1915: The Death of Innocence

by Lyn Macdonald

  Well, it was a damn silly thing to do, but I was game, so off we went over the top and out into the fog. It was a good long way, it must have been nearly four hundred yards, but we were able to walk most of it because the fog hid us from the Germans. When we got maybe twenty or thirty yards from the German line we stopped and put down this gramophone I’d been humping, and it was a fair weight, because it was one of these old things with a big horn on it. We didn’t wind it up (he’d done that before we left the trench) so he fished out a record and put it on and set it going. I can’t remember what it was, some old scratchy band music, but the Germans must have got a fair old turn hearing it blasting out through this fog-horn thing almost right next to their trench. But we didn’t wait to see. We started back again the way we came, moving a lot faster this time! But on the way the blooming fog lifted and before we got back to our trench a machine-gun opened up. The Germans gave us music all right! You should have heard these machine-gun bullets going swish, swish, swish. We both got down on the ground and you could hear the bullets going straight over the top of you, just above your head. We had to lie there a long time before we managed to get back into the trench and I was glad to get back in one piece.

  Lieutenant Pickford was delighted with himself. Not for long though! He got a real bollocking from the Colonel for going out and doing that, because after they fired this machine-gun they started shelling like the devil and two or three of our men were killed. No, he wasn’t popular! It was a silly thing to do and we got no profit out of it. But people did things like that in those days before we learned better sense.

  Pte. Η. Κ. Davis, 5th Bn., London Rifle Brig.

  We were in Plugstreet Wood for about six months and we had a very quiet time there. Of course we had some casualties, but the main difficulty was keeping awake – especially when you were on these listening posts. In the early days, when the weather was bad, that was no joke. They were a waste of time as far as I was concerned. You’d get out of the trenches at Plugstreet, take the bayonet off your rifle and stick it in the scabbard so as not to catch any light that might be going, put one round in the breech of your rifle with the safety catch on, so that all you want to do is slip it off when you want to fire. The most important thing was a waterproof sheet. You take out the waterproof sheet and you put it on the ground and you lie on this thing and start listening to see if there’s any activity going on. We always went out in pairs and before very long the man I was lying with would be kicking my legs, because I’d fallen asleep. Shortly after that I’d be doing the same to him, so we kept each other awake. But in the winter months – even sometimes when it came to spring – it was usually wet and while the waterproof sheet stopped the water coming up it also stopped the rain from going away, so before very long you were lying in a pool of water. We did three or four hours at a time like that before we crawled back to the trench. There was no way of getting dry. But, never mind, we just had to put up with it.

  Even if the old hands were not so inclined to take risks as the newcomers, they were not lacking in bravado. For reasons of their own the Germans had annoyed the London Rifle Brigade by planting a flag in front of their trenches. It flapped at them defiantly from the other side of No Man’s Land two hundred yards away, and this piece of impertinence was not to be borne. It was Corporal Jenkin who crept out on another misty morning to capture the flag and bring it triumphantly back to delight the battalion. Corporal Jenkin was the hero of the day, the flag was sent back as a trophy to London Rifle Brigade Headquarters in Bunhill Row in London and the story went with it. It even reached the ‘Charivari’ column of Punch.

  We are not surprised to hear that Corporal Jenkin of the First Battalion London Rifle Brigade succeeded in capturing a German flag at the front. Corporal Jenkin is an artist, and it was only natural that he should make for the Colours.

  It all helped to boost morale, but in the spring of 1915 in this quiet sector, morale was high. For once it was the Germans who were in the open. Facing them from their trenches on the edge of the wood with the sheltering depths of the wood itself behind them, with the undamaged trees coming into leaf and even some shell-shattered trunks showing an irrepressible tendency to push out new shoots, there were times when the British Tommies felt that the war was unreal. There were still civilians in the houses and hamlets close to the line and beyond the communication trenches and support lines that ran through the sun-dappled glades, disfigured though they were by barbed wire and the trampling of many feet, there was still a semblance of normal life.

  Just two kilometres to the south, where the railway line ran through the village of le Touret, a local train from Armentieres had puffed into the station bound for Comines and all stations east to Courtrai. It had stood there all winter long, and there it would stand for the rest of the war. The wooden carriages were holed and splintered, the engine was bullet-grazed and streaked with rust beneath a grimy coat of mud, with its wheels rusting into the few rails that still lay on the battered track, and coarse weeds poked through the layer of mud and cinders where the track ran into No Man’s Land. The sleepers had long ago been carted off and used to strengthen dug-outs. But every morning on the dot of seven o’clock a railwayman picked his way across the debris and climbed into the signal box. And there he sat, trains or no trains, war or no war, until it was time to go home at six o’clock in the evening. It had apparently not occurred to the railway authorities to pay him off.

  Sgt. B. J. Brookes, 1/16 Queen’s Westminster Rifles (County of London Regt.).

  The station was about three hundred and fifty yards behind the trenches, and the trenches ran through the village, at right angles to the road. To get to the front line one went into the first house along the road, and a passage had been made by knocking big holes in the side walls of the houses. Two of these houses were still occupied, and were open to the troops as estaminets, and it was quite possible to come out of the trenches for a quarter of an hour to get a glass of beer. In one of these houses two old women and a young girl were carrying on the business (which, needless to say, was very brisk) and it was remarkable how they stood the strain. There was a curve in the road which prevented bullets from hitting the house, but they continually whizzed by as it was easily within range and the people didn’t dare go out of their house. The beer was brought to them by army transport when it was available. I think I can safely say that in no other part of the line were civilians living so near the danger zone.

  Now that things had settled down and to all intents and purposes there was a lull in the war and time to take stock, Sir John French was at last able to accede to General Joffre’s request to stretch his line northwards and take over another sector of line from the French. Groups of officers were sent up in advance of their battalions to familiarise themselves with the terrain and to ensure that the changeover would go smoothly. Second Lieutenant Jock Macleod went up with a party of his fellow officers of the 2nd Battalion, the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders.

  This was a Regular battalion, but young Jock was not a Regular soldier. He was a student at Cambridge University and, although he had been commissioned into the Camerons at the start of the war, he was a ‘temporary gentleman’ of a few months’ training who, strictly speaking, was not yet qualified to be at the front at all. But the Camerons had suffered heavy casualties, Jock had wangled his way into a draft of reinforcements and, after two months at the front, regarded himself as an old campaigner. He had had an enjoyable time. There had been a few exciting days in the trenches at St Eloi, three weeks away from the line on a machine-gun course and, having passed out with flying colours, he now had his own command as the battalion’s newly appointed machine-gun officer. The battalion had been out at rest when Jock rejoined it, but the machine-gun section had been kept hard at it under the eye of this energetic new officer who was intent on sharing the benefit of his newly acquired expertise. He was having the time of his life and his letters home were virtual paeans of enthusiasm. The only slight disa
ppointment – for Jock was a fastidious young man – had been the discovery that the army did not permit him to send his washing home from the front. But he quite saw the point that, if every officer did so, the weekly passage of several thousand sets of shirts and pants, socks and pyjamas, would overload the mail boats and put an unreasonable strain on the army postal service. In passing on this news to his family, Jock took the trouble to remind them kindly that there was, after all, a war on. To underline this observation he added a gleeful postscript: ‘We shall be going into the trenches any day now.’

  It was in his new capacity as machine-gun officer that Jock was included in the reconnoitring party that rode out from Ypres and up the Menin Road to Herenthage Chateau where the French trenches ran through the wooded grounds.* It was a warm spring day and there was hardly a shot to be heard. It seemed almost like a holiday outing and the French treated them as honoured guests.

  2nd Lt. J. Macleod, 2nd Bn., Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, 81st Brig., 27 Div.

  The first thing that struck you was their light-heartedness. It was most amusing to hear them speaking about the Germans opposite and when a German aeroplane went over they all got excited, and shouted insults, and three officers rushed out of their dug-outs, snatched up rifles from the men, and let fly at them! ‘Of course,’ they explained, ‘it does not derange the German airmen, but it shows what we think about the swine.’ We told them we had orders against firing rifles at aircraft, and they said they had too, but it was necessary to show the Boche that they were only Boche! In the afternoon their seventy-fives began shelling the German trenches, and the French officers in the support line leapt and shouted whenever a good hit was made.

  They gave us a capital lunch – mackerel, ragout, bread, cold beef, vin rouge, and café with cognac. Our lunch party was very jolly. Four French and three British officers in a sort of semi-circular redoubt in a wood. On one side a roofless dug-out – the parapet protected with sandbags, and covered with branches – the firing trenches about two hundred yards away through the wood, and the Germans eighty yards further on in the same wood, but invisible from where we were. In the middle of the redoubt was a tree, and tied to it was a magnificent gilded eighteenth-century clock from the ruined chateau nearby. It was bright sunshine and the birds were singing and the officers were seated on the rickety remains of gorgeous chairs from the same place as the clock. Just beyond the wood was the shell-pitted remains of a golf-course, with a roller for the greens drunkenly straddling the side of a shell-hole – and all seven officers were uproariously cheerful, eating tinned mackerel with pocket knives, some off beautiful old china, others off war-worn mess tins. Every fourth tree was a splintered stump, for the Germans gave the wood a daily ration of shells. The French soldiers seemed very pleased with themselves, with us, and with everything. You should have heard them whistling The Merry Widow Waltz’ and The Marseillaise’ after lunch. They were very kind and polite to our little party, and altogether it was an admirable day.

  In the afternoon they found some curtain pole rings. ‘Aha!’ they cried. ‘We’ll have a game.’ (Doubtless the poles themselves had gone the way of all curtain poles about here – for

  firewood!) They stuck a stick in the ground and played quoits, and insisted on a most dignified major of ours playing too. One man got five out of six, so another rushed to the tree, snatched off the clock and offered it to him with a bow.

  They wanted to get some water, and to do so it was necessary to cross an open space. So they chose a man who had been twice wounded already, and sent him, because, they said, it was clear that no German bullet could kill him! They explained this to the chap and he laughed happily at the joke and went across. Every time a bullet went near him everybody – himself included! – shouted with joyous mirth. He returned safely with the water I’m glad to say!

  After dusk, as a great favour, they were going to show us one of their flares – magnificent flares they said, that lit up everything like day. After much rummaging they found a flare. Unfortunately, it was not a normal flare, but the SOS signal for artillery to open fire as hard as possible, on account of a dangerous German attack. The artillery, hearing no particularly heavy fire from the trench, telephoned inquiries, and after much jabbering on the telephone the affair ended with roars of happy laughter! If a mistake like that had been made by British infantry, our artillery would have been most annoyed, and sheets and sheets of paper would have been covered with official correspondence, giving reasons (or otherwise!) in writing.

  It was a quiet night but after dark the flares went up intermittently, as they always did, all round the German line, and the flickering flashes, the fiery fingers stabbing into the sky to bathe the night in a brief glow of luminescent green, showed the outline of the German positions. Now a sentry on the fire-step of the shadowy trenches, turning cautiously to look about him, could see the arc of the salient etched in fire – stretching in a long straggling semi-circle that hugged the ridges from Hill 60 to Herenthage Wood, crept round to enclose Polygon Wood and Zonnebeke and, far to the left, curved down and trailed into the distance. It marked the line where the remnants of the British Army had stopped and held the Germans in the dying days of autumn, giving ground but holding fast to the beleaguered city of Ypres, fighting to keep open the vital route to the sea and to prevent this last small corner of Belgium from being swallowed up by the Germans as they had swallowed up all the rest.

  Over tumultuous centuries of warfare in Flanders, Ypres had been threatened by invaders many times and the thick ramparts that were built round the town to keep them out had been designed by the famous Vauban – prince of military architects. Within its stout walls and ancient gateways Ypres had slumbered in safety and prosperity. Merchants grew rich on the wool trade and built grand houses, gabled and curlicued with statues and carvings. They raised churches, a cathedral, and fine civic buildings round the wide market square where the great Cloth Hall towered over them all. The towers and spires of Ypres could be seen from every part of the salient but they were sadly battered now, for they presented an irresistible target to the German guns.

  There were empty spaces in the streets like unsightly gaps in a fine set of teeth, and heaps of rubble where a house once stood. Here and there a whole wall had been blown down to expose some abandoned doll’s-house interior with furniture teetering askew on sagging floors. There were ugly holes that exposed the ancient timbers of steep red-tiled roofs, and broken chimneys that had slithered down and pitched into the cobbled streets. There were sightless windows gazing from the empty shells of burnt-out buildings and others in still habitable houses hastily patched up with wooden panels when the panes and shutters had been blown away. The central tower of the Cloth Hall, blackened by fire, lacked two of its four spires, the embrasures of its high arched windows were innocent of glass and the end wall of the medieval town hall they called the Kleinstadthuis had been blown away. But Ypres still lived and although many of its inhabitants had fled during the November bombardment, much of the population hung grimly on. The town was far from empty and large numbers of the refugees who had flooded in as the Germans advanced across the surrounding countryside had simply stopped there, squatting in the ruins and abandoned houses because they had nowhere else to go.

  People managed as best they could, taking their chance by day when stray shells fell from time to time, retiring at night to cellars for fear of heavier bombardments. There was business to be done and there was a large new clientele for the town was stiff with soldiers – headquarters troops, engineers and signallers who lived like troglodytes in the catacomb passages of the old ramparts, troops passing through and briefly resting on their way to the line on the salient, sightseeing groups from nearby rest-camps and billets, curious to see the heroic town for themselves. The fame of Ypres had spread and its name was fast becoming a byword in the British Army.

  For the permanent inhabitants life in Ypres was far from easy. The town water supply was drawn from two lakes, Zil
lebeke to the east and Dickebusch to the west, and they were so polluted – by exploding shells, by rubbish and ordure and, in the case of Zillebeke, even with bodies – that an epidemic of typhoid was unavoidable. It had been raging now since January and despite the valiant efforts of the Friends Ambulance Unit, the nuns at the convent, the RAMC, and the town authorities themselves, it was raging still. Vaccination was compulsory and more than seven thousand people had been treated – almost five thousand of them at the convent alone. Water barrels were set up at the entrance to the town where the road to Menin and Zonnebeke led through the ramparts and people were forbidden on pain of a heavy fine to use water from any other source. But the epidemic could hardly be contained and every day there were fresh cases. It was rife among the unfortunate refugees, crammed into the doubtful shelter of ruined houses, living in unsanitary conditions. Lacking running water, with no means of washing and often with no possessions but the clothes on their backs, they went down like flies. The refugees were the despair of the town authorities. They could not force them to move on, they could not provide them with adequate shelter, and while they could do their best to ensure that they drank clean purified water, they could not oblige them to change their clothes for clean garments they did not possess.