by Ken Tout
The year 1915 passed by in France with inconclusive battles, and even when the Germans used gas there was no decisive breakthrough. There was still no way round the trench lines, and the lines themselves were ever deeper and of greater extent and engineering ingenuity. The generals would have to do something different in 1916. In Britain, work was proceeding on a secret weapon, the tank, which would eventually replace the horse in battle. But, for the time being, the only method the generals could envisage was to pour in more artillery, explode larger mines and mobilise extra infantry divisions, all concentrated on a relatively narrow area. This, they thought, might produce a gap through which the cavalry could, at long last, gallop gloriously.
The area chosen for what was popularly known as ‘The Big Push’ would be the plains alongside the River Somme. Suddenly the Northants Yeomen were released from the monotonous routines described in Cecil Knight’s diary and were performing unexpected functions. A considerable number of men found themselves working alongside New Zealander miners, excavating and tunnelling to place mines under enemy trenches, an exploit not envisaged for the Yeomanry either by Haldane or the Earls Spencer. George Dixon responded to a call for volunteers with a knowledge of carpentry and spent months sawing, planing, hammering, preparing huts, bridges, trench duckboards and ladders ready for the Somme offensive, in a team with Highlanders and Durham Light Infantry mates. At that point Lieutenant Colonel A.G. Seymour took over command from Lieutenant Colonel Wickham who had earned a CMG at Neuve-Chapelle.
George Dixon was then sent on a mission, which caused him much surprise and some pangs of conscience whilst great battles were raging. He was told to take two men and six horses to a Royal Flying Corps airfield. He discovered that the horses were to be used for polo, which the pilots played across the airfield when not on duty. ‘They would send me a type-written note each morning to tell me what horses they would want.’ Some of the pilots had their own horses but others were novices at polo. George’s first problem was that the RFC quartermaster system could indent for petrol and oil but not for oats and hay. The RFC also allowed a rum ration every night, a privilege unknown in the Yeomanry. The horses sent under George’s care were officers’ hunters and were not accustomed to the more violent antics of the airmen:
While there I had a horse taken ill. The pilots in their RE8s would swoop over the horses’ lines and scare them. They also were rough in their polo games. This horse was covered in white lather. A chill, I thought. Unfortunately it was Major Nicholls’ favourite polo mount. I gave it a medicine ball. I had not given one before. The correct way was: hand in the horse’s mouth and drop it down the throat. I could not manage that, so I stuck the ball on the end of a stick and pushed it down the throat. The horse did not seem to improve. I had to send it to the Veterinary Corps who fortunately saved it for Major Nicholls – and saved me from the major’s wrath.
When all the huts, bridges and ladders were ready, and the armies assembled, the Somme battle began on what is regarded as the worst day in the history of the British Army: the British lost 57,470 casualties, 19,240 killed. The overall battle continued in the form of twelve separate battles over the period to 18 November, and it has been observed that ‘battalions from every infantry regiment in the British Army at some staged were stationed there, thus the Somme has a unique place in British social and military history’.14 However, the failure to make a significant breakthrough meant that there was little opportunity for exploitation by cavalry and so hundreds, if not thousands of cavalry horses were spared from slaughter at that point of the war, although horses with other functions continued to suffer.
Of future interest to the Yeomanry regiments, indeed to all cavalry regiments, were the events of 15 September 1916 when, during the Somme battles, the first tanks appeared. Liddell Hart commented:
Their early employment before large numbers were ready was a mistake; losing the chance of a great strategic surprise, and owing also to tactical mishandling, and minor technical defects, they had only limited success. Although the higher military authorities lost faith in them, and some urged their abandonment, more discerning eyes realised that here was a key which, when properly used, might unlock the trench barrier.15
It is unlikely that, when the news of the amazing invention became generally available, many Yeomanry officers foresaw that this new ugly, noisy, smelly, trundling leviathan would eventually replace their sleek and speedy thoroughbred horses. Or that the elite hunts like the Pytchley, the Quorn or the Beaufort might no longer be the main providers of ready-skilled and enthusiastic personnel.
During the long period of the Somme battles, several county Yeomanry regiments, like the NY, were split into squadrons to undertake the most urgent front-line support tasks needed. Several regiments were being amalgamated as infantry battalions to replace the massive number of infantry casualties. Other regiments were facing the Turkish Army in Egypt, still with hopes of finding an opportunity to go into action in their preferred mounted role.
To paraphrase an old saying, ‘All war and no play makes Tommy a dull boy’; it was well understood that in between the horrors of battle Tommy Atkins needed recreation and this was available in many forms, such as the polo played by RFC pilots using NY ponies. Among the front-line infantrymen there was often a football in evidence. One extreme form of sport was enjoyed by the Royal Gloucester Hussars (RGH) Yeomanry over thoroughly unsuitable and challenging Egyptian desert terrain. The RGH supplemented their pack of hounds with new recruits from the Cairo Lost Dogs Home. In the words of the Yeomen: ‘Lost dog though it may be, from the moment of purchase it is honoured with the name of Hound.’ On one occasion with a field of about a hundred the ‘Yeomanry Hounds’ raised a jackal and pursued it through orange groves and over the sands. The riders galloped dangerously across a wadi (dried river bed) and over trenches but were held up for a while by old barbed-wire entanglements. They were inspired forward by shouts of ‘Halloa forrard’ from a doughty corporal ‘in charge of some natives’, but the jackal disappeared among houses. Certainly a course not fit for quality hunt horses. However, such gallivanting was only a brief intermission in the dread realities of continuing war, with no quick end in sight in the East or West.
As 1916 rolled on towards 1917 and the intensity of battle decreased, the Yeomanry returned to the mundane monotonous routines illustrated by Cecil Knight’s diary. That other diarist, Cyril Day, now a sergeant, noted a normal day’s duties:
November 2nd – 4am I was on patrol along the front trench. 7am breakfast. 7.20 went back about a mile with party to fetch water from Brigade HQ. 10am to 12 trench patrol. 1pm dinner. 2pm wrote a letter and inspected trench mortar and machine-gun positions. 4pm tea. 5 to 6pm stand to. 6 to 8pm trench patrol, had a nap until 11pm and then went out with an Officer and a Corporal on a listening patrol between the lines. After crawling around for some time we finished our job which was to find out whether the enemy had occupied an old house in No Man’s Land.
As enemy soldiers were heard talking in the house and the mission orders did not include attacking them, the officer ordered a return to the trenches, each one to find his own way crawling around the many shell holes, and their progress interrupted by bright flares fired from time to time. Day, a very religious man, attributed his return to the fact that ‘the Lord was with me as I am not too good at remembering the way’. Apparently the Lord was not with the officer and corporal because they were never seen again and were posted as ‘missing’.
During the war a firm spirit of camaraderie had developed between most officers and their men. Often a blind eye was turned and allowances made for the mental impact of war on the men. An NY party under Lieutenant Benyon had been burying unknown bodies who had been lying in no-man’s-land for some time, the most loathsome of all tasks, apart perhaps from burying their horses. As they made their way back to billets Trooper Barnes noticed that Trooper Tucker was not carrying his rifle. He mentioned it to Lieutenant Benyon, who replied, ‘Carry on. Ignore
it!’ The loss of a rifle was, of course, a very serious offence. Back in billets the men were settling down when Lieutenant Benyon entered carrying a rifle, which was not the one left behind by Tucker. Benyon’s only comment was ‘Get the number off that rifle. Don’t ask questions and be more careful next time.’
Yeomen also had frequent reasons to be thankful for their officers’ ability to read ground, acquired in the first place by hunting the fox. George Dixon sang the praises of such men:
Gommecourt was in ruins. It had been taken and retaken several times and it was said there were sixteen lines of trenches with barbed wire in between. Patrolling in the dark in the area was fraught with problems of navigation. Sometimes on those excursions we would be led by Capt Litchfield, who was later the Secretary of the Pytchley Hunt. It was quite uncanny; he would lead us across country noticing all the signs such as shattered trees, pools of water, ruined churches and so on, taking us to points in the barbed wire entanglements where we could pass through, never once failing in his objective.
In view of the hunting cross-country skills of Captain Litchfield, there was a minor sensation in the NY ranks when a new officer arrived, a sensation both in respect of the identity of the officer and also of his abilities, or lack of. This was a Second Lieutenant Leslie Howard, born Leslie Howard Steiner, a surname which his Jewish family changed at the beginning of the war to the less Germanic-sounding Stainer. Howard was already a known film actor having taken part in the 1914 propaganda film The Heroine of Mons. Later he would become world famous for starring in Gone With The Wind, The Scarlet Pimpernel and in 1942 The First of the Few.
However, what distinguished him in the Yeomanry was that he had never ridden a horse and had to be taught to ride. Before the war there had been a minority of newly joined troopers who were not of farming stock and who had needed to be taught to ride. But this was the first NY officer who, after commissioning, had to be taught to sit on a horse.
Perhaps the arrival of this reinforcement officer was symbolic of what was now happening in many British Army units of all types: a dilution of the overall skills of a unit, compared to its level of skills at the war’s commencement, due to the huge and continuing roll of casualties and the frantic need for any available hurried replacements to fill the gaps.
Leslie Howard’s military career was abruptly cut short by shellshock. This was also a significant time because old attitudes towards ‘nervous breakdown’ were changing. On 16 March 1915 pioneering psychologist Dr Charles Myers had taken up a post at Boulogne base hospital to deal with shellshock cases and within a year saw over 2,000 patients. However, shellshock was still classified under two headings: ‘W’, the direct effect of wounding, and ‘S’ or sickness, not the immediate impact effect. At least for Howard and other sufferers of the condition, psychiatric treatment was evolving.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1 All NY references from NY archives.
2 ‘Brooksby’ in The Field, Pytchley website.
3 Arriving in 1914 NY men qualified as ‘Old Contemptibles’.
4 Rhodes-James, R., in Holmes, Military History.
5 Liddell Hart, B.H., History of the First World War.
6 The Keep Museum (Dorsets).
7 Internet, In Memoriam Tpr F.W. Davey.
8 Lewis, Yeoman Soldiers.
9 Neuve-Chapelle quotes from Liddell Hart, op. cit.
10 Day, War Diary.
11 Knight, diary in NYA.
12 Dixon, Memoirs, NYA.
13 Also Tout, An End of War re: premonition.
14 Holmes, Military History.
15 Liddell Hart, op. cit.
CHAPTER SIX
THE SLAUGHTER OF THE HORSES
(1917–1918)
At the very time when the Northants Yeomanry lads and their horses, and those of other county regiments, were about to enter upon their most traumatic and gory experience of the war, meddling bureaucracy reared its unwanted head. War Office reforms, not as relevant as Haldane’s, ordained that all Yeomen should be renumbered. If there was an irrelevance amid the slaughter, filth and confusion of the Western Front, this was it.
As a unit of the Corps of Dragoons, the NY men were now allocated the numbers 145,001 to 150,000, effective 3 April 1917. From the Haldane reforms of 1908 onwards Territorial Force units had allocated their own three- or four-digit numbers in sequence to their recruits. So NY’s Ernie Stubbs had always reported himself on parade as ‘1528 Private Stubbs, E., sir!’ Now all TF soldiers had to learn their new numbers according to their corps and Ernie now became 145677, fortunately a fairly easy number to learn. The nomenclature was further complicated because Ernie was known within his regiment as Trooper Stubbs, but even on his medal index card he was listed as a private.1
Unexpectedly, a 2NY squadron from the home base was alerted to move to France. It arrived behind the front line as a mounted squadron not knowing what fate awaited it and for a while did little. Then, to the men’s great surprise, and no little displeasure, their beloved horses were taken away; they were introduced to the new tanks, which none of them had ever seen before, and were absorbed into the infant Tank Corps. So at least one squadron of Yeomanry were already moving from the splendour of the horse manoeuvres to the mundane slog of the armoured regime, which would be the role of many Yeomen in the years to come.
These were momentary diversions before 1NY, with others such as the Essex Yeomanry and the 10th Hussars, were offered a fleeting vision of a traditional cavalry charge during the Battle of Arras. However, this soon faded into the reality of probably the most appalling losses to cavalry men and horses since the Charge of the Light Brigade. It all started rather quietly for George Dixon:
I remember riding up the cobble-stoned main road lined with trees shattered and camouflaged with sacking to prevent anything being seen by the observation balloons of the Germans. There was a lot of traffic moving up for the battle: Infantry, Cavalry, Artillery, Ambulances, etc. We passed a railway station, very much in ruins, where we joined other cavalry units. We rode to a place called the Triangle, a sort of junction of the railway of that shape. The embankment had been undermined by the Germans and made into large dug-outs capable in total of holding hundreds of men – so we had good beds for the night. The weather was awful for April, with snow and hail, the snow lying six inches deep, and we were sorry to move away from our borrowed dug-outs.2
Sergeant Cyril Day was involved in one of the initial probes on 9 April 1917 and had prayed before moving, ‘Cover my head O Lord in the day of battle’. He then asked himself, ‘Why should I be singled out for such special care?’ There was no time to await divine answers although such Biblical emanations as burning bushes and quaking earth were much in evidence:
We reached the outskirts of Fampoux and were fired at from our right. I had to take four horsemen and horses, dismounted due to conditions underfoot, over a very steep treacherous hill to drive out the enemy who were firing at us. We found about four or five Germans holding a house near a level crossing over the railway. It also crossed the river Scarpe. We immediately opened fire, killing three and took two prisoners. Another German ran to the right and as we fired he seemed to have slipped. But he returned fire bringing down one of our horses. We managed to hit him. Also here were two 8 inch German howitzer guns. Others of our troop took them out, killing one German and taking another prisoner. The rest fled.3
Other Yeomen were not so concerned about possible divine protection and tended to approach danger in a more phlegmatic way, as did Corporal Cecil Knight in his brief diary notes: ‘Stayed out all night. Standing to, side of Railway embankment. Heavy shelling. Lt Chaplain killed. Then advanced guard. Lt. Bruce wounded. Lost several horses. Rough time.’
Cyril Day, putting aside heavenly doubts and facing earthly realities, now found himself continuing the action which earned him the DCM:
The night was very cold, it started snowing in the early morning. The enemy were still holding a bridge about 500 yards further
on. I took a patrol and crept along the side of the railway. No one was on the bridge but while we were there one of their machine-guns opened fire only a few yards in front of us. We had to keep low and crawl back 500 yards to our horses but returned safely. The infantry came up and got in touch with us about 3am. This was a relief to us as this was an unprotected flank held by our troop and the ground was very favourable for the enemy to attack us. The Cyclists took over our position about 6am.
The Official History has pointed out the wastefulness of having three cavalry divisions waiting for years in France with no real possibility of a massed mounted attack across multiple trenches guarded by barbed wire and machine guns. However, ‘one small cavalry unit did prove its value on 9 April, the 1/1 Northamptonshire Yeomanry … joining the Cyclist battalion … This oddball assortment of cyclists and horsemen … was to secure all road and railway bridges across the river [Scarpe]’. The cyclists were ‘forced to dismount and carry their cumbersome machines over shell holes and marshy ground’. Once that obstacle had been overcome horsemen and cyclists charged at speed through the gap in the German lines and by 9 p.m. had achieved all their objectives, riding through Fampoux and bivouacking in the Feuchy marshes.
Among the Yeomen was Sergeant Bertie Taylor of B Squadron, the 1903 boy rubbish collector at a penny a day, who felt a sense of release after waiting over two years for a free gallop at the enemy:
The shells were dropping fast and thick, then we came to some slit trenches and we just jumped these with the horses squealing – just like a hunt! Then we passed through our leading troops and I remember seeing a lot of Scottish soldiers just lying there machine gunned. Hell of a do they had. Soon we got into Fampoux and the first thing we did was water our horses in the Scarpe. After we had mounted up again we came under shellfire and one of our officers, Captain Jack Lowther – who had an enormous nose – had the end sliced off by a piece of shrapnel. Well, we laughed didn’t we as he coolly got off his horse, picked up the end of his nose and wrapped it in his handkerchief.4