Do your balls hang low?
Do they dangle to and fro?
Can you tie them in a knot?
Can You Tie Them In a Bow?
They had reached the fourth line before the full sense of the words got through to the Commander-in-Chief. It got worse, as he listened:
Do they itch when it’s hot?
Do you rest them in a pot?
He crossed to the window and stared in disbelief as the unwitting Battalion shambled past. ‘Just as I thought,’ he said. ‘It’s the rear companies! Fetch my horse!’
The Battalion straggled, easy marching, over almost a mile of road. By the time Sir Douglas Haig had mounted and started to trot up the long column, they had started all over again, this time in harmony, for the beauty of their favourite tune was that it could be sung in parts.
Do you get them in a tangle?
Do you catch them in the mangle?
Do they swing in stormy weather?
Do they tickle with a feather?
One by one, as the marching platoons spotted the unmistakable upright figure of their Commander-in-Chief trotting purposefully past to reach the head of the Battalion, their voices trailed away into embarrassed silence. But the men at the head of the column were still lustily singing.
Do they rattle when you walk?
Do they jingle when you talk?
The Colonel had a fine voice.Riding in front of his Battalion, he was singing louder than any of his men – so loudly that he either failed to notice the falling-off of the merry chorus behind him or, putting it down to fatigue, sang louder than ever to encourage his men across the last lap of the hour’s march. Just as General Haig caught up with him, he had flung back his handkerchiefed head and was bawling in a rousing, oblivious crescendo:
Can you sling them on your shoulder
Like a lousy fucking soldier?
DO YOUR BALLS HANG LOW?
Haig had to shout to make himself heard. ‘I must congratulate you on your voice, Colonel!’
The unfortunate Colonel could only stare back open-mouthed, fumble at his unbuttoned tunic, call the Battalion to march to attention and, as an afterthought, snatch the handkerchief from his head.
‘No, no!’ Haig raised his hand. ‘The men may march easy.’ With the last of his voice the Colonel croaked the command. Haig, on his great black charger, a full hand higher than the Colonel’s horse, trotted beside him and bent down for a private word in the Colone’s ear, but his orderly, riding just behind, heard – and later reported – every word.
‘I like the tune,’ he said, ‘but you must know that in any circumstances those words are inexcusable!’
The discomfited Colonel, having now replaced his hat, managed to salute but before he could stammer an apology Haig was gone, with a final nod of rebuke, trotting back past the chastened Battalion to resume his interrupted business. It was a full five minutes before anyone broke the silence. Then, a wag halfway down the column dared to introduce another song. It was a song beloved by their virtuous Victorian grandmothers and he sang in notes of pure innocence:
After the ball was over…
The Battalion exploded. Those of them who were capable of singing took up the refrain. Even the Colonel had to laugh.
In the summer of 1916 soldiers going on leave discovered that London was wriggling, Latin-style, to the strains of La Cucuracha and dancing soulfully to I ain’t got Nobody… but the song that struck the mood of the moment was Roses of Picardy:
Roses are shining in Picardy,
In the hush of the silvery dew,
Roses are flow’ring in Picardy,
But there’s never a rose like you…
In Picardy itself the song was not unpopular. In the dusky August evenings it echoed tinnily through a thousand barnyards from the gramophones of a thousand sentimental young officers who never tired of listening to it, hands clasped behind their heads as they lay on some makeshift bed, thinking, remembering, dreaming of some real or imagined ‘Rose’ waiting in a world far removed from the smelly discomforts of the real Picardy they now inhabited where the noise of battle grumbled and roared round the horizon. But the romantic appeal of the song was irresistible and it was a smash-hit at every concert.
At more makeshift entertainments, where a clutch of soldiers out of the line sat together in a barn or estaminet, whiling away an evening with talk and stories and with the occasional song to the quavering accompaniment of a mouth organ, a new mythology of song and doggerel was growing up. There was a verse-smith in most battalions and, although their rough and ready efforts were seldom destined to be included in post-war anthologies, the boys liked them and listened intently as long-ago warriors might well have listened to the ‘Odes of Horace’, or a Viking Saga, with the feeling that it was their own history, their own experiences that were being immortalized and, to an extent, honoured.
Recovering from their ordeal at High Wood, the remnants of the Church Lads Brigade were particularly struck by the effort of their particular bard. In a sense he was anonymous, because by the time the verses had been passed round the Battalion and almost every man had scribbled out a copy in his own handwriting, no one could remember who had composed them in the first place:
There’s a Battalion out in France
Its name was spread afar.
And if you want to know its name
It’s the 16th KRR.
They trained for months at Denham
Which made every man quite fit
Then on 16th November
They embarked to do their bit.
The ride it was fairly long
And I’m sure it was no treat.
For the only food that we could get
Was biscuits and bully beef.
Now the first time in the trenches
It was not so very bad,
But on the second of January
A lively time we had.
The shells flew all around us,
Yes, there were many a score!
And the only shelter we could find
Was to lay flat on the floor.
Of course, you know, we lost a few,
Which I am sorry to say,
But we will have our own back
On the Allemands one day.
Since then we’ve seen the trenches,
Yes many and many a time,
And some of our dear comrades
Got buried by a mine.
And then we went into High Wood.
Of that I cannot speak.
We lost the flower of our flock.
It left us sad and weak.
But still we have to carry on,
Of work we do our share
And unless we have an R.E. fatigue
You seldom hear us swear.
Now when the War is finished
And we return once more,
If they take us back to Denham
There will be a treat in store.
But we shall not forget the lads
That we have left behind,
And we all hope they will rest in peace
Where the sun will always shine.
Now here’s good luck to all of us
No matter where we are,
For we know the name will never fade
Of the 16th KRR.
To the Church Lads Brigade, High Wood was just part of the saga of the Battalion’s collective history. But the 6th Wiltshires, with the memory of their ordeal at la Boisselle still searing their minds, wrote a Battle Song, and Roy Bealing, who had the ‘voice’ of his platoon, usually led the singing:
‘Twas on the first day of July,
In the year Nineteen Sixteen
When the Germans held some trenches
And to take them we did mean.
We started with Artillery,
Two thousand guns or more,
And then the lads of the Infantry
Went over with a roar.
And side by side they fought their way
Did those gallant lads of the Infantry
For the Battle of la Boisselle.
High Wood, la Boisselle, like Thiepval, Beaumont Hamel, Serre and Contalmaison, were in the past. Another name had moved into the forefront of the epic of the Somme where, since the beginning of the month, the troops had been pitting the weight of their effort against the citadel of the Germans’ second line at Guillemont.
August. High summer on the Somme, but the sounds of summer were lost behind the warring of the guns. Only one insistent sound vied with the thud of the drumming bombardments – the incessant humming of bluebottles, sated and fat as pigs, preying on the bodies of the dead and hovering above them in black droning swarms, so that in places they seemed to blot out the sky itself.
The bluebottles buzzed everywhere. They infested the trenches. They clung in infuriating clouds around the heads of the men, entered the noses, eyes and ears of soldiers who lay asleep, settled in thousands over sandbags containing rations. Swarms of bluebottles hung permanently above makeshift latrine-saps in a sinister, give-away cloud that was as good as a signpost to any alert sniper who merely had to set his sights beneath them, keep his eyes peeled for the flicker of movement that caused the swarm to disperse momentarily, and squeeze the trigger. An efficient marksman could bag up to a dozen luckless soldiers in the course of one patient day and there was no means of avoiding the danger for, by August, all the troops had diarrhoea. The flies carried the pestilence, alighting on the carrion of the bloated dead, breeding on the decaying flesh and hatching fresh generations to prey in their turn on every crumb of food a soldier ate and to cling and crawl round the rims of tin mugs sticky with the vestiges of a dozen or more brews of strong sweet tea.
In the line a man had precious little chance of washing his face, let alone his mug. In the heat of August, fresh divisions moving up to the line, through the carnage and debris of July, had found the lack of water almost the worst thing to bear. Water-bottles were filled every morning with foul-tasting chlorine-treated water, but they were soon emptied. Later in the month, when sudden thunderstorms turned the shell-holes into stagnant pools, troops in the reserve trenches were tempted to crawl out to augment their meagre water ration. This activity was strictly forbidden and rightly, because gas had permeated the shell-holes and, floating up through the rain-water, it lay in a green, lethal scum on the surface. The troops were well aware of the danger but some, tantalized beyond endurance, were willing to take the risk. The technique was to lower a mess-tin into the water with the upper half clamped tight-shut, to slip it off just far enough to fill the tin with unpolluted water, and replace the lid before lifting it out again. The boys became adept at this trick and there were only a few casualties from stomach upsets and, occasionally, inadvertent gassing.
Signaller W. H. Shaw, No. 12774, 9th Battalion, Royal Welsh Fusiliers, 58th Brigade, 19th Division
I managed to put twelve signallers in hospital when we were out on reserve. Our cook was away for some reason, so I volunteered to do the cooking. I managed to ‘find’ a bag of flour lying near a certain officers’ mess, and some currants and sultanas had come up with the rations, so I decided to give the lads a treat by making a plum duff. We had a bit of sugar and a bit of bacon fat so I mixed it all with the flour and a tin of condensed milk. Then came the question of boiling it. We weren’t short of water but the hand of the N CO, who put the chlorine in it, was so heavy that sometimes it just wasn’t possible to use it. This was one of the times! So I went out scouting and came across a shell-hole filled with lovely clear water. But, it was a well known fact that all water had to be purified and so I filled my big dixie with water and gave the water a good boil up, then I got hold of a clean sandbag, dumped the pudding into it, tied the top well round with string and boiled it up for hours, hoping for the best but, alas, all my precautions were of no avail. The lads thoroughly enjoyed their unexpected treat but, two hours later, they were all groaning and holding their stomachs and the air was blue with them telling me what they thought of my cooking! I was in just as bad a state myself, because we’d all made pigs of ourselves. The Medical Officer was sent for and he took one look at us and packed us off to the nearest First Aid station. What a scene that was! They had to use stomach pumps on the lot of us – and none too soon either. It was gas! A gas shell had made contact with that particular shell-hole, and after our C O had made contact with me, I lost my job as cook!
We were only in hospital for a few days, but, if the lads had carried out what they said they wanted to do to me, I’d have been there for months! But, unpleasant though it was, it was a relief to get out of the line for a bit – even the reserve line. It was only days since I’d been in Mametz Wood when the rations came up and I was standing, holding a loaf of bread in my hands, just about to divide it out, when it was shot to pieces – just crumbled and disappeared! It was a miracle that I wasn’t hit myself, and I suppose the loaf saved me, but it gave me a very nasty turn.
In the early days of August it was the 55th Division which was bearing the brunt of the battle. At the beginning of the month they had moved into trenches in front of Guillemont and it was on Guillemont that the attention of the Command was now focussed. The shattered village of Guillemont, its ruins strengthened and fortified as strongly as any front-line positions of a month before, lay a thousand yards beyond the splintered vestiges of Trones Wood on the road that had once led from Mametz to Combles, with Delville Wood away to the left of Guillemont and the tiny village of Ginchy at the apex of a triangle between them.
The line had changed little since the middle of July and from Serre to Thiepval it had changed not at all since Kitchener’s Army had broken its back against its granite strength on the first day of the battle. A great bite had been gnawed out of the Leipzig Redoubt. The Australians were in tenuous possession of Poziéres village. Contalmaison and the Bazentins had gone. But, beyond them, High Wood held out as obdurately as ever and, despite the valiant efforts of the troops who had gained the greater part of it, a lethal rim still held by the enemy around the edge of Delville Wood stood like a wall of iron between them and the Switch Line. On the road from Delville Wood to Guillemont two unremarkable landmarks of peacetime (a sugar beet factory and, a little further on, the sleepy tramway halt they called Guillemont Station, a lane’s length away from the outskirts of the village) were still bristling defiantly behind thickets of barbed wire – links in the menacing chain of defences that lay in formidable strength beyond the British line.
The British line ended just beyond Guillemont and beyond stood the French, cramped into an uncomfortably narrow echelon. Unless Guillemont fell and Ginchy with it, the French could not move. It was no longer a case of breaking the line, but of breaking the impasse, giving the French room to breathe and preparing the way for a concerted push over a wider front. This was the dearest desire of the French General Joffre. General Fayolles, on the other hand, who commanded the force that was jammed into the bottleneck between Guillemont and the River Somme, was rather more concerned that the British should help to relieve the pressure on his immediate area and the British Commander-in-Chief was on his side.
The first priority, as Haig saw it, was ‘to help the French forward’ by attacking Guillemont and Ginchy in a combined operation, carefully prepared and planned. ‘Preparation’ meant bombardment and, since the 55th Division had moved into the line, its artillery had been ceaselessly pounding the German trenches and the Germans had been retaliating with indiscriminate bombardments of their own. They were directed against the British gun batteries and also against the unfortunate infantry as they waited eight long days for the attack.
Gunner George Worsley, No. 690452, C Bty., 276th Brigade, R.F.A. (2nd West Lancashire Brigade), 55th Divisional Artillery
The night we took over we had a terrible time going up the line. There was a tremendous bombardment going on and we were getting nearer and nearer to it. We had to move into a gu
n position to the right of Trones Wood, alongside the road, with Guillemont just in front and the battery we were taking over from was firing right up to the last minute. Then they pulled out and we pulled in and started firing. We only had five guns to fire with, because even before we started one gun was knocked out. I was in the Signallers’ dugout, so I didn’t see it, but we heard the shell exploding and saw a stretcher being carried past. A little while later, we got a signal through from Dublin Trench. It said Please send down a burial party at once to 1/3 West Lancashire Field Ambulance Regimental Aid Post and it was signed by the Medical Officer of the 277 Brigade, a Major Reilly. It was naïve of him really. But it was his first night in there and he probably didn’t realize the situation. We had no one to spare to send a burial party for one man! When the daylight came, there were bodies all over the place – bloated bodies, they hadn’t been able to clear away. The guns were literally wheel to wheel and we were firing, firing, firing twenty-four hours a day. There were gun lines everywhere – a continuous row of them. There was no end to them – and all of them were firing almost non-stop, right round the clock.
SOMME Page 27