Loss and tragedy in Northern France

by Marie-Louise Jensen

Wherever you go in Northern France, there are memories of the first and second world wars. Even away from the main battlegrounds and cemeteries of the Somme, Verdun and Etaples, one still stumbles across scenes of battles and memorials. These are less infamous, but for those who fought and died, for the countless families that lost sons, brothers, fathers, they were significant tragedies.

My sons and I like to visit Dieppe; a charming little fishing port, easily reachable with the ferry from Newhaven. But this spot and neighbouring Pourville has seen its share of death in battle.
On August 19th , 1942, almost exactly 74 years ago, if I can trust my arithmetic, 4,963 brave Canadian soldiers set out for France. The allied forces looked forward to liberating France swiftly, but had miscalculated the German defences grievously, to the heavy cost of Canada. In a short battle, 807 Canadians perished and nearly 2,000 were taken prisoner. I can't even imagine the despair of those that survived, to have lost so many.
The map below shows the three points of attack at Dieppe, Pourville and Puys:

There are numerous plaques and testimonies to the fallen for those who take the time to linger on that beautiful coast and remember it was once the scene of dreadful slaughter and loss.

There is also a beautiful memorial garden for the Canadians who were lost, tucked just behind the sea front and below the chateau: 

I imagine many Canadian families came to visit in the aftermath of the Second World War which ran on for another three tragic years after this battle.

Today, aside from the memorials, the sea front is a happy, peaceful place, bustling with holiday makers, children, families and anyone else who enjoys a stroll along the promenades. We spent much of our own holiday at the beach at Pourville, which we love, and even experienced our own small loss and grief when the result of the EU referendum reached us. We were deeply touched that day to know that there were those in Pourville who were also grieving: enough to take down the French and Canadian flags that normally fly alongside the British flag and to lower ours to half mast:

Sapper Smith's Gallipoli diary, by Clare Mulley

Last weekend marked 100 years since the start of the First World War’s tragic Gallipoli land offensive, aimed at securing the strategic peninsula in the Dardanelles - the vital sea route to what was then the Russian Empire. It was the first combined naval-army operation in history, but both offensives were effectively repelled by Turkish forces. After eight gruelling months, Allied forces had to be withdrawn to Egypt. This was a serious defeat with significant political and military repercussions, and an estimated over 60,000 men from Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand killed and possibly 87,000 from Turkey, as well as huge numbers dying from disease.

My grandfather, Alfred Smith, a naturally quiet and peaceful young man, was among those who served at Gallipoli. Having worked in the local post office in Malton, Yorkshire, before the war, Alf had chosen to enlist with the Signals Division of the Royal Engineers, serving his country by laying the insulated telephone cables that would enable rapid military communications, and as a signaller himself.

My grandfather, Alfred Smith's 1915 war diary

Alf's war-time diaries start on 14 April 1915 when he left Biggleswade to join the ship that would transport him across the Bay of Biscay; ‘sick’ he scribbled in pencil. He then continued to the African coast, ‘Boxing contest aboard ship’; and past Malta to Alexandria in Egypt. From there he was sent to Imbros, now Gökçeada, the largest Turkish island in the Aegean, just across from Gallipoli, where he watched the ‘checking of Dardenelles by warships’. His diaries are never effusive, at most four short lines a day, with more space given to notes on signal flags and so on, but they provide a fascinating glimpse into his months at Gallipoli.

Because of its strategic location, Imbros had been retained by the Ottoman Empire in 1913 when the other Aegean islands were ceded to Greece. However the island remained under Greek administration. The first Allied attack on the Dardanelles had been launched in February 1915, followed by more sustained action a month later. During the battle, according to an account by the Ottoman General Staff, ‘all telephone wires were cut, all communications with the forts were interrupted’, but the enemy forces rallied and the British fleet was forced back, giving a huge morale boost to the Ottomans. Over the following month Allied ground forces assembled in Greece and Egypt, tasked with eliminating the Ottoman artillery so that Allied minesweepers could clear the way for the larger vessels to return. The Royal Engineers were also sent in to lay communication lines. However, a month’s delay allowed the enemy to prepare effective defences. The land campaign was launched in late April, with appallingly heavy casualties on both sides from the start.

Alfred's diary, April-May 1915

It was now that Alf’s ship arrived in the area. Although his was not an active combat role, he would soon find himself serving under fire. In early May, still onboard ship, he noted the ‘heavy bombardments’, and reported watching ‘severe fighting all morning’ on shore. Nevertheless, whenever there was a lull in the fighting and he was not sending cables, Alf managed to swim from the ship or listen to piano on deck. They docked on 19 May, and for the first few weeks Alf’s diary is filled with the heavy work of laying cables, as well as cleaning rifles, blue skies, desert winds, and ‘rumours of pay’.

The battles continued through the spring, and by mid-June Alf was noting ‘heavy bombardments’ again, and on 1 July, ‘shells falling all day… near our dug out. One, just behind, killed two men and eight horses’. Later that week he witnessed a troopship torpedoed and sunk in five minutes, and after that there is little let up in the bombing. ‘Turks using incendiary shells’ he wrote on 22 July, ‘which fired gorse on left flank’. Alf chose not to dwell on the horrors he must have witnessed, although he recorded when one friend was killed while bathing, and others were killed or wounded during the shelling of the signals camp. A few lines later he noted that ‘fresh fruit is obtainable’. Small pleasures had become remarkable.

In August Alf was sent to Suvla Bay on the mainland peninsular, five miles north of the Anzac sector, as part of the final British attempt to break the deadlock of the Battle of Gallipoli. Fortunately, he was in the second landing. Had he been in the first, his chances of survival would have been slim as wave after wave of men were shot down as they disembarked. The land there even today is full of bones and spent bullets among the broken seashells. With no picture of the wider battle strategy, Alf's diary comments only on the action nearby, the courage of the Australians, casualties among his signals staff colleagues as they worked to repair and extend communications, and the consolation provided by their meagre pay, mostly spent on cigarettes.

Alf's Royal Engineers cigarette case

The failure of the August Offensive finally showed the Allied leadership that the Gallipoli campaign could not be saved, but the knowledge was slow to effect change on the ground. Alf was still there when autumn brought relief from the heat, but gales presented new problems. He was now tormented by ‘dust and wind’ and often ‘terribly cold’ at night, even after second blankets had been issued. The dugouts flooded when the rains arrived, and a friend died from hyperthermia during one freezing period.

From late September through to December Alf was busy filling in old dugouts and digging in new foundations, helping to mend roads, make mortar and lay bricks as they shifted camp, as well as spending long days laying new cables. He must have been extremely fit. Perhaps it was a relief to work hard physically, although he was saddened to have to destroy ‘an old Turkish house, rather fine old place which has had very fine gardens’. His humanity shows in such details. He used his rare days off to inspect a downed aeroplane, explore the local town, help some fishermen to haul in their nets, and bring back sour oranges picked from roadside trees. 

,

Alfred Smith, front right, and friends from
the Royal Engineers Signal Corps,
Imbros, November 1915.

A black and white photo shows Alf and five sun-tanned pals in front of their heavy canvas tents back on Imbros in late November, all in shirt-sleeves and army trousers, one wearing a Fez, and each with a pipe or cigarette clamped into their mouths. The British Cabinet confirmed the military decision to evacuate in early December. Alf was finally shipped out to Egypt, heading for the ‘Cleopatra Camp’, two days after Christmas. ‘Not a bad ship,’ he wrote, if ‘somewhat crowded’. He would spend the rest of the war laying cables and sending signals from Egypt and Palestine.

Alf had a hard war, losing many friends and, while in Egypt, contracting the malaria that would plague him for the rest of his life. However he was fortunate to have been accepted into the Royal Engineers and, unlike so many, to survive both the Gallipoli campaign and the rest of the conflict. His greatest achievement, he said, was to have done his duty without having had to kill anyone. In 1919 he returned to work for the Post Office, moved to London, married his sweetheart, and in 1930 became father to my mother. Like many, he rarely spoke about his experiences or elaborated on his diaries – but he did not destroy them either.

Alfred Smith's war medals: The 1915-18 Star,
The British War Medal 1914-1918, and the Victory Medal.

Along with a few possessions, photos and some letters, I have Alf’s service medals. Still kept in the small cardboard box in which they were posted to him are his British War Medal 1914-1918, and his 1914-15 Star, stamped on the reverse to ‘Spr; A, Smith.’ – a more modest name you could hardly imagine. He also received the beautiful golden Victory Medal with a great winged angel on the front, and on the reverse the inscription ‘The Great War for Civilisation 1914-1919’. This was never threaded onto its fine rainbow-striped ribbon, and it is clear that Alf did not choose to wear it. Indeed I wonder how much any of his medals saw the light of day; my mother says she never saw them during his lifetime. Perhaps as these were fairly standard medals he did not seem himself as a hero, or perhaps he could not share his nation's official sanction of the conflict, having witnessed slaughter on such a scale to so little end at Gallipoli.

Back of Alf's Imbros, 1915 framed photograph

Alf's 1915 photograph, however, of himself and his mates from the Royal Engineers, who all courageously served during the Gallipoli campaign, was carefully dated, annotated with their names and home towns on the back, and framed with a hook to be hung on a wall. The photo is yellowed from exposure to the light, and was clearly highly prized. Alf died when I was a child and I never spoke to him about his war-time experiences, however I think this says much about how my gentle, very decent grandfather chose to remember his war. 

I would be very interested to know if any readers have inherited similar papers, photographs or possessions?

c. Clare Mulley

www.claremulley.com

'Christmas - Ritual and Remembrance' by A L Berridge

We used to have my grandparents over for Christmas Day. I didn’t realize my grandfather was nearly blind or that his deafness dated from the Somme, and can only remember the frustration of watching ‘The Towering Inferno’ while he sat four inches from the screen and turned round after an hour to ask in a hoarse whisper, ‘Is there a fire?’

Yes, I hate myself now. But it wasn’t only my grandparents’ own history that I missed, and I was always puzzled when at the end of the meal my grandfather would raise his glass and make a solemn toast to ‘Absent Friends.’ The gravity whizzed straight over my childish head, and it was many years before I realized we weren’t just drinking to family in Canada for Christmas, but to people who were actually dead.

It seemed a strange way to celebrate what should be a happy occasion, but Christmas is a time of ritual togetherness, and when everything else is the same we feel more acutely the sense of what is lost. The first Christmas after bereavement is terrible, with every little treat an aching reminder of those no longer there to enjoy it, but as time goes on the season becomes a pleasure rather than a pain, a way of keeping our loved ones alive and with us in memory. This year (as every year) I’ll be preparing sprouts and stuffing to the sound of 'Carols from Kings’, and smiling at the memory of my father.

But there's more to this than any one individual's recollections. Ritual is a repetition of acts performed in the same way over the long parade of years, and in its performance we are opening the door to history. That the Commons doors should be slammed in Black Rod’s face at the opening of Parliament derives from the 17th century, that the Lord Chancellor should sit on the ‘Woolsack’ goes back to the 14th, and when we see these things done then we’re watching history.

We saw it in July when the board at Buckingham Palace announced the birth of Prince George. We can see it every day – in the lowering of a flag, the wearing of a Judge’s wig, the Changing of the Guard. When a Latin Grace is recited at High Table, when monks chant Plainsong, when a bugler plays the Last Post, then we are hearing it too. And when we take communion, or drop a penny in wishing well, or even say ‘Bless you’ to someone who sneezes, then we’re not re-enacting history, we’re living it for real.

Popular wishing well in Kyoto

It’s perhaps this last which matters most to historical novelists. It’s true we spend our time recreating worlds profoundly different from our own, but when we want to engage our readers’ emotions then we concentrate most on those things that are the same. Love, death, friendship, betrayal – everyone can identify with these, and empathize with those characters who experience them. I would argue that the same is true of ritual.

Obviously it’s harder in some periods than others. Not many of us have actually poked about in an animal’s entrails as a means of foretelling the future, and I can’t say I’ve ever made an offering to Athene, but even in the classical civilizations we can still recognize the familiar seeds of actions we perform today.

When someone ‘tempts fate’ by a careless remark I may not say ‘Absit omen!’ and ‘spit in my bosom’, but I might well cry ‘Don’t say that!’ and jump to touch wood. Different actions, but when Robert Graves described a character doing this in ‘I, Claudius’ then the jolt of recognition was just the same.

And as the centuries roll on it gets easier and easier. There are Christian churches where the readings still come from the King James Bible (1611) and the communion service is conducted by the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. There are (secret) places in England where Morris Dancing isn’t a re-enactment, but continuation of a tradition handed down from generation to generation to keep alive the pagan ritual. My own favourite annual Fair is the one at Bampton in Devon, which has been going on even before Henry III granted its Charter in 1258. It’s not a quaint re-enactment like a Victorian ‘Christmas Fayre’, it’s a real county trade-meet which has quite simply never stopped. 

The Bampton Mummers at this year's Charter Fair

Ritual has a way of surviving, particularly when it’s fun. I doubt we’d really bother to ‘Remember, remember the 5th of November’ if it didn’t have fireworks and a bonfire thrown in – but we do, and it’s one of our strongest links to the past. In the Sussex village of Lindfield they even have a Guy dressed like Fawkes himself and the Lindfield Bonfire Society lead it to its doom with 17th century speeches and cries from the crowd of ‘Down with Popery!’

But it’s not just Guy Fawkes we remember now, any more than it’s only Christ we think of at Christmas. The ritual has entered history in its own right, and ‘Bonfire Night’ links us to other centuries simply on the grounds that we have all celebrated the same thing. I remember experiencing a moment’s ‘double-take’ when Sergeant Timothy Gowing in the Crimea wrote of the Battle of Inkerman (5th November 1854) ‘That was keeping up Gunpowder Plot with a vengeance!’

It can even apply beyond the specific event being commemorated. Bonfires and fireworks were around long before Guy Fawkes, but it was my experience of November 5th that made it easy for me to write about them. Describing a display in 1640’s Paris for ‘In the Name of the King’ I had to remember that the fireworks were white rather than coloured, and arranged mainly in static set pieces, but the effect on the crowd was one with which we’re all familiar. They made the same noises of ‘ooh’ and ‘ah’, and my rustic narrator noted with wonder how ‘men with hardened faces and swords on their hips turned suddenly into children.’ 

From Claude Lorrain's Firework Series (1637)

But in Europe at least, the biggest ritualized event has got to be Christmas. Traditions vary between countries, and some have faded altogether, but the ritual is still so powerfully laden with memory that for many people it’s become something to avoid. Divorce, bereavement, a reaction against an oppressive religion – hotels do a roaring trade on December 25th as customers flee the haunting shade of Christmas.

It has the power to touch us like nothing else. This little video of Christmas in 1914 is only two minutes long, but it contains one image that hits me like a kick in the stomach.

For me it’s the hats. The tins of pudding are unfamiliar to me, as alien as the trenches themselves, but those hats are identical to the ones that fall out of crackers at every Christmas table in Britain. Their remembered flimsiness is suddenly so vivid that the jollity becomes unbearable, everything so real and immediate that I want to reach into the screen and grab the men out of it, anything to save them from the horrors that only we know lie ahead.

And Christmas is full of such ambushes, each a little sensory pool of memory to trap the unwary. The glittering decorations, the trees and fluttering candles, the taste of turkey and mulled wine, the smell of cinnamon and mince pies, the tearing of paper, the sound of carol singers, a Salvation Army band, the snap of crackers and the laughter of children. Even (heaven help us) bloody Slade. Memory catches in every particle of it, and the older we get the more we find nothing has been lost. If ritual is the doorway to the past, then on Christmas Day it’s gaping wide open.

And to history too. Mince pies may no longer contain meat – but a recent culinary experiment proved that few could tell the difference between the modern pie and those created by Mrs Rundle 160 years ago. Health-and-safety may have killed the idea of charms in the Christmas pudding, but crackers still contain their substitutes – just as they in turn are the modern equivalent of ‘pulling the wishbone’. It’s true that many of our Christmas traditions date back only as far as the 19th century and Dickens, but some are far, far older, and carols like ‘Good King Wenceslas’ and ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ are mediaeval in origin. The sole surviving manuscript of ‘Adam lay ybounden’ is dated to the fifteen century, and the song itself is believed to be even older. Listen to such things, and you won’t be going back just to your own youth – but to the childhood of Henry Tudor.

Fragment of the surviving MS of 'Adam Lay Ybounden'

That doesn’t always help when we’re writing about places with their own traditions, but my own favourite Christmas ‘ingredient’ is universal to all the so-called ‘Christian countries’. It’s rarer now, and whether we personally experience it depends entirely on the town or village in which we live, but to me it’s the most magical of sounds, and one that spans the years like no other. In 17th century Paris it would have been uttered most dominantly by the voices of Marie, Jacqueline, Gabrielle, Guillaume, Pasquier, Thibaud and the Sparrows, but the same kind of sound rang out from besieged Sevastopol in 1854, and can be heard today in every city in Europe. 

This sound. This. You don’t need to be Christian to appreciate the gladness of this, or to share in the experience that’s been enjoyed across the centuries by rich and poor alike. This is the very sound of history, and if December 25th takes us back down the tide of memory, then in my mind it does so to the sound of Christmas bells. 

***

A L Berridge's much less sentimental website is here.

Her shameless appeal to Christmas charity for soldiers without graves is here.

The rest of her is probably somewhere else scoffing mince pies.