1917 – Cambridge Military History

It was October or November 1917, a British soldier in the Machine Gun Corps took some scraps of wood, possibly duckboards or pieces of an ammunition container, and crafted them into a money box for his son back home in England. He found a way, and time, to cut the wood, screw the pieces together, sand and varnish the box, and then hammered an English and French coin to the top, flanking the slot he chiseled out. He then took an extra collar badge of the Machine Gun Corps, the organization of which he was undoubtedly proud to belong, and softly hammered it into the wood on the front of the box – the hammer taps are still visible in the bronze. Finally, after the varnish had finally set in the cold and wet of the Western Front – one imagines the box in a place of honour, drying by a stove in the muck and mire of a dugout – he turned the box around and hammered a note to his son with a nail point: “To ALFIE from DAD XMAS 1917”. He sent it off in the post, hopefully to arrive safely by Christmas for his son Alfie in England.

Alfie’s father was a member of the Machine Gun Corps. This prestigious force was formed in late 1915 with the aim to improve the effectiveness of the use of crew-operated machine guns in support of Allied infantry and cavalry units on all fronts. In 1914, each infantry battalion or cavalry regiment went to war with two machine guns embedded in the unit, this was quickly raised to four. By 1915, the Army realised that machine guns were being employed in a sub-optimal fashion, and a correction was in order. The Machine Gun Corps was formed in October 1915 by taking the Maxim and Vickers gun sections from all infantry regiments and consolidating the force to provide specialized training and specific marksmanship to crews to improve the use the machine guns on the front. By 1916, the Machine Gun Corps was divided into four branches: infantry, cavalry, motorized, and heavy. Most machine gunners were trained on the grounds of Belton House, a stately home just north of Cambridgeshire, near Grantham in Lincolnshire and would go on to support the infantry.

Life in the Machine Gun Corps was not easy – its members served on all fronts in the Great War – and the force was nicknamed “the suicide club” due to its heavy casualties. The enemy, observing the importance of the machine gun sections to both defensive and offensive operations, specifically targeted machine gun positions, mainly through artillery fires. By the war’s end, 170,500 officers and men served in the Machine Gun Corps, 62,049 became casualties, just over 36 percent of total strength. 12,498 members of the Machine Gun Corps died during the war. Seven members of the Machine Gun Corps were awarded the Victoria Cross, two posthumously. The machine gunner’s grit and bravery was unquestioned.

The Machine Gun Corps was short lived. It was disbanded in 1922 to save money after the war, but its legacy lives on in the Royal Tank Regiment. The heavy branch of the Machine Gun Corps was the first to operate tanks in combat on the Western Front, forming the Tank Corps when seperated from the Machine Gun Corps in July 1917. This force became the Royal Tank Corps in 1923 and now forms the Royal Tank Regiment.

This box, this gift from a father to his son at a time when at least one of the two realised they might not meet again, is the most precious and sentimental type of trench art. It was a gift to a family member made with what was available and at hand at the time. It leads to more questions than it answers: did the father make it home by the next Christmas, in 1918, after the war ended? Did Alfie, who received the box 107 Christmases ago, keep and cherish this gift from his father? Did Alfie ever learn of the experiences, the suffering, the pain that his father must have experienced while in France with the Machine Gun Corps? What became of the box after the Christmas of 1917?

I can answer some of the last question. The box was obviously used to save coins for a long time, the slot on top is worn from the rough edges of many coins dropped through. The screws on the bottom – the old-fashioned slotted or flat head screws that one sees in Victorian or Edwardian furniture – have been taken out and screwed back many, many times. It was the only way for Alfie, or others, to retrieve the money they had saved.

What about the father? I assume he was commissioned, for the collar badge is an officer’s: it is bronze. Besides that, there is very little to learn of him.

The box eventually ended up in an antique store in Tewkesbury, a market town in Gloucestershire, and came to me for a few pounds. It now sits proudly on my shelf, as I am certain it once did on Alfie’s.

Recently, as my family was decorating for Christmas, I found myself hoping once more that Alfie’s father made it home from France a year after he made this box and was rejoined safely with his family. I hope that Alfie, and his father, shared many Christmases together in later years. Maybe a bit sentimentally, I wonder if 107 years ago, as this box was being assembled in the cold and misery of France in 1917, if its maker could have imagined it would be cared for and kept by a different family in England over a century later?

While a box like this will always spur more questions than it answers, I would like to tell you how I appreciate the questions and comments you send my way through the year, a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

I have been fascinated by Trench Art for several years. I was first exposed to numerous examples of decorated shells, paperweights, desktop items, and trinkets made in the areas around Mons and Ypres, Belgium where we lived some time ago. Some of these items I acquired and began a small collection. First though, what is Trench Art? At its most basic level, it is handcrafted artwork made by soldiers and sailors who find themselves with free time and materials to create original works of art. This was often men stuck in the trenches of the First World War, or in Prisoner of War (POW) camps from the Napoleonic Wars through World War II. Items were made as souvenirs to post home or carry back on leave, to trade, or to simply occupy time in a dangerous and horrifying situation. One feels that a soldier felt very little control over his circumstances and fate, surrounded by destruction, but could find a release through an act of creation. There are numerous items one can find: decorated brass shell casings are common, but also letter openers, desk items, regimental items, matchbook holders, ash trays, models of ships, aeroplanes, ships, and so on. The beauty of Trench Art is in its originality, its story, the story of its materials, who might have made it, and why?

According to Nicholas Saunders, who has written on the history and variety of Trench Art, there are four real categories of the craft: items made by soldiers in war; items made by POWs; items made by civilians at the front with access to materials; and finally, purely commercial items. The first three categories are the most interesting to me; however, around Belgium one often finds examples of the fourth category. Often one finds decorated shells made to sell to families traveling to Flanders in the 1920s – the Menin Gate or some other poignant memorial often is depicted on these items.

We are currently traveling in southern France on holiday. While exploring a local marché aux puces, a flea market, I found a decorated French 75-millimetre brass shell, with 1917 hammered into the lower part of the vase below a stylized cornflower. The cornflower in light blue is the symbol for remembrance in France, like the red poppy in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth Nations, or the gold star or yellow ribbon in the United States. The base of the shell reads: “75 DE C, C. 793 L. 17 C”. As time has gone by, these markings have become harder to decipher, but the “75 DE C” means 75 canon de compagne, or the 75mm quick-firing field gun, which is the gun for which the shell was made. The “C. 793 L.” is the munitions manufacturer and the lot number, so C is for Castelsarrasin, Tarn-et-Garrone, which was the location of a major armaments factory in southwest France under the Compagnie Française des Métaux (CFM) concern. This shell in particular was part of that facilities’ 793^rd lot of 1917. The “17” is the year of manufacture, 1917. The final “C” is the initial for the foundry which made the brass for the shell, also CFM’s Castelsarrasin factory in this case.

I find it interesting to delve into the history of these decorated items, these mementos made during such awful times. What makes this piece of Trench Art fascinating is that after this shell was manufactured and fired in 1917, a French soldier likely took the time to hammer a cornflower and the year into the brass, then blued the indentations. He almost certainly made this piece of art in 1917 soon after the shell was fired since the brass casings of fired rounds were collected, recycled and reforged by French armaments manufacturers desperate for raw materials late in the war. The shell vase was then kept for 107 years until it came into my possession at a French flea market this week. There are many questions which are unanswerable: where on the Front was this 75mm shell fired? At whom or what? Who made this specific piece of Trench Art? Did he survive the war? Was it a gift for a wife, a sweetheart, or family member? Maybe he made it to trade or to sell? Who kept it, cherished it, and preserved it for over a century? One question I can answer, the cost in 2024? 107 years after it was made on the Western Front, lovingly preserved, and eventually forgotten, it made it into a box of old bits of metal and cost me 8 Euros on a hot Saturday in southwest France.

For more information on Trench Art, I’d recommend an excellent book on the subject: Nicholas J. Saunders, Trench Art: A Brief History and Guide, 1914-1939. 2^nd Ed., (Barnsley: Pen and Sword Books, 2011).