Soldiers dug lines of trenches in the earth, strengthened them with sandbags and barbed wire, and set up their great guns behind. The trenches zigzagged for hundreds of miles across fields and up hills. Sometimes they were only fifty metres apart, and the British could hear German soldiers singing, and officers giving orders. The land between the two lines of trenches was called no-man’s-land, because it belonged to no one, and no one could cross it without being killed.
And that was the start of the most terrible war Europe had ever known. Afterwards, people called it the Great War. The Great War wasn’t like other wars. It was fought by machines. Machine guns fired bullets so fast that soldiers running across no-man’s-land were mown down in seconds. Aeroplanes flew over the trenches dropping bombs; cannon hurled shells from twenty miles away; and poison gas was released from canisters to choke soldiers, blind them and burn their skin.
Millions of British, French, German and Russian soldiers were killed in the Great War. They were buried in mud, for after a few months not a tree or a blade of grass remained in no-man’s-land. The only flowers that grew were poppies, red as blood, which came up every spring. And still, every year, we wear poppies to remember the dead of the Great War.
Life in the Trenches
SUCH a huge war needed more and more soldiers to fight it, so recruiting posters were stuck up all over Britain and Ireland. “Your country needs you!” they said.
“If you join the army,” the recruiting sergeants told boys who gathered to read the posters, “you can fight together. We’ll give you a regiment of your own.”
And so new regiments were invented with names like the Accrington Pals and the Grimsby Chums.
“We’ll soon beat the kaiser!” the friends joked as they put on their new uniforms.
At Waterloo Station in London, they saw wounded soldiers being carried off a hospital train. Some of them had lost legs or arms, and others had bandages over their eyes.
“It won’t happen to us,” the friends said.
At Dover they heard a rumbling sound. “Is there thunder at sea?” they asked the sailors.
The sailors just laughed. “Those are the guns firing in France,” they said.
And the friends looked at each other nervously.
When they got to France, they were told to march along a trench to “the front”. Long before they reached it, the noise of guns became deafening. When shells landed near by, the whole earth shook and they flung themselves to the ground. Even though it was night, the sky was lit up by the flashes of exploding shells.
The front was the trench right opposite the Germans.
“That’s no-man’s-land,” the sergeant told them. “There’s nothing out there but barbed wire and machine guns!”
The friends were given tea which tasted of mud and sandwiches which tasted of mud, and told they were going “over the top” at dawn. Going over the top meant climbing out of the trench and charging across no-man’s-land towards the Germans.
“But what about the barbed wire?” the friends whispered to each other. “What about the machine guns?”
No one slept. They spent the night thinking about school and their friends at home. At dawn, the officer blew his whistle and they scrambled up the side of the trench. But they couldn’t run across no-man’s-land because it was choked with barbed wire; and they couldn’t stay in line because of craters left by the shells. Then the German machine guns started firing and one by one they saw their friends killed.
At home, postmen got used to delivering the official telegrams the army sent families when their sons died. Sometimes, after an attack, they would have to deliver a telegram to every family in the district. People dreaded the sight of the postman, because he so often brought bad news.
Wilfred Owen, a poet who fought in the trenches, described marching back from the front:
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge.
Life in the trenches was just as bad for the German soldiers. Their trenches were just as muddy, and the British and French had machine guns and barbed wire of their own. Sometimes all the soldiers – German, British, French and Russian – thought about the men they were trying to kill, and who were trying to kill them, and wondered what they were like. On Christmas Day in the first winter of the war no one wanted to fight. Gradually everyone stopped shooting, then soldiers from both armies climbed cautiously out of their trenches and approached each other across no-man’s-land.
“What’s your name?”
“Dominik. I’m from Hamburg. Yours?”
“Euan. I’m from Glasgow.”
The soldiers swapped cigarettes and photographs. Some of them began games of football. Then the officers blew their whistles and ordered everyone back into the trenches. A gun went off, and then another, and the war started up again. After that the soldiers were ordered never to talk to their enemies again, in case they made friends and refused to kill them.
Meanwhile, in their headquarters, the generals tried to think up new ways to win the war.
“One big attack will do it,” said a British general called Haig. “First our guns will batter the Germans for weeks. Then thousands of soldiers will attack at once. The Germans won’t stand a chance.”
He decided to make his attack near the river Somme. The British soldiers were soon deafened by the sound of shells whistling overhead and explosions in the German trenches.
“They’ll be dead before we attack,” their officers told them.
When the day of the attack came, the men climbed out of the trenches at dawn and marched towards the German lines. But the Germans had not all been killed, for their trenches were deep enough to keep them safe. Quickly, they ran to their machine guns and started firing. In one day almost sixty thousand British soldiers were killed or wounded.
The Battle of the Somme went on for months. By the time it ended, three hundred thousand soldiers were dead, and the British had only gained a few miles of ground.
Men from all over the empire were sent to join the army in France. Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, Africans and fighters from the Caribbean arrived, and marched along the trenches under the thunder of gunfire. But they couldn’t beat the Germans either. Because they couldn’t win a victory in France, the British decided to attack somewhere else. The Turks were allies of the Germans, so they sent soldiers from New Zealand and Australia to attack Gallipoli in Turkey.
“The Germans may be unbeatable,” the generals said, “but we’ll easily defeat the Turks!”
The Turks proved brave fighters, however, and thousands of Australians and New Zealanders were killed.
Next the Germans tried to use their navy to defeat the British. Their battleships left harbour and steamed out into the North Sea. The British admiral John Jellicoe knew how important it was not to let the Germans win.
“He’s the only man who could lose the war in a single afternoon,” people said anxiously.
Unfortunately Jellicoe knew the German ships were better built than the British ones, so he didn’t dare attack them head-on. For a day and a night the great steel battleships hurled their shells at each other. More British ships were sunk than German, but in the end it was the Germans who turned away, went back to port and never came out again.
It looked as if neither side could beat the other.
“This war’s going to go on for ever,” people said gloomily.
Week after week, year after year, trains set off from Waterloo Station carrying young men to France, and returned full of coffins. It seemed as if the war would go on until there were no young men left to fight it.
The End of the War
ONE morning, at dawn, two German soldiers heard a roaring sound coming from no-man’s-land. “What is it?” they asked each other nervously.
They peered out of their trench. The noise grew louder. Before they could call for help, a huge steel shape appeared. The soldiers fired at it, but their bullets bou
nced off the sides. Another shape appeared, then another. The machines moved on caterpillar tracks, bristling with guns, and the Germans fled in terror as they rolled over the trench and opened fire.
The British called their new machines tanks. Neither machine guns nor barbed wire could stop them. At last they had found a way of getting through the German trenches.
They were only just in time. The Russians gave up the war, so all the German soldiers who had been fighting in Russia were sent west to fight the British and French, and it looked as if the Germans would win. Tanks helped stop them. Then the British and French found a new ally, the United States of America. Since becoming independent, the USA had grown into a rich, strong country whose factories were the biggest in the world. When thousands of American soldiers arrived in France to help, it wasn’t long before the Germans surrendered.
At eleven o’clock on 11 November 1918 – the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month – the guns stopped shooting at last, and from one end of the trenches to the other a terrible silence fell.
“I can hear a bird singing,” said a soldier. It was the first time he had heard birdsong in four years.
At last the Great War was over. No one had ever seen such terrible destruction before. Thirty-seven million soldiers had been killed or wounded. If you go into any church in Britain or France, in even the tiniest village, you will see a war memorial with rows of names carved on it. Those are the names of all the young men who were killed, and left sorrowing families behind them.
Even when the fighting ended, people didn’t stop dying, for right after the war a terrible epidemic of influenza swept across the world, killing even more.
“We’ll never forget the dead,” everyone promised.
And to this day, the nearest Sunday to 11 November is still called Remembrance Sunday. We wear poppies to remember all those who have been killed in wars, and at the eleventh hour – eleven o’clock – we fall silent and pray that we never have to fight such a war again.
The countries of the world started a League of Nations to decide arguments between countries by discussion not war.
“There won’t be another war like that,” people said. “That was the war to end all wars.”
And everyone breathed a sigh of relief, and settled down to enjoy the peace.
The Jazz Age
“WE were good enough to die for our government,” soldiers said as they came back home, “so we’re good enough to vote for our government!”
“If we were good enough to work in factories making guns and ammunition when the men were fighting,” said women, “we’re good enough to vote as well!”
And so, straight after the war, a law was passed which let all men over the age of twenty-one vote in elections, and finally gave women the vote (although they had to be over thirty). Nancy Astor became the first woman MP, and Britain became a democracy where all adults had a say in choosing the government.
People felt different after that. They didn’t have to look up to aristocrats as they had in the old days.
“What’s so special about lords?” they asked. “We’re all equal now!”
Nobody wanted to work as a servant any more, so the aristocrats had nobody to look after them, and one by one their palaces were closed down or sold off.
Just as they had after the Napoleonic Wars, people felt restless. They had travelled to France and met men and women from other countries. They didn’t want to go back to the old ways.
“The world’s changing!” they said. “And we want to change too!”
Wherever they looked, they saw new inventions to wonder at. For centuries people had used candles to light their homes at night. Because candles were dim, most families rose at dawn and went to bed at sunset to make the most of the daylight. But then Michael Faraday had discovered how electricity worked, and after the Great War more and more families lit their homes with electric lights.
For centuries people had dreamed of being able to communicate with each other from far away. “Imagine if I could talk to people in Australia!” they said.
In 1876 an Edinburgh-born American called Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, and the dream came true. After the Great War more and more people had telephones, and could speak to friends hundreds of miles away. When motor cars were invented, travelling became easier as well.
To start with, people couldn’t understand how cars worked. “Did you see that?” they said. “A carriage going along without a horse!”
They were so scared, that cars were only allowed to drive slowly, with men walking in front of them waving red flags. When the red flag law was dropped, excited car owners held a race from London to Brighton to celebrate (people who own old cars still drive from London to Brighton every year to remember it). Children and animals scattered as they hurtled through villages. All over Britain travellers sold horses, pulled down stables and hurried to buy cars. Before the Great War only the very rich had them, but after it cars became cheap enough for ordinary people as well.
Aeroplanes were even more exciting. There are still arguments about who was the first person to fly a proper aeroplane, but the first to fly across the Channel was a Frenchman called Louis Blériot. Blériot took off from a cliff near Calais in a flimsy machine he had made himself out of wood and canvas. Its engine puffed black smoke and sometimes broke down in mid-air.
“Good luck!” everyone shouted as he dipped and swooped over the sea.
Halfway across the Channel, fog came down and Blériot got lost. But the fog lifted just in time for him to see the white cliffs of Dover, and he crash-landed on the grass while the crowds cheered and waved British and French flags.
Officers in the navy and army looked worried, though. “If armies can fly across the Channel,” the sailors asked, “what use is the Royal Navy?”
“Aeroplanes will be able to bomb towns,” the soldiers said. “And we won’t be able to stop them!”
For the moment, though, aeroplanes seemed exciting, and pilots competed to break flying records. John Alcock, from Manchester, and Arthur Brown, from Glasgow, were the first to fly non-stop across the Atlantic. They set out from Newfoundland, but as they flew east it got colder and colder, and ice built up on the engines. They were worried the engines would stop, so Brown climbed out along the wings to hack the ice off. It was almost seventeen hours before they saw grass below them, and crash-landed in a bog in Ireland.
Amy Johnson became the first famous woman pilot. She flew solo to Australia, and was the first to fly non-stop to Moscow. She also flew from England to Japan in record time. The newspapers were full of stories about her courage and determination.
Finally, an Italian called Guglielmo Marconi came up with the idea of sending sounds through the air by radio waves. First ships used radio to speak to each other, then people used it to broadcast news and music. Just as everyone now has a television, every household then bought a radio, listened to new songs and – if they liked them – pushed back the furniture to dance.
And the radio played a new kind of music for them to dance to. It was louder than classical music, faster – and much more fun. It came from America and was called jazz.
“This is the jazz age!” couples screamed as they twirled around dance floors.
After the terrible slaughter of the Great War, it seemed as if the whole world had decided to throw a party. Women were fed up with wearing skirts too long to dance in, so they bought shorter ones.
“Disgusting!” complained old men when they saw girls’ bare legs for the first time.
They cut their hair short as well.
“You look like a boy!” shrieked mothers as their daughters came back from the hairdresser’s.
The girls didn’t care. They were having fun!
Unfortunately, if one part of the world is rich and happy, you can be quite sure that things are going less well somewhere else. The jazz age got people dancing in London and New York, but in Ireland there was no dancing. There,
everyone had more serious things to think about, for the old argument about Home Rule had started a civil war.
War in Ireland
ONE Easter, in the middle of the Great War, a group of Irish soldiers tried to start a rebellion. They seized the General Post Office in Dublin and declared Ireland free. When the British army arrived to drive them out, they closed the shutters and barricaded the door. But they didn’t have many bullets, and some only had wooden rifles that they pointed out of the windows to make the British think them well armed, so the Easter Rising didn’t last long. Today, if you go to Dublin, you can still see bullet holes in the post office walls where the British soldiers fired at the Irish until the last man surrendered.
But after the war the Irish were determined to win their freedom once and for all. Thousands had fought bravely for Britain in the Great War – wasn’t it time they were rewarded?
“All the same, I bet the British cheat us again,” muttered Irish soldiers as they returned home. “There’s no point arguing for freedom in Parliament. The only thing they understand is fighting.”
And so the fighting began. Irish republicans – people who wanted Ireland to be an independent country – set fire to English houses and attacked policemen. The British government retaliated by sending soldiers to Ireland. They were called Black and Tans because of the colour of their uniforms, and were ordered to bully the Irish into submission. Lorryloads of Black and Tans arrived in villages, beat up republicans and burned down Irish houses. The Irish Republican Army fought back, and the conflict became more and more bitter.
Even if fighting seems justified at the time, it always causes harm in the end. Violence brings more violence. It is like putting poison on a field – you might kill the weeds, but nothing can grow there for years afterwards.
The Story of Britain Page 23