Tommy (71 page)
Authors: Richard Holmes
Practical experience of the way the war broke down social barriers encouraged several clergymen to pursue Christian fellowships after the war. The Reverend Philip âTubby' Clayton was invited by Neville Talbot, senior chaplain of 6th Division, to establish a rest house for soldiers. Talbot found a suitable property in Poperinghe, and called it Talbot House after Neville's brother Gilbert, killed when the Germans first used flamethrowers against the British at Hooge in 1915. It was universally known as âToc H' (signalese for TH) and became an oasis offering comfort and sanity, where men could drink tea, read newspapers and, if they wished, pray in the âUpper Room'. A notice at the door warned all who entered to abandon rank: Toc H was one of the few places where an officer could meet a noncommissioned brother in comfort. Talbot re-established Toc H in London in 1920 and it became the centre of an international movement. The original Toc H still survives in Poperinghe, and its quiet and simple Upper Room always seems to me to be heavy with the presence of the thousands who knelt there and prayed that their cup might pass.
Sometimes men's spirituality was enhanced by the landscape. It was not always blighted and blasted, and nature struggled on in the most surprising ways. R. B. Talbot Kelly spent much of his time in observation posts, with ample opportunity to savour nature. He wrote that:
The very spirit of the trees sank deeply into me⦠to me half the war is a memory of trees; fallen and tattered trees; trees contrasted in summer moonlight, torn and shattered winter trees, trees green and brown, grey and white, living and dead⦠Beneath their branches I found the best and worst of the war; heard nightingales and smelt primroses, heard the scream of endless shells and breathed gas; rested in their shade⦠cowered in their roots.
92
C. P. Blacker had a keen eye for nature, which he put to good use as he wandered through a wood near his battalion's camp at Corbie:
The floor was ablaze with white, yellow and blue flowers. The luxuriance was so unexpected as to make me feel that, as in a fairy story, I had inadvertently broken into some secret and privileged place where I had no business to be. The white flowers, pinkily nodding in the sunlight, as if in timid recognition, were of course wood anemones; the yellow flowers were lesser celandines and primroses⦠As I picked my way through the trees I came to a concealed clearing thick with wild daffodils, mostly in bud but a few in flower.
He later sustained an out of body experience near the same wood.
The experience lasted, I should say, about thirty seconds and seemed to come out of the sky in which were seemingly resounding majestic harmonies. The thought: âThat is the music of the spheres' was immediately followed by glimpses of luminous bodies â meteors or stars â circulating in predestined courses emitting both light and music. I stood still on the tow-path and wondered if I was going to fall down. I dropped onto one knee and thought: How wonderful to die at this moment. I put my hand over my forehead as if to contain the tumult and fend off something. Wonder, awe and gratitude mounted to a climax and remained poised for a few seconds like a German star shell. Then began the foreknown descent.
Blacker, an intelligent and well-read man who went on to become a doctor, thought deeply about the incident, and eventually concluded that it had been religious rather than pathological. And when he revisited the Somme with a brother officer in 1960 he saw a dark cloud hanging over the battlefield, ârimmed and shot through with light⦠The cloud came from the infernal regions; the illumination, which came from elsewhere, honoured the multitudes of dead.'
93
Charles Douie linked the rhythm of the seasons with the pattern of men's lives.
I watched the coming of spring in the woods, and the young corn in the fields, and the men, the flower of every shire in Britain, on the march towards the chalk uplands of the battlefields. I wondered often how many of those whose eyes were delighted by the glory of the fields would see the harvest, and I thought of that other harvest which death would reap.
In the late spring of 1916 he spent much of his time in a dugout west of Thiepval, âlooking out over the broad marshes of the Ancre and the great trees of the wood beyond'.
94
In the very midst of Third Ypres Private Groom found his spirits touched by dawn: âIt was a marvellous sunrise and I remember the huge red ball of the sun resting on the top of a distant pillbox.'
95
Fred Hodges admitted that:
Certainly I have never lived so close to nature since, nor been so acutely aware of life. Between the wrecked villages, the crops lay ungathered, and nature, uncontrolled by man, was a riot of scent and colour; oats and barley mingled with cornflower and poppies, with the song of a lark in the blue sky.
96
And P. J. Campbell thought that the roses at Gibraltar Farm, not far behind the front, âwere as beautiful and smelt as sweetly here as in a Oxford garden,' and watched daily as a pair of swallows reared five young in a nest on the beam of a shelter.
97
There was always an extraordinary poignancy in discovering that even a battlefield remained home to animals and birds. A mole fell into Sidney Rogerson's trench on the Somme, and he thought it âone of Nature's miracles that this blind, slow creature could have survived in ground so pounded and upturned'.
98
Charles Douie was struck by the spectacle of two mice playing hide-and-seek behind a dud shell in his trench. Lieutenant Edwin Campion Vaughan's platoon found a dead pigeon âand buried him, railing his grave with little sticks and chains of sedgegrass, and in his coverlet of pimpernels we erected a tiny white cross'.
99
In the spring of 1916 Captain Dunn âavoided treading on little frogs in Cambrin trenches,' and shortly afterwards he heard a nightingale.
100
T
here was widespread agreement that, as Robert Graves observed: âPatriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as only fit for civilians, or prisoners. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out.'
101
An infantry officer remarked on âhow much more seriously the company would take the war were the [Ypres] Salient around Preston, or Bolton, or Manchester'.
102
And another commentator discerned âno self-conscious patriotism among the rank and file⦠The word itself meant nothing to them.'
103
Yet there was certainly a conviction, often expressed in letters home, that the war had to be won to keep Britain safe. In August 1914 Sergeant Bert Fielder assured his wife that:
If I go away you must not worry if you don't get my letters because you must understand it is all for the good of England, and the English soldier is not only fighting for his country but to save his own home from destruction and being ruled over by the Germans.
104
Men at the front, many of whom genuinely believed that they were fighting to preserve the mother country, were irritated to learn that their views were not shared by those they thought they were defending. In October 1915 Second Lieutenant Edward Underhill wrote bitterly that his countrymen had no idea what the war was about.
I don't believe you in England realize what was is, and invasion is the only thing to do it. I am not at all sure that invasion wouldn't be the best thing to happen to England. All this fuss about recruiting is very galling to us out here. We are firm believers in National Service and would like the slackers out here for a week or two. Nobody can realize what it is like unless they have heard shells rushing overhead, and have seen all the ruins of farms and houses, or been deliberately shot at by one's fellow man, even though they are a different nationality. It is ghastly to me who has only seen a little bit of what it is like. What it must be with gas and liquid fire added, and then on top of all a heavy bombardment. I hate shells; they are awful and give me the jumps, or as we say out here âthey put the wind up me'.
105
He was right to be concerned: a shell-splinter hit him in the back of the head, just under his steel helmet, as he rallied his company at Stuff Redoubt, near Thiepval, on 12 October 1916, and killed him: he was twenty-one.
Many veterans detected a sense of national superiority which had little to do with the immediate aims of the war and was not patriotism in any conventional sense. âIf the Germans won and invaded England,' declared one, âthey would still be laughed at in the villages as ridiculous foreigners.' âI did not think it occurred to us that we could ever be defeated,' opined another, âso great was our faith in the British Empire with all its great traditions.'
106
C. E. Montague later wrote of the unreasoning national pride that characterised the New Armies, adding wearily that: âthe high unreason of faith that would move mountains in 1914 seems to be scarcely able to shift an ant-hill today'.
107
Although some cynics observed that the only Empire the average soldier knew was the Hackney music hall of the same name, there was a powerful alliance between public-school commitment to an empire with a civilising mission (and, in a more practical sense, a huge network of jobs providing outdoor relief for the middle classes) and working-class music-hall patriotism with its noisy affirmation that British was best and foreigners were funny. In his
Spanish Farm
trilogy Ralph H. Mottram wrote of the soldiers' affection for âthe football fields and factories, the music halls and seaside excursions that they talked of, and hoped to see once again'.
108
And there was often a striking contrast between the shared values of the front and the increasingly distant world of Blighty. âLondon irritated me beyond expression,' wrote John Reith of his leave in 1915; âwas this what one was fighting for: loafers, profiteers, the whole vulgar throng on the streets'.
109
Bernard Martin found it irritating to be acclaimed as a hero, but âthe word meant nothing in front-line trenches' back at home:
More than once strangers patted me on the back and offered to give me a drink in a pub; but even these good-natured people did not want to learn how heroes live and die. Exceptionally, I was asked: âDo the French women wash your clothes and mend them?' and a man said, âWhen it's too dark to go on fighting â are you free for the evening, can you get to a cinema?'.
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H. E. L. Mellersh, home on leave in 1916, discovered that:
The general atmosphere at home⦠made me feel, on this leave and all subsequent leaves, that I did not any longer fit in. Inevitably I was out of sympathy with the old way of life that in any case had changed, while I too had changedâ¦
Nevertheless, when all that is said and done, I did, in those days of my first return home from the front, consider myself as someone apart, as someone belonging â even though I had been with them for so short a while â to the Second Battalion, The East Lancashire Regiment, and no longer to this cosy, suburban, restricted, uninspiring Clarence Road, St Albans.
111
Motivation often changed as experience grew. Many was the man who, like Eric Hiscock, felt patriotic enough until he found out what the war was really like.
The Oxford glamour of donning uniform was at last in shreds, the mud and fearful noise and incomprehensible action that was surrounding me had stilled for ever any semblance of Elgar's Land of Hope and Glory running through my stupid brain. War, I knew at last, was run for fools by fools on office stools, and the sooner I got out of it the better for all concerned, which meant me, my parents in Oxford, and the girl I left behind me â a plumpish flapper called Doris who sold bags and suit-cases over the counter of a smart leather-merchant's shop in Oxford's Queen Street.
112
But as big issues slipped away, smaller ones grew. Playing the game mattered. Second Lieutenant W. E. Giffard, already one-legged, and with two brothers killed in the war, was offered a ground job which would have spared him the danger of more ascents in an observation balloon. He declined on the grounds that: âI do not think it is playing the game.'
113
What was âplaying the game' to a public-school boy was âfinishing the job' for a working man. At the very end of the war one of Private Stephen Graham's comrades told him:
I am a married man⦠I have four children. I've been out here three years, and it's been hard. But if the armistice were called off tomorrow, I'd gladly go on fighting. Why? In order that we might make a clean job of it. All that I care for is that my boys should not have to go through what I've gone through.
114
What an Australian memorably termed âthe bonds of mateship' set rock-hard to link men in what one wise analyst has called âtrench households', small groups such as an infantry section, machine-gun detachment or the officers of a rifle company, who lived in close proximity, pooled privately-obtained food or drink, and wrote to console the relatives of the killed.
115
Charles Carrington thought that:
A Corporal and six men in a trench were like shipwrecked sailors on a raft, completely committed to their social grouping, so that nobody could have any doubts about the moral and physical failings of his pals since everyone's life depended on the reliability of each.
116
C. E. Montague used precisely the same simile. Front-line life was:
very domestic, highly atomic. Its atom, or unit, like that of slum life, is the jealously close, exclusive community life of a family based in an urban cellar⦠Our total host might be two million strong, or ten millions; whatever its size a man's world was his section â at most his platoon; all that mattered to him was the one little boatload of castaways with whom he was marooned on a desert island making shift to keep off the weather and any sudden attack of wild beasts.
117
Sometimes the small group encompassed those whose rank might be presumed to exclude them. Second Lieutenant Richard Gale broke down in tears when trying to wrap up the remains of his batman, dismembered by a shell, and was taken back to recover, not with his fellow officers, but to the men's dugout: âTheir comradeship meant everything to meâ¦'
118
Montague argued that this sort of relationship was not simply founded on mutual survival, though that counted for much: most NCOs and men in the line simply believed that it was up to them and the junior officers to win the war.
119
Alan Hanbury Sparrow thought that the real focus of loyalty came slightly higher, in what he called âregimental will. For we no longer rely on unknown forces, but upon what we know ourselves.'
What so many observers noticed were resolution and endurance which often had little to do with military discipline but often reflected qualities that men brought into the army, whether they came from mean streets or big houses. Siegfried Sassoon summed them up well when describing the soldier, Christ-like with his load of shouldered planks, in
The Redeemer.
No thorny crown, only a woollen cap
He wore â an English soldier, white and strong,
Who loved his time like any simple chap,
Good days of work and sport and homely song;
Now he has learned that nights are very long,
And dawn a watching of the windowed sky.
But to the end, unjudging, he'll endure
Horror and pain, not uncontent to die
That Lancaster on Lune may stand secure.
120
J. R. R. Tolkien, author of
The Lord of the Rings,
served on the Western Front with 11/Lancashire Fusiliers, and wrote that Sam Gamgee, Frodo's sturdy and long-suffering companion on his journey to Mount Doom, was a portrait âof the English soldier, of the private and batman I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself'.
121
Occasional official reports into the army's morale were conducted on the basis of censored letters, and revealed a broad spirit of endurance that was bent, but not broken, by suffering. In November 1916, in the aftermath of the Somme, one concluded that: âthe spirit of the men, their conception of duty, their Moral[e] has never been higher than at the present moment', though their earlier enthusiasm had been replaced by âdogged determination to see the thing through at any cost'.
122
And even in November 1917, as Passchendaele squelched to its close, a report based on an analysis of 17,000 letters written by combat troops concluded that: âThe Morale of the Army is sound⦠there is ample ground for the belief that the British Army is firmly convinced, not only of its ability to defeat the enemy and its superiority man to man, but also of the dangers of a premature peace.'
123
C. E. Montague, for all the disenchantment which was to give his post-war memoirs their title, wholly agreed. He had little time for the way the army was run, and was critical of staff and chaplains alike.
But the war had to be won: that was flat. It was like putting out houses on fire, or not letting children be killed; it did not even need to be proved; that we had got to win was now the one quite certain thing left in a world of shaken certainties.
124
Humour helped men endure. Some of it was decidedly dark, like the practice of giving a cheery shake to the dead hands which sometimes protruded from trenches, or infuriating, like drifting small paper boats, carefully ignited, along the long water-gully beneath the seats in base latrines. Some jokes reflected a belief that the war would prove very long. In 1915 it was said that a subaltern in a battalion on the Ploegsteert front visited a comrade in the line near Kemmel. âYou will notice,' said the Kemmel man, âmy men are planting daffodils on the parapets to hide âem. We hope to have the line quite invisible in the course of time.' âHumph,' replied the Ploegsteert man: âYou are a lot of blooming optimists.
My
men have planted acorns in front of
our
trench.'
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There was sometimes a fine edge of humour to the relationship between company commanders and their sergeant majors, or platoon commanders and their platoon sergeants. A Royal Welch Fusiliers company commander was in his dugout in a heavily-shelled front line when the sergeant major pounded down the steps with a face like thunder. âTell me the worst, sergeant major,' said the officer, expecting news of a disaster. âWell, Sir, I'm not sure that I should mention this,' replied the CSM, âbut I have just seen your servant stirring your tea with his finger.'
There was also repeated badinage between units, as Anthony French of 15/London remembered:
One spark of humour could set a whole column alight.
We approached a signaller industriously repairing a broken line and a voice cried: âSome say “Good old Signals!”' to which a second voice replied: âOthers say “â¦old Signals!”' The verb was irrelevant and its execution biologically absurd, but the couplet was invariable whoever might be the âgood old this' or âgood old that'. It was always the curious colloquial adjective âOld' that preserved the affection.
The signaller took no heed.
âHe's going up the “line”,' someone suggested.
âLend 'im your button 'ook,' said another.
The signaller turned and shouted with feigned surprise
âOh! It's the bloody infantry. What
you
doing up the line, anyway?'
âWe're looking for the GPO.'
âLookin' for bloody trouble, you mean,' said the signaller, raising a fist.
Another voice shouted: âWhat did you do in the Great War, Daddy?' and from somewhere came the oft-repeated quip: âHold your tongue, son, and polish up those medals!'â¦
âMedals?' cried another; âI've spat âem before breakfast!' Someone tried to sing âGive me the switch Miss for
Ipswich, it's the Ipswich switch which I require,' but metre and pace failed to register, so Maxwell raised his voice and set the column singing: