24hr Trench E-Book

Andrew Robertshaw

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 140

Beschreibung

The trench was the frontline Tommy's home. He lived, ate, slept, and sometimes died in this narrow passage amongst the slime of mud and blood on the Western Front. His washbasin was a mess-tin, his cooker – a small fire built into the wall, his entertainment – his friends, his fear – the man living in the trench on the other side of No Man's Land. Over 6 million men died whilst serving in the trenches – how did they live in them? For the first time, World War I historian Andrew Robertshaw and a group of soldiers, archaeologists and historians use official manuals and diaries to build a real trench system and live in it for 24 hours, recreating the frontline Tommy's daily existence, answering the questions: How do you build a trench quietly? How clean can you really get in a trench? How easy is it to sleep? How do you keep yourself entertained? How to do you stay alive and kill the enemy? And many more… Hour-by-hour, the Tommy's day unfolds through stunning colour photographs in this ground-breaking experiment in Great War history.

Leseprobe

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Having spent seven years as a classroom teacher and twenty-two years at the National Army Museum in Chelsea, I estimate that I have taught more than half a million young people about the Western Front in the Great War. In that time, I have tried to describe the routine of trench life, rather than simply barrages, going over the top and endless war poetry. Sadly, the nature of the curriculum and the focus of interest has always been the day of battle rather than the ordinary tour in the frontline. My grandfather served between 1916 and 1918. In this time he was involved in the closing days of the Battle of the Somme, was in reserve during the Battle of Arras, in the frontline for the major German attack of spring 1918 and was in action during the Allied ‘100 Days’ offensive. During that time, he was ‘in action’ for no more than a few days, was wounded three times and came home once, wounded. By far the majority of his time was spent alternating between weeks in ‘the line’, ‘in reserve’ and ‘resting’. An account of his career, which focused on his few days in battle, may emphasise what we find interesting today, but it is not typical of his experience or that of his comrades.

One early idea I had with the ‘24-Hour Trench’ concept was to use a replica trench in a museum as a backdrop on to which an audio-visual display could be projected. The plan would be to speed up reality to compress the typical trench day into something that a museum audience would be happy to watch. However, every time the project was discussed in a gallery planning group, someone would suggest ‘just’ adding in some shellfire, a gas attack or a trench raid to make the experience ‘more typical’. My response that this would, if anything, make the whole thing less typical was ignored and the project was quietly abandoned. This resulted in my decision to turn the project into a book covering just 24 hours in a real trench, in a real location at some point in the war. The advantage of a book is that I had complete control of the content and that the readers could take their time to absorb the detail. In addition, by being based on real events, it would not simply be another ‘typical’ book about the Great War.

To make the book as accurate as possible required a great deal of research and I was very fortunate that my colleague Steve Roberts was able to use his time at the National Archives, Kew, to look at various war diaries for units relevant to my chosen sector of the line – Hooge near Ypres. One disappointment for me as a Yorkshireman was the discovery that the most appropriate division in the line was recruited in Lancashire. However, historical accuracy forbade me from tinkering with the facts. The period in which the division held the line between Wieltje to Railway Wood in the spring of 1917 is described in the divisional history as follows:

During the first few months the sector was might be called a ‘quiet’ sector. Both the enemy and ourselves were tired after the strenuous work of the Somme and required, and obtained, rest.

The Story of the 55th (West Lancashire) Division,Rev. J.O. Coop, Liverpool, 1919, p. 46

By being strictly authentic, I was also able to make a key point about the experience of the frontline. One battalion of around 800 men in the division in question suffered two casualties during their tour of frontline duty. One man suffered head injuries when he fell down a well in the dark and another cut himself so badly on corrugated iron that he was medically evacuated and the nature of his injury mentioned in the War Diary. In other words, during nearly four days of frontline service in one of the most disputed areas of the British-held sector of the Western Front despite shelling, snipers, machine guns and mortars, no one was injured sufficiently badly by enemy fire to be treated for their wounds. In the same period, no one was killed! It would always be possible to argue that this was exceptional, the evidence indicates otherwise, but the key fact is that this is what happened. This meant that I felt confident that I could take one day out of a tour of duty in the frontline for an infantry unit, show the full routine in the 24 hours and miss out heavy shelling, mass casualties or any other cliché of movies and still be historically accurate.

The final question was how many men to portray as my ‘typical unit’. By 1917, a platoon of around thirty-six soldiers was the main tactical sub-unit of the British Army. I was daunted by the feeding and housing of this number of soldiers even if they were all volunteers and was aware that I would need rather more trench to house them than I had space to build. The solution was to represent the smallest sub-unit ‘The Section’. This consisted of ten or a dozen men and there were four within each platoon. According to the pencilled additions to my copy of the Training Manual S.S.143, Instruction for The Training of Platoons For Offensive Action, 1917, No.1 Section was equipped with one or more Lewis machine guns, No.2 Section consisted of bombers armed with rifles but trained to throw hand grenades and No.4 Section was armed with rifles equipped with dischargers that could fire grenades to long distance. These were all specialists. The most ‘ordinary’ section was No.3, the riflemen. This is not quite correct, as the men in this section were the best shots, snipers and bayonet fighters. However, to make my section representative of the ordinary soldier it was ideal. All I had to do was to take just over a dozen volunteers, clothe, equip and arm them historically accurately for 1917, then put them in a replica trench system under conditions as close to ‘the real’ experience as possible for just over 24 hours so they could be photographed. When I first thought about the idea, it did seem ambitious. It did not get easier.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The 24hr Trench project involved a very large number of people many of whom never saw the finished trench system, as they were not there for the weekend event and photography. I am immensely grateful for their assistance, advice and, in some cases, sweat, blood and tears. Corporal S. Haines and men of 23rd Regiment Royal Logistic Corps from St David’s Barracks near Bicester carried out the basic work on the trench. Teams of various sizes made up from the following volunteers carried out the rest of the work: Martin Stiles, Steve Roberts, Lesley Wood, Anthony Roberts, Ian Wedge, Mark Khan, Pete Birkett, Max Birkett, Steve Wisdom and Dr David Kenyon. Many of the same people also provided the back-up team for the photography and some spent the night under the stars. The cook for the weekend was Diane Carpenter. There can have been few places on the Western Front in the Great War where the menu included both a vegetarian and vegan option!

The soldiers in the trench were Neil McGurk, Stephen Wisdom, Jonathan Keeling, Paul Harding, Mark Griffin (who also provided the special effects), Pete Birkett, Max Birkett, Ian Wedge, Richard Townsley, Alex Sotheran, Justin Russell, Vince Scopes, Lewis Scopes and Richard Bass. The German sniper was Martin Stiles.

Richard Ingram was a ‘behind the scenes’ influence providing a great deal of useful advice and a few items required for the trench. Another office-based contributor was Natalie Hill who in between work as a volunteer at the Royal Logistic Corps Museum typed text, emailed images and taught me how to use ‘Dropbox’. The sniper items used were provided by Dr Roger Payne. I am immensely grateful for his support in adding a little more very expensive detail to the project.

Phil Erswell who runs PaGe Images took the majority of the photographs. He found himself pitched into 1917 and ended up conducting his longest and coldest shoot in changing light conditions whilst trying to avoid catching glimpses of the twenty-first century. Without his imagination and skill, the whole project could have been a failure.

To put the trench into context Bob Moulder did the superb drawings and even came to the site to measure up and take photographs to ensure that his work was to scale and historically accurate.

A number of suppliers contributed to the project including P.J. Judd Landscapes of East Grinstead who provided free railway sleepers and the Timberstore near Crawley which provided a great deal of inexpensive and some free timber. A good amount of the replica uniform and military equipment was provided by Richard Knight of Khaki on Campaign and the many labels and replica printed material was produced by Geoff Carefoot who runs Tommy’s Pack Fillers. A specialist supplier and one whose products were very welcome by the troops was Joyce Meader who runs Historic Knit. She is a historical military hand knitter and collector of historical military printed knitting patterns.

Finally I would like to thank my wife for putting up with large numbers of people walking mud into the house whilst we demanded endless tea, coffee and hot meals. For more than six months she became a ‘trench widow’ with a washing machine full of muddy clothes and a garden filled with trench boards, pumps and hurdles. I am lucky to have a partner prepared to put up with my obsession with the Great War, especially when I bring it so close to home.

CONTENTS

Title

Author’s Note

Acknowledgements

Foreword by Peter Hart

A World Entrenched

The Typical Soldier

Trench Kit

The Trenches in Action

Cooking in the Trenches

Building the Trench

The ‘Real’ 24 Hours

24hr Trench

Glossary of Trench Terminology

Further Reading

About the Photographer

Copyright

FOREWORD

The great battles will always be a source of fascination to the military historian. There is just so much to argue about. Strategy, tactics, the competence – or otherwise – of the generals, the twists and turns of fate. These are all grist to the mill. Yet Andrew Robertshaw has grasped the fundamental fascination of the day-to-day routine of the ordinary British soldier in the trenches. Not in battle going over the top, surrounded by bursting shells, flensing shrapnel and torrents of machine-gun bullets, but more often than not just the matter of going about their daily routine: the sort of existence experienced by millions of British soldiers throughout the war years. Details and insights once thought too mundane to be recorded in diaries, letters and books, but now as strange as life on Mars. Another world, the same planet. What was once dull now seems very strange indeed; the hardships lightly borne nearly a hundred years ago appear excessively painful to modern sensibilities.

The genius of the concept is obvious once you are immersed in this wonderful book reliving one 24-hour period for a section of men from the 1/5th King’s Liverpool Regiment of the 55th Division in the Hooge sector of the Ypres Salient in January 1917.

What can we learn from this exercise? Well it doesn’t take long to realise that this book is invaluable to an understanding of what life was like for our forbears in a realistic trench built without the comforting refuge of the modern health and safety standards so beloved by film and television producers. The results are amazing. I had the pleasure of interviewing nearly 200 Great War veterans for the Imperial War Museum Sound Archive back in the 1980s and I thought I knew almost everything there was to know about the daily routine. It was, after all, a key part of that oral history project: delving into their memories to look at the ‘stand to’, cooking and meals, sentry duty, the graft of repairing damage to the trenches, writing home to girlfriends and family, ration parties, fatigues – everything and anything we could think of. We certainly recorded and learnt a lot, but this book has brought everything sharply into focus. The combination of carefully posed photographs, diagrams, sketches and an authoritative text is an outstanding method of revealing how things actually worked in practice.

We see how a soldier was kitted out with his uniform and equipment from top to bottom. Whether it be his undergarments, the origin of the term ‘belt and braces’, or the arcane secrets of the ’08 pattern webbing, there is plenty to learn, plenty to fascinate. I have never seen such a clear demonstration of what the men wore and how it all fitted together.

Although restricted in scale to just a couple of bays of frontline, dugouts and a section of communication trench, the ‘24-Hour Trench’ was a still a major construction task undertaken by the men of the 23rd Pioneer Regiment, Royal Logistic Corps, and then finished off by the volunteers. This was evidently very much a learning experience: it certainly brought to mind that the Western Front involved thousands upon thousands of miles of trenches, each dug by hand, often under fire. The amount of labour involved is beyond belief.

The mysteries of the trench and trench life are then gradually revealed, not in aged black-and-white photos but in sharp, modern colour prints. Now you can really see what is happening! How do they brew their tea in those frontline trenches? What is a Tommy cooker? Does the rum ration make you drunk? Then there were the insights into how physically hard it really was. The dreadful freezing cold of stints of sentry duty; the soaking wet collapsing trenches, where mud is all around; the perils of shaving with a cut-throat razor; the daily ritual of cleaning their rifles – their ‘best friend’ should they have to go into action. Most evocative of all is the picture of one young soldier reading a ‘letter from home’ while defecating for ‘King and Country’ in the latrine built into the side of the communication trench: an often forgotten or sidestepped part of daily life in the trenches. The German activity is restricted to a single sniper shot, but the continual threat posed by such sniping forces all tall men to crouch down to try to ensure that their heads do not appear above the parapet for even a moment. After the evening ‘stand to’ there is the sheer hard graft of a night spent ‘improving’ the trench, enlivened by a gas scare that forces everyone into their gas masks. Sleep is hard to come by. Photos acutely reveal the very real exhaustion suffered by the volunteers even in this staged re-creation.

There are many ways to learn about the Great War. The old tried and trusted methods of books and documents still have great value, while sound recordings have considerably broadened our viewpoint. Then again the recent developments in battlefield archaeology have allowed us the electric charge of excitement of seeing history emerge from the ground. But the ‘24-Hour Trench’ re-creation, rigorously controlled to ensure all possible realism, has brought the whole thing to life in a unique fashion. It ties everything together, unifying our picture so that we can really get to grips with the nitty-gritty of life in the trenches. We owe a debt to Andrew Robertshaw and his intrepid team of volunteers.

Peter Hart

A WORLD ENTRENCHED

Since the end of the Great War in November 1918, trenches and trench warfare have defined our understanding of the conflict. It is easy to forget that the war began in August 1914 as one of manoeuvre, not trenches and barbed wire. The war began with the vast German right hook of the Schlieffen Plan, which aimed to capture Paris and force France to surrender as it had done in 1870. While this was going on French troops advanced in the south in an attempt to recapture the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine ceded to Prussia as penalty for the same defeat. With these vast conscript armies in movement, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) marched from railheads in France in defence of Belgian neutrality. The French attack, Plan XVII, was a failure and the British found themselves in a fighting retreat from the Belgian town of Mons.