Great War Memoirs, Short Reviews: An 18-Pounder Battery at War

An 18-pounder team an crew crossing the Canal du Nord, 1918 (National Library of Scotland)

A Time to Leave the Ploughshares: A Gunner Remembers, 1917-18, by William Carr (1985)

What a shame that I had overlooked this memoir, and what a pleasure now to encounter one of the finest personal accounts of artillery in action that I have ever read.

Born in 1884, William Carr was a farmer by heart and trade, his family coming from Stonehaven, on the coast of Scotland near Aberdeen. He went to war reluctantly and late—enough to have received one of the notorious white feathers that British ladies surreptitiously presented to alleged shirkers. Still, he joined willingly, but at the relatively advanced age of thirty-three, and became a subaltern in the 169th Brigade of Royal Field Artillery, taking command of an 18-pounder section of Battery 377. He would eventually serve alongside Captain Arthur Hamilton Gibbs, brother of correspondent Philip Gibbs and author of the superb memoirs Gun Fodder: The Diary of Four Years of War (1919); and The Grey Wave (1920), both of which are highly recommended.

Writing with exceptional clarity if not artistry (he was a humble farmer after all), Carr recounts his experiences with his battery from November 1917 to the war’s end a year later. Anyone who thinks artillery service in World War I was dull or distant from the real fighting will find this memoir to be a useful corrective. Carr was involved in the initial British tank-infantry assault at the Battle of Cambrai on November 20, 1917 and—more harrowingly—the German counterattack just over a week later, when Carr’s battery was shattered and overrun. During this action he initially served as a liaison to frontline infantry before making his way back to his guns and engaging the Germans nearly point-blank, over open sights.

As if this wasn’t difficult enough, Battery 377 was in the thick of the fighting on March 21, 1918, the day of the massive German offensive on the western front, including more close-quarters fighting and harrowing retreats over the following weeks. He considered April 12, 1918—when his battery was again annihilated after a ‘Brass Hat’ ordered the guns posted in plain sight of the enemy—to be the worst day of his life. Gibbs also wrote about these events in his memoirs, and he and Carr both were deeply embittered by them. Interestingly, though, Carr—who earned an M.C. for his courage—expessed more understanding with perspective gained over the decades that followed.

In describing the events of the spring, summer, and early fall of 1918, Carr offers some vivid and revealing observations of his interactions with Australian, American, and French troops, all of whom he admired. Remarkably, Carr didn’t keep a diary or retain letters he wrote during the war, so his account is taken largely from memory and subsequent (in the 1970s) battlefield visits, along with reference to official and secondary printed sources. Yet his account rings true. There’s none of the falsified dialogue or fakish white-knuckle battle scenes one encounters in modern, professionally ghostwritten “memoirs” of aging WWI and WWII veterans; and yet Carr’s descriptions of battle, in which many men were killed around him and he had several near brushes with death, are gripping and seem exceptionally authentic. The man seems simply to have had astounding powers of recall.

Eventually, after an unforgettable scene in the fall of 1918 when Carr directed the high-explosive pulverization of German infantrymen, weeping at the death he was inflicting while delighted American observers whooped approvingly nearby, Carr reached a state of mental exhaustion and effectively pulled himself out of combat. His thoughts on remembrance decades later—he passed away in 1985 just after reaching 100 years old—also make for compelling reading.

My Goodreads rating of A Time to Leave the Ploughshares (available on Open Library, where I read it, but used print copies are widely available), is five out of five. I can’t recommend it highly enough.