2352 SAPPER FRANK H.W. HOLMES

2nd/1st (West Riding) Divisional Signal Company Royal Engineers
Later 482323 62nd Division Signal Co.

Notes Compiled July 1976

PAGE TWO

The Division was soon established in and about a village named Bus-les-Artois, set in gently rolling country with a little village every two or three miles or so.

Headquarters was in a chateau in the grounds of which we DRs had the use of a hut – a light timber construction covered with wire netting and roofing felt. We used this for cooking and eating and some of us slept in a gardeners cottage nearby. In an upper room were two layers of wire netting beds and as I slept in one next to the glass-less windows it was on this bed that I first felt the patter of tiny feet across my legs as the rats came up the ivy and roamed around in search of our ‘iron rations’ – hard biscuits in a bag (excellent rat bait but soon useless to men).

The old hands we met had many tales to tell. One was of a man who disappeared one night in the chateau woods after some shelling and it was not until the leaves fell that his body was discovered in a tree top.

We were much impressed by some Holt Caterpillar tractors – the first I had ever seen – parked near us. They had displaced horses in some of the batteries, but there were not many of them and their engines never seemed to me to run very smoothly.

On one of my runs I found myself following a GS wagon with a load of bodies wrapped in blankets and their boots showing at the back.

There was some confusion over the pronunciation of place names. Generally, they were anglicised, but Mailly-Maillet brought us a laugh. When the O.C. picked up his phone and asked the operator to "give me Mailly-Maillet exchange" he got the answer "But this is your exchange sir."

It could have been about this time that I had my first field-bath. Strictly, it was in a tent, in which some enterprising individuals had dug a hole, lined it with groundsheet, and put in some hot water. Although I was permitted to join them as a mere visitor arriving when the work had been done it was a privilege to go in third – or was it fourth?

It was from Bus that we made our first runs into the battle area. The system was for the Corps HQ DRs to run forward to the Divisions, and the divisional men to the Brigades, the further communications being by men on foot. From Bus one our routes lay in part on a road and on the top of a wide plateau which had been under observation (followed, of course, by fire) by the Germans until our side had erected a sackcloth screen to cover our movement.

Our destination lay to one side of this road, so we had to leave our bikes and complete the journey on foot, over ground which had seen such bitter fighting a few months earlier. All this area and for miles around, the earth had been churned into dust, rained into mud, burst up again, and scattered time after time – with all that had been upon it, living or dead. No building, not a tree, had survived, and all that still stood were some stumps and stakes which had supported barbed wire and perhaps some of the wire itself where it had retained its original coiling and had not been chopped into short lengths. Littered over all this desolate, tortured landscape, were pieces of wagons, limbers, water carts, broken rifles, unexploded shells, shells which had ejected their shrapnel but had not fragmented, scraps of shell with razor sharp saw tooth edges – and corpses.

We had all read of how the tide of death which had been set in motion on 4th August 1914 had risen at 7.30 on the morning of 1st July 1916 to an intensity of slaughter never reached before or since, Eleven British divisions – 100,000 men or more – left their trenches in the expectation and belief that they would find a weeks unbroken bombardment by all weights of artillery putting over some 40,000 tons of shells had eliminated the forward Germans and that they had merely to walk forward and occupy the enemy lines. But at the end of the day their penetration was nil and 57,000 of them had become casualties, 20,000 of these being dead. More losses in one day than in the whole of the Crimea campaign or in the entire Boer War.

By the time the 62 Division reached this area it was frozen hard, for the late months of the 1916-17 winter were the most severe for a generation or more. Some of the July dead had been buried, others lay merely under a scattering of the earth thrown on by later shell-bursts.

One of my most vivid mind-pictures of this area is of an unbattered khaki-clad figure laden with equipment lying face down on his bayoneted rifle held at the ready, with a mere sprinkling of frozen mud to cover him. And more than one tin hat I turned over in curiosity revealed a skull picked clean by rats and insects.

However, across this awe-inspiring area we made our way – bad enough by day and worse by night – following the duckboards which had been laid to make practicable the passage of this soft and slippery expanse of slime and provide a guide-line avoiding the innumerable shell-holes of all sizes, some dry and some water filled.

Our destination on this run was a signal office in a German dug-out which was officially known as OMA (O emma ack in Signals speech). This place made clear why 1st July had been such a costly failure.

Picture the area on the German side of the screened road where motor-cycling finished as a huge tea-cake rising gently in the middle and ending north side in a wide and shallow valley and on the south in the steeper valley before Thiepval and the Ancre. Before this tea-cake lay a wider valley joining the two mentioned.

In the last-named lay the railway from Albert to Arras and from this the Germans had laid a light railway right into and under the higher ground within these three valleys. From the tunnel, some hundreds of yards long and 30 or 40 feet below the surface, they had made chambers, alternately right and left, each capable of sleeping (on the usual wooden framed wire netting beds) a score or more of men.

From each of these chambers rose part way to the surface a flight of steps towards our lines but ending with a landing which ascended another flight inclined away from our side and leading to a long series of connected trenches. It had been on these empty trenches and perhaps the topmost flight of steps our bombardment had been expended whilst the Germans waited in safety below until the infantry assault began. And the bitterness of the tragedy is intensified by the knowledge that the nature of these defences was known on our side before the action began.

My first visit to this memorable place ended after nightfall. I had had trouble in finding it after much walking and was tired, so as there happened to be no despatches to be returned I obtained permission to spend the night there. There was a bed in a corner of the signal office and on this I thankfully lay – but the night was not entirely without incident.

I should explain (for not everyone knows the details) that by this time the Mills Bomb was in common use. This deadly device consisted of a cricket-ball-size case with grooves to make it burst into small pieces, packed with explosive and having a detonator actuated by a small pin driven down by a spring which operated when the little controlling lever at one side was released. This lever was held down by a split pin and the system was that when the bomb was about to be used the safety pin was pulled out so that as soon as the bomb left the throwers hand the side lever was released, the detonator pin struck the fuse, and five seconds later the bomb exploded.

I have already referred to the rats. These creatures were innumerable – they had much on which to feed. But I have never seen such big and bold ones as those which inhabited OMA – though they were courteous enough to move to one side if you met on the steps. The tunnels of OMA had planks for floor and roof but sides were usually of untrimmed round timber, spaced a few inches apart and a few inches in from the earth behind them. Before I fell asleep in OMA I noticed a few Mills bombs in the space between the wall poles and the earth but it was not until I woke for the day that I realised that the clankings and tappings I had heard in the night had resulted from the scamperings of rats over these bombs. And it was not until much later that I read of the casualties which had resulted from the rusting away of the safety split pin, which were subsequently made of brass.

It was on the road in the shallow valley on the north of this area that I first saw a case of shell-shock. I was passing a column of troops from which this young fellow appeared to have fallen out. He seemed to be just trembling with terror, turning this way and that, with another man apparently trying to steady him. There was nothing I could do, but shall never forget him.

The frost about this time was so severe that some of the shallower wells had frozen and water had to be brought from deeper wells further back. The usual water tank wagons were not sufficient for this, and extra tankers were contrived by laying a tarpaulin as a lining to an ordinary three-tonner. We cleaned two-gallon petrol cans and used them for our water and I remember trickles which splashed over during fillings freezing solid before they reached the bottom of the outside.

Late in February 1917 came rumours of a German retirement on our front and the 25th brought firm news that the Germans had withdrawn for some miles over a wide front. On their way they had destroyed almost everything which had remained. Even the fruit trees in the village gardens had been cut down – though some which had not been completely severed were pulled back to their normal spread and put in splints but as the area was fought over twice more it is unlikely that any survived the war.

The German retirement had been to their Hindenburg Line, a well-sited and well-built series of fortifications which they had constructed during the previous autumn and winter. Thus the early weeks of 1917 saw the 62 Division – and others – clearing roads and generally preparing for the next move. We had the handicap of living in the desolate shelterless wasteland which had seen so much battle in 1916 and also of suffering booby-traps large and small, from explosive fountain pens to hidden mines.

One mine, on the outskirts of some village the name of which escapes me, left a crater so huge that troops cut terraces in its sides, built a stage at the bottom over the water which drained into it, and used the place for boxing bouts and theatricals. The Australians were greatly angered when Bapume Town Hall, which they had thought to have been deliberately spared and which they were occupying, proved to have been mined and blew up.

Just off the Bapume – Arras road was a village named Mory, where five roads met. On one of them was a row of 6-inch howitzers which nearly blew us off your bikes when we passed them; and it was here that Bert Ewbank stepped from behind a lorry and greeted me. This is just by the way. It was at Mory that a louse saved a mans life. Half-a-dozen of us were sleeping in a gardeners lean-to shed outside some big house, using make-shift beds left behind by the Bosche. We were settling for the night when one fellow decided he preferred to have his bed to himself and got out to find the intruder and dispose of him.

As he bent over his blankets, candle in hand to make a search, we were roused suddenly by a might rushing roar at which we all instinctively jumped up. For a second this was followed by silence and then came a crescendo of innumerable cracks and crashes, in the midst of which a foot-cube paving stone came through our thin roof and landed in the very middle of the mans bed. A mine at the principal road junction in the village had gone up – and with it a wagon and a team of horses as well as the traffic man.

Other things happened at Mory. On the forward side of this place was a large barn in which a Casualty Clearing Station was established and duly marked with a Red Cross on the roof, but somebody thought that the level space between the barn and rising ground in front of it would make a good artillery position and soon two or three 9.2 howitzers were installed there. It was realised that this was against the rules, however, and the guns were taken away – but not before some of us had some disconcerting moments for one of our runs lay on the road across the rising ground mentioned, right in front of these big guns, the discharge of which was, even to those behind, somewhat upsetting, to put it mildly, whilst in front for quite a distance, it was definitely dangerous.

We ran a rather similar gauntlet not far from where, at a bend in a hedgeless lane, which was slightly higher than the surrounding fields, a 60-pounder gun had been placed, but the lie of the land made its barrel rest almost on the road itself. We never liked looking into that ugly snout as we approached and were thankful to leave it behind us.

I cannot recall with certainty the dates or even the sequence of many events but it was probably about this time that the 62 Division, like many others, closed up to the Hindenburg Line, on the usual basis of two brigades in the line and the others ‘resting’ (what a joke of a description!). One of my stations was with a brigade at Achiet-le-Grand, where the Arras-Albert railway had a branch line to Bapume. I found I could have to myself a dug-out under the ruins of the railway station. It had three tiers of three-high beds, and I chose the middle one of the nine.

The roads hereabouts were very battered and when I was called out one night with something for a unit near Miraumont, three or four miles away, I felt it would be best to walk. Most of my way would be along the railway, which had been shelled here and there but was fairly clear, and the map suggested that I might break off it for a short cut across open country to my destination. It was rough going, and when I tried to make my ‘short-cut’ I found it blocked by dense thickets of barbed wire, and I had to continue on the rail track. Walking at night on a semi-wrecked railway is not recommended as a pleasant pastime.

As a consequence of this I was very tired and slept soundly (even more so than usual) the next night so that when, some time in the small hours, an orderly came to call me to the signal office across the road for a run (I never learned where to) I heard no sound of him. This was hardly surprising, as he afterwards admitted, he simply called to me from the top of the steps and never even parted the gas curtains in the passage or made sure that I heard him.

The incident was reported to the O.C. and presently I was hauled before the officer in charge of the brigade signal office, Lieut. Womersley, from Halifax, whose words I shall never forget. "I have seen the O.C. and he says I am to stop you three days pay." Young as I was, I had enough court experience to know a defendant should always be allowed his say. I refused to accept this decision and asked to go before the O.C., Capt. Montgomery. This I duly did, and he told me that I must now give up my stripes and that if I refused I should have to go before a court martial.

At that time we knew there was a good deal of combing out going on and all who were fit enough were being transferred to the infantry so I thought discretion the better part of valour when he added that I could have my stripes back later. But I never did. I have also more pleasant recollections of Achiet-le-Grand, for the railway junction had three concrete ponds storing water for the locomotives, and in these scores of soldiers swam and sprawled during these warm spring days. And the fact that nobody had any swimming costumes (trunks had hardly been invented then) did not in the least disconcert either the men themselves or the nurses of the adjoining CCS taking their ease in the field just above the ponds.

Achiet has another, quite different, memory for me. By this time we had two of our men detailed for duty in the signal office, one for the morning and the other from middle day until morning. One bright morning one of the telephonists in the signals tent overheard suspicious sounds in German and we soon learned that they came from a German plane observing for a heavy gun in the distance searching for the near-by railway junction. His first round overshot the mark, his second about three minutes later dropped short, in the village. Our tent was in-between, and his third shot did not come for a quarter of an hours or so. Tin hats and a table top were negligible protection against nine-inch shells but were at least a little moral support. There were a dozen or so shells before he scored a direct hit on the Bapume branch line and the operation ceased.

Incidentally, it was at this junction, in a cutting, that a cook made his fire on top of an unexploded shell which ultimately went off, and sent him to hospital. At this period, we DRs were living in what could be called a reconstructed cottage. It had been of the usual timber frame with wattle and daub filling, but had had a near hit and been pushed off its foundations and stripped of its wall filling and its roof tiles. We could not put the frame back but we put the tiles back on the rafters and I forget what we did about the walls, but it was summer and we lived there very comfortably for a time in this drunken looking dwelling.

On 3rd May 1917 the 62 Div. were amongst those engaged in the first attack on the Hindenburg Line, at a place called Bullecourt. The brigade with which I was at that time endeavoured to set headquarters at Ecoust, a village in front of the field guns pracatically within sight of the Bosche. I had had to leave my bike on our side of Ecoust and I was walking back towards it through that village when I ‘hard one coming’. Such are the varied speeds of sound and thought and movement that when I first heard it I felt it would fall behind me – no, in front, wrong, in a house on left, wrong again, for it exploded on my right – and during all these expectations I had not had time to turn my head or take a pace. The headquarters was soon withdrawn from Ecoust.

Near here was a narrow sunken road (named on the maps – with grim foresight – L’homme mort) where an earth-covered shack housed the office of one of our units. I arrived here one soggy morning to find Ernest Crump, amidst all the mud and dirt, putting a magnificent shine on his leggings and buttons. It was not from here one night that a man on his own in a narrow trench would have been crushed by a tank if someone had not noticed him in time.

No success followed the Bullecourt action and our area went quiet whilst the Passchendale affair developed. Tanks had first been used on 15 Sept. 1916, and we were greatly impressed to see wrecked ones near Beaumont Hamel and others sunk in the mud there had been on each side of the Albert- Bapume road. It was dry by the time we saw it, but the mud had been incredible. We DRs used to carry a shaped bit of wood with which to scrape it off from between tyre and mudguard where otherwise it would build up until the wheel became immovable. I once got off my machine to do this mud-clearing and the bike stood up on its own in the mud.

The summer of 1917 was bright and there really were large areas thickly covered with bright red poppies. Our sector continued to be free from any major action but the infantry had no peace from raids both ways across No Mans Land, sniping and intermittent shelling. We DRs had a comparatively easy time – including some pleasant swimming in the flooded marshy area next to the Ancre – after that is, we had carefully explored it and found no barbed wire lurking below the surface.

We found it impressive to watch a family of tanks entrain. Their 30-ton capacity eight-wheeled flat wagons would be drawn into a dead-end siding, No. 1 tank would rive on to the first wagon and then lurch over the buffers from wagon to wagon the length of the train, with the remainder following in turn, one tank to one wagon.

Not much mention seems to be made of supply tanks, as distinct from fighting tanks, but they seemed to be very useful, as they carried supplies over trenches and shell-holes without any bother. They were simply flat bodies on caterpillar tracks, with a little cabin at the front for the driver.

There were times when we took a walk and examined some of the scenes of the 1916 battles. One afternoon Arthur Groocock (his brother, older, was our artificer) and I had a little fun with some German ‘Potato mashers’. These were their parallel to our Mills Bombs and consisted of a canister (about the size of a small tin of beans) of sheet metal (I think) with a wooden handle about a foot long. The handle was hollow and had behind a loosely fitting cap a pot ring attached to a piece of string and the system was to retain the ring when the bomb was thrown, the handle giving a little extra length to the throwers arm. The ring pulled the string, the string actuated the fuse and about four seconds later came the explosion. We found that if thrown into a water-filled shell-hole the explosion sent up quite a spectacular little fountain. Looking back I fear that if anything had gone wrong we should have had difficulty in avoiding being labelled ‘S.I.W.’ (self-inflicted wound to the uninitiated)

There were similar but much more impressive fountains when German shells fell into a filled section of the Canal du Nord, much further south, during our expedition into the French area in July 1918.

Our sanitary arrangements usually consisted of a simple trench surmounted by a wooden construction with three or more large oval holes in it. If circumstances permitted there might be a light sacking screen around the affair and a sheet or two of corrugated iron for a roof and sometimes there could even be a little screen between and above the holes.

One sunny summer day I had an SDR despatch and orders to deliver it personally to the staff captain of a unit which had its office on one side of a shallow sunken road. Conveniently on the opposite side of this road was one of these ‘sanitary arrangements’, but nobody had troubled to screen it. And there in solitary state sat the officer I sought. Should I approach him or should I wait until he returned to duty? Whilst I pondered this problem he solved it for me by completing his performance and coming to me with hand outstretched to receive my despatch and to wish me "Good morning."

It was that run which took me along a narrow road through a shallow valley. This road was hardly damaged at all and therefore an easy ride, but on my return I found in it two new shell-holes which left me only just sufficient track between them. I did not loiter here.

It was across some canal the locality of which I cannot remember that I saw disaster follow a clumsy piece of engineering. One side member of an intended bridge had been assembled on the bank from its many parts and the plan was to draw it across to the other bank b y means of ropes and pulleys attached to a scaffold or sheer-legs. Instead, however, of making use of any of the trees on the canal bank the teams of men who held ropes attached to the girder to keep it upright on its way across when it rocked, fell on one side, and bent and buckled. End of Act 1. The rest I never saw.

On the other hand, somewhere on the uncompleted Canal du Nord, the original civilian bridge and a German temporary wooden bridge, lay in ruins in the deep dry cutting. When our advance in 1918 reached this point again we made new tracks to a temporary site nearby, and in two or three days a New Zealand company of engineers had thrown across a 70 or 80-foot gap, a bridge which soon carried troops, lorries and even tanks.

It was not far from here, I think, that we came across a tank which gained some celebrity in one of the earliest tank attacks by advancing ahead despite all opposition but came to a sad end when it tried to cross the canal and sank the bridge. The crew must have drowned like rats in a basket.

This reminds me of the only German tank I ever saw. It seemed a clumsy thing, with a skirt almost down to the ground. It had been burned, and the skeleton of the driver still sat upright before the controls when I peeped inside the doorway.

It was somewhere near Vimy, I think, that we had a run which included a stretch of concrete road. It was quite exciting to compete with slimy mud on this on a wet winter night. Just as bad but more bumpy was a length of corduroy road. We were told it was Canadian foresters who showed how to make a road over mud by laying small tree trunks side by side across the direction of travel. The mud worked through however, and so we had skidding as well as bumps with which to contend.

The undamaged but much used country roads leading to the front had their problems. The central pave was nicely wide enough for a single lorry but the water bound strips of macadam could not well compete with lorry-wheels when two vehicles or town convoys of vehicles had to pass. Thus a motorcyclist found matters distinctly difficult when he encountered one of these concentrations of traffic, especially at night, with no lights anywhere.

There was one period when we regularly carried a basket of pigeons – a two-storey basket, slung on our back. At the infantry brigade headquarters the birds were transferred to smaller baskets and distributed amongst the infantry, we taking back the larger containers. I think the home lofts were at Corps Headquarters.

For a time in the summer of 1917 we had units on each side of the Arras-Baupaume road which we crossed by narrow twisting streets which had been cleared through the debris of the villages of Behagnies and Sapignies, on the outskirts of which many troops and vehicles were encamped. It was not until weeks later when almost everybody had left the district that in the middle of one night a mine went up at the narrowest point of one of these village streets. No casualties ensued and no further damage was possible in such a devastated district.

An outstanding event for us in 1917 was the attack on 20 November at Havrincourt, towards Cambrai. The preparations for this were without precedent. German planes were not prevented when they came over during the day and they duly reported the steady entrainment of men and material and the movement of traffic by road and rail (with lights by night) towards Passchendale in the north; but they were unable to mark the return of it all and more by night (without lights). Nor did they pierce the camouflage which covered the tanks and guns, with stores and supplies, all taking up positions in the darkness, towards Havrincourt.

The traffic on these little country roads was tremendous, and in one place an entry had been made into the dry brick-bottomed Canal du Nord, the construction of which had been halted by the war, so that it could take some of this extra traffic. But, looking back, it should have been a pointer to the inefficiency of the planning that no-one had required the removal of a sand-bagged shelter which, during the quiet time of the summer, had been built half across one of these slightly sunken lanes and was a serious obstacle to men and vehicles.

However, at 6-30 on the morning of 20 November, 1917, with 1,000 guns to support them, nearly 300 aircraft overhead, and nearly 400 tanks to lead them, 62 Division was one of the eight which went forward and took the enemy completely by surprise.

Our lot had marched forward about four miles from their assembly area, made what was at that time the record advance of 7,000 yards, and had taken all the objectives allotted to them. But Bourlon Wood and Hill, which overlooked the whole scene, had remained in German hands.

At the end of the day 62 Division and the others handed over to relieving troops, marched back their 7,000 yards and four miles, to their rest area, and had hardly taken off their packs when they were called out to do it all again. The Germans were attacking in increasing strength as they brought in fresh troops released by the Russian collapse; and within ten days they had taken back all the ground that had lost. They might well have taken much more but for the arrival of Americans who had been in France no more than a few days.

We had for a time a signal office in a German dugout in Havrincourt itself and it fell to me to be on duty there from time to time. One night others there included a telegraphist who was very timid and physically somewhat insignificant, an ex-P.O. man. Apparently something had gone wrong somewhere, but as it was no concern of mine I paid little attention at first when Capt. Montgomery came in, very cross. When he began heatedly to upbraid the unfortunate telegraphist I looked up, however, and was just in time to see him give the little man a clout on the head. The victim asked me to say nothing about it but I have never forgotten the incident, which could well have had such serious consequences for our company commanding officer.

Nor have I forgotten a much simpler incident in the same dugout when I saw a man fall asleep sitting on a six-inch wide board with his back against the dugout wall.

The duty of signal office DR was to receive and record all despatches, sort them and send the incoming ones by DR, usually three times a day. Sometimes a letter was brought in bearing the order, signed by a staff officer, for it to go by Special Despatch Rider.

At Havrincourt at this time our signal service was augmented by some King Edward’s Horse (South Africans), and so it happened that I was on duty one evening when the Bourlon-Wood counter attacks were developing and I had to send out a quick succession of SDR messages (probably because telephone connection could not be maintained). It was not long before I detected some unrest amongst these Horsemen so I seized an opportunity to go to their settlement. As I suspected, they were blaming me for sending them out with single letters and it was only with difficulty that I convinced them that normal despatches were saved to go in a bunch together, and that all those they had been taking separately had been too urgent to wait for the normal thrice daily round but had been ordered by a staff officer to go by special delivery.

There was a curious spirit pervading this Havrincourt engagement. A mine-crater blocked the road at our entrance to the village and although men of the Labour Corps came out (by lorry or steam wagon) to fill in the hole by pick, shovel, and barrow, at five o’clock they knocked off, packed up and went home.

It was by this mine-crater one afternoon that off-duty troops (including me) doing a little sight-seeing watched a gun-team struggling to drag an 18-pounder up the slope from the road to passable ground to avoid the mine-crater. Eventually the young officer in charge called to the bystanders. They only needed to be asked and the gun came up the bank in no time.

Frank H.W. Holmes
Notes compiled July 1976

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Further reading from Frank Holmes:

Recollections of Pontefract Part One
Recollections of Pontefract Part Two
Recollections of Pontefract Part Three
One Man in His Time - A Short Autobiography