Tommy (36 page)
Authors: Richard Holmes
Behind the front-line trench ran another parallel trench, the âsupervision trench' or support line, at the very least gently zigzagged, but usually with bays and traverses of its own, and by 1915 there was generally another parallel trench, the reserve line, behind this. Short connecting trenches every hundred yards or so linked these lines; the whole arrangement, covering perhaps 300 yards from front to rear, formed a single defensive system. Sometimes, especially if the front trench was on a reverse slope, fire bays might be dug forward from it, each like a large letter T, with its crosspiece on the crest-line. Many trenches had saps dug forward from them towards the enemy. These often housed listening posts which warned of enemy movement or gave advance notice of a raid. âCasualties were very high,' admitted Roe, âand the saps were almost always raided in order to wipe them out. Manning a sap was universally hated.'
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Lieutenant Charles Douie of 1/Dorsets would not have agreed. He positioned an advance post of a lance corporal and three privates, and, âbefore leaving I observed to the lance corporal that the post which he held was of great danger, and wholly isolated, to which he replied in the Dorset dialect that he would be all right so long as he did not lose his pipe.' Douie left greatly heartened, wondering what could go wrong with such steady men from a county whose ancient watchword was âWho's Afeard?'
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Fire trenches were approached from the rear by communication trenches. Although these were intended for movement not for fighting, and might well have to accommodate stretcher-bearers moving in one direction and supports coming up from another, they still required either zigzags or gentler curves to limit the effect of shells bursting in them; a 1915 manual recommended the construction of machine-gun emplacements at the bottom end of straight runs of communication trenches âto repel enemy who may gain the fire trench'. Harry Ogle described the arrangements that the British inherited from the French when they moved down to the Somme.
The ground between the front line and the village [of Hébuterne] was cut up by long communication trenches and by support, reserve and old front and other lines disused. These had been captured by the French and we took over from them to find many bodies buried only thinly under earth and lime, some being within a yard of the trench side. The place was swarming with flies and rats and there were innumerable empty bottles. The French had named the trenches and we took them over complete with trench names painted on boards. The communication trenches, or to give them their much handier French name the
boyeaux,
had names of such heroes as Vercingetorix, du Guesclin and Jean Bart, famous men such as Pasteur, or battlefields such as Jena and Austerlitz â¦Â Sergeant Clarke says: âWe are lucky up here. They are getting all our water through the Boy-oh Jeener into Trenchay Brisoux, and Trenchay Sour â it is flooded.'
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Frank Hawkings was in the same village, though by then British trench names had replaced French. âA number of CTs [communication trenches] radiate out of the centre of the village connecting up the firing line,' he wrote.
The most important are Yellow Street, Yankee Street and Woman Street. The latter owes its name to a certain gruesome discovery. Opposite its entrance is a pool of stagnant, putrid water which was once the village pond. One day two men noticed what looked like a sack near the edge amongst the litter of perambulators, bicycles, pictures, chairs, beds and dead cats. They drew it out and were horrified to discover that it was the half decomposed corpse of a young woman.
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Captain Sidney Rogerson also found himself in a French-made communication trench, though much later in the war, between the Aisne and the Marne. âThe communication trenches were particularly hot,' he wrote,
as they were much deeper than those made by the British, chiefly, I imagine, on account of the use made by the French of small donkeys for carrying rations up into the line. The processions of ten or fifteen little âburros' piled heavens high with sacks and boxes, stepping stiffly up a trench with the donkey-herd behind them making uncouth noises of encouragement or reproof, never failed to amuse our men.
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Communication trenches were ideally long enough to permit troops to enter them without being observed directly from the German lines, and on flat ground overlooked by German positions they might be very long indeed. Frank Dunham was a devout Baptist from a âsuperior working-class' background, who had been a general assistant in a clothing factory before the war. After serving as a Red Cross volunteer he enlisted in a London cyclist battalion thinking that it might be fun, but would report sadly that âthere was never any issue of cycles to us'. Instead, his battalion, 25/London, fought in the trenches, and Dunham eventually became NCO in charge of the regimental aid post. He recalled that on 15 April 1917: âWe were relieved by the 8th London Regiment and came out through “Convent Lane” communication trench en route for Dickebush Huts. This was a terribly long trench, 3 miles long I was told; and it wandered about and made one feel dizzy going through it.'
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On 1 July 1916 Captain Billie Neville issued his company with platoon footballs marked: âGreat European Cup-Final: East Surreys v. Bavarians. Kick Off at Zero [Hour]', and became immortalised in history. A year before he had written home from Dernancourt, behind the Somme front, to describe how:
All those trenches lead somewhere, each has its particular object, every bend & curve is made to serve some special purpose. Inside they are kept daily in perfect condition,
A Scottish battalion marching out of the line in the Loos sector, October 1915. Six months later the steel helmet would replace service caps and Scots bonnets for troops in the front line.
the drainage system would rival London's itself. All the traffic is controlled as if by policemen, timetables are kept of the time to get from say âRoberts' to âDrake'. The routes are marked carefully to various places & every trench is named and very often numbered as well.
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The system of communication trenches did not always work well even in quiet times. When Winston Churchill did his first tour in the trenches as a major attached to the Grenadier Guards, he was told that because there were no communication trenches in that sector all movement to the front line had to take place over the top, after dark. In consequence it had not been possible for any of his kit to be sent forward: his servant had, however, secured him a spare pair of socks. And during an attack even a well-ordered system might break down as the Germans bombarded communication trenches to stop reserves from moving forward, as Lieutenant Roe discovered on the first day of the Somme.
Every single yard of the communication trench up to the front line was impassable and the confusion was indescribable. Reinforcement troops and working parties with materials and ammunition were trying to make their way forward against a stream of troops coming out of the line, including stretcher-bearers with casualties, walking wounded and exhausted troops coming out after a spell in the front line. To make matters worse, many of these sections of communication trench had been destroyed by heavy artillery fire from the German lines, and this was unceasingly active.
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Sometimes attacking troops, exasperated by the traffic jam, climbed out of the communication trenches to reach the front line over open ground. Roe watched this happen on the Somme: a second-wave battalion,
in attempting to move forward into the attack five minutes after zero hour they found that the communication trenches were so blown in as to be impassable. This meant that they were compelled to expose themselves from the start by advancing to our own front line over open ground in broad daylight. The casualties â¦Â were so heavy as a result of this that only a few of the battalion reached even our own front line.
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Trenches bore nameboards which served the same function as street signs in a town. Sometimes these reflected the regional origin of the first troops to hold them: the rides which crisscross Delville Wood on the Somme now have stone markers with street names from London, Edinburgh and Glasgow originally given to trenches there by 9th Scottish Division in July 1916. When Henry Williamson revisited the battlefields in 1925 he found Somme trenches âhalf hidden by the long wild grasses of the years â Wretched Way, Lucky Way, Tea Trench, Coffee Trench, Rum Trench'.
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There were attempts to make terminology logical so that an individual would know what sort of trench he was in, even if he was uncertain as to where he was. Trenches called âstreet' or âway' were communication trenches. The village of Villers-Guislain on the Cambrai front had Glass Street, Cheshire Street, Aylward Street, George Street and High Street fanning out from it towards the front. Cheshire Street led through Cheshire Quarry to Bicester Alley, and then into Preston Support and Preston Trench, and then further forward to Bleak Support and Bleak Trench. Grove Alley, Grass Lane, Flare Alley and Pilgrim's Way led from the Somme village of Flers to front-line trenches whose names had a degree of connecting logic: Polish Trench was behind Shine Trench, Petrol Lane ran in to Oily Lane, and Scabbard Trench was in front of Bayonet Trench. Strongpoints might simply be named after units or individuals who had fought or died there, such as Goodwin's Post on Grease Trench (along from Petrol Lane), near Gueudecourt. And sometimes there was a more complex story. Frank Dunham thought it sad that âour only casualties should result from one shell. This fell on a post in the front line, killing one and wounding three â all these casualties turned out to be Jews and the post was afterwards known as Yiddish Post.'
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Other trench signs warned men to duck in shallow stretches where snipers were active, enjoined them to pick up discarded items such as picks, shovels or rifles and take them to the nearest salvage dump for recycling, or advised them what to do if gas was detected. Gas alarms were generally empty shell cases hung from an improvised bracket on the trench wall, and were sometimes accompanied by a signboard whose doggerel enjoined those who sniffed gas to:
Beat this gong, grab your gun
And prepare to meet the bloody Hun.
And in late 1917 Rowland Feilding recorded a sign in the Croisilles sector designed to deter rubbernecking âtourists':
Visitors are requested not to show themselves, as by doing so they may give away our positions to the enemy. We live here. You don't.
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In the war's first winter dugouts were rare and funk holes hollowed out of the trench sides far more common. These could be screened with a groundsheet to give a measure of privacy, and a man might lie full-length with a modicum of cover and comfort. The practice of scraping out funk holes continued for much of the war, although it was soon officially discouraged because it weakened the sides of the trench and encouraged collapses, especially in heavy rain â or heavy shelling. Dugouts became increasingly common in 1915. Sometimes these were little more than the continuation of a funk hole, as Gerald Burgoyne reported in March 1915.
There are no officers' dugouts in my trenches so I at once started to make one in the trench I hold. I cleaned a patch about eight by five on the flank of my parapet, put some men to dig down about 18 inches, and then to build a wall of sandbags around it. I had brought down, for the purpose, six sheets of corrugated iron sheeting and some stakes.
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But they could also be a little more sophisticated, as John Reith discovered when he called on 1/Cameronians in November 1914.
HQ was half dugout and half hut. In it were the 1st Battalion CO and other officers â¦Â I was received with great cordiality â¦Â how odd for a regular colonel to be so circumstanced â in this hole in the ground, the mud on his clothes. It was, however, a comfortable hole. It was lit by two oil lamps; there were two tables, a bookshelf and ledges all round cut out of the clay for seats and bunks. There was, moreover, a coal fire burning in an excavated clay fireplace. They were only eighty yards from the Germans.
Eighty yards.
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Proper dugouts could either be mined, that is excavated via a sloping tunnel that would, with suitable steps added, eventually constitute the dugout's entrance. Or they could be âcut and cover' dugouts, made by the construction of a vast pit which was then roofed with timber or concrete with earth piled in on top. These could only be made in rear trench-systems, but the German practice of falling back from exposed positions onto better ones (most strikingly demonstrated in the withdrawal to the Hindenburg line in early 1917) meant that the Germans had a profusion of deep dugouts constructed by the cut and cover method.
Even British dugouts, proverbially less sophisticated than the German, could nevertheless be comfortable. In 1915 Billie Harris found some British dugouts on the Somme front:
too killing for words. In one of them there is a lovely case of stuffed birds, a beautiful 4 poster bed, and some nice chairs, a good big table, towel horse, ivory wash hand stand etc & endless bric-a-brac. They are all furnished magnificently from the cottages here and are jolly cosy â¦Â Company HQ is a wonderful place â¦Â On the left as you come in is a marvellous âpaper-flower' white bouquet in a gilt-framed case, worn by all brides if they are not already widows, & evidently a family treasure; next to it is my âduty roll' of officers & a time table of the times a messenger takes to get from here to all HQs or companies & our platoons, in wet or dry weather by day or night. Next again was a huge full-length mirror. With some heart-searching this morning I took an entrenching tool & scientifically smashed [it] into little pieces suitable for periscopes for our sentries by day! Then there's such a jolly old bookshelf, what's on it now? A candle,
Punch,
a tin of butter, a bottle of âVin Ordinaire'. A megaphone, 2 smoke helmets, some fags & baccy of [Lieutenant] Pearce's, my holdall, some powder bombs for dispersing gas if it's used, some lights corresponding to their star shells,
Newnes Summer Annual, The Morning Post
of
5
days ago, and a water bottle, some Nestles milk, a shaving brush and two periscopes â¦Â We've got a hat rack & an umbrella stand next to this and then comes a map (from aeroplane photos) of the German trenches so accurate that you can follow every âtraverse' & bend in them â¦Â Two of our chairs have backs and the third is only used by visitors (once) â¦Â another table littered with red covers, mags; plates, message forms for the telephone, and a place laid for an officer on duty now, who will get some bully [beef] and tea when he comes off â¦Â The roof was only designed to conduct the rain into several well-defined areas on the floor â¦Â The Hun side is sandbagged â¦Â we shutter the windows at night to secure the light â¦
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