The most notorious murder was at Montreuil and it was a murder over gambling debts. After that, an edict from GHQ strictly forbade the Chinese to gamble. GHQ might as well have forbidden them to breathe. Crouched in circles round every corner, the Chinese played Fantan by the hour – and working hours, at that! And they bribed their interpreters to inform the authorities that this was a Chinese religious observance which must be respected. It didn’t work for long! The only people who seemed to be able to keep the Chinese in any sort of order were some members of Pioneer Battalions who convinced the Chinese Labourers that their crossed-axe sleeve badges, a symbol of their status as skilled tradesmen, proclaimed them to be official executioners, with the right to summarily chop off the head of any recalcitrant ‘coolie’.
The notorious Chinese Secret Societies had come to Europe with the Labour Corps. Every coolie had his own ‘Tong’ and every coolie was convinced by his Tong leader that a Chinese who died of illness in a European hospital had been foully done to death. So, it followed that, when a coolie fell ill, two men went out of action, for the patient refused to go to hospital unless he was accompanied by a member of his Tong to see that he got a fair deal and that he came out again. This was also the aim of the medical authorities, for a dead Chinaman could be as much of a nuisance as a live one. It was up to the Chinese themselves to conduct the elaborate funeral rites but it was up to the authorities to find a suitable place of burial and ‘suitability’ was spelt out precisely in an official memorandum on the subject of Chinese graves.
The ideal site to secure repose and drive away evil spirits is on sloping ground with a stream below, or gully down which water always or occasionally passes. The grave should not be parallel to the north, south, east or west. This is particularly important to Chinese Mahommedans. It should be about four-feet deep, with the head towards the hill and the feet towards the water. A mound of earth about two feet high is piled over the grave.
It was not always easy to carry out these instructions to the letter for, at the height of the Somme Battle, the Labour Corps as a whole was suffering almost a thousand casualties a month, and many of them were Chinese. Although they were protected from ‘war risk’ and were therefore not supposed to be employed within shelling distance of the front line, nothing had been said about salvage operations and during August 1916 salvage was a matter of prime importance to the Army. As the troops fought forward, the Pioneer and Labour Battalions followed behind clearing the ground of unexploded ammunition, recovering lost equipment and rifles lying useless on the ground where there had been heavy casualties during an advance. In packing them and sending them back to the base there were many accidents.
Staff Sergeant James Kain, No. 2282, Army Ordnance Corps
There were fifty-thousand rifles lying out on the battlefield. The Pioneers used to go and fetch them in when the conditions permitted it. They came to us in open trucks and we had to clear them quick. I had a fatigue party of half a dozen men. They were all stood up on the truck passing the rifles down a line and, of course, coming straight off the battlefield, there were live rounds left in them. You grabbed them and threw open the bolt – didn’t trouble to look at it – there simply wasn’t time – and out flew the rounds, all over the place. The fellows in the truck were just throwing them out one after the other. We had two rifles every three seconds, day after day, and we were working flat out. One day I had thirty-two thousand rifles pass through my hands! I worked it out. Four tons, one load. The only vehicles that could take that load of rifles was the Foden steam engine with a very sturdy truck behind it and even with that we had to have a special steel bar made so that the sides wouldn’t bulge.
If the rifles were all right, we just tossed them on to this waiting Foden and they went straight off down the line to the workshops, where they were checked for bent barrels and any faults and then they would be issued to the troops and straight back up the line. But of course we got badly damaged rifles, bits of rifles, all sorts of things and we packed them all together and put them in crates and took them out to sea and sunk them. Some of the others had tight bolts and you would give it a smash with a hammer to make it fly open, or sometimes the catch wouldn’t be strong enough to eject the bullets still in it and one would be stuck live in the breech. Once every three weeks or so, one would go off and of course you’d always had to be sure to turn the breech away from you so that the explosion would blow the other way. There was one fellow killed, and one horse was killed and one fellow had his arm shattered, all through the same thing. But that was all the casualties we had, which was remarkable when you think how many rifles we were handling.
Once or twice a day a fellow would have to come round with a broom and sweep all the live rounds up and tip them into the wooden barrel and, further down the road in a field, were four French ladies and they sat there all day long with a special gadget which they stuck into the cartridge and eventually the bullet came out and fell into a box. They emptied the gun powder into a big barrel and their job was to put all the brass and nickel bullets in separate piles to go back home to be remade. Then, every night, they poured the gun-powder out into a heap in the field, ran a fuse to it and it just went up in a puff of smoke.
Kain was one small cog in the vast machine controlled by the Controller of Salvage at GHQ, known unkindly to his fellow officers as ‘Old Rags and Bones’ or more succinctly as ‘Swill’. It was the responsibility of the Royal Engineers to recover their own miles of telephone cable and to return it to the base where it had to be tediously rewound on to cable drums by the signallers themselves. Almost everything else came under the aegis of ‘Swill’.
Clothing was cleaned and repaired, or, if beyond redemption, sent back to the United Kingdom as rags. Entrenching tool heads were cleaned and sharpened. Steel helmets were cleaned and relined if they were whole, or, if too battered and holed, were sold as scrap iron after the chin straps had been removed for sale as old leather. Water-bottles were recovered with a new felt and supplied with new corks. Webbing equipment was dry-cleaned on motor-driven brushes, darned and repaired by local labour or, if beyond repair, had their metal fittings removed and were sent back to the United Kingdom as cotton rags. Leather equipment and saddlery was washed and treated with fish oil, which was also used to restore suppleness to old boots. Even boots whose useful life was at an obvious end had their studs removed for scrap metal before they were abandoned.
There was no item in the detritus of battle which was too insignificant to escape the attention of General ‘Swill’ Gibbs. He ran the Salvage Corps with an almost missionary zeal, in the firm conviction that every recovered horseshoe nail was another nail in the coffin of the Kaiser and he did his best to transmit his enthusiasm to the troops at the front. Soon, battalions coming out of the line were confronted with notices which demanded in peremptory terms: ‘WHAT HAVE YOU SALVED TODAY?’ The replies of the troops were invariably colourful, if not particularly helpful.
There were cogent reasons for not throwing empty bully beef tins over the parapets of trenches, as careless Tommies were apt to do. It was hardly sanitary. It encouraged flies and rats and, in places where the trenchline had remained static for many months, the clatter of piled up tins in No Man’s Land could seriously imperil patrols creeping out under cover of darkness. But a soldier in the fighting line was disinclined to carry his debris with him when he left it, and, even in billets in villages behind the line, it was easier to bury empty tins and bottles than to drag them laboriously to the salvage dump.
The survivors of the July attacks on the Somme, sensing the rapid approach of the day when they would be marching back again, were less inclined than most to concern themselves with the trivia which seemed to them to weigh unduly on the minds of their superiors. In the case of some fortunate battalions, their immediate superiors took the same view and interpreted the periods of drill and fatigues which the Army was pleased to call ‘rest’ as ‘rest’ in the civilian sense of the word. Even where a certain
amount of route marching and physical training was required to be carried out according to regulations, they organized swimming parades in lieu of PT, and country strolls, thinly disguised as route marches, to pleasant picnic spots or places of interest.
The Colonel of the 1st Queen’s Westminster Rifles, whose ordeal by shellfire at Gommecourt had been followed by a gruelling month of almost uninterrupted fatigues and carrying parties in and out of the trenches, went a little further. The Battalion had had a long slog to get to the back areas. The weather had been intensely hot. Three-quarters of the strength were men newly-arrived to replace the casualties of the First of July and the remainder had done no marching to speak of for a long time. Many of the men had fallen out and Colonel Shoolbred was of the firm and sympathetic opinion that they badly needed a rest. He gave them a whole day off to do nothing but sleep and, if they felt like waking up, to eat. The following day under the guise of the obligatory ‘route march’ he kindly organized a diversion for his battleworn men. It was a mere stroll, not more than two or three miles, along cool forest pathways to the battlefield of Crécy. On its arrival, by prior arrangement with their Colonel, the Battalion was met by a certain Professor Delve, who spent a long time courteously explaining the various points of interest on the field and expounding on the finer points of the battle, fought by their predecessors in 1346, nearly six hundred years before. The old hands of the Battalion, who had recently had a little too much of battles, listened bemused. They were, nevertheless, grateful to their Colonel. It was a kindly thought.
Colonel Shoolbred’s own superiors had to consider the welfare of the 56th Division as a whole and reports had reached Divisional HQ that the performance of the troops on the march out of the line had not come up to the standard to be expected of a Territorial Division – even one which was diluted by a large proportion of raw troops. It was all very well to be sympathetic to men who had had a rough time in the trenches, but their ultimate objective was to go back to them and, for their own good, the time spent at ‘rest’ must be used constructively – to reimpose discipline, to embark on a programme of vigorous training that would weld new and old troops into a disciplined whole with due regard to the requirements of the war. There must be no slackness, no matter what the excuse. It was not enough to make the men fit, they must be fighting fit. Divisional Headquarters issued its orders accordingly, and commanding officers were obliged to carry them out and pass them on.
After his mild shell-shock on the First of July, Arthur Agius had been kindly treated by his own Commanding Officer, who had arranged for him to spend the last few weeks pleasantly engaged on a not-too-arduous training course at an Army School at Auxi-le-Château. Now, fit and bronzed and fully recovered, he was back with the 3rd Londons. He had rejoined them in time to get to know the new men of his Company, and to take sad stock of the gaps in its old ranks, before the move back to the Somme. It would be a long hike back to the battle and, on 18 August, Agius received the first indication that their ‘holiday’ was over.
To O C ‘B’ Company
MARCH DISCIPLINE
The CO wishes all officers to pay particular attention to march discipline. The men should know that it is a disgraceful thing to fall out on the line of march unless absolutely necessary. Straggling is to be considered an offence.
Company Commanders will see that an officer marches in rear of their companies who will check all straggling and take the names of any men who fall out.
On arrival at Destination, companies will render to the Orderly Room a list of names of men who have fallen out.
The battalion has always been known as a good marching battalion and the Commanding Officer feels confident that this good reputation will be maintained.
(Signed). R. D. Sutcliffe,
Captain and Adjutant.
3rd London Regiment.
Two days later, as they were literally packing up for the move, another edict arrived from GHQ:
DISCIPLINE
A practice appears to have arisen of one soldier only saluting where more than one are passing an Officer. This practice must cease. When several soldiers pass an Officer, unless they are being marched as a party, they will ALL salute, whether there are NCOs among them or not.
When two or more men are sitting or standing about, and an Officer passes them, the senior NCO or oldest soldier will face the Officer, call the rest to attention and alone salute.
Soldiers will salute in the manner laid down in the training manuals.
Officers must return the salutes of their subordinates with a definite motion of the hand and not perfunctorily. Officers will check lack of discipline in saluting and will report to the unit concerned the names of men who fail to salute them. Such men will be severely dealt with.
(GRO 1736, Republished above for compliance by all ranks, 20 August 1916)
Agius conscientiously clipped both orders to the squared pages of the notebook he reserved for Battalion Orders, but he was not over-worried. He was rather more concerned about what they were marching back to than about discipline on the march itself, but at least he could set an example. The Colonel and the senior officers would be mounted but Agius chose to travel the long road back on Shanks’s Pony – like the men, on his own two feet.
It was good marching weather. Although there had been rain and storms in the middle of the month, it had turned fine. There was a stiff breeze but on the march that was all to the good and better by far than the heat in the early part of the month which had caused so many men to fall out on the way from the line to the rear. Now, marching back again, they were in better fettle and the spirits of the survivors were high enough to inspire them to sing as they went. The new arrivals were shortly introduced to the Battalion’s marching song. Being a familiar music-hall ditty it did not take them long to get into the swing of it and, as the Battalion, now back at full-throated strength, passed through the villages of the Somme to the familiar strains of I’m ‘Enery the Eighth I am, it seemed almost – but not quite – like old times.
Chapter 17
The colonel of any battalion on the march back to the Somme encouraged the men to sing. It whiled away the time between the hourly ten-minute stops – when one hour could feel like two in the dog days of August to men who marched weighed down by pack and rifle, tin helmets slung under rolled-up greatcoats, through clouds of dust that smarted the eyes and settled in a gritty layer at the back of a thousand parched throats. A song was no balm to a battalion of feet, swelling and sweating in woollen socks and heavy boots; it did nothing to lighten the cumbersome weight of equipment on weary backs, but a good song could lighten the spirits and discourage pensive contemplation when boys were going into battle for a second time, still haunted by all-too-vivid memories of the first.
The Tommies had their own ideas of what constituted a good song, and they seldom coincided with those that people at Home fondly imagined them to be singing as they swung along the roads of France on their way to the fields of battle and to victory. Least of all did they coincide with the ideas of a certain Mr Ainger whose patriotic fervour had inspired him to produce a booklet entitled Marching Songs for Soldiers set to well-known tunes. The words were appropriately updated and in every syllable they breathed bellicosity and patriotic intent. For the modest price of one shilling – ‘all proceeds devoted to the Belgian Relief Fund’ – the Marching Songs could be purchased in a full-size edition ‘with pianoforte accompaniment’ and, in the first months of 1915, it sold in such quantities as to suggest that family musical evenings all over the country were being enlivened by the strains of such ditties as:
D’ye ken John French, with his khaki suit,
His belt and his gaiters, and stout brown boot,
Along with his guns, and his horse, and his foot,
On the road to Berlin in the morning.
The pocket-size edition (price twopence) had outsold the original several times over and, lovingly tucked into parcels by mothers, sisters and sweethearts, e
ach anxious to lift the spirits of her own particular warrior, the songbooks had arrived in France by the thousand. On the whole, the songs had not caught on. Few battalions of Tommies were to be heard marching to the ringing words:
To arms! To arms! We bring the Jubilee.
To arms! To arms! The Flag that calls the Free.
For the right the foe to smite alike by land and sea,
While we go marching to Germany!
Marching, if not directly to Germany, at least back to face Germany’s soldiers on the battlefield of the Somme, even if the words had not seemed a trifle inappropriate, the strains of Marching through Georgia did not exactly fit the Tommies’ stolid progress across the miles of ‘marching easy’ that carried them eastwards. Slower, more lugubrious melodies fitted the pace and were more attuned to their mood. John Brown’s Body was a favourite, although Mr Ainger, who had matched the melody to his favourite theme (‘Belgium has been harried with fire and with sword…’) might have been pained to hear the less elegant version preferred by the troops:
John Brown’s baby’s got a pimple on its bum,
John Brown’s baby’s got a pimple on its bum,
John Brown’s Baby’s Got a Pimple On Its Bum,
And the little bugger can’t sit down.
He would not have been alone in his disapproval. The Commander-in-Chief himself took a priggish interest in the songs warbled by his now largely youthful army. It was rumoured that General Haig found even the official version of Mademoiselle from Armentières offensive to his well-bred ears, even though it had already become popular in the most respectable circles at Home. The Tommies, however, preferred the infinite variations of less respectable versions, and the younger soldiers, in particular, newly drafted to France and into the ranks of the fighting battalions were first aghast, then amazed, then – in most cases – delighted at the bawdy freemasonry of which they had so suddenly and felicitously become a part. Some schoolboy faces, unable to cast off the shibboleths of their rigid and sheltered upbringing, blushed, stayed silent and, as hymn tunes had been so frequently adopted to accompany words that were less than religious in feeling, worried on occasion that the whole blasphemous battalion might be struck down by an avenging thunderclap from Above. General Haig was more concerned with moral tone than with avenging thunderclaps. No battalion would have ventured to march to a ribald song within miles of his headquarters. No colonel within a considerable radius of any spot where there was a likelihood of meeting a staff officer would have allowed his battalion to march, even in the heat of an August day, with tunics undone and shirt buttons loosened and still less would he have relieved his own sweltering discomfort by replacing his stiff army hat with a khaki handkerchief knotted at each corner in the style of a day-tripper to the beach at Southend. It was unfortunate for one particular Battalion marching towards the Somme that it happened to present precisely this appearance as it passed through a village where a senior Ordnance Officer had his headquarters. It was unfortunate that the Commander-in-Chief, concerned about supplies of ammunition for the coming Push, should have been visiting the Ordnance HQ in person – unfortunate too that the Battalion should have been in full vocal flood and rendering a particular chorus compared to which the bawdiest version of Mademoiselle from Armentières might have been considered a suitable serenade for a maiden aunt:
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