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BELLS OF HELL GO TING-A-LING-A-LING
Blue boards with light bumping to ends of spine with light foxing throughout the 149 pages. The dust jacket is not price clipped and is in a mylar cover.
- GenresHistoryWorld War I
160 pages, Paperback
First published November 8, 1977
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 5, 2017
The First World War snowed a blizzard of memoirs and novels, some of which we all know; Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, Frederic Manning. Non-literary figures also got in on the act (Anthony Eden, for example, whose Another World is rather good). Eric Hiscock’s The Bells of Hell Go Ting-A-Ling-A-Ling, by contrast, has sunk without trace. But it may be one of the very best of them all. This is partly because it was written nearly 60 years after the events it describes. This gives the language a freshness that is much easier for the modern reader than (say) Blunden, who is a wonderful writer but can feel very old-fashioned. Hiscock's memoir is like hearing about the war from a gifted raconteur in the pub. It is also brutally frank.
Hiscock was born in 1900 and brought up in Oxford. His parents had met when both in service to an aristocrat, Lord Lane-Fox, and his father had later become a “scout” – domestic staff – in one of the Oxford colleges. Hiscock’s home was not a wealthy one, but seems to have been secure and cheerful.
In 1915, however, at the age of just 15, Hiscock joins the army. Like many others, one suspects, he has been inspired by a friend. The army clearly knows he is underage, and he spends the next two years in Britain. In this he is luckier than an old teacher of mine who had been sent to the Somme at 15, and who started crying when I asked him about it over 50 years later.
The young Hiscock is shipped off to Edinburgh, where he makes the acquaintance of one Sergeant-Major Priestman. The latter is a regular who “had had a testicle shot off in the Mons retreat”, and who “bullied from Reveille at six in the morning ...to Lights Out at night, spitting venom. But at week’s-end, he was not averse to accepting hard cash for a forty-eight hour pass.” It reminds one of the famous wartime song (which Hiscock quotes):
When the bloody war is over,
O how happy I shall be...
No more crying out for furlough,
No more bribing for a pass,
You can tell the Sergeant-Major
To stick his passes up his arse.
In other words, never mind the mud and the lice of Flanders; much of being at war was simply about being bullied on a massive scale. That’s something you won’t find so much in Edmund Blunden or Robert Graves (though Frederic Manning, who spent time in the ranks, hints at it more).
Hiscock does get to the front, in early 1918 when he is still some months underage. As he and his companions file into the trench for the first time, a sniper kills the sergeant (not Priestman) a few feet from him. “Possibly somebody did something about him as his lifeless body fell to the sodden duckboards ...but I think we just left him there. As [we] scrambled into the shelter my steel helmet caught a protuberance in the muddied roof. It was the knee of a khaki-clad corpse.” There is plenty more like this. One of the most evocative passages in the book, for me, is Hiscock’s description of repeated night journeys up to the trenches, on duckboards across the mud; it is a treacherous passage and it is not unusual for an overladen man to simply lose his footing and fall into the mud or a flooded crater below, never to be seen again.
Yet some at least of this can be found in many books (though perhaps not quite so vividly). What marks this book out, besides its contemporary feel, is its frankness. Hiscock doesn’t bother with the King and Country nonsense. Instead we hear how months of bully-beef wrecks his digestion so that he will be seriously ill in later years. We hear how he gets his penis bitten by a vengeful French girl after he decides, as the last minute, not to have full intercourse with her (she was, “it turned out, a diseased nymphomaniac”). It’s played for laughs but then he quietly tells us, at the end of that passage, how a fellow-soldier later catches a dose at the end of the war and shoots himself rather than go home to his family.
But perhaps the most extraordinary part of this book is Hiscock’s own court-martial for cowardice. Many men were convicted; few were actually shot, but it was still over 300, and Hiscock will have been well aware of being on trial for his life. As he recounts it, he injures himself accidentally while cleaning his rifle, and is accused of doing it deliberately to get himself repatriated. The accuser, a Lieutenant Clarke, is (according to Hiscock) a homosexual jealous of Hiscock’s friendship with another man. It is impossible to know if this account is correct; one could, I suppose, find the transcripts of the court-martial if they exist, but they might not settle the case. For what it is worth, Hiscock returns to combat – incredibly, he is returned to the same unit, which must be dangerous for Clarke – and serves until his discharge in 1919. This does not suggest cowardice. If one does take Hiscock’s account at face value, it demonstrates that this war put ordinary men at the mercy not just of the enemy, but of the very worst of their own people.
Hiscock survives the war and goes on to take part in the postwar occupation of Germany – itself fascinating, as there are few enough accounts of the post-WWII occupation, let alone of this one. The book ends back in Oxford as he picks up the thread of his life. In these last parts he describes friendships with two intellectual homosexuals in some detail. In the book he also talks about feelings of love for other soldiers. Hiscock does not appear to be especially prejudiced against homosexuality, and his attitudes seem extremely liberal for 1976, let alone 1918. I have read one or two comments on the book that have suggested that Hiscock himself had repressed feelings for men, not uncommon at that time. But I do not see why his sensitivity towards others’ sexuality should be ascribed to that. It may be that, having spent much time at close quarters with other men in his youth, he was forced acknowledge the existence of diverse sexuality; after all, he was also (if his telling of the Clarke story is true) nearly killed by its consequences.
There is much that in The Bells of Hell that is grim but in the end, oddly, the book itself isn’t. Hiscock writes warmly of his parents, of his life in Oxford and of (for example) fishing for Sunday breakfast with his father at Godstow. He seems to have been aware of his luck in surviving the war. The book is also peppered with character sketches, often wry and funny (I loved the forger and general spiv, Vanner). And the various fumbling sexual adventures show a keen sense of the ridiculous.
I first read this book in 1991 and never forgot it, to the extent that I decided to track it down 25 years later. I found it as startling and vivid as I did before, and wondered why it has not had the impact of other books about the first war. Hiscock went on to a successful career in advertising and Fleet Street, and married Romilly Cavan, a novelist and playwright who also wrote some of the earlier TV scripts. The Bells of Hell was published by Desmond Elliott’s Arlington Books, a small company but a distinguished one. But Hiscock was not of the officer class that still dominated publishing and criticism in the 1970s, and it may be you still had to be an Oxbridge poet, or at least of the slaughtering classes, before you were really allowed to write about the Great War.
If so, that is our loss. Wars are not just about what a country does to its enemies; they are about what it does to its own people in the process.
Hiscock was born in 1900 and brought up in Oxford. His parents had met when both in service to an aristocrat, Lord Lane-Fox, and his father had later become a “scout” – domestic staff – in one of the Oxford colleges. Hiscock’s home was not a wealthy one, but seems to have been secure and cheerful.
In 1915, however, at the age of just 15, Hiscock joins the army. Like many others, one suspects, he has been inspired by a friend. The army clearly knows he is underage, and he spends the next two years in Britain. In this he is luckier than an old teacher of mine who had been sent to the Somme at 15, and who started crying when I asked him about it over 50 years later.
The young Hiscock is shipped off to Edinburgh, where he makes the acquaintance of one Sergeant-Major Priestman. The latter is a regular who “had had a testicle shot off in the Mons retreat”, and who “bullied from Reveille at six in the morning ...to Lights Out at night, spitting venom. But at week’s-end, he was not averse to accepting hard cash for a forty-eight hour pass.” It reminds one of the famous wartime song (which Hiscock quotes):
When the bloody war is over,
O how happy I shall be...
No more crying out for furlough,
No more bribing for a pass,
You can tell the Sergeant-Major
To stick his passes up his arse.
In other words, never mind the mud and the lice of Flanders; much of being at war was simply about being bullied on a massive scale. That’s something you won’t find so much in Edmund Blunden or Robert Graves (though Frederic Manning, who spent time in the ranks, hints at it more).
Hiscock does get to the front, in early 1918 when he is still some months underage. As he and his companions file into the trench for the first time, a sniper kills the sergeant (not Priestman) a few feet from him. “Possibly somebody did something about him as his lifeless body fell to the sodden duckboards ...but I think we just left him there. As [we] scrambled into the shelter my steel helmet caught a protuberance in the muddied roof. It was the knee of a khaki-clad corpse.” There is plenty more like this. One of the most evocative passages in the book, for me, is Hiscock’s description of repeated night journeys up to the trenches, on duckboards across the mud; it is a treacherous passage and it is not unusual for an overladen man to simply lose his footing and fall into the mud or a flooded crater below, never to be seen again.
Yet some at least of this can be found in many books (though perhaps not quite so vividly). What marks this book out, besides its contemporary feel, is its frankness. Hiscock doesn’t bother with the King and Country nonsense. Instead we hear how months of bully-beef wrecks his digestion so that he will be seriously ill in later years. We hear how he gets his penis bitten by a vengeful French girl after he decides, as the last minute, not to have full intercourse with her (she was, “it turned out, a diseased nymphomaniac”). It’s played for laughs but then he quietly tells us, at the end of that passage, how a fellow-soldier later catches a dose at the end of the war and shoots himself rather than go home to his family.
But perhaps the most extraordinary part of this book is Hiscock’s own court-martial for cowardice. Many men were convicted; few were actually shot, but it was still over 300, and Hiscock will have been well aware of being on trial for his life. As he recounts it, he injures himself accidentally while cleaning his rifle, and is accused of doing it deliberately to get himself repatriated. The accuser, a Lieutenant Clarke, is (according to Hiscock) a homosexual jealous of Hiscock’s friendship with another man. It is impossible to know if this account is correct; one could, I suppose, find the transcripts of the court-martial if they exist, but they might not settle the case. For what it is worth, Hiscock returns to combat – incredibly, he is returned to the same unit, which must be dangerous for Clarke – and serves until his discharge in 1919. This does not suggest cowardice. If one does take Hiscock’s account at face value, it demonstrates that this war put ordinary men at the mercy not just of the enemy, but of the very worst of their own people.
Hiscock survives the war and goes on to take part in the postwar occupation of Germany – itself fascinating, as there are few enough accounts of the post-WWII occupation, let alone of this one. The book ends back in Oxford as he picks up the thread of his life. In these last parts he describes friendships with two intellectual homosexuals in some detail. In the book he also talks about feelings of love for other soldiers. Hiscock does not appear to be especially prejudiced against homosexuality, and his attitudes seem extremely liberal for 1976, let alone 1918. I have read one or two comments on the book that have suggested that Hiscock himself had repressed feelings for men, not uncommon at that time. But I do not see why his sensitivity towards others’ sexuality should be ascribed to that. It may be that, having spent much time at close quarters with other men in his youth, he was forced acknowledge the existence of diverse sexuality; after all, he was also (if his telling of the Clarke story is true) nearly killed by its consequences.
There is much that in The Bells of Hell that is grim but in the end, oddly, the book itself isn’t. Hiscock writes warmly of his parents, of his life in Oxford and of (for example) fishing for Sunday breakfast with his father at Godstow. He seems to have been aware of his luck in surviving the war. The book is also peppered with character sketches, often wry and funny (I loved the forger and general spiv, Vanner). And the various fumbling sexual adventures show a keen sense of the ridiculous.
I first read this book in 1991 and never forgot it, to the extent that I decided to track it down 25 years later. I found it as startling and vivid as I did before, and wondered why it has not had the impact of other books about the first war. Hiscock went on to a successful career in advertising and Fleet Street, and married Romilly Cavan, a novelist and playwright who also wrote some of the earlier TV scripts. The Bells of Hell was published by Desmond Elliott’s Arlington Books, a small company but a distinguished one. But Hiscock was not of the officer class that still dominated publishing and criticism in the 1970s, and it may be you still had to be an Oxbridge poet, or at least of the slaughtering classes, before you were really allowed to write about the Great War.
If so, that is our loss. Wars are not just about what a country does to its enemies; they are about what it does to its own people in the process.
May 9, 2026
Surprisingly well written it reallly takes you to those awful times in the trenches. Great read !
November 24, 2021
This is the kind of war book that I most enjoy, an autobiographical account. Eric Hiscock ended up in the trenches of the First World War at a young age (through his own misguided contrivances, it must be said). His views of the realities of getting shot at and blown to bits by artillery are not tinged by any kind of idiotic jingoism. We see the waste of fine young men wiped out in a burst of machine gun fire or bayoneted during a pointless assault on enemy trenches. Hiscock survives this nightmare without severe lasting physical injuries, but carries his memories to remind us during an era when war has remained far from Western Europe for many generations.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews