by Peter Parker
In January 1916 the government passed the Military Service Act, which meant that all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-one who had not volunteered would be called up to serve in the already severely depleted British army unless they were medically unfit or were in reserved occupations. The Act came into force in March, and Harry Patch turned eighteen in June. His eldest brother, George, suffered from asthma and was ineligible for military service, but for Harry ‘there was no getting out of it’. His lack of enthusiasm had been reinforced when his other brother, William, had returned to Combe Down a few months later after being wounded in the legs at Ypres, bringing with him tales of the mud and filth in the trenches, the prevalence of lice, and the dangers of shrapnel to which his injuries bore tangible witness. Harry’s papers arrived in October and, with five other men from the village, he collected his uniform from a local barracks and took the train for Exmouth to attend a basic training course.
The commandeered house in which he was billeted was spartan and the drill and physical training he underwent during the unusually cold winter arduous. For reasons he never discovered he was awarded a lance corporal’s stripe, but this was taken away from him after he got into a fight when a fellow soldier stole his boots. Further training, including gas and bayonet drill, took place when he was posted to Sutton Veny in Wiltshire at the beginning of 1917. The men slept in huts and learned to handle rifles, taking part in target practice on Salisbury Plain. Patch proved a good shot and won the crossed-rifles badge of a marksman, which meant he could go to war as a sniper or as part of a Lewis-gun team. Disliking the notion of lining up individuals in his sights and shooting them in cold blood, Patch opted for the Lewis gun, a portable lightweight machine gun then widely in use on the Western Front. The Lewis gun had been designed by an American army colonel of that name in 1911 and was distinguished from other machine guns of the period, in which bullets were fed into the weapon from an ammunition belt, by a revolving drum magazine containing forty-seven bullets which was mounted on top of the gun. ‘Lightweight’ in this context meant a weapon officially weighing 28 pounds. Even so, the effort of carrying it into position through the mud of the front line was considerable, and resulted in Patch mistakenly recalling that the gun weighed 38 pounds – which may have been what it felt like. The US army failed to adopt the new weapon, so Lewis moved to Europe to find a new market. He set up a company in Belgium, then worked in Britain with the Birmingham Small Arms Company (BSA), which manufactured firearms, shells and military vehicles for the British army and bought a licence to make the Lewis gun in 1914. The weapon came into general use at the front in October 1915, and its effectiveness may be judged by freely circulated stories that any prisoners taken by the Germans found to be wearing the Lewis-gun badge on their sleeves were more likely to be shot than ordinary infantrymen. A well-practised Lewis-gun team could fire up to 500 rounds per minute. Patch embarked for France at Folkestone in Kent in June 1917, a week before his nineteenth birthday. The naive enthusiasm of 1914 had long since evaporated, most particularly in the wake of the dreadful events on the Somme in July 1916. ‘We all knew what we were going to,’ Patch recalled; ‘there were no illusions any more, no excited chatter or joviality.’ It was not until they reached Boulogne and settled into camp that they learned which regiments they had been assigned to. Volunteers early in the war may have been able to choose which regiment they joined, but conscripts in 1917 went where they were most needed, to regiments that had suffered most casualties or were experiencing other manpower shortages. Boys who had grown up together, and as young men endured the long months of training at the same camp, were now parted. While Patch’s close Combe Down friend Charlie Wherrett was drafted to the Somerset Light Infantry and sent to Egypt, Patch himself was sent to the 7th Battalion of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. He was immediately made part of a Lewis-gun team, taking the place of a man who had been sent home on compassionate leave. As No. 2 on the team of five, it was his job to carry spare parts, including a spare barrel, so that if the gun jammed or was damaged it could more or less be rebuilt on-site. Since the spare parts weighed almost as much as the gun itself, it would be difficult for the No. 2 also to carry a standard-issue rifle, and so Patch was given a Webley service pistol of the sort officers usually carried in exchange for his Lee Enfield. No. 1 carried the gun itself, while Nos 3, 4 and 5 carried between them 200 rounds of ammunition. The team spent a couple of days behind the lines doing target practice and getting used to taking apart and putting together the gun, then moved to the front, passing one of the most famous sites of the war, the ruined Cloth Hall at Ypres. A testament to the town’s medieval wealth and splendour resulting from the Flemish cloth trade, this huge thirteenth-century building had been virtually razed by German shelling. Frequently depicted on postcards of the era, it had so much become a symbol of the devastation caused by the war that Churchill suggested it should not be restored but remain in its shattered state as a memorial to the sacrifices made between 1914 and 1918.
The individual ranker in the First World War – such as the military Everyman officially listed as 29295 Pte. H.J. Patch, C Company, 7th DCLI – took his place within the fighting force at the bottom of a large and complex chain of command. An army, commanded by a general, would consist of some 200,000 men, and each army was divided into ever smaller but still huge units: corps of around 50,000 men commanded by a lieutenant-general; divisions of about 12,000 under a major-general; brigades of 4,000 commanded by a brigadier; and regiments of 2,000 under the command of a colonel. It was only at the regimental level that where one belonged in the force became meaningful, since each regiment had a name and a history, rather than being an apparently amorphous unit designated merely by a number. The strength of a force obviously fluctuated depending on casualties and recruitment, particularly in a war in which massive losses could be suffered on a single day. In principle, however, individual regiments consisted of two battalions of around a thousand men each commanded by a major. It was the next unit that began to have real significance for the ranker: a battalion’s four companies, each consisting of 250 men led by a captain, who would probably know at least by name every man under his command. Companies were further subdivided into platoons, fighting units of around sixty men, commanded by a junior and often very young officer, the second lieutenant or ‘subaltern’. As a training manual published in 1917 put it: ‘The Platoon Commander should be the proudest man in the Army. He is the Commander of the unit in the attack. He is the only Commander who can intimately know the character and capabilities of each man under him.’ Within each platoon were sections of fourteen men under a lance corporal, the rank Patch attained before his fight back in England; but gun teams were special. At this period companies tended to be allotted four Lewis guns each. Although members of a company, gun crews such as Patch’s were excused the boring everyday duties to which most rankers were subjected and were expected instead to spend their time keeping their weapons in good working order. Furthermore, although overseen by NCOs, they operated as an individual unit under the command of the team’s own No. 1, in Patch’s case a man called Bob Haynes. Patch always knew, and later could only remember, the three other members of the team by their nicknames. No. 3 was known as Maudy (‘There was an actress of that name. He had a good sense of humour,’ Patch recalled), while Nos 4 and 5 were known as Jack and Jill. Female nicknames were not uncommon, and in no way significant, in the trenches. Gun teams had to rely upon each other even more than members of the same platoon or section would, jointly committed to keeping their precious weapon clean and oiled and fully functional. Doing so in the front line was not easy, since around Ypres in 1917 even the summer months were characterised by a great deal of rain, from which the guns had to be protected as a main priority, often with the rain capes officially meant for their operators. Indeed, the rain started on 30 July and continued throughout August, which was unseasonably cold. This rainfall, the heaviest for thirty summers, increased the already
quagmire-like nature of the area in which the soldiers were operating, an area that reminded Patch of the Somerset Levels, the partly submerged and flood-prone region in the centre of his home county. More water meant more mud, the chief enemy of machine guns, which, unless kept scrupulously clean, could easily jam and so perhaps be put out of action at a crucial moment in an attack.
The fact that a gun team was a small individual unit, set slightly apart from their infantrymen comrades in the same company, meant that the bonds between its members became particularly strong. Even more than a platoon, they relied upon each other for their own collective safety, and could not really function except as a group of five. ‘We were just that little body alone, and we shared everything,’ Patch recalled. As did infantrymen, the gun crew distributed among themselves the contents of any parcels received from home: tobacco, cigarettes, chocolate, cakes – even new socks. But it was more than that.
You could talk to them about everything and anything. I mean, those boys were with you night and day, you shared everything with them and you talked about everything. We each knew where the others came from, and what their lives had been, even where they were educated. You were one of them; we belonged to each other, if you understand. It is a difficult thing to describe, the friendship between us. I never met any of their people or any of their parents but I knew all about them and they knew all about me. There was nothing that cropped up – doesn’t matter what it was – that you couldn’t discuss with them in one way or another. If you had anything pinched, you could talk to them, and if you scrounged something, you shared it with them. You could confide everything in them. When they got letters from home, any trouble, they would discuss it with you.
This camaraderie, a common feature of the war, helped men endure conditions at the front, which were often extremely primitive. During the four months, from June to September, that he spent there, Patch never had a bath or a change of clothes, and body-lice were a constant irritant. ‘Each louse – he had his own particular bite,’ he recalled, ‘and he’d drive you mad. We used to turn our vests inside out to get a little relief, and tomorrow you’d be just as lousy as you were today.’ Attempts to get rid of these pests by the use of such patent remedies at Keating’s Powder or Harrison’s Pomade, or by such crude expedients as running a candle-flame along the seams of filthy uniforms, had only limited success. When Patch was finally given a communal bath in water containing some sort of insecticide, he reckoned that the dead lice could have been ‘shovelled’ out. All water had to be carried up the line, mostly in old petrol cans which tainted it, and latrines were often little more than a plank placed across a shallow trench. Rats were everywhere, grown fat on corpses, gnawing their way through equipment, devouring rations, and running across the faces of sleeping soldiers. ‘It doesn’t matter how much training you’ve had,’ Patch recalled, ‘you can’t prepare for the reality, the noise, the filth, the uncertainty and the calls for stretcher-bearers.’ Conditions were also very frightening, with Germans shelling the trenches and aircraft circling overhead – hence the calls for stretcher-bearers, or sometimes just for shovels in order to scoop into empty sandbags the remains of what had a few moments before been one of your fellow soldiers, perhaps even a close friend. ‘Anyone who tells you that in the trenches they weren’t scared, he’s a damned liar,’ Patch said towards the end of his life; ‘you were scared all the time.’
It was always said that the trenches of the Western Front stretched ‘from Switzerland to the Sea’, and indeed the front line ran for some 457 miles north-west from the French–Swiss border through France and Belgium right up to the North Sea coast near the border with Holland. Front-line trenches in fact consisted of three roughly parallel lines. The first of these was the fire trench, from which men went over the top or kept watch on the enemy in the trenches opposite. Behind this was the support trench, which contained the company headquarters, a first-aid post overseen by a medical officer, kitchens and stores, and dugouts for officers. This was where troops alternating with those in the fire trench waited until called forward. Farther back still was the reserve trench for further reinforcements. These three lines were connected to each other by zigzagging communication trenches, and all were vulnerable to shellfire. Because of the waterlogged terrain, trenches in the sector where Patch served were comparatively shallow, and it had been necessary to build substantial breastworks for the protection of the troops in addition to the usual parapet of sandbags (usually filled with earth rather than sand) at ground level in front of the trench and the matching parados at the rear. The bottom of the trench was covered with wooden duckboards, intended to keep the soldiers’ feet out of the mud and the water that accumulated there. These were not always effective: Patch recalled ‘watching the water flow beneath the duckboards’ and having to use (and so waste) boxes of ammunition to stand on in places where the mud had become too deep.
Fire trenches were not built in one straight line but consisted of alternating firebays and traverses. The firebays, where men regularly ‘stood to’, peering out across rolls of defensive barbed wire into no man’s land from raised platforms known as firesteps, projected forward; traverses, where men ‘stood down’ after being on duty and, if lucky, ate or napped in ‘funk-holes’ scooped out of the sides of the trench, projected backwards. One obvious advantage of this crenellated arrangement was that it prevented any enemy troops who managed to overrun a trench from being able to enfilade, or fire along it for any distance. Another was that it contained bomb blasts or the effects of grenades lobbed into a single bay of the trench. Even so, being in any part of the front line tested even the strongest man’s nerves. ‘The shelling was ferocious at times,’ Patch remembered; ‘you’d feel the vibration of the ground, you couldn’t help but tremble, mild shellshock.’ Shells were what men feared most. They might talk about a bullet having someone’s name on it, and the dangers from enemy snipers when standing to were very real; but shells were horribly random and could land anywhere in the front line. If you suffered a direct hit you might quite literally be blown to pieces, but in some ways immediate extinction seemed preferable to the terrible injuries caused by shrapnel, which could damage or remove limbs, destroy faces, emasculate and eviscerate. Many such wounds proved fatal, and death could be painfully protracted. Those who survived were often left with injuries that might get them out of the war but would leave them permanently disfigured or disabled. ‘You couldn’t deal with the fear and apprehension we had about being hit by shrapnel,’ Patch recalled. ‘It was there and it always would be. I know the first time I went into the line we were scared; we were all scared. We lived hour by hour, we never knew the future. You saw the sun rise, hopefully you’d see it set. If you saw it set, you hoped you’d see it rise. Some men would, some wouldn’t.’
As was customary, Patch’s battalion served three days in the front line, then made its way back along the narrow communication trenches as the relieving battalion came in. These regularly congested trenches proved tempting targets for the Germans, and changeovers could be quite as dangerous as being in the front line, as Patch would later discover to his cost. The battalion was being removed only as far as the support trench, where the men waited in case they were needed to bolster the front line if it came under attack. After four days in support, they came out of the line and caught up on some much-needed sleep in tented billets, where the daily allowance of water drawn from a well was one bucket per seven men. With this they had to fill the drinking-water bottles they carried with them, shave and wash their faces. Being out of the line did not mean men could enjoy day-long relaxation, since there were numerous jobs that needed doing, from repairing tracks to carrying food or duckboards up the line.
There was, however, one place in this sector where men could take their rest uninterrupted. Talbot House, universally known as ‘Toc H’ (signallers’ code for its initials), was a clubhouse in rue de l’Hôpital in Poperinghe, a small town close to the front line. Damaged by shellfire du
ring the summer of 1915, the house had been leased to the British army by its Belgian owner, and in December that year, at the instigation of a British army chaplain called Philip ‘Tubby’ Clayton, had been refurbished and opened as somewhere for all serving men to relax. It was named in memory of Lieutenant Gilbert Talbot, the son of the Bishop of Winchester, who had been killed in action in July of that year. In spite of the involvement of the Church, the refuge Toc H provided was not specifically religious – though an upper room built for the drying of hops was converted into a chapel for those who wanted to visit one or take what in all too many cases turned out to be a last communion. A motto above the house’s front door, adapted from the one over the entrance to hell in Dante’s ‘Inferno’, stated the main principle of its foundation: ‘All rank abandon, ye who enter here’. Conceived as a wholesome alternative to the bars, cafés and brothels of Poperinghe, it was comfortably furnished and boasted a library from which books could be borrowed, a piano for sing-songs, and various kinds of board games. Patch remembers getting a cup of tea and food there too. He also recalled receiving Holy Communion from Clayton himself, along with the four other members of the gun team.
The men of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry returned to the front line in July 1917 to take part in the Third Battle of Ypres. Popularly known as Passchendaele, which subsequently became a byword for pointless slaughter, it was the last major battle of attrition to take place on the Western Front. The initial attack opened at 3.50 a.m. on 31 July and, in heavy rainfall and atrocious conditions, the offensive continued sporadically until 6 November, when the village of Passchendaele was finally captured. It was not General Haig’s finest hour, as we have seen, and the numerous assaults, often carried out against all advice on the ground, eventually resulted in British casualties of some 310,000 men. In preparation for the first attack, British guns launched a massive bombardment on 22 July, during which around 4,250,000 shells were fired at the German front line. Although some gains were made along the 11-mile front as British troops advanced in the early hours of 31 July in what became known as the Battle of Pilckem Ridge, attempts to follow up these small successes were hampered not only by the incessant rain but by the damage the bombardment had done to the drainage systems, which meant that the terrain was more waterlogged than ever. Tanks were rendered more or less useless and troops quickly became bogged down in the Flanders mud. The Allies gained at best some 2,000 yards of ground at the cost of some 32,000 men killed, wounded or missing.