Teenage Tommy

by Richard van Emden

  Frequent contact with local civilians ensured memorable moments of humour. On one occasion I watched as some tommies, to the bewilderment of a farmer, tried to obtain eggs by strutting around a farmyard, squawking and dropping lumps of chalk from their behinds. As each man tried to trump the others with a yet better impression, so the others fell about laughing. The impressions were as much about having a good joke as about buying eggs.

  Through miming, most soldiers made it clear what they were after, although that did not guarantee that local people were willing to understand. We were once at a crossroads and an officer had decided that, to site a machine-gun, a trench and breastworks would have to be dug. There was already a ditch to work from, but the two shovels and pick-axe on the Troop packhorse were not enough, so a group of us went to a nearby house. Perhaps the farmer had recently lost some chickens to soldiers, perhaps he did not want a trench dug so close to his house, whatever the reason, he seemed incapable of understanding what we wanted. ‘Shovel, shovel, shuuvelll,’ we explained to accompanying actions. Finally the farmer left us to return a few minutes later with his white cart horse, his ‘cheval’.

  Fighting abated towards the end of November and the Regiment went into winter billets. My memory is hazy of this time, although two very youthful and upbeat letters which I sent to my parents from France found their way to the Sussex Gazette, and were published.

  The first was dated November 3rd and confirmed that:

  ‘I’m still going strong, we are capturing Germans every day and our artillery is playing hell with them. All our cavalry are armed with bayonets now and we are doing infantry work as well as cavalry. I have seen plenty of black chaps from India, they are in the trenches next to us. There are some good fighters, as mad as March hares. Now the Winter is coming on it is a bit nippy lodging at “Mrs Greenfields”. Our Regiment has lost a lot of men. We lost most of them when we charged some German guns among some coal mines. We got covered with coal dust. I was one that came through safely. We were all as black as miners. We hear that Russia is doing well, as well as us.’

  Shortly afterwards, a second letter dated November 16th noted that:

  ‘I’m still alright. You say you were not allowed bonfires on the 5th. We had some awful fires, whole villages on fire and big farm buildings. They were too big to cook the breakfast on. I don’t know what Kaiser Bill thinks General French’s Contemptible Little Army is made of, but it is better than his big army. You would never believe how cheerful the British lads are going about their work whistling or smoking all the time and ever true to the old country.’

  Christmas 1914 has become famous for the fraternisation which took place all the way along the line. This may have been the case, but I had no involvement in it, nor did I hear anything about it, although news of an impromptu Anglo/German truce is supposed to have caused a sensation back at home.

  No matter Where a soldier was that Christmas, he received a little festive cheer in the form of a Christmas tin, the personal gift, we were told, of Queen Mary. The tin contained a picture of the Queen, a packet of tobacco and twenty cigarettes. I wasn’t a big smoker so I kept the contents for a souvenir. The cigarettes were stolen later in the war, but the picture and the tobacco I still own to this day.

  Just before Christmas, Colonel Howell left for England, and I did not see him again until January. This left me at something of a loose end, for on Christmas Day all officers’ servants were ordered to rejoin their respective squadrons for a festive dinner. Normally orderlies had their meals at the Regimental HQ, but it had closed down for that one day, and not having a squadron to go to, I was rather left to my own devices. There was one other man in the same position, so together we made our own makeshift Christmas dinner consisting of a Maconochie (an all-in-one dinner made up of things like beef, butter beans and carrots) and a tin of fruit we had managed to scrounge. It wasn’t quite how my mother had made Christmas dinner, but it was the best, under the circumstances.

  NOTES

  1. Ben heard this story when he was taken as Major Bridges’ horse orderly to the 4th Hussars later that month. The Pursuing Practice entailed a trooper, while riding, running his sword through a man from behind. As he rode past, the trooper retrieved his weapon by twisting his body round in the saddle and withdrawing the blade as the man fell. It was the Pursuing Practice that Harrison had apparently acted out while drunk, ‘galloping’ towards the Hussars’ mess door, and impaling the polished oak with his sword.

  Lieutenant Archibald Harrison’s name appears in the Army List for May 1914 but disappears from June 1914 onwards, perhaps giving some credence to the incident Ben described with the mess room door. His name does appear in the Army Medal Role as a member of the Intelligence Corps, but, rather adding to the mystery, it states that he embarked for France two days after he is supposed to have taken patrols out with the 4th Dragoon Guards on the night of August 21st. Harrison briefly took command of C Squadron after Captain Hornby was wounded in October. He left the Regiment on sick leave on December 14th 1914 and did not return, being transferred to the infantry in 1915.

  2. Captain Fitzgerald was bom and raised at Wexford in Ireland. The son of a wealthy family, he attended Eton College, and joined the 4th Dragoons straight from military college in 1907. At the outbreak of war he had been given a dispensation to marry, and a special ceremony had been held before the Regiment left for France. He had already ridden his luck when, during the battle of Mons, he was slightly wounded by a machine gun bullet which slit his cheek open. He was the first officer in the Regiment to lose his life.

  3. The owner, Madame Loetitia Supply, then thirty six years old, was to face a sad future. Of the three civilians killed in Moulins during the war, two were members of her family, Blanche and Lucien, killed almost certainly by a shell which hit their home. Today their names appear on the village war memorial. The village itself underwent sporadic attack for much of the war, during which both her estaminet, the Café de la Gaîté, and barn were destroyed. The street, the Rue de la Fontaine, was, like most of the village, rebuilt after the war but, perhaps for obvious reasons, Madame Supply’s home was not. Madame Supply continued to live in the village until her death in September 1950 when she was aged nearly seventy three. She now rests in the village cemetery.

  4. During the confusion of the Retreat, both Regiments had been split up into isolated companies, the men following those officers left to lead them. These exhausted soldiers had collapsed in the streets of St Quentin, and slept where they lay, propped against walls or lying on pavements.

  The Dragoons had been acting as rearguard to the Division, covering the infantry’s retreat, but had not expected to find any troops in the town. Arriving, Bridges posted two troops with machine guns to defend the town’s approaches, and sent Lieutenant Harrison to assess the situation in St Quentin. He returned with the news that some 400 to 450 infantrymen were slumped on the cobblestones of the town’s historic square, and all the way down the road to the train station from where the staff of the BEF’s GHQ had left for Noyon on the last train that morning. Many of the men had had no food for two days or more, and had cast away their equipment. Some had been given white wine by friendly locals, and were now drunk; a few had been taken in, two sleeping the sleep of the dead under a couch in a chemist’s back parlour.

  Other than those of the Warwicks and Dublin Fusiliers, there were stragglers from several regiments, and at first few were in a mood to be moved on. ‘Our old man has surrendered to the Germans, and we’ll stick with him. We don’t want any bloody cavalry interfering,’ shouted one. Scarcely one soldier saluted any of the Dragoons’ officers, and one is even recorded as pointing a rifle in Bridges’ direction. Undeterred, Bridges spoke to the Mayor, asking him to requisition all available transport in the town in which to evacuate the troops. Ignoring the Mayor’s protests that the men had already surrendered, Bridges took a copy of the incriminating note signed by Elkington and Mainwaring.

  It was at this p
oint that Bridges had had the idea of a toy band. Striking up with ‘The British Grenadiers’ and ‘Tipperary’, Bridges and his trumpeter walked around the square’s fountain. ‘I stopped playing and made them a short exhortation and told them I was going to take them back to their regiments,’ recalled Bridges.

  Eventually, wrote Osbum, ‘We persuaded one of the colonels to march in front of his men. My recollection is that he looked very pale, entirely dazed, had no Sam Browne belt and leant heavily on his stick.’

  It was after midnight when the long trail of troops finally left the town in thickening fog, Bridges leading the way. As they left, Osburn realised that his map-case was missing and returned ‘to look for it in the now deserted Grande Place. As I sat on my horse alone there, taking a last look round, I heard an ominous sound – the metallic rattle on the cobbles of cavalry entering the town through one of the darkened side streets that led into the Grande Place.’

  The following day, both Lieutenant-Colonels were relieved of their commands and subsequently court martialled on September 11th and 12th, at Chouy. Both were charged with ‘Scandalous Conduct’, the decision of the court being that both were guilty and would be cashiered.

  Losing his battalion, Elkington joined the French Foreign Legion in which he served with distinction, being badly wounded in the leg. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille Militaire by the French and, as a result of his bravery, he was reinstated to his former rank by King George V in August 1916 and awarded a DSO.

  John Ford Elkington was forty eight years old at the outbreak of war. Bom in 1866 in Jamaica, he was educated in Guernsey before passing out of military college in 1885. He joined the Royal Warwickshire Regiment in 1886, serving as a Major in South Africa in 1900 and 1901, where he was awarded the Queen’s South Africa Medal with four clasps. In 1904 he was made Lieutenant-Colonel, a rank he held when he took command of the first battalion in February 1914. He married relatively late in life, in 1908, and had a son the following year. After the war he chose never to wear his medals and walked with a pronounced limp for the rest of his life.

  Mainwaring was two years older than Elkington, and had joined the Dublin Fusiliers in 1885. Like his counterpart, he served with his regiment for the next thirty years, going to South Africa in 1900, and taking command of the 2nd Dublin Fusiliers in March 1912. Unlike Elkington, Mainwaring was reinstated neither during nor after the war. Little is known of the rest of his life except that he retired to Derbyshire and died aged sixty six in 1930.

  The events at St Quentin achieved great notoriety, with a four-verse poem, ‘The Toy Band’ being written by Sir Henry Newbolt, to which music was added by Sir Richard Paget. In 1994 an excellent book, Dishonoured, by Peter T. Scott, was published, giving the most detailed account yet of the events of that day.

  A very young Benjamin (left) in 1900.

  Riding ‘General’ in Danny Park, April 1913.

  Little Dene, Beddingham, near Lewes in Sussex, c. 1912. In the centre is Sidney Clouting, Ben’s cousin, who was killed in a disastrous attack by the 1/5th Sussex on Aubers Ridge, May 9th 1915.

  A raw recruit at Seaforth, Ben poses for a picture in his full dress uniform.

  Captain Charles Beck Hornby (1883–1949), second in command of C Squadron, led the first attack by British troops on continental Europe for 99 years.

  Church Parade, June 1914. Ben is third from the left.

  Stables, May 1914. Left to right

  Rear Row: Perkins, Bell, Unknown, Unknown

  Front Row: Clouting, Sharp, Unknown

  Stables, c. 1914.

  A last picture before leaving Tidworth.

  The consummate soldier, Adrian Carton de Wiart VC (1880-1963), wounded numerous times during the war.

  Lieutenant Pat Fitzgerald (1886–1914). Married as war broke out, he became the first officer of the Regiment to be killed in action, September 13th 1914.

  (Left) Hitherto unidentified picture of a regiment disembarking at Boulogne, featured in ‘The War Illustrated’, but now known to be men of A Squadron, 4th Dragoon Guards, leaving HMT Winifredian.

  Standing right, Pte Thomas Cumber, rescued under fire by Ben during the charge at Audregnies, August 24th 1914, was nevertheless taken prisoner. Photographed at Muncheberg POW camp, 40 miles east of Berlin.

  Madame Supply, right, holding the baby, stands in front of her estaminet and barn. For two days she was to hide Ben and Lt Harrison, the 4th Dragoons’ Intelligence Officer, under the noses of the Germans.

  A farmhouse at Mont Notre Dame, south of the Aisne. Ben and Lt Harrison stayed overnight here in the company of some French Dragoons in September 1914.

  4th Dragoon officers in the trenches at Vlamertinge 1915.

  Left to right, Lt Aylmer, Lt Gallaher, Major Sewell, and Capt McGillycuddy, November 1914.

  Left to right, C Squadron’s Tilney, Frost and Jervis.

  4th Dragoon officers in Querrieu Wood, 1916.

  Captain Hornby at Cerseuil, September 1914.

  Part of a letter written by Capt Hornby to Capt Carton de Wiart in which Ben’s strength of character was mentioned at length.

  The château at Potijze where Ben brought the injured de Wiart, and where he was to return the same night with the body of his friend Frank (Mickey) Lowe.

  The Commonwealth War Graves signpost to Château Lawn Cemetery, where Lowe still rests.

  Frank Lowe’s grave, eighty years after he was killed by a stray bullet while walking on the Zonnebeke Road.

  Queen’s Ward, Graylingwell Hospital, circa July 1915. Ben is on the left, wearing a white shirt and tie.

  Ben, top right, with a group of wounded soldiers, poses for a picture in the landscaped grounds of Graylingwell Hospital, August 1915.

  A newspaper cutting appealing for news on Ben’s cousin, Sidney Clouting, missing since May 9th 1915. No trace of Sid was ever found.

  The newspaper cutting dated July 1916 which blew across a field to Ben while he was waiting for rations at a brigade dump. Incredibly, it featured his father (far left) and his mother (4th right).

  Home leave in 1917 at Croxley Green. The Clouting family moved here in 1916 after the riding accident to Ben’s father.

  Paris Plage, 1917. The two Bens, Ben Clouting (right) with Ben Spooner.

  Were these the soldiers whom Lieutenant Stanley and the men of Ben’s troop met on the Hohenzollern bridge on December 6th 1918?

  The fighting over, A Squadron rides on to the Platz in front of Cologne Cathedral. The 4th (Royal Irish) Dragoon Guards had been the first troops to enter Germany, six days before.

  May 1919, The 50th (Northumbrian) CCS, Huy. Ben, critically ill after an appendix operation, is being taken to a ward to die. He is carried by four German prisoners of war.

  The same place today, off the Rue Grégoire Bodart, Huy. In 1919 the buildings were part of a teacher training college before being taken over as a hospital.

  The opening of the memorial to the first action of the war, August 21st 1939 at Casteau. From left to right, L/Cpl JW Stevens, Unknown, Pte Mawson, Cpl Regan, Pte Rootes, Trumpeter Patterson, Corporal Tilney, Captain Hornby, Pte Clouting. All the men in this picture were either wounded or taken prisoner during the 1914-18 war.

  The lady in the chauffeur-driven car, Louise Donnay de Casteau, (front right). Moments after the BEF’s first encounter with the Germans, she asked Captain Hornby if she might go on duty at Mons.

  The memorial shortly before its unveiling by Major-General Mullens, who commanded the Regiment when it went to France in August 1914.

  Ben during a visit in May 1990.

  Ben looks down the road to the village of Casteau where 1st Troop, C Squadron, engaged the enemy on August 22nd 1914.

  The Menin Gate, Ypres. Ben stands under the names of a few of his Regiment who have no known graves.

  Reading’s Old Contemptibles in the summer of 1966; Ben, as President of the branch, is in the centre. This picture was used on the front cover of ‘The Old Contemptible�
�� magazine, January 1967.

  Later years. Ben in the uniform of a City of London policeman in the 1920s.

  The Old Contemptibles’ final pilgrimage, May 1990: Ben lays a wreath in memory of fallen comrades.

  Enjoying lunch in Ypres with fellow Old Contemptible Archie Stanley (left).

  Where it all started – Ben is filmed next to the house where the first shot was fired.

  31st May 1990: a final parade before boarding the coach home. Standing L to R: William Thompson, Benjamin Clouting, Fred Dixon, Frank Sumpter, Tom Sharpe, Johnny Morris, Joe Armstrong, Victor Holden and Basil Farrer. Sitting L to R, G B Jameson, Bill Humphrey, Archie Stanley. Rear centre is Brigadier GMS Sprake, the then Honorary Secretary of the Old Contemptibles Association and to the right is Laura Parke, widow of Old Contemptible Charlie Parke.