Forgotten Voices of the Somme (23 page)

Sergeant Charles Quinnell

9th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers

I was taken to a big marquee about a mile behind the line, and there I was given the various shots of anti-tetanus, and by this time I was utterly exhausted and I went to sleep. And when I woke up I was being lifted into a motor vehicle, taken down to the railhead and from there a train journey down to Étaples, which was forty or fifty miles away.

They tried to save my leg. I had seven days with my foot in a bath of hot water, and I was taken into the operating theatre where tubes were put in to drain it, but by this time it was turning septic, the leg was swelling up like a football.

So they amputated the leg – but they made such a hasty job of it that they left bits of dead bone in the stump, and it was the best part of a twelve-month before they found these. Well, you just imagine a surgeon doing twelve
amputations
a day. The man was tired, tired, tired. He had a butcher's apron on, a waterproof apron, and you were just another case; he didn't even look at you to see who you were.

Corporal Henry Mabbott

2nd Battalion, Cameron Highlanders

I can remember a blinding white light. I got up to run, but I went down. Something happened to my right leg. I got up again to run, and once again I went down. I felt for my leg, and halfway down my calf there was nothing. It was bleeding very badly, and I cut the string of my gas mask, put it round my thigh and tied it as tight as I could. I put the knife I was using back into its sheath, and put the sheath in and turned it until the blood had stopped flowing, and I hung on to it. All was well, until somebody found me and carried me to a stretcher. There was an awful amount of shelling going on, and he took an awful long time to get me down to a dressing station. The doctor in the dressing station put a needle into my wrist, and I know no more until I woke up in hospital. I was given what was known as the
'guillotine operation'
. Nothing more was done.

Then they discovered that I had
gangrene
. I was taken to another hospital where they opened up my spine and pumped something in. I was visited by a
Salvation Army
major who wrote to my parents, saying that I'd lost my right leg, but that I was one of the most cheerful people in the ward. A couple of days afterwards, a Salvation Army lassie came along, and she wrote home that I'd lost my left leg. I learnt many months afterwards that they were of the opinion that I'd lost both.

I was brought home to a private hospital in Grosvenor Square. A Harley Street man, who was giving his services absolutely free, told me that he would have me up into the operating theatre the next morning. I asked him what he was going to do and he explained everything to me. He said he would saw through the bone, seal it, and he would connect the nerves and the ligaments, as though he was putting an electric cable together.

They put me to sleep, and I woke up in my bed. Each morning, it had to be dressed, and there was a huge tube inside, which had to be brought out, sterilised and put back again. The pain was getting far too much, and as the tube was taken out one morning, I said to the nurse, 'That's not going back!' She said, 'It is!' I said, 'It's not!' She went to get matron, who said it must be done. So I took everything out of my locker, and managed to get the locker up, and said that the first person that attempted to put that tube back would get the locker full force. They waited until the doctor arrived, and he agreed that the tube shouldn't go back.

In due course, I was taught to use crutches, and the very first thing I did was to go to
Selfridges
, with two others. The lift attendants were young women, and that morning one of them had very short trousers on, and I smacked her leg as I entered the lift. She objected to it – and I was turned out of Selfridges. They never had my custom again.

Private Basil Farrer

3rd Battalion, Green Howards

I was walking along the top of my trench when I got a bullet right through the lower left arm. I got down into the trench, and I was quite near a dugout where there was an artilleryman who bandaged me up. I went back to my regimental aid post, and I was sent further back. Walking along, I heard somebody yell out, swearing at me. It was almost dawn, and the artillery were opening out for attack – and I was walking bang right in front of them. I would have been blown to pieces, without this fellow yelling out to me. From the front, I was sent on a train back to hospital in
Rouen
. I must have got dirt in the wound, because by the time I was in Rouen my arm had swollen and I had gangrene. They had to slash quite a lot of it off. It is only small now, but it was a terrific gash. I remember coming round and a medical officer saying, 'I have given you a Blighty.' I was walking wounded when I went in, and they carried me out on a stretcher.

I was taken up to Le Havre, and then across the Channel. Orderlies came around, asking us what part of England we would like to be sent to. They liked to send the wounded as near to their homes as they could, so they could be visited by their relatives. The result of that, when we arrived at Southampton, I was put on an ambulance train and taken off at Warrington, because my mother lived on the outskirts of Manchester. I remember as soon as I got there, I had to have my wound re-dressed. The nurse came up to me and she saw my face, and she said, 'Are you frightened?' I was nineteen. I was only a kid. 'What are you frightened of?' she said. 'Are you going to hurt me?' I said. 'I won't hurt you,' she said. I asked that because in the tented hospital in Rouen, every time the nurse dressed my wound in Rouen, she used to pull it. Oh! It was agony! She was callous. So when I got to Warrington, the nurse saw I was a bit scared. But she dressed my wound, and I never felt it. She was a proper qualified nurse. I was in that hospital for two or three weeks.

I was so pleased to have a Blighty wound. After that, I was moved to St

Helens and they were nuns there, with just one qualified civilian nurse, and I was there until the end of December. I was discharged, and I had Christmas at home. Then I reported to the depot at Richmond, with the Yorks. It was the first week of January, and I hadn't properly healed. I had no use of the fingers or thumb. I couldn't bend them – the bullet had gone through the nerve. I was on early morning parade with my rifle and everything, and I passed out like a log. I just fainted. The result was I was excused parades.

Then I was posted to West Hartlepool, and from there drafts were formed to be sent back to France. But I appeared before a medical board – and I was recommended for discharge, with a pension of sixty per cent. I didn't have use of my hand, and the general feeling was that no one who had been in France for any length of time wanted to go back. Oh no! But while I was waiting for my discharge, some order must have been passed that men who could still be used must not be discharged. They must be retained and put in departmental corps. I wasn't consulted at all, and I was transferred to the
Army Pay Corps
at St Helens.

I was in
St Helens
for a few days, and then sent down to Nottingham, where they were opening a pay office to deal with the accounts of the Labour Corps. I was going to be a clerk, in the lowest category. I was billeted out on civilians, and I had only been in the house for five minutes, when the landlady – if you'd like to call her that – said, 'There's a soldier at the door, and he wants to speak to you.' It was a Canadian soldier – and I didn't know him. He said, 'I saw you arrive just now, and I want to ask you a favour.' I said, 'What favour?' He said, 'I'm on special leave from the front, and I'm getting married tomorrow, and returning the next day. I know nobody in town. Will you be my best man?' I said, 'I don't know you.' He said, 'It doesn't matter.' I said, 'I don't know what to do.' He said, 'It doesn't matter. Just pass me the ring.' So the next day, at a church nearby, I was best man at this soldier's wedding. Afterwards, we went and had a drink at one of the houses. Never heard or saw him again.

Lieutenant Norman Collins

6th Battalion, Seaforth Highlanders

We were drawn out of the line for a rest. We were sent near
Auchonvillers
, and we had a clean up, and we got back into our officers' togs. We recovered very well. We had musical evenings, with the pipes playing; we had boxing

matches. I was upset, though, because I was detailed to go back up the line with a working party. We had to go to a dump, where we had to pick up barbed wire and posts and take them up a communication trench, and get out after dark, and mend the wire in front of the line. I thought this was most unfair, having just come out of action, but there you were, this sort of thing happened.

So, we got as far as the dump, and we picked up the material and entered the communication trench. I had my squad of about a dozen men with me, and I heard the shriek of a shell and it sounded different. I knew a lot about the shrieks of shells by this time. It was getting louder and louder, and I thought it had my name on it. It landed just behind us, and it killed, or badly wounded, the whole of the squad. I was blown down, but I was the least injured, and I got a piece of the shell in my thigh. We were all taken into a first-aid post, and a doctor examined everybody. He kept saying, 'Dead, dead, dead, take them out!' He didn't want to bother with those. The dead were grey. As soon as they died, they went a grey colour. The doctor did the best he could with the wounded, put them on stretchers and got them on to ambulances. I was able to walk because I hadn't broken any bones, and I walked with the wounded to the ambulance, got in and we went down the road.

As we drove along, we passed the artillery, the field guns, and then the heavy guns, and after a while the noise of the guns died away, and we knew that we were out of the danger zone. We went into a tented hospital, and that night we slept in white sheets. After that, we were sent back to England and I landed up in the
Brighton workhouse
, which had been converted into a hospital. I was glad to be there.

Lieutenant Ulick Burke

2nd Battalion, Devonshire Regiment

A lot of men died between being wounded and getting to a
casualty clearing station
, or a base hospital, because there was no blood plasma in those days. And also your journey – especially if you were on a stretcher – was very precarious. A fellow would step on what he thought was a piece of the road – but it was a hole – and down he'd go, and over would go the stretcher, and you'd be hurled into the road. And there was so much mud and dirt that could get into the wound, that gangrene was the worst enemy.

Captain Maberly Esler

9th Battalion, Border Regiment

As the battalion medical officer, I had a sergeant and a corporal and I had three stretcher-bearers allotted to each company, and there were four companies in the battalion, so that gave me twelve stretcher-bearers to call on, in an emergency. I had a first-aid post in a dugout just behind the trenches, which could hold twenty or thirty wounded men. The stretcher-bearers went out and found people who were lying out, and couldn't get in themselves, and brought them to the first-aid post where we did all the dressing we could do.

The function in the front line was to pick people up immediately they were wounded and put on a first-aid dressing, or give them morphia. All we could really do was to cover the wound, keep it from getting infected and stop haemorrhaging by compression on the main vessel. If an arm or leg was shot and bleeding profusely, you had to stop the whole thing by putting a tourniquet on, but you couldn't keep a tourniquet on for longer than an hour without stopping the blood supply and losing the leg altogether, so it was very necessary to call a field ambulance quickly, who could ligature the vessels. In those cases, they had to be on the ambulance in five or ten minutes.

The field ambulance could come up at any time of day or night. We would get in touch with them by field telephone and tell them we had these cases. The field ambulance could perform minor operations, then, as quickly as possible, they'd move them back to the casualty clearing station, which could do major operations and would sort them out. They decided if they were fit to go home, or fit to go back to their fighting units, or else they passed them back to a base hospital.

Private Basil Farrer

3rd Battalion, Green Howards

In the morning, it was 'stand to', and then after that, as stretcher-bearers, we would be in the front line in our dugout, and we would be available on call if there was a casualty. We would pass the day playing cards, writing letters or reading – if you had anything to read. There was always something to talk about. You'd wander up and down the trenches looking for someone to talk to. Those that had nothing to do very often lay down in a dugout. If you had a dugout. Because we knew we may be on duty at night-time.

If there was a casualty, word passed down the line 'stretcher-bearer,

stretcher-bearer', then, of course, we would go along the line and attend to the man. We'd see if he's wounded and if we could apply his dressing. Then we'd put him on a stretcher and take him down to the aid post. You would try not to hurt him – and the thing was to get him out. It's surprising what men could put up with. I have seen – during battle – men who have been crawling on their knees with half a foot off. And in an attack, you looked after your own wounded. As you passed, there might be a man calling for you; you looked on his shoulder and saw if he was one of your regiment. If not, you left the fellow. It wasn't an instruction as far as I can recollect, but it was a natural thing. You had plenty of your own.

Corporal Wilfred Woods

1/4th Battalion, Suffolk Regiment

On the Somme, a lot of men were never picked up at all. There was a sergeant with his shin all ripped open, and he had been there about a week; it was all green gangrene, and full of maggots as big as that. He was alive and could talk to you. I said, 'I will do what I can to get you out!' We went back and left him there, and at night we heard, 'Stretcher-bearer! Stretcher-bearer!' and then, 'Bang, Bang.' The Germans were throwing hand bombs at him, you see.