The Monocled Mutineer

by John Fairley

  Plumer had watched the creeping disillusion of the conscript British Army. By 9 September he knew that the nine divisions of British and Australians that Haig had provided for him would hardly suffice. It was to be attrition again, and every man was needed. Along the Ypres to Menin Road were gathered dismounted cavalry, reformed regiments, returned wounded, any man who could be rustled up to trade his life for a German. That day, too, the French were engaged in a strange and bloody exercise, but far from the front line. For the fearful consequences of sedition which Haig and Pétain alike had cause to dread had come to pass. Mutiny had given the spark to insurrection. Ten thousand troops of France’s Russian allies, serving in Champagne, had overthrown their officers, set up Soviets and declared a Bolshevik revolution. Now they were surrounded by French cavalry, artillery and three brigades of infantry. Thousands of miles from home, but buoyed up by propaganda from Trotsky and his friends in Paris, and the bewitching oratory of Private Globa, the Russians refused to surrender.

  As the mutiny at Étaples unfolded victoriously through the middle days of September, simultaneously the new Bolsheviks of Champagne were systematically shelled into defeat by the heavy artillery of the French Army, but only after three days and nights of machine-gunning and trench warfare a hundred miles behind the front line. Some weeks earlier, Private Percy Toplis too had made his dispositions. He had made his way from the ragged company on the Somme back to the old familiar territory of Étaples where his talents for bluff and disguise would allow him a more elegant life. It was a journey which was to threaten the British Army with that same plague which had brought such mortal danger to France.

  7

  On a low rise overlooking the Channel coast of France south of Boulogne stands one of the largest of all British war cemeteries. Rolling endlessly through sparse trees, couch-grass and shrubs, the graves of more than 10,000 men straggle away up the road towards Boulogne. Étaples is the cruellest of cemeteries. Here lie the men who died lingeringly of gas and gangrene, without limbs or sight – the pitiful roll-call of those who lived long enough to endure the stretcher journey back through darkness and mud and shell-fire to the clearing stations, who survived the rattling cattle wagons with bunks stacked three or four high, who faced the surgeon and the operating table, but who could not hold on to life long enough to see England again. They were buried by the professional mourners from the military hospital, ten, fifteen, twenty a day, far from the battlefields on which they had made their sacrifice. And with bleak impassivity their last resting-place overlooks the most hated place in all of France in those years of war, the Bull Ring of Étaples.

  ‘It was a hellish dump without a single redeeming feature,’ wrote one veteran, Corporal Reynolds from Leicester.

  ‘I can truthfully say,’ wrote another soldier, ‘that I had moments there as unpleasant as any on the Western Front. I was never so angry elsewhere.’

  ‘It was a killer, sand everywhere, dreadful,’ recalled John Musgrove from Wallsend-on-Tyne.

  Étaples displayed the crucifixion of the British soldier daily in a fearful triptych: the perfunctory notes of the ‘Last Post’ sounded like an endless loop of dismal muzak on the brow of the hill; at its foot was the parade of victims lashed by their wrists in Army Field Punishment No. 1; and in the deadening sand and silt of the beach beyond, hundreds, thousands of troops were abused and mauled by instructors whose violence and sadism were to be remembered even after some of the horrors of the battlefields themselves faded from the mind. This was the British Army’s No. 1 training camp. Its regime was so sickeningly brutal that men were to plead to go up the line and face the enemy.

  ‘I applied to get out and go to the battlefield,’ wrote Private J. McCormick of the Seaforth Highlanders, who now lives in Saltcoats, Ayrshire. ‘I would get more peace there.’

  Private Bradfield from King’s Lynn says: ‘Every man who passed through the Bull Ring so hated the staff that I wouldn’t have given them a cat’s chance if they’d come up the line. They were bastards all of them.’

  Victor Silvester, whose post-war fame as a dance orchestra leader was to reach out round the world from London, first made the acquaintance of the Étaples Bull Ring as a scrawny, sandy-haired youth of 17 in June 1917. A vicar’s son, he had been only 14 years old when he ran away to war from boarding school. Strictly speaking, you were not allowed to fight or die in your country’s cause before the age of 18, but it was not until a great wave of protest came from parents back home, in 1917, that the rule was observed. Even then those under age were not sent back to England, but to Étaples to await the magical date that would take them back into battle.

  Silvester, despite his age, had already reached veteran status, having been wounded on the Western Front near Arras. Three years of ceaseless carnage had made him hard and tough physically and mentally. He had seen men die in bloody and agonizing fashion. He had seen soldiers playing football with a human head blown off in battle, but he was still unprepared for Étaples.

  He recalled: ‘Back at Arras I had been told by an officer that I would find it something of a rest camp where I could get fully fit again. It turned out to be a protracted exercise in calculated cruelty, especially for the large number of us still suffering from our wounds.’

  On his first day breakfast was one ‘dog biscuit’, before the march to the Bull Ring assault course for a ten-hour stint without anything more to eat. On his second day a muttered objection to hour upon hour of superfluous training brought him an immediate one hour’s full pack drill, consisting of non-stop jumping up and down on the same spot, to the point where he collapsed. He had taken exception to monotonously bayoneting a straw-filled sack, on which was a painting supposed to look like the Kaiser, on the grounds that he had been practising on real, live Germans for three years – and the same could not be said for his instructor who had never seen a German, dead or alive.

  After ten days of Bull Ring barbarism, Silvester was given a break, and with it came another shock. He was posted to Commandant Thomson’s office as a messenger. There an officer congratulated him on the crossed rifle sign on the lower part of his left sleeve, indicating that he was a first-class marksman who had passed a musketry range test. Silvester would be just right for occasional ‘special duty’.

  The fact that his special talent had been recognized gave Silvester his one moment of passing pleasure at Étaples. The next day he discovered to his horror the real significance of the interview. Between messages he was idling through a thick wad of foolscap sheets, headed Army Orders – Part 1, when the full, sinister meaning of ‘special duty’ dawned on him.

  There were fifty sheets, each one relating to a particular soldier whose interests in the war had ceased with dawn execution. The papers recording the deaths of these soldiers were all marked ‘strictly private’. A typical example read:

  No. 743261 Brown J. W. Private, 7th Battalion Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry. On July 11th, 1917, Pte. Brown was granted 14 days leave from his battalion at the Front, to return home to England. After 25 days he had not returned to his unit and was duly posted as a deserter. The Military Police were notified, and, on the instructions of the Army Provost Marshal, two military policemen called at his home to find him absent. Three days later he was interrogated and arrested and brought back to his Regiment in France where he was detained. On the 20th of August, 1917, he was tried by Court Martial, found guilty and sentenced to death by firing squad. The sentence was duly carried out on the morning of August 28.

  Under this Army Act there were twenty-five crimes for which a man might have to pay with his life. The other forty-nine soldiers had died for offences ranging from, ‘Shamefully casting away their arms in the presence of the enemy’, ‘Desertion in the face of the enemy’, ‘Behaving in a cowardly manner’, to ‘Inducing others to behave like cowards’. The records of their fate were casually hung among a pile of memos on the office notice board.

  After the events which were to follow at Étaples another
soldier was to spot a fresh bundle of execution notices on that same board.

  But before that time and before being switched to the Austrian-Italian Front, Silvester was to become an unwilling executioner at Étaples.

  Just before his sudden death in 1978 he revealed his painful secret. He had been forced to take part in five shootings.

  He recalled:

  The first man I had to help to kill was a private in my own regiment, the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, a fact which filled me with even greater shame. He was said to have fled in the face of the enemy.

  We marched to a quarry outside Étaples at first dawn. The victim was brought out from a shed and led struggling to a chair to which he was then bound and a white handkerchief placed over his heart as our target area.

  Mortified by the sight of the poor wretch tugging at his bonds, twelve of us, on the order, raised our rifles unsteadily. Some of the men, unable to face their ordeal, had got themselves drunk overnight They could not have aimed straight if they had tried, and, contrary to popular belief, all twelve rifles were loaded. The condemned man had also been plied with whisky during the night, but he had remained sober through fear.

  The tears were rolling down my cheeks as he went on attempting to free himself from the ropes attaching him to the chair. I aimed blindly and when the gunsmoke had cleared away we were further horrified to see that, although wounded, the intended victim was still alive. Still blindfolded, he was attempting to make a run for it still strapped to the chair. The blood was running freely from a chest wound. An officer in charge stepped forward to put the finishing touch with a revolver held to the poor man’s temple.

  He had only once cried out and that was when he shouted the one word ‘mother’. He could not have been very much older than me. We were told later that in fact he had been suffering from shell-shock, a condition not recognized by the army in 1917.

  By the time I had taken part in four more such dawn executions, I did not have to feign illness. Like the other executioners. I was screaming in my sleep and physically ill every day. I was put into a hospital and strapped down to the bed to prevent me running away. I was then sent away from Étaples and all its horrors to the Italian Front. The simple business of being twice wounded there was less injurious by far than all the mental scars that Étaples left with me for the rest of my life.

  Small wonder that Étaples was to be the scene of a frantic wild uprising – an eruption that was to turn into six days of open mutiny with 100,000 men immobilized in the vital week before the start of the Passchendaele offensive, with thousands of them hunting down police and officers, and infantry and cavalry pulled out of the line to put them down. Étaples also had one unique ingredient to contribute to the poteen of rebellion: besides humiliation and degradation inside the base, there was defiance outside it.

  In the woods around the base camp, in patches of firm ground among the coastal bogs, in chalk dugouts on the wild downland, was a small army of deserters. Travelling by night, hiding by day, living by ‘lifting’ food from farms, Percy Toplis had made his way to the coast at Étaples by early June 1917. He was there gathered into the Sanctuary, the most elaborate and bizarre underground society in all the long subterranean civilization of the Western Front. From the sand-dunes of Berck and Paris Plage, past Le Touquet and Étaples and up through the woods towards Boulogne, there had grown up, from 1915 onwards, a metropolis of the nether world, its forum in the caves and pits round Camiers, its highways the labyrinthine chalk tunnels which honeycombed the hinterland, its residences dugouts, furnished, lit, warmed to a standard that made the trenches and billets of war seem a barbarous dream.

  There, tantalizingly almost within sight of England just twenty miles away across the Channel, deserters plied the trades of the underworld until the chance came to get a boat, flee to Paris or simply melt into the complaisant community of lonely Frenchwomen left behind by conscription and the war. Sporadically the British authorities attempted to flush them out. But they were men of infinite resources. One of the British secret policemen employed to try and undermine the Sanctuary recalled that among the men he caught were veterans of two or even three years in the tunnels:

  ‘Sometimes they were armed with revolvers, but the weapons mostly favoured and carried were sand-bags, or “thuds” as they were termed. These simple but effective weapons were improvised from the white linen ration bags – their creation being simplicity itself. Just sufficient sand was placed in the bag, which was screwed and tied up tightly. Rifle barrels, quartered and filed down conveniently for the pocket, knives, daggers, pieces of solid rubber tyres, ash entrenching-tool handles with an iron end, short sticks, knuckle-dusters, pieces of chain – many and varied were the crude weapons found on these men.

  ‘Not only did the deserters rob civilians, but mixing with the huge general mass of troops in the vast base headquarters would take an opportunity of running crown-and-anchor boards, shooting dice, three-card manipulation and any other manoeuvre whereby they might acquire money. If not in these ways, then they would rob army hostels, canteens and officers’ messes. It was impossible to stop and question every man on the roads around and in Étaples. There were colonials masquerading as English and English dressed as colonials and a large proportion of men dressed as officers in stolen uniforms.

  ‘Gambling in those times was nothing. The Military Police were powerless. In fact the Military Police applied Nelson’s tactic of the blind eye to the telescope. It was regarded as a safety valve, and so long as there was no trouble or rioting the troops could do as they liked. I have seen many times the ‘Top of the Hill’, as it was termed, reminiscent of Epsom Downs on Derby Day, only with no conglomeration of male and female fashion, but simply of khaki and hospital blue. Tommies with Cockney, Midland, Northern, Scottish, Irish and Colonial accents all shouting the odds like bookmakers on the racecourse. You might hear such invitations as, “What about a flutter at the old mud hook,” being crown and anchor. If you didn’t like the status of this military bookmaker, there would be another on his left shouting out such encouragement as, “Come on, me lucky lads. You win ’em and I’ll pay,” or, “The old firm, the old firm.” Some enterprising Tommies went so far as to get boards painted advertising their stands. To see a Tommy with an old black or grey silk top-hat or bowler, or even with a bookmaker’s satchel was quite a common sight. There were crude notices painted on gutta-percha ground-sheets, “No limit. Five francs to five million. Jock of Pontius Pilate’s Bodyguard. Old Digger of the Aussies. Old Darkie of the Diehards, the Sky’s My Limit.”’

  It was in and among such an atmosphere that the absentee would move, safe in the assurance of the old saying, ‘There’s safety in numbers.’ Among hundreds of thousands of soldiers, all odds were against his detection, provided he used caution. The place was made for that prince of masquerade, Percy Toplis. Dressed, according to mood, as a captain, a sergeant-major, or even in moments of convenient diffidence as a corporal, Toplis set about turning the confusion of Étaples base headquarters into a comfortable living. Only later was he to help to turn it into an insurrection.

  The Étaples base that he entered for the second time in that third year of the war, 1917, was, however, already moving towards an explosion. Brigadier-General Thomson’s olympian vision of his task as base commander had remained unruffled during a year in which his staff had refined Étaples into a unique short course in brutality and persecution.

  ‘One PT sergeant was so maltreating the soldiers in the Bull Ring that I had a dust-up with him and laid a complaint,’ recollects Company Sergeant-Major John Gray of the Gordon Highlanders, ‘but I was just rapidly posted away to the front.’

  The new draft, arriving at Boulogne from Folkestone, fell instantly into the clutches of the infamous ‘Canaries’ – the permanent instructors at the camp. They wore yellow armbands, and took less than a fortnight to earn the undying hatred of almost every man among the million or more who passed through their hands.

&n
bsp; ‘They were the worst type of man imaginable,’ comments Private Notley of Norwich. ‘It was rumoured that some of them came from the glass-house at Aldershot. They made men’s lives a misery.’

  The Canaries took over the new soldiers on the twenty-mile route-march from Boulogne. This had been General Thomson’s idea back in April, to start toughening the troops up straight away. ‘A rest camp has been established at Neufchatel for a midday rest,’ his diary generously records. His soldiers remember it as a hut where they got half a slice of bread and the use of a cold tap. And the shouting started immediately the march was under way. Any man with a blister on his foot or any sign of flagging from the double-quick infantry pace was harried, sworn at, threatened.

  ‘The whole approach from Boulogne was depressing,’ recalls Private Notley, ‘with hospitals and cemeteries lining the whole route. When we got to Étaples, it was new kit and rifles and more abuse until we got to our quarters.’

  The vast array of candidates for the front line was corralled behind barbed wire into a series of infantry base depots (IBDs). These stretched on either side of a road for a mile or more up a hill behind the town of Étaples itself. Étaples, a little fishing port on the River Canche, with its classic French main square with cafes and bars, was out of bounds to the Bull Ring troops. The only means of access – bridges across the railway and the river – were held day and night by a rota of petty Horatios ordered to deflect all-comers from the perilous delights of a glass of wine at an estaminet or an evening at the town cinema.