Twelve Days on the Somme: A Memoir of the Trenches, 1916 Read online

  Camp 34, Trones Wood

  This edition first published in 2006 by Greenhill Books/Lionel Leventhal

  Ltd, Park House, 1 Russell Gardens, London NW11 9NN

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  MBI Publishing Co., Galtier Plaza, Suite 200, 380 Jackson Street, St Paul,

  MN 55101-3885, USA

  Copyright © Sidney Rogerson, 1933

  Foreword © Jeremy Rogerson, 2006

  Introduction © Malcolm Brown, 2006

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  ISBN-13 978-1-85367-680-2

  ISBN-10 1-85367-680-2

  ISBN 9781848326743 (epub)

  ISBN 9781848326750 (prc)

  Frontispiece: ‘Camp 34, Trones Wood’ by Stanley Cursiter

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group

  “Then appeared the iron king crowned with his iron helm, with sleeves of iron mail on his arms. . . . and round him and behind him rode his men armed as nearly like him as they could fashion themselves; so iron filled the fields and the ways and the sun's rays were in every quarter reflected from iron.”

  Old Parisian Chronicler

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Introduction

  Author's Introduction

  I Up the Line

  II Taking-Over

  III Trench-Holding

  IV Relief

  V The Way Back

  VI Into Rest

  FOREWORD

  AS THE ELDEST of Sidney Rogerson's three children, I was asked by Michael Leventhal of Greenhill Books to give a brief account of my father from a family perspective. He was born, the eldest son of a country parson, in Winterborne Kingston, Dorset, in 1894, and at the age of six the family moved to Yorkshire where they were to live for the next fifteen years. This was perhaps the most influential period of his life, when he developed a deep love and knowledge of the countryside around him, and for the local inhabitants, which was to remain with him throughout his life. After school at Worksop College, Nottinghamshire, he went up to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, on a Modern History Exhibition in 1912, but on the outbreak of war he left to join the West Yorkshire Regiment without completing his degree, although he was subsequently awarded his BA after the war. Time at university was spent mainly on the cricket and soccer pitches, and in addition he used his flair for drawing cartoon sketches to illustrate various college menus and the like. Indeed, he harboured designs on joining the Slade and becoming an artist, but all that changed with his wartime experiences in the trenches. Two of his sketches drawn at the time are included in this book.

  After the war he went into public relations and joined the Federation of British Industries, the forerunner of the present CBI, becoming publicity manager. In 1930 he moved to ICI where he started the publicity department and remained as the manager for over twenty years, before retiring in 1954 to take up a new position in the War Office as Advisor to the Director of Public Relations at the personal request of the prime minister, Winston Churchill. Later he became an honorary colonel in the Territorial Army.

  Twelve Days was the first of seven books that he wrote, and it was received with acclaim as the first real account of life in the front line by someone who had actually lived through it, although it took seventeen years before he could bring himself to recount the horrors of life at the time. Writing fiction never appealed to him, but his interest in a broad sweep of other subjects is reflected in his books, which range from The Old Enchantment, a series of sketches of country life published in 1938, to Propaganda in the Next War, also published in 1938 and which was greeted with considerable interest in Germany. His last book was Wilfred Rhodes, a biography of that great Yorkshire and England cricketer, which came out in 1960. After suffering a massive stroke my father spent the last two years in hospital and died in 1968.

  What I remember most about him was his sense of fun and his interest in people from all walks of life. At heart he was essentially a countryman, and even in the 1930s he hated to see the indiscriminate growth of suburbia and its effect on the English landscape. He had boundless energy and was game for anything. One endearing example of this occurred when I was serving as Navigation Officer of HMS St Kitts, a Battle-class destroyer based in Malta. After taking part in the Suez Operation of 1956 we were due to return to the UK, and my father decided he would like to come with us. My captain granted permission for him to take passage but the only available accommodation was in my two-berth cabin, where for the next ten days he occupied the bottom bunk with me above. Since we were due to return to Plymouth, and my father needed to get back to London as quickly as possible, off Ushant we passed him across at sea by jackstay transfer to our sister ship HMS Saintes, which was heading for Portsmouth. Not bad going for a sixty-two year old!

  There was rarely a dull moment when he was around, and to complete the picture I have asked Dr James Hayes to add his thoughts and recollections. James, a retired colonial civil servant and, like my father, an author, first met him in Gibraltar in 1954 when James was serving as a national-service subaltern in a Yorkshire regiment and was detailed off to look after my father during his short visit. Later, James became a close friend to all the family, and despite the age difference he and my father were in many ways kindred spirits with a number of shared interests. His views are given below:

  “As I found out on his visit to ‘The Rock’, Sidney Rogerson was especially good with Yorkshire folk and at drawing people out, and nowhere is this humanity and his multiple talents demonstrated so strongly as in Twelve Days. His keen powers of observation, his retentive almost photographic memory, allied to his ability to tell a good story and to paint word-pictures in the most memorable prose, are all evident in this book. The varied subject matter of his other books affirms his wide range of interests, in each of which he was exceedingly well informed and had something useful to say. He showed a great interest in the study of eighteenth-century military officers, and also encouraged me to write about my own brief experience of active service in Korea. This I might never have done without his pointing the way in Twelve Days, with its descriptions of normal life in the line and the lengthy moves up and down, which became one of the classic accounts of the Great War.

  “When I was back at university in London, Sidney took me under his wing, and he readily assented to be one of my referees for a Colonial Service appointment in Hong Kong. During the two years before I left I spent many happy weekends with the Rogerson family in Suffolk, travelling up and down with Sidney. During this period I got to learn much more about him and the sources of his inspiration and achievements. Sidney Rogerson was a big man in mind and body. Ever forthright, he did not suffer fools gladly, not endearing himself to some people in the process, but to those who appreciated him for what he was and what he stood for, he was a beacon. Looking back over half a century later I feel immensely privileged to have known him at an important stage of my life.”

  JEREMY ROGERSON

  2006

  INTRODUCTION

  I SUSPECT that most people casually picking up
this volume and glancing through its pages will immediately assume that it is yet another predictable diatribe against the horrors of the First World War. Here we go again: mud, lice, rats, squalor, futility, protest—the same old mixture as before. In fact, it is a book of protest, but not against the war; rather, against the way the war had come to be interpreted when the surge of novels, memoirs and other writings which have become the iconic classics of that conflict caught the headlines from the late 1920s onwards.

  The date of its publication is highly significant. Twelve Days was published in 1933 and represents a determined attempt to hold back what by then had become an immensely powerful tide. In the wake of the Armistice of November 1918 there had been a widespread acceptance that, despite the suffering and sacrifice it had entailed, the war had been necessary and had been worthily and honourably won. By the time Rogerson took up his pen, however, it was evident that this attitude had undergone a serious transformation. What had taken place has been well described in a recent incisive study of the subject by an American historian, Professor Janet S. K. Watson:

  In 1914–1918, you were recognized in many social venues as a worthy (if not necessarily equal) participant in the war—whether you were a soldier, a VAD [i.e. a lady volunteer nurse], a munitions worker, or a bandage roller. By the twentieth anniversary of the beginning of the conflict, however, the popular definition of culturally legitimate war experience had narrowed to that of the soldier in the trenches: young junior officers or possibly men in the ranks, preferably serving in France or Belgium, and almost certainly disillusioned.*

  As for the four-year-long wrestling match which had taken place in that crucial area of those two countries known to history as the Western Front, it had by then come to be seen as “a pointless, static conflict over strips of earth, which achieved nothing other than the slaughter of millions of young men from both sides”.†

  The names of the books which had commandeered the agenda scarcely need listing, for to a substantial degree they hold the field to this day. Prominent among them were Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War, published in 1928; Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That and Richard Aldington's Death of a Hero, all published in 1929; and Henry Williamson's Patriot's Progress and Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, both published in 1930. Adding to the mix was R. C. Sherriff's play Journey's End, first staged in 1928, and Wilfred Owen's poems, which began their sustained emotional impact in an edition by Edmund Blunden of 1931.

  This was the context in which Sidney Rogerson, former infantry officer, proud member of the West Yorkshire Regiment (The Prince of Wales's Own), and veteran of the Somme and of the arduous but ultimately successful campaigns of 1917–18, began his fight-back. He puts his cards on the table in his Introduction, forcefully and without equivocation:

  The war, it seems, was many wars. There was the grim-smiling-faces-of-undaunted-boys' war of the early correspondents with attacking battalions dribbling footballs across a sporting No-Man's-Land. There was the Generals' war, of the clean map-squares, in which there was never any muddle, no one was ever afraid, and the troops always advanced, by the right, in perfect formation, “as if on parade.” Even when they came back again, as they not infrequently did, they retired reluctantly, in good order, dressed by the left. Recently there has been the war of the Sewers, in which no one ever laughed, those who were not melancholy mad were alcoholically hysterical, and most of the action took place in or near the crude latrines of the period.

  This is strong stuff, which he clearly hoped would have some effect. “This post-war propaganda,” he argues in a further angry paragraph, “piling corpse on corpse, heaping horror on futility, seems bound to fail from every point of view.” In fact, as has already been implied, the cause was being lost even as Rogerson threw his weight behind it; the new disenchantment would oust the old certainties and become the generally accepted doctrine for the foreseeable future. Though not without strong and eloquent support for his case, as we shall see.

  Who was he, this forceful, thoughtful, determined, eloquent young ex-officer, hitherto unknown as a writer, taking on those whom he saw as his enemies, like a latter-day Beowulf out to confront his Grendel?

  As has been explained in the Foreword, Sidney Rogerson, a parson's son, was born in 1894, lived much of his youth in Yorkshire, and was educated at Worksop College, Nottinghamshire, and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where he read for a BA in Modern History. A member of the Cambridge University Officers Training Corps, he was commissioned into the West Yorkshire Regiment on 14 August 1914, just eight days after the start of the war against Germany. Unlike many of his kind, however, he was spared an early baptism of fire; indeed, whereas thousands of the volunteers of 1914 found themselves poised for action in front-line trenches on the morning of 1 July 1916—the first day of the Battle of the Somme—he was still in England at that point, yet to see a shot fired in anger. He sailed for France on 20 July, as one of several hundred reinforcements intended for his regiment's second battalion, which had gone into action as twenty-one officers and 702 other ranks on 1 July, to be reduced to five officers and 212 other ranks by the end of the day.

  By this time a lieutenant, he was posted to B Company, which he later commanded. Like many other battalions which suffered heavily on 1 July 1916, the 2nd West Yorkshires were withdrawn to recover and retrain, returning to the front in the final phase of a campaign which lasted overall for over four and a half months, from 1 July to 18 November. Twelve Days is Rogerson's narrative of a period of front-line duty in November, the battle being on the edge of closedown when they were instructed to withdraw. There were no over-the-top attacks during this period, no trench raids, no fierce flurries of action. Rather, it was a case of determinedly holding the line whatever the conditions or the casualties. To catch the character of the campaign in this grim final phase there can surely be no better description than that coined by Captain J. C. Dunn in his outstanding war diary of the 2nd Royal Welch Fusiliers (the battalion of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves), long famous as The War the Infantry Knew. He called it “The Pitiless Somme”, a phrase which says it all.

  Yet for Rogerson this was no cause for anger. Hence his comment on what he described as “one of the remarkable characteristics of the British soldier—when by every law of nature he should have been utterly weary and ‘fed-up’ he invariably managed to be almost truculently cheerful” (p. 130). Hence too his ability to find satisfaction in pleasures that seemed even better for the circumstances in which they were enjoyed, as in this passage, brimming, almost literally, with nostalgia: “How the keen edge of appreciation of creature comforts is blunted by a life of peace! Did not a mess-tin of stew, a tot of rum or whisky and water in a tin mug, taste more like divine nectar than the best champagne drunk out of the finest cut-glass to-day?” (p. 96). Summing up his attitude in a keynote passage in his Introduction, which might challenge the assumptions of many people today, he stated: “Life in the trenches was not all ghastliness. It was a compound of many things; fright and boredom, humour, comradeship, tragedy, weariness, courage, and despair.”

  He even found occasion to chronicle the battalion's experience with pencil and paper, in a style more than a little reminiscent of that of the master of First World War caricature, Bruce Bairnsfather, who was himself a front-line infantry officer as well as an artist. It gives the publishers and myself great pleasure to be able to include here two sketches by Sidney Rogerson, drawn during the twelve days of the book's title, one dated 7 November and the other 15 November, reproduced with the permission and encouragement of the Rogerson family. If nothing else these drawings, never before published, show that their author could find laughter, even comedy, in a situation which we would now tend to assume to have been almost unendurably horrific.

  However, let us be clear about one central aspect of Sidney Rogerson's sincerely held creed. He was far from being an uncritical supporter of the way the war
on the Western Front had been fought. He was, for example, forthright in his criticism of the practice of senior generals to make their dispositions without adequate knowledge of the actualities of the fighting fronts:

  One of the war's greatest tragedies was that the High Command so seldom saw for themselves the state of the battle zone. What could the men at G.H.Q. who ordered the terrible attacks on the Somme know of the mud from their maps? If they had known, they could never have brought themselves to believe that human flesh and blood could so nearly achieve the impossible, and often succeed in carrying out orders which should never have been issued. [pp. 29–30]

  Nor does Rogerson pull his punches in regard to that regular butt of soldierly anger, the army staff. His criticism was not, however, a conventional moan against the staff's perceived incompetence or insensitivity; it was a specific criticism of a specific policy at a particular time, i.e. the three months following the shattering experience on the Somme's first day, which was also the period when he himself finally evolved from untried trainee in the reserve to active soldier in the field. Instead of being given the chance to regroup and recover in decent trenches, the battalion was moved to what he called “the putrid boneyard of Vermelles”, part of that grim industrial area to the north of the Somme where the previous year's Battle of Loos had been fought and lost:

  This is the charge that must be laid at the door of the higher staff, that it kept troops with no strategic or tactical advantage in that giant memorial to its own failure, the Loos battlefield, instead of withdrawing them to clean ground where some adequate trench system could be constructed which would enable them to observe and hold the enemy and at the same time to cut down the high daily toll of lives. [pp. 5–6]