Soldier Record

My Grandfather, George Millington, told me when l was a school-boy how as a young soldier in The Royal Welch Regiment (he had, like many other, lied about his age, it is believed he may have been as young as fourteen when he enlisted; his date of birth is not known, as he was found abandoned as a little boy outside a Victorian workhouse) they made their way up to the so-called front line during the battle of Passchendaele in 1917.

There were no trenches with neat dug-outs and fire-steps. There was just shell-holes filled with mud and water. The water table was only four feet below the surface and so what trenches existed were flooded. Often they were up to their necks in mud.

Going up to the front could only be done at night-time and usually it was pouring rain (it rained throughout this horrendous battle- incessantly); no lights of course could been shown. Granddad related this experience to me the full horror of war, terrifying me. You had to hold onto the man's pack in front of you and shuffle forward over the slippery, muddy duck-boards. If you slipped off the boards you drowned in the mud (they couldn't pull them out what with all their combined weight of heavy boots, great coats, packs, ammunition, supplies and rifles). If flares were fired up into the night-sky all you could do was freeze and hope and pray you were not seen by the enemy.

Over forty-thousand British soldiers simply disappeared into the mud of Passchendaele. Being sent out (in the dark of course) in to "no-man's land" was a terrifying ordeal (as part of a work detail usually to repair the barbed wire); it meant crawling amongst decomposing corpses with rats scampering over you, and always it meant being quiet, make a noise and all hell would break out. Granddad clearly remembered men getting stuck in the mud on such details and when the dawn came up, if they hadn't drowned, they were simply picked off by the German snipers. It was hell.