Ten years after

by Philip Gibbs

The Spirit of the Victims

By the end of the Battle of the Somme the first impulses of the war had died down, the first emotions had been forgotten. Disillusion, dreadful experience, bitterness, had turned the edge of idealism. One cannot understand the mind of men ten years after without going back to that period of disenchantment. The young men who had hurried to the recruiting stations were on fire with enthusiasm for France and Belgium, for the rescue of liberty and civilisation, and for love of England. They became rather damped in the training camps because of so much red-tape, eyewash, spit and polish, and humiliation. They were handled, not like men filled with heroic spirit, but often like swine. Sergeant-majors swore at them in filthy language; old officers, too feeble for the front or sent back in disgrace for their incompetence, set them to ridiculous, time-wasting work. Reviews, inspections, parades, took the heart out of them. They had not joined for this ... they were trained and staled by the time they went to France, though their spirits rose at the thought of getting into “the real thing” at last. They didn’t like it. They hated it when its routine became familiar and horrible and deadly. They were ready to stick it out to the death—they did so—but certain values altered as their illusions were shattered. It was all very well—though not at all pleasant—to die for civilisation or liberty, but it was another thing to die for some old General they had never seen because he ordered them to attack positions which were wrongly marked on his maps, or because he was competing in “raids” with the General commanding the line on his left, or because he believed in keeping up the “fighting spirit” of his troops by ordering the capture of German trenches which made another salient in his line and were bound to be blotted out in mud and blood as soon as the German guns received their signals. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Sweet to die for one’s country—in the first flash of enthusiasm—and afterwards necessary anyhow, though distinctly unpleasant to have both legs blown off, or both eyes blinded, or one’s entrails torn out. But not in any way comforting to be sent over the top with a battalion unsupported on the right or left, or with wrong orders, or without a barrage to smash the enemy’s wire, or by some incredible blunder which meant the massacre of a man’s best pals and a hole in his stomach. Inevitable, perhaps. Yes, but unforgivable by its victims when it became a habit.... Over and over again battalions were wiped out because some one had blundered. It was the same on the German front, the French front, every front. And its effect in the minds of the fighting men was the same in all nations and on both sides of the line. It made them rage against the Staff. It made them feel that the front line men were being sacrificed, wasted and murdered by pompous old gentlemen and elegant young men living very comfortably behind the lines in pleasant châteaux of France, far from shell fire, growing “flower borders” on their breasts. Men talked like that, with increasing irony. They were unfair, often. It’s not easy to be fair when one’s certain death is being ordered by influential folk who do not share the risks.