by Barrie Pitt
The bells of hell go ting-aling-aling,
For you but not for me,
The herald angels sing-aling-aling,
I’ll be up there for tea.
or
If you want to find your sweetheart, I know where he is,
I know where he is, I know where he is.
If you want to find your sweetheart. I know where he is,
Hanging on the front line wire.
Rarely did the notes of classical music sound in the British lines and a record of a sonata would remain unplayed or be quickly broken unless jealously guarded by its owner, but oddly enough strains of such music would be listened to in silence if they floated across from the enemy lines. One infantryman tells of the existence in 1916 of an old piano in the trenches opposite, upon which some practised hand had played Schubertian melodies for hours on end. When after a day of sporadic inter-trench raids the piano was silent, there was no satisfaction expressed, and the following day the infantryman heard a sentry softly whistling passages from the second movement of the Unfinished Symphony.
Other sounds in the background of trench life were the scrape and clatter of spades, the clank of dixies, the thud of earth-balled boots on the duckboards in fine weather, the slop and squelch of mud and the continual trickle of running water in wet: curses and laughter, shouted orders and the high cry of ‘Stretcher bearers!’ – these formed the tapestry of sound, rent by the crack of casual bullet, burst open by the explosion of occasional rifle-grenade or ‘minnie’.
The men themselves were not of the highest standards of either physique or morale. It was impossible that they should be by 1918, for the cream of the Empire’s manhood had already been lost on the Somme, and since. In the first day of that ill-conceived attack – largely in the first hour – nearly 60,000 of the young, ardent enthusiasts who had rushed forward to join Kitchener’s New Army had fallen; and the slaughter of the following months plus Passchendaele had taken most of the rest. Those who still lived and were fit enough to serve in the trenches, did so with shattered nerves, and bodies which cringed with expected agony at every rifle-crack and bomb-burst. According to the casualty records, as many men had been wounded and returned to action as were serving in the front line – but some had been wounded several times, thus allowing a proportion of unscathed.
The old Regular Army – the Contemptibles – had gone; graves, hospitals and prison-camps held the majority, the residue served on the Staff.
There was still the continual influx of youngsters coming in as soon as they reached the minimum age – as their brothers had done in 1914 and 1915 – but now their ranks were mixed with conscripts and the ideals of service and sacrifice which had animated the original New Armies were corroded away. When everyone had been a volunteer, the sense of patriotic compact had engendered a fierce pride in being a front-line soldier. There had been a willingness to accept all hardship, all pain, and death: only the end of the war or a bullet could end a voluntarily entered contract. But now this atmosphere was gone, and the sly and the self-centred strove to set the pattern of behaviour. Often they were successful, and divisions with magnificent records gained at Delville Wood or Gallipoli were to prove of doubtful reliability during the closing weeks of the war.
Yet in many ways these men were more efficient soldiers. The cunning which they developed in avoiding the more obnoxious duties sometimes helped them to avoid the enemy bullets, and the almost dog-like devotion and reverence which the first volunteers had offered to their regular NCOs and officers, had been replaced by a deep and not ill-founded scepticism. ‘Never obey orders – they’re already cancelled’, was a maxim which too often proved reliable, as young officers coming new into the line were quickly taught. Older officers were by now well aware of the fact that tomorrow a live soldier would be of more use than a hero uselessly killed today. Courage and fortitude were still available in abundance – but eager confidence was at a premium: the well of the soldiers’ patriotism had been drawn upon too deeply, and too often had its waters been poured wastefully away. Now they wished to live, for they could not be certain that any cause but the enemy’s would profit by their deaths.
For the enemy – the Jerries as they were called in envy of their coal-scuttle helmets – the Briton in the front line had considerable respect and a sympathy born of common experience. Among the legends of enemy behaviour with which newcomers into the line were regaled were always a few to show Jerry in good light – the story of the 1914 Christmas fraternizations, the virtual cease-fire after Loos which had allowed the British to collect their wounded from no-man’s-land, the unspoken agreements in some parts of the line at times, to fire high or to miss the unwary with the first shot. These stories leavened the main tale of hard, professional efficiency, and sweetened the bitterness caused by the web of booby traps left behind by the Germans when in 1917 they retreated behind the deep fortifications of the Hindenburg Line.
Even the hatred caused by these abominations had an admixture of reluctant, professional admiration. In all – as so often happens – the fighting soldier preferred his enemy to his ally, for the French were no more popular with the British than the British with them.
By this time, it was the Staff who were regarded by the British front-line soldier as his main enemy (a not uncommon development in any army) and for them he nursed a bitter hatred and an undying contempt. There were indeed, many occasions upon which members of the Staff acted with such unbelievable idiocy that no other effect upon the men who had to carry out their plans could have been expected. Upon one occasion a general ordered that gas should be released at all costs before an attack, despite the fact that the wind was blowing gently in his men’s faces: on another, in order to ‘raise the morale’ of troops utterly exhausted by weeks of attack and counterattack, a daylight advance in November was ordered across ground clearly marked on the map as ‘Marsh: sometimes dry in summer.’
Only one army commander seems to have made regular inspections of conditions at the front, and after 1914, no one in the higher ranks ever spent as long as one week living the life of the front-line infantry in the trenches. Thus, the crassest mistakes had been made due solely to ignorance of local conditions.
The fault lay basically in the peacetime structure of the Army, in which the officers were separated from the other ranks by an impassable social and mental barrier. Regular officers – especially in the favoured cavalry regiments which were to supply most of the top commanders – were scions of wealthy and aristocratic houses: a very large proportion of the men, on the other hand, aptly deserved Wellington’s description of his army at Waterloo – ‘the scum of the earth, enlisted for drink.’ There was thus no common ground between commissioned and non-commissioned ranks other than that forged by action – and action in 1914 had killed most of the regular officers and led to the rapid promotion of the rest.
The survivors were men used to expensive pleasures who had led lives of much physical but little mental exercise, and very few had any form of cultural interest which would serve to widen their intellectual field. They had been trained on the assumption that officers were gentlemen whose life was ordered by a set and clearly understood code, and that the men were shifty, idle, irresponsible and knavish – and although the vicissitudes of war compelled them now to accept as brother officers men with utterly different ideas, who obviously did not conform to the strict and peculiar tenets of their own code, they saw no reason to believe – few of them even suspected – that there could be any difference in the type of man who now served in the ranks.
In this they were enormously mistaken. Few events in Britain’s history have been finer than the nation-wide flow of volunteers into the forces between the outbreak of war and the introduction of conscription at the beginning of 1916. From all walks of life they came, professional man and artisan, poet and plumber, coal-miner, craftsman and Cordon Bleu cook. The vast majority of them had proved themselves quite capable of supporting themselves (and often t
heir families) in civilian life, and many were progressing satisfactorily up the ladders of their vocations when they had answered their country’s call: they were cheerful, capable, industrious, eager to learn and aflame with enthusiasm. Altogether they represented the finest material ever offered to a military commander, and from them could have been moulded the greatest army the world had ever seen.
Yet what they accomplished was due far more to their own unquenchable spirit than to their professional mentors. These eager multitudes were the men with whom the regular officer on the Staff eschewed contact (the new, unacceptable officers could best act as channels of communication), and when circumstances rendered contact unavoidable, the majority of Staff officers approached the task with either feudal arrogance or unbearable patronage. At first this attitude was accepted by the men of the New Armies as just another inexplicable aspect in a new, rather incomprehensible life. But soon they responded with ribaldry, and when the iron of failure due to administrative inefficiency had entered their souls, with blistering contempt.
It was not an emotion which dimmed with the passage of time. After the war, A. G. MacDonnell was to pillory the Staff in several of his books, and C. E. Montague referred to the promotion of one officer from division to corps with relief, as it lessened the danger to the troops from that of a fatal accident to that merely of an obscure mortal disease. Another refers to members of the Staff striding about with hunched shoulders and riding-whips, endeavouring to give the impression that they had spent their entire lives in strained relations with a horse.
‘Jerry’s got a gun on our front,’ one warrior is reported as telling another, ‘… with a fantastic range. Must be over forty miles.’
‘That’s nothing,’ replied his companion. ‘He’s got one on our front that hit Corps Headquarters!’
This last comment was apt, and reveals a true but sombre state of affairs. One psychological hazard against which no commanding general of the Great War saw the necessity of protecting his Staff, was the fact that the longer a man remains out of danger, the less willing he becomes to face it. Officers who in 1914 would have thought nothing of walking unconcernedly along a bullet-swept ridge in order to hearten their men by showing an inspiring contempt for danger, by 1918 would not spend an hour within shelling range of the enemy if they could avoid it. Too often they were inept at concealing their emotions and extraordinarily tactless in their excuses for retreat.
‘Must get back,’ announced one of them loudly, as the evening ‘hate’ started in a particularly noisome sector of the line. ‘Got veal for dinner, and if I don’t get there in time the bloody servant won’t have cooled the wine properly!’
Such men – GSOs in the lower echelons – and such incidents, raised the front-line infantry’s fury to almost ungovernable heights, for they felt instinctively that these were the men who obscured the vision of the commanding generals, and who twisted or failed to pass on to them the representations of the fighting soldiers.
There was some truth in this, but there is more in the truism that generals get the staff they deserve. Men who were incapable of realizing the difference in the quality of those now under their command were not surprisingly also incapable of either adapting themselves to new conditions of warfare, or realizing that some of the ideas upon which they had been trained were basically incorrect. So far as the strategical and tactical problems which faced them were concerned, many of the Great War generals were, in one of the more brilliant analogies of modern literature, like savages trying to tear a screw from a baulk of timber: all they could think to do was to try to exert more and more direct pull on the head of the screw. The notion that it could be loosened by rotation would never have occurred to them, and would have been treated with the utmost contempt if made.
Most of them were also overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of the forces under their command. Relatively unambitious men had suddenly found themselves commanding armies far larger than those of Wellington or Marlborough – whom they had been brought up to regard as the greatest military geniuses their country had produced. They endeavoured, honestly and sincerely, to grapple with the vast complexities which faced them, and they failed, most of them, because they were holding positions far above their professional ceiling.
This problem, in fact, vexed all armies, including the enemy’s. Rudolf Binding, while serving on the Staff of one of the German armies, questioned whether there was a single general then alive who knew how to use armies numbered in millions:
One hears that there are people who can only count up to three. The Fueguian can count up to five, as many fingers as he has on his hand. Many company commanders can really only count up to one hundred, the sum of their cohort. I know myself men who could do anything with one regiment but nothing with two, and history teaches us that there have been men who could do this and that with one hundred thousand men, but could not move three hundred thousand.
Such then, were the intellectual limitations of many of the men who directed their countries’ war efforts on the Western Front, and as invariably happens when men in command have great powers but neither the experience nor the mental ability to wield them, they all in their various capacities were soon surrounded by courts of flatterers and sycophants – indeed none but these could remain around the seats of power, for uncertainty of mind or purpose is exquisitely sensitive to contrary or critical opinion, and uses its power to suppress it.
© CASSELL & co. LTD. 1962
There were thus many headquarter organizations of divisional, corps, or army status, composed essentially of one man endeavouring earnestly to carry out duties far beyond his capacities, surrounded by favourites whose main occupation was bolstering his confidence, eagerly endorsing his every opinion and often suppressing facts and figures which cast the unwelcome light of truth upon the effects of his decisions. It is no matter for wonder that the sight of red tabs on the uniform of a British officer provoked bitter anger in the men who paid with their lives for the egregious errors made by the men who wore them.
There were, of course, exceptions. Men would intrigue and bribe in order to be sent to the Second Army when Plumer commanded it and Harington was his Chief-of-Staff, and men in the Dominion divisions were not so bitter as those from England, once they had their own Dominion (and ex-front line) Staffs. Possibly because as Commander-in-Chief he was so utterly remote from them all, Sir Douglas Haig was not himself the object of great criticism from those in the front line: it was as though those between absorbed the anger and the scorn. Perhaps, too, faith in somebody, somewhere, was a psychological necessity for those in the trenches.
* * *
There had existed during the closing months of 1917, a place of weakness in the British line – and weakness inevitably invites attack. The position was that known as the Flesquières Salient, and it had been formed as a result of the tank breakthrough towards Cambrai in November, and the subsequent counterattack which had won back for the Germans most of the ground they had lost. The Flesquières Salient was, in fact, the truncated stub of the short-lived Cambrai Salient – and here, as the old year died, was fought a battle which typified the bitterness and the fury, the bravery and the squalor, the resolution and the waste of all the trench fighting which had taken place along the Western Front.
It was a microcosm of the war, and it happened in a locality which was to prove a most vital sector of the front in the months to come.
The front line – such as it was – was held by men of the British 63rd Division. For seven miles the salient bulged out towards the enemy from Demicourt in the north to Gouzeaucourt in the south, its apex lying just north of a derisory hillock called Welsh Ridge, and overlooking the German-held village of Marcoing. This was ground which a month before had been in the German rear – a stretch of the Hindenburg Line now served as first support trench behind the British front – with the result that when the men of the 63rd Division took it over, it was neither continuously trenched nor adequately protected by bar
bed wire belts. It was, in fact, a discontinuous line of outposts hurriedly improvised in the stress of battle.
It was as well that the nights were long, and the labours of the working-parties could thus be extended to the limit of their physical endurance. By Christmas Eve the trench system had been completed – or at least made continuous – running in three shallow, uneven lines which jutted back and forth like the edges of ill-used toothed wheels, for four miles in a curve around the apex of the salient. One line scarred the forward slope of the ridge, one line the crest, and the third lay at the foot of the steep reverse slope. At intervals, even shallower communication trenches zig-zagged back across the ridge to connect the three lines, while in the open areas more wire belts looped and sprawled, forming occasional dense thickets around the few sandbagged machine-gun posts. Ditches – they could not be called trenches – ran back from these posts to the trench lines behind them.
Just before dawn on December 30th, an intensive barrage was opened on the front line and advanced posts, and when the barrage abruptly shifted to the line on the crest of the ridge, white-garbed forms rose from the snow just beyond the outer wire belt, and stormed across it towards the trenches. The chaos and confusion of a trench battle descended on the forward positions with the immediacy and tragic inevitability of a nightmare.
Those British on the firesteps screamed warnings and opened fire, those in dug-outs rushed out thrusting their bayonets up towards the swathed and sheeted figures leaping down upon them, and knots of cursing, struggling men swayed back and forth, killing or maiming each other with club and bayonet, rifle-butt and boot, fighting too close and too quick to aim or fire. The first wave of attackers was beaten back or killed in the trenches, some of the second wave broke into the communication trenches and began bombing their way along them to the support trench, then the third attack wave came in and all the forward positions were submerged.