No one survived the Great War unscathed. The wounded had their scars, as did the men and women who cared for them – although theirs were less easy to see. The country as a whole had been wounded. The war was like a lesion on the collective brain of the nation. The lesion was a cruel condition; there was no memory loss; instead, there was too much memory – for the soldiers of their wartime experience, for the families of the loved ones they had lost. Everyone had lost someone – husband, brother or son, neighbour, workmate or pal. But it wasn’t just the dead who were mourned. Many of those who made it home were lost too, pale shadows of their former selves, unable to explain what they had suffered to families who would never be able to understand.
A few days after his wounding, Mickey Chater wrote home to his family: ‘Well my dears, I had such a charming birthday charging German trenches that I am now in hospital.’ It took a year in hospital in France before he was ready to come home. His injuries were so complex that doctors had almost given up on him, but his life was saved when one of the pioneers of facial surgery took over his case. Charles Valadier was particularly proud of the work he had done to reconstruct the young soldier and wrote about it in a medical journal, giving Chater a copy just before he left his hospital. Chater married his girlfriend, Joy, at the end of 1916 and they had a son. But the Mickey who came back was a shadow of the Mickey who had marched away, head held high with dreams of glory. He was more serious and everyone noticed his fragility. Despite his injuries, he tried to return to France, but it was clear that he would never again be a soldier, so he worked for the Ministry of Munitions until the end of the war. In 1919 he joined the family paper business, from which he retired in 1967.1 When, after his retirement, he was asked by the Harrow School Old Boys to give a lecture on his war experiences, it wasn’t quite the speech they had expected from someone who had participated in the battle of Neuve Chapelle.2 Much of it was taken up with his gratitude to the medical staff who had worked so hard to save his life in France. When Chater died in 1974, Valadier’s journal article was found carefully preserved among his papers.3
It took Bert Payne almost two years before he was ready to leave hospital. He didn’t take to the enforced inactivity and was soon up and about within the hospital walls, volunteering to work as an orderly. His doctors were as grateful for his resourcefulness as his COs had been in France and put him to work in the VD ward, to spare the female nurses. Despite being in considerable pain and on a restricted diet because of his injuries, he became one of the most senior orderlies in the hospital, relied upon to draw up diet sheets, distribute medications and assist the radiographer. His girlfried, Joey, had waited for him and they married in May 1918. When Armistice was declared, Payne took almost no notice. He was determined to get on with his life and not even the unveiling of a Pals’ Memorial in Montauban meant very much to him. Yet like Chater, he would never quite recover. The physical damage to his face was obvious and his jaw didn’t work all that well, so Joey learned to make soft food that he could chew. But there was other damage, less immediately obvious. The returning scout was a harder man than the one who had gone to war. He became less forgiving of weakness and intolerant of failure, especially by members of his own family. Most of all, he despised all wars. ‘War is ridiculous,’ he once said. ‘You can’t win. You kill a lot of men and they kill a lot of you and when you’ve got there, you’re there in any case.’ His children were a little afraid of him, but his grandchildren found him fascinating. He painted them pictures of the phoney tree he had discovered and they were never quite sure whether or not the story was true. Then they went to the Imperial War Museum and saw from their display that it was. Bert Payne died in 1982.4
Joseph Pickard endured years of operations before finally being released from hospital in 1922. When he went home to Alnwick, there were no jobs for him at Hardy’s, as he had feared. Instead he found work at the Birtley Instructional Factory, set up after the war to provide jobs for soldiers, where he trained as a watch-maker. The damage he had suffered to his back meant that he was in pain for the rest of his life, but he was unable to secure a decent disability pension from the Army. Joseph Pickard retired in 1959 but lived on in poverty until his death in 1988.
John Glubb was the exception. He never lost his physical scars, but he would always relish his part in the Great War. It took a year to put his face back together. One of the surgeons was William Kelsey Fry who, unable to return to France because of his own injuries, was now operating on soldiers at the Army’s new facial hospital at Sidcup. Glubb knew of Kelsey Fry’s war record and was honoured to meet him. During a month’s recuperation he took a voluntary job to stave off boredom when he was harangued as a shirker by a housewife. He demanded that the surgeons finish repairing his face as quickly as possible, so he could return to the front. He didn’t need his old face, he said, just a face that worked. By the summer of 1918, a year after his wounding on the Menin Road, the surgeons had finished with Glubb. It didn’t look pretty, they warned him; his strong boxer’s jaw and chin were gone for ever. But he didn’t need to be pretty where he was going and the Army didn’t care about his lopsided face. They needed seasoned officers more than ever to counter the last enemy offensive.
When the war ended, Glubb was determined to go on soldiering. In 1920 he volunteered for duty in Mesopotamia and fell in love with the Arab world. He single-handedly raised a camel corps of Bedouin tribesmen, leading them to a series of victories, and when the kingdom of Transjordan was created as part of the post-war settlement, he resigned his commission and was made principal military officer to King Abdullah I. His Bedouin corps became the Arab Legion and for decades it was the most formidable military force in the region. In 1956 Glubb retired with the rank of lieutenant general and returned to Britain, where he wrote a series of popular memoirs of both the Great War and his time in the Middle East. He was knighted the same year. Glubb was the last man ever to be given the title of Pasha, but he was just as proud of the name given to him by his Bedouin troops: Abu Hunaik, or Father of the Little Jaw.
Few stretcher bearers wrote about their experiences and very few at home understood what they had been called upon to do. Earnest Douglas, William Young and William Easton were all decorated for their courage during the Year of Battles, but all three were captured during the last Great German offensives of 1918. Nothing is known of Douglas and Young after their return to England, but Easton volunteered to remain in Germany, where he worked in a POW camp hospital after the Armistice. There he was desperately needed: after the German defeat, the staff, including all the doctors, had simply left the camp and gone home. Easton nursed the remaining patients in the hospital until they were all strong enough to return to Britain in 1919; he was demobbed the following year. Struggling to find a job, he realised that his medical experience was of real value and applied for a position in a hospital for amputees in Bristol, where he worked until his retirement.
Regimental Medical Officers had all had medical careers in civilian life before the war, so many of them simply resumed it when they came home.5 John Linnell was one of those, but Alfred Hardwick decided to put his experience to good use and followed John Glubb to Mesopotamia; he finally returned to his practice in 1927. There is no record of whether the ferrets were able to make the difficult adjustment to peacetime ratting, but Hardwick kept up his interest in zoology by becoming a Fellow of the Zoological Society. Both Linnell and Hardwick were decorated for their service in France.
William Kelsey Fry never returned to the front, but he remained one of the war’s most popular and remarkable RMOs. When he had recovered from his injuries the RAMC decided to draw on his dental surgical experience and sent him to a new hospital at Sidcup, set up specially for facial casualties and run by the surgeon Harold Gillies. It was the perfect posting. Kelsey Fry had the quiet confidence to inspire staff and patients in an untested hospital doing innovative work. Gillies could be difficult, but remembered that ‘Captain Kelsey Fry turned up for duty … and put us in his pocket straight away.’6 Everyone at Sidcup soon became fond of him, even Henry Tonks, the notoriously grumpy artist who kept the hospital’s diagrammatic records and who gave Kelsey Fry two pictures that he painted of work in the operating theatre.7 After the war, Kelsey Fry took up a post at Guy’s in the Dental School, but as soon as war broke out again in 1939 he volunteered for service. Once again he would find himself at the cutting edge of casualty treatment. He was sent to East Grinstead, where he designed and built the reconstructive dental unit for Archibald McIndoe, which after the war became the leading centre for postgraduate study in dental surgery. In 1951 Kelsey Fry was knighted and he continued his work, writing the key textbooks on his specialism, until his death in 1963. An old comrade from the Fusiliers, writing to The Times, made the following contribution to his obituary:
He was steadfastly courageous, devoted to his battalion and to his task. His calm and happy temperament carried him unstrained throughout all that long period. He was immensely kind … Needless to say, the battalion loved him, and particularly that little band of outstanding stretcher bearers whom he inspired and with whose survivors he remained in touch. That is the man we remember with gratitude. Other good men followed him, none quite reached his stature.8
Anyone visiting Kelsey Fry’s home remembered two things about him above all others: his smile, which never dimmed, and the greenhouse where he grew his beloved carnations. He always wore one in his buttonhole. His photograph, complete with smile and carnation, was used by King’s College London in their student recruitment material for the academic year 2010–11.
Surgeon John Hayward returned home to Liverpool and retired soon afterwards. Norman Pritchard came back to a civilian career at King’s College Hospital. Henry Souttar remained at the Army’s hospital at Netley until the end of the war and retained his interest in physics.9 He even married the daughter of a physics professor and wrote several textbooks on the application of physics to surgery, as well as designing equipment for Netley’s recuperative physiotherapy departments. He never forgot his time with Marie Curie at No. 1 Belgian Field and was an enthusiastic pioneer of radium therapy. His post-war work was as influential as his achievement at Furnes. In 1929 he wrote and illustrated The Art of Surgery, which remained the standard textbook for decades, and throughout his career he designed and built surgical instruments. He was knighted in 1949 and died in 1964, at the age of eighty-eight.
Jentie Patterson left No. 3 CCS when her father became seriously ill and her sister Martha could no longer nurse him on her own. She returned briefly to France, first as a nurse on a hospital ship and then, in March 1916, to ready an entirely new CCS, No. 16, for the coming offensive. No. 16 was one of the most up-to-date CCSs at the front. The living quarters were excellent and there was even a bath hut. But when her father’s condition was declared mortal Patterson went back to Scotland and nursed him until he died. The records of the Royal College of Nursing indicate that she continued to nurse after the war and never married. Winifred Kenyon left nursing soon after the war, presumably to get married, but saved all her mementos of her time at the CCS, including the newsletters that reported the results of the Hare and Hound races and the fancy-dress competitions. Nothing is known of Nurse Elizabeth Boon except for the letter she wrote to the family of Private Simpson in Tottenham after his death. The letter, and the care and devotion it showed, meant so much to the soldier’s family that they donated it as a single item to the archives of the Imperial War Museum. Private Joseph Simpson is buried in the Terlincthun British Military Cemetery in Wimille, plot number X.E.4.
Both orderlies, Alfred Arnold and Harold Foakes, survived the war and came home. We know almost nothing about their lives afterwards, except that both men married and had families, who one day sat them down and made them write up their memories of the war. It was a similar story for the hospital-train staff. Nurses Bickmore and Morgan got off their trains in 1918 and nothing more is known of them, except the few memories they jotted down of their time in France. Margaret Brander, like Jentie Patterson, went home and contined nursing for the rest of her life at the Perth Royal Infirmary. Her will established a scholarship in her name to support student nurses of limited means. Quaker Leonard Horner was demobbed in 1919 and formed the Old Sixteeners’ Association, so that the close friendships made on the rails of France would not be lost. One of their first acts was to bind up the train newsletters into hardback volumes, which they donated to the Quaker Library at the Friends House in Euston. Nothing more is known of the fate of Trains No. 3 and No. 10, but No. 16 was sent east at the end of the war and used to repatriate Russian POWs from Germany. Many of its wartime staff continued to serve on board. The train was finally decommissioned in 1921 and returned to civilian commuter service in Britain.
All army chaplains were instructed to hold a service of thanksgiving on 17 November 1918. Ernest Crosse was particularly relieved when the Armistice was declared. He never told his family, but he believed that had the Allies lost the war, he might have lost his faith in God altogether. By the end of the war he was in Italy, and he spent all night cycling to a printer’s to have 5,000 copies of a hymn sheet produced, which he distributed during a whole day of thanksgiving services held in camp after camp.10 On his return to England he became Canon of Chichester Cathedral and headmaster at Ardingly School. He later went back to parish work, first in Henley-on-Thames and then in Glynde in East Sussex. Crosse wrote three books on chaplaincy and war, and his artefacts from the Somme – including the map on which he had marked the graves of the soldiers he had buried – were shown in the Imperial War Museum’s 2009 exhibition, ‘War and Memory’.
One by one, the other padres came home and continued their ministries.11 Wilfred Abbott went to the Transvaal, before returning to Britain to serve at St Paul’s, Haggerston in the East End of London. He retired to Brighton in 1938. John Murray returned to his parish in Southwark and died in 1943. Montagu Bere went to Shanklin in Portsmouth, where he remained until his retirement in 1935. Cyril Horsley-Smith stayed in France until 1920, working with a huge parish of bored soldiers waiting to be demobbed. In 1929 he took his daughter to France to show her where he had served, including a cemetery where he had buried every single man lying there. It was some consolation to him that the graves were consecrated as he had left them and were well looked after. Horsley-Smith had four parishes between 1930 and 1947, when he finally retired. He died in 1954.
None of the soldiers who had seen Father John Lane Fox burying men at Loos ever forgot the sight, and many of those who had known him described the chaplain as the most extraordinary man they had ever met. Father John was almost killed in 1916 when a grenade accidentally exploded and severely injured his face and right hand. At the time there was the perception that the Sacrament could not be administered by a priest with a severe physical imperfection, and Father John was devastated and feared the loss of his priestly identity. He was sent home to London to recuperate, and when his family visited him in hospital they found him on the brink of total despair, flinching at every loud noise and unable to walk without help.12 By the time news of the Somme offensives reached the hospital he had slowly begun to recover, but his spirits only fully returned when he received confirmation from the Church authorities that Canon Law did not prevent him from officiating at Mass. By October 1916 he was back in France, where he celebrated Mass for three battalions of the Irish Guards, his broken hand holding up the Sacrament.
He remained in France for a further year, when his Order recalled him to open their new monastery at Fort Augustus in Scotland. He reluctantly obeyed and stayed in Scotland until early 1918, when he convinced the abbot to let him return to the war. He then served in Italy with the 23rd Division and took part in the battle of Vittorio Veneto. Conditions at the front were dreadful and Father John became severely ill and was sent back to the infirmary at Fort Augustus. After the war he rarely spoke about his service at the front, and it was only much later that he came to understand something of how much he had meant to the men in his care. His vocation and service gave him great joy until the end of his life. Once he was asked if he had heard of the contemporary hymn ‘Lord of the Dance’; he replied that he often sang it to himself in his rooms at Fort Augustus.13 He died there in 1974, aged ninety-four, and was buried in the abbey’s cemetery on the shores of the loch. His few possessions were passed on to his family, including a chalice given to him by the Irish Guards. Small enough to be tucked into a tunic belt for use in the field, it is engraved around the base with Father John’s battle honours, as proudly displayed as on any regimental flag, for the man who won them all by his love: Festubert 1915 – Loos 1915 – Somme 1916 – Ypres 1917 – Lille 1918.
Without Claire Tisdall’s memoir, the London Ambulance Column would have disappeared from history. But she too was a casualty with invisible scars, and it took her decades to find the strength to revisit her wartime experience. In early 1919 she caught flu and then suffered a nervous breakdown. By 1923 she had recovered sufficiently to take up a place at King’s College to study for a much longed-for undergraduate degree in medieval English literature; she graduated in 1927 with a 2.1. Nothing more is known about her life until the late 1960s, when she retired to the small village of Ringmer in Sussex. Incidentally, Ernest Crosse was rector in the next village along the Downs, Glynde, at the same time, but there is no evidence that they ever met. In Ringmer she began her memoir, writing with the clarity and skill of an English scholar, although she was never able to quite purge the text of the deep, unmended pain. She completed her LAC memoir in 1976 and sent a copy for storage in the archives of the Imperial War Museum. Claire Tisdall died sometime in the early 1980s, in the shadow of the Sussex Downs. One more life given to the war, finally at peace.