World War I Read online

  World War I

  Scottish Tales of Adventure

  Allan Burnett is one of Scotland’s best-selling authors for young readers. He was born and brought up in the Western Isles and educated at the University of Edinburgh, while working after dark as a ghost tour guide. Allan has written many other books, including Mary, Queen of Scots and All That and Invented in Scotland – Scottish Ingenuity and Inventions through the Ages. He is also the author of World War II: Scottish Tales of Adventure.

  This eBook edition published in 2014 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  In memory of

  Andrew Sinclair, John Sinclair and Frederick John Burnett – Royal Scots

  First published in 2014 by

  Birlinn Limited

  Copyright © Allan Burnett, 2014

  Illustrations copyright © Chris Brown, 2014

  The moral right of Allan Burnett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN: 978 1 84158 932 9

  eBook ISBN: 978 0 85790 063 0

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Teacher Threw a Bomb

  Fire in the Sea

  Hell’s Orchestra

  A Hasty Retreat

  Flight of the Black Cat

  Author’s Note – Maps and Activities

  Acknowledgements and Further Reading

  Introduction

  Merry it was to laugh there –

  Where death becomes absurd and life absurder.

  For power was on us as we slashed bones bare

  Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder.

  Wilfred Owen

  ‘Lads, you’re wanted! Over there,’

  Shiver in the morning dew,

  More poor devils like yourselves

  Waiting to be killed by you.

  Ewart Alan Mackintosh

  In this book of stories from the First World War, soldiers dodge snipers’ bullets and hurl grenades at the unseen enemy while experimental breathing apparatus shields them from deadly gas.

  Men piloting an amazing new invention called the aeroplane zoom through the clouds with guns blazing at their opponents.

  Pioneering women doctors and their staff save soldiers’ lives while they are bombarded with cannon-fire and chased through foreign lands.

  They are stories of adventure and excitement, of courage and optimism. They are tales of triumph in adversity.

  But the First World War was also about death and destruction on a gigantic scale, of intolerable misery and cruelty, often with no way out and no happy endings.

  For me, these two sides to the war – the exhilarating and the miserable – are equally important. We need both to make sense of it, to comprehend why people went to fight in the first place, and to understand why there was so much regret after it was all over.

  That is why the stories in this book also show aspects of the war’s dark side. They demonstrate, too, how a soldier’s fortunes often depended on luck.

  Some people believe that luck is just down to chance, like rolling a dice. But others believe it is down to destiny or fate.

  Take the moment that led to the outbreak of the First World War. It took place on a street corner in a city called Sarajevo, the capital of what was then Bosnia.

  Back in the summer of 1914 a teenager called Gavrilo Princip stood there and pulled out a pistol. He took aim and shot dead a man called Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, who were being driven past in their open-topped motor car.

  The Archduke had been a very important person, and his friends swore revenge on Princip and his friends. One thing led to another, and eventually whole empires took sides over the issue, like gangs fighting in a playground – just on a far, far bigger scale.

  On Princip’s side were the Allies – the Russian, French and British empires, of which Scotland was part. And on the other side were the empires of Austro-Hungary, Turkey and Germany.

  The result was the First World War.

  When I was twelve years old, I stood in the exact spot where Gavrilo Princip had fired his gun more than three-quarters of a century earlier. I felt as though the assassin was still there, standing right next to me, and taking aim at his victims.

  What would have happened, I wondered, if by chance the bullets had not hit their target? In fact, the Archduke was supposed to have been travelling by a different route for his own safety, but his driver took a wrong turn. If only the driver had not made that fateful error and given Princip his chance. The chain of events that followed might have been avoided.

  Yet, perhaps the world was simply destined to go to war. The big empires were looking for an excuse to fight, and now they had it.

  My experience in Sarajevo led me to think about other important questions too. Like, what did the First World War have to do with me? In time, I found some interesting answers.

  I visited another city called Ypres in Belgium. You will read about what happened there in this book.

  Some of the biggest and bloodiest battles of the First World War were fought around Ypres. The place was flattened and had to be rebuilt. A huge number of Scottish soldiers died there. In fact some historians conservatively estimate that over 100,000 Scots lost their lives in the First World War. Others argue that Scotland lost more men per head of population than any other country except Turkey and Serbia.

  What’s more, I learned that at least two of my own great-grandfathers – and a great-great grandfather – had all fought in that war in a regiment called the Royal Scots.

  One of them was sent to fight in a place called Gallipoli, in Turkey. One day, the battle trench he was in was hit by a bomb and it collapsed on top of him. Eventually his wiggling fingers could be seen protruding from the rubble and he was pulled out alive. Many of his friends were not so lucky.

  These discoveries brought the war much closer to home.

  Eventually I realised that the First World War had everything to do with my life, and with Scotland, the country I grew up in.

  Every street, farm and island has its share of amazing and sorrowful First World War stories to tell. Chiselled into stone memorials in cities, towns and villages across the country are the names of the men who died.

  The world they left behind was changed for ever.

  The war brought new technology and new ways of doing things, as well as great anger about the loss of life. The people of Scotland were deeply affected.

  While researching this book I discovered that the place I went for my daily walk was affected in its own special way, and seems to be haunted by some of the war’s most famous figures. It is a hill with two summits that overlooks Edinburgh, the nation’s capital, from the south-west. The hill, known as Craiglockhart, is adorned by woods, a golf course and some grand Victorian buildings.

  Craiglockhart Hill gives a fine view of Edinburgh, where, during the First World War, huge cigar-shaped German airships hung in the sky next to the castle and dropped their bombs.

  Edinburgh was the home town of Field Marshall Douglas Haig, commander of the British forces on the war’s Western Front. Many historians believe the Allied victory that ended the First World War in 1918 was largely thanks to Haig’s determined leadership, his inspirational battle tacti
cs and his ability to rally the troops.

  At least, that is one side of the story.

  The other way of looking at it is that Haig, and other war leaders, made errors that doomed hundreds of thousands of men to a miserable death.

  That was the opinion of one wounded English officer who looked out over Edinburgh from Craiglockhart Hill in the autumn of 1917. His name was Wilfred Owen. He was a patient at Craiglockhart War Hospital, a building that still stands on the hill today.

  Owen was treated for an illness called ‘shell shock’, which was caused by the stress of intense combat in the trenches. During his treatment at the hospital Owen played golf, taught at a local school, and became friends with another patient called Siegfried Sassoon.

  Sassoon wrote poetry to express his feelings about the war. He encouraged Owen to do the same. Eventually Owen was returned to duty, but he was killed in battle in November 1918, just a few days before the war ended.

  Another powerful poet who was killed in action during the war was Ewart Alan Mackintosh. He was a Gaelic-speaker and bagpipe player whose family came from the Highlands. His Scottish regiment, the Seaforth Highlanders, was led proudly into battle by pipes and drums only for its young recruits to be smashed and broken in their hundreds by bombs and bullets.

  The words of Mackintosh and Owen – some of which appear at the beginning of this Introduction – continue to live and grow long after the poets’ lives were cut short. Their poetry emphasises the barbarity and hopelessness of the First World War. But even so, it is beautiful.

  By showing us the worst of what human beings are capable of, it makes us try harder to bring out the best.

  The Teacher Threw a Bomb

  At around 9.30pm torchlights appeared at the far end of the street, accompanied by music and marching boots. ‘The soldiers are coming!’ shouted a boy perched high up on a glowing street lamp.

  The crowd’s pent-up excitement exploded. They clapped, cheered, roared and whistled. Flags and handkerchiefs waved from tenement windows above. The grand farewell had begun.

  First came the band. Bagpipes blared. Kilts flared in the breeze. Tubas and trombones blasted. Bass drums boomed and snares rat-a-tat-tatted.

  Then followed the rest of the men, in rows four abreast, some singing songs of war as their trrrump-trrrump-trrrump bootsteps echoed off the grey granite walls. The bonnets on their heads swam along in formation like a shoal of exotic fish from the great North Sea.

  Now and then, a young woman broke through the crowd barrier and rushed forward. She would throw her arms around a soldier’s neck and kiss him, only to be hurled away by a hard-hearted sergeant. The memory of the bristle of her sweetheart’s moustache on her cheek and whisky breath from his last drink at his home barracks was her prize.

  George Ramage was not expecting female attention, but he got it anyway. Marching on the edge of the procession, he found himself being handed presents from unknown women. He was already carrying a heavy backpack, a rifle and 120 rounds of ammunition – but since the presents were mostly cigarettes they were a welcome additional burden. Fags, he had heard, could be bartered for other goodies once they reached the front line.

  Ramage was thirty-three years old. Before joining the army, he had been a teacher down in Edinburgh. Some of the lads marching with him were almost young enough to be his pupils.

  The soldiers completed their march from King Street Barracks to the station next to Union Square. The waiting locomotive impatiently belched out smoke and steam as men piled into the carriages. Ramage hauled himself aboard. The guard blew his whistle and the doors began to slam.

  By 10pm the train was crawling out of Aberdeen and soon the wheels were clickety-clacking over the rail joints, as darkened fields sped past. Ramage saw himself and the others reflected in the carriage’s ink-black windows. There were eighty-five men in his draft – off to join the 1st Battalion, Gordon Highlanders, as part of the British Expeditionary Force in France and Belgium. Some were excited first-time recruits, but others were wounded and unsmiling veterans returning to the firing line.

  The veterans had been promised that the war – declared on 4 August 1914 – would be over by Christmas. Well, Christmas had been and gone and the German Empire, which had advanced across Europe, remained undefeated.

  Ramage was one of those who had enlisted early in the new year, on 19 January 1915. He was ordered to Aberdeen, where his battalion was based, for training in preparation for deployment. It was now 13 April and his wartime adventure was about to begin.

  By noon the next day the train had crossed the Scottish border and was well into England. They arrived at Southampton docks at a quarter to four. The steamer was waiting. Up the gangway went Ramage and company, joining other drafts for the infantry, cavalry and engineers.

  Ramage found a space on deck to sleep and the next morning woke to witness the vessel entering the mouth of the River Seine, having safely crossed the English Channel to France. Dozens of other steamers were sailing about alongside torpedo boats and minesweeping trawlers.

  On the bank of the river stood the port city of Le Havre – its name French for ‘The Harbour’. Near the water’s edge was a hoarding that read ‘God Bless You All’. A French soldier dressed in a blue coat and baggy red trousers waved a salute.

  Further on, more well-wishers flocked to the banks. Behind them lay fields, beyond which were white cliffs with pretty chateaux perched on top. School bells rang out, rifles fired in the air and dogs barked in greeting. ‘Heep Heep Hooray!’ shouted a group of women, waving handkerchiefs and flags, their feet soaked by the wash as the troopship sped past. Ramage couldn’t help waving back.

  At lunchtime the vessel reached its destination, the city of Rouen. As the soldiers marched uphill to spend the night in a British camp, Ramage noticed that many of the locals here seemed gloomier, although some of the women perked up when they noticed the Scotsmen’s kilts and bare legs.

  The final stage of Ramage’s journey to the front was by train. Tightly packed in a cushionless carriage, and with lumps in their throats, the men began to sing songs they’d learned at school. ‘Me and my true love will never meet again, on the bonnie bonnie banks of Loch Lomond …’

  To avoid becoming too homesick, they followed that with an upbeat ragtime jazz song, ‘We are the Gordon swells boys, we are the Gordon swells!’

  In the morning they made a few stops. Some were brief, just long enough for locals to pass bottles of wine through the carriage windows in exchange for tins of ‘bully beef’ – a type of tinned corned beef which was the mainstay of the soldiers’ rations.

  Other stops were longer. At Hazebrouck, a French town about ten miles from the Belgian border, Ramage washed under a water pipe used to fill the trains’ steam engines. Then, while someone made tea, he and his friends watched transfixed as two military aeroplanes – still a dazzling new invention – shimmered in the sunshine overhead.

  At last, just as the men were growing tired and argumentative from hours spent in the cramped carriage, the train made its final stop at Bailleul. They were now very close to the border with Belgium and the front line beyond. Bailleul’s sleepy old streets, rudely awakened by war, were swarming with soldiers, horses and army motor vehicles. Ramage and the others marched through the town and began a six-mile hike north, to the billets – the place where they would sleep until sent to the trenches.

  They rested en route in a ploughed field. It was here, while lying on the freshly turned soil, that Ramage heard the distant sound of man-made thunder for the first time. He jerked his head up to listen.

  BOOM … BOOM … BOOM … The guns of war. Suddenly the thought struck him that he might never see home again.

  The billets were a welcome sight, wooden huts with corrugated-iron roofs sloping down to the ground. The soldiers had crossed the border into Belgium a couple of miles back and were now in a place called La Clytte. The British field guns – huge, long-barrelled cannons – were located nearby. Every time th
ey fired, the huts shook.

  About four miles further on to the north-east was the city of Ypres – pronounced ‘Eee-prey’ – a major battle zone. The Gordon Highlanders were part of a line defending the land around Ypres. Their goal was to stop the Germans advancing west to the coast, beyond Ypres, and capturing the French port of Calais.

  At night, while searchlight beams hunted for aircraft overhead, the giant field guns fired time after time on the enemy trenches. With each strike, broad flashes lit up the sky. To Ramage, it looked as if the door of an immense iron furnace was being opened and shut. The flashes were accompanied by loud booms, like breakers hitting sea cliffs. The distant rifle and machine-gun fire echoed like rivets being hammered into a ship’s hull.

  By day, elderly local farm workers sowed seeds on the edge of the battlefield with gnarled hands, wiping sweat off their wrinkled faces as they went. Their home was a war zone, yet they tried to continue as if nothing had happened.

  Ramage was kept busy by being drilled, marched and inspected. The reality of what he had signed up for was becoming clearer as each day passed, and never more so than when he listened while an officer read out cases in which the death sentence had been passed on Tommies – the nickname for British soldiers – for disobeying orders.

  This was no idle threat. One man had refused to go to the trenches with his platoon. So he was put in front of a firing squad and shot. Another deserted his post in the trenches – he too was shot. An officer in the firing line took cover without permission and for this he was also shot.

  At last it was time for Ramage’s first stint in the battle trenches. At 7pm on Thursday, 22 April 1915, he and the rest of the men of No 16 Platoon, D Company, 1st Gordons, cleaned their huts and departed, carrying all their possessions in their backpacks and pouches. These included two days’ rations of bully beef, biscuits, bread, cheese, sugar and tea. Not forgetting their ‘smokes’ – another Tommy word for cigarettes.

  No halting. No speaking. No smoking. These were the orders as the men marched along in the gathering darkness, stray bullets whizzing past their ears. They passed ruined farmsteads and the remains of shattered trenches, and skirted round the edges of huge craters left by exploding bombshells.