Joseph Gray's Camouflage Read online

  ‘I want to be an artist,’ Patricia announced with some finality.

  She hoped he’d be pleased, but her grandfather appeared to be quite mortified. His gentle face set into a frown. He levelled his eyes on Patricia then turned to her mother.

  ‘Art?’ he queried after a long pause. ‘Art? What has art ever done for us as a family?’

  It was a question that hung in the air between them, a question for which there was no answer. Maureen stared at her father uncertainly. What had art done? She couldn’t say. Joe shook his head again and left it there. Patricia gulped her tea and wondered. She couldn’t possibly grasp the hurt in her mother’s eyes, or the true weight of the silence. What had art done? But she made up her mind there and then to visit her grandfather as often as possible.

  After that she invited herself to Marlow every other weekend. She’d sit with Joe in his studio, perusing the creaking bookshelves and watching him at work. There were many canvases, stacked eight to ten deep, and none were ever finished.

  ‘Not yet,’ Joe said. ‘They’re not quite ready, they’re not right.’

  He worked on different paintings at different times, moving between them according to his own logic, adding little details, blending light and shadow. He would paint and paint and paint. What should art do? It shouldn’t end.

  Patricia became particularly attached to a painting of an almond tree in blossom. She could stare for hours at the glistening surface: the dappled sunlight on scattering petals, the delicate brickwork on the wall behind, and the white cat sitting at the base of the trunk, a small and silent spectator. She watched the painting move through various stages, and then on one visit the cat had vanished. She told Joe that this was a mistake. She suggested he put it back.

  After a short debate he did as his granddaughter asked, and in a matter of a few moments its pale, glistening form was reinstated.

  ‘Better,’ said Patricia. ‘Much better.’

  But the next time she visited the cat had gone again.

  ‘Now why have you done that?’ she asked. ‘I think the cat should go back.’

  Joe eventually relented, only to remove it on another day and wait to see what happened. A shadow grew where the cat had sat, as the paint was layered over it. The cat came and went, and this game of hide-and-seek continued over months. It might have gone on for ever.

  ‘But then I met your father and moved to Australia. I never came back, and neither did the cat.’ My mother sighs at the memory. ‘I inherited the painting, long after Joe had died, and I was sad to see the cat had gone.’

  I smile and shake my head.

  No, I tell her.

  The cat didn’t disappear. It was just very well hidden.

  Let me explain.

  Notes

  CAB = Cabinet Papers

  CD, TC, CDTC = Camouglage Development and Training Centre

  HO= Home Office

  IWM = Imperial War Museum

  PREM = Prime Minister’s Office Records

  TNA = The National Archives

  WO = War Office

  Jack Sayer, ‘The Camouflage Game’, refers to his unpublished, hand-written memoir, courtesy of Gillian Ward.

  To avoid repetition, the majority of quotes from Joseph’s letters to Mary are not noted. Unless stated otherwise, they form part of the Barclay family archive. Similarly, images reproduced form part of this archive, except where credited otherwise.

  1 ‘London Press’, June 1922, Joseph Gray to Andrew Paterson in a letter, 22 June 1922, from the Paterson Family Archives, courtesy Andrew Paterson Collection

  2 The Graphic, 20 June 1916, n.p.

  3 Tim Newark & Jonathan Miller, Camouflage, ex. cat. IWM, London, 2007, p. 56

  4 Ibid.

  5 Roy R. Behrens, False Colors: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage, Bobolink Books, Iowa, 2002, p. 171

  6 ‘Notes on Concealment and Camouflage’, The War Office, 1937, IWM collections WO 1732

  7 Diary of 2nd Lt. David Cooper (September 1940–December 1943), IWM Archive 90/6/1

  8 The original version of this poem can be found in IWM Archive Maj. D. A. J. Pavitt Documents.2790

  stands for Aeroplane: his is the eye That Camouflage tries to defeat; this is why

  They no longer looked like soldiers, at least not the kind of soldiers he had ever seen before. Their faces were smeared with dirt, their tunics stiff with mud, their heads and legs swathed in rags. Joseph Gray scanned his own filthy uniform. Was it enough? He took the badge from his bonnet and tucked it in a pocket, just as an extra precaution.

  ‘We had heard that the sun’s rays striking a badge or button had often been the cause of attracting fire.’1

  It was 10 March 1915 – not a day for taking any chances; even if there was no sun, even if it had been raining non-stop for days, even if the landscape ahead looked so destroyed nothing could survive there.

  He crouched low beside a man of the Second Black Watch. With a shaky hand he was lighting cigarette after cigarette, taking a puff or two on each, then throwing them away. To his left, another was emptying his pack.

  He thrust something out.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Shirts and socks.’ The man was digging into his pack. ‘I don’t want them. Here’s a loaf, too!’

  Joe knew what he was really saying, what he was really thinking, but he tried to push him off.

  ‘Away! You’re havering! You’ll be laughing at this tomorrow.’2

  He didn’t sound much like a Scot, and he didn’t look like much of a soldier. He was neither. Joseph Gray was from South Shields, and a year after graduating from its art school, he had moved to Dundee to work as an illustrator for the Courier. The son of a sea captain, he had already travelled plenty – to France, Spain and even Germany – so when the war broke out he saw it as another great adventure. He’d enlisted with his workmates; they all had the same idea.

  ‘There were about twelve of us who called ourselves, from some headline, “Writers and Fighters Too”. We were all from the newspaper offices in Dundee, and meant to keep together.’3

  Lord Kitchener, the war minister, wasn’t allowing any journalists on the Front, and the Official War Artists Scheme was at least another year away, but that didn’t stop men from the Courier, the Dundee Advertiser, the People’s Friend. They’d eagerly joined the 4th Battalion of the Black Watch and had every intention of reporting their experiences from the trenches. As they’d set off from Caledonian Station, people had shouted ‘Keep it short!’, the subeditor’s nightly cry to reporters.

  Yes, that was the plan. Keep it short.

  When I first told my mother that I was going to write Joe’s story, she said: ‘Don’t make him out to be some kind of hero.’ I thought that very strange. She knew nothing about Joe’s time in France. She remembered him only as the old man who’d cut himself off from his only daughter, the old man who would endlessly fuss over his paintings, never able to say: ‘Yes, it is done.’ But if each painting was a battle, then Joe’s first was Neuve Chapelle.

  The 4th landed in France on 26 February 1915; eight days later they were in the trenches. Neuve Chapelle was a small village about twenty miles north of Ypres. If British troops could break through German lines and capture it, then they could push on to the higher ground of Aubers Ridge.

  Yes, that was the plan.

  It started with the ominous drone of British planes. They flew back and forth over the German trenches like giants birds of prey, checking and re-checking the enemy’s positions. Neuve Chapelle was the first large-scale offensive by the British and the first time aerial photography was used. This meant the trench lines were known in advance. This should have made it easier.

  But then a single gun boomed and any sense of a plan disappeared. Joe held his breath as the first bombardment began. He pretended to himself that he knew what to expect, yet it was beyond anything he had imagined. From that first warning signal he felt an assault on all of his senses. Shells and bullets whistled pa
st, whipping up the earth and filling his nostrils, his mouth, making him choke. Shots from eighteen pounders screamed, explosives came like express trains. For a second he dared to peer over the edge of the parapet; he saw clouds of dust and smoke, continuous flashes of fire like a furious burning sunset. It was beautiful in all the ways it shouldn’t be.

  ‘Fourth Black Watch, move to the left in single file!’

  Every order had to be screamed. Joe was blinking grit, following the man in front, barely able to see beyond him, barely able to see anything until he was clambering over it: burst sandbags, earth, the already dead and wounded. Bullets thudded into the ground on both sides, throwing up mud and burning his eyes. Surely he would die now. Through the smoke, blinking, he saw a stretcher-bearer drop like a stone, taking the man he carried down with him. Men were falling all around and the communication trench was filling up with bodies. Blood and mud. It turned out blood was more slippery, but still he was alive and still he followed orders. Those who were able inched their way towards Port Arthur, a ruin of a trench only forty yards from the German line. It twisted and turned like a Chinese puzzle, at times so narrow they had to squeeze their way along. Joe was on his hands and knees, moving inch by painful inch. The confusion and chaos engulfed him. The air was thick with smoke and the explosions didn’t stop.

  The battle was going on around him but without him. He accepted he would die, pushed himself flat on his stomach, and waited. A group of Seaforths appeared. Was this a sign of success? They brought with them a straggling band of German prisoners, wild-eyed and terrified.

  ‘The remarkable thing is not that some were insane – but that any had retained their reason.’4

  A few years ago my aunt Victoria visited a number of First World War battlefields in France. As she was shown around a workshop where they were making headstones, she explained to the guide that her grandfather had been at Neuve Chapelle.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, lowering his eyes. There was silence. ‘I am so sorry.’

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘You don’t understand. He survived.’

  The guide looked up, shocked. ‘Well, he was one of the very, very few . . .’

  My mother’s words come back to me: ‘Don’t make him out to be some kind of hero.’

  Joe never claimed to be. When he wrote about Neuve Chapelle later he was clear about the facts: he was little use to anyone. The 4th had been in France no time at all and he hadn’t yet fired his gun. When evening finally came, he was put to work repairing a dugout, the very one he’d built two days before. He had to step over still-warm corpses to do so, passing back and forth to reach the only working pump. Staying alive was, so far, his great achievement.

  How to make sense of it? He wasn’t sure, but as long as he was breathing he could draw, and there was no denying that these strange, unatural sights demanded it.

  That night he was on sentry duty. ‘As I stood at my post and looked over towards the captured positions, the scene, after darkness fell, was most dramatic. Ahead two farmhouses were burning furiously. From the blazing buildings crimson and golden tongues of flame arose that illuminated the rising billows of smoke. Our artillery still fired incessantly, filling the air with an infernal din. The heavy shells hurtled wailing over our heads, their bursting flashes cleaving the darkness . . .’5

  He began sketching. It made him feel more in control. He drew the men of different regiments, the destroyed earth they hid in, the shells exploding in the night sky. He recorded colours and shapes and shadows. And as he worked he tried to imagine himself back in Dundee, in a future he didn’t dare believe that he had.

  Art was his escape. It gave him a purpose and helped make meaning, and it also offered respite. With pencil in hand Joe could be in two places at once, sunken deep in this ruined earth whilst floating free of it. If he died – which he knew was likely – then his drawings might survive. That was as close as he got to hope.

  But if drawing gave him comfort, it was soon to become his job. Captain Boase had been in charge of the battalion since their first weeks in the drill hall in Dundee and he was aware of Joe’s skill as a draughtsman. Early on, Joe had come under suspicion for his thick Northumbrian accent and his interest in German newspapers – some of the men even thought he was a spy. Joe had had to explain about his background and his travels, how he had drawn many different landscapes. It was enough for Boase to set him to work as his observer, his scout, his extra pair of eyes.

  Joe wasn’t the first artist to find himself so employed. Commanding officers discovered, much to their surprise, that artists could be quite useful in wartime: ‘Every artist is a trained observer,’ after all. ‘His profession has taught him to use his eyes more keenly than the ordinary man, and consequently the artist–soldier is particularly valuable for all reconnaissance and observation work. His ability to draw rapidly and accurately is helpful for many military purposes.’6

  It was no sinecure. The observer had to be good at map-reading and judging of distance, have a keen sense of light and shade. He had to draw quickly, and under intense pressure. He often worked alone, and not only did he need to be attuned to every detail of the landscape, he also had to blend with it. There was no point gathering crucial evidence if it died with him in No Man’s Land. He had to see without being seen.

  By the end of March, Joe was regularly being sent on reconaissance, by himself or shadowing Boase. He perfected the art of crawling on his belly like a lizard, always moving slowly, taking advantage of the debris of the battlefield to make a shield. His uniform was already the colour of the earth, and his hands and legs were now bandaged in rags to protect them from cold as much as anything else. He looked more like an animal than a man, and that was fine, because that was safer.

  Dawn or dusk were the best times since he needed light to work, although that increased the risk, and not just to himself. On Palm Sunday he angered an entire trench occupied by Indian troops. They initially ‘seemed to derive considerable amusement from my sketching’.7 But it didn’t last long. ‘I worked unmolested for five minutes, the Indians gathering round with sundry amused expressions, until a bullet thudded into the parapet about a yard to my right. This was at once followed by another, so I hastily sat down while a Boche across the way emptied his magazine without doing any damage.’ Joe waited and tried again, tentatively lifting his periscope. More fire broke out, much to the disgust of those around him. He soon knew many swear words in Hindustani – ‘at least it sounded more like bad language than anything else’ as he carried on with his task.8

  It helped to see the humour in it – to write letters home boasting about a luxurious billet and delicious food – since only the next night he was lost in the darkness, stumbling from shell hole to shell hole, trying to find his way to a new location. ‘The whole ground was terribly torn up, and many German dead lay around.’ Joe hid under corpses as shells exploded over him, trying not to look too long into their empty staring eyes. They were men just like him, the only difference being the colour of their uniform. ‘Some lay peacefully in composed attitudes; others were twisted into grotesque formless heaps.’9

  He had to wait for a long time until it was safe. The landscape always looked desolate and empty, but even when it looked empty he knew it never was. It was bristling with men poised to kill him. Joe hated the German snipers but had to admire how well they hid: under nets, in hollow trees. They were clever with their trenches, too, alternating different-coloured sandbags that made it harder to see the loopholes. He reported it all back to Boase. The British didn’t understand such tricks, opting for one colour, neatly patted down to form a perfect line.

  Tidiness didn’t help anyone. There are no straight lines in nature, as every artist knows. There should be curves and dips, nothing too jarring. But Joe wasn’t now thinking of marketable pictures and an audience back home. He was part hunter, part prey, and he tried to convince himself it would make him a better artist. One day.

  But it wasn’t just about making s
ketches from life. He had to read and replicate air photographs to make drawings of the German positions; he had to duplicate maps and plans of attack. Sometimes he knew what would happen ahead of time. Would that make it easier?

  Joe Lee, an artist and poet, one of his fighter–writer friends, sought him out one bright May afternoon.

  ‘We’ve got an important job to do in a hurry. We must have a secluded place to discuss it.’10

  They took themselves off to an empty office and there examined the contents of a large brown envelope. It was a map, or rather a plan that showed the distribution of troops for their next engagement. They were now tasked with making exact copies for all commanding officers.

  So it was that Joe knew the exact distribution of troops before the Battle of Festubert. The 4th were to be used in the assault on the German trenches in front of Aubers Ridge. He had a strong, abiding sense that it would be bad.

  The following night, the night of 8 May, it was unseasonally cold. He would remember it years later. A strange wind moaned through the trees as they began marching to Lansdowne Post through darkness, the few lanterns casting ghostly shadows. It felt as if nature was offering a warning. Joe stayed at the head, close to Captain Boase, and in the pale light of dawn they first glimpsed the smoking ruins of the battlefield. It looked like a storm at sea, with clouds of dust and smoke that stretched to infinity.

  Their communication trenches snaked towards the road, but the Germans had located every furrow and a barrage of shell fire had already begun.11 The bombardment had started at four o’clock in the morning and showed no signs of relenting. The battalion couldn’t get any closer. Instead they held back in the reserve trenches, trapped under constant fire. Every inch was jammed with men of different units; Seaforths and Gurkhas, most of them wounded. The smell of burning flesh became overpowering. Stretcher-bearers moved back and forth. Keeping low, Joe waited until the order came to move, but then he wondered how they would move since so many men crowded him. Boase ordered them forward. They stopped and started.