Category Archives: First World War

Arts, Books, Britain, First World War

Biographical Book Review: Reverend Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy

WOODBINE WILLIE

Selfless: The Reverend Studdert Kennedy

Intro: The Army chaplain who handed out almost a million cigarettes as WWI troops lay dying

AMID the carnage of the trenches, the Reverend Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, offered spiritual and practical succour to injured and dying troops.

And at a time when an estimated 96 per cent of soldiers smoked, one of the ways the clergyman helped them was to hand out cigarettes.

The British Army chaplain’s generosity in giving Woodbine to men on the front line to boost morale earned him the sobriquet of “Woodbine Willie”.

Official records also show that he regularly ventured – unarmed – into No Man’s Land, often under heavy machine gun and artillery fire, to give dying troops one last cigarette.

Clutching his Bible for protection, the “Battlefield Saint” would whisper the Lord’s Prayer and hold their hands until the end.

Reverend Kennedy’s selfless bravery during the First World War, particularly at the Battle of Messines, earned him a Military Cross.

Now his biographer has calculated that he spent most of his wartime wages handing out nearly one million cigarettes to Allied troops, returning home virtually penniless.

Dr Linda Parker said he sacrificed his family’s financial future to safeguard the emotional wellbeing of the men in his care.

“Studdert Kennedy was one of the First World War’s true heroes – a courageous and selfless Christian who gave away everything he had for the benefit of others,” she said.

“With the exception of his family’s annual living expenses, he spent the rest of his salary – his family’s entire income, really – on the men he took under his spiritual wing. He did, in almost complete certainty, spend virtually everything he owned. He filled his backpack with Woodbines, Bibles and a great deal of love.”

Book Cover: A Seeker After Truths by Dr Linda Parker

Troops were issued with two ounces of cheap rolling tobacco with their rations, but supply was irregular. Woodbines, which were strong and unfiltered, were not widely available on the Western Front and were like gold dust in the trenches.

Dr Parker – the author of A Seeker After Truths: The Life and Times of G A Studdert Kennedy (‘Woodbine Willie’) 1883–1929 – estimates he gave away 864,980 cigarettes at his own expense. She reached the figure by calculating the total number of men Studdert Kennedy is likely to have met between December 1915 and September 1918, the smoking rate among troops at the time, and his propensity to offer one or more cigarettes to “every man he met”.

She believes that over the course of nearly three years, he spent the equivalent of £43,249 in today’s money – every spare penny of his Army’s salary. This is based on a packet of five Woodbines costing 1d, which equals 25p today. His grandson, the Reverend Canon Andrew Studdert-Kennedy, team rector in Marlborough, Wiltshire, and an honorary chaplain to the Queen, agrees with Dr Parker’s findings.

“Anecdotes about my grandfather’s generosity are part of the annals,” he said. “My grandmother allegedly came home one day to find him dragging their mattress downstairs to give to someone in need, and another time he gave his coat away.

“I’ve no doubt whatsoever that he did everything within his financial means to help those men on the front line.”

Before the war, Studdert Kennedy served as a vicar in a poor parish in Worcester. When war was declared against Germany he enlisted as a temporary chaplain.

In December 1915, he was stationed at a railway station in Rouen, France, where he held communion with the troops, wrote letters for the illiterate, and prayed with young soldiers. When they left for the front line, he gave them copies of the New Testament and, to the 96 per cent of soldiers who smoked, one or more Woodbines.

News of Studdert Kennedy’s kindness and generosity spread, and by early 1916 he was known as “Woodbine Willie”.

His fame spread further when he was sent to the trenches of the Somme, Ypres and Messines. He routinely prayed with dying soldiers and was awarded the Military Cross after running through “murderous machine gun fire” at Messines Bridge to deliver morphine to men screaming in agony in No Man’s Land. He was gassed at the Battle of the Canal du Nord in 1918 and sent home on sick leave.

After the Great War, Studdert Kennedy became a pacifist, social reformer, author and poet. He was also made personal chaplain to King George V. When he died in 1929 aged 45, ex-servicemen sent a wreath with a packet of Woodbines at the centre to his funeral in Worcester.

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Arts, Books, Britain, First World War, History

Book Review: Birdsong…

Birdsong, written by Sebastian Faulks, is an epic novel of World War I courage and turmoil.

Birdsong, written by Sebastian Faulks, is an epic novel of World War I courage and turmoil.

IN 1910, Stephen Wraysford, a junior executive in a textile firm, is sent by his company to northern France. Whilst in France he falls for Isabelle Azaire, a young and attractive matron who abandons her abusive husband, a wealthy textile baron, who sticks by Stephen long enough to conceive a child. Wrayford convinces her to leave a life of passionless comfort to be at his side, but things do not turn out according to plan. Wraysford is haunted by this doomed affair and carries it with him into the trenches of World War I.

Six years on, Stephen is back in France, as a British officer fighting in the trenches. Facing death and embittered by isolation of war, he steels himself against thoughts of love. But despite rampant disease, harrowing enemy tunnel explosions and desperate attacks on highly fortified German positions, he manages to survive, and to meet with Isabelle again. The emotions roiled up by this meeting, however, threaten to ruin him as a soldier. Everything about this masterly written novel is outsized, from its epic, if occasionally broken-down, narrative, to its gruesome and utterly convincing descriptions of battlefield horrors. Birdsong is enlivened with considerable historical detail related through accomplished prose. Sebastian Faulk’s narrative flows with a pleasingly appropriate recklessness that brings his characters to forceful and dynamic life.

Birdsong derives much of its incredible power from its descriptions of mud and blood, and Stephen Wrayford’s attempt to retain sanity and a scrap of humanity while surrounded by the Nazi onslaught. What becomes highly enthusing as the story progresses is the simultaneous description of his present-day granddaughter’s quest to read his diaries, though incomplete and difficult to read, is designed to give some sense of perspective and proportion. Birdsong is an unflinching, articulate fictional war story that rewards the reader with beautifully flowing use of the English language. Faulks deserves every accolade that has been heaped on him to date.

 

THE writing is impressive throughout. The writer’s prose is always exact and elegant and, on occasions, rises to real lyricism, without (cleverly) ever sounding forced. What makes Faulk’s style come to life is the authentic nature of the dialogue, a discourse that is well placed without the irritating linguistic anachronisms that so often blight historical novels set from the recent past. The experience of trench warfare, for instance, is made so vivid and clear that sometimes the reader may well be tempted to put Birdsong aside. But, it’s worth going on if such thoughts cross the mind because events are seen through the eyes of very well developed characters. The author is able to connect the central character, Stephen, with the reader in an extraordinarily adept way; one feels emotionally involved. A link exists with the modern era, through Wrayford’s granddaughter, who goes to great lengths in finding out more about her grandfather, whom she never knew, and who is stridently seeking to establish her own identity more definitively in the process. This establishes a sense of continuity with the past.

 

THE book starts before the war in Amiens, in 1910, when Wraysford has an intense love affair with a married woman that comes to an unsatisfactory end. Sexual passion is, no-doubt, a notoriously difficult subject to portray in a novel, but Faulks manages it with good demeanour and disposition.

The prose then shifts in time to 1916, when we encounter Stephen, already an officer promoted from the ranks, becomes trapped in the travails of the troglodytic netherworld of the Great War’s western front. The horrors of such experiences are depicted objectively; the facts are allowed to speak for themselves on countless occasions, and are all the more telling for that. But in Stephen Wraysford’s military character and being – despite the bestial filth of trenches, narrow underground tunnels, and random death – an ember of self-preservation resists annihilation. Faulks does exceptionally well in describing with clarity, and bracingly dramatises survival against all the odds.

Though fictional, Faulks has, undoubtedly, done his homework. The reader is left to feel that his descriptions of events are based on clearly documented facts and research. Some of the central scenes in the novel are set in a relatively unfamiliar context: that of the mining tunnels, for instance, that both sides constructed between their respective trench networks. The Allies and the Germans both dug these mines and countermines – sometimes, as Faulks illustrates, one side would succeed in detonating explosions that destroyed the enemy tunnels, killing the sappers or burying them alive. To describe the technicalities of this in fiction is no easy task, but Faulks manages it well by allowing his reader to see it through the eyes of one of the sappers.

From conveying the heart-rending anxieties of leading men over the top, Faulks moves to soften Wraysford’s increasingly cold fatalism with memories of his torrid pre-war liaison and love affair with Isabelle, a Frenchwoman. The affair ruined her life but produced a child whose daughter furnishes a vehicle for flash-forwards to the 1970s, when that granddaughter becomes curious about who Wraysford was. As typical of the “lost generation” of Britain, the Wraysford antihero realistically conveys what a waste, in terms of lives and psyches, the trench experience was.

 

DESPITE the masterfulness offered by Faulk’s, the book isn’t an unqualified success. There are distinctive aspects of Stephen’s character that are not wholly or satisfactorily resolved. This claim is laid bare when we consider that Wraysford didn’t know his parents. He was brought up, first by his grandparents, then in an institution, before being taken away by a man he didn’t know who became his legal guardian, but for whom he doesn’t care for. Here the novel becomes unclear. Stephen Wraysford’s level of education is left vague, though it appears higher than might otherwise be expected from his background. His religious views are also left somewhat nebulous and indefinable; he occasionally prays when under stress and, once, before an assault, he receives Holy Communion. For the most part, however, the reader may well come to the view that the central figure is an agnostic. On leave in England he has an experience of nature mysticism that has no connection with Christianity.

 

BIRDSONG ends on an affirmative note, when Elizabeth, Stephen’s granddaughter, gives birth to a baby whom she names after a boy, the son of one of the sappers, who died near Stephen after an attempt to extricate themselves from an underground tunnel enemy explosion. This could easily have been interpreted as being sentimental or over-symbolic but, whilst highly charged and very emotive, paid off because the theme fitted in with Elizabeth’s determination to discover her family history.

Sebastian Faulk’ Birdsong is an impressive and well-crafted achievement. The story, one that is based on the ruins of war and the indestructibility of love, will likely stay in your mind long after you close the book.

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Arts, Books, First World War, History

Books/History: ‘Meeting the Enemy: The Human Face of the Great War’…

HISTORICAL REFERENCE WITH A DIFFERENCE

As the centenary of the Great War approaches, a tide of new books about it is due for publication. It must be the most written-about war in history.

Richard van Emden’s ‘Meeting the Enemy: The Human Face of the Great War’, though, is a World War I historical reference with a difference. Emden is a specialist who has found a literary niche, little explored, charting the personal contacts between Britons and Germans and their feelings about each other as the war progressed.

It began on both sides in a blaze of patriotic bluster. Crowds poured into Berlin’s main thoroughfare, Unter den Linden, as they did in London’s Piccadilly and Pall Mall. In Berlin they bellowed, ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, Über Alles’; in London, ‘Rule Britannia!’

The phrases of the hour in Britain were: ‘We must stand by France’ (German troops were already in Belgium) and ‘It will be over in three months’. Why three months, nobody precisely knew.

There were many more German immigrants in Britain than Britons in Germany. They faced internment, with dire consequences for their families, who were eventually supported by meagre grants from their government.

There was fury in Germany at Britain’s declaration of war, along with widespread feelings of betrayal. Only the previous year, George V visited his cousin the Kaiser, and was pictured wearing a ‘pickelhaube’ – a spiked, plumed German helmet matching the German leader’s. Now King George was pictured on a postcard as ‘der Judas von England’.

The Kaiser was honorary colonel of a regiment of British dragoons and an Admiral of the Fleet to boot. His British orders and decorations were packed in brown paper and delivered to the British Embassy with a message that he had no further use for them.

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NEVERTHELESS, he ordered that the English Church in Berlin, built as a present to his English mother, was to be kept open, and its pastor, the Rev Henry Williams, left at liberty for the duration.

The diaries of Rev William’s are much quoted, describing how life in Germany deteriorated when the Allied blockade began to bite.

Anti-German feelings ran high in Britain at the war’s opening and flared again with the sinking of the Lusitania off Southern Ireland in 1915, drowning more people than the Titanic had.

A remarkable book reveals how warring troops bonded in the trenches.

A remarkable book reveals how warring troops bonded in the trenches.

There were riots in the Lusitania’s home port of Liverpool, with the shops of German immigrants being looted and burnt. This rancour was markedly absent from the front line in Flanders, where the famous Christmas truce took place in 1914. Everyone knows that it started with men in both trenches singing Christmas carols and shouting ‘Merry Christmas’ to each other, then climbing out of their trenches to exchange gifts and friendly talk in no man’s land.

In some places the truce lasted into January, until orders came from above that war must be resumed. Officers on both sides synchronised their watches, agreeing to start again in an hour, saluted each other and went back to their respective trenches.

Those in the higher echelons of the British Army were furious at the spontaneous fraternising – pictures of which appeared in the newspapers. When Christmas approached in 1915, they threatened dire punishment if it should happen again.

But it did – at least in the Scots’ Guards section of the front. Their company commander, Sir Iain Colquhoun, agreed to a German suggestion of a truce to bury the dead lying in no man’s land. This developed into full-scale fraternising. The Germans danced to a mouth organ.

Captain Colquhoun was court-martialled and reprimanded. All leave was cancelled for six months as punishment.

Some other friendly contacts were surprising. When the British took over part of the French sector in 1915, they were met with a message left on the barbed wire, fixing a rendezvous for the exchange of newspapers.

One British officer was told that German officers had been in the habit of crossing over in the evenings for a game of bridge with their French opponents. That stopped when they found the British waiting for them.

Many deserters crossed the line at night to surrender and escape further fighting. A Sergeant Dawson, bogged down in the mud of no man’s land, could only wait to be captured. When he surrendered to the five Germans who pulled him out, they assured him: ‘No, we are your prisoners. Take us to your headquarters.’ He was helplessly lost, but they knew the way.

Prisoners were remarkably well-treated. Captain Wilfred Birt, who died in Cologne hospital after a stoic struggle with painful wounds, was given a slap-up military funeral in the cathedral by Germans. Serving British officers were invited to attend, and were allowed free passage back to their side afterwards.

Another imprisoned British captain was allowed three weeks’ leave to go home to see his dying mother. He gave his promise to return, kept his word … then set about trying to escape as usual.

The highest display of mutual esteem occurred between the fighter pilots who were in combat above the lines. They carried no parachutes, as they were too bulky for narrow cockpits. So when a machine caught fire, the pilot was faced with the choice of burning or jumping.

German pilots made a habit of finding their victims, alive or dead. If dead, they dropped details of their names and burial sites over the British lines. If alive, they would invite them to a slap-up meal in their mess.

Both sides were ruthless to each other in the air but observed the rules of chivalry on the ground. When the German ace Max Immelmann was killed, a British pilot dropped a wreath and message of condolence on his airfield.

When fellow ace Werner Voss was shot down doing battle against seven opponents at once, the victorious pilot said: ‘If only I could have brought him down alive.’

This illustrated the difference between personal combat and the industrialised warfare of machine guns and artillery barrages on the ground. When it was possible to know your enemy individually, hatred was seldom shown.

A brigadier, Hubert Rees, who was captured during the Germans’ last offensive in March 1918, was ordered to a car that took him to the top of a plateau. Here he was ushered forward to meet the Kaiser, who questioned him then said: ‘Your country and mine ought not to be fighting each other. We should be fighting together. I had no idea that you would fight me.’

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HE ASKED: ‘Does England wish for peace?’ Rees replied: ‘Everyone wishes for peace.’

After the Kaiser had gone into exile and Rees had been released from captivity and was wandering about Berlin, he witnessed the return of the Prussian Guards to the city, often described as a ‘triumph’.

Rees had a different word for it – pathetic. ‘Companies of boys and over-age men. Officers without swords. Rusty weapons, broken-down horses drawing limbers. As a military spectacle it was lamentable.’

As British troops occupied the Rhineland, a British guardsman wrote: ‘The people welcomed us as rescuers from anarchy.’ Also from starvation. Their British ‘guests’ were a vital source of food from the Army’s well-stocked canteens.

The ban on fraternisation had to be lifted. ‘Our fellows would open their tunics to show their scars. The German boys would do the same,’ wrote a private soldier. Only weeks after they had been doing their best to kill each other, they behaved like comrades in arms.

– ‘Meeting the Enemy: The Human Face of the Great War’ written by Richard van Emden is published by Bloomburg at £20.

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