Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (92 page)

French
poilu
Louis Barthas’s unit was first posted to the front late in November, having spent the previous months guarding prisoners and suchlike. He reached Annequin in the Pas de Calais in winter darkness, after travelling from Narbonne in the far south of France. Early next morning on the edge of the town, he was amazed to be familiarly greeted by three spectral figures, caked in mud from head to foot and scarcely identifiable as human. These were
copains
who had left the same barracks only five days earlier. ‘They describe lying for hours in the mud without shelter, amid daily rains and poor food.’ Soon he and his comrades found themselves manning a waterlogged trench. When darkness fell, sleep
eluded them for some hours, tormented as they were by the fears fed by sporadic firing and flares.

Their slumber, when it belatedly came, was interrupted by the clink and thud of picks and shovels. ‘What are you doing?’ Barthas demanded dozily of the dim figures above him. ‘Burying the dead from the last assault,’ growled a voice. But many huddled grey lumps of decaying humanity remained unreachable in no man’s land, prey for rats and circling crows. Another French soldier described how attacking infantrymen felled by machine-guns lay thereafter for a month in front of his trench, ‘lined up as on a manoeuvre. The rain falls on them inexorably and bullets shatter their bleached bones. One evening Jacques, on patrol, saw enormous rats fleeing from under their faded coats. They were fat from human meat. His heart pounding, he crawled towards a dead man. His helmet had rolled away. He was showing a grimacing face, with no flesh; his skull bare, his eyes eaten. A denture had slid onto his rotting shirt, and out of his gaping mouth a foul animal jumped.’

On 18 November, a letter from an unnamed BEF officer was published in the press at home. ‘Sitting here, and reading the English papers that arrive, one cannot help feeling that England has not yet succeeded in banishing the spectacular and romantic conceptions of war which no longer bear any relation to the actuality. The papers still give the impression that war is an affair of dash and clash’ – the author cited publicity accorded to the experiences of the London Scottish at Ypres. ‘This is not what is happening. The bravery of our men, and they are splendidly brave, consists of sitting, often for days and nights, in sodden trenches, with the terrifying noises and earth-shaking concussions of shells … I read of the Sportsmen’s battalion, all athletes [one of the newly formed ‘Pals’ units]. All very nice, if individual prowess were in question, but it is not. What is wanted is ordinary men, trained in discipline and trained to shoot, and plenty of them – men who can be held in not to shoot until the proper moment, not men who are going to whoop and slash and kill two Germans at one stroke.’

Georges Clemenceau, statesman and journalist, wrote in the same spirit: ‘we always represent the soldier grappling with the enemy … Yet how much more elusive is the courage required by enduring inactivity under a hail of shells. How much harder is the test imposed by passive suffering, which continues relentlessly and devours all physical and psychological resistance.’ It was recognised on both sides of the Western Front that there was no prospect of a significant breakthrough before
spring. German officer Rudolf Binding wrote grumpily on 22 November, in Flanders: ‘As matters stand now, not only here but all along the line, both we and the enemy have so crippled ourselves … that … we cannot get the momentum for a thrust … It may be an incredible achievement to create this endless, unbroken line from the Alps to the sea as a monstrous whole; but it is not my idea of strategy.’ Once it was plain that no further big operations were imminent, the BEF granted leave to some officers and men – their first such reprieve since August. In the ensuing scramble for seats on trains, one party of officers rode a locomotive’s coal tender to Boulogne.

Commanders also exploited the breathing space to send home some frail spirits who had been found wanting. These included Brigadier R.H. Davies, a New Zealander deemed to have failed on the Aisne, and Lt. Col. Noel Corry of the Grenadiers, whose crime had been to withdraw without orders from Mons on 23 August. George Jeffreys, his second-in-command, thought Corry badly treated, because his decision had been correct. Other cases were more equivocal: Lt. Col. Delme-Radcliffe of the Royal Welch Fusiliers returned to their depot having suffered a nervous breakdown, a term that covered a range of ill-defined conditions. The simple explanation was that some regular officers had shown themselves unfit for the stresses of war. Such people were treated much more generously by the military hierarchy in 1914 than would be humbler soldiers in the years ahead.

As for those who remained in their trenches, even if victory was not immediately attainable, commanders on both sides convinced themselves that activism was essential, to prevent men from sinking into a slough of despond and inertia. They thus initiated a policy of mounting local attacks, the futility of which was apparent to those obliged to execute them. French junior officers complained bitterly about lives sacrificed by generals merely eager to be seen to be doing something – ‘
de paraître agir
’. On the British front, Capt. John Cowan described a typical battle at Givenchy in December: ‘One of our companies attacked a German saphead and captured their trench, but were enfiladed by machine-guns and very heavily cut up, only two men returning out of fifty that attacked. Lt. Kerr was killed while trying to get back to our trench. C Coy went to their support and we were not relieved until our trenches were blown up. I … was up day & night soaking through & no sleep for five nights. It was hard and onerous work as we expected attacks every night.’

Early on the morning of 21 December, Cowan’s men were cleaning their rifles when ‘a rumbling noise was heard and all the trenches shook.
The parapet and trenches gave way & the ground opened up all around us [a chain of enemy mines had exploded]. Above this were heard the cheers of Germans 10 yds. away, charging with fixed bayonets … eventually [we] had to retire. Some of my men were smothered alive, others bayoneted.’ The Germans had blown ten mines on the Indian corps’ front, which caused severe casualties together with alarm and confusion. In the support trench Cowan rallied ten survivors, and alongside forty Gurkhas of the neighbouring battalion delivered a counter-attack: ‘Some of us charged without weapons at all – I gave Sergeant Brisbane my revolver as his was useless but he got shot through the head by my side … By the grace of God the Germans did not face us but turned about … I picked up a rifle and accounted for seven Germans all hit in the back. I also shot a German officer … But the Germans began to bomb us, working from traverse to traverse & we finally retired to the reserve line under heavy fire.’ Cowan’s battalion lost fourteen officers and 516 men, ‘which was terrible … I was lucky to get through: one shot went through the top of my balaclava.’

The consequence of such a drain of losses in routine trench activity – raids, patrols, sniping, surprise barrages and local attacks – was that British commanders became increasingly concerned about manpower. Home bases were scoured to find replacements until Kitchener’s new formations were trained and equipped for the campaigns of 1915. But the dross of the old army was unimpressive material: Lionel Tennyson wrote in his diary: ‘Sergeant Swinchat arrived with 2nd reinforcement, a most useless NCO. When I threatened to march him up before the Commanding Officer for idleness, he shot himself in the foot and was awarded a court martial.’ Swinchat was reduced to the ranks, but escaped imprisonment in the absence of evidence that he had acted deliberately. He probably thought this the best possible outcome for his interests.

Sir Douglas Haig complained to the War Office about the shortcomings of such men: ‘I said we wanted patriots who knew the importance of the cause for which we are fighting. The whole German people have been impregnated from youth up with an intense patriotic feeling, so that they die willingly for their country. There are not many of our men who will do this unless well led. Now we are short of officers to lead them. I said send out young Oxford and Cambridge men as officers; they understand the crisis in which the British Empire is involved.’ The Germans certainly did not share Haig’s view that their own men were happy to die: they saw themselves facing the same problems of motivation and leadership as their adversaries. Rudolf Binding wrote from Ypres: ‘There is no doubt that the
English and French troops would already have been beaten by trained troops. But these young fellows we have only just trained are too helpless, particularly when the officers have been killed. Our light infantry battalion, almost all Marburg students … have suffered terribly from enemy shellfire.’

In Britain the
Morning Post
campaigned stridently for conscription, but the
New Statesman
claimed that such a drastic step ‘would amount to the sacrifice of nine-tenths of our moral case in this war. It would not only amount to an admission – wholly unjustified – that the heart of the country is not in the war … It would change the basis of our participation. It would no longer be the war of the British people – it would be the war of the British governing classes.’ Lord Northcliffe emphasised his determination to address this issue on his own terms. ‘I have seen the government,’ he told the
Daily Mail
’s assembled executives one evening, ‘and they asked me to work up a strong recruiting campaign. I declined point-blank until our men [press correspondents behind the front] are treated properly, and facilities given them to help recruiting by telling about our army. I can get 500,000 men, but I must do it my own way. They would not agree, so I refused point-blank.’ Thus, through the winter of 1914 and the year that followed, the army struggled to recruit through the voluntary system the numbers of men needed if the country was to play a major role in the war on the continent.

In response to desperate need, the army lowered its minimum height requirement from five feet eight inches in August to five feet five inches in October, and five feet three inches in November. This was partially successful: 1,186,351 British civilians joined the colours in 1914. But other combatant armies already deployed in the field three or four times that number of troops. Only in 1916 did British forces in France attain mass proportionate to their country’s size, and only the introduction of conscription that year allowed them to sustain reinforcements to meet the insatiable demands of the struggle. In any event it is doubtful that a large army could have been armed and equipped earlier: the BEF suffered chronic shortages of warm clothing – the goatskin coats issued that first winter were quite unsuitable – of every kind of weapon and above all of artillery ammunition, until domestic industrial production reached full capacity in the war’s third year.

Also wanting were draught and pack animals. The British took 53,000 horses to France in 1914, and other armies used them in like proportion. The official historians noted: ‘The enormous wastage from animal casualties of a modern war was under-estimated.’ The BEF’s horses and mules suffered an annual mortality rate of 29 per cent, with over 13,000 dead in France and Flanders before New Year 1915 from disease or enemy action. Alexander Johnston reckoned that on the march to the Aisne he passed a dead horse every two hundred yards: ‘poor brutes, they have a terrible time of it’. Many such casualties – shot, crippled or ridden to exhaustion – were drawn from the 165,000 hunters and plough horses purchased for the British Army in the first twelve days of war. In September the retreating Germans threw down spiked metal caltrops, or ‘crows’ feet’, to cripple pursuing cavalry. These frequently achieved their purpose, especially when compounded by French housewives’ practice of tossing stove ashes onto rural tracks without removing nails and other old iron.

Many horses fell victim to incompetent or brutal handling. Vets catalogued examples of mistreatment by ignorant riders and grooms: artillery drivers ‘chucking’ horses in the mouth; cavalry wantonly neglecting to feed or water their mounts; men galloping horses on paved roads without urgent need; riders ignoring saddlesores. Cavalry remount depots were formed at Ormskirk, Swaythling and Shirehampton, and beside each was a veterinary hospital capable of tending a thousand four-legged patients. Army stables at Pitt Corner camp near Winchester at one time held more than 3,000 sick and injured animals.

Meanwhile heavy plough horses, conscripted against expert advice, proved quite unsuitable for the artillery role for which they were earmarked. The official historians noted: ‘Veterinary officers … foresaw their weakness for military purposes, and anticipated the heavy loss which would ensue if they were indiscriminately employed in war … because of great susceptibility to disease, large food and watering requirements, and inability to stand forced marches.’ Heavy horses perished in thousands in France, partly because of the extreme vulnerability of their feet to wet weather. Both the French and the British made huge foreign purchases of replacements, but the right sort of animal was identified only after harsh experience. Many Canadian remounts died on the Atlantic passage, or soon after arriving in Britain. It was found that the most suitable stock were tough American country beasts from areas like the Dakotas, rather than barn-reared horses. By the war’s end, the British Army’s animal strength rose to 450,000; an estimated total of two million hapless horses
and mules served on both sides of the Western Front. The Royal Army Veterinary Corps, which mustered just 360 personnel in 1914, numbered 28,000 four years later.

If healthy and unwounded men, as well as animals, found trench life terrible enough, those who became casualties suffered appallingly. German Alois Löwenstein gazed pityingly upon some typical battlefield victims: ‘Among a bunch of corpses lay three wounded Frenchmen. One man had both legs shattered; the second’s stomach was torn open; the third had tried to shoot himself until one of our chaps took away his revolver. He fired twice at his own head to escape pain, but aimed clumsily, a little too high. The skullcap was uplifted and he moaned in a fashion to melt the heart. Another man lay apparently dead, but with one leg still twitching like that of a partridge that is unable to die. Awful!’