Tommy (42 page)
Authors: Richard Holmes
I will describe the sequence during our tour at the beginning of July when the long hours of midsummer daylight were just beginning to shorten.
All three officers were on duty during stand-to and stand-down â from 3.15 to 4.15 am in the early morning and from 9.30 to 10.30 in the later evening â¦
In addition to these two periods of standing-to, each officer in turn did a long watch and a short watch during every twenty-four hours. The three long watches of about twenty-four hours ran from morning stand-down at 4.30 am to 8.30 am; from 8.30 am to 12.15 pm; and from 12.30 to 5.30 pm The short watches were mounted during the evening period from 5.30 pm to stand-to at 9.30 pm This evening period of three hours was divided into three short watches of about an hour and a half for each officer, thus making an evening meal, taken in turn, possible.
On the different days of the tour, I did long and short watches at different times. The best of the long watches was the first of the day, after the early morning stand-down. In fine weather it was good to see the sun rising and enjoy the cold air â¦Â The night watches, though not longer than an hour and a half, could be tribulating because of the longing for sleep. For the sentry to fall asleep on duty was regarded as a serious crime. For an officer to be found asleep on duty was
a fortiori
about the last word. I had not properly known till this tour how intense could be the craving for sleep. It could seem almost irresistible. If you leaned against the side of the trench for more than a short moment, your consciousness would insidiously and insensibly dissolve. Your brain seemed to melt and you slid down into the region of unstable mists. When you felt yourself to be in danger of slithering into this state, you welcomed a noise of war â a shell or a rifle bullet which roused you.
96
When Robert Graves was attached to the Welch Regiment in the trenches he was told that:
Our time-table is: breakfast at eight o'clock in the morning, clean trenches and inspect rifles, work all morning, lunch at twelve, work again from one till about six, when the men feed again. âStand-to' at dusk for an hour, work all night, âstand-to' for an hour before dawn. That's the general programme â¦Â We officers are on duty all day, and divide the night up into three-hourly watches.
97
Bernard Adams remembered a similar routine, but this time in a support trench, and from a private soldier's point of view.
This would be a typical day, say, in April.
4 am
Stand to. Until it gets light enough to clean your rifle, then clean it.
About 5 am
Get your rifle inspected, and turn in again.
6.30 am
Turn out to carry breakfast up to company in front line. (Old Kent Road very muddy after rain. A heavy Dixie to be carried from top of Weymouth Avenue, up via Trafalgar Square, and 76 Street to the platoon holding the trench at the Loop.)
7.45 am
Get your own breakfast.
9 am
Turn out for working party: spend morning filling sandbags for building traverses in Maple Redoubt.
11.30 am
Carry dinner up to front company. Same as 6.30 am
1 pm
Get your own dinner.
1â4 pm
(with luck) rest.
7.15 pm
Clean rifle.
7.30 pm
Stand to. Rifle inspected.
Jones puts his big ugly boot out suddenly, just after you have finished cleaning rifle, and upsets it. Result â mud all over barrel and nosecap.
8.30 pm
Stand down. Have to clean rifle again and show platoon sergeant.
9 pm
Turn out for working party till 12 midnight in front line.
12 midnight.
Hot soup.
12.15 am
Dug out at last till
4 am
Stand to. And so for three days and nights.
Adams acknowledged that this was âreally quite a moderate programme'. But however much officers sought to spare their men, there were unexpected emergencies.
A couple of [German trench mortar] canisters block Watling Street; you
must
send a party of ten men and an NCO to clear it at once; or you suddenly have to supply a party to carry âfootballs' up to Rue Albert for the trench-mortar men. The Adjutant is sorry; he could not let you know before; but they have just come up to the Citadel, and must be unloaded at once. So you have to find the men for this on the spur of the moment. And so it goes on, night and day. Oh, it's not all rum and sleep, is life in Maple Redoubt.
98
For private soldiers life in the reserve trenches generally consisted of sentry duty interwoven with digging or wiring parties and punctuated by meals. Rifleman Percy Jones described his routine during a nine-day tour of duty in reserve trenches near La Chapelle d' Armentières in December 1915.
Reveille was at 5 am, stand-to with rifles and equipments until 1 pm, draw rations for the day at
7
.30, meals when you like. If free in the evening one could go to sleep for the night, but as the principal duty of men in the reserve trenches is to do fatigues, one was rarely free. The most important daily fatigues were wood fatigue to the Headquarter Farm at 6 am, and the star performance of the day:- ration, mail-bag and general fatigue in the Factory, a ruined building on the Armentières road, which commenced from 5.30 to 6.30 pm And frequently lasted to 10 pm
The daytime was spent digging in, repairing and draining trenches, of which we had a great deal during the last few days. There was also a night trench digging fatigue at any unearthly hour from 5 pm to 5 am
99
In front-line trenches in daylight there was usually one sentry per platoon. From early 1915 there was an increasing trickle of mirrors, placed on the parados and adjusted so that a man sitting on the firestep could see the trenches opposite, and trench periscopes of a variety of designs which permitted better observation. Until then sentries had had to peer over the parapet at regular intervals, and German snipers took advantage of any opportunity. Private Frank Richards began the war with two particular friends, known to us only as Billy and Stevens. In trenches at Bois Grenier in 1915 Richards and Stevens were watching Private Berry standing in a pool of water with his boots and puttees off, trying to fix a pump: âhis language,' reported Richards, âwas delightful to listen to':
Soon he slipped on his back in the water and we burst out laughing. Then suddenly Stevens too dropped down in a sitting position with his back against the back of the trench; but this was no laughing matter. A sniper on our right front had got him right through the head. No man ever spoke who was shot clean through the brain: some lived a few seconds and others longer. Stevens lived about fifteen minutes â¦Â He was a married man with three children and one of the cleanest white men I ever met. He was different to the majority of us, and during the time he was in France he never looked at another woman and he could have had plenty of them in some of the places we were in â¦
100
Henry Williamson had a similar experience when his trench was sniped: âCrack! And the man next to you stared at you curiously for a moment. Then you saw a hole in his forehead and when he slid down you saw that the back of his head was open.'
101
At Cambrin in June 1915 Robert Graves was shocked to find a man hit in the head:
making a snoring noise mixed with animal groans â¦Â One can joke with a badly-wounded man and congratulate him on being out of it. One can disregard a dead man. But even a miner can't make a joke that sounds like a joke over a man who takes three hours to die, after the top part of his head has been taken off by a bullet fired at twenty yards' range.
102
Soldiers perished from illness or accident long before they reached a trench: Ian Hay memorably described how his own battalion's first dead soldier was left âalone with his glory beneath the Hampshire pines'. Accidental death was common on rifle ranges and training grounds in France. In August 1914 Lieutenant Roland Miller's 123rd Field Battery RFA lost its first man to friendly fire, âwhen a gunner wandered out of station [at Le Cateau], met a French sentry, but not yet appreciating the reality of things, nor understanding the language, tried to pass, and was shot dead.'
103
On Easter Sunday 1915, Lieutenant Roe saw a âscene of indescribable horror and confusion' resulting from an explosion at a grenade-filling unit in France.
104
Harry Ogle's chum, Billy Brown, was killed when his mortar crew, showing off at a demonstration, managed to load a second bomb before the first had left the muzzle.
105
Frank Dunham's comrade George Bloomfield was cleaning his rifle in a trench at Ypres in 1917 when it went off, killing Private Beazley.
106
And so it went on.
Once men were within range of hostile fire, death came in a myriad of capricious ways. After he reached the front, Private Bernard Livermore mused on:
Death from a sniper's bullet, death from a rifle grenade, death from a Minnie or a toffee apple; death from shrapnel (possibly from our own guns) or from gas, if the wind were in the right direction. Death also might come from bayonet or nail-studded cosh if the Bosche raided our lines.
107
But the challenge to men's fortitude came neither wholly from the simple fact of death, nor from the shocking circumstances which so often accompanied it. Shell or bullet converted a comrade to a corpse, sometimes one which lacked physical integrity, and this had to be disposed of promptly, though with as much dignity as the situation afforded.
Men killed in or near the front line were buried where they fell, or collected after the action for burial behind the lines. In December 1914 Captain Gerald Burgoyne was told that there was a dead man close to his company's position at Locre.
Went out and found (from his identity disc) he was No 8863, B. West, Suffolk Regiment. Lying with his overcoat tied over his face alongside a ruined farm. Died possibly from wounds. Horrid job, lifting his head to get his identity disc. I buried him at dusk, and said the Lord's prayer over him. Couldn't read any prayers as we couldn't have any light, and as it was three bullets came so close to us, they might have been aimed at us.
108
The following spring even the energetic Burgoyne found it hard to keep pace with death's demands.
I saw five of the Gordons and they were smelling most unpleasantly. Got the subaltern of [position] H3 to bury two of them. On the parapet of H2 noticed the left leg, from the top of the hip to the foot, of a Frenchman. It was covered in a bit of red trouser â¦Â Had that buried too. In a Jack Johnson hole full of water within 30 yards of my trench, and on the road, I noticed a body, the face above water, of a bearded German. He had been there for months. Could do nothing but fill in the hole with stones and rocks.
109
Men felt a strong obligation to bury comrades if it was at all possible. Private Stuart Dolden was moving up towards Vermelles with the London Scottish in September 1915 when âWalker, my own particular chum' was shot through the chest. They dressed his wound at the next halt, but there they had to leave him. The following day Dolden went back with another man:
in an attempt to find the body of our pal Johnny Walker â¦Â He lay there looking perfectly peaceful. In life Johnny had been a good looking boy with a bright expression and a merry twinkle in his eye, and even in death he looked serene.
110
Private Roy Ashford of 2/16th London went into the line on the Somme in September 1916, and during his first tour of duty his friend Private Hearn was killed outright by a shell, blown backwards into the trench as he stood on the firestep on sentry duty.
First I went through his pockets and put his treasures into his gas helmet satchel, to be returned to his relatives. Then â¦Â we heaved the body over the parados. I decided the best case would be to scrape at the nearest shell hole, which I did with a spade the Germans had left behind â¦Â As reverently as possible we laid the body in the bottom and scraped the earth over it â¦Â I stuck his bayonet at the head of the grave and hung his steel helmet thereon â¦Â Then, having done our best for our lost pal, we crawled back into the trench.
111
Ashford immediately wrote a letter of condolence to Hearn's brother, a company sergeant major in another battalion.
The worst of improvised burials close to the front line was the near-certainty that the body would be disinterred by shellfire. The pre-war army had expected great things from cyclists, acting as bicycle-borne infantry in mobile war. In the event, while cyclists did indeed prove useful as orderlies and message-carriers, most bicycle units sent to the Western Front finished up acting as infantry. Private Jimmy Smith of the Northern Cyclist Battalion buried his best friend Ernie Gays.
I took him by the ankles, the other two took him by the arms, and we laid him in and covered him up. I remember feeling a bit upset, for the grave was only about four feet deep. I knew he probably wouldn't be there for very long, because of the shell-fire.
112
Frank Dunham, a stretcher-bearer, was in the line near Ypres in December 1916 when he was called to a man so badly hurt as to be beyond human aid. The man's âinarticulate sounds â¦Â turned to groans' which so upset his comrades that they waited some way along the trench until he had died. The body was then covered with a groundsheet, but had to be kept in the trench until it could be moved under cover of darkness.
113
Bodies moved out of the line were often taken back in the same General Service wagons which had brought rations forward, and buried in civilian cemeteries or, as the weight of casualties grew, in new military graveyards. These were sometimes within artillery range of the front, so burials had to take place at night. The dead were usually shrouded in a blanket or sewn into hessian, although Captain Billy Congreve, a young staff officer (who would himself live only a further two years), had a rough coffin made for his divisional commander, Major General Hubert Hamilton, killed in October 1914.