The Monocled Mutineer

by John Fairley

  A subsequent, not-too-serious, attempt at an inquiry finished with a select committee of Congress declaring it had no authority to summon witnesses, no money to conduct an investigation and that there was no time to do it, anyhow. The Department of Justice stayed silent while the scandal, a squalling but short-lived infant, was buried without honour.

  The administration could turn again to its task of rounding up aliens and spies and passing legislation controlling the content of foreign newspapers, part of the campaign capitalizing on the mood of loyalist support sparked off by the Étaples raid.

  At Étaples itself the raid had further helped to put the British soldiers in a mood for mutiny, among the first observers of which would be the US war correspondents who had been honoured guests at the Bull Ring the previous day. The pressmen were in the lounge of the Hôtel des Voyageurs at Étaples, writing features in praise of the British methods of training for war, when the door burst open and in stormed the first of the mutineers who had fought their way into the town. With the newspaper men staring in silent astonishment, the mutineers swept the prepared dispatches off the tables on which they then proceeded to dance while they poured bottles of looted wine down their throats. By sheer accident the Americans had landed on the greatest story of the war but, before they could act on it, the British administration demonstrated that they too had a way of suppressing unpalatable news.

  One correspondent excitedly telephoned Commandant Thomson’s second in command, Colonel Nason, who had been his proud host at the Bull Ring the previous day. He demanded to know what the hell was going on. He was told to stay put pending the arrival of two British captains in two staff cars, when all would be revealed. The cars arrived within minutes and the Americans were hustled out of the hotel back to headquarters where Nason, deeply embarrassed and apologetic, explained that his soldiers were proving ‘a little wayward and difficult to handle’.

  He predicted that the riots would not spread and that a very minor crisis would be over that night. However, just in case it should prove otherwise, the British Censor had already been contacted, and the Americans would not be allowed to file one word of copy on the subject. Meanwhile, the British would be pleased to protect the Americans from any further unpleasantness there might be by confining them to British HQ for the next ten days.

  The great Étaples cover-up had begun with the house arrest of the public representatives of Britain’s newest ally.

  9

  There was never a real day of rest at Étaples, but Sunday was the nearest thing. Reveille sounded at 7 a.m. rather than 5 a.m. Parades and training were restricted to five periods before noon. It was also the one day when the camp cinema was open in the afternoon. Otherwise it was business as usual. Inside the huge base, the long, ugly finger of the camp incinerator belched forth its thick black smoke, dowsing the huts and tents with an ever-pervading smell of burning flesh. For, along with the waste, it took the amputated limbs from the hospitals.

  Alongside the railway line from Boulogne the bugles were still incessantly blowing the ‘Last Post’ as the dead were trundled on Union Jack-draped handcarts along to the cemetery. And at the station, with its five flower-decked platforms, the trains still hooted and steamed their way to and from the front, a hundred or more a day, even on Sundays. Those rattling their way east with human reinforcements, supplies and heavy guns passed the military cattle-trucks travelling west with their cargoes of wounded and dying.

  One man who was to play a crucial role on that black day of Sunday, 9 September 1917, had planned to sleep in late. Second Lieutenant James Davies, Royal Fusiliers, had already faced a personal crisis that week and was being posted back to the front. He was an actor who had left the stage of the London Palladium to join the army in the first week of the war in August 1914. At the battle of Loos in September 1915 he had been a corporal with a section of the 24th Division, one of 300 survivors out of 1,100 men. He had already been wounded three times, and his grateful commanders had rewarded him with a posting to Étaples to recover. Then, on 7 September 1917, the young officer had staged his own one-man mutiny – and got away with it. It had happened when a young lieutenant had taken him to the Bull Ring to teach him how to fire a Verey pistol:

  ‘This stupid man, whose feet looked as if they had been flattened by walking around on the sand, staged his Verey light demonstration for me and a group of fellow officers. I do not think he had been nearer the front than Étaples, and I remember thinking at the time, This surely must be the bloody end.

  ‘It was very hot, and standing around on parade with the sun beating down on my tin hat I felt very dizzy and just sat down, to the astonishment of those around me. I felt I could not go on, but before the shouting started I ran from the Bull Ring to the adjutant’s office.

  ‘I burst in on him, shouting, “This nonsense is not making me fit to go back to my battalion. It is making me unfit. I am not going back to the Bull Ring any more.”’

  Davies then threw down a challenge.

  ‘Send me back to my unit or put me under arrest.’ I remember him looking up at me with some astonishment from his desk. My outburst amounted to a refusal to obey orders and, in a way, it was a mutinous stance, but with this difference. I was stating a preference, and I suppose the system had won in a way. There were many who felt the system had been ruthlessly designed to make men glad to leave Étaples for battle.

  ‘Of course, there was this other difference. The other ranks would never have been allowed to forcibly express their desires. I was. I never went back to the Bull Ring again.’

  On that last day before returning to the front, Davies had washed and shaved by 11 a.m. and joined two other officers walking into Étaples town to take the single-decker tram which ran by the side of the road to Paris Plage. They had a lunch-time drink in the Hôtel des Anglais, part of which was in use as a war hospital, followed by a leisurely stroll to the beach for an afternoon in the sun.

  As the young veterans chatted desultorily about Davies’s good fortune in escaping Étaples, Corporal Wood of the Gordon Highlanders, not so lucky in the fate awaiting him, strolled out of the barbed-wire compound where the Scots were billeted and down towards the cinema. Since midday it seemed to have been getting hotter and hotter, and the tantalizing glimpse of the sea below did nothing to cool the atmosphere. The Gordons had had as hellish a war as any, and Corporal Wood had seen his share. He was a popular, admired NCO. The quarantine regime in Étaples was not much of a reward.

  Coming up the road towards him that afternoon, however, was one of Étaples’s more welcome sights: a girl in the uniform of the WAACs, a girl he knew, from Aberdeen. Whether it was chance, a lover’s tryst or a fleeting wartime assignation, this simple boy-meets-girl incident was to put the match to the tinder. Wood stopped. The two stood talking. In the heat of the afternoon the soldier lounged, his tunic unbuttoned.

  They were interrupted by a military policeman. Wood recognized him as a well-known boxing champion, Private Harry Reeve. Unlike most boxers, Reeve was renowned for throwing his weight about outside as well as inside the ring. He ordered Wood to move on. Talking to WAACs wasn’t allowed. In any case, the corporal was improperly dressed. There was a sudden flare of violence as the two men shouted. There was shoving and pushing, a punch was thrown. Private Reeve took out his revolver and shot Wood. Quickly the news filtered round the Scots regiments. It came for them as the final straw. The Étaples mutiny was on.

  It was after eight o’clock before Davies said his good nights to the other officers, after dinner in the hotel in Paris Plage, his intention being to walk back to base on his own. Darkness was beginning to shroud the poplar trees on the coast road, and in the shadows under the trees, Davies spotted a horse-drawn fiacre with an elderly driver. He changed his mind about walking, handed over five francs and started out over the cobbles on his journey into history.

  About a quarter of a mile out from Étaples town centre the horse pricked up its ears. Davies’s first reaction
to the noise of distant uproar was, like that of many others that night, to think that the Germans had broken through and captured the town. He dismissed the notion. But as they drew nearer to the Town Hall end of the town centre, the din had grown deafening. They turned into the square and the horse stopped in its tracks. Davies jumped down from the fiacre.

  ‘It was the most astonishing sight. Hundreds of troops were yelling, jeering, cheering, singing and dancing.’ Davies turned and headed for his depot via the narrow iron railway bridge which was to figure so vividly in the events to follow. As he crossed the bridge he looked down on another astounding gathering. Below him several hundred troops were running amok. Tents, huts and latrines were being set on fire. By the light of the flames, the troops who had either not attempted or who had failed to break out of camp could be seen standing to in the separate compounds of their IBDs. Armed officers had chosen this method of keeping them away from the main body of mutineers. Other senior officers were rushing about, with the rioters on the outside of the parade grounds jeering at their confusion.

  Davies got to his depot’s wooden office in the centre of a cluster of bell-tents, some of which were ablaze. Troops were dancing around them, whooping it up like Red Indians on the warpath. A lieutenant-colonel dashed in behind him. The colonel gave his order to the adjutant, and the adjutant, as Davies puts it, ‘not liking me very much’, passed it on to Davies. He was to go back to the bridge in command of fifty men with fixed bayonets. And he was to stop, by force if necessary, any more rebels crashing into Étaples.

  Because of the recent night air-raid on the American hospital, camp and road lighting had been restricted, but by now the lights were fully on. Searchlights had also been rushed to the scene, and as Davies marched at the head of his men their bayonets glistened and gleamed when caught in the cross-beams of light. Mutineers fell back on either side of the column, still booing, jeering and cat-calling, uncertain about their next move. When the fixed bayonets mounted the steps and took up position in two ranks across the bridge, their minds were made up.

  The road into the town was being barred, so the bridge had to be taken. The rioters started moving menacingly towards the bridge with its wooden steps and iron framework. Davies had been plunged into a desperate situation without warning. Having lined up his soldiers behind him, he turned to face the foe, many of them friends of the rifle and bayonet holders behind his back. If he ordered them to fight off the mutineers, would they do so? And if they did obey, how much common blood would be spilled? At his back was the forbidden territory of Étaples town.

  He looked down about twenty feet upon the sea of angry faces beginning to press round the bottom of the stairway. These men, his comrades in battle, had had their bravery snubbed, their patience tested beyond all endurance. Suddenly, ridiculously, says Davies, some lines from his last London Palladium part came back to him. They were, ‘Gather round my braves, gather round. For I, Black Eagle, your chief, have something to say to you.’

  ‘For one wild moment I had the idea that the tension might be broken and a bond created if I addressed the mutineers on similar lines,’ he remembers ruefully.

  Thunderous cheers and chants from below jolted him back to an acute awareness of his plight. The cheering signalled the first advance up the steps towards the rebels. They were coming at him, cautiously as yet, but determinedly and, most frightening of all, wordlessly. Even the cheers from those inciting from behind had died. In front, in almost equal numbers, were Australians, New Zealanders and Scots. The Royal Fusiliers to his rear started to cough and uneasily shuffle their feet, but Davies continued to stand his ground without flinching.

  The lemon-squeezer New Zealand hats, the wide-brimmed, side-turned-up Australian headgear, the bottle-green glengarries of the Gordon Highlanders formed the bobbing advance of a force which threatened to engulf the guardians of the bridge over Étaples railway. Somewhere to the rear of the rebels a lone piper started to play ‘Highland Laddie’, the regimental tune of the Gordons. The Jocks started to chorus their own adaptation of words to the music, softly at first, then more loudly, ‘Bonny Wullie’s gone awa, will he no come back again?’

  Second Lieutenant Davies knew the Gordon’s regimental motto, ‘Strike Sure’, and he had seen them in reckless action in the past. He tried hard to detect if hand-guns were being carried by the rebels, but they were jammed so tightly together that he could not be certain. He had never raised his own pistol throughout, carefully keeping it dangling nonchalantly in his right hand, pointing down towards the top step immediately below where he stood.

  Suddenly the piper stopped playing, the singing ceased and the threats, the cheering and the jeering drained away. They were inches apart now: a big burly Highland trooper, full of hatred born of intense grievance, leading his excitable followers in a just cause, and an understanding English officer with his finger on the trigger. Davies remembers:

  ‘The Scotsman was so tall that though he was on the next to top step of the bridge, it had become an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, with me on the top step.’

  Then Davies had another wildly irrelevant thought. It was that they were both improperly dressed. The wild-eyed Jock did not have his uniform collar fastened at the front, and Davies should have had a sword in his hand instead of the revolver. He broke the silence as calmly as he could. ‘I don’t know what the hell’s been going on here today, but be a good fellow and take your crowd back to the camp. It can all be sorted out tomorrow when we’ve all simmered down.’

  Davies had spoken evenly but loudly enough for those jamming the stairs behind the Scot to hear. They heaved closer behind their leader, trying to jostle him past Davies with shouts of, ‘Tell him about the murder … tell him we want to get the bastard police that did it.’

  The leading Scotsman braced himself backwards against the crowd pushing him from behind, held up his right hand and yelled at Davies, ‘Ye hear what they say, sir. It’s no you we’re out tae git. We’ve got naething against you, but I mist ask ye tae stand aside.’ There was a pause. Then, in an even louder voice, the Jock added, ‘And if ye don’t we’ll turn the machine-guns on ye.’

  At this there was further rustle of uneasy movement among the soldiers behind Davies, while wild pandemonium broke out again among those before and below him. Above the general din he heard shouts of, ‘Get the guns.’ Davies knew there was an armoury near at hand. This highly dangerous game of poker had to end.

  He turned to face his heavily outnumbered troops and ordered them to stand aside. He could see the relief flooding back into their faces. Then the fusiliers were brushed aside as the mutineers stormed past them over the bridge towards Étaples. The mutiny of Étaples was to be bloody, but it would have been bloodier still but for the brave and difficult decision by a twenty-year-old lieutenant to concede defeat. His mature example was to be followed by junior officers throughout the mutiny, to the fury of Commandant Thomson.

  Davies watched the victorious mutineers surge across the bridge and down the steps at the other side, screaming and yelling in the manner he had so often seen them adopt when charging the enemy lines at the front. At the centre of the rushing, shoving, pushing phalanx was the piper, marching stolidly and imperturbably, refusing to be jostled out of tune.

  Davies marched his fifty fusiliers back behind the barbed wire of their own compound where an impatient, irritated adjutant listened to explanations and decided to change tactics. At this point it was thought that not many of the rebels were armed. So the adjutant moved to confiscate as many rifles as he could.

  ‘All arms they could get hold of were piled on the parade-ground under guard,’ said Corporal Frank Edwards of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment. ‘It fell to my lot to be detailed with the picket to hold the bridge which carried the little tram-cars for Paris Plage over the River Canche. We were put in the charge of an elderly major and were formed into three groups, one at each end of the bridge, the other in the centre. I was in the second rank of the s
quad holding the town end of the bridge. After about twenty minutes we heard the sound of singing, and a mob of soldiers in various stages of undress swarmed into view. They were led by a Canadian private who, with his tunic unbuttoned and his cap on the back of his head, occasionally gave vent to his feelings by shouting, “Down with the Red Caps, let’s release the prisoners,” which were loudly echoed by his companions. They seemed to be attracted by our little force, and came towards us, laughing and jeering. Our commander ordered us to load, but only one man near me did so. The Canadian advanced right up to our front rank, closely followed by the mob, and the whole crowd surged forward right across the bridge. A tram-car was following closely, and the leader, together with many of his followers, boarded it. The only man to suffer being he who foolishly loaded his rifle, who had his hat thrown into the river by one of the crowd who had seen him do it.’

  The adjutant decided on one last attempt. Forty officers were marched through a gauntlet of boos, jeers and catcalls to man the bridge. This time there were no preliminaries, just tough, bitter hand-to-hand fighting as lieutenants and captains grappled and wrestled with privates. As the men rushed at them up the steps, heads down, the advantage was heavily with the officers. From their superior strategic position it was relatively easy to repel the onslaught by throwing or butting the attackers back down the stairs. But some did make it to the top, where the mauling became fast, furious and ferocious. Soldiers, taught by the Canaries how to handle themselves in the event of being disarmed, were handing out to their officers the benefit of their tuition.

  A call had gone out from the aptly named reinforcement camp headquarters to the officers’ club behind the Town Hall: ‘All officers to the bridge.’ Thirty more officers who had until then deemed it wise to stay away from the rioters in the square outside, ran out of a side-exit, heading for the railway. They arrived just in time to add their weight and prevent the men breaking through. And weight it was. Until then it had been an unceremonial fracas. Now it became vicious. Hitherto men had been hurled back down the steps. But their persistence had destroyed all patience. Two were hurled through the air, over the side of the bridge to the track below and, although injured, managed to crawl off the track out of the way of a trainload of troops slowly gathering speed for the Western Front. For those thus in transit it could not have been the most uplifting spectacle. Oddly enough, they cheered themselves hoarse and shouted encouragement from below before a cloud of billowing steam and smoke obscured the contest.