Forgotten Voices of the Somme (37 page)

Second Lieutenant Edmund Blunden

11th Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment

How did we get through? Partly the fear of fear. The fear of being found afraid. Another factor is the belief in human beings – your colleagues. Any one day, you say, 'My job is to be at the crossroads at such and such a time with whatever I'm carrying, and old so-and-so will be there expecting it and there'll be no letting him down.' Also, there was the interest in what would come out of this extraordinary, titanic, fatal performance, and interest in how it was being done. During the Passchendaele battle, I was walking with one or two signallers, in front of the Germans. The Germans had a bang and it was beautiful shooting. One of our lads, a tall, handsome youth, said, 'I never did see such shelling!' It was like he was applauding a conjuring trick in the music halls, or a piece of fast bowling in a Test match. He was really looking at a remarkable feat of skill on behalf of another human being. Of course, after a time nobody cared any longer. Even a drama could go on too long. That was what we felt. This one went on far too long.

Corporal Don Murray

8th Battalion, King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry

There was a chap in my carriage on the train home from the war, and he said, 'Let me come to the window! There's something I've wanted to do ever since I've been in the army!' 'All right then,' I said. So he stood at the window, and at the end of the platform was a military policeman, and this bloke waited until the train had pulled level with him and he spat straight in his face. And then the train was off. 'God!' he said. 'That was good!'

Signaller Leonard Ounsworth

124th Heavy Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery

The officer in charge back in England – he'd been retired God knows how many years and come back into the army – he was all spit and polish, parade

and that kind of thing. He came on parade one day – I've forgotten what he had to tell us, but he marched up and down like Napoleon for a minute or two, with his hand across his chest like this, you see, and then he suddenly turned round, he says, 'You men fought with honour and glory in the field of battle in France and
Flanders
, gad! How I wish I could have been with you.' He banged his fist like that. We gaped open-mouthed at him, silly old devil.

Corporal Don Murray

8th Battalion, King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry

I'd always imagined the
end of the
war: we'd come marching through the streets of Bradford, and there'd be flags flying. Well, when the time came I was all by myself, it was pouring with rain and I got a tram home. I knocked on the door, and Sissy's mother answered. 'I'm so glad you've come. Dad's just dying . . . ' That was some homecoming.

Private Albert Day

1/4th Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment

When I came back from the war in March 1918, the
Bristol
tramway gave me back the office job I'd had before I went in. It was all chaps when I went, but when I came back it was full of girls. I'm scared stiff of girls. So I became a bus driver, a navvy, a labourer, you name it. I did it for eighteen months. Then I went to Canada, but I came back because I couldn't get a job as a Turk over there.

When I was back here, I wasn't very happy about the way they treated the chaps. I mean,
Lloyd George
said that when the war was over, he'd make this a land fit for heroes. Two years afterwards, and there's fifty thousand men out of work in Bristol, nearly starving. They stopped these men's dole and they stormed the Bristol Board of Guardians offices, demanding relief. Able-bodied men couldn't get relief, but they soon altered that. So then I saw this job and that's when I went home and wrote a letter, and I became an Assistant Relieving Officer. And I took the full law examination of England and Wales.

Sergeant Frederick Goodman

1st London Field Ambulance, Royal Army Medical Corps

After my time in the Royal Army Medical Corps, my parents wanted me to become a doctor. But it wasn't for me. I'd had quite enough on the Somme,

and I thanked them very much – it would have been quite an outlay putting me through medical school – and I told them that, if they didn't mind, I would much prefer to become a chartered accountant.

Private William Holmes

12th Battalion, London Regiment

My wife was a very good artist, in watercolours. We were living in Broadstairs, and I used to go round with a pedlar's licence, door-to-door, selling birthday cards, which I'd sell for sixpence each. I was making a living. One Christmas, I sold 1,500 Christmas cards around
Margate
and
Ramsgate
. And even with a bullet still inside me, I never had any sickness.

Reverend Leonard Martin Andrews

Chaplain, attached to Royal Fusiliers

Half of the men, I'm sure, had no idea what they were fighting for. But they went and gave their lives.

Private Frank Lindlay

14th Battalion, York and Lancaster Regiment

We used to say, 'If your name's on it – you get it.' That was the philosophy.

Private James Snaylham

11th Battalion, East Lancashire Regiment

General Haig wanted shooting. That's what I thought because there was no support at all. When I called back to our trenches there weren't a person in, not one. They were all out there wounded or dead.

Private Tom Easton

21st Battalion, Northumberland Fusiliers

I have a great respect for Douglas Haig. I believe that his idea was correct.

Corporal Harry Fellows

12th Battalion, Northumberland Fusiliers

Haig was a man who never cared for men's lives, and he became known to us as 'The Butcher'.

Captain Philip Neame VC

Headquarters, 168th Infantry Brigade

I don't think I ever came across any – what shall I say? – defeatist feeling in the brigade I was with, nor did I ever hear or feel any disgruntlement at our high command.

Lieutenant Phillip Howe

10th Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment

I would say that I enjoyed the war more than any other period of four years I have ever had.

Corporal Henry Mabbott

2nd Battalion,
Cameron Highlanders

There is one spot in France – Contalmaison – where there are eight hundred Cameron Highlanders in four graves. That's what we lost, eight hundred out of a thousand in taking Contalmaison, and losing it again.

Private Russell Bradshaw

11th Battalion, East Lancashire Regiment

In those days, there were just stumps in the copse, but today it's a thick, wooded area. A mass of trees. Far different to those days, when there was nothing about.

Private Tom Easton

21st Battalion, Northumberland Fusiliers

Today, on visits to the Somme, I often go back to the line of graves where these men are. Some of these men were old enough to be my father, and they treated me like a son – even in those circumstances.

Private William Holmes

12th Battalion, London Regiment

We were all just a band of brothers. No brothers were ever more united than we were. But, after the war, we never kept in touch ...

Private Arthur Pearson

15th Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment

The Leeds Pals have a very strong association. We meet about once a month. There's about twenty people who turn up. We used to have dances and whist drives – of course, those days are over – but it's nice to see the old faces, and talk about the old days; we can't forget them ...

Private Frank Lindlay

14th Battalion, York and Lancaster Regiment

I can only remember faces and first names. I can remember them one after another. I have photos in my house, and I look every day. It's a thought that's in my mind all the time. Has been for years.

Private Donald Cameron

12th Battalion, York and Lancaster Regiment

About a month before the sixty-fifth anniversary of July 1, I wrote to the Mayor of
Sheffield
, asking her if she would invite the few surviving members of our battalion to her parlour, for a talk. She wrote back, and refused. Such is life. But you'd expect the mayor to remember that it was the mayor who appealed to the young men of Sheffield, in 1914, to join up and make one of the best battalions in the world.

Second Lieutenant W. J. Brockman

15th Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers

I'm eight-six, but as I've got older I've avoided the company of older men. Men my own age. They get into that lazy, slurring way of speaking, which I determined not to do. I go down to the golf club every week, and play poker with men about fifty years of age. That keeps my mind active. And I don't lose
a lot
of money. I win a bit more than I lose, but this isn't what we're here to talk about ...

Private Joseph Pickard

4th Battalion, Northumberland Fusiliers

I got hit by a shell. When I came to myself, I was lying amongst a load of dead men. I found out where I was hit, and I tore my trousers down, and I thought if I stop here it's either a bullet or a bayonet. So I got the first-aid packet out;

all that was in there was a lot of gauze and a little tube of something. I was hit underneath the joint of the leg, and it cut the sciatic nerve, it chipped both hip joints, it smashed the left side of the pelvis, I had three holes in the bladder. I lost my nose. Ha-ha. I was a bloody mess. Oh dear. I crawled along the road on my hands and knees, and I saw a fellow I knew and I gave him a shout, and someone or other got a stretcher. They carried us through the barrage, and I got into a wagon, and I remember a fellow said, 'You'll be all right now, chum.'

I reckon if anything like this happens, and you're shocked, it takes a lot of the feeling away from you. The ambulance took us to an old farmhouse, where the roof was blown off. I wanted a drink. Well, they wouldn't give us any water, you see, abdominal wounds – you never get water. I asked a fellow to take my boot off, and I remember being in this advance clearing station, and when I come round it was dark. I was lying in a stretcher and I didn't know what was the matter with us. It turned out there was a blanket over the top of us. I was left for death.

I got rid of this blanket and I shouted at an orderly, and two of them came down and had a look at us. They wouldn't give me a drink, of course. Picked the stretcher straight up and put us on the hospital train. I knew there was something the matter with my face, but I never bothered about it. In cases like that, you want to live, and to hell with what you look like. So I got on the hospital train and I began to know what was the matter, because I got on me side on the hospital train, but I had to get the sister to pull me back. I couldn't shift myself. I lay on me back all the time until I got to Rouen.

They shoved us on the Red Cross wagon there, and Rouen is a lot of cobbles, you know. The wagon had a bit of speed on. I was calling the driver everything you could think about. I finished up with my hands through the slats at the top, and the fellow was saying, 'I am trying to get you there as quick as I can!' When I got to Rouen, they left us outside the hospital.

I was lying there and the doctor came and said, 'What's the matter with you then?' I says, 'It's not bloody hard to see, is it?' He walked away. They can get nippy when you are like that, you know. So later on they took us inside and, believe it or not, every bed was full, stretchers six deep across the floor. You could hardly get moving. An orderly came up and said, 'Had any dinner?' I said, 'Son, I have had nowt to eat for ten days.' He fetched me a plate, and God, I scoffed the lot. He fetched some rice pudding in a basin, I scoffed that; he fetched something to drink and I scoffed that.

I don't suppose they knew what was the matter with us, and I didn't care. Shortly after, they put somebody out of a bed and put me into it. They cut all my clothes off. There was a mixture of chalk, wet, blood, God – everything. They cut everything off of us, and they took us up to X-ray. I mentioned I had shrapnel behind the joint in my leg, but they couldn't find it. The X-ray couldn't find it, and they slashed us in the operating theatre, and they couldn't find it. The sister used to come every day to change my dressing, and I'd tell her it was still there. She got hold of the flesh and opened it – and there was the piece of shrapnel, just like that, stuck underneath the joint. I got the last rites in that hospital. They came and laid this thing out in front of us, and I thought, 'Oh God, I can't be as bad as that.' Ha ha.

I was in Rouen for six weeks. The sister did her damnedest to get us out, and back to England, but the doctor used to come and look at my graph every morning, and say, 'Oh, it's not down yet.' My temperature. Eventually, he gave in, and I was sent home with a tube from my thigh, right up into my bladder. I was sent to the
Ford Western General in Glamorgan
. I was there for about eight months, in the abdominal ward, with the doctor working on my pelvis.

When I was there, I always had blinking bandages over my nose. I was chatting away with the sister; one day I said, 'Give us a loan of your scissors.' And I cut all the blinking bandages off, to have a look at it. It didn't bother me. The sister asked if it bothered me. 'What do you think about it?' she said. 'Off it's gone!' I said. 'And I don't think I'll be travelling along the line to look for it!'