Robert Graves, who survived the First World War to become one of the most famous English poets and novelists of the twentieth century, served in it as an officer of the 2nd Battalion,
Royal Welch Fusiliers, the same regiment in which his friend, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, soldiered. Goodbye toAll That, his memoir of the trenches, has become one of the most celebrated of Great War autobiographies. It was, in fact, written at great speed in order to fulfil an obligation to a publisher. Perhaps because it is a work dashed off almost without reflection, it has a directness, vitality and often morbidity missing from more deliberate compositions.
The troops with the worst reputation for acts of violence against prisoners were the Canadians (and later the Australians). The Canadians’ motive was said to be revenge for a Canadian found crucified with bayonets through his hands and feet in a German trench. This atrocity had never been substantiated; nor did we believe the story, freely circulated, that the Canadians crucified a German officer in revenge shortly afterwards. How far this reputation for atrocities was deserved, and how far it could be ascribed to the overseas habit of bragging and leg-pulling, we could not decide. At all events, most overseas men, and some British troops, made atrocities against prisoners a boast, not a cenfession.
Later in the war, I heard two first-hand accounts.
A Canadian-Scot: ‘They sent me back with three bloody prisoners, you see, and one started limping and groaning, so I had to keep on kicking the sod down the trench. He was an officer. It was getting dark and I felt fed up, so I thought: “I’ll have a bit of a game.” I had them covered with the officer’s revolver and made ’em open their pockets without turning round. Then I dropped a Mills bomb in each, with the pin out, and ducked behind a traverse. Bang, bang, bang! No more bloody prisoners. No good Fritzes but dead ‘uns.’
An Australian: ‘Well, the biggest lark I had was at Morlancourt, when we took it the first time. There were a lot of Jerries in a cellar, and I said to ’em: “Come out, you Camarades!” So out they came, a dozen of ‘em, with their hands up. “Turn out your pockets,” I told ’em. They turned ‘em out. Watches and gold and stuff, all dinkum. Then I said: “Now back to your cellar, you sons of bitches!” For I couldn’t be bothered with ’em. When they were all safely down I threw half a dozen Mills bombs in after ‘em. I’d got the stuff all right, and we weren’t taking prisoners that day.’
An old woman at Cardonette on the Somme gave me my first-hand account of large-scale atrocities. I was billeted with her in July 1916. Close to her home, a battalion of French Turcos [North African native infantry] overtook the rearguard of a German division retreating from the Marne in September 1914. The Turcos surprised the dead-weary Germans while still marching in column. The old woman went, with gestures, through the pantomime of slaughter, and ended: ‘Et enfin, ces animaux leur ont arraché les oreilles et les ont mises à la poche!’ [‘And finally those animals cut off their ears and put them in their pockets!’]
The presence of semi-civilized coloured troops in Europe was, from the German point of view, we knew, one of the chief Allied atrocities. We sympathized. Recently, at Flixécourt, one of the instructors told us, the cook of a corps headquarters mess used to be visited at the chateau every morning by a Turco - the orderly to a French liaison officer. The Turco used to say: ‘Tommy, give Johnny pozzy,’ and got his tin of plum-and-apple jam.
One day the corps had orders to shift by the afternoon, so the cook told the Turco, giving him his farewell tin: ‘Oh la, la, Johnny, napoo pozzy tomorrow!’
The Turco would not believe it. ‘Yes, Tommy, mate,’ he insisted, ‘pozzy for Johnny tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow!’
To get rid of him, the cook said: ‘Fetch me the head of a Fritz, Johnny, tonight. I’ll ask the general to give you pozzy tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.’
‘Right, mate,’ said the Turco, ‘me get Fritz head tonight, general give me pozzy tomorrow.’
That evening the mess cook of the new corps that had taken over the château found a Turco asking for him and swinging a bloody head in a sandbag. ‘Here Fritz head, mate,’ said the Turco, ‘general give me pozzy tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.’
As Flixécourt lay more than twenty miles behind the line...
We discussed the continuity of regimental morale. A captain in a line battalion of a Surrey regiment said: ‘Our battalion has never recovered from the first battle of Ypres. What’s wrong is that we have a rotten depot. The drafts are bad, and so we get a constant re-infection.’ He told me one night in our sleeping hut: ‘In both the last two shows I had to shoot a man of my company to get the rest out of the trench. It was so bloody awful, I couldn’t stand it. That’s why I applied to be sent down here.’ Thus was the truth, not the usual loose talk that one heard at the Base. I felt sorrier for him than for any other man I met in France. He deserved a better regiment.
The boast of every good battalion was that it had never lost a trench; both our line [regular] battalions made it - meaning, that they had never been forced out of a trench without recapturing it before the action ended. Capturing a German trench and being unable to hold it for lack of reinforcements did not count; nor did retirement by order from headquarters, or when the battalion next door had broken and left a flank in the air. And, towards the end of the war, trenches could be honourably abandoned as being wholly obliterated by bombardment, or because not really trenches at all, but a line of selected shell-craters.
We all agreed on the value of arms drill as a factor in morale. ‘Arms drill as it should be done,’ someone said, ‘is beautiful, especially when the company feels itself as a single being, and each movement is not a synchronized movement of every man together, but the single movement of one large creature.’ I used to get big bunches of Canadians to drill: four or five hundred at a time. Spokesmen stepped forward once and asked what sense there was in sloping and ordering arms, and fixing and unfixing bayonets. They said they had come across to fight, and not to guard Buckingham Palace. I told them that in every division of the four in which I had served - the First, Second, Seventh, and Eighth — there were three different kinds of troops. Those that had guts but were no good at drill; those that were good at drill but had no guts; and those that had guts and were good at drill. These last, for some reason or other, fought by far the best when it came to a show - I didn’t know why, and I didn’t care. I told them that when they were better at fighting than the Guards they could perhaps afford to neglect their arms drill.
We often theorized in the mess about drill. I held that the best drill never resulted from being bawled at by a sergeant-major: that there must be perfect respect between the man who gives the order and the men that carry it out. The test of drill came, I said, when the officer gave an incorrect word of command. If the company could, without hesitation, carry out the order intended or, if the order happened to be impossible, could stand absolutely still, or continue marching, without confusion in the ranks, that was good drill... Some instructors regarded the corporate spirit that resulted from drilling together as leading to loss of initiative in the men drilled.
Others argued that it acted just the other way round: ‘Suppose a section of men with rifles get isolated from the rest of the company, without an NCO in charge, and meet a machine-gun. Under the stress of danger this section will have that all-one-body feeling of drill, and obey an imaginary word of command. There may be no communication between its members, but there will be a drill movement, with two men naturally opening fire on the machine-gun while the remainder work round, part on the left flank and part on the right; and the final rush will be simultaneous. Leadership is supposed to be the perfection for which drill has been instituted. That’s wrong. Leadership is only the first stage. Perfection of drill is communal action. Though drill may seem to be antiquated parade-ground stuff, it’s the foundation of tactics and musketry. Parade-ground musketry won all the battles in our regimental histories; this war, which is unlikely to open out, and must almost certainly end with the collapse, by “attrition”, of one side or the other, will be won by parade-ground tactics — by the simple drill tactics of small units fighting in limited spaces, and in noise and confusion so great that leadership is quite impossible.’ Despite variance on this point we all agreed that regimental pride remained the strongest moral force that kept a battalion going as an effective fighting unit; contrasting it particularly with patriotism and religion.
Patriotism, in the trenches, was too remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or prisoners. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out. As ‘Blighty’, a geographical concept, Great Britain was a quiet, easy place for getting back to out of the present foreign misery; but as a nation it included not only the trench-soldiers themselves and those who had gone home wounded, but the staff, Army Service Corps, lines of communication troops, base units, home-service units, and all civilians down to the detested grades of journalists, profiteers, ‘starred’ men exempted from enlistment, conscientious objectors, and members of the Government. The trench-soldier, with this carefully graded caste-system of honour, never considered that the Germans opposite might have built up exactly the same system themselves. He thought of Germany as a nation in arms, a unified nation inspired with the sort of patriotism that he himself despised. He believed most newspaper reports on conditions and sentiments in Germany, though believing little or nothing of what he read about similar conditions and sentiments in England. Yet he never underrated the German as a soldier. Newspaper libels on Fritz’s courage and efficiency were resented by all trench-soldiers of experience.
Hardly one soldier in a hundred was inspired by religious feeling of even the crudest kind. It would have been difficult to remain religious in the trenches even if one survived the irreligion of the training battalion at home. A regular sergeant at Montagne, a Second Battalion man, had recently told me that he did not hold with religion in time of war. He said that the niggers (meaning the Indians) were right in officially relaxing their religious rules while fighting. ‘And all this damn nonsense, sir - excuse me, sir - that we read in the papers, sir, about how miraculous it is that the wayside crucifixes are always getting shot at, but the figure of our Lord Jesus somehow don’t get hurt, it fairly makes me sick, sir.’ This was his explanation why, when giving practice fire-orders from the hilltop, he had shouted, unaware that I stood behind him: ‘Seven hundred, half left, bloke on cross, five rounds, concentrate, FIRE!’ And why, for ‘concentrate’, he had humorously substituted ‘consecrate’. His platoon, including the two unusual ‘bible-wallahs’ whose letters home always began in the same formal way: ‘Dear Sister in Christ’ or ‘Dear Brother in Christ’, blazed away.
The troops, while ready to believe in the Kaiser as a comic personal devil, knew the German soldier to be, on the whole, more devout than himself. In the instructors’ mess we spoke freely of God and Gott as opposed tribal deities. For Anglican regimental chaplains we had little respect. If they had shown one-tenth the courage, endurance, and other human qualities that the regimental doctors showed, we agreed, the British Expeditionary Force might well have started a religious revival. But they had not, being under orders to avoid getting mixed up with the fighting and to stay behind with the transport. Soldiers could hardly respect a chaplain who obeyed these orders, and yet not one in fifty seemed sorry to obey them. Occasionally, on a quiet day in a quiet sector, the chaplain would make a daring afternoon visit to the support line and distribute a few cigarettes, before hurrying back. But he was always much to the fore in rest-billets. Sometimes the colonel would summon him to come up with the rations and bury the day’s dead; he would arrive, speak his lines, and shoot off again. The position was complicated by the respect that most commanding officers had for the cloth - though not all. The colonel in one battalion I served with got rid of four new Anglican chaplains in four months; finally he applied for a Roman Catholic, alleging a change of faith in the men under his command. For the Roman Catholic chaplains were not only permitted to visit posts of danger, but definitely enjoined to be wherever fighting was, so that they could give extreme unction to the dying. And we had never heard of one who failed to do all that was expected of him and more. Jovial Father Gleeson of the Munsters, when all the officers were killed or wounded at the first battle of Ypres, had stripped off his black badges [of the Army Chaplains Department] and, taking command of the survivors, held the line.
Anglican chaplains were remarkably out of touch with their troops. The Second Battalion chaplain, just before the Loos fighting, had preached a violent sermon on the Battle against Sin, at which one old soldier behind me grumbled: ‘Christ, as if one bloody push wasn’t enough to worry about at a time!’ A Roman Catholic padre, on the other hand, had given his men his blessing and told them that if they died fighting for the good cause they would go straight to Heaven or, at any rate, be excused a great many years in Purgatory. When I told this story to the mess, someone else said that on the eve of a battle in Mesopotamia the Anglican chaplain of his battalion had preached a sermon on the commutation of tithes. ‘Much more sensible than that Battle against Sin. Quite up in the air, and took the men’s minds off the fighting.’
I felt better after a few weeks at [the base at] Harfleur, though the knowledge that this was merely a temporary relief haunted me all the time. One day I left the mess to begin the afternoon’s work on the drill-ground, and passed the place at which bombing instruction went on. A group of men stood around a table where the various types of bombs were set out for demonstration. I heard a sudden crash. A sergeant of the Royal Irish Rifles had been giving a little unofficial instruction before the proper instructor arrived. He picked up a No. I percussion-grenade and said: ‘Now lads, you’ve got to be careful here! Remember that if you touch anything while you’re swinging this chap, it’ll go off.’ To illustrate the point, he rapped the grenade against the table edge. It killed him and the man next to him and wounded twelve others more or less severely.