A whole panoply of boats, steam whistles screeching, left Southampton and took us to France one night. We’d crossed the rough and tumbling channel on a civilian ferry like holidaymakers. Holidaymakers who could fire fifteen rounds a minute in three clips of five.
There were six divisions in the BEF and we knew we were just a gesture of support for the French. Although we wanted to, we didn’t expect to get stuck in.
There was a remote possibility. The French had a million men mobilized but they were in the wrong place. There was a danger of them being outflanked by the German army coming through Belgium. Our job was to plug the gap if need be.
At dawn we were steaming up the Seine to Rouen. People lined each bank, cheering and waving tricolore flags. Rowing boats tried to keep up, people standing unsteadily in them, throwing fruit and flowers, toffees and rosettes.
We were mobbed in the narrow streets of Rouen. People were hanging out of windows, children running alongside waving flags. Our buttons were ripped off our jackets as souvenirs by screaming women. Hardly anybody hung on to their cap badges. A lot of us lost our caps altogether.
For other regiments that was pretty straightforward, but we in the Royal Sussex had the Roussillon plume as part of our cap badge. The regiment had got it at the battle of Quebec decades earlier when we had wiped the floor with the soldiers of the French Roussillon brigade and ripped the plumes off their helmets.
When asked about the plume by curious older men in Rouen, I simply said the French brigade had given it to us in recognition of our bravery in battle. Others, stupidly, told the truth in gory detail. The welcoming crush turned into a near-riot.
It was a hot afternoon and marching on cobbles, buffeted at every turn, was no picnic. By now our uniforms were hanging mostly buttonless. We stumbled finally into a large park where we were bivouacking for the night.
I wandered down to find my Lancashire mates at one of the beer tents. I’d managed to get some local currency early on. Just as well — there were long queues outside the Paymaster’s as soldiers changed coppers and threepenny bits so they could get a tuppenny pint.
I found Jim, Jack and Ted and we sat together eating our iron rations — biscuits and bully beef — then Jim was lured away by the siren sounds of girls calling from outside the park railings. Some just wanted to flirt, others had a more professional purpose. The warm evening got hotter.
‘Not interested?’ I said to Jack and Ted.
‘I love my wife,’ Ted said.
‘And you made her a promise.’
He shook his head.
‘Didn’t need to. It goes without saying.’
I sipped my beer.
‘What about you, Jack?’
‘Didn’t you read that note from Kitchener?’
We all laughed. Kitchener had put a note in every kit bag: ‘Do Your Duty Bravely, Fear God, Honour The King.’ It also said: ‘In this new experience you may find temptations both in wine and women. You must entirely resist both temptations, and, whilst treating all women with perfect courtesy, you should avoid any intimacy.’
‘You?’ he said.
‘Nobody back home waiting for me or worried about me.’ I gestured towards the railings. ‘But I’m not interested in that.’
‘You’ve got family at home, though, worrying over you,’ Jack said. ‘A mum and dad.’
‘Neither.’ I smiled. ‘I’m God’s lonely man.’
Ted clapped me on the back.
‘Jesus, lad — that’s a bit bleak for your age. Wait until you go home the conquering hero — the girls will be all over you.’
We marched fifteen miles north the next day. We were billeted in the evening in school rooms, village halls and, in my case, a big barn stinking of cow dung. We were supposed to stay there a few days, so the next day we helped with the harvest — the grain in the fields was ripe and high. Grateful women kept us supplied with buckets of home-brewed cider.
We cheered when on the lane beside our field we saw a line of bright red London double-decker buses led by a van with an advertisement for HP Sauce plastered on its side. Posters on the side of the buses advertised West End plays — Shaw’s Pygmalion and a comedy with Sir Charles Hawtrey at the Coliseum. The sight of them tugged at my heart.
We didn’t cheer quite so much when the next day we had to get in the buses for the journey up to the Mons-Conde canal. We bumped and shuddered and listed for mile after slow mile through the French countryside.
It was hard to think about fighting alongside the French, not against them. I had an ancestor who had fought and died at Malplaquet. The Roussillon plume in my cap was a constant reminder of our former enmity.
On Thursday, 20th August, the Belgian army was forced to abandon Brussels and withdraw to Antwerp after eighteen days resisting the Germans. The Belgians were poorly trained and ill-equipped but clearly brave — it was only later, when we came face-to-face with the mass of the German army, that we realized they must have been outnumbered a hundred to one.
On the 22nd we had our first sight of the enemy. We were on the undulating Nimy Road and a German cavalry patrol trotted over the brow of the next hill, bold as brass on their big horses, spruce in their grey uniforms and polished helmets, long lances held upright. The commander was puffing on a cigar. They were a shock, I can tell you. A few of us opened fire.
We set up quite a racket but we were too far away to hit anything. The horsemen wheeled in an orderly manner and trotted back over the brow of the hill, leaving us pocking only the bright blue sky.
TWO
We’d heard that we weren’t going to attack the Hun army until our commander, Sir John French, was sure of its size and disposition. But the sighting of the cavalry must have startled him because suddenly we were out of the buses and marching double-time to the Mons canal in torrential rain. When the rain stopped, the sun came out and hit like a hammer. The dust kicked up. Then more rain, more sunshine.
We started out, as Robert Service had it, battle-bound and heart-high, singing It’s A Long Way To Tipperary. But by the time we’d covered forty kilometres my uniform was so soaked in sweat and rainwater I could have wrung it out. Some of my companions didn’t make the forty kilometres. They had new boots they hadn’t yet broken in. A lot of old stagers were sitting at the roadside nursing blistered feet.
The first night, we camped in a field with no fires or lights. We were not much more than a stone’s throw away from Malplaquet. The field was open but we were in the Black Country. There were slag heaps and coal mines, chemical plants, glass works and factories, and sooty washing on the lines in the back gardens of grubby villages.
Ted closed his eyes and breathed in.
‘Smell that slag heap. You could imagine you’re in Accrington.’ He laughed. ‘I’m not saying that’s a good thing, mind.’
Next day we hobbled into Mons during a big market. We sat on the cobblestones in the sunshine, bedraggled, steaming like horses. We got our rations: a big loaf of bread between us four and tins without labels, some rusted, probably dating back to the Boer War. It was pot luck what was in them. Mine had stewed apple, Jimmy had pilchards — we put them together. The locals gave us cheese and sausage, apples and pears. I stuffed my knapsack full for later.
We went for a walk. Got hauled into cafes for beer. Hauled into a hairdresser for a haircut. Given cigars and cigarettes. A photographer pulled us into his shop and out into his muddy back yard for a photograph against a bit of tarpaulin. Jack scribbled on a piece of card ‘Somewhere in France’ and propped it against a barrel next to us. We each got a print of the snap.
When we got back to the square, our regiment was lining up. We marched on to Nimy to take up position on the bank of the canal.
‘Bloody hell, this is a bit bigger than the Leeds and Liverpool,’ Jim said, looking across the wide expanse of water. ‘I wonder if we can have a dip?’