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| Captain Charles Stormont Gibbs, MC, 4th Suffolks |
There's a sub-genre of World War One literature that I swore off about 20 years ago, when I concluded I had reached my lifetime quota for such works. It's the vast collection of the accounts of former British Army junior officers who had attended public schools (prep schools in American lingo). Almost all of them are clear, coherent, with high-level vocabularies. Most, however, tell the stories of the same battles, the same sort of disillusionment, and determinedly follow a literary framework Hemingway described that was later re-formulated for a TV movie: "All true stories end in death — this is a true story." My problem with these memoirs is not their quality or all those tragic deaths, but their sameness.
Nonetheless, I am always looking for fresh works on the Great War, fiction as well as non-fiction, and Charles Stormont Gibbs work, From the Somme to the Armistice, seems to have been rediscovered and gaining some 21st century popularity. I couldn't bring myself to read it, but I discovered some excellent quotes and excerpts that, collectively I think, capture the spirit of the work and I offer them below for our readers' consideration. Someday, I might just buy a copy for myself.
Charles Cobden Stormont Gibbs (1897–1969) was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant out of Radley College's OTC program in November 1916. He arrived in France while the Battle of the Somme was already underway and soon joined the festivities. Serving to the end of the war, he earned the Military Cross for " organising defensive measures to meet enemy counter-attacks under heavy bombardment." After the war, he became an educator, most notably running Gayhurst preparatory school in Gayhurst, near Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire.
At the Somme
1. This string of wounded men took the stuffing out of me a bit. Like most people I had not fully realised that the horror of war is wounds, not death. I had thought of people being killed perhaps, if they weren’t lucky enough to get a nice little wound at first.
2. The next shock of the war came to me – the next experience – the death of one’s friends. It didn’t seem possible. I jumped out of the trench and ran forward into no man’s land “Come back sir, you can’t do any good”, from an old man in the trench behind. I came back. Wounded they might be but there they lie until they died, for no living man could go to their help – certainly not the only officer but two left in the battalion – just the colonel, Tack, Rush and I – all the rest had gone, even the doctor. I got back in the trench and cried until I couldn’t see.
3. I knew an orderly or runner wouldn't have much chance of finding his way so I decided to go myself. I memorised the details of the map, took a direction off the star and after twenty minutes or stumbling along stepped straight into the Company HQ - Triumph!
4. A struggling line of men, running in a sort of staggering run. Some running, some dropping. The first few got level with me and as I looked at them I saw in their eyes that wild look of men mad with fear.”
5. We got wedged in a traffic jam for some minutes and it seemed touch and go whether they [his men] could be kept in a frame of mind to follow on. Especially was this so when the result of the jam became evident in the shape of strings of wounded coming down from further forward. Amongst these was young Suttle with all the fingers of one hand hanging by shreds of skin. He held up his hand as he passed me with a grimace but he knew his wound had saved his life.
6. In any sort of hand fighting there are the savage emotions that motivate the shot or thrust. The great horror of war is this prostitution of civilized man. He has to fight for his country and to do so has in actual practice to be brutalized for his country; he has to learn to hate with the primitive blood lust of the savage if he is to push a bayonet into another human being (who probably no more wants to fight than he does). Need he hate? In the case of the average man he must as the counter-balance to fear.
Then Came Passchendaele
7. I returned to France from leave about 19th September [1917]. I reached the transport lines in front of Ypres in the evening and went up with the rations after dark. . . We had to follow the line of the Menin Road keeping off the road some fifty yards at one side, for the road was continually under shellfire. . . I remember falling over a dead man and the revolting sensation one had when this happened in the dark.
8. The great idea seemed to be to take the Passchendaele ridge on which hundreds of lives had been squandered. Canadians had tried, Australians had tried, but the Germans still defended the ridge and it was said that on the position of the line from which we were to start there was the greatest concentration of enemy artillery yet known.
9. When dawn came things did not pan out as they should have done if the generals had their way. First no one was ready except ourselves. The Middlesex had lost their way and arrived an hour late, the other battalion quie lost and never did arrive at all.
10. Our barrage opened as planned and immediately the enemy put down a counter barrage of such intensity that its effect was quite unimaginable. . . We had practically no shelter so that the men lay flat at first, for it had been decided not to advance until the battalions on our flanks were ready. To prevent chaos and panic and simply losing the lot, the CO and I had to walk backwards and forwards along the top of the trench–at least that is what the "Old Man" did and I had to be with him. . . Well, we both had charmed lives. The CO's revolver took one piece of shell that would have killed him and I got a clod in the back that knocked me down. . .
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