The final horror

9:47am Tuesday 11th November 2008

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1918 was the most awful year of the Great War, but also the year that Britain proved itself the world’s dominant military force, says Peter Hart.

Here, using North-East soldiers’ memories, he takes us through that final year.

IN many ways 1918 was the most awful and tragic year of the Great War. The scale of the fighting on the Western Font exceeded anything that had gone before.

It was continental warfare on an epic scale, as huge citizen armies faced each other in the final battles that would decide the war.

It was a year when Britain and France for a time appeared close to defeat, when it seemed that all might be lost.

But it was also the year that resulted in the ultimate British victory after a series of offensives in the last hundred days of the war.

For the only time in history, the British Army could lay a realistic claim to being the dominant military force.

The men of the North-East were right in the middle of the fighting. These seemingly ‘ordinary’ men from villages and towns across Durham and Northumberland were not helpless victims being marched to slaughter by incompetent generals. They were soldiers. True, they were fed up to the back teeth and scared witless, but they fought on regardless.

“The truth is every man Jack is fed up and not a single one has an ounce of what we call patriotism left in him. All that every man desires now is to get done with it and go home.

I have lost pretty nearly all the patriotism that I had left – it’s just that thought of you all over there, you who love me and trust me to do my share in the job that is necessary for your safety and freedom. It’s just that that keeps me going and enables me to ‘stick it’.” Corporal Laurie Rowlands, 15th Durham Light Infantry.

Many of the men caught up in the German spring offensives were painfully inexperienced.

Private Albert Bagley had watched in horror as one of his pals was hit.

“Poor boy! He was groaning something awful. Looking into his face I saw he was a boy called Phillips. A corporal came up and said ‘Come on lad, do you want the Jerries to get you, come on, buck up!’ All he replied was ‘Oh mother, mother!’ till he was calling at the top of his voice. His condition got worse, until at last he fell back – all over within two minutes of receiving the fatal bullet.”

Private Albert Bagley, 1/6th Northumberland Fusiliers.

When they came under heavy fire it was sometimes almost unbearable.

“The volume of firing got so fierce that at last flesh and blood could not stand against it any longer. As if by some instinct, every man threw himself down flat, burying their faces in the soil as best they could for protection. I was lying flat and wondered how long I would be like this... and I felt a tickling sensation under my face. Raising my head as high as I dare, I saw that the tickling was caused by a beetle worming its way. How I wished then that I was a beetle!”

Private Albert Bagley, 1/6th Northumberland Fusiliers.

In the chaos of the fast-moving battles many of the Durhams and Northumberlands were surrounded and taken prisoner. To have fought on would have been suicide, not just for their officers but for the men they commanded. To young Captain Hugh Lyons, a veteran of three years of war, it a rational decision.

“I saw Germans all round the hill and looking up I saw half-a-dozen of them ten yards away, shouting and raising their rifles.

The wounded men were shouting at me to surrender, and indeed I saw nothing else for it – so I just stood up and in a minute we were prisoners.”

Captain Hugh Lyon, 6th Durham Light Infantry.

But the Germans failed to break through the British lines and when they ran out of steam they were ripe for counter-attack. On August 8 the British offensives began.

By this time the British generals under Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig had a mastery of the All Arms Battle. Here were the infantry, well armed with light machine guns. In immediate support were the heavy machine guns and mortars. Concealing them were dense smoke barrages, while alongside were tanks to crush the wire. Aircraft flew above, diving down to harass the German army every step of the way.

Underpinning everything was the Royal Artillery, killing exposed troops with shrapnel, blasting strongpoints and threatening everything with poisonous gas shells.

Accompanying the tanks on August 8 was Major Mark Dillon of Durham City.

“As the dawn began to break we could see occasional tanks through the mist in front of us. We struck the main road and walked on down it. There seemed to be very little hostile retaliation going on. Unfortunately, a field battery had not been overrun, and was cracking off any ammunition it could find.

One of these, a shrapnel shell, burst on percussion between my legs, and that is all I know of the battle.”

Major Mark Dillon, 2nd Battalion, Tank Corps.

He had been unlucky, but the Germans had no answer to the new tactics. Back they fell, pummelled ceaselessly as the British, French and American armies smashed into them time and time again. At last the Germans were forced to negotiate for peace. But even on Armistice Day itself men were still dying.

“At about ten o’clock a shell came down and killed a sergeant of ours that had been out since 1915. Killed by the shrapnel. We thought that was very unlucky – to think he’d served nearly four years and then to be killed within an hour of the Armistice.”

Private Jim Fox, 11th Durham Light Infantry.

For many men the suffering did not end there. The severely wounded had to come to terms with their broken bodies. One badly wounded veteran was Joseph Pickard, of Alnwick, who had been smashed up by a shell.

His leg wounds were serious, but his facial injuries affected him more deeply.

“The nose was cut off to about half way up the bridge. I got a piece of plastic to put across the hole – I just covered it. All the kids in the blinking neighbourhood would gather: talking, looking – gawping at me. I could have taken my crutch and hit the whole lot of them!

I was sitting one day and I thought ‘Well, it’s no good, I can stop like this for the rest of my life – I’ve got to face it sometime.’ So I went out again and when people stared I used to turn round and look back at them!”

Joseph Pickard.

It was men like this who had won the war. We should remember them with pride.

■ Peter Hart is the author of 1918: A Very British Victory (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, £20). He is giving a talk – Not Again: The German Offensive on the Aisne, 1918, at 2pm on Saturday, November 22 at the DLI Museum, Aykley Heads, Durham. He can be contacted at peterhartmilitary.com