The Shadow of War

by Stewart Binns

  Farnborough

  The Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough was a British research establishment, known by several different names during its history, that eventually came under the aegis of the UK Ministry of Defence, before finally losing its identity in mergers with other institutions. The first site was at Farnborough Airfield in Hampshire. In 1904–1906 the Army Balloon Factory, which was part of the Army School of Ballooning, under the command of Colonel James Templer, relocated from Aldershot to the edge of Farnborough Common in order to have enough space for experimental work. In October 1908, Samuel Cody made the first aeroplane flight in Britain at Farnborough. In 1988 it was renamed the Royal Aerospace Establishment before merging with other research entities to become part of the new Defence Research Agency in 1991.

  Field punishment

  Field punishment was introduced in 1881 following the abolition of flogging and was a common punishment during the Great War. A commanding officer could award field punishment for up to twenty-eight days.

  Field Punishment Number One (often abbreviated to ‘F. P. No. 1’ or even just ‘No. 1’) consisted of the convicted man being placed in fetters and handcuffs or similar restraints and attached to a fixed object, such as a gun wheel, for up to two hours per day. During the early part of the war, the punishment was often applied with the arms stretched out and the legs tied together, giving rise to the nickname ‘crucifixion’. This was applied for a maximum of three days out of four, up to twenty-one days in total. It was usually applied in field punishment camps set up for this purpose a few miles behind the front line, but when the unit was on the move it would be carried out by the unit itself. It has been alleged that this punishment was sometimes applied within range of enemy fire. During the Great War, Field Punishment Number One was issued by the British Army on over 60,000 occasions. Although the 1914 Manual of Military Law specifically stated that field punishment should not be applied in such a way as to cause physical harm, abuses were commonplace (for example, the prisoner would deliberately be placed in stress positions with his feet not fully touching the ground).

  In Field Punishment Number Two, the prisoner was placed in fetters and handcuffs but was not attached to a fixed object and was still able to march with his unit. This was a relatively tolerable punishment. In both forms of field punishment, the soldier was also subjected to hard labour and loss of pay. Field Punishment Number One was eventually abolished in 1923, when an amendment to the Army Act which specifically forbade attachment to a fixed object was passed by the House of Lords.

  Fitzsimmons, Bob

  Robert James ‘Bob’ Fitzsimmons was a British professional boxer who made boxing history as the sport’s first three-division world champion. He was successively Middleweight, Light Heavyweight and Heavyweight World Champion. Fitzsimmons is the lightest of all Heavyweight Champions, an accolade that, almost certainly, will never be taken from him. Nicknamed ‘Ruby Robert’ and the ‘Freckled Wonder’, he took pride in his lack of scars and appeared in the ring wearing heavy woollen underwear to conceal the disparity between his significant trunk and puny legs. He was known for his pure fighting skills and his dislike of training. Fitzsimmons is ranked 8th on Ring Magazine’s list of the ‘100 Greatest Punchers of all Time’.

  Gewehr 98 Mauser rifle

  The Gewehr 98 (abbreviated G98) was a German bolt-action Mauser rifle firing cartridges from a five-round internal clip-loaded magazine. It was the German service rifle from 1898 to 1935, when it was replaced by the Karabiner 98k. The Gewehr 98 was the main German infantry weapon of the Great War.

  Green spot ammunition

  Snipers rely on their skill, the quality of their rifle and its sight, but also their ammunition. The first 5,000 rounds out of a new mould are packaged with a green spot so that they can be used by snipers, before the balls of later rounds suffer from minor deteriorations in the ball moulding through wear.

  Hackles

  These are the long, fine feathers which are found on the backs of certain types of domestic chicken; they are often brightly coloured, especially on roosters. In military parlance, the hackle is a clipped feather plume that is attached to a military headdress. In the British Army the hackle is worn by some infantry regiments, especially those designated as fusilier regiments and those with Scottish and Northern Irish origins. The colour of the hackle varies from regiment to regiment.

  Lancashire Fusiliers: primrose yellow.

  Royal Fusiliers: white.

  Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers: grey.

  Royal Irish Fusiliers: green.

  Royal Northumberland Fusiliers: red over white.

  Royal Scots Fusiliers: white.

  Royal Warwickshire Fusiliers: blue over gold.

  Royal Welch Fusiliers: white.

  Havercake

  An oatcake, or type of flatbread, made from oatmeal and sometimes flour, cooked on a griddle or baked in an oven. In Lancashire and Yorkshire, oatcake was a staple of the diet up to the Great War. Oatcakes were often called ‘havercakes’ (from ‘hafr’, the Old Germanic word for oats). The word is perpetuated in the nickname ‘Havercake Lads’ for the 33rd Regiment of Foot (The Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, West Riding) and also in the term ‘haversack’.

  Highgate, Thomas

  On 5 September 1914, the first day of the Battle of the Marne, Thomas Highgate, a nineteen-year-old British private, was found hiding in a barn dressed in civilian clothes. Highgate was tried by court martial, convicted of desertion and, in the early hours of 8 September, was executed by firing squad. His was the first of 306 executions carried out by the British Army during the Great War. The only son of a farm worker, Thomas Highgate was born in Shoreham, in Kent, in 1895. In February 1913, aged seventeen, he joined the Royal West Kent Regiment. On the first day of the Battle of the Marne, and the 35th day of the war, Private Highgate’s nerves got the better of him and he fled the battlefield. He hid in a barn in the village of Tournan, a few miles south of the river, and was discovered wearing civilian clothes by a gamekeeper who happened to be English and an ex-soldier. Highgate confessed: ‘I have had enough of it, I want to get out of it and this is how I am going to do it.’

  Having been turned in, Highgate was tried by a court martial for desertion. The trial, presided over by three officers, was brief. Highgate did not speak and was not represented. He was found guilty. At 6.20 on the morning of 8 September, Highgate was informed that he would be executed. The execution was carried out fifty minutes later – at 7.07 – by firing squad. Highgate’s name is shown on the British memorial to the missing at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre on the south bank of the River Marne. The memorial features the names of over 3,000 British soldiers with no known grave.

  Inflexible, HMS

  HMS Inflexible was an Invincible-class battlecruiser of the Royal Navy, built in 1907. She and her sister ship Invincible sank the German armoured cruisers SMS Scharnhorst and SMS Gneisenau during the Battle of the Falkland Islands.

  Jack tar

  Jack tar (also Jacktar, Jack-tar or even Tar) was a common term originally used to refer to seamen of the Merchant or Royal Navy, particularly during the period of the British Empire. Members of the public, and also seafarers themselves, made use of the name in identifying those who went to sea. It was not used as an offensive term and sailors were happy to use the term to label themselves. Its etymology is not certain, but there are several plausible possibilities: before the invention of waterproof fabrics, seamen were known to ‘tar’ their clothes before departing on voyages, in order to make them waterproof; it was common among seamen to plait their long hair into a ponytail and smear it with high-grade tar to prevent it getting caught in the ship’s equipment; in the age of wooden sailing vessels, ropes and cables were soaked in tar to prevent them rotting in a damp environment.

  Junkers

  Members of the landed nobility in Prussia. They owned great estates that were maintained and worked by peasants with few rights. After 1871 they were the dominant forc
e in German military, political and diplomatic leadership. The most famous Junker was Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Junker is derived from Middle High German ‘Juncherre’, meaning ‘young nobleman’, or ‘young lord’. Many Junkers took up careers as soldiers, mercenaries and officials. Being the bulwark of the ruling House of Hohenzollern, the Junkers controlled the Prussian Army and their influence was widespread in the north-eastern half of Germany: Brandenburg, Pomerania, Silesia, West Prussia, East Prussia and Posen.

  Knur and Spell

  An ancient Pennine folk game, akin to the southern English games of trap-ball and probably an ancestor of golf. Often associated with gambling, it was very popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in the fields around moorland pubs. The object is to hit a ‘potty’ (knur), sometimes a small piece of heartwood or a small pottery ball, as far as possible with a long flexible club. The longest hit takes the prize. Distances of several hundred yards could be achieved. The game and its name are thought to be Norse in origin.

  Lant-trough

  A receptacle for collecting human urine. Fermented human urine (lant) was used for various purposes from as early as Roman times. The Romans used it as a cleaning agent for stained clothes and even as a whitener for teeth. The emperor Nero imposed a highly lucrative tax on the urine industry. In nineteenth-century Lancashire, lant was used in the tanning and woollen industries as a cleanser for the removal of natural oils in the production of leather and wool.

  Le Cateau, Battle of

  The Battle of Le Cateau was fought on 26 August 1914. British General Horace Smith-Dorrien took a calculated gamble during the retreat from Mons, which was against direct orders. Feeling his men were in disarray in a retreat hindered by thousands of French civilians, he decided to fight: 40,000 British troops formed a defensive line just south of the Cambrai–Le Cateau road and just west of Le Cateau itself. Britain suffered many more casualties than at Mons – 7,812 – in a ferocious and hard-fought encounter. It also lost 38 artillery pieces. German losses were much higher, perhaps as many as 20,000. However, Smith-Dorrien’s decision meant that the rest of the retreat from Mons could be undertaken with much less arduous harassment and could well have saved a greater part of the BEF from destruction.

  Lee-Enfield rifle

  The Lee-Enfield rifle was the main infantry weapon used by the military forces of the British Army from the early twentieth century until 1957.

  Lee-Metford rifle

  The Lee-Metford was a bolt-action British Army service rifle, combining James Paris Lee’s rear-locking bolt system and ten-round magazine with a seven-groove rifled barrel designed by William Ellis Metford. It replaced the Martini-Henry rifle in 1888, following nine years of development and trials, but remained in service for only a short time until replaced by the similar Lee-Enfield in 1913.

  Lyddite shell

  British explosive shells filled with Lyddite were the first British generation of modern ‘high explosive’ shells. Lyddite is picric acid fused at 280°F and allowed to solidify. The shells detonated and fragmented into small pieces in all directions, with no incendiary effect. For maximum destructive effect the explosion needed to be delayed until the shell had penetrated its target.

  Maconochie’s and Moir Wilson British Army rations

  These were just two of the many manufacturers of Great War army rations. Maconochie’s, an Irish stew produced in Fraserburgh and Stornoway in Scotland, was the most popular. Soldiers got a weekly ration of 12ozs of dried ‘bully’ beef, 1lb 4ozs of bread or flour, 4ozs of bacon, 3ozs of cheese plus sugar, tea, jam, salt, pepper and mustard when available. As in the navy, a ‘tot’ (half a gill/70mls) of rum was issued daily; double before a battle. Ten thousand copies of the Daily Mail were also sent to the Front every day.

  Mad minute

  This was a pre-Great War term used by British Army riflemen during training at the Hythe School of Musketry to describe scoring a minimum of 15 hits on to a 12-inch round target at 300 yards within one minute using a bolt-action rifle (usually a Lee-Enfield or Lee-Metford rifle). It was not uncommon during the Great War for riflemen to exceed this score. Many could average 30 plus shots; the record, set in 1914 by Serjeant Instructor Alfred Snoxhall, was 38 hits. During the Battle of Mons, there were numerous German accounts of coming up against what they believed was machine-gun fire when in fact it was squads of riflemen firing at this rate.

  Marne, First Battle of the

  The Battle of the Marne was fought between 5 and 12 September 1914. It resulted in an Allied victory against the German Army. The battle effectively ended the month-long German offensive that opened the war and had reached the outskirts of Paris. The counter-attack of six French field armies and one British army along the Marne River forced the German Imperial Army to abandon its push on Paris and retreat north-east, setting the stage for four years of trench warfare on the Western Front. The Battle of the Marne was an immense strategic victory for the Allies, wrecking Germany’s bid for a swift victory over France and forcing it into a protracted two-front war. The Allied armies were over a million strong and faced a German force of over a million and a half.

  Allied casualties were over 263,000, of whom more than 81,000 died. German losses were at least 220,000 dead or missing.

  Marne taxis

  The use of Parisian taxis was the idea of General Gallieni, the military governor of the city. On the evening of 6 September 1914, he requisitioned 1,200 taxis to assemble in the Esplanade des Invalides at 19.00 hours; for the next seven hours they ferried men from their positions on the outskirts of Paris to the front line at Nanteuil (four in the seats, one in the luggage compartment). In all, almost an entire division of 12,000 men was transported. The French Treasury paid the fares according to the standard rate per metre travelled. In all, the bill came to 70,102 French francs (approximately £140,000 today). Taxis were used for the rest of the campaign and became part of French military folklore.

  Marquess of Queensberry rules

  The code of traditional rules in the sport of boxing is named after John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, who publicly endorsed the code. The Queensberry rules were the first to require the use of gloves in boxing. In popular culture the term is sometimes used to refer to a sense of sportsmanship and fair play. The rules were written by John Graham Chambers, a Welshman, and drafted in London in 1865, before being published in 1867. The Marquess of Queensberry’s third son was Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas, the close friend and lover of Oscar Wilde.

  Maschinengewehr 08

  The MG 08 was the German Army’s standard-issue machine gun in the Great War, an adaptation of Hiram S. Maxim’s original 1884 Maxim gun. It could reach a firing rate of up to 400 rounds per minute using 250-round fabric belts of 7.92 x 57mm ammunition, although sustained firing would lead to overheating; it was water-cooled using a jacket around the barrel that held approximately one gallon of water. Using a separate attachment sight with range calculator for indirect fire, the MG 08 could be operated from cover. Additional telescopic sights were also developed and used in quantity during the war.

  Maxim machine gun

  The Maxim machine gun was adopted by the British Army in 1889. In 1912, the army turned to the Vickers gun (see entry below) and then, in 1915, to the lighter Lewis gun (which could be made much more quickly than the Vickers and, although too heavy for efficient portable use, became the standard support weapon for the British infantry).

  Melton blue

  A blue-dyed version of melton cloth, a heavy, smooth woollen fabric with a short nap, particularly used for army uniforms and overcoats. Its name comes from Melton Mowbray, in Leicestershire, the traditional centre for its production.

  Mons, Battle of

  The Battle of Mons began on the morning of 23 August 1914 with a heavy German artillery barrage. The men of the British Expeditionary Force, many of whom had only just arrived at the battlefield, were exhausted. They were carrying 80lb packs; many had new boots an
d were walking on cobbled roads. Nevertheless, they formed up along the Canal du Centre, west and north of Mons, in a defensive position nine miles long. Nine and a half British battalions (10,000 men) held four German divisions (70,000) for most of the day.

  The Germans attacked in large numbers, but in close formation, suffering significant casualties from extremely accurate British infantry marksmen. However, by midday large numbers of Germans had crossed the canal and some British units began to fall back. The tactical withdrawal lasted until dusk, but the Germans did not follow in hot pursuit; they had suffered unexpectedly high casualty figures and called a ceasefire to lick their wounds.

  British losses on the day were 1,642 killed, wounded and missing. They included 400 from the 4th Battalion Middlesex Regiment and 300 from the 1st Battalion Royal Irish Regiment. German losses were at least 6,000, but could have been as many as 10,000.

  Old Contemptibles

  Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany reportedly issued an order on 19 August 1914 to ‘exterminate … the treacherous English and walk over General French’s contemptible little army’. Thus, the regular soldiers of Britain’s standing army of 1914, who went to France as the British Expeditionary Force, became known as ‘The Old Contemptibles’. However, no concrete evidence has ever been found to suggest that such an order was issued by the Kaiser. It was likely to have been a British propaganda invention, one that has since become accepted as fact and made legend.