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

by Gordon Corrigan

  Again, if Stones had been a private soldier he might well have had the benefit of any doubt there may have been; but he was an NCO, and more importantly the NCO in charge of the men in that sector. He should not have acted in the way that he did, he should not have dumped his rifle, and given that discipline in that battalion was bad, and that a number of men had panicked, Stones had to be shot, as much to make the point as in punishment for his behaviour.

  Of the 346 men executed during the war, no fewer than ninety-one were already under suspended sentences for serious offences, and nine were under two suspended sentences. Of these, forty were under suspended sentences of death, and one man had already been sentenced to death twice. It cannot be said that the army did not offer a man a second chance.

  There will always be a proportion of men in any society who are psychologically unsuited for the business of war. In a small regular army they would be weeded out, but when a mass army has to be raised and deployed quickly, some, through no fault of their own, will slip through the net. Nevertheless, in the exigencies of all-out war these men had been enlisted; they had taken an oath to do their duty, and they had to endure like everyone else. That some were incapable of so enduring may make them victims of the war, but there can be no room for sentimentality when the very existence of the state is in danger.

  Regardless of what the present campaign for pardons for all men executed may claim, the men executed by the British army in the war were fairly tried and sentenced under the law as it then stood. Far from being blunt and bloody instruments, courts martial went to great lengths to be fair, and avoided the maximum punishment whenever they could. Even then, nearly ninety per cent of the sentences of death were not carried out, and it is difficult for a soldier reading the records today to find a single case where it is obvious that an injustice has been done. That there is a memorial to those ‘shot at dawn’ in the commemorative arboretum near Lichfield is an insult to the millions of men who did their duty, frightened and inexperienced as most of them must have been. Those who were shot had let their comrades down. They had failed. They are not martyrs to injustice, and those who demand pardons for them (and presumably, by extension, for any soldier ever punished in any way by military law) show a complete lack of understanding of conditions and requirements in a mass army at war. It may have been hard justice, but it was justice, and this was a hard war.

  NOTES

  1 Manual of Military Law, War Office, 1914, HMSO, London, 1914.

  2 Ibid., p. 302.

  3 For the legal arguments see J. R. Morgan, KC, The Great Assize, John Murray, London, 1948.

  4 This author recalls one of his Gurkhas being tried before the commanding officer for a minor traffic offence. When asked whether he wished to accept the commanding officer’s award or be tried by court martial, he opted for the latter. As this had never happened before there was consternation, until questioning revealed that the young rifleman thought he was being given the option of being tried by the quartermaster, who was generally believed to be a soft touch!

  5 Manual of Military Law, War Office, 1914, HMSO, London, 1914, p. 633.

  6 This author has sat as a member, prosecuted or defended at over a hundred courts martial of British soldiers over a period of thirty-five years, ranging from murder to fraud. He has not infrequently known the guilty to be acquitted, but never an innocent man convicted.

  7 Ibid., pp. 378–9.

  8 Ibid., p. 379.

  9 Robert Blake (ed.), The Private Papers of Douglas Haig, Eyre and Spottiswoode, London, 1952, p. 291.

  10 Public Record Office, Kew, WO 90/7.

  11 Gerard Oram, Death Sentences Passed by Military Courts of the British Army 1914–1924, Francis Boutle, London, 1998.

  12 A charity founded in 1919 to care for psychological casualties of the war was called ‘Combat Stress’.

  13 Although there were attempts to divide these cases into ones that were classified as ‘wounds’, thus attracting a wound stripe, and those that were ‘sick’, which did not.

  14 James Sambrook, With the Rank and Pay of a Sapper, Paddy Griffith Associates, Nuneaton, 1998.

  15 Public Record Office, Kew, WO32/47/48, Report of the War Office Committee into the Causation and Prevention of Shell Shock, HMSO, London, 1922.

  16 Public Record Office, Kew, ADM 156/24, Record of Trial Sub-Lt Dyett.

  17 Public Record Office, Kew, PRO WO71/535, Record of Trial L/Sgt Stones.

  9

  A NEEDLESS SLAUGHTER

  The Battle of the Somme, as the series of attacks either side of that river came to be known, is probably more deeply ingrained in British folk memory than any other episode of the Great War; indeed the first day of the Somme is about all that much of the British public remembers about the Great War. The Somme is often cited as an example of naïve bravery pitted against hopeless odds, coupled with stubborn pursuit of goals that were quickly obvious as being incapable of achievement. To many, perhaps most, the Somme epitomises all that was wrong about the conduct and leadership of the war. Sixty thousand British casualties on 1 July 1916 says it all.

  The French had always favoured the offensive: a great swathe of their country was occupied by the enemy and they wanted him out. The British, traditionally wary of involvement in mass engagements with no discernible aim save the wearing-down of the enemy, would have preferred to wait until their army was ready, and then strike a swift blow that might end the war, or that would at least lead to some clear advantage for the Allies. As the junior partner in a coalition, however, the British had little choice but to accede to French strategic priorities.

  Plans for Allied operations in 1916 began to be formulated at a conference at Chantilly on 6 December 1915. Representatives of the French, British, Russian and Italian governments, with their military advisers, met to review the war situation and to take decisions as to future action. It was pointed out that with the virtual elimination of Serbia from the war, the evacuation of the Serbian government to Corfu and the retreat of the Serbian army into Macedonia, the Germans could now add ten divisions from the Serbian front to their existing twelve-division reserve on the Western Front, giving them a total of 110 divisions there. This meant that if the Germans stood on the defensive in the east, they could mount a serious offensive in the west. The conference concluded that, to forestall German attacks in the west, the Allies should mount simultaneous offensives on every front, and that until the Allies were ready to do so, those nations with reserves of manpower (Great Britain, Italy and Russia) should mount local attacks with a view to wearing down German resistance. It was also agreed that there should be no further attempts in the Dardanelles and that the Gallipoli adventure should be closed down completely. The British troops from Gallipoli should be redeployed east of the Suez Canal, to defend only, and on the Salonika front the French and the British, reinforced by the redeployed Serbian army, should likewise remain on the defensive, the aim being simply to prevent further German expansion. The western Allies should step up their assistance to Russia, to allow that country to mount an offensive when the time came, and there was discussion concerning the supply of Italian labourers for French factories to manufacture the heavy artillery that Russia badly needed.

  The general staffs now withdrew to work out their ideas as to how the conclusions of the conference could be implemented. The British General Staff paper, signed by the CIGS, Murray, on 16 December 1915 and submitted to the British government, began by putting up a number of military skittles to ensure that they were knocked over. Although the results of the Gallipoli campaign removed one prominent ‘easterner’ – Churchill – from the government in the short term, there were still many British politicians who yearned for a cheaper way to defeat Germany than by facing her full strength on the Western Front, and who searched for soft underbellies and props that might be knocked away. The General Staff pointed out that shortage of shipping prevented any new fronts from being considered, and emphasised that should the full weight of Br
itish military strength not be deployed on the Western Front, then the garrison of the UK would have to be considerably increased to counter invasion. The defence of Britain, they said, was best done in France. Any ideas that the politicians might have about a landing in the Adriatic, cooperation with Russia in Asia Minor or a renewed attempt on Constantinople via the Dardanelles were dismissed. What was more, said the paper, if the French and British adopted nothing more than a defensive posture on the Western Front, then there was still an invasion threat because the Germans might launch their own offensive and capture the Channel ports. The General Staff’s conclusion was that there should be concerted, coordinated offensives on the Eastern, Western and Italian Fronts. ‘The ruling principle must be to place every possible [British] division – fully manned and equipped in all respects – in France next Spring.’1 The paper explained that there was now (December 1915) stalemate on the Western Front, but that the enemy could be defeated there if the Allies went about it the right way. There was no point in simply standing on the defensive – what had been taken could not be regained in that way.

  The British generals had now accepted that any ideas of waiting until they had a massive army, trained and equipped, and then delivering the decisive blow and dictating the future shape of Europe, must be abandoned; but the government had not entirely given up hope that that it need not yet launch the British army into a mass offensive. On 23 December 1915 the new CIGS, Sir William Robertson, wrote to the War Committee of the Cabinet asking them if they accepted that France and Flanders were the main theatre of war, and whether they would confirm that there should be offensive operations there in 1916.2 The reply, dated 13 January 1916, gave authority for preparations for offensive action to take place, but added that the actions themselves would not necessarily be agreed to.3 At a further conference at Chantilly on 12 March 1916 the Allied commanders-in-chief agreed their military strategy, but it was not until another somewhat testy memorandum from Robertson to the War Committee on 31 March, effectively saying, ‘Come on, government, can we attack or can’t we?’, that the government approved British participation.4

  After the Chantilly conference of December 1915 the British high command, as the junior partner on land, accepted that there would be offensive action in 1916; the question was, where should it be? From the perspective of General Sir Douglas Haig, commanding the BEF since December 1915, the major effort should be in Flanders. Britain was the protector of Belgium, and an attack out of the Ypres salient could sever German railway communications and allow the BEF, even if it failed to break through the German defences and restore mobility, at least to improve its position from the flat, wet and enemy-overlooked localities that they had held since late 1914. Here there was a clear British strategic interest, which diminished as the front ran south.

  True, the ground was less favourable to the attacker in Flanders than it was around Arras, or even as far as the Somme, but capturing ground for its own sake was not part of the British way of making war. Even as late as January 1916 there were Anglo-French discussions about an offensive in the area of Arras, and the impression gained by many in the British GHQ was that Joffre, commanding the French armies, would favour – or at least consent to – a British effort in Flanders provided that it was coordinated with whatever the French might do to the south. A number of possible plans were under preparation, including one for a joint effort astride the Somme, but as time went on it became increasingly clear that it was a Somme offensive that Joffre wanted. In August 1915 the British had been persuaded to extend their front by taking over a fifteen-mile sector north of the Somme, previously held by the French, and with the French Tenth Army initially sandwiched between the north of the new British sector and the south of the rest of the BEF at Loos. By June 1916 the BEF had also taken over the French Tenth-Army stretch, and now joined with the French on the river Somme. The French were never entirely convinced that the British were making full use of their available manpower, and British ripostes that they had two million men in the Royal Navy who ensured freedom of the seas for all the Allies fell on deaf ears. There is some evidence that French insistence on the Somme area for the major effort of 1916 was to make sure that the British took part – certainly the British Official Historian thought so – and planning was now concentrated on that area.5

  Reluctantly the British acceded to French demands. There was, however, a major difference in the purpose of the Somme offensive as viewed by the two commanders-in-chief. Joffre saw it as a battle of attrition – the aim was to kill Germans. Haig hoped for penetration of the German defence lines and a subsequent breakout. The British did not engage in battles of attrition: winning by one wicket was not a procedure favoured by a nation with a small volunteer army, even though it was now placing more men in the field than ever before in its history.

  Originally the Somme offensive was to be over a front of sixty miles, with the French providing the major share of the troops, and preparations proceeded along those lines. Then, on 21 February 1916, the entire plan was thrown into confusion. The Germans at last launched an offensive of their own, and attacked the French at Verdun. Verdun had an almost mystical significance for France. It was there that in 843 the heirs of Charlemagne had divided up Europe between them, and although it became German in 923 it was French again by 1552, and was besieged in the Thirty Years War. In 1792 French revolutionary armies held out against German attackers until the commander, General Beaurepaire, committed suicide (or was murdered by less patriotic inhabitants). Verdun’s resistance became a rallying cry of the revolutionary Danton, and in 1870 it was the last French fortress to fall to the Prussians. In 1914 it was the strongest fortified town in the world (or seemed to be), and was the key to the French frontier defences. By 1916, however, the French had accepted that forts were no longer an effective means of defence and had largely disarmed them. It would have made military sense for the French to give up Verdun in 1914 and to hold a shorter line further back; but the symbolic importance of Verdun remained, and it formed the base of a salient that jutted out into German-occupied territory.

  The Chief of the German General Staff, Falkenhayn, who had taken over from the younger Moltke in November 1914, saw an attack on Verdun as a way to remove the British from the war. He saw Britain as being the bar to a German victory, not because of its little army, but because of the Royal Navy and British money. A direct attack on the British in Flanders would be difficult – the ground was as bad for an attacker moving west as it was for the British who wanted to move east – and as England could not be invaded, the solution was to grind the French army down and eliminate its capacity to make war. A resounding defeat of the French, and a collapse of French political and military will, would force British withdrawal from the continent and, so Falkenhayn reasoned, from the war. It was not Falkenhayn’s intention to capture Verdun – or at least not swiftly – for to do so would negate the very purpose of the attack. The French would defend Verdun to the last man; more and more French divisions would be drawn in, and the Germans would ‘bleed the French army white’. The Germans wanted the Verdun battle to last long enough for that to happen.

  Falkenhayn ordered the German Fifth Army to attack ‘in the direction of Verdun’. The Commander of the Fifth Army, Crown Prince William of Prussia (‘Little Willy’), no doubt realising the difficulty of persuading soldiers to attack but not to succeed too quickly, modified the aim in his orders to the army and instructed it to ‘capture Verdun’. Although a figure of fun to the British public, the Kaiser’s son was by no means incompetent as a general, and he had the highly capable General Schmitt von Knobelsdorf as his chief of staff. The German Fifth Army had nine divisions, or 140,000 men, available, and they were to be supported by 3,406 field guns, 542 heavy guns, 152 trench mortars, 168 aircraft, fourteen balloons (for artillery-spotting) and four Zeppelin dirigibles. There was a massive deception plan to hide the forthcoming attack from French intelligence, which included hiding the assault troops in massive und
erground bunkers or Stollen. The German Fifth Army was initially to attack over a front of eight miles on the east bank of the River Meuse (there were insufficient troops to attack on both banks simultaneously), and each corps of two divisions would have 6,000 wire-cutters, 17,000 spades, 125,000 hand grenades, one million sandbags and eighty-eight tons’ weight of barbed wire.

  As it was, the attack was delayed by snow, and British naval intelligence discovered, almost at the last moment, that the expected German assault would in fact fall upon Verdun. Although the French army was able to begin to reinforce before the German attack began, at first all went according to Falkenhayn’s hopes, and French troops were hastily removed from other parts of the front to defend the sacred soil of Verdun.

  The Somme offensive would still take place – indeed it was imperative that it did, if only to take the pressure off Verdun – but there would now be fewer French troops available. The planned French contribution of forty-two divisions and 356 heavy guns on a front of twenty-eight miles was reduced at the end of April 1916 to thirty divisions and 312 heavy guns over sixteen miles. As more and more French divisions were sucked into the meat-grinder of Verdun, on 22 May there was a further reduction to twenty-two divisions over seven and a half miles.6 The British would now assault over fourteen miles to the north of the River Somme, with eleven divisions jumping off on the first day. In the event the French could provide only twelve divisions with two more in reserve, but over a front of twelve miles, astride and to the south of the Somme (where the ground was more favourable to the attacker).