by Andrew Marr
Though the Women’s Land Army got the most coverage, relatively few women went to work full time in agriculture. Farmers preferred to pay less to child workers. But they swarmed into munitions factories, into transport jobs, into offices and into general industrial jobs vacated by men. The total number of extra women in employment in industry during 1914–18 rose by around 800,000 to just under 3 million; some 400,000 more women found jobs in offices; another 200,000 women’s jobs were created in government and banks employed a further 50,000 or so.84 From Glasgow trams to Liverpool shell factories, the London Underground to women police officers patrolling urban parks, Britain suddenly started to look a little different. Skirts became a little shorter. Some women in factories or on farms took to wearing trousers. Cigarettes became popular with women as well as men. Moral attitudes shifted: when it became clear that the exodus of men to the front had left thousands of unmarried mothers pregnant, their children were declared patriotic ‘war babies’ and money raised to support them. Other forms of support made breakthroughs too: the bra began to oust the old-fashioned camisole. One diplomatist said later that when he had left England in 1911 ‘contraceptives were hard to buy outside London or other large cities. By 1919 every village chemist was selling them.’85 One way and another, the Edwardian woman had gone.
The suffrage victory came about, however, by Westminster accident, the kind of random clink of billiard balls that often happens there. The men’s franchise included an occupational qualification. But with the upheaval caused by the war, not only for the fighting men but for those who had moved job to help maintain industry, the register was useless. It would need to be rethought. To hold an election while disenfranchising the nation’s heroes was patently absurd. The old rules would have to be torn up. This gave Asquith cover to announce a semi-conversion to votes for women. In early 1917 a committee of peers and MPs suggested a universal franchise for men and for all women over a certain age who were able to vote in local government elections or were married to a voter. When the age was fixed at thirty, this would give around 8.4 million women the vote, many more than the suffragettes had hoped for before the war. The Commons voted overwhelmingly for this in June 1917 and, under the influence of the new patriotism, that arch reactionary Lord Curzon only recommended abstention and the Lords too passed the measure, which became law in February 1918. Were the women workers pleased? Probably, but they had other worries too. In the munitions factories, so many were turning yellow through poisoning that they were popularly known as ‘canaries’.
A Plague on Haig?
The man who from Christmas 1915 until the end of the fighting was in charge of Britain’s main struggle on land has seen his reputation plummet from national saviour to bloodsoaked fool. Sir Douglas Haig, later Earl Haig, was a cavalry officer who had started his service in India, fought with Kitchener in the Sudan and then taken part in the Boer War. As aide-de-camp to Edward VII he was well connected at court, abstemious, brief of speech and strongly religious. Though he cordially despised politicians, particularly Lloyd George, he was a highly political man and a born intriguer who had effectively knifed his predecessor, Sir John French, before getting command of the British forces in France for himself. The ultimate ‘donkey’, the very image of the unimaginative and stubborn general sending his men to the slaughter, at the time he had a huge reputation. Partly because of his post-war work for veterans and the wounded, Haig’s funeral in 1928 was one of the biggest modern Britain has ever seen – more people turned out to pay their respects to him than would for Churchill, or indeed Princess Diana.
The case for Haig is that he was always more flexible in his thinking, keener on new weapons of war such as tanks and aircraft and a better administrator than the critics understand. He fought against any diversion of the war into other theatres, such as the Middle East or Italy, and always understood that Germany had to be defeated in France, where her main power was concentrated. He might have suffered from excessive self-belief, even a complex about being God’s instrument, but commander-in-chief is no job for the introspective or indecisive. And the job was particularly hard. Nobody had fought a war like this one before. When he took over as commander the British Expeditionary Force had about 600,000 men and held thirty miles of front line; by 1918 he was commanding three times as many men holding 123 miles. As one pro-Haig military historian has put it: ‘It was Haig who had to manage that expansion; and train, equip, deploy and fight the largest army Britain has ever had . . . in a coalition war with difficult allies.’86 By the final stage of the war it was Haig’s army which alone was able to mount a sustained attack and which eventually defeated the German army decisively. As to his strategy in the bloodiest battles, including that notorious first day of the Somme and then the bloody slog of Passchendaele, it is argued that Haig’s massive use of artillery and belief that the Germans would be broken by waves of infantry attack after the bombardments may have been wrong but was entirely logical.
The case against him is that he lacked the flexibility to learn from his mistakes, and had insufficient imagination to understand the human cost of what he was attempting. Too often in Haig’s diaries, the loss of 10,000 or more men is described as ‘very small’. The Passchendaele attack, which drew horrified protests from some more junior commanders, was intended to retake a coastal strip of Belgium and deprive the Germans of U-boat bases in a bold move Haig described with such theatrical bravado that the cabinet was briefly entranced. By the time the British and Canadian forces attacked, the terrible weather had made their job all but impossible. The Germans were terribly mauled – ‘Flanders 1917’ is to Germany what day one of the Somme is to Britain, or Verdun to France – but their line did not break. The British gained some higher ground but at the cost of 250,000 casualties, of whom more than 50,000 were killed. One of Haig’s closest aides is said to have wept when he saw the conditions, and asked: ‘Did we send men to fight in this?’ Haig persisted in the attack long after it was obvious to those fighting that no breakthrough would be achieved, and if he takes credit in part for the eventual victory in Flanders then he must be blamed for the fact that there, at Tyne Cot, stands the largest Commonwealth cemetery in the world.
The question that is ultimately unanswerable, of course, is whether the war could have been won without such slaughter. Other generals thought so. Lloyd George had always believed the war could have been won without such a dark blood-sacrifice and this was the source of his hostility to Haig throughout the second half of the war when he briefly put a French general, Nivelle, over Haig’s head until Nivelle was discredited by his failed offensive. Eventually Lloyd George had had to give way to Haig. The alternatives to slogging in Flanders had collapsed. The Italians were badly beaten at Caporetto, the Dardanelles and Salonika expeditions had been failures and, although the war in the Middle East had gone well, it was hardly the high road to Berlin. And Lloyd George could not keep sacking commanders-in-chief, or falling out with a military top brass which still had the support of the country. Trying to think through alternatives was the job of a humane democratic leader, but Lloyd George’s skills as a military strategist were negligible and both he and Haig knew it.
Haig’s moment of glory, and partial vindication, came in 1918, when the Allies had little hope of the war ending soon. On the Russian front, after the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, Germany had imposed a punitive peace. The March 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk took from Russia a third of her population, half her industry and almost all her coal. A savage warning to France and Britain about what to expect if Germany won in the West, it allowed the German commander Ludendorff to hugely reinforce his armies in Flanders, giving him a sudden superiority in numbers over the British and French. He would only have this for a while, however, since the Americans were on their way. Realizing that by now his main enemy was Haig’s BEF, he gambled everything on smashing through the British lines in a final push. This was always going to be hard. On the rare occasions when some kind of breakthrough h
ad been achieved – such as the Battle of Cambrai at the end of 1917, when British tanks had briefly seized the initiative – following through, dragging artillery and supplies across ravaged trench lines, had proved almost impossible. But Ludendorff had a simple idea. He refused to use the word strategy: ‘We chop a hole. The rest follows.’87
Ludendorff nearly did chop his hole. Using specially selected shock troops, the first time ‘storm troopers’ appeared, carrying the new sub-machine guns as well as their traditional grenades, flame throwers and trench mortars, and preceded by the usual artillery barrage, the Germans fell upon the British. Haig’s army was at the time relatively weak: Lloyd George, mistrusting him, had held back all the reinforcements he had wanted. Later, this would cause a significant political crisis for the prime minister when a major general, Sir Frederick Maurice, wrote an open letter to the press accusing Lloyd George (and Bonar Law) of lying to Parliament about the relative strengths of the British army at the beginning of 1917 and 1918. It was a tangled affair, but Lloyd George saw off his enemies in the Commons in a speech combining guile, chutzpah and bluff. For the two British armies concerned, the effects were rather more dramatic. Ludendorff’s men heavily outnumbered the British Fifth Army under Sir Hubert Gough, who had twelve divisions facing forty-two German ones, and had clustered his men too far forward. The Germans, using gas and high explosives, broke his defences and would quickly gain forty miles, taking more than 1,000 square miles of territory. On 21 March 1918, the Germans took around 21,000 British prisoners, one of the largest British surrenders ever. Six days later Gough, protesting bitterly about his treatment, was sacked by Lloyd George.
The British Third Army, north of Gough, better prepared for in-depth defence, gave far less ground. But it still seemed likely that the Germans would succeed in breaking through between the British and French. As the BEF retreat continued, Haig issued his famous 11 April Order of the Day, insisting that victory would be won by whoever held on the longest: ‘There is no course open to us but to fight it out. Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us might fight on to the end.’ By this stage in the war it was a matter of who was left standing. And though German advances continued, Ludendorff began to turn his attention to the south, and to the French, forgetting his original determination to break Haig. Paris seemed in imminent danger, at the end as it had been at the beginning. But ferocious British defensive fighting took such a toll on this final ‘Kaiser Battle’ attack that the German army’s spirit began to break. In its way it was a great victory, albeit one made while walking backwards. By July the Germans had been stopped and by early August the Canadians and Australians were counter-attacking with such success that Ludendorff’s own spirit was broken. By September a ferocious British-French counter-attack was destroying the German lines and by the following month the German army was collapsing as the BEF, with the Americans now in the war too, drove deeper and deeper behind the original scenes of carnage and stalemate.
For all this, at the time Haig was much praised, along with Lloyd George who never lost his nerve. Haig was in his way just as brave a man, and as dedicated a leader as the prime minister. Later his name was indelibly linked to the murderous frontal assaults of the war as a whole. Haig was dogged without flair, brave but unimaginative. He was not a fool. But he was not a great military genius at a time when Britain sorely needed one. In a way, Britain’s victory was a victory for Haig values – resilience, refusal to give up. But as the surrenders of March 1918 hint, it was a close-run thing.
The Ribbon in the Mersey: Protest
The endless beach at Formby, where the Mersey meets the Irish Sea, was a quiet place even in wartime. On it, alone, in July 1917, a tall and striking-looking officer was walking. Stopping by the water, he first shook his fist at the sky. Then he began to tug at the small ribbon sewn onto his tunic, showing he had won the Military Cross. It fell weakly on the water and floated away. The man turned back. He was Siegfried Sassoon, a hero from the trenches, who was in the middle of the worst crisis of his young life. Back in Britain after being wounded, he had decided that the war was being fought for the wrong reasons, and that he would refuse to serve any longer. He was well aware that this would probably mean a court martial and possibly even the death penalty, though disgrace and imprisonment were likelier. He had written to his commanding officer ‘with the greatest possible regret’ to tell him ‘it is my intention to refuse to perform any future military duties’. Nobody could call him a coward. Indeed, he himself likened the protest to his earlier recklessness in the front line. Now, summoned at once to his regiment’s base at Litherland on the outskirts of Liverpool, he had been sent to await his fate in a nearby hotel, where he was mainly occupying himself learning poetry off by heart to keep him going in prison.
Sassoon was no ordinary objector. His family was one of the better-connected of the great Jewish dynasties of Edwardian England who mingled with the set of the Prince of Wales. Sassoon had been brought up in a classic old-fashioned English gentry way, part of the Sussex landed set, reading the imperial adventure stories of G. A. Henty and Rider Haggard and riding obsessively to hounds. These were days when hunting was central to upper-crust country life and considered so important for developing manliness and horsemanship that the army did not count time off for fox hunting as leave. Educated at Marlborough, where he was said to have carried knuckle-dusters to repel anti-Semites, and at Cambridge, Sassoon wanted to be a writer. But when war came it seems all but inevitable that he instantly enlisted in the Sussex Yeomanry, quickly switching to the Royal Welch Fusiliers to get to France more quickly.
All this would matter when his great rebellion started because, unlike many, his friends would be well connected and powerful. In the fighting, Sassoon had shown himself not only a charismatic front-line leader but spectacularly brave. He shared the usual frontline distaste for staff officers and politicians, but it was not until he arrived back home that his distaste turned to a wider disgust. It is best sampled, not from his excellent lightly fictionalized autobiography Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, in which he appears as George Sherston, but from his diaries, articulating a feeling that must have been widely shared but which was mostly buttoned up and suppressed by those serving. On 19 June 1917 he wrote: ‘The soldiers who return home seem to be stunned by the things they have endured. They are willingly entrapped by the silent conspiracy against them. They have come back to life from the door of death . . . They vaguely know that it is “bad form” to tell the truth about the war.’ Then his anger turns on the politicians:
The rulers of England have always relied on the ignorance and patient credulity of the crowd. If the crowd could see into those cynical hearts it would lynch its dictators . . . Of the elderly male population I can hardly trust myself to speak . . . They glory in the mechanical phrases of the Northcliffe Press. They regard the progress of the war like a game of chess, cackling about ‘attrition’ and ‘wastage of manpower’ and ‘civilization at stake’. In every class of society there are old men like ghouls, insatiable in their desire for slaughter, impenetrable in their ignorance.88
This is the same disgust that can be found in poems of the time, such as the memorable suggestion that a jingoistic crowd in a music hall would be well served by the arrival of a spouting tank lumbering down the aisles.
Sassoon decided to make his protest public, by writing a ‘soldier’s declaration’ against the war. He announced that he was now ‘in wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it’. What had begun as a war ‘of defence and liberation’ had become one ‘of aggression and conquest’ and, had the war aims been published, then it would be clear that a peace settlement could be negotiated. He was writing on behalf of the soldiers against ‘the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of ago
nies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize’. It was a powerful denunciation, and made strong points – not least in tacitly drawing attention to the war in the Middle East and Africa, little debated, but where Britain was indeed extending her influence and empire. Yet his argument about war aims seems odd. By this stage in the conflict, the question was whether Germany could be beaten and would withdraw from captured territory if she was not; there was no evidence that she would, and indeed the most dangerous German attack was still to come. Nor was it fair to tar all civilians and politicians with the same brush. Millions knew pretty clearly what was happening. They could talk, and hear, even if they could not yet read it all. Sassoon’s own poems, published during the fighting, contained vivid descriptions of the filth and degradation of Flanders. Even among the Colonel Blimp types in their clubs, there were many heartbroken men.
Sassoon was speaking for a small minority, but by 1917 it was a growing one. We have already met Edmund Morel, the half-French campaigner who fought for the natives of the Belgian Congo with such success. Many radical Liberals had been aghast at the declaration of war and had formed what they called the Union of Democratic Control, calling for Parliament, not the Crown, to be supreme in all matters of war-making and treaties; for an ‘international council’ to be formed – a first draft of the idea that would become the League of Nations – for general disarmament, and for there to be no changes of boundaries without referendums. By November 1914 they had broken with the Liberals, begun to form branches around the country and had the support of eighteen Liberal and Labour MPs, including Ramsay MacDonald. Backed by the Manchester Guardian’s editor C. P. Scott and rich Quaker families, they began to hold meetings, issue pamphlets and publish their own journal. Radical suffragettes, the Independent Labour Party and pacifists would join them.89 It is very hard to gauge how many people supported the UDC and the No-Conscription Fellowship which followed it. This took courage. Bertrand Russell was stripped of his Trinity College, Cambridge, lectureship and later imprisoned. The Liberal MP Charles Trevelyan’s local council passed a motion calling for him to be ‘taken out and shot’. MacDonald was barred from his golf club, which complained that ‘we are tainted as with leprosy’; he was later beaten up and narrowly escaped being thrown in a canal. Ferociously attacked by newspapers, their meetings were broken up by hostile audiences and at one, in Farringdon, London, in November 1915 soldiers stormed the platform and drove the speakers off.