Tommy (57 page)

A gunner officer sent forward with an attack would be well aware that his was a vital but dangerous job. Julian Tyndale-Biscoe was detailed to accompany an infantry attack in mid-August 1916, controlling the fire of two artillery brigades. His commanding officer told him frankly that ‘the longer you stay alive the greater use you will be', and he stuffed his pockets with biscuits and raisins before setting off with two good signallers, both volunteers, and half a mile of cable on drums. He directed fire as long as he could until a sharp counterattack came in ‘with German infantry zigzagging like rabbits … [I] picked up a rifle and had some pot shots … I saw several bowled over'. But by now the barrage had outdistanced the assault, and ‘up popped the machine guns, with our men only half way across, and several stout Germans, standing waist-high, poured fire upon them, this holding up the whole attack'. The telephone wire had been cut, but Tyndale-Biscoe managed to save the day by telling his guns to reduce their range by flashing Morse code with an old petrol tin rigged to a rifle and bayonet. He was shot through the shoulder minutes later, but the episode earned him an MC, and MMs for the two signallers – often the unsung heroes of such stories.
¹⁰²

The other unsung heroes toiled on the gun-line, servants of machinery in the age of industrialised war, converting the shells that arrived from the wagon-lines each night into heaps of empty brass cases, recovered and sent off to the base for recycling. An infantry officer watched a field battery at work on the Somme –

There was a clear understanding in many batteries that officers concerned themselves with things like fireplans and tactics, but that NCOs looked after daily routine. A No. 1 was very busy: he was not simply responsible for the gunners, horses, limber and wagon in his subsection, but had to do a myriad of other tasks in action, such as keeping an eye on the length of recoil every time his gun fired to ensure that the recuperator band was not too worn, watching the breech in prolonged firing so that it did not get so hot as to ‘cook-off' a newly-loaded round, and monitoring the run-out adjusting valve to ensure that the barrel ran out smoothly.

Good Nos 1 jealously guarded their authority over their gunners. When Second Lieutenant Campbell tried to sort out a minor accident, Sergeant Denmark turned on him with a face like thunder: ‘Who's taking charge here, are you, Sir, or am I?' He later explained: ‘Don't be daft. Officers have their own responsibilities … How do you think it's going to help us or anyone else if you go asking to be hit?'
¹⁰⁴
When the battery joined the preparatory bombardment for Third Ypres everybody was clear what had to be done. The creeping barrage would increase by 100 yards every four minutes, and the Nos 1 were responsible for ordering the lifts. ‘There was very little talking,' recalled Campbell. ‘Everyone was alert, each man had his work to do and he was doing it; he did not want to be distracted.'
¹⁰⁵

The layers who aimed the guns were also important men, for they needed to be able to set their sights quickly and accurately, perhaps with gas masks on or hostile counter-battery fire crashing down, so that the barrage moved at the right pace. They practised regularly, because:

By 1918 layers were often nineteen-year-olds, with the nimble fingers and agile brains of youth, tweaking their dial sights and deftly balancing the elusive cross-levelling bubble with easy confidence. And just as regular infantry officers had often prided themselves on being good shots, so many gunner officers might have agreed with R. B. Talbot Kelly that: ‘I was the equal of the best of the layers, just as I could take the place of any driver in a gun team.'
¹⁰⁶
But the secret of good leadership lay in knowing how to do the job without crowding those whose job it was.

The Royal Artillery attracted a good proportion of steady, slightly introspective men who would never have joined the army in normal times, but took themselves and their new profession seriously. At Arthur Behrend's brigade headquarters was Gunner Freshwater, ‘the hardest of hard-workers and a first-rate handyman.' He once refused to move when an officer shouted: ‘Come here, carpenter.' ‘Yes, I heard you,' he acknowledged. ‘But I'm not a carpenter. I am Gunner Freshwater.' His devotion to his mundane duties could only have one end. On 21 March 1918 he went on with his work despite the bombardment: a shell fell nearby, and ‘when the smoke and dust had cleared away we could see him lying dead on the road with his overturned barrow beside him'.
¹⁰⁷
But there were moments when very junior soldiers simply had to carry on. At Third Ypres 134th Battery RFA was so hard hit by gas and shell that only two of its men, Acting Lance Bombardier Fisher and Gunner Monchie, were left on their feet. They knew that they
were
the battery, and that the infantry relied on them. They opened fire with a single gun at the appointed hour, and maintained the barrage lifts on their own until help arrived and Fisher, badly gassed, was carried away.
¹⁰⁸

G
as was first used on the Western Front by the Germans at Second Ypres in April 1915. Its appearance introduced a new edge of harshness into the war. Ernest Shephard's company was caught by a gas attack on Hill 60, just outside Ypres, on 1 May 1915, and even the tough-minded Shephard was shocked by what he saw.

The following day he wrote:

Lord Stanhope was at a French headquarters near Ypres just after the initial attack, and saw a French general interview prisoners, one of whom admitted to helping launch the gas. ‘Sergeant major,' said the general quietly. ‘Take a file of men and take this man to the wall at the bottom of the garden.' There was a brief pause and a volley.
¹¹⁰

A German officer prophesied that the Allies would condemn the Germans as uncivilised and develop gas themselves as soon as they could, which is precisely what happened. The British government immediately decided to retaliate, and in May 1915 Charles Foulkes, a regular engineer, who had hitherto known nothing about chemical weapons, was appointed to command an organisation which began as the Special Service Party, was briefly 250th Company RE, and went on to become the Special Companies and eventually the Special Brigade. Foulkes was typical of the energetic and resourceful men who would rise to meet the challenges posed by military revolutions, without allowing existing organisational barriers to stop them, but, in the process, losing much of their objectivity about the merits of their pet weapons.

The War Office wrote to universities in search of chemists, and combed the army for suitable personnel: by 30 July it had 400, 126 by transfer and 274 by special enlistment. In September, on the eve of the first British use of gas at Loos, Robert Graves's company commander was scathing about them: ‘Chemistry-dons from London university, a few lads straight from school, one or two NCOs of the old-soldier type, trained together for three weeks, then given a job as responsible as this.'
¹¹¹

This was not an unfair analysis of the Special Companies' composition, although it did less than justice to the quality and commitment of many of their members. They were enlisted as corporals, Royal Engineers, on 3 shillings a day, which created predictable problems, and Foulkes asked them to revert to private soldiers. Ronald Ginns, a well-educated and democratically-inclined corporal, described how: ‘the proposal was voted upon and, needless to say, rejected unanimously'. He agreed, however, that some of the Old Army NCOs were not ideal. There was a corporal with a DCM: ‘reduced to the ranks for drunkenness. He looked like what he was, a drink-sodden Irishman, who was however entirely destitute of fear.' And then there was a sergeant who was:

Some of the sergeants ‘& better-class corporals' were commissioned in the field, ‘gazetted straight away and equipped in France'. And it was also quickly realised that the gas companies had an appetite for honest labour, and reserve infantry battalions in Britain produced ‘some good steady workers …'.

Foulkes recommended that chlorine gas should be discharged from cylinders in front-line trenches, which was the method used by the Germans. He had 5,100 cylinders containing 140 tons of chlorine available for Loos. By dawn on 25 September the 1,400 men of the gas companies had lugged their cylinders into the front line, connected up their discharge pipes – a vertical pipe going up to the parapet and a horizontal pipe pointing towards the German lines. The success of the gas would depend partly on wind direction, and Haig, then commanding 1st Army, was faced with a difficult decision, for the wind was very light that morning: he asked his senior aide de camp to light a cigarette, and when he saw the smoke drift gently eastwards he authorised the use of gas. It worked well in the southern part of the attack front, but in the north the wind eddied back, blowing the gas onto the attackers. The episode is often highlighted as an example of the sheer stupidity of the high command, but the effects of the gas on British troops are overstated: in fact it killed only seven of them, and without it the substantial gains around Loos village would have been impossible.

The first appearance of gas had prompted the adoption of primitive anti-gas protection, with rags, gauze or cotton pads (French and Belgian chemists generously supplied sanitary towels for this purpose, with ear-loops already handily attached) held across the mouth and nose by tape or string. It could be kept damp with a solution of bicarbonate of soda, and some medical officers recommended urine. In late May some units were supplied ‘with a flannel pad chemically treated and a pair of eye protection mica goggles'. By the end of the year most soldiers had what was officially called the ‘smoke helmet' but was better known as ‘the goggle-eyed booger with the tit', a grey flannel bag, impregnated with chemicals, with two eyepieces and a rubber mouthpiece. Frank Hawkings received his helmet ‘made of flannel soaked in hexamine and glycerine, and fitted with a rubber mouth valve' in July.
¹¹³
Bernard Livermore was in the line near Vimy a year later when:

The smoke helmet had only a limited life once exposed to gas so two had to be carried. In 1917 it was replaced by the PH (Phenate-Hexamine) Helmet, which had thicker material, impregnated with alcohol, glycerine, caustic soda and sodium phenate. It had a one-way valve at the mouth piece, and two glass eyepieces, with spare glasses available.

This in turn was succeeded by the box respirator, which Lieutenant W. Drury of 4/King's Shropshire Light Infantry described in his Western Command Gas School notes as:

Fresh air was drawn in through the cylinder, whose mixture of charcoal, permanganate and soda lime, in layers separated by gauze, was designed to filter gas from the air to make it breathable. The box respirator was available in five sizes, although ‘Nos 1 and 5 sizes are only issued by special indent … Every man at the front should have issued to him a box respirator, one PH helmet and one pair of goggles.' Masks were tested in gas chambers at training units in Britain and at the base, and platoon commanders were bidden to inspect them weekly for wear and tear.
¹¹⁵
The box respirator was a lifesaver, but men hated living in it. F. P. Roe called it ‘the familiar obscene blubbery spitting object, always a major obstacle to full movement, and often uncomfortably sweaty in warm weather or if worn over a long period of time. The eyepieces invariably clouded over from the inside …'.
¹¹⁶

Anti-gas protection marched in step with improvements in gas delivery. In early 1916 the four existing gas companies expanded into the Special Brigade, with four battalions of four companies apiece, and a mortar battalion. The latter, equipped with 4-inch Stokes mortars, pointed the way ahead, for gas was now being delivered, by both sides, by indirect fire as well as cylinder. From mid-1916 gas was routinely added to bombardments. It was useful for incapacitating the horses of hostile batteries, which could be accorded only primitive protection via an equine gas mask: the very notion of trying to fit masks to terrified horses in a muddy wagon-line at two o'clock on a rainy morning beggars belief. Captain Dunn saw his first horse in a gas mask in August 1917: ‘worn at the “alert”, fixed to the noseband of the head-stall'. Gas could be used to drench headquarters, so that staff officers, even in deep dugouts, would be forced to work masked-up; and it could be slipped in with the morning mist to incapacitate men caught at break-of-day befuddlement.

Both the Allies and the Germans relied on two main types of gas shell, each of several different varieties, developed in an attempt to sidestep the enemy's anti-gas protection. T-shells delivered liquid (usually benzyl bromide and xylyl bromide) which vaporised into lachrymatory or tear gas, ‘which causes men to weep and the eyes are made so painful that men are practically put out of action for some time'. The liquid vaporised slowly and ground contaminated by it remained dangerous for twenty-four hours or longer. K-shells were lethal, their palite or disphosgene converted to gas when the shell burst to give instant, though short-duration, effect. Sometimes K-shells had tear or sneezing gas added: the latter made it hard for men to keep their respirators in place, and if they fumbled too long the gas killed them.

Gas shells had a sound all of their own. The liquid in them – 317cc for a German 77-mm shell – slopped about as the shells spun in flight, sometimes giving them a curious hooting sound (James Dunn thought they ‘twittered') as they arrived to burst with a plop which was scarcely louder that that of a dud. By the end of the war the British were using gas grenades too. One, a variant of the No. 28 grenade, filled with a coughing agent, was used for clearing enemy-held dugouts, and another variant, filled with a persistent tear agent, could be used to render abandoned dugouts uninhabitable by unmasked troops.

Mustard gas, a favourite filling for German shells in the last eighteen months of the war, was not primarily lethal but was incapacitating, spreading ugly blisters over the skin and causing temporary or permanent blindness. Captain Dunn reported the symptoms as: ‘redness or blistering of sweaty parts, streaming eyes, and a few have some cough'. One doughty fusilier muttered: ‘I don't mind the (obscene) gas if it'll rid me of the (obscene) lice.'
¹¹⁷
Dunn noted that he had a fresh batch of casualties the next morning, and it soon became clear that mustard was very persistent indeed, and that splashed uniforms had to be discarded.

And in sufficient concentration mustard was indeed a killer. Sergeant Charles Arnold of the Border Regiment was in a dugout at Ypres when a gas shell burst squarely inside:

One British officer, sent to decontaminate a captured German position in late 1918, saw two of his experienced sergeants, Jo Cross and Don Britton, looking at some damaged gas shells without their gas masks on.

Familiarity often bred a dangerous contempt. When the Germans first used what was initially called ‘mustard oil' at Ypres in 1917, Major Martin Littlewood RAMC saw the breezy divisional gas officer pick up an empty shell and put it under his arm. It produced an immediate blister, ‘so I entered him sick. It was a great temptation to fill in his label as a “self-inflicted wound”.' Littlewood thought that the new gas was very effective indeed, and believed that the Germans could not have been aware just how many British gunners had been blinded by it.
¹²⁰

From mid-1917 the mortar battalion's companies often delivered Thermit bombs, which were not conventional gas at all: their mixture of powdered aluminium and iron oxide was ignited to produce ‘a metal-melting heat that doused enemy trenches with a rain of molten fragments'.
¹²¹
By then some of the best results were being obtained from the Livens projector, brainchild of William Livens, a civil engineer commissioned in 1914. His projector was basically a huge and simple mortar, usually dug-in dozens at a time, and fired at once to lob their projectiles, containing gas or Thermit, a relatively short distance. Baseplates of Livens projectors still emerge after the spring ploughing of French and Belgian fields: they look like large steel helmets trodden on by an ungainly giant.