The Iron Harvest

The so called "iron harvest" continues to amaze and appal in equal measure. The visitor to the Western Front has enough on his or her plate just getting their heads around the body count without contemplating the idea that this dreadful war might still be taking victims today.
A battlefield trip to the Somme with journalists from papers such as the Telegraph and Mirror led to a chance meeting with farmer Claude Samain, whose fields regularly yield piles of rusting munitions a hundred years on. In 1916, his fields were crisscrossed by a maze of communication trenches, filled with the flower of North country menfolk. Lads from Leeds and boys from Barnsley would have awaited their fate out on Claude's land. The ill fated Accrington Pals too. These were Kitchener's volunteers, who joined up in the breathless excitement of the late summer of 1914. They had trained hard, and were desperate to impress. This was their town's chance to make a mark. The Accrington Pals would become famous for the role they would play in the great breakthrough, they hoped. Tragically, they have become synonymous with the blood letting of July 1st, 1916. Accrington is forever associated with a strangely named football team and the fact that out of 700 men who went over the top on that sunny morning, 585 of them were dead or wounded just minutes later. They were, as a witness said, "mown down like meadow grass".
Claude's land is peaceful now. He showed us rusted heaps of metal, plied up against the brick wall of a barn. The weight and sharp edges of the shrapnel makes you shudder - what these red hot pieces of flying metal could do to a human body doesn't bear thinking about for too long. Venomous coils of barbed wire, spent cartridges, shell fuzes and bent rifle barrels had all been collected by Claude over the past few months. And around the corner, the dangerous stuff. Unexploded shells, some no doubt containing poison gas, stood to attention in neat rows waiting for the army truck to arrive. There didn't appear to be any rush.
Claude and his fellow farmers can be forgiven for being a little blasé about it all. He recalled his time as a child in these fields, exploring a nearby copse which had been used a medical post. He would chase around, hunting amongst the shredded pieces of tarpaulin for treasures in a place where  wounded men, some screaming, some at the very point of death, would have been carried in by sweating stretcher bearers. Suffering on an unimaginable scale has always formed the backdrop to his life in this quiet, rural corner of France.

 

STA Neil - kia July 1st 1916

Leeds Pals

All too brief

Cecil Abercrombie - Died at Jutland, May 31st, 1916 

In 1977, a battered, dust covered photo album was hooked out of a builder’s skip on a street in central London. The pictures captured the pre WW1 marriage of a young naval officer called Cecil Abercrombie.  A rugby international and a Hampshire cricketer, Abercrombie was destined to be one of the 8,500 men killed at the Battle of Jutland at the end of May, 1916.

He spent some of his youth with relatives in the New Forest, the Shaw family of Milford House, and on joining the navy he played rugby for the Combined Services side in Portsmouth. A powerful loose forward, he went on to win six Scottish caps. By the summer of 1912 he had taken up cricket, and he impressed the crowd at Lords with some destructive hitting in the Army v Navy match. His quick fire century in the second innings featured a mammoth six that landed on the players’ dressing room balcony. Hampshire lost no time in securing his signature.

In just 13 matches in the summer of 1913, Abercrombie scored nearly a thousand runs.  Most famously, Abercrombie combined with George Brown to produce a huge stand of 325 for the seventh wicket against Essex, a record that is still etched proudly on Hampshire’s records board more than a hundred years later. Abercrombie smashed 165 runs, including 11 fours and 4 sixes.

Hampshire’s supporters would have been licking their lips at the prospect of their new hero dismantling County attacks in the 1914 season, but naval duty called for Abercrombie.

When his ship, HMS Defence, was finally called into action at Jutland at the end of May 1916, Abercrombie was one of 903 men lost. Defence had lasted a matter of minutes in combat. A stunned officer on board a nearby ship, the Obedient, wrote that after a huge explosion “we could see no sign of a ship at all – Defence had gone.”

Abercrombie and his wife had only married in 1913, and the battered photo album saved from the builders’ skip was the record of their time together. Like Abercrombie’s cricket career, her married life had been all too brief.

Fighting them on the Beaches

"Wars are not won by evacuations" Churchill, 1940

Careful preparation of a battlefield tour involves walking familiar ground all over again, thinking practically about the logistics of where coaches can park, starving schoolkids can eat etc etc.
But in the midst of the logistics, Jeremy Banning (www.jeremybanning.co.uk) and I had the time and space to think about the events of 1940. Both of us spend most of our time on WW1, and the tour we're planning for Single Step will take in the Ypres Salient, but the fact that we will be based at Dunkerque means that it is an opportunity for us to tie in the events of WW2.

There are some who see the struggle against Hitler as an extension of 1914-18 - in other words, one long World War, stretching over the first half of the twentieth century. The Kaiser and the Fuhrer were very different men, of course, but the roots of conflict go back to the relative imbalance of power in Europe. Germany, as the growing force at the centre of the continent, was restless. The Kaiser wanted his "place in the sun". Hitler wanted "lebensraum". Same difference?

Preparing a school battlefield tour of the Dunkirk area took us to the beautiful Memorial (see the picture), whose panels are filled with the names of 4,500 men who have no known grave. We also called in on the excellent Dunkirk museum (http://www.dynamo-dunkerque.com/en/) - a place that packs an awful lot into a small space - as well as the beach itself. A view across the level sands towards the Bray Dunes from the Mole is immediately populated by thousands of khaki figures and abandoned trucks in the popular imagination, such is the power of the Dunkirk myth three generations later. Close your eyes and you can hear the satanic screams of the Stuka bombers. Over 338,000 men were lifted from this area in 1940 in one of the most remarkable operations of any war. The Admiralty thought they might be able to rescue about 45,000. Although, as Churchill noted, wars are not won through evacuations, the "Miracle of Dunkirk" meant that Hitler could not assume that Britain was out of the war just yet. Cue graphics and theme tune from "Dad's Army".

Planning for the summer

With a long winter behind us, battlefield guides are shaking themselves down and sniffing the air. Daffodils are out.

The email inbox is filling up with requests to go to Ypres or the Somme - the usual venues - but also to visit small, out of the way cemeteries down quiet tracks to find the grave of a relative killed a hundred years ago. These bespoke battlefield tours are always special, and I learn as much as my clients on these trips.

And away from the WW1 battlefield tours, there are some intriguing cultural trips in the offing. Dylan Thomas' Wales, Yeats' Ireland and Shakespeare's Stratford are all in the mix.

It's all in the planning...

Thoughts from last battlefield tour.

WW1 changed us as a country, probably in more ways than we might imagine. Fighting a Total War meant that the state had to modernise its approach, and it had to pass laws that allowed it to fight that war in the most effective way possible.

The logistics of moving millions of men, feeding them, training them, kitting them out - all this had to be carried out by a High Command that was used to handling a pre war force that was a fraction of the size of the British Army between 1914 and 1918. And, of course, that pre war force had been a fully professional outfit. To turn those keen recruits that joined up in their thousands when war was declared in the late summer of 1914 into soldiers was a mammoth task, and it could only be done with the support of a modern industrial state working at full capacity.

On our last bespoke battlefield tour, where this was discussed at some length, we reflected on the fact that the logistics behind the CWGC was evidence of a highly organised state structure too. This was particularly obvious at Thiepval and the Menin Gate, where the individual names of those who were lost were painstakingly recorded and carved into stone.
Lest We Forget.

Politicians on Battlefield Tours

A little something in the news this week. Mr Cameron and Monsieur Hollande meeting at Pozieres Cemetery, a place that holds great significance for me and my family. There are over 2,700 men buried in the courtyard space just off the Albert to Bapaume road, but it was a name on the surrounding wall that first brought me to the Somme nearly 20 years ago. One name amongst 14000 - those who were missing after the German Spring Offensive in 1918.

William Watkinson was with the Lancashire Fusiliers, and was killed in the German attack launched on a foggy morning in late March 1918. It was the Kaiserschlacht, the last desperate throw of the dice by the German High Command. Although initially successful, sweeping away the hapless Lancashire Fusiliers just north of St Quentin, the offensive eventually fizzled out. The tide finally turned in August 1918, and some of the casualties that lie in Pozieres Cemetery are from that final push to victory. By that time, of course, my great grandmother Rose had received the dreaded telegram, and she was beginning to face up to life with her two daughters.
I still remember the moment when I first saw William Watkinson's name, in the company of my father and his two brothers. The grandfather they never knew.
Bottom left hand corner, if you get a moment Dave.

On this day

On February 29th, 1916 - two entirely unrelated events. Hardly noted at the time, the first event was one of those unheeded warnings that lead on to ultimate disaster, the second so small scale that it would have been noticed by a handful of colleagues and perhaps a proud mum.

Firstly - on this day a hundred years ago, Hollweg, the German Chancellor, warned the Kaiser that pursuing a policy of unrestricted UBoat warfare would run the risk of dragging the US into the conflict. Thirteen months later, Woodrow Wilson stood before the US Congress to ask for their support, and Hollweg was proved right. War, as Wilson put it, had been "thrust upon the United States". For many months the greatest economic power in the world had resisted the call to get involved "over here", but the U Boat campaign was a disastrous misjudgement. Despite the defeat of Russia later in 1917, and the consequent freeing of a million troops that could bolster their numbers on the Western Front, the tide was turning against Germany. Pretty soon, in a war of attrition, the generals knew that the fresh faced "Doughboys" streaming into Europe would tip the balance.

The second event that occurred exactly a hundred years ago today - a keen soldier was promoted to the rank of Corporal. His name - Benito Mussolini. Like his future ally Adolf Hitler, so much of his thinking was forged by the conflict. I find myself wondering what on earth the comrades of both men made of their elevation to power in the 1930's, and of the fact that they were, despite these experiences, so determined to take their countries back to the battlefield.