by John Fairley
Some officers were more venturesome. Two marched up to Corporal Reynolds’ group and started to read out the sonorous terms of the Riot Act and the Army Act, ending each sentence with the invocation, ‘The Penalty for this is Death.’
‘We just shouted them down,’ says Reynolds. ‘Their copies of the Acts were just snatched from them and burned.’
As Sunday night drew on, the only real sign of authority came from an officer of the Durham Light Infantry. In parade-ground style he turned out fifty of his troops with fixed bayonets and marched them to the main road through the camp. It was the start of a strange three-day gavotte. Private Musgrove, on canteen detail for the East Yorkshires, saw it with astonishment:
‘It was like the grand old Duke of York. The Durhams would stand at the bottom of the hill, with their backs to the railway, all of them with fixed bayonets, with an officer out in front, his sword drawn. At the top, which was less than a quarter of a mile away, the Scots gathered in a large group and slowly marched down the hill. The Durhams started up the hill towards them, and then the Scots would break into a trot whereupon the Durhams withdrew to the bottom. The Scots would then take a little rush at them, daring the officer to shout, “Fire.” Of course, had the officer done this there would have been a slaughter on the hill, and things were bad enough everywhere else without that. Then there would be a short lapse with both sides standing there staring at each other, before the officer shouted “Charge.” The Scots then started back up the hill to regroup, the Durhams would retreat and the same performance would begin all over again.
‘The Durhams were scared to go too far because the Scots were also armed with rifles, but they did not have bayonets. It was an endless cat-and-mouse game that was still going on two days later when I went out for more food.’
The rebel Scots had no real quarrel with the Durhams. It was the Military Police who were to feel the full weight of the troops’ hatred in the first twenty-four hours. The military police compound at the bottom of the hill was the first target of the Scots and the Australians after news of Corporal Wood’s death spread. The police personnel never stood a chance. Most of them broke out and fled towards the railway station and the town.
‘The police huts were shattered,’ says Jack Musgrove. ‘The windows and doors were smashed and off their hinges. Several huts were burning. There was nothing left.’
Several Red Caps were thrown out of first-floor windows. Another group was trapped on the railway bridge and thrown over on to the lines. As dusk fell, a grim manhunt developed among the sidings and cattle-trucks around Étaples station. Two policemen were cornered by a group of Australians who hammered their heads to pulp against the troop trucks waiting at the station. As one frightened French train driver tried to pull out of the station, an Aussie climbed on to the tender and threatened to beat his head in with a lump of coal.
Private W. E. Beane, who now lives at 2 Low Road, Lessingham, Norwich, was with the Royal West Surreys, and was shut in a camp opposite the Scots:
‘We were just ordered to stand by. Shooting went on all night, a lot of it. The Scots went right into the base headquarters looking for military policemen.’
Out in the sand-dunes, Aussies were hunting down the Red Caps and Canaries with Lewis machine-guns, according to Private Joseph Perks of 24c Hebrides Drive, Mill o’ Mains, Dundee.
Private Bill Ellett of 23 Valentine Parker Court, Greenhoe Place, Swaffham, Norfolk, had just arrived wounded in hospital at Étaples that night:
‘I was only half-conscious. It was the middle of the night. Suddenly the orderlies came along and put our kit on us. We were put on stretchers and hurried out and down to the railway. They just stacked us there in the dark for hours. We thought the Germans had broken through. I remember the shooting and the noise, and then eventually we were put into hospital trucks and taken off to Trouville.’
Yet, according to the commandant’s diary, all had been quiet from 10 p.m.
The dawn of Monday was to do little to help Commandant Thomson’s Nelsonian view of events. Much of the camp had been abandoned by many of his officers. There was not a military policeman to be seen. But the instructors up at their own camp in the Bull Ring, three miles away, were as yet unscathed.
Those officers who had maintained control of the troops in their own IBD compounds, now attempted to keep the situation as normal as possible. They marched them out for the usual training in the Bull Ring.
Private Phil Chester of the Northumberland Fusiliers, living at 2 Crane Close, Cranwell Village, Sleaford, Lincolnshire, after retiring from thirty years of working at the near-by RAF College, was there:
‘The moment you got to the Bull Ring the routine was you fell out and sat on the sand until the instructors came. This particular morning when they told us to get up, nobody moved. We just kept sitting. It was truly an amazing sight to look around and see thousands and thousands of men just sitting there silently. I don’t know how it happened, really. I don’t remember anything being said about it beforehand.
‘There were sergeant-majors, corporals and instructors by the hundreds, all shouting to us to get to our feet. Not a man moved. You could see that the NCOs were flummoxed. There was nothing they could do. No particular group had activated us. It was just as if each man had reached the same decision at the same moment. For two hours they tried every threat and every piece of persuasion they could think of. But nothing happened, nobody stirred. We just went on ignoring them, even laughing at them sometimes.
‘In the end they got us up by promising us we could go back to camp, have a day’s rest. By that time the sit-down had lasted two hours.’
Back at the camp, the sit-down troops were given a meal, and when they had finished eating they heard, for the first time ever at Étaples, this question, ‘Any complaints?’ Phil Chester and his mates were so astonished that they celebrated by bursting through the railway-bridge pickets into Étaples for a cup of after-lunch coffee.
General Thomson’s diary contains no reference to this mass defiance three miles up the road. He had troubles enough nearer home.
Troops created disturbance in evening.
Owing to police being unable to cope with situation, Major J. Henderson, O.C. No. 25 IBD was ordered to take charge of town of Étaples and to command any guards and picquets. General
Officer Commanding Lines of Communication, Asser, visited Étaples in the morning and issued instructions. Orders were given that all officers were to be present in their Depots from 5.30 p.m. to 10.00 p.m. A Board of Enquiry sat to collect evidence as to the occurrences on 9th September. At 4.00 p.m. bodies of men broke through the picquets into the town and held noisy ‘meetings’. During the afternoon and evening several motor cars were interfered with.
A picquet of 2 officers, 100 other ranks from the Lewis Gun School, Le Touquet, was sent to Paris Plage. There was no disturbance nor was any damage done there.
At 6.30 p.m. a mob of 200–300 proceeding along the River road towards Detention Camp were met and addressed by the Base Commandant, and were led by him, assisted by Major White, Major Dugdale, Assistant Provost Marshal, and Captain Strachan APM back to camp. On No. 1 Bridge a crowd of 1,000 were collected. They were also addressed by the Commandant, and began to disperse, and were evidently from their temper not out to make further trouble.
About 8.00 p.m. another small party of about 100 attempted to get at the Field Punishment Enclosure (where they thought police were hidden). This party was spoken to by the Commandant and dispersed quietly.
At 9.00 p.m. Major Cruickshank, saw a crowd of 100 opposite Town Station. They thought there were police in the station and tried to enter. They were almost immediately persuaded to return to camp.
The demeanour of all crowds towards officers was perfectly good.
Thomson had cause enough to know that the last sentence, at least, was the reverse of the truth. For he had personally encountered a new spirit of organization and leadership, and the first whiff of politi
cs which was turning the Étaples affair from a mass outburst of anger into a determined mutiny.
The mutineers who had not returned to base on the Sunday night had instinctively made their way to link up with the permanent deserters who flourished in the woods around Paris Plage, most of them under the patronage and guidance of Percy Toplis, whom they now nicknamed ‘The General’. Mr William Stephens, of Elsynge Road, Wandsworth, London, a Ministry of Social Security official, school governor and Battersea Trades Council vice-president before his retirement over ten years ago, was at Paris Plage when the mutineers and the deserters joined forces on the Monday morning. As a private in the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment, he was an orderly in one of the hospitals at Paris Plage. He remembers seeing Toplis’s name on wanted posters in the area:
‘If he was a villain then he was not the only one around Étaples. Maybe he too was tired of being humiliated, deprived, brutalized and treated like a dog. We had all got tired of being treated with less consideration than that given to the horses.’
It was a strange council of war which convened under the dripping wet poplar trees on the morning of Monday, 10 September. The fine weather of the previous day had given way to a steady drizzle, but to warriors accustomed to fighting through mud and blood, these were not uncomfortable conditions. What they were suffering from that morning, as they squatted on the wet grass to discuss their next move, was a common hangover.
The clear-headed Toplis, fresh from an overnight stay in the Hôtel des Anglais where he had posed as an officer just back from the line on leave, had to do most of the thinking for them. The delight of the deserters was boundless when they heard that the Military Police were no more. They were eager to show their gratitude, and, assured that the coast had been quite literally cleared, they offered to return to Étaples with the mutineers to take part in day two of the mutiny, under Toplis’s leadership.
This weird, mixed bag of disaffection and desertion started marching on Étaples in the late afternoon. They were about 1,000 strong, and they swung along the coast road, back to the scene of Sunday’s triumph. Free at last from the fear of arrest, Toplis boldly led his column of deserters from the front. Before they got to the River Canche bridge they merged and then split up into four separate groups, each numbering over two hundred and each group containing some of the deserters. They hoped that in this manner they would be able simultaneously to cause maximum harassment at different points.
Toplis felt he had a clear duty. He headed his mob straight for the detention compound and released the prisoners, about fifty of them. The Toplis troops met with only token resistance from prison guards, who put up a show at struggling, but made no attempts to use their guns.
Madame Andrée Dissous of Étaples was one of several Frenchwomen who used to sell cigarettes and confectionery to the troops from two-wheeled stalls which were pushed along the road to the Bull Ring. During the half-hour midday break, orange chocolates were very popular with the soldiers. Madame Dissous remembers Toplis’s bold stroke well:
‘I saw the 200 or so men just march up to the compound gates, issue some threats, and the next thing the prisoners, with their shaven heads, came tumbling through the gates.’
Sergeant-Major Gray of the Gordon Highlanders saw it too:
The Provost Marshal was thrown down the railway embankment on the way.’
By now Thomson was desperate. He took to the back seat of his long, open staff car on a tour of the areas of the camp that he had never seen before, stopping off wherever mobs of mutineers were gathered to deliver speeches that started off in a blustering manner, but finished in conciliatory fashion when he saw that threats were not going to work.
By 6.30 on the Monday evening, when Thomson ran into the Toplis mob on the river road, the much-shaken, confused general thought that they were on their way to raid the detention camp when in fact they had already been there. He was attempting to close the door of an empty stable. His car had to stop because Toplis and his men were blocking its route. Thomson stood up in the back only to have his opening sentence drowned in a storm of abuse. He got as far as, ‘How dare you call yourselves soldiers, British soldiers …’ when the mob closed in on his vehicle and started to rock it violently. He was forced to sit down again.
Toplis had dressed for his part. That is to say, this was one of the few occasions when he was actually attired in a private’s uniform and not that of an officer. He held up his hand, signalling for silence from his followers. ‘What a sight it was to see the commanding officer there with tears in his eyes begging of us to let this trouble subside,’ recalls a Lancashire fusilier, George Souter of Ardwick, ‘and appealing for us to keep up the tradition of the British Army.’
The sight of the ashen-faced general, sitting now in the back seat, encouraged Toplis to climb on the running-board and dictate the terms for ending the mutiny. It was for Toplis, of course, an entirely academic exercise since he had no intention of enduring the Étaples base in any shape or form. He was simply revelling in the revolution. The revolt would end, he told Thomson, only when the town of Étaples was thrown open to the troops, when the Bull Ring had been closed, the Military Police removed and food and general conditions improved. Thomson turned to make his chauffeur drive on, but he was forced to hear out the private’s demands.
He made no reply at that moment, but in the end he would be forced to concede every condition Toplis had laid down. It had been a short, sharp speech and, after he had delivered it, Toplis stepped down from the car and ordered his men to clear the way for it to continue.
He next selected a deputation of five, himself included, to call on the soldiers’ champion, Horatio Bottomley, who by chance had arrived to stay at Étaples’ Hôtel des Voyageurs while writing a series for his paper John Bull. There Toplis repeated the demands to Bottomley, plus an additional one that army pay should be increased. (That too would come to pass.)
While Toplis was laying down his cease-fire terms to Thomson, the New Zealanders, men and officers, turned their attention to a smaller prison compound that he and his followers had overlooked.
Weber Todman, now 92, of 49 Dublin Street, Wanganui, New Zealand, was a Lewis machine-gunner with the New Zealand Rifle Brigade. He tells the story:
Thomson could have settled the issue earlier in the day on terms that were less demanding than those made by Toplis. We had held a meeting, at which Toplis was not present, in a canteen in the morning where it was decided to ask the Commandant to withdraw all the Military Police immediately. We in the Rifle Brigade, with the agreement of our officers, offered to act in place of the police. An officer took this offer to Thomson but, at that stage, he stupidly, stubbornly turned it down.
Part of the small prison compound was used as a barracks for some of the Military Police, and right alongside the wooden building was the main ammunition dump. We decided to do a two-in-one job – burn the bastards out and blow up the dump at the same time.
When he saw what was happening, a senior English officer threatened to charge us with a platoon of fixed bayonets. We told him that if he did that we would use our rifles and the mutiny would become a civil war. The police had barricaded themselves in, but when they saw us advancing on them with cans of kerosene they bolted.
There were hundreds of us on the scene now, and a right menacing mob we must have looked. Many of us had masked our faces with handkerchiefs to avoid being identified and punished later. The English officer who had made the threat to fight us off could only stand by and watch as we threw the fuel over the police barracks.
I was among those who helped to get the building alight. Some soldiers brought up a supply of grenades ready to chuck into the ammunition dump, which was already being threatened by the fierce flames fanning out all along its edge from the blazing barracks. At that point a dispatch rider roared down the hill with a message from the Commandant’s office. He would reconsider our request to act in place of the police if we preserved the ammunition dump intact
.
A lot of the mutineers wanted to carry out our original plan in full, and actually had the grenades in their hands ready to throw when two of our officers got them to change their minds on the sensible grounds that we stood the risk of blowing ourselves up with the dump. Even then it was agreed that a decision on whether a safer, alternative means of destruction should be employed would depend on the toss of a coin. Looking back on it now that was a truly amazing decision to have made.
We all stood round in a huge circle and watched the coin come down heads up. If it had been tails the dump would have been no more. The English officer, I think he was a captain, jumped on the dispatch rider’s motor-cycle, heading for the Commandant’s office with the news that we had responded to his plea by sheer chance.
Todman is convinced that the strong line taken by the New Zealanders gave Thomson his greatest scare and strengthened Toplis’s hand in his subsequent confrontation with Thomson. He looks back with mixed feelings on the chance decision to preserve the ammunition. He was to use some of it in the murderous battle of Passchendaele from which he was stretchered out with a wound so serious that he went back on the first hospital ship to New Zealand.
By Monday evening, with all training stopped, no police, the mutineers in control of the camp and reinforcements piling up at Folkestone but unable to move, the army had to face the fact that the situation was out of control. Worse for Haig was the nightmare that this sedition might be imported to the front line. The decision was taken that troops – and reliable troops – would have to be pulled out of the forward areas and sent to quell the mutiny.
As the urgent messages went to and fro between Étaples and Haig’s headquarters on the Monday night, violence was once again spilling into the streets of the town. Pierre Durigaieux, later to become the town doctor at Étaples, lived in a house behind the town hall, next to the British officers’ club. Events, he says, had taken an even more ugly turn:
