The Platoon: An Infantryman on the Western Front, 1916–18

By Joseph Johns Steward, Steve Roberts and Andrew Robertshaw

John Joseph Steward fought in the Great War, from the Battle of the Somme to the final offensives of 1918, and he was an acute, unflinching observer of the conflict he took part in - of life and death on the Western Front. He was a writer, too. He recorded his experiences in accurate detail and later in life he wrote a graphic fictionalized account of his wartime career - the story of his war, his comrades and his platoon. His narrative is published here for the first time, edited, annotated and with an introduction by Andrew Robertshaw and Steve Roberts. Their research into Stewards story is a fascinating example of how such work can be used to give a vivid insight into the experiences of a Great War ancestor. About the EditorsAndrew Robertshaw is Curator/Manager of The Royal Logistic Corps Museum in Deepcut, Surrey. For the past twelve years he has been coordinating a group conducting an archaeological dig of British trenches and other sites on the Somme. He frequently appears on television as a commentator on battlefield archaeology and the soldier in history. His publications include A Soldiers Life, The Somme 1st July 1916, Digging the Trenches (with David Kenyon) and Ghosts of the Somme (with Alastair Fraser and Steve Roberts).Steve Roberts is a retired police officer and an ex-regular soldier. He has a keen interest in military history and as a result of his grandfathers service a particular passion for the Great War. He specializes in researching the individuals who served during the period and has worked in this field on a number of television projects. He is a founder member of the Great War archaeology group No Mans Land and also a battlefield guide regularly taking groups to France and Belgium. He has previously co-authored Ghosts on the Somme (with Alastair Fraser and Andrew Robertshaw)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9781783031696

Book preview

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Frontispiece: bookplate with Joseph Johns Steward’s signature. (Family collection)

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First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

Pen & Sword Military

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street

Barnsley

South Yorkshire

S70 2AS

Copyright © The Platoon: the estate of Joseph Johns Steward

Copyright © Introductory text and notes: Andrew Robertshaw and Steve Roberts

9781783031696

The right of Joseph Johns Steward, Andrew Robertshaw and Steve Roberts to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Typeset in Ehrhardt by Phoenix Typesetting, Auldgirth, Dumfriesshire

Printed and bound in England by CPI UK

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Preface

Timeline

Introduction and Methodology

Joseph Johns Steward: A Biography

The Platoon in the Great War

Chapter One - The Bull Ring

Chapter Two - Into Action

Chapter Three - The Somme

Chapter Four - Leuze Wood

Chapter Five - The Battle of Attrition

Chapter Six - In Rest

Chapter Seven - Neuve Chapelle and Winter 1917

Chapter Eight - The Battle of Arras

Chapter Nine - Out of the Line

Chapter Ten - Training for the Next Stunt

Chapter Eleven - The Ypres Salient

Chapter Twelve - The Battle of Cambrai

Chapter Thirteen - Vimy and Oppy Wood

Chapter Fourteen - The Kaiser’s Battle

Chapter Fifteen - The Last Hundred Days

Chapter Sixteen - Rest Eternal

Time to Go Home

Select Bibliography and References

Index

Acknowledgements

The editors of The Platoon would like to express their thanks to all those without whom the book would not have been possible. The first is, of course, the author Joseph Johns Steward, a man whom we never met but now know so much about. We can only speculate as to the circumstances in which he wrote this book, but his personal account of warfare on the Western Front is war from the point of view of the ‘PBI’, the Poor Bleeding Infantryman. It is a frank, factual and moving account that on his death was nearly thrown away as rubbish. The fact that it was not lost was due to the intervention of Joan Gray, who rescued the folder from the house in Croydon and passed it on to her daughter-in-law Jean Gray. Jean brought the typescript to the attention of Julian Waltho from Kent College, who suggested that Andy Robertshaw might like to look at it.

The rest, as they say, is history, but the publication would not have been possible without the support of our long-time publisher at Pen & Sword, Rupert Harding. He saw the potential of The Platoon and freely admits that his attitude to the value of the book improved with every version we sent him. This process of editing would have been rather delayed had it not been for the skills of Lesley Wood, who retyped the entire book. (The editors would still be typing now, had it been left to them.)

Thanks must also go to Colin Lattimore, Chairman of the Book Plate Society, for his assistance in dating the original book plate and subsequently enabling the editors to establish an approximate time frame for the writing of the manuscript, and to Bruce Harling, who, despite residing in Nice, illustrated the ease with which information from the United Kingdom census records could be accessed.

We are also grateful to Major Chris Carling, whose friendship, companionship, opinions and map reading expertise were much appreciated while we were attempting to follow the movements of ‘The Platoon’ around northern France.

We would also like to thank the staff at the Imperial War Museum and the National Archives for all their assistance in tracing various individual and unit records and images. We must also thank Barbara Levy for allowing us to reproduce ‘Twelve Months After’ by Siegfried Sassoon.

Finally we want to thank Joanna and Russell Gray, Jean’s son and daughter, for allowing us to publish the book, and Jean’s relative Laurence Hawkins for providing vital family history and some of the photographs we have used. Without the assistance of Jean’s extended family, we would have no photographs of the author at all.

Andy Robertshaw and Steve Roberts

March 2011

Abbreviations

Preface

It is true to say that people are interested in other people’s lives. Whether this is based on events in the headlines, the strange domestic activities of ‘celebrities’ or the virtual lives of actors in television dramas makes no difference. As a result there is a profusion of magazines dedicated to revealing the minutiae of other people’s daily lives, human frailties and indiscretions. For many of us, however, it is our own families and ancestors that remain a subject of fascination, surprise and revelation. Whether the connection is genealogical, biological, via marriage or other relationship, ‘family’ history compels tens of thousands of people to spend hours of their leisure time in pursuit of facts about ‘their’ relatives’ past lives. The success of family history magazines, television programmes and spin-off events such as ‘Who Do You Think You Are? Live’, held annually at Olympia, demonstrate that this interest is no longer the preserve of antiquarians or specialist societies. Web-based genealogy sources such as ‘Ancestry’ and ‘Find my Past’ have been created to both foster and feed this passion for information. The number of magazines dedicated to family history may not quite rival the profusion of those concerning celebrities, yet the availability of family history magazines in supermarkets indicates a clear trend. Membership of the Society of Genealogists and the Family History Society has rocketed over the past twenty years, as have groups dedicated to family names and local history. In consequence, the numbers of people using the resources of Somerset House, local archives and The National Archives (TNA) have grown dramatically in the same period. Any visitor to TNA in Kew, on even a gloomy winter day, cannot be unaware that the majority of people searching the records are not authors and academics. They are on the hunt for family members who, frequently, they had never met and were totally unaware had ever existed until they ‘caught the family history bug’.

Steve and Andy are frequent visitors to Kew, and what always strikes them is the number of people who are researching their Great War ancestors. Despite the passage of over ninety-five years since the guns fell silent on 11 November 1918, people are drawn back to that conflict to try to understand what their family members experienced, and perhaps wanting to ‘close the book’ by discovering how or why an individual was killed. Both Steve and Andy receive a large number of letters and e-mails from people who are keen to discover the fate of a family member who saw military service and gain some insight into their experience. It is, therefore, no coincidence that some of the most compelling episodes in the series ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ are those concerning military history. This is partly due to the drama of any involvement of a family member in world events, but it is also linked to the way in which the War Office at the time had the fortunate habit of keeping records about both events and individuals. As a result, it is possible to research not only what was happening generally on a specific day during a war, but also where an individual may have been at that time. By comparison, the records for contemporary civilians are frequently at best sketchy and may only cover the basics of birth, marriage and death. One result of this interest was the BBC series ‘My Family at War’, first broadcast in November 2008, which examined the Great War military careers of the relatives of various celebrities. A wide variety of sources was used and although only a limited number of careers could be explored, these and other programmes indicated to the public what information could be available about their family members.

Steve and Andy have both met people who began to research their Great War ancestors because the potential of unlocking military records was revealed by this type of television. However, a large number of people remain deterred by the apparent complexity of military records, the language used and their own lack of knowledge of military service. This book is not intended to be a guide to the many sources available, but rather it is a case study on how someone with little or no experience can use those resources for themselves. Rather than providing a simple systematic ‘how to’ guide, which might lack interest for the reader, it has been based around an original account of the experience of the war written by one of its participants, Joseph Johns Steward. He was a member of a small military sub-unit, a platoon, and his story reveals much about the experiences common to most servicemen in the war. His account has allowed Andy and Steve to demonstrate what information is available, where to find it and how to use it to reconstruct the experience of the war for yourself. Where necessary, it has indicated the limitations of research and, it is hoped, demonstrated that mistakes can be made by jumping to conclusions or not understanding the sources. Further, it explains the slang and terminology used by soldiers and provides some context to the world-changing events in which the men of Steward’s platoon participated. Many of those men did not come home, but the majority did and ‘The Platoon’ was written by a veteran of the Great War before the mass-market appeal of memoirs about the period between 1914 and 1918. It was not until the 1960s that memoirs by ‘Other Ranks’, rather than officers, were published in large numbers and there is nothing to suggest that the author ever tried submitting his typescript to a publishing house.

The author clearly wanted to convey something of his experience to another generation; he could not have imagined that his book would finally be in print nearly a hundred years after the events it describes. Steve and Andy hope that they have done the author justice and that his work will help readers to understand the experiences of their own family members. And that it will show, too, how an amateur historian can link up the fragmentary records they left behind and ultimately walk their battlefields, whether in reality during a tour of France or Belgium, or from the safety and comfort of desk and computer, which is where most of this work is done.

Timeline

1914

1915

1916

1917

1918

1919

Introduction and Methodology

In 2009 Andy Robertshaw gave a presentation to a group of history students studying the Great War at Kent College near Canterbury. After the session was over the teacher, Julian Waltho, showed him a photocopied version of a typescript that belonged to a colleague at the school, geography teacher Jean Gray. The original, rather battered, black quarto-sized ring binder, bursting at the seams, contained a typewritten novel entitled ‘The Platoon’. There were 211 pages, typed on one side with double-spaced lines, so it was physically easy to read, although the style was rather limited and as a novel it was not a page-turner. At the front of the file was a bookplate bearing the name of the author, Joseph Johns Steward, and a very interesting map of northern France with over fifty places underlined in ink, from Mons in the northeast, to near Amiens in the southwest, with the obvious southern boundary being the Somme. When Joseph died, the folder was very nearly thrown away. Fortunately Joan Gray, Joseph’s niece, rescued it and later passed it to Jean, her daughter-in-law.

Jean eventually passed the folder on to her children Joanna and Russell, but, although they all looked at it, it remained forgotten on a bookshelf for several years. They could not think of anyone who might be interested in it, but just could not bring themselves to throw it away as the author had obviously poured so much energy into it. The children left home and moved into flats with limited space and so ‘The Platoon’ stayed on Jean’s bookshelf, leaving her pondering the question of what to do with it.

In 2009 Jean, a geography teacher, accompanied the history department visit with Year 9 pupils to the Ypres salient, and in a quiet moment had told Julian Waltho about the dilemma with ‘The Platoon’. Julian was immediately very interested and said that he might have a solution as he knew