The Monocled Mutineer

by John Fairley

  The men had retreated, but it was the only small victory the authorities had that night, or for another five days. And the next confrontations were to be far more ruthless and bloody. The mutineers had targets they were absolutely determined to destroy: the Red Caps and Canaries of Étaples.

  About 1,500 mutineers had succeeded in making it over the railway into the town, leaving a trail of havoc and devastation. When the troops roared in, the French customers in the cafes and estaminets had fled to their homes, and the restaurant owners had closed their doors only to have them smashed down by the invaders.

  Those who could not crash their way into the cafés because of the crowds already jammed inside had barrels of beer and wine rolled out to them in the square. Street stall-holders whose business it was to turn out soggy potato chips on paraffin-heated braziers had disappeared along with the entire local population. Behind locked doors they listened in terror to the bedlam in the square.

  A mixture of threats and pleas by equally terrified military policemen and Bull Ring instructors had resulted in some of these fugitives being given refuge by householders in streets just off the square. Inside, they huddled in little groups too scared to speak as the rebels rampaged long into the night. In the rue Saint-Pierre the door of one house was smashed down by Australians and Scots who found a military policeman and a Canary hiding under the same bed. Outside the bedroom door, an elderly French fisherman and his wife, dressed in their customary all-black Sunday-night clothes, stood weeping as the fugitives were kicked and battered and left for dead.

  When the potato supply ran out back in the square, the braziers were overturned and the paraffin used to set fire to the barrels that had been drained. To these bonfires were added piles of chairs and tables taken from both inside and outside the cafés. The centre of Étaples was a wreck by the time the first officers’ patrols could get there at about 11 p.m.

  Many of the soldiers had started to straggle back to camp. But the main body of the mutineers had left the town and crossed the bridge over the Canche River, heading for the woods of Le Touquet and Paris Plage. The widespread rumour in the town was that the British troops were behaving in this wanton fashion because they had suffered a heavy defeat and were in retreat from the front, pursued by victorious Germans.

  Sergeant Fred Parrott, RAMC, of Steep Hill, Streatham, London, was in charge of the reception room in the hospital where Corporal Wood, the first casualty of the uprising, died on the Sunday night. He remembers the rumour which swept through the hospitals and the outskirts of the camp about the reported German breakthrough.

  ‘As far as my hospital was concerned it started when two breathless nurses rushed back from the town saying that there had been a lot of noise and shooting and the local French people had told them the Germans had got through. Everybody was confined to the hospital for the rest of the day and night.’

  When the truth became known, he and a medical corporal armed themselves with revolvers, dug a large hole in the sand near the hospital and hid in it, waiting to ambush any mutineers who strayed their way.

  ‘But,’ says Parrott, ‘the dissidents did not get as far as us although we could hear a lot of shooting going on in the distance.’

  The excitement of a very bloody Sunday died down towards midnight. But the respite was to be brief. The limited, laconic, official version of these five tumultuous days, signed by General Thomson in the War Diary, gives little away, though he must have seen the first troubles as the soldiers spilled out of the cinema across from his office window. But it does admit to another incident which stirred the cauldron that boiling Sunday afternoon. The New Zealanders, furious at stories that the British were blocking their leave, had also broken out. As the general’s War Diary for the day reads:

  Disturbance in Reinforcement Camp between Military Police and Troops about 6.30 p.m., Corporal Wood, 4th Gordons being accidentally shot.

  About noon a Corporal from 27 Infantry Battalion Division, warned the Military Police that the New Zealanders intended raiding the Police Hut on account of a New Zealand Corporal who had been arrested by the police sometime previously. As threats by Colonials were fairly common, no notice was taken.

  About 3.00 p.m. the police arrested No. 25/548 Gunner A. J. Healy, New Zealand Artillery, at Three Arch Bridge, Étaples. Gunner Healy alleges he was arrested without any provocation and after having been assaulted by the Police.

  The Corporal in charge released Gunner Healy.

  The incident of the arrest of Gunner Healy was witnessed by other men, and some feeling was shown against the Police. A crowd began to gather by 4.00 p.m. and by 5.00 p.m. this crowd had increased, largely being augmented by men leaving the afternoon performance of the Cinema. About 5.30 p.m. a New Zealander went to the Police Guard Room and demanded the release of Gunner Healy. This New Zealander was shown, by being taken into the Guard Room, that the prisoner had been released. The attitude of the crowd was very threatening, stones were thrown, and attempts made to rush the Police Hut.

  It was no coincidence that the New Zealanders were in the forefront of the trouble. For some days the newspapers reaching the camp had been carrying stories that the British government was resisting plans to give up to six months’ leave to New Zealanders who had served in France for three years. A fortnight before, on 28 August, the Secretary of State for War, Lord Derby, had startled his fellow members in the War Cabinet by circulating among them a telegram received from New Zealand. Coming from the Governor-General of New Zealand, the Earl of Liverpool, it read:

  An arrangement has been agreed to by my Government whereby after 3 years service members of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force may return on leave to Dominion; numbers to be limited to 250 per month and leave to be reckoned as 6 months from departure from the front until return which would allow 2 months in New Zealand. Detailed arrangements are being made direct with General Officer Commanding New Zealand Expeditionary Force and my Government trust that Imperial authorities will raise no objection to these arrangements.

  This last sentence virtually defied the Cabinet not to acquiesce, a challenge immediately taken up by the War Secretary, who rushed to find an ally in the person of the Adjutant-General, Lieutenant-General Sir G. F. N. Nacready. This hastily arranged consultation enabled Lord Derby to write on 7 September, two days before the mutiny:

  I circulate to the War Cabinet for their consideration a notice by the Adjutant-General on the foregoing telegram which, in his view, indicates a very dangerous line of policy.

  His observations are:

  If leave on this scale is to be given to the New Zealanders, irrespective of the military situation at the front, the same measure must be meted out to all troops, Dominion or British, and the result will be that the forces at the front will be completely depleted. If the privilege is confined to Dominion troops a spirit of strong antagonism which will, in my opinion, result in bloodshed, will spring up between the British and Dominion troops, between whom already, on account of the difference of pay, and the absence of the death penalty in the Australian Contingent, the feeling is not too friendly.

  The first inkling of this news had reached France in the first week of September. Another element had thus been added to the flammable mixture swirling around Étaples as the great Passchendaele battle began.

  In the months leading up to September there had been an increase in the number of occasions when Canaries and military policemen had been found mysteriously shot or bayoneted to death. Cause of death in these isolated but nevertheless numerous incidents had always been officially listed as ‘accidental’. By September, too, many men had already been to the front once and were enduring Étaples for the second and, in some cases, the third time, having just recovered from wounds. News of Bolsheviks in Russia and mutiny in France, and deserters from the chalk pits mixing freely with the soldiers, also helped to stoke the fire. The fact that the uprising did not happen earlier was, however, only because of the transit-camp nature of Étaples. Men
rarely had to put up with, it for periods longer than seven to ten days before having to face what they regarded as the lesser hell, the front line. Opportunities to get together, to conspire, were few.

  From the moment of the assault on the police hut, Commandant Thomson’s account parts company with that of every other witness. Predictably, it tries to minimize the troubles. Even so, it must have made horrendous reading at Field-Marshal Haig’s headquarters as his staff struggled to get enough reinforcements through to feed the Passchendaele offensive. Back at Folkestone, urgently needed troops were marooned waiting for the Étaples mutiny to be resolved. There was no chance of them being shipped across and into the maelstrom of a base in the grip of rebellion. Before jump-off day, ten days later, not only would reinforcements have almost come to a halt, but Haig would be bleeding the line of assault troops to put down the mutiny at his base.

  Brigadier Thomson’s diary for the first night of the mutiny continues:

  Shots were fired from a revolver, two or three, by No. 204122 Pte. H. Reeve, Camp Police. Pte. Reeve states he had no revolver, but that a man (Australian or New Zealander) in the crowd had one which he, Pte. Reeve, snatched and fired over the heads of the crowd. The revolver was snatched from Pte. Reeve.

  One man, No. 240120 Corporal W. B. Wood, 4th Gordons, on the outskirts of the crowd, was hit in the head and died after admission to No. 24 General Hospital, at 8.5 p.m. the same day. A French woman standing in the Rue de Heguet was also hit by a bullet. The crowd at this time, shortly after 6.00 p.m. in the vicinity of Three Arch Bridge and the Police Hut was 3,000–4,000 strong.

  Captain V. C. Guinness, Camp Adjutant, saw the crowd at 6.15 p.m. and was then told of the shooting by the Police. He at once reported to Colonel Nason, O.C. Reinforcements, who immediately ordered a picquet of one officer, 50 other ranks from New Zealand depot. This picquet at once turned out with rifles and bayonets, but no ammunition. Colonel Nason went to the Police Hut and seeing the serious state of affairs, ordered two further picquets, each of 100 other ranks with officers from No. 19 and No. 25 IBDs. A further picquet of 1 officer, 15 other ranks was also detailed from No. 18 IBD.

  At the Officers’ Club, Colonel Nason ordered all officers to immediately rejoin their Depots, and each depot was ordered to send three officers to No. 2 Bridge to persuade the crowd to return.

  Feeling in the crowd was only against the Police and Officers were treated respectfully. The officers gradually got the men back to camp and by 9.45–10.00 p.m. all was quiet.

  During the fracas at Three Arch Bridge, and directly the shots had been fired, the demeanour of the crowd was so threatening towards the Police, that the Police disappeared.

  A crowd of about 1,000 gathered in Étaples town, and about 7.30 p.m. tried to break into the Sevigne Cafe where two policemen were hiding. Several officers held back the crowd and the town was clear by 9.00 p.m.

  Lieutenant Davies does not feel that the treatment accorded to him and other officers on the railway bridge that night was of the most ‘respectful’ nature. He recalls that the last salute he got was when he stepped down from the carriage which brought him back from Paris Plage. Certainly Étaples was anything but quiet by 9 p.m. And the camp was in uproar all night.

  The veterans are united in disagreeing with Thomson’s account of the shooting of William Wood by Harry Reeve, a pre-war welterweight boxing champion, later sentenced by court martial to one year’s hard labour for manslaughter. All of them swear that the real reason for the deliberate shooting of Wood was that Reeve caught him speaking to the WAAC.

  Thomas McNab (86), Royal Flying Corps, of 352 Main Street, Glasgow, witnessed the last part of that drama outside the cinema: ‘This military policeman was being dragged along the ground by two soldiers. A crowd of soldiers followed on taking it in turns to hit him and kick him. I saw an Aussie belting the captured policeman with a long stick. The policeman was howling out in agony.’

  Indeed memories are vivid, and, after sixty years, remarkably unanimous about that night and the extraordinary days that followed. And the men who remember were not riff-raff or draft-dodgers, but often among the bravest who had seen action since the earliest days of the war.

  Frank Reynolds (82), of 5 Stoughton Drive, Evington, Leicester, ran a chemist’s business until he retired at the age of 72. He was a founder member of the Old Comrades Association before it became the British Legion, of which he is a vice-president. In September 1917 he was a corporal in the 2nd Suffolk Regiment and already held the Military Medal for bravery at the Somme in 1916, where he received wounds which subsequently resulted in the loss of an eye.

  In that first explosion of anger, Reynolds helped to launch an attack on General Thomson’s own office, because, he says: ‘The Commandant was regarded as the lowest form of human existence, a craven coward, and it was generally known he was a heavy drinker without a thought for the suffering in his own self-made concentration camp. It was common knowledge in the camp that the Commandant was seldom sober.’

  A group of a hundred mutineers had crashed into the midst of an officers’ meeting and summarily ordered them to their feet.

  ‘We were armed, but we did not require to use our weapons. The officers meekly obeyed. We bundled them outside and locked them up in the guardroom next door. We then piled brushwood and trestles round the wooden hut.’

  It was a succinct ultimatum – half an hour to give an undertaking to improve the soldiers’ lot or be burned alive. It took less than ten minutes for an officer to call out a surrender to the terms stated. As Reynolds puts it, ‘Like the cowards they were, they quickly capitulated.’

  But their ordeal was not yet over. The mutineers then loaded Commandant Thomson and a dozen officers into two trucks and set off with them down the road to the bridge over the River Canche. The little convoy covered the half-mile from the commandant’s office at a slow pace so as to give the cheering men lining the route a good view of what was going on. On the bridge the two lorries stopped. There was a moment of silence, then the trucks tipped up and slid the top echelon of the British Army’s No. 1 Base over the parapet and into the river – another incident unrecorded in the official diary. By the time Thomson and his senior officers hit the water and were swimming for their lives, the banks of the River Canche were crowded with hundreds of men, yelling and hooting derisively.

  From that moment the mutiny spread like wildfire. Sapper David Paton, No. 49479, Royal Engineers, from Dundee, was caught up willy-nilly in the advances by the mutineers into Étaples:

  ‘You were pushed out whether you wanted to or not. Thousands and thousands of us crashed down on the bridges over the railway. You had to go with the crowd. If you had tried to turn round you would have been trampled to death.

  ‘At the bottom of the hill, on the south side of the railway, there were rows of soldiers with fixed bayonets, but if they had tried to stop the mobs getting into Étaples, they would have been crushed to death as well, so they just downed their weapons and went with us. There was no other way they could have gone. There was nothing else they could have done. I can remember the noise now as we went roaring down the hill. The shouting was deafening.

  ‘Hundreds went off to Paris Plage, and it was two or three days before they came back. I heard that a lot never came back.’

  Lucien Roussel was a boy of fifteen, helping out in his mother’s shop in Étaples town square when the wave of Scots, Australians and English hit them.

  ‘The British troops stormed into the town like real savages, grabbing or destroying everything in their path. They took over the square for days on end. It was black with troops.

  ‘There were bloody incidents at the station, shooting, beatings up, vehicles set on fire. The rebels took prisoner one of the officers responsible for the camp, locked him up in a slatted wooden cage and paraded him around Étaples on the back of an open lorry.

  I saw a patrol with a number of officers set upon by the mutineers on the Canche bridge. All of them were
thrown into the water. Just at that moment a military police lorry arrived on the bridge. The driver, seeing what was happening, tried to reverse, but he was trapped by rebels coming up from behind.

  ‘The two men in the front of the lorry and the four in the back all got the same treatment – into the river. Then the lorry was set on fire.’

  An Étaples photographer, Achille Caron, also remembers moments of terror at the station: ‘I saw a cavalry officer going at full gallop down the rue de Rosamel with a mob of soldiers in full pursuit.’

  The town of Étaples was hopelessly out of control, but in the camp some officers acted to try and stop the situation collapsing completely. They were helped by the construction of the camp. Each infantry base depot was wired in as a self-contained unit on either side of the road. There were usually only one or two gates.

  The East Yorkshires were one of several battalions where the officers acted firmly and fast. Senior NCOs were armed and put on the gates. All the men were routed out of their tents and the canteen hut and stood to. The officers did not feel confident enough to risk using their men against the rioters.

  ‘So they kept us on the move,’ says Private Jack Musgrove of Dinsdale Avenue, Kings Road Estate, Wallsend-on-Tyne. ‘Invented any sorts of jobs for us, so we didn’t sit around and conspire. But no one was allowed out of the IBD except the canteen men like myself to get food. That went on for five days.’