Tommy (40 page)

In the first autumn of the war the British Expeditionary Force was under very heavy pressure at Ypres and its front was paper-thin. There were almost no reserves, and the British front could not have been held at all had the Cavalry Corps not fought as infantry, using its rifles with a skill which testifies to the thoroughness of their pre-war training. At the crux of the battle on 31 October, when Sir John French announced that he proposed to bring up his headquarter guard – 1/Cameron Highlanders – lead them to where the line was broken and die fighting, he was only indulging in mild hyperbole: he had no other units in reserve. During that first winter there were simply too few troops available for proper rotation to be introduced, and battalions spent week after week in the line. On 6 November Aidan Liddell of 1/Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders wrote, with understandable satisfaction, that: ‘I had my boots off and changed my socks today, the first time since 18th of September.'
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On 15 November Arthur Smith observed that his Coldstream battalion had so far spent nineteen days in the line: ‘One man has gone off his head and committed suicide, & one officer has completely broken down with nerves.'
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The example of a single battalion sets the pattern for this early period. The 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers went into the line at La Cordonnerie near Fromelles on the night of 22 October 1914 and came out again on the night of 14 November, rested for seventy-two hours, and went back into the line again, this time for eleven days in freezing weather. After another short rest, during which it furnished a guard of honour for a visit by the king, it spent another twenty-four days in the line. These stints of front-line duty would have been regarded as unreasonably long later in the war, and speak powerfully for the Old Army's powers of endurance. However, snipers and trench mortars, which were to impose a growing toll on front-line troops, were still in their infancy, and ‘trench wastage' was still relatively low: 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers lost only eight killed and ten wounded in its last twenty-four days in the line.

Although there were occasional gruelling exceptions (a West Yorkshire battalion spent seventy days in the front line in the Loos sector in 1915, and 13/York and Lancaster fifty-one days in the line on the Somme the following year), from early 1915 there was increasing regularity in the pattern of rotation. Charles Carrington reviewed his diary for 1916 and found that:

The upright and soldierly James Jack was a Cameronian captain in 1914, Sidney Rogerson's commanding officer in 2/West Yorkshire on the Somme in 1916, and a brigade commander in 1918. Between December 1914 and August 1916, while serving with 1/Cameronians, he spent 141 days in the trenches, ninety in brigade support, twenty-three in brigade reserve, ninety-seven in divisional reserve, seventeen in army reserve, fifteen days travelling, nineteen in hospital and twelve on leave.

A battalion would usually be ‘warned for duty' in the trenches two or three days before it was expected to move. The twelve days so well chronicled by Rogerson began in the huts of Citadel Camp, Fricourt, on 7 November 1916 when 2/West Yorkshire received orders to relieve 2/Devon, a forward battalion also in 24th Brigade of 8th Division, on the night of 10/11 November. His battalion's experience is so typical that there is merit in following its footsteps, and reaching out to reinforce it with other examples as we do so.

By now it was standard practice to leave a proportion of the battalion out of the line, under the second in command, to act as a basis for reconstitution if the worst happened, and on this occasion one of the company commanders and two company sergeant majors (including Rogerson's sergeant major, CSM Scott) were amongst those left behind. On 8 November the battalion moved up to an intermediate position, Camp 34, between Bernafay and Trônes Woods. Normally for a daylight move a battalion would march in column of route – with the men in ranks of four, shaking out into ‘artillery formation', with platoons more widely spaced, when it came within the range of German medium guns. But here the tracks were too poor to permit this, and so the battalion marched in Indian, or single, file. Rogerson did not like it, observing that:

There was no camp ready when they arrived, because the battalion which should have vacated the tents had been so badly knocked about on its tour of the line that the survivors were ‘weary and shocked in body and spirit, and too dejectedly apathetic to raise themselves to any effort …'. Although Rogerson's men were ‘in a most cheerful mood', he observed that as a man got closer to the front: ‘His vision changed, he began to lose his wider view …'. Any sense of the scale of the enterprise disappeared, and men could not tell you what the battalion's plan was: ‘but ask them to describe the Kirchner pictures on the wall of their dug out, or the particular brand of bully beef which hung on the wire, and they will find little difficulty'. Two of his soldiers scrounged ‘a huge balloon tarpaulin which proved big enough of itself to house more than half the company'. Company headquarters was installed in a tent, duckboards were pilfered from the nearby Royal Engineers' dump, and a brazier was lit. ‘The day closed with an issue of rum,' recalled Rogerson. ‘The first stage of the relief was over.'

Men were kept busy the next day, 9 November, with ‘arms drill, bayonet fighting, platoon drill, bomb cleaning, kit inspections', partly to prevent them from vegetating under their shelters and partly to help integrate men who had joined 2/West Yorkshire at Fricourt, many of them Tyneside miners with heavy Geordie accents. James Jack, spick and span as ever (‘Always die like a gentleman: clean and properly dressed'), briefed his company commanders in the battalion headquarters dugout, a short length of roofed-over German trench with a table and a couple of wire-covered frames which served as beds or chairs. A and B Companies were to hold the front line with C and D in close support, and Jack took the company commanders forward at 5.00 on the morning of the 10th to look at the ground in the dawn light so that they would have a clear idea of it by the time their companies arrived under their seconds in command. Guides from the Devons met them just behind the front and kept up a helpful patter:

They crossed a low valley carpeted with dead, khaki outnumbering field grey by three to one, and reached the Devons' position where Rogerson was given a mug of tea. It reeked of petrol: the same tins were used for both liquids, and although petrol tins should have been burnt out to get rid of any dregs this was not always done. The Devon company commander showed Rogerson the position: there were two companies forward, in a very poor trench, on newly-captured ground, touching on the inner flank but with their outer flanks in the air. The enemy main line was a thousand yards away on the Transloy-Bapaume road, but there were Germans in improvised positions much closer. The mud was so thick that it took an hour to walk a few hundred yards. And there was nothing to see: ‘just mile upon mile of emptiness, with never a house or tree, a hedge or spot of green to break the austere monotony …'.

The takeover went well. The company came up in single file under Captain Maclaren, its Canadian second in command. The company sergeant major had been left behind, and so Sergeant Chamberlain was ‘acting up'. But as Maclaren stepped aside to remove his jerkin a single shell – a random ‘whiz-bang' from a German 77-mm field gun – fell just where he had been standing and killed Chamberlain outright. Maclaren took his papers and identity disc and moved on before the last man in the line had time to close up and discover the reason for the temporary stoppage. There was a hasty handover by the Devons and the incomers signed for the trench stores ‘which they could not see, much less count'.

Once established, the company fell into the familiar pattern of line-holding, with capricious danger, hard work and boredom equally mixed. For the remainder of the first night it was important to get the trenches as well dug as possible. Rogerson's company headquarters, a hundred yards behind the front trench, was too far back for him to control the company properly, so he posted Maclaren forward with orders to ‘dig like blazes all night and lie doggo all day'. A soldier from a recent draft was hit by a stray bullet and sent back as ‘walking wounded'. But the work progressed: before dawn Corporal Buggy Robinson's men had their trench down to a full seven feet. The subaltern commanding A, the adjoining company, had disappeared (no sign of him was ever found), and Second Lieutenant Skett of B, going forward in an effort to find him, was killed. He was immediately buried ‘as reverently as we could in the circumstances, digging a grave between bursts of machine gun fire in the parados of the forward trench'.

Half an hour before daybreak the company stood to. The procedure, its name a contraction of standing to one's arms, meant that:

Lieutenant C. P. Blacker of 2/Coldstream Guards thought that the risk of attack was ‘questionable', but added: ‘A more cogent reason was that, attack or no attack, troops should be thoroughly alerted and put on their toes at daybreak and nightfall. During stand-to everyone stands in the fire-bays, alert and at the ready with bayonets fixed.'
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Platoon and company commanders would visit their men; signallers would check communications and clear the debris of the previous twelve hours from their tables or alcoves, and company sergeant majors, upon whom so much of the minutiae of company administration depended, would check things like reserve ammunition stores and latrines. They would take the opportunity to ensure that a new platoon commander or weak sergeant felt that subtle mix of encouragement laced with gentle sarcasm. Different battalions had different rules, but in some at times like this, the sergeant major was no longer ‘sir' to the non-commissioned members of the company, but ‘major' to his platoon sergeants and section commanders, as formality relaxed but discipline remained. ‘All set, Major,' was how Corporal John Lucy of the Royal Irish Rifles responded to a front-line order from his CSM.
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A young officer in 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers:

After morning stand-down men cleaned their rifles, with section commanders ensuring that no more than half the weapons were stripped at the same time, and ate their breakfast. Rogerson enjoyed ‘a hearty meal of “Maconochie” – tinned meat and vegetables – eaten cold and washed down with a tea-cup full of rum.' Lieutenant Colonel Jack appeared – although it was an unsound practice for visitors to arrive during stand-to, and some units banned all movement at that time – to tell Rogerson to take command of the orphaned A Company in addition to his own, and to leave him with a new subaltern to replace Skett, alive at dusk but buried before dawn.

By now men's nostrils had become accustomed, though never used to, the smell of the line. Charles Carrington wrote that: ‘The smell of burnt and poisoned mud – acrid is, I think, the right epithet – was with us for months on end, and through it one could usually distinguish a more biotic flavour – the stink of corrupting human flesh.'
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Frank Hawkings recalled the ‘penetrating and filthy stench which assailed our noses and filled the atmosphere – a combination of mildew, rotting vegetation and the stink which rises from the decomposing corpses of men and animals. This smell seems to be a permanent fixture in the firing line and there is no mistaking it.'
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The much-decorated Adrian Carton de Wiart never lost his romantic view of the war, but even he admitted that: ‘My worst memory was the stench of putrefying bodies, for I could smell them still, and though death may be sublime on a battlefield, it is certainly not beautiful.'
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Eric Hiscock reflected grimly on the smells that assailed him on his first night in the line.