The Lost Tommies. Ross Coulthart

The Royal Sussex Regiment

       Armistice Day

       Shocked

       Notes

       Bibliography

       Index of Names

       Acknowledgements

      About the Publisher

      The men who were boys when I was a boy are dead. Indeed they never even grew to be men. They were slaughtered in youth; and the parents of them have grown lonely, the girls they would have married have grown grey in spinsterhood, and the work they would have done remains undone. J. B. Priestley ¹

Prologue

      … average men and women were delighted at the prospect of war … the anticipation of carnage was delightful to something like ninety per cent of the population. I had to revise my views on human nature.

      Bertrand Russell, on 1914 ²

      There was a time before, and, for those who survived, there was a time after. But for generations of men and women, the cataclysm of the First World War left a raw emotional scar, a legacy of loss and tragedy that still lingers today. It is difficult to comprehend one century on just how readily so many young men clamoured to go to war. The patriotic fervour that followed the declaration of war in August 1914 may seem quaintly naive today but for many of the men rushing to enlist the biggest fear was that the fighting would all be over before they got the chance to teach the Germans a lesson.

      PLATE 1 A soldier from the 7th or 8th Battalion, Leeds Rifles. They were part of the West Yorkshire Regiment – he wears the West Yorkshire shoulder badge.

      On 4 August 1914 thousands of men already serving in territorial reserve regiments, including those with the Prince of Wales’ Own West Yorkshire Regiment, received the long green envelopes marked ‘Mobilization – Urgent’. Recruitment offices were also overwhelmed by young men rushing to enlist, willing to do their duty for King and country; a flood reaching 30,000 a day at its peak.

      I went to Bellevue Barracks, home of the 6th West Yorks, a Territorial battalion, and found there were crowds round there. Everybody was excited and every time they saw a soldier he was cheered. It was very patriotic and people were singing ‘Rule Britannia’, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, all the favourites. A challenge had been laid down over Belgium and they were eager to take it up. I should have been home at nine but I stayed there until late at night. Everybody stood in groups saying ‘We’ve got to beat the Germans’ and quite a number were already setting off to enlist.³

      Few anticipated the horror of what was to come. But the survivors would never forget it. George Morgan was one of the first volunteers for the West Yorkshires. When he admitted to the recruiting sergeant that he was only sixteen, the sergeant advised him to go outside, come back and tell him something different. George returned with the implausible claim that he was now in fact nineteen; he was then sworn in to service.

      It was the biggest incident in my life. I’ve lived sixty years afterwards, and I’ve never, never got over it. It’s always been there in my mind. It was the biggest thing that ever happened to me. We’d all got to know each other very well and we were all very good comrades, in fact I don’t think there’s ever been better comradeship ever … and then all at once when this day, this terrible day of 1st July, we were wiped out.⁴

      Just two years into the war, on that first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, it was one battalion in particular of those eager West Yorkshires, the 10th, that was to earn the dubious distinction of having suffered more casualties on that dreadful day than any other British Army unit. Twenty-two officers and 688 men were either killed or wounded, from a unit normally 1,000-strong; more than two-thirds of the men failed to answer the roll call the following day. During the months the Battle of the Somme raged, some one million men from both sides of the conflict combined would be either killed or wounded – and for little discernible gain to either side.

      The West Yorkshires was just one of dozens of regiments that went over the top on the first day of the Somme – over 20,000 British soldiers would die in that first twenty-four hours alone; there were 57,470 casualties. Such losses are so overwhelming in their magnitude, so great was the industrial scale of the slaughter, that one can sometimes overlook the fact that each of those broken bodies was a father, a son, a brother, a lover or friend.

      Throughout the war, in a quieter corner of Picardy just behind the Somme front lines, soldiers from regiments like the West Yorkshires enjoyed brief respites from the conflict. It was in the small village of Vignacourt that thousands of soldiers met a local French couple who dedicated themselves throughout the war to photographing the soldiers – partly to supplement their income but also because they no doubt realized the profound historic significance of what they were witnessing on their doorstep. They were civilian amateur photographers Louis and Antoinette Thuillier and, as battalion after battalion visited their village of Vignacourt, the couple captured images of the men (individually and in groups) before they were once again thrown back into the trenches, all too often to suffer grievous wounding or death. Among the pictures taken by Louis and Antoinette is the one below featuring members of the 6th Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment.

      PLATE 3 Soldiers of the 6th Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment in Vignacourt while they were billeted in the area from early April 1916 through to 9 June.

      One of those West Yorkshiremen photographed was a young Bradford man, Walter Scales, a twenty-year-old clerk when his 6th Battalion West Yorkshires was mobilized. He was an officer – barely out of his teens – in a proud territorial unit made up largely of volunteer city workers like himself. Walter looked so young when he joined up that his brother officers called him ‘the Babe’. Within weeks of this photograph being taken by the Thuilliers, he was to lead his men into the horrors of the Battle of the Somme.

      PLATE 2 Close-up of Captain Walter Alexander Scales, 6th Battalion West Yorkshires.

      For all the troops, Vignacourt was a welcome relief from the front line. A 6th Battalion history records the eight weeks the unit spent training and resting in and around Vignacourt as one of the happier times the battalion enjoyed throughout the entire war:

      If we looked at this Vignacourt period from the point of view of the official War Diary we should dismiss it in a few words, something as follows:- ‘Training carried on vigorously: Battalion and Field Days weekly: Reinforcements of three officers and 170 other ranks received in May: two officers and 100 other ranks provided for work on New Railway Sidings at Vignacourt; battalion provides Brigade Head Quarters’ Guard every fourth day, etc, etc.’ The War Diary would thus compress the life of eight weeks into as many lines, whereas a few lurid hours in the Leipzig Salient on July 15th would fill a page. Most of the members of the Battalion would reverse the emphasis, however, and become eloquent on a joy ride to Amiens: a favourite estaminet at Vignacourt: an anniversary dinner: a jolly billet; and they would dismiss the affair in the Leipzig