1915: The Death of Innocence

by Lyn Macdonald

  Love to Helen and the boys

  Your affectionate brother

  R. A. Scott McFie

  In the trenches there was danger, there were frequent alarms and there were many casualties but it was difficult to decide what was the worst enemy – the Germans, the weather, or sheer boredom.

  Trpr. W. Clarke.

  When it was quiet, it was so boring. Awake all night. Stand-to just before dawn, which meant that you got up on the fire platform, ready for old Jerry in case he would make a surprise attack, and then at dawn stand-down, hoping you’d get a mug of tea or something to eat, which as often as not we didn’t get because being so close to the German lines we couldn’t make fires to brew tea. We had to rely on the boys at the back making tea down in the deep quarry and bringing it up. It got very boring during stand-down too if nothing was doing. Funny that, you were bored if there was no danger. Well, there really wasn’t anything to do except read, that is, if you were lucky enough to have something. You could write letters if you felt like it, or sometimes you dozed.

  At night there was always the fear of the unknown, the threatening shadows in No Man’s Land, the rustling of the wind, the occasional crack of a twig or some other unidentifiable sound magnified in the darkness. The small night noises heard behind nervous bursts of fire might be the movement of some animal, for the rats were busy at night, or might just be a band of enemy raiders poised to descend. The first night of a Battalion’s stint in the front-line trenches was always the worst. After days of relaxation nerves were on edge and even soldiers with no immediate duties, stretched out on the fire-step or dozing restlessly in funk-holes burrowed into the clammy wall of the trench, slept with one ear cocked in case of danger. It was marginally more comfortable for the officers, but their job was no sinecure.

  Lt. R. E. Smith, 7th Bn., Royal Scots Fusiliers, 45 Brig., 15 Div.

  We had three officers in the Company at the time, which meant three hours on duty and six off. Ill take the day as starting at 12 midnight, and I’ll suppose that I go on duty at 2 a.m. From 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. you have been making desperate efforts to get to sleep. You are sitting in a dug-out, which our fellows have captured. In it there are a couple of chairs, from goodness knows where, and a kind of table, and there are two compartments leading out of it. In one are the company signallers with all their telephone apparatus and the other is used by the gunners as an artillery observation station and is provided with special observation loop-holes. The whole place leaks like hell and you have to keep your oilskins on all the time, but the main things that strikes you about the place is its smell which is reminiscent of a pantry, a stable loft, a coal cellar and the hold of a ship. However there is a brazier and it is warm. All the light is from a pair of candles, stuck in bottles.

  At two o’clock very punctually, the man you are to relieve comes in and kicks you out of a sort of doze, you get up, swear, and put on some extra wraps, your revolver, electric torch, gas-helmet. The other man, who is now wriggling into your late place on the floor, gives you his report which is something of this sort: ‘All quiet. We’ve got a working party repairing the parapet in Bay 6, and another pumping all along the main trench from Bay 5 to Bay 9. One sentry in Bay 4 is complaining of frostbite, but I think he’s skrimshanking. Good luck. It’s a hell of a night.’ You walk out into the trench. The air is refreshing after the dug-out, but it’s beastly cold and there’s a bit of a drizzle.

  Your duties are to visit all sentries, generally inspect all work that is being done, and you are responsible for meeting any emergency until some superior person comes along. The men’s job is to do sentry and to go on working-parties, etc. As you come up to the first sentry you ask him, ‘Have you anything to report?’ You get this sort of answer: ‘Nothing much doing, sir, I can hear them working just opposite and I think they have a patrol out on the left.’ Alongside the sentry there are two figures wrapped up in waterproof sheets, sitting on the fire-step which is raised about eighteen inches off the floor of the trench. They are two reliefs for that particular bay or traverse and the three take it in turns, one hour on, two off. Poor devils, they have to sit out there all night and in all kinds of weathers.

  The bottom of the trench is on an average six to eight inches deep in slushy chalk the consistency of whipped cream, and in some places it is two and even three feet deep in water. After doing the round you give a look to the working-parties. Some of this is beastly work. The sandbags get water-logged and then freeze, and the bags burst, and a mass of parapet weighing three or four tons topples right over. All the debris has to be cleared, new bags have to be filled, and the broken bit has to be built up again. This is a filthy dirty job and a most tiring one – a sandbag filled with chalk is a jolly good weight. You then give a look to the sap – a trench which runs perpendicularly from our line out towards the enemy – and here one has to be rather more careful. The sap may be going to be used for a listening post, or perhaps as the starting point of a future firing trench. Of the three men in it one is at the end and acting as a sentry, the other two with their rifles and bayonets fixed alongside them are quietly and silently working, the one picking, the other shovelling the chalk up to the side. They have to take care not to throw earth up while a star shell is burning as this would give the show away. By the time this is over, two of the three hours have passed, and you can sit down on the fire-step for ten minutes or so and smoke and talk to one of the sentries. Every now and again there is the purring of a machine-gun and the sing-sing-sing-sing as the bullets fly overhead, generally searching for the transport away back behind. One more round of the sentries completes the time, but just before five when the sky is beginning to grow grey there is suddenly a loud whizz in the air, coming yards away. Then five or six ‘pip-squeaks’ come over together, a pause and then another whizzing but this time louder and slower and a bigger bang, three or four of these and then the ‘pip-squeaks’ come on again. In a quarter of an hour it is over.

  At six o’clock there is a general cry of stand-to all along the line, and everyone turns out and stands-to their post as this is the danger hour. But the feature of stand to is the issue of the rum ration. By this time it is light and you can see the men’s faces and clothes and it is really a picture. Everything – faces, hands, clothes – are the same dirty-white colour, and the chalk is lying deep over everything. They have three or four days’ growth of hair on their faces and the only things which are clean are the rifles and ammunition which at all costs must be kept clean of dirt. Of course, the poor beggars are pretty fagged out and show it.

  Most battalions were low in numbers. Drafts of reinforcements were arriving in dribs and drabs and there were seldom enough to bring them up to anything like full strength and replace the casualties incurred in the daily routine of holding the line. Even in quiet periods there was an average of five thousand casualties a week. Manpower was still a headache and one of the many matters on which opinion in Government circles was divided. Unlike more militaristic nations which required every young man reaching a certain age to do military service and which could call upon huge reserves of trained men in the event of war, Great Britain had always depended on her standing army of professional soldiers and also relied on willing volunteers to augment it in time of need. Now, after fifteen months of war, with greater casualties than had ever been imagined – and, as the war spread, far wider commitments than had ever been envisaged – it was becoming evident that volunteers could not be relied on indefinitely to fill the ranks. Recruiting had slowed down, enthusiasm had waned, and it was time for drastic measures. Conscription had been under discussion for months but there were some to whom the word ‘conscription’ was anathema. True to his nickname of ‘England’s best recruiting sergeant’, it was Lord Derby who worked out and sponsored a compromise scheme.

  The Derby scheme was conscription in all but name, but it retained an element of individual choice that at least paid lip-service to the ideal of a volunteer army. Every man between the a
ges of nineteen and forty-two was required to register – and it was estimated that there were five million of them. If he was not debarred from military service, either because he was unfit or employed on work of national importance, he then had a choice. He could either enlist immediately in the regiment of his choice, with the possibility of applying for a commission, or he could wait to be called up in his category and sent wherever the Army chose. There would be a six-week period of grace in which men could make up their minds, but the Government gave an unequivocal assurance that married men would not be called upon until all the single men were in the ranks. The call-up would start early in the New Year.

  The Territorials had done more than their bit and had lost close to half their strength. Kitchener’s ‘First Hundred Thousand’ had already taken a bad knock. The second hundred thousand, and the third, were trained and ready to go, but a hundred thousand men amounted to barely seven divisions of combatants and support troops and the nation’s commitments were growing so fast that far, far more would be needed if the war was to be won. Now that the autumn battles had drawn to a disappointing close the question of whether it was to be won on the western front or elsewhere was back on the agenda. None of the dilemmas that faced the Government had yet been resolved.

  It was the end of October before General Sir Charles Monro arrived to take over command of the British forces on the Gallipoli Peninsula. On instructions from Lord Kitchener his first and most pressing duty was to ‘report fully and frankly on the military situation’, to suggest any means by which the deadlock might be removed, either by attacking with sufficient force to finally trounce the Turks, or by evacuating the troops and cutting their losses. Kitchener, who was personally opposed to evacuation, urged him to submit his report as soon as it was humanly possible and Sir Charles Monro almost immediately set off on a tour of inspection. After long experience of the disciplined organisation on the western front he was astounded by the ramshackle, makeshift conditions on the peninsula, and appalled by the suffering of the troops. Every Divisional Commander he spoke to pooh-poohed the very idea of an offensive and they were unanimous in their opinion that, in their present state of health, the troops were incapable of keeping up a sustained effort for more than twenty-four hours. The Commanders believed that they could hold on to their present positions but only so long as the Turks were short of ammunition. If, as now seemed all too likely, the enemy received heavy supplies of guns and ammunition, they could hold out no promises, except that they would do their best.

  At GHQ on the island of Lemnos the staff had drawn up a careful memorandum for the information of the new Commander-in-Chief. A breakthrough could be made, but not before the spring and not without the addition of a staggering four hundred thousand men. They gave it as their opinion that evacuation would be feasible, but only if it were voluntarily carried out very soon. If the Turks were to force them off the peninsula into the sea it would be a sad and costly shambles. Sir Charles Monro came down heavily on the side of immediate evacuation. There was no sane alternative. The day after he telegraphed his views to London the destroyer HMS Louis was blown ashore by strong winds and wrecked at Suvla Bay.

  Everyone but Lord Kitchener was agreed that the evacuation should start without delay. He had an ally in Admiral Keyes who was pressing the merits of a new naval scheme to force the Dardanelles, and Kitchener was tempted. Evacuation would be expensive – Monro had hazarded a likely loss of 30 or 40 per cent – and in the present delicate political climate it would also be seen in the Near East as an ignominious climb-down on the part of the British Empire. ‘I absolutely refuse to sign an order for evacuation,’ Kitchener telegraphed to Lemnos, ‘which I think would be the greatest disaster and would condemn a large percent age of our men to death or imprisonment.’ Lord Kitchener boldly decided to travel to Gallipoli to see for himself, and the Dardanelles Committee decided that the matter should be left in abeyance until his return.

  Travelling fast overland to Marseilles and onwards by destroyer, Kitchener reached Mudros on 9 November. Next day it was blowing hard and the destroyer that carried him across the fifteen miles to the peninsula bucked and ploughed through heavy seas and the lighter that carried him to the shore spun like a cork in the whirling currents.

  Once ashore, Kitchener did not take long to make up his mind. Standing with General Birdwood at a post high above Anzac he put his hand on the General’s arm and said, Thank God, Birdie, I came to see this for myself. You were quite right. I had no idea of the difficulties you were up against.’ He was as deeply impressed by the spirit of the men as he was appalled by the conditions. ‘I think you have all done wonders,’ he assured General Birdwood as they shook hands in farewell. Kitchener was now on his way to Greece to review the situation at Salonika, and it was 22 November before he cabled his long-expected report to London and the 24th before he finally set sail for England. Pending the final decision of the Cabinet he had already ordered that preliminary preparations for evacuation should begin. Two days after his departure winter roared down the peninsula and made the final crushing decision for them.

  The storm struck with the force of a hurricane and it raged on for three days. The wind howled and hammered, sweeping away piers, dashing small vessels into matchwood, uprooting trees, tearing the flimsy roofs from dug-outs, lashing whirlwinds of stinging sand against the bare limbs of the miserable soldiers still clad in thin khaki drill. And then thunder began to roll, out-thundering any bombardment, lightning flashed, and the heavens opened. It poured in sheets for twenty-four hours. Dug-outs soon flooded, stores were washed away, trenches, gullies, dried-up water-courses, turned to raging torrents so deep that many men were drowned. Hundreds more died of exposure.

  Spr. J. Johnston.

  Our officer, Captain Newton Phillips, seeing the state of the men, said it was a case of every man for himself and God for us all. Well, I and my pal Dai Morris had previously been employed digging a dug-out for the officer in charge of explosives and cartridges and we knew this might be a good place to take over, so we made for this dug-out which was more than half full of boxes of these bombs. There was about two feet of water in the dug-out but we piled some of the boxes at one end to get above it, then we settled down to sleep. About midnight there was a short lull in the storm and another officer, Buck Adams, came round to inspect if the bombs were all right and he shone a torch into the dug-out and ordered us out of there, so we both decided that we should go down to the beach and walk along the sand which would be better than stamping around in the mud and freezing. On our way we came across a big galvanised tank that had been put up on sandbags to hold paraffin oil supplies. The storm had washed away the sandbags under the tank, the tank had then fallen down and all the oil had run out to sea. We thought the empty tank would be a grand shelter from the storm and would be dry inside and a shelter from the wind and the cold. I started to crawl inside when my head came into contact with hobnailed boots. I shouted to the man to shift up and make room for two more men, but there was no response. Then we realised something was wrong and we found that there were seven men in the tank and they’d all been suffocated with the fumes. They were all dead! We had a real fright at finding this and intended reporting it when we got to our camp. Then we made our way towards our camp and rounding a corner we saw what seemed to be a number of men sitting and sprawling in the mud. We found on getting nearer to them there were twenty-three men all frozen to death. They’d left the front-line trench after being there for thirty-six hours and were making their way to the beach to a boat which was waiting to take them out to a Red Cross boat to give them food and a night’s rest and more food supplies before they returned to the front line again, as supplies could not reach them owing to the floods. They had had a ration of rum before leaving the trench – that was all they had there – and the effects of the rum on their way down to the boat had worn off. They had slumped down where they were and had been frozen to death. You see, when the rain stopped a bitter frost set i
n, and men who’d been soaking wet the previous day had the clothes frozen to their bodies, and if you took off your overcoats they could be put to stand upright frozen stiff. For a couple of days after the storm died down we were on duty digging graves.

  The troops were hardest hit at Suvla Bay, where there was little or no shelter. There was less flooding at Helles where the trenches were mostly on sloping ground, and in the high posts on the peaks at Anzac the Aussies with their underground dug-outs and galleries were a little better off. The trenches were virtually abandoned, but it was fortunate that the Turks were in the same plight. The temperature plunged. On the third night the wind dropped and in the wake of the hard frost it began to snow. Not many of the Anzacs had ever seen snow before.

  There was an unofficial armistice in places where the soldiers of both sides had been forced out of the flooded trenches and huddled in groups in the open with no attempt at concealment and no stomach for a fight. But the guns were still firing from batteries miles behind.

  Col. G. Beith.

  I was in command of fifteen posts and I lost thirteen or fourteen of them in the storm. I was conferring with a sergeant and a corporal and bang, the next thing I knew I was lying in a trench with two corpses on top of me. There were eight or nine inches of icy cold water and mud in the trench and about eight inches of snow on the parapet. I managed to push the corpses off and I crawled into the dug-out. It was about eleven o’clock in the morning and I wasn’t picked up until seven o’clock at night and taken down to the Advanced Dressing Station. All they did was wipe mud off me a bit and send me off to the Casualty Clearing Station on the beach, but the barge that took the wounded out to the hospital ship had been smashed on the rocks during the storm and we had to wait for two days before they could get us off. There were hundreds of us there and it was sheer hell.