The Western Front during the First World War was a great battlefield, but also a huge civil-engineering site. The demands of the war required the construction of camps, roads and light (Decauville) railways on an enormous scale, as well as the sinking of wells, laying of pipeline, sawing of timber, management of canals and building of every sort of military installation, from airfields to ammunition dumps.
In the British army, the work fell on the Corps of Royal Engineers, whose officers and men were both soldiers and construction workers. One of them, John Glubb, in 1914 a cadet at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, proved also to be a gifted writer. Sent to France in November 1915, he was posted to the 7th Field Company, Royal Engineers, and soldiered at the front throughout the war, though three times wounded. His last wound was very serious, scarring his face for life, and keeping him out of battle until late in 1918. After the war his military duties took him to the Middle East, where he remained for the rest of his service, first in Iraq, then in Transjordan (now Jordan). In Transjordan he became the trusted servant of the royal government and, as Glubb Pasha, the commander of the Arab Legion. The Anglo-French invasion of Suez in 1956 led to his dismissal, though he was by then a legendary and famous figure in both the Middle East and Britain. In retirement he settled to writing, his talent for which he had shown in his First World War journal, published in 1977 as Into Battle. These extracts describe his work as an engineer officer, his pleasure in a brief holiday from the fighting amid the beauty of the unspoiled countryside behind the lines and his experience of being wounded. Few First World War memoirs combine the qualities of matter-of-fact reporting and lyrical evocation of landscape as his do.
September 23 — 26 1916,working on Decauville railway
23 September: The Boche has retired a little way on our Corps front and we have temporarily lost touch. We were above him on a forward slope beyond High Wood [on the Somme front], and he doubtless did not like to remain overlooked. We cannot immediately follow him up, as the country sloping down from High Wood to Eaucourt is simply a wilderness of shell-holes almost impossible to cross and is in full view all the way. Not a fly can cross the High Wood ridge without being seen by the Boche. The whole country is rolling downs, looking in the distance like a ploughed field, but in reality a continuous series of shell-holes and mounds between them.
The area is thickly dotted with specks of black and grey, !ving motionless on the ground. When you approach, the black patches rise into a thick buzzing swarm of bluebottles, revealing underneath a bundle of torn and dirty grey or khaki rags, from which protrude a naked shin bone, the skeleton of a human hand, or a human face, dark grey in colour, with black eye holes and an open mouth, showing a line of snarling white teeth, the only touch of white left. When you have passed on again a few yards, the bluebottles settle again, and quickly the bundle looks as if covered by some black fur. The shell-holes contain every debris of battle, rifles, helmets, gas-masks, shovels and picks, sticking up out of the mud at all angles.
One cannot see these ragged and putrid bundles of what once were men without thinking of what they were - their cheerfulness, their courage, their idealism, their love for their dear ones at home. Man is such a marvellous, incredible mixture of soul and nerves and intellect, of bravery, heroism and love - it cannot be that it all ends in a bundle of rags covered with flies. These parcels of matter seem to me proof of immortality. This cannot be the end of so much.
24 September: It seems hopeless to overtake the front line by building roads across this vast waste of mud. The latest idea is to lay down a hasty ‘decauville’ light tramline, from the left of High Wood towards Eaucourt l’ Abbaye. The company has stopped work on the roads and is to lay these tramlines. This, however, presents me with a new headache, for we have to carry the tramlines on our wagons from Bécourt to High Wood.
The big-gauge railway has now been laid up to Bécourt, where the guns were a week ago! [A series of British assaults from mid-September had resulted in the German line being pushed back in places.] Half a mile of big-gauge railway was laid in forty-eight hours, and the trains began to run before the line was ballasted.
25 September: I rode back to our mounted-section lines at Bécourt and loaded up the trestle wagons with tramlines, and took them up to High Wood after dark. 14th Corps (Lord Cavan), on our right, took Lesboeufs, Morval and Gueudecourt today.
26,Siptenrher. Took some trolleys and sleepers for the tramline up to High Wood. This decauville 60-centimetre gauge track is complete with sleepers and is supposed to be laid down all ready-made, and just bolted together. In practice, however, some of the sleepers and bolts are always missing, and a good deal of improvisation is needed.
It is curious from the ridge beside High Wood, standing on an expanse ploughed up in shell-holes and strewn with rifles, helmets and corpses, to see only two miles away a peaceful landscape of downs, leafy woods, and the church steeple of Le Barque showing above the trees. This country had been out of range of our artillery until a week ago. However it is now within range and already the copses in front are becoming smashed and stripped. Soon all the trees will have disappeared, as in High Wood, leavingonly an occasional splintered trunk standing, and a debris ofsplit, torn and rottingtimber on the ground. As you stand lookingat this view, you hearthe continuous quiet wheu-u-nof our big howitzer shells, which seem to spring up from the horizon behind you — or the lightning wheut of the whizz-bangs flying past — followed by a sudden volcano of grey on the distant hills, or the little white puffs of shrapnel among the trees.
By what tortuous build-up of evil have men become such tragic and cynical destroyers of their fellow beings, and of the glorious beauty of nature?
The broad-gauge railway had huge working parties of Indians and also a British Labour battalion. The latter were a butt for much scorn on the part of the boys. The sight of the war was to see a very tired whizz-bang shrapnel come over and burst with a ping somewhere up in the clouds. The Labour battalion would down tools like one man, officers and NCOs shouting and gesticulating to their men to take cover, as if the whole Boche army was coming at them with fixed bayonets. I remember old Corporal Cheale, who was in charge of NO. 4 Section, gazing solemnly at them and saying, ‘I’d like to get ’old of some of thim Labour battalion, Sir!’
Cheale is a character. He combines to an absolute fearlessness, a morbid love for the dead. Just before I joined in November 1915 at Armentières, a great many casualties from shelling had occurred in the company, which was billeted in a large school. In the morning, the big schoolroom was full of mutilated corpses. Many were new reinforcements, whose names nobody knew, making identification difficult. Cheale volunteered to help. When the job was over, he went up to the second-in-command and said, ‘Excuse me, Sir, did you notice this young feller? Don’t he make a lovely corpse?’
About the same time, he got married to a French girl, though he knew not a word of French, nor she of English. But they seemed to get on very well and he always went regularly on leave, and wrote to her most affectionately to
Madame Cheale,
Sentier de l’Eglise,
Nieppe.
He greatly enjoyed the work on 15 September, clearing the roads behind the infantry advance up to High Wood. The ground was thickly strewn with corpses, from brand new to skeletons. The pockets of the dead it was his self-imposed task to search, after which he would carry them away, wrapped in an affectionate embrace. He would always allude to them as property owners (owning six feet of soil), and talked cheerfully of the day when he would become one.
He had a habit, when other men were ducking or crawling around, of standing up very straight, looking peacefully around and remarking, ‘I don’t reckon much of these ’ere whizz-bangs!’ ...
Riding alone
28 — 30 April [1917] : The weather is absolutely and incredibly perfect - our first taste of spring, coinciding with our arrival at this beautiful village. The warmth and sunshine after snow and mud makes [the Battle of] Arras seem another world [Glubb’s unit had been moved north from the Somme to the Arras front]. The village lies on a single road running along a narrow valley, and consists of farms and white-painted cottages with thatched roofs. On either side rise the downs.
Behind the officers’ mess, in a one-storey farmhouse, stretches a little orchard and beyond it a paddock full of coarse meadow grass. At the bottom of this burbles a little stream, then a few trees and then the steep wall of the downs, crowned by a beech wood of tenderest, lightest spring green.
Lying on the grass in the orchard, one can feel the warm sun and watch the little fleecy clouds slowly moving across the blue to where the latter joins the light green of the beeches on the hill. One can hear the cocks crowing in the village and the birds singing, and an occasional cuc-koo, cuc-koo far away in the hills. We only expect to be out here for a week or so, so are doing little training - just basking in the loveliness and the warmth.
Baker is in hospital in Rouen, and there is no one else I care to go out with, except perhaps the ‘fat boy’, but he is too lazy to come. I went for many rides bv myself, the country being thickly wooded, chiefly with beech woods. Through these I rode alone, down old neglected rides, while all round my head was a dazzling bower of light emerald green. Underfoot crunched the beech nuts, while the ground was everywhere carpeted with anemones and cowslips. Pulling up and sitting quietly on my horse in the heart of the forest, it was impossible to catch a sound of the outside world, except the jingling of my own bit and the murmuring of the trees.
Hooking a haversack on my saddle, containing a sponge and towel and Tolstoy’s The Cossacks, I twice rode off into the woods, tied up my horse, and bathed in a little stream.
Woundedand operation
A BLIGHTY ONE
I set out on the evening of 21 August to go down to the dump at Hénin, to see certain stores loaded up correctly. I was riding an old black mare, most unsuitably called Geisha, for nothing in the world could be less like a dancing girl. She would not walk, but jogged endlessly, her nose stuck out, her neck as stiff as wood, and her mouth like iron. The champion tool-cart team was out that night in GS [General Service] wagons, proudly wearing their prize-winning rosettes.
I was expecting to meet some infantry wagons in Hénin, but, as they did not turn up, I rode on through St Martin-sur-Cojeul, to see my own wagons which had gone on ahead, but had been obliged to halt there. The road beyond St Martin was in view of the enemy, and it was not yet quite dark. I dismounted and sat on a stone for a short time, and then rode back through St Martin ‘village’, which consisted of a sea of untidy mounds of broken bricks, covered with grass.
Some long-range shells whined over, and burst about 120 yards beyond the road. It seemed to me to be a 4-inch gun at extreme range. 1 began to trot at first, but finding shells bursting well over I pulled back to a walk, determined not to run away. Just as I left St Martin, the shelling ceased. Here I met Driver Gowans coming up with a GS wagon, and stopped him to tell him he would have to do two trips, as the infantry wagons had failed to come. No shells had fallen for the last five minutes, since those which had passed over my head a few hundred yards back.
As I spoke to Gowans, I think I heard for a second a distant shell whine, then felt a tremendous explosion almost on top of me. For an instant I appeared to rise slowly into the air and then slowly to fall again. I seemed to have dimly heard the rattle of wagon wheels and then for a moment I saw my horse’s neck in front of my face.
I dropped off to the ground and set out at a half run toward Hénin. I must have been dazed, for I remembered nothing afterwards of the wagon or of where my poor horse had gone. Scarcely had I begun to run towards Hénin, when the floodgates in my neck seemed to burst, and the blood poured out in torrents. I could actually hear the regular swish of the artery, like a firehose, but coming and going in regular floods and pauses.
I was in a kind of dazed panic, deserted by all my bravado, and I cowered down as the shells whipped by and burst all around. Then I got up and stumbled on as quick as I could. I had a vague idea that I might be going to die, but was not alarmed by it. At the crossroads to Hénin, no traffic man was to be seen, but beyond it some artillery wagons were waiting for the shelling to cease, before trying to pass.
I could not speak, but I paused in the middle of the road, and gave one or two sobbing groans, whereupon the traffic man appeared, from where he had been crouching in a shell-hole to avoid the shells. He called to a gunner driver to watch the post, and led me a little further down the road to a dressing station in an old cellar under a mound of bricks. I could feel something long lying loosely in my left cheek, as though I had a chicken bone in my mouth. It was in reality half my jaw, which had been broken off, teeth and all, and was floating about in my mouth.
I sat on the table in the cellar, while they dressed my wound. The RAMC [Royal Army Medical Corps] orderly put some plug into my neck which stopped the bleeding. They also put a rubber tube in my wound, sticking out of the bandage. They told me there was no ambulance in Hénin and I should have to walk to Boiry-Becquerelle. We accordingly set out, I leaning on the medical orderly’s arm. I was not looking forward to the long walk at all, but luckily the orderly remembered that there was some regimental medical officer, who lived in a dugout at the south end of the village. We turned in there and I sat down on a stone at the entrance to the dugout.
This doctor said it was all rubbish not getting an ambulance, and sent the orderly back to the dressing station to telephone to Héninel for one. He took my temperature and said that I was all right for the moment, but I heard him tell the orderly that it was a good thing they dressed me at once, or I should have been done for. I felt no anxiety about whether I should live or die, but I was very cold, and the broken pieces of jawbone in my mouth were unpleasant. I felt no pain.
I gave the doctor my name and unit, and told him that our camp was on the Neuville — Vitasse road, next to the battalion in reserve. I wrote down, ‘Please let them know,’ for I could not speak. I heard later that the doctor sent the company a telegram, saying that I was badly wounded and was not expected to live.
At last the ambulance arrived and we set off. I was horribly cold, which I conveyed to the medical orderly by signs and he put a blanket round me. We went through Boiry-Becquerelle to the main Casualty Clearing Station (No. 20 CCS) at Ficheux. Here they helped me out and into a chair, when a doctor came up and said, ‘What’s the matter here, old man?’ and took off and redid my bandage. I was put into the ‘pending operations’ ward, and slept like a log till the morning.
Early next morning I was dressed for the slaughter in long woollen stockings and laid in a line of stretchers waiting for operating. Somebody gave me an injection of morphia, and then two orderlies came up and said, ‘Come on, this one will do first.’ So they picked up my stretcher and bore me out, along the duckboard walks, with a steady bobbing up-and-down motion. Lying on my back, I looked up at the blue sky and the white drifting clouds.
Then into a hut all white inside, with a row of white operating tables down the centre and white-aproned doctors and nurses moving about. They held up my stretcher and I crawled over on to the table and lay down. One or two of them came to look at me, and then the anaesthetist came up, and told me to breathe deeply through my nose. At a word from the surgeon, he put the mask on my face and I smelt that suffocating sickly smell of gas. Once or twice I felt I would suffocate and longed to pull it off. Then my head began to sing, and a tap of water which was dripping seemed to grow louder and louder. I began saying to myself ‘I’m still awake! Yes, of course, I must be.’ The tap grew louder and louder, and beat all through my head. For a moment, the man took off the mask, and a voice said, ‘How old are you?’ I tried to say twenty, and he put the mask back. The singing and the tap grew louder - and then nothing.
When I came round again, Dad was beside my bed. I was almost perfectly conscious at once, and I remember writing down on a piece of paper, ‘This rather spoils our leave.’ We were both due for leave to England and had been trying to arrange to go together on 24 August. Colonel Rathbone had telephoned II Army that morning to say I was hit.
When Dad came into the mess for lunch, his staff officers, Colonel Stevenson and Major de Fonblanque, told him they had a message for him, which they would tell him after lunch. Not suspecting anything, he had a good lunch, and then they told him that I had been hit and that they had ordered his car to be ready, knowing that he would want to come and see me. So he drove down at once, but he was not allowed to stay long.
I remained half alive for several days, lying still all day only semi-conscious. I asked for a book to read but found I could not read it. I had apparently nearly swallowed my tongue during the operation and, to prevent this, they had pierced my tongue and threaded a wire through it with a wooden rod on the end of it. This was extremely uncomfortable. A good deal of discharge came from my mouth, and I was very miserable, with my pillow always covered with blood and slime. I was later told that I looked very bad, with my mouth dragged down, discharging and filthy, and with my head and neck all bandages.
The CCS was made entirely of marquees and tents, and was comfortable, considering the circumstances. The officers’ ward consisted of three or four marquees, placed side by side, with boarded floors, and rows of beds with coloured counterpanes, and looked neat and pretty.