One afternoon, Holmes came to see me. De Wiart was worried that the dark mare – Nancy – had come down with sunstroke, and he wanted me to pay special attention to her. It was important to get her out of the sun, and so for several days I looked after her in the remains of a house on the outskirts of Arras. The house had lost its roof, but had just enough of the ground floor ceiling left to afford cover. Discovering an old bath tub, I filled it with water from a shallow well nearby, and on the orders of a veterinary officer periodically bathed Nancy’s head to get her temperature down. Pushing her head down between her front legs, I used a bit of old sacking to squeeze the water over her, just enough to keep her head cool.
There was an open-air swimming pool quite close to where I was. It still had water in it, and several men from Brigade Headquarters used to go down and have a swim, together with several goldfish which had somehow found their way into the pool. An unofficial sports day was organised on one occasion, with prizes being awarded for the different races. The high board was also still in position, and an impromptu diving contest was held, won by one of the officers.
When I wasn’t at the pool, I was back at the house looking after Nancy. Standing in the doorway one morning, I noticed a cart coming up the road towards my house, driven, curiously enough, by a gendarme, with an elderly Frenchman sitting next to him. Stopping at my house, the gendarme climbed down and began speaking some incomprehensible French at me, pulling various papers from his pocket as he spoke. I didn’t know what he wanted, but I guessed the papers had something to do with the house, for they clearly wished to go in. Pushing past, they went to move some loose floor boards in one comer of the house, which I had deliberately placed over a cellar trap-door in case it gave way under Nancy’s weight.
Not knowing what they wanted, I became annoyed, telling them that the horse was ’très malade’ and should not be disturbed. But both men ignored what I said, and carried on scurrying around until they had got into the cellar, from which they reappeared moments later clutching several bottles of wine. Had any soldiers known of this treasure trove, the cellar would have been stripped bare long ago, and I now felt doubly annoyed at missing out on such a hoard. Doubtless, the owner wanted to secure his wines before he lost everything to the war, and was clearly intent on filling his wagon with as much wine as his tired grey horse could be expected to pull. I watched as they made endless trips to the cellar, before the old man handed me the last four bottles and pushed off, leaving me to replace the floorboards!
At Brigade HQ, we could expect to receive rations roughly every three days, although quite what food might arrive was another matter. The strangest that a group of eight of us received, as a two-day ration, was a whole 561b cheese, a tin of biscuits, and some tins of Tickler’s Plum Jam. Quite what we were supposed to do with a whole cheese, none of us knew, until one of the corporals suggested we made toasted cheese. Putting a dixie over a fire, we began to chop the cheese into it, alternatively adding water to make it more runny and bran to thicken it. All we ended up with was an unpleasant, gooey mess which we spooned onto the biscuits, and ate with a dollop of the Tickler’s jam.
Tickler’s was the worst of the various jams available, because it tasted of paraffin. The best was Colonial Conserve, but most of that seemed to vanish into the officers’ mess long before we saw it. Tins of corned beef were also very common. Like the jams, they varied greatly in quality; the worst of them, on a hot day, could literally be poured out of the can, being almost entirely liquid fat. Actually pleasant to eat were the circular loaves of white bread, cut across the top so that they broke more easily. Unfortunately, they were too often put into sacks straight after baking, and were consequently pretty flat when they came out again.
To supplement our diet, volunteers walked to the nearest YMCA marquee, although this might be ten miles away. If the sergeant in charge gave his permission, the lads pooled what money they had on them before one or more volunteers, a couple of horses’ nose bags in hand, started the long but usually pleasant walk. The idea was to go and fetch whatever was available, tins of fruit, chocolate, cigarettes, tins of Capstan tobacco, and to share out the proceeds equally on return. As these trips made a change from the routine of life at Headquarters, I volunteered many times and on one of these trips actually met an old school friend, Will Sherlock.
It was an odd meeting, for we were both quite alone on a long straight road, in fact we had walked towards each other for a full ten minutes before a hand shot out and a voice shouted, ‘Ben Clouting!’ I looked closely. ‘Will Sherlock! My goodness!’ We had grown up together and been to the same school at Beddingham. His parents had been farm workers who lived within a mile of my family, so I had seen a lot of him. He had joined the Artillery and was out on an errand for the battery. We stopped and had a natter, and talked about the past and what had happened to friends, and then we parted and I never saw or heard of him again, not even to know if he survived the war.
Of all the creatures an outside life brought a soldier into contact with, lice were the most hated and rats the most loathed. Lice had been with us since the Mons Retreat, when the discovery that I was infested by them had a great effect on me. We’d never been warned about them before the war, indeed, I had never seen them but I knew what they were. Smaller than ants, they were white fat things like little grubs and laid their eggs wherever there was body hair, sticking on before spreading out into all one’s clothes. Where they originally came from I never knew, some said from straw, but all I know is that for three or four days I had become frantic to get rid of them. I did not think I could tell anyone; I felt embarrassed and ashamed. I dumped my underpants in the hope that that would help, but of course it made no difference at all. Little did I know that everyone else was just as lousy. No one said anything at first, but then in talk the truth came out.
From that time onwards, we all suffered from interminable itching as these creatures roamed around our clothes, leaving blotchy red bite marks wherever they stopped to feast. To get rid of them, a burning candle was run up and down the seams, killing off most of the tiny white eggs as well as the live lice; alternatively, we cracked them between our thumb nails.
Every now and again, we were given baths in brewery vats, where a ladder was used to climb down into three or four feet of water, heated by a steam pipe. After little more than a couple of minutes, we would be ordered out to be rinsed off with a cold bucket of water before being reunited with our clothes. These had been taken away to be deloused using hot air, but this treatment provided only temporary relief and we were soon lousy again. In 1916, my parents had sent me a green shaving-type stick which boldly – and inaccurately – claimed to cure the problem. However, miracle cures aside, only boiling our clothes seemed to get rid of the lice.
By 1917, we had got hold of square biscuit tins in which to boil our underclothes, but we had to be careful on two counts. The first was, if the unit was forced to move unexpectedly. This happened only once, but it proved costly. For having hastily rolled up my wet clothes, I shoved them into my saddle bag, only to discover later than the leather of the saddle had stained and mottled my shirt. The second was, that we had to make sure there was a good supply of water, for otherwise the tin’s soldered edges would melt on the open fire. However, if all was well we boiled our cotton underpants and flannelette shirts (known as grey-backs) before pegging them out to dry, finally, although not indefinitely, lice-free.
It was perhaps while our clothes were drying that we would join in one of the many organised ratting expeditions. Soldiers’ attitudes to the rats differed greatly. Some hated them, and never got used to their loathsome presence. Others, especially those from the countryside, like myself, or those who had worked on farms, were not particularly bothered by them. During the period I had been in the trenches in 1915, there had been an enormous number of rats which ran along the top of the trenches, or swam, snout above the water, through the sodden front and support lines. These rats could be the size
of small cats, for there were any number of dead bodies near the lines on which to feed.
That they ate the dead bodies was only natural, but it hardly endeared them to the men. This explained why ratting was such a popular pastime with officers’ servants and transport men alike. Ratting took place either around deserted farmhouses, or among holes in a hedgerow. A whole afternoon could be taken up, packing cordite into the holes before the rats were smoked out in their dozens. Earlier in the war, ratting had been something of a laborious exercise, as cartridge cases were emptied from hundreds of .202 bullets to get enough cordite to prove effective. By 1917, when more shells were available, it was possible to get hold of a shell case, or better still, the cordite that was packed separately to fire the big guns.
Howitzer cordite gave off a nasty green gas and was packed into a hole from which a trail of cordite was drawn. Once the trail was lit, a clod of earth was quickly packed around the cordite in the hole, forcing the fumes down the tunnels and the rats out. There was a great deal of excitement as we laid into the rats with sticks and clubs, scattering them squealing in all directions, as we killed just as many as we possibly could.
Since the outbreak of war I had had just one leave, those seven days at my parents’ home after my discharge from hospital. However, in August 1917 I was given a three-day pass to England. It was not a long leave by any standards, but I was delighted to get the chance to go home, and I was soon on my way down the line to catch a troop train to the channel ports. The train was packed with soldiers, most exhausted, all filthy, but to a man, glad to be going home and in good spirits. As the train trundled its way through the French countryside, a rumour filtered through to us that there was a nurse aboard and that she was being sent home because she was pregnant. Whether there was any truth in this, heaven only knows, but the men began musing as to whether she would get a wound stripe, and the baby, a blue chevron for being on active service.
It had taken a long time for my father to recover from his injury in 1916. For several months, my parents had lived with an aunt of mine in Twickenham, where dad had convalesced until well enough to take on light work at Croxley Green. He was looking after a pony, and in exchange, they were allowed to live in ‘Elmcote’ cottage, a house belonging to a soldier on duty in France. It was really an act of kindness, the house being rented on the understanding that, when the soldier returned, they would move out.
As a three-day pass began and ended with the Transport Officer at Dover, I was anxious to get home as soon as the brief formalities were over. Once past the officer, I had to make my way to London, where I took the Bakerloo Line to Watford. Armed with my parents’ new address, I finally arrived at Croxley Green station a little after 2am, where a taxi driver patriotically gave me a free lift home.
My father was very disgruntled at being woken up by my knock, leaning out of the window to discover what on earth was going on. ‘It’s our Ben, it’s our Ben!’ I heard my sisters shouting, followed by a racing of feet as they arrived at the door, candle in hand. Nobody went to bed that night; the whole family was together and we sat and just talked and talked.
The next day, I outlined where I had been and what I'd seen, and showed them those souvenirs I had brought home, including the newspaper picture of my parents. They had bought the home issue of The Daily Mirror for several weeks in the expectation of seeing it, but it was never published in the UK.
In no time at all I was on my way again. Everybody put a brave face on it, and rather than a sad farewell at the station, I left my family at the front gate. To hide her fears, my mother became almost jolly, following me out of the house, while pretending to blow a trumpet and singing ‘Come to the Zulu war, boys.’ I had sung it as a lad, when I had played soldiers with my red-tipped sword. This was my send-off, and, after I had gone, my mother went inside, and cried as if her heart was absolutely broken. It was days before she got over it for, as I learnt later, she was not only distraught at my going but felt that by singing that song, she was in effect sending me off to be killed. I had already been wounded twice, and both my parents felt that sooner or later I would get hit again.
I headed back to Belgium, to Ypres, where the battle for Passchendaele was in full swing. The battle, 3rd Ypres as it was also known, was a fiasco. In the whole war, I never saw anything or anywhere worse than the wasteland through which the infantry had to fight. It was desolate but for the tree stumps where a wood once grew or the few bricks where a building had been, and sometimes the hulks of tanks, jammed deep in the mud, wrecked by enemy fire.
The first tank I had seen was soon after their first use during the Somme Battle the previous September. At that time, prior to their attack, the roads on which they were to drive had been taped off and put out of bounds. Only later did we hear fantastic stories about what they could do, and I wondered why they had not been more successful. To my mind, they looked unwieldy, with the wheels at the back to help steer and the little turrets on each side. I had always been grateful not to have served in them, and up at Ypres it was possible to get a good look inside. They were cramped death traps. The tanks I saw were generally burnt out and, on more than one occasion, I saw the grisly remains of their crews fried inside. These tanks had the smallest of trap doors to get in and out through, and it must have been a ghastly end when the tank was knocked out and the crew was unable to escape.
As far as the eye could see, everything was devastated, the only signs of human habitation being the endless miles of duckboards that traversed the battlefield. To step off the duckboards was to risk death, for most of the shell holes lay lip to lip, full of mud or contaminated water. As men had literally drowned in the quagmire, wire netting was spread over the duckboards, to help soldiers keep their footing. I used these duckboards during September and October 1917, as I crossed and re-crossed the battlefield, taking rations to any of the Brigade’s beleaguered battalions in the front line. We used mules to make the journey, picking them up from the divisional dump where they had either been allocated to take up the usual rations of bully beef and biscuits, or to carry the most important cargo, water. Water was taken up in old petrol cans, into which we dropped a lighted match to burn off any excess fuel, before swilling them out and filling them up. The cans held two gallons of water, four cans being hung on each side of a mule. Every can weighed some twenty pounds, so that a fully-laden mule was expected to carry eight cans, or 160 pounds of water. We would go up the line in the afternoon, so that we would arrive near the front at twilight, this being anything up to two miles from the actual battle line. Mules were co-operative creatures and would go where horses couldn’t but the ground was so pitted that we could only travel so far before passage became impossible. Normally we headed for a pre-determined spot, to be met by the Regiment’s Quartermaster with his ration party from the line. He would set up a post, perhaps with some camouflage netting hung up on tree stumps, so that when we arrived we could off-load the mules under cover, before picking up the empty cans and beginning our journey back. His ration party then lugged the Battalion’s food and water the rest of the way.
Slogging our way up, we would pass other parties of one sort or another, coming down parallel tracks or squeezing past on our own. We rarely stopped, other than to pass on any useful tips, preferring to press on as quickly as possible so we could begin our way back correspondingly early.
Yet there is one image that has stuck in my mind, and if I could paint, I would paint it today. It would be of a soldier with his right arm blown off, a piece of dressing pinned across his wound, leading another man who had been blinded. The two were on a parallel line of duckboards to ours, the blinded man, bandages draped across his eyes, walking behind. He was holding onto his comrade’s left shoulder as he was led back down the line, and it was unbelievably pathetic. As such, it was not an abnormal sight, indeed it didn’t even begin to turn my stomach. Yet it was a moment somehow framed in time, and I have never forgotten it.
Most of us were quite callous
by that time; the dead were simply the unlucky ones. Death was one of those things, and if it came to burying a man, the act of handling him meant nothing, it was just a thing you did out of humanity. There was no shortage of shell holes in which to bury the dead, making it quite easy to roll them down into a hole with little ceremony, and cover them up. They were not you, that was the important thing, and although that sounds callous, it did breed an unbelievable comradeship amongst the living. Throughout my army life, I never really had a bosom pal, and if anything, was something of a loner. Yet even I felt a comradeship then that I never experienced again, and it was the one thing I missed more than anything else after the war.
Those trips up the line never became any easier; they were always difficult and hazardous. Exposed and vulnerable on the duckboards, it was not hard to feel that life was very tenuous at times. Once, late in the afternoon, we felt sure the Germans had seen our small column, for although any sudden shelling felt quite personal, there seemed no other reason why they should send over two batches of shells, ‘coal boxes’, or ‘Jack Johnsons’ as they were also known. There were ten of us, each leading a mule in single file, when they began landing all around us, between sixty and eighty yards away. They didn’t land all at once but in two salvoes of four, with the range near enough dead right. If they could see us, then it needed just a slight readjustment and we could be wiped out in one go. There was no cover in front, so I shouted that we should turn and chase back to a small mound we had passed. I had barely got the words out when the second salvo come over, throwing earth over twenty feet into the air. There was a terrific crash followed by a black cloud of smoke. I was frightened, bloody frightened. My self-control drained away and I found myself muttering, ‘Oh God, help me, please God, help me’. I could visualise the next round landing in the middle of us, and there we were, trying to turn heavily-laden mules around. Time seemed to freeze, but in the end we all reached the comparative safety of the knoll and there we waited until the Germans laid off. We had been lucky. ‘Coal boxes’ could cause awful casualties, but the mud was so thick that the shells were ploughing deep into the ground, severely reducing their effectiveness.
Teenage Tommy Page 19