by Andrew Marr
It was not just food. There were shortages of most things, and for the first time stern limits on the opening times for pubs and the strength of beer. This is the moment when the restrictions on pub opening hours that were such a feature of twentieth-century Britain first began. The new regulations allowed watering of beer, and a vigorous campaign against drunkenness began because of worries about the amount munitions workers were drinking. The measures appear to have worked very effectively: convictions for drunkenness fell dramatically, even if the country’s leaders proved hypocritical on the subject. Lloyd George bullied the King into announcing that he would give up alcohol for the duration of the war, strongly suggesting to him that his lead would be followed by cabinet ministers, clergy, businessmen and judges. In fact, almost nobody followed poor King George, least of all Lloyd George. The then prime minister, Asquith, a notorious drinker, was much alarmed until Lloyd George assured him that alcohol would be available for those who could get a doctor’s note ‘to the effect that it was necessary for you to have it’, at which Asquith brightened up.
If you were very unlucky, you might see the war at first hand. Scarborough, Whitby, Bridlington and Hartlepool were bombarded by German warships sitting close enough offshore to be clearly visible to those they were trying to kill. This was a huge embarrassment for the Royal Navy and partly hushed up at the time, though many people were killed and a lot of damage done. The German navy’s intention had been to keep embarrassing the British Home Fleet so that it could be enticed out and attacked with U-boats and mines, but the shelling was otherwise an act of terror, rather than of any military value. Houses, parts of old Whitby Abbey and warehouses were hit, and panicking people fled for the hills. Later, parts of the south of England were raided by Zeppelins, causing awe and shock if not the devastation their commanders had hoped for. For people still getting used to manned flight, death from the air and the ‘baby killer’ Zeppelins were a terrible shock. Air-raid warnings involved policemen on bicycles blowing whistles and displaying placards; people died praying beside their beds. Later still, London was attacked, rather more lethally, by Gotha bombers. This was not 1940: only around 850 people were killed inside Britain by all the German raids of the Great War, as compared to 60,000 in the second conflict. But the psychological effect of fearing that the bombers might swarm over at any moment was deep and lasting and would contribute to appeasement in the thirties.
The way most people witnessed the war, however, was in the bodies of the wounded men returning and the faces of those who had received a letter or telegram informing them of a bereavement. Above all, these were the years of visible death. A little over 6 million men were mobilized to fight in the war, and more than 722,000 died (41,000 of them after the Armistice from their wounds), though an accurate figure will never be found. But the danger was unevenly distributed. One in eight fighting soldiers was killed, and nearly a third wounded. Including those taken prisoner almost half, 47 per cent, of the army were casualties. The worst place was Flanders: for every nine men sent there from Britain, five would be killed, wounded or reported missing. In the navy people were half as likely to be killed (though few were wounded: ships sank, and that was that). In the air force the death rate was just 2 per cent. Nor was the danger equally distributed by class and geography. Scots took a disproportionate share of the deaths, as did the Ulstermen: both were used as shock troops in some of the worst battles. Officers were disproportionately more likely to be killed, and junior officers especially so (though seventy-eight British generals also died). From the main Oxbridge colleges the ratio of deaths was twice the national average. A survey of peers aged under fifty and their sons concluded that a higher percentage of ducal families had suffered violent death over the fifty years from 1880 than during 1330–1479 – the period of the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses. And being a frontline subaltern, the lowest-ranking officer, was particularly dangerous. Those who think of painters and writers as effete might be interested to know that no regiment, battalion or division of the British army suffered higher casualties than the Artists’ Rifles, the 28th Battalion of the London Regiment, which specialized in training subalterns – so much so that they were known as the Suicide Club.63
Of the whole adult male population of Britain, one in seven aged under twenty-five died. Half a million British men under thirty died.64 Astonishingly, given the myths about a lost generation, the British population actually continued to rise, partly because people stopped emigrating during the war. One historian has pointed out that ‘of all those counted in 1911 and who were of military age between 1914 and 1918, eighty-six per cent of them were still there when they were counted again in 1921’.65 The other side of this coin is that the huge numbers of deaths and maimings were focused on particular parts of the country, from the ‘Pals’ battalions of Bradford and Liverpool to the Scottish regiments. Despite the higher death rate of officers, the vast bulk of the dead and maimed were working class. As the army was expanded, and then expanded again, recruitment was partially sub-contracted to local councils and business leaders, who naturally made much of the value of men joining up alongside their friends and neighbours. As discussed below, it probably helped morale. But because of the swift slaughters during specific attacks, the dreadful envelopes would also arrive simultaneously at house after house in just a few adjacent streets. The intensity of what happened in some places is not lessened by the fact that it did not happen everywhere.
Here again we have to have steady fingers and humility in trying to reach back to touch the past. Death was better known ninety years ago. The average life expectancy for a man, before the war, was in the late forties and for a woman the early fifties. Disease, as we have seen, killed far more people. Many of the soldiers digging trenches or working underground in Flanders were coal miners or engineering workers at home, where fatal industrial accidents were routine. Before easy access to anaesthetics, people were more used to pain. Before plastic surgery and abortion on demand, there were far more disfigured and disabled people in civilian life. These were tougher times. And when one compares Britain’s losses to those of the other main Western Front belligerents, they recede statistically a bit: the French lost nearly twice as many dead (and 3.7 per cent of the population, against Britain’s 1.5 per cent) and the Germans three times as many (3.2 per cent). Yet nothing really cancels the brute facts, such as the 20,000 British soldiers killed on the first day of the Somme or the terrifying nature of the experience of industrial war. Clearly, no comparison, or any reflection on life’s inherent hardships, had much impact on people at the time. With their imperial wars, the British were simply unused to anything like this.
The British Expedition
Tales of the British Expeditionary Force, or BEF, tell us quite a lot about the country that sent it. The BEF is a battered mirror to life as it had been, as well as providing gritty glints of the world that is to come. Though we talk of the ‘British army’, in this fight there were successive armies. The first, the original British Expeditionary Force, was small, professional, well trained and badly equipped. It helped save France from the German onslaught but was more or less wiped out in doing so. The next army was of Territorials and auxiliaries, quickly swollen by the third army, the vast volunteer forces created by Kitchener. Finally, there was the conscript army of those who had not volunteered before. For a long time, through these different armies, traditional class distinctions remained, the rivalries between counties, trades and professions survived and some of the failures of pre-war Britain, particularly in organization and technology, were mimicked. This would be a war not just of soldiers against soldiers but of system against system. It would pit the organized, disciplined Prussian traditions against the more chaotic and unfairer Edwardian British way, greatly to the latter’s disadvantage, until Britain learned the hard way and began to change.
Recruitment showed how powerful class loyalties were. As Wilfred Owen discovered, in the early years of the war commissions
were available for people from ‘good’ public schools, not for your average grammar-school boy. There was even a special University and Public Schools Brigade for those who could not face serving alongside working-class soldiers, as well as an Old Boys Corps and ‘sportsmen’s’ battalions, advertised ‘for the upper and middle classes only’. In many other places, at open-air gatherings in city centres, public-school men, barristers and clerks found themselves lining up with labourers and factory workers, sharing a queue and a chat with people across the class divide for the first time in their lives. In percentage terms, those most likely to enlist as volunteers came from the professions, banks, offices and the entertainment world. Agricultural workers and factory workers were needed more at home, of course, though coal miners were also particularly likely to enlist. As with the Boer War, medical inspections of volunteers showed a nation still badly fed and poorly doctored. To start with, because the medical examiners were given a shilling for every man they passed, large numbers of unfit men were sent into uniform. Later, worryingly high percentages of men with curved spines, poor eyesight, rotten teeth or bad lungs were noted. Perhaps the most revealing statistic of all is that on average serving soldiers were five inches shorter than officers. ‘Bantam’ battalions were formed in which every man was less than 5 foot 3 inches tall.
Once in France, at least in the early years, these divisions remained. Among the upper fighting classes, school songs were sung, founders’ days celebrated and jokes exchanged in Latin or Greek. Public-school officers sent vividly descriptive letters home while ordinary soldiers had to leave theirs unsealed for censorship. Officers had servants – ‘batmen’ – and handmade clothes. They ate well. One artillery officer serving at Vimy Ridge in 1916 recorded dinners of ‘soup, fish (if possible), meat (or fowl when poss.) asparagus, vegetables (always fresh); savoury (always), pudding (always), Whisky, Perrier, Port (every night), Vermouth, Sherry, biscuits, cigarettes and cigars, coffee, tea or cocoa, fruit’.66 During his short period as an officer in France, Winston Churchill wrote to his wife to send two bottles of old brandy and one of peach brandy every ten days, plus ‘Stilton cheeses: cream: hams: sardines – dried fruits: you might almost try a big beef steak pie: but not tinned grouse’. Yet the ‘noblesse oblige’ tendency among the upper- and middle-class officers was also impressive. Unlike their French counterparts, front-line officers lived with their men as well as leading them into battle, and organized football matches and other games to keep them occupied, very much in the tradition of the muscular Christian. Famously, one officer, Captain Nevill of the 8th East Surreys, prepared his attack on the first day of the Somme by painting a football with ‘The Great European Cup-Tie Finals. East Surreys versus Bavarians. Kick off at zero.’ Another football was painted with the words ‘No referee’ and both were kicked over the parapet when the attack started, Nevill having offered a prize for whoever dribbled a ball to the German lines. He was killed straight away.67 His widely reported behaviour was regarded as marvellous back home and lunatic in Germany.
British soldiers were often eating well for the first time in their lives, albeit on dull fare. Their rations were more generous than the French or German ones, and included fresh meat and vegetables where possible, with biscuits, cheese, bacon, bread, cigarettes and a daily tot of rum. This would have been much more than many working-class men would have had at home, and was a source of envy and astonishment to German troops when they broke through British lines later in the war – though by then Germany had had to cope with a long British blockade and the so-called ‘turnip winter’. British troops had shorter spells at the front line too and were comparatively well looked after medically. But, because the army reflected the country, they were much less well educated than the German troops they were facing and, to begin with, in worse physical shape. Mostly industrial workers, they were dogged, tough and obedient, while also being cynical and scabrous. Some had joined the army early because there were few practical alternatives; in the first weeks of the war, it is estimated that half a million men were made redundant. For many they had the solidarity of living and fighting alongside others from their street, village or factory.
Though the war was relatively mechanized, it reflected a horse-drawn Britain too. At its peak, the army in France was using around 450,000 horses and mules to get around, to carry and occasionally to attack with. Many had been brought across the Atlantic from Canada, the United States or South America but almost a fifth of the horses and mules at home had been taken from the farms, stables and streets. What awaited them was not pleasant – the army mules had their vocal cords cut to stop them braying and giving away their position to the enemy, while grey or dappled horses were dyed dark. Both would then be at high risk of being blown up as they took men, messages and equipment back and forward from the front lines. All the armies fighting had large cavalry contingents, though apart from a few attacks at the 1917 Battle of Cambrai (involving Sikhs and Canadian cavalry, along with English hussars) the British cavalry was little used. Still, with the horses, the aristocratic officers and the lack of socialist or suffragette rhetoric, it is easy to see why so many conservative-minded Britons found much that was reassuring amidst the dirt, the boredom and the fear.
For officers and men the 1,000-strong battalion, defending its own little piece of the front, became a community, a wartime village or firm, with its own class divisions, but where everyone knew everyone else. The badges, the accents and the characters produced an intense sense of belonging which veterans would remember all their lives. But this was an unreal Britain without unions, strikes and political divisions (for all the politicians were pretty much despised, along with the red-tabbed staff officers, allegedly living it up in châteaux far back from danger). It was coarse and the songs sung were famously very rude, as well as very funny. It is somehow reassuring to know that the famous ‘Hymn of Hate’ written by Ernst Lissauer, and sung by the German troops to express their loathing of the British, was promptly translated and sung by the BEF too, with a chorus, ‘Oo do we ’ite?’ and a full battalion replying: ‘England!’ One vivid source for the tone of the trenches was created by a captain from the 12th Battalion of the Sherwood Foresters, who found himself in the worst place of all, the Ypres salient (which means it jutted into German lines and was under attack from different directions) in February 1916. Captain F. J. Roberts, who would go on to win a Military Cross on the Somme and who survived the war, came across a half-smashed old printing works in the ruins of Ypres, with the type scattered outside in the mud. Though no journalist, he promptly decided to rescue and repair it, and produce a newspaper for the troops around him. This he did, first from the old building and then, when it had been finally blown to pieces, from a rat-infested cellar sheltered below the seventeeth-century ramparts of Ypres, built by the military architect Vauban.
Roberts’s paper was first called the Wipers Times – ‘wipers’ is supposed to be how Sir John French, the BEF’s first commander who spoke no French, pronounced Ypres. The name would later shift as the Sherwood Foresters were moved around. It is a thin production, facetious, angry and gossipy by turn. But to get some sense of the extraordinary circumstances in which it was written, printed and distributed, it is worth turning to Philip Gibbs, a journalist who described the salient at the time as a sea of red liquid mud composed of brick dust and ‘bodies, bits of bodies, and clots of blood, and green, metallic-looking slime, made by explosive gases . . . Human flesh, rotting and stinking, mere pulp, was pasted into the mud-banks. If they dug to get deeper cover, their shovels went into the softness of dead bodies who had been their comrades. Scraps of flesh, booted legs, blackened hands, eyeless heads, came falling over them when the enemy trench-mortared their position.’68 These are Stalingrad conditions, possibly the worst that any British soldiers have ever experienced for a prolonged time. So how did they see themselves, in the pages of their own little paper?
The first thing to say is that it is all terribly British. The horrors aroun
d them are referred to only in cod advertisements with wild typography about flame-throwers, gas and mortars. There is anger present, but it is mostly directed at officers behind the front line and blow-hards at home who keep writing about how well the war is going. Censorship at home is mocked: the newspaper promises to refer to the war ‘which we hear is taking place in Europe, in a cautious manner’. More satirical adverts target the officer class: ‘Are You Miserable? Are You Unhappy? Do You Hate Your Company Commander? Yes! Then buy him one of our New Patent Tip Duck Boards . . . If he steps on to the end/’Twill take a month his face to mend.’ But most of the miseries are made light of. A Nature Notes column explains: ‘Birds . . . are of two kinds only – The Carrier Pigeon (a delicacy for front line trenches), and the nameless, untamed variety usually collected by junior officers.’ There is plenty of gossip, which must have meant something at the time, about an unnamed major and his Belgian friends and his wallpaper. It is striking to find complaints about ‘an insidious disease . . . affecting the Division, and the result is a hurricane of poetry. Subalterns have been seen with a notebook in one hand, and bombs in the other absently walking near the wire in deep communion with the muse.’ Above all, there is a great deal of dreadful verse and awful puns, Limericks about girls from the Somme sitting on number five bombs, and the rest of it. The Wipers Times is a fascinating record because it reminds us that in the middle of the horror, many people were not reflecting on religion, or politics, or the meaning of war, but were just trying to get by with the same facetious humour and gossip they always liked. Edwardian Britain was a place of bad jokes, bad verse and horsing about, as well as a country in crisis; and the BEF was like that too. One extract of anonymous doggerel perhaps tells us more about how the poor bloody infantry was really thinking, than the protest poetry of Owen or Sassoon:
