After starting my project, I came to the conclusion that an interview with a person would be more interesting than just technical information from books.

I therefore wrote to the nursing officer at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, hoping that he would put me in touch with a war veteran who fought in the trenches. I received a letter from Mr Quinnell who lived in the Rochester area as a boy.

I visited him in July and he gratefully told me of some extracts of his time on the Front. I found he was still very sharp and had an excellent memory for someone of 86 years of age.

I met Charles Quinnell at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea on 27th July, 1981. He told me his adventures and what life was really like in the trenches.

I am now aged 86, and I was born in Plumpstead, Kent on the 18th May, 1895. I worked for my father when I was 14, as a bricklayer and plasterer. In August 1914, when war broke out, I enlisted for the Royal Fusiliers at Hounslow, then had training for marching, handling rifles and Vickers machine guns. I was stationed at various garrisons, Colchester in Essex and Folkestone in Kent, included. In March 1915 we marched in five days to Aldershot, just outside Guildford we were reviewed by Lord Kitchener, who was Commander-in-Chief of the British Army. I was in the 12th division, and we went to France in May 1915, and landed at Boulogne. We then proceeded towards the firing line in easy stages, and we were taken into the front line where we found the 1st Battalion of the Gloucester Regiment. After one week with them we learned about patrols in No-Man's-Land, how to erect barbed wire on poles, how to cook our own meals and, in other words, how a front line soldier spent his life. One of the strange things of the First World War was the fact that we rarely saw the enemy because, like us, they were below ground level in trenches, but we soon found out that they were really there.

One of the first things I learned was erecting barbed wire defences. This job consisted of a team of six. Three were carriers of posts and coils of barbed wire, two were post erectors, and the posts had to be driven into the ground by a heavy wooden mallet, and after a few thumps of this in the still of the night, the Germans would open fire with machine guns. This made us drop flat and wait until the machine gun had stopped firing, and then we would jump up and carry on thumping a few more posts in. Two men would then pick up a coil of wire and put it on a pole so it revolved, and then they would dance round the post, and it was my job, as NCO, with thick leather gloves on, to wrap the wire round the posts. The whole job took from two-three hours, more than half of which was taken lying flat on the ground, dodging machine gun bullets.

We had very little shell fire until the Battle of Loos. This took place on the 25th September, 1915 and at a point where the British lines joined the French lines. For the first time since the war began the British troops broke through the German lines. These lines consisted of the German firing line, support line and the reserve line. We received orders to relieve the British troops on the night of the 26th September, and then we had to dig a trench in front of the old German line, but the soil here was chalk. We only had our entrenching tools to do the job, but with a covering party out in front if the Germans wanted to see what was happening, we managed to scrape enough chalk away to lie down in cover, and there we had to lie for 15 or 16 hours, until the darkness came again, and then followed another night of digging. After three days here we were moved about a mile north, and there we came opposite one of the strongest parts of the German line, and there we experienced a taste of real shell fire. Also the Germans had invented a new kind of trench mortar, and this caused us more casualties than all the other shell fire put together in numbers killed and wounded.

We were in the line 23 days, during which we had not taken our equipment off. On the night of the last day we were in the line and just as it was dusk, one of our sentries reported that he could see movement in front of the German line. We all got up on the firestep, and in the gathering darkness we could see the Germans massing for an attack. We were ordered not to fire until we were given the order to do so. About five minutes later we could see the Germans advancing, and for the first time, I saw a large number of Germans together at one time. It was to be the last time the German army used an attack of this kind. Soon we were given the order to fire and the hours and hours of practice with our short Lee-Enfield rifles paid dividends. The Germans just melted away. We waited until it got dark and crawled out and got some German helmets. This had been my first real glimpse of Germans after three months in France.

Life in the trenches could be quite pleasant in the summertime. Rations used to come up on our horse wagons, called general service wagons, pulled by horses or mules. A watercart, of which the water had been treated with chloride of lime, would travel with the general service wagon, and this small convoy would stop at a village a mile or so behind the line, and ration and water parties would go down the communication trenches to meet the convoy in the village. These rations and the water would be picked up at the village and taken back down the communication trench, and delivered to a sergeant major.

Every night at dusk, and every morning at dawn, every man would be on the alert because these were the favourite times for infantry to attack. After stand down the platoon sergeants would take a party along to the sergeant major and draw rations for their platoon, each platoon consisting of 40-50 men. These rations would be shared out so that each man drew a quarter of a loaf of bread, if he was lucky, three or four hard biscuits, a tin of bully beef, a small wafer of cheese, a tin of jam to share between ten, tin of butter and a tin of condensed milk also to be shared out between ten, and also a rasher of bacon for each man. Part of our equipment was a mess tin. This held about one and a half pints of water, and the lid fitted over the top, and had a fold back handle which fitted also, and made a frying pan.

One of the tricks we learnt from the Gloucesters, in our early days, was to take a piece of dry wood into the trenches. This we kept inside our tunic to keep it bone dry, and when we had time, out would come our jack knife and we would scrape off slithers of wood no thicker than a match. In the side of the trench we would make a miniature fireplace, and after drawing water from the petrol tins, we could put our half filled mess tins on the fireplace, and use these slithers of wood to make a smokeless fire. After feeding the fire for about five minutes, in went the tea and sugar and condensed milk. We would then fry our rashers of bacon on the mess tine lid, and fry a piece of bread or biscuit in the fat.

In June 1916 we were taken out of the line and billeted in a village ten miles behind the line. There we were visited by a high-ranking staff officer, and my particular company had to practice covering five miles in one hour fully equipped. We also had to practice training in the local slag heaps of the area. The slag was useful for cover. We were then entrained for what I now know to be the Somme front. When we detrained, we were met by a guide and we marched in the darkness for three hours and eventually halted in a wood, and were told to get a few hours sleep. We were awoken at 3.30 am for breakfast. At 4.15 am we thought all hell had broken loose, and everybody rushed to the edge of the wood, but we had orders not to go out into the open. Our wood was situated on high ground and there, away to the south, was the whole Somme battlefront. Eighteen pounder guns were placed about 20 yards apart, just covered by a little camouflage netting, these stretched as far as the eye could see. About a quarter of a mile behind these eighteen pounder guns there were 4.5 inch howitzers. Further back were the real big boys, sixty pounder guns, eight and nine inch howitzers, then there was one twelve inch naval gun that was mounted on railway tracks.

The British bombardment kept going for four hours and then suddenly stopped. By this time we had been told of our objective, which was a slag heap just on the outskirts of Bapaume, a small town, so we were expecting a signal to move off, at any moment, on our advance. We could see many of our boys going over the top, and also we could the sound of the German machine guns. The hours went by and we were still waiting in our wood. We did not get the order to move until it was dark, and we knew the initial attack had failed. We received orders to move into the old British front line, and we spent the whole night getting our wounded men in from No-Man's-Land. On the 7th of July it was our turn to go into the line, and then over the top. My platoon was 43 strong that night, we come out of action later and I had only one private, one lance corporal and myself left. All the others were killed or wounded, and what made it unbearable was that we had not taken what we had gone for.

Q. When you enlisted, did you feel obliged to go to war ?
A. No. I went because I wanted to go. No man in my platoon was pushed into war. I think my generation was a lot tougher than today's. I especially would have fought anybody for anything. Nobody had to encourage us over the top of the trench either, we were ordered and so we went.

Q. Did you experience any hand-to-hand fighting ?
A. Yes. The first time I remember we were attacking, and I charged forward to a German trench. Three Germans were standing in a group and I went for the man standing in the middle. I knocked him over and kneeled on him. They were all shit-scared and one kept screaming 'Kamerade, Kamerade'. The two others started to run in opposite directions, but I managed to shoot all three. Bayonets were never used for fighting, I have never met anybody who has used one, and when I was in hospital [Mr Quinnell was in hospital for a year through an injury to the left leg which was eventually amputated. G. S.] I never heard of anybody with bayonet wounds. The only time I saw a bayonet being used was to chop up wood. We always used a rifle in an attack, because a rifle is a hundred times better than a bayonet in practice.

Q. Other than the actual fighting, what things did you find the most unpleasant ?
A. The worst thing was definitely the lice. Before I went in the trenches, I had never seen any like the ones that were there. Every week or so, I went to the de-lousing station and we swapped our old shirts for new ones. The new shirts rarely fitted, however. The cold was another of our enemies in the winter. It was just impossible to get warm. Many men used animal skins as coats, and I used a goat skin.

Mud and water in the trenches was another problem. First we were issued with Wellington boots, but even these were not suitable as the mud was so deep. Finally we were issued with thigh-length boots.

The general dirtiness of life in the trenches was, of course, unpleasant. Our latrines were large biscuit tins about 2 ft * 2 ft * 1 ft. These were cleaned out once every day. The bath water was often kept in large beer vats. If you were one of the last people to use the water, a layer of scum almost an inch thick had to be scraped off.

The rats were another problem. They fed off the corpses and were much larger than normal rats.

Q. What were the relationships between the French and English like ?
A. Excellent ! Obviously we were welcomed by the French people as we were helping to protect their own land. We often stayed in French farms several miles behind the lines. Men slept in the animal sheds. Sometimes you were lucky to spend a night with French people.

Return to top

http://www.sassoonery.demon.co.uk/veteran.htm