Last days of Bradford Pals in French village Bus-les-Artois

To anyone passing through this rural corner of Northern France, there would be nothing remarkable about the church flanked by trees. But look closer at the Church of Saint Pierre and you’ll see the names of young soldiers scratched into the limestone walls. Alongside them are regiment numbers and dates. Some of the lads carved June 30, 1916 into the wall - perhaps knowing it would be the last day of their lives.

The village of Bus-les-Artois offered brief respite for the Bradford Pals billeted there in the summer of 1916, prior to the Battle of the Somme. Up to 8,000 troops stayed in tents around the village, with Divisional Headquarters in its chateau.

For most of the Pals, the village they fondly referred to as‘Bus’ offered a last taste of leisure time, before they arose early on July 1 to march to the nearby Somme battlefields. Most of them never returned.

It was ‘Bus’ where they scrubbed their uniforms and polished their boots, played cards over a drink or two in the estaminet, sat among orchard trees listening to bandsmen play in the sunshine, and watched Charlie Chaplin in a makeshift cinema.

These days ‘Bus’, in the Hauts-de-France region, is home to just 120 people. More than a century after the soldiers set up camp there, the village remains a time capsule, with residents still unearthing items in back gardens and nearby fields. Beer bottles, shaving kits and toothbrushes are among the things the men left behind, displayed in a ramshackle museum. Still visible is the outline of a cinema screen in an old barn, and a ticket booth etched into its wooden door. It is like the men simply packed up and marched off yesterday.

The story of Bus-les-Artois draws coachloads of visitors, mainly on trips to cemeteries seeking the graves of fathers, uncles and grandfathers - men who lost their lives in the mud and horror of the First World War.

Bradford Pals veterans on a trip to Bus-les-Artois (Image: Image submitted)

I visited Bus-les-Artois in November 2016 with members of Bradford WW1 Group. We were in France to unveil a Bradford Pals memorial on the Serre Road, marking the centenary of the end of the Battle of the Somme, and it felt particularly poignant to call at ‘Bus’, where so many Pals spent their final days. The village mayor, Ghislain Lobel, showed us the old barn which was converted into a cinema, where the soldiers watched silent films, and another barn where some of the men slept. Here we saw a shell case fashioned in a candle-holder, with a smut of candle smoke visible on the wall above.

The carvings of soldiers’ names and drawings in the soft stone church walls are fading, but I could make out ‘W. Yorks’ and I thought of the local young men clinging to their final hours of freedom.

Inside the church was a fascinating display of photographs of soldiers going about their duties in the village: sharpening bayonets, washing and ‘de-lousing’ uniforms in tin tubs and hanging their socks on a wall behind the church. The scrapbook of photos, put together by a villager during the war, offers a glimpse into life behind the scenes of the Front. Many of the photos reflect the international feel of the village, when soldiers from around the world were billeted there. In one photo, Maori soldiers are doing the Haka, another shows a New Zealand dressing station in nearby woodland, and there are also images of animals used in the war, including a dog lying at the grave of a soldier in his regiment.

A little museum, housed in a shed at the end of a row of cottages, contains an array of items the men used during their daily lives at the Front, including toothbrushes, helmets, petrol cans, binoculars, stretchers and shell carriers. “It’s as if they’d just left,” said Bradford WW1 Group founder Geoff Barker.

Two Bradford Pals billeted at ‘Bus’ never made it to the front line. Private Herbert Crimmins and Private Arthur Wild were on ration duties, carrying water, ammunition and stores. At noon on June 30 the ration party’s officer, Second Lieutenant JR Thornton, issued orders: the men were to parade at 6pm that day, ready to proceed to the trenches.

That afternoon Crimmins and Wild went to an estaminet for a few drinks, maybe try to forget, briefly, the battle looming the next day. Later, they wandered a little and fell asleep in a field. When they awoke at dusk, they’d missed the 6pm roll call and, afraid to return to camp, walked to a nearby village. Three days later the pair gave themselves up to the Military Police and on August 16 they appeared before a Field Court Martial. Despite good character reports from their officer, the men were found guilty of desertion and were executed by firing squad. They are buried at Vieille Chappelle Cemetery.

In ‘Bus’ stands a Bradford Pals memorial installed in 2016 by a group of Bradford City supporters. The group, called Bus to Bradford, raised £3,000 for the stone and unveiled it at a ceremony attended by the Bus-les-Artois mayor and French Army veterans.

Bradford Pals memorial at Bus-les-Artois (Image: Image submitted)

The Somme Offensive, fought by British and French armies against the Germans, took place between July 1 and November 18, 1916. One of the largest and bloodiest First World War battles, it left more than one million men wounded or killed. In the first few hours of the battle, 1,770 Bradford men were killed or injured.

For those who never returned to ‘Bus’, those precious days in the village in late June, washing socks, listening to music and carving their names into walls, offered a brief respite from the horror awaiting them down the road.