Tommy

by Richard Holmes

  ‘I don’t see that you can do anything,’ I answered slowly. ‘What can you do? Besides, I don’t see that S—’s really to blame. He must have been half mad with excitement by the time he got to that trench. I don’t suppose he ever thought what he was doing. If you start a man killing, you can’t turn him off again like an engine. After all, he is a good man. He was probably half off his head.’

  ‘It wasn’t only him. Another did exactly the same thing.

  ‘Anyway, it’s too late to do anything now. I suppose you ought to have shot both on the spot. The best thing now is to forget it.’

  ‘I dare say you’re right.’177

  An experienced sergeant in Fred Hodges’s battalion, wounded, his platoon cut off by a box barrage and badly outnumbered, told his men: ‘You can’t do anything, lads. Put up your hands and cry Kamerad.’178 Prompt surrender saved their lives. On 28 March 1918 the Rain brothers, both privates in the Queen’s Westminsters, realised that their position had been encircled – a nearby company of the London Rifle Brigade, seeing the way things were going, had already given in ‘with practically no resistance’ – and concluded that surrender was the best option. They dumped their kit in their trench, and then walked over the parapet with their hands high above their heads.

  A German officer motioned us with his walking stick to the rear. It was with some difficulty that we found our way to the German trenches, the ground being almost unrecognisable. The place was crowded with Germans coming across in full marching order, who took little notice of us, & seemed extremely jubilant at their so-called victory.179

  Particularly detested adversaries might well be killed on the spot: we have already seen the fate of the Minenwerfer man who fell into the hands of the Royal Welch at Fricourt. When Alan Hanbury Sparrow’s battalion was clearing a village in 1914 it was ordered that all concealed snipers and machine-gunners were to be killed out of hand: ‘the only way to stop it is to let these fellows realize it means certain death’.180 Some Germans lay up in shell holes on the Somme as the mid-September attack rolled over them.

  These scattered Germans were always a nuisance. A single man would lie in a shell hole and be passed over, and would then calmly snipe runners, or any single or couple of men who approached him. To a bigger party he would surrender if in danger of being discovered, and if it was not convenient to detach a man to take the prisoner back he would often be told to get back himself, but at the first opportunity he would slip into another shell hole and start sniping again.

  Lieutenant Stephen Stokes, Welsh Guards, was grenaded by one of these men, but the bomb left him uninjured. It was the German’s last weapon, and he then tried to surrender:

  but Stokes refused to accept it, and without argument shot him. It may be argued that it requires brave men to do these deeds, but as brave men they must be prepared to accept the logical consequences of their action.181

  And there were periods when men were disinclined to accept almost any sort of surrender. The German gas attack of April 1915 caused widespread resentment amongst British and French alike, and it was not a good time for a German to be captured. Captain Arthur Smith saw few prisoners then, ‘because most of them were killed before they had a chance to surrender & also the British soldier is none too keen to make prisoners of them after this gas business’.182 Captain Lord Stanhope saw a French general interview a prisoner, discover that he had been involved in the gas attack, and order. ‘Sergeant major… take a file of men and take this man down to the wall at the bottom of the garden.’. 183 Tempers had worn thin on the Somme by 26 July, as Graham Greenwell wrote: ‘feelings run a bit too high to make the unwounded prisoner’s lot a happy one. A whole crowd who came towards our own trenches with their hands up were mown down by their machine guns as well as ours.’184 In April 1917 a group of German prisoners detained in a quarry just behind the Arras front unwisely applauded a successful counterattack, and were immediately grenaded by their infuriated escort. And while most front-line soldiers had a healthy scepticism about tales of German barbarism, rare first-hand experience of real atrocities put iron into the soul. In November 1918 Guy Chapman’s company:

  Went back to Louvignes… We buried those who had died at Ghissignies. The faces of the section killed in the orchard had been mutilated by the enemy. The instrument, a knife lashed to a stick, was found beside a corpse, the eyes of which had been gouged out.185

  Simply having his surrender accepted did not guarantee a man’s life. Both sides sent men captured in major attacks back across No Man’s Land under escort. Often there was a barrage falling between the high-water mark of the attack and friendly trenches, and escorts sometimes concluded that it was too dangerous to take their prisoners back, and killed them. Crozier believed that: ‘The British soldier is a kindly fellow and it is safe to say, despite the dope, seldom oversteps the mark of barbaric propriety in France, save occasionally to kill prisoners he cannot be bothered to escort back to his lines.’186 Sometimes prisoners were killed by accident. The war diary of 10/Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers tells how, on 1 July 1916, prisoners taken by the first attacking wave were so anxious to reach the safety of the British line that they ran back, collided with the second assaulting wave coming forward, ‘and many were bayoneted in the heat of the moment’.

  But sometimes it was deliberate. Frank Richards saw one of his comrades escorting six German prisoners towards Clapham Junction on the Menin Road during Third Ypres. The man left him in no doubt as to what was to happen.

  ‘Look here, Dick. About an hour ago I lost the best pal I ever had, and he was worth all these six Jerries put together. I’m not going to take them far before I put them out of mess.’…

  Some little time later I saw him coming back and I knew it was impossible for him to have reached Clapham Junction and returned in time… As he passed me again he said: ‘I done them in as I said, about two hundred yards back. Two bombs did the trick.’ He had not walked twenty yards beyond me when he fell himself: a shell-splinter had gone clean through him.

  Richards remarked that while he had heard of such things happening, this was the only case that he could vouch for, and added that ‘the loss of his pal had upset him very much’.187

  Fury at friends lost could indeed drive moderate men over the edge. At Ypres in 1917 Norman Gladden watched: ‘two of our runners sniping at German prisoners… Both were normal, kindly fellows in ordinary times, loving fathers of families… the particular incident was unusual in my experience, the aberration of individuals under incalculable stress.’188 An ‘old time sergeant’ in Stephen Graham’s Scots Guards battalion approached his officer, who was ‘a poet, and wrote some very charming lyrics and had a taste in art,’ saluted and asked: ‘Leave to shoot the prisoners, sir?’ He declared that it was to avenge his brother’s death, and duly shot the Germans one after the other. Some men approved, but others were clearly shocked.189 And there were soldiers who enjoyed killing, in a boyish, destructive, self-willed way. On 10 June 1915 one private soldier wrote that:

  I saw a Hun, fairly young, running down the trench, coming down the trench, hands in the air, looking terrified, yelling for mercy. I promptly shot him. It was a heavenly sight to see him fall forward. A Lincoln officer was furious with me, but the scores we owe wash out anything else.190

  Such incidents demonstrate just how much depended on officers setting a standard of behaviour. Some battalions had an unofficial policy of discouraging the taking of prisoners. Private Arthur Hubbard of the London Scottish told his mother from the Somme that:

  We had strict orders not to take prisoners, no matter if wounded. My first job was when I had finished taking some of their wire away, to empty my magazine on 3 Germans that came up out of one of their deep dugouts, bleeding badly, and put them out of their misery. They cried for mercy, but I had my orders, they had no feeling whatever for us poor chaps…191

  Such cases were the exception rather than the rule, and even a hard man like Frank Crozier insisted that prisoners
should be protected.

  On 1 July 1916 he watched ‘an advancing crowd of field grey… fall like grass before the scythe’ and forcefully intervened when he could see that they were prisoners.192 But he admitted that there were times when it was simply not possible to accept surrenders. While supervising the collection of wounded from the front line on the night of 1 July 1916 he recalled how he was

  suddenly challenged by a German sentry. I pull out my revolver, fire and miss him; but my orderly, who is behind me, sums up the situation and fires a Very light pistol he is carrying, hitting the Boche in the head and blowing it off. There is another German behind who puts up his hands and shouts ‘Kamerad’. The dark is lit up by the burning German whose uniform is on fire. We can take no chances, so I kill the other German with my second round.193

  When the fury had passed, men could be extraordinarily kind to prisoners. Henry Williamson retained one dominating image of breaking the Hindenburg line in 1918. It was:

  the sight of a Saxon boy crushed under a shattered tank, moaning ‘Mutter, Mutter, Mutter,’ out of ghastly grey lips. A British soldier, wounded in the leg, and sitting near by, hears the words, and dragging himself to the dying boy, takes his cold hand and says ‘All right, son, it’s all right, Mother’s here with you.’194

  Ernest Parker led a party which captured a German in a night raid near Ypres, and: ‘When we arrived at the Canal bank dugouts… the men fell out with their prisoner to have breakfast… we were amused to discover the troops regaling the German prisoner with rum and cigarettes’.195 Edward Vaughan captured a bedraggled group of Germans near Langemarck on 27 August 1917. He could not spare a man to escort them back, ‘so I put them into shell holes with my men who made a great fuss of them, sharing their scanty rations with them’.196 And when Crozier’s men captured two German electricians near Cambrai in 1917, his batman, David Starrett, at once started a conversation with them in pidgin French, gave them cigarettes and tried to scrounge them some food.

  Starrett (to the cook) ‘Have you got some tea and steak for these two Jerries?’

  Selbwy: ‘No, not *** likely; there’s not enough for ourselves.’

  Starrett ‘We can’t let them starve.’

  Selbwy: ‘Well, you’ve got some tea and steak yourself. Give ’em yours.’

  The prisoners got their tea and beefsteak, some bread, margarine and jam. And they devoured the food like hungry hounds.197

  Starrett’s kindness was handsomely rewarded, because the prisoners then revealed that there was a large booby trap in the cellar: had they been summarily executed it would never have been discovered till it destroyed Crozier’s headquarters.

  MORALE AND DISCIPLINE

  The glue which holds armies together has a complex and variable composition, which includes not only major components like belief in a nation’s war aims and hostility towards the enemy, but small, and often more powerful, ones like the bonds that link men in their sections, companies and battalions. The formal structure of the military hierarchy, backed by the constraints of discipline, also plays its part, and wise leaders recognise that the stick of discipline must work alongside carrots such as sport, entertainment, decorations and leave.

  When a man joined the army he became subject to a code of discipline enshrined in the annual Army Act and King’s Regulations for the Army, a legal code explained by The Manual of Military Law. The latter emphasised that ‘in all times and in all places, the conduct of officers and soldiers as such is regulated by military law’.198 It was pervasive and intrusive, and created a wide range of offences which had no civil equivalents. Although discipline had a wholly formal aspect, it was hedged about with unofficial sanctions. Thus while it was an offence under military law for a superior to strike an inferior, many units tolerated unofficial violence. Captain Gerald Burgoyne told his company NCOs in 1914 that ‘I could not be bothered with petty crime, they must make the men obey them, how I did not care; and that I would back them up in all they did. ‘ Not long afterwards he saw a fatigue party, ‘the men all over the place, no discipline, and the corporal in charge, useless… I ran out and gave him two under the jaw.’ And when a man was late on parade, pleading that ‘I was just getting a drop of tea wetted,’ Burgoyne ‘lifted him a couple of the best and kicked him till he ran.’199

  In December 1914 a company quartermaster sergeant in 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers found that a corporal – ‘a smart-looking man but a poor non-commissioned officer’ – had been seen striking a brave but scruffy soldier. The company quartermaster sergeant duly laid him out. The corporal complained of assault, but the company commander decided that justice would be done if the CQMS knocked the corporal down once more.200 Corporal Charles Arnold was cheeked by a man in his section, but ‘instead of putting him in the guard room which was the right place for him I gave him a good hiding… Perhaps you may call me a cruel bounder [but] the fellow thanked me afterwards because if I had put him in the guard room he would have got about three months imprisonment.’201 Unofficial punishments were often winked at by officers. In 1914 Captain Lord Stanhope’s company contained a man who was:

  always late and always filthy, and the men disliked him as much as I did. I suggested one day that when he came up for punishment that the company should see that he washed properly at the baths. On the next visit that we made, I heard the most frightful yells and, looking round the corner from my bath, found the men cleaning him with a hard scrubbing brush which was followed by a pail of nearly boiling water.202

  Some regular NCOs maintained that they did not need to go to these lengths: it was possible to ‘sweat a man’ quite legally so that he would get ever deeper into trouble and finish up in military prison.

  A soldier of the rank of corporal or below formally charged with an offence (rather than being simply cuffed round the head or being told to clean out the latrines) would appear before his company commander. The company commander might either deal with it himself, or remand the soldier to the commanding officer. Fines (for instance, the second offence of drunkenness rated 2/6d and the third 5 shillings) and periods of CB (confined to barracks) were the most common penalties at this level. ‘Company orders’ (‘company memoranda’ for the Guards) could be very rough justice indeed, with a presumption of innocence often replaced by the unstated conviction that the man would not have been charged if he was not guilty. In 1917 Private William Albery, under training in England, was brought up before his company commander for a trivial misdemeanour.

  ‘Kep orf.’ Quick march, Halt. Left Turn. Company Commander. ‘Have you anything to say?’

  ‘Please Sir –’

  ‘Hold your noise’ shouted the sergeant, ‘Seven days CB’ ordered the captain. ‘Seven days CB’ echoed the sergeant. So that was that.203

  In addition to being confined to barracks ‘CB’ involved performing ‘fatigue duties to the fullest possible extent, with a view to relieving well-conducted soldiers therefrom’.204 And there were extra parades, including pack drill, under the provost sergeant, who supervised the regimental police. Harry Ogle experienced it himself:

  Seven soldiers, in full marching order but without rifles, file through a gate and approach the burly figure of the Provost Sergeant, who stands at ease, his silver-topped cane under his left arm in the middle of a small field. The straggling party has nearly reached him when suddenly he springs to attention and yells at the nearest man: ‘You there, right marker, Halt!’ and then to the remainder, ‘Fall in on the left of the marker at the double. Halt! Answer your names.’ The Provost Sergeant delivers every order and every homily in a loud hoarse yell, without the least sign of strain or even effort, and without a pause for either breath or punctuation. There is seldom more than ten paces marched without either a change of direction or formation. ‘Into file, right turn. Quick march. On the left form squad. Forward. When you joined the army you joined a body of MEN. If you behave like kids you TAKE THE CONSEQUENCES. About turn. By the left. Change direction left. Left form. Forwar
d.’205

  A soldier who went before the commanding officer appeared on battalion orders, this time with the regimental sergeant major marching in the capless prisoner between a two-man escort. The CO’s powers of punishment were wider than those of a company commander: he could detain a man, or award him Field Punishment No. 1, for up to twenty-eight days, and could reduce corporals and lance corporals to the ranks. A man could elect for trial by court martial, or be remanded by the CO, and senior NCOs and officers alike were sent for court martial for all but the most minor offences, for the commanding officer could neither imprison them nor deprive them of their rank.

  Flogging in the army had been abolished in peacetime in 1868, on active service in 1881 and in military prisons as recently as 1907. The old army believed that there remained a requirement for a campaign punishment which was exemplary and yet did not result in an individual escaping from duty. The result was Field Punishment No. 1, which could be awarded by either a CO or a court martial. A prisoner sentenced to it forfeited his pay, could, as the Manual of Military Law explained, be kept in fetters or handcuffs so as to prevent his escape, and ‘may be attached for a period or periods not exceeding two hours in any one day to a fixed object, but he must not be so attached during more than three out of four consecutive days, nor during more than twenty-one days in all’. He could be subjected to ‘labour, employment and restraint’ as if he was undergoing a sentence of hard labour. Field Punishment No. 2 was precisely the same, but did not include the daily attachment to a ‘fixed object’.206