Tommies: The British Army in the Trenches

by Rosie Serdiville

  Where ground permitted, the trench would be dug down some 8 feet, and would be about 12 wide. A shelf or firestep was built in to the forward-facing flank to form a fighting platform. Sandbags were used to form a parapet and, to the rear, a parados. The former was generally lower than the former so defenders’ profiles would be broken up and thus less exposed to snipers. Distances between the opposing lines could be half a mile or only a matter of yards.

  George Hilton, 2nd Battalion, KOSB, was born in 1872 and served in the ranks for eight years before being commissioned in 1900 as a second lieutenant in DCLI. He then joined KOSB as lieutenant in 1905 and by December 1916 was a major. At 43, Hilton was a relatively old man. Very much a career soldier, he was sent out at the turn of the year. ‘3 January: the enemy was about 22 yards distant and during the time we were changing threw up flares by means of pistols, these burn very brightly and the men had to crouch until the light burned down … we were sniped a very little during the night.’

  The trench sides, even in firm dry chalk upland, would not stand without support. Timber and corrugated iron had to be brought in and fatigue parties kept busy hour after exhausting hour, maintaining the structure. ‘5 January: The dugouts are in a field north of a farm. It is a very large farm and a pity to see it in this condition. There is a petrol engine here just installed and it looks like being ruined … lots of tobacco out hanging up, of course it will be ruined too.’ ‘9 January: We marched to the trenches and I took over a trench on the left of the road. It was a perfect maze of trenches and very difficult to understand. Fryer and myself went to shelled out Smelly Pig Farm and got some straw and tried to make things comfortable.’

  A trench was never a purely linear feature. If it were, once penetrated, the enemy, gaining a foothold, could rake the entire length. Instead, they were built as an alternating system of projecting fire-bays linked by traverses. To attack such a trench meant ‘bombing up the traverses’. An attacking section would be divided between bombers, grenade throwers and bayonet men. The former lobbed their bombs over the fire-bay while the latter rushed the traverse ready to deal with any survivors who might have fight left in them, a dreadful attritional slogging match. Snipers were a constant and deadly menace. ‘10 January: The enemy started sniping us and when I got back to my trench I found Fryer had been shot dead. It gave me quite a nasty turn. I fear he had been looking up and had got an unlucky shot.’

  No battalion spent all its time in the trenches. Service in the line was followed by a period in reserve, punctuated by welcome, if all too brief, spells of relative repose. Hilton observed that a poor billet merited more censure than an ill-sited or badly finished trench: ‘12 January: The billet in the convent isn’t all that could be desired. It is strange how one exclaims over a bare room when one has been in the open.’ Minor inconveniences in the daily attrition of death and disease often rankled: ‘17 January: Had to do the cooking as my new servant has gone sick. Troops are not standing this bad weather.’ Out of the line periods in support or even at rest were marked by drill, parades and sport: ‘26 January: Had a company parade this morning near the asylum, something for the men to do; football match in the evening and paid out the men.’

  Death in battle was not the only hazard. Major actions were relatively rare but random shelling, sniping and sheer bad luck ensured a steady flow of casualties whenever the battalion was ‘up’: ‘18 January: We had a very bad time today, the Germans shelled all day; I lost one killed and four wounded. The minen-werfers were very busy and about thirty of them fell in and around my trenches but did little damage, beyond frightening one platoon’.

  An indispensable feature of the trench-fighter’s troglodyte existence was the dugout. Generally, this limited accommodation was reserved for officers whilst ORs had to scrape shelters or ‘funk-holes’ in the sides of the trench. In the stygian, rat-infested gloom of the dugout, small comforts carried great weight: ‘20 January: saw a very neat stove today and have sent to Army & Navy Stores for one, hope it will arrive in time for our next go of trenches.’ Happily it did: ‘4 February: Found my little primus stove very useful.’

  Mail order was not always necessary. Parcels from home were a way for family and friends to remind soldiers that they were missed and cared for. Collecting and paying for comforts became a national activity. Businesses were quick to pick up on the trend. Adverts for morphine ampoules, complete with syringes, were placed by Boots the Chemist, whilst newspapers abounded with ads for useful gadgets like that primus stove, preparations to kill lice and tinned cakes.

  During the third week of February the KOSB marched up to Ypres: ‘28 February: I went to 38 & 39 trenches this time. The Germans shelled us all day but only wounded one man. We had to work like niggers to get the trenches in any sort of order. The communication trench was awful.’ By mid-March an attack on high ground near St. Eloi was being proposed but did not proceed. They did not entirely escape the attentions of the Kaiser’s increasingly potent air force: 12 April: ‘Zeppelins came over last night and dropped about half a dozen bombs. We could distinctly see the thing. The bombs did no damage at all.’

  Within a month, they were being readied for an attack on Hill 60. This feature was entirely man made, a conical mound of spoil, left from railways construction. The heap rises some 60 metres; forming an artificial spur to the Messines Ridge where the first British mine of the war was blown by Lt. White RE on 17 February 1915. From the beginning of March, 173rd Tunnelling Company, RE, had begun digging a series of three tunnels beneath the enemy line. It was filthy, dangerous and exhausting work, the tunnellers regularly disinterring the rotting remains of French and German dead. The explosion timed for 19.05 on 17 April flung a vast column of debris into the spring skies and the British attack swept forward, killing or capturing the shocked and stunned defenders for, by 1915 standards, very modest loss.

  A 1915 advert for Sunlight Soap, directly appealing to families back home wanting to send useful gifts to their loved ones on the front line. (The War Budget, via Wikimedia Commons)

  ‘17 April: Lay low in the communication trench and dugouts all day, in the evening the mines were exploded and I have never seen such a sight in my life, it was indescribable. The attack came off a few minutes later and off we went to the top of the hill and worked like niggers to make it defendable. At about midnight I retired to the woods and slept for about four hours.’ The KOSB were not long in reserve. Despite the swiftness of the initial British success, the Germans, as ever, put in strong and determined counter-attacks: ‘18 April: Had to go and reinforce as the enemy were putting in a counter-attack. It was very difficult holding on. Command of the regiment devolved on me as all the seniors were killed or wounded. Marched off around 15.00 hours – very lucky to be alive!’

  Any elation at such a significant success was diluted by knowledge of the blood price paid. Besides there was no respite, a major German offensive was brewing: ‘22 April: Had orders to occupy trenches 35 to 37 tonight. Marched off around 19.30 hours but when nearing Vlamertinge met the adjutant of the West Kents who had turned back and said the village was impassable on account of refugees. The French had given way and were running; the Germans had broken through.’

  In early April, the British had taken over a further 5 miles of French-held trenches, north-east of the battered ruin of Ypres and it was here the blow fell. This, the second battle of Ypres, witnessed the first use of poison gas by the Germans on the Western Front. French colonial forces, faced with the satanic yellowish mist, broke. Canadians, deployed around St. Julien, did not and fought on in a display of sublime courage for which they paid a very heavy price.

  In the wake of this break-in the situation in the salient deteriorated rapidly ‘23 April: About 14.00 hours we were ordered to stand to. We marched to the [Yser] Canal having been given orders for an attack at 16.15 hours or thereabouts. The men behaved splendidly. I finally decided I must push up to the firing line but didn’t get far before I was bowled over. Broster pulle
d me into a ditch and I made my way to the dressing station. I was sent off to Poperinghe and from there to Boulogne.’

  Although a bullet remained lodged in his spine for thirty years, Hilton returned to duty in 1916 and held a range of staff appointments, surviving the war without further injuries.

  Baptism of fire

  Despite initial German successes, Second Ypres quickly became a slogging match. The enemy blundered forward and the Allies blundered in riposte. General Smith-Dorrien was one high-ranking casualty, not of German bullets but of Sir John French’s animosity. He had been foolish enough to suggest shortening the line at Ypres and avoiding further piecemeal and bloody counter-attacks. When General Plumer, his successor, suggested the same tactics, French concurred.

  These finer points of grand tactics and general politicking were not immediately evident to Herbert Waugh and those other youthful Hectors who ventured across the Channel. Their expectation was that the damsels of France and Belgium would be lining up to surrender their favours. In this they would be disappointed. Tommy found the forward areas devoid of females and those he met in lanes and billets to the rear proved less than glamorous: ‘Such girls as he encountered wore clogs, dressed like agricultural labourers, smelt of stables and byres and looked with reserve and suspicion at anything in a khaki uniform’.

  The battalion colonel was a figure of awe. The fusiliers ‘gazed up at him as he clattered by on his great horse and asked each other if it was true that his monocle was affixed to the peak of his service cap by a hinge. One of his sayings was “a barrage moves as a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night”. He had a marked aversion to any officer “not quite out of the right drawer” and, on encountering an officer in the trenches who had several days’ growth of beard; he was heard to enquire “who is that officer with a face like a musical box?”’

  The Geordies saw their first French poilu on the dockside at Boulogne; he ‘stood silently on guard duty, cloaked and with a long bayonet fixed to his rifle.’ Northern France, the first alien shore most had visited, was ‘pretty, quite flat’. Billets were found in ancient timber framed-barns, for the most part dilapidated. St. George’s Day 1915 was commemorated as the regiment’s annual fete day, with officers sporting red and white roses. Marching ever nearer to the inferno, hobnails ringing on unyielding pave, they passed into Belgium where streams of refugees crowded the roads. As they neared Poperinghe, long toiling columns of wounded appeared. Men bloodied, vacant and broken, thrown out of the giant mincer of the Western Front as surely as they were now being drawn in. By Vlamertinghe, their trenches were real, wet and very cold at night. Waugh shared his billet with a friend, known as Broncho ‘after a popular American western movie character’. The pair adopted the expedient of alternately using each other as a mattress, sharing body warmth. This was necessity rather than passion and permitted a measure of sleep.

  As for their Belgian hosts, the fastidious Waugh observed; ‘our allies serve an admirable cup of coffee but not always in a clean cup’. Battle-scarred Ypres was unrecognisable as the pleasing and prosperous medieval city it had been, ‘the true tragedian, the Hamlet of them all – shells rattled over our heads like railway trains. We alternately walked and ran, stumbling over obstacles whilst fragments of roofing trickled down on us.’

  In rain-soaked fields, heavy, cloying earth wet and pungent, backlit by the flames of burning villages, like some travesty of northern lights, the dipping arcs of flares ahead marked the front line. Next day, moving up they saw their first dead man, heard the first frantic calls for ‘stretcher bearers’. Their home for 25 April was a ‘muddy ditch’ scarcely worth defining as a trench; next door, a British field battery whose constant roaring bark filled their senses. With every hour, the reality of the war intruded further:

  There was an ugly field to be crossed that morning, great shells plunging into all parts of it and throwing black fountains of earth house-high. We wavered for a bit until the adjutant came up; ‘come along “A” Company, they’re not firing at you’; shrapnel and ‘Jack Johnson’s’ falling all around us.

  More shallow scrapes than trenches with little cover from snipers who now began to make themselves felt: walking wounded, ‘dirty, disordered and exhausted’ staggered by in droves. As morning wore on, fire from the heavier guns diminished, replaced by ‘an increasing tattoo of small arms’. The almost reassuring business of digging in took on a new urgency. Labours were interrupted by a wild, dishevelled officer from the front who implored them ‘to go up there’. The man was clearly in shock and the Fusiliers felt they had lost ‘that boy-scout-on-holiday feeling’.

  The morning of 26 April was to be 6th Battalion’s moment of baptism. They went over attacking towards St. Julien; ‘up the rise we began to meet machine-gun bullets in streams, rifle bullets from every angle and then the HE coal boxes or Jack Johnsons. 6th & 7th Battalions advanced towards the outskirts of the village where week old German dead lay all around.’ More digging in – ‘a hundred yards away the farmer lies dead amidst his roasted cattle, dead horses everywhere’.

  To these young men drawn from their desks and dusty precedents, their comrades from regular battalions seemed like a breed apart. Tommies (Manchesters) and turbaned warriors of the Indian Army (Pathans) deployed alongside, seemed moulded into uniform, bearing the weight of their kit as though it weighed nothing at all, ‘expressionless faces and listless gait, war’s chloroform; one pitied the Indians especially, brown faces and gentle, lustrous dark eyes who had come so far to fight the white man’s battles’.

  ‘Individuals while abroad cannot well forget that they are foreigners, but battalions are communities and take their native atmosphere with them, like nomadic tribes’. Broncho, the Hollywood lookalike, ‘an athletic public schoolboy, already qualified as a solicitor’ who had drafted Waugh’s will told his friend ‘“I’ve said goodbye to all the old life at home,” so sure he was of his presentiment of impeding death, all too soon fulfilled; he was from Benton but never saw Benton again.’

  The attack against St. Julien was hastily planned, ground not reconnoitred. Men moved forward beneath a full weight of kit, greatcoats included, much of which was jettisoned. They carried the older, Long Lee Enfield rifle, only field caps, no ‘steel bowlers’. Many officers still carried pre-war private purchase rifles, originally intended for rather less dangerous sport. ‘A brigade staff officer, red hat and all, galloped up to our company commander in tremendous haste, reined in his horse, shouted brief and urgent orders, pointed ahead with out-flung arm and rode off as quickly as he had come.’ These Saturday night soldiers advanced towards contact ‘and on we went, clerks, artisans and labourers led by solicitors, chartered accountants and land-agents, all dressed up in khaki’.

  ‘The enemy played his complete orchestra, HE, Machine-gun and rifle fire’. The Fusiliers passed over the forward line, held by a Scottish unit, filing through a gap in the British wire and into no man’s land. ‘I remember P dropped his pipe, and popped back to pick it up – the enemy were invisible, lining the hedges in front, just like a sham attack in training. We were ordered to fire and to fix bayonets, advancing in rushes. All around the great black cones of blown up earth that rose out of the green plain, the whip-crack of bullets passing overhead and the little throbs as they hit the turf … during a moment’s lull the sound of a lark in full song above.’

  As the City Battalion struggled forward into the wall of enemy fire, Waugh was hit, ‘a dull and heavy thump, a blow, and imagined for a minute I’d been struck by a flying stone’. He lay out on the field with other wounded and dead nearby: ‘Z asked me to give a message to his mother in Byker’. Despite his own wounds Waugh complied. Three months later on returning to duty at the city’s drill hall, he was astonished to see the same man very much alive, though walking with a stick.

  Waugh was able to make his own way back to the regimental aid post, crammed into a disused stretch of trench. Another wounded comrade whose personal camera had somehow surviv
ed the fight offered to take photos – ‘battle into bank holiday’. Having been patched up and still on his feet, Waugh was advised to make his way back into the ruins of what had been St. Jean. Sporadic shelling continued, rounds crashing among the waving trees. ‘If I were you,’ the MO cautioned as he set off, ‘I’d avoid the trees there, it’s by the cemetery and they’re shelling it’. Having no wish to add to the graveyard population, Waugh took a more circuitous route to relative safety.

  At a field ambulance station he was fed with warm, sweet tea, Tommy’s universal remedy, bread and marmalade. A hazardous series of lifts by various conveyances eventually saw him back to Vlamertinghe. Painted images of long-dead saints flickered by candlelight as they gazed benignly down on scores of British wounded in an overcrowded church, huddled on chairs, prone on stretchers.

  When the survivors of 149 Brigade were relieved next day, they had lost their commanding officer (Brigadier-General Riddell), 42 officers and 1,912 other ranks, roughly two thirds of their total strength. They were the first of the Territorials to go into action as a full brigade. Kitchener had been wrong – these unlikely soldiers had not faltered and had paid the full, terrible price of their blood passage.

  Attrition

  In the early weeks of 1915 a split had opened between the ‘westerners’ who perceived that the war would be lost and won on the Western Front and those who favoured a more peripheral or ‘eastern’ strategy. This was tried and tested and the easterners possessed impressive advocates in Churchill and Lloyd George. Kitchener wrote to French on 1 January indicating the easterners might get their way. The ‘Little’ Field Marshal was aghast; weakening the Western Front to create nothing more than a holding garrison would, in his view be disastrous. Of course the easterners got their way. The tragedy at Gallipoli became the graveyard of their hopes.