The Last Veteran

by Peter Parker

  Although a patriot who believed in composing stirring tunes for stirring times, Elgar was also a man who had many friends in Germany, a country in which his reputation as a composer stood very high. It was, for example, a German, Hans Richter, who had conducted the first performance of the quintessentially English Enigma Variations in 1899. Elgar’s feelings about the First World War were, therefore, equivocal, and he grew very much to dislike the fact that ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ (the major tune in his Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 with words added, to the composer’s dissatisfaction, by A.C. Benson) became Britain’s ‘second national anthem’. Russell developed this notion by using the march to represent the First World War in his film. Although a commentary outlined Elgar’s unhappiness about the way the piece had been appropriated, for the most part the march is played without comment over archive footage from the First World War, starting with jubilant crowds greeting the outbreak of war in London and ending, inevitably, in the war cemeteries. As the first notes of the piece are heard, we see film of a recruitment rally in Trafalgar Square, followed by footage of men marching through the streets. In a scene in which new recruits in civilian clothes march over one of the city’s bridges, a boy watches them and keeps turning to look at the camera. It is perhaps a mark of the way people by now thought about the war that it is impossible to look at this boy without wondering what became of him, a plausible supposition being that he was killed in the trenches. As the music progresses, the action moves to the Western Front, with footage of men going over the top and the injured being carried along the trenches. As the ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ tune swells on the soundtrack, Russell uses footage of a long procession of soldiers, blinded victims of gas attacks. There is also footage of the temporary cemeteries, row upon row of crosses stretching to the horizon, with a close-up of a single marker for the grave of an unidentified body. The sequence ends with a panning shot of the permanent gravestones in a war cemetery, the pan quickening in pace until stone after stone rushes past in almost unimaginable profusion. The overall effect of this sequence, as Elgar’s biographer Michael Kennedy put it to Russell many years later, was that it was almost as if ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ was being blamed for the First World War. It is a highly skilful, and highly manipulative, piece of film-making.

  The real blame for the First World War, however, had been laid firmly at the door of the politicians who started it and the generals who conducted it, known collectively and unaffectionately as the Frock-coats and Brass-hats. Just as in the late 1920s and early 1930s, when public opinion was influenced by Churchill’s The World Crisis, Liddell Hart’s The Real War and Lloyd George’s War Memoirs, three seminal accounts of the war published in the 1960s attacked the reputations of those who had conducted the First World War. The first and most controversial book to put this case in the run-up to the fiftieth anniversary of the war was Alan Clark’s The Donkeys: A History of the B.E.F. in 1915, published in 1961. The title was taken from an observation attributed to the German commander and strategist General Hoffman, who described the British troops in the First World War as ‘lions led by donkeys’. Unlike the War Poets, the lions in Clark’s book were not civilian volunteers and conscripts but professional soldiers. They were members of the regular army, whose service and traditions stretched back over the centuries but who, according to Clark, were betrayed by their commanders in 1915, most seriously at the costly Battle of Loos. Aptly described by The Economist as ‘a shell-burst of a book’, it opened: ‘This is the story of the destruction of an army – the old professional army of the United Kingdom that always won the last battle, whose regiments had fought at Quebec, Corunna, in the Indies, were trained in musketry at Hythe, drilled on the parched earth of Chuddapore, and were machine-gunned, gassed and finally buried in 1915.’ As a prelude to this dismal story, Clark argued that in September 1914, in the wake of the German defeat at the First Battle of the Marne, a chance had arisen for the British cavalry to break through the enemy lines, but this had been frittered away by overcautious and indecisive commanders, thus condemning the army to the four years of attritional trench warfare that followed. ‘A resolute thrust, pressed with even a semblance of the disregard for casualties that characterized later operations under the same commanders,’ Clark insisted, would have isolated the tired and hungry German First Army of General von Kluck, which had been separated from the Second Army led by General von Bülow, and would have resulted in ‘wholesale surrenders.’

  Clark’s main narrative begins with an unflattering account of relationships within the British High Command as background to the events of 1915, in which ‘considerations of personal vanity and prestige led to much bloodshed that might have been avoided by a dispassionate consideration of the military principles involved’. His book is anything but dispassionate, repeatedly accusing the generals of being ill prepared, ‘ignoring […] the repeated warnings of the Intelligence Section and, indeed, the evidence that presented itself to the naked eye of any observer in the front line’. The text is enlivened by such asides as: ‘The battle – if the afternoon’s massacre may be dignified by such a term – lasted three hours.’ Just as in the book’s plates section Clark juxtaposes a photograph of Joffre, Poincaré, Foch, Haig and George V standing smartly uniformed on the steps of a chateau (and captioned: ‘Polished boots’) with one of the devastated landscape around the village of Loos, so the bickering and infighting that took place among the High Command (sarcastically referred to as a ‘Band of Brothers’) is contrasted with the stoicism of front-line soldiers holed up in winter trenches. Clark vividly evokes the cold and sodden conditions in which troops ‘starved of the equipment necessary in trench warfare, with little pretence even of artillery support and seriously short of trained junior officers and N.C.O.s’ endured these conditions, before noting that: ‘In the warmth and comfort of the Allied Headquarters, however, the mood was one of optimism.’

  That such optimism was unjustified, and was supported neither by clear strategy or a proper consideration of what was happening in the front line, is a principal theme of the book. Even before the main narrative of the battles of 1915 begins, Clark undermines Haig’s reputation, gleefully outlining the general’s inglorious early career. His conclusion is that Haig’s ascension to high command ‘owed more to influential connections than to natural ability’, an unfortunate result of which was that ‘the Army seemed to contain many people who had tried to thwart [him] or who had, on account of superior quality, excelled him’. The whole of the High Command is portrayed as petty, scheming and rivalrous, but Clark retains his strongest criticism for Haig, frequently and damningly quoting from official papers in order to bolster his attack.

  An example of Clark’s method is the chapter dealing with the Battle of Aubers Ridge in May 1915. It is prefaced by an epigraph reproducing an exchange taken from the Rifle Brigade Official History:

  GENERAL RAWLINSON: This is most unsatisfactory. Where are the Sherwood Foresters? Where are the East Lancashires on the right?

  BRIGADIER-GENERAL OXLEY: They are lying out in No-Man’s-Land, sir, and most of them will never stand again.

  In the wake of the partially successful first attack, Clark reports, men from the Irish Rifles attempting to return to their own trenches with a large party of Germans they had taken prisoner were being fired upon not only by the enemy but also by the British, who imagined that a counter-attack was taking place. Losses had been considerable and the communication trenches, which were known to have been insufficiently deep, were now clogged with stretcher-bearers and the walking wounded. Back at HQ, Haig nevertheless gave orders to renew the attack. By the time these orders were received, ‘it was plain to all the commanders on the spot that it was physically impossible to mount an attack with the shattered remnants of the assaulting battalions that remained in the front trenches, while the acute congestion in the immediate rear made the task of relieving them with fresh troops, and that of evacuating the large number of wounded that impeded free c
irculation, laborious and costly’. The orders for an immediate attack were, therefore, ignored: ‘It was plainly impossible to achieve a state of readiness before the afternoon.’ This did not, however, deter the ‘impatient’ Haig, who shortly before noon ‘issued further orders insisting that the attack should be pressed “immediately”’. Desperate attempts were made to follow these orders, but the Germans were firing on the assembly trenches: ‘The majority of men never even climbed out into No-Man’s-Land, although many companies were reduced by more than half as they huddled in the shallow, crowded forming-up places waiting for the whistle. By two o’clock the position had changed not at all, except that the 8th Division had suffered a further 2,000 casualties.’

  In a characteristic shift of perspective, Clark moves immediately from this account to the operational centre for the attack at Lestrem to find Haig attending a luncheon where ‘the talk was mainly of horses and hunting’. Clark quotes from an unidentified diary of someone there who reported that when news was brought of the failure of this attack, ‘launched as a result of Haig’s insistent orders’ and ‘attended by serious losses’: ‘the Chief took it very hard. We had been getting reports all morning of how well the French had been doing and he must have felt that they would be laughing at our efforts.’ The clear implication is that Haig was more concerned about being laughed at by the French than about the massive casualties among his own men that were a direct result of his stubbornness.

  Returning his narrative to the front, Clark once again juxtaposes the circumstances of the generals and their troops: ‘While Haig was motoring from Lestrem to Aire, the position of the 2nd London, the Munsters and the Northants, still holding on inside the enemy lines, was becoming hourly more desperate.’ Haig was in fact merely returning to his own headquarters, but Clark’s deliberate use of the verb ‘motoring’ makes the journey sound like a jaunt. In spite of receiving a report from General Gough, commander of the 7th Division, who had made a ‘personal reconnaissance’ of the front line and was convinced that no renewed assault during daylight had any hope of succeeding, Haig ordered another attack for 4 p.m. The bombardment that preceded this killed all but three of the hapless Munsters, who had managed to break through the German line. The attack itself was a costly failure and the day’s British losses were 458 officers and 11,161 men: ‘It had been a disastrous fifteen hours of squandered heroism, unredeemed by the faintest glimmer of success.’

  Clark’s account of the Battle of Loos is equally dispiriting, leaving readers with the indelible impression that in the First World War gallant troops were repeatedly and pointlessly sacrificed by pig-headed generals. It was a version of history that reinforced the one handed down by the War Poets – and the historical accounts of Churchill, Liddell Hart and Lloyd George. Liddell Hart was still a hugely influential figure in First World War studies, and it comes as no surprise to find in Clark’s book a fulsome acknowledgement to ‘that acknowledged master of military history, Captain B.H. Liddell Hart, who has allowed me access to his private files on the period and has been of the greatest help at every stage in the development of the book’. The Donkeys was Clark’s first work of non-fiction and it won him few friends among professional military historians, who challenged its reliability and disliked its anti-authoritarian tone. It was perhaps made worse by the fact that Clark was not a tiresome young pacifist lefty from a redbrick university, from whom little better could be expected. He had been educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford (where he studied under leading historians Robert Blake, who would edit Haig’s diaries, and Hugh Trevor-Roper, who would become Haig’s son-in-law); had briefly been in training with the cavalry during the Second World War and been a member of the Royal Auxiliary Air Force in the 1950s; and had trained for the bar. The leading military historian Michael Howard, however, was unimpressed by these credentials, writing in The Listener that:

  Military history, more than any other branch of historical studies, lends itself to the journalist and the populariser. This is not to belittle the work of either, for journalism and literary entertainment are respectable professions calling for great skills and hard work. But what these practitioners write is not history […] Mr Clark is not a historian. Neither the tuition of Professor Trevor-Roper nor the access to the files of Captain Liddell Hart of which his publishers boast have made him one.

  While acknowledging that Clark was ‘a vivid writer with considerable gifts both of description and narrative’, Howard also accused him of bias and poor scholarship: ‘Like other contemporary works on the first world war, [the book] accepts unquestioningly a popular stereotype of brave British lives being squandered by stupid generals and fills out the picture by selective quotation from a very limited number of sources used without any sort of critical acumen.’ He conceded that the book was ‘good value’ as ‘entertainment’, but added: ‘As history it is worthless.’

  The Donkeys nevertheless remains an important historical document – if not of 1915, then certainly of the 1960s. It was very popular with the general reader, and its ferocious attack on the leadership of the generals and its portrayal of the front-line soldiers as courageous men sent heedlessly to their inevitable doom set the tone of debate for the entire decade. It fixed even more firmly in the public mind the mud-blood-and-futility view of the war.

  Clark was a fledgling historian, easy for those who regarded themselves as his elders and betters to dismiss; but equally popular, even more influential and almost as controversial as The Donkeys was A.J.P. Taylor’s The First World War: An Illustrated History (1963). Frowned upon by many of his peers for his outspoken and occasionally eccentric views and manner, and challenged by his successors over his reliability, Taylor was a genuinely populist historian and an excellent communicator, who had a long career both on television and as a newspaper columnist. With his heavy-framed spectacles and jauntily askew bow tie, he was perhaps the one historian most people would have recognised, and his book on the First World War was written for the general rather than the specialist reader. It was produced by the ‘packager’ George Rainbird, who took advantage of the advances in printing technology that had resulted in the colour supplements to Sunday newspapers to produce at affordable prices beautifully designed and lavishly illustrated books for mainstream publishers – in this instance Hamish Hamilton. The democratic aim of these books was to popularise such subjects as history by leavening serious and well-researched texts, usually by well-known authors, with contemporary illustrations, often in full colour. In Taylor’s case, the illustrations were all black and white, in keeping with the subject matter, and were used by the author with subversive wit. Even without reading the full text, one would have a pretty clear idea of Taylor’s general thesis just by looking at the illustrations and the captions he provided to highlight his arguments – or, some would argue, score cheap points.

  Although most captions to photographs of the war zones were reasonably neutral, Taylor sometimes uses them as an offensive weapon to blast wartime clichés: ‘The wicked Hun’ beneath a picture of one of the Kaiser’s less terrifying conscripts, a bespectacled and exhausted soldier who looks like a mild-mannered clerk; ‘Civilization triumphs again’ beneath a now famous photograph of a long line of shuffling men blinded in a gas attack. Taylor reserves his biggest guns, however, for the Frock-coats and Brass-hats. A photograph of French in morning dress, complete with glossy top hat and cane, presumably late for some appointment since he is running past a crowd of onlookers, is captioned: ‘Sir John French, commander of the B.E.F., in training for the retreat from Mons’; a portrait photograph of Haig posing in his uniform, his cap under one arm, is tagged: ‘He relied upon divine help, became an earl and received £100,000 from parliament’. ‘He could have lost the war in an afternoon’ accompanies a photo of Admiral Jellicoe aboard his flagship; a picture of the French High Command, their embonpoint barely contained by their uniforms, is labelled: ‘French generals suffering from undernourishment’. Politicians fare no better than th
e military: Lloyd George being conducted along a line of munitions workers – as well he might be since he was after all Minister of Munitions – is captioned: ‘Lloyd George casts an expert eye over munitions girls’; ‘Lloyd George and Churchill on the march to the top’ runs another caption – that march being along a London street in formal wear rather than the one through a shattered landscape to the front endured by the soldiers carrying out their bidding.

  These figures are treated with equal disrespect in the text, a text which – it by now seems almost inevitably – had been submitted in draft to the doyen of First World War studies, B.H. Liddell Hart. The disasters on the Western Front are duly itemised and blame apportioned. The Battle of Loos was fought largely because Kitchener thought that ‘unless the British gave full support [to the French], Joffre would be overthrown and the French politicians would then make peace. Hence, British soldiers died so that France could be kept in the war.’ At the end of the battle, the Allies had ‘made no gain strategically or even on the most limited scale; there had simply been useless slaughter’. The Battle of Verdun was ‘the most senseless episode in a war not distinguished for sense anywhere’, but the Battle of the Somme was not much better: ‘Nothing had been learnt from previous failures except how to repeat them on a large scale.’ Taylor itemises the casualties (420,000 British, 200,000 French) and throws doubt upon the Official History:

  The Germans probably lost about 450,000; and would have lost less if it had not been for the order of [the German commander] Falkenhayn, rivalling Haig in obstinacy, that every yard of lost trench must be taken in counter-attacks. Many years later, the editor of the British official history performed a conjuring trick on the German figures, and blew them up to 650,000, thus making out against all experience that the attackers suffered less than the defence. There is no need to take those figures seriously.