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Frank Richards holds a unique place in military writing, for several reasons. His book Old Soldiers Never Die is reckoned to be among the finest war memoirs ever produced, and one of very few to be written by a private soldier. Richards was himself a rarity, having survived active service from the beginning of the First World War in 1914 right through to its conclusion in November 1918. He was never seriously wounded, yet picked up a Distinguished Conduct Medal and Military Medal in the process.
Officers’ memoirs of the First World War are well known: Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That, and Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel are just some examples. All are carefully shaped literary narratives written by well-educated men.
Richards’ account, by contrast, is raw, unfiltered, and direct. He wrote the book in 1933, when memories were still relatively fresh. This is significant, because later ‘memories’ harvested by journalists and popular historians in the period preceding the deaths of the last trench veterans can be problematical – men whose faculties were fading would fall back on a shared ‘mud, blood, and rats’ narrative that very much aligned with their audience’s expectations.
The freshness and detail of Richards’ writing was first noticed by one of his favourite officers, who had the job of censoring his letters home – none other than Robert Graves, later author of his own celebrated memoir and the famous I, Claudius books.
It was Graves to whom Richards reached out in 1933 when he started writing his account. Impressed by the writing, Graves offered supporting comments and advice – and secured a publisher. But the voice remains distinctly Richards’ own, down to the earthy tone and unpolished grammar.
The ‘most literary’ battalion in the army
The Second Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers, has been described as the ‘most literary’ battalion in the entire British Army. As well as Frank Richards, its ranks included celebrated authors like Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, plus Captain J C Dunn, who wrote another classic, The War the Infantry Knew. The latter book does much to confirm the accuracy of Richards’ account.
Unlike his officer contemporaries, Richards’ style is anecdotal and full of incidental detail. But he has a natural flair for telling a story, and the narrative never sags or loses pace. It works because he recounts the whole life of an infantryman, not just the combat episodes. Nor is the writing filtered by officer-class inhibitions about behaviour. He describes the Tommy looking for sex and cheap alcohol, enjoying laughter and pranks, trying to avoid irksome duties, and finding moments of comradeship and mutual solace amid widespread death and destruction.
Richards is far from a model soldier. He displays a talent for seeking out female company while avoiding the overcrowded brothels, and rum and white wine (or ‘ving blong’, as he calls it) always seem to be in plentiful supply. Looting and destruction of private property occur when the opportunity or need arises. There are also affecting details, such as the loyal dog that stays with the boys in the trenches and learns to duck shell-fire alongside them, and the French newspaper boys coming up to the communication trenches to sell English newspapers. Richards discusses the postal system, too, which was so efficient that condolence letters written by the comrades of dead soldiers sometimes reached the widows before the arrival of the official telegram.
Inaccuracies do exist in Old Soldiers Never Die, but tend to be based on genuine contemporary perceptions. An example is the early chapter where Richards describes the Germans firing ‘expanding bullets’ that caused terrible wounds. He describes British snipers filing the tips of their bullets flat in retaliation (which ironically would have greatly reduced their accuracy).
In the early part of the war, both sides accused the other of using ‘dumdum’ bullets, but in reality this was groundless. What they were seeing was the result of modern high-velocity ammunition hitting bone, and as a result tumbling sideways in the body, leaving a massive exit wound. The memoir is all the more authentic for retaining a debate which a historian might, with the benefit of hindsight, have omitted.
One treasured chapter in the book gives us a rare infantryman’s view of the famous Christmas Truce of 1914:
Two of our men then threw their equipment off and jumped on the parapet with their hands over their heads. Two of the Germans done the same [sic] and commenced to walk up the riverbank, our two men going to meet them. They met and shook hands and then we all got out of the trench.
Unrelenting drama
Enlisted initially as a ‘rifle and bayonet man’, Richards spent much of the war as a signaller. This chiefly entailed laying telephone cables, repairing the frequent breaks caused by enemy fire, and acting as a runner when communications broke down completely. These duties were exceptionally dangerous, and part of the book’s unrelenting drama is the way that death stalks those in the front line. This is described unsentimentally. ‘Passing along the trench,’ Richards writes almost casually at one point, ‘I came across the headless body of Sergeant Bale.’
Part of the drama is the way death stalks those in the front line.
But it is the set-piece assaults that really stick in the mind. Richards graphically describes the chaos and confusion that usually attends these, for instance in the autumn of 1915 at the Battle of Loos, where attacking troops were accidentally gassed by their own side:
The trench was reeking with gas and we were wearing our tube helmets rolled up on our heads; if we pulled them down over our faces we wouldn’t have been able to see anything. The scaling-ladders were not much good; when rested on the bottom of the trench or against the back of a traverse they were too short, and when rested on a fire-step they were too long.
C [company] and the remainder of B now went over, the majority climbing over the parapet and the fire-steps, to be met with heavy machine-gun and rifle fire, some of them falling back in the trench killed or wounded as they were climbing over the parapet. Not a man in either company got more than 30 yards from his own trench.
Notwithstanding this, officers in the front line for the most part are regarded with respect and even admiration. They lead by example and share the hardships of their men. The soldiers’ contempt is generally reserved for officers further up the command chain.
The book is full of wry black humour, often directed at senior officers. Ordered to deploy a new type of Bangalore Torpedo under the enemy barbed wire, the men carry out the hazardous mission successfully, but the device, eagerly observed by the officers, fails to detonate. They are told to repeat the sortie into no-man’s land the next day to retrieve it from under the noses of the Germans:
When day came and we stood-to, the torpedo could be distinctly seen where Freezer and his chums had put it on the enemy wire. Some very beautiful remarks were made about it. One old soldier told a new young soldier that the torpedo hadn’t finished yet. It was liable to go off, and when it did it would travel up and down the German front, with a rage against barbed wire, blasting it all away without missing a single strand; after which it would turn its attention to the barbed-wire dumps in the Back Areas, and finally make for Germany.
Richards ends his account as he started, sharing soldiers’ tales with a comrade and singing songs, including ‘Old soldiers never die, they simply fade away’, which gave him his title.
In his account, the British infantryman emerges as stolid, enduring, humorous, and irreverent. Set it alongside Spike Milligan’s memoir of North Africa, Rommel? Gunner Who?, and we get a remarkably consistent picture, showing perhaps that the British Tommy was more than just a stereotype. MHM
Frank Richards
Born: June 1883
Died: August 1961
Nationality: British
Orphaned at an early age, Frank Richards – whose real name was Francis Philip Woodruff – was brought up by his aunt and uncle in Monmouthshire. He worked as a coal miner as a young man, before signing up for duty with the Royal Welch Fusiliers in 1901. He served in India and Burma from 1902 to 1909, and during the First World War saw action in all the major theatres of the Western Front. After the success of his first book, Old Soldiers Never Die, he published another memoir, Old Soldier Sahib, in 1936, recounting his time in India. Richards was interviewed as part of the BBC series The Great War, which was broadcast in 1954. Despite his long military career, he never rose above the rank of private.
