by Paul Ham
When 1916 began, the war was still young, the adventure real, and everyone wanted to be in it. The middle classes of all the respective nations were loudly receptive to the idea that they were fighting for the motherland, for King, Kaiser, Emperor or Tsar. Every side had God on their side. This would be the ‘decisive’ year, declared the Triple Entente (France, Russia, Britain and their colonial allies), a refrain they would repeat at the start of every year. The coming battles would be unlike anything the world had seen, fought at Verdun, on the Meuse, on the Somme, in Italy and on the Eastern Front, where Russia’s Brusilov Offensive prepared to unleash the most lethal military operation to that point in history.
Britain, France, Russia and Germany had cranked up the war effort to a level of intensity unimaginable twelve months earlier. Factories chugged away night and day to deliver the instruments of death. Millions of rounds of heavy explosive, hundreds of thousands of rifles, machine guns, uniforms, gas shells, gas masks, grenades, trenching tools, and all kinds of newfangled equipment poured off the assembly lines. Governments and military commanders adopted new ways of managing their huge new armies: the British forces were being reorganised, under the deep reforms of Viscount Haldane and Haig. The appeal from Lord Kitchener – field marshal and secretary of state for war – to fill his ‘New Armies’ had raised the largest volunteer force in the world. Almost 2.5 million British men voluntarily enlisted between August 1914 and December 1915. The promise of a square meal and the King’s shilling, more than god or country, persuaded the unemployed and malnourished to enlist. They made up the majority. Even this immense force was not enough, and from 2 March 1916 the British Government began conscripting single men for frontline duty, under the first Military Service Act; on 25 May, another Act extended conscription to married men.5
Germany was similarly moving to a total war footing. On 31 August 1916, General Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg instructed the War Ministry to ratchet up production to unprecedented levels. ‘Men – as well as horses – must be replaced more and more by machines,’ he wrote. Women, the wounded, prisoners, social misfits and minors would be compelled to work in war industries. The war effort was a ‘screw without end’, Hindenburg said: victory would go to the power that turned the screw tightest at the right moment.6 Henceforth, he called for the monthly output of gunpowder to double, to 12,000 tons, and of machine guns to triple, to 7000 pieces. Those rates of production were scheduled to remain in force until at least May–June 1917, when, a German colonel confidently declared, ‘the war would have ended’.7
By 1916, Europe had turned into a vast armed camp. Great armies, millions strong, gazed across no-man’s-land, bristling for action. No, it would not be over by Christmas, not this year or the next. The trenches were no longer the shallow, hastily dug scrapes of 1914. Solid wooden A-frames and duckboards, deep tunnels, reinforced dugouts and cement bunkers locked down the front lines, behind which a labyrinth of support and communication trenches, like subterranean cities, wound back to the railheads, encampments and training grounds in the tented rear areas, brimful of fresh troops and shipments of weapons and supplies. Food, ammunition and medical provisions were produced, packaged and delivered by millions of civilians, mostly women, working day and night in darkened factories on the home front. These oceans of toiling humanity lapped either side of that great fissure of black earth running from the Belgian coast to the Swiss Alps, where, on this ‘Western Front’, the contest of the world would be decided.
Verdun almost broke the spirit of the belligerents. The memory of that ghastly confrontation, fought over ten months (21 February–18 December 1916), disabused thousands of troops of their faith in the war and indelibly scarred the historical soul of France and Germany. ‘Like Auschwitz … Verdun came to symbolise a breach of the limits of the human condition,’ wrote the French historian Antoine Prost.8 The 299-day bloodbath transformed the meaning of war. The ‘noble sacrifice’, the ‘fight for freedom and country’, had become a program of indifferent extermination. Verdun killed or wounded between 600,000 and 900,000 men (depending on the source), 315,000–542,000 French and 281,000–434,000 German. At the end of it, 160,000 French and 143,000 German soldiers lay dead.9 Neither side ‘won’: the German strategy amounted to a series of limited attacks on French border forts aimed at drawing the blue-uniformed poilu into a narrow killing zone and then pulverising them with artillery of such intensity that ‘not even a mouse could live’. Those were the words of the chief of the German general staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn, for whom it was immaterial whether the Germans actually took Verdun. The main objective of the battle, as he assured the Kaiser, was to ‘bleed France white’ (Blutabzapfung).10 Not for nothing was Falkenhayn known as the ‘Blood-Miller of Verdun’, and the Great War’s first exponent of a strategy of pure attrition.
To relieve the French at Verdun, and divert the German forces, the British and Dominion armies launched the Somme Offensive (1 July–18 November 1916). The Somme was a diversion. Haig had preferred to fight in Flanders, but he bowed to the political imperative of aiding Britain’s chief European ally. We need not dwell on this catastrophic struggle, which has produced more literature than any other Anglo-Saxon battle. As we know, or should know, the holocaust killed or wounded more than 1.3 million men, in one of the bloodiest confrontations in history. The Somme claimed 57,470 British casualties on the first day (of whom more than 19,000 were killed); the Germans lost 40,000 over the first ten days. The ensuing battles, of Albert, Fromelles, Delville Wood, Pozières, Thiepval Ridge, Ancre and many more, surged and flowed over the plains of Picardy, killing or wounding the Allies at the rate of almost 3000 men per day.11
Haig later described the Somme as the start of ‘the wearing-down war’, or the war of attrition, a term that broadly meant slowly grinding down the enemy’s strength and resources, until it became possible to break through to open ground and destroy their residual strength. Attrition, reckons a US military writer, Dr J. Boone Bartholomees, ‘strategically favors the attacker since he can regulate his own pain; he can select when, where, and how hard he attacks and thus control to at least some extent his losses’.12 That may be true, yet the ‘body count’ in an attritional war almost always favours the defenders, as the great Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) explained in his book On War (a lesson taught to generations of Sandhurst men): i.e. men defensively employed in well-entrenched positions had an inherent advantage over their attackers.13 In 1916 and 1917, the Germans acted on this: they chose not to initiate any major offensives, instead defending their gains of 1914 and 1915. And so, entrenched in their fortified redoubts, their dug-outs and concrete pillboxes, the German infantry prepared to exploit their Clausewitzian advantage: they simply sat and waited for the enemy to charge, aiming to bleed the attackers to death.
Britain, France and their allies more than obliged, hurling wave after wave of recruits at the German lines. The Somme killed or wounded many more British, French and Dominion troops than German troops, in line with von Clausewitz’s grim equation: 794,000 versus 540,000 (according to a consensus of scholars).14 Again, no side ‘won’ this series of gruesome encounters: the Germans withdrew and were reinforced; the British consolidated their modest gains.
Certain military experts now calmly remind us of the chief ‘benefit’ of the Somme: it taught Allied commanders useful tactical lessons, chiefly the correct application of the creeping barrage, without which they could not have won the war. The Great War would be a steep and bloody learning curve. Of course, Germany could cite the same lessons: the learning curve proceeded at a similar pace for both sides, ceding no ultimate advantage. In any case, the Allied armies did not fight the Somme purely to learn ‘lessons’ and educate the commanders. The more intelligent and innovative generals (Britain’s Herbert Plumer, Australia’s John Monash and Canada’s Arthur Currie) did not need the Somme to teach them the point of the creeping barrage, or evidence of its failure in the mass graves of the Anglo-S
axon and Celtic dead. In this light, one can’t help wondering how families who’d lost their sons on the Somme would have reacted to this ex post facto justification for the battle: ‘Oh, we had to fight the Somme to teach the generals how to fire the heavy guns. Sorry about your boy.’
The third year of the Great War ended in stalemate after the bloodiest contests in history. Censorship could not shield the public from the casualty lists, which crowded the newspaper columns and reduced whole communities to despair. Some towns, such as Accrington, in East Lancashire, were rumoured to have lost nearly all their young men. The Somme had annihilated many ‘pals battalions’ – i.e. drawn from the same communities or industries – nourishing an impression that an entire generation was being systematically wiped out.
British High Command defended their actions on the grounds that the Germans must never be allowed to rest; the offensive spirit must be kept high; the German Army must be worn down. At the end of this ‘wearing-down war’, whenever it finally came, the victor would be the last man standing. That prospect did not unduly trouble the Allied generals. In 1917, the British commanders knew they were losing men at a faster rate than Germany, but they also knew they would soon draw on a far deeper pool of manpower, once France had recovered and the Americans had arrived. Yes, they would probably lose more men in absolute terms, but Germany and Austria-Hungary would exhaust their reserves more quickly. By that brutal logic, the Entente would win the war.
On the trains and ships bound for France they came, the usual boisterous, overconfident young men, keening for battle and ‘killing the Boche’ (or ‘Tommies’, on the German side). Many found refuge in jokes; others were thoughtful, ruminant, or immersed in their books. Many were quietly terrified. If most had shared Norman Collins’s feelings in 1914 – ‘I felt I had to defend our country’15 – and the writer A. P. Herbert’s sense that he’d been ‘calmly persuaded’ to go to war ‘for a just cause’,16 fewer felt that way in 1917. The thrill of the declaration of war had dissipated, and the patriotic affection of earlier years had cooled into something harder, more ruthless, or, at any rate, less self-deceiving. The men who had trained the new recruits had served on the Western Front and seen the carnage, after all.
By 1917, their illusion of invincibility had waned. The romance of war, the boyish hero-worship, the glory of the charge, their faith in the cause had come unstuck. The soldiers had heard all about the Somme and Verdun. They’d seen the wounded in the streets – the lucky ones – or heard about the rest: shellfire could disembowel, decapitate and castrate you. If your friend beside you took a direct hit, you’d be covered in his blood and entrails. Artillery would tear apart ‘the pleasant fringes of war … and drinking in strange towns’ with the indiscriminate power of an epidemic.17 Chlorine and phosgene gases would kill you slowly, in great agony (mustard gas would not be used until July 1917).
To say you’d enlisted for god, king or country invited ridicule from hardened veterans. The soldiers were no longer ‘duped by the War talk’, wrote Richard Aldington, an officer in the Royal Sussex Regiment in 1917, in his autobiographical novel of the war: ‘They laughed at the newspapers. Any new-comer who tried to be a bit high falutin was at once snubbed with, “Fer Christ’s sake don’t talk patriotic!” They went on with a sort of stubborn despair …’18
Others shared Private Neville Hind’s hardened sense of duty: ‘from the first day I put on Khaki, I accepted the moral responsibility for killing Germans, just as the Conscientious Objector refuses from the outset’.19 There was little glory in it; it was a job. Hind’s low-key departure, like most, was bereft of the euphoria of earlier years: a small crowd saw his regiment off. Some troops sang and shouted from the carriages, ‘though others were silent’20 – such as the Cardiff City ex-professional footballer and the Northumberland miner, ‘very kind, generous and soft-hearted; getting on for 40, leaving home, maybe for the first time, and feeling it very acutely, leaving a wife and family’.21 ‘Old’ soldiers just back from the front had told the men what to expect. Hind’s 25-year-old platoon sergeant, puffing away on a Woodbine at the station, cried ‘like a child at the brutality of men’ as his unit departed. Hind’s regimental chaplain, who had also ‘been out’, stood on the platform looking ‘grave, yet in a sense cheery’.22
They travelled all night to Folkestone and boarded a packed troop ship escorted by a destroyer: the submarine threat was at its height in 1917. During the crossing to France, they passed a hospital ship, a reminder of what ‘all knew, tho’ none said, that there were some of us would never return’.23 The songs had changed. Few sang the rousing tunes that piped them into battle in 1914 and 1915: ‘Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty’ had replaced ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’.24 But their sense of humour, ‘the great safety-valve of a soldier’, never deserted them.25 On New Year’s Eve of 1916–17, to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, they sang:
We’re here because we’re here,
Because we’re here, because we’re here,
We’re here because we’re here,
Because we’re here, because we’re here.26
The Seabrook brothers, George, 25, Theo, 24, and Keith, 20, sailed from Sydney aboard the troop ship Ascanius on 25 October 1916 and landed at Devonport, Plymouth, on 28 December. The eldest of eight children, the brothers formed the core of a close-knit, if peripatetic family. George was an apprentice painter, Theo a fireman, and Keith a telephone operator. Pre-war photos show their father, William, padded up and playing cricket with his sons, like any other Australian dad, in the backyard of their inner-city cottage.
Their mother Fanny (née Isabel Ross) came from a prosperous family of staunch Methodists, proprietors of the general store in Grafton, a town in northern New South Wales. This determined young woman became the rock on which her growing brood relied. ‘I’ve never heard anyone in the family say a harsh word about her,’ recalls one relative. ‘She held the family together.’27 Her elfin face and small frame belied a strong-willed woman of stoic calm, in marked distinction to the erratic, vulnerable disposition of her husband, William.
In 1916, the Seabrooks settled in Petersham, a working-class suburb of Sydney, where William resumed his trade as a railway carpenter, offering Fanny a welcome respite from his exhausting delusions. William had hitherto persuaded himself, Micawber-like, that his fortune lay around the next bend, in pursuit of which he’d dragged the family across the country on various doomed excursions – to Fremantle, in Western Australia, to invest in a dolomite mine; back to New South Wales, to the town of Armidale, to open a book-shop; and elsewhere, with new ideas and get-rich-quick schemes, none of which amounted to much.
George and Theo enlisted for service abroad in the Australian Army in August 1916; their younger brother Keith, aged nineteen, required his parents’ ‘full permission to enlist for active service abroad’, which he received the same month. Despite his youth, Keith had had experience as a junior officer in the militia, and would receive an acting sergeant’s and later a lieutenant’s rank. They signed the oath that bound the Dominions to defend the British realm:
I [name] swear that I will well and truly serve our Sovereign Lord the King in the Australian Imperial Force … and that I will resist His Majesty’s enemies and cause His Majesty’s peace to be kept and maintained …28
They then passed their medical examinations – free of scrofula, phthisis, syphilis, impaired constitution, defective intelligence, defects of vision, voice or hearing, haemorrhoids, severe varicose veins, marked varicocele with unusually pendant testicle, inveterate cutaneous disease, chronic ulcers, traces of corporal punishment or evidence of having been marked with the letters D. [Deserter] or B.C. [Bad Character], contracted or deformed chest, and abnormal curvature of the spine – and were pronounced ‘fit for active service’.29
The voyage to England took them via Colombo, South Africa and Dakar. The day after their arrival, they marched into a training camp at Rollestone, near Salisbury. On leave, they visited L
ondon. Their postcards offer a glimpse of their characters: George had recovered from the death of his wife, in January 1916, and he wrote home with great enthusiasm. Theo lacked his brothers’ self-confidence yet ‘loved to poke fun’ at them all.30 Keith was the more responsible, and wrote of his brothers’ health and plans.
They were all having a ‘glorious time’ in London. ‘This place is very cold, we had a good fall of snow yesterday,’ Keith told his grandmother.31 They had ‘had a great time riding on the buses, no doubt you would too,’ they told their little sister Jean.32 ‘My word,’ they wrote to their youngest brother, Clarrie, ‘you would jump with glee if you where [sic] in London …’33
At about this time, a young Englishman with a markedly different background to the Seabrooks was serving as a junior officer in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. Like so many former public school boys, the Old Etonian Desmond Allhusen had enlisted as soon as he left school, in August 1914. At news of the declaration of war, Allhusen and his friends rejoiced. ‘There were scenes of wild enthusiasm,’ Desmond noted in his diary. ‘A form of parting much used among the cadet school-leavers was “Good-bye. See you again in Hell”.’34 Later that evening, Desmond found his brother Rupert in his room, ‘sharpening his sword’.
