Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front

(#litres_trial_promo)

Frederick Hodges attended Northampton Grammar School, and followed the fortunes of older boys and masters who had joined the army: one came home ‘full of shrapnel … We were thrilled.’ Hodges was later ‘amazed how attractive all this information about the war was to under-age boys … One thing was certain … we must, we MUST be fit, so that we would pass A1 when the long awaited day came’.

(#litres_trial_promo) He joined the Northamptons in July 1917, and was sent to France, with so many other eighteen year olds, in the crisis following the German offensive of March 1918. On arrival in France:

We were lined up in a very long single line. We were then counted off into groups destined for different battalions. Friends who stood in line next to one another were parted by a hand and an order, and marched off to different Regimental Base Headquarters. There were bell tents in a long line, where particulars were taken, and to our surprise, new regimental numbers were given to us …

In this peremptory way, I and about 300 others suddenly became Lancashire Fusiliers, while some of our friends became Manchesters or Duke of Wellington’s or East Yorkshires …

He was posted to 10/Lancashire Fusiliers, where he was well received by the fiercely Irish Company Sergeant Major Doolan, ‘a regular soldier, one of the very few of the original British Expeditionary Force who had survived to this stage of the war’. He was soon calling his battalion ‘T’owd Tenth’, and was anxious to get his new cap badge.

Hodges finished the war a corporal, and proudly returned home to Northampton in full fig.

My khaki uniform was stained and worn, but my belt shone, my buttons gleamed, and my khaki tunic bore the colourful insignia of my regiment, brigade and division. On my epaulettes I wore the green and black tabs of battalion gas NCO with the brass fusilier bomb and the brass letters LF.

On my upper arms above my Corporal’s stripes, the Battalion sign, an oblong yellow flash and the 52nd Brigade sign, a green square 52, and above these and just below my epaulettes, the 17th Divisional sign, a white dot and dash on a red background. My mother said it was quite colourful.

(#litres_trial_promo)

In his assessment of the reasons for the Allied victory, Frederick Hodges suggested that ‘the dogged courage and will to win at whatever the cost’ was more important than ‘superior military arts and skills’. He identified ‘unquenchable spirit, the sticky and the earthy wit of the infantryman at war, who, though he was a mere pawn in the plans of generals, yet remained an individual who served ideals; and for those ideals, faced death daily at some chance or mischance of war with courage in the line of duty’. Hodges may have been more idealistic than many, but he came close to identifying the qualities which helped keep what was now a national army together in the last year of a long war.

OLD WORLD, OLD ARMY (#ulink_72e4e11a-3dad-5265-a14b-fe8a22d4bbb2)

‘Then the “Dead March”, and what a nightmare,’ wrote Will Fisher.

We draw on leather gloves, lift a body onto a sheet of brattice cloth, wrap it up, then tie it to a stretcher. ‘Off with it, boys’, and what a journey, even to us … And the stupefying heat and bad air, causing the sweat to pour down one in streams, and to add to the romance the sickening stench, rising all the time to the face of the man behind. In one place, wading to our knees in water, one man fell with the stretcher. Some bodies are heavy too, our wrists giving out before the two miles are covered … ‘Who is it?’ ‘Don’t know, indeed’, on we go … Twenty have so far been buried unidentified, owing to melting …

The pity of it all, that flesh should be so cheap.

(#litres_trial_promo)

This could so easily be a scene from the Western Front, perhaps in a flooded trench at Festubert in the spring of 1915, or on the northern slopes of Longueval Ridge at the end of the Somme, but it is not. Will Fisher is describing the Senghenydd mining disaster of 1913, in the heart of the South Wales coalfields, in which 439 men died. Fisher had just come off shift, but immediately went underground again to help with the rescue operations. We will meet him again, lifelong socialist but successful and committed soldier: there was less inconsistency in that than some would have us believe. For the moment, though, let him usher us into the cramped and sweaty basement of what Barbara Tuchman called ‘The Proud Tower’, the world that went to war in 1914.

It is easy to romanticise Edwardian England as just one long afternoon where it was always strawberries and cream at Henley, shooting parties at Sandringham, dinner at Quaglino’s and a breathless hush in the close as young Corinthians laid willow to leather. A gentleman could travel from London to Paris and on to Berlin and St Petersburg in the comfort of his Pullman carriage with the minimum of formalities and little risk. Churches were well attended, though earlier talk of a national religious revival now seemed misplaced. Sensible chaps like Alfred Hale could live quiet but comfortable lives on investment income. There might be a morning in the library, lunch in the club in St James’, then a first-class carriage on the ever-reliable 4.48 from Waterloo to Petersfield, and a cab from the station to find a glass of nut-brown Amontillado and one of Mrs Ling’s pies, in all its savoury splendour, waiting at home.

Even a little further down the social scale a satisfying and predictable routine could be found. J. B. Priestley left school to become a junior clerk in the wool trade, working for Helm and Co. in Swan Lane, Bradford. His day began at 9.00 and ended at 6.00, 6.30 or even 7.00 pm, though if he stayed that late there was an extra 6d in the pay packet for ‘tea away’. He smoked Cut Black Cavendish in his pipe, 3½d an ounce from Salmon and Gluckstein’s, and wrote prose and poetry at home, enjoying the ‘irregular rhythm of effort and relaxation’. Looking back on his youth he could not disguise his affection for the old world. ‘I belong at heart to the pre-1914 North Country …’ he wrote; ‘something at the core of me is still in Market Street hearing the Town Hall chimes’.

(#litres_trial_promo)

But we do not need to look very much harder to see the cracks in the masonry. The labour movement was growing stronger by the year: there were 422 strikes in 1909, 834 in 1912, and 1,459 in 1913: there would have been a General Strike in 1914 had war not intervened. Class divisions within Britain were still accepted by many, though there was growing rancour. On 23 January 1917 Corporal Will Fisher, already feeling the symptoms of the tuberculosis that would kill him, wrote:

Want to go through to the end, feel fit enough. Anniversary of enlisting two years ago. DEATH OF MY BOY GEORGE. The lad is better off; he is free from wage slavery and the insults of class rule.

(#litres_trial_promo)

John Simpson Kirkpatrick, one of the heroes of the Australian fight for Gallipoli, was a merchant seaman from Tyneside who jumped ship in Sydney in 1909. In 1912 he told his mother:

I wonder when the work men of England will wake up and see things as other people see them. What they want in England is a good revolution and that will clear out some of the Millionaires and lords and Dukes out of it and then with a Labour Government they will be almost able to make their own conditions.

(#litres_trial_promo)

And if the Bradford community described by J. B. Priestley was ‘closer to a classless society than anyone born in southern England can ever understand’, there was a desperate underclass which even junior clerks seldom saw. John Cusack’s mother brought up five children in two ground-floor rooms in a Glasgow tenement. There was no bathroom, and just a cold water tap and grate in the kitchen. His father and mother slept in the bed, and the children on the floor of a room eight feet square. The family went to a public wash house once a week. After his father emigrated to America the family was barely able to survive.

For dinner at midday we’d probably have some broken biscuits which you could buy for a ha’penny a packet or we might have a ha’penny worth of hot chips from the fish and chip shop. A portion of fish cost tuppence, which was too dear for dinner …

I hardly ever wore any shoes. I used to wear short pants made of corduroy for a Sunday otherwise of flannel. They were never new, unless you were the eldest child. You simply fell into your brother’s clothes. I would wear a little flannel shirt of a dark colour, a jacket and what we’d call a bonnet or hookerdon, a cap which I pulled down well over one eye.

(#litres_trial_promo)

Underwear was uncommon – John Cusack’s comrades found their army issue vests and drawers items ‘previously unknown to us’. In working-class households where it did exist it had to last a full week between washes. It is small wonder that wartime rationing significantly improved the diet and health of families such as these.

In July 1901 Arthur Osburn was a medical student at Guy’s Hospital, just back from serving as a volunteer private in the Boer War, an experience which helps account for the bitter flavour of his memoirs. It was decades before the founding of the National Health Service, and the very poor depended for their medical treatment on the charity of doctors and senior medical students. Osburn was on duty in a Bermondsey slum. ‘Outside in the shabby court the heated air quivered,’ he wrote:

Odours of hops, tanneries, horse dung and wood pavement inextricably blended. The mean tumbledown dwelling I was in buzzed with flies, while the frowsy smell of unclean bedding was everywhere; here and there the familiar chain of brown vermin crawled from the loose and half-rotten skirting boards upwards onto the greasy walls. A thin wailing sound was coming down the steep rickety staircase from a room above – one of the spate of unwanted infants which plague the slums and which I had helped bring into the world, wondering at the time whether the snuffling, puling bundle of misery would not have done better to have got itself born in an African jungle.

‘That makes fifteen, and I’ve buried nine, sir,’ the mother had said. The midwife, nodding confidentially at me, had suggested a bootlace or lying the unwanted one down on a blanket. Full of youthful rigidity and righteousness I had sternly threatened her with the coroner if the child was not alive the next day.

(#litres_trial_promo)

William Woodruff grew up in a Lancashire cotton town about ten years later. His father worked in the mill, and family life was typical of that of many manual workers, a notch up from the tenement underclass but still with precious little room for financial manoeuvre.

My brother Dan and I shared a bedroom with our parents. There were two metal beds with straw mattresses resting on thin metal slats … Dan and I slept in the same bed. We slept so close to our parents that we could touch them. The nearness of our bodies made us feel safe. I accepted my parents’ love-making long before I understood it. It was as natural as somebody using the pisspot … It didn’t disturb me, or confuse me, or revolt me. Like my father’s deep snoring, I ignored it. Living in such a confined space meant everybody shared in everybody else’s joys and sorrows.

(#litres_trial_promo)

Joseph Garvey, born in Halifax in 1888 to an Irish immigrant family, was four years old when he lost his father in a quarry accident. There were no benefits, just a collection from fellow workers and the proceeds of a benefit dance which brought in less than £10, and his mother had to raise six children. ‘It was a hard life for her,’ he reflected, ‘all work and no play, no rest. She was a small woman with long dark auburn hair, and a fresh complexion. Good looking, but she was not built on strong lines.’ She died in 1902, and Garvey eventually got a job as an assistant machine minder at 24 shillings a week, good money indeed.

(#litres_trial_promo) Dover-born George Fortune, one of nine children,

left school at fourteen and got a job as a lather boy. It was a first class shop, they used to charge 4d for a haircut … My wages were 3/6d a week – 8 am to 8pm, Saturday 8 am till midnight. I cleaned all the windows, scrubbed out the shops, cleaned two copper urns, one for morning, one for afternoon. I never had metal polish to clean them with – paraffin oil and whitening …

I used to do this kind of work in the cellar. It was very dark there – he would not let me have a light during the day. He liked me to sweep up after customers and brush them down; take his little boy to school and bring him home; tease out dirty old combings that old ladies used to bring to have them made up into wigs; set the razors.

(#litres_trial_promo)

If life was hard in the shadow of dark satanic mills, the countryside was not always green and pleasant for its occupants. Life on the land was changing as machines began to replace men, eventually ‘to sacrifice the community and the connected way of life on the twin altars of speed and greed’.

(#litres_trial_promo) H. J. Massingham wrote of ‘the ruin of a closely-knit society with its richly interwoven and traditional culture that had denied every change, every aggression except the one that established the modern world’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In Lark Rise to Candleford Flora Thompson described her own village, Juniper Hill in North Oxfordshire, unaware that hers was a picture of a world that was changing for ever. Most men in the village lived off the land, with their own hierarchy of farm labourers, ploughmen, carters, shepherds, stockmen and blacksmiths, and nicknames like ‘Bishie’, ‘Pumpkin’ or ‘Boamer’. Labourers received 10 shillings a week, skilled workers 2 shillings more. They ate one hot meal a day, usually stewed vegetables reinforced with a little bacon, for all households maintained a family pig, killed, bloodily and noisily, during the first two quarters of the moon, for the meat from a pig killed beneath a waning moon was believed to shrink in cooking.

Many farming youngsters were ‘thickset, red-faced men of good medium height and enormous strength …’. Their older workmates ‘stooped, had gnarled and swollen hands and walked badly, for they felt the effects of a life spent out of doors in all weathers …’. Endurance was their favourite virtue: ‘Not to flinch from pain or hardship was their ideal.’ Their womenfolk were as tough, and ‘a young wife would say to the midwife after her first confinement, “I didn’t flinch, did I? Oh, I hope I didn’t flinch.”’ They did not begrudge their employer his beef and port: he was ‘Not a bad ‘ole sort … an’ does his bit by the land.’ Their rancour was reserved for his bailiff, ‘“Muster Morris” to his face but “Old Monday” or “you ole devil” behind his back.’ Boys sometimes did a stretch in the army before returning, or going off to seek work in a town. In 1914 Juniper Hill, like so many other villages, did not flinch, and sent its young men, Flora’s brother among them, to the war. ‘Eleven out of that little community never came back again,’ lamented Flora.

A brass plate on the wall of the church immediately over the old end house seat is engraved with their names. A double column, five names long, then, last and alone, the name of Edwin.

(#litres_trial_promo)

Illegitimate births were unknown in ‘Lark Rise’ in the 1880s, but became frequent soon afterwards. They generally passed without much comment, but when young Emily blamed the son of the house where she had been in service for her condition there was widespread support for her. The youth was able to prove that he had been away from home at the relevant time, and Emily went on to raise a large family without benefit of husband. In Glasgow there was an overall illegitimacy rate of 7 percent in 1913, and in the very poor Blackfriars district this rose to 15.6 percent of all births. The city’s Medical Officer of Health reported that year that he feared that about 8 percent of poor children were infected with syphilis.