Percy wrote a few short and powerful diary entries about experiences in the trenches of France. It is now 100 years since the end of WW1 and so it is most appropriate to share this first hand account. It is moving and confronting.
Leaves from a Subaltern’s Diary July 7, 1916
“We are in support. My initiation is going to be a gradual one. Last night I had my first working party, and came under fire for the first time. ”Under fire”–what a consummation in those two small words! How I looked forward to it, how I dreaded it, how I questioned myself on the absolute test! And it was a marvellous experience, the crack of those bullets, the hiss of those shells. I was in a peculiar situation; some of the men in my platoon have been out here since February 1915; my Sergeant is a hard-bitten old-timer who has been through everything since the gas attack at Ypres. (Curiously enough, we are back in the “salient”, where the Battalion first won its immortality.)
“They know I am green; I could feel their eyes on me even in the darkness. Thank God for it! It bucked me up, made it impossible for me to fall down. I did have a sickly feeling in the pit of my stomach when it began, and then, suddenly, I didn’t care, and a great joy came over me. We were clearing out and draining a trench that had been blown in during the fighting of early June, and out of sheer bravado I got up and walked along the parapet to inspect the work. It was my chance to make an impression, to show those veterans that, green as I was, fear would not prevent me from learning. There was a German machine gun traversing at intervals along the top, the bullets were sputtering into some dilapidated tree trunks just behind the trench. I was disobeying orders, I was a fool if you like, but it was worth it. I knew that when, as I climbed down, I heard one of the wise ones mutter to another, – “I guess the kid will do.”
“It was a mild affair last night; if I have the luck to live there are hundreds of infinitely worse ones ahead. But somehow I begin to believe that I shall be able to do the work Canada sent me out here to do. I don’t think I have ever felt quite so content with life. At last, after all these months of sham warfare, of expensive training, I’m here. It is like what the dear old Faculty always made out graduation from College to be, leaving behind the little mock universe to grapple with realities. I have never been so proud; for I am at last one unit, however negligible, in the Great Defence.
July 13, 1916
“I’m writing this in a little tin-roofed shelter about seventy-five yards behind the front line. It’s 2 a.m. and I’ve just finished my first independent tour of duty. Hitherto I’ve only been allowed to dog the heels of a more experienced officer, but tonight they sent me out alone. So for three hours I’ve been responsible for the defence of three hundred yards of trench. I’ve had a taste of the ultimate, done a share of the world’s work. It was good to get up beside a sentry, to strain my eyes out over No Mans Land when one of those fizzing Hun flares changed its murkiness to an almost daylight brilliance, to whisper inwardly a challenge to those clay ditches beyond the green.
“Yesterday afternoon a message came in from HQ that our artillery was going to put a wire-cutting exhibition on at 5 p.m. The Company Commander immediately began to make arrangements for thinning out the front line, and I wondered.
“He explained that this was to avoid the retaliation that the Boche was certain to develop. When our guns opened up I was in here. They tell me it was only a small barrage, but the noise seemed terrific. I grabbed my steel hat and started out to see the fun. Just as I reach the door there was a loud explosion and a rush of air that sent me spinning back into the shelter. That was the first of the retaliation. I made another rush for it. A few yards from the door the trench floor was covered with loose earth, and over it were scattered fragments of flesh. I went on, shuddering, and found the Company Commander standing at the corner of the communication and support trenches. I asked him if there was anything I could do, and he ordered me up to the front lines.
“Up there an officer and a senior N.C.O. were already on duty, one on either half of our front. I joined the N.C.O. midway between two posts that were still manned. Knowing the game from A to Z, he was watching the sky over the hump trenches for minenwarfen bombs. At intervals he would shout, ”Minnie right” or ”Minnie left”. Then we, with the men of the post on the flank indicated, would dash off down the trench in the opposite direction, returning, after the explosion, to the same spot. I went off to the post on the left. There was again that nasty sinking feeling in my stomach; I’m certain my face was like chalk. But I couldn’t help noticing those men. Strained, grim, white faces watching a little black object shooting up into the clouds to the East, appearing again just in front, larger, coming down! You could hear the vibrant hiss of it, like the exhaust of a slow-working steam-engine – an evil, malicious thing! A close one! – down the trench they’d go, scurrying like rabbits, to return a few seconds later laughing. Yes, laughing! There’s a grim humour to it that won’t be dimmed.
“We came off very luckily. Only two men slightly wounded and badly shaken up. The company on the right was much less fortunate; a huge piece of minenwarfen tore through its commander’s stomach. God rest his soul; they say he was a brave officer and a fine gentleman.
“On my way back here I found that the fragments of flesh were not what I thought. That shell landed in a ration dump near the trench and blew up a lot of bully beef tins.
“I can’t help thinking tonight that, whatever may lie ahead, this day has made my life worth more than sixty years of peace could have made it.
August 6, 1916
“We’re on the way to the Somme, out of the routine of trench warfare and off to the great battle. But before we jump off for our own particular smash at the Hun, we’ve got a lot of training to do. So they’ve halted us here, probably for a couple of weeks. Well, I’m all atingle when I think of what we’re going to see, but the billet is good, the weather ideal, and it shouldn’t be a long fortnight.
“These Frenchwomen are marvellous beyond description. They work all day in the fields, from early morning until dark, doing their housework at the noon hour and at the evening. And in spite of the awful grind of their existence, they manage to keep cheerful. “C’est la guerre” is their “Allah wills it”!
“One of them asked me the other day when I thought the war would be over. Good lord! What do I know about it? I shrugged my shoulders and said, ”Probably in five years.” Then I saw the pain in her eyes as she turned away, and cursed myself for a blundering fool.
“In 1915 she had three sons at the war. One of them was killed at Verdun. Just yesterday I was standing in the front doorway when the postman came along. She walked quickly out past me through the garden to the gate over which the facteur was leaning with a letter in his hand. I saw her take it, glance over the envelope, tear it open. Then suddenly her face went white; she came falteringly along the path with bowed head, and did not see me as she passed. I looked in a moment later. She was kneeling on the floor under a little crucifix, hands clenched over her head. It was the eldest “mort pour la patrie”. This morning, before I got up, she was at work again in the fields.
“What can one liken them to, these women of France? Their sons are called the sword of France; these are her wounded, uncomplaining, immortal Soul.
October 15
“Over two months since I’ve opened this diary. We’ve been through our Gethsemane and Golgotha. Scarcely a familiar face in the whole battalion! Why I should have come through the whole shambles with a slight wound that didn’t even take me off duty and is already completely healed is a riddle I shall never be able to solve. I came out with a company which, after being padded with the draft of reinforcements that awaited us, numbers 40 rifles. There’s one officer under me; he got a bit of shrapnel through the arm but never left the trench. God! Shall I ever forget the dead? Canadians, Australians, Imperials, Germans piled together, tangled; out in the sun and rain for weeks, – stinking! Sometimes they sat up in the battered trenches, caked into position with hardened mud. You had to tramp on them when you passed; hobnailed boots tore the clothes from their backs, greening flesh showed through the rents. And their faces! Glaring with bared teeth some of them, snarling, others smiling even in their long death. Give me the glaring ones!
“There is one incident seared deeper than any other into my brain. Headquarters were established in a big German dugout under a recently captured village. I had been called in to take over the duties of the Scout officer who had gone out with trench fever. There were the Colonel, the Second-in-Command, the Adjutant and myself in the space of twelve feet by six, the rest of the place being occupied by the battalion and company runners, signallers and batmen, about thirty-five men in all. We were getting something to eat one evening, when an officer ploughed his way through the crowded passage and asked where he would find his Headquarters. He belonged to the battalion on our right and had been summoned up from the transport lines. The place he was looking for was a wireless station which I had come upon that day. There was another large dug out there in which his Colonel and staff had set up Headquarters. I took him to the entrance and pointed out the path. He had a sergeant with him and they started off together. It was still light enough to see one’s way and the distance was only a couple of hundred yards.
“In 10 minutes the officer returned, minus his helmet and badly shaken up. A shell had landed close, killing the Sergeant and he had lost his way. I got up to guide him over myself, but by this time the shelling had become general and heavy, and the Colonel ordered us to wait a few minutes. After a little while I started out, leaving the C.O. and the two other officers filling their pipes from my tobacco pouch. We had just reached the top step when a heavy shell hit the dugout. My steel hat was knocked off and I was stunned for a second. I heard a shriek below, and turned to go back. As I turned, a rush of flame spurted up the staircase, singeing my hair and clothing, and revealing in a flash the most horrible site I have ever witnessed. Down below me was a writhing mass of human bodies jammed in the passage, fighting for exit! I turned again, jumped into the open and rushed off in search of a party to dig up the ruins.
“We took out of that place thirty casualties, nine dead, twenty-one wounded and burnt. The dead included the Colonel, Second-in-Command and Adjutant. Of the others, several were absolutely insane. They lay on the ground next day grovelling, groaning and screeching.
“There were comic incidents also in our experience of the Somme. We got badly hammered during our first tour. That was at Mouquet (?) Farm. For four days we were under almost incessant artillery fire of every calibre from the whizzbangs to the 8-inch. The worst of them all were the whizzbangs and five-nines. The trenches were mere shallow, battered ditches no fire steps, no revetment, no draining. There had been a bit of a skirmish in front when we came in, and during a brief lull in the cannonade a party of our stretcher-bearers went out, in plain daylight, to bring in some wounded men. As far as sniping was concerned, the Hun left them pretty well alone, but they had just removed a man’s kilt, dressed a thigh wound and were carrying him towards our line, when a 4.1 landed close to the stretcher. Quick as lightning the wounded man jumped to the ground and ran up the slope with his shirt-tails flying, beating the stretcher-bearers in by a good fifty yards. In spite of the hell we had been enduring for twenty-four hours, a great laugh ran along our trench at the sight of the almost naked Scotchman, supposedly unable to walk, sprinting, in true ten-second form, for shelter, followed more slowly by a disgruntled and disgusted stretcher party.
“I recall another episode that had to do with our Medical Details. They had discovered a wounded German in No Man’s Land, and were carrying him home when they noticed one of our own men in a shell-hole. Dropping the stretcher, they went over and proceeded to administer first aid. No sooner had they got their backs turned, bending over the wounded “Jock”, when the Hun rose languidly to his feet, yawned, stretched himself, all the time keeping his eye on his busy benefactors, then prepared to settle down more comfortably. He was just a second too late. One of the bearers turned from his work and caught him in the act of bending down. Thenceforward the Boche carried one end of the stretcher.”
Percy Corbett
Corbett Family - view from Australia 