The Lost Tommies. Ross Coulthart

      There were also the ‘bombers’ of the West Yorkshires, who arrived in Vignacourt on 5 April 1916 for a well-earned rest from months of fighting. Among them were Bernard Coyne, John Bannister and Harry Duckett. The bombers were a unit of men specially trained in the use of hand grenades, a form of warfare that required close and bloody fighting at the sharpest point of the front lines. These men knew their odds were not good going into the coming Somme offensive. Two of that trio would fall within weeks; the other would almost make it through the war, only to fall in its final few weeks.

      

      PLATE 4 Bombers of the 1/6th Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment in Vignacourt during their eleven days in the area from 5 April 1916.

      PLATES 5–7 1/6th West Yorkshire bombers Bernard Coyne, John Bannister and Harry Duckett.

      For eight weeks the West Yorkshires took their rest and training in Vignacourt but they knew what was coming. One history records that the men came to regard their time in the village as their ‘fattening up for the slaughter’.⁶

      Within possibly just days and certainly weeks of his photograph being taken in Louis Thuillier’s farmyard (Plates 8 and 9, below), Second Lieutenant Cuthbert George Higgins, the smooth-faced young officer sitting in the middle of the men of C Company from the 6th Battalion of the West Yorkshires, was dead. Higgins was a Londoner from Hanover Square – his father, William, is listed in the 1901 census as clerk to a brewing company – and it is not clear how his son came to be commissioned with the West Yorkshires. Within hours of the beginning of the Battle of the Somme, on 1 July 1916, the twenty-four-year-old was killed in the British Army’s massive attack on the town of Thiepval. Assaulting the town required the breaching of a maze of trenches heavily protected with a huge number of machine guns, across an open and exposed no man’s land. Higgins was in the reserves, waiting in Thiepval Wood to follow the leading waves of troops that had gone over the top at 6.30 a.m. When the order finally came at around 3.30 p.m. for his company to advance, logistical failures meant the 6th Battalion had to go over alone:

      It is a misnomer to say they attacked Thiepval, for not a man got more than a hundred yards across No Man’s Land. ‘The men dropped down in rows, and platoons of the other companies following behind remained in our lines, as to do anything else was suicide. It is impossible to describe the angry despair which filled every man at this unspeakable moment. It was a gallant attack,’ said the Brigade Diary, ‘but could not succeed from the first.’ The enemy’s parapet was alive with machine guns. Again and again attempts were made to climb the parapets and advance, but all in vain, those who succeeded in reaching No Man’s Land only added their bodies to the pile of dead and dying. The 1/6th was the only Battalion of the 146th Infantry Brigade which succeeded in obeying the orders to advance, with what result has been described – every third man in the Battalion had become a casualty – the results were nil!⁷

      PLATE 8 Close-up of Second Lieutenant, C. G. Higgins, C Company, 6th Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment, taken during the battalion’s eight-week stay in Vignacourt from April to June 1916.

      PLATE 9 West Yorkshire Regiment 6th Battalion soldiers, probably from C Company under the command of then Captain R. A. Fawcett (seated, second row, second from left). The officer first from left is a Lieutenant Hornshaw. The officer third from left is Second Lieutenant C. G. Higgins.

      It puts the war’s appalling losses in some perspective to pause and consider that toll; one-third of this one small battalion, men whose faces are probably among these Thuillier images, was wounded or killed on the very first day of the Somme … so many casualties in just one day of fighting, in a war that was to last for years.

      PLATES 10–12 Young soldiers of the West Yorkshire Regiment just before the Battle of the Somme – a final few days’ rest in Vignacourt before the Big Push.

      Almost a century later it is easy to imagine that the ghosts of these lost Tommies still linger in the ancient French farmhouse where these photographs were taken. On a bitterly cold winter morning, above the very farm courtyard where thousands of young soldiers posed, I am stumbling up an ancient wooden spiral staircase on the last leg of what has been an intriguing historical detective story chasing the clues in the Thuillier images. Each step takes me further back in history, through the detritus of a family home stretching back generations. The wobbly and uneven steps are layered with dust, and I have to steady myself against the crumbling plaster and brick walls. I feel my way in the murky gloom as I step into the attic of this old farmhouse.

      The attic is a long, dusty, oak-floored room. Although I am wrapped against the bitter cold of a French winter, the biting chill still penetrates the gaps in the eaves and walls. We move aside old leather suitcases, saw blades and bottles, a stack of empty salvaged Second World War American jerrycans; in one corner is an elegant, perfectly preserved nineteenth-century baby’s carriage with large painted cast-iron wheels. Above our heads the knots of old tree limbs can still be seen in the hand-chiselled oak beams supporting the heavy tiled roof.

      My breath is visible as condensation in the frigid air. There is only the sound of feet shuffling up the stairs behind me, and the muffled noise of the occasional vehicle outside. We are all mute with anticipation. It scarcely seems possible that this decrepit attic could be, after months of searching, the place where a treasure trove of extraordinary First World War photographs has lain hidden. There are mounds of old motorcycling magazines from the 1930s that we carefully lift aside, peeling back the decades of a family’s jumble. Everything is covered in a thick layer of dust.

      Then, by the light of an attic window, we see three old chests.

      I lift the lid of one of them, a battered ancient metal and wood chest. And there they are: thousands of glass photographic plates – candid images of First World War British soldiers behind the lines. There were also Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, American, Indian, French and other Allied troops.

      PLATE 13 The battered chests in which the glass plates were stored. (Courtesy Brendan Harvey)

THE ORIGINS OF ‘TOMMY’

      There was a touching naivety among the officers and men who had marched to war as ‘Pals’ and volunteers; the depth of patriotic feeling and the urge to rush off to war to defend Mother England may seem extraordinary today. But this was an era of the great British Empire and there was enormous pride and loyalty to King and country. Men were proud to be British ‘Tommies’, a curious term for British soldiers that many believe has its origins in a story that underlines the blood and sacrifice that for most Britons back then made Great Britain and its empire ‘Great’. The term ‘Tommy Atkins’ was being used as a generic description of British troops early in the eighteenth century. But one account of how First World War troops came to be known as ‘Tommies’ was that it was appropriated from the story of a British soldier named Tommy Atkins who had died in a battle in Flanders, Belgium, in 1794. The story went that the Duke of Wellington was inspecting badly wounded soldiers after