Breakdown

by Taylor Downing

  The Official Medical History notes that the two principal factors that contributed to the cause of nervous disorders were ‘prolonged fighting and heavy bombardment’, and that ‘the type of warfare practised during the Somme battles of 1916 provided ideal conditions for the development of these disorders.’ Artillery duels between British and German gunners ‘frequently lasted several hours or days, and during this period of waiting the nerves of all were kept on edge. Then after the attack came the reckoning of the losses amongst comrades.’ After a short respite, the whole process would be repeated again. ‘Little by little men became worn down by such experience’. Before long, dozens and then hundreds of men started to suffer from their nerves, ‘a gradual change would be noticed in the demeanour and behaviour of the patient, and he would eventually reach hospital with the report that he was “quite useless in the line.”’ The Official Medical History notes that other men would be faced ‘with an experience of inexpressible horror’ and that this would cause a complete and sudden breakdown of their self-control. ‘Such men have said afterwards, “It made me feel I had lost my senses.”’14

  The Official Histories of the First World War were researched and written in the decades following the war not by independent historians but by senior military figures. The authors usually understated problems and tended to be moderate in their views or criticisms, when they expressed them at all. However, the two authors of the Official Medical History did not mince their words when it came to shell shock, nor did they attempt to play down the scale of the problem. The Official Medical History freely admitted that ‘nervous disorders’ now ‘assumed importance as a cause of wastage’ and that from the first days of the Somme the problem ‘became acute’. It went on, ‘In the first few weeks [of the battle] several thousand soldiers were rapidly passed out of the battle zone on account of nervous disorders, and many of them were evacuated to England.’15

  However, the first problem to engulf the medical services from 1 July was the treatment of the conventionally wounded. There had been much detailed preparation for the Big Push and hospitals had been cleared to cope with the anticipated casualties. By the beginning of July, Fourth Army had fourteen Casualty Clearing Stations at its disposal. Each CCS was effectively a small hospital a few miles behind the front, out of range of the enemy’s artillery, and each could accommodate between 500 and 1,600 wounded men. There would be a minimum of ten medical officers in a CCS, supported by orderlies and a few female nurses. This was as far forward as the army allowed women during the war. The CCSs included several wards for different types of patient, modern operating theatres, a laboratory, X-ray machines and a full medical supply depot. They were usually located at central points near road junctions or the siding of a railway line. Some were made up of large buildings requisitioned for the purpose; others existed in rows of marquees and temporary wooden huts laid out across green fields.

  Before July, the RAMC had made preparations to evacuate up to 10,000 men per day. Six motor ambulance convoys and three fully equipped ambulance trains were on standby. But in the first days the scale of the casualties overwhelmed the regimental aid posts, the field ambulance units and Casualty Clearing Stations. More than 38,000 wounded men required treatment on 1 July alone. The front-line aid posts and dressing stations were the first to be inundated. Private Frank Ridsdale of the 89th Field Ambulance captured in his diary the chaotic scenes at his aid post: ‘First wounded arrived 8am very busy, wounded coming in by hundreds, the road to the hospital like the way to a football match, a pathetic sight, the men lined up 4 deep to be dressed … working all night, terrible wounds – doing dressings in a dug out by the aid of a candle. Very tired … terrible bombardment all night shaking the place, never to be forgotten night.’16

  By the end of the day, the field ambulance units had admitted 14,672 casualties and of these a little more than half, 7,764, had reached the CCSs. This was itself a remarkable achievement. But not even half of the wounded were yet accounted for and thousands of wounded men were in regimental aid posts or, worse, still stuck out in No Man’s Land, where it was impossible for stretcher bearers to reach them. Many wounded men lay in the mud and the water-filled craters for several days. One poor man of the 56th (London) Division at Gommecourt lay in No Man’s Land for fourteen days before being brought in. Miraculously his wounds did not turn septic and he survived. On the evening of 1 July and over several subsequent days, local truces were agreed with the German troops to allow stretcher bearers to go out and bring in the wounded. Captain Carden Roe, MO with the 1st Royal Irish Fusiliers, described a truce as late as lunchtime on 5 July when a ‘large Red Cross flag’ was raised above the parapet of the British trench. When after a few minutes the Germans had fired no shots, ‘two MOs stood up on the parapet beside the flag. Still the enemy held their fire. The two officers then advanced across No Man’s Land with the flag. A mass of curious heads appeared above the German parapet and a German MO and some orderlies came out to meet ours. The officers of both sides stiffened to a ceremonious salute. The Germans carried our wounded from near their wire to the middle of No Man’s Land and handed them over to our bearers. This great work of humanity went on until all the wounded were collected. Then, again, the officers saluted. Not a word had been exchanged all afternoon.’17 As in many such cases on the Somme, the truce had been respected but there had been no fraternisation.

  By the evening of the first day of the offensive, the whole medical system – but most especially the CCSs – were suffering from ‘acute congestion’.18 This was exacerbated by a foul-up with the deployment of the ambulance trains. Only one of those allocated had arrived. Through the night thousands more men were brought in for medical care. By early morning of 2 July, a single CCS at Gézaincourt, in the northern sector where the casualties had been particularly bad and which had a narrow-gauge railway link to the front, had received 5,346 casualties. It had been constructed to cope with 1,000 wounded. The overloading of the CCSs was reaching crisis point.

  Howard Somervell was a surgeon at Vecquemont at the southern end of the battlefield. One of the largest CCSs, it had prepared for 1600 patients. Somervell was twenty-six and had only qualified as a doctor at University College Hospital, London, in 1915. On qualifying he volunteered and went straight into the RAMC. On 1 July, Vecquemont like the other CCSs was quickly overwhelmed. A line of ambulances a mile long waited patiently to unload their human cargoes. Somervell wrote that ‘the whole area of the camp, a field of five or six acres, was completely covered with stretchers placed side to side, each with its suffering or dying man upon it.’ Working in one of the four operating theatres, Somervell had the chance occasionally to take ‘a brief look around to select from the thousands of patients those few fortunate ones whose life or limbs we had time to save. It was a terrible business.’ He learned quickly the principles of military surgery: ‘we rapidly surveyed them to see who was most worthwhile saving. Abdominal cases and others requiring long operations simply had to be left to die. Saving life by amputation, which can be done in a few minutes, or saving of limbs by the wide opening of wounds, had to be thought of first.’ Writing nearly twenty years later, Somervell recalled, ‘Even now I am haunted by the touching look of the young, bright, anxious eyes, as we passed along the rows of sufferers. Hardly ever did any of them say a word, except to ask for water or relief from pain. I don’t remember any single man in all those thousands who even suggested that we should save him and not the fellow next to him … There, all around us, lying maimed and battered and dying, was the flower of Britain’s youth – a terrible sight if ever there was one, yet full of courage and unselfishness and beauty.’19

  On 2 July, the head of Medical Services in France, Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Sloggett, ordered the immediate dispatch of extra doctors and surgeons from the quiet sectors further north in order to carry out more urgent operations, and he hastened the arrival of three more ambulance trains. By the end of that day, the CCSs had received 14,416 wounded
men. By now, the evacuation of wounded from the CCSs to the base hospitals was at last working more efficiently and 11,299 men were taken back by train, motor convoy or barge. By 3 July, the operating theatres in the CCSs had dealt with roughly 10 per cent of patients, double the usual percentage. By this time, the numbers of wounded being moved on from the CCSs actually exceeded the number of new patients arriving. From 3 to 6 July, as more and more casualties were gathered into the system, just over 30,000 wounded were evacuated by hospital ship back to Britain.20 Crowds gathered at Victoria and at Charing Cross stations to cheer the wounded as trains bearing the men offloaded their sad cases for distribution to hospitals around London. The RAMC had finally caught up with the colossal tragedy of 1 July.

  With battalions scattered in various places along the front, with so many men stuck in No Man’s Land and with such dreadful losses among officers, it took some time to calculate the full extent of the numbers of dead and wounded on the first day. Even by 3 July, Rawlinson believed the total was not much more than 14,000, less than one-quarter of the actual figure. On that day, he concluded, ‘I do not think that the percentage of losses is excessive.’21 However, as the battle continued and the full scale of the losses on 1 July became apparent, the nature of the wounds that were reported began to change. The machine gun battle on the morning of 1 July became the artillery war that predominated for the rest of the conflict. The losses began to average 2,500 per day and remained at that level for the next twenty weeks. And the incidence of shell shock victims shot up. With this, the higher echelons of the army became increasingly worried.

  Commanders firmly believed that shell shock was contagious, that steady, reliable men would be upset by nervy men; that soldiers with symptoms of hysteria would infect the troops around them. They were also concerned that men would see shell shock as an easy way of getting out of the army, the old fear that malingering would increase. As one historian has written, ‘commanders feared that an epidemic of hysteria would sweep the army.’22 With the casualty lists growing, army commanders became concerned to reduce what was now called ‘wastage’, that is the loss of men who had not suffered physical wounds. If a modern industrial war inevitably led to high rates of injuries from bullets and shell fragments, other forms of ‘wastage’ must be kept to a minimum.

  The Times, like all the major national newspapers, filled its columns with long lists of the dead and wounded. And it had a special category for ‘Wounded – Shell Shock’. As this section grew longer it was apparent within days of the start of the Somme battle that, as the paper recorded on 18 July, there was ‘an extraordinarily high percentage of cases of shell shock among our casualties’.23

  Affecting as it did the morale of a fighting unit, the spread of shell shock had the potential to reduce the ability of the British army to maintain its fighting spirit. But as shell shock was seen as contagious, would it merely spread between small groups of men? Or, much more threateningly as it seemed to the army high command, if the situation got out of hand could it conceivably affect entire front-line battalions? If this were allowed to happen the entire fighting spirit of the citizen army, made up as it was of so many volunteers, might be undermined. Commanders would have to take action to prevent this.

  6

  ‘No More’

  The Pals battalion officially designated as the 11th Battalion The Border Regiment, and recruited from the market towns, mines and agricultural estates of Westmorland and Cumberland by the eccentric Earl of Lonsdale, had begun training in Carlisle, Kendal and Workington, finally coming together to train as a single unit at a racecourse outside Carlisle. Its commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Percy Machell, was a true professional and cared deeply for the welfare of his men. Without an adjutant and with hardly any experienced officers alongside him, he struggled at first, but slowly the situation began to improve. A small group of officers were appointed, including a competent adjutant. Most of the rest were young men from university OTCs. Alongside Machell, only two other officers (out of thirty-one) had any pre-war military experience. An elderly regimental sergeant-major from the Indian army, RSM Cowie, was brought out of retirement and strove to install some marching discipline in the new recruits.

  By March 1915 the battalion was at full strength. Khaki uniforms now began to come through and when the first proper rifles were assigned to the battalion, it at last began to look like a military unit. But its training still consisted mostly of route marching, drilling and physical fitness. None of the officers had any experience whatsoever of trench warfare.

  On a grey, damp day in May the battalion marched out of Carlisle watched by crowds who lined the roads up to four or five deep. It was a proud moment both for the town and the battalion. Training continued first in Yorkshire and then on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. Everywhere, the fit, smart recruits with the nickname of the ‘Lonsdale’ battalion made a good impression. When they left their Command in Wiltshire they received a message from the commanding officer who said he was ‘confident that wherever you go you will sustain the credit of the Western Command … He will watch your military career with great interest.’ On 23 November the battalion sailed from Folkestone to Boulogne. Fourteen months after the first men had volunteered, the Lonsdales finally arrived in France.

  The battalion travelled by train and on foot to Albert near the Somme. It was allocated a section of the front recently taken over from the French, and which was at the time very much a quiet sector. The battalion was assigned to the 97th Brigade, led by Brigadier J.B. Jardine, a cavalryman who had been in the 5th Lancers; the brigade formed part of the 32nd Division, a unit made up almost entirely of New Army battalions recruited in the north of England and Scotland, under the command of Major-General Sir William Henry Rycroft.

  In December the Lonsdales had their first taste of the trenches. They found them in a dreadful condition. The second-in-command, Major Diggle, noted, ‘The trenches we had first to take over were very bad … In many places there were no duck-boards and in consequence, the mud and water was four or five feet deep.’ The men were kept busy rebuilding the parapets and shoring up the sides with sandbags. Machell wrote, ‘The men are excellent … I am quite delighted with them. They are not foolish at all, just sensible, and do their job without the smallest fuss, though the hardships for them are damnable … I have nothing to complain of at all. I am working day and night.’1

  As winter turned into spring, the Lonsdales settled into trench routine, rotating with the 2nd Battalion The King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry (KOYLI), and two Pals battalions of the Highland Light Infantry, the 16th ‘Glasgow Boys Brigade’ and the 17th ‘Glasgow Commercials’. They would spend seven days in the forward trench, seven days in support, another seven days at the front and then seven days in reserve. Although this was a quiet sector it could easily flare up, and any action the Lonsdales took was met by a reaction from the Germans. At one point a night patrol spotted a trench battery being installed in the German lines. The shelling of the location on the following day led to heavy counter-fire from the German artillery. Slowly, the casualties began to grow in number, with young officers forming a high proportion of those lost. Once again, in March, Machell noted that he was ‘getting short of officers’. But, as commanding officer, he was always industrious in his duties. Diggle wrote: ‘For the first six months there was never a night that the CO did not go around the trenches. Not a casual walk round, but four or five hours out. I took the other part of the night. But he was a man of 53, and he did not sleep in the day … The CO put system and organisation into everything he came in contact with … protection first, then rest, and then work … We had the name of being the best Infantry Battalion in France, among any of those who had anything to do with us.’ At the end of May, Machell was mentioned in dispatches – as was the whole battalion – ‘for consistent good work’, a high accolade.2

  That same month, the brigade was moved to the Authuille Sector, opposite a German stronghold bristling with mac
hine guns, protruding into the British lines, and known as the Leipzig Redoubt or Salient. The whole brigade must have been aware of growing preparations for the Big Push, although of course they did not know exactly where and when it was to come. With the division wanting more information about an enemy machine gun nest about forty yards behind the front line, known as the Bull’s Eye, along with details of the units occupying the German lines, the Lonsdales were ordered to carry out a raid on the German trenches. The call went out for volunteers, and four officers and 82 men were selected from those who came forward. A young officer named Lieutenant Barnes was put in command and for three weeks he trained the men nightly a few miles behind the front, where the layout of the enemy trenches taken from aerial photographs had been exactly replicated. Under the keen eyes of the CO, the volunteers carefully rehearsed every aspect of the raid.