A Broken World Read online

  Not least remarkable was the transformation of the bell-tent allotted for Company Headquarters. On arrival this had flapped lugubriously on its sagging ropes over a patch of mud, but within the hour it had been pitched afresh, taut and confident in appearance; a neighbouring R.E. dump had provided enough new trench boards for a complete floor, and a brazier had been lit.

  The enlargement of that camp in so short a time is worthy to rank among the minor miracles of war.

  The day closed with an issue of rum. The first stage of the relief was over.

  A SIKH IN PALESTINE The letter below was sent by a Sikh in Palestine to his uncle. It is part of a book of translated, transcribed and censored letters from Indian soldiers serving in Palestine and Egypt during final operations against the Turks. The book was compiled in 1918 by D. C. Phillott, lieutenant colonel and chief censor at the Indian Base, Port Said. The writer is unnamed (in other letters names were cut or deliberately changed) but he was probably with a cavalry regiment on the coast of Jaffa.

  After greetings, let it be known to you that by the Grace of God I am well & flourishing & even praying to God for your health & well being. I pray God that your dutiful servant may soon get a sight of you & obtain the privilege of kissing your feet. I am a traveller, & in a strange country, & have scanty leisure; these are the reasons for my not writing before. Hence you must continue to inform me of your welfare without waiting for a letter from me. Two or three days ago the Indian mail came in, but there was no letter by it from Uncle — nor from you. I did get one from my mother’s brother Diyāl Singh, which said that my maternal grandmother had taken up her abode in Heaven. I grieve for her loss. Such was God’s will. Strange are the ways of Providence. What dangers and vicissitudes are written in my Fate. At one time, the sufferings of heat; at another, the pains of cold. At one moment I perish from thirst; at another I have a surfeit of water. At times I roost on a rock, at times I repose on soft sand. At one time not a morsel of food; at another an abundance of grapes & melons. In short mysterious are the ways of the Immortal God. From passing through innumerable changes of life & in surroundings, the very structure of my body has undergone change. At one time from residing in a cold climate my complexion was as fair as a British soldier’s; at another, from exposure to heat & sun, it was as black as a negro’s. As to the hairs of my head & beard, what can I say of them? They too, poor things, have seen all sorts of changes; at one time brown, at another white, at another black. At times glossy with perfumed oils; at times begrimed with dust & dirt & so on & so on.

  Now listen to a description of my present surroundings. We are camped on the sea-shore & the breeze is cool. Near my tent, that is in about one-hundred-and-fifty yards from the sea, a net is erected from it to within fifty yards of me: this net is decreed as a death-by-the-stake for poor helpless tired-out quails.

  When the cold sets in, the quails migrate from cold countries to save their lives & fly to a warmer climate. After a long journey over the ‘Greek Sea’ (a lake) they arrive weary & worn, hungry & thirsty. When not at sea & high up in the air they view the distant land & drop joyfully to alight in it. There they are snared in the miles of nets erected by tormentors & become suspended, heads up & legs down. If by any chance any bird escapes the nets, the poor thing lies on the ground helpless from exhaustion. These are gathered by hand by the fowlers, to become delicate morsels for rich & poor.

  I pray to Almighty God to guard in safety all my relatives, intimates & friends, & to hasten the day of my return to them.

  GUY CHAPMAN (1889–1972) served with the Royal Fusiliers in France and Belgium winning the MC and twice being mentioned in despatches. After the war, he worked in publishing and married the writer Storm Jameson in 1926. He also served in the Second World War, after which he became Professor of Modern History at Leeds University. The following extract is from A Passionate Prodigality: Fragments of Autobiography (1933).

  Next day we were marching. It was the 18th October and the smell of autumn lay heavy on the air; a chill colourless morning, but the sun broke through as we passed a lonely sentry before a lonely handsome château near Ranchicourt, an army or corps headquarters; at least, something too august for our acquaintance. Our trench-camped limbs were already growing aware of their novel freedom. We stepped lighter and with a rhythmical swing. That night we came to Magnicourt-en-Comté, and there we lay two days.

  When we moved out, there was a nip in the air. The first frosts had come. Beeches showered us with copper and yellow coin. Briars shaken by our tread flung us the crystals from their sprays. The way was lined with brave colours; streamers of travellers’ joy waved in the faint breeze and hawberries shook their crimson heads at the tramp of our boots. As we passed under a tunnel of dark trees, the band broke into its thunderous jollity. Blow, fife; rattle, drum. On this morning the clatter of Brian Boru is better than all Beethoven’s nine symphonies. Even the immortal Ninth pales before the chorus: And we’ll buy a pair of laces orfer pore–old–Mike. The battalion is moving as one man; very strong, very steady, with a sway in the shoulders and a lilt in the feet. We have regained our youth; we have recovered the innocence with which we came to France, an innocence not now of ignorance but of knowledge. We have forgotten whither we are marching: we do not greatly care what billets we find tonight. We are content to live in the moment, to feel the warm sun, to enjoy the strength of our bodies, and to be lulled by the rhythmical momentum with which we march. We are no longer individuals but a united body. The morning, the sun, the keen air, and the rhythm of our feet compound a draught more heady than the doctored vin blanc, than the forgotten kisses of the girl in the billet. Few had forebodings of their destiny. At the halts they lay in the long wet grass and gossiped, enormously at ease. The whistle blew. They jumped for their equipment. The little grey figure of the colonel far ahead waved its stick. Hump your pack and get a move on. The next hour, man, will bring you three miles nearer to your death. Your life and your death are nothing to these fields – nothing, no more than it is to the man planning the next attack at G.H.Q. You are not even a pawn. Your death will not prevent future wars, will not make the world safe for your children. Your death means no more than if you had died in your bed, full of years and respectability, having begotten a tribe of young. Yet by your courage in tribulation, by your cheerfulness before the dirty devices of this world, you have won the love of those who have watched you. All we remember is your living face, and that we loved you for being of our clay and our spirit.

  STUART CLOETE (1897–1976) was a South African novelist and essayist. He was born in Paris to a Scottish mother and South African father. He was educated at Lancing College in Sussex and was commissioned second lieutenant at the beginning of the First World War in 1914, at the age of seventeen, in the Ninth King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. The passage below is from his memoir A Victorian Son (1972) and refers to his experiences on the Somme, when, at the age of nineteen, he was an acting captain in charge of a company.

  The sun swelled up the dead with gas and often turned them blue, almost navy blue. Then, when the gas escaped from their bodies, they dried up like mummies and were frozen in their death positions. There was even a man bandaging himself who had been killed by a shell fragment as he unrolled the bandage. There were sitting bodies, kneeling bodies, bodies in almost every position, though naturally most of them lay on their bellies or on their backs. The crows had pecked out the eyes of some and rats lived on bodies that lay in the abandoned dugouts or half-buried in the crumbled trenches. These rats were very large and many of them piebald, blotched with pink, where they had lost great patches of their hair. They were quite fearless, their familiarity with the dead having made them contemptuous of the living. One night one fell on my face in a dugout and bit me. It must have been running along a beam above me and the vibration of a shell exploding nearby had knocked it off.

  Burial was impossible. In ordinary warfare the bodies went down with the limbers that brought up the rations. Now
there were hundreds, thousands, not merely ours but German as well. And where we fought several times over the same ground bodies became incorporated in the material of the trenches themselves. In one place we had to dig through corpses of Frenchmen who had been killed and buried in 1915. These bodies were putrid, of the consistency of Camembert cheese. I once fell and put my hand right through the belly of a man. It was days before I got the smell out of my nails. I remember wondering if I could get blood poisoning and thinking it would be ironic to have survived so much and then be killed by a long-dead Frenchman.

  The only previous experience I had had of rotting bodies had been at Serre, where, as a battalion, we dealt with the best part of a thousand dead who came to pieces in our hands. As you lifted a body by its arms and legs they detached themselves from the torso, and this was not the worst thing. Each body was covered inches deep with a black fur of flies which flew up into your face, into your mouth, eyes and nostrils, as you approached. The bodies crawled with maggots. There had been a disaster here. An attack by green, badly led troops who had had too big a rum ration — some of them had not even fixed their bayonets — against a strong position where the wire was still uncut. They hung like washing on the barbs. Like scarecrows which scared no crows since they were edible. The birds disputed the bodies with us. This was a job for all ranks. No one could expect the men to handle these bodies unless the officers did their share. We worked with sandbags on our hands, stopping every now and then to puke.

  […]

  This period was extraordinary. A terrible nightmare of fear, hardship, exhaustion and unbelievable loneliness. I had lived with two gods – Mr Luck and Mr Death. I was not particularly afraid of being killed. I think what most of us feared was being crippled, blinded or hit in the genitals. There seems to be a natural instinct when fighting to lean forward, bending to protect them. Freud’s castration complex is a reality in action.

  […]

  The Somme Battle was a period of fantastic contrasts. One day while the battalion was being rested and fattened up with food and new drafts of men I could be galloping Rajah over untouched fields, riding down partridges – if you marked them, they generally made three flights, you could catch them if you could find them – and the next we were back in it. It was a period of summer hayfields, singing birds and flowers on the one hand, and of mud, blood and the stink of dead bodies on the other, with nothing to separate these two worlds, the summer idyll and the inferno, but a few hours of marching time.

  […]

  I was out of it in the best possible way [Cloete was wounded in August 1916] for a while. But thinking it over I was amazed at the courage I had seen. I had not had time to think of it before. Of all the men I had seen hit. Of the badly wounded men lying on stretchers by the aid posts and casualty clearing stations. I had hardly heard one cry out. When they were hit they would gasp and say, ‘I’m hit’, and someone would shout for stretcher bearers. Word would be passed on, echoing down the line. I have heard boys on their stretchers crying with weakness, but all they ever asked for was water or a cigarette. The exception was a man hit through the palm of the hand. This I believe to be the most painful wound there is, as the sinews of the arm contract, tearing as if on a rack. Men with stomach wounds moaned. Otherwise there was silence.

  JOE MURRAY was an ordinary seaman in the Hood Battalion, Royal Naval Division. This is a transcription of a recording made by the BBC in 1964 that is preserved in the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive and was printed in Forgotten Voices of the Great War.

  Dysentery was a truly awful disease that could rob a man of the last vestiges of human dignity before it killed him. A couple of weeks before getting it my old pal was as smart and upright as a guardsman. Yet after about ten days it was dreadful to see him crawling about, his trousers round his feet, his backside hanging out, his shirt all soiled – everything was soiled. He couldn’t even walk.

  So I took him by one arm and another pal got hold of him by the other, and we dragged him to the latrine. It was degrading, when you remember how he was just a little while ago. Neither my other pal nor I were very good – but we weren’t like that. Anyway, we lowered him down next to the latrine. We tried to keep the flies off him and to turn him round – put his backside towards the trench. But he simply rolled into his foot-wide trench, half-sideways, head first in the slime. We couldn’t pull him out, we didn’t have enough strength, and he couldn’t help himself at all. We did eventually get him out but he was dead, he’d drowned in his own excrement.

  S. W. BROWN was part of the Ambulance Service Corps and won a Military Medal for his service. This short letter, sent to the BBC on 2 August 1963, tells a single anecdote of a curious mistake made whilst in Neuve Chapelle in France. Brown was responding to the BBC’s 1963 call for ‘vivid’ memories of the war. The aim was to produce a 26-part documentary series for the half-centenary. The Great War series was first broadcast in 1964, and featured eyewitnesses reminiscing against black-and-white film footage. Only a small number of veterans who responded to the initial call were interviewed; the majority of veterans’ letters were unanswered. Many of the responses in this book have been reproduced here for the first time.

  2. 8. 63

  Dear Sirs,

  I served with the A.S.C. in 1915 attached to the 11th India Field Ambulance, Lahore Div with horse ambulance. One night I had to go up to get some wounded from dressing station in the Neuve Chappel district. Among those we got was one who had a boot lace with what we thought were figs but when we looked again we found they were ears.

  Yours,

  S. W. Brown M. M.

  Fleet

  A. F. HIBBERT was a gunner in the Royal East Kent Mounted Rifles, serving in Gallipoli. The following is the text of his 1963 letter to the BBC.

  GALLIPOLI

  Banstead

  Surrey

  12. 7. 1963.

  Referring to Radio Times July 6th-12th. The Great War 1914-18. I herewith send you anecdote which happened to me during the first 18 months of the 1914-18 War.

  (1.)

  In July 1915 at Cape Helles Gallipoli my comrade and myself erected a small bivouac a few yards from the trenches and we both noticed a very nasty smell during the night and removing a small quantity of sand in the morning we found we had been lying on a dead Turk as he had been partly buried there.

  (2.)

  Another incident at Gallipoli December 1915. After coming out of the trenches at night my comrade and myself went to the cookhouse and enjoyed a feed of which we thought was rice and currants, the next morning we were told by the cook it was plain rice & the lid had been left off the dixie the feed, therefore, was rice and flies.

  Gunner A.F. HIBBERT

  Royal East Kent Mounted RIFLES 1914

  CAPTAIN. MACHINE GUN CORP. 1918.

  E. W. J. EDGLEY was a lieutenant in the Loyal North Lancashires who saw action in the major battlefields of the Western Front. This letter was another response to the call for memories for the BBC’s Great War series.

  THE SCHOOL OF INFANTRY,

  SUPPORT WEAPONS WING,

  NETHERAVON, WILTS.

  17th September 1963

  THE GREAT WAR.

  I served in France and Flanders during the whole of 1917 and the first half of 1918.

  I was then a Lieutenant in the 2/4th Batt. The Loyal North Lancashire Regt, (now The Loyal Regiment) of 170 Brigade in 57 Division, but served during this period in the 170th Light Trench Mortar Battery, which usually co-operated with my Battalion.

  My strongest recollections are: –

  (1) Mud.

  (2) The difficulty of movement in the mud and the hopelessness of the attacks at Passchendaele.

  (3) The size of the rats in the ramparts at Ypres. and in retrospect, the patience and endurance of the soldiers.

  E. W. J. Edgley

  (Major E. W. J. Edgley TD Retired)

  TOM ADLAM, VC was an officer in the 7th Battalion, Beds and Herts Regiment. The following pas
sage is from the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive and was reprinted in Forgotten Voices of the Great War.

  We’d been in the reserve when our battalion was called in to try and straighten out the line. Then just before we went up, my CO was called away so I was put in charge of the company. I was briefed at headquarters and it was impressed upon me that we had to do this at night, because they’d already tried several times in daylight and been held up by various strongpoints. So we had to get into the trench at night, then try and bomb our way to these strongpoints.

  Luckily, just before we started the attack my CO came back and took over. But by then it had taken us so long to get into position it was almost daylight. I knew we weren’t supposed to do this in daylight but the CO said, ‘We’ll get over.’ The section of trench my platoon faced was only about a hundred yards away, so we did get quite a long way before the machine-guns started up.

  We dived into shell-holes and I thought, ‘We’ve got to get into this trench somehow or other.’ So I went crawling along from shell-hole to shell-hole till I came to the officer in charge of the next platoon. I said, ‘What do you think, Father?’ (We all called him Father, it was his nick-name.) He said, ‘I’m going to wait till it gets dark then crawl back. We can’t go forward.’ I said, ‘Well, I think we can. Where I am, I’m not more than fifty yards from the trench.’

  He shook hands with me solemnly and said, ‘Goodbye, old man.’ I said, ‘Don’t be such a damn fool. I’ll be back all right.’ I got back to my platoon and said to them, ‘Get a bomb in your hand, pull out the pin and hold it tight. As soon as I yell “charge”, stand up, run two or three yards and throw it. And I think we’ll get into that trench, there’s practically no wire in front of it.’