1915: The Death of Innocence Read online

  The Prince of Wales, on the other hand, was quick to appreciate that the age of the German Emperor was very much to the point. He was over ninety and he was frail. Inevitably he must die soon. His heir, Prince William’s father, was dying too. This fifty-six-year-old Crown Prince (who was, in the words of his mother-in-law, Queen Victoria, ‘noble and liberal-minded’) had been waiting thirty years for the throne and with it the opportunity of bringing much-needed reform to autocratic government in Germany. Now he was mortally ill with cancer of the throat and, like it or not, the chances were that Prince William would soon be Kaiser. Ever the diplomat, the Prince of Wales talked his mother round to the view that for the sake of future relations with the German Empire it would be unwise to offend its Emperor-to-be. The Queen relented, but held the Prince of Wales responsible for ‘keeping William sweet’.*

  ‘Keeping William sweet’ was a matter of keeping him occupied and, if possible, flattered. The Jubilee programme fortunately included almost enough parades, reviews and tattoos to satisfy even Prince William’s passion for military pageantry, and they would keep him busy for some of the time; for the rest of it, his uncle shrewdly guessed that nothing would keep his nephew sweeter than arranging for him to inspect a few regiments. From the future Kaiser’s point of view the highlight of this agreeable programme was the day he spent with the Prince of Wales’ own regiment, the 10th Royal Hussars, at their barracks in Hounslow. The visit was a huge success and the future Kaiser came back full of it. In particular, he was impressed by a delightful novelty the like of which he had never seen before. It was the regimental machine-gun and it was the private property of the Commanding Officer, Colonel Liddell. The previous year he had purchased it out of his own pocket from the Nordenfeld Company and had it mounted on a light two-wheeled carriage that a horse could gallop into action. Prince William had been charmed. He inspected the regiment, rode with it in the morning, lunched in the officers’ mess, rode out again in the afternoon and, as a grand finale to the day, even joined the Hussars in a wild cavalry charge. The Prince made a flattering speech before his departure and soon after he returned to Berlin sent his signed photograph, in the uniform of his own Hussars of the Guard, in appreciation of the splendid day he had spent at Hounslow. That was not all. Four invitations were dispatched by his grandfather, the German Emperor. They were addressed to the Colonels of the four regiments the Prince had inspected during his visit and invited them to spend three weeks as the Emperor’s guests in Berlin.

  When the four Colonels travelled to Berlin, they took with them a wonderful present by command of the Prince of Wales. It was a machine-gun, just like the one William had admired at Hounslow, complete with an identical ‘galloping carriage’. It capped William’s pleasure in what were to be three blissful weeks. With his parents wintering in Italy in the vain hope of improving his father’s health there was no one in Berlin to cramp his style. Under the rheumily indulgent eye of his aged grandfather, who found this young turkey-cock more to his taste than his gentler, liberal-minded heir, William could strut and show off to his heart’s content.

  Like his uncle, the Prince of Wales, Colonel-in-Chief of the 10th Royal Hussars, Prince William had a cavalry regiment of his own. They were the Hussars of the Guard, the crack Garde Husarien Regiment, and he instantly whisked the two Cavalry Colonels off to Potsdam to enjoy the hospitality of his regiment for the duration of their visit. It gave him huge pleasure to show off his troops, to ride with the British officers as his horsemen drilled, to escort them on inspections of the stables and the barracks, to ride out with them on manoeuvres, to fight mock battles, to entertain his visitors at formal dinners in the mess and at the Palace, to present them to his grandfather the Emperor. At all these events the new machine-gun had pride of place, trundling through manoeuvres on its carriage driven by Corporal Hustler of the British Hussars, or standing on the parade ground with a cluster of Prussian Hussars listening respectfully as Hustler, or occasionally Prince William himself, explained its finer points. Hustler was to stay on for several weeks to instruct a nucleus of Prussian troopers in its use. But, by the time of the last grand review on the eve of the British Colonels’ departure, when the machine-gun bowled past the Emperor and his guests at the head of the regiment, quite a number of the men had already mastered the art of firing it, and Prince William was well pleased.

  But already in 1887 the clumsy hand-cranked Nordenfeld was obsolescent. Before long it was replaced by the quick-firing fully automatic Maxim and the new Kaiser brought even the ‘old donkeys’ of his General Staff round to the view that a few more machine-guns in other regiments would not come amiss. By the turn of the century the German Army possessed more of them than any other in Europe – and once they had taken up the idea they made the most of it. Machine-gunners were highly trained, there were inter-regimental competitions to keep them on their toes and, as a further incentive, prizes for the winners, who each received a watch inscribed with the Kaiser’s name and presented as his personal gift. The standard of firing was high and every German machine-gunner was a marksman.

  In the British military establishment there were men who grasped the significance of this new weapon – the great Sir Garnet Wolseley as early as 1885, General Allenby as late as 1910, and in the years between there were others who urged and lobbied, pleading the case for machine-guns. A few were grudgingly purchased, but the High Command remained unconvinced.

  To these professional minds – trained long ago to study ancient battles, schooled in the belief that the classic practices of war were inviolable – the idea of the machine-gun as a short-range weapon for the use of infantry did not come easily, for the infantry were still expected to charge cheering with the bayonet, clearing the way for the cavalry to dash gloriously past and take up the real battle. The General Staff were cavalrymen almost to a man, and if they bothered to think of machine-guns at all they thought of them as highly over-rated weapons. Even when they blazed into action in the Russo-Japanese war, even when Sir Ian Hamilton as British Military Observer reported on their devastating effect, the British General Staff remained unmoved.

  The assessment of supplies of equipment and ammunition likely to be required in any foreseeable circumstances had been fixed in 1901 at the end of the Boer War. In 1904 it was reviewed and confirmed. That year Vickers supplied the British Government with ten machine-guns for the use of the British Army. By 1914 when Great Britain went to war with Germany, this standard annual order had not been increased. By now the Infantry Training Manual devoted just a dozen pages to machine-guns, and the Cavalry Manual still enjoined that ‘it must be accepted as a principle that the rifle, effective as it is, cannot replace the effect produced by the speed of the horse, the magnetism of the charge, and the terror of cold steel’.

  This principle was still held sacred by the army commanders when the British Army went to war with Germany in 1914. By the turn of the year when the bogged-down armies were standing face to face across a dreary stretch of Flanders mud, they had seen no particular reason to change their view. Winter was always a time of breathing space. Soon the spring would come, the armies would be on the move and the cavalry would come into its own.

  Chapter 2

  There were new graves in the burgeoning cemeteries behind the lines where they had buried the missing of the autumn battles whose bodies had been recovered during the Christmas truce. During January, as the sad parcels of belongings reached home and the last sparks of hope were extinguished, a series of poignant letters appeared in The Times, under the heading ‘Swords of Fallen Officers’. Officers who had gone with the Regular Army to France had gone equipped and accoutred almost as elaborately as their military ancestors had gone to Waterloo, and there was much heart-burning when their effects reached home and their swords were found to be missing. It was hard for mourning relatives to accept the most likely explanation that these prized possessions had been pilfered en route and the tone of the letters from bereaved fathers left little doubt
of their firm belief that their sons had died charging the enemy trenches, sword in hand:

  My late son’s sword may have been picked up and forwarded to someone else. It is a Claymore, No. 106,954, made by S. J. Pillin, and has embossed on it the battles of the regiment and ‘DCM from DFM’.

  •

  I am a fellow-sufferer, having received the effects of my late son, admirably packed but minus the sword, to my great sorrow and disappointment.

  •

  I would like to endorse the letter from ‘The Father of an Officer Killed in Action’. The pain caused to relatives by non-receipt of a lost one’s sword is great.

  •

  To any private soldier, English or Indian, who may have found the sword and returns it to me through his officer, I will send a present of £5.

  •

  We are all giving of our best and dearest for our country, and the least we ask for is that those precious relics should be restored to us.

  •

  The colonel of my son’s regiment kindly wrote and told me it had been sent to the depot some days before, but I can hear nothing of it, so I suppose it has gone with the others, but where? There does not seem much demand for swords at the Front; if there was, I would not grudge it.

  •

  It is suggested to me that when my son was struck down he may have been carrying the sword in his hand, and it fell into the wet trench and sank – not improbable.

  But it was spades not swords that were wanted in the trenches. And manpower. And muscle-power. And hard grinding labour. The brunt of the work fell on the Royal Engineers.

  The 5th Field Company, Royal Engineers, had been out since the beginning. They had dug the Army out of Mons, they had dug trenches for the infantry throughout the long retreat, blown bridges over rivers in full view of the Germans when the last of the infantry had safely crossed, and, when the tide had turned, they built pontoon bridges across the same rivers to take the infantry back, first to the Marne, then to the Aisne, and finally along the long road north as they raced the Germans back to Flanders. The engineers had toiled again at Ypres, digging trenches for reserves and supports and, always under shellfire, throwing up entanglements of barbed wire to protect them. And when the Germans attacked and the troops were pushed back, as the front line gave way, and battalions were decimated, the engineers had gone into the trenches and helped the thinning ranks of infantrymen to beat the Germans off. The 5th Field Company had been in at the kill when the last wavering line faltered and briefly gave way, when the Prussian Guard streamed through and every man was needed to try to stop them. In retrospect it had been their moment of glory, for the sappers had flung down their spades, picked up their rifles, formed up with the ragged remnants of the infantry, fixed bayonets and charged into Nonnebosschen Wood to drive the Germans back. It had not seemed very glorious at the time – but it had saved the day.

  Now the infantry were returning the favour by turning out working parties night after night to labour alongside the sappers constructing defences. Working in the flooded marshland to the south of Armentieres where the River Lys, swollen by incessant rain, wound across the waterlogged plain and overflowed to mingle with a thousand streams and ditches, even the battle-hardened veterans who had been out since the start of the war agreed that this was the worst yet. It was a waterscape rather than a landscape. Trenches filled up with water as fast as they were dug and the culverts and dams they made to divert it merely channelled the flood to another trench in another part of the line. They built bridges across watery trenches that collapsed into the stream with the next rainstorm in a cascade of mud as the sodden banks that supported them gave way. They took levels, drew up plans, set up pumps, but still the water rose. The trenches were knee deep in it. The men who manned them, soaking, shivering, plastered from head to foot with mud, reflected bitterly that it was not so much the Germans as the weather that was the adversary.

  Lt. C. Tennant, 1/4 Bn., Seaforth Highlanders (TF), Dehra Dun Brig., Meerut Div.

  Water is the great and pressing problem at present, the weather has been almost unprecedently wet and the whole countryside is soaked in mud and like a sponge. Owing to its flatness it is generally impossible to drain the trenches and in many cases those now being held were only taken in the first instance as a temporary stopping place in the attack. A battalion would dig itself in at night – perhaps improve an ordinary water ditch with firing recesses – in the expectation of getting on a bit further the next day. The change and chance of war has caused these positions to become more or less permanent and every day of rain has made them more and more unpleasant until now the chief question is how to keep the men more or less out of the water. In a summer campaign it would not matter, but when a hard frost sets in at night, and we have had several (luckily short) spells, frostbite sets in at once and the man is done for so far as his feet and legs are concerned. Our own British troops have stood it wonderfully well but some of the Indian regiments have suffered pretty severely in this respect. As you may well imagine some of these trenches that have been held for a long time are in a pretty grizzly state.

  In the fight against the elements there was little energy to spare for fighting the enemy and, in any event, in such conditions attack was all but impossible. It was obvious that the Germans were in the same plight and on frosty nights, when the clouds cleared and the light from a hazy moon rippled on lagoons of ice and water spread across the morass, when the machine-guns fell silent and only the occasional smack of a bullet cracked in the frosty air, the Tommies could hear the splosh and thud of boots and spades in front and see the Germans silhouetted fifty yards away engaged on the same dreary task, bailing and digging, and doubtless cursing, just as they were themselves.

  Day after day throughout the cheerless month of January, Corporal Alex Letyford recorded a terse catalogue of miseries in the pocket diary he kept wrapped in oilcloth to protect it from the wet.

  Cpl. A. Letyford, 5th Field Coy., Royal Engineers.

  1.1.15 At 6 p.m. (in dark) go to the trenches making culvert and dams. Trenches knee-deep in water. We work until 3 a.m.

  2.1.15 6 p.m. off to the trenches. I take some men and make dam to prevent water coming from German trench and return at 5 a.m.

  3.1.15 Parade at 6 a.m. March to trenches. We dig communication trenches and are fired at the whole time. Work until 6 p.m.

  4.1.15 During the day we build stables near billet for our horses. At 6 p.m. we go to the lines and trace out redoubts. Rather risky work as we are only eighty yards from the Germans who are doing a lot of sniping from their lines. We also make a bridge across our front line. Four feet of water in this part of the trench line. Return to billets about midnight.

  5.1.15 Spend the morning trying to dry out our clothes. We are all covered in mud from head to foot. At 6 p.m. I go with Captain Reed to the trenches and fix six pumps. Wading about in water to our waists until 2 a.m.

  6.1.15 We go up at 8.45 a.m. and improve trenches for reserves.

  7.1.15 Go out at 3 a.m. and make a bridge in the line of trenches about a hundred and fifty yards from Fritz. Return at daylight and rest remainder of day.

  8.1.15 Again at work on the reserve trenches. At nightfall I remain with eight men and make the bridge again, it having been knocked into the stream. It rains nearly all the time and the enemy torment us with their Very lights and sniping. Return at 9 p.m.

  9.1.15 Parade at 8 a.m. I take four men to dig communication trench. Work until 5 p.m. and reach billet at 6.30 p.m. The trenches are now waist-deep in water, part of section returned early, being soaked through, breast-high. My party had to run the gauntlet on returning across the open in preference to coming through the trenches!

  The journey was slow and hazardous, because it was impossible to accomplish it silently. The sound of splashing and sliding, the clink of tools, an inadvertent cry as a bridge collapsed or someone plunged into a water hole, were a sure sign that men were on the move, and the enemy flares would his
s into the sky, bathing the lines in incandescent light that showed up every tree, every twig, every man who was caught in its glare. Then machine-guns would spit from their hidden posts and snipers take aim at such targets as they could see before the rocket burned out and plopped, sizzling, back to the sodden earth. It lasted seconds but, to the men standing motionless for fear of being spotted, it seemed an eternity.

  Even quite far behind the front line it could be as dangerous by day, for the ‘line’ was hardly a line at all, but a succession of outpost trenches cut off by the water-filled dykes that crisscrossed the flooded land. Under the cover of mist and darkness it was easy enough for snipers to slip through and find hideouts convenient for taking pot-shots at unsuspecting or unwary soldiers. In the lines themselves, marooned all day in barrels begged from breweries to provide reasonably dry standing, sentries kept a sharp look-out, but snipers were devious and some, more courageous and ingenious, were skilled in the arts of disguise and deceit. Stories of spies and snipers abounded – and some of them were true.

  Lt. R. Macleod, V Bty., RHA, 2 Indian Cavalry Div.

  We had a little spy hunt the other day. We shifted our billet to a new place. On going into the loft we discovered a little observation place very neatly made in the roof. There was a place where two tiles could be easily slid up, giving a very good view over part of the country. (The rest of the tiles being cemented down.) There was also a supply of provisions concealed up there. At the back of the house there is a large barn, apparently filled with straw. On examining the place it was found that the straw was hollow, and contained a small room with a passage leading to it through which a man could crawl. There was also another passage leading out to a trap-door very cunningly concealed under a heap of straw above a cow stall. No spy has been near the place since. We only discovered the presence of the room and passage by walking on top of the straw, and finding it giving way under our feet.