B00D2VJZ4G EBOK (42 page)

My memories of that night are growing a little dim. One memory is of shouting from the darkness beyond the hedge. This came from the Captain of ‘C’ Company – which was in the support line. He told me many of his men were drowned, and nearly all collapsed from cold, and he asked me what to do. I told him to keep his men together and moving about while it was dark, but at the first sign of light to lie down behind the parados of the trench. His voice had a desperate sort of ring in it, which told me more than his words did. Other shouts were heard at intervals, and to those who came close enough the same orders were given. During the night several of the men near me collapsed, and the M.O. seemed to be dying of cold.

With the first streaks of light came a young officer from ‘A’ Company, which was on the right flank – and the lowest ground. He had managed to jump out of the trench when the flood came pouring over the parapet, and was dry, fit, and strong. He had got a plank from somewhere and crossed the intervening trenches by means of it. And he came splashing along in the grey dawn with the plank on his shoulder. He had a dismal tale to tell of his own company. Many were drowned, others missing, He had left a few men behind the parados.

I told off the strongest of our party to salve two spades as soon as the water sank a little, and to dig a hole for the others to sit in – a shelter of some kind.

I decided to try to get up the front trench with the young subaltern and his plank. All the trenches were abrim and the water swirling along strongly. The torrent had eaten away the sides and each trench looked like a small river in spate.

We went up the hedge side. This gave us some cover from view, and also led straight to the front line. We crossed several trenches and ditches with some difficulty, and reached the front line in the middle of the sector.

No Man’s Land was a lake. No attack would come over that for some time. North and south the front trench was full of sullen brown water, and behind it was no sign of life. Only here, where the hedge joined the front trench, were there any men. Fifteen of them were there, with the company sergeant-major of ‘A,’a very stout fellow, who had saved several from drowning, and was cheering them up as best he could. They were all blue with cold, shivering and wild-eyed.

‘B’ Company lines ran on to higher ground, so we turned north to find them. For some way the trench was full, and the muddy water hid its dark secrets. At the extreme end of our line the slope of the ground told, and here, behind an old stone wall, we found some twenty men and three officers. They had got their machine gun in action, and I told the company commander that he must watch the whole front carefully, and be prepared to cover most of it. On our way back to Headquarters we saw a number of bodies of men who had obviously died of cold and exhaustion.

The men were digging when I got back. Eight of them were taking turns with two spades, and they had dug down about 4 feet in a square of 9 feet.

In this hole we existed for another forty-eight hours. In the afternoon two runners got up from the Brigade. Our orders were to hang on for the present, and I learnt that the whole front was disorganized, ration parties drowned, trenches impassable, and floods everywhere in the basin.

No rations came up in all that time. We found one tin of gooseberry jam and a rum jar half full of rum and muddy water. These were shared out among the party. We had nothing dry of any kind, no matches, tobacco, paper, clothes. That evening it began to freeze and the night was bitter. The M.O. died in his sleep, and two other men also.

Next day there was not more than 2 or 3 feet of water in the trenches, and we had about forty rifles in action as well as the machine gun, but all the men were exhausted. One Turk sniped at us from a tree, and hit several men before we got him. It was quite impossible to get the wounded men away. Five other Turks struggled across No Man’s Land (it took them an hour) and gave themselves up. Poor devils – they were half-dead already.

On the second day the brigadier waded up. He stood thigh deep in the trench to hear my gloomy report and went back with hardly a word. He had seen all that was necessary – and there was nothing to say. Moving about carefully on the top we found a number of bodies. None was wounded, all had died of cold and exposure. Two brothers of ‘C’ Company had died together. The arm of one was round the other’s neck, the fingers held a piece of biscuit to the frozen mouth.

It seemed a strange and inexplicable thing that these men who had come there to fight, and had fought bravely, had been killed by the elements.

The trenches were a foul sight. Everything was covered by a slimy scum of mud. The front trench in the southern half was unspeakably horrible; this was where the flood had been deepest and strongest.

On the third day we were withdrawn. Forty-five of us all told crawled back to a ravine near brigade headquarters – many on hands and knees. Forty-five out of 500. The adjutant was killed on the way by shrapnel from a solitary shell.

In the ravine we camped under tarpaulins, and slept round a fire. They sent us up brandy and tinned chicken from the medical stores, and dry boots and clothes. On each of the succeeding days we stumbled up to the trenches to collect identity discs and to bury our dead.

Lieut.-Colonel F. W. D. Bendall was before the War captain, unattached list, Territorial Army. 1914, promoted Lieut.-Colonel to raise and command 2/3rd Battalion The London Regt. (Territorial Army). 1915, Malta; The Sudan; Gallipoli, Suvla Bay. 1916–1917, France, commanding 8th and 7th Battalions Middlesex Regt. Wounded August 1917, Battle of Passchendaele Ridge. 1918, Home service. Despatches (2) and C.M.G
.

After six months’ training in Scotland I was as fit as drill, fresh air, and mutton stew could make me. I could route march all day with full pack; I could make four bulls at 500 yards; and I could run as far as any man in the battalion. I was an efficient robot-soldier the morning I went on board the
Olympic
bound for Gallipoli. On the trip out from Liverpool to Mudros I was inoculated five times. My body was sore, my head ached, and my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. Before I landed I was a physical wreck.

The peninsula loomed up black and foreboding. The lighter that took my company from the troop-ship grounded on the beach and the men jumped ashore. The guns were booming along the whole Suvla Bay front; Verey lights sizzled in the sky and the orders were passed from one to the other in whispers. The men formed up near a shelter and moved off and then halted.

Gallipoli, and I was sick before I started.

‘Sergeant, you will go to the front line immediately,’ the landing officer told me.

‘Follow me,’ a guide said; and I followed him with my men across the beach and up through a gulley into the darkness. When I reached the top of a hill a bullet whizzed over my head. I ducked and the guide laughed at me. I felt the top of my helmet. The whole place smelt of sage and decaying flesh – a rich combination. So this was war! I stumbled on and on through the darkness with my fears. The machine guns rattled away on my left. The smell of death was everywhere.

I jumped into a trench. I followed the guide through the darkness. The guide was blotted out two paces in front of me. I would have lost him but for the click, click of his entrenching tool. I arrived with my draft at regimental headquarters without a casualty. The adjutant came out of his dug-out. His clothes were covered with mud, his face had three-weeks’ growth, and his left hand was bandaged. He had been struck with a bullet only a few minutes before.

‘Nice clean lot of men you have,’ he said. ‘You are badly needed.’

We were. Ten hours before a storm had swept the Peninsula of Gallipoli, and the ruin of it! Desolation everywhere. Thank God it was dark! It was better to have the first experience of trench life before the dawn. I stumbled over men lying on the ground, moaning, crying in their agony; their legs frozen to their hips. There was an utter utterness about it. There was no one to attend to them; no one to carry them back to the beach. Everyone was demoralized; everyone was sick, waiting, waiting for the stretcher bearers who never came.

I had only a hundred men, and the adjutant divided them equally between the four companies. I was detailed to ‘C’ Company. I was shown the communication trench. ‘You will find your company officer in a dug-out up there,’ the adjutant said. I found the captain and reported to him. ‘Twenty-five men,’ he said. ‘What a landfall.’ It was just before the dawn.

‘We stand-to at dawn,’ the captain said to me. ‘Post some sentries; we haven’t had any since the storm.’

I posted the sentries and walked up and down the trench. I linked up with the companies on my flanks. There was little rifle fire, but it had its terrors. Everywhere I moved I stumbled over dead bodies; they floated towards us on the receding flood. The dead bodies were washed over the parapet, and the rains had opened the shallow graves. The first hours in the trenches were horrible.

I worked for twenty-four hours. The next night I took out a patrol across the mud of No Man’s Land. I fell into the abandoned trenches; I crawled through the water with two men after me. I got within 20 yards of the Turks’ wire on my first patrol. I saw them digging in the darkness, improving their trenches and putting up new wire. They were as demoralized as we were.

The next morning the sun came up in a blaze of orange. It became very hot before eight o’clock and it was middle November. The company spent many days digging trenches to let the water run off from the front line. And there were orders for deep dug-outs as the winter loomed ahead.

There was not much sudden death, but there was slow death everywhere. The body was slowly dying from the inside. We talked to each other; we laughed occasionally, but always the thought of death in our minds – our insides were dying slowly.

The water was death; the bully beef was death; everything was death. I was afraid to eat a thing. It terrified me; it made me feel dead. A man would pass me holding his stomach, groaning in agony, and a few minutes later I would take him off the latrine, dead. The men contracted dysentery and fever every day. The bullets did not take a big toll. It was the death of germs.

I worked with my men all day and all night. I was lucky to snatch a few hours’ rest in the middle of the day. The company had now thirty men to hold 200 yards of front. The sentries were posted at incredible distances apart. And for ever the patrols and the fatigues and digging day and night – digging, digging, infernal, intensive digging.

The company had been in the line twenty-five days; it was a record. There was no talk about going out for a rest; there was nowhere to go, only down to the beach, and the beach was shelled incessantly. It was safer in the line.

The food consisted of tea and biscuits. No meat. There was plenty of jam, but if a man was ‘fed-up’ with war all he had to do if he wanted a nice bed on a hospital ship was to eat a tin of jam. Many a tired man looked longingly at the flaming red cross on the side of the hospital ship at night and opened a tin of apricots. They carried him away the next day or the day after.

There were rumours every day – cook-house rumours, latrine rumours, and trench rumours. They were always different. The regiment was doing this to-day and that tomorrow. No soldier will deny the psychological blessing of them. They were the hope of tired men, of fed-up men, and sick men. They were lovely rumours, always original and timely. Nothing came of them. Dig and dig; patrol and patrol; raid and raid. Above all, over all, hopeful, glorious rumours! The company is going out of the line to-morrow for a month. The company has been ordered to Mesopotamia. The company is going to Egypt for the winter. There were rumours all day and all night.

One morning the captain called me. ‘Our trenches must be deepened 3 feet,’ he told me. Why, God only knew. They were quite deep enough if a man went about at the stoop. Three feet deeper, and only twenty-five men left in the company to do the work.

‘Three days to do it, sergeant; and see it is done; don’t care how.’ It was done.

A few days later there was an incredible rumour. The General Staff would pass along our trench at noon. The men had to scrape off the mud with jack knives; they were given a pint of water to shave and, God above, their buttons had to be polished. The joke of the deepening of the front line trench was now obvious. The war must be made safe for the generals.

At noon the order was passed along to ‘Stand at attention.’

We did, and Lord Kitchener passed and his general’s cap was just six inches below the parapet. There were a number of Staff officers following him, and as they passed around the traverse of the trench their footsteps seemed to echo: ‘It’s hopeless! It’s hopeless!’

The next morning the company officer called me into his dug-out. He was a hard drinker and a brave officer.

‘There are rumours of an evacuation, sergeant,’ he said. ‘Kitchener does not like the look of it for the winter; but there is nothing official. Perhaps we shall have good news to-night.’

I smiled as I went back to my trench. When did the British Army ever retire? It was impossible. Here for ever. Flies in a spider web – million to one against ever getting out. Evacuation, no! I was sorry for those sick men who would believe the story. There would be more raised hopes, more denials, and more silly talk.

However, the impossible did happen. It was to be in ten days, the captain told me. Ten days, and the regiment would go to Egypt, the captain said – perhaps Cairo, certainly Alexandria. It was not a bad War after all!

The remaining days were full of feverish activity. Small mines were sunk; bully beef tins were filled with explosives and scores of rifles with time fuses were stuck about the trenches. I worked like a galley slave all day and all night. The British Army was going to leave the ghastly place and outwit the Allahs on the opposite hill. Yes, the British Army would sneak away in the night under the cover of darkness, what a story to tell my grandchildren! ‘Once upon a time, my young hearers, I fought in the rear-guard action when my regiment ran away from Johnny Turk at Gallipoli.’