I’m not one of those adventurous sportsmen who are always up for this kind of thing but I am convinced that it is the plain duty of every man who can, to go out if one is called upon … I am sure it would be a most splendid experience for those who come back.
Mickey Chater, 3 August 1914
Somewhere along the Boulogne road the motor ambulance bumped and jolted awake the young soldier hanging on a stretcher in the rear. Other ruts and more bumping kept him conscious and he tried to remember who he was and what had happened to him. Then more lurching, and all that mattered was the terrible pain that burned out from his face and took over his body and mind. A steady piece of road gave him some breathing space, enough to gather himself and focus on something else. When he tried to open his eyes to see where he was, only one eye would open; the other was stuck shut with something. As he tried to lift his head, the pain tore through him again, so he lay back and tried to breathe calmly, looking up at the ambulance roof of narrow wooden slats and peeling paint spattered with blood, some dried and old, some redder and fresh. It couldn’t all have come from him. Then another rut threw the ambulance into the air, the soldier almost bumping his nose against the bloody roof. Instinct made him turn his head away, but the movement brought back the pain, and darkness engulfed him again. Just before he lost consciousness he heard other cries in the ambulance. He realised he was not alone.
With the soldier silent, the ambulance struggled on. The driver would have been grateful for the moments of quiet, with none of the howling that had accompanied him from the minute he started the engine and pulled away from the ruined farmhouse that served as a medical post. He had tried to keep the ambulance steady, avoiding the holes and ruts in a road that had been chewed up by hundreds of other vehicles, horses and gun carriages going towards the battle of Neuve Chapelle, as well as scores of other ambulances going back and forth between the front and the hospitals at the coast.1
The driver realised that whatever he did made the howling worse. If he went faster, he hit the ruts harder and the ambulance bumped a foot or more into the air, before crashing down on its thin rubber tyres. But if he went slower, the vehicle might get stuck and would have to be pushed out. And slowing down only emphasised all the smaller bumps in the road. He had watched the men being loaded – broken and soaked in mud and gore – and, like all the other ambulance drivers, he knew he needed to drive fast. The hospitals were too far away from the battlefield and he didn’t think the wounded men had enough blood in them to survive. So he accelerated away again. As the cries rose up from the back, he pressed his face close to the dirty windscreen and tried harder to find a piece of road with no craters, praying that they would be there soon.2
When the soldier regained consciousness he remembered who and where he was. He had fought at Neuve Chapelle, with the Gordons, and his name was Mickey Chater. He had been woken early on the first day of the battle by men creeping into the forward trenches; then there had been the sound of clanking metal and a faint smell of stew as their hot meal was passed around, amid hushed, nervy chatter. However much he had hoped to be joining them, he would not be. Instead he went to his battalion post to the rear to resume the work of digging relief trenches that his men had been doing all week.3 Then, at first light, they heard clattering as gun crews wheeled pieces of artillery past them to get into position for the barrage that signalled the beginning of the battle.
At 07.30 the guns crashed into life and it seemed to Chater that the noise rang in his ears even now, as he lay in the ambulance. He had never heard anything like it. They had to stop work as both air and earth became one quivering jelly.4 He remembered squadrons of aircraft flying overhead, and larks – hundreds of them, screaming a kind of frantic song as they were scared off the fields surrounding the town of Neuve Chapelle. He was surprised that even now he could still hear them above the thundering in his memory. Then the Gordons had watched the town being destroyed. Chater remembered seeing the trees that had lined the town square being blasted into the air, with broken boughs and branches landing pell-mell amongst the rubble. Shells hit a brewery, blowing it apart and sending hundreds of empty wooden barrels thumping down the streets. Soon he couldn’t see the town any more through the clouds of dust. Everyone agreed that nothing could have survived the shelling. At 08.00 the soldiers went in.
Within an hour or so reports reached the Gordons that the forward troops’ advance had been quick and successful; progress would continue to be made for three hours that morning. But then the reports began to change. First, returning artillery officers told of finding the town’s cemetery blasted open, spilling corpses that had been buried there after the British Expeditionary Force’s (BEF’s) first desperate defence of the area six months earlier. It had to be a bad omen. Then the British advance slowed and stopped altogether in late morning. There was so much rubble in the town that troops were finding it difficult to make their way forward. They found themselves shelled by their own artillery, and all contact with the reserves who waited somewhere on the flanks had been lost.5 Telephone cables were cut in more than fifty places.6 And then the walking wounded began to emerge from the dust clouds. Chater and the Gordons broke off from their digging to help them sit down and to find them water. They learned that most of the enemy’s barbed wire had survived the barrage, as had their snipers and camouflaged machine-gun nests, and the Germans were cutting men down like wheat at harvest time.
In the afternoon the Gordons saw a force of Royal Engineers advance towards the town to help fortify the place. Apart from the steady stream of stretchered wounded, no significant numbers of troops came back, so the Gordons assumed that those who had taken the town were holding on. By late afternoon it had become too dark to fight and things went quiet. Chater and his battalion thought they would be rested until morning, but an officer dashed over and ordered them out onto the battlefield to dig a new communications trench. The work took all night and was as back-breaking as it was demoralising, for all around them burial parties were retrieving uncountable numbers of corpses. It was dawn when they clambered back into their trenches for a quick meal and to await orders. As the sun came up, it showed the town wreathed in mist. There was no sign of the enemy.
The Gordons were ordered to join a regiment of Grenadier Guards and lined up for the attack. There were rumours that so many shells had been used the day before that, for the second morning of the battle, each gun had been allocated only five rounds. It was indeed a much shorter artillery barrage, and Chater barely had time to nod acknowledgements to those around him – some friends, some strangers – in the forward trench. Then shouted orders and whistles signalled the advance, the trench ladders went up and the men went over. In his ambulance, Chater tried to remember what had happened after that, but it would not come to him. His memory, sharp and clear until the very point of seeing his own muddied hands gripping the sides of the wooden trench ladder, failed him.
Perhaps it failed because, for the remainder of his battle of Neuve Chapelle, Chater would have been operating on raw instinct, trying to survive, with no time for thinking, and with the terrifying sound of the enemy artillery barrage coming closer and closer. Later he would remember that he pressed on, one boot in front of the other, trying to find a foothold in the rubble of stone, metal and splintered wood. And it was freezing – his hands white and numb gripping his rifle, and his breath puffing out like dragon smoke. Then a new sound: the cracking of enemy rifles firing directly at the approaching troops.
Chater stayed upright for a few more minutes, scrabbling to stand, desperately searching for shelter, and even managing to fire off a few rounds in the direction of the enemy. He could smell the battlefield as if it were a living thing, sweating cordite and blood, twisting and writhing as if trying to shake him off its back. His ears rang as bullets and shells burst close by, their jagged fragments ricocheting in all directions. One more step, and then another, and then an explosion, too close. A rag of hot metal slammed into his face, clawing its way through the soft flesh of his cheek and blasting away his teeth and the bones of his jaw.7 As he rocked on his feet, absorbing the impact, a second fragment tore into his shoulder, bringing him crashing to the ground. Blood streamed into his eyes, blinding him, and the pain brought him to the edge of consciousness as his comrades pushed past him, continuing their desperate advance.
Chater remained where he had fallen, drifting in and out of the light, almost giving in to the darkness, when from somewhere he heard the shrill sound of an officer’s whistle calling a halt to their advance. He could feel the pounding of heavy boots coming towards him, so he gathered up his last scraps of energy and managed to moan loudly enough to attract attention. He was hoisted up on strong arms and dragged away to the forward trenches. From there, the regiment’s last remaining bearers managed to get him to the aid post in an abandoned farmhouse.8 They laid him carefully down where the Regimental Medical Officer (RMO) would see him. They had little hope for the lad. Chater was drenched in blood, his face and shoulder ragged and filthy, and his breathing sounded as if all the debris of the town was stuck in his windpipe. The RMO had been treating the wounded of Neuve Chapelle all day and he was fighting to save every life he could.9 He managed to slide a couple of morphine tablets into Chater’s wreckage of a mouth, along with some splashes of water. Then, once the young man had calmed and his breathing had eased, he could gently dress his wounds, holding the pieces of his fractured face in place, easing open his clenched fists and murmuring something comforting that he hoped the soldier could hear. When he had done everything he could, the RMO called for bearers to take the stretcher to the next ambulance leaving for the hospital, sixty miles away up the Boulogne road.
In the ambulance, the morphine had begun to wear off as Chater drifted in and out of consciousness. Then there was another bump, but this time he heard the squeak of a handbrake and tyres crunching on gravel. The canvas flaps at the rear were folded back and he heard footsteps and voices, as the driver briefed the nurses and orderlies who had come to collect his load. Then the pain was back again, rolling in waves stronger than ever, as hurried hands jostled his stretcher out of the straps and into the open. He cried out as he was moved into the daylight, set down and then carried inside by two orderlies.
A nurse leaned over him, not able to see much past his blood-soaked bandages and matted hair, but knowing from his grey skin and his moans of agony that he was close to death. She had lost count of how many men she had escorted up the once-pristine flagstone steps of the hospital – 800 patients had arrived in just the thirty-six hours since the beginning of the battle, each one in a worse condition than the last.10 At least Chater had seen a medical officer, if only for a minute or so; most men came in straight from the battlefield, covered in mud and dust, their wounds undressed, their blood dripping onto the floor of the ambulance or onto the man on the stretcher beneath. Sometimes ambulance drivers jumped down from their vehicles on arrival to warn orderlies and nurses that all had gone quiet in there a while back, so there was probably no hurry to unload. In one ambulance they had opened the doors to find a single survivor, trapped among the corpses of his comrades, having endured the sounds of their agony as they died one by one.11
Inside the hospital, the two bearers gently carried Chater on his stretcher as the nurse led them to the ward for the very worst cases. There was almost no room left and they had to carry him with the greatest care so as not to step on the stretchers lying between the beds, in the middle of the ward and out into the corridors. If Neuve Chapelle had been a victory, as everyone was saying, then the staff would hate to see a defeat. A doctor was brought to see Chater immediately and the nurse set to work removing his uniform and cleaning his face. She gently sponged away the blood that had caked one of his eyes shut. Chater blinked several times and then opened his eyes wide: no more blood splatters, just a white ceiling and the kind, tired face of a nurse drifting in and out of his vision. He was scheduled for surgery, she quietly explained. Nothing to worry about. He was safe now. As he finally fell asleep, he wondered at his war. Months of waiting and then just minutes of fighting. There would be no great victory for him to remember, only this pain. But also something else: the faces of all the men and women who had appeared before him, determined to fight for his life. Those were memories worth saving.