Tommy

by Richard Holmes

  Alfred Hale, snatched into the army from his comfortable middle-aged, middle-class world, was less impressed. He was posted as an officers’ mess servant to a Royal Flying Corps unit at Bedford, and found his young gentlemen anything but considerate. ‘I cannot help blaming Captain Ross,’ he declared.

  If he had been a little less of an almighty tin god, thought a little less of his own comfort and more of other people’s, things might have been very different. He might at least have seen that his own junior officers came down at the right time in the morning, and this set a better example to the men.274

  Life in the world of earth and wire was generally uncomfortable and dangerous, but it was made more tolerable by the pattern of rotation that kept soldiers on the move between front and rear. And although men were killed in their trenches, by shells, mortar bombs or sniper-fire, as well as by the myriad accidents that assail folk working outdoors with heavy equipment in all weathers, severe casualties came, not in the drudgery of line-holding, but in the inferno of battle. Walter Nicholson believed that: ‘Trench fighting goes on throughout the war; but a battle comes like a hailstorm, mows down a field of corn, and is over for a year.’275 Let us now turn our attention to the components of these violent and lethal storms.

  V

  STEEL AND FIRE

  A MILITARY REVOLUTION

  Every picture tells a story. Look at a photograph of a group of British infantrymen at Mons in August 1914, or perhaps on the Aisne a month later. They are combatants defined, like their fathers and grandfathers before them, by a personal weapon. In their case it is the .303-inch Short Magazine Lee-Enfield rifle, just as, for men who fought ninety-nine years before at Waterloo (about 25 miles from Mons and within earshot of its gunfire), it was the muzzle-loading Brown Bess musket. There are only two automatic weapons for each thousand-man battalion. These are Vickers-Maxim machine guns, mounted on a tripod, their ammunition contained in canvas belts and their barrels encircled by a metal jacket containing water to cool the barrel as it cracks out its 450 rounds a minute.

  The faces are a mix of old and young: youths in their first enlistment, and recalled reservists who have wet their moustaches in canteens from Dublin to Delhi. Indeed, moustaches are almost universal, as the only excuse for not having one is a boyish inability to grow hair on the upper lip. King’s Regulations leave no room for doubt: ‘The hair of the head will be kept short. The chin and the lip will be shaved, but not the upper lip. Whiskers, if worn, will be of moderate length.’1 Military uniform has deep psychological symbolism, and amongst its traditional functions are a desire to make its wearer look taller (hence high shakos and bearskin caps); broader (epaulettes); and more virile (codpieces, sporrans, tight overalls – perhaps reinforced, toreador-style, with a well-placed folded handkerchief – facial hair and pigtails). When two officers in the Accrington Pals shaved off their moustaches before going home on leave in November 1915 Lieutenant Colonel Rickman bellowed: ‘Get off my parade and don’t come back until they’ve grown again.’2

  In the Old Army status had always been defined with deadly elegance. Officers wore well-cut tunics of whipcord or barathea, with buff-coloured breeches and long puttees or tall brown field boots. Badges of rank were worn on the cuffs, stars and crowns framed by a flounce of worsted braid and emphasised by braid bands, one for subalterns, two for captains, three for majors and lieutenant colonels and four for colonels. Sam Browne belts with cross-straps, their glassy sheen the pride of many a batman, supported a .455 Webley revolver on the right hip and a sword on the left. Although fashion favoured the single cross-strap over the right shoulder, some regiments (such as the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry and the Cameronians) wore two straps, crossed in the middle of the back and running straight down the front from shoulders to waist.

  In the first years of the war the sword was not simply a ceremonial survival. Company Sergeant Major John Clingo of No. 2 Company 3/Coldstream Guards saw two men approach his position at Landrecies on the night of 25 August 1914. They were believed to be French officers, and Private Robson, one of the machine-gunners, rose as they approached, ‘when without a moment’s warning one … whipped out his sword and practically disembowelled poor Robson … [but] his assailant had scarcely turned before he and his companion were riddled with lead’.3 John Lucy saw all the nine officers of two attacking companies hit on the Aisne: ‘They fell forward in the advance waving their naked swords.’4 Lieutenant George Roupell of the East Surreys found his sword useful for walking behind the firing-line, beating men on the backside with the flat and telling them to shoot low. Alan Hanbury-Sparrow ran a German through with his sword at First Ypres, and was wounded seconds later, which might not surprise us. When 2/Scottish Rifles attacked at Neuve Chapelle in March 1915 the commanding officer left it to his company commanders to decide whether swords should be carried, and two decided that they should. At least one infantry officer wore a sword on 1 July 1916, an adjutant who wanted to ensure that he could be easily identified by runners. But by this stage they were clearly obsolete, and a general routine order specified that they should be sent back to England ‘securely fastened so that the sword cannot fall out, or become detached from the scabbard’.5

  Look at a similar photograph from October 1918: the shape and silhouette are different, for the infantryman now resembles not the gamekeeper but the industrial worker. The faces are different, for the average age of senior officers has dropped by about ten years, though while there are twenty-five-year-old lieutenant colonels there are also forty-five-year-old corporals. Half the infantrymen in France are eighteen years old, although all too often young faces frame old eyes. The replacement of the field service cap by the steel helmet, and the wearing of leather jerkins over many tunics, makes the soldiers’ silhouette very different to those squared-off outlines of 1914, and there is now a rich iconography of wound stripes, service stripes and brigade and divisional patches on tunics, with some badges painted on helmets too. It is far more difficult to make out the officers. Even those who are wearing officer-style uniforms have moved their badges of rank to their shoulders, in the style condemned by crusty majors of 1915 as ‘wind-up tunics’. But most officers eschew uniforms of such distinctive colour and cut when in battles or raids, and dress as private soldiers, perhaps with the addition of stars on the epaulette, but perhaps not.

  This was not a popular practice with all officers, some of whom argued that it was important to show style even at the risk of one’s life. On 24 February 1917 Captain Graham Greenwell complained that:

  Our new Brigadier, among other fads, has insisted on all officers providing themselves with Tommies’ uniforms as a sort of disguise: they are to be worn not only in the attack but in the ordinary trench warfare; it is a sad departure from the ‘Nelson Touch’ – all decorations won in battle and worn in battle.6

  Greenwell’s brigadier was, however, simply obeying orders. Pamphlet SS 135, The Training and Employment of Divisions, declared that ‘All infantry officers taking part in an attack must be dressed and equipped exactly like the men. Sticks are not to be carried.’ Some officers carried rifle and bayonet in battle early on in the war. When C. P. Blacker was searching for his brother (missing, believed killed), he discovered that ‘he had been last seen carrying a rifle and bayonet well in front of his platoon … I came back less than hopeful’.7 A photograph of 1/Lancashire Fusiliers preparing to assault on 1 July 1916 shows a second lieutenant dressed as a private, apart from his single epaulette star. He had evidently just been issued with his tunic, which fits so badly that he has had to turn the cuffs back, and he has not made a good job of putting on his puttees. Later during the same battle a surprised soldier saw his commanding officer go over the top dressed exactly like a private, carrying rifle and bayonet.

  Moustaches had become far less common by 1918. In the summer of 1916, when one might have thought that more serious issues were pressing, an officer was court-martialled for persistently shaving the upper lip
. He defended himself by saying that he was an actor in civilian life, and shaving off a moustache at the war’s end might leave him with a rash on the upper lip which would make it harder to get work. He was duly convicted and sentenced to be cashiered. The adjutant general at GHQ, was Lieutenant General Sir Nevil Macready, and the papers passed across his desk on their way to the commander in chief for confirmation of sentence. Macready had never much liked wearing a moustache himself.8 He did not simply recommend that the sentence be quashed, but had King’s Regulations changed, and the wording ‘but not the upper lip’ deleted from the Army Order 340 (3) of 1916. However, there was to be no fanciful facial hair, and so ‘if a moustache is worn no portion of the upper lip is to be shaved.’9 Many officers and men of the Territorial Force and New Armies had never paid much attention to the moustache regulation in any event. In November 1914 Gunner Bill Sugden reported to his wife Amy that his was coming along well, but: ‘I am trying to be photographed with it on. I want to see what you think about it. If you say it is to come off then I shall shave it off.’10 It did not last the month. Permission to shave the upper lip saw many razors gratefully plied, though not always with a happy outcome. The Reverend Pat Mc Cormick reported that his divisional commander had removed his, but ‘it didn’t improve him’.

  By 1918 some wholly new weapons are in evidence. Pouches bulge with hand grenades, and box respirators are always handy for both sides now use gas as a matter of course. Sentries need to be briefed on wind direction, and wise officers check cellars and dugouts for persistent gas before allowing men to enter. And while there are still plenty of rifles about, some are now equipped to fire rifle grenades, and there are numerous Lewis light machine guns, with fat cooling sleeves round their barrels and flat circular magazines (‘pans’) on top. Although the Lewis gun cannot provide the sustained long-range firepower of the Vickers, the fact remains that there are more automatic weapons in a single forty-man infantry platoon as in a whole battalion four years before.

  And the infantry now has its own artillery. Trench mortars are not part of infantry battalions, but are grouped in companies attached to each infantry brigade. They are mostly inaccurate and short-ranged, but are still capable of dropping their bombs (often the cylindrical ‘toffee apple’, its ‘stick’ a spigot that fits down the weapon’s muzzle), into the trenches opposite with shattering effect. The Germans had enjoyed an early lead with mortars, the hated Minenwerfers (‘minnies’ to the British), whose slow-moving, fat projectiles blew in whole sections of trench. There were some very primitive British trench mortars in late 1914, developed alongside devices like giant catapults, crossbows and bomb throwers that seemed to owe more to medieval sieges than to twentieth-century war. In early 1915 Captain Newton, then a company commander in 5/Sherwood Foresters, designed several types of mortar which were built at 2nd Army workshops, which Newton later commanded.

  By the end of the war there were 2-inch spigot mortars firing the ‘toffee apple’, 3.7- and 4-inch medium mortars, and 9.45-inch heavy mortars. But the most successful of them all (and the ancestors of the 3-inch mortar of the Second World War and the 81-mm mortar still used by British infantry) were the 3- and 4-inch mortars designed by Wilfred Stokes, managing director of Ransomes of Ipswich, a firm best known for the manufacture of cranes. His weapon was originally rejected because it did not take existing ammunition, but the intervention of Lieutenant Colonel Matheson of the Trench Warfare Supply Department and David Lloyd George, Minister of Munitions, saw it brought into service. ‘Mr Stokes’s drainpipe’ had a fixed firing pin, and its bomb was simply a canister of explosive with a percussion fuse. At the base of the bomb was an extension fitted with a blank 12-bore cartridge, with horseshoe-shaped secondary charges round it to give increased range. When the bomb was dropped down the barrel the primer on the cartridge hit the fixed firing pin and ignited, setting the bomb on its way. It was cheap, simple and murderously effective: over 12,000 Stokes mortars were made during the war.

  Heavy trench mortars were the responsibility of the Royal Garrison Artillery, but light and medium weapons were entrusted to infantry trench-mortar companies, still badged to their parent regiments, and often composed of men a sergeant-major was happiest to lose. Because mortar fire generally invited retaliation, mortarmen were not welcome guests in the front line, as Llewellyn Wyn Griffith remembered.

  At night a trench mortar officer set his guns in a derelict trench about twenty yards behind the line and carried up his ammunition, heavy globes of iron with a little cylindrical projection like a broken handle. In the morning I moved the men from the bays between the trench mortars and their target, to lighten the risk of loss from retaliatory fire. A pop, and then a black ball went soaring up, spinning round as it went through the air slowly; more pops and more queer birds against the sky. A stutter of terrific detonations seemed to shake the air and the ground, sandbags and bits of timber sailed up slowly and then fell in a calm deliberate way. In the silence that followed the explosions, an angry voice called out in English across No Man’s Land, ‘YOU BLOODY WELSH MURDERERS.’11

  Nor was it good for mortarmen to be captured by soldiers they had recently bombarded. Opposite Fricourt on the Somme, 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers were repeatedly shelled by a mortar firing a two-gallon drum of explosive, which sounded ‘like the Day of Judgement’ when it landed, blowing in all but the very deepest dugouts. When they took the village they found ‘a wooden cannon buried in the earth and discharged with a time-fuse. ‘The crew offered to surrender,’ wrote Robert Graves, ‘but our men had sworn for months to get them.’12 Nearby a German frantically sought to have his surrender accepted by shrieking ‘Minenwerfer man, Minenwerfer man’ in the hope that this might make him seem less hostile, but his opponent quietly remarked: ‘Then you’re just the man I’ve been looking for,’ and ran him through with his bayonet.

  The transformation of the army did not stop with the infantry. In 1914 most artillery was close behind the firing line. At Le Cateau on 26 August the 18-pounders and 4.5-inch howitzers of II Corps were pushed right forward into the infantry positions. There was a heart-stopping moment at midday when the decision was taken to withdraw the guns. The six-horse teams, under cover behind a low ridge, galloped forward through the infantry of the second line to recover the guns: soldiers of the Royal West Kents rose to their feet to applaud the self-sacrificing bravery of their gunner brothers. In 1918 field artillery was tucked into folds of the ground behind the infantry, and there was a proliferation of heavier guns, lurking unseen over the horizon, with a power and range that the men of 1914 could never have dreamt of. Forward observation parties of gunner subalterns and their wire-trailing signallers abounded. There were wireless sets at all formation headquarters and some battalions and batteries had them too: cumbersome and unreliable though they were, they were beginning to enable command and control to catch up with the swiftly-accelerating technology of killing. Even some of the aircraft overhead were now fitted with wireless to enable them to control the fire of heavy batteries. Many a visitor to a war cemetery just behind the front line has mused at the apparently incongruous presence of a Second Air Mechanic Royal Flying Corps amongst the graves of RGA gunners. He was in fact their radio operator, linking their 9.2-inch heavy howitzers to an observing aircraft, and running the same risks when counter-battery fire plunged in.

  Indeed, by 1918 the air was very busy: one artillery officer reckoned that he could often see fifty aircraft in the sky at any one time. Gone were the few German Taubes of 1914, fluttering malevolently over the battlefield, and the even rarer string-and-sealing wax aircraft of the Royal Flying Corps, engaged by harassed British infantrymen who swiftly came to regard all aircraft as hostile. There was now a wide range of aircraft carrying out the classical functions of air power. Fighters battled overhead to secure air superiority, and to blind the enemy gunners by clearing the skies of his reconnaissance aircraft and observation balloons. Ground attack aircraft (the British were just introducing the S
opwith Salamander, named after the mythical creature which could live in fire) swooped down to bomb and machine-gun front-line positions. Ammunition was dropped (not wholly successfully) to forward units at Amiens on 8 August 1918. Light bombers reached behind enemy lines to attack road and rail junctions in an effort to interdict the flow of men and material to the front. And lastly, though the combatants in France would not have taken much notice of it, strategic bombers, such as German Gothas and British Handley-Pages, reached deeper still, with the German bombing of London, first by Zeppelin and then by Gotha, giving a grim foretaste of horrors of the next war.

  Men on the ground were indeed ambivalent about the war in the air. But there was widespread admiration for the courage of individual airmen on both sides. On 7 June 1916 Frank Hawkings reported that: ‘A very daring aviator has been flying over the Hun trenches all day. The troops call him “the mad major”.’13 The term was widely used, for Bernard Livermore, miles away in the Vimy sector at much the same time, saw:

  the mad major zig-zagging along in his primitive ramshackle aeroplane. Flying just above our heads, he gave us a cheery wave, climbed quickly into the sky, and departed for a hurried tour of the German trenches in front of Vimy. He dropped very low and emptied his revolver at suitable targets … Who this courageous chap was we never found out, but he certainly improved our morale.14

  In mid-1915 Private Raymond Grimshaw of 1/7th West Yorkshires watched a German aircraft lose a brief aerial battle.

  The ‘Taube’ burst into flames, and dived downwards. We expected to see it crash to the ground but with wonderful skill the German got control of his machine – although it was blazing furiously and tried to volplane back to his own lines. He got to within 1,000 feet of the ground, when he was suddenly seen to jump or fall out of the machine … Though he was German we admired the gallant attempt he made to get back.15