The following is an extract from Henry Williamson’s book, ‘Love and the Loveless’, he is describing life in an Infantry Base Depot where men spent time before being sent out to units in the line.  Many of these men had seen action at the front and did not like their treatment in the IBD.  He is describing it as seen by the main character in the book, Phillip Maddison, a Lieutenant.

That is followed by a short extract from Edmund Blunden’s book, “Undertones of War”, an excellent work based on Blunden’s time in France. The extract gives a little insight into the IBD at Etaples.

Williamson. There was a feeling of desolation in the Infantry Base Depots on both sides of the railway at Etaples. He sensed it at once.  The men might have been prisoners of war, without the freedom, such as it was, of a P.O.W. camp. At least the German prisoners of war knew where they were.  The fact that they were in a hostile country gave them some sort of resistance, if not resilience.  But here in an I.B.D. the men did not know where they were.  They had lost the only thing that held them together: the spirit of being “all in it together”; they lacked the friendly encouragement of their own junior officers, a spirit which was to be found only in a regiment.

The camps were surrounded by barbed-wire fences. Military police carried loaded revolvers. Sentries with fixed bayonets guarded the gates.  Only 10% of each Depot was allowed out on pass at any one time. If you had been warned for reinforcement, the time allowed you, whether officer or man, was only between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. of any one day. It was not damned well good enough!  No wonder the poor devils had a pathetic faith in Horatio Bottomley - at whom The B.E.F. Times, written comfortably in the rear, had jeered!  So had he himself, Phillip reflected. One lived and learned.

Near the Depot camps, occupying hundreds of acres of sandy soil, was the Bull Ring.

Here thousands of men daily received intensive training with bombs, rifle-grenades, Lewis gun and rifle fire, and bayonet practice.  They passed finally through a series of assault courses, in and over trenches, past exploding shells (gun-cotton slabs detonated beside small tins of petrol), through water plashes and barbed wire. Urged on by instructor-voices screaming almost hysterically to simulate sufficient patriotic pretense (Phillip thought) in order to keep their safe jobs, the effect of these ex-boxers, ex-wrestlers, and cheap-jacks was more horrible than being in the line; for at least that was real.  There was something damnable about a Base system which treated old soldiers, some with two and three wound stripes, as though they were rookies, expecting them at bayonet practice on the usual straw-filled dummies to show frenzy for blood - Gar’n, smash th’ bastard! Gar’n, three inches in the throat! - right nipple - left nipple - groin - then the butt of the rifle into - (voice dropping to a sneer) -”the right place to stop him having any more little Huns”.

The brass-braided wound-stripers, half dead inside their heads, three-quarters of their courage expended with the deaths of old comrades, muttered quietly to themselves.  Loos -Somme - Langemarck - they’d had enough.  Keep the bullshit for the rookies, who do they think we are?

In one of the camps, passed four times daily, to and from the great arena of the sandhills, was the Punishment Compound, in full view of the marching columns which were called to attention as the leading platoons drew level with the gates and sentry boxes. Here Field Punishment No. 1 was on display; men tied back to back along a taut picket line, their arms stretched to the limit.  Those who sagged during the time in which they were spread-eagled - one hour in the morning, another in the afternoon - were checked by red-capped military police. The effect on the beholders was degrading. Phillip heard men muttering. There were stories of legs and arms being twisted, of screams from the cells at night, and punishment by open-handed blows of boxing gloves. The cells were dark, with tiny ventilation holes at the top, each little more than the size of a sentry box, so that a man could not lie down in his solitary confinement. The whole place was rancid with subdued anger, with an under-current of bitterness and despair making for sullenness; the idea, it was said, was to make life there so bad that up the line would be cushy by comparison.

One aspect of the training camps was ‘the bullring’, where the instructors were ‘real martinets’ [Holmes, ‘Tommy’] “The chief complaint about the bullrings was not the quality of their training ....... It was their stark dehumanisation at a time when men were steeling themselves to face what lay ahead.  And it was their remorseless imposition of the same soulless programme upon eighteen-year-old recruits and forty-five-year-old combat veterans:after mid-1916 all but a fortunate few went up the line by way of the bullrings, whether it was their first trip to France or whether they were wounded being recycled through the training machine.”

Etaples, from Edmund Blunden’s, “Undertones of War”.

“...there was a train journey between verdurous banks and silvering poplars, ending drearily at Etaples, known as Eatapples or Heeltaps. The Base! dismal tents, huge wooden warehouses, glum roadways, prisoning wire.  I took my share of a tent, trying to remember the way to freedom, and laid on my valise the ebony walking-stick which had been my grand-father’s, and was to be my pilgrim’s staff.  It went.  I was away from it only a few minutes - it went.  But this was before the war was officially certified to be making the world safe for democracy.

Was it on this visit to Etaples that some of us explored the church - a fishing-village church - and took tea comfortably in an inn? Those tendernesses ought not to come, however dimly, in my notions of Etaples. I associate it, as millions do, with “The Bull Ring”, that thirsty, savage, interminable training-ground. Marching up to it, in the tail of a long column, I was surprised by shouts from another long column dustily marching the other way: and there, sad-smiling, waving hands and welcoming, were two or three of the convalescent squad who had been so briefly mine on the April slopes opposite Lancing. I never saw them again; they were hurried once more, fast as corks on a millstream, without complaint into the bondservice of destruction. Thinking of them, and the pleasant chance of their calling to me, and the evil quickness with which their wounds had been made no defence against a new immolation, I found myself on the sandy, tented training-ground. The machine-guns were thudded at their targets, for the benefit of those who had advanced through wire entanglements against such furies equally with beginners like myself.  And then the sunny morning was darkly interrupted.  Rifle-grenade instruction began. A Highland sergeant-major stood magnificently before us, with the brass brutality called a Hales rifle-grenade in his hand. He explained the piece, fingering the wind-vane with easy assurance; then stooping to the fixed rifle, he prepared to shoot the grenade by way of demonstration. According to my unsoldierlike habit, I had let the other students press near the instructor, and was listlessly standing on the skirts of the meeting, thinking of something else, when the sergeant-major having just said “I’ve been down here since 1914, and never had an accident,” there was a strange hideous clang. Several voices cried out; I found myself stretched on the floor, looking upwards in the delusion that the grenade had been fired straight above and was about to fall among us.  I had indeed been fired, but by some error had burst at the muzzle of the rifle: the instructor was lying with mangled head, dead, and others lay near him, also blood-masked, dead and alive. So ended that morning’s work on the Bull-Ring.”