally been accomplished by stealth and in silence. Two thirds of the withdrawal was now complete and the Germans still had no inkling that it was under way. In the evening of 3 May the last stage of the retirement would begin and, in the most dangerous move yet, the front line itself would be evacuated.
Chapter 19
On the evening of 3 May Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry were waiting to move back from their position in the front line on the edge of Polygon Wood. Despite its name this regiment was not part of the Canadian Expeditionary Force. It was part of the 27th Division of the British Army composed almost entirely of Regular battalions and the Patricias were not alone in the belief that they were just as good as the professionals. They were a unique force, and well they knew it, although it was only nine months to the very day since they had been conceived in the imagination of a Montreal businessman, Hamilton Gault. On 3 August, the eve of the declaration of war, he had travelled to Ottawa, where an emergency military conference was taking place, to ask permission to raise a Battalion of Canadians. Hamilton Gault was a prominent citizen and a wealthy man with the entreé to influential circles. He had also done service as a soldier and there was no difficulty about seeing Sir Sam Hughes during a recess in the conference. But it was a certain Colonel Farquhar who was fired by the idea and joined enthusiastically in Gault’s efforts to get it off the ground and proposed they should aim at recruiting experienced soldiers who would settle down quickly to military life and need minimal training – a mere refresher course – before they were ready to go to war.
Thousands of ex-servicemen had settled in Canada in the decade before the war and since they were self-evidently young men of adventurous spirit, they were the right type or, as Farquhar himself put it, ‘the best of the breed’. So many of them flocked from all over Canada to join up that, even among these desirable recruits, the regiment was able to have the pick of the bunch. There were prospectors, farmers, professional and business men, lumberjacks, even some cowboys and a prize-fighter or two. Fifty, who called themselves The Legion of Frontiersmen’ banded together and arrived in a body and the Edmonton pipe band in full Highland regalia, played themselves into the recruiting office and joined up en masse, announcing that they had ‘come to play the regiment to France and back again’. The band was enrolled even before the Battalion was complete. Hamilton Gault himself contributed $100,000 to set the ball rolling and the Battalion was raised and equipped in the short space of ten days.
Only one in ten of its members had been born in Canada. Sixty-five per cent were English, 15 per cent were Scots and 10 per cent had been born in Ireland, some had been in Canada for as long as twelve years, some for a matter of months, but they considered themselves Canadian to a man. Of 1,100 recruits 1,049 had served in the Army or the Navy, almost half of those had seen war service and between them they wore the ribbons of 771 campaign and service medals. There were two sections of ex-guardsmen, two of ex-riflemen and two of ex-public school boys. They were tough and they were fit. They also had royal patronage. Colonel Farquhar was Military Secretary to the Duke of Connaught, the Governor General of Canada, who had not only released him so that he could take command of the battalion but had also agreed to part with his ADC and another member of his personal staff, to form a nucleus of officers. Gault himself was appointed senior captain and other officers had been found among the hundreds of willing volunteers.
The Duke of Connaught had also, in a sense, given his daughter and the Battalion, now bearing her name, basked in the distinction of having the prettiest and most glamorous Colonel-in-Chief of any Battalion anywhere. Princess Patricia of Connaught took her duties seriously and intended to be more than just the figurehead of her Regiment and she began by making them a unique and personal gift. On Sunday 23 August, while the British Expeditionary Force was in the thick of its first engagement at Mons, Princess Patricia presented the Regiment with its own colours. She had designed the banner herself, cut out the red material with her own hands, fringed it with gold and embroidered her own entwined initials as a centrepiece. It had taken the princess a week of hard work and late nights to complete it but the pleasure and pride of the men made it more than worthwhile. Five days later the colours, escorted by a guard of honour, were carried proudly at the head of the Regiment as the Patricias marched on board ship to the skirling strains of their own pipe band. The anticlimax came when they were forced to disembark again at Quebec. The Patricias, as they were now called even on the parade ground, finally sailed on 27 September and despite the disappointing delay they were still the first of the Empire’s troops to arrive at the war – or, at least, to arrive in the United Kingdom. The 27th Division was in the process of being formed by Regular Battalions brought back from overseas and there was no question that the Patricias were good enough to join them. Before they left England for France they were inspected by Lord Kitchener who was deeply impressed by the medal ribbons displayed on chest after chest as he passed along their ranks. ‘Well!’ he exclaimed to Colonel Farquhar. ‘Now I know where all my old soldiers went to!’
In four months at the front the Patricias had earned a high reputation and not a few more medal ribbons to add to their collection. There had also been casualties for they had been in the gruelling close-fighting in the trenches at St Eloi and when they left to come to Ypres many of the originals were left behind in their own small regimental cemetery. The last to be buried was their Commanding Officer, Colonel Farquhar, shot by a sniper as he was handing over to the Colonel of the Battalion that relieved them. That had been a blow, and it was felt personally by every man, because now the Patricias were more than a regiment, they were a family. Major Gault had been wounded and, in his absence, Captain Buller had taken temporary command and a hundred reinforcements had arrived from Canada. Among them was Jimmy Vaughan. On the night of 3 May he was almost the last man to leave the line.
The Patricias had not expected to take part in the withdrawal, for they were long overdue for relief, but the 2nd Shropshire Light Infantry who should have relieved them had been hurried away to assist elsewhere and the Patricias had been twelve days in the line in front of Polygon Wood, fifty yards from the German trenches. Now they were to fall back, in the trickiest part of the whole retirement, and they were very tired, for each company, when it was not engaged in the firing line and was nominally ‘in support’, had been engaged in back-breaking labour helping to dig the new line three miles in the rear. The rudimentary trenches were far from complete, but it was time to go.
Like nine tenths of his comrades Vaughan was not Canadian born. Four years earlier he had left Stockton-on-Tees to work on a farm in Canada.
Pte. J. W. Vaughan, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, 80 Brig., 27 Div.
I joined up with my pal Jack Bushby and we didn’t join with the first lot because we were working near Winnipeg on a farm and it was harvest time. Well, the harvest was hard work but it was two dollars a day and that was good money so naturally we didn’t want to miss out, but we joined up in November when the Patricias called for reinforcements. We were young and we had the same idea that everybody did, ‘Oh, the war will be over in about three months, so we’ll get a nice trip home out of it and we’ll soon be back.’ Well, how wrong could you be? We didn’t get much in the way of training. We were shipped out in January, had a bit of training at Tidworth in England, and we joined the regiment in the field on 28 March and by 19 April we were in the front line at Polygon Wood, and there we stuck until we had to retire. We didn’t worry about the fact we had to retire, didn’t think we were losing out or anything, because it was all explained to us.
They started on the move as soon as it got dark and, of course, we had the wood behind us, quite a thick wood that time, so there was no problem about concealment or anything, and over a period of a couple of hours they moved off a platoon at a time. But they’d told us just how important it was that the Germans shouldn’t be given the idea that we were clearing off. I was one of thirteen men left behind as a rearguard and we were told exactly what we had to do. What we did was fire a shot – and of course at night you could see the flash of the rifle, the Germans could see it – then we would walk along the trench, maybe for about ten yards, and we would wait a few seconds and fire another shot, and then another chap would come along and do the same and I’d come back to another place and fire off again. That led his nibs across the road to figure that the trench was still fully occupied. Of course I was scared, but we were all very conscious of the responsibility and that we had to stay in the front line until the officer figured that the main part of the regiment had taken up the line at Frezenberg and Bellewaerde Ridge a few miles away. That was the idea. Eventually he came along and he said, very quietly, ‘All right, boys, I think they’ve had long enough now. We’ll be off, and he went along the line getting the men together. Out we got, into the communication trench and back to the main trench we had in Polygon Wood. Everything was quiet at first and then, after a minute, all hell broke loose because, as soon as they didn’t hear any more firing from the front line, the Germans figured that we were coming over. They thought it was the lull before the storm. Well, that hurried us on our way, all this firing going on behind us and bullets coming right through the wood, knocking twigs off the trees. But we never got a scratch, nobody got hit, and eventually we cleared the wood and started going across country to the new position. It didn’t take us as long as it did the main body of the Regiment because there weren’t so many of us. It took about an hour and we got there about maybe half past three in the morning.
Well, there were trenches, I suppose you could call them that, but they were only about two and a half feet deep because there had been no time to do any more, and the boys that were already there were trying to build up a parapet, filling sandbags and piling them along the trench, so we had to forget any idea we might have had about having a kip, because we had to start in too, digging and such. We didn’t get them very deep either before the next morning. It was a beautiful morning. It’s funny, but the weather we had during all that battle was beautiful, beautiful, beautiful weather. Next morning there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and pretty soon after it got light some German planes came over looking for us, and of course they’d found we’d gone by then but they had no idea before the morning, because all night and when we were going back, we’d heard them bombarding, wasting their shells on these empty trenches, and that gave us some satisfaction, even a laugh. But how they found us was this. When these planes came over and spotted us they dropped smoke bars over the side of the plane, and the German artillery officers would naturally have their glasses trained on the plane, you see, and these smoke bars came down in streaks and they just hung there above our position. No clouds, no wind to blow them away, they just hung there plumb above us – and then it started!
It started with the German infantry. It was the first time the Patricias had seen anything approaching open warfare and it was an impressive spectacle to see long lines of Germans pouring down over the Westhoek Ridge at the double – so impressive that some men incautiously stood up on the parapet to get a better view. As it approached, the great mass of grey-clad soldiers thinned, split, separated, and mounted officers galloped up and down the lines directing the deployment.
The Germans were beyond the range of rifles, and the guns that might have created havoc could not easily find the range from their new positions before the enemy went to ground and began to dig in. They had pushed machine-guns forward to protect them and they were firing at close quarters, raking the half-built parapets with streams of bullets that kept the Patricias’ heads well down. There was nothing they could do but grit their teeth and stick it out. And then the shelling began when the Germans had got the range. The ‘smoke bars’ had done the job well, and they had the range to the inch. The shallow trenches crumbled beneath the onslaught, machine-guns were buried, whole bays disappeared and, by the end of the day, 122 men had been hit.
It was the last and the worst of the Patricias’ twelve days in the line. Later in the evening the Shropshires came up to relieve them and the Patricias gathered up what remained of their belongings. Dog-weary, hollow-eyed with fatigue, carrying their dead to be decently buried and their wounded to be tended, they trudged out of the line.
The Shropshires set to work to do what little they could to shore up the defences before dawn, and in the shifting dark beyond the battered line the Germans were busy too. All night long, as they waited on the alert, the Shropshires could hear the chink of iron, the faint sound of voices on the breeze, and knew that the enemy was on the move. But the Germans were hard at work, digging and consolidating their new line, and they made no attempt to advance further.
The retirement had taken them completely by surprise. Now, at last, it was complete.
In Ypres too it was time to go. The Provisional Committee met for the last time in the house of the secretary, Aimé van Nieuwenhove. It was a dreary meeting. There were no minutes to read, for his notes had been destroyed by the shell that demolished his study, but no one needed reminding that the main topic of discussion had been on the number of bodies in the streets and the fear that if they were not removed the typhus epidemic could not be contained for much longer. A start had been made in the intervening week and three labourers engaged to dispose of the bodies at the rate of ten francs for a dead horse and three francs for a human corpse. The horses were buried in the largest shell-holes and the human remains interred, with little more ceremony, in temporary plots within the ramparts.
There had been no difficulty in finding people willing to undertake even this unpleasant job now that the economy of the town had come to a halt and there was no work to be had. But there were nevertheless rich pickings, and for the last few days posses of soldiers had been roaming the ruined streets, searching cellars for wine, breaking into abandoned shops and houses and helping themselves to objects they regarded as ‘souvenirs’. The officials of the town regarded them as stolen property and there were reports that civilians venturing to protest had been threatened with rifles and even bayonets. People were complaining bitterly and demanding that the Committee should press the military authorities to stop the pillage. Even in the midst of the débâcle, such a request had to be made through the proper channel, and the ‘proper channel’ was the departed civilian Commandant of the town. No one knew precisely where he had gone, perhaps to Watou, perhaps to Poperinghe, possibly even further afield, but the Committee spent most of the afternoon drafting a letter urging him to take the matter up. It also asked for the prompt dispatch of a force of workmen to assist with the removal of corpses from the streets.
It was sent off by messenger to the Commandant’s last known address in the hope that it would find him. It never did, but it hardly mattered now. Next day Ypres was ordered to be evacuated of all civilians and the order had to be obeyed. It was a hard blow to stomach.
Aimé van Nieuwenhove.
Tuesday 4 May All of us are deeply dispirited. After battling for six months against all these adversities, having been deprived for so long of our comfortable everyday lives with the sole object of trying to hold on to our homes, we must now resign ourselves to abandoning all our belongings. What will be left when we return?
Last night was reasonably quiet, but in the morning a huge number of shells fell from different directions. About eleven o’clock the bombardment eased off and I started to make my preparations for leaving. I took everything that remains into the wine cellar for safety and blocked up the entrance with boxes and crates. About three o’clock I heard that two motor ambulances will leave about ten o’clock to take the Committee to Abeele. So, here we are, and this is the last night I shall spend in Ypres. I feel deeply discouraged. Even the anticipation of seeing my dear ones, and the satisfaction of emerging from this furnace with my dignity intact, makes up only a very little for my sadness in having to leave my house.
The town was being evacuated section by section and for three consecutive days the Friends Ambulance Unit ran a shuttle service to transport the old and the sick, while the able-bodied made their way on foot to Poperinghe where trains were waiting to convey them far from Ypres. Ahead of them lay a journey of many days, for they were to be sent well away from the danger zone, away from Belgium itself, deep into France to be billeted on strangers and to manage as best they could. It was a bleak prospect. More fortunate citizens who had relatives in France or who, like Aimé van Nieuwenhove, were people of substance, could make private arrangements, but it was small consolation. Everyone had to go.
Aimé van Nieuwenhove made a last tour of his beautiful, battered house. During the night the glass of the drawing-room windows had been shattered by an explosion. He removed two leaves from his dining table to nail across the gaps but without much hope that they would prevent any determined person from getting in. He went upstairs, looked into the bedrooms and locked the doors. Last of all he went to the kitchen where his children’s three canaries chirped happily in the morning sun, unhooked the cages, carried them one by one to the garden and opened the doors. The canaries, as reluctant as van Nieuwenhove himself to quit familiar surroundings
were in no hurry to fly off. He watched them for a few minutes, sick at heart, and then he turned away.
Aimé van Nieuwenhove.
Wednesday 5 May The members of the committee met at my place for departure. During the whole period of the bombardment I have seldom seen my colleagues so well-groomed as they were today. At last, the cars having arrived, everybody got in and I double-locked my front door. What a lovely day it was. I hadn’t seen the outskirts of the town for six months now. I sat up in front with the driver.
I cast a last look at the Grand’ Place and the Place Vanden-peereboom and finally on the rue Elverdinghe. The shells escorted us out of town as if to pay us their farewell compliments. It was extraordinary how frightened we felt at these explosions, just as we were leaving the places where so many other shells had fallen without much bothering us.
Our first stop was in front of the hospital on the Vlamer-tinghe road. I got out of the car and looked towards the derelict railway station. I could still see the shells exploding on the town, then, as I got back into the car, I bade a sad, tearful farewell to our dear little city.
The Committee were almost the last to go but, despite the official order, a few obstinate souls remained although the bombardment had started up again only a little less furiously than before. Now that the town officials had departed Father Delaere had taken charge.
Father Delaere.
6 May I have got permission from the English Commandant to stay in the town with ten men who are working under my orders, burying the dead, interring the horses, putting out fires and patrolling the streets to prevent pillaging. We are virtually alone.
The weather has turned rainy. I wish to heaven that it was only raining rain but, alas, shrapnel shells are also raining down, three or four every minute. There are no more than twenty of us left in the town. Ypres is well and truly dead! There is a terrible emptiness but I do not let it depress me. I will not submit to this enforced evacuation without trying every possible means to resist it. I have decided to stay to the end – dead or alive. God have pity on me!
7 May The fire that reduced the church of St Nicolas to cinders spread to the boys’ school next door and it too fell prey to the flames. In the rue Carton many houses went on fire, among them Judge Tyberhien’s with all his treasured antiques. My men, who had gone out to look for bodies, triumphantly brought back a poor old man of eighty-six whom they’d found in an abandoned house where he would certainly have died of hunger. They have been doing a good job in finding bodies. Between 27 April and 7 May they buried thirty-two civilians and many, many horses – seventeen of them in a single enormous shell hole.
Our life is very strange. We have enough meat now to last us a long time because my men killed a calf they found abandoned and wandering along the street. We have bread too. There is no longer a baker in the town but we have the key to his house and there’s plenty of flour so, this afternoon, my men managed to bake some bread in his oven.
8 May Towards seven o’clock in the morning the shelling started up furiously – deafening crashes of big guns and the constant whistling of shrapnel shells. While I was praying in the chapel there was an enormous bang and a shell demolished the best part of the neighbouring building which was newly built. Nevertheless, my men arrived with three bodies, one of them a woman found in the Café Reubens. We thought we’d be here for a long time but suddenly I heard that permission to stay in the town had been withdrawn and we were ordered to leave before six o’clock in the evening. The police showed me a telegram saying that the evacuation must be completed with no exceptions whatever. Three of my men, who had gone out to bury the bodies, did not return so I went out to look for them. It was truly terrible! All the time shrapnel was exploding above the town. Four horses lay bathed in their own blood in the Grand’ Place at the corner of the rue de Lille and all along the length of the rue au Beurre we could see bloodstains everywhere, but not a living soul. Everything is in flames, nothing but ruins and it’s rare to see a whole wall standing among the heaps of brick and rubble. Hardly a cellar has not been broken into and there are many strong-boxes forced open and tossed among the debris. The houses that have escaped the fire are all holed and splintered, at the mercy of the four winds, ripe for pillage. It is truly the abomination of desolation.
I searched in vain for my men, for they had been arrested by the police and taken forcibly to Poperinghe.
The shells that rained that day on Ypres were not directed at the few defiant civilians still lurking in the ruins. It was the start of a new offensive.
Creeping forward within a stone’s throw of the new allied line the Germans were able to judge that it was crude and sketchy, that its defences were weak, and it was easy to tell from the sparse bombardments that the British were short of shells and heavy guns. And there in front of them was Ypres, almost within spitting distance. The Germans still lacked troops, but the retirement had given them new heart. Surely with one more push Ypres would fall into their hands.
It was 8 May, and that same morning General Plumer sent an order to the troops around the salient. It urged them to hold the line tenaciously and, at all costs, to avoid the necessity of calling for reinforcements. In the light of ‘the big scheme further south’ there would be no one to spare to help them out of trouble.
It was Plumer’s first official order as Commander of the Second Army. Thirty-six hours earlier Smith-Dorrien had at last been forced into resignation. In a personal letter to the Commander-in-Chief he had pointed out, in tones of injured dignity, that the evident lack of trust in him ‘constituted a weak link in the chain of command’ and that for the general good, it might be better if he were to serve elsewhere. It was delivered on the morning of 6 May and, although his letter was addressed personally to Sir John French, Smith-Dorrien did not receive the courtesy of a personal reply, or even an acknowledgement. That evening a curt order arrived from GHQ, instructing him to hand over command of the Second Army to General Plumer and to return to England.*
Chapter 20
The morale of the Germans was high. On 6 May they had finally pushed the allies off Hill 60, with another devastating gas attack. Now they were ready to launch a fresh attack which they believed might secure Ypres itself. They intended to attack all round the rim of the shortened salient, but the full force and the brunt of the assault would fall on the apex of the British line where it ran across the Bellewaerde Ridge to Frezenberg. Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry were back in the line, holding the rudimentary trenches that were traced across the eastern edge of the Bellewaerde Ridge.
In peacetime this small stretch of high ground, this circle of low ridges that swelled up like an amphitheatre from the flat Flanders Plain, had been a desirable place to live – and there were half a dozen chateaux arid small country estates, in as many square miles. Their wealthy owners had planted woodlands, hedged off fields, made roads to link up farms, built chapels in the hamlets and laid out water-scapes and pleasure-grounds round their fine country mansions.
All but one of them were now in the hands of the Germans. Previously the allies standing round the salient had invariably had another ridge at their backs and the advantage of dead ground, invisible to the enemy, where supplies could be brought up and troops could move unobserved to and from the line. Bellewaerde was the smallest ridge of all – and it was the last. Beyond it the ground dipped to meet the flat-lands that ran round Ypres and rolled off into the distance to meet the sea.
Across the ridge behind the Patricias’ trenches a finger of woodland curved round the edge of an ornamental lake in the grounds of Hooge Chateau concealing it from view. This was a favourite spot of the Baron de Vinck for it was well stocked with fish and he enjoyed relaxing there on a summer’s evening, drifting in a small boat on its placid surface with the trout rising to his bait. Tame swans sailed on the lake, birds nested in the trees and across the grassy parkland peacocks screeched and strutted on the chateau terrace.
Now beneath the shattered gables and glassless windows the terrace was a mass of mud and debris. The swans and the peacocks had vanished. Down by the lake the boats lay sinking by a half-demolished jetty, and where the margins of the lake had been battered by shell-fire the water was gradually seeping away and trickling down the hill. Nevertheless the lake was a lake still, and lying as it did directly behind the Patricias’ trenches a few hundred yards away it would hamper them severely if they had to fall back in a hurry.
The King’s Royal Rifles who extended the line to the right of the Patricias were better placed and better hidden, for their trenches bent back to run through Chateau Wood, still as thick and lush with springtime green as when the baron or his son Yves had strolled in its leafy glades to bag a rabbit or a bird or two for the pot. The glades and rides were ploughed and trampled now by the passage of many soldiers but, like the rest of the 27th Division line curving south round the salient through well-wooded country, Chateau Wood provided useful cover. Beyond it, on the open ground on the extreme left of the 27th Division line, the Patricias had no cover at all and they were badly in need of it.
In the forty-eight hours they had been out of the line the Shropshires who replaced them had done their best to improve the trenches after their pounding by German guns, but they were still lamentable and in places barely three feet deep, for beneath a shallow layer of topsoil the ground was marsh and without considerable manpower, without time to plan and dig an elaborate drainage system, without pumps to discharge the water, a trench would flood and turn to ditch if they dug deeper. There were parapets of a kind to replace the breastworks destroyed by the first bombardment but sandbags were scarce, and the claggy earth that crumbled and slipped for want of support threatened to turn into mud at the first sign of rain. The tangle of wire stretched in front of the trenches was too thin and too meagre to make up for their deficiencies.
On their left the Patricias’ trenches rested on a country road that meandered gently up the slope past a scatter of isolated ruins to the village of Westhoek on the ridge beyond. Before the war came to Ypres, when five minutes’ gentle stroll would have brought a walker to the village, they had been barns and cottages. Now they stood gaunt and skeletal in the No Man’s Land between the lines. Just a few nights ago the Regiment had tramped down this very road to the new line. Now hardly a mouse could scamper across without attracting the fire of machine-guns and eagle-eyed snipers on the ridge above.
Since the British retirement the Germans had made good use of their time. With the advantage of the newly won ridges and a hinterland of dead ground they had moved up large quantities of supplies – tools, wire, timber for revetments – and although their new trenches were not yet constructed to their customary standard of perfection, they had built strongpoints at intervals along the ridge, from the corner of the Menin Road which British Tommies had cheerily christened Clapham Junction to the ruins of Westhoek village, and across the open to the high ground above Frezenberg a mile beyond it. And they had sited them carefully to command the British trenches and everything that moved behind. There were guns well dug in and concealed in the woods close behind their line – in Clonmel Copse, in Nonnebosschen Wood, in Inverness Copse where so recently Jock Macleod had enjoyed his alfresco lunch with the hospitable French and where the gilt chairs and flamboyant clock salvaged from the chateau were doubtless now adorning the dug-out of German gunners.
The Patricias were still tired, for their time out of the line – and less than a mile behind – had been too short to restore men stunned by the ferocity of the bombardment that had decimated the Battalion, and too short to stiffen it with reinforcements. A draft of new men had arrived with Hamilton Gault, newly returned from hospital in England, but there were far too few to begin to fill the gaps. Even the Colonel was gone, shot by a sniper during the ‘rest’. Major Gault was now in command but there was no officer above the rank of lieutenant to assist him. Battalion headquarters was only an apology for a dug-out – a few rough boards thrown over part of the second-line trench a hundred yards behind the first – but Princess Patricia’s colours were there and they did a good deal to hearten Gault crouching with the signallers, and hoping against hope for the best.
If the Patricias’ trenches were badly placed they were marginally better off than the 28th Division on their left. Their position, bulging slightly forward to form the true apex of the new salient, ran across open ground on the forward slopes of the Frezenberg Ridge where they had no cover at all, for trenches could only be sited for concealment if there was high ground behind them where observers could direct bombardments on to No Man’s Land at the first sign of an attack. But there was no high ground behind, no more ridges for observation, no concealed artillery positions, few enough guns and not nearly enough ammunition.
On the flat land beyond Frezenberg village the 1st Suffolks were in the line and Signaller Harry Crask was at Battalion Headquarters in one of the dug-outs hastily constructed near the straggling stream they called the Hannebeek. It was Colonel Wallace’s own dug-out and it was not much of a place but from what Crask was able to gather he was a good deal better off than the men in the trenches in front. They were having a miserable time. The battalion had gone into the trenches on 17 April, and the battle had begun on the very day they were due for relief. They had been on the go ever since, attacking, counter-attacking, growing weaker in strength after each costly encounter. Shelling had also taken its toll and the Suffolks now were a pale shadow of the sun-bronzed battalion of Regulars which just a few months ago had quit garrison duties in Egypt to sail for Europe and the war. On that morning of 8 May there were fewer than four hundred of the originals left, and long before nightfall the Battalion would have ceased to exist.
But a company of Cheshires had been sent up to help them and, although shell-fire had accounted for some seventy casualties, the last few days had been comparatively quiet. Crask was not alone in suspecting that something was brewing and that the lull was only the calm before the storm for, working as they were at close quarters, he could sense that Colonel Wallace was worried and on edge. Captain Chalmers was a frequent visitor to the HQ dug-out, struggling back with difficulty from the front line, where the bombarded banks of the stream had given way and the water had spread to turn the low ground from a morass into a swamp. Conditions in the trenches were worse – much worse – and so Chalmers explained to the Colonel several times a day. ‘Pitiable’ was the word he used. The line was a pitiable mass of mud and blood, the men were ‘done up’ and in a pitiable condition, constantly asking when they were going to be relieved. There was nothing the colonel could do about it.
It was Crask who received the signal when it finally came through and, suppressing his own delight, handed it poker-faced to the Colonel. The battalion would be relieved that night. Colonel Wallace gave an audible sigh of thankfulness. ‘Thank God for that!’ he said. Then, turning to the Adjutant, ‘Let Chalmers know – and say he can tell the men.’ The message was logged in the small hours of the morning of 8 May. But in the darkness behind the enemy trenches orderlies were dishing out coffee, bread and sausage to long lines of German soldiers waiting to attack.
Pte. H. J. Crask, MM, 1st Bn., Suffolk Regt., 84 Brig., 28 Div.
I’d been on the telephone all night. About 6 a.m. a message came through that the 69th Battery would open fire on the whizz bang battery that had been bothering us. Whether it did or not I don’t know, for the Germans immediately opened an attack. Shells were raining all over the shop – especially round about us so as to prevent our supports getting up. I was in the dug-out with the C.O. and the Adjutant, working the telephone and making ready for breakfast – but that part of the business didn’t come off! All remained intact for about twenty minutes. Then number 1 dug-out next to us was struck by a shell, badly wounding Drew in the head and burying all the rifles, so everyone there scattered for the exit. Sergeant Crabb came into ours. Our dug-out lasted out for about another ten minutes, then a shell exploded just in the rear of the dug-out and knocked the telephone, me and Crabb out of our positions and wounded the Adjutant who was directly behind us. We hardly knew what was happening for a few minutes or how we had got off so lucky. The telephone, chair, table, all had disappeared – with a hole a few yards in circumference staring at us in their place. We all cleared out to the emergency trench which had been dug in the rear of a ditch and which turned out far worse than the shattered dug-outs because we were up to our waists in water – and up to our necks after ducking down with shells raining all around! During all this they had also dropped one on number 3 dug-out, shattering a beam which struck Corporal Pugh and smashed his right leg just above the ankle and also wounded him in the head and left arm. It was the hottest shop I had ever been in! I just had time to get properly soaked through, shaking with cold, when a shell dropped right on the edge of the trench, burying me and Lance-Corporal Game. I was lucky again for, after being helped out, Game was found to be horribly wounded with two large holes in the back, one on either side of his backbone. I took him back to number 2 dug-out (which hadn’t been hit again) and there I done him up as best I could.
All round the salient the air was whirling in a ferment of smoke and flying mud. The din was deafening, shock waves vibrated along the front, and the earth quaked and heaved and blew apart with the force of the explosions. Fields disappeared. Trenches disintegrated. Men were blown to bits. Two miles away from the Suffolks, and separated from them by the front of the 83rd Brigade, the Princess Patricias were having just as gruelling a time. Shortly after 6.30 a.m. Major Gault had managed to scribble a message to Brigade HQ reporting ‘very, very heavy shelling’ – but Brigade hardly needed to be told. In Brigade Headquarters dug-out, half a mile away at the western corner of Railway Wood, they were taking punishment on their own account, for the German guns were searching wide and probing deep and there was little doubt that this was the prelude to an all-out attack. It was hard to credit that the bombardment could possibly get worse but at seven o’clock the fire grew even stronger, the shells flew thicker, and every gun seemed to be trained on the sector where the Patricias and the Suffolks and the unfortunate battalions of the 83rd Brigade were clinging on at the crest of the battered salient. The Patricias’ front line was all but obliterated by high-explosive and shrapnel shells that, bursting high, rained red-hot fragments of metal that wiped out whole sections of men at a stroke, while machine-guns on the high ground, sweeping methodically from side to side, sprayed the trenches with incessant fire.
At eight o’clock Gault dispatched a second message to Brigade Headquarters:
Have been heavily shelled since 7 a.m. Sections of front trenches made untenable by enemy’s artillery, but have still about 160 rifles in front line. German infantry has not yet appeared. Should they rush our front trenches will at once counter-attack if possible… In lulls of gunfire there is heavy fire from rifles and machine guns. Please send me 2 machine guns if possible. I have only two left in the front line. None in support… Most of my wire gone.
The runner managed to dodge through the bombardment and safely reached Brigade HQ. It was the last direct news of the Patricias and already it was out of date. Even as the Brigadier was reading it the German infantry was swarming down the Westhoek Ridge to attack the British trenches. And they were whooping as they came.
Looking back on it, even the Patricias themselves found it difficult to believe that they had beaten the Germans back. The line was feeble, their front-line trench was almost non-existent, but every man, even the wounded who were still capable of raising a rifle, poured such accurate and such deadly fire into the German infantry as they advanced that the attack hesitated, faltered, and finally petered out as the survivors began to work their way cautiously back up the hill. When they saw that their infantry attack had failed the German guns opened up again more furiously than before and machine-gun crews which had managed to reach the ruined buildings in the first rush were firing in unison at almost point-blank range. The silence when the guns stopped was almost as stunning as the noise of the bombardment. Then there was a throaty rumbling from beyond the ridge that rose to a roar as the Germans poured down in a mass, running and shouting as they came. The front line was almost obliterated now and there was little point in trying to hold on. In the lull small groups of men had begun to make their way back to the support line and although the rearguard did their best to hold the enemy off, this time the attack was unstoppable. Watchers, peering anxiously from the support line a hundred yards behind, saw with astonishment a row of small white flags appear in part of the line where the fire of a few desperate survivors kept the enemy pinned down but the optimists whose first incredulous thought had been that the enemy was surrendering were soon disillusioned. The Germans were signalling their position to their own guns, warning them to lengthen range, to punish the second line as they had punished the first, and to finish the job.
Pte. J. W. Vaughan.
We were hit dead centre with heavy guns and machine-guns and then we were enfiladed from the right and enfiladed from the left along the trench both ways and it seems that they were using tear-gas too because your eyes were smarting and watering and you had quite a time fighting that off. All the officers practically were gone and of course these trenches weren’t much good even to begin with. Then they blew what there was to pieces and there was practically no protection at all.
You didn’t have much chance. I was hit with a shell splinter and I was just laying there in the trench, what there was of it, and Lieutenant Papeneau came along. He was a wonderful man from Quebec. He came from one of the oldest French-Canadian families, so he came along, and he had his automatic in his hand ready for the Germans to come on, but he stopped and knelt down beside me. One of my buddies had already ripped my puttees off and slit my pants down because I was hit in the leg and my leg had started to swell. Lieutenant Papeneau looked at it and he shoved a cigarette in my mouth and lit it, and he said, ‘Don’t worry, Vaughan, we’ll get you out just as fast as we can.’ I said, ‘That’s fine, sir.’ But I lay there for six hours. That’s as fast as they could get me out. Six hours! I was lucky to get out at all. One fellow had just been leaning over talking to me and he stood up and the next minute he got it, and he fell down dead nearly on top of me. That really upset me because he was one of the married men. In fact that’s when I began to get scared. It was all hell let loose, and laying there at the foot of that trench you didn’t know what was going on – except that it was bad!
Now that the Patricias’ front line had been withdrawn the support line was literally the line of last resort – and things were bad. But they were not so bad as they might have been. The 4th Rifle Brigade, in reserve in the lee of the Bellewaerde Ridge, took advantage of a brief pause in the shelling and managed to send forward a company to help out. They walked upright, for they were heavy laden, and the Patricias cheered them on as they came. ‘I don’t know if there were angels at Mons,’ remarked one soldier later, ‘but we saw angels that day at Bellewaerde, and they had RB on their shoulders.’ They brought boxes of ammunition, and, best of all, two machine-guns. And they also brought hope and fresh heart to the hard-pressed Patricias, for it was not enough merely to save their line – already it was clear that it was up to them to save the day.
Hamilton Gault, wounded for the second time in two hours, and this time seriously, was forced to send a message to Captain Adamson instructing him to take command of the Patricias in the line. He hardly needed to add that he must hold on ‘at all costs’. But the situation was worsening by the minute. Adamson himself was wounded and as he crawled along the line, supervising the setting-up of the machine-guns, and handing out rifle ammunition, he was well aware that there was a huge gap in the line on their left. Cautiously raising his head to scan the Frezenberg Ridge, even through clouds of swirling smoke he could see British troops of the 28th Division streaming back to the rear. It could be only a matter of time before the Germans followed to take up the lost ground. When they did the Patricias would be out-flanked.
It was the line of the 83rd Brigade that had given way – only a small part of it, but enough to allow the enemy first to penetrate the gap then to widen it by creeping to the rear of the troops on either side. From the rear, through the smoke and confusion of the fighting, it was hard for Brigade Staff to make sense of the situation, but the sight of retiring troops told its own story and it was clear to the anxious Staff Officers that reinforcements attempting to cross the open slopes of the Frezenberg Ridge would either be mown down or entrapped in their turn. All that could be done was to pray that the flanks would hold, to stiffen the GHQ line, and to hope against hope that the small bodies of men still holding out would be able to contain the enemy until his assault ran out of steam and they could rally the men to counter-attack.
Much closer to the crumbling front, where Harry Crask crouched with the remnants of the signallers in the ruins of his Battalion HQ dug-outs, the position was no clearer.
Pte. H. J. Crask.
Not one of us knew what was happening in front but we more or less knew what to expect. Young French eventually turned up from the front line about 11 a.m., slightly wounded in the head, and stopped with us since the shelling was getting wild again. He reported that our fellows were still holding out in the trenches, but we could see men retiring on our right.
A few minutes afterwards Germans appeared to the right of us, so we had to get out of the trench or we would have been enfiladed. We went back, or rather we struggled back on our chests to the dug-out dragging Game, but all the nine of us were in a helpless condition. There was the Colonel, Sergeant Crabb, Brown, French, Manton, Hayward, Humphreys, Lance-Corporal Game wounded, and myself – and we had not a weapon amongst us.
If Colonel Wallace could not go down fighting, he intended at least to go down with dignity. He had a box of fine Havana cigars in his pocket and he was equally determined to give no German the chance of filching them. He handed the box round and forced a smile to reassure his bedraggled men. ‘Smoke, lads? Might as well make the best of things.’ The cigars were large and opulent. It took a little while to set them well alight and the men had hardly begun to puff before the Germans were upon them.
They loomed up and circled the shell-hole shouting ‘Hände hohe’ and even if the words were incomprehensible the message was clear enough for they stood with rifles and fixed bayonets aimed at the entrance to the battered dug-out. One by one the men clambered out wreathed in clouds of cigar smoke and raised their hands. The air sang with bullets and they had hardly cleared the dug-out when French was shot through the heart and collapsed at Crask’s feet. ‘The direction of the shot,’ Crask noted sadly, ‘was from Burnt Farm.’ Burnt Farm was, or had been, behind the British line, but the line was so chaotic and the Germans were advancing so fast that it was hard to tell if it had been fired by friend or foe. Crask had his suspicions and so perhaps had the Germans, for one German soldier bent down to pick up French’s cap and placed it gently over the dead man’s face to hide the staring eyes.*
Pte. H. J. Crask, MM.
They immediately pulled the remaining lot of us down amongst them and we had to lay there roughly two hours in their front line (we were captured about 11.45 a.m.). During that time a party of King’s Own tried to retire about eighty or a hundred yards away, but they were simply mad! They were mowed down like so much corn by rifle and machine-gun fire. A few that were left put their hands up, and the Germans in our line ceased fire immediately. They were good fellows all round that captured us. They were 77th Hanoverian Regiment and they kept us from fire as much as possible by making a parapet in front of us as well as for themselves. They also gave us meat and bread and coffee, and did their best for our wounded. At 1.30 p.m. we were all put in a dug-out. Two guards stayed with us and their line then began to advance towards Ypres. We all had the same opinion – that they were simply making a walk of it to Ypres, then on to Calais, and that they’d finally reach London. The Germans hardly seemed to know as much as I did. They undoubtedly thought that we were all that was left of the Contemptible Little Army.
But it was not quite all – although, after three weeks’ fighting in the salient, such reserve battalions as there were were so pitifully low in numbers that they were battalions in name only, and a third of the men in the ranks of the 1st Yorks and Lancs – the only battalion that was anywhere near full strength – had arrived just three days earlier as a draft of inexperienced reinforcements. The 1st Welch, like the Territorials of the 12th London Rangers, were barely the strength of a single company. The 2nd East Yorks and the King’s Own could muster fewer than six hundred men between them and the 1st East Lancs were only three hundred and fifty strong. The reserves could not achieve much, but they had to try. Far out in front some ragged remnants were fighting on but they were isolated and would soon be surrounded and a great gap yawned across two miles of open ground between the Patricias at Bellewaerde and the Northumberland Fusiliers at Mouse Trap Farm.
Although by mid-afternoon the Germans had paused in their advance there was no possibility of a counter-attack because the fight had been taken up by their artillery and the British reserves could not hope to penetrate the curtain of deadly fire, but even in the teeth of the bombardment the five hundred men of the East Yorks and the King’s Own managed to advance as much as a thousand yards in an attempt to fill the gap. They were just half-way to the old broken line, but they could go no further. The advance had cost them dear, and still they were nowhere near the Germans. Behind their curtain of exploding shells the Germans were entrenching across the gap but mercifully on either side of it the flanks held. They did more than hold. East of Mousetrap Farm the Northumberland Fusiliers clung on, decimated by shelling, beating off attacks in front and on their open flank far into the evening. It was the Germans who gave up first.
Two miles away, the Patricias had every available man in the line – every signaller, every batman, every pioneer, every cook and every orderly. Earlier, with the help of the 4th Rifle Brigade, the left-hand company swung round at right-angles to their front, spread out in a thin line facing the gap, and attacked the enemy troops as they appeared. For the moment at least it seemed they had scared them off, and now help had arrived to extend the flank line further and to form a line of reserves at the Patricias’ backs. Even so, it was still touch and go and a determined attempt by the Germans to widen the gap further and ‘roll up the line’ would have been hard to withstand. But the Germans were still short of men and the one heartening piece of intelligence in an otherwise catastrophic day came from the Royal Flying Corps. Pilots, vigilantly patrolling the skies beyond the salient, could see no large-scale troop movements, no unusual number of trains rushing towards the German railhead and no fresh divisions making for the front. After their initial triumph the Germans seemed content to depend for the moment on the protection of their artillery while they dug in, re-grouped, and used the breathing space to bring up local reserves, to evacuate their casualties, and to marshal prisoners and send them tramping to the rear in long despondent columns.
Pte. H. J. Crask, MM.
We started back just before dusk and our own artillery gave us a parting shell or two which caused more than a little wind amongst us – at least Sergeant Hart of the Cheshires put in a certain amount of gymnastics after the style of the ostrich dance! I could not at all estimate the strength of the Germans. Zonnebeke was simply crammed with them and our own artillery seemed to be lost.
They made any amount of sarcastic cowardly remarks as we passed, calling us swines, etc. One sneering idiot called us ‘cousins from over the Channel’, telling us also that we were prisoners – we hardly knew that I suppose! – finishing up with a sneer and also spitting at us. We were halted again on the other side of Zonnebeke by some dirty little officer and made to carry the German guards’ packs. We had to leave behind our two badly wounded men, Corporal Pugh and Lance-Corporal Game, in two separate dug-outs – apparently dying and left entirely on their own, but with no stretchers they had to be left.
We halted several times before finally reaching our first night’s quarters and were questioned by any amount of officers trying to pump us. If they had not asked so many questions they would not have had so many untruths told to them! They thought we were all Kitchener’s men. We told them that they were still in England – and didn’t they look shocked! They had the impudence to tell us that our own Regular Army was absolutely wiped out during the latter part of 1914 and they were more surprised than ever when some of us showed them our pay books and told them that there were lots more Regulars to come from India. Then we were taken charge of by Uhlans and settled down about 10 p.m. at a place called Beclaeare and were put in the church which they had made something like a pigsty. But I was only too glad to get down after such a day and then a march of four miles.
For most of the day Jimmy Vaughan had been lying wounded and helpless in the Patricias’ line through the clamour and tumult of the battle, but at last he too was out of it.
Pte. J. W. Vaughan.
Do you know how they got me out? It was the roughest, readiest thing you ever saw, but they had no other way to do it. There was no parados at the back of the trench – well, there practically wasn’t a trench by that time! But normally you build up the front to fire at the enemy and it helps to shelter you, and you also should build up the back of the trench a certain amount, what they call the parados, but we had no parados, none at all, and with nothing to conceal you the stretcher-bearers couldn’t get up, couldn’t carry you back anyway for that matter. So what they did was this. When the first-aid men got to me a couple of fellows said, ‘Now, Jimmy, there’s an artillery dug-out just fifty yards straight ahead. Now, you’ve got to crawl over there, crawl to that dug-out and get down in there.’ And do you know how they did it? One took hold of my shoulders, the other took hold of my legs – and one leg was wounded, remember! – and they threw me over the back of the trench. That’s the only way they could get me out. When I got my breath back and got myself together, I crawled along and crawled along, and it felt like fifty miles not fifty yards. Well, I made it to the dug-out and when I did get in it was full of wounded men, packed with wounded men, and the moans and groans all over were something terrible. I squeezed in and lay down where I could and waited there for the dark, for the stretcher-bearers to come up.
Well, eventually it did get dark and I remember the stretcher-bearers picking me up and getting me out of the dug-out and they carried me to the field dressing station which was about three-quarters of a mile away from the front line.There was a Red Cross ambulance truck there and the doctor happened to come out, and whether the dressing station was full up or not I don’t know, but he looked at me and he said, Tut him in the ambulance and when she’s loaded, take him to Vlamertinghe.’ So they took us through Ypres to Vlamertinghe and when we got there, the whole street as far as your eye could see was nothing but stretchers and blankets and walking wounded with blankets over their shoulders, and there must have been half a dozen doctors or more working flat out.*
Darkness was a long time falling on that fine May evening and when it did come it brought little respite from the flash of the guns and the thunder of explosions. The air was heavy with fumes and smoke that thickened as they mingled with the night mist. The situation was still desperate but the Patricias were now in touch with the 85th Brigade, for fresh troops had succeeded in advancing a short distance and stiffening the last few survivors of the earlier advance in their forward position, while across the ridge near Mouse Trap Farm where the hard-pressed Northumberland Fusiliers were still standing firm, as late as 7.30 in the evening the 1st Royal Warwicks and the 2nd Royal Dublin Fusiliers had extended the front and even dashed forward to push the enemy back. Coming after the advance of the 85th Brigade this feat so unsettled the Germans that they actually abandoned some positions they had captured and drew back. It was some small encouragement and these precious footholds made it possible in the hours of darkness to form a tenuous line between the flanks. It was a flimsy enough bulwark and it ran a full three-quarters of a mile behind the front-line positions of that morning, but it was complete. The gap was closed. The tension had slackened.
It would be hours, even days before, they could begin to count the cost but already it was obvious that it had been enormous. Whole battalions had been wiped out, like Harry Crask’s, for of the 1st Suffolks only one officer and twenty-nine men returned from the fight. Only two officers and a hundred and twenty men of the 3rd Monmouths survived, and fifty-three men and a sergeant of the 12th London Rangers. Next day the six thousand men of the 84th Brigade could muster only fourteen hundred of their number. The Patricias had four officers and a hundred and fifty men left.
They had fought like lions to the limit of their endurance and far beyond it. They were drained and exhausted, and it was time to go. The guns rumbled on but the fire was thinner now for the Germans had relaxed their efforts, as worn out as their opponents by the fearful day.
A young moon rose in the hazy sky above the battlefield. On both sides of the line they were carrying out the wounded and relieving the men who had survived the worst of the onslaught.
When the Patricias’ turn came in the early hours of the morning they dragged themselves thankfully back to assemble behind the trench. In the light of the first streaks of dawn Lieutenant Niven formed them up and placed himself at the head of the column. He was carrying Princess Patricia’s colours. They had not escaped entirely unscathed and the rich red of the banner was smudged and streaked and slightly torn. But the Princess’s colours had stayed in the line throughout the battle and now the colours led the survivors of her Regiment out. They marched down the track that led past Bellewaerde Lake, down the hill through Railway Wood and round to the Menin Road. In the shallow-scraped trenches reserve troops of their own 80th Brigade stood up to cheer them as they passed and some called out, ‘Well done the Pats!’ They were too weary just then to savour either the moment or the accolade, but it soon passed into Regimental history.
Chapter 21
Less than twenty miles to the south where the troops were assembled for the start of the ‘big show’ on which the French and British Commands had pinned their hopes the night was clear and starry. From the Aubers Ridge, a thin pencil line against the luminous sky, past the black-etched slag heaps of the Loos coal fields, across the chalky foothills of Artois to the ancient towers of Arras at the limit of the French attack, the French and British armies were poised and waiting for the morning. They had assembled by stealth, but it was an open secret, for the preparations for battle and the movement of tens of thousands of men could hardly be concealed and only yesterday the Germans had erected a taunting notice in their trenches in front of Aubers Ridge that was clearly meant to rile the British a hundred yards away: ‘Attack postponed until tomorrow.’ The implication that the enemy was ready and waiting was clear and the snipers had relieved their feelings by firing at the notice and reducing it to matchwood.
In a front-line trench on what was once the road that led from Sailly to Fromelles Charlie Burrows was sound asleep for, like all old soldiers, he had learned the lesson of resting when he could. Charlie had been in it from the start, he had landed with the 7th Division at Antwerp, he had fought through the first Battle of Ypres, and he had been fighting ever since, but as a gunner this was his first experience of being in the front line with the infantry. It was hardly surprising that he was exhausted for they had moved up earlier in the evening, man-handling the guns into positions that had been secretly prepared for them close up to the German trenches. The wheels were fitted with rubber tyres to reduce the noise as far as possible, but it was nerve-racking heavy work to drag them in under the very noses of the enemy. But every man was a volunteer and nobody had grumbled. Now, there was nothing to do but wait. They had been left in no doubt of the part they were to play and they were well prepared for it.
Gnr. C. Β. Burrows, 104th Bty., 22nd Brig., RFA.
They’d pulled us out of the line on 28 April to somewhere about three kilometres north-west of Merville and we stayed there for four days. Our left section of two guns did some experimental firing on barbed wire entanglements there. We heard that it was an exact replica of the German front line immediately in front of us in our old position. Dozens of Generals and Staff Officers came to watch us firing and after we’d finished they went to inspect the result. We practised and practised, and moved back to our old position on 2 May and on the night of 8 May we went into action right on the front-line parapet. Plenty of excitement. We are to cut the German barbed wire with our shrapnel shells the same as we experimented with at Merville in front of the Generals. We get the guns into position all right and cover them as best we can. I bet we will cop it hot here – there’s only about a hundred yards distance between ours and the enemy front line. All our gunners are eager for the fray. The 7th Battalion Middlesex Regiment are in the trenches behind us – they belong to the 8th Division and this is their first attack. We are to attack in the morning.
Not since the Battle of Omdurman had guns been deliberately positioned in the front line with the infantry, but desperate measures were called for if the battle was to be won. Guns were scarce. Ammunition was scarcer still and three weeks of fighting at Ypres had depleted reserve stocks to an alarming level. There were not enough guns and there were certainly not enough shells to cut the wire and batter the German line across the length of the battle-front, so a full-scale frontal attack was out of the question. It was useless, in the circumstances, to attempt to repeat the tactics employed across the same ground in the Battle of Neuve Chapelle two months earlier, and Sir Douglas Haig and his staff had come up with a new plan. The guns would be concentrated in two groups and, firing as fast and as hard as they could, would attempt to cut the wire and pierce the line in two places, on the left in front of Fromelles and on the right to the south of Neuve Chapelle and the Bois du Biez. Then the troops would dash through the gaps, fight their way beyond and sweep round across the Aubers Ridge in a pincer movement that would trap the Germans behind them. The troops had also been placed with care – the Meerut Division, well blooded and experienced, on the right, and the 8th Division two miles to the north. When the battle began every gun would be trained on the German line in front of them. The gunners would drive the breaches, but it was up to the hardened and experienced infantry to follow through and exploit the gains.
Between these two vital sectors the troops holding the front line that looped round Neuve Chapelle and ran north in front of Fauquissart to meet the 8th divisional sector were neither hardened nor experienced. The West Riding Territorials had been in France for exactly three weeks and two days but they had already had one casualty.
Cpl. A. Wilson, 1/5 Bn. (TF), West Yorkshire Regt.
We went more or less straight into the trenches in front of Aubers Ridge, about ten days before the battle. Of course it was all quiet then compared to what came later, with just the odd bit of shelling and sniping, and we went in in batches to get us accustomed to it. The very first night we were there my Company Commander, Captain Lansdale, was shot in the neck. He hadn’t been in the trenches half an hour and out he went! He wasn’t killed, or even very badly wounded, though I remember we were horrified seeing him streaming with blood. I wasn’t far away when it happened, but it could only have been a flesh wound. Anyway, out he went, and that was our first casualty. Strangely enough he came back several months later, again as our Company Commander, and he hadn’t been in the trenches another night when he was shot in the shoulder! We could hardly believe it! His total service in the trenches didn’t even amount to a day and he ended up with two wound stripes. We thought it was a great joke the second time it happened – of course we were a bit blasé by then – but the first time he never got anywhere near the Battle of Aubers Ridge. We had another temporary Company Commander for that show.
The West Riding Brigade did not expect to play a very active part in the ‘show’ a few hours hence for, if all went well and the Germans in the trenches on their front were cut off by the troops converging behind, they would surely give up with no more than a token fight. The night turned chill as they waited for the dawn and the start of the battle, and sitting with their backs to the wall of the trench Arthur Wilson and his friend Walter Malthouse huddled together for warmth. Despite Arthur’s elevated rank of Corporal the two boys were inseparable. It was almost exactly a year since they had joined the Territorials and Walter, marginally senior in age if not in rank, was still apt in moments of levity to annoy Arthur by calling him ‘little lad’. This was a reference to the day of their mobilisation.
Cpl. A. Wilson.
We were at Scarborough on our annual camp on the Saturday of the August bank holiday weekend and I happened to be promoted to Corporal and that day I was acting Battalion Orderly Corporal, so I was with the Colonel in the Battalion office. In the afternoon a motor-cycle dispatch rider arrived with special sealed orders to say that the Battalion had to mobilise immediately and strike camp and return to York. There were loads of us there – West Yorks 5th and 6th Battalions, 7th and 8th Battalions, Leeds Rifles, and also the West Yorks Rifle Regiment from Leeds. Well, we packed up and we marched into Scarborough late at night. Of course with all the troops going through the town, and all the excitement, people were coming out of their houses to see what was going on – some of them already in their night attire. I was marching behind the Colonel, who was on his horse, and I had four men each side of me with fixed bayonets. Well, being Battalion Orderly Corporal I was carrying dispatches and my rifle was put in a truck, so that I was marching through Scarborough with these four armed men round me, while I was carrying the boxes. One old girl looked out of her door and she was standing there in her nightdress and she shouted out, ‘Yon little lad’s off to prison!’ Well, that was me of course. Walter thought it was a huge joke and he never let me forget it.
The Yorkshiremen had also brought their guns and, although they were hardly up to date, they were thankfully received. They were better than nothing but, like many others, the guns of Norman Tennant’s battery had seen service in the Boer War and also at the Battle of Omdurman.
Gnr. N. Tennant, 11th Howitzer Bty., West Riding Brig. (TF), RA.
They were five-inch breech-loading Howitzers – great, clumsy old weapons. And they fired 561b high explosive shells. You had to thrust the shell into the breech, ram it home, and then push in the charge that would fire it, which was explosive held in a canvas bag shaped something like a mushroom with two smaller charges in canvas bags behind it. They were called the ‘cores’ and it was hard physical work. The gun-drill was just as it had been in the old days and the weapon was really obsolete. Once you’d loaded the gun it was fired by pulling a lanyard and, of course, the guns themselves took a fair bit of man-handling. I did my share of gun-drill in the early days, but I was more than happy when I was made a signaller.
Major Paul Petrie was our Commanding Officer, and actually we’d lost him a few weeks before we went to France. It was a strange affair, because he wasn’t called Petrie then. His name was Steinthal, a German name, and he’d been forced to leave the battery, because the powers that be were suspicious about his antecedents and thought he might have German sympathies. He was in the wool trade in Bradford, and there were a lot of families in that business who were German from generations back. Anyway, he was forced to give up the command while they checked all this out and we got a nasty little fat short-arsed fellow in his place. Nobody liked him. He had a high opinion of himself and he used to give orders in a high-pitched, snarling voice. I remember when we were on the march on the Great North Road, he called out, ‘Battery will trot.’ Well, away we went at a fair lick and I don’t suppose this little fat fellow was a very experienced rider because he was bumping up and down in the saddle looking extremely uncomfortable, going redder and redder in the face, and it was as much as he could do to hold on. It wasn’t long before he’d had enough. But he could hardly get the order out because he was thudding up and down so hard that he couldn’t get breath. Eventually he managed to jerk out the order, ‘B… b… b… battery w… w… walk m… m… m… march!’ We were most amused. I was delighted myself because I didn’t like him at all. He’d just given me fourteen days’ CB and the worst of that was that it lost me my embarkation leave.
It was all over a piece of nonsense. At stables one morning one of my horses was restless and started kicking the one next to him in the stall, so I picked up a broom – only a light affair – and gave the horse a whack to move him away. Well, as luck would have it, just at that moment this little Major came along, and he went absolutely purple in the face. He screeched, ‘Sergeant-Major, take that man’s name!’ Well, the Sergeant-Major, Billy Brown – a lovely chap – knew perfectly well who I was, but he had to come up and solemnly ask my name – as if he didn’t know! – and I was up before the Major on a charge of ‘cruelty to a horse’. And that’s how I lost my embarkation leave. All I managed to get was twenty-four hours’ compassionate leave, because I wrote to my parents and asked them to send a telegram saying my presence was needed to sign some business paper or other. Fortunately our own Major came back to us just before we left. He came back as Major Petrie. Someone who knew him said Petrie was his wife’s name and he’d adopted it to avoid any more trouble.
The Battery was dug in across the fields behind Richebourg St Vaast but Tennant and his fellow signaller Vallender were on permanent duty at the observation post in an empty house in the partly ruined village half a mile away on the main road to Neuve Chapelle. This suited them well. The Observing Officer seldom came to the post and in his absence the signallers amused themselves by scrounging, exploring, and souvenir hunting in the empty barns and houses. In the course of their wanderings they found an old drain-pipe and were struck by a brilliant idea for an emergency signalling system, and when they were next off duty they hastened to share this discovery with two gunners from the Battery. The first experiment was carried out next night, and it took them the best part of the day to prepare it. They built a bed of sandbags for the drain-pipe, laid it carefully in the direction of a pre-arranged fixed point to the left of the Battery, wedged it firmly into place and piled more sandbags on top. Morse code signalled through this narrow channel – a mere pin-prick of light – would surely be invisible to all but the recipients of the message and if the unreliable telephone line were to fail the drain-pipe would be worth its weight in gold. They were extremely pleased with themselves.
Unfortunately it was a large drain-pipe. The light that emerged from the other end was somewhat larger than a pin-prick, and when they began to signal at the appointed hour, the flickering beam flashed like a searchlight across the fields. The answering flash from the gunners at the battery was clearly visible in the observation post and doubtless just as visible to the Germans, since the gunners in the Battery were naturally signalling towards the enemy lines. The gunners had some difficulty in convincing the Military Police that they had not been signalling to the enemy and were not spies. Still chastened by the effect of a severe wigging from Major Petrie the signallers dismantled their ingenious apparatus, resigning themselves to conventional methods – and also to the weary prospect of crawling across the fields to repair the telephone line in the all-too-likely event of its being broken.
In the early hours of the morning Major Petrie himself had come to the observation post with the Observing Officer, anxious to see the bombardment and the battle for himself. The OP was crowded. The atmosphere was tense, but it was the tension of excitement for every man in the battery from the major downwards was thrilled at the prospect of taking part in the real war at last. From their post on the main road Tennant and Vallender had watched the build-up to the battle as the fighting troops trudged past towards the trenches. They were behind the Indians and their guns were to help to pave the way for the assault of the Meerut Division. In the last few days the fields and orchards round the village had been transformed into a panorama of the East that would not have been out of place on an Indian cantonment and from the tall bearded Sikhs to the cheerful little Gurkhas the Indians were a source of endless and colourful interest. They were troops of the Garhwal Brigade waiting in reserve for the coming battle.
Gnr. N. Tennant.
I can remember how excited I was that night. We all were. Of course, in the run-up to the bombardment – our first bombardment – there was no question of going to sleep. We couldn’t have slept anyway! You had the feeling that something tremendous was going to happen. Of course we had no idea what it was and we’d been told nothing. I hadn’t the faintest inkling that they were going for Aubers Ridge. I’d never heard of Aubers Ridge and I didn’t hear it mentioned for a long time afterwards. All we knew was that we were going to take part in the big breakthrough and we were going to push right through to Lille. That’s all we were told. I didn’t even know that the French were attacking too. We were raw and inexperienced, but we were wildly enthusiastic and we had no doubt that we were well on the way to winning the war!
Not all the gunners were so sanguine as the enthusiastic new arrivals.
Bdr. W. Kemp.
When the ammunition came up it was sealed in strong heavy boxes which could only be opened by hefty men with pickaxes, and it took some time. There were not many rounds. Next week the Battery was turned out one night to unload ammunition. There was one wagon and when it was all unloaded there were ten rounds – and they were all armour-piercing shells from the coast defence batteries. That’s all they could give us. We didn’t find it reassuring. We thought it was a disgrace.
The heavy guns were intended to fire on specific targets where strongpoints had been spotted in the German line. The task of the massed field-guns was to batter the line itself, to cut the coiled barbed wire that protected it and to carve a passage for the infantry. The bombardment was timed to last for thirty minutes rising for the last ten to a crescendo of concentrated fire. It had worked initially at Neuve Chapelle, and although reports had indicated that the Germans had now improved their line Sir Douglas Haig had little doubt that it would work again.
The full extent of the ‘improvements’ was not visible from the air. Pilots, and even observers on the flat ground opposite, could see that the belts of wire were thicker than before but they could hardly guess that beyond them lay another obstacle. The breastwork parapets of the trenches had been built up and widened – they were seven feet high and as much as fifteen, even twenty feet across. It had all taken a prodigious amount of labour and throughout March and April hundreds of working parties from troops supposedly at rest, helped by squads of recruits brought from depots as far away as Lille, had shifted incalculable tons of earth to fill the sandbags that made up the new defences. Between the parapets and the visible belt of wire the excavations they had left behind were filled with sunken barbed wire, close-coiled and lethal. Even if the outlying belts of wire were blown away these man-traps lay beyond. They were invisible. And they were almost indestructible.
The trench-defences were constructed with equal skill and forethought. Every few yards in both parapet and parados large wooden boxes had been buried cave-like, deep into the thick wall of sandbags, each one large enough to shelter two men and calculated to protect them from even a direct hit from all but the heaviest of high explosive shells. A whole garrison could survive bombardment uninjured and largely unperturbed. And there were machine-gun posts ingeniously constructed from V-shaped wooden frames burrowed deep into the protection of the sandbagged parapet with the embrasure at the point of the V, with its steel-rail loop-hole directed towards the enemy. They were placed every twenty yards, carefully positioned at corners and traverses to increase the field of fire, and they were entirely invisible from the British lines.
With ten times as many guns and fifty times as many shells, and had the bombardment lasted hours instead of minutes, it would still have been a tough nut to crack. As it was, many guns were old and of obsolete design, many more were inaccurate, suffering from such wear and tear that their shells failed to reach their targets in the enemy line, and many were of too small a calibre to make much impression on it when they did. To add to the difficulty a great deal of the ammunition was faulty.
Bar. W. Kemp.
We opened fire at twelve hundred yards behind Fauquissart at targets spotted for us by an aeroplane, and we put out a very large letter L, with the long shank on the line of fire to assist the observer in the plane. What we fired at during the battle I just don’t know. My bombardier watched the attack and he said that the infantry were met with machine-gun fire as soon as they showed themselves. They never even took the first trench at Fauquissart.
Firing at point-blank range from the British front trench a hundred yards from the German line Charlie Burrows’s guns had done well – better even than the gunners realised, for if they had not made the only gap in the wire it was certainly the most effective. They were so close to their target that it would have been difficult to miss.
Gnr. C. B. Burrows.
Attack starts at 5 a.m., our section fire for about an hour and blow all the wire entanglements to blazes. They then lift their fire further on, and the infantry go over. Enemy reply with intense fire. Heard that our infantry were doing well and that some prisoners have been taken by the 2nd Lincolns, and that in parts they have reached the enemy second line. Fighting lasts all day, the infantry do not seem to make much headway. They have plenty of casualties. Our section very lucky up to now, only two gunners wounded out of eight. The German artillery could not have spotted them yet. Heard that our Captain is wounded in two places, but he still carries on.
It was the two leading companies of the 2nd Rifle Brigade who had got through the breach, but they were almost on their own. Then things began to go wrong.
Capt. R. Berkeley, MC.
A number of ‘shorts’ caused severe casualties in the advanced sap where Β and D companies were assembled to lead the attack. At 5.40 a.m. undismayed by this misadventure, they swept across to the German trench taking it in their stride and pushed on to the battalion objective, followed by A and C companies who occupied and consolidated the German trench. Battalion Headquarters crossed immediately behind the support companies but the enemy machine-gun fire was terrific and they had heavy casualties. The battalion machine-guns were unable to get across. Battalion Headquarters were dispersed and the bombing and blocking parties, so carefully organised beforehand, were at once broken up and could not be re assembled. Nevertheless, the task had been performed swiftly and well, and they were just enjoying the afterglow of success when they suddenly realised that, apart from a handful of the Royal Irish Rifles, they were entirely alone. Where were the turning movements to right and left that were to enlarge the gap? Where was the advanced guard ‘including some mounted troops’ that was to press on as soon as the first objective was secured? The Rifle Brigade were on the first objective. Where were the East Lancashires on the right, and the Sherwood Foresters beyond them?*
The answer was not hard to find. As Captain Berkeley sadly recorded, ‘They were lying out in No Man’s Land and most of them would never stand again.’ From their burrows, well protected by many square yards of earth-filled sandbags, the German machine-gunners had begun to fire even before the bombardment ceased, catching troops like the East Lancs as they crawled out from their trenches preparing to assault. The battle orders had made no bones about the fact that success depended on ‘a continuous forward movement of fresh troops’. Most of the ‘fresh troops’ of the second wave and support battalions were shot down as they cleared the parapet. The battle and the troops who fought it died in No Man’s Land.
Bdr. W. Kemp.
I was asked to go forward with some signalling gear, because the Major had asked Lieutenant Brian to go forward and observe the fire using his periscope. We were nailed down for a start by a 77 mm battery. So the officer spoke to them and said, ‘I can’t move from here. They’re shelling where I want to go.’ Well, we got into the line and it was terrible there. There we were with our ten rounds, and the German shells raining down in hundreds! It was all so hopeless and useless. I didn’t like my position where I was with the telephone. I don’t know why, I just had a feeling I didn’t like where I was. So I moved a little bit away from the officer, and it must have been a premonition, because next minute a shell came over, there was a terrible explosion and Lieutenant Brian was killed. We should both have gone if I hadn’t moved.
What a waste of life! He couldn’t do anything or even see anything. I was with him at the OP and all I could see was that it was all a dismal failure. Away on the right beyond Neuve Chapelle, the attempt to exploit a second breach in the line had been no more successful. By seven in the morning both attacks had come to a standstill and as more and more troops were sent forward, as the casualties mounted and the hours passed, the battle-field descended into chaos.
Capt. W. G. Bagot-Chester, MC.
It soon came through the telephone to say the first line had been taken, only to be contradicted afterwards. We waited in the redoubt from 3 a.m. to 2 p.m., when we were ordered forward. We had to advance about two thousand yards across open country to start with, but we were not fired on until we reached a long communication trench leading up to the front trench-line. Of course we advanced in artillery formation. Toward the last hundred yards or so German ‘Woolly Bears’ began to burst overhead, and ‘Jack Johnsons’* close by, but I had only one man hit at this point. We then got into a long communication trench leading up from Lansdowne Post to the Gridiron Trenches. Here we were blocked for a long time, shelling increasing every moment, wounded trying to get by us. After a time we got into the Gridiron where it was absolute hell. Hun shells, large and small, bursting everywhere, blowing in the parapet here and there, and knocking tree branches off. Here there was fearful confusion. No one knew the way to anywhere. There was such a maze of trenches, and such a crowd of people, many wounded, all wanting to go in different directions, one regiment going back, ours trying to go forward, wounded and stretcher-bearers going back, etc. I presently went on to a trench called the Pioneer Trench. There I had twenty-six casualties from shell. Havildar Manbir had his leg blown off, and was in such agony that he asked to be shot.
As one got further to the front trench, the place got more of a shambles, wounded and dead everywhere. Those who could creep or walk were trying to get back; others were simply lying and waiting. The ground in front was littered with Seaforth bodies and 41st Dogras. From the Pioneer Trench I went on to the front trench, occupied by the 41st Dogras, who, however, had very few men left so heavily had they suffered. One of their British officers had completely lost his nerve, and was rather a pitiable sight. I tried to comfort him a bit. We had to set to work at once to try to clear up the trench. It was full of killed and wounded, equipment of all sorts, and the ground in front was strewn with dead Seaforths, who made the charge this morning at 5.40 a.m. from this trench, also 41st Dogras, who made a second attempt. Towards dusk the 41st moved out. Through the night we were at work repairing the trench and cleaning up generally, while out in front, parties were at work searching for their wounded.
One of the dead Seaforths was Lieutenant Charles Tennant who had written his last letter to his ‘Darling Lucy’.*
Between the two assaults, in the trenches in front of Fauquissart, Arthur Wilson and Walter Malthouse had hardly enjoyed a grand-stand view of the battle for the incessant shelling had kept their heads well down. All they had heard was the noise of the guns, the spit of machine-guns not far ahead and a spate of rumours that died away as the day wore on. It was late in the afternoon when a shell exploded in the trench.
Cpl. A. Wilson.
Of course we were standing to all day, ready to go, but about three o’clock in the afternoon we were stood down and told we could rest a bit in the trench, and it was fairly clear that nothing much else was going to happen. Well of course we were exhausted, and I got down in the trench next to Walter and I dropped off right away. All of a sudden there was an almighty explosion, right in the trench, a direct hit just a little bit further along from where we were. I was right next to Walter – touching him even. I was stunned of course, but when I got my wits together I could hardly believe it. I was covered in blood – saturated – and I really thought I’d bought it. But it was Walter’s blood. I didn’t have a scratch myself. Walter had taken the full blast and somehow or other it hadn’t touched me. He was blown to bits. A terrible sight. I don’t think there was a bit of his body bigger than a leg of lamb. I gathered up what I could, put him into a sandbag and later on when it got dusk, a few of us got out of the trench and buried him a little way behind, about twenty-five yards back, because we couldn’t go far. I had my prayer book and I read the burial service – the whole thing, prayers and everything. We had several men to bury of course but we saw that they got a proper burial. We were all friends in the Territorials, joined together, been together all along. We felt pretty bad about it. The worst of it was that from the direction of the shell we felt almost sure it was one of ours. Of course the authorities wouldn’t have that! But I got a few of the men digging and it only took us half an hour to find the nose-cap. Sure enough it was marked ‘WD’ – War Department. It was from a naval shell fired by one of our long-distance guns mounted on an armoured train. So we proved the point. But it didn’t do Walter any good.*
Many hours before, the remnants of the 2nd Rifle Brigade had been pushed back to the German trench where they had first made the breakthrough and held a hundred yards of it in the face of assaults from either side. It was the only small gain of the day. But at two o’clock in the morning of 10 May the enemy attacked in force and from three sides. A little later, Colonel Stephens, arriving with troops to relieve his Battalion, found that there was no battalion left to relieve. The Germans had made good their losses and closed up their line. The battle was over.
Capt. W. G. Bagot-Chester, MC.
Everything is fairly quiet now. At night parties from regiments behind who took part in the attack come up to my trench and go out in front to search for their dead to bring them in and bury them behind. We don’t fire much by night or day. By day there is nothing to be seen to fire at, and by night it would only be a chance shot.
Gnr. C. B. Burrows.
Nothing much doing on the 10th. Our guns have narrow shaves, but do not do any more firing, and we pull them out of action about 8 p.m. in the dark. The battery move off at 11.15 p.m. and march all night to Festubert. There we heard that the French had done good near Arras, and that our attack had been a washout. Heard we were supposed to have been after Aubers Ridge. Well, all I can say is that concludes the Battle of Aubers Ridge and no mistake.
The stretcher-bearers, as always, had done sterling work and they had rescued most of the wounded, for the men of the second waves and succeeding attempts had been hit as they advanced from the assembly trenches across open ground.
Pte. L. Mitchell 24th Field Ambulance, 8 Div.
I did my share of bringing men off the battle-field but by the time it came to Aubers Ridge I’d been transferred to the nursing Division, working in the main dressing station a little way back from the line. I remember watching the infantry going up for the battle and they were singing ‘We beat the Germans every time, we beat the Germans at Mons. We beat the Germans at Neuve Chapelle and now we’re going to give them hell.’ They weren’t singing the same at the end of the battle. It was a real disaster, that attack was. The Germans smashed the whole thing up.
Our division, the 8th Division, had the heaviest casualties of any of the divisions that took part in the attack and it was an appalling affair. For three days we never stopped dressing the wounded men as they were brought in, and at the end of those three days we still had something like sixty or seventy stretcher cases outside. We just didn’t know what to do with them. The Major I was with dropped on the floor exhausted and I had to give an anaesthetic for the removal of an arm and I had never given an anaesthetic in my life. I didn’t actually see very many die because as soon as you dressed them they were taken out and put in ambulances and lorries and taken away down to the Casualty Clearing Stations. The vehicles were packed jam-full, and sometimes they were coming back full from the Casualty Clearing Stations because they were full up and the ambulance drivers didn’t know where to take the wounded.
I never saw any attack with so many men who had bullet wounds as at Aubers Ridge. The Germans just mowed them down and most of the bullet wounds were through the legs. We had a lot of splinting to do, splinting, splinting, splinting. But one man was brought in with his face covered with a bandage and when the Major came in to look at him and see what was the matter he went out and was violently sick. When he took the bandages off we saw the man had no eyes, no nose, no chin, no mouth – and he was alive! The Sergeant called me and said, ‘The doctor says I’ve got to give him four times the usual dose of morphia.’ And I said, ‘You know what that will do, don’t you?’ And he said, ‘Yes. And I can’t do it. I’m ordering you to do it.’ So I had to go in and give him four times the dose of morphia. I laid a clean bandage on his face and stayed with him until he died. That stayed in my memory for a very long time. It stays in it now.
It isn’t very nice to go and kill a man, is it? And I had to do it again after that. A man was brought to us with a piece of steel, a big chunk of shell, sticking out of his breast-bone and sticking out of his back. He also had an arm smashed up and very severe head wounds – and he was still alive, how I don’t know because the steel was running right through him. Well it was quite impossible to do anything for him, and I was only too glad to put him out of his misery. Of course I didn’t do it off my own bat. The Officer tells you to do it and you do it – but you don’t forget! When I got home after the war I sometimes used to have a nightmare and wake up in the night thinking my arms were covered with blood. It wore off eventually.
For the troops like the West Yorks who remained in the line, the most enduring memory was the sight of the countless rows of dead. The battlefield was one vast charnel house and although many bodies lay where they had been struck down between assembly or support trenches and the British front line, so long as the German machine-gunner ruled the battlefield it was risky work to attempt to bring them in for decent burial.
It was a beautiful month of May, and as one warm day succeeded another and swallows dipped and soared in the cloudless sky the sickly smell of putrefaction seeped into every trench and dug-out, permeated every article of clothing, and tainted every morsel and every mug of tea that the troops consumed.
Chapter 22
Despite the disappointing results of 9 May, Sir Douglas Haig was determined to ‘press on vigorously’ on the 10th, but an early morning meeting with his Divisional Generals, at which he intended to finalise details of the next assault, forced him to the reluctant conclusion that it would be futile for the moment to attempt to renew the attack on Aubers Ridge. One day’s fighting had resulted in the staggering loss of four hundred and fifty-eight officers and more than eleven thousand men, and the surviving troops were in such a state of confusion and disarray that it would take days to reassemble them as an orderly fighting force. But it was not so much the toll of casualties that influenced him, nor even the vehement opposition of some of his field officers. The deciding factor was the want of sufficient ammunition to guarantee a decisive result.
It was a hard pill to swallow – and all the harder in the light of the glowing reports that had reached his Headquarters trumpeting the success of the French Army on his right. The French had prepared the way with long heavy bombardments and in the first hours of the battle their success had been phenomenal. They swept across the hill of Notre Dame de Lorette, captured the defences round the chapel on its summit, thrust down into the Souchez Valley and across it towards the lower slopes of the Vimy Ridge looming ahead like a bastion to guard the Douai Plain. And there they had stopped. The French reserves were held too far back and in the time it took them to reach the front to replace the casualties and pursue the battle, the advance had slowed, the Germans had recovered from the first blow and the impetus was lost. But Marshal Joffre was far from despondent. Encouraged by the first heady success it was natural to suppose that the set-back was only a hiccup on the road to certain victory. With one more effort Vimy Ridge would be sure to fall and the Germans would be just as surely on the run. It was self-evident that the British must continue to give support by keeping the enemy busy, by pinning down his reserves and carrying out their commitment to the letter. National pride, even national honour was at stake. If the attack on Aubers Ridge had to be called off, how were they to be vindicated?
One crumb of encouragement lightened the weight of Haig’s dilemma. On the extreme right of the attack where the British sector met the French, the 1st Division had succeeded in advancing the line in front of Festubert. It was a small comfort to Sir Douglas Haig that here, where it would be of greatest use to the French, a concentrated effort stood the greatest chance of success. A decision was swiftly reached. The 7th Division which had played only a minor part in the battle of Aubers Ridge would march south to Festubert. In a matter of days, when the troops had been reshuffled, when resources had been concentrated and the plans and preparations had been made, the assault would be renewed.
In the midst of this reappraisal and recasting of his tactics Sir Douglas Haig was in no mood to spare time for any journalist, not even for Colonel Tim Repington who, as military correspondent of The Times, was the only representative of the press who was persona grata with the Army. He referred him brusquely to GHQ and there Repington met with better success. From the point of view of Sir John French, Repington arrived at an opportune moment. The Commander-in-Chief had watched the attack on Aubers Ridge from a church tower in the village of Laventie and although his view was necessarily limited and the full facts had not yet come to light, he was convinced in his own mind that, despite his careful husbanding of shells, lack of ammunition for the guns had been a major cause of the disappointing result. The War Office telegram that awaited him on his return to GHQ could not have come at a worse moment. It ordered him peremptorily to release twenty thousand rounds of ammunition from his meagre reserve for immediate dispatch to Gallipoli. It was the last straw, and although the telegram had added that the shells would be replaced ‘in a few days’ French was seething with indignation and only too willing to seize the chance to publicise his grievances by unburdening them to Repington. Six days later the explosion erupted in The Times and the shock waves travelled the length and breadth of the country. The story pulled no punches and, as Sir John French intended, the message came through stark and clear: ‘British soldiers died last week on Aubers Ridge because the British Army is short of shells.’
Lord Kitchener was furious. Mr Asquith was equally put out by the unconventional means chosen by the Commander-in-Chief to appeal direct to the public above the head of the Government. And it was not the first time. Towards the end of March, in the disappointing aftermath of Neuve Chapelle, French had complained of shortage of ammunition in two interviews to journalists which had caused considerable anxiety in the Cabinet and in the country as a whole. Lord Kitchener had categorically denied that it was true. Of course there were difficulties, but they would be resolved in time, and meanwhile, he reassured Asquith, the supply of shells was quite adequate for present requirements. The Prime Minister could hardly doubt the word of this distinguished soldier who was his own Secretary of State for War and he was easily convinced. Only three weeks earlier in a public speech at Newcastle he had set out to quash the rumours and convince the country that the stories were untrue and that all was well. Now he had been made to look a fool, and it was difficult not to lay the blame squarely at Kitchener’s door.
Lord Kitchener was not a dishonourable man but he was not above misleading, and perhaps not above hinting that the Commander-in-Chief might be making much of the lack of ammunition in order to distract attention from his own tactical failures. With every appearance of righteous indignation he denied that Sir John French had ever informed the War Office that he was unable to undertake offensive operations for lack of munitions. Even if this was true in a literal sense, it took no account of French’s many pleas and complaints. Nor did it take account of the fact that his plans and expectations for offensive operations were based on estimates of supplies which had been promised by the War Office and that the promises had not been kept. But Kitchener stood his ground. In his opinion supplies were adequate and the expenditure of shells was extravagant. Asquith was in no position to challenge him: he had no other first-hand information to enable him to form an independent judgement. While all diplomatic papers and communications received by the Foreign Office were copied, as a matter of course, for the Prime Minister, on the pretext of secrecy no communications of any kind were passed on by the Admiralty or the War Office, or even exchanged between themselves as interested parties.
Three weeks after his Newcastle speech, in which he had denied in all good faith that there was a shell shortage, and two days before the story broke in The Times, information had come into Asquith’s hands. Even before the bombshell exploded – and he had purposely asked Repington to delay publication for a day or so – the Commander-in-Chief sent two trusted members of his senior staff to London. They carried three copies of a secret memorandum in which Sir John French clearly and concisely set out the situation and stressed its gravity. They also carried copies of all correspondence and communications which had passed between GHQ and the War Office over the previous months, and were instructed to show this evidence to Lloyd George, and also to two leading members of the Opposition, Bonar Law and Arthur Balfour.
The difficulties had many strands, but the major problem boiled down to the fact that management of the war was in the hands of one man and the Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, was disinclined to relinquish it.
Kitchener had seen long and distinguished service but he was a soldier of the old school. His active soldiering had been far from home and his custom, traditional since time immemorial, had been to get on with a mission and to dispatch news of the outcome when it was over. The news had taken days, and occasionally weeks to reach London but since it was invariably satisfactory in the long run, and since transport and communications were so slow that consultation would have been out of the question, successive Governments had been content to leave military matters to the professional military men. Lord Kitchener had devoted his whole life to the army. He was unmarried, he was a successful commander, he enjoyed the confidence of the nation which had covered him with honours, and he saw no reason to alter the status quo.
But the times and the circumstances had changed from the days when small-scale wars and the national interest could safely be left to the professional army. Now that the whole nation was engaged in a far wider, far greater conflict on the nation’s very doorstep, now that the ‘national interest’ was also the personal interest of millions of individual citizens who were being individually urged to do their bit to help to win it, the old system simply would not do. The ‘Shell Scandal’ when it broke made this abundantly clear to everyone but Lord Kitchener himself. He was displeased, to say the least, that in defiance of cast-iron military etiquette and his own authority Sir John French had seen fit to go direct to the politicians and, worse, to use the ungentlemanly medium of the press to air his complaints and stir up trouble. It breached every canon of military etiquette, it flouted the authority of the War Office, and moreover Kitchener clung to the view that the whole tale was a gross exaggeration – and so he assured the Prime Minister. But the Prime Minister was not easily reassured.
Lord Kitchener’s duties were weighty and manifold and far beyond the capacity of a single man to carry out. The vital matter of recruitment and expanding and equipping the Army, a mammoth task on its own, had fallen entirely on his shoulders. It was his responsibility to coordinate the command, to oversee the conduct of the war and to consider its political as well as strategic aspects. A million and one unforeseen details demanded his attention and, since the most able officers of the General Staff on whose experience he might have drawn had decamped to GHQ in France, the onus fell almost entirely on Lord Kitchener himself. The officers of the General Staff had been replaced by ‘dug-outs’ – elderly officers brought out of retirement – and, to a man, they were so much in awe of Lord Kitchener that the boldest among them would have hesitated to proffer advice, still less to cast doubt on the judgement of his illustrious chief. Even apart from the supply of munitions Asquith fully realised the difficulties that taxed his Secretary of State for War, but it was clear that the situation was critical.
On the question of munitions output the Government had done its best to be helpful. As far back as the previous October, largely at the instigation of Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Asquith had set up a Cabinet committee on munitions with Lloyd George himself as chairman, but any moves that it made to widen the scope of the manufacture of munitions, by mobilising as much as possible of the engineering capacity of the country and inviting engineering firms to apply for Government contracts, were frequently thwarted by the War Office. Sir Stanley von Donop, Master-General of Ordnance, backed by Kitchener himself, had no confidence in any but the Government contractors who had furnished the lesser requirements of peacetime, and was unwilling to place orders elsewhere. He was only reluctantly persuaded to allow a certain amount of sub-contracting of minor components to private firms and to acquiesce in the placement of a few orders with armament firms in the United States of America. With the cooperation of the Board of Trade, the War Office preferred to concentrate on obtaining manpower, and where possible clawing back skilled workers now serving in the Army and sending them back to the work-bench so that the capacity of the existing armaments manufacturers could expand.
Lord Kitchener, always impatient with what he saw as the interference of civilians, had finally killed off the Munitions Committee by refusing to attend its meetings on the grounds that he had no time. It had not met since early January, but Lloyd George, never afraid to speak out, had continued to voice his misgivings. It was to this ally that Sir John French had turned, and now that the matter was in the public domain the fat was well and truly in the fire. It was the catalyst that caused the underlying friction in the Government to blow up into a full-scale political crisis. It had become glaringly obvious that a modern war could not be run, as in the past, by separate departments with no supreme authority with sufficient knowledge to coordinate the strands.
The Opposition, which until now had been patriotically cooperative, was beginning to voice its unease, and shocked public opinion showed signs of becoming hostile. Both had to be mollified.
The situation of the Liberal government, now ten years in power, was a peculiar one. Its present majority in the House of Commons depended on a pact with the smaller National and Labour parties, while the Conservatives (the official opposition) made up the largest single party in the House. The Conservatives, therefore, had to be treated with consideration and Asquith had sought to circumvent party politics and gain their goodwill by co-opting into the War Council two of their leading members, Balfour and Bonar Law, and occasionally inviting others to attend its meetings on an ad hoc basis. This was as far as he could go. There was no question of making the Opposition privy to the detailed deliberations of the Cabinet, even in so far as they affected the war. Party politics ruled that out of court, for with such a narrow margin in the House, Liberal Cabinet Ministers would never have countenanced relinquishing or even sharing their power with Parliament.
The War Council was another matter. Since it was merely an extension of the long-established Committee of Imperial Defence the appointment of members was traditionally left to the discretion of the Prime Minister of the day. The War Council was not concerned in the day-to-day running of the war. It met infrequently and, like its parent committee, its function was confined to discussing and determining matters of long-term policy. It had last met eight weeks previously on 19 March, the day after ships of the Royal Navy launched the attempt to force the Dardanelles, but it had not been summoned to discuss the details and implications of a military attack on Gallipoli and, by the time Asquith next called them together on 14 May, a great deal of water had flowed under the bridge. It was a gloomy meeting. A review of the situation showed impasse on the western front and signs that things were going badly with the Russians in the east. Worst of all was the situation in the Dardanelles. The naval attempt to force the straits had failed, there was little chance of renewing it, and the gamble of a military attack (which, had it been launched simultaneously, might easily have succeeded) seemed already to have been lost. The far-reaching strategy to relieve the pressure on Russia, open the road to the Danube and encourage the vacillating neutrals to come in on the side of the allies was in ruins. What was to be done?
The War Council considered four options, but, now that the troops had been committed, the possibility of withdrawing them was unanimously dismissed and there were only three real alternatives: to push on rapidly to victory, which they recognised was impossible without substantial reinforcements; to settle down to a siege, which would strain available resources to breaking point; to send out reinforcements for a new all-out assault, to which the same objections applied. After many hours’ deliberation the War Council came to no decision other than to ask Sir Ian Hamilton what size of force he would require in order to guarantee the capture of the Gallipoli peninsula, and Sir Maurice Hankey sourly noted that this was ‘a question that ought to have been put to him before ever a man was landed’.
It was the last important meeting of the War Council for the political crisis was boiling up. Asquith now realised that there was no alternative but to form a Coalition Government, to disband the War Council, set up a Ministry of Munitions with full powers, to dissolve the bickering Cabinet and re-form it on non-party lines even if it meant that some of his closest colleagues would have to go. The Shell Scandal was one factor in the fall of the Liberal government, but it was the Dardanelles fiasco and the resignation of the First Sea Lord, Lord Fisher, that had finally brought matters to a head and forced the Prime Minister’s hand.
It was not the first time that Fisher had threatened resignation. For months now there had been growing hostility between the First Sea Lord, the naval man, and his chief, Winston Churchill, who occupied the political post of First Lord of the Admiralty. The idea of subduing the forts that protected the Dardanelles and forcing the straits by sea-power alone had been Winston Churchill’s baby.* Fisher’s baby was the Navy. As First Sea Lord in the pre-war years before his first retirement he had nurtured its growth, had scrapped obsolete battleships, introduced the mighty Dreadnoughts and fast modern battle-cruisers, and modernised its structure. Now, at the age of seventy-four, he was not prepared to risk his ships under pressure from a landsman thirty years his junior, in what he increasingly viewed as a hare-brained scheme.
Fisher had been lukewarm about the scheme from the start and his attitude changed to tight-lipped hostility. It had been one thing when the plan involved a swift blow, a short commitment and a high probability of success. Now that the naval attempt had failed with the loss of two of his battleships and the disabling of another, now that the ‘disengagement’ in the event of failure, which had been the attraction of the original naval plan, was no longer on the cards, now that the Dardanelles enterprise had drifted into what showed every likelihood of being a long drawn out campaign requiring the Navy’s continued presence, he was no longer prepared to support it by risking any part of his fleet. In Fisher’s view the Royal Navy should bide its time, blockade German ports, tempt the German Navy out to fight and ultimately decide the war in the Baltic. He might have been persuaded, as he had been earlier in the year, but despite the genuine efforts of Churchill to mollify the old Admiral his simmering resentment had grown over the months to something approaching hatred. He hated what he saw as Churchill’s highhanded attitude in pressing ahead with his own plans, in taking his own soundings, in communicating with Naval Commanders over the head of his First Sea Lord and above all he hated his unbridled enthusiasm. The First Sea Lord saw no alternative but to resign. It was the cue for a shake-up all round and, together with the munitions crisis, an unmistakable signal that it was time for the politicians to get a grip on the war.
Lord Kitchener had become increasingly awkward to deal with and it was tempting to take advantage of the re-shaping of the Cabinet to replace him as Secretary of State for War, but although Kitchener’s star was waning in political quarters, he was extremely popular with the rest of the country. To most people Kitchener was the war. It was his face that stared from every bill-board and gazed up from the pages of every magazine. Kitchener’s imperious finger had beckoned the nation to war and it was the first of Kitchener’s Armies that was on the point of leaving for the front to win it. To the public at large Kitchener himself seemed to personify stern British determination, and the desirable virtues of honour and duty had been the hall-mark of his distinguished career. Plans were already afoot to celebrate his birthday on 24 June with a mammoth recruiting campaign, and arm-bands stamped ‘Kitchener’s Birthday Recruit’ were being turned out in thousands ready for the occasion. Lord Kitchener was a national hero and a large segment of the female population of the United Kingdom was partial to heroes and would not be content until every eligible young man in the country was wearing heroic khaki.
Much of the recruiting propaganda was aimed at stimulating women to encourage their men to enlist. There were posters depicting noble matrons – ‘Women Of Britain Say Go!’; white-haired old ladies at cottage doors drawing the attention of a reluctant son to troops marching on the road outside – ‘It’s Your Duty, Lad!’; young girls arm-in-arm with a soldier – ‘Is Your Best Boy In Khaki?’; and many women regarded it as a personal mission to accost every young man in civvies to shame him into joining up.
Jeremy Bentham and his friend Bob Southin had been favoured by the attentions of one such lady on a train journey from Harwich to London, and somewhat to their astonishment for they had been in the war from the very beginning. It was true that they could be loosely described as wearing civilian clothes, but ‘loosely’ was an appropriate word for their suits fitted where they touched and, on that particular day, five days after their escape from the internment camp at Groningen in Holland, they were already coming apart at the seams. Bentham and Southin were two of the fifteen hundred men of the 1st Brigade of the Royal Naval division who had entered neutral Holland when they were cut off by the advancing German Army after the Battle of Antwerp the previous September, and they had been languishing in internment ever since.*
Able Seaman J. S. Bentham, Benbow Bn., 1st Brig., Royal Naval Div.
It was an elderly lady who got into our compartment and tackled us and did she feel small when Southin told her we were escaped prisoners of war! Of course we were very pleased with ourselves, but we must have looked like a couple of scarecrows. At the camp the Dutch officials opened and inspected all our large parcels but they didn’t bother about small ones, so I wrote to a friend of mine to send out a couple of suits folded up small, a bit at a time. I think his sister cut out the pieces and he sent them one at a time, a sleeve, a trouser leg or the front of a jacket, and thread and some buttons. It took us some months to collect all the pieces and then we had to sew them together, not very expertly.
Groningen wasn’t like being in a prisoner of war camp in Germany. We weren’t short of food, though the diet was pretty dull, but tradesmen came to the camp with barrows selling cake and fruit and chocolate and cigarettes and we had plenty of money to buy things, because we were paid a certain amount by the Dutch authorities and I also got a monthly pay-cheque from the Dutch agents of Cocks-Biddulph, the bank I’d worked for in London. We also used to make photograph frames out of Dutch cigar boxes which we sent to Selfridges in London and in return they sent us out cigarettes and anything we needed, so we were quite well off, and the local people were very good to us. In fact the camp was open to civilian visitors every Sunday, and whole crowds of them used to come to see us just as though they were visiting the zoo and we really felt like caged animals. But I got quite attached to a Dutch girl who used to come and talk to me through the barbed wire and we got so friendly that she persuaded her father to write to the Commandant to ask if I could visit their house for a meal now and then. We got so friendly that one evening, just before I was due to go back to the camp, her elder brother asked me when I was going to give his sister a ring! Well that really scared me and it certainly speeded up our plans to get away.
Of course, we’d been planning it for months, and the first thing we did was to change our religion. That meant that instead of attending church parade in the camp we were marched down every Sunday to the Walsche Kerk in the town, accompanied by a guard who waited outside during the service. There were about ten of us in the party and either the others had the same idea of getting away or perhaps they just wanted a change of scene and a breath of air. I’d also done my best to learn a bit of Dutch but there were a lot of words I didn’t know. However, the following Sunday we put on our civilian suits under our naval uniforms, and we were jolly glad of the baggy trousers for we could stuff our caps into our socks. Half-way along the road to the church I stopped to do up my bootlaces and then Southin and I dashed into a wood alongside the road, tore off our blouses and bell-bottoms, hid our seamens’ uniforms under some thick bushes and got back on the road further up as a couple of very disreputable civilians. We avoided the town and found the road for Assen which was about twenty miles away, and of course we were terrified we would be picked up on the road, but we got there late in the afternoon and went into a café and I ordered two beef steaks with potatoes. We were starving by then! But the man was suspicious and right away he asked us if we’d escaped from Groningen and he also told us that the police would give him fifty guilders’ reward if he reported us. So I said, ‘Well I’ll give you a hundred if you don’t,’ and I showed him the money. His manner immediately changed and he said we should be safer upstairs and showed us to a bedroom and said he would cook us a meal if we paid extra. We were a bit worried when he went out and locked the door from the outside, but he played fair and came up with two plates with gorgeous steaks and vegetables and two glasses of lager and he said that in the morning he would take us to the railway station and told me what tickets to ask for and made me repeat it in Dutch. He would walk in front of us next, he said, but we were on no account to try to speak to him. I told him that if he did this I would give him an extra fifty guilders.
Next morning after we’d had a good night’s sleep and some coffee, he was as good as his word. When we got to the station I asked for ‘Twee kartyes naar Rotterdam,’ which I had practised saying. I bought a paper and pretended to read it when we got on the train and Southin closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep. We should have changed at Utrecht but we stayed in the train because we saw some Dutch police on the platform and eventually we arrived, not in Rotterdam, but Amsterdam! Well, of course, our idea in going to Rotterdam was to try to get on a ship, so we hadn’t the faintest idea what to do next. We started walking round the town and after a while I spotted a shop with an English name. It was called ‘Bell’s Asbestos Company’ so in we went and I put on as casual an air as I could. When the man came forward to serve us I said, ‘Is Mr Bell in?’ He laughed and said the place was part of a chain of shops in Europe and there was no Mr Bell. So I then spilled the beans and explained who we were. He was very nice, and an Englishman, because Holland being a neutral country there were any number of English people living and working there, but he told us that if he were caught helping escapees he would be expelled from Holland. However, after he phoned the British Consul and the Consul said that on no account were we to go near his office and that he didn’t wish to know or hear anything about us, he decided to help us himself. Needless to say this was a huge relief.
He didn’t like the look of our scruffy caps so he went out and bought us two straw hats and then took us to a café in a side street and bought us a meal. Then, the same way as we’d done in the morning, we followed him to the station where I bought tickets for Rotterdam and then followed him on to the platform where he stopped and watched from a discreet distance as we got on the train. We reached Rotterdam without any other mishap but the next problem was to get into the docks because there were police at the entrance. So we hung about and then we saw a man with a huge load on a barrow pushing it towards the docks, so we whipped off our straw hats and bent down and helped him to push the barrow through the entrance. He was quite pleased about that and we were delighted. Nobody challenged us, and the police took no notice.
Our friend in Amsterdam had found out that the SS Cromer was leaving that night and told us to make for it. We waited until no one was about, then ran up the gang-plank on to the ship and were met by the cook who was lounging about the deck. I greased his palm quite considerably, but I think he’d have helped us anyway. The cook was the only man on board and he hid us below until the Captain and the crew came back. Then our troubles were over! The Captain had us dressed in greasy overalls and told us to look busy when the police came round to inspect the boat before she sailed. When they came into the engine room the Captain came with them and he kept telling them to hurry up, because he didn’t want to miss the tide. What a night that was, for the cook had used the money I gave him and sent ashore for a lot of beer, and next morning we were up on deck feasting our eyes on dear old England as we approached Harwich.
HMS Maidstone was the guard ship at the entrance to Harwich Harbour and our Captain signalled across and in no time a ship’s cutter came to fetch us over to the Maidstone and the Captain himself was waiting to meet us on the deck – two such scruffy individuals that it must have given the matelots quite a turn to see him shaking hands with us, because the Captain of a ship is nearly God to them. He took us to his cabin for a drink and gave us a fright by reminding us that, as from the time we had escaped, we were officially deserters. But he said, ‘Don’t worry about it, just contact your headquarters and report as soon as you can,’ and he gave us travel warrants for the train journey to London. It was the happiest journey of my life! We were in such high spirits that we simply couldn’t stop laughing – it was so marvellous to feel free and back in our own country again. Best of all was arriving at Liverpool Street. We could hardly believe that we were really back in dear old London!
‘Dear old London’ had changed considerably since Bentham had left it in August the previous year and the war had laid its mark on the streets. There were fewer young men about and most of those there were seemed to be in khaki. There were newspaper-sellers on every corner – far more, it seemed to Bentham, than ever before – for Londoners were avid for news, and recruiting posters met the eye wherever they turned. Flag-sellers were out in force collecting for war charities and the bill-boards advertising West End plays showed that theatreland too was working for the war. Basil Hallam (soon to enlist himself) was appearing in The Man Who Stayed at Home and Alsace was still enjoying a successful run. Along the Strand and Shaftesbury Avenue diligent ladies, bent on personal recruitment, haunted stage doors to accost young actors and any likely passers-by, and any civilian-clad young man who managed to escape their clutches still had to run the gauntlet of recruiting offices liberally sprinkled across the West End. There were half a dozen between the Strand and Hay market alone, each with an eagle-eyed recruiting sergeant pacing the pavement outside on the look-out for potential recruits. All of them were conspicuously decorated with flags and posters, but it was the recruiting office of the Royal Naval Division that drew the biggest crowds for they had thoughtfully filled a window with a display of shells and rifles and various interesting items salvaged from the battle-field plus a life-size wax figure in the uniform of the Royal Naval Division.
Since Jeremy Bentham’s uniform was still lying hidden beneath bushes far away in Holland he was anxious to obtain a replacement.He presented himself at the depot at Blackfriars in the role of returned hero and not only persuaded the storekeeper to fit him out with new clothes but, feeling that he richly deserved promotion, also induced him to hand over a Leading Seaman’s badge; This at least would prevent him from doing sentry duty when he reported to the Royal Naval Division at its base in the Crystal Palace. Suitably arrayed he made his way to Sydenham to report for duty, was welcomed with open arms and awarded fourteen days’ leave. It was some compensation for the anticlimax of his home-coming.
Able Seaman J. S. Bentham.
I went home expecting a hero’s welcome, but when I arrived at the house I couldn’t make anyone hear, so I went next door and the neighbours told me that my father and stepmother were away on holiday in Newquay. So I had to set off to my married sister’s in Wembley and she was suitably pleased to see me so unexpectedly. My father cut short his holiday and came home but he was far from glad to see me and instead of a welcome I was told I was an exceedingly silly boy. There I was, he said, safe in Holland for the duration and now due to my stupidity I would have to go back into the war. I told him that was the whole point of escaping. However he soon came round and I rather think he was quite proud of my exploits because that night he took me down to the local pub and spent the evening telling his friends all about my adventures. That was another good night, because everyone wanted to treat me.
But my real moment of glory came at the first pay parade after I’d returned to the Crystal Palace. On pay parade your name was called, you took a step forward smartly and advanced to the table with your cap extended to receive your pay. Of course the average sailor had only a week or two’s pay to draw, but when it came to me there was quite a bit as I had only been paid one guilder every ten days and I had eight months’ pay owing. Well! My cap was covered with golden sovereigns and you could hear the gasp from all the rookies as I marched back, for they didn’t know me from Adam, or where I had come from. I had more than twenty golden sovereigns in my cap. Did I feel rich! Of course I didn’t say anything about my self-appointed promotion, but no one questioned it, and I was never ordered to take the Leading Seaman’s badge off. Best of all, I was told that my application for a commission had been granted and I started training right away. I was cock of the walk and no mistake!
I knew I was a lucky man because I soon found out about the terrible casualties my Division had suffered in Gallipoli, and I knew full well that if our Brigade hadn’t been interned after Antwerp, I might easily have been one of them.
The five weeks that began on 22 April with the German attack at Ypres accounted for the highest casualties since the start of the war and the full cost of the landings at Gallipoli was only beginning to be known. Every day fresh casualty lists told the tale of the push at Aubers Ridge and Festubert. Nothing had been gained and all there was to show were the long, long lists of soldiers killed, missing or wounded that filled so many columns of the daily newspapers, and the shower of official telegrams that were dreaded by every family with a boy at the front. Even the sight of a telegraph boy cycling down a street could strike terror into a nervous heart.
When a telegram arrived for Jock Macleod’s family his mother was at the local VAD hospital where she worked three afternoons a week.
Miss Betty Macleod.
Friday May 21st. Both parents were out when the wire came, Mother at the hospital and Daddy playing bowls in the Trinity Fellows’ Garden, so Mollie and I set off on our bicycles to find them. Of course they both had fits. They saw us coming waving a telegram – poor Mother turned as white as a sheet and couldn’t stop shaking for ages, and Daddy got a shock too, though after the nasty turn she’d had herself Mother warned us to call out as soon as he saw us to say it was good news. The telegram was from Jock to say that he had leave and was arriving in Cambridge by the 6.15. The whole family tootled up to the station to meet Jock. He looked tired and pale but quite fat, and he was very cheerful. Went out with him and Daddy after supper to see the war telegrams at the library in a sort of triumphal progress down the middle of the street – so many people stopped us and wanted to speak to Jock.
When we got home we settled down to make swabs for the hospital while we all chatted to Jock. What we gleaned was this. On May 19th Sir John French inspected three Battalions of his Brigade and congratulated them. He said they had been subjected to the most intense shell-fire ever known in the history of war. He would not have blamed them, nor been at all surprised, if he had found them on the other side of Ypres and if it had not been for them saving Ypres Italy would not have come into the war. Ypres was to be added to the names on their regimental colours. Jock says there are only seven officers left in his Battalion and he is second in seniority now. He told a tale about one of the men who said, when he was bayoneting a German, This is for the Lusitania’ – prod – ‘And there’s another for me’ – prod. Laughed and talked until very late.
Saturday May 22nd. Jock slept on till eleven o’clock and then had breakfast in his dressing-gown. Meanwhile we went out to buy him sweets and fruit. He ate nearly the whole lot before dinner! In the afternoon we took him up to tennis and tea at the club and Mother came to watch, but Jock got weary soon so we all went home. A few more tales came out. One sergeant sang ‘Here we are. Here we are, Here we are again’ all through a bayonet charge and he has been recommended for the VC. Glorious day. Supper in the garden.
The warm May evening, the gentle pleasures of a quiet Cambridge garden, were in sharp contrast to the miseries of battle in the Ypres salient and, in the bosom of his admiring family, with teenage sisters hanging on his lips avid for ‘tales’, a soldier who had endured its privations could be forgiven for feeling that mild exaggeration was preferable to the truth.
Jock Macleod had a glorious leave. He dined with his father at Caius College, picnicked with his mother and sisters on the river, showed off to admiring friends and acquaintances, consumed gargantuan home-cooked meals and still found room to eat fruit and sweets galore. On the last full day of his leave the whole family went up to stay with his grandmother in London.
Miss Betty Macleod.
Tuesday May 25th. We travelled in state – First Class! – and went straight to 22 Harley Street, then went out a little walk with Jock who bought an electric torch. A great family dinner, all of our lot and Grannie and aunts and uncles. About 9.30 Mother, Uncle Arnold, Jock, Mollie and me went in a taxi to the West End Cinema and spent an interesting three-quarters of an hour. Saw pictures of the Italian Army, cavalry and artillery, coming down mountains etcetera. Everybody cheered!
The news that Italy had declared war on Austria, if not yet on Germany, was almost the only cause for satisfaction in the whole dreary month. In German-occupied Brussels, where for obvious reasons the population was not able to celebrate openly, grocery stores packed their windows with mountainous displays of macaroni and their customers demonstrated their patriotism by purchasing large quantities. In London, where there was a sizeable Italian community, crowds of flag-waving expatriates paraded through the streets, scooping up so many Londoners as they went that the police had to be brought in to control the march to the Italian embassy where the ambassador obligingly appeared on the portico waving an outsize Italian flag. The following morning Victoria Station was mobbed by hordes of excited straw-boatered Italians bound for Italy to join the Army, each with a large excited family to see him off. The shrieking, the cheering, the unrestrained weeping, the shouted farewells, almost raised the roof. There were women with babies in arms and a brood of dark-eyed children at their heels, there were stout mothers and moustachioed fathers, aged grandmothers in voluminous black, and troupes of uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces, nephews. Small girls wore hair-ribbons in the national colours, small boys waved flags, and adults of both sexes were decked out in sashes of red, white and green. Some carried baskets, also beribboned in Italy’s colours, and filled with flowers for the women to throw, Italian style, as the men went off to war.
Even after the noisy emotional farewells, when the travellers had passed through the barrier to board the train and were craning out of doors and windows for a last wave and a last look, hundreds of their relatives, impelled by a single impulse, charged the barrier and poured on to the platform, running the length of the train in search of some particular Luigi or Marco or Antonio, to bombard him with flowers, to claim one more embrace, to call one more arrivederci, to hold up a child for a last fraternal or fatherly kiss.
It was beyond the power of the single bewildered guard to control them and it required the assistance of several policemen before the crowd was induced to stand back and the train doors could be banged shut. When order had been restored, and the flustered guard managed to summon up sufficient breath to blow the final whistle, the train steamed out a full ten minutes late.
The Government would dearly have liked a similar demonstration of enthusiasm that would inspire more Britishers to enlist. The casualty figures alone, at Ypres, at Aubers Ridge, at Festubert, and also at Gallipoli, spoke for themselves of the continuing need for men. Lord Kitchener had let it be known that he would need a million and a half new recruits before the year was out and, setting aside the difficulty of equipping such an army in the immediate future, no serious politician believed that anything like the required number could be found without introducing conscription. But, fired by the success of his recruiting campaigns in the first months of the war, Kitchener remained stubbornly wedded to the principle of voluntary service and the army had now lowered the obligatory height for would-be soldiers by two inches in order to encourage smaller men who had been rejected once to try again. They also raised the age limit to forty.
Some imaginative newspaper readers came up with bizarre ideas to swell the ranks and one letter outlining a proposal that verged on the sadistic appeared in the Daily Mirror. It was boldly headed ‘A Chance for the Unfit’:
There are some thousands of men in this country in the early stages of consumption who are willing to fight, but cannot pass the medical test. Why not form a battalion of them, train them to shoot (no long marches or strenuous exercises) and let them go to the front? We should then have a body of men to draw on for those hazardous enterprises which sometimes have to be undertaken, and which practically mean certain destruction. These men would vastly prefer such a glorious end to the prospect of a lingering and miserable death at home.
It was signed with the pseudonym ‘ΤΒ’. No one, least of all unfortunate victims of tuberculosis, was much taken with the idea.
Before the end of May the battle at Ypres had fizzled out. Even the Germans were temporarily short of shells. The attempt to capture Festubert had been given up. Thousands of soldiers had died and the hospital ships plying back and forth from France to England and from the Dardanelles to Malta, were carrying ever-increasing loads of wounded.
Towards the end of that momentous month of May the Coalition Government formally took office. One of the first decisions of the new Cabinet was to set up a Cabinet Committee solely concerned with sorting out affairs in the Dardanelles.
Something had to be done.
Part 5
‘Damn the Dardanelles – they will be our grave’
(Admiral Fisher)
The moon shines bright on Charlie Chaplin
His boots are cracking,
For want of blacking,
And his little baggy trousers they want mending
Before we send him
To the Dardanelles.
Anon.
Chapter 23
The Territorials of the 7th Royal Scots were glad to be on their way. Although they had in theory been ‘on active service’ since the outbreak of war and had volunteered to a man for foreign service, most of their soldiering had been spent guarding coastal defences within shouting distance of their home town of Leith and while they appreciated the home comforts that were still within easy reach, it was hardly the adventure they had anticipated. It was almost a month since Leith had given them a huge send-off. Even the Provost and Town Council had turned out for an official farewell and the battalion marched to the station through crowds of people who mobbed the pavements to cheer the local boys leaving, as they supposed, for the front. It was something of an anticlimax to find that the move took them no further than Larbert, a mere twentyfive miles inland along the Firth of Forth. But now they really were off to the front. Rumour had it that they were bound for the Dardanelles, and rumour for once was right.
It was a complicated business to embark a whole brigade of four battalions at the small station at Larbert and it was no less complicated for the railway authorities to filter numerous troop trains into the mainline network without unduly disrupting the normal flow of goods and passenger traffic. It had been a long day of parades and roll-calls, blankets to be handed in, kits and rifles to be inspected, iron rations to draw for the long journey to Liverpool, and, for the officers, a thousand and one last-minute details to be seen to before the Battalion moved off. It was almost midnight before the first half of the Battalion, A and D Companies, marched out of camp to entrain. The five hundred men of B and C would follow two hours later in another special train.
By the time a fatigue party had loaded the ammunition, by the time a final roll-call had been held under the dim station lights and the two companies were divided into platoons and formed fours to entrain in batches of eight to each compartment, the night was far advanced. The pipe band that played them aboard the train, and would play them off again at the other end, piled into the front carriage with their drums and instruments and had the luxury of having it to themselves. The battalion signal sections and machinegunners were together in the second coach, and the colonel and the officers took their places in the first-class compartments immediately behind. It was a quarter to four in the morning before the train finally got up steam and pulled out of the station and by that time the excitement had died down. A few enthusiasts set up card schools. Most were glad to relax and by six o’clock on a fine May morning, as the train trundled through the Borders towards the station at Kirtlebridge, almost all of them were sound asleep. This was a great disappointment to Ella Plenderleith.
Mrs Ella Smith, née Plenderleith.
My father was the signalman at Kirtlebridge. We lived at the station and he always used to tell us when the troop trains were coming through, because we liked waving to the soldiers as they went past. I was fifteen at the time. It must have been about half past six when the train went through, because my father was on duty at six o’clock and it was a while after that when he shouted to us that the train would be coming past. We hurried up and got dressed and went outside to see it go through, but we were a bit disappointed that morning because a lot of the soldiers were sleeping and not many waved back to us. It was my father’s first job that morning after he went on duty to clear that train through and signal to the next box down the line that it was on its way. The next box was Quintinshill. It was about six miles away just outside Gretna village – the last mainline signal box in Scotland.
Not long afterwards there was a tremendous crashing noise. We heard it six miles away! A few minutes later my father called out from the signal box to tell us what had happened.
What had happened was the worst rail crash in history. Like William Plenderleith at Kirtlebridge, signalman James Tinsley should have come on duty at six o’clock, but he had a private arrangement with his night-shift colleague, Meakin, which allowed him an extra half hour’s sleep before catching the local train from Carlisle and arriving at work nearly forty minutes late. Trains passing through in the meantime were ‘logged’ by Meakin on a scrap of paper, usually the back of a telegraph form, and transferred later in Tinsley’s handwriting into the official log. Tinsley returned the favour when it was his turn to work night-shift and the arrangement had worked to the satisfaction of both parties. But it failed to work that morning. The London to Glasgow express was forty-five minutes late on its journey north, and because the two loop lines were occupied by stationary goods trains Meakin had put the slow local train temporarily on the down line to wait until the fast express went through. Meakin was in a hurry to get off at the end of his long night’s stint and he had hardly left the signal box when Plenderleith rang through from Kirtlebridge to ‘offer’ the troop train travelling south on the down line. Tinsley had arrived moments before in the very train that now stood before his eyes on the main down line but he claimed later that he ‘forgot’ about it. He accepted the troop train without demur and pulled the lever that would drop the arm of the signal half a mile up the track to indicate that the line was clear. The troop train had picked up speed on the downward gradient from Kirtlebridge and was hurtling fast towards Gretna. It was almost a quarter to seven in the morning.
L/cpl. G. McGurk, 1/7 (Leith) Bn. (TF), Royal Scots (Lothian Regt.).
We were packed together like herrings in a barrel. Some were fast asleep, and most of those who were awake were so weary that when the disaster came it caught them at a disadvantage. Some of our chaps were leaning out of the windows at the time, and naturally they were the first to see that something was wrong.
One of the men in our carriage – Glass, I think, was his name – suddenly drew in a scared face and shouted, ‘We’re running into another train.’ The words were scarcely out of his mouth before there was a terrible crash, and the carriage seemed to leap into the air. We were all pitched on the floor in a heap.
I was one of the first to go down, and three other chaps all fell on top of me. They squeezed the breath out of me, but otherwise I was unhurt.
Sgt.J. Combe, 1/7 (Leith) Bn. (TF), Royal Scots.
The first two or three carriages were telescoped. I was travelling with Pipe-Major Ross and we felt the carriages coming up in the air and we held our legs up and when the crash came we were shot into the air and the roof of the carriage collapsed and fell down on Ross’s back. He was pinned down and shouting to me to help him. I myself was covered with debris and before I could help Ross I had the job of my life to wriggle myself free. I pulled the Pipe-Major by the head for all I was worth. It seemed like hours before I managed to get him free.
Pte. A. Thomson, 1/7 Bn. (TF), Royal Scots.
We were eight to each compartment and the doors locked! The last stop was Carstairs where some of us exchanged a little light-hearted banter with a few girls who were making an early start to work but nearly everyone else had settled down to sleep. Suddenly there was a terrific crash. The carriage rose up and sank down again listing dangerously over a steep bank. The cries and screams and the hiss of steam escaping from the engine was deafening! One by one we climbed out through the window of our compartment and on to the line. What a sight met our eyes. The wreckage was piled at least thirty feet high and terror-stricken men were staggering about. Worse still were the men who were trapped in the twisted metal of the wreckage.
L/cpl. G. McGurk.
The wreckage of the carriage was dropping on us, and the cries of the men that were injured were heart rending. One man had his neck broken by the fall, while others had their arms broken, heads cut, and legs twisted. I managed to get out from the wreckage, and, along with other uninjured men, went along the train to see what could be done. The scene was sickening.
The job was to know where to begin, but some officers got us organised and spread us along the train at intervals, and we started to dig out the dead and dying.
Men who managed to get out in the first moments after the crash were the lucky ones. The initial impact had derailed the engines of both trains and sent them teetering across the up line in the path of the express thundering north. A minute later the first of its two powerful engines ploughed into the wreckage with a roar that was heard for miles.
The troop train got the worst of it. The fire which had already started in the wooden coaches immediately behind the engines burst into an inferno. Carriage walls splintered. Bogies collapsed. Men were trapped. Soldiers who had managed to clamber out a minute before and were staggering dazed on the embankment, or trying to free trapped comrades, were killed or injured as the wreckage buckled and flew apart with the second impact. The fire took hold and began to spread along the rest of the train and behind the ear-splitting blast of escaping steam the cries of panic from men buried beneath the debris chilled the blood.
Sgt. J. Combe
The shrieks and the moans of the men as they were being slowly roasted to death was terrible to hear. The cruellest thing I’ve ever seen in all my life was the body of one man hanging high up on part of the wreckage with his arms outstretched. He had no head. But the worst was one fellow whose legs were horribly burned and he was pinned down and it was impossible to get him out. The flames were simply eating him up and getting nearer to his face. He must have been in terrible agony. He kept shouting ‘For God’s sake, shoot me!’
Young Gordon Dick was one of the lucky ones. He had been thrown clear of the third coach and knocked unconscious in the first crash. When he came round he found himself lying on the track between the rails with both feet caught up in the wreckage, and the flames creeping closer, burning his face and arms as he struggled to get free. It was the second crash that released him and it took all his strength to crawl to the embankment before he passed out again. Only one other man of the eight in his carriage escaped.
Mrs Ella Smith, née Plenderleith.
It was a terrible accident! When my father called out from the signal box a few minutes after we heard that awful crash and told us what had happened I simply couldn’t believe that just ten minutes before we’d stood waving to the train. Another girl and I set off right away to see it. It would be well over an hour’s walk but we ran a lot of the way. What a terrible sight it was, engines and carriages were piled high and it was still burning. Soldiers were being burned alive because they couldn’t get them out. One of the officers was sitting in the field among the dead, looking round about him to see how many of the lads were left. There didn’t seem to be many. It was a most terrible tragedy. I’d never seen anything like that. You couldn’t imagine anything like it!
By the time the single local fire engine appeared it could do little to staunch the flames. As they begun to spread, a shocked NCO was still cool-headed enough to organise a group of the survivors to run to the rear and unhitch the ammunition wagon and to roll it back by sheer muscle-power to a safe distance. But there were explosions just the same, for the train was lit by gas lamps and, as the flames spread along its length, gas tanks beneath the carriages exploded in the heat, flinging burning debris across the field and spreading more carnage among the helpless rows of newly rescued casualties.
There were not many civilian casualties, for the troop train had taken the worst of the collision, and passengers from the other two trains scrambled down the embankment to do what they could to help. Women from the village, running across the fields to find out what was happening, rushed home again and returned with piles of sheets and tablecloths to tear into bandages and to cover the bodies of the dead. Two hours after the accident an ambulance train came up from Carlisle, but long before then Dr John Edwards was at the scene, working close to the burning wreckage, amputating limbs to free men who were trapped, while the firemen did their best to keep the flames at bay.
Stretcher-bearers made countless back-breaking journeys, carrying the injured to the ambulance train for the short journey to Carlisle, laying the still bodies of the dead in empty goods wagons. It was many hours before they were all taken away – and many more before the wreckage cooled and salvage workers toiling by the light of arc lamps could begin the fearful job of recovering bodies.
Pte. A. Thomson.
I was detailed for stretcher-bearer duties. What a job for a lad not yet eighteen! I wept. I saw many a battlefield after that, but I never saw anything like the things I saw on that terrible day.
It was afternoon before we’d rescued everyone we could and there was nothing more that could be done. A lot of the men lay down in the field, they were so exhausted, and some of us thought about the folks at home and how worried they’d be when the news got out and they walked to Gretna post office to send telegrams. Then there was a roll-call. Fifty-seven of us answered our names out of nearly five hundred who left Larbert that morning. About five o’clock they put us on a goods train and took us to Carlisle and then up to the castle for a wash and a meal. A while later they took us back to the station and there was a special train waiting to take us on to Liverpool.
In the confusion of the emergency with all effort concentrated on finding space for the wounded in Carlisle’s overflowing hospitals, and the sad task of identifying the dead, no one had time to give much thought to the uninjured survivors. They were still in a state of shocked exhaustion, bedraggled in smoke-blackened uniforms, they had neither rifles, caps nor kit, they had been up all the previous night and had suffered an appalling experience. They should never have been asked to complete the journey they had begun nearly sixteen hours before but no orders had been issued to the contrary.
Despite long delays on the journey the second half of the Battalion had reached Liverpool early in the evening at the end of an anxious day. They knew that there was trouble.
Pte. W. Begbie, 1/7 Bn., Royal Scots.
We left Larbert in the second train. After a while we stopped at some station for a long time. We were allowed to come out of the train but not to leave the station. We all felt that something was wrong but it was not until Captain Dawson told us that we knew the first train had been in an accident. He didn’t know the details. When we got on the train again to finish our journey to Liverpool, we were really worried – especially the men who had relatives in the first train. Later anyone who had a relative on the first train was sent back home.
Like all locally raised Territorial Battalions the 7th Royal Scots was a family. Pipe-Major Ross, who had been left behind in hospital, had a son in the band who was more seriously wounded. The two Duff brothers, George and Robert, had been killed. The Salvesen brothers were both casualties, one killed and one wounded. Some families had three or more relations in the Battalion. As the news trickled through and spread from mouth to mouth and street to street in Leith where Saturday shoppers were out in full force, friends and relatives rushed to the battalion’s headquarters. Soon there was a crowd of thousands.
Miss Anne Armstrong.
My father was a sergeant in the 7th Royal Scots. How well I remember that Saturday morning. As soon as we heard about the accident Mother rushed off to the Dalmeny Street Drill Hall. She took us children with her – in fact all the family went – and we waited there nearly all day for news. I’ll never forget straining to hear as they read out the names of the men who’d been accounted for. They came through just a few at a time and, oh, the relief when we finally heard my father’s name called out. He was injured, it’s true, but he was alive!
I went three times with Mother to visit Father in Cumberland Infirmary before he was moved from Carlisle. The first journey was the worst. I don’t know who organised the visit, but a lot of the wives and parents went, and travelling down in the train in the morning most of the women were in tears – it was only the day after the crash – and no one knew what to expect. But when we met up again for the journey home they were all smiles. As a child I couldn’t understand this change. I remember Mother explaining that they’d all been through a terrible anxious time. My father had a badly fractured ankle which left him with a permanent limp, and he was badly cut about the nose and face.
Mrs A. Marshall, nee Duff.
My family lived in Musselburgh, and there was quite a bunch of Musselburgh boys in the battalion. All the relatives went rushing to the railway station, but they were told to go to the post office and wait there for news. My mother was in a state, for she had a baby eleven months old in her arms (which was myself) and my brother, who was just three, and they said that my granny was in an even worse state because, of course, she had two boys in the same company. They were both killed – my father and my uncle. My father was twenty-seven and my mother was twenty-five, and there she was, left on her own, a widow, with the two of us to bring up. But it was a good while before they got definite news.
The anxious crowd was still waiting for news at nightfall. At long intervals a window was flung up and a name called out. Then it slammed shut and the waiting began again. The names they called were only those of the survivors, and there were few enough of them. Some people who could not stand the suspense made the tortuous journey to Carlisle by branch lines and local trains to find out the situation at first hand. Bob White’s father took with him Bob’s last letter from Larbert by way of identification, for it was written on notepaper headed with the badge of the 7th Royal Scots. In it Bob had written delightedly, ‘I put my name in for the signalling and I and Sinclair were accepted, so I do no duties until further orders! The sun has been very hot and we have played football all day.’ But the signallers had all gone. The pipers had all gone. Three officers and two hundred and eleven men had been killed, and two hundred and forty-six seriously wounded.*
Mrs A. E. Cowley.
My father was the Reverend William Swan, DD, minister of South Leith Parish Church, and he was also the local chaplain of the 7th Royal Scots. He was summoned to Carlisle at once, and he had the heart-rending duty of comforting the wounded and the relatives after the dreadful train disaster. How well I remember it! He didn’t come home until very late the next night and he was deeply upset. He told us that he had to stand on a chair on the platform at Carlisle station and had to read the casualty list to the anxious relatives who had rushed to Carlisle. It was the saddest thing he ever had to do in his life. Then a few days later he held the mass funeral at Leith. It was almost too much to bear.
The hospitals were overwhelmed. Church halls were commandeered, GPs from miles around rushed to Carlisle to help, and surgeons, doctors, nurses, worked right round the clock attending to the injured. Some of them died in the night and to Dr Edwards’s distress one was the drummer boy of sixteen whose legs he had amputated to release him from the burning train. Near the boy’s bed another badly burned man lay dying. He tossed and turned and muttered all night. Edwards, bending over him, caught his words: ‘If only we could have had a fight for it!’ He muttered it over and over again.
In the early hours of Sunday morning Colonel Peebles led the remnant of his half battalion of 7th Royal Scots up the gangway to board the Empress of Britain – six officers and fifty-seven dazed, dishevelled men. Their Brigadier was waiting on the deck. He returned Colonel Peebles’s salute then shook his hand in silence. At that particular moment neither man was capable of uttering a word.
Pte. A. Thomson.
Early next morning we were put to work sorting out blood-stained equipment salvaged from the wrecked train. It was a gruesome task and I’m quite sure that there was flesh stuck to some of it. Later we were diverted to carrying ammunition aboard ship. Then we were mustered and allocated our mess decks for the voyage.
Perhaps some officer had thought it best to keep the men busy after their ordeal, but the Divisional Commander thought differently and Major-General Egerton had wired with some indignation to the War Office. Shortly before sailing time a reply came back. The survivors could be sent back north and other Royal Scots whose relatives were known to have been killed or injured in the crash could go home too.
Pte. A. Thomson.
We were lined up on the quayside and marched off through the streets to Lime Street Station. Believe it or not, some children playing in the street threw stones at us. We had no equipment and we looked so bedraggled and disreputable that they took us for German prisoners!
The officers had volunteered and been given permission to stay on board, but Lieutenant Riddell was sent home in charge of the party of survivors. The men were unusually silent and subdued. Riddell tried to cheer them up with the news that the General had decreed that they should all be given fourteen days’ leave, but they were too tired and worried to care. Most went to sleep or stared blankly out of the windows.
As the train cleared the outskirts of Liverpool and began to pick up speed on the journey north, the Empress of Britain cast her moorings and began to slip down the Mersey carrying their comrades on the first stage of the voyage to Gallipoli.
The voyage was pleasant and uneventful. A collection for the dependants of the men who died in the disaster raised £612 which was cabled home from Gibraltar on the day of the mass funeral. Most of Leith and half of Edinburgh turned out for it and the Reverend William Swan who conducted the ceremony was assisted by the Dean of the Thistle and Chapel Royal. Two hundred and fourteen bodies were carried to Rosebank Cemetery in Leith, and so many were charred beyond recognition that all of them were buried together in a mass grave. All the survivors were present.
Afterwards they went home on leave, but few had the heart to enjoy themselves. One man, Private William Roach, spent most of his time composing a eulogy to his shattered battalion. He called it The Heroes of Gretna’:
We had been for some ten months in training,
And we found it was work and not play;
You may guess that each man was delighted
When we learned we were going away.
Off we sped, never thinking of danger;
Ah! I see every happy face still –
Now a joke, now a laugh, now ‘Where are we?’
‘Yes, the next box will be Quintinshill.’
And ’twas just then the terrible smash came;
Heavens! It caught us like rats in a trap,
Just when some of our boys, a bit drowsy,
Were enjoying a quiet little nap.
I was thrown to the right of our carriage,
My head and right arm were held fast;
Horror! Here were the flames coming near me.
What a death! Was next minute my last?
Yes, I shouted for help – and I listened,
‘Oh, God!’ I heard dying men shout;
And midst that came a second collision!
I can tell you no more! I got out.
Ask me not of the sights I beheld there,
As I lay on the ground all alone;
But I’ll tell of brave lads who leapt into the flames
And saved lives at the risk of their own!
Oh their deeds will aye live in my memory,
Their praises I sing them aloud,
But to soldier with such a Battalion,
It’s of that most of all, boys, I’m proud.
Yes the scenes of that woe-stricken morning
From my vision I never can blot;
But ‘twill ever for me be the boast of my life
That I once was a Seventh Royal Scot.
In the early hours of 13 June the remainder of the 7th Royal Scots landed with the 156th Brigade of the Lowland Division on the shores of Gallipoli.
Whatever was in store for them they, at least, would have a ‘fight for it’.
Chapter 24
Gallipoli was the most ancient and, to a classical scholar, the most romantic of battle-fields. More than six centuries before the birth of Christ the Greeks had colonised the peninsula and founded a city on the site of the modern town of Gallipoli and christened it Heliopolis. The Turks called it ‘Gelibolu’ and it lay on the eastern coast of the peninsula looking towards the coast of Asia across the Dardanelles – the narrow seaway that reached north towards Constantinople on the Sea of Marmara, and flowed south to meet the waters of the Aegean. Long ago the ancient city of Troy had stood guard at the mouth of the Dardanelles, controlled its seaborne trade and grown rich and powerful on the proceeds. For this was the Hellespont of history and legend.
It was across the Hellespont that Leander swam each night for a lovers’ tryst with Hero, priestess of Aphrodite, who flung herself into its waters when he drowned. The legendary Helen of Troy, heroine of Homer’s Iliad, might have looked across these straits from those fabled ‘topless towers of Ilium’. Five hundred years before the dawn of Christian history Xerxes built a bridge of three hundred boats to carry his army across the Hellespont and up the peninsula on a march that ended at Thermopylae, and a century later Alexander the Great crossed to Asia on his way to conquer an empire. The Dardanelles had witnessed the passage of scores of armies and over the centuries, and as recently as the Balkan Wars a mere twelve months before, the peninsula had been lit by the campfires of soldiers and echoed to their curses and the tramping of their feet.
Few of the modern soldiers were classical scholars, but looking out from the western shores of the peninsula to the islands floating beneath a turquoise sky on the blue Aegean Sea, they were impressed by its timeless beauty.
On the small island of Bozcaada near the toe of the peninsula, British warships were anchored in the harbour of Tenedos where, according to legend, the thousand black-prowed vessels of Agamemnon’s fleet had sheltered long millennia before. Bozcaada just ten miles to the south was easily visible to the naked eye. Away to the west Samothrace, once home of the sea-god Poseidon, was hard to pinpoint in the glaring daylight, but it could be seen on the evening horizon when the peaks of its hills were lit by the setting sun and the glorious sunsets were balm to the red-rimmed eyes of soldiers wearied by the heat and dust of an ugly day.
Now and again they caught a fleeting glimpse of Lemnos in the distance, and this was familiar ground, for it was there in Mudros harbour that the soldiers left the troopships that brought them from Egypt and boarded destroyers for the last leg of the voyage to Gallipoli. No one had troubled to tell them that Lemnos, like Imbros, was immortalised by Homer in the Iliad and when a soldier recognised the faint outlines of these islands on the horizon, if he thought anything at all it was merely to hope he would soon have a closer view on the first leg of the voyage home.
Even the minority who had enjoyed a classical education found that Hellenic travel, even at the Government’s expense, soon palled and during a brief rest period in a miserable fly-ridden dug-out Captain Clement Attlee amused himself by putting the general feeling into verse.
Many a time I’ve longed these ways to go,
To wander where each little rugged isle
Lifts from the blue Aegean’s sparkling smile
Its golden rocks or peaks of silent snow,
The land of magic tales of long ago,
Ulysses’ wanderings and Circe’s wile,
Achilles and his armour, Helen’s smile,
Dear-won delight that set tall Troy aglow.
Happy the traveller whose eye may range
O’er Lemnos, Samothrace and Helles’ strait,
Who smells the sweet thyme-scented breezes. Nay,
How willingly all these I would exchange
To see the buses throng by Mile End Gate
And smell the fried fish shops down Limehouse way.*
Not a single man at Gallipoli would have disagreed, although most would have put it in robust and less elegant terms. By mid-June they had all had more than enough of it. The Gallipoli adventure was not going according to plan and it had gone wrong from the beginning.
The unsuccessful attempt by the Royal Navy to force the straits in March had put the Turks on their guard, and the long lapse of time before the landings gave them ample time to take precautions, to send a strong force to the peninsula and to build and strengthen its defences. They had no doubt that they would be needed, and needed soon, for the plan to invade Gallipoli was the worst-kept secret of the war.
While Sir Ian Hamilton and his staff were still in Egypt letters were arriving from the War Office by the regular mail openly addressed to ‘The Constantinople Expeditionary Force’ to the horror and fury of its Commander-in-Chief who, before leaving London, had specifically requested that it should be known as ‘The Mediterranean Expeditionary Force’. Well before the end of March Egyptian newspapers were not merely reporting the arrival of troopships, but were making no bones about the fact that the troops were bound for the Dardanelles. The Army had money to spend and officers of the advance guard were buying up mules and donkeys by the score and scouring the bazaars for milk-cans, canisters, and any other containers that could possibly be used to carry water. In Port Said they were even purchasing vessels by the dozen – the flat-bottomed lighters that sailed out to unload big ships and bring their cargoes to the shore, and the lowly hoppers that worked alongside dredgers and carried away the silt or gravel. No matter how old or slow or decrepit the boats were, so long as they were reasonably seaworthy the Army was willing to pay a good price. Their owners drove excellent bargains and the word spread. It did not require a high degree of inquisitiveness to guess that something big was underway, nor a high degree of intelligence to guess what it was.
The Greek government was not yet fully committed to the cause of the allies but it was common knowledge that Greece had been glad to allow them to use the islands of Imbros, Lemnos and Bozcaada as forward bases in the interest of wresting Constantinople from the hands of their old enemies the Turks. Destroyers and battleships were concentrating in the harbour of Tenedos on Bozcaada and at Mudros on the island of Lemnos. The lighters and hoppers that would take the troops from the ships through shallow water to the shore were towed across the Mediterranean to cluster in swarms round the island of Lemnos. Hospital ships steamed into position. The preparations could not possibly be concealed, and with small boats scudding between the islands on their everyday business of fishing and trading there was very little that did not reach the ears and even the eyes of the Turks. Looking out to sea from vantage points on the peninsula they watched British warships diligently patrolling a few miles from the coast, guessing perhaps that Staff Officers on their decks had their eyes fixed on Gallipoli, peering through powerful binoculars and trying to form an impression of the lie of the land. It was the closest they could get to reconnoitring.
From the sea the Gallipoli Peninsula was a sight of remarkable beauty. Beyond the narrow bays and escarpments at the toe of the promontory, at Cape Helles where the Dardanelles met the Aegean Sea, a low plain rose behind the seashore village of Sedd-el-Bahr, cupped in a saucer between low cliffs, and stretched north to the inland village of Krithia. Beyond it crouched Achi Baba, a deceptively unimposing hill with a broad-breasted summit just high enough to command a view of the Aegean across its western shoulder and the narrows of the Dardanelles to the east. Further north on the western coastline, the land took on a wilder aspect. Sheer cliffs scarred with deep gullies and ravines swept down almost to the water’s edge and towered up to rugged heights of formidable grandeur. To the officers planning the campaign it was obvious that they also constituted a formidable obstacle which could not be tackled head on. They would have to be outflanked. The ideal landing place was far further north on the Gulf of Saros, near Bulair at the neck of the peninsula, where the waters of the Dardanelles began to open into the Sea of Marmara and where an isthmus of land only a few miles wide divided them from the Aegean shore. If the Army could seize the isthmus the Turks in the peninsula would be cut off and trapped, the Army would be in command of the Dardanelles, and long before Turkish reinforcements could possibly arrive from the north, the Navy would be in Constantinople and Turkey would have thrown in the towel. It was obvious. It would be equally obvious to the Turks – and it was precisely because they would be ready to meet an attack that the idea of landing at Bulair was rejected.
The plan was cleverly conceived to deceive the Turkish Army, and it envisaged more than a single landing. Streaming ashore from an armada of shallow-draught lighters and cutters, troops would be punched into the blunt southern nose of the peninsula and advance to capture Krithia village and beyond it Achi Baba. Then forces previously landed on the western beaches north of Cape Helles would link up to widen the advance as it swept across the narrow ankle of the peninsula to the straits beyond. They were under no illusion that it would be easy. All along the coast, in places where the cliffs were lower and the ground beyond was easier to cross, tell-tale streaks of newly turned earth showed that the Turks were busy digging trenches, and banks of new barbed wire shone bright when they caught the sun. After one reconnoitring voyage aboard the battleship Queen Elizabeth Sir Ian Hamilton reported in a letter to Lord Kitchener, ‘Gallipoli looks a much tougher nut to crack than it did over the map in your office.’
The only available maps of the Gallipoli Peninsula were old and rudimentary. They were also inaccurate. They gave no impression of the precipitous terrain, no hint of the deep gullies, the dried-up water-courses, the narrow razor-edged ridges, the deep chasms beyond. And they gave no idea of the thorny, impenetrable scrub that covered the ground and which looked attractively green and lush seen from a distance. It grew thick on the slopes that rose sheer from the sea above a small cove that was nameless before the landings. One day they would call it Anzac – and before long it would be as well known in Australia as the names of Sydney and Melbourne.
The men of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who went ashore at Anzac Cove were not intended to land there at all and they were never intended to scale the heights that soared up from the beach. They should have been landed on the wide and sandy expanse of a beach, code-named X beach, a mile to the south, where easier country ran north of Achi Baba across the peninsula to the waters of the Dardanelles. But the small boats that carried the soldiers from the big ships were cockleshell-light and no one had realised that once they had cast off and were making for the shore, the undertow of the swift current would carry them well to the north. The moon had set. A faint phosphorescence gleamed on the water. Once or twice, as distant search-lights on the Asian coast routinely searched the Dardanelles, the outline of the land ahead flickered momentarily into view, but the darkness was inky black. With no light to guide them and with the treacherous current dragging at their hulls, it was almost inevitable that the leading boats of the covering force should drift to the wrong beach. And once the men of the covering force had landed and were scrambling up the heights that loomed directly ahead, once they had come to grips with the enemy and the main body had landed to reinforce them and daylight revealed the full measure of the misfortune, it was far too late to bring them back.
Captain Herbert Kenyon was one of the first men ashore. He was not an Australian, but he did belong to the staff, and as Staff Captain of the 7th Indian Mountain Artillery Brigade, he was vital to the success of the operation. These would be the first guns ashore and Kenyon’s task was to find the positions from which they could best support the troops. The Indian Mounted Brigade consisted of two batteries, the 21st and 26th.*
Capt. H. Kenyon, DSO, Royal Artillery, Att. 7th (Indian) Mountain Art. Brig.
It was a perfect night when we started out from Mudros, warm, bright moonlight, not a ripple on the water. I had my greatcoat with me, revolver, haversack, electric lamp, small cap, three days’ rations and two waterbottles full of water and tea. Almost exactly at midnight the destroyer glided off with about two hundred and fifty Australians on board, and Colonel Maclagen, commanding the covering party, with his brigade major and staff captain plus Colonel Parker, Kirby, Thorn and myself.
We sat where we could on deck – not a light – not a sound – no smoking – no talking. I guess we were all thinking too deeply to talk. We had some excellent cocoa, biscuits, cigarettes, and then had quite a good sleep. I was woken by the destroyer stopping about 3 a.m. The moon was nearly down then but I could just make out the dark mass of four battleships which looked enormous in the dark, and behind them were one or two destroyers. About 3.30 a.m. we got the order to go and the four destroyers glided between the battleships in absolute silence. I went down below, and there was a curious feeling in the air, which can only be produced when a party of friends are definitely committed to what all realised might be death in an hour.
We could not sit still and periodically one or other of us went up on deck and could just make out the land. Suddenly the telegraph rang out (which we thought must be heard in Egypt!) and then they ordered ‘full speed astern’, and I don’t think any noise has sounded so noisy before. The boats were immediately lowered and filled and there wasn’t a sound from the shore or from our boat. We were in the second lot to go. It was completely dark and silent, then suddenly there was a lot of firing from the shore.
We filled the boat quickly. Some bullets fell near us and one knocked a hole below the water-line. Then the coxswain said, ‘Shove her off and pull steady together,’ but a sailor said the boat was making water pretty fast. All the boats were provided with a pail and wooden plugs in case of emergency. The pail was at my feet, and I was jolly glad of an excuse to put my head down and look for a plug! Bullets were falling all round us then. All the plugs were too large and a sailor cut one to fit. The whole of this took I suppose one or one and a half minutes. Then we shoved off. The coxswain stood the whole time and it was magnificent the way he worked the crew. ‘Stronger – all together – keep her moving – nearly there. Now let her have it!’ And we bumped on the beach.
The row lasted about three minutes I think, and I had undone the laces of my boots in case we sank. As we grounded a man was knocked over and wounded. Just before we got there we heard a cheer ashore and we all joined in. The moment we touched, the coxswain shouted, ‘Tumble out boys and get at ‘em! We’ll get the boat back. Don’t you wait!’ And out we tumbled – literally! The men were carrying tons of kit. We grounded in about three feet of water, and as they jumped out practically every man went headlong full-length under! It made me really laugh, and the Colonel and I got out more carefully.
It was about eight or ten yards from the water’s edge to the foot of the hills and we all doubled in under the bank and then up we went after the others, shouting, yelling, cursing, tumbling down and tripping over bushes and holes. It was impossible for the men to climb in their kit so they chucked them as they scrambled up.
Even though most of the men had abandoned almost everything but their rifles, the climb would have taxed the agility of a mountain goat, and Norman Scott from Melbourne was not the only man who blessed the weeks of arduous training as much as they had cursed it – slogging with full packs across the desert under the hot Egyptian sun – and he was not the only one to boast that they were ‘so strong and so well trained that we could almost walk up a vertical wall’. It was just as well. In one way a vertical wall might have been easier. At least they would have travelled in a straight line.
Negotiating gullies, edging round sheer overhangs, hauling themselves up the steep crevices of dried-up water-courses, grasping at thorny bushes with bleeding hands, scrabbling through sandy soil that crumbled and slid beneath booted feet, it was literally every man for himself. The possibility of keeping together in sections or platoons, let alone in companies or battalions, was laughable. The wonder was that they managed to reach the top and when they did, they were scattered piecemeal across a wide and hostile landscape. It was daylight now. Looking back, down the long haul to the beach and the sea beyond it, crowded with battleships and destroyers, the men of the vanguard saw string upon string of small boats approaching in long tows to the shore and, far below, an ant-like khaki swarm as the men of the next wave ran up the beach to tackle the climb in their turn. They might also have heard a strangely incongruous sound coming faintly across the water. Now that the fighting had started and there was no need for silence the men in the tows were singing on their way to the shore. They were singing the song some patriot had composed before the war was a month old.
Rally round the banner of your country
Take the field with brother o’er the foam
On land or sea, wherever you be
Keep your eye on Germany!
But England Home and Beauty have no cause to fear
Should auld acquaintance be forgot?
No! No! No! No! No! Australia will be there
Australia will be there.
Even if they were not familiar with all the words, the Anzacs all knew the last few lines – and they seemed singularly appropriate to the occasion.
If they had stopped to think about it the soldiers who had already scaled the heights might have realised that they were facing a dilemma. In front of them was no gentle undulating country, no flatland, no recognisable objectives, no sight of the waters of the Dardanelles. All they could see were more hills, other valleys, deep precipitous slopes thick with scrub and bush. And Turkish snipers and machine-gunners, well hidden in the scrub, were determined to make sure they got no further. The Turkish guns were firing from behind their line and as yet there were no British guns to answer back.
Capt. H. Kenyon, DSO.
The Colonel and I ran with the men to the top of the first hill, and then the Colonel stopped to look round, because of course our job was to reconnoitre for positions for the battery. Eventually he sent me off in one direction whilst he went in another. I rejoined him later and we both decided there was no place for the Battery there. Then Thorn and Kirby joined us and we moved along the beach to our right. By then it was daylight and a gun from Gabe Tepe began enfilading straight down the beach. We walked in that direction keeping as far under the cliff as possible. There were a fair number of dead and wounded on the beach but no one moved the wounded. Everyone was too busy.
We then climbed a little hill or spur, called Hell Spit later, which is where one side of Shrapnel Valley ran down to the beach. We looked round there and then the Colonel sent me off to look at what seemed a possible position while he had a breather. However it was no good, and then he went off and told me to wait till he came back. There was a Turkish trench there and a little sentry dug-out, and as some shells and a good many bullets were coming along I got inside this and was practically hidden. Presently I heard someone coming along, so I looked out and at once a voice shouted ‘Who’s that!’ and pointed his bayonet at me. I didn’t take long to answer him in language which convinced him I was English! And then I realised how foolish I had been, so I left my retreat and sat down in the open. That was a narrow escape!
Presently the Colonel came back and told me which way 26th Battery was to start off when it arrived, and told me that, when I had seen them all off, I was to try and get news of 21st Battery and then bring the Brigade Staff along.
At about 8 a.m. 26th Battery began to land. I told Kirby where to take them and then helped to hurry the mules away as the beach was being badly shelled. Twenty-sixth started about 10 a.m. up the hill, but there was no news or sign of 21st disembarking, so I left word with Thorn to bring them along the same way, and then I collected the Headquarters Staff and telephone mule and started off. I got on a wrong track and found myself at an unhealthy spot marked by some undiscovered snipers in the brushwood. I put the men under cover where some of our infantry were and had a look round and presently I found the track again, so I came back and brought them along. It was a longish steep climb and the whole time bullets were singing everywhere. I was going up the edge of a nullah and the enemy’s shrapnel were fairly well pouring down it. I wasn’t one little bit happy, and all the time was wondering, ‘Shall I get as far as that bush, or that mound?’ It didn’t occur to me that I should get up the whole way!
We had to take one or two breathers where there was any cover. Starting off again was the hardest part, and I wished I didn’t have to give the order! At last we got up to the battery mules, right at the top of the nullah, which ends on a small grassy hill we later called the Razor Back.
I went to the Colonel and found him very much agitated as Bruce had been up for an hour and hadn’t yet brought the Battery into action. At 11.50 he said, ‘If the Battery isn’t in action by 12 I will take command myself.’ Just before 12 however it came into action. Almost at once a Turkish Battery which had been shelling down the nullah switched onto the Battery, and it was pretty nasty.
Even without Turkish marksmen firing from the topmost heights and machine-guns sweeping the slopes it would have been hard going and, although the men clinging to the slopes were still in shadow, as the dawn spread slowly up the sky behind the Dardanelles there were shouts of alarm behind the crackle of the bullets, and the sickening thud of tumbling bodies as a bullet found its mark and a wounded man lost some precarious foothold and crashed back down the hill.
The three guns, dragged and man-handled to a perch well up on high ground, were at least able to give the troops some local help, but it was the big guns on the battleships standing off the peninsula which were meant to fire the artillery barrage that would help the troops to get ahead. It was not their fault that they failed. Signal stations on the landing beaches were to transmit messages to the ships and bring their guns to bear on the places where they were most needed. The difficulty was that the signallers on land had no idea what was happening on the high ground behind them and it was impossible for observers at sea to make anything of the situation for themselves. Even on the clifftops it was hard to see what was happening for the troops were so split up and units so confused that there was little or no cohesive command. Even where officers had managed to keep control, or to gather together a significant number of men, the command broke down. The low, thick scrub, so useful to the enemy in their defence, was of little use to soldiers creeping through it to attack across unfamiliar ground, and the officers leading them were so often obliged to stand up to find direction that snipers were easily able to pick them off as soon as they appeared. Deprived of leadership, with no specific objectives and with no clear idea of what was expected of them, driven on by the simple knowledge that they were there to capture the peninsula and kill any Turks in their path, the men acted on their own initiative and charged ahead into a hundred private battles of their own. The men at their backs followed their lead. They plunged down sheer slopes into clefts and found no way back and no way out on the other side. They clambered into gullies and hauled themselves up slopes, breasted knolls and pressed on, sometimes in groups of as few as a dozen men, and they put the fear of death into the Turks.
Three men got further than any others. Lieutenant Loutit and two scouts actually ran three and a half miles across country to the top of a rough hill and reaching the summit, found themselves looking across the waters of the Dardanelles. They were the only soldiers to catch so much as a glimpse of them for many months to come. As they worked their way back, it was plain to see that no one else had managed to make much headway. But it was a magnificent effort and it was not the fault of the troops that it had not wholly succeeded. Later the logs of the signals exchanged between the battleships made tragic reading.
Goliath to Sapphire: ‘What is the position occupied by our troops?’
Sapphire to Goliath: ‘No news from the shore but northern limit appears to be square 176 R3…’
Goliath to Dublin: ‘Are any of our troops dressed in blue?’ Bacchante to Galeka: ‘Have we landed any cavalry?’
Amethyst to Sapphire: ‘Have you any idea how things have been going?’
Sapphire to Amethyst: ‘No news at all!’
All that the gunnery officers could see from the ships was the smoke of Turkish shells exploding along the line of the advance beyond the high escarpments. For fear of hitting their own troops scattered haphazardly behind them, they could do nothing to help them.
Capt. H. Kenyon.
Presently I started off to see what information I could get, but got held up by a big nullah so came back again. It was not a pleasant walk alone. When I got back to the Battery I found Chapman had been wounded so I went to him, helped with the bandaging, and started him off down the hill. Then the Colonel called me and said ammunition was running short, and not coming up quick enough, so I was to go down and get it along. I went down considerably quicker than I came up! I found Rossiter running the ammunition but as he did not know the situation I took it on and hustled it up as fast as it came along. I found the beach packed with wounded, and they were coming down in a steady stream. Chapman arrived when I was there looking jolly bad. All his colour had gone and he could hardly talk. I sat with him while he was being dressed by the doctor and tried to cheer him up, and then saw him carried off to the boat.
I then remembered I was hungry so sat on the beach with General Lotbiniere and some other fellows, took off my belt and revolver and electric lamp and had some lunch. In the middle of it a shell burst all among us, so we bolted back under the bank.
It looked then as if there could hardly be a whole man left in the force, and crowds of the men who came back told all sorts of tales from which one gathered matters were pretty serious.
Serious though the position was at Anzac things might have been worse still had it not been for the feint attack at Bulair the previous evening. Men of the Royal Naval Division had embarked in small boats and rowed towards the shore just before dusk while there was still enough light for the Turkish observers to spot them. After dark they had rowed back again to the big ships and later under cover of the darkness Lieutenant Freyberg had volunteered to swim from a small boat a mile off shore to light flares along the beach. It was a feat worthy of Leander himself, and it rightly won him the Victoria Cross for it did more than anything else to convince the German Commander of the Turkish forces that the main force of the invasion would strike here. Even though there was no sign of them in the morning except for the ominous sight of British battleships standing off the coast, even though there were reports of landings at six other places a good day’s march away, Liman von Sanders was so convinced that they must be feints intended to mislead him that he kept the bulk of his manpower standing by all day at Bulair. It was well after nightfall on 25 April before he realised that he had been duped and sent troops marching south to reinforce the far more thinly defended sectors of the peninsula where the landings had actually taken place. It was von Sanders’s first and only gaffe of the campaign, and it was that little bit of luck, in a day of endless setbacks, that gave the allied troops the chance to dig in and consolidate their hold on the peninsula.
But it was only a toe-hold. And the sea was at their backs.
Chapter 25
Three weeks and one day after the rail crash that wiped out half the battalion, the two remaining companies of the 7th Royal Scots landed on the shores of Gallipoli. For some of them, and particularly for the Commanding Officer, the voyage to the Mediterranean had hardly been a rest cure. The signal section had been wiped out at Gretna, so Captain Wightman, no expert himself, took on the job of training a new one, and the men who volunteered to replace the dead signallers had spent long hours training, swotting up morse code, practising semaphore on deck, and attempting to master the art of flashing by signal lamp. They were still far from expert, but they would have to do. The machine-gunners had gone too and Alex Elliott, co-opted as machine-gun officer in place of Lieutenant Christian Salveson who died in the Gretna crash, had spent every waking hour training new machine-gunners as best he could in the confines of a ship at sea and, he fervently hoped, keeping one step ahead of them, poring over instruction manuals through night after wakeful night, doing his utmost to prepare for the day when his cursory knowledge would be put to the test.
In the early hours of 13 June they came ashore at V beach at Cape Helles. It was Sunday morning, and it was five weeks and all but a few hours since the 29th Division had landed at the same spot on the first day of the Gallipoli campaign. The trawlers that brought the Royal Scots to the shore tied up alongside the River Clyde, a beat-up old collier grounded near the beach to act as a pier that would carry the troops across the deep water to dry land. At the landings five weeks ago the River Clyde had been a vital part of the plan, for the main thrust of the attack was to be launched at Cape Helles at the toe of the peninsula from the beaches that were code-named V, W and X, and it was vital that the largest possible number of troops should be landed in the shortest possible time. As at Anzac the spearhead of the covering force would be carried in strings of open boats, ships’ cutters or lifeboats, towed by trawlers or steam-driven hoppers to the shore, where the tows would turn about to return to the waiting transports to fetch the second wave. Each tow could carry perhaps three hundred men – but not nearly enough to ensure success in the first vital hour of the assault, and it was at V beach that the situation would be critical.
V beach at the foot of a natural amphitheatre of gently sloping land looked deceptively innocent – a narrow strip of sand, perhaps three hundred yards long with low cliffs on the left, and a ruined fort above the village of Sedd-el-Bahr on the right, on the headland where the peninsula turned back towards the mouth of the Dardanelles. It was here that the River Clyde was to play a part not unlike the part played by the legendary wooden horse at the siege of Troy in Agamemnon’s war. The shabby old tub, sailing in towing a hopper and with three lighters in her wake, carried two thousand soldiers who were to storm the beach in the first vital stage of the attack. The plan was to ground the River Clyde close to the beach, the hopper moving ahead of her to act as floating bridge. As soon as it was in position beneath the prow the men would pour out through wide sally-ports newly cut in her sides, along broad gang-planks to a platform beneath her bows, on to the hopper and off again, splashing through shallow water to dry land to secure the beach and open the road to Krithia. The final objective for that first day’s fighting was Achi Baba. The Staff were by no means unduly optimistic in supposing that the doughty regular soldiers of the 29th Division would easily reach it.
Because of the strong currents that dragged at the sea where the Aegean met the Dardanelles, the Royal Navy was fearful that the tows might lose direction and could only guarantee to land them safely by daylight. It was a perfect spring morning. As the flotilla set off for the shore just after six o’clock the peninsula still seemed to be slumbering under a pale cloudless sky. Lieutenant-Colonel Williams, of the General Headquarters Staff, had his eyes fixed on the quiet coastline ahead and he could hardly believe their good fortune. There was no sign of life. As the first Staff Officer ashore it was part of his job to make a record of events as they happened. Standing on the bridge of the River Clyde with a grandstand view of the tows as they bobbed towards the bay, he made hasty minute-by-minute jottings in his notebook.
6.10 a.m. Within 1/2 mile of the shore. We are far ahead of the tows. No O.C. troops on board. It must cause a mix-up if we, 2nd line, arrive before the 1st line. With difficulty I get Unwin (Captain of the River Clyde) to swerve off and await the tows.
6.22 a.m. Ran smoothly ashore without a tremor. No opposition. We shall land unopposed.
But the Turks were holding their fire and in their trenches well hidden
by folds in the rising ground they too were blessing their luck. They had stayed cool under the thundering of the thirty-minute bombardment by the battleships standing off on the horizon. It had not touched their trenches. It had not touched the barriers of wire that ran behind the beach. They had suffered no casualties, and they could ill have spared them for there were only two companies to defend the beach. Their defences were rudimentary, but they had machine-guns commanding the beach from the high ground and cunningly placed to fire in enfilade from the old fort. Even so, it took nerve to wait, to watch the River Clyde steaming towards the shore and the armada of small boats drawing ever nearer. They waited until they were within yards of the beach. And then the machine-guns opened up. At that distance, with such a target, they could hardly miss. It was sickening carnage.
From the bridge of the grounded River Clyde Colonel Williams watched appalled, and his hand shook as he scrawled:
6.25 a.m. Tows within a few yards of shore. Hell burst loose on them. One boat drifting to north, all killed. Others almost equally helpless. Our hopper gone away.
The men on board the River Clyde were standing at the open sally-ports ready to double up the gangways, but the hopper that should have run forward beneath the bows of the collier to form the floating bridge had swung broadside and was wallowing helpless in the water frothing in a lash of bullets streaming from the machine-gun in the fort. The lighters on the starboard side of the River Clyde were higher and less manoeuvrable than the tiny hopper and they had only been brought in as a failsafe to help to bridge the gap if the collier chanced to ground too far from the shallow water for the smaller vessel to do the job. In the hail of bullets, and with little time to spare, it was not easy to inch two lighters into position in front of the big ship’s bow, to connect them precariously with gang-planks, and even when this had been managed they still yawed and wavered treacherously in the current. It was the Captain himself, Commander Unwin, who dived into the sea to steer them towards the shore and drag them into position. An able seaman dived in after him to help and there the two men stood, up to their waists in water, pulling on a rope to hold the lighters steady so that the troops could disembark. Bullets from two machine-guns mounted on the bows of the River Clyde sprayed over their heads.* Apart from the rifles carried by the infantry they were the only weapons there were to answer the lethal fire and the rifles, in the circumstances, were useless. Not many soldiers survived to fire them.
Few of them even reached the shore. They were shot down almost to a man as they ran down the gang-ways. In minutes the lighters were piled deep with dead and dying men and the water turned red with the blood of the wounded staggering off the gangways to sink and drown beneath the weight of their equipment. The handful of men who reached the beach dashed to the shelter of a low sandy bank and watched in horror as line after line of their comrades were struck down and the tows of open boats bobbed aimless and adrift on the water.
Somehow, despite his own horror, Colonel Williams managed to carry on recording the calamity.
6.35 a.m. Connection with shore very bad. Only single file possible and not one man in ten gets across. Lighters blocked with dead and wounded. Maxims in bows firing full blast, but nothing to be seen excepting a Maxim firing through a hole in the fort and a pom-pom near the sky-line on our left front.
9.0 a.m. Very little directed fire against us on the ship, but fire immediately concentrates on any attempt to land. The Turks’ fire discipline is really wonderful. Fear we’ll not land today.
When almost a thousand men had been lost attempting to disembark from the River Clyde, realising that no more could be done until nightfall they called a halt. It was nine o’clock in the morning and, as the sun climbed higher, conditions in the dark hold of the ship where nine hundred more men were waiting were already uncomfortably hot and cramped. For the moment they had been reprieved, but settling down restlessly in the stuffy gloom, lit only by a few hanging lamps hastily rigged up, they could hear the muffled sound of firing from the land, the spatter of machine-guns from the deck above, the thud of big guns firing from the Asiatic shore and the crump of shells exploding on the beach. They could only guess what was happening.
Waiting on the deck of a small transport that had seen civilian service as a cross-channel steamer, Brigadier-General Napier waited impatiently for the return of the tows that would take him and the second wave of his 88th Brigade to the shore. They were a long time coming and some of them never arrived at all for, like the soldiers in the open boats, many of the sailors manning them had been killed within yards of dry land. The tow that did eventually arrive had landed some of its men but the boats were crowded with dead and wounded. It was several minutes before they were unloaded and the General with his Staff and the second wave of soldiers were able to clamber down to take their places. They sat down gingerly, for the seats were still wet and slippery with blood but in his frustration at the delay, assuming with some irritation that his tow had been used to transport all the casualties, Napier made no inquiry. It was not the sailors’ job to decide that a landing was hopeless or to volunteer any such opinion to a Senior Army Officer. Their job was to convey the Army to the shore and whatever their trepidation they did not intend to shirk it. Stoically, trailing the little boats behind them, they headed back to the beach and back into the maelstrom.
On board the collier the Commanding Officer of the 2nd Hampshires had just seen one of his own companies wiped out in a vain attempt to land and watched incredulously as Napier’s tow neared the open beach. Snatching up a megaphone he called to it to come alongside and the naval officer in charge obediently changed course. But General Napier was on his mettle. From his position in the leading boat, just a foot or so above the surface of the water, he could see that the lighters were full of men and he poised himself to spring on board and lead them ashore. But the men were all dead. Carington-Smith bellowed from the River Clyde,’ You can’t possibly land!’ But Napier yelled back, ‘I’ll have a damned good try!’ And then the machine-guns started up. General Napier and his staff reached the hopper, but they could get no further. Soon their own bodies were lying dead among the rest.*
When night fell many hours later, although the Turks continued to fire haphazardly, the troops in the River Clyde were at last able to land and with only a small number of casualties. Under cover of darkness a makeshift jetty was flung out to link the ship to the shore. It was built from the piled-up packs of dead men. Even by morning the water lapping the beach was still red with blood. Exactly two months earlier, on 26 February, after the bombardment of the fort at Sedd-el-Bahr, while the Royal Navy was engaged in its attempt to secure the Dardanelles, a party of Royal Marines had landed on this very beach and reconnoitred it unchallenged and at their leisure.
V beach and some ground beyond it had long ago been secured, but the beaches were still in full view from the high ground and HMS Carron which brought the 7th Royal Scots from Lemnos prudently cruised just over the horizon until after dark. The tows of open boats were a thing of the past now, but in the dark and in a choppy sea it was not entirely easy to transfer the men and their brigade stores to the three trawlers that were to take them across the last few sea-miles to land on the peninsula. In the early hours of the morning the Royal Scots filed off the trawlers, up the gangways of the River Clyde alongside and on to the platform beneath her bows. Now it was linked to the beach by a proper jetty but, even so, it was hard work to man-handle the stores ashore and it was daylight before fatigue parties had finished stacking them on the beach.
Compared to the bloody Sunday morning of 25 April, V beach was peaceful. The village of Sedd-el-Bahr was reduced to ruins, but the belts of wire had been cleared away. The rising ground was criss-crossed with new tracks, with freshly dug trenches, and there were sandbagged bivouacs burrowed into the slopes and dumps of supplies in the shelter of the cliffs and the old fort. During the night a procession of ration parties and pack-mules had come and gone laden with food and water and ammunition for the men in the line. A Red Cross flag flew above a cluster of tents and shelters near the beach and, not far from the dressing station, a crop of white crosses marked the graves of the soldiers who had died of their wounds.
They were just a few of the casualties. In the five weeks since the landings, the small Gallipoli force had spent most of its strength. Two pushes towards Krithia had advanced them a mile or so up the peninsula but Krithia itself was still in Turkish hands, Achi Baba remained inviolable and the losses, by comparison with the strength of the force, had been staggering. For every hundred yards gained a thousand men were lost. Not all of them were killed or wounded in battle. Many were falling sick with dysentery. Conditions were worsening and although it was still early summer the heat was already trying and the men were plagued by flies that swarmed and thrived by the million in trenches and dug-outs, and preyed on the bodies of the dead lying unburied between the lines. The spring flowers that carpeted the peninsula in April had withered away and so had the sweet-scented blooms on the thorny scrub that was now so brittle and tinder-dry that it could be snapped off and used as firewood. The burst of a shell, even the scorch of a flying bullet, could set it alight. Everywhere the ground was arid and the nullahs and trenches were thick with dust that rose in clouds at every step, inflamed every eye, filled every nostril and rasped mercilessly at the back of every throat parched for lack of water. Later, as the summer drew on, it would be worse. Even now it was no picnic.
Sgt. H. Keighley, 29th Div., Royal Artillery.
The food was bully beef and biscuits with apple jam and cheese, and you had dried vegetables which had to be soaked overnight in the dixie to boil next day. It were like eating rubber! The potatoes were the same. The food was almost nil. If we did get any bread, which later on we did perhaps once a month, we got just one loaf between eight men for a day’s ration. We’d no fresh water. The water that we drank was brought by boat to W beach and water-carts collected it and brought it up so far. We were on the west side of Y ravine and it was a very high cliff. You had to climb a winding path to the top and we had to carry dixies full of water from water-carts up to this gun position.
I was put on as latrine orderly and we had to dig a trench for the latrine and you had to stand astride to do your business, and then you had to cover it with soil because the flies were, oh, dreadful! The latrine was like a hole in the ground. I had to cover it with a ground sheet pegged above the hole and at night if I struck a match to light a candle in the dark the ground sheet was just black with big flies, and when you were eating jam or biscuits you had to knock flies off to get them to your mouth. Most of us got dysentery. That was the biggest scourge we had on Gallipoli, dysentery and ill-health from lack of fresh water and lack of proper food. I got dysentery very badly. I hadn’t the strength to go up and down the cliff, across the ravine and up the hill to get to the Medical Officer (he was on the other side) and in the end I lost two or three stones. I was dreadful! I practically had to sleep alongside the latrines, my tummy had so much trouble.
I used to go with an officer on observation post duty. We hadn’t trenches, we only had parapets built up with sandbags, and we were going up one day to the front line to do OP duty and he stopped to talk to somebody. We stopped about two minutes and that saved us from being blown to bits, because the Turks blew a mine just at the top of the ravine and when we got up there, there were infantrymen laying dead and badly wounded all over the place. A proper mess – and we should have been there if the officer hadn’t stopped. He was a ranker officer, and he seemed to sense that I was fed up with not being one of the gun crew and being sent on mucky jobs all the time, and he used to take me up to the OP when it was his turn to go. I loved it for all it was dangerous, because No Man’s Land was very short and you daren’t put your head above the sandbagged parapet, but to me it was what I joined up for – and that was to see action.
With constant grappling between the lines there was plenty of action, but there was little progress and after the costly battles for Krithia the fighting had settled down to trench warfare. The troops were weak and debilitated, ammunition was scarce, and with no real prospect of advancing until more reinforcements arrived there was no alternative but to mark time, knowing that when the chance did come it would be harder than ever to break through. It was plain to see that the Turks were using the respite to dig more trenchsystems, to bring in more troops and to strengthen the defences. Since the guns were strictly forbidden to fire more than two rounds a day unless the Turks attacked, there was precious little that could be done to impede them.
The French contingent, on the other hand, was well-off for ammunition and fresh stocks of high explosive shell were arriving regularly from France. The French had played a vital role. On 25 April their diversionary landing on the Asiatic shore had helped to confuse the Turks and appreciably assisted the landings on the peninsula. Now they had taken over the sector running north of Morto Bay where the toe of the peninsula turned into the Dardanelles and in a series of costly attacks between 21 and 25 June they had advanced their line and gained high ground which would give the allies a head start when the time came to push ahead towards the vital objectives of Krithia and Achi Baba. But there was still a huge stumbling block on the Aegean shore. It was Gully Ravine. And before there could be any thought of going further the situation there had to be resolved.
Like all the soldiers of the 156th Infantry Brigade the Royal Scots were soft after weeks of inactivity on the journey. A few days after their arrival they were pushed into the reserve line to acclimatise, to become accustomed to shell-fire, to tone up flabby muscles and get back into shape. They dug communication trenches until they were sick of it and they were only too happy when the time came to march into action. They marched by a tortuous route over rough country to the high ground above Y beach.
Behind the trenches steep cliffs led down to the beach. Inland, less than half a mile away, was Gully Ravine, a deep declivity two miles long, many metres wide and, in places, as much as a hundred feet deep. The British trenches bisected it half-way up its length and just above Y beach and to the north a network of enemy trenches formed a redoubt on the clifftops, spanned Gully Ravine and stretched away on the inland side as far as Krithia. Staring across at the bristling new defences it was difficult to believe that the landing at Y beach had been unopposed and that Colonel Matthews, commanding the Y beach force, had walked with his ADC to the outskirts of Krithia only a mile away. He had not been asked to capture it alone, though his troops might have easily done so. His orders had been to wait for the troops advancing from V beach and, when they reached him, to join in on the left of their advance and thus widen the front of the attack. Lacking any other orders, in the absence of any news, and with no message of any kind reaching him from higher authority, he dutifully went on waiting while his troops kicked their heels on the clifftops enjoying the pleasant spring sunshine and admiring the view. The Turks had ample time to muster and march to Y beach to oppose them. Much later Matthews was criticised for failing to act with initiative, but his orders had been explicit, and it had apparently occurred to no one to suggest how he should act if the troops at V beach failed to make headway.
Directly across the peninsula at the northern tip of Morto Bay it had been the same story. The South Wales Borderers landed unmolested at S beach and they were waiting too. There were no Turkish troops within miles, and on 25 April the British troops at S beach and Y beach outnumbered by several times the entire Turkish force – only five battalions – in the sector south of Achi Baba. The two British contingents were just five miles apart on either side of the peninsula. They might easily have advanced and spread out to join hands across it, walked into Krithia and pushed on to Achi Baba. By cutting off the few Turkish troops who were so gallantly resisting at the beaches at Cape Helles they might very well have altered the course of the campaign.
The day after the landing, when V beach was finally secured and the village of Sedd-el-Bahr was stormed and captured, a copy of a desperate message fell into British hands. It had been hastily scribbled by a junior Turkish officer and it reeked of panic:
My Captain, either you must send up reinforcements and drive the enemy into the sea or let us evacuate this place because it is absolutely certain that they will land more troops tonight. Send doctors to carry off my wounded. Alas, alas my Captain, for God’s sake send me reinforcements because hundreds of soldiers are landing. Hurry up. What on earth will happen my Captain.
But there were no reinforcements within reach to be sent. The following day, dazed and weakened by casualties, the remnants of the eight Turkish companies at V beach streamed away up the hill. There was no pursuit, for the landing force was too exhausted to do much more than consolidate hard-won positions and steel themselves to meet the counter-attacks they believed would surely be launched. But there were no counter-attacks at V beach or anywhere else, for the south of the peninsula was being evacuated. The night after the landings, under cover of darkness, the weary Turkish soldiers who had fought so hard to thwart the landing pulled back several miles to meet reinforcements from the north and, with Achi Baba behind them, they started digging a line of strong defences in front of Krithia.
Recently they had been considerably strengthened and, by late June, a succession of strongly defended redoubts and trenches ran across the spur of land that dominated the beaches on the seaward side of Gully Ravine and across the ground on its inland side barring the road to Krithia. Unless they could be pushed off the cliffs, unless Gully Ravine could be captured, there was little hope of making progress towards Achi Baba, and no hope at all of linking up with the Anzacs, still battling it out on the heights above Anzac Cove. No one was under any illusion that the task would be easy.
A less formidable series of unconnected trench-lines on the Krithia side of Gully Ravine might have presented a lesser problem had it not been for two difficulties. After the battles for Krithia men were scarce and guns and ammunition were scarcer still, and it was evident that the highest proportion of such resources as they had must be concentrated in the vital sector on Gully Spur where the 29th Division were detailed to make the assault. No other troops could easily be spared to attack inland on their right, and if the assault of the 29th Division was widened, if they were thinned out to attack across both sectors on either side of the ravine, it was doubtful if they could possibly succeed.
Sir Ian Hamilton was not anxious to commit the raw Territorials of 156th Brigade, but there was no one else and he was reluctantly forced to attach them to the 29th Division at the urgent request of its Commander. They would attack on the right of Gully Ravine. ‘If necessary’, a brigade of the 29th Division would support them. But, looking over General de Lisle’s dispositions for the battle, the Corps commander was worried. He was particularly unhappy with the arrangements for artillery support, for almost all the guns and ammunition were to be directed on the 29th Division sector. Only four batteries could be spared to assist the Royal Scots and their comrades in their first experience of battle. They could only hope for the best – but the Corps Commander was not alone in fearing the worst.
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