Christmas in the Trenches (15 page)

Jerusalem was not the only famous city of the Middle East to be captured by British forces during 1917, as on 11 March, troops under Maj-Gen Maude had entered Baghdad in Mesopotamia. The capture of this fabled city was a great morale boost to the Allied cause, being the first major victory, in any theatre of war, after the very tough and generally inconclusive fighting of 1916. In just three months Maude had steadily advanced his force up the line of the Tigris, prising the Turks out of a number of tough positions and taking Kut-al-Amara on 24 February. Although offensive operations continued after the fall of Baghdad, there was to be no decisive end to the campaign in 1917. Indeed, the gloss was rather taken off the year’s successes by the death of Maude from cholera on 18 November. Operations were then halted for the winter by his successor, Lt Gen Sir William Marshall, leaving most of the troops to celebrate a quiet Christmas in tented camps as the Turks tried to reorganise their forces for the defence of Mosul in northern Mesopotamia:

Just a line while I have the opportunity and before I freeze to death. Alas the cold weather and winds are on us morn and night with heat in between. Yesterday I had two and a half inches of ice in my bucket and a bitter wind . . .

As you know, our successful operations are over for the present or at least there is a slight lull. There are going to be lots of sports down the line at Baghdad this Xmas. I am one of the Regt team for the football tournament and we are doing four to five hours training per day. We are also sending four boxers and hope to leave this awful spot in the wilderness on 20th. There will be a certain percentage from each Corps down there.
¹¹
(
Capt Conrad Price, 2nd Norfolks
)

Baghdad was also a focus for the troops’ attention as mail from home passed through the city on its way to be distributed amongst the various units:

We have heard that the long over due mail was to reach Baghdad on the 22nd so we hope to get the letters, at all events, just about Xmas, even if we have to wait a bit for the parcels. It has been dreadful going for over three weeks without news of you. I wonder if this is the ‘Xmas mail’ or if that is not due to come till February, as usual. I wonder too if an intermediate mail has been sunk.
¹²
(
Capt Charles Baxter, 6th South Lancashires
)

Luckily, Baxter and his comrades did not have too much longer to wait for their mail:

On the evening of the 26th the Christmas mail did eventually arrive. It was about a month’s mail too, so I got an enormous haul. Eight letters from you and three from Eric and a few others . . .

Thank you very much too for the photographs of the garden in winter and summer, which arrived in the third letter. The Yucca must be perfectly lovely when it is in full bloom. I suppose the colour of the flowers is white, isn’t it? The sight of the snow makes one feel positively cold! It is very nice to see all the trees and lawns and everything again, as I have seen very little of that sort of thing since leaving England.
¹³
(
Capt Charles Baxter
)

Such comments show the great importance of letters and other reminders of home, especially to troops serving in such an alien environment as Mesopotamia. Additionally the mail brought gifts from home and these, along with items from Expeditionary Force canteens and company stores, helped cheer the men’s desert Christmas:

Christmas Day – Tuesday
: Come off guard at 6am and have a holiday spending the time between meals at football. We do pretty well for food issue rations being for breakfast small rashers of bacon, portion of tinned kippers and ¼ tin of machonicie. Lunch rice and fruit, dinner stew and about 1oz of pudding which had been sent from Blighty by some fund in Acton.

Beside this I had bought from the Company Stores 1 tin of salmon, 2 tins of Sardines, 1 tin of Cocoa and 3 packets of biscuits, we also had rum issue at night. So we had a fairly good time. (
L/Cpl W.C. Gale, 2nd Norfolks
)

Even those not able to get down to Baghdad for the sports, or on some other pretext, were able to tell their families at home that they had spent a good Christmas, albeit under campaigning conditions:

Ours was not so bad at all in fact I think it was as nice as it could possibly have been under the circumstances.

The weather, which is the main thing, was perfect. Sunshine and no wind, and the hottest day we have had for a long time, and of course that made all the difference.

The C.O., Tiny and Birch came round in the morning, and Charlton made a speech to my company (which as you know, is over a mile away out in the blue). He did not speak for very long, but just told them what fine fellows they were, as indeed they are, and reminded them of Xmas in the past, when he or Birch commanded the company and wished them a merry Xmas and many merrier ones in England in the future. Then I called for three cheers for the C.O. and dismissed the parade and entertained our three guests for quite a long time.

A two days sports programme had been arranged. It was to be more or less of a comic show, with none of the usual items. However the first event – the only event of the morning – was a serious thing. It was a three miles cross country race, competed for by companies and everybody was all out to win it. I was delighted with the result, as my company won it, more or less in a walkover, somewhat to everybody else’s surprise, though not to my own. We got five places out of the first ten men in, which was far better than even I had expected.

In the afternoon too, we were very successful, but there was nothing that I cared about winning so much as the race of the morning.

The men didn’t do so badly in the food line . . . Every man had a parcel and about 6 oz of plum pudding from the ‘Ladies of India’ and we officers all contributed towards providing them with a bottle each of Japanese beer – a somewhat expensive but very satisfactory item. The Government as usual, did not provide a single thing in the way of extra food. Perhaps however it was all snaffled by the S & T.

As for the officers, we were extraordinarily lucky, as one of our convoys had been down . . . to bring up stores from the Expeditionary Force Canteen . . . and had been held up by rain. However it reached us on Xmas eve, and just saved us from an almost ‘ration’ Xmas. You see no mail has arrived for nearly a month. Even as it was we had to share the men’s plum pudding, not having any of our own (We always leave anything in the way of gifts or free luxuries of any sort to the men, except in very special circumstances). But we had a real goose for dinner, not a tinned variety either, and had lots of other good foods.

Some of the other companies had turkeys but we drew for them and we failed in as much as we drew a goose. But there was really more on it than on some of the turkeys, which were rather small.
¹⁴
(
Capt Charles Baxter
)

Like troops in Mesopotamia, those chasing the elusive von Lettow-Vorbeck around East Africa were also enjoying a lull in the fighting. This was because the Germans had slipped into Portuguese territory on 25 November, which signalled the failure of British forces, under Gen van Deventer, to prevent such a move. The Schutztruppe now numbered only some 300 Germans and 1,700 Askaris. But these were the fittest men von Lettow-Vorbeck had and for the remainder of the campaign he would rely on mobility rather than fighting strength as his chief weapon. During December the Germans re-equipped with weapons and ammunition by raiding Portuguese garrisons, the latter’s forces being too weak and disorganised to prevent this. At the same time British forces did little to assist their ally and were content to patrol the frontier, increase their hold on German East Africa and ready their forces for a new campaigning season. To prepare for this, new recruits to the King’s African Rifles were put through their paces at training camps such as that at M’bagathi, 12 miles west of Nairobi. Here Lt J. Elliott (3rd/6th KAR), the machine-gun training officer, had a more eventful Christmas than he anticipated:

Xmas 1917 and New Year 1918 were great celebrations. We did a bit of riding, running down the zebras which were in thousands near us, a bit of shooting getting a buck or two, and spent the nights trying to sleep in the heat. One night I had dozed off when I was awakened by the feeling that I was being struck by thousands of red-hot needles. I lit my lamp and jumped out into the open for the banda and every inch of me, bed and everything was a moving mass of red ‘safari’ ants . . .

Hell! I broke open the Q.M. Stores and slept under the stars that night, and I was a mass of minute red punctures the next morning, but the ants had moved on and the Mess had a good laugh at me . . .

The Governor General dined with us one night, and as there were nine Scots in the Mess the G.G. suggested an eightsome reel, and, of course, a request from him was an order. One got the pipes skirling and the other eight of us danced the reel on the mud floor with the temperature over 90 degrees in the hut. The dust rose in clouds and I can remember the G.G. standing in the anteroom hut with field glasses fixed to his eyes trying to see us through the dust.

Of course, the campaign in East Africa, like those in Mesopotamia and Salonika, witnessed many more casualties caused by disease than by enemy action. As far as possible the worst cases were taken out of theatre by hospital ship. Many of these men would spend Christmas 1917 in South African hospitals, such as No. 3 General Hospital at Durban:

Christmas Day was rather dull – just an extra good dinner and nothing more – except for a few evergreens and flags scattered about the ward. I always thought Xmas in hospital was one long orgie of merriment and was rather disappointed. We had a few small gifts from the Durbanites, of which the most useful was 10/- each from the Turf Club. There was considerably more excitement on the 27th when the tent I was in consisting of three marquees joined together, and containing about 30 patients caught fire about one o’clock in the morning and in about ten minutes was burnt to the ground. Nobody was hurt, but the difficulty was to find accommodation for us, the hospital being very full; and we sat around in a lettuce patch in pyjamas and slippers while they discussed the situation. For me they found a very comfortable bed in the Sgt. Majs tent, but most then had to share the few mattresses that were rescued from the fire on the floor of the mess tent, a hard bed but perhaps better than a bed of lettuces. The next day they scattered us among various wards. I am now in what was a drill hall . . .

The people I met at Durban last time have been to see me and I have not wanted for cigarettes, fruit and literature. Since I have begun to get about a bit I have been to see them and had some whiskey and soda and been for a very decent motor ride.
¹⁵
(
Sgt Roland Mountfort, 25th Royal Fusiliers
)

Peace at Last! Christmas 1918

I wish to remind all ranks serving under my command that during the trying and unavoidably extended period that must elapse before the demobilization of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force can be expected, the good name of the British Army depends upon the individual conduct of each member of the Force in the various countries now in our occupation.

Courtesy and consideration to the inhabitants of these countries were never more essential, even during the period of active operations, than they are now, and I feel certain that I can rely on every member of this Force to maintain the traditions of the British Army in this respect.

In these countries special temptations exists with regard to Wine and Women. Both must be resisted. Our relatives and friends are anxiously awaiting our return home, and they will expect to find all those of us who have escaped wounds in action with our physical and our moral energies unimpaired. Treat all women with courtesy, but shun all undue intimacy. Remember that temptation, which when encountered is hard to resist, is often easy to avoid.

Final impressions are usually the more lasting; and on the behaviour of the troops during the present period will depend the final impression left by the British Army on the inhabitants of these countries.

The honour of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force is in your hands. I do not fear to leave it there.

General Sir Edmund Allenby’s Special Order of the Day, January 1919

For troops celebrating Christmas in 1918, the wishes for peace expressed by them and their comrades over the previous four years had finally come true. When the guns fell silent on the Western Front at 11 a.m. on 11 November, victory for the Allies was complete. The process began in the Balkans with the Bulgarians signing an armistice on 30 September, followed within weeks by the Turks (30 October) and Austria-Hungary (4 November).

This final march to victory had been a hard-fought struggle with the British and French having weathered a series of German offensives between 21 March and 15 July. The German gamble was played in an attempt to win the war before American manpower made itself felt on the Western Front. Transferring 23 Divisions from Russia, Ludendorff achieved a superior concentration of manpower for his offensive. However, he was forced to leave over one million German and Austro-Hungarian troops in the East to further German territorial ambitions in the chaos of Bolshevik Russia. Ludendorff’s first blow fell on the weakened British 5th Army who were thrown into confusion by the speed of the German assault. In a pattern that played itself out in each of the major German attacks of 1918, an initial successful breakthrough and advance was gradually checked by a combination of stiffening resistance by Allied forces, tiredness among the German infantry and the inability of their artillery and logistic support to keep pace with the advance. When the Germans were halted by French troops on the Marne in July, Ludendorff’s war-winning strategy was in ruins and his army no longer had any reserves of manpower to make good their heavy losses.

When the Allies went over to the offensive in August, the lead role was played by Haig’s forces. Despite suffering a manpower shortage brought on by the heavy losses of late 1917 and having large numbers of men deployed in other theatres of war, British, Dominion and Empire troops, supported by the French and Americans, went on to defeat the German field army in 100 days of offensive action, including the storming of the strong Hindenburg Line position.