The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  But there is another story he told me, an astonishing one, quite out of character. At the very end of the war in 1918, he said, he had been ordered to command a firing party to execute a soldier. He had refused. Then, with the war over, the army punished him by forcing him to help transport the corpses left lying on the front lines for burial in the great British cemeteries. All the time I knew him, Bill hated things that rotted. A dead bird, a dead dog in a road would make him turn away. My father’s insubordination sounded unlike him. But I admired him enormously for it. Indeed, as the years went by, I came to the conclusion that my father’s refusal to kill another man was the only thing he did in his life which I would also have done.

  For my twenty-eighth birthday, he bought me William Moore’s The Thin YellowLine, one of the first histories of capital punishment on the Western Front. My mother told me that Bill had read the book from beginning to end in total silence. He had wanted me to read of the fate of the 314 men executed by the British in the Great War. It seemed to prey on his mind. Not long before he died, I asked him if he knew the identity of the doomed soldier he refused to shoot. He was an Australian, my father replied, who had got drunk and then murdered a French gendarme. Someone else had commanded the firing squad.

  That was all. I once asked Peggy to talk to my father about the war, to interview him as if she were a journalist, to find out about this missing segment of his life. She promised that she would. Yet on his death in 1992, all I found were nine short pages of notes in his own handwriting—in pencil—about the history of his family. “Born 1899 at ‘Stone House,’ Leasowe, Wirral, Cheshire,” it said. “Father, Master Mariner Born 1868. Mother, Market Gardner’s [sic] daughter, born 1869. Earliest record [of the Fisks] Danish professor, came to England 1737. [I] attended Council School. Won Scholarship to High School. Father unable to support me there, so no alternative but to leave school and compete for work in Borough Treasurer’s Department. Examination (25 entrants) for 6 shillings per week—was successful and commenced two weeks before my 14th birthday in 1913.” So no wonder my schooling was so important to Bill. The notes failed to mention that his father Edward had once been first mate on the Cutty Sark, the great tea-clipper now permanently in a Greenwich dry dock. There was another short entry, recording that only after the First World War was over did Bill discover that his own grandfather—his father Edward’s father—had also served in the same conflict, as a naval reservist at Zeebrugge in 1918, when the British blocked the Belgian harbour to prevent its use by German U-boats and destroyers.

  It would be another six years before I learned more. For when my mother lay dying in the autumn of 1998, I found in the roof of her home in Maidstone a tin box of the kind that families sent to soldiers in the Great War with soap and shaving brushes. On the front, the words “Parfumery Chiyotsbaki” were stamped above a painting of a young, half-smiling woman with roses in her hair. Inside the box were dozens of photographs from the 1914–18 war. Some were postcard-sized pictures of Bill’s long-dead army friends in the uniform of the King’s Liverpool Regiment, all of them with the solemn faces of doomed youth. “Lads from Preston” it said on the back of a large card. Others had been taken by Bill with his illegal camera. One I had seen before—the picture of the shattered countryside of the Western Front. “North of Arras 1918,” Bill had written on the back. Another showed a young officer on horseback with the words “Self on Whitesocks near Hazebruck” on the reverse side. There was a French money coupon and a photograph of fifty young soldiers with my father, hatless, lying sprawled at the front, hobnailed boots towards the camera. A dramatic snapshot showed the 4th Battalion of the King’s Liverpool Regiment on parade in driving snow at Douai in northern France, bayonets fixed amid the blizzard, another—much faded and probably poorly developed—showed the Douai artillery school, a vast Napoleonic building confronting a parade ground filled with British troops and horses and gun carriages. “Major General Capper inspects ‘B’ Company,” he had written on the back.

  And there was a larger photograph of Bill Fisk, leaning against the windowsill of a house in Arras, dated August 1918. He was a tall, handsome man, a shock of dark hair, deep-set eyes, protruding nose, a faint smile on his face, right hand self-consciously pushed into his trouser pocket, the horse rampant insignia of the regiment on his lapel. He looked like the young Burt Lancaster. Aside from the handsome appearance, I had to admit he looked a little like me.

  Another picture showed him in an open-top car with a man and a woman. And a snapshot showed him in the French countryside in civilian clothes but still in his Great War puttees, the cloth wraps that British troops wore around their legs to prevent trench water from pouring into their boots. Behind him, hanging on a branch, was a woman’s hat. Had there been a wartime love affair? He never said and my mother never spoke anything of it. When Bill was in France, she was not even born. But on his death, I had found two tickets to the races at Longchamps in 1919. “Throw them away!” my mother had commanded me. She didn’t like the thought that Bill had kept those tickets all those years.

  The tin of photographs had been stored in a shoebox in the roof. But in my mother’s desk downstairs I found pages of notes in her handwriting. It was the interview with my father she had promised to make at least a decade earlier. Bill had spoken more freely to her. He describes his excitement at being posted to France—an amazing reaction from a man whose friends from Liverpool had already died at Ypres—and the thrill of wearing his first officer’s uniform. He received a grant of £50 and “scrounged” a Smith & Wesson revolver. “I thought I was a Field Marshal,” he told my mother. He was sent to France in August of 1918. “When I first got to France there were thousands of Chinese there,” he said. “They were brought there to repair the roads from shell holes, and they had been robbing a French provision train, and we were the next battalion . . . I was a junior subaltern at the time.” Bill arrived at the Chinese encampment near Arras to find a group of huts surrounded by barbed wire.

  When I got there they wouldn’t let us in . . . but they would let me in [alone]. I said to this Chinese man who could speak English: “I’ve been sent to make inquiries about a French supply train [with] my platoon of 30 men.” [He said] “You can come in, but not your men”—which I didn’t think much of. I didn’t like that “not your men” a little bit. But I went in and sat at a table and there were Chinks all round, and this fellow aimed a knife at my forehead between my eyes. I was trying to read something, leaning forward, when I felt this fellow opposite me moving . . . he would have got me in the back of the neck if I hadn’t moved. Well, I shot him dead and made for the door, and ran like hell—they were streaming after me and the Sarge that was in charge of these 30 men opened fire—I don’t know how many of the Chinks they killed. It’s a good job they did.

  Many of the incidents Bill related to Peggy were told in an off-hand manner. The rat had bitten him on the chest just outside Arras—one of thousands that swarmed around the lines. “Their teeth must have been poisonous because they were eating casualties and dead men [who] had . . . been laying out for a week or more in the sun . . . The hospital at Amiens was staffed by German prisoners and that was where a German prisoner that was looking after me . . . gave me a shell case and he had inscribed on it a drawing of the regimental battalion horse, [my] name and rank and I took it home.” Then he added in reference to me that “the lad would have liked that, I’m sure he would.” For years, the shell case sat on his mother’s mantelpiece in Birkenhead but then disappeared long before I was born.

  The armistice of November 1918 was only a ceasefire and tens of thousands of British troops stayed on in the filth of the front lines in case hostilities with the Germans resumed. At Dover and Folkestone, thousands of British troops refused to board the boats to France in 1919, but my father volunteered to serve an extra year. He told my mother of his long horse rides with his colonel through the broken cities of northern France as the victorious powers dismembered the old empires of Eur
ope and the Middle East at Versailles. One of his horses was blind in one eye and rode in circles, dumping him in a French railway yard. He was sent to Cologne as part of the army of occupation, and to Le Havre to oversee the departure of the last British fighting troops from France.

  But still there was so little on the war itself, the agony of the trenches in which I knew he had spent weeks. And nothing of the execution party he said he had refused to command. The last page of my mother’s notes broke off in mid-sentence. Had Bill destroyed the rest? My family was now gone, and I had inherited few of my father’s memories—save for those recollections to my mother and the cache of little snapshots. But there was one other way in which I could seek the missing months of my father’s life. In January 1999, I walked into the British Public Record Office in the London suburb of Kew and asked for Bill’s personal war service file—along with the war diaries of his two battalions—the 12th and 4th King’s Liverpool Regiment.

  I have to admit to a slight tingle in the back of my hands when the tiny reader’s computer bleeped and I walked to the desk where a middle-aged civil servant handed me file no. WO374/24476. The cover read “2nd Lt. Wm Fisk.” But almost at once, my hopes fell. Printed on the same cover were the words “weeded in 1936” and “weeded in 1955.” A file that might have contained fifty or sixty pages was left with scarcely twenty. Bill’s commission as an officer was intact, his civilian status listed as “assistant book-keeper.” The War Office questionnaire even asked if Bill was “of pure European descent.” “Yes,” Bill had replied. I don’t suppose he had much trouble with that one. Under “power of command,” an officer had written: “V fair. He only needs experience.” Bill’s dates of posting to France, his transfer to his postwar battalion and his final embarkation by steamship from Boulogne back to Liverpool just before Christmas of 1919 were all there. But nothing more. What had been taken out of the files? Reference to a refusal to command an execution, perhaps? A small massacre of Chinese workers?

  A separate PRO file on the Chinese showed there were 187,000 of them in France by 1918, paid by the War Department, many of them lured away from their homeland by false promises that they would not be in the firing line—a promise that was a lie. Documents in the files refer to them as “coolies,” stating that they should be kept away from Europeans. At least ten were executed for murder, several of them not even given the dignity of a name—only a number—when they were shot at dawn by British troops. The war diary of one British regiment did make a single intriguing reference to Chinese involvement in the looting of “French provision trains.”

  Then my reader’s computer bleeped again. The war diaries of the King’s Liverpool Regiment had arrived from the archives. In the last months of the Great War, a massive German offensive that almost reached Paris was turned back by British, Canadian, French and newly arrived American troops. Bill’s last battles were thus part of a great Allied counter-attack that would still be in progress when the conflict ended. Handwritten on flimsy paper that was crumbling at the edges, the battalion war diaries came in big cardboard boxes. Yet the pages of the 12th Battalion’s history from August 1918 seemed eerily familiar. It would be many hours before I realised why this was so.

  There were brief, hurried reports in the war diaries of “hostile shelling” and “enemy gas shells causing four OR [other ranks] casualties.” On 22 August there was a raid towards German trenches which ended in the capture of two German prisoners. “Most of the enemy’s concrete emplacements were destroyed by our artillery fire.” On 1 November the battalion was in billets at Rue St. Druon in Cambrai. I knew my father had been in Cambrai—he had told me it was burning when he entered it with a Canadian unit—but what caught my attention was the handwriting. It was identical to the handwriting on the back of the snapshots I had found in the loft of my mother’s home. Even the little squiggles that Bill used to put under his capital “D’s were there. I found them under the “D” of Douai.

  Bill Fisk must have been the second lieutenant tasked to write up the battalion war diary each night; of course, he had been an “assistant book-keeper.” Sometimes the entries were only a few words in length, a remark about the “inclement weather”—all his life, my father called rainy days “inclement,” much to my amusement—but there were other, longer reports in the dry military language that Bill would have been taught to use. “Strong fighting patrols out by day and night,” Bill was reporting in early October. “. . . Patrols active and touch constantly maintained with the enemy. During the morning of the 5th contact patrols moved N. and S. from newly gained positions . . . Hostile opposition entirely in the form of M.G. [machine gun] Fire; machine guns appeared to be very numerous.” In the official diaries, Bill always referred to the Germans as “the enemy.” All his life, he called them “the Bosche.”

  He had been billeted in Douai. Yes, I knew that. Because along with the tin of snapshots—which included a long-distance photograph of German prisoners being led away down a tree-lined road by Bill’s comrades in the King’s Liverpool Regiment—were hundreds of black-and-white postcards. Everywhere Bill was stationed, he bought these cheap photographs of the cities and towns and villages of northern France. Some showed the devastation caused by German shellfire. Most had been printed before the war—of medieval towns with tall church spires and cobbled streets and Flemish house façades, of delicate tramcars rattling past buildings with wooden verandas—and were even then, as Bill collected them, souvenirs of a France that no longer existed.

  In his collection from Douai, there were twenty-four postcards, some of which Bill had obviously sent home to Edward and Margaret Fisk in Birkenhead, because he had written a line or two on the reverse side. On the back of a prewar photograph which showed a streetcar negotiating the Rue de Bellain—devastated in the recent fighting—he had written with irony: “Haven’t seen any car here yet.” A picture of the Place d’Armes—the clock tower of the town hall in the distance, a set of elegant nineteenth-century town houses to the right—carried Bill’s caption: “The buildings to the right of the tower are ruined. Our mess is about 100 yards from the Tower (Hotel de Ville).” There was a picture of the medieval Porte d’Arras—“My billet is 50 yards from here—Will,” he had written, adding a kiss for his mother Margaret. He had included a printed drawing of a huge couple in Middle Ages regalia which captured Douai’s long and violent history.67 Much easier for Bill to understand was a dramatic photograph—obviously published after the town’s liberation by the British—showing German occupation troops in spiked helmets goose-stepping past their officers in the Place du Barlet. He sent it home to Birkenhead, writing angrily on the back: “The Bosche [sic] manner in entering a town.”

  Much more precise, however, was a beautifully framed photograph, taken through an archway, of a set of turreted brick buildings close to the town hall. On the pavement to the right of the postcard, Bill had marked a cross. “I have put a cross under our mess,” he wrote on the back. “1606, Passage de l’Hotel de Ville.” The street had obviously survived the First World War. I wondered if it had survived the Second. On one of our interminable pilgrimages around the battlefields, Bill had driven my mother Peggy and me through Douai—it must have been in the late 1950s—but I had no memory of visiting these houses. All I can recall is that a gendarme had whistled Bill to a halt when he drove his beloved Austin of England car the wrong way up a one-way street. Bill had even bought a tiny wooden model of a fat gendarme to celebrate the occasion when a pompous French policeman dared to criticise the driving of one of Douai’s British liberators. The model stood for years on the windowsill of the sitting room in our Maidstone home.

  Eighty-six years after Bill sent those postcards from Douai, I pushed them carefully into an envelope—“2nd Lt. William Fisk,” I wrote on the cover—and set off once more for the French city that Bill had entered under German shellfire in 1918. I’m not sure what I hoped to find in Douai. A ghost of the town he entered, a few of the buildings still standing, perhaps,
an old pavement upon which a soldier had trodden a generation before me, cobblestones that he had marked with a cross twenty-eight years before I was born. The TGV express from the Gare du Nord flashed through the rainswept countryside of northern France, water lashing the carriage windows, sliding into Douai in just over an hour. I had the vague idea that it might be possible to use Bill’s pictures to discover the city, to graft his image of Douai—albeit badly damaged by the time he sent his postcards home—onto the present, to walk in Bill’s footsteps. One of his postcards showed the city’s railway station, a fine three-storey nineteenth-century construction in the Dutch style, the windows embroidered in dressed stone, with horses and carriages and an early motor vehicle in the forecourt. But the station into which my train glided was a box, a cheap block of late 1940s concrete whose ceiling was peeling away. On the back of the station picture in 1918, Bill had written something illegible: “This is . . . a little.” The missing word looked like “humped.” Perhaps he meant “bombed” or “damaged.”

  I soon discovered why. “The British and Americans bombed the place to pieces in the Second World War,” an old man in the station buffet told me. “The Germans destroyed Douai in 1914 and then in 1918 and then the Germans destroyed it again in 1940 and then the British and Americans bombed it in 1944. They wanted to stop the Germans using the railway to send reinforcements to Normandy after the landings.” I stopped at a local bookshop. The sixtieth anniversary of D-Day—Jour-J in French—had provoked an army of new books on the German occupation, though strangely not a single volume about the city in the First World War. But a booklet on Douai’s military history recorded how German troops had occupied the city on 31 August 1914—twenty-seven days after the outbreak of war, just over four months after Bill’s fifteenth birthday—how they had been driven out and then returned on 2 October. As a railhead and a centre of the French coal-mining industry, Douai would become a strategic military objective. All Frenchmen between the ages of seventeen and fifty were ordered to leave and then, when resistance to the occupation began, the Germans took hostages. Twenty hostages, including seven women, were sent to Germany on 1 November 1916, another thirty-three—twelve of them women—to Germany and Lithuania in late December 1917. In all, 193 civilians died in German hands during the Great War.