Tommy
The British Soldier On The Western Front 1914–1918
Richard Holmes

COPYRIGHT

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First published by HarperCollins Publishers 2004

Copyright © Richard Holmes 2004

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DEDICATION

For Lizzie, with love and admiration

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

INTRODUCTION

PROLOGUE: TOMMY ATKINS

I

ZERO HOUR

SWITZERLAND TO THE SEA

THE EBB AND FLOW OF BATTLE

II

ONE WAR, FOUR ARMIES

OLD WORLD, OLD ARMY

SATURDAY NIGHT SOLDIERS

NEW ARMY

III

CHAIN OF COMMAND

ONE LONG LOAF?

IV

A VIEW FROM THE PARAPET

FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE

BASE DETAILS

V

A MILITARY REVOLUTION

BROTHER LEAD AND SISTER STEEL

THE BOLD BOMBARDIER

THE DEVIL’S BREATH

BRAZEN CHARIOTS

SWORD AND PISTOL

WITH THE RANK AND PAY OF A SAPPER

WOEFUL CRIMSON

VI

THE WILL OF AN ARMY

MAN AND GOD

FRIEND AND FOE

MORALE AND DISCIPLINE

ENVOI

REFERENCES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABBREVIATIONS AND GLOSSARY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INDEX

P. S.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INTERVIEW

READ ON

PRAISE

ALSO BY RICHARD HOLMES

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

INTRODUCTION

Contemporaries instinctively called it Great: La Grande Guerre, Weltkrieg, and we can easily see why. Of course it was not the largest single event of world history: that ghastly honour must go to the Second World War, which in terms of human suffering and material destruction was infinitely worse for the world as a whole. But for Britain alone the First World War caused more casualties, which partly accounts for the fact that it is remembered in a particular way here. Many who lived through both conflicts agreed with Harold Macmillan and J. B. Priestley that the First World War was a more significant watershed than the Second. Barbara Tuchman may have been the first to use the analogy of 1914–18 as an iron gate separating the present from the past, and it has proved to be an enduring and powerful image ever since.

So there it lies, overgrown, like the trenches that still lace the landscape of Northern France, but somehow dug deep into our consciousness. And it usually enters our minds not as history, but as literature. One of the problems with trying to write about the First World War is that most people have already read Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Pat Barker and Sebastian Faulks before you get to them. I am certainly not the first historian to complain that it was far too literary a war. Cyril Falls began the process even before the Second World War; Correlli Barnett continued the movement thirty years ago and only last year, Brian Bond’s important book The Unquiet Western Front fired yet another well-aimed burst into an enemy who shows little sign of falling, but lurches on, stick grenades in hand, intent on doing yet more mischief to our understanding. Professor Bond suggests that ‘the “real” historical war abruptly ceased to exist in November 1918’.¹ What followed was the resurrection and reworking of the war largely in terms of novels, memoirs and war literature in general. Indeed, Paul Fussell, in his influential book The Great War and Modern Memory, maintained that the war was uniquely awful and as such lay ‘outside history’, explicable primarily through its literature.

This process has not simply affected the way we think of history: it strikes a resonance through the present and on into the future. Omer Bartov described what he termed ‘the invention of memory’ when he considered the effect of war literature in both France and Germany. ‘Experience of loss and trauma extends beyond personal recollection,’ he argued, ‘and comes to encompass both individual and collective expectations of the future.’² It seems to me that Bartov has identified a key element of the process. By studying the war as literature we do not simply colour our view of the past and make it all but impossible to teach the war as history. We go on to tint our picture of the present and our image of the future too. When Second World War soldiers wanted to describe something going particularly badly they spoke of ‘The biggest balls-up since the Somme.’ For years it was impossible to attend a military presentation without a clip of Blackadder Goes Forth discussing the strategic imperative of inching Field Marshal Haig’s drinks cabinet closer to Berlin, and in the first Gulf War British camps in the desert were named after Captain Blackadder and his cronies.

No sooner had its last shot echoed away than some participants recognised that the war they knew was being hijacked. Charles Carrington, who won his Military Cross as an infantry officer at Passchendaele, complained:

It appeared that dirt about the war was in demand … Every battle a defeat, every officer a nincompoop, every soldier a coward.³

Cyril Falls, a veteran turned Oxford don, saw how:

Every sector became a bad one, every working party is shot to pieces; if a man is killed or wounded his entrails always protrude from his body; no one ever seems to have a rest … Attacks succeed one another with lightning rapidity. The soldier is represented as a depressed and mournful spectre helplessly wandering about until death brought his miseries to an end.⁴

In practice it was not that simple, for many of the men writing in the 1920s and 1930s – Robert Graves and R. C. Sherriff amongst them – were actually ambiguous about the war, and actively resented being termed ‘anti-war authors’.

Ambiguity became less marked as the war receded. Oddly enough, this happened at precisely that moment when, had the war been considered primarily as history, the appearance of a wide range of new sources, not least the first of the official histories, might have been expected to have broadened understanding. Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, first published in 1929 and made into a film the following year, was an important milestone. Remarque’s own experience of the war was very limited. He never actually fought in the trenches, was slightly wounded by shrapnel, and after the war was censured for posing as a decorated officer. The undaunted Charles Carrington was infinitely more experienced, and was indeed what Remarque pretended to be. But All Quiet struck a powerful chord with many veterans looking back at the war from the deep disillusionment of the late 1920s, and in a sense more accurately reflects the state of its author and his friends in 1929 than the condition of the German army twelve years before.

Alongside the evolution of a literary cult which, by and large, came to see the war as waste built on futility and compounded by human error, there grew up a historical genre which was scarcely less influential. During the war there had been two major schools of strategic policy in Britain. One, the Easterners, took their tone from a letter written by Lord Kitchener to Sir John French, British commander in chief on the Western Front, at the very beginning of 1915 – Kitchener suggested that the German lines in France might well be ‘a fortress which cannot be taken by assault’, and suggested that there might be merit in looking elsewhere. Gallipoli and Salonika were both offspring of this logic. The other, the Westerners, would have agreed with Sir Douglas Haig, who took over as commander in chief in late 1915, that the war could only be won by beating the German army in the field. And as Haig announced in his final dispatch, this could only be accomplished by ‘one great continuous engagement’.

What happened in the 1920s and 1930s is that the Easterners, who had shown little sign of winning the war, certainly won the historical argument. Churchill’s The World Crisis lambasted offensives on the Western Front which were, he declared, ‘as hopeless as they were disastrous’. Churchill had served as a cavalry officer, charging at Omdurman in 1898, and had been a battalion commander on the Western Front in early 1916. I can forgive him much on those counts alone: whatever he lacked it was not physical courage. But what of Lloyd George, whose mid-1930s Memoirs announced the bankrupcy of ‘narrow, selfish and unimaginative strategy and … [the] ghastly butchery of a succession of vain and insane offensives’? He accused generals not simply of professional incompetence and ignorance of the real conditions, but of personal cowardice. These accusations gloss over the fact that, as prime minister, Lloyd George had a direct personal responsibility for the very strategy he criticised. And Lloyd George was not right to carp about the cowardice of First World War generals. About fifty-eight were killed, or died of wounds received. Three divisional commanders were killed at Loos in September 1915, more British divisional commanders than were killed by enemy fire in the whole of the Second World War.⁵

There was a more reputable combatant in the wings. Captain Basil Liddell Hart, whose evergreen rank veiled about six weeks’ service at the front followed by a longer stint in the Army Educational Corps, argued that Britain’s commitment to the Western Front clearly violated his own, oft reinvented, strategy of indirect approach and clearsighted description of the British way in warfare. Britain should have avoided that lethal concentration of troops and gone somewhere else. He thought that Gallipoli had been promising, and T. E. Lawrence had done really well in the desert. He could produce no evidence that the destruction of railways in the Hejaz made the teacups rattle in Berlin, but no matter. What had really brought Germany down, he argued, was naval blockade and internal collapse. I must not trivialise Liddell Hart, for he remains a commentator of rare insight, was helpful to students and, even late in life, was capable of surprising generosity to Haig. But he is the archpriest of the argument that there must have been a better way: his liturgy, after all these years, still has the power to inspire.

The historical debate – not really the right word, for there was never much debate about it – was rejuvenated in the 1960s. Events such as the Cuban missile crisis, the Aldermaston marches, the Vietnam War and the burgeoning of an independent youth culture encouraged an iconoclasm, in which the generals of the First World War received unprecedented critical attention. Despite the reduction in the release period of public records from fifty to thirty years, meaning that most documents on the war became available in 1968, there was no immediate rush to reinterpret the war based on this evidence. Indeed, perhaps the most influential book ever written on the war, A. J. P. Taylor’s The First World War: An Illustrated History, was little more than a triumphant flambéeing (with the blowtorch lit by Liddell Hart) of the leftovers of the historiography of the 1930s.

On re-reading Taylor’s book I am stunned by its brilliant, incisive juxtaposition of bons mots, real insights and excruciating errors. ‘Failure [at Third Ypres in 1917] was obvious by the end of the first day to everyone except Haig and his immediate circle,’ it declares. Obvious, that is, to everyone except the German high command, which grew gloomier as the battle wore on, and thousands of British participants, whose letters and diaries often testify to a confidence not shared by those writing in the foreknowledge of failure. Even the Australian Official History speaks approvingly of 2nd Army’s attacks up the Menin Road in September, almost two months after everyone was meant to have lost confidence in the battle.

Leon Wolf’s In Flanders Fields, whose publication actually predated that of A. J. P. Taylor’s book, was in many respects a more reliable work. A study of the 1917 campaign around Ypres, it is well written, and makes good use of memoirs and interwar histories. But it too confirmed the primacy of a school of historiography which seemed more interested in expounding a priori assumptions than looking at the facts. It contains no real sense of the campaign’s strategic purpose, nor is there any feel at all for the British army’s vast improvements in tactical method. And lastly, Alan Clark’s The Donkeys, for all its verve and amusing narrative, added a streak of pure deception to writings on the First World War. Its title is based on the ‘Lions led by Donkeys’ conversation that apparently took place between Hindenburg and Ludendorff. Sadly for historical accuracy, there is no evidence whatever for this: none. Not a jot or scintilla. The real problem is that such histories have sold well and continue to do so. They reinforce historical myth by delivering to the reader exactly what they expect to read.

But help is at hand. The scrabble of feet on duckboards announces the arrival of supports. First there was John Terraine’s Douglas Haig: The Educated Soldier, published in 1963, and really a brave and remarkably impartial piece for its day. Terraine held his ground alone for some time, assailed by pastiches like Oh What a Lovely War, but by the mid-1970s revisionism with some real scholarly weight behind it crashed into the argument. Historians such as Tim Travers, Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson worked with the newly-released official documents to look at the British high command, Peter Simpkins examined the New Armies, Paddy Griffith charted the improvement of British tactics, and John Bourne, of the admirable Centre for First World War Studies at Birmingham University, initiated a mass of work on the background of British generals. It is a cruel reflection on book-buying that some of the most important work was not the most widely read: J. G. Fuller’s Troop Morale and Popular Culture and Gary Sheffield’s Leadership in the Trenches have never enjoyed quite the sales of Alan Clark’s The Donkeys.

I do not applaud the appearance of these works just because some of them are revisionist – as it happens I find myself in the uncomfortable No Man’s Land of historiography, collecting salvoes from both extremes – but because they are serious and scholarly in a way that an awful lot of earlier work simply was not. The war had already attracted too many historians who were determined to bend its events to fit their own analytical framework, jamming their pastry-cutters onto the evidence, and either discarding anything that lay outside their intriguing shape, or rolling it extra thin if there was not quite enough. Last year’s publication of the first volume of Hew Strachan’s magisterial First World War does, in a way, mark a turning point in the whole process: here we have scholarship blended with emotion, and a successful attempt to look at the conflict as a world war, not just as the Western Front with attached sideshows.

However, there is still a trend for many of the war’s historians to be overly preoccupied with the big political, strategic and operational issues. Was the war avoidable? Had Britain any other course of action in 1914? Were British generals actually geniuses rather than donkeys? Was the Treaty of Versailles too hard or too soft? How well understood was the post-Somme doctrine for divisions in the attack? In the process they often lose sight of the men who actually fought the war. True, combatants get anthologised, and we have lots of examples – some of them actually very good – of the historian as copytypist. And there is an ever-widening use of oral history, so that the words of this fast-disappearing generation can reach out to help us understand what this war was really like.

Or can they? I make this point as gently as I can, for it is no mere conventional politeness to say how much I admire the men who fought on the Western Front. But the interviewing of veterans in the 1970s and beyond concentrated, as it had to, on those who had survived. Like accounts written long after the events they describe, interviews with survivors inevitably reflect the past through the prism of the present. Although A. J. P. Taylor was unduly harsh to write them off as ‘old men drooling over their lost youth’, they do require at least some degree of caution. Sometimes survivors played their roles too well: they became Veterans, General Issue, neatly packed with what we wanted to hear, exploding at the touch of a tape-recorder button or the snap of a TV documentarist’s clapper-board. Up to my neck in muck and bullets; rats as big as footballs; the sergeant major was a right bastard; all my mates were killed. And sometimes, just sometimes, they tell us this because they have heard it themselves.

So we should be extra cautious about how we use and interpret oral history and other non-contemporary evidence. It is often far too late-recorded oral history: occasionally forgotten voices tell us about imaginary incidents. Much better to go back to what people thought at the time. And in the case of the First World War there is really no excuse for not doing so. Both the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum and the Liddle Collection in the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds are bursting with letters, diaries and an assortment of ephemera. And when I say bursting, I mean just that: new material is arriving faster than a single diligent historian can keep up with. However gloomy I get about being an historian, I am always excited by opening one of those big brown archive boxes, and tipping out letters on YMCA notepaper from the infantry base depots at Etaples, a leather-bound Jermyn Street diary, or a field message book with its flimsy, carboned paper and waterproofed cover. There is something unutterably poignant about a diary entry written by somebody who didn’t know whether he would be alive to eat his supper that day. I am not suggesting that we ought not to read Sassoon and Graves, Campbell and Carrington, all published after the war, but the closer we get to events the better our chance of finding out how people really felt.

The army of 1918, warts and all, represented the greatest collective endeavour of the whole of British history: over 4 million men went to France and nearly three quarters of a million stayed there forever. As the war went on they drifted apart from the land that had raised them, and lived in a world with its own rules, values, beliefs and language. They celebrated the armistice in silence, not with wild rejoicing. And then they went back to pick up their lives. For most of them the war was not, pace Paul Fussell, a break, a sundering. It was, as Private David Jones termed it, in parenthesis, bracketed into a busy life.⁶ It soon became evident that they had won the war but lost the peace, and the corrosive effect of this sense of collective betrayal can hardly be over-emphasised. The positive diaries become bitter memoirs as Military Crosses and Military Medals went to the pawnshop. And so we remember the war not as we might, through the eyes of 1918, as a remarkable victory so very dearly won, but through the eyes of 1928 as a sham which had wasted men’s lives and squandered their courage.

A brief word about terminology. When describing battalions in the British army I have followed the example of the Official Historian, Sir James Edmonds, and generally render 2nd Battalion The Queen’s Regiment as 2/Queen’s, and 2nd/7th Battalion The London Regiment as 2/7th London. Terms generally abbreviated, such as RFA for Royal Field Artillery or RMO for Regimental Medical Officer, are spelt out in full when they first appear, and a brief glossary at the end of the book should mitigate confusion. When an individual is identified by rank in the text, the rank given is that he held at the time of his mention: Harry Ogle, for instance, is variously private, corporal and captain.

Money features in these pages from time to time, usually mentioned because of its scarcity. It was reckoned in pounds, shillings and pence, with twelve pence (d) to the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound. A guinea, more common in Jermyn Street than the Gorbals, was twenty-one shillings. Prices rose in Britain throughout the war, with an almost regular ascent of 27 percent from its outbreak to January 1918. Food prices rose rather more swiftly, with a rise of around 133 percent from 1914 to 1920. Bread that sold for 4d a loaf in 1914 was 11½d at the end of 1917, and the price of a quart of milk over the same period rose from an average of 3½d to 7½d. A working man’s overcoat, 27s 4d in 1914, was 46s 8d in 1918, and a good shirt rose in price from 4s 6d to 8s 2½d. A woman’s hat, 8s in 1914, was 15s 11d four years later, and a corset, still an essential item of female dress, rose from 4s to 13s 8d.

There were sharp regional variations in working-class income: a bricklayer in Glasgow earned 10d an hour in 1914 and a cracking 22d in 1918, while his colleague in London drew 43s 9d a week at the start of the war and 88s at its end. Farm labourers, earning a broad average of 19s a week in 1907, took home 31s 9d in 1918. George Ashurst pocketed 12s 6d a week as a clerk in a Lancashire colliery. In 1914 J. B. Priestley, a clerk with literary ambitions, received 4s for a long day’s work: his whisky was 3s 6d a bottle and his pipe tobacco 3½d an ounce. William Shotter, who lived in Wimbledon, got 6 shillings a week as a trained draughtsman and then 17s 6d for a seven-day week as a milk roundsman. A tailor-made suit cost him 17 shillings and a ‘big dinner, roast beef, potatoes, pudding’ was sixpence. A middle-class professional man could expect around £500 a year, and Sir George Sitwell, a well-to-do baronet, thought that £530 a year was quite enough to keep young Osbert in the cavalry, with horses, servant and groom. There was certainly serious money about: Sir John French, never a safe pair of hands where cash was concerned, had borrowed £2,000 off Douglas Haig, then his brigade major, in 1899.

A Lancashire mill worker might pay 6s a week for accommodation and, at the other social extreme, a sizeable family house in London could be rented for £100 a year. Even Sir George Sitwell only had to pay 12 guineas a week for a decent London house. Osbert, recovering from mumps at Scarborough, thought 4s 9d a day far too much for board and lodging. Many families lived in rented property: the national obsession with house purchase was still to come. But for those who wanted to buy, an attractive house in the Home Counties might cost £550, although a prospective purchaser noted that a water rate of £8 a year was ‘not very satisfactory’.

Army officers had to buy their own uniforms. I. G. Andrew, commissioned from the ranks into the Cameronians in 1916, was delighted to get a uniform grant of £50 and to find himself on 7s 6d a day. The Bond Street outfitters Pope and Bradley (‘By Royal Appointment to HM the King of Spain’) charged from £3 13s 6d for a service dress jacket and £2 12s 6d for Bedford cord breeches (buckskin strapped). A waterproof trench coat cost £5 15s 6d, though there was a running debate as to whether a Burberry was a better bet than a stout oiled cotton coat. Maxims of London compromised, advertising a coat interlined with oiled silk for just £4 10s. A British warm, a square-cut knee-length coat with leather buttons, could be had for three or four pounds.

It was understood that most pre-war regular officers would not be able to live on their pay: an infantry officer in an unfashionable regiment might rub along on a private income of £160 a year. In 1909 a territorial infantry subaltern, training part-time, pocketed 5s 3d a day and the lieutenant colonel commanding his battalion 18s, both rather less than their regular equivalents. In 1918 a gunner lieutenant received 10s 6d a day, and ‘with field allowances, etc, as long as I’m out here, I’ll be getting nearly £250 a year’.⁷ Officers habitually carried cheque books into battle so that they could pay for home comforts if they were captured: often a cheque drawn on Cox & Kings, in Germany, would find its way back via Switzerland, providing families with welcome news.

Soldiers’ pay was low, with an infantry private beginning on 1 shilling a day and a Royal Horse Artillery Warrant Officer picking up 6 shillings. A complex system of additions, via proficiency pay and suchlike, and deductions for things like ‘barrack damages’ complicated army pay, and Gunner Bill Sugden ruefully told his fiancée that at the end of the process ‘you end up with nothing at all’. He was fortunate because his employer, the decent Walter Heppenstall, topped up his army pay by sending his mother 5s a week. King’s Regulations established fines for drunkenness at 2s 6d for the first offence and 5 shillings for the second, rising to a punitive 10 shillings if the offence had been committed within three months of a previous lapse.

On the continent men were paid in local currency, and although exchange rates varied, a franc was worth 10d in mid 1916, and there were twenty-five to the pound at the end of the war. Transactions were complicated by the fact that while Banque de France notes were good throughout the country, small-denomination notes issued locally were met with a curt pas bon ici outside their area of origin. In 1917 a Christmas turkey, at 3s 2d a pound, cost 30 shillings, arguably better value than an up-market Parisienne lady of the night who charged a subaltern £8 for the pleasure of her company, leaving him to muse on the cost of living – and the cheapness of death.

PROLOGUE: TOMMY ATKINS

In 1815 a War Office publication showing how the Soldier’s Pocket Book should be filled out gave as its example one Private Thomas Atkins, No. 6 Troop, 6th Dragoons. Atkins became a sergeant in the 1837 version, and was now able to sign his name rather than merely make his mark.

By the 1880s the expression ‘Tommy Atkins’ was in wide use to describe the prototypical British soldier, and Kipling’s poem Tommy summed up the nation’s ambivalence about her defenders.

… Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that an’ ‘Tommy, ’ows’s your soul?’ But it’s ‘Thin red line of ’eroes’ when the drums begin to roll …

… For it’s Tommy this an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Chuck him out, the brute!’ But it’s ‘Saviour of ’is country’ When the guns begin to shoot; An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please; An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool – you bet that Tommy sees!

During the First World War the nickname was widespread, with derivatives like Tommy cooker, for a small trench stove, talking ‘Tommy’, to describe other rank repartee, or even ‘Tommyness’, to define certain attitudes and behaviour. When British and German soldiers yelled greetings or insults across No Man’s Land it was always ‘Fritz’ and ‘Tommy’.

A corporal writing in 1914 caught the man in all his lights and shades: ‘Sometimes Tommy is not a pleasant fellow, and I hated him that afternoon. One dead German had his pockets full of chocolate. They scrambled over him, pulling him about, until it was all divided.’ An engineer officer saw a large Frenchwoman fall into a canal, to be tugged to the bank by ‘two tommies’ who, in their eagerness to help, pulled her dress up over her head, demonstrating that knickers were not then universal in rural France. The expression was, of course, prohibited. A divisional commanders’ conference in October 1915 affirmed that: ‘The use of the word “Tommy” to be absolutely barred. The term is never permitted in a good regiment.’

The order had as much effect as so many others, and the nickname persisted, sometimes as Tommy, sometimes as Atkins, and once, memorably, as ‘Mr Atkins, gentleman’, used by an officer who saw soldiers helping refugees with gentleness and generosity. Nicknames are not always popular with their recipients, and such was the case with Tommy. Many soldiers felt patronised by it, and its English implication grated on Scots, Irishmen and Welshmen. But Sergeant Charles Arnold, himself a quintessential Tommy, declared that:

Tommy Atkins – full private – is, when all is said and done, the one who won the war. He won it by sheer dogged pluck … When is something going to be done for the man who isn’t a general or a guardsman or an Anzac, nor even a London Scot but just a clodhopper from Suffolk, or Devon, or Durham – the man who obeyed orders and stuck it out? Of this man little was heard, possibly because he had a habit of going into places a thousand strong and coming out a remnant of a hundred and fifty or so. Dead men tell no tales of their own glory.

I

ZERO HOUR

Even his white cotton long johns, the last resort of comfort and dignity, are soaked by the mud he has been lying in for the past half hour. Although it is a fine night with bright moonlight, there is little promise of spring this morning of 2 April 1917, and the winter, the worst anyone can remember, still grips the front line as it snakes down from Arras towards Bapaume like a slimy and malevolent old serpent. The cold has its merits, for it makes lice less lively: there is scarcely a man within three miles of the front who is not aware of lice busy at his armpits and crotch. Corporal Thomas Atkins is lying towards the right-hand end of a line of eighteen similar figures, nine of them in his own section, on the western edge of a long spur with the village of Croisilles, houses roofless and walls gaping, but, unlike so many villages further west, still just recognisable as the little agricultural community it once was, on its far side. They are in No Man’s Land, with the rusting zigzags of the German wire out of sight in front of them. Behind them is another similar line: this little block of one officer and forty men constitutes No. 1 Platoon, A Company, 2nd Battalion The Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment.

To its left is No. 2 Platoon, looking much the same but, (for this is ‘Dozy Two’, the despair of the company sergeant major and a risk to all decent men) sounding noisier as Lieutenant Wills, its long-suffering commander, adjusts something that sounds, across the chilly night, like a sack of scrap metal. It can only be Private Desmond, the company idiot, who has unfortunately not been left back with the transport where he can do no harm to himself or others. There are worse places to be on this long morning, thinks Thomas Atkins, and with No. 2 Platoon is one of them.

Atkins is twenty-five and unmarried, and was a butcher’s roundsman in Peckham before he enlisted in late October 1914. He joined the army because everybody else was doing it, and he did not want to miss the excitement. And he chose the Queen’s because Jack Chamberlain, a roundsman with the same firm, had an uncle in the regiment, and told Thomas that its cap badge, the Paschal lamb, was the finest in the army. That was enough for a single train ticket to Guildford, and a long walk up the hill to Stoughton barracks, where a sergeant thought that there might just be two vacancies. Getting into the army was easier than getting to France, and it took three months of basic training – shooting on Ash Ranges and route marches along the Hog’s Back to Farnham – and another three of hanging about the depot before his name appeared on a typewritten list fluttering outside the orderly room. His draft, two officers and fifty-eight men, marched to Guildford station and went by train to Southampton. An overnight crossing in a cattle boat took them to Le Havre, whence they were shuffled by railway to an infantry base depot at Etaples, and then posted to the 2nd Battalion, out of the line near Poperinghe, behind Ypres.

Having a chum in the same draft helped, and he recognised some NCOs from Stoughton. There were more decent blokes than bad bastards: any section had three or four good men, as many average, and one or two walking disasters, usually weeded out and sent off to the trench mortars in one of their periodic appeals for men. Officers were recognisably different in style and substance, and there were still enough pre-war regulars to give the battalion an old army feel of Blanco and brickdust.

The pattern of battalion life, with rotation between the front line, reserve trenches and rest billets (usually with more work than rest), came easily to Atkins. There was no sense in fighting what you couldn’t change. Food was regular, if predictable, and there was not much to spend your pay on but omelette and chips, accompanied by thin French beer or sharp white wine. Two shillings a week went home to his mother. The rest, increasing from a private’s miserable 1 shilling a day to a corporal’s more respectable 1s 3d in July 1916, as Somme casualties created vacancies, went straight into his belly. He was shocked the first time he was shelled, and profoundly surprised the first time he was sniped at: rifle fire was so much more personal, and it seemed odd that a German he had never met should try to kill him.

By this April of 1917 he has become familiar with death and wounds, with enough of his friends dead to be aware of his own mortality but not so many lost as to make him obsessed by the risks he must run. He knows his job, thinks himself good at it, and believes that his superiors think so too. The only drawback to the promotion that cannot be far away is that it will make it harder for him to see his mate, Corporal Jack Chamberlain.

Further back down the gentle slope, towards the barbed wire in front of the British front-line trench, are Nos 3 and 4 Platoons, the remainder of A Company. Shiny A is the battalion’s right-forward company. It is to attack at zero hour, 5.15 that morning, with B Company on its left and C and D Companies behind. The two rear companies, in the British front line and the communication trenches just behind it, will advance in section worms, little columns which will make them easier to control as they move forward, passing through the first wave of attacking companies to consolidate the captured ground.

The layout of the morning’s plan is quite clear in Atkins’s mind. Five minutes before the attack British field artillery will shell the German front line, while heavier guns will reach out more deeply in an effort to prevent the German artillery from responding effectively to the SOS rockets which their infantry will be sure to send up. As the advance begins the artillery will fire a creeping barrage, moving 100 yards every three minutes. Atkins knows that he and his men must ‘lean on the barrage’, leaving no more than 50 yards between the shell bursts and their advancing line. The trick is to arrive on the German front line, where the railway embankment runs across the front of the village, before its garrisons have emerged from their dugouts. Anyone who remembers the opening stages of the battle of the Somme the previous summer knows that it is better to risk losing men from the occasional shell that bursts short than to allow the barrage to spit and crack its way across the landscape too far ahead of the infantry, giving the Germans time to emerge to man their surviving positions and tuck machine guns into fresh shell holes.

The battalion is to take the German front-line trench and the embankment behind it, and then form a defensive flank facing north-east while the other three battalions in the brigade gain more ground. Brigadier General Hanway Cumming, the brigade commander, in a dugout a mile and a half further back, would tell us that the 21st Division on the left and the 4th Australian Division on the right will also be attacking as part of a larger plan conceived by 3rd Army. But this is not a matter for Atkins. He has seen the divisional commander on two occasions, but could not tell us that he is called Major General Herbert Watts and will soon have his reputation for being a very competent operator recognised by a knighthood. Getting to the railway embankment with skin intact will be quite enough for Atkins this morning, and the divisional plan is veiled from him in the mists of higher strategy. His men are to take the German front-line trench, and then work their way along it to the right until they meet the 22nd Manchesters, their right-hand neighbours. The company commander, with his unhappy facility for making the simple complicated (he was a lawyer in another life, which may explain it), calls it ‘effecting a junction’.

An artillery forward observation officer and his two signallers will move up with the company, the signallers unrolling cable as they go to maintain telephone communication with the guns. Goodness knows how long it will last, for unburied cable is easily cut by shellfire or by the iron-rimmed wheels of wagons. The gunner subaltern, warned by his commander that his job is to stay alive as long as he can to keep in contact with the guns, is not at his best. Like most officers in this part of the field he is dressed as a private soldier, and Private Desmond, perhaps entirely innocently, has already asked him: ‘Spare a fag, cocker?’ Although Desmond was put in the picture by an outraged signaller, it was not a good start for any gunner’s day.

Corporal Atkins’s little band of nine is much the same as any other British section in France this chilly morning. Although this is in theory a regular battalion, there is actually only one regular in the section. Private Sammy Jacques, with his rheumy eye, droopy moustache and South African War medal ribbons, resolutely does no more and no less than his duty, honouring the oath he took, half a lifetime ago, to ‘defend Her Majesty, her heirs and successors, in person, crown and dignity, against all enemies’. Although Atkins is nearly half his age, Jacques always properly calls him ‘Corp’, and never trades on his long service – except to lace his language with the impenetrable patois of the old India hand for whom a rifle is always a bundook, a girl a bint and a bed a charpoy. He is no problem out of the line, for he drinks to get drunk, and goes straight from upright and thirsty to horizontal and silent: no unseemly shouting, brawling or resisting the guard.

Atkins’s second-in-command, rejoicing in the rank of temporary, unpaid lance corporal, is Henry Adnam, a solicitor’s articled clerk and public school man who volunteered in late 1915, not long before conscription came into force. Had he joined a year before he might have got straight in with a commission, but those easy days have gone, and if he wants one now he will have to prove himself on mornings like this, and seems in a fair way to be doing so. There are four long-standing members of the section, Abraham, Bertorelli, Jarvis and Wolverton, all also from south London, a reflection of the regiment’s pre-war recruiting base. They are known quantities and men of proven value – Jake, Bertie, Jackie and the Wolf amongst themselves, and to Atkins too, when the presence of an officer does not impose formality. Their preference for holding rations and food parcels in common is tinged with disregard of the property rights of those outside the charmed circle. If the company finds itself diffy (that is, deficient) of any of its stores when they are next checked by the regimental quartermaster sergeant, the Wolf will be let out to prowl and the missing items will be ‘found’, perhaps with file marks where serial numbers used to be.

The remaining three members of the section, Arlington, Kersley and Pryce-Owen, are recent arrivals, young 1916 conscripts drafted in through Etaples to replace men killed or wounded in the steady low-level attrition of a winter’s line-holding. Arlington is from Middlesbrough, Kersley from Shaftesbury and Pryce-Owen from North Wales. Nowadays men are sent forward from the base without much regard for cap badge or local origin: these three became Queensmen at Etaples, and, as Jacques puts it, do not know ‘Braganza’ (the regimental march) from a Number One burner. It is too early to know what to make of them. The three are inclined to chum up, and this morning they lie side by side. Disregarding the allotted spacing of three yards between men, Kersley has wriggled across to Pryce-Owen, whose first battle this will be, and the tips of their boots are touching.

Only Atkins, Wolverton and Pryce-Owen have wristwatches: Wolverton’s belonged to a previous platoon commander who mislaid it somewhere between the front-line trench where he was sniped and the regimental aid post only 250 yards behind. The worst thing about being watchless on a morning like this is not knowing how close the battle is: for many soldiers it is like standing on the scaffold with no idea of when the trap will be sprung. Even the fortunate few find their watches little help, for their hands seem to be sticking: this is the longest 5 o’clock in the history of the world.

All wear khaki tunic and trousers, with long puttees wound from ankle to calf. The comfortable service caps of the past have been replaced by battle bowlers, the broad-brimmed steel helmet, screened against shine by stretched hessian. The men have khaki webbing – a broad waistbelt, with water bottle on the right, entrenching tool and bayonet scabbard on the left, and braces which support ammunition pouches at the front and a haversack (containing ‘the unexpired portion of the day’s rations’, a notionally waterproof ‘gas cape’ and a spare pair of socks) in the centre of the back. Large packs, now almost never carried at times like this, have been left with the transport in a village three miles back. It may be days before they are seen again, and there is always the danger that somebody else will have seen to them first. Four of Atkins’s men are bombers, whose rifles will be slung from their left shoulders during the battle, and who will throw hand grenades, the popular and (generally) reliable Mills bomb, carried in the pouches of a webbing waistcoat. Four are bayonet men, who will work in concert with the bombers, clashing around the Grecian key traverses of German trenches as soon as the grenades explode, and then holding their ground while the bombers come up to repeat the process.

For the advance all, save the bombers, will carry their Short Magazine Lee-Enfield rifles with long sword-bayonets fixed, at the high port, obliquely across the chest. The section immediately behind comprises Lewis-gunners, their fat-barrelled machine guns with drum magazines on top. Corporal Chamberlain of No. 2 Section is kneeling over a Lewis gun whose ‘No. 1’, who carries and fires the weapon, is having trouble with the magazine. A dry snap tells us that Chamberlain has clipped it with the heel of his hand and it is now securely seated. His is that sort of hand.

Second Lieutenant Baker, the platoon commander, ghosts gently past Corporal Atkins’s section with a glance and a grin. He wears the same uniform as his men and carries rifle and bayonet. Only a bronze star on each shoulder shows that he is an officer, and the ribbon of the Distinguished Conduct Medal (which he won as a corporal at the first battle of Ypres in November 1914) reveals that he is no stranger to this sort of morning. The company commander, Captain Roseveare, stands alongside Company Sergeant Major O’Hara 100 yards back, squarely in the middle of his company. Roseveare is taking occasional glances at his watch (his, too, seems stuck fast) and looking across to his left where his colleague, the commander of B Company, is just visible against the first hint of dawn’s light.

They will never be quite sure what caused it, though first guesses are right, and it was in fact the repositioning of Private Desmond that alerted a German sentry. There is just enough light for his NCO to make out shapes beyond the wire, and a signal rocket shoots up from the German front line, and bursts into a spectacular golden shower. This is an urgent appeal for fire on what the British call the SOS, on which guns are laid when not otherwise engaged: in this case it is the valley west of the spur, where attackers might reasonably be expected to form up. And, sure enough, the call is promptly answered. The shells arrive before the sound of the 77-mm field guns that fired them, and a barrage of tightly-packed explosions, with six guns firing ten rounds a minute, falls in the bottom of the little valley. It is as well that the Germans are firing blind. An hour before they would have caught the battalion moving up, but now the valley floor is empty. Indeed, the barrage is so regular and methodical that the rear companies of the Manchesters, moving up towards the right, are able to advance to their forming up place by avoiding it as if it was a physical obstacle.

The German guns are still firing when there is a single dull thump somewhere behind the battalion, like dad slamming the front door after an evening on the town, thinks Atkins. It is a single 18-pounder of 7th Division’s artillery, seconds ahead of the barrage programme. Almost immediately the other field guns join in, twelve six-gun batteries of 18-pounders and a single battery of 4.5-inch howitzers. Bigger, heavier guns further back add their lethal contribution: four 60-pounders, and two mighty 9.2-inch guns of a siege battery, Royal Garrison Artillery, named Charlie Chaplin and Vesta Tilley by popular vote of their gunners. The shells sound like trains rushing overhead: for the infantry the sensation is like nothing so much as standing under a railway bridge on a busy line, with the shells sounding ‘like an iron shod tyre going round a gritty corner of a road’. Although the closest shells are bursting over the German front line, about 200 yards away, their din is terrific. Normal conversation would be impossible and the shock of each explosion, even at this distance, tugs at loose clothing and equipment.

Although Atkins does not know it, the gunners are not trying to destroy the German front line: that will take more time and metal than they have available. Instead, they seek to neutralise it by keeping its garrison underground, and so the field guns burst their shrapnel 30 feet over the German trenches, scattering them with lead balls. Most German gun positions were identified from the air in the days leading up to the attack, and the fire of the one hostile battery already in action audibly slackens as Vesta Tilley plants a monstrous high-explosive shell between two gunpits, half filling them with earth, and killing, wounding or concussing men for a hundred yards around.

At 5.15 the platoon commanders blow their whistles and the men rise to their feet and move forwards at a walk. As they breast the rise they can clearly see the bursts of shrapnel, white against the grey dawn, over the German trenches, and the German barbed wire, gapped by shelling and patrols over the past week, offers little obstacle. The leading platoons are in the German forward trench, just in front of the railway embankment, without losing a man. Once there, the drills take over.

The trench, an outpost of the main Hindenburg line, prepared the previous year when the old Somme defences lay in front of it, is good even by German standards. Its sides are stoutly revetted with wood, and thick duckboards on its floor cover a deep drainage sump. Jumping in is easy, for the firestep rises from the trench bottom along the side facing the British. Getting out will be harder, for the back wall of the trench, topped by a broad earth parados, rises up like a cliff. The only sign of human occupation is a single dead German lying on his back on the duckboards staring at the sky. But when Abraham and Jarvis throw grenades down the steps of a dugout there are shrieks from below and a desperate cry of ‘Kamerad’. Two Germans struggle up the steps half carrying a third. Kersley and Pryce-Owen, bayonet men for the bombers here, seem torn between aggression and embarrassment as they shove the prisoners against the side of the trench. Lance Corporal Henry Adnam will watch them until the company commander allocates men from one of the follow-up waves to escort them back across No Man’s Land.

Atkins stands behind Abraham and Jarvis as they lob grenades over the next traverse. Two grenades, two explosions, a point so often taught but so easily and fatally forgotten. Atkins leads the way round the corner to find a short run of empty trench reeking of freshly-turned earth, wet wood and explosive. Kersley and Pryce-Owen pause at the next turning, and the bombers throw two more grenades. This time something is different. There is the scuffling of feet on duckboards before the grenades explode, and Atkins arrives in the next section of trench at the same time as a German senior NCO enters it from the other side.

Although he has been in France for about two years, most of the Germans Atkins has seen have been either dead or prisoners. There is certainly no mistaking this one’s purpose or determination. He has a trim beard, and wears a cap rather than the coal-scuttle helmets of the two soldiers behind him. A thick row of silver braid round his collar marks his rank; on his left breast is an Iron Cross. He fires his automatic pistol twice: time stands still as the empty cartridge cases catch the light as they spin up and away. There is a crash behind Atkins as Abraham falls forwards, hit in the chest, and then the German’s momentum carries him straight onto Atkins’s bayonet. He has no time to think, but leans forward onto his rifle, setting the bayonet firmly: he then gives it a quarter-turn (‘making the wound not only fatal, but immortal’, as base warriors, who have never seen a trench, like to say) and tugs it out easily enough. The German falls backwards with blood pulsing from his throat, but it is a measure of his resolve that he fires once more, at the very doors of death, missing Atkins by a hair’s breadth. Then he drums his heels on the duckboards and is still.

The other two Germans take the hint, drop their rifles and raise their hands, crying Kamerad. There is a deafening bang just behind Atkins as Jarvis shoots one straight between the eyes: only the seconds spent working his bolt to chamber another round enable Atkins to grab his rifle by the fore-end, jerk the muzzle upwards and yell: ‘No, no! They’ve jacked!’ Jarvis stops at once, like a drunk suddenly sobering up, turns to look at Abraham lying on the trench floor too obviously dead, swears, spits, slings his rifle and takes another grenade out of his waistcoat. He is just about to throw it when there is a loud shout of ‘Manchester, Manchester’ from behind the next traverse. And round it stalks a little corporal with a toothless grin, a grenade in his hand, and a lanky bayonet man behind him. ‘’Ello, choom,’ he says. The junction is complete.¹

SWITZERLAND TO THE SEA

The Western Front drew men of my grandfathers’ generation to it like a malign and irresistible magnet. During the course of the First World War about 4 million British soldiers served there. From March 1916 there were never less than a million on the Western Front, and the total peaked at 1,721,056 on 1 August 1917. Although this book is concerned primarily with the British soldier, it is important not to forget that the British Expeditionary Force in France contained substantial Empire and Dominion contingents (from India, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa), and adding these to the narrowly British figure sees the total number of men under British command top two million in the summer of 1917.² Some 1,724,000 British officers and men were killed, wounded or reported missing on the Western Front, about five casualties for every nine men sent out.³

Almost 400,000 Canadians went to France, where 210,000 were killed or wounded. Newfoundland, then not legally part of Canada, lost 3,661 casualties, not including Newfoundlanders serving, as many did, in other national contingents. The Australians, with over 300,000 men in France, suffered over 180,000 casualties, and the New Zealanders, with about 90,000 in Europe, almost 47,000. The Indian Army sent almost 160,000 men to France, and some 25,000 of them were killed or wounded. Although the bulk of South African soldiers fought in Africa, more than 14,000 were killed or wounded in France. There was inevitably friction between British and Dominion contingents, with Poms v. Aussies spats the best known. The tendency for popular history to emphasise national achievements at the expense of collective effort often makes it hard to remember that this was a giant imperial endeavour. But just as there was suffering and misery enough for all, so too ought the credit to be more evenly distributed.

From Britain’s point of view the Western Front was easily the most expensive of the war’s theatres: Gallipoli, the next most deadly (though it lasted less than a year), killed or wounded two of every nine men sent out. Although the Second World War was a far greater tragedy in human affairs (for instance, Russian military dead probably numbered 10 million) the British armed forces lost 264,000 killed in all theatres, far less than half those killed on the Western Front a generation earlier. The Western Front thus has the melancholy distinction of being the costliest theatre in which British troops have ever fought.

And yet the front needs to be kept in proper perspective. It would be wrong to suggest that it was more dreadful, in the First World War, than Gallipoli in its scorching, stinking summer or, on the Italian front, than the Julian Alps in mid-winter. And it would be equally wrong to rank it worse than some Second World War clashes, such as ‘The Kokoda Trail in New Guinea, flooded Dutch polders, the Hurtgen forest and the Reichswald, an Arakan monsoon, frozen foxholes in the Ardennes and the Apennines, the beaches of Tarawa and the putrid slime of Okinawa’.⁴ But what distinguishes the Western Front is its dreadful combination of loss of life, qualitative misery and its sheer, mind-numbing scale, made somehow more strange by its ‘ridiculous proximity’ to Britain.

In all, nearly 750,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers, sailors and airmen died on the Western Front. They rest in more than 1,000 military and 2,000 civilian cemeteries, Over 300,000 have no known graves, and are commemorated on Memorials to the Missing like the Menin Gate in Ypres and the Thiepval Memorial on the Somme. These cemeteries and memorials mark the course of the old front line as it weaves across Belgium and down into France, with concrete pillboxes, preserved (and some more evocatively unpreserved) trenches, whilst starkly rebuilt villages trace the war’s path.

The Western Front ran for about 460 miles, depending on the ebb and flow of battle, from the dunes of the North Sea coast, across alluvial Flanders, laced with drainage ditches and speckled with pollarded willows. Even the salient which bulged round the little Belgian town of Ypres had once looked handsome, as Lieutenant Guy Chapman reflected when he looked at it in the spring of 1917.

Two mornings later we sat on the Tower Hamlets ridge and surveyed the desolation. Many months hence, I was standing on this spot with a major in the Bedfords. ‘I was here in nineteen-fourteen,’ he said; ‘then you could not see half a mile for the woods.’ It was scarcely credible. In nineteen-seventeen, it was as bare as a man’s hand. It could not, one thought, ever have been otherwise. Could such destruction have been wreaked? Were these puke acres ever growing fields of clover, beet or cabbage? Did a clear stream ever run through this squalmy glen? This, the map tells you, was once a magnate’s estate. Now the lawns are bare of grass. The ornamental water has been replaced by more recent landscape gardeners; it is a quag of islands and stagnant pools, over which foul gases hang.⁵

Henry Williamson, who knew the salient as a private in the London Rifle Brigade in 1914 and later as an officer in the Bedfords, observed that it:

had the outline of a skull, with teeth trying to crack Ypres … A fit man can easily walk round the skull’s outline in a day; but in ’17, could he have walked without human interference, he would have dropped exhausted, before he had finished a hundredth part of the way, and been drowned with his face under the thin top mud.⁶

Graham Seton-Hutchison, infantry officer turned machine-gunner, mused on the way that nicknames, chosen when the world was green, now veiled nameless horrors. ‘God knows what cynical wit christened these splintered stumps Inverness Copse or Stirling Wood,’ he wrote. ‘And who ordained that these treacherous heaps of filth should be known as Stirling Castle or Northampton Farm?’⁷

Further south came the Lens coalfield with its winding gear, slag heaps and miners’ cottages, and then the escarpment of Vimy Ridge north of Arras. There the front line climbed onto the great chalk expanse of Artois and Picardy – open, confident countryside which lifted the spirits of soldiers marching down from the mud of the Ypres salient, partly because it looked like the last bit of England that most of them had seen, for it was ‘effectively an extension of the Weald anticline in southern England’.⁸ Lieutenant G. F. Ellenberger of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry described his arrival on the uplands above the Somme in the spring of 1916:

The poplar-lined pavés straight-stretching across the continuous plains of the North were a thing of the past; the road on which we were wound up and down following the valley on our left, on the other side of which the country rose in delightful hills; in the bottom of the valley flowed the Somme; the land we were traversing recalled the downs of Hampshire, its chalky slopes undulating and covered with coarse grass, and here and there dotted with dark copses and small woods. It was a sumptuous new world in the morning mist, seeming almost as it were home to which we had come from the flat mud of Flanders.⁹

Charles Carrington of the Royal Warwickshires thought that ‘it might be Kent if it wasn’t Picardy’. And Captain Rowland Feilding, fresh to the Somme from Flanders, told his wife how

The ground is becoming strewn with a great variety of wild flowers. Few and far between are the wild lilies of the valley in bloom, which are much sought after by officers and men, and are therefore very difficult to find.

Another common flower is a white one to which I cannot give a name. It grows from a bulb and has leaves like a daffodil, but much narrower and with a white stripe. If only you were in the country I would send you some bulbs.¹⁰

This charming landscape was destined to be destroyed as comprehensively as the Ypres salient had been. Second Lieutenant Bernard Martin, of the North Staffordshires, wrote of his own fifteen months on the front that:

The most dreadful picture in my Somme gallery is a landscape – a wide upland slope, uniformly drab, dirty white, chalk mixed with decaying vegetation, nor a tree stump or bush left, just desolation, with a track named Crucifix Alley for men to walk round or through shell holes to the larger desolation of Delville Wood. The whole blasted slope clotted to the very edges with dead bodies, too many to bury, and too costly, the area being under constant fire from artillery. This awful display of dead men looked like a set piece, as though some celestial undertaker had spaced the corpses evenly for interment and then been interrupted. Several times I picked my way through this cemetery of the unburied. A landscape picture my memory turns up in horror.¹¹

Captain Bruce Bairnsfather, infantry officer and cartoonist, noted the lethal connection between surviving landmarks and enemy fire. ‘A farm was a place where you expected a shell to come through the wall at any minute’, he warned; ‘a tree was the sort of thing gunners took range on; a sunset indicated a quality of light in which it was unsafe to walk round’.¹²

The front line crossed the meandering Somme, still running more or less due south, before swinging eastwards to follow the high ground above the River Aisne. From there it followed the Chemin des Dames, the Ladies’ Way, once a carriage road built so that the daughters of Louis XV could drive from Compiègne to the Château de la Bove, seat of the Duchesse de Nemours. Although the British passed this way in 1914 and again in 1918, from the Chemin des Dames eastwards the front was French-held. Yet the process of converting landscape to desolation was just the same, and was all the more resented because the men who fought on this blighted landscape had often lived there too. Almost three-quarters of French soldiers were peasants, and the ravaging of their land and the destruction of little villages that had stood on it for a thousand years went to their hearts. In March 1917 a French trench newspaper told how:

The ruins of the village, entirely smashed up by bombardments, scarcely made up, here and there, a few sections of wall with a sinister whiteness, from which emerged, like a sad wreck, the skeleton of a church, horribly bony, torn, murdered, mangled; a fountain and a cross remained intact, side by side, in the middle of the dead hamlet. All around, desperately white stones strewed the ground, smashed up higgledy-piggledy, piled up in heaps, amongst shell holes, plaster, burnt woodwork, with only a few briar hedges to throw their black shadows onto this livid landscape. Anyone who has not seen this little place with the straight road passing its collapsed homes, cannot understand what intense emotion, what dark and chilling sadness, what unspeakable agony is revealed by this vision of desolation.¹³

Next, the front ran across the dry, chalky plateau of Champagne – like Artois but on an even greater scale – to disappear into the mighty forest of the Argonne. It emerged on the Meuse at the little fortress town of Verdun, its bare uplands ravaged in the fighting of 1916 and, even to my English mind, still quite the most evocative spot in the whole of this belt of murdered nature. The line then followed the right bank of the Meuse past St-Mihiel, and then climbed up into the Vosges, to end, on the hills of the Swiss frontier, in geography almost as unlike that of the Flanders coast as it is possible to imagine.

John Masefield thought that the front could best be understood as a river flowing across the landscape, straight here, meandering there, sometimes wide and sometime more narrow. In some areas normality came very close to its bank. Private Robert Case of the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry told his parents in July 1915 that: ‘Back behind the lines there are, except for quantities of khaki, no indications of the biggest strafe the world has known. The land is tilled up to say 1½ miles of the firing line, and in many cases within 1,000 yards.’¹⁴ In others, like the Somme sector in 1916–18, repeated attack and counterattack widened the front to what was, literally and metaphorically, a broad marsh. ‘I cannot give you any conception of what the battlefield is like now,’ wrote Masefield to his wife in October 1916,

but if you will imagine any 13 miles x 9 miles known to you, say from Goring to Abingdon, raking in Dorchester, Wallingford, Nettlebed and the Chilterns above Goring, you will get a hint of its extent. Then imagine in all that expanse no single tree left, but either dismembered or cut off short, & burnt quite black. Then imagine that in all that expanse no single house is left, nor any large part of a house, except one iron gate & half a little red chapel, & that all the other building is literally blasted into little bits, so that no man can tell where the villages were, nor how they ran, nor what they were like.¹⁵

The Western Front was speckled with architecture which reflected its past. The great squares of Béthune and Arras, with their arcaded walks and florid house fronts – redbrick for Flanders, relieved by honey-coloured stone for Artois and Picardy – were reminiscent of the plaças in Spanish cities, for this was once the Spanish Netherlands. Officers and men with a literary or historical bent, and there were many, mused on architectural detail. As 4/Coldstream Guards slogged across Artois in late 1915 an officer observed ‘a comic incident’:

Sergeant Melton was marching next to me. Behind us were two educated men, Sergeant Oliver and Corporal Newton – who started a discussion about the relative merits of Hazlitt and Goldsmith. To this exchange, which we could not help overhearing, Melton reacted with ill-concealed disgust. When we passed a partly-restored church Oliver and Newton discussed its date. One of them suggested it might be six hundred years old. Melton, who had good eyesight, noticed that the restored front door had a date on it. He half turned round, and, with a rictus of sarcasm, addressed Sergeant Oliver as follows: ‘You great booby, how can it be that old when it has 1857 over the door?’¹⁶

Churches often had harsh and unpromising exteriors but were prettier inside. Captain James Dunn thought that Doullens church, though ‘nondescript and unattractive without, has fine early twelfth-century detail within’, as well as ‘finely-preserved mid-Gothic arching’.¹⁷ Private Frank Richards, of the same battalion, saw things with a slightly different eye. ‘Stevens and I visited the cathedral,’ he wrote of Rouen, ‘and we were very much taken with the beautiful oil paintings and other objects of art inside. One old soldier who paid it a visit said it would be a fine place to loot.’¹⁸ However, some private soldiers were more appreciative. Stapleton Tench Eachus, a Royal Engineers signaller, explained why he had mixed views about the church of St-Gilles at Epagnette in mid-1916.

The church is an old one and not by any means remarkable for its structural architecture, at least that was my impression. It had however been elaborately decorated and the walls and pillars painted in divers hues. The paintings, which were hung about the building, constituted in my view the most remarkable feature to be seen in this place of worship. Perhaps however my vision in such matters may be influenced in a prejudicial direction on account of the fact that having had the privilege of visiting that most wonderful sumptuous church, St John’s at Valetta, Malta, one is apt to judge readily and in so doing overlook the claims of those of less repute.¹⁹

Men were often struck by the way that the names of bars, hotels and restaurants reflected the area’s turbulent past. A tavern on the Brussels road outside Mons, at the scene of the first clash between British and German cavalry on 22 August 1914, was named La Reine d’Hongroie, after the Queen of Hungary: Maria Theresa, when Mons was in the Austrian Netherlands. Aux Armes de France with its Valois blue with golden lilies and L’Ecu de France with its crown had both survived three republics, and Le Bivouac de L’Fmpereur bore the distinctive silhouette of the little corporal. The peasantry slaked their thirst in a score of establishments named Les Cultivateurs, and there were horses, prancing or ploughing, black and white. There was the double-headed eagle for the Hapsburg Empire and his crowned cousin for the French, and even, as a sharp-eyed army doctor recorded, Au Grand Marlbrouck named after the first Duke of Marlborough and La Reine d’Angleterre after his queen.²⁰

This was a land already marked by war. Many were struck by the bizarre connection of ancient and modern. When Charles Carrington returned to the battlefields in 1923 he found:

a trench still full of the flotsam and jetsam of war. I dug an old gun out of the mud and found to my surprise that it was not a modern rifle but a Brown Bess musket, dropped there by some British soldier during Wellington’s last action against a French rearguard in 1815.²¹

There was fighting there long before Wellington. In the sixteenth century the northern border of France followed the line of the Somme, as the fortifications at Montreuil, Doullens and Péronne, so familiar to British soldiers of the war, still demonstrate. Philip II of Spain built the great monastery-palace of El Escorial, just north of Madrid, to celebrate victory over the French at St-Quentin in 1557.

But the rising power of France was not to be denied, and the border moved inexorably northwards. Cyrano de Bergerac fought the Spaniards at Arras in fiction, and the future James II of England fought them in fact when Duke of York, and a lieutenant general in French service. ‘I joyn’d the Army by Peronne …’, he wrote.

About the 16th [July 1654] … wee began our march towards Arras, and camp’d at a village called Sains, near Sauchy-Cauchy which lys between Cambray and Arras … The next day we continued our march towards Mouchy-le-Preux … Monsieur de Turenne’s own quarter was at this place of Mouchy … Monsr. de la Ferté had his quarter at the right hand of our Line down by the side of the River Scarpe, at a Village called Peule.

Give or take the vagaries of spelling, James’s countrymen would have recognised Cambrai and Monchy, Arras and the Scarpe, though they might have reflected grimly that a battle then cost both sides ‘not … above four hundred … I remember but one Collonell, M. de Puymarais, Coll of horse, a brave young gentleman …’.²² There were to be rather more brave young gentlemen stretched out on the slopes between Monchy and Arras when the British 3rd Army assaulted the place in April 1917.

The French fortified the captured ground. Vauban’s pré carré was a double line of geometrical artillery fortresses, one running from Gravelines to Arras and on to Avesnes, the other from Dunkirk to Ypres, Menin and Valenciennes to Maubeuge. The bastions and ravelins of this fortification, built to resist the close-range pounding of heavy guns, proved surprisingly resistant to more modern artillery, and thousands of British soldiers were to retain grateful memories of casemates beneath the ramparts at Ypres, which accorded a measure of protection hard to find elsewhere in or around that blighted town. They also housed the ‘offices’ of one of the best-known trench newspapers, The Wipers Times, whose first edition had its own view on architecture:

FOR SALE, cheap, Desirable Residence. Climate Warm: fine view. Splendid links close by, good shooting. Terms moderate. Owner going abroad. Apply Feddup, Gordon Farm, nr Wipers.²³

There were older defences too. Coucy le Château, the finest medieval castle in France, lay on the British line of retreat in 1914. One of its lords had married Isabella, daughter of Edward II of England, and was created Earl of Bedford. His house already had the proud boast:

Roi ne suis, ne Prince, ne Duc, ne Comte aussi, Je suis le Sire de Coucy.²⁴

The castle’s methodical destruction when the Germans withdrew from the area in 1917 offended the capable and soldierly Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, the local army group commander, who protested to his own high command that it had no military value. Henry V’s men knew the castle at Peronne, and when 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers moved down south in mid 1916, they

saw Corbie across the Somme. It cold-shouldered Henry V when he marched along its ridge, to turn at Agincourt on the host that beset him. But from what unknown church near-by did Bardolph take the golden pyx?²⁵

Captain Reginald Tompson, a railway staff officer in 1914, was delighted to find himself in the village of Le Bourget, just outside Paris, the scene of a battle in the Franco-Prussian War. ‘This is the very place immortalised by de Neuville in his picture Le Bourget’, he exulted in his diary. ‘I must go and see the church. They tell me the scene is exactly as in ’70.’²⁶

Landscape stirred more than history. Once, when 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers were on the march:

There were few men within range of seeing who did not look wistfully at a wayside house of red brick and tiles, built to an English design, and set in an English garden …²⁷

Men easily found familiar comparisons. The old hospital in Corbie was ‘something on the lines of St Cross in Winchester’, the stream running through Lumbres would make ‘an ideal trout stream, if only it was properly cared for’. Scottish infantry sitting about their billets in St-Omer made it seem like a Lanarkshire town, and Aubers Ridge looked just like the Hog’s Back between Guildford and Farnham.²⁸ The villages on the Somme were ‘each … as big as Cholsey, reckoning from the church to half way to the asylum’. Second Lieutenant H. M. Stanford, Royal Field Artillery, told his parents that the Flanders countryside ‘is very flat and full of dykes and canals but one can see fairly high hills out to the E. and N.E., otherwise it might be part of the marshes at home for the most part’. In the trenches, however, ‘the mud becomes worse than the Aldeburgh River, and that’s saying a great deal’.²⁹ John Masefield, on the Somme as a correspondent in 1916, described the Ancre running down the western edge of the battlefield, ‘beneath great spurs of chalk, as the Thames runs at Goring and Pangbourne’.³⁰

Most combatants wondered if the blighted landscape could ever be restored. ‘We used to say that it would never be reclaimed,’ wrote Henry Williamson,

that in fifty years it would still be the same dreadful morass … It was said that this land … would not be cleared up for 100 years. But after the armistice Russian labourers came over in thousands, also Italians. I saw them digging with long-handled shovels, first collecting great dumps of wire and yellow unexploded shells. Rifles stood on thinning bayonets in places all over the battlefield in 1924, marking where wounded men had fallen. Dugouts were beginning to cave in.³¹

In some places, like the zones rouges at Verdun, the land was simply cloaked in pine trees after the war and left to the patient hand of nature. Some villages were so comprehensively destroyed that they were no longer worth rebuilding in a post-war France whose manpower losses had reduced pressure on the land.

When President Poincaré gave Verdun its Cross of the Légion d’Honneur he prophesied that ‘this ravaged countryside will recover the laughing face that it wore in happy times’, but the years have proved him wrong.³² The villages of Douaumont, Fleury, Vaux, Bezonvaux, Louvemont, Ornes, Haumont, Beaumont and Cumèries were never rebuilt. Small wonder that the female figure in Rodin’s bronze La Défense, sited symbolically outside Verdun’s Porte St-Paul, is ‘screaming in grief and anger at the sky’.³³ But elsewhere his optimism has been justified, as John Masefield prophesied while the war was still in progress.

When the trenches are filled in, and the plough has gone over them, the ground will not long keep the look of war. One summer with its flowers will cover most of the ruin that man can make, and then these places … will be hard indeed to trace, even with maps … In a few years time, when this war is a romance in memory, the soldier looking for his battlefield will find his marks gone. Centre Way, Peel Trench, Munster Alley and these other paths to glory will be deep under the corn, and gleaners will sing at Dead Mule Corner.³⁴

Major General Sir Ernest Swinton thought that Masefield was right. In Twenty Years After he wrote that:

Time has worked its changes. The battle-fields today are green and gold again. Young trees are everywhere and the desolate waste of shell-hole and mud has given way to pasture-land and waving corn. Proudly on the heights stand the memorials to the fallen, and in the valleys and on hillside peacefully lie the silent cities where they rest.³⁵