209726 Capt. Arthur William Wolffsohn British Army 9th Btn. Royal Welsh Fusiliers One of the most effective war posters put out by Lord Kitchener in August 1914 was one showing some children asking their father "Daddy what did you do in the Great War?" later to be replaced by "Your Country Needs You"
As military conscription was not enforced until years later, this poster shamed some thousands of unwilling volunteers to join up. As soon as conscription started, patriotism went by the board. You just waited to be called up or found the best means of avoiding it. No one was going to ask you what you did in the Great War. You just did what you were told, and that was your answer.
As one who joined up as a volunteer in 1914 and thus completely ruined my studies and future career I always wanted to be an engineer. I am still bitter at those that by not joining up were able to get five years head start on any youngster of business age who, after having fought for his country, found on his return that the best jobs were already taken and were in fact looked down upon as totally inexperienced for his age. These are the same men who always come forward first when there was any loyalty about to show the patriotism they so surely threw away when there was a chance to give their lives for King and Country.
I have started out some five or six times to try to give a concise answer to my son or his family as to what the War was like and what part I took in it, not that one, in so many millions who took up the colours, can claim to have played more than an infinitesimal part in winning that struggle. In fact, I have heard that the Americans did it.
It is now 54 years since the War commenced [1968], so that anyone under 65 cannot have much idea of the sufferings of the troops living day and night in heavy thigh gum boots in trenches, sometimes over their knees in liquid mud, having to e relieved every 48 hours, with the consequent march over miles of shell holes, quagmires of mus, snow and slush in pitch darkness under shell fire to reach slightly better dug-outs. The weeks of nervous tension seeing your best friends riddled, blown up and mutilated by rifle or shell fire and knowing that the same thing might happen to you at any moment. The hopelessness of it all when neither side from 1914 to 1916 were able to advance an inch. Or from August 18th 1916 when the Allies advances were thrown back practically to the original line by the Germans after both sides had lost a million men.
A short history of our 9th Division was published in 1919 and our Battalion Major, subsequently A/Lt. Col. T/Major H. Lloyd-Williams published his personal experiences, giving full details of the participation of the 9th RWF in that war. I therefore propose to condense onto one page my own war service movements in England, Belgium and France and then concentrate, not so much on the unpleasantness of the War, but on the highlights of some of the fighting I was in and the occasional amusing, at least to me, incidents that took place.
My first experience of going up the line consisted of being driven up in an old London motor bus with solid tyres, still marked "Piccadilly" with all the advertisements intact. En route we stopped in a wood opposite some roofless houses. There was an enormous explosion and half the bus load of raw troops, including myself, tumbled out and got under the bus as best we could to avoid the second shell. Nothing happened and when we emerged we had quite an audience of grinning old-stagers. The explosion had been a salvo of our own light field guns hidden in the shelled houses.
After sunset we left the bus and conducted a working party of men with spades to do some water drawing in the second line. As we proceeded, rifle shots burst out every few seconds, some going thump and others ricocheting over our heads with a frightening squeal. The men, now made up of veterans, did not seem at least worried over this fire, but I was convinced that unless I did some bobbing down I would surely be hit. I there chose to oversee the work being done at the lowest possible point of the ditches, and in some cases I stood in the water itself to be a foot or two lower.
Being pitch dark I hoped the men would not notice my antics. I afterwards leant that due to the water level being about one foot below earth, the second line (that is trench) had been converted into a six foot breastwork of sandbags filled with earth. The bullets being fired at us either hit the breastworks or ricocheted overhead, so that we had been in comparative safety.
The signs of previous battles were everywhere. Out in No-Man's-Land were strewn the corpses, which from the fragments of kit remaining could not be recognised as Scottish troops. It may sound gruesome at this moment, but one used those days to crawl and fall over such remains and take cover behind them when patrolling about in No-Man's-Land with as little concern as one would regard any other obstacle. There was much snow about and on moonlight nights the whiteness and the silence were ghost like in their effective and, when more intense than usual, the calling of some wounded or starving cat in some ruin behind the line intensified the eeriness.
As Battalion Machine Gun Officer I had placed four guns in strategic positions so that each gun's sweep of bullets would intersect the next, thus allowing no part of No-Man's-Land to be free from machine gun fire.
I was returning to my dug out in the second line, from which point I could visit the guns by the shortest routes, when I saw a flash-light being waved indiscriminately along communication trenches which was of course, strictly forbidden. I immediately yelled "Put out that ruddy light". A few minutes passed and the light went out. Suddenly I saw a figure shuffling past me. I thought his steel helmet seemed unusual and then "Hello Winston, I didn't expect to see you here". I realized that I was perhaps the only British Officer who has ever given such an order to Churchill. I is right about the tin hat. Winston would never wear the hat in vogue; it was a French blue steel helmet he had picked up somewhere.
A day before Christmas in these same lines, the Germans gave us a barrage of tear gas shells which affected our eyes in spite of our crude masks. That evening they put Christmas candles on their parapets and sang suitable songs calling on us to have an armistice the next day. This had occurred on another front the previous year and had been strictly forbidden since then. At dawn on Christmas day the Germans stood on their parapet waving and cheering and we noticed they looked like boys of 16. Our 14lb battery Observation Officer was standing beside me and I saw him pick up the phone. A few seconds later four shells spread shrapnel fairly close to the Germans, who dived into their earthworks and were not seen again. Our guns were limited to firing one round per gun per day due to the intense shortage of ammunition, afterwards solved by Lloyd-George as Minister of Defence.
The Germans holding these lines were mostly Bavarians of a friendly type. When the Prussians were to relieve them they yelled to us the previous night Royal Welch, they had found out somehow, "Be careful tomorrow, the Prussians are coming". The first man who showed his head the next morning was instantly sniped at. They also had a sense of humour. One day I saw the tops of ladders being carried along their lines. Thinking I might get a head popping up carelessly, I trained a rifle I had attached to a periscope (so I could shoot without lifting my head) on the ladders and had several shots at them. Within a few minutes, a stick with a round disk painted red was displayed above the German trench; this was waved from one side to the other the exact signal used by us when practising on our own rifle ranges to indicate a miss.
In March 1916, by which time I had been promoted to 1st Lieut. We were in a portion of the front line where the distance between the opposing trenches varied from 800 to only 40 yards. Where the two trenches converged to the 40 yards separation was called the Ducks Bill, due to its similarity of the trench design.
To prevent hand-bombs falling into out trenches, these later were covered with chicken wire, and there were all sorts of trap dugouts and inner defences. Actually this position became too hot for either side and we withdrew all but a few sentries.
My dug-out was some 300 yards from this point and one night I thought I heard curious tapings. I mentioned this to some officer passing through and he must have alerted Headquarters at St.Omer who, to my astonishment sent up two mining experts with listening gear to interview me.
Ordering everyone not to move, they listened at various points for something like two hours and reported that they could not discover anything unusual. My ears proved correct, at dawn a few days later I heard a tremendous explosion, my dug-out shook like an earthquake and, although I got out quickly I could still see sandbags, men, earth and debris some two hundred feet in the sky. The Ducks Bill had blown, causing many casualties amongst the North Staffordshire Regiment and many men were shell-shocked or completely unfit for action. Being out of my area, I could only alert my guns against a possible attack and bring one gun to bear slightly in the direction of the gap thus caused in the line. However the South Wales Borderers rushed up from reserve and held the line against a few hostile attempts to dislodge them.
On 7th September 1916 our Battalion was in the trenches at Plug Street (Polegstreet) the home of Bairsfather's cartoons, who does not remember If you know a better hole, go to it and visited Armentieres the various Mademoiselles seemed to be employed in an open laundry within shelling distance of the Huns. Here I was nearly hit by a new German mortar shell shaped like a pineapple which buzzed like a hornet.
As time wore on and the men saw that I never seemed to be wounded in action (out of four hundred officers passing through the ranks of the RWF during the war, the Major H.Lloyd Williams and myself were the only two left in 1918, the others being killed or wounded, missing or transferred; they seemed to classify me as a Human Tank. When one goes over the top the drill is to be single line spaced outwards, the men being at least five yards apart. On the Somme, on the first attack when I was halfway between the hostile trenches, I found no men for a considerable distance on either side of me. Looking back, they were strung out in a line behind me they explained that as no bullet would hit me, the safest place was exactly behind me.
Aviation was very primitive in 1914/15 and planes were only used for observation, until one day an officer took out his revolver and fired at a German in mid air. It did not take long for them to take up Lewis Machine Guns with them and then came the invention of firing through the propeller.
One day sitting in billets in Belgium we heard a hum of planes, on rushing out we saw a German crash diving into a ploughed field, his wheels hit a deep rut, the plane overturned and the Observer and his Officer fell clear leaving the Pilot, a sergeant, with a bullet through his calf hanging upside down caught by his belt. The amazing thing is that the three British planes either thought the German crew would escape or were making sure that they were their particular prize. They therefore dived down onto the ploughed field and promptly nosed into the ground or turned over. A stiff price to pay for two Germans. Our men soon turned out and watched as the German officer took out a suitcase, removed his flying helmet, windjammer etc. and replaced them with a smart drill helmet and uniform coat of a German aviator. Then, pulling out his greatcoat he held it out for one of our men to act as valet, and was surprised when he was left standing with it. I, as a machine gun officer, was given the German machine gun to take to pieces. It had jammed which probably caused their downfall, and try as we might we never managed to unjam it.
Another day, as I was taking a long line of mule limbers up the line; I saw a German plane diving like a falling leaf. Thinking he was bluffing, I ordered the mule train off the road and, sure enough, the German straightened up and came down the road. Just as I thought he would start firing, he swerved off and crashed in a field nearby. We found him upside down in his cockpit dead as a doornail, with no passengers. As these men never flew alone, we thought the Observer must have fallen off. They must have died at considerable height and the falling leaf manoeuvre widely used later as a bluff must have been the planes natural way of crashing. Our men who had taken cover under the limbers looked sheepish when they realised that the plane could have done them no harm.
The Germans extended their raids with their Zeppelins as proves this extract for Lloyd Williams. On the evening of Friday November 18th 1917, I found a telegram from Ian Baxter, and catching the 6 p.m. train met him and Wolffsohn at the Criterion Theatre where we witnessed A Little B it of Fluff. Later we had supper at the Trocadero, in the course of which the alarms were sounded that an air raid was in progress. We went outside to observe the kind of barrage that was said to be fired by anti-aircraft guns, but quickly hurried back to cover when we heard the whistle of bombs which fell in Piccadilly near Swan & Edgar's corner.
Another curious affair occurred at Rocquingy in an aerodrome in the back lines near where we were camped. One night a large plane circled our field a few times and then shot off, green and red Verey lights circling off again. On the next pass the ground staff shot off similar lights and the plane glided in. A German Gotha straight into our laps. Apparently it had lost its way and the lights were the code for answering signals from German aerodromes. The bright RFC officer had brought off a scoop. The Germans had made the reply lights the same as the planes, presumably on the theory that no one would be so foolish as to devise so simple a code, and hence the British would reply in different colours.
|