The Ghost of the Trenches Read online

  The corporal laughed and obliged. ‘Where did you come from, little fella?’ he asked as he rubbed the dog’s soft fur. ‘Why, you ain’t wearing a collar! You’re pretty darn scrawny too. I reckon you must be a stray. Am I right?’

  The dog answered by springing to his feet, putting his paws up on the soldier’s knees and licking his face eagerly.

  Noticing the dog’s short, stubby tail, which all this time hadn’t stopped wagging furiously, the corporal announced, ‘Well, I’m going to call you Stubby, and if you stick with me, I’ll make sure you get well fed. What do you think about that?’

  As if he understood every word, Stubby barked and barked until the soldier scooped him up and took him into the barracks.

  From that day forward, the corporal and the dog were rarely parted. Stubby would take himself off while his master was training and return in time for a meal each night as the sun was going down. Then he would curl up underneath the corporal’s bed and sleep soundly until dawn.

  Stubby was happier than he had ever been, and the corporal was glad to have a companion, for he had been missing his farmstead home where his ma and pa always had plenty of sheep dogs around to help control their cattle and to guard the property at night.

  So when his training was over and his troop was called to action, the corporal could not bear the thought of being parted from his faithful new friend. With the help of his fellow soldiers, the corporal smuggled Stubby on board the ship that was to carry them across the ocean to France.

  The men almost succeeded in keeping the little dog’s presence a secret. However, one night, when the ship was not far from the French coast, a staff sergeant came into Corporal Conroy’s cabin for an off-the-cuff inspection and spotted the little dog bunked up with his master.

  All the men in the cabin were immediately woken as the air turned blue and the staff sergeant demanded to know whose dog it was and what was going on.

  Still groggy from sleep, the startled corporal struggled to think of an answer that would calm his superior officer. He stammered and stuttered. But words were not needed, for Stubby jumped down from the bunk, sat firmly and obediently at the shiny toe-caps of the staff sergeant’s highly-polished boots, and raised his right paw to his eye.

  The staff sergeant went quiet. He blinked twice, not believing his own eyes. Then he started to laugh. ‘Well, blow me down if the little critter isn’t giving me a salute,’ he chuckled. ‘Looks like your dog’s better trained that you, Corporal Conroy!’

  So Stubby had managed to melt even the hardest of hearts, and even though Corporal Conroy was ordered to perform extra duties for smuggling an unauthorised animal on board, the staff sergeant allowed the clever dog to stay, on the strict instructions that he didn’t get in the way.

  Only days later, the corporal and his troop experienced their first taste of combat, thrown in at the deep end at the Battle of Malmaison where they were tasked with helping the French to recapture the ridge at Chemin des Dames. For many of the soldiers, most of them young and barely out of school, this was a terrifying time.

  The mud in the trenches turned rust-red with blood, as one after another the young soldiers fell. Everywhere he looked, Corporal Conroy could see friends lying wounded or dying under heavy artillery fire, and the noise of the exploding shells and machine guns rattled his eardrums and made him cry out loud for mercy.

  Yet amid all the chaos, Stubby remained calm. He was not afraid.

  Anxious to keep his little companion safe, the corporal taught Stubby to duck down behind the sandbags. He was surprised how quickly Stubby caught on. He learned so quickly, in fact, that he was soon the first to duck as each new wave of German bombardment came crashing down upon them.

  ‘I reckon that dog of yours can hear the shells coming before we can,’ remarked the staff sergeant, before bellowing down the trench, ‘Listen men, keep an eye on Stubby here. He’ll warn you of incoming fire.’

  It wasn’t just enemy bullets and shells that Stubby was able to detect coming. He was also the first to know when there was poison gas in the air. His sensitive little nose would twitch as he caught the first whiff of it on the breeze and he would immediately begin to bark, buying the soldiers vital time to pull on their gas masks, or start up their Ayrton fans to blow the fatal fumes away.

  The stories of Stubby’s amazing abilities spread rapidly from one man to the next, from trench to trench. By day, stories of the clever little dog were shared between friends as they lay, side by side, at their gun posts. By night, whispers of his brave deeds were passed around, as the men huddled together around a flickering candle. The soldiers wrote about Stubby, too, in their postcards and letters home to their families and loved ones, and the tales of the dog’s achievements became more exaggerated and more impressive by the day.

  There was the story of how, one night, Stubby woke up while the corporal and all the other men in the trench were sleeping. It was said that the dog had heard something moving, so he crept through the mud in the bottom of trench without making a sound, and peeped around the corner. Sure enough, there was a German spy, creeping about under cover of darkness, scouting for maps and clues as to his enemy’s battle plans.

  The soldiers told how Stubby crouched down low on his tummy and crawled right up to the German. Then, with a growl, he sprang up and bit the soldier hard on the back of his thigh. The soldier cried out in alarm as the pain shot through his leg, waking the slumbering Americans nearby. They grappled the spy to the ground and took his weapon, but even then the determined little dog would not let go of his prey. Only when he saw Corporal Conroy approaching did he relax his jaws and release the petrified German.

  And so the tales of the little dog’s heroic deeds multiplied, until he had fought in as many as eighteen battles, and had been injured many times. He even received a wound stripe, like a real soldier, after being hurt by a wooden splinter that had stuck in his side.

  There are those who said that Stubby met President Wilson, while he was visiting his troops in France, and shook the President’s hand with his paw. Others claimed that Stubby was the first dog ever to have been made an honorary sergeant.

  Which of these tales are true and which are legend, we may never be sure, but we do know that both Stubby and his master, Corporal Conroy, survived the Great War and returned home safely to America.

  Once there, Stubby was rewarded with medals for his bravery. Now a nationwide hero, he travelled from state to state, the star of countless war parades, with Corporal Conroy always at his side. Wherever they went, the pair drew in the crowds, as people clamoured to see the little stray dog who had become a sergeant.

  When the excitement began to die down, it was time for Corporal Conroy to turn his mind to their future. He headed for Georgetown University in Washington DC to study law, taking his canine friend with him.

  Proud to have such a famous war hero on campus, the students quickly adopted Stubby as their football team mascot, an honour which the dog appeared to relish, for at the half-time hooter he could often be seen nudging a football around the field with his nose as the crowds cheered.

  Stubby grew old, happy and content and ever loyal to his friend and master the corporal. One evening soon after, on 4 April 1926, Stubby climbed into Corporal Conroy’s lap one last time. There, in his master’s arms, he fell into a deep peaceful sleep, dreaming of a Great War from which this time, he would never return.

  11: The Soldier and the Donkey

  As the Austrian Archduke was shot, and Europe hurtled towards war, children in back alleys, snickets and ginnels all over England were bouncing balls and skipping rope while singing the following verse:

  When the moon shines bright on Charlie Chaplin

  His boots are cracking, for want of blacking

  And his little baggy trousers they want mending

  Before we send him to the Dardanelles.

  Charlie Chaplin was a famous comic actor. This jolly rhyme that carried his name foretold the dark clouds
of war that were gathering, for although Charlie never had to leave his home in Switzerland, a whole generation of British men were soon marching away.

  The Dardanelles is a narrow strip of sea in Turkey which separates Europe from Asia. Forming its north coast is the Gallipoli Peninsula, the site of a bloody Allied campaign against Turkey that lasted from 25 April 1915 to 9 January 1916. The Allies hoped to win control of the Dardanelles and the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Constantinople (now called Istanbul), as this would have given them a safe sea route through from the Aegean Sea to the Black Sea and the coast of Russia. However, the campaign failed and many thousands of soldiers on both sides were left dead, either from the fighting or from disease.

  The first wave of the Allied attack on the Gallipoli Peninsula, on 25 April 1915, involved landing troops from Australia and New Zealand on a beach now known as Anzac Cove. ANZAC stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. Among the Australian soldiers was an Englishman named John ‘Jack’ Simpson, born John Kirkpatrick, whose story has become an ANZAC legend. Here follows a retelling of that tale…

  There was once a boy called John Kirkpatrick Simpson. He was born in 1892 in South Shields, a coastal town in County Durham, which lies in the part of England known today as Tyne and Wear.

  Although he was christened John, most people called the boy Jack. Jack loved animals, and as a schoolboy he would spend the long, sunny days of his summer holidays working with the donkeys who gave tourists and holiday-makers rides on the beach. Life was good and Jack was happy. But when he was just seventeen, his father died and his family’s fortunes changed. Jack soon found himself looking for a new life.

  Having a taste for adventure, Jack decided to become a seaman, and he travelled all the way to the other side of the world – all the way, in fact, to Australia. Jack liked this exotic new country so much that he decided to take a risk and, along with a dozen of his fellow seamen, jumped ship, going absent without leave, never to return.

  Jack found himself a job as a labourer and there, thousands of miles from his South Shields home, he might well have stayed had he not heard the news, five years later, of a Great War which had begun back home in Europe. Anxious to do his part, Jack signed up with the Australian Air Force, using the new, shorter name of John Simpson, thinking that he might soon be on his way back home to Blighty or, at least, to nearby France.

  But that was not to be, for Jack – now John – was destined for a more distant battlefield. Assigned to the 3rd Field Ambulance Brigade, John was tasked with being a stretcher-bearer.

  If he thought that the job of a stretcher-bearer would be easy, John had a nasty surprise. On 25 April 1915, his brigade landed on the beaches of the Gallipoli coast. As they disembarked on the sands of the tiny Anzac Cove, John and his comrades were met with a daunting and difficult climb up steep cliffs and, to their horror, they quickly came under fire from the enemy troops, hidden among the dunes.

  John was a quick thinker. With men falling all around him, he immediately set to work. At the camp on the beach, he loaded his empty stretcher with water supplies and hurried up the steep pathways to quench the thirst of the Australian troops as they fought their way inland. Then, water supplies distributed, he would swiftly load a wounded soldier onto his now empty stretcher and carry him back to the beach, to a safe place, where he could be cared for.

  But there were too many men injured and too few stretchers, and John and his fellow ambulance workers were forced to carry the wounded soldiers on their backs.

  That was, until John spotted a donkey wandering across the sand. Remembering the skills he had learned as a boy on the beach in South Shields, John wrapped a bandage around the donkey’s nose, forming a makeshift rein, and led it towards the fighting to collect his next wounded soldier.

  Amid the chaos and the noise of the battlefield, John and the donkey became firm friends. John named the donkey Duffy, and for the next three and a half weeks, they trudged back and forth from the beach, day and night, dodging enemy fire as they climbed up and down Shrapnel Gully and the Monash Valley, carrying water on the way and wounded men on the way back.

  No matter how hard his task, John never became downhearted. As long as he had his faithful companion Duffy by his side, he could be heard singing and whistling as he went on his way, taking no heed of the bullets that whizzed past him and the shells that exploded all around.

  Then, on the morning of 19 May, as he was leading Duffy down through Monash Valley with an injured man on the donkey’s back, the determined and courageous John – just 22 years of age – was hit and killed by a bullet from a Turkish machine gun.

  That might have been the end of the tale, but his faithful friend Duffy had other ideas. The brave little donkey was not to be stopped. He knew what his master and friend would have wanted him to do. And so he continued down the well-worn track, carrying the wounded man sprawled across his back all the way to safety.

  The story of a soldier with a clever donkey as his companion, who had together saved so many lives, spread through the Australian army and became a symbol of the bravery that so many Allied soldiers displayed at Gallipoli. Some versions of the story give the donkey a different name: sometimes Abdul, sometimes Murphy, even sometimes Queenie. And there are those who say that on his last fateful journey, he was carrying not one but two wounded soldiers back from the front line. But whichever is the true version of the tale, there is no doubt that John ‘Jack’ Simpson Kirkpatrick’s story made him a legend on both sides of the globe.

  Today, if you visit South Shields, you can see for yourself one of the six statues that have been raised in honour of the legendary John Simpson. But to see the other five, you would have to follow in John’s footsteps, and travel to Australia, all the way round to the other side of the world.

  12: The Spooky Submarine

  The waters of the North Atlantic are awash with stories of ghost ships, jinxed vessels and unexplained sinkings and explosions. The tale of the German U-boat or submarine that follows is one of the nastiest and most mysterious. It involves a vessel known as UB-65. It was originally believed that UB-65 sank off the coast of Ireland on 10 July 1918. However in 2004, an underwater archaeological survey proved that the vessel had actually sunk four days later, off Cornwall.

  During the Great War, the German Admiralty used a shipbuilding yard in Bruges in Belgium to build their fleet of U-boats, the submarines that were to terrify the British supply convoys bringing precious supplies to Britain.

  In 1917, a brand new U-boat was in the dock. Her construction was nearly complete when Jacques, a dockyard worker, paused in his brushing. He had been distracted by a shiny coin, a franc that had been dropped by a welder. With his eyes fixed downward, Jacques failed to notice the steel girder being swung into position on a steel strop from a crane above. The end of the girder hit the hapless cleaner square on the temple, killing him stone dead. As the girder dropped neatly into position in the superstructure of the sub, some of his blood and skull went with it, and so Jacques became the first victim of that jinxed U-boat, the UB-65.

  In days gone by, when employers were not so bound to health and safety regulations, losing a labourer or two during the construction of a great vessel like the UB-65 was not that rare. So work did not stop with the loss of poor Jacques, and just one month later the UB-65 was launched for her first sea trials. In the engine room the poor souls with their rags and long-spouted oil cans spluttered, retched and vomited as the engine room filled with fumes. Three of these unfortunate souls collapsed onto the rough steel floor and expired. They had suffocated in the smog.

  UB-65 had now claimed four lives – a jinx indeed. Of course, the German Admiralty kept news of these tragedies under wraps, not wishing to give the English Navy the chance of using it for propaganda. And even though the U-boat’s captain knew that his crew were getting jumpy, he closed the hatches for the sub’s first dive.

  However, just to make sure all was safe and secure, the captain sent a relia
ble sailor forward for an outside inspection of the hatches. On a day of flat calm as it was, this was a normal procedure. Yet inexplicably, this experienced sailor stepped off the vessel and was swept away in the wash.

  UB-65 had now claimed five lives.

  And the death toll did not stop rising. On that very same dive, UB-65 struck the sea bed and the briny water seeped in. For hours, the captain tried and failed to raise his vessel. Then, just as the captain was about to give up, the sub rose mysteriously to the surface.

  The crew sailed the UB-65 back to Bruges for repairs and arming, thinking that their luck had changed. But during the arming process, a torpedo warhead exploded, killing six and taking the sub’s death toll to eleven.

  Among the sailors killed in the torpedo blast was the Second Lieutenant. An ambitious young man, he had often stood, arms folded, on the prow of the vessel, enjoying making himself appear important.

  The crew thought that they had seen the last of him, but that very night some of the sailors swore that they saw the Second Lieutenant standing, once again, on the prow, his arms folded. Meanwhile others saw him walking in the corridor, leading from the torpedo bay.

  The Imperial Navy took the mysterious incidents on the UB-65 so seriously that they had the submarine exorcised by a priest. But their efforts were in vain.

  During the crew’s next tour of duty, a gunner went mad, the Chief Engineer broke his leg and one sailor committed suicide – and before every one of these tragedies, crew members reported seeing the Second Lieutenant, standing with his arms folded on the prow of the vessel, keeping an eye on things.

  Given her record, it was inevitable that the UB-65 would meet a sorry end, although nobody thought it would be quite as strange as it was.

  On 14 July 1918, the UB-65 was drifting off the Cornish coast near Padstow when the skipper of an American submarine, the L2, spotted the vessel with the ghostly Second Lieutenant on her prow. As he watched, wondering what the officer was doing, an explosion tore the German U-boat apart from stem to stern.