Authors: Jon E. Lewis
That night was quieter even than usual. Just as dawn was breaking I went to a cooker for some tea. As soon as I returned to my hut the barrage opened. It was incredible. My hut was near the cross-roads at the top of the main street of the village. I bolted for the nearest dug-out. The men were getting their blankets rolled in bundles of ten. Four men had to fall in and take them to B.H.Q., past those cross-roads. We never knew whether they arrived. The men went out with blanched faces to find their battle positions. One of them had mislaid his tin-hat. I gave him mine. I was without until nightfall. I went to other dug-outs.
In one, just as they were filing out a boy went mad and shrieked, He was quickly quietened. My nerves were dreadfully shaken. For half an hour I skulked in the deep dug-out which the signallers occupied. They had had no contact with anywhere after the first few minutes. I would like to have stayed there, but my faithful batman said headquarters would wonder why I had not appeared. He knew I was funking, and that was how he helped me.
It was now about 10 a.m., Headquarters was opposite the aid post. There was no aid post left. In the dug-out the C.O. was just arranging to fall back to try and find contact with Division. I remained behind with my batman and a man detailed to watch the precious blankets. I thought we could direct stragglers. There were no stragglers. The Germans were obviously moving their guns forward. After about a quarter of an hour the blanket guard ran in shouting, ‘Good God! padre, the Boche are coming down the hill.’ We bolted out the back. Our headquarters was less than a hundred yards from the top of the street. We pelted on. We passed no infantry, but just before we reached the canal at Jussy we passed a battery of 18-pounders plugging away steadily. By nightfall Jussy was our headquarters. The sky seemed full of Fokkers. During the first two days I didn’t see a single British plane. For days after, the Germans were overwhelmingly more numerous.
At one time the Germans were one side of a railway embankment and our men the other. They had bombs. Ours had scarcely any ammunition. On the fifth day my brigade consisted of twelve officers and not more than 260 men out of three battalions.
Of course, some may have got with other units, but the casualties were terrific and none had joined us from the battalion that was in the line when the show opened. For some days it was a case of running back to dig fresh positions, making a brief stand, then back again. Demoralization seemed complete. The men were hungry, tired, and hopeless.
At last, after several days, we were in front of Noyon. One of our R.A.M.C. units was marching into the barracks when a plane swooped down and bombed them. There were over a score of casualties. Ten days or so later we were talking about this in mess. There was a young lieutenant there who had been with the Air Force for instruction. He turned white as death. The plane that bombed our men was a British plane and he had been in it. They believed the troops were Germans.
After what seemed an eternity, we were crowded into lorries and rushed away from the line. The French had come forward to relieve us, and we thought we were going to safety. We were soon disillusioned. We were being rushed up to the front of Amiens. Our whole division was little more than the strength of a battalion. We were rushed as a composite battalion straight into the line. Our uniforms were all sorts. Our R.A.M.C. remnants were not with us. We had no stretchers. We were in despair. We were dug-in on the banks caused by plateaux which rose in terraces. Quite suddenly a tremendous bombardment started. It lasted two hours. Then equally suddenly it ceased and no attack came. I walked along the banks that were occupied. In one ‘cubby’ sat a soldier without a head. In another a sergeant lay asleep from exhaustion. He had slept through the barrage. Soon a lot were asleep. That night we were finally relieved by the Aussies. They came up fresh and singing. We had thought the War was over and we were licked, but as we went back we saw, to our amazement, a newly erected prisoners’ barbed-wire cage. By the next night it was filled with Germans.
Three months in hospital and in England followed. Then once more in the line until a week before the end. I am glad to cut this part of the story short. The moral of new drafts of officers and men was often very bad. There were incidents one would like to forget. I remember a show at the end of October. We were believed to have an easy task, but camouflaged machine guns made the event a tragic fiasco. There was an aid post on a sunken road which was safe until you turned the bend that led into the village we were to capture. Then it was under direct observation and almost point-blank range from machine guns in and round the village church tower. I had taken a casualty back as dawn was breaking. My nerve had gone. Instead of returning to my work, I cowered in the side of the road trembling like a leaf. When walking wounded came I walked as though I was going forwards and then when they had passed I hid again. This went on for half an hour. Then it was getting light. I took hold of myself, and, keeping to the side of the road, walked right down to the outskirts of the village. Not until I saw a German did I realize that they were still in occupation, Fortunately, he had not seen me. The rest of the day was spent carrying wounded. Once, perforce, we had to come up that sunken road. The machine guns kept quiet till we rounded the bend in the road.
I took six frightened boys back to their company. They were hiding and might have been shot for cowardice. I used a number of Germans as stretcher bearers. We dressed one boy’s wound as he lay in the sunken road. A German lay flat on the far side. I lay on the near side. He died when we dragged him to a sheltered spot. The German was a man of about fifty! He wept like a child. I asked him why in French. He said he had had four sons killed, and that boy was like his youngest. I sent him back to safety, I could write much more. I hate war. I fight now to end it.
The writer of this narrative served in the Scottish Battalion in 1916 as a Private. In 1917 he became a Brigade Chaplain, and was awarded the M.C. and Bar
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It was a cold wet day towards the end of September 1918, and we had pulled our guns out from our position on Pilkem Ridge from which we had been firing on Passchendaele. We were resting in an old school at Hazebroucke while our O.C. had been finding a new ‘possy’ for our guns.
I had been with this particular battery about five months, having come out from Prees Heath as a reinforcement the previous April. ‘Jerry’ had presented me with a cushy ‘Blighty’ at Ypres in November 1917, and coming back to the same part of the line after five months in England did not make me feel very comfortable. In fact I was ‘windy,’ more so than at any time during my first spell of fifteen months in France. Day after day we had had casualties: a few killed, some wounded, others gassed. When was I going to get mine? I wondered how it would come.
Would half my body be pitched up into the branches of a tree as had been the case with one poor gunner on the canal bank? I hoped not, please God, not that! Nor like that boy who got it in the stomach at Reninghelst, who, when we let down his trousers, found his intestines bursting through the two holes the shell fragments had made. I prayed that I should not be mutilated. If I had to go ‘West,’ let it be a quick death – a hole in the head perhaps; that wouldn’t be so bad. But let my body be in one, and not scattered, when they came to bury me.
There was one man in this battery who gave me comfort. His name was Bob Lawrence. He was a bombardier and the No. 1 of our gun. He and another gunner, Frank Thomas, were my particular chums. The others of our gun detachment who formed our clique were Jimmy Fooks, the oldest man in our section, whose time was nearly up: he was looking forward to going home soon for a month’s leave; Harris, a fair-haired youth, who had just come back from leave and had left a young bride behind; and Kempton, who was due for leave and expecting to go any day.
Bombardier Bob Lawrence was a butcher in civil life. He was very easy-going and good-tempered, and never appeared to have the wind up. He was slow in his movements – a plodder. Nothing upset him: shells didn’t worry him – at least he didn’t show it if they did. He floundered about in the mud as if he enjoyed it, but the lice played hell with him. He would spend an hour cleaning up his shirt, killing the vermin until his thumb nails were covered with their blood. As soon as he put his shirt on, he would start itching again and scratch himself raw. He was quite bald, without eyebrows, or eyelashes; his body was as hairless as a baby’s. He used to wear a wig of a dirty ginger colour which was beginning to show signs of wear, so that at the artificial parting you could see the soiled leather or rubber that formed its foundation.
At this time Bob had been in France three years, and I thought he was safe for ‘duration.’ He had never been hit, and I thought he never would be. If I was one of a working party sent to prepare a forward position or build an observation post, I was nervy and ‘windy’ if Bob was not of the party. I would start off with my limbs trembling and my heart in my mouth, and, until we were well on our way back to billets, I would be nothing but a bundle of nerves. Indeed, it was only by exercising all my will power that I was able to hide my feelings and control my actions. If Bob was with us, how different I felt! ‘It’s all right; nothing to worry about,’ and off I would go contented and almost care-free.
We had made a fire in an old oil drum which was planted in the middle of the class-room of the school that was our temporary home at Hazebroucke. The room was full of smoke, and this made our eyes water and rendered the atmosphere so thick that one could cut it. About thirty men were lying about, some reading, some writing letters, others having a ‘crumb up,’ as we called the process of picking lice from our shirts. Steel helmets, gas respirators, and the remainder of our equipment were hanging from nails in the walls, and sand-bags filled with spare clothing and private property acted as pillows.
Harris had been giving us an account of his leave, telling us what it was like sleeping between sheets again and taking his meals off a clean tablecloth. He told us, too, how a flapper had presented him with a white feather one day when he was out in ‘civvies’ with his wife. Then we started talking of our chances of coming through the War. We had all seen over twelve months’ fighting, and had overlived our allotted span of life as R.G.A. gunners. Bob, with his three years of active service, had become quite a fatalist. ‘It’s no use worrying, Ken,’ he said, turning to me. ‘If a shell has got your name written on it, it will get you; it will turn round corners to get you.’ Then he started singing in his flat, cracked voice, ‘What’s the use of worrying, it never was worth while,’ until someone suggested a game of nap.
Bob couldn’t resist a game of nap. He would go ‘nap ‘with the most impossible of hands, and I am afraid he was ‘rooked’ shamefully. He would lose all his pay the very day that he received it, but he never went short of anything as long as one or the other of us had it. Parcels from home, cigarettes, tobacco, toothpaste, shaving soap, and writing paper were property common to our little clique. If you wanted something that one of the others had, you just helped yourself in front of his eyes. If he wasn’t about, you helped yourself just the same, and told him, if you thought of it, when he returned.
You would curse and swear at each other to the best of your ability, but never with any bad feeling. If your chum came back to billets too drunk to stand, you would just put him to bed, tuck his blankets around him, and put an empty biscuit or fruit tin near his head in case he should need it. Then you would turn in beside him, and cuddle up to him for warmth, and share his lice with him. In the morning you would fetch his breakfast of bread and bacon and canteen of tea to him in bed, as he would probably awake with a thick head.
Bob always slept with a Balaclava helmet on his head. In fact his head was always covered, and I believe he was rather conscious of his wig. When I think of it, it amazes me that we didn’t pull his leg about his wig, but we never did. It wasn’t that his stripe protected him, as we chaffed him as much as we did each other. We often told him to ‘go to hell’ or to take a ‘running jump at himself.’ He would then threaten to run us in for ‘insubordination’; that was his favourite saying, but never once did he report any man.
Though he was an N.C.O., he always did his share, and often more than his share, of all the hard and disagreeable tasks that fell to our lot, such as humping 6-inch shells and boxes of cartridges weighing over 1 cwt. If the caterpillars had to be fixed to the wheels of the gun on a dark, shell-swept road covered with thick slimy mud, Bob would do his whack, getting his hands all bashed and cut, and his fingers pinched between the blocks. On duty at the battery, though there was no need to for him to do a turn on guard, he always would, so that each man’s turn might be a little less. He wouldn’t even choose his turn, but always took his chance out of the hat as we gunners did. Perhaps we would have to do a harassing fire during the night at the rate of ten rounds per hour on roads behind the enemy’s line. Then Bob would split his detachment into two, working the gun with four men and himself, while the other four got what sleep they could in the dug-out. When the night was half through he would send his four men in and call the other four out, but he would stick to the gun throughout the night, with no rest at all.
On October 2nd about twenty of us were sent forward over Messines Ridge to prepare positions for two guns that were coming up during the night. A lorry took us as far as safety would allow; then we made our way on foot along a road up the Ridge. The Germans had this road under observation, so we went along in parties of three and four, 50 yards or so separating each party. A day or so previously this road had been held by the enemy and now the bodies of Germans and horses lay about, the stench from which was fearful. Some were headless, some limbless, while others looked just asleep. A German gun team had been caught by one of our shells as it was getting away. Two of the horses lay dead in the traces, two gunners in grey lay in the road, while a third was doubled across the muzzle of the gun, all dead. One of the wheels was smashed, and under the gun was a hole in the road where the shell had burst.