A Frank farewell

11th February 1915

Frank Crawshaw 1893-1915 RIP
We will remember him

Frank was killed today.

It’s hard to specify a time, but during the day the Germans shelled the British support lines and dugouts. Eight men were hit in separate incidents at 10.30am and 3pm. Two men died. One was Frank, the other was (Acting) Corporal Francis Alfred Jones from Cheshire. The shells were high explosive says the Dorsets’ diary. At least it would have been quick for one of them. The 15th Brigade’s diary lists 7 injured and only one killed so can we assume one died later of wounds? Jones is listed on the Menin Gate. Which usually means that his body was never found.

Frank was originally buried in a cemetery in Frenchman’s Farm. This cemetery was destroyed in later fighting. May we infer that Frank may have died in a dressing station, which Frenchman’s Farm was at some point. Frank now lies in Wulverghem-Lindenhoek Military Cemetery but his grave is only a marker, as far as I can make out, with six other graves that somehow survived the later destruction.

It’s easy to try to find reasons why and how it happened. But frankly, if you’ll excuse the pun, the odds were against him. Frank was one of a dwindling number of original members of the 1st Bn Dorsets that set out from Victoria barracks on August 14th 1914. I haven’t researched the casualties in terms of ordinary soliders but Gleichen makes a note that, of the 127 officers who came out with him to France with the 15th Brigade, all that remained were:

Norfolks—Done and Bruce (both ill in hospital from strenuous overwork), Megaw (killed later), Paterson.

Dorsets—Ransome, Partridge.

Bedfords—Griffith (trustiest of C.O.’s, who had been under heavier fire than almost any one in the Brigade, yet never touched), Allason (thrice wounded), Gledstanes (killed later).

Cheshires—Frost (killed later)

I’ve come to Belgium today to pay my respects to these men as well as Frank, my great great uncle. But I also want to see and walk the landscape he fought in. I’ve been to Ypres a couple of times (in 2005 and 2010) but I didn’t know anything about Frank’s life, or the history of the Dorsetshire Regiment. I think I know a little bit more now.

As you drive inland from the channel ports the pancake-flat landscape suddenly buckles up to the south as you approach the turning for Poperinge on the A25. It was at that moment that I finally understood why the Ypres Salient was so important to the British. Beyond this point there was no cover to the north, which meant no breaks in the landscape, behind which to hide a battery of guns or reserve troops. Jump forward 25-odd years to 1940 and you see what happens when the Germans break through.

And yet the landscape also made the salient incredibly dangerous. A salient is inherently lethal in itself but Ypres was special as it has hills which, in early 1915, the Germans held. They could fire down on the enemy as well as conceal guns behind those hills. Forty nine other men were killed in and around Ypres on the 11th February 1915.  The British had no real cover from which to hide their men and so they suffered casualties like waves pick up and turn over shells on a beach. The attritional damage inflicted on the British during the early part of 1915 took a long time for them to recover from.

Wulvergem, as it’s now known, lies in a depression in gently undulating land dominated by Mont Kemmel in the North and Messines in the South. I see now that the Germans commanded every vantage point, invisible over the crest of a slope, and they were able to pour fire into easily visible targets, including the barns and farms that litter the landscape even today.

It’s pretty hard to discern between a scruffy barn an one that’s had a couple of shells through it. The trees are all pollarded here, raggedy scarecrows in the pale winter light. Frank was fighting in a landscape he’d recognise today. It’s only later, when the villages and towns were destroyed by the bigger siege guns, that the landscape shifted from tattered to torn apart.

Tomorrow I will walk across this landscape but this is the last daily post I’ll be making. Thanks for coming on this journey with me. I’m off for a cold tea.

Lest we forget.

Jonathan Elliman
Ypres 2015

He seemed to like getting shot at

 

10th February 1915

Today we finally meet up with Royal Engineer Captain Johnston again. He’s been busying himself, relentlessly working 18 hours a day improving the defences up and down the 15th Brigade’s trenches. I am guessing by the name that his home is R.E. Farm, now a small cemetery on the Wulverghem-Wytschaete Road. Gleichen cannot praise him highly enough. He remembers a moment Johnston was thrown into a fit of berserking rage.

And with it all he was as plucky as the devil—he seemed to like getting shot at. One night he got a ricochet bullet over his heart, but this only put him in a furious rage (if you can use the word about such a seeming mild person), and spent the next twenty-four hours in collecting ammunition and bombs and extra trench-mortars and firing them himself; this seemed to soothe him.

The 15th Brigade’s diary records this happening on the night of the 10th February. Events like this usually ended with German reprisals and little else gained.

Sector E was still a collection of disconnected trenches running down from Hill 75 (Spranbroekmolen). Men were also holed up in barns and farms behind the line, long since lost to enemy shells and woodworm. So men were stuck in the trenches throughout the daylight hours.

It must have been tempting to stick your head over the parapet, whether through fatigue or curiosity or sheer boredom, but it was usually fatal. Ernest Shephard writes:

One man Charlie Nickells killed by sniper at 7.a.m. thro’ showing over the trench.

Poor Charles Nicholls, a Londoner, had been with the battalion since the 23rd October 1914, having joined the 1st Bn from the Special Reserve 3rd Bn. He left a wife, Mary Ann but no other records I can find of his life up to this point. I think he died of wounds later.

Another Dorset man was killed too; Hilton George Miller, this time a regular, originally with the 2nd Bn Dorsets out in India, joining the 1st Bn on the 27th August 1914. This seems a strange date to be joining the Dorsets as they were passing through St Quentin on the retreat to the Marne at this point. Miller hailed from Shirley in Southampton. They are both buried in Dranouter graveyard. The Dorsets’ diary records 1 killed and 3 wounded amid a day-long musketry fight and occasional shelling.

These deaths are an indication of a slow increase in attritional casualties. The Germans now knew the ground they were facing intimately and looking down into the British lines gave them considerable advantage over their enemy. Regular rifle fire kept the casualties mounting for the British, let alone snipers. As the winter began to recede, the shells were also increasing their relentless search for death.

Albert square bashing

7th February 1915

In Bailleul, the Dorsets’ time in billets was still being marked in the diary by a series of dittos (well a big curly brace actually) and so there’s not a lot I can say about what they might have got up to. If there were any letters from Frank during this period of relative rest, sadly none exist today.

The 15th Brigade’s diary is a bit more descriptive. Today was a Sunday and orders were received that the brigade was to parade tomorrow for the King of Belgium, Albert I.

Back at the front, Sector E was added to the dominion of the 5th Division, taking over responsibility from 3rd Division to the north.

Poulet the other one

4th February 1915

The much-maligned 6th Cheshires, notorious from their alleged Christmas football kickabout, were paraded for the pleasure of the 15th Brigade’s Brigadier; our old friend Gleichen.

The report sounds just like him. He is “surprised” at their turnout. “Steadier, cleaner and better” than he expected. “Much improved”. Of the Dorsets there is no mention.

There’s a rather good story in the 5th Division diary about some guard chickens. Yes, you heard me right. The Germans had apparently tied chickens to their wire entanglements.  A patrol from Sector A approached the enemy line but the chickens’ squawking gave the game away and the Germans opened fire. Fowl play or what, eh?