Tommy

by Richard Holmes

  in an attempt to find the body of our pal Johnny Walker … 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 … 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 … As reverently as possible we laid the body in the bottom and scraped the earth over it … I stuck his bayonet at the head of the grave and hung his steel helmet thereon … 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 ‘inarticulate sounds … 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.

  I had to take the spurs off his poor feet, though, as they would not fit, and then we nailed on the lid … It was a pitch dark night and had been raining hard all day, so there was mud everywhere and a cold wet ‘feel’ in the air. The rifle and machine-gun fire was very heavy, and it sounded but a few yards away, so loud was it and so still the night.

  The scene was one of the strangest and most beautiful I have ever seen. The poor church battered by shells, the rough wooden coffin with a pewter plate nailed on the lid on which we had stamped his name, a rough cross of flowers made by the men, a small guard with fixed bayonets and the group of twenty to thirty bareheaded officers and men. Above all, the incessant noise …114

  It was often impractical to dig individual graves, and bodies were laid side by side in a long trench. On at least one occasion shellfire forced the chaplain, burial party and mourners to take refuge in the trench, leading to wry jokes about ‘the quick and the dead’. Bandsman Erskine Williams of the Sherwood Foresters was an artist and musician who had joined the army in 1915. His band was responsible for burying the dead at Essex Farm, just north of Ypres, in August 1917, and he tells how:

  After we had dug the grave at noon we fetched the bodies from the hospital, wrapped in blankets and carried on stretchers … There was a whacking great shell hole in the graveyard. Some of the bodies were just as they had been knocked out … but the band worked well on the job, filling the grave in with earth after a brief service to the accompaniment of screaming shells …

  The poor faces at last covered with earth – what a sad sight. I was moved more by the pitiable appearance of the victims than by the terror of their look. I was surprised to find I could carry one end of a stretcher with its awful load from hospital to cemetery; it was a duty which seemed to give me strength … all in drizzling rain.115

  Frank Dunham, watching his mate Corporal Gardiner buried under sporadic fire in Chester Farm Cemetery, at much the same time, complained: ‘I fancy the padre got slight “wind up” with the rest of us, for he cut the service short and was soon off afterwards.’116

  Most soldiers became inured to the sight of death, and often made rough jokes about the dead: we would now call the process ‘avoidance humour’. Henry Williamson saw a German’s arm sticking out of the ground near Miraumont on the Somme, and ‘a young soldier laughingly put the handle of a broken spade between the stiff fingers, saying “Now them, Jerry, get on w’it: no bluudy skrimshankin” ‘ere.’117 But the same soldiers could be reverent about graves, allied or enemy. The Reverend Harold Davies saw that some British soldiers had restored a German cemetery in newly-recaptured territory, ‘and outside have written with infinite pity “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them who trespass against us."’118 In December 1917 Second Lieutenant Huntley Gordon found a cross, made from a broken propeller, just in front of his gun position.

  Round the propeller-hub is painted ‘2nd Lieut. J. G. Will RFC.’ He was the wing three-quarter known before the war as ‘the flying Scot’ … The grave must have been made by Boche airmen – a curiously chivalrous act, for they can hardly have thought it likely that we would advance far enough to see it.119

  At night it was safe to look out over the parapet. Robert Graves tells us that in 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers sentries were ordered to:

  Stand with their heads and shoulders above the parapet, and their rifles in position. This surprised me at first, but it implied greater vigilance and self-confidence in the sentry, and also put the top of his head above the level of the parapet. Enemy machine guns were trained on this level, and it would be safer to get hit in the chest or shoulders rather than the forehead. The risk of unaimed fire at night being negligible, this really was the safest plan. It happened in battalions which did not insist on the head-and-shoulders rule, but just let their sentries sneak an occasional peep over the top, that an enemy patrol would sneak up unseen to the British wire, throw a few bombs, and get safely back.120

  Sentries were posted in pairs at night, and in a well-conducted platoon their two-hour tours of duty would be staggered so that one was fresh and the other experienced. There was often a corrosive monotony to sentry duty, as Harry Ogle reported, shortly after his arrival on the Somme front in 1915.

  I am standing on day sentry-go in a front line trench … at the moment I am doing nothing but peer through a loophole. Through this loophole, which is about a foot and a half wide and half a foot high, I can see five wooden posts which support nineteen strands of barbed wire between them. I have counted them over and over again to keep myself awake. The strands of wire come close to my loophole, over its right hand corner. There are seventeen barbs on them … Right in the middle foreground of a bright though ill-framed picture lie two empty tins, one jagged lid shining uncomfortably in the morning sun. There it must stay until nightfall. These are only the nearest of hundreds in the high grass.121

  Sleep beckoned all too invitingly. ‘Sleeping at post’ was a capital offence in military law, and accounted for 449 death sentences during the war. Only two of these were actually carried out, both in Mesopotamia, where a pair of sentries in 6/Somerset Light Infantry were court-martialled and (despite a plea by their divisional commander for a suspended sentence of imprisonment) shot. This
very low percentage of executions reflects the fact that both courts martial and the officers who commented on their cases as they went up the chain of command for final confirmation by the commander in chief knew all too well how tired men became, and generally recommended clemency.122 Indeed, we may suspect that the men actually charged for sleeping at post represented only a tiny proportion of those actually caught asleep by an officer or sergeant, most of whom would have understood how difficult it was to stay awake. Lieutenant C. P. Blacker admitted that sometimes it was only the sound of a bullet that stopped him from slithering into unconsciousness, and:

  The Very lights not only illuminated no-man’s-land, they also alerted dozy sentries. I sometimes asked the latter if they had private means, other than the traditional expedient of pinching oneself, of keeping awake. I encouraged them to think up methods, practise them on themselves and report to me any that were effective. In retrospect [he later became a doctor] I have wondered why we did not treat ourselves with small doses of caffeine.123

  One patent method was not without risk, as F. P. Roe reflected:

  I have seen soldiers and senior NCOs standing in the front-line trench looking over the parapet from the firestep with the point of their fixed bayonet (sharpened for active service) touching the soft flesh under the chin and kept steady there by holding it with the thumb and forefinger of the right hand. I have over and over again seen the soldiers with a little speck of dried blood caused by a nodding head and a prick with the extreme top of the bayonet – a device guaranteed to keep the sleepiest sentries awake.124

  At Ypres in mid-1917 Gunner Aubrey Wade, manning his battery’s telephone (a post no less important on a gun-line than a sentry was to the infantry), drifted asleep and missed a call for supporting fire. He knew the dangers, admitting that:

  Sleep was dangerous on my job … The slightest relaxation, and the next thing would be the major tapping me on the shoulder and telling me I would be placed under arrest. The court-martial, and the military prison, and the final scene.

  But now: ‘Our battery was silent behind me while the infantry was going through it up there, and it was my fault.’ Questioned the following morning, he told his commanding officer that he had been out mending the wire, and showed him a recent repair. He suddenly realised that it was not in fact his wire, but happily for him the CO did not.125

  Sentries were often tired because of the other demands on men’s energies. Working parties in the line were required to bring up trench stores such as wire, timber, trench-mortar bombs and duckboards from the rear; to repair damaged trenches and construct new ones; to bury telephone cables, and to keep wire entanglements in good order. Bernard Livermore of 2/20th London remembered how trenches were deepened. ‘One man used a pick on the heavy clay for two minutes by the watch,’ he wrote. ‘His companion then got to work with the spade and tossed the earth up eight feet to where a third man spread it. We were so worn out that often we fell asleep, standing up, in our two minutes of rest.’126 The sandbag was to the front-line soldier what the flint was to primitive man. ‘Filling sandbags and replacing shell-shattered old ones always kept us busy,’ thought F. P. Roe. ‘Each sandbag was about eighteen inches long and nine inches wide and of course was filled with earth or chalk available on the spot. A filled sandbag thoroughly soaked with water seemed to weigh a ton.’ The trenches Frank Hawkings occupied at St-Eloi in May 1915 were:

  almost entirely built of sandbags and as they badly needed repair they kept us very busy. To judge by the grouses of the two companies in the Scottish Wood, life there is none too easy. Every blessed night they have to supply parties to carry up sandbags and other RE [Royal Engineers] stores. To add to their discomfort, Fritz sometimes strafes the edges of the wood with whiz-bangs.127

  As David Jones observed:

  Empty sandbags were used for every conceivable purpose. They were the universal covering. They were utilised as a wrapping for food; for a protection to the working parts of a rifle, and a cover for bayonets against rust. The firm, smooth contour of a steel helmet was often deprived of its tell-tale brightness, and of its significant shape, by means of a piece of stitched-on sackcloth. The sandbag could be cut open and cast over the shoulders against the weather or tied around the legs or spread as a linen cloth on the fire-step for a meal, or used in an extremity as a towel or dish-cloth; could be bound firmly as an improvised bandage or sewn together as a shroud for the dead. There remained the official use: they constituted, filled with earth, the walls, ceiling and even the floor surface of half our world.128

  Ration items such as cheese could often be ‘very hairy, imprinted with the sodden hessian’s weft and warp’. Sandbags were also ideal receptacles for the personal effects of the dead. One officer, seeing a filled sandbag accompanying a body being carried out of the line, asked if it contained the man’s effects, only to be told: ‘No, sir: his mate.’ The practice of wrapping them round the legs to prevent puttees from becoming caked with mud was universal, and its frequent banning in routine orders had little effect.

  Lieutenant Roe recalled how wood and metal sometimes took over from hessian.

  Occasionally instead of interminably rebuilding the walls of the trench exclusively with sandbags we were able to utilise fascines and gabions. A gabion is a very handy hollow cylinder of metal [or wicker] filled with earth; fascines were long faggots of wood such as short branches of trees bound round at intervals with strong cords into bundles about eighteen inches or two feet in diameter, and three to four feet in height … The fascines were especially useful when the trench was dug well into the ground and a parapet created of undisturbed earth, rather than built up from ground level with sandbags. In some areas the undisturbed earth forming the parapet could be more firmly held on the inside with rabbit wire stretched between wooden battens but this was a job for the expert sappers of the Royal Engineers. Sometimes it was advantageous to use flat wooden devices like sheep hurdles made of strong withy-like branches of small trees. These additions were called revetments.129

  There were times when the damage done by German artillery meant that trenches had to be rebuilt ‘entirely without cessation’. On the eve of the Somme this work absorbed the energies of frontline troops, and the need to dig extra communication trenches to enable attacking units to move forward swallowed up the efforts of units notionally in reserve or at rest.

  In 31st Division the 94th Brigade behind the line in reserve billets were busy providing working parties to carry forward the materials with which they spent many hours repairing and rebuilding. The brigade provided daily the large total of 1,500 troops at a time to work under Royal Engineers supervision. They too get tired out for they daily had a long route-march from their Bertrancourt billets into the line and a similar return trek at the end of the day – sometimes even at night.130

  There were few jobs which illustrated the advantages of pre-war experience quite as much as digging. Middle-class men like Corporal Henry Ogle, an art teacher who had enlisted in the infantry in 1914, suddenly found the social order reversed as he tried to dig a small funk hole.

  I was doing a hurried dig … when Tom [a miner] said, ‘Corp, you’m a schoo’master an’ knows a thing or two that’s no use in this bloody place, but when it comes to pick and shovel work why, that’s my job. I don’t say you know nowt about it, but you acts as if you don’t, bein’ in a ‘urry, an’ I’m goin’ to schoo’master you …’. He puts his pipe in his pocket, hands me his pouch, seizing my shovel with a grip and balance acquired by daily use over long years. But he eyed it, and then me, with distaste. ‘You want to keep her clean, lad. Make yourself one of these. Some call it a “minute killer” but a proper mon saves more minutes than he kills.’ He produced a little piece of wood shaped like a spade from the top of his sandbagged right lower leg and scraped the muddy tool clean. ‘Now then!’ he growled, and began at the edge of the funk hole or where he judged it ought to be. He shovelled out a hundredweight or two, placing it neatly behind the
edge of the trench to make room for roof-spans, if any. While he worked he delivered his lesson, suiting the actions to the words or phrases and fixing me with that rather fierce gaze of his to make sure I was attending. ‘Begin at back, an’ keep your feet off till you’ve made a bottom to stand on. Always work from a clean bottom. Find your right level, then you slopes it up a bit towards the back unless you wants water there. There’s the bottom!’ (Slapping it with his shovel.) ‘Now your shovel will slide, an’ firm it down as you go, sweet and easy like. Now find your side walls and batter them. Don’t forget or your edges will be falling on your ‘ead when you’re trying to sleep. Clear your stuff as you go, don’t stand on it.’ (Looking at me severely.) ‘Now, square your back corners, dead true and clean. No, you finish your smoke – you don’t get baccy like that every day an’ I’m not done schoo’mastering yet! Get your right hand so it backs agin’ the inside of your right knee. Now use your knee to start your shove. That’s usin’ your weight. Easy! Throw o’er left shoulder working right-’anded, an’ right shoulder left-’anded. No, a proper mon will pick an’ shovel as good wi’ one as wi’ t’other. Use body and legs to save your arms. An’ use your ‘ead on this job, same as you uses it on your own job.’131

  This quotation tells us much, and not just about trench-digging. Harry Ogle, an educated man who had joined up as a private, was now a corporal, and would end the war as a temporary captain with a Military Cross. Tom was properly respectful to an NCO, although ‘Corp’ soon became ‘lad’. He was proud of his skills, twice referring to the link between hard work and manliness which was such a striking feature of the Edwardian working man, be he urban or rural. The chance of a middle-class man like Ogle living in close proximity to a miner in peacetime was remote. He might have once judged Tom as a potential striker, while Tom might easily have seen him as a toff with more money than sense. Thousands of young men like Harry Ogle were broadened by the experience of serving with soldiers from working-class backgrounds, and many never forgot it. We must also forgive men like Harry Ogle their attempts to catch regional accents in their prose: they no more meant offence than James Dunn meant to mock the brave Private Edge’s speech impediment. And while Tom and his ilk rarely sought to capture middle-class accents in their own accounts, they were often apt at imitating them. The practice was called ‘talking Rupert’, and the young Second Lieutenant P. J. Campbell, in charge of his first working party, was amazed just how well they did it.