Tommy

by Richard Holmes

  For most of the war there was a set quota for awards. On the Western Front for the year from 1 April 1917 it was 200 DSOs and 500 MCs every month: in May 1918 the limit was removed ‘provided the standard of the award was maintained’. There was no specified limit for DCMs and MMs. During the whole of the war 500 VCs (and two bars) were awarded for service in France and Belgium, with 6,768 DSOs (with 606 first bars, 69 second bars and 7 third bars); 31,793 MCs (with 2,761 first bars, 157 second bars, and 4 third bars); 21,041 DCMs (with 439 first bars, and 7 second bars), and 110,342 MMs (with 5,718 first bars, 180 second bars, and a single third bar).272

  It was widely agreed that a man was far more likely to receive an award for a successful operation than a ‘dud show’. While a commanding officer could never wholly guarantee an award, he could make it clear that he would recommend those taking a prominent part in, say, a trench raid, for decorations, if they survived. Brigadier General H. B. de Lisle, commanding a cavalry brigade in 1914, promised a DSO to the first officer to kill a German with the new pattern cavalry sword, and was as good as his word, although Captain Charles Hornby’s DSO, earned on 21 August 1914, was not gazetted till February the following year. A good deal also depended on a commanding officer’s skill at citation-writing (what Rowland Feilding called ‘not necessarily a truthful but a flowery pen’), and his relationship with the brigadier. Feilding, constantly warned by his superiors that most decorations had to reflect ‘a specific act of bravery’ rather than sustained good performance, described one act so eloquently that the delighted general wanted to hear all about it from the soldier when he conferred the decoration, but the man was unable to recall the incident. Awards were scarce in Stormont Gibbs’ battalion, he recalled, because the CO ‘never gave anyone a good write up; the fact of his putting anyone in at all was a remarkable event’. Gibbs did his best, as adjutant, to make up for the deficiency, ‘and in this manner Scrimgeour and Richards got MCs. I don’t remember anyone else getting one tho’ “other ranks” got a fair ration of MMs.’273

  The system caused joy and woe in equal portions. George Coppard MM admitted that ‘to win a medal of some sort was my highest ambition. There were medal-scoffers of course, who joked about medals being sent up with the rations, but I am sure that every man in his heart would have liked a medal, if only to relieve the monotony…’.274 Decorations brought extraordinary pleasure: Siegfried Sassoon wrote of the preoccupation with the left-hand side of the tunic, so common to winners of the MC, and John Cusack was delighted to put up his ‘duckboard’. Yet along with the honest pride engendered by a decoration came the burden of living up to it. ‘After you got a decoration there was a general feeling – and a fear – that you were expected to do more in any action that was going,’ thought Cusack.275 F. P. Roe had a Royal Munster Fusilier corporal under his command who had won the VC in Gallipoli but declined to wear the ribbon ‘as he had been so teased by his fellow soldiers in the regiment…’.276

  On the other hand, some men became so caught up in the repeated demonstration of courage that it eventually consumed them. Company Sergeant Major J. Skinner VC DCM and French Croix de Guerre was wounded in action eight times and, after his investiture with his VC, given a posting in Scotland. But he evaded the order and rejoined his old company near Ypres, apparently wagered with a brave comrade as to which of them would be hit next, and was then killed in March 1918 as he went out to aid a wounded man. This very gallant warrant officer was carried to his grave by six other VC winners of the incomparable 29th Division. Towards the end of the war Lieutenant F. L. C. Jones – ‘A Mons man, a Grenadier, commissioned in France’, who was hoping for a regular commission – confided to a brother officer that he was ‘going all out for a VC to boost his chances. When his advancing platoon found a machine-gun post he yelled, ‘Here’s my chance, I’m after that VC.’ ‘He got twenty yards, and went down, shot through the head,’ recalled an eyewitness.277

  Not all who wanted decorations received them. Feilding wrote that: ‘I have known men – good men too – eating their hearts out through lack of recognition. How petty this sounds! Yet a ribbon is the only prize in war for the ordinary soldier…’.278 Ernest Shephard was infuriated to read that a baker with the Army Service Corps had been awarded the DCM ‘for turning out the maximum amount of bread’, and snorted: ‘Ye Gods, what an insult to a fighting soldier, who risks his life daily. What are the authorities thinking about to award medals in this way and bring contempt on what should be a prized honour?279 Diaries are spattered with comments about undeserved awards, and drenched with complaints about unrequited valour. Private Mayne of 6/Connaught Rangers was caught by a German raiding party, hit all over with grenade fragments and had his left arm shattered. ‘Nevertheless he struggled up,’ wrote Feilding, ‘and leaning against the parapet, with his unwounded hand discharged a full magazine (twenty-seven rounds) into the enemy, who broke, not a man reaching our trench. Then he collapsed and fell insensible across the gun.’ At that stage only the Victoria Cross and Mention in Dispatches could properly be awarded posthumously: Mayne died of his wounds, and was duly mentioned.280

  The lavish award of decorations to staff officers caused irritation to those outside the scarlet circle. Arthur Osburn complained that ‘our own generals and even some of their youngest ADCs with their rainbow breastplates of coloured gee-gaws and ribbons surpass even the Ruritanians’.281 Regimental officers who went onto the staff knew just how much easier it was for staff officers to be recognised. When Lord Stanhope, then on a corps staff, heard that he had received a MC and a Mention on 1 January 1916 he confessed that he had always objected to the decoration of staff officers, but in this case, he mused, it was a recompense for the promotion he might have received had he remained at regimental duty. And then, eighteen months later, ‘to my surprise and much to my dismay I was awarded the DSO. The Corps Commander was always most free in recommending both his own staff and those serving under him for rewards.’282 And a general’s ADC, on the staff since being shot at Loos, told Guy Chapman that the divisional commander had just offered to recommend him for an MC yet again: ‘Damn it, if I couldn’t get one with the Brigade of Guards I’m not going to pick it up on the way… It isn’t decent.’283 Lieutenant Colonel Dunnington-Jefferson, a regular Royal Fusilier who served on the intelligence staff at GHQ throughout the war, was even more frank:

  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 – Italian Order of St Maurice and St Lazarus;

  Belgian Order of the Crown and Croix de Guerre; French Legion of Honour.284

  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 … 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.285

  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 – 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. ‘Did 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, ‘watered’ 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.286

  Getting clean and louse-free – and having one’s dignity restored in the process – 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 – ‘chatted’ – 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.287

  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 ‘Vinny 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.288

  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: ‘They nearly all had beards – officers and men – and were literally covered in mud and wet through.’289 Joseph Maclean wrote from his trench in 1917 that: ‘I haven’t washed or shaved for a week and look like a Boche prisoner.’290 After getting up the morning after coming out of the line on the Somme, Captain Rogerson shaved: ‘What bliss it was to lather up and feel the razor shaving off this unwelcome growth.’291

  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, ‘the 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.’292

  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 ‘deloused’ shirts and socks with our own fumigated tunics and slacks were handed over by the attendants.293

  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 … The hot bath was a joyful event … Marching companies of soldiers in fatigue dress, carrying towels only, were a familiar sight on the Armentières road … 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.294

  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 ‘the supercilious indifference with which they jostled past the mere front-line officer … with their alert deference when a red tab entered the room’.295 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!!296

  In Poperinghe the military favourite was Cyril’s, usually known as Ginger’s after ‘the 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.