by John Fairley
Only officers and instructors were allowed across to the two brothels, or to sample the wares of La Comtesse, Étaples’ most flamboyant whore, who drove ostentatiously round the main square of an evening in an open carriage and pair. Yet even this restricted jollification caused General Thomson endless worry. Throughout the spring and summer of 1917, while the base camp seethed beneath him, the commandant seemed to concentrate his thoughts mainly on the much-needed VD hospital for officers, to judge from his diary entries:
[February:] Work on venereal hospital for officers has not yet been started.
[March:] Officers’ venereal hospital not started but site is pegged out.
[April: ] Building for officers’ venereal hospital in progress.
[May:] Work nearing completion.
[June – triumphantly:] Officers’ venereal hospital opened on the 21st.
In the cauldron that was to produce the most serious threats to discipline in the entire war, no other subject got more of the commandant’s attention than the venereal welfare of his officers. He made certain that other ranks were not exposed to the risk of infection by the simple expedient of keeping them locked up. But the actual bacillus which was to inflame Étaples and wreck Thomson’s career was being cultured, to his apparent unconcern, four miles away from the Étaples hospitals in the infamous Bull Ring. Each new arrival met it on his first morning.
Reveille at 5 a.m. Herded out of the bell-tents where they slept crammed up to twenty-two in one tent. Given breakfast and the day’s rations of one slice of bread. Then formed up with full kit and rifle for the four-mile march to the beach. The Scots sometimes marched to the pipes; the New Zealanders had their own band. But none could avoid the day’s opening cacophony in the corridor of insult known as the ‘Canary Run’. The instructors were lined up five or six feet apart on either side of the road. Through the gauntlet of ranting, swearing Canaries, the troops passed at the quick march. Any man whose rifle was not at the correct slope, whose puttee was loose or unsymmetrical, who had any mark on a uniform, would be swamped in a torrent of oaths. The physical trials of the Bull Ring were ruthless to the point of inhumanity, but for many soldiers it was the daily concentrated gauntlet of degradation in the ‘Canary Run’ which lives with them most.
‘Even now, in my eightieth year,’ writes Private Notley, ‘I remember the abuse heaped on the rank and file there and wonder what comradeship means,’
The Bull Ring itself was merely a set of staked-out patches in the sand-hills. It was tailor-made to compound the torments of the instructors. In the heat of the summer, high collars had to stay tightly buttoned, sleeves immaculately rolled down. The soft sand dragged at the ankles. Wet, it stained the khaki of the uniforms to the fury of the Canaries. Dry, it penetrated collar and cuff to rasp the flesh red against the coarse serge. The sand exacerbated everything. The soldiers dug at the soft sand. Inevitably, immediately, it trickled back and scorned their efforts. The instructors raged. The sand muffled all sound and made it impossible to keep step. The instructors savaged the defaulters. In the frightening dark of the gas chamber where the crude gasmasks were tested, there was sand to drag the feet so that escape seemed as remote as in a nightmare.
Private David Paton of Dundee remembers this as the worst of all the trials of the Bull Ring. ‘You thought you would collapse and choke for ever in that deep sand. If you took too long the Canaries were there to swear and send you through again.’
Always the instructors held the whip-hand.
‘They were just a lot of bullies,’ said Private Joe Perks of Dundee. ‘Front-line dodgers, I would call them. If you answered them back you were for the high jump. The training was much worse than normal training. Say you were doing skirmishing. If it wasn’t to their satisfaction they made you do it over and over again. I’ve seen people getting it maybe six times a day, the same thing over and over again until the best-disciplined men lost their rag and lashed out. Then it would be seven days’ field punishment. They had a fence at the Bull Ring, and often there would be rows of men tied to it no matter what the weather. It happened to me once. They marched you out and tied you by the wrists. You just stood there. You couldn’t ease yourself. Nothing. It was like the Foreign Legion. It did cause hatred, but usually the discipline overruled that.’
At twelve o’clock there was a halt. The one slice of bread could be eaten. For a moment, a glimmer of humanity was allowed on to the beach in the form of Lady Angela Forbes’s charity tea canteen, which would later attract the wrath of Haig himself. The ration was half a pint of tea per man.
‘It was an odd sort of tea, you know, dishwater. But it was better than the army supplied, which was nothing. They came down with it on a trolley and you marched up and got your tankard.’
Then it was back for the afternoon session. The Bull Ring was laid out for more than a mile on either side of the Boulogne Road and furnished with specimens of every catastrophe likely to confront the soldier. He was shown down what was laughingly known as Fleet Street, with twenty-nine different types of wire and trenching device. There was a three-day-event-style course, with drop-jump, post and rails, something known as the confidence planks, and a vaulting bar. It was right beside the road, and seemed principally reserved for exhausting minor defaulters. There was a complete model battlefield with every sophistication of dugout and trench. But this also seems to have had little attention from the instructors. What they liked principally was bayonet fighting.
There were bayonet sacks in the drill area, bayonet sacks in the trench lay-out, bayonet sacks in the attack area. Hour after hour the men in full kit were made to charge with full pack and fixed bayonets, through barbed wire and into water, leaping trenches, climbing walls, downhill and uphill, running, stumbling, scrambling up again while, as one victim wrote, the Canaries chirped: ‘Get a move on, blast you. Put some guts into it. Forget you’re white men. Stick it in. Don’t tickle him. What’s the good of shoving it there? You’ve got to take his life not his voice. Like to have a rest, wouldn’t you?’
The same soldier remembers: ‘At Étaples we were treated in a manner which made us ashamed to be soldiers. It made us bitter. But, considering ourselves old campaigners, we resented still more the treatment accorded to drafts fresh from England, boys whose physical condition was not up to it: the sectional rushes, the belly-flopping, the “On the ’ands downing”, the marching, the manual drill, the saluting at every few steps. What a bad war it was at Étaples.’
After the one slice of bread and tea the training would often go on until four or five in the afternoon. And so did the persecution. As the Gordon Highlander, David Stuart of Clydebank, was coming out of the Bull Ring one day ‘just about all in’: ‘I said to my mate, thank God that day’s over. Anything for an excuse with the Canaries. They called the two of us out of the parade and gave us another hour on the assault course.’
No one remembers that the Bull Ring produced anything except resentment. But the gun-and-bomb ranges had a fatuity which was especially ironic for the front-line veterans.
‘Old hands considered it a joke to spend time playing with strange gear like the trench catapult and the West spring gun (grenades always fell off the silly arm),’ is Charles Richards of Auckland’s memory.
And Joe Perks says: ‘They had a special line in jam-tin bombs. You filled the jam tin with stones, put your gun cotton inside with a fuse and lit it with your cigarette. It did about as much damage as a pea-shooter.’
Sporadically there were grisly incidents: a hand blown off when a nervous youth failed to throw his grenade over the target wire and it bounded back. Corporal Reynolds heard of more than one instructor ‘accidently’ bayoneted on the ranges. One legendary tale recounted how a young boy blew the brains out of a Canary at point-blank range. He was supposed to be firing blanks during the practice course, and the most vicious instructor was standing in front, laying into him about his shaky aim. The youth slipped a live round into the rifle and squeezed the trigger.
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The march back to camp was the final trial.
‘Whatever the weather, a man or boy was expected to be as alert and smart as if the day had just started,’ recalls Private Wood of Manchester. ‘Again the Canaries were there, lined up, ranting away.’
Sixty years on, his bitterness is unalloyed.
‘That Étaples base camp held more bloody scroungers both in officers, sergeants and men than any camp in England or France. They dodged the trenches while there were young men of eighteen years dying, being gassed, wounded, taken prisoner.’
There is no doubt that this feeling was at the heart of the eruption which was to follow in September 1917. The conscripts who came reluctantly to fill the holes in Kitchener’s slaughtered volunteer army were full of resentment. But the mutiny could never have raged as widely and venomously as it did without the deep feeling among those who had seen Arras, Messines, the Somme that they were being humiliated and exploited by people clinging tightly to cushy lives away from the carnage of the front: military police, admin, men, instructors, the whole despised gang of ‘base wallahs’.
In retrospect, the notorious base camp had its bizarre, almost comic aspects. There was the messenger-dog barracks for the motley canine regiment drafted in to train for the front line, and there was the pigeon barracks. There was the WAAC quarters, guarded even more closely than the prisoner-of-war cages, and the Under-Age battalion. Here boys, often veterans of the battlefields who had been discovered or betrayed as lying about their ages, were collected and fattened up until either they reached the age of nineteen or their chest measurements matched up to War Office requirements for the fighting man.
More immediate entertainment was in short supply. There was a wood of beech trees alongside the camp with a notice in English: ‘These woods have been given for the recreation of the troops by M. de Roquigny’. Lady Angela Forbes organized a bath-house and a beer-hut, but at eight o’clock it closed to all but officers. She also owned a donkey which roamed the camp and provided, at least for Private Perks and his friends, a doleful rodeo. There was the Salvation Army hut. There was the Expeditionary Force canteen but, as Charles Richards says, there was little comfort there.
‘As the Aussies and Canadians got four shillings a day and Tommy Atkins only one, the canteen was invariably bought out – especially as the Aussie mess-tin could hold four pints.’
Bathing in the sea was forbidden – a small but infuriating restriction to be added to the list of the mutineers’ grievances. There was a small cinema. But spare time mainly meant sitting round the long trestle tables near the mess tent, cleaning equipment and writing letters home.
One common distraction, however, is common to all armies away from the fighting line: the charms of the fairer sex. There were the two little brothels which were causing such heartache to Brigadier-General Thomson, not to mention La Comtesse.
‘And for any man who could beat the system, there was an estaminet on the rue des Hautes Communes,’ says Corporal Reynolds. ‘It was run by Madame Walle and her three daughters, Alice, Madeline and Lycette with no hanky-panky. Supplies were very scarce, chiefly egg and chips, but they did their best at fair prices. Alice kept order, aided by a back-handed chop to the throat which would have been no discredit to Steve Vidor.’
The hundreds of nurses serving the hospitals at Le Touquet, Paris Plage and Camiers were equally if more genteelly unavailable. Nurse Dorothy Barefoot, who came from Ottawa with the No. 1 Canadian General Hospital to Étaples, spent such little time off as she had from the mutilation in the wards at the little cafés of Paris Plage.
‘The most popular spot was a little place called Le Chat Bleu tucked away amid the smart shops. There was a nice little hotel in Étaples called Les Voyageurs where we sometimes had dinner. Good food and the walls covered with paintings from artists who had paid for a meal that way before the war. We went on bicycle rides through the countryside. There were occasional parties and dances in the recreation hall, but Dame Maude McCarthy, our chief, considered such things unsuitable. It was only later when the American girls arrived enthusiastic for some relaxation after the heart-breaking duties in the wards that the ban was lifted.’
Even on the wrong side of the railway tracks, in the great base camp itself, there were some carefree possibilities, but only if you knew the ropes. Private Parrott of Leeds arrived at Étaples with the 3rd London Regiment with the benefit of a brother, Sergeant Fred, long established on the base hospital staff.
‘He gave me a good time, including a very welcome bath, a complete change of uniform, civilian food and wine, and last, but by no means least, a nice young WAAC whose philosophy was “Live for today, for tomorrow we may die”, which approximated to my own ideas. The next day we were marshalled into the cattle-trucks again to God knows where,’
Some nice young WAACs undoubtedly risked punishment by providing a warm Godspeed to the men leaving for the front, though the history of this aspect of their war service does not find its proper place of honour in the official memoirs. Nor does the fateful relationship between a WAAC and a Gordon Highlander which was to catapult the Étaples camp into rebellion. But while it was a love story which started the Étaples mutiny, it was the presence of the Australians which made such a thing seem possible to the British Tommy. The Aussies were indeed an eye-opener for the British troops. For three years the British had not only gone unquestioning to the slaughter at the front, but had endured the harshest regime of Victorian discipline whenever they came out of the line. Field punishment awaited any man who jibbed at a superior’s orders, the firing squad any man who deserted, showed cowardice or even nodded off to sleep on duty. The class system imposed a succession of increasingly callow public-school officers on even the most battle-hardened troops.
By 1917, the British were fertile ground for the talk of peace at the Stockholm Conference of the Socialist International, and even for the propaganda of revolution which seeped out of Russia. More immediately and vividly, the Aussies reminded Tommy daily that the system was neither immutable nor essential. Gallipoli, the Somme, Ypres had taught them that the Aussies fought as bravely as any man in battle. But, despite Haig’s urgings, there was no death penalty in the Australian Army. The Aussie officer often came from the ranks of the fighting troops. And when the Aussie soldier went back for a rest, he stood no nonsense about military protocol. It was the Aussies who dominated the pontoon schools and the gambling at Étaples. And they felt protective towards the Scots whom they saw as innocents trapped under the harsh discipline of the English. Toplis had seen them cut down a field punishment victim earlier in 1917. By August, Private Jellie from Auckland witnessed them cut down every prisoner at the military police compound. They would never salute an officer at Étaples, or stand for any interference from the Red Caps. In July there was a fist fight when two Aussies tried to cross the bridge to go into Étaples town. Within, minutes, half of Queensland joined in the brawl, until a military policeman drew his revolver and wounded one.
To the Scots in particular it was a seminar in liberation. Private Joe Perks enlisted after he had been fired from a Dundee jute factory for whistling while he worked, and was amazed to meet men who defied exploitation of any kind:
‘They were the greatest gamblers in the world. I’ve seen the sergeant of the Military Police come along, and they’d just say, “Go on, buzz off. Don’t bother us.” They’d go because they couldn’t do anything with them. The men were there to fight, and when there was no fighting they wanted their pleasures. That’s the way it went. The Australians were the greatest blokes I ever met. I remember when I came out of hospital at Étaples after trench fever and I went to get my hair cut. The barber holds out his hand: “That will be half a franc.” There was this big Australian sitting there, and he says: “You want half a franc. The bloke doesn’t have half a franc. He doesn’t have a Woodbine. He’s just down the line. He’s been up there fighting, with you lounging and scrounging about back here. No, no,” he says, “if yo
u don’t behave yourself I’ll give you a good hiding.” John, this Australian was called. He took me down to the canteen and bought me a few cakes and fags and gave me his post office box number. He was a sheep-shearer. “Fancy him wanting half a franc top and him getting paid for it as well,” he says. “No, I’m not having anything like that.”’
When the mutiny came to Étaples, the combination of the Scots and the Australians, the special grievances of the New Zealanders, the oratory of Percy Toplis, the common hatred of the Red Caps and Canaries, the burgeoning populism, purveyed by papers like John Bull, were together to prove a deadly mix. For six days Brigadier-General Thomson and his staff would stand helplessly by and watch the old order collapse and threaten the fighting ability of the British Army, just as their ally on the Eastern Front, Russia, was about to be levered out of the war for good by revolution.
As an officer in the Manchester Regiment, the poet Wilfred Owen had written a letter to his mother in which he described Étaples:
I lay awake in a windy tent in the middle of a vast, dreadful encampment.
It seemed neither France nor England, but a kind of paddock where the beasts are kept a few days before the shambles. I heard the revelling of the Scotch troops, who are now dead, and who knew they would be dead.
I thought of the very strange look on all faces in that camp; an incomprehensible look, which a man will never see in England; nor can it be seen in any battle. But only in Étaples.
It was not despair, or terror, it was more terrible than terror, for it was a blindfold look, and without expression, like a dead rabbit’s.
On 9 September 1917, the beasts would break out of the paddock. A complete breakdown in Anglo-American communications was to add to an already formidable list of reasons for the havoc they would wreak.
