Letters From the Trenches: A Soldier of the Great War (11 page)

Food was tremendously important to the troops in the trenches. Since they were often cold, wet and muddy, and frequently very tired, it was understandable that they would think of hearty meals,
thick soups and stews, to fortify them against the elements. The reality, of course, was that almost the only edible treats came from their food parcels. Extra food from home was welcome as a
supplement to the very poor rations that they were expected to live off. Bread was an essential, but as we have seen, it was usually far from being very fresh. Now we learn that the quantities were
a real problem at this time. A shared loaf of stale bread between four or five – and Harry notes that it is a small loaf – is not exactly fighting fare. The bread would be supplemented
by tinned ‘bully beef’ (from French boeuf bouilli, boiled beef – i.e. corned beef, ‘corned’ meaning cured with salt), tea and endless cigarettes. Furthermore,
delivering hot food to the front line could be a real problem. The cooking facilities might be a mile or so behind the lines and the hay boxes used to keep the food hot while it was transported
were simply that – wooden boxes lined with hay. Sometimes, for any one of a number of reasons, hot food would not arrive in the front-line trenches, and the soldiers would resort to eating
anything they had cold, often bully beef with hard biscuits or Maconochie straight from the tin, supplemented with anything they might have left over from their parcels. Tea, though, they could
usually rustle up, heating the water on braziers or small spirit stoves.

Harry, very politely, frequently reminds Kate and Jack how much he appreciates their parcels. It is clear from his letters that he would, as was the normal practice, share his
‘extras’ with his pals. He would expect to share in their good fortune whenever it came around, and no doubt did.

We learn from his letter to Kate that Harry is about to write to his wife Ethel, and she plainly wrote to him, as can be seen from references he makes in his letters to Jack and Kate. The
letters to Ethel have not survived, however. In some ways I am grateful that I don’t have to make any decision about publishing what was surely very personal and possibly intimate
correspondence. I have been told that Ethel was extremely upset by the war and everything to do with it. I am not sure of the reasons behind this, but the upshot was that she destroyed all the
letters. It may be that she was a little less bitter by the time the ‘Jack and Kate’ letters came to her in the 1940s, which perhaps explains why she did not destroy those as well.

Before the battalion went back into the line on 20 September, it had been sent to an assembly point, as the war diary attests: ‘19th Moved from camp at 9.45 pm to BEDFORD HOUSE being
“A” Battn of Reserve Brigade.’

Bedford House was the name the British gave to Château Rosandel when it was first taken over as a command post. The château building had been destroyed by shelling during the course
of the fighting in the Salient, but the deep, secure cellars continued to be used as a headquarters. It is easily found today, situated on the main road, the N336, about two miles (3km) to the
south of Ypres. The grounds are now a war cemetery but, visiting it today, it is just possible to see the remains of the château. The old moat frames a beautiful and tranquil setting,
immaculately maintained, as these places always are, by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Since the British front line at this time would have been a little over a mile away from Bedford
House, it was an ideal stopping-off and assembly point for troops moving forward, or for regrouping on return.

On the Ypres battlefield as a whole, the distances involved are surprisingly small. The Dickebusch training area, the battalion’s last stop before Bedford House, was just over two miles
(4km) to the west of Ypres. Mount Sorrel, their objective at Messines Ridge, was as far again to the east. The Menin Road, the focus for much of the action in the coming few weeks, with
‘Hellfire Corner’, is about two miles to the north-east. ‘Hellfire Corner’, the junction of the Menin Road with a railway line, provided a perfect ‘bullseye’ for
the German artillery. The area was pre-registered on their guns, so as soon as any activity was noted there, a few shells could be sent on their way. It was not a place to linger in. The standard
practice was to get through it as quickly as possible by whatever means of transport – foot, horse, motor – was being used.

The area today is, of course, very different from how it was in the autumn of 1917. Trees, hedges and undergrowth dominate the landscape, where Harry would have seen a shell-pocked morass of
mud, littered with the debris of warfare. There would be nothing but desolation between the two front lines. The war diary takes up the account following the actions on 20–22 September:

It would appear from his next letter (see
here
) that Harry missed this uncomfortable couple of days, having been detached from the battalion and sent, presumably with a working party, to help
shift artillery. He met with some interesting experiences on the 25th or 26th, as he was to recount to Jack. Things became even more interesting, however, after he returned from the working party
to the front-line trenches, as the war diary reports:

The location of all this action is likely to have been on the south side of the Menin Road, close to the hamlet of Gheluvelt (Geluveld).

The war diary entry for the following two days also makes interesting reading:

Harry takes up the account of the German assault on the 30th:

Harry, for once, gives a very clear account of the events of 29 and 30 September in this latest letter to Jack. He seems to have had quite an adventure a few days before. The ‘lumber
waggons’ would be the standard horse-drawn, open-bodied, four-wheeled general-service (GS) wagons designed for transporting the tons of timber, ammunition, barbed wire, equipment and pretty
much anything else used in trench warfare. Built of wood with metal fittings, they had spoked and iron-rimmed wooden wheels.

Even at this stage of the war, horse-drawn transport was still the main method of moving equipment, including artillery. The advantages of the motor lorry were just beginning to be realized;
meanwhile, the horses suffered dreadfully. The two technologies collide – literally, in Harry’s experience.

The enemy’s counter-attack on the morning of the 30th was a major action, and Harry was at the centre of it. The Germans had lost ground over the recent weeks and were becoming
demoralized. Their carefully prepared defences were – despite the interlocking pillboxes, the well-constructed trenches prepared in depth, the wire entanglements and the mud – falling
to the determined (if costly) Allied assaults. This counter-attack against the 9th York and Lancasters was important, and the preparation for it would have been meticulous. At five o’clock in
the morning it would have been dark, the visibility worsened by a thick mist lying over the battlefield.

The assault began with an ‘intense [artillery] bombardment helped on with minenwerfers & smoke bombs’. There is no way of telling how long the enemy bombardment would have
lasted. The minenwerfer was a short-range weapon, and would certainly have been fired from the enemy’s front line directly ahead. Possibly they caused the casualties among the battalion
rather than rifle and machine-gun fire during the assault. The whole performance, rather more than the normal morning’s ‘hate’, would have meant that the British troops, already
‘stood to’ at that time of day, would have been on guard for an attack.

When the attacking German infantry were spotted (I have no idea how the defenders would see – darkness, mist and smoke bombs must have made observation challenging, at the least),
following standard procedure a flare was sent up as an SOS, to call up artillery support. But at 5.15 a.m., in the poor conditions, nobody saw the flare, and so the battalion was left on its own,
to deal with the attack as best it could.

They did well. Harry’s letter to Jack of 3 October was the first, years ago, to catch my attention among the bundle in the drawer, describing the attack and his feelings. What struck me
especially was the line ‘I . . . did not feel nervous when I saw them coming over.’ In this, perhaps, lies a clue to the nature of the British infantry of the Great War, men who faced
danger and privation and terrible risks with a simple acceptance of reality and an unflinching shrug at their fate and their duty. Earlier in the same letter Harry writes, ‘we only got a few
bumps which we are used to.’ There is a wealth of character in that simple, understated aside.