Blighty One
Sherriff’s war was rapidly approaching its end. In early June several hundred tons of TNT was detonated in mines beneath the Messines Ridge, the opening of Haig’s plan for a mighty British push to gain the higher ground, remove the salient, and ultimately push up to the Belgian coast. The Germans were blown to pieces but the advantage was wasted in a fatal delay. With several weeks to strengthen their defences, they built a network of pillboxes with heavy machine guns. It was a low point in British strategy. It took three months and 260,000 casualties to take a local landmark, a ridge at a hamlet called Passchendaele.
Millions of shells were fired in preparation for the Passchendaele offensive which opened on 31 July with a hurricane of fire from British guns as the Fifth Army attacked on a seven mile front. Unfortunately 1917 produced the wettest summer in seventy-five years and the bombardment – four and a half million shells were fired over two weeks – only succeeded in destroying the low country’s delicate drainage system. The landscape turned into a brown porridge that sucked everything into it. The suffering for men and horses was appalling.
Passchendaele gave rise to Tyne Cot, the largest of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries. The cemetery expanded like a city and, as Geoff Dyer observed in The Missing of the Somme, like a city it acquired suburbs. Today, as you come in from the coach park, the sight of all those headstones in endless serried ranks is numbing. The cemetery wall has an alphabet of 34,000 inscribed names of British and Commonwealth soldiers whose remains are still lost in the mud, now an innocent gentle green slope in a rather boring bit of country.
Historians either see Passchendaele as the epitome of folly in a campaign that should have been closed down as soon as it started or as a costly strategic victory, the beginning of the end for Germany whose butcher’s bill was unpayable. Until he was an old man Sherriff didn’t have a view. ‘I never knew a thing about the battle of Passchendaele except that I was in it. I only discovered what it was about years later when I read a history of the war.’13 There speaks the true voice of the Poor Bloody Infantry.
On the evening of 1 August, C and D Companies of the 9/East Surrey went into the Old French Trench, two miles south-west of Ypres. Sherriff explained that he was in charge of thirty men:
At dawn on the morning of the attack, the battalion assembled in the mud outside the huts. I lined up my platoon and went through the necessary inspection. Some of the men looked terribly ill: grey, worn faces in the dawn, unshaved and dirty because there was no clean water. I saw the characteristic shrugging of their shoulders that I knew so well. They hadn’t had their clothes off for weeks, and their shirts were full of lice. Our progress to the battle area was slow and difficult. We had to move forward in single file along the duckboard tracks that were loose and slimy. If you slipped off, you went up to your knees in mud. During the walk the great bombardment from the British guns fell silent. For days it had wracked our nerves and destroyed our sleep. The sudden silence was uncanny. A sort of stagnant emptiness surrounded us. Your ears still sang from the incessant uproar, but now your mouth went dry. An orchestral overture dies away in a theatre as the curtain rises, so the great bombardment faded into silence as the infantry went into the attack. We knew now that the first wave had left the British front-line trenches, that we were soon to follow...14
These men were wretched, ground down by appalling food and a lack of exercise, which made the march to the assembly area particularly hard. Most of them were in their forties and out of condition. Their boots didn’t fit. Many had septic blisters on their feet that needed at least a week’s medical attention. Sherriff wrote, ‘we had passed the point of no return.’ The food was sodden biscuits and cold stew and the bacon, the troops complained, ‘smelt of dead men’. Diarrhoea had broken out, men relieving themselves anywhere and everywhere. As Sherriff noted, these were the crack troops who were supposed to break through the German lines, advance to Belgium and win the war.
For the battalion it was their biggest ordeal since the Somme. Its task was to hold the captured trenches at Klein Zillebeke in the wake of the Pilckem Ridge attack. On 1 August C company moved from camp two miles south west of Ypres prior to going up to the battle front to relieve the men in the attack of the day before. Sherriff was in the second wave. They moved along slimy duckboards to the forward area. The British guns fell silent for the first time in days, an effect he compared to the dying of an orchestral overture. In front of them was a vast expanse of mud and twisted wire. It had been pelting with rain for three days solid and the Germans had dug into the gloop as best they could. The war diary states: ‘C Company got caught in a heavy rain of shelling from the enemy, suffering some twenty casualties in killed and wounded. However the men were not to be discouraged and they went on cheerfully...’
Not according to Sherriff they didn’t. The constant rain had soaked everyone through. The communication trenches were waist-high in toffee-coloured water. All the men could think about was getting a longed-for ‘blighty one’. ‘All of us, I knew, had one despairing hope in mind that we should be lucky enough to be wounded, not fatally, but severely enough to take us out of this loathsome ordeal and get us home.’15 But the problem, he realised, was that no stretcher-bearers would ever reach anyone in the impossible mud.
The order came to climb out of the trenches. The rotten sandbags fell apart as they heaved themselves over. The shelling had been so heavy there was not a landmark left. They might as well have been on the moon. Sherriff and his men tripped on submerged barbed wire, which ripped their legs. The mud was blown everywhere by ‘coalboxes’, shells that exploded in a cloud of black smoke. Decaying bodies from previous fighting were occasionally blown up into the humid air and the stench was appalling. The first wave of East Surreys was wiped out by machine gun fire and had rolled into waterlogged craters where they floated like wax dolls.
Sherriff arrived at the shattered German trench to find it full of wounded and dying British soldiers. The improvised first aid station was useless as the doctor and his orderlies were all dead. The engineers whose job it was to lay telegraph wires had also been killed so Morse communication was impossible. The remnants of the first wave – 15 out of 100 men – were cut off. All he could do was give first aid. Sherriff went to work, applying pathetically inadequate bandages to huge gaping wounds, comforting the men. His work in that trench with the dying that afternoon was heroic although he describes it as ‘only a matter of watching them slowly bleed to death’. But it is reasonable to think that he found the inner strength he had always craved, able to carry on under fire, his fear banished, reassuring the dying as one by one they slipped away. He had once talked in his letters of how much he would prefer to treat wounds than to cause them. Now he got his chance and he proved himself a superb officer, doing what he could with calm compassion.
At some point he and a runner were ordered by Warre-Dymond to find B Company. He made his way down shattered trenches. A whizz-bang glanced the top of a pillbox five yards from him. Sherriff thought at first his whole face had been blown away. Plastered in mud and blood but still conscious, he was sent back on foot to find a dressing station. ‘The doctor swabbed our wounds on our hands and faces and tried to see through the holes in our uniforms where pieces of debris had gone in. ‘You don’t seem to have got anything very deep. Can you go on?’ The trip took forever as he staggered across the mud. At the base hospital, a doctor removed fifty-two pieces of pea-sized concrete from Sherriff’s face, right hand and torso. ‘One for every week of the year... I needed no souvenir to remind me of the monstrous disgrace of Passchendaele’. 16
The 10th Casualty Clearing Station at Abeele received over 2000 casualties on the first two days of the offensive, including a hundred Germans. Sherriff is mentioned as wounded in the war diary for 2 August as is his friend Percy High. That day he wrote to his mother a letter that, because of his injured hand, looks as if it was by a nine-year-old.
Dear Mother
I am writing to say that I am feeing quite well although I was wounded this morning in the right hand and in the right side of the face. Nothing at all serious Dear, don’t worry, I walked down alright... I am very lucky, I think to get off so lightly, considering what some of my men got... I will write you further (unless I have got a “blighty”) and tell you more about it.
But rest content that I am quite well: there is a chance of getting home.
I have a job to write as my hand is like my face, peppered all over with little bits.
From your loving son, Bob. 17
To his father he wrote on 8 August:
Dear Pips
Am writing this left-handed as my right is hors de combat at present. I was hit by several small splinters also on the right side of my face – the shell was so close that the big pieces went over my head – it burst about 5 feet away; lucky for me my wounds are none worse and the shell no bigger.
I feel quite fit no pain – hope to get to England.
Am very much bound up and look worse than I feel.
Hoping to see you soon.
From your loving son
Bob
He was very lucky to be alive. His comrade Lieutenant William Sadler – possibly caught in the same shell burst as Sherriff – died of his wounds the next day. Sadler’s fate has been researched by Van Emden and Piuk in their book Famous: 1914-1918. Hopefully thinking there might have been a muddle, Sadler’s distraught father wrote to the War Office for clarification of his boy’s death and asked that the reply be sent to a neighbour’s flat to spare his wife the sight of another telegram. She was already ill with worry about their other son also fighting in France. The bad news was duly confirmed. It took Mr Sadler a week to pluck up the courage to tell his wife. Families in Britain and Germany were swamped with a huge wave of grief as casualty rates ballooned in early August.
Three days after his exit from the front Sherriff’s battalion was massively shelled, the rain sheeted down and the mud jammed their guns. A German raiding party attacked under cover of a mist. The battalion took 151 casualties in the first week of August. Among them was Colonel Henry de la Fontaine. A sniper caught him recce-ing the Germans’ position. He was in his mid-forties and had been with the regiment since he was nineteen. He made it his business to know every man in the battalion by name and regarded them, in his civilised phrase, as ‘their superior in rank but their equal in humanity’. ‘A personal friend of, and beloved by, every man in the Battalion, he died for the safety of his men’, records the battalion war diary with rare emotion. The colonel would take his place in Sherriff’s roll of honour in his diary.
Sherriff was soon back in England, convalescing at the British Red Cross Hospital at Netley, near Southampton. His wounds were not too bad but he was lucky not to have been blinded. He was also perhaps lucky to have been sent home: his was a borderline blighty. His friend Lindsay wrote to him about the new commander Le Fleming (‘a ripping chap – you’d like him’) and was breezily snobbish about the new officer intake. ‘My dear boy, we have 11 new subalterns.... They have hardly an aitch between them and are very terrible people I can’t stick at any price.’18 Sherriff wrote to his friend Webb (congratulating him on his MC) about not being able to wait to get back to ‘the dear old 9th’. But he wrote to his father on 18 August: ‘I shall not of course hesitate to report any trouble with my head for I think 10½ months is quite a sufficient spell out there and that I am due at least a couple of months off in England.’
Sherriff also wrote home saying that he was uncomfortable about exaggerating his neuralgia symptoms to the Medical Board which was minded to grant him three weeks leave and three weeks home service at the barracks at Dover (with the 3/ East Surrey) before returning him to the Front. Sherriff never had to go back to France. He stayed with the Home Service from November 1917 to January 1919 acting as musketry officer and gas officer when he was promoted to lieutenant and then finally de-mobbed in January 1919 with the rank of Captain, having been stationed in Glasgow.
He had survived the worst conflict in human history and the relief must have been overwhelming. He was not a natural officer. When he was famous, at a battalion reunion dinner he made a speech and asked a question of his commanding officer, Nobby Clark: ‘I wonder if you remember, Sir, what you said to me when I reported to you that I had just been wounded and that I was to be evacuated? “Afraid I don’t,” said Nobby. You said, “Thank God,” remarked Sherriff; and sat down to soldierly applause.’ 19
When Sherriff came to writing the play he set it in the run-up to Thursday, 21 March 1918 (the play’s action closes on the dawn of that day), a date that means nothing much now. But to the audiences of Journey’s End in 1929 it was hugely significant. A pivotal day and ‘the most dangerous moment of the war for the Allied cause’.20 The German objective was one massive all-out effort to ‘beat the British’ still undefeated on the Western Front. The plan was to launch a war-winning assault before the slow build-up of American troops in France could make a difference. The Russians had accepted crushing peace terms earlier in the month, freeing up vast numbers of German troops for a big push at St Quentin where the play is set. It was known as Operation Michael or Kaiserschlacht (the Kaiser’s Battle). The German order was given: ‘The Michael attack will take place on March 21. Break the first enemy positions at 9.40am.’ That is just a few hours after the play ends: the curtain comes down on the sound of the first shells of an almighty dawn barrage known as ‘Bruchmüller’s Symphony’ after the artillery officer who conducted it. Over a million shells were fired in five hours on a sixty-mile front. The British troops curled into a collective foetal ball and endured it.
Casualty rates in the coming days were among the highest of the war. The German advance – using fast moving units of storm troopers bypassing points of resistance – was hugely successful and gained thirty-eight miles, causing mayhem. It was so devastating that on 11 April Haig gave his famous ‘backs to the wall’ order in which he said: ‘each one of us must fight to the end...every position must be held to the last man’. The British Fifth Army heroically contested every single yard. The German advance would over-reach itself. It eventually petered out and was finally reversed at enormous cost to both sides.
Ten years later Britons were all too aware of what an epic ordeal that March Retreat had been. The British survivors of that barrage used the same phrase – ‘all hell let loose’. They experienced a near-constant earthquake. Gregory Clarke’s sound effects at the close of play in Journey’s End were so loud it hurt: the whistling and explosions were unbelievable. Even so, it was just the merest hint of what it must have been like in reality.
So what happened to Sherriff’s beloved battalion? The previous few days it had been in reserve. On 21 March they were holding a position at Villecholles. Lieutenant Colonel Le Fleming (De La Fontaine’s replacement) was caught in the open on a recce and shot dead. Laurence Le Fleming’s loss was another bad blow. At thirty-eight he was not only an excellent CO but also an acclaimed cricketer who had played for Kent. His well-known brother, John, who survived the war, was a former rugby international and schoolmaster and their father was a vicar. In Sherriff’s eyes both the Le Fleming brothers had the dream CV. Yet, oddly, the Colonel he was to create in Journey’s End could not have been more different. He is unable to remonstrate with his superiors on behalf of the men’s safety and he is forgetful of the human cost of the raid he has supervised. When he orders the German prisoner’s pockets to be turned out (which contain, schoolboy style, a bit of string, fruit drops and a pen knife) you get the impression of a not very inspiring head boy in front of a first-year. Sherriff for some reason divorced the best COs he knew from the one he sketched in his play.
On 23 March the 9/East Surrey had to retreat across the Somme from Falvy to Pargny. D Company had to swim for it, the enemy pressing in all the time and by the end of the day the battalion had taken heavy losses against crack German troops. The crisis came on 26 March when the 9/East Surrey found itself occupying the old German line east of Rosières. The battalion was reduced by a fierce attack to about 300 men holding 1,000 yards of mostly open ground. They were soon completely surrounded after an aborted withdrawal. The decision to jump into an old communication trench and fight it out was taken by the replacement commander Nobby Clark (he had originally assigned Sherriff to C Company) who despite being savagely wounded in the face by a shell was carrying on. To the men he was a figure of huge respect and amiability. Nobby gave it to them straight: ‘You will either be killed or captured before the morning is out. Stick it out for the honour of the Regiment.’
That’s precisely what they did. The regimental history records ‘a great number of acts of heroism’ against heavy odds in this amazing last stand by the battalion. Two unnamed Lewis gunners kept firing until their gun was destroyed by a bomb blast. Badly injured the pair picked up their rifles and continued firing until they were both killed. Lance Corporal Bradley continued to work his Lewis gun alone despite being shot through the chest. Lieutenant Grant kept up a lethal fire until he was shot through the head. The Germans kept coming and were repeatedly beaten back, their dead thickly strewn around. Eventually the thin khaki line was down to its last round and the Germans were finally able to rush them. There were just two unwounded officers and fifty-five men left when they were taken prisoner. Captain Warre-Dymond would win the MC for his galvanizing leadership and obliviousness to danger while under relentless mortar and machine gun fire. Michael Lucas in his history of the battalion quotes Fred Billman, who was badly wounded and wrote to his wife with classic Tommy understatement: ‘Well darling, I guess you are wondering why you have not heard from me, but it’s been a bit busy over here lately.’21 A bit busy!
In the film This Happy Breed set between the wars in south London, Noël Coward includes a toast to the East Surrey, the regiment Coward might have joined. The 9th was by then famous. When Sherriff came to write up his diary, he included in the dedication some names.
In writing these pages I have always in mind the memory of:
Lieut. Colonel H T M de la Fontaine DSO
Major Anderson VC
Captain Lindsay MC
Lieut. Douglass
Lieut. Patterson
2nd Lieut. Millard
2nd Lieut. Trench
2nd Lieut. Kiber
Lieut. Picton
Lieut. Grant
Captain Pirie
Lieut. Sadler
who were all killed, fighting with the 9th East Surreys in the Ypres Salient, on Vimy Ridge, in the Valley of the Somme and on the plains around Loos.
These were much the same men who would one day walk into his play complaining about no pepper.
13 R.C.S., Promise of Greatness, p.143
14 Ibid., p.145
15 Ibid., p.146
16 Ibid., p.149-150
17 2 August 1917
18 Letter to R.C.S., 20 September 1917
19 Rosa Maria Bracco, Merchants of Hope, p.170
20 Andrew Roberts, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, p.136
21 Lucas, The Journey’s End Battalion, p.139