by Paul Ham
On 15 August 1914, Allhusen was gazetted as a second lieutenant. He attended the Royal Military College, Sandhurst the following year. ‘I can’t recollect having learnt anything there,’ he wrote, ‘but the time passed very pleasantly … The Old Etonian coterie was exempt from most of the orders … and we amused ourselves without much interference.’35
He left Sandhurst shortly before his nineteenth birthday and sailed for France on the night of 5 October 1915, in charge of a platoon of working men several years older. At Le Havre, he discovered that he’d already drunk most of the brandy that he’d brought for the battlefield. His regiment camped on a hill above Honfleur, the scene of Henry V’s ‘once more into the breach’ scene, he remarked.36
Allhusen suffered from recurring jaundice, yet he repeatedly persuaded medical boards to pass him fit. ‘This was not very difficult,’ he wrote in 1916, after a three-month convalescence, ‘as at this time Boards took the view that if anybody said he was fit he was certain to be.’ Another man, he noticed, passed fit and ‘could hardly walk’.37
Allhusen spent the first half of 1917 either in hospital or on sick leave. His frequent Channel crossings showed how total war had transformed the voyage. In 1915, he’d been ‘shown to my cabin by a steward, asking unnecessary questions about breakfast next morning. I had slept between sheets and had, in general, travelled to the war like a gentleman.’ In 1917:
I was bundled onto a small, smelly, overcrowded boat, hermetically sealed to stop the slightest glimmer of light showing. It was just a question of getting as many human beings on board as the ship would carry. There was barely standing room for everybody, and no question of lying down.
After hours at sea, ‘the atmosphere was indescribable’.38
Nineteen-year-old Corporal John Ronald Skirth, of Eastbourne, had had a protected, Christian upbringing. He excelled at maths and enjoyed reading the Romantic poets. A few weeks before he left for France, in March 1917, he realised that he’d ‘fallen in love’ with Ella, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl. The couple promised to devote their lives to each other when he came home – a common enough dream. He sailed on the Mona’s Queen, an antiquated old bucket of a paddle steamer from the Isle of Man, which would be sunk by a German submarine on her return trip.39
Skirth arrived at Le Havre at dawn on 1 April and spent the first two nights under canvas bell tents in pouring rain. In his wallet, he carried a photo of Ella, ‘wearing the spotted white dress she wore the day I fell in love with her’.40 According to his identity disc, Skirth was officially ‘120331 Corporal Skirth, J.R., B.C.A., C. of E., 239 Siege Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery’. B.C.A. stood for ‘battery commander’s assistant’, whose job was to gather the information on weather, wind, distance, topography and other variables necessary to calculate the target range for the guns. His battery operated the ‘heavies’ – heavy guns that fired 6- or 9.2-inch-calibre shells – as well as four howitzers, ‘stubby fat-looking monsters’, weighing two tons each, which had to be towed to the front behind tractors.
Skirth’s naivety made him an easy target for his friends, the ‘Tyneside Twins’ Geordie and Bill, who mocked him for his two stripes, ‘posh’ accent and ‘because I was barmy enough to read poetry’.41 They quickly fastened onto Skirth’s sexual inexperience (he was a virgin): ‘[T]hey were a decade ahead of me in … their familiarity with every detail of the female anatomy.’ Skirth’s other ‘best friend’ was a red-haired, six-foot amateur Scottish boxing champion from Glasgow, called Jock Shiels. In a few months, Jock would drag Skirth out of a gas-filled shell hole, ‘in which, but for him I would have died a painful death’.42
Skirth grew to hate his commanding officer ‘more than any of my country’s enemies’, a man who ‘in every way possible sought to humiliate me’.43 This officer, a public school and Camberley Staff College-educated ‘100% professional’ and recipient of the Distinguished Service Order (DSO), wore a neat, steel-grey moustache on a face ‘desiccated into parchment’ by the suns of India and Aden. Clearly, he had little time for men like Skirth, whom he regarded as delicate examples of the ‘New Army’; yet he valued Skirth’s maths brain, which served as the battery’s ‘calculating machine’.44
In turn, the commanding officer was apparently unpopular throughout the ranks. ‘Everyone,’ Skirth recalls, ‘from senior officers down to the humblest ranked gunner feared [him]. I never saw him smile. I never heard him utter one word of praise to anyone. I never saw him perform one act of kindness. In addition I never saw his face register emotion of any kind – until one terrible day at Passchendaele.’45
Fathers faced a tough choice: should they avoid the risk of denying their children a father’s love and care? Or should they offer their country their able bodies in its time of need? In 1914, the 34-year-old E. C. Allfree was ‘just a peaceful solicitor’ living in Broadstairs, east Kent, ‘with a wife and three children to keep’. When Britain declared war, he was sitting in the Country Inn near Canterbury ‘watching the cricket during the Canterbury Cricket Week’. He had had no military training, never fired a rifle and didn’t know how to ride. What good would I be as a soldier, he wondered. How could I leave my wife and family? Who would support them? What would happen to my business?46
Posters and the press warned him that Britain needed every fit man, and he hurt his wife’s feelings when he said, ‘This is the first time I have ever wished I was not married.’47 He was not being unkind: ‘I meant that if one was single, one would be relieved of that horrible indecision as to what one’s duty was.’ As a married man, he enlisted in the Derby Scheme’s reserves, composed of those willing to go but not yet needed. He served as a ‘special constable’, drilled and practised shooting, guarded the local waterworks in case enemy aliens poisoned the water and wandered around at night ‘looking for spies and landing parties and finding none …’48
The demands on manpower soon came knocking. On 10 June 1916, his group were ordered to present themselves at Canterbury Barracks. By then, Allfree’s wife, Dolly, had given birth to a fourth child, now six months old. Allfree moved the family from Broadstairs – then vulnerable to German air raids – to a cottage in Herne Bay and drew up his will.
Noting Allfree’s above-average intelligence, the army awarded him a commission, and he joined the Royal Garrison Artillery. On 27 April 1917, the new Lieutenant Allfree sailed from Southampton aboard the SS King Edward, which was ‘absolutely packed … soldiers everywhere as tight as sardines’. They crossed the Channel in darkness, escorted on either side by ‘torpedo boats’ to protect them from enemy submarines. Men slept in their lifebelts, in the gangways and on the decks, ‘everywhere and on everything’. Allfree did not sleep: ‘there seemed no spot that invited sleep. I leant over the side of the ship and drank in the weirdness of it all.’49 All through the night, the only sounds were the chunck, chunck, chunck of the engines and the swish of the black water along the ship’s sides.
At first sight, Lieutenant Patrick Campbell, nineteen, seemed another sensitive middle-class young man prone to fall prey to his imagination and crack up. Like many junior officers, Campbell was barely a man: his voice had not yet fully broken, he lacked self-confidence and his platoon’s carnal sense of humour shocked him.
In April 1917, he was saying goodbye to his parents on the platform at Oxford Station. It was ‘very disagreeable’, he recalls.50 They had already lost one son and their eldest was stationed in Mesopotamia. The previous night, his father had read to him from St John’s Gospel, ‘Let not your Heart be Troubled, neither let it be Afraid,’ and advised him that he could do ‘what any Tom, Dick or Harry’ had done. His mother offered more practical advice: ‘You have to go, I know you wouldn’t be happy if all the others went and you were left behind.’51
From the ship’s deck, Campbell looked down on the near-deserted wharves: ‘Nobody … was interested, no-one was seeing us off, there would be no waving from the shore.’52 The thought that he would not make a good officer tormented him. He felt
afraid, not of death, but of fear itself. Touching in its pathos is his youthful idea that a prefect’s beating or a game of football would prepare him for artillery fire: ‘I had been able to bear these things as well as anyone else, I should be able to bear shellfire. But a slight doubt remained, I could not entirely banish the feeling of unease.’53 Campbell gazed at the stars and looked forward to ‘my first view of a foreign country’ and the beginning of ‘a Great Adventure’.54
Over many of these men, observed Richard Aldington, ‘hung a sense of doom’, which a British staff officer ‘admirably if somewhat ruthlessly expressed’ to a meeting of subalterns. ‘You are the War generation,’ he said. ‘You were born to fight this War, and it’s got to be won … So far as you are concerned as individuals it doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn whether you are killed or not. Most probably you will be killed, most of you.’55
2
THE HUMAN FACTOR
I am ‘meant to win’ by some Superior Power.
Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, in a letter to wife, 27 December 1915
I am not prepared to accept the position of a butcher’s boy driving cattle to the slaughter.
Prime Minister David Lloyd George, 9 February 1917
At what cost was the war worth winning? Would the great struggle extirpate the European powers, their empires and Western civilisation itself? For what were they fighting: king and country, freedom, the privileges of the ruling class, the war profiteers? If they were winning, why did they have so little to eat? At the start of 1917, people of all political persuasions and social backgrounds, from Liverpool factory workers to liberal intellectuals, German housewives to Russian Bolsheviks, were asking such questions. The huge losses on the Somme, at Verdun and in the eastern theatre had traumatised European society, and rumblings of dissent were growing: workers were refusing to work in war industries; civilians were turning against the war; even rogue conservatives were rethinking whether the huge cost was worth it. The Australian people upset Britain (and infuriated the Labor prime minister, Billy Hughes, who lost his seat as a result) by narrowly rejecting conscription in a national referendum on 28 October 1916, sending a clear message that the little dominion would not jump to fulfil British demands for more men.
And men were precisely what the British war effort needed. ‘The overwhelming preponderance in man power,’ David Lloyd George later wrote, ‘which had given the Allies such a false sense of security and lured them in 1915 and 1916 into enterprises where human life was thrown lavishly and recklessly into the conflagration to feed the flames as if there was an endless store of available men in reserve, had now practically disappeared.’ Militarily, the Central Powers looked ‘stronger and more unbreakable than they had ever been’.1
By 1917, the belligerents’ ‘war aims’ had fundamentally shifted. The Entente Powers (Britain, France and Russia) continued to insist on their 1914 goals – that they were at war to punish German aggression and liberate Europe from tyranny. Germany and her allies continued to insist that they were fighting a defensive war, a ‘preventive strike’, to secure the Reich and their empires against the three-way vice of the Triple Entente. By now, however, the world had changed, and the powers adjusted their policies and propaganda accordingly. Tsarist Russia teetered on the brink of collapse, and France and Britain were gravely weakened: the Triple Entente looked like crumbling, and deep pessimism infected the three governments. Britain and France used state propaganda and an acquiescent press to reassure their people that they were engaged in a sacred struggle to avenge the immense sacrifices of 1916. Germany had come through 1916 in a stronger state, and the Prussian High Command believed they could win the war and implement the fantastic program for European conquest that they’d unveiled in September 1914, to which the German government had not committed.
In fact, the European powers were in a state of crystallising panic. They had everything to lose if they lost – their empires, markets and financial power. A new enemy, the ‘enemy within’, was threatening to overthrow the very systems of government that had prevailed for centuries, founded on the divine right of kings, imperial rule (and partial democracy), and the concentration of capital in the hands of a small elite. The new socialist and liberal parties were determined to overturn the political order that had tolerated systemic inequity and social exclusion. Extremists in Russia and Germany went further: they aimed to dismember the ruling classes and reorder society along communist lines. A spectre was indeed haunting Europe, as Karl Marx had warned: workers were organising and unions railing against their employers. The shortage of food and huge casualties were political gifts to opposition parties such as Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the British Labour Party. On the extreme fringes, the Bolsheviks, Anarchists and other militant movements welcomed the prospect of their nations’ military collapse as the handmaiden of revolution and the decapitation of the bourgeoisie. Lenin, the Bolsheviks’ self-exiled leader, longed for his country’s defeat as an opportunity to seize power and destroy Tsarism forever. The authoritarians in power in Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary played into their hands by refusing even moderate social reform.
Even that relatively docile political species, the British worker, had begun to place class loyalty ahead of loyalty to country. Socialist leaders exploited the widespread feeling that the English aristocracy who had taken Britain to war in 1914 had more in common with their German and Russian counterparts than with the ordinary people of their country. The perception exacerbated extreme social tension. Relatively liberal Britain, driven by rising political stars David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, had made concessions to social reform: the introduction, for example, of a collective labour law (Trade Disputes Act 1906), a nod at security for the elderly (Old Age Pensions Act 1908) and provision of assistance to the unemployed (National Insurance Act 1911). The irony of the state caring for the old and unemployed while killing off the young was not lost on many soldiers.
If Britain was a beacon of social progress in the leaden, authoritarian facade of Europe, her government postponed deeper reforms: to extend votes to women, improve public healthcare and alleviate extreme poverty. Mothers had no say in the choice of government that would force her sons to fight and die, if necessary. Many workers were outraged at the profiteering of war-related businesses at a time of extreme food shortages: a record number of strikes would animate 1917. All of this alarmed the richest echelons and capital-owning classes. A glance at the graphs in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century shows just what was at stake for Europe’s upper orders: in 1914, total net private wealth in Europe was worth about 600–700 per cent of national income.2 The elites had everything to lose if they lost the war.
Governments were thus acutely aware that they were fighting two wars: against the enemy without, who wanted to carve up their empires and extract a big war dividend; and against the enemy within, who wanted social reform, votes and higher wages (or the ‘redistribution of capital’). The year of 1917 would see the most acute expression of this inner-outer tension, especially in Russia. Only total victory would give the German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian regimes the authority they needed to defeat their internal enemies and preserve their empires. Having refused to liberalise their otiose systems, they had little choice other than to fight to the bitter end, for their ancient privileges and financial power, the preservation of which they continued to sell to their people as a noble sacrifice for god, the Fatherland and the incumbent crowned head.
In sum, the Great Powers’ war aims now boiled down to ‘victory at all costs’, as the German historian Holger Herwig concludes:
the more the war cost in blood and treasure and the longer it went on, the greater the clamour for post-war gains. The conservative regimes of the Central Powers feared that failure to bring home vast indemnities and annexations would endanger their near-exclusive rights to rule.3
The crowning irony is that the imperial dynasties of Russia, Germany, Austria-Hung
ary and the Ottomans were genuinely at risk just as their people were losing interest in defending them.
While most governments and their press pulpits continued to bellow for war, a rising number of moderate, middle-class people were beginning to disagree with them, on moral and religious grounds. Shocked by the huge losses on the Western Front, many British, French and German people no longer believed the costs justified the aims of the war, whatever they happened to be. The Catholic Church had made its opposition to the war very clear, and would make several doomed appeals for a peaceful settlement. Indeed, one of the church’s most outspoken anti-war voices was Daniel Mannix, the Irish-born Catholic archbishop of Australia, who provoked uproar in 1917 by damning the global conflict as ‘just an ordinary trade war’.4 In Germany, middle-class women who couldn’t feed their children were taking to the streets in violent protests, stealing and attacking shops. For them, a looted ham meant far more than news of the fall of Bucharest.5
Powerful government officials felt moved to find a peaceful solution. An eminent British example was the former Conservative foreign secretary and statesman Lord Lansdowne (Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne), who, in November 1916, privately circulated a letter in the Cabinet urging the government to seek a negotiated peace with Germany. No war aims could be advanced after the Somme, Lansdowne argued, that would recompense Britain for the cost of victory in the blood of the nation’s youth.6 The British Government were aghast that so prominent a Conservative should put forward a ‘defeatist’ position. It was considered exceedingly bad form, notwithstanding the fact that several powerful figures, including Herbert Asquith, the embattled Liberal prime minister who had recently lost his son on the Somme, were ‘in complete concurrence’ with Lansdowne.7