BRITAIN AT WAR


CHURCHILL ON THE FRONT LINE


guns began, the Colonel came along to our trench and suggested a view over the parapet. As we stood up on the fire-step we felt the wind and swish of several whizzbangs flying past our heads, which, as it always did, horrified me. Then I heard Winston say in a dreamy, far-away voice: ‘Do you like War?’”9


When a batch of young recruits found themselves under fire during one of Churchill’s little night-time battles, he tried to dispel their nervousness by exclaiming enthusiastically, “This is great, isn’t it?”


TOP:


A view near Hyde Park Corner in Ploegsteert Wood, showing a German 5.9 inch shell burst, which effectively covered an area approximately 500 yards in diameter. Note the small white splashes where the fragments hit the water. The road shown leads to Messines, and the duckboard track continued to the reserve support and front lines, near Prowse Point and St. Yves. The house in the wood was the terminus of the light railway. (Courtesy of the Australian War Memorial)


ABOVE RIGHT:


Canadian infantry manning a front line breastwork in Ploegsteert Wood on 19 October 1915 – barely weeks before Winston Churchill arrived in the area. Ploegsteert remained in Allied possession for the majority of the First World War; only in 1918 did the Germans briefly capture it. (IWM Q29023)


ABOVE LEFT: Winston Churchill (centre of middle row) with fellow officers of the 6th (Service) Battalion the Royal Scots Fusiliers in 1916. Churchill’s second-in-command in the regiment was Sir Archibald Sinclair, later made Secretary of State for Air in 1940 as part of Churchill’s coalition government. One of the other subalterns during Churchill’s tenure was Sir Edmund Hakewell- Smith. During the Second World War, Hakewell-Smith would be promoted to Major-General and become commander of the 52nd (Lowland) Division in 1943.


AUGUST 2010


It is clear that Churchill himself really did enjoy war and his time at the front, as his comments in another of his letters reveals: “Went out in front of our own parapet into No Man’s Land and prowled about looking at our wire and visiting our listening posts. This is always exciting.”


One day the brigade commander visited Churchill’s battalion headquarters at Laurence Farm (often referred to as Lawrence Farm) just after that stronghold had suffered a very heavy period of shelling. The defences of the post had been badly damaged. The Brigadier-General saw the condition of the place and remarked to the Colonel: “Look here, Churchill, this won’t do, you know. There’s no protection at all here for the men. You ought to get something done – build something to make it safe. Men cannot go on living here: look at that sentry there – it’s dangerous, you know, it’s positively dangerous.”


Churchill, clearly irritated, retorted with a single, blunt, sentence. “Yes, sir,” he replied, “but, you know, this is a very dangerous war”.10


* Winston’s time at the front was soon over. His


weakened battalion was to be amalgamated with the regiment’s 7th Battalion – another service battalion. This meant that there would be a need for only one Lieutenant-Colonel. As Churchill would be the junior of the two officers concerned, he would have to forfeit his command.11


He returned to Britain and the House of Commons. Eventually he was back in office when, in July 1917, he was appointed as Minister of Munitions. Churchill had left the front line and was back on the Front Bench.


Though the five months that he served with the BEF were comparatively quiet, fifteen of his men were killed and over a hundred injured in that period. During his time with the Royal Scots Fusiliers Churchill displayed “reckless daring” personally leading thirty-six forays into No Man’s Land and, as one of his officers later wrote, “I am fairly convinced that no more popular officer ever commanded troops. As a soldier he was hard-working, persevering and thorough ... He is a man who is apparently always to have enemies. He made none in his old regiment, but left


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