1915: The Death of Innocence

by Lyn Macdonald

  The warm May evening, the gentle pleasures of a quiet Cambridge garden, were in sharp contrast to the miseries of battle in the Ypres salient and, in the bosom of his admiring family, with teenage sisters hanging on his lips avid for ‘tales’, a soldier who had endured its privations could be forgiven for feeling that mild exaggeration was preferable to the truth.

  Jock Macleod had a glorious leave. He dined with his father at Caius College, picnicked with his mother and sisters on the river, showed off to admiring friends and acquaintances, consumed gargantuan home-cooked meals and still found room to eat fruit and sweets galore. On the last full day of his leave the whole family went up to stay with his grandmother in London.

  Miss Betty Macleod.

  Tuesday May 25th. We travelled in state – First Class! – and went straight to 22 Harley Street, then went out a little walk with Jock who bought an electric torch. A great family dinner, all of our lot and Grannie and aunts and uncles. About 9.30 Mother, Uncle Arnold, Jock, Mollie and me went in a taxi to the West End Cinema and spent an interesting three-quarters of an hour. Saw pictures of the Italian Army, cavalry and artillery, coming down mountains etcetera. Everybody cheered!

  The news that Italy had declared war on Austria, if not yet on Germany, was almost the only cause for satisfaction in the whole dreary month. In German-occupied Brussels, where for obvious reasons the population was not able to celebrate openly, grocery stores packed their windows with mountainous displays of macaroni and their customers demonstrated their patriotism by purchasing large quantities. In London, where there was a sizeable Italian community, crowds of flag-waving expatriates paraded through the streets, scooping up so many Londoners as they went that the police had to be brought in to control the march to the Italian embassy where the ambassador obligingly appeared on the portico waving an outsize Italian flag. The following morning Victoria Station was mobbed by hordes of excited straw-boatered Italians bound for Italy to join the Army, each with a large excited family to see him off. The shrieking, the cheering, the unrestrained weeping, the shouted farewells, almost raised the roof. There were women with babies in arms and a brood of dark-eyed children at their heels, there were stout mothers and moustachioed fathers, aged grandmothers in voluminous black, and troupes of uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces, nephews. Small girls wore hair-ribbons in the national colours, small boys waved flags, and adults of both sexes were decked out in sashes of red, white and green. Some carried baskets, also beribboned in Italy’s colours, and filled with flowers for the women to throw, Italian style, as the men went off to war.

  Even after the noisy emotional farewells, when the travellers had passed through the barrier to board the train and were craning out of doors and windows for a last wave and a last look, hundreds of their relatives, impelled by a single impulse, charged the barrier and poured on to the platform, running the length of the train in search of some particular Luigi or Marco or Antonio, to bombard him with flowers, to claim one more embrace, to call one more arrivederci, to hold up a child for a last fraternal or fatherly kiss.

  It was beyond the power of the single bewildered guard to control them and it required the assistance of several policemen before the crowd was induced to stand back and the train doors could be banged shut. When order had been restored, and the flustered guard managed to summon up sufficient breath to blow the final whistle, the train steamed out a full ten minutes late.

  The Government would dearly have liked a similar demonstration of enthusiasm that would inspire more Britishers to enlist. The casualty figures alone, at Ypres, at Aubers Ridge, at Festubert, and also at Gallipoli, spoke for themselves of the continuing need for men. Lord Kitchener had let it be known that he would need a million and a half new recruits before the year was out and, setting aside the difficulty of equipping such an army in the immediate future, no serious politician believed that anything like the required number could be found without introducing conscription. But, fired by the success of his recruiting campaigns in the first months of the war, Kitchener remained stubbornly wedded to the principle of voluntary service and the army had now lowered the obligatory height for would-be soldiers by two inches in order to encourage smaller men who had been rejected once to try again. They also raised the age limit to forty.

  Some imaginative newspaper readers came up with bizarre ideas to swell the ranks and one letter outlining a proposal that verged on the sadistic appeared in the Daily Mirror. It was boldly headed ‘A Chance for the Unfit’:

  There are some thousands of men in this country in the early stages of consumption who are willing to fight, but cannot pass the medical test. Why not form a battalion of them, train them to shoot (no long marches or strenuous exercises) and let them go to the front? We should then have a body of men to draw on for those hazardous enterprises which sometimes have to be undertaken, and which practically mean certain destruction. These men would vastly prefer such a glorious end to the prospect of a lingering and miserable death at home.

  It was signed with the pseudonym ‘ΤΒ’. No one, least of all unfortunate victims of tuberculosis, was much taken with the idea.

  Before the end of May the battle at Ypres had fizzled out. Even the Germans were temporarily short of shells. The attempt to capture Festubert had been given up. Thousands of soldiers had died and the hospital ships plying back and forth from France to England and from the Dardanelles to Malta, were carrying ever-increasing loads of wounded.

  Towards the end of that momentous month of May the Coalition Government formally took office. One of the first decisions of the new Cabinet was to set up a Cabinet Committee solely concerned with sorting out affairs in the Dardanelles.

  Something had to be done.

  Part 5

  ‘Damn the Dardanelles – they will be our grave’

  (Admiral Fisher)

  The moon shines bright on Charlie Chaplin

  His boots are cracking,

  For want of blacking,

  And his little baggy trousers they want mending

  Before we send him

  To the Dardanelles.

  Anon.

  Chapter 23

  The Territorials of the 7th Royal Scots were glad to be on their way. Although they had in theory been ‘on active service’ since the outbreak of war and had volunteered to a man for foreign service, most of their soldiering had been spent guarding coastal defences within shouting distance of their home town of Leith and while they appreciated the home comforts that were still within easy reach, it was hardly the adventure they had anticipated. It was almost a month since Leith had given them a huge send-off. Even the Provost and Town Council had turned out for an official farewell and the battalion marched to the station through crowds of people who mobbed the pavements to cheer the local boys leaving, as they supposed, for the front. It was something of an anticlimax to find that the move took them no further than Larbert, a mere twentyfive miles inland along the Firth of Forth. But now they really were off to the front. Rumour had it that they were bound for the Dardanelles, and rumour for once was right.

  It was a complicated business to embark a whole brigade of four battalions at the small station at Larbert and it was no less complicated for the railway authorities to filter numerous troop trains into the mainline network without unduly disrupting the normal flow of goods and passenger traffic. It had been a long day of parades and roll-calls, blankets to be handed in, kits and rifles to be inspected, iron rations to draw for the long journey to Liverpool, and, for the officers, a thousand and one last-minute details to be seen to before the Battalion moved off. It was almost midnight before the first half of the Battalion, A and D Companies, marched out of camp to entrain. The five hundred men of B and C would follow two hours later in another special train.

  By the time a fatigue party had loaded the ammunition, by the time a final roll-call had been held under the dim station lights and the two companies were divided into platoons and formed fours to entrain in batches of eight to each co
mpartment, the night was far advanced. The pipe band that played them aboard the train, and would play them off again at the other end, piled into the front carriage with their drums and instruments and had the luxury of having it to themselves. The battalion signal sections and machinegunners were together in the second coach, and the colonel and the officers took their places in the first-class compartments immediately behind. It was a quarter to four in the morning before the train finally got up steam and pulled out of the station and by that time the excitement had died down. A few enthusiasts set up card schools. Most were glad to relax and by six o’clock on a fine May morning, as the train trundled through the Borders towards the station at Kirtlebridge, almost all of them were sound asleep. This was a great disappointment to Ella Plenderleith.

  Mrs Ella Smith, née Plenderleith.

  My father was the signalman at Kirtlebridge. We lived at the station and he always used to tell us when the troop trains were coming through, because we liked waving to the soldiers as they went past. I was fifteen at the time. It must have been about half past six when the train went through, because my father was on duty at six o’clock and it was a while after that when he shouted to us that the train would be coming past. We hurried up and got dressed and went outside to see it go through, but we were a bit disappointed that morning because a lot of the soldiers were sleeping and not many waved back to us. It was my father’s first job that morning after he went on duty to clear that train through and signal to the next box down the line that it was on its way. The next box was Quintinshill. It was about six miles away just outside Gretna village – the last mainline signal box in Scotland.

  Not long afterwards there was a tremendous crashing noise. We heard it six miles away! A few minutes later my father called out from the signal box to tell us what had happened.

  What had happened was the worst rail crash in history. Like William Plenderleith at Kirtlebridge, signalman James Tinsley should have come on duty at six o’clock, but he had a private arrangement with his night-shift colleague, Meakin, which allowed him an extra half hour’s sleep before catching the local train from Carlisle and arriving at work nearly forty minutes late. Trains passing through in the meantime were ‘logged’ by Meakin on a scrap of paper, usually the back of a telegraph form, and transferred later in Tinsley’s handwriting into the official log. Tinsley returned the favour when it was his turn to work night-shift and the arrangement had worked to the satisfaction of both parties. But it failed to work that morning. The London to Glasgow express was forty-five minutes late on its journey north, and because the two loop lines were occupied by stationary goods trains Meakin had put the slow local train temporarily on the down line to wait until the fast express went through. Meakin was in a hurry to get off at the end of his long night’s stint and he had hardly left the signal box when Plenderleith rang through from Kirtlebridge to ‘offer’ the troop train travelling south on the down line. Tinsley had arrived moments before in the very train that now stood before his eyes on the main down line but he claimed later that he ‘forgot’ about it. He accepted the troop train without demur and pulled the lever that would drop the arm of the signal half a mile up the track to indicate that the line was clear. The troop train had picked up speed on the downward gradient from Kirtlebridge and was hurtling fast towards Gretna. It was almost a quarter to seven in the morning.

  L/cpl. G. McGurk, 1/7 (Leith) Bn. (TF), Royal Scots (Lothian Regt.).

  We were packed together like herrings in a barrel. Some were fast asleep, and most of those who were awake were so weary that when the disaster came it caught them at a disadvantage. Some of our chaps were leaning out of the windows at the time, and naturally they were the first to see that something was wrong.

  One of the men in our carriage – Glass, I think, was his name – suddenly drew in a scared face and shouted, ‘We’re running into another train.’ The words were scarcely out of his mouth before there was a terrible crash, and the carriage seemed to leap into the air. We were all pitched on the floor in a heap.

  I was one of the first to go down, and three other chaps all fell on top of me. They squeezed the breath out of me, but otherwise I was unhurt.

  Sgt.J. Combe, 1/7 (Leith) Bn. (TF), Royal Scots.

  The first two or three carriages were telescoped. I was travelling with Pipe-Major Ross and we felt the carriages coming up in the air and we held our legs up and when the crash came we were shot into the air and the roof of the carriage collapsed and fell down on Ross’s back. He was pinned down and shouting to me to help him. I myself was covered with debris and before I could help Ross I had the job of my life to wriggle myself free. I pulled the Pipe-Major by the head for all I was worth. It seemed like hours before I managed to get him free.

  Pte. A. Thomson, 1/7 Bn. (TF), Royal Scots.

  We were eight to each compartment and the doors locked! The last stop was Carstairs where some of us exchanged a little light-hearted banter with a few girls who were making an early start to work but nearly everyone else had settled down to sleep. Suddenly there was a terrific crash. The carriage rose up and sank down again listing dangerously over a steep bank. The cries and screams and the hiss of steam escaping from the engine was deafening! One by one we climbed out through the window of our compartment and on to the line. What a sight met our eyes. The wreckage was piled at least thirty feet high and terror-stricken men were staggering about. Worse still were the men who were trapped in the twisted metal of the wreckage.

  L/cpl. G. McGurk.

  The wreckage of the carriage was dropping on us, and the cries of the men that were injured were heart rending. One man had his neck broken by the fall, while others had their arms broken, heads cut, and legs twisted. I managed to get out from the wreckage, and, along with other uninjured men, went along the train to see what could be done. The scene was sickening.

  The job was to know where to begin, but some officers got us organised and spread us along the train at intervals, and we started to dig out the dead and dying.

  Men who managed to get out in the first moments after the crash were the lucky ones. The initial impact had derailed the engines of both trains and sent them teetering across the up line in the path of the express thundering north. A minute later the first of its two powerful engines ploughed into the wreckage with a roar that was heard for miles.

  The troop train got the worst of it. The fire which had already started in the wooden coaches immediately behind the engines burst into an inferno. Carriage walls splintered. Bogies collapsed. Men were trapped. Soldiers who had managed to clamber out a minute before and were staggering dazed on the embankment, or trying to free trapped comrades, were killed or injured as the wreckage buckled and flew apart with the second impact. The fire took hold and began to spread along the rest of the train and behind the ear-splitting blast of escaping steam the cries of panic from men buried beneath the debris chilled the blood.

  Sgt. J. Combe

  The shrieks and the moans of the men as they were being slowly roasted to death was terrible to hear. The cruellest thing I’ve ever seen in all my life was the body of one man hanging high up on part of the wreckage with his arms outstretched. He had no head. But the worst was one fellow whose legs were horribly burned and he was pinned down and it was impossible to get him out. The flames were simply eating him up and getting nearer to his face. He must have been in terrible agony. He kept shouting ‘For God’s sake, shoot me!’

  Young Gordon Dick was one of the lucky ones. He had been thrown clear of the third coach and knocked unconscious in the first crash. When he came round he found himself lying on the track between the rails with both feet caught up in the wreckage, and the flames creeping closer, burning his face and arms as he struggled to get free. It was the second crash that released him and it took all his strength to crawl to the embankment before he passed out again. Only one other man of the eight in his carriage escaped.

  Mrs Ella Smith, née Plenderleith.

  It was
a terrible accident! When my father called out from the signal box a few minutes after we heard that awful crash and told us what had happened I simply couldn’t believe that just ten minutes before we’d stood waving to the train. Another girl and I set off right away to see it. It would be well over an hour’s walk but we ran a lot of the way. What a terrible sight it was, engines and carriages were piled high and it was still burning. Soldiers were being burned alive because they couldn’t get them out. One of the officers was sitting in the field among the dead, looking round about him to see how many of the lads were left. There didn’t seem to be many. It was a most terrible tragedy. I’d never seen anything like that. You couldn’t imagine anything like it!

  By the time the single local fire engine appeared it could do little to staunch the flames. As they begun to spread, a shocked NCO was still cool-headed enough to organise a group of the survivors to run to the rear and unhitch the ammunition wagon and to roll it back by sheer muscle-power to a safe distance. But there were explosions just the same, for the train was lit by gas lamps and, as the flames spread along its length, gas tanks beneath the carriages exploded in the heat, flinging burning debris across the field and spreading more carnage among the helpless rows of newly rescued casualties.

  There were not many civilian casualties, for the troop train had taken the worst of the collision, and passengers from the other two trains scrambled down the embankment to do what they could to help. Women from the village, running across the fields to find out what was happening, rushed home again and returned with piles of sheets and tablecloths to tear into bandages and to cover the bodies of the dead. Two hours after the accident an ambulance train came up from Carlisle, but long before then Dr John Edwards was at the scene, working close to the burning wreckage, amputating limbs to free men who were trapped, while the firemen did their best to keep the flames at bay.