Patrick (‘Pat’) Campbell retired to Budleigh after a career in teaching, and wrote four books. The Ebb and Flow of Battle (1977) and In the Cannon’s Mouth (1979) were based on his experiences during World War I, when he served as Captain and Second-in-Command of 150 Army Brigade in the Royal Field Artillery. He was awarded the Military Cross, though he points out in The Ebb and Flow of Battle that the award was made based on a senior officer’s blatantly fictional account which is reproduced in the official citation. ‘I was distressed when I read it,' he tells us. 'It was not true that I had inflicted heavy casualties on the enemy.’
The Ebb and Flow of Battle deals with events in 1918 and is not an obviously anti-war book. However a noticeable theme is the author’s emphasis on the common humanity shared by both sides in conflict. Campbell had fought in Belgium, at Ypres and at Paschendaele during the previous year, but was struck by the more peaceful landscape of Northern France where he arrived in March after sick leave. ‘Ypres had been all shells and shell-holes, mud and desolation, but here there was grass, and men played football only three miles from the line,’ he writes. An observation post gives him ‘a wonderful view’ over enemy-held territory. ‘At Ypres I had never seen a living German soldier, except prisoners. Now I saw some, and it gave me a strange feeling. They were our enemies. They had to try and kill us and we had to try and kill them, but they looked like ourselves and were doing ordinary things.’
By August, the ebb and flow of battle finally saw the approach of victory for the Allies, but with it, the author’s keen sense of losses suffered on both sides. ‘In the evening I took the horses to water in the little river Luce, we crossed no-man’s-land, we went inside what had been enemy land in the morning. His front-line trench was full of bodies, all Germans, they were the first dead Germans I had seen for a long time, I had never seen so many in one place. The sight of them gave me no elation, as once it would have done. Satisfaction yes, we had won a great and totally unexpected victory, but elation no. In March our front-line trench must have looked like that, full of brave Jocks and South Africans.’
The similarity in scenes of slaughter is in contrast to the peaceful landscape. ‘It was a beautiful summer evening, and the little river Luce was beautiful. It was like a little river in England and the flowers growing at the water’s edge, where my horses were drinking, were English flowers. The water was so clean, the field in front of me looked utterly peaceful, but only fifty yards away there was that trench, full of dead Germans, we should see them again on our way back, the grey faces, the poor twisted bodies. They had been bayoneted by the Canadians in the morning, you can’t take prisoners in a front-line trench in an attack. Wives, mothers, sweethearts, would not know yet, they would still be writing letters, but the letters would never be read. It might have been us.’
A month later comes a moment of sympathy for a single enemy figure spotted by chance. It comes as Campbell overlooks the ‘unspoiled country’ beyond the last line of German defences on the Western Front known as the Hindenburg Line: ‘undulating hills, villages, little woods, villages fit to live in, trees that bore leaves, a hillside without shell-holes. It was like a Promised Land,’ he muses.
‘I saw a German cart being driven along the road behind the canal, close up to the line. I could have shot at it if I had been in communication with the battery. The man was driving furiously, he knew his danger, he must have been delayed in some way and daylight had caught him, now he was galloping back towards safety, whipping up his horse. I was probably the only Englishman who saw him, and I could do nothing . But after one moment’s regret at my impotence I felt sorry for him, I hoped he would escape, I was glad when he reached a bend in the road and was hidden from sight.’
Patrick Campbell – ‘Soldier, Schoolmaster, Writer’ – died on 26 June 1986, aged 88, and was buried alongside his wife Camilla in St Peter’s Burial Ground, on Moor Lane, Budleigh Salterton.
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