Tommy

by Richard Holmes

  Etonians celebrated 4 June in proper style. Lieutenant C. P. Blacker went to the 1917 dinner with fellow Old Etonians in his battalion, and found 300 guests seated, not by army seniority, but according to the dates when they had been at school. Sadly, the evening got out of control with the sort of high spirits which would have been vandalism (with sore heads and field punishment to follow) had it occurred in a canteen. A speech by Lord Cavan was inaudible; a group climbed onto the table, ‘forming a ram as in Eton football’, and the table collapsed. Eventually ‘everything breakable in and around the room – tables, chairs, bottles, glasses, windows – was systematically smashed’. Blacker’s disgust with the performance made him feel ‘out of gear with my old school’.318

  Music halls played such an important part in pre-war popular culture that it is hardly surprising that they were quickly replicated on the Western Front in the form of divisional concert parties. Some actors were professional, others talented amateurs. The 4th Division’s Follies led the way in December 1914, and soon there were dozens of others, with names like The Volatiles, The Snipers, The Duds, The Pipsqueaks, The Whizzbangs, The Lads and The Verey Lights. Their repertoire was a mixture of songs and sketches, part cribbed from the London music hall and part extemporised to reflect life at the front: men relished sentimentality, popular songs and, of course, actors in drag. Soldiers remarked that some of these were very convincing indeed, although it was acknowledged that getting the shoulders quite right was never easy. In 25/Royal Fusiliers the quartermaster, against all the odds, was transformed into a convincing woman, and had his audience ‘indulging in delightful fantasies that brought them substantial memories of the girls they had left behind in London, Manchester, Glasgow, wherever.’319

  Really good ‘female’ leads were so important that divisional staffs became involved in finding them. Lieutenant Colonel Walter Nicholson, then in 51st Highland Division, tried to swap Private Connell of the Highland Light Infantry, star of the 32nd Division concert party, for two radial machine-gun mountings, and when negotiations broke down, promptly ‘kidnapped’ him, with the army commander’s approval, and transferred him to the divisional artillery. Nicholson thought that The Duds of 17th Division were ‘perhaps the best in the country’. It was his policy to have a show every night, and a new one would open just a day after a divisional move. He noted sadly that his star, Isabelle de Holstuff – alias Private Plumstead – went the way of so many leading ladies, by first showing ‘a tendency to slovenliness’ and then growing conceited. The best of the concert parties ‘reached a high level, thanks to the talent available … But perhaps the standard of the shows and their popularity could be counted as a measure of our mentality under strain; they might have bored us in the piping times of peace.’320 Some officers found the material rather too near the knuckle, but John Reith, who saw The Follies in 1915, thought it ‘quite elaborately done, clever, and thoroughly enjoyable’.321

  Concert parties were more than just a cheap way to entertain the troops. Like songs on the march, they provided an outlet for resentments, and enabled soldiers to take a gentle poke at authority. Private Walkey, a machine-gunner in 1/20th London and talented lyricist until his death at Loos, set new words to a popular song.

  Hullo! Hullo! When’s the next parade?

  Can’t we have a minute to ourselves?

  Five, nine, three: another after tea.

  Oh! oh! oh! they’ve done us properly.

  Hullo! Hullo! What’s their dirty game,

  Working us at ninety in the shade?

  It wasn’t the tale they told when we enlisted,

  Now it’s all parade, parade, parade.

  But though flag-waving patriotism was unpopular, there was plenty of room for divisional pride; 29th Division’s party would sing:

  With a roll of the drums, the division comes

  Hotfoot to the battle’s blast,

  When the good red sign swings into the line,

  Oh! There they’ll fight to the last.322

  So many of the habits of peace slipped easily into war. There were divisional horse shows and race meetings, both popular and well attended. This was partly because they gave drivers and transport men the chance to show their animals off to advantage, and partly because they offered the opportunity of seeing great men in the spotlight, with sturdy quartermasters bumping along in the ‘Stores Stakes’, and rather more horsey officers cracking round with their battalion’s hopes (and a good deal of money) riding with them. In July 1917 Rowland Feilding finished up in hospital, telling his wife that:

  I turned a somersault with my mare over the sandbag wall at the Royal Munster Sports yesterday … straining and tearing some muscles in my back, and breaking a bone or two in my left hand. The last I remember was crawling away from the course, and the soldiers clapping as I picked myself up from the ground. They are always like that.323

  Transport was provided to give men days at the beach, and when the demands of the front permitted, leave centres on the coast could accommodate parties for up to two weeks: Stuart Dolden remembered ‘twelve perfectly glorious days’ at 5th Army Rest Camp near Equihen, Boulogne.324

  But it was the army’s passion for football that chimed most eloquently with the old life. James Jack complained that however tired men claimed to be, they would play football whenever the opportunity arose. Bernard Martin agreed that:

  On every possible occasion the men turned to sport. We had inter-Platoon matches and inter-Company Championships, football most of the year, in summer cricket. We played in any weather, on any condition of ground where we happened to be and at all available times: for instance a match between my company and B Company only a few hours before we started a night trek to relieve a battalion of Warwicks in the front line. I wrote the score on the back of a trench map; we won 3–0, and I added, below, the names of two officers killed and three wounded during the relief.325

  Edward Underhill admitted that a football match was ‘quite good fun’, even if the ball was an odd shape: ‘Soccer, of course, the men only play that.’326

  And there were quieter amusements. Men read voraciously across a literary spectrum of extraordinary breadth. There were the classics: Alan Hanbury Sparrow read Francis Bacon’s Essays at Passchendaele, preferring it to Handley Cross or The Pickwick Papers which he normally carried. Private Norman Gladden enjoyed sentimentality, noting that authors like Charles Garvie and Elinor Glyn were always snapped up from bookshops. Lieutenant Charles Douie carried The Dolly Dialogues, Rider Haggard novels and The Oxford Book of English Verse, C. P. Blacker, who went to war with the two-volume Principles of Psychology, was absorbed, by August 1918, in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Blacker, spotted reading a book by Bertrand Russell while waiting for a train, was at once befriended by the railway transport officer, ‘a distinguished linguist and scholar’ who was working on the proofs of a book by Israel Zangwill. Private Groom ‘found poetry helped … I took my school Golden Treasury [of English Verse] to France. Actually it became invaluable – it was my talisman – so much that when a whiz bang blew my haversack and its contents to smithereens I was windy for weeks until another Golden Treasury arrived from England.’327 P. J. Campbell enjoyed Framley Parsonage because it described such a peaceful existence where getting into financial trouble was the worst thing that could possibly happen: ‘that could not be so bad, I thought, as being FOO on the day of an attack’.328 Stephen Graham saw his comrades read newspapers like the London Mail and London Opinion, and ‘voraciously devour’ the tub-thumping John Bull, while The Times and Morning Post remained ‘comparatively untouched’.329 And against all the odds, the adventure stories of Nat Gould, Jack London and Rudyard Kipling were the three most popular authors in military hospital libraries.

  The army also generated literature of its own. ‘Trench journals’ or ‘trench newspapers’ appeared in ever-increasing numbers from early 1915. They generally started as newssheets published by individual units or formations and ofte
n became sophisticated productions containing announcements, news, a variety of humour, sketches and cartoons. The Fifth Gloster Gazette, for instance, was the journal of 5/Gloucesters, a territorial battalion which served in France in 1915–17, and fought in Italy from November 1917 to September 1918 when it returned to take part in the Hundred Days. The gazette was initially edited by the padre, the Reverend G.F. Helm MC, and one of its most notable contributors was Will Harvey, a talented poet who had joined as a private in 1914 and was commissioned after winning the DCM. Private K. A. Robertson, also later commissioned and awarded the MC, designed the cover and provided much of the artwork. Other contributors, writing under initials or pseudonyms, included Captain R. F. Rubinstein (‘Fibulous’) and Second Lieutenant Cyril Winterbotham (‘C.W.W.’), who was killed the day after submitting his poem The Wooden Cross. Not all contributors were Glosters: Captain W. O. Downs MC, a promising playwright, killed in action, served in 4/Royal Berkshire, and the contributor ‘Emma Kew’ was Lieutenant Gedye of the Bristol Royal Field Artillery, also killed in action.330

  Although The Fifth Gloster Gazette was produced in France till mid-1917, thereafter it was printed in Bristol and shipped to the front. In contrast, The Wipers Times, journal of the 24th Division, was generally printed ‘in a rat infested cellar at Ypres’. Except for the final edition of December 1918 it was never produced outside the front-line area, and ‘at one time the printing press was within 700 yards of the front line and above ground’.331 It was edited by Captain F.J. Roberts of 12/Sherwood Foresters, and its contributors included the poet Gilbert Frankau, an officer in the divisional artillery. The printing press was rescued from a wrecked works in Ypres, and a sergeant in the Foresters, a printer in civilian life, soon restored it to working order, though the third edition was delayed because of ‘the jealousy of our local competitors, Messrs. Hun and Co.’ who ‘brought some of the wall down on our machine’ with a shell. The Wipers Times was unusual in that it was written, edited and printed so close to the front. Most other ‘trench’ journals were actually printed well behind the lines or, indeed, in Britain, and enjoyed a wide circulation amongst families and friends in the unit’s recruiting area as well as in the units themselves.

  Such journals contained announcements of decorations, promotions and casualties: the February 1917 edition of The Fifth Gloster Gazette proudly reported that Private H. W. Voller had been commissioned in the field, adding sadly that he had been ‘since killed in action’. There were genuinely helpful hints on how to fill in the army-issue correspondence card or how to write to a prisoner of war in Germany, and tongue-in-cheek advice, for instance about the need for soldiers standing to attention while holding a dead rat to ensure that the creature’s tail was in line with the seam of the trousers. But what makes them so valuable is the insight they provide into what junior officers, NCOs and men – it is rare to find an editor above the rank of captain, and many contributors were private soldiers – actually thought about the war. Of course there were limits to comment and criticism, but the trench journals of the First World War, with their bottom-up attitudes, were quite different to other war publications, including, for instance, the Gulf War’s Sandy Times – essentially a top-down official publication.

  If The Fifth Gloster Gazette and The Wipers Times are, because of their modern facsimile editions, the best known of the trench journals, they are simply the tip of a mighty iceberg: the war reserve collection in the University Library at Cambridge comprises no less than 118 British and Commonwealth titles. Battalion journals had titles that were baldly descriptive (The London Scottish Regimental Gazette); humorous (The Gasper for the public schools battalions of the Royal Fusiliers or The Mudlark for 1/Bedfords) or historical (The Minden Magazine for the Lancashire Fusiliers). The titles of divisional journals varied from the punnish The Direct Hit (58th London Division) and The Dump (23rd Division) to the more patriotic The Dagger, or London in the Line (56th London Division).

  Strong threads of consistency link trench journals. Overt patriotism was rare, and criticism of the government and its policy common. In January 1916 The GASPER satirised Asquith, then prime minister.

  O Free Man and Noble Man Asquith!

  A peerless Peer were he!

  But he clings to the lime like a principle mime,

  Spouting prodigiously.

  We may go to the wall, but were Asquith to fall

  ’Twere a criminal tragedy!

  Nor did the Labour politician Ramsay Macdonald escape unscathed. In August 1917 The BEF Times described how ‘Flamsey MacBonald’ had addressed a great Labour meeting only to be heckled and booed: ‘Mr Flamsey only looked pained and surprised at the ingratitude of the working man who grudged him his self-appointed task of doing nothing at £400 a year.’

  ‘Are you a victim to optimism?’ inquired The Somme Times of its readers in July 1916.

  You don’t know? Then ask yourself the following questions. 1) Do you wake up in the morning feeling that all is going well for the Allies? 2) Do you sometimes think that the war will end in the next twelve months? 3) Do you consider our leaders are competent to conduct the war to a successful issue? If the answer is ‘yes’ to any one of these questions, then you are in the clutches of that dread disease.

  England, according to The Whizz-Bang of January 1916, was a far-off land ‘where no shells burst and no bullets fly’. The Welsh Division New Year Souvenir for 1917–18 described the war in an alphabet:

  E – why England! For whom we are fighting,

  Tho’ it’s awfully boresome and rarely exciting.

  And yet there was still a regard for the Empire. As late as November 1918 The Dagger assured its readers that the British Empire was founded on hope and humanity, and the Canadian Dead Horse Corner Gazette of October 1915 affirmed that ‘imperialism has ceased to be an empty phrase, it has become an actuality revitalized by national sacrifice’.

  Pay was a constant theme. In July 1916 The Fifth Gloster Gazette set its readers a mock examination which included the question: ‘A munitions worker works 5 hours a day, 5 days a week and draws £5 pay per week. Compare the scale of pay of those who make the shells and those who deliver them.’ The BEF Times of 1 December 1916 declared:

  Here’s to the lads of the PBI,

  Who grin through comfort and danger alike,

  Go ‘over the top’ when the chance comes to strike;

  Though they’re living in Hell they are

  Cheery and gay,

  And draw their stipend of just one bob a day.

  Officers and NCOs were gently sent up. A poet in the Welsh Division described a trench inspection.

  A subaltern stood in a blasted trench

  More like a field well ploughed.

  He cursed old Fritz for his dirty tricks

  And spoke his thoughts aloud:

  ‘The Brigadier comes round today.

  What a lot of faults he’ll find.

  His little book is full of notes

  And “strafes” of every kind.

  "What are these sand-bags doing here?

  Why is this place not clean?

  When did the Primus stove get lost?

  Where has that rifle been?

  Where are your men at work just now

  When did you visit your Posts?

  Why is this cook-house in this state?

  What’s this? – Oh! Lord of hosts!” ’

  In Christmas 1916 the editor of The Dump commented on an unhelpful senior officer.

  I once asked a choleric Colonel

  To write something for this jolonel

  But I’m sorry to tell,

  He replied ‘Go to —’ Well,

  He consigned me to regions infolonel.

  Poetry ranged from doggerel to dramatic and from parody to profundity. When we think of First World War poets we should consider not simply the great and the good, but the thousands of men who found in verse the only way of expressing the inexpressible. The poem The Offside Leader may f
eature in no anthology, but it says a good deal about the way field gunners thought about their horses.

  This is the wish as he told it to me,

  Of Gunner McPherson of Battery B.

  I want no medals or ribbons to wear,

  I’ve done my bit and I’ve had my share,

  Of filth and fighting and blood and tears,

  And doubt and death in the last four years.

  My team and I were among the first

  Contemptible few, when the war clouds burst,

  We sweated our gun through dust and heat

  We hauled her back in the big retreat,

  With weary horses and short of shell

  Turning out backs on them. That was hell.

  That was at Mons, but we came back there,

  With shining horses and shells to spare,

  And much I’ve suffered and much I’ve seen,