Episode 2 Welsh Memories of World War I

The generation of Welshmen who fought in the First World War

is now long gone.

The old soldiers have all passed away.

What survives is their first-hand testimony,

recorded in interviews filmed over the last decades

of the 20th century.

We thought that the enemy was going to come over to England

and burst in and slaughter your mother, your children, the lot.

The brutality of war touched lives,

not just on the battlefield but at home, too.

Sometimes I'd feel, "I'm doing something that's going to

"kill someone or maim someone,"

but you had to forget that sort of thing, you know.

This is the story of the Great War,

in the words of the Welsh men and women who lived through it.

For the first time, I realised that probably I may go...die

and I'd never experienced anything like it before and I was terrified.

By 1916 - the midpoint of the war -

the naive optimism of its early years was a distant memory.

That year's Somme Offensive had seen hundreds of Welsh soldiers killed

in battles like that at Mametz Wood.

On the ground, the conflict had become

a long, bloody process of attrition.

But the war wasn't just being fought in the trenches.

Both sides were taking advantage of a new invention - the aeroplane -

to take the fight into the skies.

The average life expectancy for a new British pilot on the front

was 11 days.

I said goodbye to everybody

and I naturally thought I was going to be killed,

obviously.

Oh, yes, I gave my life to the Army,

to the Air Force,

to the Force, rather, and I expected to be killed.

Within weeks of joining up,

Hubert Williams was flying bombing raids over enemy lines.

The place, of course, was full of smoke and foul air

and all the rest of it, you know,

and you had pieces of shrapnel going through your aircraft.

We were in an engagement

and the shell burst with an awful lot of black smoke and I dived in,

doing about 140mph,

and I came up and I saw these four Taubes in front of me

and, of course, I just let go to them, the four of them,

and they just disappeared, one after the other.

I didn't know whether I'd killed them or what happened.

They just disappeared.

During the war, you're not a human being.

Don't forget that.

It's difficult to explain it.

You are a war machine and you become a war machine

and you do not think about home or anything like that whatsoever.

Behind me was a German.

They were coming on again, a second lot.

Of course, he fired at me and blew the tail

and, of course, I had no control.

I knew I was going down so I switched the engines off.

I can remember going down and, all of a sudden, bang.

Hubert was dragged unconscious from the wreckage of his plane

by civilians from a nearby village.

He spent the best part of a year recovering in hospital.

Aeroplanes were just one of the new technologies employed in what was

the first large-scale war fought between industrialised nations.

On the ground, soldiers faced the threat of chemical weapons.

I can remember as well as can be, we were on sentry,

sentry in the trenches,

and we saw this...like a garden fire, almost,

a bit of smoke coming up from something green put on them.

It got into your lungs and your nose and your eyes and into your lungs.

There were two sorts of gas - that lethal stuff that strangled you

and the mustard gas, which blinded you.

Our eyes were sort of burning.

We thought it was the smoke from the brazier.

And the natural thing to do if your eyes were burning

when you're waking up is to give them a rub.

But we didn't know, obviously, that the gas, heavier than air,

had percolated down into the cellar.

Of course, when we got up, up into the open air,

we found that our eyes were burning...

and eventually blindness crept in.

Burning crept in

in parts of our body that were exposed to the gas.

One of the things I saw was...

..men fall...

..unable to go any further.

Unable to breathe.

And...

..big, braw men...

..asking in so much pain

that they begged passing soldiers to shoot them,

to put them out of their misery.

I saw it.

I was shipped off across the Channel

and I found myself eventually up in St Luke's Hospital in Bradford,

totally blind, lung infection and blistered.

But eventually, after about four and a half months, I recovered my sight.

Those soldiers sent home from the war included not just men

suffering physical wounds,

but those who'd experienced psychological breakdown in

the face of relentless bombardment.

Among them, Rupert Rees's uncle.

They all look out,

a shell burst right near him

and he was shell-shocked.

And he was transferred to Bridgend.

When my mother heard the news, she was very upset.

She had to go to see him

and, when we got there, we went in this big yard

to see all these men walking about with their eyes open

but they couldn't see anything at all.

They weren't living in this world.

Coming back...

..from the hospital,

I can remember my mother catching hold of my hand tightly,

as much to say, "You're not going,"

crushing my hand, going back to the train.

I can remember it so, so very well.

Jack Jones, later a successful novelist,

was also sent home, suffering from shrapnel wounds and mental trauma.

I was so ill with the strain of 13 weeks' continuous fighting

I was sent home

to a hospital in Brighton. And then,

having got home,

I decided that I would do everything possible to stay home,

to look after my family

and leave King and country to look after themselves.

When my wife and children met me on the platform

and my wife tearfully said,

"Oh, thank God. Will you have to go again?"

And I said, "Not if I can bloody well help it, my dear."

I was posted to a recruiting station as a propagandist

because it was volunteers then.

"Come on, join up," with Kitchener on the board saying,

"Your King and country needs you," on the hoardings.

And I was posted to a recruiting station in Merthyr.

And I was put to speak at meetings and, believe me,

I spoke like a man inspired.

Spoke trying to get others to go to the war

so as not to go myself.

By 1916, voluntary recruitment could no longer provide

the huge numbers of men the war effort demanded.

That January, conscription had been introduced

for men between the ages of 18 and 41.

But a small number refused to serve.

Many were driven by the religious conviction that killing was immoral.

There was one man in particular who afterwards

became my brother-in-law, Ithel Davies,

who was imprisoned in Kinmel Bay

because of his refusal

to take part in war.

He could have been excused on national service grounds

because he was the son of a farmer

and could have been exempted, but he wouldn't stand on those grounds

so he was put in jail in Kinmel Park,

and actually had his nose broken by an officer who knocked him down

and he fell into a trench.

Of course, he was one of our great heroes at the time.

My father used to go and see him and try and get him released

but he was there all the time that the war was on.

Some conscientious objectors were spared prison,

but they couldn't escape the resentment and anger of the public.

This man who lived in Station Street in Aberdare, owned a repair shop,

he had a son and a daughter.

Nearby was the old fire station and across the side of the road,

on the other side of the road, was the police station.

And a whole crowd,

knowing now that this man was a conscientious objector,

marched down Station Street

to get him out of the house

and murder him.

That was the idea. They'd have killed him if they'd got hold of him.

That was the feeling about it all.

The police did nothing about it.

Many young Welshmen who didn't object on conscientious grounds were

nonetheless reluctant to go to war.

I was hoping and hoping that the war

would be finished before I was called up.

You may call me a bit of a coward but I didn't want to join the Army

because I knew,

I could see by the casualty lists,

that so many had died.

Nonetheless, Percy Williams volunteered

in the belief that, as a volunteer,

he'd have to serve for less time than conscripted soldiers.

He was at the front in France

when his battalion came under attack from a German artillery barrage.

Nearly sick with fright.

And then we just had to wait until this started.

For hours, all hell let loose.

Shells were falling and there was a gas attack before and we had to...

Of course, we had to put on our gas masks

and the gas mask got covered with a film and you couldn't see, and then

I was faint-hearted and sick and I felt sick

and I had to spew up my...

And I know that I was absolutely terrified for hours.

He says, "The Germans have broken through." Because there was a tank.

He said, "I've seen the tanks," and he said, "We are surrounded."

This German came, with his fixed bayonet,

and I thought he was going to kill me.

He came to me and he shouted at me, "Halt! Halt! Halt!"

And I was petrified.

They captured thousands, thousands,

and I'd never fired a shot there.

Percy was taken captive

and would see out the remainder of the war behind enemy lines.

Over 170,000 British soldiers were taken prisoner during the conflict.

As the war continued to deprive Wales of a generation of young men,

the jobs they left behind were increasingly done by women.

I was a Land Girl in the First World War.

I was at the Green Farm right opposite my home.

Five o'clock in the morning, we had to get up.

We had to milk 100 cows and then we had to muck out the cow sheds.

Then you went home to breakfast - half an hour - then back again.

When I was a Land Girl, I began to feel, oh, I had a pound a week,

I was independent of anybody.

Nobody bossing me what time to get up, what fire to light,

what coal to put on fire,

running beck and call for the cook.

None of that. I was my own boss nearly.

You know, I was told what to do - go pick stones in the field or cut

the hay or plough the field - and I was out there as happy as a lark.

I loved it.

As Minister of Munitions,

the politician they called the Welsh Wizard, David Lloyd George,

had harnessed the industrial might of the country.

Thousands of women served the war effort in the munitions works.

Pembrey was a munitions factory, making cordite.

Cordite is used as an explosive for rifles

or any firing of guns.

Sometimes I'd feel I'm doing something that's going to kill

someone or maim someone,

but you had to forget that sort of thing, you know,

when you were working there, and you just put it out of your mind.

Women on the home front looked forward to the occasions

when their loved ones returned home on leave.

But bidding farewell to them again could prove painful,

as the sister of the poet Ellis Evans,

better known by his bardic name, Hedd Wyn, recalled.

TRANSLATION:

# Keep the home fires burning

# While your hearts are yearning

# Though your lads are far away

# They dream of home. #

Percy Williams's parents also worried about their son.

They knew only that he was missing,

and for months were unaware that he'd survived,

albeit as a prisoner of war, enduring dreadful conditions.

I was, for a couple of months, behind the German lines in France.

We were always hungry and we simply had a bit of black bread

and then a few potatoes.

I was down from about 12st till about 7... 6 or 7st.

As losses mounted, the mood at home changed.

A month after Ellis Evans's death,

an ode he had written, under the name Hedd Wyn,

won the most prestigious prize at the 1917 National Eisteddfod.

On the festival stage,

the bardic chair he should have claimed as his own

was draped in a black sheet.

It became a symbol of the sacrifice demanded by the war.

The loss and grief that followed in the wake of the conflict

touched the whole of society.

There was a woman, and her son was on that train

and he never returned.

He was killed.

And for years that woman went up

at the station, waiting for her son, so they said.

She used to sit there and wait for the train to come in.

A terrible thing. Of course she was... Her mind had gone.

A terrible thing, to lose your mind.

On the 11th of November, 1918, the war finally came to an end.

The Armistice came and I shall never forget that time.

I was at Shotton, at the works at that time, and we were

expecting some news and, at 11 o'clock,

the hooter started blowing and the bells started ringing and we gave up

our work and went home, got the early train and went home to celebrate.

Some Welsh prisoners of war, like Percy Williams,

weren't even aware that the Armistice had been declared.

I said, "What was that noise in the night?

"It sounded like firing."

"No," he said, "nothing."

We didn't realise that there was an armistice

until about a fortnight afterwards.

We were, of course, absolutely delighted

and we just couldn't believe that our luck was in like that.

Because I'd seen quite a few of our fellows dying.

We were very excited when we knew that my father was coming home,

and my mother was looking forward very much

and she decided that she must have a new suit to wear.

He brought us presents -

a teddy for my brother and ornaments for my sister and I.

But when he tried to get my brother to go on his knee

and make a fuss of him,

he was terrified of this strange man in uniform.

Of course, he was a mere baby when he left, you see,

and he didn't remember my father at all.

But we were all very thrilled to be a family again.

The boy I was courting was called up in 1916

and before that he was,

you know, nice, kind and very thoughtful,

but when he came back after it, I found him aggressive.

He was very short with people, you know, not like he used to be.

I think he resented the war, he resented everything, I think.

He changed.

Well, I was in the choir, in St John's Choir

and one of the singers was a young man named Parker.

And he put his age on from 17 to 18, volunteered to join the Navy.

Away he went. I didn't see him again for many, many years.

When he came back to Aberdare, he'd go to the pub and get drunk...

..and he wanted to forget all about the boys

who'd been torpedoed all around him,

screaming in the water to be saved and picked up.

But he didn't register it in his mind.

And these comrades there, it seems so terrible to leave them

but that's what happened to them.

And then he got drunk and drunk and drunk.

His father would come down and beg of him,

"Harry, come on. Come along. Mother wants you. Come."

He wouldn't move. Wouldn't go.

For many women, the war had opened up new horizons.

The first war changed women, I think, because the girls,

they wouldn't go back to service once they'd had

a taste of a porter on the railway or bus conductress or in munitions.

We didn't want to go back to service again.

They were free.

But many who'd witnessed the war at first hand were

overcome by a sense of waste.

The age between 17 and 23 or 24

is a lovely time of your life,

and you had to be fighting in a war, and your friends

and hundreds of them being killed.

Thousands of them being killed.

There's no doubt about it that the cream,

the cream age were killed unnecessarily. What for?

I don't think ever there should be any wars. I don't believe in them.

When I went to France, we were told that it was a righteous war,

Let them go and fight it amongst themselves.

The First World War transformed society,

about politics, class and religion.

It left an indelible mark on a generation

that had seen friends, family and comrades

make the ultimate sacrifice.

that's the people that should be honoured.

Those that didn't. They gave their life and that is it.

And they're the people that are worthy of thinking about.

They're the people that really did the job.