World War I Love Stories

by Gill Paul

  Jessie and Micky outside the schoolhouse in Ardeonaig when he was about three months old. There were just nineteen pupils in the school.

  The baby, officially named Duncan but always referred to by Hugh and Jessie as “Micky,” was born in January 1915. Still the argument raged about where Jessie should live until finally her mother became angry about what she called her daughter’s “persecution” and took a teaching post in a little village called Ardeonaig, where her daughter and grandson would live with her for the next couple of years. The location on Loch Tay was so remote that it took the best part of a day to reach it from Glasgow, making it perfect for keeping the child’s birth secret, though difficult for Hugh and Jessie to meet when he got leave from the army.

  He started his training in Inverness, then in January 1915 went south to Aldershot and Cirencester before being sent over to France in July. Right from the start, Jessie sent regular packages full of his favorite foods from home: oatcakes and butter, eggs—which miraculously arrived “fresh as paint”—and biscuits. She also sent tobacco, although before the war she had frequently nagged him to cut down on his smoking. She got baby Micky to scribble in one letter and Hugh replied, “He’s a remarkable writer for his age, ain’t he?”

  Initially, Hugh’s battalion of the Cameron Highlanders were digging trenches, but as early as September 25, 1915, at the Battle of Loos, they saw their first action, about which Hugh wrote home, “Hell can hold no hotter corner. For hours we held that damned line against constant counter attack, and ceaseless enfilade fire, and always one was waiting one’s turn to be hit.” The Scotsmen acquitted themselves admirably, securing the town of Loos and a hill known as Hill 70, though at great cost: 6,500 men died from the 15th Scottish Division, with Hugh being the only sergeant left in his company. In his battalion there were 75 percent casualties: he had lost almost all his army friends while, he wrote, “All I got was a bullet thro’ my sleeve and a bit of shrapnel ripping my hose-top.” (Hugh wore a kilt and the hose-top was the top of his socks, which were folded double just below the knee.)

  Hugh with his two-year-old son during a brief period of home leave in September 1917. “Love to my own dear wee sonnie boy,” he wrote afterward.

  That autumn, Hugh was sent home to Scotland on sick leave with a nasty case of recurring boils, which he described as “an ideal malady for a person of my sunny disposition” because “they don’t give me the least pain.” He was tasked with drafting new recruits over the course of 1916 and he also did some preaching with the United Free Church, but best of all he was able to spend time with Jessie and their son. Gradually, they were letting people know about their marriage and parenthood, and even visited her sister in Bristol together in October 1916. Hugh could have seen out the rest of the war from Scotland, but he complained of feeling “tame-catty” (cowardly) and anxious to get back to the Front to do his bit. Despite his love for Jessie—“I take spells of desperate longing to see you, Jess, and hold you in my arms and kiss you till you cry for mercy”—he pushed for a commission to return to France, and it came through in late 1916 when he learned he would be joining the 5th Battalion of the Cameron Highlanders. In February 1917, he was once more back at the Western Front.

  LIFE AT THE FRONT

  Troops were sent to the front line in rotation, so most men spent just four to six days firing and being fired upon before they were sent back behind the lines for a period of “rest” (which in practice might mean road building or other manual work). Hugh complained bitterly when his unit was stuck at the Front for eight days because someone forgot to relieve them. Sleep was difficult in the trenches due to the noise and discomfort, and water for washing was in short supply. There was usually a metal brazier supplying heat and a bucket or nearby shell hole served as a toilet. Rations were barely edible by the time they reached the men and the British complained bitterly about the tins of “bully beef” that were their standard fare, preferring “Maconochie’s,” a mixture of meat and root vegetables. When they ventured across no-man’s-land during offensives, they found that German trenches tended to be dug deeper and had more home comforts than the British and French ones.

  Sandbags and planks shore up the earth in this basic trench, c. 1916.

  From Arras to Passchendaele

  Hugh soon got back into the rhythm of time in the trenches under heavy shellfire followed by rest periods behind the lines. He wrote about taking part in a game of bridge one afternoon when suddenly a shell came through their billet, commenting wryly that “somehow the game lost its interest after that.” In April, his battalion got through the Battle of Arras with only 85 losses, but with typical understatement, he described France as “an entirely unhealthy residential area.” He took a course to learn about the new Lewis gun, a machine gun developed in the US, and in June was promoted to commander of his company, an honor he glossed over in his letters. As summer progressed, depression took hold of him and he admitted to Jessie that he had “several times resigned myself to a crown and a harp at the toute de suite” (in other words, to death).

  Two soldiers of the Cameron Highlanders using a Maxim gun, a new type of machine gun.

  In September 1917, Hugh’s spirits were lifted immeasurably by a brief period of home leave, which he described as a time of “infinite tenderness” and “just like a bit of heaven all the time.” Jessie replied: “I’m glad it was so happy for you, dear, for that is what I wanted it to be . . . and you are to have a whole long lifetime of it.”

  When Hugh got back across the Channel, his battalion had moved into Belgium, near Ypres, where the ground was waterlogged by heavy rain. “This kind of thing makes moving about in the bogs and shell-holes … vastly unpleasant,” he commented. His battalion was to be part of a big Allied push in this region and he seemed to have a sense of foreboding when he wrote of the “howling gale with lashing unceasing rain.” On the night of October 12, as part of the Battle of Passchendaele, his men went over the top into no-man’s-land and in the chaos of battle Hugh was wounded in the left thigh. He was carried from the field and two days later was taken by train to a hospital in Le Tréport on the Normandy coast.

  Unaware of Hugh’s injury, Jessie kept writing to him regularly until October 18, when she received a telegram from the War Office informing her that he had “gunshot wound left thigh severe,” followed by a letter from him in which he makes light of the injury. However, she soon realized it could be more serious than he was letting on and traveled across to Le Tréport to be with him, leaving Micky in Ardeonaig with her mother. She found Hugh delirious with fever in his hospital bed and needing morphine in order to sleep. He had difficulty eating and soon grew very weak, but she wrote optimistically to her mother that he was “fighting well” and that “every day that passes will bring him nearer safety.”

  “… several times I have resigned myself to a crown and a harp at the toute de suite …”

  The Battle of Passchendaele, or Third Battle of Ypres, from July 31 to November 10, 1917, cost both sides dearly and served no real tactical purpose. Here stretcher-bearers struggle in the deep mud.

  But it was not to be. On November 12, Hugh died, probably as a result of gas gangrene, a deadly form of gangrene that causes gas to be produced in infected tissues. Jessie was by his side right until the end, and she was there when he was buried in a military cemetery near the hospital with a wooden cross to mark his grave. One of the nurses who had tended him was distraught and wrote to Jessie that in ten years of nursing, “Never have I been more grieved and sadder than I am now about your own dear boy.” Her father wrote, “Our hearts are sore for you my dear in your great grief, but you will have the memory with you always that your dear one did his duty nobly and died a hero’s death.” When Jessie got back to Scotland she was given a package of the last eight letters she had written to him marked “undelivered,” along with some of his personal possessions, including a tiny suede wallet in which he had kept a photograph of her and his son at Ardeonaig.
/>   MEDICAL FACILITIES IN FRANCE

  Medics at regimental aid posts just behind the front line could perform first aid, but the seriously wounded had to be taken by field ambulance to a casualty clearing station, normally about 9 miles behind the lines. There patients were assessed in a reception area, and those who were severely wounded and suffering from shock were treated in a resuscitation area, where they were placed in heated beds and given blood transfusions to prepare them for surgery. It was found that the best way to prevent fatal infections and gas gangrene in wounds was cutting out all dead and injured tissue within 36 hours, but this was not always possible. The bacilli that caused gangrene were pervasive in the muddy soil and on the shell fragments within wounds, and could proliferate even after amputation of the affected limb. Patients who required longer-term care were sent to general hospitals that were also accessible on the French railway network, such as the one in Le Tréport where Hugh was treated. If they’d got a “blighty” (the colloquial term for a wound that earned them a period of recuperative leave at home), soldiers would be shipped back to a military hospital in the UK as soon as they were well enough to travel.

  The telegram officially informing Jessie of Hugh’s death.

  Jessie’s mother brought little Micky, who was now almost three years old, back to Glasgow where he would be Jessie’s “comfort and her shield” in the coming years, while she was still in deep mourning for the loss of the love of her life. The young boy flourished at school and was on track for a great future, but then the unthinkable happened when in 1931 he died at the age of sixteen after a short illness. Jessie never remarried but moved in with her sister, Dine, and devoted her life to working for the church and sometimes helping out in the school.

  Though Jessie and Hugh had only had a relatively short time as husband and wife, their love was deep and she must have taken comfort during her grief in all the wonderful love letters Hugh had written her between July 10, 1911 and October 19, 1917. In an early one he wrote, “I wish you could hand over your toothache to me. I would positively enjoy having it, if I knew it would save you pain.” In that last letter, as he lay in his hospital bed seriously wounded, he concluded, “This morning the world looks very beautiful, and full of joy to me … All my love, precious, to you and my darling boy. Yours, Hugh.”

  Jessie and her son Micky shortly before his death in 1931. He attended the High School of Glasgow, where he was reported to be a lively character with much potential.

  “All my love, precious, to you and my darling boy.”

  Percy & Dorothy

  SMYTHE

  Married: June 7, 1919

  Percy received an ANZAC Gallipoli medallion, issued to all the Australian and New Zealand troops who served there between the landing in April 1915 and the evacuation in January 1916.

  Percy Ellesmere Smythe

  AUSTRALIAN

  February 5, 1893

  Rank & regiment: Lieutenant, 24th Battalion Australian Imperial Forces

  Dorothy Nellie Jewell

  British

  September 18, 1899

  The Smythe brothers, from left to right: Vern, Bert, Percy, and Viv. All four would serve but only three would return.

  Percy decided he wanted to marry Dorothy within three weeks of their first meeting, but they faced strong opposition from her family, who were determined to stop her from emigrating to the other side of the world.

  P ercy grew up in a large family of one older brother, three sisters, and four younger brothers, in the little outback town of Jerilderie, New South Wales, Australia, where their father worked as a bootmaker. Money was tight, so the boys left school early to work but continued to take lessons from their grandfather in the evenings. Percy enjoyed sketching and writing and in April 1906, at the age of thirteen, he won a silver medal for one of his poems. When war was declared in 1914, the four oldest boys all enlisted in the Australian Imperial Forces. Percy was turned down at first because his chest measurement was an inch and a half too small (34 inches was the minimum). Then he saw an ad in the paper for Snowy Baker’s Physical Culture School and within a week the exercises they prescribed had increased his chest to the requisite size, enabling him to enlist and begin his training in May 1915.

  His brothers, Bert and Vern, were present at the landing of Australian troops in Gallipoli, but Percy didn’t set sail till July. His mother came to see him off and he shed a few tears as the ship pulled away, wondering whether all of his brothers would return safely. His company sailed up the Suez Canal and stopped in Gallipoli, where he had his first taste of life in the firing line “Lying there with my head to the ground it sounded for all the world like a saucepan-full of porridge boiling very quickly,” he wrote in the diary he would keep throughout the war years. Conditions were poor, with decaying corpses left on the ground and maggots crawling everywhere, and he soon succumbed to pneumonia, which had him laid up in a Maltese hospital for three months to regain his strength. By 1916, he was back on duty in Egypt and then Northern France, and he whiled away the time in the trenches writing stories, which he sent off to magazines and literary agencies (with no immediate success), and drawing sketches of the scenes around him. In July, he was caught up in the fierce battle at Pozières, when Australian forces captured a crucial ridge but suffered heavy losses in the process. He was buried in a dugout after one round of heavy shelling and had to be rescued by comrades.

  ANZAC troops landed on the Gallipoli peninsula to try to drive out Turkish troops guarding the Dardanelles straits, but the resistance was too strong and they failed to break out of their beachheads.

  Percy’s drawing at Corbie Abbey in Picardy, France, from August 1915. He enjoyed sketching churches, gardens, and battlefield scenes.

  On Christmas Eve 1916, his chest still weak, Percy caught bronchitis and was sent to England to recuperate. He was still there in May 1917 when he got word that his older brother Bert had been killed in the trenches east of Bullecourt. His strong religious faith helped him to accept it as God’s will, but he was still moved to tears a couple of weeks later when the mail brought him a letter from Bert with a gift of seven shillings “in case he was short.”

  On August 23, 1917, Percy met a girl named Dorothy Jewell while waiting at a train station in Birmingham and they fell into conversation. She told him she worked for the Canteen Board at Ludgershall, providing meals for servicemen, and before she left he had persuaded her to go on a date with him three days later. In his diary, he described her as “a bonnie little lass, lively and innocent”—but it didn’t stop him going out on a date with someone else the next day. It seems Percy had always had an eye for the ladies. He was in correspondence with some girls in Australia who seemed interested in him; there was also a nurse in the hospital in Malta who had taken a liking to him; plus a couple of “delightful young flappers” in France; and not forgetting at least two other girls he’d kissed while in Birmingham. But Dorothy was different—“roguish, loving and lovable”—and within three weeks of meeting her Percy had decided he was going to propose. It wasn’t quite love at first sight, but it wasn’t far off.

  CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS

  One of Percy’s religious friends, Jack Elliott, was fiercely opposed to the war, claiming that it was at odds with Christian values, but Percy wrote, “He only sees the wickedness of all this slaughter, without considering all the righteous self-sacrifice and suffering that has taken place.” Those who refused to fight because of their beliefs were known as conscientious objectors or “conchies.” Some objected on political grounds, arguing that Germany was not the enemy and that there were different ways to solve the problems between the countries; for Quakers and Jehovah’s Witnesses, war was against their religion; and pacifists were against war in general. After the draft was introduced, in most countries conscientious objectors had to appear before tribunals explaining their reasons for refusing to fight, and they were frequently ordered to do war work on the home front or behind the lines; those who refused might b
e jailed. Public opinion was strongly against conchies; they were often handed white feathers—symbolizing cowardice—when out in public.

  The Jewell Family

  Dorothy’s father was very strict and, rather than sneak around behind his back, Percy approached him directly and asked permission to go out with his daughter. To his surprise, the answer was a firm no. Mr Jewell said that at seventeen she was too young and, anyway, she was already corresponding with another soldier by the name of George Pike. Percy was undeterred—he wrote in his diary that she was “a dear little girl, with auburn hair and grey eyes full of mirth”—and Dorothy liked him enough to risk her father’s wrath. Together they managed to escape his watchful eye and go for long walks or bicycle rides in the countryside, or attend church together, where Percy was delighted to hear that she had a pretty singing voice. On September 15, they had a frivolous conversation in which Dorothy declared that she would not get married before the age of 25, while Percy tried to persuade her that 19 was a better age. They tossed a coin—“two heads for 23, two tails for 19, and one of each for 21, and 21 won the toss.” But there were still two obstacles in their way: her father and the war.