1917 has wowed film critics... and these tales of the heroic battlefield runners who inspired it
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Tony Rennell www.facebook.com
Sam Mendes acknowledges a hero to whom 1917 is a homage - his grandfather, Trinidadian Alfred Mendes, a writer whose tales of World War I young Mendes lapped up.
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We live in an age of instant communication — by internet, mobile phone, texts, blogs and all the other wonders of cyber-technology.

Royals rashly resign on Instagram. In a micro-second, a drone can be instructed from 6,000 miles away in Washington to launch a missile strike on a rogue Iranian general arriving at Baghdad airport and eviscerate him. The speed of delivery is staggering.

It is ironic, therefore, that one of the most talked-about films of 2020 is one whose story depends on the oldest and slowest of all devices for transmitting orders and information — the message passed person to person by hand or by mouth.

British director Sam Mendes’s gripping World War I epic 1917 opened in cinemas last week, having already won him a Golden Globe for best drama film and best director.

It’s also been nominated for ten Oscars and nine Baftas. The storyline that is making it such a huge success is a simple one — will a vital battlefield message get through or not? If it doesn’t, there will be a bloodbath.

One spring morning in 1917 on the Western Front, two young British soldiers are called to a general’s dugout and instructed to make their way through enemy territory with a desperate warning to a fellow British commander in a distant location.

He is due to launch an attack on the Germans at dawn the next day but, if he does, he will be walking into a trap. ‘Your orders,’ the general solemnly tells the two lance-corporals, ‘are to deliver a message calling off tomorrow morning’s attack. If you fail to get through in time, there will be a massacre and we will lose 1,600 men.’

As an added incentive to make it, the brother of one of the messengers is a lieutenant in the brigade that faces being slaughtered. No pressure, then!

What follows is a Mendes spectacular of action and white-knuckle suspense — befitting the man who directed the last two Bond films — as the corporals cross No Man’s Land between the two armies, stagger through trenches and tunnels, fight their way through the ruins of towns and kill Germans who stand in their way.

Their own side try to stop them. ‘You can’t possibly make it, mate. Are you insane?’ But they press on regardless, telling each other breathlessly — as messengers have done ever since Pheidippides brought the news from the Battle of Marathon to Athens in 490BC — ‘We need to keep moving.’

For Mendes — who was knighted in the New Year Honours list — the story has great relevance to today (as well as personal relevance, which we will come to later).

‘We’re in a very self-obsessed culture,’ he said in a recent interview. ‘We live in a time where we’ve lost the idea of what it means to sacrifice ourselves for others. Here was a generation of people who sacrificed everything for something bigger than themselves.

‘There’s a line in the film by one of the soldiers, who says, “It’s not even our country!” and yet they went because they were fighting for something bigger than their country, and that is something I find very moving.’

In our modern, high-tech world, it’s also easy to forget how primitive the war fought by our grandfathers and great-grandfathers was just a century ago.

Vehicles were generally horse-drawn, rifles bolt-action, bayonets a must, trenches dug by hand, barbed wire the main defence, gas indiscriminate and liable to be blown back in your face by a change in wind direction.

Communications were basic, relying on centuries-old methods such as semaphore, flags, whistles, pigeons and even dogs. There was Morse code via telegraph, but transmission required a physical line, which was dangerous to lay and not always feasible at the front line. Radio existed, but the equipment was cumbersome and army commanders distrusted it.

Hence the reliance on the courage and determination of human messengers, such as the two in Mendes’s film. In that tale, they are soldiers picked from the ranks for a one-off mission, but the historical records of World War I show there were also real, dedicated and trained runners and couriers who were constantly on the move on the battlefield.

Identified by a red armband on the left arm, they took orders to the front line from military HQs miles away in the rear and took reports of the fighting back, as well as carrying messages between positions on the front.

They lived dangerously, dodging enemy bombardments, sticking their heads above the parapet — literally in the case of Corporal Robert Iley, from County Durham, a runner with the Yeoman Rifles section of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps.

‘Our front line was a hastily dug, shallow trench on the Somme,’ he recorded in his memoirs, ‘and the CO gave me a message to take to the battalion on our right. “There is no room to pass along the trench,” he told me, “so you must run along the top. You’ll probably be killed, but you must go.”

‘I returned safely and was greeted with “Hullo, Iley, still alive”, and was sent with a similar message to the left. Again I was lucky.’

Was he scared? All he would admit to, with the understatement typical of his generation, was being a little wound up.

More was required of a runner than simply being lucky, quick on his feet and brave to the point of foolhardiness. They had to be physically fit, mentally alert and reliable.

The best of them were experts in map-reading and reconnaissance, with an ability to memorise the configuration of the front line. They had to know every twist and turn en route to the front and through the maze of trenches.

One of their duties was to guide units of fresh troops as reinforcements and replacements to whichever section of the front they were needed — and they had to be able to do so in the dark because such troop movements were less risky at night.

Delivering platoons to the front could be particularly hazardous — as Iley found out when moving up for the Third Battle of Ypres in the summer of 1917.

‘I had to guide a party into the line, and had a fearful journey. The enemy evidently expected an attack, as he shelled all roads heavily with gas and shrapnel. My party was the last to leave, and I took them by a route not taken by the other parties.

‘Wearing gas masks, we doubled most of the way, dropping into ditches here and there and always finding a shelter when most necessary. We galloped over the Ypres Canal, a heavy shell just missing our rear. The officer I was accompanying was alarmed, thinking I was lost, but we reached our destination first and without casualties.

‘I felt handsomely rewarded when the officer and each man shook hands with me. Most of the other parties going up had suffered heavily, many being gassed.’

Private William Hunter was a runner with the New Zealand forces fighting in France and was awarded the Military Medal for conspicuous gallantry. The citation praised his ‘complete disregard for danger and energetic devotion to duty’.

It recorded how ‘he had to pass through the enemy’s barrage, but he kept in touch with the forward troops at a time when telephone communication was impossible’.

On another occasion, he made it through despite intense enemy artillery and machine gun barrage to deliver urgent despatches to the forward companies. ‘His gallant conduct was a splendid example to his comrades.’

Eventually, Hunter must have taken one risk too many because he was killed in action in 1918, just 19 days before the end of the war. He was aged just 20 and one of four brothers to die in the conflict.

By some miracle, runner Corporal Iley’s luck held and he survived the war, but it was often a close call. He was cycling along a duckboard track with a fellow courier one day ‘when we heard the approach of a shell.

‘My companion dived into a water-filled trench but foolishly I cycled on. I was blown into a tree, but got off with scratches.’

On the Somme, he delivered despatches from a general on the front line to brigade headquarters, then, as instructed, headed straight back to the trench he’d come from. Some British soldiers stopped him just before he got there, telling him the enemy had captured the trench.

‘But I had my orders, and thought those fellows mistaken, so I jumped confidently into the trench, straight into some Germans. I was too surprised to do anything, but the Jerries more so. All but one ran away, and he raised his hands saying, “Mercy! Kamerad!” I took him prisoner.’

So exposed were runners on the battlefield that there was every chance of being hit by ‘friendly fire’ as well as by the enemy.

While carrying a report back from the front, Iley threw himself to the ground as a barrage of shells crashed overhead, missing him by a whisker. They had come from his own side.

Nor did being a messenger spare him the worst of the fighting. At Passchendaele in September 1917, he lay beside his commanding officer in the dawn as they waited for zero hour and an all-out attack on an enemy-held ridge.

‘Watch in hand, the colonel counted the seconds — 50, 40 and down to five, four, three, two — and off we moved to meet very stubborn resistance from German pillboxes which our artillery barrage had missed.

‘Their machine guns swept us with bullets, and some of our new men wavered, this being their first experience of war. The colonel rallied them and ordered my section to rush a particular pillbox that was holding us up.

The Huns threw a flare bomb in our midst and mowed us down with machine gun fire. Of my section of ten, five were killed and four wounded.’

He himself was hit. A bullet in the leg spun him round; two more went into his thigh. Others passed through his clothes but missed his flesh. He staggered three miles to a road and a lorry took him to a medical post.

It was then back to Blighty to recover, before returning to the front line in France in early 1918, just in time for the spring offensive, Germany’s last major throw of the dice to win the war. Now a runner with the Machine Gun Corps, Iley was still in the thick of it when the enemy was stopped and Germany’s spring offensive was over. In effect, the war was won.

It is good that in 2020 stories like Iley’s should continue to inspire us. As director of 1917, Sam Mendes is right that we need reminding of a time when self-sacrifice came before self-indulgence. He himself acknowledges a hero close to home to whom his film is a homage — his grandfather, Trinidadian Alfred Mendes, a writer whose tales of World War I young Mendes lapped up as a boy.

One story that took particular root was how 20-year-old Alfred’s battalion was overwhelmed at Passchendaele and suffered losses of more than 150 men.

His commander had lost touch with three companies somewhere out there in the miles of No Man’s Land, stranded in shell-holes and water-filled craters.

Staff officers at headquarters were desperate to know their positions, and the CO asked for volunteers to look for them. Mendes stepped forward, despite being warned ‘this is a dangerous assignment; there may be no return’.

Alfred did so, he explained later in his autobiography, ‘because I had done a signalling course and, although it bore little relationship to the job at hand, I felt myself under an obligation to the battalion’.

He made his way out through the thick mud and, he recorded, ‘found all three companies, in spite of the snipers, the machine-gunners and the shells’.

Alfred returned with the information his superiors needed ‘without a scratch, but with a series of hair-raising experiences that would keep my grandchildren enthralled for nights on end’.

He was awarded a Military Medal. The citation read: ‘This man acted as company runner and for two whole days was continually on the move from company to platoon and battalion headquarters, this in spite of continuous machine gun fire and sniping.

‘It was largely due to his coolness and his complete disregard for his personal safety that his commanding officer was kept informed of the state of affairs on that flank.

‘He set a fine example of devotion to duty and every soldierly quality.’

It was an example his grandson Sam would remember, and, though the actual storyline changed massively, it would be the inspiration for his award-winning 1917.

As a tribute to those who, against all odds and at great personal cost, do their duty, its message is well and truly delivered.