THE EXPERIENCES OF THE RANK AND FILE
Kipling knew many of the young men who fought. They visited Bateman’s and told their stories. Throughout his writing career he had a personal interest in representing the experiences of the common soldier, and examples of this are numerous throughout his Great War history.
WOUNDED
It was a still day, and the reeking, chemical tainted fog of the high explosives would not clear. Orders would be given and taken by men suddenly appearing and as suddenly vanishing through smoke or across fallen earth, till both would be cut off in the middle by a rifle bullet, or beaten down by the stamp and vomit of a shell.
There was, too, always a crowd of men seated or in fantastic attitudes, silent, with set absorbed faces, busily engaged in trying to tie up, staunch, or plug their own wounds to save their own single lives with their own hands. When orders came to these they would shake their heads impatiently and go on with their urgent, horrible business. Others, beyond hope, but not consciousness, lamented themselves into death.
Vol 2. 2nd September 1916
SHELL SHOCK
Jerry was usin’ trench-mortars at his pleasure on us those nights. They was crackin’ on our heads, ye’ll understand. An’ I was in a bay with two men. Wan was a new young man, an’ the trench-mortars was new to him. Cowld? It was all of that! An’ Jerry crackin’ this dam’ trench mortar-stuff of his on our heads at will. It put the wind up me! Did I tell you the other man in the bay was dead! He was. That finished me new young man. He kep’ trying to make himself smaller an’ smaller against the trench-mortars. In the end of it, he laced his arrums round his ankles—he did—an’ rocked to an’ fro, whishperin’ to the Saints. Shell-shock? Oh, yes, ’twas all that. Presintly I heard Mr. —— comin’ the rounds, walking outside the trench. Ye see more where ye’re outside a trench, but ’tis no place I’m fond of without orders. ‘An’ are ye all cozy down there, Sergeant?’ says he. Yes, ‘cosy’ was his word! Knowin’ him well, ‘Why wud we not be cosy, Sorr?’ says I, an’ at that he dhrops into the bay to have a look. We was cosy enough, all three of us—the dead man dead an’ stiffenin’ in the frost, an’ this fine new young lad of ours embracin’ his own ankles an’ rockin’ back an’ forth, an’ me so sorry my leave was up. Oh! we was the cosiest party in the whole dam’ front line that night; and for to make it all the cosier, my new young man, as soon as he set eyes on Mr.——, he flung his arrums around his neck, an’ he let out a yell, an’ he hugged him like a gurrl. I had to separate ’em!
Vol 2. November 1917.
TRENCH FOOT
Next day, the 12th November, the medical officer and the four company commanders were added to the reconnaissance parties. (“It was like going into a cold bath, one toe at a time. And I don’t see how looking at it for a week in advance could have made it any better.”) Wet days followed the wet nights with Hunnish precision. A wretched Lieutenant (Montgomery) was sent out like Noah’s dove to “arrange the route for leading his company in,” the communication-trenches being flooded; and on the 14th November, after Divine Service, the men were paraded in billets and “rubbed their feet with anti-frostbite grease preparatory to going into the trenches.” It seems a small matter, but the Battalion had been in the way of hearing a good deal about the horrors of the previous winter in the Ypres Salient, when men were forbidden to stand for more than twelve hours at a time belly-deep in water without relief—“if possible.” (“That foot-greasing fatigue, with what the old hands told us was in store, put the wind up us worse than Loos. We was persuaded we would be drowned and frost-bit by whole platoons.”)
Vol 2. November 1915.
CHRISTMAS
The postponed Christmas dinners for the men were given, two companies at a time, on the 28th and 29th, whereby Lieutenant Moore, then Acting Quartermaster, distinguished himself by promptitude, resource, and organisation, remembered to his honour far beyond mere military decorations. At the eleventh hour, owing to the breweries in the back-area being flooded, there was a shortage of beer that should wash down the beef and the pounds of solidest plum-pudding. “As it would have been obviously preferable to have had beer and no dinners to dinners and no beer, Lieutenant Moore galloped off to Estaires pursued by a waggon, while the Second in Command having discovered that some of the Eleventh Corps (it is always sound to stand well with the corps you hope to join) also wanted beer, promised to get it for them if supplied with a lorry, obtained same and bumped off to Hazebrouck. Lieutenant Moore succeeded in getting 500 litres in Estaires and got back in time.” So all was well.
Festivities began a little before two, and lasted till eight. They sat at tables and ate off plates which they had not done since leaving England. Food and drink are after all the only vital matters in war.
Vol 2. December 1915.
TRENCH WARFARE
'They cleared out, as best they could, the mixed English and German bodies that paved the bottom of the trench, and toiled desperately at the wreckage - splinters and concrete from blown-in dug-outs, earth slides and collapses of head-cover by yards at a time, all mingled and besmeared with horrors and filth that a shell would suddenly increase under their hands.'
Vol 1. 15th September 1916.
'No one seems to recall accurately the order of events between the gathering in Bernafay Wood and the arrival of the shadow of the Battalion in camp at the Citadel. The sun was shining; breakfast was ready for the officers and men near some trees. It struck their very tired apprehensions that there was an enormous amount of equipage and service for a very few men, and they noticed dully a sudden hustling off of unneeded plates and cups. They felt as though they had returned to a world which had outgrown them on a somewhat terrifying scale during all the ages they had been away from it.'
Vol 1. 16th September 1916.
'The frost broke in the 3rd week in February, and the last state of the ground was even worse than it had been throughout the rainy autumn. Trenches caved in badly; dumps sank where they were being piled; the dirt and the buttresses of overhead shelters flaked and fell away in lumps; duckboards went under by furlongs at a time; tanks were immobilized 5 feet deep and the very bellies of the field-guns gouged into the mud.'
Vol 1. 17th February 1917.
PERMISSIONS
Men of the Wiltshire Regiment attacking near Thiepval, 7 August 1916, during the Battle of the Somme.
By Ernest Brooks - This is photograph Q 1142 from the collections of the Imperial War Museums (collection no. 1900-09), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=116371