Tommy

by Richard Holmes

  15 July 1915. We hear that a mine which the REs have been preparing beneath the Mound of Death for some time past is due to be exploded shortly.

  17 July 1915. The mine was exploded at dawn this morning, but a little later the enemy exploded counter-mines beneath trench Q1. We had a shocking lot of casualties, and all the troops stood to arms and kept up a rapid fire to ward off a possible attack. They say that fortunately the enemy mine blew up short of the trench, but in spite of this there are nineteen killed and three or four times that number wounded. A bad show.180

  On 9 April 1916 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers were holding the line near Bethune:

  At 8 am the Germans blew in yet another small mine on our part of this much-mined area. Five miners were caught underground; four or five of our men were more or less buried in the collapse of our part of the trench; a broken leg has been the worst injury. It has been an exciting affair for the miners. They could hear the German miners only an estimated 10 feet off, so there was a race against time to get a charge tamped and fired. The camouflet that was blown there yesterday morning obviously failed to wreck the German work.181

  In June that year the Germans exploded a much bigger mine beneath the same battalion, leaving a scar 120 yards long, 70–80 yards wide and 30 feet deep, with a smaller crater proper within it. The explosion cost B Company two-thirds of its trench strength, including ‘two very recently joined young officers and its fine sergeant-major’. The Germans who attacked in the aftermath of the blast were driven off by a brisk counterattack led by Captain Stanway of C Company (sergeant major in 1914 and battalion commander in 1918). Frank Richards thought that much credit was also due to Private Hammer Lane, whose platoon commander panicked and yelled: ‘We’ll have to surrender.’ ‘Surrender my bloody arse!’ shouted Lane. ‘Get your men to meet them front and rear!’ It was ‘a glorious summer morning next day’ and, hearing that a staff officer was coming to inspect the crater, some of the fusiliers propped up a dead German officer on the firestep, with a lighted candle in one hand and a small bible in the other. Just before the red tab appeared they put a lighted cigarette in the corpse’s mouth. Richards maintained that this was not done to insult the dead German, who was decently buried soon afterwards, ‘but just to give the Staff officer a shock’.182

  There were shocks underground too when miners broke into one another’s galleries and fought with pistols, knives or coshes. British miners unable to obtain a revolver would occasionally cut most of the butt and barrel off a rifle, leaving them with a stubby weapon whose bullet could penetrate more earth than a pistol-bullet.

  But the most dreaded fate was not sudden extinction in an underground brawl, but slow death at the end of a gallery blown in by a German camouflet. In June 1916 the main tunnel of Petit Bois, one of the mines aimed at Messines Ridge, ran for 1,600 feet to a fork where it divided into two chambers to contain explosives. On 12 June the ground above shook and there were two spouts of earth from No Man’s Land: the blue-rimmed craters showed that the German camouflets had been driven deep. Twelve miners were walled up at the far end of the tunnel. Rescuers frantically dug a new tunnel to bypass the destroyed section, but when they reached the trapped miners four days later they found them all dead. Or so they thought. One of them, Sapper Bedson, an experienced miner from Whitehaven, had picked a spot at the tunnel face where the ground was slightly higher, removed the glass from his watch so that he could feel the time, put his water bottle to hand, and dozed fitfully while his mates gradually suffocated around him. He was unconscious when they got him out, but came to and muttered: ‘It’s been a long shift. For God’s sake give me a drink.’183

  Despite this setback, Petit Bois was brought back into service, pushed forward to 1,800 feet, and again split to allow two huge charges to be placed. There were eventually twenty-four mines loaded with a total of a million pounds of ammonal under Messines Ridge.184 The largest, laid by 1st Canadian Tunnelling Company near St-Eloi, contained a remarkable 95,600 lbs of ammonal, 125 feet below the ground, and was finished only nine days before the battle started. Nineteen of the mines were blown at 3.10 on the morning of 7 June 1917 with a blast so thunderous that the professor of geology at Lille University, more than 12 miles away, sprang from his bed thinking that there had been an earthquake, and the earth tremor was registered by a seismograph on the Isle of Wight. Some defenders were vaporised; others were buried beneath earth and rubble; still others were found intact but dead in their dugouts, the breath sucked from their bodies by the explosion. Philip Gibbs thought the sight:

  The most diabolical splendour I have ever seen. Out of the dark ridges of Messines and Wytschaete and that ill-famed Hill 60 there gushed out and up enormous volumes of scarlet flame from the exploding mines and of earth and smoke all lighted by the flame spilling over into mountains of fierce colour, so that the countryside was illuminated by red light.185

  There were many ways in which the war pointed the way ahead, but in the gigantic mine, its pillars of fire reaching up to an affronted heaven, there was a destructive ingenuity not to be rivalled until the explosion of the first atomic bomb.

  WOEFUL CRIMSON

  The war imposed an unprecedented burden on the army’s medical services. They had learnt valuable lessons in the Boer War, and the Royal Army Medical College at Millbank, founded in 1902, had done much to improve the professional education of army doctors. But their wartime expansion was staggering. The Royal Army Medical Corps grew from 1,279 regular and 1,128 territorial officers and 3,811 regular and 12,520 territorial other ranks in 1914, to over 10,000 regular officers and 98,986 other ranks, and 2,845 territorial officers and 32,375 other ranks in November 1918.186 As almost all RAMC officers were medically qualified this enormous expansion was only made possible by luring a growing proportion of the nation’s doctors into military service. The fact that the RAMC was already short of doctors when war broke out exacerbated the problem. There was as yet no National Health Service, and it was to prove anything but easy to shift doctors from secure, relatively well-paid jobs, into the army.

  Some went easily enough. Dr Henry Owens heard on 3 August 1914 that doctors were required and put his name forward: he rode the mare Colleen in the horse-show at Harleston that afternoon. He reported to the War Office on 6 August, ‘told them that I wanted to see something of the war, if possible & as soon as possible, & wanted some job with a horse to ride in it’. He was immediately posted to 3rd Cavalry Field Ambulance as a temporary lieutenant RAMC.187

  However, what was easy for an enthusiastic young doctor in 1914 was less easy for others. Some volunteers were initially turned down because they were too old, while many territorial doctors needed time to make arrangements to hand over their practices. The army soon offered twelve-month contracts to doctors who volunteered, leading territorials to complain that their own terms of service were inferior but their obligations greater. The Central Medical War Committee tried to take a global view of the problem of providing army doctors while at the same time providing for the health of the civilian population, and local medical committees strove, not always with success, to ensure that those doctors who did volunteer did not have their patients filched by partners who stayed behind. Captain Robert Dolby admitted that the regimental medical officers who joined with him in the early autumn of 1914 were:

  A scratch lot … one of us on leave from India, where he was a doctor to an Indian Railway; another, one of the most distinguished of the younger heart specialists in London, a man for whom ‘auricular fibrillation’ had no terrors; two of us, much general medical knowledge but no special leanings; and myself, by way of being a bit of a surgeon. We were badly wanted; for the casualties among medical officers had been great. Regimental medical officers, with their advanced dressing posts in good positions when fighting commenced, too busy with their wounded to notice the retirement of the fighting lines in front, had awakened to find themselves in the forefront of battle … Many of them, to their credit, stayed with their wounded,
and paid the penalty of duty with their lives or with many months in a German prison camp.188

  There were frequent fears that the army would run out of doctors. No less than 400 were killed or wounded on the Somme, and the army in France was usually well understrength for doctors: over 500 in March 1918, for instance. Conscription never applied to doctors, but there were frequent warnings that unless doctors heeded the call and served in their medical capacities, they would find themselves conscripted as privates in the infantry, and this may have concentrated some medical minds. The problem was eventually solved by a combination of methods. Experienced medical students serving in the army were discharged and sent back to medical school. P. J. Campbell’s comrade Edward, with his MC and bar, went off to qualify. Another gunner officer, recommended for a decoration at Loos when, as a forward observation officer, he temporarily reverted to his earlier calling to care for wounded in a front-line trench, was sent back to complete his studies, and was then re-commissioned, this time into the RAMC. He died bravely, still undecorated, in March 1918. Next, female doctors took over an increasing number of military appointments in Britain, though on shamefully unequal terms of service, to free their male colleagues for the front. No less than 200 nursing sisters were trained as anaesthetists, and finally, from 1917 American doctors were posted to British military hospitals or served as medical officers with units.

  Not all the Americans were ready for the cultural shock. Guy Chapman remembered that in 1918 his battalion’s new medical officer, ‘a sturdy round-faced American doctor from Baltimore, of a humour and an ingenuousness to smooth our churlish insularity’, was mercilessly conned by the battalion’s seasoned malingerers, who appeared on sick parade in droves and were promptly excused duty. When told what was happening he replied with surprise: ‘D’you mean those boys have been guying me?’189 He toughened up immediately, and the sick list shrank. In addition, several volunteer medical organisations, of which the Scottish Women’s Hospital is perhaps the best known, took some of the pressure off military hospitals.

  It took the medical services some time to adjust to the sheer scale of the war. In October 1914 Surgeon General Sir Arthur Sloggett was sent out to become director general of medical services in the British Expeditionary Force, France, and established a medical cell in GHQ at St Omer. A director of medical services superintended the medical services of each of the BEF’s armies, and there were medical cells at corps and divisional headquarters. At the latter the assistant director of medical services, a full colonel, controlled three field ambulances, each a lieutenant colonel’s command, which provided the essential links between the regimental medical officer and the hospitals to which his wounded would be evacuated. A number of civilian consultants, including some of the most distinguished specialists in Britain, were given temporary rank in the RAMC to advise the director general.

  The regimental medical officer, a lieutenant or captain in the RAMC, was effectively the general practitioner for an infantry battalion or unit of equivalent size in other arms. When his unit was not in the line, men came to see him at specified times, usually a morning ‘sick parade’, although he would deal with subsequent emergencies as they arose. When Frank Dunham became his medical officer’s orderly in June 1918 he was amazed at the range of illnesses that were presented at his first sick parade: ‘Impetigo, Psoriasis, ICT (Inflammation of Connecting Tissue) and others some of which I was in a mess with when it came to writing them down’.190 The flu-like ‘trench fever’, pyrexia of unknown origin – or PUO to doctors – was endemic, and although many infantrymen observed that they generally felt better than they ever had at home, a doctor argued that what really counted was steadfastness in the face of constant minor illness.

  Tis easy to smile when the skies are blue

  And everything goes well with you,

  But the man who could grin

  With his boots letting in,

  With a boil on his neck

  And its mate on his chin

  With an ITC at the back of each knee

  And PUO of 103,

  Was the fellow who won the war.191

  The medical officer’s usual prescription was ‘M&D’ – medicine and duty, which meant that the patient would remain at work while he took the appropriate medication, often a ‘No. 9 pill’, a vigorous laxative which dealt well (though, in Haig’s case in August 1914, volcanically) with the consequences of a diet of army biscuits and bully beef. More serious routine cases could be sent off to a specialist in a hospital behind the lines.

  The regimental medical officer had two distinct responsibilities. On the one hand he was a commissioned officer in a combatant army, bound to observe military law: but on the other he had sworn an older oath before he was attested into the army, and was aware – sometimes very well aware – of the fact that his responsibilities as a doctor might conflict with those as an officer. Medical officers were under constant pressure to keep sick lists down, and, as Lord Moran testifies, often had to send back into the line men who, by any objective standard, richly deserved rest. Lieutenant G. N. Kirkwood, RMO of 11/Border, was dismissed for over-empathising with the soldiers under his care, and his divisional commander declared that: ‘Sympathy for sick and wounded men under his treatment is a good attribute for a doctor but it is not for an MO to inform a CO that his men are not in a fit state to carry on a military operation. The men being in the front line should be proof that they are fit for any duty called for.’192

  A soldier wounded in action would walk, or be carried by regimental stretcher-bearers – soldiers in his battalion who carried no arms and were distinguished by their stretcher-bearer brassards – to the regimental aid post, in, or just behind, the front trench system. Officers and men had two first field dressings sewn beneath the front flaps of their tunics, and could give basic first aid even before the wounded man reached the regimental aid post, but only when the battle permitted. Men were ordered not to stop to help their comrades in an attack, and found it ‘very distressing to have to leave friends lying on the ground without being able to do something for them’.193 Many officers carried gelatine lamells, thin sheets of gelatine containing mild analgesic, and as early as 1915 company commanders were issued with ‘a tube of 14 grain tablets of Morphia; 1 to ease pain; 2 (or ½ grain) to cause semi-insensibility till death comes.’194

  Many medical officers went out on to the battlefield to help the wounded themselves when the pressure of work at the regimental aid post died away, and it is an index of their courage that of the only three men awarded a bar to the Victoria Cross, two were medical officers. Captain Noel Chavasse, RMO to the 1/10th King’s Liverpool, the Liverpool Scotttish, earned one VC on the Somme and the bar, posthumously, at Ypres. Arthur Martin-Leake had won his VC in the Boer War and added its bar in 1914. Martin Littlewood knew him in 1917, and was pleased to find that he was sensible as well as brave. When they came under shellfire he declared: ‘By God, this is dangerous. Run.’ ‘We were only too cheerful to do so,’ admitted Littlewood. ‘Only a very brave man can be a coward.’ Martin-Leake’s realism was well founded, for a medical officer did his men a disservice if he went forward when it was not absolutely necessary. Arthur Smith lamented that his medical officer, in a very tight corner at First Ypres, was ‘much too brave for a doctor, they ought to keep further back. He was right up dressing our fellows’ wounds when he was hit in the arm. He died two hours before our stretcher bearers arrived two days later, from loss of blood.’195

  Good stretcher-bearers, and there were many, were highly regarded. Norman Gladden remembered Private Bell with affection and respect:

  He was a fat, lazy and easy-going person in normal times, who became a fearless, self-sacrificing hero when there was any succouring to be done. His good temper, carried almost to the limits of non-involvement, made him a favourite in the company, and he could almost get away with murder.196

  The award to Bell of the Military Medal was universally popular, and it is no accident that
the most-decorated other rank of the war, Lance Corporal Bill Coltman VC, DCM and bar, MM and bar, was a stretcher-bearer. A gardener from Burton-on-Trent, he enlisted in 1/6th North Staffordshire in January 1915, but as a member of the Brethren, a Nonconformist sect, felt unable to kill, and duly became a stretcher-bearer, one of many soldiers who were prepared to serve but not to take life. He went back to gardening after the war.

  Carrying a man on a 6-foot stretcher with its wooden poles and canvas base was often sheer, backbreaking stuff, and Frank Dunham never forgot his first carry:

  It was slow work, and the mud in the wood was knee deep, we were slipping all over the place with the stretcher and I felt sorry for poor old Chambers, who gave an extra loud moan every time the stretcher bumped. We four SBs were all done in by the time we reached the Aid Post, and we rested here a short time while the MO saw after Chambers – he had an ugly-looking wound in the small of the back. Cpl Leary was good enough to give us a mug of tea each and, thus refreshed, we returned to our dugout.197

  Stormont Gibbs saw stretcher-bearers at work clearing Delville Wood in August 1916.

  One of these bearers had been working increasingly at getting people who were near enough to drag and now he was working further afield crawling about with bandages and iodine and a water bottle. The look in his eyes was such a contrast with what I had seen earlier in the eyes of those men who were running away. It was also a contrast with the dull expression of the people who were left. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the soul of this man seemed to be shining through his eyes as he went about his dangerous work of mercy. His face was beautiful.198