Salisbury Plain
The British War Office purchased its first land on Salisbury Plain in 1897. Today, the government owns 94,000 acres of the chalky soil and rolling hills — the biggest military training ground in the United Kingdom. There are artillery ranges, polo horses and tenant farmers, some of whom pay a “peppercorn rent” on condition that tanks can come through their fields. It is a green landscape free of billboards, a place that looks not too different (albeit drier) than it did in 1914, when Canadians spent a miserable, soggy winter there, one of the wettest on record
It rained all the time, wind whipped through the unheated bell tents and, according to the Official History of the Canadian Army in the Great War by Col. G.W. L. Nicholson, the ground wouldn’t drain. The Canadians trained with route marches, musketry lessons, drills and trench digging. It was so miserable that the Australians and New Zealanders decided to train in Egypt.
“There were no means of drying clothing, and men who ploughed through ankle-deep mud all day had to let their rain-soaked uniforms dry on their backs,” notes Nicholson.
The men cheekily named their landlocked locale “Lark Hill on the Sea” and their practice combat “the battle of lamb shit hell,” in letters and postcards home.
Thomas Lionel Fuller, 30, a short, handsome guy descended from a family of local hop farmers, was a fixture in the muck. He took thousands of snapshots with his half-plate camera of soldiers going about their daily routines. He’d return the next day to sell them as postcards, a penny a shot, like a photographer at a minor league hockey tournament.
Today, Thomas’s grandson, Jim Fuller, 55, has large photo albums of T.L. Fuller postcards showing young men smiling and laughing, marooned on cars on flooded roads, dragging horses through the mud, all tokens to send home to worried parents and sweethearts, to show everything was OK.
In the winter of 2013-14, those postcards came to life.
“It was as almost as if the water knew of the centenary approaching, Tilshead flooded, the mud was phenomenal,” says Richard Osgood, senior archeologist with Britain’s Ministry of Defence, as he drives through hills yellow with canola and pulls into parking lots near cemeteries where Commonwealth victims reside. One man was killed by a bayonet practice gone wrong, another fell down a well, others were victims of diseases borne in the damp and wet conditions.