Stewart Binns
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THE DARKNESS AND THE THUNDER
1915: The Great War Series
Contents
Introduction: 1915
PART ONE: JANUARY
In Winter’s Chilling Grip
Friday 1st
Locre, West Flanders, Belgium / British Army Field Hospital, Provost Lace Mill, Poperinghe, West Flanders, Belgium / Blair Atholl Castle, Perthshire / Keighley Green Working Men’s Club, Burnley, Lancashire / Admiralty House, Whitehall, London
Saturday 9th
Towneley Hall, Burnley, Lancashire / Walmer Castle, Kent
Saturday 16th
Kemmel, West Flanders, Belgium
Tuesday 19th
Prince and Princess of Wales Dock, Royal Navy Dockyard, Gibraltar / The Duke’s Head Hotel, Market Place, King’s Lynn
Wednesday 20th
Admiralty House, Whitehall, London
Saturday 23rd
Cant Clough Reservoir, Widdop Moor, Burnley, Lancashire / Locre, West Flanders, Belgium
PART TWO: FEBRUARY
Gallipoli: The Nightmare Begins
Tuesday 9th
The Cabinet Room, 10 Downing Street, Whitehall, London
Friday 19th
HMS Inflexible, off Cape Helles, Dardanelles
Saturday 20th
Blagdon Hall, Seaton Burn, Northumberland
Sunday 21st
Burnley Lads’ Club, Manchester Road, Burnley, Lancashire / Kruisstraat, Wulvergem, West Flanders, Belgium
Sunday 28th
British Army Field Hospital, Provost Lace Mill, Poperinghe, West Flanders, Belgium
PART THREE: MARCH
Granny’s Boom!
Wednesday 3rd
Reform Club, Pall Mall / Irish Benedictine Convent, Rue St Jacques, Ypres / Kruisstraat, Wulvergem, West Flanders, Belgium / 33 Bangor Street, Caernarvon, Wales / St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell, London
Wednesday 10th
The Cabinet Room, 10 Downing Street, London
Friday 19th
HMS Flexible, off Cape Helles, Dardanelles
Tuesday 23rd
10 Downing Street, Whitehall London
PART FOUR: APRIL
A Gasping Death
Monday 12th
Hill 60, Zwarteleen, Belgium
Friday 23rd
British Army Field Hospital, Provost Lace Mill, Poperinghe, West Flanders, Belgium
Sunday 25th
HMS Implacable, off Cape Helles, Dardanelles
A Hideous Spectacle
Sunday 9th
Laventie, Pas-de-Calais, France
Saturday 15th
St Omer, Pas-de-Calais, France
Friday 21st
The Houses of Parliament, London
PART SIX: JUNE
Heat, Dust and Diarrhoea
Friday 4th
RMS Essequibo, the Dardanelles
Wednesday 16th
Cambridge Road Trench, Bellewarde Ridge, Hooge, West Flanders, Belgium
Wednesday 30th
Rugeley Camp, Penkridge Bank, Cannock Chase, Staffordshire
PART SEVEN: JULY
Flammenwerfer
Saturday 3rd
Marble Lodge, Blair Atholl Estate, Perthshire
Sunday 11th
Vlamertinge, West Flanders, Belgium
Sunday 25th
Hoe Farm, Hascombe, Surrey
Thursday 29th
Hooge, West Flanders, Belgium
PART EIGHT: AUGUST
Mustafa Kemal
Friday 6th
Suvla Bay, Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey
Sunday 29th
Red Cross Stationary Hospital 7, Hôtel Christol, Boulogne, France
PART NINE: SEPTEMBER
The Battle of Loos
Wednesday 1st
Suvla Bay, Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey
Wednesday 15th
St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell, London / South Camp, Ripon, North Yorkshire
Saturday 25th
Vermelles, Pas-de-Calais, France
PART TEN: OCTOBER
‘So be merry, so be dead’
Saturday 9th
Marble Lodge, Blair Atholl Estate, Perthshire
Saturday 16th
British Army Field Hospital, Provost Lace Mill, Poperinghe, West Flanders, Belgium
Sunday 31st
Hoe Farm, Hascombe, Surrey
PART ELEVEN: NOVEMBER
Winter Returns
Tuesday 16th
Larkhill Camp, Durrington, Wiltshire
Wednesday 17th
Kephalo Bay, Imbros, Greece
Friday 19th
Convalescent Hospital No. 6, Alexandria, Egypt
Sunday 21st
Guards Division HQ, La Gorgue, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France
PART TWELVE: DECEMBER
Evacuation
Wednesday 8th
Dickebusch, West Flanders, Belgium
Friday 10th
St Eloi, West Flanders, Belgium
Sunday 12th
Maison de Ville, Grande Place, Poperinghe, West Flanders, Belgium
Saturday 18th
Hostellerie St Louis, Clairmarais, St Omer, Pas-de-Calais, France
Sunday 19th
Nibrunesi Point, Suvla Bay, Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey
Friday 31st
Myrina, Mudros Bay, Lemnos, Greece
Epilogue
Dramatis Personae
Casualty Figures of the Great War
Glossary
Genealogies
Maps
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE DARKNESS AND THE THUNDER
1915: THE GREAT WAR SERIES
Stewart Binns began his professional life as an academic. He then pursued several adventures, including being a schoolteacher, specializing in history, and a stint as a soldier, before becoming an award-winning documentary-maker and, latterly, an author. His television credits include the ‘In Colour’ genre of historical documentaries, notably the BAFTA and Grierson winner Britain at War in Colour and the Peabody winner The Second World War in Colour.
He also launched Trans World Sport in 1987, Futbol Mundial in 1993, the International Olympic Committee Olympic Games Camera of Record in 1994 and the Olympic Television Archive Bureau in 1996. He produced FIFA’s official history of football in 1989, The People’s Game, the All England Club’s official history of Wimbledon, Wimbledon: A History of the Championships, in 2001 and, in 2004, Tiger Woods’ authorized biography, Tiger.
Currently chief executive and co-founder, with his wife, Lucy, of the independent production and distribution company Big Ape Media International, Stewart has in recent years continued to specialize in historical documentaries, including two series about the life of Winston Churchill, histories of the Korean War and of Indo-China, major studies of modern Japan and India and Sport under Threat, a documentary about terrorist threats at major sporting events.
His previous novels, Conquest, Crusade, Anarchy and Lionheart (The Making of England quartet), and The Shadow of War, the first of his Great War series, were published to great acclaim.
His home is in Somerset, where he lives with his wife and twin boys, Charlie and Jack.
www.stewartbinns.com
To all those who endured the Great War
Author’s Note
The Darkness and the Thunder is a work of fiction. Although largely based on real events, and while many of the characters are borrowed from history, names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used entirely fictitiously
.
Some of the characters speak in their local vernacular, especially the old Pennine dialect of North-east Lancashire. Largely gone now, it was still spoken into the 1960s, and I remember well its unique colour and warmth. It was an unusual combination of Old English and the nineteenth-century ‘Mee-maw’ – the exaggerated, mouthed reinforcements of speech used to overcome the noise of the looms in the cotton mills made famous by comic actors such as Hylda Baker and Les Dawson.
The meanings of various East Lancs dialect expressions, as well as examples of Cockney rhyming slang and background facts about military terms, Victorian and Edwardian mores and various historical references, are explained in the Glossary at the back of the book.
Introduction: 1915
For all the combatants and civilians held in the terrifying grip of the Great War, any hope of a quick and decisive victory has been extinguished long before the icy chill of winter 1914 set in. Almost a million dead, the vast majority of them French and German, had seen to that. Britain has lost over 30,000 of her finest sons, experienced veterans of Britain’s elite professional army, in the slaughter of the British Expeditionary Force. Back home, the news has been met first with incredulity, then with a growing feeling of dread.
By the beginning of 1915, the Napoleonic dash at the Front of the early days of the war has been replaced by the grinding horror of trench warfare. Optimism, elan and innocence have been supplanted by futility, lethargy and cruelty.
Now, winter’s terrors are diminishing yet further the already enfeebled morale of the troops in their waterlogged pits and rat-infested warrens, reducing them to an even more pitiful state than in the aftermath of the dreadful battles of the autumn. As the men try to survive the squalor, the generals search in desperation for solutions to end the impasse.
The Western Front is a forbidding streak of barbed wire, shell-holes and trenches running from the North Sea to the Alps. Of its 402 miles, the noble Belgian Army holds the northern 22 miles and the indomitable French Army guards 360 miles to the south. In between, the scant remnants of the glorious British Expeditionary Force is the bulwark of just 20 miles, but it is a vital sector that protects the northern flank of Paris and one that will soon expand.
This is the continuing story of five communities of Britain’s people, their circumstances very different but all of them part of the enormous tragedy that is unfolding. They and their homeland are being changed for ever by the catastrophic events of the Great War. The gruesome statistics of the death and suffering of 1914 are only the beginning. Slaughter on an even greater scale is yet to come.
Part One: January
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IN WINTER’S CHILLING GRIP
Friday 1 January
Locre, West Flanders, Belgium
The chilling hand of winter has grasped the hearts of the warriors of the Great War; her icy touch has put their martial passions into hibernation. There are still sporadic outbursts of fighting: persistent sniping, frequent skirmishes and long-range bombardments. Death is still commonplace, not only from combat but also from disease. However, the mass slaughter of the previous year has abated. Men who are cold and wet, hungry and exhausted, do not fight well.
If the ugly world of the trenches of the 400 miles of the Western Front is not quite the hell of the battles of the autumn of 1914, it is a purgatory where men are trapped in a torment of deprivation and anxiety. The deprivation has many guises: the hardship of an appalling diet, the stinging pain of trench foot, the death rattle of bronchitis, the indignity of insanitary conditions. But the greatest burden in this limbo of the winter of 1914–15 is a gnawing anxiety, an ever-deepening foreboding born of a certainty. It is an inevitability acknowledged by everyone on the battlefield: the hell of autumn’s battles will soon return.
There is but one respite from the slow torture of the trenches: the heaven that is the billets located just behind the Front. Often not much better than squalid by civilized standards, they are nevertheless usually dry, sometimes warm and mainly well stocked with rations. Most importantly, they are relatively safe from the terrors of combat. For most battalions at the Front, five or six days in trenches are being alternated with an equal amount of time in billets.
Fourth Battalion Royal Fusiliers has been billeted at Locre, West Flanders, since Boxing Day. As billets go in this merciless war, the Hospice of St Antoine, its nuns long departed and the building now in the hands of the British Expeditionary Force, is almost a home from home. Despite the fact that it has been heavily shelled and lacks much of its roof, the sappers have made it waterproof. There is sufficient fuel from the nearby woods to keep its many fires going and in its cellars is a decent supply of rations. For men relieved of duties in the dismal trenches just a few miles away, a warm, dry refuge and a full belly are the stuff of dreams.
Locre itself is little more than a few houses straddling the crossroads of the routes between Ypres to the north-east and Bailleul to the south-west, and from Poperinghe due north and Armentières to the south-east. Ypres, the crux of the British defensive position in Flanders, is less than eight miles away and the French border is less than two miles distant in the opposite direction.
Not quite as flat but just as drab as other parts of the region, the landscape is featureless and monotonous. The small, red-brick cottages, their inhabitants long since gone to safer locations to the west, are faintly reminiscent of the more uninspiring parts of rural England – or at least they would be without the ravages of five months of war. The local church, L’Église St Pierre, still stands but is badly damaged. Its roofless nave provides space for the tents of a British Army field hospital, while its vestry has become a makeshift serjeants’ mess for the Fusiliers.
The year 1915 is just thirty minutes old, and the sounds of revelry and celebration spill from the boarded-up windows and open door of the large, hexagonal room. Despite the biting cold, there are many serjeants standing outside in the night’s ice-cold air, drinking, smoking and laughing. As they do at their home barracks at Albany on the Isle of Wight, the Royal Fusiliers, Londoners and proud of it, share the mess with their fellow Fusiliers, 1st Battalion Northumberlands and 1st Battalion Royal Scots. They make for strange bedfellows, having few folk memories in common and hailing from very distant corners of Britain. Nevertheless, each is known for its remarkable endurance on the battlefield and its notorious irascibility when at rest.
Inside St Pierre’s spacious and once-grand vestry, Royal Fusilier Colour Serjeants Maurice Tait and Harry Woodruff have avoided all attempts to get them to join in the less-than-tuneful renderings of soldiers’ favourite songs. However, they do smile at the latest popular ditty, sung with gusto by their fellow NCOs:
Do your balls hang low?
Do they dangle to and fro?
Can you tie them in a knot?
Can you tie them in a bow?
Do they itch when it’s hot?
Do you rest them in a pot?
Do you get them in a tangle?
Do you catch them in a mangle?
Do they swing in stormy weather?
Do they tickle with a feather?
Do they rattle when you walk?
Do they jingle when you talk?
Can you sling them on your shoulder
Like a lousy fucking soldier?
Do your balls hang low?
‘Well, ’Arry, another year’s gawn, and wot a fuckin’ year it was!’
Harry pauses and looks at his life-long friend and comrade in many battles. He is brooding again. ‘New Year’s Day, Mo? So wot’s the point in makin’ a fuss? It’s just another day to die.’
Maurice has been getting used to Harry’s increasingly sombre moods but, even so, is shaken by his morose comment.
‘ ’Arry, you miserable bugger, we ain’t gonna cop it on New Year’s Day!’
‘Don’t be too sure, mate. We got relieved on Boxing Day by the Worcesters; wot’s the bettin’ we go up the line tonight to give the country boys a cosy New Year’s
night in billets?’
Army veterans of almost twenty years’ standing, Maurice and Harry are part of a breed that is becoming rarer by the day. The non-commissioned officers of the British Expeditionary Force have paid a brutal price in the first months of the war. As the two men glance around the room, they see only a few faces they recognize from the Fusilier barracks at Albany, and none from India or the Boer War, where they both served with distinction.
‘Thank fuck it’s quiet this winter, Mo. My nerves was shot before Christmas.’
‘Too right! One minute you was as miserable as sin, couldn’t get a peep outta yer; the next you was shoutin’ and ollerin’ abaht killin’ every Fritz in sight.’
‘It’s the bloody shellin’, mate. I can stand most things, but not knowin’ where the next one’s comin’ from drives me doolally.’
‘Listen, ’Arry, if yer name’s on it, that’s it. No point frettin’ abaht it.’
‘You’ve got bottle, Mo. Dunno ’ow you keep an even keel when everyone’s droppin’ like flies. One of the Geordie boys was tellin’ me that out of their twenty-eight serjeants wot came over in August, only six are still ’ere.’
‘Same with us, ain’t it?’
‘Right … and we’re two of ’em. So wot’s the odds on us surviving another year in this khazi?’
‘ ’Arry, leave it be. Now you’re makin’ me windy!’
‘So yer should be, mate! D’yer know how many of them Worcester farmer boys have been pinged by Fritz snipers since they relieved us?’
‘Go on, surprise me.’
‘No, guess, yer pillock!’
‘Eight.’
‘Seventeen! Fuckin’ seventeen, Mo! Plugged through the eye, through the back of the head, between the eyes; those Hun snipers are fuckin’ Dead-eye Dicks, I’m tellin’ yer!’
Maurice tries to appear blasé to calm Harry’s bile. ‘Should ’ave kept their heads down, shouldn’t they? If yer keep yer nut dahn, Fritz can’t put a fuckin’ slug in it, can he?’ Not wanting Harry to dwell any more on the stark arithmetic of the war, he changes the subject. ‘Wonder wot those Fritz boys are up to wot we played football against on Christmas Day?’