Chasseaud - Rats Alley: Trench Names of the Western Front

Genius named them, as I live! What but genius could compress

In a title what mans humour said to mans supreme distress?

Jacobs Ladder ran reversed, from earth to a fiery pit extending

With not angels but poor Angles, those for the most part descending.

Thence Brocks Benefit commanded endless fireworks by two nations,

Yet some voices there were raised against the rival coruscations.

Picturedrome peeped out upon a dream, not Turner could surpass,

And presently the picture moved, and greyed with corpses and morass.

So down south; and if remembrance travel north, she marvels yet

At the sharp Shakespearean names, and with sad mirth her eyes are wet.

The Great Wall of China rose, a four-foot breastwork, fronting guns

That, when the word dropped, beat at once its silly ounces with brute tons;

Odd Krab Krawl on paper looks, and odd the foul-breathed alley twisted,

As one feared to twist there too, if Minnie, forward quean, insisted.

Where the Yser at Dead End floated on its bloody waters

Dead and rotten monstrous fish, note (east) The Pike and Eel headquarters.

Ah, such names and apparitions! Name on name! Whats in a name?

From the fabled vase the genie in his cloud of horror came.

Edmund Blunden

Maps and photographs in the text are from the authors collection unless otherwise credited.

First published in 2006

This extended second edition first published 2017

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2017

All rights reserved

Peter Chasseaud 2006, 2017

Foreword Alan Sillitoe 2006, 2017

The right of Peter Chasseaud to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the authors and publishers rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 8490 4

Original typesetting by The History Press

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

The column, like a snake, winds through the fields,

Scoring the grass with wheels, with heavy wheels

And hooves, and boots. The grass smiles in the sun,

Quite helpless. Orchard and copse are Paradise

Where flowers and fruits grow leisurely, and birds

Rise in the blue, and sing, and sink again

And rest. The woods are ancient. They have names

Thiepval, deep vale, La Boisselle, Aubpines,

Named long ago by dead men. And their sons

Know trees and creatures, earth and sky, the same.

We gouge out tunnels in the sleeping fields.

We turn the clay and slice the turf, and make

A scheme of cross-roads, orderly and mad,

Under and through, like moles, like monstrous worms.

Dig out our dens, like cicatrices scored

Into the face of earth. And we give names

To our vast network in the roots, imposed,

Imperious, desperate to hide, to hurt.

The sunken roads were numbered at the start.

A chequer board. But men are poets, and names

Are Adams heritage, and English men

Imposed a ghostly English map on French

Crushed ruined harvests and polluted streams.

So here run Piccadilly, Regent Street,

Oxford Street, Bond Street, Tothill Fields, Tower Bridge,

And Kentish places, Dover, Tunbridge Wells,

Entering wider hauntings, resonant,

The Boggart Hole, Bleak House, Deep Doom and Gloom.

Remembering boyhood, soldier poets recall

The desperate deeds of Lost Boys, Peter Pan,

Hook Copse, and Wendy Cottage. Horrors lurk

In Jekyll Copse and Hyde Copse. Nonsense smiles

As shells and flares disorder tiny lines

In Walrus, Gimble, Mimsy, Borogrove

Which lead to Dum and Dee and to that Wood

Where fury lurked, and blackness, and that Crow.

Theres Dead Mans Dump, Bone Trench and Carrion Trench,

Cemetery Alley, Skull Farm, Suicide Road,

Abuse Trench and Abyss Trench, Cesspool, Sticky Trench,

Slither Trench, Slimy Trench, Slum Trench, Bloody Farm.

Worm Trench, Louse Post, Bug Alley, Old Boot Street.

Gas Alley, Gangrene Alley, Gory Trench.

Dreary, Dredge, Dregs, Drench, Drizzle, Drivel, Bog.

Some frame the names of runs for frames of mind.

Tremble Copse, Wrath Copse, Anxious Crossroads, Howl,

Doleful and Crazy Trenches, Folly Lane,

Ominous Alley, Worry Trench, Mad Point,

Lunatic Sap, and then Unbearable

Trench, next to Fun Trench, Worry Trench, Hope Trench,

And Happy Alley.

How they swarm, the rats.

Fat beasts and frisking, yellow teeth and tails

Twitching and slippery. Here they are at home

As gaunt and haunted men are not. For rats

Grow plump in ratholes and are not afraid,

Resourceful little beggars, said Tom Thinn,

The day they ate his dinner, as he died.

Their names are legion. Rathole, Rat Farm, Rat Pit,

Rat Post, Fat Rat, Rats Alley, Dead Rats Drain,

Rat Heap, Flat Rat, the Better Ole, King Rat.

They will outlast us. This is their domain.

And when I die, my spirit will pass by

Through Sulphur Avenue and Devils Wood

To Jacobs Ladder along Pilgrims Way

To Eden Trench, through Orchard, through the gate

To Nameless Trench and Nameless Wood, and rest.

A.S. Byatt

The names of many people who came to inhabit my novels were taken, after happy, and minute examination, from the 1-inch sheets of the Ordnance Survey. The name of a river, farm or, more generally, village, was given to a character if the surrounding landscape and the sound of the word fitted his or her temperament, and mirrored in some way what their fate was going to be. In any case this seemed a sure method of making the name easy on the memory of the reader. Thus many Nottinghamshire villages, in name at least, have adorned or otherwise my books.

It gives me great pleasure to see Peter Chasseauds erudite analysis on the subject of nomenclature with regard to the Western Front in the Great War. Trench names from that conflict have always fascinated me, so not only should the book be of much use to historians, but it will also be a gold mine to the intelligent and questing tourist and battlefield enthusiast who roams the areas with which it deals. Above all, it will delight the general reader who has any feeling for that war.

The author of this work is the most knowledgeable person I know on the landscape and cartography of that murderous campaign, as all his former works prove. The same subjects have always been of great interest to me, and I recall talks with Dr Chasseaud a few years ago, concerning the necessity of some treatment about the multifarious trench names of the Western Front. The topic seemed to us full of arcane but real value.