A fascinating insight into the life of an ordinary First World War soldier is given by descendants of a Gedling miner in a new book.
“Ordinary” is perhaps an unfair description, for without the extraordinary contribution of the likes of Harry Lawrence, Britain would never have triumphed in that dreadful conflict and the country they built on their return from battle would have been very different to the one we know today.
After much research but with no letters or diaries from Harry or his family or friends to call upon, his son Brian Lawrence and grandson Oliver Lawrence-Overy have a produced a remarkable account of Harry’s working and military life and of conditions facing soldiers from recruitment to front line - and, for the lucky ones, to home again.
A miner’s son, Harry left school in Bulwell at the age of 13 and began working for pot-maker Richard Sankey and Son.
By the time he was 21, he was an underground miner at Gedling Colliery, sunk 14 years earlier.
Four weeks after the outbreak of war, he volunteered for the army, enlisting at Nottingham’s Carrington Street recruiting centre, a week before his height would have ruled him out because he fell just short of the new minimum requirement of 5ft 6in.
Assigned to the new 7th Battalion, King’s Own Scottish Borderers (KOSB), he was among 900 men who were transformed from clumsy civilians into smart soldiers at an army camp in Bordon, Hampshire, practising with broomsticks instead of rifles, before being transferred to Winchester, where they were issued with proper uniforms and real rifles, fitted with 17-inch bayonets.
Shipped from Southampton to Le Havre, Harry and his battalion reached Mazingarbe, France, on August 3, 1915, and entered trenches that formed part of a continuous 475-mile stretch from the North Sea to the Swiss border.
“The trenches were 6 to 8 feet deep, mostly open to the sky, with a front built-up parapet, topped by sandbags facing the enemy, with a similar rear parados,” the authors write in A Gedling Miner Went To War.
“In the insanitary conditions, with local cesspits, unburied bodies, uniforms worn for many days at a time, dirty and wet, infested by lice and rats, it was not only foul but dangerous, causing the slightest wound or scratch to become infected… trench foot was caused by prolonged exposure to extreme cold and wet, due to immersion of feet in water.
“There was also trench fever: its symptoms were a high temperature and body pains… there was the pervasive stench of the living and the dead, body parts now embedded and protruding from trench walls.
"In summer, swarm of flies were attracted to rotting flesh to eat and in which to lay eggs which became maggots. Flies were also attracted to the tons of horse manure, from which maggots also emerged.”
In the Battle of Loos, Harry’s battalion was a small cog in a gigantic British offensive launched against German trenches just a couple of hundred yards away.
On Saturday, September 25, at 6.30am, the British infantry – “fortified by the daily ration of strong neat rum” – went “over the top”.
“Using wooden ladders they climbed over the protective parapet and onto the open ground of no man’s land towards the firing enemy, stumbling through barbed wire, shell holes, tree stumps, wounded, screaming comrades, dead bodies, squelching through the blasted earth which was heaving with explosions and soil and gas.
“Into this hellish terror, through withering fire from machine guns, the KOSB had to cross 250 yards of the fire trenches into which they had been crowded, then get through gaps cut in the wire and spread out over their front line 400 yards wide, their part of the attack against the 20 miles of German lines.
“Of course Harry was scared, but more scared of being a coward and not supporting his mates. It has often been said that these soldiers fought, not for King and Country, but for their pals.”
Those British soldiers who managed to reach the German wire found it intact and were slaughtered as they tried to cross it. Others were wounded or gassed. Many drowned in the mud.
Out of 950 soldiers in the battalion, 20 officers and 611 men were killed or wounded.
Back home, the book records, the war affected everybody. There was petrol rationing, expensive bread, meatless days, no woollen clothes in the shops and women in trousers doing men’s jobs.
It was during the Battle of the Kink, in May 1916, that Harry was badly wounded in the left thigh, probably from a sniper bullet or shrapnel caused by an exploding bomb. He would be away from his battalion for 11 months.
He was initially treated at a first-aid post just behind the trenches, where “nurses endured the misery of wounded soldiers waking up to discover an empty pyjama sleeve or a missing leg”.
Eventually, he was taken by hospital ship to England and admitted to the Red Cross military hospital in Winchester before being sent to Ulster to recuperate.
After further convalescence at home, he returned to France and the front line in April 1917 and remained on active service until the end of the war, during which time his battalion was involved in the Battle of Pilckem, part of the Third Battle of Ypres, near Passchendale.
When the war finally ended with the Armistice on November 11, 1918, there were mixed feelings among the troops, the book says “because of the horrors they had endured to reach this day, and because they knew the grief and sorrow of losing comrades to death, injury, blindness or permanent disability.
“They did not know that the promised land ‘fit for heroes was not to be. Thousands of ex-soldiers would soon be wandering the streets begging, scrabbling in the gutter for cigarette ends.”
Harry went back to living with his parents in Priory Road, Gedling but, in his mid-30s, married Elsie, a divorced woman in her late 20s who was one quarter German and had a son aged six.
Though the innocent partner in the divorce, she was still considered scandalous.
They went on to have a daughter and two sons and settled eventually at 21 Cambridge Street.
Harry returned to the pit where, over time, most of his fingers were broken and, in 1948, a lump of coal the size of a piano fell on him, breaking his leg. He was off work for 11 weeks.
He joined the Royal British legion, served as an air raid warden in the Second World War and, after retirement in 1958, spent most of his time in his beloved garden, where he built a pigeon loft.
“As a perverse reward for a well-lived life,” the book concludes, “he developed a progressive wasting disease (motor neurone) and died in 1965, at home in his own bed, at the age of 72. A decent, brave, honest, straightforward, hard-working family and, above and below ground, and a modest patriot.”