Men, boys and horses were packed into a steamer that stank of human sweat and horse droppings, and were shipped across the Channel to France. They were sent straight to the front-line trenches.
I said, “I’ve heard about this, front lines and trenches and going over the top and the likes, but what does it all mean?”
He said, “Well I wasn’t there – I was too old. I suppose I could have gone as a veteran, but the Post Office was vital work, because all communications were handled by the Post Office, so I don’t think I would have been released. However, I have met several men who were there at the front and who survived, and they told me the realities we never heard about back home.’
“Tell me about them, will you?”
“If you really want me to I will. But are you sure you want to hear? It’s not the sort of thing one should discuss with a young lady.”
I assured him I really did want to hear.
“Then you had better get me another drink. No, not that sherry stuff. If you look in the bottom of that cupboard you will find half a bottle of brandy.”
I filled his glass, and he took a gulp.
“That’s better. It upsets me, talking about it. My two beautiful boys died in those trenches. I reckon I need a bit of brandy inside just to think about it.”
He finished the glass, and handed it back to me for a refill, then continued his narrative.
The things he told me that evening were deeply disturbing. The trenches, I learned, were a series of massive dugouts intended as temporary camouflage in flat countryside that offered no natural protection for an army. In the event, they were used for four years of continuous warfare, and provided living accommodation for soldiers.
For months on end men were camped underground in trenches that were always damp, and sometimes waterlogged. Conditions were so cramped, and the men so tightly packed side by side, that the only way to sleep was to stand with their heads and shoulders learning over the parapet. Trench-foot (rotting of the skin caused by a fungal infection), frost-bite and gangrene were rife. The men endured filthy clothes, unchanged for weeks, and lice, millions of lice, that spread from one man to another and were impossible to eliminate. There was no sanitation, and drinking water was contaminated by mud and sewage. Hot food was an infrequent luxury. The rats were everywhere, thriving on an unlimited supply of human flesh as men died in such numbers that the living were unable to bury them.
Both armies were entrenched in their dugouts, often in a line only a hundred yards apart, and both sides were ordered to blow the other to smithereens. Men were being blown to pieces all around; arms, legs, heads were blown off; men were disembowelled, faces torn open, eyes shot out. If the men were ordered to leave their trenches (“go over the top” as it was called) and advance on foot towards the enemy line they would be heading straight into the line of fire and as many as 100,000 men could die in a single day.
And all the time, the cold, the damp, the hunger, the lice, and the stench of decomposition as rats gnawed at the corpses of the dead, drove the men stark raving mad.
“It’s worse than I had thought, far worse,” I said. “I can’t even imagine it. I think I would have gone out of my mind in such a situation.”
“Many did. And there was precious little sympathy for them.”
“It is surprising that men did not simply run away. What was to stop them?”
“Desertion was punishable by death by firing squad.”
In that instant I remembered my Uncle Maurice. He was a strange, withdrawn man subject to violent passions and irrational behaviour. He was potentially dangerous, and I had always been very afraid of him. My aunt told me that he had spent four years, the entire war, in the trenches and somehow miraculously survived. “Don’t provoke him dear,” she would say, and I could see that her entire life was devoted to trying to ease his mind and bring tranquillity to his life. She was an angel, and I thought at the time that he did not deserve her – but without her he would have been a nervous wreck, and probably even certified as insane.
She said, “He hardly even talks about the war, he bottles it up. Occasionally I can get him to talk about it, and I think it helps. But he still even now, thirty years afterwards, has dreadful nightmares. He screams and thrashes around the bed, and shouts to people in his dreams.”
Having heard Mr Collett’s descriptions of trench warfare I began, for the first time, to understand my Uncle Maurice, and my aunt’s saintly devotion.
One day she told me the most dreadful story of all. Her husband had been ordered to join a firing squad of ten men to shoot one of their companions who had deserted and been captured. The victim was a boy of nineteen who had been so terrified by the noise of guns and the death happening all around him that his mind had snapped and he had run away screaming. He was quickly arrested, for he had not managed to stumble more than half a mile, then was court-martialled, and sentenced to death for desertion. All the men knew the boy and each one hoped and prayed he would not be ordered to join the firing squad. Ten men were selected and ordered to shoot the boy in cold blood, and my uncle was one of them.
I told the story to Mr Collett. For several moments he said not a word, but was busy cleaning out his pipe with a murderous-looking weapon, scraping and gouging the nicotine and tar from the encrusted bowl of his old friend. Then he blew hard down the stem and bits of black stuff flew into the air.
“That’s better,” he muttered “no wonder it wouldn’t draw.” Then he said, “Fill my glass, will you dear?”
I sloshed more brandy in, not knowing how strong it was. He took a sip and rolled it on his tongue, then said: “That is a dreadful story. It will remain with your uncle for the rest of his life. War brutalises a man. It is not surprising he was moody and violent. But you must remember two things: running away from battle has always been punishable by death. Military discipline must be harsh, or every soldier would run away; and secondly in a firing squad of ten men only one held a rifle with live ammunition – nine held blanks. So every man had a nine out of ten chance of not being responsible for the death of his colleague.
“I don’t know what to think. I suppose it’s as you say – military discipline must be harsh – but it’s dreadful all the same. I find it almost unfathomable.”
“Of course you do, my dear, you are in a profession that is devoted to caring for life, not destroying it. ‘War is hell’ – General William Sherman said that about the American Civil War a hundred years ago. It always has been hell and it always will be.”
“My grandfather told me that his uncles had been in the Crimean Wars and never came back. The family never knew what happened.”
“No they wouldn’t. The common soldier was completely expendable, not even named. Did you know that after the battle of Sebastopol the bones of the dead were collected up in sacks and shipped back to Britain to be ground down into fertilizers that was sold to farmers for a profit.”
“That can’t be true.”
“It is true. Perfectly true.”
“It’s disgusting! I think I’ll try a shot of your brandy.”
“Be careful. It’s strong stuff.”
“I’m not worried, I can take it.” I boasted.
I poured some, and took a gulp as I had seen him do. It didn’t just take the roof off my mouth; it set fire to my throat and gullet and windpipe. I started coughing and choking violently. He laughed. “I warned you.”
When I had recovered, I said, “But that was a hundred years ago. They can’t have been so callous after the First World War.”
“Beautiful cemeteries were built all over Northern France, the graveyards of millions of young men. They rest in peace.”