To say that every young man in Britain was dying to join the army would be an exaggeration. George and Peter would be partly buoyed by their fellow passengers. They sat in a carriage full of reservists overflowing with a ‘pack up your troubles’ mentality, but it had begun to ebb by the time they were redirected to the rifle depot at Winchester. George had served in the ECOTC too but never took it seriously, which was a common sentiment before the war. He joked about his awful shooting and was more vocal about the ‘topping rag’ on the way back to school in the train than serious military matters, although he thought it was all rather fun ‘seeing an enemy skulking along about 500 yards off, and potting at him’.
Peter had ‘odd sensations’ in the pit of his stomach as they climbed the hill from the station. George had a funny turn outside, ‘something between a fainting fit and a sick headache’ and had to sit down and pull himself back together outside the barracks. Peter was all for running away back to London ‘humiliated but free’, but George took a deep breath, steadied himself and marched them both through the door.
When George and Peter entered the rifle depot they found themselves face to face with a lieutenant colonel who appeared to be busy and showed little interest in their presence. Where were they at school? Eton. Were they in the corps? Yes. Did they play games? As soon as he established that George was the Davies who had made that 59 at Lord’s in 1912 in front of his very eyes, for his old school, this fellow OE who himself had been in the XI changed his tune and immediately became more congenial. Peter met his approval by way of being related to George and with that, they were in the army.
When George and Peter reported to Sheerness to join the King’s Royal Rifle Corps in September it was in a depressed mood. They watched baby-faced officers being sent off to replace those who had fallen in the early days of the war and as they undressed in their tent to go to bed that first night, George said: ‘Well, young Peter, for the first time in our lives we’re up against something really serious. F*** me if we aren’t.’
Life in the Intelligence Corps had not been entirely plain sailing for George Fletcher, even if he was far removed from the action he craved. He had been grazed by shrapnel during the retreat but it could have been far more serious. ‘A man a few yards off was biffed … I stole his Greatcoat which kept me alive.’ He had even been arrested. One night he was rattling along on his smell when he ran into a party of Germans. Thinking quickly, he started chattering away in German and they failed to notice that he was not one of them. Unfortunately for George he was overheard by a British contingent lurking nearby and dragged off for incarceration as a spy. There he sat until a fellow OE chanced by and asked him what the devil he was doing locked up.
In fact, George had become so tired of motorcycles and of intelligence work that he had been ‘touting’ to every staff officer he could get within earshot to try to secure a transfer to an infantry battalion. George was attached to the 2nd Royal Welsh Fusiliers. ‘Henceforth I march on my feet like a man instead of scorching on my tail like a monkey.’ He had arrived in time for the beginning of the battle for Ypres in October but they occupied a section of the line to the south, away from where Regie was involved in the thick of the action. George was still unaware of his brother’s death when he and his men were pulled from the lines in November. He set to work shaving off the scratchy beard that had grown in the fortnight spent in a cramped, makeshift ditch.
As the snow began to fall the men of the BEF who had survived the slaughter got ready for a winter of inactivity as far as large-scale battles were concerned. George sat ‘begloved and bemittened’, wearing every item of clothing he possessed at once, draped in all of the blankets that he could find. He was convinced that he and his men would remain where they sat until the following March. ‘We shall stay facing one another in trenches the whole weary winter,’ he suggested to his parents, ‘and in the Spring, we shall go for them.’ If this was the case, then the lines hurriedly scraped into the earth as the battle had raged around them simply wouldn’t do as accomodation.
One of the first priorities was to make a solid bottom to the trenches, by whatever means possible in the worsening conditions; be it brushwood, bricks, sacks of straw, timbers or ammunition crates. The digging of communicating trenches was also important so that the men could move to and from the firing line in safety. George was in a trench only 100 yards or so away from the Germans, so barbed wire entanglements were especially vital to keep the enemy out of their lines. George was trying to construct a dugout. He had an old door as a roof, which leaked; three more forming walls with the last side made out of ammunition crates. The entrance was hung with a waterproof sheet and he had found a long box to act as a bed and stuffed it full of straw and blankets. As yet, trench was an elaborate description for their home. They lacked a parapet to shield them and the addition of one of these was absolutely vital, as any attempt to dig down brought more water into the trench. Any attempts they were making to pave the floor with bricks were useless as they just sank into the thick, glutinous mud.
On his 27th birthday George was supervising the construction of a communication trench that filled up with water as soon as they dug it. It had rained continually for over a week and when he tried to walk to and fro the water nearly went over the top of his gumboots. He had been tying them on with webbing straps so that they did not get left behind when he lifted his feet but it was a losing battle. By the end of January pumps had arrived to bale out the trenches. The worst of it was that the water had nowhere to go, wherever it landed on the clay-like soil, it stayed. They had taken to pumping it out of one trench and into an old communication trench which had been barricaded with sandbags, but no matter what the men of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers tried, the water found a way to trickle back in.
The amount of mud shocked new arrivals. Ian Henderson left Eton in the summer that war was declared and subsequently joined the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders who were in the same brigade as George Fletcher’s battalion. Still a teenager, he was cloaked with a sometimes painful naivety. The crossing was wonderful, the men were wonderful, the weather fine and all was dandy until ‘beastly shells’ turned up and put him in ‘the most awful funk’. In one of his letters home he admitted to an ‘awful discovery’ he hoped that they wouldn’t be shocked, but he had found two lice in his vest, and he was not the only one. ‘I haven’t had my shirt off for eight days now or my boots. And terrible to think of, I haven’t had a bath for very nearly a month.’
On 11 November George reported that his feet had been wet for three days despite his new habit of rubbing vaseline all over them to try and keep the water out of his skin. His men had stood in a trench for three days. With almost nowhere to lie down and rest they spent day and night trying to bale out the trench with buckets only to see the water find its way back in. The men with the buckets were exposed all day long to German rifles, ‘but they, poor things were just as badly off’. It had created a sort of uneasy truce. They did not snipe at the Germans whilst they battled the water and vice versa.
One young woman who knew George Llewelyn Davies well said of her own Etonian brother, who would be killed in May 1915 with the 19th Hussars, that he thought the war was going to be ‘one long cavalry charge, everyone waving their swords – Smash the Kaiser! Terrific!’1 George Davies was never, she knew, under any such illusions. ‘He knew what he was in for from the word go.’ In early December the brothers had been separated. Peter, still seventeen, was left at Sheerness whilst George was sent to the 4th Rifle Brigade. The battalion had arrived home from India in preparation for being sent to war and he was to go with them. Leaning out of the train as it pulled from the station, George waved goodbye to his younger brother, calling out ‘Till our next merry meeting!’
George was subsisting with holes in his pants almost as soon as he arrived at the front but that was the least of his concerns. He had had a harrowing walk up to the trenches one night through thick mud in complete darkness. He was bringing up t
he rear and accidentally found his way into a silent, abandoned communication trench. He waded into mud up to his knees. There, unsteady and perhaps with a hint of panic setting in, he toppled over backwards. ‘Behold me sitting with exceedingly cold water trickling into me everywhere, unable to move and shouting for help.’ Another OE had told a similar, horrific story of a ‘missing’ man who had vanished whilst relieving troops one night. They assumed that he had stopped a stray bullet in the dark. Two days later when the same men came out of the trenches they heard groans coming from a waterlogged communication trench. They found the missing man up to his shoulders in mud. He had got lost and sank. It took them more than four hours to extract him and get him help but he died of shock and exposure almost immediately.
The spectre of death was always lurking in the trenches. The men of George Fletcher’s battalion used to sit discussing the spirits of dead men. They used to say that when the war was over, the ghosts of dead troops would be marching over their fields every night ‘cursing and grousing’ as they were moving along and that no farmer would be able to use the land again. They talked about whether or not the soldiers already claimed by the war could wander through space and look down upon them. One of their number was dry in his response when he replied that he ‘wouldn’t mind betting’ that at that very moment they were looking down and ‘dancing a two step and clicking their heels together in holy glee to think that they had scrounged out of this blasted misery’.
Dead, rotting men were turned up all over the Ypres Salient area when troops tried to drain or extend their lines. Many were in an advanced state of decomposition and the smell was harrowing. George Fletcher was sat right across from a turnip field that was full of dead Germans and he told one of the other Eton masters that it required ‘heartiness’ to see every day the remains of human beings laying face down on the ground ‘in lumps and rows’ right opposite where they slept and ate. The smell reminded them that they were there even if they could not see them.
Life was cheap. Just because there was no fighting going on, it did not entirely remove the threat of death. George talked about four consecutive sergeants getting ‘biffed in the head’ by sniper fire in a short space of time and shell fire still accounted for the lives of many. Every now and again something brought home to the OEs in the front lines that it was a human life like their own that they were referring to. George Davies went to great lengths to shield ‘Uncle Jim’ from the horrors that he was enduring, but he wrote home on one occasion of having seen ‘violent death’ just a few feet from him. He had been underneath a parapet when a man had exposed his head to a German rifle and George watched the top of his head taken off. ‘I oughtn’t write about these things … but it made an impression.’ Just four days later Barrie replied and informed him that his uncle, Guy Du Maurier, had been killed a few miles up the line. He urged, begged George to stay safe. ‘I don’t have any little desire for you to get military glory … You would not mean a featherweight more to me [if] you come back a General. I just want yourself.’ He ended on a desperate note. ‘I have lost all sense of war being glorious, it is just unspeakably monstrous to me now.’ At home on leave, Peter watched Barrie walking up and down in his room, ‘smoking pipe after pipe, thinking his dire thoughts’.
George Fletcher found it especially hard to have to utilise his German proficiency to read through the letters of dead enemy soldiers to try to glean information. Military relevance aside, he found it awful to have to read what their mothers had sent them. Finally though, he was confronted with his personal loss. Ten days after his brother’s death he was lamenting his broken wristwatch and that there was no Regie close enough to fix it for him. He supposed that he was still to the north, where he heard the artillery was busy. Nearly a week later, he was complaining that he had had no news. ‘I don’t know what he has done since going to his new battery … I expect Regie has had a fearfully exciting time … Please send me all his letters.’
He finally received the news that his brother had died on 16 November and it was brutal, shocking. All he could do, isolated in his trench with plenty of time to contemplate his loss was find solace in the fragments of poetry that he had stored inside his head. ‘This does not make me in the last more revengeful against the Germans except that I feel more willing to push the war right home to a decision’. Any murderous feelings he had went towards the pacifist MPs criticising the war and to the crowds who went to football and, in his opinion, cared ‘not two straws’ how many lives were being claimed, the best of men dying ‘while defending their worthless lives’.
Boredom was rife on the British front. George had been ‘snaffling’ in Armentières and managed to find a skipping rope and an eclectic collection of English books in the classroom of a school including Brer Rabbit and Robinson Crusoe. He was, he said, flabby and fat. By spring his men would be ‘as fat as Wiltshire hogs’, or worse still, as fat as Germans. His captain apparently had already begun morphing into a frog, ‘so podgy has he become’. He just wanted to hibernate until spring when he might be of some use. His father was sending him more reading material from his flat in Eton but it did little to alleviate the monotony. It was a blessing to have a vivid imagination. George Davies was dreaming of a family reunion at the Ritz when he got home, and Ian Henderson was imagining a posh dinner with his parents, a crisp white tablecloth, polished silver and lovely food. George Fletcher’s imaginings had transcended to a whole other level. He had been having a vivid dream about a talking goat wearing medals and causing a stink in his room. It disappeared eventually with a clap of thunder and he woke up to find that the thunder was in fact the artillery shelling German trenches in front of him.
The men of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers sang to keep themselves occupied. One of the corporals had a penny whistle and the rest would sing along. George thought that the Germans were better at it. It was ‘eerie and wonderful’ listening to their harmonies as they drifted across no-man’s-land. He sent home snippets of sights and sounds that coloured his image of life at the front. The rattle of maxims ‘like a very loud motorcycle’. Rifles made a double report when they were fired. There was a ‘pleasant hiss’ as British shells went overhead on their way to the German trenches. Aeroplanes buzzed above him, men chatted around him; their frequent blasphemy had a strangely contented ring about it. Then came the crack of a sniper’s bullet, the singing of the cat-like shrapnel.
His daily routine was not inspiring. George would get up just before dawn and stand to, barging his way down the trench, dragging out ‘snoring lumps of humanity’. He went stamping up and down with a pipe in one hand and the other shoved deep into his pocket, a light-hearted impression of his father. The day was spent supervising the men; making sure that they cleaned their rifles, arranging digging parties, wood-fetching parties, sawing parties, guard duty. Then he would have to censor the men’s letters. Before dark there was more organising, dictating who was going to fetch water, who was going to fetch rations, who would be put in one of the outposts. Any gaps in his day he attempted to fill with eating, drinking lukewarm tea or jumping up and down to keep warm. At night they waited for ‘water-cart’ – not only literally water but the nickname for the gossip that came with the drinking rations. (Most of the time it was fanciful. On one occasion it was rumoured, via a friend of Regie’s, that Kitchener’s army was to be equipped with knuckledusters with long spikes and with daggers; the officers were to get miniature axes.) Finally, George had checks to do at 9 p.m., midnight and 3 a.m. before he could attempt to sleep, before beginning all over again, until they reached the end of their five-day stint and were relieved for a similar period.
This stuffy atmosphere of course made for bickering and antagonisms. Most of George’s rage was aimed at the Scottish battalion that rotated in and out of the lines with his men. This was on the grounds that their only occupation was to undo any of the work that his men had done and he even took to drawing flaming red dragons on parts of the trench to make it clear whose territory
it was.
It was symptomatic of his gift for endearing himself to his men. One hardened reservist in his battalion claimed that they were wary of young subalterns who were shunted into their path. They were judged by whether or not they showed guts in the trenches. On this score, George impressed immediately. The same man claimed that his men thought him ‘the bravest man in France’, with ‘more brains than all the battalion officers put together’. George had heard them talking about him in the close confines of the trenches: ‘T’aint ’arf a lark bein’ in that there Fletcher’s section … ’E speaks to the bastards in their own bloody language!’ In return George was already quite fond of them. He was massively amused by a conversation he overheard one morning between two of the soldier servants:
‘You go and wake Mr Fletcher.’
Mess servant: ‘You go and wake adjective Fletcher your adjective self; I’ve got this ’ere adjective bacon to serve up.’
They might have moaned a lot, but he thought they were remarkable. ‘They can carry any weight through any mud and dig any amount of wet clay all through the night.’ They required prodding, but as long as he was standing there cursing over their shoulders they were very efficient and thorough. One day he was marching them through Armentières when he decided to cheer them up by pulling out his penny whistle and playing the ‘Marseillaise’ in the highest possible key with electrical effect. After that they cheerfully swung through the ‘echoing and desolate town’ just like the mythical soldiers in the Daily Mail.
Blood and Thunder Page 11