How I would delight to see one of your wolf-nosed sanitary inspectors turned loose in this, our Brucamps. How you would sniff, how snort, how elevate your highly educated proboscis! … And how masterly indifferent would our grubby people be of you, how little would they be impressed, how hopelessly insane they would think you, and what grave danger there would be of a second Revolution if you or any untold number of you essayed to remove from them their beloved dung-heaps.
It is the same with the ‘British Tommy’. He might lose his kit as soon as look at it, he might need ‘booting along’ or a good ‘strafing’ – May’s favourite word – he might get drunk, he might be ‘something of a gross animal’, but ‘God knows he has enough to put up with. And I cannot help but love him.’
‘Men dropped by the road side exhausted,’ he writes in one wonderfully evocative passage,
Others staggered pitifully along in bare feet, the mud having snatched both boots and socks from them. Others again went strong, chattering and laughing whilst among the lot the officers, those of us whose strength was equal to it, went in and out carrying a rifle for this man, giving a cigarette to another, helping a lame duck up on to his poor, swollen feet again and chaffing or cracking feeble jokes with them all … It was a dark night. Men were but shuffling shadows against the chalk mud of the roadway except when the lights went up from the lines all about us. Then you could see the huddled forms of tired, mud-caked Englishmen shuffling home from their labours. The war is a war of endurance. Of human bodies against machines and against the elements. It is an unlovely war in detail yet there is something grand and inspiring about it. I think it is the stolid, uncomplaining endurance of the men under the utter discomforts they are called upon to put up with, their sober pluck and quiet good-heartedness which contributes very largely to this. All the days of my life I shall thank God I am an Englishman.
It does not stop him grumbling at all the usual targets of the infantry officer – the staff officer with nothing but a public school to recommend him, the deliberate idiocy of the censors, the base camp shirkers who would be all the better for a week in the trenches, the public at home querulously wondering why the Army isn’t ‘moving’ – but nothing in the end can dent his faith. It is possible that had he lived to see where his blind confidence in the build-up to the Somme led he would have shared in the general disillusion, but any man who can extract comfort out of Loos or the disastrous fall of Kut or ‘Thank God for the Navy’ a week after Jutland is probably proof against anything that even the Great War can throw at him.
There was nothing abstract about May’s patriotism; that was the strength of it. It was embodied in the men he was fighting with – in Bunting, his loyal batman, who had pulled him out of the canal when drunk one night in Manchester; in the puzzling Richard Tawney who, for whatever reasons of his own, went on refusing a commission; in the ‘pitiful sight’ of ‘Poor English soldiers battered to pieces’; in ‘Gresty … a good man and one whom we liked well … his poor body full of gaping holes’ – and it made May want to fight. ‘Do those at home yet realise how their boys go out for them?’ he asked,
Never can they do enough for their soldiers, never can they repay the debt they owe. Not that the men ask any reward – an inviolate England is enough for them, so be it we can get our price from the Hun. Confound the man … But one day we’ll get at him with the bayonet. The issue must come at last to man to man. And when it does I have no doubt as to the issue. We’ll take our price then for Gresty and all the other hundred thousand Grestys slain as he was standing still at his post.
It needs to be remembered that the 22nd was also the ‘7th City Pals’, and the strong friendships and loyalties around which the whole concept of the Pals battalions had been initiated made such losses seem more painful still. By the time that the Battle of the Somme began, the battalion formed in November 1914 had of course changed with time, deaths, promotions and new arrivals out of all recognition, but one only has to look at the parallel accounts of May’s old comrades from the Morecambe, Grantham and Lark Hill days – fascinatingly incorporated here as footnotes to his own diary entries to add fresh perspectives – to feel how strong were the bonds formed in England in a battalion like the 22nd and how bitterly the losses were mourned. ‘Tonight we had a little reunion of all the old boys,’ May himself wrote just a week before the Somme began,
There was the doctor, Murray, Worth, Bill Bland, ‘Gommy’, Meller and myself and we sat round a table and sang the old mess-songs … It was tip-top and we all loved each other. There are so many new faces with us now and so many missing that the battalion hardly felt the same – and one cannot let oneself go with the new like one loves the old boys. I would that the battalion was going over with all its old contingent. How certain we should all feel then. Not that the new stuff is not good. But we knew all the others so well.
Above all though, for Charlie May, England was his wife Maude and their baby daughter Pauline; his diary is an extended and deeply moving love-letter to them. He had married Bessie Maude Holl in February 1912 when they were both twenty-three, but it was really only when he had to leave her and their new daughter, that they both seem to have realised – not how much they had loved each other, that never seems to have been in any doubt – but how astonishingly fortunate they had been in their brief, shared lives. ‘I thought of you as we strolled there, Lizzie with her reins slack wandering where she would and at her own pace,’ he wrote after one afternoon spent riding through a world of larch and birch clumps and wood pigeons still untouched by war – a passage in which images of Maude, England and a deeply felt sense of natural beauty fuse into one to take us as close as we can probably get to what it was that Charlie May was ready to fight and, if necessary – un-heroically, reluctantly but matter-of-factly – die for.
And I longed that you could have been with me, for I know how you would have loved it and how happy we two would have been. The green rides of Epping came back to me in a flash. You in that black spotted muslin dress you used to wear looking cool and lovely so that I just asked nothing more than to walk along and gaze at you dumbly, like any simple country lout gazes at his maid.
‘I do not want to die,’ he wrote; the thought of never seeing Maude again, of his daughter growing up and never knowing him, turned ‘his bowels to water’. But as the sporadic tours in the front-line trenches and the training behind the lines intensified in the build-up to the expected great summer offensive of 1916, there became less and less room for the ‘personal’. It is impossible to read these diaries and the first casual mention of the Somme without a sense of grim foreboding, and yet at the same time there is no missing the growing excitement at the approach of battle, at the movement of troops, the massing of guns in preparation for the preliminary bombardment and the submersion of the individual in a mighty collective whole. ‘It is marvellous,’ he wrote, ‘this marshalling of power. This concentrated effort of our great nation put forward to the end of destroying our foe. The greatest battle in the world is on the eve of breaking. Please God it may terminate successfully for us.’
There had been ominous warnings for the 22nd in the weeks leading up to the Battle of the Somme – a night raid with heavy casualties that showed the German wire uncut by the artillery, dud shells and ‘whispers’ that ‘our ammunition … is not all that it should be’ – but the grief that the word ‘Somme’ would conjure up for thousands of families whose sons had flocked to enlist in the autumn of 1914 belongs to retrospect. To Charlie May the word meant only a glimmering river – ‘full of sport’, he thought it should be, as he set off to buy his fishing tackle in Corbie – idling quietly through a landscape of ‘tiny panoramas’ of bullrushes and pampas grass, of ‘brown trees, blue, sparkling waters, white, brown, red, blue and purple houses clustering around their grey churches’. The larger picture, the overall strategic concerns and aims that lay behind the Somme offensive of July 1916 – Verdun, the Eastern Front, the eternal illusion of a ‘break-through’ – were of no concern. His Great Battle – the battle that would mark ‘the beginning of the end’, he told Maude on 15 June – would be what he called the ‘Battle of Mametz’, and his responsibilities were to the men around him and the wife and daughter who were never