At the start of the war I volunteered in Coventry at Greyfriars Church. I was immediately posted to Devonshire Regiment that was short of men. I had a travel warrant for the railways, they were based in Exeter. There, I got to know a man named Jim Wesson. He was freakishly tall, about 6' – I was above average height, and I came up shoulder height to Jim. He was painfully thin, although he ate like a horse, all the army allowed him to eat. The training consisted mainly of square-bashing and spud-bashing, usually with blunt knives, and occasionally rusty. How we didn't poison the entire battalion, I didn't know!
After training, we were sent to North France, near a village called Saint Chevre. I had an anglo-french dictionary in my kit, and it translated to Saint Goat, which caused much merriment for about a couple of days. The village had a church and a couple of bars, since deserted. All the village walls were ruined by the constant shell-fire. We were in a trench and all it did was drizzle, we were damp throughout the year. There was mud all around, and the hazard of trench cave-in always threatened. The sandbag and duckboards became close friends.
We were in a salient to the right of the front line.
Eventually, the sergeant, Sergeant Morton became cracked, with the constant shell-fire. With a sneer, he announced Jim and I would be on sentry from about 2a.m. We were cold and it rained. It was January, 1917, and the German soldiers had gone from pickelhaubes to stahlhelms. We were plonked down in a trench and keeping watch: the main hazard was dozing off. The penalty was doing so was a shouting-at from the sergeant, two offences and it meant death at dawn.
In charge of our battalion was Major Farqhar: you can guess what we all called him. All except Jim, who was strict chapel. I, by contrast, was a freethinker, occasionally agnostic, at other times, a full-blown atheist. I had read and owned a copy of Darwin's On The Origin Of Species.
We even slept together, for warmth, rather than homosexuality. In fact, homosexuals were shot at dawn. I had a wife and a couple of kids. I cursed the fact that Jim was so bony, he couldn't help it.
We slept fully clothed, just kicked off our muddy, hobnailed boots on the duckboards.
Under Major Farqhar, there was supposed to be some junior officers. There weren't, they had all got wiped out by a German shell, at least we guessed it was German. Major Farqhar had requested some replacements, there was a delay, we all guessed it was because graduates moved away from Devon because of lack of employment opportunities.
We lit a couple of cigarettes, hand-rolled. Hand rolling them kept you awake longer. It was one of few pleasures allowed by the British Army, apart from a sip of rum when you went over the top. We lit the cigarettes under the brims of our tin hats, angled to spare the flame. There was drizzle all around, huge drops accumulated around the brims.
Walt Pascoe had got killed on the latrine by a a german shell. We found one eyeball, that was all that was left of him. We found nearby a bottom jaw. It wasn't part of Pascoe as it had too many teeth. We collected all the eyeball and the faeces in an empty sandbag. Such was the reality of life on the Western Front. We hurled the sandbag over the top, into no-man's land.
We were on 'stag' when suddenly something erected itself in no-man's land, it was something about twenty feet tall, it resembled a man.
“Pass me the binoculars”, I said to Jim.
“Sure, but you'd better be careful with them. We don't get many of them these days.”
“I only want to observe that thing, to evaluate what it was.”
Through the binoculars I saw the colossus. We assumed it was the German revenge because we had unveiled tanks a couple of months before. It was armoured and had triangular feet with 2 toes and 1 behind. The hands were like the feet with 2 fingers and 1 thumb. The head was clad in a stahlhelm with horns like the devil. The face was skull-like. We guessed it was to make British troops panic. The colossus held a halberd rather than a Mauser rifle. The whole thing was painted in feldgrau paint.
I rang the bell to summon the sergeant, as we didn't know what it was. The sergeant turned up, buttoning his battledress.
We unleashed a couple of shots, whether they hit, we didn't know. In the half light I couldn't see the target well enough. Jim unleashed a couple of shots, and he was the better marksman out of us two. I assumed his couple of shots hit and bounced off.
“Shoot its eyes out”, commanded the sergeant.
“What eyes? It ain't got none”, said Jim.
“Wait.”, said the sergeant and went off. He returned with a sniper. The sniper sucked his thumb and held it up to test the wind. He then adjusted his rifle, some wheels, Jim and I were amazed by his actions. He then unleashed a couple of shots, via his telescopic sight.
“It should be dead, I hit it in the heart and the head”. Yet, by virtue of its armour, it kept marching towards the front line.
After a couple of minutes, a Lewis gun opened up its chattering. Eventually, the colossus got tired of it and swung its halberd, catching the Lewis gun operator with the spike and mashing him.
The colossus advanced on the front line. Following it, there were dozens of troops. There should have been thousands but the Germans had just completed a big push a few days ago,losing several thousands.
The British artillery then waked up and fired a couple of shells. They fell short and exploded in the mud. Then one hit the colossus in the middle of its chest, it didn't explode, it was a dud.
Sergeant Morton issued, “I want two volunteers to undertake a mission most dangerous.”
Private Wilson said, “I'll go.”
He volunteered for any mission, volunteering for anything that helped the British Empire. He was a pink-skinned Unionist from Northern Ireland. We all call him, “Spud”. It enraged him therefore we did it more. His hair was gingerish and cropped short, he had a severely clipped military moustache. He seemed like he would explode from his battledress, even if it were two sizes larger, he would still explode. His tin hat seemed tiny in comparison.
“Private Allen-Smith,I want you to go too, as back up.”. My name was, in fact, Allen Smith. Sergeant Morton got it wrong. I didn't contradict him as this would lead to further punishment.
“You are to approach the whatever-it-is, and attach a satchel charge coated with axle grease to it, whatever part you're able to. The axle grease should make it stick.”
It was like a sentence of death, my stomach turned upside down and it rumbled there and then. My skin went white.
We crouched approaching the colossus. The length of wire spiralled out from Morton's satchel bomb. It led to a couple of men with a plunger, hidden behind our front lines.
Just then, a parachute flare shed its blinding light. Morton put down the satchel charge, and he went under the colossus's foot. I didn't see what happened, distracted by the parachute flare. We prayed that Morton was crushed, otherwise he would have drowned in the mud. There was no huge pressure on me to make good on my now solo mission. I prayed to God to let me survive this encounter with the colossus, to let me get back to my kids, even though I was normally agnostic. I attached the satchel charge to the colossus's leg. I straightaway dived into a shell crater nearby as the men handling the plunger were very nervous. The explosion hit me. I remembered nothing until a couple of weeks later, I woke up in a French hospital, attended by some middle-aged nuns. They couldn't speak English and I couldn't speak French apart from from a few schoolboy phrases. I must have broken my leg during the explosion and broke my little finger on the fall to the shell crater.
The sergeant came to visit me, with the news I'd get the Victoria Cross. Major Farqhar had recommended it personally. Eventually the VC turned out to b just gossip. The authorities had countermanded it as they didn't want the story about the colossus getting out as it'd cause panic in the troops.
A couple of days later, Jim came to see me. It was the first day he could get off. When we got all the pleasantries over, we embraced, in Jim's case, gingerly, as my injuries were still significant.
I didn't get out of the hospital for twelve weeks. It felt I was in the hospital forever. He said,
“The colossus fell over, its leg was shattered.”
“Are there other colossi?”
“Not as yet, it seems to have been an experiment.”
When I got out, it was straight back to the trenches, like nothing had ever changed. I was promoted to Lance Corporal, Sergeant Wilson handed me the stripes himself with gritted teeth, he still hated me.
The colossus was transported back to Blighty and analysed thoroughly. The colossus was made of steel and brass, with some parts consisted of oak. It was powered by a diesel motor, our assumptions that it was powered by steam were incorrect.
It was manned by a short character, maybe a dwarf, called Joachim Schulz. The reason he joined up was he lived in a small village near Munich, he must have been searching for excitement in his short life. He had died when the satchel charge went off. He wasn't strapped in and died of concussion in the steel room. Unusually, the Germans didn't put their personnel first. We'd all seen the German trenches, how they were much more luxurious than our own. He had a morass of levers by which he manipulated the colossus and a periscope that allowed him to see.The upper lens was situated in the throat of the monster. Joachim joined up at 15, we all cursed the Germans for their willingness to allow children to join the army. Later we had to reflect that many of our comrades joined up under-age.
