The Moth and the Mountain

by Ed Caesar

  Parliament sanctioned a dramatic increase in army numbers. Kitchener immediately began his campaign to recruit one hundred thousand young men. In the music halls—the variety theaters that were still wildly popular in Bradford, and around the country—entertainers sang sickly patriotic songs such as “Your King & Country Want You” to attract young men to the cause. Its refrain rang out:

  Oh! we don’t want to lose you, but we think you ought to go,

  For your King and your Country both need you so;

  We shall want you and miss you, but with all our might and main,

  We shall cheer you, thank you, kiss you, when you come back again.

  Astonishingly, nearly half a million British men volunteered within a month. The generation of young Britons who signed up had known nothing but peace in Europe their whole lives. It had been forty-five years since the major powers fought a war. The prospect of a conflict out of the history books seemed almost romantic: set-piece battles, a swift advance to victory, cheers and kisses on return. But the First World War was nothing like any other war that had come before it. Napoléon had no machine guns at the Battle of Waterloo.

  These men weren’t to know that. Those half million recruits, memorialized in Philip Larkin’s poem “MCMXIV”—the lads “grinning as if it were all an August Bank Holiday lark”—signed up with little or no idea of the maelstrom they were about to enter.

  Kitchener’s drive for more soldiers had a particular impact on Bradford and the north of England. Kitchener and the generals believed men would be more likely to enlist if they could serve alongside people they knew—either from their place of work, or from the area where they lived. These units of volunteers became known as the Pals or Chums battalions. As a recruitment tactic, it was a wild success. Battalions were formed from groups of men who shared an employer (the Glasgow Tramways Battalion) or a common heritage (the Tyneside Irish Battalions) or even a pastime (the Sportsman’s Battalions). Most, however, simply joined with men from their area. The city of Manchester alone eventually raised nine Pals battalions. In the first year of the war, Bradford raised two Pals battalions. Officially, they were known as the Sixteenth and the Eighteenth Prince of Wales’s West Yorkshire Regiments. Most people called them the First and Second Bradford Pals.

  The Wilsons knew many young men who filled Bradford’s two Pals battalions. But for many in the city, it was more attractive to join Bradford’s existing territorial, or part-time, army battalion: the First Sixth. This unit, which had begun its life in 1908, was a battalion of pals before the idea had a name. Before the war, its members had spent many wet weekends together, practicing musketry, marching, and the other trades of soldiery, before returning to their jobs in the city on a Monday morning.

  When Britain declared war on Germany, the Wilson boys—Fred, Victor, Maurice, and Stanley—were twenty, nineteen, sixteen, and eleven, respectively. Officially, one had to be eighteen to sign up to the army, and nineteen to serve abroad. Although many British teenagers disregarded these regulations and lied about their ages, it’s clear from military documents that the Wilson family followed the rules. That they did so is unsurprising. Mark Wilson was a staunch Christian, and a children’s rights activist. There was no way a Wilson boy would fight underage.

  In 1914, the two oldest boys, Fred and Victor Wilson, were perfect candidates to serve. Fred, however, did not enlist. The precise reason why is lost to history. Fred had poor eyesight, which may have saved him. He was also a mathematics wizard. Mark Wilson’s textiles firm would have needed Fred at a time when uniforms were more in demand than ever.

  Victor Wilson, however, signed up at Belle Vue Barracks in September 1914, as a private—the lowest rank of common soldier. In the sole remaining photograph of Victor, he is lean and handsome, with a high forehead and wavy hair brushed back. His dark eyes promise mischief and perhaps romance. If somebody said you were looking at the photograph of a minor modernist poet, you would believe them. Victor enlisted in the First Sixth in that initial, crazy rush of recruitment. He served in the trenches before being injured in the leg by shellfire in 1915, then returned to the front line some months later.

  Maurice Wilson had to wait for his eighteenth birthday before he could follow his brother. Counting the days, he clerked at his father’s firm. As Maurice walked a mile or so to work, from his family’s terraced house on Cecil Avenue to the smoking chimney of his father’s mill at Holme Top, he saw how the war was changing the city.

  Before the outbreak of war, Bradford was a thrilling city in which to live. In the summer of 1914, Bradford hosted the Great Yorkshire Show, whose star attraction was the “world’s first passenger air service.” (In fact, the true “world’s first” passenger air service was a short-lived shuttle across Tampa Bay, Florida, between St. Petersburg and Tampa, which had run for a few weeks in the early months of 1914 and had used a Benoist Model XIV plane with a seventy-five-horsepower engine.) It had been a little more than a decade since the Wright Brothers’ first-ever powered flight, in North Carolina. By the end of 1913, there were still only eighty airworthy private craft in Britain. The idea of catching an airplane on a schedule—as you would a train or a tram or a bus—was alien, and wonderful.

  For the three days of the Great Yorkshire Show, the Yorkshire Post and Yorkshire Evening Post newspapers sponsored two Blackburn Type I monoplanes—which had a vast, eagle-like wingspan—to ferry single passengers between Leeds and Bradford, every half an hour: a journey of nine miles. The first flight took off at a little after 10:00 a.m. on the morning of Wednesday, July 22. The pilot, Harold Blackburn, flew with Dorothy Una Ratcliffe, the Lady Mayoress of Leeds, in front of him. When Blackburn’s airplane landed safely at the Quarry Bank sports field in east Bradford a few minutes after takeoff, a cow in a neighboring paddock was so alarmed that it jumped a wall and chased the machine, before being driven off.

  Maurice Wilson saw how the war had made his city gloomier, in almost every sense. As a sixteen- and seventeen-year-old, he walked to work through Horton Park, whose bandstand was no longer thronged with weekend suitors; past the cottage-style roof of the Bradford Park Avenue football stadium, whose excellent team, like all professional clubs, no longer played matches; past pubs that now shut early, at 9:00 p.m., to encourage sobriety among munitions workers; past the yellow-bricked Moravian church, whose choir was short of baritones; and finally past a makeshift infirmary for wounded soldiers. The walk home was dark, too. The city officials dimmed streetlamps early because of the fear of German zeppelin attacks.

  By the time Maurice Wilson signed up, in May 1916, the innocence and glee that had accompanied his brother’s recruitment was gone.

  * * *

  Wilson waited in the fog at Wytschaete. Just after midnight, the noise from the German lines increased. Wilson had already internalized the peculiar and theatrical language of the front line. Trench raids were entertainments; a battle was a stunt or a show. Now, at 2:45 a.m. on April 25, 1918, the curtain rose for his gala performance. The German artillery hammered the British front and support lines with explosives, smoke, and phosgene—a gas that blocked the lungs and suffocated its victims.

  Nothing scared British troops more than the first, panicked shout of “Gas!” At Ypres and at Passchendaele, the First Fifth had experienced the horrors of a German chemical attack firsthand. They knew the signs well: the incongruous scent of moldy hay, then the choking grip of the phosgene, likely to kill anyone who failed to affix his mask in time.

  Wilson and his men wore masks when the gas and artillery attacks came that morning. Noise and smoke engulfed them. Confusion reigned. One officer from the First Sixth battalion, Captain E. V. Tempest, whose soldiers often served alongside those of the First Fifth, kept a diary throughout the conflict and later wrote a lyrical, unsparing book about his experiences. In his recollection of those first few hours of battle, Tempest recalls:

  Telephone communications were broken instantly, and companies were cut off from battalions and
battalions from Brigade Head Quarters.… The night was lit up everywhere with burning farms and bursting shells. Under such a bombardment it seemed incredible that any human being in the forward area could survive to check the onrush of the German infantry.

  Wilson and many others did somehow survive, but the horrors they encountered multiplied. Just as the thick mist was clearing, and the British soldiers removed their gas masks, at around 5:00 a.m. a second bombardment—much more intense even than the first—lit the sky. The German machine guns started up, too. With communications cut between the British headquarters, which was stationed behind the big wood, and the front lines, no orders could be given or received.

  In the next few minutes, the German infantry, clad in their gray uniforms, appeared out of the smoke like ghosts and began a frontal assault on the British. Wilson’s surviving comrades may not have seen the enemy troops until they were right on top of them. The German soldiers brought small field guns up with them, to fire directly at the British positions, and a German airplane also flew low over the British front line, strafing the men of the First Fifth with “belt after belt” of machine-gun fire.

  The British troops, clustered along their weak front line, fought hard but fell in droves. The battalion was formed of four companies: A, B, C, and D. The Germans outflanked and then encircled A, B, and C. By 7:00 a.m., Germans were walking in groups of four down the Wytschaete valley, having broken through the line.

  The men of the First Fifth attempted, desperately, to resist the enemy, and to fight a retreat. Almost every man not taken prisoner was a casualty. No officers from A, B, and C Companies made it back alive, but pockets of men from these companies reportedly attempted to repel the German attack until 7:00 p.m. that evening.

  Wilson was assigned to D Company and stationed north of the big wood. He kept fighting.

  * * *

  Like his brother, Maurice Wilson started his life in the army as a private, in the First Sixth battalion. But he soon showed enough promise to gain an officer’s commission. In the class-obsessed Britain of 1914, army officers came from the higher echelons. They had been to the finest private schools, and the great universities: Oxford and Cambridge. Maurice Wilson was not traditional officer material. He was the middle-class son of a businessman who had worked his way up in Bradford’s textile industry from a factory boy to a mill owner. Maurice Wilson was undoubtedly clever. By the time he left school at sixteen, he spoke French and German fluently. But his ordinary school, Carlton Road Secondary, was a long way from the playing fields of Eton.

  By the time Wilson enlisted, however, so many junior officers had died on the Western Front that the normal rules were discarded. Men such as Wilson were considered “temporary gentlemen” and given commissions as second lieutenants, in charge of platoons of fifty men. Wilson became one of these temporary gentlemen in 1917, and he was also transferred out of his hometown battalion into a neighboring Yorkshire unit, the First Fifth, to bolster its numbers. The army spent several months instructing Wilson in the skills needed to be an officer at a training corps at Oxford University. The average life span of a second lieutenant in the First World War was about six weeks.

  Wilson was nineteen years old when he sailed to France in November 1917. He had missed the Battle of the Somme in 1916, where more than four hundred thousand British troops were killed or wounded. On the first, awful day of that battle, July 1, 1916, twenty thousand British soldiers, and nearly two thousand young men from Wilson’s hometown of Bradford alone, had died, as they climbed out of their trenches and walked in lines into German machine-gun fire. It was, and remains, the worst day in the history of the British army. The Pals battalions were especially badly hit. To J. B. Priestley, a Bradford man who would go on to be the city’s most famous writer, and who also served in France with the West Yorkshire Regiment, the Pals were like “dry moorland grass to which somebody put a match.” Like Priestley, Wilson knew many of the boys lost on July 1, 1916.

  By the time Wilson arrived in France, he had also missed the Battle of Passchendaele by the skin of his teeth. Many troops thought Passchendaele the worst battle of the entire war: a fight for the ridges to the south and east of the town of Ypres, in Flanders, and a bloody, squelching, stop-start slog. The British and German forces both eventually suffered around a quarter of a million casualties each. Heavy rain had turned the Flanders battlefields into bogs of waist-high mud. Injured men drowned in shell holes. For a period of a few weeks, British troops on their way to and from the front line had used a landmark simply known as Incinerated Man: the skeleton of a soldier still at the wheel of a truck that had been struck by a shell, and which had caught fire.

  Maurice Wilson joined the First Fifth on active duty around three weeks after they had lost many of their men, and some of their longest-serving officers, in an attack on Bellevue Spur during the worst month of the Battle of Passchendaele. Morale was understandably low. To make matters worse, the weather was appalling. In December, when Wilson moved to the front line, the battalion was defending a position about two hundred yards east of the village of Broodseinde, swapping duties in advance positions with the First Sixth. The spot was in clear view of the enemy. Men on maneuvers were forced to spend their nights in sodden shell holes. Captain Tempest noted the hardships on the front line as Wilson entered the war:

  It was pointless digging the holes deeper, as they filled with water. If one tried to make them larger, they attracted the attention of the enemy. Almost every attempt at digging resulted in the disturbance of dead bodies, in every stage of decomposition. No fires could be lit; no hot food brought up from behind; water was very scarce owing to the extraordinary difficulties of the carrying parties in such a sea of mud, and the only chance of a hot drink depended on the inhabitants of the shell hole being in possession of Tommies cookers.

  Christmas rolled around, Wilson’s first away from home. The troops who were in the front were given a half day off. They didn’t eat a proper Christmas dinner until five days later, when the battalion was well behind the line, in camp. On New Year’s Eve, there was no great celebration. In previous years, the men at the front had sung, to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne,” “We’re here, because we’re here, because we’re here, because we’re here.” But maybe even that joke had turned sour. This was now the fourth New Year’s Eve that the British army had spent on the Western Front, with hardly any movement forward or back from the positions first established in 1914. A “Neverendian” strain of black humor riddled both the British and German armies. It seemed to many soldiers that the war might simply continue forever. In the summer of 1917, one mathematically adept British officer at the front had made a calculation:

  [He] roughed out the area between the “front” of that date and the Rhine… and divided this by the area gained, on the average, at the [battles of the] Somme, Vimy and Messines. The result he multiplied by the time taken to prepare and fight those offensives, averaged again. The result he got was that, allowing for no setbacks, and providing the pace could be maintained, we should arrive at the Rhine in one hundred and eighty years.

  The war, however, was about to break open.

  * * *

  When the Germany infantry attack began at Wytschaete, Wilson was positioned slightly behind the front line with D Company, north of the big wood. Sometime around dawn, he was swiftly moved with another officer to plug a gap on the fringe of the wood, through which German soldiers threatened to stream. Men died all around him. On his left and right, British machine guns were taken out by the enemy attack. Shells exploded very close.

  Amid this fierce combat, Wilson stayed where he was, now in advance of the British front line. He was isolated and raked by German machine guns, but he continued to fire on the enemy. Exactly how long he stayed in this position is not known, but it must have been at least three hours. The enemy did not advance past his position until after 10:00 a.m.

  Imagine the horror of those hours. The Germans were firing on the British wit
h field guns, as well as machine guns and rifles. Watching a friend hit at close range with a three-inch artillery shell—torn fabric, red mist, instant death—would never leave you.

  Wilson’s courage was profound. For his act of “conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty” he won the Military Cross, one of Britain’s highest awards for valor. The citation explained that “it was largely owing to his pluck and determination in holding this post that the enemy attack was held up.” Other men who served with the First Fifth that day are described as having fought until they exhausted their ammunition. There is every reason to believe Wilson did the same.

  At some point on that bloody morning, with or without ammunition, Wilson was forced to make a decision. He could die where he stood, or he could attempt to retreat. He chose the latter course. Finding the rump of his battalion was not easy. The situation was still chaotic. The few other exhausted survivors from the First Fifth were now mingled with the remnants of the First Sixth from Bradford and the First Seventh from Leeds. These men retreated in pockets, until eventually, late at night, around eighteen hours after the first bombardment, the fighting stopped. That night, an ammunition dump on the British side of the line caught fire and exploded. It was a “magnificent and awe-inspiring spectacle,” Tempest wrote, and “a fitting end to a long and dreadful day.”

  Wilson reached safety, two miles from where he had made his stand. The survivors of the attack at Wytschaete were withdrawn behind the line to a group of huts near the village of Ouderdom. The next morning, a roll was called. Wilson must have looked around him in despair. The German attack had been slowed, but Wilson’s battalion was nearly destroyed. More than 400 of the First Fifth had been killed; 122 were later found to have been taken prisoner. The scraggy remnant of the battalion now numbered only 12 officers and 78 men. It had all happened in one day. So many of his friends were dead: dry moorland grass to which somebody had put a match.