Blood stained the sand and water of Suvla Bay (From Worcester News)

Blood stained the sand and water of Suvla Bay

3:59pm Monday 14th November 2011 in Mike Pryce By Mike Pryce

FLIES were everywhere.

Great green buzzing things that covered every inch of the stinking corpses of dead horses and unburied soldiers.

The living were not spared their attention either. They settled on food, on open wounds and bloody bandages, on your mouth, your eyes and in your ears.

“It was a ghastly hole and I ought to thank God every day that he brought me safely through it all and back to England, home and beauty.”

So wrote Victor Godrich of the Queen’s Own Worcestershire Hussars in the diary he kept during the First World War.

But this was not the land where the big guns at last fell silent.

Where mud, blood and gore filled trenches in Flanders fields. This was an altogether different place.

This was Gallipoli.

Corporal Godrich recalled: “We had many rough times afterwards on the desert and in the hills of Palestine, but they were not to be compared with Gallipoli. I shall always remember the hopeless dawns, the thirst, hunger, filth, heat, stench and the sunken cheeks and staring eyes of men dying.”

This weekend much will have been made, quite rightly, about the suffering of servicemen and women in the armed conflicts of the last 100 years, and when it comes to the First World War there will be the familiar, stuttering, black and white film clips of brave men clambering out of their dugouts and heading across No Man’s Land on the Somme.

For as Sir Jerry Wiggin points out in his foreword to the book which serialises Godrich’s immaculately kept diaries: “It is a sad fact most people in this country are unaware the First World War was fought anywhere else but in France and against any other enemy than the Germans.”

Mountains of Moab, which has been published by Victor Godrich’s son, Dr John Godrich, a retired GP, re-balances the impression. It costs £20 and 50 per cent of the profits will go to the Worcestershire Yeomanry Museum Trust, which has an impressive and comprehensive display in Worcester Museum and Art Gallery in Foregate Street.

It is a cavalryman’s tale of fighting the Turks from Cairo to Damascus and of four weeks in the hellhole that was Gallipoli.

Along with many of his fellow countrymen from the shires of England, Victor Godrich joined the local Yeomanry, the mounted units of the Territorial Army. He was shipped with his horse to Egypt in April 1915 and soon posted to the Suvla Bay landing at Gallipoli. He survived the horrors of the conflict but was ironically then struck down by typhoid fever and sent back to a military hospital in Malvern to recuperate.

Recovered, he was again sent to the Middle East in time for the last ever British cavalry charge – on the Turkish guns at Huj – and then took part in the three battles for Gaza.

After the liberation of Jerusalem, he wintered in the Moabite Mountains of Judea, among the scorpions, freezing cold and enemy bullets, before being demobilised at Damascus in August 1918 and returning home to England.

Those are the bare bones of his story, but along the way there’s much gritty and occasionally gruesome detail to be filled in.

Such as the tearful farewell at the train station when the regiment departed for final training. As mothers, wives and sisters cried their eyes out, the men were issued with identification discs.

Godrich said: “We had to tell the girls they were given to us to wear in case we were blown to bits, thus our corpses could be indentified.

Well, wasn’t it likely to be the finishing touch to a sad farewell.”

Then there is the dark humour of sitting in the shade of a group of trees between battles: “There was a dead man’s boot projecting from his grave in the middle of the trees and this came in very handy for knocking one’s pipe on.

“We were quite hardened to details like that.”

In reflective mood at Gallipoli, Godrich wrote: “War is a glorious pastime in books when you have the whole scheme laid out, the strategy explained and a map with a red line showing ‘our position’ marked.

“But to the poor beggars ‘doing it’ there is nothing but misery. One is just a ‘unit’. Your job is to do your turn on the parapet then get down and sleep (if you can), then you have to start digging or go for a mile or two under fire to fetch water, rations or ammunitions.”

Suffering from typhoid, Godrich was put on to a hospital ship bound for Alexandria. he said: “It was packed full with sick and wounded.

Every deck and gangway filled with men, some half dead. Deaths were numerous but there was no funeral service, just a blanket sewn around the body and down the plank into the sea.”

But if the cavalrymen suffered, so did their horses, terribly. In his preface, John Godrich says: “When you read this book, think always of the horses.

“They were shipped by the thousand to take part in the campaign, a cavalry regiment had up to 400 in action at full strength.

At the end of the war some officers managed to ship their beloved hunters back to England but the majority were sold to dealers and then used by Arab merchants with carts, becoming abused, emaciated and diseased”. In the land where the smell of oranges and lemons and death filled the air.

􀁥 Mountains of Moab, is available from Worcestershire Yeomanry Museum in Worcester City Museum, Foregate Street or good bookshops. ISBN 970-0-954-90439-5.