by Jon E. Lewis
How we weren’t all splashed out over and over again while in that camp, I do not know. Between us and the battery a railway ran straight up towards Messines Ridge. It was used by one of those big railway guns, which used to slip quietly up during the night, fire a few rounds and slip down again. On our other side was a light railway on which ran small cars conveying men or ammunition. In front and crossed by both railways ran the main road from Ypres to Lille. Just behind us was one of our captive observation balloons; and Jerry was always having tries for one or other of these. He smashed up a battery of guns on the other side of the main road; he cleared out another labour company on the other side of the light railway; he blew holes in the road and blew up the railway; and one day he came across in one of our own planes, fired explosive bullets into the balloon, setting it ablaze, and calmly flew back again to his own lines.
During those five months of fighting for Passchendaele our company worked on the forward roads in front of Ypres, advancing as our line advanced, working parties being sometimes in front of the field guns. On one occasion a party were working exceptionally far forward, and from a recently captured pillbox in the vicinity of Westhoek Ridge were watching our shells bursting over the German trenches. Some line men came down past, clearing out as far as they could. ‘Come on, Jock,’ they shouted to one of our men. ‘What the ’ell are you hanging about here for? If Jerry spots you, he won’t half give you gippo.’ ‘Och, its a’ richt, chum – sanriy-fairy-an. We’re workin’ here.’ ‘Working! My Gawd!’ and they stayed not upon the order of their going.
It was certainly no joke working on these roads when there was a stunt on. Jerry had them taped off to an inch and was shelling them unmercifully.
The traffic on such a road was a wonderful sight. It is a steady, continuous stream, a stream often temporarily checked when a block occurs perhaps miles further up. A shell has landed in the road and knocked a hole in it and, as likely as not, put out of action a lorry or a man or two. The traffic stops dead, perhaps both ways, and the danger of destruction is greatly intensified. Forward the ‘Labour Corps!’ A squad of men is quickly on the spot with pick and shovel, and the hole is filled up with any mortal thing that can be found – stones, beams, bricks, railway lines, sleepers, bits of cars or lorries, wheels, cases of bully, tombstones, dead horses – anything that will occupy space, and in a few minutes the traffic moves on once more, and the War goes on!
After it had become evident that our hopes of an immediate advance were doomed to disappointment, our company was taken back to Dickebusch. There we built a camp for ourselves, where we spent the winter before moving up to Shrapnel Corner near Ypres in the spring-time. The C.Q.M.S. and myself built a little hut of corrugated iron with a good sound 3-foot-high parapet all round. Our Quarter-bloke at that time was a big, black-moustached, clear-to-hell-out-of-it, sort of chap, just the very man for a company of 500 skrimshankers like ours. While he was a Q.M.S. and I only a lance-jack, in civil life I was a schoolmaster and he a school janitor. However, we worked and lived together in great harmony and friendship for a year. I did the work and he took the responsibility. He was a beadle (church officer) in the Auld Kirk, and a teetotaller. I was a deacon in the, Free Kirk, and drank his nightly tot of rum at bedtime as well as my own.
Our hut was about 8 feet by 6 feet, and just so high that if the Q.M.S. wanted to stretch himself he had either to lie down or go outside. He slept under the duckboard table-shelf-desk on which the rations were kept during the day, and I on a stretcher, with a little ‘Queen’ stove between us. In the morning at Reveillé – perhaps – I rose, lit a fire in the stove, on the top of which I put a petrol tin full of water for shaving and washing purposes. If the chimney smoked, as it usually did, I. went outside, mounted the parapet and cleaned it out with drain-rods.
Then I drew my breakfast at the cookhouse. When the petrol tin began to steam, the Quarter-bloke rose, shaved and washed, and I, having breakfasted, partly on what I got at the cookhouse, which generally consisted of a square inch of ham fat and a mug of ham tea, but chiefly on bread, butter, cheese, and jam (strawberry) that had never seen the cookhouse, proceeded to do the same, washing contentedly in Sandy’s second-hand warm water. He then went for break, fast to the Sergeants’ Mess, and I sat down by the stove to rest and smoke.
In this job there was not much to be done during the day. Perhaps one went for the rations, or to the A.O.C. dump for clothing or shovels or gum-boots, or to Pop for beer for the canteen, but our busy time was at night when the boys returned to camp. There was clothing of all sorts to be issued, allotments of pay had to be adjusted, remittances to be sent home, and all sorts of correspondence to be conducted between the men and the pay office with regard to their domestic relations. The number and nature of the family secrets I got to know would have made my fortune were I a blackmailer.
I used to have quite a number of unofficial visitors when the Q.B. went to dinner. A head would pop in at the door, and there would be a hoarse whisper: ‘Could ye spare us a candle, corporal? I want to write hame, an’ Jock McGreegor’s usin’ oor ane to heat a Maconochie wi.’
‘Anything to read, Jimmy?’ inquires a pal. I used to keep a small circulating library of magazines and books.
‘Are ye in, sorr?’ from an Irishman. ‘Could yez give us a house-wife? My threid’s all done.’
‘Hello, dominie.’ (Another pal.) ‘Any buckshee fags?’ ‘The answer is in the negative.’ ‘Get out! Here’s some oatcakes I got in a parcel to-day.’ The fags are forthcoming (‘Flags’ this week).
A platoon officer: ‘You might give this man a new shirt, Morgan. The one he had has just walked across to the incinerator.’
Then when the Last Post had sounded, and I had drunk my tot of rum, and the little tin hut was vibrating like a French cattle truck in sympathy with the continuous bombardment of the guns, I drank the Quarter-bloke’s tot, and I laid myself down on the stretcher, the handle of which had been accidentally broken in order to make it useless for its proper purpose, and, with my feet against a sack of bread and my head in aromatic proximity to half a cheese, I fell asleep.
Corporal J. C. Morgan was on the National Reserve of Officers before the War, but was rejected for service owing to eyesight, until accepted in Class B2 under the Derby Scheme. Being a schoolmaster, he was not called up for ‘Labour Abroad,’ but enlisted as a private in July 1916, and was posted to 9th Cameron Highlanders (Labour Battalion). Landed at Havre in September, and until the formation of the Labour Corps in 1917 was employed at various jobs in the back area of the Western Front. In April 1917 the battalion became the 8th Labour Company, and in June were sent up to Dickebusch; remained working on the forward roads till the Armistice, Corps Troops, II Army. Then followed the Army into Germany, marching on foot all the way – the halt, the maimed, and the almost blind. ‘Our platoon,’ he says, ‘whistling (of all things) the Russian National Anthem practically the whole way.’ Reached Cologne on December 30th and were billeted at Ohligs. Sent home for demobilization in January 1919.
TWO NIGHTS
P. Hoole Jackson
The year 1917 gave our battalion the last of a series of changes in the war areas to which it had gone. The ravages made by Gallipoli had been repaired by drafts of recruits and the return of recovered wounded men to their various platoons. Reorganization in Egypt, coupled with intensive training, had welded the new blood and the old together; and a tip-and-run campaign with the Turks in Sinai, the worst features of which were thirst, flies, and forced marches, had given the new men a slight foretaste of shell and machine-gun fire.
We came to France as a tried division, and, after a little allowance of time for acclimatization, were tested on various fronts before being given a gradually worsening front to hold.
The end of May and the beginning of June 1917 were wonderful months. In shattered villages behind the lines the ruins were being hidden by tall grass; garden-flowers, seeding themselves, spread swiftly and mingled with their wil
d kind. Everywhere the waste of war was softened by the prolific growth of unchecked crops and uncut hay. The birds mated and nested within a stone’s throw of the gun emplacements, and their songs filled the woods and even reached to the front-line trenches.
We took over our new area at night; passing over a log track through Havrincourt Wood. It was thick, extensive, full of tangled growth and beautiful ‘rides.’ The trenches lay forward of it just over a rise, whence a gentle declivity descended to the German lines. Our own trenches were newly formed; much of the front line remained to be dug, for the division we relieved had followed up a German retreat that left ground to be entrenched. Everything was new; even the distance to the German lines unknown. Bullet wounds were plentiful, but shelling light.
That night a number of us lay 200 yards in front of our own line while the rest of the battalion dug the trenches under cover of our screen. Everything was quiet; there were no casualties, and, after the colonel’s inspection of the lines just prior to dawn, the screen was withdrawn and ordinary trench routine installed.
Four of us who had been with the battalion since the beginning of the War, and only known the separation due to light wounds that had allowed us to return to the battalion after a flying glimpse of Blighty, were engaged as scouts. The duty, hitherto, had been light enough: sniping from advanced positions, an occasional patrol on a very quiet front.
Now we were to know a new phase of our task. On the second night the colonel sent for us, and we gathered round the table of boxes that occupied the centre of his dug-out. After going carefully over the ground on the map, we were ordered to go out and inspect the German lines. A thousand yards was named as being the possible distance of their front line. Our own quarters were in a small dug-out that we had dug on the previous day; well inside the wood and about 500 yards behind the trenches. This was our privilege for undertaking scout work – that we did not occupy the front line, where we could not get the rest necessary to the nightly work of going out in front of the trenches.
We worked in groups of three; one man remaining in the dug-out to prepare tea and food for us on our return just before dawn the following day. We left our own front-line trench at ten o’clock at night and remained out as long as was necessary. The rum ration was issued to us before leaving, but we never took it, preferring to have it in our tea when we returned, soaked from crawling in the long, dew-wet grass. Also, the task required quick ears and eyes, undeadened by liquor.
Two sunken roads bounded the left and right of our lines; these were convenient places for getting away from our trenches, though too dangerous to use further than that, being places obviously doubly watched.
After a few preliminary trial outings, we arrived in the front line one quiet evening just before dusk, waiting in the open trench until our eyes had got their night sight. Then we set off, this night four of us working in twos. We worked from left to right, reaching the German wire about twelve o’clock midnight. Then we lay listening.
The guns were silent; now and then a minenwerfer would soar up into the air from the German lines, and we would take rough bearings of the position of the mortar that fired it. We could hear the clack of talk in their front line, only 10 or 15 yards away; from behind we could hear the rumble of their transport bringing up rations under cover of darkness. Now and then a sniper’s bullet would ping towards our lines. Sometimes, when our own line had a working party out, we could hear the strident tones of a particularly noted-voiced serjeant-major, ‘Come on, get them spades crackin’. A set of old women ud dig quicker.’ Then one of us would touch the other and we would grin in the darkness at the little touch of humour that relieved our tension. Often we could hear the clink of German picks as they dug or mended trenches; once a working-party of fifty of them marched past where we lay in the grass and began to work about 100 yards away. We had to lie there until within an hour of dawn before they ceased, and the crawl back to our lines in the slowly increasing light was one that we patted ourselves on the back for as equalling any Red Indian’s stalking in its noiselessness.
We left everything behind us in the trench that was likely to identify us if we had the ill-luck to be captured or ‘scuppered’ while scouting-pay books, identity discs, and letters; and we discarded steel helmets because they clanged like a bell if they hit a branch or were accidentally knocked by our rifles, substituting forage caps. We wore no equipment except a bandolier of ammunition; and our bayonets were, of course, always fixed except on bright, moonlight nights.
Men whose luck it was not to have worked in this manner thought our job a dangerous one compared with ordinary trench-life, but this was not correct. Once between the lines the War became a personal affair. Each side had its men out, therefore No Man’s Land was untouched by gun-fire. Snipers and enemy scouts and patrols were our enemies, and our lives depended on our own eyes and ears and sense of direction. The life, we considered, was far better than sitting in a trench waiting for shells or digging new trenches. We were exempt from fatigues and onerous duties, and we had our own little dug-out near to Battalion Headquarters, and drew and cooked our own rations. In the daytime we rested. Every third night was followed by a period of a full twenty-four hours’ rest, and the following day we took a turn of duty on a day observation-post that was concealed amongst fallen logs on a rise overlooking the German lines, which we watched by telescope. At this post we took turns with the other headquarters’ scouts; they worked between the lines on the nights when we rested.
On the night already mentioned we lay for some time making notes and then began to crawl slowly along the German wire, parallel with it. There was a moon due up, but the clouds had so far obscured it. Just as we came to a small hillock it burst from behind the clouds and flooded the country with light. We lay still and waited; a German’s bayonet gleamed from the trench, where his rifle lay pointed over the parapet – a sentry post. But the most thrilling thing of all was the sight we had of a road through a gap between two low hills behind the enemy lines. We could see guns and transports passing across the moonlit stretch; we could see men moving up and down, groups of them stopping and talking just as we did when moving behind our own lines. It was a glimpse of a forbidden land.
Suddenly my pal touched my arm; we wriggled close together; he stretched his hand on the ground and slowly turned it to the right. Following it with a slow movement of the head, I saw shadowy figures between us and the moon – ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty – we counted. They moved slowly towards our trenches.
There was only one thing to do safely; we followed them, hoping that we could send some kind of warning to our own line. Crawling in their wake was exciting, though quite safe. When they were 50 yards from their own line they dropped to the grass and began to crawl.
We followed them to within 100 yards of our trenches, and were almost on the bank of the sunken road flanking us on the left when a Verey light sent up by some troops on our left threw us into silhouette on top of the bank; to descend into the road was to choose Scylla instead of Charybdis, for it was traversed by machine-gun fire. We flattened ourselves as soon as the light allowed us to change from our ‘frozen’ attitudes by dying out. But we had been seen, not by the patrol, but by a covering party to the patrol, who opened fire wildly on the spot we occupied. They must have formed the opinion that we were a large force attempting to cut off the big patrol; a signal sounded and the patrol retreated away to the right. Then, for some minutes we lay, our hearts panting wildly while bullets thudded into the opposite bank of the sunken road, which was raised about 3 feet above our bank. They sang over us in a continuous volley, and we gauged the numbers of rifles as being about twenty. There was nothing for it but absolute stillness; if we as much as moved a hand to thrust our rifles into firing position, or raised our heads an inch to try and find out by the flashes where the enemy was, a volley was the result. This was due to the fact that we were lying in long grass, uncut hay, which waved every time we stirred. The movement was obv
ious to the enemy because of the brilliant moonlight.
To make matters worse, our own line practically gave us up and began machine-gun fire on the German lines. The night woke to pandemonium. Fortunately this saved us and we crawled and slithered back to our own trenches with a delightful amount of information.
In three months we never lost a man on patrol, though a few German prisoners were collected, mostly snipers caught between the lines. This period of warfare concluded by an advance which lost us more men in a day than we had lost in the previous months, and we came out on rest. Sports were organized; a shooting competition was arranged. One of the prizes was carried off by a chum and myself, though there was little credit in this seeing that we had been using our rifles in sniping and scouting work for months, whereas the average Tommy rarely fired his unless an attack matured. The prize was sixty francs, and we repaired to a favourite estaminet and treated our pals after the time-honoured manner. That was the night my pal saw most distinctly two sentries on the gateway of the ruined chateau that lodged us. We had great difficulty in drawing him past before he was thrown into the guard-room. The single sentry became almost annoyed…
After a few weeks’ rest and intensive training, we went to Ypres, bound for the Passchendaele Ridge. We were to be the second brigade in, another brigade preceding us to the line. We knew the place by repute only. Its reputation was similar to that of Verdnn to the poilus – hell on earth. Every part of the line was shelled hourly; the roads behind were shelled; the camps were shelled by huge guns.
