Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassel Military) Read online

  ‘Gordon Corrigan has set out to expose this popular view, or myth, as quite simply not in accordance with fact. To this task he brings a mass of evidence, coupled with an ability to write clear, crisp, highly readable narrative . . . Mud, Blood and Poppycock should be in every school library – and studied with an open mind by all who teach the young about the Great War’

  Correlli Barnett, Daily Mail

  ‘This is no mere hagiography or turgid, blow-by-blow account of battles which, frankly, often seem repetitive. Corrigan’s book is a fascinating read because he sets it up as a trial by jury. Each chapter (and they can be read in what order you please) takes a specific “myth” of the Great War and subjects it to a test of evidence. The result – even if you want to disagree with Corrigan’s overall thesis – is gripping’

  George Kerevan, Scotsman

  ‘Corrigan peppers his book with statements that read outrageously at first but which he then backs up with devastating statistics’

  Andrew Roberts, Mail on Sunday

  ‘Corrigan has fashioned a pugnacious case, stripping away many of the misunderstandings and falsehoods that have settled as if they were established truths in the popular imagination’

  Graham Stewart, Spectator

  ‘A welcome addition to the revisionist view of World War One . . . Corrigan shows how the British embraced new military technology and developed dynamic new tactics to overcome the stalemate of trench warfare. A good argumentative tone is struck throughout the book’

  Tim Newark, Military Illustrated

  MUD, BLOOD AND POPPYCOCK

  Britain and the First World War

  GORDON CORRIGAN

  CASSELL

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Praise

  Title page

  Maps and diagrams

  Introduction

  1 An Unnecessary War

  2 The Lost Generation

  3 The Horrors of the Trenches

  4 The Tools of the Trade

  5 Government-Sponsored Polo Clubs

  6 Frightfulness

  7 The Donkeys

  8 Kangaroo Courts and Firing Squads

  9 A Needless Slaughter

  10 More Needless Slaughter

  11 The Frocks and the Brass Hats

  12 Even More Needless Slaughter

  13 Too Little, Too Late

  14 Epilogue

  Bibliography

  Index of Military Units

  General Index

  Author biography

  Also by Gordon Corrigan

  Dedication

  Copyright

  MAPS AND DIAGRAMS

  MAPS

  The Western Front 1914–18

  The Battle of Cambrai 20 November – 7 December 1917

  The Second Battle of Ypres April – May 1915

  The Battle of the Somme July – November 1916

  The Battle of the Somme (Thiepval – Guillemont)

  Area of Operations, the Battle of Messines June 1917

  Area of Operations, the Third Battle of Ypres July – November 1917

  Area of Operations, Champagne May – August 1918

  Area of Operations, Meuse – Argonne September 1918

  DIAGRAMS

  Ground

  Side view of trench

  Bird’s eye view of firing line

  Aerial view of section of firing line

  Gun ranges from Trafalgar Square

  Machine gun enfilade fire

  Machine gun cone of fire and beaten zone

  INTRODUCTION

  Everyone knows – because it is endlessly repeated in newspapers, books and on radio and television – that if the British dead of the First World War were to be instantly resurrected and then formed up and marched past the Cenotaph, the column would take four and a half days to pass. Actually it wouldn’t. The British lost 704,208 dead in the Great War, and if they were to form up in three ranks and march at the standard British army speed of 120 thirty-inch paces to the minute, they would pass in one day, fifteen hours and seven minutes. It is still an impressive statistic, but utterly meaningless. It is about as useful as saying that if all the paper clips used in the City of London in a year were laid end to end they would reach to the moon, or to New York, or halfway round the world. The figure is quoted, usually around 11 November each year, to illustrate the scale of British casualties in the war of 1914–18. It might mean more if it were coupled with the fact that the French dead, in the same formation, would take three days, five hours and thirty-seven minutes to complete the manoeuvre, and the Germans four days, eighteen hours and sixteen minutes. Even this would not help very much, because the French population was six million fewer than that of Great Britain, and the German population fifteen million more.

  The popular British view of the Great War is of a useless slaughter of hundreds of thousands of patriotic volunteers, flung against barbed wire and machine guns by stupid generals who never went anywhere near the front line. When these young men could do no more, they were hauled before kangaroo courts, given no opportunity to defend themselves, and then taken out and shot at dawn. The facts are that over 200 British generals were killed, wounded or captured in the war, and that of the five million men who passed through the British Army 2,300 were sentenced to death by military courts, of whom ninety per cent were pardoned.

  A recent schoolchildren’s visit to the Western Front required the children to visit the British cemeteries in France and Belgium and answer questions, one of which was ‘Why are there so few officers’ graves?’ The answer sought, according to the teacher present, was that the officers took no part in the attack, being safely behind the lines enjoying a good breakfast while their men went to their deaths.1 The teacher – and by extension much of the British public – was presumably unaware that the four companies of an infantry battalion going into the attack, 640 soldiers in all, would be led by around twenty-three officers, assuming the battalion was fully up to strength with no one away on leave or courses. Between 1914 and 1918 twelve per cent of all other ranks were killed, and seventeen per cent of the officers.

  The Great War, the Kaiser’s War, the First World War, call it what you will, is of contemporary interest to the British people because nearly every family in Britain had somebody killed in it. Or did they? According to the official census reports, there were approximately 9,800,000 households in Britain in 1914.2 Statistically then, only one family in fourteen lost a member. Even allowing for extended family groupings, to include uncles, cousins and in-laws, this is not every family in Britain. Perhaps everyone knew somebody who was killed? In certain parts of the country that is undoubtedly true, largely because of the way in which we recruited our infantry, but there were large swathes of the nation from where no one was killed.

  It cannot be a comfort to those widows, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters, all ageing now, who remember a loved one killed in the war, when they are told, as they all too often are, that their menfolk died in vain and that their sacrifice was a pointless waste. It is, however, not surprising that the general public attitude should be thus. As experience of war recedes – and anyone who was old enough to take part in the Second World War is in their mid-seventies now – and when no one under the age of sixty has any experience of National Service, it cannot be surprising that the great majority of the British people have no understanding of war or any insight into what an army does and how it operates. We live in a liberal society, where individual rights are given ever greater priority and legislation outlaws any form of discrimination on
the grounds of race, gender, sexual orientation, age or disability. The British army of today, let alone that of nearly a century ago, seems a strange body indeed. As standards of health and material well-being increase, and as governments become more and more accountable to the electorate, so concepts of compulsion, unthinking obedience to orders, constant risk of death or maiming, and subordination of the individual to the corporate aim appear increasingly alien. It is said that the army should reflect society, but what an army does, and what in the final analysis it is for, do not reflect society. The army defends society but it cannot share its values, for if it does it cannot do its job. An army at war may be more representative of society than one at peace, but even then it does not reflect it, being largely composed of young, physically fit males. An army may well be used for humanitarian purposes, ranging from flood relief to the distribution of food, and from peacemaking to peacekeeping. Its structure, skills, mobility and discipline make it very good at these tasks, but an army exists to fight wars when and if these occur. A war is not a moral crusade, whatever the propagandists at the time may say; it is a trial of strength with each army striving its utmost to destroy the other by all means open to it. Some years ago the British army’s small-arms training manual was titled Shoot to Kill. This led to protests from libertarians who claimed that such a title instilled aggression. Quite. Should the army have entitled its pamphlet Shoot to Miss? Soldiers are aggressive: they have to be because their job is to kill other soldiers and to do it efficiently and without moral scruple. In war individual morality must be subject to the priorities of the state, for if it is not then the army will lose, and all those hard-won human rights will count for naught.

  Given the prevalent outlook of democratic western societies, it is perhaps not to be wondered at that politicians and others objected when in December 2000 the British Chief of the Defence Staff pointed out that there is no place in the armed forces for the disabled. A compassionate society will, and should, legislate to prevent discrimination on the grounds of disablement, race, gender and sexual orientation. It will, rightly, introduce laws to regulate health and safety at work, to limit the hours worked by employees, and to encourage a climate in which promotion, dismissal, disciplinary procedures, orders and instructions can be challenged. But a society which seriously considers the extension of this culture to cover the armed forces, and in which the deterrent effect on a terrorist bomber of a sentry in a wheelchair is not instantly ludicrous, is unlikely to comprehend the military imperatives of the Great War. Even the humblest signaller, storeman or clerk may be required in the future, as he has been in the past, to pick up a rifle and defend himself, his comrades or his equipment. Soldiers must react instantly to orders, for if they take time to debate them, or to apply their own individual concepts of right and wrong, sense and nonsense, the moment for action will have passed. It is sometimes better to follow what in hindsight turns out not to have been the best course, than to do nothing at all.

  Britain has a long history of opposition to whoever is in power, and has never been easily, or complaisantly, governed. This was in many ways a good thing, as dissent has always been able to be expressed and, apart from the Civil Wars of 1638 to 1651, we have been spared rebellion, uprising, oppression and dictatorship as experienced by most of our European neighbours. There has been no successful invasion of Britain since 1066, and since then the old order has never been swept away completely and permanently; it has merely adapted. Sniping at the establishment can go too far, however, and while it is always easy (and fun) to drag the mighty down, it is more difficult to raise someone into their place. British society has always been class-ridden. As officers, by appointment if not by birth, occupy a higher social stratum than that of the men they command, civilians have found them an easy target, and the more senior the easier. Everyone chuckles when a senior politician, or a member of the Royal Family, or an air marshal is caught putting his organ where he shouldn’t; newspapers expend large sums of money trying to excavate the dirty laundry of pop stars, sporting figures and vicars. The first person to win £1 million in a recent television quiz show was widely reviled because she was upper middle-class, as if it were only artisans who should be allowed a dip in the bran tub. Criticism of the management of war comes naturally.

  It is easy for the public to criticise, and by extension to believe the worst, of the Great War. It is almost impossible for modern Britain even to begin to understand what war is or was like. A society most of whose members have never slept elsewhere than in a bed cannot comprehend that one can be quite comfortable in a hole in the ground. A society in which any distance of more than a mile is an occasion for getting out the car can scarcely conceive that a march of twenty miles carrying seventy pounds or so is no great hardship for trained troops, or that all-in stew cooked with scant regard to the health and safety at work regulations can be nourishing and tasty.

  Because everybody thinks something does not mean that they are necessarily right. Majority opinion after the Great War was that it had been a just war, and that Britain had played its part in winning it. The army’s reputation was high, the commanders were publicly thanked and, as had long been the custom, were granted monetary awards and titles. When the last Commander-in-Chief, Earl Haig, died in 1928, his body lay in state in Edinburgh and 100,000 people filed past the coffin. Seventy years later there was a campaign by a national newspaper to have his equestrian statue in Whitehall demolished. It was in the thirties that critical opinion began to be formed. The publication of Erich Maria Remarque’s fictional All Quiet on the Western Front in 1929 – which the Nazis burned but the French merely banned – stimulated a spate of anti-war memoirs and novels that had begun a few years before. Poets and writers like Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Edmund Blunden, C. E. Montague and Frederick Manning wrote convincingly that the war had been futile. They were a minority, but their views were read. Most of them were not new to having their thoughts in print: the majority had already been published before the war, and the public paid attention to what they said after it. Siegfried Sassoon, egged on by pacifists such as Bertrand Russell, published an anti-war diatribe in The Times on 31 July 1917; but then he was a patient in a mental hospital at the time, and what he said caused great offence in his old battalion which was still in France. Opposing voices were ignored, and Graham Greenwell, who stated baldly in An Infant at Arms that he had thoroughly enjoyed his war, was flayed by the reviewers. Pacifism became fashionable between the wars, and in 1933 the Oxford Union voted overwhelmingly that they would in no circumstances fight for King and Country. Much has been made of that motion, but a properly conducted debate will vote according to the quality of the argument presented, rather than in accordance with the voters’ personal intentions. In the event, of course, they did fight. The arrival of the Second World War brought a temporary halt to criticism of the First, but there was a resurgence in the 1960s when anti-establishment fervour became widespread. Writers such as J. F. C. Fuller and Basil Liddell Hart were critical of the way the war had been managed, and particularly of its commanders. Liddell Hart became the leading exponent of the study of the Great War, and anyone who expressed a view contrary to his was unlikely to be widely published or listened to. Unfortunately Liddell Hart had a personal axe to grind. He was evacuated from the battle area on three occasions during the war: once with a fever, once when concussed by an exploding shell, and finally in July 1916 when he incurred flesh wounds and suffered the effects of gas. On the second and third occasions he was sent back to England to recover, and after his second evacuation he did not return to the front. It does now appear that the injuries from his third experience of battle were more psychological than physical.3 One cannot blame him for that, but having been found wanting in physical courage – at least in his own mind if not in those of others – he sought ways to explain why it is not courage but intellect that wins wars. The generals were clearly men of courage; therefore they must be made to appear
without intellect, and all the mistakes and failures could be laid at their doors.4 Joan Littlewood’s production of the play Oh! What a Lovely War was made into a film of which the scriptwriter admitted that it was one part himself and three parts Stalin. It was an enormously popular film, well made and highly entertaining, with a superb musical soundtrack, but about as historically useful as The Wind in the Willows.5

  Any study of the British effort in the Great War must be approached from an understanding of what the army was required to do, and why it was where it was in the first place. It is totally unrealistic to impose today’s standards on the events of 1914–18. No modern general would throw 200,000 men straight at a well-defended and fortified enemy line north of the River Somme: he would go over it, round it, bypass it or punch through it. The assets to do this – tanks, helicopters, paratroops, tactical nuclear weapons – were not available in 1916. What made the British army attack along the Somme and keep attacking was dictated by what was happening at Verdun, 120 miles to the south-west.

  The war was fought between two coalitions, but that of the Central Powers, consisting of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria, was dominated by Germany, with by far the strongest economy and largest armed forces. On the Allied side, at some stage during the conflict, no fewer than twenty-four countries were technically at war with Germany, or with Germany and one or more of her allies. Some of these Allies or Associated Powers were of little account: Luxembourg, with its army of 150 royal guards who doubled as the nation’s postmen in time of peace, had no opportunity to play any part, being occupied by Germany in the first few hours of the war. The declaration of war in April 1917 by Panama, with no armed forces at all, is unlikely to have caused General Ludendorff to break out in a cold sweat; nor would that in May 1918 by Costa Rica, with a standing army of 600 men and a navy of two patrol craft commanded by an admiral, have kept the Kaiser lying awake at night. Liberia (from August 1917) and Haiti (from July 1918) cannot seriously have expected to save Europe by their efforts. These countries, along with Guatemala (April 1917), Cuba (April 1917), Nicaragua (May 1917), Brazil (October 1917) and Honduras (July 1918), came into the war on the coat-tails of the American declaration of war against Germany in April 1917 and against Austria-Hungary in December. They made no military contribution but their formal entry into the war did allow German investments and assets in their countries, and German ships in their ports, to be seized. Even Siam declared war in July 1917. China, which joined in August 1917, was utterly unable to do anything, such was the internal state of the country, although she did allow the Allies to recruit labourers for duties behind the lines in Europe; large numbers of these Chinese died during the influenza epidemic of 1918. Italy joined the Allies in May 1915 against Austria-Hungary, largely in the hope of territorial gain, and declared against Germany in August 1916. Her participation was more of a hindrance than a help to the Allies, necessitating the diversion of six French and five British divisions and an American regiment to the Italian Front in 1917 to stave off their host’s collapse. Greece entered the war in June 1917, her eye on her traditional enemies, Turkey and the Balkan states. Japan joined the Allies early, in August 1914, with a view to picking up German colonies in China and the Pacific. She took no part on land, but her navy was of help in protecting Allied trade in the Far East from German commerce raiders. Portugal came into the war on the side of her oldest ally in March 1916, and sent two small divisions to the Western Front. The efforts of Serbia (the immediate cause of the war), Montenegro and Romania were directed against Austria-Hungary and confined to their own geographical area.