"A French soldier, more dead than alive, came staggering down the shell-swept road." The war diaries of Lawrence Rowntree

SOMETIME in the spring of 1915, a young Quaker serving with the Friends Ambulance Unit behind the lines at Dunkirk confided in his journal his horror at the conditions at the makeshift hospital where he was stationed.

"I had my first glimpse at the sheds after lunch and it made me very sick," wrote Lawrence Rowntree, Joseph Rowntree's grandson. "A hot day, intolerably hot in the sheds. The stench which the soldiers would very would naturally bring after months of fighting, and added to that the unbearable septic smell and the sight of grisly wounds, combined to make me wish I had not come."

Lawrence's diary leaves little to the imagination about the appalling conditions in which wounded soldiers were being treated.

"The wounded French soldiers were brought in, in train loads of 400 to 600 from the trenches in Belgium," he wrote. "They were on their way to the big base hospitals at LeHavre, Cherbourg and further down the coast, to which they were taken by hospital ships and sometimes by train. Dunkerque was really just a rest station where the bad wounds could be redressed and the men fed.

"The sheds at that time were in a horrible condition. No beds for the men, just straw, which was apparently left there until it wore away, and which was thick, with dirt, blood and septic dressings from others who had been there before.

"The medical staff provided by the French to care for these wounded - sometimes 2,000 of them - was one young surgeon, with the result that many of the men went away with the old dressings still on. Of course there was something to be said for that, for if the wound was clean (a rarity) it was the equivalent to murder to take (the dressing) off in that place; but where the wound was septic, the pain could usually be eased a good deal by letting out the matter.

Lawrence Rowntree in uniform

"So that was what we set out to do; to take off the old dressings, clean up the wound, and put fresh dressings on; which doesn't sound very bad, but it was."

For more than a year, Lawrence - the son of Joseph Rowntree's oldest son, John Wilhelm Rowntree - served with the ambulance unit. He had borrowed his grandfather's Daimler, and took this with him to the continent. "He converted this ridiculously huge car into an ambulance," says Bridget Morris, the Executive Director of the Rowntree Society, which has put together an exhibition about Lawrence's life which can now be seen in the 'community exhibition' space at York's Castle Museum.

Lawrence, who grew up in Scalby, went to Bootham school, and had given up studying medicine to join the ambulance unit, was a 'sporty man of action', says Bridget. He certainly got into a number of scrapes.

At one point, his unit was sent to take charge of a hospital in Ypres. The French army was just leaving the town, the English had yet to arrive. It was eerily deserted - and already under aerial attack.

Bridget Morris, Executive Director of the Rowntree Society, at the new Lawrence Rowntree exhibition at the Castle Museum, York

"The great cloth hall and many other buildings were on fire, and so a fine red glow lit up the town. The roll of guns was very near, several batteries were just outside the town, and in quiet moments we heard the rattle of rifle fire like a demented mowing machine. Three of us sat and waited while the others looked for our hospital and the doctor showed us his house which had been completely destroyed by a single shell.

Then the others came back, and we moved on, picking our way over great heaps of debris and dodging huge shell holes and all the while driving over glass everywhere."

Another time he was sent out in his Daimler to collect wounded soldiers from an aid-post at Zuyoschoote, a tiny village a few hundred yards behind the trenches.

"We left the aid post - passed the mill, and immediately came in sight of the village. Two huge shells burst in quick succession on the village church...We pulled up ...and at this moment a French soldier, wounded and more dead than alive came staggering down the shell-swept road, and we gathered from him that he was the last in the village."

A young Lawrence Rowntree, left, with his mother Constance (centre), two of his sisters, and the family dog Hamlet (front) Photo by permission of Judith Stevens

They decided to beat a hasty retreat, only for the huge Daimler to get hopelessly stuck in the mud on a narrow road.

"All this time shells had been coming over, lopping off branches of trees, falling short by and on the road, and (then)... a perfect tornado came over, three and four at a time, some falling quite close by, but luckily didn't burst," Lawrence wrote. "We held a rapid consultation, cowering down in the shelter of the car, and decided to leave it and come back later with some horses and bring it out."

After 18 months or so with the ambulance unit, Lawrence was injured and returned home to recuperate. There, in 1916, he wrote up his notes from the front line in the form of a journal.

"Such as it is, here it is," he concluded, in the final paragraph. "Perhaps it will read better some years later when all this is a nightmare that is past, and not one that we are not yet woken from."

Those lines have the ring of an ending. But for Lawrence, the war was really just beginning. He left the ambulance unit, and did something which, for someone from a pacifist Quaker family, seems surprising to us know. Instead of registering as a Conscientious Objector when the Military Service Act was passed in March 1916, he signed up for a commission in the army - joining 'C' Company of what became known as the Tank Corps.

The wreckage of a British tank beside the infamous Menin Road near Ypres, Belgium. Photo: PA

The signs were there in his his ambulance unit diaries, says Bridget Morris: this was a young man burning with a sense of adventure. As Lawrence himself put it in his diary: "The excitement of it, even the fear is enticing."

We don't know what his famous family thought of him joining the army. But there's no sign that there was any kind of schism, Bridget says. The Rowntrees were pragmatic about the war, supporting those who went off to fight whatever their own personal feelings.

In August 1916, Lawrence arrived at the Somme with his crew, and their tank the Crème de Menthe. By late 1917, he had joined the Royal Field Artillery as a lieutenant, and was serving with the 26th Army Brigade in Belgium when, on July 31 - 100 years ago on Monday - the battle of Passchendaele began.

It was a battle which officially ended on November 10. But British and German batteries continued shelling each-other for days after the battle was supposed to be over.

On November 25 that year, at the age of just 22, Lawrence was killed. We don't know exactly what happened, says Bridget Morris. His was just one death among countless others - the battle saw 325,000 Allied and 260,000 German casualties.

That was no comfort to Lawrence's grandfather. Joseph Rowntree was, in later years, to be heard talking about 'My dear Lawrie's death'. It was clearly something which haunted him for the rest of his life.

Lawrence Rowntree at the Castle Museum

A hundred years on from the start of the Battle of Passchendaele, Lawrence Rowntree's story is being commemorated through a theatre performance and exhibition at the Castle Museum in York.

An exhibition running in parallel in the museum's community exhibition space, meanwhile, brings together photographs and excerpts from Lawrence's journal, together with a short film.

The exhibition "gives a fascinating and saddening insight into his (Lawrence's) time at war, taken directly from his own journals,” says the Castle Museum's learning manager, Lucky Knock.

Theatrical performances commemorating Lawrence Rowntree's life will continue daily at York Castle Museum until next Wednesday (August 2) at 11am, 12noon, 1.30pm, 2.30pm and 3.30pm.

The Lawrence Rowntree exhibition in the Community Rooms runs until the end of the year.