1915: The Death of Innocence

by Lyn Macdonald

  Stretcher-bearers made countless back-breaking journeys, carrying the injured to the ambulance train for the short journey to Carlisle, laying the still bodies of the dead in empty goods wagons. It was many hours before they were all taken away – and many more before the wreckage cooled and salvage workers toiling by the light of arc lamps could begin the fearful job of recovering bodies.

  Pte. A. Thomson.

  I was detailed for stretcher-bearer duties. What a job for a lad not yet eighteen! I wept. I saw many a battlefield after that, but I never saw anything like the things I saw on that terrible day.

  It was afternoon before we’d rescued everyone we could and there was nothing more that could be done. A lot of the men lay down in the field, they were so exhausted, and some of us thought about the folks at home and how worried they’d be when the news got out and they walked to Gretna post office to send telegrams. Then there was a roll-call. Fifty-seven of us answered our names out of nearly five hundred who left Larbert that morning. About five o’clock they put us on a goods train and took us to Carlisle and then up to the castle for a wash and a meal. A while later they took us back to the station and there was a special train waiting to take us on to Liverpool.

  In the confusion of the emergency with all effort concentrated on finding space for the wounded in Carlisle’s overflowing hospitals, and the sad task of identifying the dead, no one had time to give much thought to the uninjured survivors. They were still in a state of shocked exhaustion, bedraggled in smoke-blackened uniforms, they had neither rifles, caps nor kit, they had been up all the previous night and had suffered an appalling experience. They should never have been asked to complete the journey they had begun nearly sixteen hours before but no orders had been issued to the contrary.

  Despite long delays on the journey the second half of the Battalion had reached Liverpool early in the evening at the end of an anxious day. They knew that there was trouble.

  Pte. W. Begbie, 1/7 Bn., Royal Scots.

  We left Larbert in the second train. After a while we stopped at some station for a long time. We were allowed to come out of the train but not to leave the station. We all felt that something was wrong but it was not until Captain Dawson told us that we knew the first train had been in an accident. He didn’t know the details. When we got on the train again to finish our journey to Liverpool, we were really worried – especially the men who had relatives in the first train. Later anyone who had a relative on the first train was sent back home.

  Like all locally raised Territorial Battalions the 7th Royal Scots was a family. Pipe-Major Ross, who had been left behind in hospital, had a son in the band who was more seriously wounded. The two Duff brothers, George and Robert, had been killed. The Salvesen brothers were both casualties, one killed and one wounded. Some families had three or more relations in the Battalion. As the news trickled through and spread from mouth to mouth and street to street in Leith where Saturday shoppers were out in full force, friends and relatives rushed to the battalion’s headquarters. Soon there was a crowd of thousands.

  Miss Anne Armstrong.

  My father was a sergeant in the 7th Royal Scots. How well I remember that Saturday morning. As soon as we heard about the accident Mother rushed off to the Dalmeny Street Drill Hall. She took us children with her – in fact all the family went – and we waited there nearly all day for news. I’ll never forget straining to hear as they read out the names of the men who’d been accounted for. They came through just a few at a time and, oh, the relief when we finally heard my father’s name called out. He was injured, it’s true, but he was alive!

  I went three times with Mother to visit Father in Cumberland Infirmary before he was moved from Carlisle. The first journey was the worst. I don’t know who organised the visit, but a lot of the wives and parents went, and travelling down in the train in the morning most of the women were in tears – it was only the day after the crash – and no one knew what to expect. But when we met up again for the journey home they were all smiles. As a child I couldn’t understand this change. I remember Mother explaining that they’d all been through a terrible anxious time. My father had a badly fractured ankle which left him with a permanent limp, and he was badly cut about the nose and face.

  Mrs A. Marshall, nee Duff.

  My family lived in Musselburgh, and there was quite a bunch of Musselburgh boys in the battalion. All the relatives went rushing to the railway station, but they were told to go to the post office and wait there for news. My mother was in a state, for she had a baby eleven months old in her arms (which was myself) and my brother, who was just three, and they said that my granny was in an even worse state because, of course, she had two boys in the same company. They were both killed – my father and my uncle. My father was twenty-seven and my mother was twenty-five, and there she was, left on her own, a widow, with the two of us to bring up. But it was a good while before they got definite news.

  The anxious crowd was still waiting for news at nightfall. At long intervals a window was flung up and a name called out. Then it slammed shut and the waiting began again. The names they called were only those of the survivors, and there were few enough of them. Some people who could not stand the suspense made the tortuous journey to Carlisle by branch lines and local trains to find out the situation at first hand. Bob White’s father took with him Bob’s last letter from Larbert by way of identification, for it was written on notepaper headed with the badge of the 7th Royal Scots. In it Bob had written delightedly, ‘I put my name in for the signalling and I and Sinclair were accepted, so I do no duties until further orders! The sun has been very hot and we have played football all day.’ But the signallers had all gone. The pipers had all gone. Three officers and two hundred and eleven men had been killed, and two hundred and forty-six seriously wounded.*

  Mrs A. E. Cowley.

  My father was the Reverend William Swan, DD, minister of South Leith Parish Church, and he was also the local chaplain of the 7th Royal Scots. He was summoned to Carlisle at once, and he had the heart-rending duty of comforting the wounded and the relatives after the dreadful train disaster. How well I remember it! He didn’t come home until very late the next night and he was deeply upset. He told us that he had to stand on a chair on the platform at Carlisle station and had to read the casualty list to the anxious relatives who had rushed to Carlisle. It was the saddest thing he ever had to do in his life. Then a few days later he held the mass funeral at Leith. It was almost too much to bear.

  The hospitals were overwhelmed. Church halls were commandeered, GPs from miles around rushed to Carlisle to help, and surgeons, doctors, nurses, worked right round the clock attending to the injured. Some of them died in the night and to Dr Edwards’s distress one was the drummer boy of sixteen whose legs he had amputated to release him from the burning train. Near the boy’s bed another badly burned man lay dying. He tossed and turned and muttered all night. Edwards, bending over him, caught his words: ‘If only we could have had a fight for it!’ He muttered it over and over again.

  In the early hours of Sunday morning Colonel Peebles led the remnant of his half battalion of 7th Royal Scots up the gangway to board the Empress of Britain – six officers and fifty-seven dazed, dishevelled men. Their Brigadier was waiting on the deck. He returned Colonel Peebles’s salute then shook his hand in silence. At that particular moment neither man was capable of uttering a word.

  Pte. A. Thomson.

  Early next morning we were put to work sorting out blood-stained equipment salvaged from the wrecked train. It was a gruesome task and I’m quite sure that there was flesh stuck to some of it. Later we were diverted to carrying ammunition aboard ship. Then we were mustered and allocated our mess decks for the voyage.

  Perhaps some officer had thought it best to keep the men busy after their ordeal, but the Divisional Commander thought differently and Major-General Egerton had wired with some indignation to the War Office. Shortly before sailing time a reply came back. The survivo
rs could be sent back north and other Royal Scots whose relatives were known to have been killed or injured in the crash could go home too.

  Pte. A. Thomson.

  We were lined up on the quayside and marched off through the streets to Lime Street Station. Believe it or not, some children playing in the street threw stones at us. We had no equipment and we looked so bedraggled and disreputable that they took us for German prisoners!

  The officers had volunteered and been given permission to stay on board, but Lieutenant Riddell was sent home in charge of the party of survivors. The men were unusually silent and subdued. Riddell tried to cheer them up with the news that the General had decreed that they should all be given fourteen days’ leave, but they were too tired and worried to care. Most went to sleep or stared blankly out of the windows.

  As the train cleared the outskirts of Liverpool and began to pick up speed on the journey north, the Empress of Britain cast her moorings and began to slip down the Mersey carrying their comrades on the first stage of the voyage to Gallipoli.

  The voyage was pleasant and uneventful. A collection for the dependants of the men who died in the disaster raised £612 which was cabled home from Gibraltar on the day of the mass funeral. Most of Leith and half of Edinburgh turned out for it and the Reverend William Swan who conducted the ceremony was assisted by the Dean of the Thistle and Chapel Royal. Two hundred and fourteen bodies were carried to Rosebank Cemetery in Leith, and so many were charred beyond recognition that all of them were buried together in a mass grave. All the survivors were present.

  Afterwards they went home on leave, but few had the heart to enjoy themselves. One man, Private William Roach, spent most of his time composing a eulogy to his shattered battalion. He called it The Heroes of Gretna’:

  We had been for some ten months in training,

  And we found it was work and not play;

  You may guess that each man was delighted

  When we learned we were going away.

  Off we sped, never thinking of danger;

  Ah! I see every happy face still –

  Now a joke, now a laugh, now ‘Where are we?’

  ‘Yes, the next box will be Quintinshill.’

  And ’twas just then the terrible smash came;

  Heavens! It caught us like rats in a trap,

  Just when some of our boys, a bit drowsy,

  Were enjoying a quiet little nap.

  I was thrown to the right of our carriage,

  My head and right arm were held fast;

  Horror! Here were the flames coming near me.

  What a death! Was next minute my last?

  Yes, I shouted for help – and I listened,

  ‘Oh, God!’ I heard dying men shout;

  And midst that came a second collision!

  I can tell you no more! I got out.

  Ask me not of the sights I beheld there,

  As I lay on the ground all alone;

  But I’ll tell of brave lads who leapt into the flames

  And saved lives at the risk of their own!

  Oh their deeds will aye live in my memory,

  Their praises I sing them aloud,

  But to soldier with such a Battalion,

  It’s of that most of all, boys, I’m proud.

  Yes the scenes of that woe-stricken morning

  From my vision I never can blot;

  But ‘twill ever for me be the boast of my life

  That I once was a Seventh Royal Scot.

  In the early hours of 13 June the remainder of the 7th Royal Scots landed with the 156th Brigade of the Lowland Division on the shores of Gallipoli.

  Whatever was in store for them they, at least, would have a ‘fight for it’.

  Chapter 24

  Gallipoli was the most ancient and, to a classical scholar, the most romantic of battle-fields. More than six centuries before the birth of Christ the Greeks had colonised the peninsula and founded a city on the site of the modern town of Gallipoli and christened it Heliopolis. The Turks called it ‘Gelibolu’ and it lay on the eastern coast of the peninsula looking towards the coast of Asia across the Dardanelles – the narrow seaway that reached north towards Constantinople on the Sea of Marmara, and flowed south to meet the waters of the Aegean. Long ago the ancient city of Troy had stood guard at the mouth of the Dardanelles, controlled its seaborne trade and grown rich and powerful on the proceeds. For this was the Hellespont of history and legend.

  It was across the Hellespont that Leander swam each night for a lovers’ tryst with Hero, priestess of Aphrodite, who flung herself into its waters when he drowned. The legendary Helen of Troy, heroine of Homer’s Iliad, might have looked across these straits from those fabled ‘topless towers of Ilium’. Five hundred years before the dawn of Christian history Xerxes built a bridge of three hundred boats to carry his army across the Hellespont and up the peninsula on a march that ended at Thermopylae, and a century later Alexander the Great crossed to Asia on his way to conquer an empire. The Dardanelles had witnessed the passage of scores of armies and over the centuries, and as recently as the Balkan Wars a mere twelve months before, the peninsula had been lit by the campfires of soldiers and echoed to their curses and the tramping of their feet.

  Few of the modern soldiers were classical scholars, but looking out from the western shores of the peninsula to the islands floating beneath a turquoise sky on the blue Aegean Sea, they were impressed by its timeless beauty.

  On the small island of Bozcaada near the toe of the peninsula, British warships were anchored in the harbour of Tenedos where, according to legend, the thousand black-prowed vessels of Agamemnon’s fleet had sheltered long millennia before. Bozcaada just ten miles to the south was easily visible to the naked eye. Away to the west Samothrace, once home of the sea-god Poseidon, was hard to pinpoint in the glaring daylight, but it could be seen on the evening horizon when the peaks of its hills were lit by the setting sun and the glorious sunsets were balm to the red-rimmed eyes of soldiers wearied by the heat and dust of an ugly day.

  Now and again they caught a fleeting glimpse of Lemnos in the distance, and this was familiar ground, for it was there in Mudros harbour that the soldiers left the troopships that brought them from Egypt and boarded destroyers for the last leg of the voyage to Gallipoli. No one had troubled to tell them that Lemnos, like Imbros, was immortalised by Homer in the Iliad and when a soldier recognised the faint outlines of these islands on the horizon, if he thought anything at all it was merely to hope he would soon have a closer view on the first leg of the voyage home.

  Even the minority who had enjoyed a classical education found that Hellenic travel, even at the Government’s expense, soon palled and during a brief rest period in a miserable fly-ridden dug-out Captain Clement Attlee amused himself by putting the general feeling into verse.

  Many a time I’ve longed these ways to go,

  To wander where each little rugged isle

  Lifts from the blue Aegean’s sparkling smile

  Its golden rocks or peaks of silent snow,

  The land of magic tales of long ago,

  Ulysses’ wanderings and Circe’s wile,

  Achilles and his armour, Helen’s smile,

  Dear-won delight that set tall Troy aglow.

  Happy the traveller whose eye may range

  O’er Lemnos, Samothrace and Helles’ strait,

  Who smells the sweet thyme-scented breezes. Nay,

  How willingly all these I would exchange

  To see the buses throng by Mile End Gate

  And smell the fried fish shops down Limehouse way.*

  Not a single man at Gallipoli would have disagreed, although most would have put it in robust and less elegant terms. By mid-June they had all had more than enough of it. The Gallipoli adventure was not going according to plan and it had gone wrong from the beginning.

  The unsuccessful attempt by the Royal Navy to force the straits in March had put the Turks on their guard, and the long lapse of time bef
ore the landings gave them ample time to take precautions, to send a strong force to the peninsula and to build and strengthen its defences. They had no doubt that they would be needed, and needed soon, for the plan to invade Gallipoli was the worst-kept secret of the war.

  While Sir Ian Hamilton and his staff were still in Egypt letters were arriving from the War Office by the regular mail openly addressed to ‘The Constantinople Expeditionary Force’ to the horror and fury of its Commander-in-Chief who, before leaving London, had specifically requested that it should be known as ‘The Mediterranean Expeditionary Force’. Well before the end of March Egyptian newspapers were not merely reporting the arrival of troopships, but were making no bones about the fact that the troops were bound for the Dardanelles. The Army had money to spend and officers of the advance guard were buying up mules and donkeys by the score and scouring the bazaars for milk-cans, canisters, and any other containers that could possibly be used to carry water. In Port Said they were even purchasing vessels by the dozen – the flat-bottomed lighters that sailed out to unload big ships and bring their cargoes to the shore, and the lowly hoppers that worked alongside dredgers and carried away the silt or gravel. No matter how old or slow or decrepit the boats were, so long as they were reasonably seaworthy the Army was willing to pay a good price. Their owners drove excellent bargains and the word spread. It did not require a high degree of inquisitiveness to guess that something big was underway, nor a high degree of intelligence to guess what it was.

  The Greek government was not yet fully committed to the cause of the allies but it was common knowledge that Greece had been glad to allow them to use the islands of Imbros, Lemnos and Bozcaada as forward bases in the interest of wresting Constantinople from the hands of their old enemies the Turks. Destroyers and battleships were concentrating in the harbour of Tenedos on Bozcaada and at Mudros on the island of Lemnos. The lighters and hoppers that would take the troops from the ships through shallow water to the shore were towed across the Mediterranean to cluster in swarms round the island of Lemnos. Hospital ships steamed into position. The preparations could not possibly be concealed, and with small boats scudding between the islands on their everyday business of fishing and trading there was very little that did not reach the ears and even the eyes of the Turks. Looking out to sea from vantage points on the peninsula they watched British warships diligently patrolling a few miles from the coast, guessing perhaps that Staff Officers on their decks had their eyes fixed on Gallipoli, peering through powerful binoculars and trying to form an impression of the lie of the land. It was the closest they could get to reconnoitring.