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First published 2015

Copyright © Stewart Binns, 2015

Cover images © The Art Archive / Alamy

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-1-405-91629-5

Contents

Introduction: 1915

PART ONE: JANUARY
In Winter’s Chilling Grip

Friday 1st

Locre, West Flanders, Belgium / British Army Field Hospital, Provost Lace Mill, Poperinghe, West Flanders, Belgium / Blair Atholl Castle, Perthshire / Keighley Green Working Men’s Club, Burnley, Lancashire / Admiralty House, Whitehall, London

Saturday 9th

Towneley Hall, Burnley, Lancashire / Walmer Castle, Kent

Saturday 16th

Kemmel, West Flanders, Belgium

Tuesday 19th

Prince and Princess of Wales Dock, Royal Navy Dockyard, Gibraltar / The Duke’s Head Hotel, Market Place, King’s Lynn

Wednesday 20th

Admiralty House, Whitehall, London

Saturday 23rd

Cant Clough Reservoir, Widdop Moor, Burnley, Lancashire / Locre, West Flanders, Belgium

PART TWO: FEBRUARY
Gallipoli: The Nightmare Begins

Tuesday 9th

The Cabinet Room, 10 Downing Street, Whitehall, London

Friday 19th

HMS Inflexible, off Cape Helles, Dardanelles

Saturday 20th

Blagdon Hall, Seaton Burn, Northumberland

Sunday 21st

Burnley Lads’ Club, Manchester Road, Burnley, Lancashire / Kruisstraat, Wulvergem, West Flanders, Belgium

Sunday 28th

British Army Field Hospital, Provost Lace Mill, Poperinghe, West Flanders, Belgium

PART THREE: MARCH
Granny’s Boom!

Wednesday 3rd

Reform Club, Pall Mall / Irish Benedictine Convent, Rue St Jacques, Ypres / Kruisstraat, Wulvergem, West Flanders, Belgium / 33 Bangor Street, Caernarvon, Wales / St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell, London

Wednesday 10th

The Cabinet Room, 10 Downing Street, London

Friday 19th

HMS Flexible, off Cape Helles, Dardanelles

Tuesday 23rd

10 Downing Street, Whitehall London

PART FOUR: APRIL
A Gasping Death

Monday 12th

Hill 60, Zwarteleen, Belgium

Friday 23rd

British Army Field Hospital, Provost Lace Mill, Poperinghe, West Flanders, Belgium

Sunday 25th

HMS Implacable, off Cape Helles, Dardanelles

PART FIVE: MAY
A Hideous Spectacle

Sunday 9th

Laventie, Pas-de-Calais, France

Saturday 15th

St Omer, Pas-de-Calais, France

Friday 21st

The Houses of Parliament, London

PART SIX: JUNE
Heat, Dust and Diarrhoea

Friday 4th

RMS Essequibo, the Dardanelles

Wednesday 16th

Cambridge Road Trench, Bellewarde Ridge, Hooge, West Flanders, Belgium

Wednesday 30th

Rugeley Camp, Penkridge Bank, Cannock Chase, Staffordshire

PART SEVEN: JULY
Flammenwerfer

Saturday 3rd

Marble Lodge, Blair Atholl Estate, Perthshire

Sunday 11th

Vlamertinge, West Flanders, Belgium

Sunday 25th

Hoe Farm, Hascombe, Surrey

Thursday 29th

Hooge, West Flanders, Belgium

PART EIGHT: AUGUST
Mustafa Kemal

Friday 6th

Suvla Bay, Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey

Sunday 29th

Red Cross Stationary Hospital 7, Hôtel Christol, Boulogne, France

PART NINE: SEPTEMBER
The Battle of Loos

Wednesday 1st

Suvla Bay, Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey

Wednesday 15th

St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell, London / South Camp, Ripon, North Yorkshire

Saturday 25th

Vermelles, Pas-de-Calais, France

PART TEN: OCTOBER
‘So be merry, so be dead’

Saturday 9th

Marble Lodge, Blair Atholl Estate, Perthshire

Saturday 16th

British Army Field Hospital, Provost Lace Mill, Poperinghe, West Flanders, Belgium

Sunday 31st

Hoe Farm, Hascombe, Surrey

PART ELEVEN: NOVEMBER
Winter Returns

Tuesday 16th

Larkhill Camp, Durrington, Wiltshire

Wednesday 17th

Kephalo Bay, Imbros, Greece

Friday 19th

Convalescent Hospital No. 6, Alexandria, Egypt

Sunday 21st

Guards Division HQ, La Gorgue, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France

PART TWELVE: DECEMBER
Evacuation

Wednesday 8th

Dickebusch, West Flanders, Belgium

Friday 10th

St Eloi, West Flanders, Belgium

Sunday 12th

Maison de Ville, Grande Place, Poperinghe, West Flanders, Belgium

Saturday 18th

Hostellerie St Louis, Clairmarais, St Omer, Pas-de-Calais, France

Sunday 19th

Nibrunesi Point, Suvla Bay, Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey

Friday 31st

Myrina, Mudros Bay, Lemnos, Greece

Epilogue

Dramatis Personae

Casualty Figures of the Great War

Glossary

Genealogies

Maps

Acknowledgements

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PENGUIN BOOKS

THE DARKNESS AND THE THUNDER
1915: THE GREAT WAR SERIES

Stewart Binns began his professional life as an academic. He then pursued several adventures, including being a schoolteacher, specializing in history, and a stint as a soldier, before becoming an award-winning documentary-maker and, latterly, an author. His television credits include the ‘In Colour’ genre of historical documentaries, notably the BAFTA and Grierson winner Britain at War in Colour and the Peabody winner The Second World War in Colour.

He also launched Trans World Sport in 1987, Futbol Mundial in 1993, the International Olympic Committee Olympic Games Camera of Record in 1994 and the Olympic Television Archive Bureau in 1996. He produced FIFA’s official history of football in 1989, The People’s Game, the All England Club’s official history of Wimbledon, Wimbledon: A History of the Championships, in 2001 and, in 2004, Tiger Woods’ authorized biography, Tiger.

Currently chief executive and co-founder, with his wife, Lucy, of the independent production and distribution company Big Ape Media International, Stewart has in recent years continued to specialize in historical documentaries, including two series about the life of Winston Churchill, histories of the Korean War and of Indo-China, major studies of modern Japan and India and Sport under Threat, a documentary about terrorist threats at major sporting events.

His previous novels, Conquest, Crusade, Anarchy and Lionheart (The Making of England quartet), and The Shadow of War, the first of his Great War series, were published to great acclaim.

His home is in Somerset, where he lives with his wife and twin boys, Charlie and Jack.

www.stewartbinns.com

THE BEGINNING

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To all those who endured the Great War

Author’s Note

The Darkness and the Thunder is a work of fiction. Although largely based on real events, and while many of the characters are borrowed from history, names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used entirely fictitiously.

Some of the characters speak in their local vernacular, especially the old Pennine dialect of North-east Lancashire. Largely gone now, it was still spoken into the 1960s, and I remember well its unique colour and warmth. It was an unusual combination of Old English and the nineteenth-century ‘Mee-maw’ – the exaggerated, mouthed reinforcements of speech used to overcome the noise of the looms in the cotton mills made famous by comic actors such as Hylda Baker and Les Dawson.

The meanings of various East Lancs dialect expressions, as well as examples of Cockney rhyming slang and background facts about military terms, Victorian and Edwardian mores and various historical references, are explained in the Glossary at the back of the book.

Introduction: 1915

For all the combatants and civilians held in the terrifying grip of the Great War, any hope of a quick and decisive victory has been extinguished long before the icy chill of winter 1914 set in. Almost a million dead, the vast majority of them French and German, had seen to that. Britain has lost over 30,000 of her finest sons, experienced veterans of Britain’s elite professional army, in the slaughter of the British Expeditionary Force. Back home, the news has been met first with incredulity, then with a growing feeling of dread.

By the beginning of 1915, the Napoleonic dash at the Front of the early days of the war has been replaced by the grinding horror of trench warfare. Optimism, elan and innocence have been supplanted by futility, lethargy and cruelty.

Now, winter’s terrors are diminishing yet further the already enfeebled morale of the troops in their waterlogged pits and rat-infested warrens, reducing them to an even more pitiful state than in the aftermath of the dreadful battles of the autumn. As the men try to survive the squalor, the generals search in desperation for solutions to end the impasse.

The Western Front is a forbidding streak of barbed wire, shell-holes and trenches running from the North Sea to the Alps. Of its 402 miles, the noble Belgian Army holds the northern 22 miles and the indomitable French Army guards 360 miles to the south. In between, the scant remnants of the glorious British Expeditionary Force is the bulwark of just 20 miles, but it is a vital sector that protects the northern flank of Paris and one that will soon expand.

This is the continuing story of five communities of Britain’s people, their circumstances very different but all of them part of the enormous tragedy that is unfolding. They and their homeland are being changed for ever by the catastrophic events of the Great War. The gruesome statistics of the death and suffering of 1914 are only the beginning. Slaughter on an even greater scale is yet to come.

Part One: January

IN WINTER’S CHILLING GRIP