The Somme Situation

I was recently speaking with a man who visited France last year, as part of research into his grandfather who served in the Durham Light Infantry. During his foray behind history’s lines he was looking over a particular battlefield, and met some other English people. They said, 'Have you found any souvenirs?' He wasn't sure what they were talking about, until they showed him an old rusty piece of steel with a wider bit at one end, which they'd dug up.

'We think it's something that was used for cleaning gun barrels', they said. In fact, it was later revealed to be an unexploded mortar bomb. The man who told me this said he decided not to look for any ‘souvenirs’.

In this final year of anniversary commemorations of World War One there continues to be intense focus on France and its battlefields, and at this time in particular on the anniversary of the First Battle of the Somme. Here in London, twenty-one years ago, I stumbled across a different sort of WW1 souvenir. Not ordnance, just paper, but still with great impact.

It was 1997 and I was directing a short feature for a New Zealand TV travel programme. The theme was genealogy – researching your family history and connections – and looking at what resources were available to do that in and around London. We visited Births, Deaths and Marriages (also known as Hatches, Matches and Dispatches), the HQ of the Genealogical Society, and the National Archives at Kew.

It was at the Archives, while waiting for our liaison person to organise part of our visit, that I was idly leaning against some cabinets of large wide drawers. Being nosey I opened one, and there inside was a theatre of war. A whole battlefield. In fact it was the Western Front, and what I was looking at was an original First World War situation map.

Original Somme Situation Map, 27.3.1918

However, the liaison person returned, I shut the drawer and we carried on filming, though having tantalisingly glimpsed the drawer's contents they stayed in the back of my mind, and I wondered if one day I might get an opportunity to have a closer and longer look at them.

That day arrived last week. Having arranged a 'reader's ticket' at the National Archives, I put in a request to view the old First World War Somme situation maps, originally made for the War Office. A friend with a passion for all things WW1 was visiting, and I knew he would be gobsmacked by the documents, though what I hadn't reckoned on was my own reaction.

Poignantly, as we visited, the maps were just a few days away from their own centenary, representing the Western Front around the area of St. Quentin during what became known as the Spring Offensive, or the German military's Operation Michael. This period of the war, March and April 1918, apparently saw more territory gained and lost (depending whose side you were on) in a short period than in the whole of the conflict to that point.

We arrived at the Large Documents and Maps room on the top floor, and there waiting for us was an enormous card folder which we carried gingerly to one of the reading tables. Opening it revealed a selection of situation maps bound in individual portfolios of brown or grey. One was labelled ‘Battle of the Somme, 1918, Maps showing German situation 27^th March to 5^th April’. Another was ‘Situation Map 2, German Order of Battle, 2.I.1918 – 6.XI.1918’. There were others, all 100 years old, all representing one of the bloodiest conflicts the world has seen.

My friend Shaun had had no idea what we were coming to see. 'You're joking?' he said, but as we started to examine the documents he lapsed into silence. We both did.

NZ and Australian positions 27.3.1918 (note OneTree Hill at top)

Poring over the maps we found that each represented a single day, updated to show the position of the allied armies, battalions, regiments and so on, as well as some German positions. Different coloured inks were used accordingly, with the annotated lines varying between thick black (the actual front line), long dashes (the front line the previous day), collections of close dots (support positions), and increasingly finer variations on dots and dashes showing army boundaries, and the numbers and boundaries of Corps, Divisions, Brigades, Battalions, Pioneers and Field Companies.

None of the maps detailed the actual numbers of soldiers or casualties. None of course captured the fear, the horror, or the desperation and exhaustion of men who had been shelled, gassed, and machine-gunned - until we saw the names of the companies. Here, the 1st Coy 2/Leinster (47^th), there the 9^th Cavalry, and troops from the West Yorkshire regiment.  Further north the 9^th Australian and the 3^rd NZ and NZ Rifle Brigade were identified. A large ‘N.Z.’ had been stencilled next to the French town of Bertrancourt, where New Zealand troops were marshalled (see image below courtesy of the NZ  government WW1 website). West of Bertrancourt in what appears to be a gap in the front line itself is ‘One Tree Hill’, named presumably by the Auckland troops fighting there after the famous landmark of their home city.

Kiwi troops at Bertrancourt, France, 1 April 1918 

South of Bertrancourt , on that same day – 27^th March – soldiers of the Wellington (1^st NZ), Otago (2^nd NZ), NZRB – Rifle Brigade (3^rd NZ), 2 & 3 NZ Engineers and troops of the Maori Battalion Pioneers can be seen listed at the tiny village of Hédauville, along with British troops who (further research shows) were firing a Mk VII 6-inch gun against the first phase of Germany’s Operation Michael.

These regimental idents are the closest we get to the men in the battlefield. The maps were the ‘big picture’, annotated and redrawn daily for the military to demonstrate ground gained or lost, and the positions of divisions and battalions. The individual stories are elsewhere, in the diaries, letters, books, poems and art of those who fought.

And yet, although these maps appear to be a clinically precise view from above, history shows that the front at this time was so confused that information on the status was often inaccurate, that orders were misunderstood, and that the positions of troops were sometimes so chaotic due to fog, mist, smoke and gas that some were in fact unknowingly behind enemy lines.

Somme Situation Map, reference

The various inked lines – drawn according to the key in the corners of the maps – and the village names, the hill positions, the woods… each of these can help locate our great grandfathers; where they fought, perhaps where they fell. But they are removed and distant, out of range if you like. Shaun and I were silent for a long time looking at them, thinking about what they represented.

I knew I had to write about the maps, but afterwards I had trouble starting. Each time I drafted a first line it seemed wrong; each time I seemed to choose words that weren’t appropriate. And then I got to thinking about the people whose job it was to annotate and redraw these situation maps on a daily basis. Did they have any anxiety or distress recording the advances and retreats, the shifting lines, and naming the infantry and field companies?  Did they ever stop to think what their pen-strokes truly represented?

The only thing that came to me were emotions, and snatches of words and phrases. And so I wrote a poem, which is where this blog ends…

Drawer of Death

I opened the drawer

Looked on death

The lines, the numbers, dots and dashes

A map of war

Dashes towards the enemy

Lines of young men reduced

To annotations, abbreviations

Abbreviated lives

The front line, thick and black

Changing from day to day

The map silent

No shots, explosions, no screams

Here the engineers, there the rifle brigade

Mounted cyclists

The Maori Battalion

A small town called Misery

Whose hand drew these?

Daily recording the yards gained

Not the youths lost

Whose eyes looked at this map?

Who saw no death in the cold flick of a pen?

The drawer, the drawer of death.

__________________________________________________________

To find out how to get a reader’s ticket for the National Archives click here.

A Grand Design Space Renovation Argument

There’s an argument going on at our place. Not out loud; it’s not like the neighbour’s screaming at us for having trimmed a wee bit too much of her japonica which was hanging over on our side. No, this argument is much quieter, in fact silent, but no less a major heavyweight bout.

Mortgage-on-Thames

Having recently bought in Sunbury-on-Thames – or ‘Mortgage-on-Thames’ as we now call it – we have once again (of necessity) become property renovators. Liz and I have done this at least twice before, so we’re no strangers when it comes to peeling off old wallpaper, jemmying away rotten timbers, or in fact ripping down whole walls. Sometimes we do it just for fun, so you might want to be a bit cautious before inviting us round to your place; if we arrive with a bottle of Chardonnay and a crowbar you know you’re in trouble.

It will come as no surprise therefore to learn that over the years we have become avid followers of Kevin McCloud, George Clarke, Sarah Beeny et al, as we have watched them observe, guide, fret, advise and sometimes scoff at people’s various restoration, facelift, or complete demolition-and-rebuild projects on TV.

We’ve become immune to the drama; cue Kevin, walking towards camera, away from mud-clogged building site with stranded digger in the background: ‘The thing is, will their budget cope with this winter of discontent? Can Bob and Sally survive not only the stresses of the ever-delayed project, but the challenge of living with each other in a tent at the bottom of their soggy garden while their building project becomes more and more stuck in a sea of mud, ennui and overdue credit card payments?’ 

Probably, but we have another four commercial breaks and similar pieces-of-rhetoric-to-camera until we find out.

Sarah Beeny is positively funereal in her pre-break summaries, her voice lowering to that of a minister presiding over the eulogies and final words before the coffin is committed, probably to a muddy hole in the ground due to the worst winter since ever. The editor even adds a blue-grey tinge to the images of the property pre-reno work, along with sad violin music FX, just so we get the message that this project was death personified until SB came along.

That’s okay, there’s a lot we like about the programmes too, not least of which is having a wager on whether the wife in each Grand Designs episode will get pregnant during the building project (she does, always), and whether the same will happen between George’s first and final visits to his Amazing Spaces properties (she usually does too). We have a side-bet on whether the presenters are to blame. Sarah Beeny seems to be pregnant herself in every episode of her property programmes, but since neither Kevin nor George feature we can hardly hold them accountable.

No, what irks us the most is how Kevin endlessly talks about how the grand design in question needs to maintain ‘a dialogue’ with the landscape in which it sits, and how ‘the narrative’ of the house and grounds needs to be well-planned. The ceiling needs to ‘engage’ with the walls, while the roof should ‘embrace’ the distant horizon.

The garden incommunicado

Well I can tell you now that our property is having a blazing row, not just with the landscape but within itself. For example, the garden is definitely not speaking to the house. There is no dialogue between them, unless it’s the house saying, ‘You bastard! Look at you! Overgrown, unkempt, the scruffiest in the neighbourhood. What about me?!’

Actually the house is no better (as the garden will quickly tell you); the walls have turned their faded yellow stucco backs on the local landscape, most likely because they’re too embarrassed to engage in any discourse. It would be short-lived anyway. ‘Yellow? Dirty old yellowy stucco? You cannot be serious!’ says the landscape.

Nothing to see here, move along...

Inside, the décor has reached a stony silence with contemporary norms, the bright pink walls of the lounge and dark green of the dining room having nothing to say to today’s paint charts, especially magnolia, Britain’s biggest selling interior hue.

The roof tiles, spaced like rotting teeth in a sugar-loving octogenarian who has never visited a dentist in his life, do maintain a Theresa May-like conversation with everything below, a sort-of Brexit attitude of, ‘We’re definitely leaving, bit by bit, but we still expect to have protection from water ingress, and we’d like some guarantee of ongoing commitment to friendly upkeep of relationships, if not actual tiles’. Strong and stable, that’s what the roof wants to be.

The shed in tendrilly engagement

The garden path hates the lawn, the sage bush and adjacent rose have fallen out, while the only engagement to be seen is where the ivy has got the garden shed well and truly in its tendrilly clutches, and even that’s an unwelcome Weinstein moment. The shed is likely to fail its audition and be blacklisted. (What, too soon?) (Yep – Ed. #ShedsMatterToo)

At the river’s edge there’s a tree stump making a bid to escape across the water, while the nearby flagpole is saying nothing, there being a lack of vexillologists in the family at present.

All-in-all it’s an enormous spat, and Kevin would have his scripting skills cut out to find any meaningful dialogue anywhere on the property.

So it’s been interesting this week meeting with a couple of architects as we talk through our ideas for Mortgage-on-Thames, and we now keenly await their responses. Given the obvious conflict, we see them as quasi property marriage guidance counsellors, whose job it is to make sure that meaningful dialogue takes place between the house and Sunbury, the building and the garden, and the property in general with the neighbourhood.

Liz and I did briefly discuss inviting Kevin or George round to cover our renovation project for their TV programmes, but then dismissed the idea. I mean, we have a new mortgage; we certainly can’t afford another child.


(This blog is available as a podcast. Listen here!)

A Few Feet of Snow

It was the footprint that did it. Not that there weren't many footprints in the snow - there were: boots, shoes, dogs' paws; but this footprint on the pavement was different. It was just that: the imprint of a naked foot. In the snow.

My attention had already been attracted by the multitude of wildlife imprints in the white stuff back in the garden - the three-toed bamboo-like footprints of the coots from the river, smaller birds' prints, and a curious collection of tiny paw shapes that were either from a rat, a vole, or our garden equivalent of a mini-Yeti. Oh, and two tiny tiny boot prints from, presumably, a garden gnome which had set off through Storm Emma from somewhere else in the neighbourhood.

But this naked footprint down the road had me stumped. It wasn't alone - there was clear evidence that whoever it belonged to did actually have two feet, both unshod, and had gone for a stroll through the snow recently, despite the temperature being minus two.

They could of course have been from someone out for a jog wearing barefoot trainers. I'm no Sherlock Holmes, but I think I can safely deduce that these imprints weren't made by someone running. There were no scuff marks, no signs of quickened pace or intense motion. These, my dear Watson, were made by someone not in a hurry, not escaping a crime scene, nor desperate for a fag and determinedly striding to the local shop. These footprints were made (pauses for dramatic effect) by someone... out for a stroll.

Which begs the question, why wear barefoot trainers? Why not actual trainers, or better still, boots with thick woolen socks? No, I am convinced these were made by actual naked feet. Maybe in Sunbury-on-Thames there is a Sunbury equivalent of the fire walkers, whose membership aims to withstand the excruciating pain of, not fire, but ice and snow. These footprints could signal a rite of passage by some local youth, who is one day destined to become the tribal leader. Running Bear. Or in this case maybe Walking Bare.

Which brings me to another hypothesis: that the footprints were made by a local naturist, possibly of Scandiwegian heritage, immune to snow and freezing temperatures and keen to show defiance (among other bits) to Mother Nature, and the rest of the general neighbourhood.

Only once have I ever gone barefoot in snow, and that was after leaping out of a 39-degree Celsius hot tub to take a couple of photos. For the few seconds I was out - starkers I might add, apologies to the neighbours (again) - it was actually invigorating, enjoyable, though getting back into the tub was doubly exhilarating.

Three feet of snow

These footprints however were on a pavement, alongside the Thames, with houses bordering the other side of the road. They suggested a stroll of some distance, so whoever they belonged to must have been well hard. (Unlike me out of the hot tub, as my wife pointed out).

My main worry was that they belonged to some poor soul with Alzheimer's who had forgotten to get dressed to go down to the shop. That would be extremely sad. Or that they were the footprints of a sleepwalker, oblivious to the freezing cold, who woke up this morning wondering why there was snow on the carpet beside their bed, and why their toes had turned black from frostbite.

Anyway, due to ongoing snow flurries and Storm Emma, the prints weren't easy to follow and didn't lead anywhere conclusive. Nor could I backtrack them to their origin, so I am left bewildered. Still, it's brought a whole new dimension to Snowmaggedon and The Beast from the East. 

And as Sherlock himself might observe, 'The game's afoot!'