Patrols were an essential element of trench warfare, they were intended as a means of reconnaissance and also for taking prisoners.  Most of the men did not like them!

Edmund Blunden describes a patrol Sergeant William Parkes Max Plowman’s experience ‘The Night Patrol’, by Capt West

Patrols were dangerous actions.  Nowadays we are used to seeing television pictures taken with night-vision glasses turning night into day, soldiers knowing exactly where they are through the use of GPS systems. All this is a far cry from the situation the men who crawled out into No Man’s Land would find themselves in. Communication, knowing where they were, knowing where their own units were, let alone the enemy positions, all this made them a ‘tricky’ thing to get involved in. In the book ‘At the going down of the sun’ the authors refer to the casualties of these raids, quoting from Fourth Army Headquarters documents they say that only 7 out of 15 raids carried out on the Somme front between April and July 1916 were successful.  Between 19 December 1915 and 30 June 1916 some 5,845 men died and 119,296 were wounded in these ‘minor trench operations’.

Anthony French in ‘Gone for a Soldier’ briefly describes the composition of a raid; “The mission determined the number [of men].  Usually it was five and a junior officer: a man to cut the wire and guide his comrades back, a bayonet, a grenade thrower, another bayonet and the last man with more Mills bombs.  Often they got no further than the wire.  Sometimes only one or two returned. But more often than not the wily enemy was taken by surprise, and the party was back with a prisoner dead or alive or without an epaulette or two before a merciless fire was let loose from every enemy parapet....”

From Edmund Blunden’s book; “If one went forward patrolling, it was almost inevitable that one would soon creep round some hole or suspect heap or stretch of wired stumps, and then, suddenly one no longer knew which was the German line, which our own. I almost joined a German working party ‘in all good faith’ after such a careless circuit. Puzzling dazzling lights flew up, fell in the grass beside and flared like bonfires; one heard movements, saw figures, conjectured distances, and all in that state of dilemma. Willow-trees seemed moving men.  Compasses responded to old iron and failed us. At last by some luck or some stroke of recognition one found oneself, but there was danger of not doing so; and the battalion which relieved us sent a patrol out, only to lose it that way.  The patrol came against wire, and bombed with all its skill; the men behind the wire fired their Lewis gun with no less determination; and, when the killed and wounded amounted to a dozen or more, it was found that the patrol and the defenders were of the same battalion.  I knew the officer who led that patrol; he was by temperament suited for a quiet country parsonage, and would usually have mislaid his spectacles.”

The following is from the obituary column in the Daily Telegraph, and tells a little of the story of Sergeant William Parkes.  Born in January 1896, he was one of 11 children and in March 1915 he joined up.  He died in 2002, one of the last survivors of the Welsh Bantam Brigade formed for troops between 5ft. and 5ft 3ins. tall.  “Although two inches over the prescribed height when he joined the 12th Battalion of the 24th Regiment, South Wales Borderers, Parkes and two other men regularly went out on night reconnaissance patols together in No Man’s Land because it was believed their lack of stature made them harder to see; a tall officer who once accompanied them on patrol concluded that this was right and wanted to turn back.

Parkes’s most disturbing experience was a lone patrol on which he brushed the snow from the face of a dead German in a crater, and found that it strongly resembled that of one of his own brothers.  The toughest action in which he was involved was the taking of the formidable defences of Fifteenth Ravine at Gonnelieu, south east of Cambrai; by the end of that action he was commanding his company after all the officers were killed.

When Parkes was wounded in the leg by shrapnel in April 1917, he urged his dresser to bind him up tightly so he could return to his men; it was only when he stoos up that he realised that he could not walk.

After his leg injury, Parkes became an instructor at Sniggerly Camp, outside Liverpool, and started training for a commission; but he concluded that he was not well enough educated and returned to the Front.

Max Plowman gives a description of a patrol; “It has been raining sharply, but now at ten o’clock the sky clears and the full moon makes dark the shadows of the trenches. I meet Rowley with a chit in his hand, which he reads by the moonlight. He is to send out one officer and ten men who will bring in a German prisoner, dead or alive, for purposes of identification.  “And I’m afraid,” he adds apologetically, “it’s your turn.”

The time, the moonlight and the siting of the trenches make this order as nearly impossible as the improbable can be. Rowley agrees. It ought to have been tried when the sky was dark and before patrols went in.  Thinking it probable that the Colonel sent the order before the sky cleared, I ask Rowley if he will have it confirmed.  No. Orders are orders, even when they come if the form of plain invitations to suicide. I’d better go out and make a show, and together we’ll cook the report. Here’s a vile quandry. Is the Colonel aware that the battalion intelligence officer went out with a sergeant and a couple of men two hours ago and has not yet returned? Besides, with ten men, across one hundred yards of no-man’s-land, on a night when you can see from wire to wire! A first-class cut-throat might stand a chance, working alone; but even he would avoid such a night.

The mere receipt of such an order seems like an insult.  I shall not attempt to carry it out, and that not only for my own sake; but I should like to see the Colonel and be clear with him. Taht’s impossible.

Sick at heart and savage in temper, I pick my men and lead them down a disused forward sap.  Well away from our own trenches, it becomes uncanny work creeping along in the shadows, stick in one hand, revolver in the other, not knowing what we may confront round the next bend, I turn to see the men and find the corporal, who bragged so much about his skill at such exploits, holding back at avery safe distance. We go on.  Then suddenly, out from our left, there comes a long whistle.  A moment later it is replied to by a similar signal on our right. We wait and then go on again. The signal is repeated.  That is enough for me.  I reckon we are seen and tell the men to go back.

Down in the dug-out Rowley and I write a report that is as near lying as can be without being actual falsehood.  The whole business makes me angry.  I suppose I am wanting in humour.”

The last stanza of ‘The Night Patrol’ by Capt AG West Capt West was killed by a stray bullet at ‘stand to’ on 3rd April, 1917   We crawled on belly and elbows, till we saw, Instead of lumpish dead before our eyes, The stakes and crosslines of the German wire. We lay in shelter of the last dead man, Ourselves as dead, and heard their shovels ring Turning the earth, then talk and cough at times. A sentry fired and a machine-gun spat; They shot a flare above us, when it fell And spluttered out in the pools of No Man’s Land, We turned and crawled past the remembered dead: Past him and him, and them and him, until, For he lay some way apart, we caught the scent Of the Crusader and slid past his legs, And through the wire and home, and got our rum.

An entry for 9 January in the book ‘At The Going Down of The Sun’ gives a brief description of the circumstances of the death of Captain Newton, Canadian Light Infantry, on the 9th January 1915.

At this early stage in the war, trenches did not form continuous line, which could be very dangerous for troops new to the front. Losing his way in the darkness, Newton walked through the lines between two outposts and found himself in No Man’s Land, heading towards the german trenches. Turning back, he was challenged by his own men, but apparently failed to hear.  Warning had been given to the inexperienced troops that the Germans would try to infiltrate their lines.  With this warning in mind, the sentry on duty, getting no reply to his challenge, opened fire.  Only as his quarry cried out from his wound, did the appalled sentry recognise the voice of his officer.  Without hesitation, he climbed over the parapet and dragged Captain Newton to safety, only to find that his shot had been fatal. It says much for Newton that his last thoughts were not for himself or for his family, but rather for the distraught sentry. A fellow officer wrote: ‘The gallant and mortally wounded officer’s last effort at speaking was to let it be known that he should not have been where he was and that the sentry only did his duty.....’

From the same book, on 17 February 1917 Private Harry Barlow was killed in a raid.

“Even in meticulously planned raids, things could often go wrong.  In one raid a subaltern forgot to distinguish between true north and magnetic north on his compass and led his troops onto unbroken barbed wire, where they were cut down. A similar fate - but for a different reason - befell the 10th Cheshires in a daylight attack on the German lines near Ploegsteert Wood in February 1917. The raid had been rehearsed in great detail behind the lines at Romarin and the trenches to be assaulted had been ranged to the inch by the supporting artillery. Unfortunately. on the day of the attack a thaw set in, with a resulting rise in temperature. This threw the calculations of the gunnery officers into confusion (shells fly further in warmer air), so that on part of the attack front the protective barrage fell behind instead of on the German positions.  The Cheshires advanced bravely, only to find themselves faced by an impenetrable barrier of uncut wire.  The execution wrought by the German machine gunners was swift and merciless. Of the 200 raiders, 40 were killed and 60 were wounded. In his diary diary the battalion commander, Colonel Johnstone, noted pointedly: “It is a pity that the men who were so keen and who behaved so well did not have a better chance.” He added: “One feels proud to be commanding such men.” Private Barlow was one of those who died, now commemorated on the Ploegsteert Memorial.”