At Ypres with Best-Dunkley

Thomas Hope Floyd

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• Publié par: urkoe
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 7
• Langue: English

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Project Gutenberg's At Ypres with Best-Dunkley, by Thomas Hope Floyd This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: At Ypres with Best-Dunkley Author: Thomas Hope Floyd Release Date: February 21, 2006 [EBook #17813] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AT YPRES WITH BEST-DUNKLEY *** Produced by David Clarke, Janet Blenkinship and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries) ON ACTIVE SERVICE SERIES AT YPRES WITH BEST-DUNKLEY By THOMAS HOPE FLOYD LONDON: JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMXX Garden City Press, Letchworth, Herts. TO A LL R ANKS OF THE SECOND-FIFTH LANCASHIRE FUSILIERS WHO FELL AT YPRES ON THE THIRTY-FIRST OF JULY, 1917 I D EDICATE THIS B OOK "... Henceforth These are our saints. These that we touched, and kissed, And frowned upon; These that were frail, yet died because the good Was overthrown. That they in one dread hour Were terrible Stains not their sainthood, nor is heaven less sure That they knew hell. How beautiful they are, How bright their eyes. Their hands have grasped the key Of Paradise! They hold it out to us, Our men, our sons ... To us The lonely ones." —THOMAS MOULT.[1] FOREWORD No doubt it will be thought that some apology is necessary for thrusting upon the public all this mass of matter, relating to many persons and episodes with whom and with respect to which they may feel that they are in no way concerned. I quite realize that my action may appear strange and uncalled for to the superficial observer. But I do not hold that view. I, personally, have always felt a desire to read this kind of literature. The Press does not cease to pour forth volumes of memoirs by leading and prominent persons—matter which is all wanted for a true understanding of the history of our times. But this is not enough. We require all the personal narratives we can get; and, in my opinion, the more personal and intimate, the better. We want narratives by obscure persons: we want to know and appreciate everybody's outlook upon public events, whether that outlook be orthodox or unorthodox, conventional or unconventional. Only thus can we see the recent war in all its aspects. The motives which have prompted me to publish this book have been well expressed by Dr. A. C. Benson in his essay on Authorship in From a College Window. In that volume there occurs the following striking passage: "The wonderful thing to me is not that there is so much desire in the world to express our little portion of the joy, the grief, the mystery of it all, but that there is so little. I wish with all my heart that there was more instinct for personal expression; Edward Fitzgerald said that he wished that we had more lives of obscure persons; one wants to know what other people are thinking and feeling about it all; what joys they anticipate, what fears they sustain, how they regard the end and cessation of life and perception which waits for us all. The worst of it is that people are often so modest, they think that their own experience is so dull, so unromantic, so uninteresting. It is an entire mistake. If the dullest person in the world would only put down sincerely what he or she thought about his or her life, about work and love, religion and emotion, it would be a fascinating document. My only sorrow is that amateurs of whom I have spoken above will not do this; they rather turn to external and impersonal impressions, relate definite things, what they see on their travels, for instance, describing just the things which anyone can see. They tend to indulge in the melancholy labour of translation, or employ customary, familiar forms, such as the novel or the play. If only they would write diaries and publish them; compose imaginary letters; let one inside the house of self, instead of keeping one wandering in the park!" These memoirs, then, consist mainly of extracts from my private diary and my letters home during those memorable days, spent in the Salient and its vicinity, between the Battle of Messines and the Third Battle of Ypres. The letters cover a definite period in the history of a great battalion and in the course of the war. As will speedily be noticed, the whole period was one of looking forward, practising and awaiting a great day which we all knew was not far off, but the actual date of which none of us knew until it was almost upon us. All this time our interests (and, perhaps, our fears!) were centred upon one man, the unpopular Colonel who, few of us guessed in those days, was destined to win the V.C. on "the day," going down in a blaze of glory which should ever associate his name with that battle. With that "day," which was for many of us the end of all earthly troubles and hopes and fears, or, at any rate, an end for many months, the story reaches its natural termination. In these pages I give to the public, for what they are worth, my own personal impressions of the people and things I saw and with whom I came into contact. I hope I have revealed the late Colonel Best-Dunkley to the public just as he was —as he appeared to me and as he appeared to others. I believe that in this I am doing right. "Paint me in my true colours!" exclaimed Cromwell to Lely. That is all that any hero—and Best-Dunkley was certainly a hero—can conscientiously ask. And I am sure it was all Best-Dunkley himself would ever have asked. He was a brilliant young man, endowed with a remarkable personality. It is right that his memory should be preserved; and if his memory is to be preserved it must be the memory of the Best-Dunkley we knew. The battalion which Best-Dunkley commanded has, since his death, achieved great things and acquired great fame under the still more brilliant leadership of his successor, Colonel Brighten; but we must never forget that it was BestDunkley who led it on the glorious day of Ypres and that it was the tradition which he inspired which has been one of the strongest elements of esprit de corps in the 2/5th Lancashire Fusiliers. All who served under Best-Dunkley remember the fact with a certain amount of pride, however unfavourably his personality may have impressed itself upon them at the time—for "All times are good when old!" I am fully aware of the many imperfections of this book; but if it succeeds at all in vividly recalling to those who were in the Ypres Salient in 1917 the atmosphere of that time, and if it should encourage others to risk a similar venture, I shall feel amply rewarded. FOOTNOTE: [1] Quoted with Mr. Moult's permission. CONTENTS CHAPTER FOREWORD I OFF TO THE FRONT II THE PRISON III ENTER BEST-D UNKLEY IV MILLAIN V THE MARCH VI THE GENERAL'S SPEECH VII THE VALE OF ACQUIN VIII BACK TO THE SALIENT IX BILGE TRENCH X THE R AMPARTS XI MUSTARD OIL XII THE C ITY AND THE TRENCHES XIII R ELIEF XIV WATOU XV THE D AYS BEFORE XVI THE BATTLE OF YPRES PAGE vii 1 26 49 57 63 77 81 103 113 128 136 146 164 168 179 187 APPENDICES I MURRAY AND ALLENBY 227 II THE INFANTRY AT MINDEN III GENERAL R AWLINSON AND OSTEND IV EDWARD III AND THE ORDER OF THE GARTER V GOLDFISH C HÂTEAU 229 230 231 233 AT YPRES WITH BEST-DUNKLEY CHAPTER I OFF TO THE FRONT I had been to France before—in 1916, during the Battle of the Somme—but not as an officer; in 1916 I was a private in the Royal Fusiliers, and I had received orders to return to "Blighty" in order to proceed to an officer cadet battalion at Gailes, in Ayrshire, before I had been able to see what a front-line trench was like. So this, then, was my first experience of war—my "baptism of fire." I had seen and heard those magnificent bombardments up the line in 1916, and had gazed with awestruck admiration upon the strange horizon far away from my tents at Boulogne and Étaples, wondering what it must be like to be amongst it all, and expecting to be amongst it all in the course of a day or two; but, as I have already observed, I was recalled to England, and was not destined to be amongst it until the following summer. But now, at last, the experience, the great adventure to which I had been looking forward so long, was to be mine. I was gazetted a second-lieutenant in the 5th (Territorial) Lancashire Fusiliers on March 1, 1917; on March 26, I reported for duty with the 5th (Reserve) Lancashire Fusiliers at South Camp, Ripon, where I spent some unpleasant weeks amongst snow and mud; from Ripon the unit proceeded to Scarborough, where I rejoined it after having spent a couple of weeks in hospital, with tonsillitis, at the former place. Shortly after this, I received orders to proceed overseas, and returned to my home in Middleton Junction to spend my embarkation leave. That leave was spent in the happy way in which all such leaves were spent during the Great War, terminating with a visit to the Gaiety, in Manchester, in conjunction with my father and mother, where we saw a most enjoyable comedy entitled "The Two Miss Farndons." I bid farewell to my parents on Victoria Station at 10.35 that evening—Friday, May 25, 1917; and I then proceeded to the train which was to carry me away to England's capital. The following letter, written at Folkestone at 11.15 the following morning, describes my journey up to that moment: "I hope you and Father got home safely last night and are not worrying. My train left Manchester at 11.20. I had to change at Stockport. In neither case could I get a carriage to myself, but I managed to doze. When dawn broke we were in Northampton. It was 6.30 when the train arrived in Euston Station. I got a taxi across London to Victoria. There was an enormous crowd of military there, bound for France. People were seeing some