I'm doing no-one an injustice when I say that my mother's father did not enjoy a good reputation within the family.

Some of the stories that have been handed down to me by various family members have so far proved unverifiable, but there seems to be pretty solid evidence for conduct that was far from laudable. I'm not going to go into any of it. Suffice it to say that I never met my grandfather. He died when I was 10, and he lived just 11 miles away from us, but the only shred of contact happened when -- just once -- my mother pointed him out to me through a window. Something pretty bad must have happened for her to cut him out of her life in this way.

It was with some surprise, therefore, that I recently came across a slightly different side of the story. The Manx Museum, in an admirable contribution to lockdown sanity, opened its archives, and I found my grandfather's name in a little article from January 1918, under the rubric "Progress of the Wounded". The previous November, the article noted, he had been reported "as being severely wounded in the fighting northeast of Ypres". He had since been in hospital in "Tourville" (a mis-spelling of Trouville), "and being again convalescent, is returning for the third time to the trenches". In a letter sent to his family from Rouen, "he reports severe weather, but says this town is really beautiful in its covering of snow". Trouville, he notes, "is not unlike Douglas from the sea".

Not a lot to go on. But if you add to that some documentation that has come to me from various cousins, you end up (definitely) with a much better picture of that colossal tragedy that was World War I, and (maybe) with a fuller picture of a family tragedy.

My grandfather enlisted in May 1916 as a private in the 1st Royal Marine Light Infantry (RMLI), Plymouth Division Short Service. At this point, he was 24, and his oldest son was only a baby. A few months later, in September 1916, an older brother died of wounds in France. (He is buried in the military cemetery at Etaples, about 27 km south of Boulogne.)

Conscription, in the shape of the Military Service Act, was introduced in early 1916, and by May of that year had been extended to include married men.

The 1st and 2nd RMLI, plus two battalions of the Royal Navy Brigade, together formed the 188th Brigade, one of the three brigades that made up the 63rd (Royal Navy) Division.

"Short Service" refers to the mode of enlistment introduced in 1914, which allowed for a commitment not for the normal 12 years but for three (or for the duration of the war, if longer). Short Service personnel were trained for just over six weeks, in infantry skills only, before joining their battalions. (Long Service training, by contrast, took nearly six months, although that too had been abbreviated; before the war it lasted a year.)

My grandfather's enlistment record is not that easy for a layperson to interpret, but it seems to indicate that he was initially assigned to the Army Reserve, and was mobilized in November 1916. He then served with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF, the British army sent to the Western Front) from March 1917 to March 1918. He was wounded by shrapnel in October 1917 (that is presumably the incident the newspaper refers to), and then wounded again in March 1918. He was back in the UK by the end of May 1918, and demobilized in March 1919, about three months before my mother was born.

His record classifies his character as "very good". This is apparently the normal standard achieved by most Marines, and would not have precluded "a few recorded offences". But it's clearly better than "good", "fair", or "indifferent"... Ability was also assessed, and my grandfather was rated "satisfactory". Again, this was what was normally expected. "Moderate" would have implied below standard, while "superior" was given only occasionally, and "exemplary" very rarely. (It sounds like every other Key Performance Indicator nonsense...)



I don't have specific details of my grandfather's deployment. But for sure, the months from March 1917, when his BEF service commenced, to October 1917, when he was first wounded, were hot ones for the 1st RMLI.

Was he involved in the Battle of Arras campaign in late April? Did he experience the "battle for Gavrelle windmill", on the 28th, in which 335 Royal Marines were killed on a single day, and the 1st RMLI lost "most of their officers and more than half of their men"?

I don't know.

But given the newspaper account, and the presence of the RMLI in the Second Battle of Passchendaele in October-November, it seems highly likely that this was the action where he was first wounded. It lasted a little over two weeks, and it took the lives of 11,280 servicemen...

It was the final phase of a much bigger enterprise, the Third Battle of Ypres, which had been going on since mid-July. This offensive, synonymous with mud, by all accounts, had employed tactics "as controversial as those executed at the Battle of the Somme a little over a year earlier, and [it] was the final great battle of attrition of the war".

The Second Battle of Passchendaele began in the early hours of 26 October, the day my grandfather was wounded.

"Shrapnel" wounds are not a minor issue. Today we tend to loosely use the word to mean "shell fragments". But shrapnel is actually "an artillery projectile provided with a bursting charge, and filled with lead balls, exploded in flight by a time fuse". It was named after its inventor, Henry Shrapnel, who was a general in the British army, and died in 1842.

It "produces particularly ugly wounds, with a great deal of tissue damage and foreign material carried into the wound, including dirt from the trench environment. Frequently, the unfortunate soldier was also buried in the collapsed trench."



So the next we know about my grandfather is that he's in Trouville ("not unlike Douglas from the sea"), almost certainly at a base hospital. These were part of the casualty evacuation chain, and whereas the casualty clearing stations were close to the front line, the base hospitals were located further back, near railway lines (to facilitate the arrival of casualties) and ports (to enable the evacuation of patients back to Britain). As well as Trouville, there were base hospitals at Boulogne, Etaples, and Rouen. Trouville eventually had four, but it seems there's only one that was operational at the end of 1917 and the very beginning of 1918, and that's No. 72 General. As it didn't open until early December, presumably my grandfather was initially treated somewhere else.

John Hayward responded to the call for surgeons to serve in France in April 1918, and initially fetched up at a base hospital in Trouville, where he was very disappoinited with his lot:

"The hospital was full of the wastage of war -- men sent down from the Front, suffering from the ordinary diseases of civil life, which should have precluded their enlistment. The Front knocked them out almost at once, and they came to be patched up, to convalesce, and return.

"The mess was full of rather war-weary men, who had endured much, and were glad of an easy berth. I had plenty of operating on ordinary civil-life disabilities, and, when not engaged in filling up 'forms', enjoyed myself in field expeditions to collect butterflies and flowers, but the distant sound of guns was often disturbing."

Hayward was then transferred to a casualty clearing station, where things were very different:

"About 1 a.m. the ambulances began to arrive. It is impossible to convey an adequate picture of the scene. Into the tent are borne on stretchers, or come wearily stumbling, figures in khaki, wrapped in blankets or coats, bandaged or splinted. All of them stiff with mud, or caked with blood and dust, and salt sweat, and with labels of their injuries attached.

"They come in such numbers that the tent is soon filled, and what can be done? I can't cope with them all! Many are white and cold, and lie still and make no response, and those who do are laconic, or point to their label...

"I had never seen such frightful wounds, and could not conceive how we three surgeons could deal with them on the ensuing day."

We have a very interesting account of life at No. 72 General Hospital, Trouville, courtesy of a Private Latimer:

"This was a very nice place, also a very large place. The hospital itself could hold 5,000 men, and there were two other hospitals which were as large. These three hospitals were close to each other, and besides they were 3 Convalescent camps with 5,000 men in each.

"After I had been in this hospital for a week, I was marked out fit, then I had to give in my blue suit [hospital-issue uniform] and get a new suit of khaki. Leaving this hospital on the 11th June I was sent to No.15 Convalescent camp and put in R Company, No. 8 Hut. This was one of the finest places going, there were all kinds of sports every day, and two or three times a week we were marched down to the beach, which was about two miles away, having the brass band to lead us down. From this camp we were allowed out in the different villages nearby, only in the town of Trouville we had to have passes. We had to write out all the places and roads that was out of bounds."

Private Latimer left his convalescent camp in June 1918:

"There were squads leaving this camp every afternoon, for the base. From this camp we marched to a station in Trouville, being a few hundred together. Here we got on a Red Cross train which was very cosy. We arrived at Rouen at about mid-night, where we had something to eat and a bed till the morning, and about 10 o’clock the next morning we marched off for our base. I stayed at the base for about a week, and then I was sent off for the Battalion."

It's very possible that a few months earlier, the same kind of thing had happened to my grandfather.

But in March 1918, he's wounded again. And here, things get a bit vague.

The RMLI were involved in the First Battles of the Somme, 1918. The German army, having transferred large forces from the Eastern Front, embarked on a series of major offensives. The first, Operation Michael, began on 21 March, which went down as "the second worst day of losses in British military history with more than 38,000 casualties" (the worst day was 1 July 1916, the first day of that year's edition of the Battle of the Somme). Operation Michael continued until 5 April, "by which time the German Army had taken more ground on the Western Front than the Allies had managed since 1914". The human toll was astronomic, with British and French casualties amounting to almost 250,000, and almost 240,000 German soldiers injured, captured, or dead.

But my grandfather was wounded on 18 March, three days before this operation started. And it's really frustrating that I can't decipher the word that's written next to the ditto marks that indicate "wounded"... For sure it begins with G. There are two other letters. Could it say "Gas"?



Spiers, quoting a source from 1919-20, tells us: "During March and April 1918, including Operation Michael (March 21–April 5) the Germans discharged a massive volume of gas. As early as March 9, their '150,000 to 200,000 rounds of Yellow Cross shell […] caused heavy casualties'." Wils concurs that in the week leading up to the major offensive of 21 April, "an artillery barrage was launched, in which many mustard gas grenades were fired".

From July 1917 to November 1918, total British casualties from gas attacks came to almost 161,000, with over 4,000 deaths. Gas caused not only physical symptoms, but psychological trauma. Experts spoke of "gas hysteria" or "gas neurosis" to describe mental wounds that endured even after physical wounds had healed.

By late 1915 "gas warfare had become a psychological as well as physical weapon. Much as hellish multiday artillery barrages resulted in mental breakdowns associated with 'shellshock,' the constant threat of exposure to even a single gas shell added to the already unbearable stress of life at the front... H. Allen ... described the psychological effects of nightly gas threats: '... Gas shock was as frequent as shellshock'." War-time medical professionals also found gas cases hard to deal with.

Some military hospitals in France had specialist gas wards. From one such, No. 7 Stationary Hospital in Boulogne, 57 mustard-gas cases were evacuated to UK between May and July 1918. Was my grandfather one of them?



What effect did the war have on him? Well, of course, we can never know. Did he suffer from what became known as "shell shock"? This syndrome was experienced by soldiers who had endured the horrors of trench warfare, particularly prolonged artillery barrage. The psychological trauma to which they were subjected "had an unprecedented toll on veterans, many of whom suffered symptoms for the rest of their lives... Despite its prevalence, experiencing shell-shock was often attributed to moral failings and weaknesses, with some soldiers even being accused of cowardice... Due to the ineffectiveness of prescribed treatments, many soldiers who had witnessed trauma or experienced shell-shock attempted to self-medicate their symptoms. Alcohol and drug use were common methods to treat immediate symptoms."

Ben Shephard quotes war correspondent Philip Gibbs:

"Something was wrong. They put on civilian clothes again and looked to their mothers and wives very much like the young men who had gone to business in the peaceful days before August 1914. But they had not come back the same men. Something had altered in them. They were subject to sudden moods, and queer tempers, fits of profound depression alternating with a restless desire for pleasure. Many were easily moved to passion where they lost control of themselves, many were bitter in their speech, violent in opinion, frightening."

This observation has only increased in validity over time: "The problem with trauma is that it is not confined to the traumatic situation (in this case war). It can continue to affect people for a very long time, often permanently. People (soldiers, nurses, doctors, etc) went home after the war and it was assumed they would successfully integrate back into civilian life and forget about the war. This may have happened to many people, but others continued to be significantly affected, and the problem with war trauma is that it does not only affect the individual, it affects those around them, families, friends and work colleagues."

So where does this leave us?

Well, without very much that is rock-solid certain, that is clear. The older I get, the less I feel we can actually KNOW about anything.

So I come away from this little research excursion with the merest wisps and threads and hints.

But at least they make me try to understand more, and remind me that behind every individual, there are experiences that no-one else can ever fully understand. "Judge not, that ye be not judged."