There was one thing I wanted to be, but feared I would not be equal to it. That was a stretcher bearer.
William Young, March 1917
The call for bearer teams was the last thing a soldier heard in the forward trenches before the final order to attack. ‘Bearers up!’ were clear words in a human voice, echoing up and down the line. Then everyone tried to look away as the Commanding Officer (CO) checked his watch for the last time and reached for the whistle around his neck. As the soldiers tried to distract themselves for the minutes or seconds remaining, they jostled the bearer teams who were trying to squeeze in at the back of the trench. They bumped up against the heavy wooden stretchers, as if that would somehow charm them against being brought back on one of them later. They yelled at the bearers to ‘get a rifle’ or ‘do some fighting’.1 Other soldiers turned their backs on the bearers altogether, knowing what their presence meant and blocking out the sight of the stretchers. The bearers themselves stayed silent. They had done their talking back at the dugout, when they checked on supplies, the final location of the aid posts and exchanged addresses so that they knew who to write to, if one of their team was killed.2
Then came the shriek of the whistles, sounding everywhere along the line. Everyone turned to face forward. The soldiers panted and roared, pushed themselves over the top and hurled themselves against the enemy. They shoved past the bearers, standing stock-still, waiting for the trench to empty. Then the bearers pushed the heavy stretchers out over the top and climbed the ladders, stepping onto the battlefield, slowly and silently, each keeping an eye on the others to make sure that the team stayed together. They pressed forward behind the men, straining to hear the first scream of agony amongst the roar of the attack. After the battle of Loos one bearer wrote home that it was very easy ‘to do gallant deeds with arms in hands and when the blood is up but the courage demanded to walk quietly into a hail of lead to bandage and carry away a wounded man, that is worth talking about’.3
When Earnest Douglas joined the bearer corps he wanted to explain to his family what his job entailed and why he wasn’t quite a soldier any longer. But he couldn’t write to his parents directly because his mother couldn’t stand the worry of seeing a letter with an army postmark. So instead Douglas sent his letters to their next-door neighbour, Gladys. Gladys would signal through her window that a letter had arrived, and his father would come and collect it and check its contents, before passing it on to his wife.
Well, I’m a stretcher bearer. Whilst in the line … I’ve seen some very nasty sights and carried some nasty cases down, all under shell fire … Up past the knees in mud – balancing on the edge of shell craters, slipping and sliding, shells bursting above and in the earth all around us, it’s God’s mercy that we get through but we have the patient to think of and quickness probably means saving his life so we go right through it, not caring a damn and somehow – when you get to the sap-head and safety, you laugh and joke at all the capers we’ve been having and how ‘that one’ just missed us and so on … they talk about a soldier going out and fetching a comrade in under shell fire – and he gets the MM or DCM. We are always under shell fire and can’t dump our stretcher and run for it to a safe spot, we have to plod on …
What annoys me most is when we get a chap ‘serious’ and make a dash and he dies at the door of the dressing place – love’s labours lost. But I suppose it’s God’s will and he’s ‘the boss’ … I am contented but if they gave me my ticket they wouldn’t see my arse for dust in my rush for Blighty. If you hear anyone running a field ambulance down, tell ’em to allez and try it. I’m here Dad, and it’s no good worrying.
Douglas hadn’t become a stretcher bearer by default, as had been the case in the first few months of the war, when casualties had been dragged around the battlefield by bandsmen or pipers, or by anyone too big or too stupid to do proper soldiering. Douglas might have been unschooled, but he was bright and was immediately taken by the idea of the newly formed bearer corps when the Royal Army Medical Corps recruiter mentioned it to him. From the recruiter’s point of view, Douglas fitted the official specifications perfectly: ‘Stretcher bearers should be men of intelligence who are actually interested in their work, and on no account should they be men who have been selected because they are useless or physically incapable of regimental work.’4
Douglas had been particularly drawn to the training courses for the new stretcher-bearers corps. Like many of the men ‘enlisting to apply the bandage’, he felt that they were receiving a proper qualification that might come in handy after the war.5 It didn’t much feel like a proper qualification during the first four weeks of the course, though. Douglas needed to develop the physical strength and fitness required for bearing, so there were hours of marching up and down Box Hill in Surrey carrying a heavily weighted stretcher.6 The tall ones in his class were always put on ‘top-shelf duty’, getting down stretchers from the top rack of the training ambulance. Several hours of that would do your back in. But, once they were strong enough, the course moved to the Army’s own hospital, the Cambridge at Aldershot, where Douglas prepared to learn how to treat his patients as well as carry them.7
The course had its own textbook, The Stretcher Bearer, part of the Oxford War Manuals series, rushed into print in early 1915.8 The book was well designed: small enough to fit into a tunic pocket and full of photographs showing splints, slings and wound dressings. It made things so clear that reading didn’t even feel like studying, and it made Douglas eager to get to the front. But then came a taste of what he could expect in France. He was called out at night to unload real casualties from hospital trains at Aldershot station, and then used as a pall bearer for the funerals of those patients that the Cambridge couldn’t save.
The course lasted ten weeks and, when it had finished, Douglas was sent across the Channel to the war itself. Some of his course-mates had expressed concern that their new skills might not be properly respected in France, but their supervisors told them not to worry: the days when stretcher bearers were treated like donkeys were over. Regimental medical officers had also been getting some training. A new directive sent by the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) set it all out clearly:
The RMO should always have the keenest regard for his own personnel of medical orderlies and the stretcher bearers. On the knowledge, intiative and courageous spirit of these men both he and the unit will have to rely greatly. Good orderlies and stretcher bearers are worth any amount of trouble. He should know them all by name, get to know their histories, should cultivate their acquaintance and understand their individual characteristics, so as to learn which of them is fit to be a leader in any undertaking … generally he should care for them in all ways to the very best of his powers.9
Not only would each bearer have the respect from his medical colleagues that his skills deserved, explained the supervisor, but his training would continue at the front line. The RMOs would be giving a weekly lecture on medical subjects – a proper lecture, not skipped or rushed.10 Everyone, including the RMO, would go on learning.
And so it was when Douglas got to France. Once a week, provided they weren’t needed out on the battlefield, Douglas’s medical officer gathered his bearers around him in his dugout and told them to start a new page in their notebooks. The heading for one of the very first lectures Douglas heard was ‘PANNIER’. Panniers were used to carry a bearer’s supplies. They were made either of wicker, like fishing creels, or canvas, like satchels, with a red cross painted on the side. Every bearer was responsible for his own pannier and for the supplies inside it. If they lost an item, they had to make sure they went and got a replacement before going back out for casualties. Scissors, for instance, were lost as easily on the battlefield as lives, slipping out of cold hands down into the mud, never to be seen again. But scissors were essential. You needed them to trim dressings to size and to cut through uniforms so that you could get to the wounds.
Douglas learned he should always check that his water bottle was full and, if there was room, take a spare. Wounded men were often badly dehydrated and gulped down a bottle’s worth in one go. In a little square tin there were blue morphine tablets. If the casualty couldn’t swallow them on his own, you could slide the tablet under his tongue and let it dissolve. But you had to remember how much morphine you’d given him or there could be a problem later on. Make sure you take your crayon to make a note, or write on his forehead so that the medics at the aid post can immediately see if he’s had a dose. And stuff dressings into every spare inch of the pannier. Dressings weren’t only used on simple wounds, but were crucial to the control of haemorrhage, as they’d called it back at the Cambridge – Stopping the bleeding, in other words. Take a big handful of dressings and press them down on the bleed, and keep pressing down until it stopped or you got to the aid post. Tourniquets were only to be used as a last resort. Leave a tourniquet on too long and a limb could be lost. But let a patient bleed too long and a life could be lost. How to stop a bleed was perhaps the most important thing Douglas had learned on his course. If you couldn’t stop a bleed, there wasn’t much point even coming to France.
It was several months before Douglas went home on leave, and when he did his mother grasped his hands and wept at the state of them. Everyone at the front could spot a bearer by his hands. The wooden handles of the stretchers quickly started to deteriorate. They got shot at, or had bits broken off, and the splinters were the very devil. In the wet the wood rotted, splitting the handle ends. All that bearers could do was wind a length of wire round the handles to keep them together, but the wire would cut their hands to pieces. Gloves weren’t much help. They made it difficult to get a grip on the wood, and no one ever kept a pair of gloves for very long at the front. Douglas had bearer’s hands: a mix of blisters and calluses, first rubbed raw and then scar-cracked and worn.
He couldn’t hide his hands, but during the rest of his leave Douglas took care not to take off his shirt in front of his parents. His back and shoulders were in an even worse state. His patients were often dead weights – he had trained with a twelve-stone weight, but he often had to carry more, plus blankets. And although the official bearer complement was six, there were rarely enough men available, so two or three were more usual. The load was concentrated all on one shoulder under a wide leather halter strap, crossed over the head. The strap bit down through tunic or greatcoat, and gradually the ache turned to a burn, as the flesh rubbed raw and the muscles and joints strained. Bearers folded up sandbags and put them under the straps, but after a while – and especially in the wet – these didn’t make much difference. Slowly the strap would slide off the shoulder and down onto the neck, and a bearer would gasp out that he was choking and they would all stop. Then the straps were taken off and the sandbags rearranged, and after a few deep breaths they would continue.11 If they were lucky they managed to travel another 200 yards or so before having to stop again. Even the shortest trips could take hours.
After his mother had cried herself to sleep after his first day back home, Douglas sat up with his father and tried to answer his questions. Most of what he did was ‘the carry’ – getting a casualty on their stretcher to the aid post. There were hardly any easy carries. Night carries were probably the safest. Both sides had their bearers out then, and their sanitary squads were collecting the dead, so mostly you didn’t get shot at. But you still didn’t flaunt yourself. Sometimes Douglas carried a torch – if the batteries had stayed dry – and flashed it on and off so that the team could see where they were going, but they still tripped over corpses or duckboards and got tangled up in barbed wire. Sometimes they simply got lost and lumbered about for hours, looking for familiar landmarks.12 And the night-time battlefield had its own lullaby, with bearers calling out and listening for any response. Back and forth, back and forth they called, not too loudly, to avoid alerting the enemy, but hopefully loud enough for those trapped in shell holes to hear them; then they fell silent, straining to catch any reply. When they finally got back into the trenches, they found that the soldiers there had been listening – their lullaby had not sent them to sleep, but kept them awake, in fear for their fallen comrades.13
But when Douglas came to think about it, the one thing that really affected them badly was the weather. If it was warm, they had to take off their coats and then their backs really got a mangling.14 Sweat dripped into their eyes, making it difficult to see where they were going – and when they rubbed their eyes with their muddy hands, they cursed that now they couldn’t see anything at all. But then cold weather wasn’t any better. Cold froze the ground and made it slippery. It numbed their hands and feet. And cold often killed a patient before they could get him to the aid post.
By far the worst was the rain. It saturated their clothes – an army greatcoat could absorb seven or eight pounds of water on its own – and those of their patients, as well as any blankets or bandages. Wet leather straps stiffened and rubbed more than ever. Wet hands slipped on wet stretcher handles. Worst of all, rain turned the battlefield into mud, threatening to suck you down to your doom. The bearers put layers of empty sandbags over their boots to give them extra grip in the mud – one soldier said he looked like a stage elephant going out in layers of grey folds – but that too was of little use.
In deep mud after heavy rain one of the team had to lead the way so that they wouldn’t fall or become trapped. Some shell holes were big enough to bury a bus in and, when they got wet, their edges could easily subside. If one of the bearers slipped and fell, he could drag everyone down to the bottom. Then they had to gather themselves, disentangle the stretcher straps, reload the patient and crawl out again. Douglas had to focus hard on listening to the leader call each step on their journey. It took a huge effort to remain calm while you crawled along like a big muddy tortoise.15 What he didn’t tell his father was that stopping could mean death. At Arras, one entire team and their patient were killed after they became stuck in the mud and were blown to pieces by enemy shelling – the last bearer falling over the stretcher as if to protect the man they had been carrying.16
But stretcher bearers didn’t always mind the rain. If there were no carries, they went outside and held up their faces and their callused hands so that the rain could wash away the grime.
William Young was a soldier in the Post Office Rifles when he made his first carry. One day, out on the battlefield after the fighting had stopped, he had found a mate badly wounded in the stomach. He ran back to the aid post, but there were no bearers left. The harassed Medical Officer (MO) gave him some dressings and a water bottle and told him what to do for the casualty. Young did his best, but realised that the man was too heavy for him to move on his own. So he stayed with him, waving and calling out for help until he attracted the attention of some soldiers. Together they loaded up the man and carried him to the aid post. Young was transformed by the experience: he had saved one life among so much death. After his first period of service was over, he immediately re-enlisted in the RAMC and, after some time in the training trenches at Étaples, was transferred to a Field Ambulance for the second Line Battalion, 174th Brigade.17
One of his first jobs was to bring back a wounded man lying in a deep shell hole. When Young ran over, he was spotted by an enemy sniper, who began to fire at him. It was now too dangerous for his teammates to join him, so Young stayed in the hole with the casualty, with the sniper pinning him down for hours, firing every time he moved.18 All Young could do for the man was slowly turn his head so that he faced him, and hold his hand. He whispered a few words, told the soldier his name and that everything would be all right: eventually the bloody sniper would get bored and move on. He tried to smile, but he wasn’t sure the man could see his expression through the mud on his face. When he saw that the soldier was crying, Young squeezed his hand and tried to comfort him. The soldier shook his head almost imperceptibly and then looked away. It wasn’t the pain, he whispered. He was so sorry – he didn’t deserve to be saved. He’d been one of those who had ridiculed the bearers while they waited to go over the top. The man was sobbing openly now, and Young was worried about the sniper hearing them. He shushed the wounded man firmly. It didn’t matter any more, he whispered – the bearers understood.
Finally the soldier calmed, but the sniper had heard him and started firing again. The men lay together in fear and silence for what felt like hours, the bearer holding his patient’s hand. Then the sound of the shots drifted away. The sniper had found another target. Carefully Young got up onto his elbows and started dressing the soldier’s wounds, giving him water and morphine. He now saw that the man was small and light, so he could probably carry him on his own. By now it was dark and it was getting cold. Young felt he couldn’t wait any longer. Hoisting the patient up onto his back, he climbed out of the crater. When the sniper saw them and began firing, it was too late to go back, so Young ran for their lives. Shots followed him all the way back to the British lines, but he ducked and weaved and managed to keep them both safe. At the aid post, he laid the soldier down and re-dressed his wounds. He had spent so much time with him, in such danger, that he was reluctant to let him go. Most bearers felt like that about their patients, particularly after a long carry. As one bearer put it, sometimes their going was like that of an old friend, who shared the rigours of the journey.19
But Young’s war as a bearer really began in April 1917 at Bullecourt during the battle of Arras, where thousands of wounded men lay abandoned on the great, bloody Douai plain. His team arrived in the evening and were setting up their post when a group of soldiers ran up. Their mates were trapped in a shell hole, they told the bearers, all of them badly hurt. They had to find them, quickly. One of the soldiers tried to show them on a map where the wounded men were, but Bullecourt had been completely destroyed and Young and the team spent hours stumbling over barbed wire and mud, constantly under enemy fire, having to find their way. When they finally reached the spot the soldier had marked on the map, no one was there, alive or dead. So they struggled back and it took them two hours in the dark and cold to reach their trenches.
Young didn’t know what was worse: not finding any casualties or not being able to get to them. One of the bearers had been at Mametz Wood the previous year, where they had been pinned down in shell holes and trenches and all they could do was listen to the screaming of the wounded. They hadn’t expected to survive, let alone get to the men. But when the fighting stopped they found that their troubles had only just started. The wood was full of smashed, upturned trees and deep troughs and ditches, which made it impossible to use a stretcher. Every single casualty had to be brought out on someone’s back, in the dark. The bearers stumbled and fell for hours, cursing and apologising to the wounded, many of whom bled to death as they carried them.20
Young didn’t sleep much for the remainder of his first night at Bullecourt. He had been a soldier and, if you reported the location of wounded comrades, you usually didn’t get it wrong. As soon as it was light he would go out again. His teammates had been given other carries, so he found some volunteers from the wounded men’s regiment and loaded them up with panniers and stretchers. They got permission from the officers, on condition that the chaplain said a special blessing over them. It didn’t bode well, but out they went, under heavy enemy shelling – and the chaplain’s blessing seemed to work. Young and the volunteers found the shell hole and the twelve casualties lying at its bottom.
Young thought he had never seen anything worse. The wounded had been abandoned for days and were dehydrated, gangrenous and paralysed with fear. He began to dress their wounds and give out morphine and water, instructing his volunteers to follow his example. Even Young’s expert handling caused them to cry out in pain, never mind the fumblings of the soldiers. But Young kept steady, reassuring the wounded men: they’d all soon be in a nice warm hospital bed or back in Blighty, not to worry. But all the while he knew that many would end up on the amputation table or in the moribund ward.
Finally they were ready to move. Young’s best friend in the bearer team, George, had found his way to the shell hole in search of his comrade. The two bearers now showed the volunteers how best to move the men onto stretchers and, one by one, they sent them back through an old trench network to avoid enemy shells. When Young turned to pick up the last casualty he found that they were one stretcher short. The soldier was just a boy and his leg was almost gone, so Young hoisted him up onto his back and carried him down himself, alternating with George. The old trench network was collapsing and the men were struggling to make their way through it, so whichever bearer wasn’t carrying led the way. The last part of the carry was over open ground, and shells slammed into the earth around them as soon as they left the trenches. But somehow they made it. The colonel and the chaplain were astounded. After being summoned to the adjutant’s tent for cocoa – it was all he had to offer them at that moment – Young and George returned to their tent at the field ambulance, where they talked about their day for a good while.
At Passchendaele, Young was leading a team of bearers and thirty walking wounded when a shell struck the group, killing several bearers and their casualties, and injuring many more. Young kept his nerve and managed to lead the survivors into a nearby pillbox. It wasn’t much, but it was safe from shelling. The men had few stores, very little water, and some of the wounded had begun to cry that the enemy would find them, throw in a grenade and they would all be killed. All night the bearers treated the severely wounded men, rationing the water, cutting the dressings into ever smaller patches. As the pillbox gradually grew quiet, Young found himself looking after a big, strong man who had lost half his head. Young sat by his side, trying to calm the raging soldier who struggled to get up and leave until the moment he died. When the water finally ran out, they had to leave the pillbox. Outside, the enemy guns had presumed them dead and moved on. But the danger wasn’t over. The ground was liquid mud and the bearers had to wade their way back to their lines, stretchers held high. It took them three trips, but everyone made it. There wasn’t an aid post where Young expected to find it and no doctor either, so he set up his own post and treated the men for three more days until he was relieved.
On quiet evenings the bearers gathered together in one of their tents. Often they talked while mending their uniforms, which had been torn when the men they were carrying clawed at them in agony. One of them had a sewing kit and another a little tin of buttons, which he passed round. This was a time to think back, to make sense, to try and mend – not just their tunics, but themselves.
Everyone had a story of madness to tell. One of them had recently been at an aid post where a bearer team had just returned, covered in blood (and worse) literally up to their waists. It turned out they’d been carrying all night, and at dawn they had got back to the head of a communication trench crowded with soldiers waiting for the whistle. The leading bearer dropped down into the trench and waited for them to move. None of them did. Bloody infantry, he thought. His team was still up there, becoming a target, as the offensive was about to begin. He gave the usual call of ‘Gangway stretcher bearers!’ Everyone normally moved for the gangway call, for it meant that a wounded man was on board. It had no effect. He tried again: ‘Make way for wounded!’ Still nothing. When he walked over and pushed at the shoulder of one of the men leaning on the trench wall, the soldier’s head lolled back. He was dead. It turned out that every last one of them was dead, hit where they stood, the trench too crowded for anyone to have fallen back. The shelling was heavy and they had no choice but to use the trench; leaving the stretcher on top, they started to push the dead soldiers over. Then they got the stretcher down and told the casualty to keep his eyes shut and not to open them, whatever happened. They set off over the human mound, two of them dragging the stretcher behind them, the other two up ahead, pushing over the corpses to make a path. They kept tripping up, their legs squishing down into the soft corpses, but they carried on and returned covered in blood.21
At least corpses were quiet. If most bearers thought about it, they probably preferred a trench full of dead soldiers to living ones. They all hated arriving with a casualty at the top of a forward trench full of excited, adrenalin-fuelled soldiers, ready for the attack. When they dropped down into a trench with the torn-up patient on their stretcher, there was usually a stunned silence. The bearers could sense the men’s excitement draining away and hear stifled sobs of fear.22 So they kept their heads down and hurried as best they could. But then bearers were probably, the maddest of them all. Look at us, said one of the battle-hardened team leaders: sitting here in a tent, sewing on buttons like old maids, with the toe of a boot on a German corpse sticking up through the floor and all of us pretending not to notice.
William Easton of the 77th Field Ambulance often thought about how much he had learned since he became a stretcher bearer. ‘INOCULATIONS’ was one important lesson. The MO had taught him how to give injections, and now his team went around inoculating whole battalions against typhoid. ‘FEET’ would have been another heading in his notebook. Bearers spent hours rubbing frozen soles and toes to keep away frostbite and trench foot, and watched out for marching injuries such as sores, blisters and damaged tendons.23 ‘MORPHINE’ was a section they kept adding to as they grew more experienced as bearers. In the beginning they had all doled out the blue morphine tablets to anyone who so much as groaned, but as they came to understand the carry, they tried not to give out so much. An unconscious patient was a dead weight; patients who were awake were lighter and could tell you what hurt and if they were suddenly beginning to bleed. Moreover, giving out morphine on the carry meant there was less available for patients at the aid post. So, like most bearers, Easton had become good at negotiating with wounded men who begged for morphine; sometimes just calm confidence had the same sort of effect.24
Bearers understood the weight of a casualty better than anyone. If you ran out of stretchers, you shouldn’t use a greatcoat or a blanket to fetch someone in. Everyone made that mistake in the early days, but the patients got too bumped in a bundle, their wounds opened up again and it was much more effort than it looked. Instead you should take them on your back. You could get further than you thought, once the patient was hoisted up, and the weight of him kept you going somehow.
Then there was ‘GAS’. In 1916 the bearers’ training course was expanded to include time at ‘Gas School’. Easton was one of those who had learned about the effects of gas, how to carry a gas mask, and how to get a mask on a patient whilst he tried to wrench it off. His notebook might also have included a page headed ‘AID POST’. It wasn’t just a question of dumping down your stretcher when you got there. Sometimes the MO was busy, or even dead, so it was up to the bearer to keep the post going. On arrival the bearer would often fill out a Field Medical Card (called a ‘ticket’), cut a patient’s hair away from a head wound and trim back tunic rags. He would try to keep his patient alive until the MO or the ambulance came, and would then give them details of his wounds and what he had done for him. Working in the aid post always made Easton want to learn more about medicine. There was a Canadian bearer team that had assembled a small library containing first-aid and medical textbooks sent by one of their wives.25 Easton, like many bearers by 1917, could take a parade of the sick and run an aid post, if there was no MO to do it.
But there were other things he had learned that didn’t make it into his notebook. German, for starters. Bearers often had to supervise groups of POWs to help with carries to the rear.26 Sometimes you even had a POW as a patient on your own carry. Either way, it helped to know a bit of pidgin German, but Easton didn’t think it would be sensible to write down his vocab in his notebook. You never knew who might get the wrong idea. Quite often they came across German medical supplies and discovered that they were much better than their own. German bearers had big absorbent pads for wounds and sticky tape to fasten them with – much more efficient than the thin cotton wads with tails that Easton had to use. Any time you found German supplies, you kept them, although as the war went on, you had to be careful. Sometimes the retreating Germans left behind a cache of supplies that was booby-trapped. One of the bearer teams kept a fishing rod so that they could prod desirable items, such as binoculars, from a distance, to be sure they were safe.27
Then there were the things he had learned about on the battlefield itself. After two years of war the trench networks were beginning to crumble and collapse. But new trenches weren’t always built with the bearer in mind. They were so deep and narrow that, once you got down in them, it could suddenly be very dark except for the strip of sky above.28 They had sharp angles and corners where you had to lift the stretcher up high to pass through. Some of them weren’t more than two feet wide, and a queue of bearers could build up on top waiting for a space to lower their carry – and a queue of bearers drew snipers. Easton didn’t really care much for the new style of trench. Those wretched engineers dug them so quickly that it was easy to get lost in a labyrinth of new routes. Then you had to go back up and try and get your bearings – without getting shot – and remember the changes so that you could put them on your map.
‘MAPS’ – a single sheet of paper, but so important. Medical officers or senior bearers had to be good at drawing. New maps were issued just before the beginning of an offensive, and whole evenings were spent poring over them, crayons in hand, adding new trenches or erasing collapsed ones. Bearers wrapped their maps in a small piece of oilskin cloth to keep them dry.
Easton could have thought of other lectures to add to the stretcher-bearer syllabus. One of them would be about ‘WALKING WOUNDED’. Bearer parties attracted long lines of lightly wounded men who followed them, knowing they would lead them to the nearest aid post. Yet lines of bandaged men also attracted enemy fire, so bearers had to learn to keep the group together and out of sight. They also had to be inventive when it came to organising ‘TRANSPORT’. One team fully loaded with stretchers, and with many walking wounded behind them, came across a working party of twenty Scottish soldiers who were digging a roadside ditch.29 The bearers persuaded them to stop their work and use their wheelbarrows to carry those on the point of collapse.
‘SLEEP’. A bearer should sleep whenever he could. He should be able to sleep in spite of the sound of guns thump-thumping all night long. He should also ignore the smell of decomposing human flesh: it was the exhalation of the battlefield.30 One bearer returning from forty-six hours of continuous duty at the second battle of Ypres simply dropped to the floor of his billet and went instantly to sleep as the battle raged around him. Sometimes Easton could only snatch a few minutes here and there on a stretcher at a medical post or casualty clearing station (CCS). The nurses carefully stepped over him because they knew how much he needed the rest.
‘FOOD’: bearers should eat whatever, and whenever, they could and should learn to scavenge. Rations were often late and small, so during any lull in the fighting bearers should look for food on the bodies of the dead. A corpse had no use for a tin of bully beef, and sometimes you came upon abandoned rations and stores.31 One of Easton’s friends, who had been a bearer at Loos, still talked about the magnificent meal conjured up by one of the men in his battalion, who had managed to brew up some tea, make some toast and bacon and even find a slice of sultana cake. Bearers should never go hungry. Ask your family to send food, and use your own wages to buy extra. A younger member of a team of bearers seemed to grow an inch every month, so whilst most of his colleagues spent their money on beer and brandy, he bought himself supplies of chocolate, bread and eggs. He too would rather have had the beer, but life as a stretcher bearer gave him a tremendous appetite.32
Perhaps the last lecture ought to be on ‘ANIMALS’, with a subsection on ‘MOLES’. There was no defeating a mole. One bearer team was trying to get some sleep in a new dugout, but was woken by clods of earth landing on their faces. It was a company of moles digging their route away from the battlefield. For several nights the bearers bayoneted the area, but the guns kept firing and the moles kept coming, so eventually they gave up and moved to a different dugout.
‘PETS’ were better company. If the team was based in one place for a while, it should think about getting a pet, preferably a dog. There were plenty of dogs roaming the battlefield, abandoned by their owners. Having a pet gave you something to look after that wasn’t a broken man. And pets were funny. One team, on an easy carry, came across a small puppy that was about to drown in a flooded shell hole. One of the bearers found his way to the bottom and rescued the dog. They wrapped him in a tunic and stowed him between the boots of the casualty they were carrying. Back at the aid post, they used a mountain of dressings and blanket rags to clean him up. A neat white terrier was revealed beneath the sludge, which responded quickly to his treatment of tinned sardines and small pieces of chocolate, so the team decided to keep him. But when the tent flap was opened unexpectedly the dog ran out and flung himself in the nearest puddle, rolling around in the mud until not a trace of white fur could be seen. It seemed that the puppy had also learned how to survive on the Western Front. ‘These men,’ complained one medical officer of his bearers, ‘will keep pets under any circumstances.’33
There was plenty of hard work that needed doing when the bearers weren’t out on the field. They mended broken trenches and dug aid posts. They hollowed out resting places in trenches along their communication routes, so that they had somewhere to safely stow a casualty during a long carry. If they remembered a particularly tricky length of trench that needed widening, they did it themselves.34 They left caches of stretchers and blankets in forward dugouts, to have them readily available when the attack came.35 And they found wood and built tables and benches to furnish new aid posts. It was hard work, for sure, but bearers never really minded the grind of repair and rebuilding. It kept them busy and fit for the carries to come.36
Easton needed all his resources, physical and mental, when he travelled on the Menin Road in September 1917. Sappers had hung tarpaulins between the trees along one section of the road, to screen the bearer teams who were going back and forth to a small aid post in a cottage that was filling with casualties. But when the enemy spotted and shelled the place, everyone was killed. Easton’s team found itself trapped on the blood-drenched road, the men flinging themselves into a ditch to protect themselves and their casualties.
When the enemy fire finally died away, Easton headed for another aid post located in an elephant dugout, a metallic prefab thought to be the safest form of shelter on the front. He left his casualties there and went back for more wounded from the field. When he returned he found that a shell had hit the dugout, penetrating its metal walls and ricocheting around the structure, killing everyone inside. Easton sat with his casualty and waited until the sanitary squad arrived. He tried not to watch them as they cleaned out the shelter, but he couldn’t help overhearing that they had been told to bring sandbags rather than blanket coffins, as everyone inside had been cut to pieces. After that, Easton would never touch another sandbag, no matter how blistered his shoulder or how muddy his boots.
Bearers learned more about death than any other men on the battlefield. They learned how to read the iron voices of the guns, how to hear them shout their power and know what sacrifices they required that day.37 They learned not to fear death, as it followed them on each carry. They learned to recognise its work, to see instantly who was dead and who was still alive. They learned to watch men die. They learned how to help them out of this world, either with soft words or with a strong dose of morphine.38 They learned how to turn away from the dying and find others who would live. It was never easy. One bearer left a man to die because others needed him more. But it troubled him all day, so in the evening he went back, found that the man was alive and fetched him in.39 He never found out if the soldier survived, but at least he was able to sleep. Bearers also got used to the seriously wounded men who waved them away, sending them to more deserving cases nearby. And they always made sure there were matches and cigarettes in their panniers, kept dry in their oilskin alongside their map, so that they could give a dying man a last smoke.
They learned not to mind the long, desperate carry that ended with the casualty going straight to the moribund ward, where a chaplain waited for him, rather than a surgeon, or those they delivered straight to the sanitary squads for burial. Sometimes it helped them to keep little memories of the men they hadn’t been able to save, like a bloodstained paybook or a button pressed into their hand as a parting gift.40 They got used to getting up on mornings when their first task was to check on the casualties laid outside the aid post and remove the dead from stretchers that were needed by the living.41 And they learned about death among their own: sometimes they would need to build new teams when the old one had been utterly destroyed.42 They learned not to get annoyed when a new back wasn’t as broad or as strong as that of an old comrade. The new arrival would soon learn; his hands would toughen, and the carry would go on.
One of the chaplains at the front marvelled at the determination and courage of the bearer teams around him. He watched them closely, often going out on the carry with them, and he listened as they spoke to their casualty along the way. He noticed the little phrases they repeated over and over again as they went about their work, and one day he wrote them down and found that together they made a poem:
Easy does it – a bit o’ trench ’ere,
Mind that blinkin’ bit o’ wire,
There’s a shell ’ole on your left there,
Lift ’im up a little ’igher.
Stick it, lad, ye’ll soon be there now,
Want to rest ’ere for a while?
Let ’im dahn then – gently – gently,
There ye are, lad. That’s the style.
Want a drink, mate? ’Ere’s my bottle,
Lift ’is ’ead up for ’im, Jack,
Put my tunic underneath ’im
’Ow’s that, chummy? That’s the tack!
Guess we’d better make a start now,
Ready for another spell?
Best be goin’, we won’t ’urt ye,
But ’e might just start to shell.
Are ye right, mate? Off we goes then.
That’s well over on the right,
Gawd Almighty, that’s a near un!
’Old your end up good and tight.
Never mind, lad, you’re for Blighty,
Mind this rotten bit o’ board.
We’ll soon ’ave ye tucked in bed, lad
’Opes ye gets to my old ward.
No more war for you, my ’earty,
This’ll get ye well away,
Twelve good months in dear old Blighty,
Twelve good months if you’re a day,
MO’s got a bit o’ something
What’ll stop that blarsted pain.
’Ere’s a rotten bit o’ ground, mate,
Lift up ’igher – up again,
Wish ’e’d stop ’is blarsted shellin’
Makes it rotten for the lad.
When a feller’s been and got it,
It affec’s ’im twice as bad.
’Ow’s it goin’ now then, sonny?
’Ere’s that narrow bit o’ trench,
Careful, mate, there’s some dead Jerries,
Lawd Almighty, what a stench!
’Ere we are now, stretcher-case, boys,
Bring him aht a cup o’ tea!
Inasmuch as ye have done it
Ye have done it unto Me.43