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

by Gordon Corrigan

  War always stimulates medical advances, and survival rates increased dramatically as the war went on. What was important was speed, and on the Western Front, once wounded men got into the chain of evacuation, that is from the ADS on back, only 7.61 per cent died. In the case of men sick or injured from causes not attributable to the enemy, 0.91 per cent died. In the South African War the figures were 8.39 and 3.39 per cent respectively. Military medicine is concerned with returning men to duty as quickly as possible, and in even the most serious cases, those admitted to hospitals in the UK, 54.03 per cent were returned to duty.18

  Many medical officers were extremely brave men. In the entire history of the Victoria Cross only three men have ever won the British Empire’s highest award for gallantry twice. One of these was Captain Noel Chavasse, of the Royal Army Medical Corps.19Chavasse was the son of the Bishop of Liverpool. He graduated from Oxford and joined the Territorial Force in 1913. On the outbreak of war he was the medical officer of the Liverpool Scottish, a Territorial battalion of the King’s (Liverpool) Regiment. When the Somme offensive started Chavasse had already won the Military Cross for bravery at Hooge in 1915. On 9 August 1916 the Liverpool Scottish were attacking the village of Guillemont from a position in Trones Wood, during the second phase of the offensive. The battalion suffered heavy casualties and Chavasse spent most of the day and the following night tending the wounded in no man’s land, often under enemy observation, and helping to bring casualties back to the RAP. He was himself lightly wounded and was awarded the Victoria Cross. In a subsequent battle during the Third Ypres offensive Chavasse again went out into the open and rescued a number of men from no man’s land. This time he was badly wounded in an advanced aid post that he had set up in a dugout, and subsequently died at Brandhoek Casualty Clearing Station. He was awarded a posthumous bar to his VC.

  Chavasse was undoubtedly a highly motivated and personally very gallant officer. One has to ask, however, what on earth he was doing out in no man’s land. It is not the job of the RMO to recover wounded: that is the task of the battalion stretcher-bearers. The RMO should remain in the RAP because it is there that the wounded will be brought, or there that they will report if they can walk. If the RMO is getting himself involved in the action, he is not present at the RAP when he may be needed. It is precisely for that reason that the army insists that the wounded come or are brought to the doctor, and not the doctor to the wounded. Without in any way attempting to detract from Chavasse’s personal heroism and self-sacrifice, this author, cynical old soldier that he may be, cannot help but reflect that if he had been Chavasse’s commanding officer, then he might have awarded a rocket rather than the Victoria Cross.

  NOTES

  1 The author recalls one deep-trench latrine, or DTL, which had been in use by 200 men for at least six years, and would have lasted for years longer had it not been blown up, with interesting results.

  2 Public Record Office, Kew, War Diary 2 Oxs & Bucks, WO95/1348.

  3 The exception was in the two divisions of the Indian Corps, some of whose battalions spent far longer in the trenches, the record being held by a Gurkha battalion that spent three weeks in the trenches without relief. This was because the establishment of an Indian battalion was 250 less than that of a British battalion, while the Indian Corps was expected to hold the same length of front as its British equivalent.

  4 Major T. J. Mitchell and Miss G. M. Smith, Official History of the War, Casualties and Medical Statistics, Imperial War Museum (reprint), London, 1997.

  5 Much the same happened in the Second World War. In 1941 the incidence of syphilis alone increased by 116 per cent amongst British men and by 63 per cent amongst women. Angus Calder, The People’s War, Jonathan Cape, London, 1969.

  6 At one time in the author’s Gurkha battalion, a brigade commander of sound morals announced that men who contracted VD would be removed from the promotion roll. The result was that soldiers did not report it but instead visited a Chinese doctor, who charged the men 100 Hong Kong dollars to be injected with what turned out to be Carnation milk. Quite what effect Carnation milk has on the body is not known, but it most certainly does not cure VD, and the rule was eventually rescinded.

  7 General Routine Orders, Part I, Adjutant General’s Branch, GRO 2785, HMSO, 1 January 1918.

  8 Mitchell and Smith, Official History of the War, Casualties and Medical Statistics, Imperial War Museum (reprint), London, 1997.

  9 This was unusual: each battalion was entitled to its own chaplain, but the huge expansion of the army had created a shortage.

  10 The introduction of the Military Cross (MC) in 1915 had led to a redefinition of the DSO.

  11 The painting shows Hardy wearing a steel helmet, while the contemporary photographs show that he actually wore a service dress cap. This sort of error is all too common in military paintings commissioned long after the event, and is not the fault of the artist, but of those commissioning the painting.

  12 Rich Schweitzer, ‘The Cross and the Trenches: Religious Faith and Doubt among Some British Soldiers on the Western Front’, in War and Society, Vol. 16, University of New South Wales, October, 1998.

  13 Professor Alfred O’Rahilly, Father William Doyle, SJ, Longmans, Green & Co, London, 1920.

  14 On the other hand, Tom Johnston and James Hagerty, in The Cross and the Sword, Geoffrey Chapman (Cassell), London, 1996, speculate that there was discrimination between the 36th (Ulster) Division and the 16th (Irish) Division in the award of decorations.

  15 Southern Irish Roman Catholic priests in World War II refused gallantry awards, but not campaign medals, on the grounds that they were not British citizens. This was a somewhat illogical stance, as Gurkhas, who most certainly did accept gallantry awards, were not British citizens either.

  16 War Diary 8 Royal Dublin Fusiliers, Public Record Office, Kew, WO95/1974; War Diary 16th Division (General Staff) May 1917–April 1919, WO95/1956; War Diary 16th Division (A&QMG), WO95/1957; War Diary HQ 48 Brigade, WO95/1973.

  17 It is the experience of this author – a member of the Church of England – that the most effective army padres are the Roman Catholic ones, and the best of those are the Jesuits.

  18 Mitchell and Smith, Official History of the War, Casualties and Medical Statistics, Imperial War Museum (reprint), London, 1997.

  19 The others were Lt Martin-Leake (1902 and 1915) and Capt. Charles Upham (1941 and 1942).

  4

  THE TOOLS OF THE TRADE

  The private soldier in his trench in the firing line was the point of a very long spear, which stretched forward from well behind the battle area. Armies are structured for the job they have to do – kill enemy soldiers efficiently. This structure, common to all armies in a greater or lesser degree, and learned from centuries of experience, is based on the assumption that one person can control the actions of about ten other individuals, and that one headquarters can control up to four subordinate units. In 1914 the private soldier in the British infantry was a member of a section, consisting of up to eight privates, riflemen or guardsmen and commanded by a corporal, with a lance corporal to assist him.1 Four sections were grouped into a platoon, the lowest officer’s command, with a lieutenant or second lieutenant assisted by a sergeant. Not every army had commissioned officers this far down the chain of command, and indeed an NCO could quite well command a platoon. The real reason for the presence of a subaltern in the British army platoon was to train him, and to give him experience of small-unit command before he graduated to command of a company, which had four platoons commanded by a major or captain. The battalion, with four companies, a machine-gun section and a headquarters, the whole commanded by a lieutenant colonel, was the soldier’s immediate family. Once he joined he would spend his entire service in that battalion, except for possibly being sent away for a year or two as an instructor or recruiter if he became an NCO, or occasionally being transferred to another battalion of the same regiment. Within the battalion everybody knew everybody else, at least b
y sight. King’s Regulations, the application of military law as embodied by Parliament in the Army Act, laid down that a soldier could not be forced to change his regiment. All this made for a closeness and a regimental spirit not always present in other armies where men could be moved around as individuals, but it made for weaknesses too, as we have seen in the system of territorial recruiting. Officers hardly ever changed regiments and most infantry officers’ ambitions stretched no farther than command of their own battalion; anything after that was a bonus. In the pre-war regular army a competent officer could expect to reach the rank of lieutenant colonel from the age of forty-five onwards. If appointed to command a battalion his tour was for four years or until the age of fifty-two, whichever came first. This was rather older than today, when the commanding officer of a battalion is thirty-nine or forty on assuming command, which he holds for between two and a half and three years. Promotion in the pre-war army was inevitably slow as, unlike today, most officers joined with the intention of making the army a lifetime career. In the New Army battalions commanding officers were usually even older at the beginning of the war, for they tended to be men called out of retirement or majors previously passed over for command of their own regular battalions.

  The next level above the battalion was the brigade, commanded by a brigadier general, with four infantry battalions and certain brigade units such as a transport company of the Army Service Corps and, from 1915, a brigade trench-mortar company. A division, with three brigades, was commanded by a major-general. A division was almost a mini-army, with its own artillery, communications unit, transport, cavalry squadron and field ambulance. Before 1914 the British army rarely had formations above divisions – it was not large enough to need them – and on deployment to Europe in 1914 it had been intended that General Headquarters, the supreme military command in the field, would command the divisions directly. The French, however, with their vastly larger army, were organised into corps, with from two to four divisions in each; so for the sake of conformity the British followed suit, with each corps commanded by a lieutenant general. As the war went on and the BEF expanded, the next level up was required, and armies, commanded by a general and with two or more corps in each, were formed, beginning with the First and Second Armies at Christmas 1914. Despite the substantive ranks established for the commanders of brigades, divisions, corps and armies, the British army is wary of making too many promotions, as it invariably contracts after a war; officers were thus often a rank below that officially sanctioned, or granted local or acting rank until it was certain that they would retain the post.2

  The organisation of formations of the BEF evolved as the war progressed, particularly after the lessons of the Somme in 1916 had been absorbed. The organisation of a division of 1915 is shown opposite.

  Throughout the war it was very rare for battalions to move to another brigade, and brigades were not often transferred to another division. Divisions did move up and down the front, so battalions gained experience of different parts of the line. Corps and armies, on the other hand, tended to be static and divisions moved in and out of them as operational requirements demanded.

  The length of front held by a division depended upon the ground and on the prevailing tactical situation, but was generally between 2,000 and 4,000 yards. A brigade held half that, a battalion between 500 and 1,000 yards, and a company frontage was anything from 100 to 250 yards. This gave considerable depth to the position. An enemy attacking had first to penetrate the firing line, then fight through the support line. By then the reserve line would be fully manned and the attacker would have to get through that as well. If he succeeded – and he rarely did – the reserve brigade or a resting division’s troops would have been warned for action and further defensive positions would be manned. As the attacker advanced, his supply, evacuation and reinforcement chain got longer and longer, while the defender was pushed back onto his own equivalents. The depth of the positions on each side very largely contributed to the fact that, once the war settled down from the autumn of 1914, very few significant advances were made and a real breakthrough was rarely achieved.

  Unless enemy action was imminent, or when a major British offensive was in the offing, a division usually put two of its brigades in the front lines, with the third brigade well out of the battle area resting and retraining. Brigades had two battalions in the front, or ‘up’ as it was known, and two behind, although some brigades had three of their battalions up. As we have seen, within the battalion the usual deployment was two companies up and two back.

  A BRITISH INFANTRY DIVISION IN 1915

  DIVISIONAL HEADQUARTERS

  (Major General commanding and staff)

  1 signal company

  ARTILLERY

  HQ Divisional artillery

  12 batteries of 18pdr guns (total 48 guns)

  4 batteries of 4.5" howitzers (total 16)

  1 heavy battery (4 x 60pdr)

  1 Divisional ammunition column

  ENGINEERS

  HQ Divisional Engineers

  3 field companies Royal Engineers

  INFANTRY

  3 brigades, total 12 battalions, each battalion 4 x Vickers medium machine guns

  MOUNTED TROOPS

  1 squadron cavalry, one cyclist company

  PIONEERS

  1 pioneer battalion

  SERVICE AND SUPPORT

  3 field ambulances

  1 motor ambulance workshop

  1 sanitary section

  1 mobile veterinary section

  Divisional train

  TOTAL ALL RANKS: 19,614

  The British army was divided into fighting arms and non-fighting arms. This was not an accurate description: all soldiers were expected to fight when necessary, and most of them did. The terms used today are combat arms and supporting arms. The fighting arms were those that actually directed their activities to killing the enemy: cavalry, artillery, engineers, infantry, the Cyclist Corps and the Royal Flying Corps, with the later addition of the Machine Gun Corps and the Tank Corps. The so-called non-fighting arms were the Army Service Corps (responsible for supplies of all types and most transport not belonging to units), the Royal Army Medical Corps, the Army Veterinary Corps (responsible for the procurement and care of army horses, mules, dogs, pigeons, camels and oxen), the Army Ordnance Corps (mainly technicians who looked after ammunition and machinery), the Army Pay Corps and, from 1917, the Labour Corps.

  On 1 September 1914 men in fighting arms on the Western Front made up eighty-three per cent of the total, declining to sixty-six per cent by 1918 as advances in technology produced more and more aids to warfare. This figure is deceptive, as not all the men in a combat unit were there to fight. In an infantry battalion of 1914, at established strength of 1,000 all ranks, 640 were in rifle platoons, that is men available for defending a trench line or mounting an attack, and thirteen were manning the battalion’s machine guns. The remainder were there to ensure that the fighting men were launched into battle at the right place and the right time, and had the equipment and support they needed. Overall the proportion of supporter to fighter was probably in the order of 1:1 in 1914 and 3:1 by 1918. This ratio increases when the Labour Corps is included: established in 1917, it had 200,000 men on the Western Front by 1918, making up fourteen per cent of the total strength. The increase in the ratio of support to combat is an inevitable trend in all armies. In Normandy in 1944 it was about 4:1 in the British army and 5:1 in the US forces (but only about 2.5:1 in the German Wehrmacht). In today’s British army it verges on 8:1.

  Much of the soldier’s time in the trenches was spend in hard labour, for trenches required constant repair if they were not to collapse. During quiet periods, that is when an attack by either side was not imminent, every battalion had a routine laid down for life in the trenches. This routine revolved around security, administration and rest. It had long been the practice in the British army to stand-to every morning at first light and every evening at last light. Stand
-to meant that every soldier was either on the fire-step or ready to get onto it, fully clothed with webbing equipment of ammunition pouches and water bottle, weapon loaded and ready to fire. Not only did this ensure that the troops were ready for an enemy attack delivered at these times, as was often the case, it also gave officers an opportunity to move along the line and see each man, check that he was fit and well, that he understood his orders and that he was prepared in all respects for whatever might come.

  Each bay, that is the portion of trench between two traverses, was occupied by a section or half-section under its own NCO. By day one of these men would be on the fire-step as a sentry, looking out over no man’s land from behind the protection of a sandbagged embrasure, or through a steel shield with an observation slit. Later much use was made of periscopes, which gave sentries absolute protection as they could be operated from within the trench without a man’s having to expose his head. The remainder of the group would be improving the trench, pushing saps out towards enemy lines, digging sleeping bays into the bottom of the trench wall or in the command trench, or sleeping to order. There was very little cooking in the firing line as the smoke attracted enemy attention, but there was usually a constant supply of tea and sandwiches. Much time was spent keeping weapons clean and serviceable, and there was an inspection by officers and NCOs of every man’s rifle at least once each day, usually after breakfast. Weapon cleaning was done by half-sections, so that at least half the men’s rifles were ready to fire if need be. By night sentries were doubled, and men’s tours as sentry, generally for two hours, overlapped so that both did not change over at once and there was always at least one man whose eyes had adjusted to darkness.