Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassel Military)

by Gordon Corrigan

  Within the Allied coalition, the nations that actually mattered were France, Russia, Belgium, the United Kingdom and, neutral until 1917 but of enormous importance to the war effort even before entry, the United States of America. Belgium spent most of the war on the defensive, clinging grimly to that sliver of the country not occupied by Germany, and resisting British and French blandishments to take part in joint offensives. As the ostensible reason for the British declaration of war, however, she was important. On the German side Austria-Hungary was a ramshackle multi-ethnic state whose sole unifying factor was its Habsburg ruler, successor to the Holy Roman Emperor and now Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary. While not quite a German client state, Austria-Hungary was so far inferior to Germany in military and economic strength that, in examining the war in the west, it is reasonable to concentrate on Germany on the one hand and France, Britain and, in time, America on the other.

  In the West, at least, this was a coalition war and for most of it Britain was the junior partner on land. Decisions as to the conduct of the war could not be made by British generals – or British politicians – in isolation. Actions looked at through Anglocentric eyes may well seem unnecessary, foolish even, but when examined in the context of the war as a whole the reasons for them become clearer.

  The British army of the period 1914–18 was really four armies: the old professional regular army, with its associated reservists; the Territorial Force, of civilians turned soldiers at weekends and at annual camp; the ‘New Armies’ raised from volunteers in the first year of the war; and the conscripts, joining the ranks from 1916 onwards. Each of these groups had a different ethos and a different perspective on the war; each had its own aspirations and needed handling in a different way. As a generality, the regular army was rarely found wanting; the Territorial Force lacked equipment and was deficient in some aspects of training, but when committed fought well; the New Armies were enthusiastic and drawn from a higher stratum of society than the regulars, but were – not surprisingly – hopelessly inexperienced and undertrained when first deployed; the conscripts, unlike the other three groups, did not fight as units but were used as individual reinforcements, thus perhaps finding the culture of the army harder to adjust to. Any study of the British army in the Great War must take these factors into account.

  My own interest in the war was kindled as a schoolboy by my headmaster, a lofty figure with whom we boys rarely came in contact and who, when Empire Day was replaced by Commonwealth Day, summoned the whole school to announce that it would no longer be celebrated by a half holiday. ‘Wilf’, as he was known, did little teaching, except to the Upper Sixth A Level mathematics class. As this was in the days when university was but one of the many options open to a public schoolboy, we were a small band of six. I was there because two passes at A Level granted exemption from the Civil Service Commissioners’ examination for entry to Sandhurst, and maths seemed a reasonable bet. Of my fellow pupils one was, like myself, trying for Sandhurst; two were whiling the time away before they could take over their fathers’ estates; one was destined for the church, and one really was intending to read mathematics, at Cambridge. Apart from the Cambridge candidate (he succeeded in gaining a scholarship), none of us took sums very seriously, a fact that Wilf recognised early in the year. He was not just a dry old mathematician, however. He had been an infantry officer in the Great War and, as a change from quadratic equations, often threw us mathematical problems pertaining to war. ‘A brigade consists of a headquarters and four battalions, each of 1,000 men. It has a cyclist company and a company of the Army Service Corps attached. It has an escort of two troops of cavalry. The infantry marches at two miles per hour. The brigade sets off from Cassel at 0900 hours. At what time does the last man reach Poperinge?’ This was much more fun than proving that e = mc2, but whatever answer we came up with was always wrong. As Wilf wryly pointed out, the brigade was held up for four hours in Steenvorde because the gendarmes considered that the commander lacked the necessary travel pass. Wilf had enjoyed his war. He had been wounded and he had seen his friends and his men killed, but he did not consider the war to have been unnecessary, or a waste, or badly conducted.

  As time went on and I became seriously interested in military history, it seemed to me that much received opinion about the Great War was simply wrong. Anecdotal evidence from old soldiers, and statistics in the Public Record Office, did not seem to support much of the pejorative writings and opinions of modern commentators. It seemed to me that while the Great War was unique in British history, in that it was the first and last occasion when Britain fielded a mass army opposed to the major enemy in the main theatre for the entire period of hostilities, it was neither unnecessary nor badly conducted. Mistakes there surely were, but most were honest errors made by men who were as well trained and as well prepared as they could be, conducting a war the like of which no one on either side had expected. During the recent past, since my retirement from the army in 1998, I have conducted numerous battlefield tours, over half of them to the battlefields of 1914–18. I have tried to explain to my listeners what war is really about, how an army does its business and why much legend of the Great War is simply that: legend. I have myself come to the conclusion that Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, far from being the ‘butcher and bungler’ of popular belief, was the man who took a tiny British army and expanded it, trained it and prepared it until it was the only Allied army capable of defeating the Germans militarily in 1918. Some of my listeners have gone away convinced, some have nodded politely and continued in the comfortable safety of their preconceived ideas. People do not like their illusions shattered.

  There is today a ‘revisionist’ school of military historians who are prepared to regard the war as history rather than as an emotional experience, but most popular reading clings to the old myths of incompetence and unnecessary slaughter. Even John Keegan, in his book The First World War, has as his opening sentence, ‘This was a tragic and unnecessary conflict.’ To be fair to Sir John, he does not say that British participation in the war was unnecessary. I would argue that the aggressive nature of Germany’s war aims made it essential to confront them by force, all other options having been exhausted, but Sir John does say that the efforts of revisionist historians are ‘pointless’. I regret having to take issue with Sir John, the doyen of modern military historians. It was he, along with David Chandler, who as a lecturer in military history at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in the early sixties first stimulated my latent interest in the history of my profession, and who taught me never to accept historical accounts at face value, but to probe and question and pry and dig until the primary evidence was uncovered. Admiration and respect for Sir John need not prevent occasional disagreement with his conclusions.

  I believe that the evidence does not support the popular view of the First World War as being unnecessary, or ineptly conducted by the British. The British regular army in 1914 was 257,000 strong, most of it scattered around the Empire in its primary role of a colonial gendarmerie. The Territorial Force and the Reserves numbered, at least on paper, a further 620,000. Unlike the continental powers Britain had always eschewed conscription and, unlike the French and the Germans, the bulk of the population had no military experience. Once at war expansion was rapid and unprecedented. A nation that does not practise conscription in peace, and then has to expand hugely in war in order to field a mass army, will inevitably suffer casualties and make mistakes while that army is learning its trade. It cannot be otherwise, and it is to the very great credit of the British army of 1914–18 that it did learn its trade and was the only army capable of taking the offensive in 1918.

  In this book I have tried to look at some of the prevalent myths of the Great War and to examine the evidence relating to them. Some – the deadly effects of gas, the unimportance of the American army – I find to be without foundation: gas hardly killed anyone once it was known about, and the Americans made a very definite military contribution to the wa
r, particularly at the Second Battle of the Marne. Some myths are partly true: some public schools did suffer heavy casualties amongst their ex-pupils, although not anything like the ‘lost generation’ of mythology – not all of Harold Macmillan’s friends were killed on the Somme. Some beliefs are simply misunderstood: it is quite true that one quarter of all the shipping from Britain to France during the war carried fodder for horses, but only a very small proportion of this was for cavalry horses: the bulk of British (and French and German) transport for artillery, ammunition, supplies and ambulances was horse-drawn; and in any case, the cavalry was nothing like the useless adornment that is often claimed.

  In considering the actions of British commanders during the war I have adopted the standards of judges conducting a judicial review, a legal process where decisions made by ministers, functionaries, tribunals, panels and other quasi-official bodies are subject to challenge in hindsight. In deciding whether decisions taken were reasonable at the time, the judges ask themselves: ‘Could a reasonable man, faced with the evidence he was faced with, come to the conclusion that he did, even if we, faced with the same evidence, might have come to a different conclusion?’ It seems to me that this is the only approach that can reasonably allow an assessment of the capabilities and competence of those charged with conducting military operations in the world’s first total war. In general, British command and leadership on the Western Front emerges unscathed, albeit occasionally bruised, from such an examination, although that in other theatres – such as Gallipoli and Mesopotamia – may not. I have concentrated my attention on the Western Front because it was there that the bulk of the British army fought, and there that the war was to be won or lost. I do not say that other non-European theatres were not important, but I do say that success or failure in them was not, in the long term, germane to eventual victory or defeat. The Eastern Front was, of course, an important theatre of war, but I have largely ignored it because the British army had no involvement there until after the armistice of 1918 was signed. At the same time I recognise that had the Eastern Front not occupied the attention of up to a quarter of all available German divisions until late 1917, the results of the earlier battles on the Western Front might have been very different.

  As participants in the war open their archives and release documents previously classified, the sources for a study of the war increase with every passing year. Between 1922 and 1927 the German government published, in forty volumes, what it considered to be all the relevant diplomatic and military correspondence from 1871 to 1914, with the aim of expunging the ‘war guilt’ that had been attached to Germany since the Versailles Treaty. I have not read these forty volumes, but historians such as Fritz Fischer have, and while Fischer, although a German, is considered by some scholars to be biased against his own government’s behaviour before and during the war, much of what he quotes speaks for itself. The principal German military leaders wrote their memoirs after the war, and while these are in some cases selective, and written to justify their own actions, much German military thinking prior to the outbreak of war is revealed. On the Allied side the start point must be the Official Histories. They too may be biased, but they do record what actually happened, even if the thinking behind specific operations is sometimes shaded and mistakes understated. British cabinet papers are now, for the most part, in the public domain, as are many of the more sensitive files dealing with such subjects as military executions. Unit war diaries are an excellent primary source for operational detail. In some cases they were written after the event, in others they were edited before being submitted up the chain of command, but for what actually occurred at unit level they are the most accurate sources available to us. Memoirs, diaries and letters of participants are useful, but must be used with care. A soldier might well complain that he never saw a general in the front line, while the unit war diary records frequent visits by brigade, divisional and corps commanders. These accounts are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Not every soldier in the firing line will see a visitor, while behind the lines the whole unit will be drawn up on parade to see and be seen by the great man. Fortunately for the historian, the British army loves paper; and post-operation reports, casualty returns, strength returns, records of ammunition expenditure, equipment tables, receipts for the issue of stores, training programmes, enlistment records, training notes, citations for awards and records of promotions and postings were meticulously compiled and filed, much of this material still being available today. A particularly useful document is Statistics of the British Empire in the Great War 1914–1919, a rich fund of information produced by the War Office after the war. Deaths in the war have now been placed on CD-ROM, making comparisons of the casualty rate in the various geographical districts of the nation an easier task than hitherto. Regimental histories, while they too must be treated with care, usually include accurate records of locations, casualties and decorations, and lists of officers, and sometimes of non-commissioned officers, present at any particular period.

  In preparing this book I owe particular thanks to the writings of John Terraine, who ploughed a lonely furrow for many years in his efforts to explain the British participation in the Great War, and to show that all those British deaths had not been in vain. Professor Brian Bond of King’s College London, Professor Peter Simkins recently of the Imperial War Museum London, Dr Gary Sheffield of the Joint Services Command and Staff College, Dr John Bourne of the University of Birmingham, and Robin Neillands are all inspirational historians of the war, persuaded by the evidence and without axes to grind. I have been greatly encouraged by my fellow members of the British Commission for Military History, a body with a low public profile but a high reputation for scholarship. Here I must pay particular tribute to Chris McCarthy, for many years the General Secretary of the Commission, who not only motivated me to write my first-ever book, but is the author of The Somme: The Day-by-Day Account and Passchendaele: The Day-by-Day Account, which lay out, starkly and devoid of emotion, exactly what every division of the British and Empire armies did on each day of those two climactic British battles of the Western Front.

  The staffs of the Public Record Office, the British Newspaper Library, the Prince Consort’s Library Aldershot, the British Library, the Office of Population Statistics and the Templeman Library of the University of Kent at Canterbury have all been unfailingly helpful in my searches for hard evidence on which to base my conclusions, and Mrs Shelagh Lea has, if it is possible, surpassed herself in producing accurate maps and line drawings from my near-illegible sketches. I am grateful to Tony Cowan for permission to make use of his Cowan Report on Army Postings, a monumental work that traces the career of every officer of the rank of colonel and above who served in the British army from 1914 to 1918. Miss Elspeth Griffith, the archivist of Sedbergh School, and Mr Richard Overton have been of great assistance in supplying me with the details of Old Sedbergians who served in the war, as have Colonel Tony Lea MC of St Lawrence College, Thanet, and Dr Duncan of the Royal School Armagh. Miss Patricia Hardcastle, of the Catholic Media Office in London and Father O’Donoghe of the Jesuit Provinciate in Ireland have gone to great lengths to help in my investigations into the role of padres in the war, and particularly in my enquiries about Father Willie Doyle MC. To Colonel Andrew Pinion OBE I owe a huge debt for his advice on, and technical knowledge of, artillery in the Great War. Colonel Bob Alexander has helped me greatly by his encyclopaedic knowledge of machine guns and their characteristics. Stuart Sampson has been a mine of information on the law as it stood in 1914, and Colonel Dick Austin as to how it stands today; Simon Jones, of the King’s Regiment Museum, has been kind enough to advise me on the history of gas warfare, and Brigadier Douglas Wickenden has, as in the past, been unfailingly helpful in answering my untutored questions on the psychiatric effects of war on its participants. The opinions, and the errors, are mine and mine alone.

  My wife Imogen has, as always, been a tower of strength. Her ability to read a map, honed during twe
nty years’ service in the Women’s Royal Army Corps and Adjutant General’s Corps, has been of immense assistance when conducting reconnaissance of the relevant battles, and she has compiled the index. I am not (quite) pompous enough to believe that it was seventeen years of listening to me pontificating about battles that drove her to seek a history degree, as a full-time student at the age of forty-three, but her academic studies have enabled her to comment on the text and to make observations that had not occurred to me. Angus MacKinnon and Ian Drury of Cassell – about as far removed from the image, so beloved by authors, of the wicked publisher as it is possible to be – and my editor, Anthony Turner, have been encouraging and helpful throughout.