Tommy (48 page)
Authors: Richard Holmes
Bernard Livermore went through the bullring at Harfleur. He recalled it as:
A vast expanse, covered with small parties of men performing various antics, all with the same end in view. We practised the most deadly, the most efficient methods of killing, or avoiding being killed. This tough finishing school was as near to the real thing as possible; stretcher-bearers stood by to cart off those unfortunates who were accidentally maimed. We rushed, with raucous yells, and stabbed straw-stuffed bodies. In â¦Â Out â¦Â On Guard. On we raced and jumped down 8ft trenches, scrambling out as speedily as possible to avoid the bayonets of the following wave. We chucked our Mills Bombs out of the trenches without mishap and learned how to fire rifle grenades and other weapons. We ran, as quickly as we could, through the dreaded Gas Chamber â¦Â Sheer luck saved some of us from these training hazards. On two days I was detailed for cookhouse fatigues, a tedious and boring job doing all the work for the Sergeant Cook. He âtook a fancy' to me and said that I was a good worker. He said that if I could produce a fiver he was willing to âuse his influence' to get me a permanent base job on his staff. Rather indignantly I tried to refuse this kind offer and mentioned that I had come to fight, not to peel his spuds for the duration. âWell, no offence meant and none taken I'm sure. But, marks my words, you'll soon be wishing you had a nice cushy job down here. It ain't too cosy up in the trenches, but there is no accounting for taste.'
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Stuart Dolden was encamped on the racecourse at Rouen.
The camp held about eighty thousand men, and included an Indian section and hospitals. We spent a month there during which the usual training was carried out. On the Cavalry parade ground about a mile from the camp, trenches and dugouts had been made with barbed wire entanglements in front, and there we carried out those weird and wonderful manoeuvres pertaining to Army warfare â¦
Efforts had been made to beautify the camp, and in front of the officers' quarters little gardens had been planted with flowers and vegetables, and in some cases regimental crests and badges had been worked with various pieces of coloured glass to give an artistic touch.
The water supply was somewhat erratic, a serious matter â¦Â because it meant that if one was absent at the proper time it would be hours before you could get a wash â¦Â A good deal of our spare moments were spent in the YMCA hut where we were able to obtain refreshments, play billiards and from time to time listen to concerts arranged by the various regiments and allies.
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In 1915 the Reverend Pat Mc Cormick was a padre at the Rouen base camp; and, with two of his colleagues, was a regular feature in camp concerts singing his party piece âThree Jack Johnsons' â Jack Johnson being a popular term for a heavy shell, named after the famous black heavyweight boxer. One hopes it was funnier then than it seems now.
Three Jack Johnsons
Hark how they bang!
They went overhead with a terrible whine;
They kicked up a dust and a terrible shine;
They made the three parsons go cold in the spine;
The three Jack Johnsons!
Mc Cormick made a point of speaking to all drafts when their training was complete, before they set off to the front. He gave them âa short talk of encouragement, a prayer and a blessing â immediately after which the command to form fours was given and off they marched to the station'.
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Although living conditions were better for officers, their training at the base camps was still tough. In August 1917
Joseph Maclean wrote:
Today we had a hard time in the bull-ring. In the morning we were twice over their famous âfinal assault course' in full equipment. It is a series of rushes from trench to trench, the intervening space being strewn with barbed wire, high wire, shell holes etc, and they have fellows throwing huge fir cones at you all the time to represent bombs.
Anyone found chewing gum had to run at the double to the top of a nearby hill, known as Mount Spearmint. And there was the usual rough âhumour' from instructors, such as the Black Watch bombing officer who showed them a Mills grenade, and warned: âIf this hits ye, ye'll have an awfu' bother putting yourself together at the resurrection.'
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Some students proved the truth of his words all too quickly. When Robert Graves was an instructor at Harfleur he heard a sudden crash just after he passed a table laid out with various types of hand grenade.
A sergeant of the Royal Irish Rifles had been giving a little unofficial instruction before the proper instructor arrived. He picked up a No. 1 percussion grenade and said: âNow lads, you've got to be careful here! Remember that if you touch anything while you're swinging this chap, it'll go off.' To illustrate the point, he rapped the grenade against the table edge. It killed him and the man next to him and wounded twelve others more or less severely.
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Graves noted that by late 1916 instructors at the bullrings were:
full of bullet-and-bayonet enthusiasm â¦Â Troops learned â¦Â that they must HATE the Germans and KILL as many of them as possible. In bayonet-practice, the men had to make horrible grimaces and utter blood-curdling yells as they charged. The instructors' faces were set in a permanent ghastly grin. âHurt him, now!' âIn the belly! Tear his guts out!' they would scream, as the men charged the dummies. âNow that upper swing at his privates with the butt. Ruin his chances for life! No more little Fritzes! â¦'
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Alan Hanbury-Sparrow agreed that: âIt was all the rage, this brainless bayonet-fighting.'
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But Lieutenant R. F. Calloway, a priest who had served as a chaplain before taking a combatant commission, found it all quite inspiring. After a lecture on âThe Spirit of the Bayonet' by Lieutenant Colonel Ronald Campbell, the army's leading ideologue of bayonet fighting, he told his wife that it was âextraordinarily good, but to me the interest of the lecture lay not so much in the lecture itself as what the lecture stood for â the entire conversion of our whole attitude of mind as a nation â¦Â if the war is to be fought we must fight to kill'.
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(Calloway was killed on the Somme at the age of forty-four.) Lieutenant C. P. Blacker asked an officer responsible for training bayonet-fighting instructors how many of his qualified instructors had actually bayoneted anybody. âVery few,' he admitted. âBut we don't insist on their telling the strict truth when asked that question.'
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The chief complaint about the bullrings was not the quality of their training. Indeed, although Clifford de Boltz wrote that â¦Â the âNCO instructors were real martinets' he thought that âthe training undoubtedly did us good although we did not think so at the time'.
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It was their stark dehumanisation at a time when men were steeling themselves to face what lay ahead. And it was their remorseless imposition of the same soulless programme upon eighteen-year-old recruits and forty-five-year-old combat veterans: after mid-1916 all but a fortunate few went up the line by way of the bullrings, whether it was their first trip to France or whether they were wounded being recycled through the training machine. Graham Seton-Hutchison, regular subaltern in 1914 and machine-gun battalion commander at the war's end, was unquestionably a hard man. But he was convinced that the bullrings actually did more harm than good. He had no time for
chaotic marshalling to the whim of some witless NCO. Bullies too, yelling illiterate unanswerable personal abuse â¦Â A thousand meaty fellows, without the humours of the circus, shouted âWe're lion-tamers âere!' while volunteers, young men glowing with the first flush of patriotic pride, and older men already enjoying respectability, were harassed and pushed, marching, counter-marching, in fulfilment of some ill-tempered whim â by âstaff blokes' glued like limpets to what were known as âcushy jobs'.
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He believed that soldiers joining their units from the bullring needed to have their self-respect restored and to be treated like the comrades they were. Henry Williamson went through the bullrings, and put a thinly-fictionalised account of them in his novel
Love and the Loveless.
âThere was something damnable about a Base system which treated old soldiers, some with two or three wound stripes, as though they were new â¦', opined his hero Philip Maddison. âThe brass-braided wound-stripers, half dead inside their heads, three quarters of their courage expended with the death of old comrades muttered to themselves. Loos â Somme â Langemarck â they'd had enough. Keep the bullshit for the rookies, who do they think we are?'
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Second Lieutenant Wilfred Owen froze the blank stare of the bullring for posterity, writing to his mother on 31 December 1917.
But chiefly I thought of the very strange look on all faces in that camp; an incomprehensible look, which a man will never see in England, though wars should be in England; nor can it be seen in any battle. But only in Etaples. It was not despair, or terror, it was more terrible than terror, for it was a blindfold look, and without expression, like a dead rabbit's.
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* * *
There were many small-scale outbreaks of collective indiscipline in the British army of the First World War. Many might best be called strikes, because they occurred in 1918â19 and represented the firmly-expressed desire of citizen soldiers, who had been perfectly prepared to âdo their bit', to go home now that the war was over. Some of these strikes were certainly serious: in late January 1919 a strike at Calais effectively paralysed part of the base organisation. However, there were only three major mutinies amongst British troops on the Western Front: an outbreak in 12/South Wales Borderers in January 1916; another in a trench-mortar battery of 38th Division in September 1917; and one at Etaples in the same month. In addition there was an outbreak of indiscipline at Blargies military prison, near Amiens, in 1916, and an Australian mutiny in October 1918 when worn-out men refused to go up the line. Given the scale of mutiny in other First World War armies this testifies to the remarkable malleability of the British soldier. And the Etaples mutiny, in particular, demonstrates that it was generally resentment at what was seen as unfair treatment, rather than class tension or anti-war spirit, that drove men to disobey.
The Etaples mutiny came as no surprise to many experienced officers: Charles Carrington called it âa reaction against acts of petty tyranny by tactless officers. It was always believed at the time that it began in the mixed camps where men of all units exchanged complaints and did not know the officer in charge.'
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Captain Cyril Mason of the 60th Rifles agreed that:
There is no doubt that the men had grievances. A base camp is utterly different from one's own battalion, where officers and men are known to each other. In a base camp the men are constantly passing through, sometimes only staying a couple of nights â¦Â The permanent staff of officers is small. They are supposed to be helped by officers passing through, but officers passing through for one or two days cannot really be much help. In a base camp much of the routine work devolved onto the permanent base NCOs, some of whom abused their position taking bribes for privileges and leave passes into Le Havre. This, and the tension of waiting for orders, made base camp an unpleasant experience for men in transit.
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The mutiny began on 9 September 1917 when a military policeman arrested a New Zealand gunner. The gunner was soon released, but a crowd gathered and Private H. Reeve of the military police maladroitly fired his revolver, mortally wounding the well-respected Corporal W. B. Wood of 4/Gordon Highlanders, an innocent bystander, and also hitting a nearby Frenchwoman. There was a large-scale riot that evening, with Australians and Scots conspicuously involved in attacks on military policemen; there was a general exodus to visit the fleshpots of Etaples, with further outbreaks of rioting in the days that followed.
Lieutenant Ernest Parker observed that the rioters reserved their hatred for the Canaries: âthey had no quarrel with fighting officers and during our leisure we went over to Paris Plage every day unmolested by the mutineers'.
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A battalion of the Honourable Artillery Company succeeded in getting things under control on Thursday 13 September, and although some men broke camp the following day, the worst was over. Private Percy Croney believed that âthe government will be hushing the whole thing up, not wanting generals in France â who would sit on the courts martial â to find out how their men are tormented in the Bull Rings before coming up the line'.
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In the event, only four men were actually charged with mutiny (though there were many lesser charges), and one, Corporal Jesse Short of 24/Royal Northumberland Fusiliers, was shot for mutiny.
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The most recent work on capital courts martial concludes that the mutiny at Etaples left some officers at general headquarters âseverely rattled'.
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It certainly emphasised what experienced officers already knew well: discipline ultimately relied on the consent of the governed. During the retreat from Mons, Alan Hanbury-Sparrow realised that âdiscipline cannot go farther than public opinion allows'. The collective opinion of most units generally supported discipline, although, as we shall see, there were aspects of it â most notably the hated Field Punishment No. 1 â which were bitterly resented. Above all the unit structure, so often imperilled, but so rarely shattered, by the impact of casualties, knitted men together. âWe were banded together by a unity of experience that had shaken off every kind of illusion, and which was utterly unpretentious,' thought Charles Carrington. âThe battalion was my home and my job, the only career I knew.'
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The bullrings never wove these bonds of mateship, and remained, first to last, something purely mechanical in an army that relied on alchemy to turn its raw metal into gold.