by John Taylor
Of course, no-one can say what might have happened if Flesquières had fallen on the first day as planned. This was not the only setback to the British advance, for on the right flank the crossings over the St Quentin Canal had resisted capture, preventing the cavalry from thrusting forward to threaten Cambrai itself. Nevertheless, the questions are tantalising: if the cavalry had advanced over the Flesquières ridge, would the British have been able to occupy Bourlon Wood before nightfall? If they had seized that crucial position on 20 November, would the course of the battle, and perhaps even the war, have been fundamentally altered? We will never know, but some of the speculation stretches the bounds of credibility, bearing in mind the distances involved, the British unfamiliarity with open warfare and their lack of available reserves, and the Germans’ ability to defend in depth and then counter-attack, as they did a few days later with devastating effect.
Whatever the reasons for the setback at Flesquières, and whatever might have been, the Tank Corps had achieved a powerful symbolic victory at Cambrai. It is no exaggeration to say that the British army stood on the threshold which separates the past from the future;38 though no-one could be certain what lay beyond.
CHAPTER 36
A Peaceful, Unexceptional Place
The Western Front in the years after the war was a scene of unparalleled devastation, and also of relentless activity. Salvage and recovery teams were busy rebuilding the shattered infrastructure, as well as clearing away the debris of war and locating and burying the numberless corpses. As the wasteland slowly came back to life, the inhabitants returned to rebuild their homes and refill the trenches and shell-holes so they could start tilling the fields once more. Groups of German prisoners assisted in the work, while drifting across the countryside came parties of pilgrims – black-clad families of the fallen, and old soldiers in search of their dead comrades and the dead part of themselves.
The area round Cambrai was no exception, and among the soldiers posted to the town was Lance-Corporal Willie Anthony, who was in the Royal Anglesey Royal Engineers even though he came from Broxburn, near Edinburgh. This part of France had a special significance for him, because his younger brother Angus had been killed in a nearby village called Flesquières during the fighting on 27 September 1918, just six weeks before the end of the war.
Private Angus Anthony had been in 15th Tank Battalion and died when O56 Orestes was hit by a volley of shells near the ruined sugar-beet factory on the eastern side of the village. In a tragic twist, an officer called Captain Thomas Gibson was passing the next day and found a birthday card lying in the mud beside the wrecked tank, addressed simply to ‘Angus’ and mentioning Broxburn. Captain Gibson sent it back to his father in Glasgow, who sent it to the headmaster in Broxburn, who recognized the name and returned it to the original owner. This was Angus Anthony’s mother, and the card bore the verses she had composed for his twenty-ninth birthday:
Though out of sight
Not out of mind
My love for you is
Still true and kind
God loves you too
May you love Him
He’ll give you strength
This war to win
I’ll pray to Him
To spare your life
And bring you back
To your own dear wife.1
But Private Angus Anthony was killed three days after his birthday, and now lay buried in the cemetery nearby. When Willie arrived in Cambrai he was determined to visit the village as soon as possible, to tend his brother’s grave and describe the scene to their mother. It was New Year’s Day 1919 when he finally made the eight-mile walk:
The road took me over a bleak, bare countryside, with widely scattered villages, all in tumble-down ruins as a result of the heavy fighting in this region … I reached Flesquieres at last, a melancholy group of battered houses, all in ruin, and tenantless, not a soul to be seen or a sound to be heard.
Just before I entered the village, I reached the little military cemetery where Captain Gibson told us, so accurately, that Angus was buried. It was with bated breath that I ascended the few steps, between two tall trees, at the entrance. The cemetery is beautifully situated, facing the sun, and is divided into two parts – one for British soldiers, and one for German. There are about 100 German graves, and perhaps 60 British. There are a number of crosses over the British graves, but there is none over the men of the Tank Corps yet. So I had just to presume that the unnamed mounds must be those of Angus and his comrades.’2
Leaving the cemetery, Willie Anthony inspected the tanks surrounding the village – which he believed had been destroyed in September 1918, though the later Mark V models had already been salvaged, and the ones he saw dated back to the first attack of November 1917:
They are all still there – derelicts, just as they fell in action. I peeped inside in the hope of finding a name scribbled on the plates, but there was nothing. Those which had received direct hits were in a terrible mess, and indeed, the whole village showed it must have been a tight corner …
Well mother, I fear this story will sadden you once again, but I think also that you will be pleased too that I have been able to make this visit and see the actual place. I know I felt pleased & satisfied myself. Angus is sleeping there peacefully beside his chums.3
Later he returned, bringing a wooden cross he had had made bearing his brother’s name, and in February made a further fruitless search for O56 Orestes:
I took a walk through the village. There are a few Tommies stationed in it now, also a lot of the Chinese Labour Corps who are gathering up the wreckage of the battlefields. I went round the whole place in search of the tank with the number that [one of his crewmates] gave us, but could not find it. I examined nearly 20 derelict tanks, but none of the numbers were anything like the number he gave. Several tanks, of course, were reduced to a scrap heap, & it was impossible to find an identification mark so I had just to give up the search, but I was satisfied in having gone over all the ground, and seen the whole of the battlefield …
I noticed today that some of the French farmers have got back to some of their fields with the plough, so you can see that no time is being lost in raising valuable crops for a needy people.4
Willie mentioned that the derelict tanks were ‘all of the “D” and “E” Class’, so these were indeed the ones knocked out on 20 November.5
On 16 March 1919 he borrowed a lorry and drove out with a local photographer to capture the scene. Willie hoped they would make ‘a very interesting set of photos’, and he was correct, for in one of them he and his mates are lying on a grassy bank next to the village street, and behind them can be seen a familiar shape beside the broken walls and rafters of a shelled farmhouse. It is D51 Deborah, her front now blasted open, and the picture provides the clearest evidence of the spot where she was destroyed.
Somewhere across the road were the graves of her crew, though the crosses are hidden by the scrubby undergrowth.6
There were many other visitors to Flesquières, and they took many photographs showing the group of wrecked tanks from E Battalion to the east of the village, scattered over the hummocky ground like ships on a stormy sea. Deborah, all alone in the village street, also provided a noteworthy spectacle, and on 3 March 1919 someone took a close-up snap of the tank beside the shell-ravaged farmhouse. He must have been a former member of D Battalion, and a friend of Frank Heap, since he knew his nickname and sent him a copy of the photograph captioned: ‘Uriahs Bus. Knocked out Flesquires [sic] Nov. 20th 1917.’7 It was a proud keepsake for Frank, who had the picture copied and framed, and this became a vital piece of evidence which would enable Deborah to be identified decades later.
Finally, in June 1920 at the age of seventy-two, Mrs Mary Anthony was able to make the journey she both dreaded and dreamed of, and visited her son’s grave. An album entitled ‘Memories of France’ shows her, a frail bird-like figure in widow’s weeds, in the cemetery at Flesquières.8 Afterwards she sent som
e of the photographs to Captain Gibson: ‘Although the journey had its mournful side, we found a great measure of satisfaction in being able to see the actual place where our dear one is laid, besides witnessing terrible havoc of war in the French villages … I send you these photographs therefore as an indication that I have never forgotten your kindness at a time when you must have been much distracted yourself.’9
Such was the speed of the clear-up, that by the time of her visit the bodies of Deborah’s crew had been moved into the same cemetery, and their tank had been swallowed up in the ground – as it seemed – for ever.
* * *
A tank weighing the best part of 30 tonnes is not an easy thing to dispose of, and the salvage companies that had worked so gallantly during the war, recovering damaged machines and returning them to service, now put their specialized skills to use in clearing away the rusting hulks that littered the landscape.
The usual approach involved using a charge of gun-cotton to blow the tank apart into more manageable sections which could be buried or removed for scrap, and this was doubtless the fate of most of the tanks around Flesquières. In the case of Deborah, her position in the village street may have ensured her survival, since the buildings nearby – though already damaged – would have been completely demolished by the blast.
There was also a ready-made solution since the village was ringed by excavations prepared by the Germans to house underground bunkers, but never completed. Some still contained a lattice-work of steel struts ready for the concrete to be poured, but the one nearest to Deborah was probably just a huge hole in the ground. We cannot be sure when Deborah was removed and buried, but we know who was in charge of the operation. The Tank Museum contains a handsome photograph album donated by Lieutenant-Colonel Theodore Wenger, who commanded the Tank Field Battalion which was responsible for salvage.10 Inside is a tiny photograph, no more than a few centimetres square, captioned ‘Burying of a Tank’. Despite its small size, it is impressively detailed and shows two soldiers in workmen’s clothes and service caps looking down on the tank that has just been dragged into a hole. From the damage to her side, it can only be Deborah.
She must have been pulled across the village for a third of a mile (or more than half a kilometre) by one or two other tanks, the forces involved being so great that the towing hawsers bent some of her massive steel plates almost back on themselves. Corrugated iron sheets were piled around the shattered front to keep the earth out and make the job easier, and other debris including poison-gas shells was dumped in the hole before it was filled in.
As the clear-up continued, the other tanks around the village were blown up, and in some cases perhaps buried. A former officer who toured the area a decade after the battle found no trace of them: ‘Flesquières Wood still shows some signs of the fighting, dead, poisoned trees and shattered trunks standing above the new growth; but the village is a peaceful, unexceptional place.’11
A few years later, in 1931, another group of visitors arrived in the village in search of the past. These were German veterans of 54th Division revisiting the scenes of their battles, including the desperate rearguard action south of Flesquières.
The members of the 84th [Infantry Regiment] who were present, with old trench maps in hand, struggled eagerly to find the landmarks of the former positions in the fields, now under full cultivation once again, and to reconstruct the combat operations of 20 November 1917. The ‘kitchen gully’ [i.e. Stollenweg] where Hauptmann Soltau had his command post on 20 November was identified without difficulty, and old, partly collapsed dugouts could still be found here. On the other hand, the Kabelgraben [i.e. Chapel Alley] where Hauptmann Soltau fell could no longer be located with certainty. The former members of the 84th who were present, particularly those who had taken part in the ordeal of 2nd Battalion on 20 November and had seen their heroic leader fall, stood in deep distress at this place of most mournful memory, and many eyes were damp in solemn remembrance of Hauptmann Soltau.12
These were not the only old soldiers moving across the battlefield, for the combatants continued their manoeuvres around the village for many years after the war, though these were now the armies of the dead. The Germans, who had created the military cemetery and still occupied part of it at the time of Willie Anthony’s visit, had to give ground and their bodies were removed to another cemetery in Flesquières. This made space to bring in more of the British dead from smaller outlying cemeteries, as well as the men who had been buried where they fell, including Gunners Cheverton, Foot, Galway and Tipping whose graves had been across the road from Deborah.
Beside them was interred Private Walter Robinson, who had previously been buried elsewhere on the battlefield. For a time it was thought he might have been a member of Deborah’s crew, though the burial party responsible for collecting and reburying the bodies in December 1919 could not have known which tank he had fought in. Documents have since come to light showing he was in the crew of Demon II, so although he was not buried alongside his old crewmates, at least he was back with his comrades from No. 12 Company.
The dead men’s relatives could pay to have an inscription on their headstones, and they used these to express their pride and sorrow. William Galway’s mother chose ‘Father in thy gracious keeping Leave we now our dear one sleeping’. George Foot’s father opted for one of the most popular epitaphs: ‘Greater love hath no man’. The headstone shows his rank as lance-corporal, so in death at least, George had achieved the promotion he deserved.13
A few years later the Germans were in retreat once again, this time to a great cemetery outside the town of Cambrai which holds the remains of more than 10,000 men. Among them were Major Fritz Hofmeister and Hauptmann Harro Soltau, who now lie with more than 2,700 of their comrades in a mass grave, beneath a dark canopy of trees and smothered by clutching ivy.14 After that it was still not over: in 1930 two burial grounds established after the attack of 20 November – Flesquières Château Cemetery and 51st Divisional Cemetery – were closed down and hundreds of bodies, including some men from D Battalion, were moved to the larger cemetery at Orival Wood.15 A letter from the Imperial War Graves Commission to one bereaved family explained that ‘the position of the [Château] Cemetery conflicts with the French sanitary laws, and consequently the Commission have been unable to acquire the site, and have decided that the only course open to them is to exhume the remains for reburial … The general policy of the Commission is against any exhumation of the British dead, but, as the result of negotiations lasting for some considerable time, the Commission are forced to the conclusion that no other course is open to them.’16 Whatever this may say about the attitude of the local residents to the dead men in their midst, at least the soldiers on both sides could finally rest in peace.
* * *
Strangely enough, as the tanks disappeared from the battlefields they became an increasingly familiar sight on the streets of post-war Britain – or rather in parks and outside public buildings, where the obsolete machines were put on display in towns and cities across the country. This originated from a wartime programme of fundraising tours by so-called ‘tank banks’, which offered an eye-catching way of encouraging people to invest in War Bonds at a time when few civilians had seen a tank other than on cinema screens.
In Nottingham, for instance, Tank 119 Ole Bill arrived in January 1918 and for a week it was the focus of frenzied activity as the great and good exhorted the public to lend money – which they did, to the tune of more than £2½ million.17 It was also an effective way of countering war weariness, a message driven home in a speech by the Duchess of Portland: ‘She begged the people at home, the women, especially, not to grouse and grumble. They must keep up a cheerful spirit, and so support the brave men at the front.’18
It was only a matter of weeks since Florrie Tipping had learned of the death of her husband Fred in D51 Deborah, and perhaps she was among the crowds who went to see the tank in the Market Place, swarming with schoolchildren and civic dignitarie
s. If so she must have felt a certain pride, but perhaps she also wondered what on earth Fred had been doing getting mixed up in something like that, and how she was going to manage now bringing up his three young children, and whether the Duchess of Portland would have been more inclined to grouse and grumble if she lived in their little house in Sneinton instead of Welbeck Abbey, her enormous stately home.
After the war, in an echo of the ‘patriotic pilgrimage’ by the tank banks, more than 260 machines were presented to those towns and cities that had been especially active in fundraising. Once again these were greeted with outpourings of civic and military pride, and were placed on permanent display as a reminder of the local sacrifice and contribution to victory.
Thus it was that D46 Dragon III, which had broken down with engine trouble on 20 November 1917 while under the command of Second Lieutenant James Clark, now found a resting place beside the boating lake at Ryde on the Isle of Wight, sandwiched between a flower-bed and an ice-cream kiosk. There it provided a backdrop to many a holidaymaker’s sunny snaps, though no doubt it cast a shadow over some of the men who drifted by with their families, and remembered seeing the same dark outline in a very different time and place.19
One of the D Battalion tanks that was knocked out by German artillery at Bellevue, shortly before the attack on 22 August 1917, also survived the war and went on display in the park at Gloucester. This was D42, probably named Daphne, which later became an exhibit at the Tank Museum in Bovington, and finally at the Museum of Lincolnshire Life in Lincoln, the town where the first tanks were designed and produced. During its travels the tank was renamed Flirt II, until its true identity was established recently through careful research.20