December 19, 2025 • 45 mins
We return to the subject of Forgotten Memoirs of the First World War and discuss The Years of Remembrance by Harold Maybury which was published in 1924. Maybury served in the ranks of the 2/4th Battalion South Lancashire Regiment in the 57th (2nd West Lancs) Division, on the Western Front in 1917 and 1918. We ask what the book tells us about the experience of the Great War and what value memoirs like these have to our understanding of the conflict.
Book: The Years of Remembrance by Harold Maybury (Published by John Walker & Co., Ltd.,, Warrington, UK, 1924)
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Episode Transcript
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SPEAKER_00 (00:10):
It's been a while since our initial episode
looking at Forgotten Memoirs ofthe Great War, and there was a
positive reaction to examiningthis very subject, with several
of you getting in touch tosuggest some more titles.
So I thought a few months laterit was about time we returned to
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the subject of Forgotten Memoirsand looked at another volume of
a lesser known account connectedto a soldier's experience of the
First World War.
Memoirs are an important part ofour understanding of the layers
of the Great War, especially inan era when all of the veterans
are gone, and the memoirsthemselves are all part of the
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importance of understandingpersonal testimony, something we
discussed recently in someepisodes on oral history.
The book for this episodelooking at forgotten memoirs is
The Years of Remembrance byHarold Maybury, and it was
published in Warrington in 1924by a small publisher connected
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to the local newspaper.
It was a book that I'd neverheard of until a book list of
Tom Donovan's, one of myfavourite secondhand military
book dealers.
He put a list out some monthsago and I saw this memoir on
there, and what drew me to itwas that it was an account
written by a soldier who hadserved in the second fourth
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battalion of the SouthLancashire Regiment.
Now that's probably a littleknown battalion of the Great
War.
Why was I interested in that?
Well one of the veterans that Iknew, James Leslie Lovegrove,
Smiler Lovegrove, had served asan officer in this battalion,
gone out with them in nineteenseventeen, and served until he
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was wounded in the fighting onthe Hindenburg line the
following year.
And although I had theregimental history, I wasn't
aware that there was thispersonal account by another
member of the same battalion.
And Lovegrove, of course, was anofficer, he was a second
lieutenant, commissioned, I meanhe looks about twelve in the
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photographs of him, and I havehis account of his service which
I am going to use for a futurepodcast, but that's the view
from the position of a platooncommander, whereas this account
is from the view of an ordinarysoldier in the ranks.
So who was the author?
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Who was Harold Maybury?
He was born in Warrington ineighteen eighty-nine, from what
I can find out.
There's no kind of onlinebiography of him.
This is where I've put togetherinformation from the different
sources to kind of find out alittle bit more about the man
behind this memoir.
And by the time of the 1911census he was living at 55
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Lovely Lane, Warrington, and wasan advertising clerk to a soap
manufacturer there, possibly theCrossfield Company or the Lever
Brothers who made the famoussunlight soap.
And you see a lot of adverts forthat soap in wartime
publications.
He appears to have been anaspiring journalist as well as
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working as an advertising clerk,as some of the articles he wrote
at the very beginning of theFirst World War appeared in that
Warrington local paper TheExaminer in nineteen fourteen,
and they later published thebook itself, but he didn't
volunteer straight away.
He was not one of those thatresponded to that early call for
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volunteers.
And who knows why?
I mean not everybody did.
Some that were in good, safejobs bringing in money, perhaps
his parents depended on thatmoney.
Not everyone stepped forwardstraight away.
And what he ends up doing isjoining the Derby scheme in
December of 1915.
And the Lord Derby Scheme wasbrought in during that winter of
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1915-16 as the introduction ofconscription was just round the
corner, and this was essentiallyyour last chance to volunteer
before conscription, and therewould be some advantages in
doing that.
You could choose which regimentyou went to, you could defer
your entry into the army for ashort while, and they would give
you an armband which you couldwear on your civilian clothes,
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so that no one came up to you inthe street and suggested that
you weren't doing your bit.
You'd registered for militaryservice, although you weren't
necessarily going in straightaway.
So he does that, and afterwhatever amount of period that
he had between signing up for itand actually going into his
unit, he joined the SecondFourth South Lanks sometime in
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that either winter of 1915-16 ormore likely early 1916 when they
were based at Ashford, close towhere I now live, and they'd
been at Canterbury prior tothat, and then he went off for
further training elsewhere.
Now he didn't get to France, aswas common with the rest of his
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battalion, until February 1917,because the 2nd 4 South Lanks
were part of a wider formation,the 57th Division, which we'll
come to later on, that was heldback on home service, as was a
number of divisions, and notsent overseas until that late
stage of the First World War.
We kind of forget this reallythat not every division went
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over in the early phase of thewar.
Quite a few were held back until1917, and his battalion was one
of those units that sufferedthis fate.
And then he serves on theWestern Front.
We're going to look at his warservice through his memoirs.
The records indicate that he wasinjured on active service,
potentially wounded, and wasdischarged from the army in
January 1919 with a silver warbadge, aged 30.
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So he wasn't a youngster, hewasn't a young lad doing his bit
from the very beginning.
And later on, from what I candiscover, he worked on the
railways in Runcorn and at theWarrington Examiner's office.
He seems to have done a bit morejournalism in that interwar
period.
He married Jesse, hissweetheart, in 1921, and he died
on the twenty ninth of May 1943,still relatively young, perhaps
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because of his wounds in theGreat War.
There's no obituary for him, andI can't discover what his cause
of death was.
So there's still a lot we don'tknow about Harold Maybury.
But what I did find is thatthere is a photograph of his
grave on the internet, he'sburied in Warrington, and it has
the title of the book actuallyon his headstone.
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It says Years of Remembranceunderneath his name, a nice kind
of nod to the memoir itself.
So what does this book then tellus about his war through his
words, through his eyes, andwhat insights does it give to
the wider subject of the GreatWar?
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That's what we'll look at next.
The book Years of Remembrance isan unusual and important memoir
in a number of ways.
It's a voice from the ranks fora start, so this is the
viewpoint of an ordinarysoldier.
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He's not privately educated,he's not a commissioned officer,
he's there as part of the PBI,the poor bloody infantry,
serving in the ranks of aninfantry section, in an infantry
platoon, in an infantry companyof an infantry battalion.
So that's quite important.
And he was not, as we said, anoriginal 1914 man who responded
to Lord Kitchener's call for theraising of Kitchener's army, but
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he's a Derby man who joins underthe Derby scheme, and he joins a
territorial battalion, but not afirst line territorial
battalion, not one that went outstraight away, but one that was
formed during the war itself.
Because when the war broke out,all of these territorial
battalions in the Britishregiments of the British Army
became their own mini regimentsand they formed normally three
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battalions.
So in the case of the 4thBattalion, the South Lancashire
Regiment, that territorialbattalion, its original unit
became the 1st 4th, and theywent overseas and eventually
became part of the 55th WestLanx Division.
And then a 2nd 4th and a 3rd 4thBattalions were formed.
The 2nd 4th would go on tobecome part of the 57th 2nd West
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Lancashire Division, and the 3rd4th would be a home service unit
that would then supply recruits,replacements to the other two
battalions.
So the 2nd 4th South Lanks wasone of these units that was
probably formed initially tojust protect the shores of
Britain.
There was this continuous threatthroughout the war of some kind
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of German incursion, not so muchan invasion, but an incursion,
and a lot of troops were keptback to defend Britain, to act
as depot units, reserve units,just in case.
And the 57th Division was one ofthose.
I think there was also aconsideration by the War Office
that some of these units were,and this is not my view, this is
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theirs, were kind of dredgingthe bottom of the barrel, and
whether all of these men wouldbe exactly suitable to be sent
overseas was perhaps a matter ofsome discussion.
But the huge casualties on theWestern Front meant that
eventually all of these kind ofunits would be sent overseas in
some capacity.
And the 57th Division formed inAugust 1915 that was linked to
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the 55th Division, the firstWest Lanx who had gone over much
earlier, its units split up,then it was reformed in 1916 in
time for the Battle of theSomme.
It had formed around Canterburyin Kent, some of its units in
Ashford, like the Second FourthSouth Lanks, and then it was
based in Surrey before the wholedivision moved to France in
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February of nineteen seventeen,and this is where Harold
Maybury's war began, and this ishow he begins the memoir.
As far as the eye could see, thewasteful ocean lay placid and
calm except for the white foamtipped waves lazily lapping
against the sides of a transportbound for the shores of La Belle
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France.
It was two o'clock in theafternoon, and the white grey
cliffs of dear old England hadreceded from view, leaving only
a memory pensive and wistful,which we were to carry through
many strenuous days.
Overhead a winter sun shone highin the heavens like a ball of
fire, a few seagulls criedmournfully, and afar off a ship
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sirens sounded a warning note,and a trail of smoke heralded
the passing of a ship over thisvast expanse of water.
Nought else could be seen excepttwo sharp nosed British
destroyers throwing out fromtheir steel grey funnels dense
black clouds of smoke.
Like greyhounds they raced overdancing waves, omnipient,
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powerful, a mighty unit ofBritain's naval power, keeping
watch the while against lurkingunderseas craft.
So we can see straight away thatthe author is he's not Wilfred
Irwin, he's not SiegfriedSassoon, but equally this is not
a straightforward account wherehe says I did this, I did that.
He's got some ability to write,and being a newspaper man, I
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guess that was to be considered.
But what we see as he movesforward in his story, and we're
going to follow it, is thatleaving the port, heading to
France and arriving on thoseFrench shores, his battalion are
sent to the railhead, and likeso many soldiers before them,
they begin their journey towardsthe Western Front.
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And he says Leaving BoulogneStation, one journeys through a
succession of long tunnels, vilesmelling, with a stench of mud
from a river bed, combined withsulphur fumes from a locomotive
primitive and old fashioned,which snorted and jerked
horribly every few yards.
The train rumbled on into thelight to reveal a countryside,
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drab, dismal and common, formiles one journeyed through pain
tracts of uncultivated landwithout sign of human
habitation.
A few stunted trees devoid ofleaf and bird life added to the
desolation, and in placesoverflowing dikes transformed
plain into marshland and lake.
Occasionally one came across athatched farmstead, lattice and
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shuttered, a flock of sheepgrazing on tufted grass that did
not look good to eat, seekingtheir meat pessimistically from
God.
A windmill motionless and in astate of dilapidation stood out
in contrast to the barren anduneven landscape.
Now and then we rumbled througha wayside station, where a
sleepy porter rattled milk cans,cleaned the lamps, and slowly
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bestirred himself on this earlygrey February morn.
The rain fell with steadypersistency.
The first station of importanceon the line is Saint Omere.
So Harold's train journey tookhim and the lads from his
battalion into the heart ofnorthern France close to the
battlefield area, towards thatlong static front sandwiched
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between Flanders and the areaclose to Lons, Lens and Arras,
the so called forgotten front.
And this was a part of the linethat had seen fighting in the
early stage of the Great War,had settled down to static
trench warfare, had seenoffensive after offensive in
1915, but by early 1917 it was aquiet sector, it had been used
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as a nursery sector in theearlier stage of the fighting on
the Western Front to bring innew units to kind of inculcate
them into trench warfare, andthat was exactly what was about
to befall the fate of these menin the 57th Division who were
being sent into that so-calledquiet sector to do exactly the
same thing, learn what trenchwarfare was about, learn how to
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take over the trenches, to holdthe trenches, be relieved in the
trenches, and all the otherthings that was required for a
unit on the front line on ashooting war that the Western
Front had become by nineteenseventeen.
And here Maybury and hiscomrades of the Second Fourth
South Lanks arrive at Saley surla Lis, located in the flat
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terrain, around the Lis Riveritself and behind the lines in
that northern part of the frontof northern France.
And this is what he says aboutarriving in that area.
A few yards from the riverstands Sale Church, a
magnificent pile with squaretower pierced by loopholes and
battlements resembling someancient fortress of a bygone
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age.
Part of the masonry is shellridden, its clock face is
smashed beyond repair, and agreat hole lays bare its
interior.
Instead of a place of worship,it is now a Red Cross hospital,
albeit in earlier stages of thewar it was used as a place of
internment for German prisonersprior to them being sent to
camps further inland.
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Day was dying in the west, therewas a touch of frost in the air,
and the white silent snowglistened like a myriad jewel.
A French poilu, erect andstately, stood at his post
guarding the bridge, his bayonetreflecting the blood red rays of
a sun sunk low down on thehorizon.
Gradually the men of the SecondFour South Lanks realized that
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they were now at the war.
This was the reality of themhaving enlisted all those years
before, and now finally, inearly nineteen seventeen, coming
to France, and he continues.
For two years this Lancastrianregiment had been trained to the
highest pitch.
It was efficient, and now it wasto achieve its objective, the
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holding of a little strip ofland on the western front.
When we had marched through thewoodlands and dells of dear old
Kent and Surrey, many of uspictured in mind's eye the days
through which we were to pass,of what that goal which we so
much desired would be like andhow our first moments under fire
would leave us.
In those far off days it seemedas if a long, long trail lay in
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front, the end veiled in a mistthrough which one could not
penetrate, as if a cloudobscured the sun, which we knew
must eventually pass away.
We wanted to make good, wewanted those two years to bear
fruit in glorious achievements.
We had been sowers, and now itwas harvest time, and God knows
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we realized that there was areaper stalking ahead, had been
stalking a lot more than twoyears in this land now soaked
with blood.
But I think no, I know we wereunafraid.
We left Sale regretfully, for itwas a place one might abide in
for a lifetime and still beinterested in.
Heading towards the front line,Maybury and his battalion moved
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into the forward positions onthis part of the forgotten
front, a flat part of the frontwhere a lot of the trenches were
breastworks rather than justtrenches dug into the ground,
and he goes on to describe wheretheir part of the trenches
fitted into the wider story.
The battle line in the WesternTheatre of War in March nineteen
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seventeen, if one had lookedclosely at the map, resembled
nothing so much as the outlineof a human face, and we were in
the position of what might betermed the tip of the nose.
The Bois Grenier and La Chapelled'Armontier sectors were the
most advanced positions of aline stretching from the Belgian
coast to the Swiss frontier.
To the right of Bois Grenier layFleur Bay, where the second
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tenth Liverpool Scottish andSecond Ninth King's Regiment
were entrenched.
On our left an Irish regiment,while still further away lay
Hoopline and the Ypsalient.
Away on our right past Fleur Baythe line curved towards Arras.
In a sense, therefore, ourposition was likened to a
jutting headland, a place wheremuch might happen, for behind
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our lines lay Armontier, behindthe enemies Lille, the
Manchester of France.
The distance between our linesand the enemy varied.
In one place near Cowgate Gap,it was not more than one hundred
and forty yards, at others fourhundred.
Both sides at a seeminglyimpassable barrier of vicious
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barbed wire entanglements,separating also in no man's
land, a stream ran much swollenby winter rains.
Behind us a wood stood stark andnaked, its bows blown away by
artillery fire, but it was animpregnable position for machine
guns and others of smallcalibre.
In nineteen fourteen thetrenches we were now in had been
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the scene of great slaughter,for it was here that the
remnants of the army of Monsmade its great and glorious
stand and succeeded in blockingthe enemy's advance to the
French capital.
In those early days theconditions must have been
terrible, for even on our adventthere was much rebuilding to be
done.
What it must have been likewithout duckboards, dugouts, and
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shelter of any description, onereally cannot imagine, for when
we arrived in places it wasimpassable with water, fowl,
rank and smelling of deadbodies.
Mud and slush was waist deep,and in our front line there was
a sad lack of protection.
The book is full of vividdescription like this, giving us
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a really interesting insightinto this static front at this
quite late stage in theconflict, and part of I think
his ability to do this was thathe was often attached to The
scouts and snipers section laterhe became a signaller, but he
was doing a lot of observinginto no man's land at this
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point, so this gave him theability to see the wider
battlefield that a normal Tommyjust going about the day to day
activities of trench warfaremight not have seen.
So he continues with his view ofwhat this front was like.
The majority of war readersimagine a British soldier's life
on the Western Front toconstitute an endless vigil of
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watching and waiting for thesight of an enemy, in a trench
protected by sandy walls ofearth, together with a blazing
away of ammunition at a foe inmuch the same manner as one
bangs at a bottle in a shootinggallery at a fair, only with
more risk and more deadlyconsequences.
One pictures too the sight of aBosch squealing camarader when
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he sees a long waving line ofbayonets confronting him, and
that he scurries like a rabbitif the odds are too great and
the British guns too strong forhis liking.
One thinks also of men embracedin deadly combat, the air full
of smoke, nostrils and throatchoked full of gunpowder, the
sound of men's voices in thethroes of death, and the fierce
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cries of swift charginginfantry.
On paper it reads vivid and fullof excitement, so graphic in
description that one weavesphantom pictures at the same
time possibly wishing one couldbe an eye witness.
The painting of battles foughtin bygone ages have, to a
certain extent, given one theseimpressions, but in this great
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European war the effect is notnearly so picturesque, albeit
every moment there are acts ofheroism and bravery performed.
I have known men grown weary andtired of trench warfare, not
because of their lack ofpatriotism or of their
conditions, but because of thedeadly monosony day after day
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without coming to grips with theadversary.
When we came to France with ourrifles, our pouches full of
ammunition, expecting thatwithin a few short hours after
arrival our stock would needreplenishing, but we had a rude
awakening.
In modern warfare the rifle islittle used except in the case
of an attack by the enemy.
At other times it is hardlyused, for it is the machine guns
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and artillery that are moredeadly weapons of warfare.
The front line trenches areusually only occupied by the
infantry at night, or ratherfrom sundown to sunrise,
although the intervening periodis by no means a sinecure.
Whilst the machine gunnersoccupy the front lines during
the day, the remainder of abattalion are engaged on other
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branches of work necessary forthe preservation of life.
During the morning a detachmentmay be building trenches,
filling sandbags, carryingammunition to trench mortar
stores, ration carrying, doinggas drill, rapid loading, or
putting down new duckboards inplace of old ones.
Then follows a brief dinnerhour.
An hour later, a party mayprobably be carrying barbed wire
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and stakes up to the front line,ready for when night has fallen,
or cleaning ditches of foulwater, refilling water tanks, or
cleaning bombs and riflegrenades.
By late afternoon one has earneda brief spell for sleep.
So I think this gives us areally good insight into daily
trench warfare on a staticfront, and again important
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because it's giving that insightfrom the point of view of a man
who is doing the dirty work, notan officer coordinating it, but
one who is actually emptying thetoilets, sorting out the
replacement of duckboardscarrying heavy material and
wearing himself out day afterday after day.
And he goes on in a positionnear Bois Grenier to note for
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two months or more I never saw aGerman soldier, in spite of my
being in a sniper's loophole andstationed at an advanced
observation post, only once didI see a man's reflection through
a periscope, which at long rangeis by no means an easy task.
No man's land throughout the dayis as lonely and desolate as the
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desert wilds, the only lifeexisting thereon being the birds
who build their nests amongstthe shattered boughs of the
trees, and the bullfrogs whocroak dismally in the marsh and
streams separating the lines.
Rows and rows of entanglementsstretch across the waste,
forming a seemingly impassablebarrier.
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The horror is something thatrapidly becomes apparent to
Mabry and his comrades on afront that has been static for
so long, and he sees thereminders of that.
A huge grey rat sniffing andpurring a yard or so away, one
of a vast army who live incompanionship with those who
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like rodents pass their days inburrows beneath the earth.
The battlefields of France is alysium for King Rat.
He seeks not his food or meansof sustenance, for the reaper
provides his store in fullmeasure.
By that I mean the bodies of menwho once used to inhabit the
earth.
It isn't pleasant to think ofit, but it is one of the
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cruelties, one of the penaltiesof war.
One other interesting element ofhis account is when he witnesses
the Battle of Messines from adistance.
He's holding the front southeastof Armontiers, basically.
Flanders is just across theborder, Messines is probably not
even twenty miles away, and thefront of Messines which has been
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tunnelled into and the vastmines placed there and the
battle about to begin, men inpositions to the south could
both see and hear what happenedat Messines in June of nineteen
seventeen, and this is hisaccount of doing just that.
Over Irkingham the sausageshaped observation balloons were
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ascending in the twilight, andin the clouds somewhere I could
hear the dull drone ofaeroplanes travelling in a
northeasterly direction.
It was nothing out of theordinary.
At seven minutes past three,with startling suddenness the
gates of hell were thrown open,and a volume of sound such as I
have never heard before filledthe sweetness of the morning
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air.
With each blast the fire baywhere I stood rocked and swayed
like a ship at sea.
I gazed along the line and knewthat somewhere not far from
Armontiers a fierce battle wasraging.
Away in the distance, toweringto immense heights, giant clouds
of smoke wreathed in grotesqueform.
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I could faintly hear machineguns spitting and the tinkle
tinkle of gas gongs.
Each moment the sky was splashedwith crimson fire combined with
dots of blue, green and red,which bespoke of SOS signals and
the bursting of high explosivesin continuous roar caused wafts
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of air gently to touch the faceand speed on, elusive, like a
will of the wisp.
I knew even as the sun wouldrise that this was the great
British attack.
Having held the line on the partof the front where no major
fighting was taking place,finally in november nineteen
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seventeen, nine months aftertheir arrival in France, the
fifty seventh Division and theSecond Four South Lanks with
them moved up to the Eap Salientto take part in the closing
phase of the Third Battle ofEpe.
Maybury recalled The month ofNovember dawned cheerlessly, it
was bitterly cold with incessantrain, and this sea of mud called
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Flanders stretched desolate andforeboding.
Everywhere spoke of death, offilth, of baseness, of those
things that are not of thisbeauteous earth, a place that
seemed as if God had neverabided there, of things living,
real, pleasurable, there werenone, no song of birds, no
beauteous nature, only the starkridge that hid its gruesome
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sights from the outer world inthe waterlogg shell holes
abounding on all sides.
The light of the moon added tothe weirdness of the
surroundings, filling one with amelancholy that was
unexplainable.
The coming of night filled onewith dread, men and guns were
silhouetted in black relief tochange to figures unreal as the
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red flash of the guns played onthem from an instant of time.
Here there was nothing but shellholes filled with dank, evil
smelling water, infested withtribes of rodents and traces of
gas.
To occupy our positions atLangamark we had to traverse
from the ridge five miles ofsingle duckboard track,
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treacherous with recent slushand rain, where a false step
meant death by drowning orsuffocation in the cruel
clutching mud that clings likean octopus and never gives up
its victims.
In the months that had gone wehad witnessed few gruesome
sights that really sickened allthe nauseas, but in this
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skeleton that once was thevillage of Langamark we saw all
the horrors of ghastly warfare.
In a dip beside the broken road,battered tanks, monsters of
twisted iron and steel reared upand exposed their mangled
vitals, while scattered aboutlay human bodies stark and naked
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that told their own tale.
Broken wheels of limbers andguns obstructed one's path,
which oft times the sight ofhorses and mules steel, inert,
lifeless, in some cases headlessor devoid of limbs, the sight
reminding one of a sidelight ofthe war little thought of by
mankind.
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Nearer the line even moreghastly sights showed
themselves.
This portion of the Epe frontwas hell itself.
The fighting here in thatclosing stage of the Third
Battle of Epe was coming to anend, and units of the fifty
seventh division like the SecondFour Flanks were lucky in that
respect as they were neverrequired to go over the top in
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an attack during the ThirdBattle of Eape, during that
Battle of Passchendale as it'soften called, and didn't have to
go and fight a battle in thatmud in those conditions that he
so graphically describes therearound Langamark.
They held the line once more,held the line in this case on
the northeastern part of the Eapsalient, facing the Hutols
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Forest, and they were there forthe next few months in that mass
of shell craters on a desolatelandscape, and while they lost
men to the conditions and theday-to-day activities of holding
the line with shell fire,machine guns, trench mortars,
and everything else, thebattalion was being whittled
away by these casualties ratherthan being wiped out in one big
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attack.
And after a stint again innorthern France, where they met
Portuguese forces for the veryfirst time, the Germans had now
broken through on the Sommefront to the south.
This was March 1918, and the 2nd4th South Lanks and the 57th
Division became one of theformations that was then sent
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south to hold the line there.
So they move out of the salientafter having not had to take
part in the Third Battle of Yes.
They arrive back in northernFrance to be relieved by the
Portuguese and then proceedsouth to the Somme, and just as
they do so, literally a week orso later, the Germans attack on
(31:55):
the 9th of April 1918, and theground where they've just come
from is overrun and thePortuguese suffer heavy losses.
So again, they are quite a luckydivision in terms of how they're
moved about and moved out justas a critical moment comes
along.
And this next move broughtMaybury and his comrades to the
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village of Gomacor on the Somfront and for him the final
phase of his war experiences.
He wrote As we approach theruins of Gomacor Church, the
enemy began shelling the roads.
This new sector presented manynew aspects.
One turns up a winding lane ashort distance from the ruined
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church to immediately comewithin sight of the subsidiary
line.
Although night was nigh, therewas still enough light to pick
out the land.
Our positions were in low lyingland, and in the distance on the
crest of a hill, faintly dim tothe naked eye, were the
entrenched Huns.
We could see our shells burstingvery close and our trench
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mortars in retaliation to hisrecent bombardment, and were
playfully scattering the barbedwire entanglements close to the
German front line.
In getting to forward positionson many occasions it
necessitated journeying over thetop in the face of machine gun
fire until gradually each partytook over its respective post.
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My own section of signallers,together with a platoon, had to
cross the main road leading fromthe village.
Opposite a couple of tanks,rusty and out of action, poked
their noses up over a disusedtrench.
The stark Everton wood nearbywas being bespatted by shrapnel,
which for a moment of timeshowed up crimson against the
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gaunt, jagged and leaflesstrees.
Overhead there was a continuouswhistling sound, a sound so
strange that words cannotproperly define, yet we who were
familiar with the peculiarnoises of the night knew it to
be gas shells hurling throughthe air in the direction of
Foncavillier.
(34:01):
The night was untroubled by thewind.
Gomacor, the village of tragichistory, lay in shadows.
Occasionally one heard therumbling of carts afar off, the
dull pop of the all insistentgas shells bursting far back,
together with the rat, rat of aGerman machine gun somewhere
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over in no man's land.
Settling into the sector,Maybury and his comrades found
that the Australians were closeby, the Germans having pushed
hard against lots of differentunits here in March and April of
nineteen eighteen, and they werenow holding the line alongside
these men, and finally he wasable to look around properly.
(34:45):
Gomacor has taken its toll tothe utmost.
In nineteen sixteen this villageof sad memories was a shambles.
Foes met in hand to handfighting of the fiercest
description, the carnival ofdeath waged long, laughter and
song, the yells of men mad withthe lust of blood, the thunder
of guns near and far, the cursesof racing men and sound of
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flying hoofs of horses have allechoed within the sound of the
battered belfry of Gomor's nobleedifice of God.
Although life within its streetsand its lanes, its homesteads
and its church is long sincedead, there still remains its
ever living history as witnessthe tragic signboard which one
(35:32):
sees in its main thoroughfare.
This was once the village ofGomacor, it reads.
Slowly, day by day the tatteredremnants of what once were homes
of peaceful villagers arelevelled out by hideous shells,
and ground where once childrenplayed, and old men smoke their
(35:52):
pipes of peace in blissfulcontentment, with beauteous
nature to gladden sight andmind, adds dust to the prevalent
waste.
Instead of life in quiet cottageand sound of chiming bells, men
live and have their being insubterranean passages and
caverns under fields that oncewere ripe with corn, and instead
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of lowing of cattle at eventideand the atmospheres of peace,
there breezed the foul breath ofbloody war.
For weeks we inhabited Gomakoras do the rodent tribe, by day
hiding from the outer world inits cavernous depths, where the
light of the sun was unable topenetrate where men slept under
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roofs of chalk stone until dayhad gone and night cast a mantle
over all the earth.
Then and only then was theresigns of life, then the vigilant
watch, the monotonous tasksunder which men grow weary, and
always the snuffing out likecandles of the life of
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somebody's child.
During a lull in the battle,Harold Maybury was in a dugout
with his signallers at Gomacorwhen their position was suddenly
hit by some gas shells, and tohis horror he was caught
unawares by the gas himselfbeing quite badly gassed and
evacuated off the battlefield,bringing his war to an end.
(37:21):
So having looked at theavailable records of his and
seen that he was apparentlyinjured or wounded in the latter
part of the war, his accountthen confirms that, and that
gassing at Gomacor in the springof nineteen eighteen would
result in his discharge from thearmy and the award of a silver
war badge because of that.
(37:42):
The final part of the book isunusual because it recounts his
travels back to the oldbattlefields as a veteran in the
early nineteen twenties anddefinitely adds to the
uniqueness of this forgottenaccount of the Great War, but he
found when he got there, when hegot back to the battlefields, he
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found it disappointing.
All I saw were fields of wavingcorn, the new bridges, a few
rusty tanks, plenty of pillboxes bespattered with marks of
shrapnel bullets, and an acre ofgraves.
I went on and on and on into theheart of a land I knew, yet all
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so changed, so devoid of thesight of the real land I wanted
to see.
The million shell holes nolonger remained, with no sight
of the chain bridges, thehutmants, the baby elephants, or
the men of China.
It is all given over to afertile plain, with a way over
there a langamark batteredchurch in ruins and a chateau in
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a rapid state of repair.
Like many battlefield pilgrimsat that time, his final
destination was Eap, a name thatbrought back so many memories
for him.
I entered the ramparts of Epenear the Little Gate, with its
concrete dugout still remainingfor all the world to see.
As in the old days all wassilent, one could not altogether
(39:09):
associate quietitude with Epefor the silent streets emptied
of all save wanderers andpilgrims like myself cast a
strange spell.
As I stood near the Mening Gate,I seemed to live again the days
and nights that were gone.
On the spot I stood for fouryears from October nineteen
fourteen to october nineteeneighteen, the shells had
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pulverized this now holy ground.
I seemed to see the city inflames, the hurried exit of its
eighteen thousand peacefulinhabitants, the lonely trek of
Kith and Kin away from thisFlemish city, the tottering of
the cloth all before the forcesof enemy cannon, the coming of
Khaki soldiers to stop theonrush of myriad forces, and
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lived again the underground lifeof the soldiers who were
starving.
stationed in this furnace.
True, today it is a heap ofruins only, a shell swept
graveyard, but it is an eternalmemorial of British valour.
He said of Eape, it is a city ofdecay, yet as I went further
through its chaoticthoroughfares, I saw many bright
(40:19):
spots.
All is not sadness in Eape, andI found it along the station
place and the Bouvillard Mallon,with its beds of flowers and
scrubs, encircled by grass and arow of newly planted trees to
brighten up the lives of thosewho linger within its walls.
I saw the tragic ruins of thecathedral and walked amongst the
(40:40):
stones of the historic belfrybestruing the street, and with
it came the thoughts of how onceit reared its proud head in the
old days of old time prosperityand wealth seeming to share the
bustle of life in bygonecenturies when the peasants and
their carts halted within thesquares of Epe, and it was a
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marketplace of this low lyingcountry.
For Harold Maybury the visit wasa moving one not just limited to
Flanders as he went on toexplore other areas where he'd
served too.
On those battlefields beinggradually reclaimed, he found
some peace, I think, reflectingon what his war experiences
meant to him and perhapsstanding there on that holy
(41:24):
ground as he calls it, perhapsthat was what prompted him to
publish his memoirs just a fewyears later.
He said The star of hope stillhangs over Seisulalis, and the
earth that once was no man'sland and over Niepp and the
rolling downs, the twinklinglights of cottages show their
signs of habitation.
(41:46):
The birds have built their nestsin the once stark Everton wood
at Gomacor, the long trek ofaged peasants under shell fire
from hamlet to village fartheroff is at an end, and old men
smoke their pipes of peace infields once soaked with blood.
How soon therefore do we forgetthe mirrors of the past back in
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the sober world we come again totoil and grind each man to his
task and to his own thoughts.
In our home towns there's thelights of home, the laughter of
children, the ease, the comfortswe once long for, but out there
the fields, the hedges, the dankshell holes were our abodes, the
(42:29):
winking pearly very lights theonly gleams of light we knew,
and instead of swift movingcrowds the swish, swish of
marching feet towards the fieldof battle.
From the mirrors of the pastthere comes the voices of those
that sleep their eternal sleepfrom Ypres to the Som, and
(42:50):
moonbeams play on holy groundtill dawn arises from the east.
The guns are silent, so too aremen.
The passage of time shall surelynot blot out the years of
remembrance and that's theclosing line of the book that's
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how Mabury ends his tale withthat phrase years of
remembrance.
Maybury was a good writer, not abrilliant one but a good writer
he expressed his war experiencein easy language, easy to
understand.
He puts across feeling in hiswords he has a connection to
that landscape of the FirstWorld War, something that we
(43:33):
often talk about here on thepodcast and his view from the
ranks gives the account I thinkgreater currency and his return
to the battlefield a dimensionnot often encountered in other
books.
It's a title that reallydeserves to have been reprinted
perhaps during the centenarycertainly it should be better
(43:54):
known and not as rare as it isand that final phrase of his the
Years of remembrance wassomething obviously dear to
Mabury, which is why I thinkit's on his gravestone.
For him I suspect it was thekey, the phrase, the words to
his mind returning to thatlandscape of the Great War,
(44:19):
returning to his experiences forhim to see the faces of his
comrades who once marched besidehim and marched no more a way to
return to that place hedescribed so well which was his
very personal Old FrontlineYou've been listening to an
(44:46):
episode of the Old Frontlinewith me, military historian Paul
Reed.
You can follow me on Twitter atSomcor, you can follow the
podcast at OldFrontlinePod,check out the website at
oldfrontlineco dot where you'llfind lots of podcast extras and
photographs and links to booksthat are mentioned in the
podcast.
And if you feel like supportingus you can go to our Patreon
(45:09):
page patreon.com slasholdfrontline or support us on
buymeacoffee at buymeacoffee.comslash oldfrontline.
Links to all of these are on ourwebsites thanks for listening
and we'll see you again soon.
It's been a while since our initial episode
looking at Forgotten Memoirs ofthe Great War, and there was a
positive reaction to examiningthis very subject, with several
of you getting in touch tosuggest some more titles.
So I thought a few months laterit was about time we returned to
(00:31):
the subject of Forgotten Memoirsand looked at another volume of
a lesser known account connectedto a soldier's experience of the
First World War.
Memoirs are an important part ofour understanding of the layers
of the Great War, especially inan era when all of the veterans
are gone, and the memoirsthemselves are all part of the
(00:55):
importance of understandingpersonal testimony, something we
discussed recently in someepisodes on oral history.
The book for this episodelooking at forgotten memoirs is
The Years of Remembrance byHarold Maybury, and it was
published in Warrington in 1924by a small publisher connected
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to the local newspaper.
It was a book that I'd neverheard of until a book list of
Tom Donovan's, one of myfavourite secondhand military
book dealers.
He put a list out some monthsago and I saw this memoir on
there, and what drew me to itwas that it was an account
written by a soldier who hadserved in the second fourth
(01:38):
battalion of the SouthLancashire Regiment.
Now that's probably a littleknown battalion of the Great
War.
Why was I interested in that?
Well one of the veterans that Iknew, James Leslie Lovegrove,
Smiler Lovegrove, had served asan officer in this battalion,
gone out with them in nineteenseventeen, and served until he
(02:00):
was wounded in the fighting onthe Hindenburg line the
following year.
And although I had theregimental history, I wasn't
aware that there was thispersonal account by another
member of the same battalion.
And Lovegrove, of course, was anofficer, he was a second
lieutenant, commissioned, I meanhe looks about twelve in the
(02:21):
photographs of him, and I havehis account of his service which
I am going to use for a futurepodcast, but that's the view
from the position of a platooncommander, whereas this account
is from the view of an ordinarysoldier in the ranks.
So who was the author?
(02:41):
Who was Harold Maybury?
He was born in Warrington ineighteen eighty-nine, from what
I can find out.
There's no kind of onlinebiography of him.
This is where I've put togetherinformation from the different
sources to kind of find out alittle bit more about the man
behind this memoir.
And by the time of the 1911census he was living at 55
(03:02):
Lovely Lane, Warrington, and wasan advertising clerk to a soap
manufacturer there, possibly theCrossfield Company or the Lever
Brothers who made the famoussunlight soap.
And you see a lot of adverts forthat soap in wartime
publications.
He appears to have been anaspiring journalist as well as
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working as an advertising clerk,as some of the articles he wrote
at the very beginning of theFirst World War appeared in that
Warrington local paper TheExaminer in nineteen fourteen,
and they later published thebook itself, but he didn't
volunteer straight away.
He was not one of those thatresponded to that early call for
(03:45):
volunteers.
And who knows why?
I mean not everybody did.
Some that were in good, safejobs bringing in money, perhaps
his parents depended on thatmoney.
Not everyone stepped forwardstraight away.
And what he ends up doing isjoining the Derby scheme in
December of 1915.
And the Lord Derby Scheme wasbrought in during that winter of
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1915-16 as the introduction ofconscription was just round the
corner, and this was essentiallyyour last chance to volunteer
before conscription, and therewould be some advantages in
doing that.
You could choose which regimentyou went to, you could defer
your entry into the army for ashort while, and they would give
you an armband which you couldwear on your civilian clothes,
(04:29):
so that no one came up to you inthe street and suggested that
you weren't doing your bit.
You'd registered for militaryservice, although you weren't
necessarily going in straightaway.
So he does that, and afterwhatever amount of period that
he had between signing up for itand actually going into his
unit, he joined the SecondFourth South Lanks sometime in
(04:49):
that either winter of 1915-16 ormore likely early 1916 when they
were based at Ashford, close towhere I now live, and they'd
been at Canterbury prior tothat, and then he went off for
further training elsewhere.
Now he didn't get to France, aswas common with the rest of his
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battalion, until February 1917,because the 2nd 4 South Lanks
were part of a wider formation,the 57th Division, which we'll
come to later on, that was heldback on home service, as was a
number of divisions, and notsent overseas until that late
stage of the First World War.
We kind of forget this reallythat not every division went
(05:31):
over in the early phase of thewar.
Quite a few were held back until1917, and his battalion was one
of those units that sufferedthis fate.
And then he serves on theWestern Front.
We're going to look at his warservice through his memoirs.
The records indicate that he wasinjured on active service,
potentially wounded, and wasdischarged from the army in
January 1919 with a silver warbadge, aged 30.
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So he wasn't a youngster, hewasn't a young lad doing his bit
from the very beginning.
And later on, from what I candiscover, he worked on the
railways in Runcorn and at theWarrington Examiner's office.
He seems to have done a bit morejournalism in that interwar
period.
He married Jesse, hissweetheart, in 1921, and he died
on the twenty ninth of May 1943,still relatively young, perhaps
(06:22):
because of his wounds in theGreat War.
There's no obituary for him, andI can't discover what his cause
of death was.
So there's still a lot we don'tknow about Harold Maybury.
But what I did find is thatthere is a photograph of his
grave on the internet, he'sburied in Warrington, and it has
the title of the book actuallyon his headstone.
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It says Years of Remembranceunderneath his name, a nice kind
of nod to the memoir itself.
So what does this book then tellus about his war through his
words, through his eyes, andwhat insights does it give to
the wider subject of the GreatWar?
(07:04):
That's what we'll look at next.
The book Years of Remembrance isan unusual and important memoir
in a number of ways.
It's a voice from the ranks fora start, so this is the
viewpoint of an ordinarysoldier.
(07:25):
He's not privately educated,he's not a commissioned officer,
he's there as part of the PBI,the poor bloody infantry,
serving in the ranks of aninfantry section, in an infantry
platoon, in an infantry companyof an infantry battalion.
So that's quite important.
And he was not, as we said, anoriginal 1914 man who responded
to Lord Kitchener's call for theraising of Kitchener's army, but
(07:48):
he's a Derby man who joins underthe Derby scheme, and he joins a
territorial battalion, but not afirst line territorial
battalion, not one that went outstraight away, but one that was
formed during the war itself.
Because when the war broke out,all of these territorial
battalions in the Britishregiments of the British Army
became their own mini regimentsand they formed normally three
(08:10):
battalions.
So in the case of the 4thBattalion, the South Lancashire
Regiment, that territorialbattalion, its original unit
became the 1st 4th, and theywent overseas and eventually
became part of the 55th WestLanx Division.
And then a 2nd 4th and a 3rd 4thBattalions were formed.
The 2nd 4th would go on tobecome part of the 57th 2nd West
(08:31):
Lancashire Division, and the 3rd4th would be a home service unit
that would then supply recruits,replacements to the other two
battalions.
So the 2nd 4th South Lanks wasone of these units that was
probably formed initially tojust protect the shores of
Britain.
There was this continuous threatthroughout the war of some kind
(08:52):
of German incursion, not so muchan invasion, but an incursion,
and a lot of troops were keptback to defend Britain, to act
as depot units, reserve units,just in case.
And the 57th Division was one ofthose.
I think there was also aconsideration by the War Office
that some of these units were,and this is not my view, this is
(09:13):
theirs, were kind of dredgingthe bottom of the barrel, and
whether all of these men wouldbe exactly suitable to be sent
overseas was perhaps a matter ofsome discussion.
But the huge casualties on theWestern Front meant that
eventually all of these kind ofunits would be sent overseas in
some capacity.
And the 57th Division formed inAugust 1915 that was linked to
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the 55th Division, the firstWest Lanx who had gone over much
earlier, its units split up,then it was reformed in 1916 in
time for the Battle of theSomme.
It had formed around Canterburyin Kent, some of its units in
Ashford, like the Second FourthSouth Lanks, and then it was
based in Surrey before the wholedivision moved to France in
(09:58):
February of nineteen seventeen,and this is where Harold
Maybury's war began, and this ishow he begins the memoir.
As far as the eye could see, thewasteful ocean lay placid and
calm except for the white foamtipped waves lazily lapping
against the sides of a transportbound for the shores of La Belle
(10:21):
France.
It was two o'clock in theafternoon, and the white grey
cliffs of dear old England hadreceded from view, leaving only
a memory pensive and wistful,which we were to carry through
many strenuous days.
Overhead a winter sun shone highin the heavens like a ball of
fire, a few seagulls criedmournfully, and afar off a ship
(10:44):
sirens sounded a warning note,and a trail of smoke heralded
the passing of a ship over thisvast expanse of water.
Nought else could be seen excepttwo sharp nosed British
destroyers throwing out fromtheir steel grey funnels dense
black clouds of smoke.
Like greyhounds they raced overdancing waves, omnipient,
(11:07):
powerful, a mighty unit ofBritain's naval power, keeping
watch the while against lurkingunderseas craft.
So we can see straight away thatthe author is he's not Wilfred
Irwin, he's not SiegfriedSassoon, but equally this is not
a straightforward account wherehe says I did this, I did that.
He's got some ability to write,and being a newspaper man, I
(11:31):
guess that was to be considered.
But what we see as he movesforward in his story, and we're
going to follow it, is thatleaving the port, heading to
France and arriving on thoseFrench shores, his battalion are
sent to the railhead, and likeso many soldiers before them,
they begin their journey towardsthe Western Front.
(11:53):
And he says Leaving BoulogneStation, one journeys through a
succession of long tunnels, vilesmelling, with a stench of mud
from a river bed, combined withsulphur fumes from a locomotive
primitive and old fashioned,which snorted and jerked
horribly every few yards.
The train rumbled on into thelight to reveal a countryside,
(12:15):
drab, dismal and common, formiles one journeyed through pain
tracts of uncultivated landwithout sign of human
habitation.
A few stunted trees devoid ofleaf and bird life added to the
desolation, and in placesoverflowing dikes transformed
plain into marshland and lake.
Occasionally one came across athatched farmstead, lattice and
(12:39):
shuttered, a flock of sheepgrazing on tufted grass that did
not look good to eat, seekingtheir meat pessimistically from
God.
A windmill motionless and in astate of dilapidation stood out
in contrast to the barren anduneven landscape.
Now and then we rumbled througha wayside station, where a
sleepy porter rattled milk cans,cleaned the lamps, and slowly
(13:03):
bestirred himself on this earlygrey February morn.
The rain fell with steadypersistency.
The first station of importanceon the line is Saint Omere.
So Harold's train journey tookhim and the lads from his
battalion into the heart ofnorthern France close to the
battlefield area, towards thatlong static front sandwiched
(13:26):
between Flanders and the areaclose to Lons, Lens and Arras,
the so called forgotten front.
And this was a part of the linethat had seen fighting in the
early stage of the Great War,had settled down to static
trench warfare, had seenoffensive after offensive in
1915, but by early 1917 it was aquiet sector, it had been used
(13:50):
as a nursery sector in theearlier stage of the fighting on
the Western Front to bring innew units to kind of inculcate
them into trench warfare, andthat was exactly what was about
to befall the fate of these menin the 57th Division who were
being sent into that so-calledquiet sector to do exactly the
same thing, learn what trenchwarfare was about, learn how to
(14:13):
take over the trenches, to holdthe trenches, be relieved in the
trenches, and all the otherthings that was required for a
unit on the front line on ashooting war that the Western
Front had become by nineteenseventeen.
And here Maybury and hiscomrades of the Second Fourth
South Lanks arrive at Saley surla Lis, located in the flat
(14:35):
terrain, around the Lis Riveritself and behind the lines in
that northern part of the frontof northern France.
And this is what he says aboutarriving in that area.
A few yards from the riverstands Sale Church, a
magnificent pile with squaretower pierced by loopholes and
battlements resembling someancient fortress of a bygone
(14:59):
age.
Part of the masonry is shellridden, its clock face is
smashed beyond repair, and agreat hole lays bare its
interior.
Instead of a place of worship,it is now a Red Cross hospital,
albeit in earlier stages of thewar it was used as a place of
internment for German prisonersprior to them being sent to
camps further inland.
(15:19):
Day was dying in the west, therewas a touch of frost in the air,
and the white silent snowglistened like a myriad jewel.
A French poilu, erect andstately, stood at his post
guarding the bridge, his bayonetreflecting the blood red rays of
a sun sunk low down on thehorizon.
Gradually the men of the SecondFour South Lanks realized that
(15:43):
they were now at the war.
This was the reality of themhaving enlisted all those years
before, and now finally, inearly nineteen seventeen, coming
to France, and he continues.
For two years this Lancastrianregiment had been trained to the
highest pitch.
It was efficient, and now it wasto achieve its objective, the
(16:04):
holding of a little strip ofland on the western front.
When we had marched through thewoodlands and dells of dear old
Kent and Surrey, many of uspictured in mind's eye the days
through which we were to pass,of what that goal which we so
much desired would be like andhow our first moments under fire
would leave us.
In those far off days it seemedas if a long, long trail lay in
(16:27):
front, the end veiled in a mistthrough which one could not
penetrate, as if a cloudobscured the sun, which we knew
must eventually pass away.
We wanted to make good, wewanted those two years to bear
fruit in glorious achievements.
We had been sowers, and now itwas harvest time, and God knows
(16:47):
we realized that there was areaper stalking ahead, had been
stalking a lot more than twoyears in this land now soaked
with blood.
But I think no, I know we wereunafraid.
We left Sale regretfully, for itwas a place one might abide in
for a lifetime and still beinterested in.
Heading towards the front line,Maybury and his battalion moved
(17:11):
into the forward positions onthis part of the forgotten
front, a flat part of the frontwhere a lot of the trenches were
breastworks rather than justtrenches dug into the ground,
and he goes on to describe wheretheir part of the trenches
fitted into the wider story.
The battle line in the WesternTheatre of War in March nineteen
(17:34):
seventeen, if one had lookedclosely at the map, resembled
nothing so much as the outlineof a human face, and we were in
the position of what might betermed the tip of the nose.
The Bois Grenier and La Chapelled'Armontier sectors were the
most advanced positions of aline stretching from the Belgian
coast to the Swiss frontier.
To the right of Bois Grenier layFleur Bay, where the second
(17:57):
tenth Liverpool Scottish andSecond Ninth King's Regiment
were entrenched.
On our left an Irish regiment,while still further away lay
Hoopline and the Ypsalient.
Away on our right past Fleur Baythe line curved towards Arras.
In a sense, therefore, ourposition was likened to a
jutting headland, a place wheremuch might happen, for behind
(18:19):
our lines lay Armontier, behindthe enemies Lille, the
Manchester of France.
The distance between our linesand the enemy varied.
In one place near Cowgate Gap,it was not more than one hundred
and forty yards, at others fourhundred.
Both sides at a seeminglyimpassable barrier of vicious
(18:40):
barbed wire entanglements,separating also in no man's
land, a stream ran much swollenby winter rains.
Behind us a wood stood stark andnaked, its bows blown away by
artillery fire, but it was animpregnable position for machine
guns and others of smallcalibre.
In nineteen fourteen thetrenches we were now in had been
(19:02):
the scene of great slaughter,for it was here that the
remnants of the army of Monsmade its great and glorious
stand and succeeded in blockingthe enemy's advance to the
French capital.
In those early days theconditions must have been
terrible, for even on our adventthere was much rebuilding to be
done.
What it must have been likewithout duckboards, dugouts, and
(19:24):
shelter of any description, onereally cannot imagine, for when
we arrived in places it wasimpassable with water, fowl,
rank and smelling of deadbodies.
Mud and slush was waist deep,and in our front line there was
a sad lack of protection.
The book is full of vividdescription like this, giving us
(19:46):
a really interesting insightinto this static front at this
quite late stage in theconflict, and part of I think
his ability to do this was thathe was often attached to The
scouts and snipers section laterhe became a signaller, but he
was doing a lot of observinginto no man's land at this
(20:07):
point, so this gave him theability to see the wider
battlefield that a normal Tommyjust going about the day to day
activities of trench warfaremight not have seen.
So he continues with his view ofwhat this front was like.
The majority of war readersimagine a British soldier's life
on the Western Front toconstitute an endless vigil of
(20:28):
watching and waiting for thesight of an enemy, in a trench
protected by sandy walls ofearth, together with a blazing
away of ammunition at a foe inmuch the same manner as one
bangs at a bottle in a shootinggallery at a fair, only with
more risk and more deadlyconsequences.
One pictures too the sight of aBosch squealing camarader when
(20:49):
he sees a long waving line ofbayonets confronting him, and
that he scurries like a rabbitif the odds are too great and
the British guns too strong forhis liking.
One thinks also of men embracedin deadly combat, the air full
of smoke, nostrils and throatchoked full of gunpowder, the
sound of men's voices in thethroes of death, and the fierce
(21:11):
cries of swift charginginfantry.
On paper it reads vivid and fullof excitement, so graphic in
description that one weavesphantom pictures at the same
time possibly wishing one couldbe an eye witness.
The painting of battles foughtin bygone ages have, to a
certain extent, given one theseimpressions, but in this great
(21:32):
European war the effect is notnearly so picturesque, albeit
every moment there are acts ofheroism and bravery performed.
I have known men grown weary andtired of trench warfare, not
because of their lack ofpatriotism or of their
conditions, but because of thedeadly monosony day after day
(21:52):
without coming to grips with theadversary.
When we came to France with ourrifles, our pouches full of
ammunition, expecting thatwithin a few short hours after
arrival our stock would needreplenishing, but we had a rude
awakening.
In modern warfare the rifle islittle used except in the case
of an attack by the enemy.
At other times it is hardlyused, for it is the machine guns
(22:15):
and artillery that are moredeadly weapons of warfare.
The front line trenches areusually only occupied by the
infantry at night, or ratherfrom sundown to sunrise,
although the intervening periodis by no means a sinecure.
Whilst the machine gunnersoccupy the front lines during
the day, the remainder of abattalion are engaged on other
(22:35):
branches of work necessary forthe preservation of life.
During the morning a detachmentmay be building trenches,
filling sandbags, carryingammunition to trench mortar
stores, ration carrying, doinggas drill, rapid loading, or
putting down new duckboards inplace of old ones.
Then follows a brief dinnerhour.
An hour later, a party mayprobably be carrying barbed wire
(22:58):
and stakes up to the front line,ready for when night has fallen,
or cleaning ditches of foulwater, refilling water tanks, or
cleaning bombs and riflegrenades.
By late afternoon one has earneda brief spell for sleep.
So I think this gives us areally good insight into daily
trench warfare on a staticfront, and again important
(23:22):
because it's giving that insightfrom the point of view of a man
who is doing the dirty work, notan officer coordinating it, but
one who is actually emptying thetoilets, sorting out the
replacement of duckboardscarrying heavy material and
wearing himself out day afterday after day.
And he goes on in a positionnear Bois Grenier to note for
(23:47):
two months or more I never saw aGerman soldier, in spite of my
being in a sniper's loophole andstationed at an advanced
observation post, only once didI see a man's reflection through
a periscope, which at long rangeis by no means an easy task.
No man's land throughout the dayis as lonely and desolate as the
(24:08):
desert wilds, the only lifeexisting thereon being the birds
who build their nests amongstthe shattered boughs of the
trees, and the bullfrogs whocroak dismally in the marsh and
streams separating the lines.
Rows and rows of entanglementsstretch across the waste,
forming a seemingly impassablebarrier.
(24:31):
The horror is something thatrapidly becomes apparent to
Mabry and his comrades on afront that has been static for
so long, and he sees thereminders of that.
A huge grey rat sniffing andpurring a yard or so away, one
of a vast army who live incompanionship with those who
(24:52):
like rodents pass their days inburrows beneath the earth.
The battlefields of France is alysium for King Rat.
He seeks not his food or meansof sustenance, for the reaper
provides his store in fullmeasure.
By that I mean the bodies of menwho once used to inhabit the
earth.
It isn't pleasant to think ofit, but it is one of the
(25:14):
cruelties, one of the penaltiesof war.
One other interesting element ofhis account is when he witnesses
the Battle of Messines from adistance.
He's holding the front southeastof Armontiers, basically.
Flanders is just across theborder, Messines is probably not
even twenty miles away, and thefront of Messines which has been
(25:38):
tunnelled into and the vastmines placed there and the
battle about to begin, men inpositions to the south could
both see and hear what happenedat Messines in June of nineteen
seventeen, and this is hisaccount of doing just that.
Over Irkingham the sausageshaped observation balloons were
(26:00):
ascending in the twilight, andin the clouds somewhere I could
hear the dull drone ofaeroplanes travelling in a
northeasterly direction.
It was nothing out of theordinary.
At seven minutes past three,with startling suddenness the
gates of hell were thrown open,and a volume of sound such as I
have never heard before filledthe sweetness of the morning
(26:23):
air.
With each blast the fire baywhere I stood rocked and swayed
like a ship at sea.
I gazed along the line and knewthat somewhere not far from
Armontiers a fierce battle wasraging.
Away in the distance, toweringto immense heights, giant clouds
of smoke wreathed in grotesqueform.
(26:46):
I could faintly hear machineguns spitting and the tinkle
tinkle of gas gongs.
Each moment the sky was splashedwith crimson fire combined with
dots of blue, green and red,which bespoke of SOS signals and
the bursting of high explosivesin continuous roar caused wafts
(27:06):
of air gently to touch the faceand speed on, elusive, like a
will of the wisp.
I knew even as the sun wouldrise that this was the great
British attack.
Having held the line on the partof the front where no major
fighting was taking place,finally in november nineteen
(27:26):
seventeen, nine months aftertheir arrival in France, the
fifty seventh Division and theSecond Four South Lanks with
them moved up to the Eap Salientto take part in the closing
phase of the Third Battle ofEpe.
Maybury recalled The month ofNovember dawned cheerlessly, it
was bitterly cold with incessantrain, and this sea of mud called
(27:49):
Flanders stretched desolate andforeboding.
Everywhere spoke of death, offilth, of baseness, of those
things that are not of thisbeauteous earth, a place that
seemed as if God had neverabided there, of things living,
real, pleasurable, there werenone, no song of birds, no
beauteous nature, only the starkridge that hid its gruesome
(28:13):
sights from the outer world inthe waterlogg shell holes
abounding on all sides.
The light of the moon added tothe weirdness of the
surroundings, filling one with amelancholy that was
unexplainable.
The coming of night filled onewith dread, men and guns were
silhouetted in black relief tochange to figures unreal as the
(28:34):
red flash of the guns played onthem from an instant of time.
Here there was nothing but shellholes filled with dank, evil
smelling water, infested withtribes of rodents and traces of
gas.
To occupy our positions atLangamark we had to traverse
from the ridge five miles ofsingle duckboard track,
(28:58):
treacherous with recent slushand rain, where a false step
meant death by drowning orsuffocation in the cruel
clutching mud that clings likean octopus and never gives up
its victims.
In the months that had gone wehad witnessed few gruesome
sights that really sickened allthe nauseas, but in this
(29:20):
skeleton that once was thevillage of Langamark we saw all
the horrors of ghastly warfare.
In a dip beside the broken road,battered tanks, monsters of
twisted iron and steel reared upand exposed their mangled
vitals, while scattered aboutlay human bodies stark and naked
(29:40):
that told their own tale.
Broken wheels of limbers andguns obstructed one's path,
which oft times the sight ofhorses and mules steel, inert,
lifeless, in some cases headlessor devoid of limbs, the sight
reminding one of a sidelight ofthe war little thought of by
mankind.
(30:01):
Nearer the line even moreghastly sights showed
themselves.
This portion of the Epe frontwas hell itself.
The fighting here in thatclosing stage of the Third
Battle of Epe was coming to anend, and units of the fifty
seventh division like the SecondFour Flanks were lucky in that
respect as they were neverrequired to go over the top in
(30:25):
an attack during the ThirdBattle of Eape, during that
Battle of Passchendale as it'soften called, and didn't have to
go and fight a battle in thatmud in those conditions that he
so graphically describes therearound Langamark.
They held the line once more,held the line in this case on
the northeastern part of the Eapsalient, facing the Hutols
(30:48):
Forest, and they were there forthe next few months in that mass
of shell craters on a desolatelandscape, and while they lost
men to the conditions and theday-to-day activities of holding
the line with shell fire,machine guns, trench mortars,
and everything else, thebattalion was being whittled
away by these casualties ratherthan being wiped out in one big
(31:13):
attack.
And after a stint again innorthern France, where they met
Portuguese forces for the veryfirst time, the Germans had now
broken through on the Sommefront to the south.
This was March 1918, and the 2nd4th South Lanks and the 57th
Division became one of theformations that was then sent
(31:34):
south to hold the line there.
So they move out of the salientafter having not had to take
part in the Third Battle of Yes.
They arrive back in northernFrance to be relieved by the
Portuguese and then proceedsouth to the Somme, and just as
they do so, literally a week orso later, the Germans attack on
(31:55):
the 9th of April 1918, and theground where they've just come
from is overrun and thePortuguese suffer heavy losses.
So again, they are quite a luckydivision in terms of how they're
moved about and moved out justas a critical moment comes
along.
And this next move broughtMaybury and his comrades to the
(32:16):
village of Gomacor on the Somfront and for him the final
phase of his war experiences.
He wrote As we approach theruins of Gomacor Church, the
enemy began shelling the roads.
This new sector presented manynew aspects.
One turns up a winding lane ashort distance from the ruined
(32:37):
church to immediately comewithin sight of the subsidiary
line.
Although night was nigh, therewas still enough light to pick
out the land.
Our positions were in low lyingland, and in the distance on the
crest of a hill, faintly dim tothe naked eye, were the
entrenched Huns.
We could see our shells burstingvery close and our trench
(32:58):
mortars in retaliation to hisrecent bombardment, and were
playfully scattering the barbedwire entanglements close to the
German front line.
In getting to forward positionson many occasions it
necessitated journeying over thetop in the face of machine gun
fire until gradually each partytook over its respective post.
(33:20):
My own section of signallers,together with a platoon, had to
cross the main road leading fromthe village.
Opposite a couple of tanks,rusty and out of action, poked
their noses up over a disusedtrench.
The stark Everton wood nearbywas being bespatted by shrapnel,
which for a moment of timeshowed up crimson against the
(33:40):
gaunt, jagged and leaflesstrees.
Overhead there was a continuouswhistling sound, a sound so
strange that words cannotproperly define, yet we who were
familiar with the peculiarnoises of the night knew it to
be gas shells hurling throughthe air in the direction of
Foncavillier.
(34:01):
The night was untroubled by thewind.
Gomacor, the village of tragichistory, lay in shadows.
Occasionally one heard therumbling of carts afar off, the
dull pop of the all insistentgas shells bursting far back,
together with the rat, rat of aGerman machine gun somewhere
(34:23):
over in no man's land.
Settling into the sector,Maybury and his comrades found
that the Australians were closeby, the Germans having pushed
hard against lots of differentunits here in March and April of
nineteen eighteen, and they werenow holding the line alongside
these men, and finally he wasable to look around properly.
(34:45):
Gomacor has taken its toll tothe utmost.
In nineteen sixteen this villageof sad memories was a shambles.
Foes met in hand to handfighting of the fiercest
description, the carnival ofdeath waged long, laughter and
song, the yells of men mad withthe lust of blood, the thunder
of guns near and far, the cursesof racing men and sound of
(35:10):
flying hoofs of horses have allechoed within the sound of the
battered belfry of Gomor's nobleedifice of God.
Although life within its streetsand its lanes, its homesteads
and its church is long sincedead, there still remains its
ever living history as witnessthe tragic signboard which one
(35:32):
sees in its main thoroughfare.
This was once the village ofGomacor, it reads.
Slowly, day by day the tatteredremnants of what once were homes
of peaceful villagers arelevelled out by hideous shells,
and ground where once childrenplayed, and old men smoke their
(35:52):
pipes of peace in blissfulcontentment, with beauteous
nature to gladden sight andmind, adds dust to the prevalent
waste.
Instead of life in quiet cottageand sound of chiming bells, men
live and have their being insubterranean passages and
caverns under fields that oncewere ripe with corn, and instead
(36:14):
of lowing of cattle at eventideand the atmospheres of peace,
there breezed the foul breath ofbloody war.
For weeks we inhabited Gomakoras do the rodent tribe, by day
hiding from the outer world inits cavernous depths, where the
light of the sun was unable topenetrate where men slept under
(36:36):
roofs of chalk stone until dayhad gone and night cast a mantle
over all the earth.
Then and only then was theresigns of life, then the vigilant
watch, the monotonous tasksunder which men grow weary, and
always the snuffing out likecandles of the life of
(36:59):
somebody's child.
During a lull in the battle,Harold Maybury was in a dugout
with his signallers at Gomacorwhen their position was suddenly
hit by some gas shells, and tohis horror he was caught
unawares by the gas himselfbeing quite badly gassed and
evacuated off the battlefield,bringing his war to an end.
(37:21):
So having looked at theavailable records of his and
seen that he was apparentlyinjured or wounded in the latter
part of the war, his accountthen confirms that, and that
gassing at Gomacor in the springof nineteen eighteen would
result in his discharge from thearmy and the award of a silver
war badge because of that.
(37:42):
The final part of the book isunusual because it recounts his
travels back to the oldbattlefields as a veteran in the
early nineteen twenties anddefinitely adds to the
uniqueness of this forgottenaccount of the Great War, but he
found when he got there, when hegot back to the battlefields, he
(38:02):
found it disappointing.
All I saw were fields of wavingcorn, the new bridges, a few
rusty tanks, plenty of pillboxes bespattered with marks of
shrapnel bullets, and an acre ofgraves.
I went on and on and on into theheart of a land I knew, yet all
(38:23):
so changed, so devoid of thesight of the real land I wanted
to see.
The million shell holes nolonger remained, with no sight
of the chain bridges, thehutmants, the baby elephants, or
the men of China.
It is all given over to afertile plain, with a way over
there a langamark batteredchurch in ruins and a chateau in
(38:45):
a rapid state of repair.
Like many battlefield pilgrimsat that time, his final
destination was Eap, a name thatbrought back so many memories
for him.
I entered the ramparts of Epenear the Little Gate, with its
concrete dugout still remainingfor all the world to see.
As in the old days all wassilent, one could not altogether
(39:09):
associate quietitude with Epefor the silent streets emptied
of all save wanderers andpilgrims like myself cast a
strange spell.
As I stood near the Mening Gate,I seemed to live again the days
and nights that were gone.
On the spot I stood for fouryears from October nineteen
fourteen to october nineteeneighteen, the shells had
(39:32):
pulverized this now holy ground.
I seemed to see the city inflames, the hurried exit of its
eighteen thousand peacefulinhabitants, the lonely trek of
Kith and Kin away from thisFlemish city, the tottering of
the cloth all before the forcesof enemy cannon, the coming of
Khaki soldiers to stop theonrush of myriad forces, and
(39:56):
lived again the underground lifeof the soldiers who were
starving.
stationed in this furnace.
True, today it is a heap ofruins only, a shell swept
graveyard, but it is an eternalmemorial of British valour.
He said of Eape, it is a city ofdecay, yet as I went further
through its chaoticthoroughfares, I saw many bright
(40:19):
spots.
All is not sadness in Eape, andI found it along the station
place and the Bouvillard Mallon,with its beds of flowers and
scrubs, encircled by grass and arow of newly planted trees to
brighten up the lives of thosewho linger within its walls.
I saw the tragic ruins of thecathedral and walked amongst the
(40:40):
stones of the historic belfrybestruing the street, and with
it came the thoughts of how onceit reared its proud head in the
old days of old time prosperityand wealth seeming to share the
bustle of life in bygonecenturies when the peasants and
their carts halted within thesquares of Epe, and it was a
(41:00):
marketplace of this low lyingcountry.
For Harold Maybury the visit wasa moving one not just limited to
Flanders as he went on toexplore other areas where he'd
served too.
On those battlefields beinggradually reclaimed, he found
some peace, I think, reflectingon what his war experiences
meant to him and perhapsstanding there on that holy
(41:24):
ground as he calls it, perhapsthat was what prompted him to
publish his memoirs just a fewyears later.
He said The star of hope stillhangs over Seisulalis, and the
earth that once was no man'sland and over Niepp and the
rolling downs, the twinklinglights of cottages show their
signs of habitation.
(41:46):
The birds have built their nestsin the once stark Everton wood
at Gomacor, the long trek ofaged peasants under shell fire
from hamlet to village fartheroff is at an end, and old men
smoke their pipes of peace infields once soaked with blood.
How soon therefore do we forgetthe mirrors of the past back in
(42:08):
the sober world we come again totoil and grind each man to his
task and to his own thoughts.
In our home towns there's thelights of home, the laughter of
children, the ease, the comfortswe once long for, but out there
the fields, the hedges, the dankshell holes were our abodes, the
(42:29):
winking pearly very lights theonly gleams of light we knew,
and instead of swift movingcrowds the swish, swish of
marching feet towards the fieldof battle.
From the mirrors of the pastthere comes the voices of those
that sleep their eternal sleepfrom Ypres to the Som, and
(42:50):
moonbeams play on holy groundtill dawn arises from the east.
The guns are silent, so too aremen.
The passage of time shall surelynot blot out the years of
remembrance and that's theclosing line of the book that's
(43:11):
how Mabury ends his tale withthat phrase years of
remembrance.
Maybury was a good writer, not abrilliant one but a good writer
he expressed his war experiencein easy language, easy to
understand.
He puts across feeling in hiswords he has a connection to
that landscape of the FirstWorld War, something that we
(43:33):
often talk about here on thepodcast and his view from the
ranks gives the account I thinkgreater currency and his return
to the battlefield a dimensionnot often encountered in other
books.
It's a title that reallydeserves to have been reprinted
perhaps during the centenarycertainly it should be better
(43:54):
known and not as rare as it isand that final phrase of his the
Years of remembrance wassomething obviously dear to
Mabury, which is why I thinkit's on his gravestone.
For him I suspect it was thekey, the phrase, the words to
his mind returning to thatlandscape of the Great War,
(44:19):
returning to his experiences forhim to see the faces of his
comrades who once marched besidehim and marched no more a way to
return to that place hedescribed so well which was his
very personal Old FrontlineYou've been listening to an
(44:46):
episode of the Old Frontlinewith me, military historian Paul
Reed.
You can follow me on Twitter atSomcor, you can follow the
podcast at OldFrontlinePod,check out the website at
oldfrontlineco dot where you'llfind lots of podcast extras and
photographs and links to booksthat are mentioned in the
podcast.
And if you feel like supportingus you can go to our Patreon
(45:09):
page patreon.com slasholdfrontline or support us on
buymeacoffee at buymeacoffee.comslash oldfrontline.
Links to all of these are on ourwebsites thanks for listening
and we'll see you again soon.
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