The Last Full Measure

by Michael Stephenson

  Artillery had a ravenous and capricious appetite that devoured men in body and spirit. Lord Moran describes the death of the soul of a man almost hit by a Jack Johnson (named after the great American boxer, presumably because it packed a wicked punch):

  “It’s Sergeant Turner, sir.… You see, sir, it burst almost on top of him.… It’s a miracle, I says, as he’s here at all.”

  I found the Sergeant standing in the trench. He looked at me as if he had something to say but he said nothing. His lip trembled and he was trying to keep his limbs still. He appeared dazed by what he had been through and by this end to everything … it was plain to me the game was up and he was done. When this sort of thing happens to a good fellow it is final.61

  What the guns did not kill by commission they frequently did by omission. The constant complaint of the infantry was the failure of friendly artillery to destroy enemy barbed wire in preparation for an attack. George Coppard surveyed the failed attack around La Boiselle during the first day of the Somme battle:

  Hundreds of dead, many of the 37th Brigade, were strung out like wreckage washed up to a high-water mark. Quite as many died on the enemy wire as on the ground, like fish caught in a net. They hung there in grotesque postures. Some looked as though they were praying: they had died on their knees and the wire had prevented their fall. From the way the bodies were equally spread out, whether lying on the wire or lying in front of it, it was clear that there were no gaps in the wire at the time of the attack. Concentrated machine-gun fire from sufficient guns to command every inch of the wire had done its terrible work.… Any Tommy could have told them that shell-fire lifts wire up and drops it down, often in a worse tangle than before.62

  Back in 1915 at the battle of Loos, Sergeant Charles Lippett of the Queen’s Royal West Surreys had experienced much the same: “As we approached this wire I could see the bodies of men hanging on it, obviously dead or badly wounded, and there were no gaps in it at all. Our artillery had not cut the wire, even firing 18-pounder shells at it. The shell could land in a certain spot and instead of cutting a neat swathe through the wire to allow the troops through, it just lifted great lumps of it up and made the confusion worse.… I couldn’t even see where the enemy trench was, the barbed wire was so thick and so deep.”63

  P. J. Campbell knew very well what the problems were: “But most of all it was the wire in front of the trenches that was disconcerting, there was so much and wire was so hard to destroy. It was our job to destroy it, the field gunners’. We had to cut it up using shells that burst on percussion without making much of a hole, heavier guns could have destroyed the wire more effectively, but if they made big craters in the ground, then it was difficult for the infantry to advance.”64 The introduction of the 106 percussion fuse in 1917 went some way to rectifying the situation. Its horizontal blast not only cut wire but also reduced cratering, which in itself could be fatal to those too badly wounded to prevent themselves from drowning in the rain-filled shell holes.

  Lieutenant Edwin Campion Vaughan of the Royal Warwicks heard them at Passchendaele in 1917: “From the darkness on all sides came the groans and wails of wounded men; faint, long, sobbing moans of agony, and despairing shrieks. It was too horribly obvious to me that dozens of men with serious wounds must have crawled for safety into shell holes, and now the water was rising above them and, powerless to move, they were slowly drowning.”65

  Henri Barbusse saw them in the Artois:

  Their heads and arms are underwater, but you can see their backs with the leather of their equipment emerging on the surface of the pasty liquid, while their blue cloth trousers are blown up with the feet attached crosswise to these balloon legs, like the rounded black feet stuck on the shapeless legs of clowns or puppets. From one sunken head the hair is standing upright like waterweed. Here there is a face almost emerging, its head stranded on the edge while the body vanishes into the murky depths. It is looking upwards, its eyes two white holes, its mouth one black one. The puffy yellow skin of this mask looks soft and wrinkled, like cold pastry.66

  And if enemy shell fire was not sufficiently lethal, there was always the grotesquely misnamed “friendly fire.” The French general Alexandre Percin estimated that 75,000 French soldiers were killed by their own artillery.67 Badly made shells, often with loose driving bands (the soft metal strap around the belly of the shell that bit into the rifling and ensured proper propulsion), were common in the earlier years of the war. On February 27, 1915, the Royal Welch’s medical officer recorded, with understandable sarcasm, that “our covering battery fired four rounds somewhat as follows: into Nomansland, into our parapet, behind our line, on to a Company H.Q.; and then telephoned ‘Is that enough?’ ”68

  On August 10, 1916, Lord Moran recorded a typical incident:

  I met Burdett who had taken over “B” Company.… “It’s our God-damned guns. I can’t make out what the hell they are up to,” he exclaimed angrily. I pushed on down the trench and suddenly came upon the scene.… Shells were bursting all round and in the black smoke men were digging. Muffled appeals for help, very faint and distant came out of the earth and maddened the men who dug harder than ever, and some throwing their spades away burrowed feverishly with their hands like terriers.… We were afraid too of injuring those buried heads with the shovels and always through our minds went the thought that it might be too late. Then there was a terrific noise, everything vanished for a moment, and when I could see again Dyson and the two men working beside him had disappeared. They were buried. And then as if they had achieved their purpose in blotting this boy suddenly the guns stopped.69

  THOSE WHO SAW the first release of poison gas on the Western Front—by the Germans on April 22, 1915,* on the northern sector of the Ypres Salient—could have been forgiven for imagining it no more than a distraction: “Two curious greenish-yellow clouds [chlorine] on the ground on either side of Langemarck in front of the German line. These clouds spread laterally, joining up, and moving before a light wind, became a bluish-white mist, such as is seen over water meadows on a frosty night.”70 Its effect, however, was far from attractive, and although it caused relatively few fatalities in comparison to those from other weapons (about 6,000 British, 9,000 German, and 8,000 French; the Russians would lose 56,000, mainly due to a lack of gas masks),71 it was regarded with horror and contempt as a dirty, underhanded way to conduct warfare.

  There were four broad categories of gas: the lachrymators, or “tear gas,” which caused intense eye irritation but were not in themselves lethal; the sternutators, “sneeze gas,” which caused extreme nasal irritation but again were not in themselves fatal; suffocants, which attacked and corrupted the lungs and were highly dangerous—the most notorious being chlorine and phosgene; and vesicants, primarily “mustard gas,” which blistered the skin and, if inhaled, the respiratory tract.

  In the early phase of the war, gas was released from tubes mounted in the front trench and, because its delivery depended on wind conditions, could be disconcertingly unpredictable. The German chlorine-gas attack on completely unprepared French colonial troops in April 1915 was immediately successful but not exploited. The first British gas attack, at Loos on September 25, 1915, could have been a disaster, with the gas blowing back into the British trenches, but providentially caused only seven “friendly” deaths.72

  As the war progressed more sophisticated delivery systems were introduced, such as the mortar-type Livens projector (1917), which lobbed a whole drum of gas (its inventor, Captain W. H. Livens, “expressed the ambition of reducing the cost of killing Germans to a paltry sixteen shillings apiece”),73 and gas-filled shells fired by regular artillery. In response, gas masks were developed, ranging from the earliest crude pads soaked in urine to rubberized face masks attached to air filters, but they were often cumbersome and suffocatingly uncomfortable. In addition, irritant gases were often delivered in combinations that made wearing a mask extremely uncomfortable if they were inhaled, and lethal if the soldier removed his m
ask to get some relief.

  Phosgene and mustard gas were particularly deadly because once they entered the lungs, they penetrated the cells rapidly and hydrolyzed into hydrochloric acid. The victims essentially drowned in an excess of their own body fluid or, in the case of mustard gas, could die from secondary complications caused by extensive burning. The postmortem examination of a victim of mustard-gas poisoning described the shocking damage:

  CASE 9.—C. H. W., 101135, Pvt., R. A. F., 3 Kite Balloon Section. Died, October 23, 1918, at 7.05 a.m., at Base Hospital No. 2. Autopsy, two hours after death, by Capt. B. F. Weems, M.C.

  Anatomical diagnosis.-Extensive first and second degree burns of skin; acute conjunctivitis; membrano-ulcerative pharyngitis and tracheitis; laryngitis; membranous bronchitis; lobular pneumonia; congestion and edema [accumulation of fluid] of lungs; interstitial emphysema of lungs; acute fibrinous pleurisy, chronic fibrous pleurisy over right upper lobe; congestion of abdominal viscera; gas-shell wounds of both thighs.

  External appearance.-Extensive burns over the trunk and extremities and large, pale yellow blebs [liquid-filled blisters also called bullae] upon the anterior surface of both thighs, about the left knee, upon both forearms, and upon the neck and face. Besides these clear bullae, there are large areas of a peculiar dusky, pinkish-purple colour, in most cases adjacent to the bullae and having approximately the same distribution. The face is swollen and covered over the bearded portions by scabby exudate [body fluid]; the skin about both eyes is swollen and discoloured; there is purulent conjunctivitis. A mucopurulent exudate [fluid bubbling up from the lungs] issues from the nostrils. There is extensive gingivitis. Skin over scrotum and penis edematous and in part blistered.74

  It is no wonder that gas victims sometimes pleaded for a merciful end. Pioneer Georg Zobel witnessed the effects of a British gas attack: “Here and there were men from other units who had been surprised by the gas. They sat or lay and vomited pieces of their corroded lungs. Horrible, this death! And, much as they implored us, nobody dared to give them the coup de grâce.”75

  Gas was loathed by combatants not only for the appalling suffering it could cause but because it robbed soldiers of the chance to fight back. Sergeant Major Ernest Shephard was at Hill 60 outside Ypres on May 1, 1915: “The scene that followed was heartbreaking. Men were caught by fumes and in dreadful agony, coughing and vomiting, rolling on the ground in agony … I ran round at intervals and tied up a lot of men’s mouths, placed them in sitting positions, and organized parties to assist them.… When we found our men were dying from fumes we wanted to charge, but were not allowed to do so.… Had we lost as heavily while actually fighting we would have not cared as much, but our dear boys died like rats in a trap, instead of heroes as they all were.”76

  Even the gas mask imposed its own suffocating dehumanization, and this is why, with its bugged-out eyepieces and external trachea, it became such a potent symbol for artists of the war. It seemed to represent men entrapped in a rubberized skull, screaming to get out: “The gas mask makes you feel only half a man,” wrote Alan Hanbury-Sparrow of the First Battalion, Royal Berkshire Regiment. “You can’t think; the air you breathe has been filtered of all save a few chemical substances. A man doesn’t live on what passes through the filter, he merely exists.”77

  THE LOCKDOWN OF the Western Front in 1915 ushered in not only trench warfare but also its close relative, subterranean warfare. Mining had been used ever since there were walls to undermine, and in the pregunpowder era the attackers relied on physically weakening walls by creating voids beneath them that would lead to collapse. The advent of gunpowder added the more active ingredient of explosive demolition, the most significant prior to World War I being that blown under the Confederate earthworks defending Petersburg, Virginia, on July 30, 1864, when 8,000 pounds of gunpowder blew a crater 170 feet long and 30 feet deep, killing about three hundred Confederate soldiers in the process.

  The development of high-powered explosives such as ammonal offered the possibility of even greater potential damage, and the British in particular invested heavily in mining on the Western Front. The work, though, was not for the faint of heart:

  First of all you go down three or four ladders … It’s a terrible long way down, and of course you go alone … I didn’t go far up the gallery where they were working because you can’t easily pass along, but the RE [Royal Engineers responsible for British mining operations] officer took me along a gallery that is not being worked, and there, all alone, at the end of it was a man sitting. He was simply sitting, listening. Then I listened through his stethoscope thing† … and I could hear the Boche working as plainly as anything.… as we went away and left him he looked round at us with staring eyes just like a hunted animal.… Of course, while you hear them working, it’s all right, they won’t blow. But if you don’t hear them! God, I wouldn’t like to be an RE. It’s an awful game.78

  It was a particularly vicious form of combat. Miners and counterminers would break into each others’ tunnels and galleries and fight hand-to-hand with coshes, sharpened spades, pistols, or rifles with sawn-off barrels and shortened butts. Counterminers would constantly seek to blow up their counterparts with small mines—camouflets—which even if they did not kill by blast inflicted an even more terrible death by entombment.

  The point of it all, though, was to accumulate sufficient explosive beneath the enemy trenches to blow them to kingdom come. The Germans blew ten mines under the Indian Corps at Givenchy on December 20, 1914, causing many deaths.79 On April 17, 1915, the British blew the top off Hill 60 in the Ypres Salient, beating competing German miners to the punch. But the first truly mighty blast came on the first day of the battle of the Somme, July 1, 1916, at 7:20 a.m., when the British Hawthorn Ridge mine containing about 40,000 pounds of ammonal went off. The explosion could be heard in London. The official history of the German 119th Reserve Regiment records: “During the bombardment there was a terrible explosion which for the moment completely drowned the thunder of the artillery.… More than three sections of No. 9 Company were blown into the air, and the neighboring dugouts were broken in or blocked … and a gigantic crater … gaped like an open wound on the side of the hill.”80

  An even bigger blow, however, came at Messines a year later, on June 7, 1917. Twenty-three mines containing a combined 1 million pounds of explosive spread across a 10-mile front were detonated simultaneously. Major Walter Kranz was watching from a little way behind the German front line on Messines Ridge and saw “nineteen gigantic roses with carmine petals, or as enormous mushrooms, which rose up slowly and majestically out of the ground and then split into pieces with a mighty roar, sending up multi-colored columns of flame mixed with a mass of earth and splinters high into the sky.”81 From the British trenches there “appeared a great green meadow, slowly, taking its time, not hurrying, a smooth curved dome of grass, heaving up, up, up like a rising cake; then, like a cake, it cracked, cracked visibly with bursting brown seams; still the dome rose, towering ten, twenty feet up … and then with a roar the black smoke hurtled into the air, followed by masses of pink flame.”82 Ten thousand or so Germans were killed, and “many of the men never came to earth again, except as a rain of blood.”83

  The huge craters themselves became a unique part of the topography of combat—battlegrounds within the battleground. And as it had been with the crater at Petersburg in the American Civil War, the struggle for their control was bitterly and bloodily contested because they could provide vantage points, particularly for snipers, as well as refuges for stranded infantrymen. George Coppard witnessed the blowing of the mine beneath the German Hohenzollern Redoubt in the final stages of the battle of Loos at the end of September 1915. Once the debris had fallen (“a risk to friend and foe alike”),

  the storming party rushed forward to capture the hot and smoking crater. The German flanks bristled with machine guns, and it was a safe bet that they would take a toll of some of our boys before they reached the crater. Those who
made it literally dug in their toes to prevent themselves sliding backwards down the steep slope behind them. They lined the rim nearest the enemy, desperately prepared to die in defence of their meager gain.… A fierce bombing exchange would break out. Many of the bombs over-shot the rim of the crater and, landing on the bottom, blasted fragments up the slope.… Both sides employed snipers at vantage points on the flanks and their deadly work added to the terror.… The casualty rate rose rapidly for the first hour after the capture of a crater as alarm spread to neighbouring craters and trenches. Inspired by mutual hate and desperation, the volume of fire from short-range weapons increased, creating an almost impossible demand for stretcher-bearers. Crater fighters were considered to have a pretty mean chance of survival, twelve hours being reckoned as the limit.84

  WITH THE STRANGULATION of fluid battle and the onset of the rigor mortis of trench warfare, inventive minds turned to what might be called a miniaturized imitation of open warfare: trench raiding. The object was usually to capture enemy troops for interrogation, or simply to inflict demoralizing casualties. It was also employed, in the absence of full-throated battle, to “blood” inexperienced units and have them prove their fighting mettle, and to keep experienced but inactive troops on their toes. To many men, however, it was simply another example of the brass finding ways to get them killed.

  Corporal Sidney Amatt of the Essex Regiment described the general idea:

  They never asked for volunteers, they’d say, “You, you, you, and you,” and you suddenly found yourself in a raiding party. They went over at night, in silence, and the parties always arranged in the same way. Number one was the rifleman, who carried a rifle, a bayonet, and fifty rounds of ammunition and nothing else. The next man was a grenade thrower and he carried a haversack full of Mills hand bombs. The next man was also a bomb-thrower, he helped the first man replace his stock when it was exhausted. And the last man was a rifle and bayonet man.…