A Broken World: Letters, Diaries and Memories of the Great War

by Sebastian Faulks

We have seen a book in which the writer said that of Woolley there is nothing to say, but never again will that be said, for of Woolley there is this to say, that this hamlet of thirteen houses sent thirteen men to war and every one came back.

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  Here they stood on one great day, the men from the red fields of France, the parched sands of Mesopotamia, and the stony wilds of Palestine. Here they stood while the old rector welcomed them home, the 13 families crowding the 18 pews. We could find no shop in Woolley, no inn, no school, no letter-box, but we found a plain brass tablet of thankfulness for the safe return of their 13 men. One was wounded at Ypres, one won the Croix de Guerre for rescuing French wounded, and one was gassed; but every man came home again – home to one of the rarest hamlets in this precious countryside, home to this village thankful, to these 13 houses with not one vacant chair.

  It would be good to think that our Thankful Villages had all some visible token of their thankfulness, but often there is nothing; the village has just its memory that the men came back. But if we come to Rodney Stoke in Somerset we find a village proudly expressing its thankfulness that it offered 17 men and four women to England and all came safely home. Nowhere else have we found the spirit of thankfulness expressed as in a lovely window here, facing the door as we came in, with these grateful words:

  To the glory of God and in thankful remembrance of the safe return of all the men connected with this parish who by land and sea served their King and Country in the Great War.

  Facing it is a roll of honour with the names of seventeen men and four women: Dora and Eveleen Coleridge Smith, Sarah Chappell, and Ethel Barber. The first two were the rector’s daughters, both nursing abroad; the others nursed at home.

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  It has been a sad pleasure to come upon these Thankful Villages of which no other record exists than the one we have been able to make. Except in these few villages there is probably in every town and city and hamlet in the kingdom one

  In every wood and field and lane,

  Who will not pass this way again.

  These are the 23 Thankful Villages we have been able to discover where all the men came back; they are in 12 counties, and we give the number of the men who came back to them:

  In Yorkshire: Cayton 43; Catwick 30; Norton-le-Clay 16; Cundall 12. In Bedfordshire: Stanbridge 33. In Gloucestershire: Coln Rogers 33; Brierley 14; Little Sodbury 6. In Cambridgeshire: Knapwell 23. In Wiltshire: Littleton-Drew 22. In Somerset: Stocklinch 19; Rodney-Stoke 17; Woolley 13; Aisholt 8; Tellisford 3; Chelwood 4; Stanton Prior 3. In Northants: Woodend 19. In Derbyshire: Bradbourne 18. In Lincolnshire: Bigby 10. In Notts: Wigsley 7; Maplebeck 2. In Leicestershire: Willesley 3.

  Cayton, one of the Yorkshire villages in this list, has perhaps the record for thankfulness, for as many as 43 men went and 43 came back. As for Little Sodbury in Gloucestershire, those who believe that all things are guided in this world will like to remember that it was in an attic there that William Tyndale sat reading his Bible, and was inspired to present to the English people the noblest possession the centuries have vouchsafed to them. Four centuries after Tyndale, Fate has been kind to the village of his dreams. At Tellisford the lords of the manor have been rectors for 150 years and have kept the heart of the village friendly and beautiful. A flagged path brings us to the church between the low stone walls of a garden and a farm, covered in springtime with the matchless arabis and aubretia. Out of our English chalice of beauty has come no fairer place.

  It has been surprising to find that the remarkable experience of these Thankful Villages has already been forgotten in some of them. Would it not be a lovely thing if in each one there could be some mark of gratitude for this shining ray of fortune which befell them when England was in the Valley of the Shadow?

  RONALD BLYTHE (1922–) is a writer best known for his book Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (1969). It is loosely based on interviews with villagers; each chapter tells one of their life stories; together they build a composite picture of a village in rural East Anglia. The passage below tells the story of Leonard Thompson, a 71-year-old farmworker.

  Len and his wife live in a solitary house which stands not more than a yard off the Roman road. The foundations of the house must rest in the ditch made by the road-builders when they dug out earth for the camber. The mixture of fragility and tenacity which marks the cottage is somehow indicative of Len himself. Although there is nothing particularly frail about him in the physical sense – he is a little brown bull of a man with hard blue eyes and limbs so stretched by toil that they seem incapable of relaxing into retirement – he has stood firmly in the apocalyptic path of events which have wrenched the village from its serfdom. He is astute, unsentimental and realistic. He is neither proud nor regretful to have endured the bad times.

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  There were ten of us in the family and as my father was a farm labourer earning 13s. a week you can just imagine how we lived. I will tell you the first thing which I can remember. It was when I was three – about 1899. We were all sitting round the fire waiting for my soldier brother to come home – he was the eldest boy in the family. He arrived about six in the evening and had managed to ride all the way from Ipswich station in a milk-cart. This young man came in, and it was the first time I had seen him. He wore a red coat and looked very lively. Mother got up and kissed him but Father just sat and said, ‘How are you?’ Then we had tea, all of us staring at my brother. It was dark, it was the winter-time. A few days later he walked away and my mother stood right out in the middle of the road, watching. He was going to fight in South Africa. He walked smartly down the lane until his red coat was no bigger than a poppy. Then the tree hid him. We never saw him again. He went all through the war but caught enteric fever afterwards and died. He was twenty-one.

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  I left school when I was thirteen, on April 20th when the corn was low, I helped my mother pulling up docks in the Big Field for a shilling an acre, which my mother took.

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  When the farmer stopped my pay because it was raining and we couldn’t thrash, I said to my seventeen-year-old mate, ‘Bugger him. We’ll go off and join the army.’ It was March 4th 1914. We joined the army a few hours after we had made our decision. We walked to Ipswich and got the train to Colchester. We were soaked to the skin but very happy. At the barracks we kissed the Bible and were given a shilling. The recruiting sergeant said, ‘You can’t go home in all this rain, you can sleep in a bed in the recruiting room.’ In the morning he said, ‘Go home and say good-bye, and here’s ten shillings each for your food and fares. Report back on Monday.’

  In my four months’ training with the regiment I put on nearly a stone in weight and got a bit taller. They said it was the food but it was really because for the first time in my life there had been no strenuous work. I want to say this simply as a fact, the village people in Suffolk in my day were worked to death. It literally happened. It is not a figure of speech. I was worked mercilessly. I am not complaining about it. It is what happened to me.

  We were all delighted when war broke out on August 4th. I was now a machine-gunner in the Third Essex Regiment. A lot of boys from the village were with me and although we were all sleeping in ditches at Harwich, wrapped in our greatcoats, we were bursting with happiness. We were all damned glad to have got off the farms. I had 7s. a week and sent my mother half of it. If you did this, the government would add another 3s. 6d. – so my mother got 7s. My father died early this year and my mother lived on this 7s. a week for the whole of the war, adding a scrap to it by doing washing, and weeding in the fields. Neither of my parents lived long enough to draw the Old Age Pension. I can remember, when work was short, a group of unemployed young men coming to where some old men were sugar-beeting, which is the worst job there is, and shouting, ‘Now that you grandfathers have got the pension’ – it was 5s. a week – ‘why don’t you get out of the field and give us a chance?’ These ‘old’ men were only in their fifties b
ut the hardness of their lives had made them ancient.

  All this trouble with the village fell behind us now. I was nineteen and off to the Dardanelles, which is the Hellespont, I discovered. I had two boys from the village with me. We’d heard a lot about France so we thought we’d try Turkey. The band played on the banks of the river as we pulled out of Plymouth and I wondered if we would ever come home again. We were all so patriotic then and had been taught to love England in a fierce kind of way. The village wasn’t England; England was something better than the village. We got to Gib and it was lovely and warm. Naked Spanish boys dived round us for coins. There were about fifty nurses on the top deck and they threw tanners. You could see they were having an eye-opener. We stopped to coal-up. The dust blew all over the decks and all over us. We were packed like sardines and eating rubbish again. Water and salt porridge for breakfast. Beans and high salt pork for dinner. The pork was too bad for land-men to eat so we threw it into the coaldust and the coolies snatched it up and thrust it into their mouths, or put it into sacks to take home for their families.

  We arrived at the Dardanelles and saw the guns flashing and heard the rifle-fire. They heaved our ship, the River Clyde, right up to the shore. They had cut a hole in it and made a little pier, so we were able to walk straight off and on to the beach. We all sat there – on the Hellespont! – waiting for it to get light. The first things we saw were big wrecked Turkish guns, the second a big marquee. It didn’t make me think of the military but of the village fêtes. Other people must have thought like this because I remember how we all rushed up to it, like boys getting into a circus, and then found it all laced up. We unlaced it and rushed in. It was full of corpses. Dead Englishmen, lines and lines of them, and with their eyes wide open. We all stopped talking. I’d never seen a dead man before and here I was looking at two or three hundred of them. It was our first fear. Nobody had mentioned this. I was very shocked. I thought of Suffolk and it seemed a happy place for the first time.

  Later that day we marched through open country and came to within a mile and half of the front line. It was incredible. We were there – at the war! The place we had reached was called ‘dead ground’ because it was where the enemy couldn’t see you. We lay in little square holes, myself next to James Sears from the village. He was about thirty and married. That evening we wandered about on the dead ground and asked about friends of ours who had arrived a month or so ago. ‘How is Ernie Taylor?’ – ‘Ernie? – he’s gone.’ ‘Have you seen Albert Paternoster?’ – ‘Albert? – he’s gone.’ We learned that if 300 had ‘gone’ but 700 were left, then this wasn’t too bad. We then knew how unimportant our names were.

  I was on sentry that night. A chap named Scott told me that I must only put my head up for a second but that in this time I must see as much as I could. Every third man along the trench was a sentry. The next night we had to move on to the third line of trenches and we heard that the Gurkhas were going over and that we had to support their rear. But when we got to the communication trench we found it so full of dead men that we could hardly move. Their faces were quite black and you couldn’t tell Turk from English. There was the most terrible stink and for a while there was nothing but the living being sick on to the dead. I did sentry again that night. It was one-two-sentry, one-two-sentry all along the trench, as before. I knew the next sentry up quite well. I remembered him in Suffolk singing to his horses as he ploughed. Now he fell back with a great scream and a look of surprise – dead. It is quick, anyway, I thought. On June 4th we went over the top. We took the Turks’ trench and held it. It was called Hill 13. The next day we were relieved and told to rest for three hours, but it wasn’t more than half an hour before the relieving regiment came running back. The Turks had returned and recaptured their trench. On June 6th my favourite officer was killed and no end of us butchered, but we managed to get hold of Hill 13 again. We found a great muddle, carnage and men without rifles shouting ‘Allah! Allah!’, which is God’s name in the Turkish language. Of the sixty men I had started out to war from Harwich with, there were only three left.

  We set to work to bury people. We pushed them into the sides of the trench but bits of them kept getting uncovered and sticking out, like people in a badly made bed. Hands were the worst; they would escape from the sand, pointing, begging – even waving! There was one which we all shook when we passed, saying, ‘Good morning’, in a posh voice. Everybody did it. The bottom of the trench was springy like a mattress because of all the bodies underneath. At night, when the stretch was worse, we tied crêpe round our mouths and noses. This crêpe had been given to us because it was supposed to prevent us from being gassed. The flies entered the trenches at night and lined them completely with a density which was like moving cloth. We killed millions by slapping our spades along the trench walls but the next night it would be just as bad. We were all lousy and we couldn’t stop shitting because we had caught dysentery. We wept, not because we were frightened but because we were so dirty.

  We didn’t feel indignant against the Government. We believed all they said, all the propaganda. We believed the fighting had got to be done. We were fighting for England. You only had to say ‘England’ to stop any argument. We shot and shot. On August 6th they made a landing at Suvla Bay and we took Hill 13 again, and with very few casualties this time. We’d done a good job. The trench had been lost yet again, you see. When we got back for the third time we found a little length of trench which had somehow missed the bombardment. There were about six Turkish boys in it and we butchered them right quick. We couldn’t stay in the trench, we had to go on. Then we ran into machine-gun fire and had to fall flat in the heather, or whatever it was. Suddenly my mate caught fire as he lay there. A bullet had hit his ammunition belt. Several people near jumped up and ran back, away from the burning man and the machine-gun fire. I could hear the strike of the gun about a foot above my head. I lay between the burning man and a friend of mine called Darky Fowler. Darky used to be a shepherd Helmingham way. I put my hand out and shook him, and said, ‘Darky, we’ve got to go back. We must go back!’ He never answered. He had gone. I lay there thinking how funny it was that I should end my life that night. Then my mate began to go off like a firework – the fire was exploding his cartridges. That did it! I up and ran.

  There is nobody can say that you have killed a man. I shot through so many because I was a machine-gunner. Did they all die? – I don’t know. You got very frightened of the murdering and you did sometimes think, ‘What is all this about? What is it for?’ But mostly you were thinking of how to stay alive. The more the killing, the more you thought about living. You felt brave and honoured that you should be fighting for England. You knew that all the people at home were for it. We believed we were fighting for a good cause and so, I expect, did the Turks. You didn’t think personally. You can’t say you shot a man, although you know you hit him, because there were so many guns going at the same time. But I should think that I killed several.

  After Gallipoli I went to France. I went through the Somme and through the battle of Arras, after which I was captured. It was 14th April 1917. We ran and gave ourselves up, there was nothing more we could do. The Germans lined us up and marched us off. I thought, ‘We’re safe now. We’re out of it…’ I didn’t know what was going to happen. If I had I would sooner have gone through all the fighting again. It was the worst thing which ever happened to me in my life. We were taken to Lille, where the Germans had to make us ill and wretched in a week in order to march us through the town, so that they could say to the people, ‘Look at the great British army, look what it has been reduced to!’ We were driven into dark dungeons, straight off the battlefield, starved, made filthy and in only six days we were ill and we looked like scarecrows. The Germans knew how to do this to men. After the parade about 300 of us were packed into a half-built mansion and there we lived on pearl barley boiled in coppers and bread or cake made of weed-seed. Then we were put into a forest to make charcoal and sometimes the
Germans shot into our legs as we marched. We never knew what they would do next. They chose boys to thrash. I don’t know why I was chosen but I was a favourite for this thrashing and was always being taken off for a beating. George Holmes, a farmer’s son from the village, was one of the people who died from the ill-treatment.

  At Christmas 1917 they took us to Germany, right down to Kiel. It was snowing and we were in rags. No shoes. They gave us wooden clogs. We dug on the Kiel railway, making a track to the Baltic for the big guns. Many people died. On November 5th 1918 some German sailors arrived and set us free. They cut all the barbed wire and left just one guard in charge. ‘You can leave if you like,’ they said. ‘The war will soon be over. There is going to be a revolution, so keep off the roads. You could go and help the farmers pick up potatoes. That would be sensible.’

  So this is what we did. And when the war ended, there we were, Germans, Poles, Russians and Englishmen, working in the fields and realising that there was damn little growing in them.

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  I am old now. I read library books about the Great War – my war. The one I am reading now is called The Sword-Bearers. I have these deep lines on my face because I have worked under fierce suns.

  Jim Sams served as a sapper with the Royal Engineers Signal Company. He was killed in action on the Western Front on 29 March 1918. His brother, Tom Sams, served in the Royal Navy. Tom took a pilgrimage to see his brother’s grave in 1926 and sent three postcards, one of which read:

  Dear Dad,

  Two friends and myself are spending a week here. I am taking a wreath up to lay on poor Jim’s grave. It does bring it home very forcibly. Will write again,

  Love from

  Tom

  AFTERWORD

  War writers are often anthologists: collectors of stories, voices and images. Miscellany can speak of experiences not made sense of, or a decision not to force them into an overarching meaning. Included in this collection is May Sinclair’s account of a tour of a ‘dreadful dormitory’ for refugees. She describes being unable to find the right words to encapsulate what she sees. She is frustrated by, and yet cannot quite abandon, her guide’s question: ‘C’est triste, n’est-ce pas?’ (‘It’s sad, isn’t it?’). She is ‘stunned, stupefied’, and this is shown in her initial inability to provide a satisfactory answer. She cannot say how the scene makes her feel, because she cannot feel: her senses are ‘numbed’. Yet the title of her published collection, A Journal of Impressions in Belgium, gives a hint of what will awaken them. Sinclair ultimately finds that in order to feel she must stop trying to contain her view in an abstract word or idea: ‘The scale is too vast.’ She must instead narrow her gaze. ‘Little things strike you,’ she says.