THE STAGING CAMPS - SLING AND STAPLES
“Sling - unloved, bleak, and lonely.”
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A melancholic epithet, bestowed by one veteran soldier upon Sling Camp, which from 1914 became the main base for all in-coming reinforcements for the NZEF and gained an infamous reputation amongst Kiwi troops.
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In the Official History of New Zealand's Effort in the Great War, a four-volume popular history from the 1920s, Sling’s isolation in the middle of nowhere is described: “It was situated in the heart of the great Salisbury Plains. Twelve miles to the south of the camp clustered around its famous old cathedral, the ancient town of Salisbury; and London, with its perpetual call to the exile in training, was seventy-four miles away.”
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It was built just north of the British Army’s long-standing Bulford Camp, on the Bulford Downs, and had been created in 1898 as a temporary extension of the main camp. It was cited on top of what had been a manmade 38-acre woodland planted in the 1820s, called Sling Plantation (hence the name of the camp) and sat in the lee of Beacon Hill. Originally made up entirely of tents, permanent barracks were built by the Kiwi division to accommodate 4,000 men - though at times it had to house far more.
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Those WWI barracks were demolished in 1923, but parts of the Camp are still used by the military today and in commemoration of its relationship with NZ, one of the new barracks is still called Kiwi Barracks. And just after the end of World War I, during the demobilisation period, New Zealand troops cut a Kiwi into the chalk of Beacon Hill above the camp. It can still be seen. The place of arrival or departure for all troops moving to or from Sling was the railhead, a good three kilometre march from the camp, in the village of Bulford itself, which at the time was “a pretty, typical south-of-England village, with a few thatched houses, a hotel, a manor, and many overspreading trees.”
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The Official History, edited by former lieutenant Henry Drew, (who was a journalist in civie street before the war which may explain his lyrical turns of phrase) paints a wonderfully atmospheric picture of Sling’s surrounds: “The camp lay astride the main road from Amesbury to Tidworth ... the way to Tidworth, across undulating, uninteresting ground, flanked by clay-banked rifle ranges, was known every inch to all Sling-trained soldiers, because of the very frequent route marches along it. This was the setting of Sling — this and high, bare hills at the back of the camp, scratched everywhere white — all the Salisbury Plain is chalk land — with practice trenches, bombing-pits, and model dugouts, while here and there arose ancient, oval mounds, or tumuli.”
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As for the camp itself however, its atmosphere was decidedly less bucolic. It was notorious for dampness, cold huts, large rats, particularly strict discipline, mind-numbing parade drilling, long route marches and martinet British Army NCOs. NZ troops often had run-ins with them and the Military Police. Indeed, so disliked was Sling that a joke popular among the New Zealanders was that the Kaiser should be punished after the war by being exiled to Sling.
Sling Camp shortly after the end of WWI when a Kiwi was carved into the chalk slope above it to commemorate its New Zealander connection. This is a postcard published by Thomas Illingworth & Co.
Bert says:
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“Our heads have all had a jail crop, and will be clipped fortnightly, and I think Convict 31988 fits better than Prvte So-and-So ... They soon make soldiers of us here and when an order is given it must be done and smartly. They are going to rub it in, and in a week’s time we will just be machines with a number. A chap has to smarten up here, and NZ camps are home sweet homes to these. Every man must always be dressed neat and tidy with buttons polished etc. A chap has scarcely a minute to himself and we have lectures three nights a week.”
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In Sling the troops fresh from NZ were introduced to the skills they would need on the battlefields:
“We are to be taught the noble art of bayoneting Germans and the still more gentler art of throwing bombs [and] how to crawl through barb wire entanglements.”
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Of the instructors Bert says they are:
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“mostly chaps who have seen active service and one or two Tommies are amongst them. Our bayonette instructor’s language during bayonet practice, runs something like this. ‘Just look at that man going up to stick a German. Look at the stealthy movements. Anybody would swear he was going to rob a fowl-house. Write home and tell your mother you’re not coming back.’”
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At Sling the troops also had their metal dog tags replaced with a new set made of compressed paper – metal discs could prove fatal if hit by a bullet. Bert posted his old tags back to his brother as a souvenir.
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Bert was at Sling all through February. His diary is filled with recording the relentless pace of the training that the troops went through:
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Thurs Feb 8: “Morning practice at rifle range. Afternoon bayonet, bombing, barbwire entanglements. Lecture at night.
Sat Feb 10: “Morning rifle practice. Afternoon route march to Amesbury. We passed through Bulford camp.”
Tues Feb 13: “Rife range. Field practice firing from the hip advancing and firing with gas helmet on. Snow thawing, ground very muddy.”
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But he also gained five precious days of leave, which began with the three kilometre trudge to Bulford Station, taking a train to Waterloo in London and the tube to Euston where he stayed the night at a YMCA. Or part of the night anyway, because he was up at 3am to catch the North Western at 5am to Birmingham, then another train out to Rowley Regis to visit family, staying for two days with Uncle Alf Cashmore, the brother of his mother Annie. The two sides of the family were close. Herbert Gadd Snr had married Annie Cashmore, Alf’s sister, while Alf had married Ada Gadd, Herbert Snr’s sister.
It was only once he was home with Alf that Bert learnt his maternal grandfather, Isaac Cashmore, had died in December. Poignantly Bert later tells his father that he had written Isaac a letter while at Sling and wondered why he got no reply. In Birmingham he looked around the old haunts he knew so well as a child, telling his father “you would hardly know Blackheath now, as ever so many new building have been put up,”and says he had a crowd of kids following his every move, presumably impressed by a solider in uniform. Then, his leave at an end, he reversed the trip, arriving back at Sling at 2am on a Sunday, ready for a Church parade.
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The next day NZ PM Bill Massey and former PM Joseph Ward arrived at Sling to officially open the YMCA and concert hall there. They inspected the troops and three days later, on 1 March, Bert and his fellow reinforcements marched from camp, bound for France.
France - Etaples
Bert arrived in the main British staging base in France at the tail end of the French winter. Etaples was a virtual village of tents a few kilometres further along the coast from the famous Calais. Here the training continued; more rifle ranges, bayonetting, bomb throwing and marching.
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“It is terribly cold here, and we have plenty of snow and wind. We are all under canvas and it is no joke to sleep on cold hard boards of the tents these nights. They also give us plenty to do, and we do not move an inch without carrying our packs, which feel liketh unto a ton of bricks after I have been carrying it for an hour.”
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At Etaples a man sharing his tent came down with mumps and Bert was moved to a segregation camp for 25 days, forced to sit and wait impatiently as he saw a draft of his comrades from the Rainy 19th leave for the front. On 17 April a second draft of reinforcements was called – 145 men were wanted, 120 from one contingent and just 25 from Bert’s group. Only five days out of segregation, Bert eagerly volunteered, recording in his diary with a sense of relief “I manage to be one of the 25.” At 6am on Thursday 19 April, after reveille at 4.15am, he finally left all the training camps behind and was headed for the front, taking a train to Steenwerk about 100km further into France from Etaples, and just outside the Belgian border, across which lay the front-line trenches.
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The next day he was issued with his gas mask and was drafted into his field unit in the battle sector it was holding. He was immediately baptised into life at the front, recording in his diary the sound of artillery booming, shells flying, enemy planes overhead, and trenches to be dug.
Belgian mud, rats and lice
It had taken nine months from his enlistment to make it to where the action was. He would be at the front for another long nine months, until 28 February 1918, when he was granted leave once more to England. During this time Bert endured the typical life of a soldier on the Western Front - repeatedly sent into front line trenches facing the enemy and being at risk of strafing machine guns and artillery shells, twice going ‘over the top’ (the soldier’s term for leaping out of the trenches struggling across the hell of no-man’s-land and attacking the enemy trenches), but mainly living in support trenches or reserve camps within a few hours’ marching distance of the front line, spending his time repairing roads and collapsed or water logged trenches, burying cables, acting as a human mule carting rations and supplies to the front line trenches or guarding potato crops, all intermingled with more training and parade drills. At times the troops were pulled further back to rest camps, 100km or so from the front, where they underwent more intensive training for planned large scale advances.
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He endured cold, bad food, lice, fleas, rats and got used to sleeping in barns, abandoned and dilapidated chateaux (sometimes reveling in the luxury of finding a proper bed with a mattress) or simply hunkering down amongst the muck and mire of a trench.
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Mud was a constant feature of life on the Western Front, particularly in low lying Flanders. The huge bombardments broke up the drainage and canal systems and this, combined with heavy rainfall, resulted in flooding of much of the combat area. In addition, in Flanders the Germans held much of the higher ground and actively tried to flood opposing trenches. Bert writes:
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“An hour’s rain is enough to turn everything into a sea of mud. The mud we get in this country is different to that in NZ; this mud seems to be a composition of secotine and plasticine, and it sticketh closer than a brother. Here is the recipe for giving yourself an idea of what muddy France is like: viz: Take a stock yard after six weeks’ rain, then multiply it nine times and add plenty of water, then roll in it taking care to let the mud get into your ears and mouth, then stand up in it knee deep and have your meals, after giving your rations a good dip in the mud.”
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Added to this the weather during the European winter of 1916-1917 (October 1916 to March 1917) was the worst for 40 years so the troops had to cope with bitter cold. Bert comments:
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“New Zealand’s winter is like summer in comparison.”
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The lousy weather spilled over into summer, making it unseasonably wet and cold also.
Bert: “It is summer now, or to be correct, it is supposed to be, but it has rained fairly heavily the last fortnight.”
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With all the dead men, horses and mules lying in no-man’s-land and sinking into the mud between the trench-bound armies, the stench was appalling. At one point Bert asks light-heartedly of his brother Frank that the next time the family sends a parcel they - “put in a couple of kauri gum and ti-tree pods; don’t think that I am barmy as I am dying for a smell of the ti-tree blossom again.”
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Amidst the muck, rats were everywhere: “Rats are as bold as brass here and they will pinch your dinner under your eyes and the other night I discovered one trying my overcoat on.”
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The mud and lack of clean water made it almost impossible for the men in the trenches to keep clean: “We were in a newly dug and unmade trench for six days without a wash or a hot meal and we were working at nights digging trenches in the front line often under shell fire.”
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A chance to bathe was a luxury and Bert records all his baths and swims in rivers and canals. Most of the army was infested with lice, and Bert in his letters ruefully records his experiences with them: “The fleas are as big as rabbits over here and a great pest.”
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“The lice have started a great offensive and make their attacks at night in mass formation; Keatings they thrive on while other insect powders seem to give them a bigger appetite and makes them frisky.”
An old soldier now
Beyond the physical discomforts of mud and disagreeable food, the greatest struggle each soldier really had was coping with the stress of being forced to repeatedly put their lives at risk and, worse, the slow, dreadful realisation of the futility of what they were involved in.
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Bert was a volunteer. He had joined the fight for empire to do his bit, to do what was right. Looking at the progression of Bert’s letters you can see his state of mind and perspective on the war mature. He moves from naivete and enthusiasm to get to the front, to shock and weariness at the reality, on to despair as he battled not just the Germans, but the wet and mud and bone aching cold of the Belgian winter, and finally a cynicism sets in about why he was enduring all of this. The one constant is a genuine love for home and thoughtfulness for his family.
In March 1917 he shows how important his connection to home via letters was when he chides: “I was disgusted yesterday when the NZ mail came in and not a paltry one for myself. This may be the last letter I will be writing home as it is not worth writing if I do not receive any answers.”
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And he champs at the bit to get to the front and believes the war will soon be over before he gets his chance to join in:
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“I am disappointed at missing my draft. Well I suppose the war will be over by the time you get this.”
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In April: “The war cannot last much longer, and the allies have really got the Huns beat now.”
In May he is thinking with optimism and maybe a touch of humour of what he will do after the war: “When I get back home I am going to start farming and introduce some French methods into it.”
By June he has had his first taste of action in the front lines: “I find it hard now to settle down to write.”
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In July: “I am going to be a peace advocate after this business. The more I see of the war, the more I think what a stupid and unnecessary thing it is. It makes a man think about this life.”
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He begins to be irritated by the impression of the war back home: “It is all rot about the German soldier being so poorly fed and as for the silly cartoons that one sees in the papers, they give the public the wrong impression about the war and do not help to finish the war.”
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He is also having different thoughts about what life after the war might hold: “I can foresee that work will be scarce for a while when the men all return home. I could not go to work in a town again after this life in the open air, and I will be able to rough it after this life.”
By November he has come through the horrors of the Ypres campaign. He has seen countless men around him fall dead into the mud and yet no end to the war in sight: “I am feeling like an old soldier now. Some people seem to think the war will be over shortly. I do not say that it won’t, but I have a ten year contract with Bill Massey.”
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By January 1918 the cynicism has taken hold: “The war will collapse as quickly as it started. It is only a war of patience between the people of England and Germany. Neither side will gain anything. I heard it said it would serve the Germans right if they won this war. The Hun would be obliged to take possession of this desert of mud, bricks and shell-holes with all the rotten weather chucked in.”
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But hope still existed and flared occasionally: “I don’t think peace is so very far off.”
