Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassel Military) Page 7

  Not all deaths were caused by enemy action. Men contracted diseases, suffered from heart attacks, were run over by vehicles or suffocated by carbon monoxide produced by heaters, drowned while swimming, caught food poisoning in civilian cafés, and died when home on leave. Ten per cent of British deaths in the Great War were from causes other than enemy action, but the figure varied widely by theatre. Provided one could avoid German bullets and shells, the Western Front was the healthiest place to be, as only nine per cent of deaths were attributable to causes other than the enemy.12 In Salonika, on the other hand, of the 9,717 British deaths, fifty-five per cent were from disease and accidents. A comparison, by theatre, of deaths caused otherwise than by the enemy is shown below:

  The epidemic of influenza that spread across the world in 1918 and 1919 affected the armies too. It first made its appearance in America in 1917, but the suspicion that it was the American army, arriving on the Western Front from June 1917 onwards, that imported the disease to Europe is probably unfounded. The first recorded outbreak of this strain of influenza in Europe was in Spain in May 1918. What became known as ‘Spanish flu’ spread into France, Italy and Germany. It cut swathes through India, and wherever it appeared it seemed to attack those between twenty-five and forty, and the physically fitter specimens at that. On the Western Front there were local outbreaks in April and May 1918, before it subsided to reappear in September. Between 12 October 1918, when the British army made influenza a notifiable disease, and the end of the war in November, there were 45,000 flu admissions to casualty clearing stations, of which 2,584, or six per cent, died. By the end of the year, with the army at peace, there had been a further 1,883 flu deaths, and in 1919, from 1 January to 31 March, 1,088. Other armies were affected too, but the German civilian population, not far above starvation level as a result of the British blockade which continued into 1919 until Germany signed the Armistice, probably suffered more than anyone. Estimates as to how many died from the influenza epidemic worldwide vary greatly. It is often said that it killed more people than the war did, but we shall probably never know.

  Up to this point, when asking whether Britain really did lose a generation to the war, we have only considered deaths. Death is definite and quantifiable. A man who dies or is killed has made his contribution; his input to society ceases for ever. Deaths in the belligerent armies and nations can be compared with a reasonable accuracy. Men who are wounded but survive are more difficult to quantify, because not all armies classified their wounded and sick in the same way. In the British army, for example, men posted as ‘missing’ were included in daily casualty returns. These men might be missing because they had been taken prisoner, killed out of sight of their comrades, blown to pieces, buried under collapsing trenches or simply lost. Many of the missing turned up, hours or days later, or were officially declared by the German government as having been taken prisoner. The British records should then have been amended in hindsight, but this did not always happen. A British soldier who sustained a minor wound that did not preclude him from duty was not recorded as a casualty; in the American army all wounds, however minor, were recorded. The German army reported casualties at much greater intervals than the British, by which time their ‘missing’ had been accounted for. As the war went on the German army began to misreport their casualties, in order not to hand information to the enemy, and at one stage announced that ninety per cent of all men wounded were returned to duty – a ridiculous claim. A wound could be anything from a cut sustained in opening a tin of jam to a traumatic injury requiring amputation, and the injuries to a man wounded more than once on different occasions were returned as separate casualties.

  As for the impact on society after the war, a man who recovered from a wound and retained all his faculties would, in general, be perfectly capable of holding down employment and making his contribution to national life. A man missing an arm or a leg might or might not be capable of carrying on, and a man so badly wounded that he could never lead a normal life would be a net drain on society. The sight of maimed and disfigured men returned from the war would have had an effect on public morale, and on public perception of the war, but it is impossible at this distance to assess the psychological effects of their experiences on the mass of the returned soldiers themselves.

  It is probable that the war produced fewer traumas than similar experiences would today. On 21 December 1988 a Pan American Airlines Boeing 747 exploded in mid-air over Lockerbie in Scotland, killing all 270 passengers and crew. Bodies and bits of bodies were strewn over a wide area, and a battalion of British infantry was deployed for a period of some weeks to scour the area and recover body parts, mostly mangled and partly putrefied. The experience was such that many of the young soldiers had to be given counselling, and some had recurrent nightmares and anxiety attacks for months afterwards. Today’s youth have little or no experience of death. Bodies are rarely seen, and even the practice of viewing a family member in his or her coffin, tastefully laid out by a professional undertaker, is rare. It is now illegal to kill a pig (or a cow, sheep or goat) for human consumption, even one’s own, other than in a properly equipped and licensed abattoir. Blood and guts, human or animal, are alien to today’s Britons and disturbing when encountered. This was not the case earlier in the century when family members would assist in the preparation of a body for burial and it was common practice to kill and butcher one’s own pig, chicken or sheep. Men and women affected by rickets, or with clubbed feet, harelips or hunchbacks, were a common sight in the first half of the twentieth century, and cripples did not arouse the pity or revulsion that they would today when such conditions have been all but eliminated.

  British army statistics compiled by the medical services show that 6,218,540 non-fatal casualties were recorded throughout the war, in all theatres. Of these, sixty-five per cent were classified as ‘non-battle casualties’, that is those caused by other than enemy action. On the Western Front fifty-seven per cent of non-fatal casualties were unrelated to enemy action.

  One way in which non-fatal casualties might be quantified as to their effect on the nation and on the generation that fought the war is to examine the number of pensions paid after the war to men who were incapacitated by their wounds. While it might be argued that a man who had been a marathon runner before the war and now was minus a leg could become a lawyer instead, and thus still make a contribution, it is fair to say that the overwhelming majority of men receiving a war disablement pension were to a greater or lesser extent incapable of performing as they might otherwise have done, and to have been affected by the war. Medical boards began to sit immediately after the war to decide who should qualify for a war disablement pension. The number awarded each year increased, as men came forward or as wounds initially thought to have been cured flared up again. In 1929 the number of men in receipt of pensions reached its peak, and then began to decline as men recovered entirely or began to die off through natural causes.

  The British government made monetary awards, either as lump sums or as pensions, to 735,487 men. Many of these awards were for non-battle casualties, but if the man was serving at the time he contracted the disease or suffered the accident, it was considered to be attributable to war service. In all there were 308,622 awards for the effects of wounds, including amputations, and 426,865 for the effects of diseases. Major disabilities for which pensions or gratuities were paid are shown in Table 6:

  While some of the heart problems and rheumatism might well have arisen anyway, and tuberculosis was present in the British population in or out of uniform, the total of those who died in the war plus those accepted as having been left physically or mentally disabled by it comes to 1,437,897. In the 1930s the British Legion, the ex-servicemen’s organisation founded by Field Marshal Earl Haig after the war, organised a campaign to obtain pensions or lump-sum awards for men initially not considered to be eligible, but upon whom the effects of war service surfaced after the government’s medical boards had ceased to sit. The Bri
tish Legion claimed that 100,000 men were so affected. Adding this to our figure of men killed or affected by the war, we arrive at a figure of three per cent of the total population, or nineteen per cent of the males of military age.

  What cannot, of course, be ignored is what might be termed the ‘ripple effect’ that casualties may have had upon subsequent generations. The decline of family fortunes due to the death or incapacitation of the breadwinner; the unborn child who might have become Prime Minister (or a serial murderer); the elimination of an entire male branch of a family; all these must have had an influence on the future of the nation, but the war was imposed upon the population, and what might have been is simply not quantifiable.

  In absolute numbers, as a proportion of the population as a whole, and as a proportion of those who fought, the British lost fewer men and had fewer men medically affected as a result of war than had either her chief ally or her main enemy. The British, however, unlike other participants, had no conception of the casualties likely to be caused by war on the European scale. All that said, there was a further major factor that influenced the British perception, then and now, of the loss of a generation. That factor was the way in which the British raised the manpower to fight this war.

  By the end of 1914 the BEF had fought on the Mons canal, retreated 200 miles to the Marne, advanced to the Aisne, moved north and fought the First Battle of Ypres. It was still very largely an all-regular army. The first Territorial Force battalion to cross to France did so in September, and by the end of 1914 twenty-three Territorial Force battalions had arrived in theatre, but none joined front-line brigades before November. In August 1914 the BEF had 1,382 men killed; in September 2,717; in October 5,640 regulars and eighteen Territorials. November’s bill was 4,656 regulars and thirty-six Territorials, and that of December 2,361 and 105 respectively. In total the BEF deaths for 1914 numbered 16,915, of which 1,230, or just over seven per cent, were officers. Although in the same period 450,000 French soldiers were killed, the tiny British army could not possibly sustain the casualty rate of 1914. This had been obvious to Lord Kitchener very early on, but there was no instant solution. The individual reservists had already been embodied, the two divisions retained in England at the outbreak of war were now present with the BEF, but the bulk of the Territorial Force, with its units intended for home defence and its members not liable to serve overseas unless they volunteered (which virtually all did) was not yet ready to be deployed. There was, of course, the empire. As the law stood in 1914 a declaration of war by Britain automatically applied to the Dominions and colonies, whether they liked it or not, although the Dominion authorities had the right to decide where their troops would be employed. Apart from South Africa, where two former Boer generals led a revolt, promptly put down by two other former Boer generals, the Dominions greeted the declaration of war with enthusiasm, and all assured the mother country that they would supply troops. The difficulty was that in 1914 there were not very many troops to be had. The Canadian and Australian regular armies totalled just 3,000 men each, that of New Zealand 600. These countries did have numbers of men who had received some military training through the local militias, and they would in time make a very valuable contribution to the BEF, but that time was not yet. The only source of more trained regular manpower in 1914 was the Indian army, and two Indian infantry divisions and a cavalry brigade (swiftly expanded to two cavalry divisions) began to arrive in Marseille in September 1914. They arrived in Belgium just in time and in just sufficient strength to block the gaps in a very stretched British line and prevent the Germans from breaking through to the Channel ports.13

  When war broke out it was clear to Lord Kitchener, although to very few others, that this would not be a short war of manoeuvre, over in a few months. He thought it would last three years and that the British army would need a million men. In the event it lasted four and a quarter years and Britain needed nearly eight and a half million, but even if Kitchener’s initial thoughts had been right, the combination of the regular army, individual reservists, the Territorial Force, the Indian army and the Dominions was not going to produce a million men for the Western Front. More soldiers had to be found and they had to be found quickly. Conscription was still politically unacceptable and the men would have to be volunteers.

  One option would have been to expand the Territorial Force: it already had a structure with officers, non-commissioned officers and men; it had been training part-time and had at least a rudimentary operational capability; it was already established and accepted around the country; it owned drill halls and had a system of management and administration based on county associations. Each company of the existing four-company battalions could have been the nucleus of a new battalion, which would have had some men who were trained, or at least partly trained, in every platoon. Kitchener decided against this option. He felt that the Territorial Force, which had its original raison d’être in home defence and could not be deployed abroad without volunteering, was not the best basis on which to raise the hundreds of new battalions that would be needed. He decided to raise a completely new regular army. It would be composed of men aged between nineteen and thirty who volunteered to enlist for three years or for the duration of the war, whichever was the longer. On 5 August 1914, the day before Kitchener took office, Parliament approved an increase in the establishment of the army by 500,000 men. The famous ‘Your King and Country Need You’ proclamation was issued on 11 August and recruiting offices were swamped.

  The British army recruiting system was designed to process around 30,000 recruits a year. The job could be done in a leisurely fashion, and contracts for clothing, ammunition and equipment were based on that figure. Within ten days the first New Army, of 100,000 men known colloquially as Kitchener 1 or K1, had been enlisted, enough to produce six divisions and supporting units. By 28 August the army had a further hundred thousand – K2 – and in mid-September K3 was in being. It was one thing to find the men, quite another to provide officers and NCOs to command and train them. The rules were changed and discharged private soldiers up to the age of forty and ex-NCOs up to fifty were permitted to re-enlist. Regular officers were taken away from the Territorial Force and officers on leave from India were prevented from returning to the Indian army and attached to New Army units instead. University cadets were granted direct commissions, as were selected senior NCOs from the regular army. There were insufficient barracks to house all the new recruits, and despite emptying all the married quarters by sending the families home and using gymnasia, army schools and empty stables, there was still a shortage of accommodation. At one stage large numbers of men had to be billeted on the local population, something that had not been done since the eighteenth century. Public buildings were taken over, lines of tents were erected, and hutted camps were built. There was a shortage of everything from buttons to boots. Thread for saddlery could not be obtained because the only pre-war supplier was in Belgium, with his output now diverted to Prussian uhlans, and nobody could be found to supply enough khaki cloth to make uniforms. This last difficulty was resolved by buying up large quantities of blue serge from the GPO, and postmen went without uniforms so that soldiers could be clothed. At one stage a recruit who could turn up with his own boots and greatcoat and one suit of clothes was paid ten shillings for doing so.

  At the same time the Territorial Force was encouraged to persuade all its members to sign for general service and to expand under the aegis of its county associations. Here it came into direct competition with the New Armies. Government was not yet ready to direct industry – business as usual was the cry – and as the War Office had priority, Territorial Force associations found it difficult to let contracts for clothing, while the removal of its regular officers and NCOs led to problems in training. It became obvious that the regular army recruiting organisation could not cope with the unprecedented rush of young men to the colours. A temporary brake had to be applied to recruiting, and so the physical standards were raised in Sep
tember 1914; they were lowered again in November when some semblance of order had been restored.

  As the regular army simply could not accommodate, clothe and administer all these New Army battalions, the raising of the fourth and fifth New Armies was privatised. Now local authorities, city and county councils, and indeed almost anyone who could form a committee for the purpose, took over the raising of new battalions. They were to recruit, accommodate, clothe and train, but not arm, the battalions in the first instance. The regular army provided such instructors and officers as it could, but these were few. There were hardly any fourth and fifth New Army battalions that were given more than three officers and twelve NCOs, if they were lucky. Few members of this cadre were drawn from the cream of the service. Many were brought out of retirement, some were recovering from wounds sustained at the front, and some were the officers of the Indian army prevented by Kitchener’s orders from reporting back to their own battalions and regiments in India. This last measure caused great resentment, for Indian battalions only had eleven combatant British officers, compared to around thirty in a British battalion.

  By the time some of the later raisings were carried out the supply of officers and NCOs with some knowledge of what had to be taught was running out. The 13th Battalion the York and Lancaster Regiment (First Barnsley Pals) was commanded by a local solicitor, with the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel. The second-in-command was an alderman of the city, and the adjutant a colliery manager. The company sergeant majors were all retired NCOs, none of whom had served since the Boer War.14 The few experienced men available for the ‘pals’ battalions could not possibly administer a battalion at home, nor command it in war, entirely alone. Finding officers and NCOs was a constant problem; the men were present, but a platoon of forty men needed an officer to command it, a sergeant to administer and discipline it and four corporals, each assisted by a lance corporal, to command the sections. A company needed a company commander, a company second-in-command, a company sergeant major and a quartermaster sergeant. Initially anyone with a university or grammar-school education was liable to find himself an officer, without any training at all. These men had at least the ability to read orders and to cope with administration. Eventually short officer-training courses of four weeks’ duration were run at the Royal Military College Sandhurst. A foreman or chargehand would be a corporal, for he had experience of handling men. It was less difficult in the more technical arms. A man who was a qualified engineer in peace could do much the same job in the Royal Engineers, once he had learned something about man management and how the army did its business. In the infantry, on the other hand, the learning curve was very steep indeed.