by Wade Davis
Rifles were in short supply in Newfoundland in 1914, and when the government, on August 21, issued a call for 500 volunteers, with pay equal to that of the Canadians and free transport to St. John’s from any corner of the colony, it was inevitable that the first to respond would be those already recruited and armed by Wakefield. These were boys and young men he had known since their birth, teachers, trappers, farmers, and fishermen from a hundred coves and draws and compact towns and mission posts. Thus out of Arthur Wakefield’s personal sense of mission and duty came the legendary First Five Hundred, the core of the Newfoundland Regiment, which in time would send well over 7,000 men to war, of whom one in two would be wounded or killed.
Such casualties were unimaginable to Wakefield and his men as they marched past the throngs lining the streets of St. John’s on the fateful day of October 3, 1914. At the pier was HMS Florizel, the troopship that would carry them to England. The boys eagerly clung to their rifles, fixed with bayonets, as they marched the Regimental Colours on board. The crowds cheered, and everyone present, including the troops, broke out in a rousing rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.”
The Florizel sailed the following night, heading through the Narrows and south to a rendezvous in the darkness with a flotilla of thirty-one ships, escorted by the 26,000-ton battle cruiser Princess Royal, transporting to England the first Canadian troops, together with nearly 7,000 horses. The Atlantic crossing took eleven days. On Sunday, as the men gathered for prayer, it was Wakefield who was chosen to deliver the sermon. Following disembarkation at Plymouth, the force was transported to a training camp at Salisbury Plain. There they remained through a long fall and wet winter, soaked by two feet of rain in four months, twice the normal precipitation, as they drilled and marched and practiced all the skills deemed essential in the military training manuals, few of which would serve any purpose in France.
BRITAIN HAD NOT FOUGHT a major continental war in a century, and the high command exhibited a stubborn disconnection from reality so complete as to merge at times with the criminal. A survey conducted in the three years before the war found that 95 percent of officers had never read a military book of any kind. This cult of the amateur, militantly anti-intellectual, resulted in a leadership that, with noted exceptions, was obtuse, willfully intolerant of change, and incapable for the most part of innovative thought or action. Thus men who had fought in 1898 at Omdurman—a colonial battle in which the British, at a cost of just 48 dead, had mowed down with Maxim guns 11,000 Sudanese, wounding another 15,000—nevertheless in 1914 rejected the machine gun as a useful weapon of war. As late as March 1916, after twenty months of fighting, Douglas Haig, the British commander in chief, who had been at Omdurman as a staff officer to Kitchener, sought to limit the number of machine guns per battalion, concerned that their presence might dampen the men’s offensive spirit. For a similar reason, he resisted the introduction of the steel helmet, which had been shown to reduce head injuries by 75 percent. In the summer of 1914 he dismissed the airplane as an overrated contraption, and he had little use for light mortars, which in time would become the most effective of all trench weapons. Even the rifle was suspect. What counted was the horse and saber.
“It must be accepted as a principle,” read the Cavalry Training manual of 1907, “that the rifle, effective as it is, cannot replace the effect produced by the speed of the horse, the magnetism of the charge and the terror of cold steel.”
Throughout the war, Haig would insist on holding in reserve three full divisions of mounted troops, 50,000 men, ready at all hours to exploit the breakthrough at the front that would never come. As late as 1926, as the nation mourned the death of nearly 1 million men, Haig would write on the future of war, “I believe that the value of the horse and the opportunity of the horse in the future are likely to be as great as ever. Aeroplanes and tanks are only accessories to the men and the horse, and I feel sure that as time goes on you will find just as much use for the horse—the well bred horse—as you have ever done in the past.” The frontline soldiers knew better. Of the cavalry reserve one remarked, “They might as well be mounted on bloody rocking-horses for all the good they are going to do.”
None of this, of course, was known or anticipated by the men of the Newfoundland Regiment diligently training on the sodden fields of Salisbury Plain. A solid body of troops prepared to accept moderate casualties, they were instructed, could with “grit, determination and the qualities of a stalker” readily overcome a machine gun emplacement. The essential precondition for success, noted the official training manual of 1909, was that the men maintain throughout the attack the “sporting spirit inherent in every individual of the British race” and that they cheer as loudly as possible throughout their charge, “so as to effect, by vibration, the enemies’ nerves.” The key weapon would be the bayonet, the point of which “should be directed against an opponent’s throat, as the point will enter easily and make a fatal wound on entering a few inches, and, being near the eyes, makes an opponent flinch. Other vulnerable, and usually exposed parts are the face, chest, lower abdomen and thighs, and the region of the kidneys when the back is turned. Four to six inches penetration is sufficient to incapacitate and allow for a quick withdrawal, whereas if a bayonet is driven home too far it is often impossible to withdraw it. In such cases a round should be fired to break up the obstruction.” In point of fact, bayonet wounds caused but a fraction of 1 percent of casualties during the war. Rifle and machine gun fire brought down a third of the dead and wounded; high-explosive shells accounted for the rest. Most who died awaited their fate helplessly, clinging to the mud of a trench wall, as a storm of steel and fire rained from the sky.
AS MEDICAL OFFICER, Arthur Wakefield ran a strict camp, and insisted on cleanliness and order as a prerequisite for good health and morale. He was known to his men as “Droppings” because of his obsession with litter, and each morning they would stand aghast as he stepped into a metal pan, naked to the winter, and poured buckets of cold water over his body. Old enough to be the father of most of the troops, and a veteran of another distant war, he took a strong personal interest in their well-being, which made it all the more peculiar when, on August 17, 1915, he submitted an urgent request for a transfer to the Royal Army Medical Corps.
While Wakefield’s reasons for leaving the regiment are unclear, it was certainly not fear of action that forced his hand, for within a week he was attached to the 29th Casualty Clearing Station, destined for some of the worst fighting in France. He arrived at a time when the British were just coming to terms with the extent of the medical challenge. In the first months of the war, with the numbers of dead and wounded reaching levels never before contemplated, and with men suffering injuries of a kind and severity never before experienced, with new conditions of morbidity overwhelming everything that had been taught in medical schools, the RAMC scrambled to provide even a modicum of care. Initially those brought back from the fighting broken but still alive lay on stretchers on bare floors as their wounds festered with mysterious pathogens derived from the rich organic soils of Flanders. The sterile sands of South Africa were but a memory to army surgeons who now had to deal with gas gangrene, rampant infections that soured the atmosphere of every improvised ward with a scent of death that caused even the most stoic young nurses to vomit in repulsion.
Amputation and radical surgery became the norm as doctors raced against time to defeat the infectious spread of rot. There were, of course, no antibiotics, and they had little knowledge of germ theory. X-ray technology was primitive; locating iron in a body riddled with shrapnel was often problematic. Blood transfusions would be pioneered during the war, with Mallory’s close friend Geoffrey Keynes playing a vital role, but in the opening campaigns thousands simply bled to death. Medical officers such as Wakefield and his Everest colleague Howard Somervell were a short generation away from a medical orthodoxy that employed leeches to treat disease, rhubarb purgatives for typhus, and mosquitoes to address syphilis.
The first challenge was to get the wounded away from the front. Those who could still walk or crawl found their way to the regimental aid post, generally located in a front line or reserve trench. There a medical officer sorted the casualties, tagging each soldier with a label identifying his unit and the nature of the injury, marking each man’s forehead with indelible ink to distinguish those who might live from those certain to die, then dressing wounds, administering morphine, and severing the tangled remnants of limbs whenever necessary, often with a simple knife. Those left stranded and helpless between the lines waited stoically for darkness to fall, with the hope that they would be found by the stretcher bearers. Often they were not, for each battalion of a thousand men had only thirty-two assigned to carry the wounded and the dead, sixteen teams in all, charged with the impossible task of evacuating battlefields that frequently saw casualty rates of 50 percent. Struggling at night through mud and across collapsed trenches dense with corpses, stumbling upon the rotten flesh of horses and men killed in previous battles, in mortal danger at all times, the stretcher bearers had to carry the men, for often an hour or more, to reach the regimental aid post or a road head where the wounded might be taken by ambulance to the nearest casualty clearing station, the key link in the chain of medical rescue.
Located out of immediate threat of shell fire, yet as close to the front as possible, the CCS was both a hospital and a clearinghouse. There the medical teams, generally eight surgeons working around the clock, two to a six-hour shift, separated by triage those strong enough to be immediately evacuated by rail to the base hospitals from those whose injuries necessitated emergency surgery. A third cohort comprised those so severely wounded that there was no hope. These were tagged in red and placed in a moribund ward where they might be sedated and bathed, and comforted by nurses who did what they could to shield the lads from the inevitability of their fate. In the morning, burial details sewed their mangled remains into blankets and carted them off to the mass graves that only long after the war acquired the dignity of individual crosses placed in neat rows—an illusion that pleased the living but offered little comfort to the dead.
The stress on the medical officers at a casualty clearing station was intense and unrelenting. They were encouraged by social convention, decency, and military orders to do all that was possible to maintain good cheer. At the same time, as surgeons they had to deal with an endless flow of carnage, working through the night as guns roared and flares and star shells lit up the sky, silhouetting the ghostly figures in khaki, wrapped in bloody blankets, labels dangling from limp bodies carried into tents where the flicker of acetylene torches cast barely enough light for the doctors to determine the nature of the wounds.
Their smocks drenched in blood, with the nauseating scent of sepsis and cordite and human excrement fouling the operating theater, they cut and sliced and sawed and cauterized wounds of a sort they never would have known in ordinary practice. High-velocity bullets traveling at two thousand miles per hour could splinter the base of an oak tree, or slice the legs from a human. Shrapnel did the most damage, jagged splinters of steel, red-hot, driving debris and bits of uniform and the flesh of battlefield cadavers deep into wounds. Shell blasts could rupture the lungs, collapse organs, and drown the brain in blood such that men with no external signs of injury would lie dead beside others whose bodies had been mutilated beyond recognition. Limbs severed by steel, skulls dripping with brain tissue, genitalia simply gone, displaced by a hole in the lower gut oozing intestines. Facial injuries were the most difficult to bear; young boys with lipless mouths, bloody orifices in place of the nostrils, a shock of blond hair on a shell-skinned skull. Plastic surgery was born of the war and the need to repair, to the extent possible, faces so violated that for the rest of their lives those who survived lived behind masks, and gathered together at special rural camps where they might feel the wind on their gargoyle features without fear of mockery or pity. In addition to 108 million bandages and battle dressings, the RAMC by the end of the conflict would require 22,386 artificial eyes.
In response to the strain, the surgeons attempted to find their own peace in the midst of the madness. Some simply blanked out the war and focused exclusively on their duty, as if everything beyond the shadow of their flickering lamps and the reach of their scalpels had no intrinsic meaning or reality. One night late in the war, Mallory’s friend Geoffrey Keynes was operating in a dungeon of a citadel at Doullens on a young soldier whose genitals had been mutilated by a shell fragment. He paused for an instant to rub the sweat from his brow and looked up to see King George V standing at his side, observing the procedure. Without a word or a gesture, Keynes turned back to concentrate on his work, utterly ignoring his sovereign.
Howard Somervell, Mallory’s closest friend on Everest, was attached during the war to the 34th Casualty Clearing Station, located at Vecquemont, between Amiens and Albert on the Somme front. Like Wakefield, Somervell was a religious lad of the Lake District. He was born in 1890 in Kendal, Westmoreland, to a devout Presbyterian and evangelical family that owned a prosperous bootmaking company. Physically tough but artistically inclined, he grew up in a world of nature, music, and fine art, and as a young man thought nothing of riding his bicycle from Rye, in Sussex, to Queen’s Hall in London to hear classical performances of Beethoven, Chopin, and Schumann at the Promenade Concerts, a round-trip journey of some 150 miles.
After leaving Rugby School, he received a science scholarship to Caius College, Cambridge, and for a time flirted with atheism, joining the Heretics, a society in which, as he recalled, “all my cherished religious beliefs were dashed to the ground. For two years I strenuously refused to believe in God.” But then, toward the end of his second year, he slipped by chance into a prayer meeting at a local church in Cambridge. There he experienced a revelation and emerged to become an ardent and passionate evangelical. “It was not long,” he noted, “before I was preaching, with shaking knees and beating heart, at open aired meetings in the Cambridge marketplace.” In time, however, he came to see this period of his life as representing, as he put it, “the sowing of a kind of spiritual wild oats, an alternative to the more usual sexual variety, but a natural expression of youthful energies transferred or sublimated into spiritual channels.” His evangelical zeal mellowed, but he remained nevertheless a man of intense religious faith, convinced of the power of prayer, which he took as a visceral reality.
A medical student at the outbreak of the war, Somervell had been tempted to sign up immediately. Wise counsel from his mentor, Sir Frederick Treves, who recognized that the need for surgeons would be great, led him to continue his studies at the Royal College of Surgeons. Commissioned a captain with the West Lancs, he finally joined the RAMC in 1915. His surgical records, among the very few not to have been destroyed by fire during the German Blitz of 1940, reveal in precise detail every procedure and operation performed during the war. On August 18, 1918, for example, he treated one Lance Corporal G. A. Dickenson of the 1st Lincolns, a strong lad in his early twenties who had suffered multiple shell wounds to the eyes, face, hands, arms, shoulders, chest, and abdominal wall. The right eye Somervell excised, and several fingers were amputated.
Two subsequent days, selected from the records at random, find Somervell first in Ward 8 treating a shell wound to a shoulder, then in Ward 5 for a gunshot wound to a left arm, and immediately thence to the litter of a Private A. Griffiths of the 2nd Royal Welsh Fusiliers, whose leg required a “supracondylar amputation for shattered knee joint.” Then it is back to Ward 8 to treat a gunshot wound to the head of a Private Read of the 6th Dorsets, before returning to Ward 5 to amputate the left leg of Lance Corporal F. Thornton of the 10th West Yorks, shot in the ankle.
The following morning the routine continues. A gunshot wound has shattered the left arm of Private Russell of the 7th Lincs. In Ward 5, W. D. Smith of the 10th West Yorks has had both thighs fractured by a shell. Somervell moves to Ward 6 to remove bone fragments from the lungs of a subaltern
of the 1st Lincolns. Several other gunshot wounds are treated before he rushes to Ward 5 to try to do something to save the face of Private W. R. Filton of the 15th Welsh Regiment, who has suffered a gunshot wound that has fractured both jaws and severed the facial arteries. After Filton awaits a Private Gunn of the 10th West Yorks, with a shell wound to the right buttock that has driven cloth and dirt deep into the wound. Then he moves on to Ward 9 to deal with a gaping chest wound, and the shattered ribs of Private J. Mann, also of the 1st Lincolns. From there it is on to another enlisted man with a gunshot wound; this one, to the back, has destroyed the scapula and third rib. Finally, Somervell returns to Ward 5 to deal with a gunshot wound to the left buttock of a Private Richards. Twelve major operations in two days, two amputations, a severe facial wound, fractured bones, and blasted buttocks. Every conceivable indignation and this, in but forty-eight hours of a wartime career that lasted with similar intensity for nearly four years.
Somervell appears to have coped with the war by maintaining a precise and highly disciplined focus on the abstract possibilities of the academic moment. He became a surgeon’s surgeon, a young intern who by the age of twenty-eight had seen and dealt with virtually every possible medical trauma. In his free moments he would go out sketching, his eyes attracted, as he would later write, to the most humble objects of nature, with his heart yearning to treat every animate being as worthy of respect. His faith remained strong, but tempered by a new understanding of and patience for the fragility of the human spirit. In one moment, while on duty, he would enter a building or a tent and find it strewn with corpses or piled high with amputated legs and arms. In a ward at night he would hear the groans and curses of the wounded, young men crying out in delirium, a boy shouting “Charge!” at the top of his lungs. Then, by dawn, the constant stream of dying and mutilated men might be forgotten, at least for a morning, when the sun rose and butterflies alighted on the burnt snags and chards of a landscape seared to darkness by the war. With his fellow officers he would picnic in the copses of oaks and maples behind the line, beyond the range of shells, where larks and robins sang, and the dread and anxiety and physical pain of exhaustion could be for a moment forgotten. Thus the war became a dream, an inversion of reality that left open the possibility of faith.