Tommy (79 page)
Authors: Richard Holmes
I regret to record the following awards during the Great War, all of which should have gone to somebody who had earned them by fighting the Germans instead of to somebody who saw very little of the front line:
Six Mentions in Dispatches
DSO and Brevet of Major
Foreign Decorations â Italian Order of St Maurice and St Lazarus;
Belgian Order of the Crown and Croix de Guerre; French Legion of Honour.
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Yet it was still painful when the expected award did not materialise. Reginald Tompson already had a DSO from the Boer War, but hoped to become a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George. On 1 January 1918 he grabbed the morning papers with excitement.
I had been put in for CMG last year, but had not got it, so had to wait 6 more months, when a strong recommendation had gone in, & I was told it was a certainty. However, there was nothing. Looked down the list of Brevets wondering if by chance I had got in there, but it likewise proved blank. Felt a bit bad about it all day â¦Â The fact that most of our GHQ friends seem to have piled honour on honour in proportion as they have avoided risk apparently does not make it easier to bear.
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Foreign decorations could cause particular upset. Arthur Behrend, adjutant of a heavy artillery brigade, was asked to nominate an NCO for a French military medal. He suggested to the CO that they should recommend the pleasant but useless sergeant major, who duly received not just
a
military medal, but the prestigious
Médaille Militaire.
Some commanding officers, knowing that foreign awards were given with a set quota and were therefore relatively predictably obtained, used them as a compensation for officers and men whose British awards had not materialised. Many COs and divisional commanders distributed congratulatory certificates on much the same basis: Sassoon knew that he was not going to receive the hoped-for bar to his MC when a certificate appeared instead.
Discipline coerced men, comradeship and leadership buttressed their resolve, and decorations encouraged them. But scarcely less important was the army's growing realisation that the conditions of the front line were tolerable only for a limited period, and that once out of the line men must be allowed to enjoy themselves â as far as the demands of trench-digging and stores-carrying allowed. Even the simplest pleasures seemed Elysian to men who had recently emerged from a world of unbelievable filth laced with mortal danger. âDid not a mess tin of stew, a tot of rum or whisky in a tin mug, taste more like divine nectar than the best champagne drunk out of the finest cut glass today?' asked Sidney Rogerson.
The one meal of my life that I shall always remember, and can even now savour, consisted of an omelette for four eaten by one, with half a yard of French loaf, âwatered' down by two quarts of French beer. The subsequent instant panics were soon drowned in a sleep that lasted round the clock and several hours on, and brought an ever greater sense of relief.
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Getting clean and louse-free â and having one's dignity restored in the process â was scarcely less important than eating and sleeping. Front-line soldiers were almost invariably infested with the body louse,
pediculus vestimentii.
The fully-grown female of the species was about 4mm long, and the male slightly smaller: they were generally grey, sometimes with a blueish streak in the middle, though sharp colour variations caused great interest to their victims. They fed off their human hosts, causing intense irritation and broken skin as they did so, and the females laid eggs, about five at a time, in the seams of clothing. One unit checked the shirts of all its soldiers, and found that a mere 4.9 percent were louse-free. Just over 50 percent had one to ten lice, and an unlucky 2.8 percent had over 350 lice. When the lice found in trousers were added, the average soldier was found to be host to 14.7 of the creatures.
Lice were known as chats, and soldiers conversed â âchatted' â while plucking them from their garments. A heated bayonet was invaluable for dislodging them from the seams of a kilt. They could be cracked between thumb and forefinger, but some soldiers felt that destruction was more certain if they were dropped, with a gratifying pop, into a tin lid heated over a candle. Ernest Parker paid tribute to their valour and determination, for even
deloused shirts were not what they claimed to be, for dormant under the seams at the armpits were fresh platoons of parasites ready to come to life as soon as they were taken under our protection. In this way we maintained that the breeds were crossed, so that they survived the ceaseless war we waged on them.
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Stuart Dolden was deeply embarrassed when he first discovered that he had lice, but saw that his comrades were at work on the seams of their clothes with lighted cigarettes, burning out the eggs, so he knew that he was not alone. He plied them with Keatings, a well-known insecticide, but they seemed to thrive on it. Anthony French remained a âVinny Virgin', louse-free, for three months, but it all ended when he anointed himself with anti-louse ointment.
Almost immediately they found me. They thrived and multiplied and gorged themselves on the pomade and then turned their attention to me. I was never alone. I became louse-conscious. And I joined my colonel and my comrades in the daily hunting routine.
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Even shaving was a delight. Although men shaved as best they could in the front line, sometimes using a splash of hot tea to moisten the stubble, in many trenches this was impossible and most soldiers grew beards. Even Ernest Shephard, that tough and efficient sergeant-major, acknowledged that he and his men were bearded, filthy, and stank like polecats. When Second Lieutenant C. H. Gaskell joined 1/Wiltshire on the Aisne in September he noted that: âThey nearly all had beards â officers and men â and were literally covered in mud and wet through.'
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Joseph Maclean wrote from his trench in 1917 that: âI haven't washed or shaved for a week and look like a Boche prisoner.'
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After getting up the morning after coming out of the line on the Somme, Captain Rogerson shaved: âWhat bliss it was to lather up and feel the razor shaving off this unwelcome growth.'
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The army quickly recognised that private ingenuity was no answer to getting clean and louse-free. There were properly-organised communal baths by early 1915, and within a year divisions had bathing facilities through which personnel were rotated when out of the line. Barring bad luck and major battles, many soldiers could expect a weekly bath, as much as might have been expected in most working-class households in peacetime. While men had a hot bath, their clothes were steam cleaned in an effort to rid them of lice and louse eggs, and their shirts and underwear taken away for washing, repair and eventual reissue. There were frequent angry protests when a much-loved grey-back shirt, fluffy from repeated gentle washes (if still a bit grubby and lousy), was replaced by a board-hard garment fresh from delousing. And, as George Ashurst complained, âthe fumigation had killed the lice all right and we had some relief from the itching and scratching, but the seams of our pants and coats still held thousands of lice eggs and we soon discovered that the warmth of our bodies hatched them out again.'
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Ernest Parker visited his divisional baths in Poperinghe in 1915. There, in batches of platoons, we handed our clothing to the orderlies and took our turn in the tubs, kept warm by continual addition of hot water. These improvised baths had been made by sawing in half the vats used for storing wine, and into each of them as many as four men would struggle with one piece of soap between them. After removing a month's dirt and thus thickening the water for our successors, we stood shivering while âdeloused' shirts and socks with our own fumigated tunics and slacks were handed over by the attendants.
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There was a similar establishment in a converted brewery at Pont Nieppe, as Harry Ogle remembered.
There was little conversion necessary. The River Lys provided the necessary water, the vat room provided the bath tubs and water pipes, a storeroom was emptied for use as a dressing room, and all that was needed then was the installation of a stoving and fumigating plant. The vat room contained dozens of big wooden tubs of perhaps 200 gallons capacity, every one with water piping hot â¦Â The hot bath was a joyful event â¦Â Marching companies of soldiers in fatigue dress, carrying towels only, were a familiar sight on the Armentières road â¦Â They marched briskly along, always singing, arms swinging high, towels tucked under their shoulder straps.
Arrived at the Brasserie, the men filed into the big dressing room by a street door. Within they stripped naked. They put their boots on again, bundled their clothes together, leaving on the floor or on the benches only their braces, belts and service caps into which they put their personal gear. These were looked after by an NCO bath attendant. Next they pushed their bundles through a hatch in the storeroom wall and trooped, stark naked, looking and feeling ridiculous, on to the River Lys towing path. Within a few yards, fortunately, was the vat-room door. Every vat was big enough to accommodate two or three men at a time. The water was hot and deep. Soap lost was only with difficulty recovered. It was not provided by the bath people and that was the only snag. The rest was undiluted joy. The big, steamy room with its great tubs and innumerable steam pipes and water pipes rang with the noise of many voices raised in song or badinage or in exultant whoops of sheer delight.
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And in January 1918 a big ditch adjoining the dye factory at Ribemont on the Oise was converted into a battalion bathhouse by the stretcher-bearers of the London Scottish, but the awful weather, coupled with the presence of dye in the water, meant that the scheme was not a success, and its few users emerged muttering that they were marked men.
When routine permitted, officers could expect to get away for the day to Amiens, the mecca for units on the Somme, or Poperinghe, for units in the salient. The two best restaurants in Amiens were Godbert's and the Hôtel du Rhin, the latter home to many journalists attached to general headquarters. Captain James Dunn contrasted âthe supercilious indifference with which they jostled past the mere front-line officer â¦Â with their alert deference when a red tab entered the room'.
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Second Lieutenant Thomas Nash recalled that:
The English usually went to feed at the Hôtel du Rhin, where the food was not of the best, the charges very high and the service poor. At the Godbert the cooking was wonderful and every meal a work of art. It was not cheap, but it was jolly good. This particular day I met Papa Joffre having lunch there and mine was the only British uniform in the place. He returned my salutation very graciously and generously gave me his left hand to shake!!
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In Poperinghe the military favourite was Cyril's, usually known as Ginger's after âthe flame-headed, tart-tongued daughter of the house'. Skindles was also popular. Although James Dunn thought that its substantial civilian clientele helped keep its standards higher, Henry Williamson regarded it as the classic British home from home.
In June 1916, an officer in the Rifle Brigade, enjoying egg and chips and a bottle of wine in a certain estaminet in Poperinghe, declared to his friends that it was as good a pub as Skindles in Maidenhead. The estaminet already
had a longish name painted on its front â Hôtel de la Bourse du Hoblon something or other â but no one took any notice of that. The British officers soon began to call it Skindles, and very soon the three rooms on the ground floor were crowded with tables, and the tables with bottles; and around the bottles â¦Â sat the British officers smoking, laughing, eating or waiting to eat, and shouting the name of Zoë, which was the name of the daughter of the âMother of the Soldiers', as madame was called. The officer of the Rifle Brigade was killed on the Somme a few weeks later, as were nearly all his friends; but others came, and vanished, and others after them; and many, many more stretched their booted and puttee'd legs under the tables and drank in the fug of tobacco smoke and laughter; until the guns were silent and the feet of men marching at night were rarely heard, and upon the âMother of the Soldiers' and her helpers fell a strange loneliness.
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NCOs and men found it hard to get to Amiens: indeed, the journey often involved a good deal of lorry-hopping even by officers. Poperinghe, closer to the front, and the railhead for units in the salient, was far easier. Many establishments were out of bounds to other ranks, and in any case there was a natural tendency for each to cleave to its own. Frank Richards maintained that a brief halt at Le Cateau in August 1914 was âthe only time during the whole war that I saw officers and men buying food and drink in the same café'.
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Although the post-conscription influx of soldiers with private incomes meant that some could indeed afford to eat where they liked â one told an officer âI have independent means, sir, and am interested in agriculture' â most would have sympathised with George Coppard when he declared: âMy saddest memory of the war is my continual state of poverty.'
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The Reverend Andrew Clark, a vicar from Essex, heard soldiers complaining about their pay to a hymn-tune:
We are but little children weak
Who only earn eight bob a week
The more we work the more we may
It makes no difference to our pay.
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Soldiers were usually paid irregularly, in arrears: their paybooks, which had to be carried at all times, gave details of entitlements and stoppages. An officer designated to pay his unit drew the money from a field cashier, and soldiers were then paid in cash, in local currency, at a pay parade, signing an acquittance roll which the officer then used to support his original draft on the cashier. Or not, as the case may be. Officers were sometimes killed or wounded before they had the opportunity to submit the roll, and the Pay Department maintained a long guerrilla war against ex-officers well into the 1920s, trying, in the perennially mean-spirited way of such departments, to find out just how Mr Snodgrass managed to mislay 12 Platoon's acquittance roll during the battle of the Somme: he must either furnish it, obtain signatures in lieu, or pay up.