by Paul Ham
The Battle of Passchendaele touched hundreds of thousands of young men, who could never forget it. Private Neville Hind wrote his war memoir between October 1917 and April 1918, while in hospital in Sheffield, recovering from a gunshot wound to the shoulder. There, he loved the big breakfasts, Woodbines, books and theatre, and for a time he lived in heaven: ‘my dream has been fulfilled,’ he wrote of his luck at getting a ‘Blighty’ wound that sent him home to these comforts.7
Hind was demobbed in January 1919, and he prepared to start studies at Cambridge University in October that year. ‘This was a miserable time,’ his daughter Dorothy recounts, ‘as his mother had remarried while he was away and “home” was no longer Newcastle, so he seems to have buried himself in reading the daily press.’8 Hind graduated in 1922 with a BA in History and the next year married his Newcastle girlfriend. He got a job as a teacher at a school in York, and was later appointed headmaster at Keighley Boys’ Grammar School, a job he held until 1958. He rarely spoke about his war experience. After years of silence and awkwardness, he let his fiancée read his memoir. ‘She felt that they were able to talk together as easily as they did before he joined up,’ his daughter Dorothy recounts. ‘Before that, he was like a brick wall.’
Hind never mentioned the war to Dorothy, ‘or the Military Medal which I think he felt he did not deserve’, until she was well into adulthood: ‘On reflection, I guess it was the years at Cambridge which turned him round from becoming a bitter, introverted person to being a successful teacher and a caring, thoughtfully optimistic husband and father.’9 Hind made a success of his life, a chance so cruelly denied millions of similar young men.
So, too, did Lieutenant Patrick Campbell, the young officer who had feared his men would never accept him. Immobilised with terror at the start of Passchendaele, he went on to earn a Military Cross. He returned home, then went up to Oxford, and soon married. He lived to the age of 88. He loved his chosen career, a teacher – many veterans turned their minds to the young – and became master of Westminster Under School. In retirement, he wrote several memoirs of his years as a soldier and teacher, and lived to see the publication of his autobiography, Blade of Grass.10
Corporal Skirth suffered shell shock and amnesia after Passchendaele. On his recovery, he was transferred to the Italian front, where his disillusionment with the war was complete. He made a pact with God in the church in the village of San Martino never again to take human life. He confided in Ella that he had become a pacifist. During the ensuing battles, he was as good as his word: he targeted the guns away from the enemy, building in minor errors to his trajectories so that the shells ‘never once hit an inhabited target’ on the first attempt, giving the enemy a chance to evacuate.11 His superiors never discovered the sabotage.
Skirth declined a Military Medal, offered for his part in trying to prevent a fatal accident, and returned home in 1919 to his childhood sweetheart. He and Ella married in 1923. He, too, became a teacher, at a school in West London, and in 1929 Ella gave birth to a girl. During the Second World War, Skirth’s school was evacuated to South Wales, where he was branded a communist and a crank for his pacifism.12
Skirth’s memoir was published in 2010, entitled The Reluctant Tommy: Ronald Skirth’s Extraordinary Memoir of the First World War, to critical acclaim, notwithstanding some question marks over its accuracy. Ella and he lived happily together. They holidayed in Italy, and he rediscovered his love of poetry. Years after the war, he wrote that the Western Front had deprived him of the one thing that was as precious to him as life itself: ‘my love of beauty’.13
Millions of men would not live to see beauty. A few thousand had their lives cut short by firing squad, as emblematised by the fate of Lieutenant Harry Penrose, the pseudonymous young officer in A. P. Herbert’s novel The Secret War (based on a true story). Soon after Penrose’s voluntary return to France in 1917, a violent terror came over him, a fear so powerful that he turned and walked away from the enemy. He walked back from the front line. His trial was brisk, his sentence a foregone conclusion and his execution swift. He was shot for cowardice seven days later in a little orchard in northern France. According to the padre, Penrose faced the firing squad ‘bravely and quietly’. ‘[M]y friend Harry,’ Herbert wrote, ‘was shot for cowardice – and he was one of the bravest men I ever knew.’14
Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig returned from the war a conquering hero. For his pains, he accepted a grant of £100,000 and an earldom. He devoted the remainder of his life to ex-servicemen with the energy of a man possessed – ‘working himself to death’, in one doctor’s opinion. He would stay up late writing letters to soldiers. ‘I think that they rather prefer to get a letter in one’s own handwriting,’ Haig said. ‘The personal touch, I think, counts for something, and I can do so little for them.’15
Perhaps Haig’s finest hour was the roasting he gave the Medical Boards and Trade Unions for their indifference and hostility to war veterans. He condemned the government for failing to provide proper care and financial support for returned soldiers, especially the disabled.
The British commander-in-chief enjoyed great popularity in his waning years (Lloyd George would not try to vilify him as a butcher until well after his death). Vast crowds attended his funeral, on 3 March 1928, reportedly bigger than those at the funeral of Princess Diana, in 1997.16 Like hers, Haig’s body was borne along on a gun carriage, to Westminster Abbey. Among the pall-bearers were Marshals Foch and Pétain.
For the little Dominions, the emotional toll would be disproportionately hard. Passchendaele tore the heart out of New Zealand and left many veterans psychologically devastated. The tough Brigadier ‘Bill’ Braithwaite suffered a nervous breakdown after the battle, and was removed from his post.
One rumour – credible in the circumstances – circulated that Braithwaite had been sacked for refusing to send his men to their certain deaths, on 12 October 1917, the bloodiest afternoon in New Zealand’s history. Braithwaite ‘refused to order his men to be murdered and of course that was the end of his military career’, one soldier recalled. ‘He was returned to England and we never saw him again.’17
Homes were plunged into grief; families could not outlive the memory of their loss. Years later, one New Zealand mother, who lost two sons in the war – one at Passchendaele – and a third soon after, would suddenly break down in tears at the dinner table, ‘weeping and railing against the injustice of war’.18
Many men would not survive the peace, as at least one young bride found on her wedding day (recounts the New Zealand poet Robin Hyde):
You could get engaged, triumphantly, to a good-looking fine-faced returned man … Then, perhaps on the eve of the wedding, there would be an incoherent note, a policeman around in the morning, and an inquest on a man who had put a bullet through his head. Somebody would explain that he had been badly shell-shocked at Ypres, badly gassed. Poor old Jack, everybody said. Yes, but nobody thought, in the same degree, poor young Laura or Mavis.19
In Australia, confirmation of the death of their three eldest sons blackened the Seabrook family’s home. The younger siblings grew up in the shadow of death. None spoke of their three lost brothers. In March 1919 their father, William, suffered a nervous breakdown, forcing his wife, Fanny, to apply for a government living allowance.
The government refused her application at first, on the grounds that she was not a war widow and had provided insufficient evidence of her husband’s condition. On 26 March, she wrote in despair to a family friend, enclosing the government’s ‘curt answer to having given our three boys as a sacrifice to the country. Their loss I will never recover, and now my husband is a complete wreck, he collapsed on Sat. last, almost mad … I am afraid he will have to be put away.’20
On 1 May 1919, the government revised its decision. The deputy comptroller wrote to the comptroller of the Department of Repatriation, in Melbourne, thus:
[A]lthough Mrs Seabrook has been hit very hard by the late war, three sons having
paid the supreme sacrifice, her husband is alive, and at ordinary times quite able to provide necessary support. For some weeks, however, the husband has been prostrated with Neurasthenia, and unable to work.21
Her allowance was granted.
The Seabrooks could never afford to visit Ypres, where the Menin Gate lists George’s and Theo’s names, nor to see Keith’s grave at the Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery, near Poperinghe, in Flanders. Fanny took an active role, however, in prolonging their memory in Australia, and was invited to lay a wreath at the Australian War Memorial in the 1920s.22
Bitterly cold, standing in line on a snow-covered parade in northern France, awaiting the arrival of the King, was the Australian Private Ed Lynch and his battalion. It was 24 November 1918, and the war was over. The men stamped their feet and blew their benumbed fingers. The King was an hour late. Then a long car arrived and passed slowly by, bearing King George, who stared out at the Australian survivors, at attention in the winter cold. The King didn’t leave his car.
‘How’s it for a loan of your overcoat, King?’ yelled one soldier, to roars of recrimination from the sergeant major.
‘Hip, hip, hooray,’ shouted Lynch’s company, as the King’s car passed on.
Lynch counted himself lucky to be there: of the 250 men and two officers with whom he had joined his battalion, as reinforcements, just nineteen were left, and every one of the nineteen had been wounded at least once.
Lynch left Le Havre on 15 April 1919 and sailed for England, sad and glad to be leaving France. On the morning of 25 April, he found men cleaning their boots, shaving, removing stains from their uniforms. ‘Today’s Anzac Day, don’t you know,’ said one.
‘We didn’t know, or much care either.’23
At that night’s gala dinner, Lynch was told to ‘uphold the honour of Australia’ in front of ‘British officers and gentlemen of the town’. Any display of larrikinism would be sternly dealt with. Lynch’s ‘old general’ arrived at the event, apparently drunk, to loud applause. ‘We’re proud of him, for the first time in the war,’ Lynch recalled. The general then delivered a rambling speech about Gallipoli, with apparently no mention of Passchendaele, and quickly lost his audience.
The general took the loud applause for an encore and began ‘to clear his nearly drowned vocal cords for a fresh affliction upon us’, when the chairman rose and sat him down. The men were then asked to be upstanding, to sing, ‘Back Home in Tennessee’, at the end of which a ‘fat parson’ said ‘very good’ three times.24
Lynch sailed for Australia from Devonport on 30 May 1919, aboard the Beltana, and arrived in Melbourne on 19 July, to cheering crowds. Then he travelled by train to Sydney: ‘Station after station flits by, each with its little cheering crowd …’
In Sydney, he passed through more cheering crowds, who were searching the soldiers’ faces. Some turned away in tears, their worst fears confirmed. ‘Hey, where’s ya rifle and machine gun, mister?’ asked a disappointed boy.25
Lynch caught his mother’s eyes, ‘waiting to give me her lonely welcome’. Grandparents, brothers, sisters, friends soon crowded in, ‘mercifully allowing no time for brooding’. His father was not among them, having passed away a few weeks earlier. He then experienced the ‘heart-breaking realisation that I’ll never get the warm, friendly grip of welcome from my own proud father. The dear father, whom I loved as few men ever loved a father … May God rest his dear soul …’26
The German soldiers’ lot was worse, far worse, than that of their British, Anzac and Canadian counterparts, and beyond our scope to recount. They came home with a sense of shame and despair, to a nation in revolt, an economy in ruins, and a country experiencing the first rumblings of a brutal political movement intent on tyrannising the world. It is therefore fitting that the finest literary evocation of Germany’s Great War – Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front – should also conjure a universal statement of the homecoming soldier’s experience:
Now we wander around like strangers in the landscapes of our youth. We have been consumed in the fires of reality … We are free of care no longer – we are terrifyingly indifferent. We might be present in that world, but would we be alive in it? We are like children who have been abandoned and we are as experienced as old men …
I am young, I am twenty years of age; but I know nothing of life except despair, death, fear, and the combination of completely mindless superficiality with an abyss of suffering. I see people being driven against one another, and silently, uncomprehendingly, foolishly, obediently and innocently killing one another. I see the best brains in the world inventing weapons and words to make the whole process that much more sophisticated and long lasting … What would our fathers do if one day we rose up and confronted them, and called them to account? … Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterward? And what can possibly become of us?
On 11 May 1922, the man in whose name the British and Dominion forces had ostensibly fought the war visited Tyne Cot Cemetery. As King George V roamed the aisles of the largest Commonwealth war cemetery, he saw a point to the soldiers’ sacrifice that eluded the generals, politicians and journalists and had little to do with laying down their lives for him.
‘We can truly say,’ he said, ‘that the whole circuit of the earth is girdled with the graves of our dead. In the course of my pilgrimage, I have many times asked myself whether there can be more potent advocates of peace upon earth through the years to come, than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war.’27
APPENDIX 1
CASUALTY FIGURES
British Empire and German Casualties of Third Ypres (‘Passchendaele’) – Killed, Wounded and Missing (31 July–10 November, 1917)
British and Dominion Casualties:
TOTAL: 271,600
of which (approx.):
British: 212,100
SOURCES: Various, including the Imperial War Museums, Australian War Memorial, Edmonds, Sheffield, Sheldon, Terraine and War Cabinet Papers (see Bibliography for source details)
Australian: 38,000
SOURCES: ‘Third Battle of Ypres’, Australian War Memorial, www.awm.gov.au/military-event/E104
Canadian: 15,600
SOURCE: R. H. Roy and Richard Foot, ‘Battle of Passchendaele’, 31 May 2006 (last edited on 4 March 2015), Historica Canada, www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/battle-of-passchendaele
New Zealand: 5300
SOURCE: ‘Passchendaele: Fighting for Belgium’, updated 29 May 2015, NZ History, Ministry for Culture and Heritage, www.nzhistory.net.nz/war/passchendaele-the-battle-for-belgium; and ‘Third Battle of Ypres’, Australian War Memorial, www.awm.gov.au/military-event/E104
German Casualties:
TOTAL: 217,000
Date
Casualties
(Missing)
21–31 July
30,000
9,000
1–10 Aug
16,000
2,000
11–21 Aug
24,000
5,000
21–31 Aug
12,500
1,000
1–10 Sept
4,000
–
11–20 Sept
25,000
6,500
21–30 Sept
13,500
3,500
1–10 Oct
35,000
13,000
11–20 Oct
12,000
2,000
21–31 Oct
20,500
3,000
1–10 Nov
9,500
3,000
11–20 Nov
4,000
*
21–30 Nov
4,500
500
1–10 Dec
4,000
*
11–31 Dec
2,500
500
Total
217,000
49,000
> *Missing totals for 11–30 November and 1–31 December are combined
SOURCE: Reichsarchiv, 1942, p. 96; German casualties were counted in ten-day periods. A discrepancy of 27,000 fewer casualties recorded in the Sanitätsbericht could not be explained by the Reichsarchiv historians
APPENDIX 2
A COMPARISON OF MANPOWER BETWEEN THE BRITISH AND DOMINION ARMIES, 1917
TABLE 1
A General Comparison Of The Man-Power Of The United Kingdom And Of Each Of The Four Self-Governing Dominions
Note: The population figures of the Dominions, being mainly taken from the 1911 Census, probably err on the side of under-estimation.
In population of England, Isle of Man (50,000) is included, but Channel Island figures (100,000) are not included.
SOURCE: British War Cabinet Papers, 23 January 1917
APPENDIX 3
LORD KITCHENER’S SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS TO (THEN) GENERAL SIR DOUGLAS HAIG, 28 DECEMBER 1915
Instructions of the Secretary of State for War (Lord Kitchener) to the General Commanding-in-Chief, British Armies in France (General Sir Douglas Haig), 28 December 1915
His Majesty’s Government consider that the mission of the British Expeditionary Force in France, to the chief command of which you have recently been appointed, is to support and co-operate with the French and Belgian Armies against our common enemies. The special task laid upon you is to assist the French and Belgian Governments in driving the German Armies from French and Belgian territory, and eventually to restore the neutrality of Belgium, on behalf of which, as guaranteed by Treaty, Belgium appealed to the French and to ourselves at the commencement of hostilities.
