Richard Henry Tobin The Great War Interviews

BBC Four Collections,

specially chosen programmes from the BBC Archive.

For this collection, Max Hastings has selected interviews

with Great War veterans filmed in the 1960s.

More programmes on this theme

and other BBC Four Collections

are available on BBC iPlayer.

Sad is not a soldier's word.

Browned off, fed up, yes.

Or he'll moan the clock round.

But the only time a soldier

is

really and deeply sad

is

when his line of duty takes him

among refugees.

Those weary, shuffling hordes

stumbling down the road.

Chiefly women, children,

the elderly.

Carrying, pushing, pulling,

a pram,

a wheelbarrow, a farm cart.

Their world piled high.

And often,

perched on the top, Granny.

On a brisk November morning,

October morning,

we arrived in the port of Antwerp.

The people lined the streets.

They cheered, they waved,

they gave us flowers and wine.

The war was young, and so were we.

We felt gallant, they felt relieved.

Out to the trenches, we went.

We settled,

opened reserved ammunition,

fixed our bayonets and said,

"Now let them come."

Night came, but not the enemy.

We posted sentries and settled.

But not for long.

Heavy rifle fire broke

out on the left, then on the right.

We manned the firing step

and peered over.

Searchlights from the fort

swept

the front.

We could see nothing.

We held our fire and felt neglected.

Morning came, still no enemy.

And suddenly high in the sky

was

a train-like rumble

and whistle

followed

by an explosion.

Smoke and flames shot

up in the city.

An old hand said,

"Them's howitzer shells.

"The bastards must be

a dozen miles away."

At intervals through the day,

these

rumbling shells rolled over,

flames shot up after each explosion.

Then the oil tanks by the dockside

were alight.

The smoke gathered over the port

to

join the autumn mists,

and the glow from the fires...

it looked like hell.

We could only wait

and we felt useless, helpless.

Suddenly an order came -

prepare to move.

Just at the back of our trench

was a deserted farm.

Odd men had scrounged over

into the

farm,

and as we were about to

move,

an officer shouted to me,

"Sergeant, see the farm's clear!"

Coming back through an outhouse,

I saw some pails of milk.

And I did the most

unsoldierly action -

I emptied my half-full water bottle

and filled it full of milk.

We soon got orders to move

to the

right and onto the road.

We thought, "Ah, they won't come

to us - we're going after them."

Reaching the road, instead

of turning left, to the enemy,

we turned right to the city.

And we had received the most

deadening, soul-racking order

a soldier can

receive - retreat.

We picked our way

through

the burning buildings,

past the flaming oil tanks

to the floating bridge,

the pontoon bridge the engineers had built

for us to cross and then destroy.

Each side of the...bridge

stood the hordes of refugees.

Every kind -

children, women,

nuns, priests.

This was the bridge of sighs.

They had been stopped

so we could cross.

The flare from the burning homes

lit their faces,

expressionless and hopeless.

We were ashamed.

An officer called to me,

"Sergeant, shout, 'Break step'!"

It should have been break hearts.

We were soon across

in the open

country.

Hard pressed on down the road each

side of us the citizens of Antwerp.

After a few miles,

we arrived at a Belgian village,

marched into the cobbled square.

The orders were, "Rest where

you

stand, be ready for any alarm."

Just by was the church.

Straw had been placed all around it

with dark forms lying on it.

My pal and I moved to the straw

and were about to settle

when we noticed two young women.

With a mumbled apology,

we were moving away

when a good English voice - good

English - said, "Don't go, please."

We squatted down.

And I saw that one of the young woman

was nursing a whimpering baby.

For something to say, I said,

"Is your baby all right?"

With a sad smile, she said,

"It is not my baby.

I don't even know its mother."

She said, "We are tired and hungry."

My pal and I emptied our haversacks.

Two tins of sardines

and Army biscuits.

She sighed. She said, "The baby needs milk."

"Milk!" I swung my water bottle round.

I think even the baby was surprised.

Quite soon,

we fell in

and marched away.

The British government

had lost

a water bottle,

but a baby had found a meal.

MAN: We'll cut.

There was a jumping-off trench which

was halfway across no-man's-land.

A brigade of us had to go out and line this trench,

so we were halfway there.

But waiting, we got assembled about

one or two o'clock in the morning.

Then we had to wait till zero hour,

which was a quarter to six.

And I remember those lads

standing

there, dead silent,

we couldn't make a noise.

The fellow standing next to you, he

was your best friend, you loved him.

You perhaps didn't know him

the day before.

And then, an hour to go,

they were the longest, those hours,

and the shortest hours in life.

An infantryman in the front line,

he's got a cold, deep fear,

an experienced infantryman.

Then five minutes to go.

And then zero hour,

and all hell lets loose.

There's our barrage, the Germans'

barrage, and over the top we go.

As soon as you get over the top,

fear has left you, and it's terror.

You don't...look, you see.

You don't

hear, you listen.

Your nose is filled

with fumes

and death.

You taste the top of your mouth.

Your weapon and you are one.

A hunter, you're back to the jungle.

The veneer of civilisation

has

dropped away.

And you see the line of men,

the flare of the shells

and the mist of dawn, November dawn.

And the fumes from the shells

coming

out of the bursting shell,

which gives it

a dirty

orange colour.

Then you see this line.

Then a gap, closing, and you go on.

You come into the front line,

the Germans' front line.

What's that on the left?

You can see figures

rising from the ground.

Somebody's got

their hands up.

We'd kept well up to the barrage,

in my part of the line,

so the Germans

were down in the dug-outs.

The bombers attended to them,

and we went on.

We soon crossed the second line.

And then we came to the third line,

which wasn't

occupied by the Germans at all.

So we rested there a bit,

we had to rest for so long.

I discovered my battalion

was down to...just under 300.

And out of 20 officers, one -

captain.

Very good chap, but he'd never

been in a battle before.

This was his first experience.

I was the sergeant major

of the line.

I knew what had to be done.

But could I tell him to do it? And could he do it if I told him?

It wasn't for me to do it,

and I felt very lonely.

I looked over my shoulder,

and my colonel was coming along.

The colonel always stays back,

until he gets orders,

but he'd broken his orders

and come forward.

Friberg. He said,

"Hello, Tobin, how are you?"

I said, "I'm all right, sir."

He said, "We'll get a VC today." Might as well. He got his...!

Then he gathered all the oddments up,

and away we went

to take

the next objective.

The final objective was the village,

Beaucourt.

We hadn't sufficient men

to take that,

so we dug in and waited till some

reinforcements came up.

The colonel sent me

out on battle patrol.

Battle patrol is just 20 or 30 men,

and you go ahead of your trench.

You're really there to hold up

a

counterattack as long as you can.

That's the posh way of putting it.

But you are there to do

as much

damage as you can

and to warn the front line

so they...getting ready.

However, there was

no counterattack that night.

So we came back

from the battle

patrol all right.

One of our men went out

and he came back in great glee.

He been to the back of the village,

somehow or other,

and he was a Glasgow Irishman,

a real lad.

And he'd seen a wagon going along.

It was the Germans

bringing

the rations up,

so he climbed over the back,

bayoneted the driver

and pinched the...mail.

So he brought it back to the line,

and we had schnapps,

and in the mailbag was a box of cigars

coming up for the German commander.

Friberg sent it back to our general.

Passchendaele

was

the infantryman's graveyard.

We called it the slaughterhouse.

And even the most seasoned veteran

felt he'd be lucky

if he got there and came back.

There was no chance of getting wounded

and getting a Blighty

at Passchendaele.

You'd either get through or die.

Because if you were wounded

and you slipped off the duckboards,

you just sank into the mud.

I don't know how far

the duckboards extended,

because it was such slow

going up to the front.

Must have been hundreds and hundreds

of yards and it zigzagged about.

But each side was a sea of mud.

And you stumbled and slid along.

If you slipped,

you went

up to the waist possibly.

Not only that, but in every

pool, you'd fall in

with decomposed bodies

of humans and

mules,

or mules and perhaps both.

And if you were wounded

and slipped off,

well, then, that was the end of you.

And when you got up there,

there was

no front line,

there was no line at all.

Just a series of posts,

scraped in the mud.

Here a machine gun's crew,

there a few riflemen.

Further on a Lewis gun's crew.

And in some cases,

the battle depth of your battalion

was a thousand yards.

These posts bobbing about.

You couldn't get to any of them in daylight,

because you were under

enemy observation the whole time.

You couldn't get food, nor rations,

nor ammunition or anything

up in the

daylight,

cos these duckboards

were attacked by the Germans,

shelling them the whole time.

And in most places,

if shells start dropping,

you run to the right or run

to the

left to get some cover.

But if you're on the duckboard,

you couldn't run.

There was mud to your right

and mud to your left,

and you had to face it and go on.

The men, the relief was...hopeless.

A battalion came from

an ordinary

trench as a battalion,

but the men struggled back

in twos

and

threes,

and some of them a day late.

They hadn't been found,

they hadn't been told they'd been relieved.

Possibly, they didn't know

they were there.

I've seen men coming out

covered in mud,

they just scraped the mud from their

eyes. They had in their hands

what looked like a muddy bough

off a tree - it was the Lewis gun.

The only thought was the Germans were

in a better position as we were.

In fact, we had a case where

one

little party of men was

trying

to make their hole

more

comfortable, scooping it out,

and some hundreds of yards away,

the Germans were doing the same.

They're both in their misery,

not taking any damn notice of each other.

And...

..we used to get browned off, fed up, as we called it, in our war.

Because if we heard

we were going back to Passchendaele

a second time,

that was always the horror of an infantryman...

who wanted to go to that sector again?

Because you couldn't use

the guns up there, you see.

I've seen them make a road

to try

and get some guns up there.

18-pounder shells,

beautiful new shells,

and they were swimming in the mud

trying

to get a base to get a gun up.

We didn't have any gas

there in our stay in the line.

But everything else.

Mules, you couldn't

get any rations up on the mules.

They tried it,

and the mules either got the wind up

and jumped in the mud,

and that was the end of the mule

and your rations, you see.

Really, a man... We used to try

and regiment up for 48 hours,

they couldn't keep the men up there

any longer.

And one time we went up,

conditions were so bad they gave

the men a double tot of rum,

which was rather exceptional,

and every NCO from a Lance Corporal upwards

carried

a bottle of rum in his hip

to help troops on the way.

I was always... I thought

the battalion

commanders

had the greatest worry at Passchendaele,

because it was one of the fronts

where...their flanks were in the air.

The battalion commander,

and our battalion commander,

had to wander miles to try and get in touch

with the Canadians on the right.

Of course, the horror of that sort

of caper was there were pillboxes

scattered about

which the Germans

had made.

These had to be approached

very

carefully,

because you didn't quite know whether we were in the pillbox

or the Germans were in the pillbox,

and very often, you go in, they were

full of dead...both Germans and us.

Wounded that had crawled in

and died.

The horrors of Passchendaele.

MAN: And cut.

My

battalion had

withdrawn around the Ruhr,

and now, for days,

it was

an infantryman's battle.

Even our division of artillery

joined us as infantry.

Often firing alongside of us

over open sights.

Our major general

and his brigadiers were with us,

controlling the troops

like Wellington might.

It was leapfrog in reverse.

Battalion went through battalion,

company through company.

But always a company,

always a battalion,

standing facing the enemy,

ready to fight.

And so we came back

to the

Somme battlefields.

Our general formed us in a square,

his flanks in the air,

he put out flanking battalions.

In some six hours we came back

over these old battlefields

that had taken two years.

On the 26th of March

we dropped into a trench.

It was a trench we knew.

We knew of old.

We had started

retreating, 21st of March 1918.

We were back in the trench

that we

had attacked from,

on the 13th of November 1916.

In that trench came up

Field

Marshall Haig's famous message,

"Backs to the wall.

"Every man will stand and fight

and fall. No more retreating."

But still we had a little

joy in our hearts, the infantrymen,

because although we had not won,

we had not been beaten.

The only lead in our hearts...

..was

the thought that we were back to the old trench ding-dong.

No signs of an end.

And so the weeks

and months went on.

April, May.

We even did one or two small

attacks.

The German attacks grew fewer

and weaker.

When we were out on the line,

we used to stand by the road

and watch the fresh, strong,

plump

new American battalions swing by.

They waved and laughed and shouted.

Our boys stood by the side

of the road and grinned back.

But we wondered, did they know?

Could they do it?

Would they do it?

We were pleased to see them.

And then,

it must have been July or

August,

I saw the first sunshine.

We'd had rest at a bivouac camp.

A rough notice board had

been put up.

I heard some giggling,

some twittering, some laughing.

It was like a horde of sparrows.

I looked across.

There were dozens of infantrymen,

crowded round the board.

They were laughing

and giggling

and passing and chatting back to each other.

Those that could read the notice

were passing it on,

what was on the board.

It was almost like a Gilbert

and Sullivan comedy production.

The notice read...

..that

in the south

the

French and the Americans

had driven

back the enemy.

Goodness knows high many miles,

God knows how many prisoners and guns had been captured.

We were happy.

It was the first

sunshine since 1914.

And in our war-weary hearts

we knew that it was not the end.

But we knew it was

the beginning of the end.

MAN: And cut.