WHILE ALL THE EVIDENCE showed that the Germans were in full flight back to the Rhine, most men had become so immune to the possibility of peace that news of its arrival was more often met with silence and disbelief, than with cheering and excitement.
Ironically, the war finished where it had all started some 1559 days earlier, at the small Belgian town of Mons. A few men of the original British Expeditionary Force of 1914, who had contrived to survive four years of war, found themselves only a couple of miles from the place where they had stood during the battle of Mons in August 1914. Indeed, at the moment of peace one contingent of Allied troops actually arrived on the Mons-Brussels road at the very spot where the first action by the British Expeditionary Force had taken place. The fight then had involved British mounted cavalry with their swords against German mounted cavalry with their lances, a far cry from the mechanised war machines used by the combatants in 1918. The face of war had completely changed. Machine guns, heavy artillery and aeroplanes had come into their own, while the war had in effect seen the advent of poison gas, flame throwers, handgrenades, mortars, and tanks on the battlefield. The casualty rates of 1914 bore no comparison to those of 1918, in fact, those of the last year of the war numerically outweighed those of any other year of the conflict. It was the prolonged and sustained nature of industrialised warfare which had been different. No troops had ever been expected to remain in the battle zone for so long, and in such appalling physical conditions, as they had on the Western Front. Little surprise, then, that when despatch riders toured the battlefield distributing the news that the war was due to end at 11am, they were often met with bemusement and disbelief. The overwhelming impression given by most soldiers on the battlefield that day was that the Armistice was the cause of depression rather than of happiness. Many soldiers talked of feeling lacklustre and aimless; the end of the war, rather than providing an emotional uplift, was more akin to an anticlimax.
The public outpouring of relief and happiness at the Armistice produced scenes of great celebration throughout Great Britain, in contrast to those on the Western Front. Politicians quickly made promises that Britain would be a fit place for heroes to live in, promises they were never to keep. There was a great public clamour for retribution against Germany and resolutions were made to hang the Kaiser, to try many others as war criminals, and to make the German people pay huge reparations for their folly. The Versailles Peace Treaty of June 1919 would seek to impose many of these harsh penalties, yet for the average British Tommy who had fought the war, there was little desire to punish the Germans. Those, for example, who went to the Rhineland with the occupying forces in December 1918 often found the Germans compliant and very friendly. It left many of them wondering if the war had been worth the sacrifice.
The last day of the war, of course we didn't know it was, we had fallen out by the side of the road and suddenly we heard the patter of horses' feet and round the corner came a squadron of cavalry. There they were, sitting on their horses, looking proud. And you should have heard the remarks. “Oh, they've come on their gee-gees to help us finish the war,” and “Oh, they haven't brought their hobby horses with them.” They had gone through about an hour or so when we got word the war was over. We were right opposite a convent and all the nuns came out and decorated us with flowers, and they stuck them in our rifles, and we moved off and were cheered along. We were happy but we remained fairly calm. I was like a lot of fellows after the war, I was very depressed. I had been in the accountancy world as a boy, and I went to ask my firm to take me back again, but they couldn't – they were a small firm and unable to afford it. I was happy to get out of the army and get home, but the prospects were very bad. You go away as a boy and come back as a man. What are you going to do? There were so many people like that. There seemed to be no future for you. There were hundreds of thousands all in the same boat.
I left the Somme Battlefield behind me in December 1916 and was invalided out of the army. I had been deafened by all the shelling so from that time until the end of the war I was sent to work on a farm near Blandford, and tried to put the fighting out of my mind. When the Armistice came it didn't interest me, I didn't take any notice of it really. I was interested in being married, bringing up kids, seven of them! I was interested in my job. All things else disappeared. I didn't want to talk about the war, I didn't want anybody to know my business at all. Nobody. No, there was nobody interested anyway, so it would have been useless telling them and if you did they would only laugh at you, say it wasn't true. It wasn't a conscious thing, nobody talked about the First War in those days, even my wife, even she never heard my story and we were married seventy years.
I blanked out the war, the whole time after I got demobbed, and only once spoke about it from 1918 until 1990. It was with the woman whose husband was blown to pieces, she came to my house in Portsmouth and asked me what happened to him. I told her and she went away satisfied with the answer because she had been told he was wounded and missing. Wounded and missing! Rubbish, he was blown to bits.
I had recovered from my wounds and I'd been given a permanent commission in the Indian Army when the Armistice came along. I was on leave and I was up a bit late that morning, I was shaving, and the sirens went. My first feeling was “It's too late – all my friends are gone – it's too late. It's no good having an Armistice now.”
I had a vision and I was standing in a trench and at eye level there were feet marching, marching feet going along, and these were all the men I had known who were killed in the war. And they were marching away into the distance where I would never follow. All the people I knew had gone. Except me.
My lance corporal was a Lewis gunner, called Meikle. We got to know each other very well because every night, every four hours, I used to go and visit him in his forward position out in No Man's Land, because he would be posted there in case of a counter attack or a raid. He was the same age as myself and he was only my height, tiny little chap, a bookmaker's runner in Glasgow. We got very close, we used to have long, long talks and he would tell me all about his life.
After I was wounded in 1917, I heard that he had won the VC, Sergeant Meikle then, and he had been killed overwhelming a machine gun position on his own. He wouldn't have won it if I'd been there because I wouldn't have let him do it, I wouldn't have allowed such a silly thing, my dear old Sergeant Meikle. I went to have a look at his gravestone. I have a lovely picture and there I am, standing looking down, and Sergeant Meikle is young bones, of course, still young bones and there I am, nearly a hundred, standing on top – very old brittle bones with plenty of pain in them, but who won in the end? I mean, who had the better life? Nobody knows. Meikle died. Anyway he won't know, he has no memory and eventually I will go the same way.
When the Armistice was signed, we had been moving up quickly for a while but we'd got bogged down in this ploughed field. We were near a little village when Munro, an officer from Gateshead, he came round and told us to take it easy, because an Armistice was being signed at 11 o'clock in the morning. This was Sunday night. He told us to get a bit of rest and in the morning we'd get out and go to this little village, which we did. As we got there, the church bells started ringing, and one of our lot, a man called Slater, promptly disappeared. Munro was right, it was the Armistice. The local people were coming out shoving drinks on to us, you know, happy that the war was over. Anyway we went to look for this Slater, and we finds him sitting in the church playing the organ, playing the damned organ as happy as a sandman.
The war was a terrible thing, all those lives that were lost, thousands and thousands and thousands, for what? As to what I did, I've got nothing to be delighted about in any way. I thought it was a terrible experience and I was only grateful to think I'd come out of it alive.
I arrived home to be met at the door by my mother and sisters. I nearly had a fit, I didn't know what to say. Oh it was marvellous to see everyone, my poor father who was a cripple sitting in a chair indoors, oh it was a moving experience and was for days afterwards. To be home again with them and to be free, I couldn't believe it and then of course I had to start a new life.
With the Armistice, the first thing the colonel did was he invited anybody off duty for a big dance, and we danced all the dances we could think of, the Highland Fling, Polka, Waltz, Veleta, Cake Walk even, all kinds. I had long curly hair and it fell from underneath my uniform in big curls. After the dance a doctor came to me and said “Hurry up now and get back and put up your hair.” It was an awful disgrace to have your hair down!
A lot of nurses would like to have gone to France but they didn't, or couldn't. When I came back, I found there was such a lot of jealousy, I kept as quiet as possible about having been there. I'd done things they hadn't, and that's never popular, is it? I was so young then, and of course I felt the tops. To them, I shouldn't have gone to France, but I am definitely glad I did. It was history in the making, wasn't it? And we were part of it. Small, insignificant but true.
We were told by a despatch rider at dawn that the war was going to end at 11am and my first thought was “So I'm going to live.” I was stunned, total disbelief, and at the same time a secret and selfish joy that I was going to have a life. For months I had lived with the idea that my life belonged to my country and they can have it at any time, and I can't stop it. I couldn't say “I've had enough, I'm going home,” or “Can I have a fortnight off?” but now I knew I was going to have a life after all.
I went back to our guns and found the crews quite nonchalant, they were just cleaning up. They had begun to fire just before 11am, at what I've no idea, anyway at the allotted time they had ceased fire and were now just clearing up the gun sites. I didn't want to talk, so I carried on walking over the battlefield. I noticed some German graves that had been hastily dug, with the dead man's rifle turned upside and his helmet hung on top of the butt. They stood in threes and fives and once again I thought “Their parents don't know they're dead”, but it now came home to me too that these graves were also now the graves of our former enemy.
Did I feel sorry for myself? I might have done. I felt a bit miserable on Armistice Day to think that it was only four weeks ago that I got wounded. I mean, if the war had ended just a month earlier I wouldn't have lost my leg. Too true. You just wonder, you wonder what the future holds. I was twenty when I lost my leg, you can't always think straight, so you hope for the best. I thought about my future a lot, because I was an apprentice to the printing trade and I knew that I wouldn't be able to stand very long, not in the first stages of recovery. It was something all amputees thought, we couldn't tell until we tried to get jobs, to get a living.
Still, there you are. I had my luck, I mean it's a wonder I wasn't blown to pieces, when you think a shell dropped six feet away. As we won the war I suppose you can't grumble, you'd done what you thought was necessary to be done. Some poor souls gone, but you managed to come through, scarred but not scared. No, I am more of a matter of fact person, you know.
I suppose in a way I was heartbroken. When you're young, you can't realise and take in a lot, but you can still have an aching heart, you can really. I know from experience. It was then that I would miss my father so much. He'd been such a patient man. You see I wanted to know, questions. I must have driven the poor man mad sometimes with everlasting questions, but he was always patient and answered me as best he could, and if he couldn't, he'd say “Oh well, we'll have to look that one up.” He was wonderful really. He was so kind and gentle. I used to lie in bed and go over that last walk many, many times, when we walked up that hill together holding hands. I can remember it now as if it was yesterday. I've never forgotten it, I never will, and that's been a lot of comfort to me many times in my life.
I was on the Isle of Wight, at a place called Golden Hill Fort, that was our regimental depot at the time. I was A1 and on the next draft to go back and rejoin the regiment in Belgium. We were up on the firing range and they had told us that if the armistice was signed they'd send up a rocket. We watched for the rocket and about 11 o'clock we saw it go up. There was a lot of spare ammunition which we were using on the range and the officer said “Get rid of it, fire it out to sea, we don't want to carry it back”. The fellow next to me started blazing away when I noticed that his rifle was across mine and I said “What the hell are you firing at?” He said “That bloody hut up there.” I said “That's where the markers are!” All the markers on the targets were inside taking refuge on the floor as this lad fired live ammunition through their hut.
The First World War was an experience the like of which I had never been seen before and the world will never see again. I am glad I served, I wouldn't have missed the experience, and nearly every old soldier will tell you the same; they hated it, they abhorred it, they loathed it, but they wouldn't have missed it. You were there, you learned, you were taught to take orders, whatever they might be, and you were taught to execute those orders. If you were lucky, you're given a stripe or two and then you learn to give orders, and so you creep up the tree. It's an experience that can make or mar you for life but I have no regrets, none whatsoever. I came through it, and I came through it whole and healthy, fortunately.
There are so few of us left now. The younger generation are curious and they want to know, and that's why when we are asked we will perhaps talk about that war, but otherwise we prefer to brush it aside and say nothing. It's past, it's gone, it's finished.