1915: The Death of Innocence

by Lyn Macdonald

  In December, eight more divisions of German infantry and four of cavalry had left the western front to fight the Russians and, they hoped, to finish them off, and Sir John French was itching to take advantage of this thinning of the German line as soon as the ground and weather conditions improved. The British troops were fewer than the Commander-in-Chief could have wished for but, just for once, and possibly not for long, they substantially outnumbered their opponents. They must grasp the nettle and seize the moment to strike. The risks would be small; the rewards would be rich.

  The Aubers Ridge was a desirable objective in itself, but beyond it lay the promised land – a wide flat plateau, ideal for open warfare with little cover and none of those convenient ridges so easy for the enemy to defend. Beyond it lay the real prize, the German-occupied city of Lille, capital of French Flanders, with its satellite textile towns of Roubaix and Tourcoing. They could not be captured in a day but, given the success of the initial assault (and how could it fail?), given the assistance of the French in pushing forward (and they would surely join in!), and given the lack of large reserves of German soldiers to defend them, these important industrial towns could be captured in a campaign of two weeks. At a single blow their captive populations would be liberated and the wheels of their factories set turning to assist the allied war effort. Long before reinforcements could be brought from Germany the way would be opened to the great plain of Douai, Joffre’s army would advance, his grander design would succeed and, in the west at least, the war would be won.

  For the French population of the occupied towns it was tantalising to be so close to the line, lying beneath the heel of the Germans within the sound of the guns little more than twenty miles away. For the people of Tourcoing the frustration was worst of all. Drawing an imaginary triangle on the map Tourcoing would lie at the apex, as near to Ypres as to Aubers Ridge at either end of its base. In those early days of the war, every local attack, every minor action, every exchange of gunfire heard so clearly in the streets, raised hopes that the allies were on the move and liberation was at hand. But there were a few who took a more realistic view and Henri Dewavrin was one:

  M. Pierre Dewavrin.

  My father was always a pessimist. He had gone to a military school, the College Ste Genevieve. He intended to make a career in the army but, when he was only seventeen, there was a slump in the wool trade and he had to leave and help his father restore his business as a wool broker. But he always kept his interest in military matters. I had just turned twelve when we were occupied by the Germans. I remember very well that every day they used to post up the official army communiqués on the door of the Hôtel de Ville – not just their own German one, but the French and British communiqués as well, which was remarkable when you think of it.

  My father used to study them for hours at a time, trying to work out what was really happening, and he always took a very gloomy view, because he knew the country well, and he knew that the so-called advances that the French or the British were proclaiming were really nothing at all. He used to discuss the situation for hours at a time. He could think of nothing else. His friends and colleagues nicknamed him ‘Général’ Dewavrin because he spent his days at his club for businessmen, always talking about the war. Of course, he was naturally concerned because two of my elder brothers were with the French Army and there was no news of them. He just had to try to work out for himself what was happening and there was plenty of time to talk things over because there was no work and no business to be done.

  Everything had come to a standstill. The factories were shut down because the Germans were short of war material and the first thing they had done was to strip the factories and take all the copper parts from the machines, right down to the smallest components. Even if they could have run the machines without them there were no raw materials to work with, and all the workers of military age had been mobilised and were fighting on the other side of the line. In any event, no one wanted to work for the Germans. They occupied Tourcoing on the 10th of October and on the Sunday we went to mass as usual at our church, St Christophe. Chanoine Leclercq gave the sermon and I shall never forget it. He was a saintly man, and a brave man, because he defied the Germans. He reviled them, and he didn’t mince his words. He said that the factories must close and that, whatever happened, no one must work for the Germans or do anything at all to help them if they could avoid it. We couldn’t fight, he said, but we could show that we were Frenchmen and defy them. A few days later he was arrested and sent to Germany. He was a prisoner there for exactly four years, from 18 October 1914 to 18 October 1918. Many people were arrested and sent as hostages or prisoners to Germany. It happened in my wife’s family, that is, in the family of the lady who became my wife ten years later.

  Mme Germaine Dewavrin.

  My father was a manufacturer of wool, in partnership with his brother. It was a huge enterprise. It was called ‘Usines Auguste et Louis Lepoutre’. They had twelve factories round Roubaix and Tourcoing and two more in America, near Providence in Massachusetts. Every day between them they used the wool of ten thousand sheep – thirty thousand kilos of wool. When we were occupied, naturally all that stopped. The Germans requisitioned everything, stripped the factories bare, but my father had large stocks of wool. The Germans had taken a certain amount, but he was determined that they should not have the rest. So he hid it.

  The biggest factory was in Roubaix, and it was a huge place. In one building there was a long corridor with doors leading to the store-rooms. The wool used to be delivered on wooden pallets, so the store-rooms were packed to the ceilings with wool and then the pallets were propped up against the walls all along the corridor so that the doors were hidden. But my father was denounced. One of the workers who must have had some grievance, or who wanted money, gave him away to the Germans.

  Of course as children we knew nothing of all this until the Germans came to our house to arrest him. They took my father and my mother. We saw them go, surrounded by soldiers with fixed bayonets, they marched them on foot all the way to Tourcoing. It was terrible, terrible. I was ten years old, the youngest of the family, and we had an English nursery governess called Nellie Smale. She was absolutely distracted! Naturally, being English, she was terrified. She could have gone home when the war began, but she had been with our family for so many years she decided to stay. Of course, we never expected that things would go so fast and so badly. And the occupation, when it happened, came so quickly! Even so, many people were evacuated and Nellie could have gone too, but she chose not to. Then when she saw my father and mother being marched off she thought she would be taken next. She was terrified every day of the war!

  My mother came home next day, but my father was taken as a hostage to Germany. Months afterwards they released him but after he had been home for a time they arrested him again and sent him back to Germany. Many, many prominent citizens and industrialists were taken hostage. I suppose it was to make an example of them and ensure the good behaviour of the people in the occupied towns. It was a very hard time. It was even harder for the people who had worked in our factories and were less well off. There was great hardship. Every municipality gave out vouchers so they could buy the food the Germans were supposed to provide, but there was very little of it.

  M. Pierre Dewavrin.

  In Tourcoing we had a large house, because we were a large family, and we could not avoid having Germans billeted from time to time. Of course, we had as little as possible to do with them, but they were in our house. Sometimes they were officers, who were very correct and polite, but when there were troop movements, we often got ordinary soldiers – sometimes as many as twenty or thirty of them sleeping on the floors and eating in our kitchen. In early 1915 they were very simple men, mostly Bavarian peasants, and their officers treated them like animals, with absolute contempt. Of course, being Bavarians, they were devout Catholics and it amazed us youngsters when we saw them cross themselves when they were handed their bread ration. We
asked ourselves how the Boche could possibly be Christians!

  In their communiqués the Germans had been trumpeting their successes on the eastern front. Studying them as he did, weighing up the evidence of his own ears that the sound of gunfire to the west was lessening every day as February drew to a close, ‘Général’ Henri Dewavrin could hardly be blamed for taking a gloomy view of the progress of the war. He would have been right in deducing that British ammunition was in short supply, but it might have heartened him to know that the British guns were silent because Sir John French was economising ammunition in order to build up a reserve for the battle that lay ahead. The field guns had been rationed to six rounds a day. The heavy Howitzers were forbidden to fire more than two.

  The question of ammunition was a serious one, and for months past the sparseness of supplies reaching France had been causing Sir John French great anxiety. He was not interested in the trials and difficulties that faced the War Office, his sole concern was that supplies of guns and ammunition fell far short of the amounts that had been promised and that even if the promised supplies had been met in full they would still have fallen woefully short of the amount he required to prosecute the war with any hope of success.

  It was all very well for the army to demand more guns and munitions, but it was by no means easy to supply them. For one thing, there was the question of premises. Even if empty factories were requisitioned and others turned over to the manufacture of munitions, who was to man them? In the infectious enthusiasm of early recruiting no one had stopped to reflect that the services of skilled men would be of more use to King and Country in engineering workshops than as raw recruits in the expanding ranks of the New Armies where, for want of proper weapons, the infantry was drilling with wooden rifles and would-be gunners were learning their trade on ancient artillery pieces borrowed from museums. Some were actually obliged to practise gun-drill on a home-made contrivance, the barrel represented by a tree trunk balanced on a trestle, with two cross-sections lopped from it to imitate the wheels.

  Even if all the engineers who had disappeared into the army were combed out and brought back it would not be enough, or nearly enough. Rifles were needed. Guns were needed – machine-guns, fuses, shells by the thousands, bullets by the million. Large orders had been placed at the start of the war, and there was no shortage of raw materials, but even if the existing factories had been working flat out it would have been impossible to fulfil more than a fraction of them. But they were not working flat out and, worse, there was an upsurge of industrial troubles and disputes.

  Many of the jobs involved in the manufacture of munitions could have been carried out by unskilled labour, but the Amalgamated Society of Engineers had absolutely vetoed this suggestion and, in the face of such union opposition, employers were forced to turn down countless volunteers. Even within the skilled workforce itself there were restrictive practices. One man per machine was the rule, even where output could have been increased by working shifts, and no doubling up of jobs would be accepted. Nor was there any question of a single-union agreement that would allow an engineer to mend a fuse, if need be, or an electrician to loosen a bolt or tighten a screw.

  The attitude of the skilled men was understandable. It took seven years of hard-grafting apprenticeship, working for a pittance, to qualify as a tradesman, and even a skilled journeyman’s wage could be as little as £2 a week. The minimum wage agreement had been won only after years of struggle, and decades of exploitation in Victorian workshops were still fresh in the minds of the men who had fought for the rights and conditions they now enjoyed. Was it all to be sacrificed now? If cheap unskilled labour was swept up by the national emergency to fill the factories, might not their own jobs be swept away when the emergency was over and employers – whom they had good reason not to trust – were tempted to use the precedent to undermine the hard-won rights of skilled workers?

  Employers were at the nub of the industrial trouble that came to a head in February, for the men believed that they were making huge profits from the war, and making them at the men’s expense. Prices were rising, but wages were not and while employers on the one hand were urging the workforce to greater effort and ever-rising output, they were refusing, on the other, to meet even reasonable pay claims. Workers threatening to strike were vilified wholesale by the press, whipping up a frenzy of patriotic indignation. Few people stopped to consider the problems faced by the War Office or the culpability of manufacturers who, through greed or over-optimism and not least by reason of self-interest led by fear of competition, were probably most to blame. The workforce was a useful scapegoat and not many took the trouble to look at things from the workers’ point of view – least of all Sir John French. And least of all the gunners standing idly by their guns in Flanders while the Commander-in-Chief gathered up a supply of precious shells for his offensive.

  He was gathering men too.

  During their five-day stay at Ham the 3rd Londons had been mildly surprised to be inspected by General Willcocks and welcomed ‘to the Indian Army’ and to find that they were to form part of the Meerut Division. ‘Army’ was a forgivable conceit on the part of the general, who had good reason to be proud of his troops, but it was something of an exaggeration for it comprised a corps of two infantry divisions and one of cavalry. In addition to native Indian troops each infantry brigade contained one battalion of British Regulars (as it had done in India) and each was now to be augmented by a battalion of Territorials or Special Reservists.

  If wintry Flanders came as a rude shock to the 3rd Londons fresh from the mild climate of Malta, it had been considerably worse for the Indians and most of them had been there for months. The Indian troops had played an active part and proved their worth in spite of the dreary conditions, the icy chill of the northern marshes, the water-logged trenches where, vaselined and oiled to the waist, the men on outpost duty had to stand for hours with barely a glimpse of the pallid disc that masqueraded as the sun in those alien northern skies. Many had fallen in action and some in the trench-raids at which the Indians were so expert; frostbite, influenza and pneumonia had all taken their toll and recently measles and mumps, encountered in Europe for the first time, had swept through the ranks. But the cold was the worst, and the Indians could hardly remember the sensation of being warm, still less the fierce heat of the Indian plains burning under the sun they called ‘the Bengal blanket’. The British public were sympathetic to the plight of the men plucked so cruelly out of their element. Tons of warm comforts had been sent and it was no unusual sight to see turbanned Indian troops hunched over tiny cooking fires, cocooned in a dozen or more khaki scarves and shawls plaited and knotted across khaki overcoats. Their khaki service dress was a far cry from the colourful silken glamour of the regimental uniforms that were the joy of the Indian Army, but the names of the regiments still rang like a litany that celebrated all the pomp and panoply of Empire – the Dogras, the Baluchis, Garhwalis, the Deccan Horse, the Secunderabad Cavalry, Pathans, Sikhs, Punjabis, the Jodhpur Lancers.

  They came from every corner of the Indian sub-continent and represented every caste and creed, and this presented the military authorities with certain problems. At the base camps in Marseilles and later in Orleans and Rouen it required six separate kitchens to cater for the different dietary and religious needs and although the problem had been tackled in the field by issuing rations and allowing the Indians to cook them for themselves, this system brought other difficulties. One officer, walking past such a group cooking food on the roadside, was amazed to see them tip out the contents of their cooking pot as he passed. The ‘shadow of the infidel’ had fallen across their food and they would rather go hungry than eat it. Even the basic army rations were unacceptable to Indian troops. To the exasperation of Captain Maurice Mascall, who was an officer in a mountain gun battery, his drivers refused to eat the biscuits he was forced to issue in lieu of scarce chapatti flour. But the drivers seemed unconcerned. They politely pointed out, when called to a
ccount, that they did not expect to survive anyway and might as well die of starvation in a state of grace than be consigned to damnation by a German bullet with a stomach defiled by impure food. ‘This argument,’ remarked Mascall, ‘rather took the wind out of the Major’s sails as he had hoped that the pangs of hunger would prove stronger than caste prejudice.’