by Paul Ham
The British Army’s culture had changed dramatically too since the start of the war. By 1917, the rich identities of the old British regiments had lost their definition under a perpetual round of reinforcements who were, for the most part, conscripted men with little feeling for the grand traditions of the units to which they’d been posted. A Tommy might wind up as a Lancashire Fusilier, a Northampton, a Manchester, in the Duke of Wellingtons, or in any one of dozens of other ancient British regiments. While one can safely say the members of the famous Guards Division, the Royal Scots (the 1st of Foot) and the Queen’s Royal Surrey Regiment retained their historical identities, most of the rest were diffuse and blurred. New recruits found themselves with a body of strangers, marching, training and fighting. They formed close relationships with men in their sections and platoons, and gave little thought to anyone else – least of all higher command, who were so remote as to be invisible. They lived on laughter, mateship, Woodbines, bully beef, tea and jam. Their chief daily concerns were their comrades-in-arms and whether they’d live another day.
Since 1915, nearly a million officers and men had passed through the tented colonies that stretched along the sand dunes of the French coast. British and Empire soldiers retained distinct memories of those training days, the last before battle. They spent weeks learning how to throw Mills bombs, use a bayonet, survive gas, fire Lewis guns and rifle-grenades, and defeat the enemy in hand-to-hand combat.
The point of bayonet drill was chiefly psychological, to produce a ‘lust for blood’ – according to the Officers’ Training Manual – and engender the killer instinct (the weapon would have limited use in battle).17 The bayonet’s chief proponent was the Gordon Highlander Lieutenant Colonel Ronald Campbell, whose lecture ‘The Spirit of the Bayonet’ his students would never forget. This ferocious sermon did the rounds of the bullring and thereafter appeared in much war literature, expressing Campbell’s obsession with the weapon and its correct use.18 There would be no mercy, he explained: ‘When a German holds up his hands and says: “Kamarad – I have a wife and seven children,” what do you do? Why, you stick him in the gut and tell him he won’t have any more!’19
The men received Campbell’s lessons with a mixture of revulsion, mirth and excitement. ‘We rushed, with raucous yells, and stabbed straw-stuffed bodies,’ Private Bernard Livermore recalled.20 Robert Graves had vivid memories:
[T]he men had to make horrible grimaces and utter blood-curdling yells as they charged. The instructors’ faces were set in a permanent ghastly grin. ‘Hurt him, now!’ ‘In the belly! Tear his guts out!’ they would scream, as the men charged the dummies. ‘Now that upper swing at his privates with the butt. Ruin his chances for life! No more little Fritzes!’ … 21
Norman Collins was told to stick his bayonet into a skull, one or two of which were ‘lying about’, in order to experience how hard it is to remove a bayonet stuck into bone: only by planting your foot on the skull and pulling.22 Notwithstanding Campbell’s enthusiasm for the evisceration and castration of surrendering Germans, he made a persuasive point. ‘Get the bayonet into the hands of despondent troops,’ he later said, ‘and you can make them tigers within hours. I found nothing better to introduce recruits to the terrible conditions which awaited the poor devils up the line.’23 On the other hand, as the officer and later historian Basil Liddell Hart witnessed, troops who took Campbell at his word and put on their ‘killing face’ to charge the enemy were often shot before they got close enough.24 Officers were inured to these methods; their own training manual instructed them to foster a bloodthirsty spirit in their men, to encourage them to be ‘forever thinking of how to kill the enemy’.25
Gas drill involved sitting in a gas chamber ‘filled with various kinds of poison gas’ with your box respirator on, recalled Lieutenant Allfree. The gas clouds were denser and more lethal in the chamber than on the battlefield. An instructor always sat with the men, Allfree recalled, because some were apt, on account of ‘a sense of suffocation’ caused by ‘nervousness’ or ‘a sort of hysteria’, to want to ‘pull their masks off’.26 They’d all heard stories of the horror of gas, of phosgene and chlorine. One type, known to doctors as diphenylchloroarsine, was the only weapon used in the war in which ‘pain per se was the sole effective agent’.27 Inhalation, even in a concentration of one part in 200 million of air, produced such agony as ‘to wholly disable’ the victim.28 Since it could penetrate gas masks, the soldier in his confusion would tear off his mask, only to suffer a greater dose (the Germans nicknamed the gas the ‘maskbreaker’; both sides used it). Perhaps the cruellest stroke was that it did not kill you.
Injuries during training were frequent, and accidents often deadly. Graves recalled a sergeant of the Royal Irish Rifles advising a platoon on the use of the grenade: ‘He picked up a No. 1 percussive grenade and said: “Now lads, you’ve got to be careful here! Remember that if you touch anything while you’re swinging this chap, it’ll go off.” To illustrate the point, he rapped the grenade against the table edge. It killed him and the man next to him and wounded several others more or less severely.’29
The officers’ insistence on petty discipline struck many soldiers, especially the better-educated conscripts, as self-serving or a waste of time. Allfree, for example, found himself ‘in a large dining hut with an elderly, white-haired Major … He gave us a sort of lecture – the gist of which … was the extreme importance of saluting senior officers. Some one had failed to salute him on passing by.’30 The bullring inspired terror in sensitive men. Fearful, homesick or under-confident boys latched on to their officers or stronger men. ‘A quaint youth’ called ‘Soddy’ who shared Allfree’s tent ‘attached himself to me in a most friendly way, much as a lost dog might’.31
Private Neville Hind would never forget the load the men bore in full marching order, summoning a portrait reminiscent of Baldrick, the overburdened, mud-caked Tommy in the Blackadder series:
Army boots, socks, trousers, tunic, puttees, cap, pants, cardigan (if not in pack), shirt, belt, braces, pouches with ammunition, sandbags, rifle, bayonet in scabbard, entrenching tool and handle, water bottle, haversack, iron rations, day’s ration, valise (containing overcoat, change of under-clothing, extra socks, shaving tackle …), oil sheet, steel helmet, two gas helmets.
At the front, the soldier would abandon a lot of this, and take on ‘a good deal more’ in ammunition, Mills bombs, a club, wirecutters and perhaps an entrenching tool or spade.32 The officers carried a cane, a revolver and a few grenades.
These few weeks’ training ended with the ‘final assault course’ in full equipment, ‘a series of rushes from trench to trench’, observed Private Joseph Maclean, ‘the intervening space being strewn with barbed wire, high wire, shell holes etc, and they have fellows throwing huge fire cones at you all the time to represent bombs’.33
Meanwhile, the gunners tested and ranged their guns. In Flanders, the devout Corporal Skirth was in the process of losing a stripe. He’d been told to range his guns on a distant target; the French maps had infuriated a visiting staff officer, who was unable to do the necessary calculations. Skirth easily converted the metric measurements and plotted the range of a target he thought a farm at first, but then realised it was a church.
‘Sir,’ Skirth addressed the staff officer, ‘I think there has been a mistake. The target you have ringed is a church.’
‘What the hell has that got to do with it?’ the staff officer retorted.
‘It’s the tower of a church. There must be a mistake … Only the Germans destroy churches.’
‘Are you a bloody conchie [conscientious objector]?’ said the officer.
‘I don’t know,’ Skirth mumbled. ‘Perhaps I am. I don’t think –’
‘Listen Corporal,’ the officer interrupted, ‘what you think has nothing to do with it. I shall report your insolence to your Commanding Officer … Hand me those figures.’
Later, Skirth was able to confirm that no shell had landed within 250 ya
rds of the church: ‘My calculations must have been very inaccurate.’34
The archetypal British soldier, ‘Private Tommy Atkins’, was the ‘British working man in uniform’.35 He tended to do as he was told, without complaint. Like all soldiers, he grumbled and joked his way through the war. Tommy was the ‘clodhopper from Suffolk, or Devon, or Durham – the man who obeyed orders and stuck it out …’36 He volunteered in huge numbers and went to war with a doggedness of spirit that astonished his officers, some of whom unkindly (and wrongly, as we shall see) attributed the British soldiers’ resilience to the triumph of ignorance over reality, the failure to imagine the consequences of his actions.
There he stands, in photos, smiling through the gaps in his yellow teeth, sitting in a trench or on a truck. Tommy Atkins probably sports a moustache, as decreed by the King’s Regulations: ‘The chin and the lip will be shaved, but not the upper lip. Whiskers, if worn, will be of moderate length.’37 He wears a 1902 Pattern Service Dress of khaki tunic and trousers, with puttees (Urdu for ‘bandages’) wound from the ankle to the calf, which prevent him from snagging his trousers on wire but can induce frostbite if they freeze. On his head, during combat, is his Mk I ‘battle bowler’, the broad-rimmed steel helmet, covered in stretched hessian. A first-aid kit, or shell dressing, is sewn inside his tunic, containing bandages, iodine and safety pins. From his webbing and waist belt hang a water bottle, entrenching tool, bayonet, ammunition pouches, and grenades; in his haversack, he probably keeps the ‘unexpired’ portion of the day’s ration, his gas cape, and a spare pair of socks.38 On his feet are a pair of ‘B5’ ammunition boots, in strong, rough leather with metal-studded soles. A greatcoat or sleeveless goatskin jerkin protects him from the cold, and a rubberised gas cape from gas and rain. At the sound of the ‘gas gong’, he’ll sling on a small box respirator, connected by a tube to a full-face waterproof gas mask.
The Empire troops are similarly equipped and attired, with a few national exceptions, such as the Australians’ kangaroo-hide webbing and slouch hats. The Scots go into battle in kilts camouflaged with khaki skirts, which were essential for clans of bright tartan such as the distinctive red of the Cameron Highlanders and the Royal Stewart.
Theories abound to explain the British soldier’s unerring sense of duty. ‘To the war writers and their middle class readers,’ observed Corelli Barnett, the English historian, ‘it was this squalor of trench life that constituted not the least … unpleasant aspect of the Great War. Yet nearly a third of the British nation lived their entire lives in the slums, contemporary descriptions of which remarkably echo those of the living conditions of the trenches … Many of the rank-and-file were in fact better off in the trenches than at home.’39 Barnett suggests the pleasure Tommy Atkins derived from the relative comfort of a water-filled shell hole over a Tyneside slum explained his cheerful stoicism. This reeks of the sort of middle-class condescension Barnett otherwise scorns; it also ignores the breakdown in morale across all units, regardless of class, in the closing months of 1917. They were all men, made of flesh and blood, in the end.
While the small Anzac and Canadian units gained a reputation for inordinate courage in a series of set-piece battles, the Tommies’ performance appeared less consistent, chiefly because there were so many of them: they were everywhere and did everything, and their units varied in quality. They were the war in Flanders, in the sense that they far outnumbered the Dominion forces, and their casualties were greater (see Appendix 2). At his best, Tommy Atkins was capable of astonishing courage and endurance, as he showed at Loos and First Ypres. The English foot soldier and his Scottish, Welsh and Irish versions stayed the distance where the Russian, French, Austrian and ultimately the German armies would give up. His morale never broke – though it would come very close at Passchendaele.
‘Of this man little was heard,’ writes Sergeant Charles Arnold (himself a quintessential Tommy), ‘possibly because he had a habit of going into places a thousand strong and coming out a remnant of a hundred and fifty or so. Dead men tell no tales of their own glory.’40 The Tommies essentially won the war, reckons Arnold, with some justification: ‘He won it by sheer dogged pluck.’
A reputation for invincibility grew up around the Dominion forces, much of it deserved. The Canadian Corps drew on a string of unbroken victories, at Vimy, Arleux, Fresnoy, Avion and Hill 70, and a series of brutal facts: they had withstood the first use of gas in war, in 1915; fought (with a regiment from Newfoundland, then not part of Canada) alongside the British and Anzacs on the Somme in 1916, with 24,700 losses;41 and driven the Germans off Vimy Ridge in April 1917, sealing their renown as the first army to crack the German lines on the Western Front. In 1918, they would cap these triumphs with a brazen stand at Amiens, without which the tide of war might not have turned so soon against Ludendorff’s Spring Offensive.
A similar legend sprang up around the Anzacs, the insubordinate diggers who had boldly gone wherever their British commanders had ordered them: Gallipoli, the Somme and now Flanders. There were tangible reasons for the extraordinary offensive spirit of the Dominion armies: they were very well led, in the main, under the exceptional British generals Plumer, Birdwood and Byng and the far-sighted ‘colonial’ commanders, Monash and Currie; they swiftly embraced new tactics, technology and weapons; their officers planned every battle down to the smallest detail; and they trained damn hard. The better units in the British Army shared all these attributes, of course, and excelled in similar circumstances.
Something more, however, lay behind the Dominions’ irrepressible, near-reckless aggression, their willingness to slog it out beyond the limits of what their commanders thought possible. One explanation is that the officers and men in the Dominion armies enjoyed a far better relationship than their British counterparts. The Anzacs and Canucks were comparatively free of the burden of ‘class’ that cascaded down the British ranks and landed with a crushing thud on the head of the ordinary Tommy, who rarely spoke his mind to his superiors. The Australian, New Zealand, Canadian and South African forces were a rough-hewn lot among whom the officers and men tended to speak with the same thick accents and think within similar frames of reference. They understood each other’s worlds. Friendships between officers and men were more ‘equal’ in the Dominion than in the British ranks, creating a special kind of loyalty. Irreverent and unruly the colonial armies may have been – Richard Aldington was amazed to find that the Canadians ‘never salute’ – but their performance on the battlefield gave the lie to the idea that soldiers would only fight under a punitive regime ruled by the fear of one’s superiors or the threat of execution for cowardice.
Psychologically, the Dominions drew strength from the fact that they were small foreign armies, rugged outsiders sent to assist the Mother Country in her hour of need. They were determined to prove themselves in the eyes of the world. The Canadian Corps, uniquely among the Dominions, was a national formation (the Australians would not be organised into a national corps until 1 November 1917), and this imbued the men with a powerful sense of patriotic unity, acutely aware that they were carrying the honour of Canada in their kitbags. By any measure, they had lived up to that expectation. ‘With such men,’ a captured German battalion commander told his interrogator, he would ‘go anywhere and do anything’.42 It was of a piece with the respect that the Germans paid all the Dominion armies, whom they tended to regard as their most lethal and resilient foes.
While under the ultimate control of the British command structure, the Dominion armies had their own regimental headquarters and a very different culture. The commanders of the Australian, New Zealand and Canadian forces had begun the war as amateurs, and were promoted for their exceptional gifts and personalities – and willingness to learn. As Haig observed after inspecting the Anzacs in 1916, ‘They are undoubtedly a fine body of men, but their officers and leaders as a whole have a good deal to learn …’43
On 14 May 1917, three of those men, George, Theo and Keith Seabrook, left Engla
nd for France. ‘Well me Nipper,’ they wrote to their little brother, ‘In a very short time we all will be in the Fray smacking the Germans right & left.’44 At Étaples, the three brothers were posted to the same company in a battalion that had lost 340 men, a third of its strength, during the battle of Bullecourt. Like hundreds of thousands of reinforcements, the Seabrooks filled dead men’s shoes. They stayed for a month at a village near Arras, where they trained and relaxed, playing soccer, cricket and boxing.45 Word passed around that ‘this type of training was intended as preparation for operations … north-east of Ypres’.46 Soon enough, after a final rehearsal for a large-scale attack on German trenches, they were ordered to travel to the front in Flanders. In high spirits, the battalion ‘marched away from Clairmarais Forest and its beautiful surroundings’ and, ‘with the band playing the rousing quick-step El Abanico’, the Seabrooks headed for the Ypres Salient.47
The German soldier on the Western Front, whom the Allies generally referred to as Fritz, Boche or the Hun, was either a young recruit of seventeen to twenty years; a veteran of the Eastern Front, deployed west as Russia teetered; or one of the dwindling number of hardened Prussian professionals. Fritz was certainly a ‘valued commodity’, given the shortage of manpower in the Reich.48
He wore a field-grey tunic of thick wool, trousers of coarse grey cloth, a traditional waterproof satchel and, for shock troops, an assault pack, carrying essential gear. His cloth-covered ‘Stalhelm’, the new chromium-nickel helmet, offered all-round protection of the head, and was a great improvement on the leather, spiked Pickelhaube, which officers still wore behind the lines. His calf-length greatcoat was probably the warmest of the war. Sentries, ‘static infantry’ and some machine gunners wore steel-plated body armour over their chest and abdomen.49 From the German soldier’s waist belt and webbing hung his bayonet, water bottle, mess tin, breadbag and ammunition pouches. From his neck dangled a gas mask made of sheepskin, to preserve the Reich’s rubber resources.50
