Tommy (38 page)

A rocket stand was generally positioned just outside the company headquarters dugout, containing rockets which would be fired to tell the artillery that an attack was in progress, and requesting fire on the SOS target, usually the front of the British wire on the edge of No Man's Land.

Barbed wire, originally devised to retain livestock in their fields, had first made its appearance in the American Civil War. It was widely used in the Boer and Russo-Japanese wars, and was available, albeit in inadequate quantities, to the British army in 1914. It became an almost inseparable feature of trench warfare. Axiomatically it should keep the enemy so far from one's own trench that he could not simply lie on his own side of the wire and lob grenades into the trench. Each side controlled his own wire, repairing it, sometimes on a nightly basis, to make good damage done by shellfire or wire-cutting patrols. Wire was originally wrapped around stout wooden stakes hammered into the ground, but the weight of the wood and the noise of hammering alike suggested that there must be a better way. In 1915 all combatants introduced barbed-wire pickets, metal posts with a long sharpened corkscrew at one end and three loops along the straight section. These were screwed into the ground, and the wire was caught in their loops. They remain one of the most durable relics of trench warfare, and are still to be found in fences doing their duty in a more pacific guise. ‘A job after your own heart,' Private Erskine Williams told his father.

Angle-iron pickets, which had so many other uses in trenches, were also used for wiring, especially when, hammered well in and set at an angle, they were set at the end of runs of wire to maintain tension.

The layout of a barbed wire entanglement had an alchemy of its own, part art, part science. John Reith described the wire in front of his trench in July 1915.

A year later ten yards of wire would have been regarded as too thin, and in 1917 the German wire protecting the Hindenburg line was up to thirty yards deep – great wedge-shaped masses of rusty metal. David Jones noted that tripwire might be used almost independently: ‘Low strand-wire at about middle shin height, set some way apart from the main entanglement, often hidden in long grass.'
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Wire, British and German, was intended to blunt the force of an assault which might otherwise overwhelm the defence by sheer weight of numbers, to canalise attackers into the killing zones of machine guns (for which reason it often ran in long slants, rather than straight) and make it difficult for patrols or raiding parties to approach trenches. It could be snipped by wire-cutters which resembled large secateurs; cut with the aid of a steel clip which held it to a rifle muzzle so that a shot would sever it (a much-detested device), or by well-directed artillery fire. One of the essential requirements for the tank, which had made its first appearance on the Somme in September 1916, was the ability to crush wire, and tanks were issued with grapnels which permitted them to drag away whole sections of the stuff.

However, uncut wire was usually fatal to any mass assault, and one of the war's enduring images was of the corpses of dead attackers held upright by the wire. Henry Rawlinson gave Lord Stamfordham a graphic account of the failure of the 21st and 24th Divisions at Loos: ‘From what I can ascertain,' he wrote, ‘some of the divisions did actually reach the enemy's trenches, for their bodies can now be seen on the barbed wire.'
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Harry Ogle's abiding memory of the Somme was of bodies ‘entangled in or sprawling across the barbed wire, slumped over the remains of trench parapets, or half buried in the ruined trenches …'
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Second Lieutenant John Glubb saw a corpse at Ypres suspended in a climbing position, with ‘one foot raised and a hand stretched out … Except for the green colour of his face and hand, one would never have believed that he was dead.'
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In 1915 James Jack, looking at Rifle Brigade dead in front of his position, observed that many were ‘hanging on the German wire which they were trying to cut or surmount when killed; amongst them one whom I knew and is easily recognisable'.
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Even men on patrol, with the opportunity to pick their way through the wire, still found it a formidable obstacle, as Eric Hiscock discovered at Bellevue in 1918.

Ivor Gurney, who served as a private in 2/5th Gloucesters, lamented a comrade ‘who died on wire, and hung there … A noble fool, faithful to his stripes'. When an officer urged Gurney to crawl through a ‘hole' in the wire he was more circumspect.

Just as it was sometimes impossible to dig trenches, so too was it sometimes impossible to erect wire. Even that iron man Frank Crozier, as hard on himself as on others, realised that there was no need for wire on the blighted Somme battlefield in late 1916. I cannot be attacked,' he declared. ‘I am in a muddy wilderness and between the enemy and me is a muddy barrier over which organised advance is impossible. I need no wire and even if I did I could not get it there.' When his corps commander – ‘a goodly man whom I like and from whom I am subsequently to receive much kindness' – came forward to Crozier's headquarters to ask why he had put out no wire, he frankly admitted that he had only put up a single strand to stop men walking into the German lines by mistake. The corps commander good-humouredly riposted that the adjoining division claimed to have put out a great deal of wire, and so ‘the conference ends in gas, as such things sometimes do'.
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When Crozier was commanding 9/Royal Irish Rifles south of Ypres he offered a young officer, Second Lieutenant Army, who had lied about finding the gap in the German wire, the chance to redeem himself, in his eyes, by bringing back a sample of the wire defending the Horseshoe – a specific part of the German line. The following morning Army's company reported him a casualty. It was only later that Crozier found out what had happened.

The area between British and German wire was No Man's Land. Its width varied greatly. On flattish ground it might be as much as 3–400 yards wide (witness the great expanse of pitted greensward between the opposing front lines at Newfoundland Memorial Park on the Somme); but if the combatants were contending for a commanding feature and reluctant to give an inch it would be very much less, as the preserved Canadian and German front lines on Vimy Ridge demonstrate. Where No Man's Land represented the high-water mark of an attack, British or German, it was often littered with old wire, shell holes and corpses. But in other areas, such as the Somme front before June 1916, it might be comparatively peaceful, overgrown with grass and untended crops.

The term No Man's Land had been in use long before 1914 to refer to a piece of waste or disputed land, but during the war it acquired a significance all of its own. Although by definition No Man's Land was held by neither side, patrols had to pass through it to reach the enemy wire and the trenches beyond. In some sectors No Man's Land tended to be quiet, but in others it was regularly fought over: much depended on local custom and the preparedness of new arrivals to conform to it. Units, British and German, displayed variable degrees of hostility, with some sliding comfortably into ‘live and let live', trying to avoid action that would elicit a hostile response and so ratchet up the level of local violence.

In one sector the Germans put up a sign begging the East Surreys facing them to ‘Chuck it' when they broke an unofficial truce observed by their predecessors. In another a Bavarian cornet player serenaded his British listeners with
Love Me and the World is Mine
on request.
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Other units, like 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers, made it ‘a point of honour' to dominate No Man's Land by patrolling after dusk. Lieutenant Roe's battalion tried ‘to keep working parties and patrols as small as possible so as to reduce casualties', but he admitted that ‘the Boche on the other hand patrolled with Teutonic thoroughness'. In consequence, ‘refusing to allow the enemy to dominate no-man's-land was not only a tense job but required a concentrated vigilance which I found most exhausting …'.
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Private Harry Ogle was covering a British wiring party near Ypres in 1915 when he heard the thump of mallets from the German side of No Man's Land.

No Man's Land was always a permeable membrane, for individuals slipped across it to desert. A sentry in Frank Hawking's company was astonished to discover a German in his trench: the man said that he had been a waiter in London, was ‘a great kamerad English' and had been trying to surrender for some time.
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Five Prussian-hating Alsatians, whose province had been French till 1871, deserted to Edward Underhill's battalion.
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The process worked the other way too, for a few British deserters, well aware that their chances of remaining undetected on their side of the line were small, ‘disappeared' from front-line trenches and gave themselves up to the Germans. Deserters often sought to ingratiate themselves with their captors, and the success of a German attack on the bridgehead over the Yser on 10 July 1917 is often attributed to information volunteered by a British deserter. But the appearance of No Man's Land gave no hint as to its secrets: to new arrivals it conveyed an air of latent, mundane menace.

Men peered across the parapet onto a strange and bewildering world. Huntley Gordon surveyed the Ypres salient from a front-line trench in 1917.

Most new arrivals were shocked by the sheer emptiness of the landscape. The writer Reginald Farrer, looking over a parapet during a visit to the front in 1916, admitted:

Second Lieutenant P.J. Campbell had a gunner's eye for the ground.

And for infantry officer Charles Carrington the wire defined hostility. ‘This side of our wire everything is familiar and every man a friend,' he wrote: