Dear all
A hundred years ago this week… notable
Western Front battles began: Messines, western Belgium (October 12th,
BEF/German Army), Armentieres, northern France (13th, French Army-BEF/German
Army), Yser, western Belgium (16th, Belgian-French Armies/German Army).
Yes,
that’s Armentieres as in the Mademoiselle From Armentieres, an early classic of
Word War 1 Poor Bloody Infantry songcraft — ideal for marching because jaunty
and infinite, given plenty of verses were “written” and then you added you’re
own, ribald, surreal, satirical, tragi-comical according to taste. Et voilà, a quick web search reveals
50-60 variations — no repeats, come to that! — including these choice items
(many ruder than this, of course): “She's the hardest working girl in town/But
she makes her living upside down!/… I fell in love with her at sight/Wacked
myself for half the night/… She had four chins, her knees would knock/And her face
would stop a cuckoo clock/… She could guzzle a barrel of sour wine/And eat a
hog without peeling the rind/… The officers get the pie and cake/And all we get
is the bellyache/… The Colonel got the Croix de Guerre/The son-of-a-gun was
never there!/… You might forget the groans and yells/But you'll never forget
the mademoiselles.” Well, inkypinky parlee-voo, eh?
Meanwhile,
in Edmonton, north London, my father Sam, older brother Ted, and their pals and
fellow novice Royal Fusiliers Len and Harold made their debuts as
squarebashers, marchers and — since they’d been brought up in the church and
the Scouts by quite proper parents — lightly blushful listeners, hesitant
singers, of coarse military rhyme.
FOOTSOLDIERSAM SPEAKS
The Battalion — 2/1st
City Of London — got itself organised in the grounds of the Foundling Hospital,
as was — the walled “parade ground” area is still there in Bloomsbury, south of
King’s Cross Station, preserved as a playground.
Roughly a thousand men assembled, Sam
writes. An array of Sergeant Majors shuffled them into eight Companies of 100
each — Len in C, Ted and Harold G, Sam H, his first separation from them — the
remainder “a reserve who would fill vacancies in the ranks as they occurred…”
An officer explained that everything they did, no matter how dull and
repetitive, had a practical purpose:
“You must all bear in mind that
the movement and formations taught in military drill form the basis of control
of troop movements on the battlefield… At a later stage, hand signals from the
men in charge will take the place of spoken words — which, in certain
circumstances, cannot be heard.”
“Vacancies”, “certain
circumstances”; clearly, euphemism played its part from the outset…
Observing his new comrades, Sam — and time
now for the weekly alert to new readers that, in the first part of the book, my
father wrote in the third person and called himself “Tommy Norcliffe” —
Sam/Tommy, then, reckoned that, despite lying about his age to sign up at 16,
he might have an advantage in readiness over some older men because of his Boy
Scout training in skills such as rifle shooting and signaling.
When Company Sergeant Major West ordered
them to fall in, the lad weighed up the men on either side of him (all of them
still in their ordinary clothes, no uniforms available for a while yet):
“On Tommy’s left stood a man of
36, probably, wearing a cap at an unusual angle — the soft cloth pulled back
and the hard peak pulled forward as far as they could possibly go. Tommy
wondered if the two sections would part under the strain. Under the peak, dark
inquisitive eyes moved constantly, taking in everything with keen interest; a
cheerful, though pale, face with a sharp, red nose and black moustache; a
soiled black jacket, dark grey trousers shiny with what appeared to be grease,
and heavy, black boots completed Tommy’s sidelong view of Joe Parker.
Had
Joe cut his eyes to the right, he would have seen that Tommy too wore a black
jacket with tight grey trousers but, instead of a cap, he wore the City office
boy’s hard, flat bowler. A boy in men’s clothing?
A
rather elderly fellow of scholarly appearance called Ewart Walker stood to
Tommy’s right. He looked stern, or somewhat benign, or quizzical, all dependent
on what the brainy bloke was observing at any given moment. He wore grey flannel
trousers, a Norfolk jacket, brown, brogue shoes and, unusually at that period,
no hat to cover his cropped, grey hair.”
They spent the morning on drill, just learning to
start out on the left, then turn… then “Form fours!” really put the cat among
the pigeons with regard to stumbling about and banging into one another.
When they
got a break, Sam/Tommy chatted with “old” Joe Parker, as he thought of him. He
worked as a casual porter at Billingsgate fish market, but…
“… he’d
spent much of his life at sea, mainly on coastal vessels. He proceeded to
describe nights ashore in small seaports, winding up with his choicest
experience — his face glowed, his eyes sparkled, as he told how he put up at a
lodging house once, ate a lovely meal, and shared his beer with the buxom
landlady, her husband presently away at sea it turned out. Then he turned in.
The bed had lovely, clean, white sheets and pillows, but to all this luxury the
landlady later added the pleasure of her curvaceous body. Joe relived the
delights of having her meaty legs wrapped round him until the order to fall in
saved Tommy from making the expected noises of approval.”
That afternoon, the
Battalion undertook its first formal march through the city:
“[Lieutenant]
Swickenham told the men about the march to follow. He asked them, in spite of
their varied civilian garb, to bear themselves like soldiers. The eyes of many
London citizens would regard them and a good impression must be aimed at.
Thus
began one of many foot-slogging ventures in the course of their elementary
training. This one took them along Tottenham Court Road, New Oxford Street, and
Oxford Street, to Marble Arch and into Hyde Park, where they rested and did
some drill before returning via a different route. They marched at attention
and in complete silence for the most part, with a deal of conversation breaking
out when the CSMs ordered ‘March at ease!’ — but all of it subdued by the
unaccustomed public performance they felt they were staging.
However,
the column was long, not much short of a thousand men, and probably at quite an
early stage the officers began to realise that an error of judgment had
occurred.
People
crossing the road could not possibly wait while this long procession passed so
they would try to hurry through any gap they espied. This caused pauses and
broke the marching rhythm. Elderly folk would be helped by the men, pretty
girls too — as the occasional shriek or squeal would attest. Policemen
controlling busy crossings could not help causing gaps in the long column. So
did congested traffic, especially in
Oxford Street, where a bus or a lorry frequently became interposed between
Companies, even though drivers of all sorts of vehicles, motor or horse-drawn,
tried to let the Battalion through.
Cart
and dray drivers, perched in high seats, some of them no doubt old soldiers,
shouted words of sarcastic encouragement to the self-conscious recruits: ‘Keep
them ‘eads up!’ or ‘Swing them arms there!’, along with one or two unfavourable
comparisons to another Army apparently commanded by a certain Fred Karno. But
it was just cheerful banter and, provided you didn’t take yourself too
seriously, no offence was taken.
All
the same, the officers ensured that future route marches avoided Central London
and were undertaken Company by Company rather than the whole Battalion
together.
But
familiarity with the new routine of living soon encouraged those men who had
subdued noisy and garrulous natures on that first march to commence raising
their voices in joke and jibe. Some of the Cockneys’ humour was amusing, some
of it downright rude and embarrassing. When the Battalion marched at ease,
singing would break out — and not discouraged by the CSMs because it helped to
maintain a marching rhythm and to overcome boredom.
They
started with innocent numbers like Clementine, Boys Of The Old Brigade, John
Brown’s Body and so forth, but a sort of vocal degeneration gradually set in.
John Brown’s Body became John Brown’s Cow — it went peepee against the wall. The
music hall song which went ‘Our lodger is a nice young man, such a nice young
man is he’ lent itself to suggestions about his lewd practices. The Company
officer had to lead his men and Tommy, anonymously tucked away, felt sorry for
the young man who marched alone in front of this sometimes blasphemous company.”
And even as they
marched and sang in the streets of London, on the front line the collective
musical genius of the BEF initiated its saucy extempore regarding the good lady
from Armentieres…
All the best — FSS
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