Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front. Richard Holmes
unpromising exteriors but were prettier inside. Captain James Dunn thought that Doullens church, though ‘nondescript and unattractive without, has fine early twelfth-century detail within’, as well as ‘finely-preserved mid-Gothic arching’.17 Private Frank Richards, of the same battalion, saw things with a slightly different eye. ‘Stevens and I visited the cathedral,’ he wrote of Rouen, ‘and we were very much taken with the beautiful oil paintings and other objects of art inside. One old soldier who paid it a visit said it would be a fine place to loot.’18 However, some private soldiers were more appreciative. Stapleton Tench Eachus, a Royal Engineers signaller, explained why he had mixed views about the church of St-Gilles at Epagnette in mid-1916.
The church is an old one and not by any means remarkable for its structural architecture, at least that was my impression. It had however been elaborately decorated and the walls and pillars painted in divers hues. The paintings, which were hung about the building, constituted in my view the most remarkable feature to be seen in this place of worship. Perhaps however my vision in such matters may be influenced in a prejudicial direction on account of the fact that having had the privilege of visiting that most wonderful sumptuous church, St John’s at Valetta, Malta, one is apt to judge readily and in so doing overlook the claims of those of less repute.19
Men were often struck by the way that the names of bars, hotels and restaurants reflected the area’s turbulent past. A tavern on the Brussels road outside Mons, at the scene of the first clash between British and German cavalry on 22 August 1914, was named La Reine d’Hongroie, after the Queen of Hungary: Maria Theresa, when Mons was in the Austrian Netherlands. Aux Armes de France with its Valois blue with golden lilies and L’Ecu de France with its crown had both survived three republics, and Le Bivouac de L’Fmpereur bore the distinctive silhouette of the little corporal. The peasantry slaked their thirst in a score of establishments named Les Cultivateurs, and there were horses, prancing or ploughing, black and white. There was the double-headed eagle for the Hapsburg Empire and his crowned cousin for the French, and even, as a sharp-eyed army doctor recorded, Au Grand Marlbrouck named after the first Duke of Marlborough and La Reine d’Angleterre after his queen.20
This was a land already marked by war. Many were struck by the bizarre connection of ancient and modern. When Charles Carrington returned to the battlefields in 1923 he found:
a trench still full of the flotsam and jetsam of war. I dug an old gun out of the mud and found to my surprise that it was not a modern rifle but a Brown Bess musket, dropped there by some British soldier during Wellington’s last action against a French rearguard in 1815.21
There was fighting there long before Wellington. In the sixteenth century the northern border of France followed the line of the Somme, as the fortifications at Montreuil, Doullens and Péronne, so familiar to British soldiers of the war, still demonstrate. Philip II of Spain built the great monastery-palace of El Escorial, just north of Madrid, to celebrate victory over the French at St-Quentin in 1557.
But the rising power of France was not to be denied, and the border moved inexorably northwards. Cyrano de Bergerac fought the Spaniards at Arras in fiction, and the future James II of England fought them in fact when Duke of York, and a lieutenant general in French service. ‘I joyn’d the Army by Peronne …’, he wrote.
About the 16th [July 1654] … wee began our march towards Arras, and camp’d at a village called Sains, near Sauchy-Cauchy which lys between Cambray and Arras … The next day we continued our march towards Mouchy-le-Preux … Monsieur de Turenne’s own quarter was at this place of Mouchy … Monsr. de la Ferté had his quarter at the right hand of our Line down by the side of the River Scarpe, at a Village called Peule.
Give or take the vagaries of spelling, James’s countrymen would have recognised Cambrai and Monchy, Arras and the Scarpe, though they might have reflected grimly that a battle then cost both sides ‘not … above four hundred … I remember but one Collonell, M. de Puymarais, Coll of horse, a brave young gentleman …’.22 There were to be rather more brave young gentlemen stretched out on the slopes between Monchy and Arras when the British 3rd Army assaulted the place in April 1917.
The French fortified the captured ground. Vauban’s pré carré was a double line of geometrical artillery fortresses, one running from Gravelines to Arras and on to Avesnes, the other from Dunkirk to Ypres, Menin and Valenciennes to Maubeuge. The bastions and ravelins of this fortification, built to resist the close-range pounding of heavy guns, proved surprisingly resistant to more modern artillery, and thousands of British soldiers were to retain grateful memories of casemates beneath the ramparts at Ypres, which accorded a measure of protection hard to find elsewhere in or around that blighted town. They also housed the ‘offices’ of one of the best-known trench newspapers, The Wipers Times, whose first edition had its own view on architecture:
FOR SALE, cheap, Desirable Residence. Climate Warm: fine view. Splendid links close by, good shooting. Terms moderate. Owner going abroad. Apply Feddup, Gordon Farm, nr Wipers.23
There were older defences too. Coucy le Château, the finest medieval castle in France, lay on the British line of retreat in 1914. One of its lords had married Isabella, daughter of Edward II of England, and was created Earl of Bedford. His house already had the proud boast:
Roi ne suis, ne Prince, ne Duc, ne Comte aussi, Je suis le Sire de Coucy.24
The castle’s methodical destruction when the Germans withdrew from the area in 1917 offended the capable and soldierly Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, the local army group commander, who protested to his own high command that it had no military value. Henry V’s men knew the castle at Peronne, and when 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers moved down south in mid 1916, they
saw Corbie across the Somme. It cold-shouldered Henry V when he marched along its ridge, to turn at Agincourt on the host that beset him. But from what unknown church near-by did Bardolph take the golden pyx?25
Captain Reginald Tompson, a railway staff officer in 1914, was delighted to find himself in the village of Le Bourget, just outside Paris, the scene of a battle in the Franco-Prussian War. ‘This is the very place immortalised by de Neuville in his picture Le Bourget’, he exulted in his diary. ‘I must go and see the church. They tell me the scene is exactly as in ’70.’26
Landscape stirred more than history. Once, when 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers were on the march:
There were few men within range of seeing who did not look wistfully at a wayside house of red brick and tiles, built to an English design, and set in an English garden …27
Men easily found familiar comparisons. The old hospital in Corbie was ‘something on the lines of St Cross in Winchester’, the stream running through Lumbres would make ‘an ideal trout stream, if only it was properly cared for’. Scottish infantry sitting about their billets in St-Omer made it seem like a Lanarkshire town, and Aubers Ridge looked just like the Hog’s Back between Guildford and Farnham.28 The villages on the Somme were ‘each … as big as Cholsey, reckoning from the church to half way to the asylum’. Second Lieutenant H. M. Stanford, Royal Field Artillery, told his parents that the Flanders countryside ‘is very flat and full of dykes and canals but one can see fairly high hills out to the E. and N.E., otherwise it might be part of the marshes at home for the most part’. In the trenches, however, ‘the mud becomes worse than the Aldeburgh River, and that’s saying a great deal’.29