From Mons to Mons on the miles between.
Will Harvey had himself been posted as missing when the Fifth Gloster Gazette printed his tribute to his friend Second Lieutenant R. E. Knight DCM, who had died of wounds received on the Somme.
Dear, rash, warm-hearted friend,
So careless of the end,
So worldly-foolish so divinely-wise,
Who, caring not one jot
For place, gave all you’d got
To help your lesser fellow-men to rise.
But whether poetry attained such high seriousness, or was yet another parody of Omar Khayyam (‘Awake! For Minnie in the Bowl of Night/Has flung the Bomb that puts the Rats to flight’) it all helped make the trench journal what it was: part-funny and part-serious, proud and self-deriding, cynical yet supremely confident, an echo of a generation brought up to endure. It both reflected morale, and helped to sustain it.
The prospect of leave helped maintain morale, although, as we have already seen, it had a bittersweet tang, as so many men felt increasingly out of sympathy with the land that had given them birth. Once the leave system got into its swing in early 1915, leave was allocated by unit, with officers and men moving up steadily in a leave rota. Men received leave warrants which enabled them to travel to Boulogne and board a leave ship which took them to Folkestone, whence they travelled by train to Charing Cross or Victoria stations. Leave was normally for a week, although it was soon recognised that men travelling to the Western Isles would have run out of time by the time they reached home, so they were allocated extra days. In times of particular crisis leave was cancelled, and those still on the Continent were ordered to return to their units at once. There were frequent complaints that the system of leave allocation was unfair, and it was certainly true that generals and senior officers were able to get home far more regularly than private soldiers. One of Walter Nicholson’s divisional commanders, Philip Robinson, always became irritable if he did not get back to his family every three months, while a private in an infantry battalion might well have to wait a year.
However, like so many of life’s sought-after experiences, the reality of being on leave was often an anti-climax. P. J. Campbell wrote of the essential strangeness of being back in England, ‘thinking about the men, wondering whose turn it was to go to the OP, and what the shelling had been like today’. When he was walking through Oxford in plain clothes, a corporal asked him if he would not rather be with the lads in France: ‘a true answer would have been that I was already there, not here in the middle of Oxford’.332 John Reith should have enjoyed dinner with his brother in London, but:
I do not know whether it was the rich food to which one was a stranger, or the blaze of lights, or the orderly and ever-luxurious amenities; or the difference in atmosphere generally, and the crowds of young men who should, one thought, be in uniform. Anyhow it all jarred; I was out of touch with this sort of life and felt resentful of it.333
H. E. L. Mellersh thought that ‘there was always some disappointment in these leaves, the difficulty to fit back, in so short a period, into home life, the feeling of alienation from the home front outlook. Rather, one wanted to be with one’s companions but not at war: one wanted a binge, a spree, a night on the town, which meant going to “a show” which is to say to the theatre.’334
To the difficulty of fitting in was added the anguish of parting: it nearly finished even Frank Crozier. After saying goodbye to his wife and child at Charing Cross he declared: ‘I vow to myself never to come on leave again, even if I get through.’ Two days later he received a letter telling him: ‘After you left … we went to the hotel and cried ourselves to sleep, Baba in my arms.’335 It is small wonder that some men declined leave. ‘I said Goodbye, Sir, when we left home,’ said one soldier, ‘I couldn’t stand it again.’336 And there was the final agony of returning to one’s unit to find that familiar faces had gone. Norman Tennant ‘was grieved to hear that Arthur Driver’s brother and Gunner Gee had been killed at the OP during my absence. I felt very bad about this and in some way responsible for their loss.’ Like so many hundreds of thousands of men who made that short sea crossing he was drawn back to the front by a combination of legal obligation, the expectation of family and friends, and, above all, a sense of obligation to those he had left behind. The mixture was infinitely variable, but for most men, almost despite themselves, the carrot of mateship weighed heavier than the stick of coercion.
ENVOI
A new life began with the armistice. Captain Charles Douie declared that the soldier’s abiding memory of the armistice was of silence free from gunfire, while the civilian’s was one of enthusiastic noise. He knew at once that an old world had passed. ‘We learned to hold in high account some values no longer of much account in a protected country – courage, fidelity, loyalty to friends,’ he wrote. ‘Death was to us a byword. Our lives were forfeit, and we knew it.’1 He argued that while Britain had risen to meet the challenge of war, it was far less successful in meeting the expectations of peace, and this corrupted popular remembrance of the war, for ‘the men who had never lost heart in the darkest hours of 1918’ now faced the spectre of unemployment ‘without the support of either the old comradeship or the old faith’.2 Frank Richards DCM MM, still a private, having repeatedly turned down promotion, felt much the same. For him the armistice opened the door to: ‘a funny world and I have come to the conclusion that the lead-swingers and the dodgers get on best in it. Since 1921 I have had a pretty tough time and have had long periods of unemployment and I expect there are thousands of old soldiers who are worse off than I am.’3
Even as silence replaced din on 11 November 1918, many men recognised that, as Graham Seton-Hutchison put it: ‘The only life which they had ever known had come to an end; and the future opened mysteriously, offering what?’4 T. P. Marks remembered his train journey home with veterans ‘almost all of whom hoped to start a life of which they had dreamt in the trenches, in the wide steppes of Russia or on the River Piave’.5 The blighting of these aspirations struck many veterans as the cruellest aspect of their service. Many of those who came to look upon the war as waste and sham did so, not at the time of the armistice, but through the lens of penury and disillusionment that characterised the postwar years for all too many of them.
‘Only those men who actually march back from the battle line on 11th November, 1918, can ever know or realise the mixed feelings then in the hearts of combatants,’ wrote Frank Crozier. ‘We are dazed.’6 Stuart Dolden was making breakfast for his company that day when he heard a gunner on a horse careering through the village yelling that the war was over. He assumed ‘that the strain had been too much for him, and that something had snapped in his brain’. When the news was confirmed, he and his comrades did not ‘conduct ourselves like a crowd of maniacs’: they knew the Germans were doughty fighters, and feared that it might only be a truce. There was, however, a profound sense of relief: ‘Frankly I had had enough, and felt thoroughly weary and in that respect I was not alone.’7 The 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers greeted the news with ‘anticlimax relieved by some spasmodic cheering … by a general atmosphere of “slacking off for the day” and by the notes of a lively band in the late afternoon’. One of its officers endorsed Charles Douie’s reflections. ‘To me the most remarkable feature of that day and night was the uncanny silence that pervaded,’ he thought. ‘No rumbling of guns, no staccato of machine guns, nor did the roar of exploding dumps break into the night as it had so often done. The War was over.’8 Frank Richards, for his part, celebrated by adjourning to the cellar of a house and playing pontoon: ‘About six hours later I rose up, stony broke … But I consoled myself with the thought that I had arrived in France broke and would leave it the same way.’9
Guy Chapman’s comrades in the Royal Fusiliers accepted the armistice with a shrug.
On 11th November we marched back fifteen miles to Bethencourt. A blanket of fog covered the countryside. At eleven o’clock we slung on our packs and tramped
along the muddy pavé. The band played but there was very little singing. ‘Before a man comes to be wise, he is half dead with catarrhs and aches, with sore eyes, and a worn-out body.’ We were very old, very tired, and now very wise.10
Lancelot Spicer (Cambridge undergraduate four years before, and now a brigade major with DSO and MC and Bar) was overcome by sheer bewilderment. He was:
too deluged with the idea of the Armistice to write more … Troops marching along the road by platoons at intervals – a fresh autumn day.
An early telegram has given the expected news ‘Operations will cease at 11 am’
The men cannot grasp it – they have become so used to this soldier life, so numbed to endurance that they find it hard to believe they can live otherwise.
At 11 o’clock, under orders (and for that reason only!) the troops are halted and give three cheers – but there is no enthusiasm. Of course they are glad it is all over – but they do not realise it.11
Heavy casualties in the recent fighting of the Hundred Days were uppermost in many minds. James Jack noted that his brigade had lost two-thirds of its strength in a month, and all too many officers and men knew of a comrade killed at the very end. Let one individual tragedy stand for so many others. Eddie Giffard had not followed his two elder brothers into the army, but went off from Marlborough to help manage a sheep station in New South Wales. One brother was badly wounded on the retreat from Mons and another was killed at First Ypres. Eddie returned to England in 1914, joined the Royal Artillery, and by 1918 was commanding a field battery. His last diary entry, on 8 November, reports ‘rumours of Armistice’, but he never lived to see it. He was killed shortly afterwards by one of the last shells fired at his battery.12
The mood at GHQ was more upbeat: Reginald Tompson tells of ‘a very cheery evening, but it was spoilt by the idiocy of the Administrator of the WAACS who refused to let them dance. A very boisterous evening.’ Perhaps unsurprisingly, his diary for 12 November reports: ‘Rode early, with an awful head.’13 Some units celebrated with due formality. Burgon Bickersteth was in Leuze when the hour struck, and: ‘the trumpeters played “cease fire” and then the band crashed out “God Save the King”. The infantry presented arms, and every cavalryman sat on his horse at attention, the officers saluting. Then followed the Marseillaise, and after that the Belgian National Anthem.’14 The officers of William Carr’s battery of Field Artillery rode into Maubeuge and were royally entertained by the population.
After drinking a good deal they enjoyed a final sing-song, concluding with Scots Wha Hae, upon which they jumped on the only English officer present. ‘The French were scared,’ he remembered, ‘I believe they feared we would kill him.’15 Major Martin Littlewood was invited to celebrate with some Irish sappers, who had taken over a newly-liberated house. He had just enjoyed ‘an excellent curry’ when: ‘A distraught lady in deep mourning burst into her home. She inspected our plates, and then hurried into the back garden. She came back even more upset, demanding: “But where is Henri, the children’s friend?” Where indeed was the Belgian hare?’16
There was also ambivalence amongst those in England. H. E. L. Mellersh was on leave in London, and dropped in to see a comrade in Millbank Hospital before embarking for France. As he walked up Whitehall towards the West End, he felt strangely dissatisfied.
I should have liked to have done a bit more since retiring from the March retreat; I should have liked to have won that MC. A munition girl passed me; and she called, ‘What’s the matter? – cheer up!!’ Was I looking as gloomy as that? I was surprised at myself. I make no pretence that mine was a typical mood.’17
But there was certainly great rejoicing too. Captain Harry Ogle, on a course in Blackpool while recovering from a wound, was at once dismissed from his lecture, and he and his fellow students ‘gave one yell and rushed out to join the others, and a surging throng of all ranks mingled with civilians to converge on the Town Hall square just when the Mayor of Blackpool announced the armistice. The town went wild with relief and joy.’18 But many soldiers felt uneasy about entering into the spirit of it all. Lieutenant Ernest Parker drifted towards Trafalgar Square just in time for the official announcement.
Soon lorries carrying munition workers began joy-riding through Trafalgar Square, the passengers dancing on the floors of the lorries and screaming at the top of their voices. Alas, I could not share their high spirits, for the new life which was now beckoning had involved an enormous sacrifice, and would be yet another challenge for those like myself who had had the good fortune to survive the perils of the long war. Surrounded by people whose experiences had been so different, I felt myself a stranger and I was lost in thoughts they could not possibly share.19
The news found Robert Graves on leave in North Wales, and sent him ‘out walking alone along the dyke above the marches of Rhuddlan, cursing and sobbing and thinking of the dead’.20
The overwhelming majority of the 1,859,000 troops in France and Belgium when the armistice came into effect were wartime volunteers or conscripts: about half of them were eighteen years old, and had known no real life before the war. As Sergeant Will Fisher observed in his diary on 12 November, there was: ‘One topic of conversation now: demobilisation.’21 A few soldiers took the view that they had automatically become civilians with the conclusion of hostilities, but were swiftly disabused. Brian Lathan, private in 1914 and now a captain lugging his baggage onto a boat for England, recalled that: ‘The rank and file made it quite plain that in their opinion they had already done with the army, and demobilisation was only a formality.’22
There were noisier rumblings of discontent, provoked by the slowness of the demobilisation process and fears that all the jobs would have been snapped up by the first men to return, and in the winter of 1918–19 and beyond there were real fears amongst the army’s high command of the spread of what it termed ‘Bolshevism’ in its ranks. Harold Macmillan admitted that: ‘Even the high state of discipline of the Brigade of Guards was threatened, though it never yielded, by the genuine indignation which was felt.’23 James Jack testified to ‘serious insubordination in the back areas – none at the front – by the unfair way in which demobilisation is being conducted ‘.24 While Charles Carrington’s company remained ‘soldiers, and good for any military duty, many of them were trade unionists, with a strong sense of solidarity, even if this meant a sympathetic strike’.25 On balance, though, the ‘soldiers’ strikes’ and other disturbances that winter were less an explosion of working-class consciousness than a firmly-expressed wish for citizen-soldiers to become civilians again.
A substantial force – over 32,000 men by August 1919 – was required to garrison the Rhineland territory relinquished under the terms of the armistice. Some units marched straight there, bands and regimental colours sent out from Britain to permit impressive entries into German cities. The army’s peacetime standards of smartness were reimposed: the commanding officer of the Welsh Guards was reproved by his brigadier who had seen ‘Two men going about like poets!’ with long hair. Older soldiers from the Army of Occupation were demobilised individually over the months that followed, to be replaced by drafts of youngsters from England. Other units were disbanded in France, collapsing, like a deflated balloon, as officers and men were sent home for demobilisation. Units destined to be retained in the post-war army lost their wartime soldiers on demobilisation and were topped up with regulars from elsewhere. Although the men of Stephen Graham’s Scots Guards battalion roared with laughter when an officer suggested that some might want to sign on as regulars, a couple of the six hundred in Guy Chapman’s battalion were tempted:
‘What do you want to stay on for, Hockley? You’re married, got a family.’ ‘Well, Sir, do you think there’s anyone else in England who’ll keep my missus and kids and pay me a quid a week pocket money?’ His logic was irresistible. He was re-engaged.26
Officers and men destined to return to civilian life were divided into demobilisation groups and each group subdivided
into a range of demobilisation numbers, with different priorities for release. The first group, generally pre-war civil servants, were the demobilisers who would administer the system in Britain. The second group comprised ‘pivotal men’ who would, the government believed, create jobs for others. In the third category came the ‘slip men’ who had a slip filled out by an employer promising a job. Two remaining categories comprised men expected to find work rapidly, and those for whom the process was expected to be more difficult. All soldiers would report to one of twenty-six ‘dispersal stations’, where they would be given a ration book, pay for twenty-eight days’ terminal leave, and a baggy civilian ‘demob suit’. They could either keep their army greatcoat, give it in at the centre, or hand it in to any station master subsequently and receive £1 in return.
The system was sensible enough, but it had one serious flaw. It favoured men who had recently joined the army, because they were far more likely to be able to produce slips from potential employers or demonstrate their usefulness to the post-war economy. Men who had served longest were disadvantaged, and the dissatisfaction nerved some of the most serious disturbances, with soldiers in uniform taking part in protest marches with banners declaring: ‘We Won the War, Give Us Our Tickets’, and ‘We Want Civvie Suits’. And there were many who agreed with Graham Greenwell that the system of numbering was decidedly odd. ‘I wrote to Carew Hunt the other day and asked him to find out what was the position at Oxford,’ he wrote. ‘Students are “Class 43” on the demobilisation list – the last but one, whereas “Gentlemen” are in “Class 37". So it would seem better to be a mere gentleman.’27 After the general election of 1918 the plan was effectively scrapped, and demobilisation went on at a faster pace, with 56 percent of officers and 78 percent of men eligible for release discharged in ten weeks: 14,000 men were demobilised daily at the height of the process.