November 30th 1916

November 30, 2016dpdevitt 3 Comments

2nd Lieut. Maurice Jacks (KRRC) has returned wounded from the Front. He was involved in the attacks that took place around the River Ancre earlier this month.

“The preliminary bombardment was in full swing, and our guns were giving the Germans beans; we were in the middle of them, so the noise was pretty terrific. The censor will not allow me to tell you how many there were, but I believe in this battle there were more than in any other of the Somme offensive.

It was the night of November 12^th when we swam into our tents; we had to be up early the next morning ready to support the Division who were attacking. At 5.40 a.m. the guns loosed off ‘five minutes intense,’ and at 5.45 the infantry went over the top.

Shortly afterwards we moved up close behind them and halted in a valley to await orders. Bunches of ‘kamerads’ were coming in, many of them wounded and all more or less sullen; even our witticisms failed to cheer them up. Absurdly exaggerated reports of the success of the attack were current.

It was not until late in the afternoon that our orders arrived; and it was dark when, heavily laden with every conceivable form of tool and weapon, we went over the top. The guns showed amazing excitement, and their flashes were even more brilliant and alarming than Skipper’s lighting in ‘Macbeth.’

Our job was to clear out the first three German lines, which in their haste the attacking troops had not properly dealt with in the morning. There were any number of Huns, especially in the fourth line, where we finally settled down; all were reduced more or less to the Kamerad stage, with the exception of a few rash Prussians, and all night long we were coming across large dug-outs full of prisoners.

The trench was about one foot deep, having been battered out of recognition by our artillery. All the hours of darkness we had to spend in trying to make some cover, and when the foggy morning came we had it about four feet deep.

We were not more than 70 yards from Beaucourt – or what was left of it; and at 7 a.m. we were to attack and take it. About 6.30 the Boches clearly ‘got the wind up,’ and bombarded us vigorously; a large chunk of shell hit me in the shoulder, but the wound was not bad; I was buried four times, and the fifth burial, which was complete, finally laid me out – leaving me with nine bits of shell in the head and face.

Somebody dug me out and bandaged me; and for the next half-hour I was busy digging out my Company Commander, who had been buried by the same shell, and tying up badly wounded men. Then feeling rather ‘groggy’ I decided to try to get out; by this time the trench had been nearly filled in, and the Germans were active with their M.G’s; so the journey was not altogether a safe one.

I came across a wounded Hun (a Prussian) hit in the foot and walking with difficulty; I gave him a hand – he was in a terrible funk, and full of ‘Kameradie’ (a very technical term), and altogether rather beastly! He thought that we would win the war but ‘would not need many ships to take our men home.’ This, I must say, is a very prevalent idea among the German privates.

On the way down, I met a man I knew escorting a bunch of prisoners, among whom were two officers; the latter, he said, had complained to him at being put under the escort of a private soldier – they expected English officers to escort them!

At the dressing-station I was patched up, and from there my progress to Blighty was slow and painful, but sure.”

Maurice arrived back in England on November 20th and has now been granted 8 weeks sick leave. Not surprisingly, he is still suffering from headaches. We wish him a speedy recovery.

November 23rd 1916

November 23, 2016dpdevitt 2 Comments

Most of our reports from the battlefield of the Somme have concerned the infantry thus far. 2^nd Lieut. Humphrey Arden (RGA) writes to redress the balance.

18/11/16. “I expect you have received a thousand and one letters descriptive of the Push during these last few months, but perhaps the gunners’ point of view is not so well known.

We have been on this front practically from the beginning of the show and so far have had no rest – as a unit – night or day. The “crowded hour” of going over, with, perhaps, rest or withdrawal afterwards is not for us. Infantry may come, field artillery may go, but we, the heavies, go on for ever…

Do you know, I haven’t seen a civilian for three months, nor been inside a standing house for four. Mud walls, sand bag roofs – et voila tout.

…It is a very different sitting in your own O.P with the battery under your thumb at the other end of the wire. Then one tells the guns what to do – which is so much better than being told by a total stranger what he (often wrongly) imagines they are doing. Besides, it cheers one up to see the cautious Hun duck and run for his life, and to pursue him remorselessly till he reaches his dug-out or gets out of sight. It is better still to catch him unawares and see the bits fly – as I did yesterday.

That sort of thing makes him peevish and he looses off blindly. His blind shooting is not, and never in my experience has been, good. Of course he is bound to hit something sometimes.

He put a good round eight-inch through the roof of a neighbouring battery’s officers’ mess some weeks ago. The shell happened to be a dud and landed on its nose between the major’s knees. ‘Dear me,’ said the latter, ‘how convenient,’ and he struck a match on the base and lit his pipe. A good tall yarn? Nevertheless it happened.

…Well, we expect to go on living in this blasted heath and with the help of the wheezy old tanks and their butterfly existence, and the incomparable infantry, be they Australian or Canadians or better still, old English regiments – for they all have their turn down here, we will blast out the wily Hun foot by foot till his moral sickness is greater than he can bear.”

Before the war, Humphrey was for a short time a master at Eagle House Preparatory School. He was due to go to Cuddesdon College to prepare for Holy Orders.

November 19th 1916

November 19, 2016dpdevitt Leave a comment

Seeing the long lists of those killed or wounded, which appear daily in our newspapers, one could be forgiven perhaps, for wondering what good it is doing. There has been no real break-though on the Somme; indeed the gains seem small.

One of our Old Boys has laid his hands on a captured diary written by a Lieutenant of the 2nd Company, 180th Infantry Regiment of the German Army. This entry indicates that the enemy is clearly suffering as badly as our troops (or perhaps worse?)

Aug 25th: “Thiepval and Hill 141 represent a hell that no imagination can picture. Shelters are destroyed and uninhabitable; trenches exist no more. One lies in shell holes which change hourly, no, each minute. The heaviest shells come whistling in, close this one up and unearth the dead.

All communication is above ground, therefore the losses are startling. In 2-3 days and nights at most, a company is wiped out. Wax-yellow, without expression, the stream of wounded passes. Warm food is not to be thought of; one takes iron rations, which the stomach can scarcely digest.

Today we had a tremendously heavy bombardment, which surpassed anything I have ever experienced. Who can say if it was our own or the enemy’s artillery? Our own artillery has always shown an inclination to shoot short. We stand here under the most severe artillery fire ever seen by the world; directed so accurately by 29 captive balloons and about 30 aviators that bring under fire every shelter and every junction of a trench.

Against that, we have 6 captive balloons, which venture up a bare 600 ft high for fear of the enemy’s aviators… they are so far behind (our trenches), in order to get out of range of the naval guns, that our artillery can scarcely be said to have aerial observers. Even though the infantry observers do their duty to the uttermost, that is insufficient compensation.”

This can be said to be encouraging, but it was written back in August, and here we are in November…

November 12th 1916

November 12, 2016dpdevitt Leave a comment

It is always a pleasure to welcome back our old boys and this week we were delighted to receive a visit from Lieut. Henry Tyndale (KRRC). He was on excellent form, although still lame from the wound he received last year in Flanders.

Harry has given us an account of how this came about for publication in this term’s ‘Draconian.’

“Away to our right, on high ground rising in the middle of a large wood, was a strong German redoubt, apparently untouched by our guns. From this redoubt machine-guns were keeping the edge of the wood under fire so that those parties who emerged soon lost their leaders and many of their men. My own men were held up by those in front, who could not move, and while finding out the exact situation, I was hit.

Very fortunately I fell down into a shallow shell-crater. One of my men, who was beside me, straightened out my broken leg and bound up my wound, placing the broken part in a rough splint by tying it against a spade-handle. Once this was done I had very little pain, provided that I kept quite still, and when the attempted counter-attack was over and the men had reformed in the original support trench, I was alone with one other wounded man.

As we were so near the open ground and probably under view of the enemy, I knew that there would be no prospect of a stretcher until dusk. I sent back a reassuring message to my Company Commander, who would know where I was lying. The afternoon was beautifully warm and I could watch the sun gradually getting lower in the heavens. There was little firing.

Towards dusk a party of volunteer stretcher-bearers came across me, but they had no means for carrying me in. I waited a long time for their return with the necessary stretcher, but night fell and flares went up along the line and I began to wonder whether they had forgotten me.

An hour after sunset I heard men moving in the undergrowth near me. It was with considerable difficulty that I could guide them to my shell-hole, so thick was the wood. They had no stretcher, but someone produced an overcoat, and with rifles run up the sleeves, this provided a fair stretcher. With difficulty they got me under way, but soon I was behind a small barrier of sandbags on a track through the wood, and a wide floor board proved an excellent substitute for a stretcher.

At the dressing station I met my Company Commander, who had been searching for me in vain and was greatly relieved to see me in safe hands; before dawn I was under chloroform, having my leg set, and in the early sunlight the ambulance took me to the train.”

Harry is a Winchester man through and through. Having won a scholarship there in 1900 and subsequently another one to New College (where he got a First in Classical Moderations and Literae Humaniores) he returned to teach at Winchester.

Being unfit for active service, Harry is now working in the Intelligence Department at the War Office.

November 6th 1916

November 6, 2016dpdevitt Leave a comment

Although France is currently the centre of attention in this war, the North-West Frontier continues to require policing, in order to thwart German efforts to threaten British power in India.

Lieut. Jack Smyth VC (15th Sikhs), who wrote to us in June about the signalling course he was sent on, has written to say that he is back on active service there:

28/10/16 “Here we are on the frontier, once more on active service and I am writing this in the Mess tent, well dug down below ground to escape stray bullets…

I arrived at Peshawar to find the regiment had marched out the day before and orders awaiting me to command the Depot.

A newly joined subaltern came up and reported that he had been left as Adjutant and handed over piles of correspondence, which we had to get down to at once…

We had two or three very strenuous days with the usual notes from everyone who had gone out with the regiment asking for various things they had left behind. This sort of thing:

‘Please get the keys of my bungalow from my gardener and on the bunch you will find a brass key, which opens the third drawer of my writing table. At the back of the drawer you will find my despatch case and in it my cheque book. Please send this out by the milk lorry tomorrow. Awfully sorry to bother you, as I know how busy you must be,’ but this is part of the Depot commander’s job…

Three days ago I was relieved and sent out to join the regiment. The Mohmands with whom we are fighting, or supposed to be fighting, have so far left us severely alone, but come down at night and snipe and hurl abuse at us…

We can’t attack them because they would only retire to their hills and we should need a large force and a long line of communication to follow them, and they won’t attack us because they think barbed wire and mountain guns an unfair advantage.”

Before this, Jack had been on leave in Kashmir, where he reports that he met up with fellow Old Dragon, 2nd Lieut. Edward Sheepshanks (Indian Army) at a dinner party,

“…and thereupon had an OD dinner on our own and drank to the Skipper and the OPS, which astonished the rest of the party…”

Knowing how lively an affair an OD dinner can be, I am not surprised they were astonished!

(At least there were no Wykehamists present to sing a joyous chorus in praise of the present subjunctive – and they did not have to suffer my recitation of the Banjo Song!)

* * * * * * *

Today is the second anniversary of the death of Lieut. Roderick Haigh (Queen’s Royal West Surreys). Thanks to his bequest, which paid for our shooting range, the boys will be competing for the Roderick Haigh Cup at the end of this term.

He was a noble man, who saw it as a privilege to die for his country.