Chasing Lost Time

by Jean Findlay

  Officers were expected to be gentlemen – aristocrats or men of the upper middle classes, educated at the great public schools, and to be in possession of a private income, buying their own uniform and paying their own meal bills. The pay was nominal – about £250 a year for an officer in the KOSB, which was not considered a smart regiment. Charles never had a private income and lived frugally; he worked out to his relief that he could live off his pay, including mess bills. His diary carries a note for Thursday 20 August, ‘My mess bill for these 11 days is only 27/6 for food and 7/6 for a great amount of drink – which is modest and encouraging. At this rate I can live on my pay – as I wear no mufti and have very few outside expenses.’10

  On realising this he promptly bought some luxury items: a basin and a plate, chocolate and matches. Now that the store where he had slept was closed he rigged himself a tent in a space between a house and the wireless station, and went to bed thinking over the news that the Pope had died, and that the Kaiser would probably have a finger in the conclave and try to set the Italian cardinals in revolt against the Anglophile Italian government. ‘May all his schemes perish with him,’ he wrote. After going peacefully to bed in his tent he was then hauled up by a telephone message from the colonel telling him to explore the coast and spot any possible landing places. ‘I walk up and down the cliffs murmuring to myself “men who march away ere the barncocks say, night is growing grey”,’ He was annoyed that Thomas Hardy, author of these lines, was so near him, yet he would probably never see him, ‘the only living man who has worked out a war almost of these dimensions in The Dynasts, to see it all being staged in Europe now’.11 The next morning he was instructed to attend a court martial to learn how to run one himself. Also attending, to his joy, was Tom Gillespie from school, who was in the 2nd KOSB and had been in Dublin until recently. He sat next to him at lunch and heard that James Stueart Wilson, the choir boy to whom he had once composed plaintive love poems, was enlisting in the Guards. He also learned that ‘Rupert Brooke, the poet, has enlisted in the Artists’ Corp.’12

  On Saturday, a hot, still morning, he got his men to start digging a trench down the side of the enclosure, both for practice and as part of the anti-invasion preparations, and then sat down and wrote to the officer in command recommending a coast patrol and the occupation of an empty lighthouse. He had found this lighthouse with his sergeant and seen several excellent rooms for billeting troops in. He heard that nine years before, when the new lighthouse was finished, it had been rented by a civilian who renovated it, adding rooms, and then shot himself. The stairs were littered with empty champagne bottles, but these were soon cleared up and the place made into comfortable quarters. He could leave the old biscuit box and his rickety tent now that he had a bedroom of his own in the lighthouse; he sent a postcard of it with his room marked to his family.

  He also recommended daily bathing parades in the sea. Having spent his life swimming in cold seas all summer long, he was convinced of the benefits, and besides, there were no baths for the men and the officers had only a tin bath to share.

  Aware that he had not been to church since his Drum Service on Lanark Moor, he visited one called the Avalanche Church; it was built by Bishop Moberly of Winchester to commemorate a wreck nearby in 1877 when all the crew, the captain and many passengers were lost. Charles thought nothing special of it architecturally, but said it had an arresting quality, as if the souls of the drowned visited it constantly. Sister Benignus of Lanark wrote to say she was praying for him daily and sent thirty medals with Our Lady’s image on them to give to Catholics in the Battalion. He took one himself, in gratitude, he said, to the good sister who had thought so well of him.

  At the outbreak of war the KOSB had two Regular Battalions (1st and 2nd) and two Territorial (4th and 5th). Later on the ‘New Army’ Battalions (6th, 7th and 8th) were raised, together with a 9th Battalion, which provided reinforcements for the others. Charles moved from the 3rd to the 2nd to the 7th over the course of the war. The 3rd was the Reserve Battalion and stayed at Portland Bill throughout, providing reinforcements, training and positioning for defence. There were a thousand soldiers in each Infantry battalion, all under the command of a lieutenant-colonel, usually an experienced officer in his forties. His adjutant was his right-hand man, usually a senior captain, though occasionally a major (in time of war, it could be a lieutenant); he was responsible for the administration, organisation and discipline of the battalion; while a quartermaster dealt with stores and supplies. Also part of the team was the regimental sergeant-major, the battalion’s senior warrant officer, who ran the battalion headquarters and the orderly room. The fighting strength of the battalion lay in its four rifle companies, each with six officers and 221 infantry men, under the command of a major or a senior captain; each company had four platoons and each platoon had four sections. On his first day of war duty, Charles was a 2nd Lieutenant in charge of a platoon of 22 men. For many officers it was a shock to be confronted for the first time with the men, many of whom came from the lowest social rank and had known extreme poverty. There were men who drank too much and those who gambled, as well as teetotallers and some who used their spare time to improve their education.13 It was the officer’s job to make sure they were bound in the common cause: to serve the regiment which would become their physical and spiritual home.

  The regiment was like a family; a tough, fighting unit characterised by loyalty. Each member knew the history of his regiment and fought alongside men from his home area with whom he had grown up and whom he understood. The tribal nature of much of Scottish society, along with the tartans of the uniforms and the bright, feathered bonnets gave the ordinary Scottish soldier more than average pride in his position. No doubt the Highland regiments had the greatest impact: Charles, who had been part of one for his training and had asked to join one when called up, felt nostalgia for the drama, well described by one observer:

  One thing I will never forget is the sight of thousands of rhythmically swinging kilts as a Division of Highlanders swept towards us. Skirling at the head of the column strode the pipers, filling the air with their wild martial music. Beyond glinted a forest of rifle barrels and the flash of brawny knees rising and straightening in rhythm.14

  At Portland the men were given the new short-magazine Lee-Enfield rifle and an 18-inch bayonet, and spent time every day in what was still called ‘Musketry’ training, by the end of which they were expected to be capable of firing fifteen bullets a minute, including the loading of new bullets and unloading of spent ones.

  After five weeks Charles noted in frustration that there was still no sign of him going off to France. He watched others, including two of his servants, go to war and by 16 September he noticed that he was the senior out of twenty-two 2nd lieutenants and was now put in charge of F company with another 2nd lieutenant under him. By the end of September he was made a 1st lieutenant, in charge of pay and watching the cliffs for invasion, and the court martialling of suspected German spies. But in spite of the speedy promotion and added responsibility, he felt very left behind. After the strained preparation and training of Portland Bill, he was eager to start fighting. Ominously on 25 August he wrote, ‘I heard and heard again on reaching here a telephone rumour of 1500 British casualties: why all this cursed secrecy about things of the first importance?’15

  As autumn approached there was a sudden and desperate need for reinforcements in France. The German invasion of Belgium had doubled the French frontier with the enemy and made it 320 miles instead of 160. The immediate British effort was to stop the enemy from reaching the Channel ports of Zeebrugge, Ostend, Calais, Boulogne, and St Nazaire, which offered the shortest sea routes and the most obvious points for an invasion. Unprecedented numbers of men were being thrown into battle to stop the powerful German army from reaching the coast. They had walked over ‘neutral’ Belgium without a qualm, so why should they respect Britain? Every soldier could see a reason to fight.

  At last Charles was sent
to France. He reached St Nazaire on 9 October and joined a detachment of 2 KOSB under Lieutenant Robert Gibson, a Scotsman who had been a don at Oxford for four years. As was customary at school and at war, Charles referred to all his friends by their surnames. They became friends, sharing a tent in dusty old potato fields which Gibson called ‘No. 1 Sea View’, and taking it in turns to visit the local hotel for a decent meal. One night the waiter asked, ‘Est-ce que Monsieur reste dans l'hôtel?’ ‘Non, je reste dans la poussière, moi.’16 They bathed in the sea to wash off the dirt and Charles gashed himself on the rocks, ‘to the effusion of much blood which I naturally want to keep for field operations…’17

  All notions of chivalry and honour, deeply embedded in his idealistic spirit, were at last to be tested. On 23 October at 4 a.m. two older captains took over Charles’s command and his detatchment arrived at the front by train that evening. Here he was told that Tom Gillespie, fellow Winchester scholar, whom he was looking forward to seeing, had been killed. That was a shock, but there was no time for mourning or reflection. No one had eaten all day and the three officers were glad of a tin of Maconachie for supper, a sort of tinned stew with meat and vegetables which formed a staple at the front. They also got tea and rum, a welcome part of rations in the firing line, and they were under fire as they ate. That night Charles had the luxury of a mattress, though caked in hard mud, and he found a potato sack to put his feet in to keep them warm, but he stayed awake writing home to his mother about Tom Gillespie, for she had once met Tom’s mother.

  The men were told that they would do forty-eight hours in the front trenches then forty-eight hours behind in support trenches alternately. Trenches at this stage in the war were shallow and rudimentary as they were thought to be temporary, often made under fire with a limited number of tools. The German trenches were far superior: deeper, more fortified with long underground dugouts, electricity and curtained recesses for the officers – it was a great boost to take over a German trench and inhabit it. The Unit Diary kept by the officer in charge of the depleted KOSB ranks recorded on the 24th October that Lieutenant C. Scott Moncrieff of the 3rd KOSB and a draft of 83 men joined them making their ‘Strength in trenches A 14+10, B 133+10, C 170, D170’.18 Still a lot less than a thousand men.

  Two days later Charles was heading his letters ‘in the Field, France’, and getting his first taste of trench warfare. As he wrote and told his family of three friends who had died already, bullets sang overhead and a man was lying at his feet unconscious with a temple wound, breathing heavily. A doctor arrived to say the man would die, but ‘the rest of us are cheery in spite of the rain last night,’19 which filled the trench with slippery mud. That night they were on the move again and Belgian soldiers on the railway told him of the utter ruin and desolation of the towns along the line. Next night at midnight, he got a turn in the front line,

  We shot pretty hard for half an hour or so. Everyone had been very sleepy, but there is something rather stimulating in being under fire. I sat up on an ammunition box in one of the traverses of this trench, so that I could overlook my men on both sides and shout orders to them, and cheer them up if they got hit. With wonderful luck none of us did get hit …20

  Two days later, they were marching three miles under shellfire to billets, then on into Belgium. He described the German artillery:

  the big ones which we call Black Marias come along with a crooning whistle like pigeons and then you see a great outburst of black smoke and in due time hear the crash. But it is well to keep your head in cover in the hollowed out front of the trench, as splinters go a very long way and splinters have a song of their own like wasps. We got a good many bullets past us from the left and right, flying about round my head and shoulders and sometimes two seeming to meet with a smack in the air.21

  There had been fierce fighting over the Messines Ridge for the past ten days since 21 October. Losses were heavy and the Germans outnumbered the British.22 There were 48000 Germans and two British divisions of between 10000 and 15000. Charles arrived at Halloween, with plans to organise apple ducking with his friends, only to be met with a night of real horror and defeat. The little town of Messines had been a place of pilgrimage to the Virgin Mary since 933, and a century later Adèle, Countess of Flanders had founded a Benedictine Abbey for Noble Ladies. Hungry and tired, Charles and his men reached the village at 4 a.m. and found it in a ghastly state. Every house had been shelled, goats and pigs were wandering the streets. The medieval school had been occupied by the Germans five days before and it was Charles’s company’s job to clear any remaining Germans out of the convent with their bayonets.23 The church had been burned, and was dead and empty with little shards of glass tinkling eerily as they fell against the bars on the windows. The eleventh-century abbey had been built with courtyards, stables, piggeries, and a moat, but now it was a ghostly scene:

  In one corner a subaltern of the 21st Lancers had been looking out over the wall with one of his men, when a shell caught the wall below them. I found them lying very waxen and stiff, in the moonlight (for the moon is full just now), the officer clasping the cord of his revolver in his hand … I walked round in the moonlight to look for a wounded trooper in the 5th Dragoon Guards, whom I had promised to shelter. The ground was dotted with dead Germans, young boys mostly. The living ones we took in, some wounded, others active prisoners. Part of the town was still held by Germans who sniped at us from windows. They killed one of our subalterns and four or five men who went up a wrong street by mistake.24

  The regimental historian, Captain Stair Gillon, who was able to put the action into the perspective of the whole battle, fourteen years later described the same night in more heroic terms. The KOSB had joined the final phase of a three-week battle on the critical day when the Allies were close to losing their grip and letting the Germans pour through the gap.

  A detachment of cavalry, the 5th Dragoon Guards were hanging on also by a hair, to the village of Messines. They were on one side of the main street and the Germans on the other. It was the task of the KOSB to pass through the cavalry, clear half the village and push on into open country to the south. An advance of 800 men began at 1 p.m. It was desperate close fighting, sometimes only 50 yards or less separated the foes. House to house fighting is as difficult to describe as it is to conduct. It is the most nerve-stretching, surprising type of warfare, when death may threaten from above, below, at the side and behind. The KOSB took the convent and cleared out the houses near the church.25

  Charles saw it from the ground and it appeared more like a defeat:

  On Sunday morning, we got very sudden orders to clear out and fight a rearguard action while the cavalry retired, which we did. I had my first wound. Part of a shell hit me on the thickest part of my large skull, just on the front point of my battered old Glengarry. It was not punctured, though absurdly enough, I was, and got the credit of being wounded as the blood ran down over my right eyebrow … I was only held up for 15 seconds or so and retired as vigorously as any of them … We must have lost about 100 from our already reduced numbers … and we gained nothing, as they (the Germans) were further forward when we left than when we entered it. We three slept under some straw on the pavement opposite the gate of the school. It was a very cold autumn night, and we awoke stiff and tired to stand to which we do from 5 to 6.30 morning and evening.26

  There was one ironic aspect to that Halloween night. The German regiment, fighting hand-to-hand through the Messines church, sniping and generally overlapping British positions, was the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. A private in this regiment named Adolf Hitler distinguished himself for a whole month at Messines and was given an Iron Cross and later promoted to corporal. During his time off from fighting he made several paintings of the ruined Messines church. It was noted by fellow soldiers that Private Hitler had strong views and ranted at his colleagues who seldom listened and kept their distance, whereupon he made clay models of soldiers, lined them up on the top of the trench and deli
vered his speeches to them.27

  Charles thought this battle spelled the end of the 2nd KOSB. To cap it all, on the morning of 1 November, when the British had an advantage, they were ordered to retreat far behind the lines, as they were needed as reinforcements to a battalion several miles away at Hooge. They finally left the Bavarians, including their trench runner, Adolf Hitler, in possession of what was left of Messines.

  The retreat was nonetheless picturesque. There were still some trees left and the ground was covered in damp leaves like golden pennies fallen through the late autumn air. It was unusually warm and to add to the colour, the French Army still wore cornflower-blue and red uniforms, and their chevaliers had shining breastplates. Charles felt the surge of hope after success, thrill and praise, writing four days after the retreat:

  I have a strong presentiment that I am going to come out of this war alright. We had a very high compliment paid to us and three other Battalions this week by a cavalry General Allenby for saving the situation here last Saturday. My regiment has been ordered off as a reserve several times, but always found itself in the firing line once again. I feel rather a beast to be so utterly happy and free from care, when everyone else at home is slaving away.28

  That day the regiment received orders to join the 9th Infantry Brigade at Ypres. The blanket name later given to all battles in the area at the time was the First Battle of Ypres, which dates from 20 October to 22 November. The British success was due to their superior rapid rifle fire. In artillery they were outgunned two to one, in heavy artillery ten to one, but in musketry they prevailed – trained as they were to fire fifteen aimed rounds a minute. The attacking Germans, coming forward in closely ranked masses presented unmissable targets. The casualties were terrible on both sides: 24,000 British dead to 50,000 German.