1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [172]
The West Riding Brigade did not expect to play a very active part in the ‘show’ a few hours hence for, if all went well and the Germans in the trenches on their front were cut off by the troops converging behind, they would surely give up with no more than a token fight. The night turned chill as they waited for the dawn and the start of the battle, and sitting with their backs to the wall of the trench Arthur Wilson and his friend Walter Malthouse huddled together for warmth. Despite Arthur’s elevated rank of Corporal the two boys were inseparable. It was almost exactly a year since they had joined the Territorials and Walter, marginally senior in age if not in rank, was still apt in moments of levity to annoy Arthur by calling him ‘little lad’. This was a reference to the day of their mobilisation.
Cpl. A. Wilson.
We were at Scarborough on our annual camp on the Saturday of the August bank holiday weekend and I happened to be promoted to Corporal and that day I was acting Battalion Orderly Corporal, so I was with the Colonel in the Battalion office. In the afternoon a motor-cycle dispatch rider arrived with special sealed orders to say that the Battalion had to mobilise immediately and strike camp and return to York. There were loads of us there – West Yorks 5th and 6th Battalions, 7th and 8th Battalions, Leeds Rifles, and also the West Yorks Rifle Regiment from Leeds. Well, we packed up and we marched into Scarborough late at night. Of course with all the troops going through the town, and all the excitement, people were coming out of their houses to see what was going on – some of them already in their night attire. I was marching behind the Colonel, who was on his horse, and I had four men each side of me with fixed bayonets. Well, being Battalion Orderly Corporal I was carrying dispatches and my rifle was put in a truck, so that I was marching through Scarborough with these four armed men round me, while I was carrying the boxes. One old girl looked out of her door and she was standing there in her nightdress and she shouted out, ‘Yon little lad’s off to prison!’ Well, that was me of course. Walter thought it was a huge joke and he never let me forget it.
The Yorkshiremen had also brought their guns and, although they were hardly up to date, they were thankfully received. They were better than nothing but, like many others, the guns of Norman Tennant’s battery had seen service in the Boer War and also at the Battle of Omdurman.
Gnr. N. Tennant, 11th Howitzer Bty., West Riding Brig. (TF), RA.
They were five-inch breech-loading Howitzers – great, clumsy old weapons. And they fired 561b high explosive shells. You had to thrust the shell into the breech, ram it home, and then push in the charge that would fire it, which was explosive held in a canvas bag shaped something like a mushroom with two smaller charges in canvas bags behind it. They were called the ‘cores’ and it was hard physical work. The gun-drill was just as it had been in the old days and the weapon was really obsolete. Once you’d loaded the gun it was fired by pulling a lanyard and, of course, the guns themselves took a fair bit of man-handling. I did my share of gun-drill in the early days, but I was more than happy when I was made a signaller.
Major Paul Petrie was our Commanding Officer, and actually we’d lost him a few weeks before we went to France. It was a strange affair, because he wasn’t called Petrie then. His name was Steinthal, a German name, and he’d been forced to leave the battery, because the powers that be were suspicious about his antecedents and thought he might have German sympathies. He was in the wool trade in Bradford, and there were a lot of families in that business who were German from generations back. Anyway, he was forced to give up the command while they checked all this out and we got a nasty little fat short-arsed fellow in his place. Nobody liked him. He had a high opinion of himself and he used to give orders in a high-pitched, snarling