LITMIR.BIZ

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Mounted Brigade with strong Dominion links, and, daughter or not, it was only a matter of time before war put an end to his short married idyll. On the outbreak of hostilities five divisions of a small but highly trained British Expeditionary Force had immediately been embarked for France to stem the German advance, but Kitchener for one never had any illusions that this was going to be a short war over by Christmas and within the month the first 300,000 of a New Army had responded to his call for volunteers.

      By the end of September another 450,000 had volunteered, in October a further 137,000, and in the following month Charlie May enlisted into the 22nd Manchester Pals battalion – the ‘7th City Pals’ – and added his name to the five million men who would wear uniform of one sort or another before the war was over. The idea of the ‘Pals battalions’ had first been put to the test in Liverpool by Lord Derby and the city of Manchester enthusiastically followed suit, embracing the patriotic and civic ideal of a battalion made up of friends from the same street, pub, factory, profession, warehouse or football club, joining up and fighting together – ‘clerks and others engaged in commercial business,’ as Derby put it, ‘who wish to serve their country and would be willing to enlist in a Battalion of Lord Kitchener’s new army if they felt assured that they would be able to serve with their friends and not to be put in a Battalion with unknown men as their companions’.

      It was a sympathetic initiative, if a double-edged one as time would bitterly show, but in the late summer of 1914, as towns across Britain competed with each other in displays of civic pride, the slaughter that would engulf whole tightly knit communities in grief still belonged to an unimaginable future. Within hours of the Lord Mayor of Manchester launching his appeal in the Manchester Guardian on 31 August, volunteers were besieging the artillery barracks on Hyde Road and by the end of the next day 800 men had been sworn in and the establishment of the first of the Manchester Pals battalions, the 1st ‘City’, or 16th Service, was complete. Over the next four days another two battalions were added, and after a late summer lull in recruiting caused by the frustrating long queues, a further three battalions in November, the 20th, 21st and Charlie May’s 22nd under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Cecil de C. Etheridge.

      It would be exactly a year before Charlie May and his battalion embarked for France, and in that time an enthusiastic but improbable bunch of men drawn largely from the cotton industry and City Corporation – ‘mostly town bred’, wrote May, with a rare whiff of the King Edward’s Horse and the Empire – had to be turned into soldiers. In these early stages before their khaki uniforms arrived, they wore the ‘doleful convict-style’ ‘Kitchener Blue’ and ‘ridiculous little forage cap’ so deeply resented among the New Army, but over the next twelve months, and in the face of the universal shortages of uniforms, weapons and ammunition and every provocation and indignity an army could dream up to frustrate, bore or disillusion a civilian volunteer, the job was at least begun.

      It would be as late as October 1915, by which time the 22nd were at their final camp on Salisbury Plain as part of Major General Sir William Fry’s 30th Division, before the artillery could even start firing practice or their Lee Enfield rifles and machine guns arrive. If May’s diaries from France are anything to go by, he would have taken the frustrations in his stride. With six years’ experience in the King Edward’s Horse behind him he had received his commission back in January, and he was a company commander when, in the middle of November 1915, after a last few days’ leave to see his wife and sixteen-month-old daughter, Captain Charlie May and the 22nd Battalion finally embarked from Folkestone for Boulogne.

      The war that Charlie May had been trained for was not the fluid conflict of retreat and advance that the BEF had known in 1914 but the war of trenches that is how most of us now think of the First World War. In the popular memory the year 1915 seems almost like a pause between the heady optimism of the opening weeks of war and the slaughter of the Somme, but while May and the 22nd were shuffling from camp to camp – Heaton Park, Morecambe Bay, Grantham, Lark Hill – and progressing from longish ‘walks’ to bayonet and bomb practice, the bloody failures of Aubers Ridge, Festubert and Loos were teaching a bereaved nation the appalling reality of warfare along the 475 miles of earthworks and trenches, stretching in an unbroken line from the Channel to the Swiss border, that we know as the Western Front.

      It was to this static, troglodytic war of attrition, mud, rats, sleeplessness and endurance that May was bound and it is as they finally set off for France that his diary begins. In the last two or three years of peace Charlie May had begun to establish himself as a journalist and writer, and the diary is unmistakably the work of a born story-teller, a man with a lyrical sense of place, an ear for dialogue, a gift for rapid and vivid characterisation, a taste for the incongruous and a need to record what he saw and experienced. ‘One gets into a habit, quite unconsciously at first, of any hold it may subsequently get on one,’ he was confessing less than a month after landing in France. ‘For instance, here did I set out, gaily and with no foreboding, upon this diary, never thinking it could become a tyrant that would ’ere long rule me, and here I am reduced to impotence when evening comes round, unable to refuse the call of these pages to be scribbled in … But fill it I must, this habit has me so in its grip.’

      Charlie May’s war diaries survive in seven small, wallet-sized pocket books, written in faint pencil in his neat but tiny, italic hand, as a rich and vivid testament to this compulsion. At one level it seems rather curious that an officer of his dedication should indulge in something so defiantly in breach of King’s Regulations, but we can be grateful that he did because the result is an account that had never seen the censor’s eye, a vivid picture of battalion life in and behind the trenches during the build-up to the greatest battle fought by a British Army.

      The friendships and tensions, the homesickness, frustrations, delays and endless postponements, the fog of ignorance, the combination of boredom and terror that every man who has ever fought could testify to, the relationship of officer and batman, the almost incomprehensible contrast of the pastoral world only miles behind the fighting and the scarred and pocked ugliness of the front line – all familiar enough, perhaps, but seen and recorded here with a freshness that brings them home as if for the first time. ‘This war, I am sure, is one of the most peculiar the world has ever known if, indeed, it is not the most peculiar,’ he writes of the surreal experience of facing an enemy you might never see,

      In no other can it have been possible to soldier so long, to witness such evidence of the presence of an enemy and of his ability to injure without ever catching sight of beast, bird or man belonging to him … Except through my glasses, I have never yet seen a Fritz – an experience in no way peculiar, since it has been experienced by many a thousand others of double my active service.

      There is a visceral immediacy about a war diary – a question mark hanging over each entry, the unspoken possibility that it might be the last – that no retrospective account can quite match. But the main fascination of these pages remains Charlie May himself. There is material here – details of units, movements, coded map references (which have been omitted from the text) – that would plainly never have got past an Army censor, but it is the absence of self-censorship that makes these diaries so compelling and disarming a portrait of the archetypal English ‘Everyman officer’ – ‘a truly ordinary sort of clout-head’ as he describes himself – shorn of all the reticences and defences behind which he traditionally hides.

      There is no cynicism or pretence in these pages, no attempt to make things sound better or worse than they are, or to dissemble the depth of his feelings for the men under his command or the wife and daughter to whom his diary is addressed. In Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, any talk of ‘patriotism’ was fit ‘only … for civilians, or prisoners’ and any new arrival would soon have it knocked out of him. Underscoring every page of May’s diaries, however, is an unembarrassed pride in his country and an almost maternal affection for the Englishmen with whom he is privileged to fight.

      It has its ‘little Englander’ side – ‘I can’t imagine why the Germans want this country,’ he quotes one of his messmates on the irredeemable squalor of the ‘hairy, dirty, baggy-breeched’, sabot-wearing French peasant; ‘If it was mine, I’d give it to them and save all the fuss’ – but in nothing is he more an

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