Tommy (35 page)

Later that year the brigade had moved south to the French sector in Champagne, with its headquarters ‘accommodated in a dugout, tunnelled into a bank on the hillside and, being in the middle of the wood, was beautifully screened from aerial observation. The wood itself was delightful, full of lilies of the valley and wild spring flowers …'. Cumming did not relish the prospect of living in the dugout and so ‘had a small wooden hut built for himself'.
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Again his headquarters was overrun by a German offensive, and again he commanded from horseback. During the steady advance of the last Hundred Days he was often without a static headquarters at all. The perennial problem remained communication. Although his signallers were often able to get lines in quickly enough to speak to division, it was always hard to reach battalions, and on 26 August he managed to stop an attack, cancelled at the last moment by division, by using two ‘young and active' staff officers to sprint forwards. At this stage in the war some brigadiers were very far forward. Private Albert Bullock of 8/Royal Warwicks encountered his brigade commander in the front wave of an attack. Brigadier General Fryell ‘collected about 20 of us and we pushed up the valley with the General, who had a rifle and said he was coming with us … Just as I got up to go my leg went dead and I fell down …'.
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Frank Crozier, his brigade rushed forward to help stem the German counterattack at Cambrai, found a dugout to command from – where a visiting hussar caused concern by upsetting a bottle of port and six glasses. Pulled out of the line, he found his headquarters accommodated in a family vault in Havrincourt. The Germans had cleared out the coffins and their contents, but the place still smelt ‘diabolical'. Crozier saw that his staff were lying in the coffin niches, and asked his servant how they could do it. ‘They'd sleep anywhere, they're nearly dead themselves,' snapped his forceful orderly Corporal Starrett; ‘you lie down now as you are, here's some tea coming, and go to sleep.'
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Being on the staff of a fighting formation was certainly no sinecure. However, there were safe and predictable staff jobs, and, particularly on the lines of communication staff or at the base, a cunning or unfit officer could find himself an easy billet. J. B. Priestley, who joined a New Army battalion in 1914, was eventually commissioned in 1917, gassed and then medically downgraded to B2, ‘unfit for active service but fit for something'. He finished up at the Labour Corps depot at Rouen, running what was effectively a labour exchange that specialised in trades that were decidedly not run of the mill. ‘If Fourth Army wanted two comedians, three conjurers, a couple of female impersonators it sent us a wire saying so,' he wrote, ‘then we paraded the most likely specimens, tried one or two out on the stage, and packed them off by the next train.'
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Another temporary officer who would become an author, R. H. Mottram, spent much of his war on liaison duties with the French civil authorities, and described how rear headquarters grew.

Soldiers on their way to and from France, on duty or on leave, tended to see far more of horsey railway transport officers (‘Engines a bit frisky this morning?' asked a muddy colonel in
Punch)
or corpulent assistant embarkation officers than they did of their own formation staffs. Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Osburn, writing in 1932, by which time the staff had few friends, wrote of how:

An officer of the Scottish Rifles echoed this experience. Having come out of a hard battle:

Perceptions apart, there was not much loafing at GHQ and on formation staffs. John Charteris wrote that: ‘There are few, if any, officers who do not work a fourteen-hour day, and who are not to be found at work far into the night.'
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Most general staff officers there did some work before breakfast, took an hour for lunch, perhaps taking a turn round the ramparts for their health, and then worked on to dinner, returning to their offices afterwards. Men collapsed at their desks with the strain, and the ‘accidental' drowning of one exhausted brigadier general was widely believed to be suicide. However, the war correspondent Philip Gibbs, who himself did so much to help shape attitudes, remained unsympathetic towards them. ‘Within their closed corporation,' he wrote,

The canard that staff officers had no idea of front-line conditions is often repeated. But even if Charteris is not a sympathetic figure it is evident that he knew just what the Ypres salient was like in 1917, for he visited it several times. On 4 August 1917 he wrote that: ‘Every brook is swollen and the ground is a quagmire.' ‘The front line now baffles description,' he wrote later, ‘it is just a sea of mud churned up by shell-fire.' On 10 October, after watching the failure of an attack, he lamented: ‘Yesterday afternoon was utterly damnable. I got back very late and could not work, and could not rest.'
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Many junior staff officers knew exactly what front-line conditions were like. Reginald Tompson, then on the staff of 7th Division, wrote in his diary on 30 July 1916 that:

Nor was he unaware what all this was doing to the division. On 1 September he ‘went to Knight's funeral before starting. 3 graves, Knight … Crawford and Stroud. Knight was only a small parcel. Stroud didn't turn up as he was never found.' Four days later he recorded:

Arthur Smith was one of the two surviving staff officers in 38th Division at the end of the Mametz Wood battle.

The following year Smith himself needed the bible. He was badly wounded in the foot and the surgeon gave him a choice: ‘I could leave your foot on and you may get blood poisoning, or I could take it off, but that would be the end of your service. Let me know tomorrow what you'd like.' He opened his bible at a page containing the phrase: ‘The Lord is thy consolation and shall keep thy foot from being taken.' He declined the operation and lived to write his memoirs.

Lord Stanhope believed that the staff were blamed for what had certainly been a failing early on: ‘all through the early part of the war it was very rare for generals or staff officers to be seen in the trenches'. Indeed, when he was commanding a Grenadier company in the first winter of the war he saw his own commanding officer in the trenches only four times in three and a half months. But by the time he was on the staff of V Corps in 1917 ‘I and the GSO2 were in the front line practically every day.' He went on to suggest that the process might have been overdone, ‘and whether the Staff would not in many cases have been of more value to the fighting troops if they had thought about more fully in their offices the information they had received from reports and from personal information.'
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We may never get to like them, these GSO1s, deputy assistant adjutants and quartermaster generals, brigade majors and staff captains. Perhaps the glacis plate of historiography is now too thick to let us get close to them as they worry about their reports and returns, or deal with billeting problems in Hazebrouck or Albert. But let us at least judge them for what they were: by and large honest, brave and hardworking, sometimes promoted above the level of their competence, all too well aware of the consequences of their mistakes, and by no means ignorant of what they were expecting men to do or the circumstances in which they had to do it.

However, let us not imagine that Thomas Atkins and his comrades thought about them nearly as much as historians do. When the Reverend Harold Davies joined his division as a padre on the Somme he observed that:

And it is to this world in which red tabs counted for so little and comradeship for so much that we now turn our attention.

I
t is a truth too rarely acknowledged that the British army was not surprised by that most visible characteristic of the Western Front, the trench. The 1909
Field Service Regulations
declared that trenches were an essential ingredient of defence, and went on to warn that they must not be sited in exposed positions, should be provided with covered communications and backed by deep shelters for supporting troops.
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Infantry Training 1914
repeated much of this verbatim, and emphasised that all ranks should be taught ‘the general principles of the siting of trenches, the construction of overhead cover, and the circumstances in which trenches are required'.
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The July 1914 final examination at the Royal Military Academy included detailed questions on the entrenchment of an infantry company and a detached outpost, and the 1914 edition of the
Field Service Pocket Book
had diagrams of several sorts of trenches and covered gun positions, and a table aimed at helping an officer calculate how long entrenching a position would actually take.

Not only was the trench itself not new, but there was ample precedent for trench warfare. It was not invented in 1914, but had been a feature of sieges across the ages. The English Civil War song
When Cannon are Roaring
speaks of ‘Engineers in the trench/earth, earth uprearing'. Sappers, the traditional nickname for Royal Engineers (as well as the rank-title of the engineers' equivalent of a private), derived their name from the business of sapping – digging zigzagging approach trenches in the formal siege of fortresses. In 1864–5 the Confederates burrowed a complex network of trenches around the Virginia town of Petersburg, and Union forces sought to deal with them in ways that would be familiar half a century later, and which included exploding a huge mine beneath them. Trenches were dug in Boer War sieges, and the Russo-Japanese War featured trench warfare on an even wider scale. Indeed, the war on the Western Front had much in common with a traditional siege, with men taking to the earth to shelter themselves from the enemy's fire, and devising a variety of methods to make their own lives more comfortable and the enemy's less so.

The Western Front soon went to earth. As early as August 1914 soldiers scratched ‘lying trenches' with their entrenching tools, outlining an oblong 6 feet by 2; and rolling the turf forwards to provide some cover and a rest for the left arm to make the user's rifle fire steadier. Early that autumn there were short sections of disconnected trench, simple and primitive by later standards and not unlike the two-man foxholes of the Second World War. By Christmas trenches were continuous where the lie of the land permitted.

What was new about the Western Front was not the simple fact of trench warfare, but its scale and duration. As we saw in the first chapter, a line of field fortifications ran all the war from the Swiss border to the North Sea. There was not, as one might perhaps think, a single line of trenches along which an individual could walk all that distance, because geography and man interposed obstacles. In parts of low-lying Flanders it was impossible to dig proper trenches because the water table was too high, and so both sides built up rather than dug down. Private W. G. Birley of 21/London recalled ‘breastworks built of sandbags instead of trenches' at both Neuve Chapelle and parts of the Ypres salient.
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F. P. Roe agreed that:

Second Lieutenant Edward Underhill, writing from Ploegsteert Wood, south of Ypres, in November 1915, admitted that:

Early in 1915 Lieutenant Aidan Liddell of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders wrote that the opposing lines in his part of the salient were only 40 yards apart: he saw ‘both sides hard at work building breastwork. German officer sitting in chair directing operations'.
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Ghastly conditions such as these, which made simple existence difficult for both sides, encouraged a certain live-and-let-live attitude which was sometimes a feature of trench warfare.

But not always. George Coppard, a machine-gunner, was at Festubert in the winter of 1915, and by then the German use of poison gas and the losses of Loos had increased bitterness. He remembered that ‘the front-line area was flooded and the communication trenches had vanished under water. There was no front-line trench. Instead, earthworks, consisting of sandbags piled on top of the original parapet, had to be made.'
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When Coppard's detachment heard a German wiring party at work (he surmised that its members were probably careless because it was Christmas), they waded through thigh-deep water with a machine gun and set it up before firing a Very light which revealed around twenty Germans. The gunner opened fire while another member of the detachment put up another flare. ‘The flare burst,' he recalled,

Coppard's comrades were relieved on their fifth night in the line, slopping back in their thigh boots on an exhausting ten-hour march simply to get out of the line. Roe thought that it took about two hours to cover the 200 muddy yards of his battalion's frontage.

As better pumps and more ‘trench stores' – such as duckboards and revetting timber – arrived, trenches could be improved. Gerald Burgoyne wrote how:

Although there were frequent complaints that the Germans often picked higher ground so that the water pumped out of their trenches ran in to the British, this was certainly not always the case. In November 1915 Frank Hawkings wrote:

Even some areas of the front that were dry most of the time could be flooded by sudden heavy downpours. Hawkings recalled that at Carnoy on the Somme rains meant that:

Trench sides were revetted with timber supported by stakes or angle iron, frames of woven willow, or revetment hurdles – frames of timber lined with stout wire-netting which were ideal for holding back crumbling chalk. In Artois and Picardy trenches were generally drier than in Flanders, and the chalk which lay so close below the surface on the Somme meant that the trenches here tended to keep their shape better and required less careful revetting. But it was much harder to dig. Lieutenant Roe thought Somme chalk ‘perfectly damnably messy and intractable when trying to shovel it after rain'. However, he agreed that it did make good trenches. His battalion took over trenches from the French when the British extended their line southwards to the Somme, and he found them:

In the Vosges, towards the French-held southern end of the front where it was too rocky to dig proper trenches, both sides were forced to improvise with stone-built
sangars,
another term to add to a lexicon that few men in Britain would have understood in 1913 but which had become part of their common language two years later. Lieutenant Roe described how a trench system was laid out on the Somme in 1916.

In an ideal world (and how un-ideal this world so often was) a fire trench would be about 6 feet deep and a minimum of 3 ft 6 inches wide at the top. A gently sloping parapet (from
para pête,
‘protect head') increased the height of the trench on the enemy side by about nine inches, with a slightly higher parados
(para dos,
‘protect back') on the friendly side. This arrangement enabled a man to walk along the bottom of the trench, on slatted wooden duckboards, with his head safely below the parapet: the duckboards generally covered the sump, a narrow drainage ditch which ran along the trench floor. But it did not allow him to engage the enemy, and this was, though it was easy to forget it, the reason for his being there.

In order to enable its occupants to look out of it a fire trench was furnished with a firestep. This stood perhaps 2 feet high and ran along the enemy side of the trench. It might have been formed when the trench was first dug, or built up later with sandbags, and with real luck might have duckboards, which made it drier to sit on. Private David Jones, who served in 15/Royal Welch Fusiliers on the Somme, tells us how:

It was often a bier as well, for any body left on the trench floor would inevitably be trampled on. When an assaulting party of Royal Welch Fusiliers on the Somme passed through the trench taken by the first assaulting wave, provided by another battalion, they found a dead subaltern decently laid out on the firestep and his surviving men in good order under the platoon sergeant, who was grimly confident of holding the trench. A man standing on the firestep of a well-constructed trench would have a narrow rest on which to support his elbows when firing his rifle, with the row of sandbags supporting the lip of the parapet just in front. The prevalence of sandbags in the manufacture of the parapet meant that the colloquial ‘going over the top', for mounting an attack, was often replaced by the more intimate ‘going over the bags' by those who had done it a few times.

Because the firestep ran along the enemy side of a trench, British or German, a trench could not be used by its captors immediately they seized it. It had first to be ‘reversed', and a firestep constructed on the other side. It might be sliced into the trench wall, or made of sandbags filled with earth. But in any event there was no point in taking a trench unless one had shovels and sandbags to hand, and their carriage (usually by follow-up parties coming hard on the heels of the assault) demonstrates sound common sense, not the mutton-headed desire, so often identified by historians to make men as heavily laden as possible. The need to reverse a trench, a process which would take about ten minutes in an emergency and far longer if a respectable job was to be done, meant that very quick counterattacks were often successful: the counterattacking party could throw grenades into the trench from close range, and there was little its occupants could do to defend themselves.

The most common kind of front-line trench followed a Grecian key design, with sections of fire bay connected, by two right-angled bends, to short traverses. This arrangement meant that all but the heaviest shells bursting squarely in a trench would only kill or wound the occupants of a single bay. It also made it hard for an enemy who entered a trench to fight his way along it, for the defender would keep knife-rests – wire-wrapped timber with an X-frame at either end – which he could drop into a traverse to form a defensible block called a bomb-stop. ‘The proportion of this traversing, formed by bay and connecting trench', observed David Jones, ‘varied considerably and might be angled or square, and exactly and carefully revetted, or be little more than a series of regularly spaced salients in a winding ditch'.
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It was impossible for a fully-laden man to get out of a fire trench without assistance, and there were two main methods of overcoming this problem. The first was by the construction of sortie steps and stakes. Stout stakes, preferably made of ash, were driven deep into the parapet, and in the trench wall below each one were two staggered toeholds, ‘with brick or stout board for foot' – an arrangement which worked better on the training fields of Britain than in the real trenches of France where wooden ladders became infinitely more common.
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