1914- The Days of Hope Read online

  Lyn Macdonald

  1914

  The Days of Hope

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  List of Maps

  Author’s Foreword and Acknowledgements

  Part One

  All in the Day’s Work

  Part Two

  Strangers in a Strange Land

  Part Three

  The Long Slog

  Part Four

  The Road to Flanders

  Part Five

  Epitaph

  Illustrations

  Bibliography

  Author’s Note

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  1914

  Over the past twenty years Lyn Macdonald has established a popular reputation as an author and historian of the First World War. Her books are They Called it Passchendaele, an account of the Passchendaele campaign in 1917; The Roses of No Man’s Land, a chronicle of the war from the neglected viewpoint of the casualties and the medical teams who struggled to save them; Somme, a history of the legendary and horrifying battle that has haunted the minds of succeeding generations; 1914, a vivid account of the first months of the war and winner of the 1987 Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award; 1914 – 1918: Voices and Images of the Great War, an illuminating account of the many different aspects of the war; and 1915, The Death of Innocence. All are based on the accounts of eyewitnesses and survivors, told in their own words, and cast a unique light on the First World War. They are all published by Penguin.

  Lyn Macdonald is married and lives in London.

  For the Chums

  for old times’ sake.

  List of Illustrations

  Start of War and Mobilisation

  The 1st Lifeguards parade at Knightsbridge Barracks, April 1914. (Imperial War Museum)

  The 1st Lifeguards parade at Knightsbridge Barracks, August 1914. (Imperial War Museum)

  Irish Guards prepare for departure, August 1914. (Imperial War Museum)

  Mobilised Reservists of the Grenadier Guards. (Imperial War Museum)

  A Squadron, 11th Hussars, leaving Newcastle on the way to the front. (Imperial War Museum)

  A joke played by the 2nd Scots Guards on their Quartermaster. (Imperial War Museum)

  Battles of Mons and Le Cateau

  The 4th Royal Fusiliers in the square at Mons, August 1914. (Imperial War Museum)

  The Lancers retiring from Mons. (Imperial War Museum)

  The 1st Cambridgeshire resting during the Retreat from Mons. (Imperial War Museum)

  Lieutenant Roderick Macleod, 1911.

  Trumpeter Jimmy Naylor.

  The Marne and the Aisne

  A Uhlan horse captured at Néry. (Imperial War Museum)

  Bridging the Marne at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre. (Imperial War Museum)

  The house on the hill at Huiry.

  11th Hussars at Battalion Headquarters on the Aisne, September 1914. (Imperial War Museum)

  Antwerp and arrival of 7th Division

  A refugee family leaving Antwerp. (Imperial War Museum)

  Royal Naval Brigade in trenches at Antwerp. (Imperial War Museum)

  Duckboards across the Belgian sector. (Imperial War Museum)

  7th Division on the road from Bruges to Ostend. (Imperial War Museum)

  Consultation at a crossroads in Ghent. (Imperial War Museum)

  One of Commander Sampson’s armoured cars on the Menin road. (Imperial War Museum)

  The lush and leafy countryside provided useful cover, soon to vanish as the land was devastated. (Imperial War Museum)

  First Battle of Ypres

  Devastation in Ypres. (Imperial War Museum)

  The Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars leaving St-Omer.

  Father Camille Delaere. (Imperial War Museum)

  Charles Worsley with his wife.

  The temporary cross that marked Worsley’s grave at Zandvoorde.

  The west wing of Hooge Château. (Imperial War Museum)

  Transport retiring down the Menin road, October 1914. (Imperial War Museum)

  Troops on reconnaissance near Zandvoorde. (Imperial War Museum)

  The 2nd Scots Guards entrenched at Zandvoorde. (Imperial War Museum)

  The Cloth Hall still smouldering two days after it was set alight. (Imperial War Museum)

  Remnants of the London Scottish after their blooding at Messines. (Imperial War Museum)

  The French 75mm gun – the famous Soixante Quinze. (Imperial War Museum)

  The troopship Afric.

  Ralph Langley, a newly enlisted soldier of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps.

  Copyright owners are indicated in brackets; all photographs not credited are from private sources.

  List of Maps

  The Western Front

  The Mons Salient at Nimy

  Rearguard Action – Elouges near Mons

  Mons to Le Cateau

  The Battle of Le Cateau

  Néry

  4th Guards Brigade at Villers-Cotterêts

  The Marne at Meaux

  Approach to the River Aisne

  Positions at the River Marne

  Dragoon Guards at Bourg

  Ypres and its Surroundings

  The First Battle of Ypres

  Messines Ridge

  Author’s Foreword and Acknowledgements

  The history of 1914 is not so much the story of a war as of an army.

  It is hard to pin down the spirit of 1914, for the spirit and attitudes of the men who were actually doing the fighting were strikingly different from the attitudes of the civilians and those who were flocking to the colours at home and around the Empire. Their War, their blooding and their disillusionment were yet to come. Brooke, Grenfell, Owen, Sassoon, Hodgson, made no secret of their idealism (and how soon it changed with the experience of war!) and it is difficult for succeeding generations to identify with their extraordinary view of war as a purification, their strange resignation to dying, their passive embracement of fate, their unquestioning acceptance. The questioning and the bitterness were born later, in the stultifying horrors of trench warfare.

  For the soldiers of 1914 it was different. Kitchener’s Army was proud of its amateurism, but the regular soldiers of the old British Army took pride in their bold professional skills – and they were professionals to the marrow. The nickname ‘Old Contemptibles’ which they so good-humouredly adopted does not appear in these pages. (In any event, the Kaiser was referring to the size of the British Expeditionary Force, and not to its quality.) If Kitchener’s Army of volunteers was prepared to fight and possibly die because it was their duty, the officers and men of 1914 were prepared to fight and die simply because it was their job.

  My thanks as always must go first and foremost to the old soldiers who have taken the trouble to recall those times and to talk and write about their experiences. Only some of them are directly quoted; the recollections of many, many more are incorporated in the text and they will recognise the tales and the details they have supplied which have helped so enormously in the task not only of writing about their war and their experiences, but also of setting them in the context of their world and the times they lived in ‘the day before yesterday’. It is almost – but not quite yet – part of history, for many people who were young at the beginning of this momentous twentieth century are still alive. Some centuries from now, in purely historical terms, we will all be seen as contemporaries, and their history will come to be regarded as part of ours, as indeed it is.

  Only yesterday (at the time of writing) one old soldier* (a volunteer) remarked to me: ‘We thought we were fighting the War to end Wars.’ Well, perhaps, in a sense, they were, for the profound effect of their experiences on su
cceeding generations has surely been a powerful force for peace, even if it has not precisely been ‘Peace in our time’ so much as peace some time. Of course, that can only be a matter of opinion. What is undeniable is the continuing and, indeed, growing interest in the First World War. People – and especially young people – still flock to those old battlefields of the Western Front, visit the cemeteries, tramp the trenchlines, ponder, remember and, in a sense, still mourn – long after the generation of parents and grandparents, and even brothers and sisters, who had first-hand reasons for mourning has itself ‘faded away’. And they still ask ‘Why?’

  I would be the last to try to claim that this book comes anywhere near supplying an answer to a question which has exercised the minds of countless historians of infinitely greater skill and profundity than I. But I hope that it goes some way towards telling ‘How’. Inevitably, it has had to be concerned with politics to a far greater degree than anything I have previously written, but I make no apologies for that. The war that sent the British Army to France in 1914 was the sequel and the consequence of all that went before and a knowledge of the background and the run-up to it is necessary to an understanding and appreciation of what happened next … and next … and next … to the people who endured the four black years of war and returned, if they were lucky, to take up the threads of life in societies that were shaken to their roots, and a world in which the Old Order had disappeared forever – not always to their disadvantage. 1914 has not been an easy book to write and has taken a long, long time. But I hope it will be easy to read.

  With every book the list of those to be thanked becomes longer and it is difficult to know where to start. As always, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission has dealt with enquiries with courtesy and enthusiasm, as have various regiments. Tony Spagnoly has, as always, been ever-willing to discuss points which have arisen and has also worked extremely hard on drawing the original drafts of the numerous maps which appear in the book. John Woodroff, with his usual indefatigable industry, has burrowed deep to supply the answers to many queries and has checked all the military details. Although Alma Woodroff, much to my regret, has not been able to put in the mammoth amount of work she has done on previous books, she has always been ready to bail me out when the going got rough and I am immensely grateful to her.

  As always, several people have helped in tracking down and interviewing old soldiers, notably Barbara Taylor, John Woodroff, Guy Francis, Colin Butler and Stan Taylor and I am, as always, in their debt.

  Yves de Cock in Belgium has supplied much useful information and I am also grateful to the Elfnovembergroep for valuable material on the First Battle of Ypres contained in their private publication Van Den Grooten Oorlog.

  My French friends have, as usual, entered enthusiastically into the project and I am indebted to Jean Verdel (whose mother, before her marriage, was Flora Dignoire) and to Gaston Degardin for kindly making available his assiduous research on Bapaume before and during the German occupation. This has enabled me to do far greater justice to the French side (and in particular to the experiences of French civilians) than I would otherwise have been able to do. Guy and Jeannine Danquigny have also untiringly assisted with this project, as with many others, and Dr Marechal, the present-day owner of Miss Mildred Aldrich’s house on the Marne (and whose uncles remember playing in her garden as children in the twenties), has been most kind and helpful. I am deeply grateful to them all.

  I should also like to express my gratitude to the many people, too numerous to name, who so kindly, and often out of the blue, made available family letters, diaries and written accounts (and in particular for the diaries of Sergeant Packham and Corporal Letyford which occupy an important place in this book) or who took the trouble to put their own recollections on paper and to expand on reams of ‘matters arising’. Many who did so will find that they are not included in this book. The reason is simple. It was originally planned and researched to cover a longer period and to carry the story from the beginning of the war through 1915 to the Battle of Loos. But 1914 turned out to be a book-length story in itself. My apologies to those who are disappointed – and my assurance that all will be revealed in the next volume!

  Lastly, and by no means least, my thanks to my long-suffering family who, if they are not precisely the last casualties of the Great War, from time to time have a lot to put up with – in particular my husband, Ian Ross, who very often puts himself out in the midst of his own demanding professional commitments to accommodate the exigencies of mine. I don’t always tell him how much I appreciate it. But I do.

  Lyn Macdonald,

  London, July 1987.

  Part One

  ALL IN THE DAY’S WORK

  The great Duke of Wellington stood on the path which runs round the ramparts of Walmer Castle on a sunny day in July 1843. Near him, standing at attention, was a young Staff Officer of the Adjutant-General’s Department. He had just asked a question on a small matter of detail which the War Office thought should, as a courtesy, be referred to the Commander of the Forces. A name typical of the British private soldier was required, for use on the model sheet of the soldiers’ accounts to show where the men should sign.

  The Duke stood gazing out to sea while the young officer waited, searching in a long memory stored with recollections for a man who typified the character of Britain’s soldiers. He thought back to his first campaign in the Low Countries where he had fought his first action with his old Regiment, the 33rd Foot.

  When the battle was over and won, Wellesley rode back to where little groups of wounded men were lying on the ground. At the place where the right of his line had been lay the right-hand man of the Grenadier Company. Thomas Atkins. He stood six foot three in his stockinged feet, he had served for twenty years, he could neither read nor write and he was the best man at arms in the Regiment. One of the bandsmen had bound up his head where a sabre had slashed it, he had a bayonet wound in the chest, and a bullet through the lungs. He had begged the bearers not to move him, but to let him die in peace. Wellesley looked down on him and the man must have seen his concern. ‘It’s all right, Sir,’ he gasped. ‘It’s all in the day’s work.’ They were his last words.

  The Old Duke turned to the waiting Staff Officer. ‘Thomas Atkins,’ he said.

  From The Ypres Times,

  April 1929.

  Chapter 1

  In August on the golden plains of Picardy and Flanders, the grind of giant combines smothers the sounds of summer. Travelling in swathes across the fields, they peel the harvest from the land as a thumb peels the skin from an orange. Then the land comes into its own. Scrawled across it, after almost seventy years and more than sixty harvests, are the traces of old trenchlines. You see them in a zigzag patch of weed, a line of soil unnaturally discoloured, an undulating billow on the flat surface of a field. Here and there a rampaging thicket of nettles marks the entrance to a long-sealed tunnel or hints at a deep dugout long buried in the damp dark below. Even the lush summer grass, swaying tall on a bank or an incline, hardly blurs the outlines of deep-gouged crevices that once sheltered a battery of guns.

  As the summer vegetation dies back, laying bare the bones of the earth, uglier shapes emerge. The mangled iron and brick of a ruined machine-gun post. The concrete emplacements of a formidable redoubt and, along dusty farm-tracks churned up by heavy tractors, a sprinkling of shrapnel and some rusted shards of shell. In the lowlands of Belgium, across the face of Artois, on the downlands of the Somme, and across the breadth of France, all along the line of the old Western Front, three generations of farmers have lived among the debris and the dangers of war.

  With the advent of the technological age accidents and casualties have diminished, and the modern farmer who sets his hand to the plough or who grubs up beets or potatoes without first passing a metal detector across his field is a rare and reckless bird. Each season of the farming year still yields a lethal harvest of unexploded shells. The locals are used to them. They are a routine nuis
ance easily dealt with by Munitions Disposal Squads. Only strangers stop with cautious curiosity to examine them, stacked neatly according to calibre on the verges of country roads as far apart as Ypres in the north and Verdun a long way to the south-east. The shell-heaps stand like milestones along the path of the wind that tore through Europe, laid waste a generation and blew up into a hurricane that swept away their safe and ordered world. In the awesome stillness of its aftermath they marvelled to think that it had begun as the merest zephyr, so distant, so inconsequent, that it would hardly have rippled a field of corn growing ripe under untroubled skies in that long, hot summer of 1914.

  It was something of a novelty for British troops to arrive as allies on the soil of their old enemy France. The names of Malplaquet, Corunna, Waterloo, Quebec, rang like battle-cries through Regimental Histories, were emblazoned in gold on Regimental Colours and were linked with a host of the Regimental traditions that cemented esprit de corps.

  Memories in the north of France were equally long. It was a mere ten years since the two nations had signed the Entente Cordiale under the beneficent eye of the francophile King, Edward VII, and, as the first of the boats that would carry her soldiers to France gathered in Southampton Water and prepared to set course for the French ports of Le Havre, Rouen and Boulogne, the Mayor of Boulogne gave some thought to the circumstances of their arrival.

  It was from Boulogne after all (and less than a hundred years ago) that Napoleon, Emperor of the French, had planned to invade England, and his statue, perched on a pillar a hundred feet high, still gazed implacably across the Channel from the hills where he had poised his army. It was the dominating feature of the town, and it was hardly likely that the British troops could miss it, since some of them would be encamped at Napoleon’s very feet in the tents which, for some days now, their advance parties had been busily erecting.