Charles Carrington 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.

I joined my battalion

in December 1915,

in what we used to call

very

cushy trenches.

This was the southern part

of the British front

down towards

the Somme,

between

Gommecourt

and Serre.

And I spent the spring of 1916

really

rather enjoying myself.

In those days,

when the war was not very active,

it was really rather fun

to

be in the front line.

It was not very exacting and, indeed,

it was not very dangerous.

One was having a sort of out-of-door

camping holiday with the boys,

with a slight spice of danger

to

make it interesting.

The worst there was to it

was

the heavy working parties

that

one had to do at night,

which

pursued one all round the front.

But I, for example, used to do a lot

of patrolling in no-man's-land.

Nothing happened, as a rule.

And these boy-scout operations,

in those days

when I knew no better,

I simply regarded rather as fun.

But as the spring went on,

we all began to learn that

the

great battle was coming.

We all knew something about it

months before it was announced.

It was obvious that there was going

to

be a great push in the spring,

and this was to be

the great

moment of our lives.

And then we knew that

the

great test was coming.

And as it drew nearer,

the line livened up.

It began to get much more dangerous

and not nearly so much fun.

There was a lot more shelling

being thrown about,

and many guns were brought in

to

support our artillery,

and enormous dumps

were

formed behind.

And more men were brought into the line

and regiments were crowded up

closer together.

And we all began to work up

to

this great crisis...

and the war then assumed

a different shape.

And I don't think it was ever

the same again afterwards,

as it had been in these...

almost

romantic days,

before the Somme

when, in cushy trenches, you could

still

regard it light-heartedly.

I got up at dawn in the morning,

I was acting adjutant

of my battalion on the morning of 1st July,

and I went up to take to my

command post in the trenches,

from

which we could see over the

country

between Gommecourt and Serre.

And when I got there,

here were

messages coming in

from the front

companies to say

that

they were all

in order

and that everything was right.

We tested our lines

back to the artillery.

And I can only say that I have never

been so excited in my life.

This was like a boy going

to

the play for the first time in his life,

and this is indeed what it was.

And the noise rose to a crescendo

such as I'd never heard before,

for which we, for the first time,

used the word "drumfire",

which is a great description of it.

A noise which made all bombardments that we'd heard

in the previous days

seem like nothing at all.

And the effect of the bombardment

created a sort of hysterical feeling.

And...at zero, I sent back a message

to

brigade headquarters to say

we were all ready

and we were

going to deliver our smoke cloud.

And then, er, at the moment,

we could see the outburst of smoke

and gas from our front line

driving,

blowing in the right direction, towards the Germans,

and then

somebody shouted, "There they go!"

And I looked over to the left

and here were the London Scottish,

who were on our left,

running forward

across the 300 or 400 yards of

green

grass

between our village

and Gommecourt Wood.

Then they vanished into the smoke

and then there was

nothing left but noise.

And after this, we saw nothing

and we knew nothing,

and we lived in a world of noise,

and simply noise, for hours.

It could be just as tiring

out of the line as in the line,

and it was sometimes worse.

When you at last

got

out into rest,

what was somewhat

ironically called rest,

you supposed

you were going to have a quiet time

and some fun,

but it was

generally

spoilt by night working parties.

Very often, your company

will be

called out at night

to march

up to the line again,

in the dark and in silence,

to carry stores up to the

front line,

because for the last mile or two

towards the trenches,

everything had to be done by hand.

You collected stores from a big dump

three or four miles back,

and the nearer you got to the enemy, the more sure it was

that

it

had to be manhandled.

And although people

talk about communication trenches

and duckboard tracks,

they generally weren't there.

And if they were there,

there was

every probability

that the

enemy were going

to shell

them

and destroy them.

The more nice-looking they were,

the more dangerous they were,

because the enemy spotted them.

Now, what have we got

to take

up to the front line?

We've got to take everything. To

begin

with, food and drinking water.

Secondly, ammunition for the men,

rifle ammunition

and machine-gun ammunition.

And after that,

trench mortar ammunition,

which was very clumsy, difficult,

awkward stuff to handle.

But the worst thing of all

were

the trench stores.

If you were ever going

to

get your

trenches into any degree of comfort,

you had to carry

enormous bundles of sandbags,

baulks of timber, planks,

ready-made-up duckboards.

Worst of all, coils of barbed wire.

And barbed wire is the most damnable

stuff to handle that you can imagine.

It was made up in great coils

which

weighed, I suppose,

half

a hundredweight,

which

we carried

on a stake over two men's shoulders.

Now, even in daylight, this is

a most

awkward thing to handle

and you

were very likely to cut

your

hands

to pieces

before you got it there.

But you had to do it in the dark,

in silence,

and tramping through

the mud

and, for

the last

part of your journey, along a trench.

And going along a trench

means

stumbling along

a dark,

wet ditch

with an irregular floor,

with a kink in it,

a

right-angled turn every few yards

so that you

can't see where you're going.

And to manoeuvre these cursed things

round a corner was something

so fatiguing

that it can

hardly be described.

And one has to remember that

the men

who did it

were physically tired out when they started.

And they were probably,

worse than that, mentally tired out,

because they'd just come out

of

a trench tour for a rest,

and this was the kind of rest

they were getting.

Now, there was no escape from this.

This had to be done.

The ammunition had to get there, the

barbed wire had to reach

the

front

to protect the soldiers

who were fighting.

And if you were going to get

any

comfort at all,

you had to have the planks and trench boards.

You go stumbling along in the dark,

cursing,

falling and slipping into holes,

tripping over wires.

And when you trip over a wire,

that probably means you're breaking

the telephone wire to the

front

by

which the operational

messages have got to be sent back.

And if you make the least noise

or

attract too much attention,

the enemy will open fire.

The worst of all

is

the traffic problem,

because there are several parties

of this kind going along the trenches

and they have to be controlled

through a labyrinth of trenches,

up trenches and down trenches,

and you can have a traffic

jam

in old, bad trenches

as bad

as a London traffic jam.

Then the enemy opened fire,

or somebody has to get out on top.

And if you have to get out on top

there,

you are standing exposed.

The enemy send up

one

of their

flares and you're alone,

standing

with the impression that the

whole

German Army is looking at you.

And perhaps they are.

Well, then you struggle down again

and struggle forward,

and perhaps

you get your stuff

to the front line

and hand it over without disaster.

Then you've all got to march home

again two or three miles,

stumbling through

the trenches again,

and then perhaps five or six miles

back to your billets,

and arrive at dawn

and your next day's rest

isn't going

to be very enjoyable.

Through the long period

of fixed

trench warfare,

our world was divided by a sort

of

iron curtain, by no-man's-land,

beyond which was a world into which

we could never penetrate,

about which we knew nothing,

which was inhabited by bogeymen.

People who would kill you

if they ever saw you.

And on our side of the line,

our world was quite different.

On our side, everyone a friend.

On that side, everybody...

something

terrifying,

almost unreal.

When you stepped off

the leave

train at Victoria,

of course,

the first effect was just

that

here you were, home for the holidays.

But very soon,

that began

to wear off.

And at any

rate, from 1917 onwards,

one

felt that there was something

unreal about leave.

I'm bound to say that I got

myself into a state of mind

where it

was the trenches

that was

the real

world,

and it was London and my family that was unreal,

that I couldn't understand

or find...or

accustom myself to.

Now, of course, I was very young.

This is a boy's reaction.

And my view is that it was probably

very much worse for a married man.

This world of the trenches which

built

itself up for so long a time,

which seemed to be going on forever,

was the real world,

and it was entirely a man's world.

Women had no part in it.

And when one went on leave,

what one did was to escape

out of the man's world

into the woman's world.

And one found that, erm,

however pleased

one was

to see one's girlfriend -

and I'm speaking only

of the light

emotions of a boy,

not of the deeper

feelings of a happily married man -

one could never somehow

quite get through.

However nice

and sympathetic they were,

the girl didn't quite say

the right thing.

And one was curiously upset,

annoyed by attempts of

well-meaning

people to sympathise,

which

only reflected the fact that

they

didn't really understand at all.

And there was even a kind of

last

sense of relief

in which you returned to the boys,

when one went back

into the

man's world,

which seemed the realest thing

that could be imagined.

WOMAN: Cut.

By the time it got to

the battle

of Passchendaele,

I was, as soldiers

went,

a pretty old soldier.

I'd

already been through the Somme

and I'd been through

the very

bad winter

of '16-'17

which, among other things, was the hardest winter for 20 years

and was very tough in the trenches.

And I was not in very good

shape at all in the spring of '17,

and I feel that even before

this

battle of Passchendaele

started,

I was getting

somewhere near the end of my tether.

I didn't think

I could go on much longer.

Every soldier, I suppose,

had this breaking strain

and when I look

back on myself,

erm, I see that

I was getting near it

before this

final test came.

And then I got into what proved to

be

the toughest assignment

I ever had in my war service,

which was the battle of 4th

October

at Passchendaele,

when I was

commanding a front-line company.

Well, we advanced,

just like those

battles, under an enormous

barrage,

a much heavier barrage

than

I'd ever heard before.

We ran into a lot of Germans

and we had a lot of very severe

fighting

in the first five minutes,

in which I myself got mixed up

in

a...in a really awkward shooting-out

affair,

rather like gangsters

shooting it out on a Western film.

However, we shot it out

and we won that little battle

and we got through.

And I found that all the various

sections of my company

had

all in turn run up against

little

parties of Germans like that

and had fought it out in the shell

holes at very, very close range.

And by the time

we got

to our objective,

I found that my company

was

completely scattered.

Both my officers, all my sergeants,

and three quarters of my men

were killed or wounded,

and there was me and the Sergeant Major

and a scattered handful of men which

we had to get together somehow.

Well, we got them together somehow

and we settled down on our

objective

in a group of shell holes

and there we sat for three days.

And on the second day, it began

to

rain, and rained continuously,

so that the bog of Passchendaele

spread out into a lake.

And to begin with, we were sitting

up

to our knees in mud and water

in rather late autumn,

very short of sleep,

and having

just been through

this

very severe

mental strain

of the battle itself.

And after this,

there was no

further fighting.

The Germans did not, in fact,

counterattack us at that point.

They were very quick

to

counterattack in that battle

and we had to be on the lookout

for it all the time.

However, they shelled us very scientifically

and on the second

and the third days,

we just

sat in the mud,

being very heavily

and very systematically shelled

with pretty heavy stuff.

Mostly, the big

shells that they used most,

from their 150-millimetre guns,

which we called five-nines.

Well, you could hear

these

shells coming.

It took, I suppose -

It's very

difficult to say -

five or six seconds perhaps to come,

and in five or six

seconds,

you can pass through

quite

a number of...psychological changes.

Your mind can get through

various phases.

And...

I don't know

whether it is possible to describe

the mental changes

that one

went through.

All day long, one had nothing to do

but to sit in the mud shivering,

wet and cold, with no hot food,

very short of sleep,

and having been really rather shattered

by the fighting of the previous day -

I

mean, mentally

shattered by it -

and tried

to keep up appearances

in some way

or another

as the shells arrived.

They weren't very frequent.

There was

generally one just arriving

and another one just beginning.

And when a shell arrived,

it would

plump into the mud

10 or

20 yards away

or 50

or

100 yards away,

and would throw

out...

It would burst with a shattering shock,

which always upset me very much.

I've always been very much

upset by noise. I hate noise.

And the noise of the explosions

always was a great burden

and pain to me.

And after it had burst,

the splinters of the shell flew off,

all of them killing splinters,

and might fly 20, 30, 50 yards

away from the point of impact.

And they would take another

second

or two

before they'd all settle down in the mud.

And although a shell had

burst

50 yards away,

you might find, one second later,

a fragment of jagged iron,

nearly red hot, and weighing half a

pound, arriving in your shell hole.

Well, you'd no sooner managed one

than the next one began to

appear

and

you'd hear

in the distance quite a mild pop

as the gun fired five miles away.

And then a humming sound as it

approached you through the air,

with

a noise rather like an aeroplane

coming, growing louder and louder.

And as it grew nearer,

you begin to

calculate with yourself

whether this one has

got your name on it or not.

Well, we were always told that you

never heard the shell that hit you.

And I think this is probably true,

because most of them

travelled faster than sound.

Therefore, if you heard it,

it probably wasn't going to be

a direct hit on you,

but it might be going to

fall 20 or 30 yards away from you

and be a great danger.

We thought...

We pretended to get

very expert in the sounds of shells,

and the old soldiers

thought

they knew

exactly when they were in

great danger and when they weren't.

But I have really some doubts

whether they were as clever

as

they thought they were.

I think one could

easily be

misled about this.

The noise would

grow into a great crescendo...

and...

it would suddenly

get louder

and louder,

until it

was like the roar of

an aeroplane

coming in to land

on the Tarmac.

And at a certain point,

your nerve

would break

and you'd throw

yourself down

in the mud

and cringe

in the mud till it was past.

When you were listening to this

sound of the shells coming over,

every now and again,

there would be

one

which you made sure was coming very close indeed.

The noise would get

louder

and louder

and the machine seemed to accelerate

until it was making a great

roar

like

an aeroplane coming in to

land on the Tarmac.

And there would come a point

at

which your resolution would break.

You'd say, "This is one for me."

And in this flash of time,

in a fifth of a second,

you'd

decide that, "This is the one,"

and you'd throw

yourself down

into the mud

and cringe

into the bottom of the shell hole.

And then all the other people

who were

around would do the same.

And, well, you may

save your life by doing that.

But sometimes, you miscalculate

and this is a shell that

isn't for you at all,

but it goes sailing busily on

and plunks down on somebody else

three or four hundred yards away.

Then you get up

and roar with laughter,

and the other ones, who laugh at you

for having been the first one

to throw yourself down.

And this, of course, is hysterics.

It becomes a kind of game

in which

you cling on

and try not to let

the tension break.

And the first person in a group

who

shows the sign of fear

by giving

way and taking cover,

he's

lost

a point, and it counts against him.

And the one who holds out longest

has gained a point.

But in what game? What is this for?

And this is the problem

that

I am still unable to solve.

That after this long time, and after

I'd been 18 months in France

and had been through

several

big battles,

that

I was still trying to pretend

to

be

brave,

and not succeeding very well,

and so were we all.

The thing is a social experience,

not an individual experience.

And speaking for myself, I was

always very much more frightened

if I was alone in one of these

situations than if I was in a group.

But I've heard other soldiers say

exactly the opposite.

That would be

a matter of individual temperament.

But I, in trying to reconstruct

these

extraordinary experiences,

I think

of it always in terms of

what one

must call esprit de corps,

because

there is no other name for it

unless

one is to call it "ganging up".

Here we were, a gang of boys

who

were committed to this extraordinary

range

of activities

and had to go

through with it.

And all

the time,

one was saying to oneself,

"If

they can take it, I can take it."

Now, you struggle

with these

stresses,

which are almost

overpowering and

which may become

quite overpowering,

which may break

you down in hysterics.

And, of course, everybody

who

remembers

battle scenes

remembers

occasions

when someone did

go off

into a complete mental

breakdown,

into hysterical

fits of various sorts

which the

doctors eventually admitted

and

called...described as shell shock.

But there were ways in which

you

could maintain your self-control

and there is some strange connection

between small physical actions...

If you, erm, hum a little tune

to yourself and feel that

you can

quietly get

through this tune before the

next explosion,

it gives

you a sort

of curious feeling of safety.

Or you start drumming

with

your fingers on your knee

and have a...quite irrational desire

to complete this little ritual.

These minute things

protect

you from...

the nervous

collapse

which may

come at any moment.

But then, suddenly,

the nervous

collapse does come.

There comes the moment

when a shell is right on top of you,

and then you break completely...

..and...and...cringe on the ground

in a most undignified attitude,

after which, you've got to pull

yourself

together and start again.

The awful thing being that

this is

not an isolated experience,

but it

goes on continuously,

minute

after

minute,

and even hour after hour.

And in this particular experience,

which was the worst

that

I happened to go through,

it went on pretty well

continuously for about 36 hours -

all day, and not

quite so bad at night.

But then at night, it was very cold

and wet

and you very much wished

you

were somewhere else

than sitting in the dark, in the mud.

Um...then at last, this rather

drastic

experience came to an end

and somehow or other,

we extricated

ourselves from the mud

and drew back

to

an extremely uncomfortable camp

on the other side of the canal bank.

And then we had to count the cost.

Where do we go from there?

Now, I suppose I might have said

this was the point where

I would

start a revolution or a

mutiny

or decide not to do it again, or something of that kind,

as they

did in some of the other armies.

We didn't take it that way at all.

And we had no sooner withdrawn

ourselves from this shambles

and got together what we could

than

we began to build up

the regiment again

and get ready for the next time.

And this seems to me

extremely difficult to explain.

Now, I had lost both my officers

and all my sergeants

and three...two thirds of my men.

And here I was,

I was 20 years old,

a young Acting Captain,

and I had to begin to form

a new company. Well, to begin with,

I was in a state of complete

physical

and mental prostration,

and I think for a few days after

the battle,

I was very near having

a nervous breakdown.

But when one is young, physical rest very quickly puts that right,

and in quite a few days,

I was almost as good as ever.

This seems to me very strange.

I had to begin

by...actually

collecting

and organising the men

and finding

out what had happened

to those

who'd been killed

and those who'd been wounded.

I had to write 22 personal letters

to the wives and mothers

of men

in my company

who'd been killed.

I then had to choose privates whom

I was going to make into corporals

and lance corporals who I was going

to make into sergeants at one jump

to start again.

And then we got a draft of

100

very good men up from the base,

then we started all over again

and had a new company.

And at the end of a month,

we were ready to do it again.

And this seems to me the strangest

thing of all, when I look back on it.

This is one of the things

I find hardest to explain.

In the last year of the war,

I was sent home to train recruits.

And I spent it at a camp

in Northumberland

where we used

to take in what

were

called A4 boys,

in batches.

These were boys who were fit,

but underage and untrained,

who'd been called up

under

the Conscription Act

and had to be

made into soldiers in six months.

As soon as they were 19 years old and trained,

they were

pushed off to France in batches.

They didn't... By these days,

the

regimental system

had quite broken down -

they might

come from any part of England

and they might be sent

to any

regiment.

I didn't altogether

enjoy

this

experience.

I didn't much like being

a young, fit man

and pushing off

these

other young,

fit men

to fight instead of me.

But I suppose somebody had to do it.

When they came to us,

they were weedy, sallow, skinny,

frightened children.

Erm, the refuse of our industrial system,

as it was in those days.

And they were in very poor condition

because of wartime

shortages of food.

But after six months of good food,

fresh air and physical exercise,

they'd changed so that their mothers

wouldn't have recognised them.

We weighed and measured them,

and they put on an average of one

stone in weight

and one inch in height.

But far more than that,

at the end of six months,

they were handsome, ruddy,

upstanding, square-shouldered young men

who were afraid of nobody,

not even the Sergeant Major.

And when we'd pushed them

through this crash

programme

of military training,

out they went to France in batches.

And I didn't

awfully like to see them go,

and I often wished that

I could have gone with them myself.

However, go, they went.

And of the batch that we sent

out

in September 1918...

...many were in time to die at

the

breaking of the Hindenburg Line.

WOMAN: Cut.