CHAPTER TEN
IMMEDIATE PERCEPTIONS
Quite apart from the special case of the Americans, the Western Front rapidly became a focus of fierce controversy in both France and Britain. During the war itself there had been some public criticisms of the way the war was being run, most notably by conscientious objectors and pacifist groups, not to mention the French mutineers, even though the latter's critique was maintained as a military secret with considerable success. In Britain Captain Siegfried Sassoon made a public denunciation of the war in the summer of 1917, and was sent to a psychiatric hospital for his pains.1Politicians were sometimes forced to resign over particular policies, as was Churchill over the Dardanelles, although more often their strenuous debates were kept behind closed doors. In every country it was much more common for generals to be sacked for real or imagined mistakes, most spectacularly Nivelle and Gough, and a colourful vocabulary emerged to describe the process. In the Boer War the victims had been sent to the depot at Stellenbosch, hence they were ‘Stellenbosched’. Under Joffre the French miscreants were sent to Limoges, hence ‘Limoge;’, or they were simply ‘degomme’, which in English means ‘unstuck’ but which was more often translated directly as ‘de-gummed’. Even then, however, their dismissal could be construed less as a criticism of the war than as a resolution by the higher authorities to pursue it ever more efficiently in future.
Most public pronouncements reported in the press were supportive of the war, or at least not openly critical. A considerable effort went into censorship, and indeed into active propaganda for the benefit of both friendly and enemy populations. Nevertheless the censors could not conceal the fact that particular battles had bogged down when breakthroughs had been hoped for, nor that casualties were always running at an exceptionally high level. Soldiers' letters home could be censored, but their conversations when they were home on leave could not. Private photography at the front was banned, but the official photographers who were given access could scarcely conceal the fact that the battlefields had been reduced to a mud-scape in which all the trees and buildings had been levelled and the soldiers lived in slimy holes in the ground. The horrors of trench warfare could not really be kept secret at the time, although it was never translated into widespread civilian protests. Much more common was industrial action against poor working conditions in the factories, or grumbling against food shortages or air raids. Everyone obviously longed for peace, but for most people outside Russia – and Germany during the last month – the way to achieve it seemed to be through victory rather than subversion.
This consensus held together during the early days after the armistice, but it was gradually eroded from a number of different directions. In the first place the true and shocking scale of the casualties became an unavoidable public fact as vast numbers of monuments and military cemeteries were built. Admittedly the Germans were not allowed to build any such cemeteries on French soil until 1924, by which time the mortal remains of large numbers of their fallen had become entirely irretrievable. Therefore the scale of their burials was very much smaller than that of the allies, which tended to reinforce the general impression that the Germans, with their inconspicuous grey crosses, had suffered far fewer casualties than the British and French, who displayed unmissable fields of brilliant white crosses and Portland stone gravestones.
Meanwhile the Imperial War Museum in London, the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and a variety of French peepshows and memorial museums were also presenting photographs, paintings and archives to the public that vividly illustrated the squalid but previously hidden conditions of modern battle. Parades and other ceremonies were held on a regular basis to commemorate the fallen. At first they centred on 1–2 November, which had long been observed as a time of remembrance.2 However, they later crystallized around 11 November, the actual date of the armistice. Earl Haig's own postwar role was as head of the British Legion, which was set up to support veterans, and his annual poppy appeal has made a particularly visible display of popular solidarity with the cause of remembrance right up to the present day.
Secondly, the trench poetry and soldiers’ memoirs began to be published, presenting the public with the raw personal emotions that had previously been suppressed in the formal official reporting, and detonating a widespread surge of pacifism and anti-militarism. At first this was just a trickle, but when Robert Graves published his Goodbye to All That in 1929,3 it quickly became a flood. The year 1930 was a bumper one for publishing this type of literature, although it is perhaps remarkable that so little of it had surfaced earlier. Indeed, some of it is still appearing for the first time only in the modern age. For example, one item that was published locally in Scotland in 1930 was a play entitled The Prayer, written by a former stretcher-bearer, William St Clair. This reached a national audience, together with almost 200 pages of depressed and angry letters from the front, only in 2004.4 This volume is no less biting than many of the more famous earlier publications, and if it had entered the national consciousness in 1930 it would surely have had just the same impact that they did.
Alongside the personal testimonies of the men at the bottom of the tree, there was a third strand in the critique, which was arguably the most influential of all. This was the ‘top down’ view from politicians who, like Clemenceau, believed that ‘war is far too important to be left to generals’. Taking the lead in this movement were the wartime prime minister, David Lloyd George, and Winston Churchill, who would be the prime minister in the next war. As we have already seen, both of them had deep political reasons for finding an alternative to the ‘Western Front’ strategy favoured by the leading generals, and thereby refusing to accept the obvious truth that if France had fallen, total German hegemony in Europe was all but assured. As politicians they needed to assert their supremacy over the army, and this often meant denigrating the generals. Their war memoirs, when they appeared in 1934–6 and 1923–31 respectively, constituted a frontal assault on the military reputations of many high commanders, most notably Haig himself, especially over the sensitive matter of Passchendaele.
In this endeavour they were supported by a number of supposedly ‘reputable’ journalists and other respected figures who were even quicker to point the finger of blame. There was, for example, a school of tacticians who had their own names to make. When General Sir Ivor Maxse was de-gummed for his central role in the defeat of 21 March 1918, he was then appointed to take charge of writing tactical manuals. It served his ambition to deny that any of the 300- odd BEF manuals that had already been written possessed any merit at all, although his own infantry manual then appeared somewhat unhelpfully only after the war had ended. What Maxse was saying, in effect, was that all the authors of previous manuals had been incompetent, which was both extraordinarily unfair and factually wrong. Then as early as 1921 a new self-regarding star appeared in this area, in the shape of Captain (retired) Basil ‘Liddell’ Hart. He went one step further and asserted that there had been no tactics at all during the war – presumably not even Maxse's. It was only he, Hart, who was inventing the tactics for the twentieth century, even though a specialist might note that the manual that he actually produced was almost word-for-word the same as the one that had already been issued to British troops in February 1917. This, however, was only an opening salvo, since Hart went on to fill the newspapers with all sorts of claims that the war should have been fought in the eastern theatres, rather than France; that ‘indirect approaches’ should have been found; and that it would probably have been better not to use an army at all, but to win the whole thing by strategic bombing. Hart was extraordinarily influential during the inter-war period, basically for alleging that the high command had been incompetent in 1914–18, and trading on the general hope that ‘there would be no more Passchendaeles’.
Hart's friend J F C Fuller was another notorious maverick who had a habit of grabbing attention through the newspapers. He had been a leading staff officer for the tank corps during the war, and hence a writer of some of the manuals that Maxse and Hart affected to despise, but as a disciple of the devil-worshipper Aleister Crowley it must be said that he harboured a very odd view of the world indeed. His main disservice to the inter-war debate was to propagate the entirely erroneous idea that Haig and other ex-cavalry generals had been prejudiced against the tank corps and had tried to close it down. This was pure paranoia, which was unfortunately prolonged through the 1930s when tanks really did become a low budgetary priority, albeit only for the single and simple reason that the army as a whole was a low budgetary priority – by contrast, for example, with Hart's beloved strategic bombers. By that time, however, Fuller had left the army and had become a fascist, so his direct influence waned. But the damage had already been done.
One of the most directly critical books that appeared before the explosion of the ‘poets and novelists’ movement in 1929–30 had been Lions Led by Donkeys, written by P A Thompson in 1927. This was an analysis of British generalship, mostly limited to 1914–15, which unsparingly highlighted all the defects of that particularly chaotic period. The author did not care to examine the later achievements of BEF generalship during the period when there were sixty divisions in line rather than merely a dozen; but his main literary success was that the title he had chosen became indelibly etched onto any discussion of the Western Front forever afterwards. Apparently it had already been a well-known French phrase from 1870, but now Thompson gave it a second career as a cliché in the Anglo-Saxon world with reference to the BEF.
While we are considering the inter-war literature, we must certainly mention the so-called ‘Official Histories’, which would eventually run to several score of volumes of text, maps and orders of battle. In France they were written in an impersonal and formal style, by a committee. In Britain, however, the general editor, Brigadier James Edmonds, brought a much more personal, not to say prejudiced, approach. The author of each volume was a named individual who was allowed a certain degree of initiative. Much of what they wrote was a dry technical narrative, but occasionally a flash of ‘office politics’ shows through. Edmonds himself, for example, sometimes allows himself to be very rude about the French, in a way that would surely not have been officially approved if it had been brought to the attention of the Foreign Office.
One particularly noteworthy official historian was G C Wynne, who wrote the volumes about the BEF in 1915. Studying the bleak results of these botched battles apparently drove him into a personal depression from which he emerged not only as a believer in the ‘lions led by donkeys’ theory, but also as a great admirer of the German art of war. In the 1930s he wrote some influential studies in praise of their depth defence tactics, thereby helping to propagate the myth of the ten-foot-high German. Another influential critic of British generalship was C E W Bean, the official historian of the Australian contribution to victory. With all the brashness and assertiveness to be expected from that fledgling nation, he lost no opportunity to slate the Pommy leadership and to explain how it was always the Australians who saved the day, and ultimately won the war. This brand of mythology struck a deep chord in antipodean hearts, and it is still widely believed today.
THE SECOND GENERATION
The 1930s were marked by a growth in Western fears that if the first great war had been terrible, the next one would be terminal. Idealistic hopes that the League of Nations would make future wars impossible had evaporated the moment the USA refused to join it, whereas the rise of militaristic dictatorships in the USSR, Italy, Japan, Spain and especially Germany made it very difficult indeed to believe that international peace would last for very long. Everyone was also aware that the Great War had spawned many novel instruments of frightfulness, from poison gas, unrestricted U-boat warfare and strategic bombing, all the way down to flame throwers, hand grenades and even submachine guns. Oddly, artillery, which was the main purveyor of death, was not widely identified in the public mind as anything particularly new. Artillery had of course existed since at least the fifteenth century, and (to the uninformed) not even ‘the HE revolution’ and other crucial upgrades between 1880 and 1900 had seemed to break very far from the past. What the general public did not seem to understand was that if there had been an ‘artillery revolution’ in the late Victorian era, there had been no less than a ‘mega-revolution’ between 1916 and 1918.
What did seize the imagination of the general public was the hidden menace of future perverted science. During the war everyone had observed the extent to which states were secretly mobilizing their brainpower and industries to create deadly new weapons, and there seemed to be no particularly good reason why they should break off from doing so in 1919. One does not have to look far to find projections into the future whereby cities the size of London or Berlin could be totally destroyed by a fiendish combination of HE, gas and incendiary bombs within the space of a few days. Admittedly this type of result would not in fact be technically possible until 1945, when it was demonstrated at Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it was far from unrealistic for the press to express fears about such things a decade earlier. On the contrary, since few in the 1930s had seriously envisioned a major industrial power attempting to commit genocide on the scale that Nazi Germany actually did in the 1940s, we can even perhaps accuse the general public of a certain lack of fearful imagination, rather than an excess of it.
The Second World War began with professional soldiers, no less than pacifists, resolved that there should be ‘No more Passchendaeles’ or, in German, ‘Nie wieder Verdun’. Each army envisaged a different way of achieving this objective. In France Maginot's solution was to build a super-Verdun fortress all along the frontier that would not be as vulnerable to an initial attack as the prototype had been in February 1916. In Germany the idea was for short, sharp ‘lightning wars’ that would cut through the enemy defences with mechanized spearheads, thereby avoiding prolonged battles of attrition. In Britain, however, the solution was much less universally agreed, presumably because the army was a Cinderella service when compared with the navy and RAF, and there was no clarity about either national strategy or military doctrine. It nevertheless remained true that on a number of occasions senior officers shied away from mounting offensives for fear of sinking into a battle of attrition. Even in Germany there were grave professional doubts about attacking the strong defences of the Czech Sudetenland as well as the Maginot system, and then about the bold movement through the Ardennes into France in 1940 on an alarmingly narrow front.
Despite these early misgivings, the world's armies soon found themselves reverting to trench warfare that was every bit as costly as anything seen at Passchendaele or Verdun. In Stalingrad, Normandy and even as far afield as Iwo Jima and Okinawa the bad old processes of Zermerbungskriegcame back into play in a way that von Falken- hayn would surely have approved. More specifically still, in the Korean War the UN forces would mount the appropriately named ‘Operation Killer’, which was designed to grind down the Chinese army by pure attrition. The spirit of Verdun lived on.
The Second World War eventually cost more than six times as many casualties as the Western Front, although its result seemed somehow less futile and more decisive. For example, the democratic Germany that emerged from it was far stronger and has lasted far longer than the Weimar Republic that came out of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. The public nevertheless remained dimly aware that war itself was a bad thing, so they were still prepared to return to the Western Front as a ‘classic’ and well-documented illustration of its horrors. In the 1960s there was a new wave of pacifism as National Service was abolished in Britain and global anti-war sentiment was provoked by American operations in Vietnam. In this climate the debate about the Western Front was reborn. Books such as Corelli Barnett's The Swordbearers, on various high commanders, and Alistair Horne's The Price of Glory on Verdun, made a great impact. Even more telling was Joan Littlewood's theatrical production of Oh What a Lovely War,5 which appeared in 1963, to be followed by an influential film in 1969. This constituted a ferocious frontal attack on the generals of the Western Front as donkeys, butchers, bunglers and whatever other insults one might like to invent. On the other hand the epic 1965 BBC TV series The Great War by Tony Essex, with historical advice mainly by John Terraine, was much better researched and historically balanced. However, its main impact was through contemporary photographs and films, and many of these were unavoidably horrific. Without being particularly intended, the message propagated by the medium acted as a reinforcement of Joan Littlewood's propaganda. A solid consensus formed that the Western Front was uniquely horrible and its generals were uniquely incompetent. John Terraine himself wrote a series of books protesting at this interpretation, but he was very much a lone voice and he was cruelly mocked in fashionable circles by people who knew much less about historical realities than about whichever vacuous opinions happened to be in vogue.
Since the 1980s a new breed of military historians has increasingly applied rigorous research techniques to the story of the Western Front, treating it no longer as some sort of sacred literary parable for doomed youth, but rather as a war that had to be fought according to military logic, just like any other war. Many books have appeared in this vein, not least by the Australian scholars Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson who, although perhaps still of the ‘lions led by donkeys’ persuasion, have nevertheless taken the trouble to analyze the archives carefully rather than uncritically printing the legend. British students at the Imperial War Museum, King's College London, and more recently the University of Birmingham, have studied the same archives in more of a ‘lions led by lions’ frame of mind, to revealing effect. The impressive continuing activities of the Western Front Association have also helped to propagate their message more widely. This has not, alas, prevented the fashionable literary, television and cinematographic elite from churning out ever more of the sad old propaganda, and selling at least ten books to every one sold by scholarly military historians. The general public remains convinced that the war to save Europe from an aggressive German hegemony was totally futile, even though the second war to achieve the same objective meets general approval. It is also widely believed that the men who fought on the Western Front to liberate Belgium and France were fools who blindly accepted the orders issued by butchers and bunglers which sent them to their deaths. The fact that both the soldiers and their generals actually won the war, and were mostly proud of their achievement, appears to have been lost somewhere along the way.