Ten years after

by Philip Gibbs

Trench Warfare

The Germans were forced to dig in. It was the beginning of trench warfare. Then the line hardly altered for four years more, in spite of endless battles and unceasing death.

The British Regulars—that “contemptible little army” as the Kaiser called it before its rifle fire mowed down his men—were spent and done after the first and second Battles of Ypres, where they barred the way to Calais with a thin line standing among their dead. The Territorials—volunteers before the war—arrived, as steady as old soldiers. It was due to them that the Regulars had been able to get to France, leaving them for home defence. Then the new armies came into the field—“the Kitchener boys”—the First Hundred Thousand. They were those young men who had stormed the recruiting offices at the first call: from the Universities, public schools, city offices, village shops, and fields. They had been together in the ranks, learning each other’s language, bullied by sergeant-majors, broken in by discipline, taught to forget the decencies of civilisation as they had known it in their homes, the little comforts of their former state, individual liberty. Already they had left their old civilian life far behind. Yet they came out to France and Flanders like schoolboys in keenness and enthusiasm. They wanted to get into the “real thing” after all that gruelling training. They got into it quickly enough, up beyond Ypres at Hooge and St. Julien, or further south at “Plug Street” and Hill 60. They sat in water-logged trenches, with bits of dead bodies in the mud about them, under frightful shell-fire twenty times greater than the answer of their own guns because they were weak in artillery and short of shells. (The workers at home had not got into their stride in pouring out the engines of destruction.) They had no dug-outs worth the name. Only the Germans knew how to build them then, as they knew most else of war, as masters of technique, overwhelmingly superior in material, and in organisation. The British were in the low ground everywhere, with the Germans on the high ground, so that they could not march or move by daylight, or light a fire, or cross a road, without being signalled to watchful eyes and shelled without mercy. They were lousy in every seam of their shirts. There was no chance of cleanliness unless they were far behind the lines. Young gentlemen of England—and of Scotland, Ireland and Wales—found themselves like cave men: eating, sleeping, living in filth and the stench of corruption, under winged death searching for their bodies. They saw their comrades blown to bits beside them; counted their own chances, coldly, made it one in four, with luck. They were afraid of fear. To lose control—that would be worst of all. To show funk before the other men, to feel themselves ducking, shrinking, weakening, under those cursed shrieking shells, to surrender will power—that would be fatal. Some did, gibbering with shell-shock, or shot as cowards; but few. The marvel was that youth could stand so much, and still make jokes, laughing at the frightful irony between their old life and this new one, between the old lessons learnt by nice little gentlemen in nurseries, and this bloody business and primaeval stuff of killing and being killed!

It was truly a world war. Italy had come in. British troops were fighting in Africa and Asia. The Japanese Navy was in alliance with the British Fleet. Both France and England brought over coloured troops. Indian Princes poured out their wealth and offered their man power. Sikhs and Pathans rode through French fields. Gurkhas cut off the ears of German peasants after cutting their throats with curved knives. Indian cavalry, dismounted, were sent into the wet trenches of French Flanders and died of cold if they did not die of wounds. Seneghalese negroes drove French lorries, were massacred as infantry. Moroccans were billeted in French villages and Arab chiefs rode through Dunkirk. Chinese coolies unloaded British shells and cut down French forests for British trench props. And the coloured races of the world were shown the picture of the white races destroying each other for some reason which was never clear to them....

The Slaughter on the Somme

The British Armies in France and Flanders reached their full strength before their great offensive on the Somme in the summer of 1915. In material and in manhood they were the best that England and the Empire could produce. The men were the fine flower of their race, in intelligence, physique, training, and spirit. In time of peace they would have lived to be leaders, administrators, artists, poets, sportsmen, craftsmen, the “quality” of their nation; the fathers of splendid children. They were in living splendour the priceless treasure of the British folk—and they were squandered, wasted, and destroyed.... Behind them now was an immense power in artillery and ammunition and the material of destruction. The factories in England had been working at full pressure, millions of women had been stuffing shells with high explosives; guns, guns, guns came pouring up the roads towards the front in an endless tide; the ground was piled with ammunition dumps, and British Generals had at their command a fighting machine incomparable at that time, not only in weight of metal, but above all in freshness of enthusiasm and heroic human fire.

The British Armies rose out of their ditches for the great attack with an ardour that had never been seen before in the history of war, and in my judgment will never be seen again. They believed that at last—after artillery duels deciding nothing, after muddled battles like that of Loos, mining and counter-mining, and trench raids, and the gain of little salients at murderous cost—they were going to “do the trick” and end the war by irresistible attack. I saw the glory of those young men and the massacres of their bodies and hopes.

At the first assault, after the greatest bombardment ever seen yet still leaving forests of barbed wire and a fortress system of trenches and tunnels twenty miles deep behind the German front lines, they were mown down in swathes by German machine-gun fire, and afterwards, in isolated positions to which they staggered, blown to bits by German gun fire. By desperate courage they smashed through the outer earthworks of that infernal trench-system; for five months they fought through that twenty miles, yard by yard; but it was sheer slaughter all the way, and they were the victims of atrocious staff work, incompetent generalship, ruthless disregard of human life, repeated and dreadful blundering. The British Generals cannot be blamed. They were amateurs doing their best in an unknown type of war. They had to learn by failures and by mistakes. Perhaps their mistakes were not worse than those of the enemy’s High Command; or not much worse. But for the men it was Hell. They were ordered to attack isolated positions, which often they captured although the whole arc of German gun fire for forty miles around was switched on to their bodies until they were annihilated. High Wood, Delville Wood, Trones Wood, Mametz Wood—a hundred more—are names that bleed with the memory of enormous sacrifice of British youth. In the end they won through to open ground and forced the enemy into a far retreat to the shelter of the Hindenburg line.

The German losses in these battles of the Somme were frightful too, and for a time certainly broke the spirit of the German Army, as thousands of letters left in their dug-outs proved beyond doubt. Their agony was as great as that of the British troops. They were pounded to death in their trenches and dug-outs, until all that land stank of their bodies, and one could not walk without treading on them. They were stunned by shell fire, tortured by fear beyond human control as they crawled out of their broken ditches to meet British bayonets. Their heroism was wonderful, as all our men confessed with an admiration which extinguished hate among those—nearly all—who had a sense of chivalry. But their losses, though enormous, were not as great as the British suffered, not half as great, I think, because defence was less costly than attack in those conditions. By the end of the battle of the Somme half a million of the finest manhood of Great Britain had been killed, wounded, blinded, shell-shocked, and broken.

The tide of wounded flowed back from the fields of the Somme in endless columns of ambulances, where the bad cases lay under brown blankets with only the soles of their boots visible. To the end of my life I shall remember those upturned soles and the huddled bodies above. The walking wounded formed up in queues outside the dressing stations: silent, patient, dog-weary, caked with a whitish clay. The casualty clearing stations were crammed, and the surgeons were overworked while, row upon row, the badly wounded were laid on the grass outside the tents or on blood-stained stretchers waiting for their turn. The “butcher’s shop” in Corbie had a great clientèle. Whiffs of chloroform reeked across the roadways. Fresh graves were dug in cemeteries behind the lines, in spreading areas. The lightly wounded, after a little rest, came back laughing, cheering and joking. A Blighty wound!... Home again!... Out of it for a few months of grace!