by Harry Askin
It transpired that the sergeants had stopped behind to discuss with the colonel any case for a distinction and very soon Dick Howarth came for me. He told me he had strongly recommended me to the CO who wanted to see me about Willett and Saunders. I told the Colonel about the fearless way in which Willett had gone ahead into the redoubt time after time and that he had been a big help to me in taking several prisoners, but I didn’t mention that on each occasion he was behind me. I gave him an account of the post of danger that Jock Saunders took up on the right, and how he had stuck it. I didn’t mention, though, that it was probably because he was comfortable. I didn’t mention either that Willett and I, several times myself alone, had gone ahead past Jock for over fifty yards into the trenches occupied by the Germans. He kept me about ten minutes and then dismissed me.
Orders came round a little later to get ready to move in the morning. We were going back to the coast for a rest. And we needed it, too.
Chapter Twenty-Three
17 November 1916 – We Recuperate at the Seaside
We were away on the march at 10 o’clock on 12 November and joined up with the whole of our division on the road. General Shute was stationed at one spot on the road watching us all march by and the remark we heard from him was ‘filthy’. Quite true, we were filthy, but the conditions were hardly conducive to cleanliness. We went about ten kilometres to Gezaincourt where we stayed the night, with strict orders to get cleaned up for the morning, every man to shave, every button and badge to be bright and every vestige of Ancre mud to be brushed off. Shute would again inspect us on the march. The old devil! Curses were levelled at him from all angles and from all ranks. I think even the brigadiers cursed him; because he strafed them; they in turn strafed their colonels; they passed it onto company commanders and so on down to section leaders whose job it was to make life for the men miserable, until old Shute was satisfied with his rag-time Navy.
Our next move was to Bernaville, where we stayed until the Monday morning. Our brigade was formed up in the village square and General Shute made us a short moving speech. We must have done wonderfully well to fetch such words of praise from such a man. He told us we had created two fresh divisional records: first, we had advanced further than any other division during the war and the other, that we had taken more prisoners than any one division had taken before. It had been an absolute triumph and messages of congratulation had been received from the King, Sir Douglas Haig and both Army and Corps Commanders. Certainly it was a triumph but at what a cost. From 1 to 16 November our division had lost, in killed, 100 officers and 1,600 men, and, in wounded, 160 officers and 2,377 men. And more than three quarters of those casualties were sustained by the two naval brigades.
We were marched back to our billets after a time and dismissed. About ten minutes later somebody dashed in, ‘Corporal Askin, Major Eagles wants you outside.’ Now what the devil have I done? I thought. I went out and found Major Eagles and Lieutenant Commander Fairfax of the Howe Battalion. ‘The Commander wishes to speak to you for a few minutes, Corporal,’ Major Eagles said. The old lieutenant commander was very nice and thanked me for all I had done for him on the 13th. He then shook hands with me and told me to get along to his adjutant, Lieutenant Ellis, and give him my name and other particulars, also the name of my Bomber Willett, who was away in hospital. After I got back, all the chaps crowded round. ‘Lucky devil,’ they said, ‘It’s a VC at least.’ I began to think myself that I was in for a medal of some sort, but evidently it miscarried. One came through for Willett and one for Jock Saunders and one sergeant in the battalion got one – he had been in a dugout for the three days writing despatches to the CO.
We had a stand easy for the remainder of that day but 10.00am on the Tuesday saw us on the road again, this time for Cramont where we were paid and so drank to our victory and soon had the village as dry as a stick. Marched to Brailly next day and on the Thursday to Forest l’Abbaye, all the marches being about fifteen to eighteen kilometres.
We carried practically everything we possessed excepting our blankets, which went on battalion transport, so that you can imagine, after about fourteen miles of slogging with about 90lb deadweight hanging on to us, we were pretty well on our knees by the time we were finished. However, we were no sooner in our billets before Billy and I, and sometimes Bayliss, would drop our gear, see our own men settled, clean our buttons, have a wash and be off down the village to pick out the best estaminet before the crowd woke up. The best estaminet, of course, being the one in which the belle of the village dispensed the ‘doings’.
The last march of this series took us to Romain, a dead and alive hole about which I have only the haziest recollections. I know we marched nearly thirty kilometres to get there, were pushed in a barn and as soon as the old lady of the farm had had even a glimpse of us she had taken the bucket out of the well, locked up her fowls and ducks and buried her money. What gratitude! Here we were, fighting up to the neck in blood and mud to get them their rotten country back from the Germans and they begrudged us a drink of water. Besides, what did it matter about an odd bucket or two missing or lost down the well, or a few odd fowl and ducks absent from parade. They could always get compensation. We were a fairly decent crowd, but things like that would fetch the devil out of anybody, so we smashed the windlass, scrounged a few eggs and hadn’t been there long before we had thinned the poultry ranks down a bit. I had only been there a day or two before Sergeant Major Jeffries told me to get ready for leave. And not before time either. My last leave was Christmas 1914. It was then nearly Christmas 1916, and I‘d been through a hell of a lot.
I arrived home in the early hours of Wednesday 23 November 1916 and spent a glorious ten days there, one day of which was taken up entirely in getting married.
I’m surprised at the War Office granting leave at all to soldiers on active service. There’s nothing that takes the fighting spirit out of a man more or unsettles him than a visit home. No wonder men desert. All good things come to an end and I set off for London from home about 9.00am on 8 December and arrived too late to catch the boat train from Waterloo. I spent a terrible day in London wandering aimlessly about, writing letters in the YMCA, and finished up with an evening at the Victoria Palace.
Left in the morning at 6.15am for Folkestone. Arrived there and found my boat was an old, old French paddle-steamer, sister ship to the ‘Ark’, judging by her antiquated condition. To make the trip more interesting, there was a nasty sea running, and pouring rain, and I felt as sick as a pig before I even stepped on board. Got on board, went below and found a fairly dry corner as near midships as possible and went to sleep. And that’s as much as I remember about the crossing.
The usual fuss and confusion on landing at Boulogne, then a climb to the camp at the top of a great hill. Spent the night there and took train to Noyelles on the 10th where I joined up with my own mates again in the same billet at Romain. Billy Hurrell, Bob Bayliss and one or two more were just ready to sit down to a feed of roast fowl, baked potatoes and mashed turnips. After a good feed and a good old chat with my chums I turned in, and stayed turned in all the next day as I felt ill.
On 12 December the battalion moved to Rue, a small town near the sea, but I was too ill to walk. Went on the motor lorry that took the blankets etc., then helped unload it, no light task with a bad attack of lumbago, but I turned in in the new billet and stayed there for two days, unable to stand or even to turn over.
Saw the doctor on the 15th and he excused me duty. While in the Sick Bay, waiting my turn for the doctor, who had just come up on his horse, he turned to number one on his list. ‘What’s wrong with you, my lad?” he said. ‘Pains in the head and back, Sir.’ ‘Take these two number nines and go outside and hold my horse,’ said the kind-hearted Medical Officer. Our own doc, Jimmy Ross, had gone to England ill and this chap had been sent to us temporarily from some horse lines I should imagine. The next chap had a temp of 102-point-something, and pains in the back. ‘Sit over there for t
en minutes,’ he said to the sufferer and to the sick bay corporal, ‘Take his temp again in ten minutes, it looks like a case of cordite chewing.’ True enough the man’s temperature was normal in ten minutes and he was sent back to duty and a report sent to the CO. No end of men had got away with that dodge but the MOs had just about got the topside of the mysterious disease. I’ve seen men, just before reporting sick, empty two or three .303s, miss breakfast and chew the cordite on the way to the sick bay. Result: a high temp, which, however, only lasted about ten minutes. I was excused duty for about a week and was really ill the whole time, and had no occasion whatever to chew cordite.
I returned to full duty on 22 December and took part in whatever training was going on. We never seemed to get away from the old infernal squad and section drill, and the men were in a terrible mood, ready for anything, and longing for the freedom of the trenches.
Christmas Day came along again; that made three away-from-home three Christmases and the rotten war was only going to last six months. However, no one thought very much about that, we just hoped in an off-hand way that the thing would be over in another year or so. What we were more concerned about was keeping the spirit of Christmas 1916 up.
About six of us clubbed together for two fowl and these with a good supply of potatoes and turnips (scrounged) and a few bottles of wine made us a good dinner. We invited the cooks to dinner on condition that they made us a good meal, and real well they did it.
Boxing Day came and with it a great outcry from a Frenchwoman for two white geese. Huge quantities of white feathers were found but nothing more.
We settled down to strict training, both company and battalion, and with an irresponsible like Wanky Mitchell in charge of the company we cut some queer capers. There is no doubt the man was mad. There he was perched on a great horse like a monkey yapping out orders that no body of troops on this earth could have carried out. The CO came along one morning and chewed him up in front of the whole company. He had managed to get us into a most hopeless tangle.
New Year’s Day 1917 came and with it another good feed on poultry (paid for), and more drill. We practised brigade attacks along with 1 RM, the Ansons and the Howes over newly-dug sets of trenches, representing, I suppose, some enemy position. That kind of routine carried on with unvarying monotony until the 12th when orders came along to stand by to move. Our period of rest was at an end, and now for more business.
Where? No one knew and not many cared. Whatever part of the front we went to, we didn’t expect to miss many of the horrors of the horrible war. Once more must we go through that nerve-shattering ordeal of the first few crashing, crunching shells; not so bad perhaps for some of us veterans as for the new reinforcements, many out from England for the first time and a lot of them with very little heart for the fight.
Two months of rest in which the division had been built up to its proper fighting strength. Two more months in the line and how many of these chaps would be there with us? Winter and every appearance of being a real old fashioned one with plenty of snow and with it acres and acres of mud. Mud! I hardly know which was the worst thing we had to face – shells, bullets or mud. It wasn’t mud as we knew it in England, the kind of stuff that splashed your clean boots, and then came off with a little brushing. This was horrible stuff, clinging, cloying and an incredibly tenacious mass of filth and rottenness. Stuff that dragged the very soul out of a man and often left him floundering up to the neck. There was no getting away from it, it was our home, and even with the luck of a deep dugout it was still there, a slippery, sucking surface to everything.
Saturday 13 January saw us on the move, a march of seventeen kilometres to a place called le Titre. We were moving back in the direction of the Ancre, but the journey was too young to forecast with any certainty and, of course, being in the Navy, we never knew where we were bound for until we arrived. Sixteen kilometres the next day to Fontaine-sur-Maye where Billy Hurrell had the good luck to touch for leave. Sixteen to eighteen kilometres is just a nice march, and we had the heart left when we got in billets to get cleaned up a bit and make a dash to the best estaminet in the village. On the 15th we marched thirty kilometres, or rather we marched twenty and crawled the last ten. A terrible journey! From 8.30 in the morning to 6.30 at night and from 3.00pm we marched through a blinding snowstorm.
We stopped that night and rested next day in a fairly decent village called Autheaux. We needed that rest too. Why on earth couldn’t they provide us with motor buses or lorries if they were in such a hurry to get us back to the front?
Moved at 11.00am on the 17th and for two hours before we moved off our company had a terrible snow fight with B Company, officers, NCOs and all the men taking part. On top of that, a day’s work in itself, we slogged it for nineteen kilometres to a Godforsaken hole called Raincheval. We weren’t very far from the Ancre then; the desolate aspect of the countryside told us that. Everything was frozen hard and the cold was intense.
Chapter Twenty-Four
January 1917 – Back to the Ancre
A short march on 18 January brought us to the all too familiar desolation of Englebelmer, looking, if anything, worse than when we left it. It was more battered, more empty, the roads were ploughed a foot deeper, and the mud was everywhere and more plastic. It had defied even the efforts of the frost.
There we stopped for the night and after a sleep in whatever shelter we could find we stowed our packs at Brigade HQ and marched by way of Mesnil and Hamel to Thiepval Wood where the whole of our company and B Company were shoved in a long German tunnel in the hillside to act as general reserves. That meant work, plenty of it too, with very little time to sleep.
The tunnel was in a shocking state. Whoever had used it before us must have been filthy pigs. Some had used it instead of the latrine and bully beef and Maconochie’s were strewn about in various stages of decomposition. The stench was horrible and the whole place alive with lice. Thank God our period in General Reserve was only for forty-eight hours, then for a spell up the line. In the valley below us was the river or swamp of the Ancre and across the other side the battered and barely visible remains of the station at St Pierre Divion, taken by the Hoods under Freyberg on 13 and 14 November. All the water in the valley was frozen and the ground all round was frozen hard, too.
I had a scrounge round in the morning among the German trenches and dugouts and came across one of our tanks that had been put out of action and left derelict. From the top of the hill I could see half a dozen such tanks. I crawled inside that one for a look round but couldn’t make much out of it, except to feel sympathy for the poor devils who had to fight in them. Certainly they were secure from such things as rifle and machine-gun bullets, but a 5.9 would make a hell of a mess of one and its occupants. I got out rather hurriedly because Jerry had started slinging a few shells over. The tunnel gave one a sense of security but the stench in it almost drove one out again to risk the shells. It is an open question, whether it is better to be shot or poisoned.
There was a huge quantity of German implements of war knocking about on the hillside, rifles, trench mortars, ammunition, bombs, and rifle grenades. We soon had fatigue parties out clearing up and one new fool, just out, mistook a German bomb for a cricket ball and kicked it. It detonated. Result: one reinforcement, minus one leg, not expected to recover. Some of the new men needed nursing like babies. They were in for a good breaking in in this sector, though, as far as I could judge.
I was put in charge of a ration party at night and sent up to the front line with huge metal flasks of hot soup. They were made on the Thermos principle, held about two gallons of liquid and were strapped on the backs of the men. I went in front with the guide, and our way lay over a frozen expanse of mud and snow, part of the way along a duckboard track. At times the duckboards ended suddenly in a shell hole made by a 5.9 or an 8-inch and, as the night was black as ink, some of the men had nasty falls. However, I got my party up without any serious hurt and with all my soup intact. I reach
ed one trench which I took to be the firing line as the men were on watch on the fire-step in good strength. ‘Where do you want this soup?’ I asked the first sergeant I saw. ‘We could do with it here,’ he said, ‘but they want it in the front line.’ The front line was another 300 yards ahead and consisted of a series of shell holes, not connected in any way. The men were doing forty-eight hours in front and no movement at all was possible during daylight as the Germans could spot their every movement and were continually shelling them.
The poor devils were about frozen stiff and some of them were running and stamping about on top of their holes when we got up to them. ‘Where’s Headquarters dug-out?’ I asked one chap. ‘The next hole on the left,’ he replied. I made him take me to it because my men were fed up with wandering about in the dark and things seemed so damned uncertain. I had been used to a continuous trench with a belt of wire of sorts in front, something definite separating us from the German. Here everything was different and one got a distinct sense of insecurity and lost the sense of direction that comes from a proper trench.
I found a better constructed hole at the next with an officer and a sergeant in a little dugout. I’d just reported ‘Rations for your party, Sir’ when Jerry sent over a couple of whizz-bangs, wicked devils of things that burst twice, once in the air and again on concussion. They were right amongst us but no one was hurt. It was a wonderful thing because my party were all bunched together and we could feel the lumps whizzing past us and smell the fumes from the explosion. ‘For God’s sake get down,’ yelled the officer, ‘he’ll shell for ten minutes now.’ He didn’t, however, and we carried on serving soup. Back again to the tunnel about 3.00am without further incident.