The Dorsets, as part of 15th Brigade’s reserves, left Dranouter at 1.40pm, marched to Bailleul and went into billets. The rest of the Brigade followed them. The Holy Boys (the Norfolks) and the Bedfords, left their trenches between 7 and 8pm, arriving in Bailleul at 11.30pm for some well-earned respite from the front line.
I’m joining them.
Yesterday the Dorsets’ diary placed the battalion about Dranoutre. Today the battalion are at Dranoutre. Who knows if that means they moved a few yards or none at all. To be honest, the war diary entries are so short now, I am looking for meaning where there probably is none.
I’ve never really taken any notice before, but the war diary is signed to the right of every entry. The initials are hard to discern. I’d always assumed that they were some arcane military scribble, but I now think they are the initials of the ever-present Adjutant, Captain A.L. Ransome*. I’ve found his medal card and I believe his handwriting is on the back. I’ve posted a Photoshop image of the two and I think it’s a pretty close match. He’s the writer of our ever-duller diary. I also believe that he’s the glue holding the battalion together and had little time for niceities. Or diaries.
If we pull back a little out to the 15th Brigade, their diary entry records that the weather was improving, so more work could be carried out on the trenches. Improving weather, however, meant more activity from artillery and that’s exactly what the Bedfords experienced in the afternoon, losing an officer, Captain Basil John Orlebar to a direct hit on one of their dugouts, along with 4 other men. Orlebar was a Territorial who was a Civil Engineer in civilian life and is mentioned by name in Gleichen’s memoirs when he drew up a scheme for flooding the land around Missy when the 5th Division was clinging perilously to the north bank of the Aisne in September. The brigade withdrew from Missy before the plan could be carried out.
Out to the 5th Division and their entry reports that the night was lively with trench mortars, hand grenades and musketry keeping both sides busy, as well as shouting and cheering from the 14th Brigade, which wound the Germans up no end.
Further afield still, we turn our attention southwards and back to the River Aisne. On the 9th January the French had launched an assault on the Germans ensconced on the heights above Soissons, a key city on the banks of the Aisne. Initial success turned sour when the raging Aisne broke its bank and tore its way through the French pontoon bridges. The French were forced to retreat. The Germans counterattacked at the same time, with the whole campaign ending in disaster for the French with 12,000 men killed or captured. The Telegraph writes “there is little fear here that the Germans will succeed in taking Soissons” and summarises that it is too early to know who has won the engagement, but that the Aisne itself would decide the outcome as, in its flooded state, it ultimately prevented the Germans from taking the city. The two sides dug in defensively and Soissons was slowly pounded into a pile of rubble.
* He’s, deservedly, a Brigade Major by the end of the war.
The narrative on the blog has become much narrower since the war went to ground at the end of November. I haven’t written much about what was going on in the wider field of operations. The reason for this is threefold. Firstly I am lazy. Secondly, I am short of time. And, thirdly, I wanted this story to show the world from Frank’s perspective.
I feel that once the soldiers dug themselves into the ground they ceased to be part of a fighting brigade and became small parts in a larger war machine. They became less aware of what was happening beyond the confines of their trench as time went on. Battalions became less important than the company and ultimately the platoon became the defining relationship between fighting men in the trenches.
C.O.Lilly’s recollections describe this shift in perspective perfectly.
I never had the slightest idea of what was going on, my whole life was confined to one small portion of the line and now I realise what an extraordinarily bad training trench warfare was, and is, to teach a soldier his trade.
And in notes at the end of the typed document:
I don’t think it can be denied that trench warfare is about the worst sort of campaigning to teach a young officer his job. He never has any idea of what is going on, except what he can see with his own eyes from his trench.
The Dorsets were relieved by the Bedfords and moved back into billets in Dranoutre.
Three Dorset men were killed today, all privates: W J Mitchell, from Bermondsey, Stephen McCarthy, from Finsbury, and Frederick Thaxter from Thornton Heath, just to the south of Brixton. London supplied the Dorsets with an awful lot of men.
There’s no mention of these casualties in the diary.
The clipped “situation unchanged” in the Dorsets’ diary sounds like a British Rail announcement and described, with economy, another day of monotony in the trenches.
The Dorsets’ Captain Partridge features in the 15th Brigade’s diary entry for today. He’s been busy with an unnamed Royal Artillery officer, sending intelligence back to Brigade HQ. Major General Thomas Morland’s report for the 5th Division bears this activity out the following day, with the line “observations from front trenches show the great value of powerful periscope binoculars.” Presumably Partridge was using something like this through which to observe the enemy lines:
One Dorset man died today, according to the CWGC: His name was Francis James Harwood and he was 34. Intriguingly, he served under the surname of Westlake. He’s listed as having been killed in action in the medal rolls. There’s also evidence that he served with the Somerset Light Infantry, which makes some sense as he was born in Bridgewater, Somerset. Quite why he’d transferred to the Dorsets is a mystery. It requires more time, and I have run out of minutes in the day, so I will leave poor Francis James alone and return to him another time perhaps.
Envelope – to Mrs Webster, 29 Strathleven Rd, franked 12 Ja 15 – censored by A Griffith
dated 11-1-15Dear Aunt
Just a few lines hoping this finds you in the best of health. Well Aunt I am getting on as well as can be expected and still in the pink. We are getting on as well as can be expected and still dodging Jack Johnsons. The weather out here is terrible don’t talk about rain the country is absolutely flooded so you can guess what it is like.
I expect you have got over Xmas by now I see you had a full house, I wish I had been at home. Tom is getting plenty of leave, I wish I could get away for a few days, but I believe I am getting seven days before long, but it will be some time yet, but still lets hope it will be soon, and then we will have a good time together all of us, that’s providing all goes well out here.
Aunt have you received my two PC, well I expect you only got on, for I have [heard] that one lot of mail got burst (?burnt) and I expect your PC was in it. Please to hear that Uncle Matt is still on the knocker let’s hope he as the luck to keep it. Old Till’s Johnnie seems to be a knut tell her I have just received the Chocolate from him, and he said he had a good time at Brixton, said he nearly got (succled ?) on cold tea. Well Aunt I don’t think there is any more news at present, so will conclude hoping to hear for you soon, and also Uncle Matt.
I remain
Your affectionate Nephew
Bid xxx
Let’s deal with the censor first. We meet a new officer in charge of Frank’s section, and I’m pretty sure this is Lieutenant Allix James William Griffith. He’s joined as a reinforcement from the 3rd Battalion. His father was the Venerable Reverend Henry Wager Griffith, who was an army pastor out in the Punjab, India, where Allix was born. He’s only 19, a pupil of Charterhouse and a typical Public School Boy product of the British Empire. I talk about officers being posh but this chap takes the Bath Oliver. He’s as posh as his almost-namesake, Alexander Armstrong, and comes from the same lineage too. This website lists him as a direct descendant of that old Norman bastard, William the Conqueror.
Griffith, sadly, didn’t survive the war. He was transferred to the 2nd Battalion and sent to the Middle East, after being wounded in St Elois later in 1915. He went missing in Mesopotamia on the 25th March 1917 and is commemorated on the Basra War Memorial in Iraq. He was one of the 1200 Allied men who were casualties in the battle of Jebel Hamlin, as the British tried to push the Turkish out of Iraq. The battle, fought largely unsupported by artillery against a well dug in enemy (surprise, surprise), was disastrous for the newly reconstituted 2nd Battalion Dorsets who lost nearly 220 out of 500 men in the action.
Frank’s letter to his Aunt Caroline is filled with his usual abundance of positivity, but there is one line that expressed his resignation about the situation he finds himself in: “that’s providing all goes well out here”.
He’s very complimentary about my Great Grandfather, Carl Robert Debnam, of whom the beer of Brixton seems to have got the better of. A “knut”, according to the ever-excellent Edwardian Promenade’s glossary, is “an idle upper-class man-about-town”. (My grandfather, Bob, wasn’t a man who could hold his beer and I don’t have hollow legs when it comes to ale either – although we both enjoyed a pint when he was alive). He’s also finally got the chocolate promised back in November.
The Dorsets hunkered down in their soggy trenches while the artillery on both sides played out a deadly game of cat and mouse. The landscape, once liberally dotted with farms and villages in November, was slowly being reduced to piles of rubble and heaps of mud as the two sides pounded any landmark that might offer advantage to the other side.