by Paul Ham
A subversive spirit was sweeping Europe, summoning the force of an insurrection in Russia and Germany: the huge waste and apparent pointlessness of the war had sown disillusionment and cynicism. Five and a half million days were lost to strikes in Britain in 1917, 1.5 million in May alone, emboldening the King to tour the country to engender loyalty among the working men, in which he secured the ‘royalist’ affections of hard-bitten unionists. This, accompanied by pay rises, tax breaks and rationing, gave an impression of unity and went some way towards healing a nation on the brink of social fragmentation.
These great arguments scarcely impinged on the minds of the British soldiers and their colonial counterparts. The revolutionary fervour and demoralisation that had led millions of Russian troops to desert; the outrage at their treatment that drove the French Army to mutiny: neither would distract the British and colonial soldier from his duty, even though they were ignorant of the evolving reasons why they had to keep fighting. Fear and survival were now their chief concerns.
Writing letters home eased the men’s fears and calmed their minds. Writing home let them put their experience into a friendly, familiar context, as if to normalise it. The euphoria of being involved in tremendous events animated their early letters; later correspondence tended to acquire a darker tone, and a pointed optimism – ‘Don’t worry about me!’, ‘I’ll be all right!’, ‘It’s just a scratch!’ Others wrote of the sheer exhilaration of war, of the ‘tremendous fun’ of battle.
Most soldiers sent postcards or brief letters: Dear Mum … My Own Darling Wife … Dear Old Girl … Auntie May, Nellie, Ada, Gwen … Thank you for the parcel … Don’t get in a state when you see I’m in hospital … Thanks for the smokes, cake, pork pie, parcel from Fortnum’s … 16
Duty officers read unsealed correspondence, and blacked out or destroyed any letters that gave away military locations, unit names, deployments, or the general mood and morale. Pre-scripted field postcards were distributed on which the soldier simply struck out the sentences that were incorrect. For example:
I am quite well.
I am coming home on leave.
I received your letter.
I have been wounded.
And the home front responded, as best they could, but not always to the soldiers’ liking. ‘Dear John’ letters informing a soldier that his wife or fiancée had found someone else left many men feeling recklessly suicidal. Some threw themselves at the enemy, falling on the mercy of a bullet to escape the pain of rejection. Or the war broke the woman’s faith. A friend of Neville Hind’s received a letter from a ‘heart-broken wife’ to which he angrily replied that ‘if she couldn’t f_____ well write a better f______ letter than that, she’d better not write at all’.17 Of course, it was hardly her fault that the war had left her desolated.
The letters that survive tend to convey the experiences of the better-educated middle classes, chiefly officers. The Australian-born Colonel Alex Wilkinson, son of a British doctor, went to Eton and University College Oxford, and served as a reserve officer with the Coldstream Guards for the duration of Third Ypres. His letters home, to his sister and father, offer a rare glimpse of the world through the eyes of a young Guards officer.
Wilkinson spared his parents none of the danger. On the night of 28 June, when the Germans started shelling his position while he was writing to his father, he had to take ‘a short interlude’, he wrote, ‘as the Hun dropped [a bomb] about 50 yards away. While I write another has followed, but fortunately a dud. And another! I sincerely hope he won’t put 50 yards more onto his fuse.’18 A few weeks later, he tried to reassure his father on the eve of battle: ‘if you have not received a wire [informing him of Wilkinson’s death or wounding] by the time you get this, all will be well … You can be absolutely certain that I am all right.’ He added that he was ‘really looking forward’ to the battle: ‘I think it will be a walk over.’19
For Wilkinson, as for many men, the Great War was the defining experience of his life. The opening battle of Third Ypres was ‘splendid fun’, he wrote, talking it up to ease his father’s concerns: ‘we all enjoyed it immensely’. The ‘weather side’ of it was something else: ‘I never thought that the human frame could endure such hardship.’ In places, the water was up to his knees, ‘yet there we stayed for another 48 hours!’ Eventually they were relieved: ‘Yet never for a moment did the men lose heart …. The only thing they wanted was a chance to kill more Huns …’20
Afterwards, he looked forward to another ‘show’: ‘They were the greatest three days I have lived and had it only kept fine we could have gone much further …’21 In late August, Wilkinson received the Military Cross, of which he wrote to his family, ‘It seems strange that a decoration should be awarded to one who merely showed a marked ability in dodging missiles.’22
Captain Harry Yoxall similarly wrote of his pleasure in the war, to reassure his beloved mother. He described German shellfire as ‘beastly’ and addressed his mother as ‘dear little mummy’.23 He read Tatler magazine in the trenches. Battle was ‘good fun’, he told her: ‘for sheer excitement there’s nothing to top a trip into no-man’s land’.24 Or he was dead bored: ‘I was rather bored’, ‘bored stiff’, ‘fed up’, ‘how bored I am’, etc.25
Like many officers, Yoxall tended to portray himself as careless of danger, though the grittier entries in his diary tell a truer tale. A bleak note occasionally intrudes: ‘I think if you did ruminate much on the real meaning of the things you do and the things that are done to you, your nerves would crack in no time.’26
He entered 1917 with high hopes of action: ‘War is a very thrilling game if only something happens.’27 It soon did: in February, he witnessed a shell explode on a group of men, and had to postpone his leave. ‘It is not to be,’ he told his mother. ‘This is sad, but we must keep smiling. Somehow when you have seen a shell fall into the midst of five men and packed three of them away in a sandbag little things like leave don’t seem to matter. In fact, one wonders whether anything matters – but that way madness lies. One must at least believe that we are fighting for something or the whole ghoulish business becomes so preposterously criminal that one couldn’t carry on …’28
He carried on: ‘Things are never so black that one cannot hope.’ Like many officers, he found solace in literature, quoting Arthur Hugh Clough’s ‘Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth’ to his mother:
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look, the land is bright!
Of which he concluded, ‘it is not always from the direct source that the things which are more excellent are brought to us … it is a long and wearying business. – I grow very wise, in my old age …’
In time, he grew harder, and spared his mother little. ‘The kindest thing you can do to a German,’ he told her on 5 April 1917, ‘is to kill him, to save him from himself.’29
In his solitude, brooding on his private fears on the eve of battle, many soldiers turned to God. God will always be by your side, the Before Action services promised him. They were held in the field, and in the rear areas. The Anglicans formed the largest congregations in the British ranks, followed by the Catholics, whose padres heard the troops’ confessions before battle. The Germans attended Lutheran or Catholic services. Rabbis served the comparatively few Jewish soldiers. The prayers of Hindus and Muslims, recruited from the British and French colonies, were similarly hopeful of divine intervention.
Services were scripted to inspire an offensive spirit and blunt the fear of death. The Anglican service typically began with lines from Psalm 27: ‘Though an host of men were laid against me, yet shall not my heart be afraid: though thee rose up war against me, yet will I put my trust in Him.’ Or ‘The Lord is my light, and my salvation; whom then shall I fear?’30
They read the General Confession: ‘So let us ask His forgiveness for … any malice of ill-feeling
that we have entertained towards others …’31 And they sang from their Field Service Hymn Book, hymns such as ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, ‘Fight the Good Fight’ and ‘Jerusalem’.
‘I certainly did not admire their choice of hymns,’ Lieutenant Allfree recalled. ‘The unfortunate Tommy was always expected to sing hymns about soldiers and fighting … you could not get away from it. I suppose he was not given credit … for being capable of any other sentiment. Having been fighting all the week, he must sing about it on Sunday.’32
The services ended with a prayer that aligned the soldiers’ sacrifice with Christ’s:
Holy Jesus, Thou pattern of true manhood, grant to us Thy sons that we may throughout this time of trial keep Thy great example before us, and, in a spirit of self-sacrifice, give ourselves to the service of our King and Country, with a devotion such as inspired Thee to lay down Thy Life for the eternal welfare of the world … 33
In Neville Hind’s observation, ‘sinners’ were more receptive to the padres’ prayers: ‘those who had lived the most immoral lives are those who are most terror-stricken in the face of sudden death. The first to throw themselves on the Mercy of God.’34
Reverend E. Victor Tanner was one of the more dedicated army chaplains. He never seemed to have doubted God’s will, not in the worst of Third Ypres. Ordained in 1909, Tanner was chaplain to Weymouth College, Dorset, when the war broke out. In January 1915, he delivered a sermon to the boys that left none in any doubt that he should enlist as soon as he was old enough. ‘War would be the test of your character,’ Tanner told the boys, and Christ ‘the Captain of your soul’.35
In Flanders, Tanner frequently put his own body on the line, and keenly volunteered for frontline service: ‘I want to be where the lads are and to share their experiences – and their dangers.’36 Posted to the Worcestershire Regiment of the 33rd Division, he felt privileged to be among the men, ‘at this, their time of deepest need’. His message to the troops was that Christ had given each of His flock a divinely appointed twelve hours in which to perform His sacred duty. Until that duty was done, ‘nothing untoward can happen to him’.37 On the Somme, Tanner witnessed the results, in a daily round of burials of men who had gone forth to perform their sacred duty, and died well short of their allotted twelve hours. Now, he prepared to face the same ordeal at Passchendaele.
The day of his departure, Tanner wrote but did not send two letters, to his mother and sister. He marked the envelopes, ‘To be delivered only in the event of my death’:
My own darling Mother,
Time is short as we are going into the line this afternoon and into action tomorrow morning … I am going up into the fight voluntarily & of my own free will, firstly because I feel that my presence may be a help to these brave Worcester lads and secondly because the honour of Christ’s Church is entrusted to us Chaplains and we must be worthy of so great a privilege.
Death is no horror to me … I look forward to it though one would not be human if one did not shrink from the actual ordeal. Even the Master shrank for a moment in Gethsemane but he won the day.
This thought however gives me as much confidence as anything – that I have dedicated myself to the Master’s work & that nothing can happen to me unless my earthly task is done …
So farewell dear old Mum and AU REVOIR for if you get this letter I shall have passed into that other and more glorious sphere …
Be very brave, Mother darling
Your devoted
Sonnie38
The Worcesters moved up to the Ypres Salient in mid-September 1917. They would soon play a central role in the battle for Passchendaele Ridge.
Not all the chaplains displayed Tanner’s mettle. Some refused to venture beyond the transport lines; a few bolted, disillusioning the men. While Lieutenant Allhusen’s unit waited for a train to take them beyond Ypres,
we discovered that the Padre had deserted. He was a Roman Catholic, and a wretched creature, reliably reported to wash in bed. Most Roman Catholic Padres were better men than the Church of England ones, but this one was well down to the average. The Colonel promised to do his best to get him shot, but I am afraid without success.39
The beliefs of the devout young Anglican Ronald Skirth soon collided with what he saw as the godlessness of the war. Skirth had refused to aim his guns on a church. He invoked God as his witness in disobeying the order, but the army disagreed and demoted him.
His faith in institutional religion began to fray, and tore apart one morning as he queued to take Holy Communion ‘al fresco’ in a field service. Three clergymen had set up a gilded crucifix, a chalice and containers of consecrated bread and wine. The danger of enemy artillery had reduced the group of waiting communicants to a dozen or so. Soon enough, an enemy Fokker appeared in the distance and fired on a British blimp.
As Skirth approached the altar, he noticed the queue had dwindled to one – ‘me’. A series of German shells flew harmlessly overhead and ‘crumped’ in the distance. At this point, the chaplains:
whipped their ecclesiastical gear off the table, threw that onto a lorry … and had the site cleared in 30 seconds flat. The two padres scrambled onto the tailboard … and the lorry made the quickest standing start I’ve ever remembered seeing.
The young Skirth felt ‘morally shattered’: the churchmen who had ‘given us their blessing when we went off to war, told us patriotism was noble’, had ‘scuttled away like rabbits’ at the first approach of danger. He shouted after them, ‘Bloody Hypocrites!’40
After this episode, Skirth rejected all invocations to God to justify the war: ‘At nineteen I found my standards of conduct obsolete, my ideals shattered. I had lost all faith in institutional religion.’41 Henceforth, he prayed daily that God would ‘stop the war going on, and end the misery it caused’. When the Almighty failed to intervene, Skirth blamed the ‘wickedness’ of the war on mankind, ‘not the indifference of God’.42
He drew solace from the memory of his girlfriend, Ella, and wrote to her daily: ‘All I wished to see in her schoolgirl handwriting was “I still love you”.’43 He loved her ‘more than ever’, even if she was ‘the idealised girl of my hopes and dreams’.44 She sent him cakes and a hand-knitted scarf, as he prepared to join the Autumn battles.
In the end, many men found a repository of hope and comfort in the animals who accompanied them to the front. The armies relied on horses and mules to haul the cannons forward and carry up rations and ammunition. Gas-masked mules ran the gauntlet of shellfire to deliver rounds and food across terrain impassable to lorry or cart. The vital carrier pigeons were also a source of deep affection.
The animals were literally the soldiers’ lifesavers. They were all in this nightmare together, like Noah’s Ark in a maelstrom.
The horses in particular became the soldiers’ dearest companions. Their warm hides and swishing tails, their blameless, frightened eyes, endeared them to the soldiers in a way their fellow human beings could not.
In 1917, there were nearly a million horses in the British and Dominion armies, with more than 440,000 of them on the Western Front, of which just 27,000 served as cavalry mounts (giving the lie to the claim that the generals expected to fight a cavalry war). They died in huge numbers. Of some 1.4 million horses Germany sent to the war, 400,000 would be killed by fire and 500,000 expire of illnesses relating to malnutrition, a sixty-five per cent casualty rate. European farms were denuded of horses and mules rather like the universities and factories were bereft of men.45
The affection these magnificent animals inspired was extraordinary. ‘The killing and wounding of horses is one of the most detestable phases of the war,’ wrote the Australian Private Edward Lynch, ‘and one we’ll never get hardened to, tough though we are.’46
When hostile aircraft killed ‘Billy’, the pet stallion of a British heavy battery, on 5 July 1917, an anonymous poet wrote:
He was only a bloomin’ heavy,
Only a battery horse
But if there’
s a heaven for horses
Billy will not be lost … 47
Perhaps the most astonishing case of a soldier’s devotion to his horse was that of a young Canadian who, despite losing his nose, one eye, an entire cheek and upper jaw, stayed by his horse, itself wounded in the same attack: ‘His fore leg was smashed, so I could not leave him,’ the soldier told the Reverend Charles Doudney at a base hospital. ‘Had him all the time since we left Canada.’ Not until the horse was shot did this young man deliver his message (demanding more ammunition) and seek medical aid for himself.48
10
SEPTEMBER 1917
Our troops are elated and confident; those on the enemy’s side cannot but be depressed and we have good evidence of it. In the circumstances it is beyond question that our offensive must be pursued as long as possible … the enemy’s man power will be running out next May or June at the latest.
Haig to Lloyd George, 26 September 1917
In the lull, fear preyed on the soldiers’ minds and fired their imaginations. The best advice was to try not to think about tomorrow, what might happen. ‘Look here, lad,’ an old soldier advised the Australian Edward Lynch. ‘You give up thinking too much or this war will get you down. It will beat you. I’ve been in it since Gallipoli and I know. The man who thinks is done … Don’t look too deep and above all don’t think too deeply. Try to see the funny side of everything … Take my tip … and although I can’t say you’ll live longer you’ll certainly live happier.’1
