Amateur Gunners: The Great War Adventures, Letters and Observations of Alexander Douglas Thorburn

First published in Great Britain in 2014

By Pen and Sword Military

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Copyright © Ian Ronayne, 2014

ISBN 978 1 78383 201 9

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Contents

Foreword

Brigadier C.W. Tadier, CBE,

former Director of Royal Artillery, 2007–2009

There are many books that cover the First World War, but this one is very different. It is a first-hand account of an ‘amateur’ gunner officer who between 1916 and 1918 fought in France and Belgium, and also in Greece, Egypt and Palestine. Alexander Douglas Thorburn’s articulate account of his battery’s experience, throughout three years of war, is both telling and compelling. It is filled with amusing anecdotes and vignettes, as well as stories that will horrify. You will come away knowing the true meaning of the words stoic and heroic.

You follow Thorburn from mobilisation training in the UK, to victory in 1918. At that point, in his words: ‘we were no more amateur gunners, but actually experienced hard-bitten soldiers with more experience of war as it is, among our little party, than was to be found in the entire British Army of pre-war days.’ This is an absorbing read which will allow you to see war through the eyes of a junior officer, both in his account as well as in his letters home. The book is one of extremes. One moment you will be reading about artillery bombardments, and then you will read how he was ‘acquiring’ equipment from other units to improve their life on the front. And for those particularly interested in gunnery matters, read his ‘Tips for Gunners’ in Part Three, some of which are relevant today.

Although Thorburn has written much about artillery life and gunnery, this book also highlights the importance of the animals which, amongst other things, pulled the guns and carried stores and rations, often under enemy fire. Not only the ‘war horses’, but also the many camels and mules that were used in the various campaigns. Throughout the book, you can see how reliant the men were on their animals – a deep affection was formed. He even gives advice on the ‘use and habits of camels’ and considers mules to be ‘hard working hybrids’, which he could not have done without!

If you have a desire to learn more about ‘life in the trenches’ from an artillery perspective, discover how soldiers survived extraordinary hardships on a daily basis, and how an ‘amateur’ soldier very soon became highly ‘professional’ in the middle of a war, I would commend that you read this absorbing book – you will not want to put it down.

Introduction

One of the fascinating aspects of the British Army that fought and eventually won the First World War is its diverse origins. In contrast to both allies and enemies that entered the conflict with huge trained armies, most of Britain’s soldiers were civilians when the war started in August 1914. As volunteers or conscripts, they joined the army with which Britain had gone to war: a small core of professional ‘regular’ soldiers and a part-time home defence force, contemptuously nicknamed ‘Saturday night soldiers’. Yet together, these three groups formed the largest and arguably most successful army Britain ever fielded. It remains a remarkable fact, however, that the majority were purely amateurs – there to do a job and to return home once it was finished.

Alexander Douglas Thorburn was firmly in the amateur camp, and evidentially proud to be there. To him, longstanding army practice and tradition meant little; what mattered was a sense of duty, willingness to work hard and the invaluable experience that comes from actually fighting a modern day war. He and millions of other men clearly brought these qualities to the British Army between 1914 and 1918, helping to shape it into a war-winning weapon. At the end of the fighting, however, most had returned quietly to civilian lives, proud of their achievements but determined to move on. Thorburn decided to do something different. He had also brought to the army a keen eye for detail, a lucid writing talent and an acerbic detachment from the professional soldiers with whom he served. These were put to good use in 1933 when publishing his wartime experiences and observations in the book Amateur Gunners. From it, and a recently discovered collection of his letters, we gain a remarkable and edifying personal account of one ‘amateur’ soldier’s First World War.

Thorburn had arrived in the world on 27 July 1882, the second and final child of Alexander Thorburn, a Scottish-born cotton broker, and Catherine Thorburn, an American from the then quiet Chicago suburb of Naperville, Illinois. At the time, the family lived in Kensington, London. By the start of the twentieth century, however, young Thorburn had moved with his parents and sister Nellie to Bebington on the Wirral. His father’s business appears to have thrived well enough to allow the family to employ two servants and send their son to public school. Thorburn followed up Charterhouse boarding school in Surrey with further education at Victoria University, Liverpool where he gained a second-class honours Classics degree in 1901. A language course at the University of Marburg completed his studies and also appear to have given him a zest for travel and language.

Thorburn started his working life as a schoolmaster, teaching French and classical history. By 1911, however, the family business had beckoned and he was working as a clerk at cotton brokers Thomas Thorburn&Co in Liverpool. The outbreak of war in August 1914 interrupted this career and he volunteered, along with more than two million others, to join the British Army.

Travel and language were clearly not the only interests held by Thorburn before the war. From his writings, we find a great passion for horses and horsemanship. This passion may have been instrumental in his decision to join a branch of the army in which horses and horsemanship played a pivotal role.

Throughout the war, the Royal Artillery remained enormously reliant on four-legged horsepower. In France and Belgium, where trench warfare limited mobility, hundreds of thousands of animals still laboured behind the lines moving men and guns and bringing up supplies. In more remote theatres of war, such as Salonica and Palestine, animals moved armies and their guns across thousands of miles of terrain often lacking roads, rivers and railways. This must have been greatly appreciated by Thorburn who clearly relished the opportunity to work with horses as well as less glamorous mules, donkeys and camels. What he did not know at the time – or at least fully realise – was the extent to which this centuries-old relationship between army and animal was coming to an end.

Artillery had played a leading role in armies since its emergence in the Middle Ages. By the start of the First World War, it was one of the army’s three principal subdivisions, along with infantry and cavalry. It didn’t take long for the longstanding roles of each to change, however, as the reality of a modern industrialised conflict swept away established tradition and tactics.

Exposed in the war’s opening battles, cavalry swiftly diminished in importance as the futility of men on horseback charging an enemy armed with rifles and machine guns was realised. The infantry too soon found its traditional role – advancing in formation against an enemy battle line – proved mostly impossible. Military technology had developed before 1914 to give defenders a considerable advantage over attackers. The answer, realised in the closing months of 1914, was to get soldiers out of sight of each other. And with the emergence of trench warfare, the artillery soon assumed a new role as master of the battlefield.

By 1916, a British infantry division, which was the main tactical formation of armies, controlled three brigades of Royal Field Artillery (RFA), each of which had four batteries. Three of the batteries, designated A to C, were equipped with the 18-pounder gun, while the fourth, or D Battery, had 4.5-inch howitzers to provide high-trajectory ‘plunging’ fire. The three RFA brigades of the 60th Division that Thorburn joined in July 1916 were 301st, 302nd and the 303rd. Between them, they possessed seventy-two guns of both varieties. Thorburn was posted to a howitzer battery, and remained serving with that type of gun until the end of the war.

The 60th Division, or 2/2nd London Division as it was also known, was formed in 1914. Designated as second line, its role was originally as a recruiting and training unit for first-line divisions that went overseas on active service. It was part of the Territorial Force (later renamed Territorial Army), which was Britain’s part-time army created in the years leading up to the First World War primarily for home defence duties. Territorial soldiers were civilians who volunteered for military training at the weekends and in the evenings, and during a two-week army camp in the summer months.

On the outbreak of war, the Territorial Force mobilised to release the regular army – that is the full time soldiers – for service on the Continent with the British Expeditionary Force, or BEF. But heavy losses in 1914, along with a realisation that Britain needed more soldiers at the front, led to first line Territorial Force divisions deploying overseas for active service at the start of 1915. By 1916, the need for troops had become so high that even second line divisions joined them. In June 1916, the 60th Division left Britain after an extensive period of training, and crossed the Channel for service on at the front.

The Western Front had formed at the end of 1914 as the war of movement in the opening months lapsed into positional warfare. All along the front line, both sides created increasingly sophisticated and formidable trench systems to prevent a breakthrough by the other side. Among the strongest positions were those on the German-held Vimy Ridge.

Lying a few miles north of the French city of Arras, Vimy Ridge commanded the countryside all around. There had been heavy fighting there in 1915 as the French Army tried and failed twice to take the ridge. By 1916, when the 60th Division and Thorburn arrived, it had become a ‘quiet’ sector of the front, with both sides heavily engaged elsewhere, fighting the Battle of Somme and Battle of Verdun. This made Vimy Ridge an ideal location for newly arrived divisions to gain trench warfare experience before moving to a more active sector. Thorburn’s writing and letters clearly reflect this, with only limited action taking place and low casualty rates as a result. It was a time for building skills and experience for future use on the battlefield – which for most new British divisions in 1916 meant the Somme, with all its attendant horrors.

The 60th Division was an exception however. As a second line unit, it was labelled – clearly undeservedly according to Thorburn – as a ‘lesser’ division, and therefore better suited to secondary theatre of war. One such theatre was Salonica, far off across the Mediterranean Sea. At the end of 1916, he and the 60th Division left France for service there.

The origins of the Salonica front are complex. Britain and France had promised to send military aid to Serbia, which had been attacked at the start of the war by its far larger neighbour, Austria-Hungary. Distracted by the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign, however, nothing serious was done to aid the Serbs before October that year, and even then the Allies only landed a small force in the Greek port city of Salonica (today Thessaloniki). The intervention of Bulgaria, which entered the war on Germany’s side, together with uncertainty over Greek intentions brought the wisdom of Allied strategy into question. It was pursued, nevertheless, with the Salonica front eventually attracting hundreds of thousands of soldiers from Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Serbia and Greece.

The 60th Division arrived to find a stalemate. The British Salonica Force, or BSF, had advanced north as far as the Struma River, where it faced a determined and dug-in Bulgarian Army. As Thorburn discovered, the intensity of fighting was sporadic compared to the Western Front in France, the opportunity to engage the enemy more fleeting. Conditions did not help. The British Army had advanced into sparsely populated mountainous country crossed by few roads but with no lack of lakes, rivers and bogs. Unable to move forward and uncertain of security behind them, the Allied armies sat largely where they were for 1917 and much of 1918, earning the nickname, ‘the Gardeners of Salonica’. Thorburn and the 60th Division would not stay long enough for the depreciating label to stick however. In June 1917, they were transferred once more. And once more, their destination was one of the First World War’s ‘secondary’ fronts.

Soon after arriving in Palestine, the 60th Division gave up some of its artillery to a new British infantry division that also had the misfortune to attract a second line label. The 74th (Yeomanry) Division had formed in Egypt in January 1917 from a number of dismounted cavalry units protecting the Suez Canal from Turkish attack. Prior to the First World War, Territorial Force cavalry regiments were known as the Yeomanry, a historic title dating back to the Napoleonic Wars. In 1917, the British Egyptian Expeditionary Force, or EEF, had plans that required infantry, however, meaning the Yeomanry were not to regain their horses.

Egypt had become a theatre of war in November 1914 when Britain declared war on German’s ally in the region, the Ottoman Empire. At the start of 1915, the Ottoman Army had attacked towards the Suez Canal, which lay in British controlled Egypt, but failed to achieve a decisive breakthrough. A stalemate followed, as both sides battled not only each other but also the harsh conditions. In March 1917, however, the British commenced an offensive into Palestine. It was an enormously challenging undertaking, as Thorburn meticulously explains, with a great reliance placed on the animals needed to move the army across the desert. Eventually, in December that year, Jerusalem fell to the British, with the 74th (Yeomanry) Division performing commendably in its first battles.

For the Allies, the capture of Jerusalem was a welcome highlight in a year that generally failed to produce any real success. And there were worrying signs ahead for 1918. An armistice with Russia had freed Germany from the need to fight a two-front war, and released large numbers of soldiers for an attack in the west. In March 1918, the German Army smashed through the British lines near the French town of St Quentin and threatened to split the Allied forces in two. After three years of trench warfare, a war of movement had returned to the Western Front. Reinforcements were required, which for Thorburn meant a return to where his war had started.

In April and May 1918, the 74th (Yeomanry) Division left the Middle East for Marseilles – the same port Thorburn had left from seventeen months earlier. By then the German offensive had expanded north to attack towards the French Channel ports. A further attack was about to strike the French armies to the north-west of Paris. It was a time for everyone to fight ‘with their backs to wall,’ in the words of the British commander-in-chief, Douglas Haig.

By the time Thorburn and his battery re-entered the fighting in Belgium, however, the crisis was passing. Allied counter-attacks inflicted heavy defeats on the German Army, both materially and psychologically. And it now faced an Allied force growing in strength with the arrival of thousands of American soldiers. In September 1918, they, along with British, French and Belgian armies, began an offensive later called the ‘Advance to Victory’.

The 74th (Yeomanry) Division was part of the Allied forces that relentlessly pressed forward in the closing months of 1918. The strategy, which aimed to prevent the Germans having time to rest and regroup, resulted in some of the most intense and exhausting fighting of the war, as Thorburn records. The breaking of the formidable ‘Hindenburg Line’ defences along with a growing restlessness at home, left the Germans with little choice other than to sue for peace. With the signing of the Armistice on 11 November 1918, the First World War finally comes to an end for Thorburn and millions of other amateur soldiers.

After the Armistice, Thorburn remained in uniform for a while, serving as an education officer with 44th Brigade, RFA, and commanding a battery in Belgium. He also helped with the demobilisation of 74th (Yeomanry) Division’s horses, which must have been a painful time for him as most were sold off locally for work or slaughter. But a return to civilian life was inevitable, and he left the army in 1919 to resume a career in teaching.

He returned to live in Cheshire, settling in Oxton near Chester, not far from the family home on the Wirral. During the inter-war years he married Catherine in 1924, and they had a daughter, Dorothy, in 1928. Thorburn lived to see the world at war once more, and fighting in many of the same locations he had served. He did not see it end however. While undergoing surgery in March 1942, Alexander Douglas Thorburn died aged just fifty-nine.

I Ronayne, 2014

Part 1: Adventures

CHAPTER 1

Training

A civilian in uniform

The general excellence of the training undergone in England by a candidate for a commission in the Royal Field Artillery during the Great War was beyond question. The material was remarkably uneven in character, in previous occupation, and in age.

I started my training in No.14 Barrack Room in the regular Royal Horse Artillery (RHA) barracks at St John’s Wood in London, where my colleagues were, probably, the most varied group of men ever assembled in one place together.

In one room were to be found a famous Australian barrister, a surgeon-captain of the Chilean Navy of Irish origin, an elephant hunter from East Africa, a Cambridge professor, a South African, three English ranchers from the Argentine, a missionary from China, a planter from Jamaica, an Australian sheep-farm manager, two boys about 19-years-old, a New Zealand barrister, who used to talk Maori with a New Zealand acquaintance, a Welsh farmer, a middle-aged dog-breeder, and others, like myself, Englishmen of ordinary occupation in this country.

The system, or lack of system, by which it was hoped to convert this collection of men of ages from nineteen to forty-five into competent officers of the artillery and first class fighting men, was utterly incredible.

The first two tasks set me, in company with ‘C’ (the Cambridge Professor) were washing our barrack room floor with mops and buckets, cleaning the windows, apparently for the first time for many years, whitewashing the inside of large iron tanks used as coal scuttles, and blackleading the lower halves of the iron posts in the stables and the old round cannon balls which decorated the barrack square. After a few days, I was promoted to the duty of burnishing the steel and brass mountings of the funeral gun carriage, an ancient 13-pounder used as a hearse whenever a general’s funeral procession takes place in London.

The rest of our daily life consisted of ‘physical jerks’ in the dark before breakfast, stables – cleaning out filthy stalls with our hands, no tools being provided – very elementary gun drill, grooming and feeding horses, riding school and lectures on field artillery training, delivered mostly to classes seated on the tan in the riding school by regular non-commissioned officers (NCOs) whose knowledge of the matters on which they lectured was pitifully inadequate.

The only officer-instructor, while I was at St John’s Wood Barracks, was the riding master, a captain who as a riding-master was far inferior to Sergeant ‘L’ as a horseman, and to Corporal ‘R’ as an instructor.

There was also some semaphore drill, endless polishing of spurs, boots, and buttons (we even had to black the part of the sole on the underside of our boots beneath the instep). In fact hours every day were wasted in the modern equivalents of the pipeclay fetich of the British Army of Wellington’s period.

The food was ample, but so abominably cooked in the perfectly equipped kitchens, that most of it was uneatable and wasted. Had our cooks on active service, cooking over damp wood with a hole in the ground for a kitchen, produced from rations far inferior both in quality and quantity, such uneatable food for the men, they would have been severely punished by the battery commander, half-murdered by the men, and treated by everyone as contemptible scoundrels.

Taking it all round a more inefficient school of instruction and a worse organised unit than St John’s Wood Barracks RHA I never saw in the whole of my army career. Of course, with our total lack of military experience, we did not realise how badly the whole show was run, or how a brigade which never saw an officer (except the orderly officer of the day) could ever be anything but a ‘comic unit’, as we later learned to call such dud affairs.

We learned naturally very little and it was only through the keenness of all the students that we learned anything whatever except terms of abuse. The instruction given in this department of military proficiency was incomparable and eventually most valuable

In every circumstance of life a lively sense of humour serves to make anything tolerable and the ability to see the funny side of St John’s Wood was always an asset.

In that region these incidents are worth recording. The Australian sheep farmer had originally been a trooper in a Queensland cavalry regiment, and possessed a very smart tunic evidently made by a first class tailor. The tunics issued to us were of all shapes and sizes, and had to be fitted at a cost of three shillings and sixpence paid by the individual to the regimental tailor, who also sold the globular RHA buttons without which a man was punished for being improperly dressed. One morning the Australian appeared on parade in his Australian tunic, which had a single collar instead of the regulation turnover collar, and black fiat buttons. Immediately every NCO on parade fired at him, and the sergeant major yelled at him to know what he thought he was wearing. After explanation, he was ordered to appear wearing his other issue tunic. He then remarked ‘You won’t like it sergeant-major.’ In the afternoon the Queenslander appeared in a green, woolly tunic (as issued) at least twenty inches too big round the waist, and so large in the neck that his shirt was visible. The buttons were flat, and made of bone. As soon as we fell in, all the NCOs again rushed at him, and the sergeant-major bellowed, ‘What the – have you got on now?’ The reply of ‘my maternity tunic, sir’, was so apt and unexpected that the entire party of critics turned their backs, and doubled up with uncontrollable laughter, and a soft answer had once more turned away wrath.

The China missionary had evidently not been warned, as I had, to conceal the fact that he was not a novice in the riding school. As well as the indoor riding school there was an outdoor manège floored with cinders, which had a small lake at one end, where the rain had collected, through which the horses plodded, and which had gradually reached a depth of two and a half or three feet of black cinder and water soup, about the consistency of whipped cream. On the first morning that we paraded for riding in the manège, the sergeant-instructor who was taking the riding school asked each man if he had ridden before. Obviously some, like two Canadians, had to admit it. Others, like myself, who had been warned what to say replied ‘Not for a long time’ or something inoffensive of that kind. The missionary, however, imprudently said ‘All my life’. The sergeant then uncoiling a long stock-whip, which he habitually carried, waited until the missionary’s horse was just about to plod into the black porridge; then, giving the sour-tempered animal a vicious cut across the hocks, he called out, ‘That man, that’s ridden all his life, he’s