Teenage Tommy

by Richard van Emden

  By no means all the Germans were giving up. The enemy’s rearguard action was tenacious, and often caused grievous casualties, as well-placed machine guns caught infantrymen out in the open, or artillery raked battalions on the move.

  On one night in early October, Jerry gunners caught a battalion of Jocks and a battery of artillery, in the same road at the same time. I rode past the carnage hours afterwards. It was clear that the Germans had been deadly accurate, for there were any number of dead Scotsmen in their kilts sprawled about between shattered guns and dead horses. The debris continued for several hundred yards all down the road, underlining the congestion of traffic that there must have been at the time. At least four guns had been knocked out, lying upside-down or on their sides, with dead gunners and drivers strewn around.

  The shelling had happened on a road just outside a village, through which I had had to pass on my way to discover where the Regiment’s rations were due to be dumped that night. The village had been badly knocked about, leaving everything in chaos. Evidently the place was a major thoroughfare, for troops and artillery were all moving up to keep pace with the German retreat, so I decided it would be easier to make my through the town’s outskirts and found a passage safely through.

  That evening, I returned to the village with the Regiment. The destruction had largely been cleared; only the village, now cloaked in darkness, was crowded with fresh battalions all making their way forward. By this time our Colonel was losing his temper. ‘Can’t anyone get us out of this bloody hole?’ I rode forward to say that I had passed that way in the morning and knew a route around the village. I was told to lead on, and took the Regiment single file along the track and out the other side of the village.

  During the last weeks of the war, I was used as a ground scout. I carried a lance with a pair of fish tail wire cutters, screwed on about a foot below the top of the shaft. The lance was held by a sling attached to the forearm, and was carried with the shaft held tightly under the arm. The tip of the lance could pick barbed or telephone wire and steer it into the cutters, the mere act of riding forward usually being enough to cut the wire. The ground scouts rode ahead, and to a certain extent picked the route the following squadrons would take. When crossing open country, they had to be very circumspect about which wires they broke. Telephone lines which the engineers might have run forward in the night might be carrying vital information, and naturally we feared cutting our own communications.

  On the night of November 10th, we bivouacked in a field not far from Mons, and awaited further orders. The Germans were in full retreat, stopping only to fight the briefest rearguard actions, while their pioneers and engineers worked feverishly to delay our advance. At first light, we moved off a short distance to a road where we dismounted and stood at our horses’ heads, facing the centre of the road. Each side of the road was lined with fully matured poplar trees into which German engineers had drilled, laying explosives. The intention had been to blow them, across the road, but most had either failed to go off or had been defused by our engineers, the explosives being left to protrude from the tree trunks.

  We had received information that some Germans were making a stand near a village called Ath, and that at 2pm the infantry was to make a frontal assault, supported by cavalry. Two regiments of cavalry, we and, I believe, the 18th Hussars, were to attack around Ath’s flanks, cutting off the enemy’s retreat, although our orders were not to worry about Ath itself, but to sweep past and harass any Germans we happened to come across. We were to be guided in the attack by what we found.

  That morning, our Troop officer came round with a map to show us broadly the direction we were to take. At this time we were a few miles away from our target, for while rifle fire was quite distinct, it was nowhere near us. There would be further instructions before the attack went in, but meantime we checked our saddlery and all our equipment before the Regiment moved on again. It was fully light, and we were much nearer the firing line when we halted once again along a hedge-lined road that helped to conceal our presence. I had just begun to re-check my saddlery when I saw an old Douglas motorbike speeding towards us with a despatch rider frantically waving his helmet. As he came closer, I could hear him shouting, ‘It’s all over, boys, there’s an Armistice. It’s all over’. At first I didn’t know what he meant. What was all over? I hadn’t a clue. In fact, what was an Armistice? I’d never heard the word.

  There wasn’t any real excitement or jubilation at the news; naturally we were relieved, and I’m sure a weight lifted from our shoulders, but that was about all. The war everyone had hoped would end, had ended, but so too had a way of life. Now it had apparently dragged to a close, I, for one, felt almost ambivalent. I was unemotional by nature, and my jumbled thoughts, such as I had at 11 o’clock that November morning, went unspoken.

  Immediately after the motorbike had sped away, the order came, ‘All officers to the front!’ (the front being wherever the Colonel was at the time). It was quickly followed by ‘All senior NCOs to the front!’, instructions being relayed through the NCOs to the troops that as of 11am we were to cease all offensive action. It was about 9am by this time, and there was still plenty of gunfire around Ath as it took time for the message to get round. Our sister Regiment, the 7th Dragoon Guards, launched, at the point of the sword, an attack in the last hour of the war. It seems funny that we didn’t know anything about the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, in fact many men didn’t know what the date was; most were concerned only to live day to day.1

  Editor

  On November 11th 1918, the Regimental Diary records that the Brigade halted west of Beloeil, and the Dragoons billeted for the night at Quevan- camps. ‘The men’ it says, ‘were under cover but the horses were out.’

  Ben

  That evening we moved into a field and put the lines down. We were close to a small village, and during the evening some local people came out and brought us wine, which they had no doubt gone to great pains to hide during four years of occupation. I had a drink and joined in some of the light-hearted chat, but there were no particular celebrations, and the men remained quiet and subdued. While we had all lived under the threat of injury or death, there was a common purpose, but all of a sudden the threat had been lifted. At the time I didn’t know what to think, but years later I could recognise that there were some feelings of bitterness which didn’t really go until I had left the army.

  It was a bitterly cold Armistice night. Orders were issued that all our blankets were to be put on the horses and that we were to sleep under our coats. Later, a couple of officers came round. They had got wind that some troopers had pinched their blankets back, their walk-round pre-empting a flurry of activity as several men scrambled to reunite horses with covers. Meanwhile the rest of us kept warm, as we’d often done, by sleeping in groups of three, huddling together on ground sheets under our knee-length warm coats. A local farmer let us help ourselves to straw to pad the ground, and we used our saddles as wind breaks. We finally settled down with our cap comforters pressed down firmly on our heads and our coats pulled over our shoulders. It was an uncomfortable night, we ached with the cold, our legs were stiff, our extremities chilled to the bone. In the morning there was some half-hearted merriment as men stood their frozen coats upright, as testimony to the cold.

  For the next three or four days a phoney war continued, with occasional gunfire, and now and again the explosion of a delayed mine. These mines had been laid before the Armistice and were wired to explode once Jerry had pulled back, destroying crossroads, or other important junctions. At one crossroads we saw how the Germans had placed an eight-inch shell into each of four holes, wiring them together to blow the place to smithereens. The Engineers had got there just in time and disconnected them, leaving the shells sitting idly in their pits, their nose cones peeping above the road.

  Before the Regiment received orders to ride for Germany, we were told to polish and clean everything to pre-war standards, or a
s near as humanly possible. We had no polish, but by cracking up old bricks, of which there was an ample supply, we made brick dust, an abrasive which, when used with a dab of water, could clean steel and polish buttons up a treat. It was the authorities’ plan to show the German people that we were a victorious army, by the high level of smartness.

  It was somewhat ironic that while our equipment and uniforms looked the part, the men wearing them were anything but healthy. Flu, or the ‘parasite of unknown origin’, as it was known, had taken hold of Europe that winter, so that as we rode towards Cologne we began to lose men, all of whom were quickly whisked to hospital. Our farrier was one of the first to drop, leaving the Troop without anyone to tend the horses, should a shoe come loose and need replacing. As luck would have it, the first horse to have problems was mine, so, having no option, I got hold of the farrier’s kit and shoed my own horse, using what knowledge I’d picked up watching others. Evidently my efforts were considered good enough, because within no time at all I was made temporary farrier, and was subsequently assigned to look after another Troop as well. Each evening, it was my job to take the farrier’s kit and walk round checking the horses’ hooves, putting a nail in here and there, so as to avoid disruption when the Squadron was on the move. I continued the job almost until we reached Cologne, when reinforcement shoeing smiths arrived to take over.

  Editor

  Although an occupation of Berlin was seriously considered, there would have been immense practical problems supplying Allied armies stationed hundreds of miles into enemy territory. Such a scheme would have required a massive increase in manpower to guard vital supply lines, so instead the Allies decided to occupy the Rhineland. This region was not only the jewel in the crown of Germany’s industrial power but, with the natural barrier of the mighty river Rhine, was an area easily defendable should hostilities resume.

  In December 1918, the occupying force was to be troops of the 2nd Army, under General Sir Hubert Plumer. At the forefront of the Army, the 4th Dragoons, part of the 1st Cavalry Division, were commanded, by a quirk of fate, by forty-seven-year-old Major-General Richard Mullens, who had led the 4th Dragoons to France in August 1914. The advance guard was to be the 2nd Cavalry Brigade under Brigadier-General A Lawson. He would go ahead of the Army, reaching the Franco-German frontier at the end of the month.

  Ben

  As our Regiment had been first into action back in 1914, we were given the privilege of being the first troops to cross into German territory. As far as I know, the whole British Army stood still on 1st December 1918 while the 4th Dragoon Guards crossed a frost-covered frontier early one morning. We passed through several villages where the inhabitants came out to watch us pass by, including one small town where the Bürgermeister turned out to take the salute.

  Editor

  On December 1st at 5am, the 2nd Cavalry Brigade moved off, crossing the frontier at 9am near Eicherscheid, a town near Malmédy. Orders were given that, as far as possible, men of 1914 should be put in the vanguard of the advance as it crossed into Germany, and according to one war correspondent and author, Ferdinand Tuohy, it was the 4th Dragoon Guards who were the first to cross. By 4th December, the 1st Cavalry Division had reached Duren, approximately twenty miles from Cologne, but pushed on in response to urgent calls from the city’s Mayor, Konrad Adenauer, to arrive and fill the dangerous power vacuum left by the departure of retreating German forces.

  Ben

  On December 6th, we entered Cologne, where we were to stay for the next four months. On that first day, I was part of an advance guard which rode ahead of the main body of Dragoons into the town. One squadron, AI believe, formed up in the square outside the Cathedral, while two troops under the command of 2nd Lieutenant Stanley rode on past the Cathedral to check that the Germans had crossed to the other side of the Rhine – the preliminary dividing line between the two armies.

  The Troop was meant to go to the middle of the magnificent Hohenzollem Bridge, a broad-spanned bridge guarded at both ends by huge stone towers, and wide enough to take both conventional traffic and two railway tracks. Instead, on reaching the middle, Stanley said, ‘Come on, let’s go over and have a look’. At the command of ‘Carry swords’, we rode right over to the far side, whereupon the German sentries turned out and presented arms, Stanley returning the salute before riding forward to speak to the one officer present. We were there some minutes before we about-wheeled and rode back to rejoin the Regiment.

  Editor

  2nd Lieutenant Stanley had been ordered to lead both the 3rd and 4th Troops of C Squadron, and one section from the 2nd Machine Gun Squadron, to take over the bridge. Posting sentries at the western end and positioning a sub-section of machine guns to cover the crossing, Stanley led the two troops over the bridge, only to find a ten-man German guard formed up across the roadway at the other end. Intimating through a mixture of hand signals and broken French that he expected them to leave, Stanley gave the German officer in charge half an hour to remove the detachment. Refusing to move without the authority of the General commanding the Rhine bridges, the officer did agree to inform his superiors of the Dragoons’ presence. Some minutes later, a staff car drew up, and out stepped a much-decorated German General who, on meeting 2nd Lieutenant Stanley, asked if he was aware that the British were not due to cross the bridge until the 12th. At this point a compromise was reached, giving control of two-thirds of the bridge to the British, enabling them, as Stanley later recalled, to ‘keep observation of the Germans while they could not ascertain our movements at the Western end’. A chalk line was drawn across the bridge to signify the divide, while a German officer was ordered to report each sunrise to the British, informing them of when the Germans would withdraw from the eastern third of the bridge.

  Ben

  Before we crossed the Rhine, the Regiment’s horses were taken up to the city zoo, while the Regiment went into billets at the Artillery Depot in Nippes. The following day, December 7th, I was sent with a section of six men to take over a little fort half a dozen miles away. The fort consisted of six anti-aircraft guns, all out of action with their breech blocks taken away. Our orders were to stay there until relieved. We were shown on a map where to go and had little difficulty finding it, although the trooper sent on later with our rations got hopelessly lost. This forced us to improvise, so, taking a break from the monotony of guarding the fort, we nipped off into a neighbouring field of turnips, where we were able to close in on a stray hare. The hare was duly despatched, cooked and served up with a loaf of poor quality bread, obtained from a local shop. This was the main event of an otherwise uneventful stay, and we returned three days later as the Regiment was awaiting permission to cross the Rhine, where it was to move into the vacated cavalry barracks in Deutz, overlooking the river.

  Editor

  The 4th Dragoon Guards unofficially crossed into Deutz on December 11th, a day early, to relieve congestion on the west bank. B squadron subsequently stayed in Deutz while A and C Squadrons returned the following morning to take part in a parade across the river.

  Ben

  It was a dull, overcast day when we assembled on the square in front of the Cathedral to make final preparations for the official crossing of the Hohenzollem Bridge. Shortly before 10am, a bugle call brought us to attention, followed by the order to mount and draw swords. We were in immaculate condition and must have brought home to the crowds of people watching that we were not just a victorious army, but a disciplined one too. As we moved off, the bands struck up with ‘Rule Britannia’, then as the Regiment swung round the Cathedral, I saw General Plumer ready to take the salute standing before a huge Union Jack.

  No sooner had the Regiment crossed the bridge than it rode into Deutz and beyond, fanning out east of the Rhine into a twenty- five-mile-deep de-militarised zone, which the Germans had vacated the day before. The Regiment was billeted in neighbouring villages as units were sent out. For three days I went with ten men, criss-crossing the buffer zone to ensure that
the Germans’ withdrawal was complete. It was a leisurely trip and we did not encounter any problems, returning to stay at our billet, a little pub near Wermelskirchen, north-east of Cologne. After this initial phase was completed, the Regiment rode back to Deutz to take over the vacated cavalry barracks. From here, a troop of cavalry would leave each day to ride around Cologne to ensure all was well and to remind the local population just who was in charge.

  From now until the following June, when the final peace treaty was signed, all army personnel continued to live under the dictates of the Armistice. On our arrival, we were encouraged to walk around in pairs for self-protection, and were told to carry side-arms when out of barracks. We were still at war, and the authorities were keen to keep contact between us and civilians to a minimum. Back in Deutz, the routine of barrack life returned. There was the usual work to be done, guard duty, some troop training and musketry, and inter-regimental and Brigade sports. There were lectures, too, on all sorts of topics, such as health care, horsemanship and post-war reconstruction, while every now and again we had morale-boosting visits from various dignitaries including, on at least two occasions, the Prince of Wales.