The Rifle Brigade is going away
To leave the girls in the family way.
The KRRs are left behind,
They’ve two and six a week to find.
This sentiment, with all its bawdy implications, and even the strong language of the term ‘Black Buttoned Bastards’ might reasonably have been expected to bring a blush to the cheeks of the 16th King’s Royal Rifle Corps for they had been recruited from the ranks of the Church Lads Brigade. But such piety as they had harboured in the far-off days of peacetime had been well and truly knocked out of them during the two years they had spent in Kitchener’s Army and, in particular, by the eight months almost to the day that they had been serving in France and in the trenches. This was a matter to which the Battalion’s Padre had become resigned. It was many months now since he had gone looking for a party engaged in digging trenches behind the lines. He had come upon Jack Brown’s platoon and announced, as he jumped down among these black sheep of his flock, ‘I knew where you all were. I couldn’t see you but I knew where you were from the language that was coming up. I knew it was the Church Lads Brigade and I’ve never heard anything like it in all my life.’
It was fortunate that the Padre had not been within earshot that afternoon at Fricourt. The Church Lads had marched eighteen kilometres to get there and their feet were killing them.
Corporal Jack Beament, MM, A Coy., 16th Btn., King’s Royal Rifle Corps (Church Lads Brigade), 33rd Division
It was a terribly hot day and we’d only had ten minutes halt in each hour all the way up. Everywhere was devastated but we spotted a stream and we made for it. There was Jack Brown and old Billy Thompson and his pal Charlie Thompson from West Hartlepool and myself. Billy wasn’t a very big chap but how he could swear! I always remember him, after that march taking off his equipment and taking off his boots and socks and swearing like hell. ‘Those fucking, bloody bastards! Those bloody fucking bastards!’ Between us we said more than a word or two, because it was so hot and we had full equipment and 120 rounds of ammunition to carry. I’ll never forget the relief of it, coming to the edge of this stream and bathing my poor bloody feet. We weren’t there long, and there was a bit more swearing when we were told to pick up our stuff again and march up the line. We regretted having taken our boots off, because it wasn’t so easy to get them on again!
I shall never forget that scene as we went up the line. As we marched along there was a corpse of a soldier with no head plonked up against the side of this sunken road, and a bit further on, sticking up above the ground, a hand and obviously a body underneath it, but all you could see was a hand, and, on the lefthand side, just lumps of flesh with the innards and remains of a poor horse all rolled up there together. A shell must have got them. There were bodies all around. You can’t describe it! That massacre had happened fourteen days before we got there. It was horrifying. We were all only about twenty years of age and you’re a bit callous then. It’s a cruel age really. You have no sort of feeling. But it must have made some sort of impression because I can still see it all in my mind’s eye, this terrible scene as we went up the line. But we had to take it all in our stride because we couldn’t do anything about it. We’d got to go forward. That was our job.
Rifleman Jack Brown, MM, No. 3 Platoon, A Coy., 16th Btn., King’s Royal Rifle Corps (Church Lads Brigade), 33rd Division
We was going to High Wood. That’s what we was told. It was a hot day and the stench was something awful. The guns were there firing and all the artillery blokes had got their shirts off. There was two banks, one on either side of the road, about chest high – if you could call it a road! And when we actually looked, they weren’t banks at all! They were heaps of overturned waggons, dead horses, broken equipment and, not to tell a lie, dead bodies as well. The smell was terrible. We went up to a place and, believe it or not, they called it Happy Valley! On the way up there was a trench at right angles to where we was, and it was full of dead Germans, just standing there where they’d been shot. You could see their heads and shoulders, just stood up there where they’d been firing from. They hadn’t fallen down and they’d gone as black as pitch.
You didn’t worry when you got in the Army. You didn’t – straight! Well I didn’t anyhow. I was carrying the rations and I got a bit fed up with them, they was so heavy. So we was told to sit down for a rest and I said, ‘What about some of you carrying these rations for a while?’ Nobody seemed to want to, so I just said, ‘Well, I don’t suppose any of us’ll want much rations tomorrow.’ I dumped them, and that’s the last I saw of them. Didn’t care really, not among all that. I don’t mind saying it, on the way up there, what I did was, I just said a little prayer for myself. I always did it before we went into action, but on the way up there to High Wood, looking around at those terrible things, I just kept saying this little prayer. I suppose it must have been answered, or I wouldn’t be here now!
A few little prayers went up from the Church Lads Brigade that night as they waited in the shelter of Bazentin le Petit Wood to go over the top in the morning. From Jack Brown’s platoon, at least, they were intermixed with imprecations of a more down-to-earth nature and even Jack himself now rather regretted having dumped the rations. Appetites which had been temporarily sickened on the march to the line had nevertheless been sharpened by the long day’s exertions and, with the prospect of going into action in the morning, a little food – even bully beef and army biscuits – would have been a comfort. Jack himself managed to scrounge a bite from his mate Jack Beament in Number One Platoon, but it was as much as his life was worth to let the rest of his own platoon see that he had done so.
It wasn’t the first time the two boys had shared a meal. Even before the war, when both had been working for John Dickinson’s Paper Company at Croxley Mill, they had shared their lunchtime sandwiches. But munching the dry army biscuit, or sucking it as best he could, that was not what Jack Brown had in mind. He nudged Beament. ‘Remember those feeds at Miss Harper’s?’ ‘Yes,’ replied Jack Beament, ‘And remember the fleas?’
They both well remembered the fleas in the first billet they had shared at Denham. Even the beds had been full of them. It was not that the spinster, Miss Harper, and the two bachelor Harper brothers were anything less than scrupulously clean and they themselves seemed to be impervious to the fleas, doubtless through years of custom, for they were dog breeders to Colonel Wyld and it was on his estate that the Church Lads had been concentrated when the Battalion was first formed, with the Colonel (then Major) as Second-in-Command of the Battalion. The boys had arrived in detachments from all over the country, some from as far away as Scotland and the north. They were a good bunch, but Jack Beament, despite having been a senior sergeant in the Church Lads Brigade, was a youth whose physique it would have been charitable to describe as lanky. When he had first tried to join the Army in August 1914 the Army had described his chest measurements in rather less kindly terms and turned him down flat. Now he was rather glad of it. It had been September before it had been suggested that the Church Lads Brigade should form its own Battalion and there were thirty-two past or present ‘Church Lads’ working together at the paper mill at Croxley Green. To lose them en masse would certainly make a hole in the work-force but the manager, Mr Charles Barton-Smith, was all for it. He was over Army age himself but he had served as a captain in the Church Lads Brigade, so he connived, encouraged them and even supplied a lorry to take them up to London.
Corporal Jack Beament, MM, A Coy., 16th Btn., King’s Royal Rifle Corps (Church Lads Brigade), 33rd Division
Every one of us passed the test – including my vital statistics! There was even one lad, Charlie Rogers, who was practically blind in one eye and, when he had his eyes tested by the Colour Sergeant, we were seated on a form at the back. When they covered his good eye and it came to his bad one and he had to read out some numbers off the chart, we were all whispering, ‘Twenty-four, forty-eight, nineteen, twenty-eight,’ and Charlie repeated them. It’s a won
der the Sergeant didn’t hear, because he was standing right by Charlie. But if he did, he turned a blind eye, so Charlie’s blind eye got through. All thirty-two of us got through.
Rifleman Jack Brown, MM, No. 3 Platoon, A Coy., 16th Btn., King’s Royal Rifle Corps (Church Lads Brigade), 33rd Division
We got our calling up papers a few days later and we had to go to Sardinia House, Kingsway in London. The mill gave us a lorry and it was waiting outside the Red House, which is the pub at Croxley, and we all bundled in there and it took us to Watford Junction to get the train, not knowing where we was going or anything. We found Kingsway all right but we didn’t know where Sardinia House was or anything else but we found it and we got introduced right away to the army regulations. There was a Regimental Sergeant-Major and he took our names and particulars and we got lined up and we marched through the streets. I’d got an old flute and I was playing it. I was playing The Girl I Left Behind Me and I played it all the way through London to Paddington Station. We stepped out on that march! Because the Church Lads wasn’t just a religious organization. It was a bit like the Boys Brigade, you did drill and all that, and we made a pretty good job of that march to Paddington – or so we thought.
Of course we didn’t know where we was going and everyone was guessing, would it be Durham, or would it be Bristol or anywhere at all? Anyhow we got in the train and away it went. By this time we’d been all day on the journey because we left Croxley Green quite early in the morning and, blow me, about half an hour later we ended up at Denham – just about seven miles away from Croxley Green where we’d all started out from!
By some miracle, although the Battalion had had its share of trench warfare and casualties, the original thirty-two were still together. They were older, harder, fitter. Even Jack Beament’s chest measurements had expanded by a good two inches, but their link with Denham was as strong as ever. ‘Lizzie Wyld’, as the Battalion had disrespectfully nicknamed their Commanding Officer, was the local squire and, although they had moved on to Clipstone Camp near Nottingham within three months, the residents of Denham still regarded the 16th King’s Royal Rifles with proprietary affection as ‘their Battalion’. Other troops who had followed them after they had moved north to Nottingham had a kindly reception but the proceeds of every concert, every village fête, every bazaar and jumble sale and the product of hundreds of knitting needles, clicking through miles of khaki wool, were intended for the benefit of the Church Lads and the Church Lads alone. The coffers of the Battalion’s Comforts Fund swelled, the Battalion Stores bulged with a plenitude of socks and scarves, gloves and knitted helmets, and there was hardly a man of the original contingent who did not also receive a regular supply of letters and parcels from his old billet at Denham.
Altogether the Battalion was spoilt and Jack Beament was more spoilt than any. He had a share in the collective parcels sent by the Harper household at Denham and parcels from Heanor as well, where he and Harry Chapman had been billeted in Mundy Street with Mr and Mrs Buxton. A parcel had arrived only yesterday. In it was a small tin of patriotic design, adorned by a picture of the King, and Mrs Buxton had filled it with chocolate. Jack had put it in his haversack and now his haversack was on the parapet of the old German trench where they were preparing to pass the night. He considered sharing the chocolate with Jack Brown and Charlie Rogers right away, and then thought better of it. He would keep it for tomorrow.
Machine-gun fire was coming from High Wood across the valley, slowly traversing in the dark in the hope of catching troops assembling for the big attack that would surely come in the morning. It was a random bullet, almost spent, that hit the haversack. It went straight through the tin of chocolate which thus, facetiously, became the first of the Battalion’s casualties in the battle for High Wood. Beament was nervously conscious of the fact that, had he not placed the haversack on the parapet, that casualty might have been himself.
Chapter 13
Only two days ago, give or take the occasional spot where a stray shell had created havoc, the trees in High Wood had been in full leaf. But twenty-four hours of fighting and shelling had taken ghastly toll. The leaves were limp and yellowed by cordite. Branches hung splintered from lurching tree trunks. Whole trees had been uprooted and sent crashing into the trampled undergrowth, and the tangle of branches, now seeming to spring out of the ground, gave fine cover for snipers firing from behind them and, looming up fearful and grotesque in the light of the green star shells that rose and fell in the heart of the wood, barred the way to the infantry blundering forward.
It should have been a sylvan scene, the half-full moon riding high on a summer’s night over the woods and valleys of the Somme. To observers in the British line, looking across the valley to the wood that swelled and sank in an inferno of flash and fire, the moon, the stars, the warmth seemed strangely incongruous.
Repeated reports had claimed that High Wood had been captured by the 7th Division, and Brigadier-General Baird, in command of a Brigade of the 33rd Division, had sent his men into it with orders to consolidate the line. ‘Consolidate’ meant ‘dig’, and on a line running diagonally through the wood, they dug for half the night, cursing the undergrowth, cursing the tentacles of roots that entangled spades and entrenching tools, and cursing the fact that, for all their orders and all the reports and assurances that the wood had been captured, machine-gun bullets were spraying them as they worked. In lulls between the bursts, they could hear voices very close in front of them shouting orders in a language that was unmistakably German. And, occasionally, the alien commands seemed to come from behind their backs.
It was a gruelling and frightful night of fear and crucifying labour. In the first light of the dawn, the weary men were ordered to filter back out of the wood, to abandon the new line, and to prepare the line outside High Wood for a fresh attack. The long night’s digging had gone for nothing.
In spite of the insistence of Headquarters that High Wood had been captured – or nearly so – by the 7th Division, it was obvious to Brigadier-General Baird, from the experience of his own troops during the dreadful hours they had spent in it, that this was not the case. Furthermore, the new orders were that the whole division should pivot to face north and, with High Wood on its right, attack the trenchlines that lay between it and Martinpuich. The Glasgow Highlanders were to start out on this affray from the western corner of High Wood and, as no one knew better than the Glasgow Highlanders themselves, the western corner was still clenched in the hands of the Germans. Their orders were therefore inviting them, if not to turn their backs on the enemy, at least to launch into an attack which would bring them, in a matter of yards, within a hail of enfilade fire.
It was suicide to think of attempting it. In remarkably restrained but pungent terms, Brigadier Baird pointed out this fact to Divisional Headquarters and pointed out furthermore that, no matter how his troops were positioned, the attack could not hope to be successful unless the enemy had been cleared from High Wood. Judging by the experience of his troops in the night, this was palpably not the case. Divisional Headquarters was unperturbed. The troops had perhaps been edgy. It had been categorically claimed as long ago as ten o’clock the previous evening that High Wood had been captured, and the casualties which Baird’s Brigade had unfortunately sustained, the difficulties they had encountered during the night, must have been due to isolated pockets of resistance – nothing that a little ‘mopping up’ would not put right. His opinion, they informed him in placatory tones, would be recorded. But the attack would go ahead.
In a lather of impotent fury, all that Brigadier Baird could do was to send a company of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps up to the wood itself. When the main attack began they, with the remnants of three platoons of the Glasgow Highlanders, would attack through High Wood. At best they would clear the remaining ‘pockets of resistance’. At worst they would divert the Germans’ attention from the right flank of the 33rd Division as they pushed towards the north.
The attack wa
s due to start at nine o’clock. The bombardment started at 8.30. It sounded loud and impressive. It had no particular effect.
Rifleman J. Brown, MM, No. 3 Platoon, A Coy., 16th King’s Royal Rifle Corps (Church Lads Brigade)
We’d laid there all night in these little shelters what we’d dug and they were just bringing up the breakfast and the order came to march, so we never got no breakfast that morning. Cor’ Blimey,
I was frightened. Just thinking, ‘Hope I’ll get out of it.’ But my legs worked, so I got up and walked out with the rest. We went across the valley and got up to High Wood and when we got along the side of the wood we lay down there and had a look down this valley what we’d come up. There was a Jock regiment marching up the road in fours and Jerry opened up on them and I remember two or three shells dropping right in among the column and they just closed ranks and came on – never faltered! Then our own bombardment started and, as usual, they was dropping short. They was falling in the fields behind us. Our own guns! I don’t believe one of them went into High Wood and that’s what they were supposed to be bombarding before we went in. They was too far away to hit us, because we was right up against the wood, and they certainly didn’t hit the wood! I don’t know what they was aimind at or whether they’d just had a good rum ration the night before! I reckon they were trying to ricochet off on to the target!
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