Forgotten Memoirs of the Great War Part 1

In this episode we start a look at some of the Forgotten Memoirs of the First World War, starting with Percy Croney's 'Soldiers Luck' published in the mid-1960s. Croney was a 1914 volunteer who served with the Essex Regiment and Scottish Rifles at Gallipoli and on the Western Front, being wounded several times and taken prisoner in March 1918. We ask what the value of memoirs like this are to our understanding of the Great War. 

Percy Croney - Soldier's Luck on Open Library

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

With so many books, particularly memoirs published about the First World War, can there really be forgotten memoirs? In the start of a new series looking at some forgotten and lesser known books of the First World War, we begin with an ordinary soldier's tale of the Great War from Gallipoli to the Somme. As I record this, the eightieth anniversary of VE Day Victory in Europe Day is just a couple of weeks away. And I was reading in a newspaper that perhaps as few as two hundred Second World War veterans might still be alive in the UK. Now I think this figure is too low. It could easily be much more like two thousand veterans of the Second World War still alive, and there are a huge number of people that fit the age bracket who've been alive, been of military age during that period, whether they all served, we don't know. But what is clear to me and has been clear to me in the last couple of years is that that generation of the Second World War is at less than one minute to midnight now. It's almost gone. A generation that for me has been with me all my life because my father was one of them, a veteran of Anzio in the Italian campaign, but so much a part of my professional life from guiding to television to writing about the Second World War, which kind of flowed through at the same time side by side, of course, with my interest in the Great War. Those two massive conflicts that dominated the 20th century have sat side by side in my life all of my life one way or another. And all of this discussion of veterans of the Second World War as we approach VE Day made me think back to the 1980s and 90s when I was privileged to interview so many Great War veterans and sadly gradually watch them fade away as the nineties moved towards the millennium, and in those first few years of the new century, the last of the Great War veterans that I knew were gone, and within a few years, the very last of them, Harry Patch, was gone too. I posted about the Second World War veterans on Twitter or X as it is now, but it will always be, and I'm sure for many of you still be Twitter. And Richard Van Emden, who will be well known to many of you who listen to this podcast, the author of so many fantastic books about the Great War, himself having interviewed hundreds of Great War veterans, he had this to say in one of his tweets about Great War Veterans at a similar point, a similar stage to where we are now with these World War II men and women. He said that when the French offered the Legion d'hur to all surviving British Great War veterans in 1998, they awarded about three hundred and fifty to four hundred all told, if I remember correctly. I don't doubt that a few were missed. So kind of what he was saying is that then we were in that point where we are now where only a few hundred remained, perhaps it's a couple of thousand for the second world war, but things are changing, and very soon we will have taken another step beyond the Great War to a point where even the next Great War, the witnesses of that will almost, if not totally, be gone. And all of this made me feel that this is another one of those moments where the First World War meets the Second World War, but in a different way. Because eyewitnesses to conflict are incredibly important in our understanding of it. Once they've all gone, we can't go back and ask them questions. There will be testimony, there will be recordings, there are documentaries that feature veterans of both world wars, and I've recommended many of the Great War ones here on this channel from, for example, A Game of Ghosts, and indeed some of the programmes that Richard Van Emden himself worked on with the last Veterans of the Great War, which were made in the late nineties and early 2000s. But once the veterans have gone, it does mark a new chapter because we're left with a finite archive. We can't add to it, we can't expand upon it, and in some areas those voices are still an even silent because not every aspect of every part of those two great conflicts has been recorded through the human experience. Even less so, I think, for the First World War, because recording devices in the seventies and eighties and even in the nineties were not as sophisticated as they are now, and that generation lived just outside a publishing boon in that nineties period when a lot of Second World War veterans privately published their memoirs, something that very few First World War veterans did. Now we've lost all of the Great War veterans now, but that does not mean their voices are entirely silent. As we've said, there are recordings, there are memoirs, there are books, there are interviews. But one of the things that I discover as the podcast prompts me to explore this subject of the Great War more and more is something that I often say that there is still so much to learn. And just kind of when we think we've read all the accounts, we've seen all the interviews, we've looked at all the diaries and the unpublished accounts, very often something comes along that challenges that viewpoint just as it should. And one of the layers of our knowledge that has always especially appealed to me are the memoirs that veterans left behind. As we've said, they didn't live really to see that kind of self-publishing period, but a lot of them did write down their experiences and get them published, often by small publishers. And this is authors who wrote about their experiences from the well known ones to the lesser known ones, from Robert Graves and Seafried to Soon and Edmund Blunden, to names that are far less known to those even those interested really in the Great War. And I literally have shelves and shelves of these memoirs. I've never been able to stop buying them, and I still buy them even now, and many of them I've read again and again and spoken about some of them on this podcast, the value of memoirs. We've had quite a few episodes about that. What is the kind of history of these First World War memoirs? Well, there were wartime accounts, accounts actually published while the war was going on, but there was strict censorship, and when you read some of those, they often don't ring true. That these men have had to kind of temper what they're trying to describe, particularly in terms of the horror of that experience, the toughness, the brutality, often the carnage of it. A lot of that is really played down in those wartime published accounts. But when the war is over and these men become civilians again, you see this growth in the publication of war books in the 1920s kind of reaching this peak in the late 20s, particularly in 28 and 29, when a huge number of books were published. But when you look at the commonality, particularly in that period, it's largely memoirs by officers, so offering one viewpoint into the war from the point of view of platoon or company, or in some cases, some battalion commanders or artillery commanders, not so much voices from the ranks. And so many of these books are published that there's a bit of a pushback on them and they decline for a while. And then the 30s, particularly as you approach the mid-thirties, when there's this idea that perhaps the generation, two decades on almost from the armistice who have fought that war have been forgotten, then more books are published then, and increasingly you begin to see books by ordinary soldiers about ordinary soldiers' experience. Obviously, another Great War then comes along, and that's not really a period for publishing books on the previous conflict. But by the time you approach the 50th anniversary of the Great War in the 1960s, then again there's a bit of a resurgence of publications of memoirs by men who were there, covering quite a broad church, and that continues on into the 70s, with some quite big publishers like William Kimber publishing officers and ordinary soldiers memoirs in often quite well illustrated books, few of which did very well. And I remember in the 1980s when I first began my book buying journey, finding a lot of these books in the remainder bookshops of places like Brighton and Eastbourne and Bexhill and Hastings, or tucked away in the second hand bookshops as well. But obviously, as that generation got older, then the number of these books being produced declined. There was a couple in the eighties, but that was much, much rarer. So we kind of think that we've seen them all. When you collect these over a long period of time, you kind of get used to the titles that are out there. Occasionally you see variations in these books, a couple of different editions. Sometimes you're lucky to find one with a dust wrapper. They probably all had dust wrappers at one point, but people just took them off and threw them away, unfortunately. And some of those dust wrappers, and I know there are people who collect first editions memoirs with dust wrappers, are really quite impressive things in their own right. I've always been more interested in the book. I've got a few with dust wrappers, but I'm much more interested in what's in that book, reading that book, consuming and understanding what it kind of tells us. And although we do kind of sometimes think that we've seen them all, I quickly and frequently discover that that is a crazy assertion, especially when I subscribe to secondhand book lists of the likes of Tom Donovan. Now I've mentioned Tom a lot of times, I don't have shares in his company, he's an old friend who I've known for many, many years. I was thinking just the other day, it's probably over 40 years that I've been buying books from him when he used to have a stall at one of the London Medal Fairs in the mid-1980s. And Tom continues to put out a list, he's bought quite a few libraries recently, and through those, through the sale of those libraries, and then putting on sale through his list, it opened up a chance to get some memoirs that are rare and also uncover some that I've just never encountered before. And on his most recent list, I bought two of these. And both of these particular books, one of which we're going to discuss here, and hopefully another one in another episode, they spoke to me because they connected me to things and people, which is important in the way we connect to books and the subject of the First World War. Both were rare titles that I'd never ever heard of before, and books that are barely recognised as part of that kind of contribution of memoirs about the Great War. And that prompted me to think that there is something in podcasts about forgotten memoirs of the Great War podcasts here. And this episode, which will be the first of several, I hope, perhaps many, because there are some great and neglected titles out there, will begin to look at some of these lesser known forgotten and inverted commas memoirs of the First World War. So that's the pitch here. That's what this episode is about, forgotten memoirs. But what specific book are we talking about for this first episode? Well, the one that really caught my eye in that catalogue was a book called Soldier's Luck by Percy Croney. Now that's a book that I will be surprised if you've ever heard of. Some of you might be lucky to own an edition. The cover shows the cat badge of the Essex Regiment, which was the author's regiment they principally served with, and it was published by a small publisher in Devon in 1965. It's never been reprinted and it isn't easily available, but I will put some links to it onto the podcast website and in the show notes where I've found it in online catalogues. And if you're in the UK, I've discovered that there is a British Library edition that you can request through your local library to have it sent there for you to read. So who was Percy Croney? What was his story and why did this book appeal to me? And more importantly, what does it tell us about the Great War? The question that we must always ask, I think, when we look at these memoirs of the First World War. So Percy Croney was born in Warthamstow, in Essex, in 1895, part of that kind of Greater London at that period, and he was the son of a bookbinder. He joined the Essex Regiment, as the cover of the book kind of indicates, in late 1914, as a Kitchener's Army, a new army volunteer. He did initially try to get in the local 7th Battalion of the Essex Regiment, the Territorial Battalion, which was his local TF Territorial Force Battalion, but that was full up, and in the end he joined the 12th Battalion of the Essex, which was a reserve unit, not one scheduled to immediately go overseas as part of Kitchener's army onto the battlefield, but to act in a reserve capacity. And possibly that's why not so many people had joined it, because it's hard for us to understand this, but many men in 1914 volunteering wanted to get to the battlefield as quickly as possible. But the 12th Battalion, like so many of these reserve units, didn't stay home service reserve units long because the casualties on the battlefield meant that these units often had to be disbanded and the men sent overseas. In Percy Croney's case, this wasn't to France, it wasn't to the Western Front, he found himself in that mid-part of 1915 being transferred to the 1st Battalion, the Essex Regiment, and sent to Gallipoli because the 1st Essex had been on empire duty when the war broke out, recalled to Britain, formed part of the 29th Division and had taken part in the original Gallipoli landings on the 25th of April 1915. It had suffered a lot of casualties in the fighting for Cape Hellas and in the fighting around the village of Crithia and Gully Ravine, and Percy Croney joined it as a reinforcement. Now this is one of the reasons why it appealed to me, which I'll come back to later on in this podcast. But he stayed with the 1st Essex, he served with them at Gallipoli, then later on the Somme, where he was wounded, having also been wounded at Gallipoli. He later transferred to the 2nd Battalion Scottish Rifles, which eventually became part of the 20th Light Division, and he was taken prisoner on the Somme in March 1918, remaining a prisoner of war in Germany until the end of the conflict later that year. Now I can find little else about him except that he married Lillian Evans in West Ham in 1921. They had a son, Morris, in 1925, and Percy Croney seems to have died in May 1968 in the New Forest in Hampshire and appears to be buried in New Milton Cemetery. And if anyone listening to the podcast knows where New Milton Cemetery is or lives near it, and can pop along and see if Percy Crony's grave is still there, I would be greatly interested to know that and love to see a photograph of it. But in terms of his war, and what we're going to do is look at Percy Crony's book. We're not going to read the whole book, obviously, but I'm going to pick out a few key extracts to give you a sense of what the book is like. It is well written, he's an ordinary guy, but it's very well written, and use some extracts to give you a kind of flavour of this book and hopefully help you to see the value of memoirs like this and what they tell us about the experience of the Great War. So his war then begins at Gallipoli, at Souvla Bay, where the first battalion of the Essex Regiment have moved to from Cape Hellas in the late summer, approaching the autumn of nineteen fifteen, as in many respects the campaign is beginning to wind down, particularly in that Souva area where the landings have taken place in August, it's all gone terribly wrong, and everyone's back into static trench warfare there. So this then is his first account of arriving at Gallipoli in nineteen fifteen. With engine throbbing the boat surges on over black water, sheeny in the light of the myriad stars shining in a soft black sky. There is no moon tonight. Shells are coming from the unseen land in front. They come with an ascending whistle and explode in a splash of instant gone red fire in a line across our front. The boat's engine throbs faster and harder. The line of bursting shells is reached, to left, then right, a shriek, a crash, a splash of fire, a great fountain shoots up on either side, ghostly in the starlight. The boat jars and lurches, moments of heavy rain, the boat speeds on, the line of bursting shells is left behind. A blacker blackness is seen low down in front beneath the stars. Galipoli, and a small light appears. The boat slackens speed. Now little more than drifting, it turns, now bumps sideways against a jetty. We scramble from the boat, are guided along a jetty, or at least two or three lighters fixed end to end from the shore, and boarded over to form one and step off onto the sand. Forming into file, the guide leads on, and we are then over the sand perhaps for a hundred yards, when after a right wheel, he halts us. For a while we are left to stand listening, wondering. The Turk gunners have ceased shelling the sea, but from no more than a quarter of a mile away, sharp in the still night, there comes the sound of rifles, sometimes singly, sometimes in a crackle. So that's his introduction to warfare, his introduction to Gallipoli, and if he thought food in the army was bad, he quickly discovers what rations at Gallipoli were like. Rations now come up and are issued by the sergeant under the watchful eyes of the platoon commander. Perhaps there are four biscuits per man, a tin of bully beef between two, three, or even sometimes four. Some mornings also a sandbag filled with tins of jam come up, but that will be flung unopened over the parados, for most men suffer in greater or lesser degree from dysentery, and all believe that jam aggravates it. Why don't they send us a bit of cheese instead? Is a daily complaint. Rations are indeed small here. Now once he's in the trenches with this battalion he's joined, he's a kitcheners recruit. This is a regular battalion, and many of the pre war regulars, despite casualties, are still serving. And this is one of the things that interested me about this because I have a personal connection to the first battalion, the Essex Regiment, in that I had two relatives who served in it. Tommy Sainty, who was a pre-war regular who was killed at Gallipoli in May 1915 before Crony before Percy Croney joined it. And my uncle Dan, Dan Boyles from Colchester, who had also joined as a pre-war regular in 1912, and he'd gone out with a second Essex in nineteen fourteen, been wounded at Eape in 15, recovered, and then, like Percy Crony, was sent to Gallipoli as a replacement. So when I read this, I'm kind of reading for the first time, because I don't know of any other memoir that covers the Essex Regiment lads at Gallipoli, I'm reading the kind of experiences that my uncle Dan and Tommy Sainty, my great uncle, would have had at Gallipoli in 1915. And that is again one of the kind of layers of interest in memoirs like this and what they tell us about the individual soldiers' experience. And what Crony finds is that when he's talking to the old Sweats in this battalion, that they insist that he calls them soldier, short for trained soldier, as a kind of and a mark of respect for their service, for their status as regular soldiers of the old British army. So that's a kind of interesting element to this. How and this was a question I think in a podcast Q ⁇ A some time ago, how the old army viewed the new army, and you do get a sense of that through Crony's memoirs. And what he finds himself, because of his training in Britain, he finds himself posted to the signal section of his company because of the signals training he'd done back home, and then he's sent up to the forward positions where the battalion is on Chocolate Hill at Souvla, overlooking the forward part of the battlefield. The trench dies away at the rocky foot of Chocolate Hill, about fifty yards to the left of my old post, and Essex Nullah is a gully running up its side. Besides manning a hundred yards or so of the trench running across the valley, Y Company also holds the forward edge of Essex Nullah, though with a woefully thin line of men. The hillside is just bare rock and sangers are being built for extra cover, but the work proceeds only slowly, not altogether because sandbags must be filled in the valley below and carried up, but mostly because men are so few. Although it must be three or four weeks now since the nulla was taken, nowhere do the sangers yet rise to more than a bare two feet. I proceed up the bottom of the nulla slowly, taking in the position of the posts and the general lie of the land for a signaller's job does not end at the tapper. He is also the runner who carries the message when received. And I guess he's thinking by looking round the positions that he's walking up into, I might have to carry messages to and fro areas of this battlefield, so I need to know what it looks like in the daylight because I might have to do it at night as well. But when he's here he joins the signal section in a bivy area amongst the rocks and realise that he doesn't have to be on front line duty all the time, that they're there to act as the communications for the unit in the front line, not there necessarily to do the fighting. But the problem at this stage of the campaign, particularly here at this part of Suvla, is that the men were dropping with sickness on a regular basis, and within a short time he finds himself senior soldiers simply because the men around him, including some of these regulars, are fading away because not of enemy action, not of Turkish shells or snipers or grenades, it's sickness, and sickness became the major cause of casualties in this area in the latter part of the Gallipoli campaign. And then he's wounded while on duty in Essex Nulla, serving with the signalers in November 1915, and finds himself being evacuated away from Suvla by boat with other wounded soldiers, and is taken not just to a hospital ship or to one of the islands close by where they were treating wounded soldiers like Mudros, he finds himself being taken all the way to Malta and ends up in hospital there. So that again this memoir gives us an interesting kind of insight into an ordinary soldier's experience as a patient in a hospital at Malta during the Gallipoli campaign, so it's incredibly important in that respect. By the time he recovers from this wound as returns to the battlefield from Malta, his unit has left Gallipoli, the Gallipoli campaign has come to a conclusion, and they are now in Egypt. Initially just kind of standing still for a little while in Egypt, rebuilding the units, not just like the 1st Essex, but the whole of the 29th Division, from their experience of the Gallipoli campaign in 2015, finding replacements, doing training, replacing equipment, all this kind of stuff. But their duty is not to stay in Egypt, not to defend the Suez Canal, which was under threat from the Ottoman Empire at that time, but the war on the Western Front needed them now, and the whole division was about to be sent to France, and they'd gone, and Percy Crony arrived at this kind of tail end of that and followed up behind, and he finds himself on a ship heading to France, arriving at Marseille where the rest of the division had already disembarked, and then he heads by train up to the Somme front through fields touched by snow and weather that was complete contrast from where he'd come from in Egypt. He'd gone from the heat of the Egyptian desert and conditions there through to the chill and the snow and the cold of a European spring. The winter is not quite over. And he finds himself too at the depot at Rouen, because at this stage the depot of the British Army was not at Tarpla, it was at Rouen, and he goes to the infantry base depot there, and he's detached initially from going straight on to join the first Essex and ends up on a working party. Now this wasn't uncommon, so he'd not gone with the whole battalion to this new front, he'd ended up in the kind of tail end, the echelon of it. He gets the infantry base depot, the infantry base depot needs personnel for working parties up near the front line, so he's sent with a detachment of men to be attached to the Royal Engineers. And this is interesting because this isn't always recorded in every military record that now survives. It would have been recorded somewhere at the time, but so little of that kind of paper trail survives. So occasionally you have, let's say he'd been killed in this duty, he would be buried in a place a long way from where his battalion actually was, and it would be a bit of a mystery. And if it wasn't recorded in the War Graves records or in Soldiers Died or anywhere else, then we would have no idea of what he was up to. So again, this memoir gives us a bit of an insight into how soldiers could be detached and then moved around. And he finds himself working on some defences on behalf of the Royal Engineers just outside Arras. Some hundreds of wicker work revitments made like ordinary hurdles are needed in the building of the redoubt, which in essence is a maze of trenches, where any jerries entering would quickly lose all sense of direction and be wiped out by our bombers, who will be knowing all the redoubt's windings. So our work in the line is sometimes cancelled for a night or two, and days are spent in making revitments in a wood, an hour's march away. No man grumbles at the change. One half of the party goes into the wood with bill hooks to cut suitable sticks, while the rest divide into couples to manufacture the hurdles in a field adjoining. Once hands have acquired the knack, the work is easy. They are made good and strong to resist the pressure of the earth, and hour by hour the stacks grow higher. Green fields bright in the sunshine stretch away on all sides as far as the eye can see, and a mile off in different directions the whitewashed cottages of two small villages stand out against the green. To them at midday we make our way, for in most every French cottage a simmering coffee pot is ever on the hob, and a cup of French coffee is more tasty to drink with our haversack rations than the water in our bottles. So he's probably thinking this is a bit of a cushy number, an easy job at this point, but it doesn't last forever and finally he rejoins his actual battalion, the first battalion the Essex Regiment, who are now on the Somme front, and having been there for some weeks acclimatising to the conditions on the Western Front, he discovers that when he gets there the signal section that he's been a part of is full, personnel have all been replaced, he's no longer needed in that capacity, so instead he goes back to his old rifle platoon, and he joins them in the trenches near to Auchanvier, Oceanvillas to the troops, and this is his description of arriving on the Western Front. When the twenty ninth division took over this sector from the French, nearly half of Oceanvillas was handed over as a billeting area. Few civilians live here now, besides the families running the Estaminaes. Jerry had never yet ranged a gun on the place, yet on the third night after English troops replaced the French, the billets were heavily shelled. It is freely said that there are spies amongst the remaining civilians, though how they communicate with the enemy is hard to imagine. Crony goes on to say The sun has gone down, twilight darkens its single street as we enter the village of May May, deserted by civilians but occupied by English troops, though they, by daytime, may move about only singly, and then close hugging the house walls, because of Jerry's balloon observers. The long column slows almost to a halt between the houses of the leading platoons formed single file on entering the communication trench, beginning on the far side of a crossroads just beyond the last house of Maley Mailey. As feet flops down the ramp and the trench walls rise darkly on either side, that strange feeling comes again, a kind of thrill, a sensation of leaving the ordinary world behind and moving on to something wonderful beyond one's understanding. Crony then goes on to give us some great detail of this sector around Ocean Villas opposite Beaumont Hamel before the Somme offensive, something that we rarely read about, the focus is on first of July onwards, but what happened in almost that year before the Battle of the Somme began, and this memoir gives us a bit of an insight into that static period before the Somme battle even happened. It tells us about the static nature of this Somme front, the state of the positions. He talks about the kit left behind by French soldiers and the reminders of their occupation of this part of the Western Front, from field graves through to the way they'd made their trenches. And also he describes the changing seasons standing in those trenches around ocean villas as spring moves towards the early summer, so it's a great insight into that period. He notes at one point in the book when they're issued with shrapnel helmets, steel helmets for the very first time, which they're told to wear at all times when in the front line trenches to protect themselves from airbursts from shrapnel. He discusses how he's offered a commission at one point, but given his working class background, he believes that that's not for him. And after nearly a year with the first Essex, he states I belong to the 44th. And that's an interesting statement in its own right because he says I belong to the 44th. Well the 44th is the old name for the 44th Regiment of Foot that in the eighteen eighties became the Essex Regiment. And we kind of see that language of the old army beginning to permeate its way into even volunteers, Kitchener's men like him. And within just a short period he's taken on that identity of the old army and proud to be a part of it, something that I think we don't often always appreciate, how proud these soldiers were of the units that they were serving with. Preparations for the Somme offensive continue, and he talks about that, and Crony and his pals are now getting ready for the attack, moving up towards those trenches on the outskirts of Ocean Villas to take part in the assault on the village of Beaumont Hamill on the first of july nineteen sixteen. And his battalion, first battalion, the Essex Regiment, he's there. My uncle Dan, who I mentioned before, he's there too. Like Crony, he'd been wounded in Gallipoli, didn't get as far as Malta, he went to Mudros, he'd been shot through the elbow by a Turkish sniper in the Crithia Vineyard, but he was there too, and all of them in that battalion, both men who just joined, and there was quite a lot of replacements came in that period leading up to the Battle of the Somme. Kitchener's men like Crony, old sweats like my uncle Dan, they're all getting ready for this offensive. And the 1st Battalion, the Essex Regiment, was not going to be in the first wave of the attack. They were in reserve with a recently joined unit that had joined them at Souvler in 1915, the Newfoundland Regiment, and then ahead of them were two other battalions, the 2nd Battalion South Wales Borderers and the 1st Battalion Border Regiment, both veteran battalions of Gallipoli from the very first landings, and they were going to be in the first wave of the assault, and the Essex and the Newfoundlanders were going to come up behind, possibly never to be used if the attack went well. But all of those had been at Gallipoli and seen attacks break down very quickly there. I would guess, and you get a sense of this from Crony's account, that they're not always believing what they're being told, that this is going to be a complete walkover. He then describes as they're moving up to take part in the offensive, going past the gun sites, and this would have been in that area just to the south of Ocean Villas, in the Mesnall Valley, where there's a couple of little cemeteries there today, including Knightsbridge Cemetery, and the natural kind of geography of the land there makes it a perfect location for gun sites which can be hidden in the folds and the gullies and the ravines that are there. So moving up through that bit of the landscape, they pass the gunners, who are very confident that the artillery is going to do its job and that they've blasted Jerry to bits, as many of them say, but of course this kind of overbelief in what the power, particularly of divisional level artillery, could do, was something that contributed to the failure of the first day of the Battle of the Somme. The gunners having fired probably for them an unprecedented bombardment from their field guns, their 18 pounders and their 4.5s, those guns that were still at divisional level at that point. Nevertheless, their shellfire would prove to be ineffective. The wire would be uncut in many places, the German trenches not destroyed, and more importantly, the German defenders not entombed or killed in their dugouts. So when the attack did go in, it turns into something very different very quickly. Those leading waves of the South Wales borders and the Border Regiment are almost annihilated in the first moment of the battle, and the Newfounders and the Essex Regiment find themselves being called on to take part. And Crony calls his chapter on the first of July bewilderment, which I think kind of sums it up really in terms of obviously how he felt about it, and this is part of his account. July first, nineteen sixteen with first light of morning, orderly men go back along the communication trench to the cookhouse. But cooks will be working under difficulties, the Dixies brought back are only partly full, and a bare mess tin lid of cold tea is the total of our rations, but not a grumble is heard, men's thoughts are on other things, and as army biscuits are munched, only each man himself could tell how his thoughts strayed. Men know their drill, and as each finishes his elementary breakfast he climbs the steps to heaven, already cut up through the parapet from the firestep at the right hand of each bay. Here on top we stand, ready to fall in in our waves on command, looking forward at the red and black wall of the barrage resting on Jerry's trench, about three hundred yards away. Time crawls, how it crawls, yet in the end, though the watches of all nearby are on the way to England, we know that pinpoint in time twenty minutes past seven is close. It is the moment fixed for detonating that seventy tons of TNT in a chamber under Beaumont Hammel. Slowly while in the sunshine, a hill is growing from the wall of dust and smoke lying on Jerry's trench. It grows to a column, high yet it ceases to rise, flattens at the top, mushrooms out slowly subsides. No explosion was heard against the roar of the bombardment, only the ground shuddered and for a moment a great pressure seemed to rest on one's chest. Even before the great eruption of earth and dust had ceased to fall, men were calling It's short. It's wide the bloody RE's The ruins of Beaumont Hamill are hidden by the barrage, and from back here we may be mistaken, yet truly the mine did appear too near us and in the wrong direction. So that first hand account of the Hawthorne Mine exploding from the positions to the south of it where the Essex were, again, makes this a really important memoir because there aren't that many first hand accounts like that. So again, that is the value of these lesser known, forgotten memoirs of the Great War. They give us insights into subjects and pinpoints as he calls it in the war that are so familiar to us. And although he's not aware of what's happening directly in front of them with the borders and the South Wales borderers, it's time for the first Essex to do their bit, and he recalls that in his book. The din is fearful, the sun is blurred by the dust in the air, and the same dust is already turning men's sweaty faces to grey. Minutes passed. What are we waiting for now? If our barrage passes on before we get there, we won't stand a chance against these machine guns. Lumps of chalk continually fall, men are being hit by splinters and shrapnel. Calls for stretchers quickly cease, stretchers cannot come along. This crowded trench, wounded must be passed along, from hand to hand. How harsh and forbidding no man's land looks. Men of the eighty sixth and eighty seventh brigades lie thickly about, on the near foreground. Many hung on his wire which looks almost untouched. It was the job of the Stokes guns and mortars to destroy this wire. What have they been doing with all the thousands of bombs and shells we were carrying up for them? Where is our own barrage now? It has left and gone on from his reserve line, our objective. Wounded men are still coming in, sometimes singly, sometimes two together, helping each other. Even those who appear only slightly wounded do not seem to hurry. Our trench will look to be no very safe haven under this barrage. So Crony realizing that this is that moment they're going in, he finds himself now part of a bombing party in his company, and then being moved forward to help other men on their flanks, possibly men from the Newfoundland Regiment. While moving up to go into battle, the trench is hit by German artillery fire, and Percy Crony is wounded badly in the leg. This is now his second wound, wounded at Gallipoli, and now here on the first day of the Somme. As he's He's been treated for his wounds. He inquires about the other men in his bombing party who were with him when the shells drop, and he discovers that all of that section are dead. Only he survives, and this is what he calls soldier's luck, the title of the book, luck that he ascribes, I think, to almost a sense of randomness. But this is his blighty one. This is what will take him not just to the base hospital, which he goes to, and to the coastal hospitals at Wimer, but to England and on to London, back home for him, and he finds himself crying at the very thought of being back in old London town. Three months after he's recovered from his wound, and Crony's now on his way back to his battalion, he thinks, but instead, and this was really common at this period of the war, he finds himself transferred not in this case to another battalion, but to another regiment, the Cameronians, the Scottish Rifles, a completely different philosophy, a rifle regiment with black buttons, totally different traditions and mentality, perhaps even, to the old forty fourth, the Essex Regiment, but he joins them in Ireland, and soldiers often had absolutely no say in this. The army, with all those catastrophic casualties on the Somme, began to move men around as and where they were needed, and men from any part of Britain could end up in any regiment completely unconnected to where they came from. So in the case of Percy Crony, a London lad from the outskirts of London, an Essex boy ends up in a Scottish regiment. So he joins them in Ireland, and this was an area still full of British troops. Following the events in Dublin in Easter nineteen sixteen, the British Army perhaps had sent more troops to Ireland at that point, not just Irish regiments with their depots there, but regiments of the British Army like the Cameronians. And he spends some months there before he's then sent in a draft from the Cameronians to one of their active battalions on the front line. And on arrival in France he goes through the infantry base depot and is sent to join the 2nd Battalion, the Scottish Rifles, who at that point are in the 8th Division, a regular army division. This is a regular army battalion, so perhaps he feels a little bit better about these back with the kind of old sweats who he understands, and he joins not long after their attack on the 31st of July 1917, the first day of the third battle of Yape, when that whole division had advanced over the Belawarder Ridge astride the men in Rhode, and had suffered quite a lot of casualties in the process, despite capturing all of their objectives. The most costly day in Flanders during all four years of the war there, and he arrived with the men in his draft as a replacement for those losses. And initially he goes into the line with them in the lease sector. This is the forgotten front as we'd call it now, so this is south of Armontiers, and this is how he describes that. Gallipoli trenches were shallow, uneven, sandy, and winding between big rocks. On the Somme they were dry, wide and built deep in chalk. Here in the Lease Valley they are muddy, wet and crumbling, the air filling them dank and cold, yet even as my feet clump down the ramp, a strange feeling of belonging comes. I belong to the war and almost feel its fingers closing round me, as though never again to lose hold. For a moment a shiver shakes me and is gone, and gone too are the fears and worries that have for months past troubled my mind. And I think that's a really interesting insight into how soldiers felt connected to this conflict. We tend to perhaps think that they all hated it, they wanted to run away as fast as possible, but many knew that this was their place, their place in time, and they were part of this story. They were one of those enacting this story, and that comes across very strongly in Crony's book. And then from here they move to Epre for the tail end of the third battle of Epe. He hasn't taken part in the fighting there yet, and for Perse, that's the name that the lads call him, Percy Crony, this is where he sees Eap for the first time. The huge ruin of Eape rises low in front, and we enter between the shattered buildings. The rubble and broken masonry has been cleared from the centre of the streets to the width of a marching column, and banked high on each side. Fronts and roofs blasted away, sagging floors stare blindly up to the somber sky. Cloth hall is past, massive and impressive, even in all its torn shapelessness. Eap, desolate, and echoing hollowly, with bursts of great shells is left behind, and we come to desolation its very self. No house, no road, no tree, no shrub, no blade of grass lives on the sea of tortured black mud, stretching away, and hills strike silently the mud covered sleeper track on which we march. And with that very powerful description of coming on to this smashed landscape of Flanders, Crony and the men in his battalion, the Scottish Rifles, they spend the cold, hard and wet winter of nineteen seventeen eighteen in Flanders up at the front line near to Paschendale village, and he describes how due to the desolate wasteland in which they live, they feel totally cut off from the world, cut off from reality, almost isolated and seemingly alone there. They're relieved and then sent to Popperinger after some time in the front line and promised four weeks rest near St. Omar. But due to lack of reinforcements within the BEF at this time, the army, the BEF is being reorganized, and the second battalion Scottish Rifles are now taken out of the eighth division and transferred to the twentieth Light Division, and they instead are sent back up the line, and Percy and the lads in his unit rather disgustedly find themselves at Hellfire Corner on their way up to the front. The column turns right onto the men in road at Hellfire Corner, and with a camouflage netting tattered and sagging on our left, continue on to halt just before reaching the skyline of a ridge. Jerry is shelling this bit of road, and walking on to look over the ridge, one can see the flashes from his guns far away in the murk. There are tunnels under the ridge in which we are to billet for the night, but must wait for night, and the troops already down there to continue on their way. Debris of war lies about, a surprising number of broken aeroplanes and bogged down tanks. A few men leave the road and push through the mud to stand with their backs to a tank, but only a few, for if Jerry has got your number on it, a shell will get you wherever you are. But this stint in the mud is short lived, thankfully for them, and the whole division is then pulled out of Flanders and sent down to the Somme front in March of nineteen eighteen. The German Kaiserschlack, the Kaiser's battle, a German offensive is about to break against the British Army, unbeknownst of course to Percy Crony and his chums and unbeknown to most of the British Army. There are some units that get a sense of something is about to happen, and in many respects they don't have long to wait because that offensive comes on the twenty first of march nineteen eighteen, and Crony describes this in a chapter that he calls chaos. It's a really good account of the sporadic nature of the fighting at this time in march nineteen eighteen. Trench warfare kind of ended for a while, and they were pushed back often over open ground, defending villages and copses and fields and canals and bridges, and the fighting that he takes part in with the Second Scottish Rifles results in him being taken prisoner as they're trying to evacuate some of their wounded back to Nesley on the Somme front. From the battlefield he's taken to Saint Contas and Quentin, which was a kind of marshalling area for a lot of prisoners taken in that opening phase of the March 1918 offensive, and then further back to a railhead and then onwards into Germany to a proper prisoner of war camp where he meets up with representatives of the Red Cross and fills in the paperwork, and his parents back home would have gotten the notification to say that he was alive and he was a prisoner of war, but he quickly discovers what the reality of being a prisoner of war in Germany was, which was that you were going to be put to work, and him and the other prisoners are forced to work in a mine. And this was really, really common. I interviewed quite a lot of veterans who were taken prisoner in 1918, either in March or April of that year, and one lad, a gunner, who lost his leg in the lease, was put on crutches and sent down a coal mine with a pick in his hand. This was against the conventions of the time, but the Germans utilized Allied prisoners of war, not just British, but all of the other nationalities that were there being held in Germany in this kind of capacity, in factories, in mines, salt mines, all kinds of things. And the conditions were really poor, the food was poor, and many of the men succumbed to illness. And right across Germany there are cemeteries from the First World War of men who died as prisoners of war largely of sickness. But in November 1918 they receive the news of the signing of the armistice. The war is over, but the manager and the German soldiers in charge of the mine which they're working in initially won't release them because they can't quite believe it. But soon they begin their long journey home, which takes them through Belgium, on into France, and Crony finds himself once more at Wimmera on the French coast, and then on a boat home. Now his war is over. His soldier's luck, as he calls it, has saved him. So what's the value of books like this? I mean we haven't read every page of this book. There's no need to, and I hope that the extracts that we have had have given you a flavour of what a good account it is. He is a natural writer, I think, and he describes his war and what he sees, written from the perspective of nearly five decades. I don't know whether he'd written an earlier example of this and then perhaps revived it for this 1965 account, or whether after the passage of fifty years it kind of left him like a bullet and he wanted to get it all down on paper. That's very common that I discovered, that's very common with veterans who've kind of suppressed this for so long. But the value of these books is they give us all kinds of insights, I think. Those layers that we speak about when we speak about the Great War, layers of understanding. We discover the human experience of war through this book, what he ate, what he felt, how he connected to where he was, how he saw himself in the greater picture of what the war represented to him and his comrades, what being in an infantry battalion was like, what being a volunteer was like serving alongside pre-war regular soldiers, and how quickly he could become the veteran, he could become the one that everyone looked at and looked to for guidance on the battlefields, as much of a curse, I think, for some soldiers as a blessing. So it gives us insight into all kinds of things, and we discover through his service at different sectors of the front an insight into what life and conditions and battle was like in those parts of the landscape of the First World War. So that's what these memoirs do, and as we've said in previous podcasts about the value of memoirs, when we look at the landscape today, we can take books like Cronies, go back to Ocean Villas and the ground close to the Newfoundland Park because the trenches that the Essex moved up in, they are still there. He mentions, for example, St. John's Road in his account, and that of course is a trench that is still marked, still there to this day. So it enables us to take the landscape as we know it now, weave in accounts like this to build up a picture of what it was like then and understand what unfurled, what happened in these places. It's not just the unit histories and the war diaries, these memoirs have a very, very important part, particularly in this time when the actual voices of veterans are silent, when that generation has gone. We can look to forgotten memoirs, lesser known memoirs like Crony's Soldier's Luck and discover a lot about the Great War. As always, we learn through books like these. They bring together those layers we discuss here so often. It's like the crisscross pathways of the Great War are not just on the landscape, they're often in the pages of books like this too. They give us a human face to the war and an insight into personal experience at places that we know only too well, and give depth, I think, to the history of those battlefields along with that ever fascinating old frontline. You've been listening to an episode of the Old Frontline with me, military historian Paul Reed. You can follow me on Twitter at Somcor, you can follow the podcast at OldFrontline Pod. Check out the website at oldfrontline.co.uk where you'll find lots of podcast extras and photographs and links to books that are mentioned in the podcast. And if you feel like supporting us, you can go to our Patreon page, patreon.com slash oldfrontline, or support us on buyme a coffee at buymeacoffee.comslash oldfrontline. Links to all of these are on our websites. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you again soon.