ABSTRACT
The First World War left the whole of John’s generation scarred for life. Some opposed the war, to be abused and assaulted daily by men, and spat on and handed white feathers by women. Others saw things in the trenches which would haunt them all their lives, and lost nearly all their friends. Quite what John saw, I do not know, for he never talked about it except to tell funny stories. He did not experience the worst horrors of the war, but for the rest of his life the war was with him, every day, and his dead and horribly maimed friends were with him too. The burning anger that rich men should send poor men to suffer and die in pain and without dignity never left him. He enlisted in the 9th Middlesex Battalion, but quickly transferred to the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry (KSLI) because Shropshire was closer to the ancestral home in Cheshire. There he served with G Company, recruited (apart from himself ) entirely from Ludlow in Shropshire. These early decisions almost certainly saved his life. While others, including most of the KSLI’s battalions, were sent to France, to be mown down like flies in the squalor of the trenches, and others to Gallipoli to be killed by Turkish guns amid the sand and the ferocious
insects, John’s battalion embarked for India in October 1914. The idea was that these raw recruits would take over routine imperial garrison duty, so as to free regular soldiers for the real fighting, in Europe. So the battalion served in Hong Kong, the Andaman Islands, Singapore and Rangoon from 1914-17. So on 23 January 1915 John found himself in Rangoon. It was by far the safest place to be. And his memories, as he passed them on to me, were not those of the typical First World War soldier – though perhaps, like many others, he suppressed the worst of them. He remembered entering the regimental boxing tournament and reaching the final because all the best boxers were in the other half of the draw. In the final bout he was blasted to the canvas in the first round. He remembered getting lost and separated from his comrades, and walking for hours trying to find them, terrified by footsteps behind him. When he arrived at the camp he found that the footsteps belonged to the native water-carrier, who, possessing no boots, found it less uncomfortable to step in John’s footprints. One of his favourite war poems was always Rudyard Kipling’s “Gunga Din”, about a native Indian water-carrier:
Of all them blackfaced crew, The finest man I knew Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din
and especially the lines
Though I’ve belted you and flayed you, By the livin’ Gawd that made you, You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!
