Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

by Max Hastings

  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 wholeso
me 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.

  Edouard Cœurdevey expressed bitterness at the everyday sight of officers in glittering cars hastening past long columns of wounded men who were obliged to trudge on foot to the nearest aid station – a matter of twelve miles on one occasion: ‘These gentlemen pass without one car stopping to pick up the most exhausted [casualties]. The major mustn’t be late for his roast!’ Alois Löwenstein described the same contempt of Frontsoldaten, facing shot and shell, towards the staff: ‘They are posted many km behind the front and man desks, telephones and ticker tapes. The horses of ordnance officers grow fat.’

  Every intelligent man in the line was in some degree afflicted by fear, but some succumbed more visibly than others. ‘It is curious to see the eyes of a frightened man,’ wrote François Mayer. ‘They are mad with anguish and terror. These nasty shells are not worth the fear they inspire. Unless they achieve a direct hit, they are harmless. One hears their whistle a long way off, then counts to ten before the moment of their detonation.’ Ambulance driver Dorothie Feilding wrote scornfully about the inadequacies of some men under fire, notably a volunteer named Johnyson, in civilian life a land agent: ‘It’s odd how the mere sound of [a shell] crumples men up. It was that way with Johnyson from Dunchurch – the moment there was a “black maria” [German shell] in sight he got in a sort of faint & utterly collapsed & one of the other chauffeurs the same way.’

  Beyond psychological burdens, there were plenty of physical ones. As winter tightened its grip, many of even the fittest young men began to suffer from rheumatism and trench foot, caused by living around the clock in sodden boots and socks, often wading to the knee or above in filthy water. Sick lists soared. Bronchial infections became commonplace, and sometimes fatal. Lice were no mere nuisance, but carriers of disease. ‘My darling, today is our seventh in the trenches,’ Sgt. Gustav Sack wrote from Hardecourt on 5 November. ‘We look like pigs in the proper meaning of the word, a layer of mud a centimetre thick – no exaggeration – sticks to greatcoats, tunics and trousers … If the disgusting newspapers say: “slowly gaining ground” that means we advance 50–60m[etres] towards the enemy by digging for two nights!’ Sack was a journalist, but he described himself recoiling from almost everything he read in German newspapers about the nobility of the war and the trench experience. He felt that he could never put pen to paper to describe what he had experienced in France: ‘all those who go around talking about “writing something great after witnessing war” are talking rubbish’.

  On 24 December George Jeffreys wrote, on the morning after relieving a unit in the line during darkness: ‘I went round early. The water up to my waist in some places. Daylight showed our trenches to be very badly sited as well as full of water and mud … The country quite flat and featureless, and intersected with dykes … the Germans can overlook us … It took me over two hours getting along the line, wading a good bit of the way.’ Robert Harker was in the same condition: ‘It’s extraordinary out here at this game, we lose all accounts of time both the day of the week and date, it all seems to be reckoned by the way we go into the trenches and then come out for rest … The mud … is extraordinary. It has a lot of clay and mineral matter in it and it goes into a thick paste like bird-lime with tremendous suction in which feet stick. Five men in another section got stuck and bogged in a communication trench up to the firing line and it was 7 hours before 3 of them were got out … by kneeling on faggots out of a hedge and scraping the mud away from their legs and feet with our hands … The mud sticks on to one’s clothes, overcoat, trousers and equipment in half-inches of depth and we have almost double the weight to carry, it is almost impossible to keep one’s rifle in working order as it all gets coated and clogged.’ Harker endured several more months of this purgatory before death delivered him.

  François Mayer began the autumn by writing cheerfully home to his wife: ‘We are happy, very well fed. Of course there are plenty of moaners – grognards – but I would say that men’s morale is generally better than it was at the start of this thing. Some violent socialists have passionately rediscovered patriotism.’ Only a few men had started to mutter about deserting, he said, though some Prussians in the opposing trenches did so, coming forward with raised hands and crying out, ‘Vive la France! C’est atroce!’ Interrogation revealed complaints of poor rations and ill-treatment by their officers. But as weeks went by and the weather worsened, Mayer’s spirits flagged along with those of millions of others. On 31 October he took part in an attack in which most of his company fell before the survivors were ordered to retreat: ‘It was then that our luck ran out. Scurrying back, all three of my copains were hit: Chabrier fell shot in the head; Dufour was wounded and died a few hours later; Blanc received three bullets in his haversack.’

  Mayer found himself prey to a growing sense of futility, intensified by each new operation in which he participated. ‘Yesterday we made a feint attack to draw German reserves into our area,’ he wrote from Rosières, south-east of Amiens, on 29 November, ‘and thus assist a real attack near Quesnoy-en-Sarterre. It was unenjoyable from my viewpoint. After our guns had put down several salvos on the enemy, he opened an intense fire after which ten men led by a sergeant advanced about sixty metres from our lines. This provoked a rain of incoming shrapnel. After about an hour, our ten men returned, but the enemy bombardment continued until evening. What was it all for? I don’t know. In the company, one man was killed and two wounded, for meagre results.’ Col. Wilfrid Abel-Smith was appalled to read Lord Kitchener’s prediction that the war would be protracted, observing disbelievingly, ‘It is impossible to believe that the world can stand such a thing for two years.’

  All the armies found it necessary to employ sanctions to maintain discipline. When at last Frank Richards’s unit secured a respite from the line, its commanding officer exploited this to inflict extr
a route marches – delayed imposition of punishments given to all those, including officers, who had straggled – dropped out and fallen behind – during the retreat from Mons. Even a man who had taken part in a bayonet charge with another unit had to march, cursing profusely. In rest billets, the same martinet administered No. 1 Field Punishment to soldiers found guilty of disciplinary offences. Instead of being lashed to a wagon wheel – the usual procedure – the men were tied to railings outside a factory in Houplines. Local women gathered around, some to sympathise, others to mock. One man said he didn’t mind doing field punishment, ‘but he didn’t want a bloody lot of frog-eating bastards gaping at him’.

  Every nation imposed some capital sentences for battlefield flight or desertion, though the Germans executed far fewer of their own men than did the allies. Lucien Laby witnessed the shooting of a Frenchman from a cyclists’ regiment, convicted of abandoning his post in the face of the enemy: ‘He dies courageously, unbuttoning his tunic and saying, “My dear comrades, aim at my breast not my head.”’ The victim refused a blindfold and shouted at the last, ‘Long live France! Long live Alsace!’ Edouard Beer described a hideously botched Belgian execution: two condemned men were lashed to posts, and at the order a ten-strong firing squad unleashed a volley. One victim fell, but when the doctor examined the other he found him still alive, and muttered to the officer in command, who in turn told off a corporal to deliver a coup de grâce. After a shot, the doctor checked the man again – and found him still clinging to life. This time the officer seized the corporal’s rifle and himself ended the wretched victim’s sufferings. Beer wrote: ‘The officers retired, the men cut down the corpses. All were profoundly impressed. I heard one say, “Ah! I’d rather have my head blown off by a German shell than be ignominiously carved up by an incompetent brute.”’