that knickers were not then universal in rural France. The expression was, of course, prohibited. A divisional commanders’ conference in October 1915 affirmed that: ‘The use of the word “Tommy” to be absolutely barred. The term is never permitted in a good regiment.’
The order had as much effect as so many others, and the nickname persisted, sometimes as Tommy, sometimes as Atkins, and once, memorably, as ‘Mr Atkins, gentleman’, used by an officer who saw soldiers helping refugees with gentleness and generosity. Nicknames are not always popular with their recipients, and such was the case with Tommy. Many soldiers felt patronised by it, and its English implication grated on Scots, Irishmen and Welshmen. But Sergeant Charles Arnold, himself a quintessential Tommy, declared that:
Tommy Atkins – full private – is, when all is said and done, the one who won the war. He won it by sheer dogged pluck … When is something going to be done for the man who isn’t a general or a guardsman or an Anzac, nor even a London Scot but just a clodhopper from Suffolk, or Devon, or Durham – the man who obeyed orders and stuck it out? Of this man little was heard, possibly because he had a habit of going into places a thousand strong and coming out a remnant of a hundred and fifty or so. Dead men tell no tales of their own glory.
Even his white cotton long johns, the last resort of comfort and dignity, are soaked by the mud he has been lying in for the past half hour. Although it is a fine night with bright moonlight, there is little promise of spring this morning of 2 April 1917, and the winter, the worst anyone can remember, still grips the front line as it snakes down from Arras towards Bapaume like a slimy and malevolent old serpent. The cold has its merits, for it makes lice less lively: there is scarcely a man within three miles of the front who is not aware of lice busy at his armpits and crotch. Corporal Thomas Atkins is lying towards the right-hand end of a line of eighteen similar figures, nine of them in his own section, on the western edge of a long spur with the village of Croisilles, houses roofless and walls gaping, but, unlike so many villages further west, still just recognisable as the little agricultural community it once was, on its far side. They are in No Man’s Land, with the rusting zigzags of the German wire out of sight in front of them. Behind them is another similar line: this little block of one officer and forty men constitutes No. 1 Platoon, A Company, 2nd Battalion The Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment.
To its left is No. 2 Platoon, looking much the same but, (for this is ‘Dozy Two’, the despair of the company sergeant major and a risk to all decent men) sounding noisier as Lieutenant Wills, its long-suffering commander, adjusts something that sounds, across the chilly night, like a sack of scrap metal. It can only be Private Desmond, the company idiot, who has unfortunately not been left back with the transport where he can do no harm to himself or others. There are worse places to be on this long morning, thinks Thomas Atkins, and with No. 2 Platoon is one of them.
Atkins is twenty-five and unmarried, and was a butcher’s roundsman in Peckham before he enlisted in late October 1914. He joined the army because everybody else was doing it, and he did not want to miss the excitement. And he chose the Queen’s because Jack Chamberlain, a roundsman with the same firm, had an uncle in the regiment, and told Thomas that its cap badge, the Paschal lamb, was the finest in the army. That was enough for a single train ticket to Guildford, and a long walk up the hill to Stoughton barracks, where a sergeant thought that there might just be two vacancies. Getting into the army was easier than getting to France, and it took three months of basic training – shooting on Ash Ranges and route marches along the Hog’s Back to Farnham – and another three of hanging about the depot before his name appeared on a typewritten list fluttering outside the orderly room. His draft, two officers and fifty-eight men, marched to Guildford station and went by train to Southampton. An overnight crossing in a cattle boat took them to Le Havre, whence they were shuffled by railway to an infantry base depot at Etaples, and then posted to the 2nd Battalion, out of the line near Poperinghe, behind Ypres.
Having a chum in the same draft helped, and he recognised some NCOs from Stoughton. There were more decent blokes than bad bastards: any section had three or four good men, as many average, and one or two walking disasters, usually weeded out and sent off to the trench mortars in one of their periodic appeals for men. Officers were recognisably different in style and substance, and there were still enough pre-war regulars to give the battalion an old army feel of Blanco and brickdust.
The pattern of battalion life, with rotation between the front line, reserve trenches and rest billets (usually with more work than rest), came easily to Atkins. There was no sense in fighting what you couldn’t change. Food was regular, if predictable, and there was not much to spend your pay on but omelette and chips, accompanied by thin French beer or sharp white wine. Two shillings a week went home to his mother. The rest, increasing from a private’s miserable 1 shilling a day to a corporal’s more respectable 1s 3d in July 1916, as Somme casualties created vacancies, went straight into his belly. He was shocked the first time he was shelled, and profoundly surprised the first time he was sniped at: rifle fire was so much more personal, and it seemed odd that a German he had never met should try to kill him.
By this April of 1917 he has become familiar with death and wounds, with enough of his friends dead to be aware of his own mortality but not so many lost as to make him obsessed by the risks he must run. He knows his job, thinks himself good at it, and believes that his superiors think so too. The only drawback to the promotion that cannot be far away is that it will make it harder for him to see his mate, Corporal Jack Chamberlain.
Further back down the gentle slope, towards the barbed wire in front of the British front-line trench, are Nos 3 and 4 Platoons, the remainder of A Company. Shiny A is the battalion’s right-forward company. It is to attack at zero hour, 5.15 that morning, with B Company on its left and C and D Companies behind. The two rear companies, in the British front line and the communication trenches just behind it, will advance in section worms, little columns which will make them easier to control as they move forward, passing through the first wave of attacking companies to consolidate the captured ground.
The layout of the morning’s plan is quite clear in Atkins’s mind. Five minutes before the attack British field artillery will shell the German front line, while heavier guns will reach out more deeply in an effort to prevent the German artillery from responding effectively to the SOS rockets which their infantry will be sure to send up. As the advance begins the artillery will fire a creeping barrage, moving 100 yards every three minutes. Atkins knows that he and his men must ‘lean on the barrage’, leaving no more than 50 yards between the shell bursts and their advancing line. The trick is to arrive on the German front line, where the railway embankment runs across the front of the village, before its garrisons have emerged from their dugouts. Anyone who remembers the opening stages of the battle of the Somme the previous summer knows that it is better to risk losing men from the occasional shell that bursts short than to allow the barrage to spit and crack its way across the landscape too far ahead of the infantry, giving the Germans time to emerge to man their surviving positions and tuck machine guns into fresh shell holes.
The battalion is to take the German front-line trench and the embankment behind it, and then form a defensive flank facing north-east while the other three battalions in the brigade gain more ground. Brigadier General Hanway Cumming, the brigade commander, in a dugout a mile and a half further back, would tell us that the 21st Division on the left and the 4th Australian Division on the right will also be attacking as part of a larger plan conceived by 3rd Army. But this is not a matter for Atkins. He has seen the divisional commander on two occasions, but could not tell us that he is called Major General Herbert Watts and will soon have his reputation for being a very competent operator recognised by a knighthood. Getting to the railway embankment with skin intact will be quite enough for Atkins this morning, and the divisional plan is veiled from him in the mists of higher strategy.
