by Jon E. Lewis
Edited and Introduced by C. B. Purdom
Foreword by Malcolm Brown
Constable • London
Constable & Robinson Ltd
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Robinson Publishing Ltd, 1997
This revised and updated edition published by Constable,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2009.
Foreword © Malcolm Brown
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
is available from the British Library
978-1-84901-067-2
eISBN: 978-1-47211-181-4
Printed and bound in the EU
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Cover photograph: Wiring party of the 12th East Yorkshires near Roclincourt, 1918/Imperial War Museum;
Cover design by stuartpolsondesign.com
CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction
THE OLD CONTEMPTIBLES, 1914
The Retreat from Mons, August 23rd–September 5th, 1914
Bernard John Denore
An Old Contemptible at Le Cateau
R.G. Hill
The First Battle of Ypres, October 1914
J.F. Bell
IN FRANCE AND FLANDERS, 1915–1918
A Territorial in the Salient
F. L. Watson, M.C.
The First Gas Attack
Anthony R. Hossack
The Battle of Loos
W. Walker
A Highland Battalion at Loos
Thos. McCall
At a Sap-Head
David Phillips
Trenches at Vimy Ridge
Harold Saunders
In a Kite Balloon
W. Sylvanus Lewis
A Night Counter-Attack
F. W. Watts
A Gunner’s Adventure
N. H. Bradbury
The Carnoy Cows
T. S. Williams
Ordinary War on the Somme
Fred Ball
Delville Wood
Capt. S. J. Worsley, D.S.O., M.C.
In a Billet
Harry Drake
17-21
George F. Wear
A Wireless Operator
B. Neyland
At Messines Ridge in 1917
E. N. Gladden
A July Day at St. Julien
Alfred Willcox
A Labour Company at Ypres
J. Cumming Morgan
Two Nights
P. Hoole Jackson
On the Belgian Coast
George Brame
A Nightmare
Alan F. Hyder
A Cavalry Brigade at Cambrai, November 1917
Chris Knight
La Vacquerie, December 3rd, 1917
W. R. Dick
A Boy’s Experiences
C. J. Arthur
Varieties of Trench Life
A. A. Dickson
A Runner’s Story 1916–18
R. W. Iley
In a Highland Regiment, 1917–18
H. E. May
Opening of German Offensive, March 1918
Alfred Grosch
Retreat
R. G. Bultitude
‘Stand-to’ on Givenchy Road
Thomas A. Owen
When Tank Fought Tank
F. Mitchell, M.C.
Bravery in the Field
Alexander Paterson
Noyon, March 23rd, 1918
Dr. F. O. Taylor
A Casualty Clearing Station
Dr. John A. Hayward
Rations
C. Goddard-Chead
A Padre’s Story
Anon.
Messines, October 1918
A B. Kenway
AT GALLIPOLI
A Boy at Gallipoli
Fred T. Wilson
The Flood at Suvla Bay
F. W. D. Bendall
The Evacuation of Suvla Bay
W. H. Linch
IN MACEDONIA
The End of Bulgaria
N. C. Powell
IN PALESTINE
A Sapper in Palestine
H. P. BONSER
Tell-el-Sheria
William G. Johnson
IN MESOPOTAMIA
The Corridor
T. Clayton
Those Desert Days
Robert Harding
IN GERMAN EAST AFRICA
The Devil – My Friend
Charles Trehane
IN THE AIR
‘The Circus’
F. Suckling
The Casualty
Rev. John H.W. Haswell
August to November 1918
H.F. Taylor
SOME WOMEN
August 1914
Esmée Sartorius
The Great Retreat in Serbia in 1915
M. L. Tatham
The Story of a W.A.A.C.
A B. Baker
ON THE SEA
War at Sea
J. Willey
Zeebrugge
W. Wainwright
Torpedoed in the Aegean Sea
Reginald C. Huggins
PRISONERS
First Days of Imprisonment
Reginald Morris
Captivity in the Ardennes
Victor Denham
FOREWORD
This book was first published in 1930, appearing under the imprint of Messrs J. M. Dent, the originator of that illustrious, long honoured library of books bearing the name ‘Everyman’. Also in that year there appeared on the scene that much consulted, much admired, magisterial work entitled War Books: A Critical Guide, written by Cyril Falls: professional soldier, noted historian and destined to become Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford. This was, as we might now see it, an Ofsted report on works relating to the recent Great War published in the period from the Armistice of 1918 to the end of the 1920s. Falls was able to include, presumably as a last-minute entry, a comment on the present work. His verdict is worth quoting in full:
This is a very striking book, throwing light upon almost every phase of the War. It contains sixty short narratives by writers of all ranks from private to lieutenant-colonel, but unfortunately only three from the Navy and the Royal Air Force. Practically every campaign is mentioned, though of course the vast majority of the incidents are from the Western Front. The narrators are in no case professional writers, and though some (but by no means all) lack literary skill, they are far more representative of the British Army, Navy, and Air Force, than any professional writer with his overcharged sensibilities and his inevitable reaction to literary influences and conventions.
That final sentence carries with it, surely, a clear if coded reference to the new style of writing about the recent war that was beginning at that time to make increasingly significant waves, a style of which, evidently, though not unexpectedly, Cyril Falls did not wholly approve. Heralded much earlier in the decade by C. E. Montague’s grounding-breaking book, Disenchantment, first published in 1922 – the message of which was clearly implied by its title – the books which now dominated the literary scene were to become the most famous and influential to emerge from the First World War, a conflict which to this
day has never been allowed to slip quietly into the past, but remains a permanent focus of controversy. It is a conflict on which after almost a hundred years, (to borrow a key-note phrase from another area of continuing cultural disagreement), many still look back in anger.
To name some of the titles which appeared at this time: the year 1928 saw the publication of Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War, while 1929 produced a positive harvest including Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero, Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, Charles Carrington’s memoir A Subaltern’s War (written under the pseudonym of Charles Edmonds), and the English translation of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, a striking ‘take’ on the war from the point of view of the former enemy.
Falls’s comments on the above were mixed. He had high praise for Edmund Blunden, claiming that his memoir was ‘probably the only single book we have had in English which really reaches the stature of its subject’; he saw some virtue in Richard Aldington’s offering, in spite of describing it as ‘one of the bitterest war novels that has been written’, but he was deeply critical of the works by Graves and Remarque. For the latter he had no time at all, blaming his book’s runaway success on the massive publicity campaign that had preceded its arrival; and condemning it as ‘frank propaganda’ by an author who ‘appears to know singularly little of certain of the details which he describes’. He praised Graves for his excellent war scenes, but found that overall his attitude ‘left a disagreeable impression. One might gather that thousands of men instead of a few hundred were executed, and that suicides were as common as blackberries. He is in short an example of the “intellectual”, whose intelligence with regard to the War penetrates a much shorter distance than that of the plain man.’ He had highest praise of all for Charles Edmonds: ‘The writer does not make war any prettier than its ugly self, but he shows that ordinary men endured it without becoming the shambling woebegone spectres so often depicted. These spectres would not have been victorious against the worst troops in the world. Mr Edmonds lets us see how and why the real men were victorious against the best.’
The following year, 1930, provided a further crop, including, as already stated, Cyril Falls’s own War Books, which appeared late enough to catch Everyman at War but too soon for Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, though he had warm praise for its already published predecessor, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, which, while mainly a paean for a lost peace, managed to include some brief war scenes which he found ‘impressive’.
Another book of that year for which I think Falls would have not have found place even had it appeared in time, but which I see as a work of considerable significance in the present discussion, in that it enshrined a markedly different view of the world of the Western Front from that purveyed by the majority of the books mentioned above, was the collected reprint of the most famous of the trench magazines produced during the war, The Wipers Times.
The story of the founding of that magazine has been often told. In brief, two officers of the 12th Sherwood Foresters, Captain (later Colonel) F. J. Roberts and Lieutenant (later Major) J. H. Pearson, found an abandoned printing press somewhere in the ruins of Ypres, ‘capital’ of that infamous killing-ground known as the Ypres Salient, ‘acquired’ it, and turned their unofficial ownership of it to excellent effect by producing between February 1916 and December 1918 over twenty editions, which won such a reputation for good writing and wit that all but its last two issues were republished in Britain to considerable acclaim while the war was still in progress.
In 1930 it was thought timely to give the magazine a further airing, in a handsome collected edition, with a Foreword by a commander widely admired by the troops during the war, Field Marshal Sir Herbert, now Lord, Plumer, and an Introduction by the chief editor, F. J. Roberts. Roberts had mocked the military hierarchy and joked about almost every aspect of the Western Front war, but he had firmly believed in the justice of the cause for which so many had suffered and died, and he had not been pleased to find that the new wave of publications flooding the nation’s bookshops appeared to denigrate the values in which he and his like had so firmly believed.
He declared his hand at once in the volume’s dedication. Whereas an earlier compilation had been dedicated to those who had ‘gone west’; this volume carried a more assertive message, doubtless devised by Roberts himself:
TO THE SOLDIERS OF THE SALIENT
AND THE TRUTH ABOUT THE WAR
The ‘truth about the war’ was, clearly, his truth as he saw it, not the new truth now being promulgated to the disadvantage of the old.
He showed his hand even more pointedly in his Introduction by resorting to a rousing foray in the house style of The Wipers Times which had been its special hallmark, harking back to the time of the great German offensive launched on 21 March 1918, which, historically, had been the event that was most responsible for taking his magazine off the presses for much of the war’s final year. Far from yielding ground to the best-selling titles commanding the field in 1930, he took a deliberate, brilliant lunge at them, as it so happened, very much in line with the views expressed by Cyril Falls:
Hastily taking two aspirin and placing helmet, gas, in position, I looked out of the door, only to find the beautiful March morning obscured by what seemed to be one of London’s best old-style November fogs. Shouting for batman, Adjutant, Sergeant, Sergeant-Major and the Mess-Waiter, I emerged into the chilly air, which was being torn and rent in the most alarming way. All was not quiet on the Western Front, the Sub-Editor and I drank a case of whiskey, shot the Padre for cowardice and said “good–bye to all that”. (The influence of these modern War Books is most insidious.)
Sadly, this was Roberts’ last bow. He faded from the scene, wrote no more about the war or any other subject, emigrating to Canada to take up his pre-1914 profession as a mining engineer and dying in obscurity in the 1960s. The founder of The Wipers Times was not honoured as he surely should have been by an obituary in the newspaper whose title he had deliberately mimicked when founding his own publication, The Times of London.
The riches emanating from that highly productive year 1930, however, are not yet exhausted. For it also saw the first appearance of another remarkable book which has won a considerable reputation: Soldiers’ Songs and Slang, collected and edited by John Brophy and Eric Partridge, both literary figures of considerable distinction, but, unlike Blunden, Graves, Aldington or Sassoon, former soldiers who had served not as officers but in the ranks. They offered a radically different perspective on the war of the Western Front, the viewpoint of the anonymous, unprivileged lower depths of the vast organisation that was the British Army, especially the shilling-a-day infantrymen who were at everybody else’s beck and call, and who were frequently officially referred to not as soldiers but as ‘rifles’; their status being defined less by the uniforms they wore or even the names they bore but by the weapons they carried. The new book added their hugely eloquent, ribald, funny, often world-weary voices to the rising clamour.
Soldiers’ Songs and Slang was to go through several editions in the 1930s, re-emerge as The Long Trail in the 1960s, and it has now re-appeared in a new printing as The Daily Telegraph Dictionary of Tommies’ Songs and Slang in 2008. (I confess to having been part of this process, having proposed its resurrection in the first place and contributed a new Introduction.)
But to return to the subject of Everyman at War, where does this book, also published in 1930, fit in this fascinating parabola of literary effusions?
Basically, I see it as firmly, and I would suggest proudly, occupying a substantial territory in the middle ground, between the high-octane literary works of the Graveses and the Sassoons of this world – to which the names of Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg and Ivor Gurney would be added in due course – and the writings and utterances of the ‘warrior or warriors unknown’ who devised the songs and the slang saved for posterity by Brophy and Partridge. The authors of the sixty pieces here reprinted
were writing straightforwardly about what they knew, about what they saw, about what they experienced, and they clearly – as Falls swiftly realised – were untouched by any modish cult or trend in the literary circles of the time. They wrote as themselves, not in response to any school of thought or wind of change, and, in Falls’s view, were all the better as chroniclers of the recent war on that account. As the reader will see, they were all were meticulously identified by the editor with details as to their service careers, so that friends and relatives would be aware of the fact of their contribution to the historical records, but their essential virtue is that collectively they constitute the ‘Everyman’ of the original title – the ordinary citizen, the unsung mass -and it is good to see this remarkable volume returned to its rightful place in the public domain with that title restored.
And there is, I should add, some quite outstanding writing here, writing that deserves to be remembered and not, as it were, allowed to be airbrushed out of historical memory. To name just one contribution, the terrifying plight of a fearful ordinary soldier caught up in a failed ‘over the top’ advance during a major battle has never been better evoked for me than in the account, only seven pages long, entitled ‘Ordinary War on the Somme’. The author was former Private Fred Ball, who enlisted with the Liverpool Pals in January 1915, crossed to France in November that year and served continuously in France for the remainder of the war, then went to Germany with the Army of Occupation, finally being demobilised in March 1919, never having sought or received promotion. And he is just one of sixty.
