At the end of season eight of the Old Front Line, we featured some bonus episodes, one of which looked at the memoirs of Great War veteran Malcolm Vivian.

Malcolm was a fascinating and engaging man, and we became good friends in the mid to late eighties just as I was about to go to university.

Living in Saltash in Cornwall and coming from what he always said was the oldest Cornish family, the Vivians, I went to see him on many occasions, and he wrote to me frequently, often pages and pages detailing his memoirs.

Sometimes letters would come two, three, four times a week.

Now the extracts from what he sent me that I included in that previous podcast, and I'll put a link to it in the show notes for this episode, seemed to hit a bit of a chord with you the listeners, and many of you asked if I'd ever thought about turning his letters and accounts into a book.

I mean that would be wonderful, but publishing is a bit of a hard world right now, particularly stuff to do with the Great War, and as I've said a few times of late, there is this thing called the old frontline podcast that gets in the way of these kind of things.

But of course what the podcast enables me to do is to take material like that and quickly, more readily share it with an audience like yourselves.

So considering how popular that episode was, what I've done is to go back into that material that I have for Malcolm Vivian, and I've made another selection from it.

And again, this is only a small part of what he sent me and what he told me over the years that I knew him, so I'm sure it is something that we will return to again in an episode like this for the podcast.

Now one of the things that Malcolm would often talk to me about was how heavy artillery was used.

Now, on one level, talking to a veteran, you're getting an insight into their experiences, where they came from, what they saw, what they went through.

But for someone like Malcolm, he was kind of on a slightly different level.

Being an officer and ending the war as a major, he saw the war in very different ways.

His responsibilities were very different to those of ordinary soldiers, and one thing that he had to be on top of was how they used the technology that he had in his unit to fight their war, which were siege guns as part of a siege battery of the Royal Garrison artillery.

And Malcolm was unusual really in that because when I reflect on this, he not only wanted me to understand his own experiences, he wanted me to develop a wider knowledge and understanding of the Great War as a whole, and where artillery, particularly heavy artillery, fitted into that, and what I came to learn, not just from him, but from wider research is how important artillery is in those battles of the First World War on the Western Front, indeed on any front.

So I'm forever grateful really to veterans like him who taught me so much.

So to give you a bit of an understanding of what I mean, this is an extract from one of the letters where he talks about the use of heavy guns in a siege battery of the Royal Garrison artillery.

In theory a gun was absolutely correct and every round fired at the same range and bearing should burst in the same hole.

As a check and a guide to ranging, one hundred rounds were fired, and the distance between the nearest and the furthest burst measured.

This in yardage or equivalent degrees and minutes was the hundred percent zone.

The aim was to find when ranging the correct range by an equivalent number of overs and shorts on the target.

The assumption became that in such a case half of the rounds would be in the middle of this bracket and hit the target.

If the first round was a plus, you fired the next at the short end of the bracket, if this was a short, you halved the difference.

This process was continued till you were sure you were hitting.

With an accurate gun like the 9.2 inch howitzer, if well sighted and well laid, you could shorten the procedure by making exact corrections.

So what he then went on to do was to explain a bit more what parameters affected the use of artillery.

The flight of the shell was affected by strength and direction of the wind, barometric pressure, the number of rounds fired from each gun and its consequent barrel wear, temperature of the air and temperature of the cartridge store, and these had to be checked at intervals and compensations made to the range and bearing of the gun.

Malcolm went on to say for a forward observation officer, a nine point two inch howitzer was a delightful gun to range on a target from a trench or other vantage point.

If the day was quiet you might hear the gun fire, then hear it passing overhead and so keep your head down till just before it was due to burst, and of course such a big shell had a big burst easy to observe.

You always, if possible, when ranging from an open trench or point changed your position to avoid snipers frequently.

My brother, also a forward observer, was shot through the hand, a very close thing.

Malcolm's Siege Battery, the ninety sixth Siege Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery, formed from the Glamorganshire Territorial Force unit of the RGA, came to France just a few months before the Battle of the Somme, and that became his first battle.

I've spoken about his time in the observation post at Hebuturn in an earlier podcast, but it's worth just repeating here, and one of the things he sent me while we were on this subject, discussing it through letters and on the telephone, he said I'll send you my map, and he sent through the post an original trench map that he'd used in that dugout at Hebuturn, observing on the battlefield around Gormacore, still covered in places in some mud and the markings that he made in nineteen sixteen.

The map was in poor condition because of its age, and a miracle really that he'd kept it.

But in those days the Western Front Association had a cartographer who was a professional cartographer, and I sent it to her and she very kindly repaired the map, and the map went back eventually to Malcolm, and he was delighted with the repairs and often would show it to people who came round to see him.

But he describes this time in the OP at Hebutern in this account.

The trench system started just by Hebutern Church, which as I left the trenches on the night of the first of July after six days in the observation post was blazing fiercely.

An infantry corporal held battalion roll call, seventeen privates answered.

Of course, a lot more drifted back later.

A London Rifle Brigade private was building a fire to heat a cup of tea, a shell burst beside him.

He would never drink that tea.

Another LRB man asked if I'd seen a private about, a man that was his brother.

What I have never seen chronicled was that on the evening I had seen German soldiers jump out of their front line trenches at Gormacor and start collecting the wounded.

A padre took some of our lads out with stretchers, no man's land was wide, but there was no fraternization.

One day a raw field artillery lieutenant stumbled into our observation post dugout which was opposite Gormacore, very much worse for wear, and said his OP had been blown in, and his major and telephonists were buried.

We gave him a mammoth whiskey in the usual chipped enamel mug, and Sergeant Parsons and myself went along the trench with him.

One look at the front told us there was no way in there.

It was completely sealed with heavy timbers.

The Royal Field Artillery Lieutenant said there was an emergency shaft opening into the open near our wire.

So there was, and a few feet down the shaft was bisected by a sheet of corrugated iron, jammed tight and on one side was a gunner struck unconscious.

Being young and thin and tall, I was able to wriggle head first into the shaft and get my hands under his armpits.

The others, helped by two infantrymen, pulled my legs and eventually he shot out like a cork from a bottle, very shell shocked.

We put him on the firestep.

Another man come up, but he was big and heavy, and I couldn't move him.

Eventually a medical officer came up and said he was dead.

The groans of the others trapped had ceased, so we gave up.

By this time other men from the RFA battery had arrived, so we left them to it.

One remarkable thing was the Germans hadn't machine gunned us.

I expect our barrage had made them keep their heads down.

Malcolm spent a long time in that dugout at the opening stage of the Battle of the Somme, and he witnessed the advance of the fifty sixth London Division.

It was a division that he would come across quite a lot in his war, both on the Somme and later at Arras, and part of his unit's target, the part of the battery that he was commanding, dropping these 9.2 inch shells onto the German positions, was lobbying those shells not into the front line, not into even the support or reserve line, but positions beyond that, including a place called Rossignol Wood, Nightingale Wood.

And in the late 1980s, on one of my trips out there, I took a copy of his map where he'd marked some of the targets on there, and I went to Rossignol Wood and discovered the shell craters from his shells.

Now that's something that normally a gunner officer never gets to see, and it took him 70 odd years to see them, but I took some photographs of these quite deep depressions where the shells had exploded within the wood.

9.2 inch shells are quite big and they form quite a big crater, and there all those decades later, and they're probably still there today, was the evidence of his gunfire from his siege guns from ninety six siege battery directed by him in the opening stage of the Battle of the Somme in nineteen sixteen.

Arras, the Battle of Arras in April and May of nineteen seventeen was a big part of Malcolm Vivian's war and a big part of what we always discussed.

In the previous account, the previous podcast episode I did on his memoirs, I described how he got ready for the ninth of april nineteen seventeen, the opening stage of the Arras battlefield and the attack that was made that day, and he went into the observation post overlooking the battlefield where that division that he'd supported on the first day of the Somme, the 56th London Division, that's where they were about to go into action.

But later on, as the battle progressed, they stayed in that sector and they worked more and more to try and take out targets on the main Hindenburg line, particularly bunkers.

His unit became particularly proficient in this bunker busting.

And he went forward on many occasions with his Ford observation team, which would be him and a number of signallers, ordinary gunners, perhaps a few bombatiers, who would then go forward and they'd run the signals for him while he spotted for the guns.

And one particular incident which we're gonna hear about now was in front of the Hindenburg line, close to where Rookery and Cuckoo Passage Cemeteries are today.

There's a bit of a sunken lane there and that's where this episode takes place.

It's on the high ground above the village of Eninel, Heninel.

So this is how Malcolm recalled that incident.

In may nineteen seventeen I was observing from the lip of a sunken lane and registering on trench junctions in the Hindenburg line.

Down in the lane was Sergeant Parsons and two linesmen, brewing tea.

It was early morning and the sun was low in the east.

I was abominably careless.

I should have known better, but the sun was obviously reflected from the lens of my binoculars.

Parsons called out Char up, sir.

I took a step down and reached for the mug.

It was knocked out of my hand by a shower of clods of earth.

There was a whiz and a crash, and on the lip of the lane, where my head had been a second before, was a smoking blackened crater, where a whizbang had gone off.

With a gun, the velocity of the shell was greater than the speed of sound, so the shell arrived before the whine of its flight was heard.

We hopped it down the lane very quickly before the next salvo.

One second saved us from complete decapitation, and it would have been my own fault for gross carelessness.

If your observation posts were directly in the line of flight, gun target, pences and shorts, rights and lefts were obvious.

If, however, you're observing of necessity from an angle to the line of flight, it was not easy, as range and direction tended to be confused.

It was a help to study the ground to mark the bearing of any prominent object to the target.

No thrill in life equaled mine when I knew we were on target, particularly if it was a machine gun emplacement.

And Malcolm mentioned that because he'd seen many attacks in the Battle of the Somme, where men had gone forward into no man's land and been mown down by those machine guns, and he did, as he often said to me, as much as possible to try and eliminate those machine guns for the infantry so that wouldn't happen again.

But he went on to talk about the kind of cooperation that the artillery did with the war in the air, something we touched on in the series that we did about the war in the air, the Royal Flying Corps and the RAF on the Western Front.

And this is Malcolm's memories of counter battery work involving cooperation with the air services.

Counter battery work.

We did a lot of shelling of German batteries, the fall of each round being plotted by the observer rear gunner in a cooperation mostly with No.

eight or number sixteen squadrons Royal Flying Corps, flying at first B two Cs, then RE eight or AW machines based at Bellevue or Mondicor.

The observer would transmit messages to us, we had a wireless mast and three Royal Flying Corps signallers attached to us.

We could only communicate with the plane by putting strips of linear material on the ground, each with its own meaning.

The aircraft after calling us would fly backwards and forwards, battery target.

It used a clock code to indicate the position of each of our bursts, A meaning twenty five yards, then one for one o'clock, etc.

We made the necessary corrections, fired again, waited for the observer's report.

These chut were generally very successful, but the slow observation planes were a tempting target for the fast German scout planes, especially the albatross.

On the other hand, a really good observer, with his machine gun, could put up a fire defence.

Once our position had not yet been spotted, we were doing a shoot when a German recce plane came along.

Not wanting to disclose our position, we did not fire twice when the observer was waiting for the fall of our shell.

Fed up he wired Fed up C one.

C one meant going home.

That afternoon I was in the command post dugout, the major was away, when a Royal Flying Corps tender stopped on the road and two RFC officers, Lieutenants Burund and Howes, came in and saluted.

Then they said they'd been sent up to apologise for the C one.

They hadn't got gas masks in that position, and we used to be shelled most afternoons for at least half an hour, having been located by mixed HE and gas shells.

Fortunately the dugout was well gas proofed with door blankets, so the two RFC officers were safe.

One of the things that I'd learned fairly early on from talking to Malcolm about his own life and his upbringing, that his mother was American, and when I looked back on it, I realised that kind of set him apart in many ways.

The influence of an American mother with a different philosophy to people from Britain, I think changed him in all kinds of ways.

I mean he was from a wealthy family, privately educated, and he was at Oxford when the war began in August 1914, but he had a different attitude to so many different things, and would often tell me that the war taught him the value of people and that despite his upbringing he never took anything for granted because he learned from his men how lucky he was, and I think his mother had also given him a bit of a sense of that as well.

And I think it's one of the reasons he never said this, but he obviously got on very well with the ordinary soldiers in his unit, his sergeant, he's bombardiers, he's signallers, he's linesmen, and I think that's because he treated them in a very different way, perhaps to some of the other officers.

And one of the other things that I got to learn about him was that he wasn't afraid to poke a finger at authority, as this tale that he related tells us.

There was a brigadier general Royal Artillery called KK Knapp.

He had a great reputation as a thruster for leading from the front, going to observation posts and making battery visits on his own.

You know my indignation at the ignorance of past senior officers of the potential vulnerability of a nine point two inch howitzer battery, while after a sticky do on the lower Somme area, we had moved up into Knapp's command area.

I stood an officer, two gunners and two signallers down at once to get some sleep, and put the cooks on to get the meals ready while everybody else got on with working on the guns, and breaking off for dinner when it was all done, and then getting on with the remounting of the guns, preparing for any action.

By the time they'd finished, everyone was absolutely all in.

The linesman had run a line to group headquarters, and then I stood everyone down for some sleep.

The posted officer took over as duty officer, and the signal as manned the telephone, and the others became sentry and gas alert man.

There was of course lots to be done like building cartridge shelters, but we were ready for action.

Then I saw Knapp so reported to him, and he started to tear me off a strip.

I let him have his say and then said Excuse me, sir, everything you say is of course necessary, but there is something much more necessary.

He said what?

So I said be ready for immediate action, but not efficient action until the men have had some rest.

Tired they could easily drop a fuse shell, or a gun layer can make an error in range and bearing, and then I went on about the work involved in moving a nine point two inch battery.

He said show me, so we examined the guns.

He probably knew, of course, while I made a running commentary, adding If you'd be here in two days, you'd find everything apple pie.

He came back in three days, was pleased with everything, chatted to the gun detachments who were of course old hands.

At the end he said Good and I said, Can we offer you some tea, sir?

But I'm afraid it will be in an enamel mug and taste strongly of chlorine, not brigades bone china.

He said, I'm well accustomed to the flavour of chlorinated tea in an enamel mug.

I said, Yes, I know that, sir.

He gave me a cheerful smile and said I'll be seeing you.

When the major got back he said At it again, I hear.

I said what?

He said ticking off brigadiers.

They are most amused about the tea and mug.

The general said you've got a good battery there.

A few days later I was in the observation post when Nat wearing his red staff hat came down the dugout steps and said What have you got to show me, Vivian?

So we climbed the ladder to the observation post chamber, and I pointed out spots of interest, including a small mound, obviously a machine gun fortress, which interested him a lot.

He said, Is there any way I can get closer to look at it?

Yes, there's a short trench, very little used as the parapet is too low, and it's enfiladed by a very accurate sniper.

Show me, Knapp said.

I said, Certainly, but please do me a favour, sir.

Do you know what every man in the trench said when you passed by in your red staff hat?

Christ, a bleeding brigadier.

If you wear that hat in the trench, some German will spot it, and they'll throw everything they've got at us, which I shall find most distasteful.

Please take one of the telephonist steel helmets, which he did, and we explored the trench, me telling him to keep low repeatedly, and he saw what he wanted.

We returned to the OP, he changed hats, and left, refusing my helmet.

I met him a few days later, but when he was with an infantry colonel and his intelligence officer, so I crouched into the side of the trench, but he caught my eye, winked, and touched the edge of his tin hat that he was wearing.

Sadly, I never saw him again.

Now the man in that story that Malcolm describes is a very interesting character.

He's Brigadier General Kempster Knapp, CMG, who had served with a mountain battery of the Royal Garrison Artillery and come to France in December of nineteen fourteen.

During the war he was mentioned dispatches on several occasions and decorated with the Distinguished Service Medal and American decoration by the American Expeditionary Force, the AEF for supporting their men with his artillery in the battles on the Hindenburg line in September and October of nineteen eighteen.

It was said that General Knapp proved of invaluable assistance to our infantry by the Americans.

He showed himself an indefatigable worker, a brilliant tactician, and a loyal friend to us.

Knapp later became deputy lieutenant of Northamptonshire and stayed on in the regular army after the war, and his son John also became a gunner, the commander of a mountain battery, and he was killed in Burma in nineteen forty five while commanding thirty third Mountain Battery Royal Artillery and is commemorated on the Rangoon Memorial.

And what I found with talking to Malcolm is that all these kind of characters would come up in his conversations, and I would look them up and find out what happened to them and where they went, and all these kind of connections, those layers that I often talk about in this First World War history, I really began to kind of understand what that meant because everything, one way or another, seemed to be interconnected.

Now later on in 1917, after Arras, his unit moved up to the area near Toulons, just to the south of what was known as the Luz Salian, which was the line that was established after the Battle of Luz in September and October of 1915, with a kind of salient that existed that incorporated the village of Luz and the Bethune Lens Roads to the south, went out towards the main road that ran from Lens up to Hullock.

Hullock was still in German hands, and the Hohenzollern Redoubt to the north was also still in German hands, forming this kind of salient that British troops sat in, and unit after unit kind of passed through there.

But in 1917, this was a sector that had been held by the 46th North Midland Division, who'd been on Malcolm's flank in the Battle of Gommercore on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, and now the Canadian Corps had moved in here with a new commander, Arthur Curry, who had taken over after Bing had been promoted following the capture of Vimy Ridge in April of 1917, and the Canadians now moved into this sector near Lens to take part in an attack on Hill 70.

And it was during this operation that I discovered that Malcolm had been awarded a military cross for his bravery.

And it took me quite a while to get out of him that he had been awarded the MC.

And on one of the trips, when I went up to see him, one of the early trips, I asked him about his medals, and he kind of rummaged around in a drawer and got this kind of box of medals out, which was his MC, which wasn't engraved.

He saw me looking at the back of it and asked me what I was doing, and I said, Well, sometimes people like yourself had your MC engraved, and he said, No, I didn't bother with that.

And then he saw me looking round the edges, the rims of his British War and Victory Medal, and he said, Why are you looking there?

I said, Well your names inscribed on this, and he'd had them all those years, and he didn't even realise they were named, and then there was his Second World War medals in there which also included the Africa Star.

Now after I pressed him a little bit, he finally sent me the details of the award of his military cross, which happened when they were attached to the Canadian Corps, taking part in these Hill 70 operations in the summer of nineteen seventeen.

And this is his official citation.

His MC when it was gazetted, there is no citation listed, but he had the original recommendation that he loaned me, and this is what it said on it.

For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty.

When his battery was under an intense hostile bombardment, he rushed out into the open to extinguish a pile of burning cartridges, and succeeded in doing so, although high explosive shells were bursting within six yards of him, and he was completely blackened with smoke and burning debris.

His complete disregard of personal safety undoubtedly saved the emplacement from being destroyed.

He added to this, this is taken from the official recommendation.

It isn't strictly true.

What really happened was that behind each gun were shells fused with a new 106 fuse, instantaneous action.

And if these went up, so would the guns.

The attack on Hill seventy by the Canadian infantry was time for the next day, and every possible gun was needed for the wire cutting.

The attack was a complete success with light casualties, and I can only suppose that the Canadians were so pleased with our work that they gave me an immediate gong.

Just fancy, that was sixty eight years ago.

I'm not so quick on my feet now.

Like many of the veterans that I interviewed, whether it was about their war or medals that they'd been awarded, they always played that down.

They never pushed themselves forward, they were not those kind of men, and many of them, including Malcolm, always said to me that there were many that they'd seen who'd not survive the war.

They were the ones that really deserved these medals, not them.

That was a common phrase, that was a common idea expressed by many of these veterans that I interviewed.

And I remember being a young student then I wrote back to him and told him that it was very brave what he'd done, and he replied You say my military cross action was very brave.

It wasn't, you know.

It was just a job of work.

One's sternest critic must always be oneself.

What other people may think, you have to live with yourself throughout the years.

In that case, every possible effort had to be made to help the infantry attack and save lives by efficient wire cutting, so every possible gun had to be kept in action.

It was just as simple as that.

When you've seen lines of men in the words of their favourite song hanging on the old barbed wire, you don't argue but act.

And during one of our kind of follow up conversations, either at his house or down the pub often when I went to see him we'd go down to a riverside pub and have lunch there together and talk things over.

He mentioned the fact that he'd been in an observation post at Serre on the thirteenth of november nineteen sixteen, when the Hull Powell's battalions had made their attack on the village right at that end phase of the Battle of the Somme, and he'd seen them go out into no man's land, it had rained heavily, the conditions were poor, they'd literally got stuck in the mud, but the machine guns had not been silenced by the barrage, the barrage had not done its job, and they played merry hell on the men of those hull battalions and chopped them down in no man's land, and it was a sight that he never forgot, and he told me that when the battery position came under fire, they all went down into dugouts that they'd prepared, and he was peeking out and he could see the German shells dropping closer and closer to the guns and closer to the piles of shells stacked alongside them ready for the bombardment, and he knew that if they got hit the guns would be wiped out, but he said he also had a flashback to Sayer, flashback to those men chopped down in no man's land by machine gun fire.

And that spurred him up out of the dugout, out of safety, to act, as he said, not to sit there and think about it, but to do something about the situation that he was in.

And I think again that is partly due to his background.

Growing up in the countryside, being a devotee of rugby and team games, understanding what teamwork was all about, and also having that American mother that I think gave him a different view of the world, made him a man apart, I think, to some of those that he served with.

And whenever I tried to suggest things like that, of course, again, he would play them down.

After a winter in the Eap Salient, Malcolm's unit had been there giving fire support to the units in that winter of nineteen seventeen eighteen, he'd made a decision to put in for a transfer to the Royal Flying Corps.

He'd realized in the work that they'd done with the RFC how important the war in the air was.

He was always proud of his time with the RFC.

First trained as an observer and then as a pilot, and then the war ended before he had a chance to fly in combat.

And later in the Second World War, when he went off to take command of the anti-aircraft defences at Suez as an officer in the Royal Artillery, he very proudly wore his RFC wings on his uniform, and I've got a photograph of him which I'll use for this podcast episode where you can clearly see his old RFC wings on there.

But this period as nineteen eighteen dawned, this was the end of his time on the Western Front, and perhaps it's a good point to end this latest episode of his memoirs.

I always remember one night in february nineteen eighteen after I decided I wanted to fly and applied for a second to the Royal Flying Corps, and had been successful.

We were up in the salient, I said goodbye to the remaining Glamorgans in the siege battery, and stood on the duckboards waiting for my transport.

It was a marvellous night, pitch black with all the stars in creation blazing out in the great firmament of heaven.

I'd stood and watched them on so many nights, a Ryan wheeling across the sky and revolving on his own orbit.

The night was peaceful, an occasional crump of shells, the very lights rising and falling in the line, with the rattle of a machine gun followed by the slower stutter of a spandau.

I could have howled.

It was the only life I knew.

Why was I leaving it?

I would have given anything in those moments to reverse my decision.

But that was the end of his war in France and Flanders.

Perhaps that decision saved his life, who knows?

And as I've looked this week through those letters of his written in Biro on blue writing paper mostly, tucked inside their envelopes with long out of date stamps showing our late Queen, and many of them from forty years ago now.

It's taking me back to that time when I travelled around, meeting men, incredible men like Malcolm Vivian.

Some I knew briefly, only met once.

Others came to be close friends like Malcolm, a man at the end of his life in some ways, and me then at the beginning of my adult life.

I think he saw a lot of himself in me, perhaps that's how we and why we got along, and he always encouraged me in all kinds of ways.

He was a good teacher, and not just about the war.

I learned a lot about life and people from him and many other veterans besides, things that I carried with me into the pathways of my own travels around the world, and in many ways still carry.

Malcolm and men like him are part of my conscience.

They're my moral compass.

They enrich my life, enrich my knowledge of a war that was then, all those years ago, largely forgotten, and all these decades later, they have enabled me to tell you the stories like this, knowing that many of you never got a chance to meet veterans like Malcolm Vivian.

But more than that, Malcolm and so many other names I could mention, they walk with me in the shadows of that past, walk with me still.

Each time I return to that landscape, their spirits form part of one of those many layers that we find there.

They exist within those layers, within the culture of those battlefields, within the very heart of all that we find along that old front line.

You've been listening to an episode of the Old Frontline with me, military historian Paul Reed.

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