Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  The social order had changed for men as well as for women. The rate of casualties had been three times as high among junior officers as among other ranks. The war had destroyed a slice of the old ruling class, which had absorbed a disproportionate blow: 18 per cent of public schoolboys who had fought died, against 11 per cent of the total; and the generation that had left school between 1908 and 1915 – born between about 1890 and 1897 – had been especially badly hit.5 Of all the public schools Eton had suffered the most deaths, with 1,157 old boys’ names immortalised on a memorial occupying the length of an entire cloister. Many of the old officer class who had survived were returning to uncertainty and reduced private incomes. Great estates were broken up and great houses sold. Class barriers had been eroded or broken, not just because some NCOs became officers. Post-war reconstruction presented new opportunities for men and women to break out of their pre-war roles. Government grants would enable entrepreneurial ex-soldiers to start businesses, or to farm, and be their own masters.

  The most significant factor with which the country had to deal was the aftermath of a terrible slaughter of its young men. In 1914 the British regular Army and its reserves had amounted to 733,514 soldiers. Over the next four years another 5.1 million had been recruited, so that by the Armistice 22.1 per cent of the UK male population was serving. Around 705,000 men from the British Isles had died: from the British Empire, another 250,000. Over 560,000 had fallen in Flanders: half had no known grave.6 Given the controversy over Irish recruitment, and the consequences of its mishandling, one should note that 49,435 of the dead had been Irish. A disproportionate number were from what is now Northern Ireland.7 Although a soldier had a higher chance of dying in the Crimean War (thanks to disease ravaging the Army there before Florence Nightingale fought the problem), Britain in November 1918 was, because of the sheer numbers who had fought, a land with a total of widows and orphans more historically disproportionate than at any time since the civil wars of the seventeenth century. It was overwhelmed with of mothers lacking sons to support them, and young women who would never find a husband. The proportion of women in the population had risen, especially in the younger age group. An estimated 340,000 children lost one or both parents.8 ‘Maybe the true misfortune of the war was that the older men remained obstinately alive,’ A. J. P. Taylor reflected.9 Influenza remained rampant, with a third wave (worse on mainland Europe than in Britain) taking hold by February 1919. Enemy action, for all the terror it wrought and the outrage it caused, had killed fewer than 1,500 civilians.

  In the 1930s Arthur Mee, a popular topographer and journalist who wrote the county-by-county series The King’s England, identified just thirty-two ‘thankful villages’ in England and Wales where no man had been killed in the war, and which therefore had no war memorial. It is now believed there are fifty-three, out of nearly 11,200 civil parishes in England and Wales; there is none in Scotland or Northern Ireland. Taylor wrote that in the British Isles the loss of men was actually lower than that caused by emigration before 1914, when many Irish went to America and many British to the ‘white’ parts of the Empire – Canada, Australia, New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, the recently formed Union of South Africa. Between 1903 and 1913 around 3.15 million Britons emigrated, around half of them to Canada, where another half million would follow them by the end of the Second World War.10

  There was an understandable demand for formal means of remembering the dead. A temporary national cenotaph would appear in Whitehall in the summer of 1919, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens after consultation with the government, and would the following year be replaced by a permanent stone structure. In the 1920s the poppy, symbol of the fields in Flanders where so much of the BEF’s war had been fought, would become a ubiquitous symbol of remembrance in early November as the commemoration of the Armistice anniversary approached. But in the spring of 1919 one casualty of war above all others was lodged in the public’s consciousness, as an example of the cost of the conflict and the values for which it had been fought. On 15 May Edith Cavell’s funeral procession wound through London en route to Westminster Abbey. No aspect of pomp was left untouched to honour this most unpompous of women. When the ship bearing her remains arrived at Dover the bells of the town’s church rang a solemn and lengthy peal. From Dover to London people lined the railway tracks to salute her train, which was met at Victoria by, among others, a phalanx of nurses. Her coffin, draped by a Union flag, was taken on a gun carriage along Victoria Street to the Abbey, the street lined with soldiers and the gun carriage escorted by men from the Coldstream Guards with arms reversed. ‘Officers saluted,’ The Times reported, ‘and women and children stood in reverent quiet.’11

  Flags flew at half-mast; the congregation in the Abbey included Queen Alexandra, ministers and ambassadors. The Asquiths were among the notables at the funeral, the ex-prime minister finding ‘a crowded but most undistinguished and unrepresentative congregation’ on reaching the Abbey.12 After the service the procession continued through the City to Liverpool Street, and the coffin was placed in a railway carriage freshly painted and draped in purple, the colour of mourning, and white. Nurse Cavell’s remains were taken by train to Norwich, where she was buried with full military honours in the precincts of the cathedral. The train was met in Norwich by a guard of honour of the Norfolk Regiment; the approach to the cathedral was thronged with people. ‘Let us forgive, if we have the strength,’ Rider Haggard, a Norfolk man, wrote, ‘but forget – never!’13

  The damaged living, as well as the dead, required society’s attention. One and a half million men had been afflicted by gas or wounds, and shell shock was endemic. As long ago as August 1916 the question of how the nation should discharge its obligations towards those wounded too severely to work, and to their dependents and those of the Glorious Dead, had already started to vex MPs. In a long Commons debate it had been proposed that in addition to the statutory, state-funded benefits agreed by Parliament early in the war, the people of Britain should show their gratitude by contributing to voluntary funds, organised on a county-by-county basis, from which additional help could be given to families in special need. Yet not everyone felt the burden should fall on charity. William Rutherford, a Liverpool Unionist MP, had spoken for many when he said:

  Fourteen years ago I was Lord Mayor of Liverpool myself. In Liverpool in that year we had sixty veterans from the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny, and three-quarters of those veterans who came to the little annual dinner that we gave them year by year had to be got out of the workhouse to attend, wearing their medals. It was a sight to impress anyone who had any respect or regard for their own country to see these men, and to think that it was in the workhouses where they were driven to spend their days in order to get the necessaries to eat and drink, and clothe. We believe, in making this matter a question of principle, that in the midst of the splendid sacrifices of this War—a sacrifice of lives, property, sons, limbs, business and prospects—no man broken in this War, nor his wife, his mother, nor his child, ought to suffer want or hardship, or to be obliged to beg their bread. It is not charity to which these people and these classes are entitled or for which they are asking; it is simple justice. Those who lose their lives for us in this War, we know that God Almighty will look after them; but those whom they leave behind are left as a legacy to the House of Commons, which has charge of the funds of the country and ought to see that common justice is done, and to see that the bargain which was made with these men is honourably carried out.14

  Lady Haig investigated how best to care for men who through disability struggled to return to civilian life. Many wounded officers, who unlike those of the old regular Army had no private incomes but had risen from the ranks, faced penury. When a week after the Armistice Haig heard from Lloyd George that the King, on his recommendation, had wished to give his commander-in-chief a viscountcy, Haig asked for any question of his rewards to ‘stand over until the PM has fixed allowances for Disabled Officers and men’, as well as gratu
ities ‘for all ranks of the Armies under my orders.’15 Haig felt the war disabled had been ‘disregarded’, and explained to the King that he had refused a peerage to bring greater pressure on the government to assist them.16 For all his faults, Haig was determined to do the right thing by those who had survived his tactical and strategic errors, and his concern led to the formation in 1921 of the British Legion.

  For some weeks, and despite questions in Parliament, Haig continued to refuse a peerage. The Disabled Officers Fund was spending £5,000 a month and had almost run out of money, and the number of ‘very sad cases’ put before Haig distressed him.17 The DOF money ‘goes to help (chiefly) Officers who have insufficient or no pensions at all and Doctors’ Certificates show many are unable to work and yet have no pensions or subsistence. What is to be the future of these poor people? They have given their all to the Country and without any bargaining.’ It was a powerful consideration for Haig that were he to relent and take the peerage offered him, it would give him a place in Parliament whence he could conduct his campaign far more formidably.

  Lloyd George told Sir Philip Sassoon, Haig’s private secretary, that the delay in looking after disabled ex-servicemen was the fault of John Hodge, pensions minister until the reconstruction in January 1919, who had caused ‘lamentable chaos’. Given the political risks Hodge, originally a Labour MP, had taken during the war to stop strikes, this was unfortunate recompense, and another sight of the prime minister’s familiar and unappealing trait of evading responsibility. He said Hodge’s successor, Sir Laming Worthington-Evans, had promised the system would be working smoothly within two months.

  Many old soldiers suffered from what was called ‘shell shock’. This had been recognised from the beginning of the war, even if early treatment was not especially effective. At first the victims were called ‘nerve-shaken soldiers’ and the Lunacy Commission was responsible for their care. In 1916 the Hampshire County Lunatic Asylum was set aside for these soldiers, as was a part of Netley Hospital in the same county, and the Maudsley on Denmark Hill in south-east London; other such units soon proliferated, such as at Maghull on Merseyside, and the Springfield War Hospital at Wandsworth. Officers – most famously Siegfried Sassoon – were treated at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland; Sassoon’s doctor, and its medical officer, Captain William Halse Rivers, who in 1904 had co-founded the British Journal of Psychology, became the leading authority on shell shock.

  Rivers, influenced by Sigmund Freud, thought the attempt by some of his colleagues to make the shell-shocked repress their memories was wrong. He believed that those who tried to bury them found them returning during sleep, and traumatising them, whereas learning to confront reality would help overcome the trauma: this would be achieved by what he called ‘a process of prolonged re-education’.18 Shell shock entirely misdescribed the mental damage done to soldiers by their experiences in the Great War; for all the efforts made by Rivers (who died in 1922) and his colleagues, some men’s lives were blighted for decades, and some exhibited physical symptoms such as shaking. Afflicted men were an all too common sight in post-war Britain.

  The government recognised the threat of returning soldiers creating an epidemic of venereal disease, unprecedented even by the standards of the war. Newspapers carried precautionary advertisements; and VD specialists were demobilised before the men, to ensure that treatment could be provided where it was needed. One in five demobilised men had VD: the government offered treatment free of charge to try to control it. The press, running articles about the dangers of syphilis, had lost much of its pre-war coyness, but still could not bring itself to describe the specific ‘simple sanitary measures’ – condoms – that would prevent VD spreading.19 Men home on leave had been responsible for 55,000 new cases in 1918, with 16,000 – 10,000 men and 6,000 women – in the London district alone.20 There were 140 treatment centres, but more were needed. While the government devoted more resources to clinics and education, Dr Randall Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose understanding of the soldiery appeared limited, pronounced helpfully that ‘I am sure it would not do good if we did not bear in mind that it is not only a medical question but a moral question too, and that we must look on the ethical aspects of it as well as upon those which deal simply with the physical results.’21 What worried the government most was the infection of unborn children, and the consequent rise in stillbirths, infant mortality and disabled babies. Although VD had been rife in cities and around garrisons throughout the nineteenth century and until 1914, the way the problem was now admitted and openly discussed exemplified how the war had transformed society and its rules.

  Official concern about the infection of unborn children was part of a broader concern about the declining birth rate that had accompanied the war; the population, too, required reconstruction. In June 1918 Sir Bernard Mallet, the Registrar General, lectured at the Royal Institute of Public Health about the decline of the birth rate: 881,890 children had been born in England and Wales in 1913, but only 668,346 in 1917.22 A record number of marriages in 1915 had helped slow the fall, but Sir Bernard said he believed 650,000 lives had been ‘lost’ during the war because of failure to procreate. He was also concerned that with so many young men killed, and others badly maimed, the birth rate would take years to recover. He thought the equivalent of 7,000 lives were ‘lost’ each day to the nations of Europe, which he called ‘race suicide … on the most colossal scale’.

  Even more colourful language had been used by Hayes Fisher, when opening Baby Week in July 1918, a state-sponsored encouragement to procreate: ‘We must take care that we were well supplied with a healthy population for the future,’ The Times reported him as having said, ‘and that the racial cradle gained a substantial victory over the racial coffin. Unless we did this the waste places of the earth would not be peopled by our race, but by another race with a different language and ideals, a people lower in the ranks of civilisation and Christianity.’23 Such was the horror of the future felt after four years of the master race killing each other all over Europe. The Dowager Lady Londonderry had opened a Mothercraft Exhibition in London, to cater for ‘girls’ who had ‘escaped from home quite early and did not know even how to hold a baby.’ The desire to protect the well-being of mothers and babies drove the foundation of a ministry of health.

  The range and scale of the challenges Britain faced required an unprecedented social and economic reconstruction. To dismantle a vast war machine and redeploy the people who had manned it, and to reconstruct a country after four years of privations, would require an unprecedented level of government intervention. As far as the public were concerned, reconstruction had to begin with Britain’s fabric: except for accommodation for vital workers there had been little building during the war, and little refurbishment of crumbling properties. The people awaited the execution of election promises about housing. A conference on roads that reported in 1913–14 had had its findings put into abeyance, but with the war over and the restraints on motor traffic lifted along with petrol restrictions, the need to construct major highways became urgent. In greater London a programme of building arterial roads began, which would precipitate the spread of suburbs in the 1920s and 1930s.

  The days of the minimal state and economic liberalism under Gladstone and Asquith were over. As soon as the War Cabinet met after the election it discussed what to do with the nationalised factories no longer required to make arms.24 There were ideas – soon scotched – that they might manufacture goods and compete with the private sector; Lloyd George was enough of a Liberal to want them off the state’s books, but finding buyers would be hard. Inflation had reduced the value of the allowances Parliament set in 1914: an urgent adjustment would be required if unease were not to become unrest. Asquith knew this. After the Easter Rising and the disaster of the Somme, when confidence in his rule was falling, he had made vague statements that things after the war could not be as before. This implied a more equitable distribution of wealth – perhaps even by th
e state – to ensure the poor were looked after. A Joint Labour Committee was established to ensure that, when the time came, demobilisation happened smoothly, and that men returning from the front and women whose working lives the conflict had transformed would have their needs accommodated. Now the time had come, Asquith was not even in Parliament, and his successor, with a fresh and hefty mandate, found it hard to apply himself to such inevitable but unglamorous consequences of peace, when for much of his time until June 1919 he would be at Versailles as an international statesman, seeking to conclude the peace treaty.

  For the coalition to keep all the promises Lloyd George had made in the election campaign would require far more money than was available. Just to raise the revenues needed to meet essential challenges such as housing, health care and education would involve a fundamental economic reconstruction, as workers rejoined industries denuded of labour and capital. At the Armistice, Britain was spending almost half its gross domestic product in the public sector, four times the amount of 1914; and the gap between income and expenditure was £1.5 billion, eight times the 1913–14 figure. The national debt was fourteen times the level of 1914. When America entered the war, Law tried to persuade it to lend direct to Allied countries rather than via Britain: but it would not, thus saddling the Treasury and therefore the taxpayer with responsibility for the problem. Britain owed overseas creditors £1,365 million, £852 million to the United States: but was owed £1,741 million, £568 million of it by Russia. France owed Britain £508 million (mostly borrowed from America and lent on), Italy £467 million (ditto), Belgium £98 million, Serbia £20 million and others £79 million. Technically the American debt was no problem if Britain’s debtors paid up; but the Russian loans had had no prospect of being repaid since the replacement of the Tsar by the Bolshevik government.25