The idea was to crawl underneath the German wire and jump into their front-line trench. Then you’d dispose of whoever was holding it, by bayonet if possible, without making any noise, or by clubbing over the head with the butt. Once you’d established yourself in the trench you’d wend your way round each bay. A rifleman would go first, and he’d stop at the next bay.… The bomb-thrower would then throw a grenade towards the next bay, and when that exploded the rifleman who was leading would dash into the trench and dispose of any occupants.…
… But the raiding parties were rarely successful because by the time we got halfway across no man’s land and come up against the Jerry wire, the Germans had usually realised something was going on and opened up their machine-guns on that area. So we’d have to scuttle back to our own lines before we all got killed.85
Captain Dunn records the risks of a raid at Cuinchy on April 25, 1916, undertaken by two companies of the Royal Welch:
Another raid has been planned by the C.O.… Fifty-five of B and C Companies are to go for the re-entrants of a small salient on the left of the road.… Things went wrong from the start. “Uncle” [one of the officers] sent his contingent up tail first, and so late that they barely got out in time. Then most of them followed Sergeant Joe Williams, who made off half-right, shouting, “Lead on, B Company: lead on, B Company.” They ran into uncut wire, were enfiladed by a machine-gun and Joe was killed. That gun was to have been kept quiet by the two new trench-mortars, the Stokes, detailed to protect the right flank, but both broke down when they began to fire. The few of B who followed their officers got into the enemy’s trench but found it empty. C Company’s 2 officers and 25 men also got in, but all they could bring away was an anti-gas apparatus. Both parties were heavily strafed from behind … a second sergeant was left behind dead. Another of the dead was Earnshaw.… All four officers were wounded.… It was agreed afterwards that the previous day’s and the morning’s wire-cutting had made him [the Germans] wise, and he was ready—in his second line.86
In his play Journey’s End, R. C. Sheriff, who had served as an officer in the East Surreys and had been wounded at Passchendaele in 1917, has the action pivot on the disastrous outcome of a raid insisted on by headquarters even though it was known that the enemy had been forewarned. The company’s commanding officer, Stanhope, tries to dissuade his colonel:
STANHOPE: Meanwhile the Boche are sitting over there with a dozen machine-guns trained on that hole [in their wire]—waiting for our fellows to come.
COLONEL: Well, I can’t disobey orders.
STANHOPE: Why didn’t the trench-mortars blow a dozen holes in different places—so the Boche wouldn’t know which we were going to use?
COLONEL: It took three hours to blow that one. How could they blow a dozen in the time? It’s no good worrying about it now. It’s too late.87
If going out was risky, so was coming back, when nervous sentries could be as lethal as the enemy. Captain H. Blair describes the reception of his returning patrol:
Nearing our wire, I changed places with the corporal, he was leading and I was in rear, for I wanted to warn the listening-post, who might not be expecting us after nearly six hours absence. Not a minute after our change of places two shots were fired from the post. The corporal was hit in the chest and stomach; he died, poor fellow, soon after being got back to the trench. The sentry told me he had been warned that only two had gone on patrol; spotting a third man, he inferred that we were being stalked, and fired. It was a tragic mischance that two snap-shots at 40 yards, by moonlight, at a crawling figure took effect.88
The British poet-soldier Siegfried Sassoon, feeling “intensely alive,” led a trench raid that ended for him when he foolishly decided “to take a peep at the surrounding country. This was a mistake which ought to have put an end to my terrestrial adventures, for no sooner had I popped my silly head out of the sap than I felt a stupendous blow in the back between my shoulders … to my surprise I discovered I wasn’t dead.”89
Sassoon’s fellow Royal Welch officer friend and fellow poet Robert Graves felt that night operations, whether trench raiding or patrolling in no-man’s-land, at least meant that friendly fire was more or less unaimed, and if one was wounded, the chances of survival were increased because field hospitals would not be overwhelmed with the casualties from a full-scale battle. On the other hand, notes Graves: “Patrolling had its peculiar risks. If a German patrol found a wounded man, they were as likely as not to cut his throat. The bowie-knife was a favourite German patrol weapon because of its silence. (We inclined more to the ‘cosh,’ a loaded stick.) The most important information that a patrol could bring back was to what regiment and division the troops opposite belonged. So if it were impossible to get a wounded enemy back without danger to oneself, he had to be stripped of his badges. To do that quickly and silently, it might be necessary first to cut his throat or beat in his skull.”90
THE STASIS OF trench warfare encouraged a special breed of killers. As in the trenches around Petersburg in the American Civil War, snipers took advantage of their victims’ vulnerability through the carelessness brought on by boredom or inexperience. In one two-week period in December 1915, for example, British troops sustained 3,285 casualties, of which about 25 percent were in all probability head and neck sniper wounds.91
George Coppard writes of his mate’s death:
Lulled by the quietness, someone would be foolish and carelessly linger with his head above the top of the parapet. Then, like a puppet whose strings have suddenly snapped, he crashes to the bottom of the trench. There is no gradual falling over, but instant collapse. A Jerry sniper with a telescopic sighted rifle, nicely positioned behind the aperture of an armoured plate, has lain patiently, for hours perhaps, watching our parapet for the slightest movement. His shot is successful and a Tommy is breathing his last, not quite lifeless, but dying. The back of the cranium is gone, and the grey brain flecked with red is splashed out. A pal of mine named Bill Bailey … died in this way.92
Even in the front line there was something shocking about the way reassuring domesticity could be instantly and bloodily smashed. Coppard continues, “There were four of us in a short section of trench, Bailey, Marshall, myself and another. It was early morning and stand-to was over. The fire was going nicely and the bacon was sizzling. I was sitting on the fire-step and just as I was about to tuck in Bill crashed to the ground. I’ll never forget the sound of that shot as it found its billet.” After taking Bill to the first-aid post (where he shortly died), Coppard and his pals returned to the trench “ravenous with hunger.” They were hoping to reassemble the shards of normalcy, but the “bacon and bread was on the fire-step, but covered with dirt and pieces of Bill’s brain.”
Ernst Jünger would have recognized Coppard’s unnerving experience of unreality. As he describes:
A sentry collapses, streaming blood. Shot in the head. His comrades rip the bandage roll out of his tunic and get him bandaged up. “There’s no point, Bill.” “Come on, he’s still breathing, isn’t he?” Then the stretcher-bearers come along, to carry him to the dressing-station. The stretcher poles collide with the corners of the fire-bays. No sooner has the man disappeared than everything is back to the way it was before. Someone spreads a few shovelfuls of earth over the red puddle, and everyone goes back to whatever he was doing before. Only a new recruit maybe leans against the revetement, looking a little green about the gills. He is endeavouring to put it all together. Such an incredibly brutal assault, so sudden, with no warning given. It can’t be possible, can’t be real. Poor fellow, if only you knew what was in store for you.93
Sniping takes place in its own ambiguous world. On the one hand it is an act of individual skill, but on the other its anonymity robs it of the kudos usually attached to individual combat. It is valued but reviled, admired but detested:
The German snipers observed and fired from under the eaves of houses, so it was most difficult to locate them. When a parapet was blown in by a she
ll, or when a trench caved in with the rain where the men had undercut it for shelter, the sniper looked out for the repair or rescue party. The want of communication trenches, which there had not been time to get on with, and the places where the sections had not yet dug far out enough to join up, were the causes of many casualties. Snipers covered their working parties; worse still they covered attacks, preventing our men lining the parapet until the attackers were close up. Only in the dark could food and ammunition be brought up and the wounded and dead be taken down.94
Although the Allies decried German sniping as “underhanded,” they recognized that it was superior to their own, not only in equipment such as superb telescopic sights but also in training, particularly concealment:
The Germans had special regimental snipers, trained in camouflaging themselves. I saw one killed once at Cuinchy, who had been firing all day [a fatal error] from a shell-hole between the lines. He wore a sort of cape made of imitation grass, his face was painted green and brown, and his rifle was also green-fringed. A number of empty cartridges lay beside him [another fatal giveaway of position], and his cap bore the special oak-leaf badge. Few of our battalions attempted to get control of the sniping situation. The Germans had the advantage of having many times more telescopic sights than we did, and bullet-proof steel loop-holes. Also a system by which snipers were kept for months in the same sector until they knew all the loop-holes and shallow places in our trenches, and the tracks that our ration parties used above-ground by night, and where our traverses occurred, and so on, better than most of us did ourselves. British snipers changed their trenches, with their battalions, every week or two, and never had time to study the German trench-geography. But at least we counted on getting rid of the unprofessional sniper. Later we secured an elephant-gun that could send a bullet through enemy loop-holes; and if we failed to locate the loop-hole of a persistent sniper, we tried to dislodge him with a volley of rifle-grenades, or even by ringing up the artillery.95
Some snipers would draw a moral line (or at least recognize it). A Canadian marksman confided in the military historian Philip Haythornthwaite that after he had shot a German who was relieving himself in the latrine he felt he was no better than an assassin.96 And Robert Graves, indulging in some amateur sniping near Cuinchy, was disarmed by a sudden revulsion: “While sniping from a knoll in the support line, where we had a concealed loop-hole, I saw a German, perhaps seven hundred yards away, through my telescopic sights. He was taking a bath in the German third line. I disliked the idea of shooting a naked man, so I handed the rifle to the sergeant with me. ‘Here, take this. You’re a much better shot than I am.’ He got him; but I had not stayed to watch.”97
WHAT WAS LEFT of the warrior code, with its emphasis on individual combat, on a death in some way chosen? There were, of course, many acts of great valor and ennobling self-sacrifice, and there was a kind of individual combat during trench raiding. But the general tenor of warfare had become long-distance, mechanical, anonymous, processed. Nevertheless, within this process there was a need to reassert the power of the individual warrior—and as in all previous wars since the introduction of the gun and cannon, it was the blade that represented the last vestige of the heroic duel. And in World War I that heroic blade was embodied in the bayonet.
The bayonet was the figurative and literal point of the frontal attack. It was by the physical ejection of the enemy from his frontline trenches that defenses could be breached, which reserves could exploit, and victory would be won. The attack with the bayonet also represented the moral fiber of the soldier, and cold steel embodied the aggressive élan that would force the great unlocking of the stalemate.
On the eve of the war, Field Marshal Foch, for example, declared that “the French Army, returning to its traditions, no longer knows any other law than the offensive.… All attacks are to be pushed to the extreme with the firm resolution to charge the enemy with the bayonet, in order to destroy him.… This result can only be obtained at the price of bloody sacrifices. Any other conception ought to be rejected as contrary to the very nature of war.”98 It was an emphatic reaffirmation of the offensive doctrine of France’s revolutionary and Napoleonic armies and would echo Danton’s famous invocation of the supremacy of the attaque a l’outrance: “Il nous faut de l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace et la France est sauvée.”99 The Germans adhered to the same flamboyant heroic credo: “When the decision to assault originates from the commanders in the rear, notice thereof is given by sounding the signal ‘fix bayonets.’ … As soon as the leading line is to form for the assault, all the trumpeters sound the signal ‘forward, double time,’ all the drummers beat the drums, and all parts of the force throw themselves with the greatest determination upon the enemy.… When immediately in front of the enemy, the men should charge with bayonet and, with a cheer, penetrate the position.”100 (German Infantry Regulations, 1899)
The problem proved to be getting to the trenches in the first place, and the frontal attack became the focal point for what many saw as the murderous failure of general staffs in their relentless pursuit of breakthrough. Ironically, in a war that had become literally and metaphorically deadlocked, the strategic obsession, shared by all the general staffs, was with movement and fluidity. Siegfried Sassoon recalls the clash between the tactical realities that inhibited fluid warfare and the official line that insisted upon it: “The Fourth Army School was at Flixécourt.… Between Flixécourt and the War … there were more than thirty English miles. Mentally, the distance became immeasurable.… For instance, although I was closely acquainted with the mine-craters on the Fricourt sector, I would have welcomed a few practical hints on how to patrol those God-forsaken cavities. But the Army School instructors were all in favour of Open Warfare, which was sure to come soon, they said. They had learnt all about it in peacetime; it was essential that we should be taught to ‘think in terms of mobility.’ ”101
In the event, disastrous losses for all sides destroyed the possibility of the heroic in the old sense. The impressive extended-order frontal attacks that had characterized the earlier part of the war had to be modified in the face of unacceptable casualties. All the combatant armies on the Western Front developed versions of smaller-scale assault units, less impressive visually but much more pragmatic. Stand-off killing, particularly by artillery and machine guns, reduced the possibility of hand-to-hand fighting, and as a reflection, the incidence of bayonet-inflicted casualties was minuscule: .32 percent, for example, of one sample of 200,000 British casualties.102 Lord Moran notes: “Hand to hand fighting is vanishing out of war, and even veterans have never met cold steel, which was the way death came to the ancients. Once when I had a bayonet a few inches from my belly I was more frightened than by any shell, but it left nothing behind it. It went out of my mind, it would never happen again.”103
Nevertheless, there were strenuous attempts throughout the war to keep alive the “spirit” of bayonet fighting. The British Manual of Bayonet Training reminds soldiers that “the bayonet is essentially an offensive weapon. In a bayonet assault all ranks go forward to kill or be killed, and only those who have developed skill and strength by constant training will be able to kill. The spirit of the bayonet must be inculcated into all ranks, so that they go forward with that aggressive determination and confidence born of continual practice.”104
Robert Graves describes the frenzied exhortations of the bayonet instructors at Amiens: “In bayonet-practice, the men had to make horrible grimaces and utter blood-curdling yells as they charged. The instructors’ faces were set in a permanently ghastly grin. ‘Hurt him, now! In at the belly! Tear his guts out!’ they would scream, as the men charged the dummies. ‘Now that upper swing at his privates with the butt. Ruin his chances for life! No more little Fritzes! … Naaoh! Anyone would think you loved the bloody swine, patting and stroking ’em like that! Bite him, I say! Stick your teeth in him and worry him! Eat his heart out!’ ”105
Most instructors t
hemselves were, to use British Army parlance, “all mouth and trousers.” When pressed, the officer in charge of British bayonet training admitted that very few had actually been involved in real bayonet fighting. “But we don’t insist on their telling the strict truth when asked that question.”106
Bayonet fighting may have been rare, but it could be ruthlessly effective.* Gunner officer P. J. Campbell recalled entering a German trench that had just been captured: “The field in front of me looked utterly peaceful, but only fifty yards away there was that trench, full of dead Germans … the grey faces, the poor twisted bodies. They had been bayoneted by the Canadians in the morning, you can’t take prisoners in a front-line trench in an attack.”107 Private Stephen Graham remembered that such ruthlessness had been insisted on when clearing an enemy trench: “The second bayonet man kills the wounded.… You cannot afford to be encumbered by wounded enemies lying at your feet.”108
Like most hand-to-hand combat, it was more often than not messy rather than parade-ground clean: “I saw one man single me out and come at me with his bayonet. He made a lunge at my chest, and, as I guarded, his bayonet glanced aside and wounded me in the hip; but I managed to jab him in the left arm and get him on the ground, and when he was there I hammered him on the head with the butt-end of my rifle.”109
Even with a relatively clean kill there was an appalling intimacy to deal with. Sergeant Stefan Westmann describes bayoneting a Frenchman:
I was confronted by a French corporal with his bayonet to the ready, just as I had mine. I felt the fear of death in that fraction of a second when I realised that he was after my life, exactly as I was after his. But I was quicker than he was, I pushed his rifle away and ran my bayonet through his chest. He fell, putting his hand on the place where I had hit him, and then I thrust again. Blood came out of his mouth and he died.
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