Читать книгу As It Happened - Clement R. Attlee - Страница 14

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The First World War marked the close of an epoch. The Victorian certainty in progress passed away and the secure position of Britain in the world was gravely shaken, as was the social system, which had been steadily undermined by the propaganda of Socialists and by the writings of Shaw and Wells. Years of uncertainty lay ahead.

Looking back, one can see now that the German and Austrian ruling classes, by their ill-considered action in making war, destroyed the class society that gave them their privileged position. The outbreak of the war caused great heart-searchings in the ranks of the Labour and Socialist movement, especially in the membership of the Independent Labour party, which had always been strongly pacifist. It had always been held that war would be prevented by the international solidarity of the workers. There had been a great underestimate of the strength of national and patriotic feelings; also a failure to realize that the issues presented by a war are seldom as clear-cut as the theorists imagine.

The difference of view in the party was well illustrated in our family. My brother Tom was a convinced conscientious objector and went to prison. I thought it my duty to fight. We ended the war as near neighbours in Wandsworth—I in hospital and he in jail—but with no breach of our mutual affection.

I do not suppose that my war experiences were very different from those of most men of my generation, but four years in an entirely different milieu had their effect on my outlook.

I was told when I first tried to join the Army that I was too old at thirty-one. I tried to enlist but could not do so, as I still held a volunteer commission in the Cadets. However, I joined the Inns of Court Regiment and for a fortnight or so drilled recruits in the square of Lincoln’s Inn. At the same time a relative of one of my pupils, who was commanding a battalion of Kitchener’s Army, had applied for me, and one Sunday morning, on returning from doing a guard at Lincoln’s Inn, I found a letter telling me to report as a lieutenant to the 6th South Lancashire Regiment at Tidworth. There I found plenty to do, having had more experience than most of the subalterns, and I soon found myself in temporary command of a company of seven officers and two hundred and fifty men. Most of them were still in “civvies,” and I remember going home one weekend and collecting spare trousers from neighbours in Putney in order to make good deficiencies. Our lads were mostly from Wigan, Warrington, and Liverpool and were excellent material. We had six regular officers in the battalion and a limited number of regular or reserve N.C.O.s.

The task of creating a new unit was one of very great interest. I enjoyed our period of training at Tidworth, Winchester, and Chobham, and I found most of my fellow officers very congenial.

“A” Company. South Lancashire Regiment, 1914. (The author is the second from the right, front row.)

We had a fine adjutant, Captain Marsh of the Indian Army, but early in 1915 he was sent to France to serve with an Indian unit that had a shortage of experienced officers. I was appointed in his place. Towards the end of our training we were on operations most days and did the office work in the evening.

We expected to be sent to France, but in the late spring we got orders to equip with tropical kit. I realized that our destination was either Gallipoli or Mesopotamia. At the end of May, Marsh returned to us, and I took over command of B Company; I was the only amateur company commander. In June 1915 we sailed from Avonmouth for the East and had an uneventful voyage through the Mediterranean to Alexandria. Thence we had a more interesting time, passing up through the Greek islands with their little white villages in the hills. Moudros harbour, crammed with shipping, was a wonderful sight. After bivouacking for two nights in a vineyard we went up on destroyers by night to the Gallipoli Peninsula, landed, and proceeded to the Gully Ravine. Here I met Hunter-Weston, the Corps commander, subsequently to be a fellow member of the House of Commons. We stayed our first night in the trenches with the Lancashire Fusiliers of the 29th Division. Their battalion strength was about the same as that of my company. Our lads found many old friends and settled in very well. I had three or four weeks at Helles, experiencing the heat and smells and flies. Like many others, I got dysentery, a complaint for which our diet of bully beef, biscuit, and tea without milk was not very suitable. Eventually I fainted and was carried down to the beach and embarked for Malta. I thus missed the big attack at Anzac, where our division had six or seven thousand casualties, including many of my friends of the South Lancashires.

I had a fairly severe attack of dysentery, but was well looked after in a small hospital at Hamrun in Malta. Later I had a restful time at an officers’ convalescent centre in the Scicluna Palace, where my chief companion was a young gunner, F. N. H. Davidson, whom I was to know later in the Second World War as a major general.

In late September I sailed for Egypt. I had heard that my brother Bernard had joined up as a chaplain in the Navy. On arriving at an hotel in Alexandria some instinct urged me to ask if there was a Chaplain Attlee there. The reply was, “Just arrived half an hour ago.” He had come to join the Royal Naval Division. We had a pleasant time together before he went to Helles and I ultimately to Suvla, but we were destined to meet again in Port Said. Incidentally, I had another curious meeting later in the war. When returning from France I got into a carriage of a London Underground train and found myself next to my brother Laurence who was also returning to England from overseas.

After a few days in Alexandria I went to Moudros, where Lord Kitchener, who had come out to consider the question of evacuation, reviewed the details of our division. There were tiresome delays in the base camp as the weather was stormy. Eventually I got off in a small Clyde River steamer. We had a very rough time for forty-eight hours; the wind blew strongly and the boat rolled violently. However, I was O.C. Troops, and by dint of devotion to duty and bridge I was not sick, a circumstance that gave me great confidence in later voyages. I rejoined my battalion, which was at Suvla holding part of the front line in front of Chocolate Hill. It was a great relief to be back again, although so many of the old lot had gone. We held the same trenches until the evacuation, never leaving the line. The most notable incident was the blizzard; heavy rain turned our trenches into moats, and frost and snow followed. Numbers of men had to be evacuated with frozen feet, and a good many died.

At the Suvla evacuation I was in command of the rearguard holding a perimeter round the evacuation beach. The various parties passed through peacefully. I left with the last party just before General Maude.

The Gallipoli campaign will always remain a very vivid memory. I have always held that the strategic conception was sound. The trouble was that it was never adequately supported. Often I have thought how near we came to victory, and I have tried to work out what the consequences would have been in that event. Unfortunately the military authorities were Western-Front-minded. Reinforcements were always sent too late. For an enterprise such as this the right leaders were not chosen. Elderly and hidebound generals were not the men to push through an adventure of this kind. Had we had at Suvla generals like Maude, who came out later, we should, I think, have pushed through to victory. Even as it was we came near to success. But for General Baldwin’s column losing its way, it would have joined the Gurkhas and the South Lancashires on Sari Bair. But for Mustafa Kemal Pasha being in command of a Turkish division at the crucial point, we might have held that height. It was a tragic failure. I always feel a sympathy with all old Gallipolitans; as James Thomson the poet says, I “feel the stir of fellowship in all disastrous fight.”

I recall the heat and the flies and later the frost and the snow. I remember many talks with men on the night watches. One night in the front line I had a lively discussion with two of my sergeants—a railwayman and a carman—on craft and industrial trade unionism, while Johnny Turk kept up a brisk fire. I remember the discussions we used to have at battalion headquarters. Colonel Charlton, commanding the battalion, and Captain Withers—two of the best—would say, “Let’s have a good ‘strafe’ tonight—have Attlee to dinner,” and we would discuss socialism or some similar controversial topic. I recall discussing what would happen after the war. The commanding officer said that there were so many people who had served in the war that justice would be done to the ex-servicemen. I said that I feared not. Unfortunately I was right.

After a period at Moudros and some weeks at Port Said, training and refitting, we were ordered to Mesopotamia. We were under the impression that we were going to a “well-run show,” but we were to be disillusioned. I was ship’s adjutant on the voyage under a very cheery old gunner colonel. He was one of the world’s worst bridge players, but I was luckily drawn against him for the last two days. He summed me up once to my commanding officer as “A charmin’ feller, just going to play bridge with him, but a damned democratic, socialistic, tub-thumping rascal.”

At Basra we embarked on paddleboats to go up the Tigris. I had half the battalion and a collection of Indian details, without officers. Fortunately one of my N.C.O.s could speak a bit of Hindustani, as it had not occurred to anyone to provide an interpreter. After a week’s voyage we arrived at Sheikh Saad and disembarked. We had had a couple of barges, full of mules, tied onto each side of our steamer. They were rather lively on landing, and I told our somewhat bewildered transport officer that he was putting on the best circus I had seen in years. We had a pretty heavy tonnage of stores, which we had to manhandle. I was not very pleased when a staff officer made us shift them twice to other locations. I complained to a senior officer, and he said, “Was it that bloody fool with an eyeglass?” I said, “Yes, sir. Thank you very much.”

We were to go into an attack before long and practised it diligently. Our divisional commander, General Maude, was a first-rate leader and explained everything to us fully. We attacked on April 5, 1916, at El Hanna, but found, as I had anticipated, that the Turks had for the most part withdrawn. However, a shell—fired, I found out years later, by one of our own batteries—caught me with a bullet through the thigh and a piece of nose-cap in the buttocks, and I had to be carried off the field. In two subsequent attacks our division suffered very heavy losses, so perhaps I was fortunate. I went down to Basra on a river steamer crowded with wounded soldiers, and then to Bombay. Thence I went to Alexandria, and so home to England, which we reached in June. By this time I could walk about a little. I remember that as we neared England we heard of the loss of Kitchener, the War Minister, who had been drowned on his way to Russia.

After convalescing for a month or two I went to a training battalion at Prees Heath in Shropshire. It was not very lively. In December, however, Colonel Woods, who had commanded our battalion until the Anzac show, applied for me to join him at Wool, in Dorset, where he was commanding one of the new tank battalions. I had an interesting year with the Tanks, going to France twice on instructional tours. The last trip also took me to Passchendaele in Belgium, where I assisted in the preparations for the attack on Poelcapelle. I was promoted to the rank of major and became supernumerary to our battalion, with the result that I was left at Wool to start a new battalion. After some weeks a colonel took over, and, not unnaturally, wanted to fill up with senior officers of his own choice. I did not want to go to the Depot and so returned to the Infantry.

After a spell in a training camp at Barrow, where I conducted a successful class in trade-union history for a number of invalids who could not go on parade, I was eventually successful in getting sent to France to our 5th Territorial Battalion, which had just taken part in the brilliant defence of the Givenchy-Festubert sector as part of the 55th Division under General Jeudwine.

It was interesting to contrast the backgrounds of the officers of 1918 with those of 1914. In the 6th Battalion they were all from the public schools and many from Oxford or Cambridge. In the 5th there was far greater variety. I had a Lancashire miner who had been in Gallipoli with me and a lad who had been an errand boy, but they were very good material. The latter was quite a rough lad. He was sent on an officers’ course and, when asked to write a tactical appreciation, said to the instructor, “Dost think Ah’m Douggy ’aig, lad?” He was reported as being unfit to be an officer, and this infuriated General Jeudwine. He asked me for a report. I said that he was an excellent officer, a good disciplinarian, and that the men would follow him anywhere. The general was delighted and gave the school commandant “a raspberry” for suggesting that one of his officers was unworthy of his rank.

I recall one day when a soldier was brought up to me in handcuffs. He had accumulated sentences of twelve years’ imprisonment, which would await him at the end of the war. I told him that he must now set to work to get remission and that we would help him. Our lads, too, were all determined to help. As one lad of nineteen said, “I reckon that poor lad has never had a chance. He’s been dragged up.” I think myself that he was not entirely sane. However, we all set out to help him. He volunteered for every patrol. He lay out between the lines sniping and in a few weeks I got about six years of his sentence remitted. A little later I recommended the remission of the rest. Next evening I found him and his sergeant outside my dugout. The sergeant said that he refused to go back to the line. On my questioning him, he talked wildly about being fed up and so on. I was much annoyed that all our trouble should go for nothing, so I adopted a method I had found useful with disobedient boys. I took out my watch and said, “You’ve got one minute to return to duty,” and then counted slowly. At forty-five seconds he sloped arms and returned to the trench. I suppose it was irregular but I did not put him on a charge, and when I left the unit he was still doing well.

Our old club boys had, of course, joined up, and most of them speedily got promoted to N.C.O. rank. I met only one of them in the war. He had become a flying officer. In later years he used to come to the House of Commons in striped trousers and a tail coat, “lobbying” for a trade association of which he was secretary. He was a bright lad and the only club boy who had joined the Independent Labour party before the war.

I served in France for some weeks and saw the approaching end of the war, evidenced by a reluctance of the Germans to attack. We were advancing towards Lille when I fell sick and had to have a minor operation. Evacuated to England in October, I celebrated the armistice in hospital. I was suffering from some painful boils, which seemed to get no better. A Canadian brought in some champagne to cheer us up.

Having decided to try to get away for Christmas, I dressed and made out a pass in the presence of a surgeon who, knowing nothing of my case, signed it. My brother Rob was waiting with a taxi, and I got away to Salisbury to stay with my sister. A civilian doctor cured me in three days. On my return I was demobbed and received a useful little wound gratuity.