Tracks to the trenches - someone else got our title

As you know, we have been preparing a book about Colonel Pechot, a modest French soldier who, almost single-handedly, introduced 60 centimetre gauge railways as a way of supplying an army at war. These  narrow gauge railways were used by both sides on the Western Front and elsewhere between 1914 and 1918. We therefore were going to call our book 'Colonel Pechot: Tracks to the Trenches' If it doesn't say what's inside the tin, folk aren't going to buy the tin; and what applies to groceries, applies also to literature!

The good people at the Apedale Heritage Centre - Loomer Road, Chesterton, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffs ST5 7RR - have used our title! We are fond of Apedale. It is on an industrial site which took advantage of 60cm equipment that was sold off after the First World War. The site, now run by volunteers, features a coal-mine that can still be visited and an abundance of preserved stock, some of which dates back to the time of the Great War.  One or two photos in our Pechot book were taken there, so we always look to see what's new, so to speak. This time, we were startled to say the least!

We saw a trench!

Digging a trench is hard work and involves some extra materials. You can see how they stand out against the freshly turned earth. When the War began, French soldiers actually had to fight in bright blue uniforms. The British were more fortunate to be in khaki.

For an instant we wondered if we had been swept back in time, but no, the world was still in full glorious colour, and the sound was working perfectly. We went over to investigate. Three lads were indeed digging a trench system.

The trenches are being constructed with corrugated iron, sandbags or, just seen, woven willow

This is to be part of the Living History display at their World War 1 Event which will take place 12th - 14th September. They decided to call the event 'Tracks to the Trenches'
For more details go to www.ww1-event.org

We took a closer look. Three sorts of trenches were under construction. Some had walls of corrugated iron. A length of trench was being skilfully sided with willow - back in the days of the War, some of the conscripts were old-fashioned hedgers and used their skills in the earth of the Western Front. Some trenches were walled with sandbags. Interestingly, if pressed, most veterans of World War 1 used to recount a version of the 'hand' story. A corpse has been incorporated into a trench wall; the hand protrudes. Any soldier passing shakes the hand. My grandpa, who was at the Western Front, used to tell the story. A similar tale was brought home by the soldiers from the Potteries. As Staffordshire is the county of the hearty hand-shake, story ends with the hand coming away in a soldier's grip! If there is a moral to the tale it is this. Veterans of the Great War knew that their listeners would never comprehend the full horror of their experiences. They fell back on macabre humour!

We looked into the construction. As it had been raining, the trench floors already looked authentically muddy. Although they looked deep, walking has to be achieved half-crouching. The trenches follow the authentic pattern of the Western Front, never straight for long. They weren't designed by drunkards; they zig-zig in order to foil enemy gunners.

The material at Apedale is mainly British. The British came late to 60cm railways, starting the War with a small amount of 2'6" gauge material, as I recounted in an earlier blog. Haulage was supposed to be accomplished by animal or human power.

To complete the Trench experience, you have to imagine the full-size version of this locomotive chugging towards the Front. Steam locomotives would stop short of the trenches and allow a petrol-powered one to take the train the rest of the way. Model of a British War Department Baldwin 4-6-0T by Wrightscale

Trench railways were introduced in a 'bottom-up' sort of way. Once the boys on the ground saw the Pechot system, they imitated it. Between spring and autumn 1916, the Top Brass followed, adopting the metric 60cm gauge in preference to 2'

Another system was being developed during the War. You could see from the photographs taken at Apedale how well bright colours show up against mud. The British had learned the value of khaki during the Boer War of 1899 to 1902. The art of camouflage continued to be studied during the 1914-18 War. Indeed, while my grandpa was running bent double along the trenches, Malcolm's grandpa was developing camouflage.

This model was built by Jim Hawkesworth, using a Wrightscale WD bogie kit. It shows a War Department water tank in camouflage. As well as using field colouring, the shape has been 'broken up' to help disguise the shape. WD wagons followed the idea introduced by Pechot - use braked bogies and standardise as far as possible

What if there hadn't been a Pechot?

Looking back at the fifty three months of the Great War, no-one thinks it could have been different. Somehow huge armies on several Fronts magicked the resources to slug it out for a protracted period. In fact, since the American civil war, nothing on this scale had occurred. The answer, we believe, is that portable narrow gauge railways, quickly laid, had overcome the logistics problem. Millions could be fed, watered and reinforced on the field.

Yet the invention was not inevitable. History turns on human will, not on faceless 'forces'. If Pechot hadn't devoted his considerable energies over a life-time to military transport, the French wouldn't have had a supply system ready - well - almost. There were the little problems of actually getting stuff made and training up the troops. They overcame such problems for the best possible reason - the opposition already had railways and trained troops. We are confident that the German Feldbahn system - of just such portable railways - owed its existence to the fact that, some years before the War, they saw what the French were doing!

A 60cm railway goes into the French fort  of Bois L'Abbe near Epinal. Before 1914, the French strategy was to depend on a network of these forts to deter invaders. Supplies and reinforcements were quickly moved thanks to the little railway which was equally at home inside as out.

There was nothing 'inevitable' about the Pechot System. We can imagine how things might have been if there had been no Prosper Pechot. Let us look at the British experience. In the 1870s, around the time that Pechot was looking at difficulties in military transport, the British Army were aware of these problems and setting their best minds to it. Those minds were in the Royal Engineers - allow me to be a little prejudiced - my Grandpa was a Sapper! Railways were the best form of military supply for the period but were hard to lay quickly, one obstacle being steep gradients. Mother Nature does not like flat spaces. If there are any, she fills them up with water. Elevated track in 18" (45cm) gauge looked promising. This was the Fell System. 500 man-days, it was calculated, were required to construct each mile of track. After a few trials in 1872-4, the Engineers filed a report and that was it.

The British Pechot, Mr Henry Handyside, lately Assistant Engineer to the Government of Nelson Province, New Zealand, then came forward. The Handyside Patent System enabled a locomotive to be used as a stationary engine to haul  its train up inconvenient gradients. Existing locomotives could be retrofitted with the necessary equipment. The need for civil engineering was much reduced. Handyside got into the Press and found himself a commercial backer. In 1876, the Royal Engineers were moved to witness trials, and by November 1876, they were ordering their own version - in their favoured gauge of 18". Trials went on until 1885 when it was decided to abandon the system Handyside System altogether on the grounds of unit and operational cost. Metre gauge lines were proposed as an alternative although no-one was delegated to look into the matter. Naivety or complacency? You decide. By 1914, 2'6" (75cm) was the British Army's gauge of choice - not that they had much material anyway (4 1/2 miles).

In the period 1874-80, Captain Pechot of the French Artillerie had conducted trials to determine which gauge would be best for portable military track. When his superiors were too mean or cautious to help him, he turned to Paul Decauville the industrialist. He encountered opposition from the French equivalent of the Sappers. At the time that the British abandoned their trials, the French concluded to their own satisfaction that metre gauge would do for military purposes.  Pechot looked to the Navy for support. Then the Press discovered that all France's defences could be blown to smithereens by high explosive. The Government were forced to act. By sheer force of personality and the sacrifice of all his weekends, Pechot showed that 60cm gauge could, cheaply and quickly, provide the new mobility that was required.

And what of the Germans? They had favoured 75cm for military gauge. When the French were conducting trials around Toul, they too switched gauge to ... 60cm. Soon after the Pechot Bourdon loco appeared, the Germans switched from small locomotives with conical boilers and horse-drawn wagons to a system of bogie wagons of roughly the same dimensions as the Pechot ones, pulled by locomotives analogous to the Pechot one. They worked even harder at field supply than the French. By Christmas 1914, at the time when most experts decreed that the War would be over, it had only just begun.