Myths and Legends of the First World War

by James Hayward

  None of which amounted to an unambiguous denial, which came finally from the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs on December 2nd, in response to a question by Arthur Henderson, the Labour member for Burnley:

  SIR AUSTEN CHAMBERLAIN: My Right Honourable Friend the Secretary of State for War told the House last week how the story reached His Majesty’s Government in 1917. The Chancellor of the German Reich had authorised me to say, on the authority of the German government, that there was never any foundation for it. I need scarcely add that on behalf of His Majesty’s Government I accept this denial, and I trust that this false report will not again be revived.

  Perhaps the most telling comment on the whole inglorious episode was offered by an American editorial, from The Times-Dispatch of Richmond, Virginia for December 6th:

  A few years ago the story of how the Kaiser was reducing human corpses to fat aroused the citizens of this and other enlightened nations to a fury of hatred. Normally sane men doubled their fists and rushed off to the nearest recruiting sergeant. Now they are being told, in effect, that they were dupes and fools; that their own officers deliberately goaded them to the desired boiling-point, using an infamous lie to arouse them, just as a grown bully whispers to one little boy that another little boy said he could lick him.

  The encouraging sign found in this revolting admission of how modern war is waged is the natural inference that the modern man is not over-eager to throw himself at his brother’s throat at the simple word of command. His passions must be played upon, so the propaganda bureau has taken its place as one of the chief weapons. In the next war, the propaganda must be more subtle and clever than the best the World War produced. These frank admissions of wholesale lying on the part of trusted Governments in the last war will not soon be forgotten.

  C.E. Montague, a former infantry officer and the author of Disenchantment, had already expressed similar sentiments in 1922. His account of the discovery of a reputed Kadaveranstalt during the closing stages of the war reveals something of the extent to which trench myths such as the corpse factory and the Crucified Canadian were accepted as fact by many fighting troops:

  Of all this kind of swordsmanship the most dashing feat was the circulation of the ‘corpse factory’ story. German troops, it was written in part of our Press, had got, in certain places near their front, a proper plant for boiling down the fat of their own dead. It was not said whether the product was to be used as a food, or as a lubricant or illuminant only. Chance brought me into one of the reputed seats of this refinement of frugality. It was on ground that our troops had just taken, in 1918.

  At Bellicourt the St Quentin Canal goes into a long tunnel. Some little way in from its mouth you could find, with a flash-lamp, a small doorway cut in the tunnel’s brick wall, on the tow-path side of the canal. The doorway led to the foot of a narrow staircase that wound up through the earth till it came to an end in a room about 20 feet long. It, too, was subterranean, but now its darkness was pierced by one sharp-edged shaft of sunlight let in through a neat round hole cut in the five or six feet of earth above.

  Loaves, bits of meat, and articles of German equipment lay scattered about, and two big dixies or cauldrons, like those in which we stewed our tea, hung over two heaps of cold charcoal. Eight or ten bodies, lying pell-mell, nearly covered half the floor. They showed the usual effects of shell-fire. Another body, disembowelled and blown almost to rags, lay across one of the dixies and mixed with a puddle of coffee that it contained. A quite simple case. Shells had gone into cook-houses of ours, long before then, and had messed up the cooks with the stew.

  An Australian sergeant, off duty and poking about, like a good Australian, for something to see, had come up the stairs too. He had heard the great fat-boiling yarn, and how this was the latest seat of the industry. Sadly he surveyed the disappointing scene. Ruefully he noted the hopelessly normal nature of all the proceedings that had produced it. Then he broke the silence in which we had made our several inspections.

  ‘Can’t believe a word you read, sir, can you?’ he said with some bitterness. Life had failed to yield one of its advertised marvels. The press had lied again. The propagandist myth about Germans had cracked up once more. ‘Can’t believe a word you read’ had long been becoming a kind of catchphrase in the army. And now another good man had been duly confirmed in the faith, that whatever your pastors and masters tell you had best be assumed to be just a bellyfull of east wind.

  Montague overstates his case, perhaps, but the point is well made. Sadly, the lasting infamy of the corpse factory fiction of 1917 would have a detrimental effect on the way in which the Ministry of Information steered British reporting of Nazi atrocities against the Jewish population in Europe. However, whether aerial bombing of death factories such as Auschwitz would have hindered the Holocaust, and saved lives, remains a moot point.

  6

  Lions, Donkeys and Ironclads

  In modern memory, the enduring popular stereotype of British infantry tactics in the First World War offers extended lines of hopelessly exposed troops floundering in a sea of mud, while attempting to cross No Man’s Land beneath a hail of machine gun bullets, obstructed by barbed wire, and hindered rather than helped by the supporting artillery barrage. Their commanders, from ‘Butcher’ Haig downward, are portrayed as aloof, callous and incompetent figures, billeted in luxurious châteaux far behind the trenches in the front line, of which they knew nothing and cared less. General Ludendorff derided his enemy for pursuing strategic aims with little regard for tactical difficulties, and is said to have appraised the British army as ‘lions led by donkeys’. In truth, this memorable phrase was applied to the British generals not by the German Deputy Chief of Staff, but by the historian Alan Clark in 1961, who in falsifying history in the interests of newsworthy copy did much to perpetuate the most facile yet damaging myth of the entire war.

  In the years following the Armistice, and more particularly in the wake of the publication of the war memoirs of David Lloyd George, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig came to be widely vilified as the callous architect of a disastrous military strategy on the Western Front. His strategy was interpreted as one of attrition, in which the opposing armies were obliged to batter themselves to pieces, launching attack after attack regardless of cost. In particular the tragedy of the first day of the Somme offensive, on which the British army suffered record casualties of 57,000 men – fully one-half of the attacking force – has come to be seen as emblematic of the carnage and futility across the whole of the Western Front. That the actual number killed on that day was approximately 20,000 is less widely appreciated, as is that fact that the Somme campaign lasted a total of four and a half months, produced a lesser average of 2,500 casualties daily, played a significant part in the destruction of the German field army, and forced the BEF to develop tactics that would eventually win the war.

  Nevertheless, the tragedy of July 1st 1916 has clouded perception ever since, and played a significant part in launching a veritable flotilla of myths. So too have the war poets – Sassoon, Owen, Graves, Blunden – a small and largely unrepresentative group of junior officers who are among the most quoted British voices from the First World War. Sassoon endorsed the popular perception of ‘butchers and bunglers’ as early as 1917 in his celebrated poem ‘The General’, thought to have been inspired by his then Corps commander, Lieutenant-General Sir Ivor Maxse:

  ‘Good morning, good morning!’ the General said

  When we met him last week on our way to the line.

  Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ’em dead,

  And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

  ‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack

  As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

  . . .

  But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

  Few of his fellow poets were any kinder. Writing in 1936, eight years after the death of Haig, Lloyd George, the former Liberal Prime Min
ister, made plain his dislike of the same Generals collectively, and Haig in particular:

  It is not too much to say that when the Great War broke out our Generals had the most important lessons of their art to learn. Before they began they had much to unlearn. Their brains were cluttered with useless lumber . . . Some of it was never cleared out to the end of the War . . . They knew nothing except by hearsay about the actual fighting of a battle under modern conditions. Haig ordered too many bloody battles in this War. He only took part in two . . . He never even saw the ground on which his greatest battles were fought, either before or during the fight. . . . The distance between the châteaux and the dug-outs was as great as that from the fixed stars to the caverns of the earth.

  Others subsequently carried their condemnation further still, the historian Basil Liddell Hart even suggesting that in the wake of ‘manslaughter’ on such an epic scale, those commanders responsible should be held accountable to the nation. Given that on one view the operational history of the British army on the Western Front between 1914 and mid-1918 constitutes a succession of débâcles and disasters, it is easy to contend that its heavy losses – half a million dead, one and a half million wounded – were entirely due to the ignorance and ineptitude of its commanders. But this, as we shall see, is no less a myth than the German corpse factory or the Angel of Mons.

  In truth, the manner in which Haig and the General Staff conducted their war should be viewed in its proper context, and in particular bearing in mind the technology available at the time. The First World War was the first truly global conflict, and the first to involve technologies that are now taken for granted: aircraft, tanks, wireless telegraphy and chemical weapons. It was also the first great artillery war, and the first in which the machine gun achieved its full potential. It represented the first conflict of modern mass production, and widespread use of the internal combustion engine. As the historian John Terraine points out in his masterly study of wartime mythology, The Smoke and the Fire, the commanders on all sides found themselves caught in a hiatus of technology – and therefore of tactics – in which they were presented with the poisons well in advance of the antidote. Add to this the fact that Britain’s small regular army had been effectively destroyed by early 1915, that the New Armies had to be trained and equipped almost from scratch, that the BEF was subordinated to French command throughout the conflict, and that too many major offensives were timed or launched for no better reason than to relieve pressure on its French and Russian allies, and it is little wonder that the First World War took four long years to win.

  This is not to suggest that British strategy and tactics were never worthy of reproach, whether on the Somme or elsewhere. For example, on July 1st 1916 General Henry Rawlinson ordered his Fourth Army to cross No Man’s Land in extended line at ‘a steady pace’, thus providing those German machine gunners not eliminated by the preceding artillery barrage with an exposed, slow-moving target. By no means all British troops advanced in this fashion, and therefore blame for the comparative slaughter on the left flank can hardly be credited to this factor alone. Indeed on the right flank the attackers succeeded in taking all their objectives, regardless of whether they advanced in extended line or skirmisher formation. Yet the myth of the slaughter by extended line persists, and dovetails with the misconception that British troops were too overloaded to move or fight properly. In the Official History by Sir James Edmonds, their slow and murderous progress across No Man’s Land is falsely ascribed to the excessive weight of equipment carried by each soldier:

  The total weight carried per man was about 66 lbs, which made it difficult to get out of a trench, impossible to move much quicker than a slow walk, or to rise or lie down quickly . . . This overloading of men is by many infantry officers regarded as one of the principal reasons of the heavy losses and failure of their battalions; for their men could not get through the machine gun zone with sufficient speed.

  While it is certainly true that a load equal to half a man’s body weight greatly complicates the task of scrambling over the top of a trench, or rising from a prone position, it does not prevent him from moving forward at a jogtrot, or taking cover, nor would it utterly exhaust him in a mere matter of minutes. On the Somme, the distance between the opposing first line trenches was seldom greater than 500 yards, and the ground conditions reasonably firm and level in most sectors. Yet the myth perpetrated by Edmonds and Liddell Hart that ‘hopelessly handicapped’ troops found it ‘physically impossible’ to cross the machine gun zone to the German line at anything other than a snail’s pace gained widespread acceptance, despite the fact that British troops were scarcely less heavily equipped in 1918, yet still managed to advance some 84 miles in 116 days.

  But that is to leap forward in time. In truth, the tactical hiatus imposed by trench warfare was chiefly the result of new technologies rather than inept leadership. The preceding 60 years were marked by revolutionary increases in firepower, in particular the steady improvement of the rifle over the musket in terms of range, velocity and rate of fire. This in turn drastically reduced the effectiveness of horsed cavalry, the traditional arm of exploitation in a war of movement. As a result, trench warfare had already been encountered during previous campaigns, for example at Sebastopol (1854–55), Plevna (1877) and Port Arthur (1904–5). The development of the machine gun served only to seal the bargain. August and September 1914 produced a war of movement only because the Allied armies spent much of this period engaged in a fighting retreat. Once the German advance was checked at the Battle of the Marne, the digging of protective trenches along the Aisne became a foregone conclusion. The addition of barbed wire and increased numbers of automatic weapons served only to make the stalemate permanent. It would be two years before an all-new technical innovation capable of breaking what had become a form of siege warfare (the tank) rather than deepening it (artillery, poison gas) would make its début on the battlefield, even then in a form which promised much but delivered considerably less. The only alternative course of action would have been to stop the war, which was no alternative at all.

  How, then, might the Generals have acted differently? Since 1918 sources as diverse as Lloyd George, the rock group Pink Floyd and the television comedy series Blackadder have promoted the canard that all British commanders were remote, even cowardly figures, preferring to direct each futile Big Push from the comfort of a well-appointed château deep inside the comfort zone, and far removed from the sharp end. But again, this is false history. In modern warfare it is not the role of senior commanders to lead from the front, or expose themselves to unacceptable levels of risk by making foolhardy tours of inspection of front line positions (although some, like Allenby, did). To do so would have been wholly irresponsible: ordinary troops can be trained in a matter of months, whereas the process of training and developing senior commanders is measured in years. Similarly their headquarters could hardly be sited within range of enemy guns. Besides which, a surprising number of British generals did become casualties during the conflict: no fewer than 78 were killed while on active service, and another 146 wounded. During the Battle of Loos (1915) alone, eight commanders above the rank of major-general became casualties, including one captured. And it should not be forgotten that most of the First World War generals had engaged the enemy more closely in previous campaigns when more junior in rank. The oft-told story that Lieutenant-General Sir Launcelot Kiggell burst into tears during ‘his first visit’ to the front at Passchendaele in November 1917 is almost certainly apocryphal.

  Had Haig and his Staff subordinates attempted to direct their battles from positions nearer the front, they would have gained no advantage at all. A critical yet often ignored factor in the manner in which the First World War was fought is that it was the only conflict in history to have been fought without effective battlefield communications or voice control. It is a simple but irrefutable truism that without control the commander is unable to command. In 1914 the Royal Engineers signals service barel
y existed, and lost much of its equipment and cable stock during the retreat from Mons. Early wireless sets were the size of an ammunition limber, and scarcely field-portable beyond the location of a brigade or divisional headquarters. Field telephones were available, but suffered from at least two significant drawbacks. The first of these was that the cables were prone to being cut by shellfire, or by the iron-shod wheels of artillery or transport vehicles. Adverse weather and cable theft also worked to their detriment. By 1916 the Engineers had reached the conclusion that cables would only be secure from shelling when buried to a depth of six feet, although even that degree of hard labour offered no guarantees. Conditions at the front meant that breaks were often hard to locate, let alone repair, yet it was not uncommon for signallers to have to repair 40 or 50 cable breaks in a single day. The other problem was security, the official RE history published in 1921 acknowledging that more was given away to enemy eavesdropping in 1916 than during the previous year. Only in the last few months of the war did wireless finally come into its own, so that for almost the entire duration of the war communications between forward and rear areas relied upon such imperfect (and usually hazardous) means as runners, carrier pigeons, heliographs, semaphore flags and lamps, rockets, and messages dropped by aircraft. If smoke was used to screen an attack, the options were limited further still.

  Once an attack was launched, communications with the advancing troops were reduced almost to zero. Pigeons, dogs and visual morse were seldom reliable, while markers – if visible – confirmed little more than the position reached by a particular unit. The greater burden fell on runners, whose chances of survival were much reduced when trying to cross open ground swept by shell, machine gun and sniper fire. In these conditions a message could take hours to reach its destination – up to six according to the Official History, by which time the position on the ground might have changed beyond recognition. The problem affected the Germans to a lesser degree, since on the Western Front theirs was essentially a defensive war, conducted from deep dugouts and trenches which benefited from relatively secure communication systems. During an assault, therefore, British commanders were more often than not unable to command and control, whether by way of committing reserves to exploit success, or to call off futile attacks, or – and this most crucially – to call down artillery support where needed. The problem was less one of incompetence than of impossibility. At the outset of the war the necessary technology simply did not exist, and by its close had still not reached a sufficiently advanced state of development.