Richards Old Soldiers Never Die

1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-910901-57-1
Verlag: Parthian Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 326 Seiten

'...the greatest account of trench warfare....' --Phil Carradice, BBC Arguably the greatest of all published memoirs of the Great War, Old Soldiers Never Die is Private Frank Richards' classic account of the war from the standpoint of the regular soldier, and a moving tribute to the army that died on the Western Front in 1914. In this remarkable tale, Richards recounts life in the trenches as a member of the famous Royal Welch Fusiliers, with all its death and camaraderie, in graphic detail, vividly bringing to life the trials and tribulations faced by the ordinary rank and file.

Frank Richards was born in 1883 in Monmouthshire. Orphaned at nine years old, he was brought up by his aunt and uncle in the industrial Blaina area, and went on to work as a coal miner throughout the 1890s before joining the Royal Welch Fusiliers in 1901. A veteran soldier who served in British India and many areas of the Western Front, he wrote his seminal account of the Great War from the standpoint of the common soldier, Old Soldiers Never Die, in 1933. This was followed by Old Soldier Sahib, a memoir of his time serving in British India, in 1936. He died in 1961.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Richards, Frank

Leseproben

FOREWORD

Frank Richards opens his astounding yet neglected memoir with a gathering of workmates in a South Wales coalfield pub in August 1914. Aware that his readers may well have expected to be introduced to familiar themes, Richards immediately sets out to establish his own territory and idiom and in so doing provides one of the most striking openings in the literature of twentieth century Wales. It is an opening that, on its own, merits book-length discussion.

In the Wales of 1914 industrial and political tensions were well to the fore, but we have now been introduced to a group of friends who went from the pit to the pub, not to discuss wage-rates and workers’ control but rather to reminisce about years spent in India, Burma, South Africa and China when their individual feats of soldiering had guaranteed famous victories. Basic to the trajectory of their careers was the fact that Wales was an integral part of the United Kingdom and that military service anywhere in their nation’s global Empire was a rewarding and honourable option and one to recall with pride.

On that August day in 1914 at the Castle Hotel in Blaina, Richards and his butties suddenly learn that a new war has been declared and that reservists (as many of them were) had been called up. This news occasioned ‘excitement and language’ and calls for glasses to be filled. The old soldiers, however, knew their duty and fully intended to report for duty on the morrow. Richards, then, has launched his tale but now he has to assure his readers by indicating that there is going to be humour, urbanity and possibly irreverence in what follows. As the drunken old soldiers wend their way home one former artilleryman mimed the firing of shells thereby ‘destroying a mining village in the valley beyond’. Writing very early in the 1930s Richards had perceptively anticipated the actions of countless young picture-goers who in the next generation would walk home from cinemas re-enacting the military heroics they had just witnessed on big screens and imagining the total destruction of neighbouring communities.

From the fourth of August 1914 we are firmly in our author’s hands: he is at his Regimental Depot at Wrexham on the 5th and by the 10th he is in France. A typical soldier, his main concern is the availability of ‘booze and fillies’ and soon he has reassuring evidence that in that respect ‘we had nothing to grumble about as regards Rouen’. Private Frank Richards’ war has begun and the story he has to tell takes us to his demob in December 1918 and his subsequent shoddy treatment by pension boards back in Wales. We are presented then with that relatively rare thing; a perspective of the Great War in the words of an ordinary soldier and one who saw it all, who quite astonishingly is able to provide first-hand accounts of front line fighting at Bois Grenier, Loos, Bethune, the Somme, Arras, Ypres and Passchendaele. At his demob Richards mused that the chance of his surviving that lot had been twenty-thousand-to-one and yet his seamless story is now told in a voice that is never less than direct and refreshing. It is a remarkable account and one that offers an unusual emphasis for, as the author’s fellow Royal Welsh Fusileer and literary mentor Robert Graves immediately spotted, this book is ‘about the army rather than the war’. It is a vital distinction and one that invites us to judge its overall value in a different context, one both literary and social.

The First World War undoubtedly brought about the birth of modern Wales. It set up an intense interplay between a newly centralised national economy, an enhanced British state and the increasingly democratic institutions and voices of a working people. Wales had been massively involved in the War and now a hundred years on it is essential that we all acquaint ourselves with the major historiographical issues that have lingered. Was it really necessary for Britain to be involved in the War at all? Whose fault was the War? Which rulers and politicians allowed a local dispute to become a World War? It became, as Wales knew to its cost, a remorseless war of attrition: did that betoken a careless disregard of the lives of ordinary people or was it the best available strategic option? These questions, all too often the preserve of academics, need to be more fully debated in Wales. In 2014, as the great Centenary commemoration began, it was soon apparent that across the globe, and not least in Wales, the War was being examined more from the bottom than the top. Local historians and history societies had access to seemingly limitless material depicting a war fought and experienced by hitherto anonymous individuals. We have been left in no doubt that it was the People themselves who actually fought the Great War.

What has been refreshing about this new emphasis on real lives is that we can escape from prevailing stereotypes. In his 1975 book, The Great War in Modern Memory, Paul Fussell argued that it was probably the English class system and the influence of Shakespeare that lent a rather theatrical and somewhat comic feel to the literary treatment of the Great War’s common soldiers. Undeniably Shakespeare’s Henry V is a great play about soldiers at war, and in many productions Henry’s conversation with a Welsh soldier is often the most amusing and memorable scene. The trouble is that so many subsequent authors have been tempted to write in the same mode. In literary works of considerable distinction one is likely to encounter unconvincing lapses into the colloquial. In Ford Madox Ford’s great novel sequence of the 1920s, Parade’s End, the English officer has to deal with a soldier from Pontardulais who longs to see his ‘bleedi’ little ’ut on the bleedin’ Mumbles’ and a miner ‘from God knows what up-country valley’ with ‘shaggy hair like a Caribbean savage’. In In Parenthesis, his masterful attempt to both relive and mythologise warfare, David Jones explains how one Welsh soldier, Watcyn, ‘knew everything about the Neath fifteen and could sing Sospan Fach’ but ‘might have been an Englishman when it came to matters near to Aneirin’s heart’.

In discussing what he called the ‘Theatre of War’ Fussell had concentrated his attack on the ‘stagiest’ of Great War memoirs, those of Robert Graves, himself another of the many writers who had served with Welsh regiments. For Fussell, Goodbye to All That was ‘a satire, built out of anecdotes heavily influenced by the techniques of stage comedy’: its author was ‘a joker, a manic illusionist, a fiction writer employing all his tricks’ including a story involving ‘a very dirty act’ at the Wrexham barracks. Graves had published his subsequently acclaimed memoir in 1929, at the very time he became aware of the manuscript by Frank Richards, a soldier who had served under him in the trenches. Graves was to champion Richards and urged him to write a subsequent volume on his pre-1914 military service. For that volume, published in 1936, Graves provided an excellent introduction in which he praised the lucidity, economy and lack of pretension that characterised the writing. He highlighted the qualities of ‘loyalty, openness and moral sureness’, and somewhat ironically explained how Richards ‘never sniggers in the perverted modern fashion’.

Theatricality was never a feature of Richards’ style. Graves’ own memory prompted his observation that it was Richards’ ‘long training as an army signaller’ that gave his prose its succinct authenticity. We might be tempted to assume that, as a signaller, Richards had found a safe wartime niche away from front line action, but we are left in no doubt that signallers performed a skilled and dangerous role at the Front itself (as is confirmed in Llewelyn Wyn Griffith’s 1931 account of his brother’s death in Up To Mametz And Beyond). Richards provides ample evidence of his own sheer professionalism as a signaller, and that quality of professionalism becomes indeed the hallmark of his writing. Richards was first and foremost a storyteller and he had instinctively mastered the technique of providing only the essential background details relevant to any incident that he is recalling. This is especially the case with his use of individual characters, whether they be officers, friends or anonymous soldiers: they enter the story to perform their role or, in the case of one ‘Old Soldier’, possibly an alter ego, to give a cryptic snap judgement or complaint. Certainly we learn little of the country from whence they came, the only qualitative comment on his fellow countrymen being a compliment to soldiers from Birmingham.

The technique he employs, then, is one in which anecdote follows anecdote, and the end result is a masterful picture of how the war of attrition was conducted from an ordinary soldier’s point of view. Throughout one is struck by the author’s sure control of his material, by the absence of rhetoric and by a sense of balance: matters are always held in check. Fundamental to his control is the reporting of disasters, accidents, injuries and carnage (occasionally and incredibly interrupted by short periods of leave in Wales). The reader can only be fascinated by the details but we are always invited to share the author’s own matter of fact reaction to these inevitable by-products of warfare. At every stage we are being educated into a professional soldier’s point of view.

Professionalism is a concept rarely...