Victoria's Cross

by Gary Mead

  Some other military decoration sacks – usually those pertaining to officers – were not so tightly held. As Sir Martin Lindsay, a former officer, wrote, if you had the right connections you would in all likelihood get some very prestigious medals:

  [I]n spite of the provision of the Royal Warrant which instituted the DSO, that it was for ‘special service in action,’ staff officers below the rank of general were awarded the DSO or the MC . . . Such was the indignation of the Brigade of Guards when the 6th Earl of Rosebery [Harry Primrose, who served as Camp Commandant and ADC to General Allenby] emerged at the end of the war with the DSO and MC earned at Army HQ without a day spent at the front with his regiment, that for a few years he was virtually ostracised.31

  The creation of new gallantry decorations, particularly the Military Cross and Military Medal, served a dual function: the supposed distinctiveness of the VC could be preserved, by limiting the numbers handed out, while the authorities were able to reward clearly courageous acts according to different grades. The invention of the MC and the MM obviously had nothing to do with any objective change in the definition of courage, were such even possible; rather it was because from 1914 onwards there was too much courage. It was not merely the case that technology, with its manifold means of long-range destruction, depersonalized warfare; it was also that anonymous barbarity became ubiquitous. Officers who had gained their professionalism in the Victorian era struggled to cope with the loss of an important sustaining ideal – that killing another human being might be done chivalrously. General Sir Ian Hamilton, who led the failed expedition at Gallipoli, summed up the changed nature of warfare:

  From Ypres onwards trenches and barbed wire fastened their paralysing grip upon the field . . . war sank into the lowest depths of beastliness and degeneration. The wonder of war, the glory of war, the adventure of war, the art of war all hung on its shifting scenery. For years the Armies had to eat, drink, sleep amidst their own putrefactions. Bit by bit the old campaigner’s memories and young soldier’s dreams were engulfed in machinery and mud.32

  The first commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) sent to Flanders in 1914 was General Sir John French, who, at sixty-two, was still physically vigorous; but French and many of his contemporaries had learned their profession on horseback and were baffled by the technicalities of the new warfare. War obviously meant killing, but that need not, should not, entail bestiality; French was unable to grasp that honour and glory died with the birth of the machine-gun, and that beastliness was endemic to the new battlefield. In 1919 French saw no absurdity in writing that soldiers, ‘emulating the knights of old, should honour a brave enemy only second to a comrade, and like them, rejoice to split a friendly lance today and ride boot to boot in the charge tomorrow’.33

  The VC was born in an era when Sir John French’s understanding of warfare was a plausible model; by 1915 only Victorian soldiers could still cleave to that limited horizon. Prior to 1914 the individual could matter; a spirited gallop, a determined rally, the rescue of a wounded officer – all could be noble and practical acts that might not only be physically seen, but were regarded as intrinsically important for morale: a courageous battlefield act might inspire others to greater determination or bravery, or even turn the tide. By 1916 there was a need for heroes, not just to maintain morale at home, but to inspire the conscripted millions who were not professional soldiers. In a post-war committee investigating the incidence of shell shock, Lord Southborough referred to a witness statement by Lieutenant Colonel H. Clay, Chief Recruiting Staff Officer of the London District, who said ‘that the men were trained to the last pitch when they went out in 1914. It was different with the unfortunate man taken suddenly out of an office. He was brought up and rushed in twelve weeks straight into the trenches.’34

  As the First World War’s Western Front settled into apparently endless trench warfare, the scope for the individual to make a difference shrank almost to the point of invisibility; the mass mattered infinitely more. A single word – attrition – came to define the nature of the battlefield. The war gained a lastingly gloom-laden reputation, assisted by Winston Churchill’s ersatz Augustan rhetoric:

  No war is so sanguinary as the war of exhaustion. No plan could be more unpromising than the plan of frontal attack. It will appear not only horrible but incredible to future generations that such doctrines should have been imposed by the military profession upon the ardent and heroic populations who yielded themselves to their orders.35

  Individual soldiers on the Western Front rarely saw the enemy; 59 per cent of casualties were due to artillery.36 If Sir John French embodied the warrior spirit of the nineteenth century, Pollard spoke for that of the twentieth. Pollard’s VC – single-minded aggression, the killing of the enemy, bestiality if necessary – would become the archetype for VCs awarded during the later stages of the First War and certainly throughout the Second.

  When the war started in 1914, the War Office was swamped by demands from field officers who, in their own small quarter of the Flanders battlefields, almost daily encountered the kind of self-sacrificial bravery that they imagined – often correctly – might merit a VC. The end result was that those senior officers based in London who had the task of sifting VC recommendations pushed the requirement for VC eligibility – bowing to pressure when necessary to award VCs such as Cornwell’s – beyond anything previously seen, without any reference to the VC warrant. Their in-trays were lightened by two developments: the invention of new medals and the informal acceptance of posthumous VCs. Following the crumbling of Edward VII’s resistance to posthumous awards in 1907, a dead soldier could get the VC, even though the extant VC warrant made no posthumous provision and would not do so before 1920.37 And, steadily, the authorities realized that one way to measure supreme courage might, if the circumstances were right, be a gallant, or at least a useful, death.

  Yet the informal acceptance of posthumous VCs merely allowed another anomaly to surface. During the First War posthumous awards of lesser decorations – the DSO, the MC, the DCM, the DSC (Distinguished Service Cross) and the DSM (Distinguished Service Medal) – were not permissible. This discrepancy provoked considerable resentment from soldiers, heartache for families of dead servicemen, and pointed exchanges in Parliament. The impossibility of posthumous decorations – other than the VC or a Mention in Despatches – led to some extraordinary anomalies. Corporal James McCarthy of the 1st Royal Irish Regiment, stationed at Ain Kanish in Palestine, was cleaning grenades in barracks on 24 January 1918, when the fuse of one grenade started fizzing. He carried it outside, intending to throw it to safety, but fellow soldiers were standing about and it must be supposed he realized it could not be thrown anywhere without risking the lives of others. He was last seen holding the grenade tightly in both hands and close to his body. The explosion killed him but no one else was injured. McCarthy received a posthumous gold Albert Medal, originally created for civilians who saved life at sea and in 1877 extended to acts ‘performed on land . . . in preventing accidents in mines, on railways, and at fires, and from other perils on the shore’.38 McCarthy was obviously no civilian, but the Albert Medal could at least be given posthumously; the only alternative military decorations that were posthumously available were the VC or a Mention in Despatches. There were ten incidents when more than one Albert Medal was awarded between 1914 and 1918, and sixty-nine occasions when a single medal was granted.39

  The ruling against posthumous gallantry awards (other than the VC or MiD) was debated on 8 March 1916 in the House of Lords. Lord Sydenham,40 a Liberal and a former lieutenant general with the Royal Engineers who had served in the Sudan expedition under Kitchener, highlighted the anomaly:

  [I]t cannot be said, when one order is posthumous, that the concession may not be conceded of other orders . . . in the allocation of orders for gallant action it is very difficult to say exactly where the line of the Victoria Cross comes and that of the next lower decoration. It is a question that ca
nnot be decided with absolute certainty.

  More precisely, the ‘system’ was a cracked veneer overlaying confusion and muddle, not simply with the VC but with the whole gamut of military decorations. Lord Sandhurst, Under-Secretary of State at the War Office, responded to Sydenham for the government with unhelpful sympathy, pointing out that families of dead VC winners would be sent the Cross, while in the case of the CB, CMG, DSO and MC, the insignia might be sent to the next of kin, so long as the man who gained the distinction survived long enough for it to have been gazetted. A posthumous VC might not be in strict accordance with the extant VC warrant but could nevertheless be given; a posthumous MC could not. Sandhurst said this was regrettable, but all he could offer was a promise that the ‘whole matter will be dealt with at the termination of the war’. The government blocked posthumous decorations other than the VC because of the old anxiety – to permit them might mean a flood of retrospective demands. As Sandhurst put it: ‘the selection of names is always a very difficult matter in the case of posthumous honours. Whatever system was adopted . . . it would be very difficult to satisfy every claim.’41 There the matter rested until the end of the war.

  As slaughtered heaps were interred in Flanders, London continued to be inundated with VC recommendations. Sifting the questionable from the deserving was taxing. Some early ones, such as this approved by Sir John French, received short shrift: ‘On 24th August [1914], when retiring he [Lieutenant W. G. R. Elliott of the 1st Cheshire Regiment] ran back, picked up a wounded man, and carried him 100 yards to safety under a hot fire, being himself shot through both ankles.’42 Courageous acts that formerly might have gained the VC were, if not ten a penny, certainly in far greater numbers than ever before, and many went unnoticed; indeed, the brave sometimes had to make do with compensations other than medals.

  Frank Richards served as a private in the 2nd Battalion, Royal Welch Fusiliers, throughout the war. In his memoir Old Soldiers Never Die,43 Richards tells of ‘Broncho’, an incorrigible troublemaker when out of the front line but ‘a grand front-line soldier, and most of his crimes were caused by overbearing non-commissioned officers’. In trouble once more, Broncho redeemed himself by volunteering to carry a message to Battalion HQ, through an intense artillery barrage. ‘I’ll take the bloody message,’ shouted Broncho, even though it ‘was a hundred to one he would be blown to bits before he had gone sixty yards’. Broncho not only carried the message – he returned with an answer. The previous week he had carried to safety a man who was wounded during a night patrol: ‘For these two acts [Broncho] had a term of imprisonment washed out and about six months accumulated Number Ones; but he got no decoration.’44

  Max Plowman had started out the war as a member of a Territorial Army Field Ambulance unit and later became a commissioned officer before finally turning conscientious objector early in 1918. In his memoir, Plowman recalled a ‘remarkable soldier’ called Side, a rag-picker in civilian life and a stretcher-bearer at the Somme:

  on the 1st of July he carried stretchers under fire continuously for twenty-four hours. Anyone who knows the weight of a loaded stretcher and remembers the heat, the condition of the ground, and what the firing was like upon that day, will agree with me that the Victoria Cross would have expressed rather less than Side’s deserts. However, he for his bravery was promoted to full corporal in the fighting-ranks.45

  But before new medals could be invented there was ready to hand another way of cutting the number of VC claims: change what was demanded. That had already happened to some extent, by making a posthumous Cross possible; death in the performance of conspicuous gallantry surreptitiously served to exclude conspicuous gallantry that did not quite result in death. In December 1914 General Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the 1st Division in Flanders, met King George V, in the course of which they discussed the VC. The king admired Haig’s professionalism and had sanctioned his appointment as commander of the Aldershot garrison. Although both were taciturn, emotionally buttoned-up and highly conscious of status, Haig and the king were friends and had developed a mutual respect since they first met in 1898. According to Haig, the king thought a VC for rescuing a fallen comrade ‘was justified and beneficial. I replied that each case must be judged on its merits but, as a rule in civilised war such efforts did the wounded man harm and also tended to increase loss of valuable lives.’46 Superficially this appears callous, but Haig was merely espousing the conventional notion of what a ‘civilised’ war constituted. His mentor during the Sudan campaign (and later), Horatio Kitchener, had the same view of a VC for rescuing the wounded: ‘I think that some steps should be taken to discourage recommendations for the Victoria Cross in civilised warfare in cases of mere bringing in of wounded and dismounted men.’47

  For Haig and his contemporaries, civilized war was played according to clear, mutually understood rules; both sides showed mercy to a wounded and militarily uniformed enemy. An ‘uncivilized’ war had no such rule; a British soldier who fell into the hands of Sudanese Dervishes, mutinous Indian sepoys, Afghan tribesmen or Zulu warriors could usually expect torture and humiliation before a terrible death. British soldiers sometimes took no prisoners in colonial wars, but did not as a matter of course indulge in torture before the killing. In reality, there was a degree of hypocrisy in Haig’s position. In the South African war he had seen nothing wrong in spearing fleeing and unarmed Boers with his cavalryman’s lance, although he may have justified that butchery because the Boers were, in his eyes, renegades and not professional soldiers;48 but Haig assumed that in a white man’s war both sides would desist from torturing and then killing wounded prisoners.49 It would be wrong to say that in such a casual way Haig changed the course of the VC’s history; after all, he wanted each case ‘to be judged on its merits’ and in conversation with the king suggested that rescuing fellow soldiers from a burning building would certainly merit consideration for a VC. In any case, no formal changes were made to the VC’s warrant during the 1914–18 war.

  When Haig succeeded French as the BEF’s commander-in-chief on 15 December 1915, he stuck to his word regarding the VC recommendations he sanctioned – each case was judged on its merits. This meant that quite a few ‘rescue’ VCs got through, particularly if they suited wider considerations, such as deflecting uncomfortable attention from British military disaster. On 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, when almost 20,000 British soldiers were killed, temporary Lieutenant Geoffrey St George Shillington Cather, adjutant of the 9th Royal Irish Fusiliers, gained his VC ‘for the most conspicuous bravery’ (the conventional opening phrase used in First War VC citations) during the attack at Beaumont Hamel.50 The 9th Battalion went over the top at 7.10 a.m., immediately coming under intense machine-gun fire; the bodies soon piled up. Twelve hours later Cather was the only surviving officer of the battalion. Between 7 p.m. and midnight Cather was out in No Man’s Land with other volunteers, searching for wounded survivors and recovering three. Next morning Cather continued the search, rescuing another man, giving water to others and arranging for them to be collected later, all the while under direct machine-gun and intermittent artillery fire. Cather was killed mid-morning.51 He showed considerable courage and selfless dedication, but his VC was of the type that Haig had apparently ruled out in December 1914. But in the days that followed the start of the Battle of the Somme, Haig needed all the ‘good’ publicity that could be mustered; in the absence of obvious battlefield victory, dead heroes were the best available means of garnering the sympathy of a critical press and a bewildered and appalled general public.

  As the VC had grown in status and acquired greater mystique – despite the many anomalies of the nineteenth century – the establishment took care to limit, as much as possible, the number awarded. This happened in two ways. The adjudication process implemented by the hierarchy of committees raised the minimum bar for consideration for a VC, without public acknowledgement. Simultaneously, a multiplicity of alternative gallantry awards, which attempted to
grade more finely the distinctions between supposed ‘levels’ of courage displayed, were introduced. In December 1914 the Military Cross was instituted, specifically for warrant officers (sergeant majors) and junior officers (captain and below), who were, because of their rank, ineligible for the Distinguished Service Order, of which almost 9,000 were distributed during the First World War. By the end of the war, many MC citations, published in the London Gazette, spoke of the kind of gallantry that in a previous era might have gained a VC. An example is the 1918 citation for Acting Major Norman Fielden Dare, of the Royal Field Artillery, for a second MC bar:

  For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty. This officer was in command of a battery when it was rushed by an overpowering number of the enemy. His judgment and coolness enabled him to extricate four of his guns, which he brought later into action in a forward position, from which, though much exposed, he directed their fire himself, inflicting severe casualties on the enemy and breaking up their attack.52

  The partial rescue of previously deserted guns at Colenso in 1899 – an inglorious moment in British military history – had seen six Crosses awarded. Standards had clearly changed: more than 37,000 MCs were awarded during the First War, with almost 3,000 bars.53

  Sir Frederick Ponsonby, successively private secretary to Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, and now King George V, witnessed the haphazard birth of the MC, as his role included the supervision of what he called the whole ‘tiresome question’ of decorations. A Conservative to his marrow, Ponsonby had long fought a rearguard action to prevent British honours from being cast away like birdseed on the deserving and the undeserving alike, as had happened with decorations in Germany, France, Italy and Russia. He regarded it as his duty to defend what already existed, not to create something new and possibly superfluous, such as the MC, but the pressure to reward courage on a vastly enlarged scale weakened even his resolve. If there was resistance to giving out VCs with the relative abandon of the nineteenth century, then clearly the bravery of some officers, particularly the junior ones who would bear the brunt of the fighting, was going to go unrecognized. Ponsonby summed up the position: