Tommy

by Richard Holmes

  Although there were occasional gruelling exceptions (a West Yorkshire battalion spent seventy days in the front line in the Loos sector in 1915, and 13/York and Lancaster fifty-one days in the line on the Somme the following year), from early 1915 there was increasing regularity in the pattern of rotation. Charles Carrington reviewed his diary for 1916 and found that:

  I spent 65 days in the front line trenches, and 36 more in supporting positions close at hand … In addition 120 days were spent in reserve positions near enough to the line to march up for the day when work or fighting demanded, and 73 days were spent out in rest. 10 days were spent in hospital … 17 days … on leave … The 101 days under fire contain twelve ‘tours’ in the trenches varying in length from one to thirteen days. The battalion made sixteen in all during the year … We were in action four times during my … tours in the trenches. Once I took part in a direct attack, twice in bombing actions, and once we held the front line from which other troops advanced. I also took part in an unsuccessful trench raid.72

  The upright and soldierly James Jack was a Cameronian captain in 1914, Sidney Rogerson’s commanding officer in 2/West Yorkshire on the Somme in 1916, and a brigade commander in 1918. Between December 1914 and August 1916, while serving with 1/Cameronians, he spent 141 days in the trenches, ninety in brigade support, twenty-three in brigade reserve, ninety-seven in divisional reserve, seventeen in army reserve, fifteen days travelling, nineteen in hospital and twelve on leave.

  A battalion would usually be ‘warned for duty’ in the trenches two or three days before it was expected to move. The twelve days so well chronicled by Rogerson began in the huts of Citadel Camp, Fricourt, on 7 November 1916 when 2/West Yorkshire received orders to relieve 2/Devon, a forward battalion also in 24th Brigade of 8th Division, on the night of 10/11 November. His battalion’s experience is so typical that there is merit in following its footsteps, and reaching out to reinforce it with other examples as we do so.

  By now it was standard practice to leave a proportion of the battalion out of the line, under the second in command, to act as a basis for reconstitution if the worst happened, and on this occasion one of the company commanders and two company sergeant majors (including Rogerson’s sergeant major, CSM Scott) were amongst those left behind. On 8 November the battalion moved up to an intermediate position, Camp 34, between Bernafay and Trônes Woods. Normally for a daylight move a battalion would march in column of route – with the men in ranks of four, shaking out into ‘artillery formation’, with platoons more widely spaced, when it came within the range of German medium guns. But here the tracks were too poor to permit this, and so the battalion marched in Indian, or single, file. Rogerson did not like it, observing that:

  A very comforting sense of comradeship can be developed by tramping along in fours. There is a sense of close company; the ability to talk to your neighbour, even to sing with him. There is the inevitable swing and rhythm of the column. But put men into Indian file and this corporate cheerfulness evaporates. They develop a spiritless shamble with the whole line constantly contracting and expanding, alternatively treading on one another’s heels, then panting to recover lost distance.73

  There was no camp ready when they arrived, because the battalion which should have vacated the tents had been so badly knocked about on its tour of the line that the survivors were ‘weary and shocked in body and spirit, and too dejectedly apathetic to raise themselves to any effort …’. Although Rogerson’s men were ‘in a most cheerful mood’, he observed that as a man got closer to the front: ‘His vision changed, he began to lose his wider view …’. Any sense of the scale of the enterprise disappeared, and men could not tell you what the battalion’s plan was: ‘but ask them to describe the Kirchner pictures on the wall of their dug out, or the particular brand of bully beef which hung on the wire, and they will find little difficulty’. Two of his soldiers scrounged ‘a huge balloon tarpaulin which proved big enough of itself to house more than half the company’. Company headquarters was installed in a tent, duckboards were pilfered from the nearby Royal Engineers’ dump, and a brazier was lit. ‘The day closed with an issue of rum,’ recalled Rogerson. ‘The first stage of the relief was over.’

  Men were kept busy the next day, 9 November, with ‘arms drill, bayonet fighting, platoon drill, bomb cleaning, kit inspections’, partly to prevent them from vegetating under their shelters and partly to help integrate men who had joined 2/West Yorkshire at Fricourt, many of them Tyneside miners with heavy Geordie accents. James Jack, spick and span as ever (‘Always die like a gentleman: clean and properly dressed’), briefed his company commanders in the battalion headquarters dugout, a short length of roofed-over German trench with a table and a couple of wire-covered frames which served as beds or chairs. A and B Companies were to hold the front line with C and D in close support, and Jack took the company commanders forward at 5.00 on the morning of the 10th to look at the ground in the dawn light so that they would have a clear idea of it by the time their companies arrived under their seconds in command. Guides from the Devons met them just behind the front and kept up a helpful patter:

  It’s not easy to find in the darkness … In daylight it’s all right. You follow this track till you come to a dead Boche. Here he be, zur! … Then you have to look for a white tape – here, zur – and he leads you roight up to behind the old front line. But it’s easy to go wrong at noight.74

  They crossed a low valley carpeted with dead, khaki outnumbering field grey by three to one, and reached the Devons’ position where Rogerson was given a mug of tea. It reeked of petrol: the same tins were used for both liquids, and although petrol tins should have been burnt out to get rid of any dregs this was not always done. The Devon company commander showed Rogerson the position: there were two companies forward, in a very poor trench, on newly-captured ground, touching on the inner flank but with their outer flanks in the air. The enemy main line was a thousand yards away on the Transloy-Bapaume road, but there were Germans in improvised positions much closer. The mud was so thick that it took an hour to walk a few hundred yards. And there was nothing to see: ‘just mile upon mile of emptiness, with never a house or tree, a hedge or spot of green to break the austere monotony …’.

  The takeover went well. The company came up in single file under Captain Maclaren, its Canadian second in command. The company sergeant major had been left behind, and so Sergeant Chamberlain was ‘acting up’. But as Maclaren stepped aside to remove his jerkin a single shell – a random ‘whiz-bang’ from a German 77-mm field gun – fell just where he had been standing and killed Chamberlain outright. Maclaren took his papers and identity disc and moved on before the last man in the line had time to close up and discover the reason for the temporary stoppage. There was a hasty handover by the Devons and the incomers signed for the trench stores ‘which they could not see, much less count’.

  Once established, the company fell into the familiar pattern of line-holding, with capricious danger, hard work and boredom equally mixed. For the remainder of the first night it was important to get the trenches as well dug as possible. Rogerson’s company headquarters, a hundred yards behind the front trench, was too far back for him to control the company properly, so he posted Maclaren forward with orders to ‘dig like blazes all night and lie doggo all day’. A soldier from a recent draft was hit by a stray bullet and sent back as ‘walking wounded’. But the work progressed: before dawn Corporal Buggy Robinson’s men had their trench down to a full seven feet. The subaltern commanding A, the adjoining company, had disappeared (no sign of him was ever found), and Second Lieutenant Skett of B, going forward in an effort to find him, was killed. He was immediately buried ‘as reverently as we could in the circumstances, digging a grave between bursts of machine gun fire in the parados of the forward trench’.

  Half an hour before daybreak the company stood to. The procedure, its name a contraction of standing to one’s arms, meant that:

  all troops in the line stood in the
ir appointed places, their rifles in their hands, or immediately convenient, with bayonets fixed, ready for any dawn action on the part of the enemy. When it was fully day and the dangerous half-light past, the order would come to ‘stand down and clean rifles’. This procedure was strict and binding anywhere in the forward zone, under any circumstances whatever. The same routine was observed at dusk. So that hour occurring twice in the twenty-four, of ‘stand-to’, was one of peculiar significance and there was attached to it a degree of solemnity, in that one was conscious that from the sea dunes to the mountains, everywhere, on the whole front the two opposing lines stood alertly, awaiting any eventuality.75

  Lieutenant C. P. Blacker of 2/Coldstream Guards thought that the risk of attack was ‘questionable’, but added: ‘A more cogent reason was that, attack or no attack, troops should be thoroughly alerted and put on their toes at daybreak and nightfall. During stand-to everyone stands in the fire-bays, alert and at the ready with bayonets fixed.’76 Platoon and company commanders would visit their men; signallers would check communications and clear the debris of the previous twelve hours from their tables or alcoves, and company sergeant majors, upon whom so much of the minutiae of company administration depended, would check things like reserve ammunition stores and latrines. They would take the opportunity to ensure that a new platoon commander or weak sergeant felt that subtle mix of encouragement laced with gentle sarcasm. Different battalions had different rules, but in some at times like this, the sergeant major was no longer ‘sir’ to the non-commissioned members of the company, but ‘major’ to his platoon sergeants and section commanders, as formality relaxed but discipline remained. ‘All set, Major,’ was how Corporal John Lucy of the Royal Irish Rifles responded to a front-line order from his CSM.77 A young officer in 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers:

  feeling none too sure of himself as the stream of shells swished overhead and burst behind … was immensely heartened by the sight of his CSM, Dealing, leaning at ease over the parapet and looking round. ‘See anything, Sergeant-Major?’ he asked with what unconcern he could put into his voice. ‘It appears to me, sir, that there’s sweet damn-all.’78

  After morning stand-down men cleaned their rifles, with section commanders ensuring that no more than half the weapons were stripped at the same time, and ate their breakfast. Rogerson enjoyed ‘a hearty meal of “Maconochie” – tinned meat and vegetables – eaten cold and washed down with a tea-cup full of rum.’ Lieutenant Colonel Jack appeared – although it was an unsound practice for visitors to arrive during stand-to, and some units banned all movement at that time – to tell Rogerson to take command of the orphaned A Company in addition to his own, and to leave him with a new subaltern to replace Skett, alive at dusk but buried before dawn.

  By now men’s nostrils had become accustomed, though never used to, the smell of the line. Charles Carrington wrote that: ‘The smell of burnt and poisoned mud – acrid is, I think, the right epithet – was with us for months on end, and through it one could usually distinguish a more biotic flavour – the stink of corrupting human flesh.’79 Frank Hawkings recalled the ‘penetrating and filthy stench which assailed our noses and filled the atmosphere – a combination of mildew, rotting vegetation and the stink which rises from the decomposing corpses of men and animals. This smell seems to be a permanent fixture in the firing line and there is no mistaking it.’80 The much-decorated Adrian Carton de Wiart never lost his romantic view of the war, but even he admitted that: ‘My worst memory was the stench of putrefying bodies, for I could smell them still, and though death may be sublime on a battlefield, it is certainly not beautiful.’81 Eric Hiscock reflected grimly on the smells that assailed him on his first night in the line.

  That night we lit candles and brewed strong tea from chlorinated water poured from an old petrol can (the heat came from a strange concoction in a can labelled ‘Tommy’s Cooker’) and the fumes from this emergency fuel mingled with chloride, petrol, and the smell of decaying flesh wafting from Nomansland through the blanket door of the dugout. Those famous roses of Picardy seemed a long way away, and probably stank.82

  The presence of unburied dead and discarded food encouraged rats. They scuttled along trenches and down dugout steps, crouched expectantly on timbers and rifled men’s kit like the most experienced and persistent of looters. Their familiarity with human beings produced contempt. In a billet, Lieutenant Roe discovered:

  Corporal Arthur Major [who had been asleep] was sitting up in the straw with a fully grown rat swinging from his nose with his teeth in the cartilage. We had already experienced rats nibbling away at the back of our hair … The lighting was elementary, a couple of hurricane ‘butties’ and a torch or two and I was momentarily taken aback. Clearly I could not shoot the rat with my 0.45 inch revolver in such a confined space and equally clearly I could only open the teeth and free them from the cartilage if the rat was first killed. There was only one solution, so I borrowed [Sergeant] Appleford’s bayonet and got on with the job.83

  They were cunning: when men took to hanging their food from stout cord attached to dugout beams the rats ‘soon learned to walk along the cord and pull up the food with one of their front paws’. Stuart Dolden described their depredations in the Armentières sector in 1917.

  At the rear of the trenches there were huge holes from which earth had been taken to fill the sandbags which formed the parapets. These holes filled up with water, and at night one could see the snouts of rats as they pushed their way across. They grew fat on the food they pilfered from us, and anything they could pick up in and around the trenches; they were bloated and loathsome to look on. We were filled with an instinctive hatred of them, because however one tried to put the thought out of one’s mind, one could not help feeling that they fed on the dead. We waged ceaseless war on them and, indeed, they were very easy prey because owing to their nauseating plumpness they were slow of foot. We would wait and watch for them as they left the water and climbed awkwardly to the bottom of the trench. Then with a run we would catch them squarely with a mighty kick and there would be one less to batten on us.

  The officers on their nightly rounds would fire on them with their revolvers and in the morning it would be a common sight to see disembowelled rats lying amongst our barbed wire.84

  A gunner forward observation officer found a monstrous rat blocking his view.

  It sat just out of arm’s reach and washed. I shouted at it, flicked mud at it, threw pebbles at it and not the slightest heed was taken. Eventually in desperation I fetched my stick and, measuring the distance carefully, was able to give it a very violent jab in the middle. It then moved to one side and continued to wash.

  Eventually he shot it with his revolver.85 But such is the whimsical perversity of the British soldier that even the much-reviled rat could sometimes touch his heart. One platoon found a three-legged, one-eyed rat, so obviously a companion in adversity that, christened Albert, it became their pet.

  On that first day in the line, Rogerson had to dissuade one of his officers from going to look for his brother, killed three weeks before in nearby Dewdrop Trench: even if his body was found, it would probably have been terribly mangled. While looking across the parapet Rogerson was narrowly missed by a sniper: ‘a deafening clop’ in his right ear showed just how good the man’s aim had been. An artillery forward observation officer with a signaller and drum of cable arrived to spot for a 6-inch battery shelling a nearby German position. ‘I was not disposed very charitably for him,’ admitted Rogerson, ‘as so far we had gone almost unmolested, and experience had taught us that any form of artillery offensiveness promptly evoked retaliation which as often as not fell on the PBI.’86

  The British shelling induced some Germans to bolt, and the newly-arrived Second Lieutenant Cropper, shooting fast with a soldier acting as his loader, hit four or five of them. Cropper had been commissioned from Sandhurst the year before, showed ‘a surprising confidence in one so young (he was not more than twenty)’ and was to be killed as
the battalion’s adjutant in March 1918. Surprisingly, there was no retaliation. Buggy Robinson formed up to ask permission to loot German dead behind the position (he made a tidy living out of selling souvenirs to the Army Service Corps) and Rogerson agreed to turn a blind eye provided he agreed to bring back paybooks and identity discs from British dead.

  A ration party arrived, carrying sandbags full of bread, tinned bully beef, jam, biscuits, water and rum. They had lost two men killed on the way up. ‘The ration carriers’ was a most unenviable task, as thankless as it was dangerous’, thought Rogerson. ‘Rarely in those days did they complete their double journey without casualties. Occasionally the whole party was wiped out while their company waited, parched and famished, for the water and food scattered about the shell holes.’87 In 1915 Frank Richards had been carrying rations up to the front with a ration party which included Private Bolton. One of Bolton’s puttees came undone and they paused while he did it up and the rest of the party went on. No sooner had they moved off than there was heavy shelling just ahead: they saved themselves by taking cover in what they soon discovered was a latrine trench. When the shelling stopped they found their way forward to their own company and reported to Lieutenant Richardson.

  We met Mr Richardson, who was pleased to see us: the majority of our ration party had been killed by the barrage on the road. Bolton’s puttees had undoubtedly saved us. Mr Richardson was holding his nose and inquiring what was the matter with us, as we smelt like polecats. We explained to him what had happened, but that anyway we had saved the bread.88

  It was typical of the caprice of front-line life that Bolton was killed six weeks later trying to dismantle German shells ‘which we used to sell to men in the Back Areas who were not coming in the line’.