Raw Material

by Alan Sillitoe

  The British commanders did not know how to keep the times of their attack secret, as if the more dead and wounded lying between the lines, the more successful the battle. There was no such thing as surprise, not only because of lengthy bombardments which advertised an attack loud and clear for days if not weeks beforehand but because it was always possible to trick the exact date of the offensive out of the British Army staff.

  The French would not unreasonably want to know when their villages were going to be in danger from artillery replies and counterattack. But at the same time there may have been someone among them able to transmit information across to the Germans. The British staff, scornful of petty secrecy, were dangerous romantics who had never heard of spies. In any case, British grit was always supposed to triumph in the end, in spite of corpse-filled shell-holes, or bodies hanging like scarecrows on the barbed wire to rot in full view of eighteen-year-olds who had not yet ‘gone over the top’ but were soon to do so.

  In February 1916 the inhabitants of Meaulte, close to the Somme and behind the front line, were ordered to evacuate their village, since they would be in peril when the big attack started. But the inhabitants did not want to leave, in spite of the danger, protesting that they would not only lose their livestock but, more important, the whole of the present year’s crop.

  They sent an eloquent and moving petition to King George V in London, explaining their feelings on the matter. One of the king’s secretaries passed it back to Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander in France, who had the magnanimity to allow the French villagers to stay where they were, warning them however that they must remain in their houses for three days from July 1st. Months in advance, therefore, he had given away the exact date of the British attack. From then on the Germans began to strengthen their line which, even after 400,000 casualties and five months later, the British failed to break.

  Yet on the first day of the Somme battle the British Army was at the height of its quality regarding the skill and spirit of the men. This was never to be regained, at any time during the rest of the war. It was wasted away in ten minutes. Though the soldiers of the Somme were only half-trained compared to the pre-war peacetime army, they could fire their rifles generally at a more rapid rate than those who came later. As volunteers they possessed ‘dash’ and intelligence, while those conscripts of the next two years became dogged and despairing, and tried to stay alive longer, though they had little chance of doing so. It was admitted by the staff that they did not have the quality of the men who went down on the Somme.

  The blow finished Britain as a world power, and as a country fit for any hero to live in. The heroes and their heroic spirit was dead. If they had survived they would indeed have insisted after the war that England be made habitable for them. But such an insistence would have disturbed the old order too fundamentally for its comfort, which with sadistic prescience saw to it therefore that those heroes did not outlast them.

  The men of the Somme did not die because they wanted to perpetuate the class structure of English cities and the English countryside, nor the power of those five per cent, who owned ninety-five per cent of the country’s wealth. As they went up to the front they thought some unwritten and unspoken agreement existed that this would be done away with for ever if they took part with all their might and main in the war.

  They did not fight for England as it was. They fought to change England, as much as, if not more so than, to protect their country from the Germans with whom, deep down, they had no quarrel. The fact is that their deaths (which they did not expect) only made sure that the England they disliked would remain in the ascendant. In that sense they actually betrayed their country by going to fight for it. But it is difficult not to succumb to treachery when it is callous enough.

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  Reading the official history of the Battle of the Somme one is struck by the vast preparations that went on for months beforehand, of the immense labour of building roads, tramways, and narrow-gauge railways through the otherwise empty fields, and the erecting of tents, depots, and huts; the hauling of ammunition and guns, the sinking of wells for water, the siting and equipping of hospitals to receive the wounded, the allotting of so many trains per division for its supplies—all this meticulous timetable planning to create a superb and efficient factory for getting 300,000 men up to the front and into slaughter, an organization that covered the whole of northeastern France. The only trouble was that it didn’t work.

  There were nearly a million and a half British soldiers in France and Belgium on June 30th, 1916, holding ninety miles of front, making an average of ten men of all arms to defend every yard of ground facing the Germans. On most sectors of the line this was much less, since the proportion on those parts where an offensive was being prepared—e.g. the Somme—had to be more or less double.

  A linear city in which fighting almost never ceased during four years stretched from the English Channel to the Swiss frontier. Some four million men on either side had to be provided with food, water, clothing, guns, and ammunition, as well as other impedimenta and necessities of ordinary life. It was Slaughter City stretched out over the fields for 400 miles, ammunitions wagons going one way, ambulances the other—the same on both sides.

  All the so-called civilized and intellectual brains of Europe were engaged in trying to discover ways of breaking into the other half of this composite city of mud trenches, strongpoints, dugouts, tents, huts, and, further back, real houses and halls in towns and villages. Where the two civilizations met it was a waste-ground, a blood-soaked rammel-tip, a shanty-town of bones and death, a vast fearful stinking serpentine conglomeration of misdirected energy and talent which has since been commemorated as something glorious in thousands of shabby poppy-strewn pre-totalitarian war memorials up and down the country, and in every country in Europe.

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  At Messines Ridge, on June 7th, 1917, nearly a year after the first Somme battle, the British Army tried again. It blew up the German front line, and moved forward over the earthquake zone which had been created. Nine divisions of about 12,000 men in each took part in the attack, with three more in support.

  ‘Briefly,’ says the army manual on demolitions and mining, ‘the tendency of low explosives is to shift, and of high explosives to shatter.’ I did not know this when I read of the Messines assault, or when my father gloated over the sudden skyward direction of the Hill 60 part of the ridge.

  Tunnels were dug under the German trenches, and loads of ammonal were stacked in their secret places. Ammonal is a slightly sticky substance like damp sugar. One might say that it is crystalline and doesn’t flow very well, and that though it is fairly dry it has to be kept from getting wet. For this reason it is packed in hermetically sealed tins, which must be placed close together so that the detonation waves will pass through and ignite the well-tamped cache. A detonator and primer is buried in the charge. Ammonal produces a lifting effect, and so is ideal for mined charges.

  Nearly a million pounds of it—over 400 tons—were made ready for the attack, so packed that, after ignition, its force would go only upwards. There were 55 tons alone under Hill 60, the unsuspecting Germans snug in their bunkers above. When the 1,000,000 pounds went off at dawn the whole sky was—but the dreadful picture has been many times described.

  Burrowing by British soldier-miners and uniformed navvies had been going on for eighteen months. The longest tunnel was over 700 yards, the deepest more than a 100 feet. Many of the explosions had a radius of destruction of 200 feet. Thousands of German soldiers were killed. Many went mad. Thousands more were taken prisoner.

  And one more ridge was captured.

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  The explosions did their job. The dawn attack was successful. But though open land lay before the troops quite early in the morning they were paralysed by the vacillations of the inexperienced staff who examined maps with glazed eyes miles away in comfortable chateaux and manor houses. If the men were unable to exploit what they had bravely and
painfully won—for the earthquake landscape still had to be fought over—it wasn’t entirely for lack of ability at bringing up reserves. Often they were immediately to hand, but the staff were crushed by the problems of moving them. They had not planned to break through, therefore when they did it was not exploited. Instead of advancing down the valleys on the other side of the ridge and throwing the German front into confusion by capturing Comines, the troops on their hard-won high ground, tired after the fighting and happy that they had survived, took off their tunics and lay in the sunshine because no one could tell them what to do, until the returning Germans began to pick them off in dozens, finding good targets in their white skins. One more attack, begun with such brilliancy and hope, fizzled miserably out. As has often been said before, and cannot be repeated too many times, the Germans considered that the British soldiers fought like lions, but were led by donkeys.

  The gaps were occasionally there for the infantry to go forward, but the yeomen farmers and country gentlemen in uniform had the antique vision of galloping through on their horses to finish off the Germans with swords and lances! They couldn’t leave such ‘glory’ to the lower-class craftsmen and clerks and slum-dwellers. The élite of the army, the cavalry, must have its turn. They waited impatiently on their fine horses, cursing the infantry because they had not cut the wire properly, and the artillery for making so many holes in the ground that their horses would be held up, and their spotless tunics splashed with mud.

  But the infantry made a big mistake when they broke open the German defences. They did not carry with them boxes of live foxes, to be released at the right moment so that the foxhunting cavalry commanders champing in the fields behind could begin a wild, tally-hoing, unstoppable chase. If the foxes had been sturdy and resourceful the foxhunters might have made it to the Rhine before the baffled German reserves had collected their wits and closed in, and driven them into the water.

  Certainly the British infantry would have been glad to see them go, while those who were not could have followed them. Of the rest, the pigeon-fanciers might have sent back racers telling of the famous victory, and the ex-colliers celebrated with whippet races, while those still bored and unconvinced could have finished off the corpse-eating rats in no-man’s land—a combination of animal scenes worthy of the great Doctor Doolittle himself.

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  For every officer killed or wounded on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, twenty-two other ranks fell with him. During the whole of the Boer War, in which the total British casualties were under 17,000, the proportion was one officer to eleven other ranks.

  If Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, the British class war was fought out on the Western Front with real shells and bullets. The old men of the upper classes won by throwing the best possible human material into the slaughter, including their own high-spirited and idealistic young. But the masses who joined up were people who had been perfected by more than a century of the Industrial Revolution. In one sense they were indeed the flower of mankind: intelligent, technically minded, and literate, men of a sensibility whose loss sent England as a country into a long decline. When they died, as nearly a million did, they took their skills with them.

  Such people were thrown away with prodigal distaste because they were coming to the point of stepping into their own birthright. Their potential was about to become manifest, and they would have demanded what had been denied them for so long. War seemed the only alternative to revolution, and the leaders of every nation were faced by the same cosmic problem.

  They sided with destiny and chose war, but by the end of it revolution had come in any case, and the exhausted peace or truce soon brought in another round of war and revolution that began in 1939 and has by no means ended yet. Wars can be started, but revolutions can never be stopped, for whoever creates war makes revolution, which then seems the surest chance of winning peace, even after the longest of wars. ‘Only revolution can save the earth from hell’s pollution,’ said Byron, though one cannot believe that in their heart of hearts those key men of 1914 thought exactly that. Time goes more slowly than we think. The Great War has ended, but Europe is only now recovering.

  To go back to the trenches is but a small step, and no one yet knows the true meaning of what went on there. The men of 1914 were slaughtered, and indeed allowed themselves to be slaughtered—which was the fatal flaw in their perfectability. The old men of the upper classes who were in command possessed the half-concealed knowledge that if they did not dispose of them in this sporting roulette-wheel fashion then those millions would turn round and sweep them away.

  It was perhaps the last viciously competent task that the British upper class was to perform, and it is from the Great War that the drift between officers and men, governing and governed, between those lavish with the blood of others, and those frugal with the rich life they saw themselves on the point of beginning to enjoy, really began. Before 1914 a unity could have been possible, and the men might then have tried it. Joining up to fight was, in a sense, their way of saying yes, but the old men used this affirmation to try and finish them off.

  In order to maintain a mythical ‘balance of power’ on the mainland of Europe, or to arse-lick over the humanly meaningless alliances concocted in some cosy office or dreamlike court, they destroyed the internal balance of the country. England was an imperial power that embarked on a war of aggressive defence. When there were no more colonies left to grab, the empires of the world went for each other’s throats. Germany tore the guts out of the British Empire, and choked on them.

  The best that can be said is that the upper classes lacked the imagination to realize what they were doing, though their subconscious must have known well enough. Never before had such an assault been made of class against class, and the music of the German machine-guns and the percussion of their artillery on the Somme must have caused some ambiguous emotions in those who sent the men over, except that many heard the music from a distance, if at all.

  For four years British soldiers were slung against the impregnable German defences, flesh against flying steel, and they never really succeeded in breaking through. The army did so in 1918 only because the Americans had started to bring their fresh skill and material into the war.

  The nearest the British came to it was at Cambrai in 1917. This was due to the technical knowledge and the calm tenacity and bravery of the men in 400 tanks. They laid the German defences wide open, but the staff was so tragically incompetent that even with an armoured force that no one had ever seen before, and against which the Germans had as yet little defence, they could not take advantage of the silent and empty road leading into the abandoned city of Cambrai. They could not believe their luck and so, as always in such cases, luck continued to run against them. The other breakages of the German front, on the Somme on July 14th, 1916, later the same year at Flers, and at Third Ypres the following year could not be exploited because there were no live men left to push through the gaps.

  But if the British had finally succeeded in breaking through, the staff would have sent the army into a disaster far greater than that of a failed attack. With patient, maladroit negligence they would have concocted humiliation as well as tragedy for the men. Something in their bone-heads must have warned them of the dangers in pushing on when the gap was opened, of getting a few divisions through into open country where they would be at the mercy of quick-moving German reserves, to be surrounded and hammered into annihilation. The army would lose so many men that they would be in no position to play at war with them much longer. The higher echelons of the staff might then have their own bodies threatened by shot and shell, and that was never their idea at all.

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  Too high a standard was set for the men in the line by officers who never went near it. The front was regarded by the General Staff as a temporary fixture which was liable to alter at any time, for when the big push came and the breakthrough happened, no more trenches would be needed because the troops w
ould lead the staff in a fine dash towards Potsdam. And it was liable to come at any minute, for one never knew when the Germans would crack.

  Consequently, the British trenches were rarely allowed to become too comfortable for fear the soldiers would get soft, or that they wouldn’t want to leave them when told to get up and attack the Germans. They must never be corrupted by the defensive spirit while one more useless sacrifice could be wrung from them. In 1917 the Russian Army voted with its feet for peace by getting out of the line as fast as it could. The British Army on the Somme and at Passchendaele voted with its corpses for death.

  The staff must have been a preening, self-conscious lot, and imagined every soldier to be the same, for they made sure that their positions were always overlooked by the Germans. They liked being chiked at from hilltops and ridges. All along the front, from the high dunes of the Belgian sea-coast, south via the hills near Ypres, the Messines Ridge, Vimy Ridge, and the uplands before Bapaume, it was indeed a theatre of war to the Germans, who were invariably permitted by the gallant British staff to have the best seats in it.

  The British Army was used as a battering ram against an unbreakable door. The soldiers who formed it looked bitterly at high ground up which they would have to advance. Every year of the war they were led out on an annual bloodbath, and though the door of the German defences creaked and cracked, it never burst open.

  In spite of the French troubles at Verdun, the British should not have attacked for at least another two years, so that the New Army could have been trained to the standard of its opponents and, more important, so that its officers could have been properly instructed. The German war machine, dangerous as it was, could have been slowly bled to death by the many Allies, instead of being continually and suicidally attacked.