Moving into position at Armentières

Armentières sector 1916. (Source http://www.nzhistory.net.nz)

Delving into the official history, New Zealand Artillery in the Field, 1914-18, I learn that:

about the middle of May orders were received to move up to Armentieres .... Artillery units made a two days' trek of the journey from the billeting area to Armentieres, and experienced fair enough weather, although it was still somewhat cold. Batteries had previously sent forward by motor 'bus small advance parties, who had quartered for a week with the outgoing batteries, and whose business it had been to familiarise themselves with the area covered by the guns of the battery they were to relieve, with the location of its observation posts, the system of communications, and all else that was essential.

According to New Zealand History online, the New Zealand troops arrived in Armentières on 13 May, where they began learning about the trench warfare techniques developed by the British over the previous 18 months. It goes on:

The New Zealand soldier’s experience in Armentières was dominated by the tedium of trench warfare – training, work parties and trudging along the network of communication trenches. Thanks to a complicated system of scheduled rotations, a soldier typically spent only a few days each month in a front-line trench.

You can read about someone else's following of their grandfather's footsteps, and who will be visiting Armentières itself from 13 May,  at: "Following in Pop's Footsteps".

Preparations at Armentières

On the 1st of May, 2016, Sydney Williams was transferred to the Trench Mortar Battery of the 3rd Brigade, stationed at Le Ciseaux - one of the villages referred to in my previous post. According to New Zealand Artillery in the Field, 1914-18, the Brigade commanding officer was Lt-Colonel Ivon Standish, DSO, mentioned in this Stuff article, Veterans of three wars, excerpted below:

Having served in the second Boer War, Standish went on to be a highly regarded artillery officer in WWI, receiving a Distinguished Service Order for extinguishing a fire in the ammunition pit under a maelstrom of bullets. ... 

... men like Standish would not have seen much action, if any, in South Africa as many would have arrived after the war was over. But their arrival at the front during WWI was a rude awakening. 

"South African war veterans talking about Gallipoli said how they'd seen more shells and more bullets in one day than they had in a year in South Africa."

Of Armentières, where the New Zealand Division were about to go into battle later in May, New Zealand Artillery in the Field, 1914-18, says it:

... had for long been a quiet sector, undisturbed by any of the fierce contests which had raged along other parts of the long battle front. It was a good breaking-in ground for a Division which had seen no previous fighting, and it was a suitable place in which to "spell" a Division which had been heavily engaged. 

The New Zealand Division, fully reinforced and rested and strengthened after its hard but splendid service on Gallipoli, came to France confident in its strength and vigour, and eager to prove its quality in the new arena; but there was yet much to be learned of the complexities of a system of warfare which, new in itself, was subject to changes almost every day. Without this necessarily accurate knowledge and the perfection and thoroughness of organisation insistently demanded as a primary condition of success, valour and endurance would avail but little.

Sydney Williams: Egypt to France

After a lull paralleled by my grandfather’s “monotony of existence in a camp ... more or less isolated in the desert”, I have returned to the history of his Division (New Zealand Artillery in the Field, 1914-18) in the transition time between the Anzac evacuation and embarkation for France. My grandfather, Sydney Williams, was stationed at Moascar, near Ismailia on the banks of the Suez Canal.

These few months saw a complete reorganisation of the Australian and New Zealand forces, and “the formation of a self-contained, complete New Zealand Division”. There was extensive training, but also games of football (read ‘rugby’?) in the evening and on Saturdays, as well as swimming in Lake Timsah.

But the men, according to the official history, were “growing weary of inaction, and confident of their fitness to take the field again”. They began to talk of France, and “to look forward eagerly to the day when they would enter the lists against the most formidable of their enemies. ... The syllabus of training which had been mapped out had hardly been completed when orders appeared announcing that the Division would shortly embark for France.”

In Moascar, my grandfather had been promoted to Artillery Sergeant on 11 March 2016. When he embarked for France on 7 April, he was with the 13 Battery under Captain T Farr, part of the 2nd Brigade commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel F B Sykes. The troops arrived in Marseilles:

Everyone was eager for his first glimpse of France, and the ship's rails were lined and every vantage point on deck was crowded as the transports made their way up the picturesque harbour and proceeded to their berth at the wharves. ... as units came ashore they were packed into long troop trains, and set off on their journey northwards through the heart of Southern France. The countryside was clad in the fresh and tender verdure of spring, and looked fair indeed to eyes that for long had gazed upon nothing more attractive than the scarred slopes of Gallipoli, the bare hills of Lemnos, and the parched and boundless spaces of the Egyptian desert. Marseilles and the sea were quickly left behind, and soon the way lay through the Rhone Valley, with its blossoming orchards and orderly vineyards, its quaint little clustering villages, and its busy towns. ... The beauties of the countryside, the sense of change, and the novelty of the surroundings left no room for dull thoughts or weariness of mind.

The troops arrived in Le Havre after a journey of about fifty hours. After camping out on a cold hillside for a few days, the artillerymen were billeted out near Hazebrouck:

in and about small villages, such as Lynde, Le Ciseaux, and Blaringhem, small places with a poor estaminet [small cafe] or two, and little else of note beyond the church with its spire standing up above the clustering thatched roofs. The old barns and disused stables, which served as billets, were made comfortable enough with the aid of straw bedding, even if they were not overclean ...

The New Zealand Division was due to go into service at Armentieres, but before that the Artillery were tested on their shooting abilities.

Each Brigade in turn was required to send a party of gunners from each of its batteries to Calais, where they carried out live shell practice on ranges on the sea-front. ... the affair was very simple, but it served to demonstrate the discipline and smartness of the gun-crews. In congratulating the men of one battery on their shooting, which had been but typical of that of all the brigades, an English staff officer explained that all batteries were being so tested prior to going into the line in France since, on occasions, one or two batteries had inflicted as much damage on their own infantry as on the enemy!

Today, it’s euphemistically called ‘friendly fire’.

In my bones: No hero's death for Katherine Mansfield's brother

I visited Katherine Mansfield's family home in Thorndon, Wellington a few weeks ago - to see the exhibition "In my very bones - Katherine Mansfield's War" about the relationship between her and her brother Leslie Heron Beauchamp, and how much of her writing about New Zealand was triggered by his death in World War I.

Leslie's death was no noble sacrifice, no valiant death - it was an accident, as many military deaths are. He was a bombing officer in the South Lancashire Regiment, and while demonstrating the use of a hand grenade to another officer, the grenade went off prematurely. Both officers were killed, Leslie surviving by about three quarters of an hour before dying of his wounds at the site. From the exhibition record:

In late September 1915, Beauchamp’s battalion departed for the Western Front. Soon after landing he wrote his last letter to his sister, Katherine:

“Dearest Katie, no time for a letter am frightfully fit and full of beans! The trenches are beastly wet owing to the big bombardment going on. So far have remained scathless so that’s all right!”

This would be his last letter. The following day, on the 6^th of October, Beauchamp was killed during a training accident in Ploegsteert Wood, Belgium. He was conducting a grenade-throwing demonstration when the ‘bomb’ he was holding exploded prematurely, mortally wounding him.

A Christmas Quiet between Campaigns

Having caught up again with my grandfather’s Artillery corps activities 100 years ago, I see that Christmas and New Year were spent at Zeitoun camp in Egypt, following the evacuation from Anzac Cove in early December 1915. You don’t hear much about the evacuation these days – certainly no special commemorations like we’ve seen for the disastrous Anzac landing and the battle for Chunuk Bair. But here’s what the official New Zealand Artillery in the Field, 1914-18 war record said at the time:

The evacuation of the New Zealand Field Artillery, and the other batteries attached to the Division, extended over little more than a week. Orders to evacuate the guns were issued on December 10th, and the evacuation began the following night, when one section of guns from each New Zealand Battery was sent away. In many cases the guns had to be manhandled for a considerable distance, across trenches and broken ground, before they could be got on to ground where they could be limbered up and taken to the beach by the teams, but these difficulties were made light of in the determination that the New Zealand Brigades should leave none of their guns behind when Anzac was evacuated. ...

The final stages of the evacuation were carried out with methodical quietness, and exactly according to the time-table which had been laid down. It was a trying and anxious time for the whole Army Corps, but for none so much as the small garrison which held Anzac during the last twenty-four hours, and whose lives may be literally said to have hung by a thread. Everything possible was done in order to create the appearance of normal activity, and even to encourage the enemy in the belief that fresh troops were being landed by night.

Later, the official record reports:

The evacuation of Anzac having been a gradual process extending over more than a week, units arrived back in Egypt distributed on different transports, and in no particular order. On arrival at Alexandria some parties proceeded to Zeitoun, and others to Moascar. At this latter place, which was merely a railway siding a mile from Ismailia, on the banks of the Suez Canal, advance parties were proceeding with the establishment of a big camp where the Division was to be once more concentrated under canvas. With the arrival of the Infantry Brigades, the artillerymen with their horses and guns, other Divisional troops, and the Supply and Transport services, the camp took on an air of bustle and animation, and the men gradually settled down again to the routine of training.

Te Ara has this short video clip of Zeitoun camp from the time, where my grandfather was exactly a hundred years ago, though his war record shows he moved to Moascar camp on 24 January 1916. The location of each camp is shown on the map below.

A prayer for peace: preserve us from degeneration, disaster and war

Convinced that violence to deal with violence only begets more violence, that root causes of injustice and hatred need to be identified and healed; remembering also that Jesus told us to pray for our enemies, and that "all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword" (Matt 26:52), I wish to share this prayer associated with a relatively little-known devotion to Mary as 'the Lady of All Nations'. This is associated with apparitions of Mary in Amsterdam from 1945-1959, accepted by the Church as being of supernatural origin.

In revealing the prayer to Ida Peerdeman, Our Lady said the prayer was purposely kept short and simple, 'so that every person may manage to say it, even in this modern and speed-mad world.' Significantly, when so many countries are wracked by war, distress or turmoil, it asks for 'the Holy Spirit to live in the hearts of all nations, that they may be preserved from degeneration, disaster and war'.

The prayer in full:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Father,
send now your Spirit over the earth.
Let the Holy Spirit live in the hearts of all nations,
that they may be preserved from degeneration, disaster and war.
May the Lady of All Nations, the Blessed Virgin Mary, be our advocate.
Amen.

Read more ...

A chance for peace - it was good enough for Eisenhower

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. - Dwight D Eisenhower.

Those were the words I held up today in the rain to honour Armistice Day - when 'the war to end all wars' ended. Most people probably wondered what on earth we were on about. Hard to believe these words were spoken by an American President at the height of the Cold War, who had been WWII general.

He spoke them after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, when he felt there was an opportunity to nip the Cold War in the bud. It prompted him to give a speech that would be titled “The Chance for Peace”, against the counsel of then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

The speech went onto say: "Now, there could be another road before us—the road of disarmament. What does this mean? It means for everybody in the world: bread, butter, clothes, homes, hospitals, schools—all the good and necessary things for decent living."

Similar could be said today of climate change and our addiction to carbon. Whether we see it or not, there is another road that lies before us.

Read more about the context from Robert Schlesinger.