Letters From the Trenches: A Soldier of the Great War (4 page)

In time, the Army would replace many of its wooden huts with the corrugated-steel prefabricated Nissen hut, invented by a Canadian officer in 1916 and used in the First World War and,
extensively, in the Second. At Rugeley in 1917, however, twenty-nine men in a hut designed for twenty illustrates the pressure to turn out replacement soldiers for the front line.

Vaccinations – soldiers were inoculated against typhoid and paratyphoid on joining up. Whatever the controversy today over the use of vaccines, the insanitary conditions and poor hygiene
of the trenches made such protection not just reasonable, but essential. Also available at the time was an anti-tetanus injection. However, this was generally administered after injury rather than
as a preventive measure.

The ‘pass’ Harry refers to would have allowed him a short leave at the end of the training period, prior to joining his unit on active service, probably across the Channel in France
or Belgium.

‘Dripping’ is the residue of fat and juices that is left after meat has been roasted, poured into a bowl and allowed to cool and set, to be used again for frying or roasting. Before
cholesterol and salt were identified as mainly harmful, ‘bread and dripping’ was a common snack, or even meal, in the industrial Midlands of England and elsewhere. I can remember
enjoying it in the 1950s. The fat from the Sunday joint, with the wonderful brown jelly underneath it, was spread on to bread with a liberal amount of salt, and the slice then eaten. It had the
merit of being full of flavour, cheap and quite nutritious, although probably not very healthy.

In general, it would appear that the newly joined conscripts were not particularly well fed. The last line of the letter sums up Harry’s feelings with a touch of wry humour. We shall hear
more of his experiences of Army food – always a preoccupation of soldiers – as his service progresses.

The War Office specified the period of training for volunteer infantrymen in 1914 and 1915 as eight months. By the time Harry, a conscript, started his training, the desperate need for soldiers
had reduced this period to around five months. Perhaps this reduction was not really a problem, as no amount of training could prepare these young men sent to the front line for what was to
follow.

As an extra detail at Rugeley at this time, the Army had built a replica of the Messines–Wytschaete Ridge in Belgian Flanders on the camp’s training grounds on Cannock Chase. The
actual ridge lies a few miles to the south of the town of Ypres (Ieper), and in early 1917 was occupied by the Germans in well dug-in emplacements; Ypres itself was held by the British, who also
occupied a ‘salient’ jutting eastwards from the town into German-held territory. The ridge was only a few metres high, but it was sufficiently prominent to dominate the plain, giving
excellent views of the Allies’ movements and dispositions. For months, the British High Command had been making preparations to take this ridge, in order to deprive the Germans of their
commanding view over the Ypres Salient. The mock-up on Cannock Chase was just a small part of the meticulous planning that went into the operation. For Harry, the Messines Ridge was to be a
significant element of his experiences over the next month or so.

By May 1917, with his basic training completed, Harry was in France with an infantry battalion to which he had been assigned, from where he wrote both to his brother and to one
of his sisters. Harry’s references in his letters to his location on the Western Front were always to France or, occasionally, Flanders (an area that in fact occupies parts of France, Belgium
and Holland). He would have actually spent most of his time in Belgium, but that small country, so important in the history of the Great War, never gets a mention.

Shortly after crossing the Channel, Harry wrote to his brother Jack.

Is there some anticipation, perhaps even apprehension, at the prospect of ‘going up the line’? Nor do I know why, regarding the address, ‘we have got to put it in the middle of
our letter’. Clearly it was not an enduring instruction, for it rarely appeared there again in Harry’s letters.

At that time, soldiers’ numbers were regimental numbers, so that, changing regiment meant being issued with a new number. (In the British Army today, an individual soldier’s number
is his unique Army number, and remains constant for the whole of his service.) Harry’s number, given in this first letter from France, didn’t last long, as he changed regiment –
having previously been assigned to two others, from which he had rapidly been moved. I have not been able to discover what process was involved in assigning new recruits once they arrived in
France. I suspect that, at the depots to which these men were sent, there would have been a list of regiments with a shortage of men, and that some clerical exercise would have taken place to fill
the gaps. In the early days of the war, the policy had been to keep recruits that had joined together from the same location in the same units. The flaw in that initial policy was that whole towns
could lose their supply of young men in a single action, as had been tragically demonstrated by the disaster that overtook some of the ‘Pals’ battalions on the Somme in July 1916.

The
Arcadian
was a Royal Mail steamer that was employed as a troopship and ammunition carrier. She was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine in the Mediterranean on 15 April 1917; of
the 601 troops on board, 75 perished. If Harry had not suffered from bad teeth, obviously requiring attention, at Rugeley, this story might have been very different.

A few days later, Harry wrote to Kate. Things have moved on a little, since his letter to Jack.

For whatever reason, at the fourth attempt to find a regiment, Harry joined the 9th (Service) Battalion, the York and Lancaster Regiment, having previously been attached to the Yorkshire
Regiment (Green Howards), the South Staffordshire Regiment and the West Yorkshire Regiment.

I can only estimate the date on which he joined the York and Lancasters. Working backwards from his letter to Kate, which is dated, I would guess that the first letter to Jack, when Harry was
still with the West Yorkshires, must have been written in the first week in May, which would indicate that he joined the 9th York and Lancasters between the 7th and the 10th.

Referring to the battalion war diary for that month, from 3 to 9 May the 9th was out of the line, undergoing training on the Boescheppe (Boeschepe) training ground, about ten miles (16km) west
and slightly south of Ypres, just over the border into France. That would have been a logical time to take in new recruits. On the 10th, the battalion moved to a new camp and on the night of 11th
it relieved another unit, taking its place in the front line.

Harry is, at last, ‘in the line’, in a proper fighting unit, experiencing his first taste of a battlefield on the Western Front. His letter to Kate of 13 May must have been written
when he was actually in the front line, for the battalion had been relieved in the trenches by 14 May, and sent by train to Poperinghe (Poperinge), the main British administration and rest centre
for the Ypres sector, some six miles (10km) west of the city and well away from the front.

As May progressed, Harry’s battalion would be charged with the task of preparing for the major assault on the crucial objective of the Messines Ridge, as a prelude to the coming great
offensive, in which the British were to attempt to drive the Germans back from the Ypres Salient. The battalion’s role in the coming action would have been determined by now, and the training
programme undertaken to ensure that all ranks were properly prepared. It can be said that the imminent battle, unlike so many offensives on the Western Front, generally enjoys a reputation for
thorough and meticulous planning and preparation.

CHAPTER 3

FIRST TASTE OF THE TRENCHES

M
AY
1917. H
ARRY IS NOW
a trained infantryman, taking his place in the front line, close to the strategically important town of
Ypres. What would he have found?

The front line here, as on most of the Western Front, had been virtually static for the last two years. Despite the lack of progress, the level of fighting in this sector had been consistently
intense, with enormous losses on both sides. The armies had constructed elaborate defensive positions, vast networks of interlocking trenches with concrete bunkers at strategic points. The trench
maps of the time show a mass of fine lines stretching back hundreds of yards from the front line, delineating the first, second and reserve lines of trenches, as well as supply and communication
trenches.