Breakdown

by Taylor Downing

  The few days rest at Contay sorting out deceased comrades kits did not improve their mental state.

  Carrying up rations under heavy and intense shell fire.

  Digging out the dead in the trenches and carrying them down as well as living in the atmosphere of decomposed bodies.

  Exposure in open trenches under continuous shelling and without sleep.

  Twenty men that day (9th July) had been sent to the Advanced Dressing Station suffering from shell shock.

  Kirkwood had signed and dated the certificate. He might not have realised quite how far he was sticking his neck out.

  After Kirkwood, Brigadier Jardine gave his evidence. He reported, ‘I had no idea that the Battalion was in such a state nor had I been told so by anyone. I believed the Battalion to be in good spirits.’ Looking back, he faithfully recounted that ‘Within thirty minutes of zero hour on the first day of the attack (1 July) all the officers became casualties. This was a shock but not many units would have collapsed as this one did.’ For him it was absolutely clear what was behind the events. The reason was ‘that the late C.O. Lt-Col Machell who was a splendid example as a C.O. kept everything in his own hands and NCOs had not been accustomed to act on their own responsibilities in absence of officers’. In other words, the battalion’s morale had disintegrated on the death of Machell. Jardine argued that it was the ‘mental disability’ of the men that had stopped them fighting. ‘And that mental disability was caused by the failure of the NCOs to preserve the right spirit – to encourage the men and to set a good example in the absence of officers.’

  Jardine was no Blimp. He was a modern officer who had done well on 1 July by using his own initiative and had achieved one of the few successes that day by ensuring that his Highland battalions reached the Leipzig Redoubt. But he had little time for Kirkwood, who he probably thought was a soft touch. He told the court, ‘I don’t attach much importance to the MO’s ideas. The Battalion has been less under fire than others in the Brigade and I hear of practically no case of shell shock in it.’ For him the platoon sergeants, whose arrests he had ordered, were to blame. They had ‘failed in their duty’.

  The papers of the court of enquiry were then passed up through the chain of command, and at each level the more senior officer could reverse an action or confirm it. The papers went next to the divisional commander, Major-General Rycroft, who came to a harsh conclusion. First, of Jardine, he said, ‘It is a pity that this battalion was detailed for the duty. The Brigadier had fever else I am sure he would have known the condition of the Battalion and not detailed it.’ He recognised the record of the Lonsdales, writing that ‘This Battalion has done most excellent work since coming out [to France] and I regret that some NCOs and men should have tarnished its reputation.’ However, he concluded that there was not sufficient evidence to charge the four sergeants and ordered their release. His fury was entirely focused on one man: ‘Evidently the MO, Lt Kirkwood RAMC, who has been with the Battalion during the winter showed undue sympathy with the men on this occasion. Sympathy for the sick and wounded men under his treatment is a good attribute but it is not for a MO to inform a CO that his men are not in a fit state to carry out a military operation. The men being in the front line should be proof that they are fit for any duty called for.’ Rycroft announced that Kirkwood was to be immediately relieved of his duties and sent home in disgrace.

  The papers were passed on to the commander of X Corps, Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Morland. He commented that ‘The Battalion is one of the best in the 32nd Division. It carried out before the present operations (July 1st) a most successful raid and its spirit was very good. On July 1st it lost all the officers present with the Battalion and more than 500 men. It is a pity it was selected for such an enterprise.’ He confirmed Kirkwood’s punishment and regretted that there was not enough evidence to take disciplinary action against the four sergeants.

  Finally, when the papers arrived on the desk of General Hubert Gough, the commander of Reserve Army of which the Lonsdales were now a part, the true bulldog voice of high command made itself heard. Gough was known for his pushy, hands-on approach and was what today would be called a micro-manager.20 He relished getting involved in the details of the Enquiry and wrote, ‘The facts disclose a deplorable state of discipline and an entire absence of courage and of any soldierly qualities amongst the NCOs and men of the battalion.’ He blamed the temporary battalion commander, Palmer, for ‘Weakness and disinclination to take responsibility’. By asking the MO to see the men, he said, Palmer’s action ‘was tantamount to questioning the orders he received and was calculated to encourage the spirit of indiscipline and cowardice already shown’.

  But Gough’s full ire was kept for Kirkwood, of whom he wrote, ‘The conduct on the part of Lt Kirkwood RAMC shows him to be totally unfitted to hold a commission in the Army or to exercise any military responsibility.’ He went on, ‘Immediate steps must be taken to remove Lt Kirkwood RAMC from the service. The certificate which he signed and the reasons given by him in support of it conclusively prove that he has no conception of the duties and responsibilities of a regimental MO and so long as he is allowed to remain in the service he will be a source of danger to it. There can be no doubt that the conduct of the men and the failure of the men are largely attributable to this officer’s extraordinary ideas of duty.’ It is clear that Gough had found the man he wanted to make an example of. The Medical Corps must be made to understand that it could not encourage ‘wastage’ by approving large-scale cases of shell shock.

  However, this particular fight was not yet over. The RAMC rallied to Kirkwood’s defence. The Director of Military Services in the 32nd Division wrote to his commander that ‘Kirkwood has performed his duties conscientiously and well. The late C.O. Lt-Col P.W. Machell, had a high opinion of him. The sick rate of the Battalion was never excessive and he did very good work during the recent fighting in attending to the wounded and except for the present regrettable incident he has given complete satisfaction.’ The appeal was rejected.

  It was only when the news of Kirkwood’s dismissal reached Sir Arthur Sloggett, Director of Military Services in France, that he was able to bring some sanity to the case. He wrote that the whole sequence of events was ‘deplorable’ but that Kirkwood ‘appears to have been made the scapegoat’. He pointed out that ‘Lieutenant Kirkwood did not volunteer his opinion but was ordered to give it and send it direct to the Brigade Headquarters in accordance with instructions from the Adjutant, and this opinion was not acted on, so it can hardly be argued that the conduct of the men was due to his action.’ Sloggett continued, ‘I do not agree with the opinion of the Commander [Reserve Army] that he is a source of danger to the service if he remains in it. He will still be able to do work at the Base and with the alarming shortage of MOs now, it would be most inadvisable to remove him from the service.’ Kirkwood was demoted to the level of an orderly and sent to work at a base hospital. No doubt this was humiliation enough.21

  The whole court of enquiry had revealed the sorry state of affairs in the army after the collective trauma of 1 July. Junior officers, some only just over twenty years of age, were acting in temporary positions of command far above the level their training and experience had prepared them for. Men still shattered from seeing their pals shot down in front of their eyes were too traumatised to return to the front trenches so soon and go over the top again. Commanders behind their desks felt they needed to stop the ‘wastage’ and take a stand to prevent shell shock from becoming contagious. However, the worst was yet to come.

  The message Gough wanted to send out was aimed not only at the RAMC and MOs up and down the Western Front, but at the men. He wrote of the incident, clearly in a fury, that ‘It is inconceivable how men who pledged themselves to fight and uphold the honour of the country could degrade themselves in such a manner and show an utter want of manly spirit and courage which at least is expected of every soldier and every Britisher.’ He ordered the public humiliation of
the Lonsdales in front of the rest of the brigade. Accordingly, on 17 July, General Rycroft assembled the survivors of the Lonsdale battalion. They were not to bear arms. All the other available units of the brigade were gathered and told to carry their weapons. Rycroft read out a short reprimand to the officers and men of the Lonsdales telling them that the army commander ‘considers those who failed in their duty have brought disgrace not only on themselves but also on the battalion to which they belong’.

  For the 250 survivors of one of the worst massacres in the history of the British army, this public disgrace in front of their peers must have been extraordinarily hard to take. The battalion that had been raised with such pride and enthusiasm in the autumn of 1914, that had performed its duties in France so well and had been widely praised and mentioned in dispatches, that had suffered so terribly on 1 July, was now the object of vilification from its own commanders. But the senior figures in the British Army had made it absolutely clear. They would not stand for excessive levels of shell shock. The discipline and morale, possibly even the fighting spirit of the entire army was at stake.

  7

  Attrition

  The collective punishment handed out to the Lonsdales in the middle of July 1916 made it clear that the British army would not tolerate mass cases of shell shock. If a whole unit looked as though it was going down with war neuroses, then the fact would have to be covered up somehow. From now on, the story of shell shock would be that of individuals or small groups, and of the many different attempts to treat the problem and get men back into the fighting line.

  Private Arthur Hubbard, a clerk in Streatham, south London, before the war, had joined the 14th Battalion The London Regiment, a London Scottish Pals battalion. He had gone over the top with the 56th Division in the diversionary attack at Gommecourt on the morning of 1 July. Five days later his mother and sisters received a letter he had sent them from hospital in Ipswich, where he was recovering from shell shock. He wrote:

  Dear Mother and All

  No doubt you have been worrying about me very much but now you can rest assured I am quite all right suffering from slight Shell Shock.

  Went over and took the Huns 4th line of trenches on Saturday morning at 7.30am and held same until 3.30pm in the afternoon when by that time their artillery had completely wiped our battalion out, and what was left of us had to crawl back to our own trenches but the bounders mowed us down with machine gun fire as we were retiring. I managed to get back safely after a long and weary struggle over 300 yards of rough ground. I got buried over in their second line by a shell but managed to work my way out, my steel helmet saved my life … I shall be quite myself in a week or two, as you will notice by my writing only my nerves are shook up, severe head-ache now and again when my mind is on the affair … Have scores of adventures to tell you all when I get home.

  So for the present must close with fondest love to all.

  I remain

  Your Aff[ectionate] Son

  Arthur1

  Arthur Hubbard wrote to his mother or his sisters every few days, and each letter conveyed a little more of the horrors he had witnessed. On 7 July he wrote, ‘They have treated me splendid since my admission. My temperature went up pretty high yesterday but has gone done [sic] to normal today. All I am worried with now is weakness in the back and headache at rear of head … It was a terrible sight that I shall never forget as long as I live … We had strict orders not to take prisoners, no matter if wounded. My first job was when I had finished cutting some of their wire away, to empty my magazine on 3 Germans that came out of one of their deep dugouts bleeding badly and I put them out of misery. They cried for mercy, but I had my orders, they had no feeling whatever for us poor chaps. Soon after that I was waiting for more excitement when one of their huge shells burst a few yards away smashing my rifle up and at the same time covering me with about a ton of soil. It’s a lucky thing I hadn’t got my helmet off at the time of having a blow, or I don’t suppose I would have been so lucky. Soon after that one of our Majors came up to me and asked me what was wrong and no sooner had he finished his sentence a sniper caught him clean through the throat and he was dead in less than five minutes.’

  Hubbard clearly did not suffer bad physical effects from the shell shock, and by the end of the month he was well enough to be helping on the ward, which had now filled to capacity. One hundred and ten wounded men arrived in one day alone. Hubbard wrote, ‘I am busy most of the day helping the Sister and Nurses to dress the patients and of course am kept on going. The Sister said she will be very sorry when I have to go away which will be any day now, so if you write to me and I have been shifted to convalescence she will send the letters on to me, there is no telling where I shall go, and perhaps only be away for a week, then home for ten days leave.’ In August, Hubbard was sent to a convalescent camp in Eastbourne. Eager to reassure his mother and sisters that all was well he kept telling them that the camp was excellent, the weather was glorious and he was feeling a lot better.

  But it’s clear that Hubbard was not recovering, and was still haunted by memories and almost certainly nightmares of being buried alive, of the deaths he had been responsible for and those he had witnessed. ‘All I know,’ he wrote at the end of August, ‘is we had 121 fit men left out of 1,200 after the attack.’ In October he left the convalescent camp and visited the widow of the major whose death he had witnessed. She naturally wanted to hear a first-hand account of what had happened to her husband, but evidently telling the story was very upsetting for poor Hubbard.

  By November, Hubbard was still not better. He had returned to the London Scottish training camp near Winchester, but it was apparent that he was not capable of returning to active service. He was called to a medical board, which would most likely assign him to non-combatant duties. He wrote, ‘This medical board has not arrived here yet so cannot give you any news just yet, am living in hopes of something good in the near future that will suit my requirements as long as this war lasts.’

  It’s not recorded what happened to Hubbard except that he never returned to the fighting front. Throughout, he had maintained in his letters the cheery attitude of a loving son and brother so as not to distress his mother and sisters. His handwriting was clear and firm. Hubbard was no doubt one of the many thousands of men who, although not physically scarred by the war, lived with terrible memories of what he had seen and done and was never able to return easily to civilian life. Tragically, even though only in his early twenties, Hubbard took his own life shortly after the end of the war. Shell shock was cited as a contributing factor.

  At the root of all war neuroses like shell shock was fear. Every soldier felt fear. He was lying if he said he did not. But men did not want to admit their fear or show signs of it to their chums, so they suppressed this entirely natural emotion. William Tyrrell, a MO who treated hundreds of cases of war neurosis, said, ‘“Shell shock” is born of fear. Its grandparents are self-preservation and the fear of being found afraid. Any emotion which has to be repressed or concealed demands an unrestricted but well-controlled output of nervous energy … Under its stimulus a man squanders nervous energy recklessly in order to suppress … and mask or camouflage that which if revealed will call down ignominy upon his head and disgrace him in the eyes of his fellows.’2 In other words, fear and the fear of showing fear were both causes of the problem. MO Charles Wilson asked, ‘Is there anyone who does not feel fear?’ He answered that there might be the occasional ‘happy soul’ who ‘never had to make an effort to carry on … Perhaps he was killed or wounded and was remembered as a man without fear.’ But Wilson argued that such men were incredibly rare; no one can in reality get used to the modern battlefield and ‘no man can go on for ever, sooner or later all men feel fear’.3

  Soldiers in the early twentieth century seldom talked about fear, adopting a brusque or even macho style to disguise their feelings. The popular heroes of the age from Boy’s Own Paper, or from the works of Rudyard Kipling or G.A. Henty, d
id not show fear. Consequently, the common phrases of a soldier’s language often made light of the danger they all knew they were living with. As one soldier wrote, ‘if you did ruminate much on the real meaning of the things you do and the things that are done to you, your nerves would crack up in no time.’4 So various phrases were adopted to neutralise the horrors of trench life. In order to avoid acknowledging directly that a comrade had been killed, soldiers would say he had ‘copped a packet’ or ‘been topped off’. Steel helmets and bayonets were referred to as ‘tin hats’ and ‘tooth picks’.5 ‘Cheer up, cockie, it’s your turn next’ was a phrase intended to cheer a fellow soldier.6 It has been argued that ridicule and irony were particularly British traits inherited by the citizen army from Edwardian popular culture.7 However, it is more likely that all soldiers in all armies have used humour as a strategy to cope with the horrors of war, although it is particularly remembered today among the British soldiers of the Great War.

  The black humour of the popular songs sung by British soldiers during the war is a perfect example of this. In order to play down or mock danger, soldiers would add new words to popular ballads or music hall hits. Of the many now well-known wartime soldiers’ songs, three examples clearly make the point. When a high-velocity shell was fired, faster than sound, from one of the smaller field artillery pieces, a soldier heard the ‘whizz’ for only an instant before the ‘bang’ of the explosion, so there was virtually no warning of an incoming shell. This was the soldiers’ version:

  Hush! here comes a whizz-bang

  Hush! here comes a whizz-bang

  Now you soldier boys

  Run down those stairs

  Down in the dugout and say your prayers.

  Hush! here comes a whizz-bang