Tommy (47 page)

Officers and men wrote home for favourite brands. Second Lieutenant H. M. Stanford, an unusually keen pipe smoker for one so young, ended his second letter home on 7 November 1914 with a request for:

He was soon seeking ‘another pipe-lighter like the last … I have broken the top off mine'. And then on 16 November there was a request which did credit to his classical education: ‘Please send matches and baccy
quam celerrime'.
On the 23rd he asked:

A delighted postscript added: ‘As you were! 3 parcels and some papers just arrived; amongst them, baccy.'
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Private Herbert Boorer was also a pipe man, telling his wife that:

Alcohol was as eagerly sought but, at least as far as private soldiers were concerned, was less easily come by. The rules were clear. Apart from the rum ration, spirits were forbidden to NCOs and men on active service. As we shall see in the next section, beer and wine could be purchased in the rear areas, but it was hard, though not impossible, to smuggle them into the trenches. The rum ration, a quarter-gill (one-sixteenth of a pint) per man per day, was not a right, and had to be approved by divisional commanders on medical advice that conditions were arduous. In practice almost all divisional commanders granted the rum ration. We have already seen how Major General Reginald Pinney's refusal to do so did not endear him to the troops. In Robert Graves's opinion the sick list of 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers rose alarmingly when the rum issue ceased. ‘Our men looked forward to their tot of rum at dawn stand-to as the brightest moment of their twenty-four hours,' he wrote. ‘When this was denied them, their resistance weakened.'
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Rum was drawn by battalion quartermasters in brown earthenware jars marked ‘SRD'. This officially stood for ‘Special Rations Department', but was popularly believed to mean ‘Seldom Reaches Destination' or ‘Service Rum Diluted'.

The rum ration has fuelled its own set of myths, with stories of almost insensible men going over the top and staggering across No Man's Land. While it is impossible to prove that this never happened, I have not encountered a single reliable
contemporary
source that mentions large-scale alcohol abuse in the trenches. Soldiers drank themselves into oblivion in rear areas, and sometimes individuals or small groups with access to drink did so in the front line. When asked by a young officer whether the rum ration was a good thing, Frank Crozier gave a textbook justification:

Some contemporaries maintained that the rum ration was never abused. James Jack emphasised that it was ‘in no sense a battle dope', and reprimanded Sidney Rogerson for allowing Sergeant Major Scott to issue it to his company, as it came out of the line, without the officer supervision demanded by reglations. Charles Carrington maintained that officers' privately-purchased spirits were never common enough to permit front-line drunkenness: ‘Whisky – at seven and sixpence a bottle, a subaltern's daily pay, was a rarity which we husbanded.'
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Frank Richards maintained that in his battalion:

However, rum was certainly used to reinforce, if not to induce, fighting ‘spirit'. A former Black Watch medical officer told the 1922 War Office Committee on Shell Shock that ‘had it not been for the rum ration I do not think that we should have won the war'. In his battalion they always tried to give the men a good meal and a double ration of rum in coffee before going over the top. Colonel Walter Nicholson believed that the rum ration ‘saved thousands of lives … It is an urgent devil to the Highlander before action; a solace to the East Anglian countryman before the fight.'
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In Thomas Penrose Marks's battalion an extra ration was given before an attack. This ‘is supposed to give us Dutch courage. It might fulfil its purpose if it were handed out in more liberal doses … It does not even make us merry … But every one of us welcomes it.'
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Lieutenant Vaughan, recently arrived in the line, felt increasingly nervous at the prospect of an imminent attack, ‘so that I was forced to go into the dugout and dispel the images with a whisky'.
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Even the pious John Reith admitted that rum:

Gerald Burgoyne agreed that it was an invaluable asset to tired men.

Edward Underhill thought that those in Britain who were trying to stop the rum ration ‘are fools, for it is the best thing out here. On a cold morning after a cold night a tot of rum is very good. The dawn is the worst time of the night for cold, and so that is when they have it.'
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When Ernest Shephard's rum ration failed to arrive on 27 April 1915 he blamed ‘newspaper agitation by cranks', and hoped that those responsible would come up the line to supply hot coffee to the troops.

But of course things sometimes went wrong. Private Ernest Parker was sent back from an outpost to draw the rum ration for his section, and:

Gerald Burgoyne was not as forgiving. In March 1915 he found that a platoon sergeant and his corporals had finished off a half-jar of rum intended as a St Patrick's night libation for the whole platoon, ‘getting beastly drunk … instead of giving each man in the platoon a tot … But I'll have ‘em for it, the Swines.'
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Bernard Livermore was grateful that his company sergeant major was kinder. He had enjoyed an early-morning rum ration, made more generous by the fact that there had been many casualties and so there were extra tots, and shortly afterwards an officer, telling him that he looked frozen, gave him a slug of whisky from his hip flask. Then Company Sergeant Major Dawes sent him to battalion HQ with a message.

A drunken man in a forward trench could be a dangerous liability. In September 1917 a drunken soldier in 13/Royal Fusiliers yelled ‘“Over the top! Over the top! We're coming for you” before an early morning attack. An officer ordered: “Keep that man quiet.” And presently the noise stopped. When I went along the next day I found him, very quiet. Someone had stuck a bayonet into him.'
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A drunken officer was a more serious liability. When Frank Crozier was commanding 9/Royal Irish Rifles he regarded two other COs as ‘a menace to our safety' because of their drinking.

Both were relieved of their commands.

On his rounds one night Crozier found one of his company commanders, the brave and popular George Gaffikin, drunk in his dugout.

Crozier was right about the court martial. Colonel Nicholson knew a commanding officer who was a regular of eighteen years' service:

An officer court-martialled for such an offence early in the war would be immediately discharged with ignominy, thrust into civilian life shorn of rank and pension. But once conscription was in force he was deemed to be available for service as a private soldier. ‘Automatically he was reduced to the ranks and handed over to an APM's [assistant provost marshal's] escort,' wrote Nicholson. ‘Thence he went to the base as a prisoner, perhaps in the charge of a lance corporal, where he was posted as a private into another regiment.'
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Within a few days a man like this went from the peak of commanding a battalion at the front to the trough of being a private soldier in the rear, with guard duties and fatigues, and the juddering pattern of hurry-up-and-wait, all glimpsed through a haze of uncertainty.

T
he term ‘rear' was a relative one. To a man in a front-line trench, company headquarters, perhaps only a hundred yards away, was a safe haven where a runner would often loiter if he could, while to a company commander, battalion headquarters, three hundred yards further back, was a fretful place of sharp adjutants and busy commanding officers with an unyielding concern for ration parties, wire-pickets and leave rosters. The transport lines, with the gruff quartermaster and horsey transport officer, were as far back as a man might go without dropping out of the battalion's orbit altogether. In the transport lines men rarely wore steel helmets, but they did polish their buttons, shoulder titles and cap badges daily, while front-line soldiers were not expected to polish in the trenches. There was a short-lived attempt to dull all brass fittings with acid, but the eventual policy was for brass to be allowed to tarnish in the line but to be shined when men came back from it. Charles Carrington reckoned that his men disliked outsiders in direct proportion to their distance from the wire. There was an elaborate hierarchy, starting with ‘the bloody munitions workers at home who were earning high wages and seducing your girlfriend; number four platoon in the next trench who made such a noise that they woke up the enemy gunners … and, of course, the staff who could conveniently be blamed for everything'.
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A unit out of the line might be accommodated in a purpose-built camp, housed in a large building such as a factory, school or barracks, or billeted on French or Belgian civilians. Camps were a particular feature of the base – the army's sprawling administrative area running up from Le Havre through Rouen to Etaples and its satellites. They initially consisted wholly of tents, but wooden huts quickly made their appearance, first for kitchens, cookhouses, latrines and messes but eventually for sleeping quarters too. The need for cheap and easily-built huts inspired Lieutenant Colonel Peter Nissen of the Royal Engineers to design an oblong hut with a half-round roof which bears his name. The Nissen hut could be assembled by infantry pioneers under engineer supervision, as Corporal George Ashurst of 16/Lancashire Fusiliers discovered early in 1917.

The ignorance of his men led to a run-in with his commanding officer when Ashurst returned to the battalion, but once the unit's pioneers were put at his disposal he quickly put up enough huts to house the battalion, and was rewarded with his third stripe.
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Like barracks at home, camps provided social control as well as accommodation, with perimeter fences patrolled by the guard, a guardroom at the main gate and a camp commandant in overall charge, answering to the Lines of Communication staff. These ‘scarlet majors at the Base' have had a rough ride from contemporaries and historians alike. Walter Nicholson is, however, right to suggest that most of them – dug-outs or officers worn out at the front – usually did their best with unpromising permanent staff, and were fatally handicapped because they were bound to lack any real bonds with the men passing through their camps. It was the army's ‘us and them' at its most extreme.

Transit camps near docks and railheads housed formed units or drafts on their way to or from the front. Most incomers landed at Le Havre, though nearby Harfleur and the Channel ports of Boulogne and Calais were also used, the latter for individuals going to or returning from leave. Some vessels went up the Seine as far as Rouen, especially early in the war, as Corporal John Lucy recalled.

Frank Richards acknowledged that his comrades were not slow to take advantage of this ‘alarming freedom', and when his battalion left Rouen the majority of its members ‘had given their cap and collar badges to the French ladies they had been walking out with, as souvenirs, and I expect in some cases had also left other souvenirs which would either be a blessing or a curse to the young ladies concerned'.
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Brigadier General Count Gleichen (who later changed his name to the more publicly acceptable Lord Edward Gleichen) landed at Le Havre at much the same time. He found that his rank afforded him no protection from the weather, because:

The Irish Guards did not know quite what to make of their enthusiastic welcome. Aubrey Herbert MP was accompanying the battalion in an unofficial status. His tailor had run him up an officer's uniform without badges of rank, and he fell smartly into step as the battalion left its London barracks. On arrival at Le Havre he heard a Coldstream officer announce:

Over the following months accommodation improved, though it remained relatively spartan. Immediately after he arrived in France with a draft, Corporal Clifford de Boltz marched up the infamous hill out of Le Havre: ‘When we reached the top completely exhausted we saw a huge camp composed of tents, 10 men were allocated to each tent which did not give much room for equipment, we lay down like sardines in a tin but being properly exhausted we went to sleep.'
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The nature of the French welcome had certainly changed by the time Private A. J. Abraham arrived in 1918:

From Le Havre troops went forward by train, direct to railheads behind the front if they had arrived as formed units or trained drafts. Although officers could expect proper passenger carriages, soldiers travelled in:

Private Abraham adds that:

Stuart Dolden found himself even worse off.

Drafts not destined to go straight to units – the majority of men arriving in France from mid-1916 – went instead to Etaples and its surroundings, the unwelcoming world of the base depots. Between June 1915 and September 1917 over a million officers and men passed through Etaples on their way to the front.
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Historians often write as if there was a single ‘Bullring' at Etaples, but there was not. Instead, the area east of the River Canche was paved with a mosaic of numbered infantry base depots, general hospitals and convalescent camps, and the sandy area north of the depots themselves had a long line of training compounds. Charles Douie remembered ‘a great wilderness of tents and buildings. For mile on mile the camps stretched along the dunes. I was awed at the vast array which spoke of the growing might of the British Expeditionary Force.'
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Dotted amongst huts and tents were numerous canteens which sold food, soft drink and necessities such as writing paper and soap, at near cost price, or even distributed them free. Many letters home, now nestling in archives, bear the red triangle of YMCA note-paper, testifying to its importance for young men deeply anxious to communicate with home. Bernard Livermore looked back on these canteens with enormous gratitude.

The term ‘bullring' originated in the troops' suspicion that they were being goaded into performing their drills by the permanent staff (known as ‘Canaries' because of their yellow armbands) for the amusement of onlookers. There were other bullrings too. Anthony French found himself based at a depot at Le Havre, known as ‘The Pimple':