Last Man Standing

by Richard van Emden

  The Chemical Works at Roeux before the Arras offensive.

  The same ground after the April attack with the Chemical Works almost obliterated.

  May 22nd 1917

  Dear all

  I am quite all right. This open warfare is very funny though.

  We received instructions to capture a certain trench last Wednesday night [16th May]. The artillery put up a barrage and we went over partly through little bits of trench and partly over the top. When we got there we found that the trench was already held by our own men.

  The Boche put up three lines of ‘crump’ barrage and I had about the worst hour going through that, that I’ve ever had. I was partly buried and very slightly wounded. One piece in the hand and one in the leg.

  We held the line for 5 days and have just come out. The Germans were on our right and left flanks as it was a very advanced position. One night they assembled for a counter-attack. Our artillery smashed them up. There are hundreds of dead lying about. The trenches are blocked with them in many places and the stench is terrible. There are scores of wounded Boche lying about. We got some collected who had been lying out wounded for 10 days.

  Goodness knows how they lived. Of course most of them were too far gone.

  I found some of ours as well who had lain out for 4 or 5 days.

  There is no more news. We are in reserve at present in the open.

  Love Norman xx

  Norman

  Shelling was constant as we made our way towards the front line. I know I was blown off my feet by a small shell on one occasion. The explosion also caught my bearer, Simpson, who landed on top of me.

  When we entered the trench it had been extremely battered. I remember having to climb out of the communication trench to let the troops who had been fighting pass by while we lay on top. The weather had been bad, as I remember, and at several places arms and bottoms of corpses were sticking out of the communication trench. In the support trench the men had tried to repair the line too, and, as the mud had begun to dry out, so bits and pieces were sticking out of the wall. A feature of Roeux was the Chemical Works and another was the cemetery. This had been blown to pieces and a lot of graves churned up, which was a terrible sight. There were dead all over the place, both Germans and our own men, from the attacks and counter attacks that had been going on for over a month.

  Of the attack itself, it was something of an abortive affair, and in the end the fighting we expected didn’t materialise. We didn’t know that then of course, and, as we waited to go, our chances of living, we felt, were cut down to minutes and seconds. It was dark and the shelling was merciless, although their impact was greatly reduced by the soft ground. It meant, however, that all over the battlefield at Roeux there were dud shells; the place was simply littered with them, and bits of equipment, and dying men.

  A remarkable image of a 5.9 inch German shell exploding close to Norman.

  We went over the top and advanced, quietly at first, using the dark to conceal our presence, and that is all I recall, except for one thing. As we went forward I remember Captain [Claude Hamilton] Jack Harris waving for me to come on, and I ran forward and flopped on the ground beside him. We were still being heavily shelled at the time and I did a very silly thing. I took my tin helmet and I rolled it, like Charlie Chaplin used to do with his bowler hat, and put it back on again. That’s the way I reported to Captain Harris, with a little joke like that.

  A trench map carried by Norman during the fighting around Roeux in May 1917. The shaded area is original dirt from the battlefield.

  We dug in shortly afterwards, taking over from the Argylls, and my friend Jock Henderson, of course, although I didn’t see him. We were in the support trench, Corona Trench, and much work had to be done to try and create some semblance of order as the line had been almost obliterated. There was an overwhelming stench of death here. I saw many wounded men, and you never got them in, you couldn’t get them in, and they might have their intestines blown out. You could lose most of your guts and still live, dying gradually. It was terrible hearing the wounded out in no man’s land at night, crying out in pain, and it affected us very much. We did try and go out at night to bring them in, but many were too badly wounded to help, and it was better just to give them a dose of morphine. They died often talking about their families or their childhoods.

  Editor: Amongst the dead and injured close to the British line was one German body on which Norman found the following, moving letter. It is now preserved amongst Norman’s papers held at the Imperial War Museum. Today, historians maintain that, while casualties were terrible for all sides during the previous year’s fighting on the Somme, the rate of attrition was, for the Germans, unsustainable.

  The following letter seems to bear out the plight in which the German Army had found itself in early 1917. The original wording seems to indicate that the writer of the letter was an elderly gentleman.

  Cassel 14.1.1917

  My dear friend

  I have received your letter. While the content of your [letters] has always given me great pleasure in the past, your latest one has put me into rather a sad mood. Above all, this comes from your telling me that the harshness of life during the time you have spent on the Somme has made such a strong impact on you that you have wished for death. I am truly sorry to hear this. I know you to be a person who is content with a modest lot in life, and I can appreciate how hard things must have been to bring you to such thoughts. Fortune is certainly inflicting a tough time on our dear comrades, who have to achieve, and suffer, tremendous things out there. But then again I know from my dear friend Kloppmann that, in his case, these moods can quickly be driven away if there is someone around who puts himself in his position and recognizes the superhuman achievement for what it is. And, my dear friend, you know that our commander-in-chief is aware of the value of what you are doing and has spoken so often and so enthusiastically about the heroic courage and the heroic temperament of his fighters, and in this way has shown the Fatherland what it owes to its defenders; and from my heart I hope that our dear Germany will always be eager to show its gratitude to its sons. If it can cheer you up a little, accept my assurance that I value you greatly and that I am firmly convinced that you always and fully do your duty. I do hope that you have now been given the opportunity to recover from the strains of recent weeks. That’s what I wish for you with my whole heart, and even more I desire that it may soon be granted to us to obtain peace. Even though it is being said everywhere and all the time that peace is still unthinkable, yet I cannot but believe that the thought of peace, now that it has been conveyed to the world by our Kaiser, will become unstoppable. I’ve been an optimist all my life, and have had no bad experiences because of it, and intend to remain one. I also ran into your brother a few times, when he was on leave over Christmas. I suppose he is now already back in the middle of things. I have had a letter from Goldhahn in Bucharest, and recently one too from Schlau. Yes, I’m now very satisfied with my second tenor, and very proud of him. Well, what a joy it will be when we are all together once more. Gögel writes frequently too. You are, all four of you, to have a letter from me today. I’ve started with yours, because it weighed heaviest on my heart. So for now I wish you all the best from my heart, and equally from my heart I send you my greetings.

  Yours Flörcke, who hopes soon to have another sign of life from you.

  Editor: The identity of the recipient, who had so earnestly wished for death, remains a mystery. It is not known if Norman understood the exact contents of the letter. However, he was moved enough by what he discovered that his intention at the time was to post the letter back to the sender after the war. Another curiosity concerns the circumstances in which Norman found the above letter. In his possessions there is a metal identity disc to a German soldier named Kloppmann, surely the soldier referred to in the letter above. Was Kloppmann killed before the recipient of the letter, or the other way around? Either way it seems inconceivable that these items w
ere not taken from one body.

  Norman

  Bombardments were terrible for both sides. We felt we had more in common with the German infantry sitting perhaps one hundred yards away than we did with our own or their gunners, who never seemed to shoot at each other but were always intent on bombarding us. This was especially true with our heavy artillery which was situated, in some cases, miles behind the line. We were under the same conditions as the Germans: they were in muddy trenches; they were suffering under intensive shellfire. It was rather like a big boxer hitting a little man who was undefended. We didn’t feel any real animosity towards them.

  At night, when I used to go out on patrol into no man’s land, we crawled very often from shell hole to shell hole, with saps connecting them, and got very close to the German wire and we could hear them talking. On more than one occasion we called out to them; indeed a few of our chaps threw tins of bully beef over and they reciprocated by throwing some German cigars to us. We felt pretty sure we were dealing with people we could make friends with, and a lot of them spoke English.

  This fraternization happened on at least one occasion in the line at Rouex before we attacked, and then of course the harmony was disturbed for quite a time afterwards.

  German soldiers try to rebuild their trench after a direct hit from British artillery.

  After such intense fighting you always had men lying out in No Man’s Land, probably with their testicles blown off and crying in agony and lying out there all night long in the dark, in the rain. Most would never have survived. But you had a choice. They could die in agony or you could shoot them. You were shown how to do the thing very cleanly. You would take your .45 revolver and talk to the man and kneel behind him and whilst you were talking pull the trigger, put a bullet through the back of his head and immediately the whole of the front skull came away and they were dead instantly. There was no pain about it, but I can honestly say this, that I never had the courage – because that’s what it took – I never had the courage myself to shoot a wounded soldier. I carried out the operation many times afterwards on animals. I could kill a pet dog far better than a vet could, but I was never able to shoot a wounded soldier. I probably should have. My friend, Otto Murray Dixon, was wounded in the stomach in the Arras attack in April. He was in great agony from what I was told. The kindest thing would have been to shoot him on the battlefield. Instead of that, they took him back to hospital and he died days later. It’s a tremendous thing to shoot a friend, even though he’s in agony, and I just didn’t have the courage to do it. Most of them died overnight but of course they didn’t thank you for it, I’m sure.

  During daylight we took what rest we could, although on several occasions we were attacked by German aircraft, which, toward the end of the day would dive low, perhaps a couple of hundred feet or less, and strafe our trenches before returning to base. On one occasion, a plane flew very, very low and we all fired and I actually emptied my .45 revolver at him although of course I didn’t hit anything. People laugh at this, but early one morning, a plane was brought crashing to the ground by Lewis Gun fire from our trench. Other planes were simply driven off by machine gun fire, including several red-coloured aircraft that, I believe, were part of the famous Flying Circus.

  Among my possessions from that time in the line is a mud-covered map, on which are marked in little dots the places where I sited the Lewis Guns at one end of Corona trench, in what was left of Roeux. [Ed. see page 148] In charge of one of the guns was a lance corporal of mine called Meikle and, we got to know each other very well. At night we used to go out beyond the front line and make ourselves comfortable in a nice shell hole that wasn’t too wet and mount his Lewis Gun, so he would be there if there was a raid during the night. As a 2nd Lieutenant, I had to visit all my men for two hours in the trenches, wherever they were, and every night I used to go out to his forward position at the end of a sap, in a shell hole, and sit with him. He was the same age as myself, possibly slightly younger, and he worked for a Glasgow railway company as well as being a bookmaker’s runner. We got very close; we used to have long, long talks and he would tell me all about his life. When the war broke out he said that he’d made several attempts to enlist as a sixteen year old, but had been rejected because of his inadequate chest measurements. He finally enlisted sometime in 1915 and had gone out to France a year later just as the Somme offensive began.

  Corporal John MeikleVC MM

  He was a tiny little chap – we had that in common – and he stammered and you wouldn’t think he could say boo to a goose. His men in the Lewis Gun team really worshipped him, even though he used to frighten them. When a coalbox dropped near and the fragments whistled through the air, Meikle would say to them ‘You want to watch out, boys, there’s death in those pieces’. It was his form of humour. The following year he was killed in an action for which he won the Victoria Cross.

  He was such an unassuming person and I am sorry that I had to live and he had to die.

  In the front line it was two hours’ patrolling and then four hours on a wire bed in a shallow dugout. A dugout is a funny place; it was a place where you managed to get two or three hours’ sleep before you went out to do an inspection. The dugout was lit by candles, and when you got back, in the holes in the wall there would be a little twinkle and it was the eyes of a rat. You’d look round and these were reflected in the light of the candles. You got into bed and you’d quickly pull a blanket over your head, and immediately the rats ran out over the blanket and knocked over the candles and gobbled them up in a few seconds.

  The whole routine was immensely tiring, and after four hours’ rest you had to be practically kicked out of the dugout to do another spell of patrol. The stress was terrible. I had a fellow officer called Aubrey Finch. He was a little older than I was, and we had an argument one time. I was a little pickled and I threw a glass of whisky in his face, which was a terrible thing to do to a fellow officer.

  Stress bred fear, without doubt. You are always frightened. Mind you, most didn’t show it. Men made every excuse if they were shaking or their teeth were chattering, which happened to me on more than one occasion. You just pretended it was something else, it was cold or something like that.

  I remember one occasion: my teeth started to chatter because we were under a bombardment and I was in a hole in the side of a trench and the Sergeant was making me a cup of tea, making it with a candle and a billy can. In any case my teeth started chattering and I apologised to him and said ‘It’s so cold, isn’t it?’ Actually I knew perfectly well that my teeth were chattering because I didn’t like the shells dropping closer and closer, and he said ‘Yes, it is cold, Sir,’ and passed it off, you see. And then it stopped and you pulled yourself together, but I don’t mind admitting I was never the stuff that heroes were made of.

  To ease the pressure we smoked; almost every man seemed to smoke. Cigarettes were a great comfort and, at the right time, worked wonders. My favourite was a brand called Passing Cloud and I recall in many stressful circumstances lighting a cigarette, although out of view of the Germans.

  Most of the cigarettes were terrible and were hardly worth smoking. The cheap cigarette was the Woodbine. The Players and Goldflake were quite good ones, sixpence for twenty or fivepence ha’penny for Players. Although I might smoke up to 40 or 45 cigarettes a day, I never inhaled, so I can’t say that I was a great addict, but some men would take the end of a cigarette and relight it and, even though it was saturated in tar and nicotine, they’d enjoy it.

  Smoking was all part of the camaraderie and of course it relieved stress, no doubt about it, it’s a drug that relieved stress. You wouldn’t sit smoking in the dark in a trench, or you’d soon have a few whizz bangs come over. However, behind the lines, the men used to gather together, light a cigarette, and you could see the ends glowing in the dark. There’s no doubt about it, cigarettes relieved strain and stress. They were highly prized.

  Norman wearing a German cap stands in front of the ruin
s of Fampoux. His previously young face looks drawn.

  After several days in the line we were withdrawn to the ruined village of Fampoux, where I slept the night there amongst the ruins, in a little room. For the next few days, the battalion was employed cleaning up, while some of the men took the chance to bathe in the nearby canal, of which I retain some snaps.

  Editor: The line held by the Seaforth Highlanders in front of Roeux was the final position attained during the Battle of Arras. The following day, the 17th, the battle officially ended. It had lasted 39 days in total and the British Army had suffered around 159,000 casualties, or over 4,000 a day, the worst casualty rate for any battle fought by the British Army during the war. The 51st Division had lost 6,500 officers and men.

  A few hours relaxation for the men of Norman’s platoon, seen here bathing in a canal near the River Scarpe.

  May 24 1917

  Dear all

  ….we are holding a reserve line now and not having a bad time.

  The worst of open warfare is there are no dug-outs when we are shelled heavily. We stuck a 17 hour shelling the other day. Of course ‘the Boche are getting short of shells’ see Daily Mail

  I got a few souvenirs including the ribbon of an Iron Cross. I enclose it in this letter…..

  Au revoir

  Best love