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

by Gordon Corrigan

  Now began what was termed ‘the race to the sea’. It was not, of course, a race, but successive attempts by Germans and Allies to turn the other’s flank, and each army moved further and further north to achieve it. Neither did, and the race, if race it was, was won by the Allies (just) when they reached the coast at Nieuwpoort, south-west of Ostend, in the first week of October. This was the end of mobile war on the Western Front, the war for which all armies had trained and which all expected. From now on operations developed into what was effectively siege warfare, with the Germans digging in on someone else’s territory, while the rightful owners attempted to expel them.

  The year 1915 was a learning phase, when both sides adjusted to trench warfare and sought ways of breaking out of it. This necessitated offensives by the Allies (it was their land that was occupied) with British offensives at Neuve-Chapelle in March and Aubers Ridge in May, far larger French attacks in Champagne, and a joint effort at Loos in September. The Germans experimented with the use of gas, in the Franco-British Ypres sector in April, and the Allies retaliated at Loos. Simultaneously the British Territorial Force was arriving at the front, and the first of the New Army divisions were deployed. Away from Europe the joint landings at Gallipoli, well conceived but flawed in execution, were turning to failure.

  Nineteen sixteen saw major attempts by the Allies to break the German line, with the joint Somme offensive much affected by a major German attack at Verdun in the French sector. The British New Armies were now fully employed, tanks made their first appearance and conscription was introduced in the UK. The following year rendered the bulk of the French army temporarily unavailable for anything other than static defence after its mutinies in June, and the British fought at Passchendaele perforce alone. America entered the war on the Allied side and US troops began to arrive in France in large numbers. The final year of the war, 1918, saw a major German offensive in March, prompted by losses at Passchendaele and the imminent threat of American action. This offensive failed: it pushed the French and British back but never split them, and it ran out of steam in the summer. Now the Allies, led by the British, went onto the offensive once more, launching the final advance that was to drive the German army back and lead not to unconditional surrender, but to an armistice and victory for the Allies. The threat of German militarism had been removed, at least for a further generation, the lost French territories were regained and Belgium was once more secure. This was a just war, and a necessary war. The British expenditure in lives and in treasure was great, but there was no alternative, and the price paid, in this author’s respectful submission, was worth that outcome.

  NOTES

  1 The title was German Emperor rather than Emperor of Germany, in order to show that there were other German monarchs, but this was semantics. By 1914 Wilhelm II and his acolytes decided policy for the whole empire.

  2 Strictly speaking, the Emperor could declare a defensive war on his sole authority; he had to have the approval of the Bundesrat to declare an aggressive war. In practice it made no difference.

  3 This seems to have been a Prussian trait: Frederick the Great was at one time sentenced to death (and subsequently reprieved) by his own father.

  4 The Treaty of Peace between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany, signed at Versailles, 28 June 1919, HMSO, London.

  5 The USA was an Associated Power, not an Ally. The difference is not entirely semantic, being imposed because the American President Woodrow Wilson wished to appear as an honest broker, distanced from French and British war aims despite having entered the war on the Allied side.

  6 Ibid., Clause 227.

  7 Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War, Chatto and Windus, London, 1967.

  8 General Erich von Ludendorff (trans. F. A. Holt, OBE), The General Staff and Its Problems, Hutchinson, London, 1920.

  9 Ibid.

  10 He was recalled to replace Prince Louis of Battenberg, hounded out of office by an upsurge of anti-German public opinion. Battenberg, son of the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, had been in the Royal Navy since he was a boy and became First Sea Lord in 1912. There is no evidence whatsoever that he was ever anything but a loyal officer of the British Navy. The family name was changed to Mountbatten in 1917, and his son was Lord Louis Mountbatten, who became First Sea Lord and subsequently the first Chief of Defence Staff.

  11 The full text of the note is in Bernadotte E. Schmidt, The Coming of the War 1914, 2 vols., New York, 1930.

  12 It would have been abolished much earlier, but the Treasury was unwilling to find the money to compensate those officers who had already paid for their commissions, or to fund the pensions that would have to be paid now that retiring officers could not raise capital by ‘selling out’. The system was not all bad – see my Wellington – A Military Life, Hambledon & London, London, 2001.

  13 Eton College had sent a volunteer contingent to the Boer War, and today is the only CCF to have a battle honour.

  14 Today the rank is brigadier, an economy measure introduced in 1921. If brigade commanders were no longer generals then they were not entitled to certain allowances admissible for all generals. The brigadiers carried on doing exactly the same job, with rather less pay and fewer perks. The equivalent ranks today in the (less parsimonious) American and French armies are brigadier general and général de brigade.

  15 Today’s division, with a war establishment of around 15,000 men, is provided with thirty-one staff officers in peace, augmented from the TA watchkeepers’ pool in war.

  16 To Russia £568 million, to France £425 million, to Italy £345 million and to others £127 million. Much of this was in turn raised by Britain on the American money market. Britain had to repay eventually, but she failed to recover much of the Russian loan and some others also defaulted. The situation led to suspicion in America that the financial and industrial lobby were in favour of American entry into the war on the Allied side to ensure that the loans were repaid.

  2

  THE LOST GENERATION

  The British perception of the Great War is of seemingly endless lists of dead and wounded soldiers, many maimed for life. The war, it has been claimed, led to the loss of the very men who could have prevented the inter-war decline of Britain as a world power, and who would have provided the national leadership missing for much of the rest of the twentieth century. Every town and village has its war memorial, and the names of the dead are seen as evidence of the sacrifice of a whole generation to war.

  By 1914 Britain had long ceased to involve herself in large-scale military adventures in Europe. She was a naval power, and while the sinking of a ship of the line with all hands might cost 600 lives, it did not happen very often, and when it did those who lost their lives were professional sailors: drowning was an occupational hazard. In the twenty-two years of war against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France the major British effort on land was in the Iberian Peninsula, where Wellington’s army was never more than 100,000 strong, all volunteers who effectively enlisted for life. Total British deaths there were around 40,000. The climactic Battle of Waterloo produced twenty-eight per cent British casualties, but this amounted to only 1,400 British dead. Britain’s involvement in the Crimean War, 1854–6, led to the death of over 20,000 British soldiers, four-fifths from disease rather from than Russian bullets. Prior to 1914 the largest number of troops ever sent abroad by Britain was 450,000 to the South African War, 1899–1902; 22,000 of them died, two-thirds from disease.

  In contrast the European powers were well accustomed to the losses of war. The combined armies of continental Europe suffered well over three million dead between 1793 and 1815. The Battle of Austerlitz on 2 December 1805 accounted for 4,000 French and 7,000 Russian dead; at Wagram on 5–6 July 1809 the French lost 8,300 killed and the Austrians nearly 6,000; Borodino on 7 September 1812 cost nearly 7,000 French and 10,000 Russian lives. In the Crimea the combined Russian, French and Turkish death toll was 765,000.

  Rather than following the E
uropean pattern of huge armies raised by conscription, the British employed a small all-volunteer force that could be inserted, supported and supplied by the Royal Navy, and that could as easily be removed should the situation demand.

  The British were not accustomed to a heavy butcher’s bill. The number of British dead in the Great War, and particularly that on the Western Front, came as a rude shock, for their experience had done nothing to prepare them for it. The table below shows the size of the armies deployed by Britain in her wars of the previous 120 years, those armies as a percentage of the population, and the percentage of the British population killed.1

  In the past, the death of soldiers had little impact on the population at large. Now, for the first time in history, the British would wage a war with mass armies deployed against the main enemy for the entire war. It is hardly surprising that the scale of casualties seemed – and by British standards was – horrendous. Britain mobilised around eight million men. Most of these went to the army, which was, and remains, a manpower-intensive organisation. The Royal Navy, on the other hand, was a technical service; there it was ships that mattered, and a dreadnought of 1914, with ten twelve-inch guns, carried the firepower of six army divisions’-worth of artillery but needed only one twenty-third of the number of men to operate it.2 In the greatest sea battle of the war, at Jutland in 1916, in which 265 warships took part, combined casualties were fewer than 10,000, of whom around 3,500 were killed. Of the total British deaths in the Great War, only 32,208, or 4.6 per cent, were in the Royal Navy.

  Putting the British army deaths for the Great War in the same format as those for previous wars, shown in Table 1 above, we find:

  The Great War deaths impressed the British far more than had those in any previous conflict, not only because they were thirty-two times greater in absolute numbers than those of the last war the British had fought, (against the Boers), but also because a far greater proportion of the population than ever before was under arms. The deaths were not spread evenly across the population, but occurred mainly in males of military age, those who were between nineteen and thirty-four during the conflict. While there were many deaths of men over the age of thirty-four, and many below nineteen who committed the offence of false enlistment by lying about their age, it was this portion of the population that bore the brunt of the military deaths. As an aside, a mathematical exercise may enable us to arrive at some comparison of the impact of the death rates in British wars on the British armies themselves. If the military deaths in each war are assumed to have been spread evenly over the period of hostilities – which of course they were not – and those casualties are compared to the average strength of the army during the war, we find that the percentage of deaths was just over one per cent during the twenty-two years of the wars against France, 3.5 per cent for the South African War and just over five per cent for the Great War. For the Crimea the figure is almost eleven per cent, which would indicate that for the man on the ground the Crimean War was worse by a factor of two than the Great War.

  Enormous though they seem, compared to ally and enemy the British casualties of the Great War were far from excessive – a relative term, of course. One in sixty-five of the British population was killed, one in twenty-eight of the French. In Britain one in every twelve men mobilised was killed; in France one in every six. With the exception of some of the relatively small number of reservists with a liability to reinforce the regular army, Britain mobilised few men over thirty until the last two years of the war. France, with far more men in the population who had received military training, mobilised over three million men who were over thirty when war broke out, and fourteen per cent of them were killed. In addition she conscripted 230,000 men who were under eighteen when the war ended, and 3,600, or 1.6 per cent, of those were killed. Nearly 60,000 Frenchmen aged forty-five when war broke out were mobilised during it. The highest death rate for the French was amongst those born in 1896, who were aged eighteen in 1914: 292,000 were mobilised, mostly in 1914, and twenty-nine per cent of them were killed.

  Germany, with a population of 60,300,000 in 1914 and her efficient system of universal conscription, mobilised 13,250,000 men during the course of the war. Nearly fifteen per cent of these were killed, one in thirty-one of the population, one in every seven mobilised. Table 3 below illustrates the comparative cost in lives to the three major western combatants.3

  France, with a population six and a half million less than that of the United Kingdom, mobilised more men and suffered nearly twice as many deaths. The demographic effect on France was enormous, particularly in the removal of a large number of young men of breeding age. It led to an acceleration in the decline of an already ageing population, and influenced the course of French politics and military strategy for a generation. Even in the France of today, the death toll of the Great War is manifest in the plethora of war memorials with long lists of men Morts pour la France. Every village has one, and the same names occur over and over again, men of successive generations of the same families who died for Napoleon, for Bazaine or MacMahon in 1870, and for Joffre, Nivelle, Pétain and Foch in 1914–18.

  The demographic effects on the United Kingdom were far less, as a glance at the population counted by the ten-yearly censuses shows:4

  The casual observer would be forgiven for failing to notice that between the census of 1911 and that of 1921 the greatest bloodletting in British military history took place. Despite the war deaths the overall male population between 1911 and 1921 actually rose, admittedly at a slightly lower rate than during the previous ten-year period, but at about the same rate as between 1921 and 1931.

  A similar exercise may be narrowed down to males of military age, that is those between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four in 1911, all of whom would have been of an age to fight at some time in the war. These same men would have been aged from twenty-five to forty-four at the 1921 census. This group shows a decline of fourteen per cent between 1911 and 1921, but the reduction includes deaths other than those attributable to the war, and net emigration. Examined on the same basis, the period from 1901 to 1911 shows a decline in the equivalent group of eight per cent, and the period from 1921 to 1931 of six per cent. The point is that of all those counted in 1911 and who were of military age between 1914 and 1918, eighty-six per cent of them were still there when they were counted again in 1921. Even if the reduction was entirely due to the war, which it was not, it is far from the loss of a generation.

  If the overall population loss in the war was rapidly replaced, which the census figures indicate, then we should examine the losses sustained by that portion of British society that would have been expected to provide the political, commercial, academic and military leadership of the nation after the war. While there were many who rose from humble beginnings to achieve greatness, the largest source of leaders and opinion-formers, after the war as before and during it, was the public schools. At this point readers who, in the words of Cecil Rhodes, failed to win the lottery of life by being born British, should note that British public schools are actually private. They are separate from the state education system, fee-paying and mainly boarding. Then as now, pupils gained entry by passing an examination set and marked by the school. The public schools’ ethos was based on the production of a governing class to run nation and empire. During the Great War, and before it, the output of the public schools was a natural source of officers.5

  Eton College, founded by King Henry VI in 1440, had long been seen as an institution for the nurturing of cabinet ministers, colonial governors and, it has to be admitted, a fair few lounge lizards. Boys who wanted to learn, or could be forced into learning, received an excellent education and contacts that ensured gainful and influential employment. Those who were rich enough not to have to bother at least acquired some manners, and the ability to mix in society. When war came, Old Etonians answered the call. In total 5,650 served, almost all as officers, and 1,157 were killed, a ratio of one in five.6 Between them they won thirt
een Victoria Crosses, the British Empire’s highest award for gallantry. Tonbridge School, smaller and slightly less grand than Eton, sent 2,225 of its old boys to the war. They may have collected only one VC, but 415 were killed, the same ratio as that of Eton.7 Sedbergh School, in Cumbria, sent 1,250 men to the war and 251 were killed, again a ratio of one in every five.8 St Lawrence College, in Thanet, sent around 650 ex-pupils to the war and 132, or one in five, were killed.9 The figures for other public schools are similar. Apart from a few schools, such as Pangbourne, which had a long tradition of providing naval officers, the vast majority of these public schoolboys went to the army. Eton sent only 163 to the Royal Navy, where the death rate was trivial in comparison. The Irish gentry fared only slightly better. The Royal School Armagh, a typical Irish public school, sent 235 of its old boys to fight, and forty-three were killed, a ratio of one in six.10 This may be explained by there being no conscription in Ireland, or perhaps they were just luckier than most.

  Oxford and Cambridge, the premier universities in the land, had a similar strike rate to those of the public schools. Seven thousand seven hundred and forty-five Oxford graduates served and 1,542, or one in five, were killed, while Cambridge graduates provided 9,926 men for the armed services, with 2,210, or just over one in five, killed.11 Even so, eighty per cent came back.

  Overall, one in every seven British army officers was killed in the Great War, and one in every eight other ranks, so it would seem that the products of public schools and universities were killed in a rather higher proportion than officers and men from other sources. It is of course true that those who were killed, both officers (who by definition were leaders) and other ranks, were the physically fittest and, at least before conscription, the most strongly motivated sections of the male population. Whether the removal of one in seven of the obvious potential leaders really did lead to a dearth of national direction after the war is doubtful; enough returned unscathed to ensure that life went on.