Breakdown Read online

  ALSO BY TAYLOR DOWNING

  Secret Warriors

  Night Raid

  The World at War

  Spies in the Sky

  Churchill’s War Lab

  Cold War (with Jeremy Isaacs)

  Battle Stations (with Andrew Johnston)

  Olympia

  Civil War (with Maggie Millman)

  The Troubles (as Editor)

  Copyright

  Published by Little, Brown

  ISBN: 978-1-4087-0662-6

  Copyright © 2016 Taylor Downing

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Maps drawn by John Gilkes.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Little, Brown

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  For those who suffered

  And continue to suffer

  Contents

  Also by Taylor Downing

  Copyright

  Dedication

  List of Maps

  Prologue

  1 The Pals Battalions

  2 Training a Citizen Army

  3 The Shell Shock Enigma

  4 The Big Push

  5 Epidemic

  6 ‘No More’

  7 Attrition

  8 Yard by Yard – From Pozières to the Ancre

  9 Rough Justice

  10 Laboratory of the Mind

  11 The Ghosts of War

  Epilogue

  Appendix 1: Numbers

  Appendix 2: War Trauma Before the First World War

  Appendix 3: Shell Shock in Other First World War Armies

  Appendix 4: The Somme Battlefield Today

  Acknowledgements

  Illustrations

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  List of Maps

  The battlefield of the Somme, July to November 1916

  Attack by 11th Borders, The Lonsdales, on 1 July, 1916

  Prologue

  It was not the first war he had fought in. Archibald McAllister Burgoyne left his native Lancashire in 1893 to emigrate to southern Africa, where he worked in the rapidly expanding mining industry. When clashes with the Boer population escalated into war in 1899 he signed up to do his bit by volunteering to fight as a trooper in the South Rhodesian Volunteers. After the Boer War was over he went back to mining until again he felt the call to imperial duty in August 1914, when the mother country plunged into the first full European war in one hundred years.

  Aged forty-one, Burgoyne volunteered as a private in the South African army and in December 1915, after extensive training, he sailed for the Middle East. In Egypt he joined half a million troops from across the Empire – Australians, New Zealanders and Indians. But he did not spend long there. The greatest need for men was on the Western Front and in mid-April 1916 his unit left Alexandria for Marseilles. By the end of that month he and his fellow soldiers, now organised into what was called the 1st South African Brigade, were training for trench warfare not far behind the Allied lines. On 29 April, the Commander-in-Chief of British forces in France, General Sir Douglas Haig, inspected the brigade, many of whose members, like Burgoyne, were more mature than the average troops to be found in France. Haig described the brigade as ‘a fine lot of boys’. Burgoyne confided in his diary, ‘Pretty old fashioned “boys” some of us.’1

  When Haig launched his ‘Big Push’ on an eighteen-mile front to the north of the river Somme on 1 July 1916, Burgoyne and the South African Brigade were stationed at Bray just behind the front line in the southern sector of the assault. The brigade formed a part of 9th Division under Major-General Furse. On 1 July the offensive on that part of the front was largely successful. British troops captured the village of Mametz and a complete breakthrough looked possible, although the opportunity was missed and the Germans soon sent in reinforcements to shore up their front-line defences. Over the next ten days, Burgoyne was involved in the exhausting task of bringing up supplies of ammunition, barbed wire and rations through reserve trenches that were packed with men going forward to the front and others moving back to rest from the heavy fighting. At one point a shell landed in the very next bay to Burgoyne, about ten yards away. His friend Dan received a direct hit. He was blown to pieces from the waist down and body parts were scattered around the trench. But, astonishingly as it seemed to Burgoyne, Dan’s top half appeared to be entirely untouched. His face did not even have a mark on it except for a slight scratch on his balding head.

  Over the next few days the German shelling increased in intensity. Burgoyne noted in his diary, ‘The din is ear-splitting … The whizzing and whining of the shells overhead is like the passing of express trains. The different shells have quite distinct sounds. Some whine, others almost shriek, some hiss and some sob distinctly.’ The men had names for the different types of shells that every soldier soon came to recognise. The ‘whizz bangs’ were from field artillery, ‘Jack Johnsons’ from heavy howitzers, and ‘woolly bears’ were the bursts and smoke of a big German high explosive shell. It took about four weeks for a soldier to distinguish the sound of one from another.

  By 12 July Burgoyne, like tens of thousands of other men along the Somme front, was living in an inferno of almost continuous bombardment. He wrote of the effect it had on him: ‘Being shelled in the trenches is crook [dreadful]. One is so helpless. All one can do is lie as low down as possible, and wait for it to come. You can do nothing. There would be some satisfaction if you could get a bit of your own back. But you just sit still and wait for it to stop – or the other thing. I don’t wonder at men getting “Shell Shock”. Some go mad – temporarily. We have been shelled since 11.30 this morning. A few minutes ago one struck the kitchen, and the cook, his mate and the S[ergeant] M[ajor]’s batman were hit – the former seriously. Seven men have been hit this afternoon. One chap got hit in 15 places. Pieces of shell and debris have been falling in our bay all afternoon.’

  On Saturday 15 July, the South African Brigade directly entered the battle along the Somme. By this point, the principal target was a series of woods scattered across the ridge beyond the British lines. Burgoyne’s unit deployed in Delville Wood, a bleak, tangled wreck of vegetation where the trees had been shattered but the undergrowth was still thick with shrub and thistle. That night they settled in on the edge of the wood, crawling into the mass of shell craters to get as low as possible. Part of the brigade began to advance into the southern part of the wood. But it was difficult terrain in which to fight and the German defenders put up ferocious opposition. The South Africans had to fight yard by yard to move forward.

  The artillery bombardment around Delville Wood seemed to reach a new intensity. The crashing of the shells was almost deafening. Sometimes a shell ricocheted off the trunk of a tree in an unearthly shriek, bringing down branches and leaves. By the middle of Sunday 16 July the walking wounded were coming back and passing Burgoyne and his two mates, who were taking shelter in a shell hole. A soldier from the Highland Light Infantry crawled by on all fours. Two men were hit in the stomach and their screams echoed across the wood from the nearby dressing station, unnerving those in the vicinity. Burgoyne’s own platoon sergeant had his arm smashed in an explosion.

  Then something even more alarming took place. Burgoyne described it in vivid detail a few days later: ‘The wor
st of all was a young fellow of the 2nd Regt who crawled to our hole on hands and knees. He was unhurt and was carrying his full kit, and rifle with bayonet fixed dragging behind him, by the sling. He was all in. His eyes were bulging, his mouth open and his throat working as though he were swallowing something. “Oh God! Oh God!” he moaned continuously. He stopped just on the edge of our hole, but did not appear to see us. He stared straight ahead. We asked what was the matter – was he hit? For a time he took no notice – did not appear to hear us, in fact. Then, without looking at us he cried “I want to get out; I want to get out.” We directed him to the dressing station. “I don’t want the dressing station; I want to get out.” I pointed to the wall of a house on the edge of the wood and told him to make for that. He struggled to his feet and moved off – doubled up – stopping dead and dropping to the ground at the sound of every shell. His nerves were absolutely gone. He was better out of it. He came near putting the wind up us three and we were glad when he left.’

  Burgoyne and his mate had encountered a man who was suffering badly from shell shock. The long stare, the bulging eyes, the lack of normal interaction, the constant swallowing and difficulty in speaking – all were characteristics of the condition. And the effect the man had on Burgoyne and his colleague was also typical. They could not understand what had happened to him; they did not know what to do. But more than anything his presence spooked them. They had no idea what he would do next. He was unpredictable. He might do something that would suddenly bring down a mass of shells on himself, and them. They were indeed ‘glad when he left’.

  But the hell of what the soldiers called ‘Devil’s Wood’ continued. On 18 July Burgoyne and his unit were ordered to go ‘over the top’ and occupy the wood. Under heavy machine-gun fire and yet another artillery bombardment they slowly moved through the remaining tree stumps and shattered shrubs. Men were going down everywhere. The shells shrieked low across them, just above their heads. A sergeant on Burgoyne’s left was blown into the air and landed only a few yards away, winded but still alive. Before he could collect himself another shell landed near him and buried him under a mountain of earth, leaves and branches. It took Burgoyne and his mates a little while to reach him and dig him out from under the debris. When they retrieved him ‘he was unwounded – but quite mad – temporarily I hope. He was jabbering and mumbling like a maniac.’ Yet another case of shell shock.

  Later that same day a shell landed even closer to Burgoyne. In an instant, he saw a flash, was aware of a column of smoke and earth, felt the heat of the explosion and experienced a sudden numbing pain that shot up his left arm. He was blown into the air, came down a few yards away and rolled to the bottom of a shell hole. His rifle was splintered and in pieces, the butt completely blown off. His bayonet had been fixed but was nowhere to be seen. Burgoyne was aware that his tunic had been ripped in many places, but apart from his shattered arm the only damage he could find was that he had a wound in his ear and blood was trickling down his neck. He was able to get up during a lull in the bombardment and, still carrying the remains of his now useless rifle, he made his way past piles of dead German and British soldiers to a dressing station. Just outside he was shocked to see a head floating in a water-filled crater. There was no body.

  At the dressing station he was bandaged up and given his first cup of tea in five days. He was taken off in a very shaky lorry to a Casualty Clearing Station where he was given a large tetanus injection. Burgoyne was one of the lucky ones, as with a ‘Blighty’ wound he was shipped back to Britain where he slowly recovered in hospital. It took a couple of months to recover from his wounds but he was back in training with the brigade at the end of September. The 9th Division’s official war diary simply noted for 18 July, ‘The losses by the South African Brigade holding Delville Wood were said to be heavy.’2

  During the same days that Private Burgoyne and the South African Brigade were struggling to capture Delville Wood, Captain Frederick St John Steadman was serving as a medical officer a few miles to the north in a field ambulance unit with the 60th Division. His field ambulance was an advanced dressing station consisting of two long, low wooden huts each of which in civilian conditions would be used as a ward to hold twenty-four patients. Steadman was struggling in one of these huts to cope with seventy-eight patients wounded during the first week of the battle when the artillery opened up around him. He described it in a letter to his wife: ‘North, east and south, the great guns are thundering, belching and flashing. It is like a huge thunderstorm, only it is absolutely continuous, with huge crashes in between, with vivid sheet lightning (along miles of front) which never goes out. Star shells and rockets go up every moment. We can see the German answering shells bursting continually. The bombardment is terrific. There has been nothing like it in the world before, not even in this war. The officers with us here say that they have heard nothing like it. The earth is trembling and shaking with it … We are six miles away. What it must be like in the trenches I don’t know. Hell can be nothing to it!’3

  Steadman, aged thirty-five in 1916, was an experienced and caring doctor who tried to give time to each and every one of the pitifully wounded men who were brought in to his field ambulance. He called the patients his ‘boys’ and tried to minister to their needs while keeping his medical wards as sanitary as possible. One of the major problems was the lice the wounded men brought with them from the trenches. The beds were packed closely. As Steadman wrote, they ‘were actually touching each other and in some cases lice were swarming from one man to another’. As the numbers in his ward grew with the arrival of even more wounded men, Steadman struggled to keep up. He described to his wife one of his strongest memories from that day: ‘There are some very pathetic cases. I treat each man as though he were a human being, and try to make his short stay comfortable, after all the hell he has been through. So I smile at each man, when he comes in, and try to make him feel at home.’

  Steadman described how a Highland soldier arrived, covered with mud from head to foot, and swarming with lice. ‘Such a nice fellow too, quite educated, no doubt came from a good home in Dundee. He was very tired and seemed dazed with want of sleep; his face was twitching constantly from the strain he had been through. I greeted him cheerfully and said “Well, what I can do for you?” He looked at me and said “Well, sir, if – then hesitates as though he were about to ask some tremendous favour, quite out of my power to give, or as though he expected me to be angry with the boldness of his request. So I smiled and said, “Well! What is it?” and his lips quivered and he said: “Well, sir, I have not had my clothes off for nearly six weeks; if I could just have a bath?”’ Steadman was struck by the pathos of this simple request, ‘almost to break down asking for such a simple thing! Mind you, he was suffering from shell shock, having been blown up and rendered unconscious, but uninjured otherwise. All this was forgotten, it was the bath he wanted. I laughed and said “Of course you shall, and what is more, I can give you a clean shirt”.’

  Arranging a bath, however, was no easy matter. A horse and cart had to go into the nearest village to fill a large carrier with water. This had to be heated in a series of dixies or large kettles over a stove. The whole process took about five hours but it helped the Highlander quickly recover from his mild shell shock and exhaustion. He was back in the line in a matter of days.

  As the injured kept on coming, Steadman was amazed at the number who were suffering from shell shock. He had never imagined that such cases could be so terrible. He characterised them as having ‘an exhausted look, with their faces twitching, and hands and arms shaking constantly’. In another letter to his wife he wrote: ‘We had another bad case of shell shock in. Poor man, he lost his friend near him, but the shell did not touch him – it knocked him down by the loud concussion. The man looks quite insane; it is fearful to watch him. I think he will eventually recover but it is very sad. Another boy of 17 in my ward, also suffering from shell shock, does nothing but cry and say he can’t stand the no
ise. He is quite unnerved. I shall probably send him down the line in a day or two. He is no good here and ought not to have come out, but he gave his age as 19!’

  Of another shell shock victim, Steadman wrote: ‘I go up to him in the morning, and I sit down on his bed and hold his hand and pretend to feel his pulse, and I say “Well, better this morning?” He leans forward and whispers “The cloud is very bad this morning, sir.” I ask “What cloud?” He looks very cunning and says “The cloud out there, sir. I walked to the door of the ward this morning and saw the black cloud and ran back quick. Both of them were in it.”’ This went on every morning, although, as Steadman explained to his wife, most of the time the man appeared quite sane and talked perfectly rationally. He discovered that a high explosive shell had burst between the man and two of his chums, killing them both but only knocking him down and throwing a great cloud of black smoke over them. ‘This is the cloud he thinks he sees every morning, and he thinks he sees his two friends in it. I sent him to the C[asualty] C[learing] S[tation] and home to Blighty this morning. At least I think my note which I sent with him will get him to Blighty. These shell shock cases are very, very sad to watch.’

  By late July 1916, Steadman’s small unit, which in normal times could cope with forty-eight patients, was receiving fifty wounded men a day, most of whom would be kept in the wards for at least a week. The overcrowding was dreadful but Steadman still tried to give every one of his ‘boys’ the care they needed. He noted that many of the shell shock victims suffered from appalling nightmares. Again, in a letter to his wife he described a regular pattern. ‘I go from bed to bed, having a cheerful chat and a joke with each one … before passing on to the next bed I look each man straight in the face and say “Anything else?” Sometimes a man hesitates as he knows the other men may overhear what he says to me, so I just bend over close, and he often whispers “The dreams, sir, I dare not go to sleep because I dream so of – (and I know he means of his chum’s death). I have about 12 men in the ward suffering like this; all have had their friends killed by their sides. These men can’t sleep; if they get to sleep they wake up with a cry, and shriek out.’ Even an experienced doctor like Steadman was taken aback, writing ‘It is very sad to see strong brave men, brought down like this.’