Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (93 page)

During the preceding half-century, military medicine had advanced less than many other branches of science. In the absence of antibiotics, gangrene remained a massive killer, its contribution increased by the days of delay many men endured before their wounds were properly treated. Patients often deluded themselves that they were recovering because their pain receded. In truth, however, they had merely acquired the numbness and pallor that signified imminent death. Survival required extraordinary luck. René Cassin was shot in the stomach – almost always a fatal occurrence – near Saint-Mihiel on 12 October. The French army’s medical services decreed that he could be treated only by his own regiment’s doctors, who were four hundred miles away. He endured a ten-day journey to reach them, followed by an operation performed without anaesthetic. The experience made him a lifelong crusader for wounded veterans and human rights.

When Edouard Cœurdevey entered a French field hospital to pay a last visit to a friend who was dying there, he found eighty men lying on straw in a sugar factory, still dressed in their mud-soaked uniforms. The hospital’s sole bed was reserved for a man identified as close to expiry. In October a railway points failure dispatched an ambulance train carrying five hundred wounded along a track which led to a blown bridge across the Marne. Only two of the train’s fifteen carriages – by chance, those that carried German casualties – escaped a headlong descent into the river. Not every nurse was a sister of mercy. Captain Plieux de Diusse was shocked to see one woman striding down a line of railway wagons laden with groaning men. At each open door she demanded perfunctorily whether
anyone needed a doctor, but when a victim begged aid for his comrade whose stomach wound had reopened, unleashing the stench of gas gangrene, the nurse ignored him and marched on. De Diusse eventually found an overworked doctor, told him of the case, then fled the scene: ‘I have had enough of these horrors, and leave them to it,’ he wrote.

Louis Maufrais, an army medical orderly, described his own pathetic efforts to treat a wounded man: ‘his face, with a broken jaw, is no more than a bloody mess. Having removed some fragments from his mouth we managed to lower a tube into the oesophagus through which we pass a sort of enema, some water and then some coffee.’ Maufrais’s aid post often lacked sufficient water even to wash the mud from his own hands before he dressed a wound. He and his comrades had nothing to offer patients suffering shock, as were most, and blood transfusions were impossible in such an unhygienic environment. He depicted one post at which he served: ‘to the left of the entrance two corpses are lying in the sun covered with a fragment of tent canvas; behind them is a tall heap of equipment, rifles, bayonets, blood-soaked linen. The interior is lit only by a few candles and two lamps. Gradually my eyes discern the wounded lying on the ground, almost on top of each other. There is a smell of living matter, blood, vomit; the only sounds [are] ceaseless cries. The most difficult challenge is to place a foot between one boy’s legs and a knee under the armpit of another in order to attend to a third.’

Maufrais was also required to bury the dead, ‘often stinking appallingly, in a state of total putrefaction, their faces black, swollen and crawling with maggots. One needed a strong stomach to undress them and remove their identity tags.’ In the first months of the war, officers were interred separately from their men, but as casualties mounted the French army issued orders that only those holding the rank of captain and above should qualify for such a privilege. The French government, in response to a public clamour, eventually allowed families to choose to take home their dead loved ones, but this became a contentious issue when many proved unable to afford the cost of moving the bodies. The British and Germans, meanwhile, buried almost all their private soldiers in common graves close to where they fell.

The battlefield had not yet been ironed by explosives into a featureless mudscape – this required the labour of many more months and thousands of heavy guns. In 1914 some buildings still survived, together with battered hedges and woods, but day by day their numbers were depleted. A German
regimental commander near Poelkapelle, one Maj. Grimm, described how some of his men made themselves wonderfully comfortable in a farmhouse, where he himself had his first shave for days. But then their haven became the target of an artillery concentration which killed most of the occupants.

As men grew accustomed to living and exchanging fire month after month in unchanging settings, local landmarks achieved notoriety. The Rifle Brigade fought a fierce battle for a position near Messines known as ‘the Birdcage’, because it was so heavily wired. At Le Bassée, ‘the Leave Train’ was a derelict chain of wagons, filled with concrete by the Germans and used to some effect by their snipers. There, a fortunate British soldier might ‘cop a Blighty one’ – suffer a light wound that earned him a ride home, hence the name. There was much slaughter at a position in the Vosges known to Germans as ‘HWK’ –
Hartsmannsweilerkopf
– while the French called it ‘
Vieille Amande
’, ‘Old Almond’. The Kaiser’s soldiers devoted immense effort and accepted heavy casualties to gain possession of this hilltop, because it commanded the road to Mulhouse.

In 1914 the armies lacked almost every necessity for positional warfare. Telephones were in short supply, but signallers could not expose themselves to flash Morse signals or use semaphore flags, as they had been accustomed to do in colonial campaigns. Instead, commanders were often obliged to send written messages, at mortal risk to the runners who carried them. Rifles fouled with mud and powder residue could not be properly cleaned, because of a lack of oil and cotton waste. As a result they often jammed, a problem compounded by poor-quality ammunition, supplied by shoddy manufacturers. When some Royal Welch soldiers killed a pig at an abandoned farm, they used its fat to grease their weapons. Sanitary arrangements were primitive: men urinated into bully-beef tins, which were then tossed as far as possible over the parapet. It was likewise necessary to defecate in the shelter of a trench. Until routines for removing waste were introduced, this too was merely thrown into no man’s land. When engineers laid a single strand of protective barbed wire across the Royal Welch’s front, one of Frank Richards’s mates said contemptuously that a giraffe could walk under it. But for weeks, there was no more British wire to be had.

The Germans took much more trouble to make themselves comfortable than did the British, French or Belgians. They not only entrenched deeply, but also added homely touches to their dugouts. Lt. Adolf Spemann admired the shelving, skylights and recesses with which his men adorned
their quarters. Neatly painted entrance signs identified such residences as ‘Villa Sorgenfrei’ – Carefree House. Another bunker was lined with dud French projectiles, and christened ‘Palais des Obus’ – Shell Palace. The Germans ate better than the French, too: Louis Barthas’s unit subsisted for weeks upon cold coffee, a chunk of dried meat and some mudstained bread, distributed daily at dawn. Private enterprise supplemented this meagre diet, for those willing and able to pay: each night, one of Barthas’s comrades risked court-martial to slip out of the line and walk to Béthune, where he fulfilled food orders for half the company, returning before daybreak heavily burdened.

Professional soldiers, including the highest, now viewed the struggle as a contest of rival wills, in which it was essential that their side should prevail by displaying a superior tolerance of suffering and loss. On 7 December, Charles de Gaulle wrote to his mother: ‘What is this conflict but a war of extermination? A struggle of this kind, which in its range, significance and fury goes beyond anything that Europe has ever known, cannot be waged without enormous sacrifices. It has to be won. The winner will be the side that desires it most ardently.’ De Gaulle recoiled in disgust from the spirit of co-existence that developed in many parts of the line. After digging a trench towards the Germans to frustrate a matching enemy sap, he urged his battalion commander that they should use it to bring down fire. The major strongly dissented: ‘Don’t start anything like this in our sector. You will cause fireworks. Leave the enemy in peace at the Bonnet Persan, since he leaves us in peace in our part of the world!’ De Gaulle wrote sourly: ‘Trench warfare has a serious drawback: it exaggerates this feeling in everyone – if I leave the enemy alone he will not bother me … It is lamentable.’

Yet units which confronted each other for weeks on end disagreed with the earnest young French officer. They pursued accommodations to make existence fractionally less intolerable. In woods north of Pont à Mousson lay the spring of Père Hilarion, from which both the French and the Germans drew water. North of Ypres, after heavy rain British and Germans alike sometimes perched on their parapets because trenches were flooded and field drains wrecked by shelling. Amid common misery, neither showed much enthusiasm for starting a firefight. Early in December, a German surgeon reported that his neighbouring infantry regiment had a regular half-hour evening truce with the French, during which the dead were brought in for burial, and the combatants exchanged newspapers. Eventually, however, the French abandoned this easy relationship:
‘obviously they were cross about our latest victories against the Russians’. More likely, some senior officer intervened. Gen. d’Urbal wrote warning his
confrère
Gen. Grossetti: ‘Please note that men who stay too long in the same sector become familiar with their neighbours opposite. This results in conversations and sometimes visits which often lead to unfortunate consequences.’

A new mood was sweeping the warring nations, which owed nothing to the romantic delusions and enthusiasms of August. When Louis Barthas left Narbonne for the front in November, he contrasted the lack of ceremony, the absence of cheers and kisses, attending his unit’s departure with late-summer’s parades of enthusiasm. It seemed to him symbolic that whereas four months earlier women had crowded the station platform pressing fruit, jam, wine on soldiers, now they sold these commodities to them for cash. Minor wounds had become objects of desire. After Sgt. Wilhelm Kaisen’s brother was shot in the left hand, Kaisen told his family jealously: ‘he really hit the jackpot’. François Mayer suffered severe lacerations when he threw himself to the ground under shellfire and landed on a heap of broken glass. His injuries secured him a precious few days out of the line. ‘I am desolated to abandon my
copains
, but have promised to return to them within the week.’ Behind the line, he overcame his initial embarrassment about being fussed over by sympathetic civilians: ‘Everywhere I am evasive about admitting the nature of my wound and give the impression it was made by a bullet. The fruits of my half-lie are several quarts of coffee and glasses of rum, given free.’

Young German gunner Herbert Sulzbach met some French prisoners, and was bewildered to hear most profess relief that they were on their way to Germany with whole skins, the war behind them. It was the same in the French lines: a German prisoner told Edouard Cœurdevey: ‘We are much better off here than fighting.’ When some of the man’s comrades reproached him, Cœurdevey asked if they thought France was to blame for the war. Neither France nor Germany, they said: ‘it is Russia that is responsible. We soldiers fight because we have to.’ There were still a few aspirant heroes, however, who derived a flagellatory delight from their predicament, or at least from pretending that they did. Julian Grenfell, idolised by his peers for reasons mystifying to posterity, wrote in October: ‘I adore war … It is like a big picnic without the objectlessness of a picnic. It is all the best fun … It just suits my stolid health and stolid nerves and barbaric disposition. The fighting-excitement vitalizes everything, every
sight and action. One loves one’s fellow-man so much more when one is bent on killing him.’

Far more soldiers, however, loathed every moment of their ordeal, of which the infantry bore the overwhelming burden. They also resented the fact that behind the lines, hundreds of thousands of support troops lived in relative comfort, able to sleep, wash, enjoy wholesome food with little danger of violent interruption. A German soldier said sourly: ‘The war is like a cinema. The action’s at the front and the best seats are at the back.’ Gunner Wilhelm Hillern-Flinsch wrote: ‘In the rear they are living exactly as in peacetime and indeed do not notice the war. Infantry and pioneers bear the brunt of it all, as I see it. They wear funeral shrouds day and night.’ Alois Löwenstein wrote home to his daughter Agnes, expressing dismay about his own privileged role as a driver, not much in harm’s way: ‘Some soldiers conduct lightning: it strikes them again and again. Your adored father, however, is located far from any thunderbolts, which sometimes makes me feel ashamed of myself. I can’t help my position: I would like to face the thunderstorm if I was allowed to.’

If Löwenstein was sincere, he was unusual. As ‘Ma’ Jeffreys led his men forward to take another turn in the line, he described an encounter at Merville with an unnamed fellow Grenadier officer. Jeffreys demanded, ‘When are you coming back to the regiment?’ His acquaintance answered, ‘Good God, you don’t think I’d be such a fool as to do that! I’ve got a good job.’ Jeffreys wrote bitterly: ‘He’s an arch-shirker and brazen-faced about it into the bargain. He’s a draft-conducting officer on the railway, or something of the sort.’

Les biffins
– ‘the scavengers’, as French infantry sardonically called themselves – felt increasing contempt towards the long ‘tail’ of men who wore the same uniform as themselves, but shared few of their risks. One officer happened upon some marines on the road, travelling in vehicles rather than footslogging. He asked their commander if they had taken any losses, and received a shrug: ‘very few’, which seemed to mean none. The army officer wrote: ‘I look at my poor troopers, marching up the road on their way to be pulverised in waterlogged trenches. No, decidedly in this war there is no equality in the sufferings endured by the different combatants at the front.’ A party of French officers, back from the line for a few days, were eating in a hotel at Houdain, where a corps headquarters was stationed. One of the
biffins
recoiled in disgust from the cries of ‘Waiter! Another Chartreuse!’ uttered by staff officers obviously accustomed to dine every night in such easy circumstances.