Henry Williamson The Great War Interviews

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.

I was a young soldier of 17

just before the war.

I joined a Territorial Regiment for

the sport, the boxing and swimming.

And when, on the 3rd of August, 1914,

mobilisation orders came out,

we were all very excited

and apprehensive.

Because the whole feeling in the air

was one of anxiety,

at the same time great endeavour,

and most of us

wanted

to be out in France

before

the war was over by Christmas,

because the great thing said

by the papers was that it would be

over by Christmas, largely

because

of the Russian steamroller.

Well, we mobilised,

we had our bayonets sharpened,

taken away in wheelbarrows

and put on the grindstone

by the armourers down below.

When they came back we were a little

bit nervous about this

sharpness,

because we realised

the other side had bayonets, also.

And one morning, after being about

ten days in London and sleeping

in various schools, it was August

and the holiday time,

we marched out

of London

with bugles playing

and

the Fife band playing and the drums.

Tremendous excitement.

Cheered by the crowds.

People standing up on the tops of

motor buses and raising their hats.

And we felt pretty fine.

When we came to London Bridge

we were told to break step,

otherwise the pounding

of thousands

of nailed boots

at the same

time might have shaken

the foundations.

We went down into Surrey.

We heard that many of our sister

battalions of the London Regiment

were also on this divisional march

and we were concentrating

on the coast,

because we thought

there might be an invasion.

Of course, the air was full

of rumours,

and also full of dust,

because it was

a month of great heat.

We sweated tremendously, we carried

about 60lbs of ammunition

and kit and our rifle.

We got blisters, but we did

about 15 or 16 miles a day.

Ten minutes halt every hour.

We lay on our backs gasping.

Water bottles were drunk dry.

People in cottages, women in sun

bonnets came out with apples

and jugs of water.

And we passed some of the battalions

who'd been in front of us

whose headquarters were in some

of the poorer quarters of London,

and I remember so well the dead

white faces, many with boils,

lying completely exhausted

and sun-stricken in the hedges.

Hundreds of them.

We considered ourselves

one of the elite regiments,

battalions of the London Regiments,

such as the London Scottish,

Queen's Victoria's and London Rifle

Brigade, to which I belonged.

We did not fall out.

But then we had been more fortunate

and had had proper nourishment

before the great march began.

Well, we were down in Surrey

and we had great field days,

this glorious August weather

kept on,

and one morning

we heard

that we were going

overseas.

If we - those who wished to

volunteer.

Of course the Territorials had

joined only for home service.

Most of us volunteered,

because at that time we'd heard

of the retreat from Mons,

and one

or two soldiers had come home

in the regular army, we'd met them,

wounded, slightly wounded,

and they told tales of horror

and devastation

and we were completely shocked.

Then the news came through

of the great retreat, the losses,

and the onslaught of the Germans

and,

of course, all the papers

for some

days had been full of

atrocities,

which were pretty severe.

And I suppose we believed them.

It was still a very small world

and we volunteered to go out.

After a couple of months,

our orders

came through.

And when they came through,

I remember

in the tented

lines

on Crowborough,

Crowborough

Heath, most of the fellows cheered

and rolled over - it came down early

in the morning, the news through

the colour sergeant of the company -

rolled over and kicked their legs

in

the air and cheered and cheered

and

cheered. Tremendously excited.

I wasn't excited.

I was apprehensive.

I didn't believe the war was going

to be over by Christmas.

I had a feeling, from having talked

to two of the chaps from Mons

in the local hospital that it wasn't

going to be altogether a picnic.

Erm, it would be true to say that

we

enjoyed our first visit to the trenches.

The weather was dry.

We went through a wood under

Messines Hill, south of Ypres.

We were brigaded with regulars,

who

wore balaclava helmets

and had beards,

and the whole feeling

was one of tremendous comradeship.

And these old sweats, who were

survivors of Mons and Aisne,

ah, they had no fear at all.

Any apprehension we had of going

in under fire was soon gone

there in the trenches

and we enjoyed it.

As I say, the weather was dry,

the wood had a number

of pheasants in and rabbits.

We would have our ration bacon

and tea and white bread

and we'd hop out of the back of the

trenches - risking the snipers -

and make our fires 50 or 60 yards

in among the trees.

We also enjoyed a phenomenon

that

was known as 'wind up'.

The battles had died down in our

sector under Messines Hill,

but they were still going

on

up at Ypres,

and at night one would hear

the crackle of musketry far away.

And then these, what I call

the lilies of the dead,

the flares

going up

and slowly sinking down

and

giving this powdery greenish light.

They were sinking down under

parachutes.

The German lights were much

better than ours.

And they would come down the line,

you would see them,

and you'd hear

the machine guns

going.

They'd sweep down,

we were ordered to stand to

and we'd fire into the...

into No-Man's-Land,

about 80 yards from the Germans,

and we'd see perhaps figures

darting about

and coming forwards and lying

flat

and then going back.

And this would

go down south at a great rate,

travelling about 15-20 miles an hour

I should think.

Then it would die out.

It was known as the nightly wind up.

Well, our time in the trenches

was very happy.

We had one or two men sniped,

which was rather a shocking sight,

but it was war, and we accepted it,

we accepted the dead bodies

lying

out just in front.

We accepted the fact that we had to

go out sometimes on listening

patrol

within ten yards

of the German lines and lie down and

listen,

see if they were assembling

for

an attack, and then go back.

And I can honestly

say there was no fear at all.

It was a picnic.

One night in the second week

of November

there was a tremendous storm of rain.

Lightning, flares still going up,

water, raindrops splashing up

nine or ten inches in No-Man's-Land

and it went on and on and on and on.

That stopped the first battle

of Ypres,

which was raging up north.

Our sector north of Armentieres

had

ceased the actual fighting.

The dead were lying out in front.

The rains kept on.

We were in yellow clay.

The water table was two feet below.

Our trenches were seven feet deep.

We walked about

or moved very

slowly in a marn,

or a pug of yellow watery clay.

When the evening came

we could get out.

It took about an hour to get out.

Some of our chaps slipped in

and were drowned and weren't seen

until we trod on them perhaps later.

The condition of the latrines, I...

can be imagined.

And we couldn't sleep.

Every minute was like an hour and

when were we going to be relieved?

We were told we couldn't be relieved

because nobody...

They hadn't one battalion in reserve

in the British Expeditionary Force,

except those out in support who

would go out for a few days.

And we were four days in this

dreadful trench,

called the Hampshire T-Trench.

It was 60 yards from the Germans

and they could snipe right down it

and we had a lot of men sniped.

I had my friend standing beside me.

We were trying to work a

pump

which the engineers had

brought in, or we'd carried

in

at night, and it wouldn't work.

We found afterwards it was connected

the wrong way round.

The outlet pipe was on the inward

side

and we pumped for a long time

and nothing happened.

And suddenly there was a

tremendous crack,

going like that...

Right, the clack of the bullet

which really, as we know now

breaks the sound barrier.

Incidentally, they used to say

that they used explosive bullets, the Germans.

Well, this hit my friend

in the front of the head

and took away the back of his head

and he fell down.

Just slipped down.

Well, we were relieved after

the fourth night

and some of us had to be carried out.

I noticed that so many of the

tough

ones were carried out

and the

skinny little whippersnappers

like

myself, somehow, could...

Perhaps we

hadn't got the weight

to carry but

we got out somehow,

and we marched back.

And we could go in estaminets

and have cafe rum

for about a ha'penny and omelettes.

And it was great fun.

We had to go on working

parties

at night in the wood.

That was all night long.

And, after four more nights,

we were in

the

trenches again,

back slithering

into this Hampshire

T-Trench

and doing it all over again.

The paths through Ploegsteert Wood -

oh, they got pretty bad.

Up to a foot deep in mud.

We had to carry rations.

And what was pretty boring

was the tobacco

that we had to carry, tins of tobacco.

The rations were

then

10,000 cigarettes a day,

or 5 lbs of pipe tobacco.

Of course, many funds

were sponsored

by newspapers,

comforts for the troops.

And one of the things

we loathed

carrying

were these

biscuit boxes

which were cubes of

bright

metal, about 18 inches cubic.

And, of course, they were seen,

and Jerry

- or the Allemans, as we called him,

from the Allemand, presumably,

"Jerry"

hadn't appeared then as a name -

the Allemans would then

fire his machine guns.

And we just...

All the chips would fly down

from the woods and fall on us.

We didn't give a damn except that

we'd

take the occasion to dump this

blasted biscuit box in a shell hole,

where many others lay beside it.

And, er...

we

were overjoyed when the

heavy

frosts came and the mud ceased.

We had to clear out of the Hampshire

T-Trench, it was untenable.

It was half ice, and we had

so many men sniped

that it

was left abandoned.

And when the frosts came

we would try and sleep

and our boots would freeze.

It was very painful.

We weren't allowed to take them off, so...

some of us would walk about at

night

and swing the arms to keep

warm,

and the greatcoats, of course,

were frozen,

and the yellow clay that was on

them

was frozen, too.

Very hard to get it off.

It was a great weight.

Being

stiff as boards,

we just hacked the skirt off

about two feet up the skirt

with bayonets

and walked about in short coats.

And then we had

an issue of goatskins.

And these were like jerkins.

They had no arms, just armholes

and they were fastened by tapes.

They were pretty warm, but

they

didn't warm the feet, of course,

these frozen boots and the belt,

and many of our chaps

went down with frostbite.

When the boots were taken off

in the

billet,

the feet swelled up

like tomatoes,

and some of them got

gangrene and had to lose their feet.

But that was in the hospitals

when they went down.

On the 19th of December, the Brigade

was ordered

to make an attack

on part of the German trench

which

enfiladed the Hampshire T-Trench.

The attack was to be made

in daylight,

and to get over

the German wire

paillasses of straw

were made, to be carried

and thrown over the wire for the men

to run over the straw hurdles.

We were in support of this attack.

We were ordered to lie down at the

edge of the wood and await events.

There was practically no bombardment

because there were very few shells.

I think the ration was

two

a day a heavy gun,

our six inch Long Toms

they were called.

But the shells screamed over,

half a dozen lyddite.

Two of them burst in our front

trench,

four burst in No-Man's-Land,

and then, hoarsely cheering,

we heard the hoarse cries

and the

shouts of the Lancashires,

the East

Lancs, who were making the attack.

And they were

only about five or six yards,

running forward, round the

shell

holes filled with ice,

and the machine guns opened up

and down they went.

Cries and screams.

We were in support lying there for...

three or four hours.

Then the order came.

The London Rifle Brigade

will

carry on the attack.

The order was not actually to start,

but

to be prepared for it.

I noticed my friend Baldwin

on my

left -

he had an ashen white face.

I felt drained out, and

when I tried to get up I couldn't,

my knees were wobbling.

And we lay there another half hour.

Then heard, with great relief, that

the attack was not to be repeated.

We went out later and

helped

to

get in the wounded with stretcher bearers.

And I remember one man

being brought

back,

and when on a stretcher,

when he was safely inside the wood

and being carried away,

he sang, you know,

in a light tenor voice,

"Oh for the wings,

for the wings

of a dove,

"far, far away would I rove,"

because he was said to...

a choir,

to sing

in a church choir before the war.

And, far away in the woods,

as we went back rejoicing

to have

our rum ration, we heard this

voice

singing,

as the stars came out.

But one poor chap with us,

he took

a first sip of the rum

and gave a

shriek and

dropped the jar,

because

some fellow back in the rear had

stolen the rum

and

filled the jar

with Condy's Fluid, which was brown.

This fellow had taken a mouthful,

and

it went down into his stomach.

We heard he died later.

On Christmas Eve we had a job

to

do in No-Man's-Land

which put the wind up everybody.

That is to say we were

all

quiet among ourselves.

The job was to go into frozen

No-Man's-Land

and drive in some stakes which

were

to support hurdles

on which

some tobacco had been drying

in a barn in the woods -

of course

it was all abandoned

by the Belgians.

And we made - we were to make a sort

of alleyway or cover from view,

so that, in the event of a German attack,

we could reoccupy the

Hampshire T-Trench

which had been

abandoned

owing to the floods in it,

because that was a key position.

Now, it was explained to us

that we

had to knock in these

posts

18 inches into this frozen

soil and we'd be 50 yards

away from the Germans,

and

as we crept out,

trying to avoid

our boots ringing

on the frozen

ground

and expecting any moment

to fall flat

with the machine guns opening

up,

and nothing happened.

And, within two hours

we were walking about and laughing

and talking and there was nothing

from the German lines.

And then, about 11 o'clock,

I saw a Christmas tree going

up

on the German trenches

and there was a light.

And we stood still

and we watched this and we talked,

and then a German voice began

to

sing a song, Heilige Nacht.

And after that somebody,

"Come over, Tommy. Come over."

And we still thought it was a trap,

but some of us

went over at once

and

they came to

this barbed wire fence between us

which was five strands of wire hung

by...hung with empty bully beef tins

to make a rattle if they came, and

very soon we were exchanging gifts.

The next day we went out again.

The whole of No-Man's-Land as far

as

we could see was grey and khaki.

There they were, smoking and talking,

shaking hands, exchanging names

and addresses for after

the war to

write to one another.

We had a splendid present

from Princess Mary,

a brass box

with her young face

and head

embossed on it and tobacco inside,

a packet of tobacco and a packet of

20 cigarettes with a Christmas card.

And the Germans had also presents,

and they had, some of them

had meerschaum pipes with the figure

of the Crown Prince's head on it.

And, of course, we thought Little

Willy, as we called him,

was a little bit of an arse.

But it was rather a shock to be told

-

as a Saxon held up his pipe -

to show me and he said,

"Prachtiger Kerl Kronprinz."

And somebody who could speak German

translated "prachtiger Kerl"

was "jolly good fellow".

The Germans started burying

their dead which were frozen,

and we picked up ours

and buried them.

And little crosses of ration box

wood were nailed together,

quite small ones, and in indelible

pencil they would put, the Germans,

"Fur Vaterland und Freiheit" -

"For Fatherland and Freedom".

And I said to a German,

"Excuse me, but how can you

be

fighting for freedom?

"You started the war,

and WE are fighting for freedom."

And he said, "Excuse me,

English comrade, Kamerad,

"but WE are fighting for freedom,

for our country."

And I said, "You also put,

"'Here

rests in God ein unbekannter Held' -

"Here rests in God an unknown hero.

"In god."

"Oh yes, God is on our side."

But I said, "He's on our side."

And that was a tremendous shock.

One began to think that these chaps,

who were like ourselves,

whom we liked and who felt about

the war as we did

and who said,

"It'll be over soon

"because we will

win the war in Russia."

And we said,

"No, but the Russian steamroller

"is going to win the war in

Russia."

"Well, English comrade, do not

let us quarrel on Christmas Day."

And we exchanged more gifts

and there was a football match

behind the German lines.

And we saw -

we had seen before

this -

five or six German

lines of the men

about two or three

hundred yards apart, all

standing up

in the

distance on their

parapets and we only had one trench.

There was nothing behind us at all.

I talked to an officer the next day,

because the truce went on

for

several days, and he said, "You

know, we could not have gone on

"in

the first battle of Ypres,

"or Ypres

as you call it, because you had so

many reserves

in"

your woods and so

many automatische pistole."

I said,

"Well, all our machine guns

were

gone,

"they were all knocked out."

And he said,

"Oh, no, your automatische pistole."

It was our 15 rounds rapid.

We also learned that many

of the German mass attacks

were

made by boys,

German students of 16 and 17,

arm in arm with one rifle among three.

The truce went on for four days.

In the morning,

we'd come out of the wood

and wave to our opposite numbers

and they'd come and talk again.

Then the order came round,

it was the fraternisation had to stop,

and the Germans sent over a note

saying their staff was

visiting

their trenches that night,

the truce must end.

And they would have to fire

their machine guns.

They would fire them high,

but would we in any case keep

under

cover in case regrettable

accidents occurred.

And 11 o'clock precisely,

they opened up and we saw the flashes

of the machine guns

going high,

and

it was passed back

to intelligence that the Germans

were using Berlin time in the trenches,

which was one hour

before

British time,

which was, I suppose

an important item of intelligence.

And that was the end of our truce.

I loved my mules and horses

that I looked after,

but there was great suffering

during that winter at the Somme.

They had mud rash.

They also...they

could seldom be groomed.

They were working all night and most

of the day on fatigues,

and after a

bit you'd see one

of your donks, as

they were called,

pulling limbers.

It would be going along very slowly

as usual and picking its way,

these gentle creatures.

One of its ears would go down,

and then perhaps the next night

or

the next day following,

a second ear would go down,

and then in the morning

when you went to

your picket line

the

men on picket

duty would say, "Jimmy's gone, sir."

Or "Nelson's gone," -

he was a one-eyed mule.

And there they were lying down

in the mud with a glazed eye,

dead with pneumonia.

The battle of the Somme

officially

ended in November 1916.

But the shelling went on.

The nightly work went on.

The troops went into the line,

and I, who was in charge

of a transport for a machine gun

company, used to go nightly

up railway road, which lay between

the two flanks of the Somme battle.

To the south, Thiepval and the

Wunderwerk and the

Schwaben Redoubt,

and to the north up

to Beaumont Hamel and to Gommecourt.

And one February, 1917 I remember,

we were going up railway road

expecting nightly the shelling

and usually lost a mule or two,

and we were not shelled,

and we wondered what had happened.

And then we heard the old Hun,

as we called him, was pulling out.

He'd pulled out his heavy Howitzers,

he'd gone.

And then we saw the cavalry come up,

the Bengal Lancers trotted past.

It was a wonderful sight.

Rumours all round, news that -

was he going?

Was he packing up altogether?

He was going into the Siegfriedstellung,

we read in Comic Cuts.

And, bit by bit, we followed,

our patrols went out.

They had a very good rearguard

action and delayed our advance,

and, at last, we got on to green fields

and roads that weren't shelled.

All the railway lines had been

picked up, all the buildings

had been blown up, but it was almost

virgin country

and we could

gallop on the downs,

we could see

the hares

and see the larks.

After the months and months

of utter

brownness and chaos and everything

going back into ruin,

to see that

open country again was marvellous.

And there on the horizon to the east

we saw our heavy howitzers

already starting to bombard

the Hindenburg Line.