Raw Material

by Alan Sillitoe

  More sensibly, the British Army should have gone on to the defensive in the spring of 1915, and at the same time tried to make peace. The Germans would not have accepted the terms of withdrawal to their own frontiers at that time, but perhaps after two more years of stalemate they might have seen it as the only possible course. But the British believed in the suicidal maxim that the best defence lies in the attack—which it does, but only if you can be sure of winning. Otherwise it leads to frustration, reaction, and stubbornness—this latter a fatal quality in the British character when it is given a free run, for it crushes fresh thought, destroys flexibility, and scoffs at improvisation.

  More than two years were to go by before Lieutenant-General Sir John Monash showed how an attack could be made without incurring massive casualties—in the offensive before Amiens by the Australians and Canadians on August 8th, 1918. Monash, if any man can be singled out for such an honour, was the person responsible for Ludendorff’s cry that ‘August 8th was the blackest day of the German Army in the history of the war’. A few more generals with the intellect of Monash might have saved the British Army hundreds of thousands of casualties, and brought some kind of victory to it as well. But such people were rare, and the fools and criminals were too many.

  Monash made his men train in combination with the actual tank crews before they went into battle together. When the attack opened and his men moved forward he arranged for ammunition to be dropped by parachute. The artillery barrage was only to begin on the day of the attack, and not a week before.

  It was as if the longer the casuality lists became, the closer the staff must have thought they were to wearing down the Germans, and to victory. It never came in the sense they sought it, not finally until 1945, when the Bolshevism they loathed had had twenty-five years to stiffen the Russian character which was said in 1917 to have let the Allies down so badly. The Germans were finally finished off as a military nation at Stalingrad and Kursk.

  The British battalion commanders in the First World War did not like the uncomfortable mud, but death and replacements made them feel they were actually getting somewhere. Raids and minor attacks were constantly launched to keep up the spirits of their men and foster the tigerish grit of aggression in them. But as soon as they had to stop much of this, in the eerie winter of 1917–18, and go on the defensive because they really had no more men to throw away, the Germans came back and broke through with comparative ease, on March 21st, 1918.

  Haig, Britain’s number one war criminal, expected the Germans to advance in this attack at the same slow pace of his own clumsily-planned assaults. The remnants of the Fifth Army were hardly able to save themselves because it had been insisted that the British soldiers should have no training in the art of retreat. By this time the army was so weakened in morale that it could not be trusted to do it properly. If it couldn’t attack, then it had to fight and die where it stood.

  This senseless edict took away their chance of life, for tens of thousands were killed. In actual fact the British Army excelled in the art of retreat—as in the fighting withdrawal of 136 miles in thirteen days from Mons in 1914, when the small British Expeditionary Forced faced several Germany Army corps which attempted to envelop and destroy it. The retreat to Dunkirk in the Second World War, and the subsequent evacuation, was a great military feat.

  With encouragement and planning a similar operation might have been repeated in 1918, but there was panic and rout in what was left of the Fifth Army as it fell back—with the usual acts of great and unquestionable bravery. Discipline cracked, and only the French divisions, recently recovered from their own mutinies, saved the British from disaster.

  Brute force was used to bring the soldiers to heel. Redcaps and officers held gangs of stragglers at gunpoint to herd them back into the fight. Not all casualties were caused by the Germans. The full story of the retreat has yet to be written, though it probably never will be. Many old scores were settled in the confusion. Men shot their own officers and sergeant-majors with more readiness than usual—though one heard of this happening during the rest of the war as well, such frequent tales that there must have been truth in them.

  44

  Most of those who came back from the war did not want to talk about it, were embarrassed if one questioned them, became furtive in their recollections, as if they had taken part in something shameful.

  It was left to the self-confident, extrovert, unimaginative commanding officers to arrange for the military histories of their units to be written, perhaps in order to wipe away some of the shame that they might otherwise have felt. Men I spoke to in childhood were savagely wry: ‘Never again. They only sent us to France because they wanted to get us killed.’ Not for them the regimental histories, to pore over with their hearts that had been steeped in the bitter realism of war. If they could have bothered with any reminiscences at all they might have preferred the highlighted accounts of disillusioned poets who were, after all, humanly closer to them.

  They were sour and sad because they had been dragged into war by the foetid, super-efficient ruling-class machine that for a thousand years had perfected its grip on their souls—but which did not know how to win a war when it came to fighting one, or how to stop it when the blood-bill ran too high. And the men were angrier at the fact that they had allowed themselves to be betrayed, final proof that their manhood had gone and, with it, that supreme self-confidence which had only become apparent to them when they had already offered themselves up to the war, by which time it was too late.

  To give the impression, as history books do, that the British nation volunteered for the war ‘as one man’ is false. Perhaps one man can do so. After one man, another will follow, and even if the time gap is infinitesimal, it cannot be said that they went to the recruiting centres together—though it was to the advantage of government propagandists to have the population believe that this was so. I would like to think that one followed another like sheep, or that a hundred men were paid by the War Office to stand outside a recruiting centre and have their photographs taken, than that they sprang to it like automatons.

  All sorts of tricks and pressures were employed to get men into the army in the two years before conscription came. Those of a certain class who did not hurry to join up finally capitulated when nanny met them in the street and handed them a white feather for cowardice. My Uncle Frederick, who said that this became quite common, was offered one on the top deck of a tram by an elderly woman. Instead of blushing with shame he gave her a violent push: ‘Leave me alone, you filthy-minded old butcher!’

  Then he made his way off the tram expecting to be pursued by howls of ‘universal execration’ from other passengers, but they were embarrassed and silent, so that he walked down the steps unmolested.

  This nanny appeared to have mistaken him for some type which he clearly was not. They seemed determined, he told me, to get their revenge on those young gentlemen whom they had been forced to spoil and mollycoddle as infants. They also possessed more than a residue of spite against the parents they had been bullied by, and retaliated now by hurrying their pet sons into the trenches—or any sons they could get their hands on, for that matter. It was one more example, he added, of how war puts the final touch of degradation on certain people in whom it has already got a fair grip. Not that this was meant to malign the women. Far from it. Men did the fighting, after all.

  In war it is the worst of a country that persuades the best men to die. It is easier to deceive the best than the worst. But if it is true that the best men are fools and go with ease, while the worst are cunning and find it easy to hold back, what else can war be but an utterly sure method of destroying a country? Uncle Frederick argued against this, and said that any who went deserved exactly what they got. I was inclined to take his word for it, for he himself never put on any uniform, and so bolstered my faith in humanity. He thought it was a case of the old wanting their revenge against the young. Those young men who fight and come back will then grow up to
revere the values of the old who made sure they went—so the old in their deadly wisdom fondly imagine. And who can say they are wrong? The geriatrics stay behind to cheer them on, while the less senile put their black-hearted experience into smoothing out the paths that lead to the splintered sinews and dereliction of the battlefield.

  One does not want to be unjust to those who took part in the war, but I do not see why the dead need war memorials, since they are already dead and so have no more requirements of this world. Perhaps the living want them more, to try and justify the feeling of guilt they have towards the dead, the guilt that eats at the living because they survived. No dishonour is done to the dead by wanting to see all war memorials destroyed. As for survivors still sound in wind and limb, they wouldn’t want them either if they hadn’t been worked on to desire them by those self-same people who manipulated their sentiments and got them into the war in the first place.

  What about the maimed, blind, gassed, and limbless who, after all, paid the most? The only real voice they have left is that which enables them to cry out now and again for a living pension or pittance with which to sustain themselves. I feel sure that, knowing what it is to be maimed for a lifetime, they would not go into that war or any war if they could have their lives over again.

  One might say, in ranting against the awful waste and slaughter, that the officers and members of the government, the priests, scholars, and authors who promoted the enterprise, are no longer alive and here to listen, so why shout? And if they were, it would make no difference, because they would not hear.

  Yet people exactly like them are still here today and would do the same again—conditions permitting—in different ways, using other means, if given the chance. Every time it happens it seems as if it has never happened before. The same people are still either crushing or perverting the people. One must resist all authority, regimentation, law, and dehumanizing sameness—whether it comes from a government itself, or the backside of its soul called the silent majority. One can never say: ‘All that sort of thing is finished’—because nothing is ever finished without eternal vigilance and united action when the ugly head of unthinking patriotism is raised.

  45

  The loud voices of the birds told me it would soon be light, but I hadn’t really been asleep, due to an unexplained sharp click from the dashboard of the car that disturbed my brain every few minutes of the short and chilly night.

  I thought it came from the clock but couldn’t be sure. It was a coma rather than good slumber. Huge lorries roared along the motorway by which I was parked, going to Lille or Paris, and taking a few minutes to cross the battlefield of the Somme, some of whose acres were now buried under this broad, swathing highway.

  Stirring myself, I took a gulp of brandy. It was half past three, with a faint light in the east, and I thought that a dawn attack at this time of the summer would have meant no rest at all, men dying in a half dream as they stumbled forward, or only waking to the pain of being wounded.

  I drove along the empty road to Bapaume, and then southeast up to Flers and Longueval, where the outlines of hedges and fields were sharply enough etched for me to switch off the car lights. It was four o’clock, and no one was yet awake, all shutters being closed. Heavy mist lay in the hollows, but the land was wide open and rolling, high against the sky, with intensely dark patches of wood here and there. Faint scars showed where fighting took place, particularly on the edges of Delville Wood, in which thousands perished on both sides.

  The same could be said of High Wood, and I drove to it slowly from Longueval, the sky leaden and the birds still noisy, but the half-kilometre flank of packed trees facing south was formidable up the gentle slope, stolid and uninviting even now in the dawn. The British, led for once by the cavalry, captured it on July 14th, 1916, but, owing to the failure to take it several hours earlier than they did, when it was empty, and to get up reinforcements to hold it properly, they were thrown out. Waves of attacking infantry passed through it, or stayed in it, and it was not finally taken till after two months of the most dogged and costly fighting of the war.

  I walked up the lane hoping to enter the wood, but it was fenced off and, as of old, one needed wire-cutters to get into it. Words on a board stated that trespassers would be prosecuted. Perhaps similar notices had been there in 1916 when the British unexpectedly broke through to it. Had the soldiers wondered, in any case, when they were launched in attack after attack, what had been the name of the man who owned the wood? Where was he at the time? Did he know that British soldiers were being mown down in hundreds because they were trying to get his wood back from the Germans?

  Did he realize, wherever he was and whoever he was, that they were being bled and mangled for the sake of his half-kilometre square of tree-covered land? If he had seen them dying outside the wood, and burning to death inside, would he have wanted them to go on trying to get it back for him? What property was worth so much? Surely it would have been better to have gone up to the Germans under a flag of truce and made some attempt at paying them to get out.

  And when those British battalions at last captured that bit of smoking, tree-ruined land, considering the price they had had to pay, who would it belong to then? It was the sort of awkward question my Uncle Frederick liked to put. Should it not have been theirs? It could surely be nobody else’s after that big shindig. But they’d been brought up to respect other peoples’ property, even to die for it in thousands, which was a somewhat unfathomable passion since none of them had any of their own. The most they’d say perhaps is that if anybody deserved High Wood it was the dead, but that was a trick, because since the dead were dead and had no say, and in any case couldn’t read notices saying that trespassers would be prosecuted, then it must go back to its private owner, waiting to claim its few charred trunks. One might say that a notice such as faced me is better than a hail of bullets, but either way, one can’t get in, which makes one wonder what it was all for.

  Even a man who had allowed himself to become a soldier should never do anything unless he first asks himself: ‘Why?’—and tries to square the action he is about to take with his own conscience. To disobey orders is a virtue, and if one is then alone after taking the responsibility of it, one exists in a state of grace, and becomes a hero of humanity.

  46

  I thought of walking in the field where my Uncle Edgar had lain while waiting to be captured, but I didn’t want to disturb his shadow which must still have been on it. So at a later hour on Sunday morning I went into Aveluy Wood, in the valley of the Ancre.

  The trees were grown up again, but not to any great stature, though inside it was dark enough to keep out the light. The pitted ground had no recognizable paths among the livid summer greenery, whereas the pre-1914 maps showed many. Banks of earth were piled above shallow yet distinct trenches. Bits of rusty wire and iron spikes, pieces of shovel and decaying steel were scattered under the leaves. If I dug I would have found bones, but I walked over ground that four battalions of West Yorkshire men had taken cover in before making their futile attack against Thiepval on July 1st, 1916.

  Like other belligerent nations of the Great War the British have no defence against the charge of internal slaughter, of self-indulgent flag-waving, of a national patriotic suicidal lemming-rush, of the right hand smashing the left with such unfeeling brutality that both arms are still crippled more than half a century later. These are the unstated views of people I grew up among, of Frederick and his brother Edgar, the composite reactions to catastrophe of those whose words are not supposed to matter as far as history is concerned. But these myths have soaked themselves into the backbone of the country, and such unwritten emotional history will take generations to defuse.

  The wood was defended by London battalions of the 47th Division when the British front swung away from the Germans at the beginning of April 1918, and there was savage hand-to-hand fighting with heavy loss of life on both sides. Undoubtedly there were many bones under the soil. Northern
France is a vast bone-yard—British, German, and native French—and four million corpses rotted there. Why had they left their wives, children, and parents to fight and die in this patch of wood? Were they so bored that they became belligerent and patriotic to cure it? Or was it true, as many said, that war was invented to keep massacre away from the homely fireside?

  England, for so long the balcony from which one observed European revolutions, was dragged into an unnecessary revolution in 1914 by the scruff of its own neck, off with a wave and a smiling cheerio to help gallant little Belgium and clamorous Gaul. The upper classes were bored after late-Victorian stagnation and Edwardian good living, and wanted at the same time to cup the stirring body of the oppressed country. It seemed to fit in so well, everything coming together with such force that it almost makes one believe in God, in order to think that the Devil got into them.

  Yet I come across the stray but galling reflection that if I had been alive at the time and twenty years of age I too might have allowed myself to be drummed into the slaughter—unless, being like my Uncle Frederick, I opted out with the closely-guarded integrity of my native sense. I am enough like him to have done that, though no one can finally say.

  I picked up a marlin spike and for a moment considered taking it as a souvenir, but the idea seemed ludicrous so I threw it down. My feet were occasionally trapped in the undergrowth, legs buckling when some hidden trench or shell-hole opened below. There were ghosts all around—though I laughed at the insane notion of it—and no noise except for the brush of my own passing, and the crack of dead, overfed twigs. I stood and listened, and couldn’t get away from Edward Elgar’s music which kept coming into my mind. I disliked it at such a time, but there was nothing to be done about it. Let the ghosts haunt the ghosts, and spiders weave their webs. It was bad to be alone in such a place.