6 BLHMA Montgomery-Massingberd Papers MM10/11, Draft Autobiography, p. 22.
7 BLHMA Montgomery-Massingberd Papers MM7/3: submission by Brig. Reginald John Kentish.
8 Alan Clark, The Donkeys, p. 6. Although Clark adopted the phrase ‘lions led by donkeys’ as a quote from General Ludendorff’s chief of staff, he later admitted that he had made up the phrase; see David Reynolds, The Long Shadow, p. 331. There was, however, a book published in 1927 by Capt. P.A. Thompson with the title Lions Led by Donkeys.
9 For the latest interpretations of the war see, for instance: Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War; Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory: The First World War: Myths and Realities; Gary Sheffield, The Chief: Douglas Haig and the British Army; Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory; William Philpott, Bloody Victory: Sacrifice on the Somme; David Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918. For the myths portrayed in the television programmes marking the centenary of the Great War see Stephen Badsey, ‘A muddy vision of the Great War’ in History Today, Vol. 65(5), May 2015, pp. 46–8.
10 Jay Winter, ‘Shell shock and the cultural history of the Great War’, in Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 35 (1), January 2000, pp. 7–11.
11 See, for instance, over the last twenty years: Anthony Babington, Shell Shock: A History of the Changing Attitudes to War Neuroses; Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists 1914–1994; Peter Leese, Shell Shock: Traumatic Neuroses and the British Soldiers of the First World War; Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely, Shell Shock to PTSD: Military Psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf War; Fiona Reid, Broken Men: Shell Shock, Treatment and Recovery in Britain 1914–1930. See also Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely, ‘Battle for the mind: World War 1 and the birth of military psychiatry’ in The Lancet, Vol. 384, 2014, pp. 1708–14.
12 Report of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into ‘Shell Shock’ (hereafter RWOCESS), p. 63.
13 Reid, Broken Men, p. 5.
1 The Pals Battalions
1 Harold Macmillan, Winds of Change, p. 59, and Gerald Brenan, ‘A Survivor’s Story’, in George Panichas (ed.), Promise of Greatness, p. 39.
2 The latest study on these secret negotiations is by politician David Owen, The Hidden Perspective: The Military Conversations 1906–1914. The book contains much fascinating material and Owen compares these secret negotiations before the First World War with discussions between Tony Blair and President George Bush and secret arrangements that committed Britain to support the US in its invasion of Iraq in 2003.
3 Herbert Asquith to Venetia Stanley, 5 August 1914, in Michael and Eleanor Brock (eds), H.H. Asquith: Letters to Venetia Stanley, p. 157.
4 The Times, 3 August 1914.
5 Violet Bonham Carter, Winston Churchill as I Knew Him, p. 316.
6 Peter Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, p. 35; the remark was made to Sir Percy Girouard.
7 This description of Kitchener’s first Cabinet meeting comes from Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, Vol. 1, p. 191.
8 David Lloyd George, War Memoirs Vol. 1, p. 499.
9 A comment he made to Foreign Secretary Lord Grey, quoted in Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, p. 41.
10 The Times, 30 August 1914 (in a special Sunday edition). For a review of press censorship in the early stages of the war and of Kitchener’s role in it, see Taylor Downing, Secret Warriors, pp. 271–5.
11 Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, p. 61.
12 Ibid., pp. 83–5.
13 Paul Oldfield and Ralph Gibson, Sheffield City Battalion, pp. 25–33.
14 For more details see Downing, Secret Warriors, pp. 273ff.
15 Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, p. 86.
16 IWM Art: PST 2734. The latest analysis of the poster says that its impact has been vastly exaggerated and that the numbers coming forward declined after it became universal; see James Taylor, ‘Your Country Needs You’: The Secret History of the Propaganda Poster, pp. 21–45.
17 David Cannadine has summed this up, saying that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century ‘there was a noticeable proliferation of the “lower middle class”; that army of clerks and office workers who were neither factory labourers nor factory owners, but who merged into the working class beneath and the prosperous middle class above’; see David Cannadine, Class in Britain, p. 117.
18 Rupert Brooke, ‘Peace’, the first of five sonnets in his sequence called 1914.
19 Hew Strachan, The First World War: Vol. 1 To Arms, p. 136.
20 David Parker, The People of Devon in the First World War, pp. 59–60.
21 A.T.Q. Stewart, The Ulster Crisis, p. 234; Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, p. 95.
22 The traditional province of Ulster consisted of nine counties, all of which were represented in the UVF. After Partition in 1922, the region entitled Northern Ireland consisted of six counties.
23 Captain C. Falls, The History of the 36th (Ulster) Division, pp. 5–7.
24 Col H.C. Wylly, The Border Regiment in the Great War, pp. 28–9.
25 Cumbria: Roll of warrant officers, NCOs and other ranks, who served in the Lonsdales during the First World War.
26 Gary Sheffield, Leadership in the Trenches, p. 1.
27 Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War, p. 102.
28 Lloyd George, War Memoirs Vol. 1, p. 361.
29 Rudyard Kipling, The New Army in Training, pp. 61–3.
30 John Keegan, The Face of Battle, p. 221.
31 Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth, pp. 213–14.
2 Training a Citizen Army
1 R.H. Mottram, ‘Stand To’, in Panichas (ed.), Promise of Greatness, pp. 206–7.
2 Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, pp. 194–5.
3 C.E. Montague, Disenchantment, p. 6.
4 Macmillan, Winds of Change, p. 59.
5 Oldfield and Gibson, Sheffield City Battalion, pp. 33–4.
6 Cumbria: ‘V.M.’, Record of the XIth (Service) Battalion Border Regt (Lonsdale), pp. 6ff.
7 For a discussion of Haldane’s reforms and the attempt to introduce a more scientific outlook, see Edward Spiers, Haldane: An Army Reformer, pp. 11ff.
8 Quoted in Tim Travers, The Killing Ground, p. 39.
9 The Neglect of Science, report of proceedings of a conference held in the rooms of the Linnean Society, Burlington House, Piccadilly, 3 May 1916, presided over by Lord Rayleigh and attended by H.G. Wells and other distinguished scientists.
10 There were technical schools in Britain and some of the universities, especially the newer universities of Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool, were beginning to develop closer links to industry, while Cambridge was pioneering various new scientific studies. See Downing, Secret Warriors, pp. 33ff.
11 Quoted in Travers, The Killing Ground, p. 41.
12 H.G. Wells, Anticipations, p. 212.
13 Ibid., p. 189. Wells expanded on this concept in a famous short story in the Strand Magazine in 1903 called simply ‘The Land Ironclads’; this would later be cited as one of the sources of the idea of the development of the tank in 1915–16.
14 Ibid., p. 208.
15 Ibid., p. 213.
16 Graham Farmelo, Churchill’s Bomb, p. 18.
17 H.G. Wells, ‘Of a cross-channel passage’, Daily Mail, 27 July 1909.
18 Quoted in Travers, The Killing Ground, p. 67.
19 Sir Philip Joubert de la Ferté, The Fated Sky, p. 32.
20 For more detailed coverage of the debates relating to the development of military aviation before the First World War, see David Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane, pp. 1–17, and Downing, Secret Warriors, pp. 51–74.
21 Gary Sheffield, The Chief, pp. 59–62.
22 John Blair, In Arduis Fidelis, p. 77.
23 Quoted in Mark Harrison, The Medical War, p. 125.
24 During the Great War inoculations against typhoid fever were credited with saving the lives of 130,000 men and preventing nearly 900,000 men from being invalided out of the army; as his obituary for the Royal Society
noted, ‘For this achievement, Leishman must be accounted to have been one of our most successful generals in the Great War.’ See Guy Hartcup, The War of Invention, p. 171; Downing, Secret Warriors, p. 216.
25 Blair, In Arduis Fidelis, p. 80.
26 Fiona Reid, Broken Men, p. 12.
27 Charles Myers, Shell Shock in France 1914–1918, pp. 16–17.
28 Oldfield and Gibson, Sheffield City Battalion, pp. 35–7.
29 Strachan, The First World War: Vol. 1, pp. 1065–60.
30 Basil Liddell Hart, ‘Forced to Think’, in Panichas (ed.), Promise of Greatness, p. 99.
31 Simkins, Kitchener’s Army, p. 212.
32 Ibid., p. 221.
33 R.C. Sherriff, ‘The English Public Schools in the War’, in Panichas (ed.), Promise of Greatness, p. 137.
34 Sheffield, Leadership in the Trenches, p. 35; Sheffield says the number might have been as high as 27,000.
35 Cumbria: ‘V.M’, Record of the XIth (Service) Battalion Border Regt (Lonsdale), pp. 6–8.
36 Cumbria: Letters of Percy Machell dated 2 November and 28 November 1914.
37 Keegan, The Face of Battle, p. 225.
38 A.J.P. Taylor points out that the four-letter word, ‘fuck’, came out of the trenches. Used by the men, it was copied by officers, and ‘its universal use was first observed by the literate classes’ during the war; see A.J.P. Taylor, English History 1914–1945, p. 62.
39 Siegfried Sassoon, Sherston’s Progress, pp. 304–5 is one of many examples of this.
40 Macmillan, Winds of Change, p. 100, and Sheffield, Leadership in the Trenches, p. 136.
41 Quoted in Travers, The Killing Ground, p. 40.
42 Quoted in John Terraine, Douglas Haig, p. 160.
43 Simon Robbins, British Generalship on the Western Front, p. 16.
44 Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, p. 152.
45 Robert Foley, German Strategy and the Path to Verdun, p. 103.
46 Quoted in Harrison, The Medical War, p. 23.
47 Aubrey Herbert, Mons, Anzac and Kut, p. 11.
48 Strachan, The First World War: Vol. 1, p. 278.
49 Brigadier-General John Charteris, At G.H.Q., p. 59.
50 Brigadier-General Sir James E. Edmonds, History of the Great War Based on Official Documents, Military Operations France and Belgium, 1915 Vol. 1, p. 51.
3 The Shell Shock Enigma
1 Lord Moran, The Anatomy of Courage, p. 3.
2 Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves, pp. 1, 21; see also Downing, Secret Warriors, Chapter 11 ‘The Mind’, pp. 241–66.
3 This description is from German medical officer and psychologist Walter Ludwig, published in 1920 and quoted in Alexander Watson, Enduring the Great War, p. 27. From the beginning shell shock was a problem that had to be confronted by all the armies on the Western Front; see Appendix 3.
4 Captain Wilfrid Harris, a physician attached to the Springfield Hospital, Wandsworth, quoted in Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely, Shell Shock to PTSD, p. 23.
5 The best recent account of the Torres Strait expedition and the intellectual journeys taken by its members over the following decades is Ben Shephard, Headhunters, pp. 23ff.
6 Myers, Shell Shock in France, p. 14.
7 Ibid., pp. 13–14.
8 The Lancet, 13 February 1915, pp. 316–20.
9 Gerald Brenan, ‘A Survivor’s Story’, in Panichas (ed.), Promise of Greatness, p. 47.
10 Grafton Elliot Smith and T.H. Pear, Shell Shock and Its Lessons, p. 2.
11 RWOCESS, p. 16.
12 Ibid., p. 34.
13 Shephard, A War of Nerves, pp. 10–11.
14 Peter Barham, Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War, p. 39.
15 Quoted in Elliot Smith and Pear, Shell Shock and Its Lessons, p. 109.
16 Elliot Smith and Pear, Shell Shock and Its Lessons, pp. 115, 121, 131.
17 Barham, Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War, p. 45.
18 Frederick W. Mott, War Neuroses and Shell Shock, pp. 1–5, 130ff.
19 Harold Wiltshire, ‘A contribution to the etiology of shell shock’ in The Lancet, Vol. 1, 1916, p. 1212.
20 Myers, Shell Shock in France, p. 26.
21 Elliot Smith and Pear, Shell Shock and Its Lessons, pp. 1–2.
22 Myers, Shell Shock in France, pp. 28, 40; Mark Harrison, The Medical War, pp. 111–12.
23 Myers, Shell Shock in France, pp. 95–6.
24 Ibid., pp. 42–8.
25 Edgar Jones, ‘An atmosphere of cure: Frederick Mott, shell shock and the Maudsley’ in History of Psychiatry, 25, 2014, p. 415; Emily Mayhew, Wounded, p. 207.
26 Myers, Shell Shock in France, pp. 36, 38.
27 W. Johnson and R.G. Rows, ‘Neurasthenia and War Neuroses’, in Macpherson et al. (eds), History of the Great War Based on Official Documents: Diseases of the War Vol. II, p. 2.
28 RWOCESS, p. 14.
29 The Times, 25 May 1915.
30 The Manchester Guardian, 26 April 1915.
31 Ian Whitehead, Doctors in the Great War, p. 182.
32 Johnson and Rows, ‘Neurasthenia and War Neuroses’, p. 9.
33 RWOCESS, p. 64.
34 For more details on the structure of medical care along the Western Front from 1915 to 1918, see Downing, Secret Warriors, pp. 221–6.
35 Myers, Shell Shock in France, p. 90.
36 RWOCESS, pp. 30–1.
37 Moran, The Anatomy of Courage, p. xxii.
38 Myers, Shell Shock in France, p. 53.
39 RWOCESS, p. 76.
40 IWM Documents 9188: Papers of H.E. Fayerbrother quoted in Malcolm Brown, Tommy Goes to War, p. 89.
41 RWOCESS, p. 30.
42 Edgar Jones, ‘An atmosphere of cure: Frederick Mott, shell shock and the Maudsley’, p. 416.
43 IWM Documents 1859 for Claire Tisdall’s unpublished memoir; Leese, Shell Shock, p. 37.
44 RWOCESS, p. 16.
45 Ibid., pp. 14–15.
46 Ibid., p. 30.
47 Ibid., pp. 88–91.
48 Myers, Shell Shock in France, pp. 97–8.
4 The Big Push
1 Gary Sheffield, The Chief, p. 127.
2 Brigadier Sir James Edmonds, History of the Great War Based on Official Documents, Military Operations, France and Belgium, 1916, Vol. I (hereafter Official History, 1916 Vol. I), p. 16.
3 Robertson to Haig, 5 January 1916 in Robert Blake (ed.), The Private Papers of Sir Douglas Haig 1914–1919, p. 122.
4 There is considerable debate over this phrase. Falkenhayn later said he had used it in December 1915 and that he had never intended to break through at Verdun. However, no copy of any document using the words has ever been found and Crown Prince Wilhelm openly spoke of the ‘capture of the fortress of Verdun’ as an objective. Falkenhayn used the phrase in his memoirs, written after the war, possibly as a way of justifying the battle of attrition at Verdun and the huge German losses there.
5 Gary Sheffield and John Bourne (eds), Douglas Haig: War Diaries and Letters, 1914–1918, 26 May 1916, p. 188.
6 Quoted in William Philpott, Bloody Victory, pp. 98–9.
7 Quoted in Philpott, Bloody Victory, p. 113.
8 Quoted in Gen. Sir Frederick Maurice (ed.), The Life of General Lord Rawlinson of Trent From His Journals and Letters, p. 130.
9 It has to be said on the other hand that Rawlinson had told the King’s aide-de-camp during a visit that this was ‘Capital country in which to undertake an offensive’ and had written in his diary, ‘one gets an excellent view of the enemy’s positions which could I think be captured without much trouble’. These comments are from his private papers at the Churchill Archive Centre, Cambridge and suggest that, like all the commanders on the Somme, he expressed different views about his hopes and ambitions at different times; quoted in Philpott, Bloody Victory, p. 107.
10 Quoted in Maurice (ed.), The Life of General Lord Rawlinson of Trent, p. 157.
11 Philpott, Bloody Victory, p. 119.
12 Quoted in Maurice (ed.), The Life of Gen
eral Lord Rawlinson of Trent, p. 158.
13 Downing, Secret Warriors, p. 93; by the end of the battle of the Somme the RFC had taken some 19,000 photos and from these 430,000 prints had been made.
14 Peter Simkins, ‘Building Blocks: Aspects of Command and Control at Brigade Level in the BEF’s Offensive Operations 1916–1918’ in Gary Sheffield and Dan Todman (eds), Command and Control on the Western Front, pp. 158–9.
15 Gary Sheffield, The Somme, p. 19.
16 Keegan, The Face of Battle, p. 219.
17 Sheffield and Bourne (eds), Douglas Haig: War Diaries and Letters, 1914–1918, 29 March 1916, p. 183.
18 Quoted in Maurice (ed.), The Life of General Lord Rawlinson of Trent, pp. 155–6.
19 Edmonds, Official History, 1916 Vol. I, p. 491.
20 Letter from Haig to his wife, 14 October 1915, quoted in Sheffield, The Chief, p. 147.
21 Edmonds, Official History, 1916 Vol. I, p. 294.
22 Ibid., pp. 299–307.
23 Ibid., p. 288.
24 Quoted in Peter Hart, The Somme, p. 90.
25 Gerry Harrison (ed.), To Fight Alongside Friends, p. 212. I am grateful to Malcolm Brown for drawing my attention to Charlie May in The Imperial War Museum Book of the Somme, p. 54.
26 Quoted in Martin Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme, p. 107.
27 The letter was published anonymously on 29 July 1916 and is quoted in Brown, The Imperial War Museum Book of the Somme, pp. 57–8.
28 Maurice (ed.), The Life of General Lord Rawlinson of Trent, p. 161.
29 Charteris, At G.H.Q., p. 151.
30 Sheffield and Bourne (eds), Douglas Haig: War Diaries and Letters, 1914–1918, 30 June 1916, p. 195.
31 Edmonds, Official History, 1916 Vol. I, p. 315.
32 Harrison (ed.), To Fight Alongside Friends, p. 213.
33 Edmonds, Official History, 1916 Vol. I, p. 483.
5 Epidemic
1 Gerald Brenan, ‘A Survivor’s Story’ in Panichas (ed.), Promise of Greatness, p. 44.
Breakdown Page 35