It seems to take a vast amount of firing to kill a man.
Charles McKerrow, 14 September 1915
Neuve Chapelle provided RMO John Linnell with the memory that would stay with him for the rest of his life. On the second day of the battle he had led the 23rd Field Ambulance attached to the Grenadier Guards to an aid post in an abandoned farmhouse. There had barely been time to explore the sturdy old building – although he discovered, to his delight, that it had a working tap – before the courtyard and stable block filled with stretchers and walking wounded. Linnell and his team worked for several hours without stopping, the bearers bringing them one grimy, battered, terrified man after another (one of them was Mickey Chater). Eventually they blurred into one bloody line as the medics dressed wounds, gave out morphine and ordered men into ambulances to take them to the base hospitals.
Then, at a time when Linnell was beginning to feel unable to cope with the sheer number of arrivals for much longer, a young gunnery officer wandered in. It was all right, he told the RMO so quietly that Linnell had to lean forward to hear him. He didn’t need much, he said, but he had received a biff in the back, so he would sit down for a moment, if the doc wouldn’t mind. There was something about him – a distracted calmness – so Linnell didn’t call over a bearer, but helped the man sit down on a bit of wall. The young officer sighed and looked off into the distance. He made no protest when Linnell lifted up his tunic to examine his back. A piece of shell fragment had blown a hole in him, front to back. When Linnell squatted down to get a better look, he could see all the way through the young man to the fields beyond. When he got to his feet, the officer got up too. He stood still, breathing quietly. Linnell pressed some morphine tablets into his hand, gave him a water canteen and watched as the man walked out of the farmhouse.
Linnell struggled not to let this one patient overwhelm him. He had other problems. Word had got out about the aid post and now cavalry troops, motor carriers, stray soldiers as well as an endless stream of casualties were heading to the farmhouse from all over the battlefield to shelter behind its thick walls. Soon they were becoming a target themselves. Three shells hit the exterior walls and, with every explosion, the gun aimers got closer and closer. Linnell realised that they were trapped. They would have to stay in the farmhouse, even though the bombardment was getting so heavy that many of the casualties thought they were back on the battlefield.
So they worked on in the courtyard and stables, half-blinded by brick dust, dashing from shelter to shelter to avoid the shrapnel. The main dressing room received a direct hit, killing a German POW and further wounding the men being bandaged, but somehow missing their doctors. A huge piece of shrapnel quivered in the plaster over their heads, but they worked on. More and more holes appeared in the walls and ceiling. The patients waiting to be evacuated watched the debris of trees and buildings flying up into the sky, then crashing down around them. Suddenly one of them spotted a Royal Flying Corps (RFC) aircraft. The pilot flew his machine in wild loops, drawing the enemy fire away from the farmhouse, and everyone stopped to watch and cheer. Then they heard clattering hooves and squealing metal wheels as several horse-drawn guns arrived, the drivers shouting like madmen and flogging the horses on. The battery positioned itself just below the farmhouse and opened fire on the enemy guns that had shelled the farmhouse. Within minutes the German position fell silent.
Most of Linnell’s patients could now be moved on. Darkness came and the little farmhouse grew quiet as the doctors and their remaining patients fell asleep on stretchers or fragments of wall, all feeling safer for the presence of the gun crews outside, watching over them. In the morning, after a short church service from the regimental chaplain, the work began again: guns and wounded, over and over, all day. In the evening, as the fighting slowed for the very last time, Linnell looked up to see a little queue of ambulances and trucks outside the aid post, waiting to take them all away. As he loaded up the last truck with their remaining supplies, he looked back at what remained of the farmhouse. There, just outside the walls, he saw the body of the young gunnery officer. He lay where he had fallen, only a few steps away from the wall where Linnell had examined him the day before.
William Kelsey Fry and his bearer teams of the 7th Division Royal Welch Fusiliers had made it safely out of Neuve Chapelle and joined their battalion in the first Artois offensive of May 1915. By then they had already gained a reputation as one of the best medical teams at the front. Frank Pearce and George Sheasby were Kelsey Fry’s bearer team leaders, and the Fusiliers got used to seeing the three men together, pointing out features on the battlefield and conferring about conditions – doc and bearers indistinguishable one from the other.
On 9 May, the Fusiliers were ordered to take a small town close to the Aubers Ridge. It took them three days to conquer Festubert’s sad streets, lined with ruined houses and charred tree stubs, and they suffered their heaviest casualty load of the war so far. The bearer teams were quickly overwhelmed by the numbers of wounded, and Kelsey Fry himself went out onto the battlefield to retrieve casualties. Time after time he cleaned the mud off his glasses, braced himself and joined the fighting soldiers, oblivious to all but the cries of the man he was trying to find in the middle of the chaos. When he found him, Kelsey Fry hoisted him up onto his back and ran as fast as he could. During one of these trips he was shot in both legs. The wounds weren’t serious, but he was losing blood and lucky to make it back to the medical post with his patient. His bravery earned him a Military Cross (MC) for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty whilst under heavy fire.1 His leg wounds earned him a short spell in hospital.
The division was sent to join a second assault on the Aubers Ridge in September 1915 at the battle of Loos, where chlorine gas was used for the first time. British tactics were completely inept. Men were ordered to advance straight towards heavily defended German trenches, bristling with machine guns. So many were killed that when the troops finally turned to retreat, the German gunners, repelled by the slaughter, ceased firing. The enemy even sent out their own medical personnel to help bearers like Frank Pearce who were trying to bring in some of the 8,000 casualties.2 Loos earned Pearce a Distinguished Conduct Medal (DCM) for his bravery from 25 to 29 September, when he carried wounded men from the field on his back for forty-eight hours without stopping.3
In between battles, Kelsey Fry got on with the mundane duties of an RMO. If there was no fighting, much of his day was spent on sanitary work.4 Every time the battalion moved, it was his responsibility to find a fresh-water supply and to make sure it didn’t get polluted. This was a task that could take up days of his time. Once rivers were found, the water had to be tested as being fresh. If there was no river, wells were dug down to a water source. Then holes for 200-gallon water tanks had to be dug and filled – and hopefully he hadn’t run out of chlorine supplies. And then there were the latrines: Kelsey Fry had to site, dig and maintain them. No wonder some RMOs complained that their work could be dull.5
The RMO also had to keep his men as clean as possible, which meant regular inspections of their kitbags, enamel mugs and feet; enamel mugs were standard issue at the front – they didn’t smash and were easily cleaned. Some RMOs made their men feel like criminals, but not Kelsey Fry. He had this smile, the men of the Welch Fusiliers all agreed, that somehow made a difference. Men who had only met him once, being brought to him on a stretcher, felt the same. They listened to his calm and reassuring voice as he inspected their wounds, tore out a Field Medical Card from the large book they came in and fastened it to their tunic.6 His voice alone could make you feel better and quieten your mind.7 Not that he was soft. Everyone knew about his courage under fire and he exercised real authority. There were few officers at the front who could make men move quite as quickly as William Kelsey Fry.8
By 1916, the ‘Year of Battles’, Kelsey Fry’s reputation had reached the upper ranks of the RAMC. They decided to promote him away from the dirt and gunfire of the front line to a safer post, heading one of the new casualty clearing stations, but Kelsey Fry refused. He felt that he could not serve his country as well there as he could at the front. In March the Welch Fusiliers were sent to Verdun, and now it was George Sheasby’s turn to get a DCM for his bravery.9 When orders came to prepare for a new offensive in the early summer, Kelsey Fry was told to oversee the creation of an entirely new aid post and several new teams of bearers. No one knew the date of the offensive, but their post was to be up and running as soon as possible so that it could receive the soldiers who were wounded going out into no-man’s-land after dark to prepare the battlefield.
One of the aid post’s very first patients was the poet Siegfried Sassoon. He had been cutting enemy wire at night when he was shot by a sniper. His injuries were not life-threatening, but he confessed to Kelsey Fry at the aid post that he hoped they might earn him an MC. Sassoon was moved to a casualty clearing station, which Kelsey Fry was visiting when the news came through that he had indeed won his medal. Knowing how much it meant to the young soldier, Kelsey Fry hurried over to the ward to tell him. Seeing that Sassoon was visibly disappointed not to have received the actual decoration right away, Kelsey Fry went to find a nurse to ask for a needle and thread. Then he sat down on Sassoon’s bed, took off his tunic and unpicked his own faded medal ribbon, hard won at Festubert. He sewed it carefully onto Sassoon’s tunic and handed it to the young soldier, with a smile. Sassoon always kept the doctor’s ribbon, even though he would eventually reject his own medal.10
Sassoon missed the early months of the Somme as it took longer for him to recover from his injury than he would have liked. His comrades in the Welch Fusiliers kept him posted with regular letters telling him of their rough time, when they had lost 200 men in just three days. Kelsey Fry, Pearce and Sheasby didn’t have time to write letters. They worked for two months straight, moving from medical post to medical post as the offensive bucked and surged, with the casualty load never slowing. At the end of August they found themselves at Guillemont Wood, where British and German forces fought each other fruitlessly in preparation for another, larger offensive in early September. There was hardly time to prepare a medical post, so they simply dug a hole as deep as time and the enemy would allow and put a tarpaulin over it. It filled with casualties almost immediately, like rain collecting in a puddle. As at every aid post on the line, they worked so hard that they stopped hearing the shellfire and didn’t notice as it crept closer and closer.
The first Sassoon heard of the tragedy was when he received a letter in hospital.11 At four o’clock on 29 August a shell had hit Kelsey Fry’s medical post and exploded. Everyone knew the doctor and his team were in the post at the time, along with five severely wounded men, and, despite continuing shellfire, ran to help. But it was too late: Pearce and Sheasby had both been killed, along with all their patients and two other bearers. Under unremitting fire, the soldiers and orderlies dug and dug, pulling out body after body until they found their doctor – miraculously alive among the death and debris – covered in the blood of his closest comrades. The man who had carried so many casualties from the battlefield was now carried away himself, his bright eyes closed and his smile gone. Kelsey Fry would survive, but never recovered sufficiently to return to the front. For the Fusiliers, the loss of their RMO was as bitter as any death.
For Major Alfred Hardwick the first sign of the new offensive was that beer prices in the officers’ mess went up. Then he was ordered to lead his 59th Field Ambulance to a new location alongside the 19th Division. The field ambulance was one of the mobile aid posts, made up of carts and mule trains. With its own MOs and bearer teams, it could be sent wherever it was needed. Moving up and down the line wherever trouble flared, rather than waiting for it to catch up with them, it collected and treated casualties.12 The 59th waited for a few days at its new location and then, on 1 July 1916, it was off, the following days and nights blurring into one bloody whole.
Ten days later they were moved again, this time to a location alongside a small railway line that had been built specially for the offensive. Hardwick was told that his casualties were only fourth in line for use of a trolley to get them back to a CCS. The first priority was shells, the next Royal Engineers’ supplies, then rations; last, and definitely least, came the wounded. The only entries in Hardwick’s diary during the first weeks of the Somme read: ‘dead men + +’. He even gave up trying to read and just sat in his dugout when he was off duty, smoking pipe after pipe, his nights filled with the unending thump-thumping of shells landing nearby.
Unlike troops who were moved back and forth from trench to billet, the field ambulances were kept close to the front for as long as possible. The 59th saw service from the very first day of the Somme to the last, 19 November. It moved from Guillemont to Ginchy, Morval and Martinpuich, and then to Thiepval, Le Transloy and the sodden valley of the Ancre.13 For Hardwick, it was all one and the same, except for a growing danger from abandoned munitions that increasingly cluttered the roads and landscape through which they moved. Even the thousands of empty shell cases half-buried in the mud were a danger, as they could trip up man or horse, breaking a leg or turning over a cart full of supplies and casualties. Then there were the dud bombs and unexploded shells that littered the landscape; there were so many that you stopped noticing them after a while, until the sound of an explosion served as a reminder. Sappers tried to clear areas of munitions, but no one had time to get rid of the miles and miles of tangled barbed wire and cables that sprawled everywhere. Entire days were wasted as orderlies and bearers had to cut paths through the debris, the wire snagging and ripping their clothes and flesh as they worked to make a way for the field ambulance.
By September 1916, Hardwick was beginning to think that the battle would never end and that he would spend the rest of his life here. He became grateful for small mercies, like the dugout they built in the underground oven of an old bakery at the Stuff Redoubt. It was so deep, and the walls so thick, that they sat in complete silence and in a soft darkness lit up by candles throwing shadows on the solid stone walls. Nobody wanted to return to the harsh light and infernal din of the battle. By now the main assault on Thiepval was over, but the fighting continued, providing a steady stream of casualties to be brought to safety. Hardwick had to find the best route for the bearers to bring them out, so he spent a day scouting the forward area to produce a map with directions from the trenches at Zollern to the Stuff Redoubt. It wasn’t a particularly long carry, about two hours, but without some kind of map the bearers would get lost in the blasted landscape of the battlefield. Hardwick kept the instructions simple, providing landmarks that they would all recognise:
Trip from Zollern to Stuff in order:
1. Trench board over a wide trench
2. Then make due N for a smashed up harrow
3. A smashed Bosche lumber cart in a shell hole
4. Then two dead Huns also lying in a shell hole and then 50 yards in front we drop into trench leading to Stuff Road.
In November, when most of the world thought the battle of the Somme was over, Hardwick and the men of the 59th Field Ambulance knew it was not. Each day seemed grimmer and more pointless than the last. They had moved from the safe bakery into a new dugout that was at best only splinterproof. To make matters worse, a heavy rainstorm had washed away some of the walls, revealing the corpses of six Germans in one parapet. By now Hardwick was struggling to support his staff. Several bearers would go sick each day from the strain of holding up for months on end under the stress of battle. Yet despite his sympathy for the men, Hardwick brooked no argument. Sick meant sick, and anything else meant that you worked as normal. If he let one fall out, the whole lot would disappear.
Besides, they were all in it together. They had very little water and had received no supplies of clean, new clothes for weeks. There was no prospect of replacement for tunics ripped by barbed wire, so they had to sew them back together themselves. There seemed to be as many rats in the dugouts as lice on their bodies, and ration deliveries were sporadic and inadequate. They received little news of the progress of the battle, except what they heard from the walking wounded who turned up at the dugout for treatment. Their stories of scores of wounded men, out near the front, which the bearers had no hope of reaching, did little to lift their mood. By the time the offensive officially came to a halt on 19 November, the 59th was barely able to crawl back towards the rear, with its prospect of food, water and a thorough clean.
Perhaps in recognition of their long exposure to the worst of the war, the field ambulance was held back from the front for most of 1917. They were based at a casualty clearing station, and such was their comfort and sense of security that in late spring Hardwick attached a makeshift plough to his horse and created a small vegetable garden. It was a fertile spot, thanks also to the horse, and the neat little rows of green shoots emerging from the manure-rich soil contrasted with the devastated remains of a small town nearby. Hardwick was now able to treat a much wider range of medical ailments than he was used to, including patients in a new influenza ward. He even became a kind of GP to the few locals left behind, helping to deliver a baby and getting paid in cheap local wine.
He was also able to study men with a range of psychiatric conditions brought on by the war, who were kept in a separate tent at the CCS. All over the front RMOs were coming to find this class of patient increasingly interesting. For some of them the treatment was quite simple: when the sound of the guns drew nearer and the patients became increasingly upset, the staff went round the ward putting cotton wool in their ears to muffle the noise and restore calm.14 Later on that year Hardwick was summoned to testify at the court martial of one of his former patients in the mental ward, who had been arrested for desertion. For nearly an hour the army prosecutor kept Hardwick in the witness box, asking him the most blithering questions he had ever heard on a subject that the army lawyer evidently didn’t understand. Then he was dismissed. Hardwick never found out what happened to the man, but feared the worst.15
By January 1918 the 59th Field Ambulance was ready to return to the front line. Hardwick thought it a miracle that they had survived with so few losses. As the array of carts and horses moved out towards another offensive in the Somme valley, it still comprised the same men he had around him since the foundation of the 59th in 1915. And there was no one he would rather go forward with. The war awaited them with some fresh twists. It rained throughout January and most of the brand-new trenches were full to the brim with freezing water; anyone who fell in could easily drown. It also meant that the bearers had to forgo safety below ground, instead having to go all the way over the top for stretcher cases.
When the waters receded, a different plague was sent to try them. Rats by the hundred scuttled freely around the trenches, feeding on all the rubbish left behind by the flood. The men loathed them above all else, and one animal in particular: a huge specimen that waddled where it liked and chewed with impunity. Their hearing became sensitised to the smallest of scratching sounds, which indicated that one of the rats was at work on a boot, a carefully saved biscuit or a candle end. Hardwick was determined to do something about this.
In March he was given a two-week pass, long enough to go all the way home to the West Country to see his family. While he was there he bought two ferrets and a large cage.16 On the train to London, and at his hotel, noses were wrinkled, but Hardwick dusted the cuffs of his uniform and glared back. The ferrets couldn’t have made a better start when they got to the 59th: bombing out of their cages, they returned to place the giant rat dead at Hardwick’s feet. It was better than getting a medal. From then on, the ferrets boarded in their own dugout in a nearby shell hole and were released daily. They never failed to find their prey – ten or twenty rats a day sometimes, with thirty-five being the record. When the division moved as a result of the German spring offensive, the first order of business was to scoop up the ferrets and stow their cage safely among the medical supplies. On Hardwick’s birthday they celebrated with red wine, games of poker and organised ratting, with each kill being celebrated with increasingly drunken cheers and songs about the only two creatures who really enjoyed themselves on the Western Front. What would the ferrets do, the men wondered, if the war ever ended? How could they ever go back to a Cornish farm, now that they had hunted for trench rats in France?
By April 1918 the 59th Field Ambulance was back on the old battlefield of the Somme. It looked much the same as it had when they had left at the end of 1916. There were still empty shell casings scattered and half-buried, and tangles of barbed wire as far as the eye could see. And almost the same numbers of wounded men. But this time the field ambulance itself would not escape injury. On 17 April a shell hit its medical post, burying it under tons of wet mud. Sharples, Hardwick’s lead bearer, was killed instantly along with two others, and Hardwick dug for hours to free another five men. They had survived together for three years, but now the field ambulance was finally broken apart. Hardwick stayed on until the war ended in November. Then he and his ferrets quietly returned home.
Charles McKerrow had been a GP in Ayr before volunteering for the RAMC in May 1915 and being appointed RMO to the 10th Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers. He went despite his wife Jean’s misgivings, but felt he had no choice. Others might have sheltered behind their practice or some ailment, but he knew he would never have been able to live with himself if he had done the same. He didn’t quite put it in those terms to Jean. He lied to her instead: he would hardly be in any danger at all, he wrote. Doctors were not allowed to advance with the first line of the regiment. He was expressly forbidden, by the most stringent ‘regulations’, to put himself in harm’s way. He was mostly to hide himself amongst the baggage. And just in case she didn’t quite believe him, he wrote to her almost every day, even if it was just one of those pre-printed postcards saying that he was well.
McKerrow’s first billet was in a ruined farmhouse in Laventie. It had so many bullet holes in its tin roof that it looked like a pepper pot. His bearer teams and orderlies had come to the farmhouse to meet him and there were moments of nervous tension as they waited to discover what kind of man the new RMO would be. It didn’t take them long to work McKerrow out. When they arrived, he was in his shirt sleeves, carrying some carpentry tools and planks. He’d been given the worst kind of little cart, he explained, just a bit of wood with four wheels nailed to the sides. No use to anyone – everything fell off. What was needed was something with sides and a bit of shelving, and a few handholds. It should be able to carry at least three patients and some supplies. He talked and listened to his bearers and orderlies while he worked on his cart and, when he had finished, they saw that he had built just what he had said he would. No need to worry about the new doc.
For his part, McKerrow also liked what he found. There were three men in particular whom he came to rely on. Clark and Kirtley headed up a team of thirty-two bearers, and Matthew Coulson was the chief orderly, who would look after McKerrow personally. The new RMO gave his weekly lectures to the bearer teams and found them so receptive that by November he had encouraged them to treat slight cases themselves in the nearest trench. As it got colder and wetter, his lectures focused on the problem of trench foot, explaining its causes and the preventative measures. The bearers listened intently and decided to take the message out to the soldiers. Organising themselves into small groups, they put together specialist supply panniers and visited every single one of the Northumberlands’ trenches. There they lectured and then saw each case of trench foot, treating it and demonstrating care of the condition to the entire battalion.
McKerrow was extremely proud of them. He was also grateful, for he needed all the spare time he could get, not just for writing to Jean, but because the local people had discovered the doctor billeted in the old farmhouse. All of a sudden he was a GP again, treating pneumonia and toothache, and birthing babies; he was even summoned by the local farmer when three of his cows were injured by a shell exploding in his barn. The locals couldn’t pay him, but they did his laundry and replaced the straw bedding that his horse, Tommy, consumed every day.
It wasn’t just the locals who helped McKerrow. RAMC supply lines in his area were unreliable, so he turned to a source he knew to be efficient: his wife back in Ayr. She’d already sent him provisions – tinned sardines, haggis and shortbread – and when he asked her to ‘join the team’, she agreed. Jean soon found him the lice combs and medical scissors that he needed, ordering in bulk. Bearers lost scissors every time they went on a carry, so there were plenty of repeat orders. She also got shirts and socks for those men who couldn’t get to a laundry. As the first Christmas approached, she sent vegetables, ham and kippers. This enabled McKerrow to care for his men to the best of his ability, as the RAMC instructed him, but he couldn’t have done it without his wife.17
The first time McKerrow saw his dugout in the trenches he was amazed at how well dug it was. When he met his men of the Northumberlands he found out why: most of them were miners and, when it came to repairing trenches, digging sanitary pits, wells or RMOs’ dugouts, they were second to none. They enjoyed the work because it took them away from the boredom of sentry duty and trench life. On a chilly evening one of them suggested that he put a fireplace in one of the larger medical dugouts. When the doc returned a few days later there was indeed a fireplace dug into the wall, brick-lined and with a chimney to let out the smoke.
Over Christmas and into the New Year the Northumberlands were involved in several attacks. It had rained heavily and they were unable to drain the water out of the trenches and dugouts. Everyone wore waders wherever they were – hard enough to get out of when you were fishing, McKerrow thought, never mind just about to go over the top. If anything was dropped in the mud, it sank, never to be seen again; McKerrow lost a pair of slippers that way. He even had to raise up his bed on wooden planks to lift it away from the water.
Conditions were taking their toll. His entire world seemed to consist of the reeking aid post and the freezing, sodden battle front; there were days when McKerrow could hardly remember anything else. Yet Jean’s parcels always contained something personal from her and the family – a photograph, a hand-warmer, a copy of the Ayrshire Post – which cheered him up. In return he asked her if she wanted any polished-brass shrapnel noses to use as vases in their living room.
And sometimes there was even good news at the front. One day word came from a nearby CCS that a man whose life McKerrow and the bearer teams had worked particularly hard to save had indeed survived. McKerrow made sure to tell each member of the bearer team personally. That night he walked out into the open and looked up at the stars. It was a clear night, and to his surprise he found that he could quite easily see Venus and Jupiter just setting, and Mars and Saturn rising. A busy night, astronomically. Back in his dugout he wrote down his observations. From then on, with stellar charts sent by Jean, he became one of many men and women at the front who looked up towards the heavens and found comfort in the eternal passage of the stars.
McKerrow’s reputation as a fine RMO soon began to spread. Men from other battalions sought him out, if their own doctor wasn’t available – and sometimes even if he was, turning up to his sick parades trying to blend in. He made a point of going round the lines every single day, and several times if there were new arrivals to the battalion, realising that newcomers became agitated if they thought the doctor hadn’t noticed them. He found that he had come to prefer trenches to billets, and wrote home to Jean that when he came back to Ayr he would probably always walk in the gutter. It wasn’t the only thing that surprised him. Sometimes he almost forgot about the war. Once, treating the wounded under fire for hours on end, he simply stopped noticing the sound of the guns and worked as calmly as if he were in his examination rooms at home.
In May 1916, McKerrow was informed of the forthcoming offensive. He was ordered to reduce his personal belongings to a minimum and was moved to a new aid post and billet near Amiens. He was aware of the seriousness of the situation and, in a letter accompanying a parcel of his belongings he assured his wife that during the next three months he would be cautious to excess.18 His battalion didn’t join the Somme offensive until the end of the first week. By then it had heard what had happened to three other Northumberland battalions. Attacking La Boisselle on the first day of the battle, they had lost 2,440 men and seventy officers within hours.19 When their own battalion finally went forward, McKerrow set up an aid post as close to the new front as possible. He followed the troops as they moved forward, at one point taking over a German aid post, complete with casualties and a medical orderly, who insisted on helping him.
McKerrow worked for three straight days, treating 1,000 casualties without stopping. They came in and went out again, and piles of bloodied bandages were trampled down into the mud, layer on layer. Watching over him was his orderly, Matt Coulson, who brought him continual supplies of coffee and soup, chasing after him round the aid post until McKerrow took the mug and drank whatever he was given. Coulson also brought fresh socks for the doctor, and made him sit down in a corner while he changed them and rubbed his feet and legs. But he couldn’t keep the RMO off his feet for long. Only on 10 July did McKerrow retire to the rear for a brief rest. In his first letter home to Jean his pride in his team, three of whom would later receive medals, took precedence over his own experience:
No one could have possibly equalled my stretcher bearers … As one hard-bitten chap said to me, ‘they are doing Christ’s work’. It really is very fine to see these chaps passing through storms of shell to help their comrades. I am very proud of them and hope they will get some rewards apart from the normal ones of their conscience.
In the third week of July the pace of battle slowed. Pushing further forward into enemy territory, the Northumberlands stumbled upon an artillery officer’s dugout, which they duly presented to their RMO to serve as an aid post. McKerrow had a good look through the things that the German officer had left behind, before lighting a fire and making coffee for Coulson and some of the bearers; he imagined how annoying it must be for the previous occupant to see smoke puffing up into the sky from his old dugout. McKerrow had spent a year in Vienna as part of his medical training and spoke fluent German, so when he found a cache of letters he translated them for Jean. She could see what a German officer – a man not so different from him – might write home.
At the end of July he was summoned to the rear to take part in the court martial of one of the casualties he had treated during the first three days, who had been accused of inflicting the wound on himself. Taking the witness stand on behalf of the soldier, McKerrow remembered quite clearly that there had been no powder burns on either the man’s skin or on any of the clothes that he had been wearing. In which case, he stated, the shot must have been fired from some distance away. His cool scientific testimony ensured that the man was acquitted.
He returned to the front to find that he had lost his comfortable German dugout in an enemy counterattack, and for the next two weeks the Northumberlands moved back and forth. McKerrow moved from aid post to aid post, and onto the field of battle itself. Once again, the days blurred into each other. He realised that somehow death had become unimportant to him. It wasn’t callousness, just too much knowledge. He had other problems to solve. When one morning during battle there was no time to dig a new aid post, he went round the battalion and borrowed all the men’s greatcoats. Then he found a deep shell hole and constructed a roof with the coats held up by rifles. The Northumberlands looked on in amazement, and McKerrow’s reputation for fearlessness and ingenuity grew even more.
By mid-August he was the only RMO left in the entire brigade and his bearer teams were badly depleted. There was barely enough time to train up their replacements, but somehow Kirtley and Clark managed to pull them into shape. McKerrow received a letter from Jean with the news that an uncle of his had been wounded by shotgun fire on a grouse moor. For the first time in months he got angry: as if there weren’t enough places in the world to get shot. One attack by the Northumberlands had cost the lives of two-thirds of the men taking part. That night he went out with the bearer teams to bring in the wounded and lost a bearer to a sniper. McKerrow knew the danger he put himself in, but his duty was not only to the wounded, but also to the unharmed soldiers in the battalion. They attacked with far greater confidence if they knew that he and his bearer teams would come to find and treat them.
October was a low point for McKerrow. Tommy, the scruffy horse that had carried him and pulled his cart for more than a year, attacked a groom and had to be destroyed. The stress of battle had got to the animal, as it had to the humans around him. Everywhere McKerrow looked there was loss. By now his entire bearer teams consisted of replacements, with only Clark and Kirtley surviving. They had been moved again, into an area where there was almost constant fighting. One of the new intake was shot in the stomach by a sniper almost as soon as he arrived. For the first time McKerrow began to wonder if he had now done his duty and felt it might be time to move to a safer position in the rear. He had a friend who ran a field hospital and made an informal enquiry to him about a transfer.
When the battalion was moved again to a quiet part of the front and the offensive finally ended, McKerrow had time to work on another project that he had taken on. Trench fever was a type of flu that brought down men by the hundreds for days at a time, without any discernible infectious agent. Always more interested in the defeat of the microbe than in that of the human enemy, McKerrow began to investigate the root causes and conditions of the disease. To Jean fell the task of going through all the diaries he had kept since his arrival in France and had sent back to her in Ayr, in which he had recorded the weather and general medical statistics from his brigade. Whilst Jean processed the data, Kirtley made a significant personal contribution to the research by going down with trench fever himself. He was installed on a stretcher in McKerrow’s dugout, so that he and the doc could study every aspect of his illness. McKerrow was the first RMO in France to research the condition and wrote up his research into a paper, ‘Pyrexias of Doubtful Origin in an Infantry Battalion on Active Service’. When he read it at an RAMC conference to great acclaim, he was asked to prepare it for publication.20
This response to his work gave him new heart, and for the first time since the beginning of the Somme offensive his letters home became more positive. He even started imagining life after the war, planning a long family trip to India. He formalised his request to transfer to a field hospital and applied for some leave – he hadn’t been home since April. It was the longest separation from Jean since they were married and he was especially looking forward to seeing his son; he even contemplated diagnosing the boy with a mysterious ailment so that he could extend his time at home for a few more days.
On 20 December, McKerrow and Clark left the aid post for their daily tour of the line. They never got to their men. At ten o’clock an enemy shell exploded close to them and both medics were hit. Horrified Northumberlands gathered around them and a bearer party, including Matt Coulson, arrived immediately. The two men were taken by stretcher to their own aid post and from there by ambulance to the nearest casualty clearing station four miles away. Their supply of morphine was good and there were few bumps in the road, yet both men had ruptures to all the major abdominal arteries and their conditions were inoperable. Clark died soon after arriving at the CCS, with Matt Coulson at his side. McKerrow was nursed by a fellow Scot, Sister Constance Druce, and he impressed her with his great calm and his refusal to fear the inevitable. He died at nine o’clock that evening.
The next day the bodies of McKerrow and Clark were wrapped in blankets and buried in the little cemetery in Poperinghe. For the men of the 10th Battalion it was the worst loss they had experienced and they decided to honour their RMO by building a cross for him and erecting it over his grave. Many of them wrote to Jean with their condolences, but Coulson couldn’t bear setting pen to paper. Instead his wife wrote to McKerrow’s widow, woman to woman, explaining that her husband was overcome with grief and couldn’t yet bring himself to talk about the loss.
As McKerrow would have wished it, Jean oversaw the publication of his article on trench fever in the 1918 volume of the Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps. Coulson became the orderly-servant to the battlion’s new RMO, who would later record that, for the remainder of the war, Coulson talked of little else but Doc McKerrow.