Tommy (61 page)

These charges, in the very last days of the war, underline the fact that cavalry could be very useful if it moved fast, snatched fleeting opportunities, and made good use of the ground and supporting fire. But if it launched a frontal attack on an intact defence it was likely to lose: the difference between success and failure might be a matter of minutes, and there was little chance of recovery if the decision was wrong. It is also clear that, since time was always of the essence, cavalry was likely to do better if it was close-coupled to the divisional battle to make the best of brief chances, not held at a high level for deliberate strokes. And if the Cavalry Corps ultimately failed to deliver the strategic blow for which Haig thought it suited, the British were indeed fortunate that there was no German equivalent. The Germans had steadily reduced the proportion of their cavalry to other arms on the Western Front, and in March 1918 found themselves with nothing to exploit the promising success they achieved against the British astride the Somme. We have just seen how good German infantry could be routed by horsemen if caught off-balance, and the same thing happened, on a far larger scale, to robust Turkish infantry in Palestine. Artillery officers like P.J. Campbell and Arthur Behrend, seeing the pillars of their universe totter, thanked heaven that there was no German cavalry on hand to administer the decisive kick.

The cavalryman's life on the Western Front represented the most extreme juxtaposition of ancient and modern. Corporal Harry Easton of the 9th Lancers charged at Elouges on 24 August 1914, and his account could almost come from the Napoleonic wars.

Private Ben Clouting was nearby with the 4th Dragoon Guards.

The horse again made its own ageless demands, as Private R. G. Garrod of the 20th Hussars discovered in August 1914.

As the front solidified into trench warfare, there were repeated attempts to replace the extemporised stabling of the first six months of the war by temporary stables which offered cover and hard-standing for horses. But there was sometimes little that could be done, as Ben Clouting recalled of the hard winter of 1917–18:

And the war imposed extra burdens of its own, as an officer of the 3rd Hussars recalled of the Somme in the autumn of 1916.

Hussars, once the most colourful and dashing of light cavalry, reduced to navvies in the world of earth and wire.

I
n one sense military engineering underwent no revolution in the First World War. Sappers, then as now, helped the army to fight, move and live. When the army was in retreat they blew up bridges. The first engineer VCs of the war were won on 23 August 1914 by Lance Corporal Charles Jarvis, who worked single-handed under heavy fire for an hour and a half to destroy the lock bridge at Jemappes on the Mons-Condé canal, and by Captain Theodore Wright, who made repeated though unsuccessful attempts to blow up the nearby road bridge at La Mariette, swinging hand over hand beneath it. When the army advanced, they threw pontoons across rivers whose bridges had been demolished by the Germans. At Vailly on the Aisne, on 14 September, ‘the passage of the bridge [was] kept open and controlled with great coolness' by Captain Wright, who was killed by a shell.
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When opportunity offered they replaced pontoons with permanent structures, strengthened old bridges to bear new loads, or added fresh crossings to water obstacles which compelled the British to fight astride or across them.

Engineers provided the brains (though not always the muscle) behind the construction of everything from field fortifications to roads and camps, and many spent their time in the familiar task of trench-digging, as Lieutenant John Glubb reported in early 1916.

They also constructed railways, from spurs off the full-gauge main line to the Decauville light railways that ran up to the front. On 1 April 1917 Sergeant Will Fisher wrote: ‘In charge [of] party laying “Decaville” light railway, shift 12–8, for conveying ammunition to batteries. Line running through Bapaume town, advance parties levelling, demolishing walls.'
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They were responsible for gas delivered by cylinder, projector and mortar. They diverted civilian water supplies if they were available, or drilled for water if they were not. Searchlights were their responsibility too. The Royal Engineers Signal Service laid and maintained cable for telephone and telegraph, and could do so at speed, cross-country from a cart paying out cable from huge drums. Members of the Signal Service were responsible for all wireless communications, from GHQ down to individual sub-units with heavy batteries or tank brigades. They installed and ran power-buzzers (essentially a short-range apparatus for transmitting Morse), and furnished the army with its carrier-pigeon service. They worked closely (though not always harmoniously) with the Royal Artillery in flash-spotting and sound-ranging. By the end of the war the Royal Engineers numbered over a quarter of a million officers and men, and we cannot wonder at it.

In another sense, though, even if the sappers did not preside over military revolution, much of the change they managed was nothing if not momentous. The development of wireless communication was one such example (although it had ceased to be an engineer's responsibility when it came to full flowering: the Corps of Signals was formed in June 1920 and became Royal that same August). Another crucial responsibility was surveying, mapping and printing. Twentieth-century armies' reliance on maps is so obvious that it is often scarcely mentioned. However, British sojourn in France and Belgium in 1914–18 was accompanied by the need to produce accurate maps on a previously undreamed-of scale. Some were area maps for which French and Belgian national resources provided at least a basis, although the British preferred contours rather than the height-hachuring of continental maps. Others were trench maps on a much larger scale, required in large numbers and subject to frequent change as battle ebbed and flowed.

There were only three trained survey officers in the British Expeditionary Force in August 1914, but the Topographical Sub-Section of GHQ (‘Maps GHQ') came into its own in 1915, when it ordered the re-drawing of all trench maps on a scale of 1:10,000. There was the familiar tension between various parts of the army – 2nd Army, for example, retained its own series of map-sheets covering its front – and individual field survey companies, one for each army, pressed ahead with their own experiments and innovations. No. 3 field survey Company broke new ground when it brought out a privately-purchased printing machine and process camera in early 1917, which enabled it to produce daily situation maps. In June 1918 the Field Survey companies were renamed battalions, not before time as many had previously had a strength of more than a thousand officers and men. It has been estimated that more than 34 million maps of one sort or another had been issued for use on the Western Front, an accomplishment, in its way, no less remarkable than many more showy achievements.
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Map users certainly noticed the improvements. Lieutenant Roe recalled that early trench maps, drawn on sections of bigger topographical sheets,

But Bernard Martin tells us just how much better things had become by Third Ypres in 1917.

Before the war the army gave map references using what was known as the ‘Bingo' system, which appears to have come into use in the British army in about 1885, and was certainly current in the Boer War. A pre-war order, referring to a mutually-agreed map, might be:

The system was not foolproof: there were long-running Boer War jokes about which R in MODDER RIVER the writer actually meant.
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The army began the First World War with the Bingo system, as Captain Robert Dolby, medical officer of 2/King's Own Scottish Borderers, remembered.

In 1915 the Bingo system was replaced by the more methodical grid-reference system, with which generations of Sandhurst cadets would become depressingly familiar. Peter Chasseaud, doyen of the war's topographical historians, tells us how it worked:

In practice, for a soldier wishing to find the full reference for the southern tip of High Wood on the Somme, it would work as follows: the reference would begin with the number of the 1:40,000 map sheet, in this case 57cSW3, which establishes that the map is one of those covering the general area of the Somme (57d sheets lie to its west and 57b sheets to its east). A capital letter – in this case M – defines the 6,000-yard square in which the wood lies. The 1,000-yard square is numbered 4, and the 500-yard sub-square within it is c. Within this sub-square he would first establish the position of the wood edge in eastings, estimating how far from left to right it lies in tenths. It is nine-tenths of the way along, so earns the figure 9. He would then do the same for northings: here the tip of the wood lies right on the line, so earns 0. His full reference for the southern edge of High Wood is thus: 57cSW3 M4c90. This would be close enough for most sorts of work, but an even more precise definition could be found by giving the subdivisions of eastings and northings in hundreds rather than tenths, although there was little point in trying to attain this degree of accuracy save on 1:10,000 trench maps.

The same method works in reverse. We saw earlier how Lieutenant Colonel U. L. Hooke of the Queen's was buried in the field. His battalion's Army Book 120 gives the location of his grave at H.23.b.7.5, Ref 1/40,000 51b. On the 1:10,000 series this is sheet 51b NW3, and from it we can see that the colonel was buried on the southern edge of the village of Fampoux, east of Arras, just north of the Arras-Cambrai railway line. Utten Lamont Hooke, killed at the age of thirty-six and, as the cemetery register informs us, the husband of Enid A. Hooke of 50 Temple Road, Croydon, still lies there, in Plot I, Row C and Grave 35 of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission's Level Crossing Cemetery, Fampoux.

If the engineers discovered novel techniques as far as mapping was concerned, they blended old and new to take the war underground. Medieval engineers had dug beneath besieged castles, secured their tunnels with wooden pit-props, smeared the wood with pig fat and then fired it. When the props burnt the tunnels collapsed, and the fortifications above sank on their foundations. The advent of gunpowder made the business more hazardous and spectacular: chambers were packed with barrels of powder and then exploded. An attacker could blow up part of a fortress, breaching its defences, while a defender could use countermines, exploding them under attacking troops as they massed for the assault. The traditional importance of military mining is underlined by the fact that the Royal Engineers had themselves evolved from the Corps of Royal Sappers and Miners. However, even the most traditionally-minded sapper could not have guessed, in August 1914, just how important mining would once again become.

Given the resemblance of trench warfare to sieges, it is scarcely surprising that both sides took to mining. The Germans began in December 1914 by exploding ten mines beneath a sector held by the Indian Corps at Festubert. British attempts at retaliation in January 1915 failed. The sector chosen was simply too wet, and water entered the tunnels dug by 20th Fortress Company Royal Engineers more quickly than the pumps could shift it. The Germans helpfully hoisted a notice, in English, in their trenches. ‘No good your mining,' it read. ‘It can't be done. We've tried.'
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In February the Germans exploded a mine beneath a battalion of East Yorkshires at St-Eloi, just south of Ypres, and the demand for retaliation grew.

John Norton Griffiths, Conservative MP and civil engineer, had already been pressing the War Office to employ what he called ‘moles', labourers who had been working on a tunnelled drainage system in Manchester using a technique called clay-kicking. A man would sit with his back against a wooden rest, with a special spade between his feet. As he kicked it forward to dig out clay, his mate reached past him to drag the debris out. In February 1915 Norton Griffiths was summoned to see Lord Kitchener. He demonstrated the technique of clay-kicking on the floor of Kitchener's office, using a fire shovel from the grate, and was at once told to recruit 10,000 of his moles. He left for France immediately, and called on the BEF's chief engineer, Brigadier General George Fowke, wearing what James Edmonds – then a sapper colonel and later the official historian – called ‘something between uniform and hunting kit'. He soon received formal War Office approval to raise the first Royal Engineer tunnelling companies, numbered 170 to 178.

Norton Griffiths encountered a host of problems in raising his miners. There were predictable difficulties over pay: clay-kickers were entitled to six shillings a day, their mates a mere 2/2d. Some men, enlisted, as they thought, specifically for mining duties, did not take comfortably to military discipline, and had to cope with some mining equipment that had served in the Crimea. But work was quickly out in hand, and on 17 April 1915, 171 Tunnelling Company blew the top off Hill 60, in the Ypres salient, just beating German miners, who planned to explode a mine of their own on the 19th. Although the Germans recaptured Hill 60 in the gas attack which so infuriated Ernest Shephard, the pattern was set, and over the next two years British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand miners grew increasingly effective. On 19 June 1915, 175 Tunnelling Company exploded the biggest mine of the war thus far, containing 3,500 lbs of ammonal, beneath Hooge Ridge on the Menin Road.