Tommy (45 page)
Authors: Richard Holmes
Lastly, getting back into British lines could be as dangerous as leaving them. Although flanking battalions would have been notified of the raid, disorientated raiders, coming back across No Man's Land, might not be as carefully received by another battalion as by their own. Roe admitted that âit was not unknown for men of a patrol on returning from a raid one by one instead of together to be killed by our sentries'.
147
Siegfried Sassoon, an intrepid raider who won his MC for a desperate effort to rescue a wounded lance corporal from a shell hole on an abortive raid in 1916, was wounded in the head in 1918 by a highly-regarded sergeant who thought that his returning patrol was an incoming German raid.
Food figured largely in men's minds. Of course there was a need to ingest sufficient Calories to sustain a body engaged in manual labour, which British government dietitians reckoned required 3,574 a day. Front-line troops were expected to receive 4,193 Calories a day (the Americans enjoyed a generous 4,714 and the Germans a meagre 4,038) and those in rear areas rather less. But the preparation and consumption of food also gave a texture to long days and busy nights, provided those little mental inducements which enabled men to blunt the discomforts of the moment by looking forward to something as mundane as bully beef and biscuit, and gave a focus for the little communities, gathered round tommy cooker or wood fire. Troops in trenches might either be issued exclusively with cold rations, tinned or fresh, which they would have to cook themselves, or be partially fed by hot foot prepared behind the lines in horse-drawn wheeled cookers, one per company, fitted with dixies, large metal cooking pots heated by a fire below. Although dixies were often used to deliver food over short distances, hay boxes, oblong double-skinned containers like huge oblong thermos flasks which preserved the heat, were always preferred.
Neither method, however, admitted of much culinary subtlety, and even centrally-cooked meals, popular because they had more variety and involved less front-line labour, generally consisted of stew, with pea soup and porridge as occasional alternatives. Stuart Dolden of the London Scottish was a former public school boy and had been a solicitor before the war, but found himself manning a cooker in 1916. He describes how central cooking worked in his battalion.
When the Company were in the trenches, the cooker remained at the transport lines, and two cooks stayed with it and daily cooked meat, bacon and vegetables, which were sent up to the trenches nightly with the rations. The other two cooks went up with the Company and made tea for the troops during the Company's spell in the line and also served the rations. Then, on the next occasion, we used to reverse the role and the two cooks who had been in the line previously stayed with the cooker and the other two went up.
148
When his battalion moved up into the line at Hébuterne on the Somme:
The cookers followed later and on the way up stopped at Bayencourt to pick up the Company's rations at the transport line. After dark, we arrived at Hébuterne, a village just behind the front-line trenches. Part of the Battalion was in the trenches just in front of the village, while the remainder was in reserve in the village itself. We cooked meals and fatigue parties carried the dixies up to the platoons in the front line.
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But there was no happy ending, for: âWhen the meat arrived next day its presence was so very obvious that we had suspicions as to its goodness. We accordingly got the MO [medical officer] to have a look at it. He immediately condemned part of it, and the remainder we had to wash in permanganate of potash.'
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And although the cookers ran smoothly on roads, they were difficult to move across broken country. When the division came out of the line:
A wearying march followed, for the whole Division tramped across tracks temporarily laid across ploughed fields. At one spot the cooker became permanently embedded in the mud. The whole transport had to charge over a steep incline, and our cooker horses failed to rise to the occasion. At last, with a great struggle and an extra horse, we got over the hillock and we were on our way again.
After tramping through thick mud for solid hours, we at last arrived at our destination â a camp situated in a howling wilderness about one and a half miles north of Bray. The cookers were drawn up in a line in front of the camp â¦Â Water was again the trouble, and we had to wait for water tanks to be brought up on motor lorries â¦Â In the evening we had to make up tea and sugar rations in sandbags and these were taken up to the battalion by the ration limbers.
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Exhaustion or inattention in these situations could have serious consequences. Unsupervised troops might remove the dixies and light the burners, turning the cooker into a large open-air radiator. On one occasion a soldier tethered horses to a London Scottish ration limber. They pulled the rations off it, and âscoffed the whole of the bread and biscuit rations, and so we had nothing to eat for the whole day'. Company cookers also produced food when battalions were out of the line, although their menus could be more varied. However, a particular favourite remained bacon fat. George Coppard remembered how the cooks would shout âroll up for your dip' and produce dixie lids full of bacon fat into which men would dip their bread. And: âSometimes the cooks poured an extra tin of condensed milk into the big dixies of tea. The toffee-like brew seemed delicious to my young palate.'
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The tommy cooker, a small tin holding a chunk of solid fuel or a pot of meths on which a mess tin full of water or tinned food was heated, came in several varieties, but was not widely available at the start of the war. A company's officers might club together to buy a field canteen like that described by Gerald Burgoyne in April 1915: âOur scoff box arrived last week and we brought it up to the trenches with us; a box fitted with plates, cups, coffee pot, etc, for six. A “joy for ever” is the primus stove with which I have been playing, blackening my dugout with smuts.'
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The dextrous and inventive (and there were many such) improvised. Sidney Rogerson's corporal, Robinson, would soak four-by-two flannelette cloths (issued for cleaning rifles) in whale oil (issued to rub into the feet) in a small tin in order to brew a cup of tea: his scale of operations widened when he obtained an empty German ammunition box. Rogerson remembered him:
His lean face lit by the faint flickering of the whale-oil lamp on which mug by mug he brewed us hot drink, talking to himself the while in his curious mixed slang.
âTray bonn, ma peach!
Now the
doo lay!
Where's the
paree! Bonn
for the troops! This and a little drop of “Tom Thumb” will go down grand.'
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Frank Hawkings wrote from Wulverghem in January 1915: âJust made some Oxo. Heating apparatus â one tin of Vaseline and a piece of four-by-two.' Seven months later he proudly declared that such grubby improvisation was a thing of the past: âSome of us have invested in a baby primus stove for cooking purposes when we are in the line.'
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Larger-scale cookers were available. Lieutenant Roe remembered that, early on in the war:
We were issued with charcoal braziers and a regular bag of charcoal â¦Â The only utensils were our own individual mess tin and its lid, an enamelled mug, and a knife, fork and spoon. For quite a long time my platoon of sixty men was issued with one solitary loaf of bread a week, the rest of the ration being made up with biscuits. The usual procedure was to fill a mess tin with the very, very scarce drinking water, bring it to the boil on the brazier, and then add the very hard biscuits. When there was a nice porridgy consistency we stabbed open a tin of Tickler's jam, called âpozzy', and mixed it all together. This was eaten with a spoon and was usually accompanied by some cold slices of corned (bully) beef. For some reason we preferred the meat cold at that time.
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Braziers were a mixed blessing because when issued fuel ran out men were inclined to burn almost anything flammable to cook and keep warm. C. P. Blacker observed that:
Trench braziers were improvised and the demand for fuel grew. The wooden crosspieces of the duckboards and the boarding of the hurdles burned well, and once the discovery was made that these materials could be prised off, they quickly disappeared. Little could be done to stop these depredations to which blind eyes were turned. No one would admit responsibility. It was worst in severe frosts. âYou won't suffer for this as long as the cold spell lasts,' people would be told, âbut after the next thaw these trenches will be impassable and you will have casualties on the top.' And so they did. But not necessarily those who despoiled the revetments.
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It was futile to warn men of the dangers of using braziers in unventilated dugouts or cubbyholes. In April 1918 Captain James Dunn was told by an orderly that there was âsomething wrong' with his men, and found them in a fume-filled cellar.
Sergeant Jones, âOl' Bill', was blue and stertorous; his assistant and '37 Jones, my servant â a faithful little fellow, were dead: they slept nearer the floor level and in the far end of the cellar. Wrapped in blankets, and laid in the open with a fresh wind blowing over him, Jones came-to in a couple of hours and fell asleep. On waking he said he feared he would not get such a good job again if he went to hospital, so I kept him; he was almost himself again in a week.
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Bully beef, its very name deriving from the
boeuf bouilli
developed by the Napoleonic French army, had been issued by the British army for at least half a century. Soldiers carried a tin of bully beef and another of biscuits as iron rations (many found the phrase very expressive) which could only be eaten if no other food was available: unauthorised consumption of iron rations was an offence, and they were inspected regularly. Private George Fortune ate his on the way to the front by rail in 1917 when feeding arrangements broke down completely.
We did not have a biscuit between us, as we had lost our rations when we changed trains. Someone had forgotten to take them off, and the train went off while we were being lined up for counting. We were about three days without grub. I ate my iron rations which consisted of a small tin of corned beef and biscuit which you were not allowed to touch until you had permission from an officer.
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Harry Ogle remembered a ration distribution in a barn in 1915 as his battalion went up the line, at which one of the corporals produced some new biscuits to replace any iron rations that had become damaged.
The two corporals lay out the platoon's rations on a groundsheet, dividing them into four parts, one for each section, and the lance corporals take one each to divide between their men. âWhat sort of pozzy is it, Freddie?' âPlum-and-apple as per bloody usual.' There are tins of butter and jam to open, loaves to cut, cigarettes, pipe tobacco, matches and mail to distribute, and soon everybody is occupied and there is comparative quiet till Corporal Middleton come in with a big, shiny square tin. âThere's a tin of hard tack here. Make up your iron rations from it, anything that's spoiled. Iron rations only, mind, and in case any of you lot start trading your bully tins for love or anything else you fancy, there's a kit inspection in the near future.'
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Corporal Middleton's warning was entirely appropriate, for rations were sometimes sold or bartered. Edward Spears maintained that a British soldier âwishing to enjoy the favours of a young lady' would open his proposition with a tin of jam and the words
âMademoiselle, confiture?'
This remains wholly uncorroborated but, if true, would represent a remarkable triumph for a product often derided by the men to whom it was issued. âWhen the âell is it going to be strawberry?' snorted Bruce Bairnsfather's cartoon character Old Bill.But there was something comforting even about plum and apple, its praises sung in a ditty rapped out in the best Gilbert and Sullivan staccato:
Tickler's Jam,Tickler's Jam
How I love old Tickler's Jam,
Plum and Apple in a one-pound pot
Sent from Blighty in a ten-ton lot.
Bully could be eaten cold with bread or hardtack biscuits, fried with onions (and sometimes crumbled biscuits) to make a hash, or, reinforced by whatever vegetables were available, it could form the basis for the all-in stew which the soldiers of all armies know so well. It was soon supplemented by tinned meat and vegetables, generically known, from the manufacturer of the most common brand, as Maconochie's. It was a welcome addition for Lieutenant Roe, who affirmed that âpreviously we had subsisted on cold slices of bully, bully rissoles, fried bully and bully stew', and for Private Herbert Boorer of the Grenadiers, who told his wife in 1915 that: âThey feed us on corned beef and dog biscuits. The biscuits are alright, although a trifle hard.'
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The chief complaints about Maconochie's were its monotony and unreliability. A good tin, solidly filled, was a welcome friend: George Coppard declared that this âdinner in a tin' was his personal favourite. Frank Richards thought that tins made by Maconochie or Moir Wilson could be depended upon for âa tasty dinner', but another firm offered only âa piece of rotten meat and some boiled rice'. Its managing director should, he suggested, âhave been put against the wall and shot for the way he sharked us troops'.
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Soldiers complained that there was sometimes too much liquid, or pieces of meat of such speculative origin that some men were reluctant to eat it in the dark. However, at least it allowed
The Wipers Times
to run an âadvertisement' featuring testimonials from delighted customers. âPlease forward to me the residential address of Mr Maconochie,' begged Corporal Will Bashem, âas when next on leave I wish to call and pay my compliments.' Bombardier S. A. R. Castic affirmed that: âwords are inadequate to express my delight when I observe your famous rations upon the mess table'. Private Codder declared that his mortally-wounded pal regretted dying before he had been able to meet âyour world-famed proprietor. Need I say more?'.