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

by Gordon Corrigan

  In the east the German treatment of the Poles was brutal, and included deportation for forced labour – but then in their brief periods of independence the Poles have always showed a rather unwise propensity to be rude to both the Russians and the Germans at the same time. Once the initial war of movement was over German occupation in the west was severe; but while strict it was by and large legal. Race memory and myth persist, however, and this author was assured by a local battlefield guide in Saint-Mihiel in 1999 that on one occasion (variously 1914, 1916 and 1918) the occupying Germans lined up all the postmen and shot them! The truth is less dramatic. The French and the British ran intelligence networks behind German lines. As movement was restricted by the occupying power, the obvious people to recruit as intelligence-gatherers were those whose occupations allowed them to move around the countryside, and this included postmen, priests, doctors and itinerant tradesmen. Some agents were, inevitably, caught by the Germans; they were then tried for spying and, in accordance with the laws of war, suffered the death penalty. Some postmen in the employ of the Allied intelligence services were caught and shot, but this is far from wholesale elimination of the mail-delivery system.

  In many cases the Germans acted legally but with little regard for the effects of their actions on neutral opinion. The case of Edith Cavell is a classic case in point. Cavell was the daughter of the Rector of Swardeston in Norfolk, and took up a post as governess in Brussels in 1890. Later she trained as a nurse, and in 1907 was appointed supervisor in a training school for nurses, also in Brussels. In 1914 she was visiting her mother in Norwich when war broke out. She immediately returned to Brussels where her nursing school was now a Red Cross hospital. She nursed Belgian and Allied soldiers, and when the Germans occupied the city she remained. At this stage of the war there were many British and Allied stragglers who found themselves behind the German lines, and Nurse Cavell became involved in hiding many in the hospital and then passing them along an escape route to neutral Holland, from where most of them managed to return to England or France.

  About 200 soldiers had been helped to escape when in July 1915 the Germans arrested two members of the underground network, and in early August they arrested Nurse Cavell. She was brought to trial in October 1915, accused of helping Allied soldiers to escape, and admitted that she had indeed done so. She was sentenced to death and shot by firing squad at a rifle range outside Brussels at dawn on 12 October 1915.14 Contrary to the impression given even today, Edith Cavell was not a naive young girl, but was fifty years old at the time of her death and presumably knew exactly what she was doing. The laws of war accepted that a civilian in occupied territory, regardless of nationality, who aided the enemy could be prosecuted, and, if found guilty, could be put to death. In law the Germans were perfectly entitled to execute her, as the Allies did with German agents found in French territory. Whether it was wise to have done so, however, is another matter. Her supposed last words – the oft-quoted ‘Patriotism is not enough…’ – rang round the world; ‘Remember Edith Cavell’ became a rallying cry of recruiters and a great boost to the postcard industry. She was given a memorial service in St Paul’s Cathedral on 29 October 1915. After the war her body was repatriated and given a funeral service in West-minster Abbey and a grave in a prominent position just outside the east end of Norwich Cathedral. She has two statues, one in Norwich and one in St Martin’s Lane in London. Brave and patriotic Edith Cavell certainly was: murdered she was not. Her execution was a public-relations disaster for Germany, but it was not unlawful.

  Apart from its submarines the German navy was largely confined to port for most of the war, but the occasional ship did slip out and shell English coastal towns, to the great embarrassment of the Royal Navy. The only other way for Germany to hit the British mainland was from the air. On 10 January 1915 sixteen German aircraft were seen over the Channel. Bad weather prevented them from making an attack, but on the 19th two German Zeppelins dropped bombs on Yarmouth and King’s Lynn, killing four civilians and damaging property. After the by now standard British remonstrations against uncivilised behaviour, forty aircraft of the Royal Naval Air Service bombed Ostend, Middelkerke, Ghistelles and Zeebrugge on 19 February, causing a panic but little damage. The Germans responded on 21 February by sending one aircraft to bomb Colchester, Braintree and Coggeshall, to no effect. On 14 April Zeppelins were over the Tyne, causing minor damage, and on the 15th a Zeppelin bombed Lowestoft and Southwold, while an aircraft attacked Faversham and Sittingbourne. The British gleefully reported this last effort as causing the death of one blackbird.

  On 10 May Zeppelins dropped 100 bombs on Southend, killing a woman and causing £20,000-worth of damage, and on 13 May the King ordered the German Kaiser, the German Crown Prince, the King of Württemberg and the German princes struck off the roll of Knights of the Garter. Bombing continued throughout May, and Ramsgate, Southend and London were all attacked, the score being four civilian deaths (including a child), four civilians injured and some, mainly slight, damage.

  The British had airships too, largely in the hands of the Royal Navy and very effective when used as convoy escorts in an anti-submarine role, but no dirigibles of the size and range of the Zeppelin. As the Zeppelins could fly at a greater height and for longer than could most aircraft, they were very difficult to deal with. At last, on 7 June 1915, Flight Sub Lieutenant R. A. J. Warneford, RN, piloting a Royal Navy aircraft, shot down a Zeppelin at 6,000 feet over German-occupied Belgium. He was awarded the Victoria Cross, but was himself killed ten days later when his aircraft crashed near Paris.

  German bombing now improved, and between 7 June and mid-September 1915, when the air offensive against the British mainland ceased for the year, bombs from German Zeppelins and aircraft killed sixty civilians and injured 140.15

  Throughout the war there were twelve shellings of the British coast by German ships, resulting in the deaths of 143 civilians and fourteen soldiers and sailors, and injury to 604 civilians and thirty servicemen. Zeppelin raids on the British mainland killed 498 civilians and fifty-eight servicemen, and injured 1,236 civilians and twelve servicemen. Ten Zeppelins were shot down or crashed on British territory or just off the coast. German aircraft raids on the United Kingdom accounted for 619 civilian and 238 military deaths, and injuries to 1,650 civilians and 400 servicemen. Full details of casualties inflicted by Allied air raids on German territory are not available, but in 1922 the War Office quoted a German estimate of 720 killed and 1,754 injured.16

  While 1,570 deaths from coastal shelling and air raids was minuscule compared with casualties in the war zones, it was the first time for well over a century that an enemy had been able to visit death and destruction on civilians in the British homeland. Bombing of civilians from the air was regarded as a terror tactic, and it had a profound effect on British government and military thinking. It gave rise to the post-war theory that ‘the bomber will always get through’ and led to the (erroneous) belief, in Germany and in England, that bombing of cities would so disrupt industry and reduce civilian morale that a future war could be won from the air. It did, however, have the benefit that by 1939 about the only field of warfare in which Britain was reasonably well prepared was the air defence of the United Kingdom.

  On 18 February 1915 the Germans, increasingly concerned with the effects of the Royal Navy blockade, declared that British territorial waters would henceforth be considered a war zone, in which all shipping, including neutral shipping, would be sunk on sight without warning. As the German surface fleet was penned up in port by the Royal Navy, this meant unrestricted submarine warfare. The German logic was sound: Britain could not be invaded, and defeat of her army in Flanders seemed unlikely. Britain did, however, import a large proportion of her food and raw materials, and if the flow of food and goods could be cut off, then Britain could be starved out of the war.

  Such a declaration was undoubtedly a departure from the laws of war, which did allow the sinking of enemy – but not neutral – merch
ant shipping by submarines, but only if the submarine surfaced first and gave the enemy crew the opportunity of taking to their lifeboats. The Germans had observed this restriction in the very early days of the war, but British Q ships – merchant ships with disguised weaponry, or Royal Navy vessels disguised as merchant ships – made the practice hazardous, and increasingly German submarines would remain submerged and sink without warning. Logical it was, but the affect on neutral opinion, particularly on the only neutral of any importance, the United States, was catastrophic. On 1 May a German submarine attacked the US tanker Gulflight. Only two of her crew were lost, but the incident led to a formal protest by the US government. On 7 May a far greater public outcry was caused by the sinking of the Lusitania. The Lusitania was a British-registered passenger liner and was carrying war materials as part of her hold cargo. She was therefore a legitimate target, and the German embassy in Washington had actually warned US citizens not to sail on her. The only legal argument that there can possibly be is whether the submarine was entitled to sink without warning.17 One thousand one hundred and fifty-four lives were lost on the Lusitania, and 114 of these were US citizens. American opinion, hitherto not actually anti-British but certainly annoyed by the British blockade, now began to swing towards irritation with Germany. Other sinkings followed, including that of the British liner Arabic on 19 August 1915 with the loss of four American lives. Vehement American protests persuaded Germany to abandon unrestricted submarine warfare, for the time being at least, on 1 September 1915 – quite possibly to Germany’s serious detriment, for by then she had sunk almost one million tons of Allied shipping. Unrestricted submarine warfare was tried again in 1916, and again American protests persuaded Germany to call it off. By the time Germany was prepared to have another go at strangling Britain from beneath the seas, in 1917, it was too late, for now this was one of the major factors precipitating America’s entry into the war on the Allied side.

  On balance, then, Germany was first to use ‘weapons of terror’ – gas, flame and tunnelling – but it was the British, and by extension the French, who developed these same weapons and became far better at using them than their originators. The Germans got the blame for their introduction, while the British reaped what military benefit there was to be had. The shooting of Belgian hostages and the burning of villages in reprisal turned much neutral opinion against Germany, while unrestricted submarine warfare, the one piece of frightfulness that might have won them the war – or at least led to a negotiated peace – was abandoned in 1915 just when it was becoming effective.

  NOTES

  1 There are some indications that the Germans had experimented with lachrymatory (teargas) shells during the winter of 1914, but the cold weather inhibited the diffusion of the gas and the effects were almost unnoticeable.

  2 Major-General Sir Henry Thuillier, Gas in the Next War, Geoffrey Bles, London, 1939.

  3 L. F. Haber, The Poisonous Cloud, Oxford, 1986.

  4 Papers of Generalleutnant Nachlass Freiherr von Hügel, Commander German XXVI Corps, quoted by Ulrich Trumpener, ‘The Road toYpres: the Beginnings of Gas Warfare in World War I’, in Journal of Modern History, September 1975, quoted in Simon Jones, ‘Under a Green Sea, the British Responses to Gas Warfare’, in The Great War, Vol. 1, No. 4, August 1986, pp. 126–32, and Vol. 2, No. 1, November 1989, pp. 14–21.

  5 Haber, op. cit.

  6 I am grateful to Mr Simon Jones, Curator of the King’s Regiment Museum, Liverpool, for permitting me to use the results of his research in arriving at this conclusion.

  7 Brigadier General J. E. Edmonds, Military Operations France and Belgium 1915, Winter 1914–15, pp. 162 et seq., Macmillan, London, 1927.

  8 In legal terms the ‘Tu Quoque’ defence, specifically ruled inadmissible as a defence at the Nuremberg International War Crimes Tribunal after World War II.

  9 Simon Jones, op. cit.

  10 The number is probably understated, as some would have been returned as ‘killed in action’; but even so, the proportion is tiny.

  11 The PPCLI had been raised as a private finance initiative by the owner of Eaton’s Stores in Canada. Named after the daughter of the Duke of Connaught, brother of King George V and Governor General of Canada, it was open only to ex-regular soldiers of the British army, and to Canadians who had served in the South African War. It was able to move to Europe much earlier than the units of the Canadian Corps and was, so far as is known, the only battalion to take its colours into the line.

  12 Of the two that failed to go off, one went up in 1955 as a result of a lightning strike and the other, just to the north of Ploegsteert Wood, is in the process of being removed at the time of writing.

  13 It is true that the uniform of the Belgian Civil Guards – an overcoat of civilian pattern and a hat looking very much like a truncated topper – did make them look like civilians from a distance.

  14 It was stated – with great indignation – that the trial was held ‘in secret’. No military trial in wartime, German, French or British – then or now – is open to the public or press.

  15 Details of air raids from The Annual Register 1915, Longmans, London, 1916.

  16 Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War, War Office, London, 1922.

  17 It might be argued that as the British reaction to the German declaration that British waters were a war zone was to repudiate the provisions of the 1909 agreement in regard to restrictions on blockades, then the Germans were only doing to the British what the British were doing to them – applying starvation tactics. The difference was that the British stopped neutral shipping bound for Germany and impounded – or bought – the cargoes; they did not sink the ships and drown the crews.

  7

  THE DONKEYS

  Alan Clark wrote a book about the British generals, The Donkeys, in which he quotes General Hoffman, one of the more tactically astute German First War generals, as describing the British Army of 1914–18 as being composed of ‘lions led by donkeys’. Clark is scathing as to the abilities of British generals during the war; John Laffin describes them as ‘butchers and bunglers’; Basil Liddell Hart says that most were incompetent; and Lloyd George, in his 2,108-page, two-volume My War Memoirs rarely has a good word to say about them. The public perception of British generals of the Great War is of men obsessed with mass frontal attacks, who refused to learn from the slaughter, were blind to technological advances and whose war plans were no more sophisticated than a desire to kill Germans regardless of the losses to our own side. The typical British general of the time is thought to be old, grey-haired, overweight and sporting a large moustache, a cavalryman dressed in boots and breeches and carrying a swagger cane. Comfortably ensconced in their chateaux well behind the lines, oblivious to the trials and tribulations of the men in the trenches, the ‘donkeys’ continued to send men in parade-ground formation across machine-gun-swept open ground onto impenetrable barbed wire, which their own artillery had failed to destroy. The awkward fact that the Allies did actually win the war is variously ascribed to German exhaustion and social unrest, the Americans, the French or the Royal Navy blockade. That the British army was the only major army on the Western Front which did not suffer a major collapse of morale is explained by British stolidity in the face of incompetent leadership.

  Armies are hierarchical institutions. The organisation of British armies had been arrived at by trial and error and 250 years of experience.1 By 1914 the pyramid structure of section, platoon, company, battalion, brigade and division was well understood and had worked satisfactorily in wars, major and minor, all over the world. The creation of higher formations – corps and armies – followed naturally as the army expanded.

  The pre-war British army was tiny by European standards. Employed mainly as an imperial garrison, only the Expeditionary Force in Aldershot was trained or equipped to take the field against a first-class enemy. Few senior commanders had any experience of handling anything larger than a brigade in
the field. Sir John French, the BEF’s first commander, had impeccable qualifications for his post. Aged sixty-two when war broke out, he had started his career as a fourteen-year-old midshipman in the Royal Navy, which he left after four years to join first the Militia and then the regular army in the 8th and later the 19th Hussars. He was clearly considered to be able as he was appointed adjutant of the 19th Hussars (the regimental staff officer and the commanding officer’s right-hand man) the year he joined, and was promoted to captain in 1880. After a period away from the regiment as adjutant of a Yeomanry regiment he saw active service with the Hussars in the Egyptian campaign of 1884, being promoted major at the early age of thirty-one and brevet lieutenant colonel at thirty-three. He commanded his regiment, a cavalry brigade and then a cavalry division in the South African War, by the end of which he was a lieutenant general. He had ample experience of active service, had served on the staff in the War Office as a colonel, and was well decorated. He became successively Commander-in-Chief Aldershot (the major peacetime command at home), Inspector General of Cavalry and, in 1912, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, or professional head of the British army. A field marshal by March 1914, French had little choice but to resign when the government felt unable to honour certain guarantees that he had given during the so-called Curragh Mutiny.2 As field marshals do not retire, he was the obvious choice as Commander-in-Chief of the BEF when it deployed in 1914. The only other possible candidate was Field Marshal Kitchener, but he was wanted at home as Minister for War.