Gallipoli to the Somme: Recollections of a New Zealand Infantryman

By Alexander Aitken

Alexander Aitken was an ordinary soldier with an extraordinary mind. The student who enlisted in 1915 was a mathematical genius who could multiply nine-digit numbers in his head. He took a violin with him to Gallipoli (where field telephone wire substituted for an E-string) and practiced Bach on the Western Front. Aitken also loved poetry and knew the Aeneid and Paradise Lost by heart. His powers of memory were dazzling. When a vital roll-book was lost with the dead, he was able to dictate the full name, regimental number, next of kin and address of next of kin for every member of his former platoon—a total of fifty-six men. Everything he saw, he could remember. Aitken began to write about his experiences in 1917 as a wounded out-patient in Dunedin Hospital. Every few years, when the war trauma caught up with him, he revisited the manuscript, which was eventually published as Gallipoli to the Somme in 1963. Aitken writes with a unique combination of restraint, subtlety, and an almost photographic vividness. He was elected fellow of the Royal Society of Literature on the strength of this single work—a book recognised by its first reviewers as a literary memoir of the Great War to put alongside those by Graves, Blunden and Sassoon. Long out of print, this is by some distance the most perceptive memoir of the First World War by a New Zealand soldier. For this edition, Alex Calder has written a new introduction, annotated the text, compiled a selection of images, and added a commemorative index identifying the soldiers with whom Aitken served.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Apr 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9781775589792

Book preview

GALLIPOLI TO THE SOMME

Gallipoli to the Somme

RECOLLECTIONS OF A

NEW ZEALAND INFANTRYMAN

By

Alexander Aitken

8/2524 N.Z.E.F.

Edited and Introduced By

Alex Calder

Contents

Editor’s Introduction

A Note on the Text

Acknowledgements

Chronology

GALLIPOLI TO THE SOMME

Introduction by Sir Bernard Fergusson

Author’s Note

1   Egypt to Lemnos

2   Lemnos: Sarpi, Kastro

3   Lemnos to Gallipoli

4   Gallipoli to Lemnos

5   Lemnos to Egypt

6   Egypt: Ismailia

7   Ismailia and the Suez Canal

8   Egypt to France: Hazebrouck

9   Hazebrouck to Estaires

10 Estaires to Armentières

11 Armentières Salient: The Front Line

12 Armentières: The Cresendo

13 Terdeghem: A Grenade School

14 Armentières: The Raids Begin

15 Armentières: The Raid of the 4th Otagos

16 Armentières: After the Raid

17 Flanders to Picardy: Citernes

18 Citernes to Fricourt

19 Fricourt to Flers: 15th September 1916

20 Delville Wood: Longueval

21 Goose Alley: 25th September 1916

22 Goose Alley: 26th September 1916

23 Goose Alley: 27th September 1916

Epilogue

Appendix: Scraps from a Diary, 1915–1916

Editor’s Notes

Bibliography

Commemorative Index of Names

Plates

Editor’s Introduction

ON 14 JULY 1916, AT ARMENTIÈRES, THE 4TH COMPANY OF THE 1ST Otago Infantry Battalion made a disastrous night raid on the trenches opposite. Of the 181 men who blackened their faces and clambered over the parapet, 163 would be killed or wounded. Sergeant Alexander Aitken, of 10th Company, had been picked to lead a section of his former platoon in a supporting position on the left flank. The platoon wriggled through the wire in advance of the main assault and dug into shell holes in the middle of no-man’s-land. A tremendous artillery barrage went overhead, crashing into the German trenches. Aitken checked his watch: zero hour, the raiders would be on their way. Suddenly, bright flares shot up from the enemy lines, illuminating the men of 4th Company as they fell to machine-gun fire and crumpled under shrapnel bursts. Out on the flank, the supporting party themselves came under fire. Aitken had earlier noticed that men from another section of the platoon were dug in rather too close to a row of trees—a natural ranging target for German mortar crews. Few would survive the night’s long bombardment. Come daylight, having helped carry in the wounded, Aitken returned exhausted to his own lines. He was in a bad way, suffering—he thought later—from minor shell shock. Captain James Hargest gently guided him back to Company HQ and suggested he try to catch some sleep. Whenever Aitken closed his eyes, he ‘heard again . . . the whistle of the falling mortar bombs’, he saw his dead and dying comrades, he saw that line of trees. He gradually became aware of a conversation continuing around him, and that it involved his former platoon’s roll book, presumed missing along with the sergeant in whose pocket it had been inadvertently taken into action. The details it contained were now urgently needed. In a semitrance, Aitken dictated the full name, the regimental number, the name of next of kin, and the address of next of kin, for every member of his old platoon—a total of fifty-six men.¹

Those who were killed that day are buried in the Cité Bonjean military cemetery just out of town. It contains a total of 453 individual New Zealand graves, along with a ‘Memorial to the Missing’ listing the names of a further 47 known to have been killed in this sector but whose bodies were never recovered. In one corner of a manicured lawn stands a monument with the inscription: ‘THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE’. For a visitor like me, that cannot be true. I do not remember any of ‘the fallen’: the names are mere names, alphabetised into anonymity. A battlefield tourist following in Aitken’s footsteps can drive in not much more than an hour from Armentières, where the New Zealand Division was introduced to the Western Front in May 1916, to the necropolis of the Somme, where another ‘Memorial to the Missing’ at Caterpillar Valley lists the names of 1,205 New Zealanders whose remains were unidentifiable or never found—an astonishing half of those killed here in September and October 1916, yet the merest fraction of the 72,194 names inscribed on the nearby British ‘Memorial to the Missing of the Somme’ at Thiepval. That total is so unfathomably large it seems impossible they can all be there; yet every name is present and correct and locatable by a relative making a pilgrimage.

I made my own visit to the Thiepval Memorial in September 2016, during the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. Naturally, I looked first for my own name. I could see Calder after Calder in the Highland Regiments, but who was to say any of them were ‘mine’? Lacking a known personal connection, the mind struggles to take in the magnitude of this towering monument to loss. But an information panel helps the visitor size up this edifice in mathematical terms. There are 72,194 names—so many per square foot on a site of so many square feet. How did the architect fit them all in? Sir Edward Lutyens found a geometrically elegant solution: by basing his design on a stack of interlocking arches, he was able to maximise the surface available for inscription.

While I was pondering dimensions, our battlefield tour-guide had retired to change his clothes, emerging in a suit and bowler hat to MC a brief ceremony of remembrance. There was to be one of these for each of the 141 days of the Somme. Huddled family groups mounted the steps to lay a wreath. People spoke. There was a minute’s silence, followed by a Last Post—someone pressed play on a boom-box—that was nonetheless moving in this setting. Not so the closing Exhortation:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them.

Familiar words, yet I recoiled from them. There is a gap between names that are recorded and people who are remembered—and I felt it open like a chasm in the air between the arches of the missing at Thiepval.

Yet my encounter with these ‘intolerably nameless names’² is offset by a story about one of them, carried from the war as a letter from the comrades of a lost Irishman, killed that very day a hundred years ago, to his widow. The grandson explained that the letter had little to say, except to acknowledge an act of kindness recently performed by the dead man, and to assure his wife that while her husband’s body had not been recovered, they had had time to arrange his limbs, that he had not died uncared for. All modern war stories need to find a way between these two extremes. There is a human scale—individual, singular, ordinary—on which our sympathies are engaged. Set against this world of particulars and singularities is everything that is too big or too much for ready comprehension. This forms the least communicable part of a soldier’s experience. We see it in the way diaries written at the time so often need words for a lack of words: ‘I can’t say’, ‘you had to be there’. Perhaps something similar happens when we read about war. To learn that 19,240 British soldiers were killed on the first day of the Somme gives one measure of grief and suffering, yet all such numbers, to paraphrase Stalin, are merely statistics. So while friends and relatives may feel the loss of a single soldier’s life as a tragedy, that focus is less available to anyone trying to explain what it was like to be a soldier in the Great War. Aitken at one point explains that grief for a school-friend would be felt later, but in the pitch of battle, his strongest impression is of casualties occurring everywhere around him. The true theme of the war memoir is not the single death, but death in numbers, death over and over, even though those numbers numb the mind.

Yet Aitken’s restoration of the missing roll-book works the other way. No-one really believes the names on these war monuments live ‘for evermore’: there is no human memory that could encompass them. But, like so much else in this volume, Aitken’s hypermnesic recollection of impersonal military records has a particularizing, and humanizing, force. Against the odds, fifty-six names, along with their connections, have been remembered. Rolls of the dead make the mind glaze over, but on this occasion we feel wonder. It is not surprising the episode soon grew into legend. Some soldiers said Aitken knew the numbers of their rifles too, and he was himself put out when, in the 1930s, the episode returned in an even more unlikely form: a lubberly newspaper reporter had mistaken his platoon for a battalion. Like all good stories, this one went around the world. And so, one afternoon, on his quiet walk home from the university, Professor Aitken noticed newspaper billboards with the headline, EDINBURGH WIZARD. Much to his dismay, on opening the evening paper, he discovered the wizard was himself.³

The man with the enchanted memory was born in Dunedin on 1 April 1895, the eldest of the seven children of Elizabeth and William Aitken, a grocer’s assistant. William’s parents ran a small leasehold farm on the Otago Peninsula at Seal Point. The grandchildren were frequent visitors there, as well as to the farm of their Auntie Jeanie, on the coast north of the city at Waitati. In 1945, Aitken recalled those childhood holidays in a letter to his aunt that is interesting not only for the flavour it gives of his early years, but also for the highly imagistic quality of the recollections, and for his habit of listing one impression after another, making a slideshow out of his long, semicolon-heavy sentences. He also intertwines these vividly recollected images with a reflexive commentary on how his memory is functioning. His war experiences would be remembered in this way too.

I always remembered with greatest clearness my visits to, and stays at Waitati. How I used to hear the trains at night come round the cliffs, away over across the bay, from Purakaunui, and then quite a time after, rumble by the creamery; . . . the washing and polishing of the cream-separator, the two-handed sawing of wood with Uncle George; you and Mrs Pullor going off to paint; the Rev. A. M. Finlayson looking hard at me when I said ‘to commiserate with’ instead of ‘to commiserate’; . . . . the pig-hunting expedition, . . . no wild boar, but an unforgettable memory of the pure clear water of the Waikouaiti River in its upper reaches, purling over golden shingle as we emerged upon it from the bush in the early morning . . . I could if I liked add detail to detail, a little here and a little there, and recapture the whole picture of some thirty years ago. And I can do the same for an earlier time, the old days down Seal Point at Grandpa’s; even the earliest, enormously far back in time, yet vivid; going to holidays in the cart, our mother in it, we in shelter under cover, leaving behind us Dunedin and Otago Harbour, and reaching that high point by Highcliff where suddenly the outer Pacific is seen, the Gull Rock and that other rock, the tongue of cape stretching out toward it from Sandymount, and away down, the tiny farm-houses of Seal Point in their clumps of trees . . .⁴

As a child, Aitken’s horizons were not to be encompassed by any classroom. ‘Can you spell cat?’ asked the infant mistress on his first day; he preferred to spell words like ‘Invercargill’.⁵ Others in the family had been precocious. An uncle had shown an early gift for mental calculation, but there was no money in the family for education. Aitken’s father also had a pronounced facility with figures, mentally totting up the pounds, shillings and pence in the grocery account books, and requiring his eldest boy to do the same. That was putting a talent to use. One feels there would have been no great sorrow had Alec also been obliged to leave school early; fortunately, he obtained a scholarship to Otago Boys’ High School, but his wife Winifred would later recall that it was ‘touch-and-go whether he wasn’t taken from school at 13’.⁶

On his first day of high school, Aitken was dubbed ‘Swotty’ after memorising a Latin vocabulary at a glance. It takes a certain milieu to produce a nickname like that, but it stuck with some affection and went with him to the trenches. Aitken seems only to have minded that the label was so misapplied: ‘Few pupils at OBHS have ever worked less’, he insisted. ‘I played an inordinate amount of fives, I took some part in athletics, and used to leave preparing my lessons until just before classes, walking up the three hills of London Street.’⁷ Nonetheless, in his final year, he took first place overall in the National University Scholarship Examinations by a considerable margin, having come first in Latin, third in both English and Mathematics, and fourth in French.⁸

But the most important points of growth for Aitken in his teenage years were extracurricular. Winifred recalls his introduction to the violin:

When my husband was 18, his father produced an old fiddle, an execrable instrument, & said that if he liked to teach himself to play it, he could have it. He had one term’s tuition from an old and nearly blind fiddler, who couldn’t even see the position of the fingers on the strings properly, & everything since then has been done by himself, by almost superhuman efforts.⁹

The musician we meet in these pages has only had three years with his instrument, yet he is already proficient enough to attempt Bach’s ‘Chaconne’ when confined to quarters at Estaires. Later in life, Aitken became the leader of the Edinburgh University Musical Society Orchestra and performed much of the repertoire for string quartet to a high amateur standard. He often said he gave far more thought to music than to mathematics.¹⁰ One is bound to wonder how someone so intellectually gifted could spend most of his war, not as an officer with all the advantages rank might offer a diffident young man, but as a regular N.C.O., rubbing along with the labourers and farm-workers and tradesmen of the Regiment. The violin is the strongest clue: as Sarah Shieff points out, ‘this incongruous piece of contraband’ is passed hand-to-hand on long route marches only because the men judge it worth carrying. As she goes on to suggest, it represents moments of community, of the fragility of precious things, and for Aitken himself, in his solo practice sessions, a way of structuring time that runs counter to an inhuman military order.¹¹

The discovery that mathematics opened a door to memory came at the age of fifteen. Until then, school arithmetic was a bore, but algebra, when introduced by a gifted teacher, came as a revelation. Simple formulae could be short-cuts to large calculations and Aitken soon made a game out of squaring three-digit numbers. ‘I then began to feel I might develop a real power’, he recalled, ‘and for some years . . . practiced mental calculations and memory like a Brahmin Yogi.’¹² He also noticed an increasing ease:

I found that gains were cumulative and, so to speak, stratified, in the sense that they formed a deposit sinking deeper and deeper into the subconscious and forming a kind of potential which, in certain states, I make drafts at extraordinary speed. I discovered, too, that the more I used relaxation, not concentration as ordinarily understood; for concentration, the dinning in by force, is the surest way to put a clamp on your brain, to stop its easy functioning and to lose all your gain. Memory naturally played a great part, and reciprocally memory itself was strengthened in all other departments of acquired learning as well. For example poetry, especially Latin poetry, and music became easier to learn at a few readings.¹³

Aitken seems to have been a tenacious improver in any field that took his interest. He had no special flair for athletics, but pushed himself as a jumper, setting higher and higher bars on a frame made from saplings in a bush clearing, and took pride in reaching a reasonably competitive level at school and, later, inter-university games.¹⁴

When war broke out in 1914, Aitken was nineteen years old and in his second year at university. He wanted to join up immediately along with fellow students like his friend George Pilling, but his father would not give the necessary permission. Alec had to wait until April 1915, when he was of an age to enlist without parental consent. Unusually for a war memoirist, Aitken’s narrative begins not with these events, but with his embarkation for Egypt with the Sixth Reinforcements on 14 August 1915. He tells us nothing about his motives for going; nor is there a single anecdote about his induction into military life, or the months of training and drill-bashing at Trentham military camp. So far as telling a war story is concerned, this is a significant omission. As Paul Fussell points out: ‘Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. . . . But the Great War was more ironic than any before or since.’¹⁵ The irony, at its simplest, is of a war that would be over by Christmas dragging into four years of deadlock; or of General Sir Douglas Haig, writing to his wife on the eve of the Somme, ‘I feel that every step of my plan has been taken with the Divine help’, and confiding to his diary, ‘the wire had never been so well cut nor the artillery preparation so thorough’.¹⁶ Irony is what we are left with when events conspicuously prove otherwise. But by forgoing the ‘before’ of a ‘before-and-after’ narrative, Aitken’s memoir cannot so easily follow the familiar contours of a story in which an innocent and optimistic young soldier is confronted by human savagery on an unprecedented scale. Nor can his memoir follow the archetypal story of a journey and return home common in war narratives from the Odyssey to The Lord of the Rings. As a writer, he would need to find other points of contrast and subtler tones and effects. His memory helped him in at least two ways. The clear, postcard-like images he could summon to mind work hand in hand with the power of the telling detail to suggest more than themselves. And we see his memory develop a more intimate relation to irony in the way it picks out events from the ambient horror: it is nothing to jump into a trench littered with dead bodies, but when a man drops into a trench to find his brother, not seen since Gallipoli, lying dead at his feet—that is bound to be memorable.¹⁷ As Aitken himself puts it: ‘The Somme seemed to predispose such abstract and inhuman coincidences as these.’

Despite his decision to focus only on his period of active service overseas, there can be little mystery about Aitken’s motives for enlisting. His idealism is legible between the lines of his narrative, and there is no reason to suppose he would have felt differently from fellow Otago students, like Pilling, whose personal diary reveals that he volunteered out of loyalty to the Empire in its time of need, and that he felt a duty to defend civilised values against the militarism of the Central Powers. Had Aitken’s father allowed him to leave with the Main Body, he may, of course, not have returned with a story to tell. And had he survived the disasters of the April landings on Gallipoli or the Sari Bair offensive of August 1915, he would perhaps have been among the remnant evacuated to Lemnos, men so hollowed out by sickness and exhaustion, they seemed ghosts of themselves to the fit and unbloodied reinforcements. Shaken to be meeting so few survivors, Aitken introduces a quasi-mathematical calculation: ‘the sixteen companies in the four infantry battalions . . . had been reduced in almost the same proportion’, and itemises his own North Otagos as an instance. They number only eighteen men, have no officers, no senior N.C.O.s, only two lance-corporals, and even with the influx of fresh troops, the company is less than a third its full strength. One senses the kind of applied maths question that might invite an examinee to compute the full strength of the Expeditionary Force and its casualties suffered to date, but there is no calculation to perform. He might have provided an actual figure from published histories of the campaign, but has instead portrayed himself trying to take in the situation mathematically. Aitken served at Gallipoli for five weeks prior to the evacuation, and we often see him coming to terms with his experience in this mathematical way. Troubled one night by the thought of having possibly killed someone—he and another soldier had fired simultaneously at an incautious Turk—his mind turns to a probability table, but he finds ‘to become analytical might lead to doubt the cause for which we were fighting’—which was awkward, since ‘he was far from such doubt then’. On one of several occasions in which he escapes death by a whisker, he remarks, again with a mathematician’s objectivity, that since survival and death in these circumstances are equally matters of chance, there is no comfort to be found in the fatalism of those who speak of their ‘number being up’ or of a shell with someone’s name on it.

The Anzacs had been mauled by Gallipoli, but worse was to follow on the Western Front. More detailed explanations of historical and military context are best left to the editorial notes, but it is worth reminding the reader that in May 1916 the New Zealand Division arrived at a front that had been locked in stalemate since the so-called ‘Race to the Sea’ of 1914, a series of attempted and countered flanking movements that left in its wake lines of opposing trenches running from the Belgian coast to the Swiss Alps. On the whole, the German Army had the better position: they were drier, on higher ground, and had the great advantage of perfecting well-prepared defensive positions while the British and French, if the war was to be won, were obliged to push back the invaders. Allied attacks in the summer of 1915 had cost 200,000 casualties to no effect. The problem, it seemed then, was ineffective artillery support for the infantry and deadly retaliation from enemy guns; moreover, because the infantry had attacked on a narrow front, it was difficult to bring in reserves in support of any advantage gained, yet counterattacks could be tightly focused. For six months, Haig and his generals prepared countermeasures and formulated new plans for a major summer offensive that would annihilate the German Army. Meanwhile, the Germans attacked the French at Verdun. Unlike the British, they expected no quick, decisive victory. The plan was to attack at a place the French were committed to defend and grind them down through attrition. When the Anzacs reached the front in May 1916, Verdun was already a pressure point, and the so-called ‘nursery sector’ around Armentières was proving to be no kindergarten. The Germans had to be prevented from reinforcing at Verdun and along the Somme. The raid of the 4th Otagos on 14 July may have been prompted by such considerations, but, as Aitken suggests, its catastrophic result cannot be sheeted home to Haig and his most senior generals only. Night raids were usually the work of twenty or thirty men who had a definite and limited objective, such as capturing prisoners for interrogation. ‘Who was to blame for its failure, that is to say, for the plan itself ?’ Aitken asks. ‘Probably Division or Brigade, having chosen so large a unit as a company to go over—but surely Battalion also, for drafting so unimaginative a scheme.’

Two weeks earlier, on 1 July, after a week-long artillery bombardment in which a million and a half shells were fired, the Allies attacked along a broad thirteen-mile front at the Somme. At 7.30 a.m., as the British guns increased their range and began to pummel more distant targets, some 110,000 troops began to walk towards the German front lines. They were expecting cut wire and little opposition. At 7.31 or thereabouts, the German troops emerged like angered wasps from their deep dug-outs, and within moments were deploying machine-guns. As a child reader of the war comics of the 1960s, I have found it difficult to entirely lose the impression that machine-gun ‘nests’, with their inevitable ‘rat-a-tat’, are positioned not far in front of advancing troops, their pinging bullets nimbly side-stepped by a rushing attacker or passing harmlessly over the head of the commando wriggling towards the enemy, grenade in hand. In fact, the effective range of machine-guns in the Great War was two and a half kilometres. They could be fired en masse on an upwards trajectory to land as a carpeting bombardment or, more deadly still, positioned at an angle to attacking troops, so that the hail of bullets arrived in enfilade, which closed up the gap between individual targets. The geometry is important: a pair of machine-guns positioned squarely in front of those Otago men making a dash of a hundred yards or so might account for around two-thirds of them before they themselves were overrun. But if the same pair of guns were placed at an angle of 45 degrees to the direction of the attack, the entire attacking force might be killed or wounded in less than a minute. Separate the pair, and the cross-fire becomes more lethal still.

Having lost 60,000 casualties on the first day of the Somme, Haig proposed a second push for mid-July, and, having once again made

Reviews for Gallipoli to the Somme

[sosayso · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

War memoirs by a remarkable man who could forget nothing, and was later a professor of mathematics. When he came to write this book he could remember every detail of his experiences on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, including names and details of all his fallen friends. Very moving.