08/06/2024
Recollections of Sapper Percy Beaton 218 Company, Royal Engineers.
I used to be called ‘Bolshie’ in the army because I tended to question everything. And I often said, ‘That’s stupid!’ which didn’t go down well with the senior NCO’s-especially the old hardened ones. I thought lots of things were stupid. You know-sloping arms, presenting arms, saluting people. As a civilian, you had your own life, and you were never dictated to. But when you went into the army, you were dictated to by a load of people who, in many cases, were completely ignorant. And the rules of the army at the time! Such as ‘dumb insolence’-if you looked at somebody with a scowl on your face, you could be put on a charge and get seven days confined to barracks. For looking at somebody!
Sapper Beaton left Southampton on 12th September 1939 on board the Duke of Argyll along with another 280 or so engineers and 8 officers.
The mood on the ship going out was quite cheerful. There were one or two people who’d just been married prior to being called up, and they weren’t very happy. But most of the single lads were fine. Of course, there was so much unemployment about at the time that it was something for people to do-and there was about 14 shillings a week coming into their pockets.
My very first punishment was on the boat going across to France. All the tall chaps who were over five foot ten were issued with rifles because there was only 30 rifles between about 300 of us, and I was one of the unfortunate ones to get a rifle handed to me. I didn’t want a rifle, it didn’t interest me. But unbeknownst to me, everybody had been told to clean these rifles-and believe you me, they wanted some cleaning because they were thick packed with grease. They were told to be on top deck at a certain time with the rifles clean. And of course, I turned up with the rifle just as it was issued, and I got seven days sanitary duties which I carried out when I got to France, in this school and it was absolutely filthy. The French Army had been sleeping in it, and there was about two foot of straw in every room. And there was excreta all over the place. The French had obviously wiped their backsides with their hands and wiped it down the wall. You can imagine as a young lad of 20, it didn’t go down very well with me.
People were underestimating the Germans. There was a story running round that all German tanks were cardboard, made of papier mache, that holidaymakers had been going along in Germany, and these papier mache tanks had come out of the trees, and the cars had gone straight through them. These were the sorts of rumours running around.
We went to Le Treport where we were given a very large hotel called the Trianon which had to be converted into a hospital. And the French used it disgustingly. We had to clear all this straw out of all the rooms and wash all the walls down. And there was an instance where I put my foot in it good and proper. There was a big marble staircase, and as I was washing it down with water, down the staircase came Lord Gort, Hore-Belisha and a load of dignitaries. I said to them, ‘Mind out where you are going! You’re making my bloody stairs dirty! I’ve just cleaned them!’ They looked most surprised that somebody had spoken to them like that. And I was severely reprimanded by a young captain who said, ‘Do you know who you’re talking too?’ I said, ‘I haven’t a bloody clue and I couldn’t care less. Look at my stairs!’
I had my first girlfriend at Le Treport. A French girl. He father was a French Army officer. She was a decent girl, had to have a chaperone everywhere. We were in a hotel on the corner, and she used to go past on her way to school every day. She used to look shyly up and smile at me, and we had the 10th Hussars staying in the same hotel, and one of them was a French interpreter. One Sunday morning, he came to look for me, and said, ‘There’s a young lady downstairs and she wants you to go to church with her.’ I said, ‘Young lady? I don’t know any young lady.’ I went down and it was this young girl, and she was Catholic, and I wasn’t, and I told her I couldn’t go to church – I didn’t know the Catholic carry-ons. But we walked out for quite a while, and then, of course, when we got pushed back, we just lost touch with each other.
In Le Treport, we came into contact with a Liverpool company of Pioneers, and by God, they were a tough crowd. They became our labourers, you could say. A lot of them had been in prison, and released on the understanding they went to France. They had a Sergeant Major with them, a huge man, 73 years old, and he used to carry a stick with a big ball on the end, and he used to whack them with it when they got out of hand. One of their Sergeants thought he was clever, and he used to try and embarrass them, and make them look small. And one night, they found him in a restaurant on his own, having a drink. They took him outside and used him as a wheelbarrow-they dragged him down the cobbled streets face downwards. His head was in bandages for weeks. You wouldn’t have known it was him-only two slits and a little bit of a mouth. They caught a fellow for it, and they put him in a French prison just off the seafront, and at high tide, there was six inches of water in his cell. It was absolutely terrible in there. He said, ‘All the prisons I’ve been in in England, I’ve never had my heart broken… but this broke my heart.’ Still, they might be a tough crowd, but they used to look after us. They looked on us as young and inexperienced soldiers, and they used to father us.
When we go to France, it had been like a holiday at the beginning. A hard working holiday, but a holiday, and it wasn’t until the German breakthrough came and we started getting shelled and bombed and shot at that we realised we might lose our lives.
The British troops were despondent. There were no two ways about it. The Jocks, for example, they’re good fighting soldiers, and they were furious that they hadn’t got the arms to hold the Germans back. They said, ‘We could have held them back! They are a load of young, inexperienced soldiers, and we could have mowed them down, and they would have run.’ I think we were all despondent at the time because we expected better things of our army.
When we were on the retreat, I think the French got the impression that we were leaving them in the lurch. The roads were packed with French people, and we were on lorries, sort of forcing our way through the crowds, pushing people off the road. Sometimes when we went past, they used to shake their fists at us, much as to say, ‘We’ve got to walk and you’re all riding!’ It was sad for them.
On the retreat, we had this spell of blowing up bridges. On one particular bridge, we were told to blow it at one o’clock after a French cavalry unit had crossed it. It came to one o’clock and we gave them to quarter past one and we blew this bridge up, and it blew four shops up as well. The people protested like mad and the cavalry unit showed up after we blew it. They were just standing there, speechless, stranded on the German side, and then the old Frenchman started rattling on at us. We couldn’t understand a word he was saying, but we had given them a quarter of an hour, and they happened to be late.
When we were blowing up the bridges, the French housewives used to be doing their washing in the river, and beating it on the stones. They used to carry on unconcerned. We told them that we were actually going to blow the bridge, and they used to just put their washing back in the baskets and saunter away casually. They took it in their stride.
There was no actual panic but people were sometimes a bit uncertain because you heard a rumour-some French speaking person would say to you, ‘The Germans are five miles down the road and advancing fast,’ and we wouldn’t be prepared to move. So we’d be thinking to ourselves, ‘Are they five miles down the road or aren’t they? And if they do come, what do we do?’ Because nobody had told us what to do. The fifth column used to cause a lot of despondency because you didn’t know if it was true or not. You could turn around and say, ‘Oh, it’s a load of lies. It’s only the fifth column!’ But there was always the fear it might be the truth for once.
