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

by Gordon Corrigan

  The 63rd Royal Naval Division felt the wrath of its commander because its officers did not consider the subject of shit management to be worthy of much attention – there were far more important things to think about. The Royal Naval Division was a creation of Churchill. As First Lord of the Admiralty he found that on mobilisation the Royal Navy, having called up its reserves, had far more men than there were berths on ships. It was thought (correctly as it turned out) that naval casualties would be few; hence the retention of a large number of replacements was unnecessary. The army, on the other hand, did need men and their need for reinforcements could be very great. The Royal Navy produced an infantry division consisting of a brigade of Royal Marines and two brigades of sailors turned soldiers. The division got off to a somewhat shaky start. It took part in an abortive attempt to prevent the Germans from taking Antwerp in October 1914; when it had to withdraw, the 1st Royal Naval Brigade were too slow, failed to get across the River Scheldt, and had about half their number interned in Holland for the duration of the war. The division next took part in the Gallipoli escapade and eventually arrived back on the Western Front in May 1916, when they found themselves transferred from the Admiralty to the War Office. There were problems. The Royal Marines adapted without any great difficulty; they belonged to the Navy but their traditions stemmed from the army and they were trained as soldiers. The sailors, on the other hand, resented what they saw as enforcement of unnecessary army discipline and army ways of doing things. Naval and army discipline are, of course, different. A sailor goes where the captain sails, and cannot absent himself. He has a job to do in the ship and his working environment is much the same in peace as it is in war. A soldier can run away, his working environment changes by the minute once battle is joined and, unlike the sailor who kills anonymously from a distance, the infantry soldier can see the look in the eye of the man whose life he is trying to extinguish. Army and navy training and discipline reflect these differences.

  The navy would have liked to have an admiral commanding their division, but this would have been about as sensible as appointing a general to be captain of a battleship. When the division arrived on the Western Front in 1916, Major-General Cameron Shute was appointed General Officer Commanding 63rd (Royal Naval) Division. Shute was a pre-war regular officer, originally of the Welsh Regiment and the Rifle Brigade, and was fifty years old when he took up the post. He had attended the Staff College, at a time when most officers did not, and had been through the mill of staff appointments including Brigadier General Staff Aldershot, one of the really taxing, and important, pre-war staff jobs dealing with troops. He had also commanded his battalion before the war, and a brigade on the Western Front. He was by any standards a well-trained, experienced and competent officer. Shute inspected the various units of the Royal Naval Division on taking over command, and did not like what he saw. Too little attention was being paid to keeping weapons clean, and latrine management was nothing short of a mass outbreak of dysentery waiting to happen. Shute is forgotten in military history except in the words of a poem, supposedly written by A. P. Herbert (who served in the division) and which, like all scurrilous and witty productions, received wide circulation:

  The General inspecting the trenches

  Exclaimed with a horrified shout,

  ‘I refuse to command a division

  Which leaves its excreta about.’

  But nobody took any notice,

  No one was prepared to refute

  That the presence of shit was congenial

  Compared with the presence of Shute.

  And certain responsible critics

  Made haste to reply to his words,

  Observing that his staff advisers

  Consisted entirely of turds.

  For shit may be shot at odd corners

  And paper supplied there to suit,

  But a shit would be shot without mourners

  If somebody shot that shit Shute.

  It caused great amusement, but Shute was absolutely right. Dirty weapons will fail to fire when needed, and lack of attention to latrine discipline leads to disease. It would appear that the Royal Naval Division did not fully absorb General Shute’s strictures, for in January 1918 the 2nd Battalion Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry took over a sector of the front from the Nelson Battalion and reported that the state of the trenches was bad.2

  A general lack of cleanliness compounded by food left lying about, particularly in and around horse lines and abandoned ration dumps, could of course attract rats, and in the early days there were certainly lots of them in evidence. They did scamper around in no man’s land and bodies left unrecovered did provide nourishment for them. Bodies were always recovered whenever humanly possible and taken back to the rear for temporary burial, before being given a proper and seemly funeral. Bodies left lying where they fell were not good for morale; they were never left in the trenches for longer than absolutely necessary, nor did the British follow the French practice in the early days of burying their dead in the parapet. Good discipline got rid of rubbish and edible scraps, and rats were rarely a problem in the trenches, although lice, inevitable when men cannot wash properly, sometimes were. On coming out of the line troops had their uniforms fumigated, laundered and ironed, and if necessary exchanged, to reduce the risk of infestation.

  The usual procedure in defence was for an infantry battalion to man the firing line and the support line, while the reserve line would contain the brigade reserve, from another battalion, and sometimes the battalion reserve as well. The reserve trenches were rarely fully manned; rather, reserves would be in billets anything up to a mile behind the firing line, ready to be deployed as necessary, either to mount a counter-attack or to man the reserve trenches if an enemy offensive was taking place or imminent. The proportion of men placed in the firing line varied; sometimes two companies would be in the firing line and two in the support trenches, at other times three might be in the firing line. As the war went on it became increasingly the practice (on both sides) for the firing line to be lightly held, so as to avoid casualties from sporadic shelling and sniping, and to reinforce from the support line if an attack was likely. It was for the brigade staff to allocate stretches of the front to battalions, and a matter for battalions to decide which company went where.

  British soldiers did not spend four years of war in the firing line, or even at the front. Men were regularly rotated from the firing line to the support and reserve lines and then back to billets, usually well behind the battle area. The billets were generally civilian houses in villages, appropriated by the army. They varied in standard and there were times when men were accommodated in stables, tents, or huts erected by the Royal Engineers. Here they would recover from the fighting, undergo training, eat freshly prepared food, have hot baths or showers and exchange their worn-out items of clothing. Although French law forbade the sale of spirits in the war zone, this was widely flouted and those who wanted to (which was most) could easily obtain alcohol and the staple of the British soldier, fried eggs and fried potatoes. It is said that the current Belgian obsession with chips with everything stems from their entrepreneurial culinary activities during the war, although this does not explain their curious habit of lacing them with mayonnaise.

  The British army took great pains to ensure that men were regularly rotated between front-line positions and billets to the rear. With a division having two of its brigades in the line and one out, and with each brigade having two of its four battalions in the line, a battalion could expect, on average, to spend just ten days a month in the trenches. In practice this varied with the tactical situation: more men would be in the line when a German attack was imminent, or when the British intended to take the offensive. This was balanced by each division’s coming out of the line en bloc at intervals, to rest and undergo retraining. Even when a battalion was in the line there were usually only two companies forward, with two in the support or reserve trenches. On occasions the reserve line w
as not manned, but the troops held in billets ready to occupy the trenches if needed. An examination of five typical regular battalions, stationed on the Western Front for the whole of the war, shows how effective the British system of rotation was. The tables below show the maximum time any soldier of those battalions spent in the trenches – firing, support or reserve – during the month of January in each year of the war. These were typical trench-warfare months, in which nothing very much was happening save the usual programme of trench raids, shelling and sniping. The maximum time is shown because, while adjutants did their best to give all four companies an equal amount of time in the trenches and out of them, when a battalion went into the line for three or five days an equal distribution was not possible; this was corrected when the battalion next went into the line. Also shown is the number of deaths in the battalion from all causes during those months. Deaths in a defensive posture, though a constant drip, were not excessive; it was the major offensives, where men had to cross open ground and expose themselves to enemy fire, that caused the majority of the casualties.

  The so-called horrors of the trenches were very short-lived indeed, and it is unusual to find any battalion spending more than four or five days a month continuously in the firing line.3 Out of the line there was much to do, but while deaths did occur from accidents, sporadic shelling of billets, premature explosion of grenades in training and air attack, men were relatively safe and comfortable. The 1st Battalion South Wales Borderers were out of the line for the whole of January 1917, and in billets near Beaucourt. Their programme for this month is shown overleaf:

  This constant rotation between firing and support lines, reserve and billets occasioned a great deal of work for brigade staff officers and much effort in traffic control. It was a constant headache for those responsible for allocating billets, and kept adjutants gainfully employed making sure that each company got an equal balance between time at the front and time in billets or reserve. Rotation required more units to hold a given length of front than if units had simply been put in the trenches and left there, and local knowledge of a unit’s sector could never be as comprehensive as it would have been had men spent longer in the line. There was always the risk of an enemy attack being launched while a relief was taking place, or when a newly arrived company or battalion had not yet settled in. Sporadic shelling of the communication trenches could cause mayhem if a battalion was moving up them to relieve another battalion at the front.

  All these problems were far outweighed by the advantages that rotation had for morale. The firing line was not a fun place to be, but however unpleasant it might be on Tuesday, the soldier knew that on Friday he would be back in a comfortable billet out of range of anything but a speculative shell; in the warm, eating hot food and with a hot bath and clean clothes available. There can be no doubt that regular rotation, never keeping men in the post of most danger for more than a few days at a time, made a very significant contribution to the fact that the British army, alone amongst the major forces on the Western Front, never suffered a collapse of morale. Even when things were at their worst, as during the German offensive in the spring of 1918, British soldiers never seriously doubted that in time things would get better, and that great efforts were being made to look after their comfort and welfare. Their time in the firing line was short enough for them to see relief in sight, and to know that they only had to stick it out for a few days at most before they could move back to comparative civilisation.

  This was not the case in the French army, where rotation was only formally introduced at divisional level during the battle for Verdun in 1916, and was even then far less frequent at company level than it was in the British army, and where, before 1917, French official welfare was almost non-existent. Even when the full weight of the enemy was directed against the BEF, men still never spent more than six or at most seven days in the line. This was also the case during British offensives, when a man attacking on the first day would normally be out of the line on Day Two. During the battles of the Somme in 1916 and Passchendaele in 1917, the British kept on attacking for months, but not with the same troops. Battalions were regularly relieved and given time to reconstitute and rest before being committed once more, as we shall see.

  There were other attractions, besides egg and chips, that could be enjoyed when in billets. If a battalion was not in reserve or on stand-by for a move, soldiers were allowed to visit villages and towns. An inevitable consequence was venereal disease, long an occupational hazard for soldiers away from home. The French army recognised that young, fit men, away from wives and girlfriends, will inevitably attempt to get rid of their dirty water, particularly when it may be the last chance they will have, and it took steps to provide for it. The inhabitants of the maisons tolérées in the rear areas were inspected by medical officers, and access was controlled by the military police. Venereal disease amongst French soldiers was never a serious problem in Europe. The official British view was that such urges could be controlled by good discipline and healthy exercise, with the result that venereal disease took a steady, and unnecessary, toll of the fighting strength of the BEF. Men visited independent prostitutes or enthusiastic amateurs, with the inevitable results. Altogether the army medical services treated 153,531 cases of VD on the Western Front.4 Thirty-two men per thousand per year, or the equivalent of a platoon in every infantry battalion, caught VD and were unavailable for duty for between twenty-eight to thirty-seven days. This was only marginally better than in the South African War, where the average wastage through VD was thirty-four men per thousand. These figures represent only a small proportion of VD cases, those that were not reported early and could not be treated in battalion regimental aid posts or as outpatients. Contrary to the popular view of French girls being of lax morals and enticing our young soldiers into a life of sin, only forty-five per cent of infections were contracted in France; thirteen per cent came from other countries or were of unknown origin; and a possibly surprising forty-two per cent of all cases were contracted in the United Kingdom, indicating a lowering of moral standards under the pressures of war.5

  The British army was never quite sure whether catching VD should be regarded as a self-inflicted wound, and thus subject to punishment, or whether it should be regarded in the same light as influenza or any other disease common on the front. While VD undoubtedly is self-inflicted, and absents a man from duty, fear of punishment only encourages men to conceal it until it reaches an untreatable stage.6 In some cases local commanders came to an agreement with the French and turned a blind eye to their men’s doing their bit for inter-allied cooperation. Eventually it was realised that men could not be prevented from having sex, but that opinion at home would never accept the French solution. The Commander-in-Chief was an old enough soldier to accept, albeit with reluctance, that other ranks would contract VD, but was perturbed when officers caught it. In a General Order it was announced that warrant officers and NCOs infected with VD should be considered for reduction in rank, and officers might be required to resign their commissions.7 This latter was a serious matter, for unlike a relinquishment of a commission in peacetime, which permitted withdrawal to civilian life, a resignation during the war made the one-time officer liable to conscription as a private soldier. It is not known how many officers were required to resign under this provision, but it is likely to have been very few: officers could afford to have the results of their dalliances treated privately without the army finding out.

  Flanders, where a large proportion of the BEF spent most of the war, is flat and the water-table is high. Even in good, dry weather water appears after only a few feet of digging. The winter of 1914–15 was exceptionally cold and wet, and flooding of trenches was a problem. Initially this led to large numbers of men contracting trench foot, caused by a lack of circulation in the feet and legs and, if untreated, leading to gangrene and amputation. Most cases were caught before recourse to the knife but, before preventative measures were enforced, many soldiers suffered
from bad feet which would affect them for the rest of their lives. The remedies were the issue of whale oil (to be rubbed on the feet before entering the trenches) and thigh-high rubber waders, the loosening of puttees, regular changing of socks, and drainage of trenches. At first drains were soak-pits dug into the floor, but mechanical pumps would later be provided. If all else failed and trenches were uninhabitable in very heavy rain, they were abandoned and men took refuge behind breastworks – grouse-butt-type banks of earth. By the middle of 1915 trench foot had been all but eliminated, except in battalions new to the front, and a high incidence of it was regarded as the fault of officers who had failed to enforce remedial action.

  British commanders knew that, while an army might not exactly march on its stomach, in the Napoleonic sense, men who were hungry or whose food intake lacked the ingredients essential to good health would not fight as well as men who were well fed. A balanced diet was provided, and the administrative staff took great pains to ensure that it was delivered. It is now recognised that a fit, active and athletic adult male needs a daily intake of between 3,000 and 3,500 calories. Heavy physical work or exceptionally cold conditions increase the requirement. The British army aimed to give its soldiers at the front a daily intake of 4,193 calories. This was less than the French and more than the Germans, who aimed for 4,466 and 4,038 calories respectively. The difference was that the French ration, despite including almost a pint of wine daily, was of such poor quality that it was one of the causes of the mutinies of 1917. The Germans, however hard they tried, rarely managed to provide the laid-down ration once the blockade by the Royal Navy began to take effect. British soldiers hardly ever went without, and the prescribed daily ration scale per man is shown in the table opposite.